"Oh, I don't mean that. I mean real French, the kind Aunt Etta is always reading." For she was persuaded, after observing Aunt Etta's way with books in yellow covers, that all the really interesting things were written in the French language.
"You aren't far enough advanced for that, dear," Aunt Etta was sympathetic but discouraging, "though you are doing very nicely with your French conversation."
"Come here a minute, darling." Mrs. Archbald raised her pleasant voice in command. "I want to see if I've got the right length for this coat. What I can never understand about Jenny Blair," she added to her sister-in-law, "is the way she is so far ahead in some things and so backward in others."
"Well, we were all that way," Etta said consolingly. "I'm sure she seems very bright when you compare her with Bena Peyton."
"But Bena has a nice plump little figure, and Jenny Blair is as straight as a pole."
Rising obediently, Jenny Blair tripped with reluctant feet into the library, and stood patiently between her mother and Aunt Etta while the coat was slipped over her shoulders and fastened with a safety-pin on her flat little chest. She was a golden wisp of a child, with soft flaxen hair, a shower of freckles over her small snub nose, and a vague rosy mouth which melted into a short dimpled chin. Though she was not pretty, she had inherited the yellow-hazel eyes and the wide, expectant gaze of the Archbalds. While she stood there, she shifted uneasily on her feet, and, because she hated trying on more than anything in the world, desperately invoked the power of pretense.
"Hold still, Jenny Blair, or I can't measure you. What are you mumbling?"
"Oh, nothing, Mamma, but I do hate trying on. I was just making-believe."
"Well, you make-believe entirely too much. That may be one reason you are so stringy and peaked. If you would only stop moping for a while, you might put some flesh on your bones. Have you had your glass of milk after lunch?"
Jenny Blair nodded. "Joseph Crocker gave me a currant bun to eat with it. I was out there when the carpenters stopped to rest, and Aunt Isabella brought them some coffee."
Mrs. Archbald glanced quickly at Etta and then looked away again. "They must have almost finished that work on the stable," she said slowly.
"Oh, they have, Mamma, but I'll be so sorry. I like old Mr. Crocker and Joseph better than—than anybody."
"Well, run away now, and finish your chapter before you go out to skate."
Slipping away quickly, Jenny Blair ran back through the folding doors and sank down on the rug by the French window. Hopefully, she opened her book at the place where Jo and Amy very nearly, but not quite, make a scene. Dejectedly, since nothing happened, she shut the book again and turned her eyes to the garden. An inner stillness pervaded her, and through this stillness, she became aware presently of the faint stirring, of the slow pulse of time—or was it eternity? But when did time end and eternity begin? Nobody knew, not even her grandfather. She had asked him, "When is time?" and he had answered, "Now." Then she had asked, "When is eternity?" and he had answered, "For ever." He didn't know, he said, what time was like, but she knew—she had always known. She had only to shut her eyes very tight and repeat the word, and she saw that time was flat and round and yellow, but eternity was long and pale and narrow and shaped exactly like a pod of green peas. But when she tried to make her grandfather understand, he laughed and told her not to let her fancy run away or she would never be able to catch it again. "They are like that, Grandfather. I see them," she had insisted; and her mother, who was always repeating herself, had said tartly, "Don't be silly, Jenny Blair. You see entirely too much."
About her the old house stirred and murmured and creaked with a life of its own; and beyond the house there was the world in which factories boomed, steam whistles blew, bad smells sprang up on the wind, and the new red touring cars buzzed through the streets. In the library voices flowed on and stopped and flowed on again, like a brook over pebbles. Beyond the French window, the blows of a hammer rang out, clear as a bell, from the stable where old Mr. Crocker and his son Joseph were repairing the roof. Across the hall, in the back drawing-room, Aunt Isabella was revenging herself on the piano for her broken engagement. In the midst of a vehement passage, she would break off in anguish, pause, with suspended hands, while the piano waited and shivered, and crash down into a discord. Whenever the torrent of false notes splintered about Jenny Blair's ears, she would cower down into the past, down into another room, with blue water and yellow ships on the wall, down into another age when she was having supper while her mother played to her in the firelight.
Like a soap-bubble blown from the bowl of a pipe, the scene wavered for an instant, and then floated outward and upward on Aunt Isabella's wild music. Blue water and yellow ships; the rusty glimmer of firelight; the fresh taste of bread and milk in her mouth; the sound of her mother's playing, which rippled on and on until it was shattered at last by a scream and the steady tramp, tramp, tramp, of feet on the staircase,--all these memories hung, imprisoned and alive, in that globe of air, while Aunt Isabella's discord trembled and moaned and sank, dying, far away in the stillness.
"Oh, Isabella, how can you?" Aunt Etta wailed. "You are spoiling the piano."
A stool was pushed back on a velvet carpet; there was the sound of irregular footsteps in the hall; and Isabella appeared, dark, scornful, with a wine-red colour burning in her cheeks and lips. "I don't care," she answered defiantly. "I want to spoil something."
"Not the piano," Mrs. Archbald implored. "And before Jenny Blair too."
Jenny Blair did not mind, as she hastened to assure her mother, but, without a pause, Aunt Isabella had flown through the French window, and down into the garden where the Crockers were working. In her beauty and anger she was magnificent. Nothing, not even the royal air with which Mrs. Birdsong swept up the aisle in church and sank rustling on her knees, had ever made such delicious thrills flicker up and down Jenny Blair's spine. It might not be conduct, she told herself, but it was splendid. With her genuine gift for imitation, she decided that she would try her best to have a broken engagement, when she grew up, and to be passionate and defiant while she struck false notes on the piano.
"There are times," remarked Etta, who appeared to invite disaster, "when I almost think she is out of her head."
"Be careful." Mrs. Archbald was pursing her lips. "Jenny Blair understands more than you think. But a shock like that," she added, with commiseration, "is enough to unbalance any woman. And, after all, Isabella was not really to blame."
"Not really," Etta assented. "Not for the accident to the horse anyway. But you must admit, Cora," she added primly, "that Thomas Lunsford had reason on his side when he insisted that an engaged girl ought not to go out in a buggy with another young man. I can never understand how Isabella could be so deeply in love with Thomas, and yet carry on her flirtation with Robert Cantrell."
"She is high-spirited," Mrs. Archbald replied in a subdued tone, "but nobody will ever make me believe she has any harm in her. Of course, I can't help feeling that there is some excuse for the way Thomas acted, though, I must confess, I did not expect him to take Isabella at her word when she offered to release him. If I'd dreamed he could behave that way, I should have advised her just to go to bed and stay there until the scandal blew over. That is what Amy Cross did, and everything turned out right in the end."
"I begged her to go to bed," Etta rejoined, "but you can't do anything with a headstrong girl like Isabella. 'You may be as innocent as a babe,' I reminded her, 'but you must acknowledge that staying out in the woods until daybreak did not look well.' After all, you can't expect men not to judge by appearances."