The Masquerade Brings Me Nothing but Pain.
There were, in all, ten of us at the table. Sir William beamed upon us
from the end nearest the windows, with Daisy on his left hand and the
London dame on the other--in the place of distinction to which she was, I
suppose, entitled. Below Lady Berenicia sat Mr. Stewart, Sir John, and
Walter Butler. I was on the left side below Mr. Cross. These details come
back to me as if they were of yesterday, when I think of that dinner.
I could not see Daisy from where I sat, but all through the meal I watched
the effect she was producing upon those opposite us. To do her justice,
Lady Berenicia seemed to have no alloy of jealousy in the delight with
which she regarded the result of her handiwork. Mr. Stewart could not keep
his fond eyes off the girl; they fairly glowed with satisfied pride and
affection. Both Sir John and Walter gave more attention to our beautiful
maiden than they did to their plates, and both faces told an open tale of
admiration, each after its kind.
There was plenty of gay talk at the head of the table--merry chatter of
which I recall nothing, save vaguely that it was about the triumph of art
over unadorned nature at which we were assisting.
Mr. Cross and I bore our small part in the celebration in silence for a
time. Then we fell to talking quietly of the journey upon which we were so
soon to embark; but our minds were not on the subject, and after a little
its discussion lapsed. All at once he said, as if speaking the thoughts
which tied my tongue:
"To my mind the young woman is not improved by these furbelows and
fal-lals my wife has put upon her. What wit or reason is there in a
homely, sensible little maiden like this--a pretty flower growing, as God
designed it to, in modest sweetness on its own soil--being garnished out
in the stale foppery of the last London season?"
"But it is only a masquerade, sir," I pleaded--as much to my own judgment
as to his--"and it does make her very beautiful, does it not?"
"She _was_ beautiful before," he replied, in the same low tones. "Can a
few trumpery laces and ribbons, a foolish patch, a little powder, affect
what is real about a woman, think you? And do any but empty heads value
unreal things?"
"True enough, sir; but this is nothing more than harmless pleasantry.
Women are that way. See how pleased she is--how full of smiles and
happiness she seems. It's a dull sort of life here in the woods. Poor
Daisy, she sees so little of gayety, it would be cruel to begrudge her
this innocent pleasure."
"Innocent--yes, no doubt; but, do you know, she will never be the same
girl again. She will never feel quite the same pretty little Mistress
Daisy, in her woollen gown and her puttical kerchief. She will never get
the taste of this triumph out of her mouth. You do not know women, young
man, as I do. I have studied the sex in a very celebrated and costly
school. Mark my words, ideas have been put into her head that will never
come out."
I tried to believe that this was not so. "Ah," I said, "to know other
women is not to know our Daisy. Why, she is good sense itself--so prudent
and modest and thoughtful that she makes the other girls roundabout seem
all hoydens or simpletons. She has read the most serious books--never
anything else. Her heart is as good as her mind is rich. Never fear, Mr.
Cross! not all the silks in China or velvets in Genoa could turn her
dear head."
He smiled, somewhat compassionately I thought, and made no answer.
Was I so firm in my faith, after all? The doubt rose in my thoughts, and
would not down, as the gallant talk flowed and bubbled around me. _Would_
this Daisy be quite the same next day, or next week, singing to us at the
old harpsichord in the twilight, with the glare of the blaze on the hearth
making red gold of that hair, plaited once more in simple braids? I tried
with all my might to call up this sweet familiar figure before my mental
vision: it would not freely come.
She was laughing now, with a clear ripple of joyousness, at some passing
quip between our host and sharp-tongued Lady Berenicia, both of whom
employed pretty liberally their Irish knack of saying witty, biting
things. The sound came strangely to my ears, as if it were some other than
Daisy laughing.
I was still in this brown study when Sir William called the health of the
ladies, with some jocose words of compliment to them, congratulation to
ourselves. I rose mechanically after the other gentlemen, glass in hand,
to hear Mr. Stewart make pleasant and courtly acknowledgment, and to see
the two women pass out in a great rustling of draperies and hoops, with
Walter Butler holding open the door and bowing profoundly. The faint scent
of powder left on the air annoyed me, as something stifling those thoughts
of the good little adopted sister, whom I had brought to the Hall and lost
there, which I would fain dwell upon.
We sat over our Madeira and pipes longer than usual. Candles were brought
in by Sir William's young body-servant Pontiac, for there was a full moon,
and we might thus prolong our stay after nightfall. The talk was chiefly
about our coming trip--a very serious undertaking. Sir William and Mr.
Butler had adventures of their own early trading days to recall, and they
gave us great stores of advice drawn from experience, and ranging from
choice of shirts and spirits to needful diplomacy with the Algonquins
and Sakis.
Then the company drank the health of Mr. Cross, and were good enough to
couple mine with it. A comical little yellow boy danced for us before the
hearth--an admiring wall of black faces and rolling white eyeballs filling
up the open door meanwhile. Walter Butler sang a pretty song--everybody,
negroes and all, swelling the chorus. Rum was brought in, and mixed in hot
glasses, with spice, molasses, and scalding water from the kettle on the
crane. So evening deepened to night; but I never for a moment, not even
when they drank my health, shook off the sense of unrest born of Daisy's
masquerade.
It was Molly Brant herself, nobly erect and handsome in her dark, sinister
way, who came to us with word that the moon was up over the pine-ridged
hills, and that Mistress Daisy was attired for the homeward ride,
and waiting.
Of all the pictures in Memory's portfolio, none is more distinct than this
of the departure that evening from the Hall. A dozen negroes were about
the steps, two or three mounted ready to escort us home, others bearing
horn lanterns which the moonlight darkened into inutility, still others
pulling the restive horses about on the gravel. Mr. Stewart swung himself
into the saddle, and Daisy stepped out to mount behind him. She wore her
own garments once more, but there was just a trace of powder on the hair
under the hood, and the patch was still on her chin. I moved forward to
lift her to the pillion as I had done hundreds of times before, but she
did not see me. Instead, I was almost pushed away by the rush of Sir John
and young Butler to her side, both eager to assist. It was the knight,
flushed and a little unsteady with wine, who won the privilege, and held
Daisy's foot. I climbed into my saddle moodily, getting offence out of
even this.
So we rode away, pursued down the path to the lilacs by shouts of
"Good-night! Safe home!" Looking back to lift my hat for the last adieu, I
saw the honest old baronet, bareheaded in the clear moonlight, waving his
hand from the lowest step, with Lady Berenicia and the others standing
above him, outlined upon the illumined doorway, and the negroes grouped on
either side, obscurely gesticulating in the shadows of the broad, dark
front of the Hall, which glowed against the white sky.
As I recall the scene, it seems to me that then and there I said farewell,
not alone to pleasant friends, but to the Daisy of my childhood and youth.
* * * * *
The Hall slaves rode well ahead in the narrow road; we could just hear
faintly the harmony of the tune they were humming in concert, as one hears
the murmur of an AEolian harp. As a guard, they were of course ridiculous:
the veriest suspicion of peril would have sent them all galloping
helter-skelter, with frantic shrieks of fright. But the road was perfectly
safe, and these merry fellows were to defend us from loneliness,
not danger.
I did indeed rest my free hand on the pistol in my holster as I jogged
along close behind the old gray horse and his double burden; but the act
was more an unconscious reflection of my saturnine mood, I fear, than a
recognition of need. There was every reason why I should dwell with
delight upon the prospect opening before me--upon the idea of the great
journey so close at hand; but I scarcely thought of it at all, and I was
not happy. The moon threw a jaundiced light over my mind, and in its
discolored glare I saw things wrongly, and with gratuitous pain to myself.
In fact, my brooding was the creature of the last few hours, born of a
childish pique. But as I rode gloomily silent behind my companions, it
seemed as if I had long suffered a growing separation from them. "Three is
a clumsy number," I said to myself, "in family affection not less than in
love; there was never any triad of friends since the world began, no
matter how fond their ties, in which two did not build a little interior
court of thoughts and sympathies from which the third was shut out. These
two people whom I hold dearer than everything else on earth--this good
gentleman to whom I owe all, this sweet girl who has grown up from
babyhood in my heart--would scout the idea that there was any line of
division running through our household. They do not see it--cannot see it.
Yet they have a whole world of ideas and sentiments in common, a whole
world of communion, which I may never enter."
This was what, in sulky, inchoate fashion, I said to myself, under the
spur of the jealous spirits which sometimes get rein over the thoughts of
the best of us. And it was all because the London woman had tricked out
our Daisy, for but a little hour or two, in the presentment of a
court lady!
Conversation went briskly forward, meanwhile, from the stout back of the
gray horse.
"Did you note, papa, how white and soft her hands were?" said Daisy.
"Mine were so red beside them! It is working in the garden, I believe,
although Mary Johnson always wore gloves when she was out among the
flowers and vegetables, and her hands were red, too. And Lady Berenicia
was so surprised to learn that I had never read any of the romances which
they write now in England! She says ladies in London, and in the provinces
too, do not deem themselves fit to converse unless they keep abreast of
all these. She has some of them in her chests, and there are others in the
Hall, she has found, and I am to read them, and welcome."
"You are old enough now, my girl," replied Mr. Stewart. "They seem to me
to be trivial enough things, but no doubt they have their use. I would not
have you seem as inferior to other ladies in knowledge of the matters they
talk of, as they are inferior to you in honest information."
"How interested she was when I told her of the serious books I read, and
of my daily occupations--moulding the candles, brewing the beer, carding
wool, making butter, and then caring for the garden! She had never seen
celery in trenches, she said, and would not know beans from gourds if she
saw them growing. It seems that in England ladies have nothing to do with
their gardens--when, indeed, they have any at all--save to pluck a rose
now and then, or give tea to their gentlemen under the shrubbery when it
is fine. And I told her of our quilting and spinning bees, and the
coasting on clear winter evenings, and of watching the blacks on Pinkster
night, and the picnics in the woods, and she vowed London had no
pleasures like them. She was jesting though, I think. Oh, shall we ever go
to London, papa?"
"By all means, let us go," chuckled Mr. Stewart. "You would see something
there she never saw--my grizzled old head upon Temple Bar. Shall we be off
to-morrow? My neck tingles with anticipation."
"Old tease!" laughed Daisy, patting his shoulder. "You know there have
been no heads put there since long before I was born. Never flatter
yourself that they would begin again now with yours. They've forgotten
there was ever such a body as you."
"Faith! the world doesn't go round so fast as you young people think. Only
to-day I read in the London mail that two months ago one of the polls that
had been there since '46 fell down; but if it was Fletcher's or Townley's
no one can tell--like enough not even they themselves by this time. So
there's a vacant spike now for mine. No, child--I doubt these old bones
will ever get across the sea again. But who knows?--it may be your fortune
to go some time."
"Lady Berenicia says I must come to the Hall often, papa, while she is
there," said the girl, returning to the subject which bewitched her; "and
you must fetch me, of course. She admires you greatly; she says gentlemen
in London have quite lost the fine manner that you keep up here, with your
bow and your compliments. You must practise them on me now. We are to keep
each other company as much as possible, she and I, while her husband and
Douw go off together. You should have seen her mimic them--the two
solemn, long-faced men boring each other in the depths of the wilderness."
The talk had at last got around to me. Daisy laughed gayly at recollection
of the London woman's jesting. Surely never a more innocent, less
malicious laugh came from a maiden's merry lips, but it fell sourly on
my ears.
"It is easy for people to be clever who do not scruple to be
disagreeable," I said, without much relevancy.
"What is this, Douw?" Mr. Stewart turned half-way in his saddle and
glanced inquiry back at me. "What is wrong with you? You were as glum all
the evening long as a Tuscarora. Isn't the trip with Mr. Cross to
your liking?"
"Oh, ay! I shall be glad to go."
It was on my perverse tongue's end to add the peevish thought that nobody
would specially miss me, but I held it back.
"He has had a perfect Dutch fit on to-day," said Daisy, with good-natured
sisterly frankness; "for all the world such as old Hon Yost Polhemus has
when his yeast goes bitter. Whenever I looked down the table to him, at
dinner, he was scowling across at poor Walter Butler or Sir John, as if he
would presently eat them both. He was the only one who failed to tell me I
looked well in the--the citified costume."
"Rather say I was the only one whose opinion you did not care for."
She was too sweet-tempered to take umbrage at my morose rejoinder, and
went on with her mock-serious catalogue of my crimes:
"And what do you think, papa? Who should it be but our patient, equable
Master Douw that was near quarrelling with Walter Butler, out by the
lilacs, this very morning--and in the presence of ladies, too."
"No one ever saw me quarrel, 'ladies' or anybody else," I replied.
"Faith! then I did myself," Mr. Stewart laughingly called out. "And it was
before a lady too--or the small beginnings of one. I saw him with my own
eyes, Daisy, get knocked into the ashes by a young man, and jump up and
run at him with both fists out--and all on your account, too, my lady;
and then--"
"Oh, I am reminded!"
It was Daisy who cried out, and with visible excitement. Then she clapped
her hand to her mouth with a pretty gesture; then she said:
"Or no! I will not tell you yet. It is so famous a secret, it must come
out little by little. Tell me, papa, did you know that this Mr. Cross up
at the Hall--Lady Berenicia's husband--is a cousin to the old Major who
brought me to you, out of the rout at Kouarie?"
"Is _that_ your secret, miss? I knew it hours ago."
"How wise! And perhaps you knew that the Major became a Colonel, and then
a General, and died last winter, poor man."
"Alas, yes, poor Tony! I heard that too from his cousin. Heigh-ho! We all
walk that way."
Daisy bent forward to kiss the old man. "Not you, for many a long year,
papa. And now tell me, did not this Major--_my_ Major, though I do not
remember him--take up a patent of land here, or hereabouts, through Sir
William, while he was on this side of the water?"
"Why, we should be on his land now," said Mr. Stewart, reining up the
horse.
We sat thus in the moonlight while he pointed out to us, as nearly as he
knew them, the confines of the Cross patent. To the left of us, over a
tract covered thick with low, gnarled undergrowth, the estate stretched
beyond the brow of the hill, distant a mile or more. On our right, masked
by a dense tangle of fir-boughs, lay a ravine, also a part of the
property. We could hear, as we passed there, the gurgle of the water
running at the gulf's bottom, on its way to the great leap over the rock
wall, farther down, of which I have already written.
"Yes, this was what Tony Cross took up. I doubt he ever saw it. Why do you
ask, girl?"
"_Now_ for my secret," said Daisy. "The Major's elder son, Digby, inherits
the English house and lands. The other son, Philip--the boy you fought
with, Douw--is given this American land, and money to clear and settle it.
He sailed with the others--he is in New York--he is coming here to live!"
"We'll make him welcome," cried Mr. Stewart, heartily.
"I hope his temper is bettered since last he was here," was the civillest
comment I could screw my tongue to.
Clouds dimmed the radiance of the moon, threatening darkness, and we
quickened our pace. There was no further talk on the homeward ride.