messages.” 98 Miss Pinckney was right. For years she had fought the telephone and kept it out, making Richard Pinckney’s life a tissue of small inconveniences, and suffering this epitaph on her sanity to be written by all sorts of inferior people, “Plumb crazy.” She led the way from the breakfast-room and passed into the hall. The spirit of Vernons inhabited the hall. One might have fancied it as a stout and prosperous gentleman attired in a blue coat with brass buttons, shorts, and wearing a bunch of seals at his fob. Oak, brought from England, formed the panelling, and a great old grandfather’s clock, with the maker’s name and address, “Whewel. Coggershall,” blazoned on its brass face, told the time, just as it had told the time when the Regent was ruling at St. James’s in those days which seem so spacious, yet so trivial in their pomp and vanity. Sitting alone here of an afternoon with the sun pointing fingers through the high leaded windows, Whewel of Coggershall took you under his spell, the spell of old ghosts of long forgotten afternoons, 99 spacious afternoons filled with the cawing of rooks and the drone of bees. English afternoons of the good old time when the dust of the post chaise was the only mark of hurry across miles of meadow land and cowslip weather. And then as you sat held by the sound of the slow-slipping seconds, maybe, from some door leading to the servants’ quarters suddenly left open a voice would come, the voice of some darky singing whilst at work. 99 A snatch of the South mixing with your dream of England and the past, and making of the whole a charm beyond words. That is Charleston. Set against the panelling and almost covering it in parts were prints, wood-cuts, engravings, portraits in black and white. Here was a silhouette of Colonel Vernon, the founder of the house, and another of his wife. Here was an early portrait of Jeff Davis, hollow-cheeked and goatee-bearded, and here was Mayflower, the property of Colonel Seth Mascarene, the fastest trotting horse in Virginia, worshipped by her owner whose portrait hung alongside. Phyl glanced at these pictures as she followed Miss Pinckney, who opened doors shewing the dining-room, a room rather heavily furnished, hung with portraits of long-faced gentlemen
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