“WINONA, THE CHILD OF THE PRAIRIE,” WILL BE PRECEDED BY
A FAVORITE FARCE,
In which the great BILLY BARKER will appear in one of his most
outrageously funny bits.
NEW SCENERY by Q. Z. SLOCUM
Music by Professor Kiddoo’s Silver Bugle Brass Band and
Philharmonic Orchestra.
Chickway’s Grand Piano, lent by Schmidt, 2 Opera House Block.
AFTER THE SHOW GO TO HANKS’ AND SEE A MAN!
Pop Williams, the only legitimate Bill-Poster in New Centreville.
(New Centreville Standard Print.)
Document No. 27.
_Extract from the New Centreville [late Dead Horse] “Gazette and Courier
of Civilization,” Dec. 24th, 1878._
A little while ago, in noting the arrival of Miss Nina Saville of the New
Centreville Opera House, we quoted rather extensively from our esteemed
contemporary, the Mendocino _Times_, and commented upon the quotation.
Shortly afterwards, it may also be remembered, we made a very direct and
decided apology for the sceptical levity which inspired those remarks,
and expressed our hearty sympathy with the honest, if somewhat effusive,
enthusiasm with which the dramatic critic of Mendocino greeted the sweet
and dainty little girl who threw over the dull, weary old business of
the stage “sensation” the charm of a fresh and childlike beauty and
originality, as rare and delicate as those strange, unreasonable little
glimmers of spring sunsets that now and then light up for a brief
moment the dull skies of winter evenings, and seem to have strayed into
ungrateful January out of sheer pity for the sad earth.
Mendocino noticed the facts that form the basis of the above
meteorological simile, and we believe we gave Mendocino full credit for
it at the time. We refer to the matter at this date only because in our
remarks of a few days ago we had occasion to mention the fact of the
existence of Mr. Zeke Kilburn, an advance agent, who called upon us at
the time, to endeavor to induce us, by means apparently calculated more
closely for the latitude of Mendocino, to extend to Miss Saville, before
her appearance, the critical approbation which we gladly extended after.
This little item of interest we alluded to at the time, and furthermore
intimated, with some vagueness, that there existed in Mr. Kilburn’s
character a certain misdirected zeal which, combined with a too keen
artistic appreciation, are apt to be rather dangerous stock-in-trade for
an advance agent.
It was twenty-seven minutes past two o’clock yesterday afternoon. The
chaste white mystery of Shigo Mountain was already taking on a faint,
almost imperceptible hint of pink, like the warm cheek of a girl who hears
a voice and anticipates a blush. Yet the rays of the afternoon sun rested
with undiminished radiance on the empty pork-barrel in front of McMullin’s
shebang. A small and vagrant infant, whose associations with empty barrels
were doubtless hitherto connected solely with dreams of saccharine
dissipation, approached the bunghole with precocious caution, and retired
with celerity and a certain acquisition of experience. An unattached goat,
a martyr to the radical theory of personal investigation, followed in the
footsteps of infantile humanity, retired with even greater promptitude,
and was fain to stay its stomach on a presumably empty rend-rock can,
afterward going into seclusion behind McMullin’s horse-shed, before the
diuretic effect of tin flavored with blasting-powder could be observed by
the attentive eye of science.
Mr. Kilburn emerged from the hostelry of McMullin. Mr. Kilburn, as we have
before stated at his own request, is a gentleman of imposing presence. It
is well that we made this statement when we did, for it is hard to judge
of the imposing quality in a gentleman’s presence when that gentleman is
suspended from the arm of another gentleman by the collar of the first
gentleman’s coat. The gentleman in the rear of Mr. Kilburn was Mr. William
Beauvoir, a young Englishman in a check suit. Mr. Beauvoir is not avowedly
a man of imposing presence; he wears a seal ring, and he is generally a
scion of an effete oligarchy, but he has, since his introduction into
this community, behaved himself, to use the adjectivial adverb of Mr.
McMullin, _white_, and he has a very remarkable biceps. These qualities
may hereafter enhance his popularity in New Centreville.
Mr. Beauvoir’s movements, at twenty-seven minutes past two yesterday
afternoon, were few and simple. He doubled Mr. Kilburn up, after the
fashion of an ordinary jack-knife, and placed him in the barrel,
wedge-extremity first, remarking, as he did so, “She is, is she?” He then
rammed Mr. Kilburn carefully home, and put the cover on.
We learn to-day that Mr. Kilburn has resumed his professional duties on
the road.
Document No. 28.
_Account of the same event from the New Centreville “Standard,” December
24th, 1878._
It seems strange that even the holy influences which radiate from this
joyous season cannot keep some men from getting into unseemly wrangles.
It was only yesterday that our local saw a street row here in the quiet
avenues of our peaceful city--a street row recalling the riotous scenes
which took place here before Dead Horse experienced a change of heart
and became New Centreville. Our local succeeded in gathering all the
particulars of the affray, and the following statement is reliable. It
seems that Mr. Kilburn, the gentlemanly and affable advance agent of the
Nina Saville Dramatic Company, now performing at Andy Hanks’ Opera House
to big houses, was brutally assaulted by a ruffianly young Englishman,
named Beauvoir, for no cause whatever. We say for no cause, as it is
obvious that Mr. Kilburn, as the agent of the troupe, could have said
nothing against Miss Saville which an outsider, not to say a foreigner
like Mr. Beauvoir, had any call to resent. Mr. Kilburn is a gentleman
unaccustomed to rough-and-tumble encounters, while his adversary has
doubtless associated more with pugilists than gentlemen--at least anyone
would think so from his actions yesterday. Beauvoir hustled Mr. Kilburn
out of Mr. Mullin’s, where the unprovoked assault began, and violently
shook him across the new plank sidewalk. The person by the name of Clark,
whom Judge Jones for some reason now permits to edit the moribund but
once respectable _Gazette_, caught the eye of the congenial Beauvoir,
and, true to the ungentlemanly instincts of his base nature, pointed to a
barrel in the street. The brutal Englishman took the hint and thrust Mr.
Kilburn forcibly into the barrel, leaving the vicinity before Mr. Kilburn,
emerging from his close quarters, had fully recovered. What the ruffianly
Beauvoir’s motive may have been for this wanton assault it is impossible
to say; but it is obvious to all why this fellow Clark sought to injure
Mr. Kilburn, a gentleman whose many good qualities he of course fails
to appreciate. Mr. Kilburn, recognizing the acknowledged merits of our
job-office, had given us the contract for all the printing he needed in
New Centreville.
Document No. 29.
_Advertisement from the New York “Clipper,” Dec. 21st, 1878._
WINSTON & MACK’S
GRAND INTERNATIONAL
MEGATHERIUM VARIETY COMBINATION,
COMPANY CALL.
Ladies and Gentlemen of the Company will assemble for rehearsal, at
Emerson’s Opera House, San Francisco, on Wednesday, Dec. 27th, at
12 M. sharp. Band at 11.
J. B. WINSTON, }
EDWIN R. MACK, } Managers.
Emerson’s Opera House,
San Francisco, Dec. 10th, 1878.
Protean Artist wanted. Would like to hear from Nina Saville.
12--1t*.
Document No. 30.
_Letter from Nina Saville to William Beauvoir._
NEW CENTREVILLE, December 26, 1878.
MY DEAR MR. BEAUVOIR--I was very sorry to receive your letter of
yesterday--_very_ sorry--because there can be only one answer that I can
make--and you might well have spared me the pain of saying the word--No.
You ask me if I love you. If I did--do you think it would be true love
in me to tell you so, when I know what it would cost you? Oh indeed you
must never marry _me_! In your own country you would never have heard
of me--never seen me--surely never written me such a letter to tell me
that you love me and want to marry me. It is not that I am ashamed of my
business or of the folks around me, or ashamed that I am only the charity
child of two poor players, who lived and died working for the bread for
their mouths and mine. I am proud of them--yes, proud of what they did
and suffered for one poorer than themselves--a little foundling out of an
Indian camp. But I know the difference between you and me. You are a great
man at home--you have never told me how great--but I know your father is
a rich lord, and I suppose you are. It is not that I think _you_ care
for that, or think less of me because I was born different from you. I
know how good--how kind--how _respectful_ you have always been to me--_my
lord_--and I shall never forget it--for a girl in my position knows
well enough how you might have been otherwise. Oh believe me--_my true
friend_--I am never going to forget all you have done for me--and how good
it has been to have you near me--a man so different from most others--I
don’t mean only the kind things you have done--the books and the thoughts
and the ways you have taught me to enjoy--and all the trouble you have
taken to make me something better than the stupid little girl I was when
you found me--but a great deal more than that--the consideration you
have had for me and for what I hold best in the world. I had never met a
_gentleman_ before--and now the first one I meet--he is my _friend_. That
is a great deal.
Only think of it! You have been following me around now for three months,
and I have been weak enough to allow it. I am going to do the right thing
now. You may think it hard in me _if you really mean what you say_, but
even if everything else were right, I would not marry you--because of your
rank. I do not know how things are at your home--but something tells me
it would be wrong and that your family would have a right to hate you and
never forgive you. Professionals cannot go in your society. And that is
even if I loved you--and I do not love you--I do not love you--_I do not
love you_--now I have written it you will believe it.
So now it is ended--I am going back to the line I was first
in--variety--and with a new name. So you can never find me--I entreat
you--I beg of you--not to look for me. If you only put your mind to
it--you will find it so easy to forget me--for I will not do you the wrong
to think that you did not mean what you wrote in your letter or what you
said that night _when we sang Annie Laurie together_ the last time.
Your sincere friend,
NINA.
Documents Nos. 31 and 32.
_Items from San Francisco “Figaro” of December 29th, 1878_:
Nina Saville Co. disbanded New Centreville 26th. No particulars received.
Winston & Mack’s Comb. takes the road December 31st, opening at Tuolumne
Hollow. Manager Winston announces the engagement of Anna Laurie, the
Protean change artiste, with songs, “Don’t Get Weary,” “Bobbin’ Around,”
“I Yoost Landet.”
Document No. 33.
_Telegram from Zeke Kilburn, New Centreville, to Winston and Mack,
Emerson’s Opera House, San Francisco, Cal._
NEW CENTREVILLE, Dec. 28, 1878.
Have you vacancy for active and energetic advance agent.
Z. KILBURN.
(9 words 30 paid.)
Document No. 34.
_Telegram from Winston and Mack, San Francisco, to Zeke Kilburn, New
Centreville_:
SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 28, 1878.
No.
WINSTON & MACK.
(Collect 30 cents.)
Document No. 35.
_Bill sent to William Beauvoir, United States Hotel, Tuolumne Hollow,
Cal._:
_Tuolumne Hollow, Cal., Dec. 29, 1878._
_William Beauvoir, Esq._
Bought of HIMMEL & HATCH,
Opera House Block,
JEWELLERS & DIAMOND MERCHANTS,
Dealers in all kinds of Fancy Goods, Stationery, and
Umbrellas, Watches, Clocks and Barometers.
TERMS CASH. MUSICAL BOXES REPAIRED.
Dec. 29, One diamond and enamelled locket $75.00
One gold chain 48.00
------
$123.00
_Rec’d Payt._
_Himmel & Hatch_,
_per S._
PART FIFTH.
Document No. 36.
_Letter from Cable J. Dexter, Esq., to Messrs. Pixley and Sutton, San
Francisco._
NEW CENTREVILLE, CAL., March 3, 1879.
MESSRS. PIXLEY & SUTTON:
GENTS: I am happy to report that I have at last reached the bottom level
in the case of William Beaver, _alias_ Beaver Bill, deceased through
Indians in 1861.
In accordance with your instructions and check, I proceeded, on the
10th ult., to Shawgum Creek, when I interviewed Blue Horse, chief of
the Comanches, who tomahawked subject of your inquiries in the year
above mentioned. Found the Horse in the penitentiary, serving out a
drunk and disorderly. Though belligerent at date aforesaid, Horse is now
tame, though intemperate. Appeared unwilling to converse, and required
stimulants to awaken his memory. Please find enclosed memo. of account
for whiskey, covering extra demijohn to corrupt jailer. Horse finally
stated that he personally let daylight through deceased, and is willing
to guarantee thoroughness of decease. Stated further that aforesaid
Beaver’s family consisted of squaw and kid. Is willing to swear that
squaw was killed, the tribe having no use for her. Killing done by
Mule-Who-Goes-Crooked, personal friend of Horse’s. The minor child was
taken into camp and kept until December of 1863, when tribe dropped to
howling cold winter and went on government reservation. Infant (female)
was then turned over to U. S. Government at Fort Kearney.
I posted to last-named locality on the 18th ult., and found by the
quartermaster’s books that, no one appearing to claim the kid, she had
been duly indentured, together with six Indians, to a man by the name
of Guardine or Sardine (probably the latter), in the show business.
The Indians were invoiced as Sage Brush Jimmy, Boiling Hurricane,
Mule-Who-Goes-Crooked, Joe, Hairy Grasshopper and Dead Polecat. Child
known as White Kitten. Receipt for Indians was signed by Mr. Hi. Samuels,
who is still in the circus business, and whom I happen to be selling
out at this moment, at suit of McCullum & Montmorency, former partners.
Samuels positively identified kid with variety specialist by name of Nina
Saville, who has been showing all through this region for a year past.
I shall soon have the pleasure of laying before you documents to establish
the complete chain of evidence, from knifing of original subject of your
inquiries right up to date.
I have to-day returned from New Centreville, whither I went after Miss
Saville. Found she had just skipped the town with a young Englishman by
the name of Bovoir, who had been paying her polite attentions for some
time, having bowied or otherwise squelched a man for her within a week or
two. It appears the young woman had refused to have anything to do with
him for a long period; but he seems to have struck pay gravel about two
days before my arrival. At present, therefore, the trail is temporarily
lost; but I expect to fetch the couple if they are anywhere this side of
the Rockies.
Awaiting your further instructions, and cash backing thereto, I am, gents,
very resp’y yours,
CABLE J. DEXTER.
Document No. 37.
_Envelope of letter from Sir Oliver Beauvoir, Bart., to his son, William
Beauvoir._
+----------------------------------------+-----+
| | |
| _Sent to Dead Letter Office_ | |
| | |
| +-----+
| |
| _Mr. William Beauvoir_ |
| _Sherman House Hotel_ |
| _Chicago_ |
| _United States of America_ |
| |
| _Not here_ |
| _try Brevoort House_ |
| _N. Y._ |
+----------------------------------------------+
Document No. 38.
_Letter contained in the envelope above._
CHELSWORTH COTTAGE, March 30, 1879.
MY DEAR BOY: In the sudden blow which has come upon us all I cannot
find words to write. You do not know what you have done. Your uncle
William, after whom you were named, died in America. He left but one
child, a daughter, the only grandchild of my father except you. And this
daughter is the Miss Nina Saville with whom you have formed so unhappy
a connection. She is your own cousin. She is a Beauvoir. She is of our
blood, as good as any in England.
My feelings are overpowering. I am choked by the suddenness of this great
grief. I cannot write to you as I would. But I can say this: Do not let me
see you or hear from you until this stain be taken from our name.
OLIVER BEAUVOIR.
Document No. 39.
_Cable dispatch of William Beauvoir, Windsor Hotel, New York, to Sir
Oliver Beauvoir, Bart., Chelsworth Cottage, Suffolk, England._
NEW YORK, May 1, 1879.
Have posted you Herald.
WILLIAM BEAUVOIR.
Document No. 40.
_Advertisement under the head of “Marriages,” from the New York “Herald,”
April 30th, 1879._
BEAUVOIR--BEAUVOIR.--On Wednesday, Jan. 1st, 1879, at Steal Valley,
California, by the Rev. Mr. Twells, William Beauvoir, only son of Sir
Oliver Beauvoir, of Chelsworth Cottage, Surrey, England, to Nina, only
child of the late William Beauvoir, of New Centreville, Cal.
Document No. 41.
_Extract from the New York “Herald” of May 29th, 1879._
Among the passengers on the outgoing Cunard steamer _Gallia_, which left
New York on Wednesday, was the Honorable William Beauvoir, only son of
Sir Oliver Beauvoir, Bart., of England. Mr. Beauvoir has been passing his
honeymoon in this city, and, with his charming bride, a famous California
belle, has been the recipient of many cordial courtesies from members of
our best society. Mr. William Beauvoir is a young man of great promise
and brilliant attainments, and is a highly desirable addition to the
large and constantly increasing number of aristocratic Britons who seek
for wives among the lovely daughters of Columbia. We understand that the
bridal pair will take up their residence with the groom’s father, at his
stately country-seat, Chelsworth Manor, Suffolk.
VENETIAN GLASS.
BY BRANDER MATTHEWS.
I.
IN THE OLD WORLD.
They had been to the Lido for a short swim in the slight but bracing
surf of the Adriatic. They had had a mid-day breakfast in a queer little
restaurant, known only to the initiated, and therefore early discovered
by Larry, who had a keen scent for a cook learned in the law. They had
loitered along the Riva degli Schiavoni, looking at a perambulatory
puppet-show, before which a delighted audience sturdily disregarded
the sharp wind which bravely fluttered the picturesque tatters of the
spectators; and they were moved to congratulate the Venetians on their
freedom from the monotonous repertory of the Anglo-American Punch and
Judy, which consists solely of a play really unique in the exact sense
of that much-abused word. They were getting their fill of the delicious
Italian art which is best described by an American verb--to loaf. And yet
they were not wont to be idle, and they had both the sharp, quick American
manner, on which laziness sits uneasily and infrequently.
John Manning and Laurence Laughton were both young New Yorkers. Larry--for
so in youth was he called by everybody pending the arrival of years which
should make him a universal uncle, to be known of all men as “Uncle
Larry”--was as pleasant a travelling companion as one could wish. He was
the only son and heir of a father, now no more, but vaguely understood
when alive and in the flesh to have been “in the China trade;” although
whether this meant crockery or Cathay no one was able with precision to
declare. Larry Laughton had been graduated from Columbia College with the
class of 1860, and the following spring found him here in Venice after
a six months’ ramble through Europe with his old friend, John Manning,
partly on foot and partly in an old carriage of their own, in which they
enjoyed the fast-vanishing pleasures of posting.
John Manning was a little older than Larry; he had left West Point in 1854
with a commission as second lieutenant in the Old Dragoons. For nearly
six years he did his duty in that state of life in which it pleased the
Secretary of War and General Scott to call him; he had crossed the plains
one bleak winter to a post in the Rocky Mountains, and he had danced
through two summers at Fort Adams at Newport; he had been stationed for a
while in New Mexico, where there was an abundance of the pleasant sport
of Indian-fighting,--even now he had only to make believe a little to see
the tufted head of a Navajo peer around the columns supporting the Lion
of Saint Mark, or to mistake the fringe of _facchini_ on the edge of the
Grand Canal for a group of the shiftless half-breeds of New Mexico. In
time the Old Dragoons had been ordered North, where the work was then less
pleasant than on the border; and, in fact, it was a distinct unwillingness
to execute the Fugitive Slave Law which forced John Manning to resign his
commission in the army, although it was the hanging of John Brown which
drew from him the actual letter of resignation. Before settling down to
other work--for he was a man who could not and would not be idle--he had
gratified his long desire of taking a turn through the Old World. Larry
Laughton had joined him in Holland, where he had been making researches
into the family history, and proving to his own satisfaction at least
that the New York Mannings, in spite of their English name, had come from
Amsterdam to New Amsterdam. And now, toward the end of April, 1861, John
Manning and Laurence Laughton stood on the Rialto, hesitating _Fra Marco
e Todaro_, as the Venetians have it, in uninterested question whether
they should go into the Ghetto, among the hideous homes of the chosen
people, or out again to Murano for a second visit to the famous factory of
Venetian glass.
“I say, John,” remarked Larry as they lazily debated the question, gazing
meanwhile on the steady succession of gondolas coming and going to and
from the steps by the side of the bridge, “I’d as lief, if not liefer,
go to Murano again, if they’ve any of their patent anti-poison goblets
left. You know they say they used to make a glass so fine that it was
shattered into shivers whenever poison might be poured into it. Of course
I don’t believe it, but a glass like that would be mighty handy in the
sample-rooms of New York. I’m afraid a man walking up Broadway could use
up a gross of the anti-poison goblets before he got one straight drink of
the genuine article, unadulterated and drawn from the wood.”
“You must not make fun of a poetic legend, Larry. You have to believe
everything over here, or you do not get the worth of your money,” said
John Manning.
“Well, I don’t know,” was Larry’s reply; “I don’t know just what to
believe. I was talking about it last night at Florian’s, while you were
writing letters home.”
“I did not know Mr. Laughton had friends in Venice.”
“Oh, I can make friends anywhere. And this one was lots of fun. He was a
priest, an _abbate_, I think he calls himself. He had read five newspapers
in the _caffè_ and paid for one tiny cup of coffee. When I finished the
_Débats_ I passed it to him for his sixth--and he spoke to me in French,
and I wasn’t going to let an Italian talk French to me without answering
back, so I just sailed in and began to swap stories with him.”
“No doubt you gave him much valuable information.”
“Well, I did; I just exuded information. Why the first thing he said,
when I told him I was an American, was to wonder whether I hadn’t met his
brother, who was also in America--in Rio Janeiro--just as if Rio was the
other side of the North River.”
John Manning smiled at Larry’s disgusted expression, and asked, “What has
this _abbate_ to do with the fragile Venetian glass?”
“Only this,” answered Larry. “I told him two or three Northwesters, just
as well as I could in French, and then he said that marvellous things were
also done here once upon a time. And he told me about the glass which
broke when poison was poured into it.”
“It is a pleasant superstition,” said John Manning. “I think Poe makes use
of it, and I believe Shakespeare refers to it.”
“But did either Poe or Shakespeare say anything about the two goblets just
alike, made for the twin brothers Manin nearly four hundred years ago? Did
they tell you how one glass was shivered by poison and its owner killed,
and how the other brother had to flee for his life? Did they inform you
that the unbroken goblet exists to this day, and is in fact now for sale
by an Hebrew Jew who peddles antiquities? Did they tell you that?”
“Neither Edgar Allan Poe nor William Shakespeare ever disturbs my slumbers
by telling me anything of the sort,” laughed Manning.
“Well, my _abbate_ told me just that, and he gave me the address of the
Shylock who has the surviving goblet for sale.”
“Suppose we go there and see it,” suggested Manning, “and you can tell me
the whole story of the twin brothers as we go along.”
“Shall we take a gondola or walk?” was Larry’s interrogative acceptance of
the suggestion.
“It’s in the Ghetto, isn’t it?”
“Most of the Jew curiosity dealers have left the Ghetto. Our Shylock has a
palace on the Grand Canal. I guess we had better take a gondola, though
it can’t be far.”
So they sat themselves down in one of the aquatic cabs which ply the water
streets of the city in the sea. The gondolier stood to his oar and put
his best foot foremost, and as the boat sped forward on its way along the
great S of the Grand Canal, Larry told the tale of the twin brothers and
the shattered goblet.
“Well, it seems that some time in the sixteenth century, say three hundred
years ago or thereabout, there were several branches of the great and
powerful Manin family--the same family to which the patriotic Daniele
Manin belonged, you know. And at the head of one of these branches were
the twin brothers Marco Manin and Giovanni Manin. Now, these brothers were
devoted to each other, and they had only one thought, one word, one deed.
When one of them happened to think of a thing, it often happened that
the other brother did it. So it was not surprising that they both fell
in love with the same woman. She was a dangerous-looking, yellow-haired
woman, with steel-gray eyes--that is, if her eyes were not really green,
as to which there was doubt. But there was no doubt at all that she was
powerfully handsome. The _abbate_ said that there was a famous portrait
of her in one of these churches as a Saint Mary Magdalen, with her hair
down. She was a splendid creature, and lots of men were running after
her besides the twin Manins. The two brothers did not quarrel with each
other about the woman, but they did quarrel with some of her other lovers,
and particularly with a nobleman of the highest rank and power, who was
supposed to belong not only to the Council of Ten, but to the Three.
Between this man and the Manins there was war to the knife and the knife
to the hilt. One day Marco Manin expressed a wish for one of these goblets
of Venetian glass so fine that poison shatters it, and so Giovanni went
out to Murano and ordered two of them, of the very finest quality, and
just alike in every particular of color and shape and size. You see the
twins always had everything in pairs. But the people at Murano somehow
misunderstood the order, and although they made both glasses they sent
home only one. Marco Manin was at table when it arrived, and he took it in
his hand at once, and after admiring its exquisite workmanship--you see,
all these old Venetians had the art-feeling strongly developed--he told
a servant to fill it to the brim with Cyprus wine. But as he raised the
flowing cup to his lips it shivered in his grasp and the wine was spilt on
the marble floor. He drew his sword and slew the servant who had sought to
betray him, and rushing into the street he found himself face to face with
the enemy whom he knew to have instigated the attempt. They crossed swords
at once, but, before Marco Manin could have a fair fight for his life, he
was stabbed in the back by a glass stiletto, the hilt of which was broken
off short in the wound.”
“Where was his brother all this time?” was the first question with which
John Manning broke the thread of his friend’s story.
“He had been to see the yellow-haired beauty, and he came back just in
time to meet his brother’s lifeless body as it was carried into their
desolate home. Holding his dead brother’s hand, as he had often held it
living, he promised his brother to avenge his death without delay and at
any cost. Then he prepared at once for flight. He knew that Venice would
be too hot to hold him when the deed was done; and besides, he felt that
without his brother life in Venice would be intolerable So he made ready
for flight. Twenty-four hours to a minute after Marco Manin’s death the
body of the hireling assassin was sinking to the bottom of the Grand
Canal, while the man who had paid for the murder lay dead on the same spot
with the point of a glass stiletto in his heart! And when they wanted to
send him the other goblet, there was no one to send it to: Giovanni Manin
had disappeared.”
“Where had he gone?” queried John Manning.
“That’s what I asked the _abbate_, and he said he didn’t know for sure,
but that in those days Venice had a sizable trade with the Low Countries,
and there was a tradition that Giovanni Manin had gone to the Netherlands.”
“To Holland?” asked John Manning with unwonted interest.
“Yes, to Amsterdam, or to Rotterdam, or to some one of those-dam towns, as
we used to call them in our geography class.”
“It was to Amsterdam,” said Manning, speaking as one who had certain
information.
“How do you know that?” asked Larry. “Even the _abbate_ said it was only a
tradition that he had gone to Holland at all.”
“He went to Amsterdam,” said Manning; “that I know.”
Before Larry could ask how it was that his friend knew anything about the
place of exile of a man whom he had never heard of ten minutes earlier,
the gondola had paused before the door of the palace in which dwelt
the dealer in antiquities who had in his possession the famous goblet
of Venetian glass. As they ascended to the sequence of rambling rooms
cluttered with old furniture, rusty armor, and odds and ends of statuary,
in which the modern Jew of Venice sat at the receipt of custom, both
Larry Laughton and John Manning had to give their undivided attention to
the framing in Italian of their wishes. Shylock himself was a venerable
and benevolent person, with a look of wonderful shrewdness and an
incomprehensibility of speech, for he spoke the Venetian dialect with
a harsh Jewish accent, either of which would have daunted a linguistic
veteran. Plainly enough, conversation was impossible, for he could barely
understand their American-Italian, and they could not at all understand
his Jewish-Venetian. But it would not do to let these _Inglesi_ go away
without paying tribute.
“_Ciò!_” said Shylock, smiling graciously at his futile attempts to open
communication with the enemy. Then he called Jessica from the deep window
where she had been at work on the quaint old account-books of the shop, as
great curiosities as anything in it, since they were kept in Venetian, but
by means of the Hebrew alphabet. She spoke Italian, and to her the young
men made known their wants. She said a few words to her father, and he
brought forth the goblet.
It was a marvellous specimen of the most exquisite Venetian workmanship.
A pair of green serpents, with eyes that glowed like fire, writhed around
the golden stem of a blood-red bowl, and as the white light of the
cloudless sky fell on it from the broad window, it burned in the glory of
the sunshine and seemed to fill itself full of some mysterious and royal
wine. Shylock revolved it slowly in his hand to show the strange waviness
of its texture, and as it turned, the serpents clung more closely to the
stem and arched their heads and shot a glance of hate at the strangers who
came to gaze on them with curious fascination.
John Manning looked at the goblet long and eagerly. “How did it come into
your possession?” he asked.
And Jessica translated Shylock’s declaration that the goblet had been at
Murano for hundreds of years; it was _anticho_--_antichissimo_, as the
signor could see for himself. It was of the best period of the art. That
Shylock would guarantee. How came it into his possession? By the greatest
good fortune. It was taken from Murano during the troubles after the fall
of the Republic in the time of Napoleon. It had gone finally into the
hands of a certain count, who, very luckily, was poor. _Conte che non
conta, non conta niente._ So Shylock had been enabled to buy it. It had
been the desire of his heart for years to own so fine an object.
“How much do you want for it?” asked John Manning.
Shylock scented from afar the battle of bargaining, dear in Italy to both
buyer and seller. He gave a keen look at both the _Inglesi_, and took up
the glass affectionately, as though he could not bear to part with it.
Jessica interpreted. Shylock had intended that goblet for his own private
collection, but the frank and generous manner of their excellencies had
overcome him, and he would let them have it for five hundred florins.
“Five hundred florins! Phew!” whistled Larry, astonished in spite of his
initiation into the mysteries of Italian bargaining. “Well, if you were to
ask me the Shakespearian conundrum, Hath not a Jew eyes? I shouldn’t give
it up; I should say he has eyes--for the main chance.”
“Five hundred florins,” said John Manning. “Very well. I’ll take it.”
Shylock’s astonishment at getting four times what he would have taken was
equalled only by his regret that he had not asked twice as much.
“Can you pack it so that I can take it to New York safely?”
“_Sicuro, signor_,” and Shylock agreed to have the precious object boxed
with all possible care and despatch, and delivered at the hotel that
afternoon.
“_Servo suo!_” said Jessica, as they stood at the door.
“_Bon di, Patron!_” responded Larry, in Venetian fashion; then as the door
closed behind them he said to John Manning, “Seems to me you were in a
hurry! You could have had that glass for half the money.”
“Perhaps I could,” was Manning’s quiet reply, “but I was eager to get it
back at once.”
“Get it back? Why, it wasn’t stolen from _you_, was it? I never did
suppose _he_ came by it honestly.”
“It was not stolen from me personally, but it belonged to my family. It
was made for Giovanni Manin, who fled from Venice to Amsterdam three
hundred odd years ago. His grandson and namesake left Amsterdam for New
Amsterdam half a century later. And when the English changed New Amsterdam
into New York, Jan Mannin became John Manning--and I am his direct
descendant, and the first of my blood to return to Venice to get the
goblet Giovanni Manin ordered and left behind.”
“Well, I’m damned!” said Larry, pensively.
“And now,” continued John Manning as they took their seats in the gondola,
“tell the man to go to the church where the picture of Mary Magdalen is. I
want a good look at that woman!”
* * * * *
In the evening, as John Manning sat in a little _caffè_ under the arcades
of the Piazza San Marco, sipping a tiny cup of black coffee, Larry entered
with a rush of righteous indignation.
“What’s the matter, Larry?” was John Manning’s calm query.
“There’s the devil to pay at home. South Carolina has fired on the flag at
Sumter.”
* * * * *
Three weeks later Colonel Manning was assigned to duty drilling the raw
recruits soon to be the Army of the Potomac.
II.
IN THE NEW WORLD.
In the month of February, 1864, a chance newspaper paragraph informed
whom it might concern that Major Laurence Laughton, having three weeks’
leave of absence from his regiment, was at the Astor House. In consequence
of this advertisement of his whereabouts, Major Laughton received many
cheerful circulars and letters, in most of which his attention was claimed
for the artificial limb made by the advertiser. He also received a letter
from Colonel John Manning, urgently bidding him to come out for a day at
least to his little place on the Hudson, where he was lying sick, and,
as he feared, sick unto death. On the receipt of this Larry cut short a
promising flirtation with a war-widow who sat next him at table, and took
the first train up the river. It was a bleak day, and there was at least
a foot of snow on the ground, as hard and as dry as though it had clean
forgot that it was made of water. As Larry left the little station, to
which the train had slowly struggled at last, an hour behind time, the
wind sprang up again and began to moan around his feet and to sting his
face with icy shot; and as he trudged across the desolate path which led
to Manning’s lonely house he discovered that rude Boreas could be as keen
a sharp-shooter as any in the rifle-pits around Richmond. A hard walk
up-hill for a quarter of an hour brought him to the brow of the cliff on
which stood the forlorn and wind-swept house where John Manning lay.
An unkempt and hideous old crone as black as night opened the door for
him. He left in the hall his hat and overcoat and a little square box he
had brought in his hand; and then he followed the ebony hag upstairs to
Colonel Manning’s room. Here at the door she left him, after giving a
sharp knock. A weak voice said, “Come in!”
Laurence Laughton entered the room with a quick step, but the
light-hearted words with which he had meant to encourage his friend died
on his lips as soon as he saw how grievously that friend had changed.
John Manning had faded to a shadow of his former self; the light of his
eye was quenched, and the spirit within him seemed broken; the fine,
sensitive, noble face lay white against the pillow, looking weary and wan
and hopeless. The effort to greet his friend exhausted him and brought on
a hard cough, and he pressed his hand to his breast as though some hidden
malady were gnawing and burning within.
“Well, John,” said Larry, as he took a seat by the bedside, “why didn’t
you let me know before now that you were laid up? I could have got away a
month ago.”
“Time enough yet,” said John Manning slowly; “time enough yet. I shall not
die for another week, I fear.”
“Why, man, you must not talk like that. You are as good as a dozen dead
men yet,” said Larry, trying to look as cheerful as might be.
“I am as good as dead myself,” said his friend seriously, as befitted a
man under the shadow of death; “and I have no wish to live. The sooner I
am out of this pain and powerlessness the better I shall like it.”
“I say, John, old man, this is no way for you to talk! Brace up, and you
will soon be another man!”
“I shall soon be in another world, I hope,” and the helpless misery of the
tone in which these few words were said smote Laurence Laughton to the
heart.
“What’s the matter with you?” he asked with as lively an air as he could
attain, for the ominous and inexplicable sadness of the situation was fast
taking hold on him.
“I have a bullet through the lungs and a pain in the heart.”
“But men do not die of a bullet in the lungs and a pain in the heart,” was
Larry’s encouraging response.
“I shall.”
“Why should you more than others?”
“Because there is something else--something mysterious, some unknown
malady--which bears me down and burns me up. There is no use trying to
deceive me, Larry. My papers are made out, and I shall get my discharge
from the Army of the Living in a very few days now. But I must not waste
the little breath I have left in talking about myself. I sent for you to
ask a favor.”
Larry held out his hand, and John Manning took it, and seemed to gain
strength from the firm clasp.
“I knew I could rely on you,” he said, “for much or for little. And this
is not much, for I have not much to leave. This worn old house, which
belonged to my grandmother, and in which I spent the happiest hours of
my boyhood, this and a few shares of stock here and there are all I have
to leave. I do not know what the house is worth, and I shall be glad when
I am gone from it. If I had not come here, I think I might perhaps have
got well. There seems to be something deadly about the place.” The sick
man’s voice sank to a wavering whisper, as if it were borne down by a
sudden weight of impending danger against which he might struggle in vain;
he gave a fearful glance about the room, as though seeking a mystic foe,
hidden and unknown. “The very first day we were here the cat lapped its
milk by the fire and then stretched itself out and died without a sign.
And I had not been here two days before I felt the fatal influence: the
trouble from my wound came on again, and this awful burning in my breast
began to torture me. As a boy, I thought that heaven must be like this
house; and now I should not want to die if I thought hell could be worse!”
“Why don’t you leave the hole, since you hate it so?” asked Larry, with
what scant cheeriness he could muster; he was yielding himself slowly to
the place, though he fought bravely against his superstitious weakness.
“Am I fit to be moved?” was Manning’s query in reply.
“But you will be better soon, and then”--
“I shall be worse before I am better, and I shall never be better in this
life or in this place. No, no, I must die in my hole, like a dog. Like a
dog!” and John Manning repeated the words with a wistful face, “Do you
remember the faithful beast who always welcomed me here when we came up
before we went to Europe?”
“Of course I do,” said Larry, glad to get the sick man away from his
sickness, and to ease his mind by talk on a healthy topic; “he was a
splendid fellow, too. Cæsar, that was his name, wasn’t it?”
“Cæsar Borgia I called him,” was Manning’s sad reply. “I knew you could
not have forgotten him. He is dead. Cæsar Borgia is dead. He was the last
living thing that loved me--except you, Larry, I know--and he is dead. He
died this morning. He came to my bedside as usual, and he licked my hand
gently and looked up in my face, and laid him down alongside of me on the
carpet here and died. Poor Cæsar Borgia--he loved me, and he is dead! And
you, Larry, you must not stay here. The air is fatal. Every breath may be
your last. When you have heard what I want, you must be off at once. If
you like, you may come up again to the funeral before your leave is up. I
saw you had three weeks.”
Laurence Laughton moved uneasily in his chair and swallowed with
difficulty. “John,” he managed to say after an effort, “if you talk to me
like that, I shall go at once. Tell me what it is you want me to do for
you.”
“I want you to take care of my wife and of my child, if there be one born
to me after my death.”
“Your wife?” repeated Larry, in staring surprise.
“You did not know I was married? I knew it at the time, as the boy said,”
and John Manning smiled bitterly.
“Where is she?” was Larry’s second query.
“Here.”
“Here?”
“In this house. You shall see her before you go. And after the funeral
I want you to get her away from here with what speed you can. Sell this
house for what it will bring, and put the money into government bonds.
You may find it hard to persuade her to move, for she seems to have a
strange liking for this place. She breathes freely in the deadly air that
suffocates me. But you must not let her remain here; this is no place for
her now that a new life and new duties are before her.”
“How was it I did not know of your marriage?” asked Larry.
“I knew nothing about it myself twenty-four hours before it happened,”
answered John Manning. “You need not look surprised. It is a simple story.
I had this shot through the breast at Gettysburg last Fourth of July. I
lay on the hillside a day and a night before relief came. Then a farmer
took me into his house. A military surgeon dressed my wounds, but I owed
my life to the nursing and care and unceasing attention of a young lady
who was staying with the farmer’s daughter. She had been doing her duty
as a nurse as near to the field as she could go ever since the first Bull
Run. She saved my life, and I gave it to her--what there was of it. She
was a beautiful woman, indeed I never saw a more beautiful--and she has a
strange likeness to--but that you shall see for yourself when you see her.
She is getting a little rest now, for she has been up all night attending
to me. She _will_ wait on me in spite of all I say; of course I know there
is no use wasting effort on me now. She is the most devoted nurse in the
world; and we shall part as we met--she taking care of me at the last as
she did at the first. Would God our relation had never been other than
patient and nurse! It would have been better for both had we never been
husband and wife!” And John Manning turned his face to the wall with a
weary sigh; then he coughed harshly, and raised his hand to his breast as
though to stifle the burning within him.
“It seems to me, John, that you ought not to talk like that of the woman
you loved,” said Laurence Laughton, with unusual seriousness.
“I never loved her,” answered Manning, coldly. Then he turned, and asked
hastily, “Do you think I should want to die if I loved her?”
“But she loves you,” said Laurence.
“She never loved me!” was Manning’s impatient retort.
“Then why were you married?”
“That’s what I would like to know. It was fate, I suppose. What is to be,
is. I never used to believe in predestination, but I know that of my own
free will I could never have done what I did.”
“I confess I do not understand you,” said Larry.
“I do not understand myself. There is so much in this world that is
mysterious--I hope the next will be different. I was under the charm, I
fancy, when I married her. She is a beautiful woman, as I told you, and I
was a man, and I was weak, and I had hope. Why she married me that early
September evening I do not know. It was not long before we both found out
our mistake. And it was too late then. We were man and wife. Don’t suppose
I blame her--I do not. I have no cause of complaint. She is a good wife
to me, as I have tried to be a good husband to her. We made a mistake in
marrying each other, and we know it--that’s all!”
Before Laurence Laughton could answer, the door opened gently and Mrs.
Manning entered the room. Laurence rose to greet his friend’s wife, but
the act was none the less a homage to her resplendent beauty. In spite
of the worn look of her face, she was the most beautiful woman he had
ever seen. She had tawny, tigress hair, and hungry, tigress eyes. The
eyes, indeed, were fathomless and indescribable, and their fitful glance
had something uncanny about it. The hair was nearly of the true Venetian
color, and she had the true Venetian sumptuousness of appearance, simple
as was her attire. She seemed as though she had just risen from the
couch whereon she reclined before Titian or Tintoretto, and, having
clothed herself, had walked forth in this nineteenth century and these
United States. She was a strange and striking figure, and Laurence found
it impossible to analyze exactly the curious and weird impression she
produced on him. Her voice, as she greeted him, gave him a peculiar
thrill; and when he shook hands with her he seemed to feel himself face
to face with some strange being from another land and another century.
She inspired him with a supernatural awe he was not wont to feel in the
presence of woman. He had a dim consciousness that there lingered in his
memory the glimmering image of some woman seen somewhere, he knew not
when, who was like unto the woman before him.
As she took her seat by the side of the bed she gave Laurence Laughton a
look that seemed to peer into his soul. Laurence felt himself quiver under
it. It was a look to make a man fearful. Then John Manning, who had moved
uneasily as his wife entered, said, “Laurence, can you see any resemblance
in my wife to any one you ever saw before?”
Their eyes met again, and again Laurence had a vague remembrance as though
he and she had stood face to face before in some earlier existence. Then
his wandering recollections took shape, and he remembered the face and the
form and the haunting mystery of the expression, and he felt for a moment
as though he had been permitted to peer into the cabalistic darkness
of an awful mystery, though he failed wholly to perceive its occult
significance--if significance there were of any sort.
“I think I do remember,” he said at last. “It was in Venice--at the Church
of Santa Maria Magdalena--the picture there that”--
“You remember aright!” interrupted John Manning. “My wife is the living
image of the Venetian woman for whose beauty Marco Manin was one day
stabbed in the back with a glass stiletto, and Giovanni Manin fled from
the place of his birth and never saw it again. It is idle to fight against
the stars in their courses. We met here in the New World, she and I, as
they met in the Old World so long ago--and the end is the same. It was to
be--it was to be!”
Laurence Laughton gave a swift glance at his friend’s wife to see what
effect these words might have on her, and he was startled to detect on her
face the same enigmatic smile which was the chief memory he had retained
of the Venetian picture. Truly the likeness between the painting and the
wife of his friend was marvellous; and Laurence tried to shake off a
morbid wonder whether there might be any obscure and inscrutable survival
from one generation to another across the seas and across the years.
“If you remember the picture,” said John Manning, “perhaps you remember
the quaint goblet of Venetian glass I bought the same day?”
“Of course I do,” said Larry, glad to get Manning started on a topic of
talk a little less personal.
“Perhaps you know what has become of it?” asked Manning.
“I can answer ‘of course’ to that, too,” replied Larry, “because I have it
here.”
“Here?”
“Here--in a little square box, in the hall,” answered Larry. “I had it
in my trunk, you know, when we took passage on the _Vanderbilt_ at Havre
that May morning. I forgot to give it to you in the hurry of landing, and
I haven’t had a chance since. This is the first time I have seen you for
nearly three years. I found the box this morning, and I thought you might
like to have it again, so I brought it up.”
John Manning rang the bell at the head of his bed. The black crone
answered it, and soon returned with the little square box. Manning
impatiently broke the seals and cords that bound its cover and began
eagerly to release the goblet from the cotton and tissue paper in which
it had been carefully swathed and bandaged. Mrs. Manning, though her
moods were subtler and more intense, showed an anxiety to see the goblet
quite as feverish as her husband’s. In a minute the last wrapping was
twisted off and the full beauty of the Venetian glass was revealed to
them. Assuredly no praise was too loud for its delicate and exquisite
workmanship.
“Does Mrs. Manning know the story of the goblet?” asked Larry; “has she
been told of the peculiar virtue ascribed to it?”
“She has too great a fondness for the horrible and the fantastic not to
have heard the story in its smallest details,” said Manning.
Mrs. Manning had taken the glass in her fine, thin hands. Evidently it
and its mystic legend had a morbid fascination for her. A strange light
gleamed in her wondrous eyes, and Laughton was startled again to see the
extraordinary resemblance between her and the picture they had looked at
on the day the goblet had been bought.
“When the poison was poured into it,” she said at last, with quick and
restless glances at the two men, “the glass broke--then the tale was
true?”
“It was a coincidence only, I’m afraid,” said her husband, who had rallied
and regained strength under the unwonted excitement.
Just then the old-fashioned clock on the stairs struck five. Mrs. Manning
started up, holding the goblet in her hand.
“It is time for your medicine,” she said.
“As you please,” answered her husband wearily, sinking back on his pillow.
“My wife insists on giving me every drop of my potions with her own hands.
I shall not trouble her much longer, and I doubt if it is any use for her
to trouble me now.”
“I shall give you everything in this glass after this,” she said.
“In the Venetian glass?” asked Larry.
“Yes,” she said, turning on him fiercely; “why not?”
“Do you think the doctor is trying to poison me?” asked her husband.
“No, I do not think the doctor is trying to poison you,” she repeated
mechanically, as she moved toward a little sideboard in a corner of the
room. “But I shall give you all your medicines in this hereafter.”
She stood at the little sideboard, with her back toward them, and she
mingled the contents of various phials in the Venetian goblet. Then she
turned to cross the room to her husband. As she walked with the glass
in her hand there was a rift in the clouds high over the other side of
the river, and the rays of the setting sun thrust themselves through the
window and lighted up the glory of her hair and showed the strange gleam
in her staring eyes. Another step, and the red rays fell on the Venetian
glass, and it burned and glowed, and the green serpents twined about its
ruby stem seemed to twist and crawl with malignant life, while their
scorching eyes shot fire. Another step, and she stood by the bedside. As
John Manning reached out his hand for the goblet, a tremor passed through
her, her fingers clinched the fragile stem, and the glass fell on the
floor and was shattered to shivers as its fellow had been shattered three
centuries ago and more. She still stared steadily before her; then her
lips parted, and she said, “The glass broke--the glass broke--then the
tale is true!” And with one hysteric shriek she fell forward amid the
fragments of the Venetian goblet, unconscious thereafter of all things.
THE RED SILK HANDKERCHIEF.
BY H. C. BUNNER.
The yellow afternoon sun came in through the long blank windows of the
room wherein the Superior Court of the State of New York, Part II.,
Gillespie, Judge, was in session. The hour of adjournment was near at
hand, a dozen court-loungers slouched on the hard benches in the attitudes
of cramped carelessness which mark the familiar of the halls of justice.
Beyond the rail sat a dozen lawyers and lawyers’ clerks, and a dozen weary
jurymen. Above the drowsy silence rose the nasal voice of the junior
counsel for the defence, who in a high monotone, with his faint eyes fixed
on the paper in his hand, was making something like a half-a-score of
“requests to charge.”
Nobody paid attention to him. Two lawyers’ clerks whispered like
mischievous schoolboys, hiding behind a pile of books that towered upon
a table. Junior counsel for the plaintiff chewed his pencil and took
advantage of his opportunity to familiarize himself with certain neglected
passages of the New Code. The crier, like a half-dormant old spider, sat
in his place and watched a boy who was fidget ting at the far end of the
room, and who looked as though he wanted to whistle.
The jurymen might have been dream-men, vague creations of an autumn
afternoon’s doze. It was hard to connect them with a world of life and
business. Yet, gazing closer, you might have seen that one looked as if
he were thinking of his dinner, and another as if he were thinking of the
lost love of his youth; and that the expression on the faces of the others
ranged from the vacant to the inscrutable. The oldest juror, at the end
of the second row, was sound asleep. Everyone in the court-room, except
himself, knew it. No one cared.
Gillespie, J., was writing his acceptance of an invitation to a dinner set
for that evening at Delmonico’s. He was doing this in such a way that he
appeared to be taking copious and conscientious notes. Long years on the
bench had whitened Judge Gillespie’s hair, and taught him how to do this.
His seeming attentiveness much encouraged the counsel for the defence,
whose high-pitched tone rasped the air like the buzzing of a bee that has
found its way through the slats of the blind into some darkened room, of a
summer noon, and that, as it seeks angrily for egress, raises its shrill
scandalized protest against the idleness and the pleasant gloom.
“We r’quest y’r Honor t’ charge: First, ’t forcible entry does not
const’oot tresp’ss, ’nless intent’s proved. Thus, ’f a man rolls down a
bank”--
But the judge’s thoughts were in the private supper-room at Delmonico’s.
He had no interest in the sad fate of the hero of the suppositious case,
who had been obliged, by a strange and ingenious combination of accidents,
to make violent entrance, incidentally damaging the persons and property
of others, into the lands and tenements of his neighbor.
And further away yet the droning lawyer had set a-travelling the thoughts
of Horace Walpole, clerk for Messrs. Weeden, Snowden & Gilfeather; for the
young man sat with his elbows on the table, his head in his hands, a sad
half-smile on his lips, and his brown eyes looking through vacancy to St.
Lawrence County, New York.
He saw a great, shabby old house, shabby with the awful shabbiness of a
sham grandeur laid bare by time and mocked of the pitiless weather. There
was a great sham Grecian portico at one end; the white paint was well-nigh
washed away, and the rain-streaked wooden pillars seemed to be weeping
tears of penitence for having lied about themselves and pretended to be
marble.
The battened walls were cracked and blistered. The Grecian temple on the
hillock near looked much like a tomb, and not at all like a summer-house.
The flower-garden was so rank and ragged, so overgrown with weed and vine,
that it was spared the mortification of revealing its neglected maze, the
wonder of the county in 1820. All was sham, save the decay. That was real;
and by virtue of its decrepitude the old house seemed to protest against
modern contempt, as though it said: “I have had my day. I was built when
people thought this sort of thing was the right sort of thing; when we had
our own little pseudo-classic renaissance in America. I lie between the
towns of Aristotle and Sabine Farms. I am a gentleman’s residence, and
my name is Montevista. I was built by a prominent citizen. You need not
laugh through your lattices, you smug new Queen Anne cottage, down there
in the valley! What will become of you when the falsehood is found out of
your imitation bricks and your tiled roof of shingles, and your stained
glass that is only a sheet of transparent paper pasted on a pane? You are
a young sham; I am an old one. Have some respect for age!”
Its age was the crowning glory of the estate of Montevista. There was
nothing new on the place except a third mortgage. Yet had Montevista villa
put forth a juster claim to respect, it would have said: “I have had
my day. Where all is desolate and silent now, there was once light and
life. Along these halls and corridors, the arteries of my being, pulsed
a hot blood of joyous humanity, fed with delicate fare, kindled with
generous wine. Every corner under my roof was alive with love and hope
and ambition. Great men and dear women were here; and the host was great
and the hostess was gracious among them all. The laughter of children
thrilled my gaudily decked stucco. To-day an old man walks up and down my
lonely drawing-rooms, with bent head, murmuring to himself odds and ends
of tawdry old eloquence, wandering in a dead land of memory, waiting till
Death shall take him by the hand and lead him out of his ruinous house,
out of his ruinous life.”
Death had indeed come between Horace and the creation of his spiritual
vision. Never again should the old man walk, as to the boy’s eyes he
walked now, over the creaking floors, from where the Nine Muses simpered
on the walls of the south parlor to where Homer and Plutarch, equally
simpering, yet simpering with a difference,--severely simpering,--faced
each other across the north room. Horace saw his father stalking on his
accustomed round, a sad, familiar figure, tall and bent. The hands were
clasped behind the back, the chin was bowed on the black stock; but every
now and then the thin form drew itself straight, the fine, clean-shaven,
aquiline face was raised, beaming with the ghost of an old enthusiasm, and
the long right arm was lifted high in the air as he began, his sonorous
tones a little tremulous in spite of the restraint of old-time pomposity
and deliberation,--
“Mr. Speaker, I rise;”--or, “If your Honor please”--
The forlorn, helpless earnestness of this mockery of life touched Horace’s
heart; and yet he smiled to think how different were the methods and
manners of his father from those of brother Hooper, whose requests still
droned up to the reverberating hollows of the roof, and there were lost in
a subdued boom and snarl of echoes such as a court-room only can beget.
Two generations ago, when the Honorable Horace Kortlandt Walpole was the
rising young lawyer of the State; when he was known as “the Golden-Mouthed
Orator of St. Lawrence County,” he was in the habit of assuming that he
owned whatever court he practised in; and, as a rule, he was right. The
most bullock-brained of country judges deferred to the brilliant young
master of law and eloquence, and his “requests” were generally accepted
as commands and obeyed as such. Of course the great lawyer, for form’s
sake, threw a veil of humility over his deliverances; but even that he
rent to shreds when the fire of his eloquence once got fairly aglow.
“May it please your Honor! Before your Honor exercises the sacred
prerogative of your office--before your Honor performs the sacred duty
which the State has given into your hands--before, with that lucid
genius to which I bow my head, you direct the minds of these twelve good
men and true in the path of strict judicial investigation, I ask your
Honor to instruct them that they must bring to their deliberations that
impartial justice which the laws of our beloved country--of which no abler
exponent than your Honor has ever graced the bench,--which the laws of
our beloved country guarantee to the lowest as well as to the loftiest of
her citizens--from the President in the Executive Mansion to the humble
artisan at the forge--throughout this broad land, from the lagoons of
Louisiana to where the snow-clad forests of Maine hurl defiance at the
descendants of Tory refugees in the barren wastes of Nova Scotia”--
Horace remembered every word and every gesture of that speech. He recalled
even the quick upward glance from under the shaggy eyebrows with which
his father seemed to see again the smirking judge catching at the gross
bait of flattery; he knew the little pause which the speaker’s memory
had filled with the applause of an audience long since dispersed to
various silent country graveyards; and he wondered, pityingly, if it
were possible that even in his father’s prime that wretched allusion to
old political hatreds had power to stir the fire of patriotism in the
citizen’s bosom.
“Poor old father!” said the boy to himself. The voice which had for so
many years been but an echo was stilled wholly now. Brief victory and long
defeat were nothing now to the golden-mouthed orator.
“Shall I fail as he failed?” thought Horace: “No! I can’t. Haven’t I got
_her_ to work for?”
And then he drew out of his breast pocket a red silk handkerchief and
turned it over in his hand with a movement that concealed and caressed at
the same time.
It was a very red handkerchief. It was not vermilion, nor “cardinal,” nor
carmine,--a strange Oriental idealization of blood-red which lay well on
the soft, fine, luxurious fabric. But it was an unmistakable, a shameless,
a barbaric red.
And as he looked at it, young Hitchcock, of Hitchcock & Van Rensselaer,
came up behind him and leaned over his shoulder.
“Where did you get the handkerchief, Walpole?” he whispered; “you ought to
hang that out for an auction flag, and sell out your cases.”
Horace stuffed it back in his pocket.
“You’d be glad enough to buy some of them, if you got the show,” he
returned; but the opportunity for a prolonged contest of wit was cut
short. The judge was folding his letter, and the nasal counsel, having
finished his reading, stood gazing in doubt and trepidation at the
bench, and asking himself why his Honor had not passed on each point as
presented. He found out.
“Are you prepared to submit those requests in writing?” demanded
Gillespie, J., sharply and suddenly. He knew well enough that that poor
little nasal, nervous junior counsel would never have trusted himself to
speak ten consecutive sentences in court without having every word on
paper before him.
“Ye-yes,” the counsel stammered, and handed up his careful manuscript.
“I will examine these to-night,” said his Honor, and, apparently, he made
an endorsement on the papers. He was really writing the address on the
envelope of his letter. Then there was a stir, and a conversation between
the judge and two or three lawyers, all at once, which was stopped when
his Honor gave an Olympian nod to the clerk.
The crier arose.
“He’ ye! he’ ye! he’ ye!” he shouted with perfunctory vigor.
“Wah--wah--wah!” the high ceiling slapped back at him; and he declaimed,
on one note, a brief address to “Awperns han bins” in that court, of which
nothing was comprehensible save the words “Monday next at eleven o’clock.”
And then the court collectively rose, and individually put on hats for the
most part of the sort called queer.
All the people were chattering in low voices; chairs were moved noisily,
and the slumbering juror opened his weary eyes and troubled himself with
an uncalled-for effort to look as though he had been awake all the time
and didn’t like the way things were going, at all. Horace got from the
clerk the papers for which he had been waiting, and was passing out, when
his Honor saw him and hailed him with an expressive grunt.
Gillespie, J., looked over his spectacles at Horace.
“Shall you see Judge Weeden at the office? Yes? Will you have the kindness
to give him this--yes? If it’s no trouble to you, of course.”
Gillespie, J., was not over-careful of the feelings of lawyers’ clerks, as
a rule; but he had that decent disinclination to act _ultra præscriptum_
which marks the attitude of the well-bred man toward his inferiors
in office. He knew that he had no business to use Weeden, Snowden &
Gilfeather’s clerk as a messenger in his private correspondence.
Horace understood him, took the letter, and allowed himself a quiet smile
when he reached the crowded corridor.
What mattered, he thought, as his brisk feet clattered down the wide
stairs of the rotunda, the petty insolence of office _now_? He was
Gillespie’s messenger to-day; but had not his young powers already
received recognition from a greater than Gillespie? If Judge Gillespie
lived long enough he should put his gouty old legs under Judge Walpole’s
mahogany, and prose over his port--yes, he should have port, like
the relic of mellow old days that he was--of the times “when your
father-in-law and I, Walpole, were boys together.”
Ah, there you have the spell of the Red Silk Handkerchief!
It was a wonderful tale to Horace; for he saw it in that wonderful light
which shall shine on no man of us more than once in his life--on some of
us not at all, Heaven help us!--but, in the telling, it is a simple tale:
“The Golden-Mouthed Orator of St. Lawrence” was at the height of his
fame in that period of storm and stress which had the civil war for its
climax. His misfortune was to be drawn into a contest for which he was not
equipped, and in which he had little interest. His sphere of action was
far from the battle-ground of the day. The intense localism that bounded
his knowledge and his sympathies had but one break--he had tasted in his
youth the extravagant hospitality of the South, and he held it in grateful
remembrance. So it happened that he was a trimmer,--a moderationist he
called himself,--a man who dealt in optimistic generalities, and who
thought that if everybody--the slaves included--would only act temperately
and reasonably, and view the matter from the standpoint of pure policy,
the differences of South and North could be settled as easily as, through
his own wise intervention, the old turnip-field feud of Farmer Oliver and
Farmer Bunker had been wiped out of existence.
His admirers agreed with him, and they sent him to Congress to fill
the unexpired short term of their representative, who had just died in
Washington of what we now know as a malarial fever. It was not to be
expected, perhaps, that the Honorable Mr. Walpole would succeed in putting
a new face on the great political question in the course of his first
term; but they all felt sure that his first speech would startle men who
had never heard better than what Daniel Webster had had to offer them.
But the gods were against the Honorable Mr. Walpole. On the day set
for his great effort there was what the theatrical people call a
counter-attraction. Majah Pike had come up from Mizourah, sah, to cane
that demn’d Yankee hound, Chahles Sumnah, sah,--yes, sah, to thrash
him like a dawg, begad! And all Washington had turned out to see the
performance, which was set down for a certain hour, in front of Mr.
Sumner’s door.
There was just a quorum when the golden-mouthed member began his great
speech,--an inattentive, chattering crowd, that paid no attention to his
rolling rhetoric and rococo grandiloquence. He told the empty seats what
a great country this was, and how beautiful was a middle policy, and he
illustrated this with a quotation from Homer, in the original Greek (a
neat novelty: Latin was fashionable for parliamentary use in Webster’s
time), with, for the benefit of the uneducated, the well-known translation
by the great Alexander Pope, commencing:
“To calm their passions with the words of Age,
Slow from his seat arose the Pylian sage,
Experienced Nestor, in Persuasion skilled,
Words sweet as honey from his lips distilled”--
When Nestor and Mr. Walpole closed, there was no quorum. The member from
New Jersey, who had engaged him in debate, was sleeping the sleep of
honorable intoxication in his seat. Outside, all Washington was laughing
and cursing. Majah Pike had not appeared.
It was the end of the golden-mouthed orator. His voice was never heard
again in the House. His one speech was noticed only to be laughed at, and
the news went home to his constituents. They showed that magnanimity which
the poets tell us is an attribute of the bucolic character. They, so to
speak, turned over the pieces of their broken idol with their cow-hide
boots, and remarked that they had known it was clay, all along, and dern
poor clay at that.
So the golden-mouthed went home, to try to make a ruined practice repair
his ruined fortune; to give mortgages on his home to pay the debts his
hospitality had incurred; to discuss with a few feeble old friends ways
and means by which the war might have been averted; to beget a son of his
old age, and to see the boy grow up in a new generation, with new ideas,
new hopes, new ambitions, and a lifetime before him to make memories in.
They had little enough in common, but they came to be great friends as the
boy grew older, for Horace, inherited all his traits from the old man,
except a certain stern energy which came from his silent, strong-hearted
mother, and which his father saw with a sad joy.
Mr. Walpole sent his son to New York to study law in the office of Messrs.
Weeden, Snowden & Gilfeather, who were a pushing young firm in 1850.
Horace found it a very quiet and conservative old concern. Snowden and
Gilfeather were dead; Weeden had been on the bench and had gone off the
bench at the call of a “lucrative practice;” there were two new partners,
whose names appeared only on the glass of the office door and in a corner
of the letter-heads.
Horace read his law to some purpose. He became the managing clerk of
Messrs. Weeden, Snowden & Gilfeather. This particular managing clerkship
was one of unusual dignity and prospective profit. It meant, as it always
does, great responsibility, little honor, and less pay. But the firm was
so peculiarly constituted that the place was a fine stepping-stone for
a bright and ambitious boy. One of the new partners was a business man,
who had put his money into the concern in 1860, and who knew and cared
nothing about law. He kept the books and managed the money, and was beyond
that only a name on the door and a terror to the office-boys. The other
new partner was a young man who made a specialty of collecting debts.
He could wring gold out of the stoniest and barrenest debtor; and there
his usefulness ended. The general practice of the firm rested on the
shoulders of Judge Weeden, who was old, lazy, and luxury-loving, and who,
to tell the honest truth, shirked his duties. Such a state of affairs
would have wrecked a younger house; but Weeden, Snowden & Gilfeather had a
great name, and the consequences of his negligent feebleness had not yet
descended upon Judge Weeden’s head.
That they would, in a few years, that the Judge knew it, and that he was
quite ready to lean on a strong young arm, Horace saw clearly.
That his own arm was growing in strength he also saw; and the Judge knew
that, too. He was Judge Weeden’s pet. All in the office recognized the
fact. All, after reflection, concluded that it was a good thing that he
was. New blood had to come into the firm sooner or later, and although it
was not possible to watch the successful rise of this boy without a little
natural envy and heart-burning, yet it was to be considered that Horace
was one who would be honorable, just, and generous wherever fortune put
him.
Horace was a gentleman. They all knew it. Barnes and Haskins, the business
man and the champion collector, knew it down in the shallows of their
vulgar little souls. Judge Weeden, who had some of that mysterious ichor
of gentlehood in his wine-fed veins, knew it and rejoiced in it. And
Horace--I can say for Horace that he never forgot it.
He was such a young prince of managing clerks that no one was surprised
when he was sent down to Sand Hills, Long Island, to make preparations for
the reorganization of the Great Breeze Hotel Company, and the transfer of
the property known as the Breeze Hotel and Park to its new owners. The
Breeze Hotel was a huge “Queen Anne” vagary which had, after the fashion
of hotels, bankrupted its first owners, and was now going into the hands
of new people, who were likely to make their fortunes out of it. The
property had been in litigation for a year or so; the mechanics’ liens
were numerous, and the mechanics clamorous; and although the business was
not particularly complicated, it needed careful and patient adjustment.
Horace knew the case in every detail. He had drudged over it all the
winter, with no especial hope of personal advantage, but simply because
that was his way of working. He went down in June to the mighty barracks,
and lived for a week in what would have been an atmosphere of paint and
carpet-dye had it not been for the broad sea wind that blew through the
five hundred open windows, and swept rooms and corridors with salty
freshness. The summering folk had not arrived yet; there were only the
new manager and his six score of raw recruits of clerks and servants. But
Horace felt the warm blood coming back to his cheeks, that the town had
somewhat paled, and he was quite content; and every day he went down to
the long, lonely beach, and had a solitary swim, although the sharp water
whipped his white skin to a biting red. The sea takes a long while to warm
up to the summer, and is sullen about it.
He was to have returned to New York at the end of the week, and Haskins
was to have taken his place; but it soon became evident to Weeden, Snowden
& Gilfeather that the young man would attend to all that was to be done at
Sand Hills quite as well as Mr. Haskins, or--quite as well as Judge Weeden
himself, for that matter. He had to shoulder no great responsibility; the
work was mostly of a purely clerical nature, vexatious enough, but simple.
It had to be done on the spot, however; the original Breeze Hotel and Park
Company was composed of Sand Hillers, and the builders were Sand Hillers,
too, the better part of them. And there were titles to be searched;
for the whole scheme was an ambitious splurge of Sand Hills pride and
it had been undertaken and carried out in a reckless and foolish way.
Horace knew all the wretched little details of the case, and so Horace
was entrusted with duties such as do not often devolve upon a man of his
years; and he took up his burden proudly, and with a glowing consciousness
of his own strength.
Judge Weeden missed his active and intelligent obedience in the daily
routine of office business; but the Judge thought it was just as well that
Horace should not know that fact. The young man’s time would come soon
enough, and he would be none the worse for serving his apprenticeship in
modesty and humility. The work entrusted to him was an honor in itself.
And then, there was no reason why poor Walpole’s boy shouldn’t have a sort
of half-holiday out in the country, and enjoy his youth.
He was not recalled. The week stretched out. He worked hard, found time to
play, hugged his quickened ambitions to his breast, wrote hopeful letters
to the mother at Montevista, made a luxury of his loneliness, and felt a
bashful resentment when the “guests” of the hotel began to pour in from
the outside world.
For a day or two he fought shy of them. But these first comers were
lonely too, and not so much in love with loneliness as he thought he
was, and very soon he became one of them. He had found out all the walks
and drives; he knew the times of the tides; he had made friends with the
fishermen for a league up and down the coast, and he had amassed a store
of valuable hints as to where the first blue-fish might be expected to
run. Altogether he was a very desirable companion. Besides, that bright,
fresh face of his, and a certain look in it, made you friends with him at
once, especially if you happened to be a little older, and to remember a
look of the sort, lost, lost forever, in a boy’s looking-glass.
So he was sought out, and he let himself be found, and the gregarious
instinct in him waxed delightfully.
And then It came. Perhaps I should say She came; but it is not the woman
we love; it is our dream of her. Sweet and tender, fair and good, she may
be; but let it be honor enough for her that she has that glory about her
face which our love kindles to the halo that lights many a man’s life to
the grave, though the face beneath it be dead or false.
I will not admit that it was only a pretty girl from Philadelphia who came
to Sand Hills that first week in July. It was the rosy goddess herself,
dove-drawn across the sea, in the warm path of the morning sun--although
the tremulous, old-fashioned handwriting on the hotel register only showed
that the early train had brought--
“_Samuel Rittenhouse, Philadelphia.
Miss Rittenhouse, do._”
It was the Honorable Samuel Rittenhouse, ex-Chief-Justice of Pennsylvania,
the honored head of the Pennsylvania bar, and the legal representative of
the Philadelphia contingent of the new Breeze Hotel and Park Company.
In the evening Horace called upon him in his rooms with a cumbersome stack
of papers, and patiently waded through explanations and repetitions
until Mr. Rittenhouse’s testy courtesy--he had the nervous manner of
age apprehensive of youthful irreverence--melted into a complacent and
fatherly geniality. Then, when the long task was done and his young guest
arose, he picked up the card that lay on the table and trained his glasses
on it.
“‘H. K. Walpole?’” he said: “are you a New Yorker, sir?”
“From the north of the State,” Horace told him.
“Indeed, indeed. Why, let me see--you must be the son of my old friend
Walpole--of Otsego--wasn’t it?” said the old gentleman, still tentatively.
“St. Lawrence, sir.”
“Yes, St. Lawrence--of course, of course. Why, I knew your father well,
years ago, sir. We were at college together.”
“At Columbia?”
“Yes--yes. Why, bless me,” Judge Rittenhouse went on, getting up to look
at Horace: “you’re the image of your poor father at your age. A very
brilliant man, sir, a very able man. I did not see much of him after we
left college--I was a Pennsylvanian, and he was from this State--but I
have always remembered your father with respect and regard, sir,--a very
able man. I think I heard of his death some years ago.”
“Three years ago,” said Horace. His voice fell somewhat. How little to
this old man of success was the poor, unnoticed death of failure!
“Three years only!” repeated the judge, half apologetically; “ah, people
slip away from each other in this world--slip away. But I’m glad to have
met you, sir--very much pleased indeed. Rosamond!”
For an hour the subdued creaking of a rocking-chair by the window had
been playing a monotonously pleasant melody in Horace’s ears. Now and
then a coy wisp of bright hair, or the reflected ghost of it, had flashed
into view in the extreme lower left-hand corner of a mirror opposite him.
Once he had seen a bit of white brow under it, and from time to time the
low flutter of turning magazine leaves had put in a brief second to the
rocking-chair.
All this time Horace’s brains had been among the papers on the table;
but something else within him had been swaying to and fro with the
rocking-chair, and giving a leap when the wisp of hair bobbed into sight.
Now the rocking-chair accompaniment ceased, and the curtained corner by
the window yielded up its treasure, and Miss Rittenhouse came forward,
with one hand brushing the wisp of hair back into place, as if she were on
easy and familiar terms with it. Horace envied it.
“Rosamond,” said the judge: “This is Mr. Walpole, the son of my old friend
Walpole. You have heard me speak of Mr. Walpole’s father.”
“Yes, papa,” said the young lady, all but the corners of her mouth. And,
oddly enough, Horace did not think of being saddened because this young
woman had never heard of his father. Life was going on a new key, all of a
sudden, with a hint of a melody to be unfolded that ran in very different
cadences from the poor old tune of memory.
My heroine, over whose head some twenty summers had passed, was now in the
luxuriant prime of her youthful beauty. Over a brow whiter than the driven
snow fell clustering ringlets, whose hue--
That is the way the good old novelists and story-tellers of the Neville
and Beverley days would have set out to describe Miss Rittenhouse, had
they known her. Fools and blind! As if anyone could describe--as if a
poet, even, could more than hint at what a man sees in a woman’s face
when, seeing, he loves.
For a few moments the talkers were constrained, and the talk was meagre
and desultory. Then the Judge, who had been rummaging around among the
dust-heaps of his memory, suddenly recalled the fact that he had once,
in stage-coach days, passed a night at Montevista, and had been most
hospitably treated. He dragged this fact forth, professed a lively
remembrance of Mrs. Walpole,--“a fine woman, sir, your mother; a woman of
many charms,”--asked after her present health; and then, satisfied that he
had acquitted himself of his whole duty, withdrew into the distant depths
of his own soul and fumbled over the papers Horace had brought him, trying
to familiarize himself with them, as a commander might try to learn the
faces of his soldiers.
Then the two young people proceeded to find the key together, and began
a most harmonious duet. Sand Hills was the theme. Thus it was that they
had to go out on the balcony, where Miss Rittenhouse might gaze into the
brooding darkness over the sea, and watch it wink a slow yellow eye with
a humorous alternation of sudden and brief red. Thus, also, Horace had to
explain how the lighthouse was constructed. This moved Miss Rittenhouse
to scientific research. She must see how it was done. Mr. Walpole would
be delighted to show her. Papa was so much interested in those mechanical
matters. Mr. Walpole had a team and light wagon at his disposal, and
would very much like to drive Miss Rittenhouse and her father over to the
lighthouse. Miss Rittenhouse communicated this kind offer to her father.
Her father saw what was expected of him, and dutifully acquiesced, like
an obedient American father. Miss Rittenhouse had managed the Rittenhouse
household and the head of the house of Rittenhouse ever since her mother’s
death.
Mr. Walpole really had a team at his disposal. He came from a country
where people do not chase foxes, nor substitutes for foxes; but where they
know and revere a good trotter. He had speeded many a friend’s horse in
training for the county fair. When he came to Sand Hills his soundness in
the equine branch of a gentleman’s education had attracted the attention
of a horsey Sand-Hiller, who owned a showy team with a record of 2.37.
This team was not to be trusted to the ordinary summer boarder on any
terms; but the Sand-Hiller was thrifty and appreciative, and he lured
Horace into hiring the turnout at a trifling rate, and thus captured every
cent the boy had to spare, and got his horses judiciously exercised.
There was a showy light wagon to match the team, and the next day the
light wagon, with Horace and the Rittenhouses in it, passed every carriage
on the road to the lighthouse, where Miss Rittenhouse satisfied her
scientific spirit with one glance at the lantern, after giving which
glance she went outside and sat in the shade of the white tower with
Horace, while the keeper showed the machinery to the Judge. Perhaps she
went to the Judge afterward, and got him to explain it all to her.
Thus it began, and for two golden weeks thus it went on. The reorganized
Breeze Hotel and Park Company met in business session on its own property,
and Horace acted as a sort of honorary clerk to Judge Rittenhouse. The
company, as a company, talked over work for a couple of hours each day.
As a congregation of individuals, it ate and drank and smoked and played
billiards and fished and slept the rest of the two dozen. Horace had
his time pretty much to himself, or rather to Miss Rittenhouse, who
monopolized it. He drove her to the village to match embroidery stuffs.
He danced with her in the evenings when two stolidly soulful Germans,
one with a fiddle and the other with a piano, made the vast dining-room
ring and hum with Suppé and Waldteufel,--and this was to the great
and permanent improvement of his waltzing. She taught him how to play
lawn-tennis--he was an old-fashioned boy from the backwoods, and he
thought that croquet was still in existence, so she had to teach him to
play lawn-tennis--until he learned to play much better than she could. On
the other hand, he was a fresh-water swimmer of rare wind and wiriness,
and a young sea-god in the salt, as soon as he got used to its pungent
strength. So he taught her to strike out beyond the surf-line, with broad,
breath-long sweeps, and there to float and dive and make friends with the
ocean. Even he taught her to fold her white arms behind her back, and swim
with her feet. As he glanced over his shoulder to watch her following
him, and to note the timorous, admiring crowd on the shore, she seemed a
sea-bred Venus of Milo in blue serge.
I have known men to be bored by such matters. They made Horace happy. He
was happiest, perhaps, when he found out that she was studying Latin.
All the girls in Philadelphia were studying Latin that summer. They had
had a little school Latin, of course; but now their aims were loftier.
Miss Rittenhouse had brought with her a Harkness’s Virgil, an Anthon’s
dictionary, an old Bullion & Morris, and--yes, when Horace asked her, she
had brought an Interlinear; but she didn’t mean to use it. They rowed out
to the buoy, and put the Interlinear in the sea. They sat on the sands
after the daily swim, and enthusiastically labored, with many an unclassic
excursus, over P. V. Maronis Opera. Horace borrowed some books of a small
boy in the hotel, and got up at five o’clock in the morning to run a
couple of hundred lines or so ahead of his pupil, “getting out” a stint
that would have made him lead a revolt had any teacher imposed it upon his
class a few years before--for he was fresh enough from schooling to have a
little left of the little Latin that colleges give.
He wondered how it was that he had never seen the poetry of the lines
before. _Forsan et hæc olim meminisse juvabit_--for perchance it will joy
us hereafter to remember these things! He saw the wet and weary sailors
on the shore, hungrily eating, breathing hard after their exertions; he
heard the deep cheerfulness of their leader’s voice. The wind blew toward
him over the pine barrens, as fresh as ever it blew past Dido’s towers. A
whiff of briny joviality and adventurous recklessness seemed to come from
the page on his knee. And to him, also, had not She appeared who saw, hard
by the sea, that pious old buccaneer-Lothario, so much tossed about on
land and upon the deep?
This is what the moderns call a flirtation, and I do not doubt that it was
called a flirtation by the moderns around these two young people. Somehow,
though, they never got themselves “talked about,” not even by the stranded
nomads on the hotel verandas. Perhaps this was because there was such a
joyous freshness and purity about both of them that it touched the hearts
of even the slander-steeped old dragons who rocked all day in the shade,
and embroidered tidies and talked ill of their neighbors. Perhaps it was
because they also had that about them which the mean and vulgar mind
always sneers at, jeers at, affects to disbelieve in, always recognizes
and fears,--the courage and power of the finer strain. Envy in spit-curls
and jealousy in a false front held their tongues, may be, because, though
they knew that they, and even their male representatives, were safe from
any violent retort, yet they recognized the superior force, and shrunk
from it as the cur edges away from the quiescent whip.
There is a great difference, too, between the flirtations of the
grandfatherless and the flirtations of the grandfathered. I wish you
to understand that Mr. Walpole and Miss Rittenhouse did not _sprawl_
through their flirtation, nor fall into that slipshod familiarity which
takes all the delicate beauty of dignity and mutual respect out of such a
friendship. Horace did not bow to the horizontal, and Miss Rittenhouse did
not make a cheese-cake with her skirts when he held open the door for her
to pass through; but the bond of courtesy between them was no less sweetly
gracious on her side, no less finely reverential on his, than the taste
of their grandparents’ day would have exacted,--no less earnest, I think,
that it was a little easier than puff and periwig might have made it.
Yet I also think, whatever was the reason that made the dragons let them
alone, that a simple mother of the plain, old-fashioned style is better
for a girl of Miss Rosamond Rittenhouse’s age than any such precarious
immunity from annoyance.