House Divided by Ben Ames Williams Page A

it needed painting, though the roof sometimes leaked, though it was shabby here and there, was a continuing wonder. The lofty arched hall with fluted pilasters, the marble mantels, the carved panelling, the wide curving stairs, the high-ceiled rooms with wall paper brought from England a hundred years before, all these were beyond superlatives. Side halls connected the central part of the house with what had once been separate wings, so that the whole structure was now full two hundred feet from one end to the other. The drawing room, its windows hung with bright damask, caught the sun all day long; and old portraits, richly shadowed, hung between the windows that reached from the floor almost to the ceiling.
    Mrs. Currain was in these days as happy as Enid. “You musn’t let me wear you out with so many questions, Mama,” Enid warned her; and the little old lady said smilingly:
    â€œWhy, my dear, there’s nothing I like so much as having you love this house. I do too, you know.” She knew all there was to know about the old mansion. “Mr. Bexley built it, more than a hundred years ago. My husband’s father bought it from Mrs. Bexley. She was Martha Foxhall, and my mother was a Foxhall, so we were distant cousins, so I’ve always felt at home here since the day Mr. Currain carried me up the steps and across the threshold.” She knew the architectural features by their proper names and spoke of the hipped roof
with its dormers, of pilasters and pediments and finials, and of flutings and entablatures, of modillions and rosettes and soffits, of balusters and balustrades, till Enid was lost in amused bewilderment.
    â€œI declare, Mama, you’ve got me so mixed up I don’t know windows from doors,” she confessed. “I can hardly remember which are mantels and which are panels.”
    Mrs. Currain smiled at her pretty confusion. “The mantels are marble,” she pointed out. “Carved in England before they were brought here. And the panels are heart-pine like the floors, cut and sawed and shaped here on the place.”
    â€œThe floors are hardly worn at all,” Enid commented. “Pine must be like iron.”
    Mrs. Currain nodded. “Yes, but of course it would burn like gunpowder. We’re always afraid of fire. If one ever started, the whole house would go. That’s why we never take lamps upstairs at all. Candles are so much safer.”
    Enid liked best of all the drawing room, so full of warm lights and rich shadows. She and Mrs. Currain received callers there, Mrs. Currain presiding at the tea table where silver and glass and eggshell china gleamed and shone; and after the stately ladies had gone she told Enid all about them, and her own words forever led her into memories. “My husband brought me home here fifty-two years ago, you know,” she might say, with perhaps a smiling apology for her garrulity. “I was nineteen—he was much older, of course—so I’ve lived almost a lifetime here. But even when I first came the people loved to talk about the days before the Revolution, when Williamsburg was a great town.” And she would drift into interminable tales, of old Mrs. Wills and other famous gossips, and of Mrs. Davis whose passion was collecting bonnets through long bedridden years, and how Decimus Ultimus Barziza came by that strange name, and of the Reverend Scervant Jones who would rather write a poem than a sermon, and of a dozen more.
    Enid, though she might protest to Trav that his mother would talk her to death, yet enjoyed these hours with the older woman; and she took a sensuous delight in the big house and its noble setting. The service buildings were on the side away from the river, receding among concealing oaks. To right and left of the lawns toward the
river, the gardens were enclosed in a hedge of tree box, and enriched by lush masses of bush box and with each bed framed in its own dwarf border. Now in