But in this matter my prognostication was thoroughly at fault; yet
surely, knowing Kings Port’s sovereign habit, as I had had good cause
to know it, I was scarce beyond reasonable bounds in supposing that the
arrival of Miss Rieppe would heat up some very general and very audible
talk about this approaching marriage, against which the prejudices of
the town were set in such compact array. I have several times mentioned
that Kings Port, to my sense, was buzzing over John Mayrant’s affairs;
buzzing in the open, where one could hear it, and buzzing behind closed
doors, where one could somehow feel it; I can only say that henceforth
this buzzing ceased, dropped wholly away, as if Gossip were watching so
hard that she forgot to talk, giving place to a great stillness in
her kingdom. Such occasional words as were uttered sounded oddly and
egregiously clear in the new-established void.
The first of these words sounded, indeed, quite enormous, issuing as it
did from Juno’s lips at our breakfast-table, when yesterday’s meeting on
the New Bridge was investing my mind with many thoughts. She addressed
me in one of her favorite tones (I have met it, thank God! but in two
or three other cases during my whole experience), which always somehow
conveyed to you that you were personally to blame for what she was going
to tell you.
“I suppose you know that your friend, Mr. Mayrant, has resigned from the
Custom House?”
I was, of course, careful not to give Juno the pleasure of seeing that
she had surprised me. I bowed, and continued in silence to sip a little
coffee; then, setting my coffee down, I observed that it would be some
few days yet before the resignation could take effect; and, noticing
that Juno was getting ready some new remark, I branched off and spoke to
her of my excursion up the river this morning to see the azaleas in the
gardens at Live Oaks.
“How lucky the weather is so magnificent!” I exclaimed.
“I shall be interested to hear,” said Juno, “what explanation he finds
to give Miss Josephine for his disrespectful holding out against her,
and his immediate yielding to Miss Rieppe.”
Here I deemed it safe to ask her, was she quite sure it had been at the
instance of Miss Rieppe that John had resigned?
“It follows suspiciously close upon her arrival,” stated Juno. She might
have been speaking of a murder. “And how he expects to support a
wife now--well, that is no affair of mine,” Juno concluded, with a
washing-her-hands-of-it air, as if up to this point she had always
done her best for the wilful boy. She had blamed him savagely for not
resigning, and now she was blaming him because he had resigned; and
I ate my breakfast in much entertainment over this female acrobat in
censure.
No more was said; I think that my manner of taking Juno’s news had been
perfectly successful in disappointing her. John’s resignation, if it
had really occurred, did certainly follow very close upon the arrival of
Hortense; but I had spoken one true thought in intimating that I doubted
if it was due to the influence of Miss Rieppe. It seemed to me to the
highest degree unlikely that the boy in his present state of feeling
would do anything he did not wish to do because his ladylove happened to
wish it--except marry her! There was apparently no doubt that he would
do that. Did she want him, poverty and all? Was she, even now, with eyes
open, deliberately taking her last farewell days of automobiles and
of steam yachts? That voice of hers, that rich summons, with its quiet
certainty of power, sounded in my memory. “John,” she had called to him
from the automobile; and thus John had gone away in it, wedged in among
Charley and the fat cushions and all the money and glass eyes. And
now he had resigned from the Custom House! Yes, that was, whatever it
signified, truly amazing--if true.
So I continued to ponder quite uselessly, until the up-country bride
aroused me. She, it appeared, had been greatly carried away by the
beauty of Live Oaks, and was making her David take her there again this
morning; and she was asking me didn’t I hope we shouldn’t get stuck? The
people had got stuck yesterday, three whole hours, right on a bank in
the river; and wasn’t it a sin and a shame to run a boat with ever so
many passengers aground? By the doctrine of chances, I informed her, we
had every right to hope for better luck to-day; and, with the assurance
of how much my felicity was increased by the prospect of having her and
David as company during the expedition, I betook myself meanwhile to my
own affairs, which meant chiefly a call at the Exchange to inquire for
Eliza La Heu, and a visit to the post-office before starting upon a
several hours’ absence.
A few steps from our front door I came upon John Mayrant, and saw at
once too plainly that no ease had come to his spirit during the hours
since the bridge. He was just emerging from an adjacent house.
“And have you resigned?” I asked him.
“Yes. That’s done. You haven’t seen Miss Rieppe this morning?”
“Why, she’s surely not boarding with Mrs. Trevise?”
“No; stopping here with her old friend, Mrs. Cornerly.” He indicated
the door he had come from. “Of course, you wouldn’t be likely to see her
pass!” And with that he was gone.
That he was greatly stirred up by something there could be no doubt;
never before had I seen him so abrupt; it seemed clear that anger had
taken the place of despondency, or whatever had been his previous mood;
and by the time I reached the post-office I had already imagined and
dismissed the absurd theory that John was jealous of Charley, had
resigned from the Custom House as a first step toward breaking his
engagement, and had rung Mrs. Cornerly’s bell at this early hour with
the purpose of informing his lady-love that all was over between them.
Jealousy would not be likely to produce this set of manifestations in
young, foolish John; and I may say here at once, what I somewhat later
learned, that the boy had come with precisely the opposite purpose,
namely, to repeat and reenforce his steadfast constancy, and that it was
something far removed from jealousy which had spurred him to this.
I found the girl behind the counter at her post, grateful to me for
coming to ask how she was after the shock of yesterday, but unwilling to
speak of it at all; all which she expressed by her charming manner, and
by the other subjects she chose for conversation, and especially by the
way in which she held out her hand when I took my leave.
Near the post-office I was hailed by Beverly Rodgers, who proclaimed to
me at once a comic but genuine distress. He had already walked, he said
(and it was but half-past nine o’clock, as he bitterly bade me
observe on the church dial), more miles in search of a drink than his
unarithmetical brain had the skill to compute. And he confounded such a
town heartily; he should return as soon as possible to Charley’s yacht,
where there was civilization, and where he had spent the night. During
his search he had at length come to a door of promising appearance, and
gone in there, and they had explained to him that it was a dispensary.
A beastly arrangement. What was the name of the razor-back hog they
said had invented it? And what did you do for a drink in this confounded
water-hole?
He would find it no water-hole, I told him; but there were methods which
a stranger upon his first morning could scarce be expected to grasp. “I
could direct you to a Dutchman,” I said, “but you’re too well dressed to
win his confidence at once.”
“Well, old man,” began Beverly, “I don’t speak Dutch, but give me a
crack at the confidence.”
However, he renounced the project upon learning what a Dutchman was.
Since my hours were no longer dedicated to establishing the presence
of royal blood in my veins I had spent them upon various local
investigations of a character far more entertaining and akin to my
taste. It was in truth quite likely that Beverly could in a very few
moments, with his smile and his manner, find his way to any Dutchman’s
heart; he had that divine gift of winning over to him quickly all sorts
and conditions of men; and my account of the ingenious and law-baffling
contrivances, which you found at these little grocery shops, at once
roused his curiosity to make a trial; but he decided that the club was
better, if less picturesque. And he told me that all the men of the
automobile party had received from John Mayrant cards of invitation to
the club.
“Your fire-eater is a civil chap,” said Beverly. “And by the way, do you
happen to know,” here he pulled from his pocket a letter and consulted
its address, “Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael?”
I was delighted that he brought an introduction to this lady; Hortense
Rieppe could not open for him any of those haughty doors; and I wished
not only that Beverly (since he was just the man to appreciate it and
understand it) should see the fine flower of Kings Port, but also that
the fine flower of Kings Port should see him; the best blood of the
South could not possibly turn out anything better than Beverly Rodgers,
and it was horrible and humiliating to think of the other Northern
specimens of men whom Hortense had imported with her. I was here
suddenly reminded that the young woman was a guest of the Cornerlys,
the people who swept their garden, the people whom Eliza La Heu at the
Exchange did not “know”; and at this the remark of Mrs. Gregory St.
Michael, when I had walked with her and Mrs. Weguelin, took on an added
lustre of significance:--
“We shall have to call.”
Call on the Cornerlys! Would they do that? Were they ready to stand by
their John to that tune? A hotel would be nothing; you could call on
anybody at a hotel, if you had to; but here would be a demarche indeed!
Yet, nevertheless, I felt quite certain that, if Hortense, though the
Cornerlys’ guest, was also the guaranteed fiancee of John Mayrant, the
old ladies would come up to the scratch, hate and loathe it as they
might, and undoubtedly would: they could be trusted to do the right
thing.
I told Beverly how glad I was that he would meet Mrs. Weguelin St.
Michael. “The rest of your party, my friend,” I said, “are not very
likely to.” And I generalized to him briefly upon the town of Kings
Port. “Supposing I take you to call upon Mrs. St. Michael when I come
back this afternoon?” I suggested.
Beverly thought it over, and then shook his head. “Wouldn’t do, old man.
If these people are particular and know, as you say they do, hadn’t I
better leave the letter with my card, and then wait till she sends some
word?”
He was right, as he always was, unerringly. Consorting with all the
Charleys, and the Bohms, and the Cohns, and the Kitties hadn’t taken
the fine edge from Beverly’s good inheritance and good bringing up; his
instinct had survived his scruples, making of him an agile and charming
cynic, whom you could trust to see the right thing always, and never
do it unless it was absolutely necessary; he would marry any amount
of Kitties for their money, and always know that beside his mother and
sisters they were as dirt; and he would see to it that his children
took after their father, went to school in England for a good accent and
enunciation, as he had done, went to college in America for the sake
of belonging in their own country, as he had done, and married as many
fortunes, and had as few divorces, as possible.
“Who was that girl on the bridge?” he now inquired as we reached the
steps of the post-office; and when I had told him again, because he
had asked me about Eliza La Heu at the time, “She’s the real thing,” he
commented. “Quite extraordinary, you know, her dignity, when poor old
awful Charley was messing everything--he’s so used to mere money, you
know, that half the time he forgets people are not dollars, and you have
to kick him to remind him--yes, quite perfect dignity. Gad, it took a
lady to climb up and sit by that ragged old darky and take her dead dog
away in the cart! The cart and the darky only made her look what she
was all the more. Poor Kitty couldn’t do that--she’d look like a
chambermaid! Well, old man, see you again.”
I stood on the post-office steps looking after Beverly Rodgers as he
crossed Court Street. His admirably good clothes, the easy finish of
his whole appearance, even his walk, and his back, and the slope of his
shoulders, were unmistakable. The Southern men, going to their business
in Court Street, looked at him. Alas, in his outward man he was as a
rose among weeds! And certainly, no well-born American could unite with
an art more hedonistic than Beverly’s the old school and the nouveau
jeu!
Over at the other corner he turned and stood admiring the church and
gazing at the other buildings, and so perceived me still on the steps.
With a gesture of remembering something he crossed back again.
“You’ve not seen Miss Rieppe?”
“Why, of course I haven’t!” I exclaimed. Was everybody going to ask me
that?
“Well, something’s up, old boy. Charley has got the launch away with
him--and I’ll bet he’s got her away with him, too. Charley lied this
morning.”
“Is lying, then, so rare with him?”
“Why, it rather is, you know. But I’ve come to be able to spot him when
he does it. Those little bulgy eyes of his look at you particularly
straight and childlike. He said he had to hunt up a man on business--V-C
Chemical Company, he called it--”
“There is such a thing here,” I said.
“Oh, Charley’d never make up a thing, and get found out in that way! But
he was lying all the same, old man.”
“Do you mean they’ve run off and got married?”
“What do you take them for? Much more like them to run off and not get
married. But they haven’t done that either. And, speaking of that, I
believe I’ve gone a bit adrift. Your fire-eater, you know--she is an
extraordinary woman!” And Beverly gave his mellow, little humorous
chuckle. “Hanged if I don’t begin to think she does fancy him.”
“Well!” I cried, “that would explain--no, it wouldn’t. Whence comes your
theory?”
“Saw her look at him at dinner once last night. We dined with some
people--Cornerly. She looked at him just once. Well, if she intends--by
gad, it upsets one’s whole notion of her!”
“Isn’t just one look rather slight basis for--”
“Now, old man, you know better than that!” Beverly paused to chuckle.
“My grandmother Livingston,” he resumed, “knew Aaron Burr, and she used
to say that he had an eye which no honest woman could meet without
a blush. I don’t know whether your fire-eater is a Launcelot, or a
Galahad, but that girl’s eye at dinner--”
“Did he blush?” I laughed.
“Not that I saw. But really, old man, confound it, you know! He’s no
sort of husband for her. How can he make her happy and how can she make
him happy, and how can either of them hit it off with the other the
least little bit? She’s expensive, he’s not; she’s up-to-date, he’s not;
she’s of the great world, he’s provincial. She’s all derision, he’s all
faith. Why, hang it, old boy, what does she want him for?”
Beverly’s handsome brow was actually furrowed with his problem; and, as
I certainly could furnish him no solution for it, we stood in silence on
the post-office steps. “What can she want him for?” he repeated. Then
he threw it off lightly with one of his chuckles. “So glad I’ve no
daughters to marry! Well--I must go draw some money.”
He took himself off with a certain alacrity, giving an impatient cut
with his stick at a sparrow in the middle of Worship Street, nor did
I see him again this day, although, after hurriedly getting my letters
(for the starting hour of the boat had now drawn near), I followed where
he had gone down Court Street, and his cosmopolitan figure would
have been easy to descry at any distance along that scantily peopled
pavement. He had evidently found the bank and was getting his money.
David of the yellow heir and his limpid-looking bride were on the
horrible little excursion boat, watching for me and keeping with some
difficulty a chair next themselves that I might not have to stand up all
the way; and, as I came aboard, the bride called out to me her relief,
she had made sure that I would be late.
“David said you wouldn’t,” she announced in her clear up-country accent
across the parasols and heads of huddled tourists, “but I told him a
gentleman that’s late to three meals aivry day like as not would forget
boats can’t be kept hot in the kitchen for you.”
I took my place in the chair beside her as hastily as possible, for
there is nothing that I so much dislike as being made conspicuous for
any reason whatever; and my thanks to her were, I fear, less gracious in
their manner than should have been the case. Nor did she find me, I must
suppose, as companionable during this excursion--during the first part
of it, at any rate--as a limpid-looking bride, who has kept at some
pains a seat beside her for a single gentleman, has the right to expect;
the brief hours of this morning had fed my preoccupation too richly, and
I must often have fallen silent.
The horrible little tug, or ferry, or wherry, or whatever its
contemptible inconvenience makes it fitting that this unclean and
snail-like craft should be styled, cast off and began to lumber along
the edges of the town with its dense cargo of hats and parasols and
lunch parcels. We were a most extraordinary litter of man and womankind.
There was the severe New England type, improving each shining hour, and
doing it in bleak costume and with a thoroughly northeast expression;
there were pink sunbonnets from (I should imagine) Spartanburg, or
Charlotte, or Greenville; there were masculine boots which yet bore
incrusted upon their heels the red mud of Aiken or of Camden; there
was one fat, jewelled exhalation who spoke of Palm Beach with the true
stockyard twang, and looked as if she swallowed a million every morning
for breakfast, and God knows how many more for the ensuing repasts; she
was the only detestable specimen among us; sunbonnets, boots, and even
ungenial New England proved on acquaintance kindly, simple, enterprising
Americans; yet who knows if sunbonnets and boots and all of us wouldn’t
have become just as detestable had we but been as she was, swollen and
puffy with the acute indigestion of sudden wealth?
This reflection made me charitable, which I always like to be, and I
imparted it to the bride.
“My!” she said. And I really don’t know what that meant.
But presently I understood well why people endured the discomfort of
this journey. I forgot the cinders which now and then showered upon us,
and the heat of the sun, and the crowded chairs; I forgot the boat and
myself, in looking at the passing shores. Our course took us round
Kings Port on three sides. The calm, white town spread out its width
and length beneath a blue sky softer than the tenderest dream; the white
steeples shone through the enveloping brightness, taking to each
other, and to the distant roofs beneath them, successive and changing
relations, while the dwindling mass of streets and edifices followed
more slowly the veering of the steeples, folded upon itself, and
refolded, opened into new shapes and closed again, dwindling always,
and always white and beautiful; and as the far-off vision of it held
the eye, the few masts along the wharves grew thin and went out into
invisibility, the spires became as masts, the distant drawbridge through
which we had passed sank down into a mere stretching line, and shining
Kings Port was dissolved in the blue of water and of air.
The curving and the narrowing of the river took it at last from view;
and after it disappeared the spindling chimneys and their smoke, which
were along the bank above the town and bridge, leaving us to progress
through the solitude of marsh and wood and shore. The green levels of
stiff salt grass closed in upon the breadth of water, and we wound among
them, looking across their silence to the deeper silence of the woods
that bordered them, the brooding woods, the pines and the liveoaks,
misty with the motionless hanging moss, and misty also in that Southern
air that deepened when it came among their trunks to a caressing,
mysterious, purple veil. Every line of this landscape, the straight
forest top, the feathery breaks in it of taller trees, the curving
marsh, every line and every hue and every sound inscrutably spoke
sadness. I heard a mocking-bird once in some blossoming wild fruit tree
that we gradually reached and left gradually behind; and more than once
I saw other blossoms, and the yellow of the trailing jessamine; but the
bird could not sing the silence away, and spring with all her abundance
could not hide this spiritual autumn.
Dreams, a land of dreams, where even the high noon itself was dreamy; a
melting together of earth and air and water in one eternal gentleness of
revery! Whence came the melancholy of this? I had seen woods as solitary
and streams as silent, I had felt nature breathing upon me a greater
awe; but never before such penetrating and quiet sadness. I only know
that this is the perpetual mood of those Southern shores, those rivers
that wind in from the ocean among their narrowing marshes and their
hushed forests, and that it does not come from any memory of human hopes
and disasters, but from the elements themselves.
So did we move onward, passing in due time another bridge and a few
dwellings and some excavations, until the river grew quite narrow, and
there ahead was the landing at Live Oaks, with negroes idly watching for
us, and a launch beside the bank, and Charley and Hortense Rieppe about
to step into it. Another man stood up in the launch and talked to them
where they were on the landing platform, and pointed down the river as
we approached; but evidently he did not point at us. I looked hastily
to see what he was indicating to them, but I could see nothing save the
solitary river winding away between the empty woods and marshes.
So this was Hortense Rieppe! It was not wonderful that she had caused
young John to lose his heart, or, at any rate, his head and his senses;
nor was it wonderful that Charley, with his little bulging eyes, should
take her in his launch whenever she would go; the wonderful thing was
that John, at his age and with his nature, should have got over it--if
he had got over it! I felt it tingling in me; any man would. Steel wasp
indeed!
She was slender, and oh, how well dressed! She watched the passengers
get off the boat, and I could not tell you from that first sight of her
what her face was like, but only her hair, the sunburnt amber of its
masses making one think of Tokay or Chateau-Yquem. She was watching me,
I felt, and then saw; and as soon as I was near she spoke to me without
moving, keeping one gloved hand lightly posed upon the railing of the
platform, so that her long arm was bent with perfect ease and grace.
I swear that none but a female eye could have detected any toboggan
fire-escape.
Her words dropped with the same calculated deliberation, the same
composed and rich indifference. “These gardens are so beautiful.”
Such was her first remark, chosen with some purpose, I knew quite
well; and I observed that I hoped I was not too late for their full
perfection, if too late to visit them in her company.
She turned her head slightly toward Charley. “We have been enjoying them
so much.”
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, pronounced 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-passengers, 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 space 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 muffled 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 assenting, 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 assured 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 shores,
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 assets 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.