few weeks Marcus took her to the theater several times, and Oh, the
wonder not only of seeing Booth's _Hamlet_ and Modjeska's _Rosalind_
through the medium of his kindness and his comment and elucidation, but
of seeing how many persons in the audience strove to catch her cousin's
eye and invite his recognition! He did editorial paragraphs which were
clever for the leading daily paper, of course, but there was more to
it than that! Apparently if one can successfully back up some chosen
eccentricity, as of an old hat and shabby cape and the rest of it,
by exactly the adequate manner, he attains to being a personage! And
Selina for the better part of her seventeen years, had been thinking
Marcus merely had bad manners!
"You must do a bit of reading of a little different nature, pretty
cousin mine," he told her about this same time. "Aunt Lavinia and good
Miss Ann Eliza keep you a child."
And accordingly he brought her books of a flattering nature, among them
"The Story of Creation," differing from the narrative in the Pentateuch
in a way which would have startled Mamma and Auntie unspeakably. But
which she and Maud, adventurous soul that this person always was, set
themselves to read faithfully.
And lastly, about February, Marcus came round with a letter from Miss
Boswell who with her aunt was spending the remainder of the winter in
the South. Evidently the intimacy between Marcus and Miss Pocahontas
was close.
He read Selina one especial bit, which, or so it seemed to her who had
seen nothing at all of the world, opened a wide-spreading and dismaying
vista!
More and more [thus went the letter] I am convinced we ought to do
some of our wandering early. Our sense of true values ought to come
to us young. These glorious Florida nights of tropical softness and
moonlight only gain through their recall of other scenes as lovely
met in my wanderings when I was young with my invalid father and my
mother in search of the health he was not to find. I don't suppose we
ever really deplore the gain through experience, whatever the cost at
the time. My love to the little sequestered way-side bloom, Selina.
How sweet she was in her sheltered innocence and how touching. Do not
forget how we discussed the chances for her, you and I, for a bit more
of the world through you, her big cousin?
So? That was it? Miss Boswell with her tender eyes of comprehension was
behind this kindness from Marcus? Still one must be thankful even for
dictated favors once they are accepted.
Marcus read her bits again from a second letter full of the soft
glamour of tropical scene and beauty. After he had gone, Selina hunted
her old school geography and sought the map. A pale yellow lady-finger
a little over-run in the baking, Florida was on the page, but in the
mind of Selina as she sat there in the shabby parlor with the book
outspread on her lap, Florida the ever-blooming and the tropical, was
Ponce de Leon in gleaming apparel with banner and sword stepping ashore
upon sands flowing golden beneath the fancied fountain of his search,
Ponce de Leon the ever glorious and understandable to youth, symbol of
quest, of faith in the fabled, of adventuring forth!
Maud walked in here on Selina in the parlor in the dusk, the open
book still on her lap, the fire died to red embers, Auntie's brasses
in the faint glow the one note of brightness amid the gloom. Selina's
smile was a bit wan as she looked up and fluttered the pages of the
unwieldy folio. "Thirty-seven maps herein of the world and its blue
and pink and yellow grand divisions and kingdoms and countries, Maudie!
Marcus has just been here and he's left me wincing over what he calls
my limitations. I've been to Cincinnati, once, for two days, to the
exposition and the musical festival with you and Judy and your mother.
And I've been to Chicago for a week with Auntie and Cousin Anna to
visit some Wistar kin who live in a dreary house right on the street,
one of a row. Though Cousin Anna says it's a very good house and being
in a real city is expected to sit on the street in a row, that I merely
don't know any better. And that's the extent of my traveling!"
"Limitations is a very good word," decided Maudie promptly. "I'm
deploring our deficiencies right along! I've a new word myself. Mr.
Welling and I are reading German together. I gave up waiting for the
rest of you to keep your appointments and asked him. That's what I came
over to tell you. We started last night."
These friends of Culpepper were their friends now. As Maud put it,
since they discovered they were outgrowing Brent and Sam and the rest,
these newer acquisitions were a godsend!
Mr. Welling, by Christian name Henry, square-set by mind as by body
though a wag, had seemed to gravitate to mercurial Maud.
"Apparently to correct what he chooses to call my sweeping
mis-assertions," was Maud's way of explaining it.
Mr. Cannon, Preston by name, and perpetual joker, gravitated to Adele
for whom he had to diagram each joke, and assure her he didn't mean
it, while Mr. Tate, that scholastic young man, with earnest admiration
sought Amanthus who told him wonderingly she'd always supposed Pompey
was a buried city till he told her he was a general.
Something of the personal histories of these young men were known now
to the young ladies. The father of Mr. Welling was a judge in his end
of the state. Mr. Cannon's people lived in one of the mountain counties
and were what is called land-poor, and Mr. Tate had been raised by a
grandmother.
"And shows it," Maud said when she heard this. Mr. Tate had money left
him by his grandfather too, in a quiet respectable sense, and when his
grandmother died he would have a very considerable more.
"And his name's Lemuel," again from Maud at the time they were learning
these facts, "and it's perfectly patent after you know him, why the
others continually bait him."
But right now Maud had come over to talk to Selina about her German and
Mr. Welling.
"What's your new word, Maud?" Selina asked.
"_Wanderlust._ We came on it last night. It's apropos of what you were
saying about the thirty-seven maps in the atlas."
"I see."
In April the Boswells returned from the South and Miss Pocahontas
wrote asking Selina up to Eadston to visit her.
"It will mean a new spring dress," demurred Mamma, "and the price of
the ticket besides."
"But it will mean three days for her with Marcia and Pocahontas
Boswell," said Auntie. "She can go up from Friday to Monday and not
miss her teaching either. I must say, Lavinia, they're the kind of
people I want to have her visit."
"I suppose you're right. We'll have to manage the rest of it. Selina
get your pen and thank Miss Pocahontas for her invitation, and say you
accept with pleasure."
Miss Pocahontas herself was at the Eadston station on the following
Friday afternoon to meet Selina. The carriage and horses and colored
coachman in livery waiting for them outside were all old and handsome
and well preserved. The town as they drove through it was old, too, but
not so well preserved.
"As though our forefathers planned and builded for us better than we
deserve," Miss Pocahontas said in speaking of this. She seemed to
regret it and to make a point of it.
A covered wooden bridge across the river dividing the town seemed older
than anything else. Indeed Miss Pocahontas herself and Selina, as the
carriage rolled echoingly across this bridge, full of laughter and
pretty exchange of confidences, alone seemed young of all the staid and
sleepy place. For the square, brick house they came to presently, on a
street of big, square houses, its yard running down to this same river,
was old too, and its box hedges and its purple beeches were old with it.
[Illustration: "A covered wooden bridge across the river ... seemed
older than anything else."]
And within the house the big rooms, both above and below stairs, were
filled with old furniture, and mahogany at that, not sent to the
junk-shop or the attic either, but cared for and revered and openly
treasured. And as for other old things there were old portraits and old
brasses and old andirons, and soft-footed, pleasant-voiced old colored
servants, two at least among them in spectacles and with white hair.
There were old candle-sticks, old silver and old damask on the supper
table later. The pale-gray dress of Miss Boswell the elder, who was
tall and pleasing, trailed with a soft rustle, and the amber-toned
dress of the younger Miss Boswell was cut low.
Selina's mother had strained a point and along with the new spring
street dress, had made her a soft chaille, white sprinkled over with
pink rosebuds. Selina here at the Boswell table with it on, could not
be too thankful!
When the meal was about half over, Miss Marcia Boswell laughed softly:
"I saw your Cousin Maria Buxton last week, Selina. She was down here in
Eadston for the day to pay her taxes and took her dinner with us. She
reminded me that your aunt as a girl, once was here overnight with her
to a dance. She also made me admit what I've supposed all these years
was hidden in my maiden breast. Which is, that when she and I and your
Aunt Ann Eliza Wistar were sixteen--Ann Eliza spent a good deal of
her time up here with Maria in those days--we all three were in love
with the desperation of love at sixteen, with John Buxton, the father
of your Culpepper. He married at twenty according to his own bent
and not ours. Maria of course got him later after they were both free
again. Maria usually holds to her point pretty well, as I suggested to
her when she twitted me the other day. And even with two daughters of
her own by her first husband, if she has a downright weakness, and she
admits it herself, it's for her stepson by John Buxton, your Culpepper."
"Why," said Selina, quickly, "if Auntie's really foolish about any one
person in the world, it's Culpepper."
"Better and better," laughed Miss Marcia Boswell, altogether a
delightful personage. "I'll be ready when next they come twitting me."
The next day Miss Pocahontas and Selina in a pretty phaeton, drove
about the town with its old state buildings, and out the road along the
cliffs overlooking the river.
"Tell me about the teaching," Miss 'Hontas asked. "How does it go? Are
you satisfied that it's the right thing?"
Selina flushed, hesitated and opened her heart. "It's the only thing
I can do as far as I can see, if it paid better. My little boys seem
to be getting along pretty well. But it don't pay at all, especially
when I have to ride in bad weather. I can't talk much about it at
home, Mamma and Auntie don't understand, and take it out in disliking
the mothers of my little boys. And I don't seem to know how to find
anything better for next year."
She hesitated, her gaze up the canyon of the rushing river winding
between its cliffs of limestone softened with April verdure. She
had seen little of any scenery before! "You're so practical and so
definite, Miss 'Hontas, you and Miss Boswell, too. Auntie thinks it's
terrible to make personal remarks, and I beg your pardon, but I envy it
so."
"I'm not practical, I'm afraid, my dear, as you'll find. Look at
the town there below us, Selina, nestling in its hollow? I'm a bit
overenthusiastic instead. But perhaps what you see in Aunt Marcia and
myself is the result of depending on ourselves for a good many years.
My father died alone with me in Rome when I was fifteen, and my mother
had died shortly before. Aunt Marcia and I have our own means and look
after them."
The next day, on Sunday afternoon, Miss Pocahontas had callers: Mr.
Mason, a bluff young man who let it be understood his interests were
horses and in a milder degree the new stables he was building on his
stock-farm, and Mr. Huger who talked in a prosperous way of the tobacco
market and the present dullness in business. One could not associate
either of them in mind with Miss 'Hontas.
After these callers were gone, Miss 'Hontas went upstairs to her
sitting-room to write a note to a Miss Diana Talbot. Why she mentioned
this name, Selina did not quite see, but later on she was to understand.
She went up to this sitting-room, too, at Miss Pocahontas' suggestion,
and finding a seat on the broad white window-sill, not far from the
desk, looked out on the gravel paths and the box edgings and the beds
of jonquils and tulips in the garden sloping down to the river.
Presently Miss Pocahontas laid down her pen and rather tenderly studied
the slim figure in the rosebud chaille on the window-seat.
"And what now?" she asked with the smile in her eyes she seemed to keep
there for Selina, as this person turned.
"Mr. Huger was speaking of Marcus, Miss 'Hontas, after he heard he was
my cousin. He said what jolly good company men found him. I wouldn't
have thought Marcus was such a good mixer? Miss 'Hontas, do you suppose
another thing is true? From something Marcus said to me, I fancy he
writes verse."
Miss Pocahontas laughed outright: "And you have not grasped yet, or
will not, my little friend, that your cousin is a really and easily
clever person--even to cultivating Mr. Huger, who is prominent and
might be useful? Since you say he intimated it, why, yes, he writes
verse, writes bits of it even to me. The Austin Dobson its prophet
sort of thing my share is, light but clever and graceful, the ballade,
the triolet, the rondeau. I even have tried my hand at it under his
tutelage and encouragement myself," laughing.
Selina fingered a fold of her rosebud chaille and colored: "I don't
believe I know Austin Dobson and I'm sure I don't know about the
ballade, and the rest of what you mentioned."
When she heard more about these ballades and the rest and even was
shown some attempts at them by Miss 'Hontas, smiling at herself as she
did so, she was charmed. She had caught a new viewpoint, too! By play
at these clever things of life, play which one puts a value on as play,
life is made prettier! She and Maud and incidentally the others had
gone at everything exaggeratedly and too in earnest! By taking self too
seriously, you lay yourself open to ridicule! Ardent and dear Selina,
she was sure she had it right now!
And so pleased was she, that when on her return home the next day
the group gathered at her house in the evening to welcome her, she
complained to them about the commonplaceness of the average intercourse
and disclosed to them the more pleasing and different diversions of
persons like Miss Pocahontas and Marcus.
The response, however, was not all that she could have hoped for.
"Since when this furore about Marcus?" inquired Culpepper, but then he
always had refused ordinary grace to him, holding that he was a poseur.
"It was I always defending Marcus to you, up to now, Selina," said Maud
with a show of truth.
"She complains of the commonplaceness of intercourse when you are here,
Algy," said Mr. Cannon, "and when Tate, old man, is just through
telling Miss Amanthus that no man can say wherein lies the significance
of the fifth leg of the Assyrian bull."
"This poet person named Austin, and his masterpieces called Dobsons,
make a note of 'em, Culpepper," directed Mr. Welling. "Some of us must
try and qualify."
As the days went on, however, Marcus was not above being pleased by
this new attitude from Selina. He met her downtown wearing her new
spring hat, and the mail the next morning brought her a communication
from him, penciled, off-hand as it were, on the back of an envelope,
saying:
A broad-brimmed hat upon her head
To shade her cheeks' sweet roses,
A crown were fit, but she wore instead
A broad-brimmed hat upon her head.
I'll see her thus until I'm dead
And darkness on me closes,
A broad-brimmed hat upon her head,
To shade her cheeks' sweet roses.
Selina discovering more and more that Marcus was sought for, and
according to his fancy, went everywhere, felt even gratefully what
these lines meant coming from him.
Again, on the day later in May when her little class was to close for
the summer, she wore her new white piqué that she felt became her, to
mark the occasion. When the hour came for saying good-bye to William
Jr. and his three companions, they accompanied her to the Williams'
front gate, then because it was to be a protracted farewell until fall,
went with her to the corner.
As she was taking leave of them here with final conscientious
admonitions in her capacity of their teacher, Tommy Bacon's younger
brother, Tod, came along and stopped to ask her something about the
barge picnic up the river, on for Friday. It was here that Marcus,
out in that neighborhood in the quest of a book he had loaned, so he
explained, came upon the group, Selina looking very well indeed in that
new piqué which became her, being kissed in succession by four little
boys, and Tod waiting until this be done, to walk along home with her.
That same afternoon's mail brought her another communication from
Marcus, carelessly penciled in blue this time, which said:
The young she loves,
The innocent doves,
And her heart is quite tender, I ween,
And little boys
Are ceaseless joys
Up from six all the way to sixteen.
How she preaches,
As she teaches
With a glow in every feature,
And they,
Lack-a-day,
Fall in love with their teacher!
There was no denying that it was pleasing, and Selina determined, if
it was not lapsing too much into that overearnestness again, that she
would put this and the preceding one from Marcus away with certain
other treasures. There are kinds in straws to show the way the wind
blew, that some day surely will be pleasing to bring forth and show,
not alone to one's children but grandchildren. Maud did even more in
this sort of prudential provisioning; she saved _all_ illuminating
and perhaps valuable data, lists of her reading, theater programs,
dancing-cards with personal tributes in masculine writing upon them,
so that if in time need should come for biographical matter concerning
her, it would be there. And she frankly declared, too, that she had
every enthusiastic and honorable intention that such material should be
needed. But then one had learned not to pattern on Maud too closely!
At the close of Marcus' gratifying stanzas he had added a further line:
Had no idea until recently you were taking this thing of teaching and
earning your way in earnest. Come down to my place at 3:30 to-day and
see me.
By place, Marcus meant his office at the newspaper building. It was
three o'clock when the postman left the note. When Mamma heard about
it she demurred at first, saying it was no place for a young girl to
be going, but when Selina pointed out that she had only to go up a
stairway opening on the street to a door at its head, she gave way.
"Put on your spring suit and that jabot I made you to show at the
throat of your jacket when you went up to Eadston," she directed,
"and wear your best gloves and your good hat. No, the piqué won't do,
Selina; a business office calls for wool street clothes."
"And let us hope he'll be there when you get there," said Auntie. "It's
mighty little dependence I ever put on Marcus."
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Marcus was there when Selina arrived, actually and for once in the
place at the time he said he would be. A bare floor, a shabby desk,
three wooden-bottom chairs, and a framed cartoon of Marcus himself
hanging on the wall, was the whole of it.
He arose as Selina came in and an elderly lady seated in the second of
the three chairs looked at her with expectant interest.
"This is my Cousin Selina, Miss Diana Talbot."
Selina saw a plump, comely and cheerful person in comfortably sensible
dress, mantle and bonnet. It may be interpolated that what Miss Diana
Talbot saw was an ardent-faced, pretty girl in a plaid skirt and
plain jacket, a hat with roses, and a manner bright with interest and
interrogation.
The ladies shook hands.
"Miss Talbot has plans afoot to open a school in the autumn," said
Marcus, "and Miss Pocahontas Boswell has done you the compliment to
propose that she consider you as a teacher. Miss Talbot also on the
recommendation of the elder Miss Boswell and her niece, has come
from her part of the state to have me advise with her about her
advertisements and her prospectus."
[Illustration: "Marcus was there when Selina arrived."]
Miss Diana Talbot took up the narrative cheerily: "Miss Boswell and
Pocahontas and I were at the same small hotel in Florida this winter.
Pocahontas goes down with her aunt every year. I am returning South
later in the summer to open a winter school for girls whose health
requires they winter in the South, and whose parents are anxious their
schooling be continued. I will say the idea was suggested to me by an
acquaintance of the winter staying at the hotel with his family, a Mr.
Ealing from our part of the state. His two daughters are the nucleus
of my school, in fact my first enrollments. Pocahontas has suggested I
let her look after my French and music this first year as she has to
be South anyway. And she tells me that she has satisfied herself that
you can coach beginners in Latin and algebra, hear classes in the lower
branches and be of use to me in a secretarial way. I should say I have
taken the hotel where we were staying, for my school. The proprietor
died and it seemed opportune."
After further conversation and an appointment for a second meeting
with Selina, Miss Talbot left. Resuming his seat before his desk with
his long person outstretched in relaxation, Marcus smiled with lazy
satisfaction over at Selina, flushed prettily with excitement.
She was glad to have this word with him: "If it turned out by chance
that I could go, would it cost much to get me there, Marcus? To--to
Florida?" Her voice almost broke on the magic of the word.
"Ticket, sleeper, meals, trunk, something in your pocket to start you
on--a hundred or more dollars at least. I tell you though, Selina,"
Marcus actually roused himself and sat up emphatically, "you must make
it. The longer I look at it, the more I can see it is just what you
need. I haven't an idea but Pocahontas sees this in it for you, too,
in proposing it. A little contact with the larger world, a little
assertion and standing on your own two feet will do everything for you.
Aunt Lavinia and good Miss Ann Eliza, as I've said before, keep you a
baby, whereas naïveté can come to be downright irritating, and so can
lack of sophistication. Break away, Selina, and find yourself now."
There was that in this unfamiliar view of herself through Marcus'
estimate which hurt, and she went away silent.
Precedent and training had done all they might to make intercourse
between Selina and her father strained and unnatural. She could
remember when she was a bit of a thing, how on taking a pricked finger
to him for attention, she had been snatched away as from an act of
impiety, by womenkind, Mamma or Auntie, for womankind to attend it, and
somehow the episode seemed typical.
To open confidence with your father was as desperate a violation of
custom as to be immodest, and she had not forgotten the embarrassment
of going to him for money for her teaching venture of the winter, even
after her mother had opened the way. It came to her now that such a
relation between a daughter and father was a bit shocking.
[Illustration: "She went to her father."]
That night after her mother and her aunt were gone together to
Wednesday evening service, she went to her father who was reading his
paper as usual in the back parlor, and spoke quickly before her courage
could fail her.
"You--you have been giving me five dollars a month for my carfare and
change since I began teaching, Papa. And through Mamma you are paying
for my clothes. Isn't it a losing business for you? I've only been
giving Mamma the sixteen dollars I make a month, for Aunt Viney, and
that's over with for the summer now."
"Instead of keeping the sixteen dollars for your carfare and
incidentals and such?" smiled Papa, perhaps a little embarrassed, too,
at the trend of the conversation. "Won't you sit down, Selina?"
"But it seems so much more to Mamma and Auntie to have it come from me
this way."
"I bow to the processes in feminine logic more intricate than I can
follow," agreed Papa. "And what then, Selina?"