My Dear Cornelia/Book 5/Chapter 3
I had been having a curiously disquieting premonition—primarily the result of Oliver's indiscreet betrayal of intimate family matters—that Cornelia must have been gravely altered by the shocks and strains of the preceding seven months. She might seem almost a stranger, I thought; and as we plunged into the walnut grove and I caught a glimpse in the distance of the broad yellowish-white front of the villa, and knew that in a few seconds I should see her, I was conscious of a caved-in feeling, together with a tension of the nerves, such as Enoch Arden experienced on turning into his garden walk after a protracted absence. But so far as the eye could see, there was absolutely nothing in my premonition.
As we drew up before the door of Santo Espiritu, she waved to us from an open window and flew out to meet us, with her incredible, indescribable air of a young girl, and in a certain very simple blue gown, or the replica of a blue gown in which I had remarked last summer that she looked like a bluebird. Cornelia, as I had known her, had at least three principal moods: her winter mood, in which she was His Excellency's hostess, and the note was a quite mature graciousness; her summer mood, in which she was the children's mother, and the note was high ethical solicitude; and her country walking mood, in which she reverted to the appearance of seventeen, and the note approached caprice. When I saw the blue gown,—maybe it was a 'frock,'—I said to myself, "She is in her country walking-mood!"
She greeted me with bright gayety, untinged, so far as I could perceive, by suppressed feeling. Then she led me through a spacious hall and across a magnificent area of Navajo rugs into a pleasant dusky living-room, where I made the acquaintance of her sister Alice, an agreeably quiet woman with peaceful eyes, and the children's tutor, Mr. Blakewell, a young fellow with extraordinarily courteous manner and easy conversation, but with the ascetic pallor and the faded iris which one associates with "spirituality."
I shall not dwell on these minor figures in the scene. They interested me only as notes of the background in which Cornelia had developed a fourth mood, which was new to me.
As soon as the travelers had removed their dust, we all met for an early dinner. This was served in the suave air under the sky canopy of the patio or inner court—a delightful place, equipped with a fireplace against chilly evenings, and partly tiled and spread with Indian rugs; on three sides there was a narrow strip of lawn fringed with roses and sweet-smelling shrubs; wistaria and myrtle and some flaming-blossomed vine tapestried the walls and rambled over the roof and festooned the wide archway on the west, which opened into a walled garden, green beneath a spraying fountain—the removal of the fountain from the patio to the garden being one of the "American improvements."
"Father" Blakewell murmured a Latin grace upon the repast and, in the course of the meal, quoted us some of the rules of an English Benedictine monastery in which he had sojourned. This, I assume, was less to asperse us with the odor of sanctity than with the elements of Latin, which the young people maintained was an unnecessary burden. "Every man," said Oliver, "should know American; then, if he feels the need of a 'second language,' let him study English." But the children rather took the lead in the conversation announcing that, in honor of Saint Mary of the Sea, the family had adopted a fish diet, and that they had made a penitential hymn, which they at once proceeded to chant. It ran something like this:—
To-day's Monday,
Monday, barracuda,
Tuesday, mackerel,
Wednesday, flounder—
and so forth. The only other scraps of the table talk which I retain are connected with Cornelia's amused and amusing summary of a letter from Ethelwyn, who had visited her "Arabian saint" and reported that the leader of her party, an ex-Evangelical clergyman from Nebraska, who spoke only English and had never before been outside the United States, had, on being addressed by the saint in Arabic, understood perfectly everything that was said to him.
"My Lord!" Oliver exclaimed,—"I beg your pardon,—By Pollux! I wish I could get up my Vergil that way!" Dorothy said that she didn't understand why her mother and the rest of them made so much fun of Cousin Ethelwyn: it seemed to her, she said demurely, "very much like Pentecost." Father Blakewell explained the distinction, but I have forgotten just what it was. I infer that the children were cutting up a little on my account; for Oliver followed his sister with a grave-faced remonstrance against their "bigotry" toward the new mystical Oriental cults: they had something, he said, which people seemed to want; and, for his part, though he didn't care for the style of their prophets, he thought there was a lot of common-sense in some of the Bahaist notions about world peace and about bringing forward the common ethical basis of all the great first-class religions.
"But Oliver dear," said Cornelia, "you really wouldn't care for these Orientals, if you had to associate with them. They are so—well, I suppose some of them may be clean. But for a really well-bred, intelligent woman, like Ethelwyn, to go trailing around the world after an ignorant barefooted Arabian peasant seems to me to be almost disgusting—it's so—so eccentric."
"I suppose," replied her son, "that well-bred Romans of the first century felt very much as you do when Saint Paul, the humpbacked tailor of Tarsus, tried to introduce his Levantine fanaticisms into the Forum."
"Oliver! That, you know, was very different," said Cornelia. "Saint Paul was in the central religious tradition of the world: what Newman calls the 'classical' religion, the formative power in what he calls our 'classical' Western civilization. It means so much to be central and not eccentric."
"Was Saint Paul 'central' when he appeared in Rome?" asked the incorrigible youth.
"You answer him, Mr. Blakewell," said Cornelia.
"I think," said the young man quietly and seriously, "that Saint Paul was central wherever he appeared."
"I see," said Oliver.
At the same instant he and Dorothy exchanged winks; and all this arguing abruptly ceased. Then we strolled into the garden, where I was urged to light my cigar. We examined the water lilies under the fountain, and the various exotic plants which Ethelwyn's gardeners had persuaded to perfume the air. Cornelia put a sprig of heliotrope in my buttonhole, smilingly quoting a line of The Winter's Tale about flowers for my "time of day." Presently the children, with Father Blakewell and their Aunt Alice, returned to the court, where the mah jongg outfit had been set out in place of the dinner-table and a little fire of cedar wood had been lighted, more for its social fragrance than from any need of it. Soon we heard a pleasant chatter of "seasons" and "green dragons" and "characters."
It was a pleasant picture, as we looked in on it through the archway. We stood there together for a moment, her shoulder just brushing my sleeve, and we seemed both to be studying the scene, like—I sentimentalized it long afterward—like a pair of happy parents fondly watching their children at play. We seemed both to be thinking of the same thing; but I know that we were not; for I myself was thinking what a wonderful chatelaine Cornelia was, and what elaborate properties she really required for the adequate staging of her part in life, and what an unutterable fool any poor professor would be who should think that, if he picked up that little exquisite body by my side, he could carry off Cornelia, and make her his own. What I loved in her, I said to myself in a kind of bittersweet paroxysm of realization, was paradoxically not in her; it was the charming world which she had the gift of creating around her; and it would require a caravan of elephants to provide her with suitable accessories for the lodging of a single night.
"And now," said Cornelia, recalling me from my swift revery, "if you don't mind walking so soon after dinner, I'm going to take you down to the sea—for the sunset." She glanced at me sidewise and upward from gray eyes which deliciously feigned serious question about the words which her lips were framing: "Do you mind?"