The Trumpeter Swan | Page 8

and
she adored the Judge. She spent two months of every year with him in
his square brick house in Albemarle surrounded by unprofitable acres.
The remaining two months of her vacation were given to her mother's
father, Admiral Meredith, whose fortune had come down to him from
whale-hunting ancestors. The Admiral lived also in a square brick
house, but it had no acres, for it was on the Main Street of Nantucket
town, with a Captain's walk on top, and a spiral staircase piercing its
middle.
The other eight months of the year Becky had spent at school in an old
convent in Georgetown. She was a Protestant and a Presbyterian; the

Nantucket grandfather was a Unitarian of Quaker stock, Judge
Bannister was High Church, and it was his wife's Presbyterianism
which had been handed down to Becky. Religion had therefore nothing
to do with her residence at the school. A great many of the Bannister
girls had been educated at convents, and when a Bannister had done a
thing once it was apt to be done again.
Becky was nineteen, and her school days were just over. She knew
nothing of men, she knew nothing indeed of life. The world was to her
an open sea, to sail its trackless wastes she had only a cockle-shell of
dreams.
"If anybody," said Judge Bannister, on the first day of the Horse Show,
"thinks I am going to eat dabs of things at the club when I can have
Mandy to cook for me, they think wrong."
He gave orders, therefore, which belonged to more opulent days, when
his father's estate had swarmed with blacks. There was now in the
Judge's household only Mandy, the cook, and Calvin, her husband.
Mandy sat up half the night to bake a cake, and Calvin killed chickens
at dawn, and dressed them, and pounded the dough for biscuits on a
marble slab, and helped his wife with the mayonnaise.
When at last the luncheon was packed there was coffee in the thermos
bottle. Prohibition was an assured fact, and the Judge would not break
the laws. The flowing glass must go into the discard with other
picturesque customs of the South. His own estate that had once been
sold by John Randolph to Thomas Jefferson for a bowl of arrack
punch----! Old times, old manners! The Judge drank his coffee with the
air of one who accepts a good thing regretfully. He stood staunchly by
the Administration. If the President had asked the sacrifice of his head,
he would have offered it on the platter of political allegiance.
So on this August morning, an aristocrat by inheritance, and a democrat
by assumption, he drove his bays proudly. Calvin, in a worn blue coat,
sat beside him with his arms folded.
Becky was on the back seat with Aunt Claudia. Aunt Claudia was a

widow and wore black. She was small and slight, and the black was
made smart by touches of white crepe. Aunt Claudia had not forgotten
that she had been a belle in Richmond. She was a stately little woman
with a firm conviction of the necessity of maintaining dignified
standards of living. She was in no sense a snob. But she held that
women of birth and breeding must preserve the fastidiousness of their
ideals, lest there be social chaos.
"There would be no ladies left in the world," she often told Becky, "if
we older women went at the modern pace."
Becky, in contrast to Aunt Claudia's smartness, showed up rather
ingloriously. She wore the stubbed russet shoes, a not too fresh cotton
frock of pale yellow, and a brown straw sailor.
"Yon might at least have stopped to change your shoes," Aunt Claudia
told her, as they left the house behind.
"I was out with Randy and the dogs. It was heavenly, Aunt Claudia."
"My dear, if a walk with Randy is heavenly, what will you call Heaven
when you get to it?"
They drove through the first gate, and Calvin climbed down to open it.
Beyond the gate the road descended gradually through an open pasture,
where sheep grazed on the hillside or lay at rest in the shade. The bells
of the leaders tinkled faintly, the ewes and the lambs were calling.
Beyond the big gate, the highroad was washed with the recent rains.
From the gate to the club was a matter of five miles, and the bays ate
up the distance easily.
The people on the porch of the Country Club were very gay and
gorgeous, so that Becky in her careless frock and shabby shoes would
have been a pitiful contrast if she had cared in the least what the people
on the porch thought of her. But she did not care. She nodded and