But a little while, and all that I had just witnessed in such vivid dumb-show might have seemed to me in truth some masque; so smooth had it been, and voiceless, coming and going like a devised fancy. And after the last of the players was gone from the stage, leaving the white cloth, and the silver, and the cups, and the groups of chairs near the pleasant arbor, I watched the deserted garden whence the sunlight was slowly departing, and it seemed to me more than ever like some empty and charming scene in a playhouse, to which the comedians would in due time return to repeat their delicate pantomime. But these were mental indulgences, with which I sat playing until the sight of my interrupted letter to Aunt Carola on the table before me brought the reality of everything back into my thoughts; and I shook my head over Miss Eliza. I remembered that hand of hers, lying in despondent acquiescence upon her lap, as the old lady sat in her best dress, formally and faithfully accepting the woman whom her nephew John had brought upon them as his bride-elect—formally and faithfully accepting this distasteful person, and thus atoning as best she could to her beloved nephew for the wrong that her affection had led her to do him in that ill-starred and inexcusable tampering with his affairs.
But there was my letter waiting. I took my pen, and finished what I had to say about the negro and the injustice we had done to him, as well as to our own race, by the Fifteenth Amendment. I wrote:—
“I think Northerners must often seem to these people strangely obtuse in their attitude. And they deserve such opinion, since all they need to do is come here and see for themselves what the War did to the South.
“You may have a perfectly just fight with a man and beat him rightly; but if you are able to go on with your work next day, while his health is so damaged that for a long while he limps about as a cripple, you must not look up from your busy thriving and reproach him with his helplessness, and remind him of its cause; nor must you be surprised that he remembers the fight longer than you have time for. I know that the North meant to be magnanimous, that the North was magnanimous, that the spirit of Grant at Appomattox filled many breasts; and I know that the magnanimity was not met by those who led the South after Lee’s retirement, and before reconstruction set in, and that the Fifteenth Amendment was brought on by their own doings: when have two wrongs made a right? And to place the negro above these people was an atrocity. You cannot expect them to inquire very industriously how magnanimous this North meant to be, when they have suffered at her hands worse, far worse, than France suffered from Germany’s after 1870.
“I do think there should be a different spirit among some of the later-born, but I have come to understand even the slights and suspicions from which I here and there suffer, since to their minds, shut in by circumstance, I’m always a ‘Yankee.’
“We are prosperous; and prosperity does not bind, it merely assembles people—at dinners and dances. It is adversity that binds—beside the gravestone, beneath the desolated roof. Could you come here and see what I have seen, the retrospect of suffering, the long, lingering convalescence, the small outlook of vigor to come, and the steadfast sodality of affliction and affection and fortitude, your kind but unenlightened heart would be wrung, as mine has been, and is being, at every turn.”
After I had posted this reply to Aunt Carola, I had some fears that my pen had run away with me, and that she might now descend upon me with that reproof which she knew so well how to exercise in cases of disrespect. But there was actually a certain pathos in her mildness when it came. She felt it her duty to go over a good deal of history first, but:—
“I do not understand the present generation,” she finished, “and I suppose that I was not meant to.”
The little sigh in these words did great credit to Aunt Carola.
This vindication off my mind, and relieved by it of the more general thoughts about Kings Port and the South, which the pantomime of Kings Port’s forced capitulation to Hortense had raised in me, I returned to the personal matters between that young woman and John, and Charley. How much did Charley know? How much would Charley stand? How much would John stand, if he came to know?
Well, the scene in the garden now helped me to answer these questions much better than I could have answered them before its occurrence. With one fact—the great fact of love—established, it was not difficult to account for at least one or two of the several things that puzzled me. There could be no doubt that Hortense loved John Mayrant, loved him beyond her own control. When this love had begun, made no matter. Perhaps it began on the bridge, when the money was torn, and Eliza La Heu had appeared. The Kings Port version of Hortense’s indifference to John before the event of the phosphates might well enough be true. It might even well enough be true that she had taken him and his phosphates at Newport for lack of anything better at hand, and because she was sick of disappointed hopes. In this case, Charley’s subsequent appearance as something very much better (if the phosphates were to fail) would perfectly explain the various postponements of the wedding.
So I was able to answer my questions to myself thus: How much did Charley know?—Just what he could see for himself, and what he had most likely heard from Newport gossip. He could have heard of an old engagement, made purely for money’s sake, and of recent delays created by the lady; and he could see the gentleman—an impossible husband from a Wall Street standpoint!—to whom Hortense was evidently tempering her final refusal by indulgently taking an interest in helping along his phosphate fortune. Charley would not refuse to lend her his aid in this estimable benevolence; nor would it occur to Charley’s sensibilities how such benevolence would be taken by John if John were not “taken” himself. Yes, Charley was plainly fooled, and fooled the more readily because he had the old version of the truth. How should he suspect there was a revised version? How should he discover that passion had now changed sides, that it was now John who allowed himself to be loved? The signs of this did not occur before his eyes. Of course, Charley would not stay fooled forever; the hours of that were numbered,—but their number was quite beyond my guessing!
How much would Charley stand? He would stand a good deal, because the measure of his toleration was the measure of his desire for Hortense; and it was plain that he wanted her very much indeed. But how much would John stand? How soon would his “fire-eating” traditions produce a “difficulty”? Why had they not done this already? Well, the garden had in some way helped me to frame a fairly reasonable answer for this also. Poor Hortense had become as powerless to woo John to warmth as poor Venus had been with Adonis; and passion, in changing sides, had advanced the boy’s knowledge. He knew now the difference between the embraces of his lady when she had merely wanted his phosphates, and these other caresses now that, she wanted him. In his ceaseless search for some possible loophole of escape, his eye could not have overlooked the chance that lay in Charley, and he was far too canny to blast his forlorn hope. He had probably wondered what had changed the nature of Hortense’s caresses, and the adventure of the torn money could scarce have failed to suggest itself to the mind of a youth who, little as he had trodden the ways of the world, evidently possessed some lively instincts regarding the nature of women. To batter Charley as he had battered Juno’s nephew, might result in winding the arms of Hortense around his own neck more tightly than ever.
Why Hortense should keep Charley “on” any longer, was what I could least fathom, but I trusted her to have excellent reasons for anything that she did. “It’s sure to be quite simple, once you know it,” I told myself; and the near future proved me to be right.
Thus I laid most of my enigmas to rest; there was but one which now and then awakened still. Were Hortense a raw girl of eighteen, I could easily grant that the “fire-eater” in John would be sure to move her. But Hortense had travelled many miles away from the green forests of romance; her present fields were carpeted, not with grass and flowers, but with Oriental mats and rugs, and it was electric lights, not the moon and stars, that shone upon her highly seasoned nights. No, torn money and all, it was not appropriate in a woman of her experience; and so I still found myself inquiring in the words of Beverly Rodgers, “But what can she want him for?”
The next time that I met Mrs. Gregory St. Michael it was on my way to join the party at the old church, which Mrs. Weguelin was going to show them. The card-case was in her hand, and the sight of it prompted me to allude to Hortense Rieppe.
“I find her beauty growing upon me?” I declared.
Mrs. Gregory did not deny the beauty, although she spoke with reserve at first. “It is to be said that she knows how to write a suitable note,” the lady also admitted.
She didn’t tell me what the note was about, naturally; but I could imagine with what joy in the exercise of her art Hortense had constructed that communication which must have accompanied the prompt return of the card-case.
Then Mrs. Gregory’s tongue became downright. “Since you’re able to see so much of her, why don’t you tell her to marry that little steam-yacht gambler? I’m sure he’s dying to, and he’s just the thing for her?”
“Ah,” I returned, “Love so seldom knows what’s just the thing for marriage.”
“Then your precocity theory falls,” declared Mrs. St. Michael. And as she went away from me along the street, I watched her beautiful stately walk; for who could help watching a sight so good?
Charley, then, was no secret to John’s people. Was John still a secret to Charley? Could Hortense possibly have managed this? I hoped for a chance to observe the two men with her during the visit of Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael and her party to the church.
This party was already assembled when I arrived upon the spot appointed. In the street, a few paces from the church, stood Bohm and Charley and Kitty and Gazza, with Beverly Rodgers, who, as I came near, left them and joined me.
“Oh, she’s somewhere off with her fire-eater,” responded Beverly to my immediate inquiry for Hortense. “Do you think she was asked, old man?”
Probably not, I thought. “But she goes so well with the rest,” I suggested.
Beverly gave his chuckle. “She goes where she likes. She’ll meet us here when we’re finished, I’m pretty sure.”
“Why such certainty?”
“Well, she has to attend to Charley, you know!”
Mrs. Weguelin, it appeared, had met the party here by the church, but had now gone somewhere in the immediate neighborhood to find out why the gate was not opened to admit us, and to hasten the unpunctual custodian of the keys. I had not looked for precisely such a party as Mrs. Weguelin’s invitation had gathered, nor could I imagine that she had fully understood herself what she was gathering; and this I intimated to Beverly Rodgers, saying:—
“Do you suppose, my friend, that she suspected the feather of the birds you flock with?”
Beverly took it lightly. “Hang it, old boy, of course everybody can’t be as nice as I am!” But he took it less lightly before it was over.
We stood chatting apart, he and I, while Bohm and Charley and Kitty and Gazza walked across the street to the window of a shop, where old furniture was for sale at a high price; and it grew clearer to me what Beverly had innocently brought upon Mrs. Weguelin, and how he had brought it. The little quiet, particular lady had been pleased with his visit, and pleased with him. His good manners, his good appearance, his good English-trained voice, all these things must have been extremely to her taste; and then—more important than they—did she not know about his people? She had inquired, he told me, with interest about two of his uncles, whom she had last seen in 1858. “She’s awfully the right sort,” said Beverly. Yes, I saw well how that visit must have gone: the gentle old lady reviving in Beverly’s presence, and for the sake of being civil to him, some memories of her girlhood, some meetings with those uncles, some dances with them; and generally shedding from her talk and manner the charm of some sweet old melody—and Beverly, the facile, the appreciative, sitting there with her at a correct, deferential angle on his chair, admirably sympathetic and in good form, and playing the old school. (He had no thought to deceive her; the old school was his by right, and genuinely in his blood, he took to it like a duck to the water.) How should Mrs. Weguelin divine that he also took to the nouveau jeu to the tune of Bohm and Charley and Kitty and Gazza? And so, to show him some attention, and because she couldn’t ask him to a meal, why, she would take him over the old church, her colonial forefathers’; she would tell him the little legends about them; he was precisely the young man to appreciate such things—and she would be pleased if he would also bring the friends with whom he was travelling.
I looked across the street at Bohm and Charley and Kitty and Gazza. They were now staring about them in all their perfection of stare: small Charley in a sleek slate-colored suit, as neat as any little barber; Bohm, massive, portentous, his strong shoes and gloves the chief note in his dress, and about his whole firm frame a heavy mechanical strength, a look as of something that did something rapidly and accurately when set going—cut or cracked or ground or smashed something better and faster than it had ever been cut or cracked or ground or smashed before, and would take your arms and legs off if you didn’t stand well back from it; it was only in Bohm’s eye and lips that you saw he wasn’t made entirely of brass and iron, that champagne and shoulders decolletes received a punctual share of his valuable time. And there was Kitty, too, just the wife for Bohm, so soon as she could divorce her husband, to whom she had united herself before discovering that all she married him for, his old Knickerbocker name, was no longer in the slightest degree necessary for social acceptance; while she could feed people, her trough would be well thronged. Kitty was neat, Kitty was trig, Kitty was what Beverly would call “swagger “; her skilful tailor-made clothes sheathed her closely and gave her the excellent appearance of a well-folded English umbrella; it was in her hat that she had gone wrong—a beautiful hat in itself, one which would have wholly become Hortense; but for poor Kitty it didn’t do at all. Yes, she was a well folded English umbrella, only the umbrella had for its handle the head of a bulldog or the leg of a ballet-dancer. And these were the Replacers whom Beverly’s clear-sighted eyes saw swarming round the temple of his civilization, pushing down the aisles, climbing over the backs of the benches, walking over each other’s bodies, and seizing those front seats which his family had sat in since New York had been New York; and so the wise fellow very prudently took every step that would insure the Replacers’ inviting him to occupy one of his own chairs. I had almost forgotten little Gazza, the Italian nobleman, who sold old furniture to new Americans. Gazza was not looking at the old furniture of Kings Port, which must have filled his Vatican soul with contempt; he was strolling back and forth in the street, with his head in the air, humming, now loudly, now softly “La-la, la-la, E quando a la predica in chiesa siederia, la-la-la-la;” and I thought to myself that, were I the Pope, I should kick him into the Tiber.
When Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael came back with the keys and their custodian, Bohm was listening to the slow, clear words of Charley, in which he evidently found something that at length interested him—a little. Bohm, it seemed, did not often speak himself: possibly once a week. His way was to let other people speak to him when there were signs in his face that he was hearing anything which they said, it was a high compliment to them, and of course Charley could command Bohm’s ear; for Charley, although he was as neat as any barber, and let Hortense walk on him because he looked beyond that, and purposed to get her, was just as potent in the financial world as Bohm, could bring a borrowing empire to his own terms just as skillfully as could Bohm; was, in short, a man after Bohm’s own—I had almost said heart: the expression is so obstinately embedded in our language! Bohm, listening, and Charley, talking, had neither of them noticed Mrs. Weguelin’s arrival; they stood ignoring her, while she waited, casting a timid eye upon them. But Beverly, suddenly perceiving this, and begging her pardon for them, brought the party together, and we moved in among the old graves.
“Ah!” said Gazza, bending to read the quaint words cut upon one of them, as we stopped while the door at the rear of the church was being opened, “French!”
“It was the mother-tongue of these colonists,” Mrs. Weguelin explained to him.
“Ah! like Canada!” cried Gazza. “But what a pretty bit is that!” And he stood back to admire a little glimpse, across a street, between tiled roofs and rusty balconies, of another church steeple. “Almost, one would say, the Old World,” Gazza declared.
“Our world is not new,” said Mrs. Weguelin; and she passed into the church.
Kings Port holds many sacred nooks, many corners, many vistas, that should deeply stir the spirit and the heart of all Americans who know and love their country. The passing traveller may gaze up at certain windows there, and see History herself looking out at him, even as she looks out of the windows of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. There are also other ancient buildings in Kings Port, where History is shut up, as in a strong-box,—such as that stubborn old octagon, the powder-magazine of Revolutionary times, which is a chest holding proud memories of blood and war. And then there are the three churches. Not strong-boxes, these, but shrines, where burn the venerable lamps of faith. And of these three houses of God, that one holds the most precious flame, the purest light, which treasures the holy fire that came from France. The English colonists, who sat in the other two congregations, came to Carolina’s soil to better their estate; but it was for liberty of soul, to lift their ardent and exalted prayer to God as their own conscience bade them, and not as any man dictated, that those French colonists sought the New World. No Puritan splendor of independence and indomitable courage outshines theirs. They preached a word as burning as any that Plymouth or Salem ever heard. They were but a handful, yet so fecund was their marvelous zeal that they became the spiritual leaven of their whole community. They are less known than Plymouth and Salem, because men of action, rather than men of letters, have sprung from the loins of the South; but there they stand, a beautiful beacon, shining upon the coasts of our early history. Into their church, then, into the shrine where their small lamp still burns, their devout descendant, Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael led our party, because in her eyes Kings Port could show nothing more precious and significant. There had been nothing to warn her that Bohm and Charley were Americans who neither knew nor loved their country, but merely Americans who knew their country’s wealth and loved to acquire every penny of it that they could.
And so, following the steps of our delicate and courteous guide, we entered into the dimness of the little building; and Mrs. Weguelin’s voice, lowered to suit the sanctity which the place had for her, began to tell us very quietly and clearly the story of its early days.
I knew it, or something of it, from books; but from this little lady’s lips it took on a charm and graciousness which made it fresh to me. I listened attentively, until I felt, without at first seeing the cause, that dulling of enjoyment, that interference with the receptive attention, which comes at times to one during the performance of music when untimely people come in or go out. Next, I knew that our group of listeners was less compact; and then, as we moved from the first point in the church to a new one, I saw that Bohm and Charley were dropping behind, and I lingered, with the intention of bringing them closer.
“But there was nothing in it,” I heard Charley’s slow monologue continuing behind me to the silent Bohm. “We could have bought the Parsons road at that time. ‘Gentlemen,’ I said to them, ‘what is there for us in tide-water at Kings Port? ‘”
It was not to be done, and I rejoined Mrs. Weguelin and those of the party who were making some show of attention to her quiet little histories and explanations; and Kitty’s was the next voice which I heard ring out—
“Oh, you must never let it fall to pieces! It’s the cunningest little fossil I’ve seen in the South.”
“So,” said Charley behind me, “we let the other crowd buy their strategic point; and I guess they know they got a gold brick.”
I moved away from the financiers, I endeavored not to hear their words; and in this much I was successful; but their inappropriate presence had got, I suppose upon my nerves; at any rate, go where I would in the little church, or attend as I might and did to what Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael said about the tablets, and whatever traditions their inscriptions suggested to her, that quiet, low, persistent banker’s voice of Charley’s pervaded the building like a draft of cold air. Once, indeed, he addressed Mrs. Weguelin a question. She was telling Beverly (who followed her throughout, protectingly and charmingly, with his most devoted attention and his best manner) the honorable deeds of certain older generations of a family belonging to this congregation, some of whose tombs outside had borne French inscriptions.
“My mother’s family,” said Mrs. Weguelin.
“And nowadays,” inquired Beverly, “what do they find instead of military careers?”
“There are no more of us nowadays; they—they were killed in the war.”
And immediately she smiled, and with her hand she made a light gesture, as if to dismiss this subject from mutual embarrassment and pain.
“I might have known better,” murmured the understanding Beverly.
But Charley now had his question. “How many, did you say?”
“How many?” Mrs. Weguelin did not quite understand him.
“Were killed?” explained Charley.
Again there was a little pause before Mrs. Weguelin answered, “My four brothers met their deaths.”
Charley was interested. “And what was the percentage of fatality in their regiments?”
“Oh,” said Mrs. Weguelin, “we did not think of it in that way.” And she turned aside.
“Charley,” said Kitty, with some precipitancy, “do make Mr. Bohm look at the church!” and she turned after Mrs. Weguelin. “It is such a gem!”
But I saw the little lady try to speak and fail, and then I noticed that she was leaning against a window-sill.
Beverly Rodgers also noticed this, and he hastened to her.
“Thank you,” she returned to his hasty question, “I am quite well. If you are not tired of it, shall we go on?”
“It is such a gem!” repeated Kitty, throwing an angry glance at Charley and Bohm. And so we went on.
Yes, Kitty did her best to cover it up; Kitty, as she would undoubtedly have said herself, could see a few things. But nobody could cover it up, though Beverly was now vigilant in his efforts to do so. Indeed, Replacers cannot be covered up by human agency; they bulge, they loom, they stare, they dominate the road of life, even as their automobiles drive horses and pedestrians to the wall. Bohm, roused from his financial torpor by Kitty’s sharp command, did actually turn his eyes upon the church, which he had now been inside for some twenty minutes without noticing. Instinct and long training had given his eye, when it really looked at anything, a particular glance—the glance of the Replacer—which plainly calculated: “Can this be made worth money to me?” and which died instantly to a glaze of indifference on seeing that no money could be made. Bohm’s eye, accordingly, waked and then glazed. Manners, courtesy, he did not need, not yet; he had looked at them with his Replacer glance, and, seeing no money in them, had gone on looking at railroads, and mines, and mills,—and bare shoulders, and bottles. Should manners and courtesy come, some day, to mean money to him, then he could have them, in his fashion, so that his admirers and his apologists should alike declare of him, “A rough diamond, but consider what he has made of himself!”
“After what, did you say?” This was the voice of Gazza, addressing Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael. It must be said of Gazza that he, too, made a certain presence of interest in the traditions of Kings Port.
“After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes,” replied Mrs. Weguelin.
“Built it in Savannah,” Charley was saying to Bohm, “or Norfolk. This is a good place to bury people in, but not money. Now the phosphate proposition—”
Again I dragged my attention by force away from that quiet, relentless monologue, and listened as well as I could to Mrs. Weguelin. There had come to be among us all, I think—Beverly, Kitty, Gazza, and myself—a joint impulse to shield her, to cluster about her, to follow her steps from each little lecture that she finished to the new point where the next lecture began; and we did it, performed our pilgrimage to the end; but there was less and less nature in our performance. I knew (and it was like a dream which I could not stop) that we pressed a little too close, that our questions were a little too eager, that we overprinted our faces with attention; knowing this did not help, nothing helped, and we went on to the end, seeing ourselves doing it; and it must have been that Mrs. Weguelin saw us likewise. But she was truly admirable in giving no sign, she came out well ahead; the lectures were not hurried, one had no sense of points being skipped to accommodate our unworthiness, it required a previous familiarity with the church to know (as I did) that there was, indeed, more and more skipping; yet the little lady played her part so evenly and with never a falter of voice nor a change in the gentle courtesy of her manner, that I do not think—save for that moment at the window-sill—I could have been sure what she thought, or how much she noticed. Her face was always so pale, it may well have been all imagination with me that she seemed, when we emerged at last into the light of the street, paler than usual; but I am almost certain that her hand was trembling as she stood receiving the thanks of the party. These thanks were cut a little short by the arrival of one of the automobiles, and, at the same time, the appearance of Hortense strolling toward us with John Mayrant.
Charley had resumed to Bohm, “A tax of twenty-five cents on the ton is nothing with deposits of this richness,” when his voice ceased; and looking at him to see the cause, I perceived that his eye was on John, and that his polished finger-nail was running meditatively along his thin mustache.
Hortense took the matter—whatever the matter was—in hand.
“You haven’t much time,” she said to Charles, who consulted his watch.
“Who’s coming to see me off?” he inquired.
“Where’s he going?” I asked Beverly.
“She’s sending him North,” Beverly answered, and then he spoke with his very best simple manner to Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael. “May I not walk home with you after all your kindness?”
She was going to say no, for she had had enough of this party; but she looked at Beverly, and his face and his true solicitude won her; she said, “Thank you, if you will.” And the two departed together down the shabby street, the little veiled lady in black, and Beverly with his excellent London clothes and his still more excellent look of respectful, sheltering attention.
And now Bohm pronounced the only utterance that I heard fall from his lips during his stay in Kings Port. He looked at the church he had come from, he looked at the neighboring larger church whose columns stood out at the angle of the street; he looked at the graveyard opposite that, then at the stale, dusty shop of old furniture, and then up the shabby street, where no life or movement was to be seen, except the distant forms of Beverly and Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael. Then from a gold cigar-case, curved to fit his breast pocket, he took a cigar and lighted it from a gold match-box. Offering none of us a cigar, he placed the case again in his pocket; and holding his lighted cigar a moment with two fingers in his strong glove, he spoke:—
“This town’s worse than Sunday.”
Then he got into the automobile. They all followed to see Charley off, and he addressed me.
“I shall be glad,” he said, “if you will make one of a little party on the yacht next Sunday, when I come back. And you also,” he added to John.
Both John and I expressed our acceptance in suitable forms, and the automobile took its way to the train.
“Your Kings Port streets,” I said, as we walked back toward Mrs. Trevise’s, “are not very favorable for automobiles.”
“No,” he returned briefly. I don’t remember that either of us found more to say until we had reached my front door, when he asked, “Will the day after to-morrow suit you for Udolpho?”
“Whenever you say,” I told him.
“Weather permitting, of course. But I hope that it will; for after that I suppose my time will not be quite so free.”
After we had parted it struck me that this was the first reference to his approaching marriage that John had ever made in my hearing since that day long ago (it seemed long ago, at least) when he had come to the Exchange to order the wedding-cake, and Eliza La Heu had fallen in love with him at sight. That, in my opinion, looking back now with eyes at any rate partially opened, was what Eliza had done. Had John returned the compliment then, or since?
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