Part 6

The elaborate arrangements which had been made for Moira from the first, and the increasing complexity of the child’s education, which had been undertaken very early by Mrs. Seymour, made it easier for Ellen to regard her as a member of the Blaydon family. It was only when Moira misbehaved within her knowledge or in her sight, that the true mother felt it hard to play her neutral rôle. While Moira was good she was a Seymour, naturally, but when she was bad she seemed to Ellen to be wholly her own. Ellen’s impulse then, in spite of the habit of suppression, was to correct her as a mother would.

When these occasions had passed and she could reflect back on them, she thought it a blessing that Moira’s correction was in the hands of others than herself. One instance of Mrs. Seymour’s wise manner of dealing with unusual conduct filled her mind with wonder and created for her almost a new conception of life.

Aunt Mathilda was consulting with her in the kitchen when Moira burst in and cried:

“_Maman_, oh, _Maman_, the calf came right out of the cow! I saw it. I did.”

The child’s face was a study. She did not apparently know whether to be very grave, or a little frightened or to laugh, and in one who was so rarely puzzled it would have seemed pathetic had her sudden announcement been less shocking than it was. As they learned afterward, she had witnessed the birth, by sheer accident, while in the stables with Harvey. Ellen blushed scarlet and was on the point of exclaiming indignantly, but Mrs. Seymour checked her with a gesture and took the child in her lap. Then she said in a tone the most natural in the world:

“Why, certainly, my dear. That is what happens when all animals are born, and people too. First we are carried in our mothers. Then we walk by ourselves, just as the calf will in a day or two. Now you won’t ever forget that, will you?”

Beginning the middle of September and for eight months each year, Miss Cheyney, the governess, came every morning at nine, and quiet reigned while she went over the lessons with the three children shut up in the library. After luncheon, Eberhard, the man, took her back by motor to the train as he had brought her.

Ellen was always glad to see her visits begin, not only because Miss Cheyney was very democratic and “nice” to her, and proud of Moira’s progress, but because they ushered in the Fall. She loved the glorious colours that spread out in widening and deepening hues over the wooded hills, until all the world seemed to have put on a flaming cloak. She and the children would fill the house with sumach and maple branches then. And when the men began bringing up the heavy logs that had lain drying in the woods all summer and sawing and splitting them for the fireplaces in the house, she could see in anticipation the flames leaping in the chimney and hear the crackling of the wood in the fierce heat, and watch the glow of dancing light on the children’s faces. She had not seen open fireplaces since the New Orleans days, when they were lighted only for a few weeks in the year; and never had she seen anything to compare with the one in the Blaydon living room which was so high a woman could stand in it while she cleaned.

And then the parties began. There were nearly always two big ones each Winter, and between them a constant stream of dinners and late motor parties, and informal crowds who tramped over from the Club to dance. Ellen loved to hear the music going at full tilt, the new jazz music that was just coming in. She didn’t mind, as much as she should have, the young men getting tipsy. She was thrilled to watch the couples disappear down through the trees, laughing and chatting, eager to escape the floods of light that poured from every window in the house; or slip into their motors for a drive along the dark roads.

She had always thought of Sterling Blaydon as a reserved and serious man, and she wondered how he stood so much excitement. Then she realized that she was dealing with a new Sterling Blaydon, who not only stood it but encouraged it. His pride in the place and his love of filling it with people was like a boy’s.

A great part of the pleasure she took in these affairs arose from the fact that her daughter was a favourite. Tall, important men and dazzling young women were attentive to Moira and Moira enjoyed it as much as they did. She was growing extraordinarily self-possessed, particularly with her elders. Often enough the frank equality she adopted toward them made Ellen gasp.

Only in the dead of winter, when the snow piled up a foot or two everywhere and the drifts sometimes were up to a man’s middle, would they be without company for many days at a time. During this brief closed season--for it did not last long at the worst--Mr. Blaydon usually lived in town, and sometimes Mrs. Seymour would join him there, when engagements came in bunches or the theatres were particularly interesting. And the children, freed from their teacher, would be idle.

Coming upon Moira alone at such times, with her constituted guardians away and out of mind, Ellen experienced her moments of gravest temptation. How she longed then to take the youngster in her arms and pour out the floods of love pent up within her. These yearnings were made all the more unbearable by the simple affection with which she was nearly always greeted by her daughter; yet at the same time the child’s own attitude strengthened her resistance. For Ellen stood in awe of her. The force of training, the sedulously cultivated point of view, the entirely different environment had already stamped her with the mark of another caste. Ellen could not look upon her for more than an instant as simply the object of possessive human feeling. It would sweep over her at some childlike expression, some quaint, serious look. It would be checked by some unlooked for sophistication of gesture or remark.

Moira familiarly uttered the names of grown young men who to Ellen were no more than shadows from an upper world, coldly courteous ghosts who did not see her even when they looked at her. Every season the little girl extended her interests and knowledge into a wider world and grew more alien. And gradually as the years flew by even the servants who had been in the old Trezevant place when they came there, and who somehow seemed to preserve for her, by their presence, the actuality of her motherhood, passed, until there was not one left. Gina, whose sympathy she had felt most keenly, though the sprightly Italian said nothing, was the last. And Gina went away to be married....

X

To be nearly sixteen; to have a great room all to oneself, with high windows that looked upon surfs of close, glittering, talkative leaves, and hills far off between them; to have a small library of one’s favourite books, and a whole corner of the room devoted to the paraphernalia of one’s dearest hobby, which was painting; to have a square high bed, covered with a tester, and a wonderful, many-shelved Sheraton table beside it, and candles in old green brass candlesticks; to have a row of white, built-in armoires full of pretty dresses and cloaks and shoes; to have all this and to know one has helped to create it, was to possess a shrine where the thoughts of girlhood might safely let themselves go to all the four winds of the imagination, like many-coloured birds set free, unmindful of the traps and huntsmen scouring the world beyond.

But Moira’s real favourite was not the lovely golden brown tapestry, nor the stained little bas relief of the Child, nor even the drawings of Michelangelo and Rembrandt, but a painting hung on the wall facing the foot of her bed, where she could look at it the first thing in the morning as she rose, and the last thing at night as she retired. It was a portrait of Mathilda’s grandmother at eighteen, painted in Virginia, a year before she crossed the plains with her young husband. The smooth, dark red hair was parted and drawn about the head above the ears like a cap, its gleam of colour apparent only in the gloss of the high lights. The blue eyes and fresh complexion and fine, regular features were done with infinite tenderness. She sat in a black gown, opening wide at the neck, against a red background formed by a cloak thrown over the chair. Moira knew it was good painting, of an exquisite older style, though the name of the painter was unsigned and had long been forgotten. She amused herself making little verses about it.

“My young great grandmother sits in her frame And the red of her cloak burns warm as a flame....”

Many a time she sat up in her bed pretending to have conversations about the stirring adventures of her grandmother’s early days, for she had heard the whole story of the young woman’s arduous journey and home-building--and also about the young men who came to Thornhill, discussing their characters without reserve. One could do this in perfect propriety with a dead great grandmother.

“Tommy McNutt wants to come over every day and ride with me, Grandmother. But he squints out of doors, and he always wants to help you on a horse and he talks like a newspaper piece. I’d rather have somebody to talk to like old George Moore, wouldn’t you, dear? It’s a pity you were born too early to read George Moore. I know you would like him”--and she broke off for rhyme again:

“The courtly old painter I am sure wore lace And the things he said brought a flush to her face.”

“But if I should like Tommy I’d have a whole house as big as this one all my own. And if I should like Mark Sturm, the young brewer, I’d have two.... I don’t care, _Maman_ will give me a house.”

“Then there’s Selden Van Nostrand. He’s tremendously popular because he makes up verses about ‘Aphrodite in a nightie,’ but he sometimes does better than that. The other day he said his heart was a leaf devoured by the worm of Egotism, shrivelled in the fire of Sex, and trampled by the feet of Virtue. I see you like that one, Grandma. Beautiful Grandma, I have your eyes--

“Her wide blue eyes have a trace of play And the day she sat was a fine bright day!”

Moira finished her morning cup of tea on the stand beside the bed and recalled suddenly that this fine, bright day was one of special significance, for Hal was coming home from his last year at prep school. Hal was the one young man she never talked to her great grandmother about, because, as she explained to herself, she was his great grandmother also and would be prejudiced. She stood in the sunlight pouring through the window, watching it gleam upon her firm shoulders and flanks. She had not decided whether she would go to the station with her mother and Uncle Sterling or not.

Hal had treated her pretty badly the summer before and been very satirical, and the worst of it was she had found it hard to resent because he had seemed suddenly to be much older and to have some right to authority. He had been nicer at Christmas, taking her to two parties and giving her a set of Verlaine bound in tooled leather, but even when he tried to be nice to her he had somehow seemed condescending.

She was in great doubt. Nobody, of course, would attach any significance to it, whichever she did, not even Hal, probably. It was only important to herself. She knew something had happened to her during the past year that was comparable to the change in Hal the year before. She had evidence now under her hands and in her eyes as she stood undressed, evidence that did not wholly please her, for she had lately taken a fancy to dislike women. More satisfactory evidence was a sense of mental growth.

She had just returned from a long Spring vacation in New York with Mathilda, not her first visit but her most exciting one, and her thoughts were awhirl with Pavlova and Rachmaninoff and the Washington Square Players, bobbed hair and the operas at the Metropolitan, and a dozen startling, vivifying, even violent art exhibitions. She felt that she was probably much more splashed by the currents than Hal himself, for certainly one did not really learn anything at a boy’s school. Such places could only be high class stables for thoroughbred colts to pass the awkward stage in, under trainers far less capable than those they would have had if they were horses.

And now the question was whether to test the glamour of these mental and physical acquisitions upon Hal by waiting to meet him alone, or to go like a good fellow and see him with the family. There was, of course, nothing personal about it; Hal was no more than an opportune judge. He represented the best criticism the East had to send back to them.

After her bath she decided for action. She would go with the others and meet him. “Anyway, why attach so much importance to Hal? He’s quite capable of attaching enough to himself.”

There was the possibility, too, of dramatic interest in his arrival. The year before, on his return, at eighteen, he had boldly announced to his father he was going to war. There wasn’t to be a day lost, he wanted to go at once. Every man in his class was going somehow or other. Sterling Blaydon opposed it, the argument dragged out for days, and finally the family won. But it was only with the understanding that if Hal would finish his last year at school he might make his own decision. The country’s participation in the war was now over a year old and the outlook was dismal, one German advance after another having succeeded. There were plenty of youngsters of nineteen and twenty in it, and Hal would insist upon enlisting. He had, as a matter of fact, and as his letters showed, done almost no schooling at Fanstock that year. The entire institution had been made over into a training camp.

Moira remembered how her cousin had chafed the summer before, hating his idleness and the wretched fate of being in excessive demand to entertain girls. Her sympathy with his groans had gone a long way to help her forgive his ill treatment.

And yet she had never been worked up to a pitch of great excitement about the war.

One failing had troubled her ever since she could remember--the tendency to disagree with opinions as soon as an overwhelming majority held them.

It was partly due to the example of Mathilda’s own fastidiousness and independence of judgment, but she went farther than Mathilda, and supposed that she must have inherited this inconvenient trait from that mythical father of whom she had been told so little and longed to know so much. At all events, she arrived at certain conclusions, by herself, about the war: for example, that perhaps Germany was not entirely the instigator, that cruelties were probably practised on both sides--war’s horrors produced them--and that after all it did seem as though the whole world was furiously pitted against two or three caged-in nations.

She did not entirely like herself for these heresies and kept silent upon them. But she promised herself the fun of an argument with Hal. How it would irritate him!

“He’ll think I’ve lost my mind. Perhaps he’ll surrender me to the authorities. How wonderful--I wish he would!”

She took one final glimpse of herself and walked slowly out of the room to face a hard day. She felt she would prove a formidable antagonist for Hal.

But downstairs a surprise was waiting. She found Mathilda, suppressing a few tears, and her Uncle sitting in a profound study. Their disappointment communicated itself to her at once. Something had happened about Hal.

Mrs. Seymour indicated the yellow night-letter on the table.

“Dear Father and Aunt [it read]: Offered chance to join aviation training corps, Long Island, at once. No time to come home. Wish me luck enough to get over soon. Love. Hal.”

Well, that was sensation enough for her. He had acted with divine independence.

The months that followed until the Armistice were dull and tragic. She would a hundred times rather have gone over herself, though it be as a rank flag-waver. It was all stupid, cunning, criminal, got up by old men to kill young ones. It would be stupid enough to take Hal, her playmate. Night after night she saw him, mutilated or dead; she got so she could picture exactly the way a small hole looked in a man’s forehead, just the degree of red and blue about its tiny rim, and the relaxed, livid expression of a face that had been dead several hours. These pictures haunted her wakeful nights in many different guises, but always with Hal’s features. She learned in imagination how flesh looked when it was laid open or gangrened, and the appearance of the end of a limb that had been taken off. And she grew so bitter that she found she could not pray, though she had always experienced a soothing pleasure from the language of the Book of Common Prayer. She never said those pieces again. She would sit up suddenly in bed, as though she had been wakened by a barrage, and talk by fitful candlelight to her portrait.

XI

“And you aren’t really sorry you didn’t get over?”

“Sorry? Wouldn’t you be?”

“Well, I don’t know. Considering the hordes of disillusioned veterans I’ve met this winter--”

“At least they had a chance to get disillusioned in action. Something for their money. With me it’s just two years--practically three years--gone to pot, and a sort of feeling it isn’t worth while to go back at all. To college, I mean.”

“You couldn’t start this time of year, could you?”

“I suppose I could do something.”

“It would be fun having you around until Fall--like old times.”

Hal laughed shortly.

“You’d care?”

“I’ve had a good long spell of Thornhill alone, you know. Next year I shan’t mind, because I’ll be away at school myself.”

“My Lord, Moira, have you anything more to learn?”

“Oh, yes, I could learn to be useful, for instance.”

“You manage to be most anything, if the notion strikes you.”

“I’m not so crazy to go,” she mused. “I imagine it’ll be rather awful. Formalities, lady lecturers, highbrow girls with shell-rimmed glasses. They’ve been cramming education down the throats of the fashionable young for a generation and what’s the result? Country clubs, prohibition, and a beastly war.”

“Cynical, eh?”

“No more than you would be, if you’d done nothing but read newspapers these last two years. I suppose now they’ll all combine and squeeze everything out of Germany that she has left--just as the Persians and the Greeks did, and the kings in the Bible. And there’ll be a lot of moralizing--more than ever. Of course, you’ll be glad. The victor is always spoiled.”

“Pooh,” he laughed. “You’ve got me wrong. I don’t give a damn what they do. Say, the only principles I have left are principles of horsemanship. I’m highly interested in the way you sit Elfin.”

“Isn’t she a beauty!”

“She’s a pretty horse. But I wasn’t referring entirely to the equine part of the combination.”

It was the first real day they had had together since Hal’s discharge from camp the week before. The weather was like an Indian summer afternoon, one of those exceedingly mild days of February between spells of stiff cold. They had been galloping along the high road, when Moira suddenly pulled up and turned her horse into a meandering lane, so narrow that the stripped branches met in sharply accentuated patterns overhead against the sky. The fields were a monotonous, hard stubbly brown, except where pockets of soiled snow lay in the holes and under the protecting sides of hillocks.

“Is Selden Van Nostrand coming out to-morrow?” asked Hal, after they had ridden a hundred yards in silence.

“Yes.”

“Does he come out often?”

“Yes ... let’s go as far as Corey’s Inn for a bite. I’m famishing, aren’t you?”

“I don’t like him. I suppose you know that.”

“You’re not going to be like the rest of the patriots, are you? Get so you despise anybody with a critical mind?”

“I admire people who say what they mean as much as anybody. But I do object to Van Nostrand, because he’s faintly rotten, and even his wit is literary. He always seems to be rehearsed. Anybody can do that Wilde thing if they study up on it long enough. The point is, is it worth while?”

She laughed with a touch of malice.

“You sound like a book review, Hal. His line is pretty easy, but it’s a line. Nobody ever even tries to be amusing here, and he not only tries but I think he succeeds.”

“It’s from him, I suppose, you got this fellow-feeling for the Germans. Well, he had plenty of opportunity to cultivate it, staying at home.”

Moira gave him a glance of friendliness.

“Oh, it’s such fun to have you back, I don’t care what you say. If you knew all the dreams I’ve had, terrifying dreams, seeing you--hurt and cut up and dead. I’d wake up mad enough to kill Germans myself.”

“Did you really dream about me, Moira?” He pulled his horse closer to hers, leaning as far as he could. The girl’s mount, disliking to be crowded, pranced out of control, and Hal had to swerve away, but he kept his eyes on the straight, slim figure.

“God, Moira, what a beauty you’ve grown!”

She began to murmur aloud:

“When I was one and twenty I heard a wise man say Give crowns and pounds and guineas But not your heart away, Give gold away and rubies But keep your fancy free, But I was one and twenty, No use to talk to me.”

“Moira!” he cried, but she was gone, at full gallop down the lane.

“Hurry!” she called back, “I’m nearly dead with hunger.”

And from there to the inn was a race.

When they returned it was dark, and both were eager to reach the stables, but as they wheeled into the little pasture road which led through the tenant’s land and past Hermann Dietz’ house, a curious scene halted them.

The house was a very old-fashioned small wooden dwelling, with a high stone foundation, built by the past generation of Dietzes twenty-five or thirty years before. The barn, larger than the house, was some twenty yards from the kitchen door, across a squalid cow yard. A dim lamp or two was burning in the house, but this was completely deserted, the doors hanging open and giving it a half-witted grimace. The centre of attraction was a big double barn door. Around this, in a lighted semi-circle stood the Dietz family, consisting of the bony, tall, salmon-faced father, the emaciated, dreadfully stooped mother, and four children of varying ages. A curious murmur arose from the group, and riding closer, Moira and Hal saw that they were weeping. Beyond, they could catch a glimpse of the body of a horse, swaying slightly from side to side in its last agony, and casting monstrous shadows on the high cobwebbed walls behind, thrown by the lantern which stood on the ground at Hermann’s feet.

Moira dismounted and signalled to Hal to follow her.

“They’ve been grieving this way since yesterday,” she whispered, “and to-day the veterinary told them he couldn’t save the horse.”

The sobs arising from the pitiful group, two of the smallest of whom clung to their mother’s skirts and hid their faces, more frightened at the commotion than troubled about the horse, rose and fell with the spasms of suffering that swept over the dying beast. Moira heard Ellen’s reassuring voice and saw her face for the first time in the lantern light at the far end of the group.

“Ah, Mrs. Dietz, let them put the poor animal out of its pain,” she was saying in a loud whisper to the mother. “It can’t live.”

Moira turned to Hal and took his arm. He had been smiling grimly at the scene, but as her hand fell upon his sleeve he covered it with his own. The horse, the drama of primitive sorrow, everything was forgotten, except her features and hair, and gipsy loveliness in the wavering light.

“They’re Ellen’s children, these people,” she said. “She’s wonderful to them. She told me yesterday ‘that horse is like a member of their family, Miss Moira. It’ll be terrible when it dies.’ Isn’t she fine to come down here and comfort them?”

They turned at the sound of foot-steps crossing the hard earth and stubble, and two stocky figures passed them.