In the dining room, which was lighted by tallow candles, I found an
obviously exasperated host and hostess. When I entered Cousin Pelham was
fussing about a mahogany cellaret, while Mrs. Blanton was pinning a bib
of checked gingham round the neck of a little girl in a high chair. With
my English ideas of bringing up children, I thought it an odd custom to
have the row of high chairs and trays at the table, and to allow such
mere babies to appear at the evening meal.
“This is Gertrude,” said Mrs. Blanton, after my apologies had been
contritely offered and graciously accepted by Cousin Pelham, “and that,”
nodding to a little boy of the same age, “is John. The other two are
Robert and Jane.” They were robust, healthy-looking children, with dark
hair and high colour, as unlike their delicate half-brother as one could
well imagine.
At supper there was little conversation, for Cousin Pelham, who, I
surmised, could talk delightfully when he made the effort, appeared to
be absorbed in the food that was placed before him. This was of
excellent quality. Evidently, I decided, the second Mrs. Blanton was the
right wife for him. Vain, spoiled, selfish, amiable as long as he was
given everything that he wanted, and still good-looking in an obvious
and somewhat flashing style, he had long ago passed into that tranquil
state of mind which follows a complete surrender to the habits of life.
I wondered how that first wife, Clarissa of the romantic name and the
flaming hair, had endured existence in this lonely neighbourhood with
the companionship of a man who thought of nothing but food and drink.
Perhaps he was different then; and yet was it possible for such abnormal
egoism to develop in the years since her death? He ate immoderately, I
observed, and even before he left the table I could see that the
drowsiness which afflicts the overfed was descending upon him.
“The garden is charming,” I said. “I have never seen one like it, so
irregular and apparently neglected, and yet with a formal soul of its
own.” Cousin Pelham stared at me over the dish of fried chicken from
which he was carefully selecting the brownest and tenderest piece. “The
garden? Oh, yes, we’ve had to let that go. It was kept up as long as
Clarissa lived. She had a passion for flowers; but we can’t get any of
the darkeys to work it now.” Then he appealed directly to his wife, who
was engaged in teaching Gertrude how to hold her fork properly. “There
hasn’t been a spade stuck in the garden this spring, has there, Hannah?”
Mrs. Blanton shook her head, without removing her eyes from the little
girl. “Nor last spring, nor the one before that,” she rejoined. “Nobody
sets foot in it now except Pell, and he oughtn’t to go there. I tell him
there might be snakes in the long grass; but he won’t mind what I say.
It takes as much work as we can manage to plough the fields and the
kitchen beds. We can’t spare any for that old garden you have to spade.”
“Perhaps that’s a part of the charm,” I responded. “It expresses itself,
not some human being’s idea of planting.”
She looked at me as if she did not know what I meant, and on my other
side Cousin Pelham chuckled softly. “That sounds like Clarissa,” he
said, and there was no trace of sadness in his voice.
Across the table little Pell was eating delicately, pretending to be a
bird. Now and then his stepmother turned away from the younger children
to scold him about his fastidious appetite, or his odd manner of using
his knife and fork, as if they were a superior kind of chopsticks. Her
tone was not harsh. It was no sharper indeed than the one she used to
her own children; yet, whenever she spoke to him, I felt rather than saw
that he winced and shrank away from her. The child’s nerves were
overstrung, I could tell that just by watching him with his stepmother;
and to her, who could see nothing that was not directly before her eyes,
his sensitiveness appeared deliberate perversity. Yet he was an
attractive child in spite of his elfin ways. If he could only find the
sympathy and understanding he needed so desperately, I felt that he
might become very lovable.
Though I was sorry for the child then, I had barely touched the edge of
the passion which presently filled my heart. The hardest hour of all,
and one of the most trying moments in my life, came when we passed into
the library, and Mrs. Blanton summoned the children to bed. The younger
children, already nodding, obeyed without protest; but when it came to
Pell’s turn to kiss his father good-night, he began to shake and whimper
with terror. For a minute I did not understand; then turning to Cousin
Pelham, I asked, with a sympathy so acute that it stabbed like a knife,
“Is Pell afraid of the dark?”
Cousin Pelham, sunk in the softest old leather chair, was beyond the
sound of my voice; but his wife answered immediately in her firm and
competent tone.
“We are trying to break him of it. It would be dreadful for his father’s
son to be a coward.”
“Does he sleep in the nursery?”
“He used to, but we had to move his bed across the hall because he kept
the other children awake. He gets, or pretends to get, the most
ridiculous notions into his head, and he carries on so that the other
children don’t get any sleep when they are in the room with him.”
“Where does he stay now?”
“In the spare room next to yours. We moved him there a few weeks ago,
and you would think from the way he behaved that we were sending him to
his grave.”
“But doesn’t that seem the wrong way, to frighten a nervous child into
hysterics?”
At this she turned on me the most exasperating force in the universe,
impregnable common sense.
“We’ve got to break him of it,” she retorted, “or he will be a baby all
his life.”
“I think you’re wrong,” was all I could say feebly in denial; and my
words had as little effect as the dash of hail on a window-pane. But,
while I answered, I was telling myself that I had found out where the
boy slept, and that I would go to his room as soon as I had bidden the
family goodnight. Cousin Pelham and his wife stayed downstairs, I knew,
in what they called “the chamber” behind the drawing room, so I should
have to guard against only the stupid-looking nurse who had a room, I
supposed, near the children.
Bending over, I pressed the boy to my heart. “I am near you, and I will
take care of you,” I whispered. Then, releasing him, I stood back and
watched him walk, wincing and trembling, after the sturdy children of
his stepmother.
It seemed to me that the evening would never end. Every minute I was
straining my ears for a sound from the floor above, while Cousin Pelham
dozed through the processes of digestion, and Mrs. Blanton and I
discussed such concrete facts as wood and stones and preserves and the
best way to build a road or to cut down a tree. At last, when I was
exhausted beyond belief, though it was only a little after nine o’clock,
she laid down her mending, rose from her chair, and, with her hand on
her husband’s shoulder, wished me good-night.
“You will find a candle in the hall,” she said. “We never use lamps in
the chambers.” Her use of the archaic word struck me at the time as
poetic. It was the only poetic touch I ever observed about her.
On a table in the hall I found a row of tallow dips in old brass
candlesticks; and after lighting one, I took it in my hand and ascended
the circular staircase. Ahead of me the light flitted like a moth up the
worn steps, which the feet of generations had hollowed out in the centre
as water hollows out a stairway of rock. The hall above was empty—it
occurred to me at the moment that I had never seen such empty-looking
halls—and was quite dark except for the flickering light of my candle.
As I crossed the floor the green mist which I had left in the garden
floated in and enveloped me, and that wistful fragrance became
intolerably sweet. I had suddenly the feeling that the dim corners and
winding recesses of the hall were crowded with intangible shapes.
After glancing through my open door to assure myself that I had not made
a mistake, I stole across the hall and hesitated before the threshold of
what Mrs. Blanton had pointed out to me as “the spare room.” If the
child were sleeping, I did not wish to arouse him, but all idea that he
slept was banished as I pushed the door wider and heard him talking
aloud to himself. Then, while the pointed flame of my candle pierced the
obscurity, I saw that he was not, as I had first thought, alone. The old
coloured woman in the black alpaca dress, with the white apron and the
red turban, was bending over him. When I approached she turned slowly
and looked at me; and I felt that her dark, compassionate face was love
made manifest to my eyes. So she had looked down on the child, and so,
for one miraculous instant, she gazed directly into my heart. For one
miraculous instant! Then, while I stood there, transfixed as by an
arrow, she passed, with that slow movement, across the room to the door
which I had left open. Before I could stir, before I could utter a word
to detain her, she had disappeared; and the boy, sitting up in the
heavily draped bed, was staring at me with wondering eyes. “Mammy was
telling me a story,” he said.
“I didn’t know that you had a mammy now.” This was the best that I could
do at the moment.
“Oh, yes, I have!” He smiled with charming archness, and I noticed that
the fear had passed out of his voice.
“When did she come?” I asked.
“She has been here always, ever since,” he hesitated, “since before I
was.”
“Does she look after the other children too?”
He laughed, cuddling down into the middle of the feather bed. “They
don’t know about her. They have never seen her.”
“But how can she come and go in the house without anybody seeing her?”
At this the laughter stopped. “She has a way,” he answered
enigmatically. “She never comes into the house except when I’m afraid.”