The Ghost Girl Part 15

"I don't know, exactly, but she called me Miss Julie."

"Oh--she called you Miss Julie," said the other. Then she relapsed into thought and nothing more was said till they reached their destination.

CHAPTER V

Charleston's Magnolia Cemetery like everything else about Charleston shows the touch of the War. Here the soldiers lie who fought so bravely under Wade Hampton and here lies the general himself.

Go south, go north, and you will not find a place touched by the War where you will not find n.o.ble memories, echoes of heroic deeds, legends of brave men.

Miss Pinckney was by no means a peace party and this thought was doubtless in her head as she stood surveying the confederate graves. There were relations here and men whom she had known as a child.

"That's the War," said she, "and people abuse war as if it was the worst thing in the world, insulting the dead. 'Clare to goodness it makes me savage to hear the pasty-faces talking of war and making plans to abolish it. It's like hearing a lot of children making plans to abolish thunder storms. Where would America be now without the War, and where'd her history be? You tell me that. It'd just be the history of a big canning factory. These men aren't dead, they're still alive and fighting--fighting Chicago; fighting pork, and wheat, and cotton and railway-stock and everything else that's abolis.h.i.+ng the soul of the nation.

"There's Matt Carey's grave. He had everything he wanted, and he wasn't young. Now-a-days he'd have been driving in his automobile killing old women and chickens, or tarpoon fis.h.i.+ng down 'n Florida letting the world go rip, or full of neur--what do they call it--that thing that gets on their nerves and makes crazy old men of them at forty--I've forgotten.

_He_ didn't. He took up a gun and died like a lion, and he was a middle-aged business man. No one remembers him, I do believe, except, maybe me, clean forgotten--and yet he helped to put a brick into the only monument worth ten cents that America has got--The War.

"And some northern people would say 'nice sort of brick, seeing he was fighting on the wrong side.' Wrong side or right side he was fighting for something else than his own hand. _That's_ the point."

She closed up her lips and they went on. Phyl found her father's grave in a quiet spot where the live-oaks stood, the long grey moss hanging from their branches.

Miss Pinckney, having pointed out the grave, strayed off, leaving the girl to herself.

The gloomy, strange-looking trees daunted Phyl, and the grave, too young yet to have a headstone, drew her towards it, yet repelled her.

It was like meeting in a dream some one she had loved and who had turned into a stranger in a strange place.

Just as Charleston had dimmed Ireland in her mind as a bright light dims a lesser light, so had some influence come between her and the memory of her father. That memory was just as distinct as ever, but grief had died from it, as though Time had been at work on it for years and years.

The Phyl who had stepped out of the south-bound express and the girl of this morning were the same in mind and body, but in soul and outlook they had changed and were changing as though the air of the south had some magic in it, some food that had always been denied her and which was necessary for her full being.

Miss Pinckney returned from her wanderings amongst the graves and they turned to the gate.

"It used to seem strange to me coming here when I was a girl," said she.

"It always seemed as if I was come to visit people who could never come to see me. I used to pity them, but one gets older and one gets wiser, and I fancy it's they that pity us, if they can see us at all, which isn't often likely."

"D'you think they come back?" said Phyl.

"My dear child, if I told you what I thought, you'd say I was plum crazy.

But I'll say this. What do you think the Almighty made folk for? to live a few years and then lie in a grave with folk heaping flowers on them?

There's no such laziness in nature. I don't say there aren't folk who live their lives like as if they were dead, covered with flowers and never moving a hand to help themselves like some of those N'York women--but they don't count. They're against nature and I guess when they die they die, for they haven't ever lived." Then, vehemently: "Of course, they come back, not as ghosts peekin' about and making nuisances of themselves, but they come back as people--which is the sensible way and there's nothing unsensible in nature. Mind you, I don't say there aren't ghosts, there are, for I've seen 'em; I saw Simon Pinckney, the one that died of drink, as plain as my hand same day he died, but he was a no account. He hadn't the making of a man, so he couldn't come back as a man, and he wasn't a woman, so he couldn't come back as a woman; so he came back as a ghost. He was always an uneasy creature, else I don't suppose he'd have come back as anything. When a man wears out a suit of clothes he doesn't die, he gets a new one, and when he wears out a body--which isn't a bit more than a suit of clothes--he gets a new one. If he hasn't piled up grit enough in life to pay for a new body, he goes about without one and he's a ghost. That's my way of thinking and I know--I know--n'matter."

She put up her sunshade and they returned, driving through the warm spring weather. Phyl was silent, the day had taken possession of her. The scent of pink mimosa filled the air, the blue sky shewed here and there a few feather traces of white cloud and the wind from the sea seemed the very breath of the southern spring.

It seemed to Phyl as they drove that never before had she met or felt the loveliness of life, never till this moment when turning a corner the song of a bird from a garden met them with the perfume of jessamine.

Charleston is full of surprises like that, things that s.n.a.t.c.h you away from the present or catch you for a moment into the embrace of some old garden lurking behind a wrought iron gate, or tell you a love story no matter how much you don't want to hear it--or tease you, if you are a practical business man, with some other futility which has nothing at all to do with "real" life.

It seemed to Phyl as though, somehow, the whole of the morning had been working up to that moment, as though the perfume of the jessamine and the song of the birds were the culmination of the meaning of all sorts of things seen and unseen, heard and unheard.

The message of the crazy old negress came back to her. Who was Miss Julie?

and who was the Mr. Pinckney that was to meet her, and where was the gate at which they were to meet in such a secretive manner? Was it just craziness, or was it possible that this was some real message delivered years and years ago. A real lover's message which the old woman had once been charged to deliver and which she had repeated automatically and like a parrot.

Miss Julie--could it be possible that she meant Miss Juliet--The Juliet Mascarene to whom she, Phyl, bore such a strong family likeness, could it be possible that the likeness had started the old woman's mind working and had recalled the message of a half-a-century ago to her lips.

It was a fascinating thought. Juliet had been in love with one of the Pinckneys and this message was from a Pinckney and one day, perhaps, most likely a fine spring day like to-day, Pinckney had given the negro girl a message to give to Juliet, and the lovers and the message and the bright spring day had vanished utterly and forever leaving only Prue.

The gate would no doubt be the garden gate. Phyl in all her life had never given a thought to Love, she had known nothing of sentiment, that much abused thing which is yet the salt of life, and Romance for her had meant Adventure; all the same she was now weaving all sorts of threads into dreams and fancies. What appealed to her most was her own likeness to Juliet, the girl who had died so many, many years ago. A likeness incomplete enough, according to Miss Pinckney, yet strong enough to awaken memories in the mind of Prue.

CHAPTER VI

"Miss Pinckney," said Phyl, as they sat at luncheon that day, "you remember you said yesterday that I was like Juliet Mascarene?"

"So you are," replied the other, "though the likeness is more noticeable at first sight as far as the face goes--I've got a picture of her I will show you, it's upstairs in her room, the one next yours on the same piazza--why do you ask me?"

"I was thinking," replied Phyl, "that the old woman in the kitchen--Prue--may have meant Juliet when she called me Julie, and that it was the likeness that set her mind going."

"It's not impossible. Prue's like that crazy old clock Selina Pinckney left me in her will. It'd tell you the day and the hour _and_ the minute and the year and the month and the weather. A little man came out if it was going to rain and a little woman if it was going to s.h.i.+ne. But if you wanted to know the time, it couldn't tell you nearer than the hour before last of the day before yesterday, and if you sneezed near it, it'd up and strike a hundred and twenty. I gave it to Rachel. She said it was 'some'

clock, said it was a dandy for striking and the time didn't matter as the old kitchen clock saw to that. It's the same with Prue, the time doesn't matter, and they look up to her in the kitchen mostly, I expect, because she's an oddity, same as Selina Pinckney's clock. Seems to me anything crazy and useless is reckoned valuable these days, and not only among coloured folk but whites--Dinah, hasn't Mr. Richard come in yet?"

"No, Mistress Pinckney," replied the coloured girl, who had just entered the room, "I haven't seen no sign of him."

"Running about without his luncheon," grumbled the lady, "said he had a deal in cotton on. I might have guessed it." Then when Dinah had left the room and talking half to herself, "There's nothing Richard seems to think of but business or pleasure. I'm not saying anything against the boy, he's as good and better than any of the rest, but like the rest of them his character wants forming round something real. It wasn't so in the old days, they were bad enough then and drank a lot more, but they had in them something that made for something better than business or pleasure. Matt Curry didn't go out and get killed for business or pleasure, and all the old Pinckneys didn't fight in the war or fight with one another for business or pleasure. There's more in life than fooling with girls or buying cotton or sailing yacht races, but Richard doesn't seem to see it.

I did think that having a ward to look after would have sobered him a bit and helped to form his character--well, maybe it will yet."

"I don't want to be looked after," said Phyl flus.h.i.+ng up, "and if Mr.

Pinckney--" she stopped. What she was going to say about Pinckney was not clear in her mind, clouded as it was with anger--anger at the thought that she was an object to be looked after by her "guardian," anger at the implication that he was not bothering to look after her, being too much engaged in the business of fooling with girls and buying cotton, and a reasonable anger springing from and embracing the whole world that held his beyond Vernons.

"Yes?" said Miss Pinckney.

"Oh, nothing," replied the other, trying to laugh and making a failure of the business. "I was only going to say that Mr. Pinckney must have lots to do instead of wasting his time looking after strangers, and if he hadn't I don't want to be looked after. I don't want him to bother about me--I--I--" It did not want much more to start her off in a wild fit of weeping about nothing, her mind for some reason or other unknown even to herself was worked up and seething just as on that day at Kilgobbin when the woes of Rafferty had caused her to make such an exhibition of herself in the library. Anything was possible with Phyl when under the influence of unreasoning emotion like this, anything from flinging a knife at a person to breaking into tears.

Miss Pinckney knew it. Without understanding in the least the psychological mechanism of Phyl, she knew as a woman and by some electrical influence the state of her mind.

She rose from the table.

"Stranger," said she, taking the other by the arm, "you call yourself a stranger. Come along upstairs with me. I want to show you something."

Still holding her by the arm, caressingly, she led her off across the hall and up the stairs; on the first floor landing she opened a door; it was the door of the bedroom next to Phyl's, a room of the same shape and size and with the same view over the garden.

Just as the drawing-room had been kept in its entirety without alteration or touch save the touch of a duster, so had this room, the bedroom of a girl of long ago, a girl who would now have been a woman old and decrepit--had she lived.