The Romance of a Plain Man Part 31

"If you're going to swell, Ben, now's the time," said the General, "and out you go."

But my training had been in a hard school, and by the end of the month he had ceased to enquire in the mornings "if my hat still fitted my head."

"You'll have your ups and downs, Ben, like the rest of us," he said, "but the main thing is, let your fortunes see-saw as they may, always keep your eyes on a level. By the way, I saw Sally Mickleborough last night, and when I asked her why she fell in love with you, she replied it was because she saw you pus.h.i.+ng a wheel up a hill. Now there's a woman with a reason--you'd better look sharp, or she'll begin talking politics presently like her Aunt Matoaca. What do you think I found on my desk this morning? A pamphlet, addressed in her handwriting, about the presidential election." Then his tone softened. "So Sally's going to marry you in spite of her aunts? Well, she's a good girl, a brave girl, and I'm proud of her."

When I went home to supper, I was to have a different opinion from Dr.

Theophilus.

"I saw Sally Mickleborough to-day, Ben, when I called on Miss Matoaca,--[that poor lady gets flightier every day, she left a pamphlet here this morning about the presidential election]--and the girl told me in the few minutes I saw her in the hall, that she meant to marry you next month."

"She will do me that great honour, doctor."

"Well, I regret it, Ben; I can't conceal from you that I regret it.

You're a good boy, and I'm proud of you, but I don't like to see young folks putting themselves in opposition to the judgment of their elders.

I'm an orthodox believer in the claims of blood, you know."

"And is there nothing to be said for the claims of love?"

"The claims of moons.h.i.+ne, Ben," observed Mrs. Clay in her sharp voice, looking up from a pair of yarn socks she was knitting for the doctor; "you know I'm fond of you, but when you begin to talk of the claims of love driving a girl to break with her family, I feel like boxing your ears."

"You see, Tina is a cynic," remarked Dr. Theophilus, smiling, "and I don't doubt that she has her excellent reasons, as usual; most cynics have. A woman, however, has got to believe in love to the point of lunacy or become a scoffer. What I contend, now, is that love isn't moons.h.i.+ne, but that however solid a thing it may be, it isn't, after all, as solid as one's duty to one's family."

"Of course I can't argue with you, doctor. I know little of the unit you call 'the family'; but I should think the first duty of the family would be to consider the happiness of the individual."

"And do you think, Ben, that you are the only person who is considering Sally's happiness?"

"I know that I am considering it; for the rest I can't speak."

"I firmly believe," broke in Mrs. Clay, "that Sally's behaviour has helped to drive Matoaca Bland clean out of her wits. She's actually sent me one of her leaflets,--what do you think of that, Theophilus?--to me, the most refined and retiring woman on earth."

"What I'd say, Tina, is that you aren't half as refined and retiring as Miss Matoaca," chuckled the doctor.

"That is merely the way she dresses," rejoined Mrs. Clay stiffly; "it is her poke bonnet and black silk mantle that deceives you. As for me, I can call no woman truly refined who does not naturally avoid the society of men."

"Well, Tina, I had a notion that all of you were pretty fond of it, when it comes to that."

"Not of the society of men, Theophilus, but of the select attentions of gentlemen."

"I'm not taking up for Miss Matoaca," pursued the good man; "I can't conscientiously do that, and I'm more concerned at this minute about the marriage of Ben and Sally. You may smile at me as superst.i.tious, if you please, but I never yet saw a marriage turn out happily that was made in defiance of family feeling."

As I could make no reply to this, except to put forward a second time what Mrs. Clay had tartly called "the claims of moons.h.i.+ne," I bade the doctor goodnight, and going upstairs to my room, sat down beside the small square window, which gave on the garden, with its miniature box borders and its single clipped yew-tree, over which a young moon was rising. "A mixture of a fighter and a dreamer," the old man had once called me, and it seemed to me now that something apart from the mere business of living and the alert man of affairs, brooded in me over the young moon and the yew-tree.

A letter from Sally had reached me a few hours before, and taking it from my pocket, I turned to the lamp and read it for the sixth time with a throbbing heart.

"You ask me if I am happy, dearest," she wrote, "and I answer that I am happy, with a still, deep happiness, over which a hundred troubles and cares ripple like shadows on a lake. But oh! poor Aunt Mitty, with her silent hurt pride in her face, and poor Aunt Matoaca, with the strained, unnatural brightness in her eyes, and her cheeks so like rose leaves that have crumpled. Oh, Ben, I believe Aunt Matoaca is living over again her own romance, and it breaks my heart. Last night I went into her room, and found her with her old yellowed wedding veil and orange blossoms laid out on the bed. She tried to pretend that she was straightening her cedar chests, but she looked so little and pitiable--if you could only have seen her! I wonder what she would be now if the General had been a man like you? How grateful I am, how profoundly thankful with my whole heart that I am marrying a man that I can trust!"

"That I can trust!" Her words rang in my ears, and I heard them again, clear and strong, the next morning, when I met Miss Matoaca as I was on my way to my office. She was coming slowly up Franklin Street, her arms filled with packages, and when she recognised me, with a shy, startled movement to turn aside, a number of leaflets fluttered from her grasp to the pavement between us. When I stooped and gathered them up, her face, under the old-fas.h.i.+oned poke bonnet, was brought close to my eyes, and I saw that she looked wan and pinched, and that her bright brown eyes were s.h.i.+ning as if from fever.

"Mr. Starr," she said, straightening her thin little figure as I handed her the leaflets, "I've wanted for some time to speak a word to you on the subject of my niece--Miss Mickleborough."

"Yes, Miss Matoaca."

"My sister Mitty thought it better that I should refrain from doing so, and upon such matters she has excellent judgment. It is my habit, indeed, to yield to her opinion in everything except a question of conscience."

"Yes?" for again she had paused. "It is very kind of you," I added.

"I do not mean it for kindness, Mr. Starr. My niece is very dear to me; and since poor Sarah's unfortunate experience, we have felt more--strongly, if possible, about unequal marriages. I know that you are a most remarkable young man, but I do not feel that you are in any way suited to make the happiness of our niece--Miss Mickleborough--"

"I am sorry, Miss Matoaca, but Miss Mickleborough thinks differently."

"Young people are rarely the best judges in such matters, Mr. Starr."

"But do you think their elders can judge for them?"

"If they have had experience--yes."

"Ah, Miss Matoaca, does our own experience ever teach us to understand the experience of others?"

"The Blands have never needed to be taught," she returned with pride, "that the claims of the family are not to be sacrificed to--to a sentiment. Except in the case of poor Sarah there has never been a mesalliance in our history. We have always put one thing above the consideration of our blood, and that is--a principle. If it were a question of conscience, however painful it might be to me, I should uphold my niece in her opposition to my sister Mitty. I myself have opposed her for a matter of principle."

"I am aware of it, Miss Matoaca."

Her withered cheeks were tinged with a delicate rose, and I could almost see the working of her long, narrow mind behind her long, narrow face.

"I should like to leave a few of these leaflets with you, Mr. Starr,"

she said.

A minute afterwards, when she had moved on with her meek, slow walk, I was left standing on the pavement with her suffrage pamphlets fluttering in my hand. Stuffing them hurriedly into my pocket, I went on to the office, utterly oblivious of the existence of any principle on earth except the one underlying the immediate expansion of the Great South Midland and Atlantic Railroad.

A fortnight later I heard that Miss Matoaca had begun writing letters to the "Richmond Herald"; and I remembered, with an easy masculine complacency, the pamphlets I had thrown into the waste basket beside the General's desk. The presidential election, with its usual upheaval of the business world, had arrived; and that timid little Miss Matoaca should have intruded herself into the affairs of the nation did not occur to me as possible, until the General informed me, while we watched a Democratic procession one afternoon, that Miss Mitty had come to him the day before in tears over the impropriety of her sister's conduct.

"She begged me to remonstrate with Miss Matoaca," he pursued, "and by George, I promised her that I would. There's one thing, Ben, I've never been able to stand, and that's the sight of a woman in tears. Of course when you've made 'em cry yourself, it is different; but to have a lady coming to you weeping over somebody else--and a lady like Miss Mitty--well, I honestly believe if she'd requested me to give her my skin, I'd have tried to get out of it just to oblige her."

"Did you go to Miss Matoaca?" I asked, for the picture of the General lecturing his old love on the subject of the proprieties had caught my attention even in the midst of a large Democratic procession that was marching along the street. While he rambled on in his breaking voice, which had begun to grow weak and old, I gazed over his head at the political banners with their familiar, jesting inscriptions.

"I declare, Ben, I'd rather have swallowed a dose of medicine," he went on; "you see I used to know Miss Matoaca very well forty years ago--I reckon you've heard of it. We were engaged to be married, and it was broken off because of some woman's rights nonsense she'd got in her head."

"Well, it's hard to imagine your interview of yesterday."

"There wasn't any interview. I went to her and put it as mildly as I could. 'Miss Matoaca,' I said, 'I'm sorry to hear you've gone cracked.'"

"And how did she take it?"

"'Do you mean my heart or my head, General?' she asked--she had always plenty of spirit, had Matoaca, for all her soft looks. 'It's your head,'

I answered. 'Lord knows I'm not casting any reflections on the rest of you.' 'Then it has fared better than my heart, General,' she replied, 'for that was broken.' She looked kind of wild, Ben, as she said it. I don't know what she was talking about, I declare on my honour I don't!"

A cheer went up from the procession, and an expression of eager curiosity came into his face.