So Mrs. Weguelin smiled and her dark eyes danced a little. "You remember I said that, then?"

"I remember everything that you said."

"How much have you seen of the creature?" demanded Mrs. Gregory, with her head pretty high.

"Well, I'm seeing more, and more, and more every minute. She's rather endless."

Mrs. Weguelin looked reproachful. "You surely cannot admire her, too?"

Mrs. Gregory hadn't understood me. "Oh, if you really can keep her away, you're welcome!"

"I only meant," I explained to the ladies, "that you don't really begin to see her till you have seen her: it's afterward, when you're out of reach of the spell." And I told them of the interview which I had not been able to tell to Miss Josephine and Miss Eliza. "I doubt if it lasted more than four minutes," I assured them.

"Up the river?" repeated Mrs. Gregory

"At the landing," I repeated. And the ladies consulted each other's expressions. But that didn't bother me any more.

"And you can admire her?" Mrs. Weguelin persisted.

"May I tell you exactly, precisely?"

"Oh, do!" they both exclaimed.

"Well, I think many wise men would find her immensely desirable—as somebody else's wife!"

At this remark Mrs. Weguelin dropped her eyes, but I knew they were dancing beneath their lids. "I should not have permitted myself to say that, but I am glad that it has been said."

Mrs. Gregory turned to her companion. "Shall we call to-morrow?"

"Don't you feel it must be done?" returned Mrs. Weguelin, and then she addressed me. "Do you know a Mr. Beverly Rodgers?"

I gave him a golden recommendation and took my leave of the ladies.

So they were going to do the handsome thing; they would ring the Cornerlys' bell; they would cross the interloping threshold, they would recognize the interloping girl; and this meant that they had given it up. It meant that Miss Eliza had given it up, too, had at last abandoned her position that the marriage would never take place. And her own act had probably drawn this down upon her. When the trustee of that estate had told her of the apparent failure of the phosphates, she had hailed it as an escape for her beloved John, and for all of them, because she made sure that Hortense would never marry a virtually penniless man. And when the work went on, and the rich fortune was unearthed after all, her influence had caused that revelation to be delayed because she was so confident that the engagement would be broken. But she had reckoned without Hortense; worse than that, she had reckoned without John Mayrant; in her meddling attempt to guide his affairs in the way that she believed would be best for him, she forgot that the boy whom she had brought up was no longer a child, and thus she unpardonably ignored his rights as a man. And now Miss Josephine's disapproval was vindicated, and her own casuistry was doubly punished. Miss Rieppe's astute journey of investigation—for her purpose had evidently become suspected by some of them beforehand—had forced Miss Eliza to disclose the truth about the phosphates to her nephew before it should be told him by the girl herself; and the intolerable position of apparent duplicity precipitated two wholly inevitable actions on his part; he had bound himself more than ever to marry Hortense, and he had made a furious breach with his Aunt Eliza. That was what his letter had contained; this time he had banished himself from that house. What was his Aunt Eliza going to do about it? I wondered. She was a stiff, if indiscreet, old lady, and it certainly did not fall within her view of the proprieties that young people should take their elders to task in furious letters. But she had been totally in the wrong, and her fault was irreparable, because important things had happened in consequence of it; she might repent the fault in sackcloth and ashes, but she couldn't stop the things. Would she, then, honorably wear the sackcloth, or would she dishonestly shirk it under the false issue of her nephew's improper tone to her? Women can justify themselves with more appalling skill than men.

One drop there was in all this bitter bucket, which must have tasted sweet to John. He had resigned from the Custom House: Juno had got it right this time, though she hadn't a notion of the real reason for John's act. This act had been, since morning, lost for me, so to speak, in the shuffle of more absorbing events; and it now rose to view again in my mind as a telling stroke in the full-length portrait that all his acts had been painting of the boy during the last twenty-four hours. Notwithstanding a meddlesome aunt, and an arriving sweetheart, and imminent wedlock, he hadn't forgotten to stop "taking orders from a negro" at the very first opportunity which came to him; his phosphates had done this for him, at least, and I should have the pleasure of correcting Juno at tea.

But I did not have this pleasure. They were all in an excitement over something else, and my own different excitement hadn't a chance against this greater one; for people seldom wish to hear what you have to say, even under the most favorable circumstances, and never when they have anything to say themselves. With an audience so hotly preoccupied I couldn't have sat on Juno effectively at all, and therefore I kept it to myself, and attended very slightly to what they were telling me about the Daughters of Dixie.

I bowed absently to the poetess. "And your poem?" I said. "A great success, I am sure?"

"Why, didn't you hear me say so?" said the upcountry bride; and then, after a smile at the others, "I'm sure your flowers were graciously accepted."

"Ask Miss Josephine St. Michael," I replied.

"Oh, oh, oh!" went the bride. "How would she know?"

I gave myself no pains to improve or arrest this tiresome joke, and they went back to their Daughters of Dixie; but it is rather singular how sometimes an utterly absurd notion will be the cause of our taking a step which we had not contemplated. I did carry some flowers to Miss La Heu the next day. I was at some trouble to find any; for in Kings Port shops of this kind are by no means plentiful, and it was not until I had paid a visit to a quite distant garden at the extreme northwestern edge of the town that I lighted upon anything worthy of the girl behind the counter. The Exchange itself was apt to have flowers for sale, but I hardly saw my way to buying them there, and then immediately offering them to the fair person who had sold them to me. As it was, I did much better; for what I brought her were decidedly superior to any that were at the Exchange when I entered it at lunch time.

They were, as the up-country bride would have put it, "graciously accepted." Miss La Heu stood them in water on the counter beside her ledger. She was looking lovely.

"I expected you yesterday," she said. "The new Lady Baltimore was ready."

"Well, if it is not all eaten yet—"

"Oh, no! Not a slice gone."

"Ah, nobody does your art justice here!"

"Go and sit down at your table, please."

It was really quite difficult to say to her from that distance the sort of things that I wished to say; but there seemed to be no help for it, and I did my best.

"I shall miss my lunches here very much when I'm gone."

"Did you say coffee to-day?"

"Chocolate. I shall miss—"

"And the lettuce sandwiches?"

"Yes. You don't realize how much these lunches—"

"Have cost you?" She seemed determined to keep laughing.

"You have said it. They have cost me my—"

"I can give you the receipt, you know."

"The receipt?"

"For Lady Baltimore, to take with you."

"You'll have to give me a receipt for a lost heart."

"Oh, his heart! General, listen to—" From habit she had turned to where her dog used to lie; and sudden pain swept over her face and was mastered. "Never mind!" she quickly resumed. "Please don't speak about it. And you have a heart somewhere; for it was very nice in you to come in yesterday morning after—after the bridge."

"I hope I have a heart," I began, rising; for, really, I could not go on in this way, sitting down away back at the lunch table.

But the door opened, and Hortense Rieppe came into the Woman's Exchange.

It was at me that she first looked, and she gave me the slightest bow possible, the least sign of conventional recognition that a movement of the head could make and be visible at all; she didn't bend her head down, she tilted it ever so little up. It wasn't new to me, this form of greeting, and I knew that she had acquired it at Newport, and that it denoted, all too accurately, the size of my importance in her eyes; she did it, as she did everything, with perfection. Then she turned to Eliza La Heu, whose face had become miraculously sweet.

"Good morning," said Hortense.

It sounded from a quiet well of reserve music; just a cupful of melodious tone dipped lightly out of the surface. Her face hadn't become anything; but it was equally miraculous in its total void of all expression relating to this moment, or to any moment; just her beauty, her permanent stationary beauty, was there glowing in it and through it, not skin deep, but going back and back into her lazy eyes, and shining from within the modulated bloom of her color and the depths of her amber hair. She was choosing, for this occasion, to be as impersonal as some radiant hour in nature, some mellow, motionless day when the leaves have turned, but have not fallen, and it is drowsily warm; but it wasn't so much of nature that she, in her harmonious lustre, reminded me, as of some beautiful silken-shaded lamp, from which color rather than light came with subdued ampleness.

I saw her eyes settle upon the flowers that I had brought Eliza La Heu.

"How beautiful those are!" she remarked.

"Is there something that you wish?" inquired Miss La Heu, always miraculously sweet.

"Some of your good things for lunch; a very little, if you will be so kind."

I had gone back to my table while the "very little" was being selected, and I felt, in spite of how slightly she counted me, that it would be inadequate in me to remain completely dumb.

"Mr. Mayrant is still at the Custom House?" I observed.

"For a few days, yes. Happily we shall soon break that connection." And she smelt my flowers.

"'We,'" I thought to myself, "is rather tremendous."

It grew more tremendous in the silence as Eliza La Heu brought me my orders. Miss Rieppe did not seat herself to take the light refreshment which she found enough for lunch. Her plate and cup were set for her, but she walked about, now with one, and now with the other, taking her time over it, and pausing here and there at some article of the Exchange stock.

Of course, she hadn't come there for any lunch; the Cornerlys had midday lunch and dined late; these innovated hours were a part of Kings Port's deep suspicion of the Cornerlys; but what now became interesting was her evident indifference to our perceiving that lunch was merely a pretext with her; in fact, I think she wished it to be perceived, and I also think that those turns which she took about the Exchange—her apparent inspection of an old mahogany table, her examination of a pewter set—were a symbol (and meant to be a symbol) of how she had all the time there was, and the possession of everything she wished including the situation, and that she enjoyed having this sink in while she was rearranging whatever she had arranged to say, in consequence of finding that I should also hear it. And how well she was worth looking at, no matter whether she stood, or moved, or what she did! Her age lay beyond the reach of the human eye; if she was twenty-five, she was marvelous in her mastery of her appearance; if she was thirty-four, she was marvelous in her mastery of perpetuating it, and by no other means than perfect dress personal to herself (for she had taken the fashion and welded it into her own plasticity) and perfect health; for without a trace of the athletic, her graceful shape teemed with elasticity. There was a touch of "sport" in the parasol she had laid down; and with all her blended serenity there was a touch of "sport" in her. Experience could teach her beauty nothing more; it wore the look of having been made love to by many married men.

Quite suddenly the true light flashed upon me. I had been slow-sighted indeed! So that was what she had come here for to-day! Miss Hortense was going to pay her compliments to Miss La Heu. I believe that my sight might still have been slow but for that miraculous sweetness upon the face of Eliza. She was ready for the compliments! Well, I sat expectant—and disappointment was by no means my lot.

Hortense finished her lunch. "And so this interesting place is where you work?"

Eliza, thus addressed, assented.

"And you furnish wedding cakes also?"

Eliza was continuously and miraculously sweet. "The Exchange includes that."

"I shall hope you will be present to taste some of yours on the day it is mine."

"I shall accept the invitation if my friends send me one."

No blood flowed from Hortense at this, and she continued with the same smooth deliberation.

"The list is of necessity very small; but I shall see that it includes you."

"You are not going to postpone it any more, then?"

No blood flowed at this, either. "I doubt if John—if Mr. Mayrant—would brook further delay, and my father seems stronger, at last. How much do I owe you for your very good food?"

It is a pity that a larger audience could not have been there to enjoy this skilful duet, for it held me hanging on every musical word of it. There, at the far back end of the long room, I sat alone at my table, pretending to be engaged over a sandwich that was no more in existence—external, I mean—and a totally empty cup of chocolate. I lifted the cup, and bowed over the plate, and used the paper Japanese napkin, and generally went through the various discreet paces of eating, quite breathless, all the while, to know which of them was coming out ahead. There was no fairness in their positions; Hortense had Eliza in a cage, penned in by every fact; but it doesn't do to go too near some birds, even when they're caged, and, while these two birds had been giving their sweet manifestations of song, Eliza had driven a peck or two home through the bars, which, though they did not draw visible blood, as I have said, probably taught Hortense that a Newport education is not the only instruction which fits you for drawing-room war to the knife.

Her small reckoning was paid, and she had drawn on one long, tawny glove. Even this act was a luxury to watch, so full it was of the feminine, of the stretching, indolent ease that the flesh and the spirit of this creature invariably seemed to move with. But why didn't she go? This became my wonder now, while she slowly drew on the second glove. She was taking more time than it needed.

"Your flowers are for sale, too?"

This, after her silence, struck me as being something planned out after her original plan. The original plan had finished with that second assertion of her ownership of John (or, I had better say, of his ownership in her), that doubt she had expressed as to his being willing to consent to any further postponement of their marriage. Of course she had expected, and got herself ready for, some thrust on the postponement subject.

Eliza crossed from behind her counter to where the Exchange flowers stood on the opposite side of the room and took some of them up.

"But those are inferior," said Hortense. "These." And she touched rightly the bowl in which my roses stood close beside Eliza's ledger.

Eliza paused for one second. "Those are not for sale."

Hortense paused, too. Then she hung to it. "They are so much the best." She was holding her purse.

"I think so, too," said Eliza. "But I cannot let any one have them."

Hortense put her purse away. "You know best. Shall you furnish us flowers as well as cake?"

Eliza's sweetness rose an octave, softer and softer. "Why, they have flowers there! Didn't you know?"

And to this last and frightful peck through the bars Hortense found no retaliation. With a bow to Eliza, and a total oblivion of me, she went out of the Exchange. She had flaunted "her" John in Eliza's face, she had, as they say, rubbed it in that he was "her" John;—but was it such a neat, tidy victory, after all? She had given away the last word to Eliza, presented her with that poisonous speech which when translated meant:—

"Yes, he's 'your' John; and you're climbing up him into houses where you'd otherwise be arrested for trespass." For it was in one of the various St. Michael houses that the marriage would be held, owing to the nomadic state of the Rieppes.

Yes, Hortense had gone altogether too close to the cage at the end, and, in that repetition of her taunt about "furnishing" supplies for the wedding, she had at length betrayed something which her skill and the intricate enamel of her experience had hitherto, and with entire success, concealed—namely, the latent vulgarity of the woman. She was wearing, for the sake of Kings Port, her best behavior, her most knowing form, and, indeed it was a well-done imitation of the real thing; it would last through most occasions, and it would deceive most people. But here was the trouble: she was wearing it; while, through the whole encounter, Eliza La Heu had worn nothing but her natural and perfect dignity; yet with that disadvantage (for good breeding, alas!, is at times a sort of disadvantage, and can be battered down and covered with mud so that its own fine grain is invisible) Eliza had, after a somewhat undecisive battle, got in that last frightful peck! But what had led Hortense, after she had come through pretty well, to lose her temper and thus, at the finish, expose to Eliza her weakest position? That her clothes were paid for by a Newport lady who had taken her to Worth, that her wedding feast was to be paid for by the bridegroom, these were not facts which Eliza would deign to use as weapons; but she was marrying inside the doors of Eliza's Kings Port, that had never opened to admit her before, and she had slipped into putting this chance into Eliza's hand—and how had she come to do this?

To be sure, my vision had been slow! Hortense had seen, through her thick veil, Eliza's interest in John in the first minute of her arrival on the bridge, that minute when John had run up to Eliza after the automobile had passed over poor General. And Hortense had not revealed herself at once, because she wanted a longer look at them. Well, she had got it, and she had got also a look at her affianced John when he was in the fire-eating mood, and had displayed the conduct appropriate to 1840, while Charley's display had been so much more modern. And so first she had prudently settled that awkward phosphate difficulty, and next she had paid this little visit to Eliza in order to have the pleasure of telling her in four or five different ways, and driving it in deep, and turning it round: "Don't you wish you may get him?"

"That's all clear as day," I said to myself. "But what does her loss of temper mean?"

Eliza was writing at her ledger. The sweetness hadn't entirely gone; it was too soon for that, and besides, she knew I must be looking at her.

"Couldn't you have told her they were my flowers?" I asked her at the counter, as I prepared to depart. Eliza did not look up from her ledger. "Do you think she would have believed me?"

"And why shouldn't—"

"Go out!" she interrupted imperiously and with a stamp of her foot. "You've been here long enough!"

You may imagine my amazement at this. It was not until I had reached Mrs. Trevise's, and was sitting down to answer a note which had been left for me, that light again came. Hortense Rieppe had thought those flowers were from John Mayrant, and Eliza had let her think so.

Yes, that was light, a good bright light shed on the matter; but a still more brilliant beam was cast by the up-country bride when I came into the dining-room. I told her myself, at once, that I had taken flowers to Miss La Heu; I preferred she should hear this from me before she learned it from the smiling lips of gossip. It surprised me that she should immediately inquire what kind of flowers?

"Why, roses," I answered; and she went into peals of laughter.

"Pray share the jest," I begged her with some dignity.

"Didn't you know," she replied, "the language that roses from a single gentleman to a young lady speak in Kings Port?"

I stood staring and stiff, taking it in, taking myself, and Eliza, and Hortense, and the implicated John, all in.

"Why, aivrybody in Kings Port knows that!" said the bride; and now my mirth rose even above hers.



XVII: Doing the Handsome Thing

It by no means lessened my pleasure to discern that Hortense must feel herself to be in a predicament; and as I sat writing my answer to the note, which was from Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael and contained an invitation to me for the next afternoon, I thought of those pilots whose dangers have come down to us from distant times through the songs of ancient poets. The narrow and tempestuous channel between Scylla and Charybdis bristled unquestionably with violent problems, but with none, I should suppose, that called for a nicer hand upon the wheel, or an eye more alert, than this steering of your little trireme to a successful marriage, between one man who believed himself to be your destined bridegroom and another who expected to be so, meanwhile keeping each in ignorance of how close you were sailing to the other. In Hortense's place I should have wished to hasten the wedding now, have it safely performed this afternoon, say, or to-morrow morning; thus precipitated by some invaluable turn in the health of her poor dear father. But she had worn it out, his health, by playing it for decidedly as much as it could bear; it couldn't be used again without risk; the date must stand fixed; and, uneasy as she might have begun to be about John, Hortense must, with no shortening of the course, get her boat in safe without smashing it against either John or Charley. I wondered a little that she should feel any uncertainty about her affianced lover. She must know how much his word was to him, and she had had his word twice, given her the second time to put his own honor right with her on the score of the phosphates. But perhaps Hortense's rich experiences of life had taught her that a man's word to a woman should not be subjected to the test of another woman's advent. On the whole, I suppose it was quite natural those flowers should annoy her, and equally natural that Eliza, the minx, should allow them to do so! There's a joy to the marrow in watching your enemy harried and discomfited by his own gratuitous contrivances; you look on serenely at a show which hasn't cost you a groat. However, poor Eliza had not been so serene at the very end, when she stormed out at me. For this I did not have to forgive her, of course, little as I had merited such treatment. Had she not accepted my flowers? But it was a gratification to reflect that in my sentimental passages with her I had not gone to any great length; nothing, do I ever find, is so irksome as the sense of having unwittingly been in a false position. Was John, on his side, in love with her? Was it possible he would fail in his word? So with these thoughts, while answering and accepting Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael's invitation to make one of a party of strangers to whom she was going to show another old Kings Port church, "where many of my ancestors lie," as her note informed me, I added one sentence which had nothing to do with the subject "She is a steel wasp," I ventured to say. And when on the next afternoon I met the party at the church, I received from the little lady a look of highly spiced comprehension as she gently remarked, "I was glad to get your acceptance."

When I went down to the dinner-table, Juno sat in her best clothes, still discussing the Daughters of Dixie.

I can't say that I took much more heed of this at dinner than I had done at tea; but I was interested to hear Juno mention that she, too, intended to call upon Hortense Rieppe. Kings Port, she said, must take a consistent position; and for her part, so far as behavior went, she didn't see much to choose between the couple. "As to whether Mr. Mayrant had really concealed the discovery of his fortune," she continued, "I asked Miss Josephine—in a perfectly nice way, of course. But old Mr. St. Michael Beaugarcon, who has always had the estate in charge, did that. It is only a life estate, unless Mr. Mayrant has lawful issue. Well, he will have that now, and all that money will be his to squander."

Aunt Carola had written me again this morning, but I had been in no haste to open her letter; my neglect of the Bombos did not weigh too heavily upon me, I fear, but I certainly did put off reading what I expected to be a reprimand. And concerning this I was right; her first words betokened reprimand at once. "My dear nephew Augustus," she began, in her fine, elegant handwriting. That was always her mode of address to me when something was coming, while at other times it would be, less portentously, "My dear Augustus," or "My dear nephew "; but whenever my name and my relationship to her occurred conjointly, I took the communication away with me to some corner, and opened it in solitude.

It wasn't about the Bombos, though; and for what she took me to task I was able to defend myself, I think, quite adequately. She found fault with me for liking the South too much, and this she based upon the enthusiastic accounts of Kings Port and its people that I had written to her; nor had she at all approved of my remarks on the subject of the negro, called forth by Daddy Ben and his grandson Charles Cotesworth.

"When I sent you (wrote Aunt Carola) to admire Kings Port good-breeding, I did not send you to forget your country. Remember that those people were its mortal enemies; that besides their treatment of our prisoners in Libby and Andersonville (which killed my brother Alexander) they displayed in their dealings, both social and political, an arrogance in success and a childish petulance at opposition, which we who saw and suffered can never forget, any more than we can forget our loved ones who laid down their lives for this cause."

These were not the only words with which Aunt Carola reproved what she termed my "disloyalty," but they will serve to indicate her feeling about the Civil War. It was—on her side—precisely the feeling of all the Kings Port old ladies on Heir side. But why should it be mine? And so, after much thinking how I might best reply respectfully yet say to Aunt Carola what my feeling was, I sat down upstairs at my window, and, after some preliminary sentences, wrote:—

"There are dead brothers here also, who, like your brother, laid down their lives for what they believed was their country, and whom their sisters never can forget as you can never forget him. I read their names upon sad church tablets, and their boy faces look out at me from cherished miniatures and dim daguerreotypes. Upon their graves the women who mourn them leave flowers as you leave flowers upon the grave of your young soldier. You will tell me, perhaps, that since the bereavement is equal, I have not justified my sympathy for these people. But the bereavement was not equal. More homes here were robbed by death of their light and promise than with us; and to this you must add the material desolation of the homes themselves. Our roofs were not laid in ashes, and to-day we sit in affluence while they sit in privation. You will say to this, perhaps, that they brought it upon themselves. But even granting that they did so, surely to suffer and to lose is more bitter than to suffer and to win. My dear aunt, you could not see what I have seen here, and write to me as you do; and if those years have left upon your heart a scar which will not vanish, do not ask me, who came afterward, to wear the scar also. I should then resemble certain of the younger ones here, with less excuse than is theirs. As for the negro, forgive me if I assure you that you retain an Abolitionist exaltation for a creature who does not exist, or whose existence is an ineffectual drop in the bucket, a creature on grateful knees raising faithful eyes to one who has struck off his chains of slavery, whereas the creature who does exist is—"

I paused here in my letter to Aunt Carola, and sought for some fitting expression that should characterize for her with sufficient severity the new type of deliberately worthless negro; and as I sought, my eyes wandered to the garden next door, the garden of the Cornerlys. On a bench near a shady arrangement of vines over bars sat Hortense Rieppe. She was alone, and, from her attitude, seemed to be thinking deeply. The high walls of the garden shut her into a privacy that her position near the shady vines still more increased. It was evident that she had come here for the sake of being alone, and I regretted that she was so turned from me that I could not see her face. But her solitude did not long continue; there came into view a gentleman of would-be venerable appearance, who approached her with a walk carefully constructed for public admiration, and who, upon reaching her, bent over with the same sort of footlight elaboration and gave her a paternal kiss. I did not need to hear her call him father; he was so obviously General Rieppe, the prudent hero of Chattanooga, that words would have been perfectly superfluous in his identification.

I was destined upon another day to hear the tones of his voice, and thereupon may as well state now that they belonged altogether with the rest of him. There is a familiar type of Northern fraud, and a Southern type, equally familiar, but totally different in appearance. The Northern type has the straight, flat, earnest hair, the shaven upper lip, the chin-beard, and the benevolent religious expression. He will be the president of several charities, and the head of one great business. He plays no cards, drinks no wine, and warns young men to beware of temptation. He is as genial as a hair-sofa; and he is seldom found out by the public unless some financial crash in general affairs uncovers his cheating, which lies most often beyond the law's reach; and because he cannot be put in jail, he quite honestly believes heaven is his destination. We see less of him since we have ceased to be a religious country, religion no longer being an essential disguise for him. The Southern type, with his unction and his juleps, is better company, unless he is the hero of too many of his own anecdotes. He is commonly the possessor of a poetic gaze, a mane of silvery hair, and a noble neck. As war days and cotton-factor days recede into a past more and more filmed over with romance, he too grows rare among us, and I regret it, for he was in truth a picturesque figure. General Rieppe was perfect.

At first I was sorry that the distance they were from me rendered hearing what they were saying impossible; very soon, however, the frame of my open window provided me with a living picture which would have been actually spoiled had the human voice disturbed its eloquent pantomime.

General Rieppe's daughter responded to her father's caress but languidly, turning to him her face, with its luminous, stationary beauty. He pointed to the house, and then waved his hand toward the bench where she sat; and she, in response to this, nodded slightly. Upon which the General, after another kiss of histrionic paternity administered to her forehead, left her sitting and proceeded along the garden walk at a stately pace, until I could no longer see him. Hortense, left alone upon the bench, looked down at the folds of her dress, extended a hand and slowly rearranged one of them, and then, with the same hand, felt her hair from front to back. This had scarce been accomplished when the General reappeared, ushering Juno along the walk, and bearing a chair with him. When they turned the corner at the arbor, Hortense rose, and greetings ensued. Few objects could be straighter than was Juno's back; her card-case was in her hand, but her pocket was not quite large enough for the whole of her pride, which stuck out so that it could have been seen from a greater distance than my window. The General would have departed, placing his chair for the visitor, when Hortense waved for him an inviting hand toward the bench beside her; he waved a similarly inviting hand, looking at Juno, who thereupon sat firmly down upon the chair. At this the General hovered heavily, looking at his daughter, who gave him no look in return, as she engaged in conversation with Juno; and presently the General left them. Juno's back and Hortense's front, both entirely motionless as they interviewed each other' presented a stiff appearance, with Juno half turned in her seat and Hortense's glance following her slight movement; the two then rose, as the General came down the walk with two chairs and Mrs. Gregory and Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael. Juno, with a bow to them, approached Hortense by a step or two, a brief touch of their fingers was to be seen, and Juno's departure took place, attended by the heavy hovering of General Rieppe.

"That's why!" I said to myself aloud, suddenly, at my open window. Immediately, however, I added, "but can it be?" And in my mind a whole little edifice of reasons for Hortense's apparent determination to marry John instantly fabricated itself—and then fell down.

Through John she was triumphantly bringing stiff Kings Port to her, was forcing them to accept her. But this was scarce enough temptation for Hortense to marry; she could do very well without Kings Port—indeed, she was not very likely to show herself in it, save to remind them, now and then, that she was there, and that they could not keep her out any more; this might amuse her a little, but the society itself would not amuse her in the least. What place had it for her to smoke her cigarettes in?

Eliza La Heu, then? Spite? The pleasure of taking something that somebody else wanted? The pleasure of spoiling somebody else's pleasure? Or, more accurately, the pleasure of power? Well, yes; that might be it, if Hortense Rieppe were younger in years, and younger, especially, in soul; but her museum was too richly furnished with specimens of the chase, she had collected too many bits and bibelots from life's Hotel Druot and the great bazaar of female competition, to pay so great a price as marriage for merely John; particularly when a lady, even in Newport, can have but one husband at a time in her collection. If she did actually love John, as Beverly Rodgers had reluctantly come to believe, it was most inappropriate in her! Had I followed out the train of reasoning which lay coiled up inside the word inappropriate, I might have reached the solution which eventually Hortense herself gave me, and the jewelled recesses of her nature would have blazed still more brilliantly to my eyes to-day; but in truth, my soul wasn't old enough yet to work Hortense out by itself, unaided!

While Mrs. Gregory and Mrs. Weguelin sat on their chairs, and Hortense sat on her bench, tea was brought and a table laid, behind whose whiteness and silver Hortense began slight offices with cups and sugar tongs. She looked inquiry at her visitors, in answer to which Mrs. Gregory indicated acceptance, and Mrs. Weguelin refusal. The beauty of Hortense's face had strangely increased since the arrival of these two visitors. It shone resplendent behind the silver and the white cloth, and her movement, as she gave the cup to Mrs. Gregory St. Michael, was one of complete grace and admirable propriety. But once she looked away from them in the direction of the path. Her two visitors rose and left her, Mrs. Gregory setting her tea-cup down with a gesture that said she would take no more, and, after their bows of farewell, Hortense sat alone again pulling about the tea things.

I saw that by the table lay a card-case on the ground, evidently dropped by Mrs. Gregory; but Hortense could not see it where she sat. Her quick look along the path heralded more company and the General with more chairs. Young people now began to appear, the various motions of whom were more animated than the approaches and greetings and farewells of their elders; chairs were moved and exchanged, the General was useful in handling cups, and a number of faces unknown to me came and went, some of them elderly ones whom I had seen in church, or passed while walking; the black dresses of age mingled with the brighter colors of youth; and on her bench behind the cups sat Hortense, or rose up at right moments, radiant, restrained and adequate, receiving with deferential attention the remarks of some dark-clothed elder, or, with sufficiently interested countenance, inquiring something from a brighter one of her own generation; but twice I saw her look up the garden path. None of them stayed long, although when they were all gone the shadow of the garden wall had come as far as the arbor; and once again Hortense sat alone behind the table, leaning back with arms folded, and looking straight in front of her. At last she stirred, and rose slowly, and then, with a movement which was the perfection of timidity, began to advance, as John, with his Aunt Eliza, came along the path. To John, Hortense with familiar yet discreet brightness gave a left hand, as she waited for the old lady; and then the old lady went through with it. What that embrace of acknowledgment cost her cannot be measured, and during its process John stood like a sentinel. Possibly this was the price of his forgiveness to his Aunt Eliza.

The visitors accepted tea, and the beauty in Hortense's face was now supreme. The old lady sat, forgetting to drink her tea, but very still in outward attitude, as she talked with Hortense; and the sight of one hand in its glove lying motionless upon her best dress, suddenly almost drew unexpected tears to my eyes. John was nearly as quiet as she, but the glove that he held was twisted between his fingers. I expected that he would stay with his Hortense when his aunt took her leave; he, however, was evidently expected by the old lady to accompany her out and back, I suppose, to her house, as was proper.

But John's departure from Hortense differed from his meeting her. She gave no left hand to him now; she gazed at him, and then, as the old lady began to go toward the house, she moved a step toward him, and then she cast herself into his arms! It was no acting, this, no skilful simulation; her head sank upon his shoulder, and true passion spoke in every line of that beautiful surrendered form, as it leaned against her lover's.

"So that's why!" I exclaimed, once more aloud.

It was but a moment; and John, released, followed Miss Eliza. The old lady walked slowly, with that half-failing step that betokens the body's weariness after great mental or moral strain. Indeed, as John regained her side, she put her arm in his as if her feebleness needed his support. Thus they went away together, the aunt and her beloved boy, who had so sorely grieved and disappointed her.

But if this sight touched me, this glimpse of the vanquished leaving the field after supreme acknowledgment of defeat, upon Hortense it wrought another effect altogether. She stood looking after them, and as she looked, the whole woman from head to foot, motionless as she was, seemed to harden. Yet still she looked, until at length, slowly turning, her eyes chanced to fall upon Mrs. Gregory St. Michael's card-case. There it lay, the symbol of Kings Port's capitulation. She swooped down and up with a flying curve of grace, holding her prey caught; and then, catching also her handsome skirts on either side, she danced like a whirling fan among the empty chairs.



XVIII: Again the Replacers

But a little while, and all that I had just witnessed in such vivid dumb-show might have seemed to me in truth some masque; so smooth had it been, and voiceless, coming and going like a devised fancy. And after the last of the players was gone from the stage, leaving the white cloth, and the silver, and the cups, and the groups of chairs near the pleasant arbor, I watched the deserted garden whence the sunlight was slowly departing, and it seemed to me more than ever like some empty and charming scene in a playhouse, to which the comedians would in due time return to repeat their delicate pantomime. But these were mental indulgences, with which I sat playing until the sight of my interrupted letter to Aunt Carola on the table before me brought the reality of everything back into my thoughts; and I shook my head over Miss Eliza. I remembered that hand of hers, lying in despondent acquiescence upon her lap, as the old lady sat in her best dress, formally and faithfully accepting the woman whom her nephew John had brought upon them as his bride-elect—formally and faithfully accepting this distasteful person, and thus atoning as best she could to her beloved nephew for the wrong that her affection had led her to do him in that ill-starred and inexcusable tampering with his affairs.

But there was my letter waiting. I took my pen, and finished what I had to say about the negro and the injustice we had done to him, as well as to our own race, by the Fifteenth Amendment. I wrote:—

"I think Northerners must often seem to these people strangely obtuse in their attitude. And they deserve such opinion, since all they need to do is come here and see for themselves what the War did to the South.

"You may have a perfectly just fight with a man and beat him rightly; but if you are able to go on with your work next day, while his health is so damaged that for a long while he limps about as a cripple, you must not look up from your busy thriving and reproach him with his helplessness, and remind him of its cause; nor must you be surprised that he remembers the fight longer than you have time for. I know that the North meant to be magnanimous, that the North was magnanimous, that the spirit of Grant at Appomattox filled many breasts; and I know that the magnanimity was not met by those who led the South after Lee's retirement, and before reconstruction set in, and that the Fifteenth Amendment was brought on by their own doings: when have two wrongs made a right? And to place the negro above these people was an atrocity. You cannot expect them to inquire very industriously how magnanimous this North meant to be, when they have suffered at her hands worse, far worse, than France suffered from Germany's after 1870.

"I do think there should be a different spirit among some of the later-born, but I have come to understand even the slights and suspicions from which I here and there suffer, since to their minds, shut in by circumstance, I'm always a 'Yankee.'

"We are prosperous; and prosperity does not bind, it merely assembles people—at dinners and dances. It is adversity that binds—beside the gravestone, beneath the desolated roof. Could you come here and see what I have seen, the retrospect of suffering, the long, lingering convalescence, the small outlook of vigor to come, and the steadfast sodality of affliction and affection and fortitude, your kind but unenlightened heart would be wrung, as mine has been, and is being, at every turn."

After I had posted this reply to Aunt Carola, I had some fears that my pen had run away with me, and that she might now descend upon me with that reproof which she knew so well how to exercise in cases of disrespect. But there was actually a certain pathos in her mildness when it came. She felt it her duty to go over a good deal of history first, but:—

"I do not understand the present generation," she finished, "and I suppose that I was not meant to."

The little sigh in these words did great credit to Aunt Carola.

This vindication off my mind, and relieved by it of the more general thoughts about Kings Port and the South, which the pantomime of Kings Port's forced capitulation to Hortense had raised in me, I returned to the personal matters between that young woman and John, and Charley. How much did Charley know? How much would Charley stand? How much would John stand, if he came to know?

Well, the scene in the garden now helped me to answer these questions much better than I could have answered them before its occurrence. With one fact—the great fact of love—established, it was not difficult to account for at least one or two of the several things that puzzled me. There could be no doubt that Hortense loved John Mayrant, loved him beyond her own control. When this love had begun, made no matter. Perhaps it began on the bridge, when the money was torn, and Eliza La Heu had appeared. The Kings Port version of Hortense's indifference to John before the event of the phosphates might well enough be true. It might even well enough be true that she had taken him and his phosphates at Newport for lack of anything better at hand, and because she was sick of disappointed hopes. In this case, Charley's subsequent appearance as something very much better (if the phosphates were to fail) would perfectly explain the various postponements of the wedding.

So I was able to answer my questions to myself thus: How much did Charley know?—Just what he could see for himself, and what he had most likely heard from Newport gossip. He could have heard of an old engagement, made purely for money's sake, and of recent delays created by the lady; and he could see the gentleman—an impossible husband from a Wall Street standpoint!—to whom Hortense was evidently tempering her final refusal by indulgently taking an interest in helping along his phosphate fortune. Charley would not refuse to lend her his aid in this estimable benevolence; nor would it occur to Charley's sensibilities how such benevolence would be taken by John if John were not "taken" himself. Yes, Charley was plainly fooled, and fooled the more readily because he had the old version of the truth. How should he suspect there was a revised version? How should he discover that passion had now changed sides, that it was now John who allowed himself to be loved? The signs of this did not occur before his eyes. Of course, Charley would not stay fooled forever; the hours of that were numbered,—but their number was quite beyond my guessing!

How much would Charley stand? He would stand a good deal, because the measure of his toleration was the measure of his desire for Hortense; and it was plain that he wanted her very much indeed. But how much would John stand? How soon would his "fire-eating" traditions produce a "difficulty"? Why had they not done this already? Well, the garden had in some way helped me to frame a fairly reasonable answer for this also. Poor Hortense had become as powerless to woo John to warmth as poor Venus had been with Adonis; and passion, in changing sides, had advanced the boy's knowledge. He knew now the difference between the embraces of his lady when she had merely wanted his phosphates, and these other caresses now that, she wanted him. In his ceaseless search for some possible loophole of escape, his eye could not have overlooked the chance that lay in Charley, and he was far too canny to blast his forlorn hope. He had probably wondered what had changed the nature of Hortense's caresses, and the adventure of the torn money could scarce have failed to suggest itself to the mind of a youth who, little as he had trodden the ways of the world, evidently possessed some lively instincts regarding the nature of women. To batter Charley as he had battered Juno's nephew, might result in winding the arms of Hortense around his own neck more tightly than ever.

Why Hortense should keep Charley "on" any longer, was what I could least fathom, but I trusted her to have excellent reasons for anything that she did. "It's sure to be quite simple, once you know it," I told myself; and the near future proved me to be right.

Thus I laid most of my enigmas to rest; there was but one which now and then awakened still. Were Hortense a raw girl of eighteen, I could easily grant that the "fire-eater" in John would be sure to move her. But Hortense had travelled many miles away from the green forests of romance; her present fields were carpeted, not with grass and flowers, but with Oriental mats and rugs, and it was electric lights, not the moon and stars, that shone upon her highly seasoned nights. No, torn money and all, it was not appropriate in a woman of her experience; and so I still found myself inquiring in the words of Beverly Rodgers, "But what can she want him for?"

The next time that I met Mrs. Gregory St. Michael it was on my way to join the party at the old church, which Mrs. Weguelin was going to show them. The card-case was in her hand, and the sight of it prompted me to allude to Hortense Rieppe.

"I find her beauty growing upon me?" I declared.

Mrs. Gregory did not deny the beauty, although she spoke with reserve at first. "It is to be said that she knows how to write a suitable note," the lady also admitted.

She didn't tell me what the note was about, naturally; but I could imagine with what joy in the exercise of her art Hortense had constructed that communication which must have accompanied the prompt return of the card-case.

Then Mrs. Gregory's tongue became downright. "Since you're able to see so much of her, why don't you tell her to marry that little steam-yacht gambler? I'm sure he's dying to, and he's just the thing for her?"

"Ah," I returned, "Love so seldom knows what's just the thing for marriage."

"Then your precocity theory falls," declared Mrs. St. Michael. And as she went away from me along the street, I watched her beautiful stately walk; for who could help watching a sight so good?

Charley, then, was no secret to John's people. Was John still a secret to Charley? Could Hortense possibly have managed this? I hoped for a chance to observe the two men with her during the visit of Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael and her party to the church.

This party was already assembled when I arrived upon the spot appointed. In the street, a few paces from the church, stood Bohm and Charley and Kitty and Gazza, with Beverly Rodgers, who, as I came near, left them and joined me.

"Oh, she's somewhere off with her fire-eater," responded Beverly to my immediate inquiry for Hortense. "Do you think she was asked, old man?"

Probably not, I thought. "But she goes so well with the rest," I suggested.

Beverly gave his chuckle. "She goes where she likes. She'll meet us here when we're finished, I'm pretty sure."

"Why such certainty?"

"Well, she has to attend to Charley, you know!"

Mrs. Weguelin, it appeared, had met the party here by the church, but had now gone somewhere in the immediate neighborhood to find out why the gate was not opened to admit us, and to hasten the unpunctual custodian of the keys. I had not looked for precisely such a party as Mrs. Weguelin's invitation had gathered, nor could I imagine that she had fully understood herself what she was gathering; and this I intimated to Beverly Rodgers, saying:—

"Do you suppose, my friend, that she suspected the feather of the birds you flock with?"

Beverly took it lightly. "Hang it, old boy, of course everybody can't be as nice as I am!" But he took it less lightly before it was over.

We stood chatting apart, he and I, while Bohm and Charley and Kitty and Gazza walked across the street to the window of a shop, where old furniture was for sale at a high price; and it grew clearer to me what Beverly had innocently brought upon Mrs. Weguelin, and how he had brought it. The little quiet, particular lady had been pleased with his visit, and pleased with him. His good manners, his good appearance, his good English-trained voice, all these things must have been extremely to her taste; and then—more important than they—did she not know about his people? She had inquired, he told me, with interest about two of his uncles, whom she had last seen in 1858. "She's awfully the right sort," said Beverly. Yes, I saw well how that visit must have gone: the gentle old lady reviving in Beverly's presence, and for the sake of being civil to him, some memories of her girlhood, some meetings with those uncles, some dances with them; and generally shedding from her talk and manner the charm of some sweet old melody—and Beverly, the facile, the appreciative, sitting there with her at a correct, deferential angle on his chair, admirably sympathetic and in good form, and playing the old school. (He had no thought to deceive her; the old school was his by right, and genuinely in his blood, he took to it like a duck to the water.) How should Mrs. Weguelin divine that he also took to the nouveau jeu to the tune of Bohm and Charley and Kitty and Gazza? And so, to show him some attention, and because she couldn't ask him to a meal, why, she would take him over the old church, her colonial forefathers'; she would tell him the little legends about them; he was precisely the young man to appreciate such things—and she would be pleased if he would also bring the friends with whom he was travelling.

I looked across the street at Bohm and Charley and Kitty and Gazza. They were now staring about them in all their perfection of stare: small Charley in a sleek slate-colored suit, as neat as any little barber; Bohm, massive, portentous, his strong shoes and gloves the chief note in his dress, and about his whole firm frame a heavy mechanical strength, a look as of something that did something rapidly and accurately when set going—cut or cracked or ground or smashed something better and faster than it had ever been cut or cracked or ground or smashed before, and would take your arms and legs off if you didn't stand well back from it; it was only in Bohm's eye and lips that you saw he wasn't made entirely of brass and iron, that champagne and shoulders decolletes received a punctual share of his valuable time. And there was Kitty, too, just the wife for Bohm, so soon as she could divorce her husband, to whom she had united herself before discovering that all she married him for, his old Knickerbocker name, was no longer in the slightest degree necessary for social acceptance; while she could feed people, her trough would be well thronged. Kitty was neat, Kitty was trig, Kitty was what Beverly would call "swagger "; her skilful tailor-made clothes sheathed her closely and gave her the excellent appearance of a well-folded English umbrella; it was in her hat that she had gone wrong—a beautiful hat in itself, one which would have wholly become Hortense; but for poor Kitty it didn't do at all. Yes, she was a well folded English umbrella, only the umbrella had for its handle the head of a bulldog or the leg of a ballet-dancer. And these were the Replacers whom Beverly's clear-sighted eyes saw swarming round the temple of his civilization, pushing down the aisles, climbing over the backs of the benches, walking over each other's bodies, and seizing those front seats which his family had sat in since New York had been New York; and so the wise fellow very prudently took every step that would insure the Replacers' inviting him to occupy one of his own chairs. I had almost forgotten little Gazza, the Italian nobleman, who sold old furniture to new Americans. Gazza was not looking at the old furniture of Kings Port, which must have filled his Vatican soul with contempt; he was strolling back and forth in the street, with his head in the air, humming, now loudly, now softly "La-la, la-la, E quando a la predica in chiesa siederia, la-la-la-la;" and I thought to myself that, were I the Pope, I should kick him into the Tiber.

When Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael came back with the keys and their custodian, Bohm was listening to the slow, clear words of Charley, in which he evidently found something that at length interested him—a little. Bohm, it seemed, did not often speak himself: possibly once a week. His way was to let other people speak to him when there were signs in his face that he was hearing anything which they said, it was a high compliment to them, and of course Charley could command Bohm's ear; for Charley, although he was as neat as any barber, and let Hortense walk on him because he looked beyond that, and purposed to get her, was just as potent in the financial world as Bohm, could bring a borrowing empire to his own terms just as skillfully as could Bohm; was, in short, a man after Bohm's own—I had almost said heart: the expression is so obstinately embedded in our language! Bohm, listening, and Charley, talking, had neither of them noticed Mrs. Weguelin's arrival; they stood ignoring her, while she waited, casting a timid eye upon them. But Beverly, suddenly perceiving this, and begging her pardon for them, brought the party together, and we moved in among the old graves.

"Ah!" said Gazza, bending to read the quaint words cut upon one of them, as we stopped while the door at the rear of the church was being opened, "French!"

"It was the mother-tongue of these colonists," Mrs. Weguelin explained to him.

"Ah! like Canada!" cried Gazza. "But what a pretty bit is that!" And he stood back to admire a little glimpse, across a street, between tiled roofs and rusty balconies, of another church steeple. "Almost, one would say, the Old World," Gazza declared.

"Our world is not new," said Mrs. Weguelin; and she passed into the church.

Kings Port holds many sacred nooks, many corners, many vistas, that should deeply stir the spirit and the heart of all Americans who know and love their country. The passing traveller may gaze up at certain windows there, and see History herself looking out at him, even as she looks out of the windows of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. There are also other ancient buildings in Kings Port, where History is shut up, as in a strong-box,—such as that stubborn old octagon, the powder-magazine of Revolutionary times, which is a chest holding proud memories of blood and war. And then there are the three churches. Not strong-boxes, these, but shrines, where burn the venerable lamps of faith. And of these three houses of God, that one holds the most precious flame, the purest light, which treasures the holy fire that came from France. The English colonists, who sat in the other two congregations, came to Carolina's soil to better their estate; but it was for liberty of soul, to lift their ardent and exalted prayer to God as their own conscience bade them, and not as any man dictated, that those French colonists sought the New World. No Puritan splendor of independence and indomitable courage outshines theirs. They preached a word as burning as any that Plymouth or Salem ever heard. They were but a handful, yet so fecund was their marvelous zeal that they became the spiritual leaven of their whole community. They are less known than Plymouth and Salem, because men of action, rather than men of letters, have sprung from the loins of the South; but there they stand, a beautiful beacon, shining upon the coasts of our early history. Into their church, then, into the shrine where their small lamp still burns, their devout descendant, Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael led our party, because in her eyes Kings Port could show nothing more precious and significant. There had been nothing to warn her that Bohm and Charley were Americans who neither knew nor loved their country, but merely Americans who knew their country's wealth and loved to acquire every penny of it that they could.

And so, following the steps of our delicate and courteous guide, we entered into the dimness of the little building; and Mrs. Weguelin's voice, lowered to suit the sanctity which the place had for her, began to tell us very quietly and clearly the story of its early days.

I knew it, or something of it, from books; but from this little lady's lips it took on a charm and graciousness which made it fresh to me. I listened attentively, until I felt, without at first seeing the cause, that dulling of enjoyment, that interference with the receptive attention, which comes at times to one during the performance of music when untimely people come in or go out. Next, I knew that our group of listeners was less compact; and then, as we moved from the first point in the church to a new one, I saw that Bohm and Charley were dropping behind, and I lingered, with the intention of bringing them closer.

"But there was nothing in it," I heard Charley's slow monologue continuing behind me to the silent Bohm. "We could have bought the Parsons road at that time. 'Gentlemen,' I said to them, 'what is there for us in tide-water at Kings Port? '"

It was not to be done, and I rejoined Mrs. Weguelin and those of the party who were making some show of attention to her quiet little histories and explanations; and Kitty's was the next voice which I heard ring out—

"Oh, you must never let it fall to pieces! It's the cunningest little fossil I've seen in the South."

"So," said Charley behind me, "we let the other crowd buy their strategic point; and I guess they know they got a gold brick."

I moved away from the financiers, I endeavored not to hear their words; and in this much I was successful; but their inappropriate presence had got, I suppose upon my nerves; at any rate, go where I would in the little church, or attend as I might and did to what Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael said about the tablets, and whatever traditions their inscriptions suggested to her, that quiet, low, persistent banker's voice of Charley's pervaded the building like a draft of cold air. Once, indeed, he addressed Mrs. Weguelin a question. She was telling Beverly (who followed her throughout, protectingly and charmingly, with his most devoted attention and his best manner) the honorable deeds of certain older generations of a family belonging to this congregation, some of whose tombs outside had borne French inscriptions.

"My mother's family," said Mrs. Weguelin.

"And nowadays," inquired Beverly, "what do they find instead of military careers?"

"There are no more of us nowadays; they—they were killed in the war."

And immediately she smiled, and with her hand she made a light gesture, as if to dismiss this subject from mutual embarrassment and pain.

"I might have known better," murmured the understanding Beverly.

But Charley now had his question. "How many, did you say?"

"How many?" Mrs. Weguelin did not quite understand him.

"Were killed?" explained Charley.

Again there was a little pause before Mrs. Weguelin answered, "My four brothers met their deaths."

Charley was interested. "And what was the percentage of fatality in their regiments?"

"Oh," said Mrs. Weguelin, "we did not think of it in that way." And she turned aside.

"Charley," said Kitty, with some precipitancy, "do make Mr. Bohm look at the church!" and she turned after Mrs. Weguelin. "It is such a gem!"

But I saw the little lady try to speak and fail, and then I noticed that she was leaning against a window-sill.

Beverly Rodgers also noticed this, and he hastened to her.

"Thank you," she returned to his hasty question, "I am quite well. If you are not tired of it, shall we go on?"

"It is such a gem!" repeated Kitty, throwing an angry glance at Charley and Bohm. And so we went on.

Yes, Kitty did her best to cover it up; Kitty, as she would undoubtedly have said herself, could see a few things. But nobody could cover it up, though Beverly was now vigilant in his efforts to do so. Indeed, Replacers cannot be covered up by human agency; they bulge, they loom, they stare, they dominate the road of life, even as their automobiles drive horses and pedestrians to the wall. Bohm, roused from his financial torpor by Kitty's sharp command, did actually turn his eyes upon the church, which he had now been inside for some twenty minutes without noticing. Instinct and long training had given his eye, when it really looked at anything, a particular glance—the glance of the Replacer—which plainly calculated: "Can this be made worth money to me?" and which died instantly to a glaze of indifference on seeing that no money could be made. Bohm's eye, accordingly, waked and then glazed. Manners, courtesy, he did not need, not yet; he had looked at them with his Replacer glance, and, seeing no money in them, had gone on looking at railroads, and mines, and mills,—and bare shoulders, and bottles. Should manners and courtesy come, some day, to mean money to him, then he could have them, in his fashion, so that his admirers and his apologists should alike declare of him, "A rough diamond, but consider what he has made of himself!"

"After what, did you say?" This was the voice of Gazza, addressing Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael. It must be said of Gazza that he, too, made a certain presence of interest in the traditions of Kings Port.

"After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes," replied Mrs. Weguelin.

"Built it in Savannah," Charley was saying to Bohm, "or Norfolk. This is a good place to bury people in, but not money. Now the phosphate proposition—"

Again I dragged my attention by force away from that quiet, relentless monologue, and listened as well as I could to Mrs. Weguelin. There had come to be among us all, I think—Beverly, Kitty, Gazza, and myself—a joint impulse to shield her, to cluster about her, to follow her steps from each little lecture that she finished to the new point where the next lecture began; and we did it, performed our pilgrimage to the end; but there was less and less nature in our performance. I knew (and it was like a dream which I could not stop) that we pressed a little too close, that our questions were a little too eager, that we overprinted our faces with attention; knowing this did not help, nothing helped, and we went on to the end, seeing ourselves doing it; and it must have been that Mrs. Weguelin saw us likewise. But she was truly admirable in giving no sign, she came out well ahead; the lectures were not hurried, one had no sense of points being skipped to accommodate our unworthiness, it required a previous familiarity with the church to know (as I did) that there was, indeed, more and more skipping; yet the little lady played her part so evenly and with never a falter of voice nor a change in the gentle courtesy of her manner, that I do not think—save for that moment at the window-sill—I could have been sure what she thought, or how much she noticed. Her face was always so pale, it may well have been all imagination with me that she seemed, when we emerged at last into the light of the street, paler than usual; but I am almost certain that her hand was trembling as she stood receiving the thanks of the party. These thanks were cut a little short by the arrival of one of the automobiles, and, at the same time, the appearance of Hortense strolling toward us with John Mayrant.

Charley had resumed to Bohm, "A tax of twenty-five cents on the ton is nothing with deposits of this richness," when his voice ceased; and looking at him to see the cause, I perceived that his eye was on John, and that his polished finger-nail was running meditatively along his thin mustache.

Hortense took the matter—whatever the matter was—in hand.

"You haven't much time," she said to Charles, who consulted his watch.

"Who's coming to see me off?" he inquired.

"Where's he going?" I asked Beverly.

"She's sending him North," Beverly answered, and then he spoke with his very best simple manner to Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael. "May I not walk home with you after all your kindness?"

She was going to say no, for she had had enough of this party; but she looked at Beverly, and his face and his true solicitude won her; she said, "Thank you, if you will." And the two departed together down the shabby street, the little veiled lady in black, and Beverly with his excellent London clothes and his still more excellent look of respectful, sheltering attention.

And now Bohm pronounced the only utterance that I heard fall from his lips during his stay in Kings Port. He looked at the church he had come from, he looked at the neighboring larger church whose columns stood out at the angle of the street; he looked at the graveyard opposite that, then at the stale, dusty shop of old furniture, and then up the shabby street, where no life or movement was to be seen, except the distant forms of Beverly and Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael. Then from a gold cigar-case, curved to fit his breast pocket, he took a cigar and lighted it from a gold match-box. Offering none of us a cigar, he placed the case again in his pocket; and holding his lighted cigar a moment with two fingers in his strong glove, he spoke:—

"This town's worse than Sunday."

Then he got into the automobile. They all followed to see Charley off, and he addressed me.

"I shall be glad," he said, "if you will make one of a little party on the yacht next Sunday, when I come back. And you also," he added to John.

Both John and I expressed our acceptance in suitable forms, and the automobile took its way to the train.

"Your Kings Port streets," I said, as we walked back toward Mrs. Trevise's, "are not very favorable for automobiles."

"No," he returned briefly. I don't remember that either of us found more to say until we had reached my front door, when he asked, "Will the day after to-morrow suit you for Udolpho?"

"Whenever you say," I told him.

"Weather permitting, of course. But I hope that it will; for after that I suppose my time will not be quite so free."

After we had parted it struck me that this was the first reference to his approaching marriage that John had ever made in my hearing since that day long ago (it seemed long ago, at least) when he had come to the Exchange to order the wedding-cake, and Eliza La Heu had fallen in love with him at sight. That, in my opinion, looking back now with eyes at any rate partially opened, was what Eliza had done. Had John returned the compliment then, or since?



XIX: Udolpho

It was to me continuously a matter of satisfaction and of interest to see Hortense disturbed—whether for causes real or imaginary—about the security of her title to her lover John, nor can I say that my misinterpreted bunch of roses diminished this satisfaction. I should have been glad to know if the accomplished young woman had further probed that question and discovered the truth, but it seemed scarce likely that she could do this without the help of one of three persons, Eliza and myself who knew all, or John who knew nothing; for the up-country bride, and whatever other people in Kings Port there were to whom the bride might gayly recite the tale of my roses, were none of them likely to encounter Miss Rieppe; their paths and hers would not meet until they met in church at the wedding of Hortense and John. No, she could not have found out the truth; for never in the world would she, at this eleventh hour, risk a conversation with John upon a subject so full of well-packed explosives; and so she must be simply keeping on both him and Eliza an eye as watchful as lay in her power. As for Charley, what bait, what persuasion, what duress she had been able to find that took him at an hour so critical from her side to New York, I could not in the least conjecture. Had she said to the little banker, Go, because I must think it over alone? It did not seem strong enough. Or had she said, Go, and on your return you shall have my answer? Not adequate either, I thought. Or had it been, If you don't go, it shall be "no," to-day and forever? This last was better; but there was no telling, nor did Beverly Rodgers, to whom I propounded all my theories, have any notion of what was between Hortense and Charley. He only knew that Charley was quite aware of the existence of John, but had always been merely amused at the notion of him.

"So have you been merely amused," I reminded him.

"Not since that look I saw her give him, old chap. I know she wants him, only not why she wants him. And Charley, you know—well, of course, poor Charley's a banker, just a banker and no more; and a banker is merely the ace in the same pack where the drummer is the two-spot. Our American civilization should be called Drummer's Delight—and there's nothing in your fire-eater to delight a drummer: he's a gentleman, he'll be only so-so rich, and he's away back out of the lime-light, while poor old Charley's a bounder, and worth forty millions anyhow, and right in the centre of the glare. How should he see any danger in John?"

"I wonder if he hasn't begun to?"

"Well, perhaps. He and Hortense have been 'talking business'; I know that. Oh—and why do you think she said he must go to New York? To make a better deal for the fire-eater's phosphates than his fuddling old trustee here was going to close with. Charley said that could be arranged by telegram. But she made him go himself! She's extraordinary. He'll arrive in town to-morrow, he'll leave next day, he'll reach here by the Southern on Saturday night in time for our Sunday yacht picnic, and then something has got to happen, I should think."

Here was another key, unlocking a further piece of knowledge for me. I had not been able to guess why Hortense should be keeping Charley "on"; but how natural was this policy, when understood clearly! She still needed Charley's influence in the world of affairs. Charley's final service was to be the increasing of his successful rival's fortune. I wondered what Charley would do, when the full extent of his usefulness dawned upon him; and with wonder renewed I thought of General Rieppe, and this daughter he had managed to beget. Surely the mother of Hortense, whoever she may have been, must have been a very richly endowed character!

"Something has most certainly got to happen and soon," I said to Beverly Rodgers. "Especially if my busy boarding-house bodies are right in saying that the invitations for the wedding are to be out on Monday."

Well, I had Friday, I had Udolpho; and there, while on that excursion, when I should be alone with John Mayrant during many hours, and especially the hours of deep, confidential night, I swore to myself on oath I would say to the boy the last word, up to the verge of offense, that my wits could devise. Apart from a certain dramatic excitement as of battle—battle between Hortense and me—I truly wished to help him out of the miserable mistake his wrong standard, his chivalry gone perverted, was spurring him on to make; and I had a comic image of myself, summoning Miss Josephine, summoning Miss Eliza, summoning Mrs. Gregory and Mrs. Weguelin, and the whole company of aunts and cousins, and handing to them the rescued John with the single but sufficient syllable: "There!"

He was in apparent spirits, was John, at that hour of our departure for Udolpho; he pretended so well that I was for a while altogether deceived. He had wished to call for me with the conveyance in which he should drive us out into the lonely country through the sunny afternoon; but instead, I chose to walk round to where he lived, and where I found him stuffing beneath the seats of the vehicle the baskets and the parcels which contained the provisions for our ample supper.

"I have never seen you drink hearty yet, and now I purpose to," said John.

As the packing was finishing Miss Josephine St. Michael came by; and the sight of the erect old lady reminded me that of all Kings Port figures known to me and seen in the garden paying their visit of ceremony to Hortense, she alone—she and Eliza La Heu—had been absent. Eliza's declining to share in that was well-nigh inevitable, but Miss Josephine was another matter. Perhaps she had considered her sister's going there to be enough; at any rate, she had not been party to the surrender, and this gave me whimsical satisfaction. Moreover, it had evidently occasioned no ruffle in the affectionate relations between herself and John.

"John," said she, "as you drive by, do get me a plumber."

"Much better get a burglar, Aunt Josephine. Cheaper in the end, and neater work."

It was thus, at the outset, that I came to believe John's spirits were high; and this illusion he successfully kept up until after we had left the plumber and Kings Port several sordid miles behind us; the approach to Kings Port this way lies through dirtiest Africa. John was loquacious; John discoursed upon the Replacers; Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael had quite evidently expressed to her own circle what she thought of them; and the town in consequence, although it did not see them or their automobiles, because it appeared they were gone some twenty miles inland upon an excursion to a resort where was a large hotel, and a little variety in the way of some tourists of the Replacer stripe,—the town kept them well in its mind's eye. The automobiles would have sufficed to bring them into disrepute, but Kings Port had a better reason in their conduct in the church; and John found many things to say to me, as we drove along, about Bohm and Charley and Kitty. Gazza he forgot, although, as shall appear in its place, Gazza was likely to live a long while in his memory. Beverly Rodgers he, of course, recognized as being a gentleman—it was clear that Beverly met with Kings Port's approval—and, from his Newport experiences, John was able to make out quite as well as if he had heard Beverly explain it himself the whole wise philosophic system of joining with the Replacers in order that you be not replaced yourself.

"In his shoes mightn't I do the same?" he surmised. "I fear I'm not as Spartan as my aunts—only pray don't mention it to them!"

And then, because I had been answering him with single syllables, or with nods, or not at all, he taxed me with my taciturnity; he even went so far as to ask me what thoughts kept me so silent—which I did not tell him.

"I am wondering," I told him instead, "how much they steal every week."

"Those financiers?"

"Yes. Bohm is president of an insurance company, and Charley's a director, and reorganizes railroads."

"Well, if other people share your pleasant opinion of them, how do they get elected?"

"Other people share their pleasant spoils—senators, vestrymen—you can't be sure who you're sitting next to at dinner any more. Come live North. You'll find the only safe way is never to know anybody worth more than five millions—if you wish to keep the criminal classes off your visiting list."

This made him merry. "Put 'em in jail, then!"

"Ah, the jail!" I returned. "It's the great American joke. It reverses the rule of our smart society. Only those who have no incomes are admitted."

"But what do you have laws and lawyers for?"

"To keep the rich out of jail. It's called 'professional etiquette.'"

"Your picture flatters!"

"You flatter me; it's only a photograph. Come North and see."

"One might think, from your account, the American had rather be bad than good."

"O dear, no! The American had much rather be good than bad!"

"Your admission amazes me!"

"But also the American had rather be rich than good. And he is having his wish. And money's golden hand is tightening on the throat of liberty while the labor union stabs liberty in the back—for trusts and unions are both trying to kill liberty. And the soul of Uncle Sam has turned into a dollar-inside his great, big, strong, triumphant flesh; so that even his new religion, his own special invention, his last offering to the creeds of the world, his gatherer of converted hordes, his Christian Science, is based upon physical benefit."

John touched the horses. "You're particularly cheerful to-day!"

"No. I merely summarize what I'm seeing."

"Well, a moral awakening will come," he declared.

"Inevitably. To-morrow, perhaps. The flesh has had a good, long, prosperous day, and the hour of the spirit must be near striking. And the moral awakening will be followed by a moral slumber, since, in the uncomprehended scheme of things, slumber seems necessary; and you needn't pull so long a face, Mr. Mayrant, because the slumber will be followed by another moral awakening. The alcoholic society girl you don't like will very probably give birth to a water-drinking daughter—who in her turn may produce a bibulous progeny: how often must I tell you that nothing is final?"

John Mayrant gave the horses a somewhat vicious lash after these last words of mine; and, as he made no retort to them, we journeyed some little distance in silence through the mild, enchanting light of the sun. My deliberate allusion to alcoholic girls had made plain what I had begun to suspect. I could now discern that his cloak of gayety had fallen from him, leaving bare the same harassed spirit, the same restless mood, which had been his upon the last occasion when we had talked at length together upon some of the present social and political phases of our republic—that day of the New Bridge and the advent of Hortense. Only, upon that day, he had by his manner in some subtle fashion conveyed to me a greater security in my discretion than I felt him now to entertain. His many observations about the Replacers, with always the significant and conspicuous omission of Hortense, proved more and more, as I thought it over, that his state was unsteady. Even now, he did not long endure silence between us; yet the eagerness which he threw into our discussions did not, it seemed to me, so much proceed from present interest in their subjects (though interest there was at times) as from anxiety lest one particular subject, ever present with him, should creep in unawares. So much I, at any rate, concluded, and bided my time for the creeping in unawares, content meanwhile to parry some of the reproaches which he now and again cast at me with an earnestness real or feigned.

We had made now considerable progress, and were come to a space of sand and cabins and intersecting railroad tracks, where freight cars and locomotives stood, and negroes of all shapes, but of one lowering and ragged appearance, lounged and stared.

"There used to be a murder here about once a day," said John, "before the dispensary system. Now, it is about once a week."

"That law is of benefit, then?" I inquired.

"To those who drink the whiskey, possibly; certainly to those who sell it!" And he condensed for me the long story of the state dispensary, which in brief appeared to be that South Carolina had gone into the liquor business. The profits were to pay for compulsory education; the liquor was to be pure; society and sobriety were to be advanced: such had been the threefold promise, of which the threefold fulfillment was—defeat of the compulsory education bill, a political monopoly enriching favored distillers, "and lately," said John, "a thoroughly democratic whiskey for the plain people. Pay ten cents for a bottle of X, if you're curious. It may not poison you—but the murders are coming up again."

"What a delightful example of government ownership!" I exclaimed.

But John in Kings Port was not in the way of hearing that cure-all policy discussed, and I therefore explained it to him. He did not seem to grasp my explanation.

"I don't see how it would change anything," he remarked, "beyond switching the stealing from one set of hands to another."

I put on a face of concern. "What? You don't believe in our patent American short-cuts?"

"Short-cuts?"

"Certainly. Short-cuts to universal happiness, universal honesty, universal everything. For instance: Don't make a boy study four years for a college degree; just cut the time in half, and you've got a short-cut to education. Write it down that man is equal. That settles it. You'll notice how equal he is at once. Write it down that the negro shall vote. You'll observe how instantly he is fit for the suffrage. Now they want it written down that government shall take all the wicked corporations, because then corruption will disappear from the face of the earth. You'll find the farmers presently having it written down that all hens must hatch their eggs in a week, and next, a league of earnest women will advocate a Constitutional amendment that men only shall bring forth children. Oh, we Americans are very thorough!" And I laughed.

But John's face was not gay. "Well," he mused, "South Carolina took a short-cut to pure liquor and sober citizens—and reached instead a new den of thieves. Is the whole country sick?"

"Sick to the marrow, my friend; but young and vigorous still. A nation in its long life has many illnesses before the one it dies of. But we shall need some strong medicine if we do not get well soon."

"What kind?"

"Ah, that's beyond any one! And we have several things the matter with us—as bad a case, for example, of complacency as I've met in history. Complacency's a very dangerous disease, seldom got rid of without the purge of a great calamity. And worse, where does our dishonesty begin, and where end? The boy goes to college, and there in football it awaits him; he graduates, and in the down-town office it smirks at him; he rises into the confidence of his superiors, the town's chief citizens, and finds their gray hairs crowned with it,—the very men he has looked up to, believed in, his ideals, his examples, the merchant prince, the railroad magnate, the president of insurance companies—all dirty rascals! Presently he faces worldly success or failure, and then, in the new ocean of mind that has swallowed morals up, he sinks with his isolated honesty, like a fool, or swims to respectability with his brother knaves. And into this mess the immigrant sewage of Europe is steadily pouring. Such is our continent to-day, with all its fair winds and tides and fields favorable to us, and only our shallow, complacent, dishonest selves against us! But don't let these considerations make you gloomy; for (I must say it again) nothing is final; and even if we rot before we ripen—which would be a wholly novel phenomenon—we shall have made our contribution to mankind in demonstrating by our collapse that the sow's ear belongs with the rest of the animal, and not in the voting booth or the legislature, and that the doctrine of universal suffrage should have waited until men were born honest and equal. That in itself would be a memorable service to have rendered."

We had come into the divine, sad stillness of the woods, where the warm sunlight shone through the gray moss, lighting the curtained solitudes away and away into the depths of the golden afternoon; and somewhere amid the miles of sleeping wilderness sounded the hoarse honk of the automobile. The Replacers were abroad, enjoying what they could in this country where they did not belong, and which did not as yet belong to them. Once again we heard their honk off to our left, from a farther distance, and I am glad to say that we did not see them at all.

"If," said John Mayrant, "what you have said is true, the nation had better get on its knees and pray God to give it grace."

I looked at the boy and saw that his countenance had grown very fine. "The act," I said, "would bring grace, wherever it comes from."

"Yes," he assented. "If in the stars and awfulness of space there's nothing, that does not trouble me; for my greater self is inside me, safe. And our country has a greater self somewhere. Think!"

"I do not have to think," I replied, "when I know the nobleness we have risen to at times."

"And I," he pursued, "happen to believe it is not all only stars and space; and that God, as much as any ship-builder, rejoices to watch every tiniest boat meet and brave the storm."

Out of his troubles he had brought such mood, sweetness instead of bitterness; he was saying as plainly as if his actual words said it, "Misfortune has come to me, and I am going to make the best of it." His nobleness, his moral elegance, compelled him to this, and I envied him, not sure if I myself, thus placed, would acquit myself so well. And there was in his sweetness a contagion that strangely reconciled me to the troubled aspects of our national hour. I thought, "Invisible among our eighty millions there is a quiet legion living untainted in the depths, while the yellow rich, the prismatic scum and bubbles, boil on the surface." Yes, he had accidentally helped me, and I wished doubly that I might help him. It was well enough he should feel he must not shirk his duty, but how much better if he could be led to see that marrying where he did not love was no duty of his.

I knew what I had to say to him, but lacked the beginning of it; and of this beginning I was in search as we drove up among the live-oaks of Udolpho to the little club-house, or hunting lodge, where a negro and his wife received us, and took the baskets and set about preparing supper. My beginning sat so heavily upon my attention that I took scant notice of Udolpho as we walked about its adjacent grounds in the twilight before supper, and John Mayrant pointed out to me its fine old trees, its placid stream, and bade me admire the snug character of the hunting lodge, buried away for bachelors' delights deep in the heart of the pleasant forest. I heard him indulging in memories and anecdotes of date sittings after long hunts; but I was myself always on a hunt for my beginning, and none of his words clearly reached my intelligence until I was aware of his reciting an excellently pertinent couplet:—

"If you would hold your father's land, You must wash your throat before your hand—"

and found myself standing by the lodge table, upon which he had set two glasses, containing, I soon ascertained, gin, vermouth, orange bitters, and a cherry at the bottom—all which he had very skillfully mingled himself in the happiest proportions.

"The poetry," he remarked, "is hereditary in my family;" and setting down the empty glasses we also washed our hands. A moon half-grown looked in at the window from the filmy darkness, and John, catching sight of it, paused with the wet soap in his hand and stared out at the dimly visible trees. "Oh, the times, the times!" he murmured to himself, gazing long; and then with a sort of start he returned to the present moment, and rinsed and dried his hands. Presently we were sitting at the table, pledging each other in well-cooled champagne; and it was not long after this that not only the negro who waited on us was plainly reveling in John's remarks, but also the cook, with her bandannaed ebony head poked round the corner of the kitchen door, was doing her utmost to lose no word of this entertainment. For John, taking up the young and the old, the quick and the dead, of masculine Kings Port, proceeded to narrate their private exploits, until by coffee-time he had unrolled for me the richest tapestry of gayeties that I remember, and I sat without breath, tearful and aching, while the two negroes had retired far into the kitchen to muffle their emotions.

"Tom, oh Tom! you Tom!" called John Mayrant; and after the man had come from the kitchen: "You may put the punch-bowl and things on the table, and clear away and go to bed. My Great-uncle Marston Chartain," he continued to me, "was of eccentric taste, and for the last twenty years of his life never had anybody to dinner but the undertaker." He paused at this point to mix the punch, and then resumed: "But for all that, he appears to have been a lively old gentleman to the end, and left us his version of a saying which is considered by some people an improvement on the original, 'Cherchez la femme.' Uncle Marston had it, 'Hunt the other woman.' Don't go too fast with that punch; it isn't as gentle as it seems."

But John and his Uncle Marston had between them given me my beginning, and, as I sat sipping my punch, I ceased to hear the anecdotes which followed. I sat sipping and smoking, and was presently aware of the deepening silence of the night, and of John no longer at the table, but by the window, looking out into the forest, and muttering once more, "Oh, the times, the times!"

"It's always a triangle," I began.

He turned round from his window. "Triangle?" He looked at my glass of punch, and then at me. "Go easy with the Bombo," he repeated.

"Bombo?" I echoed. "You call this Bombo? You don't know how remarkable that is, but that's because you don't know Aunt Carola, who is very remarkable, too. Well, never mind her now. Point is, it's always a triangle."

"I haven't a doubt of it," he replied.

"There you're right. And so was your uncle. He knew. Triangle." Here I found myself nodding portentously at John, and beating the table with my finger very solemnly.

He stood by his window seeming to wait for me. And now everything in the universe grew perfectly clear to me; I rose on mastering tides of thought, and all problems lay disposed of at my feet, while delicious strength and calm floated in my brain and being. Nothing was difficult for me. But I was getting away from the triangle, and there was John waiting at the window, and I mustn't say too much, mustn't say too much. My will reached out and caught the triangle and brought it close, and I saw it all perfectly clear again.

"What are they all," I said, "the old romances? You take Paris and Helen and Menelaus. What's that? You take Launcelot and Arthur and Guinevere. You take Paola and Francesca and her husband, what's-his-name, or Tristram and Iseult and Mark. Two men, one woman. Triangle and trouble. Other way around you get Tannhauser and Venus and Elizabeth; two women, one man; more triangle and more trouble. Yes." And I nodded at him again. The tide of my thought was pulling me hard away from this to other important world-problems, but my will held, struggling, and I kept to it.

"You wait," I told him. "I know what I mean. Trouble is, so hard to advise him right."

"Advise who right?" inquired John Mayrant.

It helped me wonderfully. My will gripped my floating thoughts and held them to it. "Friend of mine in trouble; though why he asks me when I'm not married—I'd be married now, you know, but afraid of only one wife. Man doesn't love twice; loves thrice, four, six, lots of times; but they say only one wife. Ought to be two, anyhow. Much easier for man to marry then."

"Wouldn't it be rather immoral?" John asked.

"Morality is queer thing. Like kaleidoscope. New patterns all the time. Abraham and wives—perfectly respectable. You take Pharaohs—or kings of that sort—married own sisters. All right then. Perfectly horrible now, of course. But you ask men about two wives. They'd say something to be said for that idea. Only there are the women, you know. They'd never. But I'm going to tell my friend he's doing wrong. Going to write him to-night. Where's ink?"

"It won't go to-night," said John. "What are you going to tell him?"

"Going to tell him, since only one wife, wicked not to break his engagement."

John looked at me very hard, as he stood by the window, leaning on the sill. But my will was getting all the while a stronger hold, and my thoughts were less and less inclined to stray to other world-problems; moreover, below the confusion that still a little reigned in them was the primal cunning of the old Adam, the native man, quite untroubled and alert—it saw John's look at me and it prompted my course.

"Yes," I said. "He wants the truth from me. Where's his letter? No harm reading you without names." And I fumbled in my pocket.

"Letter gone. Never mind. Facts are: friend's asked girl. Girl's said yes. Now he thinks he's bound by that."

"He thinks right," said John.

"Not a bit of it. You take Tannhauser. Engagement to Venus all a mistake. Perfectly proper to break it. Much more than proper. Only honorable thing he could do. I'm going to write it to him. Where's ink?" And I got up.

John came from his window and sat down at the table. His glass was empty, his cigar gone out, and he looked at me. But I looked round the room for the ink, noting in my search the big fireplace, simple, wooden, unornamented, but generous, and the plain plaster walls of the lodge, whereon hung two or three old prints of gamebirds; and all the while I saw John out of the corner of my eye, looking at me.

He spoke first. "Your friend has given his word to a lady; he must stand by it like a gentleman.

"Lot of difference," I returned, still looking round the room, "between spirit and letter. If his heart has broken the word, his lips can't make him a gentleman."

John brought his fist down on the table. "He had no business to get engaged to her! He must take the consequences."

That blow of the fist on the table brought my thoughts wholly clear and fixed on the one subject; my will had no longer to struggle with them, they worked of themselves in just the way that I wanted them to do.

"If he's a gentleman, he must stand to his word," John repeated, "unless she releases him."

I fumbled again for my letter. "That's just about what he says himself," I rejoined, sitting down. "He thinks he ought to take the consequences."

"Of course!" John Mayrant's face was very stern as he sat in judgment on himself.

"But why should she take the consequences?" I asked.

"What consequences?"

"Being married to a man who doesn't want her, all her life, until death them do part. How's that? Having the daily humiliation of his indifference, and the world's knowledge of his indifference. How's that? Perhaps having the further humiliation of knowing that his heart belongs to another woman. How's that? That's not what a girl bargains for. His standing to his word is not an act of honor, but a deception. And in talking about 'taking the consequences,' he's patting his personal sacrifice on the back and forgetting all about her and the sacrifice he's putting her to. What's the brief suffering of a broken engagement to that? No: the true consequences that a man should shoulder for making such a mistake is the poor opinion that society holds of him for placing a woman in such a position; and to free her is the most honorable thing he can do. Her dignity suffers less so than if she were a wife chained down to perpetual disregard."