"THY NEIGHBOR AS THYSELF"
Mr. Nicholas Jelnik, with an uplift of his fine black brows and a
satirical smile, once diagnosed the case of Great-Aunt Sophronisba
Scarlett as "congenital Hyndsitis"; Doctor Richard Geddes said you'd
only to take a glance at her house to see that she was predestined
to be damned. _I_ know that she was so hidebound in her prejudices,
so virulently conservative, so constitutionally opposed to change,
that anything savoring of modernity was anathema to her.
That old woman would as lief have had what remained of her teeth
pulled out as have parted with anything once brought into Hynds
House. She preserved everything, good, bad, indifferent. You'd find
luster cider jugs, maybe a fine toby, old Chinese ginger jars, and
the quaintest of Dutch schnapps bottles, cheek by jowl with an iron
warming-pan, a bootjack, a rusty leather bellows, and a box packed
with empty patent-medicine bottles, under the pantry shelf. A
helmet creamer would be full of little rolls of twine, odd buttons,
a wad of beeswax, a piece of asafetida, elastic bands, and corks.
She had used a Ridgway platter with a view of the Hudson River on
it, as a dinner plate for her hound, for we found it wrapped up,
with "Nipper's platter" scrawled on the paper.
By and large, it wasn't an easy task to renovate a brick barracks
finished in 1735, and occupied for ninety-nine years by a lady of
Sophronisba's parts; though I sha'n't tell how we had to tackle it
room by room, nor of the sweating hours spent in, so to speak,
separating the sheep things from the goat things. I can't help
stopping for a minute, though, to gloat over the front drawing-room
that presently emerged, with a cleaned carpet that proved to be a
marvel of hand-woven French art, rosewood sofas and chairs
upholstered in royal blue and rubbed to satiny-browny blackness, two
gloriously inlaid tables, and a Venetian mirror between two windows.
We gave the place of honor on the white marble mantel to a porcelain
painting Alicia found in a work-box--the picture of a woman in gray
brocade sprigged with pink-and-blue posies, a lace fichu about her
slim shoulders, and a cap with a rose in it covering her parted
brown hair. The little boy leaning against her knees had darker blue
eyes, and fairer hair pushed back from a bold and manly forehead.
The painting was about the size of a modern cabinet photograph, and,
though pleasing and spirited, was evidently the work of a gifted
amateur. What gave it potent meaning and appeal was the inscription
lettered on the back:
_Mrs. Lydia Hariott Hynds & Rich'd. Hynds Ag'd 7
Paint'd for Col'nl. J.H. Hynds by his
Affec. Neece Jessamine_
You couldn't help loving him, the little "Richard Ag'd 7." There was
that in the face which won you instantly; it was so clear-eyed, so
gallant, so brave, so _honest_. So we gave him and his pretty, meek
mother the place of honor in the room that had once heard his
laughter and seen her tears. And we brought down-stairs the fine
painting of Colonel James Hampden, who was the splendid colonial in
claret-color that we had so much admired, and hung him and a smaller
painting marked, "Jessamine, Aged 22" where they could look down on
those two.
These were the only pictures allowed in that room, and they gave to
it an atmosphere flavored most sweetly of yesterday. Indeed, I think
they must have approved of the room altogether, for we hadn't
changed so much as we'd restored it. Even the glass shades that
use'd to shield their wax candles were in their old places. There
was their old-world atmosphere of stateliness; their Chinese jars,
their English vases, their beautiful old Chelsea figures; and the
sampler so painstakingly
_Work'd by Ann Eliza Hynds
Ag'd 9 Yrs. 2 Mos., Nov'r, 1757_
that had been carefully framed and mounted as a small fire-screen,
perhaps for Ann Eliza's lady mama or proud grandmother. It was such
human and intimate things, the mute mementoes of children who had
passed, that made us begin to love Hynds House, for all its bigness
and uncanniness and dilapidation.
We did discover one human touch laid upon the place by Sophronisba
herself. She had gathered together a full set of small, hand-colored
photographs of Confederate generals, wrapped them in a hand-made
Confederate flag, into which was tucked a receipt signed by Judah
Benjamin for Hynds silver melted into a bar and given to the Cause,
written, "The glory is departed," across the package, and hidden it.
Alicia, who had a hankering after Confederates, herself, put the
photographs in a leather-covered album at least as old as
themselves, and kept them sacredly. She said these were America's
own vanquished and vanished Trojans, and that one got a lump in the
throat remembering how
Fallen are those walls that were so good,
And corn grows now where Troy town stood.
Schmetz brought us our upholsterer, Riedriech the cabinet-maker,
most cunning of craftsmen, who knew all there is to know about old
furniture and just what should and shouldn't be done to it. In
addition he was a grizzled, bearded, shambling old angel who clung
to a reeking pipe and Utopian notions, a pestilent and whole-hearted
socialist who would call the President of the United States or the
president of the Plumbers' Union "Comrade" equally, and who put
propagandist literature in everything but our hair.
"Mr. Riedriech," you would say reproachfully, "yesterday I
discovered Karl Marx and Jean Jaurès lurking behind my coffee-pot
and Fourier under the butter-dish. To-day I find Karl Kautsky in
ambush behind the cream-jug and Frederick Engels under the rolls."
Riedriech would regard you paternally, placidly, benevolently,
through his large, brass-rimmed spectacles:
"So? Little by little the drop of water the granite wears away. I
give you the little leaflet, the little pamphlet, _und_ by and by
comes the little hole in your head."
Thank heaven the doctor next door didn't hear that!
Alicia knew how to handle the old visionary with innocent but
consummate skill. Looking at the kind old bear with her Irish eyes:
"It must be a wonderful thing to have such mastery of one's tools,
to know exactly what to do and how to do it," she would sigh.
"'Tisn't everybody can be a master craftsman!"
"I show you in a little while what iss cabinet-making!" he said
proudly. "I do more yet by you," he added charitably, "then make
over for you chairs and tables and such, already: I make over for
you your little mind."
The old socialist did indeed show us what cabinet-making can be. He
turned the office behind the library into a workroom, and from it
Sophronisba's tattered and torn and forlorn old things emerged,
piece by piece, in shining rosewood and walnut and mahogany majesty.
If you love old furniture; if it gives you a thrill just to touch a
period chair of incomparable grace, or the smooth surface of an old
table, or the curve of a carved sofa, you'll understand Alicia's
open rapture and my more sedate delight.
The tiled fireplace in the library was really the feature of
Hynds House. There wasn't any mantel: the fireplace was sunk into
the wall, and above it and the book-cases on each side was a
space filled with more relics than all the rest of the house
contained--portraits, signed and framed documents, letters, old
flags, and a whole arsenal of weapons. Above the fireplace hung the
portrait of Freeman Hynds--thin, dark, austere, more like a
Cameronian Scotsman than a Carolina gentleman of an easy habit of
life.
However, it was not portrait or relics that made the room
remarkable, but the tiles, each a portrait of a Revolutionary hero.
Laurens, Marion, Lafayette, Pulaski, von Steuben--there they were in
buff and blue, martial, in cocked hats, and with such awe-inspiring
noses! The center and largest tile was, of course, the Father of his
Country, without the hat, but with the nose, and above him the
original flag, with the thirteen stars for the thirteen weak-kneed
little states that were to grow into the great empire of freedom
that the high-nosed, high-hearted soldiers fought for and founded.
Alicia and I touched those tiles with reverence. They were the pride
of our hearts.
As often happens in the South, there were bedrooms on the lower
floor; two of them, in fact, on one side of the hall. The front one
had been not only locked but padlocked; the windows had been nailed
on the inside, and heavy wooden shutters nailed on the outside. So
long had the room been closed that dry-rot had set in. The silk
quilt on the four-poster was falling to pieces, the linen was as
yellow as beeswax, and the sheets made one think of the Flying
Dutchman's sails. This room was of almost monastic severity: an
ascetic or a stern soldier might have occupied it. Besides the bed
it contained four chairs, a clothes-press, a secretary, and a
shaving-stand. On a small table near the bed were a Wedgwood mortar
with a heavy pestle, a medicine glass, and a pewter candlestick
turned as black as iron. The press in the corner still held a few
clothes, threadbare and sleazy, and in the desk were some dry
letters and a Business Book--at least, that's how it was
marked--with lists of names, each having an occupation or task set
down opposite it, I suppose the names of long-dead slaves. On the
fly-leaf was written, in a neat and very legible hand, "_Freeman
Hynds_."
"Sophy!" Alicia's voice had an edge of awe. "This must have been his
room. I believe he died here, in this very bed. And afterward they
shut the room up; and it hasn't been opened until now."
We looked at the old bed, and seemed to see him there, trying to
raise himself, crying out so piteously upon dead Richard's name,
only to fall back a dead man himself. What had he wanted to tell, as
he lay there dying? His painted face in the library was not a bad
man's face. It was proud, stern, stubborn, bigoted; a dark, unhappy
face, but neither an evil nor a cruel one. What was it that really
lay between those two brothers? After more than a hundred years, we
were as much in the dark as they in whose day it had happened and
whose lives it had wrecked.
We built a fire in the long-disused chimney to take the dampness out
of the room, and forced open the windows to let in the good sun and
wind. Over in one corner, pushed in between the clothes-press and
the side wall, was, of all things, a prie-dieu; and upon it a dusty
Bible with his name on the fly-leaf. Nor was it a book kept for idle
show; it plainly had been read, perhaps wept over by a tortured
heart, for it fell open at that cry of all sad hearts, the
Fifty-first Psalm. I was moving this prie-dieu, when my foot slipped
on the bare floor and I dropped it with a crash. Fortunately it was
not injured. But what had looked like a mere line of carving on the
outer edge of the small shelf--rather a thick and heavy shelf now
that one examined it carefully--had been struck smartly, releasing a
cunning spring. There opened out a thin slit of a drawer, just big
enough to hold a flat book bound in leather and stamped with two
letters, "F.H." On the fly-leaf appeared, in his own neat, fine
script, "_The Diary of Freeman Hynds, Esqr._"
The thing seemed incredible, impossible. His own daughter had
evidently been unaware of the existence of this book, which he had
not had time to destroy. And we, as by a miracle, had fallen upon
it--and perhaps the truth!
It was written in so fine and small a hand as was only possible to
the users of goose-quill pens; and this tiny, faded, brown writing
on the yellowed pages covered a period of years. He had not been one
to waste words. Once or twice, as we hurriedly turned the pages,
appeared the name "Emily." Mostly it seemed a dry, uninteresting
thing, a mere memorandum, where a single entry might cover a whole
year.
It was impossible for us to stop our work to read it then and there,
or to do more than give it a cursory glance. We turned feverishly to
those years that covered, as we figured, the period of the Hynds
tragedy. And he had written:
This day was Accus'd Rich'd. my Bro. of robbing us of our
Jewells. He protests he knows Naught & my Mthr. believes him
as doth Emily. Has a true Heart, Emily. Horrid Confusion &
my Fthr. Confound'd.
Impatiently I turned over the pages, raging to read the end, my
heart pounding and fluttering.
Two nights since dy'd Scipio, son of old Shooba's wife, the
which did send for me--
Thus far had I read, Alicia and I sitting head to head on the hall
stairs. In came Schmetz the gardener, raving, gesticulating, and
after him old Uncle Adam, stepping delicately, and with a placating
smile on his wrinkled countenance.
"Those bulbs that I have planted under the windows of you," raved
Schmetz, "the demon hens of _le docteur_ Geddes are with their paws
upturning! They upturn with rapidity and completeness, led by a
shameless hog of a rooster. Is it the orders of you that I devastate
those fowls, Mademoiselle?"
Schmetz was furiously angry, and small wonder. Those had been choice
bulbs, some of which he had presented me from his own cherished
store--freesias, daffodils, tulips, hyacinths, and the starred
narcissus, "such as Proserpine let fall, from Dis's wagon."
"Oh, our flowers!" wailed Alicia, springing to her feet; "and we
counting on those bulbs for Christmas!"
I shut Freeman's diary with a snap. Hens were more immediate.
"Put it in the drawer of the library table," called Alicia, running
out with Schmetz at her heels. "We'll read it to-night."
When I had done so, closing the door after me, I too ran outside,
where some enormous black-and-white hens, led by the biggest rooster
I had ever seen, were completing the utter destruction of our
flower bed.
We charged down upon them, and they ran to and fro, after the stupid
fashion of fowls. Back and forth Alicia, Schmetz, and I chased those
brutes; but Adam stood with folded hands, looking on from a safe and
sane distance. He refused to have anything to do with Geddes fowls
in ol' Mis' Scarlett's yard. Just then the huge rooster ran into my
skirts, all but upsetting me. It was the work of a strenuous moment
to seize him by the wings and so hold him.
Left to their own devices, the hens scuttled back to their own
domain through a break in the palings on our side of the hedge,
while in my hands the rooster squawked and plunged and kicked and
struggled; it was like trying to hold a feathered hyena.
I was very angry. I had lost my bulb bed. I couldn't wring the neck
of the raider, much as I should have liked to do so, but with an arm
made strong by a just and righteous rage I lifted that big brute
high above my head and hurled him over into his own yard. He sailed
through the air like a black and white plane.
"_Damn! Oh, damn!_" said somebody on the other side of the hedge.
There was a horrible grunt, as of one getting all the wind knocked
out of him, a scuffle, and the squawks of the big rooster, to which
the hens dutifully added a deafening chorus.
"The brute--has just about--murdered me!" grunted Doctor Richard
Geddes.
We stood in stricken silence. Swiftly, noiselessly, Uncle Adam faded
from sight, putting a solid section of Hynds House between himself
and what he felt was coming battle. Uncle Adam had no wish to have
to pray me to death, and he wasn't going to run any risks with
Doctor Richard Geddes. Where that irascible gentleman was concerned,
Uncle Adam, like Br'er Rabbit, would "trus' no mistakes."
A second later, red-faced, half-breathless, but with the light of
battle in his eyes, Doctor Geddes appeared, mounted on a ladder on
his side of the hedge.
"Who shot off that rooster?"
"_Monsieur le docteur_, the hens of you began this affray,"
explained Schmetz, politely. "They are fowls abandoned in their
morals, horrible in their habits, and shameless in their behavior.
And the husband of these wretches, Monsieur, is a bandit, a brigand,
an assassin, fit only to be guillotined. Observe, Monsieur, it
happened thus--"
"Schmetz," snapped the doctor, "shut up!--Now then, I want to know
who fired off that rooster."
"I did!" I said valiantly. "Look at my bulbs! Just look at my
bulbs!"
"Look at my stomach!" roared the doctor. "Just look at my stomach!"
"_Mon Dieu! O mon Dieu_!" cried Schmetz, dancing up and down.
"Monsieur, again I implore that you will remain calm and listen to
the voice of reason! Your hens, creatures malicious and accursed--"
"Why should I look at your horrid stomach?" said I, outraged. "I
think you had better get down off that ladder and go away!"
"Why should you? Because, you jade, you've all but driven a
twenty-pound rooster clean through it--beak, spurs and tail
feathers--that's why!" bawled the doctor. "Gad! I shall be black and
blue for a fortnight! I'm colicky now: I need a mustard-plaster!"
"_Two_ mustard-plasters," I insisted severely: "one on your tongue
and the other on your temper!"
"Temper?" flared the doctor, and flung up his arms. "_Temper?_
Here's a minx that's all but murdered me, and yet has the stark
effrontery to blather about temper! You've a bad one yourself, let
me tell you! You've the worst, outside of your late aunt--"
"Grand-aunt-in-law; your own cousin-by-blood, whom you greatly
resemble in that same matter of family temper, I am given to
understand."
"Gatchell told you that!" cried the doctor, wrathfully.
"Fish-blooded old mummy! _His_ place is in a Canopic jar! Gatchell
hasn't had a thought since 1845."
"Well, if he satisfied himself so long ago as 1845 that you have a
frightful temper and that your hens are unutterable nuisances, I see
no reason why he should change his mind," I said, frigidly. "You
have; and your hens are; and your rooster is a _demon_!"
"Straight out of the pit; undoubtedly they were hatched under
Satan's wings. Monsieur, believe me, Schmetz, when I tell you so."
"Didn't you ask me," I demanded, "to throw them over into your yard
when they invaded my premises? Very well: I threw one over and you
caught it. Why, then, should you complain?"
"Oh, yes, I caught it!" A horrible sneer twisted his countenance.
Schmetz fell to praying aloud. But he couldn't remember anything
save the grace before meat, so he prayed that, in a sonorous voice.
For he is a pious man.
The doctor's nose wrinkled and his lips stretched: "_Sophronisba!_"
he hissed, and, having hurled this hand-grenade, scuttled down the
ladder like a boy of ten.
Alicia sank upon the ground and rocked to and fro. For a minute I
wanted to catch her by the shoulders and shake her soundly; but
catching her eye instead, I also fell into helpless laughter.
Leaning on his spade, Schmetz stared at us, shaking his grizzled
head.
"Name of a cat!" murmured the puzzled Alsatian, and fell to
salvaging such bulbs as weren't utterly ruined. We were all busy at
this, when a head again appeared over the hedge--a big, leonine head
with a tossing mane and a tameless beard. An enormous pair of
shoulders followed, a tree-trunk of a leg was swung over, and Doctor
Richard Geddes dropped into our garden like a great cat. He strolled
over, hands in pockets, and looking down at grubbing us, asked
politely: "Making a garden?"
"Oh, no," Alicia told him sweetly, "we're laying out a chicken-run."
"Er--what I came over to say, is that I've got some fine bulbs,
myself, this year, particularly fine bulbs--eh, Schmetz?--and more
than I need for myself. Will you share them with me, Miss Smith?
Please! I--well, I'd be really grateful if you would," said this
overgrown boy.
"We'll be enchanted," Alicia said instantly. "When can we have
them, please?"
"Now!" cried the doctor, with brightening eyes. "By jingo, I'll get
'em this minute, and plant 'em for you, too!"
And he did. He was on his knees, trowel in hand, shouting to
Riedriech, who had come outside for a few minutes' happy arguing
with his good friend the doctor, that the socialist argument boiled
down amounts to about this--that one should do without boiled eggs
for breakfast now, in order that the proletariat may have baked hen
for dinner in the millennium; which is lunacy; anybody with a
modicum of brains--
"Brains!" snorted Riedriech. "What is it you know about brains? _No_
doctor knows what is on the inside of brains! You make tinkerings
mit the inside plumbings, _Gott bewahre_! and cut up womens and cats
and such-like poor little dumb beasts and says you, 'Now I know all
about the brains of man.' It is right there where you are wrong,
Comrade Geddes!"
"_Habet!_" said Comrade Geddes.
"Look you," said the old visionary, with sudden passion, "look you
on the little bulb here, so dirty and ugly you hide him in the
ground quick. So! But by and by comes up green shoots, and blossoms.
So it is with the great thoughts of men, the deep race-thoughts,
Comrade Geddes--seeds, bulbs, germs, all of them, in the ugly husks
of the common people. Out of our muck and grime they come, the
little green shoots which the fool will say is poison, maybe, but
which the wise know and labor and make room for. I, Riedriech, and
workers like me, we go into our graves nothing but husks. But it is
out of the buried hearts of us comes green things growing; and
then--_die Blumen! die Blumen!_" said the cabinet-maker, with a
still, far-away look.
"And," he finished, with a sad smile, "it is _our_ flowers that you
put in vases of gold on your altars. And you say, 'Listen: Jesus the
carpenter talks plain words to his fishermen friends.' And, 'Hush!
Burns the plowman makes songs in the field!'"
The doctor looked up, and his eyes were very tender; his smile made
me wonder. With a swift, friendly hand he patted the rougher hand of
the other. And it was at this opportune moment that Mary Magdalen
led around a corner of Hynds House no less personages than Mrs.
Haile and Miss Martha Hopkins. Their eyes fell upon Doctor Richard
Geddes. They looked at each other. They looked at Alicia and me. And
I knew their thoughts: "Sirens, both of you!" said Miss Hopkins's
eyes.
"How do you do, Doctor Geddes!" said both ladies, as demurely as
cats. _I_ should have felt like a boy caught stealing jam. He went
right on planting bulbs.
"Hello, Martha. What's on the carpet now?" he greeted that lady,
airily. "Writing another paper on 'The Ironic Note in Chivalry'? How
about 'The Effect of the Pre-Raphaelites upon the Feeble-minded'? Or
is it the 'Relation of the Child to Its Mother,' this time?"
"You will have your little joke, Doctor," smiled Miss Hopkins, a
dish-faced blonde with a cultured expression.
"Joke?" The doctor stared up at her. "Joke? Gad, I'd like to believe
it!" He turned to Alicia and me, politely: "Miss Hopkins," he
informed us, "moves among us clothed in white samite. She is our
center of culture; Hyndsville revolves around her."
He went on putting a bulb in the place prepared for it. His eyebrows
twitched slightly, but his mouth was smileless; Miss Hopkins was
smiling, and not at all displeased. Mrs. Haile was bland and blank,
as befits a minister's wife. Alicia's eyes were downcast, but a
wicked dimple came and went in her cheek. She looked ravishingly
pretty, the bright hair breaking into curls about her temples, her
young face colored like a rose. I do not blame Doctor Richard
Geddes for stopping in his work to stare at her with unabashed
pleasure, but I do not think it was diplomatic.
Mrs. Haile apologized for calling when we were so very busy. They
had just stopped in passing, because they were reorganizing their
missionary society and wanted to see if they couldn't interest us in
the good work. Their day-school in Mozambique needed another
teacher, and their hospital in Bechuanaland had to have more beds.
Doctor Geddes got to his feet, slapped our garden soil from his
knees, and shook his tawny mane. His eyes were no longer sweet.
"Miss Smith and Miss Gaines, thank you for the opportunity of
playing in the sand in pleasant company. Mrs. Haile, Miss Hopkins, I
go to attend some home-grown niggers who of course don't need a
hospital, nor even a decent school, in our Christian midst. Ladies,
good afternoon!" He made a fleering motion of the hand and was gone.
Mrs. Haile and Miss Hopkins smiled indulgently. Evidently, Doctor
Geddes was one brother they were willing to forgive though he
offended them until seventy times seven.
Alicia and Miss Martha Hopkins walked down the garden path together
and Mrs. Haile fell into step with me. In a low voice she thanked
me, hurriedly, for having dropped that dreadful suit. And were
we--she hesitated--were we going to be regular communicants?
I didn't want to go to St. Polycarp's any more, and it was on the
tip of my tongue to give a politely evasive reply, when our eyes met
and held each other. I saw the naked truth in hers--the pitiful
truth of the slim, poor, aristocratic little parish; the old church
overtaken and surpassed by its more modern and middle-class rivals;
and the minister's family struggling along on a salary that would
have made a hod-carrier strike. She was neatly dressed; she looked
like a gentle-woman, but one in straightened circumstances. I made a
rapid mental calculation.
"Why, yes, I think I can say we shall. Now, Mrs. Haile, I am a
business woman, and if I speak bluntly you must pardon it. Miss
Gaines and I can give two hundred dollars a year between us--fifty
for the church; one hundred and fifty to be added to the minister's
present salary."
I knew what that meant to her, and she must have known I knew, but
she didn't show it by so much as the quiver of an eyelash. Only a
faint, faint color showed in her sallow cheek, and she bowed,
half-formally, half-friendly.
"Thank you, Miss Smith," said she, gallantly. And she added, with a
glimmer of humor in her worried eyes: "As you say you're a business
woman, may I say I hope you will get your money's worth?"
At that I laughed, and she with me.
We walked down our garden path, chatting innocuously and amiably,
until of a sudden they caught sight of the little Love, the gay,
charming, naked little Love, holding his torch above his
curl-crowned head. You miss him, when you come up the broad drive
from the front gate, for Nicholas Jelnik put him in the secretest,
greenest, sweetest spot in all our garden, and you must go down a
winding path to find him.
"So it wasn't an idle tale: they did find it, really!" breathed Miss
Hopkins, staring with all her eyes. And I knew with great certainty
why _she_ had come to Hynds House that afternoon.
"Forgotten all these many years, and now here, like the dead come to
life!" murmured Mrs. Haile, abstractedly. "How strange!"
"It was said he bought it for his mother, because it looked so like
himself as a child," said Miss Hopkins. Then she remembered her
duty, held up two fingers before her eyes, and squinted through them
critically:
"Charming, but don't you think the pose strained? It's an example of
eighteenth-century work, placid enough, but it lacks that plastic,
fluidic serenity, that divine new touch of truth, that is
revivifying art since the great Rodin lighted the torch anew."
Heaven knows what else she said. It sounded like a paper on art to
me, and I have a terror of papers on art. They are, Alicia informs
me, purple piffle. Yet Alicia drank in every word Miss Hopkins
uttered, though the dimple came and went in her cheek.
"You seem interested in art, Miss Gaines." Having torn the poor
little peasant Love to tatters, Miss Hopkins descended to us
groundlings.
"I don't always seem to know what art is," admitted Alicia,
dovelike.
The lady who "moved among us clothed in white samite" smiled
encouragingly.
"That is because you are really little more than a child," she said
kindly. "When you begin to _grow_, you will improve your mind."
Alicia puckered her brows. "Ah, but I'm Irish!" she said, seriously,
"and the Irish hate to have to improve their minds. I imagine it
takes an able-bodied mind to stand intensive cultivation," she
added, guilelessly.
Miss Hopkins smiled: it was a masterpiece, that smile!
"But why, may I ask, did you choose such a situation for the
statue?" she inquired critically. "Now, _I_ should never dream of
tucking it in such an out-of-the-way place!"
The pucker came back to Alicia's brow.
"Shouldn't you?" she wondered. "I shall make a point of mentioning
that to Mr. Nicholas Jelnik, if you don't mind. You see, he chose
that spot, and we rather like it, ourselves."
Miss Hopkins stopped dead short, and Mrs. Haile started in spite of
herself. Evidently, the situation was beyond them. Didn't we _know_?
How much had Judge Gatchell seen fit to tell us? Alicia had dropped
a bomb-shell that before night would detonate in every house in
Hyndsville. They haven't very much to talk about in small towns,
except one another, and when a plump mouse of gossip frisks about
whisking his tail, why, it is cat nature to pounce upon it.
"Mr. Jelnik!" said Miss Hopkins, with an accent. "Oh, I see.
Well--he is a neighbor, of course. Certainly if Mr. Jelnik selected
that particular spot for the statue--he of all people has the best
right to do so--and to have his wishes considered."
"Of course. He has lived abroad, and seen everything of art there is
to see," Alicia agreed, placidly. Which wasn't at all what Miss
Hopkins meant.
We could see those two women turning the thing over and over in
their minds--Nicholas Jelnik, last heir and descendant of Richard
Hynds, tactily (perhaps even gladly; for had they not just witnessed
the behavior of Doctor Richard Geddes?) accepting the interlopers in
the house of his fathers! Nicholas Jelnik selecting the site for the
statue Richard had brought home in pride, and Freeman had buried in
sorrow! Miss Hopkins's stare dismissed me, shifted to Alicia, and
discovered the cause of this shameless surrender of family pride.
Her lips tightened. With politely cold hopes that we should like
Hyndsville, and warmer hopes that we would join the missionary
society, they left us.
"Wedge Number One: The poor dear heathen, Sophy!" smiled Alicia.
"The P.D.H. can be a very present help in times of social trouble,
can't he? I shall attend that missionary meeting, and take stock.
Incidentally (For goodness' sake, don't look so scandalized, Sophy
Smith! this is a fight for our lives, so to speak!) incidentally, I
shan't do the P.D.H. any harm. He won't be a bit worse than he was
before, which is promising." She put two fingers before her laughing
eyes, squinted through them, and drawled:
"You lack subtlety, Miss Smith. Cultivate your imagination, my
dear!" in Miss Hopkins's best voice.
Riedriech stuck his grizzled head out at a window, cautiously:
"Fräulein, she hass gone?" And seeing that the coast was clear,
he added, vehemently: "Cultivate the mindt! Cultivate the
imatchination! _Ach, lieber Gott! Dornröschen_, cultivate you the
_heart_. It iss not what the woman thinks, but what she loves, what
she feels, which makes of the world a home-place for men und
_kinder_." The good old Jew nodded his head vigorously at the girl,
smiled, and went back to his work. And Schmetz came and finished the
bulb bed by covering it carefully with two thicknesses of
chicken-wire.
That night, just before we went up-stairs, I went into the library
after Freeman Hynds's diary, which we were simply burning to read. I
opened the table drawer in which I had placed it. The drawer was
quite empty. The little flat book was gone.