Part 15 (1/2)
”Is you a Fahfiel', boss?” he asked eagerly. ”Is you my young Ma.r.s.e?” He jumped at the conclusion promptly. ”You favors de fam'ly mightily, sah.
I heard you was comin'”; the rag of a hat went off and he bowed low.
”Hit's cert'nly good news fo' Fahfiel', Ma.r.s.e Philip, hit's mighty good news fo' us n.i.g.g.e.rs, sah. I'se b'longed to the Fahfiel' fam'ly a hund'ed years, Ma.r.s.e--me and my folks, and I wishes yo' a welcome home, sah--welcome home, Ma.r.s.e Philip.”
Philip bent with a quick movement from his horse, and gripped the twisted old black hand, speechless. This humble welcome on the highway caught at his heart deep down, and the appeal of the colored people to Southerners, who know them, the thrilling appeal of a gentle, loyal race, doomed to live forever behind a veil and hopeless without bitterness, stirred for the first time his manhood. It touched him to be taken for granted as the child of his people; it pleased him that he should be ”Ma.r.s.e Philip” as a matter of course, because there had always been a Ma.r.s.e Philip at the place. It was bred deeper in the bone of him than he knew, to understand the soul of the black man; the stuff he was made of had been Southern two hundred years.
The old man went off down the white limestone road singing to himself, and Philip rode slowly under the locusts and beeches up the long drive, gra.s.s-grown and lost in places, that wound through the woodland three-quarters of a mile to his house. And as he moved through the park, through sunlight and shadow of these great trees that were his, he felt like a knight of King Arthur, like some young knight long exiled, at last coming to his own. He longed with an unreasonable seizure of desire to come here to live, to take care of it, beautify it, fill it with life and prosperity as it had once been filled, surround it with cheerful faces of colored people whom he might make happy and comfortable. If only he had money to pay off the mortgage, to put the place once in order, it would be the ideal setting for the life that seemed marked out for him--the life of a writer.
The horse turned a corner and broke into a canter up the slope, and as the shoulder of the hill fell away there stood before him the picture of his childhood come to life, smiling drowsily in the morning sunlight with shuttered windows that were its sleeping eyes--the great white house of Fairfield. Its high pillars reached to the roof; its big wings stretched away at either side; the flicker of the shadow of the leaves played over it tenderly and hid broken bits of woodwork, patches of paint cracked away, window-panes gone here and there. It stood as if too proud to apologize or to look sad for such small matters, as serene, as stately as in its prime. And its master, looking at it for the first time, loved it.
He rode around to the side and tied his mount to an old horse-rack, and then walked up the wide front steps as if each lift were an event. He turned the handle of the big door without much hope that it would yield, but it opened willingly, and he stood inside. A broom lay in a corner, windows were open--his cousin had been making ready for him. There was the huge mahogany sofa, horse-hair-covered, in the window under the stairs, where his mother had read ”Ivanhoe” and ”The Talisman.” Philip stepped softly across the wide hall and laid his head where must have rested the brown hair of the little girl who had come to be, first all of his life, and then its dearest memory. Half an hour he spent in the old house, and its walls echoed to his footsteps as if in ready homage, and each empty room whose door he opened met him with a sweet half familiarity. The whole place was filled with the presence of the child who had loved it and left it, and for whom this tall man, her child, longed now as if for a little sister who should be here, and whom he missed. With her memory came the thought of the five-year-old uncle who had made history for the family so disastrously. He must see the garden where that other Philip had gone with his father to hide the money on the fated Christmas morning. He closed the house door behind him carefully, as if he would not disturb a little girl reading in the window, a little boy sleeping perhaps in the nursery above. Then he walked down the broad sweep of the driveway, the gravel crunching under the gra.s.s, and across what had been a bit of velvet lawn, and stood for a moment with his hand on a broken vase, weed-filled, which capped the stone post of a gateway.
All the garden was misty with memories. Where a tall golden flower nodded alone, from out of the tangled thicket of an old flower-bed, a bright-haired child might have laughed with just that air of startled, gay naughtiness, from the forbidden centre of the blossoms. In the moulded tan-bark of the path was a vague print, like the ghost of a footprint that had pa.s.sed down the way a lifetime ago. The box, half dead, half sprouted into high unkept growth, still stood stiffly against the riotous overflow of weeds as if it yet held loyally to its business of guarding the borders, Philip s.h.i.+fted his gaze slowly, lingering over the dim contours, the shadowy shape of what the garden had been.
Suddenly his eyes opened wide. How was this? There was a hedge as neat, as clipped, as any of Southampton in mid-season, and over it a glory of roses, red and white and pink and yellow, waved gay banners to him in trim luxuriance. He swung toward them, and the breeze brought him for the first time in his life the fragrance of box in suns.h.i.+ne.
Four feet tall, shaven and thick and s.h.i.+ning, the old hedge stood, and the garnered sweetness of a hundred years' slow growth breathed delicately from it toward the great-great-grandson of the man who planted it. A box hedge takes as long in the making as a gentleman, and when they are done the two are much of a sort. No plant in all the garden has so subtle an air of breeding, so gentle a reserve, yet so gracious a message of sweetness for all of the world who will stop to learn it. It keeps a firm dignity under the stress of tempest when lighter growths are tossed and torn; it s.h.i.+nes bright through the snow; it has a well-bred willingness to be background, with the well-bred gift of presence, whether as background or foreground. The soul of the box-tree is an aristocrat, and the sap that runs through it is the blue blood of vegetation.
Saluting him bravely in the hot suns.h.i.+ne with its myriad s.h.i.+ning sword-points, the old hedge sent out to Philip on the May breeze its ancient welcome of aromatic fragrance, and the tall roses crowded gayly to look over its edge at the new master. Slowly, a little dazed at this oasis of s.h.i.+ning order in the neglected garden, he walked to the opening and stepped inside the hedge. The rose garden! The famous rose garden of Fairfield, and as his mother had described it, in full splendor of cared-for, orderly bloom. Across the paths he stepped swiftly till he stood amid the roses, giant bushes of Jacqueminot and Marechal Niel; of pink and white and red and yellow blooms in thick array. The glory of them intoxicated him. That he should own all of this beauty seemed too good to be true, and instantly he wanted to taste his owners.h.i.+p. The thought came to him that he would enter into his heritage with strong hands here in the rose garden; he caught a deep-red Jacqueminot almost roughly by its gorgeous head and broke off the stem. He would gather a bunch, a huge, unreasonable bunch of his own flowers. Hungrily he broke one after another; his shoulders bent over them, he was deep in the bushes.
”I reckon I shall have to ask you not to pick any more of those roses,”
a voice said.
Philip threw up his head as if he had been shot; he turned sharply with a great thrill, for he thought his mother spoke to him. Perhaps it was only the Southern inflection so long unheard, perhaps the sunlight that shone in his eyes dazzled him, but, as he stared, the white figure before him seemed to him to look exactly as his mother had looked long ago. Stumbling over his words, he caught at the first that came.
”I--I think it's all right,” he said.
The girl smiled frankly, yet with a dignity in her puzzled air. ”I'm afraid I shall have to be right decided,” she said. ”These roses are private property and I mustn't let you have them.”
”Oh!” Philip dropped the great bunch of gorgeous color guiltily by his side, but still held tightly the p.r.i.c.kly ma.s.s of stems, knowing his right, yet half wondering if he could have made a mistake. He stammered:
”I thought--to whom do they belong?”
”They belong to my cousin, Mr. Philip Fairfield Beckwith”--the sound of his own name was pleasant as the falling voice strayed through it. ”He is coming home in a few days, so I want them to look their prettiest for him--for his first sight of them. I take care of this rose garden,” she said, and laid a motherly hand on the nearest flower. Then she smiled.
”It doesn't seem right hospitable to stop you, but if you will come over to Westerly, to our house, father will be glad to see you, and I will certainly give you all the flowers you want.” The sweet and masterful apparition looked with a gracious certainty of obedience straight into Philip's bewildered eyes.
[Ill.u.s.tration: ”I reckon I shall have to ask you not pick any more of those roses,” a voice said.]
”The boy Shelby!” Many a time in the months after Philip Beckwith smiled to himself reminiscently, tenderly, as he thought of ”the boy Shelby” whom he had read into John Fairfield's letter; ”the boy Shelby”
who was twenty-two years old and the only child; ”the boy Shelby” whom he had blamed with such easy severity for idling at Fairfield; ”the boy Shelby” who was no boy at all, but this white flower of girlhood, called--after the quaint and reasonable Southern way--as a boy is called, by the surname of her mother's people.
Toward Westerly, out of the garden of the old time, out of the dimness of a forgotten past, the two took their radiant youth and the brightness of to-day. But a breeze blew across the tangle of weeds and flowers as they wandered away, and whispered a hope, perhaps a promise; for as it touched them each tall stalk nodded gayly and the box hedges rustled delicately an answering undertone. And just at the edge of the woodland, before they were out of sight, the girl turned and threw a kiss back to the roses and the box.
”I always do that,” she said. ”I love them so!”
Two weeks later a great train rolled into the Grand Central Station of New York at half-past six at night, and from it stepped a monstrosity--a young man without a heart. He had left all of it, more than he had thought he owned, in Kentucky. But he had brought back with him memories which gave him more joy than ever the heart had done, to his best knowledge, in all the years. They were memories of long and suns.h.i.+ny days; of afternoons spent in the saddle, rus.h.i.+ng through gra.s.sy lanes where trumpet-flowers flamed over gray farm fences, or trotting slowly down white roads; of whole mornings only an hour long, pa.s.sed in the enchanted stillness of an old garden; of gay, desultory searches through its length and breadth, and in the park that held it, for buried treasure: of moonlit nights; of roses and June and Kentucky--and always, through all the memories, the presence that made them what they were, that of a girl he loved.
No word of love had been spoken, but the two weeks had made over his life; and he went back to his work with a definite object, a hope stronger than ambition, and, set to it as music to words, came insistently another hope, a dream that he did not let himself dwell on--a longing to make enough money to pay off the mortgage and put Fairfield in order, and live and work there all his life--with Shelby.
That was where the thrill of the thought came in, but the place was very dear to him in itself.