My hostess lifted her delicate hand and let it fall. Her resentment at the would-be intruder by marriage still mounted. "Not even from that pair would I have believed such a thing possible!" she exclaimed; and she went into a long, low, contemplative laugh, looking not at me, but at the fire. Our silent companion continued to embroider. "That girl,"

my hostess resumed, "and her discreditable father played on my nephew's youth and chivalry to the tune of--well, you have heard the tune."

"You mean--you mean--?" I couldn't quite take it in.

"Yes. They rattled their poverty at him until he offered and they accepted."

I must have stared grotesquely now. "That--that--the cake--and that sort of thing--at his expense?

"My dear sir, I shall be glad if you can find me anything that they have ever done at their own expense!"

I doubt if she would ever have permitted her speech such freedom had not the Rieppes been "from Georgia"; I am sure that it was anger--family anger, race anger--which had broken forth; and I think that her silent, severe sister scarcely approved of such breaking forth to me, a stranger. But indignation had worn her reticence thin, and I had happened to press upon the weak place. After my burst of exclamation I came back to it. "So you think Miss Rieppe will get out of it?"

"It is my nephew who will 'get out of it,' as you express it."

I totally misunderstood her. "Oh!" I protested stupidly. "He doesn't look like that. And it takes all meaning from the cake."

"Do not say cake to me again!" said the lady, smiling at last.

"And--will you allow me to tell you that I do not need to have my nephew, John Mayrant, explained to me by any one? I merely meant to say that he, and not she, is the person who will make the lucky escape. Of course, he is honorable--a great deal too much so for his own good. It is a misfortune, nowadays, to be born a gentleman in America. But, as I told you, I am not solicitous. What she is counting on--because she thinks she understands true Kings Port honor, and does not in the least--is his renouncing her on account of the phosphates--the bad news, I mean. They could live on what he has--not at all in her way, though--and besides, after once offering his genuine, ardent, foolish love--for it was genuine enough at the time--John would never--"

She stopped; but I took her up. "Did I understand you to say that his love was genuine at the lime?"

"Oh, he thinks it is now--insists it is now! That is just precisely what would make him--do you not see?--stick to his colors all the closer."

"Goodness!" I murmured. "What a predicament!"

But my hostess nodded easily. "Oh, no. You will see. They will all see."

I rose to take my leave; my visit, indeed, had been, for very interest, prolonged beyond the limits of formality--my hostess had attended quite thoroughly to my being entertained. And at this point the other, the more severe and elderly lady, made her contribution to my entertainment.

She had kept silence, I now felt sure, because gossip was neither her habit nor to her liking. Possibly she may have also felt that her displeasure had been too manifest; at any rate, she spoke out of her silence in cold, yet rich, symmetrical tones.

"This, I understand, is your first visit to Kings Port?"

I told her that it was.

She laid down her exquisite embroidery. "It has been thought a place worth seeing. There is no town of such historic interest at the North."

Standing by my chair, I a.s.sured her that I did not think there could be.

"I heard you allude to my half-sister-in-law, Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael.

It was at the house where she now lives that the famous Miss Beaufain (as she was then) put the Earl of Mainridge in his place, at the reception which her father gave the English visitor in 1840. The Earl conducted himself as so many Englishmen seem to think they can in this country; and on her asking him how he liked America, he replied, very well, except for the people, who were so vulgar.

"'What can you expect?' said Miss Beaufain; 'we're descended from the English.'"

"But I suppose you will tell me that your Northern beauties can easily outmatch such wit."

I hastened to disclaim any such pretension; and having expressed my appreciation of the anecdote, I moved to the door as the stately lady resumed her embroidery.

My hostess had a last word for me. "Do not let the cake worry you."

Outside the handsome old iron gate I looked at my watch and found that for this day I could spend no more time upon visiting.

IV: THE GIRL BEHIND THE COUNTER--I

I fear--no; to say one "fears" that one has stepped aside from the narrow path of duty, when one knows perfectly well that one has done so, is a ridiculous half-dodging of the truth; let me dismiss from my service such a cowardly circ.u.mlocution, and squarely say that I neglected the Cowpens during certain days which now followed. Nay, more; I totally deserted them. Although I feel quite sure that to discover one is a real king's descendant must bring an exultation of no mean order to the heart, there's no exultation whatever in failing to discover this, day after day. Mine is a nature which demands results, or at any rate signs of results coming sooner or later. Even the most abandoned fisherman requires a bite now and then; but my fishing for Fannings had not yet brought me one single nibble--and I gave up the sad sport for a while. The beautiful weather took me out of doors over the land, and also over the water, for I am a great lover of sailing; and I found a little cat-boat and a little negro, both of which suited me very well.

I spent many delightful hours in their company among the deeps and shallows of these fair Southern waters.

And indoors, also, I made most agreeable use of my time, in spite of one disappointment when, on the day following my visit to the ladies, I returned full of expectancy to lunch at the Woman's exchange, the girl behind the counter was not there. I found in her stead, it is true, a most polite lady, who provided me with chocolate and sandwiches that were just as good as their predecessors; but she was of advanced years, and little inclined to light conversation. Beyond telling me that Miss Eliza La Heu was indisposed, but not gravely so, and that she was not likely to be long away from her post of duty, this lady furnished me with scant information.

Now I desired a great deal of information. To learn of an imminent wedding where the bridegroom attends to the cake, and is suspected of diminished eagerness for the bride, who is a steel wasp--that is not enough to learn of such nuptials. Therefore I fear--I mean, I know--that it was not wholly for the sake of telling Mrs. Gregory St. Michael about Aunt Carola that I repaired again to Le Maire Street and rang Mrs. St.

Michael's door-bell.

She was at home, to be sure, but with her sat another visitor, the tall, severe lady who had embroidered and had not liked the freedom with which her sister had spoken to me about the wedding. There was not a bit of freedom to-day; the severe lady took care of that.

When, after some utterly unprofitable conversation, I managed to say in a casual voice, which I thought very well tuned for the purpose, "What part of Georgia did you say that General Rieppe came from?" the severe lady responded:--

"I do not think that I mentioned him at all."

"Georgia?" said Mrs. Gregory St. Michael. "I never heard that they came from Georgia."

And this revived my hopes. But the severe lady at once remarked to her:--

"I have received a most agreeable letter from my sister in Paris."

This stopped Mrs. Gregory St. Michael, and dashed my hopes to earth.

The severe lady continued to me:--

"My sister writes of witnessing a performance of the Lohengrin. Can you tell me if it is a composition of merit?"

I a.s.sured her that it was a composition of the highest merit.

"It is many years since I have heard an opera," she pursued. "In my day the works of the Italians were much applauded. But I doubt if Mozart will be surpa.s.sed. I hope you admire the Nozze?"

You will not need me to tell you that I came out of Mrs. Gregory St.

Michael's house little wiser than I went in. My experience did not lead me to abandon all hope. I paid other visits to other ladies; but these answered my inquiries in much the same sort of way as had the lady who admired Mozart. They spoke delightfully of travel, books, people, and of the colonial renown of Kings Port and its leading families; but it is scarce an exaggeration to say that Mozart was as near the cake, the wedding, or the steel wasp as I came with any of them. By patience, however, and mostly at our boarding-house table, I gathered a certain knowledge, though small in amount.

If the health of John Mayrant's mother, I learned, had allowed that lady to bring him up Herself, many follies might have been saved the youth.

His aunt, Miss Eliza St. Michael, though a pattern of good intentions, was not always a pattern of wisdom. Moreover, how should a spinster bring up a boy fitly?

Of the Rieppes, father and daughter, I also learned a little more. They did not (most people believed) come from Georgia. Natchez and Mobile seemed to divide the responsibility of giving them to the world. It was quite certain the General had run away from Chattanooga. n.o.body disputed this, or offered any other battle as the authentic one. Of late the Rieppes were seldom to be seen in Kings Port. Their house (if it had ever been their own property, which I heard hotly argued both ways) had been sold more than two years ago, and their recent brief sojourns in the town were generally beneath the roof of hospitable friends--people by the name of Cornerly, "whom we do not know," as I was carefully informed by more than one member of the St. Michael family. The girl had disturbed a number of mothers whose sons were p.r.o.ne to slip out of the strict hereditary fold in directions where beauty or champagne was to be found; and the Cornerlys dined late, and had champagne. Miss Hortense had "splurged it" a good deal here, and the measure of her success with the male youth was the measure of her condemnation by their female elders.

Such were the facts which I gathered from women and from the few men whom I saw in Kings Port. This town seemed to me almost as empty of men as if the Pied Piper had pa.s.sed through here and lured them magically away to some distant country. It was on the happy day that saw Miss Eliza La Heu again providing me with sandwiches and chocolate that my knowledge of the wedding and the bride and groom began really to take some steps forward.

It was not I who, at my sequestered lunch at the Woman's Exchange, began the conversation the next time. That confection, "Lady Baltimore," about which I was not to worry myself, had, as they say, "broken the ice"

between the girl behind the counter and myself.