The Ghost Girl Part 13

"Impulsive. If I wasn't sitting here in broad daylight, I'd fancy it was Juliet Mascarene. What makes you so like her? It's not the face so much, though the family likeness runs strong, still, the face is different, though like--It's just you yourself--well, I'm sure I don't know, seems to me there's a lot of things hid from us. Look at the Pringles, Anthony's family, the ones that live in Tradd Street. If you put their noses together, they'd reach to Legare Street. It runs in the family. Julian Pringle, he died in '70, he was just the same. Now why should a long nose run through a family like that, or a bad temper, or the colour of hair? I don't know. The world's a puzzle and the older one grows, the more it puzzles one."

After dinner, Miss Pinckney ordered Phyl to put on her hat and they started out for a drive.

Every day at five o'clock, weather permitting, Miss Pinckney took an airing. She was one of the sights of Charleston, she, and the dark chestnut horses driven by Abraham the coloured coachman, and the barouche in which she drove; a carriage of other times, one of those deathless conveyances turned out in Long Acre in the days when varnish was varnish and hand labour had not been ousted by machinery. It was painted in a basket-work pattern, the pattern peculiar to the English Royal carriages, and the whole turn-out had an excellence and a style of its own--a thing unpurchasable as yesterday.

They drove in the direction of the Battery and here they drew up to look at the view. On one side of them stood the great curving row of mansions facing the sea, old Georgian houses and houses more modern, yet without offence, set in gardens where the palmetto leaves shivered in the sea wind and the pink mimosa mixed its perfume with the salt-scented air. On the other side lay the sea. Afternoon, late afternoon, is the time of all times to visit this s.p.a.cious and sunlit place. It is then that the old ghosts return, if ever they return, to discuss the news brought by the last packet from England, the doings of Mr. Pitt, the Paris fashions.

Looking seaward they would see no change in the changeless sea and little change in the city if they turned their eyes that way.

Miss Pinckney got out and they walked a bit, inspecting the guns, each with its bra.s.s plate and its story.

Far away in the haze stood Fort Sumter,--a fragment of history, a sea warrior of the past, voiceless and guarding forever the viewless. It may have been some recollection of the Brighton front and of the great harbour of Kingstown with the sun upon it, and all this seemed vaguely familiar to Phyl, pleasantly familiar and homely. She breathed the sea air deeply and then, as she turned, glancing towards the land, a recollection came to her of the story she had been reading that evening in the library at Kilgobbin--"The Gold Bug." It was near here that Legrand had found the treasure. He had come to Charleston to buy the mattocks and picks--no, it was Jupp the negro who had come to buy them.

She turned to Miss Pinckney.

"Did you ever read a story called 'The Gold Bug' by Edgar Allan Poe?" she asked. "It is about a place near here--Sullivan's Island--that's it--I remember now."

"Why, I knew him," said Miss Pinckney.

"Knew Edgar Allan Poe!" said Phyl.

"I knew him when I was a child and I have sat on his knee and I can see his face--what a face it was! and the coat he wore--it had a velvet collar--his teeth were beautiful, and his hair--beautiful glossy hair it was, but he was not handsome as people use that expression, he was extraordinary, such eyes--and the most wonderful voice in the world. I'm seventy-five years of age and he died in October '49, and I met him three years before he died, so you see I was a pretty small child. It was at Fordham. He'd just taken a cottage there for his wife, who was ailing with consumption, and my aunt, Mary Pinckney, who was a friend of the Osgoods, took me there. It must have been summer for I remember a bird hanging in a cage in the sunshine, a bob-o'-link it was, he had caught it in the woods.

"Dear Lord! I wonder where that summer day's gone to, and the bob-o'-link--'pears to me we aren't even memories, for memories live and we don't."

They were walking along, Abraham slowly following with the carriage, and Miss Pinckney was walking in an exultant manner as though she saw nothing about her, as though she were treading air. Phyl had unconsciously set free a train of thought in the mind of Miss Pinckney, a train that always led to an explosion, and this is exactly how it happened and what she said.

"But his memory will live. Look right round you, do you see his statue?"

"No," said Phyl, sweeping the view. "Where is it?"

"Just so, where is it? It's not here, it's not in N'York, it's not in Baltimore, it's not in Philadelphia, it's not in Boston. The one real splendid writing man that America has produced she's ashamed to put up a statue to. Why? Because he drank! Why, G.o.d bless my soul, Grant drank. No, it wasn't drink, it was Griswold. The man who hated him, the man who crucified his reputation and sold the remains for thirty pieces of silver to a publisher, Griswold, Rufus Griswold--Judas Griswold that was his real name, and he hid it--"

Miss Pinckney had lowered her parasol in her anger, she shut it with a snap and then shot it up again; as she did so an automobile driven by a girl and which was approaching them, pa.s.sed, and a young man seated by the girl raised his hat.

It was Richard Pinckney.

The girl was a very pretty brunette. This thing was too much for Miss Pinckney in her present temper; all her anger against Griswold seemed suddenly diverted to the automobile. She snorted.

"There goes Richard with Venetia Frances Rhett," said she. "Ought to be ashamed of herself driving along the Battery in that outrageous thing; goodness knows, they're bad enough driven by men, scaring people to death and killing dogs and chickens, without girls taking to them--"

She stared after the car, then signalling to Abraham, she got into the barouche, Phyl followed her and they continued their drive.

That evening after supper Miss Pinckney's mind warmed to thoughts of the good old days when motor-cars were undreamed of, and stirred up by the recollection of Edgar Allan Poe, discharged itself of reminiscences worth much gold could they have been taken down by a stenographer.

She was sitting with Phyl in the piazza, for the night was warm, and whilst a big southern moon lit the garden, she let her mind stray over the men and women who had made American literature in the '50's and '60's, many of whom she had known when young.

Estelle Anna Lewis of Baltimore, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Cullen Bryant, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Cornelius Mathews, Frances Sargent Osgood, N. P. Willis, Laughton Osborn. She had known Lowell and Longfellow, yet her mind seemed to cling mostly to the lesser people, writers in the _Southern Literary Messenger_, the _Home Journal_, the _Mirror_ and the _Broadway Journal_.

People well-known in their day and now scarcely remembered, yet whose very names are capable of evoking the colour and romance of that fascinating epoch beyond and around the Civil War.

"They're all dead and gone," said she, "and folk nowadays don't seem to trouble about the best of them, or remember their lines, yet there's nothing they write now that's as good--I remember poor Thomas Ward.

'Flaccus' was the name he wrote under, a thin skeleton of a man always with his head in the air and his mind somewhere else, used to write in the _Knickerbocker Journal_; I heard him recite one of his things.

"'And, straining, fastened on her lips a kiss, That seemed to suck the life blood from her heart.'

"That stuck in my head, mostly, I expect, because Thomas Ward didn't look as if he'd ever kissed a girl, but they are good lines and a lot better than they write nowadays."

The wind had risen a bit and was stirring in the leaves of the magnolias, white carnations growing near the sun dial shook their ruffles in the moonlight, and from near and far away came the sounds of Charleston, voices, the sound of traffic and then, a thread of tune tying moonbeams, magnolias, carnations and cherokee roses in a great southern bunch, came the notes of a banjo, plunk, plunk, and a voice from somewhere away in the back premises, the voice of a negro singing one of the old Plantation songs.

Just a s.n.a.t.c.h before some closing door cut the singer off, but enough to make Phyl raise her head and listen, listen as though a whole world vaguely guessed, a world forgotten yet still warm and loving, youthful and sunlit, were striving to reach her and speak to her--As though Charleston the mysterious city that had greeted her first in Meeting Street were trying to tell her of things delightful, once loved, once known and forever vanished.

As she lay awake that night with the moonlight showing through the blinds, the whole of that strange day came before her in pictures: the face of Frances Rhett troubled her, yet she did not know in the least why; it seemed part of the horribleness of automobiles and the anger of Miss Pinckney and the tribulations of Edgar Allan Poe.

Then the fantastic band of forgotten _literati_ trooped before her, led by "Flaccus," the man who didn't look as if he had ever kissed a girl, yet who wrote:

"And, straining, fastened on her lips a kiss, That seemed to suck the life blood from her heart."

CHAPTER IV

Phyl awoke to the early morning sunlight and the sounds of Charleston.

The chimes of St. Michael's were striking six and through the summery sunlit air carried by the sea wind stirring the curtains came the cries of the streets and the rumbling of early morning carts.

Oh, those negro cries! the cry of the crab-seller, the orange vendor, the man who sells "monkey meat" dolorous, long drawn out, lazy, you do not know the South till you have heard them.

The sound of a mat being shaken and beaten on the piazza, adjoining that on which her window opened came now, and two voices in dispute.

"Mistress Pinckney she told me to tell you--she mos' sholey did."

"Go wash yo' face, yo' coloured trash, c.u.mmin' here wid yo' orders--skip out o' my piazza--'clar' to goodness I dunno what's c.u.mmin' to n.i.g.g.e.rs dese days."

Then Miss Pinckney's voice as from an upper window:

"Dinah! Seth! what's that I hear? Get on with your work the pair of you and stop your chattering. You hear me?"

When Phyl came down Richard Pinckney was in the garden smoking a cigarette and gathering some carnations.

"They're for aunt," said he, "to propitiate her for my being late last night. I wasn't in till one. I'm worse even than you, you see, and the next time you are out till eleven and I let you in and grumble at you, you can hit back. Have a flower."

He gave her the finest in his bunch and Phyl put it in her belt. If she had any doubt as to the sincerity of his welcome his manner this morning ought to have set her mind at rest.

She stood looking at him as he tied the stalks of the flowers together and he was worth looking at, a fresh, bright figure, the very incarnation of youth and health and one might almost say innocence. Clear eyed, well-groomed, good to look upon.

"I generally pick a flower and put it on her plate," said he, "but this morning she shall have a whole bunch--hope you slept all right?"