“It is many years since I have heard an opera,” she pursued. “In my day
the works of the Italians were much applauded. But I doubt if Mozart
will be surpassed. I hope you admire the Nozze?”
You will not need me to tell you that I came out of Mrs. Gregory St.
Michael’s house little wiser than I went in. My experience did not lead
me to abandon all hope. I paid other visits to other ladies; but these
answered my inquiries in much the same sort of way as had the lady who
admired Mozart. They spoke delightfully of travel, books, people, and
of the colonial renown of Kings Port and its leading families; but it
is scarce an exaggeration to say that Mozart was as near the cake, the
wedding, or the steel wasp as I came with any of them. By patience,
however, and mostly at our boarding-house table, I gathered a certain
knowledge, though small in amount.
If the health of John Mayrant’s mother, I learned, had allowed that lady
to bring him up Herself, many follies might have been saved the youth.
His aunt, Miss Eliza St. Michael, though a pattern of good intentions,
was not always a pattern of wisdom. Moreover, how should a spinster
bring up a boy fitly?
Of the Rieppes, father and daughter, I also learned a little more. They
did not (most people believed) come from Georgia. Natchez and Mobile
seemed to divide the responsibility of giving them to the world. It was
quite certain the General had run away from Chattanooga. Nobody disputed
this, or offered any other battle as the authentic one. Of late the
Rieppes were seldom to be seen in Kings Port. Their house (if it had
ever been their own property, which I heard hotly argued both ways) had
been sold more than two years ago, and their recent brief sojourns in
the town were generally beneath the roof of hospitable friends--people
by the name of Cornerly, “whom we do not know,” as I was carefully
informed by more than one member of the St. Michael family. The girl had
disturbed a number of mothers whose sons were prone to slip out of the
strict hereditary fold in directions where beauty or champagne was to
be found; and the Cornerlys dined late, and had champagne. Miss Hortense
had “splurged it” a good deal here, and the measure of her success
with the male youth was the measure of her condemnation by their female
elders.
Such were the facts which I gathered from women and from the few men
whom I saw in Kings Port. This town seemed to me almost as empty of men
as if the Pied Piper had passed through here and lured them magically
away to some distant country. It was on the happy day that saw Miss
Eliza La Heu again providing me with sandwiches and chocolate that my
knowledge of the wedding and the bride and groom began really to take
some steps forward.
It was not I who, at my sequestered lunch at the Woman’s Exchange, began
the conversation the next time. That confection, “Lady Baltimore,” about
which I was not to worry myself, had, as they say, “broken the ice”
between the girl behind the counter and myself.
“He has put it off!” This, without any preliminaries, was her direct and
stimulating news.
I never was more grateful for the solitude of the Exchange, where I
had, before this, noted and blessed an absence of lunch customers as
prevailing as the trade winds; the people I saw there came to talk, not
to purchase. Well, I was certainly henceforth coming for both!