A Woman Named Smith | Page 4

the judge
had a "misery in the laigs" which confined him to his room, and that he
advised us to go to the hotel for a while.

We couldn't, for wasn't our own house waiting for us? A minute later
we had bundled into the ancient hack and were bumping and splashing
through unpaved streets, getting wet, gray glimpses of old houses in old
gardens, and every now and then a pink crape-myrtle blushing in the
pouring rain. Hyndsville was, it seemed, one of those sprawling,
easy-going old Carolina towns that liked plenty of elbow-room and
wasn't particular about architectural order. Hynds House itself was on
the extreme edge of things.
The hack presently stopped before a high iron gate in a waist-high brick
wall with a spiked iron railing on top of it, the whole overrun with
weeds and creepers. Of Hynds House itself one couldn't see anything
but a stack of chimneys above a forest of trees.
The gate creaked and groaned on its rusty hinges; then we were
walking up a weedy, rain-soaked path where untrimmed branches
slapped viciously at our faces, and tough brambles, like snares and gins,
tried to catch our feet. On each side was a jungle. Of a sudden the path
turned, widened into a fairly cleared space; and Hynds House was
before us.
We had expected a fair-sized dwelling-house in its garden. And there
confronted us, glooming under the gray and threatening sky that
seemed the only proper and fitting canopy for it, what looked like a pile
reared in medieval Europe rather than a home in America. Its stained
brick walls, partly covered with ivy and lichens; its smokeless
chimneys; its barred doors; its many shuttered windows, like blind
eyes--all appeared deliberately to thrust aside human habitancy.
_A residence for woman, child, and man, A dwelling-place,--and yet no
habitation; A House,--but under some prodigious ban Of
Excommunication._
Yet there was nothing ruinous about it, for the Hyndses had sought to
build it as the old Egyptians sought to build their temples--to last
forever, to defy time and decay. It was not only meant to be a place for
Hyndses to be born and live and die in: it was a monument to Family
Pride, a brick-and-granite symbol of place and power.

The walls were of an immense thickness, the corners further
strengthened with great blocks of granite. The house had but two
stories, with an attic under its sloping roofs, but it gave an effect of
height as well as of solidity. Behind it was another brick building, the
lower part of which had been used for stables and carriage house, and
the upper portion as quarters for the house slaves, in the old days.
Another smaller building, slate-roofed and ivy covered, was the
spring-house, with a clear, cold little spring still bubbling away as
merrily in its granite basin, as if all the Hyndses were not dead and
gone. And there was a deep well, protected by a round stone wall, with
a cupola-like roof supported by four slender pillars. And everything
was dank and weedy and splotched with mildew and with mold.
_O'er all there hung a shadow and a fear A sense of mystery the spirit
daunted And said, as plain as whisper in the ear, The place is
Haunted!_
When we opened the great front door, above which was the fan-light of
Alicia's hope, just as the round front porch had the big pillars, a damp
and moldy air met us. The house had not been opened since
Sophronisba's funeral, and everything--stairs, settles, tables, cabinets,
pictures, the chairs backed inhospitably against the wall as if to prevent
anybody from sitting in them--was covered with a shrouding pall of
dust.
The hall was cross-shaped, the side passage running between the back
drawing-room and library on one side, and the dining-room and two
locked rooms on the other. It was a nice place, that side passage, with a
fireplace and settles; and beautiful windows opening upon the tangled
garden. All the down-stairs walls were paneled: precious woods were
not so hard to come by when Hynds House was built. It was lovely, of
course, but depressingly dark.
We got one of the big windows open, and let some stale damp air out
and some fresh damp air in. Then, having despatched our hackman for
certain necessities, Alicia and I turned and stared at each other, another
Alicia and Sophy staring back at us from a dim and dusty mirror
opposite. If, at that moment, I could have heard the familiar buzzer at

my elbow! If I could have heard the good everyday New York "Miss
Smith, attend to this, please"! God wot, if I had not literally burned my
bridges behind me--Oh, oh, I had!
"The garden around this house,"--Alicia spoke in