But in this matter my prognostication was thoroughly at fault; yet surely, knowing Kings Port’s sovereign habit, as I had had good cause to know it, I was scarce beyond reasonable bounds in supposing that the arrival of Miss Rieppe would heat up some very general and very audible talk about this approaching marriage, against which the prejudices of the town were set in such compact array. I have several times mentioned that Kings Port, to my sense, was buzzing over John Mayrant’s affairs; buzzing in the open, where one could hear it, and buzzing behind closed doors, where one could somehow feel it; I can only say that henceforth this buzzing ceased, dropped wholly away, as if Gossip were watching so hard that she forgot to talk, giving place to a great stillness in her kingdom. Such occasional words as were uttered sounded oddly and egregiously clear in the new-established void.
The first of these words sounded, indeed, quite enormous, issuing as it did from Juno’s lips at our breakfast-table, when yesterday’s meeting on the New Bridge was investing my mind with many thoughts. She addressed me in one of her favorite tones (I have met it, thank God! but in two or three other cases during my whole experience), which always somehow conveyed to you that you were personally to blame for what she was going to tell you.
“I suppose you know that your friend, Mr. Mayrant, has resigned from the Custom House?”
I was, of course, careful not to give Juno the pleasure of seeing that she had surprised me. I bowed, and continued in silence to sip a little coffee; then, setting my coffee down, I observed that it would be some few days yet before the resignation could take effect; and, noticing that Juno was getting ready some new remark, I branched off and spoke to her of my excursion up the river this morning to see the azaleas in the gardens at Live Oaks.
“How lucky the weather is so magnificent!” I exclaimed.
“I shall be interested to hear,” said Juno, “what explanation he finds to give Miss Josephine for his disrespectful holding out against her, and his immediate yielding to Miss Rieppe.”
Here I deemed it safe to ask her, was she quite sure it had been at the instance of Miss Rieppe that John had resigned?
“It follows suspiciously close upon her arrival,” stated Juno. She might have been speaking of a murder. “And how he expects to support a wife now—well, that is no affair of mine,” Juno concluded, with a washing-her-hands-of-it air, as if up to this point she had always done her best for the wilful boy. She had blamed him savagely for not resigning, and now she was blaming him because he had resigned; and I ate my breakfast in much entertainment over this female acrobat in censure.
No more was said; I think that my manner of taking Juno’s news had been perfectly successful in disappointing her. John’s resignation, if it had really occurred, did certainly follow very close upon the arrival of Hortense; but I had spoken one true thought in intimating that I doubted if it was due to the influence of Miss Rieppe. It seemed to me to the highest degree unlikely that the boy in his present state of feeling would do anything he did not wish to do because his ladylove happened to wish it—except marry her! There was apparently no doubt that he would do that. Did she want him, poverty and all? Was she, even now, with eyes open, deliberately taking her last farewell days of automobiles and of steam yachts? That voice of hers, that rich summons, with its quiet certainty of power, sounded in my memory. “John,” she had called to him from the automobile; and thus John had gone away in it, wedged in among Charley and the fat cushions and all the money and glass eyes. And now he had resigned from the Custom House! Yes, that was, whatever it signified, truly amazing—if true.
So I continued to ponder quite uselessly, until the up-country bride aroused me. She, it appeared, had been greatly carried away by the beauty of Live Oaks, and was making her David take her there again this morning; and she was asking me didn’t I hope we shouldn’t get stuck? The people had got stuck yesterday, three whole hours, right on a bank in the river; and wasn’t it a sin and a shame to run a boat with ever so many passengers aground? By the doctrine of chances, I informed her, we had every right to hope for better luck to-day; and, with the assurance of how much my felicity was increased by the prospect of having her and David as company during the expedition, I betook myself meanwhile to my own affairs, which meant chiefly a call at the Exchange to inquire for Eliza La Heu, and a visit to the post-office before starting upon a several hours’ absence.
A few steps from our front door I came upon John Mayrant, and saw at once too plainly that no ease had come to his spirit during the hours since the bridge. He was just emerging from an adjacent house.
“And have you resigned?” I asked him.
“Yes. That’s done. You haven’t seen Miss Rieppe this morning?”
“Why, she’s surely not boarding with Mrs. Trevise?”
“No; stopping here with her old friend, Mrs. Cornerly.” He indicated the door he had come from. “Of course, you wouldn’t be likely to see her pass!” And with that he was gone.
That he was greatly stirred up by something there could be no doubt; never before had I seen him so abrupt; it seemed clear that anger had taken the place of despondency, or whatever had been his previous mood; and by the time I reached the post-office I had already imagined and dismissed the absurd theory that John was jealous of Charley, had resigned from the Custom House as a first step toward breaking his engagement, and had rung Mrs. Cornerly’s bell at this early hour with the purpose of informing his lady-love that all was over between them. Jealousy would not be likely to produce this set of manifestations in young, foolish John; and I may say here at once, what I somewhat later learned, that the boy had come with precisely the opposite purpose, namely, to repeat and reenforce his steadfast constancy, and that it was something far removed from jealousy which had spurred him to this.
I found the girl behind the counter at her post, grateful to me for coming to ask how she was after the shock of yesterday, but unwilling to speak of it at all; all which she expressed by her charming manner, and by the other subjects she chose for conversation, and especially by the way in which she held out her hand when I took my leave.
Near the post-office I was hailed by Beverly Rodgers, who proclaimed to me at once a comic but genuine distress. He had already walked, he said (and it was but half-past nine o’clock, as he bitterly bade me observe on the church dial), more miles in search of a drink than his unarithmetical brain had the skill to compute. And he confounded such a town heartily; he should return as soon as possible to Charley’s yacht, where there was civilization, and where he had spent the night. During his search he had at length come to a door of promising appearance, and gone in there, and they had explained to him that it was a dispensary. A beastly arrangement. What was the name of the razor-back hog they said had invented it? And what did you do for a drink in this confounded water-hole?
He would find it no water-hole, I told him; but there were methods which a stranger upon his first morning could scarce be expected to grasp. “I could direct you to a Dutchman,” I said, “but you’re too well dressed to win his confidence at once.”
“Well, old man,” began Beverly, “I don’t speak Dutch, but give me a crack at the confidence.”
However, he renounced the project upon learning what a Dutchman was. Since my hours were no longer dedicated to establishing the presence of royal blood in my veins I had spent them upon various local investigations of a character far more entertaining and akin to my taste. It was in truth quite likely that Beverly could in a very few moments, with his smile and his manner, find his way to any Dutchman’s heart; he had that divine gift of winning over to him quickly all sorts and conditions of men; and my account of the ingenious and law-baffling contrivances, which you found at these little grocery shops, at once roused his curiosity to make a trial; but he decided that the club was better, if less picturesque. And he told me that all the men of the automobile party had received from John Mayrant cards of invitation to the club.
“Your fire-eater is a civil chap,” said Beverly. “And by the way, do you happen to know,” here he pulled from his pocket a letter and consulted its address, “Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael?”
I was delighted that he brought an introduction to this lady; Hortense Rieppe could not open for him any of those haughty doors; and I wished not only that Beverly (since he was just the man to appreciate it and understand it) should see the fine flower of Kings Port, but also that the fine flower of Kings Port should see him; the best blood of the South could not possibly turn out anything better than Beverly Rodgers, and it was horrible and humiliating to think of the other Northern specimens of men whom Hortense had imported with her. I was here suddenly reminded that the young woman was a guest of the Cornerlys, the people who swept their garden, the people whom Eliza La Heu at the Exchange did not “know”; and at this the remark of Mrs. Gregory St. Michael, when I had walked with her and Mrs. Weguelin, took on an added lustre of significance:—
“We shall have to call.”
Call on the Cornerlys! Would they do that? Were they ready to stand by their John to that tune? A hotel would be nothing; you could call on anybody at a hotel, if you had to; but here would be a demarche indeed! Yet, nevertheless, I felt quite certain that, if Hortense, though the Cornerlys’ guest, was also the guaranteed fiancee of John Mayrant, the old ladies would come up to the scratch, hate and loathe it as they might, and undoubtedly would: they could be trusted to do the right thing.
I told Beverly how glad I was that he would meet Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael. “The rest of your party, my friend,” I said, “are not very likely to.” And I generalized to him briefly upon the town of Kings Port. “Supposing I take you to call upon Mrs. St. Michael when I come back this afternoon?” I suggested.
Beverly thought it over, and then shook his head. “Wouldn’t do, old man. If these people are particular and know, as you say they do, hadn’t I better leave the letter with my card, and then wait till she sends some word?”
He was right, as he always was, unerringly. Consorting with all the Charleys, and the Bohms, and the Cohns, and the Kitties hadn’t taken the fine edge from Beverly’s good inheritance and good bringing up; his instinct had survived his scruples, making of him an agile and charming cynic, whom you could trust to see the right thing always, and never do it unless it was absolutely necessary; he would marry any amount of Kitties for their money, and always know that beside his mother and sisters they were as dirt; and he would see to it that his children took after their father, went to school in England for a good accent and enunciation, as he had done, went to college in America for the sake of belonging in their own country, as he had done, and married as many fortunes, and had as few divorces, as possible.
“Who was that girl on the bridge?” he now inquired as we reached the steps of the post-office; and when I had told him again, because he had asked me about Eliza La Heu at the time, “She’s the real thing,” he commented. “Quite extraordinary, you know, her dignity, when poor old awful Charley was messing everything—he’s so used to mere money, you know, that half the time he forgets people are not dollars, and you have to kick him to remind him—yes, quite perfect dignity. Gad, it took a lady to climb up and sit by that ragged old darky and take her dead dog away in the cart! The cart and the darky only made her look what she was all the more. Poor Kitty couldn’t do that—she’d look like a chambermaid! Well, old man, see you again.”
I stood on the post-office steps looking after Beverly Rodgers as he crossed Court Street. His admirably good clothes, the easy finish of his whole appearance, even his walk, and his back, and the slope of his shoulders, were unmistakable. The Southern men, going to their business in Court Street, looked at him. Alas, in his outward man he was as a rose among weeds! And certainly, no well-born American could unite with an art more hedonistic than Beverly’s the old school and the nouveau jeu!
Over at the other corner he turned and stood admiring the church and gazing at the other buildings, and so perceived me still on the steps. With a gesture of remembering something he crossed back again.
“You’ve not seen Miss Rieppe?”
“Why, of course I haven’t!” I exclaimed. Was everybody going to ask me that?
“Well, something’s up, old boy. Charley has got the launch away with him—and I’ll bet he’s got her away with him, too. Charley lied this morning.”
“Is lying, then, so rare with him?”
“Why, it rather is, you know. But I’ve come to be able to spot him when he does it. Those little bulgy eyes of his look at you particularly straight and childlike. He said he had to hunt up a man on business—V-C Chemical Company, he called it—”
“There is such a thing here,” I said.
“Oh, Charley’d never make up a thing, and get found out in that way! But he was lying all the same, old man.”
“Do you mean they’ve run off and got married?”
“What do you take them for? Much more like them to run off and not get married. But they haven’t done that either. And, speaking of that, I believe I’ve gone a bit adrift. Your fire-eater, you know—she is an extraordinary woman!” And Beverly gave his mellow, little humorous chuckle. “Hanged if I don’t begin to think she does fancy him.”
“Well!” I cried, “that would explain—no, it wouldn’t. Whence comes your theory?”
“Saw her look at him at dinner once last night. We dined with some people—Cornerly. She looked at him just once. Well, if she intends—by gad, it upsets one’s whole notion of her!”
“Isn’t just one look rather slight basis for—”
“Now, old man, you know better than that!” Beverly paused to chuckle. “My grandmother Livingston,” he resumed, “knew Aaron Burr, and she used to say that he had an eye which no honest woman could meet without a blush. I don’t know whether your fire-eater is a Launcelot, or a Galahad, but that girl’s eye at dinner—”
“Did he blush?” I laughed.
“Not that I saw. But really, old man, confound it, you know! He’s no sort of husband for her. How can he make her happy and how can she make him happy, and how can either of them hit it off with the other the least little bit? She’s expensive, he’s not; she’s up-to-date, he’s not; she’s of the great world, he’s provincial. She’s all derision, he’s all faith. Why, hang it, old boy, what does she want him for?”
Beverly’s handsome brow was actually furrowed with his problem; and, as I certainly could furnish him no solution for it, we stood in silence on the post-office steps. “What can she want him for?” he repeated. Then he threw it off lightly with one of his chuckles. “So glad I’ve no daughters to marry! Well—I must go draw some money.”
He took himself off with a certain alacrity, giving an impatient cut with his stick at a sparrow in the middle of Worship Street, nor did I see him again this day, although, after hurriedly getting my letters (for the starting hour of the boat had now drawn near), I followed where he had gone down Court Street, and his cosmopolitan figure would have been easy to descry at any distance along that scantily peopled pavement. He had evidently found the bank and was getting his money.
David of the yellow heir and his limpid-looking bride were on the horrible little excursion boat, watching for me and keeping with some difficulty a chair next themselves that I might not have to stand up all the way; and, as I came aboard, the bride called out to me her relief, she had made sure that I would be late.
“David said you wouldn’t,” she announced in her clear up-country accent across the parasols and heads of huddled tourists, “but I told him a gentleman that’s late to three meals aivry day like as not would forget boats can’t be kept hot in the kitchen for you.”
I took my place in the chair beside her as hastily as possible, for there is nothing that I so much dislike as being made conspicuous for any reason whatever; and my thanks to her were, I fear, less gracious in their manner than should have been the case. Nor did she find me, I must suppose, as companionable during this excursion—during the first part of it, at any rate—as a limpid-looking bride, who has kept at some pains a seat beside her for a single gentleman, has the right to expect; the brief hours of this morning had fed my preoccupation too richly, and I must often have fallen silent.
The horrible little tug, or ferry, or wherry, or whatever its contemptible inconvenience makes it fitting that this unclean and snail-like craft should be styled, cast off and began to lumber along the edges of the town with its dense cargo of hats and parasols and lunch parcels. We were a most extraordinary litter of man and womankind. There was the severe New England type, improving each shining hour, and doing it in bleak costume and with a thoroughly northeast expression; there were pink sunbonnets from (I should imagine) Spartanburg, or Charlotte, or Greenville; there were masculine boots which yet bore incrusted upon their heels the red mud of Aiken or of Camden; there was one fat, jewelled exhalation who spoke of Palm Beach with the true stockyard twang, and looked as if she swallowed a million every morning for breakfast, and God knows how many more for the ensuing repasts; she was the only detestable specimen among us; sunbonnets, boots, and even ungenial New England proved on acquaintance kindly, simple, enterprising Americans; yet who knows if sunbonnets and boots and all of us wouldn’t have become just as detestable had we but been as she was, swollen and puffy with the acute indigestion of sudden wealth?
This reflection made me charitable, which I always like to be, and I imparted it to the bride.
“My!” she said. And I really don’t know what that meant.
But presently I understood well why people endured the discomfort of this journey. I forgot the cinders which now and then showered upon us, and the heat of the sun, and the crowded chairs; I forgot the boat and myself, in looking at the passing shores. Our course took us round Kings Port on three sides. The calm, white town spread out its width and length beneath a blue sky softer than the tenderest dream; the white steeples shone through the enveloping brightness, taking to each other, and to the distant roofs beneath them, successive and changing relations, while the dwindling mass of streets and edifices followed more slowly the veering of the steeples, folded upon itself, and refolded, opened into new shapes and closed again, dwindling always, and always white and beautiful; and as the far-off vision of it held the eye, the few masts along the wharves grew thin and went out into invisibility, the spires became as masts, the distant drawbridge through which we had passed sank down into a mere stretching line, and shining Kings Port was dissolved in the blue of water and of air.
The curving and the narrowing of the river took it at last from view; and after it disappeared the spindling chimneys and their smoke, which were along the bank above the town and bridge, leaving us to progress through the solitude of marsh and wood and shore. The green levels of stiff salt grass closed in upon the breadth of water, and we wound among them, looking across their silence to the deeper silence of the woods that bordered them, the brooding woods, the pines and the liveoaks, misty with the motionless hanging moss, and misty also in that Southern air that deepened when it came among their trunks to a caressing, mysterious, purple veil. Every line of this landscape, the straight forest top, the feathery breaks in it of taller trees, the curving marsh, every line and every hue and every sound inscrutably spoke sadness. I heard a mocking-bird once in some blossoming wild fruit tree that we gradually reached and left gradually behind; and more than once I saw other blossoms, and the yellow of the trailing jessamine; but the bird could not sing the silence away, and spring with all her abundance could not hide this spiritual autumn.
Dreams, a land of dreams, where even the high noon itself was dreamy; a melting together of earth and air and water in one eternal gentleness of revery! Whence came the melancholy of this? I had seen woods as solitary and streams as silent, I had felt nature breathing upon me a greater awe; but never before such penetrating and quiet sadness. I only know that this is the perpetual mood of those Southern shores, those rivers that wind in from the ocean among their narrowing marshes and their hushed forests, and that it does not come from any memory of human hopes and disasters, but from the elements themselves.
So did we move onward, passing in due time another bridge and a few dwellings and some excavations, until the river grew quite narrow, and there ahead was the landing at Live Oaks, with negroes idly watching for us, and a launch beside the bank, and Charley and Hortense Rieppe about to step into it. Another man stood up in the launch and talked to them where they were on the landing platform, and pointed down the river as we approached; but evidently he did not point at us. I looked hastily to see what he was indicating to them, but I could see nothing save the solitary river winding away between the empty woods and marshes.
So this was Hortense Rieppe! It was not wonderful that she had caused young John to lose his heart, or, at any rate, his head and his senses; nor was it wonderful that Charley, with his little bulging eyes, should take her in his launch whenever she would go; the wonderful thing was that John, at his age and with his nature, should have got over it—if he had got over it! I felt it tingling in me; any man would. Steel wasp indeed!
She was slender, and oh, how well dressed! She watched the passengers get off the boat, and I could not tell you from that first sight of her what her face was like, but only her hair, the sunburnt amber of its masses making one think of Tokay or Chateau-Yquem. She was watching me, I felt, and then saw; and as soon as I was near she spoke to me without moving, keeping one gloved hand lightly posed upon the railing of the platform, so that her long arm was bent with perfect ease and grace. I swear that none but a female eye could have detected any toboggan fire-escape.
Her words dropped with the same calculated deliberation, the same composed and rich indifference. “These gardens are so beautiful.”
Such was her first remark, chosen with some purpose, I knew quite well; and I observed that I hoped I was not too late for their full perfection, if too late to visit them in her company.
She turned her head slightly toward Charley. “We have been enjoying them so much.”
It was of absorbing interest to feel simultaneously in these brief speeches he vouchsafed—speeches consummate in their inexpressive flatness—the intentional coldness and the latent heat of the creature. Since Natchez and Mobile (or whichever of them it had been that had witnessed her beginnings) she had encountered many men and women, those who could be of use to her and those who could not; and in dealing with them she had tempered and chiselled her insolence to a perfect instrument, to strike or to shield. And of her greatest gift, also, she was entirely aware—how could she help being, with her evident experience? She knew that round her whole form swam a delicious, invisible sphere, a distillation that her veriest self sent forth, as gardenias do their perfume, moving where she moved and staying where she stayed, and compared with which wine was a feeble vapor for a man to get drunk on.
“Flowers are always so delightful.”
That was her third speech, pronounced just like the others, in a low, clear voice—simplicity arrived at by much well-practiced complexity. And she still looked at Charley.
Charley now responded in his little banker accent. “It is a magnificent collection.” This he said looking at me, and moving a highly polished finger-nail along a very slender mustache.
The eyes of Hortense now for a moment glanced at the mixed company of boat-passengers, who were beginning to be led off in pilgrim groups by the appointed guides.
“We were warned it would be too crowded,” she remarked.
Charley was looking at her foot. I can’t say whether or not the two light taps that the foot now gave upon the floor of the landing brought out for me a certain impatience which I might otherwise have missed in those last words of hers. From Charley it brought out, I feel quite sure, the speech which (in some form) she had been expecting from him as her confederate in this unwelcome and inopportune interview with me, and which his less highly schooled perceptions had not suggested to him until prompted by her.
“I should have been very glad to include you in our launch party if I had known you were coming here to-day,” lied little Charley.
“Thank you so much!” I murmured; and I fancy that after this Hortense hated me worse than ever. Well, why should I play her game? If anybody had any claim upon me, was it she? I would get as much diversion as I could from this encounter.
Hortense had looked at Charley when she spoke for my benefit, and it now pleased me very much to look at him when I spoke for hers.
“I could almost give up the gardens for the sake of returning with you,” I said to him.
This was most successful in producing a perceptible silence before Hortense said, “Do come.”
I wanted to say to her, “You are quite splendid—as splendid as you look, through and through! You wouldn’t have run away from any battle of Chattanooga!” But what I did say was, “These flowers here will fade, but may I not hope to see you again in Kings Port?”
She was looking at me with eyes half closed; half closed for the sake of insolence—and better observation; when eyes like that take on drowsiness, you will be wise to leave all your secrets behind you, locked up in the bank, or else toss them right down on the open table. Well, I tossed mine down, thereto precipitated by a warning from the stranger in the launch:—
“We shall need all the tide we can get.”
“I’m sure you’d be glad to know,” I then said immediately (to Charley, of course), “that Miss La Heu, whose dog you killed, is back at her work as usual this morning.”
“Thank you,” returned Charley. “If there could be any chance for me to replace—”
“Miss La Heu is her name?” inquired Hortense. “I did not catch it yesterday. She works, you say?”
“At the Woman’s Exchange. She bakes cakes for weddings—among her other activities.”
“So interesting!” said Hortense; and bowing to me, she allowed the spellbound Charley to help her down into the launch.
Each step of the few that she had to take was upon unsteady footing, and each was taken with slow security and grace, and with a mastery of her skirts so complete that they seemed to do it of themselves, falling and folding in the soft, delicate curves of discretion.
For the sake of not seeming too curious about this party, I turned from watching it before the launch had begun to move, and it was immediately hidden from me by the bank, so that I did not see it get away. As I crossed an open space toward the gardens I found myself far behind the other pilgrims, whose wandering bands I could half discern among winding walks and bordering bushes. I was soon taken into somewhat reprimanding charge by an admirable, if important, negro, who sighted me from a door beneath the porch of the house, and advanced upon me speedily. From him I learned at once the rule of the place, that strangers were not allowed to “go loose,” as he expressed it; and recognizing the perfect propriety of this restriction, I was humble, and even went so far as to put myself right with him by quite ample purchases of the beautiful flowers that he had for sale; some of these would be excellent for the up-country bride, who certainly ought to have repentance from me in some form for my silence as we had come up the river: the scenery had caused me most ungallantly to forget her.
My rule-breaking turned out all to my advantage. The admirable and important negro was so pacified by my liberal amends that he not only placed the flowers which I had bought in a bucket of water to wait in freshness until my tour of the gardens should be finished and the moment for me to return upon the boat should arrive, but he also honored me with his own special company; and instead of depositing me in one of the groups of other travellers, he took me to see the sights alone, as if I were somebody too distinguished to receive my impressions with the common herd. Thus I was able to linger here and there, and even to return to certain points for another look.
I shall not attempt to describe the azaleas at Live Oaks. You will understand me quite well, I am sure, when I say that I had heard the people at Mrs. Trevise’s house talk so much about them, and praise them so superlatively, that I was not prepared for much: my experience of life had already included quite a number of azaleas. Moreover, my meeting with Hortense and Charley had taken me far away from flowers. But when that marvelous place burst upon me, I forgot Hortense. I have seen gardens, many gardens, in England, in France; in Italy; I have seen what can be done in great hothouses, and on great terraces; what can be done under a roof, and what can be done in the open air with the aid of architecture and sculpture and ornamental land and water; but no horticulture that I have seen devised by mortal man approaches the unearthly enchantment of the azaleas at Live Oaks. It was not like seeing flowers at all; it was as if there, in the heart of the wild and mystic wood, in the gray gloom of those trees veiled and muffled in their long webs and skeins of hanging moss, a great, magic flame of rose and red and white burned steadily. You looked to see it vanish; you could not imagine such a thing would stay. All idea of individual petals or species was swept away in this glowing maze of splendor, this transparent labyrinth of rose and red and white, through which you looked beyond, into the gray gloom of the hanging moss and the depths of the wild forest trees.
I turned back as often as I could, and to the last I caught glimpses of it, burning, glowing, and shining like some miracle, some rainbow exorcism, with its flooding fumes of orange-rose and red and white, merging magically. It was not until I reached the landing, and made my way on board again, that Hortense returned to my thoughts. She hadn’t come to see the miracle; not she! I knew that better than ever. And who was the other man in the launch?
“Wasn’t it perfectly elegant!” exclaimed the up-country bride. And upon my assenting, she made a further declaration to David: “It’s just aivry bit as good as the Isle of Champagne.”
This I discovered to be a comic opera, mounted with spendthrift brilliance, which David had taken her to see at the town of Gonzales, just before they were married.
As we made our way down the bending river she continued to make many observations to me in that up-country accent of hers, which is a fashion of speech that may be said to differ as widely from the speech of the low-country as cotton differs from rice. I began to fear that, in spite of my truly good intentions, I was again failing to be as “attentive” as the occasion demanded; and so I presented her with my floral tribute.
She was immediately arch. “I’d surely be depriving somebody!” and on this I got to the full her limpid look.
I assured her that this would not be so, and pointed to the other flowers I had.
Accordingly, after a little more archness, she took them, as she had, of course, fully meant to do from the first; she also took a woman’s revenge. “I’ll not be any more lonesome going down than I was coming up,” she said. “David’s enough.” And this led me definitely to conclude that David had secured a helpmate who could take care of herself, in spite of the limpidity of her eyes.
A steel wasp? Again that misleading description of Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael’s, to which, since my early days in Kings Port, my imagination may be said to have been harnessed, came back into my mind. I turned its injustice over and over beneath the light which the total Hortense now shed upon it—or rather, not the total Hortense, but my whole impression of her, as far as I had got; I got a good deal further before we had finished. To the slow, soft accompaniment of these gliding river shores, where all the shadows had changed since morning, so that new loveliness stood revealed at every turn, my thoughts dwelt upon this perfected specimen of the latest American moment—so late that she contained nothing of the past, and a great deal of to-morrow. I basked myself in the memory of her achieved beauty, her achieved dress, her achieved insolence, her luxurious complexity. She was even later than those quite late athletic girls, the Amazons of the links, whose big, hard football faces stare at one from public windows and from public punts, whose giant, manly strides take them over leagues of country and square miles of dance-floor, and whose bursting, blatant, immodest health glares upon sea-beaches and round supper tables. Hortense knew that even now the hour of such is striking, and that the American boy will presently turn with relief to a creature who will more clearly remind him that he is a man and that she is a woman.
But why was the insolence of Hortense offensive, when the insolence of Eliza La Heu was not? Both these extremely feminine beings could exercise that quality in profusion, whenever they so wished; wherein did the difference lie? Perhaps I thought, in the spirit of its exercise; Eliza was merely insolent when she happened to feel like it; and man has always been able to forgive woman for that—whether the angels do or not, but Hortense, the world-wise, was insolent to all people who could not be of use to her; and all I have to say is, that if the angels can forgive them, they’re welcome; I can’t!
Had I made sure of anything at the landing? Yes; Hortense didn’t care for Charley in the least, and never would. A woman can stamp her foot at a man and love him simultaneously; but those two light taps, and the measure that her eyes took of Charley, meant that she must love his possessions very much to be able to bear him at all.
Then, what was her feeling about John Mayrant? As Beverly had said, what could she want him for? He hadn’t a thing that she valued or needed. His old-time notions of decency, the clean simplicity of his make, his good Southern position, and his collection of nice old relatives—what did these assets look like from an automobile, or on board the launch of a modern steam yacht? And wouldn’t it be amusing if John should grow needlessly jealous, and have a “difficulty” with Charley? not a mere flinging of torn paper money in the banker’s face, but some more decided punishment for the banker’s presuming to rest his predatory eyes upon John’s affianced lady.
I stared at the now broadening river, where the reappearance of the bridge, and of Kings Port, and the nearer chimneys pouring out their smoke a few miles above the town, betokened that our excursion was drawing to its end. And then from the chimney’s neighborhood, from the waterside where their factories stood, there shot out into the smoothness of the stream a launch. It crossed into our course ahead of us, preceded us quickly, growing soon into a dot, went through the bridge, and so was seen no longer; and its occupants must have reached town a good half hour before we did. And now, suddenly, I was stunned with a great discovery. The bride’s voice sounded in my ear. “Well, I’ll always say you’re a prophet, anyhow!”
I looked at her, dull and dazed by the internal commotion the discovery had raised in me.
“You said we wouldn’t get stuck in the mud, and we didn’t,” said the bride.
I pointed to the chimneys. “Are those the phosphate works?”
“Yais. Didn’t you know?”
“The V-C phosphate works?”
“Why, yais. Haven’t you been to see them yet? He ought to, oughtn’t he, David? ‘Specially now they’ve found those deposits up the river were just as rich as they hoped, after all.”
“Whose? Mr. Mayrant’s?” I asked with such sharpness that the bride was surprised.
David hadn’t attended to the name. It was some trust estate, he thought; Regent Tom, or some such thing.
“And they thought it was no good,” said the bride. “And it’s aivry bit as good as the Coosaw used to be. Better than Florida or Tennessee.”
My eyes instinctively turned to where they had last seen the launch; of course it wasn’t there any more. Then I spoke to David.
“Do you know what a phosphate bed looks like? Can one see it?”
“This kind you can,” he answered. “But it’s not worth your trouble. Just a kind of a square hole you dig along the river till you strike the stuff. What you want to see is the works.”
No, I didn’t want to see even the works; they smelt atrociously, and I do not care for vats, and acids, and processes: and besides, had I not seen enough? My eyes went down the river again where that launch had gone; and I wondered if the wedding-cake would be postponed any more.
Regent Tom? Oh, yes, to be sure! John Mayrant had pointed out to me the house where he had lived; he had been John’s uncle. So the old gentleman had left his estate in trust! And now—! But certainly Hortense would have won the battle of Chattanooga!
“Don’t be too sure about all this,” I told myself cautiously. But there are times when cautioning one’s self is quite as useless as if somebody else had cautioned one; my reason leaped with the rapidity of intuition; I merely sat and looked on at what it was doing. All sorts of odds and ends, words I hadn’t understood, looks and silences I hadn’t interpreted, little signs that I had thought nothing of at first, but which I had gradually, through their multiplicity, come to know meant something, all these broken pieces fitted into each other now, fell together and made a clear pattern of the truth, without a crack in it—Hortense had never believed in that story about the phosphates having failed—“pinched out,” as they say of ore deposits. There she had stood between her two suitors, between her affianced John and the besieging Charley, and before she would be off with the old love and on with the new, she must personally look into those phosphates. Therefore she had been obliged to have a sick father and postpone the wedding two or three times, because her affairs—very likely the necessity of making certain of Charley—had prevented her from coming sooner to Kings Port. And having now come hither, and having beheld her Northern and her Southern lovers side by side—had the comparison done something to her highly controlled heart? Was love taking some hitherto unknown liberties with that well-balanced organ? But what an outrage had been perpetrated upon John! At that my deductions staggered in their rapid course. How could his aunts—but then it had only been one of them; Miss Josephine had never approved of Miss Eliza’s course; it was of that that Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael had so emphatically reminded Mrs. Gregory in my presence when we had strolled together upon High Walk, and those two ladies had talked oracles in my presence. Well, they were oracles no longer!
When the boat brought us back to the wharf, there were the rest of my flowers unbestowed, and upon whom should I bestow them? I thought first of Eliza La Heu, but she wouldn’t be at the Exchange so late as this. Then it seemed well to carry them to Mrs. Weguelin. Something, however, prompted me to pass her door, and continue vaguely walking on until I came to the house where Miss Josephine and Miss Eliza lived; and here I rang the bell and was admitted.
They were sitting as I had seen them first, the one with her embroidery, and the other on the further side of a table, whereon lay an open letter, which in a few moments I knew must have been the subject of the discussion which they finished even as I came forward.
“It was only prolonging an honest mistake.” That was Miss Eliza.
“And it has merely resulted in clinching what you meant it to finish.” That was Miss Josephine.
I laid my flowers upon the table, and saw that the letter was in John Mayrant’s hand. Of course.
I avoided looking at it again; but what had he written, and why had he written? His daily steps turned to this house—unless Miss Josephine had banished him again.
The ladies accepted my offering with gracious expressions, and while I told them of my visit to Live Oaks, and poured out my enthusiasm, the servant was sent for and brought water and two beautiful old china bowls, in which Miss Eliza proceeded to arrange the flowers with her delicate white hands. She made them look exquisite with an old lady’s art, and this little occupation went on as we talked of indifferent subjects.
But the atmosphere of that room was charged with the subject of which we did not speak. The letter lay on the table; and even as I struggled to sustain polite conversation, I began to know what was in it, though I never looked at it again; it spoke out as clearly to me as the launch had done. I had thought, when I first entered, to tell the ladies something of my meeting with Hortense Rieppe; I can only say that I found this impossible. Neither of them referred to her, or to John, or to anything that approached what we were all thinking of; for me to do so would have assumed the dimensions of a liberty; and in consequence of this state of things, constraint sat upon us all, growing worse, and so pervading our small-talk with discomfort that I made my visit a very short one. Of course they were civil about this when I rose, and begged me not to go so soon; but I knew better. And even as I was getting my hat and gloves in the hall I could tell by their tones that they had returned to the subject of that letter. But in truth they had never left it; as the front door shut behind me I felt as if they had read it aloud to me.
All books are sourced from Project Gutenberg