Part 17 (1/2)

My silence upon these two remarks was the silence of great and sudden interest; but it led Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael to do my perceptions a slight injustice, and she had no intention that I should miss the quality of her opinion regarding the vehicle in which Hortense was reported to be travelling.

”Miss Rieppe has the extraordinary taste to come here in an automobile,”

said Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael, with deepened severity.

Though I understood quite well, without this emphasizing, that the little lady would, with her unbending traditions, probably think it more respectable to approach Kings Port in a wheelbarrow, I was absorbed by the vague but copious import of Mrs. Gregory's announcement. The oracles, moreover, continued.

”But she is undoubtedly very clever to come and see for herself,” was Mrs. Weguelin's next comment.

Mrs. Gregory's face, as she replied to her companion, took on a censorious and superior expression. ”You'll remember, Julia, that I told Josephine St. Michael it was what they had to expect.”

”But it was not Josephine, my dear, who at any time approved of taking such a course. It was Eliza's whole doing.”

It was fairly raining oracles round me, and they quite resembled, for all the help and light they contained, their Delphic predecessors.

”And yet Eliza,” said Mrs. Gregory, ”in the face of it, this very morning, repeated her eternal a.s.sertion that we shall all see the marriage will not take place.”

”Eliza,” murmured Mrs. Weguelin, ”rates few things more highly than her own judgment.”

Mrs. Gregory mused. ”Yet she is often right when she has no right to be right.”

I could not bear it any longer, and I said, ”I heard to-day that Miss Rieppe had broken her engagement.”

”And where did you hear that nonsense?” asked Mrs. Gregory.

My heart leaped, and I told her where.

”Oh, well! you will hear anything in a boarding-house. Indeed, that would be a great deal too good to be true.”

”May I ask where Miss Rieppe is all this while?”

”The last news was from Palm Beach, where the air was said to be necessary for the General.”

”But,” Mrs. Weguelin repeated, ”we have every reason to believe that she is coming here in an automobile.”

”We shall have to call, of course,” added Mrs. Gregory to her, not to me; they were leaving me out of it. Yes, these ladies were forgetting about me in their using preoccupation over whatever crisis it was that now hung over John Mayrant's love affairs--a preoccupation which was evidently part of Kings Port's universal buzz to-day, and which my joining them in the street had merely mitigated for a moment. I did not wish to be left out of it; I cannot tell you why--perhaps it was contagious in the local air--but a veritable madness of craving to know about it seized upon me. Of course, I saw that Miss Rieppe was, almost too grossly and obviously, ”playing for time”; the health of people's fathers did not cause weekly extensions of this sort. But what was it that the young lady expected time to effect for her? Her release, formally, by her young man, on the ground of his worldly ill fortune? Or was it for an offer from the owner of the Hermana that she was waiting, before she should take the step of formally releasing John Mayrant? No, neither of these conjectures seemed to furnish a key to the tactics of Miss Rieppe and the theory that each of these affianced parties was strategizing to cause the other to a.s.sume the odium of breaking their engagement, with no result save that of repeatedly countermanding a wedding-cake, struck me as belonging admirably to a stage-comedy in three acts, but scarcely to life as we find it. Besides, poor John Mayrant was, all too plainly, not strategizing; he was playing as straight a game as the honest heart of a gentleman could inspire. And so, baffled at all points, I said (for I simply had to try something which might lead to my sharing in Kings Port's vibrating secret):--

”I can't make out whether she wants to marry him or not.”

Mrs. Gregory answered. ”That is just what she is coming to see for herself.”

”But since her love was for his phosphates only--!” was my natural exclamation.

It caused (and this time I did not expect it) my inveterate ladies to consult each other's expressions. They prolonged their silence so much that I spoke again:--

”And backing out of this sort of thing can be done, I should think, quite as cleverly, and much more simply, from a distance.”

It was Mrs. Weguelin who answered now, or, rather, who headed me off.

”Have you been able to make out whether he wants to marry her or not?”

”Oh, he never comes near any of that with me!”

”Certainly not. But we all understand that he has taken a fancy to you, and that you have talked much with him.”