Princess | Page 7

and bred, and had for sire none other than Goldenrod himself. In answer to a coaxing whistle of invitation, she condescended to approach the window and accept sugar and caresses. Pocahontas patted the glossy head and neck of the beauty, chattering soft nonsense while the little heap of sugar she had placed on the window-sill vanished. Presently she laid an empty palm against the nose pushed in to her, and dealt it a gentle blow.
"That's all, Phyllis; positively all this morning. You would empty the sugar bowl if I'd let you. No, take your nose away; it's all gone; eleven great lumps have you had, and the feast of the gods is over."
But Phyllis would not be convinced; she pushed her nose up over the window ledge, and whinnied softly. As plainly as a horse can beg, she begged for more, but her mistress was obdurate. Placing both hands behind her, she drew back into the room, laughing.
"Not another lump," she called, "eleven are enough. Greedy Phyllis, to beg for more when you know I'm in earnest. Go away and play with the colts; you'll get no more to-day."
"You'll never make Phyllis believe that, my dear," remarked a tall, gray-haired lady, in a pretty muslin cap, who had entered unperceived.
"Oh, yes, mother. She understands quite well. See, she's moving off already. Phyllis knows I never break my word, and that persuasion is quite useless," replied Pocahontas, turning to give her mother the customary morning kiss, to place her chair before the waiter for her, and to tell her how becoming her new cap was. The Masons never neglected small courtesies to each other.
The branch of the Mason family still resident at the old homestead of Lanarth had dwindled to four living representatives--Mrs. Mason, who had not changed her name in espousing her cousin Temple Mason, of Lanarth, and her son Berkeley, and daughters Grace and Pocahontas. There had been another son, Temple, the younger, whose story formed one of those sad memories which are the grim after-taste of war. All three of the Masons had worn gray uniforms; the father had been killed in a charge at Malvern Hill, the elder son had lost his good right arm, and the younger had died in prison.
Of the two daughters, Grace had early fulfilled her destiny in true Virginian fashion, by marrying a distant connection of her family, a Mr. Royall Garnett, who had been a playmate of her brothers, and whose plantation lay in an adjoining county. With praiseworthy conservatism, Mrs. Garnett was duplicating the uneventful placidity of her parents' early years, content to rule her household wisely, to love and minister to her husband, and to devote her energies to the rearing of her children according to time-honored precedent. Pocahontas, the youngest of the family, was still unmarried, nay, more--still unengaged.
They had called her "Pocahontas" in obedience to the unwritten law of southern families, which decrees that an ancestor's sin of distinction shall be visited on generations of descendants, in the perpetuation of a name no matter what its hideousness. It seems a peculiarity of distinguished persons to possess names singularly devoid of beauty; therefore, among the burdens entailed by pride upon posterity, this is a grievous one. Some families, with the forest taint in their blood, at an early date took refuge in the softer, prettier "Matoaca;" but not so the Masons. It was their pride that they never shirked an obligation, or evaded a responsibility: they did not evade this one. Having accepted "Pocahontas" as the name by which their ancestress was best known, they never swerved from it; holding to it undaunted by its length and harshness, and unmoved by the discovery of historians that Pocahontas is no name at all, but simply a pet sobriquet applicable to all Indian girls alike, and whose signification is scarcely one of dignity. Historians might discover, disagree, wrangle and explain, but Pocahontas followed Pocahontas in the Mason family with the undeviating certainty of a fixed law.
To the present Pocahontas (the eighth in the line) it really seemed as though the thing should stop. She yielded to the family fiat her own case, because not having been consulted she had no option in the matter, but when Grace's little daughter was born she put in a plea for the child.
"Break the spell," she entreated, "and unborn generations will bless you. We Virginians will keep on in one groove until the crack of doom unless we are jerked out of it by the nape of the neck. Your heart ought to yearn over the child--mine does. It's a wicked sin to call a pretty baby by such a monstrous name."
Grace trampled on the protest: "Not name her Pocahontas? Why, of course I shall! If the name were twice as long and three