Lady Baltimore

LADY BALTIMORE

By Owen Wister

To

S. Weir Mitchell

With the Affection and Memories of All My Life

To the Reader

You know the great text in Burns, I am sure, where he wishes he could

see himself as others see him. Well, here lies the hitch in many a work

of art: if its maker--poet, painter, or novelist--could but have become

its audience too, for a single day, before he launched it irrevocably

upon the uncertain ocean of publicity, how much better his boat would

often sail! How many little touches to the rigging he would give, how

many little drops of oil to the engines here and there, the need of

which he had never suspected, but for that trial trip! That’s where the

ship-builders and dramatists have the advantage over us others: they can

dock their productions and tinker at them. Even to the musician comes

this useful chance, and Schumann can reform the proclamation which opens

his B-flat Symphony.

Still, to publish a story in weekly numbers previously to its appearance

as a book does sometimes give to the watchful author an opportunity to

learn, before it is too late, where he has failed in clearness; and it

brings him also, through the mails, some few questions that are pleasant

and proper to answer when his story sets forth united upon its journey

of adventure among gentle readers.

How came my hero by his name?

If you will open a book more valuable than any I dare hope to write, and

more entertaining too, The Life of Paul Jones, by Mr. Buell, you will

find the real ancestor of this imaginary boy, and fall in love with John

Mayrant the First, as did his immortal captain of the Bon Homme Richard.

He came from South Carolina; and believing his seed and name were

perished there to-day, I gave him a descendant. I have learned that the

name, until recently, was in existence; I trust it will not seem taken

in vain in these pages.

Whence came such a person as Augustus?

Our happier cities produce many Augustuses, and may they long continue

to do so! If Augustus displeases any one, so much the worse for that

one, not for Augustus. To be sure, he doesn’t admire over heartily

the parvenus of steel or oil, whose too sudden money takes them to the

divorce court; he calls them the ‘yellow rich’; do you object to that?

Nor does he think that those Americans who prefer their pockets to their

patriotism, are good citizens. He says of such people that ‘eternal

vigilance cannot watch liberty and the ticker at the same time.’ Do you

object to that? Why, the young man would be perfect, did he but attend

his primaries and vote more regularly,--and who wants a perfect young

man?

What would John Mayrant have done if Hortense had not challenged him as

she did?

I have never known, and I fear we might have had a tragedy.

Would the old ladies really have spoken to Augustus about the love

difficulties of John Mayrant?

I must plead guilty. The old ladies of Kings Port, like American

gentlefolk everywhere, keep family matters sacredly inside the family

circle. But you see, had they not told Augustus, how in the world could

I have told--however, I plead guilty.

Certain passages have been interpreted most surprisingly to signify a

feeling against the colored race, that is by no means mine. My only wish

regarding these people, to whom we owe an immeasurable responsibility,

is to see the best that is in them prevail. Discord over this seems on

the wane, and sane views gaining. The issue sits on all our shoulders,

but local variations call for a sliding scale of policy. So admirably

dispassionate a novel as The Elder Brother, by Mr. Jervey, forwards the

understanding of Northerners unfamiliar with the South, and also that

friendliness between the two places, which is retarded chiefly by

tactless newspapers.

Ah, tact should have been one of the cardinal virtues; and if I didn’t

possess a spice of it myself, I should here thank by name certain two

members of the St. Michael family of Kings Port for their patience with

this comedy, before ever it saw the light. Tact bids us away from many

pleasures; but it can never efface the memory of kindness.

LADY BALTIMORE

I: A Word about My Aunt

Like Adam, our first conspicuous ancestor, I must begin, and lay the

blame upon a woman; I am glad to recognize that I differ from the father

of my sex in no important particular, being as manlike as most of his

sons. Therefore it is the woman, my Aunt Carola, who must bear the whole

reproach of the folly which I shall forthwith confess to you, since she

it was who put it into my head; and, as it was only to make Eve happy

that her husband ever consented to eat the disastrous apple, so I, save

to please my relative, had never aspired to become a Selected Salic

Scion. I rejoice now that I did so, that I yielded to her temptation.

Ours is a wide country, and most of us know but our own corner of it,

while, thanks to my Aunt, I have been able to add another corner. This,

among many other enlightenments of navel and education, do I owe her;

she stands on the threshold of all that is to come; therefore I were

lacking in deference did I pass her and her Scions by without due

mention,--employing no English but such as fits a theme so stately.

Although she never left the threshold, nor went to Kings Port with me,

nor saw the boy, or the girl, or any part of what befell them, she knew

quite well who the boy was. When I wrote her about him, she remembered

one of his grandmothers whom she had visited during her own girlhood,

long before the war, both in Kings Port and at the family plantation;

and this old memory led her to express a kindly interest in him. How odd

and far away that interest seems, now that it has been turned to cold

displeasure!

Some other day, perhaps, I may try to tell you much more than I can tell

you here about Aunt Carola and her Colonial Society--that apple which

Eve, in the form of my Aunt, held out to me. Never had I expected to

feel rise in me the appetite for this particular fruit, though I had

known such hunger to exist in some of my neighbors. Once a worthy dame

of my town, at whose dinner-table young men and maidens of fashion sit

constantly, asked me with much sentiment if I was aware that she was

descended from Boadicea. Why had she never (I asked her) revealed this

to me before? And upon her informing me that she had learned it

only that very day, I exclaimed that it was a great distance to have

descended so suddenly. To this, after a look at me, she assented, adding

that she had the good news from the office of The American Almanach de

Gotha, Union Square, New York; and she recommended that publication

to me. There was but a slight fee to pay, a matter of fifty dollars or

upwards, and for this trifling sum you were furnished with your rightful

coat-of-arms and with papers clearly tracing your family to the Druids,

the Vestal Virgins, and all the best people in the world. Therefore I

felicitated the Boadicean lady upon the illustrious progenitrix

with whom the Almanach de Gotha had provided her for so small a

consideration, and observed that for myself I supposed I should continue

to rest content with the thought that in our enlightened Republic every

American was himself a sovereign. But that, said the lady, after giving

me another look, is so different from Boadicea! And to this I perfectly

agreed. Later I had the pleasure to hear in a roundabout way that she

had pronounced me one of the most agreeable young men in society, though

sophisticated. I have not cherished this against her; my gift of humor

puzzles many who can see only my refinement and my scrupulous attention

to dress.

Yes, indeed, I counted myself proof against all Boadiceas. But you have

noticed--have you not?--how, whenever a few people gather together and

style themselves something, and choose a president, and eight or nine

vice-presidents, and a secretary and a treasurer, and a committee on

elections, and then let it be known that almost nobody else is qualified

to belong to it, that there springs up immediately in hundreds and

thousands of breasts a fiery craving to get into that body? You may

try this experiment in science, law, medicine, art, letters, society,

farming, I care not what, but you will set the same craving afire in

doctors, academicians, and dog breeders all over the earth. Thus, when

my Aunt--the president, herself, mind you!--said to me one day that

she thought, if I proved my qualifications, my name might be favorably

considered by the Selected Salic Scions--I say no more; I blush, though

you cannot see me; when I am tempted, I seem to be human, after all.

At first, to be sure, I met Aunt Carola’s suggestion in the way that I

am too ready to meet many of her remarks; for you must know she once,

with sincere simplicity and good-will, told my Uncle Andrew (her

husband; she is only my Aunt by marriage) that she had married beneath

her; and she seemed unprepared for his reception of this candid

statement: Uncle Andrew was unaffectedly merry over it. Ever since then

all of us wait hopefully every day for what she may do or say next.

She is from old New York, oldest New York; the family manor is still

habitable, near Cold Spring; she was, in her youth, handsome, I am

assured by those whose word I have always trusted; her appearance even

to-day causes people to turn and look; she is not tall in feet and

inches--I have to stoop considerably when she commands from me the

familiarity of a kiss; but in the quality which we call force, in moral

stature, she must be full eight feet high. When rebuking me, she can

pronounce a single word, my name, “Augustus!” in a tone that renders

further remark needless; and you should see her eye when she says of

certain newcomers in our society, “I don’t know them.” She can make

her curtsy as appalling as a natural law; she knows also how to “take

umbrage,” which is something that I never knew any one else to take

outside of a book; she is a highly pronounced Christian, holding all

Unitarians wicked and all Methodists vulgar; and once, when she was

talking (as she does frequently) about King James and the English

religion and the English Bible, and I reminded her that the Jews

wrote it, she said with displeasure that she made no doubt King James

had--“well, seen to it that all foreign matter was expunged”--I give you

her own words. Unless you have moved in our best American society (and

by this I do not at all mean the lower classes with dollars and no

grandfathers, who live in palaces at Newport, and look forward to

every-thing and back to nothing, but those Americans with grandfathers

and no dollars, who live in boarding-houses, and look forward to

nothing and back to everything)--unless you have known this haughty and

improving milieu, you have never seen anything like my Aunt Carola.

Of course, with Uncle Andrew’s money, she does not live in a

boarding-house; and I shall finish this brief attempt to place her

before you by adding that she can be very kind, very loyal, very

public-spirited, and that I am truly attached to her.

“Upon your mother’s side of the family,” she said, “of course.”

“Me!” I did not have to feign amazement.

My Aunt was silent. “Me descended from a king?”

My Aunt nodded with an indulgent stateliness. “There seems to be the

possibility of it.”

“Royal blood in my veins, Aunt?”

“I have said so, Augustus. Why make me repeat it?”

It was now, I fear, that I met Aunt Carola in that unfitting spirit,

that volatile mood, which, as I have said already, her remarks often

rouse in me.

“And from what sovereign may I hope that I--?”

“If you will consult a recent admirable compilation, entitled The

American Almanach de Gotha, you will find that Henry the Seventh--”

“Aunt, I am so much relieved! For I think that I might have hesitated

to trace it back had you said--well--Charles the Second, for example, or

Elizabeth.”

At this point I should have been wise to notice my Aunt’s eye; but I did

not, and I continued imprudently:--

“Though why hesitate? I have never heard that there was anybody present

to marry Adam and Eve, and so why should we all make such a to-do

about--”

“Augustus!”

She uttered my name in that quiet but prodigious tone to which I have

alluded above.

It was I who was now silent.

“Augustus, if you purpose trifling, you may leave the room.”

“Oh, Aunt, I beg your pardon. I never meant--”

“I cannot understand what impels you to adopt such a manner to me, when

I am trying to do something for you.”

I hastened to strengthen my apologies with a manner becoming the

possible descendant of a king toward a lady of distinction, and my Aunt

was pleased to pass over my recent lapse from respect. She now broached

her favorite topic, which I need scarcely tell you is genealogy,

beginning with her own.

“If your title to royal blood,” she said, “were as plain as mine

(through Admiral Bombo, you know), you would not need any careful

research.”

She told me a great deal of genealogy, which I spare you; it was not

one family tree, it was a forest of them. It gradually appeared that

a grandmother of my mother’s grandfather had been a Fanning, and there

were sundry kinds of Fannings, right ones and wrong ones; the point for

me was, what kind had mine been? No family record showed this. If it was

Fanning of the Bon Homme Richard variety, or Fanning of the Alamance,

then I was no king’s descendant.

“Worthy New England people, I understand,” said my Aunt with her nod of

indulgent stateliness, referring to the Bon Homme Richard species, “but

of entirely bourgeois extraction--Paul Jones himself, you know, was

a mere gardener’s son--while the Alamance Fanning was one of those

infamous regulators who opposed Governor Tryon. Not through any such

cattle could you be one of us,” said my Aunt.

But a dim, distant, hitherto uncharted Henry Tudor Fanning had fought

in some of the early Indian wars, and the last of his known blood was

reported to have fallen while fighting bravely at the battle of Cowpens.

In him my hope lay. Records of Tarleton, records of Marion’s men, these

were what I must search, and for these I had best go to Kings Port. If I

returned with Kinship proven, then I might be a Selected Salic Scion, a

chosen vessel, a royal seed, one in the most exalted circle of men

and women upon our coasts. The other qualifications were already mine:

ancestors colonial and bellicose upon land and sea--

“--besides having acquired,” my Aunt was so good as to say, “sufficient

personal presentability since your life in Paris, of which I had rather

not know too much, Augustus. It is a pity,” she repeated, “that you will

have so much research. With my family it was all so satisfactorily clear

through Kill-devil Bombo--Admiral Bombo’s spirited, reckless son.”

You will readily conceive that I did not venture to betray my ignorance

of these Bombos; I worked my eyebrows to express a silent and timeworn

familiarity.

“Go to Kings Port. You need a holiday, at any rate. And I,” my Aunt

handsomely finished, “will make the journey a present to you.”

This generosity made me at once, and sincerely, repentant for my

flippancy concerning Charles the Second and Elizabeth. And so, partly

from being tempted by this apple of Eve, and partly because recent

overwork had tired me, but chiefly for her sake, and not to thwart at

the outset her kindly-meant ambitions for me, I kissed the hand of my

Aunt Carola and set forth to Kings Port.

“Come back one of us,” was her parting benediction.

II: I Vary My Lunch

Thus it was that I came to sojourn in the most appealing, the most

lovely, the most wistful town in America; whose visible sadness and

distinction seem also to speak audibly, speak in the sound of the quiet

waves that ripple round her Southern front, speak in the church-bells

on Sunday morning, and breathe not only in the soft salt air, but in the

perfume of every gentle, old-fashioned rose that blooms behind the

high garden walls of falling mellow-tinted plaster: Kings Port the

retrospective, Kings Port the belated, who from her pensive porticoes

looks over her two rivers to the marshes and the trees beyond, the

live-oaks, veiled in gray moss, brooding with memories! Were she my

city, how I should love her!

But though my city she cannot be, the enchanting image of her is mine to

keep, to carry with me wheresoever I may go; for who, having seen her,

could forget her? Therefore I thank Aunt Carola for this gift, and for

what must always go with it in my mind, the quiet and strange romance

which I saw happen, and came finally to share in. Why it is that my Aunt

no longer wishes to know either the boy or the girl, or even to hear

their names mentioned, you shall learn at the end, when I have finished

with the wedding; for this happy story of love ends with a wedding,

and begins in the Woman’s Exchange, which the ladies of Kings Port have

established, and (I trust) lucratively conduct, in Royal Street.

Royal Street! There’s a relevance in this name, a fitness to my errand;

but that is pure accident.

The Woman’s Exchange happened to be there, a decorous resort for those

who became hungry, as I did, at the hour of noon each day. In my very

pleasant boarding-house, where, to be sure, there was one dreadful

boarder, a tall lady, whom I soon secretly called Juno--but let

unpleasant things wait--in the very pleasant house where I boarded (I

had left my hotel after one night) our breakfast was at eight, and our

dinner not until three: sacred meal hours in Kings Port, as inviolable,

I fancy, as the Declaration of Independence, but a gap quite beyond the

stretch of my Northern vitals. Therefore, at twelve, it was my habit to

leave my Fanning researches for a while, and lunch at the Exchange upon

chocolate and sandwiches most delicate in savor. As, one day, I was

luxuriously biting one of these, I heard his voice and what he was

saying. Both the voice and the interesting order he was giving caused

me, at my small table, in the dim back of the room, to stop and watch

him where he stood in the light at the counter to the right of the

entrance door. Young he was, very young, twenty-two or three at the

most, and as he stood, with hat in hand, speaking to the pretty girl

behind the counter, his head and side-face were of a romantic and

high-strung look. It was a cake that he desired made, a cake for a

wedding; and I directly found myself curious to know whose wedding. Even

a dull wedding interests me more than other dull events, because it

can arouse so much surmise and so much prophecy; but in this wedding

I instantly, because of his strange and winning embarrassment, became

quite absorbed. How came it he was ordering the cake for it? Blushing

like the boy that he was entirely, he spoke in a most engaging voice:

“No, not charged; and as you don’t know me, I had better pay for it

now.”

Self-possession in his speech he almost had; but the blood in his cheeks

and forehead was beyond his control.

A reply came from behind the counter: “We don’t expect payment until

delivery.”

“But--a--but on that morning I shall be rather particularly engaged.”

His tones sank almost away on these words.

“We should prefer to wait, then. You will leave your address. In

half-pound boxes, I suppose?”

“Boxes? Oh, yes--I hadn’t thought--no--just a big, round one. Like this,

you know!” His arms embraced a circular space of air. “With plenty of

icing.”

I do not think that there was any smile on the other side of the

counter; there was, at any rate, no hint of one in the voice. “And how

many pounds?”

He was again staggered. “Why--a--I never ordered one before. I want

plenty--and the very best, the very best. Each person would eat a pound,

wouldn’t they? Or would two be nearer? I think I had better leave it

all to you. About like this, you know.” Once more his arms embraced a

circular space of air.

Before this I had never heard the young lady behind the counter enter

into any conversation with a customer. She would talk at length about

all sorts of Kings Port affairs with the older ladies connected with the

Exchange, who were frequently to be found there; but with a customer,

never. She always took my orders, and my money, and served me, with a

silence and a propriety that have become, with ordinary shopkeepers, a

lost art. They talk to one indeed! But this slim girl was a lady, and

consequently did the right thing, marking and keeping a distance between

herself and the public. To-day, however, she evidently felt it her

official duty to guide the hapless young, man amid his errors. He now

appeared to be committing a grave one.

“Are you quite sure you want that?” the girl was asking.

“Lady Baltimore? Yes, that is what I want.”

“Because,” she began to explain, then hesitated, and looked at him.

Perhaps it was in his face; perhaps it was that she remembered at this

point the serious difference between the price of Lady Baltimore (by

my small bill-of-fare I was now made acquainted with its price) and the

cost of that rich article which convention has prescribed as the cake

for weddings; at any rate, swift, sudden delicacy of feeling prevented

her explaining any more to him, for she saw how it was: his means were

too humble for the approved kind of wedding cake! She was too young, too

unskilled yet in the world’s ways, to rise above her embarrassment; and

so she stood blushing at him behind the counter, while he stood blushing

at her in front of it.

At length he succeeded in speaking. “That’s all, I believe.

Good-morning.”

At his hastily departing back she, too, murmured: “Good-morning.”

Before I knew it I had screamed out loudly from my table: “But he hasn’t

told you the day he wants it for!”

Before she knew it she had flown to the door--my cry had set her going,

as if I had touched a spring--and there he was at the door himself,

rushing back. He, too, had remembered. It was almost a collision, and

nothing but their good Southern breeding, the way they took it, saved it

from being like a rowdy farce.

“I know,” he said simply and immediately. “I am sorry to be so careless.

It’s for the twenty-seventh.”

She was writing it down in the order-book. “Very well. That is Wednesday

of next week. You have given us more time than we need.” She put

complete, impersonal business into her tone; and this time he marched

off in good order, leaving peace in the Woman’s Exchange.

No, not peace; quiet, merely; the girl at the counter now proceeded to

grow indignant with me. We were alone together, we two; no young man,

or any other business, occupied her or protected me. But if you suppose

that she made war, or expressed rage by speaking, that is not it at

all. From her counter in front to my table at the back she made her

displeasure felt; she was inaudibly crushing; she did not do it even

with her eye, she managed it--well, with her neck, somehow, and by the

way she made her nose look in profile. Aunt Carola would have embraced

her--and I should have liked to do so myself. She could not stand the

idea of my having, after all these days of official reserve that she had

placed between us, startled her into that rush to the door annihilated

her dignity at a blow. So did I finish my sandwiches beneath her

invisible but eloquent fire. What affair of mine was the cake? And

what sort of impertinent, meddlesome person was I, shrieking out my

suggestions to people with whom I had no acquaintance? These were the

things that her nose and her neck said to me the whole length of the

Exchange. I had nothing but my own weakness to thank; it was my interest

in weddings that did it, made me forget my decorum, the public place,

myself, everything, and plunge in. And I became more and more delighted

over it as the girl continued to crush me. My day had been dull, my

researches had not brought me a whit nearer royal blood; I looked at

my little bill-of-fare, and then I stepped forward to the counter,

adventurous, but polite.

“I should like a slice, if you please, of Lady Baltimore,” I said with

extreme formality.

I thought she was going to burst; but after an interesting second she

replied, “Certainly,” in her fit Regular Exchange tone; only, I thought

it trembled a little.

I returned to the table and she brought me the cake, and I had my first

felicitous meeting with Lady Baltimore. Oh, my goodness! Did you ever

taste it? It’s all soft, and it’s in layers, and it has nuts--but I

can’t write any more about it; my mouth waters too much.

Delighted surprise caused me once more to speak aloud, and with my mouth

full. “But, dear me, this Is delicious!”

A choking ripple of laughter came from the counter. “It’s I who make

them,” said the girl. “I thank you for the unintentional compliment.”

Then she walked straight back to my table. “I can’t help it,” she said,

laughing still, and her delightful, insolent nose well up; “how can

I behave myself when a man goes on as you do?” A nice white curly dog

followed her, and she stroked his ears.

“Your behavior is very agreeable to me,” I remarked.

“You’ll allow me to say that you’re not invited to criticise it. I

was decidedly put out with you for making me ridiculous. But you have

admired my cake with such enthusiasm that you are forgiven. And--may I

hope that you are getting on famously with the battle of Cowpens?”

I stared. “I’m frankly very much astonished that you should know about

that!”

“Oh, you’re just known all about in Kings Port.”

I wish that our miserable alphabet could in some way render the soft

Southern accent which she gave to her words. But it cannot. I could

easily misspell, if I chose; but how, even then, could I, for instance,

make you hear her way of saying “about”? “Aboot” would magnify it; and

besides, I decline to make ugly to the eye her quite special English,

that was so charming to the ear.

“Kings Port just knows all about you,” she repeated with a sweet and

mocking laugh.

“Do you mind telling me how?”

She explained at once. “This place is death to all incognitos.”

The explanation, however, did not, on the instant, enlighten me. “This?

The Woman’s Exchange, you mean?”

“Why, to be sure! Have you not heard ladies talking together here?”

I blankly repealed her words. “Ladies talking?”

She nodded.

“Oh!” I cried. “How dull of me! Ladies talking! Of course!”

She continued. “It was therefore widely known that you were consulting

our South Carolina archives at the library--and then that notebook you

bring marked you out the very first day. Why, two hours after your first

lunch we just knew all about you!”

“Dear me!” said I.

“Kings Port is ever ready to discuss strangers,” she further explained.

“The Exchange has been going on five years, and the resident families

have discussed each other so thoroughly here that everything is known;

therefore a stranger is a perfect boon.” Her gayety for a moment

interrupted her, before she continued, always mocking and always sweet:

“Kings Port cannot boast intelligence offices for servants; but if you

want to know the character and occupation of your friends, come to the

Exchange!” How I wish I could give you the raciness, the contagion, of

her laughter! Who would have dreamed that behind her primness all this

frolic lay in ambush? “Why,” she said, “I’m only a plantation girl; it’s

my first week here, and I know every wicked deed everybody as done since

1812!”

She went back to her counter. It had been very merry; and as I was

settling the small debt for my lunch I asked: “Since this is the proper

place for information, will you kindly tell me whose wedding that cake

is for?”

She was astonished. “You don’t know? And I thought you were quite a

clever Ya--I beg your pardon--Northerner.

“Please tell me, since I know you’re quite a clever Reb--I beg your

pardon--Southerner.”

“Why, it’s his own! Couldn’t you see that from his bashfulness?”

“Ordering his own wedding cake?” Amazement held me. But the door opened,

one of the elderly ladies entered, the girl behind the counter stiffened

to primness in a flash, and I went out into Royal Street as the curly

dog’s tail wagged his greeting to the newcomer.

III: Kings Port Talks

Of course I had at once left the letters of introduction which Aunt

Carola had given me; but in my ignorance of Kings Port hours I had

found everybody at dinner when I made my first round of calls between

half-past three and five--an experience particularly regrettable, since

I had hurried my own dinner on purpose, not then aware that the hours at

my boarding-house were the custom of the whole town. (These hours

even since my visit to Kings Port, are beginning to change. But such

backsliding is much condemned.) Upon an afternoon some days later,

having seen in the extra looking-glass, which I had been obliged to

provide for myself, that the part in my back hair was perfect, I set

forth again, better informed.

As I rang the first doorbell, another visitor came up the steps, a

beautiful old lady in widow’s dress, a cardcase in her hand.

“Have you rung, sir?” said she, in a manner at once gentle and

voluminous.

“Yes, madam.”

Nevertheless she pulled it again. “It doesn’t always ring,” she

explained, “unless one is accustomed to it, which you are not.”

She addressed me with authority, exactly like Aunt Carola, and with even

greater precision in her good English and good enunciation. Unlike the

girl at the Exchange, she had no accent; her language was simply

the perfection of educated utterance; it also was racy with the free

censoriousness which civilized people of consequence are apt to exercise

the world over. “I was sorry to miss your visit,” she began (she knew

me, you see, perfectly); “you will please to come again soon, and

console me for my disappointment. I am Mrs. Gregory St. Michael, and my

house is in Le Maire Street (Pronounced in Kings Port, Lammarree) as you

have been so civil as to find out. And how does your Aunt Carola do in

these contemptible times? You can tell her from me that vulgarization is

descending, even upon Kings Port.”

“I cannot imagine that!” I exclaimed.

“You cannot imagine it because you don’t know anything about it, young

gentleman! The manners of some of our own young people will soon be as

dishevelled as those in New York. Have you seen our town yet, or is it

all books with you? You should not leave without a look at what is

still left of us. I shall be happy if you will sit in my pew on Sunday

morning. Your Northern shells did their best in the bombardment--did

you say that you rang? I think you had better pull it again; all the

way out; yes, like that--in the bombardment, but we have our old

church still, in spite of you. Do you see the crack in that wall? The

earthquake did it. You’re spared earthquakes in the North, as you seem

to be spared pretty much everything disastrous--except the prosperity

that’s going to ruin you all. We’re better off with our poverty than

you. Just ring the bell once more, and then we’ll go. I fancy Julia--I

fancy Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael--has run out to stare at the Northern

steam yacht in the harbor. It would be just like her. This house is

historic itself. Shabby enough now, to be sure! The great-aunt of my

cousin, John Mayrant (who is going to be married next Wednesday, to such

a brute of a girl, poor boy!), lived here in 1840, and made an answer

to the Earl of Mainridge that put him in his place. She was our famous

Kings Port wit, and at the reception which her father (my mother’s

uncle) gave the English visitor, he conducted himself as so many

Englishmen seem to think they can in this country. Miss Beaufain

(pronounced in Kings Port, Bowfayne), as she was then, asked the Earl

how he liked America; and he replied, very well, except for the people,

who were so vulgar. ‘What can you expect?’ said Miss Beaufain; ‘we’re

descended from the English.’ Mrs. St. Michael is out, and the servant

has gone home. Slide this card under the door, with your own, and come

away.”

She took me with her, moving through the quiet South Place with a

leisurely grace and dignity at which my spirit rejoiced; she was so

beautiful, and so easy, and afraid of nothing and nobody! (This must be

modified. I came later to suspect that they all stood in some dread of

their own immediate families.)

In the North, everybody is afraid of something: afraid of the

legislature, afraid of the trusts, afraid of the strikes, afraid of what

the papers will say, of what the neighbors will say, of what the cook

will say; and most of all, and worst of all, afraid to be different

from the general pattern, afraid to take a step or speak a syllable that

shall cause them to be thought unlike the monotonous millions of their

fellow-citizens; the land of the free living in ceaseless fear! Well,

I was already afraid of Mrs. Gregory St. Michael. As we walked and she

talked, I made one or two attempts at conversation, and speedily found

that no such thing was the lady’s intention: I was there to listen; and

truly I could wish nothing more agreeable, in spite of my desire to hear

further about next Wednesday’s wedding and the brute of a girl. But to

this subject Mrs. St. Michael did not return. We crossed Worship Street

and Chancel Street, and were nearing the East Place where a cannon was

being shown me, a cannon with a history and an inscription concerning

the “war for Southern independence, which I presume your prejudice calls

the Rebellion,” said my guide. “There’s Mrs. St. Michael now, coming

round the corner. Well, Julia, could you read the yacht’s name with

your naked eye? And what’s the name of the gambler who owns it? He’s

a gambler, or he couldn’t own a yacht--unless his wife’s a gambler’s

daughter.”

“How well you’re feeling to-day, Maria!” said the other lady, with a

gentle smile.

“Certainly. I have been talking for twenty minutes.” I was now presented

to Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael, also old, also charming, in widow’s dress

no less in the bloom of age than Mrs. Gregory, but whiter and very

diminutive. She shyly welcomed me to Kings Port. “Take him home with

you, Julia. We pulled your bell three times, and it’s too damp for you

to be out. Don’t forget,” Mrs. Gregory said to me, “that you haven’t

told me a word about your Aunt Carola, and that I shall expect you to

come and do it.” She went slowly away from us, up the East Place, tall,

graceful, sweeping into the distance like a ship. No haste about her

dignified movement, no swinging of elbows, nothing of the present hour!

“What a beautiful girl she must have been!” I murmured aloud,

unconsciously.

“No, she was not a beauty in her youth,” said my new guide in her shy

voice, “but always fluent, always a wit. Kings Port has at times thought

her tongue too downright. We think that wit runs in her family, for

young John Mayrant has it; and her first-cousin-once-removed put the

Earl of Mainridge in his place at her father’s ball in 1840. Miss

Beaufain (as she was then) asked the Earl how he liked America; and he

replied, very well, except for the people, who were so vulgar. ‘What can

you expect?’ said Miss Beaufain; ‘we’re descended from the English.’

I am very sorry for Maria--for Mrs. St. Michael--just at present. Her

young cousin, John Mayrant, is making an alliance deeply vexatious to

her. Do you happen to know Miss Hortense Rieppe?”

I had never heard of her.

“No? She has been North lately. I thought you might have met her. Her

father takes her North, I believe, whenever any one will invite them.

They have sometimes managed to make it extend through an unbroken year.

Newport, I am credibly informed, greatly admires her. We in Kings

Port have never (except John Mayrant, apparently) seen anything in her

beauty, which Northerners find so exceptional.”

“What is her type?” I inquired.

“I consider that she looks like a steel wasp. And she has the assurance

to call herself a Kings Port girl. Her father calls himself a general,

and it is repeated that he ran away at the battle of Chattanooga. I hope

you will come to see me another day, when you can spare time from the

battle of Cowpens. I am Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael, the other lady is

Mrs. Gregory St. Michael. I wonder if you will keep us all straight?”

And smiling, the little lady, whose shy manner and voice I had found to

veil as much spirit as her predecessor’s, dismissed me and went up her

steps, letting herself into her own house.

The boy in question, the boy of the cake, John Mayrant, was coming out

of the gate at which I next rang. The appearance of his boyish figure

and well-carried head struck me anew, as it had at first; from his whole

person one got at once a strangely romantic impression. He looked at me,

made as if he would speak, but passed on. Probably he had been hearing

as much about me as I had been hearing about him. At this house the

black servant had not gone home for the night, and if the mistress had

been out to take a look at the steam yacht, she had returned.

“My sister,” she said, presenting me to a supremely fine-looking old

lady, more chiselled, more august, than even herself. I did not catch

this lady’s name, and she confined herself to a distant, though perhaps

not unfriendly, greeting. She was sitting by a work-table, and she

resumed some embroidery of exquisite appearance, while my hostess talked

to me.

Both wore their hair in a simple fashion to suit their years, which must

have been seventy or more; both were dressed with the dignity that such

years call for; and I may mention here that so were all the ladies above

a certain age in this town of admirable old-fashioned propriety. In New

York, in Boston, in Philadelphia, ladies of seventy won’t be old ladies

any more; they’re unwilling to wear their years avowedly, in quiet

dignity by their firesides; they bare their bosoms and gallop

egregiously to the ball-rooms of the young; and so we lose a particular

graciousness that Kings Port retains, a perspective of generations.

We happen all at once, with no background, in a swirl of haste and

similarity.

One of the many things which came home to me during the conversation

that now began (so many more things came home than I can tell you!) was

that Mrs. Gregory St. Michael’s tongue was assuredly “downright” for

Kings Port. This I had not at all taken in while she talked to me, and

her friend’s reference to it had left me somewhat at a loss. That better

precision and choice of words which I have mentioned, and the manner

in which she announced her opinions, had put me in mind of several fine

ladles whom I had known in other parts of the world; but hers was an

individual manner, I was soon to find, and by no means the Kings Port

convention. This convention permitted, indeed, condemnations of one’s

neighbor no less sweeping, but it conveyed them in a phraseology far

more restrained.

“I cannot regret your coming to Kings Port,” said my hostess, after we

had talked for a little while, and I had complimented the balmy March

weather and the wealth of blooming flowers; “but I fear that Fanning is

not a name that you will find here. It belongs to North Carolina.”

I smiled and explained that North Carolina Fannings were useless to me.

“And, if I may be so bold, how well you are acquainted with my errand!”

I cannot say that my hostess smiled, that would be too definite; but I

can say that she did not permit herself to smile, and that she let

me see this repression. “Yes,” she said, “we are acquainted with your

errand, though not with its motive.”

I sat silent, thinking of the Exchange.

My hostess now gave me her own account of why all things were known

to all people in this town. “The distances in your Northern cities are

greater, and their population is much greater. There are but few of us

in Kings Port.” In these last words she plainly told me that those “few”

desired no others. She next added: “My nephew, John Mayrant, has spoken

of you at some length.”

I bowed. “I had the pleasure to see and hear him order a wedding cake.”

“Yes. From Eliza La Heu (pronounced Layhew), my niece; he is my nephew,

she is my niece on the other side. My niece is a beginner at the

Exchange. We hope that she will fulfil her duties there in a

worthy manner. She comes from a family which is schooled to meet

responsibilities.”

I bowed again; again it seemed fitting. “I had not, until now, known the

charming girl’s name,” I murmured.

My hostess now bowed slightly. “I am glad that you find her charming.”

“Indeed, yes!” I exclaimed.

“We, also, are pleased with her. She is of good family--for the

up-country.”

Once again our alphabet fails me. The peculiar shade of kindness, of

recognition, of patronage, which my agreeable hostess (and all Kings

Port ladies, I soon noticed) imparted to the word “up-country” cannot be

conveyed except by the human voice--and only a Kings Port voice at that.

It is a much lighter damnation than what they make of the phrase “from

Georgia,” which I was soon to hear uttered by the lips of the lady. “And

so you know about his wedding cake?”

“My dear madam, I feel that I shall know about everything.”

Her gray eyes looked at me quietly for a moment. “That is possible. But

although we may talk of ourselves to you, we scarcely expect you to talk

of ourselves to us.”

Well, my pertness had brought me this quite properly! And I received it

properly. “I should never dream--” I hastened to say; “even without your

warning. I find I’m expected to have seen the young lady of his choice,”

I now threw out. My accidental words proved as miraculous as the staff

which once smote the rock. It was a stream, indeed, which now broke

forth from her stony discretion. She began easily. “It is evident that

you have not seen Miss Rieppe by the manner in which you allude to

her--although of course, in comparison with my age, she is a young

girl.” I think that this caused me to open my mouth.

“The disparity between her years and my nephew’s is variously stated,”

continued the old lady. “But since John’s engagement we have all of us

realized that love is truly blind.”

I did not open my mouth any more; but my mind’s mouth was wide open.

My hostess kept it so. “Since John Mayrant was fifteen he has had many

loves; and for myself, knowing him and believing in him as I do, I feel

confident that he will make no connection distasteful to the family when

he really comes to marry.”

This time I gasped outright. “But--the cake!--next Wednesday!”

She made, with her small white hand, a slight and slighting gesture.

“The cake is not baked yet, and we shall see what we shall see.” From

this onward until the end a pinkness mounted in her pale, delicate

cheeks, and deep, strong resentment burned beneath her discreetly

expressed indiscretions. “The cake is not baked, and I, at least, am not

solicitous. I tell my cousin, Mrs. Gregory St. Michael, that she must

not forget it was merely his phosphates. That girl would never have

looked at John Mayrant had it not been for the rumor of his phosphates.

I suppose some one has explained to you her pretensions of birth. Away

from Kings Port she may pass for a native of this place, but they come

from Georgia. It cannot be said that she has met with encouragement

from us; she, however, easily recovers from such things. The present

generation of young people in Kings Port has little enough to remind us

of what we stood for in manners and customs, but we are not accountable

for her, nor for her father. I believe that he is called a general. His

conduct at Chattanooga was conspicuous for personal prudence. Both of

them are skillful in never knowing poor people--but the Northerners

they consort with must really be at a loss how to bestow their money.

Of course, such Northerners cannot realize the difference between Kings

Port and Georgia, and consequently they make much of her. Her features

do undoubtedly possess beauty. A Newport woman--the new kind--has even

taken her to Worth! And yet, after all, she has remained for John. We

heard a great deal of her men, too. She took care of that, of course.

John Mayrant actually followed her to Newport.

“But,” I couldn’t help crying out, “I thought he was so poor!”

“The phosphates,” my hostess explained. “They had been discovered on his

land. And none of her New York men had come forward. So John rushed

back happy.” At this point a very singular look came over the face of

my hostess, and she continued: “There have been many false reports (and

false hopes in consequence) based upon the phosphate discoveries. It was

I who had to break it to him--what further investigation had revealed.

Poor John!”

“He has, then, nothing?” I inquired.

“His position in the Custom House, and a penny or two from his mother’s

fortune.”

“But the cake?” I now once again reminded her.

My hostess lifted her delicate hand and let it fall. Her resentment at

the would-be intruder by marriage still mounted. “Not even from that

pair would I have believed such a thing possible!” she exclaimed; and

she went into a long, low, contemplative laugh, looking not at me, but

at the fire. Our silent companion continued to embroider. “That girl,”

my hostess resumed, “and her discreditable father played on my nephew’s

youth and chivalry to the tune of--well, you have heard the tune.”

“You mean--you mean--?” I couldn’t quite take it in.

“Yes. They rattled their poverty at him until he offered and they

accepted.”

I must have stared grotesquely now. “That--that--the cake--and that sort

of thing--at his expense?

“My dear sir, I shall be glad if you can find me anything that they have

ever done at their own expense!”

I doubt if she would ever have permitted her speech such freedom had

not the Rieppes been “from Georgia”; I am sure that it was anger--family

anger, race anger--which had broken forth; and I think that her

silent, severe sister scarcely approved of such breaking forth to me,

a stranger. But indignation had worn her reticence thin, and I had

happened to press upon the weak place. After my burst of exclamation I

came back to it. “So you think Miss Rieppe will get out of it?”

“It is my nephew who will ‘get out of it,’ as you express it.”

I totally misunderstood her. “Oh!” I protested stupidly. “He doesn’t

look like that. And it takes all meaning from the cake.”

“Do not say cake to me again!” said the lady, smiling at last.

“And--will you allow me to tell you that I do not need to have my

nephew, John Mayrant, explained to me by any one? I merely meant to say

that he, and not she, is the person who will make the lucky escape. Of

course, he is honorable--a great deal too much so for his own good. It

is a misfortune, nowadays, to be born a gentleman in America. But, as

I told you, I am not solicitous. What she is counting on--because

she thinks she understands true Kings Port honor, and does not in the

least--is his renouncing her on account of the phosphates--the bad

news, I mean. They could live on what he has--not at all in her way,

though--and besides, after once offering his genuine, ardent, foolish

love--for it was genuine enough at the time--John would never--”

She stopped; but I took her up. “Did I understand you to say that his

love was genuine at the lime?”

“Oh, he thinks it is now--insists it is now! That is just precisely what

would make him--do you not see?--stick to his colors all the closer.”

“Goodness!” I murmured. “What a predicament!”

But my hostess nodded easily. “Oh, no. You will see. They will all see.”

I rose to take my leave; my visit, indeed, had been, for very interest,

prolonged beyond the limits of formality--my hostess had attended quite

thoroughly to my being entertained. And at this point the other, the

more severe and elderly lady, made her contribution to my entertainment.

She had kept silence, I now felt sure, because gossip was neither

her habit nor to her liking. Possibly she may have also felt that her

displeasure had been too manifest; at any rate, she spoke out of her

silence in cold, yet rich, symmetrical tones.

“This, I understand, is your first visit to Kings Port?”

I told her that it was.

She laid down her exquisite embroidery. “It has been thought a place

worth seeing. There is no town of such historic interest at the North.”

Standing by my chair, I assured her that I did not think there could be.

“I heard you allude to my half-sister-in-law, Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael.

It was at the house where she now lives that the famous Miss Beaufain

(as she was then) put the Earl of Mainridge in his place, at the

reception which her father gave the English visitor in 1840. The Earl

conducted himself as so many Englishmen seem to think they can in this

country; and on her asking him how he liked America, he replied, very

well, except for the people, who were so vulgar.

“‘What can you expect?’ said Miss Beaufain; ‘we’re descended from the

English.’”

“But I suppose you will tell me that your Northern beauties can easily

outmatch such wit.”

I hastened to disclaim any such pretension; and having expressed my

appreciation of the anecdote, I moved to the door as the stately lady

resumed her embroidery.

My hostess had a last word for me. “Do not let the cake worry you.”

Outside the handsome old iron gate I looked at my watch and found that

for this day I could spend no more time upon visiting.

IV: THE GIRL BEHIND THE COUNTER--I

I fear--no; to say one “fears” that one has stepped aside from the

narrow path of duty, when one knows perfectly well that one has done

so, is a ridiculous half-dodging of the truth; let me dismiss from

my service such a cowardly circumlocution, and squarely say that I

neglected the Cowpens during certain days which now followed. Nay, more;

I totally deserted them. Although I feel quite sure that to discover one

is a real king’s descendant must bring an exultation of no mean order to

the heart, there’s no exultation whatever in failing to discover this,

day after day. Mine is a nature which demands results, or at any

rate signs of results coming sooner or later. Even the most abandoned

fisherman requires a bite now and then; but my fishing for Fannings had

not yet brought me one single nibble--and I gave up the sad sport for

a while. The beautiful weather took me out of doors over the land, and

also over the water, for I am a great lover of sailing; and I found a

little cat-boat and a little negro, both of which suited me very well.

I spent many delightful hours in their company among the deeps and

shallows of these fair Southern waters.

And indoors, also, I made most agreeable use of my time, in spite of

one disappointment when, on the day following my visit to the ladies, I

returned full of expectancy to lunch at the Woman’s exchange, the girl

behind the counter was not there. I found in her stead, it is true, a

most polite lady, who provided me with chocolate and sandwiches that

were just as good as their predecessors; but she was of advanced years,

and little inclined to light conversation. Beyond telling me that Miss

Eliza La Heu was indisposed, but not gravely so, and that she was not

likely to be long away from her post of duty, this lady furnished me

with scant information.

Now I desired a great deal of information. To learn of an imminent

wedding where the bridegroom attends to the cake, and is suspected of

diminished eagerness for the bride, who is a steel wasp--that is not

enough to learn of such nuptials. Therefore I fear--I mean, I know--that

it was not wholly for the sake of telling Mrs. Gregory St. Michael about

Aunt Carola that I repaired again to Le Maire Street and rang Mrs. St.

Michael’s door-bell.

She was at home, to be sure, but with her sat another visitor, the tall,

severe lady who had embroidered and had not liked the freedom with which

her sister had spoken to me about the wedding. There was not a bit of

freedom to-day; the severe lady took care of that.

When, after some utterly unprofitable conversation, I managed to say in

a casual voice, which I thought very well tuned for the purpose, “What

part of Georgia did you say that General Rieppe came from?” the severe

lady responded:--

“I do not think that I mentioned him at all.”

“Georgia?” said Mrs. Gregory St. Michael. “I never heard that they came

from Georgia.”

And this revived my hopes. But the severe lady at once remarked to

her:--

“I have received a most agreeable letter from my sister in Paris.”

This stopped Mrs. Gregory St. Michael, and dashed my hopes to earth.

The severe lady continued to me:--

“My sister writes of witnessing a performance of the Lohengrin. Can you

tell me if it is a composition of merit?”

I assured her that it was a composition of the highest merit.

“It is many years since I have heard an opera,” she pursued. “In my day

the works of the Italians were much applauded. But I doubt if Mozart

will be surpassed. I hope you admire the Nozze?”

You will not need me to tell you that I came out of Mrs. Gregory St.

Michael’s house little wiser than I went in. My experience did not lead

me to abandon all hope. I paid other visits to other ladies; but these

answered my inquiries in much the same sort of way as had the lady who

admired Mozart. They spoke delightfully of travel, books, people, and

of the colonial renown of Kings Port and its leading families; but it

is scarce an exaggeration to say that Mozart was as near the cake, the

wedding, or the steel wasp as I came with any of them. By patience,

however, and mostly at our boarding-house table, I gathered a certain

knowledge, though small in amount.

If the health of John Mayrant’s mother, I learned, had allowed that lady

to bring him up Herself, many follies might have been saved the youth.

His aunt, Miss Eliza St. Michael, though a pattern of good intentions,

was not always a pattern of wisdom. Moreover, how should a spinster

bring up a boy fitly?

Of the Rieppes, father and daughter, I also learned a little more. They

did not (most people believed) come from Georgia. Natchez and Mobile

seemed to divide the responsibility of giving them to the world. It was

quite certain the General had run away from Chattanooga. Nobody disputed

this, or offered any other battle as the authentic one. Of late the

Rieppes were seldom to be seen in Kings Port. Their house (if it had

ever been their own property, which I heard hotly argued both ways) had

been sold more than two years ago, and their recent brief sojourns in

the town were generally beneath the roof of hospitable friends--people

by the name of Cornerly, “whom we do not know,” as I was carefully

informed by more than one member of the St. Michael family. The girl had

disturbed a number of mothers whose sons were prone to slip out of the

strict hereditary fold in directions where beauty or champagne was to

be found; and the Cornerlys dined late, and had champagne. Miss Hortense

had “splurged it” a good deal here, and the measure of her success

with the male youth was the measure of her condemnation by their female

elders.

Such were the facts which I gathered from women and from the few men

whom I saw in Kings Port. This town seemed to me almost as empty of men

as if the Pied Piper had passed through here and lured them magically

away to some distant country. It was on the happy day that saw Miss

Eliza La Heu again providing me with sandwiches and chocolate that my

knowledge of the wedding and the bride and groom began really to take

some steps forward.

It was not I who, at my sequestered lunch at the Woman’s Exchange, began

the conversation the next time. That confection, “Lady Baltimore,” about

which I was not to worry myself, had, as they say, “broken the ice”

between the girl behind the counter and myself.

“He has put it off!” This, without any preliminaries, was her direct and

stimulating news.

I never was more grateful for the solitude of the Exchange, where I

had, before this, noted and blessed an absence of lunch customers as

prevailing as the trade winds; the people I saw there came to talk, not

to purchase. Well, I was certainly henceforth coming for both!

I eagerly plunged in with the obvious question:--

“Indefinitely?”

“Oh, no! Only Wednesday week.”

“But will it keep?”

My ignorance diverted her. “Lady Baltimore? Why, the idea!” And she

laughed at me from the immense distance that the South is from the

North.

“Then he’ll have to pay for two?”

“Oh, no! I wasn’t going to make it till Tuesday.

“I didn’t suppose that kind of thing would keep,” I muttered rather

vaguely.

Her young spirits bubbled over. “Which kind of thing? The wedding--or

the cake?”

This produced a moment of laughter on the part of us both; we giggled

joyously together amid the silence and wares for sale, the painted cups,

the embroidered souvenirs, the new food, and the old family “pieces.”

So this delightful girl was a verbal skirmisher! Now nothing is more

to my liking than the verbal skirmish, and therefore I began one

immediately. “I see you quite know,” was the first light shot that I

hazarded.

Her retort to this was merely a very bland and inquiring stare.

I now aimed a trifle nearer the mark. “About him--her--it! Since you

practically live in the Exchange, how can you exactly help yourself?”

Her laughter came back. “It’s all, you know, so much later than 1812.”

“Later! Why, a lot of it is to happen yet!”

She leaned over the counter. “Tell me what you know about it,” she said

with caressing insinuation.

“Oh, well--but probably they mean to have your education progress

chronologically.”

“I think I can pick it up anywhere. We had to at the plantation.”

It was from my table in the distant dim back of the room, where things

stood lumpily under mosquito netting, that I told her my history. She

made me go there to my lunch. She seemed to desire that our talk over

the counter should not longer continue. And so, back there, over

my chocolate and sandwiches, I brought out my gleaned and arranged

knowledge which rang out across the distance, comically, like a lecture.

She, at her counter, now and then busy with her ledger, received it with

the attentive solemnity of a lecture. The ledger might have been notes

that she was dutifully and improvingly taking. After I had finished she

wrote on for a little while in silence. The curly white dog rose into

sight, looked amiably and vaguely about, stretched himself, and sank to

sleep again out of sight.

“That’s all?” she asked abruptly.

“So far,” I answered.

“And what do you think of such a young man?” she inquired.

“I know what I think of such a young woman.”

She was still pensive. “Yes, yes, but then that is so simple.”

I had a short laugh. “Oh, if you come to the simplicity!”

She nodded, seeming to be doing sums with her pencil.

“Men are always simple--when they’re in love.”

I assented. “And women--you’ll agree?--are always simple when they’re

not!”

She finished her sums. “Well, I think he’s foolish!” she frankly stated.

“Didn’t Aunt Josephine think so, too?”

“Aunt Josephine?”

“Miss Josephine St. Michael--my greet-aunt--the lady who embroidered.

She brought me here from the plantation.”

“No, she wouldn’t talk about it. But don’t you think it is your turn

now?”

“I’ve taken my turn!”

“Oh, not much. To say you think he’s foolish isn’t much. You’ve seen him

since?”

“Seen him? Since when?”

“Here. Since the postponement. I take it he came himself about it.”

“Yes, he came. You don’t suppose we discussed the reasons, do you?”

“My dear young lady, I suppose nothing, except that you certainly must

have seen how he looked (he can blush, you know, handsomely), and that

you may have some knowledge or some guess--”

“Some guess why it’s not to be until Wednesday week? Of course he said

why. Her poor, dear father, the General, isn’t very well.”

“That, indeed, must be an anxiety for Johnny,” I remarked.

This led her to indulge in some more merriment. “But he does,” she then

said, “seem anxious about something.”

“Ah,” I exclaimed. “Then you admit it, too!”

She resorted again to the bland, inquiring stare.

“What he won’t admit,” I explained, “even to his intimate Aunt, because

he’s so honorable.”

“He certainly is simple,” she commented, in soft and pensive tones.

“Isn’t there some one,” I asked, “who could--not too directly, of

course--suggest that to him?”

“I think I prefer men to be simple,” she returned somewhat quickly.

“Especially when they’re in love,” I reminded her somewhat slowly.

“Do you want some Lady Baltimore to-day?” she inquired in the official

Exchange tone.

I rose obediently. “You’re quite right, I should have gone back to the

battle of Cowpens long ago, and I’ll just say this--since you asked me

what I thought of him--that if he’s descended from that John Mayrant who

fought the Serapes under Paul Jones--”

“He is!” she broke in eagerly.

“Then there’s not a name in South Carolina that I’d rather have for my

own.”

I intended that thrust to strike home, but she turned it off most

competently. “Oh, you mustn’t accept us because of our ancestors. That’s

how we’ve been accepting ourselves, and only look where we are in the

race!”

“Ah!” I said, as a parting attempt, “don’t pretend you’re not perfectly

satisfied--all of you--as to where you are in the race!”

“We don’t pretend anything!” she flashed back.

V: The Boy of the Cake

One is unthankful, I suppose, to call a day so dreary when one has

lunched under the circumstances that I have attempted to indicate; the

bright spot ought to shine over the whole. But you haven’t an idea what

a nightmare in the daytime Cowpens was beginning to be.

I had thumbed and scanned hundreds of ancient pages, some of them

manuscript; I had sat by ancient shelves upon hard chairs, I had sneezed

with the ancient dust, and I had not put my finger upon a trace of the

right Fanning. I should have given it up, left unexplored the territory

that remained staring at me through the backs of unread volumes, had it

not been for my Aunt Carola. To her I owed constancy and diligence,

and so I kept at it; and the hermit hours I spent at Court and Chancel

streets grew worse as I knew better what rarely good company was ready

to receive me. This Kings Port, this little city of oblivion, held, shut

in with its lavender and pressed-rose memories, a handful of people

who were like that great society of the world, the high society of

distinguished men and women who exist no more, but who touched history

with a light hand, and left their mark upon it in a host of memoirs and

letters that we read to-day with a starved and home-sick longing in

the midst of our sullen welter of democracy. With its silent houses and

gardens, its silent streets, its silent vistas of the blue water in the

sunshine, this beautiful, sad place was winning my heart and making

it ache. Nowhere else in America such charm, such character, such

true elegance as here--and nowhere else such an overwhelming sense of

finality!--the doom of a civilization founded upon a crime. And yet, how

much has the ballot done for that race? Or, at least, how much has the

ballot done for the majority of that race? And what way was it to meet

this problem with the sudden sweeping folly of the Fifteenth Amendment?

To fling the “door of hope” wide open before those within had learned

the first steps of how to walk sagely through it! Ah, if it comes to

blame, who goes scatheless in this heritage of error? I could have

shaped (we all could, you know) a better scheme for the universe, a plan

where we should not flourish at each other’s expense, where the lion

should be lying down with the lamb now, where good and evil should not

be husband and wife, indissolubly married by a law of creation.

With such highly novel thoughts as these I descended the steps from my

researches at the corner of Court and Chancel streets an hour earlier

than my custom, because--well, I couldn’t, that day, stand Cowpens for

another minute. Up at the corner of Court and Worship the people were

going decently into church; it was a sweet, gentle late Friday in Lent.

I had intended keeping out-of-doors, to smell the roses in the gardens,

to bask in the soft remnant of sunshine, to loiter and peep in through

the Kings Port garden gates, up the silent walks to the silent verandas.

But the slow stream of people took me, instead, into church with the

deeply veiled ladies of Kings Port, hushed in their perpetual mourning

for not only, I think, those husbands and brothers and sons whom the

war had turned to dust forty years ago, but also for the Cause, the lost

Cause, that died with them. I sat there among these Christians suckled

in a creed outworn, envying them their well-regulated faith; it,

too, was part of the town’s repose and sweetness, together with the

old-fashioned roses and the old-fashioned ladies. Men, also, were in

the congregation--not many, to be sure, but all unanimously wearing that

expression of remarkable virtue which seems always to visit, when he

goes to church, the average good fellow who is no better than he should

be. I became, myself, filled with this same decorous inconsistency, and

was singing the hymn, when I caught sight of John Mayrant. What lady

was he with? It was just this that most annoyingly I couldn’t make

out, because the unlucky disposition of things hid it. I caught

myself craning my neck and singing the hymn simultaneously and with no

difficulty, because all my childhood was in that hymn; I couldn’t tell

when I hadn’t known words and music by heart. Who was she? I tried for

a clear view when we sat down, and also, let me confess, when we knelt

down; I saw even less of her so; and my hope at the end of the service

was dashed by her slow but entire disappearance amid the engulfing exits

of the other ladies. I followed where I imagined she had gone, out by

a side door, into the beautiful graveyard; but among the flowers and

monuments she was not, nor was he; and next I saw, through the iron

gate, John Mayrant in the street, walking with his intimate aunt and her

more severe sister, and Miss La Heu. I somewhat superfluously hastened

to the gate and greeted them, to which they responded with polite,

masterly discouragement. He, however, after taking off his hat to them,

turned back, and I watched them pursuing their leisurely, reticent

course toward the South Place. Why should the old ladies strike me as

looking like a tremendously proper pair of conspirators? I was wondering

this as I turned back among the tombs, when I perceived John Mayrant

coming along one of the churchyard paths. His approach was made at right

angles with that of another personage, the respectful negro custodian

of the place. This dignitary was evidently hoping to lead me among

the monuments, recite to me their old histories, and benefit by my

consequent gratitude; he had even got so far as smiling and removing his

hat when John Mayrant stopped him. The young man hailed the negro by his

first name with that particular and affectionate superiority which few

Northerners can understand and none can acquire, and which resembles

nothing so much as the way in which you speak to your old dog who has

loved you and followed you, because you have cared for him.

“Not this time,” John Mayrant said. “I wish to show our relics to this

gentleman myself--if he will permit me?” This last was a question put to

me with a courteous formality, a formality which a few minutes more were

to see smashed to smithereens.

I told him that I should consider myself undeservedly privileged.

“Some of these people are my people,” he said, beginning to move.

The old custodian stood smiling, familiar, respectful, disappointed.

“Some of ‘em my people, too, Mas’ John,” he cannily observed.

I put a little silver in his hand. “Didn’t I see a box somewhere,” I

said, “with something on it about the restoration of the church?”

“Something on it, but nothing in it!” exclaimed Mayrant; at which

moderate pleasantry the custodian broke into extreme African merriment

and ambled away. “You needn’t have done it,” protested the Southerner,

and I naturally claimed my stranger’s right to pay my respects in this

manner. Such was our introduction, agreeable and unusual.

A silence then unexpectedly ensued and the formality fell colder than

ever upon us. The custodian’s departure had left us alone, looking at

each other across all the unexpressed knowledge that each knew the other

had. Mayrant had come impulsively back to me from his aunts, without

stopping to think that we had never yet exchanged a word; both of us

were now brought up short, and it was the cake that was speaking volubly

in our self-conscious dumbness. It was only after this brief, deep gap

of things unsaid that John Mayrant came to the surface again, and began

a conversation of which, on both our parts, the first few steps were

taken on the tiptoes of an archaic politeness; we trod convention like a

polished French floor; you might have expected us, after such deliberate

and graceful preliminaries, to dance a verbal minuet.

We, however, danced something quite different, and that conversation

lasted during many days, and led us, like a road, up hill and down dale

to a perfect acquaintance. No, not perfect, but delightful; to the end

he never spoke to me of the matter most near him, and I but honor him

the more for his reticence.

Of course his first remark had to be about Kings Port and me; had he

understood rightly that this was my first visit?

My answer was equally traditional.

It was, next, correct that he should allude to the weather; and his

reference was one of the two or three that it seems a stranger’s destiny

always to hear in a place new to him: he apologized for the weather--so

cold a season had not, in his memory, been experienced in Kings Port; it

was to the highest point exceptional.

I exclaimed that it had been, to my Northern notions, delightfully mild

for March. “Indeed,” I continued, “I have always said that if March

could be cut out of our Northern climate, as the core is cut out of

an apple, I should be quite satisfied with eleven months, instead of

twelve. I think it might prolong one’s youth.”

The fire of that season lighted in his eyes, but he still stepped upon

polished convention. He assured me that the Southern September hurricane

was more deplorable than any Northern March could be. “Our zone should

be called the Intemperate zone,” said he.

“But never in Kings Port,” I protested; “with your roses

out-of-doors--and your ladies indoors!”

He bowed. “You pay us a high compliment.”

I smiled urbanely. “If the truth is a compliment!”

“Our young ladies are roses,” he now admitted with a delicate touch of

pride.

“Don’t forget your old ones! I never shall.”

There was pleasure in his face at this tribute, which, he could see,

came from the heart. But, thus pictured to him, the old ladies brought

a further idea quite plainly into his expression; and he announced it.

“Some of them are not without thorns.”

“What would you give,” I quickly replied, “for anybody--man or

woman--who could not, on an occasion, make themselves sharply felt?”

To this he returned a full but somewhat absent-minded assent. He seemed

to be reflecting that he himself didn’t care to be the “occasion” upon

which an old lady rose should try her thorns; and I was inclined to

suspect that his intimate aunt had been giving him a wigging.

Anyhow, I stood ready to keep it up, this interchange of

lofty civilities. I, too, could wear the courtly red-heels of

eighteenth-century procedure, and for just as long as his Southern

up-bringing inclined him to wear them; I hadn’t known Aunt Carola for

nothing! But we, as I have said, were not destined to dance any minuet.

We had been moving, very gradually, and without any attention to our

surroundings, to and fro in the beautiful sweet churchyard. Flowers were

everywhere, growing, budding, blooming; color and perfume were parts of

the very air, and beneath these pretty and ancient tombs, graven with

old dates and honorable names, slept the men and women who had given

Kings Port her high place is; in our history. I have never, in this

country, seen any churchyard comparable to this one; happy, serene dead,

to sleep amid such blossoms and consecration! Good taste prevailed here;

distinguished men lay beneath memorial stones that came no higher than

your waist or shoulder; there was a total absence of obscure grocers

reposing under gigantic obelisks; to earn a monument here you must win

a battle, or do, at any rate, something more than adulterate sugar and

oil. The particular monument by which young John Mayrant and I found

ourselves standing, when we reached the point about the ladies and the

thorns, had a look of importance and it caught his eye, bringing him

back to where we were. Upon his pointing to it, and before we had spoken

or I had seen the name, I inquired eagerly: “Not the lieutenant of the

Bon Homme Richard?” and then saw that Mayrant was not the name upon it.

My knowledge of his gallant sea-fighting namesake visibly gratified him.

“I wish it were,” he said; “but I am descended from this man, too. He

was a statesman, and some of his brilliant powers were inherited by

his children--but they have not come so far down as me. In 1840, his

daughter, Miss Beaufain--”

I laid my hand right on his shoulder. “Don’t you do it, John Mayrant!”

I cried. “Don’t you tell me that. Last night I caught myself saying that

instead of my prayers.”

Well, it killed the minuet dead; he sat flat down on the low stone

coping that bordered the path to which we had wandered back--and I

sat flat down opposite him. The venerable custodian, passing along a

neighboring path, turned his head and stared at our noise.

“Lawd, see those chillun goin’ on!” he muttered. “Mas’ John, don’t you

get too scandalous, tellin’ strangers ‘bout the old famblies.”

Mayrant pointed to me. “He’s responsible, Daddy Ben. I’m being just as

good as gold. Honest injun!”

The custodian marched slowly on his way, shaking his head. “Mas’ John

he do go on,” he repeated. His office was not alone the care and the

showing off of the graveyard, but another duty, too, as native and

peculiar to the soil as the very cotton and the rice: this loyal

servitor cherished the honor of the “old famblies,” and chide their

young descendants whenever he considered that they needed it.

Mayrant now sat revived after his collapse of mirth, and he addressed me

from his gravestone. “Yes, I ought to have foreseen it.”

“Foreseen--?” I didn’t at once catch the inference.

“All my aunts and cousins have been talking to you.”

“Oh, Miss Beaufain and the Earl of Mainridge! Well, but it’s quite

worth--”

“Knowing by heart!” he broke in with new merriment.

I kept on. “Why not? They tell those things everywhere--where they’re so

lucky as to possess them! It’s a flawless specimen.”

“Of 1840 repartee?” He spoke with increasing pauses. “Yes. We do at

least possess that. And some wine of about the same date--and even

considerably older.”

“All the better for age,” I exclaimed.

But the blue eyes of Mayrant were far away and full of shadow. “Poor

Kings Port,” he said very slowly and quietly. Then he looked at me with

the steady look and the smile that one sometimes has when giving voice

to a sorrowful conviction against which one has tried to struggle. “Poor

Kings Port,” he affectionately repeated. His hand tapped lightly two or

three times upon the gravestone upon which he was seated. “Be honest and

say that you think so, too,” he demanded, always with his smile.

But how was I to agree aloud with what his silent hand had expressed?

Those inaudible taps on the stone spoke clearly enough; they said: “Here

lies Kings Port, here lives Kings Port. Outside of this is our true

death, on the vacant wharves, in the empty streets. All that we have

left is the immortality which these historic names have won.” How could

I tell him that I thought so, too? Nor was I as sure of it then as he

was. And besides, this was a young man whose spirit was almost surely,

in suffering; ill fortune both material and of the heart, I seemed to

suspect, had made him wounded and bitter in these immediate days; and

the very suppression he was exercising hurt him the more deeply. So I

replied, honestly, as he had asked: “I hope you are mistaken.”

“That’s because you haven’t been here long enough,” he declared.

Over us, gently, from somewhere across the gardens and the walls, came

a noiseless water breeze, to which the roses moved and nodded among the

tombs. They gave him a fanciful thought. “Look at them! They belong to

us, and they know it. They’re saying, ‘Yes; yes; yes,’ all day long. I

don’t know why on earth I’m talking in this way to you!” he broke off

with vivacity. “But you made me laugh so.”

VI: In the Churchyard

“Then it was a good laugh, indeed!” I cried heartily.

“Oh, don’t let’s go back to our fine manners!” he begged comically.

“We’ve satisfied each other that we have them! I feel so lonely; and my

aunt just now--well, never mind about that. But you really must excuse

us about Miss Beaufain, and all that sort of thing. I see it, because

I’m of the new generation, since the war, and--well, I’ve been to other

places, too. But Aunt Eliza, and all of them, you know, can’t see it.

And I wouldn’t have them, either! So I don’t ever attempt to explain

to them that the world has to go on. They’d say, ‘We don’t see the

necessity!’ When slavery stopped, they stopped, you see, just like a

clock. Their hand points to 1865--it has never moved a minute since. And

some day”--his voice grew suddenly tender--“they’ll go, one by one, to

join the still older ones. And I shall miss them very much.”

For a moment I did not speak, but watched the roses nodding and moving.

Then I said: “May I say that I shall miss them, too?”

He looked at me. “Miss our old Kings Port people?” He didn’t invite

outsiders to do that!

“Don’t you see how it is?” I murmured. “It was the same thing once with

us.”

“The same thing--in the North?” His tone still held me off.

“The same sort of dear old people--I mean charming, peppery, refined,

courageous people; in Salem, in Boston, in New York, in every place that

has been colonial, and has taken a hand in the game.” And, as certain

beloved memories of men and women rose in my mind, I continued: “If you

knew some of the Boston elder people as I have known them, you would

warm with the same admiration that is filling me as I see your people of

Kings Port.”

“But politics?” the young Southerner slowly suggested.

“Oh, hang slavery! Hang the war!” I exclaimed. “Of course, we had a

family quarrel. But we were a family once, and a fine one, too! We knew

each other, we visited each other, we wrote letters, sent presents, kept

up relations; we, in short, coherently joined hands from one generation

to another; the fibres of the sons tingled with the current from their

fathers, back and back to the old beginnings, to Plymouth and Roanoke

and Rip Van Winkle! It’s all gone, all done, all over. You have to be a

small, well-knit country for that sort of exquisite personal unitedness.

There’s nothing united about these States any more, except Standard Oil

and discontent. We’re no longer a small people living and dying for a

great idea; we’re a big people living and dying for money. And these

ladies of yours--well, they have made me homesick for a national and

a social past which I never saw, but which my old people knew. They’re

like legends, still living, still warm and with us. In their quiet

clean-cut faces I seem to see a reflection of the old serene candlelight

we all once talked and danced in--sconces, tall mirrors, candles burning

inside glass globes to keep them from the moths and the draft that, of

a warm evening, blew in through handsome mahogany doors; the good bright

silver; the portraits by Copley and Gilbert Stuart; a young girl at a

square piano, singing Moore’s melodies--and Mr. Pinckney or Commodore

Perry, perhaps, dropping in for a hot supper!”

John Mayrant was smiling and looking at the graves. “Yes, that’s it;

that’s all it,” he mused. “You do understand.”

But I had to finish my flight. “Such quiet faces are gone now in the

breathless, competing North: ground into oblivion between the clashing

trades of the competing men and the clashing jewels and chandeliers of

their competing wives--while yours have lingered on, spared by your very

adversity. And that’s why I shall miss your old people when they follow

mine--because they’re the last of their kind, the end of the chain, the

bold original stock, the great race that made our glory grow and saw

that it did grow through thick and thin: the good old native blood of

independence.”

I spoke as a man can always speak when he means it; and my listener’s

face showed that my words had gone where meant words always go--home to

the heart. But he merely nodded at me. His nod, however, telling as it

did of a quickly established accord between us, caused me to bring out

to this new acquaintance still more of those thoughts which I condescend

to expose to very few old ones.

“Haven’t you noticed,” I said, “or don’t you feel it, away down here in

your untainted isolation, the change, the great change, that has come

over the American people?”

He wasn’t sure.

“They’ve lost their grip on patriotism.”

He smiled. “We did that here in 1861.”

“Oh, no! You left the Union, but you loved what you considered was your

country, and you love it still. That’s just my point, just my strange

discovery in Kings Port. You retain the thing we’ve lost. Our big men

fifty years ago thought of the country, and what they could make it; our

big men to-day think of the country and what they can make out of it.

Rather different, don’t you see? When I walk about in the North, I

merely meet members of trusts or unions--according to the length of

the individual’s purse; when I walk about in Kings Port, I meet

Americans.--Of course,” I added, taking myself up, “that’s too sweeping

a statement. The right sort of American isn’t extinct in the North by

any means. But there’s such a commercial deluge of the wrong sort, that

the others sometimes seem to me sadly like a drop in the bucket.”

“You certainly understand it all,” John Mayrant repeated. “It’s amazing

to find you saying things that I have thought were my own private

notions.”

I laughed. “Oh, I fancy there are more than two of us in the country.”

“Even the square piano and Mr. Pinckney,” he went on. “I didn’t suppose

anybody had thought things like that, except myself.”

“Oh,” I again said lightly, “any American--any, that is, of the

world--who has a colonial background for his family, has thought,

probably, very much the same sort of things. Of course it would be all

Greek or gibberish to the new people.”

He took me up with animation. “The new people! My goodness, sir, yes!

Have you seen them? Have you seen Newport, for instance?” His diction

now (and I was to learn it was always in him a sign of heightening

intensity) grew more and more like the formal speech of his ancestors.

“You have seen Newport?” he said.

“Yes; now and then.”

“But lately, sir? I knew we were behind the times down here, sir, but I

had not imagined how much. Not by any means! Kings Port has a long

road to go before she will consider marriage provincial and chastity

obsolete.”

“Dear me, Mr. Mayrant! Well, I must tell you that it’s not all quite

so--so advanced--as that, you know. That’s not the whole of Newport.”

He hastened to explain. “Certainly not, sir! I would not insult the

honorable families whom I had the pleasure to meet there, and to whom my

name was known because they had retained their good position since

the days when my great-uncle had a house and drove four horses there

himself. I noticed three kinds of Newport, sir.”

“Three?”

“Yes. Because I took letters; and some of the letters were to people

who--who once had been, you know; it was sad to see the thing, sir, so

plain against the glaring proximity of the other thing. And so you can

divide Newport into those who leave to sell their old family pictures,

those who have to buy their old family pictures, and the lucky few who

need neither buy nor sell, who are neither goin’ down nor bobbing up,

but who have kept their heads above the American tidal wave from the

beginning and continue to do so. And I don’t believe that there are any

nicer people in the world than those.”

“Nowhere!” I exclaimed. “When Near York does her best, what’s

better?--If only those best set the pace!”

“If only!” he assented. “But it’s the others who get into the papers,

who dine the drunken dukes, and make poor chambermaids envious a

thousand miles inland!”

“There should be a high tariff on drunken dukes,” I said.

“You’ll never get it!” he declared. “It’s the Republican party whose

daughters marry them.”

I rocked with enjoyment where I sat; he was so refreshing. And I agreed

with him so well. “You’re every bit as good as Miss Beaufain,” I cried.

“Oh, no; oh, no! But I often think if we could only deport the negroes

and Newport together to one of our distant islands, how happily our two

chief problems would be solved!”

I still rocked. “Newport would, indeed, enjoy your plan for it. Do go

on!” I entreated him But he had, for the moment, ceased; and I rose

to stretch my legs and saunter among the old headstones and the wafted

fragrance.

His aunt (or his cousin, or whichever of them it had been) was certainly

right as to his inheriting a pleasant and pointed gift of speech; and a

responsive audience helps us all. Such an audience I certainly was for

young John Mayrant, yet beneath the animation that our talk had filled

his eyes with lay (I seemed to see or feel) that other mood all the

time, the mood which had caused the girl behind the counter to say to

me that he was “anxious about something.” The unhappy youth, I was

gradually to learn, was much more than that--he was in a tangle of

anxieties. He talked to me as a sick man turns in bed from pain; the

pain goes on, but the pillow for a while is cool.

Here there broke upon us a little interruption, so diverting, so utterly

like the whole quaint tininess of Kings Port, that I should tell it

to you, even if it did not bear directly upon the matter which was

beginning so actively to concern me--the love difficulties of John

Mayrant.

It was the letter-carrier.

We had come, from our secluded seats, round a corner, and so by the

vestry door and down the walk beside the church, and as I read to myself

the initials upon the stones wherewith the walk was paved, I drew near

the half-open gateway upon Worship Street. The postman was descending

the steps of the post-office opposite. He saw me through the gate and

paused. He knew me, too! My face, easily marked out amid the resident

faces he was familiar with, had at once caught his attention; very

likely he, too, had by now learned that I was interested in the battle

of Cowpens; but I did not ask him this. He crossed over and handed me a

letter.

“No use,” he said most politely, “takin’ it away down to Mistress

Trevise’s when you’re right here, sir. Northern mail eight hours late

to-day,” he added, and bowing, was gone upon his route.

My home letter, from a man, an intimate running mate of mine, soon had

my full attention, for on the second page it said:--

“I have just got back from accompanying her to Baltimore. One of us

went as far as Washington with her on the train. We gave her a dinner

yesterday at the March Hare by way of farewell. She tried our new

toboggan fire-escape on a bet. Clean from the attic, my boy. I imagine

our native girls will rejoice at her departure. However, nobody’s

engaged to her, at least nobody here. How many may fancy themselves so

elsewhere I can’t say. Her name is Hortense Rieppe.”

I suppose I must have been silent after finishing this letter.

“No bad news, I trust?” John Mayrant inquired.

I told him no; and presently we had resumed our seats in the quiet charm

of the flowers.

I now spoke with an intention. “What a lot you seem to have seen and

suffered of the advanced Newport!”

The intention wrought its due and immediate effect. “Yes. There was no

choice. I had gone to Newport upon--upon an urgent matter, which took me

among those people.”

He dwelt upon the pictures that came up in his mind. But he took me away

again from the “urgent matter.”

“I saw,” he resumed more briskly, “fifteen or twenty--most amazing,

sir!--young men, some of them not any older than I am, who had so many

millions that they could easily--” he paused, casting about for some

expression adequate--“could buy Kings Port and put it under a glass

case in a museum--my aunts and all--and never know it!” He livened with

disrespectful mirth over his own picture of his aunts, purchased by

millionaire steel or coal for the purposes of public edification.

“And a very good thing if they could be,” I declared.

He wondered a moment. “My aunts? Under a glass case?”

“Yes, indeed--and with all deference be it said! They’d be more

invaluable, more instructive, than the classics of a thousand

libraries.”

He was prepared not to be pleased. “May I ask to whom and for what?”

“Why, you ought to see! You’ve just been saying it yourself. They would

teach our bulging automobilists, our unlicked boy cubs, our

alcoholic girls who shout to waiters for ‘high-balls’ on country club

porches--they would teach these wallowing creatures, whose money has

merely gilded their bristles, what American refinement once was. The

manners we’ve lost, the decencies we’ve banished, the standards we’ve

lowered, their light is still flickering in this passing generation of

yours. It’s the last torch. That’s why I wish it could, somehow, pass on

the sacred fire.”

He shook his head. “They don’t want the sacred fire. They want the

high-balls--and they have money enough to be drunk straight through the

next world!” He was thoughtful. “They are the classics,” he added.

I didn’t see that he had gone back to my word. “Roman Empire, you mean?”

“No, the others; the old people we’re bidding good-by to. Roman

Republic! Simple lives, gallant deeds, and one great uniting

inspiration. Liberty winning her spurs. They were moulded under that,

and they are our true American classics. Nothing like them will happen

again.”

“Perhaps,” I suggested, “our generation is uneasily living in a ‘bad

quarter-of-an-hour’--good old childhood gone, good new manhood not yet

come, and a state of chicken-pox between whiles.” And on this I made to

him a much-used and consoling quotation about the old order changing.

“Who says that?” he inquired; and upon my telling him, “I hope so,” he

said, “I hope so. But just now Uncle Sam ‘aspires to descend.’”

I laughed at his counter-quotation. “You know your classics, if you

don’t know Tennyson.”

He, too, laughed. “Don’t tell Aunt Eliza!”

“Tell her what?”

“That I didn’t recognize Tennyson. My Aunt Eliza educated me--and she

thinks Tennyson about the only poet worth reading since--well, since

Byron and Sir Walter at the very latest!”

“Neither she nor Sir Walter come down to modern poetry--or to alcoholic

girls.” His tone, on these last words, changed.

Again, as when he had said “an urgent matter,” I seemed to feel hovering

above us what must be his ceaseless preoccupation; and I wondered if he

had found, upon visiting Newport, Miss Hortense sitting and calling for

“high-balls.”

I gave him a lead. “The worst of it is that a girl who would like

to behave herself decently finds that propriety puts her out of the

running. The men flock off to the other kind.”

He was following me with watching eyes.

“And you know,” I continued, “what an anxious Newport parent does on

finding her girl on the brink of being a failure.”

“I can imagine,” he answered, “that she scolds her like the dickens.”

“Oh, nothing so ineffectual! She makes her keep up with the others, you

know. Makes her do things she’d rather not do.”

“High-balls, you mean?”

“Anything, my friend; anything to keep up.”

He had a comic suggestion. “Driven to drink by her mother! Well,

it’s, at any rate, a new cause for old effects.” He paused. It seemed

strangely to bring to him some sort of relief. “That would explain a

great deal,” he said.

Was he thus explaining to himself his lady-love, or rather certain

Newport aspects of her which had, so to speak, jarred upon his Kings

Port notions of what a lady might properly do? I sat on my gravestone

with my wonder, and my now-dawning desire to help him (if improbably I

could), to get him out of it, if he were really in it; and he sat on his

gravestone opposite, with the path between us, and the little noiseless

breeze rustling the white irises, and bearing hither and thither the

soft perfume of the roses. His boy face, lean, high-strung, brooding,

was full of suppressed contentions. I made myself, during our silence,

state his possible problem: “He doesn’t love her any more, he won’t

admit this to himself; he intends to go through with it, and he’s

catching at any justification of what he has seen in her that has

chilled him, so that he may, poor wretch! coax back his lost illusion.”

Well, if that was it, what in the world could I, or anybody, do about

it?

His next remark was transparent enough. “Do you approve of young ladies

smoking?”

I met his question with another: “What reasons can be urged against it?”

He was quick. “Then you don’t mind it?” There was actual hope in the way

he rushed at this.

I laughed. “I didn’t say I didn’t mind it.” (As a matter of fact I do

mind it; but it seemed best not to say so to him.)

He fell off again. “I certainly saw very nice people doing it up there.”

I filled this out. “You’ll see very nice people doing it everywhere.”

“Not in Kings Port! At least, not my sort of people!” He stiffly

proclaimed this.

I tried to draw him out. “But is there, after all, any valid objection

to it?”

But he was off on a preceding speculation. “A mother or any parent,” he

said, “might encourage the daughter to smoke, too. And the girl might

take it up so as not to be thought peculiar where she was, and then she

might drop it very gladly.”

I became specific. “Drop it, you mean, when she came to a place where

doing it would be thought--well, in bad style?”

“Or for the better reason,” he answered, “that she didn’t really like it

herself.”

“How much you don’t ‘really like it’ yourself!” I remarked.

This time he was slow. “Well--well--why need they? Are not their lips

more innocent than ours? Is not the association somewhat--?”

“My dear fellow,” I interrupted, “the association is, I think you’ll

have to agree, scarcely of my making!”

“That’s true enough,” he laughed. “And, as you say, very nice people

do it everywhere. But not here. Have you ever noticed,” he now inquired

with continued transparency, “how much harder they are on each other

than we are on them?”

“Oh, yes! I’ve noticed that.” I surmised it was this sort of thing

he had earlier choked himself off from telling me in his unfinished

complaint about his aunt; but I was to learn later that on this occasion

it was upon the poor boy himself and not on the smoking habits of Miss

Rieppe, that his aunt had heavily descended. I also reflected that if

cigarettes were the only thing he deprecated in the lady of his choice,

the lost illusion might be coaxed back. The trouble was that deprecated

something fairly distant from cigarettes. The cake was my quite

sufficient trouble; it stuck in my throat worse than the probably

magnified gossip I had heard; this, for the present, I could manage to

swallow.

He came out now with a personal note. “I suppose you think I’m a ninny.”

“Never in the wildest dream!”

“Well, but too innocent for a man, anyhow.”

“That would be an insult,” I declared laughingly.

“For I’m not innocent in the least. You’ll find we’re all men here, just

as much as any men in the North you could pick out. South Carolina

has never lacked sporting blood, sir. But in Newport--well, sir, we

gentlemen down here, when we wish a certain atmosphere and all that,

have always been accustomed to seek the demi-monde.”

“So it was with us until the women changed it.”

“The women, sir?” He was innocent!

“The ‘ladies,’ as you Southerners so chivalrously continue to style

them. The rich new fashionable ladies became so desperate in their

competition for men’s allegiance that they--well, some of them would, in

the point of conversation, greatly scandalize the smart demi-monde.”

He nodded. “Yes. I heard men say things in drawing-rooms to ladies that

a gentleman here would have been taken out and shot for. And don’t you

agree with me, sir, that good taste itself should be a sort of religion?

I don’t mean to say anything sacrilegious, but it seems to me that even

if one has ceased to believe some parts of the Bible, even if one does

not always obey the Ten Commandments, one is bound, not as a believer

but as a gentleman, to remember the difference between grossness and

refinement, between excess and restraint--that one can have and keep

just as the pagan Greeks did, a moral elegance.”

He astonished me, this ardent, ideal, troubled boy; so innocent

regarding the glaring facts of our new prosperity, so finely penetrating

as to some of the mysteries of the soul. But he was of old Huguenot

blood, and of careful and gentle upbringing; and it was delightful

to find such a young man left upon our American soil untainted by the

present fashionable idolatries.

“I bow to your creed of ‘moral elegance,’” I cried. “It never dies. It

has outlasted all the mobs and all the religions.”

“They seemed to think,” he continued, pursuing his Newport train of

thought, “that to prove you were a dead game sport you must behave

like--behave like--”

“Like a herd of swine,” I suggested.

He was merry. “Ah, if they only would--completely!”

“Completely what?”

“Behave so. Rush over a steep place into the sea.”

We sat in the quiet relish of his Scriptural idea, and the western

crimson and the twilight began to come and mingle with the perfumes.

John Mayrant’s face changed from its vivacity to a sort of pensive

wistfulness, which, for all the dash and spirit in his delicate

features, was somehow the final thing one got from the boy’s expression.

It was as though the noble memories of his race looked out of his eyes,

seeking new chances for distinction, and found instead a soil laid

waste, an empty fatherland, a people benumbed past rousing. Had he not

said, “Poor Kings Port!” as he tapped the gravestone? Moral elegance

could scarcely permit a sigh more direct.

“I am glad that you believe it never dies,” he resumed. “And I am glad

to find somebody to--talk to, you know. My friends here are everything

friends and gentlemen should be, but they don’t--I suppose it’s because

they have not had my special experiences.”

I sat waiting for the boy to go on with it. How plainly he was telling

me of his “special experiences”! He and his creed were not merely in

revolt against the herd of swine; there would be nothing special in

that; I had met people before who were that; but he was tied by honor,

and soon to be tied by the formidable nuptial knot, to a specimen

devotee of the cult. He shouldn’t marry her if he really did not want

to, and I could stop it! But how was I to begin spinning the first faint

web of plan how I might stop it, unless he came right out with the whole

thing? I didn’t believe he was the man to do that ever, even under the

loosening inspiration of drink. In wine lies truth, no doubt; but within

him, was not moral elegance the bottom truth that would, even in his

cups, keep him a gentleman, and control all such revelations? He might

smash the glasses, but he would not speak of his misgivings as to

Hortense Rieppe.

He began again, “Nor do I believe that a really nice girl would continue

to think as those few do, if she once got safe away from them. Why, my

dear sir,” he stretched out his hand in emphasis, “you do not have to

do anything untimely and extreme if you are in good earnest a dead game

sport. The time comes, and you meet the occasion as the duck swims.

There was one of them--the right kind.”

“Where?” I asked.

“Why--you’re leaning against her headstone!”

The little incongruity made us both laugh, but it was only for the

instant. The tender mood of the evening, and all that we had said,

sustained the quiet and almost grave undertone of our conference. My own

quite unconscious act of rising from the grave and standing before him

on the path to listen brought back to us our harmonious pensiveness.

“She was born in Kings Port, but educated in Europe. I don’t suppose

until the time came that she ever did anything harder than speak French,

or play the piano, or ride a horse. She had wealth and so had her

husband. He was killed in the war, and so were two of her sons. The

third was too young to go. Their fortune was swept away, but the

plantation was there, and the negroes were proud to remain faithful to

the family. She took hold of the plantation, she walked the rice-banks

in high boots. She had an overseer, who, it was told her, would possibly

take her life by poison or by violence. She nevertheless lived in that

lonely spot with no protector except her pistol and some directions

about antidotes. She dismissed him when she had proved he was cheating

her; she made the planting pay as well as any man did after the war;

she educated her last son, got him into the navy, and then, one evening,

walking the river-banks too late, she caught the fever and died.

You will understand she went with one step from cherished ease to

single-handed battle with life, a delicately nurtured lady, with no

preparation for her trials.”

“Except moral elegance,” I murmured.

“Ah, that was the point, sir! To see her you would never have guessed

it! She kept her burdens from the sight of all. She wore tribulation as

if it were a flower in her bosom. We children always looked forward

to her coming, because she was so gay and delightful to us, telling

us stories of the old times--old rides when the country was wild, old

journeys with the family and servants to the Hot Springs before the

steam cars were invented, old adventures, with the battle of New Orleans

or a famous duel in them--the sort of stories that begin with (for you

seem to know something of it yourself, sir) ‘Your grandfather, my

dear John, the year that he was twenty, got himself into serious

embarrassments through paying his attentions to two reigning beauties

at once.’ She was full of stories which began in that sort of pleasant

way.”

I said: “When a person like that dies, an impoverishment falls upon us;

the texture of life seems thinner.”

“Oh, yes, indeed! I know what you mean--to lose the people one has

always seen from the cradle. Well, she has gone away, she has taken

her memories out of the world, the old times, the old stories. Nobody,

except a little nutshell of people here, knows or cares anything about

her any more; and soon even the nutshell will be empty.” He paused, and

then, as if brushing aside his churchyard mood, he translated into his

changed thought another classic quotation: “But we can’t dawdle over

the ‘tears of things’; it’s Nature’s law. Only, when I think of the

rice-banks and the boots and the pistol, I wonder if the Newport ladies,

for all their high-balls, could do any better!”

The crimson had faded, the twilight was altogether come, but the little

noiseless breeze was blowing still; and as we left the quiet tombs

behind us, and gained Worship Street, I could not help looking back

where slept that older Kings Port about which I had heard and had said

so much. Over the graves I saw the roses, nodding and moving, as if in

acquiescent revery.

VII: The Girl Behind the Counter--II

“Which of them is idealizing?” This was the question that I asked

myself, next morning, in my boarding-house, as I dressed for breakfast;

the next morning is--at least I have always found it so--an excellent

time for searching questions; and to-day I had waked up no longer

beneath the strong, gentle spell of the churchyard. A bright sun was

shining over the eastern waters of the town, I could see from my upper

veranda the thousand flashes of the waves; the steam yacht rode placidly

and competently among them, while a coastwise steamer was sailing by

her, out to sea, to Savannah, or New York; the general world was going

on, and--which of them was idealizing? It mightn’t be so bad, after

all. Hadn’t I, perhaps, over-sentimentalized to myself the case of John

Mayrant? Hadn’t I imagined for him ever so much more anxiety than the

boy actually felt? For people can idealize down just as readily as

they can idealize up. Of Miss Hortense Rieppe I had now two partial

portraits--one by the displeased aunts, the other by their chivalric

nephew; in both she held between her experienced lips, a cigarette;

there the similarity ceased. And then, there was the toboggan

fire-escape. Well, I must meet the living original before I could decide

whether (for me, at any rate) she was the “brute” as seen by the eyes

of Mrs. Gregory St. Michael, or the “really nice girl” who was going

to marry John Mayrant on Wednesday week. Just at this point my thoughts

brought up hard again at the cake. No; I couldn’t swallow that any

better this morning than yesterday afternoon! Allow the gentleman to pay

for the feast! Better to have omitted all feast; nothing simpler, and

it would have been at least dignified, even if arid. But then, there was

the lady (a cousin or an aunt--I couldn’t remember which this morning)

who had told me she wasn’t solicitous. What did she mean by that? And

she had looked quite queer when she spoke about the phosphates. Oh,

yes, to be sure, she was his intimate aunt! Where, by the way, was Miss

Rieppe?

By the time I had eaten my breakfast and walked up Worship Street to

the post-office I was full of it all again; my searching thoughts

hadn’t simplified a single point. I always called for my mail at

the post-office, because I got it sooner; it didn’t come to the

boarding-house before I had departed on my quest for royal blood,

whereas, this way, I simply got my letters at the corner of Court and

Worship streets and walked diagonally across and down Court a few

steps to my researches, which I could vary and alleviate by reading and

answering news from home.

It was from Aunt Carola that I heard to-day. Only a little of what

she said will interest you. There had been a delightful meeting of the

Selected Salic Scions. The Baltimore Chapter had paid her Chapter a

visit. Three ladies and one very highly connected young gentleman had

come--an encouragingly full and enthusiastic meeting. They had lunched

upon cocoa, sherry, and croquettes, after which all had been more than

glad to listen to a paper read by a descendant of Edward the Third and

the young gentleman, a descendant of Catherine of Aragon, had recited

a beautiful original poem, entitled “My Queen Grandmother.” Aunt Carola

regretted that I could not have had the pleasure and the benefit of this

meeting, the young gentleman had turned out to be, also, a refined and

tasteful musician, playing, upon the piano a favorite gavotte of Louis

the Thirteenth “And while you are in Kings Port,” my aunt said; “I

expect you to profit by associating with the survivors of our good

American society--people such as one could once meet everywhere when

I was young, but who have been destroyed by the invasion of the

proletariat. You are in the last citadel of good-breeding. By the way,

find out, if you can, if any of the Bombo connection are extant; as

through them I should like, if possible, to establish a chapter of

the Scions in South Carolina. Have you, met a Miss Rieppe, a decidedly

striking young woman, who says she is from Kings Port, and who recently

passed through here with a very common man dancing attendance on her? He

owns the Hermana, and she is said to be engaged to him.”

This wasn’t as good as meeting Miss Rieppe myself; but the new angle at

which I got her from my Aunt was distinctly a contribution toward the

young woman’s likeness; I felt that I should know her at sight, if ever

she came within seeing distance. And it would be entertaining to find

that she was a Bombo; but that could wait; what couldn’t wait was the

Hermana. I postponed the Fannings, hurried by the door where they waited

for me, and, coming to the end of Court Street, turned to the right and

sought among the wharves the nearest vista that could give me a view of

the harbor. Between the silent walls of commerce desolated, and by the

empty windows from which Prosperity once looked out, I threaded my way

to a point upon the town’s eastern edge. Yes, that was the steam yacht’s

name: the Hermana. I didn’t make it out myself, she lay a trifle too far

from shore; but I could read from a little fluttering pennant that her

owner was not on board; and from the second loafer whom I questioned I

learned, besides her name, that she had come from New York here to

meet her owner, whose name he did not know and whose arrival was still

indefinite. This was not very much to find out; but it was so much more

than I had found out about the Fannings that, although I now faithfully

returned to my researches, and sat over open books until noon, I

couldn’t tell you a word of what I read. Where was Miss Rieppe, and

where was the owner of the Hermana? Also, precisely how ill was the hero

of Chattanooga, her poor dear father?

At the Exchange I opened the door upon a conversation which, in

consequence, broke off abruptly; but this much I came in for:--

“Nothing but the slightest bruise above his eye. The other one is in

bed.”

It was the severe lady who said this; I mean that lady who, among all

the severe ones I had met, seemed capable of the highest exercise of

this quality, although she had not exercised it in my presence. She

looked, in her veil and her black street dress, as aloof, and as coldly

scornful of the present day, as she had seemed when sitting over her

embroidery; but it was not of 1818, or even 1840, that she had been

talking just now: it was this morning that somebody was bruised,

somebody was in bed.

The handsome lady acknowledged my salutation completely, but not

encouragingly, and then, on the threshold, exchanged these parting

sentences with the girl behind the counter:--

“They will have to shake hands. He was not very willing, but he listened

to me. Of course, the chastisement was right--but it does not affect my

opinion of his keeping on with the position.”

“No, indeed, Aunt Josephine!” the girl agreed. “I wish he wouldn’t. Did

you say it was his right eye?”

“His left.” Miss Josephine St. Michael inclined her head once more to me

and went out of the Exchange. I retired to my usual table, and the

girl read in my manner, quite correctly, the feelings which I had not

supposed I had allowed to be evident. She said:--

“Aunt Josephine always makes strangers think she’s displeased with

them.”

I replied like the young ass which I constantly tell myself I have

ceased to be: “Oh, displeasure is as much notice as one is entitled to

from Miss St. Michael.”

The girl laughed with her delightful sweet mockery.

“I declare, you’re huffed! Now don’t tell me you’re not. But you mustn’t

be. When you know her, you’ll know that that awful manner means Aunt

Josephine is just being shy. Why, even I’m not afraid of her George

Washington glances any more!”

“Very well,” I laughed, “I’ll try to have your courage.” Over my

chocolate and sandwiches I sat in curiosity discreditable, but natural.

Who was in bed--who would have to shake hands? And why had they stopped

talking when I came in? Of course, I found myself hoping that John

Mayrant had put the owner of the Hermana in bed at the slight cost of

a bruise above his left eye. I wondered if the cake was again

countermanded, and I started upon that line. “I think I’ll have to-day,

if you please, another slice of that Lady Baltimore.” And I made ready

for another verbal skirmish.

“I’m so sorry! It’s a little stale to-day. You can have the last slice,

if you wish.”

“Thank you, I will.” She brought it. “It’s not so very stale,” I said.

“How long since it has been made?”

“Oh, it’s the same you’ve been having. You’re its only patron just now.”

“Well, no. There’s Mr. Mayrant.”

“Not for a week yet, you remember.”

So the wedding was on yet. Still, John might have smashed the owner of

the Hermana.

“Have you seen him lately?” I asked.

There was something special in the way she looked. “Not to-day. Have

you?”

“Never in the forenoon. He has his duties and I have mine.”

She made a little pause, and then, “What do you think of the President?”

“The President?” I was at a loss.

“But I’m afraid you would take his view--the Northern view,” she mused.

It gave me, suddenly, her meaning. “Oh, the President of the United

States! How you do change the subject!”

Her eyes were upon me, burning with sectional indignation, but she

seemed to be thinking too much to speak. Now, here was a topic that I

had avoided, and she had plumped it at me. Very well; she should have my

view.

“If you mean that a gentleman cannot invite any respectable member of

any race he pleases to dine privately in his house--”

“His house!” She was glowing now with it. “I think he is--I think

he is--to have one of them--and even if he likes it, not to

remember--cannot speak about him!” she wound up “I should say unbecoming

things.” She had walked out, during these words, from behind the counter

and as she stood there in the middle of the long room you might have

thought she was about to lead a cavalry charge. Then, admirably, she

put it all under, and spoke on with perfect self-control. “Why can’t

somebody explain it to him? If I knew him, I would go to him myself, and

I would say, Mr. President, we need not discuss our different tastes as

to dinner company. Nor need we discuss how much you benefit the colored

race by an act which makes every member of it immediately think that

he is fit to dine with any king in the world. But you are staying in

a house which is partly our house, ours, the South’s, for we, too, pay

taxes, you know. And since you also know our deep feeling--you may even

call it a prejudice, if it so pleases you--do you not think that, so

long as you are residing in that house, you should not gratuitously

shock our deep feeling?” She swept a magnificent low curtsy at the air.

“By Jove, Miss La Heu!” I exclaimed, “you put it so that it’s rather

hard to answer.”

“I’m glad it strikes you so.”

“But did it make them all think they were going to dine?”

“Hundreds of thousands. It was proof to them that they were as good as

anybody--just as good, without reading or writing or anything. The very

next day some of the laziest and dirtiest where we live had a new strut,

like the monkey when you put a red flannel cap on him--only the monkey

doesn’t push ladies off the sidewalk. And that state of mind, you know,”

said Miss La Heu, softening down from wrath to her roguish laugh, “isn’t

the right state of mind for racial progress! But I wasn’t thinking of

this. You know he has appointed one of them to office here.”

A light entered my brain: John Mayrant had a position at the Custom

House! John Mayrant was subordinate to the President’s appointee! She

hadn’t changed the subject so violently, after all.

I came squarely at it. “And so you wish him to resign his position?”

But I was ahead of her this time.

“The Chief of Customs?” she wonderingly murmured.

I brought her up with me now. “Did Miss Josephine St. Michael say it was

over his left eye?”

The girl instantly looked everything she thought. “I believe you were

present!” This was her highly comprehensive exclamation, accompanied

also by a blush as splendidly young as John Mayrant had been while he

so stammeringly brought out his wishes concerning the cake. I at once

decided to deceive her utterly, and therefore I spoke the exact truth:

“No, I wasn’t present.”

They did their work, my true words; the false impression flowed out of

them as smoothly as California claret from a French bottle.

“I wonder who told you?” my victim remarked. “But it doesn’t really

matter. Everybody is bound to know it. You surely were the last person

with him in the churchyard?”

“Gracious!” I admitted again with splendidly mendacious veracity. “How

we do find each other out in Kings Port!”

It was not by any means the least of the delights which I took in the

company of this charming girl that sometimes she was too much for

me, and sometimes I was too much for her. It was, of course, just the

accident of our ages; in a very few years she would catch up, would

pass, would always be too much for me. Well, to-day it was happily my

turn; I wasn’t going to finish lunch without knowing all she, at any

rate, could tell me about the left eye and the man in bed.

“Forty years ago,” I now, with ingenuity, remarked, “I suppose it would

have been pistols.”

She assented. “And I like that better--don’t you--for gentlemen?”

“Well, you mean that fists are--”

“Yes,” she finished for me.

“All the same,” I maintained, “don’t you think that there ought to be

some correspondence, some proportion, between the gravity of the cause

and the gravity of--”

“Let the coal-heavers take to their fists!” she scornfully cried.

“People of our class can’t descend--”

“Well, but,” I interrupted, “then you give the coal-heavers the palm for

discrimination.”

“How’s that?”

“Why, perfectly! Your coal-heaver kills for some offenses, while for

lighter ones he--gets a bruise over the left eye.”

“You don’t meet it, you don’t meet it! What is an insult ever but an

insult?”

“Oh, we in the North notice certain degrees--insolence, impudence,

impertinence, liberties, rudeness--all different.”

She took up my phrase with a sudden odd quietness. “You in the North.”

“Why, yes. We have, alas! to expect and allow for rudeness sometimes,

even in our chosen few, and for liberties in their chosen few; it’s only

the hotel clerk and the head waiter from whom we usually get impudence;

while insolence is the chronic condition of the Wall Street rich.”

“You in the North!” she repeated. “And so your Northern eyes can’t

see it, after all!” At these words my intelligence sailed into a great

blank, while she continued: “Frankly--and forgive me for saying it--I

was hoping that you were one Northerner who would see it.”

“But see what?” I barked in my despair.

She did not help me. “If I had been a man, nothing could have insulted

me more than that. And that’s what you don’t see,” she regretfully

finished. “It seems so strange.”

I sat in the midst of my great blank, while her handsome eyes rested

upon me. In them was that look of a certain inquiry and a certain

remoteness with which one pauses, in a museum, before some specimen of

the cave-dwelling man.

“You comprehend so much,” she meditated slowly, aloud; “you’ve been such

an agreeable disappointment, because your point of view is so often the

same as ours.” She was still surveying me with the specimen expression,

when it suddenly left her. “Do you mean to sit there and tell me,” she

broke out, “that you wouldn’t have resented it yourself?”

“O dear!” my mind lamentably said to itself, inside. Of what may have

been the exterior that I presented to her, sitting over my slice of Lady

Baltimore, I can form no impression.

“Put yourself in his place,” the girl continued.

“Ah,” I gasped, “that is always so easy to say and so hard to do.”

My remark proved not a happy one. She made a brief, cold pause over

it, and then, as she wheeled round from me, back to the counter: “No

Southerner would let pass such an affront.”

It was final. She regained her usual place, she resumed her ledger; the

curly dog, who had come out to hear our conversation, went in again; I

was disgraced. Not only with the profile of her short, belligerent

nose, but with the chilly way in which she made her pencil move over the

ledger, she told me plainly that my self-respect had failed to meet

her tests. This was what my remarkable ingenuity had achieved for me. I

swallowed the last crumbs of Lady Baltimore, and went forward to settle

the account.

“I suppose I’m scarcely entitled to ask for a fresh one to-morrow,” I

ventured. “I am so fond of this cake.”

Her officialness met me adequately. “Certainly the public is entitled to

whatever we print upon our bill-of-fare.”

Now this was going to be too bad! Henceforth I was to rank merely as

“the public,” no matter how much Lady Baltimore I should lunch upon! A

happy thought seized me, and I spoke out instantly on the strength of

it.

“Miss La Heu, I’ve a confession to make.”

But upon this beginning of mine the inauspicious door opened and young

John Mayrant came in. It was all right about his left eye; anybody could

see that bruise!

“Oh!” he exclaimed, hearty, but somewhat disconcerted. “To think of

finding you here! You’re going? But I’ll see you later?”

“I hope so,” I said. “You know where I work.”

“Yes--yes. I’ll come. We’ve all sorts of things more to say, haven’t we?

We--good-by!”

Did I hear, as I gained the street, something being said about the

General, and the state of his health?

VIII: Midsummer-Night’s Dream

You may imagine in what state of wondering I went out of that place, and

how little I could now do away with my curiosity. By the droll looks and

head-turnings which followed me from strangers that passed me by in the

street, I was made aware that I must be talking aloud to myself, and the

words which I had evidently uttered were these: “But who in the world

can he have smashed up?”

Of course, beneath the public stare and smile I kept the rest of

my thoughts to myself; yet they so possessed and took me from my

surroundings, that presently, while crossing Royal Street, I was nearly

run down by an electric car. Nor did even this serve to disperse my

preoccupation; my walk back to Court and Chancel streets is as if it had

not been; I can remember nothing about it, and the first account that

I took of external objects was to find myself sitting in my accustomed

chair in the Library, with the accustomed row of books about the battle

of Cowpens waiting on the table in front of me. How long we had thus

been facing each other, the books and I, I’ve not a notion. And with

such mysterious machinery are we human beings filled--machinery that is

in motion all the while, whether we are aware of it or not--that now,

with some part of my mind, and with my pencil assisting, I composed

several stanzas to my kingly ancestor, the goal of my fruitless search;

and yet during the whole process of my metrical exercise I was really

thinking and wondering about John Mayrant, his battles and his loves.

ODE ON INTIMATIONS OF ROYALTY

I sing to thee, thou Great Unknown,

Who canst connect me with a throne

Through uncle, cousin, aunt, or sister,

But not, I trust, through bar sinister.

Chorus:

Gules! Gules! and a cuckoo peccant!

Such was the frivolous opening of my poem, which, as it progressed, grew

even less edifying; I have quoted this fragment merely to show you how

little reverence for the Selected Salic Scions was by this time left

in my spirit, and not because the verses themselves are in the least

meritorious; they should serve as a model for no serious-minded singer,

and they afford a striking instance of that volatile mood, not to say

that inclination to ribaldry, which will at seasons crop out in me, do

what I will. It is my hope that age may help me to subdue this, although

I have observed it in some very old men.

I did not send my poem to Aunt Carola, but I wrote her a letter,

even there and then, couched in terms which I believe were altogether

respectful. I deplored my lack of success in discovering the link that

was missing between me and king’s blood; I intimated my conviction

that further effort on my part would still be met with failure; and I

renounced with fitting expressions of disappointment my candidateship

for the Scions thanking Aunt Carola for her generosity, by which I must

now no longer profit. I added that I should remain in Kings Port for the

present, as I was finding the climate of decided benefit to my health,

and the courtesy of the people an education in itself.

Whatever pain at missing the glory of becoming a Scion may have lingered

with me after this was much assuaged in a few days by my reading an

article in a New York paper, which gave an account of a meeting of my

Aunt’s Society, held in that city. My attention was attracted to this

article by the prominent heading given to it: THEY WORE THEIR CROWNS.

This in very conspicuous Roman capitals, caused me to sit up. There must

have been truth in some of it, because the food eaten by the Scions

was mentioned as consisting of sandwiches, sherry and croquettes; yet I

think that the statement that the members present addressed each

other according to the royal families from which they severally traced

descent, as, for example, Brother Guelph and Sister Plantagenet, can

scarce have beers aught but an exaggeration; nevertheless, the article

brought me undeniable consolation for my disappointment.

After finishing my letter to Aunt Carola I should have hastened out to

post it and escape from Cowpens, had I not remembered that John Mayrant

had more or less promised to meet me here. Now, there was but a

slender chance that he boy would speak to me on the subject of his late

encounter; this I must learn from other sources; but he might speak to

me about something that would open a way for my hostile preparations

against Miss Rieppe. So far he had not touched upon his impending

marriage in any way, but this reserve concerning a fact generally known

among the people whom I was seeing could hardly go on long without

becoming ridiculous. If he should shun mention of it to-day, I would

take this as a plain sign that he did not look forward to it with the

enthusiasm which a lover ought to feel for his approaching bliss; and

on such silence from him I would begin, if I could, to undermine his

intention of keeping an engagement of the heart when the heart no longer

entered into it.

While my thoughts continued to be busied over this lover and his

concerns, I noticed the works of William Shakespeare close beside me

upon a shelf; and although it was with no special purpose in mind that

I took out one of the volumes and sat down with it to wait for John

Mayrant, in a little while an inspiration came to me from its pages,

so that I was more anxious than ever the boy should not fail to meet me

here in the Library.

Was it the bruise on his forehead that had perturbed his manner just now

when he entered the Exchange? No, this was not likely to be the reason,

since he had been full as much embarrassed that first day of my seeing

him there, when he had given his order for Lady Baltimore so lamely that

the girl behind the counter had come to his aid. And what could it have

been that he had begun to tell her to-day as I was leaving the place?

Was the making of that cake again to be postponed on account of the

General’s precarious health? And what had been the nature of the insult

which young John Mayrant had punished and was now commanded to shake

hands over? Could it in truth be the owner of the Hermana whom he had

thrashed so well as to lay him up in bed? That incident had damaged two

people at least, the unknown vanquished combatant in his bodily welfare,

and me in my character as an upstanding man in the fierce feminine

estimation of Miss La Heu; but this injury it was my intention to set

right; my confession to the girl behind the counter was merely delayed.

As I sat with Shakespeare open in my lap, I added to my store of

reasoning one little new straw of argument in favor of my opinion that

John Mayrant was no longer at ease or happy about his love affair. I

had never before met any young man in whose manner nature was so finely

tempered with good bringing-up; forwardness and shyness were alike

absent from him, and his bearing had a sort of polished unconsciousness

as far removed from raw diffidence as it was from raw conceit; it

was altogether a rare and charming address in a youth of such true

youthfulness, but it had failed him upon two occasions which I have

already mentioned. Both times that he had come to the Exchange he had

stumbled in his usually prompt speech, lost his habitual ease, and

betrayed, in short, all the signs of being disconcerted. The matter

seemed suddenly quite plain to me: it was the nature of his errands to

the Exchange. The first time he had been ordering the cake for his own

wedding, and to-day it was something about the wedding again. Evidently

the high mettle of his delicacy and breeding made him painfully

conscious of the view which others must take of the part that Miss

Rieppe was playing in all this--a view from which it was out of his

power to shield her; and it was this consciousness that destroyed

his composure. From what I was soon to learn of his fine and unmoved

disregard for unfavorable opinion when he felt his course to be the

right one, I know that it was no thought at all of his own scarcely

heroic role during these days, but only the perception that outsiders

must detect in his affianced lady some of those very same qualities

which had chilled his too precipitate passion for her, and left

him alone, without romance, without family sympathy, without social

acclamations, with nothing indeed save his high-strung notion of honor

to help him bravely face the wedding march. How appalling must the

wedding march sound to a waiting bridegroom who sees the bride, that he

no longer looks at except with distaste and estrangement, coming nearer

and nearer to him up the aisle! A funeral march would be gayer than that

music, I should think! The thought came to me to break out bluntly and

say to him: “Countermand the cake! She’s only playing with you while

that yachtsman is making up his mind.” But there could be but one

outcome of such advice to John Mayrant: two people, instead of one,

would be in bed suffering from contusions. As I mused on the boy and

his attractive and appealing character, I became more rejoiced than ever

that he had thrashed somebody, I cared not very much who nor yet very

much why, so long as such thrashing had been thorough, which seemed

quite evidently and happily the case. He stood now in my eyes, in some

way that is too obscure for me to be able to explain to you, saved from

some reproach whose subtlety likewise eludes my powers of analysis.

It was already five minutes after three o’clock, my dinner hour, when he

at length appeared in the Library; and possibly I put some reproach into

my greeting: “Won’t you walk along with me to Mrs. Trevise’s?” (That was

my boarding house.)

“I could not get away from the Custom House sooner,” he explained;

and into his eyes there came for a moment that look of unrest and

preoccupation which I had observed at times while we had discussed

Newport and alcoholic girls. The two subjects seemed certainly far

enough apart! But he immediately began upon a conversation briskly

enough--so briskly that I suspected at once he had got his subject ready

in advance; he didn’t want me to speak first, lest I turn the talk into

channels embarrassing, such as bruised foreheads or wedding cake.

Well, this should not prevent me from dropping in his cup the wholesome

bitters which I had prepared.

“Well, sir! Well, sir!” such was his hearty preface. “I wonder if you’re

feeling ashamed of yourself?”

“Never when I read Shakespeare,” I answered restoring the plume to its

place.

He looked at the title. “Which one?”

“One of the unsuitable love affairs that was prevented in time.”

“Romeo and Juliet?”

“No; Bottom and Titania--and Romeo and Juliet were not prevented in

time. They had their bliss once and to the full, and died before they

caused each other anything but ecstasy. No weariness of routine, no

tears of disenchantment; complete love, completely realized--and finis!

It’s the happiest ending of all the plays.”

He looked at me hard. “Sometimes I believe you’re ironic!”

I smiled at him. “A sign of the highest civilization, then. But

please to think of Juliet after ten years of Romeo and his pin-headed

intelligence and his preordained infidelities. Do you imagine that her

predecessor, Rosamond, would have had no successors? Juliet would have

been compelled to divorce Romeo, if only for the children’s sake.

“The children!” cried John Mayrant. “Why, it’s for their sake deserted

women abstain from divorce!”

“Juliet would see deeper than such mothers. She could not have her

little sons and daughters grow up and comprehend their father’s

absences, and see their mother’s submission to his returns for such

discovery would scorch the marrow of any hearts they had.”

At this, as we came out of the Library, he made an astonishing

rejoinder, and one which I cannot in the least account for: “South

Carolina does not allow divorce.”

“Then I should think,” I said to him, “that all you people here would

be doubly careful as to what manner of husbands and wives you chose for

yourselves.”

Such a remark was sailing, you may say, almost within three points of

the wind; and his own accidental allusion to Romeo had brought it about

with an aptness and a celerity which were better for my purpose than

anything I had privately developed from the text of Bottom and Titania;

none the less, however, did I intend to press into my service that fond

couple also as basis for a moral, in spite of the sharp turn which those

last words of mine now caused him at once to give to our conversation.

His quick reversion to the beginning of the talk seemed like a dodging

of remarks that hit too near home for him to relish hearing pursued.

“Well, sir,” he resumed with the same initial briskness, “I was ashamed

if you were not.”

“I still don’t make out what impropriety we have jointly committed.”

“What do you think of the views you expressed about our country?”

“Oh! When we sat on the gravestones.”

“What do you think about it to-day?”

I turned to him as we slowly walked toward Worship Street. “Did you say

anything then that you would take back now?”

He pondered, wrinkling his forehead. “Well, but all the same, didn’t we

give the present hour a pretty black eye?”

“The present hour deserves a black eye, and two of them!”

He surveyed me squarely. “I believe you’re a pessimist!”

“That is the first trashy thing I’ve heard you say.”

“Thank you! At least admit you’re scarcely an optimist.”

“Optimist! Pessimist! Why, you’re talking just like a newspaper!”

He laughed. “Oh, don’t compare a gentleman to a newspaper.”

“Then keep your vocabulary clean of bargain-counter words. A while ago

the journalists had a furious run upon the adjective ‘un-American.’

Anybody or anything that displeased them was ‘un-American.’ They ran it

into the ground, and in its place they have lately set up ‘pessimist,’

which certainly has a threatening appearance. They don’t know its

meaning, and in their mouths it merely signifies that what a man says

snakes them feel personally uncomfortable. The word has become a dusty

rag of slang. The arrested burglar very likely calls the policeman a

pessimist; and, speaking reverently and with no intention to shock

you, the scribes and Pharisees would undoubtedly have called Christ a

pessimist when He called them hypocrites, had they been acquainted with

the word.”

Once more my remarks drew from the boy an unexpected rejoinder. We had

turned into Worship Street, and, as we passed the churchyard, he stopped

and laid his hand upon the railing of the pate.

“You don’t shock me,” he said; and then: “But you would shock my aunts.”

He paused, gazing into the churchyard, before he continued more slowly:

“And so should I--if they knew it--shock them.”

“If they knew what?” I asked.

His hand indicated a sculptured crucifix near by.

“Do you believe everything still?” he answered. “Can you?”

As he looked at me, I suppose that he read negation in my eyes.

“No more can I,” he murmured. Again he looked in among the tombstones

and flowers, where the old custodian saw us and took off his hat.

“Howdy, Daddy Ben!” John Mayrant returned pleasantly, and then resuming

to me: “No more can I believe everything.” Then he gave a brief, comical

laugh. “And I hope my aunts won’t find that out! They would think me

gone to perdition indeed. But I always go to church here” (he pointed to

the quiet building, which, for all its modest size and simplicity, had

a stately and inexpressible charm), “because I like to kneel where

my mother said her prayers, you know.” He flushed a little over this

confidence into which he had fallen, but he continued: “I like the words

of the service, too, and I don’t ask myself over-curiously what I

do believe; but there’s a permanent something within us--a Greater

Self--don’t you think?”

“A permanent something,” I assented, “which has created all the

religions all over the earth from the beginning, and of which

Christianity itself is merely one of the present temples.”

He made an exclamation at my word “present.”

“Do you think anything in this world is final?” I asked him.

“But--” he began, somewhat at a loss.

“Haven’t you found out yet that human nature is the one indestructible

reality that we know?”

“But--” he began again.

“Don’t we have the ‘latest thing’ all the time, and never the

ultimate thing, never, never? The latest thing in women’s hats is that

huge-brimmed affair with the veil as voluminous as a double-bed mosquito

netting. That hat will look improbable next spring. The latest thing

in science is radium. Radium has exploded the conservation of energy

theory--turned it into a last year’s hat. Answer me, if Christianity is

the same as when it wore among its savage ornaments a devil with horns

and a flaming Hell! Forever and forever the human race reaches out its

hand and shapes some system, some creed, some government, and declares:

‘This is at length the final thing, the cure-all,’ and lo and behold,

something flowing and eternal in the race itself presently splits the

creed and the government to pieces! Truth is a very marvelous thing. We

feel it; it can fill our eyes with tears, our hearts with joy, it can

make us die for it; but once our human lips attempt to formulate and

thus imprison it, it becomes a lie. You cannot shut truth up in any

words.”

“But it shall prevail!” the boy exclaimed with a sort of passion.

“Everything prevails,” I answered him.

“I don’t like that,” he said.

“Neither do I,” I returned. “But Jacob got Esau’s inheritance by a mean

trick.”

“Jacob was punished for it.”

“Did that help Esau much?”

“You are a pessimist!”

“Just because I see Jacob and Esau to-day, alive and kicking in Wall

Street, Washington, Newport, everywhere?”

“You’re no optimist, anyhow!”

“I hope I’m blind in neither eye.”

“You don’t give us credit--”

“For what?”

“For what we’ve accomplished since Jacob.”

“Printing, steam, and electricity, for instance? They spread the Bible

and the yellow journal with equal velocity.”

“I don’t mean science. Take our institutions.”

“Well, we’ve accomplished hospitals and the stock market--a pretty even

set-off between God and the devil.”

He laughed. “You don’t take a high view of us!”

“Nor a low one. I don’t play ostrich with any of the staring permanences

of human nature. We’re just as noble to-day as David was sometimes,

and just as bestial to-day as David was sometimes, and we’ve every

possibility inside us all the time, whether we paint our naked skins, or

wear steel armor or starched shirts.”

“Well, I believe good is the guiding power in the world.”

“Oh, John Mayrant! Good and evil draw us on like a span of horses,

sometimes like a tandem, taking turns in the lead. Order has melted into

disorder, and disorder into new order--how many times?”

“But better each time.”

“How can you know, who never lived in any age but your own?”

“I know we have a higher ideal.”

“Have we? The Greek was taught to love his neighbor as himself. He gave

his great teacher a cup of poison. We gave ours the cross.”

Again he looked away from me into the sweet old churchyard. “I can’t

answer you, but I don’t believe it.”

This brought me to gayety. “That’s unanswerable, anyhow!”

He still stared at the graves. “Those people in there didn’t think all

these uncomfortable things.”

“Ah! no! They belonged in the first volume of the history of our

national soul, before the bloom was off us.”

“That’s an odd notion! And pray what volume are we in now?”

“Only the second.”

“Since when?”

“Since that momentous picnic, the Spanish War!”

“I don’t see how that took the bloom off us.”

“It didn’t. It merely waked Europe up to the facts.”

“Our battleships, you mean?”

“Our steel rails, our gold coffers, our roaring affluence.”

“And our very accurate shooting!” he insisted; for he was a Southerner,

and man’s gallantry appealed to him more than man’s industry.

I laughed. “Yes, indeed! We may say that the Spanish War closed our

first volume with a bang. And now in the second we bid good-by to the

virgin wilderness, for it’s explored; to the Indian, for he’s conquered;

to the pioneer, for he’s dead; we’ve finished our wild, romantic

adolescence and we find ourselves a recognized world power of eighty

million people, and of general commercial endlessness, and playtime

over.”

I think, John Mayrant now asserted, “that it is going too far to say the

bloom is off us.”

“Oh, you’ll find snow in the woods away into April and May. The

freedom-loving American, the embattled farmer, is not yet extinct in the

far recesses. But the great cities grow like a creeping paralysis over

freedom, and the man from the country is walking into them all the time

because the poor, restless fellow believes wealth awaits him on their

pavements. And when he doesn’t go to them, they come to him. The Wall

Street bucket-shop goes fishing in the woods with wires a thousand miles

long; and so we exchange the solid trailblazing enterprise of Volume One

for Volume Two’s electric unrest. In Volume One our wagon was hitched

to the star of liberty. Capital and labor have cut the traces. The labor

union forbids the workingman to labor as his own virile energy and skill

prompt him. If he disobeys, he is expelled and called a ‘scab.’ Don’t

let us call ourselves the land of the free while such things go on.

We’re all thinking a deal too much about our pockets nowadays. Eternal

vigilance cannot watch liberty and the ticker at the same time.

“Well,” said John Mayrant, “we’re not thinking about our pockets in

Kings Port, because” (and here there came into his voice and face that

sudden humor which made him so delightful)--“because we haven’t got any

pockets to think of!”

This brought me down to cheerfulness from my flight among the cold

clouds.

He continued: “Any more lamentations, Mr. Jeremiah?”

“Those who begin to call names, John Mayrant--but never mind! I

could lament you sick if I chose to go on about our corporations and

corruption that I see with my pessimistic eye; but the other eye sees

the American man himself--the type that our eighty millions on the whole

melt into and to which my heart warms each time I land again from more

polished and colder shores--my optimistic eye sees that American dealing

adequately with these political diseases. For stronger even than his

kindness, his ability, and his dishonesty is his self-preservation. He’s

going to stand up for the ‘open shop’ and sit down on the ‘trust’; and I

assure you that I don’t in the least resemble the Evening Post.”

A look of inquiry was in John Mayrant’s features.

“The New York Evening Post,” I repeated with surprise. Still the inquiry

of his face remained.

“Oh, fortunate youth!” I cried. “To have escaped the New York Evening

Post!”

“Is it so heinous?”

“Well!... well!... how exactly describe it?... make you see it?...

It’s partially tongue-tied, a sad victim of its own excesses. Habitual

over-indulgence in blaming has given it a painful stutter when

attempting praise; it’s the sprucely written sheet of the supercilious;

it’s the after-dinner pill of the American who prefers Europe; it’s our

Republic’s common scold, the Xantippe of journalism, the paper without a

country.”

“The paper without a country! That’s very good!”

“Oh, no! I’ll tell you something much better, but it is not mine. A

clever New Yorker said that what with The Sun--”

“I know that paper.”

“--what with The Sun making vice so attractive in the morning and the

Post making virtue so odious in the evening, it was very hard for a man

to be good in New York.”

“I fear I should subscribe to The Sun,” said John Mayrant. He took his

hand from the church-gate railing, and we had turned to stroll down

Worship Street when he was unexpectedly addressed.

For some minutes, while John Mayrant and I had been talking, I had grown

aware, without taking any definite note of it, that the old custodian

of the churchyard, Daddy Ben, had come slowly near us from the distant

corner of his demesne, where he had been (to all appearances) engaged in

some trifling activity among the flowers--perhaps picking off the faded

blossoms. It now came home to me that the venerable negro had really

been, in a surreptitious way, watching John Mayrant, and waiting for

something--either for the right moment to utter what he now uttered, or

his own delayed decision to utter it at all.

“Mas’ John!” he called quite softly. His tone was fairly padded with

caution, and I saw that in the pause which followed, his eye shot

a swift look at the bruise on Mayrant’s forehead, and another look,

equally swift, at me.

“Well, Daddy Ben, what is it?”

The custodian shunted close to the gate which separated him from us.

“Mas’ John, I speck de President he dun’ know de cullud people like we

knows ‘um, else he nebber bin ‘pint dat ar boss in de Cussum House, no,

sah.”

After this effort he wiped his forehead and breathed hard.

To my astonishment, the effort brought immediately a stern change over

John Mayrant’s face; then he answered in the kindest tones, “Thank you,

Daddy Ben.”

This answer interpreted for me the whole thing, which otherwise would

have been obscure enough: the old man held it to be an indignity that

his young “Mas’ John” should, by the President’s act, find himself the

subordinate of a member of the black race, and he had just now, in

his perspiring effort, expressed his sympathy! Why he had chosen this

particular moment (after quite obvious debate with himself) I did not

see until somewhat later.

He now left us standing at the gate; and it was not for some moments

that John Mayrant spoke again, evidently closing, for our two selves,

this delicate subject.

“I wish we had not got into that second volume of yours.”

“That’s not progressive.”

“I hate progress.”

“What’s the use? Better grow old gracefully!

“‘Qui no pas l’esprit de son age

De son age a tout le malheur.’”

“Well, I’m personally not growing old, just yet.”

“Neither is the United States.”

“Well, I don’t know. It’s too easy for sick or worthless people to

survive nowadays. They are clotting up our square miles very fast.

Philanthropists don’t seem to remember that you can beget children a

great deal faster than you can educate them; and at this rate I believe

universal suffrage will kill us off before our time.”

“Do not believe it! We are going to find out that universal suffrage is

like the appendix--useful at an early stage of the race’s evolution but

to-day merely a threat to life.”

He thought this over. “But a surgical operation is pretty serious, you

know.”

“It’ll be done by absorption. Why, you’ve begun it yourselves, and so

has Massachusetts. The appendix will be removed, black and white--and

I shouldn’t much fear surgery. We’re not nearly civilized enough yet to

have lost the power Of recuperation, and in spite of our express-train

speed, I doubt if we shall travel from crudity to rottenness without a

pause at maturity.”

“That is the old, old story,” he said.

“Yes; is there anything new under the sun?”

He was gloomy. “Nothing, I suppose.” Then the gloom lightened. “Nothing

new under the sun--except the fashionable families of Newport!”

This again brought us from the clouds of speculation down to Worship

Street, where we were walking toward South Place. It also unexpectedly

furnished me with the means to lead back our talk so gently, without

a jolt or a jerk, to my moral and the delicate topic of matrimony from

which he had dodged away, that he never awoke to what was coming until

it had come. He began pointing out, as we passed them, certain houses

which were now, or had at some period been, the dwellings of his many

relatives: “My cousin Julia So-and-so lives there,” he would say; or,

“My great-uncle, known as Regent Tom, owned that before the War”; and

once, “The Rev. Joseph Priedieu, my great-grandfather, built that house

to marry his fifth wife in, but the grave claimed him first.”

So I asked him a riddle. “What is the difference between Kings Port and

Newport?”

This he, of course, gave up.

“Here you are all connected by marriage, and there they are all

connected by divorce.”

“That’s true!” he cried, “that’s very true. I met the most

embarrassingly cater-cornered families.”

“Oh, they weren’t embarrassed!” I interjected.

“No, but I was,” said John.

“And you told me you weren’t innocent!” I exclaimed. “They are going

to institute a divorce march,” I continued. “‘Lohengrin’ or

‘Midsummer-Night’s Dream’ played backward. They have not settled which

it is to be taught in the nursery with the other kindergarten melodies.”

He was still unsuspectingly diverted; and we walked along until we

turned in the direction of my boarding-house.

“Did you ever notice,” I now said, “what a perpetual allegory

‘Midsummer-Night’s Dream’ contains?”

“I thought it was just a fairy sort of thing.”

“Yes, but when a great poet sets his hand to a fairy sort of thing, you

get--well, you get poor Titania.”

“She fell in love with a jackass,” he remarked. “Puck bewitched her.”

“Precisely. A lovely woman with her arms around a jackass. Does that

never happen in Kings Port?”

He began smiling to himself. “I’m afraid Puck isn’t all dead yet.”

I was now in a position to begin dropping my bitters. “Shakespeare was

probably too gallant to put it the other way, and make Oberon fall in

love with a female jackass. But what an allegory!”

“Yes,” he muttered. “Yes.”

I followed with another drop. “Titania got out of it. It is not always

solved so easily.”

“No,” he muttered. “No.” It was quite evident that the flavor of my

bitters reached him.

He was walking slowly, with his head down, and frowning hard. We had now

come to the steps of my boarding-house, and I dropped my last drop. “But

a disenchanted woman has the best of it--before marriage, at least.”

He looked up quickly. “How?”

I evinced surprise. “Why, she can always break off honorably, and we

never can, I suppose.”

For the third time this day he made me an astonishing rejoinder: “Would

you like to take orders from a negro?”

It reduced me to stammering. “I have never--such a juncture has never--”

“Of course you wouldn’t. Even a Northerner!”

His face, as he said this, was a single glittering piece of fierceness.

I was still so much taken aback that I said rather flatly: “But who has

to?”

“I have to.” With this he abruptly turned on his heel and left me

standing on the steps. For a moment I stared after him; and then, as I

rang the bell, he was back again; and with that formality which at times

overtook him he began: “I will ask you to excuse my hasty--”

“Oh, John Mayrant! What a notion!”

But he was by no means to be put off, and he proceeded with stiffer

formality: “I feel that I have not acted politely just now, and I beg to

assure you that I intended no slight.”

My first impulse was to lay a hand upon his shoulder and say to him:

“My dear fellow, stuff and nonsense!” Thus I should have treated any

Northern friend; but here was no Northerner. I am glad that I had

the sense to feel that any careless, good-natured putting away of his

deliberate and definitely tendered apology would seem to him a “slight”

on my part. His punctilious value for certain observances between

man and man reached me suddenly and deeply, and took me far from the

familiarity which breeds contempt.

“Why, John Mayrant,” I said, “you could never offend me unless I thought

that you wished to, and how should I possibly think that?”

“Thank you,” he replied very simply.

I rang the bell a second time. “If we can get into the house,” I

suggested, “won’t you stop and dine with me?”

He was going to accept. “I shall be--” he had begun, in tones of

gratification, when in one instant his face was stricken with complete

dismay. “I had forgotten,” he said; and this time he was gone indeed,

and in a hurry most apparent. It resembled a flight.

What was the matter now? You will naturally think that it was an

appointment with his ladylove which he had forgotten; this was certainly

my supposition as I turned again to the front door. There stood one of

the waitresses, glaring with her white eyes half out of her black face

at the already distant back of John Mayrant.

“Oh!” I thought; but, before I could think any more, the tall, dreadful

boarder--the lady whom I secretly called Juno--swept up the steps, and

by me into the house, with a dignity that one might term deafening.

The waitress now muttered, or rather sang, a series of pious

apostrophes. “Oh, Lawd, de rampages and de ructions! Oh, Lawd, sinner is

in my way, Daniel!” She was strongly, but I think pleasurably, excited;

and she next turned to me with a most natural grin, and saying,

“Chick’n’s mos’ gone, sah,” she went back to the dining room.

This admonition sent me upstairs to make as hasty a toilet as I could.

IX: Juno

Each recent remarkable occurrence had obliterated its predecessor, and

it was with difficulty that I made a straight parting in my hair. Had it

been Miss Rieppe that John so suddenly ran away to? It seemed now more

as if the boy had been running away from somebody. The waitress had

stared at him with extraordinary interest; she had seen his bruise;

perhaps she knew how he had got it. Her excitement--had he smashed up

his official superior at the custom house? That would be an impossible

thing, I told myself instantly; as well might a nobleman cross swords

with a peasant. Perhaps the stare of the waitress had reminded him of

his bruise, and he might have felt disinclined to show himself with it

in a company of gossiping strangers. Still, that would scarcely account

for it--the dismay with which he had so suddenly left me. Was Juno

the cause--she had come up behind me; he must have seen her and her

portentous manner approaching--had the boy fled from her?

And then, his fierce outbreak about taking orders from a negro when I

was moralizing over the misfortune of marrying a jackass! I got a sort

of parting in my hair, and went down to the dining room.

Juno was there before me, with her bonnet, or rather her headdress,

still on, and I heard her making apologies to Mrs. Trevise for being so

late. Mrs. Trevise, of course, sat at the head of her table, and Juno

sat at her right hand. I was very glad not to have a seat near Juno,

because this lady was, as I have already hinted, an intolerable person

to me. Either her Southern social position or her rent (she took the

whole second floor, except Mrs. Trevise’s own rooms) was of importance

to Mrs. Trevise; but I assure you that her ways kept our landlady’s

cold, impervious tact watchful from the beginning to the end of almost

every meal. Juno was one of those persons who possess so many and such

strong feelings themselves that they think they have all the feelings

there are; at least, they certainly consider no one’s feelings but

their own. She possessed an inexhaustible store of anecdote, but it was

exclusively about our Civil War; you would have supposed that nothing

else had ever happened in the world. When conversation among the rest of

us became general, she preserved a cold and acrid inattention; when

the fancy took her to open her own mouth, it was always to begin some

reminiscence, and the reminiscence always began: “In September, 1862,

when the Northern vandals,” etc., etc., or “When the Northern vandals

were repulsed by my husband’s cousin, General Braxton Bragg,” etc., etc.

Now it was not that I was personally wounded by the term, because at the

time of the vandals I was not even born, and also because I know that

vandals cannot be kept out of any army. Deeply as I believed the March

to the Sea to have been imperative, of “Sherman’s bummers” and their

excesses I had a fair historic knowledge and a very poor opinion; and

this I should have been glad to tell Juno, had she ever given me the

chance; but her immodest sympathy for herself froze all sympathy for

her. Why could she not preserve a well-bred silence upon her sufferings,

as did the other old ladies I had met in Kings Port? Why did she drag

them in, thrust them, poke them, shove them at you? Thus it was that for

her insulting disregard of those whom her words might wound I

detested Juno; and as she was a woman, and nearly old enough to be

my grandmother, it was, of course, out of the question that I should

retaliate. When she got very bad indeed, it was calm Mrs. Trevise’s

last, but effective, resort to tinkle a little handbell and scold one of

the waitresses whom its sound would then summon from the kitchen. This

bell was tinkled not always by any means for my sake; other travellers

from the North there were who came and went, pausing at Kings Port

between Florida and their habitual abodes.

At present our company consisted of Juno; a middle-class Englishman

employed in some business capacity in town; a pair of very young

honeymooners from the “up-country”; a Louisiana poetess, who wore the

long, cylindrical ringlets of 1830, and who was attending a convention

the Daughters of Dixie; two or three males and females, best described

as et ceteras; and myself. “I shall only take a mouthful for the sake

of nourishment,” Juno was announcing, “and then I shall return to his

bedside.”

“Is he very suffering?” inquired the poetess, in melodious accent.

“It was an infamous onslaught,” Juno replied.

The poetess threw up her eyes and crooned, “Noble, doughty champion!”

“You may say so indeed, madam,” said Juno.

“Raw beefsteak’s jolly good for your eye,” observed the Briton.

This suggestion did not appear to be heard by Juno.

“I had a row with a chap,” the Briton continued. He’s my best friend

now. He made me put raw beefsteak--”

“I thank you,” interrupted Juno. “He requires no beefsteak, raw or

cooked.”

The face of the Briton reddened. “Too groggy to eat, is he?”

Mrs. Trevise tinkled her bell. “Daphne! I have said to you twice to hand

those yams.”

“I done handed ‘em twice, ma’am.”

“Hand them right away, Daphne, and don’t be so forgetful.” It was not

easy to disturb the composure of Mrs. Trevise.

The poetess now took up the broken thread. “Had I a son,” she declared,

“I would sooner witness him starve than hear him take orders from a

menial race.”

“But mightn’t starving be harder for him to experience than for you to

witness, y’ know?” asked the Briton.

At this one of the et ceteras made a sort of snuffing noise, and ate his

dinner hard.

It was the male honeymooner who next spoke. “Must have been quite a

tussle, ma’am.”

“It was an infamous onslaught!” repeated Juno. “Wish I’d seen it!”

sighed the honeymooner.

His bride smiled at him beamingly. “You’d have felt right lonesome to be

out of it, David.”

“No apology has yet been offered,” continued Juno.

“But must your nephew apologize besides taking a licking?” inquired the

Briton.

Juno turned an awful face upon hint. “It is from his brutal assailant

that apologies are due. Mr. Mayrant’s family” (she paused here for

blighting emphasis) “are well-bred people, and he will be coerced into

behaving like a gentleman for once.”

I checked an impulse here to speak out and express my doubts as to

the family coercion being founded upon any dissatisfaction with John’s

conduct.

“I wonder if reading or recitation might not soothe your nephew?” said

the poetess, now.

“I should doubt it,” answered Juno. “I have just come from his bedside.”

“I should so like to soothe him, if I could,” the poetess murmured. “If

he were well enough to hear my convention ode--”

“He is not nearly well enough,” said Juno.

The et cetera here coughed and blew his nose so remarkably that we all

started.

A short silence followed, which Juno relieved.

“I will give the young ruffian’s family the credit they deserve,” she

stated. “The whole connection despises his keeping the position.”

Another et cetera now came into it. “Is it known what exactly

precipitated the occurrence?”

Juno turned to him. “My nephew is a gentleman from whose lips no

unworthy word could ever fall.’

“Oh!” said the et cetera, mildly. “He said something, then?”

“He conveyed a well-merited rebuke in fitting terms.”

“What were the terms?” inquired the Briton.

Juno again did not hear him. “It was after a friendly game of cards.

My nephew protested against any gentleman remaining at the custom house

since the recent insulting appointment.”

I was now almost the only member of the party who had preserved strict

silence throughout this very interesting conversation, because, having

no wish to converse with Juno at any time, I especially did not desire

it now, just after her seeing me (I thought she must have seen me) in

amicable conference with the object of her formidable displeasure.

“Every Mayrant is ferocious that I ever heard of,” she continued. “You

cannot trust that seemingly delicate and human exterior. His father had

it, too--deceiving exterior and raging interior, though I will say for

that one that he would never have stooped to humiliate the family name

as his son is doing. His regiment was near by when the Northern vandals

burned our courthouse, and he made them run, I can tell you! It’s a

mercy for that poor girl that the scales have dropped from her eyes and

she has broken her engagement with him.”

“With the father?” asked a third et cetera.

Juno stared at the intruder.

Mrs. Trevise drawled a calm contribution. “The father died before this

boy was born.”

“Oh, I see!” murmured the et cetera, gratefully.

Juno proceeded. “No woman’s life would be safe with him.”

“But mightn’t he be safer for a person’s niece than for their nephew?”

said the Briton.

Mrs. Trevise’s hand moved toward the bell.

But Juno answered the question mournfully: “With such hereditary

bloodthirstiness, who can tell?” And so Mrs. Trevise moved her hand away

again.

“Excuse me, but do you know if the other gentleman is laid up, too?”

inquired the male honeymooner, hopefully.

“I am happy to understand that he is,” replied Juno.

In sheer amazement I burst out, “Oh!” and abruptly stopped.

But it was too late. I had instantly become the centre of interest. The

et ceteras and honeymooners craned their necks; the Briton leaned toward

me from opposite; the poetess, who had worn an absent expression since

being told that the injured champion was not nearly well enough to

listen to her ode, now put on her glasses and gazed at me kindly; while

Juno reared her headdress and spoke, not to me, but to the air in my

general neighborhood.

“Has any one later intelligence than what I bring from my nephew’s

bedside?”

So she hadn’t perceived who my companion at the step had been! Well, she

should be enlightened, they all should be enlightened, and vengeance was

mine. I spoke with gentleness:--

“Your nephew’s impressions, I fear, are still confused by his deplorable

misadventure.”

“May I ask what you know about his impressions?”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the hand of Mrs. Trevise move toward

her bell; but she wished to hear all about it more than she wished

concord at her harmonious table; and the hand stopped.

Juno spoke again. “Who, pray, has later news than what I bring?”

My enemy was in my hand; and an enemy in the hand is worth I don’t know

how many in the bush.

I answered most gently: “I do not come from Mr. Mayrant’s bedside,

because I have just left him at the front door in sound health--saving a

bruise over his left eye.”

During a second we all sat in a high-strung silence, and then Juno

became truly superb. “Who sees the scars he brazenly conceals?”

It took away my breath; my battle would have been lost, when the Briton

suggested: “But mayn’t he have shown those to his Aunt?”

We sat in no silence now; the first et cetera made extraordinary sounds

on his plate, Mrs. Trevise tinkled her handbell with more unction than I

had ever yet seen in her; and while she and Daphne interchanged streams

of severe words which I was too disconcerted to follow, the other et

ceteras and the honeymooners hectically effervesced into small talk. I

presently found myself eating our last course amid a reestablished calm,

when, with a rustle, Juno swept out from among us, to return (I suppose)

to the bedside. As she passed behind the Briton’s chair, that invaluable

person kicked me under the table, and on my raising my eyes to him he

gave me a large, robust wink.

X: High Walk and the Ladies

I now burned to put many questions to the rest of the company. If,

through my foolish and outreaching slyness with the girl behind the

counter, the door of my comprehension had been shut, Juno had now opened

it sufficiently wide for a number of facts to come crowding in, so to

speak, abreast. Indeed, their simultaneous arrival was not a little

confusing, as if several visitors had burst in upon me and at once begun

speaking loudly, each shouting a separate and important matter which

demanded my intelligent consideration. John Mayrant worked in the

custom house, and Kings Port frowned upon this; not merely Kings Port in

general--which counted little with the boy, if indeed he noticed general

opinion at all--but the boy’s particular Kings Port, his severe old

aunts, and his cousins, and the pretty girl at the Exchange, and the

men he played cards with, all these frowned upon it, too; yet even this

condemnation one could disregard if some lofty personal principle, some

pledge to one’s own sacred honor, were at stake--but here was no such

thing: John Mayrant hated the position himself. The salary? No, the

salary would count for nothing in the face of such a prejudice as I had

seen glitter from his eye! A strong, clever youth of twenty-three, with

the world before him, and no one to support--stop! Hortense Rieppe!

There was the lofty personal principle, the sacred pledge to honor; he

was engaged presently to endow her with all his worldly goods; and to

perform this faithfully a bridegroom must not, no matter how little he

liked “taking orders from a negro,” fling away his worldly goods some

few days before he was to pronounce his bridegroom’s vow. So here, at

Mrs. Trevise’s dinner-table, I caught for one moment, to the full, a

vision of the unhappy boy’s plight; he was sticking to a task which he

loathed that he might support a wife whom he no longer desired. Such, as

he saw it, was his duty; and nobody, not even a soul of his kin or his

kind, gave him a word or a thought of understanding, gave him anything

except the cold shoulder. Yes; from one soul he had got a sign--from

aged Daddy Ben, at the churchyard gate; and amid my jostling surmises

and conclusions, that quaint speech of the old negro, that little act of

fidelity and affection from the heart of a black man, took on a

strange pathos in its isolation amid the general harshness of his white

superiors. Over this it was that I was pausing when, all in a second,

perplexity again ruled my meditations. Juno had said that the engagement

was broken. Well, if that were the case--But was it likely to be the

case? Juno’s agreeable habit, a habit grown familiar to all of us in the

house, was to sprinkle about, along with her vitriol, liberal quantities

of the by-product of inaccuracy. Mingled with her latest illustrations,

she had poured out for us one good dose of falsehood, the antidote for

which it had been my happy office to administer on the spot. If John

Mayrant wasn’t in bed from the wounds of combat, as she had given us to

suppose, perhaps Hortense Rieppe hadn’t released him from his plighted

troth, as Juno had also announced; and distinct relief filled me when I

reasoned this out. I leave others to reason out why it was relief, and

why a dull disappointment had come over me at the news that the match

was off. This, for me, should have been good news, when you consider

that I had been so lately telling myself such a marriage must not be,

that I must myself, somehow (since no one else would), step in and

arrest the calamity; and it seems odd that I should have felt this

blankness and regret upon learning that the parties had happily settled

it for themselves, and hence my difficult and delicate assistance was

never to be needed by them.

Did any one else now sitting at our table know of Miss Rieppe’s reported

act? What particulars concerning John’s fight had been given by Juno

before my entrance? It didn’t surprise me that her nephew was in bed

from Master Mayrant’s lusty blows. One could readily guess the manner

in which young John, with his pent-up fury over the custom house, would

“land” his chastisement all over the person of any rash critic! And what

a talking about it must be going on everywhere to-day! If Kings Port

tongues had been set in motion over me and my small notebook in a

library, the whole town must be buzzing over every bruise given and

taken in this evidently emphatic battle. I had hoped to glean some

more precise information from my fellow-boarders after Juno had

disembarrassed us of her sonorous presence; but even if they were

possessed of all the facts which I lacked, Mrs. Trevise in some masterly

fashion of her own banished the subject from further discussion. She

held us off from it chiefly, I think, by adopting a certain upright

posture in her chair, and a certain tone when she inquired if we wished

a second help of the pudding. After thirty-five years of boarders and

butchers, life held no secrets or surprises for her; she was a mature,

lone, disenchanted, able lady, and even her silence was like an arm of

the law.

An all too brief conversation, nipped by Mrs. Trevise at a stage even

earlier than the bud, revealed to me that perhaps my fellow-boarders

would have been glad to ask me questions, too.

It was the male honeymooner who addressed me. “Did I understand you to

say, sir, that Mr. Mayrant had received a bruise over his left eye?”

“Daphne!” called out Mrs. Trevise, “Mr. Henderson will take an orange.”

And so we finished our meal without further reference to eyes, or

noses, or anything of the sort. It was just as well, I reflected, when I

reached my room, that I on my side had been asked no questions, since I

most likely knew less than the others who had heard all that Juno had to

say; and it would have been humiliating, after my superb appearance of

knowing more, to explain that John Mayrant had walked with me all the

way from the Library, and never told me a word about the affair.

This reflection increased my esteem for the boy’s admirable reticence.

What private matter of his own had I ever learned from him? It was other

people, invariably, who told me of his troubles. There had been that

single, quickly controlled outbreak about his position in the Custom

House, and also he had let fall that touching word concerning his faith

and his liking to say his prayers in the place where his mother had said

them; beyond this, there had never yet been anything of all that must at

the present moment be intimately stirring in his heart.

Should I “like to take orders from a negro?” Put personally, it came to

me now as a new idea came as something which had never entered my mind

before, not even as an abstract hypothesis I didn’t have to think before

reaching the answer though; something within me, which you ma call what

you please--convention, prejudice, instinct--something answered most

prompt and emphatically in the negative. I revolved in my mind as I

tried to pack into a box a number of objects that I had bought in one

or to “antique” shops. They wouldn’t go in, the objects; they were of

defeating and recalcitrant shapes, and of hostile materials--glass and

brass--and I must have a larger box made, and in that case I would buy

this afternoon the other kettle-supporter (I forget its right name) and

have the whole lot decently packed. Take orders from a colored man? Have

him give you directions, dictate you letters, discipline you if you were

unpunctual? No, indeed! And if such were my feeling, how must this young

Southerner feel? With this in my mind, I made sure that the part in my

back hair was right, and after that precaution soon found myself on my

way, in a way somewhat roundabout, to the kettle-supporter sauntering

northward along High Walk, and stopping often; the town, and the water,

and the distant shores all were so lovely, so belonged to one another,

so melted into one gentle impression of wistfulness and tenderness!

I leaned upon the stone parapet and enjoyed the quiet which every

surrounding detail brought to my senses. How could John Mayrant endure

such a situation? I continued to wonder; and I also continued to assure

myself it was absurd to suppose that the engagement was broken.

The shutting of a front door across the street almost directly behind

me attracted my attention because of its being the first sound that had

happened in noiseless, empty High Walk since I had been strolling there;

and I turned from the parapet to see that I was no longer the solitary

person in the street. Two ladies, one tall and one diminutive, both

in black and with long black veils which they had put back from their

faces, were evidently coming from a visit. As the tall one bowed to me

I recognized Mrs. Gregory St. Michael, and took off my hat. It was not

until they had crossed the street and come up the stone steps near where

I stood on High Walk that the little lady also bowed to me; she was Mrs.

Weguelin St. Michael, and from something in her prim yet charming manner

I gathered that she held it to be not perfectly well-bred in a lady to

greet a gentleman across the width of a public highway, and that she

could have wished that her tall companion had not thus greeted me, a

stranger likely to comment upon Kings Port manners. In her eyes, such

free deportment evidently went with her tall companion’s method of

speech: hadn’t the little lady informed me during our first brief

meeting that Kings Port at times thought Mrs. Gregory St. Michael’s

tongue “too downright”?

The two ladies having graciously granted me permission to join them

while they took the air, Mrs. Gregory must surely have shocked Mrs.

Weguelin by saying to me, “I haven’t a penny for your thoughts, but I’ll

exchange.”

“Would you thus bargain in the dark, madam?”

“Oh, I’ll risk that; and, to say truth, even your back, as we came out

of that house, was a back of thought.”

“Well, I confess to some thinking. Shall I begin?”

It was Mrs. Weguelin who quickly replied, smiling: “Ladies first, you

know. At least we still keep it so in Kings Port.”

“Would we did everywhere!” I exclaimed devoutly; and I was quite aware

that beneath the little lady’s gentle smile a setting down had lurked, a

setting down of the most delicate nature, administered to me not in

the least because I had deserved one, but because she did not like Mrs.

Gregory’s “downright” tongue, and could not stop her.

Mrs. Gregory now took the prerogative of ladies, and began. “I was

thinking of what we had all just been saying during our visit across the

way--and with which you are not going to agree--that our young people

would do much better to let us old people arrange their marriages for

them, as it Is done in Europe.”

“O dear!”

“I said that you would not agree; but that is because you are so young.”

“I don’t know that twenty-eight is so young.”

“You will know it when you are seventy-three.” This observation again

came from Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael, and again with a gentle and

attractive smile. It was only the second time that she had spoken; and

throughout the talk into which we now fell as we slowly walked up

and down High Walk, she never took the lead; she left that to the

“downright” tongue--but I noticed, however, that she chose her moments

to follow the lead very aptly. I also perceived plainly that what we

were really going to discuss was not at all the European principle of

marriage-making, but just simply young John and his Hortense; they were

the true kernel of the nut with whose concealing shell Mrs. Gregory was

presenting me, and in proposing an exchange of thoughts she would get

back only more thoughts upon the same subject. It was pretty evident how

much Kings Port was buzzing over all this! They fondly believed they

did not like it; but what would they have done without it? What, indeed,

were they going to do when it was all over and done with, one way or

another? As a matter of fact, they ought to be grateful to Hortense for

contributing illustriously to the excitement of their lives.

“Of course, I am well aware,” Mrs. Gregory pursued, “that the young

people of to-day believe they can all ‘teach their grandmothers to suck

eggs,’ as we say in Kings Port.”

“We say it elsewhere, too,” I mildly put in.

“Indeed? I didn’t know that the North, with its pest of Hebrew and other

low immigrants, had retained any of the good old homely saws which we

brought from England. But do you imagine that if the control of marriage

rested in the hands of parents and grandparents (where it properly

belongs), you would be witnessing in the North this disgusting spectacle

of divorce?”

“But, Mrs. St. Michael--”

“We didn’t invite you to argue when we invited you to walk!” cried the

lady, laughing.

“We should like you to answer the question,” said Mrs. Weguelin St.

Michael.

“And tell us,” Mrs. Gregory continued, “if it’s your opinion that a boy

who has never been married is a better judge of matrimony’s pitfalls

than his father.”

“Or than any older person who has bravely and worthily gone through with

the experience,” Mrs. Weguelin added.

“Ladies, I’ve no mind to argue. But we’re ahead of Europe; we don’t need

their clumsy old plan.”

Mrs. Gregory gave a gallant, incredulous snort. “I shall be interested

to learn of anything that is done better here than in Europe.”

“Oh, many things, surely! But especially the mating of the fashionable

young. They don’t need any parents to arrange for them; it’s much better

managed through precocity.”

“Through precocity? I scarcely follow you.”

And Mrs. Weguelin softly added, “You must excuse us if we do not follow

you.” But her softness nevertheless indicated that if there were any one

present needing leniency, it was myself.

“Why, yes,” I told them, “it’s through precocity. The new-rich American

no longer commits the blunder of keeping his children innocent. You’ll

see it beginning in the dancing-class, where I heard an exquisite little

girl of six say to a little boy, ‘Go away; I can’t dance with you,

because my mamma says your mamma only keeps a maid to answer the

doorbell.’ When they get home from the dancing-class, tutors in poker

and bridge are waiting to teach them how to gamble for each other’s

little dimes. I saw a little boy in knickerbockers and a wide collar

throw down the evening paper--”

“At that age? They read the papers?” interrupted Mrs. Gregory.

“They read nothing else at any age. He threw it down and said, ‘Well, I

guess there’s not much behind this raid on Steel Preferred.’ What need

has such a boy for parents or grandparents? Presently he is travelling

to a fashionable boarding-school in his father’s private car. At college

all his adolescent curiosities are lavishly gratified. His sister at

home reads the French romances, and by eighteen she, too, knows (in her

head at least) the whole of life, so that she can be perfectly trusted;

she would no more marry a mere half-millionaire just because she loved

him than she would appear twice in the same ball-dress. She and her

ball-dresses are described in the papers precisely as if she were an

animal at a show--which indeed is what she has become; and she’s eager

to be thus described, because she and her mother--even if her mother

was once a lady and knew better--are haunted by one perpetual, sickening

fear, the fear of being left out. And if you desire to pay correct

ballroom compliments, you no longer go to her mother and tell her she’s

looking every bit as young as her daughter; you go to the daughter and

tell her she’s looking every bit as old as her mother, for that’s what

she wishes to do, that’s what she tries for, what she talks, dresses,

eats, drinks, goes to indecent plays and laughs for. Yes, we manage

it through precocity, and the new-rich American parent has achieved at

least one new thing under the sun, namely, the corruption of the child.”

My ladies silently consulted each other’s expressions, after which,

in equal silence, their gaze returned to me; but their equally

intent scrutiny was expressive of quite different things. It was with

expectancy that Mrs. Gregory looked at me--she wanted more. Not so Mrs.

Weguelin; she gave me disapproval; it was shadowed in her beautiful,

lustrous eyes that burned dark in her white face with as much fire

as that of youth, yet it was not of youth, being deeply charged with

retrospection.

In what, then, had I sinned? For the little lady’s next words, coldly

murmured, increased in me an uneasiness, as of sin:--

“You have told us much that we are not accustomed to hear in Kings

Port.”

“Oh, I haven’t begun to tell you!” I exclaimed cheerily.

“You certainly have not told us,” said Mrs. Gregory, “how your

‘precocity’ escapes this divorce degradation.”

“Escape it? Those people think it is--well, provincial--not to have been

divorced at least once!”

Mrs. Gregory opened her eyes, but Mrs. Weguelin shut her lips.

I continued: “Even the children, for their own little reasons, like

it. Only last summer, in Newport, a young boy was asked how he enjoyed

having a father and an ex-father.”

“Ex-father!” said Mrs. Gregory. “Vice-father is what I should call him.”

“Maria!” murmured Mrs. Weguelin, “how can you jest upon such topics?”

“I am far from jesting, Julia. Well, young gentleman, and what answer

did this precious Newport child make?”

“He said (if you will pardon my giving you his little sentiment in his

own quite expressive idiom), ‘Me for two fathers! Double money birthdays

and Christmases. See?’ That was how he saw divorce.”

Once again my ladies consulted each other’s expressions; we moved along

High Walk in such silence that I heard the stiff little rustle which

the palmettos were making across the street; even these trees, you might

have supposed, were whispering together over the horrors that I had

recited in their decorous presence.

It was Mrs. Gregory who next spoke. “I can translate that last boy’s

language, but what did the other boy mean about a ‘raid on Steel

Preferred’--if I’ve got the jargon right?”

While I translated this for her, I felt again the disapproval in Mrs.

Weguelin’s dark eyes; and my sins--for they were twofold--were presently

made clear to me by this lady.

“Are such subjects as--as stocks” (she softly cloaked this word in scorn

immeasurable)--“are such subjects mentioned in your good society at the

North?”

I laughed heartily. “Everything’s mentioned!”

The lady paused over my reply. “I am afraid you must feel us to be very

old-fashioned in, Kings Port,” she then said.

“But I rejoice in it!”

She ignored my not wholly dexterous compliment. “And some subjects,” she

pursued, “seem to us so grave that if we permit ourselves to speak of

them at all we cannot speak of them lightly.”

No, they couldn’t speak of them lightly! Here, then, stood my two sins

revealed; everything I had imparted, and also my tone of imparting it,

had displeased Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael, not with the thing, but with

me. I had transgressed her sound old American code of good manners,

a code slightly pompous no doubt, but one in which no familiarity was

allowed to breed contempt. To her good taste, there were things in

the world which had, apparently, to exist, but which one banished from

drawing-room discussion as one conceals from sight the kitchen and

outhouses; one dealt with them only when necessity compelled, and never

in small-talk; and here had I been, so to speak, small-talking them in

that glib, modern, irresponsible cadence with which our brazen age rings

and clatters like the beating of triangles and gongs. Not triangles and

gongs, but rather strings and flutes, had been the music to which Kings

Port society had attuned its measured voice.

I saw it all, and even saw that my own dramatic sense of Mrs. Weguelin’s

dignity had perversely moved me to be more flippant than I actually

felt; and I promised myself that a more chastened tone should forthwith

redeem me from the false position I had got into.

“My dear,” said Mrs. Gregory to Mrs. Weguelin, “we must ask him to

excuse our provincialism.”

For the second time I was not wholly dexterous. “But I like it so much!”

I exclaimed; and both ladies laughed frankly.

Mrs. Gregory brought in a fable. “You’ll find us all ‘country mice’

here.”

This time I was happy. “At least, then, there’ll be no cat!” And this

caused us all to make little bows.

But the word “cat” fell into our talk as does a drop of some acid into

a chemical solution, instantly changing the whole to an unexpected new

color. The unexpected new color was, in this instance, merely what had

been latently lurking in the fluid of our consciousness all through and

now it suddenly came out.

Mrs. Gregory stared over the parapet at the harbor. “I wonder if anybody

has visited that steam yacht?”

“The Hermana?” I said. “She’s waiting, I believe, for her owner, who is

enjoying himself very much on land.” It was a strong temptation to add,

“enjoying himself with the cat,” but I resisted it.

“Oh!” said Mrs. Gregory. “Possibly a friend of yours?”

“Even his name is unknown to me. But I gather that he may be coming to

Kings Port--to attend Mr. John Mayrant’s wedding next Wednesday week.”

I hadn’t gathered this; but one is at times driven to improvising. I

wished so much to know if Juno was right about the engagement being

broken, and I looked hard at the ladies as my words fairly grazed the

“cat.” This time I expected them to consult each other’s expressions,

and such, indeed, was their immediate proceeding.

“The Wednesday following, you mean,” Mrs. Weguelin corrected.

“Postponed again? Dear me!”

Mrs. Gregory spoke this time. “General Rieppe. Less well again, it

seems.”

It would be like Juno to magnify a delay into a rupture. Then I had a

hilarious thought, which I instantly put to the ladies. “If the

poor General were to die completely, would the wedding be postponed

completely?”

“There would not be the slightest chance of that,” Mrs. Gregory

declared. And then she pronounced a sentence that was truly oracular:

“She’s coming at once to see for herself.”

To which Mrs. Weguelin added with deeper condemnation than she had so

far employed at all: “There is a rumor that she is actually coming in an

automobile.”

My silence upon these two remarks was the silence of great and sudden

interest; but it led Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael to do my perceptions

a slight injustice, and she had no intention that I should miss the

quality of her opinion regarding the vehicle in which Hortense was

reported to be travelling.

“Miss Rieppe has the extraordinary taste to come here in an automobile,”

said Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael, with deepened severity.

Though I understood quite well, without this emphasizing, that the

little lady would, with her unbending traditions, probably think it more

respectable to approach Kings Port in a wheelbarrow, I was absorbed

by the vague but copious import of Mrs. Gregory’s announcement. The

oracles, moreover, continued.

“But she is undoubtedly very clever to come and see for herself,” was

Mrs. Weguelin’s next comment.

Mrs. Gregory’s face, as she replied to her companion, took on a

censorious and superior expression. “You’ll remember, Julia, that I told

Josephine St. Michael it was what they had to expect.”

“But it was not Josephine, my dear, who at any time approved of taking

such a course. It was Eliza’s whole doing.”

It was fairly raining oracles round me, and they quite resembled, for

all the help and light they contained, their Delphic predecessors.

“And yet Eliza,” said Mrs. Gregory, “in the face of it, this very

morning, repeated her eternal assertion that we shall all see the

marriage will not take place.”

“Eliza,” murmured Mrs. Weguelin, “rates few things more highly than her

own judgment.”

Mrs. Gregory mused. “Yet she is often right when she has no right to be

right.”

I could not bear it any longer, and I said, “I heard to-day that Miss

Rieppe had broken her engagement.”

“And where did you hear that nonsense?” asked Mrs. Gregory.

My heart leaped, and I told her where.

“Oh, well! you will hear anything in a boarding-house. Indeed, that

would be a great deal too good to be true.”

“May I ask where Miss Rieppe is all this while?”

“The last news was from Palm Beach, where the air was said to be

necessary for the General.”

“But,” Mrs. Weguelin repeated, “we have every reason to believe that she

is coming here in an automobile.”

“We shall have to call, of course,” added Mrs. Gregory to her, not to

me; they were leaving me out of it. Yes, these ladies were forgetting

about me in their using preoccupation over whatever crisis it was that

now hung over John Mayrant’s love affairs--a preoccupation which was

evidently part of Kings Port’s universal buzz to-day, and which my

joining them in the street had merely mitigated for a moment. I did

not wish to be left out of it; I cannot tell you why--perhaps it was

contagious in the local air--but a veritable madness of craving to know

about it seized upon me. Of course, I saw that Miss Rieppe was, almost

too grossly and obviously, “playing for time”; the health of people’s

fathers did not cause weekly extensions of this sort. But what was

it that the young lady expected time to effect for her? Her release,

formally, by her young man, on the ground of his worldly ill fortune? Or

was it for an offer from the owner of the Hermana that she was waiting,

before she should take the step of formally releasing John Mayrant? No,

neither of these conjectures seemed to furnish a key to the tactics

of Miss Rieppe and the theory that each of these affianced parties was

strategizing to cause the other to assume the odium of breaking their

engagement, with no result save that of repeatedly countermanding a

wedding-cake, struck me as belonging admirably to a stage-comedy in

three acts, but scarcely to life as we find it. Besides, poor John

Mayrant was, all too plainly, not strategizing; he was playing as

straight a game as the honest heart of a gentleman could inspire. And

so, baffled at all points, I said (for I simply had to try something

which might lead to my sharing in Kings Port’s vibrating secret):--

“I can’t make out whether she wants to marry him or not.”

Mrs. Gregory answered. “That is just what she is coming to see for

herself.”

“But since her love was for his phosphates only--!” was my natural

exclamation.

It caused (and this time I did not expect it) my inveterate ladies to

consult each other’s expressions. They prolonged their silence so much

that I spoke again:--

“And backing out of this sort of thing can be done, I should think,

quite as cleverly, and much more simply, from a distance.”

It was Mrs. Weguelin who answered now, or, rather, who headed me off.

“Have you been able to make out whether he wants to marry her or not?”

“Oh, he never comes near any of that with me!”

“Certainly not. But we all understand that he has taken a fancy to you,

and that you have talked much with him.”

So they all understood this, did they? This, too, had played its

little special part in the buzz? Very well, then, nothing of my private

impressions should drop from my lips here, to be quoted and misquoted

and battledored and shuttlecocked, until it reached the boy himself (as

it would inevitably) in fantastic disarrangement. I laughed. “Oh, yes!

I have talked much with him. Shakespeare, I think, was our latest

subject.”

Mrs. Weguelin was plainly watching for something to drop. “Shakespeare!”

Her tone was of surprise.

I then indulged myself in that most delightful sort of impertinence,

which consists in the other person’s not seeing it. “You wouldn’t be

likely to have heard of that yet. It occurred only before dinner to-day.

But we have also talked optimism, pessimism, sociology, evolution--Mr.

Mayrant would soon become quite--” I stopped myself on the edge of

something very clumsy.

But sharp Mrs. Gregory finished for me. “Yes, you mean that if he didn’t

live in Kings Port (where we still have reverence, at any rate), he fit

would imbibe all the shallow quackeries of the hour and resemble all the

clever young donkeys of the minute.”

“Maria!” Mrs. Weguelin murmurously expostulated.

Mrs. Gregory immediately made me a handsome but equivocal apology.

“I wasn’t thinking of you at all!” she declared gayly; and it set me

doubting if perhaps she hadn’t, after all, comprehended my impertinence.

“And, thank Heaven!” she continued, “John is one of us, in spite of his

present stubborn course.”

But Mrs. Weguelin’s beautiful eyes were resting upon me with that

disapproval I had come to know. To her, sociology and evolution and all

“isms” were new-fangled inventions and murky with offense; to touch them

was defilement, and in disclosing them to John Mayrant I was a corrupter

of youth. She gathered it all up into a word that was radiant with a

kind of lovely maternal gentleness:--

“We should not wish John to become radical.”

In her voice, the whole of old Kings Port was enshrined: hereditary

faith and hereditary standards, mellow with the adherence of generations

past, and solicitous for the boy of the young generation. I saw her eyes

soften at the thought of him; and throughout the rest of our talk to its

end her gaze would now and then return to me, shadowed with disapproval.

I addressed Mrs. Gregory. “By his ‘present stubborn course’ I suppose

you mean the Custom House.”

“All of us deplore his obstinacy. His Aunt Eliza has strongly but vainly

expostulated with him. And after that, Miss Josephine felt obliged to

tell him that he need not come to see her again until he resigned a

position which reflects ignominy upon us all.”

I suppressed a whistle. I thought (as I have said earlier) that I

had caught a full vision of John Mayrant’s present plight. But my

imagination had not soared to the height of Miss Josephine St. Michael’s

act of discipline. This, it must have been, that the boy had checked

himself from telling me in the churchyard. What a character of sterner

times was Miss Josephine! I thought of Aunt Carola, but even she was not

quite of this iron, and I said so to Mrs. Gregory. “I doubt if there

be any old lady left in the North,” I said, “capable of such antique

severity.”

But Mrs. Gregory opened my eyes still further. “Oh, you’d have them

if you had the negro to deal with as we have him. Miss Josephine,” she

added, “has to-day removed her sentence of banishment.”

I felt on the verge of new discoveries. “What!” I exclaimed, “and did

she relent?”

“New circumstances intervened,” Mrs. Gregory loftily explained.

“There was an occurrence--an encounter, in fact--in which John Mayrant

fittingly punished one who had presumed. Upon hearing of it, this

morning, Miss Josephine sent a message to John that he might resume

visiting her.

“But that is perfectly grand!” I cried in my delight over Miss Josephine

as a character.

“It is perfectly natural,” returned Mrs. Gregory, quietly. “John has

behaved with credit throughout. He was at length made to see that

circumstances forbade any breach between his family and that of

the other young man. John held back--who would not, after such an

insult?--but Miss Josephine was firm, and he has promised to call and

shake hands. My cousin, Doctor Beaugarcon, assures me that the

young man’s injuries are trifling--a week will see him restored and

presentable again.”

“A week? A mere nothing!” I answered “Do you know,” I now suggested,

“that you have forgotten to ask me what I was thinking about when we

met?”

“Bless me, young gentleman! and was it so remarkable?”

“Not at all, but it partly answers what Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael asked

me. If a young man does not really wish to marry a young woman there are

ways well known by which she can be brought to break the engagement.”

“Ah,” said Mrs. Gregory, “of course; gayeties and irregularities--”

“That is, if he’s not above them,” I hastily subjoined.

“Not always, by any means,” Mrs. Gregory returned. “Kings Port has been

treated to some episodes--”

Mrs. Weguelin put in a word of defence. “It is to be said, Maria,

that John’s irregularities have invariably been conducted with perfect

propriety.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Gregory, “no Mayrant was ever known to be gross!”

“But this particular young lady,” said Mrs. Weguelin, “would not be

estranged by an masculine irregularities and gayeties. Not many.”

“How about infidelities?” I suggested. “If he should flagrantly lose his

heart to another?”

Mrs. Weguelin replied quickly. “That answers very well where hearts are

in question.”

“But,” said I, “since phosphates are no longer--?”

There was a pause. “It would be a new dilemma,” Mrs. Gregory then said

slowly, “if she turned out to care for him, after all.”

Throughout all this I was getting more and more the sense of how a

total circle of people, a well-filled, wide circle of interested people,

surrounded and cherished John Mayrant, made itself the setting of which

he was the jewel; I felt in it, even stronger than the manifestation

of personal affection (which certainly was strong enough), a collective

sense of possession in him, a clan value, a pride and a guardianship

concentrated and jealous, as of an heir to some princely estate, who

must be worthy for the sake of a community even before he was worthy

for his own sake. Thus he might amuse himself--it was in the code that

princely heirs so should pour se deniaiser, as they neatly put it in

Paris--thus might he and must he fight when his dignity was assailed;

but thus might he not marry outside certain lines prescribed, or depart

from his circle’s established creeds, divine and social, especially to

hold any position which (to borrow Mrs. Gregory’s phrase) “reflected

ignominy” upon them all. When he transgressed, their very value for him

turned them bitter against him. I know that all of us are more or less

chained to our community, which is pleased to expect us to walk its way,

and mightily displeased when we please ourselves instead by breaking

the chain and walking our own way; and I know that we are forgiven very

slowly; but I had not dreamed what a prisoner to communal criticism a

young American could be until I beheld Kings Port over John Mayrant.

And to what estate was this prince heir? Alas, his inheritance was all

of it the Past and none of it the Future; was the full churchyard and

the empty wharves! He was paying dear for his princedom! And then, there

was yet another sense of this beautiful town that I got here completely,

suddenly crystallized, though slowly gathering ever since my arrival:

all these old people were clustered about one young one. That was it;

that was the town’s ultimate tragic note: the old timber of the forest

dying and the too sparse new growth appearing scantily amid the tall,

fine, venerable, decaying trunks. It had been by no razing to the ground

and sowing with salt that the city had perished; a process less violent

but more sad had done away with it. Youth, in the wake of commerce, had

ebbed from Kings Port, had flowed out from the silent, mourning houses,

and sought life North and West, and wherever else life was to be found.

Into my revery floated a phrase from a melodious and once favorite song:

O tempo passato perche non ritorni?

And John Mayrant? Why, then, had he tarried here himself? That is a hard

saying about crabbed age and youth, but are not most of the sayings

hard that are true? What was this young man doing in Kings Port with

his brains, and his pride, and his energetic adolescence? If the Custom

House galled him, the whole country was open to him; why not have tried

his fortune out and away, over the hills, where the new cities lie, all

full of future and empty of past? Was it much to the credit of such a

young man to find himself at the age of twenty-three or twenty-four,

sound and lithe of limb, yet tied to the apron strings of Miss

Josephine, and Miss Eliza, and some thirty or forty other elderly female

relatives?

With these thoughts I looked at the ladies and wondered how I might lead

them to answer me about John Mayrant, without asking questions which

might imply something derogatory to him or painful to them. I could not

ever say to them a word which might mean, however indirectly, that I

thought their beautiful, cherished town no place for a young man to go

to seed in; this cut so close to the quick of truth that discourse must

keep wide away from it. What, then, could I ask them? As I pondered,

Mrs. Weguelin solved it for me by what she was saying to Mrs. Gregory,

of which, in my preoccupation, I had evidently missed a part:--

“--if he should share the family bad taste in wives.”

“Eliza says she has no fear of that.”

“Were I Eliza, Hugh’s performance would make me very uneasy.”

“Julia, John does not resemble Hugh.”

“Very decidedly, in coloring, Maria.”

“And Hugh found that girl in Minneapolis, Julia, where there was

doubtless no pick for the poor fellow. And remember that George chose a

lady, at any rate.”

Mrs. Weguelin gave to this a short assent. “Yes.” It portended

something more behind, which her next words duly revealed. “A lady; but

do--any--ladies ever seem quite like our own?

“Certainly not, Julia.”

You see, they were forgetting me again; but they had furnished me with a

clue.

“Mr. John Mayrant has married brothers?”

“Two,” Mrs. Gregory responded. “John is the youngest of three children.”

“I hadn’t heard of the brothers before.”

“They seldom come here. They saw fit to leave their home and their

delicate mother.”

“Oh!”

“But John,” said Mrs. Gregory, “met his responsibility like a Mayrant.”

“Whatever temptations he has yielded to,” said Mrs. Weguelin, “his

filial piety has stood proof.”

“He refused,” added Mrs. Gregory, “when George (and I have never

understood how George could be so forgetful of their mother) wrote

twice, offering him a lucrative and rising position in the railroad

company at Roanoke.”

“That was hard!” I exclaimed.

She totally misapplied my sympathy. “Oh, Anna Mayrant,” she corrected

herself, “John’s mother, Mrs. Hector Mayrant, had harder things than

forgetful sons to bear! I’ve not laid eyes on those boys since the

funeral.”

“Nearly two years,” murmured Mrs. Weguelin. And then, to me, with

something that was almost like a strange severity beneath her gentle

tone: “Therefore we are proud of John, because the better traits in his

nature remind us of his forefathers, whom we knew.”

“In Kings Port,” said Mrs. Gregory, “we prize those who ring true to the

blood.”

By way of response to this sentiment, I quoted some French to her. “Bon

chien chasse de race.”

It pleased Mrs. Weguelin. Her guarded attitude toward me relented. “John

mentioned your cultivation to us,” she said. “In these tumble-down

days it is rare to meet with one who still lives, mentally, on the

gentlefolks’ plane--the piano nobile of intelligence!”

I realized how high a compliment she was paying me, and I repaid it with

a joke. “Take care. Those who don’t live there would call it the piano

snobile.”

“Ah!” cried the delighted lady, “they’d never have the wit!”

“Did you ever hear,” I continued, “the Bostonian’s remark--‘The mission

of America is to vulgarize the world’?”

“I never expected to agree so totally with a Bostonian!” declared Mrs.

Gregory.

“Nothing so hopeful,” I pursued, “has ever been said of us. For

refinement and thoroughness and tradition delay progress, and we are

sweeping them out of the road as fast as we can.”

“Come away, Julia,” said Mrs. Gregory. “The young gentleman is getting

flippant again, and we leave him.”

The ladies, after gracious expressions concerning the pleasure of their

stroll, descended the steps at the north end of High Walk, where the

parapet stops, and turned inland from the water through a little street.

I watched them until they went out of my sight round a corner; but the

two silent, leisurely figures, moving in their black and their veils

along an empty highway, come back to me often in the pictures of my

thoughts; come back most often, indeed, as the human part of what my

memory sees when it turns to look at Kings Port. For, first, it sees

the blue frame of quiet sunny water, and the white town within its frame

beneath the clear, untainted air; and then it sees the high-slanted

roofs, red with their old corrugated tiles, and the tops of leafy

enclosures dipping below sight among quaint and huddled quadrangles;

and, next, the quiet houses standing in their separate grounds, their

narrow ends to the street and their long, two-storied galleries open

to the south, but their hushed windows closed as if against the prying,

restless Present that must not look in and disturb the motionless

memories which sit brooding behind these shutters; and between all these

silent mansions lie the narrow streets, the quiet, empty streets, along

which, as my memory watches them, pass the two ladies silently, in their

black and their veils, moving between high, mellow-colored garden walls

over whose tops look the oleanders, the climbing roses, and all the

taller flowers of the gardens.

And if Mrs. Gregory and Mrs. Weguelin seemed to me at moments as narrow

as those streets, they also seemed to me as lovely as those serene

gardens; and if I had smiled at their prejudices, I had loved their

innocence, their deep innocence, of the poisoned age which has succeeded

their own; and if I had wondered this day at their powers for cruelty, I

wondered the next day at the glimpse I had of their kindness. For during

a pelting cold rainstorm, as I sat and shivered in a Royal Street car,

waiting for it to start upon its north-bound course, the house-door

opposite which we stood at the end of the track opened, and Mrs.

Weguelin’s head appeared, nodding to the conductor as she sent her black

servant out with hot coffee for him! He took off his hat, and smiled,

and thanked her; and when we had started and I, the sole passenger in

the chilly car, asked him about this, he said with native pride: “The

ladies always watches out for us conductors in stormy weather, sir.

That’s Mistress Weguelin St. Michael, one of our finest.” And then he

gave me careful directions how to find a shop that I was seeking.

Think of this happening in New York! Think of the aristocracy of that

metropolis warming up with coffee the--but why think of it, or of a New

York conductor answering your questions with careful directions! It is

not New York’s fault, it is merely New York’s misfortune: New York is in

a hurry; and a world of haste cannot be a world either of courtesy or

of kindness. But we have progress, progress, instead; and that is a

tremendous consolation.

XI: Daddy Ben and His Seed

But what was Hortense Rieppe coming to see for herself?

Many dark things had been made plain to me by my talk with the two

ladies; yet while disclosing so much, they had still left this important

matter in shadow. I was very glad, however, for what they had revealed.

They had showed me more of John Mayrant’s character, and more also of

the destiny which had shaped his ends, so that my esteem for him had

increased; for some of the words that they had exchanged shone like

bright lanterns down into his nature upon strength and beauty lying

quietly there--young strength and beauty, yet already tempered by manly

sacrifice. I saw how it came to pass through this, through renunciation

of his own desires, through performance of duties which had fallen upon

him not quite fairly, that the eye of his spirit had been turned away

from self; thus had it grown strong-sighted and able to look far and

deep, as his speech sometimes revealed, while still his flesh was of his

youthful age, and no saint’s flesh either. This had the ladies taught me

during the fluttered interchange of their reminders and opinions, and by

their eager agreements and disagreements, I was also grateful to them in

that I could once more correct Juno. The pleasure should be mine to

tell them in the public hearing of our table that Miss Rieppe was still

engaged to John Mayrant.

But what was this interesting girl coming to see for herself?

This little hole in my knowledge gave me discomfort as I walked along

toward the antiquity shop where I was to buy the other kettle-supporter.

The ladies, with all their freedom of comment and censure, had kept

something from me. I reviewed, I pieced together, their various remarks,

those oracles, especially, which they had let fall, but it all came back

to the same thing. I did not know, and they did, what Hortense Rieppe

was coming to see for herself. At all events, the engagement was not

broken, the chance to be instrumental in having it broken was still

mine; I might still save John Mayrant from his deplorable quixotism; and

as this reflection grew with me I took increasing comfort in it, and

I stepped onward toward my kettle-supporter, filled with that sense of

moral well-being which will steal over even the humblest of us when we

feel that we are beneficently minding somebody else’s business.

Whenever the arrangement did not take me too widely from my course, I so

mapped out my walks and errands in Kings Port that I might pass by the

churchyard and church at the corner of Court and Worship streets. Even

if I did not indulge myself by turning in to stroll and loiter among the

flowers, it was enough pleasure to walk by that brick-wall. If you are

willing to wander curiously in our old towns, you may still find in many

of them good brick walls standing undisturbed, and equal in their color

and simple excellence to those of Kings Port; but fashion has pushed

these others out of its sight, among back streets and all sorts of

forgotten purlieus and abandoned dignity, and takes its walks to-day

amid cold, expensive ugliness; while the old brick walls of Kings Port

continually frame your steps with charm. No one workman famous for his

skill built them so well proportioned, so true to comeliness; it was the

general hand of their age that could shape nothing wrong, as the hand of

to-day can shape nothing right, save by a rigid following of the old.

I gave myself the pleasure this afternoon of walking by the churchyard

wall; and when I reached the iron gate, there was Daddy Ben. So full was

I of my thoughts concerning John Mayrant, and the vicissitudes of his

heart, and the Custom House, that I was moved to have words with the old

man upon the general topic.

“Well,” I said, “and so Mr. John is going to be married.”

No attempt to start a chat ever failed more signally. He assented with

a manner of mingled civility and reserve that was perfection, and

after the two syllables of which his answer consisted, he remained as

impenetrably respectful as before. I felt rather high and dry, but I

tried it again:--

“And I’m sure, Daddy Ben, that you feel as sorry as any of the family

that the phosphates failed.”

Again he replied with his two syllables of assent, and again he stood

mute, respectful, a little bent with his great age; but now his good

manners--and better manners were never seen--impelled him to break

silence upon some subject, since he would not permit himself to speak

concerning the one which I had introduced. It was the phosphates which

inspired him.

“Dey is mighty fine prostrate wukks heah, sah.”

“Yes, I’ve been told so, Daddy Ben.”

“On dis side up de ribber an’ tudder side down de ribber ‘cross de new

bridge. Wuth visitin’ fo’ strangers, sah.”

I now felt entirely high and dry. I had attempted to enter into

conversation with him about the intimate affairs of a family to which he

felt that he belonged; and with perfect tact he had not only declined

to discuss them with me, but had delicately informed me that I was a

stranger and as such had better visit the phosphate works among the

other sights of Kings Port. No diplomat could have done it better; and

as I walled away from him I knew that he regarded me as an outsider, a

Northerner, belonging to a race hostile to his people; he had seen Mas’

John friendly with me, but that was Mas’ John’s affair. And so it

was that if the ladies had kept something from me, this cunning, old,

polite, coal-black African had kept everything from me.

If all the negroes in Kings Port were like Daddy Ben, Mrs. Gregory St.

Michael would not have spoken of having them “to deal with,” and the

girl behind the counter would not have been thrown into such indignation

when she alluded to their conceit and ignorance. Daddy Ben had, so far

from being puffed up by the appointment in the Custom House, disapproved

of this. I had heard enough about the difference between the old and new

generations of the negro of Kings Port to believe it to be true, and I

had come to discern how evidently it lay at the bottom of many things

here: John Mayrant and his kind were a band united by a number of strong

ties, but by nothing so much as by their hatred of the modern negro

in their town. Yes, I was obliged to believe that the young Kings Port

African left to freedom and the ballot, was a worse African than his

slave parents; but this afternoon brought me a taste of it more pungent

than all the assurances in the world.

I bought my kettle-supporter, and learned from the robber who sold it

to me (Kings Port prices for “old things” are the most exorbitant that

I know anywhere) that a carpenter lived not far from Mrs. Trevise’s

boarding-house, and that he would make for me the box in which I could

pack my various purchases.

“That is, if he’s working this week,” added the robber.

“What else would he be doing?”

“It may be his week for getting drunk on what he earned the week

before.” And upon this he announced with as much bitterness as if he had

been John Mayrant or any of his aunts, “That’s what Boston philanthropy

has done for him.”

I dared up at this. “I suppose that’s a Southern argument for

reestablishing slavery.”

“I am not Southern; Breslau is my native town, and I came from New York

here to live five years ago. I’ve seen what your emancipation has done

for the black, and I say to you, my friend, honest I don’t know a fool

from a philanthropist any longer.”

He had much right upon his side; and it can be seen daily that

philanthropy does not always walk hand-in-hand with wisdom. Does

anything or anybody always walk so? Moreover, I am a friend to not many

superlatives, and have perceived no saying to be more true than the one

that extremes meet: they meet indeed, and folly is their meeting-place.

Nor could I say in the case of the negro which folly were the more

ridiculous;--that which expects a race which has lived no one knows

how many thousand years in mental nakedness while Confucius, Moses,

and Napoleon were flowering upon adjacent human stems, should put

on suddenly the white man’s intelligence, or that other folly which

declares we can do nothing for the African, as if Hampton had not

already wrought excellent things for him. I had no mind to enter

into all the inextricable error with this Teuton, and it was he who

continued:--

“Oh, these Boston philanthropists; oh, these know-it-alls! Why don’t

they stay home? Why do they come down here to worry us with their

ignorance? See here, my friend, let me show you!”

He rushed about his shop in a search of distraught eagerness, and with

a multitude of small exclamations, until, screeching jubilantly once,

he pounced upon a shabby and learned-looking volume. This he brought me,

thrusting it with his trembling fingers between my own, and shuffling

the open pages. But when the apparently right one was found, he

exclaimed, “No, I have better! and dashed away to a pile of pamphlets

on the floor, where he began to plough and harrow. Wondering if I was

closeted with a maniac, I looked at the book in my passive hand, and saw

diagrams of various bones to me unknown, and men’s names of which I

was equally ignorant--Mivart, Topinard, and more,--but at last that

of Huxley. But this agreeable sight was spoiled at once by the quite

horrible words Nycticebidoe, platyrrhine, catarrhine, from which I

raised my eyes to see him coming at me with two pamphlets, and scolding

as he came.

“Are you educated, yes? Have been to college, yes? Then perhaps you will

understand.”

Certainly I understood immediately that he and his pamphlets were as bad

as the book, or worse, in their use of a vocabulary designed to cause

almost any listener the gravest inconvenience. Common Eocene ancestors

occurred at the beginning of his lecture; and I believed that if it

got no stronger than this, I could at least preserve the appearance of

comprehending him; but it got stronger, and at sacro-iliac notch I may

say, without using any grossly exaggerated expression, that I became

unconscious. At least, all intelligence left me. When it returned, he

was saying.--

“But this is only the beginning. Come in here to my crania and jaws.”

Evidently he held me hypnotized, for he now hurried me unresisting

through a back door into a dark little where he turned up the gas, and I

saw shelves as in a museum, to one of which he led me. I suppose that

it was curiosity that rendered me thus sheep-like. Upon the shelf were a

number of skulls and jaws in admirable condition and graded arrangement,

beginning to the left with that flat kind of skull which one associates

with gorillas. He resumed his scolding harangue, and for a few brief

moments I understood him. Here, told by themselves, was as much of the

story of the skulls as we know, from manlike apes through glacial man

to the modern senator or railroad president. But my intelligence was

destined soon to die away again.

“That is the Caucasian skull: your skull,” he said, touching a specimen

at the right.

“Interesting,” I murmured. “I’m afraid I know nothing about skulls.”

“But you shall know someding before you leave,” he retorted, wagging his

head at me; and this time it was not the book, but a specimen, that he

pushed into my grasp. He gave it a name, not as bad as platyrrhine, but

I feared worse was coming; then he took it away from me, gave me another

skull, and while I obediently held it, pronounced something quite beyond

me.

“And what is the translation of that?” he demanded excitedly.

“Tell me,” I feebly answered.

He shouted with overweening triumph: “The translation of that is South

Carolina nigger. Notice well this so egcellent specimen. Prognathous,

megadont, platyrrhine.”

“Ha! Platyrrhine!” I saluted the one word I recognized as I drowned.

“You have said it yourself!” was his extraordinary answer;--for what

had I said? Almost as if he were going to break into a dance for joy, he

took the Caucasian skull and the other two, and set the three together

by themselves, away from the rest of the collection. The picture which

they thus made spoke more than all the measurements and statistics which

he now chattered out upon me, reading from his book as I contemplated

the skulls. There was a similarity of shape, a kinship there between

the three, which stared you in the face; but in the contours of vaulted

skull, the projecting jaws, and the great molar teeth--what was to

be seen? Why, in every respect that the African departed from the

Caucasian, he departed in the direction of the ape! Here was zoology

mutely but eloquently telling us why there had blossomed no Confucius,

no Moses, no Napoleon, upon that black stem; why no Iliad, no Parthenon,

no Sistine Madonna, had ever risen from that tropic mud.

The collector touched my sleeve. “Have you now learned someding about

skulls, my friend? Will you invite those Boston philanthropists to stay

home? They will get better results in civilization by giving votes to

monkeys than teaching Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to riggers.”

Retaliation rose in me. “Haven’t you learned to call them negroes?” I

remarked. But this was lost upon the Teuton. I was tempted to tell him

that I was no philanthropist, and no Bostonian, and that he need not

shout so loud, but my more dignified instincts restrained me. I withdrew

my sleeve from his touch (it was this act of his, I think, that had

most to do with my displeasure), and merely bidding him observe that the

enormous price of the kettle-supporter had been reduced for me by

his exhibition to a bagatelle, I left the shop of the screaming

anatomist--or Afropath, or whatever it may seem most fitting that he

should be called.

I bore the kettle-supporter with me, tied up objectionably in newspaper,

and knotted with ungainly string; and it was this bundle which prevented

my joining the girl behind the counter, and ending by a walk with a

young lady the afternoon that had begun by a walk with two old ones. I

should have liked to make my confession to her. She was evidently out

for the sake of taking the air, and had with her no companion save the

big curly white dog; confession would have been very agreeable; but I

looked again at my ugly newspaper bundle, and turned in a direction that

she was not herself pursuing.

Twice, as I went, I broke into laughter over my interview in the shop,

which I fear has lost its comical quality in the relating. To enter a

door and come serenely in among dingy mahogany and glass objects, to

bargain haughtily for a brass bauble with the shopkeeper, and to have

a few exchanged remarks suddenly turn the whole place into a sort of

bedlam with a gibbering scientist dashing skulls at me to prove his

fixed idea, and myself quite furious--I laughed more than twice; but,

by the time I had approached the neighborhood of the carpenter’s

shop, another side of it had brought reflection to my mind. Here was a

foreigner to whom slavery and the Lost Cause were nothing, whose whole

association with the South had begun but five years ago; and the race

question had brought his feelings to this pitch! He had seen the Kings

Port negro with the eyes of the flesh, and not with the eyes of theory,

and as a result the reddest rag for him was pale beside a Boston

philanthropist!

Nevertheless, I have said already that I am no lover of superlatives,

and in doctrine especially is this true. We need not expect a Confucius

from the negro, nor yet a Chesterfield; but I am an enemy also of that

blind and base hate against him, which conducts nowhere save to the

de-civilizing of white and black alike. Who brought him here? Did he

invite himself? Then let us make the best of it and teach him, lead

him, compel him to live self-respecting, not as statesman, poet, or

financier, but by the honorable toil of his hand and sweat of his brow.

Because “the door of hope” was once opened too suddenly for him is no

reason for slamming it now forever in his face.

Thus mentally I lectured back at the Teuton as I went through the

streets of Kings Port; and after a while I turned a corner which took me

abruptly, as with one magic step, out of the white man’s world into the

blackest Congo. Even the well-inhabited quarter of Kings Port (and I

had now come within this limited domain) holds narrow lanes and recesses

which teem and swarm with negroes. As cracks will run through fine

porcelain, so do these black rifts of Africa lurk almost invisible

among the gardens and the houses. The picture that these places offered,

tropic, squalid, and fecund, often caused me to walk through them and

watch the basking population; the intricate, broken wooden galleries,

the rickety outside stair cases, the red and yellow splashes of color on

the clothes lines, the agglomerate rags that stuffed holes in decaying

roofs or hung nakedly on human frames, the small, choked dwellings,

bursting open at doors and windows with black, round-eyed babies as an

overripe melon bursts with seeds, the children playing marbles in the

court, the parents playing cards in the room, the grandparents smoking

pipes on the porch, and the great-grandparents stairs gazing out at you

like creatures from the Old Testament or the jungle. From the jungle we

had stolen them, North and South had stolen them together, long ago, to

be slaves, not to be citizens, and now here they were, the fruits of

our theft; and for some reason (possibly the Teuton was the reason) that

passage from the Book of Exodus came into my head: “For I the Lord thy

God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the

children.”

These thoughts were interrupted by sounds as of altercation. I had

nearly reached the end of the lane, where I should again emerge into the

White man’s world, and where I was now walking the lane spread into a

broader space with ells and angles and rotting steps, and habitations

mostly too ruinous to be inhabited. It was from a sashless window in one

of these that the angry voices came. The first words which were distinct

aroused my interest quite beyond the scale of an ordinary altercation:--

“Calls you’self a reconstuckted niggah?”

This was said sharply and with prodigious scorn. The answer which it

brought was lengthy and of such a general sullen incoherence that I

could make out only a frequent repetition of “custom house,” and that

somebody was going to take care of somebody hereafter.

Into this the first voice broke with tones of highest contempt and

rapidity:--

“President gwine to gib brekfus’ an’ dinnah an suppah to de likes ob

you fo’ de whole remaindah oh youh wuthless nat’ral life? Get out ob my

sight, you reconstuckted niggah. I come out oh de St. Michael.”

There came through the window immediately upon this sounds of scuffling

and of a fall, and then cries for help which took me running into the

dilapidated building. Daddy Ben lay on the floor, and a thick, young

savage was kicking him. In some remarkable way I thought of the solidity

of their heads, and before the assailant even knew that he had a

witness, I sped forward, aiming my kettle-supporter, and with its sharp

brass edge I dealt him a crack over his shin with astonishing accuracy.

It was a dismal howl that he gave, and as he turned he got from me

another crack upon the other shin. I had no time to be alarmed at my

deed, or I think that I should have been very much so; I am a man above

all of peace, and physical encounters are peculiarly abhorrent to me;

but, so far from assailing me, the thick, young savage, with the single

muttered remark, “He hit me fuss,” got himself out of the house with the

most agreeable rapidity.

Daddy Ben sat up, and his first inquiry greatly reassured me as to his

state. He stared at my paper bundle. “You done make him hollah wid dat,

sah!”

I showed him the kettle-supporter through a rent in its wrapping, and

I assisted him to stand upright. His injuries proved fortunately to be

slight (although I may say here that the shock to his ancient body kept

him away for a few days from the churchyard), and when I began to talk

to him about the incident, he seemed unwilling to say much in answer to

my questions. And when I offered to accompany him to where he lived, he

declined altogether, assuring me that it was close, and that he could

walk there as well as if nothing had happened to him; but upon my asking

him if I was on the right way to the carpenter’s shop, he looked at me

curiously.

“No use you gwine dab, sah. Dat shop close up. He not wukkin, dis week,

and dat why fo’ I jaw him jus’ now when you come in an’ stop him. He de

cahpentah, my gran’son, Cha’s Coteswuth.”

XII: From the Bedside

Next morning when I saw the weltering sky I resigned myself to a day of

dullness; yet before its end I had caught a bright new glimpse of

John Mayrant’s abilities, and also had come, through tribulation, to a

further understanding of the South; so that I do not, to-day, regret the

tribulation. As the rain disappointed me of two outdoor expeditions, to

which I had been for some little while looking forward, I dedicated most

of my long morning to a sadly neglected correspondence, and trusted that

the expeditions, as soon as the next fine weather visited Kings Port,

would still be in store for me. Not only everybody in town here, but

Aunt Carola, up in the North also, had assured me that to miss the sight

of Live Oaks when the azaleas in the gardens of that country seat were

in flower would be to lose one of the rarest and most beautiful things

which could be seen anywhere; and so I looked out of my window at the

furious storm, hoping that it might not strip the bushes at Live Oaks

of their bloom, which recent tourists at Mrs. Trevise’s had described

as drawing near the zenith of its luxuriance. The other excursion to

Udolpho with John Mayrant was not so likely to fall through. Udolpho

was a sort of hunting lodge or country club near Tern Creek and an old

colonial church, so old that it bore the royal arms upon a shield

still preserved as a sign of its colonial origin. A note from Mayrant,

received at breakfast, informed me that the rain would take all

pleasure from such an excursion, and that he should seize the earliest

opportunity the weather might afford to hold me to my promise. The wet

gale, even as I sat writing, was beating down some of the full-blown

flowers in the garden next Mrs. Trevise’s house, and as the morning wore

on I watched the paths grow more strewn with broken twigs and leaves.

I filled my correspondence with accounts of Daddy Ben and his grandson,

the carpenter, doubtless from some pride in my part in that, but also

because it had become, through thinking it over, even more interesting

to-day than it had been at the moment of its occurrence; and in replying

to a sort of postscript of Aunt Carola’s in which she hurriedly wrote

that she had forgotten to say she had heard the La Heu family in South

Carolina was related to the Bombos, and should be obliged to me if I

would make inquiries about this, I told her that it would be easy,

and then described to her the Teuton, plying his “antiquity” trade

externally while internally cherishing his collected skulls and nursing

his scientific rage. All my letters were the more abundant concerning

these adventures of mine from my having kept entirely silent upon them

at Mrs. Trevise’s tea-table. I dreaded Juno when let loose upon the

negro question; and the fact that I was beginning to understand her

feelings did not at all make me wish to be deafened by them. Neither

Juno, therefore, nor any of them learned a word from me about the

kettle-supporter incident. What I did take pains to inform the assembled

company was my gratification that the report of Mr. Mayrant’s engagement

being broken was unfounded; and this caused Juno to observe that in

that case Miss Rieppe must have the most imperative reasons for uniting

herself to such a young man.

Unintimidated by the rain, this formidable creature had taken herself

off to her nephew’s bedside almost immediately after breakfast; and

later in the day I, too, risked a drenching for the sake of ordering the

packing-box that I needed. When I returned, it was close on tea-time;

I had seen Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael send out the hot coffee to the

conductor, and I had found a negro carpenter whose week it happily was

to stay sober; and now I learned that, when tea should be finished, the

poetess had in store for us, as a treat, her ode.

Our evening meal was not plain sailing, even for the veteran navigation

of Mrs. Trevise; Juno had returned from the bedside very plainly

displeased (she was always candid even when silent) by something which

had happened there; and before the joyful moment came when we all

learned what this was, a very gouty Boston lady who had arrived with her

husband from Florida on her way North--and whose nature you will readily

grasp when I tell you that we found ourselves speaking of the man as

Mrs. Braintree’s husband and never as Mr. Braintree--this crippled lady,

who was of a candor equal to Juno’s, embarked upon a conversation with

Juno that compelled Mrs. Trevise to tinkle her bell for Daphne after

only two remarks had been exchanged.

I had been sorry at first that here in this Southern boarding-house

Boston should be represented only by a lady who appeared to unite in

herself all the stony products of that city, and none of the others;

for she was as convivial as a statue and as well-informed as a

spelling-book; she stood no more for the whole of Boston than did Juno

for the whole of Kings Port. But my sorrow grew less when I found

that in Mrs. Braintree we had indeed a capable match for her Southern

counterpart. Juno, according to her custom, had remembered something

objectionable that had been perpetrated in 1865 by the Northern vandals.

“Edward,” said Mrs. Braintree to her husband, in a frightfully clear

voice, “it was at Chambersburg, was it not, that the Southern vandals

burned the house in which were your father’s title-deeds?”

Edward, who, it appeared, had fought through the whole Civil War, and

was in consequence perfectly good-humored and peaceable in his feelings

upon that subject, replied hastily and amiably: “Oh, yes, yes! Why, I

believe it was!”

But this availed nothing; Juno bent her great height forward, and

addressed Mrs. Braintree. “This is the first time I have been told

Southerners were vandals.”

“You will never be able to say that again!” replied Mrs. Braintree.

After the bell and Daphne had stopped, the invaluable Briton addressed a

genial generalization to us all: “I often think how truly awful your war

would have been if the women had fought it, y’know, instead of the men.”

“Quite so!” said the easy-going Edward “Squaws! Mutilation! Yes!” and he

laughed at his little joke, but he laughed alone.

I turned to Juno. “Speaking of mutilation, I trust your nephew is better

this evening.”

I was rejoiced by receiving a glare in response. But still more joy was

to come.

“An apology ought to help cure him a lot,” observed the Briton.

Juno employed her policy of not hearing him.

“Indeed, I trust that your nephew is in less pain,” said the poetess.

Juno was willing to answer this. “The injuries, thank you, are the

merest trifles--all that such a light-weight could inflict.” And

she shrugged her shoulders to indicate the futility of young John’s

pugilism.

“But,” the surprised Briton interposed, “I thought you said your nephew

was too feeble to eat steak or hear poetry.”

Juno could always stem the eddy of her own contradictions--but she did

raise her voice a little. “I fancy, sir, that Doctor Beaugarcon knows

what he is talking about.”

“Have they apologized yet?” inquired the male honeymooner from the

up-country.

“My nephew, sir, nobly consented to shake hands this afternoon. He did

it entirely out of respect for Mr. Mayrant’s family, who coerced him

into this tardy reparation, and who feel unable to recognize him since

his treasonable attitude in the Custom House.”

“Must be fairly hard to coerce a chap you can’t recognize,” said the

Briton.

An et cetera now spoke to the honeymoon bride from the up-country: “I

heard Doctor Beaugarcon say he was coming to visit you this evening.”

“Yais,” assented the bride. “Doctor Beaugarcon is my mother’s fourth

cousin.”

Juno now took--most unwisely, as it proved--a vindictive turn at me. “I

knew that your friend, Mr. Mayrant, was intemperate,” she began.

I don’t think that Mrs. Trevise had any intention to ring for Daphne at

this point--her curiosity was too lively; but Juno was going to risk no

such intervention, and I saw her lay a precautionary hand heavily down

over the bell. “But,” she continued, “I did not know that Mr. Mayrant

was a gambler.”

“Have you ever seen him intemperate?” I asked.

“That would be quite needless,” Juno returned. “And of the gambling I

have ocular proof, since I found him, cards, counters, and money, with

my sick nephew. He had actually brought cards in his pocket.”

“I suppose,” said the Briton, “your nephew was too sick to resist him.”

The male honeymooner, with two of the et ceteras, made such unsteady

demonstrations at this that Mrs. Trevise protracted our sitting no

longer. She rose, and this meant rising for us all.

A sense of regret and incompleteness filled me, and finding the Briton

at my elbow as our company proceeded toward the sitting room, I said:

“Too bad!”

His whisper was confident. “We’ll get the rest of it out of her yet.”

But the rest of it came without our connivance.

In the sitting room Doctor Beaugarcon sat waiting, and at sight of Juno

entering the door (she headed our irregular procession) he sprang up

and lifted admiring hands. “Oh, why didn’t I have an aunt like you!” he

exclaimed, and to Mrs. Trevise as she followed: “She pays her nephew’s

poker debts.”

“How much, cousin Tom?” asked the upcountry bride.

And the gay old doctor chuckled, as he kissed her: “Thirty dollars this

afternoon, my darling.”

At this the Briton dragged me behind a door in the hall, and there we

danced together.

“That Mayrant chap will do,” he declared; and we composed ourselves for

a proper entrance into the sitting room, where the introductions had

been made, and where Doctor Beaugarcon and Mrs. Braintree’s husband had

already fallen into war reminiscences, and were discovering with mutual

amiability that they had fought against each other in a number of

battles.

“And you generally licked us,” smiled the Union soldier.

“Ah! don’t I know myself how it feels to run!” laughed the Confederate.

“Are you down at the club?”

But upon learning from the poetess that her ode was now to be read

aloud, Doctor Beaugarcon paid his fourth cousin’s daughter a brief,

though affectionate, visit, lamenting that a very ill patient should

compel him to take himself away so immediately, but promising her

presently in his stead two visitors much more interesting.

“Miss Josephine St. Michael desires to call upon you,” he said, “and I

fancy that her nephew will escort her.”

“In all this rain?” said the bride.

“Oh, it’s letting up, letting up! Good night, Mistress Trevise. Good

night, sir; I am glad to have met you.” He shook hands with Mrs.

Braintree’s husband. “We fellows,” he whispered, “who fought in the war

have had war enough.” And bidding the general company good night, and

kissing the bride again, he left us even as the poetess returned from

her room with the manuscript.

I soon wished that I had escaped with him, because I feared what Mrs.

Braintree might say when the verses should be finished; and so, I think,

did her husband. We should have taken the hint which tactful Doctor

Beaugarcon had meant, I began to believe, to give us in that whispered

remark of his. But it had been given too lightly, and so we sat and

heard the ode out. I am sure that the poetess, wrapped in the thoughts

of her own composition, had lost sight of all but the phrasing of her

poem and the strong feelings which it not unmusically voiced; there

Is no other way to account for her being willing to read it in Mrs.

Braintree’s presence.

Whatever gayety had filled me when the Boston lady had clashed with Juno

was now changed to deprecation and concern. Indeed, I myself felt

almost as if I were being physically struck by the words, until mere

bewilderment took possession of me; and after bewilderment, a little,

a very little, light, which, however, rapidly increased. We were the

victors, we the North, and we had gone upon our way with songs and

rejoicing--able to forget, because we were the victors. We had our

victory; let the vanquished have their memory. But here was the cry of

the vanquished, coming after forty years. It was the time which at

first bewildered me; Juno had seen the war, Juno’s bitterness I could

comprehend, even if I could not comprehend her freedom in expressing it,

but the poetess could not be more than a year or two older than I was;

she had come after it was all over. Why should she prolong such memories

and feelings? But my light increased as I remembered she had not written

this for us, and that if she had not seen the flames of war, she had

seen the ashes; for the ashes I had seen myself here in Kings Port, and

had been overwhelmed by the sight, forty years later, more overwhelmed

than I could possibly say to Mrs. Gregory St. Michael, or Mrs. Weguelin,

or anybody. The strain of sitting and waiting for the end made my hands

cold and my head hot, but nevertheless the light which had come enabled

me to bend instantly to Mrs. Braintree and murmur a great and abused

quotation to her:--

“Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner.”

But my petition could not move her. She was too old; she had seen the

flames of war; and so she said to her husband:--

“Edward, will you please help me upstairs?”

And thus the lame, irreconcilable lady left the room with the assistance

of her unhappy warrior, who must have suffered far more keenly than I

did.

This departure left us all in a constraint which was becoming unbearable

when the blessed doorbell rang and delivered us, and Miss Josephine St.

Michael entered with John Mayrant. He wore a most curious expression;

his eyes went searching about the room, and at length settled upon Juno

with a light in them as impish as that which had flickered in my own

mood before the ode.

To my surprise, Miss Josephine advanced and gave me a special and marked

greeting. Before this she had always merely bowed to me; to-night she

held out her hand. “Of course my visit is not to you; but I am very glad

to find you here and express the appreciation of several of us for your

timely aid to Daddy Ben. He feels much shame in having said nothing to

you himself.”

And while I muttered those inevitable modest nothings which fit such

occasions, Miss St. Michael recounted to the bride, whom she was

ostensibly calling upon, and to the rest of our now once more harmonious

circle, my adventures in the alleys of Africa. These loomed, even with

Miss St. Michael’s perfectly quiet and simple rendering of them, almost

of heroic size, thanks doubtless to Daddy Ben’s tropical imagery when he

first told the tale; and before they were over Miss St. Michael’s

marked recognition of me actually brought from Juno some reflected

recognition--only this resembled in its graciousness the original about

as correctly as a hollow spoon reflects the human countenance divine.

Still, it was at Juno’s own request that I brought down from my chamber

and displayed to them the kettle-supporter.

I have said that Miss St. Michael’s visit was ostensibly to the bride:

and that is because for some magnetic reason or other I felt diplomacy

like an undercurrent passing among our chairs. Young John’s expression

deepened, whenever he watched Juno, to a devilishness which his polite

manners veiled no better than a mosquito netting; and I believe that his

aunt, on account of the battle between their respective nephews, had for

family reasons deemed it advisable to pay, indirectly, under cover of

the bride, a state visit to Juno; and I think that I saw Juno accepting

it as a state visit, and that the two together, without using a word

of spoken language, gave each other to understand that the recent

deplorable circumstances were a closed incident. I think that his Aunt

Josephine had desired young John to pay a visit likewise, and, to make

sure of his speedy compliance, had brought him along with her--coerced

him, as Juno would have said. He wore somewhat the look of having been

“coerced,” and he contributed remarkably few observations to the talk.

It was all harmonious, and decorous, and properly conducted, this state

visit; yet even so, Juno and John exchanged at parting some verbal

sweet-meats which rather stuck out from the smooth meringue of

diplomacy.

She contemplated his bruise. “You are feeling stronger, I hope, than you

have been lately? A bridegroom’s health should be good.”

He thanked her. “I am feeling better to-night than for many weeks.”

The rascal had the thirty dollars visibly bulging that moment in his

pocket. I doubt if he had acquainted his aunt with this episode, but she

was certain to hear it soon; and when she did hear it, I rather fancy

that she wished to smile--as I completely smiled alone in my bed that

night thinking young John over.

But I did not go to sleep smiling; listening to the “Ode for the

Daughters of Dixie” had been an ordeal too truly painful, because it

disclosed live feelings which I had thought were dead, or rather, it

disclosed that those feelings smouldered in the young as well as in the

old. Doctor Beaugarcon didn’t have them--he had fought them out, just

as Mr. Braintree had fought them out; and Mrs. Braintree, like Juno,

retained them, because she hadn’t fought them out; and John Mayrant

didn’t have them, because he had been to other places; and I didn’t have

them--never had had them in my life, because I came into the world when

it was all over. Why then--Stop, I told myself, growing very wakeful,

and seeing in the darkness the light which had come to me, you have

beheld the ashes, and even the sight has overwhelmed you; these others

were born in the ashes, and have had ashes to sleep in and ashes to eat.

This I said to myself; and I remembered that War hadn’t been all; that

Reconstruction came in due season; and I thought of the “reconstructed”

negro, as Daddy Ben had so ingeniously styled him. These white people,

my race, had been set beneath the reconstructed negro. Still, still,

this did not justify the whole of it to me; my perfectly innocent

generation seemed to be included in the unforgiving, unforgetting ode.

“I must have it out with somebody,” I said. And in time I fell asleep.

XIII: The Girl Behind the Counter--III

I was still thinking the ode over as I dressed for breakfast, for which

I was late, owing to my hair, which the changes in the weather had

rendered somewhat recalcitrant. Yes; decidedly I must have it out with

somebody. The weather was once more superb; and in the garden beneath my

window men were already sweeping away the broken twigs and debris of the

storm. I say “already,” because it had not seemed to me to be the Kings

Port custom to remove debris, or anything, with speed. I also had it in

my mind to perform at lunch Aunt Carola’s commission, and learn if the

family of La Heu were indeed of royal descent through the Bombos. I

intended to find this out from the girl behind the counter, but the

course which our conversation took led me completely to forget about it.

As soon as I entered the Exchange I planted myself in front of the

counter, in spite of the discouragement which I too plainly perceived in

her countenance; the unfavorable impression which I had made upon her at

our last interview was still in force.

I plunged into it at once. “I have a confession to make.”

“You do me surprising honor.”

“Oh, now, don’t begin like that! I suppose you never told a lie.”

“I’m telling the truth now when I say that I do not see why an entire

stranger should confess anything to me.”

“Oh, my goodness! Well, I told you a lie, anyhow; a great, successful,

deplorable lie.”

She opened her mouth under the shock of it, and I recited to her

unsparingly my deception; during this recital her mouth gradually

closed.

“Well, I declare, declare, declare!” she slowly and deliciously breathed

over the sum total; and she considered me at length, silently, before

her words came again, like a soft soliloquy. “I could never

have believed it in one who”--here gayety flashed in her eyes

suddenly--“parts his back hair so rigidly. Oh, I beg your pardon for

being personal!” And her gayety broke in ripples. Some habitual instinct

moved me to turn to the looking-glass. “Useless!” she cried, “you can’t

see it in that. But it’s perfectly splendid to-day.”

Nature has been kind to me in many ways--nay, prodigal; it is not every

man who can perceive the humor in a jest of which he is himself the

subject. I laughed with her. “I trust that I am forgiven,” I said.

“Oh, yes, you are forgiven! Come out, General, and give the gentleman

your right paw, and tell him that he is forgiven--if only for the sake

of Daddy Ben.” With these latter words she gave me a gracious nod of

understanding. They were all thanking me for the kettle-supporter! She

probably knew also the tale of John Mayrant, the cards, and the bedside.

The curly dog came out, and went through his part very graciously.

“I can guess his last name,” I remarked.

“General’s? How? Oh, you’ve heard it! I don’t believe in you any more.”

“That’s not a bit handsome, after my confession. No, I’m getting to

understand South Carolina a little. You came from the ‘up-country,’ you

call your dog General; his name is General Hampton!”

Her laughter assented. “Tell me some more about South Carolina,” she

added with her caressing insinuation.

“Well, to begin with--”

“Go sit down at your lunch-table first. Aunt Josephine would never

tolerate my encouraging gentlemen to talk to me over the counter.”

I went back obediently, and then resumed: “Well, what sort of people are

those who own the handsome garden behind Mrs. Trevise’s!”

“I don’t know them.”

“Thank you; that’s all I wanted.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’re new people. I could tell it from the way you stuck your nose in

the air.”

“Sir!”

“Oh, if you talk about my hair, I can talk about your nose, I think.

I suspected that they were: ‘new people’ because they cleaned up their

garden immediately after the storm this morning. Now, I’ll tell you

something else: the whole South looks down on the whole North.”

She made her voice kind. “Do you mind it very much?”

I joined in her latent mirth. “It makes life not worth living! But more

than this, South Carolina looks down on the whole South.”

“Not Virginia.”

“Not? An ‘entire stranger,’ you know, sometimes notices things which

escape the family eye--family likenesses in the children, for instance.”

“Never Virginia,” she persisted.

“Very well, very well! Somehow you’ve admitted the rest, however.”

She began to smile.

“And next, Kings Port looks down on all the rest of South Carolina.”

She now laughed outright. “An up-country girl will not deny that,

anyhow!”

“And finally, your aunts--”

“My aunts are Kings Port.”

“The whole of it?”

“If you mean the thirty thousand negroes--”

“No, there are other white people here--there goes your nose again!”

“I will not have you so impudent, sir!”

“A thousand pardons, I’m on my knees. But your aunts--” There was such a

flash of war in her eye that I stopped.

“May I not even mention them?” I asked her.

And suddenly upon this she became serious and gentle. “I thought that

you understood them. Would you take them from their seclusion, too? It

is all they have left--since you burned the rest in 1865.”

I had made her say what I wanted! That “you” was what I wanted. Now I

should presently have it out with her. But, for the moment, I did not

disclaim the “you.” I said:--

“The burning in 1865 was horrible, but it was war.”

“It was outrage.”

“Yes, the same kind as England’s, who burned Washington in 1812, and

whom you all so deeply admire.”

She had, it seemed, no answer to this. But we trembled on the verge of a

real quarrel. It was in her voice when she said:--

“I think I interrupted you.”

I pushed the risk one step nearer the verge, because of the words I

wished finally to reach. “In 1812, when England burned our White House

down, we did not sit in the ashes; we set about rebuilding.”

And now she burst out. “That’s not fair, that’s perfectly inexcusable!

Did England then set loose on us a pack of black savages and politicians

to help us rebuild? Why, this very day I cannot walk on the other side

of the river, I dare not venture off the New Bridge; and you who first

beat us and then unleashed the blacks to riot in a new ‘equality’ that

they were no more fit for than so many apes, you sat back at ease in

your victory and your progress, having handed the vote to the negro as

you might have handed a kerosene lamp to a child of three, and let us

crushed, breathless people cope with the chaos and destruction that

never came near you. Why, how can you dare--” Once again, admirably she

pulled herself up as she had done when she spoke of the President.

“I mustn’t!” she declared, half whispering, and then more clearly and

calmly, “I mustn’t.” And she shook her head as if shaking something off.

“Nor must you,” she finished, charmingly and quietly, with a smile.

“I will not,” I assured her. She was truly noble.

“But I did think that you understood us,” she said pensively.

“Miss La Heu, when you talked to me about the President and the White

House, I said that you were hard to answer. Do you remember?”

“Perfectly. I said I was glad you found me so.’

“You helped me to understand you then, and now I want to be helped to

further understanding. Last night I heard the ‘Ode for the Daughters of

Dixie.’ I had a bad time listening to that.”

“Do you presume to criticise it? Do we criticise your Grand Army

reunions, and your ‘Marching through Georgia,’ and your ‘John Brown’s

Body,’ and your Arlington Museum? Can we not be allowed to celebrate our

heroes and our glories and sing our songs?”

She had helped me already! Still, still, the something I was groping

for, the something which had given me such pain during the ode, remained

undissolved, remained unanalyzed between us; I still had to have it out

with her, and the point was that it had to be with her, and not

simply with myself alone. We must thrash out together the way to an

understanding; an agreement was not in the least necessary--we could

agree to differ, for that matter, with perfect cordiality--but an

understanding we must reach. And as I was thinking this my light

increased, and I saw clearly the ultimate thing which lay at the bottom

of my own feeling, and which had been strangely confusing me all along.

This discovery was the key to the whole remainder of my talk; I never

let go of it. The first thing it opened for me was that Eliza La Heu

didn’t understand me, which was quite natural, since I had only just

this moment become clear to myself.

“Many of us,” I began, “who have watched the soiling touch of politics

make dirty one clean thing after another, would not be wholly desolated

to learn that the Grand Army of the Republic had gone to another world

to sing its songs and draw its pensions.”

She looked astonished, and then she laughed. Down in the South here she

was too far away to feel the vile uses to which present politics had

turned past heroism.

“But,” I continued, “we haven’t any Daughters of the Union banded

together and handing it down.”

“It?” she echoed. “Well, if the deeds of your heroes are not a sacred

trust to you, don’t invite us, please, to resemble you.”

I waited for more, and a little more came.

“We consider Northerners foreigners, you know.”

Again I felt that hurt which hearing the ode had given me, but I now

knew how I was going to take it, and where we were presently coming out;

and I knew she didn’t mean quite all that--didn’t mean it every day, at

least--and that my speech had driven her to saying it.

“No, Miss La Heu; you don’t consider Northerners, who understand you, to

be foreigners.”

“We have never met any of that sort.”

(“Yes,” I thought, “but you really want to. Didn’t you say you hoped I

was one? Away down deep there’s a cry of kinship in you; and that you

don’t hear it, and that we don’t hear it, has been as much our fault as

yours. I see that very well now, but I’m afraid to tell you so, yet.”)

What I said was: “We’re handing the ‘sacred trust’ down, I hope.”

“I understood you to say you weren’t.”

“I said we were not handing ‘it’ down.”

I didn’t wonder that irritation again moulded her reply. “You must

excuse a daughter of Dixie if she finds the words of a son of the Union

beyond her. We haven’t had so many advantages.”

There she touched what I had thought over during my wakeful hours: the

tale of the ashes, the desolate ashes! The war had not prevented my

parents from sending me to school and college, but here the old had seen

the young grow up starved of what their fathers had given them, and the

young had looked to the old and known their stripped heritage.

“Miss La Heu,” I said, “I could not tell you, you would not wish me to

tell you, what the sight of Kings Port has made me feel. But you will

let me say this: I have understood for a long while about your old

people, your old ladies, whose faces are so fine and sad.”

I paused, but she merely looked at me, and her eyes were hard.

“And I may say this, too. I thank you very sincerely for bringing

completely home to me what I had begun to make out for myself. I hope

the Daughters of Dixie will go on singing of their heroes.”

I paused again, and now she looked away, out of the window into Royal

Street.

“Perhaps,” I still continued, “you will hardly believe me when I say

that I have looked at your monuments here with an emotion more poignant

even than that which Northern monuments raise in me.”

“Why?”

“Oh!” I exclaimed. “Need you have asked that? The North won.”

“You are quite dispassionate!” Her eyes were always toward the window.

“That’s my ‘sacred trust.’”

It made her look at me. “Yours?”

“Not yours--yet! It would be yours if you had won.” I thought a slight

change came in her steady scrutiny. “And, Miss La Heu, it was awful

about the negro. It is awful. The young North thinks so just as much as

you do. Oh, we shock our old people! We don’t expect them to change,

but they mustn’t expect us not to. And even some of them have begun to

whisper a little doubtfully. But never mind them--here’s the negro. We

can’t kick him out. That plan is childish. So, it’s like two men having

to live in one house. The white man would keep the house in repair, the

black would let it rot. Well, the black must take orders from the white.

And it will end so.”

She was eager. “Slavery again, you think?”

“Oh, never! It was too injurious to ourselves. But something between

slavery and equality.” And I ended with a quotation: “‘Patience, cousin,

and shuffle the cards.’”

“You may call me cousin--this once--because you have been, really, quite

nice--for a Northerner.”

Now we had come to the place where she must understand me.

“Not a Northerner, Miss La Heu.”

She became mocking. “Scarcely a Southerner, I presume?”

But I kept my smile and my directness. “No more a Southerner than a

Northerner.”

“Pray what, then?”

“An American.”

She was silent.

“It’s the ‘sacred trust’--for me.”

She was still silent.

“If my state seceded from the Union tomorrow, I should side with the

Union against her.”

She was frankly astonished now. “Would you really?” And I think some

light about me began to reach her. A Northerner willing to side against

a Northern state! I was very glad that I had found that phrase to make

clear to her my American creed.

I proceeded. “I shall help to hand down all the glories and all the

sadnesses; Lee’s, Lincoln’s, everybody’s. But I shall not hand ‘it’

down.”

This checked her.

“It’s easy for me, you know,” I hastily explained. “Nothing noble

about it at all. But from noble people”--and I looked hard at her--“one

expects, sooner or later, noble things.”

She repressed something she had been going to reply.

“If ever I have children,” I finished, “they shall know ‘Dixie’ and

‘Yankee Doodle’ by heart, and never know the difference. By that time

I should think they might have a chance of hearing ‘Yankee Doodle’ in

Kings Port.”

Again she checked a rapid retort. “Well,” she, after a pause, repeated,

“you have been really quite nice.”

“May I tell you what you have been?”

“Certainly not. Have you seen Mr. Mayrant to-day?”

“We have an engagement to walk this afternoon. May I go walking with you

sometime?”

“May he, General?” A wagging tail knocked on the floor behind the

counter. “General says that he will think about it. What makes you like

Mr. Mayrant so much?”

This question struck me as an odd one; nor could I make out the import

of the peculiar tone in which she put it. “Why, I should think everybody

would like him--except, perhaps, his double victim.”

“Double?”

“Yes, first of his fist and then of--of his hand!”

But she didn’t respond.

“Of his hand--his poker hand,” I explained.

“Poker hand?” She remained honestly vague.

It rejoiced me to be the first to tell her. “You haven’t heard of

Master John’s last performance? Well, finding himself forced by that

immeasurable old Aunt Josephine of yours to shake hands, he shook ‘em

all right, but he took thirty dollars away as a little set-off for his

pious docility.”

“Oh!” she murmured, overwhelmed with astonishment. Then she broke into

one of her delicious peals of laughter.

“Anybody,” I said, “likes a boy who plays a hand--and a fist--to that

tune.” I continued to say a number of commendatory words about young

John, while her sparkling eyes rested upon me. But even as I talked I

grew aware that these eyes were not sparkling, were starry rather,

and distant, and that she was not hearing what I said; so I stopped

abruptly, and at the stopping she spoke, like a person waking up.

“Oh, yes! Certainly he can take care of himself. Why not?”

“Rather creditable, don’t you think?”

“Creditable?”

“Considering his aunts and everything.”

She became haughty on the instant. “Upon my word! And do you suppose

the women of South Carolina don’t wish their men to be men? Why”--she

returned to mirth and that arch mockery which was her special charm--“we

South Carolina women consider virtue our business, and we don’t expect

the men to meddle with it!”

“Primal, perpetual, necessary!” I cried. “When that division gets

blurred, society is doomed. Are you sure John can take care of himself

every way?”

“I have other things than Mr. Mayrant to think about.” She said this

quite sharply.

It surprised me. “To be sure,” I assented. “But didn’t you once tell me

that you thought he was simple?”

She opened her ledger. “It’s a great honor to have one’s words so well

remembered.”

I was still at a loss. “Anyhow, the wedding is postponed,” I continued;

“and the cake. Of course one can’t help wondering how it’s all coming

out.”

She was now working at her ledger, bending her head over it. “Have

you ever met Miss Rieppe?” She inquired this with a sort of wonderful

softness--which I was to hear again upon a still more memorable

occasion.

“Never,” I answered, “but there’s nobody at present living whom I long

to see so much.”

She wrote on for a little while before saying, with her pencil steadily

busy, “Why?”

“Why? Don’t you? After all this fuss?”

“Oh, certainly,” she drawled. “She is so much admired--by Northerners.”

“I do hope John is able to take care of himself,” I purposely repeated.

“Take care of yourself!” she laughed angrily over her ledger.

“Me? Why? I understand you less and less!”

“Very likely.”

“Why, I want to help him!” I protested. “I don’t want him to marry her.

Oh, by the way do you happen to know what it is that she is coming here

to see for herself?”

In a moment her ledger was left, and she was looking at me straight.

Coming? When?

“Soon. In an automobile. To see something for herself.”

She pondered for quite a long moment; then her eyes returned,

searchingly, to me. “You didn’t make that up?”

I laughed, and explained. “Some of them, at any rate,” I finished, “know

what she’s coming for. They were rather queer about it, I thought.”

She pondered again. I noticed that she had deeply flushed, and that the

flush was leaving her. Then she fixed her eyes on me once more. “They

wouldn’t tell you?”

“I think that they came inadvertently near it, once or twice, and

remembered just in time that I didn’t know about it.”

“But since you do know pretty much about it!” she laughed.

I shook my head. “There’s something else, something that’s turned up;

the sort of thing that upsets calculations. And I merely hoped that

you’d know.”

On those last words of mine she gave me quite an extraordinary look, and

then, as if satisfied with what she saw in my face.--

“They don’t talk to me.”

It was an assurance, it was true, it had the ring of truth, that evident

genuineness which a piece of real confidence always possesses; she meant

me to know that we were in the same boat of ignorance to-day. And yet,

as I rose from my lunch and came forward to settle for it, I was aware

of some sense of defeat, of having been held off just as the ladies on

High Walk had held me off.

“Well,” I sighed, “I pin my faith to the aunt who says he’ll never marry

her.”

Miss La Heu had no more to say upon the subject. “Haven’t you forgotten

something?” she inquired gayly; and, as I turned to see what I had left

behind--“I mean, you had no Lady Baltimore to-day.”

“I clean forgot it!”

“No loss. It is very stale; and to-morrow I shall have a fresh supply

ready.”

As I departed through the door I was conscious of her eyes following

me, and that she had spoken of Lady Baltimore precisely because she was

thinking of something else.

XIV: The Replacers

She had been strange, perceptibly strange, had Eliza La Heu; that was

the most which I could make out of it. I had angered her in some manner

wholly beyond my intention or understanding and not all at one fixed

point in our talk; her irritation had come out and gone in again in

spots all along the colloquy, and it had been a displeasure wholly

apart from that indignation which had flashed up in her over the negro

question. This, indeed, I understood well enough, and admired her for,

and admired still more her gallant control of it; as for the other, I

gave it up.

A sense of guilt--a very slight one, to be sure--dispersed my

speculations when I was preparing for dinner, and Aunt Carola’s

postscript, open upon my writing-table, reminded me that I had never

asked Miss La Heu about the Bombos. Well, the Bombos could keep! And I

descended to dinner a little late (as too often) to feel instantly in

the air that they had been talking about me. I doubt if any company

in the world, from the Greeks down through Machiavelli to the present

moment, has ever been of a subtlety adequate to conceal from an

observant person entering a room the fact that he has been the subject

of their conversation. This company, at any rate, did not conceal it

from me. Not even when the upcountry bride astutely greeted me with:--

“Why, we were just speaking of you! We were lust saying it would be a

perfect shame if you missed those flowers at Live Oaks.” And, at this,

various of the guests assured me that another storm would finish them;

upon which I assured every one that to-morrow should see me embark upon

the Live Oaks excursion boat, knowing quite well in my heart that some

decidedly different question concerning me had been hastily dropped upon

my appearance at the door. It poked up its little concealed head, did

this question, when the bride said later to me, with immense archness:--

“How any gentleman can help falling just daid in love with that lovely

young girl at the Exchange, I don’t see!”

“But I haven’t helped it!” I immediately exclaimed.

“Oh!” declared the bride with unerring perception, “that just shows

he hasn’t been smitten at all! Well, I’d be ashamed, if I was a single

gentleman.” And while I brought forth additional phrases concerning the

distracted state of my heart, she looked at me with large, limpid eyes.

“Anybody could tell you’re not afraid of a rival,” was her resulting

comment; upon which several of the et ceteras laughed more than seemed

to me appropriate.

I left them all free again to say what they pleased; for John Mayrant

called for me to go upon our walk while we were still seated at table,

and at table they remained after I had excused myself.

The bruise over John’s left eye was fading out, but traces of his

spiritual battle were deepening. During the visit which he had paid

(under compulsion, I am sure) to Juno at our boarding-house in company

with Miss Josephine St. Michael, his recent financial triumph at the

bedside had filled his face with diabolic elation as he confronted his

victim’s enraged but checkmated aunt; when to the thinly veiled venom

of her inquiry as to a bridegroom’s health he had retorted with venom as

thinly veiled that he was feeling better that night than for many weeks,

he had looked better, too; the ladies had exclaimed after his departure

what a handsome young man he was, and Juno had remarked how fervently

she trusted that marriage might cure him of his deplorable tendencies.

But to-day his vitality had sagged off beneath the weight of his

preoccupation: it looked to me as if, by a day or two more, the boy’s

face might be grown haggard.

Whether by intention, or, as is more likely, by the perfectly natural

and spontaneous working of his nature, he speedily made it plain to

me that our relation, our acquaintance, had progressed to a stage more

friendly and confidential. He did not reveal this by imparting any

confidence to me; far from it; it was his silence that indicated

the ease he had come to feel in my company. Upon our last memorable

interview he had embarked at once upon a hasty yet evidently

predetermined course of talk, because he feared that I might touch upon

subjects which he wished excluded from all discussion between us; to-day

he embarked upon nothing, made no conventional effort of any sort, but

walked beside me, content with my mere society; if it should happen that

either of us found a thought worth expressing aloud, good! and if this

should not happen, why, good also! And so we walked mutely and agreeably

together for a long while. The thought which was growing clear in my

mind, and which was decidedly worthy of expression, was also unluckily

one which his new reliance upon my discretion completely forbade my

uttering in even the most shadowy manner; but it was a conviction which

Miss Josephine St. Michael should have been quick to force upon him for

his good. Quite apart from selfish reasons, he had no right to marry a

girl whom he had ceased to care for. The code which held a “gentleman”

to his plighted troth in such a case did more injury to the “lady” than

any “jilting” could possibly do. Never until now had I thought this

out so lucidly, and I was determined that time and my own tact should

assuredly help me find a way to say it to him, if he continued in his

present course.

“Daddy Ben says you can’t be a real Northerner.”

This was his first observation, and I think that we must have walked a

mile before he made it.

“Because I pounded a negro? Of course, he retains your Southern

ante-bellum mythical notion of Northerners--all of us willing to have

them marry our sisters. Well, there’s a lady at our boarding-house who

says you are a real gambler.”

The impish look came curling round his lips, but for a moment only, and

it was gone.

“That shook Daddy Ben up a good deal.”

“Having his grandson do it, do you mean?”

“Oh, he’s used to his grandson! Grandsons in that race might just as

well be dogs for all they know or care about their progenitors. Yet

Daddy Ben spent his savings on educating Charles Cotesworth and two

more--but not one of them will give the old man a house to-day. If ever

I have a home--” John stopped himself, and our silence was no longer

easy; our unspoken thoughts looked out of our eyes so that they could

not meet. Yet no one, unless directly invited by him, had the right to

say to hint what I was thinking, except some near relative. Therefore,

to relieve this silence which had ceased to be agreeable, I talked

about Daddy Ben and his grandsons, and negro voting, and the huge lie of

“equality” which our lips vociferate and our lives daily disprove. This

took us comfortably away from weddings and cakes into the subject

of lynching, my violent condemnation of which surprised him; for our

discussion had led us over a wide field, and one fertile in well-known

disputes of the evergreen sort, conducted by the North mostly with more

theory than experience, and by the South mostly with more heat than

light; whereas, between John and me, I may say that our amiability

was surpassed only by our intelligence! Each allowed for the other’s

standpoint, and both met in many views: he would have voted against

the last national Democratic ticket but for the Republican upholding

of negro equality, while I assured him that such stupid and criminal

upholding was on the wane. He informed me that he did not believe the

pure blooded African would ever be capable of taking the intellectual

side of the white man’s civilization, and I informed him that we must

patiently face this probability, and teach the African whatever he could

profitably learn and no more; and each of us agreed with the other. I

think that we were at one, save for the fact that I was, after all, a

Northerner--and that is a blemish which nobody in Kings Port can quite

get over. John, therefore, was unprepared for my wholesale denunciation

of lynching.

“With your clear view of the negro,” he explained.

“My dear man, it’s my clear view of the white! It’s the white, the

American citizen, the ‘hope of humanity,’ as he enjoys being called,

who, after our English-speaking race has abolished public executions,

degenerates back to the Stone Age. It’s upon him that lynching works the

true injury.”

“They’re nothing but animals,” he muttered.

“Would you treat an animal in that way?” I inquired.

He persisted. “You’d do it yourself if you had to suffer from them.”

“Very probably. Is that an answer? What I’d never do would be to make a

show, an entertainment, a circus, out of it, run excursion trains to see

it--come, should you like your sister to buy tickets for a lynching?”

This brought him up rather short. “I should never take part myself,” he

presently stated, “unless it were immediate personal vengeance.”

“Few brothers or husbands would blame you,” I returned. “It would be

hard to wait for the law. But let no community which treats it as a

public spectacle presume to call itself civilized.”

He gave a perplexed smile, shaking his head over it. “Sometimes I think

civilization costs--”

“Civilization costs all you’ve got!” I cried.

“More than I’ve got!” he declared. “I’m mortal tired of civilization.”

“Ah, yes! What male creature is not? And neither of us will live quite

long enough to see the smash-up of our own.”

“Aren’t you sometimes inconsistent?” he inquired, laughing.

“I hope so,” I returned. “Consistency is a form of death. The dead are

the only perfectly consistent people.”

“And sometimes you sound like a Socialist,” he pursued, still laughing.

“Never!” I shouted. “Don’t class me with those untrained puppies of

thought. And you’ll generally observe,” I added, “that the more nobly

a Socialist vaporizes about the rights of humanity, the more wives and

children he has abandoned penniless along the trail of his life.”

He was livelier than ever at this. “What date have you fixed for the

smash-up of our present civilization?”

“Why fix dates? Is it not diversion enough to watch, and step handsomely

through one’s own part, with always a good sleeve to laugh in?”

Pensiveness returned upon him. “I shall be able to step through my own

part, I think.” He paused, and I was wondering secretly, “Does that

include the wedding?” when he continued: “What’s there to laugh at?”

“Why, our imperishable selves! For instance: we swear by universal

suffrage. Well, sows’ ears are an invaluable thing in their place,

on the head of the animal; but send them to make your laws, and what

happens? Bribery, naturally. The silk purse buys the sow’s ear. We swear

by Christianity, but dishonesty is our present religion. That little

phrase ‘In God We Trust’ is about as true as the silver dollar it’s

stamped on--worth some thirty-nine cents. We get awfully serious about

whether or no good can come of evil, when every sky-scraping thief

of finance is helping hospitals with one hand while the other’s in my

pocket; and good and evil attend each other, lead to each other, are

such Siamese twins that if separated they would both die. We make

phrases about peace, pity, and brotherhood, while every nation stands

prepared for shipwreck and for the sinking plank to which two are

clinging and the stronger pushes the weaker into the flood and thus

floats safe. Why, the old apple of wisdom, which Adam and Eve swallowed

and thus lost their innocence, was a gentle nursery drug compared

with the new apple of competition, which, as soon as chewed, instantly

transforms the heart into a second brain. But why worry, when nothing is

final? Haven’t you and I, for instance, lamented the present rottenness

of smart society? Why, when kings by the name of George sat on the

throne of England, society was just as drunken, just as dissolute! Then

a decent queen came, and society behaved itself; and now, here we come

round again to the Georges, only with the name changed! There’s nothing

final. So, when things are as you don’t like them, remember that and

bear them; and when they’re as you do like them, remember it and make

the most of them--and keep a good sleeve handy!”

“Have you got any creed at all?” he demanded.

“Certainly; but I don’t live up to it.”

“That’s not expected. May I ask what it is?”

“It’s in Latin.”

“Well, I can probably bear it. Aunt Eliza had a classical tutor for me.”

I always relish a chance to recite my favorite poet, and I began

accordingly:--

“Laetus in praesens animus quod ultra est

Oderit curare et--”

“I know that one!” he exclaimed, interrupting me. “The tutor made me

put it into English verse. I had the severest sort of a time. I ran away

from it twice to a deer-hunt.” And he, in his turn, recited:--

“Who hails each present hour with zest

Hates fretting what may be the rest,

Makes bitter sweet with lazy jest;

Naught is in every portion blest.”

I complimented him, in spite of my slight annoyance at being deprived by

him of the chance to declaim Latin poetry, which is an exercise that

I approve and enjoy; but of course, to go on with it, after he had

intervened with his translation, would have been flat.

“You have written good English, and very close to the Latin, too,” I

told him, “particularly in the last line.” And I picked up from the

bridge which we were crossing, an oyster-shell, and sent it skimming

over the smooth water that stretched between the low shores, wide, blue,

and vacant.

“I suppose you wonder why we call this the ‘New Bridge,’” he remarked.

“I did wonder when I first came,” I replied.

He smiled. “You’re getting used to us!”

This long structure wore, in truth, no appearance of yesterday. It was

newer than the “New Bridge” which it had replaced some fifteen years

ago, and which for forty years had borne the same title. Spanning

the broad river upon a legion of piles, this wooden causeway lies

low against the face of the water, joining the town with a serene and

pensive country of pines and live oaks and level opens, where glimpses

of cabin and plantation serve to increase the silence and the soft,

mysterious loneliness. Into this the road from the bridge goes straight

and among the purple vagueness gently dissolves away.

We watched a slow, deep-laden boat sliding down toward the draw, across

which we made our way, and drew near the further end of the bridge. The

straight avenue of the road in front of us took my eyes down its quiet

vista, until they were fixed suddenly by an alien object, a growing

dot, accompanied by dust, whence came the small, distorted honks of

an automobile. These fat, importunate sounds redoubled as the machine

rushed toward the bridge, growing up to its full staring, brazen

dimensions. Six or seven figures sat in it, all of the same dusty,

shrouded likeness, their big glass eyes and their masked mouths

suggesting some fabled, unearthly race, a family of replete and bilious

ogres; so that as they flew honking by us I called out to John:--

“Behold the yellow rich!” and then remembered that his Hortense probably

sat among them.

The honks redoubled, and we turned to see that the drawbridge had no

thought of waiting for them. We also saw a bewildered curly white dog

and a young girl, who called despairingly to him as he disappeared

beneath the automobile. The engine of murder could not, as is usual,

proceed upon its way, honking, for the drawbridge was visibly swinging

open to admit the passage of the boat. When John and I had run back near

enough to become ourselves a part of the incident, the white dog lay

still behind the stationary automobile, whose passengers were craning

their muffled necks and glass eyes to see what they had done, while one

of their number had got out, and was stooping to examine if the machine

had sustained any injuries. The young girl, with a face of anguish, was

calling the dog’s name as she hastened toward him, and her voice aroused

him: he lifted his head, got on his legs, and walked over to her, which

action on his part brought from the automobile a penetrating female

voice:--

“Well, he’s in better luck than that Savannah dog!”

But General was not in luck. He lay quietly down at the feet of his

mistress and we soon knew that life had passed from his faithful body.

The first stroke of grief, dealt her in such cruel and sudden form,

overbore the poor girl’s pride and reserve; she made no attempt to

remember or heed surroundings, but kneeling and placing her arms about

the neck of her dead servant, she spoke piteously aloud:--

“And I raised him, I raised him from a puppy!”

The female voice, at this, addressed the traveller who was examining the

automobile: “Charley, a five or a ten spot is what her feelings need.”

The obedient and munificent Charley straightened up from his stooping

among the mechanical entrails, dexterously produced money, and advanced

with the selected bill held out politely in his hand, while the glass

eyes and the masks peered down at the performance. Eliza La Heu had

perceived none of this, for she was intent upon General; nor had John

Mayrant, who had approached her with the purpose of coming to her

aid. But when Charley, quite at hand, began to speak words which were

instantly obliterated from my memory by what happened, the young girl

realized his intention and straightened stiffly, while John, with the

rapidity of light, snatched the extended bill from Charley’s hand, and

tearing it in four pieces, threw it in his face.

A foreign voice cackled from the automobile: “Oh la la! il a du

panache!”

But Charley now disclosed himself to be a true man of the world--the

financial world--by picking the pieces out of the mud; and, while

he wiped them and enclosed them in his handkerchief and with perfect

dignity returned them to his pocket, he remarked simply, with a shrug:

“As you please.” His accent also was ever so little foreign--that New

York downtown foreign, of the second generation, which stamps so, many

of our bankers.

The female now leaned from her seat, and with the tone of setting the

whole thing right, explained: “We had no idea it was a lady.”

“Doubtless you’re not accustomed to their appearance,” said John to

Charley.

I don’t know what Charley would have done about this; for while the

completely foreign voice was delightedly whispering, “Toujours

le panache!” a new, deep, and altogether different female voice

exclaimed:--

“Why, John, it’s you!”

So that was Hortense, then! That rich and quiet utterance was hers, a

schooled and studied management of speech. I found myself surprised,

and I knew directly why; that word of one of the old ladles, “I consider

that she looks like a steel wasp,” had implanted in me some definite

anticipations to which the voice certainly did not correspond. How

fervently I desired that she would lift her thick veil, while John, with

hat in hand, was greeting her, and being presented to her companions!

Why she had not spoken to John sooner was of course a recondite

question, and beyond my power to determine with merely the given

situation to guide me. Hadn’t she recognized him before? Had her

thick veil, and his position, and the general slight flurry of the

misadventure, intercepted recognition until she heard his voice when

he addressed Charley. Or had she known her lover at once, and rapidly

decided that the moment was an unpropitious one for a first meeting

after absence, and that she would pass on to Kings Port unrevealed, but

then had found this plan become impossible through the collision

between Charley and John? It was not until certain incidents of the days

following brought Miss Rieppe’s nature a good deal further home to me,

that a third interpretation of her delay in speaking to John dawned upon

my mind; that I was also made aware how a woman’s understanding of

the words “Steel wasp,” when applied by her to one of her own sex, may

differ widely from a man’s understanding of them; and that Miss Rieppe,

through her thick veil, saw from her seat in the automobile something

which my own unencumbered vision had by no means detected.

But now, here on the bridge, even her outward appearance was as shrouded

as her inward qualities--save such as might be audible in that voice,

as her skilful, well-placed speeches to one and the other of the company

tided over and carried off into ease this uneasy moment. All men, at

such a voice, have pricked up their ears since the beginning; there was

much woman in it; each slow, schooled syllable called its challenge to

questing man. But I got no chance to look in the eye that went with that

voice; she took all the advantages which her veil gave her; and how well

she used them I was to learn later.

In the general smoothing-out process which she was so capably effecting,

her attention was about to reach me, when my name was suddenly called

out from behind her. It was Beverly Rodgers, that accomplished and

inveterate bachelor of fashion. Ten years before, when I had seen much

of him, he had been more particular in his company, frequently declaring

in his genial, irresponsible way that New York society was going to the

devil. But many tempting dances on the land, and cruises on the water,

had taken him deep among our lower classes that have boiled up from

the bottom with their millions--and besides, there would be nothing

to marvel at in Beverly’s presence in any company that should include

Hortense Rieppe, if she carried out the promise of her voice.

Beverly was his customary, charming, effusive self, coming out of

the automobile to me with his “By Jove, old man,” and his “Who’d have

thought it, old fellow?” and sprinkling urbane little drops of jocosity

over us collectively, as the garden water-turning apparatus sprinkles

a lawn. His knowing me, and the way he brought it out, and even the

tumbling into the road of a few wraps and chattels of travel as he

descended from the automobile, and the necessity of picking these up and

handing them back with delightful little jocular apologies, such as, “By

Jove, what a lout I am,” all this helped the meeting on prodigiously,

and got us gratefully away from the disconcerting incident of the torn

money. Charley was helpful, too; you would never have supposed from the

polite small-talk which he was now offering to John Mayrant that he had

within some three minutes received the equivalent of a slap across the

eyes from that youth, and carried the soiled consequences in his pocket.

And such a thing is it to be a true man of the world of finance, that

upon the arrival now of a second automobile, also his property, and

containing a set of maids and valets, and also some live dogs sitting

up, covered with glass eyes and wrappings like their owners, munificent

Charley at once offered the dead dog and his mistress a place in it, and

begged she would let it take her wherever she wished to go. Everybody

exclaimed copiously and condolingly over the unfortunate occurrence.

What a fine animal he was, to be sure! What breed was he? Of course, he

wasn’t used to automobiles! Was it quite certain that he was dead? Quel

dommage! And Charley would be so happy to replace him.

And how was Eliza La Heu bearing herself amid these murmurously

chattered infelicities? She was listening with composure to the murmurs

of Hortense Rieppe, more felicitous, no doubt. Miss Rieppe, through her

veil, was particularly devoting herself to Miss La Lieu. I could not

hear what she said; the little chorus of condolence and suggestion

intercepted all save her tone, and that, indeed, coherently sustained

its measured cadence through the texture of fragments uttered by Charley

and the others. Eliza La Heu had now got herself altogether in hand,

and, saving her pale cheeks, no sign betrayed that the young girl’s

feelings had been so recently too strong for her. To these strangers,

ignorant of her usual manner, her present strange quietness may very

well have been accepted as her habit.

“Thank you,” she replied to munificent Charley’s offer that she would

use his second automobile. She managed to make her polite words cut like

a scythe. “I should crowd it.”

“But they shall get out and walk; it will be good for them,” said

Charley, indicating the valets and maids, and possibly the dogs, too.

Beverly Rodgers did much better than Charley. With a charming gesture

and bow, he offered his own seat in the first automobile. “I am going to

walk in any case,” he assured her.

“One gentleman among them,” I heard John Mayrant mutter behind me.

Miss La Heu declined, the chorus urged, but Beverly (who was indeed a

gentleman, every inch of him) shook his head imperceptibly at Charley;

and while the little exclamations--“Do come! So much more comfortable!

So nice to see more of you!”--dropped away, Miss La Heu had settled

her problem quite simply for herself. A little procession of vehicles,

townward bound, had gathered on the bridge, waiting until the closing of

the draw should allow them to continue upon their way. From these most

of the occupants had descended, and were staring with avidity at us all;

the great glass eyes and the great refulgent cars held them in timidity

and fascination, and the poor lifeless white body of General, stretched

beside the way, heightened the hypnotic mystery; one or two of the

boldest had touched him, and found no outward injury upon him; and this

had sent their eyes back to the automobile with increased awe. Eliza La

Heu summoned one of the onlookers, an old negro; at some word she said

to him he hurried back and returned, leading his horse and empty cart,

and General was lifted into this. The girl took her seat beside the old

driver.

“No,” she said to John Mayrant, “certainly not.”

I wondered at the needless severity with which she declined his offer to

accompany her and help her.

He stood by the wheel of the cart, looking up at her and protesting, and

I joined him.

“Thank you,” she returned, “I need no one. You will both oblige me by

saying no more about it.”

“John!” It was the slow, well-calculated utterance of Hortense Rieppe.

Did I hear in it the caressing note of love?

John turned.

The draw had swung to, the mast and sail of the vessel were separating

away from the bridge with a stealthy motion, men with iron bars were at

work fastening the draw secure, and horses’ hoofs knocked nervously upon

the wooden flooring as the internal churning of the automobiles burst

upon their innocent ears.

“John, if Mr. Rodgers is really not going with us--”

Thus Hortense; and at that Miss La Heu:--

“Why do you keep them waiting?” There was no caress in that note! It was

polished granite.

He looked up at her on her high seat by the extremely dilapidated negro,

and then he walked forward and took his place beside his veiled

fiancee, among the glass eyes. A hiss of sharp noise spurted from the

automobiles, horses danced, and then, smoothly, the two huge engines

were gone with their cargo of large, distorted shapes, leaving behind

them--quite as our present epoch will leave behind it--a trail of power,

of ingenuity, of ruthlessness, and a bad smell.

“Hold hard, old boy!” chuckled Beverly, to whom I communicated this

sentiment. “How do you know the stink of one generation does not become

the perfume of the next?” Beverly, when he troubled to put a thing

at all (which was seldom--for he kept his quite good brains well-nigh

perpetually turned out to grass--or rather to grass widows) always put

it well, and with a bracing vocabulary. “Hullo!” he now exclaimed, and

walked out into the middle of the roadway, where he picked up a parasol.

“Kitty will be in a jolly old stew. None of its expensive bones broken

however.” And then he hailed me by a name of our youth. “What are you

doing down here, you old sourbelly?”

“Watching you sun yourself on the fat cushions of the yellow rich.”

“Oh, shucks, old man, they’re not so yellow!”

“Charley strikes me as yellower than his own gold.”

“Charley’s not a bad little sort. Of course, he needs coaching a bit

here and there--just now, for instance, when he didn’t see that that

girl wouldn’t think of riding in the machine that had just killed her

dog. By Jove, give that girl a year in civilization and she’d do! Who

was the young fire-eater?”

“Fire-eater! He’s a lot more decent than you or I.”

“But that’s saying so little, dear boy!”

“Seriously, Beverly.”

“Oh, hang it with your ‘seriously’! Well, then, seriously, melodrama

was the correct ticket and all that in 1840, but we’ve outgrown it; it’s

devilish demode to chuck things in people’s faces.

“I’m not sorry John Mayrant did it!” I brought out his name with due

emphasis.

“All the same,” Beverly was beginning, when the automobile returned

rapidly upon us, and, guessing the cause of this, he waved the parasol.

Charley descended to get it--an unnecessary act, prompted, I suppose, by

the sudden relief of finding that it was not lost.

He made his thanks marked. “It is my sister’s,” he concluded, to me, by

way of explanation, in his slightly foreign accent. “It is not much, but

it has got some stones and things in the handle.”

We were favored with a bow from the veiled Hortense, shrill thanks from

Kitty, and the car, turning, again left us in a moment.

“You’ve got a Frenchman along,” I said.

“Little Gazza,” Beverly returned. “Italian; though from his morals you’d

never guess he wasn’t Parisian. Great people in Rome. Hereditary right

to do something in the presence of the Pope--or not to do it, I forget

which. Not a bit of a bad little sort, Gazza. He has just sold a lot of

old furniture--Renaissance--Lorenzo du Borgia--that sort of jolly old

truck--to Bohm, you know.”

I didn’t know.

“Oh, yes, you do, old boy. Harry Bohm, of Bohm & Cohn. Everybody knows

Bohm, and we’ll all be knowing Cohn by next year. Gazza has sold him

a lot of furniture, too. Bohm’s from Pittsfield, or South Lee, or East

Canaan, or West Stockbridge, or some of those other back-country cider

presses that squirt some of the hardest propositions into Wall Street.

He’s just back from buying a railroad, and four or five mines in Mexico.

Bohm represents Christianity in the firm. At Newport they call him the

military attache to Jerusalem. He’s the big chap that sat behind me in

the car. He’ll marry Kitty as soon as she can get her divorce. Bohm’s a

jolly old sort--and I tell you, you old sourbelly, you’re letting this

Southern moss grow over you a bit. Hey? What? Yellow rich isn’t half

bad, and I’ll say it myself, and pretend it’s mine; but hang it,

old man, their children won’t be worse than lemon-colored, and the

grandchildren will be white!”

“Just in time,” I exclaimed, “to take a back seat with their evaporated

fortunes!”

Beverly chuckled. “Well, if they do evaporate, there will be new ones.

Now don’t walk along making Mayflower eyes at me. I’m no Puritan, and my

people have had a front seat since pretty early in the game, which I’m

holding on to, you know. And by Jove, old man, I tell you, if you wish

to hold on nowadays, you can’t be drawing lines! If you don’t want to

see yourself jolly well replaced, you must fall in with the replacers.

Our blooming old republic is merely the quickest process of endless

replacing yet discovered, and you take my tip, and back the replacers!

That’s where Miss Rieppe, for all her Kings Port traditions, shows

sense.”

I turned square on him. “Then she has broken it?”

“Broken what?”

“Her engagement to John Mayrant. You mean to say that you didn’t--?”

“See here, old man. Seriously. The fire-eater?”

I was so very much bewildered that I merely stared at Beverly Rodgers.

Of course, I might have known that Miss Rieppe would not feel the need

of announcing to her rich Northern friends an engagement which she had

fallen into the habit of postponing.

But Beverly had a better right to be taken aback. “I suppose you must

have some reason for your remark,” he said.

“You don’t mean that you’re engaged to her?” I shot out.

“Me? With my poor little fifteen thousand a year? Consider, dear boy!

Oh, no, we’re merely playing at it, she and I. She’s a good player. But

Charley--”

“He is?” I shouted.

“I don’t know, old man, and I don’t think he knows--yet.”

“Beverly,” said I, “let me tell you.” And I told him.

After he had got himself adjusted to the novelty of it he began to take

it with a series of thoughtful chuckles.

Into these I dropped with: “Where’s her father, anyhow?” I began to

feel, fantastically, that she mightn’t have a father.

“He stopped in Savannah,” Beverly answered. “He’s coming over by the

train. Kitty--Charley’s sister, Mrs. Bleecker--did the chaperoning for

us.

“Very expertly, I should guess,” I said.

“Perfectly; invisibly,” said Beverly. And he returned to his thoughts

and his chuckles.

“After all, it’s simple,” he presently remarked.

“Doesn’t that depend on what she’s here for?”

“Oh, to break it.”

“Why come for that?”

He took another turn among his cogitations. I took a number of turns

among my own, but it was merely walking round and round in a circle.

“When will she announce it, then?” he demanded.

“Ah!” I murmured. “You said she was a good player.”

“But a fire-eater!” he resumed. “For her. Oh, hang it! She’ll let him

go!”

“Then why hasn’t she?”

He hesitated. “Well, of course her game could be spoiled by--”

His speech died away into more cogitation, and I had to ask him what he

meant.

“By love getting into it somewhere.”

We walked on through Worship Street, which we had reached some while

since, and the chief features of which I mechanically pointed out to

him.

“Jolly old church, that,” said Beverly, as we reached my favorite corner

and brick wall. “Well, I’ll not announce it!” he murmured gallantly.

“My dear man,” I said, “Kings Port will do all the announcing for you

to-morrow.”

XV: What She Came to See

But in this matter my prognostication was thoroughly at fault; yet

surely, knowing Kings Port’s sovereign habit, as I had had good cause

to know it, I was scarce beyond reasonable bounds in supposing that the

arrival of Miss Rieppe would heat up some very general and very audible

talk about this approaching marriage, against which the prejudices of

the town were set in such compact array. I have several times mentioned

that Kings Port, to my sense, was buzzing over John Mayrant’s affairs;

buzzing in the open, where one could hear it, and buzzing behind closed

doors, where one could somehow feel it; I can only say that henceforth

this buzzing ceased, dropped wholly away, as if Gossip were watching so

hard that she forgot to talk, giving place to a great stillness in

her kingdom. Such occasional words as were uttered sounded oddly and

egregiously clear in the new-established void.

The first of these words sounded, indeed, quite enormous, issuing as it

did from Juno’s lips at our breakfast-table, when yesterday’s meeting on

the New Bridge was investing my mind with many thoughts. She addressed

me in one of her favorite tones (I have met it, thank God! but in two

or three other cases during my whole experience), which always somehow

conveyed to you that you were personally to blame for what she was going

to tell you.

“I suppose you know that your friend, Mr. Mayrant, has resigned from the

Custom House?”

I was, of course, careful not to give Juno the pleasure of seeing that

she had surprised me. I bowed, and continued in silence to sip a little

coffee; then, setting my coffee down, I observed that it would be some

few days yet before the resignation could take effect; and, noticing

that Juno was getting ready some new remark, I branched off and spoke to

her of my excursion up the river this morning to see the azaleas in the

gardens at Live Oaks.

“How lucky the weather is so magnificent!” I exclaimed.

“I shall be interested to hear,” said Juno, “what explanation he finds

to give Miss Josephine for his disrespectful holding out against her,

and his immediate yielding to Miss Rieppe.”

Here I deemed it safe to ask her, was she quite sure it had been at the

instance of Miss Rieppe that John had resigned?

“It follows suspiciously close upon her arrival,” stated Juno. She might

have been speaking of a murder. “And how he expects to support a

wife now--well, that is no affair of mine,” Juno concluded, with a

washing-her-hands-of-it air, as if up to this point she had always

done her best for the wilful boy. She had blamed him savagely for not

resigning, and now she was blaming him because he had resigned; and

I ate my breakfast in much entertainment over this female acrobat in

censure.

No more was said; I think that my manner of taking Juno’s news had been

perfectly successful in disappointing her. John’s resignation, if it

had really occurred, did certainly follow very close upon the arrival of

Hortense; but I had spoken one true thought in intimating that I doubted

if it was due to the influence of Miss Rieppe. It seemed to me to the

highest degree unlikely that the boy in his present state of feeling

would do anything he did not wish to do because his ladylove happened to

wish it--except marry her! There was apparently no doubt that he would

do that. Did she want him, poverty and all? Was she, even now, with eyes

open, deliberately taking her last farewell days of automobiles and

of steam yachts? That voice of hers, that rich summons, with its quiet

certainty of power, sounded in my memory. “John,” she had called to him

from the automobile; and thus John had gone away in it, wedged in among

Charley and the fat cushions and all the money and glass eyes. And

now he had resigned from the Custom House! Yes, that was, whatever it

signified, truly amazing--if true.

So I continued to ponder quite uselessly, until the up-country bride

aroused me. She, it appeared, had been greatly carried away by the

beauty of Live Oaks, and was making her David take her there again this

morning; and she was asking me didn’t I hope we shouldn’t get stuck? The

people had got stuck yesterday, three whole hours, right on a bank in

the river; and wasn’t it a sin and a shame to run a boat with ever so

many passengers aground? By the doctrine of chances, I informed her, we

had every right to hope for better luck to-day; and, with the assurance

of how much my felicity was increased by the prospect of having her and

David as company during the expedition, I betook myself meanwhile to my

own affairs, which meant chiefly a call at the Exchange to inquire for

Eliza La Heu, and a visit to the post-office before starting upon a

several hours’ absence.

A few steps from our front door I came upon John Mayrant, and saw at

once too plainly that no ease had come to his spirit during the hours

since the bridge. He was just emerging from an adjacent house.

“And have you resigned?” I asked him.

“Yes. That’s done. You haven’t seen Miss Rieppe this morning?”

“Why, she’s surely not boarding with Mrs. Trevise?”

“No; stopping here with her old friend, Mrs. Cornerly.” He indicated

the door he had come from. “Of course, you wouldn’t be likely to see her

pass!” And with that he was gone.

That he was greatly stirred up by something there could be no doubt;

never before had I seen him so abrupt; it seemed clear that anger had

taken the place of despondency, or whatever had been his previous mood;

and by the time I reached the post-office I had already imagined and

dismissed the absurd theory that John was jealous of Charley, had

resigned from the Custom House as a first step toward breaking his

engagement, and had rung Mrs. Cornerly’s bell at this early hour with

the purpose of informing his lady-love that all was over between them.

Jealousy would not be likely to produce this set of manifestations in

young, foolish John; and I may say here at once, what I somewhat later

learned, that the boy had come with precisely the opposite purpose,

namely, to repeat and reenforce his steadfast constancy, and that it was

something far removed from jealousy which had spurred him to this.

I found the girl behind the counter at her post, grateful to me for

coming to ask how she was after the shock of yesterday, but unwilling to

speak of it at all; all which she expressed by her charming manner, and

by the other subjects she chose for conversation, and especially by the

way in which she held out her hand when I took my leave.

Near the post-office I was hailed by Beverly Rodgers, who proclaimed to

me at once a comic but genuine distress. He had already walked, he said

(and it was but half-past nine o’clock, as he bitterly bade me

observe on the church dial), more miles in search of a drink than his

unarithmetical brain had the skill to compute. And he confounded such a

town heartily; he should return as soon as possible to Charley’s yacht,

where there was civilization, and where he had spent the night. During

his search he had at length come to a door of promising appearance, and

gone in there, and they had explained to him that it was a dispensary.

A beastly arrangement. What was the name of the razor-back hog they

said had invented it? And what did you do for a drink in this confounded

water-hole?

He would find it no water-hole, I told him; but there were methods which

a stranger upon his first morning could scarce be expected to grasp. “I

could direct you to a Dutchman,” I said, “but you’re too well dressed to

win his confidence at once.”

“Well, old man,” began Beverly, “I don’t speak Dutch, but give me a

crack at the confidence.”

However, he renounced the project upon learning what a Dutchman was.

Since my hours were no longer dedicated to establishing the presence

of royal blood in my veins I had spent them upon various local

investigations of a character far more entertaining and akin to my

taste. It was in truth quite likely that Beverly could in a very few

moments, with his smile and his manner, find his way to any Dutchman’s

heart; he had that divine gift of winning over to him quickly all sorts

and conditions of men; and my account of the ingenious and law-baffling

contrivances, which you found at these little grocery shops, at once

roused his curiosity to make a trial; but he decided that the club was

better, if less picturesque. And he told me that all the men of the

automobile party had received from John Mayrant cards of invitation to

the club.

“Your fire-eater is a civil chap,” said Beverly. “And by the way, do you

happen to know,” here he pulled from his pocket a letter and consulted

its address, “Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael?”

I was delighted that he brought an introduction to this lady; Hortense

Rieppe could not open for him any of those haughty doors; and I wished

not only that Beverly (since he was just the man to appreciate it and

understand it) should see the fine flower of Kings Port, but also that

the fine flower of Kings Port should see him; the best blood of the

South could not possibly turn out anything better than Beverly Rodgers,

and it was horrible and humiliating to think of the other Northern

specimens of men whom Hortense had imported with her. I was here

suddenly reminded that the young woman was a guest of the Cornerlys,

the people who swept their garden, the people whom Eliza La Heu at the

Exchange did not “know”; and at this the remark of Mrs. Gregory St.

Michael, when I had walked with her and Mrs. Weguelin, took on an added

lustre of significance:--

“We shall have to call.”

Call on the Cornerlys! Would they do that? Were they ready to stand by

their John to that tune? A hotel would be nothing; you could call on

anybody at a hotel, if you had to; but here would be a demarche indeed!

Yet, nevertheless, I felt quite certain that, if Hortense, though the

Cornerlys’ guest, was also the guaranteed fiancee of John Mayrant, the

old ladies would come up to the scratch, hate and loathe it as they

might, and undoubtedly would: they could be trusted to do the right

thing.

I told Beverly how glad I was that he would meet Mrs. Weguelin St.

Michael. “The rest of your party, my friend,” I said, “are not very

likely to.” And I generalized to him briefly upon the town of Kings

Port. “Supposing I take you to call upon Mrs. St. Michael when I come

back this afternoon?” I suggested.

Beverly thought it over, and then shook his head. “Wouldn’t do, old man.

If these people are particular and know, as you say they do, hadn’t I

better leave the letter with my card, and then wait till she sends some

word?”

He was right, as he always was, unerringly. Consorting with all the

Charleys, and the Bohms, and the Cohns, and the Kitties hadn’t taken

the fine edge from Beverly’s good inheritance and good bringing up; his

instinct had survived his scruples, making of him an agile and charming

cynic, whom you could trust to see the right thing always, and never

do it unless it was absolutely necessary; he would marry any amount

of Kitties for their money, and always know that beside his mother and

sisters they were as dirt; and he would see to it that his children

took after their father, went to school in England for a good accent and

enunciation, as he had done, went to college in America for the sake

of belonging in their own country, as he had done, and married as many

fortunes, and had as few divorces, as possible.

“Who was that girl on the bridge?” he now inquired as we reached the

steps of the post-office; and when I had told him again, because he

had asked me about Eliza La Heu at the time, “She’s the real thing,” he

commented. “Quite extraordinary, you know, her dignity, when poor old

awful Charley was messing everything--he’s so used to mere money, you

know, that half the time he forgets people are not dollars, and you have

to kick him to remind him--yes, quite perfect dignity. Gad, it took a

lady to climb up and sit by that ragged old darky and take her dead dog

away in the cart! The cart and the darky only made her look what she

was all the more. Poor Kitty couldn’t do that--she’d look like a

chambermaid! Well, old man, see you again.”

I stood on the post-office steps looking after Beverly Rodgers as he

crossed Court Street. His admirably good clothes, the easy finish of

his whole appearance, even his walk, and his back, and the slope of his

shoulders, were unmistakable. The Southern men, going to their business

in Court Street, looked at him. Alas, in his outward man he was as a

rose among weeds! And certainly, no well-born American could unite with

an art more hedonistic than Beverly’s the old school and the nouveau

jeu!

Over at the other corner he turned and stood admiring the church and

gazing at the other buildings, and so perceived me still on the steps.

With a gesture of remembering something he crossed back again.

“You’ve not seen Miss Rieppe?”

“Why, of course I haven’t!” I exclaimed. Was everybody going to ask me

that?

“Well, something’s up, old boy. Charley has got the launch away with

him--and I’ll bet he’s got her away with him, too. Charley lied this

morning.”

“Is lying, then, so rare with him?”

“Why, it rather is, you know. But I’ve come to be able to spot him when

he does it. Those little bulgy eyes of his look at you particularly

straight and childlike. He said he had to hunt up a man on business--V-C

Chemical Company, he called it--”

“There is such a thing here,” I said.

“Oh, Charley’d never make up a thing, and get found out in that way! But

he was lying all the same, old man.”

“Do you mean they’ve run off and got married?”

“What do you take them for? Much more like them to run off and not get

married. But they haven’t done that either. And, speaking of that, I

believe I’ve gone a bit adrift. Your fire-eater, you know--she is an

extraordinary woman!” And Beverly gave his mellow, little humorous

chuckle. “Hanged if I don’t begin to think she does fancy him.”

“Well!” I cried, “that would explain--no, it wouldn’t. Whence comes your

theory?”

“Saw her look at him at dinner once last night. We dined with some

people--Cornerly. She looked at him just once. Well, if she intends--by

gad, it upsets one’s whole notion of her!”

“Isn’t just one look rather slight basis for--”

“Now, old man, you know better than that!” Beverly paused to chuckle.

“My grandmother Livingston,” he resumed, “knew Aaron Burr, and she used

to say that he had an eye which no honest woman could meet without

a blush. I don’t know whether your fire-eater is a Launcelot, or a

Galahad, but that girl’s eye at dinner--”

“Did he blush?” I laughed.

“Not that I saw. But really, old man, confound it, you know! He’s no

sort of husband for her. How can he make her happy and how can she make

him happy, and how can either of them hit it off with the other the

least little bit? She’s expensive, he’s not; she’s up-to-date, he’s not;

she’s of the great world, he’s provincial. She’s all derision, he’s all

faith. Why, hang it, old boy, what does she want him for?”

Beverly’s handsome brow was actually furrowed with his problem; and, as

I certainly could furnish him no solution for it, we stood in silence on

the post-office steps. “What can she want him for?” he repeated. Then

he threw it off lightly with one of his chuckles. “So glad I’ve no

daughters to marry! Well--I must go draw some money.”

He took himself off with a certain alacrity, giving an impatient cut

with his stick at a sparrow in the middle of Worship Street, nor did

I see him again this day, although, after hurriedly getting my letters

(for the starting hour of the boat had now drawn near), I followed where

he had gone down Court Street, and his cosmopolitan figure would

have been easy to descry at any distance along that scantily peopled

pavement. He had evidently found the bank and was getting his money.

David of the yellow heir and his limpid-looking bride were on the

horrible little excursion boat, watching for me and keeping with some

difficulty a chair next themselves that I might not have to stand up all

the way; and, as I came aboard, the bride called out to me her relief,

she had made sure that I would be late.

“David said you wouldn’t,” she announced in her clear up-country accent

across the parasols and heads of huddled tourists, “but I told him a

gentleman that’s late to three meals aivry day like as not would forget

boats can’t be kept hot in the kitchen for you.”

I took my place in the chair beside her as hastily as possible, for

there is nothing that I so much dislike as being made conspicuous for

any reason whatever; and my thanks to her were, I fear, less gracious in

their manner than should have been the case. Nor did she find me, I must

suppose, as companionable during this excursion--during the first part

of it, at any rate--as a limpid-looking bride, who has kept at some

pains a seat beside her for a single gentleman, has the right to expect;

the brief hours of this morning had fed my preoccupation too richly, and

I must often have fallen silent.

The horrible little tug, or ferry, or wherry, or whatever its

contemptible inconvenience makes it fitting that this unclean and

snail-like craft should be styled, cast off and began to lumber along

the edges of the town with its dense cargo of hats and parasols and

lunch parcels. We were a most extraordinary litter of man and womankind.

There was the severe New England type, improving each shining hour, and

doing it in bleak costume and with a thoroughly northeast expression;

there were pink sunbonnets from (I should imagine) Spartanburg, or

Charlotte, or Greenville; there were masculine boots which yet bore

incrusted upon their heels the red mud of Aiken or of Camden; there

was one fat, jewelled exhalation who spoke of Palm Beach with the true

stockyard twang, and looked as if she swallowed a million every morning

for breakfast, and God knows how many more for the ensuing repasts; she

was the only detestable specimen among us; sunbonnets, boots, and even

ungenial New England proved on acquaintance kindly, simple, enterprising

Americans; yet who knows if sunbonnets and boots and all of us wouldn’t

have become just as detestable had we but been as she was, swollen and

puffy with the acute indigestion of sudden wealth?

This reflection made me charitable, which I always like to be, and I

imparted it to the bride.

“My!” she said. And I really don’t know what that meant.

But presently I understood well why people endured the discomfort of

this journey. I forgot the cinders which now and then showered upon us,

and the heat of the sun, and the crowded chairs; I forgot the boat and

myself, in looking at the passing shores. Our course took us round

Kings Port on three sides. The calm, white town spread out its width

and length beneath a blue sky softer than the tenderest dream; the white

steeples shone through the enveloping brightness, taking to each

other, and to the distant roofs beneath them, successive and changing

relations, while the dwindling mass of streets and edifices followed

more slowly the veering of the steeples, folded upon itself, and

refolded, opened into new shapes and closed again, dwindling always,

and always white and beautiful; and as the far-off vision of it held

the eye, the few masts along the wharves grew thin and went out into

invisibility, the spires became as masts, the distant drawbridge through

which we had passed sank down into a mere stretching line, and shining

Kings Port was dissolved in the blue of water and of air.

The curving and the narrowing of the river took it at last from view;

and after it disappeared the spindling chimneys and their smoke, which

were along the bank above the town and bridge, leaving us to progress

through the solitude of marsh and wood and shore. The green levels of

stiff salt grass closed in upon the breadth of water, and we wound among

them, looking across their silence to the deeper silence of the woods

that bordered them, the brooding woods, the pines and the liveoaks,

misty with the motionless hanging moss, and misty also in that Southern

air that deepened when it came among their trunks to a caressing,

mysterious, purple veil. Every line of this landscape, the straight

forest top, the feathery breaks in it of taller trees, the curving

marsh, every line and every hue and every sound inscrutably spoke

sadness. I heard a mocking-bird once in some blossoming wild fruit tree

that we gradually reached and left gradually behind; and more than once

I saw other blossoms, and the yellow of the trailing jessamine; but the

bird could not sing the silence away, and spring with all her abundance

could not hide this spiritual autumn.

Dreams, a land of dreams, where even the high noon itself was dreamy; a

melting together of earth and air and water in one eternal gentleness of

revery! Whence came the melancholy of this? I had seen woods as solitary

and streams as silent, I had felt nature breathing upon me a greater

awe; but never before such penetrating and quiet sadness. I only know

that this is the perpetual mood of those Southern shores, those rivers

that wind in from the ocean among their narrowing marshes and their

hushed forests, and that it does not come from any memory of human hopes

and disasters, but from the elements themselves.

So did we move onward, passing in due time another bridge and a few

dwellings and some excavations, until the river grew quite narrow, and

there ahead was the landing at Live Oaks, with negroes idly watching for

us, and a launch beside the bank, and Charley and Hortense Rieppe about

to step into it. Another man stood up in the launch and talked to them

where they were on the landing platform, and pointed down the river as

we approached; but evidently he did not point at us. I looked hastily

to see what he was indicating to them, but I could see nothing save the

solitary river winding away between the empty woods and marshes.

So this was Hortense Rieppe! It was not wonderful that she had caused

young John to lose his heart, or, at any rate, his head and his senses;

nor was it wonderful that Charley, with his little bulging eyes, should

take her in his launch whenever she would go; the wonderful thing was

that John, at his age and with his nature, should have got over it--if

he had got over it! I felt it tingling in me; any man would. Steel wasp

indeed!

She was slender, and oh, how well dressed! She watched the passengers

get off the boat, and I could not tell you from that first sight of her

what her face was like, but only her hair, the sunburnt amber of its

masses making one think of Tokay or Chateau-Yquem. She was watching me,

I felt, and then saw; and as soon as I was near she spoke to me without

moving, keeping one gloved hand lightly posed upon the railing of the

platform, so that her long arm was bent with perfect ease and grace.

I swear that none but a female eye could have detected any toboggan

fire-escape.

Her words dropped with the same calculated deliberation, the same

composed and rich indifference. “These gardens are so beautiful.”

Such was her first remark, chosen with some purpose, I knew quite

well; and I observed that I hoped I was not too late for their full

perfection, if too late to visit them in her company.

She turned her head slightly toward Charley. “We have been enjoying them

so much.”

It was of absorbing interest to feel simultaneously in these brief

speeches he vouchsafed--speeches consummate in their inexpressive

flatness--the intentional coldness and the latent heat of the creature.

Since Natchez and Mobile (or whichever of them it had been that had

witnessed her beginnings) she had encountered many men and women, those

who could be of use to her and those who could not; and in dealing

with them she had tempered and chiselled her insolence to a perfect

instrument, to strike or to shield. And of her greatest gift, also,

she was entirely aware--how could she help being, with her evident

experience? She knew that round her whole form swam a delicious,

invisible sphere, a distillation that her veriest self sent forth, as

gardenias do their perfume, moving where she moved and staying where she

stayed, and compared with which wine was a feeble vapor for a man to get

drunk on.

“Flowers are always so delightful.”

That was her third speech, pronounced just like the others, in a low,

clear voice--simplicity arrived at by much well-practiced complexity.

And she still looked at Charley.

Charley now responded in his little banker accent. “It is a magnificent

collection.” This he said looking at me, and moving a highly polished

finger-nail along a very slender mustache.

The eyes of Hortense now for a moment glanced at the mixed company of

boat-passengers, who were beginning to be led off in pilgrim groups by

the appointed guides.

“We were warned it would be too crowded,” she remarked.

Charley was looking at her foot. I can’t say whether or not the two

light taps that the foot now gave upon the floor of the landing brought

out for me a certain impatience which I might otherwise have missed

in those last words of hers. From Charley it brought out, I feel quite

sure, the speech which (in some form) she had been expecting from him as

her confederate in this unwelcome and inopportune interview with me,

and which his less highly schooled perceptions had not suggested to him

until prompted by her.

“I should have been very glad to include you in our launch party if I

had known you were coming here to-day,” lied little Charley.

“Thank you so much!” I murmured; and I fancy that after this Hortense

hated me worse than ever. Well, why should I play her game? If anybody

had any claim upon me, was it she? I would get as much diversion as I

could from this encounter.

Hortense had looked at Charley when she spoke for my benefit, and it now

pleased me very much to look at him when I spoke for hers.

“I could almost give up the gardens for the sake of returning with you,”

I said to him.

This was most successful in producing a perceptible silence before

Hortense said, “Do come.”

I wanted to say to her, “You are quite splendid--as splendid as you

look, through and through! You wouldn’t have run away from any battle of

Chattanooga!” But what I did say was, “These flowers here will fade, but

may I not hope to see you again in Kings Port?”

She was looking at me with eyes half closed; half closed for the sake

of insolence--and better observation; when eyes like that take on

drowsiness, you will be wise to leave all your secrets behind you,

locked up in the bank, or else toss them right down on the open table.

Well, I tossed mine down, thereto precipitated by a warning from the

stranger in the launch:--

“We shall need all the tide we can get.”

“I’m sure you’d be glad to know,” I then said immediately (to Charley,

of course), “that Miss La Heu, whose dog you killed, is back at her work

as usual this morning.”

“Thank you,” returned Charley. “If there could be any chance for me to

replace--”

“Miss La Heu is her name?” inquired Hortense. “I did not catch it

yesterday. She works, you say?”

“At the Woman’s Exchange. She bakes cakes for weddings--among her other

activities.”

“So interesting!” said Hortense; and bowing to me, she allowed the

spellbound Charley to help her down into the launch.

Each step of the few that she had to take was upon unsteady footing, and

each was taken with slow security and grace, and with a mastery of her

skirts so complete that they seemed to do it of themselves, falling and

folding in the soft, delicate curves of discretion.

For the sake of not seeming too curious about this party, I turned from

watching it before the launch had begun to move, and it was immediately

hidden from me by the bank, so that I did not see it get away. As I

crossed an open space toward the gardens I found myself far behind the

other pilgrims, whose wandering bands I could half discern among winding

walks and bordering bushes. I was soon taken into somewhat reprimanding

charge by an admirable, if important, negro, who sighted me from a door

beneath the porch of the house, and advanced upon me speedily. From him

I learned at once the rule of the place, that strangers were not allowed

to “go loose,” as he expressed it; and recognizing the perfect propriety

of this restriction, I was humble, and even went so far as to put myself

right with him by quite ample purchases of the beautiful flowers that he

had for sale; some of these would be excellent for the up-country bride,

who certainly ought to have repentance from me in some form for my

silence as we had come up the river: the scenery had caused me most

ungallantly to forget her.

My rule-breaking turned out all to my advantage. The admirable and

important negro was so pacified by my liberal amends that he not only

placed the flowers which I had bought in a bucket of water to wait in

freshness until my tour of the gardens should be finished and the moment

for me to return upon the boat should arrive, but he also honored me

with his own special company; and instead of depositing me in one of the

groups of other travellers, he took me to see the sights alone, as if

I were somebody too distinguished to receive my impressions with the

common herd. Thus I was able to linger here and there, and even to

return to certain points for another look.

I shall not attempt to describe the azaleas at Live Oaks. You will

understand me quite well, I am sure, when I say that I had heard the

people at Mrs. Trevise’s house talk so much about them, and praise them

so superlatively, that I was not prepared for much: my experience

of life had already included quite a number of azaleas. Moreover, my

meeting with Hortense and Charley had taken me far away from flowers.

But when that marvelous place burst upon me, I forgot Hortense. I have

seen gardens, many gardens, in England, in France; in Italy; I have seen

what can be done in great hothouses, and on great terraces; what can be

done under a roof, and what can be done in the open air with the aid

of architecture and sculpture and ornamental land and water; but no

horticulture that I have seen devised by mortal man approaches the

unearthly enchantment of the azaleas at Live Oaks. It was not like

seeing flowers at all; it was as if there, in the heart of the wild

and mystic wood, in the gray gloom of those trees veiled and muffled in

their long webs and skeins of hanging moss, a great, magic flame of

rose and red and white burned steadily. You looked to see it vanish; you

could not imagine such a thing would stay. All idea of individual

petals or species was swept away in this glowing maze of splendor,

this transparent labyrinth of rose and red and white, through which you

looked beyond, into the gray gloom of the hanging moss and the depths of

the wild forest trees.

I turned back as often as I could, and to the last I caught glimpses

of it, burning, glowing, and shining like some miracle, some rainbow

exorcism, with its flooding fumes of orange-rose and red and white,

merging magically. It was not until I reached the landing, and made my

way on board again, that Hortense returned to my thoughts. She hadn’t

come to see the miracle; not she! I knew that better than ever. And who

was the other man in the launch?

“Wasn’t it perfectly elegant!” exclaimed the up-country bride. And upon

my assenting, she made a further declaration to David: “It’s just aivry

bit as good as the Isle of Champagne.”

This I discovered to be a comic opera, mounted with spendthrift

brilliance, which David had taken her to see at the town of Gonzales,

just before they were married.

As we made our way down the bending river she continued to make many

observations to me in that up-country accent of hers, which is a fashion

of speech that may be said to differ as widely from the speech of the

low-country as cotton differs from rice. I began to fear that, in spite

of my truly good intentions, I was again failing to be as “attentive” as

the occasion demanded; and so I presented her with my floral tribute.

She was immediately arch. “I’d surely be depriving somebody!” and on

this I got to the full her limpid look.

I assured her that this would not be so, and pointed to the other

flowers I had.

Accordingly, after a little more archness, she took them, as she had,

of course, fully meant to do from the first; she also took a woman’s

revenge. “I’ll not be any more lonesome going down than I was coming

up,” she said. “David’s enough.” And this led me definitely to conclude

that David had secured a helpmate who could take care of herself, in

spite of the limpidity of her eyes.

A steel wasp? Again that misleading description of Mrs. Weguelin St.

Michael’s, to which, since my early days in Kings Port, my imagination

may be said to have been harnessed, came back into my mind. I turned its

injustice over and over beneath the light which the total Hortense now

shed upon it--or rather, not the total Hortense, but my whole impression

of her, as far as I had got; I got a good deal further before we had

finished. To the slow, soft accompaniment of these gliding river shores,

where all the shadows had changed since morning, so that new loveliness

stood revealed at every turn, my thoughts dwelt upon this perfected

specimen of the latest American moment--so late that she contained

nothing of the past, and a great deal of to-morrow. I basked myself

in the memory of her achieved beauty, her achieved dress, her achieved

insolence, her luxurious complexity. She was even later than those quite

late athletic girls, the Amazons of the links, whose big, hard football

faces stare at one from public windows and from public punts, whose

giant, manly strides take them over leagues of country and square miles

of dance-floor, and whose bursting, blatant, immodest health glares upon

sea-beaches and round supper tables. Hortense knew that even now the

hour of such is striking, and that the American boy will presently turn

with relief to a creature who will more clearly remind him that he is a

man and that she is a woman.

But why was the insolence of Hortense offensive, when the insolence

of Eliza La Heu was not? Both these extremely feminine beings could

exercise that quality in profusion, whenever they so wished; wherein did

the difference lie? Perhaps I thought, in the spirit of its exercise;

Eliza was merely insolent when she happened to feel like it; and man

has always been able to forgive woman for that--whether the angels do or

not, but Hortense, the world-wise, was insolent to all people who could

not be of use to her; and all I have to say is, that if the angels can

forgive them, they’re welcome; I can’t!

Had I made sure of anything at the landing? Yes; Hortense didn’t care

for Charley in the least, and never would. A woman can stamp her foot

at a man and love him simultaneously; but those two light taps, and

the measure that her eyes took of Charley, meant that she must love his

possessions very much to be able to bear him at all.

Then, what was her feeling about John Mayrant? As Beverly had said, what

could she want him for? He hadn’t a thing that she valued or needed. His

old-time notions of decency, the clean simplicity of his make, his good

Southern position, and his collection of nice old relatives--what did

these assets look like from an automobile, or on board the launch of

a modern steam yacht? And wouldn’t it be amusing if John should grow

needlessly jealous, and have a “difficulty” with Charley? not a mere

flinging of torn paper money in the banker’s face, but some more decided

punishment for the banker’s presuming to rest his predatory eyes upon

John’s affianced lady.

I stared at the now broadening river, where the reappearance of the

bridge, and of Kings Port, and the nearer chimneys pouring out their

smoke a few miles above the town, betokened that our excursion was

drawing to its end. And then from the chimney’s neighborhood, from

the waterside where their factories stood, there shot out into the

smoothness of the stream a launch. It crossed into our course ahead

of us, preceded us quickly, growing soon into a dot, went through the

bridge, and so was seen no longer; and its occupants must have reached

town a good half hour before we did. And now, suddenly, I was stunned

with a great discovery. The bride’s voice sounded in my ear. “Well, I’ll

always say you’re a prophet, anyhow!”

I looked at her, dull and dazed by the internal commotion the discovery

had raised in me.

“You said we wouldn’t get stuck in the mud, and we didn’t,” said the

bride.

I pointed to the chimneys. “Are those the phosphate works?”

“Yais. Didn’t you know?”

“The V-C phosphate works?”

“Why, yais. Haven’t you been to see them yet? He ought to, oughtn’t he,

David? ‘Specially now they’ve found those deposits up the river were

just as rich as they hoped, after all.”

“Whose? Mr. Mayrant’s?” I asked with such sharpness that the bride was

surprised.

David hadn’t attended to the name. It was some trust estate, he thought;

Regent Tom, or some such thing.

“And they thought it was no good,” said the bride. “And it’s aivry bit

as good as the Coosaw used to be. Better than Florida or Tennessee.”

My eyes instinctively turned to where they had last seen the launch; of

course it wasn’t there any more. Then I spoke to David.

“Do you know what a phosphate bed looks like? Can one see it?”

“This kind you can,” he answered. “But it’s not worth your trouble.

Just a kind of a square hole you dig along the river till you strike the

stuff. What you want to see is the works.”

No, I didn’t want to see even the works; they smelt atrociously, and I

do not care for vats, and acids, and processes: and besides, had I not

seen enough? My eyes went down the river again where that launch had

gone; and I wondered if the wedding-cake would be postponed any more.

Regent Tom? Oh, yes, to be sure! John Mayrant had pointed out to me the

house where he had lived; he had been John’s uncle. So the old gentleman

had left his estate in trust! And now--! But certainly Hortense would

have won the battle of Chattanooga!

“Don’t be too sure about all this,” I told myself cautiously. But there

are times when cautioning one’s self is quite as useless as if somebody

else had cautioned one; my reason leaped with the rapidity of intuition;

I merely sat and looked on at what it was doing. All sorts of odds

and ends, words I hadn’t understood, looks and silences I hadn’t

interpreted, little signs that I had thought nothing of at first, but

which I had gradually, through their multiplicity, come to know meant

something, all these broken pieces fitted into each other now, fell

together and made a clear pattern of the truth, without a crack in

it--Hortense had never believed in that story about the phosphates

having failed--“pinched out,” as they say of ore deposits. There she

had stood between her two suitors, between her affianced John and the

besieging Charley, and before she would be off with the old love and on

with the new, she must personally look into those phosphates. Therefore

she had been obliged to have a sick father and postpone the wedding two

or three times, because her affairs--very likely the necessity of making

certain of Charley--had prevented her from coming sooner to Kings Port.

And having now come hither, and having beheld her Northern and her

Southern lovers side by side--had the comparison done something to her

highly controlled heart? Was love taking some hitherto unknown liberties

with that well-balanced organ? But what an outrage had been perpetrated

upon John! At that my deductions staggered in their rapid course. How

could his aunts--but then it had only been one of them; Miss Josephine

had never approved of Miss Eliza’s course; it was of that that Mrs.

Weguelin St. Michael had so emphatically reminded Mrs. Gregory in my

presence when we had strolled together upon High Walk, and those two

ladies had talked oracles in my presence. Well, they were oracles no

longer!

When the boat brought us back to the wharf, there were the rest of my

flowers unbestowed, and upon whom should I bestow them? I thought first

of Eliza La Heu, but she wouldn’t be at the Exchange so late as this.

Then it seemed well to carry them to Mrs. Weguelin. Something, however,

prompted me to pass her door, and continue vaguely walking on until I

came to the house where Miss Josephine and Miss Eliza lived; and here I

rang the bell and was admitted.

They were sitting as I had seen them first, the one with her embroidery,

and the other on the further side of a table, whereon lay an open

letter, which in a few moments I knew must have been the subject of the

discussion which they finished even as I came forward.

“It was only prolonging an honest mistake.” That was Miss Eliza.

“And it has merely resulted in clinching what you meant it to finish.”

That was Miss Josephine.

I laid my flowers upon the table, and saw that the letter was in John

Mayrant’s hand. Of course.

I avoided looking at it again; but what had he written, and why had he

written? His daily steps turned to this house--unless Miss Josephine had

banished him again.

The ladies accepted my offering with gracious expressions, and while I

told them of my visit to Live Oaks, and poured out my enthusiasm, the

servant was sent for and brought water and two beautiful old china

bowls, in which Miss Eliza proceeded to arrange the flowers with her

delicate white hands. She made them look exquisite with an old lady’s

art, and this little occupation went on as we talked of indifferent

subjects.

But the atmosphere of that room was charged with the subject of which we

did not speak. The letter lay on the table; and even as I struggled to

sustain polite conversation, I began to know what was in it, though I

never looked at it again; it spoke out as clearly to me as the launch

had done. I had thought, when I first entered, to tell the ladies

something of my meeting with Hortense Rieppe; I can only say that I

found this impossible. Neither of them referred to her, or to John, or

to anything that approached what we were all thinking of; for me to do

so would have assumed the dimensions of a liberty; and in consequence of

this state of things, constraint sat upon us all, growing worse, and

so pervading our small-talk with discomfort that I made my visit a very

short one. Of course they were civil about this when I rose, and begged

me not to go so soon; but I knew better. And even as I was getting my

hat and gloves in the hall I could tell by their tones that they had

returned to the subject of that letter. But in truth they had never left

it; as the front door shut behind me I felt as if they had read it aloud

to me.

XVI: The Steel Wasp

Certainly Hortense Rieppe would have won the battle of Chattanooga!

I know not from which parent that young woman inherited her gift of

strategy, but she was a master. To use the resources of one lover

in order to ascertain if another lover had any; to lay tribute on

everything that Charley possessed; on his influence in the business

world, which enabled him to walk into the V-C Chemical Company’s office

and borrow an expert in the phosphate line; on his launch in which to

pop the expert and take him up the river, and see in his company and

learn from his lips just what resources of worldly wealth were likely to

be in-store for John Mayrant; and finally (which was the key to all

the rest) on his inveterate passion for her, on his banker-like

determination through all the thick and thin of discouragement, and

worse than discouragement, of contemptuous coquetry, to possess her at

any cost he could afford;--to use all this that Charley had, in order

that she might judiciously arrive at the decision whether she would take

him or his rival, left one lost in admiration. And then, not to waste

a moment! To reach town one evening, and next morning by ten o’clock

to have that expert safe in the launch on his way up the river to the

phosphate diggings! The very audacity of such unscrupulousness commanded

my respect: successful dishonor generally wins louder applause than

successful virtue. But to be married to her! Oh! not for worlds! Charley

might meet such emergency, but poor John, never!

I nearly walked into Mrs. Weguelin and Mrs. Gregory taking their

customary air slowly in South Place.

“But why a steel wasp?” I said at once to Mrs. Weguelin. It was a more

familiar way of beginning with the little, dignified lady than would

have been at all possible, or suitable, if we had not had that little

joke about the piano snobile between us. As it was, she was not wholly

displeased. These Kings Port old ladies grew, I suspect, very slowly

and guardedly accustomed to any outsider; they allowed themselves very

seldom to suffer any form of abruptness from him, or from any one, for

that matter. But, once they were reassured as to him, then they might

sometimes allow the privileged person certain departures from their

own rule of deportment, because his conventions were recognized to be

different from theirs. Moreover, in reminding Mrs. Weguelin of the steel

wasp, I had put my abruptness in “quotations,” so to speak, by the

tone I gave it, just as people who are particular in speech can often

interpolate a word of current slang elegantly by means of the shade of

emphasis which they lay upon it.

So Mrs. Weguelin smiled and her dark eyes danced a little. “You remember

I said that, then?”

“I remember everything that you said.”

“How much have you seen of the creature?” demanded Mrs. Gregory, with

her head pretty high.

“Well, I’m seeing more, and more, and more every minute. She’s rather

endless.”

Mrs. Weguelin looked reproachful. “You surely cannot admire her, too?”

Mrs. Gregory hadn’t understood me. “Oh, if you really can keep her away,

you’re welcome!”

“I only meant,” I explained to the ladies, “that you don’t really begin

to see her till you have seen her: it’s afterward, when you’re out of

reach of the spell.” And I told them of the interview which I had not

been able to tell to Miss Josephine and Miss Eliza. “I doubt if it

lasted more than four minutes,” I assured them.

“Up the river?” repeated Mrs. Gregory

“At the landing,” I repeated. And the ladies consulted each other’s

expressions. But that didn’t bother me any more.

“And you can admire her?” Mrs. Weguelin persisted.

“May I tell you exactly, precisely?”

“Oh, do!” they both exclaimed.

“Well, I think many wise men would find her immensely desirable--as

somebody else’s wife!”

At this remark Mrs. Weguelin dropped her eyes, but I knew they were

dancing beneath their lids. “I should not have permitted myself to say

that, but I am glad that it has been said.”

Mrs. Gregory turned to her companion. “Shall we call to-morrow?”

“Don’t you feel it must be done?” returned Mrs. Weguelin, and then she

addressed me. “Do you know a Mr. Beverly Rodgers?”

I gave him a golden recommendation and took my leave of the ladies.

So they were going to do the handsome thing; they would ring the

Cornerlys’ bell; they would cross the interloping threshold, they would

recognize the interloping girl; and this meant that they had given it

up. It meant that Miss Eliza had given it up, too, had at last abandoned

her position that the marriage would never take place. And her own act

had probably drawn this down upon her. When the trustee of that estate

had told her of the apparent failure of the phosphates, she had hailed

it as an escape for her beloved John, and for all of them, because she

made sure that Hortense would never marry a virtually penniless man. And

when the work went on, and the rich fortune was unearthed after all, her

influence had caused that revelation to be delayed because she was so

confident that the engagement would be broken. But she had reckoned

without Hortense; worse than that, she had reckoned without John

Mayrant; in her meddling attempt to guide his affairs in the way that

she believed would be best for him, she forgot that the boy whom she had

brought up was no longer a child, and thus she unpardonably ignored his

rights as a man. And now Miss Josephine’s disapproval was vindicated,

and her own casuistry was doubly punished. Miss Rieppe’s astute journey

of investigation--for her purpose had evidently become suspected by some

of them beforehand--had forced Miss Eliza to disclose the truth about

the phosphates to her nephew before it should be told him by the girl

herself; and the intolerable position of apparent duplicity precipitated

two wholly inevitable actions on his part; he had bound himself more

than ever to marry Hortense, and he had made a furious breach with his

Aunt Eliza. That was what his letter had contained; this time he had

banished himself from that house. What was his Aunt Eliza going to do

about it? I wondered. She was a stiff, if indiscreet, old lady, and it

certainly did not fall within her view of the proprieties that young

people should take their elders to task in furious letters. But she

had been totally in the wrong, and her fault was irreparable, because

important things had happened in consequence of it; she might repent the

fault in sackcloth and ashes, but she couldn’t stop the things. Would

she, then, honorably wear the sackcloth, or would she dishonestly shirk

it under the false issue of her nephew’s improper tone to her? Women can

justify themselves with more appalling skill than men.

One drop there was in all this bitter bucket, which must have tasted

sweet to John. He had resigned from the Custom House: Juno had got

it right this time, though she hadn’t a notion of the real reason for

John’s act. This act had been, since morning, lost for me, so to speak,

in the shuffle of more absorbing events; and it now rose to view again

in my mind as a telling stroke in the full-length portrait that all his

acts had been painting of the boy during the last twenty-four hours.

Notwithstanding a meddlesome aunt, and an arriving sweetheart, and

imminent wedlock, he hadn’t forgotten to stop “taking orders from a

negro” at the very first opportunity which came to him; his phosphates

had done this for him, at least, and I should have the pleasure of

correcting Juno at tea.

But I did not have this pleasure. They were all in an excitement over

something else, and my own different excitement hadn’t a chance against

this greater one; for people seldom wish to hear what you have to say,

even under the most favorable circumstances, and never when they have

anything to say themselves. With an audience so hotly preoccupied I

couldn’t have sat on Juno effectively at all, and therefore I kept it

to myself, and attended very slightly to what they were telling me about

the Daughters of Dixie.

I bowed absently to the poetess. “And your poem?” I said. “A great

success, I am sure?”

“Why, didn’t you hear me say so?” said the upcountry bride; and then,

after a smile at the others, “I’m sure your flowers were graciously

accepted.”

“Ask Miss Josephine St. Michael,” I replied.

“Oh, oh, oh!” went the bride. “How would she know?”

I gave myself no pains to improve or arrest this tiresome joke, and they

went back to their Daughters of Dixie; but it is rather singular how

sometimes an utterly absurd notion will be the cause of our taking a

step which we had not contemplated. I did carry some flowers to Miss La

Heu the next day. I was at some trouble to find any; for in Kings Port

shops of this kind are by no means plentiful, and it was not until I had

paid a visit to a quite distant garden at the extreme northwestern edge

of the town that I lighted upon anything worthy of the girl behind the

counter. The Exchange itself was apt to have flowers for sale, but I

hardly saw my way to buying them there, and then immediately offering

them to the fair person who had sold them to me. As it was, I did much

better; for what I brought her were decidedly superior to any that were

at the Exchange when I entered it at lunch time.

They were, as the up-country bride would have put it, “graciously

accepted.” Miss La Heu stood them in water on the counter beside her

ledger. She was looking lovely.

“I expected you yesterday,” she said. “The new Lady Baltimore was

ready.”

“Well, if it is not all eaten yet--”

“Oh, no! Not a slice gone.”

“Ah, nobody does your art justice here!”

“Go and sit down at your table, please.”

It was really quite difficult to say to her from that distance the sort

of things that I wished to say; but there seemed to be no help for it,

and I did my best.

“I shall miss my lunches here very much when I’m gone.”

“Did you say coffee to-day?”

“Chocolate. I shall miss--”

“And the lettuce sandwiches?”

“Yes. You don’t realize how much these lunches--”

“Have cost you?” She seemed determined to keep laughing.

“You have said it. They have cost me my--”

“I can give you the receipt, you know.”

“The receipt?”

“For Lady Baltimore, to take with you.”

“You’ll have to give me a receipt for a lost heart.”

“Oh, his heart! General, listen to--” From habit she had turned to

where her dog used to lie; and sudden pain swept over her face and was

mastered. “Never mind!” she quickly resumed. “Please don’t speak about

it. And you have a heart somewhere; for it was very nice in you to come

in yesterday morning after--after the bridge.”

“I hope I have a heart,” I began, rising; for, really, I could not go on

in this way, sitting down away back at the lunch table.

But the door opened, and Hortense Rieppe came into the Woman’s Exchange.

It was at me that she first looked, and she gave me the slightest bow

possible, the least sign of conventional recognition that a movement

of the head could make and be visible at all; she didn’t bend her head

down, she tilted it ever so little up. It wasn’t new to me, this form

of greeting, and I knew that she had acquired it at Newport, and that it

denoted, all too accurately, the size of my importance in her eyes; she

did it, as she did everything, with perfection. Then she turned to Eliza

La Heu, whose face had become miraculously sweet.

“Good morning,” said Hortense.

It sounded from a quiet well of reserve music; just a cupful of

melodious tone dipped lightly out of the surface. Her face hadn’t

become anything; but it was equally miraculous in its total void of all

expression relating to this moment, or to any moment; just her beauty,

her permanent stationary beauty, was there glowing in it and through it,

not skin deep, but going back and back into her lazy eyes, and shining

from within the modulated bloom of her color and the depths of her amber

hair. She was choosing, for this occasion, to be as impersonal as some

radiant hour in nature, some mellow, motionless day when the leaves have

turned, but have not fallen, and it is drowsily warm; but it wasn’t so

much of nature that she, in her harmonious lustre, reminded me, as of

some beautiful silken-shaded lamp, from which color rather than light

came with subdued ampleness.

I saw her eyes settle upon the flowers that I had brought Eliza La Heu.

“How beautiful those are!” she remarked.

“Is there something that you wish?” inquired Miss La Heu, always

miraculously sweet.

“Some of your good things for lunch; a very little, if you will be so

kind.”

I had gone back to my table while the “very little” was being selected,

and I felt, in spite of how slightly she counted me, that it would be

inadequate in me to remain completely dumb.

“Mr. Mayrant is still at the Custom House?” I observed.

“For a few days, yes. Happily we shall soon break that connection.” And

she smelt my flowers.

“‘We,’” I thought to myself, “is rather tremendous.”

It grew more tremendous in the silence as Eliza La Heu brought me my

orders. Miss Rieppe did not seat herself to take the light refreshment

which she found enough for lunch. Her plate and cup were set for her,

but she walked about, now with one, and now with the other, taking her

time over it, and pausing here and there at some article of the Exchange

stock.

Of course, she hadn’t come there for any lunch; the Cornerlys had midday

lunch and dined late; these innovated hours were a part of Kings Port’s

deep suspicion of the Cornerlys; but what now became interesting was her

evident indifference to our perceiving that lunch was merely a pretext

with her; in fact, I think she wished it to be perceived, and I also

think that those turns which she took about the Exchange--her apparent

inspection of an old mahogany table, her examination of a pewter

set--were a symbol (and meant to be a symbol) of how she had all the

time there was, and the possession of everything she wished including

the situation, and that she enjoyed having this sink in while she was

rearranging whatever she had arranged to say, in consequence of finding

that I should also hear it. And how well she was worth looking at, no

matter whether she stood, or moved, or what she did! Her age lay beyond

the reach of the human eye; if she was twenty-five, she was marvelous in

her mastery of her appearance; if she was thirty-four, she was marvelous

in her mastery of perpetuating it, and by no other means than perfect

dress personal to herself (for she had taken the fashion and welded it

into her own plasticity) and perfect health; for without a trace of the

athletic, her graceful shape teemed with elasticity. There was a touch

of “sport” in the parasol she had laid down; and with all her blended

serenity there was a touch of “sport” in her. Experience could teach

her beauty nothing more; it wore the look of having been made love to by

many married men.

Quite suddenly the true light flashed upon me. I had been slow-sighted

indeed! So that was what she had come here for to-day! Miss Hortense

was going to pay her compliments to Miss La Heu. I believe that my sight

might still have been slow but for that miraculous sweetness upon

the face of Eliza. She was ready for the compliments! Well, I sat

expectant--and disappointment was by no means my lot.

Hortense finished her lunch. “And so this interesting place is where you

work?”

Eliza, thus addressed, assented.

“And you furnish wedding cakes also?”

Eliza was continuously and miraculously sweet. “The Exchange includes

that.”

“I shall hope you will be present to taste some of yours on the day it

is mine.”

“I shall accept the invitation if my friends send me one.”

No blood flowed from Hortense at this, and she continued with the same

smooth deliberation.

“The list is of necessity very small; but I shall see that it includes

you.”

“You are not going to postpone it any more, then?”

No blood flowed at this, either. “I doubt if John--if Mr. Mayrant--would

brook further delay, and my father seems stronger, at last. How much do

I owe you for your very good food?”

It is a pity that a larger audience could not have been there to enjoy

this skilful duet, for it held me hanging on every musical word of it.

There, at the far back end of the long room, I sat alone at my

table, pretending to be engaged over a sandwich that was no more in

existence--external, I mean--and a totally empty cup of chocolate. I

lifted the cup, and bowed over the plate, and used the paper Japanese

napkin, and generally went through the various discreet paces of eating,

quite breathless, all the while, to know which of them was coming out

ahead. There was no fairness in their positions; Hortense had Eliza in

a cage, penned in by every fact; but it doesn’t do to go too near some

birds, even when they’re caged, and, while these two birds had been

giving their sweet manifestations of song, Eliza had driven a peck

or two home through the bars, which, though they did not draw visible

blood, as I have said, probably taught Hortense that a Newport education

is not the only instruction which fits you for drawing-room war to the

knife.

Her small reckoning was paid, and she had drawn on one long, tawny

glove. Even this act was a luxury to watch, so full it was of the

feminine, of the stretching, indolent ease that the flesh and the spirit

of this creature invariably seemed to move with. But why didn’t she go?

This became my wonder now, while she slowly drew on the second glove.

She was taking more time than it needed.

“Your flowers are for sale, too?”

This, after her silence, struck me as being something planned out after

her original plan. The original plan had finished with that second

assertion of her ownership of John (or, I had better say, of his

ownership in her), that doubt she had expressed as to his being willing

to consent to any further postponement of their marriage. Of course she

had expected, and got herself ready for, some thrust on the postponement

subject.

Eliza crossed from behind her counter to where the Exchange flowers

stood on the opposite side of the room and took some of them up.

“But those are inferior,” said Hortense. “These.” And she touched

rightly the bowl in which my roses stood close beside Eliza’s ledger.

Eliza paused for one second. “Those are not for sale.”

Hortense paused, too. Then she hung to it. “They are so much the best.”

She was holding her purse.

“I think so, too,” said Eliza. “But I cannot let any one have them.”

Hortense put her purse away. “You know best. Shall you furnish us

flowers as well as cake?”

Eliza’s sweetness rose an octave, softer and softer. “Why, they have

flowers there! Didn’t you know?”

And to this last and frightful peck through the bars Hortense found no

retaliation. With a bow to Eliza, and a total oblivion of me, she went

out of the Exchange. She had flaunted “her” John in Eliza’s face, she

had, as they say, rubbed it in that he was “her” John;--but was it such

a neat, tidy victory, after all? She had given away the last word to

Eliza, presented her with that poisonous speech which when translated

meant:--

“Yes, he’s ‘your’ John; and you’re climbing up him into houses where

you’d otherwise be arrested for trespass.” For it was in one of the

various St. Michael houses that the marriage would be held, owing to the

nomadic state of the Rieppes.

Yes, Hortense had gone altogether too close to the cage at the end,

and, in that repetition of her taunt about “furnishing” supplies for the

wedding, she had at length betrayed something which her skill and

the intricate enamel of her experience had hitherto, and with entire

success, concealed--namely, the latent vulgarity of the woman. She was

wearing, for the sake of Kings Port, her best behavior, her most knowing

form, and, indeed it was a well-done imitation of the real thing; it

would last through most occasions, and it would deceive most people.

But here was the trouble: she was wearing it; while, through the whole

encounter, Eliza La Heu had worn nothing but her natural and perfect

dignity; yet with that disadvantage (for good breeding, alas!, is at

times a sort of disadvantage, and can be battered down and covered with

mud so that its own fine grain is invisible) Eliza had, after a somewhat

undecisive battle, got in that last frightful peck! But what had led

Hortense, after she had come through pretty well, to lose her temper

and thus, at the finish, expose to Eliza her weakest position? That her

clothes were paid for by a Newport lady who had taken her to Worth, that

her wedding feast was to be paid for by the bridegroom, these were not

facts which Eliza would deign to use as weapons; but she was marrying

inside the doors of Eliza’s Kings Port, that had never opened to admit

her before, and she had slipped into putting this chance into Eliza’s

hand--and how had she come to do this?

To be sure, my vision had been slow! Hortense had seen, through her

thick veil, Eliza’s interest in John in the first minute of her arrival

on the bridge, that minute when John had run up to Eliza after the

automobile had passed over poor General. And Hortense had not revealed

herself at once, because she wanted a longer look at them. Well, she had

got it, and she had got also a look at her affianced John when he was in

the fire-eating mood, and had displayed the conduct appropriate to 1840,

while Charley’s display had been so much more modern. And so first she

had prudently settled that awkward phosphate difficulty, and next she

had paid this little visit to Eliza in order to have the pleasure of

telling her in four or five different ways, and driving it in deep, and

turning it round: “Don’t you wish you may get him?”

“That’s all clear as day,” I said to myself. “But what does her loss of

temper mean?”

Eliza was writing at her ledger. The sweetness hadn’t entirely gone; it

was too soon for that, and besides, she knew I must be looking at her.

“Couldn’t you have told her they were my flowers?” I asked her at the

counter, as I prepared to depart. Eliza did not look up from her ledger.

“Do you think she would have believed me?”

“And why shouldn’t--”

“Go out!” she interrupted imperiously and with a stamp of her foot.

“You’ve been here long enough!”

You may imagine my amazement at this. It was not until I had reached

Mrs. Trevise’s, and was sitting down to answer a note which had been

left for me, that light again came. Hortense Rieppe had thought those

flowers were from John Mayrant, and Eliza had let her think so.

Yes, that was light, a good bright light shed on the matter; but a still

more brilliant beam was cast by the up-country bride when I came into

the dining-room. I told her myself, at once, that I had taken flowers to

Miss La Heu; I preferred she should hear this from me before she learned

it from the smiling lips of gossip. It surprised me that she should

immediately inquire what kind of flowers?

“Why, roses,” I answered; and she went into peals of laughter.

“Pray share the jest,” I begged her with some dignity.

“Didn’t you know,” she replied, “the language that roses from a single

gentleman to a young lady speak in Kings Port?”

I stood staring and stiff, taking it in, taking myself, and Eliza, and

Hortense, and the implicated John, all in.

“Why, aivrybody in Kings Port knows that!” said the bride; and now my

mirth rose even above hers.

XVII: Doing the Handsome Thing

It by no means lessened my pleasure to discern that Hortense must feel

herself to be in a predicament; and as I sat writing my answer to

the note, which was from Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael and contained an

invitation to me for the next afternoon, I thought of those pilots whose

dangers have come down to us from distant times through the songs of

ancient poets. The narrow and tempestuous channel between Scylla and

Charybdis bristled unquestionably with violent problems, but with none,

I should suppose, that called for a nicer hand upon the wheel, or an eye

more alert, than this steering of your little trireme to a successful

marriage, between one man who believed himself to be your destined

bridegroom and another who expected to be so, meanwhile keeping each

in ignorance of how close you were sailing to the other. In Hortense’s

place I should have wished to hasten the wedding now, have it safely

performed this afternoon, say, or to-morrow morning; thus precipitated

by some invaluable turn in the health of her poor dear father. But she

had worn it out, his health, by playing it for decidedly as much as it

could bear; it couldn’t be used again without risk; the date must stand

fixed; and, uneasy as she might have begun to be about John, Hortense

must, with no shortening of the course, get her boat in safe without

smashing it against either John or Charley. I wondered a little that she

should feel any uncertainty about her affianced lover. She must know how

much his word was to him, and she had had his word twice, given her

the second time to put his own honor right with her on the score of the

phosphates. But perhaps Hortense’s rich experiences of life had taught

her that a man’s word to a woman should not be subjected to the test

of another woman’s advent. On the whole, I suppose it was quite natural

those flowers should annoy her, and equally natural that Eliza, the

minx, should allow them to do so! There’s a joy to the marrow in

watching your enemy harried and discomfited by his own gratuitous

contrivances; you look on serenely at a show which hasn’t cost you a

groat. However, poor Eliza had not been so serene at the very end,

when she stormed out at me. For this I did not have to forgive her, of

course, little as I had merited such treatment. Had she not accepted my

flowers? But it was a gratification to reflect that in my sentimental

passages with her I had not gone to any great length; nothing, do I ever

find, is so irksome as the sense of having unwittingly been in a false

position. Was John, on his side, in love with her? Was it possible he

would fail in his word? So with these thoughts, while answering and

accepting Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael’s invitation to make one of a

party of strangers to whom she was going to show another old Kings Port

church, “where many of my ancestors lie,” as her note informed me, I

added one sentence which had nothing to do with the subject “She is a

steel wasp,” I ventured to say. And when on the next afternoon I met the

party at the church, I received from the little lady a look of highly

spiced comprehension as she gently remarked, “I was glad to get your

acceptance.”

When I went down to the dinner-table, Juno sat in her best clothes,

still discussing the Daughters of Dixie.

I can’t say that I took much more heed of this at dinner than I had

done at tea; but I was interested to hear Juno mention that she, too,

intended to call upon Hortense Rieppe. Kings Port, she said, must take

a consistent position; and for her part, so far as behavior went, she

didn’t see much to choose between the couple. “As to whether Mr. Mayrant

had really concealed the discovery of his fortune,” she continued, “I

asked Miss Josephine--in a perfectly nice way, of course. But old Mr.

St. Michael Beaugarcon, who has always had the estate in charge, did

that. It is only a life estate, unless Mr. Mayrant has lawful issue.

Well, he will have that now, and all that money will be his to

squander.”

Aunt Carola had written me again this morning, but I had been in no

haste to open her letter; my neglect of the Bombos did not weigh too

heavily upon me, I fear, but I certainly did put off reading what I

expected to be a reprimand. And concerning this I was right; her first

words betokened reprimand at once. “My dear nephew Augustus,” she began,

in her fine, elegant handwriting. That was always her mode of address

to me when something was coming, while at other times it would be, less

portentously, “My dear Augustus,” or “My dear nephew “; but whenever

my name and my relationship to her occurred conjointly, I took the

communication away with me to some corner, and opened it in solitude.

It wasn’t about the Bombos, though; and for what she took me to task I

was able to defend myself, I think, quite adequately. She found fault

with me for liking the South too much, and this she based upon the

enthusiastic accounts of Kings Port and its people that I had written

to her; nor had she at all approved of my remarks on the subject of the

negro, called forth by Daddy Ben and his grandson Charles Cotesworth.

“When I sent you (wrote Aunt Carola) to admire Kings Port good-breeding,

I did not send you to forget your country. Remember that those people

were its mortal enemies; that besides their treatment of our prisoners

in Libby and Andersonville (which killed my brother Alexander) they

displayed in their dealings, both social and political, an arrogance

in success and a childish petulance at opposition, which we who saw and

suffered can never forget, any more than we can forget our loved ones

who laid down their lives for this cause.”

These were not the only words with which Aunt Carola reproved what she

termed my “disloyalty,” but they will serve to indicate her feeling

about the Civil War. It was--on her side--precisely the feeling of all

the Kings Port old ladies on Heir side. But why should it be mine? And

so, after much thinking how I might best reply respectfully yet say to

Aunt Carola what my feeling was, I sat down upstairs at my window, and,

after some preliminary sentences, wrote:--

“There are dead brothers here also, who, like your brother, laid down

their lives for what they believed was their country, and whom their

sisters never can forget as you can never forget him. I read their

names upon sad church tablets, and their boy faces look out at me from

cherished miniatures and dim daguerreotypes. Upon their graves the women

who mourn them leave flowers as you leave flowers upon the grave of your

young soldier. You will tell me, perhaps, that since the bereavement

is equal, I have not justified my sympathy for these people. But the

bereavement was not equal. More homes here were robbed by death of their

light and promise than with us; and to this you must add the material

desolation of the homes themselves. Our roofs were not laid in ashes,

and to-day we sit in affluence while they sit in privation. You will

say to this, perhaps, that they brought it upon themselves. But even

granting that they did so, surely to suffer and to lose is more bitter

than to suffer and to win. My dear aunt, you could not see what I have

seen here, and write to me as you do; and if those years have left

upon your heart a scar which will not vanish, do not ask me, who came

afterward, to wear the scar also. I should then resemble certain of the

younger ones here, with less excuse than is theirs. As for the negro,

forgive me if I assure you that you retain an Abolitionist exaltation

for a creature who does not exist, or whose existence is an ineffectual

drop in the bucket, a creature on grateful knees raising faithful eyes

to one who has struck off his chains of slavery, whereas the creature

who does exist is--”

I paused here in my letter to Aunt Carola, and sought for some fitting

expression that should characterize for her with sufficient severity

the new type of deliberately worthless negro; and as I sought, my eyes

wandered to the garden next door, the garden of the Cornerlys. On a

bench near a shady arrangement of vines over bars sat Hortense Rieppe.

She was alone, and, from her attitude, seemed to be thinking deeply. The

high walls of the garden shut her into a privacy that her position near

the shady vines still more increased. It was evident that she had come

here for the sake of being alone, and I regretted that she was so turned

from me that I could not see her face. But her solitude did not long

continue; there came into view a gentleman of would-be venerable

appearance, who approached her with a walk carefully constructed for

public admiration, and who, upon reaching her, bent over with the same

sort of footlight elaboration and gave her a paternal kiss. I did not

need to hear her call him father; he was so obviously General Rieppe,

the prudent hero of Chattanooga, that words would have been perfectly

superfluous in his identification.

I was destined upon another day to hear the tones of his voice, and

thereupon may as well state now that they belonged altogether with the

rest of him. There is a familiar type of Northern fraud, and a Southern

type, equally familiar, but totally different in appearance. The

Northern type has the straight, flat, earnest hair, the shaven upper

lip, the chin-beard, and the benevolent religious expression. He will be

the president of several charities, and the head of one great business.

He plays no cards, drinks no wine, and warns young men to beware of

temptation. He is as genial as a hair-sofa; and he is seldom found out

by the public unless some financial crash in general affairs uncovers

his cheating, which lies most often beyond the law’s reach; and because

he cannot be put in jail, he quite honestly believes heaven is his

destination. We see less of him since we have ceased to be a religious

country, religion no longer being an essential disguise for him. The

Southern type, with his unction and his juleps, is better company,

unless he is the hero of too many of his own anecdotes. He is commonly

the possessor of a poetic gaze, a mane of silvery hair, and a noble

neck. As war days and cotton-factor days recede into a past more and

more filmed over with romance, he too grows rare among us, and I

regret it, for he was in truth a picturesque figure. General Rieppe was

perfect.

At first I was sorry that the distance they were from me rendered

hearing what they were saying impossible; very soon, however, the frame

of my open window provided me with a living picture which would have

been actually spoiled had the human voice disturbed its eloquent

pantomime.

General Rieppe’s daughter responded to her father’s caress but

languidly, turning to him her face, with its luminous, stationary

beauty. He pointed to the house, and then waved his hand toward the

bench where she sat; and she, in response to this, nodded slightly.

Upon which the General, after another kiss of histrionic paternity

administered to her forehead, left her sitting and proceeded along

the garden walk at a stately pace, until I could no longer see him.

Hortense, left alone upon the bench, looked down at the folds of her

dress, extended a hand and slowly rearranged one of them, and then, with

the same hand, felt her hair from front to back. This had scarce been

accomplished when the General reappeared, ushering Juno along the walk,

and bearing a chair with him. When they turned the corner at the arbor,

Hortense rose, and greetings ensued. Few objects could be straighter

than was Juno’s back; her card-case was in her hand, but her pocket was

not quite large enough for the whole of her pride, which stuck out so

that it could have been seen from a greater distance than my window.

The General would have departed, placing his chair for the visitor, when

Hortense waved for him an inviting hand toward the bench beside her;

he waved a similarly inviting hand, looking at Juno, who thereupon sat

firmly down upon the chair. At this the General hovered heavily, looking

at his daughter, who gave him no look in return, as she engaged in

conversation with Juno; and presently the General left them. Juno’s back

and Hortense’s front, both entirely motionless as they interviewed each

other’ presented a stiff appearance, with Juno half turned in her seat

and Hortense’s glance following her slight movement; the two then rose,

as the General came down the walk with two chairs and Mrs. Gregory and

Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael. Juno, with a bow to them, approached Hortense

by a step or two, a brief touch of their fingers was to be seen, and

Juno’s departure took place, attended by the heavy hovering of General

Rieppe.

“That’s why!” I said to myself aloud, suddenly, at my open window.

Immediately, however, I added, “but can it be?” And in my mind a whole

little edifice of reasons for Hortense’s apparent determination to marry

John instantly fabricated itself--and then fell down.

Through John she was triumphantly bringing stiff Kings Port to her, was

forcing them to accept her. But this was scarce enough temptation for

Hortense to marry; she could do very well without Kings Port--indeed,

she was not very likely to show herself in it, save to remind them, now

and then, that she was there, and that they could not keep her out any

more; this might amuse her a little, but the society itself would

not amuse her in the least. What place had it for her to smoke her

cigarettes in?

Eliza La Heu, then? Spite? The pleasure of taking something that

somebody else wanted? The pleasure of spoiling somebody else’s pleasure?

Or, more accurately, the pleasure of power? Well, yes; that might be it,

if Hortense Rieppe were younger in years, and younger, especially, in

soul; but her museum was too richly furnished with specimens of the

chase, she had collected too many bits and bibelots from life’s Hotel

Druot and the great bazaar of female competition, to pay so great a

price as marriage for merely John; particularly when a lady, even in

Newport, can have but one husband at a time in her collection. If she

did actually love John, as Beverly Rodgers had reluctantly come to

believe, it was most inappropriate in her! Had I followed out the train

of reasoning which lay coiled up inside the word inappropriate, I might

have reached the solution which eventually Hortense herself gave me,

and the jewelled recesses of her nature would have blazed still more

brilliantly to my eyes to-day; but in truth, my soul wasn’t old enough

yet to work Hortense out by itself, unaided!

While Mrs. Gregory and Mrs. Weguelin sat on their chairs, and Hortense

sat on her bench, tea was brought and a table laid, behind whose

whiteness and silver Hortense began slight offices with cups and sugar

tongs. She looked inquiry at her visitors, in answer to which Mrs.

Gregory indicated acceptance, and Mrs. Weguelin refusal. The beauty of

Hortense’s face had strangely increased since the arrival of these two

visitors. It shone resplendent behind the silver and the white cloth,

and her movement, as she gave the cup to Mrs. Gregory St. Michael, was

one of complete grace and admirable propriety. But once she looked away

from them in the direction of the path. Her two visitors rose and left

her, Mrs. Gregory setting her tea-cup down with a gesture that said

she would take no more, and, after their bows of farewell, Hortense sat

alone again pulling about the tea things.

I saw that by the table lay a card-case on the ground, evidently dropped

by Mrs. Gregory; but Hortense could not see it where she sat. Her quick

look along the path heralded more company and the General with more

chairs. Young people now began to appear, the various motions of whom

were more animated than the approaches and greetings and farewells of

their elders; chairs were moved and exchanged, the General was useful in

handling cups, and a number of faces unknown to me came and went, some

of them elderly ones whom I had seen in church, or passed while walking;

the black dresses of age mingled with the brighter colors of youth; and

on her bench behind the cups sat Hortense, or rose up at right moments,

radiant, restrained and adequate, receiving with deferential attention

the remarks of some dark-clothed elder, or, with sufficiently interested

countenance, inquiring something from a brighter one of her own

generation; but twice I saw her look up the garden path. None of them

stayed long, although when they were all gone the shadow of the garden

wall had come as far as the arbor; and once again Hortense sat alone

behind the table, leaning back with arms folded, and looking straight

in front of her. At last she stirred, and rose slowly, and then, with

a movement which was the perfection of timidity, began to advance, as

John, with his Aunt Eliza, came along the path. To John, Hortense with

familiar yet discreet brightness gave a left hand, as she waited for the

old lady; and then the old lady went through with it. What that embrace

of acknowledgment cost her cannot be measured, and during its process

John stood like a sentinel. Possibly this was the price of his

forgiveness to his Aunt Eliza.

The visitors accepted tea, and the beauty in Hortense’s face was now

supreme. The old lady sat, forgetting to drink her tea, but very still

in outward attitude, as she talked with Hortense; and the sight of one

hand in its glove lying motionless upon her best dress, suddenly almost

drew unexpected tears to my eyes. John was nearly as quiet as she, but

the glove that he held was twisted between his fingers. I expected

that he would stay with his Hortense when his aunt took her leave; he,

however, was evidently expected by the old lady to accompany her out and

back, I suppose, to her house, as was proper.

But John’s departure from Hortense differed from his meeting her. She

gave no left hand to him now; she gazed at him, and then, as the old

lady began to go toward the house, she moved a step toward him, and

then she cast herself into his arms! It was no acting, this, no skilful

simulation; her head sank upon his shoulder, and true passion spoke in

every line of that beautiful surrendered form, as it leaned against her

lover’s.

“So that’s why!” I exclaimed, once more aloud.

It was but a moment; and John, released, followed Miss Eliza. The old

lady walked slowly, with that half-failing step that betokens the body’s

weariness after great mental or moral strain. Indeed, as John regained

her side, she put her arm in his as if her feebleness needed his

support. Thus they went away together, the aunt and her beloved boy, who

had so sorely grieved and disappointed her.

But if this sight touched me, this glimpse of the vanquished leaving the

field after supreme acknowledgment of defeat, upon Hortense it wrought

another effect altogether. She stood looking after them, and as she

looked, the whole woman from head to foot, motionless as she was, seemed

to harden. Yet still she looked, until at length, slowly turning, her

eyes chanced to fall upon Mrs. Gregory St. Michael’s card-case. There

it lay, the symbol of Kings Port’s capitulation. She swooped down and

up with a flying curve of grace, holding her prey caught; and then,

catching also her handsome skirts on either side, she danced like a

whirling fan among the empty chairs.

XVIII: Again the Replacers

But a little while, and all that I had just witnessed in such vivid

dumb-show might have seemed to me in truth some masque; so smooth had

it been, and voiceless, coming and going like a devised fancy. And

after the last of the players was gone from the stage, leaving the white

cloth, and the silver, and the cups, and the groups of chairs near the

pleasant arbor, I watched the deserted garden whence the sunlight was

slowly departing, and it seemed to me more than ever like some empty and

charming scene in a playhouse, to which the comedians would in due

time return to repeat their delicate pantomime. But these were mental

indulgences, with which I sat playing until the sight of my interrupted

letter to Aunt Carola on the table before me brought the reality of

everything back into my thoughts; and I shook my head over Miss Eliza. I

remembered that hand of hers, lying in despondent acquiescence upon

her lap, as the old lady sat in her best dress, formally and faithfully

accepting the woman whom her nephew John had brought upon them as his

bride-elect--formally and faithfully accepting this distasteful person,

and thus atoning as best she could to her beloved nephew for the

wrong that her affection had led her to do him in that ill-starred and

inexcusable tampering with his affairs.

But there was my letter waiting. I took my pen, and finished what I had

to say about the negro and the injustice we had done to him, as well as

to our own race, by the Fifteenth Amendment. I wrote:--

“I think Northerners must often seem to these people strangely obtuse in

their attitude. And they deserve such opinion, since all they need to do

is come here and see for themselves what the War did to the South.

“You may have a perfectly just fight with a man and beat him rightly;

but if you are able to go on with your work next day, while his health

is so damaged that for a long while he limps about as a cripple, you

must not look up from your busy thriving and reproach him with his

helplessness, and remind him of its cause; nor must you be surprised

that he remembers the fight longer than you have time for. I know that

the North meant to be magnanimous, that the North was magnanimous, that

the spirit of Grant at Appomattox filled many breasts; and I know that

the magnanimity was not met by those who led the South after Lee’s

retirement, and before reconstruction set in, and that the Fifteenth

Amendment was brought on by their own doings: when have two wrongs made

a right? And to place the negro above these people was an atrocity. You

cannot expect them to inquire very industriously how magnanimous this

North meant to be, when they have suffered at her hands worse, far

worse, than France suffered from Germany’s after 1870.

“I do think there should be a different spirit among some of the

later-born, but I have come to understand even the slights and

suspicions from which I here and there suffer, since to their minds,

shut in by circumstance, I’m always a ‘Yankee.’

“We are prosperous; and prosperity does not bind, it merely assembles

people--at dinners and dances. It is adversity that binds--beside the

gravestone, beneath the desolated roof. Could you come here and see

what I have seen, the retrospect of suffering, the long, lingering

convalescence, the small outlook of vigor to come, and the steadfast

sodality of affliction and affection and fortitude, your kind but

unenlightened heart would be wrung, as mine has been, and is being, at

every turn.”

After I had posted this reply to Aunt Carola, I had some fears that my

pen had run away with me, and that she might now descend upon me

with that reproof which she knew so well how to exercise in cases of

disrespect. But there was actually a certain pathos in her mildness when

it came. She felt it her duty to go over a good deal of history first,

but:--

“I do not understand the present generation,” she finished, “and I

suppose that I was not meant to.”

The little sigh in these words did great credit to Aunt Carola.

This vindication off my mind, and relieved by it of the more general

thoughts about Kings Port and the South, which the pantomime of Kings

Port’s forced capitulation to Hortense had raised in me, I returned to

the personal matters between that young woman and John, and Charley. How

much did Charley know? How much would Charley stand? How much would John

stand, if he came to know?

Well, the scene in the garden now helped me to answer these questions

much better than I could have answered them before its occurrence. With

one fact--the great fact of love--established, it was not difficult to

account for at least one or two of the several things that puzzled me.

There could be no doubt that Hortense loved John Mayrant, loved him

beyond her own control. When this love had begun, made no matter.

Perhaps it began on the bridge, when the money was torn, and Eliza La

Heu had appeared. The Kings Port version of Hortense’s indifference to

John before the event of the phosphates might well enough be true. It

might even well enough be true that she had taken him and his phosphates

at Newport for lack of anything better at hand, and because she was sick

of disappointed hopes. In this case, Charley’s subsequent appearance

as something very much better (if the phosphates were to fail) would

perfectly explain the various postponements of the wedding.

So I was able to answer my questions to myself thus: How much did

Charley know?--Just what he could see for himself, and what he had

most likely heard from Newport gossip. He could have heard of an old

engagement, made purely for money’s sake, and of recent delays created

by the lady; and he could see the gentleman--an impossible husband from

a Wall Street standpoint!--to whom Hortense was evidently tempering her

final refusal by indulgently taking an interest in helping along his

phosphate fortune. Charley would not refuse to lend her his aid in this

estimable benevolence; nor would it occur to Charley’s sensibilities

how such benevolence would be taken by John if John were not “taken”

himself. Yes, Charley was plainly fooled, and fooled the more readily

because he had the old version of the truth. How should he suspect

there was a revised version? How should he discover that passion had now

changed sides, that it was now John who allowed himself to be loved? The

signs of this did not occur before his eyes. Of course, Charley would

not stay fooled forever; the hours of that were numbered,--but their

number was quite beyond my guessing!

How much would Charley stand? He would stand a good deal, because the

measure of his toleration was the measure of his desire for Hortense;

and it was plain that he wanted her very much indeed. But how much

would John stand? How soon would his “fire-eating” traditions produce a

“difficulty”? Why had they not done this already? Well, the garden had

in some way helped me to frame a fairly reasonable answer for this also.

Poor Hortense had become as powerless to woo John to warmth as poor

Venus had been with Adonis; and passion, in changing sides, had advanced

the boy’s knowledge. He knew now the difference between the embraces

of his lady when she had merely wanted his phosphates, and these other

caresses now that, she wanted him. In his ceaseless search for some

possible loophole of escape, his eye could not have overlooked the

chance that lay in Charley, and he was far too canny to blast his

forlorn hope. He had probably wondered what had changed the nature of

Hortense’s caresses, and the adventure of the torn money could scarce

have failed to suggest itself to the mind of a youth who, little as

he had trodden the ways of the world, evidently possessed some lively

instincts regarding the nature of women. To batter Charley as he had

battered Juno’s nephew, might result in winding the arms of Hortense

around his own neck more tightly than ever.

Why Hortense should keep Charley “on” any longer, was what I could least

fathom, but I trusted her to have excellent reasons for anything that

she did. “It’s sure to be quite simple, once you know it,” I told

myself; and the near future proved me to be right.

Thus I laid most of my enigmas to rest; there was but one which now

and then awakened still. Were Hortense a raw girl of eighteen, I could

easily grant that the “fire-eater” in John would be sure to move her.

But Hortense had travelled many miles away from the green forests of

romance; her present fields were carpeted, not with grass and flowers,

but with Oriental mats and rugs, and it was electric lights, not the

moon and stars, that shone upon her highly seasoned nights. No, torn

money and all, it was not appropriate in a woman of her experience; and

so I still found myself inquiring in the words of Beverly Rodgers, “But

what can she want him for?”

The next time that I met Mrs. Gregory St. Michael it was on my way to

join the party at the old church, which Mrs. Weguelin was going to show

them. The card-case was in her hand, and the sight of it prompted me to

allude to Hortense Rieppe.

“I find her beauty growing upon me?” I declared.

Mrs. Gregory did not deny the beauty, although she spoke with reserve at

first. “It is to be said that she knows how to write a suitable note,”

the lady also admitted.

She didn’t tell me what the note was about, naturally; but I could

imagine with what joy in the exercise of her art Hortense had

constructed that communication which must have accompanied the prompt

return of the card-case.

Then Mrs. Gregory’s tongue became downright. “Since you’re able to see

so much of her, why don’t you tell her to marry that little steam-yacht

gambler? I’m sure he’s dying to, and he’s just the thing for her?”

“Ah,” I returned, “Love so seldom knows what’s just the thing for

marriage.”

“Then your precocity theory falls,” declared Mrs. St. Michael. And as

she went away from me along the street, I watched her beautiful stately

walk; for who could help watching a sight so good?

Charley, then, was no secret to John’s people. Was John still a secret

to Charley? Could Hortense possibly have managed this? I hoped for a

chance to observe the two men with her during the visit of Mrs. Weguelin

St. Michael and her party to the church.

This party was already assembled when I arrived upon the spot appointed.

In the street, a few paces from the church, stood Bohm and Charley and

Kitty and Gazza, with Beverly Rodgers, who, as I came near, left them

and joined me.

“Oh, she’s somewhere off with her fire-eater,” responded Beverly to my

immediate inquiry for Hortense. “Do you think she was asked, old man?”

Probably not, I thought. “But she goes so well with the rest,” I

suggested.

Beverly gave his chuckle. “She goes where she likes. She’ll meet us here

when we’re finished, I’m pretty sure.”

“Why such certainty?”

“Well, she has to attend to Charley, you know!”

Mrs. Weguelin, it appeared, had met the party here by the church, but

had now gone somewhere in the immediate neighborhood to find out why the

gate was not opened to admit us, and to hasten the unpunctual custodian

of the keys. I had not looked for precisely such a party as Mrs.

Weguelin’s invitation had gathered, nor could I imagine that she had

fully understood herself what she was gathering; and this I intimated to

Beverly Rodgers, saying:--

“Do you suppose, my friend, that she suspected the feather of the birds