Lady Baltimore by Owen Wister (page 3)

Josephine sent a message to John that he might resume visiting her.

“But that is perfectly grand!” I cried in my delight over Miss Josephine as a character.

“It is perfectly natural,” returned Mrs. Gregory, quietly. “John has behaved with credit throughout. He was at length made to see that circumstances forbade any breach between his family and that of the other young man. John held back–who would not, after such an insult?–but Miss Josephine was firm, and he has promised to call and shake hands. My cousin, Doctor Beaugarcon, assures me that the young man’s injuries are trifling–a week will see him restored and presentable again.”

“A week? A mere nothing!” I answered “Do you know,” I now suggested, “that you have forgotten to ask me what I was thinking about when we met?”

“Bless me, young gentleman! and was it so remarkable?”

“Not at all, but it partly answers what Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael asked me. If a young man does not really wish to marry a young woman there are ways well known by which she can be brought to break the engagement.”

“Ah,” said Mrs. Gregory, “of course; gayeties and irregularities–“

“That is, if he’s not above them,” I hastily subjoined.

“Not always, by any means,” Mrs. Gregory returned. “Kings Port has been treated to some episodes–“

Mrs. Weguelin put in a word of defence. “It is to be said, Maria, that John’s irregularities have invariably been conducted with perfect propriety.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Gregory, “no Mayrant was ever known to be gross!”

“But this particular young lady,” said Mrs. Weguelin, “would not be estranged by an masculine irregularities and gayeties. Not many.”

“How about infidelities?” I suggested. “If he should flagrantly lose his heart to another?”

Mrs. Weguelin replied quickly. “That answers very well where hearts are in question.”

“But,” said I, “since phosphates are no longer–?”

There was a pause. “It would be a new dilemma,” Mrs. Gregory then said slowly, “if she turned out to care for him, after all.”

Throughout all this I was getting more and more the sense of how a total circle of people, a well-filled, wide circle of interested people, surrounded and cherished John Mayrant, made itself the setting of which he was the jewel; I felt in it, even stronger than the manifestation of personal affection (which certainly was strong enough), a collective sense of possession in him, a clan value, a pride and a guardianship concentrated and jealous, as of an heir to some princely estate, who must be worthy for the sake of a community even before he was worthy for his own sake. Thus he might amuse himself–it was in the code that princely heirs so should pour se deniaiser, as they neatly put it in Paris–thus might he and must he fight when his dignity was assailed; but thus might he not marry outside certain lines prescribed, or depart from his circle’s established creeds, divine and social, especially to hold any position which (to borrow Mrs. Gregory’s phrase) “reflected ignominy” upon them all. When he transgressed, their very value for him turned them bitter against him. I know that all of us are more or less chained to our community, which is pleased to expect us to walk its way, and mightily displeased when we please ourselves instead by breaking the chain and walking our own way; and I know that we are forgiven very slowly; but I had not dreamed what a prisoner to communal criticism a young American could be until I beheld Kings Port over John Mayrant.

And to what estate was this prince heir? Alas, his inheritance was all of it the Past and none of it the Future; was the full churchyard and the empty wharves! He was paying dear for his princedom! And then, there was yet another sense of this beautiful town that I got here completely, suddenly crystallized, though slowly gathering ever since my arrival: all these old people were clustered about one young one. That was it; that was the town’s ultimate tragic note: the old timber of the forest dying and the too sparse new growth appearing scantily amid the tall, fine, venerable, decaying trunks. It had been by no razing to the ground and sowing with salt that the city had perished; a process less violent but more sad had done away with it. Youth, in the wake of commerce, had ebbed from Kings Port, had flowed out from the silent, mourning houses, and sought life North and West, and wherever else life was to be found. Into my revery floated a phrase from a melodious and once favorite song: O tempo passato perche non ritorni?

And John Mayrant? Why, then, had he tarried here himself? That is a hard saying about crabbed age and youth, but are not most of the sayings hard that are true? What was this young man doing in Kings Port with his brains, and his pride, and his energetic adolescence? If the Custom House galled him, the whole country was open to him; why not have tried his fortune out and away, over the hills, where the new cities lie, all full of future and empty of past? Was it much to the credit of such a young man to find himself at the age of twenty-three or twenty-four, sound and lithe of limb, yet tied to the apron strings of Miss Josephine, and Miss Eliza, and some thirty or forty other elderly female relatives?

With these thoughts I looked at the ladies and wondered how I might lead them to answer me about John Mayrant, without asking questions which might imply something derogatory to him or painful to them. I could not ever say to them a word which might mean, however indirectly, that I thought their beautiful, cherished town no place for a young man to go to seed in; this cut so close to the quick of truth that discourse must keep wide away from it. What, then, could I ask them? As I pondered, Mrs. Weguelin solved it for me by what she was saying to Mrs. Gregory, of which, in my preoccupation, I had evidently missed a part:–

“–if he should share the family bad taste in wives.”

“Eliza says she has no fear of that.”

“Were I Eliza, Hugh’s performance would make me very uneasy.”

“Julia, John does not resemble Hugh.”

“Very decidedly, in coloring, Maria.”

“And Hugh found that girl in Minneapolis, Julia, where there was doubtless no pick for the poor fellow. And remember that George chose a lady, at any rate.”

Mrs. Weguelin gave to this a short assent. “Yes.” It portended something more behind, which her next words duly revealed. “A lady; but do–any– ladies ever seem quite like our own?

“Certainly not, Julia.”

You see, they were forgetting me again; but they had furnished me with a clue.

“Mr. John Mayrant has married brothers?”

“Two,” Mrs. Gregory responded. “John is the youngest of three children.”

“I hadn’t heard of the brothers before.”

“They seldom come here. They saw fit to leave their home and their delicate mother.”

“Oh!”

“But John,” said Mrs. Gregory, “met his responsibility like a Mayrant.”

“Whatever temptations he has yielded to,” said Mrs. Weguelin, “his filial piety has stood proof.”

“He refused,” added Mrs. Gregory, “when George (and I have never understood how George could be so forgetful of their mother) wrote twice, offering him a lucrative and rising position in the railroad company at Roanoke.”

“That was hard!” I exclaimed.

She totally misapplied my sympathy. “Oh, Anna Mayrant,” she corrected herself, “John’s mother, Mrs. Hector Mayrant, had harder things than forgetful sons to bear! I’ve not laid eyes on those boys since the funeral.”

“Nearly two years,” murmured Mrs. Weguelin. And then, to me, with something that was almost like a strange severity beneath her gentle tone: “Therefore we are proud of John, because the better traits in his nature remind us of his forefathers, whom we knew.”

“In Kings Port,” said Mrs. Gregory, “we prize those who ring true to the blood.”

By way of response to this sentiment, I quoted some French to her. “Bon chien chasse de race.”

It pleased Mrs. Weguelin. Her guarded attitude toward me relented. “John mentioned your cultivation to us,” she said. “In these tumble-down days it is rare to meet with one who still lives, mentally, on the gentlefolks’ plane–the piano nobile of intelligence!”

I realized how high a compliment she was paying me, and I repaid it with a joke. “Take care. Those who don’t live there would call it the piano snobile.”

“Ah!” cried the delighted lady, “they’d never have the wit!”

“Did you ever hear,” I continued, “the Bostonian’s remark–‘The mission of America is to vulgarize the world’?”

“I never expected to agree so totally with a Bostonian!” declared Mrs. Gregory.

“Nothing so hopeful,” I pursued, “has ever been said of us. For refinement and thoroughness and tradition delay progress, and we are sweeping them out of the road as fast as we can.”

“Come away, Julia,” said Mrs. Gregory. “The young gentleman is getting flippant again, and we leave him.”

The ladies, after gracious expressions concerning the pleasure of their stroll, descended the steps at the north end of High Walk, where the parapet stops, and turned inland from the water through a little street. I watched them until they went out of my sight round a corner; but the two silent, leisurely figures, moving in their black and their veils along an empty highway, come back to me often in the pictures of my thoughts; come back most often, indeed, as the human part of what my memory sees when it turns to look at Kings Port. For, first, it sees the blue frame of quiet sunny water, and the white town within its frame beneath the clear, untainted air; and then it sees the high-slanted roofs, red with their old corrugated tiles, and the tops of leafy enclosures dipping below sight among quaint and huddled quadrangles; and, next, the quiet houses standing in their separate grounds, their narrow ends to the street and their long, two-storied galleries open to the south, but their hushed windows closed as if against the prying, restless Present that must not look in and disturb the motionless memories which sit brooding behind these shutters; and between all these silent mansions lie the narrow streets, the quiet, empty streets, along which, as my memory watches them, pass the two ladies silently, in their black and their veils, moving between high, mellow-colored garden walls over whose tops look the oleanders, the climbing roses, and all the taller flowers of the gardens.

And if Mrs. Gregory and Mrs. Weguelin seemed to me at moments as narrow as those streets, they also seemed to me as lovely as those serene gardens; and if I had smiled at their prejudices, I had loved their innocence, their deep innocence, of the poisoned age which has succeeded their own; and if I had wondered this day at their powers for cruelty, I wondered the next day at the glimpse I had of their kindness. For during a pelting cold rainstorm, as I sat and shivered in a Royal Street car, waiting for it to start upon its north-bound course, the house-door opposite which we stood at the end of the track opened, and Mrs. Weguelin’s head appeared, nodding to the conductor as she sent her black servant out with hot coffee for him! He took off his hat, and smiled, and thanked her; and when we had started and I, the sole passenger in the chilly car, asked him about this, he said with native pride: “The ladies always watches out for us conductors in stormy weather, sir. That’s Mistress Weguelin St. Michael, one of our finest.” And then he gave me careful directions how to find a shop that I was seeking.

Think of this happening in New York! Think of the aristocracy of that metropolis warming up with coffee the–but why think of it, or of a New York conductor answering your questions with careful directions! It is not New York’s fault, it is merely New York’s misfortune: New York is in a hurry; and a world of haste cannot be a world either of courtesy or of kindness. But we have progress, progress, instead; and that is a tremendous consolation.

XI: Daddy Ben and His Seed

But what was Hortense Rieppe coming to see for herself?

Many dark things had been made plain to me by my talk with the two ladies; yet while disclosing so much, they had still left this important matter in shadow. I was very glad, however, for what they had revealed. They had showed me more of John Mayrant’s character, and more also of the destiny which had shaped his ends, so that my esteem for him had increased; for some of the words that they had exchanged shone like bright lanterns down into his nature upon strength and beauty lying quietly there–young strength and beauty, yet already tempered by manly sacrifice. I saw how it came to pass through this, through renunciation of his own desires, through performance of duties which had fallen upon him not quite fairly, that the eye of his spirit had been turned away from self; thus had it grown strong-sighted and able to look far and deep, as his speech sometimes revealed, while still his flesh was of his youthful age, and no saint’s flesh either. This had the ladies taught me during the fluttered interchange of their reminders and opinions, and by their eager agreements and disagreements, I was also grateful to them in that I could once more correct Juno. The pleasure should be mine to tell them in the public hearing of our table that Miss Rieppe was still engaged to John Mayrant.

But what was this interesting girl coming to see for herself?

This little hole in my knowledge gave me discomfort as I walked along toward the antiquity shop where I was to buy the other kettle-supporter. The ladies, with all their freedom of comment and censure, had kept something from me. I reviewed, I pieced together, their various remarks, those oracles, especially, which they had let fall, but it all came back to the same thing. I did not know, and they did, what Hortense Rieppe was coming to see for herself. At all events, the engagement was not broken, the chance to be instrumental in having it broken was still mine; I might still save John Mayrant from his deplorable quixotism; and as this reflection grew with me I took increasing comfort in it, and I stepped onward toward my kettle-supporter, filled with that sense of moral well-being which will steal over even the humblest of us when we feel that we are beneficently minding somebody else’s business.

Whenever the arrangement did not take me too widely from my course, I so mapped out my walks and errands in Kings Port that I might pass by the churchyard and church at the corner of Court and Worship streets. Even if I did not indulge myself by turning in to stroll and loiter among the flowers, it was enough pleasure to walk by that brick-wall. If you are willing to wander curiously in our old towns, you may still find in many of them good brick walls standing undisturbed, and equal in their color and simple excellence to those of Kings Port; but fashion has pushed these others out of its sight, among back streets and all sorts of forgotten purlieus and abandoned dignity, and takes its walks to-day amid cold, expensive ugliness; while the old brick walls of Kings Port continually frame your steps with charm. No one workman famous for his skill built them so well proportioned, so true to comeliness; it was the general hand of their age that could shape nothing wrong, as the hand of to-day can shape nothing right, save by a rigid following of the old.

I gave myself the pleasure this afternoon of walking by the churchyard wall; and when I reached the iron gate, there was Daddy Ben. So full was I of my thoughts concerning John Mayrant, and the vicissitudes of his heart, and the Custom House, that I was moved to have words with the old man upon the general topic.

“Well,” I said, “and so Mr. John is going to be married.”

No attempt to start a chat ever failed more signally. He assented with a manner of mingled civility and reserve that was perfection, and after the two syllables of which his answer consisted, he remained as impenetrably respectful as before. I felt rather high and dry, but I tried it again:–

“And I’m sure, Daddy Ben, that you feel as sorry as any of the family that the phosphates failed.”

Again he replied with his two syllables of assent, and again he stood mute, respectful, a little bent with his great age; but now his good manners–and better manners were never seen–impelled him to break silence upon some subject, since he would not permit himself to speak concerning the one which I had introduced. It was the phosphates which inspired him.

“Dey is mighty fine prostrate wukks heah, sah.”

“Yes, I’ve been told so, Daddy Ben.”

“On dis side up de ribber an’ tudder side down de ribber ‘cross de new bridge. Wuth visitin’ fo’ strangers, sah.”

I now felt entirely high and dry. I had attempted to enter into conversation with him about the intimate affairs of a family to which he felt that he belonged; and with perfect tact he had not only declined to discuss them with me, but had delicately informed me that I was a stranger and as such had better visit the phosphate works among the other sights of Kings Port. No diplomat could have done it better; and as I walled away from him I knew that he regarded me as an outsider, a Northerner, belonging to a race hostile to his people; he had seen Mas’ John friendly with me, but that was Mas’ John’s affair. And so it was that if the ladies had kept something from me, this cunning, old, polite, coal-black African had kept everything from me.

If all the negroes in Kings Port were like Daddy Ben, Mrs. Gregory St. Michael would not have spoken of having them “to deal with,” and the girl behind the counter would not have been thrown into such indignation when she alluded to their conceit and ignorance. Daddy Ben had, so far from being puffed up by the appointment in the Custom House, disapproved of this. I had heard enough about the difference between the old and new generations of the negro of Kings Port to believe it to be true, and I had come to discern how evidently it lay at the bottom of many things here: John Mayrant and his kind were a band united by a number of strong ties, but by nothing so much as by their hatred of the modern negro in their town. Yes, I was obliged to believe that the young Kings Port African left to freedom and the ballot, was a worse African than his slave parents; but this afternoon brought me a taste of it more pungent than all the assurances in the world.

I bought my kettle-supporter, and learned from the robber who sold it to me (Kings Port prices for “old things” are the most exorbitant that I know anywhere) that a carpenter lived not far from Mrs. Trevise’s boarding-house, and that he would make for me the box in which I could pack my various purchases.

“That is, if he’s working this week,” added the robber.

“What else would he be doing?”

“It may be his week for getting drunk on what he earned the week before.” And upon this he announced with as much bitterness as if he had been John Mayrant or any of his aunts, “That’s what Boston philanthropy has done for him.”

I dared up at this. “I suppose that’s a Southern argument for reestablishing slavery.”

“I am not Southern; Breslau is my native town, and I came from New York here to live five years ago. I’ve seen what your emancipation has done for the black, and I say to you, my friend, honest I don’t know a fool from a philanthropist any longer.”

He had much right upon his side; and it can be seen daily that philanthropy does not always walk hand-in-hand with wisdom. Does anything or anybody always walk so? Moreover, I am a friend to not many superlatives, and have perceived no saying to be more true than the one that extremes meet: they meet indeed, and folly is their meeting-place. Nor could I say in the case of the negro which folly were the more ridiculous;–that which expects a race which has lived no one knows how many thousand years in mental nakedness while Confucius, Moses, and Napoleon were flowering upon adjacent human stems, should put on suddenly the white man’s intelligence, or that other folly which declares we can do nothing for the African, as if Hampton had not already wrought excellent things for him. I had no mind to enter into all the inextricable error with this Teuton, and it was he who continued:–

“Oh, these Boston philanthropists; oh, these know-it-alls! Why don’t they stay home? Why do they come down here to worry us with their ignorance? See here, my friend, let me show you!”

He rushed about his shop in a search of distraught eagerness, and with a multitude of small exclamations, until, screeching jubilantly once, he pounced upon a shabby and learned-looking volume. This he brought me, thrusting it with his trembling fingers between my own, and shuffling the open pages. But when the apparently right one was found, he exclaimed, “No, I have better! and dashed away to a pile of pamphlets on the floor, where he began to plough and harrow. Wondering if I was closeted with a maniac, I looked at the book in my passive hand, and saw diagrams of various bones to me unknown, and men’s names of which I was equally ignorant–Mivart, Topinard, and more,–but at last that of Huxley. But this agreeable sight was spoiled at once by the quite horrible words Nycticebidoe, platyrrhine, catarrhine, from which I raised my eyes to see him coming at me with two pamphlets, and scolding as he came.

“Are you educated, yes? Have been to college, yes? Then perhaps you will understand.”

Certainly I understood immediately that he and his pamphlets were as bad as the book, or worse, in their use of a vocabulary designed to cause almost any listener the gravest inconvenience. Common Eocene ancestors occurred at the beginning of his lecture; and I believed that if it got no stronger than this, I could at least preserve the appearance of comprehending him; but it got stronger, and at sacro-iliac notch I may say, without using any grossly exaggerated expression, that I became unconscious. At least, all intelligence left me. When it returned, he was saying.–

“But this is only the beginning. Come in here to my crania and jaws.”

Evidently he held me hypnotized, for he now hurried me unresisting through a back door into a dark little where he turned up the gas, and I saw shelves as in a museum, to one of which he led me. I suppose that it was curiosity that rendered me thus sheep-like. Upon the shelf were a number of skulls and jaws in admirable condition and graded arrangement, beginning to the left with that flat kind of skull which one associates with gorillas. He resumed his scolding harangue, and for a few brief moments I understood him. Here, told by themselves, was as much of the story of the skulls as we know, from manlike apes through glacial man to the modern senator or railroad president. But my intelligence was destined soon to die away again.

“That is the Caucasian skull: your skull,” he said, touching a specimen at the right.

“Interesting,” I murmured. “I’m afraid I know nothing about skulls.”

“But you shall know someding before you leave,” he retorted, wagging his head at me; and this time it was not the book, but a specimen, that he pushed into my grasp. He gave it a name, not as bad as platyrrhine, but I feared worse was coming; then he took it away from me, gave me another skull, and while I obediently held it, pronounced something quite beyond me.

“And what is the translation of that?” he demanded excitedly.

“Tell me,” I feebly answered.

He shouted with overweening triumph: “The translation of that is South Carolina nigger. Notice well this so egcellent specimen. Prognathous, megadont, platyrrhine.”

“Ha! Platyrrhine!” I saluted the one word I recognized as I drowned.

“You have said it yourself!” was his extraordinary answer;–for what had I said? Almost as if he were going to break into a dance for joy, he took the Caucasian skull and the other two, and set the three together by themselves, away from the rest of the collection. The picture which they thus made spoke more than all the measurements and statistics which he now chattered out upon me, reading from his book as I contemplated the skulls. There was a similarity of shape, a kinship there between the three, which stared you in the face; but in the contours of vaulted skull, the projecting jaws, and the great molar teeth–what was to be seen? Why, in every respect that the African departed from the Caucasian, he departed in the direction of the ape! Here was zoology mutely but eloquently telling us why there had blossomed no Confucius, no Moses, no Napoleon, upon that black stem; why no Iliad, no Parthenon, no Sistine Madonna, had ever risen from that tropic mud.

The collector touched my sleeve. “Have you now learned someding about skulls, my friend? Will you invite those Boston philanthropists to stay home? They will get better results in civilization by giving votes to monkeys than teaching Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to riggers.”

Retaliation rose in me. “Haven’t you learned to call them negroes?” I remarked. But this was lost upon the Teuton. I was tempted to tell him that I was no philanthropist, and no Bostonian, and that he need not shout so loud, but my more dignified instincts restrained me. I withdrew my sleeve from his touch (it was this act of his, I think, that had most to do with my displeasure), and merely bidding him observe that the enormous price of the kettle-supporter had been reduced for me by his exhibition to a bagatelle, I left the shop of the screaming anatomist–or Afropath, or whatever it may seem most fitting that he should be called.

I bore the kettle-supporter with me, tied up objectionably in newspaper, and knotted with ungainly string; and it was this bundle which prevented my joining the girl behind the counter, and ending by a walk with a young lady the afternoon that had begun by a walk with two old ones. I should have liked to make my confession to her. She was evidently out for the sake of taking the air, and had with her no companion save the big curly white dog; confession would have been very agreeable; but I looked again at my ugly newspaper bundle, and turned in a direction that she was not herself pursuing.

Twice, as I went, I broke into laughter over my interview in the shop, which I fear has lost its comical quality in the relating. To enter a door and come serenely in among dingy mahogany and glass objects, to bargain haughtily for a brass bauble with the shopkeeper, and to have a few exchanged remarks suddenly turn the whole place into a sort of bedlam with a gibbering scientist dashing skulls at me to prove his fixed idea, and myself quite furious–I laughed more than twice; but, by the time I had approached the neighborhood of the carpenter’s shop, another side of it had brought reflection to my mind. Here was a foreigner to whom slavery and the Lost Cause were nothing, whose whole association with the South had begun but five years ago; and the race question had brought his feelings to this pitch! He had seen the Kings Port negro with the eyes of the flesh, and not with the eyes of theory, and as a result the reddest rag for him was pale beside a Boston philanthropist!

Nevertheless, I have said already that I am no lover of superlatives, and in doctrine especially is this true. We need not expect a Confucius from the negro, nor yet a Chesterfield; but I am an enemy also of that blind and base hate against him, which conducts nowhere save to the de-civilizing of white and black alike. Who brought him here? Did he invite himself? Then let us make the best of it and teach him, lead him, compel him to live self-respecting, not as statesman, poet, or financier, but by the honorable toil of his hand and sweat of his brow. Because “the door of hope” was once opened too suddenly for him is no reason for slamming it now forever in his face.

Thus mentally I lectured back at the Teuton as I went through the streets of Kings Port; and after a while I turned a corner which took me abruptly, as with one magic step, out of the white man’s world into the blackest Congo. Even the well-inhabited quarter of Kings Port (and I had now come within this limited domain) holds narrow lanes and recesses which teem and swarm with negroes. As cracks will run through fine porcelain, so do these black rifts of Africa lurk almost invisible among the gardens and the houses. The picture that these places offered, tropic, squalid, and fecund, often caused me to walk through them and watch the basking population; the intricate, broken wooden galleries, the rickety outside stair cases, the red and yellow splashes of color on the clothes lines, the agglomerate rags that stuffed holes in decaying roofs or hung nakedly on human frames, the small, choked dwellings, bursting open at doors and windows with black, round-eyed babies as an overripe melon bursts with seeds, the children playing marbles in the court, the parents playing cards in the room, the grandparents smoking pipes on the porch, and the great-grandparents stairs gazing out at you like creatures from the Old Testament or the jungle. From the jungle we had stolen them, North and South had stolen them together, long ago, to be slaves, not to be citizens, and now here they were, the fruits of our theft; and for some reason (possibly the Teuton was the reason) that passage from the Book of Exodus came into my head: “For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children.”

These thoughts were interrupted by sounds as of altercation. I had nearly reached the end of the lane, where I should again emerge into the White man’s world, and where I was now walking the lane spread into a broader space with ells and angles and rotting steps, and habitations mostly too ruinous to be inhabited. It was from a sashless window in one of these that the angry voices came. The first words which were distinct aroused my interest quite beyond the scale of an ordinary altercation:–

“Calls you’self a reconstuckted niggah?”

This was said sharply and with prodigious scorn. The answer which it brought was lengthy and of such a general sullen incoherence that I could make out only a frequent repetition of “custom house,” and that somebody was going to take care of somebody hereafter.

Into this the first voice broke with tones of highest contempt and rapidity:–

“President gwine to gib brekfus’ an’ dinnah an suppah to de likes ob you fo’ de whole remaindah oh youh wuthless nat’ral life? Get out ob my sight, you reconstuckted niggah. I come out oh de St. Michael.”

There came through the window immediately upon this sounds of scuffling and of a fall, and then cries for help which took me running into the dilapidated building. Daddy Ben lay on the floor, and a thick, young savage was kicking him. In some remarkable way I thought of the solidity of their heads, and before the assailant even knew that he had a witness, I sped forward, aiming my kettle-supporter, and with its sharp brass edge I dealt him a crack over his shin with astonishing accuracy. It was a dismal howl that he gave, and as he turned he got from me another crack upon the other shin. I had no time to be alarmed at my deed, or I think that I should have been very much so; I am a man above all of peace, and physical encounters are peculiarly abhorrent to me; but, so far from assailing me, the thick, young savage, with the single muttered remark, “He hit me fuss,” got himself out of the house with the most agreeable rapidity.

Daddy Ben sat up, and his first inquiry greatly reassured me as to his state. He stared at my paper bundle. “You done make him hollah wid dat, sah!”

I showed him the kettle-supporter through a rent in its wrapping, and I assisted him to stand upright. His injuries proved fortunately to be slight (although I may say here that the shock to his ancient body kept him away for a few days from the churchyard), and when I began to talk to him about the incident, he seemed unwilling to say much in answer to my questions. And when I offered to accompany him to where he lived, he declined altogether, assuring me that it was close, and that he could walk there as well as if nothing had happened to him; but upon my asking him if I was on the right way to the carpenter’s shop, he looked at me curiously.

“No use you gwine dab, sah. Dat shop close up. He not wukkin, dis week, and dat why fo’ I jaw him jus’ now when you come in an’ stop him. He de cahpentah, my gran’son, Cha’s Coteswuth.”

XII: From the Bedside

Next morning when I saw the weltering sky I resigned myself to a day of dullness; yet before its end I had caught a bright new glimpse of John Mayrant’s abilities, and also had come, through tribulation, to a further understanding of the South; so that I do not, to-day, regret the tribulation. As the rain disappointed me of two outdoor expeditions, to which I had been for some little while looking forward, I dedicated most of my long morning to a sadly neglected correspondence, and trusted that the expeditions, as soon as the next fine weather visited Kings Port, would still be in store for me. Not only everybody in town here, but Aunt Carola, up in the North also, had assured me that to miss the sight of Live Oaks when the azaleas in the gardens of that country seat were in flower would be to lose one of the rarest and most beautiful things which could be seen anywhere; and so I looked out of my window at the furious storm, hoping that it might not strip the bushes at Live Oaks of their bloom, which recent tourists at Mrs. Trevise’s had described as drawing near the zenith of its luxuriance. The other excursion to Udolpho with John Mayrant was not so likely to fall through. Udolpho was a sort of hunting lodge or country club near Tern Creek and an old colonial church, so old that it bore the royal arms upon a shield still preserved as a sign of its colonial origin. A note from Mayrant, received at breakfast, informed me that the rain would take all pleasure from such an excursion, and that he should seize the earliest opportunity the weather might afford to hold me to my promise. The wet gale, even as I sat writing, was beating down some of the full-blown flowers in the garden next Mrs. Trevise’s house, and as the morning wore on I watched the paths grow more strewn with broken twigs and leaves.

I filled my correspondence with accounts of Daddy Ben and his grandson, the carpenter, doubtless from some pride in my part in that, but also because it had become, through thinking it over, even more interesting to-day than it had been at the moment of its occurrence; and in replying to a sort of postscript of Aunt Carola’s in which she hurriedly wrote that she had forgotten to say she had heard the La Heu family in South Carolina was related to the Bombos, and should be obliged to me if I would make inquiries about this, I told her that it would be easy, and then described to her the Teuton, plying his “antiquity” trade externally while internally cherishing his collected skulls and nursing his scientific rage. All my letters were the more abundant concerning these adventures of mine from my having kept entirely silent upon them at Mrs. Trevise’s tea-table. I dreaded Juno when let loose upon the negro question; and the fact that I was beginning to understand her feelings did not at all make me wish to be deafened by them. Neither Juno, therefore, nor any of them learned a word from me about the kettle-supporter incident. What I did take pains to inform the assembled company was my gratification that the report of Mr. Mayrant’s engagement being broken was unfounded; and this caused Juno to observe that in that case Miss Rieppe must have the most imperative reasons for uniting herself to such a young man.

Unintimidated by the rain, this formidable creature had taken herself off to her nephew’s bedside almost immediately after breakfast; and later in the day I, too, risked a drenching for the sake of ordering the packing-box that I needed. When I returned, it was close on tea-time; I had seen Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael send out the hot coffee to the conductor, and I had found a negro carpenter whose week it happily was to stay sober; and now I learned that, when tea should be finished, the poetess had in store for us, as a treat, her ode.

Our evening meal was not plain sailing, even for the veteran navigation of Mrs. Trevise; Juno had returned from the bedside very plainly displeased (she was always candid even when silent) by something which had happened there; and before the joyful moment came when we all learned what this was, a very gouty Boston lady who had arrived with her husband from Florida on her way North–and whose nature you will readily grasp when I tell you that we found ourselves speaking of the man as Mrs. Braintree’s husband and never as Mr. Braintree–this crippled lady, who was of a candor equal to Juno’s, embarked upon a conversation with Juno that compelled Mrs. Trevise to tinkle her bell for Daphne after only two remarks had been exchanged.

I had been sorry at first that here in this Southern boarding-house Boston should be represented only by a lady who appeared to unite in herself all the stony products of that city, and none of the others; for she was as convivial as a statue and as well-informed as a spelling-book; she stood no more for the whole of Boston than did Juno for the whole of Kings Port. But my sorrow grew less when I found that in Mrs. Braintree we had indeed a capable match for her Southern counterpart. Juno, according to her custom, had remembered something objectionable that had been perpetrated in 1865 by the Northern vandals.

“Edward,” said Mrs. Braintree to her husband, in a frightfully clear voice, “it was at Chambersburg, was it not, that the Southern vandals burned the house in which were your father’s title-deeds?”

Edward, who, it appeared, had fought through the whole Civil War, and was in consequence perfectly good-humored and peaceable in his feelings upon that subject, replied hastily and amiably: “Oh, yes, yes! Why, I believe it was!”

But this availed nothing; Juno bent her great height forward, and addressed Mrs. Braintree. “This is the first time I have been told Southerners were vandals.”

“You will never be able to say that again!” replied Mrs. Braintree.

After the bell and Daphne had stopped, the invaluable Briton addressed a genial generalization to us all: “I often think how truly awful your war would have been if the women had fought it, y’know, instead of the men.”

“Quite so!” said the easy-going Edward “Squaws! Mutilation! Yes!” and he laughed at his little joke, but he laughed alone.

I turned to Juno. “Speaking of mutilation, I trust your nephew is better this evening.”

I was rejoiced by receiving a glare in response. But still more joy was to come.

“An apology ought to help cure him a lot,” observed the Briton.

Juno employed her policy of not hearing him.

“Indeed, I trust that your nephew is in less pain,” said the poetess.

Juno was willing to answer this. “The injuries, thank you, are the merest trifles–all that such a light-weight could inflict.” And she shrugged her shoulders to indicate the futility of young John’s pugilism.

“But,” the surprised Briton interposed, “I thought you said your nephew was too feeble to eat steak or hear poetry.”

Juno could always stem the eddy of her own contradictions–but she did raise her voice a little. “I fancy, sir, that Doctor Beaugarcon knows what he is talking about.”

“Have they apologized yet?” inquired the male honeymooner from the up-country.

“My nephew, sir, nobly consented to shake hands this afternoon. He did it entirely out of respect for Mr. Mayrant’s family, who coerced him into this tardy reparation, and who feel unable to recognize him since his treasonable attitude in the Custom House.”

“Must be fairly hard to coerce a chap you can’t recognize,” said the Briton.

An et cetera now spoke to the honeymoon bride from the up-country: “I heard Doctor Beaugarcon say he was coming to visit you this evening.”

“Yais,” assented the bride. “Doctor Beaugarcon is my mother’s fourth cousin.”

Juno now took–most unwisely, as it proved–a vindictive turn at me. “I knew that your friend, Mr. Mayrant, was intemperate,” she began.

I don’t think that Mrs. Trevise had any intention to ring for Daphne at this point–her curiosity was too lively; but Juno was going to risk no such intervention, and I saw her lay a precautionary hand heavily down over the bell. “But,” she continued, “I did not know that Mr. Mayrant was a gambler.”

“Have you ever seen him intemperate?” I asked.

“That would be quite needless,” Juno returned. “And of the gambling I have ocular proof, since I found him, cards, counters, and money, with my sick nephew. He had actually brought cards in his pocket.”

“I suppose,” said the Briton, “your nephew was too sick to resist him.”

The male honeymooner, with two of the et ceteras, made such unsteady demonstrations at this that Mrs. Trevise protracted our sitting no longer. She rose, and this meant rising for us all.

A sense of regret and incompleteness filled me, and finding the Briton at my elbow as our company proceeded toward the sitting room, I said: “Too bad!”

His whisper was confident. “We’ll get the rest of it out of her yet.”

But the rest of it came without our connivance.

In the sitting room Doctor Beaugarcon sat waiting, and at sight of Juno entering the door (she headed our irregular procession) he sprang up and lifted admiring hands. “Oh, why didn’t I have an aunt like you!” he exclaimed, and to Mrs. Trevise as she followed: “She pays her nephew’s poker debts.”

“How much, cousin Tom?” asked the upcountry bride.

And the gay old doctor chuckled, as he kissed her: “Thirty dollars this afternoon, my darling.”

At this the Briton dragged me behind a door in the hall, and there we danced together.

“That Mayrant chap will do,” he declared; and we composed ourselves for a proper entrance into the sitting room, where the introductions had been made, and where Doctor Beaugarcon and Mrs. Braintree’s husband had already fallen into war reminiscences, and were discovering with mutual amiability that they had fought against each other in a number of battles.

“And you generally licked us,” smiled the Union soldier.

“Ah! don’t I know myself how it feels to run!” laughed the Confederate. “Are you down at the club?”

But upon learning from the poetess that her ode was now to be read aloud, Doctor Beaugarcon paid his fourth cousin’s daughter a brief, though affectionate, visit, lamenting that a very ill patient should compel him to take himself away so immediately, but promising her presently in his stead two visitors much more interesting.

“Miss Josephine St. Michael desires to call upon you,” he said, “and I fancy that her nephew will escort her.”

“In all this rain?” said the bride.

“Oh, it’s letting up, letting up! Good night, Mistress Trevise. Good night, sir; I am glad to have met you.” He shook hands with Mrs. Braintree’s husband. “We fellows,” he whispered, “who fought in the war have had war enough.” And bidding the general company good night, and kissing the bride again, he left us even as the poetess returned from her room with the manuscript.

I soon wished that I had escaped with him, because I feared what Mrs. Braintree might say when the verses should be finished; and so, I think, did her husband. We should have taken the hint which tactful Doctor Beaugarcon had meant, I began to believe, to give us in that whispered remark of his. But it had been given too lightly, and so we sat and heard the ode out. I am sure that the poetess, wrapped in the thoughts of her own composition, had lost sight of all but the phrasing of her poem and the strong feelings which it not unmusically voiced; there Is no other way to account for her being willing to read it in Mrs. Braintree’s presence.

Whatever gayety had filled me when the Boston lady had clashed with Juno was now changed to deprecation and concern. Indeed, I myself felt almost as if I were being physically struck by the words, until mere bewilderment took possession of me; and after bewilderment, a little, a very little, light, which, however, rapidly increased. We were the victors, we the North, and we had gone upon our way with songs and rejoicing–able to forget, because we were the victors. We had our victory; let the vanquished have their memory. But here was the cry of the vanquished, coming after forty years. It was the time which at first bewildered me; Juno had seen the war, Juno’s bitterness I could comprehend, even if I could not comprehend her freedom in expressing it, but the poetess could not be more than a year or two older than I was; she had come after it was all over. Why should she prolong such memories and feelings? But my light increased as I remembered she had not written this for us, and that if she had not seen the flames of war, she had seen the ashes; for the ashes I had seen myself here in Kings Port, and had been overwhelmed by the sight, forty years later, more overwhelmed than I could possibly say to Mrs. Gregory St. Michael, or Mrs. Weguelin, or anybody. The strain of sitting and waiting for the end made my hands cold and my head hot, but nevertheless the light which had come enabled me to bend instantly to Mrs. Braintree and murmur a great and abused quotation to her:–

“Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner.”

But my petition could not move her. She was too old; she had seen the flames of war; and so she said to her husband:–

“Edward, will you please help me upstairs?”

And thus the lame, irreconcilable lady left the room with the assistance of her unhappy warrior, who must have suffered far more keenly than I did.

This departure left us all in a constraint which was becoming unbearable when the blessed doorbell rang and delivered us, and Miss Josephine St. Michael entered with John Mayrant. He wore a most curious expression; his eyes went searching about the room, and at length settled upon Juno with a light in them as impish as that which had flickered in my own mood before the ode.

To my surprise, Miss Josephine advanced and gave me a special and marked greeting. Before this she had always merely bowed to me; to-night she held out her hand. “Of course my visit is not to you; but I am very glad to find you here and express the appreciation of several of us for your timely aid to Daddy Ben. He feels much shame in having said nothing to you himself.”

And while I muttered those inevitable modest nothings which fit such occasions, Miss St. Michael recounted to the bride, whom she was ostensibly calling upon, and to the rest of our now once more harmonious circle, my adventures in the alleys of Africa. These loomed, even with Miss St. Michael’s perfectly quiet and simple rendering of them, almost of heroic size, thanks doubtless to Daddy Ben’s tropical imagery when he first told the tale; and before they were over Miss St. Michael’s marked recognition of me actually brought from Juno some reflected recognition– only this resembled in its graciousness the original about as correctly as a hollow spoon reflects the human countenance divine. Still, it was at Juno’s own request that I brought down from my chamber and displayed to them the kettle-supporter.

I have said that Miss St. Michael’s visit was ostensibly to the bride: and that is because for some magnetic reason or other I felt diplomacy like an undercurrent passing among our chairs. Young John’s expression deepened, whenever he watched Juno, to a devilishness which his polite manners veiled no better than a mosquito netting; and I believe that his aunt, on account of the battle between their respective nephews, had for family reasons deemed it advisable to pay, indirectly, under cover of the bride, a state visit to Juno; and I think that I saw Juno accepting it as a state visit, and that the two together, without using a word of spoken language, gave each other to understand that the recent deplorable circumstances were a closed incident. I think that his Aunt Josephine had desired young John to pay a visit likewise, and, to make sure of his speedy compliance, had brought him along with her–coerced him, as Juno would have said. He wore somewhat the look of having been “coerced,” and he contributed remarkably few observations to the talk.

It was all harmonious, and decorous, and properly conducted, this state visit; yet even so, Juno and John exchanged at parting some verbal sweet-meats which rather stuck out from the smooth meringue of diplomacy.

She contemplated his bruise. “You are feeling stronger, I hope, than you have been lately? A bridegroom’s health should be good.”

He thanked her. “I am feeling better to-night than for many weeks.”

The rascal had the thirty dollars visibly bulging that moment in his pocket. I doubt if he had acquainted his aunt with this episode, but she was certain to hear it soon; and when she did hear it, I rather fancy that she wished to smile–as I completely smiled alone in my bed that night thinking young John over.

But I did not go to sleep smiling; listening to the “Ode for the Daughters of Dixie” had been an ordeal too truly painful, because it disclosed live feelings which I had thought were dead, or rather, it disclosed that those feelings smouldered in the young as well as in the old. Doctor Beaugarcon didn’t have them–he had fought them out, just as Mr. Braintree had fought them out; and Mrs. Braintree, like Juno, retained them, because she hadn’t fought them out; and John Mayrant didn’t have them, because he had been to other places; and I didn’t have them–never had had them in my life, because I came into the world when it was all over. Why then–Stop, I told myself, growing very wakeful, and seeing in the darkness the light which had come to me, you have beheld the ashes, and even the sight has overwhelmed you; these others were born in the ashes, and have had ashes to sleep in and ashes to eat. This I said to myself; and I remembered that War hadn’t been all; that Reconstruction came in due season; and I thought of the “reconstructed” negro, as Daddy Ben had so ingeniously styled him. These white people, my race, had been set beneath the reconstructed negro. Still, still, this did not justify the whole of it to me; my perfectly innocent generation seemed to be included in the unforgiving, unforgetting ode. “I must have it out with somebody,” I said. And in time I fell asleep.

XIII: The Girl Behind the Counter–III

I was still thinking the ode over as I dressed for breakfast, for which I was late, owing to my hair, which the changes in the weather had rendered somewhat recalcitrant. Yes; decidedly I must have it out with somebody. The weather was once more superb; and in the garden beneath my window men were already sweeping away the broken twigs and debris of the storm. I say “already,” because it had not seemed to me to be the Kings Port custom to remove debris, or anything, with speed. I also had it in my mind to perform at lunch Aunt Carola’s commission, and learn if the family of La Heu were indeed of royal descent through the Bombos. I intended to find this out from the girl behind the counter, but the course which our conversation took led me completely to forget about it.

As soon as I entered the Exchange I planted myself in front of the counter, in spite of the discouragement which I too plainly perceived in her countenance; the unfavorable impression which I had made upon her at our last interview was still in force.

I plunged into it at once. “I have a confession to make.”

“You do me surprising honor.”

“Oh, now, don’t begin like that! I suppose you never told a lie.”

“I’m telling the truth now when I say that I do not see why an entire stranger should confess anything to me.”

“Oh, my goodness! Well, I told you a lie, anyhow; a great, successful, deplorable lie.”

She opened her mouth under the shock of it, and I recited to her unsparingly my deception; during this recital her mouth gradually closed.

“Well, I declare, declare, declare!” she slowly and deliciously breathed over the sum total; and she considered me at length, silently, before her words came again, like a soft soliloquy. “I could never have believed it in one who”–here gayety flashed in her eyes suddenly–“parts his back hair so rigidly. Oh, I beg your pardon for being personal!” And her gayety broke in ripples. Some habitual instinct moved me to turn to the looking-glass. “Useless!” she cried, “you can’t see it in that. But it’s perfectly splendid to-day.”

Nature has been kind to me in many ways–nay, prodigal; it is not every man who can perceive the humor in a jest of which he is himself the subject. I laughed with her. “I trust that I am forgiven,” I said.

“Oh, yes, you are forgiven! Come out, General, and give the gentleman your right paw, and tell him that he is forgiven–if only for the sake of Daddy Ben.” With these latter words she gave me a gracious nod of understanding. They were all thanking me for the kettle-supporter! She probably knew also the tale of John Mayrant, the cards, and the bedside.

The curly dog came out, and went through his part very graciously.

“I can guess his last name,” I remarked.

“General’s? How? Oh, you’ve heard it! I don’t believe in you any more.”

“That’s not a bit handsome, after my confession. No, I’m getting to understand South Carolina a little. You came from the ‘up-country,’ you call your dog General; his name is General Hampton!”

Her laughter assented. “Tell me some more about South Carolina,” she added with her caressing insinuation.

“Well, to begin with–“

“Go sit down at your lunch-table first. Aunt Josephine would never tolerate my encouraging gentlemen to talk to me over the counter.”

I went back obediently, and then resumed: “Well, what sort of people are those who own the handsome garden behind Mrs. Trevise’s!”

“I don’t know them.”

“Thank you; that’s all I wanted.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’re new people. I could tell it from the way you stuck your nose in the air.”

“Sir!”

“Oh, if you talk about my hair, I can talk about your nose, I think. I suspected that they were: ‘new people’ because they cleaned up their garden immediately after the storm this morning. Now, I’ll tell you something else: the whole South looks down on the whole North.”

She made her voice kind. “Do you mind it very much?”

I joined in her latent mirth. “It makes life not worth living! But more than this, South Carolina looks down on the whole South.”

“Not Virginia.”

“Not? An ‘entire stranger,’ you know, sometimes notices things which escape the family eye–family likenesses in the children, for instance.”

“Never Virginia,” she persisted.

“Very well, very well! Somehow you’ve admitted the rest, however.”

She began to smile.

“And next, Kings Port looks down on all the rest of South Carolina.”

She now laughed outright. “An up-country girl will not deny that, anyhow!”

“And finally, your aunts–“

“My aunts are Kings Port.”

“The whole of it?”

“If you mean the thirty thousand negroes–“

“No, there are other white people here–there goes your nose again!”

“I will not have you so impudent, sir!”

“A thousand pardons, I’m on my knees. But your aunts–” There was such a flash of war in her eye that I stopped.

“May I not even mention them?” I asked her.

And suddenly upon this she became serious and gentle. “I thought that you understood them. Would you take them from their seclusion, too? It is all they have left–since you burned the rest in 1865.”

I had made her say what I wanted! That “you” was what I wanted. Now I should presently have it out with her. But, for the moment, I did not disclaim the “you.” I said:–

“The burning in 1865 was horrible, but it was war.”

“It was outrage.”

“Yes, the same kind as England’s, who burned Washington in 1812, and whom you all so deeply admire.”

She had, it seemed, no answer to this. But we trembled on the verge of a real quarrel. It was in her voice when she said:–

“I think I interrupted you.”

I pushed the risk one step nearer the verge, because of the words I wished finally to reach. “In 1812, when England burned our White House down, we did not sit in the ashes; we set about rebuilding.”

And now she burst out. “That’s not fair, that’s perfectly inexcusable! Did England then set loose on us a pack of black savages and politicians to help us rebuild? Why, this very day I cannot walk on the other side of the river, I dare not venture off the New Bridge; and you who first beat us and then unleashed the blacks to riot in a new ‘equality’ that they were no more fit for than so many apes, you sat back at ease in your victory and your progress, having handed the vote to the negro as you might have handed a kerosene lamp to a child of three, and let us crushed, breathless people cope with the chaos and destruction that never came near you. Why, how can you dare–” Once again, admirably she pulled herself up as she had done when she spoke of the President. “I mustn’t!” she declared, half whispering, and then more clearly and calmly, “I mustn’t.” And she shook her head as if shaking something off. “Nor must you,” she finished, charmingly and quietly, with a smile.

“I will not,” I assured her. She was truly noble.

“But I did think that you understood us,” she said pensively.

“Miss La Heu, when you talked to me about the President and the White House, I said that you were hard to answer. Do you remember?”

“Perfectly. I said I was glad you found me so.’

“You helped me to understand you then, and now I want to be helped to further understanding. Last night I heard the ‘Ode for the Daughters of Dixie.’ I had a bad time listening to that.”

“Do you presume to criticise it? Do we criticise your Grand Army reunions, and your ‘Marching through Georgia,’ and your ‘John Brown’s Body,’ and your Arlington Museum? Can we not be allowed to celebrate our heroes and our glories and sing our songs?”

She had helped me already! Still, still, the something I was groping for, the something which had given me such pain during the ode, remained undissolved, remained unanalyzed between us; I still had to have it out with her, and the point was that it had to be with her, and not simply with myself alone. We must thrash out together the way to an understanding; an agreement was not in the least necessary–we could agree to differ, for that matter, with perfect cordiality–but an understanding we must reach. And as I was thinking this my light increased, and I saw clearly the ultimate thing which lay at the bottom of my own feeling, and which had been strangely confusing me all along. This discovery was the key to the whole remainder of my talk; I never let go of it. The first thing it opened for me was that Eliza La Heu didn’t understand me, which was quite natural, since I had only just this moment become clear to myself.

“Many of us,” I began, “who have watched the soiling touch of politics make dirty one clean thing after another, would not be wholly desolated to learn that the Grand Army of the Republic had gone to another world to sing its songs and draw its pensions.”

She looked astonished, and then she laughed. Down in the South here she was too far away to feel the vile uses to which present politics had turned past heroism.

“But,” I continued, “we haven’t any Daughters of the Union banded together and handing it down.”

“It?” she echoed. “Well, if the deeds of your heroes are not a sacred trust to you, don’t invite us, please, to resemble you.”

I waited for more, and a little more came.

“We consider Northerners foreigners, you know.”

Again I felt that hurt which hearing the ode had given me, but I now knew how I was going to take it, and where we were presently coming out; and I knew she didn’t mean quite all that–didn’t mean it every day, at least– and that my speech had driven her to saying it.

“No, Miss La Heu; you don’t consider Northerners, who understand you, to be foreigners.”

“We have never met any of that sort.”

(“Yes,” I thought, “but you really want to. Didn’t you say you hoped I was one? Away down deep there’s a cry of kinship in you; and that you don’t hear it, and that we don’t hear it, has been as much our fault as yours. I see that very well now, but I’m afraid to tell you so, yet.”)

What I said was: “We’re handing the ‘sacred trust’ down, I hope.”

“I understood you to say you weren’t.”

“I said we were not handing ‘it’ down.”

I didn’t wonder that irritation again moulded her reply. “You must excuse a daughter of Dixie if she finds the words of a son of the Union beyond her. We haven’t had so many advantages.”

There she touched what I had thought over during my wakeful hours: the tale of the ashes, the desolate ashes! The war had not prevented my parents from sending me to school and college, but here the old had seen the young grow up starved of what their fathers had given them, and the young had looked to the old and known their stripped heritage.

“Miss La Heu,” I said, “I could not tell you, you would not wish me to tell you, what the sight of Kings Port has made me feel. But you will let me say this: I have understood for a long while about your old people, your old ladies, whose faces are so fine and sad.”

I paused, but she merely looked at me, and her eyes were hard.

“And I may say this, too. I thank you very sincerely for bringing completely home to me what I had begun to make out for myself. I hope the Daughters of Dixie will go on singing of their heroes.”

I paused again, and now she looked away, out of the window into Royal Street.

“Perhaps,” I still continued, “you will hardly believe me when I say that I have looked at your monuments here with an emotion more poignant even than that which Northern monuments raise in me.”

“Why?”

“Oh!” I exclaimed. “Need you have asked that? The North won.”

“You are quite dispassionate!” Her eyes were always toward the window.

“That’s my ‘sacred trust.'”

It made her look at me. “Yours?”

“Not yours–yet! It would be yours if you had won.” I thought a slight change came in her steady scrutiny. “And, Miss La Heu, it was awful about the negro. It is awful. The young North thinks so just as much as you do. Oh, we shock our old people! We don’t expect them to change, but they mustn’t expect us not to. And even some of them have begun to whisper a little doubtfully. But never mind them–here’s the negro. We can’t kick him out. That plan is childish. So, it’s like two men having to live in one house. The white man would keep the house in repair, the black would let it rot. Well, the black must take orders from the white. And it will end so.”

She was eager. “Slavery again, you think?”

“Oh, never! It was too injurious to ourselves. But something between slavery and equality.” And I ended with a quotation: “‘Patience, cousin, and shuffle the cards.'”

“You may call me cousin–this once–because you have been, really, quite nice–for a Northerner.”

Now we had come to the place where she must understand me.

“Not a Northerner, Miss La Heu.”

She became mocking. “Scarcely a Southerner, I presume?”

But I kept my smile and my directness. “No more a Southerner than a Northerner.”

“Pray what, then?”

“An American.”

She was silent.

“It’s the ‘sacred trust’–for me.”

She was still silent.

“If my state seceded from the Union tomorrow, I should side with the Union against her.”

She was frankly astonished now. “Would you really?” And I think some light about me began to reach her. A Northerner willing to side against a Northern state! I was very glad that I had found that phrase to make clear to her my American creed.

I proceeded. “I shall help to hand down all the glories and all the sadnesses; Lee’s, Lincoln’s, everybody’s. But I shall not hand ‘it’ down.”

This checked her.

“It’s easy for me, you know,” I hastily explained. “Nothing noble about it at all. But from noble people”–and I looked hard at her–“one expects, sooner or later, noble things.”

She repressed something she had been going to reply.

“If ever I have children,” I finished, “they shall know ‘Dixie’ and ‘Yankee Doodle’ by heart, and never know the difference. By that time I should think they might have a chance of hearing ‘Yankee Doodle’ in Kings Port.”

Again she checked a rapid retort. “Well,” she, after a pause, repeated, “you have been really quite nice.”

“May I tell you what you have been?”

“Certainly not. Have you seen Mr. Mayrant to-day?”

“We have an engagement to walk this afternoon. May I go walking with you sometime?”

“May he, General?” A wagging tail knocked on the floor behind the counter. “General says that he will think about it. What makes you like Mr. Mayrant so much?”

This question struck me as an odd one; nor could I make out the import of the peculiar tone in which she put it. “Why, I should think everybody would like him–except, perhaps, his double victim.”

“Double?”

“Yes, first of his fist and then of–of his hand!”

But she didn’t respond.

“Of his hand–his poker hand,” I explained.

“Poker hand?” She remained honestly vague.

It rejoiced me to be the first to tell her. “You haven’t heard of Master John’s last performance? Well, finding himself forced by that immeasurable old Aunt Josephine of yours to shake hands, he shook ’em all right, but he took thirty dollars away as a little set-off for his pious docility.”

“Oh!” she murmured, overwhelmed with astonishment. Then she broke into one of her delicious peals of laughter.

“Anybody,” I said, “likes a boy who plays a hand–and a fist–to that tune.” I continued to say a number of commendatory words about young John, while her sparkling eyes rested upon me. But even as I talked I grew aware that these eyes were not sparkling, were starry rather, and distant, and that she was not hearing what I said; so I stopped abruptly, and at the stopping she spoke, like a person waking up.

“Oh, yes! Certainly he can take care of himself. Why not?”

“Rather creditable, don’t you think?”

“Creditable?”

“Considering his aunts and everything.”

She became haughty on the instant. “Upon my word! And do you suppose the women of South Carolina don’t wish their men to be men? Why”–she returned to mirth and that arch mockery which was her special charm–“we South Carolina women consider virtue our business, and we don’t expect the men to meddle with it!”

“Primal, perpetual, necessary!” I cried. “When that division gets blurred, society is doomed. Are you sure John can take care of himself every way?”

“I have other things than Mr. Mayrant to think about.” She said this quite sharply.

It surprised me. “To be sure,” I assented. “But didn’t you once tell me that you thought he was simple?”

She opened her ledger. “It’s a great honor to have one’s words so well remembered.”

I was still at a loss. “Anyhow, the wedding is postponed,” I continued; “and the cake. Of course one can’t help wondering how it’s all coming out.”

She was now working at her ledger, bending her head over it. “Have you ever met Miss Rieppe?” She inquired this with a sort of wonderful softness–which I was to hear again upon a still more memorable occasion.

“Never,” I answered, “but there’s nobody at present living whom I long to see so much.”

She wrote on for a little while before saying, with her pencil steadily busy, “Why?”

“Why? Don’t you? After all this fuss?”

“Oh, certainly,” she drawled. “She is so much admired–by Northerners.”

“I do hope John is able to take care of himself,” I purposely repeated.

“Take care of yourself!” she laughed angrily over her ledger.

“Me? Why? I understand you less and less!”

“Very likely.”

“Why, I want to help him!” I protested. “I don’t want him to marry her. Oh, by the way do you happen to know what it is that she is coming here to see for herself?”

In a moment her ledger was left, and she was looking at me straight. Coming? When?

“Soon. In an automobile. To see something for herself.”

She pondered for quite a long moment; then her eyes returned, searchingly, to me. “You didn’t make that up?”

I laughed, and explained. “Some of them, at any rate,” I finished, “know what she’s coming for. They were rather queer about it, I thought.”

She pondered again. I noticed that she had deeply flushed, and that the flush was leaving her. Then she fixed her eyes on me once more. “They wouldn’t tell you?”

“I think that they came inadvertently near it, once or twice, and remembered just in time that I didn’t know about it.”

“But since you do know pretty much about it!” she laughed.

I shook my head. “There’s something else, something that’s turned up; the sort of thing that upsets calculations. And I merely hoped that you’d know.”

On those last words of mine she gave me quite an extraordinary look, and then, as if satisfied with what she saw in my face.–

“They don’t talk to me.”

It was an assurance, it was true, it had the ring of truth, that evident genuineness which a piece of real confidence always possesses; she meant me to know that we were in the same boat of ignorance to-day. And yet, as I rose from my lunch and came forward to settle for it, I was aware of some sense of defeat, of having been held off just as the ladies on High Walk had held me off.

“Well,” I sighed, “I pin my faith to the aunt who says he’ll never marry her.”

Miss La Heu had no more to say upon the subject. “Haven’t you forgotten something?” she inquired gayly; and, as I turned to see what I had left behind–“I mean, you had no Lady Baltimore to-day.”

“I clean forgot it!”

“No loss. It is very stale; and to-morrow I shall have a fresh supply ready.”

As I departed through the door I was conscious of her eyes following me, and that she had spoken of Lady Baltimore precisely because she was thinking of something else.

XIV: The Replacers

She had been strange, perceptibly strange, had Eliza La Heu; that was the most which I could make out of it. I had angered her in some manner wholly beyond my intention or understanding and not all at one fixed point in our talk; her irritation had come out and gone in again in spots all along the colloquy, and it had been a displeasure wholly apart from that indignation which had flashed up in her over the negro question. This, indeed, I understood well enough, and admired her for, and admired still more her gallant control of it; as for the other, I gave it up.

A sense of guilt–a very slight one, to be sure–dispersed my speculations when I was preparing for dinner, and Aunt Carola’s postscript, open upon my writing-table, reminded me that I had never asked Miss La Heu about the Bombos. Well, the Bombos could keep! And I descended to dinner a little late (as too often) to feel instantly in the air that they had been talking about me. I doubt if any company in the world, from the Greeks down through Machiavelli to the present moment, has ever been of a subtlety adequate to conceal from an observant person entering a room the fact that he has been the subject of their conversation. This company, at any rate, did not conceal it from me. Not even when the upcountry bride astutely greeted me with:–

“Why, we were just speaking of you! We were lust saying it would be a perfect shame if you missed those flowers at Live Oaks.” And, at this, various of the guests assured me that another storm would finish them; upon which I assured every one that to-morrow should see me embark upon the Live Oaks excursion boat, knowing quite well in my heart that some decidedly different question concerning me had been hastily dropped upon my appearance at the door. It poked up its little concealed head, did this question, when the bride said later to me, with immense archness:–

“How any gentleman can help falling just daid in love with that lovely young girl at the Exchange, I don’t see!”

“But I haven’t helped it!” I immediately exclaimed.

“Oh!” declared the bride with unerring perception, “that just shows he hasn’t been smitten at all! Well, I’d be ashamed, if I was a single gentleman.” And while I brought forth additional phrases concerning the distracted state of my heart, she looked at me with large, limpid eyes. “Anybody could tell you’re not afraid of a rival,” was her resulting comment; upon which several of the et ceteras laughed more than seemed to me appropriate.

I left them all free again to say what they pleased; for John Mayrant called for me to go upon our walk while we were still seated at table, and at table they remained after I had excused myself.

The bruise over John’s left eye was fading out, but traces of his spiritual battle were deepening. During the visit which he had paid (under compulsion, I am sure) to Juno at our boarding-house in company with Miss Josephine St. Michael, his recent financial triumph at the bedside had filled his face with diabolic elation as he confronted his victim’s enraged but checkmated aunt; when to the thinly veiled venom of her inquiry as to a bridegroom’s health he had retorted with venom as thinly veiled that he was feeling better that night than for many weeks, he had looked better, too; the ladies had exclaimed after his departure what a handsome young man he was, and Juno had remarked how fervently she trusted that marriage might cure him of his deplorable tendencies. But to-day his vitality had sagged off beneath the weight of his preoccupation: it looked to me as if, by a day or two more, the boy’s face might be grown haggard.

Whether by intention, or, as is more likely, by the perfectly natural and spontaneous working of his nature, he speedily made it plain to me that our relation, our acquaintance, had progressed to a stage more friendly and confidential. He did not reveal this by imparting any confidence to me; far from it; it was his silence that indicated the ease he had come to feel in my company. Upon our last memorable interview he had embarked at once upon a hasty yet evidently predetermined course of talk, because he feared that I might touch upon subjects which he wished excluded from all discussion between us; to-day he embarked upon nothing, made no conventional effort of any sort, but walked beside me, content with my mere society; if it should happen that either of us found a thought worth expressing aloud, good! and if this should not happen, why, good also! And so we walked mutely and agreeably together for a long while. The thought which was growing clear in my mind, and which was decidedly worthy of expression, was also unluckily one which his new reliance upon my discretion completely forbade my uttering in even the most shadowy manner; but it was a conviction which Miss Josephine St. Michael should have been quick to force upon him for his good. Quite apart from selfish reasons, he had no right to marry a girl whom he had ceased to care for. The code which held a “gentleman” to his plighted troth in such a case did more injury to the “lady” than any “jilting” could possibly do. Never until now had I thought this out so lucidly, and I was determined that time and my own tact should assuredly help me find a way to say it to him, if he continued in his present course.

“Daddy Ben says you can’t be a real Northerner.”

This was his first observation, and I think that we must have walked a mile before he made it.

“Because I pounded a negro? Of course, he retains your Southern ante-bellum mythical notion of Northerners–all of us willing to have them marry our sisters. Well, there’s a lady at our boarding-house who says you are a real gambler.”

The impish look came curling round his lips, but for a moment only, and it was gone.

“That shook Daddy Ben up a good deal.”

“Having his grandson do it, do you mean?”

“Oh, he’s used to his grandson! Grandsons in that race might just as well be dogs for all they know or care about their progenitors. Yet Daddy Ben spent his savings on educating Charles Cotesworth and two more–but not one of them will give the old man a house to-day. If ever I have a home–” John stopped himself, and our silence was no longer easy; our unspoken thoughts looked out of our eyes so that they could not meet. Yet no one, unless directly invited by him, had the right to say to hint what I was thinking, except some near relative. Therefore, to relieve this silence which had ceased to be agreeable, I talked about Daddy Ben and his grandsons, and negro voting, and the huge lie of “equality” which our lips vociferate and our lives daily disprove. This took us comfortably away from weddings and cakes into the subject of lynching, my violent condemnation of which surprised him; for our discussion had led us over a wide field, and one fertile in well-known disputes of the evergreen sort, conducted by the North mostly with more theory than experience, and by the South mostly with more heat than light; whereas, between John and me, I may say that our amiability was surpassed only by our intelligence! Each allowed for the other’s standpoint, and both met in many views: he would have voted against the last national Democratic ticket but for the Republican upholding of negro equality, while I assured him that such stupid and criminal upholding was on the wane. He informed me that he did not believe the pure blooded African would ever be capable of taking the intellectual side of the white man’s civilization, and I informed him that we must patiently face this probability, and teach the African whatever he could profitably learn and no more; and each of us agreed with the other. I think that we were at one, save for the fact that I was, after all, a Northerner–and that is a blemish which nobody in Kings Port can quite get over. John, therefore, was unprepared for my wholesale denunciation of lynching.

“With your clear view of the negro,” he explained.

“My dear man, it’s my clear view of the white! It’s the white, the American citizen, the ‘hope of humanity,’ as he enjoys being called, who, after our English-speaking race has abolished public executions, degenerates back to the Stone Age. It’s upon him that lynching works the true injury.”

“They’re nothing but animals,” he muttered.

“Would you treat an animal in that way?” I inquired.

He persisted. “You’d do it yourself if you had to suffer from them.”

“Very probably. Is that an answer? What I’d never do would be to make a show, an entertainment, a circus, out of it, run excursion trains to see it–come, should you like your sister to buy tickets for a lynching?”

This brought him up rather short. “I should never take part myself,” he presently stated, “unless it were immediate personal vengeance.”

“Few brothers or husbands would blame you,” I returned. “It would be hard to wait for the law. But let no community which treats it as a public spectacle presume to call itself civilized.”

He gave a perplexed smile, shaking his head over it. “Sometimes I think civilization costs–“

“Civilization costs all you’ve got!” I cried.

“More than I’ve got!” he declared. “I’m mortal tired of civilization.”

“Ah, yes! What male creature is not? And neither of us will live quite long enough to see the smash-up of our own.”

“Aren’t you sometimes inconsistent?” he inquired, laughing.

“I hope so,” I returned. “Consistency is a form of death. The dead are the only perfectly consistent people.”

“And sometimes you sound like a Socialist,” he pursued, still laughing.

“Never!” I shouted. “Don’t class me with those untrained puppies of thought. And you’ll generally observe,” I added, “that the more nobly a Socialist vaporizes about the rights of humanity, the more wives and children he has abandoned penniless along the trail of his life.”

He was livelier than ever at this. “What date have you fixed for the smash-up of our present civilization?”

“Why fix dates? Is it not diversion enough to watch, and step handsomely through one’s own part, with always a good sleeve to laugh in?”

Pensiveness returned upon him. “I shall be able to step through my own part, I think.” He paused, and I was wondering secretly, “Does that include the wedding?” when he continued: “What’s there to laugh at?”

“Why, our imperishable selves! For instance: we swear by universal suffrage. Well, sows’ ears are an invaluable thing in their place, on the head of the animal; but send them to make your laws, and what happens? Bribery, naturally. The silk purse buys the sow’s ear. We swear by Christianity, but dishonesty is our present religion. That little phrase ‘In God We Trust’ is about as true as the silver dollar it’s stamped on– worth some thirty-nine cents. We get awfully serious about whether or no good can come of evil, when every sky-scraping thief of finance is helping hospitals with one hand while the other’s in my pocket; and good and evil attend each other, lead to each other, are such Siamese twins that if separated they would both die. We make phrases about peace, pity, and brotherhood, while every nation stands prepared for shipwreck and for the sinking plank to which two are clinging and the stronger pushes the weaker into the flood and thus floats safe. Why, the old apple of wisdom, which Adam and Eve swallowed and thus lost their innocence, was a gentle nursery drug compared with the new apple of competition, which, as soon as chewed, instantly transforms the heart into a second brain. But why worry, when nothing is final? Haven’t you and I, for instance, lamented the present rottenness of smart society? Why, when kings by the name of George sat on the throne of England, society was just as drunken, just as dissolute! Then a decent queen came, and society behaved itself; and now, here we come round again to the Georges, only with the name changed! There’s nothing final. So, when things are as you don’t like them, remember that and bear them; and when they’re as you do like them, remember it and make the most of them–and keep a good sleeve handy!”

“Have you got any creed at all?” he demanded.

“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 they flew honking by us I called out to John:–

“Behold the yellow rich!” and then remembered that his Hortense probably sat among them.

The honks redoubled, and we turned to see that the drawbridge had no thought of waiting for them. We also saw a bewildered curly white dog and a young girl, who called despairingly to him as he disappeared beneath the automobile. The engine of murder could not, as is usual, proceed upon its way, honking, for the drawbridge was visibly swinging open to admit the passage of the boat. When John and I had run back near enough to become ourselves a part of the incident, the white dog lay still behind the stationary automobile, whose passengers were craning their muffled necks and glass eyes to see what they had done, while one of their number had got out, and was stooping to examine if the machine had sustained any injuries. The young girl, with a face of anguish, was calling the dog’s name as she hastened toward him, and her voice aroused him: he lifted his head, got on his legs, and walked over to her, which action on his part brought from the automobile a penetrating female voice:–

“Well, he’s in better luck than that Savannah dog!”

But General was not in luck. He lay quietly down at the feet of his mistress and we soon knew that life had passed from his faithful body. The first stroke of grief, dealt her in such cruel and sudden form, overbore the poor girl’s pride and reserve; she made no attempt to remember or heed surroundings, but kneeling and placing her arms about the neck of her dead servant, she spoke piteously aloud:–

“And I raised him, I raised him from a puppy!”

The female voice, at this, addressed the traveller who was examining the automobile: “Charley, a five or a ten spot is what her feelings need.”

The obedient and munificent Charley straightened up from his stooping among the mechanical entrails, dexterously produced money, and advanced with the selected bill held out politely in his hand, while the glass eyes and the masks peered down at the performance. Eliza La Heu had perceived none of this, for she was intent upon General; nor had John Mayrant, who had approached her with the purpose of coming to her aid. But when Charley, quite at hand, began to speak words which were instantly obliterated from my memory by what happened, the young girl realized his intention and straightened stiffly, while John, with the rapidity of light, snatched the extended bill from Charley’s hand, and tearing it in four pieces, threw it in his face.

A foreign voice cackled from the automobile: “Oh la la! il a du panache!”

But Charley now disclosed himself to be a true man of the world–the financial world–by picking the pieces out of the mud; and, while he wiped them and enclosed them in his handkerchief and with perfect dignity returned them to his pocket, he remarked simply, with a shrug: “As you please.” His accent also was ever so little foreign–that New York downtown foreign, of the second generation, which stamps so, many of our bankers.

The female now leaned from her seat, and with the tone of setting the whole thing right, explained: “We had no idea it was a lady.”

“Doubtless you’re not accustomed to their appearance,” said John to Charley.

I don’t know what Charley would have done about this; for while the completely foreign voice was delightedly whispering, “Toujours le panache!” a new, deep, and altogether different female voice exclaimed:–

“Why, John, it’s you!”

So that was Hortense, then! That rich and quiet utterance was hers, a schooled and studied management of speech. I found myself surprised, and I knew directly why; that word of one of the old ladles, “I consider that she looks like a steel wasp,” had implanted in me some definite anticipations to which the voice certainly did not correspond. How fervently I desired that she would lift her thick veil, while John, with hat in hand, was greeting her, and being presented to her companions! Why she had not spoken to John sooner was of course a recondite question, and beyond my power to determine with merely the given situation to guide me. Hadn’t she recognized him before? Had her thick veil, and his position, and the general slight flurry of the misadventure, intercepted recognition until she heard his voice when he addressed Charley. Or had she known her lover at once, and rapidly decided that the moment was an unpropitious one for a first meeting after absence, and that she would pass on to Kings Port unrevealed, but then had found this plan become impossible through the collision between Charley and John? It was not until certain incidents of the days following brought Miss Rieppe’s nature a good deal further home to me, that a third interpretation of her delay in speaking to John dawned upon my mind; that I was also made aware how a woman’s understanding of the words “Steel wasp,” when applied by her to one of her own sex, may differ widely from a man’s understanding of them; and that Miss Rieppe, through her thick veil, saw from her seat in the automobile something which my own unencumbered vision had by no means detected.

But now, here on the bridge, even her outward appearance was as shrouded as her inward qualities–save such as might be audible in that voice, as her skilful, well-placed speeches to one and the other of the company tided over and carried off into ease this uneasy moment. All men, at such a voice, have pricked up their ears since the beginning; there was much woman in it; each slow, schooled syllable called its challenge to questing man. But I got no chance to look in the eye that went with that voice; she took all the advantages which her veil gave her; and how well she used them I was to learn later.

In the general smoothing-out process which she was so capably effecting, her attention was about to reach me, when my name was suddenly called out from behind her. It was Beverly Rodgers, that accomplished and inveterate bachelor of fashion. Ten years before, when I had seen much of him, he had been more particular in his company, frequently declaring in his genial, irresponsible way that New York society was going to the devil. But many tempting dances on the land, and cruises on the water, had taken him deep among our lower classes that have boiled up from the bottom with their millions–and besides, there would be nothing to marvel at in Beverly’s presence in any company that should include Hortense Rieppe, if she carried out the promise of her voice.

Beverly was his customary, charming, effusive self, coming out of the automobile to me with his “By Jove, old man,” and his “Who’d have thought it, old fellow?” and sprinkling urbane little drops of jocosity over us collectively, as the garden water-turning apparatus sprinkles a lawn. His knowing me, and the way he brought it out, and even the tumbling into the road of a few wraps and chattels of travel as he descended from the automobile, and the necessity of picking these up and handing them back with delightful little jocular apologies, such as, “By Jove, what a lout I am,” all this helped the meeting on prodigiously, and got us gratefully away from the disconcerting incident of the torn money. Charley was helpful, too; you would never have supposed from the polite small-talk which he was now offering to John Mayrant that he had within some three minutes received the equivalent of a slap across the eyes from that youth, and carried the soiled consequences in his pocket. And such a thing is it to be a true man of the world of finance, that upon the arrival now of a second automobile, also his property, and containing a set of maids and valets, and also some live dogs sitting up, covered with glass eyes and wrappings like their owners, munificent Charley at once offered the dead dog and his mistress a place in it, and begged she would let it take her wherever she wished to go. Everybody exclaimed copiously and condolingly over the unfortunate occurrence. What a fine animal he was, to be sure! What breed was he? Of course, he wasn’t used to automobiles! Was it quite certain that he was dead? Quel dommage! And Charley would be so happy to replace him.

And how was Eliza La Heu bearing herself amid these murmurously chattered infelicities? She was listening with composure to the murmurs of Hortense Rieppe, more felicitous, no doubt. Miss Rieppe, through her veil, was particularly devoting herself to Miss La Lieu. I could not hear what she said; the little chorus of condolence and suggestion intercepted all save her tone, and that, indeed, coherently sustained its measured cadence through the texture of fragments uttered by Charley and the others. Eliza La Heu had now got herself altogether in hand, and, saving her pale cheeks, no sign betrayed that the young girl’s feelings had been so recently too strong for her. To these strangers, ignorant of her usual manner, her present strange quietness may very well have been accepted as her habit.

“Thank you,” she replied to munificent Charley’s offer that she would use his second automobile. She managed to make her polite words cut like a scythe. “I should crowd it.”

“But they shall get out and walk; it will be good for them,” said Charley, indicating the valets and maids, and possibly the dogs, too.

Beverly Rodgers did much better than Charley. With a charming gesture and bow, he offered his own seat in the first automobile. “I am going to walk in any case,” he assured her.

“One gentleman among them,” I heard John Mayrant mutter behind me.

Miss La Heu declined, the chorus urged, but Beverly (who was indeed a gentleman, every inch of him) shook his head imperceptibly at Charley; and while the little exclamations–“Do come! So much more comfortable! So nice to see more of you!”–dropped away, Miss La Heu had settled her problem quite simply for herself. A little procession of vehicles, townward bound, had gathered on the bridge, waiting until the closing of the draw should allow them to continue upon their way. From these most of the occupants had descended, and were staring with avidity at us all; the great glass eyes and the great refulgent cars held them in timidity and fascination, and the poor lifeless white body of General, stretched beside the way, heightened the hypnotic mystery; one or two of the boldest had touched him, and found no outward injury upon him; and this had sent their eyes back to the automobile with increased awe. Eliza La Heu summoned one of the onlookers, an old negro; at some word she said to him he hurried back and returned, leading his horse and empty cart, and General was lifted into this. The girl took her seat beside the old driver.

“No,” she said to John Mayrant, “certainly not.”

I wondered at the needless severity with which she declined his offer to accompany her and help her.

He stood by the wheel of the cart, looking up at her and protesting, and I joined him.

“Thank you,” she returned, “I need no one. You will both oblige me by saying no more about it.”

“John!” It was the slow, well-calculated utterance of Hortense Rieppe. Did I hear in it the caressing note of love?

John turned.

The draw had swung to, the mast and sail of the vessel were separating away from the bridge with a stealthy motion, men with iron bars were at work fastening the draw secure, and horses’ hoofs knocked nervously upon the wooden flooring as the internal churning of the automobiles burst upon their innocent ears.

“John, if Mr. Rodgers is really not going with us–“

Thus Hortense; and at that Miss La Heu:–

“Why do you keep them waiting?” There was no caress in that note! It was polished granite.

He looked up at her on her high seat by the extremely dilapidated negro, and then he walked forward and took his place beside his veiled fiancee, among the glass eyes. A hiss of sharp noise spurted from the automobiles, horses danced, and then, smoothly, the two huge engines were gone with their cargo of large, distorted shapes, leaving behind them–quite as our present epoch will leave behind it–a trail of power, of ingenuity, of ruthlessness, and a bad smell.

“Hold hard, old boy!” chuckled Beverly, to whom I communicated this sentiment. “How do you know the stink of one generation does not become the perfume of the next?” Beverly, when he troubled to put a thing at all (which was seldom–for he kept his quite good brains well-nigh perpetually turned out to grass–or rather to grass widows) always put it well, and with a bracing vocabulary. “Hullo!” he now exclaimed, and walked out into the middle of the roadway, where he picked up a parasol. “Kitty will be in a jolly old stew. None of its expensive bones broken however.” And then he hailed me by a name of our youth. “What are you doing down here, you old sourbelly?”

“Watching you sun yourself on the fat cushions of the yellow rich.”

“Oh, shucks, old man, they’re not so yellow!”

“Charley strikes me as yellower than his own gold.”

“Charley’s not a bad little sort. Of course, he needs coaching a bit here and there–just now, for instance, when he didn’t see that that girl wouldn’t think of riding in the machine that had just killed her dog. By Jove, give that girl a year in civilization and she’d do! Who was the young fire-eater?”

“Fire-eater! He’s a lot more decent than you or I.”

“But that’s saying so little, dear boy!”

“Seriously, Beverly.”

“Oh, hang it with your ‘seriously’! Well, then, seriously, melodrama was the correct ticket and all that in 1840, but we’ve outgrown it; it’s devilish demode to chuck things in people’s faces.

“I’m not sorry John Mayrant did it!” I brought out his name with due emphasis.

“All the same,” Beverly was beginning, when the automobile returned rapidly upon us, and, guessing the cause of this, he waved the parasol. Charley descended to get it–an unnecessary act, prompted, I suppose, by the sudden relief of finding that it was not lost.

He made his thanks marked. “It is my sister’s,” he concluded, to me, by way of explanation, in his slightly foreign accent. “It is not much, but it has got some stones and things in the handle.”

We were favored with a bow from the veiled Hortense, shrill thanks from Kitty, and the car, turning, again left us in a moment.