Nothing further during the subsequent brief exchange of notes between
Miss Lowrie and Linda was said of the latter's intention to visit her
father's family. Mrs. Feldt, however, whose attitude toward Linda had
been negatively polite, now displayed an animosity carefully hidden from
her husband but evident to the two girls. The elder never neglected an
opportunity to emphasize Linda's selfishness or make her personality
seem ridiculous. But this Linda ignored from her wide sense of the
inconsequence of most things.
Yet she was relieved when, finally, she had actually left New York. She
looked forward with an unusual hopeful curiosity to the Lowries. To
her surprise their house--miles, it appeared, from the center of the
city--was directly on a paved street with electric cars, unpretentious
stores and very humble dwellings nearby. Back from the thoroughfare,
however, there were spacious green lawns. The street itself, she saw
at once, was old--a highway of gray stone with low aged stone façades,
steep eaves and blackened chimney-pots reaching, dusty with years, into
the farther hilly country.
A gable of the Lowrie house, with a dignified white door, a fanlight of
faintly iridescent glass and polished brasses, faced the brick sidewalk,
while to the left there was a high board fence and an entrance with a
small grille open on a somber reach of garden. A maid in a stiff white
cap answered the fall of the knocker; she took Linda's bag; and, in a
hall that impressed her by its bareness, Linda was greeted by the Miss
Lowrie she had seen.
Her aunt was composed, but there was a perceptible flush on her cheeks,
and she said in a rapid voice, after a conventional welcome, “You must
meet Elouise at once, before you go up to your room.”
Elouise Lowrie was older than Amelia, but she, too, was slender
and erect, with black hair startling in its density on her wasted
countenance. Linda noticed a fine ruby on a crooked finger and beautiful
rose point lace. “It was good of you,” the elder proceeded, “to come and
see two old women. I don't know whether we have more to say or to keep
still about. But I, for one, am going to avoid explanations. You are
here, a fool could see that you were Bartram's girl, and that is enough
for a Lowrie.”
The room was nearly as bare as the hall: in place of the deep carpets of
the Feldts' the floor, of dark uneven oak boards, was merely waxed and
covered by a rough-looking oval rug. The walls were paneled in white,
with white ruffled curtains at small windows; and the furniture, the
dull mahogany ranged against the immaculate paint, the rocking-chairs
of high slatted walnut and rush bottoms, the slender formality of tables
with fluted legs, was dignified but austere. There were some portraits
in heavy old gilt--men with florid faces and tied hair, and the delicate
replicas of high-breasted women in brocades.
There was, plainly, an air of the exceptional in Amelia Lowrie's
conduction of Linda to her room. She waited at the door while the other
moved forward to the center of a chamber empty of all the luxury Linda
had grown to demand. There was a bed with tall graceful posts supporting
a canopy like a frosting of sugar, a solemn set of drawers with a
diminutive framed mirror in which she could barely see her shoulders,
a small unenclosed brass clock with long exposed weights, and two
uninviting painted wooden chairs. This was not, although very nearly,
all. Linda's attention was attracted by a framed and long-faded
photograph of a young man, bareheaded, with a loosely knotted scarf, a
striped blazer and white flannels. His face was thin and sensitive,
his lips level, and his eyes gazed with a steady questioning at the
observer.
“That was Bartram,” Amelia Lowrie told her; “your father. This was his
room.”
She went down almost immediately and left Linda, in a maze of dim
emotions, seated on one of the uncomfortable painted chairs. Her father!
This was his room; nothing, she realized, had been disturbed. The mirror
had held the vaguely unsteady reflection of his face; he had slept under
the arched canopy of the bed. She rose and went to a window from which
he, too, had looked.
Below her was the garden shut in on its front by the high fence. There
was a magnolia-tree, now covered with thick smooth white flowers, and,
at the back, low-massed rhododendron with fragile lavender blossoms on
a dark glossy foliage. But the space was mainly green and shadowed
in tone; while beyond were other gardens, other emerald lawns and
magnolia-trees, an ordered succession of tranquillity with separate
brick or stone or white dwellings in the lengthening afternoon shadows
of vivid maples.
It was as different as possible from all that Linda had known, from the
elaborate hotels and gigantic apartment houses, the tropical interiors,
of her New York life. She unpacked her bag, putting her gold toilet
things on the chest of drawers, precisely arranging in a shallow closet
what clothes she had brought, and then, changing, went down to the
Lowries.
They surveyed her with eminent approval at a dinner-table lighted only
with candles, beside long windows open on a dusk with a glimmer of
fireflies. Suddenly Linda felt amazingly at ease; it seemed to her
that she had sat here before, with the night flowing gently in over the
candle-flames. The conversation, she discovered, never strayed far
from the concerns and importance of the Lowrie blood. “My grandmother,
Natalie Vigné,” Elouise informed her, “came with her father to
Philadelphia from France, in eighteen hundred and one, at the invitation
of Stephen Girard, who was French as well. She married Hallet Lowrie
whose mother was a Bartram.
“That, my dear, explains our black hair and good figgers. There never
was a lumpy Lowrie. Well, Hallet built this house, or rather enlarged
it, for his wife; and it has never been out of the family. Our nephew,
Arnaud Hallet--Arnaud was old Vigné's name--owns it now. Isaac Hallet,
you may recall, was suspected of being a Tory; at any rate his brother's
descendants, Fanny Rodwell is the only one left, won't speak.”
The placid conversation ran on unchanged throughout dinner and the
evening. Linda was relieved by the absence of any questioning; indeed
nothing contemporary, she realized, was held to be significant. “I
thought Arnaud would be in to-night,” Elouise Lowrie said; “he knew
Linda was expected.” No one, however, appeared; and Linda went up early
to her room. There, too, were only candles, a pale wavering illumination
in which the past, her father, were extraordinarily nearby. A sense of
pride was communicated to her by so much that time had been unable to
shake. The bed was steeped in the magic of serene traditions.