The Voice of the People Part 8

Eugenia rose obediently and went into the hall. She had learned from her father and the servants not to dispute the authority of Miss Chris, though she yielded to it with a mild surprise at her own docility.

"She don't really manage me," she had once confided to Delphy, the washerwoman, "but I jes' plays that she does."

VI

When Eugenia came downstairs she found the family seated at dinner, Miss Chris and her father beaming upon each other across a dish of fried chicken and a home-cured ham. Bernard was on Miss Chris's right hand, and on the other side of the table Eugenia's seat separated the general from Aunt Griselda, who sat severely b.u.t.tering her toast before a brown earthenware teapot ornamented by a raised design of Rebecca at the well.

Aunt Griselda was a lean, dried-up old lady, with a sharp, curved nose like the beak of a bird, and smoothly parted hair brushed low over her ears and held in place by a tortoise-sh.e.l.l comb. There were deep channels about her eyes, worn by the constant falling of acrid tears, and her cheeks were wrinkled and yellowed like old parchment.

Twenty years ago, when the general had first brought home his young wife, before her buoyancy had faltered, and before the five little head-boards to the five stillborn children had been set up amid the periwinkle in the family graveyard, Aunt Griselda had written from the home of her sister to say that she would stop over at Battle Hall on her way to Richmond.

The general had received the news joyfully, and the best chamber had been made ready by the hospitable hands of his young wife. Delicate, lavender-scented linen had been put on the old tester-bed and curtains of flowered chintz tied back from the window seats. Amelia Battle had placed a bowl of tea-roses upon the dressing table and gone graciously down to the avenue to welcome her guest. From the family carriage Aunt Griselda had emerged soured and eccentric. She had gone up to the best chamber, unpacked her trunks, hung up her bombazine skirts in the closet, ordered green tea and toast, and settled herself for the remainder of her days. That was twenty years ago, and she still slept in the best chamber, and still ordered tea and toast at the table. She had grown sourer with years and more eccentric with authority, but the general never failed to treat her crotchets with courtesy or to open the door for her when she came and went. To the mild complaints of Miss Chris and the protestations of Eugenia he returned the invariable warning: "She is our guest--remember what is due to a guest, my dears."

And when Miss Chris placidly suggested that the privileges of guestship wore threadbare when they were stretched over twenty years, and Eugenia fervently hoped that there were no visitors in heaven, the general responded to each in turn:

"It is the right of a guest to determine the length of his stay, and, as a Virginian, my house is open as long as it has a roof over it."

So Aunt Griselda drank her green tea in acrid silence, turning at intervals to reprove Bernard for taking too large mouthfuls or to request Eugenia to remove her elbows from the table.

To-day, when Eugenia descended, she was gazing stonily into Miss Chris's genial face, and listening constrainedly to a story at which the general was laughing heartily.

"Yes, I never look at these forks of the bead pattern that I don't see Aunt Callowell," Miss Chris was concluding. "She never used any other pattern, and I remember when Cousin Bob Baker once sent her a set of teaspoons with a different border, she returned them to Richmond to be exchanged. Do you remember the time she came to mother's when we were children, Tom? Eugie, will you have breast or leg?"

"I don't think I could have been at home," said the general, his face growing animated, as it always did, in a discussion of old times; "but I do remember once, when I was at Uncle Robert's, they sent me eighteen miles on horseback for the doctor, because Aunt Callowell had such a queer feeling in her side when she started to walk. I can see her now holding her side and saying: 'I can't possibly take a step! Robert, I can't take a step!' And when I brought the doctor eighteen miles from home, on his old gray mare, he found that she'd put a shoe on one foot and a slipper on the other."

The general threw back his head and laughed until the table groaned, while Miss Chris's double chin shook softly over her cameo brooch.

Aunt Griselda wiped her eyes on the border of her handkerchief.

"Aunt Cornelia Callowell was a righteous woman," she murmured. "I never thought that I should hear her ridiculed in the house of her great-nephew. She scalloped me a flannel petticoat with her own hands.

Eugenia, in my day little girls didn't reach for the b.u.t.ter. They waited until it was handed to them."

Congo, the butler, rushed to Eugenia's a.s.sistance, and the general shook his finger at her and formed the word "guest" with his mouth. Miss Chris changed the subject by begging Aunt Griselda to have a wing of chicken.

"I don't believe in so much dieting," she said cheerfully. "I think your nerves would be better if you ate more. Just try a brown wing."

"I know my nerves are bad," Aunt Griselda rejoined, still wiping her eyes, "though it is hard to be accused of a temper before my own nephew.

But I know I am a burden, and I have overstayed my welcome. Let me go."

"Why, Aunt Griselda?" remonstrated Miss Chris in hurt tones. "You know I didn't accuse you of anything. I only meant that you would feel better if you didn't drink so much tea and ate more meat--"

"I am not too old to take a hint," replied Aunt Griselda. "I haven't reached my dotage yet, and I can see when I am a burden. Here, Congo, you may put my teapot away."

"O Lord!" gasped the general tragically; and rising to the occasion, he said hurriedly: "By the way, Chris, they told me at the post-office to-day that old Dr. Smith was dead. It was only last week that I met him on his way to town with his niece's daughter, and he told me that he had never been in better health in his life."

"Dear me!" exclaimed Miss Chris, holding a large spoonful of raspberries poised above the dish to which she was helping. "Why, old Dr. Smith attended me forty years ago when I had measles. I remember he made me lie in bed with blankets over me, though it was August, and he wouldn't let me drink anything except hot flax-seed tea. They say all that has been changed in this generation--"

"Leave me plenty of room for cream, Aunt Chris," broke in Bernard, with an anxious eye on Miss Chris's absent-minded manipulations. She reached for the round, old silver pitcher, and poured the yellow cream on the sugared berries without pausing in her soft, monotonous flow of words.

"But even in those days Dr. Smith was behind the times, and he has been so ever since. He used to say that chloroform was invented by infidels, and he would not let them give it to his son, Lawrence, when he broke his leg on the threshing machine. It was a mania with him, for, when I was nursing in the hospitals during the war, he told me with his own lips that he believed the Lord was on our side because we didn't have chloroform."

"He had a good many odd ideas," said the general, "but he is dead now, poor man."

"He raised up my dear father when he was struck down with paralysis,"

murmured Aunt Griselda.

When dinner was over the general returned to the front porch, and Eugenia and the puppy went with Bernard to the orchard to look for green apples.

They started out in single file; Bernard, a bright-faced, snub-nosed boy with a girlish mouth, a little in advance, Eugenia following, and the puppy at her heels. On the way across the meadow, where myriads of gra.s.shoppers darted with a whirring noise beneath the leaves of coa.r.s.e mullein plants or the slender, unopened pods of milkweed, the puppy made sudden desperate skirmishes into the tangled pathside, pointing ineffectually at the heavy-legged insects, his red tongue lolling and his short tail wagging. Up the steep ascent of the orchard a rocky trail ran, bordered by a rail fence. From the point of the hill one could see the adjoining country unrolled like a map, olive heights melting into emerald valleys, bare clearings into luxuriant crops, running a chromatic scale from the dry old battlefields surrounding Kingsborough to the arable "bottoms" beside the enrichening river.

After an unsuccessful search for cherries Bernard climbed a tree where summer apples hung green, and tossed the fruit to Eugenia, who held up her blue skirt beneath the overhanging boughs. The puppy, having dodged in astonishment a stray apple, went off after the silvery track of a snail.

"That's enough," called Bernard presently, and he descended and filled his pockets from Eugenia's lap. "They set my teeth on edge, anyway. Got any salt?"

Eugenia drew a small folded envelope from her pocket. Then she threw away her apple and pointed to the little brook at the foot of the hill.

"There's that red-winged blackbird in the bulrushes again. I believe it's got a nest."

And they started in a run down the hillside, the puppy waddling behind with shrill, impertinent barks.

At the bottom of the hill they lost the blackbird and found Nicholas Burr, who was lying face downwards upon the earth, a fishing line at his side.

"He's crying," said Eugenia in a high whisper.

Nicholas rolled over, saw them, and got up, wiping his eyes on the sleeve of his shirt.

"There warn't n.o.body lookin'," he said defiantly.

"You're too big to cry," observed Bernard dispa.s.sionately, munching a green apple he had taken from his pocket. "You're as big as I am, and I haven't cried since I was six years old. Eugie cries."

"I don't!" protested Eugenia vehemently. "I reckon you'd cry too if they made you sit in the house the whole afternoon and hem cup-towels."

"I'm a boy, Miss Spitfire. Boys don't sew. I saw Nick Burr milking, though, one day. What made you milk, Nick?"

"Ma did."

"I'd like to see anybody make me milk. You're jes' the same as a girl."

"I ain't!"

"You are!"

"I ain't!"

"'Spose you fight it out," suggested Eugenia, with an eye for sport, settling herself upon the ground with Jim in her lap.