CHAPTER XIV

CARLOTA

“I thought you lived in a farmhouse too, Cousin Beth,” Jean said, in breathless admiration, as she laid aside her outer wraps, and stood in the big living-room at Twin Oaks. The beautiful country house had been a revelation to her. It seemed to combine all of the home comfort and good cheer of Greenacres with the modern air and improvements of the homes at the Cove. Sitting far back from the broad road in its stately grounds, it was like some reserved but gracious old colonial dame bidding you welcome.

The center hall had a blazing fire in the high old rock fireplace, and Queen Bess, a prize winning Angora, opened her wide blue eyes at the newcomer, but did not stir. In the living-room was another open fire, even while the house was heated with hot air. There were flowering plants at the windows, and freshly cut roses on the tables in tall jars.

“You know, or maybe you don’t know,” said Cousin Beth, “that we have one hobby here, raising flowers, and specially roses. We exhibit every year, and you’ll grow to know them and love the special varieties just as I do. You have no idea, Jean, of the thrill when you find a new bloom different from all the rest.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised to find out anything new and wonderful about this place,” Jean laughed, leaning back in a deep-seated armchair. Like the rest of the room’s furniture it wore a gown of chintz, deep cream, cross barred in dull apple green, with lovely, splashy pink roses scattered here and there. Two large white Polar rugs lay on the polished floor.

“If those were not members of the Peabody family, old and venerated, they never would be allowed to bask before my fire,” Cousin Beth said. “But way back there was an Abner Peabody who sailed the Polar seas, and used to bring back trophies and bestow them on members of his family as future heirlooms. Consequently, we fall over these bears in the dark, and bless great-grandfather Abner’s precious memory.”

After she was thoroughly toasted and had drunk a cup of Russian tea, Jean found her way up to the room that was to be hers during her visit. It was the sunniest kind of a retreat in daffodil yellow and oak brown. The furniture was all in warm deep toned ivory, and there were rows of blossoming daffodils and jonquils along the windowsills.

“Oh, I think this is just darling,” Jean gasped, standing in the middle of the floor and gazing around happily. “It’s as if spring were already here.”

“I put a drawing board and easel here for you too,” Cousin Beth told her. “Of course you’ll use my studio any time you like, but it’s handy to have a corner all your own at odd times. Carlota will be here tomorrow and her room is right across the hall. She has inherited all of her father’s talent, so I know how congenial you will be. And you’ll do each other a world of good.”

“How?”

“Well, you’re thoroughly an American girl, Jean, and Carlota is half Italian. You’ll understand what I mean when you see her. She is high strung and temperamental, and you are so steady nerved and well balanced.”

Jean thought over this last when she was alone, and smiled to herself. Why on earth did one have to give outward and visible signs of temperament, she wondered, before people believed one had sensitive feelings or responsive emotions? Must one wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve, so to speak, for a sort of personal barometer? Bab was high strung and temperamental too; so was Kit. They both indulged now and then in mental fireworks, but nobody took them seriously, or considered it a mark of genius. She felt just a shade of half amused tolerance towards this Carlota person who was to get any balance or poise out of her own nature.

“If Cousin Beth knew for one minute,” she told the face in the round mirror of the dresser, “what kind of a person you really are, she’d never, never trust you to balance anybody’s temperament.”

But the following day brought a trim, closed car to the door, and out stepped Carlota and her maid, a middle-aged Florentine woman who rarely smiled excepting at her charge.

And Jean coming down the wide center flight of stairs saw Cousin Beth before the fire with a tall, girlish figure, very slender, and all in black, even to the wide velvet ribbon on her long dark braid of hair.

“This is my cousin Jean,” said Mrs. Newell, in her pleasant way. She laid Carlota’s slim, soft hand in Jean’s. “I want you two girls to be very good friends.”

“But I know, surely, we shall be,” Carlota exclaimed. And at the sound of her voice Jean’s prejudices melted. She had very dark eyes with lids that drooped at the outer corners, a rather thin face and little eager pointed chin. Jean tried and tried to think who it was she made her think of, and then remembered. It was the little statuette of Le Brun, piquant and curious.

“Now, you will not be treated one bit as guests, girls,” Cousin Beth told them. “You must come and go as you like, and have the full freedom of the house. I keep my own study hours and like to be alone then. Do as you like and be happy. Run along, both of you.”

“She is wonderful, isn’t she?” Carlota said as they went upstairs together. “She makes me feel always as if I were a ship waiting with loose sails, and all at once—a breeze—and I am on my way again. You have not been to Sorrento, have you? You can see the little fisher boats from our terraces. It is all so beautiful, but now the villa is turned into a hospital. Pippa’s brothers and father are all at the front. Her father is old, but he would go. She’s glad she’s an old maid, she says, for she has no husband to grieve over. Don’t you like her? She was my nurse when I was born.”

“Her face reminds one of a Sybil. There’s one—I forget which—who was middle-aged instead of being old and wrinkled.”

“My father has used Pippa’s head often. One I like best is ‘The Melon Vendor.’ That was exhibited in Paris and won the Salon medal. And it was so odd. Pippa did not feel at all proud. She said it was only the magic of his fingers that had made the statue a success, and father said it was the inspiration from Pippa’s face.”

“I wonder if you ever knew Bab Crane. She’s a Long Island girl from the Cove where we used to live, and she’s lived abroad every year for two or three months with her mother. She is an artist.”

“I don’t know her,” Carlota shook her head doubtfully. “You see over there, while we entertained a great deal, I was in a convent and scarcely met anyone excepting in the summertime, and then we went to my aunt’s villa up on Lake Maggiore. Oh, but that is the most beautiful spot of all. There is one island there called Isola Bella. I wish I could carry it right over here with me and set it down for you to see. It is all terraces and splendid old statuary, and when you see it at sunrise it is like a jewel, it glows so with color.”

Jean curled her slippered feet under her as she sat on the window seat, listening. There was always a lingering love in her heart for the “haunts of ancient peace” in Europe’s beauty spots, and especially for Italy. Somewhere she had read, it was called the “sweetheart of the nations.”

“I’d love to go there,” she said now, with a little sigh.

“And that is what I was always saying when I was there, and my father told me of this country. I wanted to see it so. He would tell me of the great gray hills that climb to the north, and the craggy broken shoreline up through Maine, and the little handful of amethyst isles that lie all along it. He was born in New Hampshire, at Portsmouth. We are going up to see the house some day, but I know just what it looks like. It stands close down by the water’s edge in the old part of the town, and there is a big rambling garden with flagged walks. His grandfather was a ship builder and sent them out, oh, like argosies I think, all over the world, until the steamboats came, and his trade was gone. And he had just one daughter, Petunia. Isn’t that a beautiful name, Petunia Pomeroy. It is all one romance, I think, but I coax him to tell it to me over and over. There was an artist who came up from the south in one of his ships, and he was taken very ill. So they took him in as a guest, and Petunia cared for him. And when he was well, what do you think?” She clasped her hands around her knees and rocked back and forth, sitting on the floor before her untouched suitcases.

“They married.”

“But more than that,” warmly. “He carved the most wonderful figureheads for my great grandfather’s ships. All over the world they were famous. His son was my father.”

It was indescribable, the tone in which she said the last. It told more than anything else how dearly she loved this sculptor father of hers. That night Jean wrote to Kit. The letter on her arrival had been to the Motherbird, but this was a chat with the circle she knew would read it over around the sitting room lamp.

Dear Kit:

I know you’ll all be hungry for news. We motored out from Boston, and child, when I saw the quaint old New England homestead we had imagined, I had to blink my eyes. It looks as if it belonged right out on the North Shore at the Cove. It is a little like Longfellow’s home, only glorified—not by fame as yet, though that will come—by Greek wings. I don’t mean Nike wings. There are sweeping porticos on each side where the drive winds around. And inside it is summertime even now. They have flowers everywhere, and raise roses. Kit, if you could get one whiff of their conservatory, you would become a Persian rose worshipper. When I come back, we’re going to start a sunken rose garden, not with a few old worn out bushes, but new slips and cuttings.

Carlota arrived the day after I did. She looks like the little statuette of Le Brun on Mother’s bookcase, only her hair hangs in two long braids. She is more Italian than American in her looks, but seems to be very proud of her American father. Helen would love her ways. She has a maid, Pippa, from Florence, middle-aged, who used to be her nurse. Isn’t that medieval and Juliet-like? But she wears black and white continually, no gorgeous raiment at all, black in the daytime, white for evening. I feel like Pierrette beside her, but Cousin Beth says the girls of our age dress very simply abroad.

The Contessa is coming out to spend the week end with us, and will take Carlota and me back with her for a few days. I’ll tell you all about her next time. We go for a long trip in the car every day, but it is awfully cold and bleak still. I feel exactly like Queen Bess, the Angora cat, I want to hug the fires all the time, and Carlota says she can’t bear our New England winters. At this time of the year, she says spring has come in Tuscany and all along the southern coast. She has inherited her father’s gift for modelling, and gave me a little figurine of a fisher boy standing on his palms, for a paper weight. It is perfect. I wish I could have it cast in bronze. You know, I think I’d rather be a sculptor than a painter. Someway the figures seem so full of life, but then, Cousin Beth says, they lack color.

I mustn’t start talking shop to you when your head is full of forestry. Let me know how Piney takes to the idea of going west, and be sure and remember to feed Cherilee. Dorrie will think of her chickens and neglect the canary sure. And help Mother all you can.

With love to all, Jean.

“Humph,” said Kit, loftily, when the letter arrived and was duly digested by the circle. “I suppose Jean feels as if the whole weight of this household rested on her anxious young shoulders.”

“Well, we do miss her awfully,” Doris hurried to say. “But the canary is all right.”

“Yes, and so is everything else. Wait till I write to my elder sister and relieve her mind. Let her cavort gaily in motor cars, and live side by each with Angora cats in the lap of luxury. Who cares? The really great ones of the earth have dwelt in penury and loneliness on the solitary heights.”

“You look so funny brandishing that dish towel, and spouting, Kit,” Helen said, placidly. “I’m sure I can understand how Jean feels and I like it. It is odd about Carlota wearing black and white, isn’t it? I wish Jean had told more about her. I shall always imagine her in a little straight gown of dull violet velvet, with a cap of pearls.”

“Isn’t that nice? How do you imagine me, Helenita darling?” Kit struck a casual attitude while she wiped the pudding dish.

“You’d make a nice Atalanta, the girl who raced for the golden apples, or some pioneer girl.”

“There’s a stretch of fancy for you, from ancient Greece to Indian powwow times. Run tell Shad to take up more logs to Father’s room, or the astral spirit of our sweet sister will perch on our bedposts tonight and rail at us right lustily.”

“What’s that?” asked Doris, inquisitively. “What’s an astral spirit?”

Kit screwed her face up till it looked like Cynthy Allan’s, and prowled towards the youngest of the family with portentous gestures.

“’Tain’t a ghost, and ’tain’t a spook, and ’tain’t a banshee. It’s the shadow of your self when you’re sound asleep, and it goeth questing forth on mischief bent. Yours hovers over the chicken coops all night long, Dorrie, and mine flits out to the eagles’ nests on mountain tops, and Helenita’s digs into old chests of romance, and hauls out caskets of jewels and scented gowns by ye hundreds.”

“There’s the milk,” called Shad’s voice from the entry way. “Better strain it right off and get it into the pans. Mrs. Gorham’s gone to bed with her neuralgy.”

Dorrie giggled outright at the interruption, but Kit hurried to the rescue with the linen straining cloth. It took more than neuralgia to shake the mettle of a Robbins these days.