Mrs. Trevise's hand moved toward the bell.

But Juno answered the question mournfully: "With such hereditary bloodthirstiness, who can tell?" And so Mrs. Trevise moved her hand away again.

"Excuse me, but do you know if the other gentleman is laid up, too?"

inquired the male honeymooner, hopefully.

"I am happy to understand that he is," replied Juno.

In sheer amazement I burst out, "Oh!" and abruptly stopped.

But it was too late. I had instantly become the centre of interest. The et ceteras and honeymooners craned their necks; the Briton leaned toward me from opposite; the poetess, who had worn an absent expression since being told that the injured champion was not nearly well enough to listen to her ode, now put on her gla.s.ses and gazed at me kindly; while Juno reared her headdress and spoke, not to me, but to the air in my general neighborhood.

"Has any one later intelligence than what I bring from my nephew's bedside?"

So she hadn't perceived who my companion at the step had been! Well, she should be enlightened, they all should be enlightened, and vengeance was mine. I spoke with gentleness:--

"Your nephew's impressions, I fear, are still confused by his deplorable misadventure."

"May I ask what you know about his impressions?"

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the hand of Mrs. Trevise move toward her bell; but she wished to hear all about it more than she wished concord at her harmonious table; and the hand stopped.

Juno spoke again. "Who, pray, has later news than what I bring?"

My enemy was in my hand; and an enemy in the hand is worth I don't know how many in the bush.

I answered most gently: "I do not come from Mr. Mayrant's bedside, because I have just left him at the front door in sound health--saving a bruise over his left eye."

During a second we all sat in a high-strung silence, and then Juno became truly superb. "Who sees the scars he brazenly conceals?"

It took away my breath; my battle would have been lost, when the Briton suggested: "But mayn't he have shown those to his Aunt?"

We sat in no silence now; the first et cetera made extraordinary sounds on his plate, Mrs. Trevise tinkled her handbell with more unction than I had ever yet seen in her; and while she and Daphne interchanged streams of severe words which I was too disconcerted to follow, the other et ceteras and the honeymooners hectically effervesced into small talk. I presently found myself eating our last course amid a reestablished calm, when, with a rustle, Juno swept out from among us, to return (I suppose) to the bedside. As she pa.s.sed behind the Briton's chair, that invaluable person kicked me under the table, and on my raising my eyes to him he gave me a large, robust wink.

X: High Walk and the Ladies

I now burned to put many questions to the rest of the company. If, through my foolish and outreaching slyness with the girl behind the counter, the door of my comprehension had been shut, Juno had now opened it sufficiently wide for a number of facts to come crowding in, so to speak, abreast. Indeed, their simultaneous arrival was not a little confusing, as if several visitors had burst in upon me and at once begun speaking loudly, each shouting a separate and important matter which demanded my intelligent consideration. John Mayrant worked in the custom house, and Kings Port frowned upon this; not merely Kings Port in general--which counted little with the boy, if indeed he noticed general opinion at all--but the boy's particular Kings Port, his severe old aunts, and his cousins, and the pretty girl at the Exchange, and the men he played cards with, all these frowned upon it, too; yet even this condemnation one could disregard if some lofty personal principle, some pledge to one's own sacred honor, were at stake--but here was no such thing: John Mayrant hated the position himself. The salary? No, the salary would count for nothing in the face of such a prejudice as I had seen glitter from his eye! A strong, clever youth of twenty-three, with the world before him, and no one to support--stop! Hortense Rieppe!

There was the lofty personal principle, the sacred pledge to honor; he was engaged presently to endow her with all his worldly goods; and to perform this faithfully a bridegroom must not, no matter how little he liked "taking orders from a negro," fling away his worldly goods some few days before he was to p.r.o.nounce his bridegroom's vow. So here, at Mrs. Trevise's dinner-table, I caught for one moment, to the full, a vision of the unhappy boy's plight; he was sticking to a task which he loathed that he might support a wife whom he no longer desired. Such, as he saw it, was his duty; and n.o.body, not even a soul of his kin or his kind, gave him a word or a thought of understanding, gave him anything except the cold shoulder. Yes; from one soul he had got a sign--from aged Daddy Ben, at the churchyard gate; and amid my jostling surmises and conclusions, that quaint speech of the old negro, that little act of fidelity and affection from the heart of a black man, took on a strange pathos in its isolation amid the general harshness of his white superiors. Over this it was that I was pausing when, all in a second, perplexity again ruled my meditations. Juno had said that the engagement was broken. Well, if that were the case--But was it likely to be the case? Juno's agreeable habit, a habit grown familiar to all of us in the house, was to sprinkle about, along with her vitriol, liberal quant.i.ties of the by-product of inaccuracy. Mingled with her latest ill.u.s.trations, she had poured out for us one good dose of falsehood, the antidote for which it had been my happy office to administer on the spot. If John Mayrant wasn't in bed from the wounds of combat, as she had given us to suppose, perhaps Hortense Rieppe hadn't released him from his plighted troth, as Juno had also announced; and distinct relief filled me when I reasoned this out. I leave others to reason out why it was relief, and why a dull disappointment had come over me at the news that the match was off. This, for me, should have been good news, when you consider that I had been so lately telling myself such a marriage must not be, that I must myself, somehow (since no one else would), step in and arrest the calamity; and it seems odd that I should have felt this blankness and regret upon learning that the parties had happily settled it for themselves, and hence my difficult and delicate a.s.sistance was never to be needed by them.

Did any one else now sitting at our table know of Miss Rieppe's reported act? What particulars concerning John's fight had been given by Juno before my entrance? It didn't surprise me that her nephew was in bed from Master Mayrant's l.u.s.ty blows. One could readily guess the manner in which young John, with his pent-up fury over the custom house, would "land" his chastis.e.m.e.nt all over the person of any rash critic! And what a talking about it must be going on everywhere to-day! If Kings Port tongues had been set in motion over me and my small notebook in a library, the whole town must be buzzing over every bruise given and taken in this evidently emphatic battle. I had hoped to glean some more precise information from my fellow-boarders after Juno had disembarra.s.sed us of her sonorous presence; but even if they were possessed of all the facts which I lacked, Mrs. Trevise in some masterly fashion of her own banished the subject from further discussion. She held us off from it chiefly, I think, by adopting a certain upright posture in her chair, and a certain tone when she inquired if we wished a second help of the pudding. After thirty-five years of boarders and butchers, life held no secrets or surprises for her; she was a mature, lone, disenchanted, able lady, and even her silence was like an arm of the law.

An all too brief conversation, nipped by Mrs. Trevise at a stage even earlier than the bud, revealed to me that perhaps my fellow-boarders would have been glad to ask me questions, too.

It was the male honeymooner who addressed me. "Did I understand you to say, sir, that Mr. Mayrant had received a bruise over his left eye?"

"Daphne!" called out Mrs. Trevise, "Mr. Henderson will take an orange."

And so we finished our meal without further reference to eyes, or noses, or anything of the sort. It was just as well, I reflected, when I reached my room, that I on my side had been asked no questions, since I most likely knew less than the others who had heard all that Juno had to say; and it would have been humiliating, after my superb appearance of knowing more, to explain that John Mayrant had walked with me all the way from the Library, and never told me a word about the affair.

This reflection increased my esteem for the boy's admirable reticence.

What private matter of his own had I ever learned from him? It was other people, invariably, who told me of his troubles. There had been that single, quickly controlled outbreak about his position in the Custom House, and also he had let fall that touching word concerning his faith and his liking to say his prayers in the place where his mother had said them; beyond this, there had never yet been anything of all that must at the present moment be intimately stirring in his heart.

Should I "like to take orders from a negro?" Put personally, it came to me now as a new idea came as something which had never entered my mind before, not even as an abstract hypothesis I didn't have to think before reaching the answer though; something within me, which you ma call what you please--convention, prejudice, instinct--something answered most prompt and emphatically in the negative. I revolved in my mind as I tried to pack into a box a number of objects that I had bought in one or to "antique" shops. They wouldn't go in, the objects; they were of defeating and recalcitrant shapes, and of hostile materials--gla.s.s and bra.s.s--and I must have a larger box made, and in that case I would buy this afternoon the other kettle-supporter (I forget its right name) and have the whole lot decently packed. Take orders from a colored man? Have him give you directions, dictate you letters, discipline you if you were unpunctual? No, indeed! And if such were my feeling, how must this young Southerner feel? With this in my mind, I made sure that the part in my back hair was right, and after that precaution soon found myself on my way, in a way somewhat roundabout, to the kettle-supporter sauntering northward along High Walk, and stopping often; the town, and the water, and the distant sh.o.r.es all were so lovely, so belonged to one another, so melted into one gentle impression of wistfulness and tenderness!

I leaned upon the stone parapet and enjoyed the quiet which every surrounding detail brought to my senses. How could John Mayrant endure such a situation? I continued to wonder; and I also continued to a.s.sure myself it was absurd to suppose that the engagement was broken.

The shutting of a front door across the street almost directly behind me attracted my attention because of its being the first sound that had happened in noiseless, empty High Walk since I had been strolling there; and I turned from the parapet to see that I was no longer the solitary person in the street. Two ladies, one tall and one diminutive, both in black and with long black veils which they had put back from their faces, were evidently coming from a visit. As the tall one bowed to me I recognized Mrs. Gregory St. Michael, and took off my hat. It was not until they had crossed the street and come up the stone steps near where I stood on High Walk that the little lady also bowed to me; she was Mrs.

Weguelin St. Michael, and from something in her prim yet charming manner I gathered that she held it to be not perfectly well-bred in a lady to greet a gentleman across the width of a public highway, and that she could have wished that her tall companion had not thus greeted me, a stranger likely to comment upon Kings Port manners. In her eyes, such free deportment evidently went with her tall companion's method of speech: hadn't the little lady informed me during our first brief meeting that Kings Port at times thought Mrs. Gregory St. Michael's tongue "too downright"?

The two ladies having graciously granted me permission to join them while they took the air, Mrs. Gregory must surely have shocked Mrs.

Weguelin by saying to me, "I haven't a penny for your thoughts, but I'll exchange."

"Would you thus bargain in the dark, madam?"

"Oh, I'll risk that; and, to say truth, even your back, as we came out of that house, was a back of thought."

"Well, I confess to some thinking. Shall I begin?"

It was Mrs. Weguelin who quickly replied, smiling: "Ladies first, you know. At least we still keep it so in Kings Port."

"Would we did everywhere!" I exclaimed devoutly; and I was quite aware that beneath the little lady's gentle smile a setting down had lurked, a setting down of the most delicate nature, administered to me not in the least because I had deserved one, but because she did not like Mrs.

Gregory's "downright" tongue, and could not stop her.

Mrs. Gregory now took the prerogative of ladies, and began. "I was thinking of what we had all just been saying during our visit across the way--and with which you are not going to agree--that our young people would do much better to let us old people arrange their marriages for them, as it Is done in Europe."

"O dear!"

"I said that you would not agree; but that is because you are so young."

"I don't know that twenty-eight is so young."

"You will know it when you are seventy-three." This observation again came from Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael, and again with a gentle and attractive smile. It was only the second time that she had spoken; and throughout the talk into which we now fell as we slowly walked up and down High Walk, she never took the lead; she left that to the "downright" tongue--but I noticed, however, that she chose her moments to follow the lead very aptly. I also perceived plainly that what we were really going to discuss was not at all the European principle of marriage-making, but just simply young John and his Hortense; they were the true kernel of the nut with whose concealing sh.e.l.l Mrs. Gregory was presenting me, and in proposing an exchange of thoughts she would get back only more thoughts upon the same subject. It was pretty evident how much Kings Port was buzzing over all this! They fondly believed they did not like it; but what would they have done without it? What, indeed, were they going to do when it was all over and done with, one way or another? As a matter of fact, they ought to be grateful to Hortense for contributing ill.u.s.triously to the excitement of their lives.

"Of course, I am well aware," Mrs. Gregory pursued, "that the young people of to-day believe they can all 'teach their grandmothers to suck eggs,' as we say in Kings Port."

"We say it elsewhere, too," I mildly put in.

"Indeed? I didn't know that the North, with its pest of Hebrew and other low immigrants, had retained any of the good old homely saws which we brought from England. But do you imagine that if the control of marriage rested in the hands of parents and grandparents (where it properly belongs), you would be witnessing in the North this disgusting spectacle of divorce?"

"But, Mrs. St. Michael--"

"We didn't invite you to argue when we invited you to walk!" cried the lady, laughing.

"We should like you to answer the question," said Mrs. Weguelin St.

Michael.