| By LOUISE JORDAN MILN |
| Author of |
| A. L. BURT COMPANY |
Copyright, 1923, by
Fredrick A. Stokes Company
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
TO
MALCOLM MURREE MILN
FROM
HIS MOTHER
MR. AND MRS. SÊN
CHAPTER I
In this day of kaleidoscopic changes, of brand-new ultra “smartness,” of emancipations so tremendous, so upheaving, so incalculably far-reaching that to some they almost seem to forecast the end of all things, still there are old bulwarks of customs, of character, of individualities and of life itself that neither change nor are changed. The Townsends of Virginia are today just what they were long before 1776.
There is only one of them left—Miss Julia—but she is they—the Townsends of Virginia; gracious, unapproachable, deft in a small, delicate way with her harpsichord, accomplished at her jellies, proud of her naperies, tyrannous and over-indulgent to her darkies, a fine judge of horseflesh, sure of herself, doubtful of you—unless your forebears of the same “first-families” caste as hers, had been born, had wived and begotten and borne, as hers invariably had, in Virginia—a stanch Episcopalian, refined to the nth degree, intolerant, sentimental—but too proud, and of too good form, to own or to show it—exclusive, generous—except of her acquaintance and in her opinions—a writer of feeble verses, brilliant along her own selected and approved lines, dull and ill-informed on all others, autocratic and secretly supersensitive, a gourmet who ate very little, an expert judge of good wines who rarely drank them—buttermilk was her one creature weakness—charitable (although she was poorly enough off—had to count her dimes, and couldn’t count with even pretense at accuracy)—charitable to every “good work” she approved of or hungry creature that came to her back door, relentlessly uncharitable to any cause she did not sympathize with and to any “beggar” who presumed at her front door.
Rosehill, the home she lived in, had more and finer magnolias than it had roses, but a great many and very beautiful roses grew at Rosehill. And in August you could smell the musk and the heliotrope right across the Potomac.
The exterior of the old red-brick “mansion” was beautiful only because so many had loved it, because birth, bridal and death so often had hallowed it, and because so many beautiful things grew about it, some of them nailed up on its mellowed red walls, some climbing there needing no nailing, for their young tendrils loved every tiny chink that time had furrowed in those old bricks.
Rosehill was on the river-edge of Virginia, only a pleasant jaunt from Washington, but it was Virginia. In the core of the old virgin state itself the Civil War had ruined or wrenched from them every holding the Townsends ever had had. But Rosehill remained to the Southern general’s widow, and here she had come with the two children the war had left her, and lived in it bitterly enough to the hour of her death, but had kept her Virginian state as far as she could with an altered purse in an altered country, and modifying in nothing her Virginian ways or manner of life. And here Julia Townsend had grown up and lived serenely enough, for she had been in her cradle when Lee faced Appomattox, and she remembered no other home. She inherited and kept all her mother’s prejudices, but little of her mother’s bitterness. She even pitied all Northerners more than she disliked them. She never by any chance broke Northern bread, but now and then she permitted some distinguished few of them to break her bread—a little “below the salt,” but graciously. But no denizen of the White House could win through her gates, and she’d have eaten crusts in a thieves’ kitchen, or, if it comes to that, brimstone in a place and company she was too refined ever to mention, far more willingly and with far less sense of degradation, than she would have eaten or drunk at the White House, or soiled the sole of her shoe on its carpets.
Her purse, such thin thing as it was, had freely been at the service of Grover Cleveland’s election war-chest—but she never had received him. The successor in Union office of Abraham Lincoln could not visit Julia Townsend. But, beyond the stigma of “Union” the chief executive of these United States was sunk even lower in the proud, unwavering estimate of Julia Calhoun Townsend: on some days of his administration the President of the United States received—he had to—any citizen who chose and made it convenient to file past him, had to receive and shake by the hand. President Cleveland might have no escape from shaking hands with his own negro coachman! True—Julia Townsend had lived and thrived for nine months at the breast of a negro woman, rather darker of skin, as it chanced, than Mr. Cleveland’s colored coachman—but that was different. It was done in Virginia, and though Mrs. Townsend had cried her heart (and her rage) out on the same faithful black breast, she never had shaken hands with her; neither she nor any other Townsend had ever done such a thing—or could have done. You might (in her creed of caste) caress a negro, you could not greet one on such show of social parity as the shaking of hands implied; you might befriend them—clearly that was your duty, and no Townsend ever shirked a duty; you could accept their service to the last strain of their muscle, the last drop of red in their veins; even, if you were a man, you might mingle the blood in your blue veins with their blood—but you did not drink tea with them, or shake their hands. This last branch of the subject—perhaps most conveniently called the mulatto-quadroon-and-such branch, was one upon which Miss Townsend never spoke and preferred not to think; but she was quite familiar with it, and accepted it with a caste-complaisance that completely and permanently anesthetized, even if it had not killed, as probably it had, any moral revulsion, or, less than revulsion, criticism. She accepted it easily and naturally as she did all else that the “first families” had done since Raleigh named Virginia after Elizabeth until now, long after War’s terrible arbitrament had made the proud virgin state a desolation and a memory. At the thought that President Cleveland might have had to shake a negro “citizen” by the hand, her nostril quivered, her spleen rose, and her old soul stiffened. She pitied Mr. Cleveland—a man she respected for much—but the dire possible official necessity had made it forever impossible that Grover Cleveland’s hand should ever touch the hand of Julia Calhoun Townsend.
During one administration, a Republican administration, the unspeakable thing actually happened. And the mistress of Rosehill chuckled. She was glad. The President’s wife, as determined a creature in her way as ever her soldier had been in his, and far quicker of temper, one morning for his impertinence summarily discharged her colored coachman, and that same afternoon the dismissed negro turned up in the line of citizens that filed past the President in the Blue Room, and held out a hand that the President had to clasp—and did—probably did with an inward chuckle of his own, for he himself had sometimes something to endure from his wife’s metal. She was furious. The story wild-fired through Washington, it crossed the Potomac long before sunset, reached Miss Townsend in her rose-and-magnolia-bound fastness, and gave her more pleasure than she often had known. Ulysses Grant may live longer and stronger in history than Grover Cleveland. But Grant was a Republican, had fought Lee, and had presumed to defeat him. Julia Townsend chuckled wickedly, and drank wine, quite a small glassful of a priceless vintage, at her solitary supper that night.
She had been but a girl still during the Cleveland and Grant administrations, but a girl with all a woman’s venom in her hot Southern heart. And she had come into her heritage—such as the War had left it—in her motherless girlhood; for the mother had not lived many years after the defeat of the Confederacy. Hate killed her. The men of the South forgave. The women could not—some of them have not even yet.
If Rosehill was but on the edge of Virginia, and a little discounted by its too-nearness to the disloyal capital from which only the river saved it and to which Long Bridge linked it, and lay not far from Arlington, where the “blue” slept as well as the sainted “gray” and many civilians stanchly Northerners, it was no alien or unsuitable residence for a Townsend. Townsends had owned it for more than a century. A Townsend had built the house. Only Townsends ever had lived in it. Miss Julia had inherited it from her mother, for the mother had been born a Townsend and had married a second cousin. Julia Townsend had a double right to all the Townsend traits and possessions. Those possessions, great once, had dwindled now to Rosehill and a narrow (even for one) income, but the traits flourished and were strong, and Julia had her full double share of them. The dwindled and still dwindling income scarcely sufficed for the decent upkeeping of the simple old place, and the quiet old gentlewoman; but they managed—Rosehill, Miss Julia Townsend and her negroes: Rosehill flaunted its flowers, the darkies obeyed their imperious, kindly ole’ missus, and Julia Townsend wore her poverty as a duchess is supposed to wear her own ermine and her husband’s strawberry leaves—and usually doesn’t.
Social Washington courted Miss Townsend—partly because she was well worth courting, partly because she rather despised it, not a little because, when she did offer hospitality, her “parties” were the pleasantest functions that ever came the capital’s way.
You couldn’t “drop in” on Miss Julia—no matter who you were or why you came. Her kitchen door was always on the latch. Her front door was guarded stiffly. Into no function of hers could you penetrate casually. You were hopelessly debarred unless she had sent you “a card” of invitation—which was a card only in name. She invariably wrote the “cards” herself, in her fine spidery hand, on sheets of cream-smooth, velvet-thick paper, scorning the modernity of engraved invitations. If she consented to receive you at all, she paid you the compliment of telling you so in her own handwriting, which not only saved the expense of engraving, and seemed to her more befitting her dignity, but filled considerable time for her with an occupation she much enjoyed. Her hair-line handwriting was peculiarly beautiful, and she delighted both in producing it and in displaying it. Julia Townsend had many vanities. But they all were innocent ones, and womanly. And, if her avoidance of engraved “At Home” cards was one of her many economies, it was (and her others were not) an accidental one. And her note-paper was a proud extravagance. Only the best paper was good enough, she thought, to record the honor of an invitation accorded from Rosehill, or to be embellished with such beautiful writing as hers.
On “Second Thursdays,” as her visiting cards indicated in the lower left-hand corner—her visiting cards were engraved—Miss Townsend was “At Home,” but it was for no one to venture to call unless Miss Townsend had “left cards” upon you. She called on no one; but once a month, unless it was Lent, “Uncle Lysander,” dressed in his speckless best, crossed the river and, with much ceremony and many bows, left a card of his mistress’s upon those in the capital whom she cared to honor with her acquaintance. And if such favor had not been shown you, you might be very sure that you could induce Uncle Lysander neither to announce you to Miss Townsend’s presence, nor to admit you inside her front door on a second Thursday, or at any other time. A woman of very high Washington social rank once had brought with her to a garden party at Rosehill, without permission or invitation, an English Countess who was staying with her. Miss Townsend had received Lady Haverhill graciously, had chanced to like, and approve, her cordially, had sent cards to her—by Lysander—and, when the Englishwoman had moved into quarters of her own at Willard’s, had invited her to dinner. But Mrs. Wentworth never again received a card of Miss Julia Townsend’s or admission to Rosehill. You had to be very careful indeed with Miss Julia—if you wished to retain her acquaintance. Even to men she indicated her willingness to receive them by means of a card and Uncle Lysander. Women in Washington did not, as a rule, leave visiting cards for their men friends. Miss Townsend saw fit to: that was sufficient.
Except for her servants she lived quite alone in the old red-brick house. At the close of the war they had been three—the mother and two daughters. But Mrs. Townsend had died and Clara, the elder girl, had done something very much worse.
Clara had been twenty when the guns had spit at Fort Sumter. Julia had been born on the day of the first Battle of Bull Run. Of their four brothers two—the twins—had been a little older than Clara, the other two, one a year, one two years younger. Naturally all four had fought for the Southern Cause. Three had fallen, as their father had, in battle; Rupert, the youngest, had died in a Northern prison. If Ruth Townsend had been without reasonableness in her hatred of the North, she had not been without cause.
But it was Clara Townsend—who lived even now, though whether she did or not her sister did not know and did not perhaps care—who had killed their mother. The death of a man, in battle, with his face to the foe and his breast set square to the guns, rarely kills a woman who loves him. Clara had married a man who had worn not a gray but a blue uniform in the terrible fratricidal war—a runaway marriage, of course. None other had been possible. The mother never had mentioned her name again; even the darkies who had adored her never whispered her name among themselves—not even the “mammy” who had suckled her—they were far too ashamed of her. And Julia, a baby still at the close of the war, soon after which it had happened, had no memory of her sister.
Almost from her birth Miss Julia had lived a solitary life. She kept her life aired, even somewhat sunned, but she shared it, or her self, with none. Every one in Washington knew her, or tried to; and she knew every one whom she considered worth knowing, or deserving it—rather different things sometimes—but she had no intimates. She lived apart.
The three persons who came nearest to intimacy with Miss Julia Townsend, so near it indeed that she had accorded them all permission to “come and see me whenever you like,” were about the last people in Washington society—needless to say they were in it—whom one might have expected her to accept, let alone welcome.
They, as it happened, as yet were unacquainted, each with the others.
Miss Julia’s most nearly intimate friends, and the three she best liked, were: a woman physician who, though of high Southern birth, had, like the not-to-be-named sister Clara, disgraced herself by becoming the wife of a Northern man; an English girl of no social position, beyond that of a nursery governess who chanced to be a relative of her titled employers; and a young man, in a minor and rather hazy position at one of the legations—a Chinese.
CHAPTER II
Miss Townsend was “At Home”—and so were the roses, the strawberries, all the delicate eggshell china and the old heavy silver. She was giving her annual garden-party. And that she might entertain her guests delicately and amply—as a Southern woman should—it had been shortened commons at Rosehill for many a week. Not the servants—they had fared as they always did, and so had the beggars who had gone to the kitchen door—but the mistress of Rosehill had discontinued the late-dinner meal—which she called “supper,” and which she liked—and had gone to bed each night at dusk, and had refrained from lighting a candle when sleep would not come. That had been a veritable sacrifice on the function-altar of hospitality. Next to drinking buttermilk the thing that Miss Julia most enjoyed was reading novels in bed—by the soft, clear light of four or five wax candles. And she, complete hostess that, true to her blood, she was, had imposed on herself other personal curtailments and economies that cost her less but saved her purse more. She had not gone to a concert or seen a play during her “retreat” of economy. But, as it chanced, there had been no play that she much wished to see at a Washington theater just then. She was an inveterate theater-goer and she rarely denied herself a matinÉe that called her. She always went alone, but she always sat in the best seats, and Uncle Lysander, his dear black face shining with importance and his great splay hands encased in snow-white gloves, always waited outside to escort his mistress home, whether the matinÉe ended in the dusk and dark of winter or in the clear light of summer—if so side-by-side a word as “escort” can be used of his attendance close behind Miss Julia. And a “good” concert she missed very rarely indeed. Miss Julia did not care for classical music, but she liked to think that she did, and she and her best bonnet, and her rose-point-lace collar, fastened carefully (not to injure the priceless mesh) by a gold and cameo breast-pin that had belonged to Martha Washington, were as sure to enrich the parquet seats as Brahms or Grieg or Haydn or Liszt were to appear in the program. In winter she wore gray or dun-colored velvet (first made in Paris for a Mrs. Townsend before Robert Edward Lee was born); in summer thin-textured silver or lilac silk. In winter she wore a costly Cashmere shawl, in summer one of heavily embroidered white Canton silk. The Cashmere shawl had a skimp, narrow, parti-colored fringe; the Chinese one had a sumptuous, knotted fringe of its own time-deepened ivory silk. But she always wore the gold and cameo breast-pin and the deep collar of rose-point; she always wore gloves of delicate kid, made by a famous French manufacturer, and exactly matching her gowns; in winter her black velvet bonnet (always the same bonnet) nodded an ostrich feather that matched her gown of the occasion as perfectly as did her gloves; in summer, her bonnet of white chip paid the hue of her dress the same ostrich feather compliment. And winter or summer, she wore uncompromisingly thick, stout leather boots—but they were well cut and with heels as high as a fashionable girl’s. She always took her program home with her. She had volumes and volumes bound in limp morocco. She often spoke of them—and sometimes she sent Lysander to purchase a piano score of some “morceau” that had charmed her, or that she thought had. But, to her credit, she never attempted their execution on her own yellow-keyed harpsichord. She “liked to have them, to think them over.” Her own greatly favorite musical compositions were “The Maiden’s Prayer” and “Her Bright Smile Haunts Me Still.” She played them both tenderly—if not too brilliantly. And “Dixie” was her anthem.
The day was perfect. The Potomac ran a “changeable-silk” glitter of blue and gold. The sky, as blue as the river, was soft and fluffed with billows of snowy clouds. The grass was almost as smooth and green as a well-kept English lawn, and the old red house was a-nod with roses, its very bricks fragrant from the magnolias nailed there. Great beds of mignonette cut great swathes of gray through the green of the grass, and lay like soft, thick rugs at the edge of the house.
Miss Julia, wearing a befrilled cream organdie delicately printed with pink wild-roses and forget-me-nots more turquoise-tinted than growing forget-me-nots ever are, stood under the giant juniper tree receiving her bidden guests. The frills of her full gown were narrowly edged with lace, and she wore Madame Washington’s brooch, pinning her befrilled organdie fichu; but the collar and heirloom of super rose-point was laid away in its tissue and lavender. To-day she wore brightly beaded bronze slippers, very high-heeled, pointed-toed. At home she never wore boots; beyond her gates she never wore anything else. A pair of shoes she did not own, and never had. She wore many valuable rings and black lace mitts on her fine white hands, and held in her right hand a valuable lace handkerchief, which nothing would have induced her to use for the purpose for which handkerchiefs are supposed to be made and bought. It had been “in the family” for six generations, and it had never been used. In her other hand she carried a tortoise-shell lorgnette which she never used either, for she had no need to—her sight still was perfectly good—and Julia Townsend was about the last woman in the world to affect an infirmity that did not afflict her. She had considerable manner, but no affectations. Her manner, always elegant, sometimes more than a little starched, was not a pose. Her manner was she, and belonged to her as legitimately as did the many good clothes she had inherited, as she had it, with birthright from several generations of Virginia ancestors. She also carried in her left hand an exceptionally fine, long-stemmed, very fragrant rose, which she sniffed frequently. If she shook hands with a guest, the lace handkerchief went for the moment to keep company with the handsome lorgnette and the big red rose. She did not shake hands with every guest that she welcomed, but to all her welcome was gracious, and she did shake hands with each guest that bade her adieu, and contrived to convey with the lingering touch of her old, maidenly fingers how much she regretted the departure.
Every one she had privileged to do so had come. Almost always it was so. Few ever missed an opportunity to visit Miss Julia at Rosehill. There was a perfume and repose both about the woman and her home that were strongly inviting, and that every one found strangely refreshing, and that some also found surprisingly stimulating. And her invitations were too scrupulously limited to be lightly disregarded. Miss Julia was old-fashioned, and every one knew she was poor. (Indeed, she boasted of it indirectly—too highly-bred to boast openly of anything—frankly proud of her poverty, since it was part and piece of General Lee’s defeat.) To be reported in the Star as having been among Miss Julia Townsend’s guests gave a social cachet which nothing in the capital itself could give.
Every one who could be was at Rosehill today. And in several ways the gathering was more catholic than a superficial intelligence might have expected. It was natural enough that a poor public school teacher should rub shoulders here with a California millionaire, and the well-known actress seemed a not inappropriate guest, since her personal character was as unsmirched as her complexion was natural, and the South always has honored all the great arts. But a Jewish banker and his beautiful daughter, a Punjabi prince and the Siamese Minister might have seemed to some a little unaccountable.
Miss Townsend was a stanch Episcopalian, but she had no theological narrowness. She respected Jews—if they were orthodox; she’d little tolerance for any apostasy—“character” was the human quality she most valued, and her love of beauty—especially the beauty of women—was almost inordinate. That accounted for Moses Strauss and his lovely daughter, Esther. The Siamese Minister and the Punjabi prince were not beautiful, and neither had been in Washington long enough yet to have established, or, on the other hand, to have lost, any great reputation for personal or intellectual character. It was the fashion just then to “know” all the Orientals one could—but that was no sesame to the door of Rosehill. Miss Julia drew a very wide distinction between Africa and Asia, and she liked to show that she did.
Four girls sat chatting idly a little way from the small linen-and-lace-covered table they had impoverished of its cakes and ice-creams and bonbons.
Molly Wheeler—her father was an Oregon Senator—Lucille Smith—hers was on the supreme bench—and Mary Withrow, the daughter of the minister of Washington’s most exclusive church—of course, an Episcopalian church—were all dressed expensively in glistening white, as was almost every woman here on this very hot day, and each wore a pretty and costly hat. The fourth girl was hatless and her simpler gown was a soft but vivid green.
“You look as if you’d grown here, Ivy,” Mary Withrow exclaimed not unreasonably. For the English girl’s gown was just the color of the young live-oak leaves that so interlaced above them where they sat, great lush ferns growing thickly against the trees’ silver trunks, that a sort of brilliant green twilight seemed all about them, although it was scarcely a quarter past four yet.
“I wish I had,” the girl in green replied. “At least, I wish I lived here.”
“Don’t you like Washington?” Lucille demanded sharply. The jurist’s daughter was stanchly and sharply loyal to Washington—grateful to it, too, perhaps, for the Smiths had come to it via several less pleasant localities.
“I hate teaching kiddies,” Ivy said with an impatient shrug.
“But your own cousins are such dear little things,” Mary remonstrated gently.
“I suppose they are,” Ivy Gilbert conceded, “dear little things, and they certainly are my cousins—but a long way off. It isn’t the children I object to—it’s having to teach them. I like Blanche fairly well, and I’m fond of Dick—sometimes—and I daresay I’d be quite fond of them, if I didn’t see them often, and never had to.”
“You don’t like teaching?” Mary said, incredulously. “Oh, I’d love to, more than anything else, if only I knew enough! And you don’t like to teach? Truly?”
“I loathe it. You don’t know whether you’d like it or not—until you’ve tried it. You’d know then. But you don’t have to ‘know enough’ or to know much of anything. Education’s a very minor asset—at least for a nursery governess, and I suspect for any other sort of teacher. There’s only one thing you need: patience, patience, patience—and then patience! Eternal patience! Cow-like, door-mat patience. Oh, I loathe the whole show! Emma’s kind enough. Charley’s a dear. But I loathe it all. I feel stuck in a ditch! And I want to move and to be. I want to taste life, and make some of it. But there, let’s talk about something else!” The young, passionate voice broke off impatiently, and the girl clutched a great fern from its root and began fanning herself with it slowly. And the scarlet peppers she wore dangling at her breast, a splendid splash of Oriental color on the exquisite jade of her linen gown, shook passionately as she moved.
The other girls wore flowers—tea-roses and violets—as girls should. But Ivy had robbed Miss Julia’s kitchen-garden of a handful of red, red peppers, and fastened them in her gown. And odd as the garniture was, no one had commented on it. Ivy Gilbert always was doing something “queer,” and no one had exclaimed at her wearing of “vegetables.” And certainly the scarlet peppers suited her. Her passionate, brunette face, with its soft, mutinous, gold-brown eyes, its vivid, curved lips, its crown of dark, curling hair, and its accentuation of darker eyebrows and up-curling long lashes, looked more Spanish than English, as she sat there in the bright green “twilight,” in her jade-green gown, and the brilliant red peppers jolting each other at her breast.
Lucille hastened to change the subject.
“Why didn’t you come to Mrs. Trull’s breakfast?” she asked.
Ivy shrugged again.
“You don’t like Maggie Trull, do you?” Molly asked. “I do, so much; why ever don’t you?”
“She kisses me!” Ivy said angrily, just as two men came through the gleaming trees. “I hate to be kissed! It’s a loathsome, indecent thing. I never can forgive any one who kisses me!”
The men had heard. The white-haired elder smiled a little under his white mustache. But his younger companion gravely regarded the girl who had spoken, and approval lit in his black, inscrutable eyes.
He, the younger man, too, looked a little Spanish, but less so than Ivy Gilbert did. He was not tall, but fully of medium height: a very handsome man, dark, beautifully built, scrupulously dressed, wearing his good garments indifferently, the flower in his coat as red as the girl’s scarlet peppers, his glance direct, noncommittal, a repose about him which only many centuries of culture can give. His passive face was clear-cut and strong and scarcely more brunette than Ivy’s own.
It was not the girl herself that arrested him first. It was what she said—for it struck a century-old note in his being, and it answered with a throb. He was twenty-seven, a citizen of the world. But he, too, thought kissing an impertinence and a nastiness—and he never had offered it, or suffered it.
Evidently a foreigner—he might have passed to many for an Italian, a Rumanian, a Greek, a Spaniard, or a Russian—of birth. The birth was indubitable, whatever the birthplace.
But one who had traveled far, and watched, would have recognized him as what he was, Chinese.
CHAPTER III
The men lifted their hats, and passed on. General Cordez knew Lucille and had met the Senator’s daughter, but he felt no necessity to join the group of girls on the grass, and no impulse. And the younger man, knowing none of them except for a very slight “bowing acquaintance” with Miss Smith, showed no impulse—if he felt any.
“That was SÊn King-lo,” Lucille said, almost excitedly, when the men were out of earshot. “I wish General Cordez had stopped and introduced him to you. He’s all the rage. I did just meet him once. But he never gives me a chance to push it a mite.”
“What is he—what’s his nationality?” Ivy asked.
“Chinese.”
Ivy’s lip curled. “What queer cards Miss Julia knows,” she said.
“Yes, doesn’t she? And the last woman in the world you’d think would,” Mary Withrow agreed. “Papa wouldn’t like me to know some of the people Miss Townsend does.”
Their talk debouched then to fashions and clothes. Ivy followed it with listless inattention. The others tossed and tore it eagerly and hotly. None of them, not even Lucille, who “had heaps of her things from Paris—and paid heaps for them, if you want to know”—cared quite as much for pretty and becoming hats and gowns as the English girl did. But she had so little money to spend on what she wore that talk of it always rather stuck in her throat.
The well-born and the well-clothed, the traveled and the noted, strolled about the festival grounds, admiring the flowers, sat in groups at the exquisitely laid little tables that dotted and white-starred the shady nooks, an attendant white-clad darky, important and cordial at each, keeping the flies off with long white-handled brushes of peacocks’ feathers, and replenishing the dishes and baskets of ice-cream, charlotte russe and fruit, the cups of tea and coffee, the jugs of butter-thick cream, and the cold-beaded glasses of cup—delicate cup of claret or moselle or cider for the “ladies,” mint juleps in strong perfection and very tall glasses for the men guests. No one could better Uncle Lysander at mixing juleps—he wore white cotton gloves when he pulled the mint from the kitchen brook-side—and few could equal Julia Townsend, of the Townsends of Virginia, at the concocting of cup.
Towards sunset, all the burnished hour’s splendor of colors glowing and melting over the blue and silver Potomac, a tinkle of banjos came from behind the tomatoes and asparagus beds. Miss Julia never permitted her blacks to obtrude jarringly their gift of ripple and rhythm, but always banjos in the distance played her garden party guests out of her gates. And as “Dearest May” signaled softly Miss Julia moved slowly gatewards.
“Now darkies come and listen, a story I’ll relate;
It happened in de valley ob de ole Ca’lina State.”
The Italian Minister bent over Miss Julia Townsend’s hand.
“Down in de cornfield whar I used to rake de hay—”
Lady Giffard had had “such a perfect afternoon.”
“I worked a great deal harder when I thought of you, dear May.”
A great diva paused a moment to listen, as she held her hostess’ hand.
“O May, dearest May, you are loblier dan de day,
Your eyes so bright dey shine at night
When de moon am gone away.”
The diva’s eyes filled with tears. “They are the sweetest singers,” she said softly, and went quickly. Miss Julia flushed delicately. She ruled her negroes with no lax hand—but she loved them. She knew their faults, blackberry thick! She knew their virtues, their worth and loyalty. And she never heard their music, the blackbird music that flutes up from their ebon throats, the music that tripped from between their broad finger tips and their banjo-strings, without an affectionate throbbing in her own heart.
“My massa gabe me holiday, I wish he’d gib me mo—”
Miss Julia went a step beyond the gate with Miss Ellen Hunter—for Miss Hunter was older than herself, and very poor.
“I t’anked him berry kindly as I pushed my boat from sho—”
Miss Julia gave a Chicago banker her finger tips; the Jewish financier a fuller clasp.
“And started for my dear one I longed so for to see—”
The sunset was fainting on the river’s breast. The banjos thrummed more softly, the sugared, golden voices sank almost in a whisper. Servants were hanging here and there a lantern on a low-branched tree—long, iron-ringed, glass, plantation lanterns. That, too, was a signal—not a signal to go; a signal to stay. It meant that there would be supper presently for a favored few—youngsters probably. Julia Townsend loved to gather “boys and girls” about her for a more intimate hour when her statelier hospitalitied had been banjo-dismissed, and already she had told one here, one there, “I hope you can stay until ten.” And they knew there’d be fried chicken and quivering icy jellies, and perhaps a little dancing on the lawn—and a punctilious, if pompous, darky servant to see you home, if you were a girl whose chaperon had been delicately and tunefully sent home.
“And ’twas from Aunt Dinah’s quilting party I was seeing Nellie home.”
Lena Blackburn looked at Miss Julia longingly. Miss Julia wished her good-by very kindly. Mr. SÊn saw the tiny comedy, and so did Ivy Gilbert. Their eyes met—just that.
“On my arm her light hand rested, rested light as ocean foam.”
The last sent-home had gone, and Miss Townsend turned back towards the house.
“I want to be in Dixie——”
Julia Townsend stood at attention—and so did the remaining guests gathered near her. Ulysses S. Grant and Philip Sheridan must have done that in the presence of Julia Townsend listening to “Dixie”—and the soldier who rode a breathless twenty miles from Winchester to Cedar Creek would have done it with the sunny sweetness of a prince—like the prince he was. The South had its Barbara Frietchies—the North had its Stonewall Jacksons.
“I want to be in Dixie——”
The brown English eyes and the black Chinese eyes met again. Something nearly a smile touched the girl’s lips. And she noticed that the Chinese—Senn, she thought Lucille had said his name was—held his hat in his hand.
Was he staying to supper then—a Chinese? Surely not.
But, as it proved, he was. He not only stayed, but he sat on Miss Gilbert’s left hand. She was not over-pleased.
Of course it was for Miss Julia to select her own guests. That was understood and accepted. But the nursery governess did a little resent the supper seating arrangements. Miss Julia herself made them.
Ivy Gilbert was too thoroughly English to draw the social color-line as white Americans drew it. She had seen Hindoos and Japanese on a perfect—or so it seemed—parity with the other undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge. A duchess, who was an acquaintance of Lady Snow’s, had, to Ivy’s knowledge, made straining and costly efforts to secure as her guest a Persian prince not many seasons ago, and on doing it had been both congratulated and envied. She had seen her own Royal Family in cordial conversation with a turbaned Maharajah, even the royal lady who was reputed most exclusive and proud. And, though her own small experience of social functions at home had been rather of Balham and West Kensington than of Mayfair, she would have been not only interested but flattered to know well any Indian—of sufficient rank and European or Europeanized education . . . but a Chinese—well, really!
However, the fault was far more Miss Julia’s than his—he couldn’t help being Chinese, of course—and since he was here, Miss Julia’s invited guest, it was for her, another guest, not to be impolite. So, perhaps feeling that a more brilliant remark would be a faux pas, too unfair a strain on Chinese savoir faire, she turned towards SÊn King-lo slightly and asked him pleasantly, “How do you like America?”
A smile flickered across the man’s mouth.
“Very much as the curate liked his egg, Miss Gilbert,” he told her gravely, then added with a franker smile, “which is how I like most countries, I think.”
“Ah! You are homesick!” But having said it, the girl blushed angrily—angry with herself for having said what she felt, as soon as she’d said it, to have been far from in good taste.
“Terribly,” SÊn said gravely—“sometimes.”
“I’m sorry I said that,” she said quickly. “I ought not,” she added with a little guilty sigh.
“But,” he disputed her courteously, “I am glad to answer any question you are good enough to ask. And, if there is one thing of which no man should be ashamed, it is being homesick, surely. And you made me no risk of criticizing your country—since you are not American—but English.”
“How do you know?”
“You told me.”
“I? We never have spoken to each other until now.”
“But you told me yourself, Miss Gilbert. I heard you speak as General Cordez and I were walking together. I heard you say several words. If I had heard you speak but one, I’d have known that you were English. An English voice in English speech is one of the few things that cannot be mistaken.”
The girl flushed again—delicately this time, and with pleasure.
“We Chinese,” he continued, “have a proverb, ‘If one word misses the mark, a thousand will do the same.’ And, if one English word spoken by an educated English voice does not proclaim nationality as nothing else can, it is because it falls on very dull or quite deaf ears.”
“Have you many proverbs in your language?” she asked, fishing about a little desperately for her next thing to say.
“Millions,” he said decidedly. “And we all know them all, and all say them at once. Probably at this moment, in China, four hundred millions of people are saying, ‘He that grasps, loses,’ or ‘The knowing ones are not hard, the hard ones are not knowing,’ or ‘The serpent knows his own hole,’ or ‘Those who know how to do a thing do not find it difficult; those who find it difficult know not how to do it,’ or ‘Even the tiger has his naps.’ No, though, I am wrong. It is both night-time and day-time in China now—my country sprawls so wide from East to West—but I have no doubt that at home, easily a hundred million Chinese are quoting time-honored adages and proverbs at this moment.”
“How perfectly terrible!” she laughed.
SÊn King-lo laughed back with her. There was no familiarity in his laughter, but a good deal of deferential good-fellowship.
“I have never heard Chinese spoken,” Miss Gilbert told him. “It is a terribly difficult language to learn—for a foreigner, I mean, isn’t it?”
“No,” SÊn said stoutly. “That is always said—has been said ever since Marco Polo’s time. But it is not true. Chinese is very easy to learn really.”
“I have never heard it,” she repeated.
“Would you care to? Shall I?”
“Please.” She scarce could make any other answer.
He said something in a low, clear voice. It ought to have reached her alone under the hum of the general table talk. But at Miss Julia’s board no one spoke shrilly, and, whatever happened in China, in the dining-room of Rosehill all did not speak at once. And the inevitable rise and fall of intonation—which is nine-tenths of the Chinese vocabulary—rang it through to others. Two or three people stopped talking, and half a dozen pricked up questioning ears.
Miss Julia challenged her guest frankly. “What are you saying?” she demanded.
SÊn King-lo bowed his head towards his hostess, and answered:
“Something that Confucius said a long time ago, Madame. This: ‘Our greatest glory is, not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.’ ”
“True and admirable!” Miss Julia said proudly. Her old eyes flashed. She was thinking of Appomattox—of a cause that she never would yield as permanently lost. And SÊn King-lo, a far-off look in his dark, masked eyes, was thinking of Shantung. The East and the West do meet sometimes in the selfsameness of human emotions.