STUFFED BIRDS
I
The Country Club was, as Judge Bannister had been the first to declare,
"an excrescence."
Under the old régime, there had been no need for country clubs. The
houses on the great estates had been thrown open for the county families
and their friends. There had been meat and drink for man and beast.
The servant problem had, however, in these latter days, put a curb on
generous impulse. There were no more niggers underfoot, and hospitality
was necessarily curtailed. The people who at the time of the August
Horse Show had once packed great hampers with delicious foods, and who
had feasted under the trees amid all the loveliness of mellow-tinted
hills, now ordered by telephone a luncheon of cut-and-dried courses, and
motored down to eat it. After that, they looked at the horses, and with
the feeling upon them of the futility of such shows yawned a bit. In due
season, they held, the horse would be as extinct as the Dodo, and as
mythical as the Centaur.
The Judge argued hotly for the things which had been. Love of the horse
was bred in the bone of Old Dominion men. He swore by all the gods that
when he had to part with his bays and ride behind gasoline, he would be
ready to die.
Becky agreed with her grandfather. She adored the old traditions, and
she adored the Judge. She spent two months of every year with him in his
square brick house in Albemarle surrounded by unprofitable acres. The
remaining two months of her vacation were given to her mother's father,
Admiral Meredith, whose fortune had come down to him from whale-hunting
ancestors. The Admiral lived also in a square brick house, but it had no
acres, for it was on the Main Street of Nantucket town, with a Captain's
walk on top, and a spiral staircase piercing its middle.
The other eight months of the year Becky had spent at school in an old
convent in Georgetown. She was a Protestant and a Presbyterian; the
Nantucket grandfather was a Unitarian of Quaker stock, Judge Bannister
was High Church, and it was his wife's Presbyterianism which had been
handed down to Becky. Religion had therefore nothing to do with her
residence at the school. A great many of the Bannister girls had been
educated at convents, and when a Bannister had done a thing once it was
apt to be done again.
Becky was nineteen, and her school days were just over. She knew nothing
of men, she knew nothing indeed of life. The world was to her an open
sea, to sail its trackless wastes she had only a cockle-shell of dreams.
"If anybody," said Judge Bannister, on the first day of the Horse Show,
"thinks I am going to eat dabs of things at the club when I can have
Mandy to cook for me, they think wrong."
He gave orders, therefore, which belonged to more opulent days, when his
father's estate had swarmed with blacks. There was now in the Judge's
household only Mandy, the cook, and Calvin, her husband. Mandy sat up
half the night to bake a cake, and Calvin killed chickens at dawn, and
dressed them, and pounded the dough for biscuits on a marble slab, and
helped his wife with the mayonnaise.
When at last the luncheon was packed there was coffee in the thermos
bottle. Prohibition was an assured fact, and the Judge would not break
the laws. The flowing glass must go into the discard with other
picturesque customs of the South. His own estate that had once been sold
by John Randolph to Thomas Jefferson for a bowl of arrack punch----! Old
times, old manners! The Judge drank his coffee with the air of one who
accepts a good thing regretfully. He stood staunchly by the
Administration. If the President had asked the sacrifice of his head, he
would have offered it on the platter of political allegiance.
So on this August morning, an aristocrat by inheritance, and a democrat
by assumption, he drove his bays proudly. Calvin, in a worn blue coat,
sat beside him with his arms folded.
Becky was on the back seat with Aunt Claudia. Aunt Claudia was a widow
and wore black. She was small and slight, and the black was made smart
by touches of white crepe. Aunt Claudia had not forgotten that she had
been a belle in Richmond. She was a stately little woman with a firm
conviction of the necessity of maintaining dignified standards of
living. She was in no sense a snob. But she held that women of birth and
breeding must preserve the fastidiousness of their ideals, lest there be
social chaos.
"There would be no ladies left in the world," she often told Becky, "if
we older women went at the modern pace."
Becky, in contrast to Aunt Claudia's smartness, showed up rather
ingloriously. She wore the stubbed russet shoes, a not too fresh cotton
frock of pale yellow, and a brown straw sailor.
"You might at least have stopped to change your shoes," Aunt Claudia
told her, as they left the house behind.
"I was out with Randy and the dogs. It was heavenly, Aunt Claudia."
"My dear, if a walk with Randy is heavenly, what will you call Heaven
when you get to it?"
They drove through the first gate, and Calvin climbed down to open it.
Beyond the gate the road descended gradually through an open pasture,
where sheep grazed on the hillside or lay at rest in the shade. The
bells of the leaders tinkled faintly, the ewes and the lambs were
calling. Beyond the big gate, the highroad was washed with the recent
rains. From the gate to the club was a matter of five miles, and the
bays ate up the distance easily.
The people on the porch of the Country Club were very gay and gorgeous,
so that Becky in her careless frock and shabby shoes would have been a
pitiful contrast if she had cared in the least what the people on the
porch thought of her. But she did not care. She nodded and smiled to a
friend or two as the Judge stopped for a moment in the crush of motors.
George Dalton was on the porch. When he saw Becky he leaned forward for
a good look at her.
"Some girl," he said to Waterman, as the surrey moved on, "the one in
the sailor hat. Who is she?"
Oscar Waterman was a newcomer in Albemarle. He had bought a thousand
acres, with an idea of grafting on to Southern environment his own
ideas of luxurious living. The county families had not called, but he
was not yet aware of his social isolation. He was rich, and most of the
county families were poor--from his point of view the odds were in his
favor--and it was never hard to get guests. He could always motor up to
Washington and New York, and bring a crowd back with him. His cellars
were well stocked, and his hospitality undiscriminating.
"I don't know the girl," he told Dalton, "but the old man is Judge
Bannister. He's one of the natives--no money and oodles of pride."
In calling Judge Bannister a "native," Oscar showed a lack of
proportion. A native, in the sense that he used the word, is a South Sea
Islander, indigenous but negligible. Oscar was fooled, you see, by the
Judge's old-fashioned clothes, and the high surrey, and the horses with
the flowing tails. His ideas of life had to do with motor cars and
mansions, and with everybody very much dressed up. He felt that the only
thing in the world that really counted was money. If you had enough of
it the world was yours!
II
Year after year the Bannisters of Huntersfield had eaten their Horse
Show luncheon under a clump of old oaks beneath which the horses now
stopped. The big trees were dropping golden leaves in the dryness. From
the rise of the hill one looked down on the grandstand and the crowd as
from the seats of an amphitheater.
Judge Bannister remembered when the women of the crowd had worn hoops
and waterfalls. Aunt Claudia's memory went back to bustles and bonnets.
There were deeper memories, too, than of clothes--of old friends and
young faces--there was always a moment of pensive retrospect when the
Bannisters stopped under the old oak on the hill.
Randolph Paine, his mother and Major Prime were to join them at
luncheon. Separate plans had been made by the boarders who had packed
themselves into various cars and carriages, and had their own boxes and
baskets.
"Caroline Paine is always late," the Judge said with some impatience;
"if we don't eat on time, we shall have to hurry. I have never hurried
in my life and I don't want to begin now."
Claudia Beaufort was accustomed to impatience in men, and she was
inflexible as a hostess. "Well, of course, we couldn't begin without
them, could we?" she asked. "There they come now, Father. William, you'd
better help Major Prime."
Randy was driving the fat mare, Rosalind. Nellie Custis, Randolph's wiry
hound, loped along with flapping ears in the rear of the low-seated
carriage. Major Prime was on the back seat with Mrs. Paine.
"My dear Judge," he said, as the old gentleman came to the side of the
carriage, "I can't tell you how honored I am to be included in your
party. This is about the best thing that has happened to me in a long
time."
"I wanted you to get the old atmosphere. You can't get it at the Country
Club. We Bannisters have lunched up here for sixty years--older than you
are, eh?"
"Twenty years----"
"We used to call it the races, but now they tack on the Horse Show. It
was different, of course, when all the old places were owned by the old
families. But they can't change the oaks and the sweep of the hills, and
the mettle of the horses, thank God."
"I am sorry I was late," said Caroline Paine, as they settled themselves
under the trees, "but I went to town to have my hair waved."
"I wish you wouldn't, Caroline," Mrs. Beaufort told her, "your hair is
nice enough without it."
Caroline Paine took off her hat, "I couldn't get it up to look like
this, could I?"
The Judge surveyed the undulations critically. "Caroline," he said, "you
are too pretty to need it."
"I want to keep young for Randolph's sake," Mrs. Paine told him, "then
he'll like me better than any other girl."
"You needn't think you have to get your hair curled to make me love
you," said her tall son; "you are ducky enough as you are."
Major Prime, delighting in their lack of self-consciousness, made a
diplomatic contribution. "Why quarrel with such a charming coiffure?"
Mrs. Paine smiled at him, comfortably. "I feel much better," she said;
"they are always trying to hold me back."
She was a woman of ample proportions and of leisurely habit. Life had of
late hurried her a bit, but she still gave the effect of restful calm.
She was of the same generation as Aunt Claudia, and a widow. But she
wore her widowhood with a difference. She had on to-day a purple hat.
Her hair was white, her dress was white, and her shoes. She was prettier
than Aunt Claudia but she lacked her distinction of manner and of
carriage.
"They always want to hold me back when I try to be up-to-date," she
repeated.
Randy threw an acorn at her. "Nobody can hold you back, Mother," he
said, "when you get your mind on a thing. Aunt Claudia, what do you
hear from Truxton?"
"A letter came this morning," said Mrs. Beaufort, lighting up with the
thought of it. "I hadn't heard for days before that. And I was worried."
"Truxton hasn't killed himself writing letters since he went over," the
Judge asserted. "Claudia, can't we have lunch?"
"William is unpacking the hamper now, Father. And I think Truxton has
done very well. It isn't easy for the boys to find time."
"Randy wrote to me every week."
"Now, Mother----"
"Well, you did."
"But I'm that kind. I have to get things off my mind. Truxton isn't. And
I'll bet when Aunt Claudia does get his letters that they are worth
reading."
Mrs. Beaufort nodded. "They are lovely letters. I have the last one with
me; would you like to hear it?"
"Not before lunch, Claudia," the Judge urged.
"I will read it while the rest of you eat." There were red spots in Mrs.
Beaufort's cheeks. She adored her son. She could not understand her
father's critical attitude. Had she searched for motives, however, she
might have found them in the Judge's jealousy.
It was while she was reading Truxton's letter that the Flippins came
by--Mr. Flippin and his wife, Mary, and little Fidelity. A slender
mulatto woman followed with a basket.
The Flippins were one of the "second families." Between them and the
Paines of King's Crest and the Bannisters of Huntersfield stretched a
deep chasm of social prejudice. Three generations of Flippins had been
small farmers on rented lands. They had no coats-of-arms or family
trees. They were never asked to dine with the Paines or Bannisters, but
there had been always an interchange of small hospitalities, and much
neighborliness, and as children Mary Flippin, Randy and Becky and
Truxton had played together and had been great friends.
So it was now as they stopped to speak to the Judge's party that Mrs.
Beaufort said graciously, "I am reading a letter from Truxton. Would you
like to hear it?"
Mary, speaking with a sort of tense eagerness, said, "Yes."
So the Flippins sat down, and Mrs. Beaufort read in her pleasant voice
the letter from France.
Randy, lying on his back under the old oak, listened. Truxton gave a
joyous diary of the days--little details of the towns through which he
passed, of the houses where he was billeted, jokes of the men, of the
food they ate, of his hope of coming home.
"He seems very happy," said Mrs. Beaufort, as she finished.
"He is and he isn't----"
"You might make yourself a little clearer, Randolph," said the Judge.
"He is happy because France in summer is a pleasant sort of
Paradise--with the cabbages stuck up on the brown hillsides like
rosettes--and the minnows flashing in the little brooks and the old
mills turning--and he isn't happy--because he is homesick."
Randy raised himself on his elbow and smiled at his listening
audience--and as he smiled he was aware of a change in Mary Flippin. The
brooding look was gone. She was leaning forward, lips parted--"Then you
think that he is--homesick?"
"I don't _think_. I know. Why, over there, my bones actually ached for
Virginia."
The Judge raised his coffee cup. "Virginia, God bless her," he murmured,
and drank it down!
The Flippins moved on presently--the slender mulatto trailing after
them.
"If the Flippins don't send that Daisy back to Washington," Mrs. Paine
remarked, "she'll spoil all the negroes on the place."
Mrs. Beaufort agreed, "I don't know what we are coming to. Did you see
her high heels and tight skirt?"
"Once upon a time," the Judge declaimed, "black wenches like that wore
red handkerchiefs on their heads and went barefoot. But the world moves,
and some day when we have white servants wished on us, we'll pray to God
to send our black ones back."
Calvin was passing things expertly. Randy smiled at Becky as he filled
her plate.
"Hungry?"
"Ravenous."
"You don't look it."
"Don't I?"
"No. You're not a bread and butter sort of person."
"What kind am I?"
"Sugar and spice and everything nice."
"Did you learn to say such things in France?"
"Haven't I always said them?"
"Not in quite the same way. You've grown up, Randy. You seem _years_
older."
"Do you like me--older?"
"Of course." There was warmth in her voice but no coquetry. "What a
silly thing to ask, Randy."
Calvin, having served the lunch, ate his own particular feast of chicken
backs and necks under the surrey from a pasteboard box cover. Having
thus separated himself as it were from those he served, he was at his
ease. He knew his place and was happy in it.
Mary Flippin also knew her place. But she was not happy. She sat higher
up on the hill with her child asleep in her arms, and looked down on the
Judge's party. Except for an accident of birth, she might be sitting now
among them. Would she ever sit among them? Would her little daughter,
Fidelity?
III
"We are the only one of the old families who are eating lunch out of a
basket," said Caroline Paine; "next year we shall have to go to the
Country Club with the rest of them."
"I shall never go to the Country Club," said Judge Bannister, "as long
as there is a nigger to fry chicken for me."
"We may have to swim with the tide."
"Don't tell me that you'd rather be up there than here, Caroline."
"I'd like it for some things," Mrs. Paine admitted frankly; "you should
see the clothes that those Waterman women are wearing."
"What do you care what they wear. You don't want to be like them, do
you?"
"I may not care to be like them, but I want to look like them. I got the
pattern of this sweater I am knitting from one of my boarders. Do you
want it, Claudia?"
Mrs. Beaufort winced at the word "boarders." She hated to think that
Caroline must---- "I never wear sweaters, Caroline. They are not my
style. But I am knitting one for Becky."
"Is it blue?" Randy asked. "Becky ought always to wear blue, except when
she wears pale yellow. That was a heavenly thing you had on at dinner
the night we arrived, wasn't it, Major?"
"Everything was heavenly. I felt like one who expecting a barren plain
sees--Paradise."
It was not flattery and they knew it. They were hospitable souls, and in
a week he had become, as it were, one of them.
Randy, returning to the subject in hand, asked, "Will you wear the blue
if I come up to-night, Becky?"
"I will not." Becky was making herself a chaplet of yellow leaves, and
her bronze hair caught the light. "I will not. I shall probably put on
my old white if I dress for dinner."
"Of course you'll dress," said Mrs. Beaufort; "there are certain things
which we must always demand of ourselves----"
Caroline Paine agreed. "That's what I tell Randy when he says he
doesn't want to finish his law course. His father was a lawyer and his
grandfather. He owes it to them to live up to their standards."
Randy was again flat on his back with his hands under his head. "If I
stay at the University, it means no money for either of us except what
you earn, Mother."
The war had taken its toll of Caroline Paine. Things had not been easy
since her son had left her. They would not be easy now. "I know," she
said, "but you wouldn't want your father to be ashamed of you."
Randy sat up. "It isn't that--but I ought to make some money----"
The word was a challenge to the Judge. "Don't run with the mob, my boy.
The world is money-mad."
"I'm not money-mad," said Randy; "I know what I should like to do if my
life was my own. But it isn't. And I'm not going to have Mother twist
and turn as she has twisted and turned for the last fifteen years in
order to get me educated up to the family standard."
"If you don't mind I shouldn't." Caroline Paine was setting her feet to
a rocky path, but she did not falter. "You shouldn't mind if I don't."
Becky laid down the chaplet of leaves. She knew some of the things
Caroline Paine had sacrificed and she was thrilled by them. "Randy," she
admonished, with youthful severity, "it would be a shame to disappoint
your mother."
Randolph flushed beneath his dark skin. The Paines had an Indian strain
in them--Pocahontas was responsible for it, or some of the other
princesses who had mixed red blood with blue in the days when Virginia
belonged to the King. Randy showed signs of it in his square-set jaw,
the high lift of his head, his long easy stride, the straightness of his
black hair. He showed it, too, in a certain stoical impassiveness which
might have been taken for indifference. His world was, for the moment,
against him; he would attempt no argument.
"I am afraid this doesn't interest Major Prime," he said.
"It interests me very much," said the Major. "It is only another case of
the fighting man's adjustment to life after his return. We all have to
face it in one way or another." His eyes went out over the hills. They
were gray eyes, deep set, and, at this moment, kindly. They could blaze,
however, in stress of fighting, like bits of steel. "We all have to face
it in one way or another. And the future of America depends largely on
our seeing things straight."
"Well, there's only one way for Randy to face it," said Caroline Paine,
firmly, "and that is to do as his fathers did before him."
"If I do," Randy flared, "it will be three years before I can make a
living, and I'll be twenty-five."
Becky put on the chaplet of leaves. It fitted like a cap. She might have
been a dryad, escaped for a moment from the old oak. "Three years isn't
long."
"Suppose I should want to marry----"
"Oh, you--Randy----"
"But why shouldn't I?"
"I don't want you to get married," she told him; "when I come down we
couldn't have our nice times together. You'd always be thinking about
your wife."
IV
From the porch of the Country Club, George Dalton had seen the Judge's
party at luncheon. According to George's lexicon no one who could afford
to go to the club would eat out of a basket. He rather blushed for Becky
that she must sit there in the sight of everybody and share a feast with
a shabby old Judge, a lean and lank stripling with straight hair, a lame
duck of an officer, and two middle-aged women, who made spots of black
and purple on the landscape. Like Oscar, George's ideas of life had to
do largely with motor cars and yachts, and estates on Long Island,
palaces at Newport and Len ox and Palm Beach. During the war he had
served rather comfortably in a becoming uniform in the Quartermaster's
Department in Washington. Now that the war was over, he regretted the
becomings of the uniform. He felt to-day, however, that there were
compensations in his hunting pink. He was slightly bronzed and had blue
eyes. He was extremely popular with the women of the Waterman set, but
was held to be the especial property of Madge MacVeigh.
Madge had observed his interest in the party on the hill.
"George," she said, "what are you looking at?"
"I am looking at those people who are picnicking. They probably have
ants in the salad and spiders in their coffee."
"They are getting more out of it than you and I," said Madge.
"How getting more?"
"We are tired of things, Georgie-Porgie."
"Speak for yourself, Madge."
"I am speaking for both of us. You are tired of me, for example."
"My dear girl, I am not."
"You are. And I am tired of you. It's not your fault, and it's not mine.
It is the fault of any house-party. People see too much of each other.
I am glad I am going away to-morrow, and you'll be glad. And when we
have been separated a month, you will rush up to see me, and say you
couldn't live without me."
She dissected him coolly. Madge had a modern way of looking at things.
She was not in the least sentimental. But she had big moments of
feeling. It was because of this deep current which swept her away now
and then from the shallows that she held Dalton's interest. He never
knew in what mood he should find her, and it added spice to their
friendship.
"I didn't know you were going to-morrow."
"Neither did I till this morning, but I am bored to death, Georgie."
She did not look it. She was long-limbed, slender, with heavy
burned-gold hair, a skin which was pale gold after a July by the sea.
The mauve of her dress and hat emphasized the gold of hair and skin.
Some one had said that Madge MacVeigh at the end of a summer gave the
effect of a statue cast in new bronze. Dalton in the early days of their
friendship had called her his "Golden Girl." The name had stuck to her.
She had laughed at it but had liked it. "I should hate it," she had
said, "if I were rich. Perhaps some day some millionaire will turn me
into gold and make it true."
"Just because you are bored to death," Dalton told her, "is no reason
why you should accuse me of it."
"It isn't accusation. It's condolence. I am sorry for both of us,
George, that we can't sit there under the trees and eat out of a basket
and have spiders and ants in things and not mind it. Here we are in the
land of Smithfield hams and spoon-bread and we ate canned lobster for
lunch, and alligator pear salad."
"Baked ham and spoon-bread--for our sins?"
"It is because you and I have missed the baked ham and spoon-bread
atmosphere, that we are bored to death, Georgie. Everything in our lives
is the same wherever we go. When we are in Virginia we ought to do as
the Virginians do, and instead Oscar Waterman brings a little old New
York with him. It's Rome for the Romans, Georgie, lobsters in New
England, avocados in Los Angeles, hog and hominy here."
There were others listening now, and she was aware of her amused
audience.
"If you don't like my little old New York," Waterman said, "I'll change
it."
"No, I am going back to the real thing, Oscar. To my sky-scrapers and
subways. You can't give us those down here--not yet. Perhaps some day
there will be a system of camouflage by which no matter where we are--in
desert or mountain, we can open our windows to the Woolworth Building
on the skyline or the Metropolitan Tower, or to Diana shooting at the
stars,--and have some little cars in tunnels to run us around your
estate."
"By Jove, Jefferson nearly did it," said Waterman; "you should see the
subterranean passages at Monticello for the servants, so that the guests
could look over the grounds without a woolly head in sight."
"Great old boob, Jefferson," said Waterman's wife, Flora.
"No," Madge's eyes went out over the hills to where Monticello brooded
over great memories, "he was not a boob. He was so big that little
people like us can't focus him, Flora."
She came down from her perch. "I adore great men," she said; "when I go
back, I shall make a pilgrimage to Oyster Bay. I wonder how many of us
who weep over Great heart's grave would have voted for him if he had
lived. In a sense we crucified him."
"Madge is serious," said Flora Waterman, "now what do you think of
that?"
"I have to be serious sometimes, Flora, to balance the rest of you. You
can be as gay as you please when I am gone, and if you perish, you
perish."
George walked beside her as the party moved towards the grandstand.
"I've half a mind to go to New York with you, Madge. I came down on your
account."
"It's because you followed me that I'm tired of you, Georgie. If you go,
I'll stay."
She was smiling as she said it. But he did not smile. "Just as you wish,
of course. But you mustn't expect me to come running when you crook your
finger."
"I never expect things, but you'll come."
Perhaps she would not have been so sure if she could have looked into
his mind. The day that Becky had ridden away, hidden by the flaps of the
old surrey, the spark of his somewhat fickle interest had been lighted,
and the glimpse that he had had of her this morning had fanned the spark
into a flame.
"Did you say the old man's name is Bannister?" he asked Oscar as the
Judge's party passed them later on their way to their seats.
"Yes. Judge Bannister. I tried to buy his place before I decided on
Hamilton Hill. But he wouldn't sell. He said he wouldn't have any place
for his stuffed birds."
"Stuffed birds?"
"His hobby is the game birds of Virginia. He has a whole room of them. I
offered him a good price, but I suppose he'd rather starve than take
it."
The Judge's box was just above Oscar Waterman's. Becky, looking up, saw
Dalton's eyes upon her.
"It's the man who came with you on the train," she told Randy.
"What's he wearing a pink coat for?" Randy demanded. "He isn't riding."
"He probably knows that he looks well in it."
"That isn't a reason."
Becky took another look. "He has a head like the bust of Apollo in our
study hall."
"I'd hate to have a head like that."
"Well, you haven't," she told him; "you may hug that thought to yourself
if it is any consolation, Randy."
V
Caroline Paine's boarders sat high up on the grandstand. If the boarders
seem in this book to be spoken of collectively, like the Chorus in a
Greek play, or the sisters and aunts and cousins in "Pinafore," it is
not because they are not individually interesting. It is because, _en
Massey_ only, have they any meaning in this history.
Now as they sat on the grandstand, they discerned Mrs. Paine in the
Judge's box. They waved at her, and they waved at Randy, they waved also
at Major Prime. They demanded recognition--some of the more enthusiastic
detached themselves finally from the main group and came down to visit
Caroline. The overflow straggled along the steps to the edge of the
Waterman box. One genial gentleman was forced finally to sit on the
rail, so that his elbow stuck straight into the middle of the back of
George's huntsman's pink.
George moved impatiently. "Can't you find any other place to sit?"
The genial gentleman beamed on him. "I have a seat over there. But we
came down to see Mrs. Paine. She is in Judge Bannister's box and we
board with her--at King's Crest. And say, she's a corker!"
George, surveying Becky with increasing interest, decided that she was a
bit above her surroundings. She sat as it were with--Publicans. George
may not have used the Scriptural phrase, but he had the feeling. He was
Pharisaic ally thankful that he was not as that conglomerate group in
the Bannister box. A cheap crowd was his estimate. It would be rather
nice to give the little girl a good time!
Filled, therefore, with a high sense of his philanthropic purpose, he
planned a meeting. With his blue eyes on the flying horses, with his
staccato voice making quick comments, he had Becky in the back of his
mind. He found a moment, when the crowd went mad as the county favorite
came in, to write a line on the back of an envelope, and hand it to
Kemp, who hovered in the background, giving him quiet instructions.
"Yes, sir," said Kemp guardedly, and stood at attention until the races
were over, and the crowd began to move, and then he handed the note to
Judge Bannister.
The Judge put on his glasses and read it. "Where is he?" he asked Kemp.
"In the other box, sir. The one above."
"Tell him to come down."
"Yes, sir, thank you, sir."
The Judge was as pleased as Punch. "That man up there in Waterman's box
has heard of my collection," he explained to his party. "He wants me to
settle a point about the Virginia partridge."
"Which man?" Randy's tone was ominous.
Dalton's arrival saved the Judge an answer. In his hunting pink, with
his Apollo head, Dalton was upon them. The Judge, passing him around to
the members of his party, came at last to Becky.
"My granddaughter, Becky Bannister."
With George's sparkling gaze bent full upon her, Becky blushed.
Randy saw the blush. "Oh, Lord," he said, under his breath, and stuck
his hands in his pockets.
"I've always called it a quail," Dalton was saying.
"You would if you come from the North. To be exact, it isn't either,
it's an American Bob-white. I'd be glad to have you come up and look at
my collection. There is every kind of bird that has been shot in
Virginia fields or Virginia waters. I've got a Trumpeter Swan. The last
one was seen in the Chesapeake in sixty-nine. Mine was killed and
stuffed in the forties. He is in a perfect state of preservation, and in
the original glass case."
"I'd like to come," George told him. "Could I--to-night? I don't know
just how long I shall be staying down."
"Any time--any time. To-night, of course. There's nothing I like better
than to talk about my birds, unless it is to eat them. Isn't that so,
Claudia?"
"Yes, Father." Mrs. Beaufort was studying Dalton closely. His manner was
perfect. It was, indeed, she decided, too perfect. "He is thinking too
much of the way he does it." The one sin in Aunt Claudia's mind was
social self-consciousness. People who thought all of the time about
manners hadn't been brought up to them. They must have them without
thinking. George was not, she decided, a gentleman in the Old Dominion
sense. Dalton would have been amazed could he have looked into Aunt
Claudia's mind and have seen himself a--Publican.
"Father," she said, after Dalton had left them, "did I hear you invite
him to dinner?"
"Yes, my dear, but he could not come----"
"I'm glad he couldn't."
"Why?"
"I'm not sure that he's--our kind----"
"Nonsense, he's a very fine fellow."
"How do you know?"
"Well, I know this," testily, "that I am not to be instructed as to the
sort of person I can ask to my house."
"Oh, Father, I didn't mean that. Of course you can do as you please."
"Of course I shall, Claudia."
"I think he is charming," said Mrs. Paine. "He has lovely eyes."
"Hasn't he?" said little Becky.