Lady Baltimore
by Owen Wister
Hypertext Meanings and Commentaries
from the Encyclopedia of the Self
by Mark Zimmerman

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, bothin 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 Vir-
gins, 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 thou-
sands 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 possibledescendant 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 fromthe 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 re-
turned 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 daythe 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 acreed 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 fornothing! 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; distin-
guished 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 whosedaughters 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 alcoholicgirls." 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 andrefinement, 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 pay-
ing 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 Catherne 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 mychocolate 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 be 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 besome 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 pre-
occupation 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; hedidn'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 JuIiet 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 religionsall 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 overfreedom, 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 I'esprif 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 islike 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 ofgratification, 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 hisdinner 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 knowhow 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 hap-
pened 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 Gen-
eral 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 re-
spectable 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 KingsPort'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 theblood."

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 Portcontinually 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 c' 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 arousedmy 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 dis-
pleased (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. Braintreewe 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 any-
body. 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 He light which had come to me, you have beheld ;he
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 withsomebody," 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 ex-
pects, 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.

"Certanly; 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 theyflew 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 antici-
pations 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 m 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 maidsand 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, byway 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; yetsurely, 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 towin 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 somepeople--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 seewhat 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 ofthis 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 peo-
ple 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 need-
lessly 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, precededus 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 in-
vestigation--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 mymind 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 ef