Hagar 10

Hagar 10

Now in the back of Sylvie's head there was certainly the thought

that 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 at

all disagreeably plain. You've got something that makes people ask who

you are. I wouldn't worry."

 

"Oh, I wasn't worrying!" said Hagar. "I was only _preferring_.--I'll

wear the lace collar." She took it out of a black Japanned box, and

with it the topaz brooch that had been her mother's.

 

The visitor from England found the large, square Eglantine parlour

an interesting room. The pier-glasses, framed in sallow gilt, the

many-prismed chandelier, the old velvet carpet strewn with large soft

roses, the claw-foot furniture, the two or three portraits of powdered

Colonial gentlemen, the bits of old china, the framed letters bearing

signatures that seemed to float to her from out her old United States

History--all came to her like a vague fragrance from some unusual

old garden. And then, curiously superimposed upon all this, appeared

memorials of four catastrophic years. Soldiers and statesmen of

the Confederacy had found no time in which to have their portraits

painted. But Mrs. LeGrand had much of family piety and, in addition,

daguerreotypes and _cartes de visite_ of the dead and gone. With her

first glow of prosperity she had a local artist paint her father from

a daguerreotype. Stalwart, with a high Roman face, he looked forth

in black broadcloth with a roll of parchment in his hand. The next

year she had had her husband painted in his grey brigadier's uniform.

Her two brothers followed, and then a famous kinsman--all dead and

gone, all slain in battle. The portraits were not masterpieces, but

there they were, in the pathos of the grey, underneath each a little

gilt plate. "Killed at Sharpsburg."--"Killed Leading a Charge in the

Wilderness."--"Killed at Cold Harbour." Upon the wall, against the

pale, century-old paper, hung crossed swords and cavalry pistols,

and there were framed commissions and battle orders, and an empty

shell propped open the wide white-panelled door. The English visitor

found it all strange and interesting. It was as though a fragrance

of dried rose-leaves contended with a whiff of gunpowder. The small

dining-room into which presently she was carried had fascinating

prints--"Pocahontas Baptized," and "Pocahontas Married," and a group of

women with children and several negroes gathered about an open grave,

one woman standing out, reading the burial service.--Roger Michael was

so interested that she would have liked not to talk at all, just to sit

and look at the prints and mark the negro servants passing about the

table. But Mrs. LeGrand's agreeable voice was asking about the health

of the Queen--she bestirred herself to be an acceptable guest.

 

The small dining-room was separated only by an archway from the large

dining-room, and into the latter, in orderly files, came the Eglantine

pupils, wound about to their several tables and seated themselves with

demureness. M. Morel was speaking of the friendship of France and

England. Roger Michael, while she appeared to listen, studied these

American 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, she

had been,--not with the stronger frame that was coming in with this

generation of admission to out-of-door exercise, the certain boyish

alertness and poise that more and more she was seeing exhibited,--but

pretty or lovely, with delicacy and a certain languor, a dim sweetness

of __EXPRESSION__, and, precious trove in America! voices that pleased.

She noted exceptions to type, small, swarthy girls and large overgrown

ones, girls that were manifestly robust, girls that were alert, girls

that were daring, girls that were timid or stupid, or simply anæmic,

girls that approached the English type and girls that were at the

very antipodes--but the general impression was of Farther South than

she had as yet gone in America, of more grace and slowness, manner

and sweetness. Their clothes interested her; they were so much more

"dressed" than they would have been in England. Evidently, in deference

to the smaller room, there was to-night an added control of speech;

there sounded no more than a pleasant hum, a soft, indistinguishable

murmur of young voices.

 

"They are so excited over the prospect of your speaking to them after

supper," said Mrs. LeGrand, her hand upon the coffee urn.--"Cream and

sugar?"

 

"They do not seem excited," thought Roger Michael.--"Sugar, thank you;

no cream. Of what shall I talk to them? In what are they especially

interested?"

 

"In your charming books, I should say," answered Mrs. LeGrand. "In how

you write them, and in the authors you must know. And then your sweet

English life--Stratford and Canterbury and Devonshire--"

 

"We have been reading 'Lorna Doone' aloud this month," said Miss

Carlisle. "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 the

other side of the table. "I should like to have seen it," she said in

her 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 old

friend and connection of my family."

 

"_Hagar Ashendyne_," said Roger Michael. "I remember meeting once in

the 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 him

as 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?" thought

Roger Michael, but what she said was only, "He was a very pleasant

gentleman, very handsome, very cultivated. My friends and I were thrown

with him during a day at Carcassonne. A month afterwards we met him at

Aigues-Mortes. He was sketching--quite wonderfully."

 

Mrs. LeGrand inwardly deplored Medway Ashendyne's daughter's lack

of _savoir-faire_. "To give herself away like that! Just the kind

of thing her mother used to do!" Aloud she said, "Medway's a great

wanderer, but one of these days he will come home and settle down and

we'll all be happy together. I remember him as a young man--a perfectly

fascinating young man.--Dinah, bring more waffles!--Yes, if you will

tell our girls something of your charming English life. We are all so

interested--"

 

Miss Carlisle's voice came in, a sweet treble like a canary's. "The

Princess of Wales keeps her beauty, does she not?"

 

The study hall was a long, red room, well enough lighted, with a

dais 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 a

discrimination that had not been possible in the dining-room. Of the

faces before her each was different, after all, from the other. There

were keen faces as well as languorous ones; brows that promised as

well as those that did not; behind the prevailing "sweet" __EXPRESSION__,

something sometimes that showed as by heat lightning, something that

had depth. "Here as elsewhere," thought Roger Michael. "The same life!"

 

Mrs. LeGrand was closing, was turning toward her. She rose, bowed

toward the mistress of Eglantine, then, standing square, with her good,

English figure and her sensibly shod, English feet, she began to talk

to these girls.

 

She did not, however, speak to them as, even after she rose, she meant

to 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 a

Fabian," she said, and went on as though that explained. She spoke

of certain movements in thought, of breakings-away toward larger

horizons. She spoke of various heresies, political, social, and other.

"Of course I don't call them heresies; I call them 'the enlarging

vision.'" She gave instances, incidents; she spoke of the dawn coming

over the mountains, and of the trumpet call of "the coming time." She

said that the dying nineteenth century heard the stronger voice of

the twentieth century, and that it was a voice with a great promise.

She spoke of women, of the rapidly changing status of women, of what

machinery had done for women, of what education had done. She spoke of

the great needs of women, of their learning to organize, of the need

for unity among women. She used the words "false position" thrice.

"Woman's immemorially false position."--"Society has so falsely placed

her."--"Until what is false is done away with."--She said that women

were beginning to see. She said that the next quarter-century would

witness a revolution. "You young people before me will see it; some of

you will take part in it. I congratulate you on living when you will

live." She talked for nearly an hour, and just as she was closing it

came to her, with a certain effect of startling, that much of the time

she had been speaking to just one countenance there. She was speaking

directly to the girl called Hagar Ashendyne, sitting halfway down the

hall. When she took her seat there followed a deep little moment of

silence broken at last by applause. Roger Michael marked the girl in

green. She didn't applaud; she sat looking very far away. Mrs. LeGrand

was saying something smoothly perfunctory, beflowered with personal

compliments; the girls all stood; the Eglantine hostess and guest,

with the teachers who had been at table, passed from the platform, and

turned, 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 and

then I felt so uneasy.--It was as though in a moment she was going to

say something indelicate! Dear Mrs. LeGrand ought to have told her how

careful 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 contrast

was achingly still. Hagar was not yet asleep. She lay straight and

still in the narrow bed, her arms behind her head. She was rarely in

a hurry to go to sleep. This hour and a half was her dreaming-awake

time, her time for romance building, her time for floating here and

there, as in a Witch of Atlas boat in her own No-woman's land. She had

in the stalls of her mind half a dozen vague and floating romances,