A Woman Named Smith. Marie Conway Oemler
in all sorts of hiding-places. When I think my day-dream may come true for you, Sophy, it almost reconciles me to the pain of parting from you; though what on earth I'm to do without you, goodness only knows!" She was sitting on my bed, kimonoed, slippered, and braided. And now she looked at me with a suddenly quivering chin.
"Alicia," said I, "ever since I discovered that there's no mistake about that lawyer's letter—that Hynds House is unaccountably, but undoubtedly mine and I've got to live in it if I want to keep it—it has been borne in upon me that you are just about the worst file-clerk on earth. You're a navy-blue failure in a business office. Business isn't your motif. Now, will you resign the job you fill execrably, and accept one you can fill beyond all praise—come South with me, share half-and-half whatever comes, and help make that old house a happy home for us both?"
"Don't joke." Her lips went white. "Please, please, Sophy dear, don't joke like that! I—well, I just couldn't bear it."
"I never joke," I said indignantly. "You little goose, did you imagine for one minute that I contemplated leaving you here by yourself, any more than I contemplate going down there by myself, if I can help it? Stop to think for a moment, Alicia. You have been like a little sister to me, ever since you were born. And—I'm alone, except for you—and not in my first youth—and not beautiful—and not gifted."
At that she hurled herself off my bed and cried upon my shoulder, with her slim arms around my neck. Those young arms were beginning to make me feel wistful. If things had been different—if I had been lovely like the Scarletts, instead of looking like the Smiths—there might have been—
Well, I don't look like the Scarletts; so there wasn't. The best I could do was to drop a kiss on Alicia's forehead, where the bright young hair begins to break into curls.
And that is how, neither of us having the faintest notion of what was in store for us, Alicia Gaines and I turned our backs upon New York and set our faces toward Hynds House.
CHAPTER II
AND ARIEL MAKES MUSIC
We had wired Judge Gatchell when to expect us, but the venerable negro hackman who was on the lookout for us explained that the judge had a "misery in the laigs" which confined him to his room, and that he advised us to go to the hotel for a while.
We couldn't, for wasn't our own house waiting for us? A minute later we had bundled into the ancient hack and were bumping and splashing through unpaved streets, getting wet, gray glimpses of old houses in old gardens, and every now and then a pink crape-myrtle blushing in the pouring rain. Hyndsville was, it seemed, one of those sprawling, easy-going old Carolina towns that liked plenty of elbow-room and wasn't particular about architectural order. Hynds House itself was on the extreme edge of things.
The hack presently stopped before a high iron gate in a waist-high brick wall with a spiked iron railing on top of it, the whole overrun with weeds and creepers. Of Hynds House itself one couldn't see anything but a stack of chimneys above a forest of trees.
The gate creaked and groaned on its rusty hinges; then we were walking up a weedy, rain-soaked path where untrimmed branches slapped viciously at our faces, and tough brambles, like snares and gins, tried to catch our feet. On each side was a jungle. Of a sudden the path turned, widened into a fairly cleared space; and Hynds House was before us.
We had expected a fair-sized dwelling-house in its garden. And there confronted us, glooming under the gray and threatening sky that seemed the only proper and fitting canopy for it, what looked like a pile reared in medieval Europe rather than a home in America. Its stained brick walls, partly covered with ivy and lichens; its smokeless chimneys; its barred doors; its many shuttered windows, like blind eyes—all appeared deliberately to thrust aside human habitancy.
A residence for woman, child, and man, A dwelling-place—and yet no habitation; A House—but under some prodigious ban Of Excommunication.
Yet there was nothing ruinous about it, for the Hyndses had sought to build it as the old Egyptians sought to build their temples—to last forever, to defy time and decay. It was not only meant to be a place for Hyndses to be born and live and die in: it was a monument to Family Pride, a brick-and-granite symbol of place and power.
The walls were of an immense thickness, the corners further strengthened with great blocks of granite. The house had but two stories, with an attic under its sloping roofs, but it gave an effect of height as well as of solidity. Behind it was another brick building, the lower part of which had been used for stables and carriage house, and the upper portion as quarters for the house slaves, in the old days. Another smaller building, slate-roofed and ivy covered, was the spring-house, with a clear, cold little spring still bubbling away as merrily in its granite basin, as if all the Hyndses were not dead and gone. And there was a deep well, protected by a round stone wall, with a cupola-like roof supported by four slender pillars. And everything was dank and weedy and splotched with mildew and with mold.
O'er all there hung a shadow and a fear
A sense of mystery the spirit daunted
And said, as plain as whisper in the ear,
The place is Haunted!
When we opened the great front door, above which was the fan-light of Alicia's hope, just as the round front porch had the big pillars, a damp and moldy air met us. The house had not been opened since Sophronisba's funeral, and everything—stairs, settles, tables, cabinets, pictures, the chairs backed inhospitably against the wall as if to prevent anybody from sitting in them—was covered with a shrouding pall of dust.
The hall was cross-shaped, the side passage running between the back drawing-room and library on one side, and the dining-room and two locked rooms on the other. It was a nice place, that side passage, with a fireplace and settles; and beautiful windows opening upon the tangled garden. All the down-stairs walls were paneled: precious woods were not so hard to come by when Hynds House was built. It was lovely, of course, but depressingly dark.
We got one of the big windows open, and let some stale damp air out and some fresh damp air in. Then, having despatched our hackman for certain necessities, Alicia and I turned and stared at each other, another Alicia and Sophy staring back at us from a dim and dusty mirror opposite. If, at that moment, I could have heard the familiar buzzer at my elbow! If I could have heard the good everyday New York "Miss Smith, attend to this, please"! God wot, if I had not literally burned my bridges behind me—Oh, oh, I had!
"The garden around this house,"—Alicia spoke in a whisper—"stretches to the end of the world and then laps over. It hasn't been trimmed since Adam and Eve moved out. But those crape-myrtle trees are quite the loveliest things left over from Paradise, and I'm glad we came here to see them with our own eyes! Brace up, Sophy! We'll feel heaps better when we've had something to eat. Aren't you frightfully hungry, and doesn't a chill suspicion strike you, somewhere around the wishbone, that if that Ancient Mariner of a hackman doesn't get back soon we shall starve?"
At that moment, from somewhere—it seemed to us from up-stairs—a sudden flood of sweetest sound poured goldenly through that sad, dim, dusty house, as if a blithe spirit had slipped in unawares and was bidding us welcome. For a few wonderful moments the exquisite music filled the dark old place and banished gloom and neglect and decay; then, with a pattering scamper, as of the bare, rosy feet of a beloved and mischievous child making a rush for his crib, it went as suddenly as it had come. There was nothing to break the silence but the swishing downpour of the outside rain.
When I could speak: "It came from up-stairs! Somebody's playing a violin up-stairs. I'm going up-stairs to find out who it is."
Alicia demurred: "It may be a real