That morning, at breakfast in the public room, Mrs. Frampton was
outraged at having a glass of ice-water and an orange given to her
before the tea was served.
"What does the man give me an orange for, such a morning as this? As to
this ice-water, I would not touch a drop of it, in any weather. I hope
you have not, either of you, taken to that dangerous habit?"
Then, as the negro in attendance leaned reflectively on the back of
Grace's chair, his round eyes fixed upon the animated face of the
speaker, "May I ask," she continued, "if that gentleman of color always
listens to your conversation? Perhaps he would join in if you asked
him."
"It's a way they have here," murmured her nephew. "They don't mean
to be cheeky, but servants here are the only class who _never_, by
any accident, address you as 'sir.' As to these waiter-fellows, their
manners, I admit, are peculiar. One darky pulled my hat off my head
the other day. He thought he was doing the civil thing."
She threw up her hands. "And, pray, did you do the civil thing in
return?" The _menu_ for the morning meal being handed to her, she
exclaimed, "Good heavens! What is this? 'Clam chowder,' 'Squab pie.'
What on earth is 'Squab pie'? 'Cold-slaw and shredded beef!'--it sounds
like cannibalism! 'Flapjacks and maple syrup!'--a combination of fish
and trees, I suppose! 'Waffles!' 'Buckwheat cakes!' 'Grits!' 'Dip
toast!'--is that another word for 'pap'?"--and so on, with a running
commentary, down the bill-of-fare.
Some of these unknown dishes, however, she tried, and candidly owned
were excellent, and when the breakfast was despatched, and they had
returned to their own "parlor," Mrs. Frampton was visibly better
disposed towards the outer world. She moved one of the ponderous chairs
to the window, and produced a long roll of embroidery.
"That is what I have not seen a woman do since I arrived in the
States," said Mordaunt. "I dare say they work a great deal in strict
private, but never in public. They don't consider it 'the thing,' I
believe. They are very angry when I say so, but it is the truth."
"Well, there is no great virtue that I can see in doing this sort of
rubbish," said his aunt, in her most amiable manner. "If I could do
anything more useful, I should. But I can talk much better when I am
pulling something about; and Grace and I are going to have a long
gossip, while you go and smoke your cigar, and bring us back the news
out of one of those dreadful, wicked papers."
"You're a regular Eve, Aunt Su," laughed her nephew, as he sauntered to
the door. "The woman tempted me, and I did eat."
"Ah! Adam was a poor creature," returned Mrs. Frampton, as she put
on her spectacles; then, when he had left the room, "I am not at all
satisfied about Mordy," she continued, as she stabbed the canvas with
her needle, and a stream of sanguinary _filoselle_ followed it.
"Why, aunty?"
"Don't you see how much more silent he is, with only an occasional
burst of his old fun? I am afraid he cares--_really_ cares--for this
girl."
"And if he does, what then? There is really nothing to object to in
her. Putting her beauty aside, she is clever--in her way--wonderfully
adaptable, and has a great deal of character. I don't say that she is
exactly the sister-in-law I should have selected, but then, almost
certainly, the girl I should prefer Mordy would not look at. If Miss
Planter makes up her mind to marry him, which I am not at all sure that
she will--"
"The idea! Not accept Mordy, who might marry almost any one in England?"
"Nonsense, aunty. You know very well that, judged by your own
standard--the worldly standard--a poor baronet, without any
transcendent abilities to advance his career, is not a match for
ambitious mammas or daughters to jump at. If dear Mordy really and
truly falls in love at last with this American girl, and if she returns
his love--she won't marry him unless she does--I see no reason why they
should not be very happy."
"I wish it had been the Hurlstone girl," said Mrs. Frampton, without
taking her eyes from her work. "Besides the money being certain in her
case, there are the relations. The Planters, I am told, are people of
yesterday."
"Yesterday, or the day before--does it make much difference?"
"The father, I am told, is impossible. The mother--"
"You heard all this from the Hurlstones; it is a tainted source. People
are even more jealous of each other over here, it seems to me, than
in London. And in this case, you see, there are peculiar reasons for
jealousy. If you meet the Planters in the course of our travels"--she
cautiously avoided any hint of the Californian rendezvous--"you must
not be prejudiced. You must judge the girl upon her own merits. Promise
me you will do this, aunty."
"Oh! No one can say I am prejudiced. That is the last charge that can
be brought against me." Grace bit her lip, and bent her head over a
dropped stitch in her knitting. There was a little pause. Mrs. Frampton
heaved a sigh, then stretching out her hand to her work-basket, drew
from the depths of it a society paper, not yet a fortnight old. "Look
here, Gracey," she continued, as she opened and flattened out the paper
with her hand; "there is a subject upon which I have long since given
up speaking to you. I shouldn't do so now but for something Mordy said
to me yesterday. I had hoped your eyes were gradually opened to Mr.
Ivor Lawrence's true character. I told Mordy to tell you the common
topic of conversation--the new light that has been thrown upon the
case. And now, as it seems you still believe in the man, I think you
should see this paragraph," and she handed the paper to her niece. It
ran thus:
"With regard to the disputed will of the late Mr. Tracy, which
promises to be a _cause célèbre_, we understand that the attorney
who drew up several wills for the deceased, between the years
1875 and 1887, has been traced to Victoria, where he emigrated on
account of his health. He is subpoenaed to appear, and will be an
important witness, as it is said he brings with him duplicates of
these wills, which appear to have been destroyed. The evidence
of this witness, as testifying to the affection which subsisted
formerly between Mr. Giles Tracy and his uncle, will, it is said,
be of paramount importance on the trial."
Mrs. Frampton's eye was fixed upon her niece as Grace read this, but
she did not wince. She folded the paper carefully, and returned it to
her aunt.
"Thank you; it makes no difference--I am sure you did not expect that
it would?--in my opinion. It would be the same if Mr. Lawrence lost his
case. I _know_ he is incapable of having used his influence with his
uncle to induce him to alter his will."
"Humph! There are grave doubts whether it is not _forged_." Grace gave
a little contemptuous smile. "I am told he has been given the cold
shoulder at his club--one man cut him dead--and he goes nowhere."
"No; if he did, he would have come to us."
Mrs. Frampton pulled her needle so irritably through the canvas that
the silk nearly snapped.
"Thank goodness he has not. If he had behaved like a gentleman, and
come forward immediately his uncle died, it might be difficult to shake
him off now. As it is, he cut the Gordian knot himself."
"We will not go over the old ground again, aunt. The trial is public
property; I can't help hearing it discussed. But that question of his
'coming forward,' please, must never be spoken of. Just think how
inconsistent you are, dear. You suggest that he forged; and then say
he would have behaved like a gentleman if, having forged, he had 'come
forward.' The fact is, Ivor Lawrence is a very proud, sensitive man.
I believe the tenor of his uncle's will was a surprise to him, and
when he was told it was to be disputed, and the charge that was to be
made against him, he resolved to subject none of his friends to the
ordeal of receiving a suspected man until the trial was over. And now,
dear aunt, please let the subject be closed, as far as I am personally
concerned. You are the only person who knows something of what I have
suffered. But I have been lighter-hearted and braver since I left
England. And why? Simply because time, instead of shaking my belief in
the man whom all the world suspects, has made it stronger. At first his
silence crushed me. If I thought my friend unworthy, I should still be
crushed, far more than at first. But you see I am crushed no longer. Be
content with that."
She had risen, and was standing before her aunt, who looked up, over
her spectacles, literally dumfounded, until she felt two strong young
arms flung round her neck and a shower of kisses upon her cheek. That
was an argument she never could resist. She patted the girl's back with
one fat, dimpled hand, while she wiped away a furtive tear with the
other.
"God bless you, child! You are too good and noble--yes, too noble--for
this wretched, miserable world of ours."
And so peace was restored between the two women, who, being very
unlike, were yet warmly attached to each other.
Later, they went forth with Mordaunt, and walked across the park, on
planks laid upon the pathway, up to Beacon Street, and were reminded
of Bath, as one looks down from its century-old crescent; and then
they crunched the frozen snow under their spiked shoes, back to the
Museum of Fine Arts, where they found a collection of Blake's strange
and poetic conceptions, and some memorable sketches by W. M. Hunt,
an artist of rare genius, lately deceased, and but little known in
England. Copley's portraits--Lord Lyndhurst's father--of which there
are so few examples in England, also interested them; and, of course,
there were the usual inevitable French pictures, which are the staple
commodity of all collections in the States. They passed a pleasant hour
here, after which Mrs. Frampton was deposited at the Brunswick, as she
declared nothing would induce her to enter the electric car, which was
to convey her nephew and niece into the heart of the city.
"I have looked inside one," she said; "that is enough! I saw a double
row of people standing up in the middle, clinging on by straps, and
jammed against the knees of those who were seated! Never saw anything
so shocking in my life. No, thank you. I will go in a carriage, or on
my ten toes, or I will remain at home. None of those dreadful tramways
for _me_!"
So they left her, and went their ways. And in their course they ran up
against Mordaunt's wiry friend, Reid. He said he had come to Boston
for a few days' visit to his mother, "who will be very happy to call
on you, Miss Ballinger, if you will allow her." And when Grace had
expressed her willingness to be called upon, he continued, "She is a
real good woman, my mother; but you must be prepared for some tall
talk. It don't amount to much, but it takes a little time to get
accustomed to it."
That evening the party assembled by Mrs. Courtly to meet her English
friends was peculiarly agreeable. Besides Mr. Laffan and other
distinguished men, there were three ladies: one, a poetess whose
stirring verse had moved a whole nation's heart, and two sisters whose
well-earned reputation for brilliancy had won for them the name of "The
Duplex Burners."
Mrs. Frampton was at her best. She was always appreciative of talent,
more especially of conversational talent, and would toss into the
caldron, now and again, a pungent remark which stimulated alike the
powers of the artists and the appetites of those who sat at meat.
The talk turning upon American modes of spelling, she said, in her
trenchant way,
"I should have been whipped when I was a child, if I had spelled
theatre _t-e-r_ instead of _tre_. Why, it is neither Latin nor any
other tongue!"
"We let 'the dead past bury its dead,'" was the reply. "We follow
the living tongues, the tongues in your head and mine, and those
distinctly say 'thea-_ter_.' We don't approve of whipping little girls
for spelling as they pronounce, even if the result be to produce such
brilliant women as yourself," with a bow.
Mrs. Frampton was reduced to silence for a moment by this un-English
compliment, and so her ear caught another that was being proffered to
Grace. Her niece was deploring the loss of the letter _u_ in so many
words as now printed in America.
"Do you really like the _u_ dropped in such a word as 'parlor'?" she
asked of her neighbor.
"I prefer a parlor with _you_ in it," he replied.
Grace laughed.
"You are trying to silence me, I see. But do tell me why you _will_
change our c's into s's, in such words as 'offence' and 'defence'?"
"I suppose we think that in 'offence' and 'defence' you English are
always _at sea_!" returned her incorrigible neighbor.
And so the chaff went on.
One man present sustained theories which, as coming from an American,
were curious. He declared there was over-education in his country, and
used all the arguments in support of this view which would have been
employed by an old English Tory.
Mordaunt Ballinger stared when he heard a citizen of the United States
declare that muscle and sinew were not yet driven out of the field by
machinery, that scientific absorption was an evil, and that the world's
work cannot be done by the brain alone. It was a little too much,
even for the young conservative member, when this clever supporter of
paradoxes maintained that people would be happier if they knew less,
and that genius was more sure to rise from a poor educational plane
than from a highly cultivated one.
"Certainly," assented another, "our most successful men in the country
have _not_ been the best educated."
"Theirs was a rich soil," continued the first speaker, "that needed
no top-dressing. It was just suited to the grain it had to grow. Its
strength was concentrated on that. Manured with learning, all manner of
rank, useless stuff would have sprung up and flourished there."
"For shame!" said Mrs. Courtly's silvery voice. "I wonder you dare
to talk such blasphemy almost within the shadow of Harvard! To think
that I should live to hear a Bostonian throw such an aspersion on
'belles-lettres.'"
"Ah! dear lady, but 'belles-lettres,' like other feminine things,
are so apt to distract our minds from the only serious object of
life--which, of course, is money-getting!"
This elicited hisses and laughter, in which the speaker himself joined.
_Il n'y a que la verité qui blesse._ Boston could never take such an
accusation to itself.
"One would fancy you were from Chicago!" said Mrs. Courtly.
Now Chicago is to the Bostonians as the full moon is to a dog--they are
never tired of baying at it.
"Well, then, I _am_ from Chicago. I was there two weeks ago on
business. And what do you suppose I saw in a shop-window? I can tell
you it was something worth going to Chicago to see. Why, a statue of
the Venus de Medici in a Jaeger's combination suit!"
"Great Scot!" cried a man from the farther end of the table, "Jaeger
must be like the poet, _nascitur_ but _non fit_. Poor goddess! 'To
what base uses we may return, Horatio!' But we are a practical people.
Beauty and utility with us go hand in hand. Indeed, you see that in
this case they don't stop _there_."
"No," said one of the ladies, gravely. "Life has never been the same
to me since I saw Lord Byron's head, with a chestnut wig upon it, in a
'tonsorial saloon,' and a bust of the young Augustus at an optician's,
with a pair of blue spectacles on his nose!"
Mrs. Frampton, meantime, was being questioned by her neighbor as to the
route the travellers meant to take in going westward.
"I suppose you go through Chicago?" he said.
"Ask my nephew. I am as dough in his hands, and the dough is
unleavened. It doesn't _rise_ in the oven of your railway carriages.
I dread the journey. By the bye, why _will_ you call them 'cars'?
My idea of a 'car' is the thing I remember as a child in my Roman
history--Tullia trampling her father to death, you know--and so on."
"We don't trample our fathers, even when they are very much in the way;
but we like short cuts for all that. Now 'car' is a short cut for a
long carriage-drive."
"Oh! but I beg to say you don't _always_ go in for shortness. You call
a 'lift' an 'elevator,' and you always 'conclude' a thing, instead of
'ending' it. I must tell you frankly that we think those long words
horrid."
"I am sorry for it," he replied, amused, "but we, on our side, think
fashionable English slang, and a good deal of fashionable English
pronunciation horrid. There is a lady here, lately returned from
London, who speaks so beautifully that we can't understand more than
half she says!"
Mrs. Frampton laughed. She was quite pleased with her neighbor. If he
carried the war into the enemy's country, she felt justified in saying
a tart thing.
"You mean that she no longer pronounces 'clerk' as if it rhymed with
'shirk' and 'work.' You get that, and the tendency to nasal intonation
from your Puritan fathers. We retain a Cavalier broadness and boldness
of utterance."
"Ah! I see the broadness and boldness," returned the American, with a
humorous twitch of the lips. "Still, all evidence shows that Englishmen
of Chaucer's day pronounced 'clerk' as it is written."
"Chaucer? Good heavens! you don't expect us to go on talking as they
did in Edward III.'s reign?"
"Why are you to start from Charles II. rather than Edward III.?
'_Clark_' is an affectation that crept into the language in the
seventeenth century, when it became the fashion to talk of _Jarsey_
and _Barkley_. The latter I believe you still retain in fashionable
parlance."
"Of course! The man or woman would be lost who spoke of _Berkley_
Square."
"But worse than all is your fashionable pronunciation of Pall Mall.
Why! you lose all the pleasant old association and courtly flavor of
the 'Palace Mall' by calling it 'Pell Mell.' You might as well call it
'Helter-Skelter'!"
"Don't talk to me of association, or accuracy, or grammar, or anything
else. Custom overrides all with us."
"The trouble is, that you will not allow it to do so with us," he
returned, smiling.
"Really, I think we might be allowed to know how to speak our own
language!"
"Not if you go on changing it all the time, according to the vagaries
of fashion. When _we_ have gotten hold of a word, we stick to it. Look
at that poor word 'genteel,' which was such a useful servant to you all
through the last century, and now you have kicked it into the gutter!"
"It deserved kicking into the gutter. It had become so frayed and
tarnished that it wasn't fit to wear. We have incorporated a number of
new words into the language, so no one can complain because we discard
one or two."
"If the new ones supplied the vacuum, but they do not. You have no word
to replace 'genteel.' Your argument reminds me of a man who, having
lost his boots, put on two hats and an overcoat!"
Thus they sparred amicably through that pleasant dinner, the least
animated participator in which, beyond a doubt, was Mordaunt Ballinger.
And yet he sat beside Mrs. Courtly, whom he sincerely liked, and who,
though she tried to make the conversation general, found an opportunity
to say to him,
"I have heard of our friends' arrival at Pittsburgh."
"Do they speak of going to California?" he asked, quickly.
"Mrs. Planter's cough was worse as soon as she got home," replied Mrs.
Courtly, with a smile. "That promises well."