THE STRAIN OF PEAVEY
It was too true that I could not call her "Little Miss," as I had
lightly called her mother "Miss Caroline" at our first encounter. Of a
dusky pallor was Miss Lansdale when I first beheld her under the night
of her hair. As the waning light showed me her, I thought of a blossomed
young sloe tree in her own far valley of the Old Dominion. Closer to her
I could note only that she was dark but fair, for observations of this
character became, for some reason, impracticable in her immediate
presence.
She greeted me kindly, as her mother's lawyer; she was cordial to me a
moment, as her mother's friend; but later, when these debts of civility
had been duly paid, when we had gone from the outer dusk into candle
light, she favored me only with occasional glances of the mildest
curiosity, in which was neither kindness nor cordiality. Not that these
had given way to their opposites; they were simply not there. Not the
faintest hint of unfriendliness could I detect. Miss Lansdale had merely
detached herself into a magnificent void of disinterest, from the centre
of which she surveyed me without prejudice in moments when her glance
could not be better occupied.
I have caught much the same look in the eyes of twelve bored jurymen who
were, nevertheless, bound to give my remarks their impartial attention.
Sometimes one may know from the look of these twelve that one's case is
already as good as lost; or, at least, that an opinion has been reached
which new and important testimony will be required to change.
It occurred to me as my call wore on that I caught even a hint of this
prejudgment in the eyes of the young woman. It put me sorely at a
disadvantage, for I knew not what I was expected to prove; knew not if I
were on trial as her mother's lawyer, her mother's friend, or as a mere
man. The latter seemed improbable as an offence, for was not my judge a
daughter of Miss Caroline? And yet, strangely enough, I came to think
that this must be my offence--that I was a man. She made me feel this in
her careless, incidental glances, her manner of turning briskly from me
to address her mother with a warmer show of interest than I had been
able to provoke.
It seemed, indeed, opportune to remember at the moment that, while this
alleged Little Miss was the daughter of Miss Caroline, she was
likewise--and even more palpably, as I could note by fugitive swift
glimpses of her face--the daughter of a gentleman whose metal had been
often tried; one who had won his reputation as much by self-possession
under difficulties as by the militant spirit that incurred them.
"Kate has little of the Peavey in her,--she is every inch a Lansdale,"
Miss Caroline found occasion to say; while I, thus provided with an
excuse to look, remarked to myself that her inches, while not excessive,
were unusually meritorious.
"Worse than that--she's a Jere Lansdale," was my response, though I
tactfully left it unuttered for an "Indeed?" that seemed less emotional.
I could voice my deeper conviction not more explicitly than by saying
further to Miss Caroline, "Perhaps that explains why she has the effect
of making her mother seem positively immature."
"My mother _is_ positively immature," remarked the daughter, with the
air of telling something she had found out long since.
"Then perhaps the other is the false effect," I ventured. "It is your
mother's immaturity that makes you seem so--" I thought it kind to
hesitate for the word, but Miss Lansdale said, again confidently:--
"Oh, but I really _am_," and this with a finality that seemed to close
the incident.
Her voice had the warm little roughness of a thrush's, which sings
through a throat that is loosely strung with wires of soft gold.
"In _my_ day," began Miss Caroline; but here I rebelled, no longer
perceiving any good reason to be overborne by her daughter. I could
endure only a certain amount of that.
"Your day is to-day," I interrupted, "and to-morrow and many to-morrows.
You are a woman bereft of all her yesterdays. Let your daughter have had
_her_ day--let her have come to an incredible maturity. But you stay
here in to-day with me. We won't be fit companions for her, but she
shall not lack for company. Uncle Jerry Honeycutt is now ninety-four,
and he has a splendid new ear-trumpet--he will be rarely diverting for
Miss Lansdale."
But the daughter remained as indifferent to taunts as she had been to my
friendly advances. It occurred to me now that her self-possession was
remarkable. It was little short of threatening if one regarded her too
closely. I wondered if this could really be an inheritance from her
well-nerved father or the result of her years as teacher in a finishing
school for young ladies. I was tempted to suspect the latter, for,
physically, the creature was by no means formidable. Perhaps an inch or
two taller than her mother, she was of a marked slenderness; a
_completed_ slenderness, I might say--a slenderness so palpably finished
as to details that I can only describe it as felicitous in the extreme.
It seemed almost certain that her appearance had once been disarming,
that the threat in her eye-flash and tilted head was a trick learned by
contact with many young ladies who needed finishing more than they would
admit.
Of course this did not explain why Miss Lansdale should visually but
patently disparage me at this moment. I was by no means an unfinished
young lady, and, in any event, she should have left all that behind; the
moment was one wherein relaxation would have been not only graceful but
entirely safe, for she was in no manner to be held accountable for my
conduct.
Yet again and again her curious reserve congealed me back upon the
stanch regard of Miss Caroline. My passion for that sprightly dame and
her gracious acceptance of it were happily not to deteriorate under the
regard of any possible daughter, however egregiously might we flaunt to
her trained eye our need to be "finished."
The newcomer's reserve was indeed pregnable to no assault I could
devise. Not even did she lighten when I said to her mother, in open
mockery of that reserve, "Well, she cost you a lot of furniture that was
really most companionable about the house," and paused with a sigh
betokening a regretful comparison of values. That lance shattered
against her Lansdale shield like all the others.
Ending my call, I felt vividly what I have elsewhere seen described as
"the cosmic chill". The small, mighty, night-eyed, well-completed Miss
Lansdale, with the voice of a golden jangle, had frozen it about me in
lavish abundance.
I went home to play the game, until my eyes tired so that the face of
king, queen, and knave leered at me in defeat or simpered sickeningly
when I was able to shape their destinies. Thrice I lost interestingly
and with profit to my soul, and once I won, though without elation, for
we know that little skill may be needed to win when the cards fall
right; whereas, to lose profitably is a mark of supreme merit.
Even after that I must have recourse to the wonted philter to bring
sleep, the face of my vision being unaccountably the face of the true
Little Miss before she had evolved into Miss Lansdale of the threatening
self-possession. I refused to bother about the absurdity of this, for
the sake of bringing sleep the sooner.
I was privileged to observe the following day that my neighbor's
daughter was still of a dusky whiteness, the baffling, shaded whiteness
of soft new snow in a cedar thicket. Incidentally she partook of another
quality of soft new snow--one by no means so incommunicable.
And yet in sunlight I incurred the full, close look of her eyes, and no
longer doubted the presence of a Peavey strain in her immediate
ancestry. Far in their incalculable depths I saw a myriad of lights,
brown-gold, that smouldered, ominously, even promisingly. It might never
meet this young woman's caprice to be flagrantly a Peavey in my
presence, but her capacity for this, if she chose to exercise it, I
detected beyond a doubt. She was patently a daughter of Miss Caroline,
and the cosmic chill had been an afterthought of her own.
She did me the honor, late in the afternoon of this day, to occupy an
easy-chair within my vined porch. She went farther. She affected a
polite interest in myself. But her craft was crude. I detected at once
that she had fallen in love with my dog; that she came not to seek me,
but to follow him, who had raced joyously from her at his first
knowledge of my home-coming.
I was secretly proud of the exquisite thoroughness with which he now
ignored her. Again and again he assured me in her very presence that the
woman was nothing, _could_ be nothing, to him. I knew this well
enough--I needed no protestations from him; but I thought it was well
that she should know it. I saw that he had probably consented to receive
her addresses through a long afternoon, had perhaps eaten of her
provender, and even behaved with a complaisance which could have led her
to hope that some day she might be something to him. But I knew that he
had not persistently faced the peril of being trampled to death by me in
his pulpy infancy--so great his fear of our separation--to let a mere
woman come between us at this day. And it was well that he should now
tell her this in the plainest of words.
The woman seemed to view me with an increased respect from that very
moment. She tried first to bring Jim to her side by a soft call that
almost made me tremble for his integrity. But he did not so much as turn
his head. His eyes were for me alone. With a rubber shoe flung gallantly
over his shoulder, he danced incitingly before me, praying that I would
pretend to be crazed by the sight of his prize and seek to wrench it
from him.
But I pretended instead to be bored by his importunities, choosing to
rub it in. To her who longed for his friendly notice,--a little throaty
bark, a lift of the paw, perhaps a winsome laying of his head along her
lap,--I affected indifference to his infatuation for me. I pretended
always to have been a perfect devil of a fellow among the dogs, and
professed loftily not to have divined the secret of my innumerable and
unvarying conquests.
"Dogs are so foolishly faithful," remarked Miss Lansdale, with polite
acerbity.
"I know it," I conceded; "that fellow thinks I am the most beautiful
person in all the world."
She said "Indeed?" with an inflection and a sweeping glance at me which
I found charged with meaning. But I knew well enough that I had for all
time mastered a certain measure of her difficult respect.
"And he's such a fine dog, too," she added in a tone intended to convey
to me the full extent of her pity for him.
"I have him remarkably well trained," I said. "I can often force him to
notice people whom I like, especially if they are clever enough to let
him see that they like me rather well."
"It would be almost worth while," she remarked with a longing look at
Jim but none at me.
"Many have found it quite so," I said, ordering Jim to charge at my
feet, "but it's a great bore, I assure you."
I needed not to be told that she envied me my power, and so deep and
genuine appeared to be her love for him that secretly I hoped he would
again be amiable to her during my absence on the morrow. The contrast of
his manner on my return would further chasten her.
From the porch we both watched her move across the little stretch of
lawn, and, at my whispered suggestion, Jim rose to his feet and barked
her insultingly over the last twenty feet of it. I was delighted to note
that this induced a shamed acceleration of her pace and a tighter
clutching of her skirts. I thought it important to let her know clearly
and at once just who was the master in my own house.