She came out of the cemetery. There was no sign of Silas in the street nor
on the front of the church.
Phyl had a full measure of the Celtic power to meet trouble halfway, to
imagine disaster. As she hurried home she saw all manner of trouble,
things happening to Richard Pinckney, and all brought about through
herself. Amidst all these fancies she saw one fact: He must be warned.
She found Miss Pinckney in the linen room. The linen room at Vernons was a
treasure house beyond a man's description, perhaps even beyond his true
appreciation. There in the cupboards with their thin old fashioned ring
handles and on the shelves of red cedar reposed damask and double damask
of the time when men paid for their purchases in guineas, miraculous
preservations. Just as the life of a china vase is a perpetual escape from
the stupidity of servant maids and the heaviness of clumsy fingers, so the
life of these cream white oblongs, in which certain lights brought forth
miraculous representations of flowers, festoons and birds, was a perpetual
preservation from the moth, from damp, from dryness, from the dust that
corrupts.
A house like Vernons exists not by virtue of its brick and mortar; to keep
it really alive it must be preserved in all its parts, not only from damp
and decay, but from innovation; one can fancy a gas cooker sending a
perpetual shudder through it, a telephone destroying who knows what
fragrant old influences; the store cupboards and still room are part of
its bowels, its napery, bed sheets, and hangings part of its dress. The
man knew what he was doing who left Miss Pinckney a life interest in
Vernons, it was that interest that kept Vernons alive.
She was exercising it on the critical examination of some sheets when Phyl
came into the room, now, with the wool she had purchased and the tale she
had to tell.
Miss Pinckney carefully put the sheet she was examining on one side,
opened the parcel and looked at the wool.
"I met Silas Grangerson," said Phyl as the other was examining the
purchase with head turned on one side, holding it now in this light, now
in that.
"Silas Grangerson! Why, where on earth has he sprung from?" asked Miss
Pinckney in a voice of surprise.
"I don't know, but I met him in the street and we walked as far as the
Battery and--and--"
She hesitated for a moment, then it all came out. To no one but Maria
Pinckney could she have told that story.
"Well, of all the astounding creatures," said Miss Pinckney at last. "Did
he ask you to marry him?"
"No."
"Just to run away with him--kissed you."
"He kissed me at Grangersons."
"At Grangersons. When?"
"That night. I went into the garden and he came out from amongst some
bushes."
"Umph-- It's the family disease-- Well, if I get my fingers in his hair I
promise to cure him. He wants curing. He'll just apologise, and that
before he's an hour older. Where's he staying?"
"No, no," said Phyl, "you mustn't ever say I told you. I don't mind. I
would have said nothing only for Mr. Pinckney."
"You mean Richard?"
"Yes."
"What has he to do with it?"
Phyl did not hesitate nor turn her head away, though her cheeks were
burning.
"Silas Grangerson thinks I care for Mr. Pinckney, he said he would be even
with him. I know he intends doing him some injury. I feel it--and I want
you to warn him to be careful--without telling him, of course, what I have
said."
Miss Pinckney was silent for a moment. She had already matched Phyl and
Richard in her mind. She had come to a very full understanding of her
character, and she would have given all the linen at Vernons for the
certainty that those two cared for one another.
Frances Rhett rode her like an obsession. Life and nature had given Maria
Pinckney an acquired and instinctive knowledge of character, and in the
union of Richard and Frances Rhett she divined unhappiness, just as a
clever seaman divines the unseen ice-berg in the ship's track. She smelt
it.
"Phyl," said she, "do you care for Richard?"
The question quickly put and by those lips caused no confusion in the
girl's mind.
"No," said she. "At least-- Oh, I don't know how to explain it--I care for
everything here, for Vernons and everything in it, it is all like a story
that I love--Juliet and Vernons and the past and the present. He's part of
it too. I want to have it always just as it is. I didn't tell you, but
when that happened in the cemetery, I was looking at her grave; you never
told me it was there with his. I came on it by accident and she was
seeming to speak to me out of it. I was thinking of her and him,
when--that happened. It was just as though some one had struck _her_ and
him. I can't explain exactly."
"Strange," said Miss Pinckney.
She turned and began to put away with a thoughtful air the linen she had
been examining. Then she said:
"I'll tell Richard and warn him to keep away from that fool, not that
there is any danger--but it is just as well to warn him."
Phyl helped to put away the linen and then she went upstairs to her room.
She felt easier in her mind and taking her seat on a cane couch by the
window she fell into a book. The History of the Civil War. This bookworm
had always one sure refuge in trouble--books.
Books! Have we ever properly recognised the mystery and magic that lies in
that word, the magic that allows a man to lead ever so many other lives
than his own, to be other people, to travel where he has never been, to
laugh with folk he has never seen, to know their sorrows as he can never
know the sorrows of "real people"--and their joys.
Phyl had been Robinson Crusoe and Jane Eyre, Monte Cristo and Jo.
History which is so horribly unreal because it deals with real people had
never appealed to her, but the history of the Civil War was different from
others.
It had to do with Vernons.