“And I may say this, too. I thank you very sincerely for bringing
completely home to me what I had begun to make out for myself. I hope
the Daughters of Dixie will go on singing of their heroes.”
I paused again, and now she looked away, out of the window into Royal
Street.
“Perhaps,” I still continued, “you will hardly believe me when I say
that I have looked at your monuments here with an emotion more poignant
even than that which Northern monuments raise in me.”
“Why?”
“Oh!” I exclaimed. “Need you have asked that? The North won.”
“You are quite dispassionate!” Her eyes were always toward the window.
“That’s my ‘sacred trust.’”
It made her look at me. “Yours?”
“Not yours--yet! It would be yours if you had won.” I thought a slight
change came in her steady scrutiny. “And, Miss La Heu, it was awful
about the negro. It is awful. The young North thinks so just as much as
you do. Oh, we shock our old people! We don’t expect them to change,
but they mustn’t expect us not to. And even some of them have begun to
whisper a little doubtfully. But never mind them--here’s the negro. We
can’t kick him out. That plan is childish. So, it’s like two men having
to live in one house. The white man would keep the house in repair, the
black would let it rot. Well, the black must take orders from the white.
And it will end so.”
She was eager. “Slavery again, you think?”
“Oh, never! It was too injurious to ourselves. But something between
slavery and equality.” And I ended with a quotation: “‘Patience, cousin,
and shuffle the cards.’”
“You may call me cousin--this once--because you have been, really, quite
nice--for a Northerner.”
Now we had come to the place where she must understand me.
“Not a Northerner, Miss La Heu.”
She became mocking. “Scarcely a Southerner, I presume?”
But I kept my smile and my directness. “No more a Southerner than a
Northerner.”
“Pray what, then?”
“An American.”
She was silent.
“It’s the ‘sacred trust’--for me.”
She was still silent.
“If my state seceded from the Union tomorrow, I should side with the
Union against her.”
She was frankly astonished now. “Would you really?” And I think some
light about me began to reach her. A Northerner willing to side against
a Northern state! I was very glad that I had found that phrase to make
clear to her my American creed.
I proceeded. “I shall help to hand down all the glories and all the
sadnesses; Lee’s, Lincoln’s, everybody’s. But I shall not hand ‘it’
down.”
This checked her.
“It’s easy for me, you know,” I hastily explained. “Nothing noble
about it at all. But from noble people”--and I looked hard at her--“one
expects, sooner or later, noble things.”
She repressed something she had been going to reply.
“If ever I have children,” I finished, “they shall know ‘Dixie’ and
‘Yankee Doodle’ by heart, and never know the difference. By that time
I should think they might have a chance of hearing ‘Yankee Doodle’ in
Kings Port.”
Again she checked a rapid retort. “Well,” she, after a pause, repeated,
“you have been really quite nice.”
“May I tell you what you have been?”
“Certainly not. Have you seen Mr. Mayrant to-day?”
“We have an engagement to walk this afternoon. May I go walking with you
sometime?”
“May he, General?” A wagging tail knocked on the floor behind the
counter. “General says that he will think about it. What makes you like
Mr. Mayrant so much?”
This question struck me as an odd one; nor could I make out the import
of the peculiar tone in which she put it. “Why, I should think everybody
would like him--except, perhaps, his double victim.”
“Double?”
“Yes, first of his fist and then of--of his hand!”
But she didn’t respond.
“Of his hand--his poker hand,” I explained.
“Poker hand?” She remained honestly vague.
It rejoiced me to be the first to tell her. “You haven’t heard of
Master John’s last performance? Well, finding himself forced by that
immeasurable old Aunt Josephine of yours to shake hands, he shook ‘em
all right, but he took thirty dollars away as a little set-off for his
pious docility.”
“Oh!” she murmured, overwhelmed with astonishment. Then she broke into
one of her delicious peals of laughter.
“Anybody,” I said, “likes a boy who plays a hand--and a fist--to that
tune.” I continued to say a number of commendatory words about young
John, while her sparkling eyes rested upon me. But even as I talked I
grew aware that these eyes were not sparkling, were starry rather,
and distant, and that she was not hearing what I said; so I stopped
abruptly, and at the stopping she spoke, like a person waking up.
“Oh, yes! Certainly he can take care of himself. Why not?”
“Rather creditable, don’t you think?”
“Creditable?”
“Considering his aunts and everything.”
She became haughty on the instant. “Upon my word! And do you suppose
the women of South Carolina don’t wish their men to be men? Why”--she
returned to mirth and that arch mockery which was her special charm--“we
South Carolina women consider virtue our business, and we don’t expect
the men to meddle with it!”
“Primal, perpetual, necessary!” I cried. “When that division gets
blurred, society is doomed. Are you sure John can take care of himself
every way?”
“I have other things than Mr. Mayrant to think about.” She said this
quite sharply.
It surprised me. “To be sure,” I assented. “But didn’t you once tell me
that you thought he was simple?”
She opened her ledger. “It’s a great honor to have one’s words so well
remembered.”
I was still at a loss. “Anyhow, the wedding is postponed,” I continued;
“and the cake. Of course one can’t help wondering how it’s all coming
out.”
She was now working at her ledger, bending her head over it. “Have
you ever met Miss Rieppe?” She inquired this with a sort of wonderful
softness--which I was to hear again upon a still more memorable
occasion.
“Never,” I answered, “but there’s nobody at present living whom I long
to see so much.”
She wrote on for a little while before saying, with her pencil steadily
busy, “Why?”
“Why? Don’t you? After all this fuss?”
“Oh, certainly,” she drawled. “She is so much admired--by Northerners.”
“I do hope John is able to take care of himself,” I purposely repeated.
“Take care of yourself!” she laughed angrily over her ledger.
“Me? Why? I understand you less and less!”
“Very likely.”
“Why, I want to help him!” I protested. “I don’t want him to marry her.
Oh, by the way do you happen to know what it is that she is coming here
to see for herself?”
In a moment her ledger was left, and she was looking at me straight.
Coming? When?
“Soon. In an automobile. To see something for herself.”
She pondered for quite a long moment; then her eyes returned,
searchingly, to me. “You didn’t make that up?”
I laughed, and explained. “Some of them, at any rate,” I finished, “know
what she’s coming for. They were rather queer about it, I thought.”
She pondered again. I noticed that she had deeply flushed, and that the
flush was leaving her. Then she fixed her eyes on me once more. “They
wouldn’t tell you?”
“I think that they came inadvertently near it, once or twice, and
remembered just in time that I didn’t know about it.”
“But since you do know pretty much about it!” she laughed.
I shook my head. “There’s something else, something that’s turned up;
the sort of thing that upsets calculations. And I merely hoped that
you’d know.”
On those last words of mine she gave me quite an extraordinary look, and
then, as if satisfied with what she saw in my face.--
“They don’t talk to me.”
It was an assurance, it was true, it had the ring of truth, that evident
genuineness which a piece of real confidence always possesses; she meant
me to know that we were in the same boat of ignorance to-day. And yet,
as I rose from my lunch and came forward to settle for it, I was aware
of some sense of defeat, of having been held off just as the ladies on
High Walk had held me off.
“Well,” I sighed, “I pin my faith to the aunt who says he’ll never marry
her.”
Miss La Heu had no more to say upon the subject. “Haven’t you forgotten
something?” she inquired gayly; and, as I turned to see what I had left
behind--“I mean, you had no Lady Baltimore to-day.”
“I clean forgot it!”
“No loss. It is very stale; and to-morrow I shall have a fresh supply
ready.”
As I departed through the door I was conscious of her eyes following
me, and that she had spoken of Lady Baltimore precisely because she was
thinking of something else.