Chapter III: Part 3

When the day arrived that was to see the triplicated entertainment of the Englishman, Sutphen was at fever-heat. So much had popular imagination expected of the object of all these cares, it was a distinct disappointment when a solemn little black-a-vised man carrying an American “dress-suit” case, stepped out of the omnibus of the Dixon House and requested of the clerk of that hostelry one of his one-dollar rooms. Barring a further demand for hot water in a jug--which the bell boy took to indicate some intention toward a private brew of punch--there was nothing to distinguish the great genius from an ordinary commercial traveler. Some enterprising spirits who had been hanging around the hotel corridor to see this arrival, went home and confided to wives and daughters their opinion that Mr. Bludgeon had better be read than seen. And these ladies who for days had been conning well-thumbed volumes of his writings sighed the sigh of discomfiture--feeling rather glad, however, that certain entertainers who were at that moment yearning for his arrival, were destined to share their disillusionment. Just before the arrival of her twelve guests for luncheon, Miss Bennett received a hasty note from Mrs. Stratton, expressing deepest regret that her fatigue resulting from necessary cares of state and home (of which naturally there was no one to relieve _her_) would prevent her from being present.

“‘A positively raging headache,’ she says,” remarked Cornelia, compressing her lips. “Never mind, mother; I don’t care. I’ll send right over and fill up with little Miss James, the elocution teacher. She is pretty and clever, and can talk up to Annetta any day, if she only gets the chance. And if you’ll believe _me_, mother, it’s not so much headache the matter with Annetta as vexation because I’m to skim the cream off the milk pan first. Good gracious! I’m tired to death myself, but I’d rather die than give up now.”

Curiosity among Miss Bennett’s _invités_ was fully sated when, upon the arrival of the guest of honor, luncheon was at once announced, and they filed into the well-remembered dining-room, where they had of old partaken of feasts of the frizzled beef and scrambled egg description. Here, _mirabile dictu!_ was a board set out in modern conventional fashion--a silver wine-cooler full of roses in the center, silver dishlets holding salted almonds, bonbons and little cakes around it; at each cover a name card, napkin, glass for claret, another for sauterne, and still another for sherry, setting off a plate of blue Meissen porcelain!

So far Mr. Bludgeon had said little beside “hum!” and “ha!” He had devoured his bread and bouillon in silence, and had drank a glass of white wine; but now he bestowed upon the listening public his first connected utterance:

“Hum! ha! very fair imitation,” he said to his hostess, turning his plate upside down to gaze upon the trade-mark on the bottom. “We use this kind of thing in our own house for every day. Perhaps you knew--but it may be only chance--that this is my favorite pattern in china. Looks clean and tidy somehow, so I tell my wife.”

Sustained by this mark of approval, Miss Bennett inwardly blessed Simonson, who, looking unconscious in an evening dress suit, was occupied at the side table, in dispensing platters of fish croquettes to his two subordinates to serve. She only wished that Annetta Stratton might have been near enough to hear. The rest of the meal, whisked along expeditiously by the trained minions, went so fast, that Miss Bennett could hardly believe her good luck when all was over. True to the instincts of more artless days, she had some thoughts of putting on her bonnet and running out to talk it over with Annetta. But her feet ached, her dress felt too tight, her mother was fretting over the loss of both pairs of spectacles, Simonson’s men were overrunning everything, Mr. Bludgeon had gone away without more than the scantest recognition of her personality--so she went up to her bedroom and had a hearty, nervous cry.

In the Lyceum Hall that afternoon, where the literary club met at 4 P.M. for the “lecture,” everybody was buzzing over the reports of the Bennetts’ swell luncheon. Mrs. Chauncey Stratton, who had insisted upon calling at the Dixon House to fetch Mr. Bludgeon to the hall in her own carriage, did not arrive till too late to hear the gossip. Just before the solemn little man stepped upon the platform, the great lady of Sutphen passed up the middle aisle, wearing a bonnet with plumes turning to all points of the compass, a trailing skirt of rich satin, a jet cuirass, and a large bouquet of violets in the bosom of her gown. Smiling, nodding on all sides with conscious pride, this patron of letters took her seat beside Mrs. Mark Grindstone.

“Seems to me you’ve ‘picked up’ since lunch time,” observed that lady, in her customary muffled tones.

“I _do_ feel better,” said Mrs. Stratton, unable to cease bowing, although in conversation with her friend. “So you were at poor Cornelia’s little affair? Do tell me how it went off.”

“Six courses--three wines--the whole thing served by Simonson--couldn’t have been better done,” answered Mrs. Grindstone, lightly.

“Simonson?” The shot had gone home.

“Mr. Bludgeon was most agreeable. He particularly noticed the table service, and seemed so pleased,” went on Mrs. Grindstone, who had a long score to settle. “But hush! Here he comes. What do you suppose he is going to read?”

“Didn’t you see the program?” asked Annetta in a chilly tone. “It was settled with me, by letter. In fact I selected the extracts from his own works, and it will be sure to be satisfactory to all.”

We pass over the somewhat subduing effect upon a large mixed audience, alien to him by birth and training, of the Englishman’s recital of his own gems of thought. The usual frost accompanying this species of entertainment was deepened while his tragic scenes and interludes were rehearsed successively. Some members of the Club were rash enough to whisper between themselves that the entertainment wasn’t worth the appropriation from their treasury required to meet its cost.

During the “tea” with introductions, that followed, Mrs. Stratton again rose to the occasion. As the fairy godmother of Genius she was immense. But Genius remained from first to last unsmiling. Life was real, life was earnest to him during that episode of American homage.

Seated at Mrs. Stratton’s right hand, at dinner in her pleasant dining-room, Mr. Bludgeon, in evening dress, unfolding his napkin, looked almost amiable. When he caught sight of the soup plate succeeding the one on which his oysters had been served, his face actually expanded into a smile.

“Very nice, very nice, upon my word,” he said, indicating the object before him with a condescending wave of his hand. “I had always been told you Americans do things in very lavish style, but, this, really, is more than I could have expected, don’t you know?”

Annetta was radiant, although she could not exactly understand why her guest’s gratitude for courtesy extended took this form. Evidently Simonson’s china, silver, roses, bonbons, decorations, were on a scale surpassing anything in Bludgeon’s previous experience of America. She felt she could afford then and there to forgive Cornelia Bennett for having had Simonson for lunch.

The dinner, rather a weight upon the Sutphenites, dragged heavily along, but it ended at last, and after coffee and cigars (Simonson’s cigars!) the gentlemen rejoined the ladies in the drawing-room.

“I am sorry to say,” explained Mrs. Stratton to her guest-in-chief, “that as we in Sutphen keep rather early hours, the reception given for you at my friend Mrs. Grindstone’s will have already begun. Mr. and Mrs. Grindstone left some time ago, with apologies to you. It is too bad that we should have to deprive ourselves of you; but I hope you will not quite forget our home and our little efforts to be agreeable.”

“No, I shall not, by George,” exclaimed the author, who had become a trifle more relaxed; “and when I tell them at home about it, they will hardly believe me, don’t you know!”

This put the apex upon Mrs. Stratton’s pyramid of joy. In her own carriage, the author seated beside her, facing her husband and Cornelia Bennett, they drove to Mrs. Grindstone’s house on the outskirts of the town.

The most novel revelation of Mrs. Grindstone’s party, at first sight, was that all the gas jets in the house were lighted and blazing--reckless of the monthly gas bill. This was something unprecedented, as also the cloak-room (Simonson’s invention), the white-capped maids (Simonson’s), and the four pieces of music hidden by Simonson in a bower of palms on the stairway. Only the familiar stooping figure of old Mr. Grindstone in his worn frock coat with a large new white silk tie, brought the public to a realizing sense of where they were. If Simonson could have tucked away the host into the hall closet, along with superfluous wraps, umbrellas, and old overshoes, that functuary would have been very much relieved.

Mrs. Grindstone, on the contrary, who might always be reckoned upon to come out strong in the matter of finery, wore a brave new gown of black silk and net, upon which had been let loose a whole collection of green beaded butterflies. The splendor of this reality at once effaced the tradition of the velvet cloak. Mrs. Grindstone’s flaxen gray hair strained to the summit of her head, was there surmounted by an aigrette of green feathers, caught by a diamond brooch. Directly she saw her, Mrs. Stratton knew why her friend had hurried home at the conclusion of the dinner. Mrs. Grindstone had not been willing to expend the first blush of success of such a toilette upon another woman’s entertainment.

“Isn’t she splendid?” whispered Cornelia. “No such dressing has ever been seen in Sutphen, in my time.”

“If I didn’t feel sure Mr. Bludgeon would think it overdone,” said Annetta, shrugging.

But she was herself impressed, and greatly. The revolt of Cornelia and Mrs. Grindstone from her rule; their blossoming forth with all this magnificence of a day; the fact that they would henceforth stand side by side with _her_ in the reminiscences of how Sutphen welcomed Mr. Timothy Bludgeon to its Literary bosom, made Annetta smart. The one consoling thought was that Mr. Bludgeon had told her his people at home would not believe him when he described to them her dinner.

“Now for the fried oysters and ice cream,” thought Mrs. Chauncey Stratton when, later on, old Mr. Grindstone offered his arm to her to follow Mrs. Grindstone and Mr. Bludgeon into supper.

Here a new surprise--one greater than all the rest--awaited her. Little tables, an innovation undreamt of in simple Sutphen, were dotting the whole room. At the chief one of these, the two leading couples, flanked by Cornelia Bennett and Major Gooch, were placed. In a trice, that indefatigable Simonson had begun the service of a supper in courses, closely resembling Miss Cornelia Bennett’s lunch.

Annetta could have cried with annoyance. Not only were the dishes, the silver, the candelabra, and all the rest, just what had twice already that day appeared before the Englishman--but the china--the imitation “onion pattern”--was identically the same.

Mr. Bludgeon, when this latter fact became manifest to his observation, smiled for the second time in Sutphen. It was not, at best, a gay, hilarious, or even a complaisant smile; but a reluctant smile of flattered vanity impossible to mistake. Presently, when they called upon him for a speech, he arose holding in his hand a glass of Simonson’s (American) champagne. What he said, preliminary to the gist of his remarks, Mrs. Stratton hardly understood. Her brain was tingling with vexation, she even snapped at Cornelia in an undertone, and fairly turned the cold shoulder on Mrs. Grindstone. When she could at last control herself sufficiently to be able to listen, the author had reached the climax of his sentences, and Mrs. Stratton was rewarded for all her labors in behalf of the Literary Club, by hearing this:

“Before I came to this country,” said the solemn little man, “I may have had doubts about American hospitality. Since visiting Sutphen especially, I have none remaining. You are the most gracious hosts in the world. As an instance of this fact, I shall always cite my unparalleled experience to-day. At the luncheon of your Secretary, the amiable lady who sits at the table with me here, pleased me with her china service; I happened to tell her it reminded me of home. What was my surprise and gratification to find that your accomplished President, at whose house I was dining a few hours later on--to whom no doubt my remark had been repeated--had at such very short notice managed to duplicate the set of china I had commended. And now, again, what can I say? Words indeed fail me, when at the hospitable board of your admirable Treasurer, I find a third set of my favorite porcelain. The resources of you Americans really do surprise me. Such a compliment, so conceived, so carried out, has never been paid to me, before. Need I say that it goes to my inmost--”

Mr. Bludgeon stopped. He had heard a giggle of hilarity that could no longer be repressed. The company, among whom Simonson and his belongings had of course been under free discussion ever since they had sat down to the tables, fairly exploded with delight.

Mr. Bludgeon hemmed, hawed, colored--finally took his seat. Mrs. Stratton hastily left the room. Mrs. Grindstone and Miss Bennett, sat on, mute, unrevealing as two Sphinxes--but evidently not offended beyond hope of recovery.

* * * * *

Some time after Mr. Bludgeon’s visit to Sutphen had begun to pass into tradition, poor Simonson’s establishment in Main Street was shut up. He had dragged along for some time; but, lacking customers, finally decided to pack up his onion-pattern china, and the rest, and had emigrated to a more promising field for a caterer’s operations. The day of his great success had proved his Waterloo.

* * * * *

Mrs. Grindstone is now the President of the Sutphen Literary Club--_vice_ Mrs. Chauncey Stratton resigned and gone abroad. Miss Bennett is still the Secretary. Mr. Grindstone’s gas bills remain reasonably low.

LEANDER OF BETSY’S PRIDE

LEANDER OF BETSY’S PRIDE

The close of a long, bright summer’s day at one of the Virginian watering-places found a little party of young people, most of them from the North, importuning jolly old Dick Ross (an offspring of the soil, and imbued with its traditions as an orange-flower is with scent) to tell them “stories.”

Ross, a tall, high-stepping, grizzled veteran, who had come out of the civil strife a Brigadier-General of Confederate Volunteers, and the hero of a hundred daring adventures about which he kept close as an oyster, was considered by the bevy who now surrounded him the best boon of their visit to the South. But for General Ross it had been passing dull at the staid old mountain spa, whither their respective families had journeyed for health and pleasure. Evening after evening, after they had danced together in the moldering old drawing-room, or played cards around a rickety table, seated in shabby chairs of defaced mahogany with ancient haircloth seats, or yawned because there was nothing else to do, the apparition of the General’s lean figure strolling into their hall of pleasures had been hailed with delight. Through him the visitors had become familiar with habits, customs, and incidents of a bygone generation, in a community as foreign to their own modes of thought as if it had been geographically remote, like Russia or the golden India. And on his side Ross never realized what a tremendously old fogy he had become till he saw the impersonal nature of the approval expressed of him and his narrations in the eyes of that pretty Puritan, little Miss Eunice Hall of Boston.

She was a scion of a famous abolition tree. Her progenitors had fought to the death against Ross and his fellow-Virginians, and had triumphed loftily over the eternal downfall of the slave aristocracy in the crash of war. True, her brother Angus, named for the sturdy representative of their line who had done most mischief to the South, showed but a homeopathically diluted remnant of his ancestor’s spirit in this respect. He had but a dim general idea of the part his grandsire had played in the Senate of the United States before the war, and was rather bored when accosted about it by strangers. He was more interested in his yacht, in golf, and in University boat-races than in musty discussions and wrangles about the right of men to hold their brother men enslaved.

Eunice was different. Lately, since she had come to womanhood, it had been her “fad” to unearth every item concerning this mighty question that had rent asunder for a time the great country she revered. Since her mamma had elected to take a cure at a placid Virginian watering-place Eunice had found several good opportunities to prosecute her researches--but none, on the whole, as satisfactory as those afforded by General Richard Ross.

The old bachelor had been absent for a few days, having ridden away astride of a pair of venerable saddle-bags on a fiery, half-broken colt to visit some kinsfolks of whom he vaguely spoke as residing “up in the country.” Now, on his return to the “Old Blue,” as these springs were generically termed, General Ross consumed a hasty supper, endued himself in a suit of spotless white duck, brushed his back hair well to the front, and stepped into the parlor, where he knew the young ladies were to be found. He was received as a hero come home from the wars.

“We have stagnated since you left,” said Louisa Stapleton of New York. “While Eunice filled up her note-book with yarns of your skirmishing, there has been nothing for the rest of us to do.”

“I am too much honored,” said the General, bowing to Miss Hall, hand on heart. “But have there been no new arrivals, no younger men to push me into the background?”

“Only one newcomer,” said Eunice, making place for him on a rusty sofa.

“And he a foreigner, ailing and married,” added Louisa, disdainfully. “Who but Eunice would have looked twice at that old fossil with one foot in the grave?”

“He interested me, I don’t know why,” confessed Miss Hall. “I met him first walking in Chinquepin Hollow, his head sunk on his breast, talking to himself. I thought I never saw such a wreck of a handsome man. And his eyes, when he fixed them on me in passing, burned like live coals.”

Old Dick started irrepressibly.

“He--you met--oh, impossible! Gad, I believe I’m possessed by one idea. A foreigner, you say--traveling with his wife?”

“Yes; they stopped here but a day, to take the evening train. As it happened, they had the room next to mine, on the upper gallery; and as our windows, opening at the floor, almost touched, I heard them speaking to each other in French in a very excited, agitated way. Fearing I might overhear what was not intended for my ear, I got up and stepped out upon the gallery. Immediately there was silence, and a long, emaciated hand, like yellow wax, drew in their shutters close together.”

A burst of laughter followed this narration.

“Trust Eunice for hatching mystery,” said Louisa, laughing. “I saw the couple getting into the stage to go to the station: he, a prosaic invalid, his head wrapped in a silk muffler; she, a dumpy little French woman, perfectly commonplace. Come, General Ross, have you not brought back to us from your travels a new story?”

“Something that happened before the war, in a nice, gone-to-seed family,” added Louisa’s younger sister, Blanche. “And pray let the house have wainscoting and a secret chamber.”

“No, no; something real. A war story,” said young Harry Lemist, who had a thirst for active movement and little imagination.

“Upon my word,” said the General, when they allowed him to reply, “I am almost afraid to tell you what occurred in the room I slept in night before last, for fear you will think I have trumped it up to answer Miss Blanche’s requisition.”

“How awfully jolly,” exclaimed Louisa Stapleton, pulling out the fringe of curls upon her forehead.

“It was nothing of the kind, Miss Stapleton. In point of fact it was about as disagreeable an experience as I remember. But to tell the tale connectedly I shall have to go back many, many years, to the time when the old mansion that sheltered me night before last was in its prime of hospitable attraction for every one that strayed within its gates. About a day’s ride from here is ‘Betsey’s Pride,’ for by this quaint appellation is still known the house built for his young wife by a wealthy Virginian land-owner, just before this century came in.”

“Not old enough by half,” exclaimed Blanche, pouting.

“Truth will out, however,” answered the narrator, accustomed to lawless interruptions. “It is a fine old house built like Lee’s birthplace, Stratford, in the form of a letter H. The cross of the H is a large salon, now absolutely bare of furniture. At the juncture of each wing with the house arises a pile of chimneys, serving to support a pavilion on the roof, where in old days a darky band used to play for the gentry, of an evening. There was a fish-pond up there, too, in my boyhood; and there still is, at the back of the house, an old ruined garden. When a lad I loved nothing better than a visit in vacation to ‘Betsey’s Pride.’ The oldest son of this house was my chum at the University, and also a kinsman, though remote. We will call him, for dramatic purposes, Llewellyn Chester. Chester was always a handsome, easy-going, free-handed fellow, brought up to consider himself the master of abundant means. His people gave him the best education of the times, and in due course sent him to travel abroad, attended only by the ‘boy,’ who in old Virginian fashion had been told off at a very tender age from among the slaves to wait on him. Leander Jameson was the ‘boy’s’ name. Smile if you will, young ladies, but gentle and simple, white and colored, we Virginians always relish fine-sounding names. Leander was a very light mulatto, tall, erect, manly, good-looking as his master, and of astonishing versatility of talent. He could sing, whistle, impersonate any one on the plantation, was an adept in athletic exercises, and had, as we said, the manners of a prince. Chester, dependent on him for so many long years for companionship, treated him with lavish indulgence and generosity. While they were in Paris, where Leander was, of course, received as an equal by his class among the whites, Chester had him take lessons in singing, dancing, fencing, and the like; filled his pockets with money, and turned him loose upon what, as it seems, was a very wild career for both of them.

“When, a few years before the war broke out, I again visited ‘Betsey’s Pride,’ it was to see a woeful change in the circumstances of the returned prodigal, my cousin. Chester’s parents had died, his sisters had lived on there in seclusion, little knowing that his extravagance had wasted all his own and involved their substance. When he finally turned up again, like a bad penny, at their home, it was to linger a few months and die. In his last illness poor Llewellyn was nursed by Leander as no one else could have nursed him. Such fidelity, tenderness! Well, it’s not of that I started out to tell. Llew Chester under the cedars of the family burying-ground, his sisters had to hear that they were ruined in fortune. But, then or since, those two women would never hear a word said against ‘poor Llew.’

“Here comes in,” went on the General, doughtily, “a chapter fortunately not common among the slave-holding families of those days. As the negroes on large plantations went on multiplying and exacting care and outlay, the revenues of their owners were naturally consumed. But it was part of our religion to hold fast to the trust committed to us by our fathers. Nothing but dire want ever made a Virginian of ‘the real sort’ part with a slave for money. When dire want came, so much the worse for slave and master. It was a degradation that bowed down the seller to the earth with shame--to have to part with these people of our black families. If anybody ever tells you to the contrary, Miss Eunice, send him to me to be convinced.”

The General, growing red in the face, winked, gulped, got up and walked up and down the room, tugged at his mustache, then sat down.

“I suppose none of you ever heard of the character as much avoided in the society of decent men with us as the headsman is in France--the negro broker and trader. But there he was, often growing fat and rich on the proceeds of his horrid business; and, like the headsman, when occasion demanded he turned up. Chester had slighted in public one of the most formidable of this fraternity, a man named Israel Johns, a sullen bully, who laid up the slight in silence and bided his time for revenge.

“As it happened, Johns’s opportunity did not come till the breath had left his enemy’s body. When it was known that the Misses Chester would be forced to part with all of their ‘likely’ black people, in order to pay the debts of the estate and live, the deepest feeling was everywhere shown for the pair. My own mother went a two days’ journey on horseback to weep with them. Remember, the oversupply of slaves in Virginia made their buyers very particular to select the best, and it was therefore much feared by the friends of the family that the first man to go off would be Leander Jameson.”

“His master’s friend--intimate! Oh, infamous! I would have starved first!” cried out Eunice, a red spot glowing in either cheek.

“God knows I think so, too, Miss Eunice,” said the old soldier, bowing his head sadly. “But that such things were was part of our burden and our curse.

“A number of us,” he went on presently, “old friends and neighbors, met together and made a purse to buy in Leander for the estate. But we were tricked--outbidden--overruled. The man who got him was, as you may surmise, none other than Israel Johns. We learned afterward that Johns said he would own that nigger if it took every cent he had. I can see him now, the dirty blackguard! A middle-sized, low-browed, swart, powerful fellow, dark as a Spaniard, with thick lips, curly black hair, and black, shifty eyes that couldn’t look you in the face. It was at the county court-house on New Year’s Day where the auction had taken place. When Leander found out who had become his owner his eyes glared like a savage animal’s. I never saw a handsome young face so transformed by rage and despair. A man who stood next to me said carelessly, ‘By Jove! it’s he that looks like the master, and Johns like the man, I am thinking.’

“I will pass over the feelings of all concerned when, in a few days, we heard that Johns had started for New Orleans to sell his prize to the highest bidder. I for one do not enjoy analyses of human emotion under stress. When you know that Chester had promised to free Leander in order to enable the fellow to go back and marry a Creole girl from Martinique whom he had met in Paris, and had died without doing so, you see how the affair stood. What followed is well known to many persons. Johns flaunted down to New Orleans with his chattel; and on the way Leander conceived one of the most daring schemes that was ever carried out to a successful ending. He managed to get his master drunk, and on arriving at New Orleans to actually sell him for a thousand dollars to a buyer before whom Leander had posed as a Virginian planter on his travels, encumbered with a tipsy ruffian he was glad to dispose of cheap.

“The complexion, good manners, educated voice, and easy diction of Leander made this thing possible. Upon receiving, as was agreed, the money down, he at once disappeared; and he has never been heard of since.”

“And Johns? What became of him?” asked the hearers in concert.

“When he came to himself and found out his condition he fought, blustered, was overcome and held in servitude. Finally the law allowed him to institute ‘a freedom suit’; and after many disappointments and delays he was identified as Israel Johns by persons sent from Virginia to New Orleans for that purpose, at Johns’s expense. By the time his freedom was secured and he was restored to his privileges as a white citizen, Leander Jameson was far beyond reach of his vengeance. But Johns’s spirit was broken, and a year later he died.”

“Is all that true?” asked Eunice Hall, who had listened in breathless interest.

“To the best of my belief, yes; you may see certainly that the tale is unvarnished by me. But as I told you, it was only the prelude to a personal experience of mine during the last six and thirty hours. When, night before last, I reached ‘Betsey’s Pride’ after a long day in the saddle, I was kindly greeted by the two little Miss Chesters, who continue to live there in the most frugal way. War, that left over their heads the shell of their father’s mansion, has left them but little else besides. My visit was, in rude fact, one of investigation--to see whether the two ladies were supplied with the necessaries of life, for which they are too proud to ask their friends. After a meal and a conversation that I can’t think of without a feeling like a knife thrust into the heart, they showed me to my room. It was, as I at once saw, the apartment in which their brother Llewellyn had breathed his last, a cold, bare place, the arrangement of its furniture unchanged in all these weary years. Through a crack widened around the window-frame ivy had shot into the room and was curling about the inner sash. The Miss Chesters could not bear to remove this vine. ‘It looked so sweet,’ they said, ‘growing in poor Llew’s room.’ An old negro woman, who brought me a jug of spring-water, hurried out as soon as she had deposited her burden. By the look in her face I knew she believed the place to contain another presence than my own.”

“Now we are coming to the real thing!” exclaimed light-hearted Blanche, clapping her hands gleefully.

“It might be, if I knew how to dress it up in fine words at awesome intervals; but I can’t. I can just tell you the simple truth--that, awakening in the middle of the night I saw, in the moonlight, as plainly as I see you now, the face and figure of Leander Jameson.”

“Good gracious!” cried Eunice, sitting bolt upright, and fixing upon old Dick a fascinated gaze.

“Of course, I had been thinking of him and his master when I fell asleep. Of course, it was an optical illusion,” added the old man. “I have said so to myself a dozen times since it happened.”

“What did you do? What did he do?” queried the listeners in unison.

They could not decide whether or not the General was trying to take them in. But all the same, the girls clutched at each other’s hands, and the young men essayed to put on an air of incredulous superiority as they waited for the climax.

“Frankly speaking,” said the hero of many fights with flesh and blood, “_I_ pulled the clothes over my head. _He_ executed the usual ‘vanishing act.’ When I looked again he was gone. The only occupant of the room beside myself was a rat that seemed to be dragging my boot across the boards of the floor.”

“Was the window open?”

“Wide,” said the General; “and, as it was the usual French window upon the ground floor of a bachelor’s wing, nothing could have been easier for a ghost than to step in and out over the sill. Next morning I examined the premises, but on the soft old green sward of a century that came close to the window outside found no trace of footsteps. The birds were singing in the very room with me; the warm sunshine bathed its every nook and corner. A young heifer, straying up, looked as if she meant to step over the threshold, but desisted. There was no trace or filament of visitation, supernatural or otherwise.”

“Naturally, since you dreamed it,” said Mr. Harry Lemist, convincingly.

“Naturally,” said the General. “I, too, made up my mind to that view of the case. But the whole thing was a curious episode. It brought back the details of my poor friend’s life and death, and of his valet’s reckless and successful stroke for freedom. On my ride back here to-day I have been recalling many instances of the intercourse between Chester and Leander Jameson--things I had long forgotten. One was that, as lads, Chester had his ‘boy’ learn tattooing of an old sailor in the neighborhood. The first result of his accomplishment was the shield of Virginia in blue on Chester’s forearm--‘_Sic semper tyrannis_’ and the rest of it, buried with him, of course--while Leander carried through life, on the outside of his right hand, the crimson image of the swan that is the Chester crest.”

Eunice Hall, self-contained little being that she was, gave at this a galvanic start.

“Why!” she exclaimed, growing pale with excitement, “I have seen it--that hand marked with a crimson swan--only a little while ago! It was the one thrust out to draw in the shutters of the Frenchman’s window. I noticed it particularly.”

“By George--then it _was_ Leander!” cried the General, springing to his feet.

* * * * *

The best efforts of General Ross to trace the fugitive and his wife resulted only in finding that they had boarded a train bound northward, and were by then probably safely in New York, if not, as seemed likely, on the ocean sailing back to Leander Jameson’s adopted home. That the ex-slave had prospered in circumstances his appearance and surroundings left no room to doubt. The General’s idea that, broken in health and knowing himself to be a dying man, Leander had not been able to resist a secret visit to the scene of his birth and of his early tragedy was considered the correct one.

* * * * *

General Dick Ross still makes his annual visit to drink the waters of “Old Blue.” The only time he has been persuaded to cross Mason and Dixon’s line, to pursue his investigations of society, was for the purpose of attending the marriage of Miss Eunice Hall, when that charming enthusiast decided upon concentrating her efforts at reform of the human race upon a single undefended man.

THE THREE MISSES BENEDICT AT YALE

THE THREE MISSES BENEDICT AT YALE

A heavy fall of snow upon the old streets of New Haven had not succeeded in blocking the wheels of progress of that merriest season of the collegiate year, known to the university world as “Prom Week.” For three days a crowd of fair visitors and their chaperons had trod the round of gayeties; had frequented the concerts, germans, teas, and receptions; they were now drawing breath and gathering energy for the last crucial test of physical endurance, the ball called the Junior Promenade.

For, to properly celebrate this time-honored and brilliant affair, custom decrees that the list of thirty or more dances and intermissions printed upon the ball-card presented to each damsel crossing the threshold of this hall of raptures shall, long beforehand, have been filled with names by the brother, cousin, or admirer having the list in charge. It follows naturally that by the time not only all these dances are accomplished but every “intermission” has been spent in an impromptu dance to the music of the band, alternating with the orchestra, night has brightened into dawn.

When the girls are finally induced by their exhausted matrons to withdraw from the giddy whirl, they leave behind a set of men, wild-eyed, and wilted as to shirt-fronts, cuffs, and collars, but undaunted in spirit. These men, the givers of the ball, then go away to their dormitories to snatch an hour or two of slumber before chapel, which has, not infrequently, been attended by beings in ulsters worn over evening clothes. It was to such tireless devotees rather invigorating than depressing to see snowflakes come trooping down upon the final scenes of their three-days’ gayety. Toward nine o’clock P.M. the streets were encumbered by lumbering old hacks pulling up before doors to receive their loads of hooded and cloaked figures, then driving with them at a furious pace to the door of the armory where the “Prom” is given, and dashing off again to secure new fares. The drivers of these vehicles, known by name to most of the students, extend to the university and its doings an almost parental indulgence. To the guests who are aiding to make the occasion brilliant they are suave beyond imagination; solicitous of comfort, descending from their perches to open the carriage doors, and assisting parlously at the elbow of the lady entering or getting out. Little of the evening’s fun is to be theirs, honest fellows, but they are sustained through the chilly vigils of the night by _esprit de corps_ and a brave desire to keep up the credit of their town.

Quite early in the fray one of these hacks disgorged under the armory’s awning a party consisting of a mother, two daughters, and a girl cousin, all three of the young women marked with the same general characteristics of family, but differing in feature and degree of beauty. The mother, a stout, comely body, with diamond butterflies quivering about the base of a tall, black aigrette that, springing from her hair, swept the carriage top as she sat, emerged with a look denoting resolution to carry on the struggle of spirit against flesh to the bitter end. For was not her only son, her pride and joy, leader of the revels as head of the floor committee of the “Prom”? Not for worlds would she have given up the wearying privilege of sitting out the ball. Never, in her own palmiest days, had she drawn near to a scene of gayety with a more proud sense of identification than to-night, when she shone in the reflected glory of her handsome boy!

Jack Benedict was, on his part, modest, as becomes the truly great! An immense favorite with his class, he had been one of those fellows who sail serenely through college life, winning, without apparent effort, honors toiled for by others without success. A good scholar, an athlete of renown, frank, cordial, sympathetic, he was put forward by the vote of his comrades whenever opportunity occurred to represent them before the world; the election to his present post being upon one of these occasions.

Fresh-faced, clear-eyed, smiling, dressed in immaculate attire, the tall young hero advanced to meet his mother and, giving her his arm, conducted the party along the length of the large hall to a box fitted up for the friends of the committee of management. The girls following them were immediately surrounded by a throng of men, consulting their dance programmes and receiving with pride their compliments upon the charming arrangements of the hall. It had already been decided among the opinion-makers that the three Misses Benedict were the stars of the festive week, and their approbation of the scene was generally awaited.

The vast inclosure of the armory was lined to its arched roof with breadths of semi-transparent stuff, alternatively pale lavender and yellow in tint, giving it a delightfully fresh and blossomy effect. From the ceiling, lighted by veiled electric bulbs, depended a racing-shell filled with flowers and a floral football, emblems of the University’s late prowess in the athletic world. From high stands on either side of the hall the band, or else the orchestra, clashed forth unceasingly enlivening strains. Beneath one or the other of these draped eyries were seen to disappear during the progress of the ball panting and perspiring men, who went away wilted after saltatory toil--but returned arrayed in the glory of fresh linen, white collars, and cuffs immaculate. Around the walls, hung with tapestry and placques of flowers, were ranged the boxes severally sold at auction to the highest bidder among the classmen who desired thus proudly to extol the ladies of their visiting families and parties. In these dainty nooks were assembled treasures from many a college sitting-room. Easy-chairs, rugs, lamps, draperies, tables, cushions--above all, cushions!--of every size, material, and color, were brought hither by their owners or borrowers from acquiescent friends, to make resting-places for the chaperons, and, when possible, the girls.

The wide, crash-covered floor, soon covered with whirling figures, became a dazzling kaleidoscope. The suggestion presented by the sight was one of extraordinary brilliancy and lightness. It was as if the Genius of American youth were abroad and at his best. No face there that did not gleam with happiness, no foot that did not spring with rapturous life. Of those encumbrances of an ordinary ball-room, the sad, the sour, the world-weary, the middle-aged, none was discernible. The young men and maidens prominent in this function, gathered from far and near in the broad Republic, were types of blended races, or pure Americans such as one may hardly see elsewhere in an Eastern festivity; and the conventional uniformity of a dance in New York, Boston, or Philadelphia was thus most agreeably varied. And through all was apparent to older eyes the joy of living and being that comes only in the first quarter of the century of life.

“Are you satisfied with it, madre?” asked Benedict, as he stopped in his evening’s toil to bend affectionately over his mother, where she sat in front of the committee-box, her satin and jet rustling in the breeze created by an ostrich-feathered fan.

“Satisfied? Indeed I am! It is a perfectly enchanting scene,” said the biased critic. “And your decorations are really admirable. I never saw such a well-managed dance. But, my dearest boy, can’t you sit down and take a moment’s rest? You will really wear yourself out.”

“No fear of that,” quoth Jack, inflating his broad chest. “After to-night we shall all lapse into ‘innocuous desuetude,’ and there’ll be full time to repose. I hope you and the other mothers can hold out. You won’t see much of your charges, I’m afraid.”

Mrs. Benedict laughed cheerily. “Dear me, no; they only rush back to be pinned or put to rights, and are off again. As to keeping the faces, much less the names, of their partners in mind, I can’t pretend to do it. Agnes and Margaret, being older, take it with more composure, but Lou flies about as if she were on wings instead of high heels. It was a whim of Agnes and Margaret to come dressed alike in those blue satin gowns with the chiffon ruffles, and I must say they are becoming. I am proud of our dear girls’ looks, aren’t you?”

“I should think so,” said Jack, starting with something of a blush as she repeated this query. He had been straining his gaze over the revolving crowd, in the effort to identify not his sisters, Lou and Margaret--pretty blonde girls of eighteen and twenty--but his cousin Agnes, a tall and rather stately young woman, a year older than Margaret, whom he had his own private reasons for not allowing to get far out of his sight or thoughts.

Agnes, the orphan daughter of a good-for-nothing cousin of Mr. Benedict’s, had a year or two before, after the death of her father, been taken by these kindly people to reside under their roof in New York. When it was Jack had first owned to himself that he loved her he could not exactly say. But her clear, pale beauty, the soft luster of her hazel eyes, her somewhat foreign grace of speech and manner--born of wide wanderings in Continental cities--had begun by captivating his imagination, and ended by exciting his enthusiastic affection. Now he thought no vision of his future was complete without Agnes installed in its penetralia. And as yet she had no idea of it.

Knowing that his parents would disapprove of love-making between the cousins until Jack had at least been long enough out of college to see his way clear to an independence, he had had the rare strength of mind to keep his passion to himself. Not even his mother suspected what a cable had been thrown out to annex her bonny craft to this landing-stage for life!

One person only had shared in his secret, and he a classmate bound to Jack by the most intimate of college ties, the man of all others in the University whom Jack most admired and trusted. This was Hubert Russell, who, coming a stranger to Yale from his birthplace in a far Western town, had remained an enigma to the many, although treasured by the few who had found him out. Russell was known as a brilliant scholar, but had never been called a “grind.” His isolation seemed to be a thing of preference.

To the society of women his objection was apparently insuperable. No threshold in the hospitable town had been crossed by him for social purposes. Jack Benedict, who alone seemed to exercise over him the magnetism that drew him from his shell, had often talked to Russell about his own family, and had striven without success to induce his friend to visit them in the holidays. Russell had listened with a sort of fascinated reserve to Benedict’s happy boyish confidences, but had not responded to them in kind until one evening in junior year over their pipes in Jack’s sitting-room. Then he had blurted out a sad tale of his father’s disgrace and imprisonment and death in the penitentiary, following the embezzlement of trust-funds confided to his keeping. This awful chapter had left upon the boy’s mind an indelible imprint. To remove the effect of it his mother had strained every nerve to send him to an Eastern University. At the beginning of freshman year he had lost his mother, too; and since then the spell of darkness had reassumed its sway over Hubert Russell. Benedict, a wholesome, happy fellow, born to no great inheritance of riches, and having his own way to hew in the world’s wilderness, then set himself to the task of restoring Russell’s tone of mind and of dissipating in him the uncertainty as to his right of place among people of unblemished honor and respectability. Little by little he had succeeded in bringing about this result. In his zeal to win Russell’s full confidence he had poured out his own--had even told him of his love for the radiant cousin, Agnes Benedict, whom Jack hoped one day to win for his wife.

During the past days of gayety Russell had been more miserably shy and reserved than ever. In vain had Jack urged him to call upon or make acquaintance with his family. As a last resort he had gone to Russell’s room that afternoon, and had shot into the letter-slit upon the locked door a note inclosing a ticket for the “Prom,” begging Hubert to look in at the ball, if only for a glance in passing, at Jack’s people in their box. While Jack now stopped to speak to his mother he saw, with curious elation and surprise, Russell standing a little distance away, talking with one of the tutors. Before he had time to beckon his friend, his sister Louisa and their cousin Agnes hurried together into the box, forsaking each the young man who had escorted her, to have some trifling repair to her toilette made by Mrs. Benedict.

“Oh, Jack!” exclaimed his madcap sister, “I am too happy for anything, and Agnes should be, if she is not, for she has evidently captivated the best-looking man in the room--next to you, of course--that tall, dark one over there. He has done nothing but gaze after her in a moony, melancholy way, while _I_ am dying to know him. Do fetch him here _now_, and introduce him, there’s a dear. Only give me half a chance and I can make him forget Agnes, I’ll promise you.”

“That?” said Jack, identifying at last the individual she was trying to point out, and watching for the effect of his revelation upon his family. “I am not surprised that you want to know him. That is my best friend, Hubert Russell.”

“Is _that_ Russell?” said the three women in concert. To them he had long been a household word.

“Yes, and he came here to please me, dear old chap. The trouble is, I don’t know whether he’ll have the courage to follow it up by being presented to you.”

“Lou does not know why he was so interested in Agnes--my Agnes,” he added to himself, striving to repress the exultation of his heart as he looked upon her he loved.

II

Jack did not realize that his friend Russell could have any confusion of mind as to which of the three Misses Benedict was the cousin honored by preference undeclared. The fact was that Hubert had strayed into the whirl of the “Prom” for, indeed, nothing but to please his friend. While making up his mind to take his courage in two hands and seek for an introduction, Russell had espied, standing in a set of lancers, a girl who then and there struck him as his ideal of scarce acknowledged dreams of woman’s loveliness. So swift yet strong was the impression thus received that Russell gasped and wondered what had come over him. The blood of young manhood surging into his temples showed him in a flash that he was to the full as weak as those at whom he had often jeered--Jack Benedict, for example, whose ravings over his pretty cousin had often made Russell smile with superiority and amusement. Whatever had been Russell’s ambitions and hopes for the future, woman had had no part in them. And yet, here in the twinkling of an eye, the waving coils of a maiden’s loosely bound hair, her airy grace, her supple, slender waist and noble shoulders had held him captive. When she turned and he saw that her face was as lovely as her form, Russell had actually started to go away. What evil spell had fallen upon him to lure his steps into this place? He resented Jack’s influence, secretly objurgated Jack’s tiresome lady-love and sisters, vowed he must and would return home--and lingered.

When the set was over, and the girl went off with her partner, Russell, half-ashamed, asked the college official who had accosted him if he knew who was the young lady in pale blue with a small wreath of white roses perched sidewise upon her hair.

“Let me see,” said the flattered tutor, squinting his eyes to take in the receding figure. “Isn’t that--yes, of course it is--a sister of Benedict’s? I met them yesterday at Mrs. Clarkson’s tea. But you ought to know Benedict’s people better than I do, Russell.”

“You know I am a recluse,” said Russell, coloring.

“Then I advise you to repair neglected opportunities and make their acquaintance on the spot. There’s another one--a little, jolly, laughing girl, and a cousin--not so good-looking by a long shot, but nice manners and intelligent. Decidedly, Benedict’s party has lent luster to the week.”

Before Mr. Grampion had finished his chuckling remarks Russell had melted away from him, and stood alone, irresolute. In this attitude he was overhauled by Benedict, who, breathless, laid a hand upon his shoulder.

“Here you are, you old fraud; come along and be presented to my mother. She is all anxiety to meet you. Expects you to have wings and a harp, from my description. And the girls are, luckily, all in the box for a minute’s breathing spell. I call this kind, Russell, for you to turn up here after all, and I’ll not forget it in a hurry.”

Russell, having no alternative, rushed blindly upon his fate. How could he tell Benedict that he had already, without reason, without excuse, fallen in love with Jack’s beautiful sister, and knew that the better part of wisdom was to retire from the fray before matters should get worse. He walked, dream-like, beside his friend, went through the ceremony of introduction to Jack’s mother, received a kind hand-shake from Mrs. Benedict, and scarcely venturing to look up, heard Jack say:

“Mr. Russell, my sisters, my cousin--all Miss Benedicts; so you will have no trouble in knowing how to address them.”