Читать книгу The Perennial Bachelor - Anne Parrish - Страница 7

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The baby wailed and drooped through the heat of his first summer; but, when Mamma cut long sprays of pungent chrysanthemums for the brass vases that stood on the altar to the glory of God and in memory of Mary Clarissa Campion, when burrs pattered down from the chestnut trees, and the frost touched the persimmons with orange and vermilion, he grew stronger, looked about him with interest, and presently was amiably plunging from outstretched hands to outstretched hands.

Other events beside Victor’s first steps, his first words, his teething, and his whooping-cough took place, though none seemed so important. Trains grew on to dresses, and crinolines were full at the bottom instead of the top, so that ladies turned from tulips to morning glories. Pamela bonnets, like saucers with strings, became so fashionable that even Mamma, who prided herself on being conservative, succumbed; although she only wore hers in the carriage, considering it far too conspicuous and coquettish to wear when she was on foot. Lizzie Blow stopped going to church and took up Spiritualism, tipped tables, and asked for one loud rap if “yes,” two if “no.” One day, when the stars were full of portent, the Prince and Princess of Wales were married in London and old Toot died in his whitewashed cabin under the weeping willow. His place was taken by Caesar, who, under Mamma’s direction, planted ribbon borders and the fashionable new pin-cushion beds here and there about the place; and two new iron urns on the terrace boiled over with petunias and sent up jets of ornamental grass. In winter, when she could not be among her flowers, Mamma learned new stitches in knitting and crochet, and everything in the house became covered with wool-work as things in damp countries are covered with mould—even the bird cages dripped crochet borders. And, when she was not busy with other things, she wound bandages and felt badly about the war—almost as badly as she felt about Victor’s croup and the naughty way in which Lily had taken to stealing sugar.

Terrible and stirring names sounded through those days, piercing even her dreamy mistiness, the Seven Days’ Battles, Fredericksburg and Gettysburg, Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, the Battle of the Wilderness. Her eyes would brim over with tears, and whispering, “Oh, the poor mothers!” she would catch her son to her breast.

The soldiers went south past The Maples, on foot, by train, or sailing down the river in great fleets of many-masted schooners. The sails of the full-rigged ships swelling in the wind, shining in the sun, stirred the heart and made war wonderful and romantic; but the tired men plodding past in clouds of dust on the road were different. Looking at them, the bugle-calls sounded faintly, the glory dimmed, and pity filled the heart. The little girls watched them from behind the hedge, and once Lily thought she saw Papa marching past, and ran out to him. But she got mixed up in the marching legs and knew she was lost forever until a kind soldier with a grey mustache picked her up, smudged the dust and tears on her face with a hand as spiritually gentle as it was physically rough, and swung away to become one of those countless tiny figures fighting together against the infinite and dramatic background of space, stars, thunder, and eternity or annihilation.

The talk of war was everywhere—monitors, the draft, buying substitutes. Between North and South, they felt pressure from both sides. Mr. Brown was ridden on a rail by masked men—which side were they on? No one knew. Cousin Willie, supposed to have southern sympathies, was threatened with tarring and feathering, but so was that violent Yankee, Mr. Farley. The war charged the air, changing everything, giving everything an excitement, an emotional tensity. Wellington Carter was being stupid at the store, breaking the candles and dropping the change on the floor—and before the candles all were burned he was being buried at Mount Pleasant with military honors. Sorrow was the common state, and boys who had marched away to fife and drum came home by the streets of silence.

“Thank God, Victor is a baby!” Mamma cried, listening to the church bell tolling. “And after all the suffering this one has brought, surely, surely, there’ll never be another war!”

The war was like distant thunder; threatening, warning, although the sun shone on the still garden. But it was Maggie in whose heart it echoed loudest.

Aunt Priscilla bought one of the new green-grey Rogers’ groups, and put it in the bay window along with the draggled lace curtains, the hanging baskets of sick ferns, and the parrot in his dirty cage; and Maggie would steal in to look at it, aflame with pity for the wounded scout, wandering in the swamp supported by a ragged negro. So sick, so sick, the veins standing out terribly on his arm under a tourniquet. Once, when no one was near, she touched her lips softly, quickly to that tortured hand, while a wordless passion flooded her to help—she didn’t know how, she didn’t know who—just to help. It was only her adoration of her little brother that kept her from running away and trying to enter the army disguised as a drummer boy.

Then one April day, when Caesar was showing the children a nest of blue eggs in a hawthorn tree and Mamma was admiring her tulips, Uncle Willie rode over to tell them President Lincoln had been assassinated.

It was like a sad, exciting story in a book to them, it was not reality. Their world was The Maples; and the road, the river, the yellow day-lilies in the tall wet grass along the meadow fence, marked the world’s ends.

Year after year, the frogs thrilled out their song, the ferns uncurled their woolly balls, the sweet rain fell, and summer came, just as if Papa had not died. Mamma was so happy with the children, the garden, the lawn, gold-green in the summer sunshine, the golden lazy days. She would never admit, never even realize consciously that his death meant a strain removed; but even his loss, dimmed by a few years, added to the perfection and harmony of her days like minor chords of music.

Her black crêpes melted into violet muslins; less and less often she said to the awed and solemn little girls, “You do remember dear Papa, don’t you, darlings?” More and more often the cornucopia, held before his picture by a bronze hand in a neatly fluted cuff, was empty of its pansies (for thoughts). Nothing was left of his passion, his jokes, his funny songs, his sudden flashing tempers, his love—nothing but a sigh, and a few tears from Mamma on a wet day, when the children or the servants had been tiresome or when she had a headache; his watch-pocket still hanging over the big bed in her room; and Maggie’s missing him.

Sometimes it seemed as if Maggie were the only one who ever thought of Papa now. But someone else remembered.

Poor Aunt Priscilla needed matches and cheese from the store, so she stood at her back door and feebly called towards the stable:

“Washington! Oh, Washington!”

But Washington, fat and black as a blackbird too fat and old to fly, felt the afternoon was over-hot for a drive, and remained where he was, comfortably hidden, mimicking his mistress under his breath:

“Wash’n’ton! Oh, Wash’n’ton!”

So Aunt Priscilla started on foot for the store, trailing her magenta draperies through the dust, her face turning from mauve to purple as she plodded along. She was thinking she would have to give up and sit down in the ditch in the shade by the side of the road, when Cousin Lizzie Blow in her little low pony carriage came rolling along in a cloud of dust, and picked her up.

“You’ll have a stroke if you don’t take care,” she said, her eyes slipping over Priscilla’s wet purple face, the point lace collar pinned on all crooked, and the lunch crumbs nested in the folds of her bodice. She herself was exquisitely neat. Her black and scarlet looked as impossible to disarrange or dim as the black and scarlet of a ladybug; and she was cool-looking, too, except for her red cheeks, one a little redder than the other, almost as red as the poppy-colored Cashmere of her Garibaldi bodice.

“What on earth are you walking for on such a day, with your stable full of horses?”

“I wanted some cheese—the mice are so bad and Willie likes it, too—me, but it’s hot!” She mopped her face with a worked collar she had snatched up, mistaking it for a handkerchief. “I couldn’t find Washington—I guess he was busy somewhere, and I don’t like to stop him. He says the work’s almost too much for him anyway. Wasn’t last night awful? I couldn’t stay in bed—I sat by the window and fanned myself until after two. Willie says it was the hottest night in ever so long.”

“Was it? I didn’t notice.”

“Didn’t notice! Why, what ever were you doing?”

“I was talking to Victor.”

“Precious little fellow!”

“Oh, he seems a right nice little boy in spite of the way they spoil him—too bad his ears stick out so dreadfully. Margaret ought to do something. But I don’t mean him. I mean his father. He was speaking to me last night.”

Aunt Priscilla gave such a start she nearly went over the side of the pony carriage into the dusty yarrow. Of course, she knew about Lizzie’s spiritualism—but she hadn’t mentioned it for ever so long—and this—oh, dear!

“He talks to me every night. It all began with the table tipping—don’t you remember the afternoon you did it with me?”

Did she remember? Could she ever forget? She hadn’t slept for nights afterwards, and she had been almost afraid to go to church on Sunday, for fear God would strike her dead for being a necromancer. And Cousin Lizzie told her that was nothing to what the table had done afterwards, when she was alone. Aunt Priscilla had a vision of it running after Cousin Lizzie like a little dog, leaping up and down stairs on its mahogany legs and three claw feet, rapping out dreadful messages. Willie and Priscilla had gone to see the Blows one evening, and, when Lizzie set out home-made wine and sponge-cake on that table, Priscilla nearly had hysterics. She would as soon have eaten sponge-cake off a coffin. When they went home, she poured out the whole story to Willie in a flood of tears, and it was bliss to hear his shouts of laughter and to be told that they hadn’t been wicked, only a pair of fools. Still, she never liked to be in the room with that table, and as for playing solitaire on it, as Lizzie did——!

“At first I had to have things—the table, and raps to spell out messages—but he speaks right to me now, since I’ve learned how to listen.”

She smiled to herself, thinking of the coming night, with her husband asleep and the whole house still. She would get up and go softly out of the room, out of the house, and lying on the cool grass, looking up at the pale gleaming locust trees, she would make herself empty as she had learned to do—empty, to receive him.

“Oh, goodness!” Aunt Priscilla crammed the collar against her mouth and looked as if she were going to cry. “Goodness, Lizzie, ain’t you scared to death? Do you see him?”

“I feel him,” Lizzie said, smiling again her secret smile, and a little shudder of ecstasy went through her.

“Well, but—oh, gracious! Do you suppose it really can be him? You’d think he’d go to Margaret if he went to anyone——”

Cousin Lizzie said nothing, flicking a horse-fly from the pony’s twitching flank.

“Does she know?”

“I don’t intend to tell her. You see, he never speaks of her.” Her voice was chanting, triumphant.

Aunt Priscilla felt ready to faint. What a relief to draw up before the store, to see Mr. Trewhitt hobbling down the ferny steps to take their orders and tell them it was a hot day, to drink the cold spring water he brought them.

Lizzie hardly spoke on the way home, except to say casually, “Oh, by the way, you needn’t repeat what I told you to Willie or Mr. B.—men are so funny,” and to mention that she was going to put up her brandied peaches tomorrow. But poor Aunt Priscilla felt as if she had been for a ride with a witch on her broom-stick!