pelleas has a little niece who when she sits in my room in the sun combing her brown hair looks like a mermaid. i told her this when on the morning after our return from the seashore she arrived to make us a visit and came to sit in my sunny window with her hair all about her shoulders drying from its fragrant bath.
“lisa,” i said, for the sea was still in my soul, “if i might tie your hair back with a rainbow and set you on a tall green and white wave you would be a mermaid. and by the way,” i added, “perhaps you can tell me something about which i have always wondered: how the mermaids in the sea pictures keep their hair so dry?”
for answer lisa smiled absently and spread a soft strand into shining meshes and regarded it meditatively and sighed dolorously. but lisa was twenty, and twenty is both meditative and dolorous, so i went on tranquilly laying sachets in my old lace; for at seventy i have sunk some of my meditation and all my dolour in such little joys as arranging my one box of rare old lace. that seems a small lesson for life to have taught, and yet it was hard to learn.
“i rather think she was latona’s brood,
and that apollo courted her bright hair—”
i was murmuring, when lisa said:—
“aunt etarre, were you ever in love?”
is it not notable what fragrance floats in the room when that question is asked? of course it may have been the orris in my hands, but i think that it was more than this.
“if forty-nine and three quarters years of being in love,” i reminded her, “would seem to you fair proof that i—”
“o, that kind,” lisa said vaguely. “but i mean,” she presently went on, “were you ever in love so that you were miserable about everything else, and you thought all the time that somebody couldn’t possibly love you; and so that seeing the postman made your heart beat the way it used to at school exhibition, and so that you kept the paper that came around flowers....”
lisa saw me smiling—not at her, heaven forbid—but at the great collection of rubbish in the world saved because somebody beloved has touched it, or has seen it, or has been with one when one was wearing it.
“i mean were you ever in love like that, aunt etarre—were you?” lisa put it wistfully.
“ah, well now, yes indeed,” i answered; “do you think that my hair was always straight on rainy days, as it is now?”
lisa sighed again, even more dolorously, and shook her head.
“it couldn’t have been the same,” she murmured decidedly.
poor, dear twenty, who never will believe that seventy could have been “the same.” but i forgot to sigh for this, so concerned i was at this breaking of lisa’s reticence, that enviable flowery armour of young womanhood. so i waited, folding and refolding my mechlin, until i had won her confidence.
he was, it developed, a blessed young lawyer, with very long lashes and a high sense of honour inextricably confused with lofty ideals and ambitions and a most beautiful manner. he was, in fact, young eric chartres, grandnephew to my dear madame sally chartres. the sole cloud was the objection of dudley manners, lisa’s guardian, to the friendship of the two on the hackneyed ground of their youth; for eric, i absently reckoned it aloud, was one year and five months older than lisa.
“but it isn’t as if he hadn’t seen the world,” lisa said magnificently. “he has been graduated from college a year, and he has been abroad twice—once when he was nine, and then for two months last summer. and he has read everything—o aunt etarre,” said lisa, “and then think of his loving me.”
“when am i going to meet him?” i asked, having exchanged with him only a word in a crowded room or two. as i expected lisa flung herself down at my knee and laid her hands over the old mechlin.
“o would you—would you? uncle dudley said he would trust me wholly to you and uncle pelleas. might he call—might he come this afternoon?”
“the telephone,” said i, “is on the landing.”
below stairs i told pelleas about it and he sighed and looked in the fire and said, “bless me, i used to wheel her mother about in a go-cart!”
“pelleas,” said i, thoughtfully, “i have seen that young eric chartres only once or twice in a crowded room, but do you know that i thought he looks a little—just a very little—as you looked at his age?”
“does he really?” pelleas asked, vastly pleased, and “pooh!” he instantly added to prove how little vanity he has.
“he does,” i insisted; “the first time i caught sight of him i could have believed—”
pelleas turned to me with a look almost startled.
“do you know,” he confessed, “more than once when i have looked at lisa—especially lisa in that gown with flowers in and the spingley things that shine,” described pelleas laboriously,—“i could almost have thought that it was you as you used to be, etarre. yes—really. there is something about the way that she turns her head—”
“and so eric chartres may call?” said i eagerly, with nothing but certainty.
“of course he may call,” pelleas said heartily; “any fine fellow who is honestly in love is as welcome here as a king.”
“then,” i continued, making a base advantage of his enthusiasm, “let us go down together and tell nichola to have tea, served in her best fashion, at five this afternoon.”
pelleas looked doubtful. “she’s making raised doughnuts,” he demurred.
“but,” i reasoned, “her tea rose bloomed yesterday. she is bound to believe in a beautiful thing or two. let us risk it.”
nichola was picking her doughnuts from the hot lard as delicately as if she had been selecting violets for essences near her native capri. she did not deign to turn or to speak as we slipped in at the door. even when pelleas had put the case to her, diplomatically dwelling on the lightness of the delicacies desired, she did not reply until she had brought to the table a colander of her hot brown dainties. then she rested her hands on each side of the pan and leaned forward. as i looked at her, her gray hair brushed smoothly back from her rugged face, her little eyes quick-winking—as if the air were filled with dust—i caught on her face an expression which i have seldom seen there: a look as if her features were momentarily out of drawing; as if, say, old nichola’s face were printed on cloth and the cloth had been twitched a bit awry.
“who’s a-comin’?” she demanded; but if nichola were to ask to see our visiting list i think that we should hardly deny her.
“it’s a friend of miss lisa’s,” pelleas explained.
“man?” nichola inquired grimly.
pelleas admitted it. i, now fancying myself wiser in the conceits of nichola, ventured something else.
“i think, nichola,” i said, “that they—that he—that they—and i thought if you had some absolutely simple sandwiches—”
“yah!” nichola exclaimed. “so there’s to be two pair o’ you!”
then something wonderful happened. nichola slipped both hands beneath her floury apron and rolled up her arms in its calico length and put her head on one side and smiled—such a strange, crinkled smile interfering with all her worn features at once.
“my father had many goats,” nichola said without warning, “and one summer i went with him to buy more, though that was before my bones were all turned to cracked iron, you may be sure. and there was a young shepherd—”
at that magic moment a sharp snapping and crackling came from the kettle, and nichola wheeled with a frown.
“so!” she cried angrily, “you come down here, letting my lard get too hot to go near to! is it not that i am baking? and as for tea, it may be that there isn’t any tea. go away!”
“pelleas,” said i, as we climbed the stairs, “if it were not that nichola is too old to work anywhere else—”
“i know it,” pelleas nodded frowning.
this is the dialogue in which we take part after each of nichola’s daily impertinences.
at four o’clock that afternoon i was roused from my drowsihead on hearing a little tap at my door. lisa came in, her face flushed, her blue embroidered frock shimmering and ruffling to her feet.
“o aunt etarre,” she begged, “put on your gray gown and your mechlin fichu, will you? and come down right away—well, almost right away,” she added naïvely.
“i will come presently,” i assured her, as if i did not understand; and then the bell rang and lisa, her eyes like stars, tapped down the stairs.
i was a long time about my dressing. the gray grosgrain silk is for very special occasions, and i had not worn my mechlin collar since pelleas’ birthday nearly a year ago. when i had them both on and my silver comb in my hair i heard nichola’s step outside my door. i bade her enter, but she merely stood for a moment on the threshold.
“che!” she said grimly. “i hope, mem, you’ve got your neck well packed with flannel under that slimpsey stuff. one would say you dress lightly, lightly for fear of missing the rheumatism.”
she had gone crookedly down the passage before i had opportunity to remention the tea. in a moment she came back, threw open my door and flung something on the bed.
“there,” she said crossly, “put it on! no need to dress as if you was ninety.”
and there on my pillow i saw as she hastened away the great pink tea rose that had blossomed only that day from the rose plant in her own window where she had tended it for months.
pelleas was in the library across the hall from the drawing-room where those two dear little people were. i opened the library door softly and went in and stood close beside his chair before he turned. pelleas is not in the least deaf, as we both know; he is simply no longer distracted by small, unnecessary noises.
he looked up smiling and then sprang to his feet and suddenly caught my hands and held me at arm’s length and bade me turn about slowly, slowly so that he might see. one would think that i had never worn my old grosgrain and my mechlin. i told him so, though i can never conceal delight. and we talked a little about the first night that i had worn it—o, so many years before, and about many things in which the very sunshine of the room had no part because these things were so much more luminous.
at last when the clock struck five we crossed the hall to the drawing-room door. at the foot of the stairs pelleas stopped for a moment.
“do you remember, etarre,” he said, “the night that i ‘spoke’ to your father, and you waited in the drawing-room, half dead with alarm, as you made me believe?”
“ah, yes,” i cried, “and how my father used to say that you won his heart by your very beginning. ‘i can’t talk about it, sir,’ you said, ‘but you see, sir, you can; and will you?’”
we laughed together as we are never tired of laughing tenderly over that, and i remembered tenderly too the old blue and white drawing-room with the spindle-legged chairs and the stiff curtains where i had waited breathlessly that night in my flowered delaine dress, while pelleas “spoke” to father. i was trembling when he came back, i recall, and he took me in his arms and kissed away my fear. and some way the thought of the girl in the flowered delaine dress who was i and of the eager, buoyant young lad who was pelleas must have shone in the faces of us both when we entered our drawing-room now, reverently, as if to meet our long-gone selves.
he was a fine, handsome fellow,—eric chartres, this young lover of lisa’s, and their sweet confusions and dignities were enchanting. pelleas and i sat on the red sofa and beamed at them, and the little fire tossed and leaped on the hearth, and the shadows gathered in the corners and fell upon us; and on lisa and her lover the firelight rested.
what a wonderful hour it was for our plain drawing-room, for so many years doomed to be merely the home of talk about war and rumours of war and relatives and their colourless doings and even about matches made for shadowy lovers whom it never might see. and now the room was called on to harbour young love itself. no wonder that the sober bindings on the shelves tried in the yellow firelight to give news from their own storied hearts that beat with the hearts of other lovers. no wonder that the flowers on the mantel looked perilously like a bridal wreath. at last, at last the poor room long deprived of its brightest uses was habited by young love.
presently pelleas startled me from my reverie.
“it’s twenty past five,” he murmured, “and no tea.”
so nichola intended to do as she pleased, and she was pleased to send no tea at all, and the rose was but a sop to cerbera. and i had so counted on seeing those young lovers in the delicate intimacy of their first tea. but even in that moment of my disappointment the stair door creaked and then i heard her coming up, one step at a time, so that i knew her to be laden with the tray.
pelleas hastened to open the door for her and we were both fain to gasp with astonishment. for in nichola came splendid in the newest and bluest of dresses with—wonder of all!—a white cap and apron to which only very stately occasions can persuade her. and when she had set the tray on the table i had much ado to keep from grasping her brown hands. for she had brought the guest-silver, my royal sèvres, my prettiest doilies and o, such thin, white, chicken sandwiches, such odorous tea and thick cream, and to crown all a silver dish of bonbons.
i tried to look my gratitude to her and i saw her standing by the fire tranquilly inspecting lisa’s young lover and pretty lisa herself who was helping him to place my chair. and it may have been a trick of the firelight, but i fancied that i detected on nichola’s face that expression of the morning, as if her features were a little out of drawing, by way of bodying forth some unwonted thought. then very slowly she rolled her arms in her crisp white apron as she had done in the morning and very slowly she began to speak.
“my father had many goats in capri,” she said again, “and one summer i went with him to buy more. and at noon my father left me in the valley while he went to look at some hill flocks. as for me i sat by a tree to eat my lunch of goat’s cheese and bread, and a young shepherd of those parts came and brought me berries and a little pat of sweet butter and we shared them. i did not see him again, but now i have made you a little pat of sweet butter,” said nichola, nodding.
we were all silent, and pelleas and i were spellbound; for it was as if this old, withered, silent woman had suddenly caught aside her robe and had looked into her own heart and given us news of its ancient beating. old nichola to have harboured such an hour of arcady as this! and at that moment she turned to me with a kind of fury.
“for the love of heaven,” she cried terribly, “why sit there stock-still till the crumpets are stone cold and the tea as red as the tail of a fox? eat!”
she was out of the room like a whirlwind and clattering down the stairs. and for a moment we all looked silently in each other’s faces and smiled a little—but tenderly, as if some unknown lover had lifted his head from his grave.
thereafter we drank our tea very happily and lisa’s young lover, with his whole heart in his eager face, told us quite simply of his love for her and begged us to help him. and we all well-nigh laughed and cried together at the bright business of life.
when the shadows had quite fallen and the young lover was gone and lisa had slipped away to her room to be alone, pelleas and i sat long before the fire. nichola’s rose, fading in my lace, gave out a fragrance to which some influence in the room was akin; and we both knew.
i said: “pelleas, i have been remembering that morning long ago at miss deborah ware’s—and our fountain of gardens. when we were twenty-something, like lisa and eric.”
“but so have i been thinking of that!” pelleas cried. and we nodded, smiling, for we love to have that happen. perhaps it makes us momentarily believe that we are each other, and no aid asked of science to bring it about. but now as i looked at him i momentarily believed something else as well.
“pelleas,” i began, “i am not sure—are you sure? has any one else really been here in the room, besides us? were lisa and eric really here—or have we only been remembering?”
pelleas was looking in the fire and he did not meet my eyes.
“lisa looks uncommonly like you, you know,” he said.
“and that young eric chartres—o, indeed pelleas, he is not unlike you as you looked the very night that you ‘spoke’ to father. dear,” i said, “perhaps those two have not been here at all. perhaps it was we ourselves.”
he looked at me swiftly; and “pooh!” said he enigmatically; but pelleas’ doubt of charming things is always like belief.
i dare say many would feel that what we suspect is manifestly impossible. besides, we have never actually admitted that we do suspect. but we are old and we have seen much magic.
