Tripping with the Tucker Twins Part 14

"There's Elizabethan ruff, and de Medici collar, and Queen Anne cottage, and Alice blue," I suggested.

"Yes, and Catherine wheels, and Minnie b.a.l.l.s, and Molly-coddles----"

"I give up! I give up! I was thinking of Charleston and the first male baby."

And so we chatted on as we turned the corner into Legare. We soon came to the beautiful Smyth gateway and then to the Simonton entrance. They vie with each other in beauty of design. The shutters of all the houses on the street were tightly closed, although it was a very mild evening, but we could hear light laughter and gay talk from some of the walled gardens; and occasionally through the grilles we caught glimpses of girls in light dresses seated on garden benches among the palmettos and magnolias, their attendant swains behaving very much as attendant swains might behave in more prosaic surroundings.

"I can't think of the girls who live in these walled gardens as ever being dressed in anything but diaphanous gauze, playing perhaps with grace hoops or tossing rose leaves in the air," said the professor. "It seems like a picture world, somehow."

"Yes, but behind the picture no doubt there is a dingy canvas and even cobwebs, and maybe it is hung over an ugly old scar on the paper and has to stay there to hide the eye-sore--there might even be a stovepipe hole behind it," I said, sadly thinking of the Gaillards and how picturesque they were and what sad things there were in their lives.

"Mercy, how forlorn we are!" exclaimed Zebedee. "Let's cheer up and merrily sing tra-la! Right around the corner here on King Street is the old Pringle House. They say there has been more jollity and revel in that mansion than almost anywhere in the South."

The Pringle House looked very dignified and beautiful in the mellow light that the moon cast over it. It is of very solid and simple design, with broad, hospitable door and not quite so formidable a wall as some of its neighbors; at least one can see the entrance without getting in a flying machine.

"Ike Marvel was married in that front parlor there--the room to the right, I believe it was," said Professor Green. "I wonder if he wrote his 'Reveries of a Bachelor' before or after the ceremony?"

"I'd like to get in there and poke around," I sighed.

"And so should I," chimed in Mrs. Green. "I am sure it is full of possible plots and counterplots for you and me, my dear."

"Do you young ladies know where the Misses Laurens live?" questioned the professor. "We might take a view of our possible abode as 'paying guests' and see how it looks by moonlight."

And so we left the Pringle House and wended our way back to Meeting Street, where we had only that morning seen the pale, sad ladies buying ten cents' worth of shrimps and regretting that they were not as big as lobsters. We hoped when they got the paying guests they would not be quite so economical in their purchases.

The house was still and dark except for a gleam of light from an upper chamber.

"A wax candle, I'll be bound, in an old silver candlestick!" I thought.

The unpainted board gates were uncompromisingly ugly by moonlight as well as by day; but the old house with its long galleries and chaste front door was even more beautiful.

"Oh, Edwin, do you think we will really get into that house? It is to me even lovelier than the much-vaunted Pringle place. But how sad about these gates! They look so new and ugly."

"Page has a lovely story she has made up about the gates," said Dum. Dee was still quiet, with little to say on that moonlight walk. "She is sure the pale old ladies sold them for a fabulous sum to some rich Yankee.

She also says she knows the younger and less pale of the old ladies used to kiss her beau through the grille of the old wrought-iron gate----"

"Beau! Why, Dum Tucker, I never used such a word in connection with an inmate of this old aristocratic mansion! I said lover. Beau, indeed! I should as soon think of saying she was chewing gum or doing something else equally plebeian."

"Hush! Listen! I hear a guitar," from Zebedee.

From the stillness of the garden behind the high brick wall where the ugly board gate flaunted its newness we could hear the faint tw.a.n.ging of a guitar. It sounded faint and cracked, but very sweet and true, and then a plaintive old soprano voice began to sing. We were afraid to breathe or move. It had the quality of a lunar rainbow it was once my joy and privilege to behold: a reflection of a reflection, the raindrops reflecting the moon, the moon reflecting the sun. I can give no idea of that experience without repeating the song she sang. I could not remember it, and had never seen it in print, but Professor Green, who seemed to be a person who knew many things worth while knowing, told us it was a poem of Dinah Maria Mulock Craik's, called "In Our Boat." He sent me a copy of it after we got back to Richmond:

"'Stars trembling o'er us and sunset before us, Mountains in shadow and forests asleep; Down the dim river we float on forever, Speak not, ah, breathe not--there's peace on the deep.

"'Come not, pale sorrow, flee till tomorrow; Rest softly falling o'er eyelids that weep; While down the river we float on forever, Speak not, ah, breathe not--there's peace on the deep.

"'As the waves cover the depths we glide over, So let the past in forgetfulness sleep, While down the river we float on forever, Speak not, ah, breathe not--there's peace on the deep.

"'Heaven shine above us, bless all that love us; All whom we love in thy tenderness keep!

While down the river we float on forever, Speak not, ah, breathe not--there's peace on the deep.'"

n.o.body said a word. We softly crept down the street.

"Now you understand how we happened to listen when Claire and her father were talking," I whispered to Zebedee. "It seemed no more real than this old lady's song did."

Zebedee wiped his eyes. Of course the song and its setting had made all the Tuckers weep. Molly Brown was not dry-eyed, and one might have spied a lunar rainbow in my eyes, too.

CHAPTER XII

MORAL COURAGE

The Battery was wonderful, wonderful, and out of all whooping. The moon was high up over the water, having made her debut sooner than Professor Green had calculated. The tide was coming in, or rather rolling in, and every wave seemed to rise up to catch a little kiss from the moon. The palmettos were, as is their way, rustling and waving their leaves like ladies of olden times in swishing silks using their fans as practiced flirts. The live-oaks did very well as cavaliers bending gallantly to catch the tender nothings of the coquettes. The Spanish moss on one particularly twisted oak hung like a great beard from the chin of some ancient, and as the slender palmetto swayed in the breeze and waved her tresses provokingly near, the gray beard mingled with them for a moment.

"The old rip!" exclaimed Zebedee to me.

"Why, I was just thinking that! It does look just like an old man."

Mr. Tucker and I, as no doubt I have remarked before, often came out with exactly the same thought almost as though we were able to read each other's minds.

"Of course she should not have led him on if she did not want to be kissed. She certainly came very near chucking him under the chin. A girl can't expect a man to withstand temptation forever. Just because a man is looked upon as a gray-bearded loon is no sign he feels like one."

The others had gone on ahead and were standing under the monument of Sergeant Jasper, who was still patiently pointing to Fort Moultrie.

"Do you think it is a girl's fault always if a man kisses her?"

"Well, no, not exactly. I certainly don't think it is a girl's fault for being kissable--but it seems to me her instinct might tell her when she is getting too kissable and she might--wear a veil--or do something to protect the poor man a little."

"Why should he not put on smoked gla.s.ses or look the other way? I can't see that it is up to the poor palmetto."

"Perhaps you are right," he said, more soberly, it seemed to me, than the conversation warranted. "I am going to Columbia tomorrow," rather sullenly.

"Are you, really? Tweedles and I are going to miss you terribly. We do wish you didn't have to go."

"'We'! Can't you ever say I? Do you have to lump yourself with Dum and Dee about everything?"

What a funny, cross Zebedee this was! I looked at him in amazement. He was quite wild-eyed, with a look on his face that was new to me. If I had not known that he was a teetotaler, or almost one, I might have thought he had been drinking. I must have presented a startled appearance, for in a moment he pulled himself together.

"Excuse me, Page! I think the moon must have gone to my head. The full moon makes me act queer sometimes, anyhow. You have heard of persons like that, haven't you? That's where lunatic got its name--Luna, the moon, you know," he rattled on at a most astonishing pace. "How old do you reckon Mrs. Green is? She looks very young. Do you think Professor Green is as old as I am?"

"Older, I should think; but then he is so--so--high-foreheaded it makes him look older."

"He was her teacher at college, so they tell me. She must have been quite young when he first knew her."

"Yes, she was only sixteen when she entered Wellington, I believe."