Lady Baltimore Part 6

"Oh, Miss Beaufain and the Earl of Mainridge! Well, but it's quite worth--"

"Knowing by heart!" he broke in with new merriment.

I kept on. "Why not? They tell those things everywhere--where they're so lucky as to possess them! It's a flawless specimen."

"Of 1840 repartee?" He spoke with increasing pauses. "Yes. We do at least possess that. And some wine of about the same date--and even considerably older."

"All the better for age," I exclaimed.

But the blue eyes of Mayrant were far away and full of shadow. "Poor Kings Port," he said very slowly and quietly. Then he looked at me with the steady look and the smile that one sometimes has when giving voice to a sorrowful conviction against which one has tried to struggle. "Poor Kings Port," he affectionately repeated. His hand tapped lightly two or three times upon the gravestone upon which he was seated. "Be honest and say that you think so, too," he demanded, always with his smile.

But how was I to agree aloud with what his silent hand had expressed?

Those inaudible taps on the stone spoke clearly enough; they said: "Here lies Kings Port, here lives Kings Port. Outside of this is our true death, on the vacant wharves, in the empty streets. All that we have left is the immortality which these historic names have won." How could I tell him that I thought so, too? Nor was I as sure of it then as he was. And besides, this was a young man whose spirit was almost surely, in suffering; ill fortune both material and of the heart, I seemed to suspect, had made him wounded and bitter in these immediate days; and the very suppression he was exercising hurt him the more deeply. So I replied, honestly, as he had asked: "I hope you are mistaken."

"That's because you haven't been here long enough," he declared.

Over us, gently, from somewhere across the gardens and the walls, came a noiseless water breeze, to which the roses moved and nodded among the tombs. They gave him a fanciful thought. "Look at them! They belong to us, and they know it. They're saying, 'Yes; yes; yes,' all day long. I don't know why on earth I'm talking in this way to you!" he broke off with vivacity. "But you made me laugh so."

VI: In the Churchyard

"Then it was a good laugh, indeed!" I cried heartily.

"Oh, don't let's go back to our fine manners!" he begged comically.

"We've satisfied each other that we have them! I feel so lonely; and my aunt just now--well, never mind about that. But you really must excuse us about Miss Beaufain, and all that sort of thing. I see it, because I'm of the new generation, since the war, and--well, I've been to other places, too. But Aunt Eliza, and all of them, you know, can't see it.

And I wouldn't have them, either! So I don't ever attempt to explain to them that the world has to go on. They'd say, 'We don't see the necessity!' When slavery stopped, they stopped, you see, just like a clock. Their hand points to 1865--it has never moved a minute since. And some day"--his voice grew suddenly tender--"they'll go, one by one, to join the still older ones. And I shall miss them very much."

For a moment I did not speak, but watched the roses nodding and moving.

Then I said: "May I say that I shall miss them, too?"

He looked at me. "Miss our old Kings Port people?" He didn't invite outsiders to do that!

"Don't you see how it is?" I murmured. "It was the same thing once with us."

"The same thing--in the North?" His tone still held me off.

"The same sort of dear old people--I mean charming, peppery, refined, courageous people; in Salem, in Boston, in New York, in every place that has been colonial, and has taken a hand in the game." And, as certain beloved memories of men and women rose in my mind, I continued: "If you knew some of the Boston elder people as I have known them, you would warm with the same admiration that is filling me as I see your people of Kings Port."

"But politics?" the young Southerner slowly suggested.

"Oh, hang slavery! Hang the war!" I exclaimed. "Of course, we had a family quarrel. But we were a family once, and a fine one, too! We knew each other, we visited each other, we wrote letters, sent presents, kept up relations; we, in short, coherently joined hands from one generation to another; the fibres of the sons tingled with the current from their fathers, back and back to the old beginnings, to Plymouth and Roanoke and Rip Van Winkle! It's all gone, all done, all over. You have to be a small, well-knit country for that sort of exquisite personal unitedness.

There's nothing united about these States any more, except Standard Oil and discontent. We're no longer a small people living and dying for a great idea; we're a big people living and dying for money. And these ladies of yours--well, they have made me homesick for a national and a social past which I never saw, but which my old people knew. They're like legends, still living, still warm and with us. In their quiet clean-cut faces I seem to see a reflection of the old serene candlelight we all once talked and danced in--sconces, tall mirrors, candles burning inside gla.s.s globes to keep them from the moths and the draft that, of a warm evening, blew in through handsome mahogany doors; the good bright silver; the portraits by Copley and Gilbert Stuart; a young girl at a square piano, singing Moore's melodies--and Mr. Pinckney or Commodore Perry, perhaps, dropping in for a hot supper!"

John Mayrant was smiling and looking at the graves. "Yes, that's it; that's all it," he mused. "You do understand."

But I had to finish my flight. "Such quiet faces are gone now in the breathless, competing North: ground into oblivion between the clas.h.i.+ng trades of the competing men and the clas.h.i.+ng jewels and chandeliers of their competing wives--while yours have lingered on, spared by your very adversity. And that's why I shall miss your old people when they follow mine--because they're the last of their kind, the end of the chain, the bold original stock, the great race that made our glory grow and saw that it did grow through thick and thin: the good old native blood of independence."

I spoke as a man can always speak when he means it; and my listener's face showed that my words had gone where meant words always go--home to the heart. But he merely nodded at me. His nod, however, telling as it did of a quickly established accord between us, caused me to bring out to this new acquaintance still more of those thoughts which I condescend to expose to very few old ones.

"Haven't you noticed," I said, "or don't you feel it, away down here in your untainted isolation, the change, the great change, that has come over the American people?"

He wasn't sure.

"They've lost their grip on patriotism."

He smiled. "We did that here in 1861."

"Oh, no! You left the Union, but you loved what you considered was your country, and you love it still. That's just my point, just my strange discovery in Kings Port. You retain the thing we've lost. Our big men fifty years ago thought of the country, and what they could make it; our big men to-day think of the country and what they can make out of it.

Rather different, don't you see? When I walk about in the North, I merely meet members of trusts or unions--according to the length of the individual's purse; when I walk about in Kings Port, I meet Americans.--Of course," I added, taking myself up, "that's too sweeping a statement. The right sort of American isn't extinct in the North by any means. But there's such a commercial deluge of the wrong sort, that the others sometimes seem to me sadly like a drop in the bucket."

"You certainly understand it all," John Mayrant repeated. "It's amazing to find you saying things that I have thought were my own private notions."

I laughed. "Oh, I fancy there are more than two of us in the country."

"Even the square piano and Mr. Pinckney," he went on. "I didn't suppose anybody had thought things like that, except myself."

"Oh," I again said lightly, "any American--any, that is, of the world--who has a colonial background for his family, has thought, probably, very much the same sort of things. Of course it would be all Greek or gibberish to the new people."

He took me up with animation. "The new people! My goodness, sir, yes!

Have you seen them? Have you seen Newport, for instance?" His diction now (and I was to learn it was always in him a sign of heightening intensity) grew more and more like the formal speech of his ancestors.

"You have seen Newport?" he said.

"Yes; now and then."

"But lately, sir? I knew we were behind the times down here, sir, but I had not imagined how much. Not by any means! Kings Port has a long road to go before she will consider marriage provincial and chast.i.ty obsolete."

"Dear me, Mr. Mayrant! Well, I must tell you that it's not all quite so--so advanced--as that, you know. That's not the whole of Newport."

He hastened to explain. "Certainly not, sir! I would not insult the honorable families whom I had the pleasure to meet there, and to whom my name was known because they had retained their good position since the days when my great-uncle had a house and drove four horses there himself. I noticed three kinds of Newport, sir."

"Three?"

"Yes. Because I took letters; and some of the letters were to people who--who once had been, you know; it was sad to see the thing, sir, so plain against the glaring proximity of the other thing. And so you can divide Newport into those who leave to sell their old family pictures, those who have to buy their old family pictures, and the lucky few who need neither buy nor sell, who are neither goin' down nor bobbing up, but who have kept their heads above the American tidal wave from the beginning and continue to do so. And I don't believe that there are any nicer people in the world than those."

"Nowhere!" I exclaimed. "When Near York does her best, what's better?--If only those best set the pace!"

"If only!" he a.s.sented. "But it's the others who get into the papers, who dine the drunken dukes, and make poor chambermaids envious a thousand miles inland!"

"There should be a high tariff on drunken dukes," I said.

"You'll never get it!" he declared. "It's the Republican party whose daughters marry them."

I rocked with enjoyment where I sat; he was so refres.h.i.+ng. And I agreed with him so well. "You're every bit as good as Miss Beaufain," I cried.

"Oh, no; oh, no! But I often think if we could only deport the negroes and Newport together to one of our distant islands, how happily our two chief problems would be solved!"

I still rocked. "Newport would, indeed, enjoy your plan for it. Do go on!" I entreated him But he had, for the moment, ceased; and I rose to stretch my legs and saunter among the old headstones and the wafted fragrance.