The Ghost Girl Part 33

Maria Pinckney knew nothing of what had occurred between Silas and Richard. Richard Pinckney, Phyl and Reggie Calhoun were the only three persons in Charleston, leaving Silas aside, who knew of the business and in a hurried consultation just before leaving the Rhetts they had agreed to say nothing.

Calhoun was for publis.h.i.+ng the affair.

"The man's dangerous," said he; "some day or another he'll do the same thing again to some one and succeed and swing."

"I think he's had his lesson," said Pinckney; "he went clean mad for the moment. Then there's the fact that I struck him. No, taking everything into consideration, we'll let it be. I don't feel any animosity against him, not half as much as if he'd stabbed me behind the back with a libel-- He did tell a lie about me to-night but it was the stupid sort of lie a child might have told. The man has his good points as well as his bad and I don't want to push the thing against him."

"I don't think he will do it again," said Phyl.

She, like Richard, felt no anger against Silas; it was as though they recognised that Silas was the man really attacked that night, attacked by the Devil.

They both recognised instinctively his good qualities. Miss Pinckney, it will be remembered, once said that it is the man with good in him that comes to the worst end unless the good manages to fight the bad and get it under in time. She had a terrible instinct for the truth of things.

"Well," said Calhoun, "it's not my affair; if you choose to take pity on him, well and good; if it were my business I'd give him a cold bath, that might stop him from doing a thing like that again. I'll say nothing."

Though Miss Pinckney was in ignorance of the affair she was strangely silent during the drive home and when Phyl went to her room to bid her good night, she found her in tears, a very rare occurrence with Miss Pinckney.

She was seated in an armchair crying and Phyl knelt down beside her and took her hand.

Then it all came out.

"I had hoped and hoped and hoped for him, goodness knows he has been my one thought, and now he has thrown himself away. Richard is engaged to Frances Rhett. He told me so to-night--well, there, it's all ended, there's no hope anywhere, she'll never let him go, and she'll have Vernons when I'm gone. She picked him out from all the other men--why?-- Why, because he's the best of the lot for money and position. Care about him!

She cares no more for him than I do for old Darius. I'm sure I don't know why this trouble should have fallen on me. I suppose I have committed some sin or another though I can't tell what. I've tried to live blameless and there's others that haven't, yet they seem to prosper and get their wishes--and there's no use telling me to be resigned," finished she with a snap and as if addressing some viewless mentor. "I can't--and what's more I won't. Never will I resign myself to wickedness, and stupidity is wickedness, not even a decent, honest wickedness, but a crazy, sap-headed sort of wickedness, same as influenza isn't a disease but just an ailment that kills you all the same."

Phyl, kneeling beside Miss Pinckney, had turned deathly white. Only half an hour ago when the little conference with Calhoun had been concluded, Richard Pinckney had taken her hand. His words were still ringing in her ears:

"You saved my life. I can't say what I feel, at least not now."

He had looked straight into her eyes, and now half an hour later--This.

Engaged to Frances Rhett!

She rose up and stood beside Miss Pinckney for a moment whilst that lady finished her complaints. Then she made her escape and returned to her room--

As she closed the door she caught a glimpse of herself in the old-fas.h.i.+oned cheval gla.s.s that had been brought up by Dinah and Seth to help her in dressing for the dance and which had not been removed. Every picture in every mirror is the work of an artist--the man who makes a mirror is an artist; according to the perfection of his work is the perfection of the picture. The old cheval gla.s.s was as truthful in its way as Gainsborough, but Gainsborough had never such a lovely subject as Phyl.

She started at her own reflection as though it had been that of a stranger. Then she looked mournfully at herself as a man might look at his splendid gifts which he has thrown away. All that was no use now.

She sat down on the side of her bed with her hands clasped together just as a child clasps its hands in grief.

Sitting like this with her eyes fixed before her she was looking directly at Fate.

It was not only Richard Pinckney that she was about to lose but Vernons and the Past-- Just as Juliet Mascarene had lost everything so was it to happen to her. Or rather so had it happened, for she felt that the game was lost--some vague, mysterious, extraordinary game played by unknown powers had begun on that evening in Ireland when standing by the window of the library she had heard Pinckney's voice for the first time.

The sense of Fatality came to her from the case of Juliet. Consciously and unconsciously she had linked herself to Juliet. The extravagant idea that she herself was Juliet returned and that Richard Pinckney was Rupert had come to her more than once since that dream or vision in which the guns had sounded in her ears. The idea had frightened her at first, then pleased her vaguely. Then she had dismissed it, her _ego_ refusing any one else a share in her love for Richard, any one--even herself masquerading under the guise of Juliet.

The idea came back to her now leaving her utterly cold, and yet stirring her mind anew with the sense of Fate.

When she fell asleep that night she pa.s.sed into the dreamless condition which is the nearest thing we know to oblivion, yet her sub-conscious mind must have carried on its work, for when she awoke just as dawn was showing at the window it was with the sense of having pa.s.sed through a long season of trouble, of having fought with--without conquering--all sorts of difficulties.

She rose and dressed herself, put on her hat and came down into the garden.

Vernons was just wakening for the day, and in the garden alive with birds, she could hear the early morning sounds of the city, and from the servants' quarters of the house, voices, the sound of a mat being beaten and now and then the angry screech of a parrot. General Grant slept in the kitchen and his cage was put out in the yard every morning at this hour.

Later it would be brought round to the piazza. He resented the kitchen yard as beneath his dignity and he let people know it.

Phyl tried the garden gate, it was locked and Seth appearing at that moment on the lower piazza, she called to him to fetch the key. He let her out and she stood for a moment undecided as to whether she would walk towards the Battery or in the opposite direction. Meeting Street never looked more charming than now in the very early morning sunlight; under the haze-blue sky, almost deserted, it seemed for a moment to have recaptured its youth. A negro crab vendor was wheeling his barrow along, crying his wares. His voice came lazily on the warm scented air.

She turned in the direction of the station. The voice of the crab seller had completed in some uncanny way the charm of the deserted street and the early sunlight. She was going to lose all this. Vernons and the city she loved, Juliet, Miss Pinckney, the past and the present, she was going to lose them all, they were all in some miraculous way part of the man she loved, her love of them was part of her love for him. She could no longer stay in Charleston; she must go--where? She could think of nowhere to go but Ireland.

To stay here would be absolutely impossible.

As she walked without noticing whither she was going her mind cleared, she began to form plans.

She would go that very day. Nothing would stop her. The thing had to be done. Let it be done at once. She would explain everything to Miss Pinckney. She would escape without seeing Richard again. What she was proposing to herself was death, the ruin of everything she cared for, the destruction of all the ties that bound her to the world, the present and the past. It was the recognition that these ties had been broken for her and all these things taken away by the woman who had taken away Richard.

Presently she found herself in the suburbs, in a street where coloured children were playing in the gutter, and where the houses were unsubstantial looking as rabbit-hutches, but there was a glimpse of country beyond and she did not turn back. She did not want breakfast. If she returned to Vernons by ten o'clock it would give her plenty of time to pack her things, say good-bye to Miss Pinckney and take her departure before Richard returned to luncheon--if he did return.

It did not take her long to pa.s.s through the negro quarter, and now, out in the open country, out amidst those great flat lands in the broad day and under the lonely blue sky her mood changed.

Phyl was no patient Grizel, the very last person to be trapped in the bog of love's despondency. Abstract melancholy produced by colours, memories, or sounds was an easy enough matter with her, but she was not the person to mourn long over the loss of a man s.n.a.t.c.hed from her by another woman.

As she walked, now, breathing the free fresh air, a feeling of anger and resentment began to fill her mind. Anger at first against Frances Rhett but spreading almost at once towards Richard Pinckney. Soon it included herself, Maria Pinckney, Charleston--the whole world. It was the anger which brings with it perfect recklessness, akin to that which had seized her the day in Ireland when in her rage over Rafferty's dismissal she had called Pinckney a Beast. Only this anger was less acute, more diffuse, more lasting.

The sounds of wheels and horses' hoofs on the road behind her made her turn her head. A carriage was approaching, an English mail phaeton drawn by two high-stepping chestnuts and driven by a young man.

It was Silas Grangerson. Returning to Grangerson's to make plans for the capture of Phyl, here she was on the road before him and going in the same direction.

For a moment he could scarcely believe his eyes. Then reining in and leaving the horses with the groom he jumped down and ran towards her.

After the affair of last night one might fancy that he would have shown something of it in his manner.

Not a bit.

"I didn't expect to come across _you_ on the road," said he. "Won't you speak to me--are you angry with me?"

"It's not a question of being angry," said Phyl, stiffly.

She walked on and he walked beside her, silent for a moment.

"If you mean about that affair last night," said he, "I'm sorry I lost my temper--but he hit me--you don't understand what that means to me."

"You tried to--"

"Kill him, I did, and only for you I'd have done it. You can't understand it all. I can scarcely understand it myself. He _hit_ me."

"I don't think you knew what you were doing," said Phyl.