Gita decided to have a Christmas party. She knew that from the time the
manor house had been built, down through the generations until the
Carteret fortunes declined, there had been a ball and a Christmas tree
for the servants and tenantry, and a gathering of the far-flung Carteret
clan. The tenants were reduced to two farmers and their families, who,
no doubt, would resent any hint of patronage, the servants to five,
within and without, and the Carterets to one, but at least she could
have a tree and a party. The tree and dancing would be in the great
central hall with her dark-browed ancestors looking down in approval.
Polly Pleyden and Elsie Brewster entered into her plans with enthusiasm
(neither Mrs. Pleyden nor Mr. Donald was consulted), and Bylant, who was
feeling somewhat exhausted after weeks of house-hunting and furnishing,
and speculating with alternate gloom and hope on his future, looked
forward to the occasion as one more ordeal to be endured. He should have
to submit to congratulations in company with Gita for the first time,
for she had attended no more dinners in Chelsea; and he had been able to
dodge felicitations himself for the most part, as his time had been
fully occupied in New York. Gita had gone to the Pleyden apartment for
several days every week (chaperoned by the aunt) and together they had
found a charming old red brick house with white trimmings in West
Twelfth Street. It had been renovated by its last owner, who had decided
to move uptown, and there was little for Bylant to do but send his own
things to the third story, and “stand round” while Gita, who rarely
asked his advice, chose rugs and furniture for the two lower floors.
Elsie, after she finished her book, undertook the prosaic commission of
furnishing the kitchen and the servants’ rooms in the extension.
Gita bought the narrowest brass bedstead she could find, as a contrast,
she gayly told Bylant, to her prevailing four-posters, and had her room
done up in yellow that it might the more surely reflect the sunlight
that streamed through the large southern windows. The chairs and
curtains were of chintz and the only pieces of manor furniture were a
tulipwood chest, with each of the drawers painted in different design
and soft faded colors, and a day-bed she found in the attic; both built
in the late seventeenth century. There was no spare bedroom, and the
day-bed, its head manipulated by chains, was to offer its inhospitable
surface to Elsie whenever she spent a night in New York. Otherwise it
was a chaise longue piled with cushions.
Her sitting-room, adjoining, she furnished almost entirely from the
manor: with a tavern table (reclaimed from the stables), a pond-lily box
with raised carving, an oak box with two rows of arched flutes, a
secretary with a single-arch molding and ball feet, two paneled chairs
from the dining-room, several Windsor chairs and two new ones for
comfort, a pine-paneled settle with a high back, and a Dutch
marriage-chest from the house in Albany. The curtains in the manor house
were faded and mended, but many of the fine old rugs were in good
condition and she sent over a pale Aubusson, ordered curtains of
artichoke-green pongee, and had the walls tinted in harmony.
Remembering her mother’s love of old French furniture, she haunted
auction-rooms and picked up a set of eight pieces covered with tapestry
framed in wood painted black and decorated with gilt bow-knots; which,
the auctioneer assured his public, had once graced a château in
Brittany. At all events it graced the big drawing-room in West Twelfth
Street, and, mindful of man’s love of comfort, she had a large davenport
and several easy chairs made that harmonized in color if not in dubious
antiquity. The rug was black velvet, the walls were pale gray, and hung
eventually with odd old landscapes painted by long-forgotten artists for
former Bylants and Carterets. Singly they were caricatures of art, but
together, and monopolizing the field, they completed the atmosphere of
lightness and charm, and this room also faced south.
Bylant, who was about to re-lease his house in Albany, reserved the
dining-room furniture; his family silver, long stored, was little
inferior to that of Carteret manor, and included Dutch pieces brought to
the settlement from Holland in the early seventeenth century. The chairs
were Jacobean and a Knickerbocker Kas served as a sideboard and for the
display of the larger pieces of silver. He also sent for two fine
tapestries; and hoped that his prosperous brothers in art with
fashionable socialist tendencies would not cut him. His own chambers had
been comfortable but severe, and so was his refuge under the roof.
The narrow hall was painted white and furnished only with a high wide
chair made in Connecticut in the seventeenth century, from the Flemish
pattern, and an English ecclesiastical chest.
Gita had been so absorbed in this furnishing of her city home, and in
the fulfillment of an old day-dream, that she barely remembered she was
to occupy the house with a canonical husband, and Bylant was by no means
blind to her attitude. He was impatient with himself when he recognized
that he was seething with dull masculine resentment, and heroically made
and remade an effort to adapt himself to his fantastic situation with
philosophy, and trust to time and daily association to do its inevitable
work. To be the sulky misused husband was no part of his program; but
playing the rôle of sympathetic friend and intellectual partner under
that narrow roof was a discouraging prospect to a highly organized
nervous system, already overstrained by months of directing a naturally
mobile temperament into channels of unbroken repose—during long hours
on duty, at least—and acting the part of a sexless intelligence. He
foresaw attacks of nervous irritability in the seclusion of his fortress
upstairs.