be willing to advance more, Oh, a great deal more, all of--" Selina
nerved herself desperately, cold to her pretty finger-tips with the
effort of it, "--yes, a hundred dollars, if you thought good could come
to me of it?"
"Willing always, Selina; able is another thing. It is not easy for a
father to confess to his daughter that as a business proposition he is
a failure."
"Papa!"
"Yes, Selina."
The very necessity to get away from the horribly painful embarrassment
of this drove her on. "I have a chance to go away and teach, I can be
a help then by earning something worth while. Marcus thinks it wise,
Marcus says I ought to go, that I need to develop in self-reliance
and----"
"Marcus be--" began Papa and stopped.
The story came forth at this with a rush of detail. "And, Papa, to be a
whole, whole winter with Miss 'Hontas, under the same roof, doing the
same things! I love her so, Papa, I love her!"
There were further questionings from him and answers from Selina and
something in his sensitive face as he watched her while she talked,
drove her to seek justification.
"There is so much in the world, isn't there, Papa? And I haven't seen
anything of it yet? Not anything!"
By the time that Miss Diana Talbot was ready to return home several
days later, it was settled that Selina should go South in October and
teach for the winter in her school.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Mamma cried right along through the summer about it, and as the time
began to approach, Auntie stopped eating and grew pale. Culpepper had
gone home in June without knowing anything about the plan just then
afoot, and here at this point, late in August, an invitation came down
from Cousin Maria Buxton for Auntie and Selina to visit her.
"There's too much to do and to plan getting Selina ready," decided
Mamma, "and there'd be the extra expense of it to consider. I don't see
how it can be arranged, do you, Ann Eliza?"
"I'll write and say so," said Auntie.
"And I think, Selina," from her mother, "it would be only polite for
you to slip a note in your aunt's letter thanking your Cousin Maria for
asking you."
[Illustration: "Selina ... sat down to write her note."]
Selina got her pen and paper and sat down to write her note, then
paused and fell to dreaming. She saw Cousin Maria's farm, three
thousand acres she believed it was, orderly, productive and prosperous.
In her mind's eye it lay in zones, as it were, the outer boundary being
the old stone wall along the encircling limestone pike; the tilled
fields came next, of hemp, tobacco, corn and what not; the middle zone
between these tilled fields and the houseyard was the wide-spreading,
park-like woodland pastures; and heart of it all, reached through the
big stone-pillared iron gate, was the house in its houseyard, with
the garden behind. She loved this house of her Cousin Maria's, set
in lilac and syringa shrubberies, a one-storied white brick, wide and
ample and flanked by wings, with big gallery porches front and back,
and beneath a high basement containing kitchen, laundry, storerooms and
the farm offices. In recall Selina saw Cousin Maria now, too, comely
like Auntie, surveying her capably and appraisingly as she welcomed
her, had she and Auntie gone. And she saw Culpepper, too, as it were at
Cousin Maria's side as they welcomed her, regarding her quizzically.
Cousin Maria and the farm and Culpepper, seemed to stand visualized
thus in her mind, symbol for some suddenly defined thing. Was it the
best of the old things? The worth while of the established things?
Then she thought swiftly of the vista opening to her of the unknown,
with Miss Pocahontas and her outstretched hand awaiting, and her heart
leaped!
She began her letter and after thanking her Cousin Maria for the
invitation, went on to state her plans.
I want you to know, Cousin Maria, and Culpepper as well, that I'm
going away about the end of September to Florida to teach, with Miss
Diana Talbot who says she knows you, and with Miss Pocahontas Boswell.
It's not only to try to help myself and so make it easier for them
here at home, but because I want to go so badly I can't pretend this
feature of it doesn't come first. I say this because Culpepper would
see through me and say it for me if I didn't. Papa knows this part of
it and sympathizes, and I'm a little afraid Mamma and Auntie suspect
it and don't, as Mamma, for one, cries so about it most of the time,
it makes it hard, but I can't feel it possible for me to be unselfish
enough now to give it up.
Culpepper came down a week before it was necessary for his return to
the law school, to see about this thing of Selina going away as he put
it to Auntie bluntly. He walked in one evening big and sunburned and
bold and blatant with health and stored energy and conviction.
It was the first week in September and hot and he found the household,
Mamma, Auntie and Selina sitting out on the stone steps in the
starlight, Papa inside reading his paper, the aroma of his cigar
floating out.
"What does it all mean?" Culpepper without preamble demanded of the
older ladies--"this thing Selina wrote about of going away to teach?
Keep still, Selina, we know your side of it."
"And mine, I hope, Culpepper," came out through the open doorway from
Papa reading under the gas-jet in the hall. "Kindly accept the fact
that I am aiding and abetting her. She came to her father this time
first."
Mamma, coming in on this tearfully, was most emphatic: "I blame Marcus,
blame him entirely. He's Juanita's own child for stirring up trouble or
trying to, for other people. He defended himself to my face by saying
I had kept Selina so overyoung for her years she's almost ridiculous,
and that he's trying to help her to find what I've deprived her of, her
right to be a reasoning and thinking human creature." Mamma produced
her pocket handkerchief.
"Juanita herself came around with him," said Auntie aggrievedly.
"She'd better have stayed at home and mended her clothes. Her skirt was
without a braid and frayed, and two buttons were gone from the front
of her waist. Instead she told us that if we of the older generation
didn't face the demands of the present younger one, it simply means
they'll cut us out of their working plans and repudiate us. Don't ask
me what she meant. You've heard Juanita. And she said the time was at
hand and was ripe and she was warning us. What time she didn't specify.
That she hadn't been prophesying to her sex all these years not to know
the signs now they were here. She talked like an altogether determined
and fanatical person, and with no more sense to it than just what I
say, but then Juanita's talk is always more or less that way."
"Marcus, of course! I might have guessed he was in it," said Culpepper
with small patience. But then these two never had struck it off anyway,
neither ever willing to concede a thing to the other, Maud always said.
"It's a fool proposition, I beg your pardon, Cousin Robert, since you
say you're in it, but I'm with Cousin Lavinia and ole Miss here, every
time. If Selina's got to teach, she'd better teach for less here at
home where we all can look after her."
He spoke to Selina presently, suggesting they take a walk about the
block. He began to question her almost as soon as they were started,
the dry sycamore leaves on the pavement crackling under their feet.
This Selina by his side was scant eighteen now.
"It's true then, what you wrote in your letter? That it's you who want
to go? You're thinner than you were and you're pale. Stop here under
the gas post and let me look at you. What's it all about?"
He seemed almost to be making an issue of her wanting to go. She
colored in the dark with a feeling of vague uneasiness that she was
about to disappoint and hurt him by what she must say. And yet when she
once was started, she amazed herself by the actual passion with which
she spoke.
"It's like rosy beckoning fingers, Culpepper, and sweet odors I've
longed for, and food and drink I'm desperate for. It's not Florida
or Kalamazoo or Keokuk nor any other definite spot, Culpepper. I've
thought about it and I know. It's the unknown. It must sound to you
that I'm talking wildly and foolishly, but I won't allow it's either of
those and I won't allow I'm to blame."
He dropped her arm from his at this, and walked back to her gate beside
her with no further word.
"Good night," then he said. And yet he had asked her for her point of
view upon it! She had always thought Culpepper fair!
Later in September Cousin Maria Buxton came down for a week's visit
and shopping, and brought Selina a dress to add to her outfit for the
warm climate. Cousin Maria was solid and handsome, as said before; her
hair, still black, was parted and banded down to her ears about her
strong and healthily florid face and her black eyes surveyed the world
capably. The morning after her arrival she came into Mamma's room from
her own room adjoining, which really was Auntie's, with the garment in
question just taken from her trunk, hanging over her arm.
"It's a dress made last spring for one of Alice's girls. She's never
had it on. They have so many they outgrow them before they get around
to them."
Alice was one of Cousin Maria's two daughters by her first husband. She
had married a prominent stock-farmer in her part of the state and was
rich. The other had married a tobacco farmer and was rich likewise.
"Lavinia," pleaded Auntie, remindingly.
"I had said Selina never should wear finery again not her own,"
explained Mamma.
"Well, isn't it her own?" returned Cousin Maria emphatically, "and
haven't you and Ann Eliza been playing mothers to my Culpepper? Come
now, Lavinia, I shall be downright put out. Ann Eliza, you may as well
give in."
As for Selina herself, standing by, the good ladies, as was their
custom, never for a moment thought of allowing her a voice in the
discussion at all!
It was a dear dress that she, used to being obedient, here was bidden
to try on, just as Cousin Anna Tomlinson happening by, came upstairs.
There was not much to it, though in that perhaps lay its appeal. Scant
and slip-like, with a show of her pretty throat, and a show, too, of
her slim nice ankles, it consisted of hand needlework on a texture of
limp mull.
"Like our India muslins when we were young," Auntie was obliged to
allow to Cousin Maria with satisfaction.
"Made by the sisters here in the convent on Madeleine Street," said
Cousin Maria.
"I always meant to give Selina gold beads," said Cousin Anna.
"Why don't you give 'em then?" from Cousin Maria. "Selina, you look
dear. With ankle-strap slippers and your finger in your mouth the way
you had to be spanked out of, you'd seem about seven again. That's
right, look pleased."
It was Mrs. Gwinne Tuttle, however, of all unpremeditated persons!--who
gave Selina beads. She came trundling in just here to pay a visit to
Auntie and her lifelong friend, Cousin Maria, leaving her carriage at
the curb. Hearing voices upstairs, she came mounting up.
"As if Ann Eliza and Maria and I hadn't slept three in a bed in order
to stay together, many a Friday night in our young days," she reminded
Mamma. "I'd better add, we all were thinner then. Selina, that dress
is something more like what it should be than the ones Anna here and
Madame Vincent put on you and me. So you are going South, they tell me,
with Pocahontas and my old friend, Marcia Boswell? I wish Pocahontas
would make up her mind whom she's going to marry and do it. Huger with
all his tobacco money, wants her, I hear, Maria, and young Mason, the
jockey club's biggest man, is after her. Marcus Bruce is on her string,
too, they tell me. She's too charming a person to grow restless and
faddish, imagining she wants occupation and not a husband! That dress,
Selina, with its round neck, needs beads."
There came a murmur from Cousin Anna.
"Well, who's keeping you from giving gold ones, Anna?" inquired Mrs.
Tuttle. "I'm going to send Selina some beads on my own account. I owe
her on a score she and I know about. I was tried that night of the
musicale, Selina; two of my best soloists had failed me, and I can't
seem to stand a person being apologetic and deprecatory anyhow. Why
didn't you rise to it and tell me what you thought of me? My beads,
Anna, are going to be coral, the coral of Selina's cheeks right now.
The ingenue style of the dress and of Selina, call for coral."
"When a girl is young," said Cousin Maria, "I say have her look young."
"She does, Maria," returned Mrs. Tuttle. "Selina looks altogether
young. She's pretty, too, and it's not going to hurt her to know it.
It'll do her good instead, and give her spirit. I'm going down street
and choose my corals now."
After Mrs. Tuttle and Cousin Anna both were gone, Cousin Maria broke
forth: "I hope Diana Talbot isn't going to make a fiasco of her legacy
with this school venture."
"We haven't heard anything about a legacy," said Mamma. "We liked Miss
Diana very much when she called twice. She seemed very cheerful and
certain about the school, and has offered Selina thirty-five dollars a
month and her board and washing. She herself and the Episcopal minister
at the place, so she said, are to teach the advanced classes."
"Diana is as cheerfully volatile and heady as the rest of the Talbots,"
claimed Cousin Maria. "They are in the county next to ours and I've
known 'em always. Old Tom Talbot, the grandfather, built the first
brandy distillery in the state in order to distill brandy from beets.
Why, with corn everywhere and fortunes, too, to be made in sour-mash
whisky, only a Talbot could say. He failed, of course, and later set
out vineyards for claret on land that held fortunes in Burley tobacco.
He had traveled and read too much to be practical, old Tom Talbot had."
"Why, of course," chimed in Auntie, "I remember the stories of _him_.
He thought once he'd succeeded in making silk thread for weaving from
milk-weed."
"It's in the blood," said Cousin Maria. "Bulkley Talbot, Tom's son,
and Diana's father, had his craze planting yucca to make rope fiber
with all his wife's inherited acres crying to God and nature for hemp.
Diana's been kept down until now by her brothers who both married
level-headed women who have kept them steady in harness themselves. In
turn they've frowned down Diana until this last year when she came into
a legacy of some several thousand dollars from an aunt. Immediately
she disbanded the little school she had taught for half her life in
her home town, and last fall went South. She said our winters were
beginning to give her rheumatism and she was going down to sit on the
equator or some of its tributaries and think things over. They tell me
she has leased this hotel for two years, and I know she has had her
school furniture shipped. I don't mean to discourage you, Selina. Diana
is one of my old friends. In one sense you'll be as safe with her as
with your mother here, or with Ann Eliza or myself. And I must say,
too, I agree with Emmeline Tuttle that it looks freakish in Pocahontas
to drag her aunt down there this early in the season that she may go
to teaching when she doesn't have to. Young women didn't indulge in
restlessness in my day."
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It seemed as though everyone wanted to do something for Selina as the
time drew near. Marcus stopped by one morning about a week before she
was to go. He had added a carelessly floating tie to his make-up of
cape and old hat, and his manner was even more easily negligent.
"Tell Uncle Robert not to do anything about a ticket for you, Selina.
The matter's as good as settled and I stopped to tell you I have a pass
for you."
This was news so astounding that Mamma on hearing it, lost her head.
"Then we will get that piece of white opera cloth, Ann Eliza, and make
her the evening cape she needs so badly. There'll be money enough for
it now."
Selina had not forgotten a certain extravagance she longed for. "And
those ankle-strap slippers, Mamma, may I have them?"
Maud brought her a letter portfolio, Juliette a little crêpe scarf,
Adele a case for photographs and Amanthus the dearest bangle for her
bracelet, if she'd owned a bracelet. Amanthus didn't always remember
things. The four came in a body with their gifts and stood about amid
the litter of preparation and packing, with embarrassment, almost with
wistfulness.
At last Maud broke forth. Judy and Adele flushed as she spoke and
Amanthus looked disturbed, but they evidently all stood with her in
what she said. "We've been talking about you, Selina. It's as if we
still need you and you no longer need us. And watching you, we can see
you're different in other ways. You've been giving in, just as you've
always given in more than any of us, letting your mother get you the
clothes she wants you to have rather than what you want, and pack your
trunk when we know how you want to pack it yourself. You're just the
same in this way _seemingly_, but in reality you're not the same at
all. You know now that you want your own way about the clothes, and
you know you want to pack your trunk. You've been slower coming to
it than any of the rest of us, except Amanthus, who hasn't any idea
what I'm talking about now, and probably never will have. Her mother
or her husband or somebody'll always pack her trunks and she'll thank
them beautifully and sweetly and mean it. But you _know_ now you want
to do it all for yourself, and it makes you different. And we've had
to decide you don't need _us_, because you've made all your plans and
arrived at your decisions without us?"
Selina looked from one to the other of them. Was it so? Did she not
need them as in the past? She did not know herself. Certainly it was
true that she passionately did want to pack her own trunk! How did they
guess? What could she say to them? She embraced them all in turn, and
kissed them tenderly.
Mr. Tate came round a full day too soon in his dates with roses for
her to take on the journey, and Mr. Cannon brought her all the latest
magazines. Mr. Welling came with a volume of what he explained were
Dobsons by that fellow Austin. Mr. Welling was a wag.
"I'm sorry none of us have been able to qualify, Miss Selina, and this
has to be the best I can do for you. There are rondeaux in it, I can
vouch for that for I've looked to see, and I'm suspicious there are
dittoes. But unfortunately there are not batteaux which would mean
more in a place like Florida. But then, of course, you'll have Miss
Tippecanoe," by which name he invariably spoke of Miss Pocahontas.
A dearth in news, or indeed in communication of any sort from Miss
Diana, began to prove worrying as the day before leaving arrived, and a
telegram was sent to Miss Pocahontas for reassurance.
By night her reply came:
Have wired Miss Talbot, and had answer. Expected on original date.
Miss Boswell and Miss 'Hontas were to leave Eadston in the late
afternoon. Selina was to start in the early evening and meet them at
one o'clock that night at the junction where she would board their
train.
This very day, Selina's trunk locked and her satchel ready, Aunt
Juanita stopped by with a message. It was a mercy she remembered to
deliver it.
"Marcus finds he is not going to get that pass; he asked me yesterday
to let you know. He put off his application until too late, but he says
he can arrange for a lower rate, and to tell Robert it will be about
half. And he does hope, Selina, you are going to be self-reliant and
not make too many demands on Pocahontas, who is a sacrifice to her aunt
and her aunt's asthma now."
Selina sat up straight and indignant. She really liked that. And from
Marcus who had insisted on her going!
Her mother began to worry as soon as Aunt Juanita left. "I'm sorry now
I took any of that money from you your father gave you this morning
for yourself, and paid the bill for your cape while I was down street,
Selina, but your father has been so bothered to get as much together,
we won't mention it to him. It isn't as if you wouldn't shortly be
earning money for yourself."
Cousin Anna came by here. "Willoughby wanted me to give you some money
for a present outright, Selina. But I said no--that fifty dollars is a
good deal for you to feel free to spend. I am putting that much in your
hands, however. I have it here with me now, for you to hold in case of
any emergency. Giving it to you with such an understanding we'll know
you have funds if need arises."
Everybody went to the train in the evening, Mamma, Auntie, Papa, the
girls, Culpepper, Mr. Cannon, Mr. Welling, Bliss, Algy even, and Tommy
Bacon. Papa had seen Marcus late in the afternoon who said he would
meet them at the station with the ticket as he was having a little
trouble getting it fixed up and that he wanted to see Selina off anyhow.
Five minutes before train time, with Selina's trunk waiting to be
checked and everybody agitated since it was known that Marcus was to
bring the ticket, there came, not this person at all, but a messenger
boy with an envelope, calling Wistar as he came through the gate, a
privilege which everybody enjoyed comfortably and at will in those days.
Well, it was here at any rate, the ticket, and Papa, his face dark with
suppressed rage, jerked out, not a ticket at all, but a scribbled line
from Marcus which Selina caught as her father flung it from him, and
read at a hurried glance while he in a quick undertone asked for her
purse to supplement his.
Cheaper rates out of the question. They tell me the regular tickets
are on sale at the station.
[Illustration: "She ... stood looking at them grouped below."]
While her father was gone to see about ticket and baggage, everybody
else boarded the train with Selina, only to be hustled off almost
immediately by the porter. Her kisses to Mamma and Auntie even were
curtailed. She hurried with them as far as the rear platform of her
coach, and stood looking at them grouped below, a somewhat bereft young
figure had she but known it, up there alone, pale and startled now the
actual moment of going was come. And she looked pretty, too, in her
new skirt and jacket of blue, with her traveling veil, also new, flung
back; quite too pretty and visibly inexperienced to be starting off
alone.
"That change at the junction by herself in the middle of the night, I
don't like it," insisted Mrs. Wistar down on the platform.
Auntie, when deeply moved, became cross. "What's the use bringing that
up now?" she demanded tartly. "You've known about it all along."
"The train's off and where's the ticket?" cried Maud.
"Oh, where?" from Juliette and Adele.
Selina's father running down the platform here and swinging up the step
to her with ticket and trunk check in his hand as the train began to
move, met Culpepper swinging up by the steps from the other side. There
was a look of determination on the older man's face. It was evident
that at this last moment he didn't like the idea of that change for her
at the junction either.
"You needn't," said Culpepper tersely, taking the ticket and check from
him. "My mind has been made up all the time, I am."
"On the contrary, I----"
"Cousin Robert!"
The eyes of the two met. "Exactly," said the younger, "now will you let
me go? Reassure ole Miss and her mother. She has to sign that ticket
somewhere, doesn't she?"
And Culpepper helped his Cousin Robert swing off the now briskly moving
train, and he and Selina saw him go back along the platform and join
the others.
* * * * *
At 1:45 Culpepper put Selina, ticket, satchel, umbrella, candy-box,
roses, magazine and lunch basket, into the actual hands of Miss
Pocahontas Boswell, up and at the steps of the sleeper to receive her.
"She's the only thing in the way of a Selina, such as it is, we've got,
you know," he remarked cheerfully.
"I know, and I'll see she is returned to you such as I take her, except
my own part in her which I propose holding," said Miss Pocahontas
smiling, too. "When do you get a train back?"
"Four in the morning," from Culpepper genially.
"He brought me here to the junction to you," Selina told Miss
Pocahontas in the dressing-room a bit later as that dear person
assisted her to get ready for her berth, "and took every sort of care
of me. But he was blunt. He wouldn't even talk."
"Why not?" from Miss 'Hontas, plaiting Selina's heavy flaxen hair.
"He didn't want me to want to come so much," said Selina, neither very
lucidly nor elegantly, she felt.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Thirty-six hours later, Miss Diana Talbot in a comfortably sensible
white dress, with a triangle of lace cap on her portly head, stood at
the top of the porch-steps of her leased hotel of white clap-boards,
the same set in a flanking of moss-draped live oaks with a nice blue
lake behind.