the old church together for the second and last time, and he stood beside
her, and they held the hymn-book between them.
Horace could not rid himself of the idea that they had stood thus
through every Sunday of a glorious summer. The week before he had sung
with her. He had a boyish baritone in him, one of those which may be
somewhat extravagantly characterized as consisting wholly of middle
register. It was a good voice for the campus, and, combined with that
startling clearness of utterance which young collegians acquire, had
been very effective in the little church. But to-day he had no heart
to sing “Byefield” and “Pleyel”; he would rather stand beside her and
feel his heart vibrate to the deep lower notes of her tender contralto,
and his soul rise with the higher tones that soared upward from her
pure young breast. And all the while he was making that act of devotion
which--“uttered or unexpressed”--is, indeed, all the worship earth has
ever known.
Once she looked up at him as if she asked, “Why don’t you sing?” But her
eyes fell quickly, he thought with a shade of displeasure in them at
something they had seen in his. Yet as he watched her bent head, the cheek
near him warmed with a slow, soft blush. He may only have fancied that her
clear voice quivered a little with a tremolo not written in the notes at
the top of the page.
And now the last day came. When the work-a-day world thrust its rough
shoulder into Arcadia, and the hours of the idyll were numbered, they set
to talking of it as though the two weeks that they had known each other
were some sort of epitomized summer. Of course they were to meet again,
in New York or in Philadelphia; and of course there were many days of
summer in store for Miss Rittenhouse at Sand Hills, at Newport, and at
Mount Desert; but Horace’s brief season was closed, and somehow she seemed
to fall readily into his way of looking upon it as a golden period of
special and important value, their joint and exclusive property--something
set apart from all the rest of her holiday, where there would be other men
and other good times and no Horace.
It was done with much banter and merriment; but through it all Horace
listened for delicate undertones that should echo to his ear the
earnestness which sometimes rang irrepressibly in his own speech. In
that marvellous instrument, a woman’s voice, there are strange and
fine possibilities of sound that may be the messengers of the subtlest
intelligence or the sweet falterings of imperfect control. So Horace, with
love to construe for him, did not suffer too cruelly from disappointment.
On the afternoon of that last day they sat upon the beach and saw the
smoke of Dido’s funeral pile go up, and they closed the dog’s-eared
Virgil, and, looking seaward, watched the black cloud from a coaling
steamer mar the blinding blue where sea and sky blent at the horizon;
watched it grow dull and faint, and fade away, and the illumined turquoise
reassert itself.
Then he was for a farewell walk, and she, with that bright acquiescence
with which a young girl can make companionship almost perfect, if she
will, accepted it as an inspiration, and they set out. They visited
together the fishermen’s houses, where Horace bade good-bye to
mighty-fisted friends, who stuck their thumbs inside their waistbands and
hitched their trousers half way up to their blue-shirted arms, and said to
him, “You come up here in Orgust, Mr. Walpole--say ’bout the fus’ t’ the
third week ’n Orgust, ’n’ we’ll give yer some bloo-fishin’ ’t y’ won’t
need t’ lie about, neither.” They all liked him, and heartily.
Old Rufe, the gruff hermit of the fishers, who lived a half-mile beyond
the settlement, flicked his shuttle through the net he was mending, and
did not look up as Horace spoke to him.
“Goin’?” he said; “waal, we’ve all gotter go some time oruther. The’
aint no real perma-nen-cy on this uth. Goin’? Waal, I’m”--he paused,
and weighed the shuttle in his hand as though to aid him in balancing
some important mental process. “Sho! I’m derned ’f I ain’t sorry. Squall
comin’ up, an’ don’t y’ make no mistake,” he hurried on, not to be further
committed to unguarded expression; “better look sharp, or y’ ’ll git a
wettin’.”
A little puff of gray cloud, scurrying along in the south-east, had
spread over half the sky, and now came a strong, eddying wind. A big
raindrop made a dark spot on the sand before them; another fell on Miss
Rittenhouse’s cheek, and then, with a vicious, uncertain patter, the rain
began to come down.
“We’ll have to run for Poinsett’s,” said Horace, and stretched out his
hand. She took it, and they ran.
Poinsett’s was just ahead--a white house on a lift of land, close back
of the shore-line, with a long garden stretching down in front, and two
or three poplar trees. The wind was turning up the pale under-sides of
grass-blade and flower leaf, and whipping the shivering poplars silver
white. Cap’n Poinsett, late of Gloucester, Massachusetts, was tacking down
the path in his pea-jacket, with his brass telescope tucked under his
arm. He was making for the little white summer-house that overhung the
shore; but he stopped to admire the two young people dashing up the slope
toward him, for the girl ran with a splendid free stride that kept her
well abreast of Horace’s athletic lope.
“Come in,” he said, opening the gate, and smiling on the two young faces,
flushed and wet; “come right in out o’ the rain. Be’n runnin’, ain’t
ye? Go right int’ the house. Mother!” he called, “here’s Mr. Walpole
’n’ his young lady. You’ll hev to ex-cuse me; I’m a-goin’ down t’ my
observa_tor_y. I carn’t foller the sea no longer myself, but I can look at
them that dooz. There’s my old woman--go right in.”
He waddled off, leaving both of them redder than their run accounted for,
and Mrs. Poinsett met them at the door, her arms folded in her apron.
“Walk right in,” she greeted them; “the cap’n he mus’ always go down t’
his observa_tor_y, ’s he calls it, ’n’ gape through thet old telescope of
hisn, fust thing the’s a squall--jus’s if he thought he was skipper of all
Long Island. But you come right int’ the settin’-room ’n’ make yourselves
to home. Dear me suz! ’f I’d ’a’ thought I’d ’a’ had company I’d ’a’
tidied things up. I’m jus’ ’s busy _as_ busy, gettin’ supper ready; but
don’t you mind _me_--jus’ you make yourselves to home,” and she drifted
chattering away, and they heard her in the distant kitchen amiably nagging
the hired girl.
It was an old-time, low-ceiled room, neat with New England neatness. The
windows had many panes of green flint glass, through which they saw the
darkening storm swirl over the ocean and ravage the flower-beds near by.
And when they had made an end of watching Cap’n Poinsett in his little
summer-house, shifting his long glass to follow each scudding sail far
out in the darkness; and when they had looked at the relics of Cap’n
Poinsett’s voyages to the Orient and the Arctic, and at the cigar-boxes
plastered with little shells, and at the wax fruit, and at the family
trousers and bonnets in the album, there was nothing left but that Miss
Rittenhouse should sit down at the old piano, bought for Amanda Jane in
the last year of the war, and bring forth rusty melody from the yellowed
keys.
“What a lovely voice she has!” thought Horace as she sang. No doubt he
was right. I would take his word against that of a professor of music,
who would have told you that it was a nice voice for a girl, and that the
young woman had more natural dramatic expression than technical training.
They fished out Amanda Jane’s music-books, and went through “Juanita,” and
the “Evergreen Waltz,” and “Beautiful Isle of the Sea;” and, finding a
lot of war songs, severally and jointly announced their determination to
invade Dixie Land, and to annihilate Rebel Hordes; and adjured each other
to remember Sumter and Baltimore, and many other matters that could have
made but slight impression on their young minds twenty odd years before.
Mrs. Poinsett, in the kitchen, stopped nagging her aid, and thought
of young John Tarbox Poinsett’s name on a great sheet of paper in the
Gloucester post-office, one morning at the end of April, 1862, when the
news came up that Farragut had passed the forts.
The squall was going over, much as it had come, only no one paid attention
to its movements now, for the sun was out, trying to straighten up the
crushed grass and flowers, and to brighten the hurrying waves, and to
soothe the rustling agitation of the poplars.
They must have one more song. Miss Rittenhouse chose “Jeannette and
Jeannot,” and when she looked back at him with a delicious coy mischief in
her eyes, and sang,--
“There is no one left to love me now,
And you too may forget”--
Horace felt something flaming in his cheeks and choking in his breast, and
it was hard for him to keep from snatching those hands from the keys and
telling her she knew better.
But he was man enough not to. He controlled himself, and made himself very
pleasant to Mrs. Poinsett about not staying to supper, and they set out
for the hotel.
The air was cool and damp after the rain.
“You’ve been singing,” said Horace, “and you will catch cold in this air,
and lose your voice. You must tie this handkerchief around your throat.”
She took his blue silk handkerchief and tied it around her throat, and
wore it until just as they were turning away from the shore, when she
took it off to return to him; and the last gust of wind that blew that
afternoon whisked it out of her hand, and sent it whirling a hundred
yards out to sea.
“Now, don’t say a word,” said Horace; “it isn’t of the slightest
consequence.”
But he looked very gloomy over it. He had made up his mind that that silk
handkerchief should be the silk handkerchief of all the world to him, from
that time on.
* * * * *
It was one month later that Mr. H. K. Walpole received, in care of Messrs.
Weeden, Snowden & Gilfeather, an envelope postmarked Newport, containing
a red silk handkerchief. His initials were neatly--nay, beautifully,
exquisitely--stitched in one corner. But there was absolutely nothing
about the package to show who sent it, and Horace sorrowed over this. Not
that he was in any doubt; but he felt that it meant to say that he must
not acknowledge it; and, loyally, he did not.
And he soon got over that grief. The lost handkerchief, whose origin was
base and common, like other handkerchiefs, and whose sanctity was purely
accidental--what was it to _this_ handkerchief, worked by her for him?
This became the outward and visible sign of the inward and spiritual grace
that had changed the boy’s whole life. Before this he had had purposes
and ambitions. He had meant to take care of his mother, to do well in the
world, and to restore, if he could, the honor and glory of the home his
father had left him. Here were duty, selfishness, and an innocent vanity.
But now he had an end in life, so high that the very seeking of it was a
religion. Every thought of self was flooded out of him, and what he sought
he sought in a purer and nobler spirit than ever before.
Is it not strange? A couple of weeks at the sea-side, a few evenings under
the brooding darkness of hotel verandas, the going to and fro of a girl
with a sweet face, and this ineradicable change is made in the mind of a
man who has forty or fifty years before him wherein to fight the world, to
find his place, to become a factor for good or evil.
And here we have Horace, with his heart full of love and his head full of
dreams, mooning over a silk handkerchief, in open court.
Not that he often took such chances. The daws of humor peck at the
heart worn on the sleeve; and quite rightly, for that is no place for
a heart. But in the privacy of his modest lodging-house room he took
the handkerchief out, and spread it before him, and looked at it, and
kissed it sometimes, I suppose,--it seems ungentle to pry thus into the
sacredness of a boy’s love,--and, certainly, kept it in sight, working,
studying, or thinking.
With all this, the handkerchief became somewhat rumpled, and at last
Horace felt that it must be brought back to the condition of neatness in
which he first knew it. So, on a Tuesday, he descended to the kitchen
of his lodging-house, and asked for a flat-iron. His good landlady, at
the head of an industrious, plump-armed Irish brigade, all vigorously
smoothing out towels, stared at him in surprise.
“If there’s anything you want ironed, Mr. Walpole, bring it down here, and
I’ll be _more’n_ glad to iron it for you.”
Horace grew red, and found his voice going entirely out of his control,
as he tried to explain that it wasn’t for that--it wasn’t for ironing
clothes--he was sure nobody could do it but himself.
“Do you want it hot or cold?” asked Mrs. Wilkins, puzzled.
“Cold!” said Horace desperately. And he got it cold, and had to heat it at
his own fire to perform his labor of love.
That was of a piece with many things he did. Of a piece, for instance,
with his looking in at the milliners’ windows and trying to think which
bonnet would best become her--and then taking himself severely to task
for dreaming that she would wear a ready-made bonnet. Of a piece with his
buying two seats for the theatre, and going alone and fancying her next
him, and glancing furtively at the empty place at the points where he
thought she would be amused, or pleased, or moved.
What a fool he was! Yes, my friend, and so are you and I. And remember
that this boy’s foolishness did not keep him tossing, stark awake, through
ghastly nights; did not start him up in the morning with a hot throat
and an unrested brain; did not send him down to his day’s work with the
haunting, clutching, lurking fear that springs forward at every stroke
of the clock, at every opening of the door. Perhaps you and I have known
folly worse than his.
Through all the winter--the red handkerchief cheered the hideous first
Monday in October, and the Christmas holidays, when business kept him
from going home to Montevista--he heard little or nothing of her. His
friends in the city, or rather his father’s friends, were all ingrained
New Yorkers, dating from the provincial period, who knew not Philadelphia;
and it was only from an occasional newspaper paragraph that he learned
that Judge Rittenhouse and his daughter were travelling through the South,
for the Judge’s health. Of course, he had a standing invitation to call
on them whenever he should find himself in Philadelphia; but they never
came nearer Philadelphia than Washington, and so he never found himself
in Philadelphia. He was not so sorry for this as you might think a lover
should be. He knew that, with a little patience, he might present himself
to Judge Rittenhouse as something more than a lawyer’s managing clerk.
For, meanwhile, good news had come from home, and things were going well
with him. Mineral springs had been discovered at Aristotle--mineral
springs may be discovered anywhere in north New York, if you only try;
though it is sometimes difficult to fit them with the proper Indian
legends. The name of the town had been changed to Avoca, and there was
already an Avoca Improvement Company, building a big hotel, advertising
right and left, and prophesying that the day of Saratoga and Sharon and
Richfield was ended. So the barrens between Montevista and Aristotle,
skirting the railroad, suddenly took on a value. Hitherto they had been
unsalable, except for taxes. For the most part they were an adjunct of
the estate of Montevista; and in February Horace went up to St. Lawrence
County and began the series of sales that was to realize his father’s most
hopeless dream, and clear Montevista of all incumbrances.
How pat it all came, he thought, as, on his return trip, the train
carried him past the little old station, with its glaring new sign,
AVOCA, just beyond the broad stretch of “Squire Walpole’s bad land,” now
sprouting with the surveyors’ stakes. After all was paid off on the old
home, there would be enough left to enable him to buy out Haskins, who
had openly expressed his desire to get into a “live firm,” and who was
willing to part with his interest for a reasonable sum down, backed up
by a succession of easy installments. And Judge Weeden had intimated, as
clearly as dignity would permit, his anxiety that Horace should seize the
opportunity.
* * * * *
Winter was still on the Jersey flats on the last day of March; but Horace,
waiting at a little “flag station,” found the air full of crude prophecies
of spring. He had been searching titles all day, in a close and gloomy
little town-hall, and he was glad to be out-of-doors again, and to think
that he should be back in New York by dinner time, for it was past five
o’clock.
But a talk with the station-master made the prospect less bright. No train
would stop there until seven.
Was there no other way of getting home? The lonely guardian of the Gothic
shanty thought it over, and found that there was a way. He talked of the
trains as though they were whimsical creatures under his charge.
“The’s a freight comin’ down right now,” he said, meditatively, “but I
can’t do nothin’ with her. She’s gotter get along mighty lively to keep
ahead of the Express from Philadelphia till she gets to the junction and
goes on a siding till the Express goes past. And as to the Express--why,
I couldn’t no more flag her than if she was a cyclone. But I tell you
what you do. You walk right down to the junction--’bout a mile ’n’ a
half down--and see if you can’t do something with number ninety-seven on
the other road. You see, she goes on to New York on our tracks, and she
mostly’s in the habit of waiting at the junction ’bout--say five to seven
minutes, to give that Express from Philadelphia a fair start. That Express
has it pretty much her own way on this road, for a fact. You go down to
the junction--walk right down the line--and you’ll get ninety-seven--there
ain’t no kind of doubt about it. You can’t see the junction; but it’s just
half a mile beyont that curve down there.”
So there was nothing to be done but to walk to the junction. The railroad
ran a straight, steadily descending mile on the top of a high embankment,
and then suddenly turned out of sight around a ragged elevation. Horace
buttoned his light overcoat, and tramped down the cinder-path between the
tracks.
Yes, spring was coming. The setting sun beamed a soft, hopeful red over
the shoulder of the ragged elevation; light, drifting mists rose from the
marsh land below him, and the last low rays struck a vapory opal through
them. There was a warm, almost prismatic purple hanging over the outlines
of the hills and woods far to the east. The damp air, even, had a certain
languid warmth in it; and though there was snow in the little hollows
at the foot of the embankment, and bits of thin whitish ice were in the
swampy pools, it was clear enough to Horace that spring was at hand.
Spring--and then summer; and, by the sea or in the mountains, the junior
partner of the house of Weeden, Snowden & Gilfeather might hope to meet
once more with Judge Rittenhouse’s daughter.
The noise of the freight-train, far up the track behind him, disturbed
Horace’s springtime revery. A forethought of rocking gravel-cars
scattering the overplus of their load by the way, and of reeking
oil-tanks, filling the air with petroleum, sent him down the embankment to
wait until the way was once more clear.
The freight-train went by and above him with a long-drawn roar and
clatter, and with a sudden fierce crash, and the shriek of iron upon iron,
at the end, and the last truck of the last car came down the embankment,
tearing a gully behind it, and ploughed a grave for itself in the marsh
ten yards ahead of him.
And, looking up, he saw a twisted rail raising its head like a shining
serpent above the dim line of the embankment. A furious rush took Horace
up the slope. A quarter of a mile below him the freight-train was slipping
around the curve. The fallen end of the last car was beating and tearing
the ties. He heard the shrill creak of the brakes and the frightened
whistle of the locomotive. But the grade was steep, and it was hard to
stop. And if they did stop they were half a mile from the junction--half a
mile from their only chance of warning the Express.
Horace heard in his ears the station-master’s words: “She’s gotter get
along mighty lively to keep ahead of the Express from Philadelphia.”
“Mighty lively--mighty lively,”--the words rang through his brain to the
time of thundering car-wheels.
He knew where he stood. He had made three-quarters of the straight mile.
He was three-quarters of a mile, then, from the little station. His
overcoat was off in half a second. Many a time had he stripped, with that
familiar movement, to trunks and sleeveless shirt, to run his mile or his
half-mile; but never had such a thirteen hundred yards lain before him, up
such a track, to be run for such an end.
The sweat was on his forehead before his right foot passed his left.
His young muscles strove and stretched. His feet struck the soft, unstable
path of cinders with strong, regular blows. His tense forearms strained
upward from his sides. Under his chest, thrown outward from his shoulders,
was a constricting line of pain. His wet face burnt. There was a fire
in his temples, and at every breath of his swelling nostrils something
throbbed behind his eyes. The eyes saw nothing but a dancing dazzle of
tracks and ties, through a burning blindness. And his feet beat, beat,
beat till the shifting cinders seemed afire under him.
That is what this human machine was doing, going at this extreme
pressure; every muscle, every breath, every drop of blood alive with the
pain of this intense stress. Looking at it you would have said, “A fleet,
light-limbed young man, with a stride like a deer, throwing the yards
under him in fine style.” All we know about the running other folks are
making in this world!
Half-way up the track Horace stopped short, panting hard, his heart
beating like a crazy drum, a nervous shiver on him. Up the track there was
a dull whirr, and he saw the engine of the express-train slipping down on
him--past the station already.
The white mists from the marshes had risen up over the embankment. The
last rays of the sunset shot through them, brilliant and blinding. Horace
could see the engine; but would the engineer see him, waving his hands in
futile gestures, in time to stop on that slippery, sharp grade? And of
what use would be his choking voice when the dull whirr should turn into
a roar? For a moment, in his hopeless disappointment, Horace felt like
throwing himself in the path of the train, like a wasted thing that had no
right to live, after so great a failure.
As will happen to those who are stunned by a great blow, his mind ran
back mechanically to the things nearest his heart, and in a flash he went
through the two weeks of his life. And then, before the thought had time
to form itself, he had brought a red silk handkerchief from his breast,
and was waving it with both hands, a fiery crimson in the opal mist.
Seen. The whistle shrieked; there was a groan and a creak of brakes,
the thunder of the train resolved itself into various rattling noises,
the engine slipped slowly by him, and slowed down, and he stood by the
platform of the last car as the express stopped.
There was a crowd around Horace in an instant. His head was whirling,
but in a dull way he said what he had to say. An officious passenger,
who would have explained it all to the conductor if the conductor had
waited, took the deliverer in his arms--for the boy was near fainting--and
enlightened the passengers who flocked around.
Horace hung in his embrace, too deadly weak even to accept the offer of
one of the dozen flasks that were thrust at him. Nothing was very clear in
his mind; as far as he could make out, his most distinct impression was of
a broad, flat beach, a blue sea and a blue sky, a black steamer making a
black trail of smoke across them, and a voice soft as an angel’s reading
Latin close by him. Then he opened his eyes and saw the woman of the voice
standing in front of him.
“Oh, Richard,” he heard her say,“it’s Mr. Walpole!”
Horace struggled to his feet. She took his hand in both of hers and drew
closer to him; the crowd falling back a little, seeing that they were
friends.
“What can I ever say to thank you?” she said. “You have saved our lives.
It’s not so much for myself, but”--she blushed faintly, and Horace felt
her hands tremble on his; “Richard--my husband--we were married to-day,
you know--and”--
Something heavy and black came between Horace and life for a few minutes.
When it passed away he straightened himself up out of the arms of the
officious passenger and stared about him, mind and memory coming back to
him. The people around looked at him oddly. A brakeman brought him his
overcoat, and he stood unresistingly while it was slipped on him. Then he
turned away and started down the embankment.
“Hold on!” cried the officious passenger excitedly; “we’re getting up a
testimonial”--
Horace never heard it. How he found his way he never cared to recall; but
the gas was dim in the city streets, and the fire was out in his little
lodging-house room when he came home; and his narrow white bed knows all
that I cannot tell of his tears and his broken dreams.
* * * * *
“Walpole,” said Judge Weeden, as he stood between the yawning doors of
the office safe, one morning in June, “I observe that you have a private
package here. Why do you not use the drawer of our--our late associate,
Mr. Haskins? It is yours now, you know. I’ll put your package in it.”
He poised the heavily sealed envelope in his hand. “Very odd _feeling_
package, Walpole. Remarkably soft!” he said. “Well, bless me, it’s none of
my business, of course. Horace, how much you look like your father!”
THE SEVEN CONVERSATIONS OF DEAR JONES AND BABY VAN RENSSELAER.
BY BRANDER MATTHEWS AND H. C. BUNNER.
I.
THE FIRST CONVERSATION.
TUESDAY, February 14, 1882.
The band was invisible, but, unfortunately, not inaudible. It was in the
butler’s pantry, playing Waldteufel’s latest waltz, “Süssen Veilchen.”
The English butler, who resented the intrusion of the German leader, was
introducing an _obbligato_ unforeseen by the composer. This was the second
of Mrs. Martin’s charming Tuesdays in February. Mrs. Martin herself,
fondly and familiarly known as the “Duchess of Washington Square,”
stopped a young man as he was making a desperate rush for his overcoat,
then reposing under three strata of late comers’ outer garments in the
second-floor back, and said to him:
“O Dear Jones”--the Duchess always called him Dear Jones--“I want to
introduce you to Baby Van Rensselaer--Phyllis Van Rensselaer, you
know--they always called her Baby Van Rensselaer, though I’m sure I don’t
know why--Phyllis is such a lovely name--don’t you think so?--and your
grandfathers were such friends.” [Dear Jones executed an _ex post facto_
condemnation upon his ancestor and hers.] “You know Major Van Rensselaer
was your grandfather’s partner until that unfortunate affair of the
embezzlement--O Baby dear--there you are, are you? I was wondering where
you were all this time. This is Mr. Jones, dear, one of your grandfather’s
most intimate friends. Oh, I don’t mean that, of course--you know what I
mean--and I do so want you two to know each other.”
DEAR JONES: What in the name of the prophet does the Duchess mean by
introducing me to More Girls?
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: I do wish the Duchess wouldn’t insist on tiring me
out with slim young men; I never can tell one from the other.
These remarks were not uttered. They remained in the privacy of the
inner consciousness. What they really said was:
DEAR JONES [_inarticulately_]: Miss Van Rensselaer.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER [_inattentively_]: Yes, it is rather warm.…
And they drifted apart in the crowd.
II.
THE SECOND CONVERSATION.
THURSDAY, April 13, 1882.
Of course, Dear Jones was the last to arrive of the favored children of
the world who had been invited to dine at Judge Gillespie’s “to meet the
Lord Bishop of Barset,” just imported from England per steamer “Servia.”
In the hall, the butler, whose appearance was even more dignified and
clerical than the Bishop’s, handed Dear Jones an unsealed communication.
DEAR JONES [_examining the contents_]: Who in Heligoland is Miss Van
Rensselaer?
As Dear Jones entered, Mrs. Sutton--the Judge’s daughter, you
know--married Charley Sutton, who came from San Francisco--Mrs.
Sutton gave a little sigh of relief, nodded to the butler, and said
in perfunctory answer to the apologies Dear Jones had not made: “Oh,
no; you’re not a bit late--we haven’t been waiting for you at all--the
Bishop has only just come”--(confidentially in his ear) “I’ve given you a
charming girl.” [Dear Jones shuddered: he knew what that generally meant.]
“You know Baby Van Rensselaer? Of course--there she is--now, go--and do be
bright and clever.” And after thus handicapping an inoffensive young man,
she took the Bishop’s arm in the middle of his ante-prandial anecdote.
DEAR JONES [_marching to his fate_]: It’s the Duchess’s girl again, by
Jove! It’s lucky Uncle Larry is going to take me off at ten sharp.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: Why, it’s _that_ Mr. Jones!
These remarks were not uttered. They remained in the privacy of the
inner consciousness. What they really said was:
DEAR JONES [_with audacious hypocrisy_]: Of course, _you_ don’t remember
me, Miss Van Rensselaer.…
BABY VAN RENSSELAER [_trumping his card unabashed_]: I really don’t quite.…
DEAR JONES [_offering his arm_]: Er … don’t you remember the Duch--Mrs.
Martin’s--that hideously rainy afternoon, just before Lent?
Here there was a gap in the conversation as the procession took up its
line of march, and moved through a narrow passage into the dining-room.
DEAR JONES [_making a brave dash at the “bright and clever”_]: Well, in
_my_ house, the door into the dining-room shall be eighteen feet wide.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER [_literal, stern, and cold_]: Are you building a
house, Mr. Jones?
DEAR JONES [_calmly_]: I am at present, Miss Van Rensselaer, building--let
me see--four--five--seven houses.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER [_coldly and suspecting flippancy_]: Ah, indeed--are
you a billionaire?
DEAR JONES: No; I’m an architect.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER [_in confusion_]: Oh, I’m sure I beg your pardon--
DEAR JONES: You needn’t. I shouldn’t be at all ashamed to be a billionaire.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: Oh, of course not--I didn’t mean _that_--
DEAR JONES [_unguardedly_]: Well, if it comes to that; I’m not ashamed of
my architecture either.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER [_calmly_]: Indeed? I have never seen any of it.
DEAR JONES: You sit here, I think. This is your card with the little lady
in the powdered wig--a cherubic Madame de Staël.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: And this is yours with a Cupid in a basket--a
nineteenth century Moses.
DEAR JONES [_taking his seat beside her_]: Talking about dinner cards--and
billionaires, you heard of that dinner old Creasers gave to fifty-two of
his friends of the new dispensation. I believe there _was_ one poor fellow
there whose wife had only half a peck of diamonds. He assembled his hordes
in the picture-gallery, as the dining-room wasn’t large enough--you see, I
didn’t build _his_ house. And to carry out the novelty of the thing, his
dinner cards were--
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: Playing-cards?
DEAR JONES: Just so--but they were painted, “hand-painted” on satin.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: And what did he take for himself--the king of
diamonds?
DEAR JONES: For the only time in his life he forgot himself--and he had to
put up with the Joker.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: What sort of people were there?
DEAR JONES: Very good sort, indeed. There was a M. Meissonnier and M.
Gérôme and a M. Corot--besides the man who sold them to him.
Everybody knows how a conversation runs on at dinner, when it does run
on. On this occasion it ran on for seventy minutes and six courses. Dear
Jones and Baby Van Rensselaer discussed the usual topics and the usual
bill-of-fare. Then, as the butler served the bombe _glacée à la Demidoff_--
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: Oh, I’m so glad you liked her. We were at school
together, you know, and she was with us when we went up the Saguenay last
August.
DEAR JONES: Why, _I_ went up the Saguenay last August.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER [_earnestly_]: And we didn’t meet? How miserably
absurd!
DEAR JONES: I’ll tell you whom I did meet--your father’s partner, Mr.
Hitchcock. He had his daughter with him, too--a very bright girl. You know
her, of course.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER [_coldly_]: I have heard she is quite clever. [A
pause.] The Hitchcocks--I believe--go more in the--New England set. I have
met her brother, though--Mr. Mather Hitchcock.…
DEAR JONES: Mat Hitchcock; that little cad?
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: Is he a little cad? I thought he was rather--bright.
After this, conversation was desultory; and soon the male guests were left
to their untrammeled selves, tobacco and the Bishop. At eleven minutes
past ten, in the vestibule of Judge Gillespie’s house, a young man and
a man not so young were buttoning their overcoats and lighting their
cigarettes. In the parlor behind them a soft contralto voice was lingering
on the rich, deep notes of “Der Asra,” the sweetest song of Jewish
inspiration, the song of Heine and of Rubinstein. They paused a moment as
the voice died away in
“Und mein Stamm sind jene Asra,
Welche sterben wenn sie lieben!”
The man not so young said: “Well, come along. What are you waiting for?”
DEAR JONES: What the devil are you in such a hurry for, Uncle Larry? It
looked abominably rude to leave those people in that way!
III.
THE THIRD CONVERSATION.
TUESDAY, May 30, 1882.
As the first band of the Decoration Day procession struck up “Marching
through Georgia” and marched past Uncle Larry’s house, a cheerfully
expectant party filed out of the parlor windows upon the broad stone
balcony, draped with the flag that had floated over the building for the
four long years the day commemorated. Uncle Larry had secured the Duchess
to matronize the annual gathering of young friends, the final friendly
meeting before the flight out of town; and many of those who accepted him
as the universal uncle had accepted also this invitation. Dear Jones and
Baby Van Rensselaer were seated in the corner of the balcony that caught
the southern sun, Baby Van Rensselaer, in Uncle Larry’s own study chair,
while Dear Jones was comfortably and gracefully perched on the broad
brown-stone railing of the balcony.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: Now, _doesn’t_ that music make your heart leap?
DEAR JONES: M’--yes.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: You know I haven’t the least bit of sympathy with
that affected talk about not being moved by these things, and thinking it
vulgar and all that. I’m proud to say I love my country, and I do love to
see my country’s soldiers. Don’t you?
DEAR JONES: M’--yes.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: Of course, I can’t really remember anything about the
war, but I try to pretend to myself that I do remember when I was held up
at the window to see the troops marching back from the grand review at
Washington. (_Rather more softly._) Mama told me about it often before she
died. And “Marching through Georgia” always makes the tears come to my
eyes; don’t it yours?
DEAR JONES: M’--yes.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: “Yes!” How queerly you say that!
DEAR JONES (_grimly_): I’m rather more inclined to cry when the band makes
“Stream and forest, hill and strand,
Reverberate with ‘Dixie.’”
BABY VAN RENSSELAER (_coldly_): I’m afraid, Mr. Jones, I do not understand
you. And you appear to have a very peculiar feeling about these things.
DEAR JONES [_rather absently_]: Well, yes, it is rather a matter of
feeling with me. Weak, I suppose--but the fact is, Miss Van Rensselaer, it
just breaks me up to see all this. You know, the war hit me pretty hard. I
lost my brother in hospital after Seven Pines--and then I lost my father,
the best friend I ever had, at Gettysburg, on the hill, you know, when he
was leading his regiment, and his men couldn’t make him stay back. So,
you see, I wouldn’t have come here at all to-day if--if--
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: Oh, Mr. Jones, I’m _so sorry_.
DEAR JONES [_surprised_]: Sorry? Why?
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: I didn’t quite understand you--but I do now. Why,
you’re taking off your hat. What is it? Oh, the battle-flags!
DEAR JONES: My father’s regiment.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER [_to herself_]: I wonder if that is the regiment I saw
coming back from Washington?
IV.
THE FOURTH CONVERSATION.
TUESDAY, August 22, 1882.
The train rattled hotly along on its sultry journey from one end of
Long Island to the other, a journey the half of which it had nearly
accomplished with much fuss and fret. Leaving his impediments of travel in
the smoker, Dear Jones entered the forward end of the parlor car in search
of an uncontaminated glass of water. As he set down the glass he glanced
along the car, and his manner changed at once. He opened the door for an
instant and threw on the down track his half-smoked cigarette; and then,
smiling pleasantly, he walked firmly down the car, past a rustic bridal
couple, and took a vacant seat just in front of Baby Van Rensselaer.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: Why, Mr. Jones!
DEAR JONES: Why, Miss Van Rensselaer!
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: Who would have thought of seeing you here in this hot
weather?
DEAR JONES: Can I have this seat or is it that I _mank_ at the
_convenances_--as the French say?
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: It’s Uncle Larry’s chair--he’s gone back to talk to
one of his vestrymen--he’s taking me to Shelter Island.
DEAR JONES: Shelter Island? How long are you going to stay there?
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: And where are you going?
DEAR JONES: I’m going to Sag Harbor to build a house for one of my
billionaires.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: Sag Harbor? What an extraordinary place for a house.
DEAR JONES: Oh, that’s nothing. Last year I had to build a house up in
Chemung county.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: Chemung?
DEAR JONES [_spelling it_]: C-h-e-m-u-n-g´--accent on the mung. You
probably call it Cheémung, but it is really Sh’mung.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: Where is it? and how do you get there?
DEAR JONES: By the _Chemung de fer_, of course.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: Oh, Mr. Jones.
DEAR JONES: You see, my mind is relaxed by the effort to build a house on
the model of the one occupied by the old woman who lived in a shoe--and
that variety of early English architecture is very wearing on the taste.
What sort of a house is it you are going to at Shelter Island? And how
long are you going to stay there?
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: Oh, it’s a stupid, old-fashioned place [_pause_]. Do
you think that bride is pretty? I have been watching them ever since we
left New York. They have been to town on their wedding-trip.
DEAR JONES: She is ratherish pretty. And he’s a shrewd fellow and likely
to get on. I shouldn’t wonder if he was the chief wire-puller of his
“deestrick.”
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: A village Hampden?
DEAR JONES: Some day he’ll withstand the little tyrant of the fields
and lead a revolt against the garden-sass monopoly, and so sail into
the legislature. I fear the bride is destined to ruin her digestion in
an Albany boarding-house, while the groom gives his days and nights to
affairs of state.
Here the train slackened its speed as it approached a small station
from which shrill notes of music arose.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: Look, the bride is going to leave us.
DEAR JONES: He lives here, and the local fife and drum corps have come to
welcome him home. Dinna ye hear that strident “Hail to the Chief,” they
have just executed?
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: How proudly she looks up at him! I think the band
ought to play something for her--but they are men, and they’ll never think
of it.
DEAR JONES: You cannot expect much tact from two fifes and a bass
drum, but unless my ears deceive me they have greeted the bride with a
well-meant attempt at “Home, Sweet Home.”
BABY VAN RENSSELAER:
“And each responsive soul has heard
That plaintive note’s appealing.
So deeply ‘Home, Sweet Home’ has stirred
The hidden founts of feeling.”
DEAR JONES [_surprised_]: Why--how did you know that poem?
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: Oh, I heard somebody quote it last Decoration Day--I
don’t know who--it struck me as very pretty and I looked it up.
DEAR JONES [_pleased_]: Oh, I remember. It has always been a favorite of
mine.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER [_coldly_]: Indeed?
DEAR JONES [_as the train starts again_]: Bride and groom, fife and drum,
fade away from sight and hearing. I wonder if we shall ever think of them
again?
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: I shall, I’m sure. She was so pretty. And, besides,
the music was lively. I shan’t have anything half as amusing as that at
Shelter Island.
DEAR JONES: Don’t you like it, then?
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: Oh, dear no! I shall be glad to get away to my aunt’s
place at Watch Hill. It’s very poky indeed, at Shelter Island (_sighs_).
And to think that I shall have to spend just two weeks of primness and
propriety there.
DEAR JONES: Just two weeks? Ah!
V.
THE FIFTH CONVERSATION.
TUESDAY, September 5, 1882. (Afternoon.)
Although it is difficult to tell the length from the breadth of the small
steamer that plies between Sag Harbor and New London, it is safe to assume
that it was the bow that was pointing away from the Shelter Island dock as
Baby Van Rensselaer stepped out of the cabin and Dear Jones walked up to
her, lifting his hat with an expression of surprise on his face that might
have been better, considering that he had rehearsed it a number of times
since he left Sag Harbor.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: Why, Mr. Jones!
DEAR JONES [_forgetting his lines, and improvising_]: How--how--odd we
should meet again just here. Funny, isn’t it?
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: It is exceedingly humorous.
DEAR JONES: I did not tell you, did I!--when I saw you on the train, you
know--that I had to go to New London, after I’d finished my work at Sag
Harbor.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER [_uncompromisingly_]: I don’t think you said anything
about New London at all.
DEAR JONES: I probably said the Pequot House. It’s the same thing,
you know. I have to go to New London to inspect the Race Rock
lighthouse--you’ve heard of the famous lighthouse at Race Rock, of course.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: I don’t think its fame has reached me.
DEAR JONES: It’s a very curious structure, indeed. And, the fact is, one
of my--my billionaires--wants a lighthouse. He has an extraordinary notion
of building a lighthouse near his place on the seashore--a lighthouse of
his own. Odd idea, isn’t it?
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: It is a very odd proceeding altogether, I should say.
DEAR JONES: I suppose you mean that _I_ am a very odd proceeding.
Well, I will confess, and throw myself on your mercy. I _did_ hope to
meet you--and the Duch--Mrs. Martin. After two weeks of the society of
billionaires, I think I’m excusable.… [_A painful pause._] And I _had_
to go to Race Rock, so I got off a day earlier than I had meant to, by
cutting one of the turrets out of my original plan--he didn’t mind--there
are eleven left--and--and--will you forgive me?
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: Really, I have nothing to forgive, Mr. Jones. I’ve no
doubt my aunt will be very glad to see you.
DEAR JONES: Ah--how _is_ Mrs. Martin?
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: She is in the cabin. She is quite well at present;
but she is always very nervous about sea-sickness, and she prefers to lie
down. I must go in and sit with her.
DEAR JONES [_quickly_]: Indeed--I didn’t know Mrs. Martin suffered from
sea-sickness. She’s crossed the ocean so many times, you know. How many is
it?
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: Six, I think.
DEAR JONES: No; eight, isn’t it? I’m almost sure it’s eight.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: Very possibly. But she is a great sufferer. I must go
and see how she is.
DEAR JONES: Yes, we’ll go. I want to see Mrs. Martin. One of the
disadvantages of the summer season is that one can’t see the Duchess at
regular intervals to exchange gossip.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: Well, if you have any confidential gossip for the
Duchess, I will wait here until you come out. I want to get all the fresh
air possible, if I have to sit in the cabin for the rest of the trip.
DEAR JONES [_asserting himself_]: Very well. I have the contents of four
letters from Newport to pour into the Duchess’s ear. You know I was
staying at the Hitchcocks’ for a fortnight, before I went to Sag Harbor.
He went into the stuffy little cabin, where the Duchess was lying on
a bench, in a wilderness of shawls. Baby Van Rensselaer waited a good
half-hour, but heard no sound of returning footsteps from that gloomy
cave. Finally she went in to investigate, and was told by the Duchess that
“Dear Jones has gone after, or whatever you call it, to smoke a cigar.”
Baby Van Rensselaer made up her mind that under those circumstances she
would go forward and read her book. She also made up her mind that Mr.
Jones was extremely rude. His rudeness, she found, as she sat reading
at the bow of the boat, really spoiled her book. She knew that she ought
not to let such little things annoy her; but then, it was a very stupid
chapter, and the fresh sea breeze blew the pages back and forward, and her
veil would not stay over her hair, and she always had hated traveling,
and it was so disagreeable to have people behave in that way--especially
people--well, any people. Just here she turned her head, and saw Dear
Jones advancing from the cabin with a bright and smiling face.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER [_about to rise_]: My aunt wants me, I suppose.
DEAR JONES: Not at all--not in the least--at present. I just came through
the cabin--on tiptoe--and she was fast asleep. In fact, not to speak it
profanely, she was--she was audible.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: Oh!
DEAR JONES: I’m glad to see you’re getting the benefit of the fresh air.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: I was afraid of waking my aunt with the rustling of
the leaves of my book, so I came out here.
DEAR JONES: I’m glad you did. It would be a shame for you to have to sit
in that close cabin. That’s the reason I didn’t come back to you when I
left Mrs. Martin. I played a pious fraud on you for the benefit of your
health.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: You were very considerate.
DEAR JONES [_enthusiastically_]: Oh, not at all.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER [_calmly_]: And if you’ll excuse me, I’ll finish my
book. I can’t read in the cabin.
Baby Van Rensselaer resumed her reading and found the book improved a
little. After a while she looked up and saw Dear Jones sitting on the
rail, meekly twirling his thumbs.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER [_after an effort at silence_]: Don’t be so
ridiculously absurd. What are you doing there?
DEAR JONES: I’m waiting to be spoken to.
Baby Van Rensselaer smiled. The boat had just swung out of the jaws of
the bay. Overhead was the full glory of a sky which made one believe that
there never was such a thing as a cloud. And they sped along over the sea
of water in a sea of light. Just then there came from the depths under the
cabin the rise and fall of a measured, mocking melody, high and clear as
the notes of a lark.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: Why, that must be a bird whistling--only birds don’t
whistle “Amaryllis.”
DEAR JONES: ’Tisn’t a bird--it’s an engineer.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: An engineer?
DEAR JONES: A grimy engineer. Quite a pathetic story, too. Some of the
Sag Harbor people took him up as a boy. He had a wonderful ear and an
extraordinary tenor voice. They were going to make a Mario of him. They
paid for his education in New York, and then sent him over to Paris to the
Conservatory to be finished off. And he hadn’t been there six weeks before
he caught the regular Paris pleurisy--it’s an _article de Paris_, you
know, and lost his voice utterly and hopelessly.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: Oh!
DEAR JONES: And so he had to come back and engineer for his living.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: How very sad. Now I can scarcely bear to hear him
whistle.
DEAR JONES [_to himself_]: Well, I didn’t mean to produce that effect.
[_To her._] Oh, he doesn’t mind it a bit. Hear him now.
The engineer was executing a series of brilliant variations on the
“Air du Roi Louis XIII.,” melting by ingenious gradations into the
“Babies on our Block.”
DEAR JONES [_hastily_]: Race Rock lies over that way. You can’t see it
yet--but you will after a while.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: Oh, then there _is_ a Race Rock?
DEAR JONES: Why, certainly.…
With this starter, it may readily be understood that a man of Dear Jones’s
fecundity of intellect and fine imaginative powers was able to fill the
greater part of the afternoon with fluent conversation. Two or three times
Baby Van Rensselaer made futile attempts to go into the cabin to see how
the Duchess was sleeping; but as many times she forgot her errand. There
was a fair breeze blowing from the northeast, but the sea was smooth, and
the little boat scarcely rocked on the long, low waves. It was getting
toward four o’clock when there was a sudden stoppage of the engineer’s
whistling, and of the machinery of the boat. Baby Van Rensselaer sent
Dear Jones back to inquire into the cause, for they were alone on the
broad sea, with only a tantalizing glimpse of New London harbor stretching
out welcoming arms of green, with the Groton monument stuck like a huge
clothes-pin on the left arm. Dear Jones came back, trying hard to look
decently perturbed and gloomy, but with a barbarian joy lighting up his
bronzed features.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: What is it?
DEAR JONES: The machinery is on a dead centre. And the whistling engineer
says that he’ll have to wait until he can get into port and hitch a horse
to the crank to start her off again.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: But how are we to get into port?
DEAR JONES: The whistling engineer further says that we are now drifting
toward Watch Hill.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: That’s just where we want to go.
DEAR JONES: Yes. [_An unholy toot from the steam whistle._] And there he
is signalling that yacht to take us off!
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: I must go to my aunt now.
DEAR JONES: Why--there’s no hurry.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: No, but she’ll be so frightened--she’ll think it’s
going to blow up or something.
Baby Van Rensselaer disappeared in the depths of the cabin. Dear Jones
disconsolately walked the deck in solitary silence for five minutes. When
Baby Van Rensselaer reappeared, his spirits rose.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: My aunt is afraid you may have difficulty in reaching
New London to-night. She wants me to ask you if you won’t stay over-night
at her place at Watch Hill?
DEAR JONES: Won’t I? Well, I will--have much pleasure in accepting your
aunt’s invitation.
VI.
THE SIXTH CONVERSATION.
TUESDAY, September 5, 1882. (Evening.)
A row of Japanese lanterns shed a Cathayan light along the little path
leading from the Duchess’s house on a rocky promontory to the little beach
which nestled under its shoulder. The moon softly and judiciously lit up
the baby breakers which in Long Island Sound imitate the surf of the outer
sea. It threw eerie shadows behind the bath-houses, and fell with gentle
radiance upon two dripping but shapely figures emerging from the water,
where the other bathers were unwisely lingering.
DEAR JONES: I think this is simply delightful. I really never got the
perfect enjoyment of an evening swim before.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: I am glad you enjoyed it.
DEAR JONES: There is something so charming in this aristocratic seclusion,
with the shouts and laughter of the vulgar herd just far enough off to be
picturesque--if you can call a noise picturesque.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER [_coldly_]: I think this beach might be a little more
private--it’s shared in common by these three cottages.
DEAR JONES: But they seem to be very nice people here. And they all swim
so well, it quite put me on my mettle. You are really a splendid swimmer,
do you know it? And that girl I towed out to the buoy, who is she?
BABY VAN RENSSELAER [_explosively_]: Mr. Jones, this is positively
insulting!
DEAR JONES: Wh--what--wh--why? I don’t understand you.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: To pretend that you don’t know that Hitchcock woman!
DEAR JONES [_innocently_]: Was that Miss Hitchcock? I didn’t recognize her.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: If this is your idea of humor, Mr. Jones, it is
simply offensive!
DEAR JONES: But, upon my soul, I didn’t know the girl--nor she me!
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: You didn’t know her? After you have been staying two
weeks at her house at Newport?
DEAR JONES [_with something like dignity_]: I was staying at her father’s
house, Miss Van Rensselaer, and Miss Hitchcock was away on a visit.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: Up the Saguenay, perhaps?
DEAR JONES: Very likely. Miss Hitchcock may have left a large part of the
Saguenay unexplored for all I know. I was introduced to her party only
half an hour before we got off the boat at Quebec.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: Long enough, however, to discover that she was
“bright.”
DEAR JONES: Quite long enough, Miss Van Rensselaer. One may find out a
great deal of another’s character in half an hour.
There was a pause, which was filled by the strains of a Virginia
reel, coming from one of the cottages high up on the bank, where
an impromptu dance was just begun. The moonlight fell on Baby Van
Rensselaer’s little white teeth, set firmly between her parted
lips. The pause was broken.
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: If you propose to descend to brutality of this sort,
Mr. Jones, I think we need prolong neither the conversation--nor the
acquaintance.
DEAR JONES [_honestly_]: No--you can’t mean that--Miss Van
Rensselaer--Baby--
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: What, sir! Your familiarity is--I can’t stand
familiarity from you! (_She clenches her little hands._)
DEAR JONES: You have no right to treat me like this. If I am familiar it
is because I love you--and you know it!
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: This is the first I have heard of it, sir. I trust it
will be the last. Will you kindly permit me to pass, or must I--
DEAR JONES: You may go where you wish, Miss Van Rensselaer--No, come, this
is ridiculous--
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: Is it?
DEAR JONES: I mean it is foolish. Don’t let us--
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: Don’t let us see each other again!
VII.
THE SEVENTH CONVERSATION.
THURSDAY, February 14, 1884.
As the soft, low notes of the wedding-march from “Lohengrin” fell gently
from the organ-loft over the entrance of Grace Church, the quartet of
able-bodied ushers passed up the centre aisle and parted the white
ribbons--a silken barrier which they had gallantly defended for an
hour in a vain effort to keep the common herd of acquaintance separate
from the chosen many of the family. Behind them came two pretty little
girls, strewing the aisle with white flowers from their aprons. The four
bridesmaids, two abreast, passed up the aisle after the little girls,
proud in their reflected glory. Then came the bride, leaning on Judge
Gillespie’s arm, and radiant with youth and beauty and happiness. As the
procession drew near the chancel-rail, the groom came from the vestry
and advanced to meet her, accompanied by his best man, Uncle Larry, who
relieved him of his hat and overcoat, the which he would dextrously return
to him when the happy couple should leave the church man and wife. And in
due time the Bishop asked, “Wilt thou have this Woman to thy wedded wife?”
DEAR JONES: I will.
The Bishop asked again, “Wilt thou have this Man to thy wedded husband?”
BABY VAN RENSSELAER: I will.
As they knelt at the altar the sun came out and fell through the
window, and the stained glass sifted down on them the mingled hues
of hope and of faith and love; and the Bishop blessed them.
THE RIVAL GHOSTS.
BY BRANDER MATTHEWS.
The good ship sped on her way across the calm Atlantic. It was an outward
passage, according to the little charts which the company had charily
distributed, but most of the passengers were homeward bound, after a
summer of rest and recreation, and they were counting the days before
they might hope to see Fire Island Light. On the lee side of the boat,
comfortably sheltered from the wind, and just by the door of the captain’s
room (which was theirs during the day), sat a little group of returning
Americans. The Duchess (she was down on the purser’s list as Mrs. Martin,
but her friends and familiars called her the Duchess of Washington Square)
and Baby Van Rensselaer (she was quite old enough to vote, had her sex
been entitled to that duty, but as the younger of two sisters she was
still the baby of the family)--the Duchess and Baby Van Rensselaer were
discussing the pleasant English voice and the not unpleasant English
accent of a manly young lordling who was going to America for sport. Uncle
Larry and Dear Jones were enticing each other into a bet on the ship’s run
of the morrow.
“I’ll give you two to one she don’t make 420,” said Dear Jones.
“I’ll take it,” answered Uncle Larry. “We made 427 the fifth day last
year.” It was Uncle Larry’s seventeenth visit to Europe, and this was
therefore his thirty-fourth voyage.
“And when did you get in?” asked Baby Van Rensselaer. “I don’t care a bit
about the run, so long as we get in soon.”
“We crossed the bar Sunday night, just seven days after we left
Queenstown, and we dropped anchor off Quarantine at three o’clock on
Monday morning.”
“I hope we sha’n’t do that this time. I can’t seem to sleep any when the
boat stops.”
“I can; but I didn’t,” continued Uncle Larry; “because my stateroom was
the most for’ard in the boat, and the donkey-engine that let down the
anchor was right over my head.”
“So you got up and saw the sunrise over the bay,” said Dear Jones, “with
the electric lights of the city twinkling in the distance, and the first
faint flush of the dawn in the east just over Fort Lafayette, and the rosy
tinge which spread softly upward, and”--
“Did you both come back together?” asked the Duchess.
“Because he has crossed thirty-four times you must not suppose he has a
monopoly in sunrises,” retorted Dear Jones. “No; this was my own sunrise;
and a mighty pretty one it was, too.”
“I’m not matching sunrises with you,” remarked Uncle Larry calmly; “but
I’m willing to back a merry jest called forth by my sunrise against any
two merry jests called forth by yours.”
“I confess reluctantly that my sunrise evoked no merry jest at all.” Dear
Jones was an honest man, and would scorn to invent a merry jest on the
spur of the moment.
“That’s where my sunrise has the call,” said Uncle Larry complacently.
“What was the merry jest?” was Baby Van Rensselaer’s inquiry, the natural
result of a feminine curiosity thus artistically excited.
“Well, here it is. I was standing aft, near a patriotic American and a
wandering Irishman, and the patriotic American rashly declared that you
couldn’t see a sunrise like that anywhere in Europe, and this gave the
Irishman his chance, and he said, ‘Sure ye don’t have ’m here till we’re
through with ’em over there.’”
“It is true,” said Dear Jones thoughtfully, “that they do have some things
over there better than we do; for instance, umbrellas.”
“And gowns,” added the Duchess.
“And antiquities”--this was Uncle Larry’s contribution.
“And we do have some things so much better in America!” protested Baby Van
Rensselaer, as yet uncorrupted by any worship of the effete monarchies of
despotic Europe. “We make lots of things a great deal nicer than you can
get them in Europe--especially ice-cream.”
“And pretty girls,” added Dear Jones; but he did not look at her.
“And spooks,” remarked Uncle Larry casually.
“Spooks?” queried the Duchess.
“Spooks. I maintain the word. Ghosts, if you like that better, or
spectres. We turn out the best quality of spook”--
“You forget the lovely ghost stories about the Rhine, and the Black
Forest,” interrupted Miss Van Rensselaer, with feminine inconsistency.
“I remember the Rhine and the Black Forest and all the other haunts
of elves and fairies and hobgoblins; but for good honest spooks there
is no place like home. And what differentiates our spook--_spiritus
Americanus_--from the ordinary ghost of literature is that it responds
to the American sense of humor. Take Irving’s stories, for example.
_The Headless Horseman_, that’s a comic ghost story. And Rip Van
Winkle--consider what humor, and what good-humor, there is in the telling
of his meeting with the goblin crew of Hendrik Hudson’s men! A still
better example of this American way of dealing with legend and mystery is
the marvellous tale of the rival ghosts.”
“The rival ghosts?” queried the Duchess and Baby Van Rensselaer together.
“Who were they?”
“Didn’t I ever tell you about them?” answered Uncle Larry, a gleam of
approaching joy flashing from his eye.
“Since he is bound to tell us sooner or later, we’d better be resigned,
and hear it now,” said Dear Jones.
“If you are not more eager, I won’t tell it at all.”
“Oh, do, Uncle Larry; you know I just dote on ghost stories,” pleaded Baby
Van Rensselaer.
“Once upon a time,” began Uncle Larry--“in fact, a very few years
ago--there lived in the thriving town of New York a young American called
Duncan--Eliphalet Duncan. Like his name, he was half Yankee and half
Scotch, and naturally he was a lawyer, and had come to New York to make
his way. His father was a Scotchman, who had come over and settled in
Boston, and married a Salem girl. When Eliphalet Duncan was about twenty
he lost both of his parents. His father left him with enough money to
give him a start, and a strong feeling of pride in his Scotch birth; you
see there was a title in the family in Scotland, and although Eliphalet’s
father was the younger son of a younger son, yet he always remembered, and
always bade his only son to remember, that his ancestry was noble. His
mother left him her full share of Yankee grit, and a little old house in
Salem which had belonged to her family for more than two hundred years.
She was a Hitchcock, and the Hitchcocks had been settled in Salem since
the year 1. It was a great-great-grandfather of Mr. Eliphalet Hitchcock
who was foremost in the time of the Salem witchcraft craze. And this
little old house which she left to my friend Eliphalet Duncan was haunted.”
“By the ghost of one of the witches, of course,” interrupted Dear Jones.
“Now how could it be the ghost of a witch, since the witches were all
burned at the stake? You never heard of anybody who was burned having a
ghost, did you?”
“That’s an argument in favor of cremation, at any rate,” replied Jones,
evading the direct question.
“It is, if you don’t like ghosts. I do,” said Baby Van Rensselaer.
“And so do I,” added Uncle Larry. “I love a ghost as dearly as an
Englishman loves a lord.”
“Go on with your story,” said the Duchess, majestically overruling all
extraneous discussion.
“This little old house at Salem was haunted,” resumed Uncle Larry. “And by
a very distinguished ghost--or at least by a ghost with very remarkable
attributes.”
“What was he like?” asked Baby Van Rensselaer, with a premonitory shiver
of anticipatory delight.
“It had a lot of peculiarities. In the first place, it never appeared to
the master of the house. Mostly it confined its visitations to unwelcome
guests. In the course of the last hundred years it had frightened away
four successive mothers-in-law, while never intruding on the head of the
household.”
“I guess that ghost had been one of the boys when he was alive and in the
flesh.” This was Dear Jones’s contribution to the telling of the tale.
“In the second place,” continued Uncle Larry, “it never frightened anybody
the first time it appeared. Only on the second visit were the ghost-seers
scared; but then they were scared enough for twice, and they rarely
mustered up courage enough to risk a third interview. One of the most
curious characteristics of this well-meaning spook was that it had no
face--or at least that nobody ever saw its face.”
“Perhaps he kept his countenance veiled?” queried the Duchess, who was
beginning to remember that she never did like ghost stories.
“That was what I was never able to find out. I have asked several people
who saw the ghost, and none of them could tell me anything about its face,
and yet while in its presence they never noticed its features, and never
remarked on their absence or concealment. It was only afterward when
they tried to recall calmly all the circumstances of meeting with the
mysterious stranger, that they became aware that they had not seen its
face. And they could not say whether the features were covered, or whether
they were wanting, or what the trouble was. They knew only that the face
was never seen. And no matter how often they might see it, they never
fathomed this mystery. To this day nobody knows whether the ghost which
used to haunt the little old house in Salem had a face, or what manner of
face it had.”
“How awfully weird!” said Baby Van Rensselaer. “And why did the ghost go
away?”
“I haven’t said it went away,” answered Uncle Larry, with much dignity.
“But you said it _used_ to haunt the little old house at Salem, so I
supposed it had moved. Didn’t it?”
“You shall be told in due time. Eliphalet Duncan used to spend most of
his summer vacations at Salem, and the ghost never bothered him at all,
for he was the master of the house--much to his disgust, too, because he
wanted to see for himself the mysterious tenant at will of his property.
But he never saw it, never. He arranged with friends to call him whenever
it might appear, and he slept in the next room with the door open; and
yet when their frightened cries waked him the ghost was gone, and his
only reward was to hear reproachful sighs as soon as he went back to
bed. You see, the ghost thought it was not fair of Eliphalet to seek an
introduction which was plainly unwelcome.”
Dear Jones interrupted the story-teller by getting up and tucking a heavy
rug more snugly around Baby Van Rensselaer’s feet, for the sky was now
overcast and gray, and the air was damp and penetrating.
“One fine spring morning,” pursued Uncle Larry, “Eliphalet Duncan received
great news. I told you that there was a title in the family in Scotland,
and that Eliphalet’s father was the younger son of a younger son. Well, it
happened that all Eliphalet’s father’s brothers and uncles had died off
without male issue except the eldest son of the eldest, and he, of course,
bore the title, and was Baron Duncan of Duncan. Now the great news that
Eliphalet Duncan received in New York one fine spring morning was that
Baron Duncan and his only son had been yachting in the Hebrides, and they
had been caught in a black squall, and they were both dead. So my friend
Eliphalet Duncan inherited the title and the estates.”
“How romantic!” said the Duchess. “So he was a baron!”
“Well,” answered Uncle Larry, “he was a baron if he chose. But he didn’t
choose.”
“More fool he!” said Dear Jones sententiously.
“Well,” answered Uncle Larry, “I’m not so sure of that. You see, Eliphalet
Duncan was half Scotch and half Yankee, and he had two eyes to the main
chance. He held his tongue about his windfall of luck until he could find
out whether the Scotch estates were enough to keep up the Scotch title. He
soon discovered that they were not, and that the late Lord Duncan, having
married money, kept up such state as he could out of the revenues of the
dowry of Lady Duncan. And Eliphalet, he decided that he would rather be a
well-fed lawyer in New York, living comfortably on his practice, than a
starving lord in Scotland, living scantily on his title.”
“But he kept his title?” asked the Duchess.
“Well,” answered Uncle Larry, “he kept it quiet. I knew it, and a friend
or two more. But Eliphalet was a sight too smart to put Baron Duncan of
Duncan, Attorney and Counsellor at Law, on his shingle.”
“What has all this got to do with your ghost?” asked Dear Jones
pertinently.
“Nothing with that ghost, but a good deal with another ghost. Eliphalet
was very learned in spirit lore--perhaps because he owned the haunted
house at Salem, perhaps because he was a Scotchman by descent. At all
events, he had made a special study of the wraiths and white ladies and
banshees and bogies of all kinds whose sayings and doings and warnings
are recorded in the annals of the Scottish nobility. In fact, he was
acquainted with the habits of every reputable spook in the Scotch peerage.
And he knew that there was a Duncan ghost attached to the person of the
holder of the title of Baron Duncan of Duncan.”
“So, besides being the owner of a haunted house in Salem, he was also a
haunted man in Scotland?” asked Baby Van Rensselaer.
“Just so. But the Scotch ghost was not unpleasant, like the Salem
ghost, although it had one peculiarity in common with its transatlantic
fellow-spook. It never appeared to the holder of the title, just as the
other never was visible to the owner of the house. In fact, the Duncan
ghost was never seen at all. It was a guardian angel only. Its sole duty
was to be in personal attendance on Baron Duncan of Duncan, and to warn
him of impending evil. The traditions of the house told that the Barons of
Duncan had again and again felt a premonition of ill fortune. Some of them
had yielded and withdrawn from the venture they had undertaken, and it had
failed dismally. Some had been obstinate, and had hardened their hearts,
and had gone on reckless to defeat and to death. In no case had a Lord
Duncan been exposed to peril without fair warning.”
“Then how came it that the father and son were lost in the yacht off the
Hebrides?” asked Dear Jones.
“Because they were too enlightened to yield to superstition. There is
extant now a letter of Lord Duncan, written to his wife a few minutes
before he and his son set sail, in which he tells her how hard he has had
to struggle with an almost overmastering desire to give up the trip. Had
he obeyed the friendly warning of the family ghost, the latter would have
been spared a journey across the Atlantic.”
“Did the ghost leave Scotland for America as soon as the old baron died?”
asked Baby Van Rensselaer, with much interest.
“How did he come over,” queried Dear Jones--“in the steerage, or as a
cabin passenger?”
“I don’t know,” answered Uncle Larry calmly, “and Eliphalet, he didn’t
know. For as he was in no danger, and stood in no need of warning, he
couldn’t tell whether the ghost was on duty or not. Of course he was on
the watch for it all the time. But he never got any proof of its presence
until he went down to the little old house of Salem, just before the
Fourth of July. He took a friend down with him--a young fellow who had
been in the regular army since the day Fort Sumter was fired on, and who
thought that after four years of the little unpleasantness down South,
including six months in Libby, and after ten years of fighting the bad
Indians on the plains, he wasn’t likely to be much frightened by a ghost.
Well, Eliphalet and the officer sat out on the porch all the evening
smoking and talking over points in military law. A little after twelve
o’clock, just as they began to think it was about time to turn in, they
heard the most ghastly noise in the house. It wasn’t a shriek, or a howl,
or a yell, or anything they could put a name to. It was an undeterminate,
inexplicable shiver and shudder of sound, which went wailing out of the
window. The officer had been at Cold Harbor, but he felt himself getting
colder this time. Eliphalet knew it was the ghost who haunted the house.
As this weird sound died away, it was followed by another, sharp, short,
blood-curdling in its intensity. Something in this cry seemed familiar to
Eliphalet, and he felt sure that it proceeded from the family ghost, the
warning wraith of the Duncans.”
“Do I understand you to intimate that both ghosts were there together?”
inquired the Duchess anxiously.
“Both of them were there,” answered Uncle Larry. “You see, one of them
belonged to the house, and had to be there all the time, and the other
was attached to the person of Baron Duncan, and had to follow him there;
wherever he was, there was that ghost also. But Eliphalet, he had
scarcely time to think this out when he heard both sounds again, not one
after another, but both together, and something told him--some sort of
an instinct he had--that those two ghosts didn’t agree, didn’t get on
together, didn’t exactly hit it off; in fact, that they were quarrelling.”
“Quarrelling ghosts! Well, I never!” was Baby Van Rensselaer’s remark.
“It is a blessed thing to see ghosts dwell together in unity,” said Dear
Jones.
And the Duchess added, “It would certainly be setting a better example.”
“You know,” resumed Uncle Larry, “that two waves of light or of sound may
interfere and produce darkness or silence. So it was with these rival
spooks. They interfered, but they did not produce silence or darkness. On
the contrary, as soon as Eliphalet and the officer went into the house,
there began at once a series of spiritualistic manifestations, a regular
dark séance. A tambourine was played upon, a bell was rung, and a flaming
banjo went singing around the room.”
“Where did they get the banjo?” asked Dear Jones skeptically.
“I don’t know. Materialized it, maybe, just as they did the tambourine.
You don’t suppose a quiet New York lawyer kept a stock of musical
instruments large enough to fit out a strolling minstrel troupe just on
the chance of a pair of ghosts coming to give him a surprise party, do
you? Every spook has its own instrument of torture. Angels play on harps,
I’m informed, and spirits delight in banjos and tambourines. These spooks
of Eliphalet Duncan’s were ghosts with all the modern improvements, and
I guess they were capable of providing their own musical weapons. At all
events, they had them there in the little old house at Salem the night
Eliphalet and his friend came down. And they played on them, and they rang
the bell, and they rapped here, there, and everywhere. And they kept it up
all night.”
“All night?” asked the awe-stricken Duchess.
“All night long,” said Uncle Larry solemnly; “and the next night, too.
Eliphalet did not get a wink of sleep, neither did his friend. On the
second night the house ghost was seen by the officer; on the third night
it showed itself again; and the next morning the officer packed his
grip-sack and took the first train to Boston. He was a New Yorker, but he
said he’d sooner go to Boston than see that ghost again. Eliphalet, he
wasn’t scared at all, partly because he never saw either the domiciliary
or the titular spook, and partly because he felt himself on friendly terms
with the spirit world, and didn’t scare easily. But after losing three
nights’ sleep and the society of his friend, he began to be a little
impatient, and to think that the thing had gone far enough. You see, while
in a way he was fond of ghosts, yet he liked them best one at a time. Two
ghosts were one too many. He wasn’t bent on making a collection of spooks.
He and one ghost were company, but he and two ghosts were a crowd.”
“What did he do?” asked Baby Van Rensselaer.
“Well, he couldn’t do anything. He waited awhile, hoping they would get
tired; but he got tired out first. You see, it comes natural to a spook to
sleep in the daytime, but a man wants to sleep nights, and they wouldn’t
let him sleep nights. They kept on wrangling and quarrelling incessantly;
they manifested and they dark-séanced as regularly as the old clock on the
stairs struck twelve; they rapped and they rang bells and they banged the
tambourine and they threw the flaming banjo about the house, and, worse
than all, they swore.”
“I did not know that spirits were addicted to bad language,” said the
Duchess.
“How did he know they were swearing? Could he hear them?” asked Dear Jones.
“That was just it,” responded Uncle Larry; “he could not hear them--at
least not distinctly. There were inarticulate murmurs and stifled
rumblings. But the impression produced on him was that they were
swearing. If they had only sworn right out, he would not have minded it so
much, because he would have known the worst. But the feeling that the air
was full of suppressed profanity was very wearing, and after standing it
for a week, he gave up in disgust and went to the White Mountains.”
“Leaving them to fight it out, I suppose,” interjected Baby Van Rensselaer.
“Not at all,” explained Uncle Larry. “They could not quarrel unless he was
present. You see, he could not leave the titular ghost behind him, and the
domiciliary ghost could not leave the house. When he went away he took the
family ghost with him, leaving the house ghost behind. Now spooks can’t
quarrel when they are a hundred miles apart any more than men can.”
“And what happened afterward?” asked Baby Van Rensselaer, with a pretty
impatience.
“A most marvellous thing happened. Eliphalet Duncan went to the White
Mountains, and in the car of the railroad that runs to the top of Mount
Washington he met a classmate whom he had not seen for years, and
this classmate introduced Duncan to his sister, and this sister was a
remarkably pretty girl, and Duncan fell in love with her at first sight,
and by the time he got to the top of Mount Washington he was so deep in
love that he began to consider his own unworthiness, and to wonder whether
she might ever be induced to care for him a little--ever so little.”
“I don’t think that is so marvellous a thing,” said Dear Jones, glancing
at Baby Van Rensselaer.
“Who was she?” asked the Duchess, who had once lived in Philadelphia.
“She was Miss Kitty Sutton, of San Francisco, and she was a daughter of
old Judge Sutton, of the firm of Pixley and Sutton.”
“A very respectable family,” assented the Duchess.
“I hope she wasn’t a daughter of that loud and vulgar old Mrs. Sutton whom
I met at Saratoga, one summer, four or five years ago?” said Dear Jones.
“Probably she was.”
“She was a horrid old woman. The boys used to call her Mother Gorgon.”
“The pretty Kitty Sutton with whom Eliphalet Duncan had fallen in love was
the daughter of Mother Gorgon. But he never saw the mother, who was in
’Frisco, or Los Angeles, or Santa Fé, or somewhere out West, and he saw
a great deal of the daughter, who was up in the White Mountains. She was
travelling with her brother and his wife, and as they journeyed from hotel
to hotel, Duncan went with them, and filled out the quartette. Before the
end of the summer he began to think about proposing. Of course he had lots
of chances, going on excursions as they were every day. He made up his
mind to seize the first opportunity, and that very evening he took her out
for a moonlight row on Lake Winnipiseogee. As he handed her into the boat
he resolved to do it, and he had a glimmer of a suspicion that she knew he
was going to do it, too.”
“Girls,” said Dear Jones, “never go out in a row-boat at night with a
young man unless you mean to accept him.”
“Sometimes it’s best to refuse him, and get it over once for all,” said
Baby Van Rensselaer.
“As Eliphalet took the oars he felt a sudden chill. He tried to shake it
off, but in vain. He began to have a growing consciousness of impending
evil. Before he had taken ten strokes--and he was a swift oarsman--he was
aware of a mysterious presence between him and Miss Sutton.”
“Was it the guardian-angel ghost warning him off the match?” interrupted
Dear Jones.
“That’s just what it was,” said Uncle Larry. “And he yielded to it, and
kept his peace, and rowed Miss Sutton back to the hotel with his proposal
unspoken.”
“More fool he,” said Dear Jones. “It will take more than one ghost to keep
me from proposing when my mind is made up.” And he looked at Baby Van
Rensselaer.
“The next morning,” continued Uncle Larry, “Eliphalet overslept himself,
and when he went down to a late breakfast he found that the Suttons had
gone to New York by the morning train. He wanted to follow them at once,
and again he felt the mysterious presence overpowering his will. He
struggled two days, and at last he roused himself to do what he wanted
in spite of the spook. When he arrived in New York it was late in the
evening. He dressed himself hastily, and went to the hotel where the
Suttons put up, in the hope of seeing at least her brother. The guardian
angel fought every inch of the walk with him, until he began to wonder
whether, if Miss Sutton were to take him, the spook would forbid the
banns. At the hotel he saw no one that night, and he went home determined
to call as early as he could the next afternoon, and make an end of it.
When he left his office about two o’clock the next day to learn his fate,
he had not walked five blocks before he discovered that the wraith of the
Duncans had withdrawn his opposition to the suit. There was no feeling
of impending evil, no resistance, no struggle, no consciousness of an
opposing presence. Eliphalet was greatly encouraged. He walked briskly to
the hotel; he found Miss Sutton alone. He asked her the question, and got
his answer.”
“She accepted him, of course,” said Baby Van Rensselaer.
“Of course,” said Uncle Larry. “And while they were in the first flush
of joy, swapping confidences and confessions, her brother came into the
parlor with an expression of pain on his face and a telegram in his hand.
The former was caused by the latter, which was from ’Frisco, and which
announced the sudden death of Mrs. Sutton, their mother.”
“And that was why the ghost no longer opposed the match?” questioned Dear
Jones.
“Exactly. You see, the family ghost knew that Mother Gorgon was an awful
obstacle to Duncan’s happiness, so it warned him. But the moment the
obstacle was removed, it gave its consent at once.”
The fog was lowering its thick damp curtain, and it was beginning to
be difficult to see from one end of the boat to the other. Dear Jones
tightened the rug which enwrapped Baby Van Rensselaer, and then withdrew
again into his own substantial coverings.
Uncle Larry paused in his story long enough to light another of the tiny
cigars he always smoked.
“I infer that Lord Duncan”--the Duchess was scrupulous in the bestowal of
titles--“saw no more of the ghosts after he was married.”
“He never saw them at all, at any time, either before or since. But they
came very near breaking off the match, and thus breaking two young hearts.”
“You don’t mean to say that they knew any just cause or impediment why
they should not forever after hold their peace?” asked Dear Jones.
“How could a ghost, or even two ghosts, keep a girl from marrying the man
she loved?” This was Baby Van Rensselaer’s question.