The Ghost Girl Part 12

Miss Pinckney, having shown Phyl out, looked round the room as if to make sure that all the familiar ghosts were in their places, then she shut the door with a snap, and turning, led the way upstairs murmuring to herself, and with the exalted and far away look which she wore when put out.

Phyl's room lay on the first landing, a bright and cheerful room papered with a rather cheap flower and sprig patterned paper, spring-like for all its cheapness, and just the background for children's heads when they wake up on a bright morning.

A bowl of flowers stood on the dressing-table, and the open window shewed across the verandah a bit of the garden, where the cherokee roses were blooming.

"This is your room," said Miss Pinckney. "It's one of the brightest in the house, and I hope you'll like it-- Listen!"

Through the open window came the chime of church-bells.

"It's the chimes of St. Michael's. You'll never want a clock here, the bells ring every quarter, just as they've rung for the last hundred years; they're the first thing I remember, and maybe they'll be the last. Well, come on and I'll show you some more of the house, if you're not tired and don't want to rest."

She led the way from the room and along the corridor, opening doors and shewing rooms, and then up a back stairs to the top floor beneath the attics.

The house seemed to grow in age as they ascended. Not a door in Vernons was exactly true in line; the old house settling itself down quietly through the years and a.s.sisted perhaps by the great earthquake, though that had left it practically unharmed, shewed that deviation from the right line in cornice and wainscoting and door s.p.a.ce, which is the hall mark left on architecture by genius or age. The builders of the Parthenon knew this, the builders of Vernons did not-- Age supplied their defects.

Up here the flooring of the pa.s.sages and rooms frankly sagged in places, and the beams bellied downwards ever so little and the ceilings bowed.

"I've seen all these bed-rooms filled in the old days," said Miss Pinckney. "We had wounded soldiers here in the war. What Vernons hasn't seen of American history isn't worth telling--much. Here's the nursery."

She opened a door with bottle-gla.s.s panels, real old bottle-gla.s.s worth its weight in minted silver, and shewed Phyl into a room.

"This is the nursery," said she.

It was a large room with two windows, and the windows were barred to keep small people from tumbling into the garden. The place had the air of silence and secrecy that haunts rooms long closed and deserted. An old-fas.h.i.+oned paper shewing birds of Paradise covered the walls. A paper so old that Miss Pinckney remembered it when, as a child, she had come here to tea with the Mascarene children, so good that the dye of the gorgeous Paradise birds had scarcely faded.

A beam of morning sun struck across the room, a great solid, golden bar of light. Phyl, as she stood for a moment on the threshold, saw motes dancing in the bar of light; the air was close and almost stuffy owing to the windows being shut. A rocking-horse, much, much the worse for wear stood in one corner, he was piebald and the beam of light just failed to touch his brush-like tail. A Noah's Ark of the good old pattern stood on the lid of a great chest under one of the windows, and in the centre of the room a heavy table of plain oak nicked by knives and stained with ink told its tale.

There were books in a little hanging book-case, books of the 'forties' and 'fifties': "Peter Parley," "The Child's Pilgrim's Progress," "The Dairy-Maid's Daughter," an odd volume of _Harper's_ _Magazine_ containing an instalment of "Little Dorrit," Caroline Chesebro's "Children of Light,"

and Samuel Irenaeus Prime's "Elizabeth Thornton or the Flower and Fruit of Female Piety, and other Sketches." Miss Pinckney opened one of the windows to let in air; Phyl, who had said nothing, stood looking about her at the forsaken toys, the chairs, and the little three-legged stool most evidently once the property of some child.

All nurseries have a generic likeness. It seemed to her that she knew this room, from the beam of light with the motes dancing in it to the bird-patterned paper. Kilgobbin nursery was papered with a paper giving an endless repet.i.tion of one subject--a man driving a pig to market--with that exception, the two rooms were not unlike. Yet those birds were the haunting charm of this place, the things that most appealed to her, things that seemed the ghosts of old friends.

She came to the window and looked out through the bars. Across the garden of Vernons one caught a glimpse of other gardens, palmetto-tree tops, and away, beyond the battery, a hint of the blue harbour. Just the picture to fill an imaginative child's mind with all sorts of pleasant fancies about the world, and Phyl, forgetting for a moment Miss Pinckney, herself, and the room in which she was, stood looking out, caught in a momentary day dream, just like a child in one of those reveries that are part of the fairy tale of childhood.

That touch of blue sea beyond the red roofs and green palmetto fronds gave her mind wings for a moment and a world to fly through. Not the world we live in, but the world worth living in. Old sailor-stories, old sc.r.a.ps of thought and dreams from nowhere pursued her, haunted her during that delightful and tantalising moment, and then she was herself again and Miss Pinckney was saying:

"It's a pretty view and hasn't changed since I was a child. Now, in N'York they'd have put up skysc.r.a.pers; Lord bless you, they'd have put them up at a _loss_ so's to seem energetic and spoil the view. That's a N'Yorker in two words, happy so long as he's energetic and spoiling views--" Then gazing dreamily towards the touch of blue sea. "Well, I guess the Lord made N'Yorkers same as he made you and me. His ways are _in_scrutable and past finding out; so'r the ways of some of his creatures."

She turned from the window, and her eye fell on the great chest by the other window.

Going to it, she opened the lid.

It was full of old toys, mostly broken. She seemed to have forgotten the presence of Phyl. Holding the chest's lid open, she gazed at the coloured and futile contents.

Then she closed the lid of the chest with a sigh.

CHAPTER III

The South dines at four o'clock--at least Charleston does.

It was the old English custom and the old Irish custom, too.

In the reign of William the Conqueror people dined at eleven A.M. or was it ten? Then, as civilisation advanced, the dinner hour stole forward. In the time of the Georges it reached four o'clock. In Ireland, the most conservative country on earth, some people even still sit down to table at four--in Charleston every one does.

One would not change the custom for worlds, just as one would not change the old box pews of St. Michael's or replace the cannon on the Battery with modern ordinance.

Richard Pinckney did not dine at home that day. He was dining with the Rhetts in Calhoun Street, so Miss Pinckney said as they sat down to table.

She sniffed as she said it, for the Rhetts, though one of the best families in the town, were people not of her way of thinking. The two Rhett girls had each a motor-car of her own and drove it--abomination!

The automobile ranked in her mind with the telephone as an invention of the devil.

Phyl had not seen Richard Pinckney since the morning and now he was dining out. Her heart had warmed to him at the station on the way to Vernons, and at breakfast he had appeared to her as a quite different person to the Richard Pinckney who had come to Kilgobbin, more boyish and frank, less of a man of the world. She had not seen him since he left the room at breakfast-time to look after her luggage. Miss Pinckney said he had gone off "somewhere or another" and grumbled at him for going off leaving his breakfast not quite finished, she said that he was always "scatter braining about" either at the yacht club or somewhere else.

Phyl, as she sat now at the dining-table with the dead and gone Mascarene men and women looking at her from the canvases on the wall, felt ever so slightly hurt.

Youth calls to youth irrespective of s.e.x. She felt as a young person feels when another young person shows indifference. Then came the thought: was he avoiding her? Was he angry still about the affair at Kilgobbin, or was it just that he did not want to be bothered talking to her, looked on her as a nuisance in the house, a guest of no interest to him and yet to whom he had to be polite?

She could not tell. Neither could she tell why the problem exercised her mind in the way it did. Even at Kilgobbin, despite the fact of her antagonism towards him, Pinckney had possessed the power of disturbing her mind and making her think about him in a way that no one else had ever succeeded in doing. No one else had made her feel the short-comings in the household _menage_ at Kilgobbin, no one else had made her so fiercely critical of herself and her belongings.

She did not recognise the fact, but the fact was there, that it was a necessity of her being to stand well in this man's eyes.

When a woman falls in love with a man or a man with a woman, the first necessity of his or her being is to stand well in the eyes of the loved one, anything that may bring ridicule or adverse criticism or disdain is death.

Phyl was not in love with Richard Pinckney, nor had she been in love with him at Kilgobbin, all the same the sensitiveness to appearances felt by a lover was there. Her anger that night when he had let her in at eleven o'clock was due, perhaps, less to his implied reproof then the fact that she had felt cheap in his eyes, and now, sitting at dinner with Miss Pinckney the idea that he was still angry with her was obscured by the far more distasteful idea that she was of absolutely no account in his eyes, a creature to whom he had to be civil, an interloper.

Her cheeks flushed and her eyes brightened at the thought, but Miss Pinckney did not notice it. She had turned from the subject of the Rhetts and their automobiles to Charleston society in general.

"Now that you've come," said she, "you will find there's not a moment you won't enjoy yourself if you're fond of gadding about. All the society here is in the hands of young people, b.a.l.l.s and parties! The St. Cecilias give three b.a.l.l.s a year. I go always, not to dance but to look on. Richard is a St. Cecilia--St. Cecilias? Why, it's just a club a hundred-and-forty years old. There are two hundred of them, all men, and they know how to entertain. I have been at every ball for the last half century. Not one have I missed. Then there's the yacht club and picnics to Summerville and the Isle of Palms, and bathing parties and boating by moonlight. If you are a gad-about you will enjoy all that."

"But I'm not," said Phyl. "I've never been used to society, much. I like books better than people, unless they're--"

"Unless they're what?"

"Well--people I really like."

"Well," said Miss Pinckney, "one wouldn't expect you to like people you _didn't_ like--there's no 'really' in liking, it's one thing or the other--you don't care for girls, maybe?"

"I haven't seen much of them," replied Phyl, "except at school, and that was only for a short time. I--I ran away."

"Ran away! And why did you run away?"

"I was miserable; they were kind enough to me, but I wanted to get home--Father was alive then--I felt I had to get home or die--I can't explain it--It felt like a sort of madness. I had to get back home."

Miss Pinckney was watching the girl, she scarcely seemed listening to her--Then she spoke: