Orren sneaked down to the dining-room and gazed with awe at the wonderfully picturesque table; boylike, he began to seek what he might devour. There was nothing good to eat on the table yet, nothing on the sideboard. He pulled open a door in the sideboard, and found far back a cut-glass dish full of candies.
“Oo-oo!” he exclaimed. “Candy mints! They put ’em way back here to hide ’em from me!” and he filled his pockets.
Then he smuggled Little Bit up-stairs to his room to keep him company, and showed him the candy mints.
“Dat looks good to me,” the little negro said.
“I bet it’ll make our mouths run water to eat ’em. When eatin’ time comes, us is gwine expe’unce joy.”
“We’ll lay ’em on this table till everybody goes to eating down-stairs,” Org said.
There were some Tickfall notables at that dinner.
There was Dr. Sentelle, clergyman, a hang-over from Civil War times, an unreconstructed rebel, a cripple since Antietam, whose voice was music, whose speech was eloquence, and every word a caress; whose face was beautiful, written all over with the literature of experience. There was John Flournoy, who had served forty years as sheriff of the Parish, a man with the physical frame of an ox, the strength of Samson, a mouth like a bear trap, and the gentle heart of a woman—the little children followed him on the streets. There was Judge Haddan, a pale, sickly man with a weak voice, trembling hands, and the stooped shoulders of the student; but his head was massive and Websterian, his eyes glowed like the eyes of some jungle beast, and no man within the borders of the State commanded more respect as a lawyer and a jurist. There was Colonel Gaitskill, the host, serene, powerful, with his snow-white beard and hair, his face glowing like an alabaster vase with a lamp in it, such a man as one beholds once in a lifetime and remembers forever. And around these a bevy of women and girls who had known these men since their babyhood.
And there was the girl of the evening, Miss Virginia Harwick Gaitskill, descendant of a long line of beautiful women and handsome men, her skin like the faint iridescence of pearls, her eyes like cornflower sapphires, her hair like cobweb, thick and wavy, colored like the heart of a ripe chestnut burr, her whole face like pearl and pomegranate and peachbloom, with the amber nimbus above it always from that soft brown hair, her laughter light and happy like a Sicilian shepherd’s reed, and her heart like oil on salt sea-water—all the beauties of the world moving, circling, advancing, retreating, but smoothing out all ruffled surfaces and stilling the storm!