Lady Baltimore. Owen WisterЧитать онлайн книгу.
many, to be sure, but all unanimously wearing that expression of remarkable virtue which seems always to visit, when he goes to church, the average good fellow who is no better than he should be. I became, myself, filled with this same decorous inconsistency, and was singing the hymn, when I caught sight of John Mayrant. What lady was he with? It was just this that most annoyingly I couldn’t make out, because the unlucky disposition of things hid it. I caught myself craning my neck and singing the hymn simultaneously and with no difficulty, because all my childhood was in that hymn; I couldn’t tell when I hadn’t known words and music by heart. Who was she? I tried for a clear view when we sat down, and also, let me confess, when we knelt down; I saw even less of her so; and my hope at the end of the service was dashed by her slow but entire disappearance amid the engulfing exits of the other ladies. I followed where I imagined she had gone, out by a side door, into the beautiful graveyard; but among the flowers and monuments she was not, nor was he; and next I saw, through the iron gate, John Mayrant in the street, walking with his intimate aunt and her more severe sister, and Miss La Heu. I somewhat superfluously hastened to the gate and greeted them, to which they responded with polite, masterly discouragement. He, however, after taking off his hat to them, turned back, and I watched them pursuing their leisurely, reticent course toward the South Place. Why should the old ladies strike me as looking like a tremendously proper pair of conspirators? I was wondering this as I turned back among the tombs, when I perceived John Mayrant coming along one of the churchyard paths. His approach was made at right angles with that of another personage, the respectful negro custodian of the place. This dignitary was evidently hoping to lead me among the monuments, recite to me their old histories, and benefit by my consequent gratitude; he had even got so far as smiling and removing his hat when John Mayrant stopped him. The young man hailed the negro by his first name with that particular and affectionate superiority which few Northerners can understand and none can acquire, and which resembles nothing so much as the way in which you speak to your old dog who has loved you and followed you, because you have cared for him.
“Not this time,” John Mayrant said. “I wish to show our relics to this gentleman myself—if he will permit me?” This last was a question put to me with a courteous formality, a formality which a few minutes more were to see smashed to smithereens.
I told him that I should consider myself undeservedly privileged.
“Some of these people are my people,” he said, beginning to move.
The old custodian stood smiling, familiar, respectful, disappointed. “Some of ’em my people, too, Mas’ John,” he cannily observed.
I put a little silver in his hand. “Didn’t I see a box somewhere,” I said, “with something on it about the restoration of the church?”
“Something on it, but nothing in it!” exclaimed Mayrant; at which moderate pleasantry the custodian broke into extreme African merriment and ambled away. “You needn’t have done it,” protested the Southerner, and I naturally claimed my stranger’s right to pay my respects in this manner. Such was our introduction, agreeable and unusual.
A silence then unexpectedly ensued and the formality fell colder than ever upon us. The custodian’s departure had left us alone, looking at each other across all the unexpressed knowledge that each knew the other had. Mayrant had come impulsively back to me from his aunts, without stopping to think that we had never yet exchanged a word; both of us were now brought up short, and it was the cake that was speaking volubly in our self-conscious dumbness. It was only after this brief, deep gap of things unsaid that John Mayrant came to the surface again, and began a conversation of which, on both our parts, the first few steps were taken on the tiptoes of an archaic politeness; we trod convention like a polished French floor; you might have expected us, after such deliberate and graceful preliminaries, to dance a verbal minuet.
We, however, danced something quite different, and that conversation lasted during many days, and led us, like a road, up hill and down dale to a perfect acquaintance. No, not perfect, but delightful; to the end he never spoke to me of the matter most near him, and I but honor him the more for his reticence.
Of course his first remark had to be about Kings Port and me; had he understood rightly that this was my first visit?
My answer was equally traditional.
It was, next, correct that he should allude to the weather; and his reference was one of the two or three that it seems a stranger’s destiny always to hear in a place new to him: he apologized for the weather—so cold a season had not, in his memory, been experienced in Kings Port; it was to the highest point exceptional.
I exclaimed that it had been, to my Northern notions, delightfully mild for March. “Indeed,” I continued, “I have always said that if March could be cut out of our Northern climate, as the core is cut out of an apple, I should be quite satisfied with eleven months, instead of twelve. I think it might prolong one’s youth.”
The fire of that season lighted in his eyes, but he still stepped upon polished convention. He assured me that the Southern September hurricane was more deplorable than any Northern March could be. “Our zone should be called the Intemperate zone,” said he.
“But never in Kings Port,” I protested; “with your roses out-of-doors—and your ladies indoors!”
He bowed. “You pay us a high compliment.”
I smiled urbanely. “If the truth is a compliment!”
“Our young ladies are roses,” he now admitted with a delicate touch of pride.
“Don’t forget your old ones! I never shall.”
There was pleasure in his face at this tribute, which, he could see, came from the heart. But, thus pictured to him, the old ladies brought a further idea quite plainly into his expression; and he announced it. “Some of them are not without thorns.”
“What would you give,” I quickly replied, “for anybody—man or woman—who could not, on an occasion, make themselves sharply felt?”
To this he returned a full but somewhat absent-minded assent. He seemed to be reflecting that he himself didn’t care to be the “occasion” upon which an old lady rose should try her thorns; and I was inclined to suspect that his intimate aunt had been giving him a wigging.
Anyhow, I stood ready to keep it up, this interchange of lofty civilities. I, too, could wear the courtly red-heels of eighteenth-century procedure, and for just as long as his Southern up-bringing inclined him to wear them; I hadn’t known Aunt Carola for nothing! But we, as I have said, were not destined to dance any minuet.
We had been moving, very gradually, and without any attention to our surroundings, to and fro in the beautiful sweet churchyard. Flowers were everywhere, growing, budding, blooming; color and perfume were parts of the very air, and beneath these pretty and ancient tombs, graven with old dates and honorable names, slept the men and women who had given Kings Port her high place is; in our history. I have never, in this country, seen any churchyard comparable to this one; happy, serene dead, to sleep amid such blossoms and consecration! Good taste prevailed here; distinguished men lay beneath memorial stones that came no higher than your waist or shoulder; there was a total absence of obscure grocers reposing under gigantic obelisks; to earn a monument here you must win a battle, or do, at any rate, something more than adulterate sugar and oil. The particular monument by which young John Mayrant and I found ourselves standing, when we reached the point about the ladies and the thorns, had a look of importance and it caught his eye, bringing him back to where we were. Upon his pointing to it, and before we had spoken or I had seen the name, I inquired eagerly: “Not the lieutenant of the Bon Homme Richard?” and then saw that Mayrant was not the name upon it.
My knowledge of his gallant sea-fighting namesake visibly gratified him. “I wish it were,” he said; “but I am descended from this man, too. He was a statesman, and some of his brilliant powers were inherited by his children—but they have not come so far down as me. In 1840, his daughter, Miss Beaufain—”
I laid my hand right on his shoulder. “Don’t you do it, John Mayrant!”