I
DIANA ROYALL pushed back the music-rack and rose from her seat at the
piano.
“Show the person in here, Kingdom.”
The negro disappeared, and Diana moved slowly to the table at the
farther end of the long room, and stood there turning over some papers
in her leisurely, graceful way.
“Who in the world is it now?” Mrs. Eaton asked, looking up from her
solitaire, “a book agent?”
“Caleb Trench,” Diana replied carelessly, “the shopkeeper at Eshcol.”
“The storekeeper?” Mrs. Eaton looked as if Diana had said the
chimney-sweep. “What in the world does he want of you, my dear?”
Diana laughed. “How should I know?” she retorted, with a slight
scornful elevation of her brows; “we always pay cash there.”
“I wonder that you receive him in the drawing-room,” Mrs. Eaton
remonstrated, shuffling her cards with delicate, much be-ringed
fingers, and that indefinable manner which lingers with some old
ladies, like their fine old lace and their ancestors, and is at once a
definition and classification. Thus, one could see, at a glance, that
Mrs. Eaton had been a belle before the war, for, as we all know, the
atmosphere of belledom is as difficult to dissipate and forget as the
poignant aroma of a moth-ball in an old fur coat, though neither of
them may have served the purposes of preservation.
The girl made no reply, and the older woman was instinctively aware
of her indifference to her opinions, uttered or unexpressed. There
were times when Diana’s absorption of mood, her frank inattention,
affected her worldly mentor as sharply as a slap in the face, yet,
the next moment, she fell easily under the spell of her personality.
Mrs. Eaton always felt that no one could look at her youthful relative
without feeling that her soul must be as beautiful as her body, though
she herself had never been able to form any estimate of that soul.
Diana hid it with a reserve and a mental strength which folded it away
as carefully as the calyx of a cactus guards the delicate bloom with
its thorns. But the fact that Mrs. Eaton overlooked was still more
apparent, the fact that a great many people never thought of Diana’s
soul at all, being quite content to admire the long and exquisite
curves of her tall figure, the poise of her graceful head, with the
upward wave of its bright hair, and the level glance of her dear eyes
under their thick dark lashes. There was something fine about her
vitality, her freshness, the perfection of her dress and her bearing,
which seemed so harmoniously accentuated by the subdued elegance of
the charming old room. Nature had specialized her by the divine touch
of a beauty that apparently proclaimed the possession of an equally
beautiful spirit; not even the flesh and blood surface seemed always
impenetrable, but rather delicately transparent to every spiritual
variation, like the crystal sphere of the magician. But Mrs. Eaton,
pondering on her young cousin’s personality from a more frivolous
standpoint, took alarm most readily at her independence, and was
overcome now with the impropriety of receiving a village shopkeeper in
the drawing-room after dinner.
“My dear,” she remonstrated again, “hadn’t you better speak to him in
the hall?”
Diana looked up from her paper, slightly bored. “In that case, Cousin
Jinny, you couldn’t hear what he said,” she remarked composedly.
Mrs. Eaton reddened and put a three spot on her ace instead of a two.
“I do not care to--” she began and paused, her utterance abruptly
suspended by the shock of a new perception.
For, at that moment, Kingdom-Come announced Diana’s unbidden guest and
Mrs. Eaton forgot what she was going to say, forgot her manners in
fact, and gazed frankly at the big man who came slowly and awkwardly
into the room. His appearance, indeed, had quite a singular effect
upon her. She wondered vaguely if she could be impressed, or if it was
only the result of the unexpected contact with the lower class? She
was fond of speaking of the Third Estate; she had found the expression
somewhere during her historical peckings, and appropriated it at once
as a comprehensive phrase with an aristocratic flavor, though its true
meaning proved a little elusive.
Meanwhile, the unwelcome visitor was confronting Miss Royall and there
was a moment of audible silence. Diana met his glance more fully
than she had ever been aware of doing before, in her brief visits to
his shop, and, like her elderly cousin, she received a new and vital
impression, chiefly from the depth and lucidity of his gaze, which
seemed to possess both composure and penetration; she felt her cheeks
flush hotly, yet was conscious that his look was neither familiar nor
offending, but was rather the glance of a personality as strong as her
own.
“You wish to speak to me?” she said impatiently, forgetting the fine
courtesy that she usually showed to an inferior.
As she spoke, her father and Jacob Eaton came in from the dining-room
and, pausing within the wide low doorway, were silent spectators of the
scene.
“I wished to see you, yes,” said Trench quietly, advancing to the table
and deliberately putting some pennies on it. “When you bought that
piece of muslin this morning I gave you the wrong change. After you
left the shop I found I owed you six cents. I walked over with it this
evening as soon as I closed the doors. I would have left it with your
servant at the door, but he insisted that I must see you in person.”
He added this gravely, deliberately allowing her to perceive that he
understood his reception.
Diana bit her lip to suppress a smile, and was conscious that Jacob
Eaton was openly hilarious. She was half angry, too, because Trench
had put her in the wrong by recognizing her discourtesy and treating
it courteously. Beyond the circle of the lamplight was the critical
audience of her home-life, her father’s stately figure and white head,
Mrs. Eaton’s elderly elegance, and Jacob’s worldly wisdom. She looked
at Trench with growing coldness.
“Thank you,” she said, “shall I give you a receipt?”
He met her eye an instant, and she saw that he was fully cognizant of
her sarcasm. “As you please,” he replied unmoved.
She felt herself rebuked again, and her anger kindled unreasonably
against the man who was smarting under her treatment. She went to the
table, and taking a sheet of folded note-paper wrote a receipt and
signed it, handing it to him with a slight haughty inclination of the
head which was at once an acknowledgment and a dismissal.
But again he met her with composure. He took the paper, folded it
twice and put it in his pocketbook, then he bade her good evening and,
passing Eaton with scarcely a glance, bowed to Colonel Royall and went
out, his awkward figure in its rough tweed suit having made a singular
effect in the old-fashioned elegance of Colonel Royall’s house, an
effect that fretted Diana’s pride, for it had seemed to her that, as
he passed, he had overshadowed her own father and dwarfed Jacob Eaton.
Yet, at the time, she thought of none of these things. She pushed the
offending pennies across the table.
“Cousin Jinny,” she said carelessly, “there are some Peter pence for
your dago beggars.”
Cousin Jinny gathered up the pennies and dropped them thoughtfully into
the little gold-linked purse on her chatelaine. For years she had been
contributing a yearly subsidy to the ever increasing family of a former
gondolier, the unforgotten grace of whose slender legs had haunted
her memory for twenty years, during which period she had been the
recipient of annual announcements of twins and triplets, whose arrivals
invariably punctuated peculiarly unremunerative years.
“That man,” she said, referring to Trench and not the gondolier, “that
man is an anarchist.”
Mrs. Eaton had a settled conviction that all undesirable persons were
anarchists. To her nebulous vision innumerable immigrant ships were
continually unloading anarchists in bulk, as merchantmen might unship
consignments of Sea Island cotton or Jamaica rum; and every fresh
appearance of the social unwashed was to her an advent of an atom from
these incendiary cargoes.
“I hope you were careful about your receipt, Diana,” said Jacob Eaton,
stopping to light a cigarette at the tall candelabrum on the piano.
“How far did your admirer walk to bring that consignment of pennies?”
“My admirer?” Diana shot a scornful glance at him. “I call it an
intrusion.”
“Did he walk over from that little shop at Cross-Roads?” Mrs. Eaton
asked. “I seem to remember a shop there.”
“It’s seven miles,” said Colonel Royall, speaking for the first time,
“and the roads are bad. I think he is merely scrupulously honest,
Diana,” he added; “I was watching his face.”
Diana flushed under her father’s eye. “I suppose he is,” she said
reluctantly, “but, pshaw--six cents! He could have handed it to a
servant.”
“Do you send the servants there?” Colonel Royall asked pointedly.
“No,” she admitted reluctantly, “I suppose he rarely sees any one from
here, but there was Kingdom at the door.”
“Who insisted on his seeing you, you remember,” objected her father;
“the soul of Kingdom-Come is above six pennies.”
“Well, so is mine!” exclaimed Diana pettishly.
“Seven miles in red clay mud to see you,” mocked Jacob Eaton, smiling
at her.
“Nonsense!” she retorted.
“I don’t see why you take that tone, Jacob,” warned his mother a little
nervously. “I call it bad taste; he couldn’t presume to--to--”
“To walk seven miles?” her son laughed “My dear lady, I’d walk
seventeen to see Diana.”
“My dear courtier, throw down your cloak in the mud and let me walk
upon it,” retorted Diana scornfully.
“I have thrown down, instead, my heart,” he replied in a swift
undertone.
But Diana was watching her father and apparently did not hear him.
Colonel Royall had moved to his usual big chair by the hearth. A few
logs were kindling there, for, though it was early in April, it was a
raw chill evening. The firelight played on the noble and gentle lines
of the colonel’s old face, on his white hair and moustache and in the
mild sweetness of his absent-minded eyes. His daughter, looking at him
fondly, thought him peculiarly sad, and wondered if it was because they
were approaching an anniversary in that brief sad married life which
seemed to have left a scar too deep for even her tender touch.
“I don’t mind about the amount--six cents may be as sacred to him as
six dollars,” he was saying. “The man has a primitive face, the lines
are quite remarkable, and--” he leaned back and looked over at the
young man by the piano--“Jacob, I’ve heard of this Caleb Trench three
times this week in politics.”
“A village orator?” mocked Eaton, without dropping his air of
nonchalant superiority, an air that nettled Colonel Royall as much as a
heat-rash.
He shook his head impatiently. “Ask Mahan,” he said. “I don’t know,
but twice I’ve been told that Caleb Trench could answer this or that,
and yesterday--” he leaned back, shading his eyes with his hand as
he looked into the fire--“yesterday--what was it? Oh--” he stopped
abruptly, and a delicate color, almost a woman’s blush, went up to his
hair.
“And yesterday?” asked Eaton, suddenly alert, his mocking tone lost,
the latent shrewdness revealing itself through the thin mask of his
commonplace good looks.
“Well, I heard that he was opposed to Aylett’s methods,” Colonel Royall
said, with evident reluctance, “and that he favored Yarnall.”
Mrs. Eaton started violently and dropped her pack of cards, and Diana
and she began to gather them up again, Cousin Jinny’s fingers trembling
so much that the girl had to find them all.
Jacob stood listening, his eyelids drooping over his eyes and his upper
lip twitching a little at the corners like a dog who is puckering his
lip to show his fangs. “Yarnall is a candidate for governor,” he said
coolly.
Colonel Royall frowned slightly. “I’d rather keep Aylett,” he rejoined.
“Yarnall had no strength a week ago, but to-day the back counties are
supporting him,” said Eaton, “why, heaven knows! Some one must be
organizing them, but who?”
Colonel Royall drummed on the arm of his chair with his fingers. “Since
the war there’s been an upheaval,” he said thoughtfully. “It was like
a whirlpool, stirred the mud up from the bottom, and we’re getting it
now. No one can predict anything; it isn’t the day for an old-fashioned
gentleman in politics.”
“Which is an admission that shopkeepers ought to be in them,” suggested
Jacob, without emotion.
Colonel Royall laughed. “Maybe it is,” he admitted, “anyway I’m not
proud of my own party out here. I’m willing to stand by my colors, but
I’m usually heartily ashamed of the color bearer. It’s not so much the
color of one’s political coat as the lining of one’s political pockets.
I wish I had Abe Lincoln’s simple faith. What we need now is a man
who isn’t afraid to speak the truth; he’d loom up like Saul among the
prophets.”
“Again let me suggest the shopkeeper at the Cross-Roads,” said Jacob
Eaton.
Colonel Royall smiled sadly. “Why not?” he said. “Lincoln was a
barefoot boy. Why not Caleb Trench? Since he’s honest over little
things, he might be over great things.”
“Is he a Democrat?” Jacob asked suavely.
“On my word, I don’t know,” replied Colonel Royall. “He’s in Judge
Hollis’ office reading law, so William Cheyney told me.”
“That old busybody!” Jacob struck the ashes from his cigarette
viciously.
“Hush!” said Diana, “treason! Don’t you say a word against Dr. Cheyney.
I’ve loved him these many years.”
“A safe sentiment,” said Jacob. “I’m content to be his rival. Alas, if
he were the only one!”
“What did you say Caleb Trench was doing in the judge’s office, pa?”
Diana asked, ignoring her cousin.
“Reading law, my dear,” the colonel answered.
“I thought he was a poor shopkeeper,” objected Mrs. Eaton.
“So he is, Jinny,” said the colonel; “but he’s reading law at night.
It’s all mightily to his credit.”
“He’s altogether too clever, then,” said Mrs. Eaton firmly; “it is just
as I said, he’s an anarchist!”
“Dear me, let’s talk of some one else,” Diana protested. “The man must
have hoodooed us; we’ve discussed nothing else since he left.”
“Though lost to sight, to memory dear,” laughed Jacob, throwing back
his sleek dark head, and blowing his cigarette smoke into rings before
his face: he was still leaning against the piano, and his attitude
displayed his well-knit, rather slight figure. His mother, gazing at
him with an admiration not unlike the devotion the heathen extends to
his favorite deity, regarded him as a supreme expression of the best
in manhood and wisdom. To her Jacob was little short of a divinity and
nothing short of a tyrant, under whose despotic rule she had trembled
since he was first able to express himself in the cryptic language of
the cradle, which had meant with him an unqualified and unrestrained
shriek for everything he wanted. She thought he showed to peculiar
advantage, too, in the setting of the old room with its two centers
of light, the lamp on the table and the fire on the hearth, with the
well-worn Turkey rugs, its darkly polished floor, the rare pieces of
Chippendale, and the equally rare old paintings on the walls. There was
a fine, richly toned portrait of Colonel Royall’s grandfather, who had
been with Washington at Yorktown, and there was a Corot and a Van Dyke,
originals that had cost the colonel’s father a small fortune in his
time. Best of all, perhaps, was the Greuze, for there was something in
the shadowy beauty of the head which suggested Diana.
Colonel Royall himself had apparently forgotten Jacob and his attitude.
The old man was gazing absently into the fire, and the latent
tenderness in his expression, the fine droop of eyes and lips seemed to
suggest some deeper current of thought which the light talk stirred and
brought to the surface. There was a reminiscent sadness in his glance
which ignored the present and warned his daughter of the shoals. She
leaned forward and held her hands out to the blaze.
“If it’s fine next week, I’m going up to Angel Pass to see if the
anemones are not all in bloom,” she said abruptly.
Colonel Royall rose, and walking to the window, drew aside the heavy
curtains and looked out. “The night is superb,” he said. “Come here,
Di, and see Orion’s golden sword. If it is like this, we will go
to-morrow.”
But Diana, going to him, laid a gentle hand on his arm. “To-morrow was
mother’s birthday, pa,” she said softly.
Mrs. Eaton looked up and caught her son’s eye, and turned her face
carefully from the two in the bay window. “Think of it,” she murmured,
with a look of horrified disapproval, “think of keeping Letty’s
birthday here!”
But Jacob, glancing at Diana’s unconscious back, signed to her to be
silent.