The Ghost Girl Part 14

"Rather," said Phyl, "I never sleep much the first night in a new place--but somehow--oh, I don't know how to express it--but nothing here seems new."

"Nothing is," said he laughing, "it's all as old as the hills--you like it, don't you?"

"It's not a question of liking--of course I like it, who could help liking it--it's more than that. It's a feeling I have that I will either love it or hate it, and I don't know which yet, all sorts of things come back to me here, you see, my mother knew the place--do people remember what their mothers and fathers knew, I wonder? But, if you understood me, it's not so much remembering as feeling. All yesterday it seemed to me that I had only to turn some corner and come upon something waiting for me, something I knew quite well, and the smells and sounds and things are always reminding me of something--you know how it is when you have forgotten a name and when it's lying just at the back of your mind--that's how I feel here, about nearly everything--strange, isn't it?"

"Oh, I don't know," said the practical Pinckney. "This place is awfully English for one thing, sure to remind you of a lot of things in Ireland and England, and then there's of course the fact that you are partly American, but I don't see why you should ever hate it."

"_Indeed_, I didn't mean that," said she flushing up at the thought that in trying to express herself she had made such a blunder. "I meant--I meant, that this something about the place that is always reminding me of itself might make me hate _it_."

"Or love it?"

"Yes, but I can't explain--the place itself no one could hate, you must have thought me rude."

"Not a bit--not the least little bit in the world. Well, I believe you'll come to love it, not hate it."

"It," said Phyl. "I don't know that, because I don't know what it is--this something that is always peeping round corners at me yet hiding itself."

"_Richard_!" came Miss Pinckney's voice from the piazza where she had just appeared, "smoking cigarettes before breakfast, how often have I told you I won't have you smoking before breakfast--why, G.o.d bless my soul, what are you doing with all those carnations?"

He flung the cigarette-end away, but she refused to kiss him on account of the tobacco fumes, though she took the flowers.

Cigarettes, like telephones, automobiles, and the memory of Edgar Allan Poe, formed a subject upon which once started Miss Pinckney was hard to check, and whilst she poured out the tea, she pursued it.

"Dr. Cotton it was who told me, the one who used to live in Tradd Street, he was a relative of Dr. Garden the man that gave his name to that flower they call the gardenia--had it sent him from somewhere in the South, but I'm sure I don't know where--New Orleans, I think, but it doesn't matter.

I was saying about Dr. Cotton, _old_ Dr. Cotton of Tradd Street, he told me that the truth about young William Pringle's death was that he was black when he died, from cigarette smoking, black as a crow. Used to smoke before breakfast, used to smoke all day, used to smoke in his sleep, I b'lieve. Couldn't get rid of the pesky habit and died clinging to it, black as a crow. I can't abide the things. Your father used to smoke Bull Durham in a corn cob, or a cigar, he'd a' soon have smoked one of those cigarettes of yours as soon as he'd have been caught doing tatting. Don't tell me, there's no manhood in them, it's just vice in thimble-fulls. I'd much sooner see a man lying healthily under the table once in a way than always half fuddled, and I'd sooner be poisoned out by a green cigar now and then, than always having that nasty sickly cigarette smell round the place."

"But good gracious, Aunt, I'm not a cigarette smoker, only once and away and at odd times."

"I wasn't talking about you so much as the young men of to-day, and the young women, they're the worst, for they encourage the others to make fools of themselves, and if they're not smoking themselves they're sucking candy. Candy sucking and cigarette smoking is the ruin of the States.

Those Rhett girls _live_ on candy, and they look it--pasty faces."

"Why!" said he, "what grudge have you got against the Rhetts now, Aunt--it's as bad to take a girl's complexion away as a man's character--what have the Rhetts been doing to you?"

Miss Pinckney did not seem to hear the question for a moment, then she said, speaking as if to some invisible person:

"That Frances Rhett may be reckoned the belle of Charleston, that's what I heard old Mr. Outhwaite call her, but she's a belle I wouldn't care to have tied round my neck. Belle! She's no more a belle than I am, there are hundreds of prettier girls between here and the Battery, but she's one of those sort that have the knack of setting young men against each other and making them fight for her; she's labelled herself as a prize, which she isn't. I declare to goodness the world frightens me at times, the way I see fools going about labelled as clever men, and women your grandfathers wouldn't have cast an eye at going about labelled as beauties. I do believe if I was to give myself out as a beauty to-morrow I'd have half the young idiots in Charleston after me, believing me."

"They're after you already," said Pinckney, "only yesterday I heard young Reggy Calhoun saying--"

"I know," said Miss Pinckney, "and I want no more of your impudence. Now take yourself off if you've finished your breakfast, for Phyl and I have work to do."

He got up and went off laughing by way of the piazza and they could hear his cheery voice in the garden talking to the old negro gardener.

Miss Pinckney's eyes softened. She was fiddling with a spoon and when she spoke she seemed speaking to it, turning it about as if to examine its pattern all the time.

"I don't know what mothers with boys feel like, but I do want to see that boy safe and married before I go. He's just the sort to be landed in unhappiness; he is, most surely; well, I don't know, there's no use in warning young folk, you may spank 'em for stealing the jam but you can't spank 'em from fooling with the wrong sort of girl."

Miss Pinckney had talked the night before of Phyl's father and had proposed taking her this morning to the Magnolia cemetery to see the grave. She broke off the conversation suddenly as this fact strayed into her mind, and, rising up, invited Phyl to follow her to the kitchen premises where she had orders to give before starting.

"I always look after my own house," said she, "and always will. Fine ladies nowadays sit in their drawing-rooms and ring their bells for the servants to rob them and they aren't any more respected. That's what makes the Charleston negro the impudentest lump of blackness under the sun, that and knowing they're emanc.i.p.ated. They've got to look on themselves as part of the Heavenly Host. Well, I'll have no emanc.i.p.ated rubbish in my house, and the consequence is I never lose a servant and I never get impudence.

They'll all get a pension when they're too old to work, and good food and good pay whilst they're working, and I've said to them 'you're no more emanc.i.p.ated than I am, we're all slaves to our duty and the only difference between now and the old days is I can't sell you--and if you were idle enough to make me want to sell you there's no one would buy such rubbish nowadays.' Half the trouble is that people these times don't know how to talk to coloured folk, and the other half is that they don't want to talk to them."

She led the way down pa.s.sages to the great kitchen, stonebuilt, clean and full of sunlight. The door was open on to the yard and through an open side door one could get a glimpse of the scullery, the great washing up sink, generations old, and worn with use, and above it the drying dresser.

There were no new-fangled cooking inventions at Vernons, everything was done at an open range of the good old fashion still to be found in many an English country house.

Miss Pinckney objected to "baked meat" and the joints at Vernons were roast, swinging from a clockwork Jack and basted all the time with a long metal ladle.

By the range this morning was seated an old coloured woman engaged in cutting up onions. This was Prue the oldest living thing in Vernons and perhaps in Charleston; she had been kitchen maid before Miss Pinckney was born, then cook, and now, long past work, she was just kept on.

Twenty-five years ago she had been offered a pension and a cottage for herself but she refused both. She wanted to die where she was, so she said. So they let her stay, doing odd jobs and bossing the others just as though she were still mistress of the kitchen--as in fact she was. She had become a legend and no one knew her exact age, she was creepin' close to a hundred, and her memory which carried her back to the slave days was marvellous in its retentiveness.

She had cooked a dinner for Jeff Davis when he was a guest at Vernons, she could still hear the guns of the Civil War, so she said, and the Mascarene family history was her Bible.

She looked down on the Pinckneys as trash beside the Mascarenes, and interlopers, and this att.i.tude and point of view though well known to Miss Pinckney was not in the least resented by her.

But during the last few years this old lady's intellect had been steadily coming under eclipse; still insisting on doing little jobs in a futile sort of way, silence had been creeping upon her so that she rarely spoke now, and when she did, by chance, her words revealed the fact that her mind was dwelling in the past.

Rachel, the cook, a st.u.r.dy coloured woman with her head bound up in an isabelle-coloured handkerchief was standing by the kitchen table on which she was resting the fore-finger of her left hand, whilst with the right she was turning over some fish that had just been sent in from the fishmonger's. She seemed in a critical mood, but what she said to Miss Pinckney was lost to Phyl whose attention was attracted by a chuckling sound from near the range.

It was Prue.

The old woman at sight of Phyl had dropped the knife and the onion on which she had been engaged. She was now seated, hands on knees, chuckling and nodding to the girl, then, scarcely raising her right hand from her knee, she made a twiddling movement with the fore-finger as if to say, "come here--come here--I have something to tell you."

Phyl glanced at Miss Pinckney who was so taken up with what Rachel was saying about the fish that she noticed nothing. Then she looked again at Prue and, unable to resist the invitation, came towards her. The old woman caught her by the arm so that she had to bend her head.

"Miss Julie," whispered Prue, "Ma.s.sa Pinckney told me tell yo' he be at de gate t'night same time 'slas' night. Done you let on 's I told yo'," she gave the arm a pinch and relapsed into herself chuckling whilst Phyl stood with a little shiver, half of relief at her escape from that bony clutch, half of dread--a vague dread as though she had come in contact with something uncanny.

She came to the table again and stood without looking at Prue, whilst Miss Pinckney completed her orders, then, that lady, having finished her business and casting an eye about the place on the chance of finding any dirt or litter, saw Prue and asked how she was doing.

"Well, miss, she's doin' fa'r," replied Rachel, "but I'm t'inking she's not long fore de new Jerusalem. Sits didderin' dere 'n' smokin' her pipe, 'n' lays about her wid her stick times, fancyin' there'er dogs comin' into de kitchen."

"A dog bit her once way back in the '60's," said Miss Pinckney; "they used to keep dogs here then. She don't want for anything?"

"Law no, miss, _she_ done want for nothin'; look at her now laffin' to herself. Haven't seen her do that way dis long time. Hi, Prue, what yo'

laffin' at?"

Prue, instead of answering leant further forward hiding her face without checking her merriment.

"Crazy," said Miss Pinckney, "but it's better to be laughing crazy than crying crazy like some folk--here's a quarter and get her some candy."

She put the coin on the table and marched off followed by Phyl.

"She wanted to tell me something," said Phyl as they were driving to the cemetery; "she beckoned me to her and took hold of my arm and whispered something."

"What did she say?"

Phyl, somehow, could not bring herself to betray that crazy confidence.