MR. ARTHUR PONSONBY PORE.
Mr. Pore was much more attractive than we had expected. Things in this
life hardly ever come up to your expectations, either good or bad, which
sounds as though I were still brooding over Mabel's proposed visit to
Cousin Park and the possible enthralling of Zebedee. I remind myself of
the Irishman who had raised a particularly fat pig from which he
expected to realize great wealth. He took it to town on market day to
sell. On the way home he met a neighbour who genially inquired:
"And how mooch did your pig be after weighing, Paddy?"
"Not as mooch as I thart it would,--and I thart it wouldn't," added
Paddy pessimistically.
In the first place, Mr. Pore was handsome. He had a stately dignity and
an aristocratic bearing that all the weighing of lard and drawing of
molasses in the world could not lessen. His forehead was intellectual;
his eyes piercing; his nose aquiline and rather haughty; his mouth a
little petulant with a pathetic droop at the corners; and his chin
(rather indicative of his character, I fancy, and explaining why he was
keeping a country store at Price's Landing instead of taking that place
in the world to which by birth and education he was entitled), his chin
decidedly receded. In doing so, however, it gave you to understand that
it retreated in good order and was unconvinced. I mean that it had that
stubborn look that receding chins sometimes do have. After all,
stubbornness was the key-note of Mr. Pore's character, rather than
weakness. I had gathered that much from what Annie had divulged to me
that night at Gresham when she had opened the box with her dead mother's
dress in it and found the note from her mother, with the twenty-five
dollars pinned in the sleeve.
He was dressed in what books call decent black. Certainly there was
nothing about him to make anyone doubt he was a perfect gentleman, even
had they been unaware of the fact that only one life stood between him
and a title. He was so excessively English that it was hard to believe
that he had spent the last fifteen years in a little settlement on the
James River, never hearing his native tongue in all that time, perhaps.
Our spoken language was very different from his, although I have heard
it said that Virginians and Kentuckians and Bostonians come nearer to
speaking the real English than any other Americans. We may come nearer
than others but we are still far off from the kind of English that Mr.
Arthur Ponsonby Pore spoke. I thought of Cousin Park and her "lower
middle class" to which she had consigned the gentleman, and wished that
he might just once look at her and Mabel through the gold _pince nez_
that straddled his aristocratic, aquiline nose!
Zebedee had gone over to Norfolk to meet his guest, and under his genial
influence I fancy Mr. Pore had somewhat melted; but his demeanor was
still rather icy. He went through the introduction to Miss Cox and all
of us girls as though it had been a court ceremony, and then turning to
Annie, he gave her a little Arthur Ponsonby peck in lieu of a kiss.
Shaking his hand, Dee declared was like grasping an old pump handle when
the sucker is worn out. You take hold thinking you are to meet with some
resistance, but instead, the handle flies up and you find yourself
foolishly shaking it up and down with no chance of getting any returns
for your trouble. The Tuckers were famous hand-shakers, as all their
friends knew, but doubtless Mr. Pore was unprepared for such a vigorous
grasp from young ladies.
I found nothing to complain of in his manner of greeting me. Not being
such a hearty hand-shaker as Tweedles, I put my hand in his and left him
to do the shaking. This he did not do, but he gave my hand a slight
pressure and gazed earnestly into my eyes. So earnest and burning was
his glance that I felt almost confused, but I thought that no doubt
Annie had told him of her confiding in me about her birth and he felt
some interest because of her affection for me.
As we took our seats on the porch, Mr. Pore's chair was by mine and
still he gazed at me with his piercing, melancholy eyes.
"Did I hear your name aright? Was it not Miss Page Allison?"
"Yes, sir! I am Annie's friend from Gresham. We have been intimate from
the day we entered school."
"Yes, yes! I know much of you and your courtesy. But tell me, Miss
Allison, are you American?" (His American was so different from ours one
could almost spell it A-m-e-h-r-i-k-e-n.)
"Yes, Mr. Pore, I am American, but my mother was English."
"Ah! I thought as much. Her name was Lucy Page, was it not?"
"Yes," I answered, wondering at his knowledge of my mother's name.
"Oh, Page! Page! Only think of it!" exclaimed Annie impulsively. "Lucy
Page was my mother's little friend, the one who lent her the slippers to
wear to the Charity Bazaar," and her enthusiasm went unrebuked by her
father. Indeed, he seemed almost as excited as Annie. The poor man had
been a long time away from persons who knew him and whom he knew and he
had the absurd notion that very few "Amehrikens" were his social equal;
now he found that his daughter had made friends with the child of his
wife's old friend.
"To think of it, to think of it! My word, but it is strange! I knew the
moment I saw you that I had seen either you or your counterpart before.
Tell me, child, all about your mother, and your grandfather, Major Page.
What a fine old soldier he was!"
And so I sat on the porch by this strange, stiff Englishman, no longer
stiff, but positively limber, Dum declared, and told all I knew of my
poor little mother and the fine old soldier, her father. They had come
to America to look up some investments made by the retired Army officer,
had settled near Warrenton and there had met my father,--and the
marriage had ensued.
"All I have left of my old English grandfather is his hat-tub, which I
still use when I am at Bracken," I said.
"My word, how I should like to own one! I have not seen a hat-tub for
twenty years," he sighed. "But tell me, Miss Allison, do you never see
nor hear from your mother's family in England?"
"I think all correspondence with them died a natural death many years
ago. Father used to write once a year to a great-aunt, Gwendoline was
her name, but she died; after that some of her daughters wrote once or
twice and then stopped. I don't even know whether they are alive and I
fancy they neither know nor care whether I am."
"I have never seen a more striking likeness than you have to your
mother. She was much younger than my wife when I knew her. We had all
been visiting at the home of the Earl of Garth, my wife's uncle. Little
Lucy Page was really not old enough to be out of the nursery, certainly
should have been in charge of a governess; but Major Page had his own
ideas about such things and took his daughter wherever he went. She was
about sixteen, I fancy."
"Just your age!" tweedled the Tuckers, who had been listening, with open
mouths and eyes, in speechless silence to Mr. Pore's revelations. When
he spoke of the Earl of Garth as his wife's uncle they looked, as poor
dear Blanche expressed it, "fittin' to bust." And then when in the most
casual manner he let drop that his own father was a baronet, I know it
was a relief to them that the hammock rope broke at the crucial moment
and they were precipitated to the floor with Mary Flannagan who was
between them.
"If something had not happened and happened pretty quick 'a kersplosion
was eminent,'" whispered Dee to me. "And now I am going to beat it to
the hotel as fast as my legs can carry me and let that hateful Mabel
Binks know that she has been nasty to the nobility. Oh, I am going to be
tactful and not let her know I came for the express purpose. I am going
to ask her to tea and be generally sweet, and then just casually let it
drop that Mr. Pore knew your mother while all of them were visiting at
an earl's, and that said earl was Mrs. Pore's uncle. I'll rub in that it
means that our modest, little English friend, called by Mabel and her
ilk Orphan Annie, is the great-granddaughter of an earl on her mother's
side and the granddaughter of a baronet on her father's."
All this Dee whispered to me while the hammock was being tied up more
securely by Zebedee. The solemn Englishman was evidently much amused by
the mishap, as he laughed in a manner almost hilarious for one so
dignified and sober. I have always heard an accident like that spoken of
as an English joke, and truly it did seem to strike him as very funny.
Harvie Price and Shorty made their appearance soon after. Harvie greeted
Mr. Pore with great respect and in a few moments they were conversing
most affably about Harvie's grandfather, General Price, and news of the
settlement.
Mr. Pore seemed to like the boy and Harvie evidently liked him. Once he
had told me that he admired Mr. Pore greatly as one who could think in
Latin.
It was easy to see that Mr. Pore was not going to be such a difficult
visitor, after all. He had evidently decided that we were good enough
socially for him, because of my mother's having been at the Earl of
Garth's. He had already admitted Harvie to his exclusive circle since he
had permitted Annie to play with him when they were children. He liked
Zebedee and Zebedee's cigars and Zebedee's children, who cracked such
delicious jokes in falling out of hammocks. Altogether he intended to
have a very pleasant weekend. I fancied he was a little sorry that he
had spoken of his connections, as it was a subject he evidently had not
touched on to strangers, but it had slipped out in his delight in
meeting someone he considered of his world, that world that he had
turned his back on so many years before but the world to which he still
belonged. He had never identified himself with his "Amehriken"
neighbours and had always held himself as an alien among them.
Annie looked a little startled and very happy. This was a new father to
her, a genial gentleman who actually talked to her friends and admitted
having titled connections in the old country. He had not censured her
once and now he was talking to Harvie with actual affability.
"Oh, Page," she whispered to me, "how glad I am I accepted your slippers
that night of the musicale at Gresham. You remember I said to you that
my mother had borrowed slippers, too, when she had worn that dress, and
that she did not mind borrowing them because she knew her friend loved
her. To think of that friend's being your mother! Oh, Page, I am so
happy!"