Lady Baltimore Part 29

It was of absorbing interest to feel simultaneously in these brief speeches he vouchsafed--speeches consummate in their inexpressive flatness--the intentional coldness and the latent heat of the creature.

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

"Flowers are always so delightful."

That was her third speech, p.r.o.nounced just like the others, in a low, clear voice--simplicity arrived at by much well-practiced complexity.

And she still looked at Charley.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I could almost give up the gardens for the sake of returning with you,"

I said to him.

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

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

She was looking at me with eyes half closed; half closed for the sake of insolence--and better observation; when eyes like that take on drowsiness, you will be wise to leave all your secrets behind you, locked up in the bank, or else toss them right down on the open table.

Well, I tossed mine down, thereto precipitated by a warning from the stranger in the launch:--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I shall not attempt to describe the azaleas at Live Oaks. You will understand me quite well, I am sure, when I say that I had heard the people at Mrs. Trevise's house talk so much about them, and praise them so superlatively, that I was not prepared for much: my experience of life had already included quite a number of azaleas. Moreover, my meeting with Hortense and Charley had taken me far away from flowers.

But when that marvelous place burst upon me, I forgot Hortense. I have seen gardens, many gardens, in England, in France; in Italy; I have seen what can be done in great hothouses, and on great terraces; what can be done under a roof, and what can be done in the open air with the aid of architecture and sculpture and ornamental land and water; but no horticulture that I have seen devised by mortal man approaches the unearthly enchantment of the azaleas at Live Oaks. It was not like seeing flowers at all; it was as if there, in the heart of the wild and mystic wood, in the gray gloom of those trees veiled and m.u.f.fled in their long webs and skeins of hanging moss, a great, magic flame of rose and red and white burned steadily. You looked to see it vanish; you could not imagine such a thing would stay. All idea of individual petals or species was swept away in this glowing maze of splendor, this transparent labyrinth of rose and red and white, through which you looked beyond, into the gray gloom of the hanging moss and the depths of the wild forest trees.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A steel wasp? Again that misleading description of Mrs. Weguelin St.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yais. Didn't you know?"

"The V-C phosphate works?"

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

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

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

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

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

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