WHISPERING LEAVES

By Ellen Anderson Glasgow

PART II

In the dining room, which was lighted by tallow candles, I found an obviously exasperated host and hostess. When I entered Cousin Pelham was fussing about a mahogany cellaret, while Mrs. Blanton was pinning a bib of checked gingham round the neck of a little girl in a high chair. With my English ideas of bringing up children, I thought it an odd custom to have the row of high chairs and trays at the table, and to allow such mere babies to appear at the evening meal.

“This is Gertrude,” said Mrs. Blanton, after my apologies had been contritely offered and graciously accepted by Cousin Pelham, “and that,” nodding to a little boy of the same age, “is John. The other two are Robert and Jane.” They were robust, healthy-looking children, with dark hair and high colour, as unlike their delicate half-brother as one could well imagine.

At supper there was little conversation, for Cousin Pelham, who, I surmised, could talk delightfully when he made the effort, appeared to be absorbed in the food that was placed before him. This was of excellent quality. Evidently, I decided, the second Mrs. Blanton was the right wife for him. Vain, spoiled, selfish, amiable as long as he was given everything that he wanted, and still good-looking in an obvious and somewhat flashing style, he had long ago passed into that tranquil state of mind which follows a complete surrender to the habits of life. I wondered how that first wife, Clarissa of the romantic name and the flaming hair, had endured existence in this lonely neighbourhood with the companionship of a man who thought of nothing but food and drink. Perhaps he was different then; and yet was it possible for such abnormal egoism to develop in the years since her death? He ate immoderately, I observed, and even before he left the table I could see that the drowsiness which afflicts the overfed was descending upon him.

“The garden is charming,” I said. “I have never seen one like it, so irregular and apparently neglected, and yet with a formal soul of its own.” Cousin Pelham stared at me over the dish of fried chicken from which he was carefully selecting the brownest and tenderest piece. “The garden? Oh, yes, we’ve had to let that go. It was kept up as long as Clarissa lived. She had a passion for flowers; but we can’t get any of the darkeys to work it now.” Then he appealed directly to his wife, who was engaged in teaching Gertrude how to hold her fork properly. “There hasn’t been a spade stuck in the garden this spring, has there, Hannah?”

Mrs. Blanton shook her head, without removing her eyes from the little girl. “Nor last spring, nor the one before that,” she rejoined. “Nobody sets foot in it now except Pell, and he oughtn’t to go there. I tell him there might be snakes in the long grass; but he won’t mind what I say. It takes as much work as we can manage to plough the fields and the kitchen beds. We can’t spare any for that old garden you have to spade.”

“Perhaps that’s a part of the charm,” I responded. “It expresses itself, not some human being’s idea of planting.”

She looked at me as if she did not know what I meant, and on my other side Cousin Pelham chuckled softly. “That sounds like Clarissa,” he said, and there was no trace of sadness in his voice.

Across the table little Pell was eating delicately, pretending to be a bird. Now and then his stepmother turned away from the younger children to scold him about his fastidious appetite, or his odd manner of using his knife and fork, as if they were a superior kind of chopsticks. Her tone was not harsh. It was no sharper indeed than the one she used to her own children; yet, whenever she spoke to him, I felt rather than saw that he winced and shrank away from her. The child’s nerves were overstrung, I could tell that just by watching him with his stepmother; and to her, who could see nothing that was not directly before her eyes, his sensitiveness appeared deliberate perversity. Yet he was an attractive child in spite of his elfin ways. If he could only find the sympathy and understanding he needed so desperately, I felt that he might become very lovable.

Though I was sorry for the child then, I had barely touched the edge of the passion which presently filled my heart. The hardest hour of all, and one of the most trying moments in my life, came when we passed into the library, and Mrs. Blanton summoned the children to bed. The younger children, already nodding, obeyed without protest; but when it came to Pell’s turn to kiss his father good-night, he began to shake and whimper with terror. For a minute I did not understand; then turning to Cousin Pelham, I asked, with a sympathy so acute that it stabbed like a knife,

“Is Pell afraid of the dark?”

Cousin Pelham, sunk in the softest old leather chair, was beyond the sound of my voice; but his wife answered immediately in her firm and competent tone.

“We are trying to break him of it. It would be dreadful for his father’s son to be a coward.”

“Does he sleep in the nursery?”

“He used to, but we had to move his bed across the hall because he kept the other children awake. He gets, or pretends to get, the most ridiculous notions into his head, and he carries on so that the other children don’t get any sleep when they are in the room with him.”

“Where does he stay now?”

“In the spare room next to yours. We moved him there a few weeks ago, and you would think from the way he behaved that we were sending him to his grave.”

“But doesn’t that seem the wrong way, to frighten a nervous child into hysterics?”

At this she turned on me the most exasperating force in the universe, impregnable common sense.

“We’ve got to break him of it,” she retorted, “or he will be a baby all his life.”

“I think you’re wrong,” was all I could say feebly in denial; and my words had as little effect as the dash of hail on a window-pane. But, while I answered, I was telling myself that I had found out where the boy slept, and that I would go to his room as soon as I had bidden the family goodnight. Cousin Pelham and his wife stayed downstairs, I knew, in what they called “the chamber” behind the drawing room, so I should have to guard against only the stupid-looking nurse who had a room, I supposed, near the children.

Bending over, I pressed the boy to my heart. “I am near you, and I will take care of you,” I whispered. Then, releasing him, I stood back and watched him walk, wincing and trembling, after the sturdy children of his stepmother.

It seemed to me that the evening would never end. Every minute I was straining my ears for a sound from the floor above, while Cousin Pelham dozed through the processes of digestion, and Mrs. Blanton and I discussed such concrete facts as wood and stones and preserves and the best way to build a road or to cut down a tree. At last, when I was exhausted beyond belief, though it was only a little after nine o’clock, she laid down her mending, rose from her chair, and, with her hand on her husband’s shoulder, wished me good-night.

“You will find a candle in the hall,” she said. “We never use lamps in the chambers.” Her use of the archaic word struck me at the time as poetic. It was the only poetic touch I ever observed about her.

On a table in the hall I found a row of tallow dips in old brass candlesticks; and after lighting one, I took it in my hand and ascended the circular staircase. Ahead of me the light flitted like a moth up the worn steps, which the feet of generations had hollowed out in the centre as water hollows out a stairway of rock. The hall above was empty—it occurred to me at the moment that I had never seen such empty-looking halls—and was quite dark except for the flickering light of my candle. As I crossed the floor the green mist which I had left in the garden floated in and enveloped me, and that wistful fragrance became intolerably sweet. I had suddenly the feeling that the dim corners and winding recesses of the hall were crowded with intangible shapes.

After glancing through my open door to assure myself that I had not made a mistake, I stole across the hall and hesitated before the threshold of what Mrs. Blanton had pointed out to me as “the spare room.” If the child were sleeping, I did not wish to arouse him, but all idea that he slept was banished as I pushed the door wider and heard him talking aloud to himself. Then, while the pointed flame of my candle pierced the obscurity, I saw that he was not, as I had first thought, alone. The old coloured woman in the black alpaca dress, with the white apron and the red turban, was bending over him. When I approached she turned slowly and looked at me; and I felt that her dark, compassionate face was love made manifest to my eyes. So she had looked down on the child, and so, for one miraculous instant, she gazed directly into my heart. For one miraculous instant! Then, while I stood there, transfixed as by an arrow, she passed, with that slow movement, across the room to the door which I had left open. Before I could stir, before I could utter a word to detain her, she had disappeared; and the boy, sitting up in the heavily draped bed, was staring at me with wondering eyes. “Mammy was telling me a story,” he said.

“I didn’t know that you had a mammy now.” This was the best that I could do at the moment.

“Oh, yes, I have!” He smiled with charming archness, and I noticed that the fear had passed out of his voice.

“When did she come?” I asked.

“She has been here always, ever since,” he hesitated, “since before I was.”

 

“Does she look after the other children too?”

He laughed, cuddling down into the middle of the feather bed. “They don’t know about her. They have never seen her.”

“But how can she come and go in the house without anybody seeing her?”

At this the laughter stopped. “She has a way,” he answered enigmatically. “She never comes into the house except when I’m afraid.”

I bent over and kissed him. “Well, you’re not frightened any longer?”

“Oh, no. I’m all right now,” he replied, stroking my hand. “The next time it gets dark Mammy says she will come back and finish her story.”

“And I am next door,” I said. “Whenever you begin to feel frightened you can come and sleep on the big couch by the window.”

“By the window,” he repeated eagerly, “where Mammy’s wrens are under the eaves. That would be fun.”

Then, as I arranged the bedclothes over him, he turned his cheek to the pillow, and settled himself for the night. A moment later, when I went out of the room, I began wondering again about the old negress. Was she a faithful servant who had sacrificed her superstition to her affection for Clarissa’s child, and had stayed on at Whispering Leaves when the other negroes had gone away? In the morning I would make some inquiries. Meanwhile I liked to remember the glory—there is no other word to describe it—that I had seen in her dark face when she bent over the boy.

In the morning, when I came out of doors, it was into a world of maize-coloured sunshine. There was new green on the cedars, and the little blue flowers in the grass looked as formal as the blossoms in a Gothic tapestry. Suddenly a harsh scream sounded a little way to the right, and a peacock, with flaunting plumage, marched across the lawn, through the sunlight and shadow. As I stood there, entranced by the colour of the morning, it seemed to me that this circle of sunlight and shadow became alive with the quiver of innumerable gauzy wings, the bright ghosts of all the birds that had ever sung in this place.

When, presently, I turned in the direction of the garden, I saw that Pell was playing in a row of flowering quince near the stile. He was on his knees, building a castle of rocks, which he had brought in a little wagon from the road in the pasture; and while I approached, I observed that he was talking aloud to himself as children talk in their play. Then, before I reached him, I found my gaze arrested by a glimmer of red amid the smoke-gray boughs of a crêpe myrtle tree; and it seemed to my startled fancy that I made out the figure of the old negress. But the next minute a scarlet tanager flashed out of the branches, and the image proved to be one of those grotesque shapes which crêpe myrtle bushes, like ancient olive trees, frequently assume.

The child was playing happily by himself.

When my shadow fell over him, he looked up with his expression of secret wisdom. Kneeling there, with his red curls and his blue-green eyes enkindled by the sunshine, he reminded me of some unearthly flower of light.

“It will be a fine castle,” I said.

He glanced hastily over his shoulder; and I noticed that his manner was shy and furtive, though it expressed also a childish pleasure that was very appealing.

“I’ve got something better than a castle,” he answered. “I found it yesterday down by the ice pond. Will you promise not to tell if I let you look?”

“I promise,” I assured him gravely; and, with another suspicious glance in the direction of the house, he sprang to his feet and caught me by the hand. Leading me round the shrubbery and over the stile, he showed me a hollow he had made in the tall grasses beneath a cluster of lilac bushes. Lying there on a bed of dry fern I saw a black and white mongrel puppy, a delightful, audacious, independent puppy, half terrier and half unknown, with an engaging personality and a waggish black ear that dropped over one sparkling eye. Fastened securely by a strip of red cotton to the shrub, beside a partly gnawed bone and a saucer of water, he sat surveying me with an expectant, inquisitive look.

“Isn’t he a beauty?” asked Pell, enraptured, as he went down on his knees and flung his arms about the puppy.

“A beauty,” I repeated; and I also went down on my knees to embrace boy and dog.

“He hadn’t had anything to eat for ever so long when I found him. Martha gives me scraps for him, and William lets him sleep in the stable.” Then he looked straight into my eyes. “You won’t tell?” he pleaded. “She wouldn’t let him stay if she knew. She doesn’t like dogs.”

Of course she didn’t like dogs. Hadn’t I felt from the first that she wouldn’t? Why, there wasn’t a dog on the place, except the two black and yellow hounds I had seen half a mile away in the cornfield, and they belonged doubtless to one of the negroes.

“No, I won’t tell,” I promised. “I’ll help you take care of him.”

His eyes shone. “Can you teach him to do tricks? He knows how to beg already. Mammy taught him.”

I released the child quickly and rose to my feet. “Where is your Mammy, Pell?”

His rapid glance flew down the garden walk, and across the narcissi, to the twisted pear tree. “She’s just gone,” he answered. “She went when she saw you coming.”

“Where does she live?”

At this he broke into a laugh. “Oh, she lives away, way over yonder,” he responded, with a sweep of his hand.

For the next week Pell and I were cheerful conspirators. When I look back on it now, after so many years, I can still recall those cautious trips to the barn or the little bed of ferns under the lilacs. We fed Wop, that was the name we chose at last, until he grew as round as a ball; and he was just passing into the second stage of his education when Mrs. Blanton discovered his presence, as I was sure that she would be obliged to do sooner or later.

I had been away for the afternoon to visit some relatives at a distance; and as we drove home about sunset, we passed on the road the old coloured woman whom Pell had called Mammy. I could not be mistaken, I told myself. I should have recognized her anywhere, not only by the quaint turban she wore bound about her head, but by that indescribable light which shone in her face.

At the time we were driving through a stretch of burned pines, and when I first noticed her she had stopped to rest and was sitting on a charred stump by the roadside, with the red disc of the sun at her back. The light was in my eyes; but, as I leaned out and smiled at her, she gave me again that long deep look so filled with inarticulate yearning. I knew then, as I had known the first afternoon, that she was trying to make me understand, that she was charged with some message she could not utter. While her eyes met mine I was smitten—that is the only word for the sensation—into silence; but after we had driven on, I recovered myself sufficiently to say to the cousin who was taking me home:

“If she is going a long way, don’t you think we might give her a lift?”

My cousin, an obtuse young man, gazed at me vacantly. “If who is going a long way?”

“The old coloured woman by the roadside. Didn’t you see her?”

He shook his head. “No, I wasn’t looking. I didn’t see anybody.”

While he was still speaking, I leaned out with an exclamation of surprise. “Why, there she is now in front of us! She must have run ahead of us through the pines. She is waiting by the dead tree at the fork of the road.”

My cousin was laughing now. “The sunset makes you see double. There isn’t anybody there. Can you see anything except the blasted oak at the fork of the road, Jacob?”

A few minutes later, when we reached the place where the road branched, I saw that it was deserted. The red blaze of the sun could play tricks with one’s vision, I knew; but it was odd that on both occasions, at precisely the same hour, I should be visited by this hallucination. That it was an hallucination, I no longer doubted when, looking up a short while afterward, I saw again the old woman’s figure ahead of me. This time, however, I kept silent, for the first thing one learns from such visitations is the danger of talking to people of things which they cannot understand. But I drove on with my heart in my throat. In front of me in the blue air was that vision; and in my mind there was a voiceless apprehension. Then, as we reached the lawn, the old woman vanished, and a moment later the sound of a child’s crying fell on my ears.

Alone on the front steps. Pell sat weeping inconsolably, with his face hidden in his thin little hands. When I sprang from the carriage, he rushed into my arms.

“She has sent him away! She has sent him away to be drowned!” he cried in a heartbreaking voice.

As I drew him close, the door opened, and Mrs. Blanton looked out.

“Come in, Pell,” she called, not unkindly, but unseeingly. “You will fret yourself into a fever. The circus is coming next week, and if you make yourself sick, you won’t be able to go to it.”

At this Pell turned on her a white and quivering face. “I don’t want to go to the circus,” he said. “I don’t want any supper. I want Wop, and I wish you were dead!”

“Pell, dear!” I cried, but Mrs. Blanton only laughed good-naturedly, a laugh that was as common as her features.

 

“He’s got his mother’s temper all right,” she remarked to me over the child’s head. “If you don’t want any supper,” she added, dragging him indoors, while he struggled to free himself from the grasp of her large firm hand which seemed as inexorable as her purpose, “you must go straight upstairs to bed.”

When we had entered the house the boy broke away from her, and marched, without a tremor of hesitation, across the hall and into the thick dusk of the staircase.

“Let me go after him,” I said. “He is so afraid of the dark, and the candles are not lighted upstairs.”

Mrs. Blanton detained me by a gesture. “He is the sort of child you have to be firm with,” she returned, and then immediately, “Mr. Blanton”—she always addressed her husband as “Mr. Blanton”—“is waiting for us in the dining room. It frets him to be kept waiting.”

After this there was nothing to do but follow her, with a heavy heart, into the room, where Cousin Pelham stood, ponderously frowning at the door. I could not this evening meet his annoyance with my usual playful apology; and a little later, when the excellent supper was served, I found that I was unable to swallow a morsel. The fact that I was leaving the next day, that I should, perhaps, not see Pell again for years, had turned my heart to lead.

When supper was over I escaped as soon as I could and ran upstairs to the room where Pell slept. A candle was burning by his bed, and to my amazement the child was sleeping peacefully, with a smile on his face where the traces of tears were scarcely dried. While I looked down on him, he stirred and opened his eyes.

“I thought you were Mammy,” he murmured, with a drowsy laugh.

“Has Mammy been here?” I asked.

He was so sleepy that he could barely answer; but, as he nestled down into the middle of the feather bed, he replied without the faintest sign of his recent distress:

“She was here when I came up. She told me it was all right about Wop. Uncle Moab is keeping him for me.”

“Uncle Moab is keeping him?” I pressed my hand on his forehead under the vivid hair; but there was no hint of fever.

“She says she gave Wop to Uncle Moab. Mammy wouldn’t let anybody hurt him.”

Then his eyes closed while the smile quivered on his lips. “Mammy says you must take me with you when you go away,” he murmured. His face changed to an almost unearthly loveliness, and before I could answer, before I could even take in the words he had spoken, he had fallen asleep.

For a minute I stood looking down on him. Then leaving the candle still burning, I went out, closing the door softly, and ran against the maid, a young Irish woman, whose face I liked.

“I was just going to see if Pell had fallen asleep,” she explained a little nervously. “I have a message for him. You won’t tell Mrs. Blanton I brought it?”

“No. I won’t tell Mrs. Blanton.”

For an instant the girl hesitated. “She is so strict,” she blurted out, and then more guardedly, “William wouldn’t have drowned the child’s puppy. He just took it away and gave it to Uncle Moab who was going along the road.”

“I am glad,” I said eagerly. “Uncle Moab will look after it?”

“He sent Pell a message not to worry. I was going in to tell him.”

“But he knows it already,” I replied indiscreetly. “Somebody told him.”

A puzzled look came into her face. “But nobody knew. William just came back a minute ago, and there hasn’t been another soul on the place this afternoon.”

I saw my slip at once and hastened to remedy it. “Then I was mistaken of course. The child must have imagined it.”

“Yes, he does imagine things,” she responded readily; and after a word of good-night, she turned back to the stairs while I crossed the hall to my room.

There, as soon as I had closed the door, I put down my candle, and turned to the open window to think over what I had heard. There was nothing really strange, I told myself, in the incident of the puppy and Uncle Moab. It was natural enough that William should have refused to obey an order he thought cruel; it was natural enough also that Uncle Moab should have been going by in the road at that hour. Everything was easily explained except the singular change in the child, and the happy smile on his little tear-stained face when he murmured, “Mammy says you must take me with you when you go away.” Over and over again I heard those words as I sat there by the window. So insistent was the repetition that I might have deluded myself into the belief that they were spoken aloud in the darkness outside. How could I take the child away with me? I asked at last, as if I were disputing with some invisible presence at my side. What room was there for a child in my active life? I loved Pell; I hated to leave him; but how could I possibly take him with me when I went away in the morning? Yet, even after I had undressed, climbed into the canopied bed, and blown out my candle, I still heard that phrase again and again in my mind. I was still hearing it hours afterward when I fell asleep and dreamed of the old coloured woman sitting on the charred stump by the roadside.

Dreams. The old coloured woman by the roadside. The song of far-off birds coming nearer. The jade-green mist of the twilight changing suddenly to opal. Light growing out of darkness. Light turning from clear gold to flame colour. Still the song of birds that became so loud it was like the torrent of waters—or of fire. Dreams. Dreams. Nothing more….

Starting awake, I was aware first of that opal-coloured light; then of the fact that I was stifling, that a gray cloud had swept in from the open window, or the open door, and enveloped me. The next instant, with a cry, I sprang up and caught at the dressing-gown on a chair by my bed. From outside, mingled with that dream of singing birds and rushing torrents, the sound of voices was reaching me. The words I could not hear, but I needed no words to tell me that these were voices of warning. Whispering Leaves was burning while I dreamed. Whispering Leaves was burning, and I must fight my way to safety through the smoke that rushed in at my open door!

“Pell!” I called in terror, as I ran out into the hall. But there was no answer to my cry, and the next minute, when I looked into the child’s room, I saw that the bed was empty. They had saved him and forgotten me. Well, at least they had saved him!

Of the next few minutes, which seemed an eternity of terror, I can recall nothing now except a struggle for air. I must have fought my way through the smoke upstairs. I must have passed that savage light so close that it scorched my face, which was blistered afterward, though I felt no pain at the moment. I must have heard that rush of flames so near that it deafened me; but of this I can remember nothing to-day. Yet I can still feel the air blowing in my face on the lawn outside. I can still see the little green leaves on the cedars standing out illuminated in that terrible glow. I can still hear the cry that rang out:

“Pell! Where is Pell? Didn’t you bring Pell with you?”

Fifteen years ago. Fire and ashes, pain and happiness, have passed and are forgotten; but that question, as I heard it then, still sounds in my ears.

“Where is Pell? Didn’t you bring Pell with you?”

“I thought he was safe,” my voice was so thick that the words were scarcely articulate. “His room was empty.”

“He isn’t with the other children. We thought he had gone to you.” The speaker I have forgotten—Cousin Pelham or his wife, or the nurse, it is no matter—but the words are still living.

“I will go back.” This was Cousin Pelham, I knew, for he had turned to enter the burning house.

“It is too late now.” This was not one, but several voices together. As they spoke the windows of the house shone like the sunrise while a torrent of flame swept through the hall.

“Oh, Pell! Pell!” I cried out in agony. “Cannot you come to me?”

For a minute—it was scarcely longer—after I called, there was no answer. We stood in that red glare, and round us and beyond us closed the mysterious penumbra of the darkness. Without the circle, where we clung together in our horror, there was the freshness and the sweetness of the spring, and all the little quiet stirs that birds make when they nest at night. And it was out of this bird-haunted darkness that a shape moved suddenly past me into the flames, a shape which as the light edged it round I saw to be that of the old negress.

“She is looking for him,” I cried now. “Oh, don’t you see her?”

They gathered anxiously round me. “The fire has blinded her,” I heard them say. “She is looking straight at the flames.”

Yes, I was looking straight at the flames, for beyond the flames, past the unburned wing of the house, from the window of an old storeroom, which was never opened, they had told me, I saw the shape of the old negress pass again like a shadow. The next instant my heart melted with joy, for I saw that she was bringing the child in her arms. The little face was pale as death; the red curls were singed to black; but it was the child that she held. Even the unperceiving eyes about me, though they could see only material things, knew that Pell had come unharmed out of the fire. To them it was merely a shadow, a veil of smoke, which surrounded him. I alone saw the dark arms that enfolded him. I alone, among all those standing there in that awful light, recognized that dark compassionate face.

Her eyes found me at last, and I knew, in that moment of vision, what the message was that she had for me. Without a word I stepped forward, and held out my arms. As I did so, I saw a glory break in the dim features. Then, even while I gave my voiceless answer, the face melted from me into spirals of smoke. Was it a dream, after all? Was the only reality the fact that I held the child safe and unharmed in my arms?