Chapter 6. Georgie-Porgie

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_ CHAPTER VI. GEORGIE-PORGIE

I

It would never have happened if Aunt Claudia had been there. Aunt Claudia would have built hedges about Becky. She would have warned the Judge. She would, as a last resort, have challenged Dalton. But Fate, which had Becky's future well in hand, had sent Aunt Claudia to meet Truxton in New York. And she was having the time of her life.

Her first letter was a revelation to her niece. "I didn't know," she told the Judge at breakfast, "that Aunt Claudia could be like this----"

"Like what?"

"So young and gay----"

"She is not old. And when she was young she was gayer than you."

"Oh, not really, Grandfather."

"Yes. And she looked like you--and had the same tricks with her hands, and her hair was bright and brown. And she was very pretty."

"She is pretty yet," said Becky, loyally, but she was quite sure that whatever might have been Aunt Claudia's likeness to herself in the past, her own charms would not in the future shrink to fit Aunt Claudia's present pattern. It was unthinkable that her pink and white should fade to paleness, her slenderness to stiffness, her youthful radiance to a sort of weary cheerfulness.

There was nothing weary in the letter, however. "Oh, my dear, my dear, you should see Truxton. He is so perfectly splendid that I am sure he is a changeling and not my son. I tell him that he can't be the bundle of cuddly sweetness that I used to carry in my arms. I wore your white house-coat that first morning, Becky, and he sent some roses, and we had breakfast together in my rooms at the hotel. I believe it is the first time in years that I have looked into a mirror to really like my looks. You were sweet, my dear, to insist on putting it in. Truxton must stay here for two weeks more, and he wants me to stay with him. Then we shall come down together. Can you get along without me? We are going to the most wonderful plays, and to smart places to eat, and I danced last night on a roof garden. Should I say 'on' or 'in' a roof garden? Truxton says that my step is as light as a girl's. I think my head is a little turned. I am very happy."

Becky laid the letter down. "Would anyone have believed that Aunt Claudia _could_----"

"You have said that before, my dear. Your Aunt Claudia wasn't born in the ark----"

"But, Grandfather, I didn't mean that."

"It sounded like it. I shall write to her to stay as long as she can. We can get along perfectly without her."

"Of course," said Becky slowly. She had a feeling that, at all costs, she ought to call Aunt Claudia back.

For Dalton, after that first ride in the rain from Pavilion Hill, had speeded his wooing. He had swept Becky along on a rushing tide. He had courted the Judge, and the Judge had pressed upon him invitation after invitation. Day and night the big motor had flashed up to Huntersfield, bringing Dalton to some tryst with Becky, or carrying her forth to some gay adventure. Her world was rose-colored. She had not dreamed of life like this. She seemed to have drunk of some new wine, which lighted her eyes and flamed in her cheeks. Her beauty shone with an almost transcendent quality. As the dove's plumage takes on in the spring an added luster, so did the bronze of Becky's hair seem to burn with a brighter sheen.

Yet the Judge noticed nothing.

"Did you ask him to dine with us?" he had demanded, when Dalton had called Becky up on the morning of the receipt of Aunt Claudia's letter.

"No, Grandfather."

"Then I'll do it," and he had gone to the telephone, and had urged his hospitality.

II

When Dalton came Becky met him on the front steps of the house.

"Dinner is late," she said, "let's go down into the garden."

The garden at Huntersfield was square with box hedges and peaked up with yew, and there were stained marble statues of Diana and Flora and Ceres, and a little pool with lily pads.

"You are like the pretty little girls in the picture books," said George, as they walked along. "Isn't that a new frock?"

"Yes," said Becky, "it is. Do you like it?"

"You are a rose among the roses," he said. He wondered a bit at its apparent expensiveness. Perhaps, however, Becky was skillful with her needle. Some women were. He did not care greatly for such skill, but he was charmed by the effect.

"You are a rose among the roses," he said again, and broke off a big pink bud from a bush near by.

"Bend your head a little. I want to put it in your hair."

His fingers caught in the bronze mesh. "It is wound around my ring." He fumbled in his pockets with his free hand and got his knife. "It may pull a bit."

He showed her presently the lock which he had cut. "It seems alive," he kissed it and put it in his pocket.

Her protest was genuine. "Oh, please," she said, "I wish you wouldn't."

"Wouldn't what?"

"Keep it."

"Shall I throw it away?"

"You shouldn't have cut it off."

"Other men have been tempted--in a garden----"

It might have startled George could he have known that old Mandy, eyeing him from the kitchen, placed him in Eden's bower not as the hero of the world's initial tragedy, but as its Satanic villain.

"He sutt'n'y have bewitched Miss Becky," she told Calvin; "she ain' got her min' on nothin' but him."

"Yo' put yo' min' on yo' roas' lamb, honey," Calvin suggested. "How-cum you got late?"

"That chile kep' me fixin' that pink dress. She ain' never cyard what she wo'. And now she stan' in front o' dat lookin'-glass an' fuss an' fiddle. And w'en she ain' fussin' an' fiddlin', she jus' moons around, waitin' fo' him to come ridin' up in that red car like a devil on greased light'in'. An' I say right heah, Miss Claudia ain' gwine like it."

"Why ain' she?"

"Miss Claudia know black f'um w'ite. An' dat man done got a black heart----"

"Whut you know 'bout hit, Mandy?"

"Lissen. You wait. He'll suck a o'ange an' th'ow it away. He'll pull a rose, and scattah the leaves." Mandy, stirring gravy, was none the less dramatic. "You lissen, an' wait----"

"W'en Miss Claudia comin'?"

"In one week, thank the Lord," Mandy pushed the gravy to the back of the stove and pulled forward an iron pot. "The soup's ready," she said; "you go up and tell the Jedge, Calvin."

All through dinner, Becky was conscious of that lock of hair in George's pocket. The strand from which the lock had been cut fell down on her cheek. She had to tuck it back. She saw George smile as she did it. She forgave him.

It was after dinner that George spoke of Becky's gown.

"It is perfect," he said, "all except the pearls----?"

She gave him a startled glance. "The pearls?"

"I want to see you without them."

She unwound them and they dripped from her hand in milky whiteness.

He made his survey. "That's better," he said, "if they were real it would be different--I don't like to have you cheapened by anything less than--perfect----"

"Cheapened?" She smiled inscrutably, then dropped the pearls into a small box on the table beside her. "Yes," she said, "if they were real it would be different----"

There was something in her manner which made him say hurriedly, "You must not think that I am criticizing your taste. If I had my way you should have everything that money can buy----"

Her candid eyes came up to his. "There are a great many things that money cannot buy."

"You've got to show me," George told her; "I've never seen anything yet that I couldn't get with money."

"Could you buy--dreams----"

"I'd rather buy--diamonds."

"And money can't buy happiness."

"It can buy a pretty good imitation."

"But imitation happiness is like imitation pearls."

He laughed and sat down beside her. "You mustn't be too clever."

"I am not clever at all."

"I believe you are. And you don't have to be. There are plenty of clever women but only one Becky Bannister."

It was just an hour later that Georgie-Porgie kissed her. She was at the piano in the music-room, and there was no light except the glimmer of tall white candles, and the silver moonlight which fell across the shining floor.

Her grandfather was nodding in the room beyond, and through the open window came the dry, sweet scent of summer, as if nature had opened her pot-pourri to give the world a whiff of treasured fragrance.

Becky had been singing, and she had stopped and looked up at him.

"Oh, you lovely--lovely, little thing," he said, and bent his head.

To Becky, that moment was supreme, sacred. She trembled with happiness. To her that kiss meant betrothal--ultimate marriage.

To George it meant, of course, nothing of the kind. It was only one of many moments. It was a romance which might have been borrowed from the Middle Ages. A rare tale such as one might read in a book. A pleasant dalliance--to be continued until he was tired of it. If he ever married, it must be a spectacular affair--handsome woman, big fortune, not an unsophisticated slip of a child from an impoverished Virginia farm.

III

In the days that followed, Becky's gay lover came and rode away, and came again. He sparkled and shone and worshipped, but not a word did he say about the future. He seemed content with this idyl of old gardens, scented twilights, starlight nights, with Beauty's eyes for him alone radiant eyes that matched the stars.

Yet as the days went on the radiance was dimmed. Becky was in a state of bewilderment which bordered on fear. George showed himself an incomparable lover, but always he was silent about the things which she felt cried for utterance.

So at last one day she spoke to the Judge.

"Granddad, did you kiss Grandmother before you asked her to marry you?"

"Asking always comes first, my dear. And you are too young to think of such things."

Grandfather was, thus obviously, no help. He sat in the Bird Room and dreamed of the days when the stuffed mocking-bird on the wax branch sang to a young bride, and his ideal of love had to do with the courtly etiquette of a time when men knelt and sued and were rewarded with the touch of finger tips.

As for George, he found himself liking this affair rather more than usual. There was no denying that the child was tremendously attractive--with her youth and beauty and the reserve which like a stone wall seemed now and then to shut her in. He had always a feeling that he would like to climb over the wall. It had pricked his interest to find in this little creature a strength and delicacy which he had found in no other woman.

He had had one or two letters from Madge, and had answered them with a line. She gave rather generously of her correspondence and her letters were never dull. In the last one she had asked him to join her on the North Shore.

"I am sorry," she said, "for the new little girl. I have a feeling that she won't know how to play the game and that you'll hurt her. You will probably think that I am jealous, but I can't help that. Men always think that women are jealous when it comes to other women. They never seem to understand that we are trying to keep the world straight.

"Oscar writes that Flora isn't well, that all her other guests are gone except you--and that she wants me. But why should I come? I wish he wouldn't ask me. Something always tugs at my heart when I think of Flora. She has so much and yet so little. She and Oscar would be much happier in a flat on the West Side with Flora cooking in a kitchenette, and Oscar bringing things home from the delicatessen. He would buy bologna and potato salad on Sunday nights, and perhaps they would slice up a raw onion. It sounds dreadful, doesn't it? But there are thousands of people doing just that thing, Georgie, and being very happy over it. And it wouldn't be dreadful for Flora and Oscar because they would be right where they belong, and the potato salad and the bologna and the little room where Oscar could sit with his coat off would be much more to their liking than their present pomp and elegance. You and I are different. You could never play any part pleasantly but that of Prince Charming, and I should hate the kitchenette. I want wide spaces, and old houses, and deep fireplaces--my people far back were like that--I sometimes wonder why I stick to Flora--perhaps it is because she clung to me in those days when Oscar was drafted and had to go, and she cried so hard in the Red Cross rooms that I took her under my wing---- Take it all together, Flora is rather worth while and so is Oscar if he didn't try so hard to be what he is not.

"But then we are all trying rather hard to be what we are not. I am really and truly middle-class. In my mind, I mean. Yet no one would believe it to look at me, for I wear my clothes like a Frenchwoman, and I am as unconventional as English royalty. And two generations of us have inherited money. But back of that there were nice middle-class New Englanders who did their own work. And the women wore white aprons, and the men wore overalls, and they ate doughnuts for breakfast, and baked beans on Sunday, and they milked their own cows, and skimmed their own cream, and they read Hamlet and the King James version of the Bible, and a lot of them wrote things that will be remembered throughout the ages, and they had big families and went to church, and came home to overflowing hospitality and chicken pies--and they were the salt of the earth. And as I think I remarked to you once before, I want to be like my great-grandmother in my next incarnation, and live in a wide, low farmhouse, and have horses and hogs and chickens and pop-corn on snowy nights, and go to church on Sunday.

"I don't know why I am writing like this, except that I went to Trinity to vespers, when I stopped over in Boston. It was dim and quiet and the boys' voices were heavenly, and over it all brooded the spirit of the great man who once preached there--and who still preaches----

"And now it is Sunday again, and I am back at the Crossing, and I played golf all the morning, and bridge this afternoon, and all the women smoked and all the men, and I was in a blue haze, and I wanted to be back in the quiet church where the boys sang, and the lights were like stars----

"I wish you and I could go there some day and that you could feel as I do about it. But you wouldn't. You are always so sure and smug--and you have a feeling that money will buy anything--even Paradise. I wonder what you will be like on the next plane. You won't fit into my farmhouse. I fancy that you'll be something rather--devilish--like Don Juan--or perhaps you'll be just an 'ostler in a courtyard, shining boots and--kissing maids----

"Of course I don't quite mean that. But I do feel that you'd be rather worth while if you'd stop philandering and discover your soul.

"I am a bit homesick, and I haven't any home. If Dad hadn't married a second time, I believe he would still love me a bit. But his wife doesn't. And so here I am--and as restless as ever--seeking something--always seeking.

"And now, once more, don't break the heart of the new little girl. I don't need to warn you not to break your own. You are the greatest example of the truth of 'he who loves and runs away will live to love another day.' Oh, Georgie-Porgie, will you ever love any woman enough to rise with her to the heights?

"Perhaps there aren't any heights for you or me. But I should like to think there were. Different hilltops, of course, so that we could wave across. We shall never climb together, Georgie. Perhaps we are too much alike to help each other up the hills. We need stronger props.

"Tell me about Flora. Is she really ill? If she is, I'll come. But I'd rather not.

"I hope you won't read this aloud to Oscar. You might, you know, and it wouldn't do. He would hate to believe that he'd be happier buying things at a delicatessen, and he wouldn't believe it. But it's true, just as it is true that you would be happy shining boots and making love to the maids like a character in Dickens.

"Come on up, and we'll motor to Boston on Sunday afternoon and we'll go to Trinity; I want somebody to be good with me, Georgie, and there are so many of the other kind.

"Ever wistfully,
"Madge."

George knew that he ought to go, but he was not ready yet to run away. He was having the time of his life, and as for Becky, he would teach her how to play the game.

IV

Aunt Claudia was away for three weeks.

"I wish she would come home," young Paine said one morning to his mother.

"Why?" Caroline Paine was at her desk with her mind on the dinner. "Why, Randy?"

"Oh, Dalton's going there a lot."

Mrs. Paine headed her list with gumbo soup. "Do you think he goes to see Becky?"

"Does a duck swim? Of course he goes there to see her, and he's turning her head."

"He is enough to turn any woman's head. He has nice eyes." Mrs. Paine left the topic as negligible, and turned to more important things.

"Randy, would you mind picking a few pods of okra for the soup? Susie is so busy and Bob and Jefferson are both in the field."

"Certainly, Mother," his cool answer gave no hint of the emotions which were seething within him. Becky's fate was hanging in the balance, and his mother talked of okra! He had decided some weeks ago that boarders were disintegrating--and that a mother was not a mother who had three big meals a day on her mind.

He went into the garden. An old-fashioned garden, so common at one time in the South--with a picket fence, a little gate, orderly paths--a blaze of flowers to the right, and to the left a riot of vegetables--fat tomatoes weighing the vines to the ground, cucumbers hiding under their sheltering leaves, cabbages burgeoning in blue-green, and giving the promise of unlimited boiled dinners, onions enough to flavor a thousand delectable dishes, sweet corn running in countless rows up the hill, carrots waving their plumes, Falstaffian watermelons. It was evident with the garden as an index that the boarders at King's Crest were fed on more than milk and honey.

Randy picked the okra and carried it to the kitchen, and returning to the Schoolhouse found the Major opening his morning mail.

Randy sat down on the step. "Once upon a time," he said, "we had niggers to work in our gardens. And now we are all niggers."

The Major's keen eyes studied him. "What's the matter?"

"I've been picking okra--for soup, and I'm a Paine of King's Crest."

"Well, you peeled potatoes in France."

"That's different."

"Why should it be different? If a thing is for the moment your job you are never too big for it."

"I wish I had stayed in the Army. I wish I had never come back."

The Major whistled for a moment, thoughtfully. Then he said, "Look here, Paine, hadn't you better talk about it?"

"Talk about what?"

"That's for you to tell me. There's something worrying you. You are more tragic than--Hamlet----"

"Well--it's--Becky----"

"And Dalton, of course. Why don't you cut him out, Paine----"

"Me? Oh, look here, Major, what have I to offer her?"

"Youth and energy and a fighting spirit," the Major rapped out the words.

"What is a fighting spirit worth," Randy asked with a sort of weary scorn, "when a man is poor and the woman's rich?"

The Major had been whistling a silly little tune from a modern opera. It was an air which his men would have recognized. It came to an end abruptly.

"Rich? Who is rich?"

"Becky."

The Major got up and limped to the porch rail. "I thought she was as poor as----"

"The rest of us? Well, she isn't."

It appeared that Becky's fortune came from the Nantucket grandmother, and that there would be more when the Admiral died. It was really a very large fortune, well invested, and yielding an amazing income. One of the clauses of the grandmother's will had to do with the bringing up of Becky. Until she was of age she was to be kept as much as possible away from the distractions and temptations of modern luxury. The Judge and the Admiral had agreed that nothing could be better. The result, Randy said, was that nobody ever thought of Becky Bannister as rich.

"Yet those pearls that she wears are worth more than I ever expect to earn."

"It is rather like a fairy tale. The beggar-maid becomes a queen."

"You can see now why I can't offer her just youth and a fighting spirit."

"I wonder if Dalton knows."

"I don't believe he does," Randy said slowly. "I give him credit for that."

"He might have heard----"

"I doubt it. He hasn't mingled much, you know."

"It will be rather a joke on him----"

"To find that he has married--Mademoiselle Midas?"

"To find that she is Mademoiselle Midas, whether he marries her or not."

V

Of course Georgie-Porgie ran away. It was the inevitable climax. Flora's illness hastened things a bit.

"She wants to see her New York doctors," Waterman had said. "I think we shall close the house, and join Madge later at the Crossing."

George felt an unexpected sense of shock. The game must end, yet he wanted it to go on. The cards were in his hands, and he was not quite ready to turn the trick.

"When do we go?" he asked Oscar.

"In a couple of days if we can manage it. Flora is getting worried about herself. She thinks it is her heart."

George rode all of that afternoon with Becky. But not a word did he say about his departure. He never spoiled a thing like this with "Good-bye." Back at Waterman's, Kemp was packing trunks. In forty-eight hours there would be the folding of tents, and Hamilton Hill would be deserted. It added a pensiveness to his manner that made him more than ever charming. It rained on the way home, and it seemed to him significant that his first ride and his last with Becky should have been in the rain.

He stayed to dinner, and afterwards he and Becky walked together in the fragrance of the wet garden. A new moon hung low for a while and was then lost behind the hills.

"My little girl," George said when the moment came that he must go, "My dear little girl." He gathered her up in his arms--but did not kiss her. For once in his life, Georgie-Porgie was too deeply moved for kisses.

After he had gone, Becky went into the Bird Room, and stood on the hearth and looked up at the Trumpeter Swan. There was no one to whom she could speak of the ecstasy which surged through her. As a child she had brought her joys here, and her sorrows--her Christmas presents in the early morning--the first flowers of the spring. She had sat here often in her little black frock and had felt the silent sympathy of the wise old bird.

He gazed down at her now with an almost uncanny intelligence. She laughed a little and standing on tiptoe laid her cheek against the cool glass. "When I am married," was her wordless question, "will you sound your trumpet high up near the moon?" _

Read next: Chapter 7. Mademoiselle Midas

Read previous: Chapter 5. Little Sister

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