Chapter 17
BETSY'S MORTIFICATION
"How you gonter git—get to school every morning?" Jo asked Rebecca.
"I don't know. They haven't decided yet. The aunts always do a lot of talking back and forth before they come to any conclusion and Grandfather is so busy with extra work at the hub factory that he hasn't thought about it yet."
"Well, Betsy and me—and I—think it would be prime if you meet us at the mill every morning and drive over with us. I thought about it first. Betsy says she did but forgot to mention it. That's the way girls do when anybody gits—gets ahead of 'em. Not all girls! I think you play right fair."
"Thank you, Jo! I'm glad they put off opening school a week because it gives my hair a chance to grow a little. I'm frightened, anyhow, about starting to school. You see I never have gone before. I guess I'm going to have a hard time in arithmetic."
"Oh, shoo! I'll learn you that. 'Taint hard."
"Well I'll teach you English while you learn me arithmetic."
The aunts promptly objected to Rebecca's accepting Jo's offer to drive her to and from school, as they did not wish to be put under obligations to neighbors they considered as objectionable as the Bollings, but they could not but concede that it simplified matters and finally gave a grudging consent to the arrangement.
Rebecca was to meet the Bollings at the mill every morning and they were to drop her there on the way home. Spottswood offered to see that Rebecca got to the bridge on time.
When school opened Spot's own dapper mare was ordered to be hitched to his red-wheeled buggy and immediately after breakfast on school mornings uncle and niece would spin over the red clay road, arriving at the trysting place in time to see the Bollings come jogging along the lane.
Betsy and Jo drove a horse known as the grey colt, hitched to a disreputable-looking old phaeton whose better days had been so long ago that brother and sister could not recall them. The grey colt might have become grey with old age, had he not been born that way. But the young Bollings made no complaint of their turnout, being thankful that they had some means of locomotion other than their own limbs. Philip had been forced to walk to the Court House to school in all weathers.
As for Rebecca, she adored both colt and phaeton. "They remind me so of the movies," she said.
Spottswood seemed to have much business at the Tillage of late and often he would suggest that Betsy should get in his buggy and Jo and Rebecca drive the colt. This arrangement suited all parties. Rebecca was supposed to walk home from the mill in the afternoon but she often found her uncle waiting for her when the grey colt made his leisurely way down the road.
The eternal feminine in Rebecca soon sensed the budding romance. She thrilled with it and did all in her power to further it, managing to lead the conversation to Betsy when she was in her uncle's presence and to Spot when she was with Betsy. Sometimes she could not help teasing a little but she did it with delicate adroitness.
"I'm getting kind of uneasy about Uncle Spot," Rebecca confided to her friend, "driving me over every morning and meeting me so often in the afternoon. He's so anxious to spare the grey colt, too, by taking part of his load when he goes over to the Court House."
Betsy blushed and whipped up the grey colt.
Occasionally Betsy came to Mill House to see her little friend and Spot always managed to have business at the house on those occasions. Sometimes he even suggested to Rebecca that he should drive her over to the Bollings. More and more did he realize that Betsy was the girl for him, although he knew she was far removed from his family ideal. There was nothing of the aristocrat about Betsy, but what did he, Spottswood Taylor, want with an aristocratic wife? He had heard too much talk of such things from his sisters and their friends, chosen because of their blue blood. He wished he knew how his father felt about it. Tom, who every one knew was his father's favorite, had married where he had loved, regardless of family tradition, and his father had promptly disinherited him. How could he, Spottswood, hope for greater leniency from his father, in case his choice of a wife displeased the old gentleman?
The whole county knew to what depths of degradation Rolfe Bolling had sunk. The fact that in his veins was as good Cavalier blood as flowed in Virginia made him the more contemptible in the eyes of his neighbors. There was no denying, however, that Rolfe Bolling's children would have done credit to the worthiest of sires. In the few months that Philip had been home the neighbors had recognized his worth and character. As for Betsy, she was a universal favorite with her gay laughing nature and her ready good-humor.
Spottswood was always hearing her praises sung at the Court House by old and young. It was spoken of as a crying shame that such a girl should not be able to have guests in her own home, but not even Betsy's insouciance could withstand the mortification of having her friends see her father and Mam' Peachy and the unfortunate conditions in her home. It was the one cloud in the sunshine of Betsy's clear sky. Sometimes it seemed very black to the girl but her nature was so sunny, her outlook so gay, that she would quickly dispel the feeling. It was absurd in that big house not to have a parlor where she might receive her friends, but her father used one front room for his bed room and the other was the family sitting room where he sprawled all day and where he saw the persons who came to The Hedges on business. There were two small rooms downstairs in the main part of the house besides the dining room but one of them was Elizabeth's sewing room and the other one was full to overflowing with Rolfe's plunder, watermelon seeds drying on newspapers, old guns and fishing rods, discarded harness and saddles, empty bottles and jugs—a miscellaneous collection of odds and ends that nothing but a fire could ever dispose of. The master of The Hedges never gave away anything and never threw away anything and the consequence was his home was overflowing with useless and worn-out articles that were the despair of his orderly wife.
If she had had her way, Betsy would have taken matters in her own hands and cleared out the rubbish that littered the one room that she might have turned into a place where she could see her friends, but Elizabeth remembered too well the moment in her early married life when she had attempted to bring some order out of the chaos of this lumber room of her husband's and his fury and Mam' Peachy's remarks about the curiosity and interfering ways of the poor whites.
Rebecca Taylor was almost the only visitor who came to The Hedges. Sometimes she spent Saturday with Betsy and Jo, and Uncle Spot would drive over for her in the evening. On these occasions he would hitch his horse and sit on the front porch, talking shyly to Betsy. Sometimes the girl would ask him into the house, but something always happened to embarrass her when he complied. Either Mam' Peachy would come slipping into the sitting room, smelling vilely of whisky and cackling shrilly about Mill folks and their perfidious ways of loving beneath them and marrying above, or Rolfe Bolling would appear in his stocking feet, the shirt that had been put on clean in the morning as filthy as though he had worn it a week.
Elizabeth would receive the young man kindly though stiffly. She saw so few persons outside of her family that her manner was apt to be distant and constrained. Philip was always cordial and pleasant. He talked farming and crops with Spot with a seeming disregard of the embarrassing interruptions caused either by the outrageous old negress or his father.
Betsy usually could laugh at Mam' Peachy and overlook her father's ill manners and slovenly habits but when Spottswood Taylor was present she took their idiosyncracies very seriously, her bright eyes would fill with tears of mortification and her usually laughing mouth tremble with hurt sensibilities.
"I can't and won't stand it!" she cried out one evening after Spottswood Taylor had driven over for Rebecca and had come into the house for a few minutes. She had asked him in knowing that her father and Mam' Peachy were safe in the kitchen with the doors closed. She knew that Old Abe had but recently arrived from his periodic trip to the mountains with a full jug, which never failed to occupy the master and a favored few for some hours. Feeling they were safely occupied and would not appear in the front of the house to disgrace her, Betsy had been quite cordial to the handsome neighbor in her invitation to enter the house.
"Come in," she had smiled. "Rebecca and Philip have gone up to the attic to find a book. They will be down in a moment."
Betsy could not but be flattered by Spottswood Taylor's evident admiration for her. She had known of it for a long time—ever since she was quite a little girl in fact. For several years she had been conscious of the fact that, in the little country church where the Taylors and Bollings worshiped, Spot paid more attention to her profile than he did to the sermon. How a girl knows her profile is being studied is an enigma not to be solved, but know it she always does. Spottswood Taylor's sisters had never seemed to be conscious of her having a profile, even of her having a face—that is not until she had gone to Mill House to see Rebecca and then the Misses Taylor had been coldly and formally polite.
Betsy was a girl with few complexities in her nature. She was not sensitive like her mother and Philip and her father's habits and appearance formerly did not seem to mortify her as they had the others. She had carelessly explained matters at The Hedges to Rebecca when she first began to go there by saying:
"Don't mind Mam' Peachy and Father! They are both kind of nutty!"
But now that Spottswood Taylor had begun to come to her home the girl had become very sensitive about the conditions there. When she broke out with "I can't and won't stand it!" more than usual had occurred to mortify her. Not only had her father come into the sitting room in his stocking feet smelling vilely of the mountain whisky but Mam' Peachy and her son, Old Abe, had followed him, both of them drank, laughing loudly and coarsely.
Mam' Peachy had leered impertinently into the face of the caller and said: "Yi! Yi! Mill House folk a callin' on they betters! I mind the time when yo' great gran'pap thought hissed uplif'ed when we-alls 'lowed him ter grin' us's cawn. He wa' the one what got in he haid ter start the hub fact'ry an' come here tryin' ter buy lan' on our side er the ribber. We wouldn't sell ter him! Naw! Not us-all! We done tol' him we'd rent a lil' strip ter him, jes fer 'commerdation. We-alls wa'n't a gonter sell off none er us's lan' but we'd rent some fer say a hunerd years fer a sum down, same as buyin'."
"Hush! You ol' fool nigger!" admonished her master. "You go on back ter the kitchen. You ain't got no sense on 'count er that cawn liquor you done been a drinkin'."
"What did she mean?" asked Spottswood, puzzled. "Wasn't the land bought from your family by my great-grandfather? I always understood it was."
"She ain't a meanin' nothin'," said Rolfe Bolling, with the insinuating manner of a person who has drunk too much but has just enough sense to try to conceal something. "You mus' 'scuse Mam' Peachy."
"Yes, you mus' scuse Mam' Peachy," said Old Abe solemnly. "She wan't a meanin' ter let no cat out'n the bag."
"Ain't no cat in no bag," said the old woman vindictively. "Ain't nothin' but a piece er paper in Ol' Marse's desk what had writ on it jes' what I 'members. I ain't nebber fergit nothin' in my life. I's drunk now but I still kin 'member an' I tell you one thing, young man, you young Taylor man, with yo' toploftical ways, you an' yo' stiff-backed sisters an' that mean ol' dried up Bob Taylor what thinks hisse'f too good ter 'sociate wif my baby here, I jes' tell you ter look out! I done made a spell on all er you Mill folks, on you white folks an' on all the black folks, an' the spell air a wuckin' an' it air wuckin' quick. I done got some er that there lil' brat's har what yo' stiff-backed sisters cut off'n her haid an' I got her tintype an' I done made a cha'm spell what air gonter bring sorrow an' de-struction on all er you-all, root an' branch. I done kep' that ol' fool Pearly Gates in the baid fer nigh on ter twenty years an' I ain't even begun yit on what I air a goin' ter do ter the whole bilin' er Taylors."
By this time Mam' Peachy was screaming in high shrill tones and had begun to jump up and down in a kind of frenzy. Philip and Rebecca heard, even up in the attic, and Philip came hurriedly down, Rebecca following more slowly.
"What is all this?" he demanded sternly. "Old Abe, take your mother to her room."
"An' who are you ter be a givin' orders in my house?" demanded Rolfe Bolling with drunken bluster.
"I am your son," said Philip sadly. "I will take you to your room, Father." He caught hold of his father's arm and led him off.
Rolfe Bolling did not resist but meekly allowed himself to be taken to his room and put to bed, weeping in maudlin fashion. "Mam' Peachy hadn't ought ter a tol' that 'bout jes' rent'n the lan' ter the Taylors. I wa' allowin' ter git lots er spo't out'n that there lease," he whimpered.
This unpleasant incident cut short the visit and, very soon, Spottswood and Rebecca bade their friends good-bye and departed for Mill House.