So they were going to do the handsome thing; they would ring the
Cornerlys’ bell; they would cross the interloping threshold, they would
recognize the interloping girl; and this meant that they had given it
up. It meant that Miss Eliza had given it up, too, had at last abandoned
her position that the marriage would never take place. And her own act
had probably drawn this down upon her. When the trustee of that estate
had told her of the apparent failure of the phosphates, she had hailed
it as an escape for her beloved John, and for all of them, because she
made sure that Hortense would never marry a virtually penniless man. And
when the work went on, and the rich fortune was unearthed after all, her
influence had caused that revelation to be delayed because she was so
confident that the engagement would be broken. But she had reckoned
without Hortense; worse than that, she had reckoned without John
Mayrant; in her meddling attempt to guide his affairs in the way that
she believed would be best for him, she forgot that the boy whom she had
brought up was no longer a child, and thus she unpardonably ignored his
rights as a man. And now Miss Josephine’s disapproval was vindicated,
and her own casuistry was doubly punished. Miss Rieppe’s astute journey
of investigation--for her purpose had evidently become suspected by some
of them beforehand--had forced Miss Eliza to disclose the truth about
the phosphates to her nephew before it should be told him by the girl
herself; and the intolerable position of apparent duplicity precipitated
two wholly inevitable actions on his part; he had bound himself more
than ever to marry Hortense, and he had made a furious breach with his
Aunt Eliza. That was what his letter had contained; this time he had
banished himself from that house. What was his Aunt Eliza going to do
about it? I wondered. She was a stiff, if indiscreet, old lady, and it
certainly did not fall within her view of the proprieties that young
people should take their elders to task in furious letters. But she
had been totally in the wrong, and her fault was irreparable, because
important things had happened in consequence of it; she might repent the
fault in sackcloth and ashes, but she couldn’t stop the things. Would
she, then, honorably wear the sackcloth, or would she dishonestly shirk
it under the false issue of her nephew’s improper tone to her? Women can
justify themselves with more appalling skill than men.
One drop there was in all this bitter bucket, which must have tasted
sweet to John. He had resigned from the Custom House: Juno had got
it right this time, though she hadn’t a notion of the real reason for
John’s act. This act had been, since morning, lost for me, so to speak,
in the shuffle of more absorbing events; and it now rose to view again
in my mind as a telling stroke in the full-length portrait that all his
acts had been painting of the boy during the last twenty-four hours.
Notwithstanding a meddlesome aunt, and an arriving sweetheart, and
imminent wedlock, he hadn’t forgotten to stop “taking orders from a
negro” at the very first opportunity which came to him; his phosphates
had done this for him, at least, and I should have the pleasure of
correcting Juno at tea.
But I did not have this pleasure. They were all in an excitement over
something else, and my own different excitement hadn’t a chance against
this greater one; for people seldom wish to hear what you have to say,
even under the most favorable circumstances, and never when they have
anything to say themselves. With an audience so hotly preoccupied I
couldn’t have sat on Juno effectively at all, and therefore I kept it
to myself, and attended very slightly to what they were telling me about
the Daughters of Dixie.
I bowed absently to the poetess. “And your poem?” I said. “A great
success, I am sure?”
“Why, didn’t you hear me say so?” said the upcountry bride; and then,
after a smile at the others, “I’m sure your flowers were graciously
accepted.”
“Ask Miss Josephine St. Michael,” I replied.
“Oh, oh, oh!” went the bride. “How would she know?”
I gave myself no pains to improve or arrest this tiresome joke, and they
went back to their Daughters of Dixie; but it is rather singular how
sometimes an utterly absurd notion will be the cause of our taking a
step which we had not contemplated. I did carry some flowers to Miss La
Heu the next day. I was at some trouble to find any; for in Kings Port
shops of this kind are by no means plentiful, and it was not until I had
paid a visit to a quite distant garden at the extreme northwestern edge
of the town that I lighted upon anything worthy of the girl behind the
counter. The Exchange itself was apt to have flowers for sale, but I
hardly saw my way to buying them there, and then immediately offering
them to the fair person who had sold them to me. As it was, I did much
better; for what I brought her were decidedly superior to any that were
at the Exchange when I entered it at lunch time.
They were, as the up-country bride would have put it, “graciously
accepted.” Miss La Heu stood them in water on the counter beside her
ledger. She was looking lovely.
“I expected you yesterday,” she said. “The new Lady Baltimore was
ready.”
“Well, if it is not all eaten yet--”
“Oh, no! Not a slice gone.”
“Ah, nobody does your art justice here!”
“Go and sit down at your table, please.”
It was really quite difficult to say to her from that distance the sort
of things that I wished to say; but there seemed to be no help for it,
and I did my best.
“I shall miss my lunches here very much when I’m gone.”
“Did you say coffee to-day?”
“Chocolate. I shall miss--”
“And the lettuce sandwiches?”
“Yes. You don’t realize how much these lunches--”
“Have cost you?” She seemed determined to keep laughing.
“You have said it. They have cost me my--”
“I can give you the receipt, you know.”
“The receipt?”
“For Lady Baltimore, to take with you.”
“You’ll have to give me a receipt for a lost heart.”
“Oh, his heart! General, listen to--” From habit she had turned to
where her dog used to lie; and sudden pain swept over her face and was
mastered. “Never mind!” she quickly resumed. “Please don’t speak about
it. And you have a heart somewhere; for it was very nice in you to come
in yesterday morning after--after the bridge.”
“I hope I have a heart,” I began, rising; for, really, I could not go on
in this way, sitting down away back at the lunch table.
But the door opened, and Hortense Rieppe came into the Woman’s Exchange.
It was at me that she first looked, and she gave me the slightest bow
possible, the least sign of conventional recognition that a movement
of the head could make and be visible at all; she didn’t bend her head
down, she tilted it ever so little up. It wasn’t new to me, this form
of greeting, and I knew that she had acquired it at Newport, and that it
denoted, all too accurately, the size of my importance in her eyes; she
did it, as she did everything, with perfection. Then she turned to Eliza
La Heu, whose face had become miraculously sweet.
“Good morning,” said Hortense.
It sounded from a quiet well of reserve music; just a cupful of
melodious tone dipped lightly out of the surface. Her face hadn’t
become anything; but it was equally miraculous in its total void of all
expression relating to this moment, or to any moment; just her beauty,
her permanent stationary beauty, was there glowing in it and through it,
not skin deep, but going back and back into her lazy eyes, and shining
from within the modulated bloom of her color and the depths of her amber
hair. She was choosing, for this occasion, to be as impersonal as some
radiant hour in nature, some mellow, motionless day when the leaves have
turned, but have not fallen, and it is drowsily warm; but it wasn’t so
much of nature that she, in her harmonious lustre, reminded me, as of
some beautiful silken-shaded lamp, from which color rather than light
came with subdued ampleness.