Читать книгу Hagar - Mary Johnston - Страница 10

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No one could be so cross-grained as to deny that Eglantine was a sweet place. It lay sweetly on just the right, softly swelling hill. The old grey-stucco main house had a sweet porch, with wistaria growing sweetly over it; the long, added grey-stucco wings had pink and white roses growing sweetly on trellises between the windows. There were silver maples and heavily blooming locust trees and three fine magnolias. There were thickets of weigelia and spiræa and forsythia, and winding walks, and an arbour, and the whole twenty acres or so was enclosed by a thorny, osage-orange hedge, almost, though not quite so high as the hedge around the Sleeping Beauty's palace. It was a sweet place. Everyone said so—parents and guardians, the town that neighboured Eglantine, tourists that drove by, visitors to the Commencement exercises—everybody! The girls themselves said so. It was praised of all—almost all. The place was sweet. M. Morel, the French teacher, who was always improving his English, and so on the hunt for synonyms, once said in company that it was saccharine.

Miss Carlisle, who taught ancient and modern history and, in the interstices, astronomy and a blue-penciled physiology, gently corrected him. "Oh, M. Morel! We never use that word in this sense! If you wish to vary the term you might use 'charming,' or 'refined,' or 'elegant.' Besides"—she gazed across the lawn—"it isn't so sweet, I always think, in November as it is in April or May."

"The sweetest time, I think," said Miss Bedford, who taught mathematics, geography, and Latin, "is when the lilac is in bloom."

"And when the robins nest again," sighed a pensive, widowed Mrs. Lane, who taught the little girls.

"It is 'refined' always," said M. Morel. "November or April, what is ze difference? It has ze atmosphere. It is sugary."

"Here," remarked Miss Gage, who taught philosophy—"here is Mrs. LeGrand."

All rose to greet the mistress of Eglantine as she came out from the hall upon the broad porch. Mrs. LeGrand's graciously ample form was wrapped in black cashmere and black lace. Her face was unwrinkled, but her hair had rapidly whitened. It was piled upon her head after an agreeable fashion and crowned by a graceful small cap of lace. She was ample and creamy and refinedly despotic. With her came her god-daughter, Sylvie Maine. It was early November, and the sycamores were yet bronze, the maples aflame. It was late Friday afternoon, and the occasion the arrival and entertainment overnight of an English writer of note, a woman visiting America with a book in mind.

Mrs. LeGrand said that she had thought she heard the carriage wheels. Mr. Pollock, the music-master, said, No; it was the wind down the avenue. Mrs. LeGrand, pleasantly, just condescending enough and not too condescending, glanced from one to the other of the group. "M. Morel and Mr. Pollock and you, Miss Carlisle and Miss Bedford, will, I hope, take supper with our guest and me? Sylvie, here, will keep her usual place. I can't do without Sylvie. She spoils me and I spoil her! And we will have besides, I think, the girl that has stood highest this month in her classes. Who will it be, Miss Gage?"

"Hagar Ashendyne, Mrs. LeGrand."

Mrs. LeGrand had a humorous smile. "Then, Sylvie, see that Hagar's dress is all right and try to get her to do her hair differently. I like Eglantine girls to look their birth and place."

"Dear Cousin Olivia," said Sylvie, who was extremely pretty, "for all her plainness, Hagar's got distinction."

But Mrs. LeGrand shrugged her shoulders. She couldn't see it. A little wind arising, all the place became a whirl of coloured leaves. And now the carriage wheels were surely heard.

Half an hour later Sylvie went up to Hagar's room. It was what was called the "tower room"—small and high up—too small for anything but a single bed and one inmate. It wasn't a popular room with the Eglantine girls—a room without a roommate was bad enough, and then, when it was upon another floor, quite away from every one—! Language failed. But Hagar Ashendyne liked it, and it had been hers for three years. She had been at Eglantine for three years, going home to Gilead Balm each summer. She was eighteen—old for her age, and young for her age.

Sylvie found her curled in the window-seat, and spoke twice before she made her hear. "Hagar! come back to earth!"

Hagar unfolded her long limbs and pushed her hair away from her eyes. "I was travelling," she said. "I was crossing the Desert of Sahara with a caravan."

"You are," remarked Sylvie, "too funny for words!—You and I are to take supper with 'Roger Michael'!"

A red came into Hagar's cheek. "Are we? Did Mrs. LeGrand say so?"

"Yes—"

Hagar lit the lamp. "'Roger Michael'—'Roger Michael'—Sylvie, wouldn't you rather use your own name if you wrote?"

"Oh, I don't know!" answered Sylvie vaguely. "What dress are you going to wear?"

"I haven't any but the green."

"Then wear your deep lace collar with it. Cousin Olivia wants you to look as nice as possible. Don't you want me to do your hair?"

Hagar placed the lamp upon the wooden slab of a small, old-time dressing-table. That done, she stood and looked at herself with a curious, wistful puckering of the lips. "Sylvie, prinking and fixing up doesn't suit me."

"Don't you like people to like you?"

"Yes, I do. I like it so much it must be a sin. Only not very many people do. … And I don't think prinking helps."

"Yes, it does. If you look pretty, how can people help liking you? It's three fourths the battle."

Hagar fell to considering it. "Is it? … But then we don't all think the same thing pretty or ugly." The red showed again like wine beneath her smooth, dark skin, "Sylvie, I'd like to be beautiful. I'd like to be as beautiful as Beatrix Esmond. I'd like to be as beautiful as Helen of Troy. But everybody at Eglantine thinks I am ugly, and I suppose I am." She looked wistfully at Sylvie.

Now in the back of Sylvie's head there was certainly the thought that Hagar ought to have said, "I'd like to be as beautiful as you, Sylvie." But Sylvie had a sweet temper and she was not unmagnanimous. "I shouldn't call you ugly," she said judicially. "You aren't pretty, and I don't believe any one would ever call you so, but you aren't at all disagreeably plain. You've got something that makes people ask who you are. I wouldn't worry."

"Oh, I wasn't worrying!" said Hagar. "I was only preferring.—I'll wear the lace collar." She took it out of a black Japanned box, and with it the topaz brooch that had been her mother's.

The visitor from England found the large, square Eglantine parlour an interesting room. The pier-glasses, framed in sallow gilt, the many-prismed chandelier, the old velvet carpet strewn with large soft roses, the claw-foot furniture, the two or three portraits of powdered Colonial gentlemen, the bits of old china, the framed letters bearing signatures that seemed to float to her from out her old United States History—all came to her like a vague fragrance from some unusual old garden. And then, curiously superimposed upon all this, appeared memorials of four catastrophic years. Soldiers and statesmen of the Confederacy had found no time in which to have their portraits painted. But Mrs. LeGrand had much of family piety and, in addition, daguerreotypes and cartes de visite of the dead and gone. With her first glow of prosperity she had a local artist paint her father from a daguerreotype. Stalwart, with a high Roman face, he looked forth in black broadcloth with a roll of parchment in his hand. The next year she had had her husband painted in his grey brigadier's uniform. Her two brothers followed, and then a famous kinsman—all dead and gone, all slain in battle. The portraits were not masterpieces, but there they were, in the pathos of the grey, underneath each a little gilt plate. "Killed at Sharpsburg."—"Killed Leading a Charge in the Wilderness."—"Killed at Cold Harbour." Upon the wall, against the pale, century-old paper, hung crossed swords and cavalry pistols, and there were framed commissions and battle orders, and an empty shell propped open the wide white-panelled door. The English visitor found it all strange and interesting. It was as though a fragrance of dried rose-leaves contended with a whiff of gunpowder. The small dining-room into which presently she was carried had fascinating prints—"Pocahontas Baptized," and "Pocahontas Married," and a group of women with children and several negroes gathered about an open grave, one woman standing out, reading the burial service.—Roger Michael was so interested that she would have liked not to talk at all, just to sit and look at the prints and mark the negro servants passing about the table. But Mrs. LeGrand's agreeable voice was asking about the health of the Queen—she bestirred herself to be an acceptable guest.

The small dining-room was separated only by an archway from the large dining-room, and into the latter, in orderly files, came the Eglantine pupils, wound about to their several tables and seated themselves with demureness. M. Morel was speaking of the friendship of France and England. Roger Michael, while she appeared to listen, studied these American girls, these Southern girls. She found many of them pretty, even lovely—not, emphatically, with the English beauty of skin, not with the colour of New England girls, among whom, recently, she had been—not with the stronger frame that was coming in with this generation of admission to out-of-door exercise, the certain boyish alertness and poise that more and more she was seeing exhibited—but pretty or lovely, with delicacy and a certain languor, a dim sweetness of expression, and, precious trove in America! voices that pleased. She noted exceptions to type, small, swarthy girls and large overgrown ones, girls that were manifestly robust, girls that were alert, girls that were daring, girls that were timid or stupid, or simply anæmic, girls that approached the English type and girls that were at the very antipodes—but the general impression was of Farther South than she had as yet gone in America, of more grace and slowness, manner and sweetness. Their clothes interested her; they were so much more "dressed" than they would have been in England. Evidently, in deference to the smaller room, there was to-night an added control of speech; there sounded no more than a pleasant hum, a soft, indistinguishable murmur of young voices.

"They are so excited over the prospect of your speaking to them after supper," said Mrs. LeGrand, her hand upon the coffee urn.—"Cream and sugar?"

"They do not seem excited," thought Roger Michael.—"Sugar, thank you; no cream. Of what shall I talk to them? In what are they especially interested?"

"In your charming books, I should say," answered Mrs. LeGrand. "In how you write them, and in the authors you must know. And then your sweet English life—Stratford and Canterbury and Devonshire—"

"We have been reading 'Lorna Doone' aloud this month," said Miss Carlisle. "And the girls very cleverly arranged a little play. … Sylvie here played Lorna beautifully."

Roger Michael smiled across at Hagar, two or three places down, on the other side of the table. "I should like to have seen it," she said in her good, deep English voice.

"Oh," said Hagar, "I'm not Sylvie. I played Lizzie."

"This is my little cousin and god-daughter, Sylvie Maine," said Mrs. LeGrand. "And this is Hagar Ashendyne, the granddaughter of an old friend and connection of my family."

"Hagar Ashendyne," said Roger Michael. "I remember meeting once in the south of France a Southerner—a Mr. Medway Ashendyne."

"Indeed?" exclaimed Mrs. LeGrand. "Then you have met Hagar's father. Medway Ashendyne! He is a great traveller—we do not see as much of him as we should like to see, do we, Hagar?"

"I have not seen him," said Hagar, "since I was a little girl."

Her voice, though low, was strange and vibrant. "What's here?" thought Roger Michael, but what she said was only, "He was a very pleasant gentleman, very handsome, very cultivated. My friends and I were thrown with him during a day at Carcassonne. A month afterwards we met him at Aigues-Mortes. He was sketching—quite wonderfully."

Mrs. LeGrand inwardly deplored Medway Ashendyne's daughter's lack of savoir-faire. "To give herself away like that! Just the kind of thing her mother used to do!" Aloud she said, "Medway's a great wanderer, but one of these days he will come home and settle down and we'll all be happy together. I remember him as a young man—a perfectly fascinating young man.—Dinah, bring more waffles!—Yes, if you will tell our girls something of your charming English life. We are all so interested—"

Miss Carlisle's voice came in, a sweet treble like a canary's. "The Princess of Wales keeps her beauty, does she not?"

The study hall was a long, red room, well enough lighted, with a dais holding desk and chairs. Roger Michael, seated in one of these, watched, while her hostess made a little speech of introduction, the bright parterre of young faces. Sitting so, she excercised a discrimination that had not been possible in the dining-room. Of the faces before her each was different, after all, from the other. There were keen faces as well as languorous ones; brows that promised as well as those that did not; behind the prevailing "sweet" expression, something sometimes that showed as by heat lightning, something that had depth. "Here as elsewhere," thought Roger Michael. "The same life!"

Mrs. LeGrand was closing, was turning toward her. She rose, bowed toward the mistress of Eglantine, then, standing square, with her good, English figure and her sensibly shod, English feet, she began to talk to these girls.

She did not, however, speak to them as, even after she rose, she meant to speak. She did not talk letters in England, nor English landscape. She spoke quite differently. She spoke of industrial and social unrest, of conditions among the toilers of the world. "I am what is called a Fabian," she said, and went on as though that explained. She spoke of certain movements in thought, of breakings-away toward larger horizons. She spoke of various heresies, political, social, and other. "Of course I don't call them heresies; I call them 'the enlarging vision.'" She gave instances, incidents; she spoke of the dawn coming over the mountains, and of the trumpet call of "the coming time." She said that the dying nineteenth century heard the stronger voice of the twentieth century, and that it was a voice with a great promise. She spoke of women, of the rapidly changing status of women, of what machinery had done for women, of what education had done. She spoke of the great needs of women, of their learning to organize, of the need for unity among women. She used the words "false position" thrice. "Woman's immemorially false position."—"Society has so falsely placed her."—"Until what is false is done away with."—She said that women were beginning to see. She said that the next quarter-century would witness a revolution. "You young people before me will see it; some of you will take part in it. I congratulate you on living when you will live." She talked for nearly an hour, and just as she was closing it came to her, with a certain effect of startling, that much of the time she had been speaking to just one countenance there. She was speaking directly to the girl called Hagar Ashendyne, sitting halfway down the hall. When she took her seat there followed a deep little moment of silence broken at last by applause. Roger Michael marked the girl in green. She didn't applaud; she sat looking very far away. Mrs. LeGrand was saying something smoothly perfunctory, beflowered with personal compliments; the girls all stood; the Eglantine hostess and guest, with the teachers who had been at table, passed from the platform, and turned, after a space of hallway, into the rose-carpeted big parlour.

Miss Carlisle and Miss Bedford brought up the rear. "Didn't you think," murmured the latter, "that that was a very curious speech? Now and then I felt so uneasy.—It was as though in a moment she was going to say something indelicate! Dear Mrs. LeGrand ought to have told her how careful we are with our girls."

The wind rose that night and swept around the tower room, and then, between eleven and twelve, died away and left a calm that by contrast was achingly still. Hagar was not yet asleep. She lay straight and still in the narrow bed, her arms behind her head. She was rarely in a hurry to go to sleep. This hour and a half was her dreaming-awake time, her time for romance building, her time for floating here and there, as in a Witch of Atlas boat in her own No-woman's land. She had in the stalls of her mind half a dozen vague and floating romances, silver and tenuous as mist; one night she drove one afield, another night another. All took place in a kind of other space, in countries that were not on any map. She brought imagined physical features into a strange juxtaposition. When the Himalayas haunted her she ranged them, snow-clad, by a West Indian sea. Ætna and Chimborazo rose over against each other, and a favourite haunt was a palm-fringed, flower-starred lawn reached only through crashing leagues of icebergs. She took over localities that other minds had made; when she wished to she pushed aside a curtain of vine and entered the Forest of Arden; she knew how the moonlight fell in the wood outside Athens; she entered the pilotless boat and drove toward the sunset gate of the Domain of Arnheim. Usually speaking, people out of books made the population of these places, and here, too, there were strange juxtapositions. She looped and folded Time like a ribbon. Mark Antony and Robin Hood were contemporaries; Pericles and Philip Sidney; Ruth and Naomi came up abreast, with Joan of Arc, and all three with Grace Darling; the Round Table and the Girondins were acquainted. All manner of historic and fictive folk wandered in the glades of her imagination, any kind of rendezvous was possible. Much went on in that inner world—doubts and dreams and dim hypotheses, romance run wild, Fata Morganas, Castles in Spain, passion for dead shapes, worship of heroes, strange, dumb stirrings toward self-immolation, dreams of martyrdom, mind drenched now with this poem, now with that, dream life, dream adventures, dream princes, religions, world cataclysms, passionings over a colour, a tone, a line of verse—much utter spring and burgeoning. Eighteen years—a fluid unimprisoned mind—and no confidante but herself; of how recapitulatory were these hours, of how youth of all the ages surged, pulsed, vibrated through her slender frame, she had, of course, no adequate notion. She would simply have said that she couldn't sleep, and that she liked to tell herself stories. As she lay here now, she was not thinking of Roger Michael's talk, though she had thought of it for the first twenty minutes after she had put out the lamp. It had been very interesting, and it had stirred her while it was in the saying, but the grappling hook had not finally held; she was not ready for it. She had let it slip from her mind in favour of the rose and purple and deep violin humming of one of her romances. She had lain for an hour in a great wood, like a wood in Xanadu, beneath trees that touched the sky, and like an elfin stream had gone by knights and ladies. … The great clock down in the hall struck twelve. She turned her slender body, and the bed being pushed against the window, laid her outstretched hands upon the window-sill, and looked up, between the spectral sycamore boughs, to where Sirius blazed. Dream wood and dream shapes took flight. She lay with parted lips, her mind quiet, her soul awake. Minutes passed; a cloud drove behind the sycamore branches and hid the star. First blankness came and then again unrest. She sat up in bed, pushing her two heavy braids of hair back over her shoulders. The small clock upon the mantel ticked and ticked. The little room looked cold in the watery moonlight. Hagar was not dreaming or imagining now; she was thinking back. She sat very still for five minutes, tears slowly gathering in her eyes. At last she turned and lay face down upon the bed, her outstretched hands against the wooden frame. Her tears wet the sleeve of her gown. "Carcassonne—Aigues-Mortes. Carcassonne—Aigues-Mortes. … "