So far, Skelton was a magnificent promise. He remained at Deerchase a
year, which he spent chiefly in improving the house and grounds, which
were already beautiful. This gave him a very good excuse for keeping
strictly to himself. Then he determined to go to Europe. His old flame,
Mrs. Jack Blair, now lived at Newington, and every time she looked out
of her windows she could see the noble brick pile of Deerchase. The
house was a fine old colonial mansion, with walls three feet thick, and
numbers of large and lofty rooms. Skelton added to it with great taste,
and had his grounds laid out by a famous landscape gardener. Newington
was very shabby; and if Mrs. Blair had been an envious woman--which she
was not--she might have suffered many pangs because of the contrast
between the two places. Mrs. Shapleigh declared that Skelton’s only
object in improving Deerchase was to spite Mrs. Blair. But it certainly
spited Mrs. Shapleigh dreadfully. She was seized with a desire that
Belfield should rival Deerchase. Now, the Shapleighs were very well
off, and Belfield was a large and handsome country house, but there
was no rivalling Deerchase in the matter. Skelton had dollars where
old Tom Shapleigh had dimes. Whenever Mrs. Shapleigh would start the
subject of improving Belfield, Mr. Shapleigh would become so totally
and obstinately deaf that there was no making him hear at all; so,
as Mrs. Shapleigh was a much-indulged woman, she went to work on her
own book to do landscape gardening, and to make Belfield as smart as
Deerchase. The effect was fearful and wonderful. A Chinese pagoda
was clapped on to one wing of the Belfield house. This was meant for
a tower. Much red velvet furniture was bought, and old Tom paid the
bills, grinning sardonically as he did it.
“I declare, Mr. Shapleigh,” Mrs. Shapleigh bewailed, “you’ve got no
feeling for your own flesh and blood. There’s nothing more likely than
that Sylvia will one day marry Richard Skelton, and then if we don’t
furnish up some and improve the place, everybody will say she never was
accustomed to anything until she went to Deerchase.”
Mr. Shapleigh declined to weep over this terrible prospect. Then came
the ornamentation of the grounds. Mrs. Shapleigh’s idea of decorative
art was a liberal supply of fresh paint of every hue of the rainbow.
She had an elaborate affair of knobs and latticework, painted a vivid
green, put up in the river between Deerchase and Belfield, in place
of the old water fence of posts and rails. A fence of some sort was
necessary to keep the cattle from wading down the salt marshes and
following the river shore into forbidden fields. The cows came tramping
placidly down the marshy creek until they got to the wonderful water
fence, where they turned tail and trotted rapidly off, their frightened
calves bleating after them. The picturesque, unpainted bridge across
the creek was metamorphosed into a highly ornate construction with a
summerhouse in the middle, expressly designed for Sylvia, who was then
in short frocks, and Skelton to do their courting in eventually. Never
was there such general overhauling and painting. The pigeon house was
painted red and the turnstiles blue. When everything was done, and Mrs.
Shapleigh was felicitating herself that Richard Skelton could no longer
have the satisfaction of thinking Deerchase was unsurpassed, Skelton
could not look toward Belfield without laughing, nor could anybody
else, for that matter.
Skelton spent a full year at Deerchase, and just as he had brought the
house and grounds to perfection this sudden idea of going to Europe
possessed him. It was a great undertaking in those days. He had nobody
to consult, nobody knew he was going, and nobody would grieve for
him except some of the older house servants. Although Skelton was an
indulgent master, he never exchanged a word with his negroes, who were
entirely managed by overseers. The afternoon before he left he was
on the river in his boat. It was a cloudy September day. Usually the
scene was full of light and glow--the broad, bright river, the cheerful
homesteads, his own beautiful Deerchase, and not even Mrs. Shapleigh,
had been able to spoil the fair face of Nature with her miscalled
ornamentation; but on that day it was dull and inexpressibly gloomy.
A grey mist folded the distant landscape. The river went sullenly to
the sea. Afar off in the marshes could be heard the booming of the
frogs--the most doleful of sounds--and the occasional fugitive cry of
birds going south rang shrilly from the leaden sky.
Skelton sailed up and down, almost up to Newington, and down again to
Lone Point--a dreary, sandy point, where three tall and melancholy
pine trees grew almost at the water’s edge, and where the river
opened widely into the bay. He felt that strange mixture of sadness
and exultation which people felt in those far-off days when they were
about to start for distant countries. There was not a soul in sight,
except in the creek by the water fence; Sylvia Shapleigh was standing
barefooted, with her skirts tucked up. Her shoes and stockings lay on
the bank. She had on a white sunbonnet, much beruffled, and was holding
something down in the water with a forked stick.
She was then about twelve years old, with a delicate, pretty,
thoughtful face, and beautiful grey eyes. So unlike was she to her
father and mother that she might have been a changeling.
Skelton guessed at once what she was after. She was catching the crabs
that came up to feed in these shallow, marshy creeks; but after pinning
her crab down she was evidently in a quandary how to get at him. As
Skelton watched her with languid interest she suddenly gave a faint
scream, her sunbonnet fell off into the water, and she stood quite
still and began to cry.
Skelton ran the boat’s nose ashore within twenty yards of her, and,
jumping out, went to her, splashing through the water.
“Oh, oh!” screamed poor Sylvia, “my foot--he’s got my foot!”
Skelton raised her small white foot out of the water, and in half a
minute the crab was dexterously “spancelled” and thrown away, but there
was a cruel mark on the child’s foot, and blood was coming. She looked
at Skelton with wide, frightened eyes, crying bitterly all the time.
“Come, my dear,” said Skelton, soothingly, “let me pick you up and
carry you home.”
“I d-d-don’t want to go home,” wailed Sylvia.
“But something must be done for your foot, child.”
“Then take me to Deerchase, and let Mammy Kitty do it.”
Skelton was puzzled by the child’s unwillingness to go home. But Sylvia
soon enlightened him.
“If I g-go home mamma will scold me, and she will cry over me, and make
me keep on crying, and that will make my head ache; and if I can get
s-something done for my foot--”
“But won’t your mother be frightened about you if I take you to
Deerchase?” asked Skelton.
“No--ooo--oo!” bawled Sylvia, still weeping; “she lets me stay out
until sundown. And she’ll make _such_ a fuss over my foot if I go home!”
Determination was expressed in every line of Sylvia’s tearful, pretty
face. Skelton silently went back to the shore, got her shoes and
stockings, went to his boat and brought it up, Sylvia meanwhile keeping
up a furious beating of the water with her forked stick to frighten
the crabs off. Skelton lifted her in the boat, and they sailed along
to the Deerchase landing. Sylvia wiped her feet on the curtain of her
sunbonnet, put on her stockings and one shoe, and nursed the injured
foot tenderly. Skelton lifted her out on the little stone pier he had
had built, and then proceeded to take down the sail and tie the boat.
“I think,” said Sylvia calmly, “you’ll have to carry me to the house.”
“Hadn’t you better let me send for my _calèche_ and pair for you?”
gravely asked Skelton.
“Oh, no,” cried Sylvia briskly, and Skelton without a word picked her
up and walked across the grassy lawn to the house. She was very light,
and, except for flapping her wet sunbonnet in his face, he had no
objection whatever to her. He carried her up the steps into the hall,
and then turned her over to Mammy Kitty, who wrapped her foot in wet
cabbage-leaves. Skelton went to the library. Presently, Bob Skinny’s
woolly head was thrust in the door.
“Please, sah, Mr. Skelton, de young lady say will you please to come
d’yar?”
Skelton, smiling at himself, rose and went back to the hall. Sylvia was
perched on one foot, like a stork.
“I think,” she said, “if you’ll give me your arm I can walk around and
look at the pretty things. Whenever I’ve been here with mamma she has
always asked so many questions that I didn’t like to ask any myself.”
“You may ask any questions you like,” replied Skelton, still smiling.
He never remembered exchanging a word with the child before. He had
taken for granted that she was her mother’s own daughter, and as such
he had no wish to cultivate her.
But Sylvia was not at all like her mother. She limped around the hall,
looking gravely at the portraits.
The Skeltons were a handsome family, if the portraits could be
believed. They were all dark, with clear-cut faces and high aquiline
noses like Skelton’s, and they were all young.
“_We_ have some portraits, you know,” remarked Sylvia, “but they are
all old and ugly. Now, all of these are of pretty little girls and boys
or handsome young ladies.”
“The Skeltons are not a long-lived family,” said Skelton. “They
generally die before forty. Here is one--Janet Skelton--a little girl
like you. She died at eighteen.”
Sylvia turned her grey eyes full of a limpid green light towards him
pityingly.
“Aren’t you going to live long?”
“Perhaps,” replied Skelton, smiling.
“I think,” said Sylvia calmly, after a while, “if I were grown up I
should like to live here.”
“Very well,” answered Skelton, who at twenty-two thought the
twelve-year-old Sylvia a toddling infant; “as I intend to be an old
bachelor, you may come and be my little sister. You may have my
mother’s room--here it is.”
He opened a door close by, and they entered a little sitting room,
very simple and old-fashioned, and in no way corresponding to the rest
of the house. It had whitewashed walls above the wainscoting, and the
furniture was in faded yellow damask.
“I intend to let this room remain as it is, to remind me that I was
once a boy, for this is the first room I remember in the Deerchase
house.”
Sylvia looked around with calmly contemptuous eyes.
“When I come to Deerchase to live I shall make this room as fine as the
rest. But I must go home now. I can get my shoe on, and perhaps mamma
won’t notice that I limp a little. You’d better take me in the boat, so
I can get back to the house from the river shore.”
Skelton, who thought it high time she was returning, at once agreed. As
he lifted her out of the boat on the Belfield shore a sudden impulse
made him say:
“Sylvia, can you keep a secret?”
“Of course I can,” answered Sylvia promptly.
“Then--I am going away to-morrow morning, to be gone a year, perhaps
longer. This is the last sail I shall take upon the river for a long,
long time.”
Sylvia’s eyes were full of regret. Although she had seen Skelton at a
distance nearly every day of her life when he was at Deerchase, and
had also seen him upon the rare occasions that visits were exchanged
between the two places, yet he had all the charm of a new and dazzling
acquaintance to her. She never remembered speaking a word with him
before, but there was a delightful intimacy between them now, she
thought. She expressed her regret at his going so volubly that Skelton
was forced to laugh; and she wound up by flinging her arms around his
neck and kissing him violently. At this Skelton thought it time to
leave. His last glimpse of Sylvia was as she stood swinging her wet,
white sunbonnet dolefully on the sandy shore.
That night a terrible storm came up. It flooded all the low-lying
fields, swept over the prim gardens at Deerchase, and washed away a
part of the bridge between Deerchase and Belfield. When, at daylight in
the morning, Skelton, with Bob Skinny, left Deerchase, everything was
under water, and trees and shrubs and fences and hedges bore witness of
the fury of the wind and the rain. Skelton’s last view of Deerchase was
a gloomy one. He meant then to be gone a year; he remained away fifteen
years.