"Primal, perpetual, necessary!" I cried. "When that division gets blurred, society is doomed. Are you sure John can take care of himself every way?"

"I have other things than Mr. Mayrant to think about." She said this quite sharply.

It surprised me. "To be sure," I a.s.sented. "But didn't you once tell me that you thought he was simple?"

She opened her ledger. "It's a great honor to have one's words so well remembered."

I was still at a loss. "Anyhow, the wedding is postponed," I continued; "and the cake. Of course one can't help wondering how it's all coming out."

She was now working at her ledger, bending her head over it. "Have you ever met Miss Rieppe?" She inquired this with a sort of wonderful softness--which I was to hear again upon a still more memorable occasion.

"Never," I answered, "but there's n.o.body at present living whom I long to see so much."

She wrote on for a little while before saying, with her pencil steadily busy, "Why?"

"Why? Don't you? After all this fuss?"

"Oh, certainly," she drawled. "She is so much admired--by Northerners."

"I do hope John is able to take care of himself," I purposely repeated.

"Take care of yourself!" she laughed angrily over her ledger.

"Me? Why? I understand you less and less!"

"Very likely."

"Why, I want to help him!" I protested. "I don't want him to marry her.

Oh, by the way do you happen to know what it is that she is coming here to see for herself?"

In a moment her ledger was left, and she was looking at me straight.

Coming? When?

"Soon. In an automobile. To see something for herself."

She pondered for quite a long moment; then her eyes returned, searchingly, to me. "You didn't make that up?"

I laughed, and explained. "Some of them, at any rate," I finished, "know what she's coming for. They were rather queer about it, I thought."

She pondered again. I noticed that she had deeply flushed, and that the flush was leaving her. Then she fixed her eyes on me once more. "They wouldn't tell you?"

"I think that they came inadvertently near it, once or twice, and remembered just in time that I didn't know about it."

"But since you do know pretty much about it!" she laughed.

I shook my head. "There's something else, something that's turned up; the sort of thing that upsets calculations. And I merely hoped that you'd know."

On those last words of mine she gave me quite an extraordinary look, and then, as if satisfied with what she saw in my face.--

"They don't talk to me."

It was an a.s.surance, it was true, it had the ring of truth, that evident genuineness which a piece of real confidence always possesses; she meant me to know that we were in the same boat of ignorance to-day. And yet, as I rose from my lunch and came forward to settle for it, I was aware of some sense of defeat, of having been held off just as the ladies on High Walk had held me off.

"Well," I sighed, "I pin my faith to the aunt who says he'll never marry her."

Miss La Heu had no more to say upon the subject. "Haven't you forgotten something?" she inquired gayly; and, as I turned to see what I had left behind--"I mean, you had no Lady Baltimore to-day."

"I clean forgot it!"

"No loss. It is very stale; and to-morrow I shall have a fresh supply ready."

As I departed through the door I was conscious of her eyes following me, and that she had spoken of Lady Baltimore precisely because she was thinking of something else.

XIV: The Replacers

She had been strange, perceptibly strange, had Eliza La Heu; that was the most which I could make out of it. I had angered her in some manner wholly beyond my intention or understanding and not all at one fixed point in our talk; her irritation had come out and gone in again in spots all along the colloquy, and it had been a displeasure wholly apart from that indignation which had flashed up in her over the negro question. This, indeed, I understood well enough, and admired her for, and admired still more her gallant control of it; as for the other, I gave it up.

A sense of guilt--a very slight one, to be sure--dispersed my speculations when I was preparing for dinner, and Aunt Carola's postscript, open upon my writing-table, reminded me that I had never asked Miss La Heu about the Bombos. Well, the Bombos could keep! And I descended to dinner a little late (as too often) to feel instantly in the air that they had been talking about me. I doubt if any company in the world, from the Greeks down through Machiavelli to the present moment, has ever been of a subtlety adequate to conceal from an observant person entering a room the fact that he has been the subject of their conversation. This company, at any rate, did not conceal it from me. Not even when the upcountry bride astutely greeted me with:--

"Why, we were just speaking of you! We were l.u.s.t saying it would be a perfect shame if you missed those flowers at Live Oaks." And, at this, various of the guests a.s.sured me that another storm would finish them; upon which I a.s.sured every one that to-morrow should see me embark upon the Live Oaks excursion boat, knowing quite well in my heart that some decidedly different question concerning me had been hastily dropped upon my appearance at the door. It poked up its little concealed head, did this question, when the bride said later to me, with immense archness:--

"How any gentleman can help falling just daid in love with that lovely young girl at the Exchange, I don't see!"

"But I haven't helped it!" I immediately exclaimed.

"Oh!" declared the bride with unerring perception, "that just shows he hasn't been smitten at all! Well, I'd be ashamed, if I was a single gentleman." And while I brought forth additional phrases concerning the distracted state of my heart, she looked at me with large, limpid eyes.

"Anybody could tell you're not afraid of a rival," was her resulting comment; upon which several of the et ceteras laughed more than seemed to me appropriate.

I left them all free again to say what they pleased; for John Mayrant called for me to go upon our walk while we were still seated at table, and at table they remained after I had excused myself.

The bruise over John's left eye was fading out, but traces of his spiritual battle were deepening. During the visit which he had paid (under compulsion, I am sure) to Juno at our boarding-house in company with Miss Josephine St. Michael, his recent financial triumph at the bedside had filled his face with diabolic elation as he confronted his victim's enraged but checkmated aunt; when to the thinly veiled venom of her inquiry as to a bridegroom's health he had retorted with venom as thinly veiled that he was feeling better that night than for many weeks, he had looked better, too; the ladies had exclaimed after his departure what a handsome young man he was, and Juno had remarked how fervently she trusted that marriage might cure him of his deplorable tendencies.

But to-day his vitality had sagged off beneath the weight of his preoccupation: it looked to me as if, by a day or two more, the boy's face might be grown haggard.

Whether by intention, or, as is more likely, by the perfectly natural and spontaneous working of his nature, he speedily made it plain to me that our relation, our acquaintance, had progressed to a stage more friendly and confidential. He did not reveal this by imparting any confidence to me; far from it; it was his silence that indicated the ease he had come to feel in my company. Upon our last memorable interview he had embarked at once upon a hasty yet evidently predetermined course of talk, because he feared that I might touch upon subjects which he wished excluded from all discussion between us; to-day he embarked upon nothing, made no conventional effort of any sort, but walked beside me, content with my mere society; if it should happen that either of us found a thought worth expressing aloud, good! and if this should not happen, why, good also! And so we walked mutely and agreeably together for a long while. The thought which was growing clear in my mind, and which was decidedly worthy of expression, was also unluckily one which his new reliance upon my discretion completely forbade my uttering in even the most shadowy manner; but it was a conviction which Miss Josephine St. Michael should have been quick to force upon him for his good. Quite apart from selfish reasons, he had no right to marry a girl whom he had ceased to care for. The code which held a "gentleman"

to his plighted troth in such a case did more injury to the "lady" than any "jilting" could possibly do. Never until now had I thought this out so lucidly, and I was determined that time and my own tact should a.s.suredly help me find a way to say it to him, if he continued in his present course.

"Daddy Ben says you can't be a real Northerner."

This was his first observation, and I think that we must have walked a mile before he made it.

"Because I pounded a negro? Of course, he retains your Southern ante-bellum mythical notion of Northerners--all of us willing to have them marry our sisters. Well, there's a lady at our boarding-house who says you are a real gambler."

The impish look came curling round his lips, but for a moment only, and it was gone.

"That shook Daddy Ben up a good deal."