CHAPTER EIGHT

ITS BLENDED ROMANCE

The rehearsal for the Twelfth Night entertainment went off so well that the double quartette most interested in it were greatly elated.

Eleanor Dinsmore, Edith Hooper, Helen Lacey three pretty girls--as well as Fayre girls--had been asked to complete the number for the gavotte, and their brothers and cousins and friends, four in all, had gladly added themselves to the Rutherfords and Lester Baldwin to make up eight men. Rob had had an inspiration, and had written words to be sung by the dancers to a beautiful old French gavotte air, as they moved through the stately figures of the charming dance. Even in ordinary modern dress the effect was so exquisite that the few privileged people who looked on were enthusiastic. The young people began to plume themselves on accomplishing something really artistic, while the fear that the ticket purchasers would feel that their purchase was equivalent to an outright donation, with no return to themselves, vanished like mists in the sunshine of the dancers' perception of unhoped-for success.

The songs were not going to fail either. The Greys and Battalion B, with Frances, had sung together since their first meeting. Now Bartlemy's uncertain bass had deepened into the real thing, Basil's tenor had grown sweeter, and Bruce's barytone richer. Oswyth had a sympathetic, true little home voice, exactly like herself; Rob sang alto very well, and Prue's high soprano had grown stronger than when they first sang together rowing and working through that summer of the beginning of Greys' acquaintance with the Rutherfords. Frances had always sung well, and now Hester's rich, splendid alto was a real acquisition, while Lester Baldwin's tenor was stronger and higher than Basil's. It really was an unusual combination of voices, and long practise together, of most of the singers, made them know exactly how to bring out one another's best points, and made the voices blend quite beautifully.

It had not taken much persuasion to get Lester Baldwin to give up his intention of going back after the rehearsal, but to accept the Rutherfords' hospitality that night and take Hester back Sunday evening.

Bruce glowered at Lester for an hour after he met him, then yielded to his personal charm, but still more to the charm of his marked preference for talking to Frances, and became cordial with a heartiness that surprised Lester. He did not know that it was not for what he had done, nor for what he was, but for what he had not done and for what he was not that Bruce Rutherford suddenly became his friend.

Sunday morning the three Greys and Battalion B carried off Hester and her cousin to the quiet church where the Grey girls had been carried in white draperies to be made little Christians in baptism--Very little and very reluctant ones.

They came out of church into a fine, cold winter rain which had threatened them on setting forth. It had kept Miss Charlotte and little Polly at home for a peaceful morning in the little grey house; it had served, with her cold, to retain Mrs. Grey at Lydia's side, for appetites attend on church-going, as a rule, and there was much to be done by those mother-hands which always smoothed out possible rough places, and made all kinds of comfort certain.

Aunt Azraella was not out either, which was a relief to the girls, who dreaded her probable addition to them at dinner, for however gentler Aunt Azraella's diminution of health might make her, she still was not adapted to great increase of joy.

"Do you think," Rob asked as they gathered around the hearth after dinner, "do you really think, Mardy, that it would be unsuited to the day for 'we (twice) four, and no more' to go up into the attic and look over the chests and trunks of old clothing?"

"It would be Shintoism--ancestor-worship," said Bruce.

"Bruce, we have sufficient knowledge of the Eastern question to understand what Shintoism is without your foot-note," remarked Rob sternly.

"I think it would be perfectly proper to the day, dear, to go into the attic and see those old costumes, that is to the Sunday side of the day, but how about the weather side of the day? Wouldn't it be too cold for you?" Mrs. Grey stretched her fingers towards the fire as she spoke; she dearly loved warmth--of all sorts.

"We're not afraid of the cold, are we girls? Of course the boys are afraid of nothing," said Rob.

_"Won't you walk into my attic?" said a robin to her mates._ _"I have venerable garments that would fit up many crates._ _"The way into my attic is up a winding stair,_ _"But, 'spite of cold, these garments old repay a journey there."_

Rob chanted this effusion, and Battalion B arose as one body and echoed, as a refrain:

"But, 'spite of cold, these garments old repay a journey there."

Then the entire eight departed atticward with Polly and her doll, Roberta Charlotte, bringing up the rear.

"Go on, Wythie; I must put Polly's jacket on," said Rob, pausing at her chamber door. "Queer, that little bodies take cold more easily than larger ones, which have more surface to catch cold on."

"What an absurd girl she is!" sighed grave Hester with supreme content in the qualities which she lacked and which Rob possessed in excess.

"She talks nonsense all the day long, and acts sense more than any one," said Wythie, with her loving smile.

Rob and Polly came quickly, the bunch of keys dangling from Rob's hand.

"We forgot these," she cried breathlessly. "We may get too cold if we try to look over all the clothes. Shall we omit the fantastic ones, Wythie, and get out only the serious ones, which we can use for the gavotte?"

"Let us open the cedar chest first," said Oswyth, taking the key Rob offered her.

She laid back the lid and displayed its contents. In five minutes they were being shaken out of their folds and held up for inspection, big cloaks, fur-trimmed hoods, shirred with rattans, long veils, shawls, for this was the chest given over to materials which might attract moths.

"The beautiful things are in the trunks," said Prue. "We shall want the silks and embroidered muslins. Open this trunk, Wythie, please."

Oswyth opened it, and the girls drew a deep breath of joy over what even their first glimpse displayed.

"Oh, Frances, do you remember these?" whispered Rob, taking out a gown of 1776, and one of the Madison Era. "Do you remember the night we wore these?"

"Indeed I do, Rob," whispered Frances. "We must only remember now what a happy night that was, and be thankful that it was so--that special night."

"I think I'll wear this gown in the gavotte," said Rob, turning to the others. "That is if no one else wants it."

"Ah, yes!" said Bruce involuntarily, and Rob knew that he too remembered her wearing it in their impromptu frolic nearly two years ago.

"Would this do, Bartlemy?" asked Prue, holding up a pale blue brocade over a quilted satin petticoat.

"It's beautiful, but better for Wythie or Frances. You ought to wear this." And Bartlemy drew out a yellow satin, overshot with white, and sweeping open down the front to display a paler yellow petticoat. "Here is a cloth-of-gold effect for a golden-haired maiden."

"We will make our audience play a game after the entertainment called 'The Search for the Golden Girl,'" suggested Lester Baldwin.

"And introduce Prue to them afterward as Miss Midas," added Hester. "My mother has a great-grandmother dress for me--crimson and silver."

"I'd like to have Oswyth wear this," said Prue looking well-pleased with her own allotment, and displaying a brocade of rosebuds on a blush ground.

"No," said Wythie. "That is lovely, Prudy, but I have a sentimental desire to wear something else. Eleanor Dinsmore and that gown have an affinity for each other."

"We must try to select gowns that not only suit each wearer, but which contrast and compose well in the general picture," said Bartlemy.

"I know what Wythie wants to do! She wants to wear one of Oswyth Grey's gowns!" cried Rob.

"Her own?" asked Hester wondering.

"No, indeed; Oswyth Grey long dead and gone; our thrice repeated great-aunt. That is her trunk standing there." And Rob pointed to an ancient chest with a heavy, old-time lock. "She died when she was not much past twenty; there was a love-story, of course, about her, and we children have always felt the fascination of our vague knowledge of her history, especially Wythie. When she was a little girl she seemed greatly impressed by this kinswoman whose name she bore--I think, in a childish way, she must have had some cloudy notion of reincarnation."

"Might we see her chest?" asked Frances. "It sounds as if opening it would be like opening a volume of poems."

Hester shivered in spite of her effort to convince herself that she was warm. Prue noticed it, and was rather glad of an excuse for getting down to warmer quarters.

"Hester is freezing," she cried. "Oswyth Grey's chest hasn't such splendid gowns in it as those we have seen; they're all simple muslins, delicately embroidered, except one heavy violet and white brocade--white, with violets strewn over it--which is the one Wythie will wear at the dance, if she wears any of them. Let's go down and get warm, all of us."

"Shall we? Are you cold, Hessie, Frances, little Rutherford B's, and Lester?" Rob asked, hesitating a little over the use of Lester Baldwin's name, though both he and Hester had protested against formality.

"Well, I'm more nearly goose-flesh than one could possibly expect me to be," said Bruce.

"I confess that the wood-fire down-stairs might be spelled wooed, for it woos me strongly, though I should dearly love to see Oswyth Grey's chest opened," said Hester.

"Why, she's shivering as she speaks!" cried Rob. "Come, then my brethren. We might carry down these gowns we have selected. I'll lay them in Mardy's room to be tried on by the girls tomorrow. Hester must slip on hers to-night--oh, I forgot! Hester has her gown at home. We haven't provided for the other two girls, but we didn't come up here intending to select gowns; merely to see them."

Rob was talking as she went on down the stairs, following her guests and Prue, Polly following her, as she always did. Her voice floated back to Wythie who had remained behind closing the trunks. She arose from her knees when the last key was withdrawn and looked longingly over to Oswyth Grey's chest, where it stood in a corner by one of the gable windows. She loved that chest and its vanished owner, whose kinship to herself she felt so strongly, the young maiden, about whom she knew really nothing but that she had loved and died--which, after all, is an epitome of all lives.

"Ah, well; I shall have plenty of chances to see you again, dear Oswyth," she said aloud.

She turned around and there was Basil, waiting for her.

"Why, you startled me, Basil," said Wythie, her colour rising. But she did not look in the least startled; it always seemed possible to Wythie that she might raise her eyes and see Basil, even when he was away.

"I thought perhaps you and I might stay behind long enough for just one peep into that other Oswyth Grey's chest," said Basil. "Let me know her, too, Wythie."

Wythie crossed over to the chest without a word, and knelt to unfasten it. Then she threw back its lid, and looked up at Basil.

"There isn't much to see, but it has always seemed to me that there was much to feel in this chest," she said.

An odour of attar of roses, of lavender, of tonka beans, blended into an indefinable, sweet mustiness by more than a hundred years, arose into the young faces bent to inhale it. Soft muslins, fine with the fineness of the importations from India when broad-sailed merchantmen went out from New England ports, yellow with age, and daintily wrought with broidery, lay neatly folded before their eyes.

Beneath them, as Oswyth the second tenderly raised them, lay high-heeled, narrow slippers, a fan that had been brought from China long ago to the happy young girl whose cheeks' tint matched its mandarin's crimson robe, a white silk shawl that might have come with the fan, its knotted silken fringe and heavily embroidered flowers several shades more yellow than the delicate fabric. Neckerchiefs of soft mull, white and in colours lay there, ribbons, stained and faded by the years, a sampler, a bead bag, clocked stockings, and a great leghorn hat with its plumes and gauze ribbons flattened by long lying. It was a young girl's chest, and its pathos spoke to Basil, the pathos of a light heart that early had ceased to beat, of brief life and long death.

Wythie lifted, one after the other, that other Oswyth's treasures, and at last raised from its box near the bottom of the chest the beautiful brocade which she wished to wear in the gavotte. Beneath it lay bed-linen, hemmed with the tiniest stitches, and table-linen with its "O. G." carefully wrought in its corners. And underneath all, in the very bottom, lay a few thin books, and a bundle of letters tied with a yellowed ribbon that might once have been either white or pale blue, and marked in the finest of old-fashioned writing: "From B. R. to O. G. Her all of life."

"B. R.?" exclaimed Basil. "Am I in this story, too, Wythie?"

"I never thought of those initials before," said Wythie, flushing to the uppermost line of her brow, "I have not opened this chest, not for ever so long--three years, it may be."

"You couldn't have thought of the initials then, Wythie, dear; I wasn't in your story as long ago as that," said Basil.

"I remember that Oswyth Grey's lover's name was Benjamin Raymond," said Wythie. "Poor little greatest aunt--they are sad letters!"

She gently untied the discoloured ribbon and the letters fell apart in her lap as she sat back on her heels to look at them. From among them fell a bunch of flowers and lock of hair; the usual trivial mementos of greater values lost.

"The first ones are formal, but they were written happily; one can see that," said Wythie, as she unfolded a yellow sheet, handling its brown folds carefully, for age had made it very frail. "It's curious how the mood of the writer shows through the set phrases of that time."

"Nature and strong feeling break through stronger barriers than phrases, Oswyth, the second," said Basil, as he picked up the flowers. "Look," he added, "these flowers were waxed for their preservation."

"Yes. I imagine Oswyth Grey did that, for her lover could never have sent her waxed flowers," said Wythie, lifting the sheet which had held them for so long that Basil might replace them. "The letters grew more frank and assured as they went on--some day we will read them. Then there was one reproaching my little greatest aunt for her hardness of heart, her cruelty after so long, and then a last one bidding her farewell. It is quite pitiable. But this is the saddest thing of all." And Oswyth unfolded the sheet which bore on its outer fold the initials and the inscription that had lain on top of the packet of letters, like their epitaph as well as Oswyth Grey's. "See, she wrote this letter to him in reply to the reproach he had made her, knowing that he would never see it; it was never sent. Read it."

Basil read it. It threw no light on the cause of the lovers' parting, but it was a passionate protest against the distrust of her which her lover had expressed to that Oswyth, and a revelation of devotion and beauty of character that, after all the years, still palpitated with life. Oswyth Grey, the little Puritan, would not have poured out her soul thus had she not felt sure that no other eyes than her own would ever rest upon that paper.

"What a pity!" murmured Basil, gently folding the unsent letter in its brown creases again. His eyes were moist.

"She died not long after that the records show; he never knew. Isn't it a pity?" Wythie's lashes hid her downcast eyes as she fingered the papers absently. "I always felt that I ought to make it right to her, because I bore her name. I can't explain just what I have felt about her, though the feeling is strong. Yet the dear girl has been quite happy for more than a century; I suppose we need not feel sad about her now. Here is a stanza written to her, signed B. R. It isn't remarkable, but it is enough to prove that her B. R. cared for poetry when many were indifferent to it."

Wythie looked up, smiling to show that the moisture on those lashes meant nothing, and offered Basil one more yellow page. He took it and read:

_If there were other like to thee, my loved one,_ _Then might I love that other perfect she;_ _But since the world holds naught like thee, my loved one,_ _How can I choose but at thy feet to be?_ _For, save in this, thou hast no fault, my loved one,_ _That to my love thou prov'st thy obduracy._

Basil returned the verse without comment, and Wythie tied up again the packet just as that other Wythie had tied it so long before. But with the great difference that for this Wythie happiness just within reach seemed to fill the shadowy attic.

"You didn't care for B. R's poetry?" she said, bending over to replace the letters at the bottom of the chest.

"On the contrary, and I like him for writing it," said Basil. "Wythie, there will never come anything between us? We shall not be parted as were this other B. R., and Oswyth Grey? I am still in college, but when I begin life you are coming to begin it with me in the Caldwell house, aren't you? We know you are, both of us, but I have been feeling lately that I wanted to hear you say it."

Oswyth trembled. She had known that Basil's first preference for her had grown into a devoted love, and she knew that she would have had no courage to face the years if they did not include Basil. Gentle Wythie had gone on to this moment without a fear, quietly unfolding without doubt or dread. But, after all, it meant so much, and for a moment the girl paused. Then she looked up into Basil's face. "It couldn't be otherwise, Basil, because it is just as Oswyth Grey wrote here: All of life," she said.

Basil bowed his head for a speechless moment. "God helping me this Oswyth shall never be unhappy," he said. Then a great joy seized him, and he was silent, holding back the expression of it, for Wythie's dove eyes looked up, half frightened, at the new, manly Basil beside her. And before either could speak Rob's voice rang out, and Rob's step came up the lower flight of stairs.

"Where are you two? Basil, Wythie, what has happened to you?" she called. "Have you fallen into a trunk, and are we going to have a case of the Mistletoe Bough right here in the little grey house and our own attic?"

She appeared at the foot of the attic stairs, peering up through the gathering darkness.

"We opened Oswyth Grey's chest--Basil wanted to see its contents--and it took longer than we realized," said Wythie coming to the head of the stairs. "Here is her white brocade with the violets; I shall wear this in the gavotte."

Wythie's voice sounded unnatural; Rob pounced on her the moment she descended, and glanced at Basil, following her with his eyes alight as they had never been before.

"What have you been doing?" she demanded. "Reading Oswyth Grey's letters? Wythie, what has kept you? Weren't you cold?"

"Oh, no; it is as warm--" began Wythie.

"'As springtime, the only pretty ring time,'" supplemented Basil.

"Wythie, tell me!" insisted Rob.

"Not now; wait until to-night," said Wythie, and escaped with Oswyth Grey's white brocade all bestrewn with violets.

"If I have to wait until to-night there's nothing to wait for; I know this minute," muttered Rob. Then she turned fiercely upon Basil.

"Basil, I thought we could trust you," she said.

"Nonsense, Rob, you knew quite well what was coming," retorted Basil with a quiet laugh of triumph.

"Does that make me like it?" she demanded. "My blessed Wythie! How do you expect me to go down again to the rest?"

"Shall I send Bruce up?" inquired Basil blandly.

Rob bolted for the back-stairs, to the calm atmosphere of Lydia till she should have regained sufficient composure to face her guests and the first romance of this generation in the little grey house.