Lady Baltimore Part 13

"Well, I'm personally not growing old, just yet."

"Neither is the United States."

"Well, I don't know. It's too easy for sick or worthless people to survive nowadays. They are clotting up our square miles very fast.

Philanthropists don't seem to remember that you can beget children a great deal faster than you can educate them; and at this rate I believe universal suffrage will kill us off before our time."

"Do not believe it! We are going to find out that universal suffrage is like the appendix--useful at an early stage of the race's evolution but to-day merely a threat to life."

He thought this over. "But a surgical operation is pretty serious, you know."

"It'll be done by absorption. Why, you've begun it yourselves, and so has Ma.s.sachusetts. The appendix will be removed, black and white--and I shouldn't much fear surgery. We're not nearly civilized enough yet to have lost the power Of recuperation, and in spite of our express-train speed, I doubt if we shall travel from crudity to rottenness without a pause at maturity."

"That is the old, old story," he said.

"Yes; is there anything new under the sun?"

He was gloomy. "Nothing, I suppose." Then the gloom lightened. "Nothing new under the sun--except the fas.h.i.+onable families of Newport!"

This again brought us from the clouds of speculation down to Wors.h.i.+p Street, where we were walking toward South Place. It also unexpectedly furnished me with the means to lead back our talk so gently, without a jolt or a jerk, to my moral and the delicate topic of matrimony from which he had dodged away, that he never awoke to what was coming until it had come. He began pointing out, as we pa.s.sed them, certain houses which were now, or had at some period been, the dwellings of his many relatives: "My cousin Julia So-and-so lives there," he would say; or, "My great-uncle, known as Regent Tom, owned that before the War"; and once, "The Rev. Joseph Priedieu, my great-grandfather, built that house to marry his fifth wife in, but the grave claimed him first."

So I asked him a riddle. "What is the difference between Kings Port and Newport?"

This he, of course, gave up.

"Here you are all connected by marriage, and there they are all connected by divorce."

"That's true!" he cried, "that's very true. I met the most embarra.s.singly cater-cornered families."

"Oh, they weren't embarra.s.sed!" I interjected.

"No, but I was," said John.

"And you told me you weren't innocent!" I exclaimed. "They are going to inst.i.tute a divorce march," I continued. "'Lohengrin' or 'Midsummer-Night's Dream' played backward. They have not settled which it is to be taught in the nursery with the other kindergarten melodies."

He was still unsuspectingly diverted; and we walked along until we turned in the direction of my boarding-house.

"Did you ever notice," I now said, "what a perpetual allegory 'Midsummer-Night's Dream' contains?"

"I thought it was just a fairy sort of thing."

"Yes, but when a great poet sets his hand to a fairy sort of thing, you get--well, you get poor t.i.tania."

"She fell in love with a jacka.s.s," he remarked. "Puck bewitched her."

"Precisely. A lovely woman with her arms around a jacka.s.s. Does that never happen in Kings Port?"

He began smiling to himself. "I'm afraid Puck isn't all dead yet."

I was now in a position to begin dropping my bitters. "Shakespeare was probably too gallant to put it the other way, and make Oberon fall in love with a female jacka.s.s. But what an allegory!"

"Yes," he muttered. "Yes."

I followed with another drop. "t.i.tania got out of it. It is not always solved so easily."

"No," he muttered. "No." It was quite evident that the flavor of my bitters reached him.

He was walking slowly, with his head down, and frowning hard. We had now come to the steps of my boarding-house, and I dropped my last drop. "But a disenchanted woman has the best of it--before marriage, at least."

He looked up quickly. "How?"

I evinced surprise. "Why, she can always break off honorably, and we never can, I suppose."

For the third time this day he made me an astonis.h.i.+ng rejoinder: "Would you like to take orders from a negro?"

It reduced me to stammering. "I have never--such a juncture has never--"

"Of course you wouldn't. Even a Northerner!"

His face, as he said this, was a single glittering piece of fierceness.

I was still so much taken aback that I said rather flatly: "But who has to?"

"I have to." With this he abruptly turned on his heel and left me standing on the steps. For a moment I stared after him; and then, as I rang the bell, he was back again; and with that formality which at times overtook him he began: "I will ask you to excuse my hasty--"

"Oh, John Mayrant! What a notion!"

But he was by no means to be put off, and he proceeded with stiffer formality: "I feel that I have not acted politely just now, and I beg to a.s.sure you that I intended no slight."

My first impulse was to lay a hand upon his shoulder and say to him: "My dear fellow, stuff and nonsense!" Thus I should have treated any Northern friend; but here was no Northerner. I am glad that I had the sense to feel that any careless, good-natured putting away of his deliberate and definitely tendered apology would seem to him a "slight"

on my part. His punctilious value for certain observances between man and man reached me suddenly and deeply, and took me far from the familiarity which breeds contempt.

"Why, John Mayrant," I said, "you could never offend me unless I thought that you wished to, and how should I possibly think that?"

"Thank you," he replied very simply.

I rang the bell a second time. "If we can get into the house," I suggested, "won't you stop and dine with me?"

He was going to accept. "I shall be--" he had begun, in tones of gratification, when in one instant his face was stricken with complete dismay. "I had forgotten," he said; and this time he was gone indeed, and in a hurry most apparent. It resembled a flight.

What was the matter now? You will naturally think that it was an appointment with his ladylove which he had forgotten; this was certainly my supposition as I turned again to the front door. There stood one of the waitresses, glaring with her white eyes half out of her black face at the already distant back of John Mayrant.

"Oh!" I thought; but, before I could think any more, the tall, dreadful boarder--the lady whom I secretly called Juno--swept up the steps, and by me into the house, with a dignity that one might term deafening.

The waitress now muttered, or rather sang, a series of pious apostrophes. "Oh, Lawd, de rampages and de ructions! Oh, Lawd, sinner is in my way, Daniel!" She was strongly, but I think pleasurably, excited; and she next turned to me with a most natural grin, and saying, "Chick'n's mos' gone, sah," she went back to the dining room.

This admonition sent me upstairs to make as hasty a toilet as I could.