“How many Lorburn places are there round here?”
“They owned pretty near the whole place before the Revolution. Now there’s only these two houses left.”
“I suppose they had a big real estate boom, and got rid of everything?”
Upton chuckled incredulously in the dusk. “I don’t believe there’s ever been much boom of any kind about the Lorburns. They just got poorer and poorer and died off, I guess.”
Vance was genuinely puzzled. “Well, I don’t see why they couldn’t have worked up a boom and unloaded the stuff on somebody,” he murmured. Then he remembered Harrison Delaney’s incapacity in the same line, and his grandmother’s caustic comments on old families that have run to seed. He was glad that no aristocratic blood clogged his own lively circulation, and that, anyhow, there were no old families in a go-ahead place like Euphoria.
Upton got up and stretched his thin arms above his head. “Well, I’m going to get a move on toward bed. It was about 150 in that fernhouse this afternoon.” He groped his way between them, and went into the hall, banging the screen door after him in the instinctive defence against mosquitoes. From where Vance lay in the hammock he could see Upton put the chain across the front door, and bolt it.
Suddenly, close to him in the darkness, he heard Laura Lou say: “You’ve had that old lilac in your buttonhole all day. It smells all faded.” She bent above him and snatched it out of his coat. Instinctively he put up his hand to prevent her; his poem had made the withered blossom sacred. “Oh, don’t—” But his hand, instead of the lilac, caught her soft fingers. They quivered, frightened yet entreating, and the warmth of her touch rushed through him, tempting, persuading; but she was no more than a little girl, awkward and ignorant, and he was under her mother’s roof. Besides, if it had not been for the heat and the darkness, and his mood of sensuous lassitude, he did not believe that even the touch of her soft skin would have roused him; the raw flapper had no charm for his unripe senses.
“Here—give it back! Listen to me, Laura Lou!” But she sprang out of reach with one of her maddening giggles, and he let her hand go, and the lilac with it, indifferently.
Upton came clumping back to the porch. “Going up to bed too?” he asked. Vance assented and tumbled out of the hammock. “All right. Then I’ll put the lamp out. Come along, Laura Lou.” To Vance he added: “Mother left a candle on the upper landing,” and he reached up to the swinging lamp, pulled it down, and filled the passage with the stench of its extinction. Laura Lou had already slipped up ahead of them to her mother’s room.
Book II
VI
“It’s here,” Upton said.
Vance had jokingly offered to accompany Upton to the Willows, and help him to dust Miss Lorburn’s rooms, so that Laura Lou should not miss the movies. But Laura Lou, flushing crimson, replied in a frightened whisper that it wasn’t true, that she wanted to go to the Willows, that she always did go when her mother couldn’t—so Vance hired a bicycle at a nearby garage, and the three cousins set out.
Upton stopped before a padlocked gate overhung with trees. A deep green lane led up to it, so rutty and grass-grown that the cousins, jumping from their bicycles, climbed it on foot. Upton pulled out a key, unlocked the padlock of the gate, and led the way in, followed by Vance and Laura Lou. The house, which was painted a dark brown, stood at the end of a short grass-grown drive, its front so veiled in the showering gold-green foliage of two ancient weeping willows that Vance could only catch, here and there, a hint of a steep roof, a jutting balcony, an aspiring turret. The façade, thus seen in trembling glimpses, as if it were as fluid as the trees, suggested vastness, fantasy, and secrecy. Green slopes of unmown grass, and heavy shrubberies of unpruned syringa and lilac, surrounded it; and beyond the view was closed in on all sides by trees and more trees. “An old house—this is the way an old house looks!” Vance thought.
The three walked up the drive, their steps muffled by the long grass and clover which had pushed up through the gravel. When the front of the house was before them, disengaged from the fluctuating veil of willows, Vance saw that it was smaller than he had expected; but the air of fantasy and mystery remained. Everything about the front was irregular, but with an irregularity unfamiliar to him. The shuttered windows were very tall and narrow, and narrow too the balconies, which projected at odd angles, supported by ornate wooden brackets. One corner of the house rose into a tower with a high shingled roof, and arched windows which seemed to simulate the openings in a belfry. A sort of sloping roof over the front door also rested on elaborately ornamented brackets, and on each side of the steps was a large urn of fluted iron painted to imitate stone, in which some half-dead geraniums languished.
While Upton unlocked the front door and went in with his sister, Vance wandered around to the other side of the building. Here a still stranger spectacle awaited him. An arcaded verandah ran across this front, and all about it, and reaching out above it from bracket to bracket, from balcony to balcony, a wistaria with huge distorted branches like rheumatic arms lifted itself to the eaves, festooning, as it mounted, every projecting point with long lilac fringes—as if, Vance thought, a flock of very old monkeys had been ordered to climb up and decorate the house front in celebration of some august arrival. He had never seen so prodigal a flowering, or a plant so crippled and ancient; and for a while it took his
