Chapter IV: The Girl Behind the Counter--I (7)

“Chocolate. I shall miss--”

“And the lettuce sandwiches?”

“Yes. You don’t realize how much these lunches--”

“Have cost you?” She seemed determined to keep laughing.

“You have said it. They have cost me my--”

“I can give you the receipt, you know.”

“The receipt?”

“For Lady Baltimore, to take with you.”

“You’ll have to give me a receipt for a lost heart.”

“Oh, his heart! General, listen to--” From habit she had turned to where her dog used to lie; and sudden pain swept over her face and was mastered. “Never mind!” she quickly resumed. “Please don’t speak about it. And you have a heart somewhere; for it was very nice in you to come in yesterday morning after--after the bridge.”

“I hope I have a heart,” I began, rising; for, really, I could not go on in this way, sitting down away back at the lunch table.

But the door opened, and Hortense Rieppe came into the Woman’s Exchange.

It was at me that she first looked, and she gave me the slightest bow possible, the least sign of conventional recognition that a movement of the head could make and be visible at all; she didn’t bend her head down, she tilted it ever so little up. It wasn’t new to me, this form of greeting, and I knew that she had acquired it at Newport, and that it denoted, all too accurately, the size of my importance in her eyes; she did it, as she did everything, with perfection. Then she turned to Eliza La Heu, whose face had become miraculously sweet.

“Good morning,” said Hortense.

It sounded from a quiet well of reserve music; just a cupful of melodious tone dipped lightly out of the surface. Her face hadn’t become anything; but it was equally miraculous in its total void of all expression relating to this moment, or to any moment; just her beauty, her permanent stationary beauty, was there glowing in it and through it, not skin deep, but going back and back into her lazy eyes, and shining from within the modulated bloom of her color and the depths of her amber hair. She was choosing, for this occasion, to be as impersonal as some radiant hour in nature, some mellow, motionless day when the leaves have turned, but have not fallen, and it is drowsily warm; but it wasn’t so much of nature that she, in her harmonious lustre, reminded me, as of some beautiful silken-shaded lamp, from which color rather than light came with subdued ampleness.

I saw her eyes settle upon the flowers that I had brought Eliza La Heu.

“How beautiful those are!” she remarked.

“Is there something that you wish?” inquired Miss La Heu, always miraculously sweet.

“Some of your good things for lunch; a very little, if you will be so kind.”

I had gone back to my table while the “very little” was being selected, and I felt, in spite of how slightly she counted me, that it would be inadequate in me to remain completely dumb.

“Mr. Mayrant is still at the Custom House?” I observed.

“For a few days, yes. Happily we shall soon break that connection.” And she smelt my flowers.

“‘We,’” I thought to myself, “is rather tremendous.”

It grew more tremendous in the silence as Eliza La Heu brought me my orders. Miss Rieppe did not seat herself to take the light refreshment which she found enough for lunch. Her plate and cup were set for her, but she walked about, now with one, and now with the other, taking her time over it, and pausing here and there at some article of the Exchange stock.

Of course, she hadn’t come there for any lunch; the Cornerlys had midday lunch and dined late; these innovated hours were a part of Kings Port’s deep suspicion of the Cornerlys; but what now became interesting was her evident indifference to our perceiving that lunch was merely a pretext with her; in fact, I think she wished it to be perceived, and I also think that those turns which she took about the Exchange--her apparent inspection of an old mahogany table, her examination of a pewter set--were a symbol (and meant to be a symbol) of how she had all the time there was, and the possession of everything she wished including the situation, and that she enjoyed having this sink in while she was rearranging whatever she had arranged to say, in consequence of finding that I should also hear it. And how well she was worth looking at, no matter whether she stood, or moved, or what she did! Her age lay beyond the reach of the human eye; if she was twenty-five, she was marvelous in her mastery of her appearance; if she was thirty-four, she was marvelous in her mastery of perpetuating it, and by no other means than perfect dress personal to herself (for she had taken the fashion and welded it into her own plasticity) and perfect health; for without a trace of the athletic, her graceful shape teemed with elasticity. There was a touch of “sport” in the parasol she had laid down; and with all her blended serenity there was a touch of “sport” in her. Experience could teach her beauty nothing more; it wore the look of having been made love to by many married men.

Quite suddenly the true light flashed upon me. I had been slow-sighted indeed! So that was what she had come here for to-day! Miss Hortense was going to pay her compliments to Miss La Heu. I believe that my sight might still have been slow but for that miraculous sweetness upon the face of Eliza. She was ready for the compliments! Well, I sat expectant--and disappointment was by no means my lot.

Hortense finished her lunch. “And so this interesting place is where you work?”

Eliza, thus addressed, assented.

“And you furnish wedding cakes also?”

Eliza was continuously and miraculously sweet. “The Exchange includes that.”

“I shall hope you will be present to taste some of yours on the day it is mine.”

“I shall accept the invitation if my friends send me one.”

No blood flowed from Hortense at this, and she continued with the same smooth deliberation.

“The list is of necessity very small; but I shall see that it includes you.”

“You are not going to postpone it any more, then?”

No blood flowed at this, either. “I doubt if John--if Mr. Mayrant--would brook further delay, and my father seems stronger, at last. How much do I owe you for your very good food?”

It is a pity that a larger audience could not have been there to enjoy this skilful duet, for it held me hanging on every musical word of it. There, at the far back end of the long room, I sat alone at my table, pretending to be engaged over a sandwich that was no more in existence--external, I mean--and a totally empty cup of chocolate. I lifted the cup, and bowed over the plate, and used the paper Japanese napkin, and generally went through the various discreet paces of eating, quite breathless, all the while, to know which of them was coming out ahead. There was no fairness in their positions; Hortense had Eliza in a cage, penned in by every fact; but it doesn’t do to go too near some birds, even when they’re caged, and, while these two birds had been giving their sweet manifestations of song, Eliza had driven a peck or two home through the bars, which, though they did not draw visible blood, as I have said, probably taught Hortense that a Newport education is not the only instruction which fits you for drawing-room war to the knife.

Her small reckoning was paid, and she had drawn on one long, tawny glove. Even this act was a luxury to watch, so full it was of the feminine, of the stretching, indolent ease that the flesh and the spirit of this creature invariably seemed to move with. But why didn’t she go? This became my wonder now, while she slowly drew on the second glove. She was taking more time than it needed.

“Your flowers are for sale, too?”

This, after her silence, struck me as being something planned out after her original plan. The original plan had finished with that second assertion of her ownership of John (or, I had better say, of his ownership in her), that doubt she had expressed as to his being willing to consent to any further postponement of their marriage. Of course she had expected, and got herself ready for, some thrust on the postponement subject.

Eliza crossed from behind her counter to where the Exchange flowers stood on the opposite side of the room and took some of them up.

“But those are inferior,” said Hortense. “These.” And she touched rightly the bowl in which my roses stood close beside Eliza’s ledger.

Eliza paused for one second. “Those are not for sale.”

Hortense paused, too. Then she hung to it. “They are so much the best.” She was holding her purse.

“I think so, too,” said Eliza. “But I cannot let any one have them.”

Hortense put her purse away. “You know best. Shall you furnish us flowers as well as cake?”

Eliza’s sweetness rose an octave, softer and softer. “Why, they have flowers there! Didn’t you know?”

And to this last and frightful peck through the bars Hortense found no retaliation. With a bow to Eliza, and a total oblivion of me, she went out of the Exchange. She had flaunted “her” John in Eliza’s face, she had, as they say, rubbed it in that he was “her” John;--but was it such a neat, tidy victory, after all? She had given away the last word to Eliza, presented her with that poisonous speech which when translated meant:--

“Yes, he’s ‘your’ John; and you’re climbing up him into houses where you’d otherwise be arrested for trespass.” For it was in one of the various St. Michael houses that the marriage would be held, owing to the nomadic state of the Rieppes.

Yes, Hortense had gone altogether too close to the cage at the end, and, in that repetition of her taunt about “furnishing” supplies for the wedding, she had at length betrayed something which her skill and the intricate enamel of her experience had hitherto, and with entire success, concealed--namely, the latent vulgarity of the woman. She was wearing, for the sake of Kings Port, her best behavior, her most knowing form, and, indeed it was a well-done imitation of the real thing; it would last through most occasions, and it would deceive most people. But here was the trouble: she was wearing it; while, through the whole encounter, Eliza La Heu had worn nothing but her natural and perfect dignity; yet with that disadvantage (for good breeding, alas!, is at times a sort of disadvantage, and can be battered down and covered with mud so that its own fine grain is invisible) Eliza had, after a somewhat undecisive battle, got in that last frightful peck! But what had led Hortense, after she had come through pretty well, to lose her temper and thus, at the finish, expose to Eliza her weakest position? That her clothes were paid for by a Newport lady who had taken her to Worth, that her wedding feast was to be paid for by the bridegroom, these were not facts which Eliza would deign to use as weapons; but she was marrying inside the doors of Eliza’s Kings Port, that had never opened to admit her before, and she had slipped into putting this chance into Eliza’s hand--and how had she come to do this?

To be sure, my vision had been slow! Hortense had seen, through her thick veil, Eliza’s interest in John in the first minute of her arrival on the bridge, that minute when John had run up to Eliza after the automobile had passed over poor General. And Hortense had not revealed herself at once, because she wanted a longer look at them. Well, she had got it, and she had got also a look at her affianced John when he was in the fire-eating mood, and had displayed the conduct appropriate to 1840, while Charley’s display had been so much more modern. And so first she had prudently settled that awkward phosphate difficulty, and next she had paid this little visit to Eliza in order to have the pleasure of telling her in four or five different ways, and driving it in deep, and turning it round: “Don’t you wish you may get him?”

“That’s all clear as day,” I said to myself. “But what does her loss of temper mean?”

Eliza was writing at her ledger. The sweetness hadn’t entirely gone; it was too soon for that, and besides, she knew I must be looking at her.

“Couldn’t you have told her they were my flowers?” I asked her at the counter, as I prepared to depart. Eliza did not look up from her ledger. “Do you think she would have believed me?”

“And why shouldn’t--”

“Go out!” she interrupted imperiously and with a stamp of her foot. “You’ve been here long enough!”

You may imagine my amazement at this. It was not until I had reached Mrs. Trevise’s, and was sitting down to answer a note which had been left for me, that light again came. Hortense Rieppe had thought those flowers were from John Mayrant, and Eliza had let her think so.

Yes, that was light, a good bright light shed on the matter; but a still more brilliant beam was cast by the up-country bride when I came into the dining-room. I told her myself, at once, that I had taken flowers to Miss La Heu; I preferred she should hear this from me before she learned it from the smiling lips of gossip. It surprised me that she should immediately inquire what kind of flowers?

“Why, roses,” I answered; and she went into peals of laughter.

“Pray share the jest,” I begged her with some dignity.

“Didn’t you know,” she replied, “the language that roses from a single gentleman to a young lady speak in Kings Port?”

I stood staring and stiff, taking it in, taking myself, and Eliza, and Hortense, and the implicated John, all in.

“Why, aivrybody in Kings Port knows that!” said the bride; and now my mirth rose even above hers.

XVII: Doing the Handsome Thing

It by no means lessened my pleasure to discern that Hortense must feel herself to be in a predicament; and as I sat writing my answer to the note, which was from Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael and contained an invitation to me for the next afternoon, I thought of those pilots whose dangers have come down to us from distant times through the songs of ancient poets. The narrow and tempestuous channel between Scylla and Charybdis bristled unquestionably with violent problems, but with none, I should suppose, that called for a nicer hand upon the wheel, or an eye more alert, than this steering of your little trireme to a successful marriage, between one man who believed himself to be your destined bridegroom and another who expected to be so, meanwhile keeping each in ignorance of how close you were sailing to the other. In Hortense’s place I should have wished to hasten the wedding now, have it safely performed this afternoon, say, or to-morrow morning; thus precipitated by some invaluable turn in the health of her poor dear father. But she had worn it out, his health, by playing it for decidedly as much as it could bear; it couldn’t be used again without risk; the date must stand fixed; and, uneasy as she might have begun to be about John, Hortense must, with no shortening of the course, get her boat in safe without smashing it against either John or Charley. I wondered a little that she should feel any uncertainty about her affianced lover. She must know how much his word was to him, and she had had his word twice, given her the second time to put his own honor right with her on the score of the phosphates. But perhaps Hortense’s rich experiences of life had taught her that a man’s word to a woman should not be subjected to the test of another woman’s advent. On the whole, I suppose it was quite natural those flowers should annoy her, and equally natural that Eliza, the minx, should allow them to do so! There’s a joy to the marrow in watching your enemy harried and discomfited by his own gratuitous contrivances; you look on serenely at a show which hasn’t cost you a groat. However, poor Eliza had not been so serene at the very end, when she stormed out at me. For this I did not have to forgive her, of course, little as I had merited such treatment. Had she not accepted my flowers? But it was a gratification to reflect that in my sentimental passages with her I had not gone to any great length; nothing, do I ever find, is so irksome as the sense of having unwittingly been in a false position. Was John, on his side, in love with her? Was it possible he would fail in his word? So with these thoughts, while answering and accepting Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael’s invitation to make one of a party of strangers to whom she was going to show another old Kings Port church, “where many of my ancestors lie,” as her note informed me, I added one sentence which had nothing to do with the subject “She is a steel wasp,” I ventured to say. And when on the next afternoon I met the party at the church, I received from the little lady a look of highly spiced comprehension as she gently remarked, “I was glad to get your acceptance.”

When I went down to the dinner-table, Juno sat in her best clothes, still discussing the Daughters of Dixie.

I can’t say that I took much more heed of this at dinner than I had done at tea; but I was interested to hear Juno mention that she, too, intended to call upon Hortense Rieppe. Kings Port, she said, must take a consistent position; and for her part, so far as behavior went, she didn’t see much to choose between the couple. “As to whether Mr. Mayrant had really concealed the discovery of his fortune,” she continued, “I asked Miss Josephine--in a perfectly nice way, of course. But old Mr. St. Michael Beaugarcon, who has always had the estate in charge, did that. It is only a life estate, unless Mr. Mayrant has lawful issue. Well, he will have that now, and all that money will be his to squander.”

Aunt Carola had written me again this morning, but I had been in no haste to open her letter; my neglect of the Bombos did not weigh too heavily upon me, I fear, but I certainly did put off reading what I expected to be a reprimand. And concerning this I was right; her first words betokened reprimand at once. “My dear nephew Augustus,” she began, in her fine, elegant handwriting. That was always her mode of address to me when something was coming, while at other times it would be, less portentously, “My dear Augustus,” or “My dear nephew “; but whenever my name and my relationship to her occurred conjointly, I took the communication away with me to some corner, and opened it in solitude.

It wasn’t about the Bombos, though; and for what she took me to task I was able to defend myself, I think, quite adequately. She found fault with me for liking the South too much, and this she based upon the enthusiastic accounts of Kings Port and its people that I had written to her; nor had she at all approved of my remarks on the subject of the negro, called forth by Daddy Ben and his grandson Charles Cotesworth.

“When I sent you (wrote Aunt Carola) to admire Kings Port good-breeding, I did not send you to forget your country. Remember that those people were its mortal enemies; that besides their treatment of our prisoners in Libby and Andersonville (which killed my brother Alexander) they displayed in their dealings, both social and political, an arrogance in success and a childish petulance at opposition, which we who saw and suffered can never forget, any more than we can forget our loved ones who laid down their lives for this cause.”

These were not the only words with which Aunt Carola reproved what she termed my “disloyalty,” but they will serve to indicate her feeling about the Civil War. It was--on her side--precisely the feeling of all the Kings Port old ladies on Heir side. But why should it be mine? And so, after much thinking how I might best reply respectfully yet say to Aunt Carola what my feeling was, I sat down upstairs at my window, and, after some preliminary sentences, wrote:--

“There are dead brothers here also, who, like your brother, laid down their lives for what they believed was their country, and whom their sisters never can forget as you can never forget him. I read their names upon sad church tablets, and their boy faces look out at me from cherished miniatures and dim daguerreotypes. Upon their graves the women who mourn them leave flowers as you leave flowers upon the grave of your young soldier. You will tell me, perhaps, that since the bereavement is equal, I have not justified my sympathy for these people. But the bereavement was not equal. More homes here were robbed by death of their light and promise than with us; and to this you must add the material desolation of the homes themselves. Our roofs were not laid in ashes, and to-day we sit in affluence while they sit in privation. You will say to this, perhaps, that they brought it upon themselves. But even granting that they did so, surely to suffer and to lose is more bitter than to suffer and to win. My dear aunt, you could not see what I have seen here, and write to me as you do; and if those years have left upon your heart a scar which will not vanish, do not ask me, who came afterward, to wear the scar also. I should then resemble certain of the younger ones here, with less excuse than is theirs. As for the negro, forgive me if I assure you that you retain an Abolitionist exaltation for a creature who does not exist, or whose existence is an ineffectual drop in the bucket, a creature on grateful knees raising faithful eyes to one who has struck off his chains of slavery, whereas the creature who does exist is--”

I paused here in my letter to Aunt Carola, and sought for some fitting expression that should characterize for her with sufficient severity the new type of deliberately worthless negro; and as I sought, my eyes wandered to the garden next door, the garden of the Cornerlys. On a bench near a shady arrangement of vines over bars sat Hortense Rieppe. She was alone, and, from her attitude, seemed to be thinking deeply. The high walls of the garden shut her into a privacy that her position near the shady vines still more increased. It was evident that she had come here for the sake of being alone, and I regretted that she was so turned from me that I could not see her face. But her solitude did not long continue; there came into view a gentleman of would-be venerable appearance, who approached her with a walk carefully constructed for public admiration, and who, upon reaching her, bent over with the same sort of footlight elaboration and gave her a paternal kiss. I did not need to hear her call him father; he was so obviously General Rieppe, the prudent hero of Chattanooga, that words would have been perfectly superfluous in his identification.

I was destined upon another day to hear the tones of his voice, and thereupon may as well state now that they belonged altogether with the rest of him. There is a familiar type of Northern fraud, and a Southern type, equally familiar, but totally different in appearance. The Northern type has the straight, flat, earnest hair, the shaven upper lip, the chin-beard, and the benevolent religious expression. He will be the president of several charities, and the head of one great business. He plays no cards, drinks no wine, and warns young men to beware of temptation. He is as genial as a hair-sofa; and he is seldom found out by the public unless some financial crash in general affairs uncovers his cheating, which lies most often beyond the law’s reach; and because he cannot be put in jail, he quite honestly believes heaven is his destination. We see less of him since we have ceased to be a religious country, religion no longer being an essential disguise for him. The Southern type, with his unction and his juleps, is better company, unless he is the hero of too many of his own anecdotes. He is commonly the possessor of a poetic gaze, a mane of silvery hair, and a noble neck. As war days and cotton-factor days recede into a past more and more filmed over with romance, he too grows rare among us, and I regret it, for he was in truth a picturesque figure. General Rieppe was perfect.

At first I was sorry that the distance they were from me rendered hearing what they were saying impossible; very soon, however, the frame of my open window provided me with a living picture which would have been actually spoiled had the human voice disturbed its eloquent pantomime.

General Rieppe’s daughter responded to her father’s caress but languidly, turning to him her face, with its luminous, stationary beauty. He pointed to the house, and then waved his hand toward the bench where she sat; and she, in response to this, nodded slightly. Upon which the General, after another kiss of histrionic paternity administered to her forehead, left her sitting and proceeded along the garden walk at a stately pace, until I could no longer see him. Hortense, left alone upon the bench, looked down at the folds of her dress, extended a hand and slowly rearranged one of them, and then, with the same hand, felt her hair from front to back. This had scarce been accomplished when the General reappeared, ushering Juno along the walk, and bearing a chair with him. When they turned the corner at the arbor, Hortense rose, and greetings ensued. Few objects could be straighter than was Juno’s back; her card-case was in her hand, but her pocket was not quite large enough for the whole of her pride, which stuck out so that it could have been seen from a greater distance than my window. The General would have departed, placing his chair for the visitor, when Hortense waved for him an inviting hand toward the bench beside her; he waved a similarly inviting hand, looking at Juno, who thereupon sat firmly down upon the chair. At this the General hovered heavily, looking at his daughter, who gave him no look in return, as she engaged in conversation with Juno; and presently the General left them. Juno’s back and Hortense’s front, both entirely motionless as they interviewed each other’ presented a stiff appearance, with Juno half turned in her seat and Hortense’s glance following her slight movement; the two then rose, as the General came down the walk with two chairs and Mrs. Gregory and Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael. Juno, with a bow to them, approached Hortense by a step or two, a brief touch of their fingers was to be seen, and Juno’s departure took place, attended by the heavy hovering of General Rieppe.

“That’s why!” I said to myself aloud, suddenly, at my open window. Immediately, however, I added, “but can it be?” And in my mind a whole little edifice of reasons for Hortense’s apparent determination to marry John instantly fabricated itself--and then fell down.

Through John she was triumphantly bringing stiff Kings Port to her, was forcing them to accept her. But this was scarce enough temptation for Hortense to marry; she could do very well without Kings Port--indeed, she was not very likely to show herself in it, save to remind them, now and then, that she was there, and that they could not keep her out any more; this might amuse her a little, but the society itself would not amuse her in the least. What place had it for her to smoke her cigarettes in?

Eliza La Heu, then? Spite? The pleasure of taking something that somebody else wanted? The pleasure of spoiling somebody else’s pleasure? Or, more accurately, the pleasure of power? Well, yes; that might be it, if Hortense Rieppe were younger in years, and younger, especially, in soul; but her museum was too richly furnished with specimens of the chase, she had collected too many bits and bibelots from life’s Hotel Druot and the great bazaar of female competition, to pay so great a price as marriage for merely John; particularly when a lady, even in Newport, can have but one husband at a time in her collection. If she did actually love John, as Beverly Rodgers had reluctantly come to believe, it was most inappropriate in her! Had I followed out the train of reasoning which lay coiled up inside the word inappropriate, I might have reached the solution which eventually Hortense herself gave me, and the jewelled recesses of her nature would have blazed still more brilliantly to my eyes to-day; but in truth, my soul wasn’t old enough yet to work Hortense out by itself, unaided!

While Mrs. Gregory and Mrs. Weguelin sat on their chairs, and Hortense sat on her bench, tea was brought and a table laid, behind whose whiteness and silver Hortense began slight offices with cups and sugar tongs. She looked inquiry at her visitors, in answer to which Mrs. Gregory indicated acceptance, and Mrs. Weguelin refusal. The beauty of Hortense’s face had strangely increased since the arrival of these two visitors. It shone resplendent behind the silver and the white cloth, and her movement, as she gave the cup to Mrs. Gregory St. Michael, was one of complete grace and admirable propriety. But once she looked away from them in the direction of the path. Her two visitors rose and left her, Mrs. Gregory setting her tea-cup down with a gesture that said she would take no more, and, after their bows of farewell, Hortense sat alone again pulling about the tea things.

I saw that by the table lay a card-case on the ground, evidently dropped by Mrs. Gregory; but Hortense could not see it where she sat. Her quick look along the path heralded more company and the General with more chairs. Young people now began to appear, the various motions of whom were more animated than the approaches and greetings and farewells of their elders; chairs were moved and exchanged, the General was useful in handling cups, and a number of faces unknown to me came and went, some of them elderly ones whom I had seen in church, or passed while walking; the black dresses of age mingled with the brighter colors of youth; and on her bench behind the cups sat Hortense, or rose up at right moments, radiant, restrained and adequate, receiving with deferential attention the remarks of some dark-clothed elder, or, with sufficiently interested countenance, inquiring something from a brighter one of her own generation; but twice I saw her look up the garden path. None of them stayed long, although when they were all gone the shadow of the garden wall had come as far as the arbor; and once again Hortense sat alone behind the table, leaning back with arms folded, and looking straight in front of her. At last she stirred, and rose slowly, and then, with a movement which was the perfection of timidity, began to advance, as John, with his Aunt Eliza, came along the path. To John, Hortense with familiar yet discreet brightness gave a left hand, as she waited for the old lady; and then the old lady went through with it. What that embrace of acknowledgment cost her cannot be measured, and during its process John stood like a sentinel. Possibly this was the price of his forgiveness to his Aunt Eliza.

The visitors accepted tea, and the beauty in Hortense’s face was now supreme. The old lady sat, forgetting to drink her tea, but very still in outward attitude, as she talked with Hortense; and the sight of one hand in its glove lying motionless upon her best dress, suddenly almost drew unexpected tears to my eyes. John was nearly as quiet as she, but the glove that he held was twisted between his fingers. I expected that he would stay with his Hortense when his aunt took her leave; he, however, was evidently expected by the old lady to accompany her out and back, I suppose, to her house, as was proper.

But John’s departure from Hortense differed from his meeting her. She gave no left hand to him now; she gazed at him, and then, as the old lady began to go toward the house, she moved a step toward him, and then she cast herself into his arms! It was no acting, this, no skilful simulation; her head sank upon his shoulder, and true passion spoke in every line of that beautiful surrendered form, as it leaned against her lover’s.

“So that’s why!” I exclaimed, once more aloud.

It was but a moment; and John, released, followed Miss Eliza. The old lady walked slowly, with that half-failing step that betokens the body’s weariness after great mental or moral strain. Indeed, as John regained her side, she put her arm in his as if her feebleness needed his support. Thus they went away together, the aunt and her beloved boy, who had so sorely grieved and disappointed her.

But if this sight touched me, this glimpse of the vanquished leaving the field after supreme acknowledgment of defeat, upon Hortense it wrought another effect altogether. She stood looking after them, and as she looked, the whole woman from head to foot, motionless as she was, seemed to harden. Yet still she looked, until at length, slowly turning, her eyes chanced to fall upon Mrs. Gregory St. Michael’s card-case. There it lay, the symbol of Kings Port’s capitulation. She swooped down and up with a flying curve of grace, holding her prey caught; and then, catching also her handsome skirts on either side, she danced like a whirling fan among the empty chairs.

XVIII: Again the Replacers

But a little while, and all that I had just witnessed in such vivid dumb-show might have seemed to me in truth some masque; so smooth had it been, and voiceless, coming and going like a devised fancy. And after the last of the players was gone from the stage, leaving the white cloth, and the silver, and the cups, and the groups of chairs near the pleasant arbor, I watched the deserted garden whence the sunlight was slowly departing, and it seemed to me more than ever like some empty and charming scene in a playhouse, to which the comedians would in due time return to repeat their delicate pantomime. But these were mental indulgences, with which I sat playing until the sight of my interrupted letter to Aunt Carola on the table before me brought the reality of everything back into my thoughts; and I shook my head over Miss Eliza. I remembered that hand of hers, lying in despondent acquiescence upon her lap, as the old lady sat in her best dress, formally and faithfully accepting the woman whom her nephew John had brought upon them as his bride-elect--formally and faithfully accepting this distasteful person, and thus atoning as best she could to her beloved nephew for the wrong that her affection had led her to do him in that ill-starred and inexcusable tampering with his affairs.

But there was my letter waiting. I took my pen, and finished what I had to say about the negro and the injustice we had done to him, as well as to our own race, by the Fifteenth Amendment. I wrote:--

“I think Northerners must often seem to these people strangely obtuse in their attitude. And they deserve such opinion, since all they need to do is come here and see for themselves what the War did to the South.

“You may have a perfectly just fight with a man and beat him rightly; but if you are able to go on with your work next day, while his health is so damaged that for a long while he limps about as a cripple, you must not look up from your busy thriving and reproach him with his helplessness, and remind him of its cause; nor must you be surprised that he remembers the fight longer than you have time for. I know that the North meant to be magnanimous, that the North was magnanimous, that the spirit of Grant at Appomattox filled many breasts; and I know that the magnanimity was not met by those who led the South after Lee’s retirement, and before reconstruction set in, and that the Fifteenth Amendment was brought on by their own doings: when have two wrongs made a right? And to place the negro above these people was an atrocity. You cannot expect them to inquire very industriously how magnanimous this North meant to be, when they have suffered at her hands worse, far worse, than France suffered from Germany’s after 1870.

“I do think there should be a different spirit among some of the later-born, but I have come to understand even the slights and suspicions from which I here and there suffer, since to their minds, shut in by circumstance, I’m always a ‘Yankee.’

“We are prosperous; and prosperity does not bind, it merely assembles people--at dinners and dances. It is adversity that binds--beside the gravestone, beneath the desolated roof. Could you come here and see what I have seen, the retrospect of suffering, the long, lingering convalescence, the small outlook of vigor to come, and the steadfast sodality of affliction and affection and fortitude, your kind but unenlightened heart would be wrung, as mine has been, and is being, at every turn.”

After I had posted this reply to Aunt Carola, I had some fears that my pen had run away with me, and that she might now descend upon me with that reproof which she knew so well how to exercise in cases of disrespect. But there was actually a certain pathos in her mildness when it came. She felt it her duty to go over a good deal of history first, but:--

“I do not understand the present generation,” she finished, “and I suppose that I was not meant to.”

The little sigh in these words did great credit to Aunt Carola.

This vindication off my mind, and relieved by it of the more general thoughts about Kings Port and the South, which the pantomime of Kings Port’s forced capitulation to Hortense had raised in me, I returned to the personal matters between that young woman and John, and Charley. How much did Charley know? How much would Charley stand? How much would John stand, if he came to know?

Well, the scene in the garden now helped me to answer these questions much better than I could have answered them before its occurrence. With one fact--the great fact of love--established, it was not difficult to account for at least one or two of the several things that puzzled me. There could be no doubt that Hortense loved John Mayrant, loved him beyond her own control. When this love had begun, made no matter. Perhaps it began on the bridge, when the money was torn, and Eliza La Heu had appeared. The Kings Port version of Hortense’s indifference to John before the event of the phosphates might well enough be true. It might even well enough be true that she had taken him and his phosphates at Newport for lack of anything better at hand, and because she was sick of disappointed hopes. In this case, Charley’s subsequent appearance as something very much better (if the phosphates were to fail) would perfectly explain the various postponements of the wedding.

So I was able to answer my questions to myself thus: How much did Charley know?--Just what he could see for himself, and what he had most likely heard from Newport gossip. He could have heard of an old engagement, made purely for money’s sake, and of recent delays created by the lady; and he could see the gentleman--an impossible husband from a Wall Street standpoint!--to whom Hortense was evidently tempering her final refusal by indulgently taking an interest in helping along his phosphate fortune. Charley would not refuse to lend her his aid in this estimable benevolence; nor would it occur to Charley’s sensibilities how such benevolence would be taken by John if John were not “taken” himself. Yes, Charley was plainly fooled, and fooled the more readily because he had the old version of the truth. How should he suspect there was a revised version? How should he discover that passion had now changed sides, that it was now John who allowed himself to be loved? The signs of this did not occur before his eyes. Of course, Charley would not stay fooled forever; the hours of that were numbered,--but their number was quite beyond my guessing!

How much would Charley stand? He would stand a good deal, because the measure of his toleration was the measure of his desire for Hortense; and it was plain that he wanted her very much indeed. But how much would John stand? How soon would his “fire-eating” traditions produce a “difficulty”? Why had they not done this already? Well, the garden had in some way helped me to frame a fairly reasonable answer for this also. Poor Hortense had become as powerless to woo John to warmth as poor Venus had been with Adonis; and passion, in changing sides, had advanced the boy’s knowledge. He knew now the difference between the embraces of his lady when she had merely wanted his phosphates, and these other caresses now that, she wanted him. In his ceaseless search for some possible loophole of escape, his eye could not have overlooked the chance that lay in Charley, and he was far too canny to blast his forlorn hope. He had probably wondered what had changed the nature of Hortense’s caresses, and the adventure of the torn money could scarce have failed to suggest itself to the mind of a youth who, little as he had trodden the ways of the world, evidently possessed some lively instincts regarding the nature of women. To batter Charley as he had battered Juno’s nephew, might result in winding the arms of Hortense around his own neck more tightly than ever.

Why Hortense should keep Charley “on” any longer, was what I could least fathom, but I trusted her to have excellent reasons for anything that she did. “It’s sure to be quite simple, once you know it,” I told myself; and the near future proved me to be right.

Thus I laid most of my enigmas to rest; there was but one which now and then awakened still. Were Hortense a raw girl of eighteen, I could easily grant that the “fire-eater” in John would be sure to move her. But Hortense had travelled many miles away from the green forests of romance; her present fields were carpeted, not with grass and flowers, but with Oriental mats and rugs, and it was electric lights, not the moon and stars, that shone upon her highly seasoned nights. No, torn money and all, it was not appropriate in a woman of her experience; and so I still found myself inquiring in the words of Beverly Rodgers, “But what can she want him for?”

The next time that I met Mrs. Gregory St. Michael it was on my way to join the party at the old church, which Mrs. Weguelin was going to show them. The card-case was in her hand, and the sight of it prompted me to allude to Hortense Rieppe.

“I find her beauty growing upon me?” I declared.

Mrs. Gregory did not deny the beauty, although she spoke with reserve at first. “It is to be said that she knows how to write a suitable note,” the lady also admitted.

She didn’t tell me what the note was about, naturally; but I could imagine with what joy in the exercise of her art Hortense had constructed that communication which must have accompanied the prompt return of the card-case.

Then Mrs. Gregory’s tongue became downright. “Since you’re able to see so much of her, why don’t you tell her to marry that little steam-yacht gambler? I’m sure he’s dying to, and he’s just the thing for her?”

“Ah,” I returned, “Love so seldom knows what’s just the thing for marriage.”

“Then your precocity theory falls,” declared Mrs. St. Michael. And as she went away from me along the street, I watched her beautiful stately walk; for who could help watching a sight so good?

Charley, then, was no secret to John’s people. Was John still a secret to Charley? Could Hortense possibly have managed this? I hoped for a chance to observe the two men with her during the visit of Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael and her party to the church.

This party was already assembled when I arrived upon the spot appointed. In the street, a few paces from the church, stood Bohm and Charley and Kitty and Gazza, with Beverly Rodgers, who, as I came near, left them and joined me.

“Oh, she’s somewhere off with her fire-eater,” responded Beverly to my immediate inquiry for Hortense. “Do you think she was asked, old man?”

Probably not, I thought. “But she goes so well with the rest,” I suggested.

Beverly gave his chuckle. “She goes where she likes. She’ll meet us here when we’re finished, I’m pretty sure.”

“Why such certainty?”

“Well, she has to attend to Charley, you know!”

Mrs. Weguelin, it appeared, had met the party here by the church, but had now gone somewhere in the immediate neighborhood to find out why the gate was not opened to admit us, and to hasten the unpunctual custodian of the keys. I had not looked for precisely such a party as Mrs. Weguelin’s invitation had gathered, nor could I imagine that she had fully understood herself what she was gathering; and this I intimated to Beverly Rodgers, saying:--

“Do you suppose, my friend, that she suspected the feather of the birds you flock with?”

Beverly took it lightly. “Hang it, old boy, of course everybody can’t be as nice as I am!” But he took it less lightly before it was over.

We stood chatting apart, he and I, while Bohm and Charley and Kitty and Gazza walked across the street to the window of a shop, where old furniture was for sale at a high price; and it grew clearer to me what Beverly had innocently brought upon Mrs. Weguelin, and how he had brought it. The little quiet, particular lady had been pleased with his visit, and pleased with him. His good manners, his good appearance, his good English-trained voice, all these things must have been extremely to her taste; and then--more important than they--did she not know about his people? She had inquired, he told me, with interest about two of his uncles, whom she had last seen in 1858. “She’s awfully the right sort,” said Beverly. Yes, I saw well how that visit must have gone: the gentle old lady reviving in Beverly’s presence, and for the sake of being civil to him, some memories of her girlhood, some meetings with those uncles, some dances with them; and generally shedding from her talk and manner the charm of some sweet old melody--and Beverly, the facile, the appreciative, sitting there with her at a correct, deferential angle on his chair, admirably sympathetic and in good form, and playing the old school. (He had no thought to deceive her; the old school was his by right, and genuinely in his blood, he took to it like a duck to the water.) How should Mrs. Weguelin divine that he also took to the nouveau jeu to the tune of Bohm and Charley and Kitty and Gazza? And so, to show him some attention, and because she couldn’t ask him to a meal, why, she would take him over the old church, her colonial forefathers’; she would tell him the little legends about them; he was precisely the young man to appreciate such things--and she would be pleased if he would also bring the friends with whom he was travelling.

I looked across the street at Bohm and Charley and Kitty and Gazza. They were now staring about them in all their perfection of stare: small Charley in a sleek slate-colored suit, as neat as any little barber; Bohm, massive, portentous, his strong shoes and gloves the chief note in his dress, and about his whole firm frame a heavy mechanical strength, a look as of something that did something rapidly and accurately when set going--cut or cracked or ground or smashed something better and faster than it had ever been cut or cracked or ground or smashed before, and would take your arms and legs off if you didn’t stand well back from it; it was only in Bohm’s eye and lips that you saw he wasn’t made entirely of brass and iron, that champagne and shoulders decolletes received a punctual share of his valuable time. And there was Kitty, too, just the wife for Bohm, so soon as she could divorce her husband, to whom she had united herself before discovering that all she married him for, his old Knickerbocker name, was no longer in the slightest degree necessary for social acceptance; while she could feed people, her trough would be well thronged. Kitty was neat, Kitty was trig, Kitty was what Beverly would call “swagger “; her skilful tailor-made clothes sheathed her closely and gave her the excellent appearance of a well-folded English umbrella; it was in her hat that she had gone wrong--a beautiful hat in itself, one which would have wholly become Hortense; but for poor Kitty it didn’t do at all. Yes, she was a well folded English umbrella, only the umbrella had for its handle the head of a bulldog or the leg of a ballet-dancer. And these were the Replacers whom Beverly’s clear-sighted eyes saw swarming round the temple of his civilization, pushing down the aisles, climbing over the backs of the benches, walking over each other’s bodies, and seizing those front seats which his family had sat in since New York had been New York; and so the wise fellow very prudently took every step that would insure the Replacers’ inviting him to occupy one of his own chairs. I had almost forgotten little Gazza, the Italian nobleman, who sold old furniture to new Americans. Gazza was not looking at the old furniture of Kings Port, which must have filled his Vatican soul with contempt; he was strolling back and forth in the street, with his head in the air, humming, now loudly, now softly “La-la, la-la, E quando a la predica in chiesa siederia, la-la-la-la;” and I thought to myself that, were I the Pope, I should kick him into the Tiber.

When Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael came back with the keys and their custodian, Bohm was listening to the slow, clear words of Charley, in which he evidently found something that at length interested him--a little. Bohm, it seemed, did not often speak himself: possibly once a week. His way was to let other people speak to him when there were signs in his face that he was hearing anything which they said, it was a high compliment to them, and of course Charley could command Bohm’s ear; for Charley, although he was as neat as any barber, and let Hortense walk on him because he looked beyond that, and purposed to get her, was just as potent in the financial world as Bohm, could bring a borrowing empire to his own terms just as skillfully as could Bohm; was, in short, a man after Bohm’s own--I had almost said heart: the expression is so obstinately embedded in our language! Bohm, listening, and Charley, talking, had neither of them noticed Mrs. Weguelin’s arrival; they stood ignoring her, while she waited, casting a timid eye upon them. But Beverly, suddenly perceiving this, and begging her pardon for them, brought the party together, and we moved in among the old graves.

“Ah!” said Gazza, bending to read the quaint words cut upon one of them, as we stopped while the door at the rear of the church was being opened, “French!”

“It was the mother-tongue of these colonists,” Mrs. Weguelin explained to him.