Lady Betty Across the Water Part 31

"Me too!" cried Ide.

"They're just like children. I guess we'll have to humour them this once," laughed Mr. Brett's Cousin f.a.n.n.y.

When I smiled at Patty, she cuddled her arm round me, and then Ide promptly did the same. Thus interlaced, the procession moved into the house.

The door of the verandah opens into a cosy sitting-room. There is nothing which you could point out as pretty in the furnishing, and decoration there is none; but the room has a delicious, welcoming look, and makes you want to live in it.

There is the queerest carpet on the floor, with irregular stripes of different colours mingling indistinctly with the grey groundwork, and all has faded into a pleasant indefiniteness of tint. There's a high-backed sofa upholstered with black horse-hair, and the springs have evidently been pressed by generations of Trowbridges who have been born, and reared, and died in the old Valley Farmhouse. The big, ugly clock, too, with the pendulum showing through a wreath of flowers on its gla.s.s door, has attained the dignity of age, and earned a right to its place on the crowded mantelpiece by ticking out the years for these same generations. There are patchwork cushions and others embroidered with worsted and beads, on the sofa and in the great horse-hair-covered armchair, and the two or three hospitable-looking chairs with rockers.

Curious sh.e.l.ls, and wax flowers under a gla.s.s case, adorn a carved wooden bracket; and there are family portraits, enlarged in crayons from old photographs, hanging on the quaintly-papered wall. Between two windows stands a "secretary bookcase," with a propped-up shelf spread with writing materials and files of paper. In the middle of the room is a round table with a homemade fancy-work cover, scarcely showing under its great bowl of mixed country flowers, and its neat piles of books and magazines. As I went in, the sun blinds were bowed for the summer heat, and the room was filled with a cool, sea-green light.

Suddenly I thought of Mrs. Ess Kay's magnificent palace in New York, with its fountain court and splendid drawing rooms. I saw her "little cottage" at Newport, and the other "cottages" and castles I had grown accustomed to there; but somehow the startling contrast between these pictures and this only made me more content with my present surroundings.

"What a nice room!" I exclaimed to the girls, pausing for a glance around.

They looked surprised.

"Do you think so?" asked Patty. "We were afraid maybe you wouldn't. The things you're used to must be a good deal handsomer. Everything's so old here."

"I love old things," said I. "Our house at home is very old, and I wouldn't have anything changed for worlds, even if it were to be made better."

"Why, that's kind of the way _I_ feel, too!" exclaimed Patty, giving my waist a sympathetic squeeze. "I _like_ this living-room. But Ide doesn't admire it a little bit."

"If I was Mis' Trowbridge I'd always sit in the parlour," said Ide, "instead of keeping it shut up, except for best, just because Mr.

Trowbridge's ma did before her. It's a _real_ pretty room. There's a Brussels carpet with roses on the floor, and a handsome suite of red velvet furniture, and a piano, and a marble table. Patty practises her music there, but aside from that none of us see the room, only to sweep and dust, till Thanksgiving and Christmas, when the relations come, or when Mis' Trowbridge has company to tea in winter. Would you like to see it? You can if you want."

I thanked her, but thought we had better put off the treat until another time, as we were on our way to my room. I was wondering how to define the difference between Patty and Ide. I saw that it was very marked, yet I didn't quite understand. The two girls appeared to be on the same footing in the house, I said to myself, but Ide was far more showy than Patty, seeming to put herself forward, as if she were afraid of not being noticed, and then she was dressed so much more elaborately. Perhaps, I thought, Patty was poor, and in a more dependent position than Ide.

The stairway, very steep and narrow, leads straight up from the "living-room," which is apparently in the centre of the house and fills the place of a hall. There are no bal.u.s.ters, but a whitewashed wall on either side, and only one person can go up at a time. At the top is a landing, with a bare, painted floor, and doors opening from it. One of the doors is mine; and as they showed me in I could see that Patty and Ide both waited breathlessly for my verdict, their faces looking quite strained and anxious until I exclaimed:

"How fresh and pretty it is here!"

I meant it, too. It is a dear room, with something pathetic about its simple sweetness, and the kind thought to give me pleasure which shows in every little innocent detail. The floor is covered with a white straw matting, and there are no two pieces of furniture that match.

There's a wide, wooden bed of no particular period that I can recognise, yet with an air of being old-fashioned, and there are stiff, square shams to hide the pillows and turn down over the top of the sheet, with fluted frills round the edges. There's a thing covered with a veneer of mahogany, which I should call a chest of drawers, if Patty and Ide hadn't mentioned it as a "bureau." A mirror divided into two halves hangs over it, with a white crocheted cover to protect the gilt frame from flies; there's a crocheted pin-cushion, too; and in vases painted by home talent bloom the sweetest gra.s.s-pinks I ever smelled.

There are little blue summer houses with pink children and brown dogs in them, matched all wrong at the edges, on the wall paper; there is a wash-handstand and a table with a white cover and more flowers; and that's all except a basket rocking-chair and some hanging shelves; but the white muslin curtains are tied with blue ribbons, and there's a hand-braided rug before the bed, and there are little lace mats under the vases. The scent of dried rose leaves and lavender mingles with the perfume of the pinks; and some of the summer house paG.o.das on the wall are hidden with old-fashioned steel engravings and photographs in home-made frames.

I didn't stop to examine the pictures at first, but after Patty and Ide had tripped away ("to see about my dinner," they said) I was attracted by a faded cabinet photograph framed with sh.e.l.ls. It was a full length figure of a young man on horseback. He was dressed something like those splendid cowboys they took me to see at Earlscourt when I was a little girl, and the face was Mr. Brett's. It was so handsome and dashing I could hardly stop staring at it while I washed off the dust of motoring. Evidently the photograph in its frame has been on the wall a long time. I am glad they happened to put it in what they call the "spare room," so I can look at it whenever I like without anyone noticing.

XVII

ABOUT COWS AND NATIONAL CHARACTERISTICS

When I went downstairs, dinner was ready in a cool, shady dining-room, with a bare floor painted brown, and a long table down the middle. It wasn't quite two o'clock, but it turned out that the family had had their dinner at noon exactly, and this was a meal only for Mr. Brett and me, with Patty and Ide to bring us things from the kitchen and wait upon us, while Mrs. Trowbridge flitted in smiling from time to time, to ask how we were "getting along." It was she who was cooking for us, and I felt quite distressed at the trouble I was giving, on such a hot day, too, but she said she was enjoying it.

It was a very funny dinner, according to my ideas, for I never had a meal a bit like it at home, even when I was small and dined in the daytime with the governess. But it was tremendously good, though none of the things went together properly. We had delicious young chicken--quite babies they were, poor dears--fried with cream; and wreathed all round our plates in a semicircle were a quant.i.ty of tiny dishes. Each one had a big dab of something different in it; mashed potatoes, succotash, green peas, a kind of vegetable marrow to which they gave the unworthy name of "squash," raw tomatoes, sweet green pickles, preserved strawberries, and goodness knows what all besides; while, if we stopped eating to breathe or speak, Patty flew in with a plate of freshly-made things of the most heavenly nature, called corn fritters. Mrs. Trowbridge beamed all over when I said I should like to live on them for a month. To drink we had tumblers of iced tea, and there was raspberry vinegar, too, which we were supposed to swallow with our dinner; and afterwards there was hot apple pie, with custard and slabs of cheese to eat at the same time.

We were obliged to eat a good deal of everything, otherwise Mrs.

Trowbridge would have felt hurt, and I felt sleepy when we had finished, but I refused to go and lie down to rest, as they wanted me to, it seemed such a waste of time. At last Mr. Trowbridge offered to show "Cousin Jim" round the farm, and maybe I looked wistful, for when they found that I was determined not to take a nap, they asked if I would go with them.

Mr. Trowbridge had on a linen coat now, a long, yellow one, which I should laugh at if I saw it on the stage in a play, but it suited him, and he looked quite impressive in it. He fanned himself with a large straw hat, without any ribbon, and talked splendidly to us, as we three walked together under the trees.

If any English person should write a novel, and make a farmer in it talk like Mr. Trowbridge, everyone who read the book would say he was impossible. His way of speaking was a little slipshod, sometimes (though not a bit more than ours when we drop our "g's" and things like that, only more guileless sounding); but without seeming a bit as if he wanted to show off what he knew--which is so boring--he quoted Shakespeare, and Wordsworth, and Tennyson; and in mentioning his work at the hives in the morning, asked if we had read Maeterlinck's "Life of the Bee." From that he fell to discussing other things of Maeterlinck's with Mr. Brett, and incidentally talked of Ibsen. There wasn't the least affectation about it all. The quotations and allusions he made were mixed up incidentally with conversation about the beauty of the country, and life on a farm. He was interested in the subjects, and took it for granted that we were, so he chatted about things he cared for, modestly and happily.

By and by he left us alone for a few minutes, while he went to speak to a man who works on the farm. He was going to show us the maple sugar camp when he came back, and we sat on a felled oak and waited, with a smell of clover coming to us on the warm breeze, and the "tinkle, tankle" of cow-bells in the distance.

"What an extraordinary man!" I said to Mr. Brett.

"You mean because he's a farmer," said he, his eyes laughing.

"Well--I suppose I do. But then, of course, he's a gentleman farmer, not an ordinary one at all."

"He's a gentleman in the way that all the good people in the country round are gentlefolk, because they're self-respecting and kind-hearted and intelligent. But he comes of generations of workers. They make no pretensions to blue blood, though perhaps they may have some in their veins, and don't think themselves superior socially to their own farm hands--like that one over there. Nor do they consider themselves inferior to anybody. Not that they would think of _a.s.serting_ their claims to equality with your friend Mrs. Stuyvesant-Knox, for instance.

They simply take it for granted that they are the equals of any other American, or for the matter of that, persons of any foreign nations.

You will perhaps hear them talking about your king and queen as 'Edward' and 'Alexandra'; but they won't mean the slightest disrespect."

"You needn't be afraid I shall misunderstand anything they may do or say," said I. "My ideas about them are beginning to crystallise already, as you thought they would. But I'm wondering at them all, still. They're so utterly new to me, so absolutely different from any types we have or could have at home."

"What would your mother the d.u.c.h.ess think of them--now, honour bright?

Don't dream you'll hurt my feelings because they're my cousins and we come of the same stock."

I thought for a minute, and then I said:

"Mother would begin to patronise them graciously at first, as if they could be cla.s.sified with our farmers--I mean, the peasant ones, not the younger-son or poor-gentleman kind. When she found she couldn't, she would be inclined to resent it. Then, at last, when a dim, puzzled inkling of the truth came into her head, and she found out that they knew as much as she about books and politics and all sorts of things--oh, I can hardly fancy exactly what she would feel; but I'd trust Mr. and Mrs. Trowbridge or anyone like them not to appear at a disadvantage with her, whatever she did with them. They wouldn't have self-consciousness enough to be overawed by her, though she can be so dreadfully alarming. Why, Mr. Brett, in a way I believe they're like _Us_--more like us, really, deep down and far back, than a good many enormously rich people I met at Newport, who think no end of themselves and live in palaces, and know Royalties abroad. Just as I said once to Sally--Miss Woodburn--_we_ take ourselves for granted, and then don't make any more fuss or bother about our manners or whether we're going to do the right thing or not. But a few of the people even in your Four Hundred don't seem quite easy in their minds about themselves. I've never seen anything in big houses at home, where I've been with Mother or Vic, to come near the luxury of theirs, yet several I've met can't seem to relax and look thoroughly comfortable, as if they really liked it. They don't loll about as we do; they only pretend to loll, because it's in their part in the play they're acting--oh, such a smart, society kind of play, with lots of changes of dress and scene in every act. They build castles because it's the smartest thing they can do, and because grand people always did it a long time ago. Of course, in old times you had to live in them and couldn't have nice seaside cottages with balconies, because if you did your enemies shot off your head, or poured boiling oil on you; but nowadays they merely say horrid things behind your back, and it's just play-acting to build new ones.

People talk about a man being 'worth' so many millions, as if it didn't matter what else he's worth, and they seem to be worrying a lot about themselves. Now, I can't imagine your cousins doing that. They just take themselves for granted, as we do in England. Their behaviour is like the air they breathe, and as much a part of themselves as that air is when it's in their lungs. There's a kind of invisible bond between our kind of people at home and people like these, I think, if you come to study it. Partly, it's from having all one's natural interests in the country, maybe, and not just going into the country from a town to play. They are real. There's nothing artificial about them."

"You've got hold of things even sooner than I thought you would, Lady Betty," said Mr. Brett, when I stopped, horrified at myself for my long harangue, in which I'd been thinking out things as I went on. "But all the same, though these new types and this pleasant Ohio farm interest you now, you know you'd rather die than be doomed to live among such people and in such a place."

"Perhaps I should be bored after a while, but I don't feel now as if I should. I know I could be happy if I had people with me whom I loved."

"But could you love anyone who----"

"Well, I've got rid of that fellow," said Mr. Trowbridge cheerfully.

"Now we'll have a look around the camp and I'll show you how we tap the maple trees for the sap; then afterwards we'll go into the sugar house where we boil it down and make the maple syrup."

We'd been talking so earnestly that we hadn't heard him come up, and I felt quite dazed for a minute.

He explained everything to us, or rather to me, for Mr. Brett knew all about it beforehand. Then we had a long walk over the hills, which are billowy and wooded, like Surrey, and when we came back Mr. Trowbridge took me to the beehives to get some honey and show me what a queen bee is like. He gave me a hat with a mosquito-net veil and put on one himself. Then he opened a hive, and when I wasn't a bit nervous, because I trusted him, he said, "I tell you what it is, Lady Betty, you're a trump. I shouldn't be surprised if there isn't something in blood after all."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "_Mr. Trowbridge took me to the beehives to get some honey and show me what a queen bee is like_"]

I was pleased, for I don't think that he or any of the others at the Valley Farm are the kind to say nice things to you unless they really mean them.

After we had done all this sight-seeing, it was past five o'clock, and I was longing for tea. "We shall have it soon now," I said to myself, as we sat on the side verandah on benches and rocking-chairs, fanning ourselves with palm-leaf fans. Mrs. Trowbridge and the girls had changed their dresses while we were away, and put on white ones, fresh and nice, though the plainest of the plain--except Ide, who had a pink Alsatian bow in her hair and a flowered sash. I think they must have washed their faces with yellow kitchen soap, too, for they were so incredibly clean and polished that the green of the waving trees seemed to be reflected in their complexion in little sheens and shimmers. I don't suppose it would have occurred to them to dust off the shine with powder, as Mrs. Trowbridge and pretty Patty seem to have no vanity; or perhaps they would consider it wicked.

They all sat and rocked, but n.o.body said anything about tea.