The Ghost Girl Part 28

"That night. I went into the garden and he came out from amongst some bushes."

"Umph-- It's the family disease-- Well, if I get my fingers in his hair I promise to cure him. He wants curing. He'll just apologise, and that before he's an hour older. Where's he staying?"

"No, no," said Phyl, "you mustn't ever say I told you. I don't mind. I would have said nothing only for Mr. Pinckney."

"You mean Richard?"

"Yes."

"What has he to do with it?"

Phyl did not hesitate nor turn her head away, though her cheeks were burning.

"Silas Grangerson thinks I care for Mr. Pinckney, he said he would be even with him. I know he intends doing him some injury. I feel it--and I want you to warn him to be careful--without telling him, of course, what I have said."

Miss Pinckney was silent for a moment. She had already matched Phyl and Richard in her mind. She had come to a very full understanding of her character, and she would have given all the linen at Vernons for the certainty that those two cared for one another.

Frances Rhett rode her like an obsession. Life and nature had given Maria Pinckney an acquired and instinctive knowledge of character, and in the union of Richard and Frances Rhett she divined unhappiness, just as a clever seaman divines the unseen ice-berg in the ship's track. She smelt it.

"Phyl," said she, "do you care for Richard?"

The question quickly put and by those lips caused no confusion in the girl's mind.

"No," said she. "At least-- Oh, I don't know how to explain it--I care for everything here, for Vernons and everything in it, it is all like a story that I love--Juliet and Vernons and the past and the present. He's part of it too. I want to have it always just as it is. I didn't tell you, but when that happened in the cemetery, I was looking at her grave; you never told me it was there with his. I came on it by accident and she was seeming to speak to me out of it. I was thinking of her and him, when--that happened. It was just as though some one had struck _her_ and him. I can't explain exactly."

"Strange," said Miss Pinckney.

She turned and began to put away with a thoughtful air the linen she had been examining. Then she said:

"I'll tell Richard and warn him to keep away from that fool, not that there is any danger--but it is just as well to warn him."

Phyl helped to put away the linen and then she went upstairs to her room.

She felt easier in her mind and taking her seat on a cane couch by the window she fell into a book. The History of the Civil War. This bookworm had always one sure refuge in trouble--books.

Books! Have we ever properly recognised the mystery and magic that lies in that word, the magic that allows a man to lead ever so many other lives than his own, to be other people, to travel where he has never been, to laugh with folk he has never seen, to know their sorrows as he can never know the sorrows of "real people"--and their joys.

Phyl had been Robinson Crusoe and Jane Eyre, Monte Cristo and Jo.

History which is so horribly unreal because it deals with real people had never appealed to her, but the history of the Civil War was different from others.

It had to do with Vernons.

CHAPTER VIII

After luncheon that day Phyl, having nothing better to do, went up to her room and resumed her book.

Richard Pinckney had not come in to luncheon, he rarely returned home for the meal, yet all the same, his absence made her uneasy. Suppose Silas Grangerson had met him--suppose they had fought? She called to recollection Silas's face just after she had struck him, the insane malevolence in it, the ugliness that had suddenly destroyed his good looks. Silas was capable of anything, he would never forgive that blow and he would try to return it, of that she felt certain. He could not avenge himself on her but he could on Richard. He imagined that she cared for Richard Pinckney. Did she? The question came to her again in Miss Pinckney's voice--she did not even try to answer it. As though it irritated her, she tossed the book she was holding in her hand to the floor and lay with her eyes fixed on the lace window curtains that were moving slightly to the almost imperceptible stirring of the air from outside.

Beyond the curtains lay the golden afternoon. Sometimes a bird shadow, the loveliest thing in shadow-land, would cross the curtains, sometimes a note of song or the sound of a bird's flight from tree to tree would tell that there was a garden down below. The street beyond the garden and the city beyond the street could be heard, but were little more evident to the senses than those things in a picture which we guess but cannot see.

Phyl, allowing her mind to be led by these faint and fugitive sounds, fell into a reverie. Then she fell asleep and straight way began to dream.

She dreamed that Miss Pinckney was in the room moving about dusting things, a duster in one hand, an open letter in the other. There was troublous news of some sort in the letter, but what it was Miss Pinckney would not say. Then the room turned into the piazza, where Juliet Mascarene was standing with her hands on the rail, looking down on the garden.

She seemed to know Juliet quite well and was not a bit surprised to see her there; she touched her but she did not turn. Phyl slipped her arm round Juliet's waist and stood with her looking at the garden, and as they stood thus the most curious dream feeling came upon her, a feeling of duality, Juliet was herself, she was Juliet. Then as this feeling died away Juliet vanished and she was standing alone on the piazza.

Then she half woke, falling asleep again to be awakened fully by a sound.

A sound, deep, sonorous, now rhythmical, now confused. It was the sound of guns.

She had heard it once long ago on the Brighton coast, and now as she sat up every nerve and muscle tense, and her mind filled with a vague dread, it came so heavily that the walls of Vernons shook.

She ran on to the piazza. There was no one there. The garden gate was wide open, there was no one in the garden, and she noticed, though without any astonishment, that some one had been at work in the garden altering the paths. A white b.u.t.terfly was flittering above the flowers, and a red bird leaving the magnolia tree by the gate, flew, a splash of colour, across to the garden beyond.

These things she saw but did not heed. She was under the spell of the guns, the sound rose against the brightness of the day as a black cloud rises across the sky or a sorrow across one's life, insistent, rhythmical, a pall of sound now billowing, now sinking, as though blown under by a wind.

She sought the piazza stairs and next moment was in the garden, then she found herself in the street.

Meeting Street was almost deserted. On the opposite side two stout, elderly and rather quaintly dressed gentlemen were walking along in the direction of the station, but away down towards the Charleston Hotel there was a crowd.

The sight of this crowd filled her with terror, a terror remote from reason, an impersonal terror, as though the deadliest peril were threatening not herself but all things and everything she loved.

She ran, and as she drew close to the striving ma.s.s of people she saw men bearing stretchers.

They were pushing their way through the crowd, making to enter a house on the right.

Then came a voice. The voice of one man shouting to another.

"Young Pinckney's killed."

The words pierced her like a sword, she felt herself falling. Falling through darkness to unconsciousness, from which she awoke to find herself lying on the cane couch in her room.

She sat up.

The curtains were still stirring gently to the faint wind from outside, on the floor lay the history of the Civil War open just as she had cast it there before falling asleep. The sound of the guns had ceased, and nothing was to be heard but the stray accustomed sounds of the city and the street.

She struggled to her feet and came out on the piazza. The garden gate was closed and the garden was unaltered. She had dreamt all that, then.

For a minute she tried to persuade herself that it was a dream, then she gave up the attempt. That was no dream. Everything in it was four square.

She could still see the shadows of the two gentlemen who had been walking on the other side of the street, shadows cast clearly before them by the sun.

The first part of her experience had been a dream, all that about Miss Pinckney and Juliet. But right from the sound of the guns all had been reality. She had seen, touched, heard.

Glancing back into the room she saw the book lying on the floor, the sight of it was like a crystallising thread for thought.