Mrs. Tryphonia Basil kept a boarding-house of the usual kind on
Four-and-a-Half Street. Male clerks--there were no female clerks in
the Government in 1854--to the number of half a dozen, two old bureau
officers, an architect's assistant, Reybold, and certain temporary
visitors made up the table. The landlady was the mistress; the slave
was Joyce.
Joyce Basil was a fine-looking girl, who did not know it--a fact so
astounding as to be fitly related only in fiction. She did not know
it, because she had to work so hard for the boarders and her mother.
Loving her mother with the whole of her affection, she had suffered
all the pains and penalties of love from that repository. She was
to-day upbraided for her want of coquetry and neatness; to-morrow, for
proposing to desert her mother and elope with a person she had never
thought of. The mainstay of the establishment, she was not aware of
her usefulness. Accepting every complaint and outbreak as if she
deserved it, the poor girl lived at the capital a beautiful scullion,
an unsalaried domestic, and daily forwarded the food to the table, led
in the chamberwork, rose from bed unrested and retired with all her
bones aching. But she was of a natural grace that hard work could not
make awkward; work only gave her bodily power, brawn, and form. Though
no more than seventeen years of age, she was a superb woman, her chest
thrown forward, her back like the torso of a _Venus de Milo_, her head
placed on the throat of a Minerva, and the nature of a child moulded
in the form of a matron. Joyce Basil had black hair and eyes--very
long, excessive hair, that in the mornings she tied up with haste so
imperfectly, that once Reybold had seen it drop like a cloud around
her and nearly touch her feet. At that moment, seeing him, she
blushed. He plead, for once, a Congressman's impudence, and without
her objection, wound that great crown of woman's glory around her
head, and, as he did so, the perfection of her form and skin, and the
overrunning health and height of the Virginia girl, struck him so
thoroughly that he said:
"Miss Joyce, I don't wonder that Virginia is the mother of
Presidents."
Between Reybold and Joyce there were already the delicate relations of
a girl who did not know that she was a woman, and a man who knew she
was beautiful and worthy. He was a man vigilant over himself, and the
poverty and menial estate of Joyce Basil were already insuperable
obstacles to marrying her, but still he was attracted by her
insensibility that he could ever have regarded her in that light of
marriage. "Who was her father, the Judge?" he used to reflect. The
Judge was a favorite topic with Mrs. Basil at the table.
"Mr. Reybold," she would say, "you commercial people of the Nawth
can't hunt, I believe. Jedge Basil is now on the mountains of Fawquear
hunting the plova. His grandfather's estate is full of plova."
If, by chance, Reybold saw a look of care on Mrs. Basil's face, he
inquired for the Judge, her husband, and found he was still shooting
on the Occequan.
"Does he never come to Washington, Mrs. Basil?" asked Reybold one day,
when his mind was very full of Joyce, the daughter.
"Not while Congress is in session," said Mrs. Basil. "It's a little
too much of the _oi polloi_ for the Judge. His family, you may not
know, Mr. Reybold, air of the Basils of King George. They married into
the Tayloze of Mount Snaffle. The Tayloze of Mount Snaffle have Ingin
blood in their veins--the blood of Poky-huntus. They dropped the name
of Taylor, which had got to be common through a want of Ingin blood,
and spelled it with a E. It used to be Taylor, but now it's Tayloze."
On another occasion, at sight of Joyce Basil cooking over the fire,
against whose flame her moulded arms took momentary roses upon their
ivory, Reybold said to himself: "Surely there is something above the
common in the race of this girl." And he asked the question of Mrs.
Basil:
"Madame, how was the Judge, your husband, at the last advices?"
"Hunting the snipe, Mr. Reybold. I suppose you do not have the snipe
in the North. It is the aristocratic fowl of the Old Dominion. Its
bill is only shorter than its legs, and it will not brown at the fire,
to perfection, unless upon a silver spit. Ah! when the Jedge and
myself were young, before his land troubles overtook us, we went to
the springs with our own silver and carriages, Mr. Reybold."
Looking up at Mrs. Basil, Reybold noticed a pallor and flush
alternately, and she evaded his eye.
Once Mrs. Basil borrowed a hundred dollars from Reybold in advance of
board, and the table suffered in consequence.
"The Judge," she had explained, "is short of taxes on his Fawquear
lands. It's a desperate moment with him." Yet in two days the Judge
was shooting blue-winged teal at the mouth of the Accotink, and his
entire indifference to his family set Reybold to thinking whether the
Virginia husband and father was any thing more than a forgetful
savage. The boarders, however, made very merry over the absent
unknown. If the beefsteak was tough, threats were made to send for
"the Judge," and let him try a tooth on it; if scant, it was suggested
that the Judge might have paid a gunning visit to the premises and
inspected the larder. The daughter of the house kept such an even
temper, and was so obliging within the limitations of the
establishment, that many a boarder went to his department without
complaint, though with an appetite only partly satisfied. The boy,
Uriel, also was the guardsman of the household, old-faced as if with
the responsibility of taking care of two women. Indeed, the children
of the landlady were so well behaved and prepossessing that, compared
with Mrs. Basil's shabby _hauteur_ and garrulity, the legend of the
Judge seemed to require no other foundation than offspring of such
good spirit and intonation.
Mrs. Tryphonia Basil was no respecter of persons. She kept boarders,
she said, as a matter of society, and to lighten the load of the
Judge. He had very little idea that she was making a mercantile matter
of hospitality, but, as she feelingly remarked, "the old families are
misplaced in such times as these yer, when the departments are filled
with Dutch, Yankees, Crackers, Pore Whites, and other foreigners." Her
manner was, at periods, insolent to Mr. Reybold, who seldom protested,
out of regard to the daughter and the little Page; he was a man of
quite ordinary appearance, saying little, never making speeches or
soliciting notice, and he accepted his fare and quarters with little
or no complaint.
"Crutch," he said one day to the little boy, "did you ever see your
father?"
"No, I never saw him, Mr. Reybold, but I've had letters from him."
"Don't he ever come to see you when you are sick?"
"No. He wanted to come once when my back was very sick, and I laid in
bed weeks and weeks, sir, dreaming, oh! such beautiful things. I
thought mamma and sister and I were all with papa in that old home we
are going to some day. He carried me up and down in his arms, and I
felt such rest that I never knew any thing like it, when I woke up,
and my back began to ache again. I wouldn't let mamma send for him,
though, because she said he was working for us all to make our
fortunes, and get doctors for me, and clothes and school for dear
Joyce. So I sent him my love, and told papa to work, and he and I
would bring the family out all right."
"What did your papa seem like in that dream, my little boy?
"Oh! sir, his forehead was bright as the sun. Sometimes I see him now
when I am tired at night after running all day through Congress."
Reybold's eyes were full of tears as he listened to the boy, and,
turning aside, he saw Joyce Basil weeping also.
"My dear girl," he said to her, looking up significantly, "I fear he
will see his great Father very soon."
Reybold had few acquaintances, and he encouraged the landlady's
daughter to go about with him when she could get a leisure hour or
evening. Sometimes they took a seat at the theatre, more often at the
old Ascension Church, and once they attended a President's reception.
Joyce had the bearing of a well-bred lady, and the purity of thought
of a child. She was noticed as if she had been a new and distinguished
arrival in Washington.
"Ah! Reybold," said Pontotoc Bibb, "I understand, ole feller, what
keeps you so quiet now. You've got a wife onbeknown to the Kemittee!
and a happy man I know you air."
It pleased Reybold to hear this, and deepened his interest in the
landlady's family. His attention to her daughter stirred Mrs. Basil's
pride and revolt together.
"My daughter, Colonel Reybold," she said, "is designed for the army.
The Judge never writes to me but he says: 'Tryphonee, be careful that
you impress upon my daughter the importance of the military
profession. My mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother married into
the army, and no girl of the Basil stock shall descend to civil life
while I can keep the Fawquear estates.'"
"Madame," said the Congressman, "will you permit me to make the
suggestion that your daughter is already a woman and needs a father's
care, if she is ever to receive it. I beseech you to impress this
subject upon the Judge. His estates cannot be more precious to his
heart, if he is a man of honor; nay, what is better than honor, his
duty requires him to come to the side of these children, though he be
ever so constrained by business or pleasure to attend to more worldly
concerns."
"The Judge," exclaimed Mrs. Basil, much miffed, "is a man of
hereditary ijees, Colonel Reybold. He is now in pursuit of
the--ahem!--the Kinvas-back on his ancestral waters. If he should hear
that you suggested a pacific life and the grovelling associations of
the capital for him, he might call you out, sir!"
Reybold said no more; but one evening when Mrs. Basil was absent,
called across the Potomac, as happened frequently, at the summons of
the Judge--and on such occasions she generally requested a temporary
loan or a slight advance of board--Reybold found Joyce Basil in the
little parlor of the dwelling. She was alone and in tears, but the
little boy Uriel slept before the chimney-fire on a rug, and his pale,
thin face, catching the glow of the burning wood, looked beautified as
Reybold addressed the young woman.
"Miss Joyce," he said, "our little brother works too hard. Is there
never to be relief for him? His poor, withered body, slung on those
crutches for hours and hours, racing up the aisles of the House with
stronger pages, is wearing him out. His ambition is very interesting
to see, but his breath is growing shorter and his strength is frailer
every week. Do you know what it will lead to?"
"O my Lord!" she said, in the negrofied phrase natural to her
latitude, "I wish it was no sin to wish him dead."
"Tell me, my friend," said Reybold, "can I do nothing to assist you
both? Let me understand you. Accept my sympathy and confidence. Where
is Uriel's father? What is this mystery?"
She did not answer.
"It is for no idle curiosity that I ask," he continued. "I will appeal
to him for his family, even at the risk of his resentment. Where is
he?"
"Oh, do not ask!" she exclaimed. "You want me to tell you only the
truth. He is _there_!"
She pointed to one of the old portraits in the room--a picture fairly
painted by some provincial artist--and it revealed a handsome face, a
little voluptuous but aristocratic, the shoulders clad in a martial
cloak, the neck in ruffles and ruffles, also and a diamond in the
shirt bosom. Reybold studied it with all his mind.
"Then it is no fiction," he said, "that you have a living father, one
answering to your mother's description. Where have I seen that face?
Has some irreparable mistake, some miserable controversy, alienated
him from his wife? Has he another family?"
She answered with spirit:
"No, sir. He is my father and my brother's only. But I can tell you no
more."
"Joyce," he said, taking her hand, "this is not enough. I will not
press you to betray any secret you may possess. Keep it. But of
yourself I must know something more. You are almost a woman. You are
beautiful."
At this he tightened his grasp, and it brought him closer to her side.
She made a little struggle to draw away, but it pleased him to see
that when the first modest opposition had been tried she sat quite
happily, though trembling, with his arm around her.
"Joyce," he continued, "you have a double duty: one to your mother and
this poor invalid, whose journey toward that Father's house not made
with hands is swiftly hastening; another duty toward your nobler
self--the future that is in you and your woman's heart. I tell you
again that you are beautiful, and the slavery to which you are
condemning yourself forever is an offence against the creator of such
perfection. Do you know what it is to love?"
"I know what it is to feel kindness," she answered after a time of
silence. "I ought to know no more. You goodness is very dear to me. We
never sleep, brother and I, but we say your name together, and ask God
to bless you."
Reybold sought in vain to suppress a confession he had resisted. The
contact of her form, her large dark eyes now fixed upon him in
emotion, the birth of the conscious woman in the virgin and her
affection still in the leashes of a slavish sacrifice, tempted him
onward to the conquest.
"I am about to retire from Congress," he said. "It is no place for me
in times so insubstantial. There is darkness and beggary ahead for all
your Southern race. There is a crisis coming which will be followed by
desolation. The generation to which your parents belong is doomed! I
open my arms to you, dear girl, and offer you a home never yet
gladdened by a wife. Accept it, and leave Washington with me and with
your brother. I love you wholly."
A happy light shone in her face a moment. She was weary to the bone
with the day's work, and had not the strength, if she had the will, to
prevent the Congressman drawing her to his heart. Sobbing there, she
spoke with bitter agony:
"Heaven bless you, dear Mr. Reybold, with a wife good enough to
deserve you! Blessings on your generous heart. But I cannot leave
Washington. I love another here!"