“Our young ladies are roses,” he now admitted with a delicate touch of
pride.
“Don’t forget your old ones! I never shall.”
There was pleasure in his face at this tribute, which, he could see,
came from the heart. But, thus pictured to him, the old ladies brought
a further idea quite plainly into his expression; and he announced it.
“Some of them are not without thorns.”
“What would you give,” I quickly replied, “for anybody--man or
woman--who could not, on an occasion, make themselves sharply felt?”
To this he returned a full but somewhat absent-minded assent. He seemed
to be reflecting that he himself didn’t care to be the “occasion” upon
which an old lady rose should try her thorns; and I was inclined to
suspect that his intimate aunt had been giving him a wigging.
Anyhow, I stood ready to keep it up, this interchange of
lofty civilities. I, too, could wear the courtly red-heels of
eighteenth-century procedure, and for just as long as his Southern
up-bringing inclined him to wear them; I hadn’t known Aunt Carola for
nothing! But we, as I have said, were not destined to dance any minuet.
We had been moving, very gradually, and without any attention to our
surroundings, to and fro in the beautiful sweet churchyard. Flowers were
everywhere, growing, budding, blooming; color and perfume were parts of
the very air, and beneath these pretty and ancient tombs, graven with
old dates and honorable names, slept the men and women who had given
Kings Port her high place is; in our history. I have never, in this
country, seen any churchyard comparable to this one; happy, serene dead,
to sleep amid such blossoms and consecration! Good taste prevailed here;
distinguished men lay beneath memorial stones that came no higher than
your waist or shoulder; there was a total absence of obscure grocers
reposing under gigantic obelisks; to earn a monument here you must win
a battle, or do, at any rate, something more than adulterate sugar and
oil. The particular monument by which young John Mayrant and I found
ourselves standing, when we reached the point about the ladies and the
thorns, had a look of importance and it caught his eye, bringing him
back to where we were. Upon his pointing to it, and before we had spoken
or I had seen the name, I inquired eagerly: “Not the lieutenant of the
Bon Homme Richard?” and then saw that Mayrant was not the name upon it.
My knowledge of his gallant sea-fighting namesake visibly gratified him.
“I wish it were,” he said; “but I am descended from this man, too. He
was a statesman, and some of his brilliant powers were inherited by
his children--but they have not come so far down as me. In 1840, his
daughter, Miss Beaufain--”
I laid my hand right on his shoulder. “Don’t you do it, John Mayrant!”
I cried. “Don’t you tell me that. Last night I caught myself saying that
instead of my prayers.”
Well, it killed the minuet dead; he sat flat down on the low stone
coping that bordered the path to which we had wandered back--and I
sat flat down opposite him. The venerable custodian, passing along a
neighboring path, turned his head and stared at our noise.
“Lawd, see those chillun goin’ on!” he muttered. “Mas’ John, don’t you
get too scandalous, tellin’ strangers ‘bout the old famblies.”
Mayrant pointed to me. “He’s responsible, Daddy Ben. I’m being just as
good as gold. Honest injun!”
The custodian marched slowly on his way, shaking his head. “Mas’ John
he do go on,” he repeated. His office was not alone the care and the
showing off of the graveyard, but another duty, too, as native and
peculiar to the soil as the very cotton and the rice: this loyal
servitor cherished the honor of the “old famblies,” and chide their
young descendants whenever he considered that they needed it.
Mayrant now sat revived after his collapse of mirth, and he addressed me
from his gravestone. “Yes, I ought to have foreseen it.”
“Foreseen--?” I didn’t at once catch the inference.
“All my aunts and cousins have been talking to you.”
“Oh, Miss Beaufain and the Earl of Mainridge! Well, but it’s quite
worth--”
“Knowing by heart!” he broke in with new merriment.
I kept on. “Why not? They tell those things everywhere--where they’re so
lucky as to possess them! It’s a flawless specimen.”
“Of 1840 repartee?” He spoke with increasing pauses. “Yes. We do at
least possess that. And some wine of about the same date--and even
considerably older.”
“All the better for age,” I exclaimed.
But the blue eyes of Mayrant were far away and full of shadow. “Poor
Kings Port,” he said very slowly and quietly. Then he looked at me with
the steady look and the smile that one sometimes has when giving voice
to a sorrowful conviction against which one has tried to struggle. “Poor
Kings Port,” he affectionately repeated. His hand tapped lightly two or
three times upon the gravestone upon which he was seated. “Be honest and
say that you think so, too,” he demanded, always with his smile.
But how was I to agree aloud with what his silent hand had expressed?
Those inaudible taps on the stone spoke clearly enough; they said: “Here
lies Kings Port, here lives Kings Port. Outside of this is our true
death, on the vacant wharves, in the empty streets. All that we have
left is the immortality which these historic names have won.” How could
I tell him that I thought so, too? Nor was I as sure of it then as he
was. And besides, this was a young man whose spirit was almost surely,
in suffering; ill fortune both material and of the heart, I seemed to
suspect, had made him wounded and bitter in these immediate days; and
the very suppression he was exercising hurt him the more deeply. So I
replied, honestly, as he had asked: “I hope you are mistaken.”
“That’s because you haven’t been here long enough,” he declared.
Over us, gently, from somewhere across the gardens and the walls, came
a noiseless water breeze, to which the roses moved and nodded among the
tombs. They gave him a fanciful thought. “Look at them! They belong to
us, and they know it. They’re saying, ‘Yes; yes; yes,’ all day long. I
don’t know why on earth I’m talking in this way to you!” he broke off
with vivacity. “But you made me laugh so.”