Should I "like to take orders from a negro?" Put personally, it came to me now as a new idea came as something which had never entered my mind before, not even as an abstract hypothesis I didn't have to think before reaching the answer though; something within me, which you ma call what you please—convention, prejudice, instinct—something answered most prompt and emphatically in the negative. I revolved in my mind as I tried to pack into a box a number of objects that I had bought in one or to "antique" shops. They wouldn't go in, the objects; they were of defeating and recalcitrant shapes, and of hostile materials—glass and brass—and I must have a larger box made, and in that case I would buy this afternoon the other kettle-supporter (I forget its right name) and have the whole lot decently packed. Take orders from a colored man? Have him give you directions, dictate you letters, discipline you if you were unpunctual? No, indeed! And if such were my feeling, how must this young Southerner feel? With this in my mind, I made sure that the part in my back hair was right, and after that precaution soon found myself on my way, in a way somewhat roundabout, to the kettle-supporter sauntering northward along High Walk, and stopping often; the town, and the water, and the distant shores all were so lovely, so belonged to one another, so melted into one gentle impression of wistfulness and tenderness! I leaned upon the stone parapet and enjoyed the quiet which every surrounding detail brought to my senses. How could John Mayrant endure such a situation? I continued to wonder; and I also continued to assure myself it was absurd to suppose that the engagement was broken.

The shutting of a front door across the street almost directly behind me attracted my attention because of its being the first sound that had happened in noiseless, empty High Walk since I had been strolling there; and I turned from the parapet to see that I was no longer the solitary person in the street. Two ladies, one tall and one diminutive, both in black and with long black veils which they had put back from their faces, were evidently coming from a visit. As the tall one bowed to me I recognized Mrs. Gregory St. Michael, and took off my hat. It was not until they had crossed the street and come up the stone steps near where I stood on High Walk that the little lady also bowed to me; she was Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael, and from something in her prim yet charming manner I gathered that she held it to be not perfectly well-bred in a lady to greet a gentleman across the width of a public highway, and that she could have wished that her tall companion had not thus greeted me, a stranger likely to comment upon Kings Port manners. In her eyes, such free deportment evidently went with her tall companion's method of speech: hadn't the little lady informed me during our first brief meeting that Kings Port at times thought Mrs. Gregory St. Michael's tongue "too downright"?

The two ladies having graciously granted me permission to join them while they took the air, Mrs. Gregory must surely have shocked Mrs. Weguelin by saying to me, "I haven't a penny for your thoughts, but I'll exchange."

"Would you thus bargain in the dark, madam?"

"Oh, I'll risk that; and, to say truth, even your back, as we came out of that house, was a back of thought."

"Well, I confess to some thinking. Shall I begin?"

It was Mrs. Weguelin who quickly replied, smiling: "Ladies first, you know. At least we still keep it so in Kings Port."

"Would we did everywhere!" I exclaimed devoutly; and I was quite aware that beneath the little lady's gentle smile a setting down had lurked, a setting down of the most delicate nature, administered to me not in the least because I had deserved one, but because she did not like Mrs. Gregory's "downright" tongue, and could not stop her.

Mrs. Gregory now took the prerogative of ladies, and began. "I was thinking of what we had all just been saying during our visit across the way—and with which you are not going to agree—that our young people would do much better to let us old people arrange their marriages for them, as it Is done in Europe."

"O dear!"

"I said that you would not agree; but that is because you are so young."

"I don't know that twenty-eight is so young."

"You will know it when you are seventy-three." This observation again came from Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael, and again with a gentle and attractive smile. It was only the second time that she had spoken; and throughout the talk into which we now fell as we slowly walked up and down High Walk, she never took the lead; she left that to the "downright" tongue—but I noticed, however, that she chose her moments to follow the lead very aptly. I also perceived plainly that what we were really going to discuss was not at all the European principle of marriage-making, but just simply young John and his Hortense; they were the true kernel of the nut with whose concealing shell Mrs. Gregory was presenting me, and in proposing an exchange of thoughts she would get back only more thoughts upon the same subject. It was pretty evident how much Kings Port was buzzing over all this! They fondly believed they did not like it; but what would they have done without it? What, indeed, were they going to do when it was all over and done with, one way or another? As a matter of fact, they ought to be grateful to Hortense for contributing illustriously to the excitement of their lives.

"Of course, I am well aware," Mrs. Gregory pursued, "that the young people of to-day believe they can all 'teach their grandmothers to suck eggs,' as we say in Kings Port."

"We say it elsewhere, too," I mildly put in.

"Indeed? I didn't know that the North, with its pest of Hebrew and other low immigrants, had retained any of the good old homely saws which we brought from England. But do you imagine that if the control of marriage rested in the hands of parents and grandparents (where it properly belongs), you would be witnessing in the North this disgusting spectacle of divorce?"

"But, Mrs. St. Michael—"

"We didn't invite you to argue when we invited you to walk!" cried the lady, laughing.

"We should like you to answer the question," said Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael.

"And tell us," Mrs. Gregory continued, "if it's your opinion that a boy who has never been married is a better judge of matrimony's pitfalls than his father."

"Or than any older person who has bravely and worthily gone through with the experience," Mrs. Weguelin added.

"Ladies, I've no mind to argue. But we're ahead of Europe; we don't need their clumsy old plan."

Mrs. Gregory gave a gallant, incredulous snort. "I shall be interested to learn of anything that is done better here than in Europe."

"Oh, many things, surely! But especially the mating of the fashionable young. They don't need any parents to arrange for them; it's much better managed through precocity."

"Through precocity? I scarcely follow you."

And Mrs. Weguelin softly added, "You must excuse us if we do not follow you." But her softness nevertheless indicated that if there were any one present needing leniency, it was myself.

"Why, yes," I told them, "it's through precocity. The new-rich American no longer commits the blunder of keeping his children innocent. You'll see it beginning in the dancing-class, where I heard an exquisite little girl of six say to a little boy, 'Go away; I can't dance with you, because my mamma says your mamma only keeps a maid to answer the doorbell.' When they get home from the dancing-class, tutors in poker and bridge are waiting to teach them how to gamble for each other's little dimes. I saw a little boy in knickerbockers and a wide collar throw down the evening paper—"

"At that age? They read the papers?" interrupted Mrs. Gregory.

"They read nothing else at any age. He threw it down and said, 'Well, I guess there's not much behind this raid on Steel Preferred.' What need has such a boy for parents or grandparents? Presently he is travelling to a fashionable boarding-school in his father's private car. At college all his adolescent curiosities are lavishly gratified. His sister at home reads the French romances, and by eighteen she, too, knows (in her head at least) the whole of life, so that she can be perfectly trusted; she would no more marry a mere half-millionaire just because she loved him than she would appear twice in the same ball-dress. She and her ball-dresses are described in the papers precisely as if she were an animal at a show—which indeed is what she has become; and she's eager to be thus described, because she and her mother—even if her mother was once a lady and knew better—are haunted by one perpetual, sickening fear, the fear of being left out. And if you desire to pay correct ballroom compliments, you no longer go to her mother and tell her she's looking every bit as young as her daughter; you go to the daughter and tell her she's looking every bit as old as her mother, for that's what she wishes to do, that's what she tries for, what she talks, dresses, eats, drinks, goes to indecent plays and laughs for. Yes, we manage it through precocity, and the new-rich American parent has achieved at least one new thing under the sun, namely, the corruption of the child."

My ladies silently consulted each other's expressions, after which, in equal silence, their gaze returned to me; but their equally intent scrutiny was expressive of quite different things. It was with expectancy that Mrs. Gregory looked at me—she wanted more. Not so Mrs. Weguelin; she gave me disapproval; it was shadowed in her beautiful, lustrous eyes that burned dark in her white face with as much fire as that of youth, yet it was not of youth, being deeply charged with retrospection.

In what, then, had I sinned? For the little lady's next words, coldly murmured, increased in me an uneasiness, as of sin:—

"You have told us much that we are not accustomed to hear in Kings Port."

"Oh, I haven't begun to tell you!" I exclaimed cheerily.

"You certainly have not told us," said Mrs. Gregory, "how your 'precocity' escapes this divorce degradation."

"Escape it? Those people think it is—well, provincial—not to have been divorced at least once!"

Mrs. Gregory opened her eyes, but Mrs. Weguelin shut her lips.

I continued: "Even the children, for their own little reasons, like it. Only last summer, in Newport, a young boy was asked how he enjoyed having a father and an ex-father."

"Ex-father!" said Mrs. Gregory. "Vice-father is what I should call him."

"Maria!" murmured Mrs. Weguelin, "how can you jest upon such topics?"

"I am far from jesting, Julia. Well, young gentleman, and what answer did this precious Newport child make?"

"He said (if you will pardon my giving you his little sentiment in his own quite expressive idiom), 'Me for two fathers! Double money birthdays and Christmases. See?' That was how he saw divorce."

Once again my ladies consulted each other's expressions; we moved along High Walk in such silence that I heard the stiff little rustle which the palmettos were making across the street; even these trees, you might have supposed, were whispering together over the horrors that I had recited in their decorous presence.

It was Mrs. Gregory who next spoke. "I can translate that last boy's language, but what did the other boy mean about a 'raid on Steel Preferred'—if I've got the jargon right?"

While I translated this for her, I felt again the disapproval in Mrs. Weguelin's dark eyes; and my sins—for they were twofold—were presently made clear to me by this lady.

"Are such subjects as—as stocks" (she softly cloaked this word in scorn immeasurable)—"are such subjects mentioned in your good society at the North?"

I laughed heartily. "Everything's mentioned!"

The lady paused over my reply. "I am afraid you must feel us to be very old-fashioned in, Kings Port," she then said.

"But I rejoice in it!"

She ignored my not wholly dexterous compliment. "And some subjects," she pursued, "seem to us so grave that if we permit ourselves to speak of them at all we cannot speak of them lightly."

No, they couldn't speak of them lightly! Here, then, stood my two sins revealed; everything I had imparted, and also my tone of imparting it, had displeased Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael, not with the thing, but with me. I had transgressed her sound old American code of good manners, a code slightly pompous no doubt, but one in which no familiarity was allowed to breed contempt. To her good taste, there were things in the world which had, apparently, to exist, but which one banished from drawing-room discussion as one conceals from sight the kitchen and outhouses; one dealt with them only when necessity compelled, and never in small-talk; and here had I been, so to speak, small-talking them in that glib, modern, irresponsible cadence with which our brazen age rings and clatters like the beating of triangles and gongs. Not triangles and gongs, but rather strings and flutes, had been the music to which Kings Port society had attuned its measured voice.

I saw it all, and even saw that my own dramatic sense of Mrs. Weguelin's dignity had perversely moved me to be more flippant than I actually felt; and I promised myself that a more chastened tone should forthwith redeem me from the false position I had got into.

"My dear," said Mrs. Gregory to Mrs. Weguelin, "we must ask him to excuse our provincialism."

For the second time I was not wholly dexterous. "But I like it so much!" I exclaimed; and both ladies laughed frankly.

Mrs. Gregory brought in a fable. "You'll find us all 'country mice' here."

This time I was happy. "At least, then, there'll be no cat!" And this caused us all to make little bows.

But the word "cat" fell into our talk as does a drop of some acid into a chemical solution, instantly changing the whole to an unexpected new color. The unexpected new color was, in this instance, merely what had been latently lurking in the fluid of our consciousness all through and now it suddenly came out.

Mrs. Gregory stared over the parapet at the harbor. "I wonder if anybody has visited that steam yacht?"

"The Hermana?" I said. "She's waiting, I believe, for her owner, who is enjoying himself very much on land." It was a strong temptation to add, "enjoying himself with the cat," but I resisted it.

"Oh!" said Mrs. Gregory. "Possibly a friend of yours?"

"Even his name is unknown to me. But I gather that he may be coming to Kings Port—to attend Mr. John Mayrant's wedding next Wednesday week."

I hadn't gathered this; but one is at times driven to improvising. I wished so much to know if Juno was right about the engagement being broken, and I looked hard at the ladies as my words fairly grazed the "cat." This time I expected them to consult each other's expressions, and such, indeed, was their immediate proceeding.

"The Wednesday following, you mean," Mrs. Weguelin corrected.

"Postponed again? Dear me!"

Mrs. Gregory spoke this time. "General Rieppe. Less well again, it seems."

It would be like Juno to magnify a delay into a rupture. Then I had a hilarious thought, which I instantly put to the ladies. "If the poor General were to die completely, would the wedding be postponed completely?"

"There would not be the slightest chance of that," Mrs. Gregory declared. And then she pronounced a sentence that was truly oracular: "She's coming at once to see for herself."

To which Mrs. Weguelin added with deeper condemnation than she had so far employed at all: "There is a rumor that she is actually coming in an automobile."

My silence upon these two remarks was the silence of great and sudden interest; but it led Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael to do my perceptions a slight injustice, and she had no intention that I should miss the quality of her opinion regarding the vehicle in which Hortense was reported to be travelling.

"Miss Rieppe has the extraordinary taste to come here in an automobile," said Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael, with deepened severity.

Though I understood quite well, without this emphasizing, that the little lady would, with her unbending traditions, probably think it more respectable to approach Kings Port in a wheelbarrow, I was absorbed by the vague but copious import of Mrs. Gregory's announcement. The oracles, moreover, continued.

"But she is undoubtedly very clever to come and see for herself," was Mrs. Weguelin's next comment.

Mrs. Gregory's face, as she replied to her companion, took on a censorious and superior expression. "You'll remember, Julia, that I told Josephine St. Michael it was what they had to expect."

"But it was not Josephine, my dear, who at any time approved of taking such a course. It was Eliza's whole doing."

It was fairly raining oracles round me, and they quite resembled, for all the help and light they contained, their Delphic predecessors.

"And yet Eliza," said Mrs. Gregory, "in the face of it, this very morning, repeated her eternal assertion that we shall all see the marriage will not take place."

"Eliza," murmured Mrs. Weguelin, "rates few things more highly than her own judgment."

Mrs. Gregory mused. "Yet she is often right when she has no right to be right."

I could not bear it any longer, and I said, "I heard to-day that Miss Rieppe had broken her engagement."

"And where did you hear that nonsense?" asked Mrs. Gregory.

My heart leaped, and I told her where.

"Oh, well! you will hear anything in a boarding-house. Indeed, that would be a great deal too good to be true."

"May I ask where Miss Rieppe is all this while?"

"The last news was from Palm Beach, where the air was said to be necessary for the General."

"But," Mrs. Weguelin repeated, "we have every reason to believe that she is coming here in an automobile."

"We shall have to call, of course," added Mrs. Gregory to her, not to me; they were leaving me out of it. Yes, these ladies were forgetting about me in their using preoccupation over whatever crisis it was that now hung over John Mayrant's love affairs—a preoccupation which was evidently part of Kings Port's universal buzz to-day, and which my joining them in the street had merely mitigated for a moment. I did not wish to be left out of it; I cannot tell you why—perhaps it was contagious in the local air—but a veritable madness of craving to know about it seized upon me. Of course, I saw that Miss Rieppe was, almost too grossly and obviously, "playing for time"; the health of people's fathers did not cause weekly extensions of this sort. But what was it that the young lady expected time to effect for her? Her release, formally, by her young man, on the ground of his worldly ill fortune? Or was it for an offer from the owner of the Hermana that she was waiting, before she should take the step of formally releasing John Mayrant? No, neither of these conjectures seemed to furnish a key to the tactics of Miss Rieppe and the theory that each of these affianced parties was strategizing to cause the other to assume the odium of breaking their engagement, with no result save that of repeatedly countermanding a wedding-cake, struck me as belonging admirably to a stage-comedy in three acts, but scarcely to life as we find it. Besides, poor John Mayrant was, all too plainly, not strategizing; he was playing as straight a game as the honest heart of a gentleman could inspire. And so, baffled at all points, I said (for I simply had to try something which might lead to my sharing in Kings Port's vibrating secret):—

"I can't make out whether she wants to marry him or not."

Mrs. Gregory answered. "That is just what she is coming to see for herself."

"But since her love was for his phosphates only—!" was my natural exclamation.

It caused (and this time I did not expect it) my inveterate ladies to consult each other's expressions. They prolonged their silence so much that I spoke again:—

"And backing out of this sort of thing can be done, I should think, quite as cleverly, and much more simply, from a distance."

It was Mrs. Weguelin who answered now, or, rather, who headed me off. "Have you been able to make out whether he wants to marry her or not?"

"Oh, he never comes near any of that with me!"

"Certainly not. But we all understand that he has taken a fancy to you, and that you have talked much with him."

So they all understood this, did they? This, too, had played its little special part in the buzz? Very well, then, nothing of my private impressions should drop from my lips here, to be quoted and misquoted and battledored and shuttlecocked, until it reached the boy himself (as it would inevitably) in fantastic disarrangement. I laughed. "Oh, yes! I have talked much with him. Shakespeare, I think, was our latest subject."

Mrs. Weguelin was plainly watching for something to drop. "Shakespeare!" Her tone was of surprise.

I then indulged myself in that most delightful sort of impertinence, which consists in the other person's not seeing it. "You wouldn't be likely to have heard of that yet. It occurred only before dinner to-day. But we have also talked optimism, pessimism, sociology, evolution—Mr. Mayrant would soon become quite—" I stopped myself on the edge of something very clumsy.

But sharp Mrs. Gregory finished for me. "Yes, you mean that if he didn't live in Kings Port (where we still have reverence, at any rate), he fit would imbibe all the shallow quackeries of the hour and resemble all the clever young donkeys of the minute."

"Maria!" Mrs. Weguelin murmurously expostulated.

Mrs. Gregory immediately made me a handsome but equivocal apology. "I wasn't thinking of you at all!" she declared gayly; and it set me doubting if perhaps she hadn't, after all, comprehended my impertinence. "And, thank Heaven!" she continued, "John is one of us, in spite of his present stubborn course."

But Mrs. Weguelin's beautiful eyes were resting upon me with that disapproval I had come to know. To her, sociology and evolution and all "isms" were new-fangled inventions and murky with offense; to touch them was defilement, and in disclosing them to John Mayrant I was a corrupter of youth. She gathered it all up into a word that was radiant with a kind of lovely maternal gentleness:—

"We should not wish John to become radical."

In her voice, the whole of old Kings Port was enshrined: hereditary faith and hereditary standards, mellow with the adherence of generations past, and solicitous for the boy of the young generation. I saw her eyes soften at the thought of him; and throughout the rest of our talk to its end her gaze would now and then return to me, shadowed with disapproval.

I addressed Mrs. Gregory. "By his 'present stubborn course' I suppose you mean the Custom House."

"All of us deplore his obstinacy. His Aunt Eliza has strongly but vainly expostulated with him. And after that, Miss Josephine felt obliged to tell him that he need not come to see her again until he resigned a position which reflects ignominy upon us all."

I suppressed a whistle. I thought (as I have said earlier) that I had caught a full vision of John Mayrant's present plight. But my imagination had not soared to the height of Miss Josephine St. Michael's act of discipline. This, it must have been, that the boy had checked himself from telling me in the churchyard. What a character of sterner times was Miss Josephine! I thought of Aunt Carola, but even she was not quite of this iron, and I said so to Mrs. Gregory. "I doubt if there be any old lady left in the North," I said, "capable of such antique severity."

But Mrs. Gregory opened my eyes still further. "Oh, you'd have them if you had the negro to deal with as we have him. Miss Josephine," she added, "has to-day removed her sentence of banishment."

I felt on the verge of new discoveries. "What!" I exclaimed, "and did she relent?"

"New circumstances intervened," Mrs. Gregory loftily explained. "There was an occurrence—an encounter, in fact—in which John Mayrant fittingly punished one who had presumed. Upon hearing of it, this morning, Miss Josephine sent a message to John that he might resume visiting her.

"But that is perfectly grand!" I cried in my delight over Miss Josephine as a character.

"It is perfectly natural," returned Mrs. Gregory, quietly. "John has behaved with credit throughout. He was at length made to see that circumstances forbade any breach between his family and that of the other young man. John held back—who would not, after such an insult?—but Miss Josephine was firm, and he has promised to call and shake hands. My cousin, Doctor Beaugarcon, assures me that the young man's injuries are trifling—a week will see him restored and presentable again."

"A week? A mere nothing!" I answered "Do you know," I now suggested, "that you have forgotten to ask me what I was thinking about when we met?"

"Bless me, young gentleman! and was it so remarkable?"

"Not at all, but it partly answers what Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael asked me. If a young man does not really wish to marry a young woman there are ways well known by which she can be brought to break the engagement."

"Ah," said Mrs. Gregory, "of course; gayeties and irregularities—"

"That is, if he's not above them," I hastily subjoined.

"Not always, by any means," Mrs. Gregory returned. "Kings Port has been treated to some episodes—"

Mrs. Weguelin put in a word of defence. "It is to be said, Maria, that John's irregularities have invariably been conducted with perfect propriety."

"Oh," said Mrs. Gregory, "no Mayrant was ever known to be gross!"

"But this particular young lady," said Mrs. Weguelin, "would not be estranged by an masculine irregularities and gayeties. Not many."

"How about infidelities?" I suggested. "If he should flagrantly lose his heart to another?"

Mrs. Weguelin replied quickly. "That answers very well where hearts are in question."

"But," said I, "since phosphates are no longer—?"

There was a pause. "It would be a new dilemma," Mrs. Gregory then said slowly, "if she turned out to care for him, after all."

Throughout all this I was getting more and more the sense of how a total circle of people, a well-filled, wide circle of interested people, surrounded and cherished John Mayrant, made itself the setting of which he was the jewel; I felt in it, even stronger than the manifestation of personal affection (which certainly was strong enough), a collective sense of possession in him, a clan value, a pride and a guardianship concentrated and jealous, as of an heir to some princely estate, who must be worthy for the sake of a community even before he was worthy for his own sake. Thus he might amuse himself—it was in the code that princely heirs so should pour se deniaiser, as they neatly put it in Paris—thus might he and must he fight when his dignity was assailed; but thus might he not marry outside certain lines prescribed, or depart from his circle's established creeds, divine and social, especially to hold any position which (to borrow Mrs. Gregory's phrase) "reflected ignominy" upon them all. When he transgressed, their very value for him turned them bitter against him. I know that all of us are more or less chained to our community, which is pleased to expect us to walk its way, and mightily displeased when we please ourselves instead by breaking the chain and walking our own way; and I know that we are forgiven very slowly; but I had not dreamed what a prisoner to communal criticism a young American could be until I beheld Kings Port over John Mayrant.

And to what estate was this prince heir? Alas, his inheritance was all of it the Past and none of it the Future; was the full churchyard and the empty wharves! He was paying dear for his princedom! And then, there was yet another sense of this beautiful town that I got here completely, suddenly crystallized, though slowly gathering ever since my arrival: all these old people were clustered about one young one. That was it; that was the town's ultimate tragic note: the old timber of the forest dying and the too sparse new growth appearing scantily amid the tall, fine, venerable, decaying trunks. It had been by no razing to the ground and sowing with salt that the city had perished; a process less violent but more sad had done away with it. Youth, in the wake of commerce, had ebbed from Kings Port, had flowed out from the silent, mourning houses, and sought life North and West, and wherever else life was to be found. Into my revery floated a phrase from a melodious and once favorite song: O tempo passato perche non ritorni?

And John Mayrant? Why, then, had he tarried here himself? That is a hard saying about crabbed age and youth, but are not most of the sayings hard that are true? What was this young man doing in Kings Port with his brains, and his pride, and his energetic adolescence? If the Custom House galled him, the whole country was open to him; why not have tried his fortune out and away, over the hills, where the new cities lie, all full of future and empty of past? Was it much to the credit of such a young man to find himself at the age of twenty-three or twenty-four, sound and lithe of limb, yet tied to the apron strings of Miss Josephine, and Miss Eliza, and some thirty or forty other elderly female relatives?

With these thoughts I looked at the ladies and wondered how I might lead them to answer me about John Mayrant, without asking questions which might imply something derogatory to him or painful to them. I could not ever say to them a word which might mean, however indirectly, that I thought their beautiful, cherished town no place for a young man to go to seed in; this cut so close to the quick of truth that discourse must keep wide away from it. What, then, could I ask them? As I pondered, Mrs. Weguelin solved it for me by what she was saying to Mrs. Gregory, of which, in my preoccupation, I had evidently missed a part:—

"—if he should share the family bad taste in wives."

"Eliza says she has no fear of that."

"Were I Eliza, Hugh's performance would make me very uneasy."

"Julia, John does not resemble Hugh."

"Very decidedly, in coloring, Maria."

"And Hugh found that girl in Minneapolis, Julia, where there was doubtless no pick for the poor fellow. And remember that George chose a lady, at any rate."

Mrs. Weguelin gave to this a short assent. "Yes." It portended something more behind, which her next words duly revealed. "A lady; but do—any—ladies ever seem quite like our own?

"Certainly not, Julia."

You see, they were forgetting me again; but they had furnished me with a clue.

"Mr. John Mayrant has married brothers?"

"Two," Mrs. Gregory responded. "John is the youngest of three children."

"I hadn't heard of the brothers before."

"They seldom come here. They saw fit to leave their home and their delicate mother."

"Oh!"

"But John," said Mrs. Gregory, "met his responsibility like a Mayrant."

"Whatever temptations he has yielded to," said Mrs. Weguelin, "his filial piety has stood proof."

"He refused," added Mrs. Gregory, "when George (and I have never understood how George could be so forgetful of their mother) wrote twice, offering him a lucrative and rising position in the railroad company at Roanoke."

"That was hard!" I exclaimed.

She totally misapplied my sympathy. "Oh, Anna Mayrant," she corrected herself, "John's mother, Mrs. Hector Mayrant, had harder things than forgetful sons to bear! I've not laid eyes on those boys since the funeral."

"Nearly two years," murmured Mrs. Weguelin. And then, to me, with something that was almost like a strange severity beneath her gentle tone: "Therefore we are proud of John, because the better traits in his nature remind us of his forefathers, whom we knew."

"In Kings Port," said Mrs. Gregory, "we prize those who ring true to the blood."

By way of response to this sentiment, I quoted some French to her. "Bon chien chasse de race."

It pleased Mrs. Weguelin. Her guarded attitude toward me relented. "John mentioned your cultivation to us," she said. "In these tumble-down days it is rare to meet with one who still lives, mentally, on the gentlefolks' plane—the piano nobile of intelligence!"

I realized how high a compliment she was paying me, and I repaid it with a joke. "Take care. Those who don't live there would call it the piano snobile."

"Ah!" cried the delighted lady, "they'd never have the wit!"

"Did you ever hear," I continued, "the Bostonian's remark—'The mission of America is to vulgarize the world'?"

"I never expected to agree so totally with a Bostonian!" declared Mrs. Gregory.

"Nothing so hopeful," I pursued, "has ever been said of us. For refinement and thoroughness and tradition delay progress, and we are sweeping them out of the road as fast as we can."

"Come away, Julia," said Mrs. Gregory. "The young gentleman is getting flippant again, and we leave him."

The ladies, after gracious expressions concerning the pleasure of their stroll, descended the steps at the north end of High Walk, where the parapet stops, and turned inland from the water through a little street. I watched them until they went out of my sight round a corner; but the two silent, leisurely figures, moving in their black and their veils along an empty highway, come back to me often in the pictures of my thoughts; come back most often, indeed, as the human part of what my memory sees when it turns to look at Kings Port. For, first, it sees the blue frame of quiet sunny water, and the white town within its frame beneath the clear, untainted air; and then it sees the high-slanted roofs, red with their old corrugated tiles, and the tops of leafy enclosures dipping below sight among quaint and huddled quadrangles; and, next, the quiet houses standing in their separate grounds, their narrow ends to the street and their long, two-storied galleries open to the south, but their hushed windows closed as if against the prying, restless Present that must not look in and disturb the motionless memories which sit brooding behind these shutters; and between all these silent mansions lie the narrow streets, the quiet, empty streets, along which, as my memory watches them, pass the two ladies silently, in their black and their veils, moving between high, mellow-colored garden walls over whose tops look the oleanders, the climbing roses, and all the taller flowers of the gardens.

And if Mrs. Gregory and Mrs. Weguelin seemed to me at moments as narrow as those streets, they also seemed to me as lovely as those serene gardens; and if I had smiled at their prejudices, I had loved their innocence, their deep innocence, of the poisoned age which has succeeded their own; and if I had wondered this day at their powers for cruelty, I wondered the next day at the glimpse I had of their kindness. For during a pelting cold rainstorm, as I sat and shivered in a Royal Street car, waiting for it to start upon its north-bound course, the house-door opposite which we stood at the end of the track opened, and Mrs. Weguelin's head appeared, nodding to the conductor as she sent her black servant out with hot coffee for him! He took off his hat, and smiled, and thanked her; and when we had started and I, the sole passenger in the chilly car, asked him about this, he said with native pride: "The ladies always watches out for us conductors in stormy weather, sir. That's Mistress Weguelin St. Michael, one of our finest." And then he gave me careful directions how to find a shop that I was seeking.

Think of this happening in New York! Think of the aristocracy of that metropolis warming up with coffee the—but why think of it, or of a New York conductor answering your questions with careful directions! It is not New York's fault, it is merely New York's misfortune: New York is in a hurry; and a world of haste cannot be a world either of courtesy or of kindness. But we have progress, progress, instead; and that is a tremendous consolation.



XI: Daddy Ben and His Seed

But what was Hortense Rieppe coming to see for herself?

Many dark things had been made plain to me by my talk with the two ladies; yet while disclosing so much, they had still left this important matter in shadow. I was very glad, however, for what they had revealed. They had showed me more of John Mayrant's character, and more also of the destiny which had shaped his ends, so that my esteem for him had increased; for some of the words that they had exchanged shone like bright lanterns down into his nature upon strength and beauty lying quietly there—young strength and beauty, yet already tempered by manly sacrifice. I saw how it came to pass through this, through renunciation of his own desires, through performance of duties which had fallen upon him not quite fairly, that the eye of his spirit had been turned away from self; thus had it grown strong-sighted and able to look far and deep, as his speech sometimes revealed, while still his flesh was of his youthful age, and no saint's flesh either. This had the ladies taught me during the fluttered interchange of their reminders and opinions, and by their eager agreements and disagreements, I was also grateful to them in that I could once more correct Juno. The pleasure should be mine to tell them in the public hearing of our table that Miss Rieppe was still engaged to John Mayrant.

But what was this interesting girl coming to see for herself?

This little hole in my knowledge gave me discomfort as I walked along toward the antiquity shop where I was to buy the other kettle-supporter. The ladies, with all their freedom of comment and censure, had kept something from me. I reviewed, I pieced together, their various remarks, those oracles, especially, which they had let fall, but it all came back to the same thing. I did not know, and they did, what Hortense Rieppe was coming to see for herself. At all events, the engagement was not broken, the chance to be instrumental in having it broken was still mine; I might still save John Mayrant from his deplorable quixotism; and as this reflection grew with me I took increasing comfort in it, and I stepped onward toward my kettle-supporter, filled with that sense of moral well-being which will steal over even the humblest of us when we feel that we are beneficently minding somebody else's business.

Whenever the arrangement did not take me too widely from my course, I so mapped out my walks and errands in Kings Port that I might pass by the churchyard and church at the corner of Court and Worship streets. Even if I did not indulge myself by turning in to stroll and loiter among the flowers, it was enough pleasure to walk by that brick-wall. If you are willing to wander curiously in our old towns, you may still find in many of them good brick walls standing undisturbed, and equal in their color and simple excellence to those of Kings Port; but fashion has pushed these others out of its sight, among back streets and all sorts of forgotten purlieus and abandoned dignity, and takes its walks to-day amid cold, expensive ugliness; while the old brick walls of Kings Port continually frame your steps with charm. No one workman famous for his skill built them so well proportioned, so true to comeliness; it was the general hand of their age that could shape nothing wrong, as the hand of to-day can shape nothing right, save by a rigid following of the old.

I gave myself the pleasure this afternoon of walking by the churchyard wall; and when I reached the iron gate, there was Daddy Ben. So full was I of my thoughts concerning John Mayrant, and the vicissitudes of his heart, and the Custom House, that I was moved to have words with the old man upon the general topic.

"Well," I said, "and so Mr. John is going to be married."

No attempt to start a chat ever failed more signally. He assented with a manner of mingled civility and reserve that was perfection, and after the two syllables of which his answer consisted, he remained as impenetrably respectful as before. I felt rather high and dry, but I tried it again:—

"And I'm sure, Daddy Ben, that you feel as sorry as any of the family that the phosphates failed."

Again he replied with his two syllables of assent, and again he stood mute, respectful, a little bent with his great age; but now his good manners—and better manners were never seen—impelled him to break silence upon some subject, since he would not permit himself to speak concerning the one which I had introduced. It was the phosphates which inspired him.

"Dey is mighty fine prostrate wukks heah, sah."

"Yes, I've been told so, Daddy Ben."

"On dis side up de ribber an' tudder side down de ribber 'cross de new bridge. Wuth visitin' fo' strangers, sah."

I now felt entirely high and dry. I had attempted to enter into conversation with him about the intimate affairs of a family to which he felt that he belonged; and with perfect tact he had not only declined to discuss them with me, but had delicately informed me that I was a stranger and as such had better visit the phosphate works among the other sights of Kings Port. No diplomat could have done it better; and as I walled away from him I knew that he regarded me as an outsider, a Northerner, belonging to a race hostile to his people; he had seen Mas' John friendly with me, but that was Mas' John's affair. And so it was that if the ladies had kept something from me, this cunning, old, polite, coal-black African had kept everything from me.

If all the negroes in Kings Port were like Daddy Ben, Mrs. Gregory St. Michael would not have spoken of having them "to deal with," and the girl behind the counter would not have been thrown into such indignation when she alluded to their conceit and ignorance. Daddy Ben had, so far from being puffed up by the appointment in the Custom House, disapproved of this. I had heard enough about the difference between the old and new generations of the negro of Kings Port to believe it to be true, and I had come to discern how evidently it lay at the bottom of many things here: John Mayrant and his kind were a band united by a number of strong ties, but by nothing so much as by their hatred of the modern negro in their town. Yes, I was obliged to believe that the young Kings Port African left to freedom and the ballot, was a worse African than his slave parents; but this afternoon brought me a taste of it more pungent than all the assurances in the world.

I bought my kettle-supporter, and learned from the robber who sold it to me (Kings Port prices for "old things" are the most exorbitant that I know anywhere) that a carpenter lived not far from Mrs. Trevise's boarding-house, and that he would make for me the box in which I could pack my various purchases.

"That is, if he's working this week," added the robber.

"What else would he be doing?"

"It may be his week for getting drunk on what he earned the week before." And upon this he announced with as much bitterness as if he had been John Mayrant or any of his aunts, "That's what Boston philanthropy has done for him."

I dared up at this. "I suppose that's a Southern argument for reestablishing slavery."

"I am not Southern; Breslau is my native town, and I came from New York here to live five years ago. I've seen what your emancipation has done for the black, and I say to you, my friend, honest I don't know a fool from a philanthropist any longer."

He had much right upon his side; and it can be seen daily that philanthropy does not always walk hand-in-hand with wisdom. Does anything or anybody always walk so? Moreover, I am a friend to not many superlatives, and have perceived no saying to be more true than the one that extremes meet: they meet indeed, and folly is their meeting-place. Nor could I say in the case of the negro which folly were the more ridiculous;—that which expects a race which has lived no one knows how many thousand years in mental nakedness while Confucius, Moses, and Napoleon were flowering upon adjacent human stems, should put on suddenly the white man's intelligence, or that other folly which declares we can do nothing for the African, as if Hampton had not already wrought excellent things for him. I had no mind to enter into all the inextricable error with this Teuton, and it was he who continued:—

"Oh, these Boston philanthropists; oh, these know-it-alls! Why don't they stay home? Why do they come down here to worry us with their ignorance? See here, my friend, let me show you!"

He rushed about his shop in a search of distraught eagerness, and with a multitude of small exclamations, until, screeching jubilantly once, he pounced upon a shabby and learned-looking volume. This he brought me, thrusting it with his trembling fingers between my own, and shuffling the open pages. But when the apparently right one was found, he exclaimed, "No, I have better! and dashed away to a pile of pamphlets on the floor, where he began to plough and harrow. Wondering if I was closeted with a maniac, I looked at the book in my passive hand, and saw diagrams of various bones to me unknown, and men's names of which I was equally ignorant—Mivart, Topinard, and more,—but at last that of Huxley. But this agreeable sight was spoiled at once by the quite horrible words Nycticebidoe, platyrrhine, catarrhine, from which I raised my eyes to see him coming at me with two pamphlets, and scolding as he came.

"Are you educated, yes? Have been to college, yes? Then perhaps you will understand."

Certainly I understood immediately that he and his pamphlets were as bad as the book, or worse, in their use of a vocabulary designed to cause almost any listener the gravest inconvenience. Common Eocene ancestors occurred at the beginning of his lecture; and I believed that if it got no stronger than this, I could at least preserve the appearance of comprehending him; but it got stronger, and at sacro-iliac notch I may say, without using any grossly exaggerated expression, that I became unconscious. At least, all intelligence left me. When it returned, he was saying.—

"But this is only the beginning. Come in here to my crania and jaws."

Evidently he held me hypnotized, for he now hurried me unresisting through a back door into a dark little where he turned up the gas, and I saw shelves as in a museum, to one of which he led me. I suppose that it was curiosity that rendered me thus sheep-like. Upon the shelf were a number of skulls and jaws in admirable condition and graded arrangement, beginning to the left with that flat kind of skull which one associates with gorillas. He resumed his scolding harangue, and for a few brief moments I understood him. Here, told by themselves, was as much of the story of the skulls as we know, from manlike apes through glacial man to the modern senator or railroad president. But my intelligence was destined soon to die away again.

"That is the Caucasian skull: your skull," he said, touching a specimen at the right.

"Interesting," I murmured. "I'm afraid I know nothing about skulls."

"But you shall know someding before you leave," he retorted, wagging his head at me; and this time it was not the book, but a specimen, that he pushed into my grasp. He gave it a name, not as bad as platyrrhine, but I feared worse was coming; then he took it away from me, gave me another skull, and while I obediently held it, pronounced something quite beyond me.

"And what is the translation of that?" he demanded excitedly.

"Tell me," I feebly answered.

He shouted with overweening triumph: "The translation of that is South Carolina nigger. Notice well this so egcellent specimen. Prognathous, megadont, platyrrhine."

"Ha! Platyrrhine!" I saluted the one word I recognized as I drowned.

"You have said it yourself!" was his extraordinary answer;—for what had I said? Almost as if he were going to break into a dance for joy, he took the Caucasian skull and the other two, and set the three together by themselves, away from the rest of the collection. The picture which they thus made spoke more than all the measurements and statistics which he now chattered out upon me, reading from his book as I contemplated the skulls. There was a similarity of shape, a kinship there between the three, which stared you in the face; but in the contours of vaulted skull, the projecting jaws, and the great molar teeth—what was to be seen? Why, in every respect that the African departed from the Caucasian, he departed in the direction of the ape! Here was zoology mutely but eloquently telling us why there had blossomed no Confucius, no Moses, no Napoleon, upon that black stem; why no Iliad, no Parthenon, no Sistine Madonna, had ever risen from that tropic mud.

The collector touched my sleeve. "Have you now learned someding about skulls, my friend? Will you invite those Boston philanthropists to stay home? They will get better results in civilization by giving votes to monkeys than teaching Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to riggers."

Retaliation rose in me. "Haven't you learned to call them negroes?" I remarked. But this was lost upon the Teuton. I was tempted to tell him that I was no philanthropist, and no Bostonian, and that he need not shout so loud, but my more dignified instincts restrained me. I withdrew my sleeve from his touch (it was this act of his, I think, that had most to do with my displeasure), and merely bidding him observe that the enormous price of the kettle-supporter had been reduced for me by his exhibition to a bagatelle, I left the shop of the screaming anatomist—or Afropath, or whatever it may seem most fitting that he should be called.

I bore the kettle-supporter with me, tied up objectionably in newspaper, and knotted with ungainly string; and it was this bundle which prevented my joining the girl behind the counter, and ending by a walk with a young lady the afternoon that had begun by a walk with two old ones. I should have liked to make my confession to her. She was evidently out for the sake of taking the air, and had with her no companion save the big curly white dog; confession would have been very agreeable; but I looked again at my ugly newspaper bundle, and turned in a direction that she was not herself pursuing.

Twice, as I went, I broke into laughter over my interview in the shop, which I fear has lost its comical quality in the relating. To enter a door and come serenely in among dingy mahogany and glass objects, to bargain haughtily for a brass bauble with the shopkeeper, and to have a few exchanged remarks suddenly turn the whole place into a sort of bedlam with a gibbering scientist dashing skulls at me to prove his fixed idea, and myself quite furious—I laughed more than twice; but, by the time I had approached the neighborhood of the carpenter's shop, another side of it had brought reflection to my mind. Here was a foreigner to whom slavery and the Lost Cause were nothing, whose whole association with the South had begun but five years ago; and the race question had brought his feelings to this pitch! He had seen the Kings Port negro with the eyes of the flesh, and not with the eyes of theory, and as a result the reddest rag for him was pale beside a Boston philanthropist!

Nevertheless, I have said already that I am no lover of superlatives, and in doctrine especially is this true. We need not expect a Confucius from the negro, nor yet a Chesterfield; but I am an enemy also of that blind and base hate against him, which conducts nowhere save to the de-civilizing of white and black alike. Who brought him here? Did he invite himself? Then let us make the best of it and teach him, lead him, compel him to live self-respecting, not as statesman, poet, or financier, but by the honorable toil of his hand and sweat of his brow. Because "the door of hope" was once opened too suddenly for him is no reason for slamming it now forever in his face.

Thus mentally I lectured back at the Teuton as I went through the streets of Kings Port; and after a while I turned a corner which took me abruptly, as with one magic step, out of the white man's world into the blackest Congo. Even the well-inhabited quarter of Kings Port (and I had now come within this limited domain) holds narrow lanes and recesses which teem and swarm with negroes. As cracks will run through fine porcelain, so do these black rifts of Africa lurk almost invisible among the gardens and the houses. The picture that these places offered, tropic, squalid, and fecund, often caused me to walk through them and watch the basking population; the intricate, broken wooden galleries, the rickety outside stair cases, the red and yellow splashes of color on the clothes lines, the agglomerate rags that stuffed holes in decaying roofs or hung nakedly on human frames, the small, choked dwellings, bursting open at doors and windows with black, round-eyed babies as an overripe melon bursts with seeds, the children playing marbles in the court, the parents playing cards in the room, the grandparents smoking pipes on the porch, and the great-grandparents stairs gazing out at you like creatures from the Old Testament or the jungle. From the jungle we had stolen them, North and South had stolen them together, long ago, to be slaves, not to be citizens, and now here they were, the fruits of our theft; and for some reason (possibly the Teuton was the reason) that passage from the Book of Exodus came into my head: "For I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children."

These thoughts were interrupted by sounds as of altercation. I had nearly reached the end of the lane, where I should again emerge into the White man's world, and where I was now walking the lane spread into a broader space with ells and angles and rotting steps, and habitations mostly too ruinous to be inhabited. It was from a sashless window in one of these that the angry voices came. The first words which were distinct aroused my interest quite beyond the scale of an ordinary altercation:—

"Calls you'self a reconstuckted niggah?"

This was said sharply and with prodigious scorn. The answer which it brought was lengthy and of such a general sullen incoherence that I could make out only a frequent repetition of "custom house," and that somebody was going to take care of somebody hereafter.

Into this the first voice broke with tones of highest contempt and rapidity:—

"President gwine to gib brekfus' an' dinnah an suppah to de likes ob you fo' de whole remaindah oh youh wuthless nat'ral life? Get out ob my sight, you reconstuckted niggah. I come out oh de St. Michael."

There came through the window immediately upon this sounds of scuffling and of a fall, and then cries for help which took me running into the dilapidated building. Daddy Ben lay on the floor, and a thick, young savage was kicking him. In some remarkable way I thought of the solidity of their heads, and before the assailant even knew that he had a witness, I sped forward, aiming my kettle-supporter, and with its sharp brass edge I dealt him a crack over his shin with astonishing accuracy. It was a dismal howl that he gave, and as he turned he got from me another crack upon the other shin. I had no time to be alarmed at my deed, or I think that I should have been very much so; I am a man above all of peace, and physical encounters are peculiarly abhorrent to me; but, so far from assailing me, the thick, young savage, with the single muttered remark, "He hit me fuss," got himself out of the house with the most agreeable rapidity.

Daddy Ben sat up, and his first inquiry greatly reassured me as to his state. He stared at my paper bundle. "You done make him hollah wid dat, sah!"

I showed him the kettle-supporter through a rent in its wrapping, and I assisted him to stand upright. His injuries proved fortunately to be slight (although I may say here that the shock to his ancient body kept him away for a few days from the churchyard), and when I began to talk to him about the incident, he seemed unwilling to say much in answer to my questions. And when I offered to accompany him to where he lived, he declined altogether, assuring me that it was close, and that he could walk there as well as if nothing had happened to him; but upon my asking him if I was on the right way to the carpenter's shop, he looked at me curiously.

"No use you gwine dab, sah. Dat shop close up. He not wukkin, dis week, and dat why fo' I jaw him jus' now when you come in an' stop him. He de cahpentah, my gran'son, Cha's Coteswuth."



XII: From the Bedside

Next morning when I saw the weltering sky I resigned myself to a day of dullness; yet before its end I had caught a bright new glimpse of John Mayrant's abilities, and also had come, through tribulation, to a further understanding of the South; so that I do not, to-day, regret the tribulation. As the rain disappointed me of two outdoor expeditions, to which I had been for some little while looking forward, I dedicated most of my long morning to a sadly neglected correspondence, and trusted that the expeditions, as soon as the next fine weather visited Kings Port, would still be in store for me. Not only everybody in town here, but Aunt Carola, up in the North also, had assured me that to miss the sight of Live Oaks when the azaleas in the gardens of that country seat were in flower would be to lose one of the rarest and most beautiful things which could be seen anywhere; and so I looked out of my window at the furious storm, hoping that it might not strip the bushes at Live Oaks of their bloom, which recent tourists at Mrs. Trevise's had described as drawing near the zenith of its luxuriance. The other excursion to Udolpho with John Mayrant was not so likely to fall through. Udolpho was a sort of hunting lodge or country club near Tern Creek and an old colonial church, so old that it bore the royal arms upon a shield still preserved as a sign of its colonial origin. A note from Mayrant, received at breakfast, informed me that the rain would take all pleasure from such an excursion, and that he should seize the earliest opportunity the weather might afford to hold me to my promise. The wet gale, even as I sat writing, was beating down some of the full-blown flowers in the garden next Mrs. Trevise's house, and as the morning wore on I watched the paths grow more strewn with broken twigs and leaves.

I filled my correspondence with accounts of Daddy Ben and his grandson, the carpenter, doubtless from some pride in my part in that, but also because it had become, through thinking it over, even more interesting to-day than it had been at the moment of its occurrence; and in replying to a sort of postscript of Aunt Carola's in which she hurriedly wrote that she had forgotten to say she had heard the La Heu family in South Carolina was related to the Bombos, and should be obliged to me if I would make inquiries about this, I told her that it would be easy, and then described to her the Teuton, plying his "antiquity" trade externally while internally cherishing his collected skulls and nursing his scientific rage. All my letters were the more abundant concerning these adventures of mine from my having kept entirely silent upon them at Mrs. Trevise's tea-table. I dreaded Juno when let loose upon the negro question; and the fact that I was beginning to understand her feelings did not at all make me wish to be deafened by them. Neither Juno, therefore, nor any of them learned a word from me about the kettle-supporter incident. What I did take pains to inform the assembled company was my gratification that the report of Mr. Mayrant's engagement being broken was unfounded; and this caused Juno to observe that in that case Miss Rieppe must have the most imperative reasons for uniting herself to such a young man.

Unintimidated by the rain, this formidable creature had taken herself off to her nephew's bedside almost immediately after breakfast; and later in the day I, too, risked a drenching for the sake of ordering the packing-box that I needed. When I returned, it was close on tea-time; I had seen Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael send out the hot coffee to the conductor, and I had found a negro carpenter whose week it happily was to stay sober; and now I learned that, when tea should be finished, the poetess had in store for us, as a treat, her ode.

Our evening meal was not plain sailing, even for the veteran navigation of Mrs. Trevise; Juno had returned from the bedside very plainly displeased (she was always candid even when silent) by something which had happened there; and before the joyful moment came when we all learned what this was, a very gouty Boston lady who had arrived with her husband from Florida on her way North—and whose nature you will readily grasp when I tell you that we found ourselves speaking of the man as Mrs. Braintree's husband and never as Mr. Braintree—this crippled lady, who was of a candor equal to Juno's, embarked upon a conversation with Juno that compelled Mrs. Trevise to tinkle her bell for Daphne after only two remarks had been exchanged.

I had been sorry at first that here in this Southern boarding-house Boston should be represented only by a lady who appeared to unite in herself all the stony products of that city, and none of the others; for she was as convivial as a statue and as well-informed as a spelling-book; she stood no more for the whole of Boston than did Juno for the whole of Kings Port. But my sorrow grew less when I found that in Mrs. Braintree we had indeed a capable match for her Southern counterpart. Juno, according to her custom, had remembered something objectionable that had been perpetrated in 1865 by the Northern vandals.

"Edward," said Mrs. Braintree to her husband, in a frightfully clear voice, "it was at Chambersburg, was it not, that the Southern vandals burned the house in which were your father's title-deeds?"

Edward, who, it appeared, had fought through the whole Civil War, and was in consequence perfectly good-humored and peaceable in his feelings upon that subject, replied hastily and amiably: "Oh, yes, yes! Why, I believe it was!"

But this availed nothing; Juno bent her great height forward, and addressed Mrs. Braintree. "This is the first time I have been told Southerners were vandals."

"You will never be able to say that again!" replied Mrs. Braintree.

After the bell and Daphne had stopped, the invaluable Briton addressed a genial generalization to us all: "I often think how truly awful your war would have been if the women had fought it, y'know, instead of the men."

"Quite so!" said the easy-going Edward "Squaws! Mutilation! Yes!" and he laughed at his little joke, but he laughed alone.

I turned to Juno. "Speaking of mutilation, I trust your nephew is better this evening."

I was rejoiced by receiving a glare in response. But still more joy was to come.

"An apology ought to help cure him a lot," observed the Briton.

Juno employed her policy of not hearing him.

"Indeed, I trust that your nephew is in less pain," said the poetess.

Juno was willing to answer this. "The injuries, thank you, are the merest trifles—all that such a light-weight could inflict." And she shrugged her shoulders to indicate the futility of young John's pugilism.

"But," the surprised Briton interposed, "I thought you said your nephew was too feeble to eat steak or hear poetry."

Juno could always stem the eddy of her own contradictions—but she did raise her voice a little. "I fancy, sir, that Doctor Beaugarcon knows what he is talking about."

"Have they apologized yet?" inquired the male honeymooner from the up-country.

"My nephew, sir, nobly consented to shake hands this afternoon. He did it entirely out of respect for Mr. Mayrant's family, who coerced him into this tardy reparation, and who feel unable to recognize him since his treasonable attitude in the Custom House."

"Must be fairly hard to coerce a chap you can't recognize," said the Briton.

An et cetera now spoke to the honeymoon bride from the up-country: "I heard Doctor Beaugarcon say he was coming to visit you this evening."

"Yais," assented the bride. "Doctor Beaugarcon is my mother's fourth cousin."

Juno now took—most unwisely, as it proved—a vindictive turn at me. "I knew that your friend, Mr. Mayrant, was intemperate," she began.

I don't think that Mrs. Trevise had any intention to ring for Daphne at this point—her curiosity was too lively; but Juno was going to risk no such intervention, and I saw her lay a precautionary hand heavily down over the bell. "But," she continued, "I did not know that Mr. Mayrant was a gambler."

"Have you ever seen him intemperate?" I asked.

"That would be quite needless," Juno returned. "And of the gambling I have ocular proof, since I found him, cards, counters, and money, with my sick nephew. He had actually brought cards in his pocket."

"I suppose," said the Briton, "your nephew was too sick to resist him."

The male honeymooner, with two of the et ceteras, made such unsteady demonstrations at this that Mrs. Trevise protracted our sitting no longer. She rose, and this meant rising for us all.

A sense of regret and incompleteness filled me, and finding the Briton at my elbow as our company proceeded toward the sitting room, I said: "Too bad!"

His whisper was confident. "We'll get the rest of it out of her yet."

But the rest of it came without our connivance.

In the sitting room Doctor Beaugarcon sat waiting, and at sight of Juno entering the door (she headed our irregular procession) he sprang up and lifted admiring hands. "Oh, why didn't I have an aunt like you!" he exclaimed, and to Mrs. Trevise as she followed: "She pays her nephew's poker debts."

"How much, cousin Tom?" asked the upcountry bride.

And the gay old doctor chuckled, as he kissed her: "Thirty dollars this afternoon, my darling."

At this the Briton dragged me behind a door in the hall, and there we danced together.

"That Mayrant chap will do," he declared; and we composed ourselves for a proper entrance into the sitting room, where the introductions had been made, and where Doctor Beaugarcon and Mrs. Braintree's husband had already fallen into war reminiscences, and were discovering with mutual amiability that they had fought against each other in a number of battles.

"And you generally licked us," smiled the Union soldier.

"Ah! don't I know myself how it feels to run!" laughed the Confederate. "Are you down at the club?"

But upon learning from the poetess that her ode was now to be read aloud, Doctor Beaugarcon paid his fourth cousin's daughter a brief, though affectionate, visit, lamenting that a very ill patient should compel him to take himself away so immediately, but promising her presently in his stead two visitors much more interesting.

"Miss Josephine St. Michael desires to call upon you," he said, "and I fancy that her nephew will escort her."

"In all this rain?" said the bride.

"Oh, it's letting up, letting up! Good night, Mistress Trevise. Good night, sir; I am glad to have met you." He shook hands with Mrs. Braintree's husband. "We fellows," he whispered, "who fought in the war have had war enough." And bidding the general company good night, and kissing the bride again, he left us even as the poetess returned from her room with the manuscript.

I soon wished that I had escaped with him, because I feared what Mrs. Braintree might say when the verses should be finished; and so, I think, did her husband. We should have taken the hint which tactful Doctor Beaugarcon had meant, I began to believe, to give us in that whispered remark of his. But it had been given too lightly, and so we sat and heard the ode out. I am sure that the poetess, wrapped in the thoughts of her own composition, had lost sight of all but the phrasing of her poem and the strong feelings which it not unmusically voiced; there Is no other way to account for her being willing to read it in Mrs. Braintree's presence.

Whatever gayety had filled me when the Boston lady had clashed with Juno was now changed to deprecation and concern. Indeed, I myself felt almost as if I were being physically struck by the words, until mere bewilderment took possession of me; and after bewilderment, a little, a very little, light, which, however, rapidly increased. We were the victors, we the North, and we had gone upon our way with songs and rejoicing—able to forget, because we were the victors. We had our victory; let the vanquished have their memory. But here was the cry of the vanquished, coming after forty years. It was the time which at first bewildered me; Juno had seen the war, Juno's bitterness I could comprehend, even if I could not comprehend her freedom in expressing it, but the poetess could not be more than a year or two older than I was; she had come after it was all over. Why should she prolong such memories and feelings? But my light increased as I remembered she had not written this for us, and that if she had not seen the flames of war, she had seen the ashes; for the ashes I had seen myself here in Kings Port, and had been overwhelmed by the sight, forty years later, more overwhelmed than I could possibly say to Mrs. Gregory St. Michael, or Mrs. Weguelin, or anybody. The strain of sitting and waiting for the end made my hands cold and my head hot, but nevertheless the light which had come enabled me to bend instantly to Mrs. Braintree and murmur a great and abused quotation to her:—

"Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner."

But my petition could not move her. She was too old; she had seen the flames of war; and so she said to her husband:—

"Edward, will you please help me upstairs?"

And thus the lame, irreconcilable lady left the room with the assistance of her unhappy warrior, who must have suffered far more keenly than I did.

This departure left us all in a constraint which was becoming unbearable when the blessed doorbell rang and delivered us, and Miss Josephine St. Michael entered with John Mayrant. He wore a most curious expression; his eyes went searching about the room, and at length settled upon Juno with a light in them as impish as that which had flickered in my own mood before the ode.

To my surprise, Miss Josephine advanced and gave me a special and marked greeting. Before this she had always merely bowed to me; to-night she held out her hand. "Of course my visit is not to you; but I am very glad to find you here and express the appreciation of several of us for your timely aid to Daddy Ben. He feels much shame in having said nothing to you himself."

And while I muttered those inevitable modest nothings which fit such occasions, Miss St. Michael recounted to the bride, whom she was ostensibly calling upon, and to the rest of our now once more harmonious circle, my adventures in the alleys of Africa. These loomed, even with Miss St. Michael's perfectly quiet and simple rendering of them, almost of heroic size, thanks doubtless to Daddy Ben's tropical imagery when he first told the tale; and before they were over Miss St. Michael's marked recognition of me actually brought from Juno some reflected recognition—only this resembled in its graciousness the original about as correctly as a hollow spoon reflects the human countenance divine. Still, it was at Juno's own request that I brought down from my chamber and displayed to them the kettle-supporter.

I have said that Miss St. Michael's visit was ostensibly to the bride: and that is because for some magnetic reason or other I felt diplomacy like an undercurrent passing among our chairs. Young John's expression deepened, whenever he watched Juno, to a devilishness which his polite manners veiled no better than a mosquito netting; and I believe that his aunt, on account of the battle between their respective nephews, had for family reasons deemed it advisable to pay, indirectly, under cover of the bride, a state visit to Juno; and I think that I saw Juno accepting it as a state visit, and that the two together, without using a word of spoken language, gave each other to understand that the recent deplorable circumstances were a closed incident. I think that his Aunt Josephine had desired young John to pay a visit likewise, and, to make sure of his speedy compliance, had brought him along with her—coerced him, as Juno would have said. He wore somewhat the look of having been "coerced," and he contributed remarkably few observations to the talk.

It was all harmonious, and decorous, and properly conducted, this state visit; yet even so, Juno and John exchanged at parting some verbal sweet-meats which rather stuck out from the smooth meringue of diplomacy.

She contemplated his bruise. "You are feeling stronger, I hope, than you have been lately? A bridegroom's health should be good."

He thanked her. "I am feeling better to-night than for many weeks."

The rascal had the thirty dollars visibly bulging that moment in his pocket. I doubt if he had acquainted his aunt with this episode, but she was certain to hear it soon; and when she did hear it, I rather fancy that she wished to smile—as I completely smiled alone in my bed that night thinking young John over.

But I did not go to sleep smiling; listening to the "Ode for the Daughters of Dixie" had been an ordeal too truly painful, because it disclosed live feelings which I had thought were dead, or rather, it disclosed that those feelings smouldered in the young as well as in the old. Doctor Beaugarcon didn't have them—he had fought them out, just as Mr. Braintree had fought them out; and Mrs. Braintree, like Juno, retained them, because she hadn't fought them out; and John Mayrant didn't have them, because he had been to other places; and I didn't have them—never had had them in my life, because I came into the world when it was all over. Why then—Stop, I told myself, growing very wakeful, and seeing in the darkness the light which had come to me, you have beheld the ashes, and even the sight has overwhelmed you; these others were born in the ashes, and have had ashes to sleep in and ashes to eat. This I said to myself; and I remembered that War hadn't been all; that Reconstruction came in due season; and I thought of the "reconstructed" negro, as Daddy Ben had so ingeniously styled him. These white people, my race, had been set beneath the reconstructed negro. Still, still, this did not justify the whole of it to me; my perfectly innocent generation seemed to be included in the unforgiving, unforgetting ode. "I must have it out with somebody," I said. And in time I fell asleep.



XIII: The Girl Behind the Counter—III

I was still thinking the ode over as I dressed for breakfast, for which I was late, owing to my hair, which the changes in the weather had rendered somewhat recalcitrant. Yes; decidedly I must have it out with somebody. The weather was once more superb; and in the garden beneath my window men were already sweeping away the broken twigs and debris of the storm. I say "already," because it had not seemed to me to be the Kings Port custom to remove debris, or anything, with speed. I also had it in my mind to perform at lunch Aunt Carola's commission, and learn if the family of La Heu were indeed of royal descent through the Bombos. I intended to find this out from the girl behind the counter, but the course which our conversation took led me completely to forget about it.

As soon as I entered the Exchange I planted myself in front of the counter, in spite of the discouragement which I too plainly perceived in her countenance; the unfavorable impression which I had made upon her at our last interview was still in force.

I plunged into it at once. "I have a confession to make."

"You do me surprising honor."

"Oh, now, don't begin like that! I suppose you never told a lie."

"I'm telling the truth now when I say that I do not see why an entire stranger should confess anything to me."

"Oh, my goodness! Well, I told you a lie, anyhow; a great, successful, deplorable lie."

She opened her mouth under the shock of it, and I recited to her unsparingly my deception; during this recital her mouth gradually closed.

"Well, I declare, declare, declare!" she slowly and deliciously breathed over the sum total; and she considered me at length, silently, before her words came again, like a soft soliloquy. "I could never have believed it in one who"—here gayety flashed in her eyes suddenly—"parts his back hair so rigidly. Oh, I beg your pardon for being personal!" And her gayety broke in ripples. Some habitual instinct moved me to turn to the looking-glass. "Useless!" she cried, "you can't see it in that. But it's perfectly splendid to-day."

Nature has been kind to me in many ways—nay, prodigal; it is not every man who can perceive the humor in a jest of which he is himself the subject. I laughed with her. "I trust that I am forgiven," I said.

"Oh, yes, you are forgiven! Come out, General, and give the gentleman your right paw, and tell him that he is forgiven—if only for the sake of Daddy Ben." With these latter words she gave me a gracious nod of understanding. They were all thanking me for the kettle-supporter! She probably knew also the tale of John Mayrant, the cards, and the bedside.

The curly dog came out, and went through his part very graciously.

"I can guess his last name," I remarked.

"General's? How? Oh, you've heard it! I don't believe in you any more."

"That's not a bit handsome, after my confession. No, I'm getting to understand South Carolina a little. You came from the 'up-country,' you call your dog General; his name is General Hampton!"

Her laughter assented. "Tell me some more about South Carolina," she added with her caressing insinuation.

"Well, to begin with—"

"Go sit down at your lunch-table first. Aunt Josephine would never tolerate my encouraging gentlemen to talk to me over the counter."

I went back obediently, and then resumed: "Well, what sort of people are those who own the handsome garden behind Mrs. Trevise's!"

"I don't know them."

"Thank you; that's all I wanted."

"What do you mean?"

"They're new people. I could tell it from the way you stuck your nose in the air."

"Sir!"

"Oh, if you talk about my hair, I can talk about your nose, I think. I suspected that they were: 'new people' because they cleaned up their garden immediately after the storm this morning. Now, I'll tell you something else: the whole South looks down on the whole North."

She made her voice kind. "Do you mind it very much?"

I joined in her latent mirth. "It makes life not worth living! But more than this, South Carolina looks down on the whole South."

"Not Virginia."

"Not? An 'entire stranger,' you know, sometimes notices things which escape the family eye—family likenesses in the children, for instance."

"Never Virginia," she persisted.

"Very well, very well! Somehow you've admitted the rest, however."

She began to smile.

"And next, Kings Port looks down on all the rest of South Carolina."

She now laughed outright. "An up-country girl will not deny that, anyhow!"

"And finally, your aunts—"

"My aunts are Kings Port."

"The whole of it?"

"If you mean the thirty thousand negroes—"

"No, there are other white people here—there goes your nose again!"

"I will not have you so impudent, sir!"

"A thousand pardons, I'm on my knees. But your aunts—" There was such a flash of war in her eye that I stopped.

"May I not even mention them?" I asked her.

And suddenly upon this she became serious and gentle. "I thought that you understood them. Would you take them from their seclusion, too? It is all they have left—since you burned the rest in 1865."

I had made her say what I wanted! That "you" was what I wanted. Now I should presently have it out with her. But, for the moment, I did not disclaim the "you." I said:—

"The burning in 1865 was horrible, but it was war."

"It was outrage."

"Yes, the same kind as England's, who burned Washington in 1812, and whom you all so deeply admire."

She had, it seemed, no answer to this. But we trembled on the verge of a real quarrel. It was in her voice when she said:—

"I think I interrupted you."

I pushed the risk one step nearer the verge, because of the words I wished finally to reach. "In 1812, when England burned our White House down, we did not sit in the ashes; we set about rebuilding."

And now she burst out. "That's not fair, that's perfectly inexcusable! Did England then set loose on us a pack of black savages and politicians to help us rebuild? Why, this very day I cannot walk on the other side of the river, I dare not venture off the New Bridge; and you who first beat us and then unleashed the blacks to riot in a new 'equality' that they were no more fit for than so many apes, you sat back at ease in your victory and your progress, having handed the vote to the negro as you might have handed a kerosene lamp to a child of three, and let us crushed, breathless people cope with the chaos and destruction that never came near you. Why, how can you dare—" Once again, admirably she pulled herself up as she had done when she spoke of the President. "I mustn't!" she declared, half whispering, and then more clearly and calmly, "I mustn't." And she shook her head as if shaking something off. "Nor must you," she finished, charmingly and quietly, with a smile.

"I will not," I assured her. She was truly noble.

"But I did think that you understood us," she said pensively.

"Miss La Heu, when you talked to me about the President and the White House, I said that you were hard to answer. Do you remember?"

"Perfectly. I said I was glad you found me so.'

"You helped me to understand you then, and now I want to be helped to further understanding. Last night I heard the 'Ode for the Daughters of Dixie.' I had a bad time listening to that."

"Do you presume to criticise it? Do we criticise your Grand Army reunions, and your 'Marching through Georgia,' and your 'John Brown's Body,' and your Arlington Museum? Can we not be allowed to celebrate our heroes and our glories and sing our songs?"

She had helped me already! Still, still, the something I was groping for, the something which had given me such pain during the ode, remained undissolved, remained unanalyzed between us; I still had to have it out with her, and the point was that it had to be with her, and not simply with myself alone. We must thrash out together the way to an understanding; an agreement was not in the least necessary—we could agree to differ, for that matter, with perfect cordiality—but an understanding we must reach. And as I was thinking this my light increased, and I saw clearly the ultimate thing which lay at the bottom of my own feeling, and which had been strangely confusing me all along. This discovery was the key to the whole remainder of my talk; I never let go of it. The first thing it opened for me was that Eliza La Heu didn't understand me, which was quite natural, since I had only just this moment become clear to myself.