THE PRINCIPLES OF MISS MATOACA
When I walked down to the office now, I began to be pointed out as "the
General's wonderful boy." Invitations to start companies, or to
directorships of innumerable boards, were showered upon me, and
adventurous promoters of vain schemes sought desperately to shelter
themselves behind my growing credit. Then, in the following October, the
consolidated oil interests bought out my business at my own price, and I
awoke one glorious morning to the knowledge that my fortune was made.
"If you're going to swell, Ben, now's the time," said the General, "and
out you go."
But my training had been in a hard school, and by the end of the month
he had ceased to enquire in the mornings "if my hat still fitted my
head."
"You'll have your ups and downs, Ben, like the rest of us," he said,
"but the main thing is, let your fortunes see-saw as they may, always
keep your eyes on a level. By the way, I saw Sally Mickleborough last
night, and when I asked her why she fell in love with you, she replied
it was because she saw you pushing a wheel up a hill. Now there's a
woman with a reason--you'd better look sharp, or she'll begin talking
politics presently like her Aunt Matoaca. What do you think I found on
my desk this morning? A pamphlet, addressed in her handwriting, about
the presidential election." Then his tone softened. "So Sally's going to
marry you in spite of her aunts? Well, she's a good girl, a brave girl,
and I'm proud of her."
When I went home to supper, I was to have a different opinion from Dr.
Theophilus.
"I saw Sally Mickleborough to-day, Ben, when I called on Miss
Matoaca,--[that poor lady gets flightier every day, she left a pamphlet
here this morning about the presidential election]--and the girl told me
in the few minutes I saw her in the hall, that she meant to marry you
next month."
"She will do me that great honour, doctor."
"Well, I regret it, Ben; I can't conceal from you that I regret it.
You're a good boy, and I'm proud of you, but I don't like to see young
folks putting themselves in opposition to the judgment of their elders.
I'm an orthodox believer in the claims of blood, you know."
"And is there nothing to be said for the claims of love?"
"The claims of moonshine, Ben," observed Mrs. Clay in her sharp voice,
looking up from a pair of yarn socks she was knitting for the doctor;
"you know I'm fond of you, but when you begin to talk of the claims of
love driving a girl to break with her family, I feel like boxing your
ears."
"You see, Tina is a cynic," remarked Dr. Theophilus, smiling, "and I
don't doubt that she has her excellent reasons, as usual; most cynics
have. A woman, however, has got to believe in love to the point of
lunacy or become a scoffer. What I contend, now, is that love isn't
moonshine, but that however solid a thing it may be, it isn't, after
all, as solid as one's duty to one's family."
"Of course I can't argue with you, doctor. I know little of the unit you
call 'the family'; but I should think the first duty of the family would
be to consider the happiness of the individual."
"And do you think, Ben, that you are the only person who is considering
Sally's happiness?"
"I know that I am considering it; for the rest I can't speak."
"I firmly believe," broke in Mrs. Clay, "that Sally's behaviour has
helped to drive Matoaca Bland clean out of her wits. She's actually sent
me one of her leaflets,--what do you think of that, Theophilus?--to me,
the most refined and retiring woman on earth."
"What I'd say, Tina, is that you aren't half as refined and retiring as
Miss Matoaca," chuckled the doctor.
"That is merely the way she dresses," rejoined Mrs. Clay stiffly; "it is
her poke bonnet and black silk mantle that deceives you. As for me, I
can call no woman truly refined who does not naturally avoid the society
of men."
"Well, Tina, I had a notion that all of you were pretty fond of it, when
it comes to that."
"Not of the society of men, Theophilus, but of the select attentions of
gentlemen."
"I'm not taking up for Miss Matoaca," pursued the good man; "I can't
conscientiously do that, and I'm more concerned at this minute about the
marriage of Ben and Sally. You may smile at me as superstitious, if you
please, but I never yet saw a marriage turn out happily that was made in
defiance of family feeling."
As I could make no reply to this, except to put forward a second time
what Mrs. Clay had tartly called "the claims of moonshine," I bade the
doctor goodnight, and going upstairs to my room, sat down beside the
small square window, which gave on the garden, with its miniature box
borders and its single clipped yew-tree, over which a young moon was
rising. "A mixture of a fighter and a dreamer," the old man had once
called me, and it seemed to me now that something apart from the mere
business of living and the alert man of affairs, brooded in me over the
young moon and the yew-tree.
A letter from Sally had reached me a few hours before, and taking it
from my pocket, I turned to the lamp and read it for the sixth time with
a throbbing heart.
"You ask me if I am happy, dearest," she wrote, "and I answer that I am
happy, with a still, deep happiness, over which a hundred troubles and
cares ripple like shadows on a lake. But oh! poor Aunt Mitty, with her
silent hurt pride in her face, and poor Aunt Matoaca, with the strained,
unnatural brightness in her eyes, and her cheeks so like rose leaves
that have crumpled. Oh, Ben, I believe Aunt Matoaca is living over again
her own romance, and it breaks my heart. Last night I went into her
room, and found her with her old yellowed wedding veil and orange
blossoms laid out on the bed. She tried to pretend that she was
straightening her cedar chests, but she looked so little and
pitiable--if you could only have seen her! I wonder what she would be
now if the General had been a man like you? How grateful I am, how
profoundly thankful with my whole heart that I am marrying a man that I
can trust!"
"That I can trust!" Her words rang in my ears, and I heard them again,
clear and strong, the next morning, when I met Miss Matoaca as I was on
my way to my office. She was coming slowly up Franklin Street, her arms
filled with packages, and when she recognised me, with a shy, startled
movement to turn aside, a number of leaflets fluttered from her grasp to
the pavement between us. When I stooped and gathered them up, her face,
under the old-fashioned poke bonnet, was brought close to my eyes, and I
saw that she looked wan and pinched, and that her bright brown eyes were
shining as if from fever.
"Mr. Starr," she said, straightening her thin little figure as I handed
her the leaflets, "I've wanted for some time to speak a word to you on
the subject of my niece--Miss Mickleborough."
"Yes, Miss Matoaca."
"My sister Mitty thought it better that I should refrain from doing so,
and upon such matters she has excellent judgment. It is my habit,
indeed, to yield to her opinion in everything except a question of
conscience."
"Yes?" for again she had paused. "It is very kind of you," I added.
"I do not mean it for kindness, Mr. Starr. My niece is very dear to me;
and since poor Sarah's unfortunate experience, we have felt
more--strongly, if possible, about unequal marriages. I know that you
are a most remarkable young man, but I do not feel that you are in any
way suited to make the happiness of our niece--Miss Mickleborough--"
"I am sorry, Miss Matoaca, but Miss Mickleborough thinks differently."
"Young people are rarely the best judges in such matters, Mr. Starr."
"But do you think their elders can judge for them?"
"If they have had experience--yes."
"Ah, Miss Matoaca, does our own experience ever teach us to understand
the experience of others?"
"The Blands have never needed to be taught," she returned with pride,
"that the claims of the family are not to be sacrificed to--to a
sentiment. Except in the case of poor Sarah there has never been a
mésalliance in our history. We have always put one thing above the
consideration of our blood, and that is--a principle. If it were a
question of conscience, however painful it might be to me, I should
uphold my niece in her opposition to my sister Mitty. I myself have
opposed her for a matter of principle."
"I am aware of it, Miss Matoaca."
Her withered cheeks were tinged with a delicate rose, and I could almost
see the working of her long, narrow mind behind her long, narrow face.
"I should like to leave a few of these leaflets with you, Mr. Starr,"
she said.
A minute afterwards, when she had moved on with her meek, slow walk, I
was left standing on the pavement with her suffrage pamphlets fluttering
in my hand. Stuffing them hurriedly into my pocket, I went on to the
office, utterly oblivious of the existence of any principle on earth
except the one underlying the immediate expansion of the Great South
Midland and Atlantic Railroad.
A fortnight later I heard that Miss Matoaca had begun writing letters to
the "Richmond Herald"; and I remembered, with an easy masculine
complacency, the pamphlets I had thrown into the waste basket beside the
General's desk. The presidential election, with its usual upheaval of
the business world, had arrived; and that timid little Miss Matoaca
should have intruded herself into the affairs of the nation did not
occur to me as possible, until the General informed me, while we watched
a Democratic procession one afternoon, that Miss Mitty had come to him
the day before in tears over the impropriety of her sister's conduct.
"She begged me to remonstrate with Miss Matoaca," he pursued, "and by
George, I promised her that I would. There's one thing, Ben, I've never
been able to stand, and that's the sight of a woman in tears. Of course
when you've made 'em cry yourself, it is different; but to have a lady
coming to you weeping over somebody else--and a lady like Miss
Mitty--well, I honestly believe if she'd requested me to give her my
skin, I'd have tried to get out of it just to oblige her."
"Did you go to Miss Matoaca?" I asked, for the picture of the General
lecturing his old love on the subject of the proprieties had caught my
attention even in the midst of a large Democratic procession that was
marching along the street. While he rambled on in his breaking voice,
which had begun to grow weak and old, I gazed over his head at the
political banners with their familiar, jesting inscriptions.
"I declare, Ben, I'd rather have swallowed a dose of medicine," he went
on; "you see I used to know Miss Matoaca very well forty years ago--I
reckon you've heard of it. We were engaged to be married, and it was
broken off because of some woman's rights nonsense she'd got in her
head."
"Well, it's hard to imagine your interview of yesterday."
"There wasn't any interview. I went to her and put it as mildly as I
could. 'Miss Matoaca,' I said, 'I'm sorry to hear you've gone cracked.'"
"And how did she take it?"
"'Do you mean my heart or my head, General?' she asked--she had always
plenty of spirit, had Matoaca, for all her soft looks. 'It's your head,'
I answered. 'Lord knows I'm not casting any reflections on the rest of
you.' 'Then it has fared better than my heart, General,' she replied,
'for that was broken.' She looked kind of wild, Ben, as she said it. I
don't know what she was talking about, I declare on my honour I don't!"
A cheer went up from the procession, and an expression of eager
curiosity came into his face.
"Can you read that inscription, Ben? My eyes ain't so good as they used
to be."
"It's some campaign joke. So your lecture wasn't quite a success?"
"It would have been if she'd listened to reason."
"But she did not, I presume?"
"She never listened to it in her life. If she had, she wouldn't be a
poor miserable old maid at this moment. What's that coming they're
making such a noise about? My God, Ben, if it ain't Matoaca herself!"
It was Matoaca, and the breathless horror in the General's voice passed
into my own mind as I looked. There she was, in her poke bonnet and her
black silk mantle, walking primly at the straggling end of the
procession, among a crowd of hooting small boys and gaping negroes. Her
eyes, very wide and bright, like the eyes of one who is mentally
deranged, were fixed straight ahead, over the lines of men marching in
front of her, on the blue sky above the church steeples. Under her poke
bonnet I saw her meekly parted hair and her faded cheeks, flushed now
with a hectic colour. In one neatly gloved hand her silk skirt was held
primly; in the other she carried a little white silk flag, on which the
staring gold letters were lost in the rippling folds. With her eyes on
the sky and her feet in the dust, she marched, a prim, ladylike figure,
an inspired spinster, oblivious alike of the hooting small boys and the
half-compassionate, half-scoffing gazers upon the pavement.
"She's crazy, Ben," said the General, and his voice broke with a sob.
For a minute, as dazed as he, I stared blankly at the little figure with
the white flag. Then bewilderment gave place before the call to action,
and it seemed to me that I saw Sally there in Miss Matoaca, as I had
seen her in the rising moon over the clipped yew, and in the whirlpool
of the stock market. Leaving my place at the General's side, I descended
the steps at a bound, and made my way through the jostling, noisy crowd
to the little lady in its midst.
"Miss Matoaca!" I said.
For the first time her eyes left the sky, and as she looked down, the
consciousness of her situation entered into her strained bright eyes.
Her composure was lost in a birdlike, palpitating movement of terror.
"I--I am going as far as the Square, Mr. Starr," she replied, as if she
were repeating by rote a phrase in a strange tongue.
At my approach the ridicule, somewhat subdued by the sense of her
helplessness, broke suddenly loose. Bending over I offered her my arm,
my head still uncovered. As the hand holding the white flag drooped from
exhaustion, I took it, with the banner, into my own.
"Then I'll go with you, Miss Matoaca," I responded.
We started on, took a few measured paces in the line of march, and then
her strength failing her, she sank back, with a pathetic moan of
weariness, into my arms. Lifting her like a child I carried her out of
the street and up the steps into the General's office. Turning at a
touch as I entered the room, I saw that Sally was at my side.
"I've sent for Dr. Theophilus," she said. "There, put her on the
lounge."
Kneeling on the floor she began bathing Miss Matoaca's forehead with
water which somebody had brought. The General, his eyes very red and
bloodshot and his lower lip fallen into a senile droop, was trying
vainly to fan her with his pocket-handkerchief.
"We have always feared this would happen," said Sally, very quiet and
pale.
"She was talking to me yesterday about her heart," returned the General,
"and I didn't know what she meant."
He bent over, fanning her more violently with his silk handkerchief, and
on the lounge beneath, Miss Matoaca lay, very prim and maidenly, with
her skirt folded modestly about her ankles.
Dr. Theophilus, coming in with the messenger, bent over her for a long
minute.
"I always thought her sense of honour would kill her," he said at last
as he looked up.