THE SPECTRE OF SCANDAL IS RAISED
A graver charge than frivolity was soon to be brought against the widow
of the late Colonel Jere Lansdale. Not with her antiquated gown, her
assisting staff, the gay bonnet, nor yet with the showy small slippers
and silken hose tinted unseasonably to her years did scandal engage
itself; but rather with the circumstance that she drank.
To "drink" meant in Little Arcady to get drunk, as "Big Joe" Kestril did
every pay-day. Clarence Stull, polishing a stove in the rear of Pierce's
hardware store, was swift to divulge that Mrs. Lansdale had "asked Chet
Pierce to have a glass of wine,--and him a-bowin' and a-scrapin' like
you'd think he was goin' to fly off the handle!"
It was enough for the town. The unfortunate woman had not yet reeled
through its streets, but Little Arcady would give her time, and it knew
there could be but one result. That sort of thing might be done in tales
of vicious high life to point a moral, but in the real world it could
not compatibly exist with good conduct. Even Aunt Delia McCormick, good
Methodist as she was, who "put up" a little elderberry wine each year
for communion purposes, was thought by more than one to strain near to
the breaking point the third branch of that concise behest to "Touch
not, taste not, handle not!"
The ladies were at once dismayed about Miss Caroline, from Aunt Delia
herself, to Marcella Eubanks, who kept conspicuous upon her
dressing-table a bedizened motto of the Daughters of Rebecca,--"The lips
that touch wine shall never touch mine." It is true that this legend
appeared to Marcella to be a bit licentious in its implications as to
lips _not_ touched by wine. It had, indeed, first been hung in the
parlor; but one Creston Fancett, in the course of an evening call upon
Miss Eubanks, had read the thing aloud, twice over, and then observed
with a sinister significance that wine had never touched his own lips.
Whereupon, in a coarsely conceived spirit of humor, he proceeded to act
as if he had forgotten that he was a gentleman.
Hence the card's seclusion in Marcella's boudoir. Hence, likewise,
Marcella's subsequent preference, in her temperance propaganda, for
straightforward means which no gentleman could affect to misunderstand.
She relied chiefly thereafter upon some highly colored charts depicting
the interior of the human stomach in varying stages of alcoholic
degeneration. According to these, "a single glass of wine or a measure
of ale," taken daily for a year, suffices to produce some startling
effects in color; while the result of "unrestrained indulgence for five
years" is spectacular in the extreme.
Besides these disconcerting color effects Marcella enacted a brief but
pithy drama in which she touched a lighted match to a tablespoonful of
alcohol, to show the true nature of the stuff and to symbolize the fate
of its votaries.
With charts and with blazing spirit, with tracts and with figures to
prove that we spend "more for the staff of death than for the staff of
life," Marcella was prepared to move upon the unsuspicious Miss
Caroline. Nor was she alone in such readiness for a good work. The
ladies all felt that their profligate sister should be brought to sign
the pledge.
And they called upon Miss Caroline with precisely this end in
view--called singly, and by twos and threes. But for some reason they
seemed always to find obstacles in the way of bringing forward this most
vital topic. If they had only discovered Miss Caroline in her cups, or
if her shaded rooms had been littered with empty rum bottles and
pervaded by the fumes of strong drink, or if she had audaciously offered
them wine, doubtless the thing would have been easy. But none of these
helpful phenomena could be observed, and Miss Caroline had a way of
leading the talk which would have made any reference to her unfortunate
habits seem ungraceful. It would be far too much to say that she charmed
them, but all of her callers were interested, many of them were
entertained, and a few became her warm defenders. Aunt Delia McCormick
surprised every one by aligning herself with this latter minority. She
declared, after her first call, that Miss Caroline was "a dear"; and
after the second call, that she was "a poor dear," and she forthwith
became of service to the newcomer in a thousand ways known only to the
masonry of housekeeping.
And since none of the ladies, for one reason or another, had found a way
to say those things that Mrs. Lansdale sorely needed to hear, it was
agreed among them that the minister must say them.
"The minister" in Little Arcady meant him of the Methodist church, the
two other clergymen being so young and unimportant as to need
identification by name.
Of the official and inspired visit of this good man to Miss Caroline,
the version that reached the public was one thing: its secret and true
history was another. The latter has never been told until now. It was
known abroad only that the minister had called on a warm afternoon in
July; that Miss Caroline had received him out of doors, on the shaded
east side of the house, where the heat had driven her to await a cooling
breeze from the river. One of the dingy rugs had been spread upon the
grass close to the lilac clump, and by an unfashionable little table
Miss Caroline sat, in a chair sadly out of date, reading of Childe
Harold. It was understood that the minister had there sat in another
antiquated chair of capacious arms and upholstered in faded green
velvet, a chair brought by Clem; and that he had weakly chatted away a
pleasant hour or two without ever once daring to bring Miss Caroline's
evil state to that attention which it merited from her. His difficulty
seemed to have been similar to that experienced by the calling ladies.
He could observe no opening that promised anything but an ungracious
plunge or an awkward stumble, and the ladies had been wrong in
suspecting that his authority as a cleric would nerve him to either of
these things.
There was despair next day when it was known that he had come away even
lavisher in praise of Miss Caroline than Aunt Delia had become; that he
refused with a gentle but unbreakable stubbornness, a thing he was known
to be cursed with latently, ever again to approach the lady with a
concealed purpose or with aught in his heart but a warm and flagrant
esteem.
So much for the public's knowledge; and doubtless the public in every
case knows all that it ought to know. But these are the facts as they
came to my privileged ears, and to what, I believe, are gifts of
interpretation not below the average.
When Clem brought the chair for the minister, Miss Caroline gave him a
brief, low-toned order, which he hurried away to execute. Within ten
minutes, and before Miss Caroline had finished telling how altogether
beautiful she found Arcady of the Little Country, Clem returned, bearing
breast-high a napkin-covered tray, from which towered twin pillars of
glass, topped with fragrant leafage and pierced each by a yellow straw.
This tray he placed upon the table beside the poems of Lord Byron, and
the minister permitted himself an oblique look thereat, even though this
involved deserting the eyes of his agreeable hostess. The ice in the
glasses tinkled a brief phrase of music, the tops burgeoned with a
luxuriant summer green, and the straws were of a sweetly pastoral
suggestiveness. The fragrance moved one to the heart of some
spice-scented dell where a brooklet purled down a pebbled course. The
ensemble was indeed overwhelming in its message of a refreshment joyous,
satisfying, timely, and of a consummate innocence.
"The day is warm," said Miss Caroline, receiving one of the glasses from
her servant, and with a bright look at her guest.
"It is intensely warm, and quite unusually so for this time of year,"
said the minister, absently taking the other glass now proffered him.
"We shall combat it," said Miss Caroline with some vivacity. She
delicately applied her lips to the straw, and a slight depression
appeared in each of her acceptable cheeks.
"A cooling beverage at this hour is most grateful," said the minister,
rejoicing in the icy feel of the glass, and falling hopefully to his own
straw.
"Clem makes them perfectly," said Miss Caroline.
"What do you call them?" asked the minister. He had relinquished his
straw, and his kind face shone with a pleased surprise.
"Why, mint juleps," replied Miss Caroline, glancing quickly up.
"Ah, mint! that explains it," said the minister with satisfaction, his
broad face clearing of a slight bewilderment.
"Clem found a beautiful patch of it by a spring half a mile up the
river," volunteered Miss Caroline, between dainty pulls at her straw.
"It is a lovely plant--a _lovely_ plant, indeed!" rejoined the minister,
for a moment setting down his glass to wipe his brow. "I remember now
detecting the same fragrance when I watered my horse at that spring. But
I did not dream that it--I wonder--" he broke off, taking up his
glass--"that its virtues are not more widely apprehended. I have never
heard that an acceptable beverage might be made from it."
"Not every one can make a mint julep as Clem can," said his hostess.
A moist and futile splutter from the bottom of the minister's glass was
his only reply.
He set the glass back on the table with a pleasant speculation showing
in his eyes. The talk became again animated. Chiefly the minister
talked, and his hostess found him most companionable.
"Let me offer you another julep," she said, after a little, noting that
his eyes had swept the empty glass with a chastened blankness. The
minister let her.
"If it would not be troubling you--really? The heat is excessive, and I
find that the mint, simple herb though it be, is strangely salutary."
The minister was a man of years and weight and worth. He possessed a
reliant simplicity that put him at once close to those he met. Of these,
by his manner, he asked all: confidence without reserve, troubles,
doubts, distresses, material or otherwise. And this manner of his
prevailed. The hearts of his people opened to him as freely as his own
opened to receive them. He was a good man and, partly by reason of this
ingenuous, unsuspicious mind, an invaluable instrument of grace.
When he had talked to Miss Caroline through the second
julep,--digressing only to marvel briefly again that the properties of
mint should so long have been Nature's own secret in Little
Arcady,--telling her his joys, his griefs, his interests, which were but
the joys and griefs and interests of his people, he wrought a spell upon
her so that she in turn became confiding.
She was an Episcopalian. Her line had been born Episcopalians since a
time whereof no data were obtainable; and this was, of course, not a
condition to meddle with in late life, even if one's mind should grow
consenting. For that matter, Miss Caroline would be frank and pretend to
no change of mind. She was an old woman and fixed. She could not at this
day free herself of a doubtless incorrect notion that the outside
churches--meaning those not Episcopal--had been intended for people
other than her own family and its offshoots. Clem had once been a
Baptist, and it was true that he was now a Methodist. He had told her
that his new religion was distinguished from the old by being "dry
religion". But these were intricacies with which a woman of Miss
Caroline's years could not be expected to entangle herself. This she
would say, however, that during her residence in Little Arcady she would
fling aside the prejudice of a lifetime and worship each Sabbath at the
minister's Methodist church.
It did not seem to the minister that she said it as might an explorer
who consents for a time to adopt the manner and customs of the tribe
among which a spirit of adventure has led him. He accepted her implied
tribute modestly and with unaffected gratification, again wiping his
brow and his broad, good face.
When I joined them at four o'clock, having been moved by hope of a
cooling chat with Miss Caroline, the minister was slightly more flushed,
I thought, than the day could warrant. He was about to leave, was, in
fact, concluding his choicest anecdote of "Big Joe" Kestril--for he was
a man who met all our kinds. "Big Joe," six feet, five, a tower of
muscled brawn, standing on a corner, pleasantly inebriated, had watched
go feebly by the tottering, palsied form of little old Bolivar Kent, our
most aged and richest man. The minister, also passing, had observed
Kestril's humorous stare.
"The big fellow called to me," he was saying to Miss Caroline as I came
up. "'Parson,' said he--they all know me familiarly, madam--'Parson,'
said he, 'I wish I could take all I'm worth and all old Kent is worth
and put it in a bunch on the sidewalk there and then fight the old cuss
for it!'"
It was a favorite anecdote of the minister's, but I had never known him
before to tell it to a lady on the occasion of his first call. Miss
Caroline laughed joyously as she turned to greet me.
"I can't tell you how finely I've been entertained," she said to me.
"Nor can I tell him for myself, madam," retorted the minister. I thought
indeed he spoke with an effort that made this gallantry seem not
altogether baseless in fact.
"I was on the point of leaving," said the minister.
"Are you returning home, or have you more calls in the neighborhood?" I
asked, feeling just a tinge of uneasiness about his expansive manner.
"No more calls, no. I had planned, instead, a pleasant walk up along the
riverside to a spring some distance above. I mean to procure a supply of
this delicious mint--for mint juleps," he added affably.
"Come with me," I urged. I was about to walk out myself. Together we
bade adieu to Miss Caroline.
But the minister's walk ended at my own door. In the cool gloom of my
little library I asked him if he would be good enough to excuse me a
moment, indicating the broad couch beneath the window.
"With pleasure, Major!" and he sank among the restful pillows. "I am
ashamed to say that the heat has rendered me a trifle indolent".
When I came softly back five minutes later, he lay in deep slumber, his
face cherubically innocent, his breathing soft as a babe's. He awoke
freshly two hours later. He apologized for his rudeness and expressed a
wish for a glass of cool water. Three of these he drank with evidences
of profound relish. Then he drew his large silver watch from his pocket.
"On my word, Major, it's after six, and I shall be late for tea! I have
trespassed shamefully upon you!"
"The heat was very trying," I said.
"Quite enervating, indeed! I seem only now to be feeling its effects."
As he walked briskly down the now cooling street, he bared his brow to
the gentle breeze of evening.
To the ladies, solicitous about Miss Caroline, who called upon him a few
days later, he said, "She is a most admirable and lovely woman--not at
all a person one could bring one's self to address on the painful
subject of intoxicants. Had she offered me a glass of wine or other
stimulant, a way might have been opened, but I am delighted to say that
her hospitality went no farther than this innocent beverage." The
minister indicated on his study table a glass containing sweetened
ice-water in which some leaves of mint had been submerged.
"It is called a mint julep," he added, "though I confess I do not get
the same delicate tang from the herb that her black fellow does. As he
prepared the decoction I assure you its flavor was capital!"