MUSIC IN THE TWILIGHT
In Cousin Penelope's wake, for she did not quite dare to walk at her
side, as she had walked with Aunt Eunice, Caroline went down to the
dining room.
To feel as she felt on entering that cool, orderly room, with its white
paint and dark paper, its old portraits and its severe, highly polished
dark furniture, you would need to have lived for six months with Cousin
Delia, whose dining room furniture was all of golden oak, carved in
endless curves and curlicues, and who kept a piece of fly-paper on the
golden oak sideboard, between the blue glass lemonade set and the plated
silver cake dish.
With a sense almost of going to church, Caroline slipped into the place
at the table to which Aunt Eunice smilingly motioned her. There was no
cloth on the table, just drawn-work doilies of sheer white linen, and on
the largest doily in the center was a crystal bowl with pale small
roses. The glasses were almost as thin as soap-bubbles, and the silver
was thin, and highly polished, and plain. All this Caroline had noted in
the first instant, and in the second she noted with relief that there
was no butler after all, only the good-humored maid, Sallie. Then she
took courage, and decided that, even though there were several knives
and forks and spoons at her place, she would be all right if she began
at each end and worked inward.
Probably in all her life Caroline had never eaten a meal that tasted so
good as that first dinner at The Chimnies. There was a clear,
well-flavored soup, in a deep plate covered with Chinese figures in
lettuce green and raspberry pink. With the soup were little golden-hued
dice which were like glorified bread crumbs. Then there were slices of
pink ham, with fat as white as marble, amber brown balls of potato,
delicate small peas, a crisp salad of lettuce and ice cold cucumber,
with pale, firm cheese and salty toasted crackers, and last of all
little tarts of fresh strawberries, topped with whipped cream.
Caroline ate, silently and earnestly. She had eaten her last three
meals, remember, out of a shoe box.
Very early, with the soup, Aunt Eunice asked her if she would like a
glass of milk.
"Yes, please, thank you," said Caroline, "if it isn't too much trouble."
After that, conversation so far as concerned Caroline, ceased to exist.
She ate, and was glad that no one noticed her, or so she thought. But
someone must have noticed her, it seemed. For when Caroline was half
through her little tart, eating in careful small bites, as her mother
had taught her, and holding her fork nicely, Cousin Penelope spoke out
of a clear sky.
"She really favors our side of the family, doesn't she, Mother?"
"Jacqueline?"
"Yes. The resemblance is striking. Just look at Great-aunt Joanna
Gildersleeve."
For the life of her Caroline couldn't help looking round, in the
direction in which Aunt Eunice and Cousin Penelope both were looking.
She half expected to see another great-aunt standing right at her elbow.
But instead she only saw, hanging upon the wall above the sideboard, the
portrait of a rather forbidding lady in a cap, with a curtain parting on
a landscape just behind her.
"I don't quite see the likeness," murmured Aunt Eunice.
"It's something in the inner curve of the eyebrow and the set of the
nostrils," Cousin Penelope explained patiently. "It's almost indefinable
but quite unmistakable."
Aunt Eunice did not dispute the point. Neither, you may be sure, did
Caroline.
When dinner was over they went into a large, square room that opened off
the dining room. All round the room were shelves of books in
many-colored bindings, and there was a great writing-table across the
western window. There was a fireplace, masked with an old-fashioned
fire-screen on which a landscape was worked in faded silks, and above
the fireplace was a marble mantel on which were a pair of bronze vases.
But there was no piano!
Caroline sat down in a low chair, which Aunt Eunice recommended to her,
and wished that she had Mildred in her arms. She began to feel very much
alone, with these people who were really not her people, and a little
bit frightened. Older folk than Caroline have felt that way, in a
strange place, among strange faces, with the day ending, and no way of
knowing what the next day may bring.
Sallie brought in a tray, with matches and a spirit-lamp, a canister
that savored of rich coffee-berries, a little glass coffee machine, half
filled with crystal clear hot water, two cups, thin as egg-shells, and
small almost as eggs.
Aunt Eunice put the machine together, measured the coffee, as if she
performed a religious ceremony, and set the lamp beneath the globe of
water.
"Of course you don't take coffee, my dear," she spoke kindly to
Caroline. "Go look in the drawer of the table over there. I think you'll
find a box of candied ginger. Help yourself!"
Caroline took courage, as she saw Aunt Eunice smile.
"If you don't mind," she whispered, "I'd rather--_have_ you a piano?"
She felt that Cousin Penelope, cool and aloof in her chair by the
window, looked at her, surprised and not altogether pleased.
"Of course, dear," said Aunt Eunice readily. "Right across the hall in
the long parlor. You can find your way?"
"Oh, yes," Caroline nodded hastily.
She wanted to get to the piano quickly, before Cousin Penelope
interfered. For she felt that Cousin Penelope was sitting up very
straight and about to speak.
"Run along!" said Aunt Eunice. Did she, too, feel that Penelope was
rising to remark?
Caroline "ran along." She went so fast that she was almost out of
earshot when Penelope expressed herself:
"Mother! That child--strumming on my piano!"
"She won't hurt the piano fatally, my dear," said Aunt Eunice, placidly
but with unexpected firmness. "Poor little shy thing! She's lonely and
homesick, as any one can see, and if the piano gives her pleasure
to-night, who would begrudge it?"
No one, evidently, while Aunt Eunice was around. Penelope sank back in
her chair, but there was a little crease, not at all becoming, in her
high white forehead.
Meantime Caroline had "found her way," easily enough, across the hall
and into the long parlor, which was as long as the book room and the
dining room put together. Such a big room, with pictures that frowned on
her through the twilight that was deepening, here on the east side of
the house. But neither the bigness of the room, nor the dimness of it
could daunt Caroline, for at the farther end she saw the polished bulk
of a grand piano.
She flew to it across the dark polished floor and the dusky rugs. There
had been no piano at Cousin Delia's, only a talking machine. Cousin
Delia liked a fox trot or a coon song as well as the next one.
Caroline sat down on the piano bench. She poised her hands for a second
over the white keys, almost afraid to touch them lest they melt away and
vanish. Then very softly but firmly she struck a chord, and another, and
another. How the piano sang in its deep, golden throat! Such a piano as
her precious Muzzy had dreamed of having some time for their very own!
Caroline struck more chords, and ran a scale to limber her little
fingers, which had grown the least bit stiff with lack of exercise.
"The dear little thing!" cooed Aunt Eunice over her coffee machine. "If
she isn't practicing her scales."
She cast an appealing look at Penelope, but Penelope in the window
looked unplacated.
Caroline found the pedals with her feet. She could just reach them. She
could make the piano talk, now loud, now low. She played very softly a
lullaby that her mother had made up, just for her--a very simple
thing--one of the first that she had ever learned. The stiffness was
going from her fingers. She and this beautiful, wonder working, deep
throated piano were friends. She began to play the last thing that her
mother had taught her, a rhapsody of Brahms.
In the library Aunt Eunice paused in her placid sipping of her coffee,
and looked amazed, for Penelope had sat up in her chair, with a quick,
passionate movement that was not like Penelope.
"Mother!" There was something like awe in Penelope's voice. "That child
can play."
"Quite so, dear."
"But it isn't parrot-playing, Mother--there's more than her funny little
bit of ragged technique--there's feeling--listen now!"
They listened, while their coffee cooled. Full, round golden notes sang
through the old dim house, now loud, now low. Night winds blew--bells
tolled--echoes wakened in a vast cathedral aisle beneath a myriad
jewel-like stained windows.
"Why, Penelope! Don't!" Aunt Eunice soothed suddenly, as if the Penelope
who swallowed her hard sobs was again a little child.
"I can't help it, Mother. Don't you see? There _is_ something after all
in the power of the soul. That Delane woman--that horsy, tangoing
California girl----"
"Penelope!"
"She's dead, I know. I shouldn't speak like that. But she had no music
in her, and Jack hadn't a note of it. But I--I----"
"Yes, dear."
"Jack was my favorite cousin," Penelope whispered. "You know how much I
cared for him. Even when that Delane girl took him away. And now Jack's
child--my music is in her--and by that much she's mine, not hers,--she's
mine!"