EGLANTINE
No one could be so cross-grained as to deny that Eglantine was a sweet
place. It lay sweetly on just the right, softly swelling hill. The old
grey-stucco main house had a sweet porch, with wistaria growing sweetly
over it; the long, added grey-stucco wings had pink and white roses
growing sweetly on trellises between the windows. There were silver
maples and heavily blooming locust trees and three fine magnolias.
There were thickets of weigelia and spiræa and forsythia, and winding
walks, and an arbour, and the whole twenty acres or so was enclosed
by a thorny, osage-orange hedge, almost, though not quite so high as
the hedge around the Sleeping Beauty's palace. It was a sweet place.
Everyone said so--parents and guardians, the town that neighboured
Eglantine, tourists that drove by, visitors to the Commencement
exercises--everybody! The girls themselves said so. It was praised of
all--almost all. The place was sweet. M. Morel, the French teacher, who
was always improving his English, and so on the hunt for synonyms, once
said in company that it was saccharine.
Miss Carlisle, who taught ancient and modern history and, in the
interstices, astronomy and a blue-penciled physiology, gently corrected
him. "Oh, M. Morel! We never use that word in this sense! If you wish
to vary the term you might use 'charming,' or 'refined,' or 'elegant.'
Besides"--she gazed across the lawn--"it isn't so sweet, I always
think, in November as it is in April or May."
"The sweetest time, I think," said Miss Bedford, who taught
mathematics, geography, and Latin, "is when the lilac is in bloom."
"And when the robins nest again," sighed a pensive, widowed Mrs. Lane,
who taught the little girls.
"It is 'refined' always," said M. Morel. "November or April, what is ze
difference? It has ze atmosphere. It is sugary."
"Here," remarked Miss Gage, who taught philosophy--"here is Mrs.
LeGrand."
All rose to greet the mistress of Eglantine as she came out from the
hall upon the broad porch. Mrs. LeGrand's graciously ample form was
wrapped in black cashmere and black lace. Her face was unwrinkled,
but her hair had rapidly whitened. It was piled upon her head after
an agreeable fashion and crowned by a graceful small cap of lace.
She was ample and creamy and refinedly despotic. With her came her
god-daughter, Sylvie Maine. It was early November, and the sycamores
were yet bronze, the maples aflame. It was late Friday afternoon, and
the occasion the arrival and entertainment overnight of an English
writer of note, a woman visiting America with a book in mind.
Mrs. LeGrand said that she had thought she heard the carriage wheels.
Mr. Pollock, the music-master, said, No; it was the wind down the
avenue. Mrs. LeGrand, pleasantly, just condescending enough and not too
condescending, glanced from one to the other of the group. "M. Morel
and Mr. Pollock and you, Miss Carlisle and Miss Bedford, will, I hope,
take supper with our guest and me? Sylvie, here, will keep her usual
place. I can't do without Sylvie. She spoils me and I spoil her! And we
will have besides, I think, the girl that has stood highest this month
in her classes. Who will it be, Miss Gage?"
"Hagar Ashendyne, Mrs. LeGrand."
Mrs. LeGrand had a humorous smile. "Then, Sylvie, see that Hagar's
dress is all right and try to get her to do her hair differently. I
like Eglantine girls to look their birth and place."
"Dear Cousin Olivia," said Sylvie, who was extremely pretty, "for all
her plainness, Hagar's got distinction."
But Mrs. LeGrand shrugged her shoulders. She couldn't see it. A little
wind arising, all the place became a whirl of coloured leaves. And now
the carriage wheels were surely heard.
Half an hour later Sylvie went up to Hagar's room. It was what was
called the "tower room"--small and high up--too small for anything
but a single bed and one inmate. It wasn't a popular room with the
Eglantine girls--a room without a roommate was bad enough, and then,
when it was upon another floor, quite away from every one--! Language
failed. But Hagar Ashendyne liked it, and it had been hers for three
years. She had been at Eglantine for three years, going home to Gilead
Balm each summer. She was eighteen--old for her age, and young for her
age.
Sylvie found her curled in the window-seat, and spoke twice before she
made her hear. "Hagar! come back to earth!"
Hagar unfolded her long limbs and pushed her hair away from her eyes.
"I was travelling," she said. "I was crossing the Desert of Sahara with
a caravan."
"You are," remarked Sylvie, "too funny for words!--You and I are to
take supper with 'Roger Michael'!"
A red came into Hagar's cheek. "Are we? Did Mrs. LeGrand say so?"
"Yes--"
Hagar lit the lamp. "'Roger Michael'--'Roger Michael'--Sylvie, wouldn't
you rather use your own name if you wrote?"
"Oh, I don't know!" answered Sylvie vaguely. "What dress are you going
to wear?"
"I haven't any but the green."
"Then wear your deep lace collar with it. Cousin Olivia wants you to
look as nice as possible. Don't you want me to do your hair?"
Hagar placed the lamp upon the wooden slab of a small, old-time
dressing-table. That done, she stood and looked at herself with a
curious, wistful puckering of the lips. "Sylvie, prinking and fixing up
doesn't suit me."
"Don't you like people to like you?"
"Yes, I do. I like it so much it must be a sin. Only not very many
people do.... And I don't think prinking helps."
"Yes, it does. If you look pretty, how can people help liking you? It's
three fourths the battle."
Hagar fell to considering it. "Is it?... But then we don't all think
the same thing pretty or ugly." The red showed again like wine beneath
her smooth, dark skin, "Sylvie, I'd _like_ to be beautiful. I'd like
to be as beautiful as Beatrix Esmond. I'd like to be as beautiful
as Helen of Troy. But everybody at Eglantine thinks I am ugly, and I
suppose I am." She looked wistfully at Sylvie.
Now in the back of Sylvie's head there was certainly the thought
that Hagar ought to have said, "I'd like to be as beautiful as you,
Sylvie." But Sylvie had a sweet temper and she was not unmagnanimous.
"I shouldn't call you ugly," she said judicially. "You aren't pretty,
and I don't believe any one would ever call you so, but you aren't at
all disagreeably plain. You've got something that makes people ask who
you are. I wouldn't worry."
"Oh, I wasn't worrying!" said Hagar. "I was only _preferring_.--I'll
wear the lace collar." She took it out of a black Japanned box, and
with it the topaz brooch that had been her mother's.
The visitor from England found the large, square Eglantine parlour
an interesting room. The pier-glasses, framed in sallow gilt, the
many-prismed chandelier, the old velvet carpet strewn with large soft
roses, the claw-foot furniture, the two or three portraits of powdered
Colonial gentlemen, the bits of old china, the framed letters bearing
signatures that seemed to float to her from out her old United States
History--all came to her like a vague fragrance from some unusual
old garden. And then, curiously superimposed upon all this, appeared
memorials of four catastrophic years. Soldiers and statesmen of
the Confederacy had found no time in which to have their portraits
painted. But Mrs. LeGrand had much of family piety and, in addition,
daguerreotypes and _cartes de visite_ of the dead and gone. With her
first glow of prosperity she had a local artist paint her father from
a daguerreotype. Stalwart, with a high Roman face, he looked forth
in black broadcloth with a roll of parchment in his hand. The next
year she had had her husband painted in his grey brigadier's uniform.
Her two brothers followed, and then a famous kinsman--all dead and
gone, all slain in battle. The portraits were not masterpieces, but
there they were, in the pathos of the grey, underneath each a little
gilt plate. "Killed at Sharpsburg."--"Killed Leading a Charge in the
Wilderness."--"Killed at Cold Harbour." Upon the wall, against the
pale, century-old paper, hung crossed swords and cavalry pistols,
and there were framed commissions and battle orders, and an empty
shell propped open the wide white-panelled door. The English visitor
found it all strange and interesting. It was as though a fragrance
of dried rose-leaves contended with a whiff of gunpowder. The small
dining-room into which presently she was carried had fascinating
prints--"Pocahontas Baptized," and "Pocahontas Married," and a group of
women with children and several negroes gathered about an open grave,
one woman standing out, reading the burial service.--Roger Michael was
so interested that she would have liked not to talk at all, just to sit
and look at the prints and mark the negro servants passing about the
table. But Mrs. LeGrand's agreeable voice was asking about the health
of the Queen--she bestirred herself to be an acceptable guest.
The small dining-room was separated only by an archway from the large
dining-room, and into the latter, in orderly files, came the Eglantine
pupils, wound about to their several tables and seated themselves with
demureness. M. Morel was speaking of the friendship of France and
England. Roger Michael, while she appeared to listen, studied these
American girls, these Southern girls. She found many of them pretty,
even lovely,--not, emphatically, with the English beauty of skin,
not with the colour of New England girls, among whom, recently, she
had been,--not with the stronger frame that was coming in with this
generation of admission to out-of-door exercise, the certain boyish
alertness and poise that more and more she was seeing exhibited,--but
pretty or lovely, with delicacy and a certain languor, a dim sweetness
of expression, and, precious trove in America! voices that pleased.
She noted exceptions to type, small, swarthy girls and large overgrown
ones, girls that were manifestly robust, girls that were alert, girls
that were daring, girls that were timid or stupid, or simply anæmic,
girls that approached the English type and girls that were at the
very antipodes--but the general impression was of Farther South than
she had as yet gone in America, of more grace and slowness, manner
and sweetness. Their clothes interested her; they were so much more
"dressed" than they would have been in England. Evidently, in deference
to the smaller room, there was to-night an added control of speech;
there sounded no more than a pleasant hum, a soft, indistinguishable
murmur of young voices.
"They are so excited over the prospect of your speaking to them after
supper," said Mrs. LeGrand, her hand upon the coffee urn.--"Cream and
sugar?"
"They do not seem excited," thought Roger Michael.--"Sugar, thank you;
no cream. Of what shall I talk to them? In what are they especially
interested?"
"In your charming books, I should say," answered Mrs. LeGrand. "In how
you write them, and in the authors you must know. And then your sweet
English life--Stratford and Canterbury and Devonshire--"
"We have been reading 'Lorna Doone' aloud this month," said Miss
Carlisle. "And the girls very cleverly arranged a little play....
Sylvie here played Lorna beautifully."
Roger Michael smiled across at Hagar, two or three places down, on the
other side of the table. "I should like to have seen it," she said in
her good, deep English voice.
"Oh," said Hagar, "I'm not Sylvie. I played Lizzie."
"This is my little cousin and god-daughter, Sylvie Maine," said Mrs.
LeGrand. "And this is Hagar Ashendyne, the granddaughter of an old
friend and connection of my family."
"_Hagar Ashendyne_," said Roger Michael. "I remember meeting once in
the south of France a Southerner--a Mr. Medway Ashendyne."
"Indeed?" exclaimed Mrs. LeGrand. "Then you have met Hagar's father.
Medway Ashendyne! He is a great traveller--we do not see as much of him
as we should like to see, do we, Hagar?"
"I have not seen him," said Hagar, "since I was a little girl."
Her voice, though low, was strange and vibrant. "What's here?" thought
Roger Michael, but what she said was only, "He was a very pleasant
gentleman, very handsome, very cultivated. My friends and I were thrown
with him during a day at Carcassonne. A month afterwards we met him at
Aigues-Mortes. He was sketching--quite wonderfully."
Mrs. LeGrand inwardly deplored Medway Ashendyne's daughter's lack
of _savoir-faire_. "To give herself away like that! Just the kind
of thing her mother used to do!" Aloud she said, "Medway's a great
wanderer, but one of these days he will come home and settle down and
we'll all be happy together. I remember him as a young man--a perfectly
fascinating young man.--Dinah, bring more waffles!--Yes, if you will
tell our girls something of your charming English life. We are all so
interested--"
Miss Carlisle's voice came in, a sweet treble like a canary's. "The
Princess of Wales keeps her beauty, does she not?"
The study hall was a long, red room, well enough lighted, with a
dais holding desk and chairs. Roger Michael, seated in one of these,
watched, while her hostess made a little speech of introduction,
the bright parterre of young faces. Sitting so, she excercised a
discrimination that had not been possible in the dining-room. Of the
faces before her each was different, after all, from the other. There
were keen faces as well as languorous ones; brows that promised as
well as those that did not; behind the prevailing "sweet" expression,
something sometimes that showed as by heat lightning, something that
had depth. "Here as elsewhere," thought Roger Michael. "The same life!"
Mrs. LeGrand was closing, was turning toward her. She rose, bowed
toward the mistress of Eglantine, then, standing square, with her good,
English figure and her sensibly shod, English feet, she began to talk
to these girls.
She did not, however, speak to them as, even after she rose, she meant
to speak. She did not talk letters in England, nor English landscape.
She spoke quite differently. She spoke of industrial and social unrest,
of conditions among the toilers of the world. "I am what is called a
Fabian," she said, and went on as though that explained. She spoke
of certain movements in thought, of breakings-away toward larger
horizons. She spoke of various heresies, political, social, and other.
"Of course I don't call them heresies; I call them 'the enlarging
vision.'" She gave instances, incidents; she spoke of the dawn coming
over the mountains, and of the trumpet call of "the coming time." She
said that the dying nineteenth century heard the stronger voice of
the twentieth century, and that it was a voice with a great promise.
She spoke of women, of the rapidly changing status of women, of what
machinery had done for women, of what education had done. She spoke of
the great needs of women, of their learning to organize, of the need
for unity among women. She used the words "false position" thrice.
"Woman's immemorially false position."--"Society has so falsely placed
her."--"Until what is false is done away with."--She said that women
were beginning to see. She said that the next quarter-century would
witness a revolution. "You young people before me will see it; some of
you will take part in it. I congratulate you on living when you will
live." She talked for nearly an hour, and just as she was closing it
came to her, with a certain effect of startling, that much of the time
she had been speaking to just one countenance there. She was speaking
directly to the girl called Hagar Ashendyne, sitting halfway down the
hall. When she took her seat there followed a deep little moment of
silence broken at last by applause. Roger Michael marked the girl in
green. She didn't applaud; she sat looking very far away. Mrs. LeGrand
was saying something smoothly perfunctory, beflowered with personal
compliments; the girls all stood; the Eglantine hostess and guest,
with the teachers who had been at table, passed from the platform, and
turned, after a space of hallway, into the rose-carpeted big parlour.
Miss Carlisle and Miss Bedford brought up the rear. "Didn't you think,"
murmured the latter, "that that was a very curious speech? Now and
then I felt so uneasy.--It was as though in a moment she was going to
say something indelicate! Dear Mrs. LeGrand ought to have told her how
careful we are with our girls."
The wind rose that night and swept around the tower room, and then,
between eleven and twelve, died away and left a calm that by contrast
was achingly still. Hagar was not yet asleep. She lay straight and
still in the narrow bed, her arms behind her head. She was rarely in
a hurry to go to sleep. This hour and a half was her dreaming-awake
time, her time for romance building, her time for floating here and
there, as in a Witch of Atlas boat in her own No-woman's land. She had
in the stalls of her mind half a dozen vague and floating romances,
silver and tenuous as mist; one night she drove one afield, another
night another. All took place in a kind of other space, in countries
that were not on any map. She brought imagined physical features into a
strange juxtaposition. When the Himalayas haunted her she ranged them,
snow-clad, by a West Indian sea. Ætna and Chimborazo rose over against
each other, and a favourite haunt was a palm-fringed, flower-starred
lawn reached only through crashing leagues of icebergs. She took
over localities that other minds had made; when she wished to she
pushed aside a curtain of vine and entered the Forest of Arden; she
knew how the moonlight fell in the wood outside Athens; she entered
the pilotless boat and drove toward the sunset gate of the Domain of
Arnheim. Usually speaking, people out of books made the population of
these places, and here, too, there were strange juxtapositions. She
looped and folded Time like a ribbon. Mark Antony and Robin Hood were
contemporaries; Pericles and Philip Sidney; Ruth and Naomi came up
abreast, with Joan of Arc, and all three with Grace Darling; the Round
Table and the Girondins were acquainted. All manner of historic and
fictive folk wandered in the glades of her imagination, any kind of
rendezvous was possible. Much went on in that inner world--doubts and
dreams and dim hypotheses, romance run wild, Fata Morganas, Castles
in Spain, passion for dead shapes, worship of heroes, strange, dumb
stirrings toward self-immolation, dreams of martyrdom, mind drenched
now with this poem, now with that, dream life, dream adventures, dream
princes, religions, world cataclysms, passionings over a colour, a
tone, a line of verse--much utter spring and burgeoning. Eighteen
years--a fluid unimprisoned mind--and no confidante but herself; of how
recapitulatory were these hours, of how youth of all the ages surged,
pulsed, vibrated through her slender frame, she had, of course, no
adequate notion. She would simply have said that she couldn't sleep,
and that she liked to tell herself stories. As she lay here now, she
was not thinking of Roger Michael's talk, though she had thought of
it for the first twenty minutes after she had put out the lamp. It
had been very interesting, and it had stirred her while it was in the
saying, but the grappling hook had not finally held; she was not ready
for it. She had let it slip from her mind in favour of the rose and
purple and deep violin humming of one of her romances. She had lain
for an hour in a great wood, like a wood in Xanadu, beneath trees that
touched the sky, and like an elfin stream had gone by knights and
ladies.... The great clock down in the hall struck twelve. She turned
her slender body, and the bed being pushed against the window, laid her
outstretched hands upon the window-sill, and looked up, between the
spectral sycamore boughs, to where Sirius blazed. Dream wood and dream
shapes took flight. She lay with parted lips, her mind quiet, her soul
awake. Minutes passed; a cloud drove behind the sycamore branches and
hid the star. First blankness came and then again unrest. She sat up in
bed, pushing her two heavy braids of hair back over her shoulders. The
small clock upon the mantel ticked and ticked. The little room looked
cold in the watery moonlight. Hagar was not dreaming or imagining
now; she was thinking back. She sat very still for five minutes,
tears slowly gathering in her eyes. At last she turned and lay face
down upon the bed, her outstretched hands against the wooden frame.
Her tears wet the sleeve of her gown. "_Carcassonne--Aigues-Mortes.
Carcassonne--Aigues-Mortes_...."