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Lady Baltimore, a novel by Owen Wister |
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Chapter 22. Behind The Times |
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_ CHAPTER XXII. BEHIND THE TIMES It was my lot to attend but one of the weddings which Hortense precipitated (or at least determined) by her plunge into the water; and, truth to say, the honor of my presence at the other was not requested; therefore I am unable to describe the nuptials of Hortense and Charley. But the papers were full of them; what the female guests wore, what the male guests were worth, and what both ate and drank, were set forth in many columns of printed matter; and if you did not happen to see this, just read the account of the next wedding that occurs among the New York yellow rich, and you will know how Charley and Hortense were married; for it's always the same thing. The point of mark in this particular ceremony of union lay in Charley's speech; Charley found a happy thought at the breakfast. The bridal party (so the papers had it) sat on a dais, and was composed exclusively of Oil, Sugar, Beef, Steel, and Union Pacific; merely at this one table five hundred million dollars were sitting (so the papers computed), and it helped the bridegroom to his idea, when, by the importunate vociferations of the company, he was forced to get on his unwilling legs. "Poets and people of that sort say" (Charley concluded, after thanking them) "that happiness cannot be bought with money. Well, I guess a poet never does learn how to make a dollar do a dollar's work. But I am no poet; and I have learned it is as well to have a few dollars around. And I guess that my friends and I, right here at this table, could organize a corner in happiness any day we chose. And if we do, we will let you all in on it." I am told that the bride looked superb, both in church and at the reception which took place in the house of Kitty; and that General Rieppe, in spite of his shattered health, maintained a noble appearance through the whole ordeal of parting with his daughter. I noticed that Beverly Rodgers and Gazza figured prominently among the invited guests: Bohm did not have to be invited, for some time before the wedding he had become the husband of the successfully divorced Kitty. So much for the nuptials of Hortense and Charley; they were, as one paper pronounced them, "up to date and distingue." The paper omitted the accent in the French word, which makes it, I think, fit this wedding even more happily. "So Hortense," I said to myself as I read the paper, "has squared herself with Charley after all." And I sat wondering if she would be happy. But she was not constructed for happiness. You cannot be constructed for all the different sorts of experiences which this world offers: each of our natures has its specialty. Hortense was constructed for pleasure; and I have no doubt she got it, if not through Charley, then by other means. The marriage of Eliza La Heu and John Mayrant was of a different quality; no paper pronounced it "up to date," or bestowed any other adjectival comments upon it; for, being solemnized in Kings Port, where such purely personal happenings are still held (by the St. Michael family, at any rate) to be no business of any one's save those immediately concerned, the event escaped the famishment of publicity. Yes, this marriage was solemnized, a word that I used above without forethought, and now repeat with intention; for certainly no respecter of language would write it of the yellow rich and their blatant unions. If you're a Bohm or a Charley, you may trivialize or vulgarize or bestialize your wedding, but solemnize it you don't, for that is not "up to date." And to the marriage of Eliza and John I went; for not only was the honor of my presence requested, but John wrote me, in both their names, a personal note, which came to me far away in the mountains, whither I had gone from Kings Port. This was the body of the note:-- "To the formal invitation which you will receive, Miss La Heu joins her wish with mine that you will not be absent on that day. We should both really miss you. Miss La Heu begs me to add that if this is not sufficient inducement, you shall have a slice of Lady Baltimore." Not a long note! But you will imagine how genuinely I was touched by their joint message. I was not an old acquaintance, and I had done little to help them in their troubles, but I came into the troubles; with their memory of those days I formed a part, and it was a part which it warmed me to know they did not dislike to recall. I had actually been present at their first meeting, that day when John visited the Exchange to order his wedding-cake, and Eliza had rushed after him, because in his embarrassment he had forgotten to tell her the date for which he wanted it. The cake had begun it, the cake had continued it, the cake had brought them together; and in Eliza's retrospect now I doubted If she could find the moment when her love for John had awakened; but if with women there ever is such a moment, then, as I have before said, it was when the girl behind the counter looked across at the handsome, blushing boy, and felt stirred to help him in his stumbling attempts to be businesslike about that cake. If his youth unwittingly kindled hers, how could he or she help that? But, had he ever once known it and shown it to her during his period of bondage to Hortense, then, indeed, the flame would have turned to ice in Eliza's breast. What saved him for her was his blind steadfastness against her. That was the very thing she prized most, once it became hers; whereas, any secret swerving toward her from Hortense during his heavy hours of probation would have degraded John to nothing in Eliza's eyes. And so, making all this out by myself in the mountains after reading John's note, I ordered from the North the handsomest old china cake-dish that Aunt Carola could find to be sent to Miss Eliza La Heu with my card. I wanted to write on the card, "Rira bien qui viva le dernier"; but alas! so many pleasant thoughts may never be said aloud in this world of ours. That I ordered china, instead of silver, was due to my surmise that in Kings Port--or at any rate by Mrs. Weguelin and Miss Josephine St. Michael--silver from any one not of the family would be considered vulgar; it was only a surmise, and, of course, it was precisely the sort of thing that I could not verify by asking any of them. But (you may be asking) how on earth did all this come about? What happened in Kings Port on the day following that important swim which Hortense and John took together in the waters of the harbor? I wish that I could tell you all that happened, but I can only tell you of the outside of things; the inside was wholly invisible and inaudible to me, although we may be sure, I think, that when the circles that widened from Hortense's plunge reached the shores of the town, there must have been in certain quarters a considerable splashing. I presume that John communicated to somebody the news of his broken engagement; for if he omitted to do so, with the wedding invitations to be out the next day, he was remiss beyond excuse, and I think this very unlikely; and I also presume (with some evidence to go on) that Hortense did not, in the somewhat critical juncture of her fortunes, allow the grass to grow under her feet--if such an expression may be used of a person who is shut up in the stateroom of a steam yacht. To me John Mayrant made no sign of any sort by word or in writing, and this is the highest proof he ever gave me of his own delicacy, and also of his reliance upon mine; for he must have been pretty sure that I had overheard those last destiny-deciding words spoken between himself and Hortense in the boat, as we reached the Hermana's gangway. In John's place almost any man, even Beverly Rodgers, would have either dropped a hint at the moment, or later sent me some line to the effect that the incident was, of course, "between ourselves." That would have been both permissible and practical; but there it was, the difference between John of Kings Port and us others; he was not practical when it came to something "between gentlemen," as he would have said. The finest flower of breeding blossoms above the level of the practical, and that is why you do not find it growing in the huge truck-garden of our age, save in corners where it has not yet been uprooted. John's silence to me was something that I liked very much, and he must have found that it was not misplaced. The first external splash of the few that I have to narrate was a negative manifestation, and occurred at breakfast: Juno supposed if the wedding invitations would be out later in the day. The next splash was somewhat louder on, was at dinner, when Juno inquired of Mrs. Trevise if she had received any wedding invitation. At tea time was very decided splashing. No invitation had come to anybody. Juno had called at five of the St. Michael houses and got in at none of them, and there was a rumor that the Hermana had disappeared from the harbor. So far, none of the splashing had wet me but I now came in for a light sprinkle. "Were you not on board that boat yesterday?" Juno inquired; and to see her look at me you might have gathered that I was suspected of sinking the vessel. "A most delightful occasion!" I exclaimed, filling my face with a bright blankness. "Isn't he awful to speak that way about Sunday!" said the up-country bride. This was a chance for the poetess, and she took it. "To me," she mused, "every day seems fraught with an equal holiness." "But I should think," observed the Briton, "that you could knock off a hymn better on Sundays." All this while Juno was looking at me, and I knew it, and therefore I ate my food in a kindly sort of unconscious way, until she fired another shot at me. "There is an absurd report that somebody fell overboard." "Dear me!" I laughed. "So that is what it has grown to already! I did go out on the boat boom, and I did drop off--but into a boat." At this confession of mine the up-country bride became extraordinarily arch on the subject of the well-known hospitality of steam yachts, and for this I was honestly grateful to her; but Juno brooded still. "I hope there is nothing wrong," she said solemnly. Feeling that silence at this point would not be golden, I went into it with spirit I told them of our charming party, of General Rieppe's rich store of quotations, of the strict discipline on board the well-appointed Hermana, of the great beauty of Hortense, and her evident happiness when her lover was by her side. This talk of mine turned off any curiosity or suspicion which the rest of the company may have begun to entertain; but upon Juno I think it made scant impression, save causing her to set me down as an imbecile. For there was Doctor Beaugarcon when we came into the sitting-room, who told us before any one could even say "How-do-you-do," that Miss Hortense Rieppe had broken her engagement with John Mayrant, and that he had it from Mrs. Cornerly, whom he was visiting professionally. I caught the pitying look which Juno threw at me at this news, and I was happy to have acquitted myself so creditably in the manipulation of my secret: nobody asked me any more questions! There is almost nothing else to tell you of how the splashes broke on Kings Port. Before the day when I was obliged to call in Doctor Beaugarcon's professional services (quite a sharp attack put me to bed for half a week) I found merely the following things: the Hermana gone to New York, the automobiles and the Replacers had also disappeared, and people were divided on the not strikingly important question as to whether Hortense and the General had accompanied Charley on the yacht, or continued northward in an automobile, or taken the train. Gone, in any case, the whole party indubitably was, leaving, I must say, a sense of emptiness: the comedy was over, the players departed. I never heard any one, not even Juno, doubt that it was Hortense who had broken the engagement; this part of the affair was conducted by the principals with great skill. Hortense had evidently written her version to the Cornerlys, and not a word to any other effect ever came from John's mouth, of course. One result I had not looked for, though it was a natural one: if the old ladies had felt indignation at Hortense for her determination to marry John Mayrant, this indignation was doubled by her determination not to! I fear that few of us live by logic, even in Kings Port; and then, they had all called upon her in that garden for nothing! The sudden thought of this made me laugh alone in my bed of sickness; and when I came out of it, had such a thing been possible, I should have liked to congratulate Miss Josephine St. Michael on her absence from the garden occasion. I said, however, nothing to her, or to any of the other ladies, upon this or any subject, for I was so unlucky as to find them not at home when I paid my round of farewell visits. Nor (to my real distress) did I see John Mayrant again. The boy wrote me (I received it in bed) a short, warm note of regret, with nothing else in it save the fact that he was leaving town, having become free from the Custom House at last. I fancy that he ran away for a judicious interval. Who would not? Was there one person to whom he told the truth before he went? Did the girl behind the counter hear the manner in which the engagement was broken? Ah, none of us will ever know that! But, although I could not, without the highest impropriety, have spoken to any of the old ladies about this business, unless they had chosen to speak to me--and somehow I feel that after the abrupt close of it not even Mrs. Gregory St. Michael would have been likely to touch on the subject with an outsider--there was nothing whatever to forbid my indulging in a skirmish with Eliza La Heu; therefore I lunched at the Exchange on my last day. "To the mountains?" she said, in reply to my information about my plans of travel. "Doctor Beaugarcon says nothing else can so quickly restore me." "Stay there for the rhododendrons, then," she bade me. "No sight more beautiful in all the South." "Town seems deserted," I pursued. "Everybody gone." "Oh, not everybody!" "All the interesting people." "Thank you." "I meant, interesting to you." I saw her decide not to be angry; and her decision changed and saved our conversation from the trashy, bantering tone which it was taking, and brought it to a pass most unexpected to both of us. She gave me a charming and friendly smile. "Well, you, at any rate, are going away. And I am really sorry for that." Her eyes rested upon me with perfect frankness. I was not in love with Eliza La Heu, but nearer to love than I had ever been then, and it would have been easy, very easy, to let one's self go straight onward into love. There are for a man more ways of falling into that state than romancers would have us to believe, and one of them is by an assent of the will at a certain given moment, which the heart promptly follows--just as a man in a moment decides he will espouse a cause, and soon finds himself hotly fighting for it body and soul. I could have gone out of that Exchange completely in love with Eliza La Heu; but my will did not give its assent, and I saw John Mayrant not as a rival, but as one whose happiness I greatly desired. "Thank you," I said, "for telling me you are sorry I am going. And now, may I treat you more than ever as a friend, and tell you of a circumstance which Kings Port does not know?" It put her on her guard. "Don't be indiscreet," she laughed. "Isn't timely indiscretion discretion?" "And don't be clever," she said. "Tell me what you have to say--if you're quite sure you'll not be sorry." "Quite sure. There's no reason--now that the untruth is properly and satisfactorily established--that one person should not know that John Mayrant broke that engagement." And I told her the whole of it. "If I'm outrageous to share this secret with you," I concluded, "I can only say that I couldn't stand the unfairness any longer." "He jumped straight in?" said Eliza. "Oh, straight!" "Of course," she murmured. "And just after declaring that he wouldn't." "Of course," she murmured again. "And the current took them right away?" "Instantly." "Was he very tired when you got to him?" I answered this question and a number of others, backward and forward, until she had led me to cover the whole incident about twice-and-a-half times. Then she had a silence, and after this a reflection. "How well they managed it!" "Managed what?" "The accepted version." "Oh, yes, indeed!" "And you and I will not spoil it for them," she declared. As I took my final leave of her she put a flower in my buttonhole. My reflection was then, and is now, that if she already knew the truth from John himself, how well she managed it! So that same night I took the lugubrious train which bore me with the grossest deliberation to the mountains; and among the mountains and their waterfalls I stayed and saw the rhododendrons, and was preparing to journey home when the invitation came from John and Eliza. I have already said that of this wedding no word was in the papers. Kings Port by the war lost all material things, but not the others, among which precious privacy remains to her; and, O Kings Port, may you never lose your grasp of that treasure! May you never know the land where the reporter blooms, where if any joy or grief befall you, the public press rings your doorbell and demands the particulars, and if you deny it the particulars, it makes them up and says something scurrilous about you into the bargain. Therefore nothing was printed, morning or evening, about John and Eliza. Nor was the wedding service held in church to the accompaniment of nodding bonnets and gaping stragglers. No eye not tender with regard and emotion looked on while John took Eliza to his wedded wife, to live together after God's ordinance in the holy state of matrimony. In Royal Street, not many steps from South Place, there stands a quiet house a little back, upon whose face sorrow has struck many blows, but made no deep wounds yet; no scorch from the fires of war is visible, and the rending of the earthquake does not show too plainly; but there hangs about the house a gravity that comes from seeing and suffering much, and a sweetness from having sheltered many generations of smiles and tears. The long linked chain of births and deaths here has not been broken and scattered, and the grandchildren look out of the same windows from which the grandsires gazed, whose faces now in picture frames still watch serenely the sad present from their happy past. Therefore the rooms lie in still depths of association, and from the walls, the stairs, the furniture, flows the benign influence of undispersed memories; it sheds its tempered radiance upon the old miniatures, and upon every fresh flower that comes in from the garden; it seems to pass through the open doors to and fro like a tranquil blessing; it is beyond joy and pain, because time has distilled it from both of these; it is the assembled essence of kinship and blood unity, enriched by each succeeding brood that is born, is married, is fruitful in its turn, and dies remembered; only the balm of faith is stronger to sustain and heal; for that comes from heaven, while it is earth that gives us this; and the sacred cup of it which our native land once held is almost empty. Amid this influence John and Eliza were made one, and the faces of the older generations grew soft beneath it, and pensive eyes became lustrous, and into pale cheeks the rosy tint came like an echo faintly back for a short hour. They made so little sound in their quiet happiness of congratulation that it might have been a dream; and they were so few that the house with the sense of its memories was not lost with the movement and crowding, but seemed still to preside over the whole, and send down its benediction. When it was my turn to shake the hands of bride and groom, John asked:-- "What did your friend do with your advice?" And I replied. "He has taken it." "Perhaps not that," John returned, "but you must have helped him to see his way." When the bride came to cut the cake, she called me to her and fulfilled her promise. "You have always liked my baking," she said. "Then you made it after all," I answered. "I would not have been married without doing so," she declared sweetly. When the time came for them to go away, they were surrounded with affectionate God-speeds; but Miss Josephine St. Michael waited to be the last, standing a little apart, her severe and chiselled face turned aside, and seeming to watch a mocking-bird that was perched in his cage at a window halfway up the stairs. "He is usually not so silent," Miss Josephine said to me. "I suppose we are too many visitors for him." Then I saw that the old lady, beneath her severity, was deeply moved; and almost at once John and Eliza came down the stairs. Miss Josephine took each of them to her heart, but she did not trust herself to speak; and a single tear rolled down her face, as the boy and girl continued to the hall-door. There Daddy Ben stood, and John's gay good-by to him was the last word that I heard the bridegroom say. While we all stood silently watching them as they drove away from the tall iron gate, the mocking-bird on the staircase broke into melodious ripples of song. _ |
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