The Intoxicated Ghost Part 6

It was well on toward sunset when Claymore reached the mountain village where Celia was staying with a party of friends. All the hours of his ride in the cars he had been reviewing his relations toward her. With his imaginative temperament he was sure to exaggerate the gravity of the situation, and he was firmly convinced that by the destruction of the portrait he had virtually renounced his betrothed. He recalled jealously the many signs Celia had given of her interest in her cousin, and he settled himself in the theory that only Ralph's boyishness and apparent want of character had prevented her cousin from winning her love.

Looking back over the summer and recalling how Thatcher had advanced in manliness, how his character had developed, and Celia's constant appreciation of his progress, Claymore could not but conclude, with an inward groan, that although she was pledged to him, her affection was really given to his rival.

Whether Celia was aware of the true state of her feelings, Tom could not determine. Her silence of the last fortnight had perplexed and tormented him; and he felt sure that in this time she could not have failed to reflect deeply upon the situation. He believed, however whimsical such a theory might seem, that his only chance of holding her was by bringing home to her the dark side of Ralph's character, as he was convinced he had been the means of showing her the best traits of her cousin. The effect of the portraits had become to him a very real and a very important factor in the case, and although he was at heart too good to regret that he had destroyed the second picture, he was not without a feeling of self-pity that fate had forced upon him the destruction of his own hopes. The logical reflection that, if his ideas were true, he had himself chosen to take up the weapon by which he was in the end wounded, did not occur to him, and would probably have afforded him small consolation if it had.

A servant directed him down a wood-path which led to a small cascade, where he was told he should find Miss Sathman. As he came within sound of the falling water, he heard voices, and pressing on, he was suddenly brought to an abrupt halt by recognizing the tones of Ralph Thatcher.

What the young man was saying Tom did not catch, but the reply of Celia came to his ears with cutting distinctness.

"And does it seem to you honorable, Ralph," she said, "to follow me here and talk to me in this way, when you know I am engaged to another man, and he your friend?"

"No man is my friend that takes you away from me!" Thatcher returned hotly. "And besides, I happen to know you have quarrelled with him. You have n't written to him since you came here."

"I have not quarrelled with him," Celia answered. "Oh, Ralph, I have always believed you were so honorable."

"Honorable! honorable!" repeated the other angrily. "Shall I let you go for a whimsical fancy that it is not honorable to speak to you? I have loved you ever since we were children, and you--"

"And I," Miss Sathman interrupted, "have never loved anybody in that way but Tom."

The woodland swam before Claymore's eyes. Instinctively, and hardly conscious what he was doing, he drew himself aside out of the path into the thicket. What more was said, he did not know. He was only aware that a moment or two later Ralph went alone by the place where he lay hidden, and then he rose and went slowly toward the cascade and Celia.

She was sitting with her back toward him, but as she turned at the sound of his footsteps, the look of pain in her eyes changed suddenly into a great joy.

VII

It was nearly a year before Tom told Celia the whole story of the two portraits. The temptation and the effects of his paltering with it were so real in his mind that he could not bring himself to confess until he had made such effort as lay in his power at reparation. He finished the original picture without more sittings, for Ralph, much to the artist's relief, kept away from the studio. Then he left Salem, saying to himself that his presence there might drive Ralph from home, where Tom wished him to remain, that the influence of the face, if it really existed, might help him.

"I do not know," Celia said thoughtfully, "whether the changes in Ralph came from the pictures or from his disappointment; but in either case I can see how real the whole was to you, and I am glad you stood the test; although," she added, smiling fondly upon her husband, "I should have known from the first that you would n't fail."

"But you must acknowledge," Tom responded, replying to the latter portion of her remark by a caress, "that Ralph has come out splendidly in the last year--since he has had that portrait to look at."

"Yes," she replied musingly, "and he is fast growing up to the picture."

THE KNITTERS IN THE SUN

_The spinsters and the knitters in the sun._ _Twelfth Night_, ii, 4.

The mellow light of the October sun fell full upon the porch of the stately old Grayman house, and the long shadows of the Lombardy poplars pointed to the two silvery haired women who sat there placidly knitting.

The mansion dated back to colonial times. That it had been erected before public sentiment was fully settled in regard to the proper site of the village might be inferred from its lonely position on the banks of the river which flowed through the little town a mile away. The funereal poplars, winter-killed and time-beaten now in their tops, had been in their prime half a century ago, yet they were young when compared to the house before which they stood sentinel. From the small-paned windows of this dwelling Graymans whose tombstones where long sunken and rusted with patient moss had seen British vessels sailing up the river with warlike intent, and on the porch where the women sat knitting peacefully, Captain Maynard Grayman had stood to review his little company of volunteers before leading them against the redcoats, and had spoken to them in fiery words of the patriots whose blood had but a week before been shed at Lexington. The place had still the air of pre-Revolutionary dignity and self-respect.

As the poplars had steadily cast their sombre shadows upon the Graymans, father and son and son's son, as generation after generation they lived and died in the old mansion, so had the Southers no less constantly remained the faithful servants of the family. They had seen the greatness of the masters wane sadly from its original splendors, the family pride alone of all the pristine glories remaining unimpaired; they had striven loyally against the fate which trenched upon the wealth and power of the house; and they had seen money waste, reputation fade, until now even the name was on the verge of extinction, and the family reduced to a bed-ridden old man querulously dwelling in futile dreams of vanished importance and the lovely and lonely daughter who wore out her life beside him.

As the Graymans diminished, the Southers, perhaps from the very energy with which they strove to aid the fallen fortunes of their masters, had waxed continually. The change which keeps from stagnation republican society, abasing the lofty and exalting the lowly, could not have had better ill.u.s.tration than in the two families. It was from no necessity that old Sarah was still the servant of the house; a servant, in truth, with small wage, and one who secretly helped out the broken revenues of her master. Dollar for dollar, she could have out-counted the entire property of her employers; and might have lived where and as she pleased, had she been minded to have servants of her own. In old Sarah's veins, however, flowed the faithful Souther blood, transmitted by generations of traditionary adherents of the Grayman family; and neither the persuasions of her children, who felt the quickening influence of the new order of things, nor the amount of her snug account in the village savings bank, could tempt the steadfast creature from her allegiance. When long ago she had married her cousin, an inoffensive, meek man, dead now a quarter of a century, she had made it a condition that she should not abandon her service; and her position in the Grayman mansion, like her name, had remained practically unchanged by matrimony.

She was a not uncomely figure as she sat in the October sunlight knitting steadily, her hair abundant although silvery, and her figure still alert and erect. From her dark print gown to the tips of her snowy cap-strings she was spotlessly neat, while an air of mingled energy and placidity imparted a certain piquancy to her bearing. Her active fingers plied the bright needles with the deftness of long familiarity, and from time to time her quick glance swept in unconscious inspection over the row of shining tin pans ranged along the porch wall, over the beehives in their shed not far away, robbed now of their honey, over the smooth-flowing river beyond, and over her sister who knitted beside her.

She had the air of one accustomed to responsibility and used to watching sharply whatever went on about her. She bestowed now and then a brief look upon the yellow cat asleep at her feet with his paws doubled under him, and one instinctively felt that were he guilty of any derelictions in relation to the dairy, her sharp eye would have detected it in some tell-tale curl of his whiskers. She scanned with a pa.s.sing regard of combined suspicion and investigation the ruddy line of tomatoes gaining their last touch of red ripeness on the outside of the window-ledge, her expression embodying some vague disapproval of any fruit of which the cultivation was so manifestly an innovation on good old customs. In every movement she displayed a repressed energy contrasting markedly with the manner of the quiet knitter beside her in that strange fashion so often to be found in children of the same parents.

The second woman was little more than a vain shadow from which whatever substance it had ever possessed had long since departed. Hannah West was one of those ciphers to which somebody else is always the significant figure. In her youth she had been the shadow of her sister, and when her husband departed this life, she had merely returned to her first allegiance in becoming the shadow of Sarah Souther once more. She was a tiny, faded creature, who came from her home in the village to visit her sister upon every possible occasion, much as a pious devotee might make a pilgrimage to a shrine. She believed so strongly and so absolutely in Sarah that the belief absorbed all the energy of her nature and left her without even the power of having an especial interest in anything else.

What Sarah Souther did, what she thought, what she said, what were the fortunes and what the opinions of her children, with such variations as could be rung on these themes, formed the subject of Mrs. West's conversation, as well as of such transient and vague mental processes as served her in place of thought. The afternoons which she pa.s.sed in aimless, placid gossip with her sister were the only bits of light and color in her monotonous existence, to be dwelt upon in memory with joy as they were looked forward to with delight.

"I d' know," Hannah remarked, after an unusually long interval of silence this afternoon, "what's set me thinkin' so much 'bout George and Miss Edith as I hev' lately. Seems ef things took hold o' me more the older I get."

A new look of intelligence and alertness came into Sarah's face. She knit out the last st.i.tches upon her needle, and looked down over the river, where a little sail-boat was trying to beat up to the village with a breeze so light as to seem the mere ghost of a wind. The story of the hapless loves of her son and Edith Grayman was sure to be touched upon some time in the course of every afternoon when she and Hannah sat together, and she was conscious of having to-day a fresh item to add to the history.

"I had a letter from George yesterday," she said, approaching her news indirectly that the pleasure of telling it might last the longer.

"Did you?" asked Hannah, almost with animation. "I want to know."

"Yes," Sarah answered, a softer look coming into her bright gray eyes.

"Yes, and a good letter it was."

"George was always a master hand at writin'," Hannah responded. "He is a regular mother's son. He would n't tell a lie to save his right hand."

"No," Sarah responded, understanding perfectly that this apparently irrelevant allusion to the veracity of her son had a direct bearing upon the difficulties which had beset his wooing; "when Mr. Grayman asked him if he had been makin' love to Miss Edith, he never flinched a mite. He spoke up like a man. There never was a Souther yet that I ever heard of that 'u'd lie to save himself."

She laid her knitting down upon her lap and fixed upon the little boat a regard which seemed one of the closest attention, yet which saw not the white sloop or the dingy sail with its irregular patch of brown. Some tender memory touched the eternally young motherhood in her aged bosom, and some vision of her absent son shut out from her sense the view of the realities before her.

"He would n't 'a' been his mother's son if he had 'a' lied," Hannah remarked, with a sincerity so evident that it took from the words all suspicion of flattery.

"Or his father's either," Sarah said. "I never set out that Phineas had much go to him, but he was a good man, and he was as true as steel."

"Yes," her sister a.s.sented, as she would have a.s.sented to any proposition laid down by Mrs. Souther, "yes, he was that."

They sat for a moment in silence. Sarah resumed her knitting, and once more became conscious of the lagging sloop.

"That's likely Ben Hatherway's boat," she remarked. "If he don't get on faster, he'll get caught in the turn of the tide and carried out again."

Hannah glanced toward the boat in a perfunctory way, but she was too deeply interested in the theme upon which the talk had touched to let it drop, and her mind was hardly facile enough to change so quickly from one subject to another.

"What did George say?" she asked. "You said it was a good letter."

"Yes," the mother answered, "it was a regular good letter, if I do say it that had n't ought. He's comin' home."

"Comin' home?" echoed Hannah, in a twitter of excitement. "I want to know! Comin' home himself?"

"I dunno what you mean by comin' home himself," Sarah replied, with a mild facetiousness born of her joy at the news the letter had brought; "but 't ain't at all likely he'll come home n.o.body else. He's comin', 't any rate. It'll be curious to see how him and Miss Edith 'll act. It'll be ten years since they said good-by to one another, and ten years is considerable of a spell."

"Happen he'll be changed," Hannah observed. "Ten years does most usually change folks more or less."

"Happen," Sarah responded, in a graver and lower tone, "he'll find her changed."

As if to give opportunity for the testing of the truth of this remark, the slight figure of Edith Grayman at that moment appeared at the head of the steep and crooked stairway which led from the chambers of the old house into the kitchen close by the porch door. She was a woman whose face had lost the first freshness of youth, although her summers counted but twenty-seven. Perhaps it was that the winters of her life had been so much the longer seasons. There was in her countenance that expression of mild melancholy which is the heritage from generations of ancestors who have sadly watched the wasting of race and fortune, and the even more bitter decay of the old order of things to which they belong.

She was slender and graceful in shape, with a stately and gracious carriage, and the air of the patrician possibly a faint shade too marked in her every motion.

As she came slowly down the time-stained stairway, her fair hair twisted high upon her shapely head, her lips slightly pressed together, and her violet eyes pensive and introspective, Edith might have pa.s.sed for the ghost of the ancestress whose rejuvenated gown of pale blue camlet she wore.