CHAPTER VII
"Miss Pinckney," said Phyl that night as they sat at supper, "when youleft me this afternoon in Juliet's room I stopped to look at the books andthings and when I opened the bureau I touched a spring by accident and alittle panel fell out and I found a lot of old letters behind it. It waswrong of me to go meddling about and I thought I ought to tell you."
"Old letters," said Miss Pinckney, "you don't say--what were they about?"
"I read one or two," said the girl. "I'd never, never have dreamed oftouching them only--only they were hers--they were to him."
"Rupert?"
"Yes."
"Love letters?"
"Yes."
Miss Pinckney sighed.
"He kept all her letters," said she, "and they came back to her after hewas killed. He was killed here in Charleston, at Fort Sumter, in the war;they brought him across here and carried him on a stretcher and she--well,well, it's all done with and let it rest, but it is strange that thoseletters should have fallen into your hands."
"Why, strange?"
"Why?" burst out Miss Pinckney. "Why I have dusted that old bureau insideand out a hundred times, and pulled out the drawers and pushed them in andit never shewed sign of having anything in it but emptiness, and you don'tdo more'n look at it and you find those letters. It's just as if the thinghad deceived me. I don't mind, and I don't want to see them, they weren'tintended for other eyes than his and hers--and maybe yours since they wereshewn you like that."
"Was it wrong of me to look at them?" asked Phyl. "I never would have doneit only--only--Oh, I don't know, I somehow felt she wouldn't mind. Sheseemed like a sister--I would never dream of looking at another person'sletters but she did not seem like another person. I can't explain. It wasjust as though the letters were my own--just exactly as though they weremy own when I found them in my hands."
Phyl was talking with her eyes fixed before her as though she were lookingacross some great distance.
Miss Pinckney gave a little shiver, then supper being over she rose fromthe table and led the way from the room.
Richard Pinckney had dined with them but he was out for supper somewhereor another. They went to the drawing-room and had not been there for morethan a few minutes when Frances Rhett was announced.
The Rhetts were on intimate enough terms with the Pinckneys to call inlike this without ceremony; Frances had called to speak to Miss Pinckneyabout some charity affair she was getting up in a hurry, but she had notbeen five minutes in the room before Phyl knew that she had called to lookat her. To look at the girl who had come to live with the Pinckneys, thered headed girl. Phyl did not know that girls of Frances' type dread redhaired girls, if they are pretty, as rabbits dread stoats, but she didknow in some uncanny way that Frances Rhett considered Richard Pinckney asher own property to be protected against all comers.
All at once and new born, the woman awoke in her instinctive, mistrustfuland armed.
Frances Rhett, despite Miss Pinckney's dispraise of her, was a mostformidable person as far as the opposite sex was concerned. One of thewomen of whom other women say, "Well, I don't know what he sees in her,I'm sure."
A brunette of eighteen who looked twenty, full-blooded, full lipped, fullcurved, sleepy-eyed, she seemed dressed by nature for the part of theworld and the flesh--with a hint of the devil in those deep, dark, pansyblue eyes that seemed now by artificial light almost black.
"Well, I'll subscribe ten dollars," said Miss Pinckney; "I reckon thedarkie babies won't be any the worse for a _creche_ and maybe not verymuch better for it. If you could get up an institution to distil goodmanners and respect for their betters into their heads I'd give you forty.I'm sure I don't know what the coloured folk of Charleston are coming to,one of them nearly pushed me off the sidewalk the other day, bag ofimpudence! and the way they look at one in the street with that sleeryleery what-d'-you-call-yourself-you-white-trash grin on their facess'nough to raise Cain in any one's heart."
"I know," replied the dark girl, "and they are getting worse; the whip isthe only thing that as far as I can see ever made them possible, and whatwe have now is the result of your beautiful Abolitionists."
"Don't call them my beautiful Abolitionists," replied the other. "I didn'tmake 'em. All the same I don't believe in whipping and never did. It's thewhip that whipped us in the war. If white folk had treated black folk likeChristians slavery would have been the greatest god-send to blacks. It waswhat stays are to women. But they didn't. The low down white made slaveryimpossible with his whipping and oppression and _we_ had to suffer. Well,we haven't ended our sufferings and if these folk go on multiplying likerabbits there's no knowing what we've got to suffer yet."
Miss Rhett concurred and took her departure. "Now, that girl," said theelder lady when Frances Rhett was gone, "is just the type of the people Iwas telling her about. No idea but whipping. _She_ wouldn't have muchmercy on a human creature black or tan _or_ white. Thick skinned. Shedidn't even see that I was telling her so to her face. Wonder what broughther here this hour with her _creche_. It's just a fad. If they got up acharity to make alligator bait of the black babies so's to sell thealligator skins to buy pants with texts on them for the Hottentots it'd beall the same to her. Something to gad about with. I wish I'd kept that tendollars in my pocket."
Miss Pinckney went to bed early that night--before ten--and Phyl, who wasfree to do as she chose, sat for a while in the lower piazza watching themoon rising above the trees. She had a little plan in her mind, a planthat had only occurred to her just before the departure of Miss Pinckneyfor bed.
She sat now watching the garden growing ghostly bright, the sun dialbecoming a moon dial, the carnations touched by that stillness and mysterywhich is held only in the light of the moon and the light of the dawn.
Phyl found herself sitting between two worlds. In the light of thenorthern moon in summer there is a vague rose tinge to be caught at timesand in places when it falls full on house wall or the road on which one iswalking. The piazza to-night had this living and warm touch. It seemed litby a glorified ethereal day. A day that had never grown up and would neverlose the charm of dawn.
Yet the garden to which she would now turn her eyes shewed nothing ofthis. Night reigned there from the cherokee roses moving in the wind tothe carnations motionless, moon stricken, deathly white.
Sure that Miss Pinckney would not come down again, Phyl rose and crossedthe garden towards the gate.
She wanted to see if the trysting place behind the magnolia and the bushesthat grew about it were still there.
At the gate she paused for a moment, glancing back at the house as JulietMascarene might have done on those evenings when she had an appointmentwith her lover. Then, pushing through the bushes and past the magnoliatrees she found herself in a little half moonlit space, a natural arbourthrough whose roof of leaves the moonlight came in quavering shafts. Shestood for a moment absolutely still whilst her eyes accustomed themselvesto the light. Then she began to search for the seat she guessed to bethere, and found it. It was between an oak bole and the wall of thegarden, and the bushes behind had grown so that their branches halfcovered it. Neglected, forsaken, unknown, perhaps, to the people nowliving in Vernons it had lingered with the fidelity of inanimate things,protected by the foliage of the southern garden from prying eyes.
She pushed back the leaves and branches and bent them out of the way, thenshe took her seat, and as she did so several of the bent branches releasedthemselves and closed half round her in a delightful embrace.
From here she could see brokenly the garden and the walk leading from thegate, with the light of the moon now strong upon the walk. The nightsounds of the street just beyond the wall came mixed with the stir offoliage as the wind from the sea pressed over the trees like the hand of amesmerist inducing sleep.
So it was here that Juliet Mascarene had sat with Rupert Pinckney on thosesummer nights when the world was younger, before the war. The war that hadchanged everything whilst lea
ving the roses untouched and the moonlightthe same on the bird-haunted garden of Vernons.
Everything was the same here in this little space of flowers and trees.But the lovers had vanished.
"For man walketh in a vain shadow and disquieteth himself in vain." Thewords strayed across Phyl's mind brought up by recollection. "He cometh upand is cut down like a flower, he fleeth as it were a shadow, and nevercontinueth in one stay."
The trees seemed whispering it, the eternal statement that leaves theeternal question unanswered.
The garden was talking to her, the night, the very bushes that clasped herin a half embrace; perfumes, moonlight, the voice of the wind, all werepart of the spell that bound her, held her, whispered to her. It was asthough the love letter of Juliet had led her here to show her as in aglass darkly the vainness of love in the vainness of life.
Vainly, for as she sat watching in imagination the forms of the lostlovers parting there at the gate, suddenly there came upon her a stirringof the soul, a joyous uplifting as though wings had been given to her mindfor one wild second raising it to the heights beyond earthly knowledge.
"Love can never die."
It was as though some ghostly voice had whispered this fact in her ear.
Juliet was not dead nor the man she loved, changed maybe but not dead. Insome extraordinary way she knew it as surely as though she herself hadonce been Juliet.
Religion to Phyl had meant little, the Bible a book of fair promises andappalling threats, vague promises but quite definite threats. As a quitesmall child she had gathered the impression that she was sure to be damnedunless she managed to convert herself into a quite different being fromthe person she knew herself to be. Death was the supreme bogey, the futurelife a thing not to be thought of if one wanted to be happy.
Yet now, just as if she had been through it all, the truth came floodingon her like a golden sea, the truth that life never loses touch with life,that the body is only a momentary manifestation of the ever livingspirit.
Meeting Street, the old house so full of memories, Juliet's letters, thegarden, they had all been stretching out arms to her, trying to tell hersomething, whispering, suggesting, and now all these vague voices hadbecome clear, as though strengthened by the moonlight and the mystery ofnight.
Clear as lip-spoken words came the message:
"You have lived before and we say this to you, we, the things that knewyou and loved you in a past life."
A step that halted outside close to the garden gate broke the spell, thegate turned on its hinges shewing through its trellis work the form of aman. It was Pinckney just returned from some supper-party or club.
Phyl caught her breath back. Suddenly, and at the sight of Pinckney,Prue's words of that morning entered her mind.
"Miss Julie, Massa Pinckney told me tell yo' he be at de gate t'nightsame's las' night. Done you let on as I told you."
And here he was, the man who had been occupying her thoughts and who wasbeginning to occupy her dreams, and here she was as though waiting for himby appointment.
But there was much more than that. Worlds and worlds more than that, awhole universe of happiness undreamed of.
She rose from the seat and the parted bushes rustled faintly as theyclosed behind her.
Pinckney, who had just shut the gate, heard the whisper of the leaves, heturned and saw a figure standing half in shadow and half in moonlight. Fora moment he was startled, fancying it a stranger, then he saw that it wasPhyl.
"Hullo," said he. "Why, Phyl, what are you doing here?"
The commonplace question shattered everything like a false note in music.
"Nothing," she answered. Then without a word more she ran past him andvanished into the house.
Pinckney cast the stump of his cigar away.
"What on earth is the matter with her now?" said he to himself. "What onearth have I done?"
The word she had uttered carried half a sob with it, it might have beenthe last word of a quarrel.
He stood for a moment glancing around. The wild idea had entered his mindthat she had been there to meet some one and that his intrusion had puther out.
But there was no one in the garden; nothing but the trees and the flowers,wind shaken and lit by the moon, the same placid moon that had lit thegarden of Vernons for the lovers of whom he knew nothing except byhearsay, and for whom he cared nothing at all.