Certainly Hortense Rieppe would have won the battle of Chattanooga! I know not from which parent that young woman inherited her gift of strategy, but she was a master. To use the resources of one lover in order to ascertain if another lover had any; to lay tribute on everything that Charley possessed; on his influence in the business world, which enabled him to walk into the V-C Chemical Company’s office and borrow an expert in the phosphate line; on his launch in which to pop the expert and take him up the river, and see in his company and learn from his lips just what resources of worldly wealth were likely to be in-store for John Mayrant; and finally (which was the key to all the rest) on his inveterate passion for her, on his banker-like determination through all the thick and thin of discouragement, and worse than discouragement, of contemptuous coquetry, to possess her at any cost he could afford;—to use all this that Charley had, in order that she might judiciously arrive at the decision whether she would take him or his rival, left one lost in admiration. And then, not to waste a moment! To reach town one evening, and next morning by ten o’clock to have that expert safe in the launch on his way up the river to the phosphate diggings! The very audacity of such unscrupulousness commanded my respect: successful dishonor generally wins louder applause than successful virtue. But to be married to her! Oh! not for worlds! Charley might meet such emergency, but poor John, never!
I nearly walked into Mrs. Weguelin and Mrs. Gregory taking their customary air slowly in South Place.
“But why a steel wasp?” I said at once to Mrs. Weguelin. It was a more familiar way of beginning with the little, dignified lady than would have been at all possible, or suitable, if we had not had that little joke about the piano snobile between us. As it was, she was not wholly displeased. These Kings Port old ladies grew, I suspect, very slowly and guardedly accustomed to any outsider; they allowed themselves very seldom to suffer any form of abruptness from him, or from any one, for that matter. But, once they were reassured as to him, then they might sometimes allow the privileged person certain departures from their own rule of deportment, because his conventions were recognized to be different from theirs. Moreover, in reminding Mrs. Weguelin of the steel wasp, I had put my abruptness in “quotations,” so to speak, by the tone I gave it, just as people who are particular in speech can often interpolate a word of current slang elegantly by means of the shade of emphasis which they lay upon it.
So Mrs. Weguelin smiled and her dark eyes danced a little. “You remember I said that, then?”
“I remember everything that you said.”
“How much have you seen of the creature?” demanded Mrs. Gregory, with her head pretty high.
“Well, I’m seeing more, and more, and more every minute. She’s rather endless.”
Mrs. Weguelin looked reproachful. “You surely cannot admire her, too?”
Mrs. Gregory hadn’t understood me. “Oh, if you really can keep her away, you’re welcome!”
“I only meant,” I explained to the ladies, “that you don’t really begin to see her till you have seen her: it’s afterward, when you’re out of reach of the spell.” And I told them of the interview which I had not been able to tell to Miss Josephine and Miss Eliza. “I doubt if it lasted more than four minutes,” I assured them.
“Up the river?” repeated Mrs. Gregory
“At the landing,” I repeated. And the ladies consulted each other’s expressions. But that didn’t bother me any more.
“And you can admire her?” Mrs. Weguelin persisted.
“May I tell you exactly, precisely?”
“Oh, do!” they both exclaimed.
“Well, I think many wise men would find her immensely desirable—as somebody else’s wife!”
At this remark Mrs. Weguelin dropped her eyes, but I knew they were dancing beneath their lids. “I should not have permitted myself to say that, but I am glad that it has been said.”
Mrs. Gregory turned to her companion. “Shall we call to-morrow?”
“Don’t you feel it must be done?” returned Mrs. Weguelin, and then she addressed me. “Do you know a Mr. Beverly Rodgers?”
I gave him a golden recommendation and took my leave of the ladies.
So they were going to do the handsome thing; they would ring the Cornerlys’ bell; they would cross the interloping threshold, they would recognize the interloping girl; and this meant that they had given it up. It meant that Miss Eliza had given it up, too, had at last abandoned her position that the marriage would never take place. And her own act had probably drawn this down upon her. When the trustee of that estate had told her of the apparent failure of the phosphates, she had hailed it as an escape for her beloved John, and for all of them, because she made sure that Hortense would never marry a virtually penniless man. And when the work went on, and the rich fortune was unearthed after all, her influence had caused that revelation to be delayed because she was so confident that the engagement would be broken. But she had reckoned without Hortense; worse than that, she had reckoned without John Mayrant; in her meddling attempt to guide his affairs in the way that she believed would be best for him, she forgot that the boy whom she had brought up was no longer a child, and thus she unpardonably ignored his rights as a man. And now Miss Josephine’s disapproval was vindicated, and her own casuistry was doubly punished. Miss Rieppe’s astute journey of investigation—for her purpose had evidently become suspected by some of them beforehand—had forced Miss Eliza to disclose the truth about the phosphates to her nephew before it should be told him by the girl herself; and the intolerable position of apparent duplicity precipitated two wholly inevitable actions on his part; he had bound himself more than ever to marry Hortense, and he had made a furious breach with his Aunt Eliza. That was what his letter had contained; this time he had banished himself from that house. What was his Aunt Eliza going to do about it? I wondered. She was a stiff, if indiscreet, old lady, and it certainly did not fall within her view of the proprieties that young people should take their elders to task in furious letters. But she had been totally in the wrong, and her fault was irreparable, because important things had happened in consequence of it; she might repent the fault in sackcloth and ashes, but she couldn’t stop the things. Would she, then, honorably wear the sackcloth, or would she dishonestly shirk it under the false issue of her nephew’s improper tone to her? Women can justify themselves with more appalling skill than men.
One drop there was in all this bitter bucket, which must have tasted sweet to John. He had resigned from the Custom House: Juno had got it right this time, though she hadn’t a notion of the real reason for John’s act. This act had been, since morning, lost for me, so to speak, in the shuffle of more absorbing events; and it now rose to view again in my mind as a telling stroke in the full-length portrait that all his acts had been painting of the boy during the last twenty-four hours. Notwithstanding a meddlesome aunt, and an arriving sweetheart, and imminent wedlock, he hadn’t forgotten to stop “taking orders from a negro” at the very first opportunity which came to him; his phosphates had done this for him, at least, and I should have the pleasure of correcting Juno at tea.
But I did not have this pleasure. They were all in an excitement over something else, and my own different excitement hadn’t a chance against this greater one; for people seldom wish to hear what you have to say, even under the most favorable circumstances, and never when they have anything to say themselves. With an audience so hotly preoccupied I couldn’t have sat on Juno effectively at all, and therefore I kept it to myself, and attended very slightly to what they were telling me about the Daughters of Dixie.
I bowed absently to the poetess. “And your poem?” I said. “A great success, I am sure?”
“Why, didn’t you hear me say so?” said the upcountry bride; and then, after a smile at the others, “I’m sure your flowers were graciously accepted.”
“Ask Miss Josephine St. Michael,” I replied.
“Oh, oh, oh!” went the bride. “How would she know?”
I gave myself no pains to improve or arrest this tiresome joke, and they went back to their Daughters of Dixie; but it is rather singular how sometimes an utterly absurd notion will be the cause of our taking a step which we had not contemplated. I did carry some flowers to Miss La Heu the next day. I was at some trouble to find any; for in Kings Port shops of this kind are by no means plentiful, and it was not until I had paid a visit to a quite distant garden at the extreme northwestern edge of the town that I lighted upon anything worthy of the girl behind the counter. The Exchange itself was apt to have flowers for sale, but I hardly saw my way to buying them there, and then immediately offering them to the fair person who had sold them to me. As it was, I did much better; for what I brought her were decidedly superior to any that were at the Exchange when I entered it at lunch time.
They were, as the up-country bride would have put it, “graciously accepted.” Miss La Heu stood them in water on the counter beside her ledger. She was looking lovely.
“I expected you yesterday,” she said. “The new Lady Baltimore was ready.”
“Well, if it is not all eaten yet—”
“Oh, no! Not a slice gone.”
“Ah, nobody does your art justice here!”
“Go and sit down at your table, please.”
It was really quite difficult to say to her from that distance the sort of things that I wished to say; but there seemed to be no help for it, and I did my best.
“I shall miss my lunches here very much when I’m gone.”
“Did you say coffee to-day?”
“Chocolate. I shall miss—”
“And the lettuce sandwiches?”
“Yes. You don’t realize how much these lunches—”
“Have cost you?” She seemed determined to keep laughing.
“You have said it. They have cost me my—”
“I can give you the receipt, you know.”
“The receipt?”
“For Lady Baltimore, to take with you.”
“You’ll have to give me a receipt for a lost heart.”
“Oh, his heart! General, listen to—” From habit she had turned to where her dog used to lie; and sudden pain swept over her face and was mastered. “Never mind!” she quickly resumed. “Please don’t speak about it. And you have a heart somewhere; for it was very nice in you to come in yesterday morning after—after the bridge.”
“I hope I have a heart,” I began, rising; for, really, I could not go on in this way, sitting down away back at the lunch table.
But the door opened, and Hortense Rieppe came into the Woman’s Exchange.
It was at me that she first looked, and she gave me the slightest bow possible, the least sign of conventional recognition that a movement of the head could make and be visible at all; she didn’t bend her head down, she tilted it ever so little up. It wasn’t new to me, this form of greeting, and I knew that she had acquired it at Newport, and that it denoted, all too accurately, the size of my importance in her eyes; she did it, as she did everything, with perfection. Then she turned to Eliza La Heu, whose face had become miraculously sweet.
“Good morning,” said Hortense.
It sounded from a quiet well of reserve music; just a cupful of melodious tone dipped lightly out of the surface. Her face hadn’t become anything; but it was equally miraculous in its total void of all expression relating to this moment, or to any moment; just her beauty, her permanent stationary beauty, was there glowing in it and through it, not skin deep, but going back and back into her lazy eyes, and shining from within the modulated bloom of her color and the depths of her amber hair. She was choosing, for this occasion, to be as impersonal as some radiant hour in nature, some mellow, motionless day when the leaves have turned, but have not fallen, and it is drowsily warm; but it wasn’t so much of nature that she, in her harmonious lustre, reminded me, as of some beautiful silken-shaded lamp, from which color rather than light came with subdued ampleness.
I saw her eyes settle upon the flowers that I had brought Eliza La Heu.
“How beautiful those are!” she remarked.
“Is there something that you wish?” inquired Miss La Heu, always miraculously sweet.
“Some of your good things for lunch; a very little, if you will be so kind.”
I had gone back to my table while the “very little” was being selected, and I felt, in spite of how slightly she counted me, that it would be inadequate in me to remain completely dumb.
“Mr. Mayrant is still at the Custom House?” I observed.
“For a few days, yes. Happily we shall soon break that connection.” And she smelt my flowers.
“‘We,’” I thought to myself, “is rather tremendous.”
It grew more tremendous in the silence as Eliza La Heu brought me my orders. Miss Rieppe did not seat herself to take the light refreshment which she found enough for lunch. Her plate and cup were set for her, but she walked about, now with one, and now with the other, taking her time over it, and pausing here and there at some article of the Exchange stock.
Of course, she hadn’t come there for any lunch; the Cornerlys had midday lunch and dined late; these innovated hours were a part of Kings Port’s deep suspicion of the Cornerlys; but what now became interesting was her evident indifference to our perceiving that lunch was merely a pretext with her; in fact, I think she wished it to be perceived, and I also think that those turns which she took about the Exchange—her apparent inspection of an old mahogany table, her examination of a pewter set—were a symbol (and meant to be a symbol) of how she had all the time there was, and the possession of everything she wished including the situation, and that she enjoyed having this sink in while she was rearranging whatever she had arranged to say, in consequence of finding that I should also hear it. And how well she was worth looking at, no matter whether she stood, or moved, or what she did! Her age lay beyond the reach of the human eye; if she was twenty-five, she was marvelous in her mastery of her appearance; if she was thirty-four, she was marvelous in her mastery of perpetuating it, and by no other means than perfect dress personal to herself (for she had taken the fashion and welded it into her own plasticity) and perfect health; for without a trace of the athletic, her graceful shape teemed with elasticity. There was a touch of “sport” in the parasol she had laid down; and with all her blended serenity there was a touch of “sport” in her. Experience could teach her beauty nothing more; it wore the look of having been made love to by many married men.
Quite suddenly the true light flashed upon me. I had been slow-sighted indeed! So that was what she had come here for to-day! Miss Hortense was going to pay her compliments to Miss La Heu. I believe that my sight might still have been slow but for that miraculous sweetness upon the face of Eliza. She was ready for the compliments! Well, I sat expectant—and disappointment was by no means my lot.
Hortense finished her lunch. “And so this interesting place is where you work?”
Eliza, thus addressed, assented.
“And you furnish wedding cakes also?”
Eliza was continuously and miraculously sweet. “The Exchange includes that.”
“I shall hope you will be present to taste some of yours on the day it is mine.”
“I shall accept the invitation if my friends send me one.”
No blood flowed from Hortense at this, and she continued with the same smooth deliberation.
“The list is of necessity very small; but I shall see that it includes you.”
“You are not going to postpone it any more, then?”
No blood flowed at this, either. “I doubt if John—if Mr. Mayrant—would brook further delay, and my father seems stronger, at last. How much do I owe you for your very good food?”
It is a pity that a larger audience could not have been there to enjoy this skilful duet, for it held me hanging on every musical word of it. There, at the far back end of the long room, I sat alone at my table, pretending to be engaged over a sandwich that was no more in existence—external, I mean—and a totally empty cup of chocolate. I lifted the cup, and bowed over the plate, and used the paper Japanese napkin, and generally went through the various discreet paces of eating, quite breathless, all the while, to know which of them was coming out ahead. There was no fairness in their positions; Hortense had Eliza in a cage, penned in by every fact; but it doesn’t do to go too near some birds, even when they’re caged, and, while these two birds had been giving their sweet manifestations of song, Eliza had driven a peck or two home through the bars, which, though they did not draw visible blood, as I have said, probably taught Hortense that a Newport education is not the only instruction which fits you for drawing-room war to the knife.
Her small reckoning was paid, and she had drawn on one long, tawny glove. Even this act was a luxury to watch, so full it was of the feminine, of the stretching, indolent ease that the flesh and the spirit of this creature invariably seemed to move with. But why didn’t she go? This became my wonder now, while she slowly drew on the second glove. She was taking more time than it needed.
“Your flowers are for sale, too?”
This, after her silence, struck me as being something planned out after her original plan. The original plan had finished with that second assertion of her ownership of John (or, I had better say, of his ownership in her), that doubt she had expressed as to his being willing to consent to any further postponement of their marriage. Of course she had expected, and got herself ready for, some thrust on the postponement subject.
Eliza crossed from behind her counter to where the Exchange flowers stood on the opposite side of the room and took some of them up.
“But those are inferior,” said Hortense. “These.” And she touched rightly the bowl in which my roses stood close beside Eliza’s ledger.
Eliza paused for one second. “Those are not for sale.”
Hortense paused, too. Then she hung to it. “They are so much the best.” She was holding her purse.
“I think so, too,” said Eliza. “But I cannot let any one have them.”
Hortense put her purse away. “You know best. Shall you furnish us flowers as well as cake?”
Eliza’s sweetness rose an octave, softer and softer. “Why, they have flowers there! Didn’t you know?”
And to this last and frightful peck through the bars Hortense found no retaliation. With a bow to Eliza, and a total oblivion of me, she went out of the Exchange. She had flaunted “her” John in Eliza’s face, she had, as they say, rubbed it in that he was “her” John;—but was it such a neat, tidy victory, after all? She had given away the last word to Eliza, presented her with that poisonous speech which when translated meant:—
“Yes, he’s ‘your’ John; and you’re climbing up him into houses where you’d otherwise be arrested for trespass.” For it was in one of the various St. Michael houses that the marriage would be held, owing to the nomadic state of the Rieppes.
Yes, Hortense had gone altogether too close to the cage at the end, and, in that repetition of her taunt about “furnishing” supplies for the wedding, she had at length betrayed something which her skill and the intricate enamel of her experience had hitherto, and with entire success, concealed—namely, the latent vulgarity of the woman. She was wearing, for the sake of Kings Port, her best behavior, her most knowing form, and, indeed it was a well-done imitation of the real thing; it would last through most occasions, and it would deceive most people. But here was the trouble: she was wearing it; while, through the whole encounter, Eliza La Heu had worn nothing but her natural and perfect dignity; yet with that disadvantage (for good breeding, alas!, is at times a sort of disadvantage, and can be battered down and covered with mud so that its own fine grain is invisible) Eliza had, after a somewhat undecisive battle, got in that last frightful peck! But what had led Hortense, after she had come through pretty well, to lose her temper and thus, at the finish, expose to Eliza her weakest position? That her clothes were paid for by a Newport lady who had taken her to Worth, that her wedding feast was to be paid for by the bridegroom, these were not facts which Eliza would deign to use as weapons; but she was marrying inside the doors of Eliza’s Kings Port, that had never opened to admit her before, and she had slipped into putting this chance into Eliza’s hand—and how had she come to do this?
To be sure, my vision had been slow! Hortense had seen, through her thick veil, Eliza’s interest in John in the first minute of her arrival on the bridge, that minute when John had run up to Eliza after the automobile had passed over poor General. And Hortense had not revealed herself at once, because she wanted a longer look at them. Well, she had got it, and she had got also a look at her affianced John when he was in the fire-eating mood, and had displayed the conduct appropriate to 1840, while Charley’s display had been so much more modern. And so first she had prudently settled that awkward phosphate difficulty, and next she had paid this little visit to Eliza in order to have the pleasure of telling her in four or five different ways, and driving it in deep, and turning it round: “Don’t you wish you may get him?”
“That’s all clear as day,” I said to myself. “But what does her loss of temper mean?”
Eliza was writing at her ledger. The sweetness hadn’t entirely gone; it was too soon for that, and besides, she knew I must be looking at her.
“Couldn’t you have told her they were my flowers?” I asked her at the counter, as I prepared to depart. Eliza did not look up from her ledger. “Do you think she would have believed me?”
“And why shouldn’t—”
“Go out!” she interrupted imperiously and with a stamp of her foot. “You’ve been here long enough!”
You may imagine my amazement at this. It was not until I had reached Mrs. Trevise’s, and was sitting down to answer a note which had been left for me, that light again came. Hortense Rieppe had thought those flowers were from John Mayrant, and Eliza had let her think so.
Yes, that was light, a good bright light shed on the matter; but a still more brilliant beam was cast by the up-country bride when I came into the dining-room. I told her myself, at once, that I had taken flowers to Miss La Heu; I preferred she should hear this from me before she learned it from the smiling lips of gossip. It surprised me that she should immediately inquire what kind of flowers?
“Why, roses,” I answered; and she went into peals of laughter.
“Pray share the jest,” I begged her with some dignity.
“Didn’t you know,” she replied, “the language that roses from a single gentleman to a young lady speak in Kings Port?”
I stood staring and stiff, taking it in, taking myself, and Eliza, and Hortense, and the implicated John, all in.
“Why, aivrybody in Kings Port knows that!” said the bride; and now my mirth rose even above hers.
It by no means lessened my pleasure to discern that Hortense must feel herself to be in a predicament; and as I sat writing my answer to the note, which was from Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael and contained an invitation to me for the next afternoon, I thought of those pilots whose dangers have come down to us from distant times through the songs of ancient poets. The narrow and tempestuous channel between Scylla and Charybdis bristled unquestionably with violent problems, but with none, I should suppose, that called for a nicer hand upon the wheel, or an eye more alert, than this steering of your little trireme to a successful marriage, between one man who believed himself to be your destined bridegroom and another who expected to be so, meanwhile keeping each in ignorance of how close you were sailing to the other. In Hortense’s place I should have wished to hasten the wedding now, have it safely performed this afternoon, say, or to-morrow morning; thus precipitated by some invaluable turn in the health of her poor dear father. But she had worn it out, his health, by playing it for decidedly as much as it could bear; it couldn’t be used again without risk; the date must stand fixed; and, uneasy as she might have begun to be about John, Hortense must, with no shortening of the course, get her boat in safe without smashing it against either John or Charley. I wondered a little that she should feel any uncertainty about her affianced lover. She must know how much his word was to him, and she had had his word twice, given her the second time to put his own honor right with her on the score of the phosphates. But perhaps Hortense’s rich experiences of life had taught her that a man’s word to a woman should not be subjected to the test of another woman’s advent. On the whole, I suppose it was quite natural those flowers should annoy her, and equally natural that Eliza, the minx, should allow them to do so! There’s a joy to the marrow in watching your enemy harried and discomfited by his own gratuitous contrivances; you look on serenely at a show which hasn’t cost you a groat. However, poor Eliza had not been so serene at the very end, when she stormed out at me. For this I did not have to forgive her, of course, little as I had merited such treatment. Had she not accepted my flowers? But it was a gratification to reflect that in my sentimental passages with her I had not gone to any great length; nothing, do I ever find, is so irksome as the sense of having unwittingly been in a false position. Was John, on his side, in love with her? Was it possible he would fail in his word? So with these thoughts, while answering and accepting Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael’s invitation to make one of a party of strangers to whom she was going to show another old Kings Port church, “where many of my ancestors lie,” as her note informed me, I added one sentence which had nothing to do with the subject “She is a steel wasp,” I ventured to say. And when on the next afternoon I met the party at the church, I received from the little lady a look of highly spiced comprehension as she gently remarked, “I was glad to get your acceptance.”
When I went down to the dinner-table, Juno sat in her best clothes, still discussing the Daughters of Dixie.
I can’t say that I took much more heed of this at dinner than I had done at tea; but I was interested to hear Juno mention that she, too, intended to call upon Hortense Rieppe. Kings Port, she said, must take a consistent position; and for her part, so far as behavior went, she didn’t see much to choose between the couple. “As to whether Mr. Mayrant had really concealed the discovery of his fortune,” she continued, “I asked Miss Josephine—in a perfectly nice way, of course. But old Mr. St. Michael Beaugarcon, who has always had the estate in charge, did that. It is only a life estate, unless Mr. Mayrant has lawful issue. Well, he will have that now, and all that money will be his to squander.”
Aunt Carola had written me again this morning, but I had been in no haste to open her letter; my neglect of the Bombos did not weigh too heavily upon me, I fear, but I certainly did put off reading what I expected to be a reprimand. And concerning this I was right; her first words betokened reprimand at once. “My dear nephew Augustus,” she began, in her fine, elegant handwriting. That was always her mode of address to me when something was coming, while at other times it would be, less portentously, “My dear Augustus,” or “My dear nephew “; but whenever my name and my relationship to her occurred conjointly, I took the communication away with me to some corner, and opened it in solitude.
It wasn’t about the Bombos, though; and for what she took me to task I was able to defend myself, I think, quite adequately. She found fault with me for liking the South too much, and this she based upon the enthusiastic accounts of Kings Port and its people that I had written to her; nor had she at all approved of my remarks on the subject of the negro, called forth by Daddy Ben and his grandson Charles Cotesworth.
“When I sent you (wrote Aunt Carola) to admire Kings Port good-breeding, I did not send you to forget your country. Remember that those people were its mortal enemies; that besides their treatment of our prisoners in Libby and Andersonville (which killed my brother Alexander) they displayed in their dealings, both social and political, an arrogance in success and a childish petulance at opposition, which we who saw and suffered can never forget, any more than we can forget our loved ones who laid down their lives for this cause.”
These were not the only words with which Aunt Carola reproved what she termed my “disloyalty,” but they will serve to indicate her feeling about the Civil War. It was—on her side—precisely the feeling of all the Kings Port old ladies on Heir side. But why should it be mine? And so, after much thinking how I might best reply respectfully yet say to Aunt Carola what my feeling was, I sat down upstairs at my window, and, after some preliminary sentences, wrote:—
“There are dead brothers here also, who, like your brother, laid down their lives for what they believed was their country, and whom their sisters never can forget as you can never forget him. I read their names upon sad church tablets, and their boy faces look out at me from cherished miniatures and dim daguerreotypes. Upon their graves the women who mourn them leave flowers as you leave flowers upon the grave of your young soldier. You will tell me, perhaps, that since the bereavement is equal, I have not justified my sympathy for these people. But the bereavement was not equal. More homes here were robbed by death of their light and promise than with us; and to this you must add the material desolation of the homes themselves. Our roofs were not laid in ashes, and to-day we sit in affluence while they sit in privation. You will say to this, perhaps, that they brought it upon themselves. But even granting that they did so, surely to suffer and to lose is more bitter than to suffer and to win. My dear aunt, you could not see what I have seen here, and write to me as you do; and if those years have left upon your heart a scar which will not vanish, do not ask me, who came afterward, to wear the scar also. I should then resemble certain of the younger ones here, with less excuse than is theirs. As for the negro, forgive me if I assure you that you retain an Abolitionist exaltation for a creature who does not exist, or whose existence is an ineffectual drop in the bucket, a creature on grateful knees raising faithful eyes to one who has struck off his chains of slavery, whereas the creature who does exist is—”
I paused here in my letter to Aunt Carola, and sought for some fitting expression that should characterize for her with sufficient severity the new type of deliberately worthless negro; and as I sought, my eyes wandered to the garden next door, the garden of the Cornerlys. On a bench near a shady arrangement of vines over bars sat Hortense Rieppe. She was alone, and, from her attitude, seemed to be thinking deeply. The high walls of the garden shut her into a privacy that her position near the shady vines still more increased. It was evident that she had come here for the sake of being alone, and I regretted that she was so turned from me that I could not see her face. But her solitude did not long continue; there came into view a gentleman of would-be venerable appearance, who approached her with a walk carefully constructed for public admiration, and who, upon reaching her, bent over with the same sort of footlight elaboration and gave her a paternal kiss. I did not need to hear her call him father; he was so obviously General Rieppe, the prudent hero of Chattanooga, that words would have been perfectly superfluous in his identification.
I was destined upon another day to hear the tones of his voice, and thereupon may as well state now that they belonged altogether with the rest of him. There is a familiar type of Northern fraud, and a Southern type, equally familiar, but totally different in appearance. The Northern type has the straight, flat, earnest hair, the shaven upper lip, the chin-beard, and the benevolent religious expression. He will be the president of several charities, and the head of one great business. He plays no cards, drinks no wine, and warns young men to beware of temptation. He is as genial as a hair-sofa; and he is seldom found out by the public unless some financial crash in general affairs uncovers his cheating, which lies most often beyond the law’s reach; and because he cannot be put in jail, he quite honestly believes heaven is his destination. We see less of him since we have ceased to be a religious country, religion no longer being an essential disguise for him. The Southern type, with his unction and his juleps, is better company, unless he is the hero of too many of his own anecdotes. He is commonly the possessor of a poetic gaze, a mane of silvery hair, and a noble neck. As war days and cotton-factor days recede into a past more and more filmed over with romance, he too grows rare among us, and I regret it, for he was in truth a picturesque figure. General Rieppe was perfect.
At first I was sorry that the distance they were from me rendered hearing what they were saying impossible; very soon, however, the frame of my open window provided me with a living picture which would have been actually spoiled had the human voice disturbed its eloquent pantomime.
General Rieppe’s daughter responded to her father’s caress but languidly, turning to him her face, with its luminous, stationary beauty. He pointed to the house, and then waved his hand toward the bench where she sat; and she, in response to this, nodded slightly. Upon which the General, after another kiss of histrionic paternity administered to her forehead, left her sitting and proceeded along the garden walk at a stately pace, until I could no longer see him. Hortense, left alone upon the bench, looked down at the folds of her dress, extended a hand and slowly rearranged one of them, and then, with the same hand, felt her hair from front to back. This had scarce been accomplished when the General reappeared, ushering Juno along the walk, and bearing a chair with him. When they turned the corner at the arbor, Hortense rose, and greetings ensued. Few objects could be straighter than was Juno’s back; her card-case was in her hand, but her pocket was not quite large enough for the whole of her pride, which stuck out so that it could have been seen from a greater distance than my window. The General would have departed, placing his chair for the visitor, when Hortense waved for him an inviting hand toward the bench beside her; he waved a similarly inviting hand, looking at Juno, who thereupon sat firmly down upon the chair. At this the General hovered heavily, looking at his daughter, who gave him no look in return, as she engaged in conversation with Juno; and presently the General left them. Juno’s back and Hortense’s front, both entirely motionless as they interviewed each other’ presented a stiff appearance, with Juno half turned in her seat and Hortense’s glance following her slight movement; the two then rose, as the General came down the walk with two chairs and Mrs. Gregory and Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael. Juno, with a bow to them, approached Hortense by a step or two, a brief touch of their fingers was to be seen, and Juno’s departure took place, attended by the heavy hovering of General Rieppe.
“That’s why!” I said to myself aloud, suddenly, at my open window. Immediately, however, I added, “but can it be?” And in my mind a whole little edifice of reasons for Hortense’s apparent determination to marry John instantly fabricated itself—and then fell down.
Through John she was triumphantly bringing stiff Kings Port to her, was forcing them to accept her. But this was scarce enough temptation for Hortense to marry; she could do very well without Kings Port—indeed, she was not very likely to show herself in it, save to remind them, now and then, that she was there, and that they could not keep her out any more; this might amuse her a little, but the society itself would not amuse her in the least. What place had it for her to smoke her cigarettes in?
Eliza La Heu, then? Spite? The pleasure of taking something that somebody else wanted? The pleasure of spoiling somebody else’s pleasure? Or, more accurately, the pleasure of power? Well, yes; that might be it, if Hortense Rieppe were younger in years, and younger, especially, in soul; but her museum was too richly furnished with specimens of the chase, she had collected too many bits and bibelots from life’s Hotel Druot and the great bazaar of female competition, to pay so great a price as marriage for merely John; particularly when a lady, even in Newport, can have but one husband at a time in her collection. If she did actually love John, as Beverly Rodgers had reluctantly come to believe, it was most inappropriate in her! Had I followed out the train of reasoning which lay coiled up inside the word inappropriate, I might have reached the solution which eventually Hortense herself gave me, and the jewelled recesses of her nature would have blazed still more brilliantly to my eyes to-day; but in truth, my soul wasn’t old enough yet to work Hortense out by itself, unaided!
While Mrs. Gregory and Mrs. Weguelin sat on their chairs, and Hortense sat on her bench, tea was brought and a table laid, behind whose whiteness and silver Hortense began slight offices with cups and sugar tongs. She looked inquiry at her visitors, in answer to which Mrs. Gregory indicated acceptance, and Mrs. Weguelin refusal. The beauty of Hortense’s face had strangely increased since the arrival of these two visitors. It shone resplendent behind the silver and the white cloth, and her movement, as she gave the cup to Mrs. Gregory St. Michael, was one of complete grace and admirable propriety. But once she looked away from them in the direction of the path. Her two visitors rose and left her, Mrs. Gregory setting her tea-cup down with a gesture that said she would take no more, and, after their bows of farewell, Hortense sat alone again pulling about the tea things.
I saw that by the table lay a card-case on the ground, evidently dropped by Mrs. Gregory; but Hortense could not see it where she sat. Her quick look along the path heralded more company and the General with more chairs. Young people now began to appear, the various motions of whom were more animated than the approaches and greetings and farewells of their elders; chairs were moved and exchanged, the General was useful in handling cups, and a number of faces unknown to me came and went, some of them elderly ones whom I had seen in church, or passed while walking; the black dresses of age mingled with the brighter colors of youth; and on her bench behind the cups sat Hortense, or rose up at right moments, radiant, restrained and adequate, receiving with deferential attention the remarks of some dark-clothed elder, or, with sufficiently interested countenance, inquiring something from a brighter one of her own generation; but twice I saw her look up the garden path. None of them stayed long, although when they were all gone the shadow of the garden wall had come as far as the arbor; and once again Hortense sat alone behind the table, leaning back with arms folded, and looking straight in front of her. At last she stirred, and rose slowly, and then, with a movement which was the perfection of timidity, began to advance, as John, with his Aunt Eliza, came along the path. To John, Hortense with familiar yet discreet brightness gave a left hand, as she waited for the old lady; and then the old lady went through with it. What that embrace of acknowledgment cost her cannot be measured, and during its process John stood like a sentinel. Possibly this was the price of his forgiveness to his Aunt Eliza.
The visitors accepted tea, and the beauty in Hortense’s face was now supreme. The old lady sat, forgetting to drink her tea, but very still in outward attitude, as she talked with Hortense; and the sight of one hand in its glove lying motionless upon her best dress, suddenly almost drew unexpected tears to my eyes. John was nearly as quiet as she, but the glove that he held was twisted between his fingers. I expected that he would stay with his Hortense when his aunt took her leave; he, however, was evidently expected by the old lady to accompany her out and back, I suppose, to her house, as was proper.
But John’s departure from Hortense differed from his meeting her. She gave no left hand to him now; she gazed at him, and then, as the old lady began to go toward the house, she moved a step toward him, and then she cast herself into his arms! It was no acting, this, no skilful simulation; her head sank upon his shoulder, and true passion spoke in every line of that beautiful surrendered form, as it leaned against her lover’s.
“So that’s why!” I exclaimed, once more aloud.
It was but a moment; and John, released, followed Miss Eliza. The old lady walked slowly, with that half-failing step that betokens the body’s weariness after great mental or moral strain. Indeed, as John regained her side, she put her arm in his as if her feebleness needed his support. Thus they went away together, the aunt and her beloved boy, who had so sorely grieved and disappointed her.
But if this sight touched me, this glimpse of the vanquished leaving the field after supreme acknowledgment of defeat, upon Hortense it wrought another effect altogether. She stood looking after them, and as she looked, the whole woman from head to foot, motionless as she was, seemed to harden. Yet still she looked, until at length, slowly turning, her eyes chanced to fall upon Mrs. Gregory St. Michael’s card-case. There it lay, the symbol of Kings Port’s capitulation. She swooped down and up with a flying curve of grace, holding her prey caught; and then, catching also her handsome skirts on either side, she danced like a whirling fan among the empty chairs.
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