East Angels: A Novel

CHAPTER I

"I think, more than anything else, I came to be under blue sky."

"Are you fond of sky?" said the young girl who was sitting near the speaker, her eyes on the shimmering water of the lagoon which stretched north and south before the house.

"I can't lay claim to tastes especially celestial, I fear," answered the visitor, "but I confess to a liking for an existence which is not, for six months of the year, a combat. I am mortally tired of our long northern winters, with their eternal processions of snow, ice, and thaw – thaw, ice, and snow; I am tired of our springs – hypocritical sunshine pierced through and through by east winds; and I have at last, I think, succeeded in breaking loose from the belief that there is something virtuous and heroic in encountering these things – encountering them, I mean, merely from habit, and when not called to it by any necessity. But this emancipation has taken time – plenty of it. It is directly at variance with all the principles of the country and creed in which I was brought up."

"You have good health, Mr. Winthrop?" asked Mrs. Thorne, in a tone which was prepared to turn with equal appreciation towards sympathy if he were, and congratulation if he were not, the possessor of the lungs which classify a person, and give him an occupation for life.

"Do I look delicate?"

"On the contrary, you look remarkably well," answered his hostess, sure of her ground here, since even an invalid likes to be congratulated upon an appearance of health: not only is it more agreeable in itself, but it gives him the opportunity to explain (and at some length) that all is illusory merely, a semblance; an adjustment of the balances between resignation and heroism which everybody should admire. "Yes," Mrs. Thorne went on, with a critical air which seemed to say, as she looked at him, that her opinions were founded upon unprejudiced scrutiny, "wonderfully well, indeed – does he not, Garda?"

"Mr. Winthrop looks well; I don't know that it is a wonder," replied Edgarda Thorne, in her soft voice. "He has been everywhere, and seen everything," she added, turning her eyes towards him for a moment – eyes in which he read envy, but envy impersonal, concerning itself more with his travels, his knowledge of many places, his probable adventures, than with himself.

"Mr. Winthrop is accustomed to a largeness of opportunity," remarked Mrs. Thorne; "but it is his natural atmosphere." She paused, coughed slightly, and then added, "He does not come into the ports he enters with banners flying, with rockets and cannon, and a brass band at bow and stern."

"You describe an excursion steamer on the Fourth of July," said Winthrop.

"Precisely. One or two of the persons who have visited Gracias-á-Dios lately have seemed to us not unlike that," answered the lady.

Mrs. Thorne had a delicate little voice, pitched on rather a high key, but so slender in volume that, like the pure small note of a little bird, it did not offend. Her pronunciation was very distinct and accurate – that is, accurate according to the spelling; they knew no other methods in the conscientious country school where she had received her education. Mrs. Thorne pronounced her t in "often," her l in "almond," her "again" rhymed with "plain."

"Did you mean that you, too, would like to go everywhere and see everything, Miss Thorne?" said Evert Winthrop, addressing the daughter. "I assure you it's dull work."

"Naturally – after one has had it all." She spoke without again turning her eyes towards him.

"We are kept here by circumstances," observed Mrs. Thorne, smoothing the folds of her black gown with her little withered hand. "I do not know whether circumstances will ever release us – I do not know. But we are not unhappy meanwhile. We have the old house, with its many associations; we have our duties and occupations; and if not frequent amusement, we have our home life, our few dear friends, and our affection for each other."

"All of them crowned by this same blue sky which Mr. Winthrop admires so much," added Garda.

"I see that you will always hold me up to ridicule on account of that speech," said Winthrop. "You are simply tired of blue. As a contrast you would welcome, I dare say, the dreariest gray clouds of the New England coast, and our east wind driving in from the sea."

"I should welcome snow," answered Garda, slowly; "all the country covered with snow, lying white and dead – that is what I wish to see. I want to walk on a frozen lake with ice, real ice over deep water, under my feet. I want to breathe freezing air, and know how it feels. I want to see trees without any leaves on them; and a snow-storm when the flakes are very big and soft like feathers; and long icicles hanging from roofs; and then, to hear the wind whistle round the house, and be glad to draw the curtains and bring my chair close to a great roaring fire. Think of that – to be glad to come close to a great roaring fire!"

"I have described these things to my daughter," said Mrs. Thorne, explaining these wintry aspirations to their guest in her careful little way. "My home before my marriage was in the northern part of New England, and these pictures from my youth have been Garda's fairy tales."

"Then you are not English?" said Winthrop. He knew perfectly that she was not, but he wished to hear the definite little abstract of family history which, in answer to his question, he thought she would feel herself called upon to bestow. He was not mistaken.

"My husband was English – that is, of English descent," she explained – "and I do not wonder that you should have thought me English also, for I have imbibed the family air so long that I have ended by really becoming one of them. We Thornes are very English; but we are the English of one hundred and fifty years ago. We have not moved on, as no doubt the English of to-day have been obliged to move; we have remained stationary. Even in dear old England itself, we should to-day, no doubt, Garda and I, be called old-fashioned."

Winthrop found himself so highly entertained by this speech, by her "We Thornes," and her "dear old England," that he looked down lest she should see the change of expression which accompanies a smile, even though the smile be hidden. This little woman had never been in England in her life; unmistakable New Hampshire looked from her eyes, sounded in every tone of her voice, made itself visible in all her movements and attitudes. She was unceasingly anxious; she had never indulged herself in anything, or taken anything lightly since she was born; she had as little body as was possible, and in that body she had to the full the strict American conscience. All this was vividly un-English.

"Yes, I always regret so much the modern ways into which dear England has fallen," she went on. "It would have been beautiful if they could but have retained the old customs, the old ideas, as we have retained them here. But in some things they have done so," she added, with the air of wishing to be fully just. "In the late unhappy contest, you know, they were with us – all their best people – as to our patriarchal system for our servants. They understood us – us of the South – completely."

Winthrop's amusement had now reached its highest point. "Heroic, converted little Yankee school-marm," was his thought. "What a colossal effort her life down here must have been for her, poor thing!"

"Your husband was the first of the American Thornes, then?" he said, with the intention of drawing out more narrative.

"Oh no. The first Edgar Thorne came out from England with Governor Tonyn (the friend of Lord Marchmont, you know), during the British occupation of this province in the last century; he remained here after the retrocession to Spain, because he had married a daughter of one of the old Spanish families of this coast, Beatriz de Duero. As Beatriz was an only child, they lived here with her parents, and the second Edgar Thorne, their son, was born here. He also married a Duero, a cousin named Ines; my husband, the third Edgar, was their child. My husband came north one summer; he came to New England. There he met me. We were married not long afterwards, and I returned with him to his southern home. Edgarda was but two years old when her dear father was taken from us."

"Miss Thorne resembles her Spanish more than her English ancestors, I fancy?" said Winthrop, looking at the handle of his riding-whip for a moment, perhaps to divest the question of too closely personal a character, the young lady herself being beside him. But this little by-play was not needed. Mrs. Thorne had lived a solitary life so long that her daughter, her daughter's ancestors, her daughter's resemblances (the last, indeed, might be called historical), seemed to her quite natural subjects for conversation; if Winthrop had gazed at Garda herself, instead of at the handle of his riding-whip, that would have seemed to her quite natural also.

"Edgarda is the portrait of her Spanish grandmother painted in English colors," she answered, in one of her neatly arranged little phrases.

"An anomaly, therefore," commented Garda, who seemed rather tired of the turn the conversation had taken. "But it can do no harm, Medusa-fashion, because fastened forever upon a Florida wall."

"A Florida wall is not such a bad thing," answered Winthrop. "I am thinking a little of buying one for myself."

"Ah, a residence in Gracias-á-Dios?" said Mrs. Thorne, her small, bright blue eyes meeting his with a sort of screen suddenly drawn down over them – a screen which he interpreted as a quick endeavor on her part to conceal in their depths any consciousness that a certain desirable old Spanish mansion was possibly to be obtained, and for a price which, to a well-filled purse of the north, might seem almost comically small.

"No; I do not care for a house in the town," he answered. "I should prefer something outside – more of a place, if I should buy at all."

"I cannot imagine why any one should wish to buy a place down here now," said Garda. "A house in Gracias-á-Dios, with a rose garden and a few orange-trees, is all very well; you could stay there for two months or so in the winter, and then close it and go north again. But what could you do with a large place? Cotton and sugar are no longer worth raising, now that we have no slaves. And as to one of the large orange groves that people are beginning to talk about, there is no one here who could manage it for you. You would have to see to it yourself, and that you could never do. To begin with, the climate would kill you; and then there are the snakes."

"Being already dead, the snakes would hardly trouble me, I suppose, unless you refer to future torments," said Winthrop, laughing. "Allow me to congratulate you upon your picture of the agricultural resources of the country. They have never before been so clearly presented to me; it is most interesting."

Garda shook her head, repressing a smile. But still she did not look at him.

"In purchasing a place here Mr. Winthrop may not be thinking of agriculture; he may be thinking only of climate," remarked Mrs. Thorne, mildly, to her daughter.

"Climate – that is blue sky, I suppose," said Garda; "I acknowledge that there is an abundance of that here. But I advise Mr. Winthrop to buy but a small piece of ground as his standing-point, and to take his sky out perpendicularly; he can go up to any height, you know, as high as the moon, if he likes. That would be ever so much wiser than to have the same amount spread out horizontally over a quantity of swamp-land which no person in his senses could wish to own."

"But the land about here strikes me as remarkably dry," observed their visitor, amused by the girl's opposition to an idea which he had as yet so faintly outlined. He suspected, however, that she was not combating him so much as she was combating the possibility of a hope in the breast of her little mother. But poor Mrs. Thorne had been very discreet; she had not allowed herself to even look interested.

"It is as dry as the Desert of Sahara," Garda answered, with decision, "and it is as wet as a wet sponge. There is this dry white sand which you see on the pine-barrens – miles upon miles of it. Then, stretching across it here and there come the great belts of bottomless swamp. That is Florida."

"Your description is a striking one," said Winthrop, gravely. "You make me feel all the more desirous to own a little of such a remarkable combination of wet and dry."

Garda glanced at him, and this time her smile conquered her. Winthrop was conscious of a pleasure in having made her look at him and smile. For it was not a matter of course that she would do either. His feeling about her had been from the first that she was the most natural young girl he had ever met – that is, in the ranks of the educated. There was a naturalness, of course, in the Indian girls, whom he had seen in the far West, which probably exceeded Garda's; but that sort of naturalness he did not care for. Garda was natural in her own graceful way, singularly natural; her glance and her smile, while not so ready, nor so promptly hospitable as those of most girls of her age, seemed to him to possess a quality which he had come to consider almost extinct – the quality of frank, undisturbed sincerity.

"I sometimes regret that I described to my daughter so often the aspects of my northern home," said Mrs. Thorne. "It was a pleasure to me at the time (it had been a great change for me, you know), and I did not realize that they were becoming exaggerated to her, these descriptions – more beautiful than the reality. For she has dwelt too much upon them; by contrast she over-estimates them. The South, too, has its beautiful aspects: that we must allow."

Winthrop fancied that he detected a repressed plaintiveness in her tone. "She thinks her daughter cruel to keep on beating down so ruthlessly her poor little hope," was his thought. Then he answered the spoken sentence: "As she has never seen these things for herself, your descriptions must have been vivid."

"No; it is her imagination that is that."

"True – I have myself had an example of her imagination in her remarks upon agriculture."

Garda laughed. "I shall say no more about agriculture, blue sky, or anything else," she declared.

"You leave me, then, to take care of myself?"

"You do not need my assistance, I never waste it."

"I should have pretended to be quite helpless! That's the second mistake I have made this afternoon. If I had only let it be supposed that my health was delicate, Mrs. Thorne would have been much more interested in me."

"Oh no, Mr. Winthrop," said his hostess, earnestly; "you are quite mistaken. Good health is in itself full of the deepest interest, I am sure, and especially at the present day, when it is so singularly rare. I am most glad you possess it – most glad indeed."

"I possess enough of it, at any rate, to go over the place, if you will be so kind," said Winthrop. "You know you promised me that pleasure some day, and why not this afternoon? There is a delightful breeze."

Mrs. Thorne dropped her eyes to the tips of her black cloth slippers, visible beneath the skirt of her gown. These little shoes one could scarcely fail to see, since the skirt, which was neatness itself in its decent black folds, was rather scanty and short. Their age and well-worn thinness, the skilful mending of their worst places, the new home-made bindings, the fresh ribbon bows bravely tied, told a story to the observers of delicate things.

But while Mrs. Thorne surveyed her slippers, her daughter was replying: "It would hardly amuse you to go over the place, Mr. Winthrop; there is really nothing to see but the crane."

"Let us go, then, and see the crane."

"Mamma would be so delighted, you know. But she never walks."

"Not far," corrected Mrs. Thorne. "I am not strong, not able to walk far."

"And I should be delighted, too," continued Garda, "only I am so sleepy. I have fallen into the habit of spending my afternoons in the hammock; that makes me immensely drowsy just at this hour."

"I feel like an interloper," said Winthrop; "say a large mosquito."

"You needn't. It's not well to sleep so much," replied Miss Thorne, calmly.

"Certainly you know how to console. Is that the hammock in which you pass your happy existence?"

"Not existence; only afternoons. You really wish to go?" she added, seeing that he had taken his hat from the chair beside him. "We will send Raquel with you, then, as guide."

"Raquel?"

"Haven't you noticed her? She lets you in when you come. She is an important personage with us, I assure you; her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother lived on the place here before her."

Winthrop recalled the portly jet-black negress who, in answer to his knock, had opened the lower door.

"Three generations make aristocracy in America," he replied; "I am afraid of so distinguished a guide. If doomed to go without Mrs. Thorne or yourself, why may I not go alone?"

"You would never find the magnolias, you would come into the live-oak avenue at the wrong end, you would look at the ruin from its commonplace side, you would see only the back of the Cherokee roses, the crane would not dance for you, the wild cattle would run at you, and you would inevitably get into the swamp," answered the girl, checking off the items one by one on her pretty fingers.

"I have confessed my fear of Raquel, and now you display before me this terrible list of dangers. Don't you think it would be but common charity to come with me yourself? My conversation is not exciting; you could easily sleep a little, between-times, as we walk."

"I believe you have had your own way all your life," remarked Garda, "or you would never persist as you do. Your humility is nothing but a manner; in reality you expect everything to be done for you by everybody."

"Not by everybody," Winthrop responded.

Mrs. Thorne had coughed as Garda ended her speech. Mrs. Thorne often coughed, and her coughs had a character of their own; they did not appear to be pulmonary. They were delicate little sounds which came forth apologetically, shielded by her hand, never quite completed; they were not coughs so much as suggestions of coughs, and with these suggestions she was in the habit of filling little pauses in the conversation, covering up the awkwardnesses or mistakes of others (there were never any of her own to cover), or acting as hyphen for disjointed remarks when people had forgotten what they were going to say. It was, indeed, a most accomplished cough, all Gracias had been indebted to it. Lately, too, she had begun to use it to veil her own little periods of consultation with herself regarding her daughter; for she seemed by no means certain of the direction which this daughter's thoughts or words might take, and the uncertainty troubled her careful maternal mind. Garda, however, though often out of sight round some unexpected corner, was never far distant; the hurrying elderly comprehension always caught up with her before long; but these periods of uncertainty, combined with cares more material, had ended by impressing upon Mrs. Thorne's face the look of anxiety which was now its most constant expression – an anxiety covered, however, as much as possible, by the mask of minutely careful politeness which fitted closely over it, doing its best to conceal, or, failing in that, to at least mark as private, the personal troubles which lay underneath.

"Mamma's cough means that I am not sufficiently polite," said Garda; "I always know what mamma's cough means." She rose, passed behind her mother's chair, and bending forward over her small head, lightly kissed her forehead. "I will go, mamma," she said, caressingly. "I will be beautifully good, because to-morrow is your birthday; it ought to be a dear little day, about six hours long, to fit you."

"I am fortunate to have asked my favor upon the eve of an anniversary," said Winthrop.

"You are," answered Garda, taking her broad-brimmed hat from the nail behind her. "It's only upon such great occasions that I am really and angelically good – as mamma would like me to be all the time."

"I will send Raquel after you, my daughter, with the umbrellas," said Mrs. Thorne, with a little movement of her lips and throat, as though she had just swallowed something of a pleasant taste, which was, with her, the expression of content.

"Surely it is not going to rain?" said Winthrop, examining the sky.

"They are sun-umbrellas; you may need them," answered his hostess, with a certain increased primness of accentuation, which immediately brought to his mind the idea that the carrier of these articles would represent the duenna whom she considered necessary.

"A Spanish graft, that, on the original New England tree," was his mental comment. "I wonder how many more there are?"

But the descendant of the Spaniards was speaking for herself. "We do not want Raquel, mamma; we can carry the umbrellas ourselves." And she passed into the darkened drawing-room, from which opened the little balcony where they had been sitting.

Winthrop, after taking leave of Mrs. Thorne, followed Garda. But he had the conviction that a duenna of some sort, though it might not be Raquel, would be improvised from that balcony before long, and sent after them.

He had already paid several visits to these ladies, and knew his way through the interior dimness, but the old house still attracted him, and he did not hurry his steps; he looked again at the rooms, which, with their few articles of furniture, had to northern eyes an appearance of cool shaded emptiness, the broad open spaces having been purposely left to give place for the free passage of air. The vaulted ceilings deep in shadow, the archways in place of the northern doors, one room panelled to the top in dark polished wood which glimmered dimly as he passed through – all these he liked to note. Beyond, the stone stairway made a leisurely, broad-stepped descent. The high wainscot on the wall at its side showed pomegranates stiffly carved in low relief, and the balustrade of the same dark wood ended in a clumsy column, with a heavy wreath of the fruit wound round it, the conventional outlines worn into vagueness by the touch of time.

The old house was built of stone, the porous shell-conglomerate of that coast. The thick blocks had been covered with an outer coat of plaster, and painted a shadeless gray-white. The structure extended itself over a large space of ground. Blank, unadorned, covered by a flat roof, without so much as the projection of a cornice to break their monotony, the walls stretched evenly round a parallelogram, and having but two stories of height, looked low in comparison with their length. But the old house in reality was not so large as it appeared to be, these same walls with their lining of rooms enclosing an interior court which was open to the sky; the windows of the inner sides looked down upon a low-curbed well, a clump of bananas, a rose-bush, and an ancient stone seat with a hook above it, where had hung in his cage, until he died of old age, Mrs. Thorne's northern canary, who had accompanied his mistress southward on her wedding journey to Florida.

Viewed from without, the gray-white abode had a peculiarly dumb aspect. On the north side there were no windows; on the south, east, and west the windows of the lower story, few at best, were covered by solid wooden shutters, which, being all kept closed, and having the same hue as the walls, could scarcely be distinguished from them. The windows of the upper story were more numerous, but almost as jealously guarded; for though their shutters were here and there partially open, one could see that in a trice they could all be drawn to and barred within, and that then the old mansion would present an unbroken white wall to all points of the compass. But once allowed to pass the door, solidly set in the stone, without top or side lights, the visitor perceived that these rooms with exterior windows darkened, opened widely upon the sunny court within. Some of them, indeed, did more. The inner walls of the ground-floor had been cut away in four places, leaving rounded open arches with pillars supporting the second story, and, under these arcades, there were chairs and tables and even a sofa visible, articles which presented to Evert Winthrop's eyes, each time he came, a picture of tropical and doorless confidence in the temperature which struck him as delightful. These arcades were not so unprotected as they appeared to be. Still, as the months went by, it could be said with truth that they remained, for five-sixths of the year, thus widely open. Evert Winthrop had spent his childhood and youth in New England, he had visited all parts of the great West, in later years he had travelled extensively in the Old World; but this was his first visit to that lovely southern shore of his own country which has a winter climate more enchanting than any that Europe can offer; to match it, one must seek the Madeira Islands or Algiers. In addition to this climate, Winthrop was beginning to discover that there were other things as well – old Spanish houses like the one through which he was now passing, a flavor of tradition and legend, tradition and legend, too, which had nothing to do with Miles Standish and his companions, or even with that less important personage, Hendrik Hudson. There was – he could not deny it – a certain comparative antiquity about this southern peninsula which had in it more richness of color and a deeper perspective than that possessed by any of the rather blank, near, little backgrounds of American history farther north. This was a surprise to him. Like most New-Englanders, he had unconsciously cherished the belief that all there was of historical importance, of historical picturesqueness even, in the beginnings of the republic, was associated with the Puritans from whom he was on his father's side descended, was appended to their stately hats and ruffs, their wonderful perseverance, their dignified orthography, the solemnities of their speech and demeanor. And if, with liberality, he should stretch the lines a little to include the old Dutch land-holders of Manhattan Island, and the river up which the Half-moon had sailed, that had seemed to him all that could possibly be necessary; there was, indeed, nothing else to include. But here was a life, an atmosphere, to whose contemporary and even preceding existence on their own continent neither Puritan nor Patroon had paid heed; and it was becoming evident that he, their descendant, with all the aids of easy communication, and that modern way of looking at the globe which has annihilated distance and made a voyage round it but a small matter – even he, with all this help, had not, respecting this beautiful peninsula of his own country, developed perceptions more keen than those of these self-absorbed ancestors – an appreciation more delicate than their obtuse one. Winthrop's appreciation was good. But it had been turned, as regarded historical and picturesque associations, principally towards the Old World. He now went through a good deal of meditation upon this subject; he was pleased, yet, on the whole, rather ashamed of himself. When Raphael was putting into the backgrounds of his pictures those prim, slenderly foliaged trees which he had seen from Perugino's windows in his youth, the Spaniards were exploring this very Florida shore; yet when he, Evert Winthrop, had discovered the same tall, thin trees (which up to that time he had thought rather an affectation) from the overhanging balcony of the little inn at Assisi – it had seemed to overhang all Umbria – did he not think of Raphael's day as far back in the past, and as completely remote from the possibility of any contemporary history in America as America is remote from the future great cities of the Sahara plains? And when, in Venice, he dwelt with delight upon the hues of Titian and Veronese, was he not sure (though without thinking of it) that in their day the great forests of his own New World untrodden by the white man's foot, had stretched unbroken to the sea? Because no Puritan with grave visage had as yet set sail for Massachusetts Bay, he had not realized that here on this southern shore had been towns and people, governors, soldiers, persecutions, and priests.