'MID NEW SURROUNDINGS
Warwick's residence was situated in the outskirts of the town. It was
a fine old plantation house, built in colonial times, with a stately
colonnade, wide verandas, and long windows with Venetian blinds. It
was painted white, and stood back several rods from the street, in a
charming setting of palmettoes, magnolias, and flowering shrubs. Rena
had always thought her mother's house large, but now it seemed cramped
and narrow, in comparison with this roomy mansion. The furniture was
old-fashioned and massive. The great brass andirons on the wide hearth
stood like sentinels proclaiming and guarding the dignity of the
family. The spreading antlers on the wall testified to a mighty hunter
in some past generation. The portraits of Warwick's wife's
ancestors--high featured, proud men and women, dressed in the fashions
of a bygone age--looked down from tarnished gilt frames. It was all
very novel to her, and very impressive. When she ate off china, with
silver knives and forks that had come down as heirlooms, escaping
somehow the ravages and exigencies of the war time,--Warwick told her
afterwards how he had buried them out of reach of friend or foe,--she
thought that her brother must be wealthy, and she felt very proud of
him and of her opportunity. The servants, of whom there were several
in the house, treated her with a deference to which her eight months in
school had only partly accustomed her. At school she had been one of
many to be served, and had herself been held to obedience. Here, for
the first time in her life, she was mistress, and tasted the sweets of
power.
The household consisted of her brother and herself, a cook, a coachman,
a nurse, and her brother's little son Albert. The child, with a fine
instinct, had put out his puny arms to Rena at first sight, and she had
clasped the little man to her bosom with a motherly caress. She had
always loved weak creatures. Kittens and puppies had ever found a
welcome and a meal at Rena's hands, only to be chased away by Mis'
Molly, who had had a wider experience. No shiftless poor white, no
half-witted or hungry negro, had ever gone unfed from Mis' Molly's
kitchen door if Rena were there to hear his plaint. Little Albert was
pale and sickly when she came, but soon bloomed again in the sunshine
of her care, and was happy only in her presence. Warwick found
pleasure in their growing love for each other, and was glad to perceive
that the child formed a living link to connect her with his home.
"Dat chile sutt'nly do lub Miss Rena, an' dat's a fac', sho 's you
bawn," remarked 'Lissa the cook to Mimy the nurse one day. "You'll get
yo' nose put out er j'int, ef you don't min'."
"I ain't frettin', honey," laughed the nurse good-naturedly. She was
not at all jealous. She had the same wages as before, and her labors
were materially lightened by the aunt's attention to the child. This
gave Mimy much more time to flirt with Tom the coachman.
It was a source of much gratification to Warwick that his sister seemed
to adapt herself so easily to the new conditions. Her graceful
movements, the quiet elegance with which she wore even the simplest
gown, the easy authoritativeness with which she directed the servants,
were to him proofs of superior quality, and he felt correspondingly
proud of her. His feeling for her was something more than brotherly
love,--he was quite conscious that there were degrees in brotherly
love, and that if she had been homely or stupid, he would never have
disturbed her in the stagnant life of the house behind the cedars.
There had come to him from some source, down the stream of time, a rill
of the Greek sense of proportion, of fitness, of beauty, which is
indeed but proportion embodied, the perfect adaptation of means to
ends. He had perceived, more clearly than she could have appreciated
it at that time, the undeveloped elements of discord between Rena and
her former life. He had imagined her lending grace and charm to his
own household. Still another motive, a purely psychological one, had
more or less consciously influenced him. He had no fear that the
family secret would ever be discovered,--he had taken his precautions
too thoroughly, he thought, for that; and yet he could not but feel, at
times, that if peradventure--it was a conceivable hypothesis--it should
become known, his fine social position would collapse like a house of
cards. Because of this knowledge, which the world around him did not
possess, he had felt now and then a certain sense of loneliness; and
there was a measure of relief in having about him one who knew his
past, and yet whose knowledge, because of their common interest, would
not interfere with his present or jeopardize his future. For he had
always been, in a figurative sense, a naturalized foreigner in the
world of wide opportunity, and Rena was one of his old compatriots,
whom he was glad to welcome into the populous loneliness of his adopted
country.