“How beautiful those are!” she remarked.
“Is there something that you wish?” inquired Miss La Heu, always
miraculously sweet.
“Some of your good things for lunch; a very little, if you will be so
kind.”
I had gone back to my table while the “very little” was being selected,
and I felt, in spite of how slightly she counted me, that it would be
inadequate in me to remain completely dumb.
“Mr. Mayrant is still at the Custom House?” I observed.
“For a few days, yes. Happily we shall soon break that connection.” And
she smelt my flowers.
“‘We,’” I thought to myself, “is rather tremendous.”
It grew more tremendous in the silence as Eliza La Heu brought me my
orders. Miss Rieppe did not seat herself to take the light refreshment
which she found enough for lunch. Her plate and cup were set for her,
but she walked about, now with one, and now with the other, taking her
time over it, and pausing here and there at some article of the Exchange
stock.
Of course, she hadn’t come there for any lunch; the Cornerlys had midday
lunch and dined late; these innovated hours were a part of Kings Port’s
deep suspicion of the Cornerlys; but what now became interesting was her
evident indifference to our perceiving that lunch was merely a pretext
with her; in fact, I think she wished it to be perceived, and I also
think that those turns which she took about the Exchange--her apparent
inspection of an old mahogany table, her examination of a pewter
set--were a symbol (and meant to be a symbol) of how she had all the
time there was, and the possession of everything she wished including
the situation, and that she enjoyed having this sink in while she was
rearranging whatever she had arranged to say, in consequence of finding
that I should also hear it. And how well she was worth looking at, no
matter whether she stood, or moved, or what she did! Her age lay beyond
the reach of the human eye; if she was twenty-five, she was marvelous in
her mastery of her appearance; if she was thirty-four, she was marvelous
in her mastery of perpetuating it, and by no other means than perfect
dress personal to herself (for she had taken the fashion and welded it
into her own plasticity) and perfect health; for without a trace of the
athletic, her graceful shape teemed with elasticity. There was a touch
of “sport” in the parasol she had laid down; and with all her blended
serenity there was a touch of “sport” in her. Experience could teach
her beauty nothing more; it wore the look of having been made love to by
many married men.
Quite suddenly the true light flashed upon me. I had been slow-sighted
indeed! So that was what she had come here for to-day! Miss Hortense
was going to pay her compliments to Miss La Heu. I believe that my sight
might still have been slow but for that miraculous sweetness upon
the face of Eliza. She was ready for the compliments! Well, I sat
expectant--and disappointment was by no means my lot.
Hortense finished her lunch. “And so this interesting place is where you
work?”
Eliza, thus addressed, assented.
“And you furnish wedding cakes also?”
Eliza was continuously and miraculously sweet. “The Exchange includes
that.”
“I shall hope you will be present to taste some of yours on the day it
is mine.”
“I shall accept the invitation if my friends send me one.”
No blood flowed from Hortense at this, and she continued with the same
smooth deliberation.
“The list is of necessity very small; but I shall see that it includes
you.”
“You are not going to postpone it any more, then?”
No blood flowed at this, either. “I doubt if John--if Mr. Mayrant--would
brook further delay, and my father seems stronger, at last. How much do
I owe you for your very good food?”
It is a pity that a larger audience could not have been there to enjoy
this skilful duet, for it held me hanging on every musical word of it.
There, at the far back end of the long room, I sat alone at my
table, pretending to be engaged over a sandwich that was no more in
existence--external, I mean--and a totally empty cup of chocolate. I
lifted the cup, and bowed over the plate, and used the paper Japanese
napkin, and generally went through the various discreet paces of eating,
quite breathless, all the while, to know which of them was coming out
ahead. There was no fairness in their positions; Hortense had Eliza in
a cage, penned in by every fact; but it doesn’t do to go too near some
birds, even when they’re caged, and, while these two birds had been
giving their sweet manifestations of song, Eliza had driven a peck
or two home through the bars, which, though they did not draw visible
blood, as I have said, probably taught Hortense that a Newport education
is not the only instruction which fits you for drawing-room war to the
knife.
Her small reckoning was paid, and she had drawn on one long, tawny
glove. Even this act was a luxury to watch, so full it was of the
feminine, of the stretching, indolent ease that the flesh and the spirit
of this creature invariably seemed to move with. But why didn’t she go?
This became my wonder now, while she slowly drew on the second glove.
She was taking more time than it needed.
“Your flowers are for sale, too?”
This, after her silence, struck me as being something planned out after
her original plan. The original plan had finished with that second
assertion of her ownership of John (or, I had better say, of his
ownership in her), that doubt she had expressed as to his being willing
to consent to any further postponement of their marriage. Of course she
had expected, and got herself ready for, some thrust on the postponement
subject.
Eliza crossed from behind her counter to where the Exchange flowers
stood on the opposite side of the room and took some of them up.
“But those are inferior,” said Hortense. “These.” And she touched
rightly the bowl in which my roses stood close beside Eliza’s ledger.
Eliza paused for one second. “Those are not for sale.”
Hortense paused, too. Then she hung to it. “They are so much the best.”
She was holding her purse.
“I think so, too,” said Eliza. “But I cannot let any one have them.”
Hortense put her purse away. “You know best. Shall you furnish us
flowers as well as cake?”
Eliza’s sweetness rose an octave, softer and softer. “Why, they have
flowers there! Didn’t you know?”
And to this last and frightful peck through the bars Hortense found no
retaliation. With a bow to Eliza, and a total oblivion of me, she went
out of the Exchange. She had flaunted “her” John in Eliza’s face, she
had, as they say, rubbed it in that he was “her” John;--but was it such
a neat, tidy victory, after all? She had given away the last word to
Eliza, presented her with that poisonous speech which when translated
meant:--
“Yes, he’s ‘your’ John; and you’re climbing up him into houses where
you’d otherwise be arrested for trespass.” For it was in one of the
various St. Michael houses that the marriage would be held, owing to the
nomadic state of the Rieppes.
Yes, Hortense had gone altogether too close to the cage at the end,
and, in that repetition of her taunt about “furnishing” supplies for the
wedding, she had at length betrayed something which her skill and
the intricate enamel of her experience had hitherto, and with entire
success, concealed--namely, the latent vulgarity of the woman. She was
wearing, for the sake of Kings Port, her best behavior, her most knowing
form, and, indeed it was a well-done imitation of the real thing; it
would last through most occasions, and it would deceive most people.
But here was the trouble: she was wearing it; while, through the whole
encounter, Eliza La Heu had worn nothing but her natural and perfect
dignity; yet with that disadvantage (for good breeding, alas!, is at
times a sort of disadvantage, and can be battered down and covered with
mud so that its own fine grain is invisible) Eliza had, after a somewhat
undecisive battle, got in that last frightful peck! But what had led
Hortense, after she had come through pretty well, to lose her temper
and thus, at the finish, expose to Eliza her weakest position? That her
clothes were paid for by a Newport lady who had taken her to Worth, that
her wedding feast was to be paid for by the bridegroom, these were not
facts which Eliza would deign to use as weapons; but she was marrying
inside the doors of Eliza’s Kings Port, that had never opened to admit
her before, and she had slipped into putting this chance into Eliza’s
hand--and how had she come to do this?
To be sure, my vision had been slow! Hortense had seen, through her
thick veil, Eliza’s interest in John in the first minute of her arrival
on the bridge, that minute when John had run up to Eliza after the
automobile had passed over poor General. And Hortense had not revealed
herself at once, because she wanted a longer look at them. Well, she had
got it, and she had got also a look at her affianced John when he was in
the fire-eating mood, and had displayed the conduct appropriate to 1840,
while Charley’s display had been so much more modern. And so first she
had prudently settled that awkward phosphate difficulty, and next she
had paid this little visit to Eliza in order to have the pleasure of
telling her in four or five different ways, and driving it in deep, and
turning it round: “Don’t you wish you may get him?”
“That’s all clear as day,” I said to myself. “But what does her loss of
temper mean?”
Eliza was writing at her ledger. The sweetness hadn’t entirely gone; it
was too soon for that, and besides, she knew I must be looking at her.
“Couldn’t you have told her they were my flowers?” I asked her at the
counter, as I prepared to depart. Eliza did not look up from her ledger.
“Do you think she would have believed me?”
“And why shouldn’t--”
“Go out!” she interrupted imperiously and with a stamp of her foot.
“You’ve been here long enough!”
You may imagine my amazement at this. It was not until I had reached
Mrs. Trevise’s, and was sitting down to answer a note which had been
left for me, that light again came. Hortense Rieppe had thought those
flowers were from John Mayrant, and Eliza had let her think so.
Yes, that was light, a good bright light shed on the matter; but a still
more brilliant beam was cast by the up-country bride when I came into
the dining-room. I told her myself, at once, that I had taken flowers to
Miss La Heu; I preferred she should hear this from me before she learned
it from the smiling lips of gossip. It surprised me that she should
immediately inquire what kind of flowers?
“Why, roses,” I answered; and she went into peals of laughter.
“Pray share the jest,” I begged her with some dignity.
“Didn’t you know,” she replied, “the language that roses from a single
gentleman to a young lady speak in Kings Port?”
I stood staring and stiff, taking it in, taking myself, and Eliza, and
Hortense, and the implicated John, all in.
“Why, aivrybody in Kings Port knows that!” said the bride; and now my
mirth rose even above hers.