It was fifteen years ago to-day; yet I can still see that road
stretching through vine-like shadows into the spring landscape.
Though I was never in Virginia before, I had been brought up on the
traditions of my mother’s old home on the Rappahannock; and when the
invitation came to spend a week with my unknown cousins, the Blantons,
at Whispering Leaves, I was filled with a delightful sense of expectancy
and adventure. None of my family had ever seen the present owner of the
place—one Pelham Blanton, a man of middle age, who was, as far as we
were aware, without a history. All I knew of him was that his first wife
had died at the birth of a child about seven years before, and that
immediately afterward he had married one of his neighbours, a common
person, my mother insisted, though she had heard nothing of the second
wife except that her name before her marriage was Twine. Whether the
child of the first wife had lived or not we did not know, for the
letters from the family had stopped, and we had no further news of the
place until I wrote from Richmond asking permission to visit the house
in which my mother and so many of my grandmothers were born.
The spring came early that year. When I descended from the train into
the green and gold of the afternoon, I felt almost as if I were stepping
back into some old summer. An ancient family carriage, drawn by two
drowsy black horses with flowing tails, was waiting for me under a
blossoming locust tree; and as soon as my foot touched the ground I was
greeted affectionately by the coloured driver, who still called my
mother “Miss Effie.” He was an imposing, ceremonious old man, very
nearly as black as the horses, with a mass of white hair, which is
unusual in a negro, and a gay bandanna handkerchief crossed over his
chest. After an unconscionable wait for the mail, he brought the
dilapidated leather pouch from the office, and tossed it on the floor of
the carriage. A minute later, as he mounted over the wheel to his seat,
he glanced back at me and remarked in an encouraging tone, “dar ain’
nuttin’ to hinder us now.”
“How far is it to Whispering Leaves, Uncle Moab?”
The old negro pondered the question while he flicked the reins over the
broad swaying backs of the horses. He was so long in replying that,
thinking he had forgotten to answer, I repeated the words more
distinctly.
“Can you tell me how far it is to Whispering Leaves?”
At this he turned and looked back at me over his shoulder. “I reckon
hit’s sum un like ten miles, or mebbe hit’s gwine on twelve,” he
responded.
“When did you leave there?”
Again there was a long silence while we jogged sleepily out of the
deeply shaded streets of the little village. “I ain’ been dar dis
mawnin’, Miss Effie,” he answered at last.
“Why, I thought you lived there?”
I was so accustomed by this time to the slowness of his responses that I
waited patiently until he brought out with hesitation, “I use’ ter.”
“Then you are no longer the family coachman?”
He shook his head above the bandanna handkerchief, and I could see his
deep perplexity written in the brown creases of his neck. “Yas’m. I’se
still de driver.”
“But how can you be if you don’t live on the place?”
“One er dem w’ite sarvants brungs de car’ige down ter de creek, en I
tecks en drives hit along de road,” he replied. “I goes dar in de
daytime,” he added impressively after a minute. “Dar’s some un um ain’
never set foot dar sence we all moved off, but I ain’ skeered er
nuttin’, sweet Jesus, in de daytime.”
“Do you mean that all the old servants moved off together?”
“Yas’m. Ev’y last one un um. Dey’s all w’ite folks dar now.”
“When did that happen?”
But, as I was beginning to discover, time and space are the flimsiest
abstractions in the imagination of the negro. “Hit wuz a long time ago.
Miss Effie,” replied Uncle Moab. “Pell, he wa’n much mo’n a baby den. He
wuz jes’ in dresses, en he’s done been in breeches now fur a pa’cel er
Christmas times.”
“Pell? Is that the child of the first Mrs. Blanton?”
“Yas’m. He’s Miss Clarissa’s chile. Miss Hannah Twine, she’s got a heap
er chillun; dar’s two pa’cel er twins en den de baby dat wuz bo’n las’
winter. But Pell, he ain’t ’er chile.”
I was beginning to see light. “Then Pell must be about seven years old,
and you moved off the place while he was still in short dresses. That
must have been just four or five years ago.”
“Dat’s hit, honey, dat’s hit.”
“And all the coloured servants moved away at the same time?”
“De same day. Dar wa’nt er one un um lef dar by sundown.”
“And they’ve had to have white servants ever since?”
“Dey’s all w’ite ones dat stays on atter sundown. De coloured folks dey
goes back in de daytime, but dey don’t stay on twell supper. Naw’m, dar
ain’ noner dem but de w’ite folks dat stays on ter git supper.”
While I questioned him the drowsy horses trotted slowly through the sun
and shadow on the dun-coloured road. The air was fragrant with mingled
wood scents and honeysuckle. A sky of flowerlike blue shone overhead.
Now and then a redbird, flying low, darted across the road, and far off
in the trees there was the sound of a joyous chorus.
“I never saw so many redbirds, Uncle Moab.”
“Yas’m. Dar sutney is er plenty er dem dis yeah. Hit’s a bird yeah, sho
nuff. Hit pears ter me like I cyarn’ put my foot outside er my do’ dat I
don’t moughty near step on er robin, en I ain’ never hearn tell er sech
er number uv blue jays. De blue jay he’s de meanest bird dat ever wuz,
but he sutney is got er heap er sense. He knows jes ez well on w’ich
side his bread is buttered ez ef’n he wuz sho nuff folks. Hi! Don’ you
begin ter study ’bout birds twel you git to W’is-perin’ Leaves. Hit
seems dat ar place wuz jes made ter drive folks bird crazy. Dey’s
ev’ry-whar’ dose birds. De wrens en de phœbes dey’s in de po’ch, en de
swallows dey’s in de chimleys, en de res’ un um is calling ter you en
pesterin’ de life outer you in de trees.”
Well, I liked birds! If there were nothing more dangerous than birds at
Whispering Leaves, I could be happy there.
While we jogged on there crept over me the feeling of restlessness, of
wistful yet indefinable desire, which is the very essence of spring. My
thoughts had been brushed for an instant by that magic spirit of beauty;
and I saw the wide landscape, with its flushed meadows sinking into the
grapelike bloom of the distance, as if it were a part, not of the actual
world, but of a universe painted on air, as transparent as the faintly
coloured shadows across the road. In the thick woods on the left
delicate green appeared to rise and fall like the foam of the sea.
Accustomed as I was to the late northern season, there was an
intoxication in this spring which was as flowery as June. A bird year,
the old coachman had called it; but a miraculous spring it seemed to me,
with its bright soft winds, as sweet as honey, and its far, serene sky.
And from the fragrant woods and rosy meadows there floated always the
joyous piping of invisible birds; of birds hidden in low thickets; of
birds high in the misty woods; of birds by the silver stream in the
pasture; of birds flying swiftly into the impalpable shadows.
“I thought birds were quiet in the afternoon, Uncle Moab?”
“Dey ain’ never quiet heah, honey. Dey chatters even in de night time.
Dey don’ hoi’ dere tongues fur nuttin’, not even w’en de snow is on de
groun’.”
Gradually, after what seemed to me to be hours of that monotonous pace,
the light on the road faded slowly to a delicate primrose. The sun was
setting beyond the rich woods on the horizon, and a thin clear veil,
like silver tissue, was dropping over the spring landscape. Presently,
as we came under the gloom of arching boughs, the old negro turned the
heads of the horses and scrambled down from the coachman’s seat.
“I ain’ gwine no furder den dis, Miss Effie,” he explained; and then, as
the gate swung open, I saw that a young white man had run forward to
unfasten it. When the old negro, with a pull at his front lock, had
shuffled off in the direction of the sunset, the young man made a bound
into the driver’s seat and jerked up the reins.
“Does Uncle Moab live near here?” I inquired. “About a mile up the road,
miss. Mr. Blanton gave him the cabin at the fork when he moved away.”
“I wonder why he moved?”
The young man broke into a cheery laugh. “When a darkey once gets a
notion in his head, the only way to get it out is with an ax,” he
retorted; and a minute later he added: “I reckon you don’t know much
about the darkeys up North?”
“Very little,” I conceded, and we drove on in silence.
The road into which we had turned was a narrow private way, very steep
and rocky, which led between rotting “worm” fences and neglected fields
to a dense avenue of cedars on the brow of the hill. As we went on, I
wondered why the fields so near the house should be abandoned. The
remains of last year’s harvest still strewed the ragged furrows, and
against the skyline on the top of the hill there was a desolate row of
corn stubble. Presently, as the carriage jolted over the rocky road, I
heard the sound of barking, or, as it seemed to me at that sombre hour,
the kind of baying to which hounds give voice on moonlit nights. Then,
when we reached the high ground at last, I found that two black and
yellow hounds were sitting amid the naked cornstalks and barking at our
approach.
“Won’t these fields be planted this year?” I asked in surprise.
“We can’t get any of the darkeys to work here,” replied the driver.
“They are too near the house.”
As we came to the brow of the hill the dogs ran to meet us, and then,
after a few barks of welcome, turned and padded on noiselessly beside
the horses. Between us and the beginning of the cedar avenue there was a
clear space of road, and when we reached this the veil over the sunset
parted suddenly like a curtain, and a glow, which I can compare to
nothing except clouded amber, suffused the horizon and the abandoned
cornfields. In this glow I discerned the gigantic shape of an old
mulberry tree near the avenue; and the next instant I made out, amid the
foliage on the high boughs, the lightly poised figure of a little boy in
a blue cotton suit, with a mass of streaming ruddy curls.
“Why, he might slip and fall,” I thought; and the words had scarcely
formed themselves in my mind, when the little figure turned sharply, as
if in terror, and uttered a cry of alarm.
“Mammy, I am falling!” he called out, as his feet slipped from the
bough.
I had already made a spring from the carriage, with the sunset dazzling
my eyes, when an old negro woman emerged swiftly from the underbrush by
the fence, and caught the child in her arms. In that instant of terror,
while my eyes were still filled with the sunset, I observed only that
the woman was tall and straight like an Indian, and that her face,
framed in a red turban, was as brown and wrinkled as a November leaf.
Then, as she placed the child on his feet, I saw that her features were
irradiated, by a passion of tenderness which gave it a strange glow like
the burning light of the sunset.
“You saved his life!” I started to cry; but before I could utter the
words she vanished into the shadow of the mulberry tree, and left the
boy standing alone in the road.
“You might have been killed,”! said sternly as I reached him, for I was
still trembling from the fright he had given me.
The boy looked up with a strange elfin glee—there is no other word for
it—in his face. “I knew Mammy would catch me,” he responded defiantly.
“Suppose she hadn’t been here?” As I spoke I looked about me for the old
negress.
At this the child laughed shrilly, with a sound that was like the ironic
mirth of an old man. “She is always where I am,” he replied.
He was a queer child, I thought as I gazed at him, ugly and pinched, and
yet with a charm which I felt from the first moment my eyes fell on him.
There was a defiant shyness in his manner, and his little face, under
the flaming curls, was too thin and pale for healthy childhood. But, in
spite of his strangeness, I had never in my life been so strongly
attracted, so completely drawn, to a child.
“You must be Pell!” I exclaimed, after a pause in which I had watched
him in silence.
He stared at me critically. “Yes, I am Pell. How did you know?”
“Oh, I’ve heard about you. Uncle Moab told me on the way over.”
At the name of Uncle Moab his face grew less blank and hard. “Where is
he?” he asked, turning to the driver. “I was going down to the gate to
meet him. I want him to mend my kite.”
“Uncle Moab went on to his cabin,” answered the young man, and I noticed
that he subdued his tone as he might have done to an ill person or a
startled colt.
“Then I’ll go after him,” replied the child. “I am not afraid.”
With a bound he started down the steep road, running in restless leaps,
with his bright curls blown out like an aureole round his head. The two
black and yellow hounds, jumping up from the stubble, followed, as
noiseless as shadows, on his trail; and in a few minutes the three
shapes melted into the obscurity of the fields.
When I was in the carriage again I remarked inquiringly to the driver:
“For a delicate child he does not appear to be timid.”
“Not out of doors. He is never afraid out of doors. In the house they
have a good deal of trouble with him.”
“Do the other children look so thin and pale?”
“Oh, no, ma’am. The other children are healthy enough. They don’t get on
well with this one, and that’s why he stays out of the house whenever
they’ll let him, even when it is raining. Pell is the child of the first
Mrs. Blanton.”
“Yes, I know. Were you here in her time?”
“No, I came afterward. The year the darkeys moved away. But anybody can
see how different she must have been from this one, who is the daughter
of old Mr. Twine, the miller. She kept house for Mr. Blanton after his
first wife died.” This was news to me, for I was absolutely ignorant of
the family circumstances. I was eager to learn more of the story; but I
could not gossip about my relatives with a stranger, so I said merely,
“Then she brought up the child—Pell, I mean?” Though the driver’s back
was turned to me, I could see by the stubborn shake of his head that my
question had aroused an unpleasant train of reflections. “No, Pell’s
mammy took care of him until he was five years old. She had nursed his
mother before him. I reckon she belonged to the family of the first Mrs.
Blanton and came to Whispering Leaves with the bride. I never saw her.
She died before my time here; but they say that as long as the old woman
lived Pell never knew what it was to miss his mother. Mammy Rhody—that
was her name—had promised the first Mrs. Blanton when she was dying that
she would never let the child out of her sight; and they say she kept
her promise to the dead as long as she lived. Whenever you saw Pell
there was Mammy Rhody, sure enough, with her eyes on him. She slept in
the room with him, and she always stood behind his high chair when they
had him down to the table. Darkeys are like that, I reckon. A vow’s a
vow. When she swore she’d never take her eyes off him, she meant just
what she said.”
“The child must miss her terribly?”
Again I saw that stubborn shake of his head. “The queer part is that the
boy insists she ain’t dead. Nothing they can do to him—Mrs. Blanton has
talked to him by the hour—will make him admit that Mammy Rhody is dead.
He says she plays with him just as she used to, and that all these birds
you hear about Whispering Leaves are the ones that she tamed for him.
Birds! Well, there never was, they say, such a hand with birds as Mammy
Rhody. She could tame anything going from an eagle to a wren, I’ve
heard, and some of the darkeys have got the notion that the woods about
here are still full of the ghosts of Mammy Rhody’s pets. They say it
ain’t natural for birds to call in and out of season as they do around
Whispering Leaves.”
“And does Pell believe this also?”
“Nobody knows, ma’am, just how much Pell believes. They’ve tried to stop
all that foolishness because it turns the heads of the darkeys.
“You can’t get one of them to stay on the place after sunset, not for
love or money. It all started with the way Pell goes about talking to
himself. Holy Moses! I ain’t skeery myself, ma’am, for a big fellow like
me, but it gives me the creeps sometimes when I watch that child playing
by himself in the shrubbery and hear him talking to somebody that ain’t
there. He does the queerest things, too, just like climbing out on that
high limb and calling out to his mammy that he was going to fall.”
“He might have been badly hurt if somebody hadn’t caught him,” I said.
The driver laughed politely, as if I had made a poor joke which he
accepted on faith though he missed the humour. “He goes on pretending
like that all the time,” he returned.
“But the old coloured woman, the one who caught him? Who is she?” I
asked.
At this the man turned sharply, letting the reins fall on the backs of
the horses. “The old coloured woman?” he repeated inquiringly.
“I mean the tall one in the black dress, with the white apron and the
red turban on her head.” There was a slight asperity in my tone, for it
seemed to me the man was incredibly stupid.
The blankness—or was it suspicion?—in his face deepened. “I don’t know.
I didn’t see anybody,” he answered presently.
Turning his head away from me again, he gathered up the reins and urged
the horses with a clucking noise into the long avenue of cedars.
Dusk, dusk, dusk. As we drove on rapidly beneath the high, closely woven
arch of the cedars, I was conscious again of a deep intuitive feeling
that the world in which I moved was as unreal as the surroundings in a
dream. Dreamlike, too, were my own sensations as I passed into that
greenish twilight which shut out the light of the afterglow. Feathery
branches edged with brighter green brushed my cheeks like the wings of a
bird; and though I knew it must be only my fancy, I seemed to hear a
hundred jubilant notes in the enchanted gloom of the trees.
Presently, as if the thought were suggested by that imaginary music, I
found myself returning to the old negress. Surely, if she had merely
hastened on in front of us, we must overtake her before we reached the
end of the avenue. Wherever the shadows crowded more thickly, wherever
there was a sudden stir in the underbrush, I peered eagerly into the
obscurity, hoping that we had at last come up with the old woman, and
that I might offer her a place in the carriage. Though I had had only
the briefest glimpse of her, I had found her serene leaf-brown face
strangely attractive, almost, I thought oddly enough, as if her
mysterious black eyes, under the heavy brows, had penetrated to some
secret chamber of my memory. I had never seen her before, and yet I felt
as if I had known her all my life, particularly in some half-forgotten
childhood which haunted me like a dream. Could it be that she had nursed
my mother and my grandmother, and that she saw a resemblance to the
children she had trained in her youth? Stranger still, I felt not only
that she recognized me, but that she possessed some secret which she
wished to confide to me, that she was charged with a profoundly
significant message which, sooner or later, she would find an
opportunity to deliver.
As we went on, the hope that we should overtake her increased with every
foot of the road. I stared into the mass of shadows. I started at every
rustle on the scented ground. But still I caught no further glimpse of
her; and at last, while I was gazing breathlessly beneath the cedars, we
came out of the avenue on the edge of an open lawn, which was sown with
small star-shaped flowers of palest blue. In front of me there were
other ancient cedars, seven in number; and farther off, beyond the row
of cedars, there was a long white house standing against the
pomegranate-coloured afterglow, where a little horned moon was sailing.
I can shut my eyes now, after all these years, and summon back the scene
as vividly as I saw it when we emerged from the long stretch of
twilight. I can still see the blue glimmer of the flowers in the grass;
the low house, with deep wings, where the stucco was peeling from the
red brick beneath a delicate tracery of Virginia creeper; the seven
pyramidal cedars guarding the hooded roof of gray shingles; and the
clear afterglow in which the little moon sailed like a ship. Fifteen
years ago! And I have not forgotten so much as the spiral pattern the
Virginia creeper made on the pinkish white of the wall.
“Are there no trees,” I asked, “except cedars?” The driver lifted his
whip and pointed over the roof. “You never saw such elms. I reckon there
ain’t any finer trees in the country, but they’re all at the back, every
last one of ’em. Mr. Blanton’s grandfather had a notion that cedars
didn’t mix, and he wouldn’t have any other trees planted in front.”
I understood as I looked, in the flushed evening air, at the dark trees
presiding over the approach to the house, with its Ionic columns and its
quaint wings, added, one could see, long after the original walls were
built. The drooping eaves, I knew, sheltered a multitude of wrens and
phoebes, and the whole place was alive with swallows, which dipped and
wheeled under the glowing sky.
We turned briskly into the circular drive, and a few minutes later, when
we stopped before the walk of sunken flagstones, the driver jumped down
and assisted me to descend. As I reached the porch, the door opened in a
leisurely manner, and my cousin Pelham, a tall, relaxed,
indolent-looking man of middle age, with gray hair, brilliant dark eyes
and an air of pensive resignation, came out to receive me. I had heard,
or had formed some vague idea, that the family had “run to seed,” as
they say in the South, and my first view of Cousin Pelham helped to fix
this impression more firmly in my mind. He looked, I thought, a man who
had ceased to desire anything intensely except physical comfort.
“So this is Cousin Effie’s daughter,” he remarked by way of greeting, as
he stooped and placed a perfunctory kiss on my cheek.
Beyond him I saw a large angular woman, with massive features and hair
of ambiguous brown, and I inferred, from the baby in her arms and four
sturdy children at her skirts, that she was the “Miss Hannah,” for whom
Uncle Moab had prepared me. She appeared to me then and afterward to be
a woman who was proficient in the art of making a man comfortable, and
who hadn’t, as the phrase goes, “a nerve in her body.”
After greeting me cordially enough in her dry fashion, she directed the
driver to take my bag upstairs to “the red room.”
“I hope you can do without your trunk until to-morrow,” she added. “All
the teams have been ploughing to-day, and we couldn’t send over to the
station.”
I replied that I could do very well without it since I had brought my
travelling bag. Then, after a few questions from Cousin Pelham about my
mother, whom he had not seen since they were both children at Whispering
Leaves, Mrs. Blanton led me into the wide hall, where I saw a picture,
framed in the open back door, of clustering elms and a flagged walk
which ran down into a sunken garden. A minute later, while we ascended
the circular staircase, with its beautifully carved balustrade, I found
my eyes turning toward that vision of spring which I had seen through
the open door.
“How white it looks out there in the garden,” I said. “It seems carpeted
with moonlight.”
She bent her head indifferently to glance over the balustrade. “That’s
narcissus. It’s in full bloom now,” she answered. “The first Mrs.
Blanton” (she might have been speaking of some one she had just left on
the porch) “planted the whole garden in those flowers, and we have never
got rid of them. The poet’s narcissus, Mr. Blanton calls it.”
“There are lilacs, too,” I responded, for the cool dim hall was filled
with the fragrance which seemed to me to be the secret of spring.
“Oh, yes, there are a great many lilacs about the wings, but they are
thickest out by the kitchen.”
The upstairs hall, like the one below, was large and dim, and while we
crossed it, my companion called my attention to a loosened board or two
in the floor. “The rats are bad,” she observed. “I hope they won’t
bother you. They make a good deal of noise at night.” And then almost
immediately: “I don’t know how you’ll manage without a bathroom, but Mr.
Blanton would never have water put in the house.”
As she spoke, she opened a door at the front and ushered me into an
immense bedroom, which was hung in a last-century fashion with faded
calico. So far as I could distinguish in the dim light, there was not so
much as a touch of red in the room. The furniture was all of rich old
mahogany, made in too heavy a style for the taste that has been formed
on Chippendale or Sheraton, and much of it looked as if it were dropping
to pieces for lack of proper care. There was a high-tester bed, hung
with the dingy calico; there was an elaborately carved bureau, with a
greenish mirror which reflected my features in a fog; and there was a
huge screen, papered in a design of castles and peacocks, which
concealed an old-fashioned washstand. Yes, it was primitive. The touch
about the water belonged to the dark ages; and yet the place possessed,
for me at least, an inexpressible charm.
When Mrs. Blanton had left me alone, after telling me that supper would
be served in half an hour, I made a few hurried preparations, while I
tried in vain to get a glimpse of myself in the mirror, where my
reflection floated like a leaf in a lily pond. Then, stealing cautiously
from the room and across the deserted hall, with its musty smell of old
spices, I crept down the staircase and out of the open back door. Here
that provocative fragrance, the aroma of vanished springs, seized me
again; and running down the worn steps of the porch, I passed the bower
of lilacs beside the whitewashed kitchen wall, and followed the flagged
walk to the sunken garden.
At the end of the walk a primitive wooden stile, like an illustration in
_Mother Goose_, led into the garden; and when I passed it, I found
myself in a flowery space, which was surrounded by banks of honeysuckle
instead of a wall. A few old fruit trees, now well past blooming, stood
in the centre; and edging the grassy paths, there were all the shrubs
with quaint-sounding names of which I had dreamed in my
childhood—guelder rose, bridal wreath, mock orange, flowering quince,
and caly-canthus. Over all there hung a mist which had floated up from
the low ground by the river; and it seemed to me that this moisture
released the scents of a hundred springs. Never until that moment had I
known what the rapture of smell could be.
And the starry profusion of the narcissi! From bank to bank of
honeysuckle the garden looked as if the Milky Way had fallen over it and
been caught in the high grass.
Suddenly, in that enchanted silence, I heard the sound of a bell. In a
house where there were no bathrooms, I surmised that bells were probably
still rung for meals; and turning reluctantly, I started back to the
stile. I had gone but a step or two when a light flashing through the
windows of the house arrested my gaze; and the next instant, when I
glanced round again, I saw the figure of the old negress, in her white
apron and red turban, standing motionless under the boughs of a
pear-tree. In the twilight I saw her eyes fixed upon me, as I had seen
them at sunset, with a look of entreaty like the inarticulate appeal in
the eyes of the dumb. While I returned her gaze I felt, as I had felt at
our first meeting, that she was speaking to me in some inaudible
language which I did not yet understand, that she bore a message to me
which, sooner or later, she would find a way to deliver. What could she
mean? Why had she sought out me, a stranger, when she appeared to avoid
the family and even the servants? Quickening my steps, I hastened toward
her with a question on my lips; but before I reached her the bell rang
again with a chiming sound, and when I withdrew my eyes from the old
woman’s face, I noticed that the little boy was running down the flagged
walk to the stile. Bitterly I regretted the moment’s inadvertence, for
when I looked back, the negress had slipped beyond some of the flowering
shrubs, and the garden appeared to be deserted. Well, next time I would
be more careful, I resolved. And with this resolution in my mind, I
hurried to meet Pell at the stile.
“She says you must come to supper,” began the boy as soon as I came
within reach of his voice. It was the first time I had heard him allude
to his stepmother, and never, during the week I spent at Whispering
Leaves, did he speak of her, in my presence, by any more intimate name.
I held out my arms, and he came to me shyly but trustingly. Though I
could see that he was a nervous and sensitive child, the victim, I
fancied, of an excitable imagination, I felt that it would not be
difficult to win his confidence, if only one started about it in the
right way. For the first time in my life I was drawn to a child, and I
knew that the boy returned my liking in spite of his reserved manner.
“It is so beautiful I hate to go in,” I said, with my arm about him.
“I wish I could never go in,” he answered, turning back to the garden.
“It is so lonely inside the house.”
“Lonely?” I repeated, for the word struck me as a queer one for a child
to use. “Aren’t your little brothers and sisters there to play with
you?” He shook his head impatiently. “But they don’t like Mammy to come
in.”
As I glanced down at his grave little face I wondered if he could be not
quite right in his mind? Beneath his vivid hair, his wide-set
greenish-blue eyes held a burning ardour that was unusual in so young a
child. I could see that he was delicate in frame, and I inferred that
his intelligence was dangerously advanced for his years.
“Do you come to the table?” I asked.
He nodded with uncanny glee. “Ever since I was four years old. I had a
high chair then. Bobbie uses it now.”
“Is Bobbie one of the twins?”
“One of the littlest twins. Janie is the other. Jack and Gerty, they are
the big ones.” Then he laughed slyly. “I’m glad I’m not a twin! I’d hate
to have a girl tagging round after me.”
We had reached the back steps, and I turned, before going in, to have a
last look at the garden.
The twilight was the colour of white grapes, and the wisp of moon was
scarcely more than a thread in the paling sky. Above the kitchen roof
there was a flight of bats. An instant later I asked myself if I were
dreaming, or if I actually saw the glimmer of the old negress’s apron by
the stile. Then the boy waved his arm in an affectionate good-night, and
I knew that my imagination had not played a trick on me.
“Who is it, Pell?” I asked.
He glanced at me with his unchildish mirth. “Don’t you see her at the
stile over yonder?”
“The old coloured woman? Yes. I’ve seen her twice before. Who is she?”
Again he laughed. For some indefinable reason the laugh grated on my
nerves. “If I tell you, will you promise not to let them know?”
I pressed his thin little body to my heart. “I’ll never repeat anything
you ask me not to, Pell.” His hand, so like a bird’s claw, went up to my
cheek with a caress; and he was on the point of replying when a step
sounded in the hall, and one of the white servants came out on the porch
to remind us that Mr. Blanton was waiting. To keep Cousin Pelham waiting
for his meals was, I soon discovered, an unforgivable offence.