tell that Boston was not an English town. It did not so impress me on a
surface-view, but it was not long before I recognized that the warp and
woof of the social fabric is that of our looms, though the pattern is a
little different,--a good sort of stuff, I think, warranted _to wash_
and wear. The variation, such as it is, tried by what I call my
differential nationometer, gives to the place its own peculiar,
delightful quality." The rigid gentleman, who was a great deal at the
Porters', was rather inclined to insist upon the great purity and beauty
of his English, to which he repeatedly invited attention, and, as Mr.
Ramsay would have said, "went in for" certain philological refinements
which Sir Robert had never heard before, and thoroughly disliked. But as
there are more Scotchmen in London than in Edinburgh, and better oranges
can be bought for less money in New York than in New Orleans, so it may
be that if you want to find really superior English you must leave
England altogether,--abandon it to its defective but firmly-rooted
_patois_, and seek in more classic shades for the well--spring of Saxon
undefiled. But Sir Robert was not inclined to do this. There were limits
to his liberality and spirit of investigation. When the rigid gentleman
instanced certain words to which he gave a pronunciation that made them
bear small resemblance to the same words as spoken by any class of
people laboring under the disadvantage of having been born and bred in
England, Sir Robert got impatient, and testily dismissed the subject
with, "Oh, come, now! I can stand a good deal, but I can't stand being
told that we don't know how to speak English in England." Something,
however, must be pardoned to a foreigner. If Sir Robert would not
consent to set Emerson a little higher than the angels, as some other
Bostonians could have wished, and had never so much as heard of Thoreau
and other American celebrities not wholly insignificant, he had an
immense admiration for Longfellow, and could spout "Hiawatha" or
"Evangeline" with the best, associated Hawthorne with something besides
his own hedges in the month of May, and was eager to be taken out to
Beverly Farms, that he might "do himself the honor to call upon" the
wisest, wittiest, least-dreaded, and best-loved of Autocrats. When the
day fixed for his departure came, he was still revelling in what the
Historical Society of Massachusetts had to show him, and actually
stayed over a day that he might see the finest collection of cacti in
the country, and at last tore himself away with much difficulty and
lively regrets, carrying with him a collection of Indian curiosities
given him by Mr. Porter, whom he considered to have behaved "most
handsomely" in making him such a present. "I can't rob you outright, my
dear fellow. I feel a cut-purse, almost, when I think of taking all
these valuable and deeply-interesting objects illustrative of the life
and civilization of the aborigines," he said. "Give me duplicates, if
you will be so generous, but nothing unique, I insist." He finally
accepted one gem in the collection,--a towering structure of feathers
that formed "a most delightful head-dress, quite irresistibly
fascinating," tried it on before a mirror that gave back faithfully the
comical reflection, and incidentally delivered a lecture on the
head-ornaments of many savage and civilized nations of every age, though
not at all in the style of the famous Mr. Barlow.
Mr. Heathcote at least was not sorry to find that they were, as he said.
"booked for Baltimore." The image of the beautiful Miss Bascombe had not
been effaced. Perhaps he had photographed it by some private process on
his heart with the lover's camera, which takes rather idealized but very
charming pictures, some of which never fade. At all events, there it
was, very distinct and very lovely, and always hung on the line in his
mental picture-gallery. It was positively with trepidation that he
presented himself before her very soon after his arrival; and an
undeniable blush "mantled" his cheek--if a blush can be said with any
propriety to mantle the male cheek--- when he marched into the
drawing-room, where she was doing a dainty bit of embroidery, and with
much simplicity and directness said, "You said I might come, you know,
and I have come; and I begged of Ethel to come too, but she could not
leave my aunt," before he had so much as shaken hands. Of course no
well-regulated and well-bred young woman--and Miss Bascombe was
both--ever permits herself to remember any man until she is engaged to
him; but she need not forget one that has impressed her agreeably. Miss
Bascombe had not forgotten the handsome Englishman she had met at Jenny
De Witt's, nor the little lecture she had given him on the duties of
brothers to sisters, and it did not strike her that his inaugural
address was at all eccentric or mysterious. He had been told what he
ought to do; he had tried to do it, as was quite right and proper. He
deserved some reward. And he got it,--though only as an encouragement to
abstract virtue, of course. The young lady was pleased to be friendly,
gracious, charming. Her mother came in presently, was equally friendly
and gracious, and almost as charming. Her father came home to dinner,
and was friendly too, and hearty, and very hospitable. Her brothers were
friendliest of all. He knew quite well that he had no claim on them,
that he had not saved the life of any member of the family or laid them
under any sort of obligation, individually or collectively, and no
reception could have seemed more special and dangerously cordial, yet no
anxieties oppressed, no fears distracted him. The weight of excessive
eligibility suddenly slipped off him, like the albatross from the neck
of the Ancient Mariner, leaving him a thankful and a happy man, and in
a week he had established himself firmly at the Bascombes', declined to
accompany his uncle to Virginia, and definitely settled in his own mind
that he would take the step matrimonial,--the step from the sublime
to--well, not always the ridiculous. With this resolution he naturally
thought that the greatest obstacle to success had been removed; but he
was soon disillusionized. He had already come to see that American girls
were very much in the habit of being gracious to everybody, and saying
pretty and pleasant things, with no thought of an hereafter; also that
they did not live with St. George's, Hanover Square, or its American
equivalent, Trinity Church, New York, stamped on the mental retina. Miss
Bascombe was "very nice" to him, he told himself, but she was quite as
nice to a dozen other men. She was uniformly kind, courteous, agreeable,
to every one who came to the house. Her cordiality to him meant nothing
whatever. Yes, he was quite free,--free as air; he saw that plainly, and
perversely longed to assume the fetters he had so long and so skilfully
avoided. What was the use of having serious intentions when not the
slightest notice was taken of the most compromising behavior? It was
true that he was perfectly at liberty to see more of Edith than an
Englishman ever does of any woman not related to him, and to say and do
a thousand things any one of which at home would have necessitated a
proposal or instant flight. But no importance whatever seemed to be
attached to them here, and he was utterly at a loss how to make his
seriousness felt. Yet it was quite clear that if there was to be any
wooing done, he would have to do it,--go every step of the way himself,
with no assistance from Miss Bascombe. "How on earth am I to show her
that I care for her?" he thought. "Other men send her dozens of
bouquets, and box after box of expensive sweets, and loads of books, and
music without end, and they come to see her continually, and take her
about everywhere, and are entirely devoted to her. I wonder what
fellows over here do when they are serious? How do they make themselves
understood when they go on in this way habitually? It is a most
extraordinary state of affairs! And neither party seems to feel in the
least compromised by it. There is that fellow Clinch, who fairly lives
at the Bascombes', and when I asked her if she was engaged to him she
said, 'Engaged to George Clinch? What an idea! _No_. What put that in
your head? He is a nice fellow, and I like him immensely, but there's
nothing of that sort between us. What made you think there was? And when
I explained, she said, 'Oh, _that's_ nothing! He is just as nice to lots
of other girls.' And when I suggested to him that he was attached to
her, he said, 'Edith Bascombe? Oh, no! She is a great friend of mine,
and a charming girl, but I have never thought of that, nor has she. I go
there a good deal, but I have never paid her any marked attention.' No
marked attention, indeed! Nothing seems to mean anything here: it is
worse than being in England, where everything means something. No, it
isn't, either. I vow that when I am at the Clintons' in Surrey I
scarcely dare offer the girls so much as a muffin, and if I ask the
carroty one, Beatrice, the simplest question, she blushes and stammers
as if I were proposing out of hand. But what am I to do? I can't sing
and take to serenading Edith on moonlit nights with a guitar and a blue
ribbon around my neck. I can't push her into the river that I may pull
her out again. I dare say there is nothing for it but to adopt the
American method,--enter with about fifty others for a sort of
sentimental steeple-chase, elbow or knock every other fellow out of the
way in the running, work awfully hard to please the girl, and get in by
half a length, if one wins at all. There is no feeling sure of her until
one is coming back from the altar, evidently."
Some of his conversations with Edith were certainly anything but
encouraging. At other times he felt morally sure that she shared that
derangement of the bivalvular organ technically defined as "a muscular
viscus which is the primary instrument of the blood's motion," whose
worst pains are said to be worth more than the greatest pleasures. He
was very much in earnest, and entirely straightforward, There were no
balancing indecisions now, but the most downright affirmation of
preference. His little speeches were not veiled in rosy clouds of
metaphor and poetry and distant allusions, like Captain Kendall's, nor
did they flow out in an unfailing stream of romantic eloquence, like
that gifted warrior's. They were so honest and so clumsy, indeed, that
Edith could not help laughing at them merrily sometimes, to his great
discomfiture, consisting as they did chiefly of such statements as, "You
know that I am most awfully fond of you. I was tremendously hard hit
from the first. If you don't believe me, you can ask Ramsay. I told him
all about it. You aren't in the least like any other girl that I have
ever known, except Mrs. De Witt a little. I suppose you know that I
would have married her at the dropping of a hat if I could have done so.
But that is all over now. I care an awful lot for you now, and shall be
quite frightfully cut up if you won't have anything to say to me,--I
shall, really. I have got quite wrapped up in you, upon my word. And I
shall be intensely glad and proud if you will consent to be my wife."
When Edith failed to take such speeches as these seriously, poor Mr.
Heathcote was quite beside himself, and, in reply to her bantering
accusations as to his being "a great flirt" and not "really meaning one
word that he said," opposed either burly negation or a deeply-vexed
silence. They looked at so many things differently that they found a
piquant interest in discussing every subject that came up.
"There go May Dunbar and Fred Beach," she said to him one Sunday as they
were coming home from church. "Isn't he handsome? They have been engaged
_three years_. Did you ever hear of such constancy?"
"Do you call that constancy? Why, if a fellow can't wait three years for
a lovely girl like that, he must be a poor stick. Why, my uncle
Montgomery was engaged to his wife seventeen years, while he went out to
India and shook the pagoda-tree, after which he came back, paid all his
father's debts, and they married and went into the house they had picked
out before he sailed," said Mr. Heathcote.
"Good gracious! what a time! I hope the poor things were happy at last.
Were they?" asked Edith.
"H-m--pretty well. He is a rather fiery, tyrannical old party. She
doesn't get her own way to hurt," he replied.
"I have heard that Englishwomen give way to the men in everything and
are always, voluntarily or involuntarily, sacrificed to them. It must be
so bad for both," said Edith sweetly.
"Oh, you go in for woman's rights and that sort of thing, I suppose," he
said, in a tone of annoyance.
"Indeed I don't do anything of the kind," replied she, with warmth. "If
I did, I should be aping the men when I wasn't sneering at them. But I
respect your sex most when they most deserve to be respected, and I
don't see anything to admire in a selfish, tyrannical man that is always
imposing his will, opinions, and wishes upon the ladies of his household
and expects to be the first consideration from the cradle to the grave
because he happens to be a man."
"But he is the head of his house. He ought to get his own way, if
anybody does, and, if he is not a coward, he will, too," said Mr.
Heathcote rather hotly. "Would you have a man a molly-coddle, tied to
his wife's apron-string, and not daring to call his soul his own?"
"Not at all," replied Edith. "It is the cowards that are the tyrants.
'The bravest are the tenderest, the loving are the daring,' as our
American poet says. And women have souls of their own, except in the
East. Why shouldn't _they_ be the first consideration and do as they
please, pray? They are the weaker, the more delicate and daintily bred.
If there is any pampering and spoiling to be done, they should be the
objects of it. And as to rights, there is no divine right of way given
to man, that I know of. I don't believe in that sort of thing at all. Of
course no reasonable woman wants or expects everybody to kootoo before
her and everything to give way to her."
"And no gentleman fails to show a proper respect for his wife's wishes
and comfort, not to mention her happiness," said Mr. Heathcote. "But of
course that sort of thing is only to be found in America. Englishmen are
all selfish, and tyrants, and domestic monsters, I know."
"I didn't say anything of the kind," replied Edith quickly, her cheeks
pink with excitement. "I don't know anything about Englishmen or the
domestic system of England, and I never expect to. But, if what I have
heard is true, it is a system that tends to make men mortally selfish;
and selfish people, whether they are men or women, and whether they know
it or not, are _all_ monsters. But I apologize for my remarks, and, as I
am not interested in the subject _in the least_, we will talk of
something else, if you please."
This very feminine conclusion, delivered loftily and with sudden
reserve, left Mr. Heathcote in anything but an agreeable frame of mind,
and for an hour or two made him doubt the wisdom of international
marriages; but this mood passed away, and he remained a fixture at the
_maison_ Bascombe, where the very postman came to know him and
generously sympathized with the malady from which he was suffering. Nor
was this the only house in which he was made very welcome. Baltimore is
one of many American cities that suffer from the vague but painful
accusation of being "provincial;" but, admitting this dreadful charge,
it has social, gastronomic, and other charms of its own that ought to
compensate for the absence of that doubtful good, cosmopolitanism. Mr.
Heathcote certainly found no fault with it, and did not miss the
population, pauperism, or other institutions of Paris, London, or
Vienna. On the contrary, he took very kindly to the pretty place, and
heartily liked the people. There was nothing oppressive or ostentatious
in the attentions he received, but just the cordiality, grace, and charm
of an old-established society of most refined traditions, perfect
_savoir-vivre_, and chronic hospitality.
"You are making a Baltimorean of me, you are so awfully kind to me," he
would say, pronouncing the _a_ in Bal as he would have done in sal; but
the truth was that he had become primarily a Bascomite and only very
incidentally a Baltimorean. The city counts hundreds of such converts
every year. He was so happy and entirely content that he would have
quite forgotten what it was to be bored just at this period but for
certain individuals,--a boastful, disagreeable Irishman, who fastened
upon him apparently for no other reason than that he might abuse England
at great length and talk of his own valor, accomplishments, and
"paddygree" (as he very properly called the record that established his
connection with Brian Boroo and Irish kings generally), and a lady who
seemed to take the most astounding, unquenchable interest in the English
nobility, as more than one lady had seemed to him to do, to his great
annoyance.
"I don't know a bit about them, I assure you," he said to her; "but I
have the 'Peerage.' If you would like to see that, I will send it you
with pleasure."
This only diverted her conversation into a different but equally
distasteful channel,--the great distinction and antiquity of her own
family. It really seemed as though she had a dread of Mr. Heathcote's
leaving the country with some wrong impression on this important subject
and was determined that he should be put in possession of all the
information she had or imagined herself to have about it. She talked to
him about it so much that the poor man was at incredible pains to keep
out of her way.
"I don't care a brass copper about her," he complained to Edith; "and
if the family has been producing women like her as long as she says, and
is going on at it, all I can say is that it is a pity they have lasted
this long, and the sooner they die out the better. What do I care about
her family, pray? I never heard as much about family in all my life, I
give you my word, as I have done since I came to America. The stories
told me are something wonderful,--all about the two brothers that left
England, and all that, you know. They seem all to have come away in
pairs, like the animals in the ark. I said to one fellow that was
beginning with those two brothers, '_Couldn't you make it three_, don't
you think?' And you'll not believe me, but I speak quite without
exaggeration, when I say that one woman out in Raising assured me
gravely that she was descended from the houses of York and Lancaster!"
"_She didn't!"_ exclaimed Edith. "That is, if she did, she must have
been _crazy_; and I won't have you going back to England and giving
false impressions of us by repeating such stories. Promise me that you
will never repeat it there."
"Oh, that's all right," he replied soothingly. "It's an extreme case, I
grant, and I'll say no more about it if it vexes you, but it is a true
tale all the same. Howe was her name, I remember; and I felt like
saying,--I'll eat my hand if I understand Howe this can possibly
be,'--that's in the Bab Ballads,--but I didn't."
Sir Robert had small opportunity of making acquaintance with Baltimore.
He was very eager to get down into Virginia, and stayed there but two
days. On the second of these he attended a gentleman's dinner-party, the
annual mile-stone of a military society composed of men who had worn the
gray and marked the well-known tendency of tempus to fugit in this
agreeable fashion. Their ex-enemies of the blue were also there, but not
in the original overwhelming numbers, and the battle was now to one
party, now to the other, the race to the best _raconteur_, rivers of
champagne flowed instead of brave blood, and the smoke of cannon was
exchanged for that of Havanas. Sir Robert's face beamed more and more
brightly as the evening wore on, and reminiscences, anecdotes, stories,
jests, songs, were fluently and cleverly poured out in rapid succession
by the hilarious company. The fun was at its height, when he suddenly
leaned forward with his body at an insinuating angle and smilingly
addressed an officer opposite: "You must really let me say that I have
been delighted by all that I have heard here to-night, and appreciate
the compliment you have paid me in permitting me to join you. And now I
am going to ask a great favor. Could you, would you, give me some idea
of 'the rebel yell,' as it was called? We heard so much about that. I am
most curious to hear it. It is always spoken of as perfectly terrifying,
almost unearthly."
The gentleman whom he addressed looked down the table and rapped to call
attention to what he had to say: "Boys, this English gentleman is asking
whether we can't give him some idea of what the rebel yell is like. What
do you say? If our Federal friends are afraid, they can get under the
table, where they will be perfectly safe, and a good deal more
comfortable than they used to be behind trees or in baggage-wagons," he
called out.
A hearty laugh followed, and, their blood having got bubbles in it by
this time, a general assenting murmur was heard.
The next instant a shriek, sky-rending, blood-curdling, savage beyond
description, went up,--a truly terrific yell in peace, and enough to
create a panic, one would think, in the Old Guard in time of war.
"Thank you, thank you. _I am entirely satisfied"_ said Sir Robert, in a
comically rueful tone, as soon as he could say anything for the uproar.
"I never imagined anything like it, never. Where did you get it? Who
invented it? Is it an adaptation of some war-cry of the North American
Indians? It sounds like what one would fancy their cries might be,
doesn't it? It has got all the beasts of the forest in it; and I confess
that I for one, would have fled before it and stayed in the wagons as
long as there was the slightest danger of hearing it. By Jove! it must
have been heard in Boston when given in Virginia. It is curious how very
ancient the practice of--"
But the company heard no more of curious practices, for their yell had
been heard, if not in Boston, in a far more remarkable quarter,--namely,
by the police, who now rushed in, prepared to club, arrest, and carry
off any and all disorderly and dreadful disturbers of the peace.
If Sir Robert had been in any danger of being murdered, all experience
goes to show that no policeman could have been found before the
following morning, and then only in the remotest part of the city. As he
was merely being wined, dined, and amused, quite a formidable body of
these devoted but easily-misled guardians of respectability and
innocence poured into the room, where at first they could see nothing
for the smoke. Matters were explained, they were invited to "take
something" before they went, and took it, and, quite placated, filed out
into the passage again, and from thence into the street.
Sir Robert sat up late that night, or rather began early on the
following day, to copy the stories he had most relished into the diary,
and do what justice he could to "the rebel yell," and, having added an
admirably discriminating chapter on "the present political situation in
the States," concluded with, "How striking is the good sense, the good
feeling, that both the conquerors and the conquered have shown, on the
whole! In other countries, how often has a war far less bloody and
protracted left in its wake evils far greater than the original one, in
guerilla warfare, murders, ceaseless revolt, and smouldering hatred
lasting for centuries on one side, and centuries of tyranny, oppression,
executions, confiscations, on the other! A brave and fine race this, not
made of the stuff that goes to keep up vendettas, shoot landlords, blow
up rulers, assassinate enemies. They can fight as well as any, and they
have shown that they can forgive better than most,--taken together, true
manliness. It may be that they are influenced by a consideration which
is said to be always present to an American,--'Will it pay?' and of
course so practical a people as this see that anarchy doesn't pay; but I
would rather attribute their conduct to nobler, more generous motives,
and in doing this seem to myself to be doing them no more than justice."
F.C. BAYLOR.
[TO BE CONCLUDED.]
OUR VILLE.
The picturesqueness of France in our day is confined almost exclusively
to its humble life. The Renaissance and the Revolution swept away in
most parts of the country moated castle, abbaye, grange, and chateau, to
replace them with luxurious but conventional piles and ruins humbly
restored and humbly inhabited. Many a farmhouse with unkempt _cour_
and dishevelled _pelouse_ is the relic of a turreted château,
stables are often desecrated churches, seigneurial _colombiers_
shelter swine, and battlemented portals to fortified walls serve, as
does the one of our ville, to house hideously-uniformed _douaniers_
watching the luggage of arriving travellers.
Our ville was never an aristocratic one, and to this day very few of our
names are preceded by the idealizing particle _de_. We have an
ancient history, however,--so ancient that all historians place our
origin at _un temps trèsrecule_. We had houses and walls when Rouen
yonder was a marsh, and we saw Havre spring up like a mushroom only two
little centuries and a half ago. Besieged and taken, burned and ravaged,
alternately by Protestant and Catholic, no wonder our ville has not even
ruins to show that we are older than the fifteen hundreds. Still,
ancient though we are, we have always been a ville of humble
folk,--hardy sailors, brave fishers, and thrifty bourgeois,--and to-day,
as always, our highest families buy and sell and build their philistine
homes back toward the _côte_, while our humble ones picturesquely
haunt the _quais_.