“What did your friend do with your advice?”
And I replied. “He has taken it.”
“Perhaps not that,” John returned, “but you must have helped him to see
his way.”
When the bride came to cut the cake, she called me to her and fulfilled
her promise.
“You have always liked my baking,” she said.
“Then you made it after all,” I answered.
“I would not have been married without doing so,” she declared sweetly.
When the time came for them to go away, they were surrounded with
affectionate God-speeds; but Miss Josephine St. Michael waited to be
the last, standing a little apart, her severe and chiselled face turned
aside, and seeming to watch a mocking-bird that was perched in his cage
at a window halfway up the stairs.
“He is usually not so silent,” Miss Josephine said to me. “I suppose we
are too many visitors for him.”
Then I saw that the old lady, beneath her severity, was deeply moved;
and almost at once John and Eliza came down the stairs. Miss Josephine
took each of them to her heart, but she did not trust herself to speak;
and a single tear rolled down her face, as the boy and girl continued to
the hall-door. There Daddy Ben stood, and John’s gay good-by to him
was the last word that I heard the bridegroom say. While we all stood
silently watching them as they drove away from the tall iron gate, the
mocking-bird on the staircase broke into melodious ripples of song.
XXIII: Poor Aunt Carola!
And now here goes my language back into the small-clothes that it wore
at the beginning of all, when I told you something of that colonial
society, the Selected Salic Scions, dear to the heart of my Aunt. It
were beyond my compass to approach this august body of men and women
with the respect that is its due, did I attire myself in that modern
garment which, in the phrase of the vulgar, is denoted pants.
You will scarce have forgot, I must suppose, the importance set by my
Aunt Carola upon the establishing of the Scions in new territories,
wherever such persons as were both qualified by their descent and in
themselves worthy, should be found; and you will remember that I
was bidden by her to look in South Carolina for members of the Bombo
connection which she was inclined to suspect existed in that state. My
neglect to make this inquiry for my kind Aunt now smote me sharply when
all seemed too late. John Mayrant had spoken of Kill-devil Bombo, the
very personage through whom lay Aunt Carola’s claim to kingly lineage,
and I had let John Mayrant go away upon his honeymoon without ever
questioning him upon this subject. As I looked back upon the ease
with which I might have settled the matter, and forward to my return
empty-handed to the generous relative to whom I owed this agreeable
experience of travel, I felt guilty indeed. I wrote a letter to follow
John Mayrant into whatever retreat of bliss he had betaken himself to,
and I begged him earnestly to write me at his early convenience all that
he might know of Bombos in South Carolina. Consequently, I was able, on
reaching home, to meet Aunt Carola with some sort of countenance, and to
assure her that I expected presently to be furnished with authentic and
valuable particulars.
I now learned that the Selected Salic Scions had greatly increased in
numbers during my short absence. It appeared that the origin of the
whole movement had sprung from a needy but ingenious youth in some
manufacturing town of New England. This lad had a cousin, who had
amassed from nothing a noble fortune by inventing one day a speedy
and convenient fashion of opening beer bottles; and this cousin’s
achievement had set him to looking about him. He soon discovered that in
our great republic everywhere there were living hundreds and thousands
of men and women who were utterly unaware that they were descended from
kings. Borrowing a little money to float him, he set up The American
Almanach de Gotha and began (for the minimum sum of fifty dollars
a pedigree) to reveal to these eager people the chain of links that
connected them with royalty. Thus, in a period of time the brevity of
which is incredible, this young man passed from complete indigence to
a wife and four automobiles, or an automobile and four wives--I don’t
remember which he had the four of. There was so much royal blood about
that it had spilled into several rival organizations, each bitterly
warring with the other; but my Aunt assured me that her society was the
only one that any respectable person belonged to.
I am minded to announce a rule of discreet conduct: Never read aloud
any letter that you have not first read to yourself. Had I observed this
rule--but listen:--
It so happened that Aunt Carola was at luncheon with us when the postman
brought John Mayrant’s answer to my inquiry, and at the sight of his
handwriting I thoughtlessly exclaimed to my Aunt that here at last we
had all there was to be known concerning the Bombos in South Carolina;
with this I tore open the missive and embarked upon a reading of it
for the edification of all present. I pass over the beginning of John’s
communication, because it was merely the observations of a man upon
his honeymoon, and was confined to laudatory accounts of scenery and
weather, and the beauty of all life when once one saw it with his eyes
truly opened.
“No Bombos ever came to Carolina,” he now continued, “that I know of, or
that Aunt Josephine knows of, which is more to the point. Aunt Josephine
has copied me a passage from the writings of William Byrd, Esq., of
Westover, Virginia, in which mention is made, not of the family, but of
a rum punch which seems to have been concocted first by Admiral Bombo,
from a New England brand of rum so very deadly that it was not inaptly
styled ‘kill-devil’ by the early planters of the colony. That the punch
drifted to Carolina and still survives there, you have reason to know.
Therefore if any remote ancestors of yours contracted an alliance with
Kill-devil Bombo, I can imagine no resulting offspring of such union but
a series of severe attacks of delir--”
“What?” interrupted Aunt Carola, at this point, in her most formidable
voice. “What’s that stuff you’re reading, Augustus?”