So this was Northern hospitality! This a Northern gentleman's home, with
its cobwebbed ceiling, its little window-panes opaque with stain of rain
and dust, its carpetless floors innocent of wax, littered with odds and
ends--here a battered riding-cane; there a pair of tarnished spurs;
yonder a scarlet hunting-coat a-trail on the banisters, with skirts all
mud from feet that mayhap had used it as a mat in rainy weather!
I leaned forward and picked up the riding-crop; its cane end was capped
with heavy gold. The spurs I also lifted for inspection; they were
beautifully wrought in silver.
Faugh! Here was no poverty, but the shiftlessness of a sot, trampling
good things into the mire!
I looked into the fireplace. Ashes of dead embers choked it; the
andirons, smoke-smeared and crusted, stood out stark against the sooty
maw of the hearth.
Still, for all, the hall was made in good and even noble proportion;
simple, as should be the abode of a gentleman; over-massive, perhaps,
and even destitute of those gracious and symmetrical galleries which we
of the South think no shame to take pride in; for the banisters were
brutally heavy, and the rail above like a rampart, and for a newel-post
some ass had set a bronze cannon, breech upward; and it was green and
beautiful, but offensive to sane consistency.
Standing, the better to observe the hall on all sides, it came to me
that some one had stripped a fine English mansion of fine but ancient
furniture, to bring it across an ocean and through a forest for the
embellishment of this coarse house. For there were pictures in frames
showing generals and statesmen of the Ormond-Butlers, one even of the
great duke who fled to France; and there were pictures of the Varicks
before they mingled with us Irish--apple-cheeked Dutchmen, cadaverous
youths bearing match-locks, and one, an admiral, with star and sash
across his varnish-cracked corselet of blue steel, looking at me with
pale, smoky eyes.
Rusted suits of mail, and groups of weapons made into star shapes and
circles, points outward, were ranged between the heavy pictures, each
centred with a moth-ravaged stag's head, smothered in dust.
As I slowly paced the panelled wall, nose in air to observe these
neglected trophies, I came to another picture, hung all alone near the
wall where it passes under the staircase, and at first, for the
darkness, I could not see.
Imperceptibly the outlines of the shape grew in the gloom from a deep,
rich background, and I made out a figure of a youth all cased in armor
save for the helmet, which was borne in one smooth, blue-veined hand.
The face, too, began to assume form; rounded, delicate, crowned with a
mass of golden hair; and suddenly I perceived the eyes, and they seemed
to open sweetly, like violets in a dim wood.
"What Ormond is this?" I muttered, bewitched, yet sullen to see such
feminine roundness in any youth; and, with my sleeve of buckskin, I
rubbed the dust from the gilded plate set in the lower frame.
"The Maid-at-Arms," I read aloud.
Then there came to me, at first like the far ring of a voice scarcely
heard through southern winds, the faint echo of a legend told me ere my
mother died--perhaps told me by her in those drifting hours of a
childhood nigh forgotten. Yet I seemed to see white, sun-drenched sands
and the long, blue swell of a summer sea, and I heard winds in the
palms, and a song--truly it was my mother's; I knew it now--and, of a
sudden, the words came borne on a whisper of ancient melody:
"This for the deed she did at Ashby Farms,
Helen of Ormond, Royal Maid-at-Arms!"
Memory was stirring at last, and the gray legend grew from the past, how
a maid, Helen of Ormond, for love of her cousin, held prisoner in his
own house at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, sheared off her hair, clothed her limbs
in steel, and rode away to seek him; and how she came to the house at
Ashby and rode straight into the gateway, forcing her horse to the great
hall where her lover lay, and flung him, all in chains, across her
saddle-bow, riding like a demon to freedom through the Desmonds, his
enemies. Ah! now my throat was aching with the memory of the song, and
of that strange line I never understood--"Wearing the ghost-ring!"--and,
of themselves, the words grew and died, formed on my silent lips:
"This for the deed she did at Ashby Farms,
Helen of Ormond, Royal Maid-at-Arms!
"Though for all time the lords of Ormond be
Butlers to Majesty,
Yet shall new honors fall upon her
Who, armored, rode for love to Ashby Farms;
Let this her title be: A Maid-at-Arms!
"Serene mid love's alarms,
For all time shall the Maids-at-Arms,
Wearing the ghost-ring, triumph with their constancy.
And sweetly conquer with a sigh
And vanquish with a tear
Captains a trembling world might fear.
"This for the deed she did at Ashby Farms,
Helen of Ormond, Royal Maid-at-Arms!"
Staring at the picture, lips quivering with the soundless words, such
wretched loneliness came over me that a dryness in my throat set me
gulping, and I groped my way back to the settle by the fireplace and sat
down heavily in homesick solitude.
[Illustration: "I SAT DOWN HEAVILY IN HOMESICK SOLITUDE".]
Then hate came, a quick hatred for these Northern skies, and these
strangers of the North who dared claim kin with me, to lure me northward
with false offer of council and mockery of hospitality.
I was on my feet again in a flash, hot with anger, ready with insult to
meet insult, for I meant to go ere I had greeted my host--an insult,
indeed, and a deadly one among us. Furious, I bent to snatch my rifle
from the settle where it lay, and, as I flung it to my shoulder,
wheeling to go, my eyes fell upon a figure stealing down the stairway
from above, a woman in flowered silk, bare of throat and elbow, fingers
scarcely touching the banisters as she moved.
She hesitated, one foot poised for the step below; then it fell
noiselessly, and she stood before me.
Anger died out under the level beauty of her gaze. I bowed, just as I
caught a trace of mockery in the mouth's scarlet curve, and bowed the
lower for it, too, straightening slowly to the dignity her mischievous
eyes seemed to flout; and her lips, too, defied me, all silently--nay,
in every limb and from every finger-tip she seemed to flout me, and the
slow, deep courtesy she made me was too slow and far too low, and her
recovery a marvel of plastic malice.
"My cousin Ormond?" she lisped;--"I am Dorothy Varick."
We measured each other for a moment in silence.
There was a trace of powder on her bright hair, like a mist of snow on
gold; her gown's yoke was torn, for all its richness, and a wisp of lace
in rags fell, clouding the delicate half-sleeve of China silk.
Her face, colored like palest ivory with rose, was no doll's face, for
all its symmetry and a forgotten patch to balance the dimple in her
rounded chin; it was even noble in a sense, and, if too chaste for
sensuous beauty, yet touched with a strange and pensive sweetness, like
'witched marble waking into flesh.