MALLOWBANKS
Mallowbanks, November third.
_Carin_, _dear_:
Where did I leave off? Oh, yes, where I went running down the big dark,
winding corridors, knocking and knocking at the strange doors!
Well, presently one of them, far away from where I was, opened, and a
voice called:
“What is it? Oh, what is it?”
“Is it you, Aunt Lorena,” I cried, running toward the voice.
“Yes, yes, Azalea. Tell me what is the matter.”
“Grandmother has gone out in the garden in her night clothes. I tried to
follow her, but I’ve lost her somewhere.”
“Oh, dear,” sighed my aunt. “It is her old trouble again. I suppose
your coming excited her. She has little spells of forgetfulness and she
wanders out to meet Jack, your father, secretly, forgetting that he is
dead. After his father forbade him the house, she used to do that—to
meet him at night and take him money and clothes—anything that she
thought would help him. I don’t believe she’ll come to any harm. She
never has. We’ll send old Martha for her, for it would hurt her feelings
dreadfully if we were to go and if she were to realize that she has been
wandering again. She’s very proud, you know.”
And, Oh, didn’t I know it, Carin! Never have I seen so much pride in
such a little creature.
Aunt Lorena called old Martha, and the poor black thing, with her huge
nightcap on, and a great flowered robe, and slippers that flopped at
every step, ran sleepily out into the garden, calling:
“Ole Miss, ole Miss, where be ye? Cain’t ye answer Martha? She’s
wanting ye bad! Please, ole Miss, where be ye?”
Aunt Lorena and I followed along behind, running down a long shaded walk
which the moonlight mottled, till at last we came to a little pool. This
was like a shield of bright steel, all shining and wonderful. There were
rustling noises all about us which suited the place and the hour but
which I did not understand.
“What is it?” I whispered.
“The swans. We have disturbed them.”
And just then, Carin, out into that glistening pool swam a coal black
swan followed by two white ones. They didn’t seem like real birds but
like some sort of a vision.
“It is just beyond the pond that mother used to go to meet your father,”
said Aunt Lorena tenderly. I loved her for speaking like that. She was
sorry for this old mother’s grief, and sympathized with the memories that
haunted her and drove her from her bed. I put my arm right around her
neck and kissed her.
“Oh, Aunt Lorena,” I said, “I think you are very sweet.”
“Hush!” she warned, and turning I saw Martha coming back with her arm
around poor little madam grandmother. We stepped back in the shrubbery
and kept very still while they passed. Grandmother was weeping like a
hurt child.
[Picture: We stepped back in the shrubbery and kept very still]
“Your young master wasn’t there, Martha,” she was saying. “He was to
meet me there to-night and I was to give him this.” She held up
something in her hand that sparkled in the moonlight. “It was my own,
Martha,” she went on, “so I had a perfect right to give it away if I
wanted. Oh, what do you suppose has happened to your young master?”
“Jes’ nothin’ at all, ole Miss,” Martha said, her voice sounding more
like that of a wild dove than anything else I could think of. “He’s sure
all right, ole Miss. He’s jes’ doin’ fine. That’s why he didn’t need
for to come for yo’ pretties. Yo’ jes’ take heart, ole Miss. That Mass’
Jack, he won’t let no hahm come to him.”
“I pray heaven,” Aunt Lorena whispered to me when they had passed, “that
good old Martha will outlive mother, for I have no idea how we should
manage without her.”
We stole softly into the house and up a little flight of stairs, and then
down the corridor to grandmother’s door. We could hear Martha still
crooning to her as if she were a frightened child, and then, little by
little, grandmother ceased weeping.
“Come,” whispered Aunt Lorena, and we stole away to my room. She saw me
back into my bed, and kissed me good night—not warmly, the way Mother
McBirney used, but gently and kindly. I like her better for not
pretending to what she does not feel. She will grow fonder of me if I
deserve it.
“We’ll say nothing about this to your Uncle David,” she cautioned me.
“It makes him wretched for days when he learns that his mother has been
‘wandering.’”
“She’ll not be ill as a result of this?”
“Probably not—only a little distrait and quiet.”
I was left alone again in my fragrant room, and still I could not sleep
for thinking of how my life had changed, and how curious were these
people I had come among. I saw the stars moving along in their courses,
and light beginning to break in the east. And then, just to show how
inconsistent I could be, I fell asleep.
I slept till noon. Think of it—me, the Early Riser!
Perhaps I wouldn’t have awakened then if Semmy hadn’t come in with
chocolate and rolls and an omelet.
“Ole Miss is wanting you, Miss,” she said.
So I ate quickly and dressed in my dark blue frock with the crocheted
lace collar and cuffs and was taken to her. She was in her bedroom
still, or rather in her sitting room, for her bedroom is a stately alcove
raised two or three feet above her sitting room. To-day she was all in
purple, with studs of amethysts in her white lace chemisette and at the
fastenings of her long lace sleeves. It was very difficult to imagine
that this was the same little broken creature I had heard weeping aloud
the night before, and being comforted like a baby.
“My dear,” she said when I went in, “I hear that you did not rest well
last night.”
“Not very well, thank you, madam grandmother,” I said dropping her a
curtsy as Aunt Lorena had told me to do.
“Being in a new place no doubt disturbed you,” said my grandmother. “You
did well to refresh yourself with sleep this morning. At your age, my
dear, I seldom arose before noon, but that was because of the many
gayeties in which I participated—a ball or a rout almost every night, and
gentlemen riding out in the afternoon to call. The times are not so
brilliant now, I regret to say. However, a few of the old families
remain to keep alive the elegant traditions of my time, and I have called
you here, Azalea, to say that I wish you to be presented to my friends.”
I curtsied again. Her queer quaint way of talking made me feel that
nothing save a curtsy would suit the occasion.
“Thank you, madam grandmother; I shall be honored.”
My grandmother put up her lorgnette. “Azalea!” she said sharply.
“Yes, grandmother.”
“Your manners are admirable.”
“Thank you, dear grandmother. I dare say they are—are inherited.”
My grandmother smiled and traced her left eyebrow with her jeweled
fingers.
“You may sit down near me,” she said. “I want to talk to you about your
coming-out party.”
So then she told me something about her friends; who had done this and
who that, and every one she mentioned was at least sixty years of age and
some, as nearly as I could reckon, were eighty or over. So at last I
said:
“And may I also be permitted to invite some of my own friends, dear
grandmother? Carin Carson who is now in the North at college, and Annie
Laurie Pace, who lives at Lee, and Mr. and Mrs. Rowantree of Rowantree
Hall, and their brother, Keefe O’Connor who is at the Academy of Design
in New York? And of course the McBirneys and the Summers, and—and some
others.”
I couldn’t help thinking how I would like to have Haystack Thompson play
at my party, and how horrified grandmother would be if she knew my
thought and what Haystack is like.
“Are you sure,” said my grandmother, “that these friends of yours would
find congenial surroundings at Mallowbanks, my dear Azalea? There is
such a thing as propriety to be considered.”
“Would it be proper for me to neglect the friends who were faithful to me
for years and years?” I asked. “I was an orphan and poor as a beggar,
and they took me in to sit beside their hearths. They gave me the best
they had; hospitality and love and learning. If I know anything at all,
it is owing to them.”
“My dear,” said my grandmother, “you speak poetically.”
“I speak the truth.”
“You have a loyal heart.”
“Yes, madam grandmother, I admit it. When I once love, I can never
forget.”
“How do you know? You are only a child.”
“I shall be like you,” I declared boldly. “I wish to be like you and
never to forget!”
She looked at me sideways. Then she tilted her delicate chin and faced me
straight.
“Azalea—last night—did you know? Did you see?”
“I saw, grandmother dear. Forgive me.”
“Ah, Azalea, your father was my dearest! They almost killed me when they
came between him and me. He was wayward, I know, but he didn’t have the
same ideas of goodness and badness that others have. I always loved him.
I love him still.”
“It is beautiful of you, madam grandmother. I hope to be just like
that.”
“Very well, Azalea. You shall have your friends to your party if they
will come. You shall ask the humblest if you choose.”
“Thank you, thank you, grandmother; you will be proud to know them. The
humblest of them are very sweet, but some, I assure you, are not humble
at all. They are accomplished enough to win even your approval.”
“No doubt they are charming, my dear granddaughter. But you must
remember that you have now come into an important position. Much will be
expected of you. You will probably wed a Ravanel. Many of the women of
my family did. My son David did also, as you know. It is a custom with
us I may say. Yes, a Ravanel or a Grévy.”
“But, dearest grandmother, I must marry the person I love. What will his
last name have to do with it?”
“Everything, my dear child. Kindly fetch me yonder book.”
“Yonder book,” Carin, was very much done up in an embroidered cover and
was lying on grandmother’s far cabinet. I wish you could see her cabinet
of fans. Some are quite historic and all are exquisite.
I brought the book and it proved to be a genealogy of the Bryce family.
(Bryce was grandmother’s maiden name.) We studied this for at least an
hour, and then grandmother called Martha to carry it to my room that I
might have it at hand to consult whenever I wished.
“You will see,” she said, “that the Bryce ladies have married Ravanels,
Grévys or Knoxes from time immemorial. You are a Knox. You will marry a
Bryce, a Ravanel or a Grévy.”
I tried not to laugh, but to save my life I couldn’t help it.
“Perhaps none of them will approve of me. Remember, madam grandmother, I
am only a homespun mountain maid.”
“Ah, but we will transform you into a shining princess,” cried my
grandmother excitedly. “I already have had that matter in mind.”
Then she clapped her jeweled old hands together as hard as she could, and
when Martha came running, gasping: “Yessum, ole Miss, yessum, ole Miss,”
grandmother said, like a potentate in the Arabian Nights:
“Have the chests brought.”
Then I remembered what Aunt Lorena had told me about the chests in which
grandmother kept her old treasures. So I was to see these darling old
brocades and crepes and embroideries! Aunt Lorena thought it would be a
dreadful thing to have to dress in them, but I was wild to do it. It
seemed a part of all the strange play that my life had become.
So presently two of the men servants came staggering in under the weight
of a great chest, and when they had set that down they went back for
another, and then for another yet.
I wouldn’t have the chests opened till I had looked all over the outside
of them. One was covered with carmine leather all tooled with gilt, and
it had a great clasp with cupids on it. Another was of dark carved wood,
very heavy, and lined with sandalwood that filled the whole room with an
old, dry perfume when it was opened. The other was a sea chest with a
sailor’s name carved on it.
“‘Samuel Bings,’” said I. “What a funny name.”
My grandmother frowned.
“I see nothing funny about it,” she said. “Samuel Bings was a very
distinguished and unfortunate man.”
“Oh, I should love to hear his story some time,” I said contritely.
“You shall,” said my grandmother relenting, “and when I have told it to
you, you will be proud that the name of Bings appeared among your
ancestry.”
Well, then, Carin, my little squirrel, we came to the opening of the
chests. How shall I ever describe to you what was in them? I
couldn’t—not in one letter nor three.
Shawls and dolmans, and great flounced skirts and lace petticoats and
silken nubias, and beaded fascinators, and real lace and fans and
slippers and silken stockings, and flowing undersleeves, and old gloves
and hats and feathers, and embroidered lingerie and lace handkerchiefs
and—Oh, mercy, Carin, everything a belle of long ago would wear. And a
belle of to-day throw away. But, no, I must not be disrespectful to old
lace and brocade, nor to China crepe and Irish poplin.
I tried on the old frocks and strutted and pranced around in them, and
put on the queer, short gloves which were as freckled with mildew as
Jim’s face. Of course I don’t mean that Jim is mildewed. Only that he
is freckled.
I wore the shawls, and dropped preposterous curtsies in the flounced
skirts, and I coquetted with my own venerable grandmother behind the
cracked old fans, and did the plumes up in my hair.
“My dear,” said my grandmother at length, “you must have these
interesting fabrics made over for you. Some slight alteration will be
necessary I suppose, but on the whole they become you immensely. You
look completely a Bryce in them.”
Just then Aunt Lorena came in. When she saw the litter in that room and
myself in a flowered silk seven yards around the bottom of the skirt, and
eighteen inches around the waist—I was almost smothered by this time—she
dropped in a chair and turned white.
“At last!” she gasped.
“Yes, Lorena,” said my grandmother with great dignity. “At last I have
found someone who appreciates these rare things. They were offered to
you as the wife of my only living son. You rejected them. You preferred
to wear inferior fabrics and passing styles. But the styles in which
these exquisite fabrics are made up, are historic, Lorena, historic.
This however, is a point which you do not seem to appreciate. I
therefore pass them on to my granddaughter—the daughter of my second son.
You will see that they are adapted to her needs, tightened perhaps—”
“No, no, dear grandmother,” I cried struggling with the hook of that
terrible dress, that held me as if it were made of steel, “not tightened.
Don’t say tightened! I am suffocating!”
Aunt Lorena came to my rescue and between us we got that band undone and
I was able to draw a long breath.
“In my day,” said my little grandmother, “girls were more delicate than
they are now. I grieve, Lorena, to discover that Azalea’s foot is far
too substantial for these slippers.”
She looked regretfully at some yellowed satin slippers with tarnished
sequins on them. Aunt Lorena and I looked down at my good sizable
feet—they have done a powerful lot of mountain climbing, as you know—and
we both laughed.
“Come,” said Aunt Lorena, “we must forget dressmaking for the day and go
for a drive. You too, mother. Won’t you come in the motor just this
once?”
“You know very well that I will not, Lorena. My pony cart will do for
me. Have young James walk at the pony’s head to-day, please. Old James
ruined my last drive by the way he groaned with the rheumatism.”
So all the finery was carted off to a big empty room where, as Aunt
Lorena explained to grandmother, we would be able to look it over better,
and I was told to dress warmly, and so got into the nice thick coat
Mother McBirney had made for me, and put on my mole-skin cap, and my veil
and gloves—for Aunt Lorena is terribly fussy about having people well
wrapped when they go motoring—and uncle and auntie and I went off.
We were gone for an hour or two and saw many beautiful old estates, but
none that I liked better than our own.
“Mother is being drawn about the garden in the pony cart,” Aunt Lorena
told me. “It is curious, but she never was a horsewoman. Even as a girl
she was rather timid with horses, and now she is very much afraid of
them. As for an automobile, it fills her with terror. So it seems best
to let her do the thing she enjoys, which is riding about the garden and
scolding the gardeners.”
“My dear!” said Uncle David.
Aunt Lorena lifted her eyebrows.
“I’m sure I didn’t mean to say anything disrespectful,” she said. “I was
only describing things as they are.”
That her description was quite right, we were soon to see. Grandmother
was still going about the garden when we got home, and it was plain that
she had “everybody by the ears.” Young James was almost in tears, the
head gardener was sulky, the boys who helped him were laughing, and every
one was or pretended to be quite frightened.
“Young James,” said my aunt, “you have kept Madam Knox out too long.”
“Yessum, I know it, mum. I wanted her to go in, mum, but she wouldn’t,
mum.”
“Oh, mum, mum, mum!” snapped grandmother, quivering with fatigue. “Who
ever heard such talk? Mum, mum, mum!”
Uncle David said nothing. He got out of the motor and gathered his
little silver-headed mother up in his arms and carried her into the house
as if she were a baby. She put her two arms around his neck and held on
tight, and I saw him kiss her very tenderly when he put her down and
called Martha to her.
“Mum, mum,” she began saying again, but Uncle David said: “Stop that,
mother, please,” and she did.
So, Carin, this is the life at Mallowbanks.
My party is to be Thanksgiving Day. Say, Oh, say that you can come! To
have you here, to have you see all I am so stupidly telling you about, to
get off in my own room with you and laugh and talk as we used, would,
perhaps, make this life seem real to me. Now, I confess, it seems like a
dream.
You keep writing about that young Southerner. You say he is leaving the
North and going home. He lives in Charleston? Is his name Bryce or
Ravanel or Grévy? If so, I’ve got to marry him!
Aunt Lorena said, however, that the only unmarried Ravanel was at least
seventy and deaf as an adder, and that she wouldn’t, if she were in my
place, be so hackneyed as to marry a Grévy. As for the Bryces, they are
my very own kin and out of the question. So you can imagine my distress!
Tut, tut, no bridegroom. And me in long dresses with my hair up. How
long must I wait?
As long, perhaps, as my coming-out party.
But it can’t be any sweeter than the birthday party Ma McBirney gave me
when we danced till the moon came up—and after.
Carin, you _must_ come!
_Fondly_
_Azalea_.