A Woman Named Smith - Marie Conway Oemler (the best novels to read TXT) 📗

Mr. Nicholas Jelnik, with an uplift of his fine black brows and a satirical smile, once diagnosed the case of Great-Aunt Sophronisba Scarlett as "congenital Hyndsitis"; Doctor Richard Geddes said you'd only to take a glance at her house to see that she was predestined to be damned. I know that she was so hidebound in her prejudices, so virulently conservative, so constitutionally opposed to change, that anything savoring of modernity was anathema to her.

That old woman would as lief have had what remained of her teeth pulled out as have parted with anything once brought into Hynds House. She preserved everything, good, bad, indifferent. You'd find luster cider jugs, maybe a fine toby, old Chinese ginger jars, and the quaintest of Dutch schnapps bottles, cheek by jowl with an iron warming-pan, a bootjack, a rusty leather bellows, and a box packed with empty patent-medicine bottles, under the pantry shelf. A helmet creamer would be full of little rolls of twine, odd buttons, a wad of beeswax, a piece of asafetida, elastic bands, and corks. She had used a Ridgway platter with a view of the Hudson River on it, as a dinner plate for her hound, for we found it wrapped up, with "Nipper's platter" scrawled on the paper.

By and large, it wasn't an easy task to renovate a brick barracks finished in 1735, and occupied for ninety-nine years by a lady of Sophronisba's parts; though I sha'n't tell how we had to tackle it room by room, nor of the sweating hours spent in, so to speak, separating the sheep things from the goat things. I can't help stopping for a minute, though, to gloat over the front drawing-room that presently emerged, with a cleaned carpet that proved to be a marvel of hand-woven French art, rosewood sofas and chairs upholstered in royal blue and rubbed to satiny-browny blackness, two gloriously inlaid tables, and a Venetian mirror between two windows.

We gave the place of honor on the white marble mantel to a porcelain painting Alicia found in a work-box—the picture of a woman in gray brocade sprigged with pink-and-blue posies, a lace fichu about her slim shoulders, and a cap with a rose in it covering her parted brown hair. The little boy leaning against her knees had darker blue eyes, and fairer hair pushed back from a bold and manly forehead. The painting was about the size of a modern cabinet photograph, and, though pleasing and spirited, was evidently the work of a gifted amateur. What gave it potent meaning and appeal was the inscription lettered on the back:

Mrs. Lydia Hariott Hynds & Richd. Hynds Ag'd 7
Paint'd for Colnl. J. H. Hynds by his
Affec. Neece Jessamine

You couldn't help loving him, the little "Richard Ag'd 7." There was that in the face which won you instantly; it was so clear-eyed, so gallant, so brave, so honest. So we gave him and his pretty, meek mother the place of honor in the room that had once heard his laughter and seen her tears. And we brought down-stairs the fine painting of Colonel James Hampden, who was the splendid colonial in claret-color that we had so much admired, and hung him and a smaller painting marked, "Jessamine, Aged 22" where they could look down on those two.

These were the only pictures allowed in that room, and they gave to it an atmosphere flavored most sweetly of yesterday. Indeed, I think they must have approved of the room altogether, for we hadn't changed so much as we'd restored it. Even the glass shades that use'd to shield their wax candles were in their old places. There was their old-world atmosphere of stateliness; their Chinese jars, their English vases, their beautiful old Chelsea figures; and the sampler so painstakingly

Work'd by Ann Eliza Hynds
Ag'd 9 Yrs. 2 Mos., Nov'r, 1757

that had been carefully framed and mounted as a small fire-screen, perhaps for Ann Eliza's lady mama or proud grandmother. It was such human and intimate things, the mute mementoes of children who had passed, that made us begin to love Hynds House, for all its bigness and uncanniness and dilapidation.

We did discover one human touch laid upon the place by Sophronisba herself. She had gathered together a full set of small, hand-colored photographs of Confederate generals, wrapped them in a hand-made Confederate flag, into which was tucked a receipt signed by Judah Benjamin for Hynds silver melted into a bar and given to the Cause, written, "The glory is departed," across the package, and hidden it. Alicia, who had a hankering after Confederates, herself, put the photographs in a leather-covered album at least as old as themselves, and kept them sacredly. She said these were America's own vanquished and vanished Trojans, and that one got a lump in the throat remembering how

Fallen are those walls that were so good,
And corn grows now where Troy town stood.

Schmetz brought us our upholsterer, Riedriech the cabinet-maker, most cunning of craftsmen, who knew all there is to know about old furniture and just what should and shouldn't be done to it. In addition he was a grizzled, bearded, shambling old angel who clung to a reeking pipe and Utopian notions, a pestilent and whole-hearted socialist who would call the President of the United States or the president of the Plumbers' Union "Comrade" equally, and who put propagandist literature in everything but our hair.

"Mr. Riedriech," you would say reproachfully, "yesterday I discovered Karl Marx and Jean Jaurès lurking behind my coffee-pot and Fourier under the butter-dish. To-day I find Karl Kautsky in ambush behind the cream-jug and Frederick Engels under the rolls."

Riedriech would regard you paternally, placidly, benevolently, through his large, brass-rimmed spectacles:

"So? Little by little the drop of water the granite wears away. I give you the little leaflet, the little pamphlet, und by and by comes the little hole in your head."

Thank heaven the doctor next door didn't hear that!

Alicia knew how to handle the old visionary with innocent but consummate skill. Looking at the kind old bear with her Irish eyes:

"It must be a wonderful thing to have such mastery of one's tools, to know exactly what to do and how to do it," she would sigh. "'Tisn't everybody can be a master craftsman!"

"I show you in a little while what iss cabinet-making!" he said proudly. "I do more yet by you," he added charitably, "then make over for you chairs and tables and such, already: I make over for you your little mind."

The old socialist did indeed show us what cabinet-making can be. He turned the office behind the library into a workroom, and from it Sophronisba's tattered and torn and forlorn old things emerged, piece by piece, in shining rosewood and walnut and mahogany majesty. If you love old furniture; if it gives you a thrill just to touch a period chair of incomparable grace, or the smooth surface of an old table, or the curve of a carved sofa, you'll understand Alicia's open rapture and my more sedate delight.

The tiled fireplace in the library was really the feature of Hynds House. There wasn't any mantel: the fireplace was sunk into the wall, and above it and the book-cases on each side was a space filled with more relics than all the rest of the house contained—portraits, signed and framed documents, letters, old flags, and a whole arsenal of weapons. Above the fireplace hung the portrait of Freeman Hynds—thin, dark, austere, more like a Cameronian Scotsman than a Carolina gentleman of an easy habit of life.

However, it was not portrait or relics that made the room remarkable, but the tiles, each a portrait of a Revolutionary hero. Laurens, Marion, Lafayette, Pulaski, von Steuben—there they were in buff and blue, martial, in cocked hats, and with such awe-inspiring noses! The center and largest tile was, of course, the Father of his Country, without the hat, but with the nose, and above him the original flag, with the thirteen stars for the thirteen weak-kneed little states that were to grow into the great empire of freedom that the high-nosed, high-hearted soldiers fought for and founded. Alicia and I touched those tiles with reverence. They were the pride of our hearts.

As often happens in the South, there were bedrooms on the lower floor; two of them, in fact, on one side of the hall. The front one had been not only locked but padlocked; the windows had been nailed on the inside, and heavy wooden shutters nailed on the outside. So long had the room been closed that dry-rot had set in. The silk quilt on the four-poster was falling to pieces, the linen was as yellow as beeswax, and the sheets made one think of the Flying Dutchman's sails. This room was of almost monastic severity: an ascetic or a stern soldier might have occupied it. Besides the bed it contained four chairs, a clothes-press, a secretary, and a shaving-stand. On a small table near the bed were a Wedgwood mortar with a heavy pestle, a medicine glass, and a pewter candlestick turned as black as iron. The press in the corner still held a few clothes, threadbare and sleazy, and in the desk were some dry letters and a Business Book—at least, that's how it was marked—with lists of names, each having an occupation or task set down opposite it, I suppose the names of long-dead slaves. On the fly-leaf was written, in a neat and very legible hand, "Freeman Hynds."

"Sophy!" Alicia's voice had an edge of awe. "This must have been his room. I believe he died here, in this very bed. And afterward they shut the room up; and it hasn't been opened until now."

We looked at the old bed, and seemed to see him there, trying to raise himself, crying out so piteously upon dead Richard's name, only to fall back a dead man himself. What had he wanted to tell, as he lay there dying? His painted face in the library was not a bad man's face. It was proud, stern, stubborn, bigoted; a dark, unhappy face, but neither an evil nor a cruel one. What was it that really lay between those two brothers? After more than a hundred years, we were as much in the dark as they in whose day it had happened and whose lives it had wrecked.

We built a fire in the long-disused chimney to take the dampness out of the room, and forced open the windows to let in the good sun and wind. Over in one corner, pushed in between the clothes-press and the side wall, was, of all things, a prie-dieu; and upon it a dusty Bible with his name