Hagar Page 6

  CHAPTER VI

  EGLANTINE

  No one could be so cross-grained as to deny that Eglantine was a sweetplace. It lay sweetly on just the right, softly swelling hill. The oldgrey-stucco main house had a sweet porch, with wistaria growing sweetlyover it; the long, added grey-stucco wings had pink and white rosesgrowing sweetly on trellises between the windows. There were silvermaples and heavily blooming locust trees and three fine magnolias.There were thickets of weigelia and spir?a and forsythia, and windingwalks, and an arbour, and the whole twenty acres or so was enclosedby a thorny, osage-orange hedge, almost, though not quite so high asthe hedge around the Sleeping Beauty's palace. It was a sweet place.Everyone said so--parents and guardians, the town that neighbouredEglantine, tourists that drove by, visitors to the Commencementexercises--everybody! The girls themselves said so. It was praised ofall--almost all. The place was sweet. M. Morel, the French teacher, whowas always improving his English, and so on the hunt for synonyms, oncesaid in company that it was saccharine.

  Miss Carlisle, who taught ancient and modern history and, in theinterstices, astronomy and a blue-penciled physiology, gently correctedhim. "Oh, M. Morel! We never use that word in this sense! If you wishto vary the term you might use 'charming,' or 'refined,' or 'elegant.'Besides"--she gazed across the lawn--"it isn't so sweet, I alwaysthink, in November as it is in April or May."

  "The sweetest time, I think," said Miss Bedford, who taughtmathematics, geography, and Latin, "is when the lilac is in bloom."

  "And when the robins nest again," sighed a pensive, widowed Mrs. Lane,who taught the little girls.

  "It is 'refined' always," said M. Morel. "November or April, what is zedifference? It has ze atmosphere. It is sugary."

  "Here," remarked Miss Gage, who taught philosophy--"here is Mrs.LeGrand."

  All rose to greet the mistress of Eglantine as she came out from thehall upon the broad porch. Mrs. LeGrand's graciously ample form waswrapped in black cashmere and black lace. Her face was unwrinkled,but her hair had rapidly whitened. It was piled upon her head afteran agreeable fashion and crowned by a graceful small cap of lace.She was ample and creamy and refinedly despotic. With her came hergod-daughter, Sylvie Maine. It was early November, and the sycamoreswere yet bronze, the maples aflame. It was late Friday afternoon, andthe occasion the arrival and entertainment overnight of an Englishwriter of note, a woman visiting America with a book in mind.

  Mrs. LeGrand said that she had thought she heard the carriage wheels.Mr. Pollock, the music-master, said, No; it was the wind down theavenue. Mrs. LeGrand, pleasantly, just condescending enough and not toocondescending, glanced from one to the other of the group. "M. Moreland Mr. Pollock and you, Miss Carlisle and Miss Bedford, will, I hope,take supper with our guest and me? Sylvie, here, will keep her usualplace. I can't do without Sylvie. She spoils me and I spoil her! And wewill have besides, I think, the girl that has stood highest this monthin her classes. Who will it be, Miss Gage?"

  "Hagar Ashendyne, Mrs. LeGrand."

  Mrs. LeGrand had a humorous smile. "Then, Sylvie, see that Hagar'sdress is all right and try to get her to do her hair differently. Ilike Eglantine girls to look their birth and place."

  "Dear Cousin Olivia," said Sylvie, who was extremely pretty, "for allher plainness, Hagar's got distinction."

  But Mrs. LeGrand shrugged her shoulders. She couldn't see it. A littlewind arising, all the place became a whirl of coloured leaves. And nowthe carriage wheels were surely heard.

  Half an hour later Sylvie went up to Hagar's room. It was what wascalled the "tower room"--small and high up--too small for anythingbut a single bed and one inmate. It wasn't a popular room with theEglantine girls--a room without a roommate was bad enough, and then,when it was upon another floor, quite away from every one--! Languagefailed. But Hagar Ashendyne liked it, and it had been hers for threeyears. She had been at Eglantine for three years, going home to GileadBalm each summer. She was eighteen--old for her age, and young for herage.

  Sylvie found her curled in the window-seat, and spoke twice before shemade her hear. "Hagar! come back to earth!"

  Hagar unfolded her long limbs and pushed her hair away from her eyes."I was travelling," she said. "I was crossing the Desert of Sahara witha caravan."

  "You are," remarked Sylvie, "too funny for words!--You and I are totake supper with 'Roger Michael'!"

  A red came into Hagar's cheek. "Are we? Did Mrs. LeGrand say so?"

  "Yes--"

  Hagar lit the lamp. "'Roger Michael'--'Roger Michael'--Sylvie, wouldn'tyou rather use your own name if you wrote?"

  "Oh, I don't know!" answered Sylvie vaguely. "What dress are you goingto wear?"

  "I haven't any but the green."

  "Then wear your deep lace collar with it. Cousin Olivia wants you tolook as nice as possible. Don't you want me to do your hair?"

  Hagar placed the lamp upon the wooden slab of a small, old-timedressing-table. That done, she stood and looked at herself with acurious, wistful puckering of the lips. "Sylvie, prinking and fixing updoesn't suit me."

  "Don't you like people to like you?"

  "Yes, I do. I like it so much it must be a sin. Only not very manypeople do.... And I don't think prinking helps."

  "Yes, it does. If you look pretty, how can people help liking you? It'sthree fourths the battle."

  Hagar fell to considering it. "Is it?... But then we don't all thinkthe same thing pretty or ugly." The red showed again like wine beneathher smooth, dark skin, "Sylvie, I'd _like_ to be beautiful. I'd liketo be as beautiful as Beatrix Esmond. I'd like to be as beautifulas Helen of Troy. But everybody at Eglantine thinks I am ugly, and Isuppose I am." She looked wistfully at Sylvie.

  Now in the back of Sylvie's head there was certainly the thoughtthat Hagar ought to have said, "I'd like to be as beautiful as you,Sylvie." But Sylvie had a sweet temper and she was not unmagnanimous."I shouldn't call you ugly," she said judicially. "You aren't pretty,and I don't believe any one would ever call you so, but you aren't atall disagreeably plain. You've got something that makes people ask whoyou are. I wouldn't worry."

  "Oh, I wasn't worrying!" said Hagar. "I was only _preferring_.--I'llwear the lace collar." She took it out of a black Japanned box, andwith it the topaz brooch that had been her mother's.

  The visitor from England found the large, square Eglantine parlouran interesting room. The pier-glasses, framed in sallow gilt, themany-prismed chandelier, the old velvet carpet strewn with large softroses, the claw-foot furniture, the two or three portraits of powderedColonial gentlemen, the bits of old china, the framed letters bearingsignatures that seemed to float to her from out her old United StatesHistory--all came to her like a vague fragrance from some unusualold garden. And then, curiously superimposed upon all this, appearedmemorials of four catastrophic years. Soldiers and statesmen ofthe Confederacy had found no time in which to have their portraitspainted. But Mrs. LeGrand had much of family piety and, in addition,daguerreotypes and _cartes de visite_ of the dead and gone. With herfirst glow of prosperity she had a local artist paint her father froma daguerreotype. Stalwart, with a high Roman face, he looked forthin black broadcloth with a roll of parchment in his hand. The nextyear she had had her husband painted in his grey brigadier's uniform.Her two brothers followed, and then a famous kinsman--all dead andgone, all slain in battle. The portraits were not masterpieces, butthere they were, in the pathos of the grey, underneath each a littlegilt plate. "Killed at Sharpsburg."--"Killed Leading a Charge in theWilderness."--"Killed at Cold Harbour." Upon the wall, against thepale, century-old paper, hung crossed swords and cavalry pistols,and there were framed commissions and battle orders, and an emptyshell propped open the wide white-panelled door. The English visitorfound it all strange and interesting. It was as though a fragranceof dried rose-leaves contended with a whiff of gunpowder. The smalldining-room into which presently she was carried had fascinatingprints--"Pocahontas Baptized," and "Pocahontas Married," and a group ofwomen with children and several ne
groes gathered about an open grave,one woman standing out, reading the burial service.--Roger Michael wasso interested that she would have liked not to talk at all, just to sitand look at the prints and mark the negro servants passing about thetable. But Mrs. LeGrand's agreeable voice was asking about the healthof the Queen--she bestirred herself to be an acceptable guest.

  The small dining-room was separated only by an archway from the largedining-room, and into the latter, in orderly files, came the Eglantinepupils, wound about to their several tables and seated themselves withdemureness. M. Morel was speaking of the friendship of France andEngland. Roger Michael, while she appeared to listen, studied theseAmerican girls, these Southern girls. She found many of them pretty,even lovely,--not, emphatically, with the English beauty of skin,not with the colour of New England girls, among whom, recently, shehad been,--not with the stronger frame that was coming in with thisgeneration of admission to out-of-door exercise, the certain boyishalertness and poise that more and more she was seeing exhibited,--butpretty or lovely, with delicacy and a certain languor, a dim sweetnessof expression, and, precious trove in America! voices that pleased.She noted exceptions to type, small, swarthy girls and large overgrownones, girls that were manifestly robust, girls that were alert, girlsthat were daring, girls that were timid or stupid, or simply an?mic,girls that approached the English type and girls that were at thevery antipodes--but the general impression was of Farther South thanshe had as yet gone in America, of more grace and slowness, mannerand sweetness. Their clothes interested her; they were so much more"dressed" than they would have been in England. Evidently, in deferenceto the smaller room, there was to-night an added control of speech;there sounded no more than a pleasant hum, a soft, indistinguishablemurmur of young voices.

  "They are so excited over the prospect of your speaking to them aftersupper," said Mrs. LeGrand, her hand upon the coffee urn.--"Cream andsugar?"

  "They do not seem excited," thought Roger Michael.--"Sugar, thank you;no cream. Of what shall I talk to them? In what are they especiallyinterested?"

  "In your charming books, I should say," answered Mrs. LeGrand. "In howyou write them, and in the authors you must know. And then your sweetEnglish life--Stratford and Canterbury and Devonshire--"

  "We have been reading 'Lorna Doone' aloud this month," said MissCarlisle. "And the girls very cleverly arranged a little play....Sylvie here played Lorna beautifully."

  Roger Michael smiled across at Hagar, two or three places down, on theother side of the table. "I should like to have seen it," she said inher good, deep English voice.

  "Oh," said Hagar, "I'm not Sylvie. I played Lizzie."

  "This is my little cousin and god-daughter, Sylvie Maine," said Mrs.LeGrand. "And this is Hagar Ashendyne, the granddaughter of an oldfriend and connection of my family."

  "_Hagar Ashendyne_," said Roger Michael. "I remember meeting once inthe south of France a Southerner--a Mr. Medway Ashendyne."

  "Indeed?" exclaimed Mrs. LeGrand. "Then you have met Hagar's father.Medway Ashendyne! He is a great traveller--we do not see as much of himas we should like to see, do we, Hagar?"

  "I have not seen him," said Hagar, "since I was a little girl."

  Her voice, though low, was strange and vibrant. "What's here?" thoughtRoger Michael, but what she said was only, "He was a very pleasantgentleman, very handsome, very cultivated. My friends and I were thrownwith him during a day at Carcassonne. A month afterwards we met him atAigues-Mortes. He was sketching--quite wonderfully."

  Mrs. LeGrand inwardly deplored Medway Ashendyne's daughter's lackof _savoir-faire_. "To give herself away like that! Just the kindof thing her mother used to do!" Aloud she said, "Medway's a greatwanderer, but one of these days he will come home and settle down andwe'll all be happy together. I remember him as a young man--a perfectlyfascinating young man.--Dinah, bring more waffles!--Yes, if you willtell our girls something of your charming English life. We are all sointerested--"

  Miss Carlisle's voice came in, a sweet treble like a canary's. "ThePrincess of Wales keeps her beauty, does she not?"

  The study hall was a long, red room, well enough lighted, with adais holding desk and chairs. Roger Michael, seated in one of these,watched, while her hostess made a little speech of introduction,the bright parterre of young faces. Sitting so, she excercised adiscrimination that had not been possible in the dining-room. Of thefaces before her each was different, after all, from the other. Therewere keen faces as well as languorous ones; brows that promised aswell as those that did not; behind the prevailing "sweet" expression,something sometimes that showed as by heat lightning, something thathad depth. "Here as elsewhere," thought Roger Michael. "The same life!"

  Mrs. LeGrand was closing, was turning toward her. She rose, bowedtoward the mistress of Eglantine, then, standing square, with her good,English figure and her sensibly shod, English feet, she began to talkto these girls.

  She did not, however, speak to them as, even after she rose, she meantto speak. She did not talk letters in England, nor English landscape.She spoke quite differently. She spoke of industrial and social unrest,of conditions among the toilers of the world. "I am what is called aFabian," she said, and went on as though that explained. She spokeof certain movements in thought, of breakings-away toward largerhorizons. She spoke of various heresies, political, social, and other."Of course I don't call them heresies; I call them 'the enlargingvision.'" She gave instances, incidents; she spoke of the dawn comingover the mountains, and of the trumpet call of "the coming time." Shesaid that the dying nineteenth century heard the stronger voice ofthe twentieth century, and that it was a voice with a great promise.She spoke of women, of the rapidly changing status of women, of whatmachinery had done for women, of what education had done. She spoke ofthe great needs of women, of their learning to organize, of the needfor unity among women. She used the words "false position" thrice."Woman's immemorially false position."--"Society has so falsely placedher."--"Until what is false is done away with."--She said that womenwere beginning to see. She said that the next quarter-century wouldwitness a revolution. "You young people before me will see it; some ofyou will take part in it. I congratulate you on living when you willlive." She talked for nearly an hour, and just as she was closing itcame to her, with a certain effect of startling, that much of the timeshe had been speaking to just one countenance there. She was speakingdirectly to the girl called Hagar Ashendyne, sitting halfway down thehall. When she took her seat there followed a deep little moment ofsilence broken at last by applause. Roger Michael marked the girl ingreen. She didn't applaud; she sat looking very far away. Mrs. LeGrandwas saying something smoothly perfunctory, beflowered with personalcompliments; the girls all stood; the Eglantine hostess and guest,with the teachers who had been at table, passed from the platform, andturned, after a space of hallway, into the rose-carpeted big parlour.

  Miss Carlisle and Miss Bedford brought up the rear. "Didn't you think,"murmured the latter, "that that was a very curious speech? Now andthen I felt so uneasy.--It was as though in a moment she was going tosay something indelicate! Dear Mrs. LeGrand ought to have told her howcareful we are with our girls."

  The wind rose that night and swept around the tower room, and then,between eleven and twelve, died away and left a calm that by contrastwas achingly still. Hagar was not yet asleep. She lay straight andstill in the narrow bed, her arms behind her head. She was rarely ina hurry to go to sleep. This hour and a half was her dreaming-awaketime, her time for romance building, her time for floating here andthere, as in a Witch of Atlas boat in her own No-woman's land. She hadin the stalls of her mind half a dozen vague and floating romances,silver and tenuous as mist; one night she drove one afield, anothernight another. All took place in a kind of other space, in countriesthat were not on any map. She brought imagined physical features into astrange juxtaposition. When the Himalayas haunted her she ranged them,snow-clad, by a West Indian sea. ?tna and Chimborazo rose over againsteach other, and a favourite haunt was a palm-fri
nged, flower-starredlawn reached only through crashing leagues of icebergs. She tookover localities that other minds had made; when she wished to shepushed aside a curtain of vine and entered the Forest of Arden; sheknew how the moonlight fell in the wood outside Athens; she enteredthe pilotless boat and drove toward the sunset gate of the Domain ofArnheim. Usually speaking, people out of books made the population ofthese places, and here, too, there were strange juxtapositions. Shelooped and folded Time like a ribbon. Mark Antony and Robin Hood werecontemporaries; Pericles and Philip Sidney; Ruth and Naomi came upabreast, with Joan of Arc, and all three with Grace Darling; the RoundTable and the Girondins were acquainted. All manner of historic andfictive folk wandered in the glades of her imagination, any kind ofrendezvous was possible. Much went on in that inner world--doubts anddreams and dim hypotheses, romance run wild, Fata Morganas, Castlesin Spain, passion for dead shapes, worship of heroes, strange, dumbstirrings toward self-immolation, dreams of martyrdom, mind drenchednow with this poem, now with that, dream life, dream adventures, dreamprinces, religions, world cataclysms, passionings over a colour, atone, a line of verse--much utter spring and burgeoning. Eighteenyears--a fluid unimprisoned mind--and no confidante but herself; of howrecapitulatory were these hours, of how youth of all the ages surged,pulsed, vibrated through her slender frame, she had, of course, noadequate notion. She would simply have said that she couldn't sleep,and that she liked to tell herself stories. As she lay here now, shewas not thinking of Roger Michael's talk, though she had thought ofit for the first twenty minutes after she had put out the lamp. Ithad been very interesting, and it had stirred her while it was in thesaying, but the grappling hook had not finally held; she was not readyfor it. She had let it slip from her mind in favour of the rose andpurple and deep violin humming of one of her romances. She had lainfor an hour in a great wood, like a wood in Xanadu, beneath trees thattouched the sky, and like an elfin stream had gone by knights andladies.... The great clock down in the hall struck twelve. She turnedher slender body, and the bed being pushed against the window, laid heroutstretched hands upon the window-sill, and looked up, between thespectral sycamore boughs, to where Sirius blazed. Dream wood and dreamshapes took flight. She lay with parted lips, her mind quiet, her soulawake. Minutes passed; a cloud drove behind the sycamore branches andhid the star. First blankness came and then again unrest. She sat up inbed, pushing her two heavy braids of hair back over her shoulders. Thesmall clock upon the mantel ticked and ticked. The little room lookedcold in the watery moonlight. Hagar was not dreaming or imaginingnow; she was thinking back. She sat very still for five minutes,tears slowly gathering in her eyes. At last she turned and lay facedown upon the bed, her outstretched hands against the wooden frame.Her tears wet the sleeve of her gown. "_Carcassonne--Aigues-Mortes.Carcassonne--Aigues-Mortes_...."