Hagar. Mary Johnston

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ her hair away from her eyes. "I was travelling," she said. "I was crossing the Desert of Sahara with a caravan."

      "You are," remarked Sylvie, "too funny for words!—You and I are to take supper with 'Roger Michael'!"

      A red came into Hagar's cheek. "Are we? Did Mrs. LeGrand say so?"

      "Yes—"

      Hagar lit the lamp. "'Roger Michael'—'Roger Michael'—Sylvie, wouldn't you rather use your own name if you wrote?"

      "Oh, I don't know!" answered Sylvie vaguely. "What dress are you going to wear?"

      "I haven't any but the green."

      "Then wear your deep lace collar with it. Cousin Olivia wants you to look as nice as possible. Don't you want me to do your hair?"

      Hagar placed the lamp upon the wooden slab of a small, old-time dressing-table. That done, she stood and looked at herself with a curious, wistful puckering of the lips. "Sylvie, prinking and fixing up doesn't suit me."

      "Don't you like people to like you?"

      "Yes, I do. I like it so much it must be a sin. Only not very many people do. … And I don't think prinking helps."

      "Yes, it does. If you look pretty, how can people help liking you? It's three fourths the battle."

      Hagar fell to considering it. "Is it? … But then we don't all think the same thing pretty or ugly." The red showed again like wine beneath her smooth, dark skin, "Sylvie, I'd like to be beautiful. I'd like to be as beautiful as Beatrix Esmond. I'd like to be as beautiful as Helen of Troy. But everybody at Eglantine thinks I am ugly, and I suppose I am." She looked wistfully at Sylvie.

      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 СКАЧАТЬ