The strain of Peavey
It was too true that I could not call her "Little Miss," as I had lightly called her mother "Miss Caroline" at our first encounter. Of a dusky pallor was Miss Lansdale when I first beheld her under the night of her hair. As the waning light showed me her, I thought of a blossomed young sloe tree in her own far valley of the Old Dominion. Closer to her I could note only that she was dark but fair, for observations of this character became, for some reason, impracticable in her immediate presence.
She greeted me kindly, as her mother's lawyer; she was cordial to me a moment, as her mother's friend; but later, when these debts of civility had been duly paid, when we had gone from the outer dusk into candle light, she favored me only with occasional glances of the mildest curiosity, in which was neither kindness nor cordiality. Not that these had given way to their opposites; they were simply not there. Not the faintest hint of unfriendliness could I detect. Miss Lansdale had merely detached herself into a magnificent void of disinterest, from the centre of which she surveyed me without prejudice in moments when her glance could not be better occupied.
I have caught much the same look in the eyes of twelve bored jurymen who were, nevertheless, bound to give my remarks their impartial attention. Sometimes one may know from the look of these twelve that one's case is already as good as lost; or, at least, that an opinion has been reached which new and important testimony will be required to change.
It occurred to me as my call wore on that I caught even a hint of this prejudgment in the eyes of the young woman. It put me sorely at a disadvantage, for I knew not what I was expected to prove; knew not if I were on trial as her mother's lawyer, her mother's friend, or as a mere man. The latter seemed improbable as an offence, for was not my judge a daughter of Miss Caroline? And yet, strangely enough, I came to think that this must be my offence—that I was a man. She made me feel this in her careless, incidental glances, her manner of turning briskly from me to address her mother with a warmer show of interest than I had been able to provoke.
It seemed, indeed, opportune to remember at the moment that, while this alleged Little Miss was the daughter of Miss Caroline, she was likewise—and even more palpably, as I could note by fugitive swift glimpses of her face—the daughter of a gentleman whose metal had been often tried; one who had won his reputation as much by self-possession under difficulties as by the militant spirit that incurred them.
"Kate has little of the Peavey in her,—she is every inch a Lansdale," Miss Caroline found occasion to say; while I, thus provided with an excuse to look, remarked to myself that her inches, while not excessive, were unusually meritorious.
"Worse than that—she's a Jere Lansdale," was my response, though I tactfully left it unuttered for an "Indeed?" that seemed less emotional. I could voice my deeper conviction not more explicitly than by saying further to Miss Caroline, "Perhaps that explains why she has the effect of making her mother seem positively immature."
"My mother is positively immature," remarked the daughter, with the air of telling something she had found out long since.
"Then perhaps the other is the false effect," I ventured. "It is your mother's immaturity that makes you seem so—" I thought it kind to hesitate for the word, but Miss Lansdale said, again confidently:—
"Oh, but I really am," and this with a finality that seemed to close the incident.
Her voice had the warm little roughness of a thrush's, which sings through a throat that is loosely strung with wires of soft gold.
"In my day," began Miss Caroline; but here I rebelled, no longer perceiving any good reason to be overborne by her daughter. I could endure only a certain amount of that.
"Your day is to-day," I interrupted, "and to-morrow and many to-morrows. You are a woman bereft of all her yesterdays. Let your daughter have had her day—let her have come to an incredible maturity. But you stay here in to-day with me. We won't be fit companions for her, but she shall not lack for company. Uncle Jerry Honeycutt is now ninety-four, and he has a splendid new ear-trumpet—he will be rarely diverting for Miss Lansdale."
But the daughter remained as indifferent to taunts as she had been to my friendly advances. It occurred to me now that her self-possession was remarkable. It was little short of threatening if one regarded her too closely. I wondered if this could really be an inheritance from her well-nerved father or the result of her years as teacher in a finishing school for young ladies. I was tempted to suspect the latter, for, physically, the creature was by no means formidable. Perhaps an inch or two taller than her mother, she was of a marked slenderness; a completed slenderness, I might say—a slenderness so palpably finished as to details that I can only describe it as felicitous in the extreme. It seemed almost certain that her appearance had once been disarming, that the threat in her eye-flash and tilted head was a trick learned by contact with many young ladies who needed finishing more than they would admit.
Of course this did not explain why Miss Lansdale should visually but patently disparage me at this moment. I was by no means an unfinished young lady, and, in any event, she should have left all that behind; the moment was one wherein relaxation would have been not only graceful but entirely safe, for she was in no manner to be held accountable for my conduct.
Yet again and again her curious reserve congealed me back upon the stanch regard of Miss Caroline. My passion for that sprightly dame and her gracious acceptance of it were happily not to deteriorate under the regard of any possible daughter, however egregiously might we flaunt to her trained eye our need to be "finished."
The newcomer's reserve was indeed pregnable to no assault I could devise. Not even did she lighten when I said to her mother, in open mockery of that reserve, "Well, she cost you a lot of furniture that was really most companionable about the house," and paused with a sigh betokening a regretful comparison of values. That lance shattered against her Lansdale shield like all the others.
Ending my call, I felt vividly what I have elsewhere seen described as "the cosmic chill." The small, mighty, night-eyed, well-completed Miss Lansdale, with the voice of a golden jangle, had frozen it about me in lavish abundance.
I went home to play the game, until my eyes tired so that the face of king, queen, and knave leered at me in defeat or simpered sickeningly when I was able to shape their destinies. Thrice I lost interestingly and with profit to my soul, and once I won, though without elation, for we know that little skill may be needed to win when the cards fall right; whereas, to lose profitably is a mark of supreme merit.
Even after that I must have recourse to the wonted philter to bring sleep, the face of my vision being unaccountably the face of the true Little Miss before she had evolved into Miss Lansdale of the threatening self-possession. I refused to bother about the absurdity of this, for the sake of bringing sleep the sooner.
I was privileged to observe the following day that my neighbor's daughter was still of a dusky whiteness, the baffling, shaded whiteness of soft new snow in a cedar thicket. Incidentally she partook of another quality of soft new snow—one by no means so incommunicable.
And yet in sunlight I incurred the full, close look of her eyes, and no longer doubted the presence of a Peavey strain in her immediate ancestry. Far in their incalculable depths I saw a myriad of lights, brown-gold, that smouldered, ominously, even promisingly. It might never meet this young woman's caprice to be flagrantly a Peavey in my presence, but her capacity for this, if she chose to exercise it, I detected beyond a doubt. She was patently a daughter of Miss Caroline, and the cosmic chill had been an afterthought of her own.
She did me the honor, late in the afternoon of this day, to occupy an easy-chair within my vined porch. She went farther. She affected a polite interest in myself. But her craft was crude. I detected at once that she had fallen in love with my dog; that she came not to seek me, but to follow him, who had raced joyously from her at his first knowledge of my home-coming.
I was secretly proud of the exquisite thoroughness with which he now ignored her. Again and again he assured me in her very presence that the woman was nothing, could be nothing, to him. I knew this well enough—I needed no protestations from him; but I thought it was well that she should know it. I saw that he had probably consented to receive her addresses through a long afternoon, had perhaps eaten of her provender, and even behaved with a complaisance which could have led her to hope that some day she might be something to him. But I knew that he had not persistently faced the peril of being trampled to death by me in his pulpy infancy—so great his fear of our separation—to let a mere woman come between us at this day. And it was well that he should now tell her this in the plainest of words.
The woman seemed to view me with an increased respect from that very moment. She tried first to bring Jim to her side by a soft call that almost made me tremble for his integrity. But he did not so much as turn his head. His eyes were for me alone. With a rubber shoe flung gallantly over his shoulder, he danced incitingly before me, praying that I would pretend to be crazed by the sight of his prize and seek to wrench it from him.
But I pretended instead to be bored by his importunities, choosing to rub it in. To her who longed for his friendly notice,—a little throaty bark, a lift of the paw, perhaps a winsome laying of his head along her lap,—I affected indifference to his infatuation for me. I pretended always to have been a perfect devil of a fellow among the dogs, and professed loftily not to have divined the secret of my innumerable and unvarying conquests.
"Dogs are so foolishly faithful," remarked Miss Lansdale, with polite acerbity.
"I know it," I conceded; "that fellow thinks I am the most beautiful person in all the world."
She said "Indeed?" with an inflection and a sweeping glance at me which I found charged with meaning. But I knew well enough that I had for all time mastered a certain measure of her difficult respect.
"And he's such a fine dog, too," she added in a tone intended to convey to me the full extent of her pity for him.
"I have him remarkably well trained," I said. "I can often force him to notice people whom I like, especially if they are clever enough to let him see that they like me rather well."
"It would be almost worth while," she remarked with a longing look at Jim but none at me.
"Many have found it quite so," I said, ordering Jim to charge at my feet, "but it's a great bore, I assure you."
I needed not to be told that she envied me my power, and so deep and genuine appeared to be her love for him that secretly I hoped he would again be amiable to her during my absence on the morrow. The contrast of his manner on my return would further chasten her.
From the porch we both watched her move across the little stretch of lawn, and, at my whispered suggestion, Jim rose to his feet and barked her insultingly over the last twenty feet of it. I was delighted to note that this induced a shamed acceleration of her pace and a tighter clutching of her skirts. I thought it important to let her know clearly and at once just who was the master in my own house.