Lady Baltimore Part 10

"Why, yes. We have, alas! to expect and allow for rudeness sometimes, even in our chosen few, and for liberties in their chosen few; it's only the hotel clerk and the head waiter from whom we usually get impudence; while insolence is the chronic condition of the Wall Street rich."

"You in the North!" she repeated. "And so your Northern eyes can't see it, after all!" At these words my intelligence sailed into a great blank, while she continued: "Frankly--and forgive me for saying it--I was hoping that you were one Northerner who would see it."

"But see what?" I barked in my despair.

She did not help me. "If I had been a man, nothing could have insulted me more than that. And that's what you don't see," she regretfully finished. "It seems so strange."

I sat in the midst of my great blank, while her handsome eyes rested upon me. In them was that look of a certain inquiry and a certain remoteness with which one pauses, in a museum, before some specimen of the cave-dwelling man.

"You comprehend so much," she meditated slowly, aloud; "you've been such an agreeable disappointment, because your point of view is so often the same as ours." She was still surveying me with the specimen expression, when it suddenly left her. "Do you mean to sit there and tell me," she broke out, "that you wouldn't have resented it yourself?"

"O dear!" my mind lamentably said to itself, inside. Of what may have been the exterior that I presented to her, sitting over my slice of Lady Baltimore, I can form no impression.

"Put yourself in his place," the girl continued.

"Ah," I gasped, "that is always so easy to say and so hard to do."

My remark proved not a happy one. She made a brief, cold pause over it, and then, as she wheeled round from me, back to the counter: "No Southerner would let pa.s.s such an affront."

It was final. She regained her usual place, she resumed her ledger; the curly dog, who had come out to hear our conversation, went in again; I was disgraced. Not only with the profile of her short, belligerent nose, but with the chilly way in which she made her pencil move over the ledger, she told me plainly that my self-respect had failed to meet her tests. This was what my remarkable ingenuity had achieved for me. I swallowed the last crumbs of Lady Baltimore, and went forward to settle the account.

"I suppose I'm scarcely ent.i.tled to ask for a fresh one to-morrow," I ventured. "I am so fond of this cake."

Her officialness met me adequately. "Certainly the public is ent.i.tled to whatever we print upon our bill-of-fare."

Now this was going to be too bad! Henceforth I was to rank merely as "the public," no matter how much Lady Baltimore I should lunch upon! A happy thought seized me, and I spoke out instantly on the strength of it.

"Miss La Heu, I've a confession to make."

But upon this beginning of mine the inauspicious door opened and young John Mayrant came in. It was all right about his left eye; anybody could see that bruise!

"Oh!" he exclaimed, hearty, but somewhat disconcerted. "To think of finding you here! You're going? But I'll see you later?"

"I hope so," I said. "You know where I work."

"Yes--yes. I'll come. We've all sorts of things more to say, haven't we?

We--good-by!"

Did I hear, as I gained the street, something being said about the General, and the state of his health?

VIII: Midsummer-Night's Dream

You may imagine in what state of wondering I went out of that place, and how little I could now do away with my curiosity. By the droll looks and head-turnings which followed me from strangers that pa.s.sed me by in the street, I was made aware that I must be talking aloud to myself, and the words which I had evidently uttered were these: "But who in the world can he have smashed up?"

Of course, beneath the public stare and smile I kept the rest of my thoughts to myself; yet they so possessed and took me from my surroundings, that presently, while crossing Royal Street, I was nearly run down by an electric car. Nor did even this serve to disperse my preoccupation; my walk back to Court and Chancel streets is as if it had not been; I can remember nothing about it, and the first account that I took of external objects was to find myself sitting in my accustomed chair in the Library, with the accustomed row of books about the battle of Cowpens waiting on the table in front of me. How long we had thus been facing each other, the books and I, I've not a notion. And with such mysterious machinery are we human beings filled--machinery that is in motion all the while, whether we are aware of it or not--that now, with some part of my mind, and with my pencil a.s.sisting, I composed several stanzas to my kingly ancestor, the goal of my fruitless search; and yet during the whole process of my metrical exercise I was really thinking and wondering about John Mayrant, his battles and his loves.

ODE ON INTIMATIONS OF ROYALTY

I sing to thee, thou Great Unknown, Who canst connect me with a throne Through uncle, cousin, aunt, or sister, But not, I trust, through bar sinister.

Chorus: Gules! Gules! and a cuckoo peccant!

Such was the frivolous opening of my poem, which, as it progressed, grew even less edifying; I have quoted this fragment merely to show you how little reverence for the Selected Salic Scions was by this time left in my spirit, and not because the verses themselves are in the least meritorious; they should serve as a model for no serious-minded singer, and they afford a striking instance of that volatile mood, not to say that inclination to ribaldry, which will at seasons crop out in me, do what I will. It is my hope that age may help me to subdue this, although I have observed it in some very old men.

I did not send my poem to Aunt Carola, but I wrote her a letter, even there and then, couched in terms which I believe were altogether respectful. I deplored my lack of success in discovering the link that was missing between me and king's blood; I intimated my conviction that further effort on my part would still be met with failure; and I renounced with fitting expressions of disappointment my candidateship for the Scions thanking Aunt Carola for her generosity, by which I must now no longer profit. I added that I should remain in Kings Port for the present, as I was finding the climate of decided benefit to my health, and the courtesy of the people an education in itself.

Whatever pain at missing the glory of becoming a Scion may have lingered with me after this was much a.s.suaged in a few days by my reading an article in a New York paper, which gave an account of a meeting of my Aunt's Society, held in that city. My attention was attracted to this article by the prominent heading given to it: THEY WORE THEIR CROWNS.

This in very conspicuous Roman capitals, caused me to sit up. There must have been truth in some of it, because the food eaten by the Scions was mentioned as consisting of sandwiches, sherry and croquettes; yet I think that the statement that the members present addressed each other according to the royal families from which they severally traced descent, as, for example, Brother Guelph and Sister Plantagenet, can scarce have beers aught but an exaggeration; nevertheless, the article brought me undeniable consolation for my disappointment.

After finishing my letter to Aunt Carola I should have hastened out to post it and escape from Cowpens, had I not remembered that John Mayrant had more or less promised to meet me here. Now, there was but a slender chance that he boy would speak to me on the subject of his late encounter; this I must learn from other sources; but he might speak to me about something that would open a way for my hostile preparations against Miss Rieppe. So far he had not touched upon his impending marriage in any way, but this reserve concerning a fact generally known among the people whom I was seeing could hardly go on long without becoming ridiculous. If he should shun mention of it to-day, I would take this as a plain sign that he did not look forward to it with the enthusiasm which a lover ought to feel for his approaching bliss; and on such silence from him I would begin, if I could, to undermine his intention of keeping an engagement of the heart when the heart no longer entered into it.

While my thoughts continued to be busied over this lover and his concerns, I noticed the works of William Shakespeare close beside me upon a shelf; and although it was with no special purpose in mind that I took out one of the volumes and sat down with it to wait for John Mayrant, in a little while an inspiration came to me from its pages, so that I was more anxious than ever the boy should not fail to meet me here in the Library.

Was it the bruise on his forehead that had perturbed his manner just now when he entered the Exchange? No, this was not likely to be the reason, since he had been full as much embarra.s.sed that first day of my seeing him there, when he had given his order for Lady Baltimore so lamely that the girl behind the counter had come to his aid. And what could it have been that he had begun to tell her to-day as I was leaving the place?

Was the making of that cake again to be postponed on account of the General's precarious health? And what had been the nature of the insult which young John Mayrant had punished and was now commanded to shake hands over? Could it in truth be the owner of the Hermana whom he had thrashed so well as to lay him up in bed? That incident had damaged two people at least, the unknown vanquished combatant in his bodily welfare, and me in my character as an upstanding man in the fierce feminine estimation of Miss La Heu; but this injury it was my intention to set right; my confession to the girl behind the counter was merely delayed.

As I sat with Shakespeare open in my lap, I added to my store of reasoning one little new straw of argument in favor of my opinion that John Mayrant was no longer at ease or happy about his love affair. I had never before met any young man in whose manner nature was so finely tempered with good bringing-up; forwardness and shyness were alike absent from him, and his bearing had a sort of polished unconsciousness as far removed from raw diffidence as it was from raw conceit; it was altogether a rare and charming address in a youth of such true youthfulness, but it had failed him upon two occasions which I have already mentioned. Both times that he had come to the Exchange he had stumbled in his usually prompt speech, lost his habitual ease, and betrayed, in short, all the signs of being disconcerted. The matter seemed suddenly quite plain to me: it was the nature of his errands to the Exchange. The first time he had been ordering the cake for his own wedding, and to-day it was something about the wedding again. Evidently the high mettle of his delicacy and breeding made him painfully conscious of the view which others must take of the part that Miss Rieppe was playing in all this--a view from which it was out of his power to shield her; and it was this consciousness that destroyed his composure. From what I was soon to learn of his fine and unmoved disregard for unfavorable opinion when he felt his course to be the right one, I know that it was no thought at all of his own scarcely heroic role during these days, but only the perception that outsiders must detect in his affianced lady some of those very same qualities which had chilled his too precipitate pa.s.sion for her, and left him alone, without romance, without family sympathy, without social acclamations, with nothing indeed save his high-strung notion of honor to help him bravely face the wedding march. How appalling must the wedding march sound to a waiting bridegroom who sees the bride, that he no longer looks at except with distaste and estrangement, coming nearer and nearer to him up the aisle! A funeral march would be gayer than that music, I should think! The thought came to me to break out bluntly and say to him: "Countermand the cake! She's only playing with you while that yachtsman is making up his mind." But there could be but one outcome of such advice to John Mayrant: two people, instead of one, would be in bed suffering from contusions. As I mused on the boy and his attractive and appealing character, I became more rejoiced than ever that he had thrashed somebody, I cared not very much who nor yet very much why, so long as such thrashing had been thorough, which seemed quite evidently and happily the case. He stood now in my eyes, in some way that is too obscure for me to be able to explain to you, saved from some reproach whose subtlety likewise eludes my powers of a.n.a.lysis.

It was already five minutes after three o'clock, my dinner hour, when he at length appeared in the Library; and possibly I put some reproach into my greeting: "Won't you walk along with me to Mrs. Trevise's?" (That was my boarding house.)

"I could not get away from the Custom House sooner," he explained; and into his eyes there came for a moment that look of unrest and preoccupation which I had observed at times while we had discussed Newport and alcoholic girls. The two subjects seemed certainly far enough apart! But he immediately began upon a conversation briskly enough--so briskly that I suspected at once he had got his subject ready in advance; he didn't want me to speak first, lest I turn the talk into channels embarra.s.sing, such as bruised foreheads or wedding cake.

Well, this should not prevent me from dropping in his cup the wholesome bitters which I had prepared.

"Well, sir! Well, sir!" such was his hearty preface. "I wonder if you're feeling ashamed of yourself?"

"Never when I read Shakespeare," I answered restoring the plume to its place.

He looked at the t.i.tle. "Which one?"

"One of the unsuitable love affairs that was prevented in time."

"Romeo and Juliet?"

"No; Bottom and t.i.tania--and Romeo and Juliet were not prevented in time. They had their bliss once and to the full, and died before they caused each other anything but ecstasy. No weariness of routine, no tears of disenchantment; complete love, completely realized--and finis!

It's the happiest ending of all the plays."

He looked at me hard. "Sometimes I believe you're ironic!"

I smiled at him. "A sign of the highest civilization, then. But please to think of Juliet after ten years of Romeo and his pin-headed intelligence and his preordained infidelities. Do you imagine that her predecessor, Rosamond, would have had no successors? Juliet would have been compelled to divorce Romeo, if only for the children's sake.

"The children!" cried John Mayrant. "Why, it's for their sake deserted women abstain from divorce!"

"Juliet would see deeper than such mothers. She could not have her little sons and daughters grow up and comprehend their father's absences, and see their mother's submission to his returns for such discovery would scorch the marrow of any hearts they had."

At this, as we came out of the Library, he made an astonishing rejoinder, and one which I cannot in the least account for: "South Carolina does not allow divorce."

"Then I should think," I said to him, "that all you people here would be doubly careful as to what manner of husbands and wives you chose for yourselves."