Eve laughed. "There is no danger. To show you, to make you feel as
secure as I do, I will tell you that there have been one or two--friends
of Jack's over there. Apparently I am not made of inflammable material."
"When you are sullen--perhaps not. But when you are as you are now?"
"I shall always be sullen to that sort of thing. But we needn't be
troubled; there won't be an army! To begin with, I am twenty-eight; and
to end with, every one will know that I have willed my property to baby;
and that makes an immense difference."
"How does it make a difference?"
"In opportunities for marrying, if not also--as I really believe--for
falling in love."
"I don't see what difference it makes."
"True, you do not," Eve replied; "you are the most extraordinary people
in the world, you Southerners; I have been here nearly a month, and I am
still constantly struck by it--you never think of money at all. And the
strangest point is, that although you never think of it, you don't in
the least know how to get on without it; you cannot improve anything,
you can only endure."
"If you will tell Dilsey to get baby ready, I will see to the boat,"
answered Cicely. She was never interested in general questions.
Presently they were afloat. They were in a large row-boat, with Pomp,
Plato, Uncle Abram, and a field hand at the oars; Cicely steered; Eve
and little Jack were the passengers. The home-island was four miles
long, washed by the ocean on one side, the Sound on the other; on the
north, Singleton Island lay very near; but on the south there was a
broad opening, the next island being six miles distant. Here stood
Jupiter Light; this channel was a sea-entrance not only to the line of
Sounds, but also to towns far inland, for here opened on the west a
great river-mouth, through which flowed to the sea a broad, slow stream
coming from the cotton country. They were all good sailors, as they had
need to be for such excursions, the Sounds being often rough. The bright
winter air, too, was sharp; but Eve was strong, and did not mind it, and
the ladies of Romney, like true Southerners, never believed that it was
really cold, cold as it is at the North. The voyages in the row-boat had
been many; they had helped to fill the days, and the sisters-in-law had
had not much else with which to fill them; they had remained as widely
apart as in the beginning, Eve absorbed in her own plans, Cicely in her
own indifference. Little Jack was always of the party, as his presence
made dialogue easy. They had floated many times through the salt marshes
between the rattling reeds, they had landed upon other islands, whose
fields, like those of Romney, had once been fertile, but which now
showed submerged expanses behind the broken dikes, with here and there
an abandoned rice-mill. Sometimes they went inland up the river, rowing
slowly against the current; sometimes, when it was calm, they went out
to sea. To-day they crossed to the other side of the Sound.
"What a long house Romney is!" said Eve, looking back. She did not add,
"And if you drop anything on the floor at one end it shakes the other."
"Yes, it's large," Cicely answered. She perceived no fault in it.
"And the name; you know there's a Romney in Kent?"
"Is there?"
"And your post-office, too; when I think of your Warwick, with its one
wooden house, those spectral white sand-hills, the wind, and the tall
light-house, and then when I recall the English Warwick, with its small,
closely built streets, and the great castle looking down into the river
Avon, I wonder if the first-comers here didn't feel lost sometimes. All
the rivers in central England, put together, would be drowned out of
sight in that great yellow stream of yours over there."
But Cicely's imagination took no flight towards the first-comers, nor
towards the English rivers; and, in another moment, Eve's had come
hastily homeward, for little Jack coughed. "He is taking cold!" she
exclaimed. "Let us go back."
"It's a splendid day; he will take no cold," Cicely answered. "But we
will go back if you wish." She watched Eve fold a shawl round the little
boy. "You ought to have a child of your own, Eve," she said, with her
odd little laugh.
"And you ought never to have had one," Eve responded.
As they drew near the landing, they perceived Miss Sabrina on the bank.
"She has on her bonnet! Where can she be going?" said Cicely. "Oh, I
know; she will ask you to row to Singleton Island, to return Mrs.
Singleton's call."
"But Jack looks so pale--"
"You're too funny, Eve! How do you suppose we have taken care of him all
this time--before you came?" Eve's tone was often abrupt, but Cicely's
was never that; the worst you could say of it was that its sweetness was
sometimes mocking.
When they reached the landing, Miss Sabrina proposed her visit; "that
is, if you care to go, my dear. Dilsey told me that she saw you coming
back, so I put on my bonnet on the chance."
"Eve is going," remarked Cicely, stepping from the boat; "she wants to
see Rupert, he is such a sweet little boy."
Dilsey took Jack, and presently Miss Sabrina and her guest were floating
northward. Eve longed to put her triumph into words: "The baby is mine!
In the spring I am to have him." But she refrained. "When does your
spring begin?" she asked. "In February?"
"In March, rather," answered Miss Sabrina. "Before that it is dangerous
to make changes; I myself have never been one to put on thin dresses
with the pinguiculas."
"What are pinguiculas?--Birds?"
"They are flowers," responded Miss Sabrina, mildly.
"It will be six weeks, then; to-day is the fifteenth."
"Six weeks to what?"
"To March; to spring."
"I don't know that it begins on the very first day," remarked Miss
Sabrina.
"Mine shall!" thought Eve.
Romney was near the northern end of the home-island; the voyage,
therefore, was a short one. The chimneys of Singleton House came into
view; but the boat passed on, still going northward. "Isn't that the
house?" Eve asked.
"Yes, but the landing is farther on; we always go to the landing, and
then walk back through the avenue."
But when the facade appeared at the end of the neglected road--a walk of
fifteen minutes--there seemed to Eve hardly occasion for so much
ceremony; the old mansion was in a worse condition than Romney; it
sidled and leaned, and one of its wings was a roofless ruin, with the
planking of the floor half tilted up, half fallen into the cellar. Miss
Sabrina betrayed no perception of the effect of this upon a stranger;
she crossed the veranda with her lady-like step, and said to a solemn
little negro boy who was standing in the doorway: "Is Mrs. Singleton at
home this evening, Boliver? Can she see us?--Miss Bruce and Miss
Abercrombie."
An old negro woman came round the corner of the house, and, cuffing the
boy for standing there, ushered the visitors into a room on the right
of the broad hall. The afternoon had grown colder, but the doors and
windows all stood open; a negro girl, who bore a strong resemblance to
Powlyne, entered, and chased out a chicken who was prowling about over
the matted floor; then she knelt down, with her long thin black legs
stretched out behind, and tried to light a fire on the hearth. But the
wind was evidently in the wrong direction for the requirements of that
chimney; white smoke puffed into the room in clouds.
"Let us go out on the veranda," suggested Eve, half choked.
"Oh, but surely--When they have ushered us in here?" responded Miss
Sabrina, remonstratingly, though she too was nearly strangled. "It will
blow away in a few minutes, I assure you."
Much of it still remained when Mrs. Singleton entered. She paid no more
attention to it than Miss Sabrina had done; she welcomed her guests
warmly, kissing Eve on both cheeks, although she had never seen her
before. "I have been so much interested in hearing that you are from
England, Miss Bruce," she said, taking a seat beside her. "We always
think of England as our old home; I reckon you will see much down here
to remind you of it."
Eve looked about her--at the puffing smoke, at the wandering chicken,
who still peered through one of the windows. "I am not English," she
said.
"But you have lived there so long; ever since you were a child; surely
it is the same thing," interposed Miss Sabrina. A faint color rose in
her cheeks for a moment. Eve perceived that she preferred to present an
English rather than a Northern guest.
"We are all English, if you come to that," said Mrs. Singleton,
confidently. She was small, white-haired, with a sweet face, and a sweet
voice that drawled a little.
"Eve is much interested in our nig-roes," pursued Miss Sabrina; "you
know to her they are a novelty."
"Ah dear, yes, our poor, poor people! When I think of them, Miss Bruce,
scattered and astray, with no one to advise them, it makes my heart
bleed. For they must be suffering in so many ways; take the one instance
of the poor women in their confinements; we used to go to them, and be
with them to cheer their time of trial. But now, separated from us, from
our care and oversight, what _can_ they do? If the people who have been
so rash in freeing them had only thought of even that one thing! But I
suppose they did not think of it, and naturally, because the
abolitionist societies, we are told, were composed principally of old
maids."