Lady Baltimore Part 9

"His left." Miss Josephine St. Michael inclined her head once more to me and went out of the Exchange. I retired to my usual table, and the girl read in my manner, quite correctly, the feelings which I had not supposed I had allowed to be evident. She said:--

"Aunt Josephine always makes strangers think she's displeased with them."

I replied like the young a.s.s which I constantly tell myself I have ceased to be: "Oh, displeasure is as much notice as one is ent.i.tled to from Miss St. Michael."

The girl laughed with her delightful sweet mockery.

"I declare, you're huffed! Now don't tell me you're not. But you mustn't be. When you know her, you'll know that that awful manner means Aunt Josephine is just being shy. Why, even I'm not afraid of her George Was.h.i.+ngton glances any more!"

"Very well," I laughed, "I'll try to have your courage." Over my chocolate and sandwiches I sat in curiosity discreditable, but natural.

Who was in bed--who would have to shake hands? And why had they stopped talking when I came in? Of course, I found myself hoping that John Mayrant had put the owner of the Hermana in bed at the slight cost of a bruise above his left eye. I wondered if the cake was again countermanded, and I started upon that line. "I think I'll have to-day, if you please, another slice of that Lady Baltimore." And I made ready for another verbal skirmish.

"I'm so sorry! It's a little stale to-day. You can have the last slice, if you wish."

"Thank you, I will." She brought it. "It's not so very stale," I said.

"How long since it has been made?"

"Oh, it's the same you've been having. You're its only patron just now."

"Well, no. There's Mr. Mayrant."

"Not for a week yet, you remember."

So the wedding was on yet. Still, John might have smashed the owner of the Hermana.

"Have you seen him lately?" I asked.

There was something special in the way she looked. "Not to-day. Have you?"

"Never in the forenoon. He has his duties and I have mine."

She made a little pause, and then, "What do you think of the President?"

"The President?" I was at a loss.

"But I'm afraid you would take his view--the Northern view," she mused.

It gave me, suddenly, her meaning. "Oh, the President of the United States! How you do change the subject!"

Her eyes were upon me, burning with sectional indignation, but she seemed to be thinking too much to speak. Now, here was a topic that I had avoided, and she had plumped it at me. Very well; she should have my view.

"If you mean that a gentleman cannot invite any respectable member of any race he pleases to dine privately in his house--"

"His house!" She was glowing now with it. "I think he is--I think he is--to have one of them--and even if he likes it, not to remember--cannot speak about him!" she wound up "I should say unbecoming things." She had walked out, during these words, from behind the counter and as she stood there in the middle of the long room you might have thought she was about to lead a cavalry charge. Then, admirably, she put it all under, and spoke on with perfect self-control. "Why can't somebody explain it to him? If I knew him, I would go to him myself, and I would say, Mr. President, we need not discuss our different tastes as to dinner company. Nor need we discuss how much you benefit the colored race by an act which makes every member of it immediately think that he is fit to dine with any king in the world. But you are staying in a house which is partly our house, ours, the South's, for we, too, pay taxes, you know. And since you also know our deep feeling--you may even call it a prejudice, if it so pleases you--do you not think that, so long as you are residing in that house, you should not gratuitously shock our deep feeling?" She swept a magnificent low curtsy at the air.

"By Jove, Miss La Heu!" I exclaimed, "you put it so that it's rather hard to answer."

"I'm glad it strikes you so."

"But did it make them all think they were going to dine?"

"Hundreds of thousands. It was proof to them that they were as good as anybody--just as good, without reading or writing or anything. The very next day some of the laziest and dirtiest where we live had a new strut, like the monkey when you put a red flannel cap on him--only the monkey doesn't push ladies off the sidewalk. And that state of mind, you know,"

said Miss La Heu, softening down from wrath to her roguish laugh, "isn't the right state of mind for racial progress! But I wasn't thinking of this. You know he has appointed one of them to office here."

A light entered my brain: John Mayrant had a position at the Custom House! John Mayrant was subordinate to the President's appointee! She hadn't changed the subject so violently, after all.

I came squarely at it. "And so you wish him to resign his position?"

But I was ahead of her this time.

"The Chief of Customs?" she wonderingly murmured.

I brought her up with me now. "Did Miss Josephine St. Michael say it was over his left eye?"

The girl instantly looked everything she thought. "I believe you were present!" This was her highly comprehensive exclamation, accompanied also by a blush as splendidly young as John Mayrant had been while he so stammeringly brought out his wishes concerning the cake. I at once decided to deceive her utterly, and therefore I spoke the exact truth: "No, I wasn't present."

They did their work, my true words; the false impression flowed out of them as smoothly as California claret from a French bottle.

"I wonder who told you?" my victim remarked. "But it doesn't really matter. Everybody is bound to know it. You surely were the last person with him in the churchyard?"

"Gracious!" I admitted again with splendidly mendacious veracity. "How we do find each other out in Kings Port!"

It was not by any means the least of the delights which I took in the company of this charming girl that sometimes she was too much for me, and sometimes I was too much for her. It was, of course, just the accident of our ages; in a very few years she would catch up, would pa.s.s, would always be too much for me. Well, to-day it was happily my turn; I wasn't going to finish lunch without knowing all she, at any rate, could tell me about the left eye and the man in bed.

"Forty years ago," I now, with ingenuity, remarked, "I suppose it would have been pistols."

She a.s.sented. "And I like that better--don't you--for gentlemen?"

"Well, you mean that fists are--"

"Yes," she finished for me.

"All the same," I maintained, "don't you think that there ought to be some correspondence, some proportion, between the gravity of the cause and the gravity of--"

"Let the coal-heavers take to their fists!" she scornfully cried.

"People of our cla.s.s can't descend--"

"Well, but," I interrupted, "then you give the coal-heavers the palm for discrimination."

"How's that?"

"Why, perfectly! Your coal-heaver kills for some offenses, while for lighter ones he--gets a bruise over the left eye."

"You don't meet it, you don't meet it! What is an insult ever but an insult?"

"Oh, we in the North notice certain degrees--insolence, impudence, impertinence, liberties, rudeness--all different."

She took up my phrase with a sudden odd quietness. "You in the North."