Essential Novelists - Harold Frederic. Frederic Harold
of saying witty, biting things. The sound came strangely to my ears, as if it were some other than Daisy laughing.
I was still in this brown study when Sir William called the health of the ladies, with some jocose words of compliment to them, congratulation to ourselves. I rose mechanically after the other gentlemen, glass in hand, to hear Mr. Stewart make pleasant and courtly acknowledgment, and to see the two women pass out in a great rustling of draperies and hoops, with Walter Butler holding open the door and bowing profoundly. The faint scent of powder left on the air annoyed me, as something stifling those thoughts of the good little adopted sister, whom I had brought to the Hall and lost there, which I would fain dwell upon.
We sat over our Madeira and pipes longer than usual. Candles were brought in by Sir William's young body-servant Pontiac, for there was a full moon, and we might thus prolong our stay after nightfall. The talk was chiefly about our coming trip—a very serious undertaking. Sir William and Mr. Butler had adventures of their own early trading days to recall, and they gave us great stores of advice drawn from experience, and ranging from choice of shirts and spirits to needful diplomacy with the Algonquins and Sakis.
Then the company drank the health of Mr. Cross, and were good enough to couple mine with it. A comical little yellow boy danced for us before the hearth—an admiring wall of black faces and rolling white eyeballs filling up the open door meanwhile. Walter Butler sang a pretty song—everybody, negroes and all, swelling the chorus. Rum was brought in, and mixed in hot glasses, with spice, molasses, and scalding water from the kettle on the crane. So evening deepened to night; but I never for a moment, not even when they drank my health, shook off the sense of unrest born of Daisy's masquerade.
It was Molly Brant herself, nobly erect and handsome in her dark, sinister way, who came to us with word that the moon was up over the pine-ridged hills, and that Mistress Daisy was attired for the homeward ride, and waiting.
Of all the pictures in Memory's portfolio, none is more distinct than this of the departure that evening from the Hall. A dozen negroes were about the steps, two or three mounted ready to escort us home, others bearing horn lanterns which the moonlight darkened into inutility, still others pulling the restive horses about on the gravel. Mr. Stewart swung himself into the saddle, and Daisy stepped out to mount behind him. She wore her own garments once more, but there was just a trace of powder on the hair under the hood, and the patch was still on her chin. I moved forward to lift her to the pillion as I had done hundreds of times before, but she did not see me. Instead, I was almost pushed away by the rush of Sir John and young Butler to her side, both eager to assist. It was the knight, flushed and a little unsteady with wine, who won the privilege, and held Daisy's foot. I climbed into my saddle moodily, getting offence out of even this.
So we rode away, pursued down the path to the lilacs by shouts of "Good-night! Safe home!" Looking back to lift my hat for the last adieu, I saw the honest old baronet, bareheaded in the clear moonlight, waving his hand from the lowest step, with Lady Berenicia and the others standing above him, outlined upon the illumined doorway, and the negroes grouped on either side, obscurely gesticulating in the shadows of the broad, dark front of the Hall, which glowed against the white sky.
As I recall the scene, it seems to me that then and there I said farewell, not alone to pleasant friends, but to the Daisy of my childhood and youth.
The Hall slaves rode well ahead in the narrow road; we could just hear faintly the harmony of the tune they were humming in concert, as one hears the murmur of an Æolian harp. As a guard, they were of course ridiculous: the veriest suspicion of peril would have sent them all galloping helter-skelter, with frantic shrieks of fright. But the road was perfectly safe, and these merry fellows were to defend us from loneliness, not danger.
I did indeed rest my free hand on the pistol in my holster as I jogged along close behind the old gray horse and his double burden; but the act was more an unconscious reflection of my saturnine mood, I fear, than a recognition of need. There was every reason why I should dwell with delight upon the prospect opening before me—upon the idea of the great journey so close at hand; but I scarcely thought of it at all, and I was not happy. The moon threw a jaundiced light over my mind, and in its discolored glare I saw things wrongly, and with gratuitous pain to myself.
In fact, my brooding was the creature of the last few hours, born of a childish pique. But as I rode gloomily silent behind my companions, it seemed as if I had long suffered a growing separation from them. "Three is a clumsy number," I said to myself, "in family affection not less than in love; there was never any triad of friends since the world began, no matter how fond their ties, in which two did not build a little interior court of thoughts and sympathies from which the third was shut out. These two people whom I hold dearer than everything else on earth—this good gentleman to whom I owe all, this sweet girl who has grown up from babyhood in my heart—would scout the idea that there was any line of division running through our household. They do not see it—cannot see it. Yet they have a whole world of ideas and sentiments in common, a whole world of communion, which I may never enter."
This was what, in sulky, inchoate fashion, I said to myself, under the spur of the jealous spirits which sometimes get rein over the thoughts of the best of us. And it was all because the London woman had tricked out our Daisy, for but a little hour or two, in the presentment of a court lady!
Conversation went briskly forward, meanwhile, from the stout back of the gray horse.
"Did you note, papa, how white and soft her hands were?" said Daisy. "Mine were so red beside them! It is working in the garden, I believe, although Mary Johnson always wore gloves when she was out among the flowers and vegetables, and her hands were red, too. And Lady Berenicia was so surprised to learn that I had never read any of the romances which they write now in England! She says ladies in London, and in the provinces too, do not deem themselves fit to converse unless they keep abreast of all these. She has some of them in her chests, and there are others in the Hall, she has found, and I am to read them, and welcome."
"You are old enough now, my girl," replied Mr. Stewart. "They seem to me to be trivial enough things, but no doubt they have their use. I would not have you seem as inferior to other ladies in knowledge of the matters they talk of, as they are inferior to you in honest information."
"How interested she was when I told her of the serious books I read, and of my daily occupations—moulding the candles, brewing the beer, carding wool, making butter, and then caring for the garden! She had never seen celery in trenches, she said, and would not know beans from gourds if she saw them growing. It seems that in England ladies have nothing to do with their gardens—when, indeed, they have any at all—save to pluck a rose now and then, or give tea to their gentlemen under the shrubbery when it is fine. And I told her of our quilting and spinning bees, and the coasting on clear winter evenings, and of watching the blacks on Pinkster night, and the picnics in the woods, and she vowed London had no pleasures like them. She was jesting though, I think. Oh, shall we ever go to London, papa?"
"By all means, let us go," chuckled Mr. Stewart. "You would see something there she never saw—my grizzled old head upon Temple Bar. Shall we be off to-morrow? My neck tingles with anticipation."
"Old tease!" laughed Daisy, patting his shoulder. "You know there have been no heads put there since long before I was born. Never flatter yourself that they would begin again now with yours. They've forgotten there was ever such a body as you."
"Faith! the world doesn't go round so fast as you young people think. Only to-day I read in the London mail that two months ago one of the polls that had been there since '46 fell down; but if it was Fletcher's or Townley's no one can tell—like enough not even they themselves by this time. So there's a vacant spike now for mine. No, child—I doubt these old bones will ever get across the sea again. But who knows?—it may be your fortune to go some time."
"Lady Berenicia says I must come to the Hall often, papa, while she is there," said the girl, returning to the subject which bewitched her; "and you must fetch me, of course. She admires you greatly; she says gentlemen in London have quite lost the fine manner that you keep up here, with your bow and your compliments. You must practise them on me now. We are to keep each other company as much as possible, she and