"Many of us," I began, "who have watched the soiling touch of politics make dirty one clean thing after another, would not be wholly desolated to learn that the Grand Army of the Republic had gone to another world to sing its songs and draw its pensions."

She looked astonished, and then she laughed. Down in the South here she was too far away to feel the vile uses to which present politics had turned past heroism.

"But," I continued, "we haven't any Daughters of the Union banded together and handing it down."

"It?" she echoed. "Well, if the deeds of your heroes are not a sacred trust to you, don't invite us, please, to resemble you."

I waited for more, and a little more came.

"We consider Northerners foreigners, you know."

Again I felt that hurt which hearing the ode had given me, but I now knew how I was going to take it, and where we were presently coming out; and I knew she didn't mean quite all that—didn't mean it every day, at least—and that my speech had driven her to saying it.

"No, Miss La Heu; you don't consider Northerners, who understand you, to be foreigners."

"We have never met any of that sort."

("Yes," I thought, "but you really want to. Didn't you say you hoped I was one? Away down deep there's a cry of kinship in you; and that you don't hear it, and that we don't hear it, has been as much our fault as yours. I see that very well now, but I'm afraid to tell you so, yet.")

What I said was: "We're handing the 'sacred trust' down, I hope."

"I understood you to say you weren't."

"I said we were not handing 'it' down."

I didn't wonder that irritation again moulded her reply. "You must excuse a daughter of Dixie if she finds the words of a son of the Union beyond her. We haven't had so many advantages."

There she touched what I had thought over during my wakeful hours: the tale of the ashes, the desolate ashes! The war had not prevented my parents from sending me to school and college, but here the old had seen the young grow up starved of what their fathers had given them, and the young had looked to the old and known their stripped heritage.

"Miss La Heu," I said, "I could not tell you, you would not wish me to tell you, what the sight of Kings Port has made me feel. But you will let me say this: I have understood for a long while about your old people, your old ladies, whose faces are so fine and sad."

I paused, but she merely looked at me, and her eyes were hard.

"And I may say this, too. I thank you very sincerely for bringing completely home to me what I had begun to make out for myself. I hope the Daughters of Dixie will go on singing of their heroes."

I paused again, and now she looked away, out of the window into Royal Street.

"Perhaps," I still continued, "you will hardly believe me when I say that I have looked at your monuments here with an emotion more poignant even than that which Northern monuments raise in me."

"Why?"

"Oh!" I exclaimed. "Need you have asked that? The North won."

"You are quite dispassionate!" Her eyes were always toward the window.

"That's my 'sacred trust.'"

It made her look at me. "Yours?"

"Not yours—yet! It would be yours if you had won." I thought a slight change came in her steady scrutiny. "And, Miss La Heu, it was awful about the negro. It is awful. The young North thinks so just as much as you do. Oh, we shock our old people! We don't expect them to change, but they mustn't expect us not to. And even some of them have begun to whisper a little doubtfully. But never mind them—here's the negro. We can't kick him out. That plan is childish. So, it's like two men having to live in one house. The white man would keep the house in repair, the black would let it rot. Well, the black must take orders from the white. And it will end so."

She was eager. "Slavery again, you think?"

"Oh, never! It was too injurious to ourselves. But something between slavery and equality." And I ended with a quotation: "'Patience, cousin, and shuffle the cards.'"

"You may call me cousin—this once—because you have been, really, quite nice—for a Northerner."

Now we had come to the place where she must understand me.

"Not a Northerner, Miss La Heu."

She became mocking. "Scarcely a Southerner, I presume?"

But I kept my smile and my directness. "No more a Southerner than a Northerner."

"Pray what, then?"

"An American."

She was silent.

"It's the 'sacred trust'—for me."

She was still silent.

"If my state seceded from the Union tomorrow, I should side with the Union against her."

She was frankly astonished now. "Would you really?" And I think some light about me began to reach her. A Northerner willing to side against a Northern state! I was very glad that I had found that phrase to make clear to her my American creed.

I proceeded. "I shall help to hand down all the glories and all the sadnesses; Lee's, Lincoln's, everybody's. But I shall not hand 'it' down."

This checked her.

"It's easy for me, you know," I hastily explained. "Nothing noble about it at all. But from noble people"—and I looked hard at her—"one expects, sooner or later, noble things."

She repressed something she had been going to reply.

"If ever I have children," I finished, "they shall know 'Dixie' and 'Yankee Doodle' by heart, and never know the difference. By that time I should think they might have a chance of hearing 'Yankee Doodle' in Kings Port."

Again she checked a rapid retort. "Well," she, after a pause, repeated, "you have been really quite nice."

"May I tell you what you have been?"

"Certainly not. Have you seen Mr. Mayrant to-day?"

"We have an engagement to walk this afternoon. May I go walking with you sometime?"

"May he, General?" A wagging tail knocked on the floor behind the counter. "General says that he will think about it. What makes you like Mr. Mayrant so much?"

This question struck me as an odd one; nor could I make out the import of the peculiar tone in which she put it. "Why, I should think everybody would like him—except, perhaps, his double victim."

"Double?"

"Yes, first of his fist and then of—of his hand!"

But she didn't respond.

"Of his hand—his poker hand," I explained.

"Poker hand?" She remained honestly vague.

It rejoiced me to be the first to tell her. "You haven't heard of Master John's last performance? Well, finding himself forced by that immeasurable old Aunt Josephine of yours to shake hands, he shook 'em all right, but he took thirty dollars away as a little set-off for his pious docility."

"Oh!" she murmured, overwhelmed with astonishment. Then she broke into one of her delicious peals of laughter.

"Anybody," I said, "likes a boy who plays a hand—and a fist—to that tune." I continued to say a number of commendatory words about young John, while her sparkling eyes rested upon me. But even as I talked I grew aware that these eyes were not sparkling, were starry rather, and distant, and that she was not hearing what I said; so I stopped abruptly, and at the stopping she spoke, like a person waking up.

"Oh, yes! Certainly he can take care of himself. Why not?"

"Rather creditable, don't you think?"

"Creditable?"

"Considering his aunts and everything."

She became haughty on the instant. "Upon my word! And do you suppose the women of South Carolina don't wish their men to be men? Why"—she returned to mirth and that arch mockery which was her special charm—"we South Carolina women consider virtue our business, and we don't expect the men to meddle with it!"

"Primal, perpetual, necessary!" I cried. "When that division gets blurred, society is doomed. Are you sure John can take care of himself every way?"

"I have other things than Mr. Mayrant to think about." She said this quite sharply.

It surprised me. "To be sure," I assented. "But didn't you once tell me that you thought he was simple?"

She opened her ledger. "It's a great honor to have one's words so well remembered."

I was still at a loss. "Anyhow, the wedding is postponed," I continued; "and the cake. Of course one can't help wondering how it's all coming out."

She was now working at her ledger, bending her head over it. "Have you ever met Miss Rieppe?" She inquired this with a sort of wonderful softness—which I was to hear again upon a still more memorable occasion.

"Never," I answered, "but there's nobody at present living whom I long to see so much."

She wrote on for a little while before saying, with her pencil steadily busy, "Why?"

"Why? Don't you? After all this fuss?"

"Oh, certainly," she drawled. "She is so much admired—by Northerners."

"I do hope John is able to take care of himself," I purposely repeated.

"Take care of yourself!" she laughed angrily over her ledger.

"Me? Why? I understand you less and less!"

"Very likely."

"Why, I want to help him!" I protested. "I don't want him to marry her. Oh, by the way do you happen to know what it is that she is coming here to see for herself?"

In a moment her ledger was left, and she was looking at me straight. Coming? When?

"Soon. In an automobile. To see something for herself."

She pondered for quite a long moment; then her eyes returned, searchingly, to me. "You didn't make that up?"

I laughed, and explained. "Some of them, at any rate," I finished, "know what she's coming for. They were rather queer about it, I thought."

She pondered again. I noticed that she had deeply flushed, and that the flush was leaving her. Then she fixed her eyes on me once more. "They wouldn't tell you?"

"I think that they came inadvertently near it, once or twice, and remembered just in time that I didn't know about it."

"But since you do know pretty much about it!" she laughed.

I shook my head. "There's something else, something that's turned up; the sort of thing that upsets calculations. And I merely hoped that you'd know."

On those last words of mine she gave me quite an extraordinary look, and then, as if satisfied with what she saw in my face.—

"They don't talk to me."

It was an assurance, it was true, it had the ring of truth, that evident genuineness which a piece of real confidence always possesses; she meant me to know that we were in the same boat of ignorance to-day. And yet, as I rose from my lunch and came forward to settle for it, I was aware of some sense of defeat, of having been held off just as the ladies on High Walk had held me off.

"Well," I sighed, "I pin my faith to the aunt who says he'll never marry her."

Miss La Heu had no more to say upon the subject. "Haven't you forgotten something?" she inquired gayly; and, as I turned to see what I had left behind—"I mean, you had no Lady Baltimore to-day."

"I clean forgot it!"

"No loss. It is very stale; and to-morrow I shall have a fresh supply ready."

As I departed through the door I was conscious of her eyes following me, and that she had spoken of Lady Baltimore precisely because she was thinking of something else.



XIV: The Replacers

She had been strange, perceptibly strange, had Eliza La Heu; that was the most which I could make out of it. I had angered her in some manner wholly beyond my intention or understanding and not all at one fixed point in our talk; her irritation had come out and gone in again in spots all along the colloquy, and it had been a displeasure wholly apart from that indignation which had flashed up in her over the negro question. This, indeed, I understood well enough, and admired her for, and admired still more her gallant control of it; as for the other, I gave it up.

A sense of guilt—a very slight one, to be sure—dispersed my speculations when I was preparing for dinner, and Aunt Carola's postscript, open upon my writing-table, reminded me that I had never asked Miss La Heu about the Bombos. Well, the Bombos could keep! And I descended to dinner a little late (as too often) to feel instantly in the air that they had been talking about me. I doubt if any company in the world, from the Greeks down through Machiavelli to the present moment, has ever been of a subtlety adequate to conceal from an observant person entering a room the fact that he has been the subject of their conversation. This company, at any rate, did not conceal it from me. Not even when the upcountry bride astutely greeted me with:—

"Why, we were just speaking of you! We were lust saying it would be a perfect shame if you missed those flowers at Live Oaks." And, at this, various of the guests assured me that another storm would finish them; upon which I assured every one that to-morrow should see me embark upon the Live Oaks excursion boat, knowing quite well in my heart that some decidedly different question concerning me had been hastily dropped upon my appearance at the door. It poked up its little concealed head, did this question, when the bride said later to me, with immense archness:—

"How any gentleman can help falling just daid in love with that lovely young girl at the Exchange, I don't see!"

"But I haven't helped it!" I immediately exclaimed.

"Oh!" declared the bride with unerring perception, "that just shows he hasn't been smitten at all! Well, I'd be ashamed, if I was a single gentleman." And while I brought forth additional phrases concerning the distracted state of my heart, she looked at me with large, limpid eyes. "Anybody could tell you're not afraid of a rival," was her resulting comment; upon which several of the et ceteras laughed more than seemed to me appropriate.

I left them all free again to say what they pleased; for John Mayrant called for me to go upon our walk while we were still seated at table, and at table they remained after I had excused myself.

The bruise over John's left eye was fading out, but traces of his spiritual battle were deepening. During the visit which he had paid (under compulsion, I am sure) to Juno at our boarding-house in company with Miss Josephine St. Michael, his recent financial triumph at the bedside had filled his face with diabolic elation as he confronted his victim's enraged but checkmated aunt; when to the thinly veiled venom of her inquiry as to a bridegroom's health he had retorted with venom as thinly veiled that he was feeling better that night than for many weeks, he had looked better, too; the ladies had exclaimed after his departure what a handsome young man he was, and Juno had remarked how fervently she trusted that marriage might cure him of his deplorable tendencies. But to-day his vitality had sagged off beneath the weight of his preoccupation: it looked to me as if, by a day or two more, the boy's face might be grown haggard.

Whether by intention, or, as is more likely, by the perfectly natural and spontaneous working of his nature, he speedily made it plain to me that our relation, our acquaintance, had progressed to a stage more friendly and confidential. He did not reveal this by imparting any confidence to me; far from it; it was his silence that indicated the ease he had come to feel in my company. Upon our last memorable interview he had embarked at once upon a hasty yet evidently predetermined course of talk, because he feared that I might touch upon subjects which he wished excluded from all discussion between us; to-day he embarked upon nothing, made no conventional effort of any sort, but walked beside me, content with my mere society; if it should happen that either of us found a thought worth expressing aloud, good! and if this should not happen, why, good also! And so we walked mutely and agreeably together for a long while. The thought which was growing clear in my mind, and which was decidedly worthy of expression, was also unluckily one which his new reliance upon my discretion completely forbade my uttering in even the most shadowy manner; but it was a conviction which Miss Josephine St. Michael should have been quick to force upon him for his good. Quite apart from selfish reasons, he had no right to marry a girl whom he had ceased to care for. The code which held a "gentleman" to his plighted troth in such a case did more injury to the "lady" than any "jilting" could possibly do. Never until now had I thought this out so lucidly, and I was determined that time and my own tact should assuredly help me find a way to say it to him, if he continued in his present course.

"Daddy Ben says you can't be a real Northerner."

This was his first observation, and I think that we must have walked a mile before he made it.

"Because I pounded a negro? Of course, he retains your Southern ante-bellum mythical notion of Northerners—all of us willing to have them marry our sisters. Well, there's a lady at our boarding-house who says you are a real gambler."

The impish look came curling round his lips, but for a moment only, and it was gone.

"That shook Daddy Ben up a good deal."

"Having his grandson do it, do you mean?"

"Oh, he's used to his grandson! Grandsons in that race might just as well be dogs for all they know or care about their progenitors. Yet Daddy Ben spent his savings on educating Charles Cotesworth and two more—but not one of them will give the old man a house to-day. If ever I have a home—" John stopped himself, and our silence was no longer easy; our unspoken thoughts looked out of our eyes so that they could not meet. Yet no one, unless directly invited by him, had the right to say to hint what I was thinking, except some near relative. Therefore, to relieve this silence which had ceased to be agreeable, I talked about Daddy Ben and his grandsons, and negro voting, and the huge lie of "equality" which our lips vociferate and our lives daily disprove. This took us comfortably away from weddings and cakes into the subject of lynching, my violent condemnation of which surprised him; for our discussion had led us over a wide field, and one fertile in well-known disputes of the evergreen sort, conducted by the North mostly with more theory than experience, and by the South mostly with more heat than light; whereas, between John and me, I may say that our amiability was surpassed only by our intelligence! Each allowed for the other's standpoint, and both met in many views: he would have voted against the last national Democratic ticket but for the Republican upholding of negro equality, while I assured him that such stupid and criminal upholding was on the wane. He informed me that he did not believe the pure blooded African would ever be capable of taking the intellectual side of the white man's civilization, and I informed him that we must patiently face this probability, and teach the African whatever he could profitably learn and no more; and each of us agreed with the other. I think that we were at one, save for the fact that I was, after all, a Northerner—and that is a blemish which nobody in Kings Port can quite get over. John, therefore, was unprepared for my wholesale denunciation of lynching.

"With your clear view of the negro," he explained.

"My dear man, it's my clear view of the white! It's the white, the American citizen, the 'hope of humanity,' as he enjoys being called, who, after our English-speaking race has abolished public executions, degenerates back to the Stone Age. It's upon him that lynching works the true injury."

"They're nothing but animals," he muttered.

"Would you treat an animal in that way?" I inquired.

He persisted. "You'd do it yourself if you had to suffer from them."

"Very probably. Is that an answer? What I'd never do would be to make a show, an entertainment, a circus, out of it, run excursion trains to see it—come, should you like your sister to buy tickets for a lynching?"

This brought him up rather short. "I should never take part myself," he presently stated, "unless it were immediate personal vengeance."

"Few brothers or husbands would blame you," I returned. "It would be hard to wait for the law. But let no community which treats it as a public spectacle presume to call itself civilized."

He gave a perplexed smile, shaking his head over it. "Sometimes I think civilization costs—"

"Civilization costs all you've got!" I cried.

"More than I've got!" he declared. "I'm mortal tired of civilization."

"Ah, yes! What male creature is not? And neither of us will live quite long enough to see the smash-up of our own."

"Aren't you sometimes inconsistent?" he inquired, laughing.

"I hope so," I returned. "Consistency is a form of death. The dead are the only perfectly consistent people."

"And sometimes you sound like a Socialist," he pursued, still laughing.

"Never!" I shouted. "Don't class me with those untrained puppies of thought. And you'll generally observe," I added, "that the more nobly a Socialist vaporizes about the rights of humanity, the more wives and children he has abandoned penniless along the trail of his life."

He was livelier than ever at this. "What date have you fixed for the smash-up of our present civilization?"

"Why fix dates? Is it not diversion enough to watch, and step handsomely through one's own part, with always a good sleeve to laugh in?"

Pensiveness returned upon him. "I shall be able to step through my own part, I think." He paused, and I was wondering secretly, "Does that include the wedding?" when he continued: "What's there to laugh at?"

"Why, our imperishable selves! For instance: we swear by universal suffrage. Well, sows' ears are an invaluable thing in their place, on the head of the animal; but send them to make your laws, and what happens? Bribery, naturally. The silk purse buys the sow's ear. We swear by Christianity, but dishonesty is our present religion. That little phrase 'In God We Trust' is about as true as the silver dollar it's stamped on—worth some thirty-nine cents. We get awfully serious about whether or no good can come of evil, when every sky-scraping thief of finance is helping hospitals with one hand while the other's in my pocket; and good and evil attend each other, lead to each other, are such Siamese twins that if separated they would both die. We make phrases about peace, pity, and brotherhood, while every nation stands prepared for shipwreck and for the sinking plank to which two are clinging and the stronger pushes the weaker into the flood and thus floats safe. Why, the old apple of wisdom, which Adam and Eve swallowed and thus lost their innocence, was a gentle nursery drug compared with the new apple of competition, which, as soon as chewed, instantly transforms the heart into a second brain. But why worry, when nothing is final? Haven't you and I, for instance, lamented the present rottenness of smart society? Why, when kings by the name of George sat on the throne of England, society was just as drunken, just as dissolute! Then a decent queen came, and society behaved itself; and now, here we come round again to the Georges, only with the name changed! There's nothing final. So, when things are as you don't like them, remember that and bear them; and when they're as you do like them, remember it and make the most of them—and keep a good sleeve handy!"

"Have you got any creed at all?" he demanded.

"Certainly; but I don't live up to it."

"That's not expected. May I ask what it is?"

"It's in Latin."

"Well, I can probably bear it. Aunt Eliza had a classical tutor for me."

I always relish a chance to recite my favorite poet, and I began accordingly:—

"Laetus in praesens animus quod ultra est Oderit curare et—"

"I know that one!" he exclaimed, interrupting me. "The tutor made me put it into English verse. I had the severest sort of a time. I ran away from it twice to a deer-hunt." And he, in his turn, recited:—

"Who hails each present hour with zest Hates fretting what may be the rest, Makes bitter sweet with lazy jest; Naught is in every portion blest."

I complimented him, in spite of my slight annoyance at being deprived by him of the chance to declaim Latin poetry, which is an exercise that I approve and enjoy; but of course, to go on with it, after he had intervened with his translation, would have been flat.

"You have written good English, and very close to the Latin, too," I told him, "particularly in the last line." And I picked up from the bridge which we were crossing, an oyster-shell, and sent it skimming over the smooth water that stretched between the low shores, wide, blue, and vacant.

"I suppose you wonder why we call this the 'New Bridge,'" he remarked.

"I did wonder when I first came," I replied.

He smiled. "You're getting used to us!"

This long structure wore, in truth, no appearance of yesterday. It was newer than the "New Bridge" which it had replaced some fifteen years ago, and which for forty years had borne the same title. Spanning the broad river upon a legion of piles, this wooden causeway lies low against the face of the water, joining the town with a serene and pensive country of pines and live oaks and level opens, where glimpses of cabin and plantation serve to increase the silence and the soft, mysterious loneliness. Into this the road from the bridge goes straight and among the purple vagueness gently dissolves away.

We watched a slow, deep-laden boat sliding down toward the draw, across which we made our way, and drew near the further end of the bridge. The straight avenue of the road in front of us took my eyes down its quiet vista, until they were fixed suddenly by an alien object, a growing dot, accompanied by dust, whence came the small, distorted honks of an automobile. These fat, importunate sounds redoubled as the machine rushed toward the bridge, growing up to its full staring, brazen dimensions. Six or seven figures sat in it, all of the same dusty, shrouded likeness, their big glass eyes and their masked mouths suggesting some fabled, unearthly race, a family of replete and bilious ogres; so that as they flew honking by us I called out to John:—

"Behold the yellow rich!" and then remembered that his Hortense probably sat among them.

The honks redoubled, and we turned to see that the drawbridge had no thought of waiting for them. We also saw a bewildered curly white dog and a young girl, who called despairingly to him as he disappeared beneath the automobile. The engine of murder could not, as is usual, proceed upon its way, honking, for the drawbridge was visibly swinging open to admit the passage of the boat. When John and I had run back near enough to become ourselves a part of the incident, the white dog lay still behind the stationary automobile, whose passengers were craning their muffled necks and glass eyes to see what they had done, while one of their number had got out, and was stooping to examine if the machine had sustained any injuries. The young girl, with a face of anguish, was calling the dog's name as she hastened toward him, and her voice aroused him: he lifted his head, got on his legs, and walked over to her, which action on his part brought from the automobile a penetrating female voice:—

"Well, he's in better luck than that Savannah dog!"

But General was not in luck. He lay quietly down at the feet of his mistress and we soon knew that life had passed from his faithful body. The first stroke of grief, dealt her in such cruel and sudden form, overbore the poor girl's pride and reserve; she made no attempt to remember or heed surroundings, but kneeling and placing her arms about the neck of her dead servant, she spoke piteously aloud:—

"And I raised him, I raised him from a puppy!"

The female voice, at this, addressed the traveller who was examining the automobile: "Charley, a five or a ten spot is what her feelings need."

The obedient and munificent Charley straightened up from his stooping among the mechanical entrails, dexterously produced money, and advanced with the selected bill held out politely in his hand, while the glass eyes and the masks peered down at the performance. Eliza La Heu had perceived none of this, for she was intent upon General; nor had John Mayrant, who had approached her with the purpose of coming to her aid. But when Charley, quite at hand, began to speak words which were instantly obliterated from my memory by what happened, the young girl realized his intention and straightened stiffly, while John, with the rapidity of light, snatched the extended bill from Charley's hand, and tearing it in four pieces, threw it in his face.

A foreign voice cackled from the automobile: "Oh la la! il a du panache!"

But Charley now disclosed himself to be a true man of the world—the financial world—by picking the pieces out of the mud; and, while he wiped them and enclosed them in his handkerchief and with perfect dignity returned them to his pocket, he remarked simply, with a shrug: "As you please." His accent also was ever so little foreign—that New York downtown foreign, of the second generation, which stamps so, many of our bankers.

The female now leaned from her seat, and with the tone of setting the whole thing right, explained: "We had no idea it was a lady."

"Doubtless you're not accustomed to their appearance," said John to Charley.

I don't know what Charley would have done about this; for while the completely foreign voice was delightedly whispering, "Toujours le panache!" a new, deep, and altogether different female voice exclaimed:—

"Why, John, it's you!"

So that was Hortense, then! That rich and quiet utterance was hers, a schooled and studied management of speech. I found myself surprised, and I knew directly why; that word of one of the old ladles, "I consider that she looks like a steel wasp," had implanted in me some definite anticipations to which the voice certainly did not correspond. How fervently I desired that she would lift her thick veil, while John, with hat in hand, was greeting her, and being presented to her companions! Why she had not spoken to John sooner was of course a recondite question, and beyond my power to determine with merely the given situation to guide me. Hadn't she recognized him before? Had her thick veil, and his position, and the general slight flurry of the misadventure, intercepted recognition until she heard his voice when he addressed Charley. Or had she known her lover at once, and rapidly decided that the moment was an unpropitious one for a first meeting after absence, and that she would pass on to Kings Port unrevealed, but then had found this plan become impossible through the collision between Charley and John? It was not until certain incidents of the days following brought Miss Rieppe's nature a good deal further home to me, that a third interpretation of her delay in speaking to John dawned upon my mind; that I was also made aware how a woman's understanding of the words "Steel wasp," when applied by her to one of her own sex, may differ widely from a man's understanding of them; and that Miss Rieppe, through her thick veil, saw from her seat in the automobile something which my own unencumbered vision had by no means detected.

But now, here on the bridge, even her outward appearance was as shrouded as her inward qualities—save such as might be audible in that voice, as her skilful, well-placed speeches to one and the other of the company tided over and carried off into ease this uneasy moment. All men, at such a voice, have pricked up their ears since the beginning; there was much woman in it; each slow, schooled syllable called its challenge to questing man. But I got no chance to look in the eye that went with that voice; she took all the advantages which her veil gave her; and how well she used them I was to learn later.

In the general smoothing-out process which she was so capably effecting, her attention was about to reach me, when my name was suddenly called out from behind her. It was Beverly Rodgers, that accomplished and inveterate bachelor of fashion. Ten years before, when I had seen much of him, he had been more particular in his company, frequently declaring in his genial, irresponsible way that New York society was going to the devil. But many tempting dances on the land, and cruises on the water, had taken him deep among our lower classes that have boiled up from the bottom with their millions—and besides, there would be nothing to marvel at in Beverly's presence in any company that should include Hortense Rieppe, if she carried out the promise of her voice.

Beverly was his customary, charming, effusive self, coming out of the automobile to me with his "By Jove, old man," and his "Who'd have thought it, old fellow?" and sprinkling urbane little drops of jocosity over us collectively, as the garden water-turning apparatus sprinkles a lawn. His knowing me, and the way he brought it out, and even the tumbling into the road of a few wraps and chattels of travel as he descended from the automobile, and the necessity of picking these up and handing them back with delightful little jocular apologies, such as, "By Jove, what a lout I am," all this helped the meeting on prodigiously, and got us gratefully away from the disconcerting incident of the torn money. Charley was helpful, too; you would never have supposed from the polite small-talk which he was now offering to John Mayrant that he had within some three minutes received the equivalent of a slap across the eyes from that youth, and carried the soiled consequences in his pocket. And such a thing is it to be a true man of the world of finance, that upon the arrival now of a second automobile, also his property, and containing a set of maids and valets, and also some live dogs sitting up, covered with glass eyes and wrappings like their owners, munificent Charley at once offered the dead dog and his mistress a place in it, and begged she would let it take her wherever she wished to go. Everybody exclaimed copiously and condolingly over the unfortunate occurrence. What a fine animal he was, to be sure! What breed was he? Of course, he wasn't used to automobiles! Was it quite certain that he was dead? Quel dommage! And Charley would be so happy to replace him.

And how was Eliza La Heu bearing herself amid these murmurously chattered infelicities? She was listening with composure to the murmurs of Hortense Rieppe, more felicitous, no doubt. Miss Rieppe, through her veil, was particularly devoting herself to Miss La Lieu. I could not hear what she said; the little chorus of condolence and suggestion intercepted all save her tone, and that, indeed, coherently sustained its measured cadence through the texture of fragments uttered by Charley and the others. Eliza La Heu had now got herself altogether in hand, and, saving her pale cheeks, no sign betrayed that the young girl's feelings had been so recently too strong for her. To these strangers, ignorant of her usual manner, her present strange quietness may very well have been accepted as her habit.

"Thank you," she replied to munificent Charley's offer that she would use his second automobile. She managed to make her polite words cut like a scythe. "I should crowd it."

"But they shall get out and walk; it will be good for them," said Charley, indicating the valets and maids, and possibly the dogs, too.

Beverly Rodgers did much better than Charley. With a charming gesture and bow, he offered his own seat in the first automobile. "I am going to walk in any case," he assured her.

"One gentleman among them," I heard John Mayrant mutter behind me.

Miss La Heu declined, the chorus urged, but Beverly (who was indeed a gentleman, every inch of him) shook his head imperceptibly at Charley; and while the little exclamations—"Do come! So much more comfortable! So nice to see more of you!"—dropped away, Miss La Heu had settled her problem quite simply for herself. A little procession of vehicles, townward bound, had gathered on the bridge, waiting until the closing of the draw should allow them to continue upon their way. From these most of the occupants had descended, and were staring with avidity at us all; the great glass eyes and the great refulgent cars held them in timidity and fascination, and the poor lifeless white body of General, stretched beside the way, heightened the hypnotic mystery; one or two of the boldest had touched him, and found no outward injury upon him; and this had sent their eyes back to the automobile with increased awe. Eliza La Heu summoned one of the onlookers, an old negro; at some word she said to him he hurried back and returned, leading his horse and empty cart, and General was lifted into this. The girl took her seat beside the old driver.

"No," she said to John Mayrant, "certainly not."

I wondered at the needless severity with which she declined his offer to accompany her and help her.

He stood by the wheel of the cart, looking up at her and protesting, and I joined him.

"Thank you," she returned, "I need no one. You will both oblige me by saying no more about it."

"John!" It was the slow, well-calculated utterance of Hortense Rieppe. Did I hear in it the caressing note of love?

John turned.

The draw had swung to, the mast and sail of the vessel were separating away from the bridge with a stealthy motion, men with iron bars were at work fastening the draw secure, and horses' hoofs knocked nervously upon the wooden flooring as the internal churning of the automobiles burst upon their innocent ears.

"John, if Mr. Rodgers is really not going with us—"

Thus Hortense; and at that Miss La Heu:—

"Why do you keep them waiting?" There was no caress in that note! It was polished granite.

He looked up at her on her high seat by the extremely dilapidated negro, and then he walked forward and took his place beside his veiled fiancee, among the glass eyes. A hiss of sharp noise spurted from the automobiles, horses danced, and then, smoothly, the two huge engines were gone with their cargo of large, distorted shapes, leaving behind them—quite as our present epoch will leave behind it—a trail of power, of ingenuity, of ruthlessness, and a bad smell.

"Hold hard, old boy!" chuckled Beverly, to whom I communicated this sentiment. "How do you know the stink of one generation does not become the perfume of the next?" Beverly, when he troubled to put a thing at all (which was seldom—for he kept his quite good brains well-nigh perpetually turned out to grass—or rather to grass widows) always put it well, and with a bracing vocabulary. "Hullo!" he now exclaimed, and walked out into the middle of the roadway, where he picked up a parasol. "Kitty will be in a jolly old stew. None of its expensive bones broken however." And then he hailed me by a name of our youth. "What are you doing down here, you old sourbelly?"

"Watching you sun yourself on the fat cushions of the yellow rich."

"Oh, shucks, old man, they're not so yellow!"

"Charley strikes me as yellower than his own gold."

"Charley's not a bad little sort. Of course, he needs coaching a bit here and there—just now, for instance, when he didn't see that that girl wouldn't think of riding in the machine that had just killed her dog. By Jove, give that girl a year in civilization and she'd do! Who was the young fire-eater?"

"Fire-eater! He's a lot more decent than you or I."

"But that's saying so little, dear boy!"

"Seriously, Beverly."

"Oh, hang it with your 'seriously'! Well, then, seriously, melodrama was the correct ticket and all that in 1840, but we've outgrown it; it's devilish demode to chuck things in people's faces.

"I'm not sorry John Mayrant did it!" I brought out his name with due emphasis.

"All the same," Beverly was beginning, when the automobile returned rapidly upon us, and, guessing the cause of this, he waved the parasol. Charley descended to get it—an unnecessary act, prompted, I suppose, by the sudden relief of finding that it was not lost.

He made his thanks marked. "It is my sister's," he concluded, to me, by way of explanation, in his slightly foreign accent. "It is not much, but it has got some stones and things in the handle."

We were favored with a bow from the veiled Hortense, shrill thanks from Kitty, and the car, turning, again left us in a moment.

"You've got a Frenchman along," I said.

"Little Gazza," Beverly returned. "Italian; though from his morals you'd never guess he wasn't Parisian. Great people in Rome. Hereditary right to do something in the presence of the Pope—or not to do it, I forget which. Not a bit of a bad little sort, Gazza. He has just sold a lot of old furniture—Renaissance—Lorenzo du Borgia—that sort of jolly old truck—to Bohm, you know."

I didn't know.

"Oh, yes, you do, old boy. Harry Bohm, of Bohm & Cohn. Everybody knows Bohm, and we'll all be knowing Cohn by next year. Gazza has sold him a lot of furniture, too. Bohm's from Pittsfield, or South Lee, or East Canaan, or West Stockbridge, or some of those other back-country cider presses that squirt some of the hardest propositions into Wall Street. He's just back from buying a railroad, and four or five mines in Mexico. Bohm represents Christianity in the firm. At Newport they call him the military attache to Jerusalem. He's the big chap that sat behind me in the car. He'll marry Kitty as soon as she can get her divorce. Bohm's a jolly old sort—and I tell you, you old sourbelly, you're letting this Southern moss grow over you a bit. Hey? What? Yellow rich isn't half bad, and I'll say it myself, and pretend it's mine; but hang it, old man, their children won't be worse than lemon-colored, and the grandchildren will be white!"

"Just in time," I exclaimed, "to take a back seat with their evaporated fortunes!"

Beverly chuckled. "Well, if they do evaporate, there will be new ones. Now don't walk along making Mayflower eyes at me. I'm no Puritan, and my people have had a front seat since pretty early in the game, which I'm holding on to, you know. And by Jove, old man, I tell you, if you wish to hold on nowadays, you can't be drawing lines! If you don't want to see yourself jolly well replaced, you must fall in with the replacers. Our blooming old republic is merely the quickest process of endless replacing yet discovered, and you take my tip, and back the replacers! That's where Miss Rieppe, for all her Kings Port traditions, shows sense."

I turned square on him. "Then she has broken it?"

"Broken what?"

"Her engagement to John Mayrant. You mean to say that you didn't—?"

"See here, old man. Seriously. The fire-eater?"

I was so very much bewildered that I merely stared at Beverly Rodgers. Of course, I might have known that Miss Rieppe would not feel the need of announcing to her rich Northern friends an engagement which she had fallen into the habit of postponing.

But Beverly had a better right to be taken aback. "I suppose you must have some reason for your remark," he said.

"You don't mean that you're engaged to her?" I shot out.

"Me? With my poor little fifteen thousand a year? Consider, dear boy! Oh, no, we're merely playing at it, she and I. She's a good player. But Charley—"

"He is?" I shouted.

"I don't know, old man, and I don't think he knows—yet."

"Beverly," said I, "let me tell you." And I told him.

After he had got himself adjusted to the novelty of it he began to take it with a series of thoughtful chuckles.

Into these I dropped with: "Where's her father, anyhow?" I began to feel, fantastically, that she mightn't have a father.

"He stopped in Savannah," Beverly answered. "He's coming over by the train. Kitty—Charley's sister, Mrs. Bleecker—did the chaperoning for us.

"Very expertly, I should guess," I said.

"Perfectly; invisibly," said Beverly. And he returned to his thoughts and his chuckles.

"After all, it's simple," he presently remarked.

"Doesn't that depend on what she's here for?"

"Oh, to break it."

"Why come for that?"

He took another turn among his cogitations. I took a number of turns among my own, but it was merely walking round and round in a circle.

"When will she announce it, then?" he demanded.

"Ah!" I murmured. "You said she was a good player."

"But a fire-eater!" he resumed. "For her. Oh, hang it! She'll let him go!"

"Then why hasn't she?"

He hesitated. "Well, of course her game could be spoiled by—"

His speech died away into more cogitation, and I had to ask him what he meant.

"By love getting into it somewhere."

We walked on through Worship Street, which we had reached some while since, and the chief features of which I mechanically pointed out to him.

"Jolly old church, that," said Beverly, as we reached my favorite corner and brick wall. "Well, I'll not announce it!" he murmured gallantly.

"My dear man," I said, "Kings Port will do all the announcing for you to-morrow."



XV: What She Came to See

But in this matter my prognostication was thoroughly at fault; yet surely, knowing Kings Port's sovereign habit, as I had had good cause to know it, I was scarce beyond reasonable bounds in supposing that the arrival of Miss Rieppe would heat up some very general and very audible talk about this approaching marriage, against which the prejudices of the town were set in such compact array. I have several times mentioned that Kings Port, to my sense, was buzzing over John Mayrant's affairs; buzzing in the open, where one could hear it, and buzzing behind closed doors, where one could somehow feel it; I can only say that henceforth this buzzing ceased, dropped wholly away, as if Gossip were watching so hard that she forgot to talk, giving place to a great stillness in her kingdom. Such occasional words as were uttered sounded oddly and egregiously clear in the new-established void.

The first of these words sounded, indeed, quite enormous, issuing as it did from Juno's lips at our breakfast-table, when yesterday's meeting on the New Bridge was investing my mind with many thoughts. She addressed me in one of her favorite tones (I have met it, thank God! but in two or three other cases during my whole experience), which always somehow conveyed to you that you were personally to blame for what she was going to tell you.

"I suppose you know that your friend, Mr. Mayrant, has resigned from the Custom House?"

I was, of course, careful not to give Juno the pleasure of seeing that she had surprised me. I bowed, and continued in silence to sip a little coffee; then, setting my coffee down, I observed that it would be some few days yet before the resignation could take effect; and, noticing that Juno was getting ready some new remark, I branched off and spoke to her of my excursion up the river this morning to see the azaleas in the gardens at Live Oaks.

"How lucky the weather is so magnificent!" I exclaimed.

"I shall be interested to hear," said Juno, "what explanation he finds to give Miss Josephine for his disrespectful holding out against her, and his immediate yielding to Miss Rieppe."

Here I deemed it safe to ask her, was she quite sure it had been at the instance of Miss Rieppe that John had resigned?

"It follows suspiciously close upon her arrival," stated Juno. She might have been speaking of a murder. "And how he expects to support a wife now—well, that is no affair of mine," Juno concluded, with a washing-her-hands-of-it air, as if up to this point she had always done her best for the wilful boy. She had blamed him savagely for not resigning, and now she was blaming him because he had resigned; and I ate my breakfast in much entertainment over this female acrobat in censure.

No more was said; I think that my manner of taking Juno's news had been perfectly successful in disappointing her. John's resignation, if it had really occurred, did certainly follow very close upon the arrival of Hortense; but I had spoken one true thought in intimating that I doubted if it was due to the influence of Miss Rieppe. It seemed to me to the highest degree unlikely that the boy in his present state of feeling would do anything he did not wish to do because his ladylove happened to wish it—except marry her! There was apparently no doubt that he would do that. Did she want him, poverty and all? Was she, even now, with eyes open, deliberately taking her last farewell days of automobiles and of steam yachts? That voice of hers, that rich summons, with its quiet certainty of power, sounded in my memory. "John," she had called to him from the automobile; and thus John had gone away in it, wedged in among Charley and the fat cushions and all the money and glass eyes. And now he had resigned from the Custom House! Yes, that was, whatever it signified, truly amazing—if true.

So I continued to ponder quite uselessly, until the up-country bride aroused me. She, it appeared, had been greatly carried away by the beauty of Live Oaks, and was making her David take her there again this morning; and she was asking me didn't I hope we shouldn't get stuck? The people had got stuck yesterday, three whole hours, right on a bank in the river; and wasn't it a sin and a shame to run a boat with ever so many passengers aground? By the doctrine of chances, I informed her, we had every right to hope for better luck to-day; and, with the assurance of how much my felicity was increased by the prospect of having her and David as company during the expedition, I betook myself meanwhile to my own affairs, which meant chiefly a call at the Exchange to inquire for Eliza La Heu, and a visit to the post-office before starting upon a several hours' absence.

A few steps from our front door I came upon John Mayrant, and saw at once too plainly that no ease had come to his spirit during the hours since the bridge. He was just emerging from an adjacent house.

"And have you resigned?" I asked him.

"Yes. That's done. You haven't seen Miss Rieppe this morning?"

"Why, she's surely not boarding with Mrs. Trevise?"

"No; stopping here with her old friend, Mrs. Cornerly." He indicated the door he had come from. "Of course, you wouldn't be likely to see her pass!" And with that he was gone.

That he was greatly stirred up by something there could be no doubt; never before had I seen him so abrupt; it seemed clear that anger had taken the place of despondency, or whatever had been his previous mood; and by the time I reached the post-office I had already imagined and dismissed the absurd theory that John was jealous of Charley, had resigned from the Custom House as a first step toward breaking his engagement, and had rung Mrs. Cornerly's bell at this early hour with the purpose of informing his lady-love that all was over between them. Jealousy would not be likely to produce this set of manifestations in young, foolish John; and I may say here at once, what I somewhat later learned, that the boy had come with precisely the opposite purpose, namely, to repeat and reenforce his steadfast constancy, and that it was something far removed from jealousy which had spurred him to this.

I found the girl behind the counter at her post, grateful to me for coming to ask how she was after the shock of yesterday, but unwilling to speak of it at all; all which she expressed by her charming manner, and by the other subjects she chose for conversation, and especially by the way in which she held out her hand when I took my leave.

Near the post-office I was hailed by Beverly Rodgers, who proclaimed to me at once a comic but genuine distress. He had already walked, he said (and it was but half-past nine o'clock, as he bitterly bade me observe on the church dial), more miles in search of a drink than his unarithmetical brain had the skill to compute. And he confounded such a town heartily; he should return as soon as possible to Charley's yacht, where there was civilization, and where he had spent the night. During his search he had at length come to a door of promising appearance, and gone in there, and they had explained to him that it was a dispensary. A beastly arrangement. What was the name of the razor-back hog they said had invented it? And what did you do for a drink in this confounded water-hole?

He would find it no water-hole, I told him; but there were methods which a stranger upon his first morning could scarce be expected to grasp. "I could direct you to a Dutchman," I said, "but you're too well dressed to win his confidence at once."

"Well, old man," began Beverly, "I don't speak Dutch, but give me a crack at the confidence."

However, he renounced the project upon learning what a Dutchman was. Since my hours were no longer dedicated to establishing the presence of royal blood in my veins I had spent them upon various local investigations of a character far more entertaining and akin to my taste. It was in truth quite likely that Beverly could in a very few moments, with his smile and his manner, find his way to any Dutchman's heart; he had that divine gift of winning over to him quickly all sorts and conditions of men; and my account of the ingenious and law-baffling contrivances, which you found at these little grocery shops, at once roused his curiosity to make a trial; but he decided that the club was better, if less picturesque. And he told me that all the men of the automobile party had received from John Mayrant cards of invitation to the club.

"Your fire-eater is a civil chap," said Beverly. "And by the way, do you happen to know," here he pulled from his pocket a letter and consulted its address, "Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael?"

I was delighted that he brought an introduction to this lady; Hortense Rieppe could not open for him any of those haughty doors; and I wished not only that Beverly (since he was just the man to appreciate it and understand it) should see the fine flower of Kings Port, but also that the fine flower of Kings Port should see him; the best blood of the South could not possibly turn out anything better than Beverly Rodgers, and it was horrible and humiliating to think of the other Northern specimens of men whom Hortense had imported with her. I was here suddenly reminded that the young woman was a guest of the Cornerlys, the people who swept their garden, the people whom Eliza La Heu at the Exchange did not "know"; and at this the remark of Mrs. Gregory St. Michael, when I had walked with her and Mrs. Weguelin, took on an added lustre of significance:—

"We shall have to call."

Call on the Cornerlys! Would they do that? Were they ready to stand by their John to that tune? A hotel would be nothing; you could call on anybody at a hotel, if you had to; but here would be a demarche indeed! Yet, nevertheless, I felt quite certain that, if Hortense, though the Cornerlys' guest, was also the guaranteed fiancee of John Mayrant, the old ladies would come up to the scratch, hate and loathe it as they might, and undoubtedly would: they could be trusted to do the right thing.

I told Beverly how glad I was that he would meet Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael. "The rest of your party, my friend," I said, "are not very likely to." And I generalized to him briefly upon the town of Kings Port. "Supposing I take you to call upon Mrs. St. Michael when I come back this afternoon?" I suggested.

Beverly thought it over, and then shook his head. "Wouldn't do, old man. If these people are particular and know, as you say they do, hadn't I better leave the letter with my card, and then wait till she sends some word?"

He was right, as he always was, unerringly. Consorting with all the Charleys, and the Bohms, and the Cohns, and the Kitties hadn't taken the fine edge from Beverly's good inheritance and good bringing up; his instinct had survived his scruples, making of him an agile and charming cynic, whom you could trust to see the right thing always, and never do it unless it was absolutely necessary; he would marry any amount of Kitties for their money, and always know that beside his mother and sisters they were as dirt; and he would see to it that his children took after their father, went to school in England for a good accent and enunciation, as he had done, went to college in America for the sake of belonging in their own country, as he had done, and married as many fortunes, and had as few divorces, as possible.

"Who was that girl on the bridge?" he now inquired as we reached the steps of the post-office; and when I had told him again, because he had asked me about Eliza La Heu at the time, "She's the real thing," he commented. "Quite extraordinary, you know, her dignity, when poor old awful Charley was messing everything—he's so used to mere money, you know, that half the time he forgets people are not dollars, and you have to kick him to remind him—yes, quite perfect dignity. Gad, it took a lady to climb up and sit by that ragged old darky and take her dead dog away in the cart! The cart and the darky only made her look what she was all the more. Poor Kitty couldn't do that—she'd look like a chambermaid! Well, old man, see you again."

I stood on the post-office steps looking after Beverly Rodgers as he crossed Court Street. His admirably good clothes, the easy finish of his whole appearance, even his walk, and his back, and the slope of his shoulders, were unmistakable. The Southern men, going to their business in Court Street, looked at him. Alas, in his outward man he was as a rose among weeds! And certainly, no well-born American could unite with an art more hedonistic than Beverly's the old school and the nouveau jeu!

Over at the other corner he turned and stood admiring the church and gazing at the other buildings, and so perceived me still on the steps. With a gesture of remembering something he crossed back again.

"You've not seen Miss Rieppe?"

"Why, of course I haven't!" I exclaimed. Was everybody going to ask me that?

"Well, something's up, old boy. Charley has got the launch away with him—and I'll bet he's got her away with him, too. Charley lied this morning."

"Is lying, then, so rare with him?"

"Why, it rather is, you know. But I've come to be able to spot him when he does it. Those little bulgy eyes of his look at you particularly straight and childlike. He said he had to hunt up a man on business—V-C Chemical Company, he called it—"

"There is such a thing here," I said.

"Oh, Charley'd never make up a thing, and get found out in that way! But he was lying all the same, old man."

"Do you mean they've run off and got married?"

"What do you take them for? Much more like them to run off and not get married. But they haven't done that either. And, speaking of that, I believe I've gone a bit adrift. Your fire-eater, you know—she is an extraordinary woman!" And Beverly gave his mellow, little humorous chuckle. "Hanged if I don't begin to think she does fancy him."

"Well!" I cried, "that would explain—no, it wouldn't. Whence comes your theory?"

"Saw her look at him at dinner once last night. We dined with some people—Cornerly. She looked at him just once. Well, if she intends—by gad, it upsets one's whole notion of her!"

"Isn't just one look rather slight basis for—"

"Now, old man, you know better than that!" Beverly paused to chuckle. "My grandmother Livingston," he resumed, "knew Aaron Burr, and she used to say that he had an eye which no honest woman could meet without a blush. I don't know whether your fire-eater is a Launcelot, or a Galahad, but that girl's eye at dinner—"

"Did he blush?" I laughed.

"Not that I saw. But really, old man, confound it, you know! He's no sort of husband for her. How can he make her happy and how can she make him happy, and how can either of them hit it off with the other the least little bit? She's expensive, he's not; she's up-to-date, he's not; she's of the great world, he's provincial. She's all derision, he's all faith. Why, hang it, old boy, what does she want him for?"

Beverly's handsome brow was actually furrowed with his problem; and, as I certainly could furnish him no solution for it, we stood in silence on the post-office steps. "What can she want him for?" he repeated. Then he threw it off lightly with one of his chuckles. "So glad I've no daughters to marry! Well—I must go draw some money."

He took himself off with a certain alacrity, giving an impatient cut with his stick at a sparrow in the middle of Worship Street, nor did I see him again this day, although, after hurriedly getting my letters (for the starting hour of the boat had now drawn near), I followed where he had gone down Court Street, and his cosmopolitan figure would have been easy to descry at any distance along that scantily peopled pavement. He had evidently found the bank and was getting his money.

David of the yellow heir and his limpid-looking bride were on the horrible little excursion boat, watching for me and keeping with some difficulty a chair next themselves that I might not have to stand up all the way; and, as I came aboard, the bride called out to me her relief, she had made sure that I would be late.

"David said you wouldn't," she announced in her clear up-country accent across the parasols and heads of huddled tourists, "but I told him a gentleman that's late to three meals aivry day like as not would forget boats can't be kept hot in the kitchen for you."

I took my place in the chair beside her as hastily as possible, for there is nothing that I so much dislike as being made conspicuous for any reason whatever; and my thanks to her were, I fear, less gracious in their manner than should have been the case. Nor did she find me, I must suppose, as companionable during this excursion—during the first part of it, at any rate—as a limpid-looking bride, who has kept at some pains a seat beside her for a single gentleman, has the right to expect; the brief hours of this morning had fed my preoccupation too richly, and I must often have fallen silent.

The horrible little tug, or ferry, or wherry, or whatever its contemptible inconvenience makes it fitting that this unclean and snail-like craft should be styled, cast off and began to lumber along the edges of the town with its dense cargo of hats and parasols and lunch parcels. We were a most extraordinary litter of man and womankind. There was the severe New England type, improving each shining hour, and doing it in bleak costume and with a thoroughly northeast expression; there were pink sunbonnets from (I should imagine) Spartanburg, or Charlotte, or Greenville; there were masculine boots which yet bore incrusted upon their heels the red mud of Aiken or of Camden; there was one fat, jewelled exhalation who spoke of Palm Beach with the true stockyard twang, and looked as if she swallowed a million every morning for breakfast, and God knows how many more for the ensuing repasts; she was the only detestable specimen among us; sunbonnets, boots, and even ungenial New England proved on acquaintance kindly, simple, enterprising Americans; yet who knows if sunbonnets and boots and all of us wouldn't have become just as detestable had we but been as she was, swollen and puffy with the acute indigestion of sudden wealth?

This reflection made me charitable, which I always like to be, and I imparted it to the bride.

"My!" she said. And I really don't know what that meant.

But presently I understood well why people endured the discomfort of this journey. I forgot the cinders which now and then showered upon us, and the heat of the sun, and the crowded chairs; I forgot the boat and myself, in looking at the passing shores. Our course took us round Kings Port on three sides. The calm, white town spread out its width and length beneath a blue sky softer than the tenderest dream; the white steeples shone through the enveloping brightness, taking to each other, and to the distant roofs beneath them, successive and changing relations, while the dwindling mass of streets and edifices followed more slowly the veering of the steeples, folded upon itself, and refolded, opened into new shapes and closed again, dwindling always, and always white and beautiful; and as the far-off vision of it held the eye, the few masts along the wharves grew thin and went out into invisibility, the spires became as masts, the distant drawbridge through which we had passed sank down into a mere stretching line, and shining Kings Port was dissolved in the blue of water and of air.

The curving and the narrowing of the river took it at last from view; and after it disappeared the spindling chimneys and their smoke, which were along the bank above the town and bridge, leaving us to progress through the solitude of marsh and wood and shore. The green levels of stiff salt grass closed in upon the breadth of water, and we wound among them, looking across their silence to the deeper silence of the woods that bordered them, the brooding woods, the pines and the liveoaks, misty with the motionless hanging moss, and misty also in that Southern air that deepened when it came among their trunks to a caressing, mysterious, purple veil. Every line of this landscape, the straight forest top, the feathery breaks in it of taller trees, the curving marsh, every line and every hue and every sound inscrutably spoke sadness. I heard a mocking-bird once in some blossoming wild fruit tree that we gradually reached and left gradually behind; and more than once I saw other blossoms, and the yellow of the trailing jessamine; but the bird could not sing the silence away, and spring with all her abundance could not hide this spiritual autumn.

Dreams, a land of dreams, where even the high noon itself was dreamy; a melting together of earth and air and water in one eternal gentleness of revery! Whence came the melancholy of this? I had seen woods as solitary and streams as silent, I had felt nature breathing upon me a greater awe; but never before such penetrating and quiet sadness. I only know that this is the perpetual mood of those Southern shores, those rivers that wind in from the ocean among their narrowing marshes and their hushed forests, and that it does not come from any memory of human hopes and disasters, but from the elements themselves.

So did we move onward, passing in due time another bridge and a few dwellings and some excavations, until the river grew quite narrow, and there ahead was the landing at Live Oaks, with negroes idly watching for us, and a launch beside the bank, and Charley and Hortense Rieppe about to step into it. Another man stood up in the launch and talked to them where they were on the landing platform, and pointed down the river as we approached; but evidently he did not point at us. I looked hastily to see what he was indicating to them, but I could see nothing save the solitary river winding away between the empty woods and marshes.

So this was Hortense Rieppe! It was not wonderful that she had caused young John to lose his heart, or, at any rate, his head and his senses; nor was it wonderful that Charley, with his little bulging eyes, should take her in his launch whenever she would go; the wonderful thing was that John, at his age and with his nature, should have got over it—if he had got over it! I felt it tingling in me; any man would. Steel wasp indeed!

She was slender, and oh, how well dressed! She watched the passengers get off the boat, and I could not tell you from that first sight of her what her face was like, but only her hair, the sunburnt amber of its masses making one think of Tokay or Chateau-Yquem. She was watching me, I felt, and then saw; and as soon as I was near she spoke to me without moving, keeping one gloved hand lightly posed upon the railing of the platform, so that her long arm was bent with perfect ease and grace. I swear that none but a female eye could have detected any toboggan fire-escape.

Her words dropped with the same calculated deliberation, the same composed and rich indifference. "These gardens are so beautiful."

Such was her first remark, chosen with some purpose, I knew quite well; and I observed that I hoped I was not too late for their full perfection, if too late to visit them in her company.

She turned her head slightly toward Charley. "We have been enjoying them so much."

It was of absorbing interest to feel simultaneously in these brief speeches he vouchsafed—speeches consummate in their inexpressive flatness—the intentional coldness and the latent heat of the creature. Since Natchez and Mobile (or whichever of them it had been that had witnessed her beginnings) she had encountered many men and women, those who could be of use to her and those who could not; and in dealing with them she had tempered and chiselled her insolence to a perfect instrument, to strike or to shield. And of her greatest gift, also, she was entirely aware—how could she help being, with her evident experience? She knew that round her whole form swam a delicious, invisible sphere, a distillation that her veriest self sent forth, as gardenias do their perfume, moving where she moved and staying where she stayed, and compared with which wine was a feeble vapor for a man to get drunk on.

"Flowers are always so delightful."

That was her third speech, pronounced just like the others, in a low, clear voice—simplicity arrived at by much well-practiced complexity. And she still looked at Charley.

Charley now responded in his little banker accent. "It is a magnificent collection." This he said looking at me, and moving a highly polished finger-nail along a very slender mustache.

The eyes of Hortense now for a moment glanced at the mixed company of boat-passengers, who were beginning to be led off in pilgrim groups by the appointed guides.

"We were warned it would be too crowded," she remarked.

Charley was looking at her foot. I can't say whether or not the two light taps that the foot now gave upon the floor of the landing brought out for me a certain impatience which I might otherwise have missed in those last words of hers. From Charley it brought out, I feel quite sure, the speech which (in some form) she had been expecting from him as her confederate in this unwelcome and inopportune interview with me, and which his less highly schooled perceptions had not suggested to him until prompted by her.

"I should have been very glad to include you in our launch party if I had known you were coming here to-day," lied little Charley.

"Thank you so much!" I murmured; and I fancy that after this Hortense hated me worse than ever. Well, why should I play her game? If anybody had any claim upon me, was it she? I would get as much diversion as I could from this encounter.

Hortense had looked at Charley when she spoke for my benefit, and it now pleased me very much to look at him when I spoke for hers.

"I could almost give up the gardens for the sake of returning with you," I said to him.

This was most successful in producing a perceptible silence before Hortense said, "Do come."

I wanted to say to her, "You are quite splendid—as splendid as you look, through and through! You wouldn't have run away from any battle of Chattanooga!" But what I did say was, "These flowers here will fade, but may I not hope to see you again in Kings Port?"

She was looking at me with eyes half closed; half closed for the sake of insolence—and better observation; when eyes like that take on drowsiness, you will be wise to leave all your secrets behind you, locked up in the bank, or else toss them right down on the open table. Well, I tossed mine down, thereto precipitated by a warning from the stranger in the launch:—

"We shall need all the tide we can get."

"I'm sure you'd be glad to know," I then said immediately (to Charley, of course), "that Miss La Heu, whose dog you killed, is back at her work as usual this morning."

"Thank you," returned Charley. "If there could be any chance for me to replace—"

"Miss La Heu is her name?" inquired Hortense. "I did not catch it yesterday. She works, you say?"

"At the Woman's Exchange. She bakes cakes for weddings—among her other activities."

"So interesting!" said Hortense; and bowing to me, she allowed the spellbound Charley to help her down into the launch.

Each step of the few that she had to take was upon unsteady footing, and each was taken with slow security and grace, and with a mastery of her skirts so complete that they seemed to do it of themselves, falling and folding in the soft, delicate curves of discretion.

For the sake of not seeming too curious about this party, I turned from watching it before the launch had begun to move, and it was immediately hidden from me by the bank, so that I did not see it get away. As I crossed an open space toward the gardens I found myself far behind the other pilgrims, whose wandering bands I could half discern among winding walks and bordering bushes. I was soon taken into somewhat reprimanding charge by an admirable, if important, negro, who sighted me from a door beneath the porch of the house, and advanced upon me speedily. From him I learned at once the rule of the place, that strangers were not allowed to "go loose," as he expressed it; and recognizing the perfect propriety of this restriction, I was humble, and even went so far as to put myself right with him by quite ample purchases of the beautiful flowers that he had for sale; some of these would be excellent for the up-country bride, who certainly ought to have repentance from me in some form for my silence as we had come up the river: the scenery had caused me most ungallantly to forget her.

My rule-breaking turned out all to my advantage. The admirable and important negro was so pacified by my liberal amends that he not only placed the flowers which I had bought in a bucket of water to wait in freshness until my tour of the gardens should be finished and the moment for me to return upon the boat should arrive, but he also honored me with his own special company; and instead of depositing me in one of the groups of other travellers, he took me to see the sights alone, as if I were somebody too distinguished to receive my impressions with the common herd. Thus I was able to linger here and there, and even to return to certain points for another look.

I shall not attempt to describe the azaleas at Live Oaks. You will understand me quite well, I am sure, when I say that I had heard the people at Mrs. Trevise's house talk so much about them, and praise them so superlatively, that I was not prepared for much: my experience of life had already included quite a number of azaleas. Moreover, my meeting with Hortense and Charley had taken me far away from flowers. But when that marvelous place burst upon me, I forgot Hortense. I have seen gardens, many gardens, in England, in France; in Italy; I have seen what can be done in great hothouses, and on great terraces; what can be done under a roof, and what can be done in the open air with the aid of architecture and sculpture and ornamental land and water; but no horticulture that I have seen devised by mortal man approaches the unearthly enchantment of the azaleas at Live Oaks. It was not like seeing flowers at all; it was as if there, in the heart of the wild and mystic wood, in the gray gloom of those trees veiled and muffled in their long webs and skeins of hanging moss, a great, magic flame of rose and red and white burned steadily. You looked to see it vanish; you could not imagine such a thing would stay. All idea of individual petals or species was swept away in this glowing maze of splendor, this transparent labyrinth of rose and red and white, through which you looked beyond, into the gray gloom of the hanging moss and the depths of the wild forest trees.

I turned back as often as I could, and to the last I caught glimpses of it, burning, glowing, and shining like some miracle, some rainbow exorcism, with its flooding fumes of orange-rose and red and white, merging magically. It was not until I reached the landing, and made my way on board again, that Hortense returned to my thoughts. She hadn't come to see the miracle; not she! I knew that better than ever. And who was the other man in the launch?

"Wasn't it perfectly elegant!" exclaimed the up-country bride. And upon my assenting, she made a further declaration to David: "It's just aivry bit as good as the Isle of Champagne."

This I discovered to be a comic opera, mounted with spendthrift brilliance, which David had taken her to see at the town of Gonzales, just before they were married.

As we made our way down the bending river she continued to make many observations to me in that up-country accent of hers, which is a fashion of speech that may be said to differ as widely from the speech of the low-country as cotton differs from rice. I began to fear that, in spite of my truly good intentions, I was again failing to be as "attentive" as the occasion demanded; and so I presented her with my floral tribute.

She was immediately arch. "I'd surely be depriving somebody!" and on this I got to the full her limpid look.

I assured her that this would not be so, and pointed to the other flowers I had.

Accordingly, after a little more archness, she took them, as she had, of course, fully meant to do from the first; she also took a woman's revenge. "I'll not be any more lonesome going down than I was coming up," she said. "David's enough." And this led me definitely to conclude that David had secured a helpmate who could take care of herself, in spite of the limpidity of her eyes.

A steel wasp? Again that misleading description of Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael's, to which, since my early days in Kings Port, my imagination may be said to have been harnessed, came back into my mind. I turned its injustice over and over beneath the light which the total Hortense now shed upon it—or rather, not the total Hortense, but my whole impression of her, as far as I had got; I got a good deal further before we had finished. To the slow, soft accompaniment of these gliding river shores, where all the shadows had changed since morning, so that new loveliness stood revealed at every turn, my thoughts dwelt upon this perfected specimen of the latest American moment—so late that she contained nothing of the past, and a great deal of to-morrow. I basked myself in the memory of her achieved beauty, her achieved dress, her achieved insolence, her luxurious complexity. She was even later than those quite late athletic girls, the Amazons of the links, whose big, hard football faces stare at one from public windows and from public punts, whose giant, manly strides take them over leagues of country and square miles of dance-floor, and whose bursting, blatant, immodest health glares upon sea-beaches and round supper tables. Hortense knew that even now the hour of such is striking, and that the American boy will presently turn with relief to a creature who will more clearly remind him that he is a man and that she is a woman.

But why was the insolence of Hortense offensive, when the insolence of Eliza La Heu was not? Both these extremely feminine beings could exercise that quality in profusion, whenever they so wished; wherein did the difference lie? Perhaps I thought, in the spirit of its exercise; Eliza was merely insolent when she happened to feel like it; and man has always been able to forgive woman for that—whether the angels do or not, but Hortense, the world-wise, was insolent to all people who could not be of use to her; and all I have to say is, that if the angels can forgive them, they're welcome; I can't!

Had I made sure of anything at the landing? Yes; Hortense didn't care for Charley in the least, and never would. A woman can stamp her foot at a man and love him simultaneously; but those two light taps, and the measure that her eyes took of Charley, meant that she must love his possessions very much to be able to bear him at all.

Then, what was her feeling about John Mayrant? As Beverly had said, what could she want him for? He hadn't a thing that she valued or needed. His old-time notions of decency, the clean simplicity of his make, his good Southern position, and his collection of nice old relatives—what did these assets look like from an automobile, or on board the launch of a modern steam yacht? And wouldn't it be amusing if John should grow needlessly jealous, and have a "difficulty" with Charley? not a mere flinging of torn paper money in the banker's face, but some more decided punishment for the banker's presuming to rest his predatory eyes upon John's affianced lady.

I stared at the now broadening river, where the reappearance of the bridge, and of Kings Port, and the nearer chimneys pouring out their smoke a few miles above the town, betokened that our excursion was drawing to its end. And then from the chimney's neighborhood, from the waterside where their factories stood, there shot out into the smoothness of the stream a launch. It crossed into our course ahead of us, preceded us quickly, growing soon into a dot, went through the bridge, and so was seen no longer; and its occupants must have reached town a good half hour before we did. And now, suddenly, I was stunned with a great discovery. The bride's voice sounded in my ear. "Well, I'll always say you're a prophet, anyhow!"

I looked at her, dull and dazed by the internal commotion the discovery had raised in me.

"You said we wouldn't get stuck in the mud, and we didn't," said the bride.

I pointed to the chimneys. "Are those the phosphate works?"

"Yais. Didn't you know?"

"The V-C phosphate works?"

"Why, yais. Haven't you been to see them yet? He ought to, oughtn't he, David? 'Specially now they've found those deposits up the river were just as rich as they hoped, after all."

"Whose? Mr. Mayrant's?" I asked with such sharpness that the bride was surprised.

David hadn't attended to the name. It was some trust estate, he thought; Regent Tom, or some such thing.

"And they thought it was no good," said the bride. "And it's aivry bit as good as the Coosaw used to be. Better than Florida or Tennessee."

My eyes instinctively turned to where they had last seen the launch; of course it wasn't there any more. Then I spoke to David.

"Do you know what a phosphate bed looks like? Can one see it?"

"This kind you can," he answered. "But it's not worth your trouble. Just a kind of a square hole you dig along the river till you strike the stuff. What you want to see is the works."

No, I didn't want to see even the works; they smelt atrociously, and I do not care for vats, and acids, and processes: and besides, had I not seen enough? My eyes went down the river again where that launch had gone; and I wondered if the wedding-cake would be postponed any more.

Regent Tom? Oh, yes, to be sure! John Mayrant had pointed out to me the house where he had lived; he had been John's uncle. So the old gentleman had left his estate in trust! And now—! But certainly Hortense would have won the battle of Chattanooga!

"Don't be too sure about all this," I told myself cautiously. But there are times when cautioning one's self is quite as useless as if somebody else had cautioned one; my reason leaped with the rapidity of intuition; I merely sat and looked on at what it was doing. All sorts of odds and ends, words I hadn't understood, looks and silences I hadn't interpreted, little signs that I had thought nothing of at first, but which I had gradually, through their multiplicity, come to know meant something, all these broken pieces fitted into each other now, fell together and made a clear pattern of the truth, without a crack in it—Hortense had never believed in that story about the phosphates having failed—"pinched out," as they say of ore deposits. There she had stood between her two suitors, between her affianced John and the besieging Charley, and before she would be off with the old love and on with the new, she must personally look into those phosphates. Therefore she had been obliged to have a sick father and postpone the wedding two or three times, because her affairs—very likely the necessity of making certain of Charley—had prevented her from coming sooner to Kings Port. And having now come hither, and having beheld her Northern and her Southern lovers side by side—had the comparison done something to her highly controlled heart? Was love taking some hitherto unknown liberties with that well-balanced organ? But what an outrage had been perpetrated upon John! At that my deductions staggered in their rapid course. How could his aunts—but then it had only been one of them; Miss Josephine had never approved of Miss Eliza's course; it was of that that Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael had so emphatically reminded Mrs. Gregory in my presence when we had strolled together upon High Walk, and those two ladies had talked oracles in my presence. Well, they were oracles no longer!

When the boat brought us back to the wharf, there were the rest of my flowers unbestowed, and upon whom should I bestow them? I thought first of Eliza La Heu, but she wouldn't be at the Exchange so late as this. Then it seemed well to carry them to Mrs. Weguelin. Something, however, prompted me to pass her door, and continue vaguely walking on until I came to the house where Miss Josephine and Miss Eliza lived; and here I rang the bell and was admitted.

They were sitting as I had seen them first, the one with her embroidery, and the other on the further side of a table, whereon lay an open letter, which in a few moments I knew must have been the subject of the discussion which they finished even as I came forward.

"It was only prolonging an honest mistake." That was Miss Eliza.

"And it has merely resulted in clinching what you meant it to finish." That was Miss Josephine.

I laid my flowers upon the table, and saw that the letter was in John Mayrant's hand. Of course.

I avoided looking at it again; but what had he written, and why had he written? His daily steps turned to this house—unless Miss Josephine had banished him again.

The ladies accepted my offering with gracious expressions, and while I told them of my visit to Live Oaks, and poured out my enthusiasm, the servant was sent for and brought water and two beautiful old china bowls, in which Miss Eliza proceeded to arrange the flowers with her delicate white hands. She made them look exquisite with an old lady's art, and this little occupation went on as we talked of indifferent subjects.

But the atmosphere of that room was charged with the subject of which we did not speak. The letter lay on the table; and even as I struggled to sustain polite conversation, I began to know what was in it, though I never looked at it again; it spoke out as clearly to me as the launch had done. I had thought, when I first entered, to tell the ladies something of my meeting with Hortense Rieppe; I can only say that I found this impossible. Neither of them referred to her, or to John, or to anything that approached what we were all thinking of; for me to do so would have assumed the dimensions of a liberty; and in consequence of this state of things, constraint sat upon us all, growing worse, and so pervading our small-talk with discomfort that I made my visit a very short one. Of course they were civil about this when I rose, and begged me not to go so soon; but I knew better. And even as I was getting my hat and gloves in the hall I could tell by their tones that they had returned to the subject of that letter. But in truth they had never left it; as the front door shut behind me I felt as if they had read it aloud to me.



XVI: The Steel Wasp

Certainly Hortense Rieppe would have won the battle of Chattanooga! I know not from which parent that young woman inherited her gift of strategy, but she was a master. To use the resources of one lover in order to ascertain if another lover had any; to lay tribute on everything that Charley possessed; on his influence in the business world, which enabled him to walk into the V-C Chemical Company's office and borrow an expert in the phosphate line; on his launch in which to pop the expert and take him up the river, and see in his company and learn from his lips just what resources of worldly wealth were likely to be in-store for John Mayrant; and finally (which was the key to all the rest) on his inveterate passion for her, on his banker-like determination through all the thick and thin of discouragement, and worse than discouragement, of contemptuous coquetry, to possess her at any cost he could afford;—to use all this that Charley had, in order that she might judiciously arrive at the decision whether she would take him or his rival, left one lost in admiration. And then, not to waste a moment! To reach town one evening, and next morning by ten o'clock to have that expert safe in the launch on his way up the river to the phosphate diggings! The very audacity of such unscrupulousness commanded my respect: successful dishonor generally wins louder applause than successful virtue. But to be married to her! Oh! not for worlds! Charley might meet such emergency, but poor John, never!

I nearly walked into Mrs. Weguelin and Mrs. Gregory taking their customary air slowly in South Place.

"But why a steel wasp?" I said at once to Mrs. Weguelin. It was a more familiar way of beginning with the little, dignified lady than would have been at all possible, or suitable, if we had not had that little joke about the piano snobile between us. As it was, she was not wholly displeased. These Kings Port old ladies grew, I suspect, very slowly and guardedly accustomed to any outsider; they allowed themselves very seldom to suffer any form of abruptness from him, or from any one, for that matter. But, once they were reassured as to him, then they might sometimes allow the privileged person certain departures from their own rule of deportment, because his conventions were recognized to be different from theirs. Moreover, in reminding Mrs. Weguelin of the steel wasp, I had put my abruptness in "quotations," so to speak, by the tone I gave it, just as people who are particular in speech can often interpolate a word of current slang elegantly by means of the shade of emphasis which they lay upon it.