Ivy Sên laid her hand on her husband’s knee. She was speechless.
“It’s true,” he assured her, “though I scarcely believe it myself yet.
Dr. Ray in Hongkong or in any other interesting place seems explicable
and natural enough, but Miss Julia Townsend is stark impossibility. But
here she is.”
“You have seen her?”
Sên King-lo smiled affectionately and a little grimly, “No. She would
not see me. But she is here.”
“But, Lo, she couldn’t possibly afford it! All that way—Washington to
San Francisco—hotels—the boat! She couldn’t ever do it. You have no
idea how poor she was really! She dressed like an old-fashioned queen,
and she had literally dozens and dozens of old chests—big ones made of
cedar wood—crammed with the costliest things, a hundred years old, some
of them, and yards and yards of lace older than that; but I never knew
her to buy anything new to wear except gloves and boots and slippers. I
don’t think she bought even stockings. She had dozens and dozens of
pairs of silk ones—the loveliest silk ones—some thin like cobwebs and
some thick as flannel; but she never wore anything else, winter or
summer. And besides all those she used to knit others, and so did Dinah
and Lucinda—she’d taught them herself. She used to make her own
handkerchiefs, hemstitch them and monogram them and all. She almost
lived off the place. But she never sold a thing—not so much as one thin
old silver spoon, not a tomato, or one of those funny turkey-wings
Lysander used for a crumb-brush. She _can’t_ have sold Rosehill or
anything in it. She’d as soon have sold her mother’s grave, or her
portrait of Robert E. Lee, the Confederate flag that had been in battle
with Stonewall Jackson, or Jefferson Davis’ autograph letters to her
father. And she never, never has let Dr. Ray pay _for_ her. She wouldn’t
do that! She _couldn’t_: not a five-cent street-car fare. How has she
found the money? Oh—and she always did so long to travel—above all to
see China. She has told me so time after time. And she had never been
out of Virginia farther than Washington, in all her life, and never
expected to be! Lo,” his wife cried with a broken giggle that sounded
full of tears, “she must have sold Lysander and Dinah!”
“Have you ever heard her speak,” Sên asked, “of a second or third cousin
of hers, Theodore Lee?”
“No.” Ivy had not.
“Neither have I. But Dr. Ray, who is several years older than Miss
Townsend, you know, though she looks much the younger of the
two—another case of work keeping us fresher than rust does—Dr. Ray
remembers him perfectly. He, too, was quite a few years older than Miss
Townsend. He served under General Lee in the Civil War—the youngest
officer in the Confederate Army, Dr. Ray says. He lost an arm at Ball’s
Bluff and a foot in the Battle of the Wilderness. The war left him
penniless, as it did so many, and his father and older brothers were
killed.”
“It was a holocaust,” Ruby murmured sadly.
“The most terrible holocaust in history until the World War,” King-lo
added.
“But slavery _had_ to be stamped out, Lo!”
“It usually dies a natural death,” the husband insisted, “as it has in
your own British Empire, and a far pleasanter death for all concerned,
the slaves included. We have seen a pleasant and beneficent side of
slavery in China, as I believe the South did——”
“Miss Townsend has poisoned your mind!” his wife told him.
“Not at all,” he denied. “Facts are facts—that’s all. And the war
between the North and the South had nothing to do with slavery. That was
an after-thought, dragged in for political purposes, necessary, perhaps,
and certainly good strong propaganda.”
“Sên King-lo! I don’t believe it!”
Sên laughed. “You didn’t specialize in American history during your
earnest scholastic career, did you? However, as your own uncrowned
laureate has said several times, that’s another story.”
“Yes—do get on about Miss Julia.”
“Lee—young Theodore Lee—worked his way to South America somehow. He
had but little luck there, but he saved enough to come home on a visit
after some years, and he spent a month at Rosehill when Miss Julia was
about sixteen.”
“Who told you all that?” Ruby interrupted him again.
“Dr. Ray—today at lunch. He went back to Brazil and had failure after
failure there—just managed to live for year after year. But he stuck to
it, one thing after another. He doesn’t seem to have had much of a
business head, but he must have had plenty of grit. And his luck turned
at last, nothing much, but it must have seemed a fortune to him. He
struck oil about a year ago—alfalfa and rose-wood and ipecacuanha, I
think.”
“What a mixture!”
“A good many fortunes are mixed,” Sên observed. “He turned his little
pile into money and sailed from Buenos Ayres almost at once—presumably,
as the sequel shows, to repeat his visit to Rosehill. But he died on the
voyage. He was buried at sea. That is the story. He left Miss Julia all
he had: nearly twenty thousand dollars, Dr. Ray says. She has bought new
clothes now, Ivy!”
“Black crêpe ones?” the girl said softly.
Sên King-lo nodded. “And the rest,” he added, “or most of it, she’s
spending in seeing the world.”
Ruby Sên’s eyes filled with tears. “And the rest?”
“A check to the Louise Home, flowers for Confederate graves. She didn’t
do it impulsively, Dr. Ray tells me. They talked it over thirty or forty
times. Then one night suddenly, as they sat on the porch, Miss Julia
exclaimed: ‘I’m going to do it. It’s what I’ve longed to do as long as I
can remember, and I’m going to now. I’ll put one thousand dollars in the
bank, to make things a trifle easier after I’m back, and to pay for my
funeral. My funeral has troubled me rather—especially if I should
happen to die soon after one of the garden-parties: I’m sometimes a
little short of ready money then. My shroud is all ready, and the lot in
the cemetery was paid for long ago, of course; but there are always
extra expenses, and a Townsend must be decently buried, and buried with
Townsend money.’ ”
“I don’t see Miss Julia on the rates,” Mrs. Sên said shakenly.
“No!” Sên King-lo said proudly. “ ‘I’ll put one thousand dollars away,
and I’ll spend every cent of the rest and see China and Spain and the
Bridge of Sighs and Westminster Abbey at last,’ and here she is in the
best rooms of the best hotel!”
“I can’t think of Washington without Miss Julia across the river at
Rosehill,” Ruby said musingly.
“Nor I,” Sên King-lo agreed. “It’s like a harp with its sweetest string
gone.”
“And how those poor darkies will miss her! And what a time they’ll have!
Dinah and Uncle Lysander must feel like orphans.”
“Lysander and Dinah are here with Miss Julia,” Sên chuckled.
Mrs. Sên gave a little gasping laugh. “Great Scott!” she cried.