Part 33 (2/2)
”Ah,” I returned, ”Love so seldom knows what's just the thing for marriage.”
”Then your precocity theory falls,” declared Mrs. St. Michael. And as she went away from me along the street, I watched her beautiful stately walk; for who could help watching a sight so good?
Charley, then, was no secret to John's people. Was John still a secret to Charley? Could Hortense possibly have managed this? I hoped for a chance to observe the two men with her during the visit of Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael and her party to the church.
This party was already a.s.sembled when I arrived upon the spot appointed.
In the street, a few paces from the church, stood Bohm and Charley and Kitty and Gazza, with Beverly Rodgers, who, as I came near, left them and joined me.
”Oh, she's somewhere off with her fire-eater,” responded Beverly to my immediate inquiry for Hortense. ”Do you think she was asked, old man?”
Probably not, I thought. ”But she goes so well with the rest,” I suggested.
Beverly gave his chuckle. ”She goes where she likes. She'll meet us here when we're finished, I'm pretty sure.”
”Why such certainty?”
”Well, she has to attend to Charley, you know!”
Mrs. Weguelin, it appeared, had met the party here by the church, but had now gone somewhere in the immediate neighborhood to find out why the gate was not opened to admit us, and to hasten the unpunctual custodian of the keys. I had not looked for precisely such a party as Mrs.
Weguelin's invitation had gathered, nor could I imagine that she had fully understood herself what she was gathering; and this I intimated to Beverly Rodgers, saying:--
”Do you suppose, my friend, that she suspected the feather of the birds you flock with?”
Beverly took it lightly. ”Hang it, old boy, of course everybody can't be as nice as I am!” But he took it less lightly before it was over.
We stood chatting apart, he and I, while Bohm and Charley and Kitty and Gazza walked across the street to the window of a shop, where old furniture was for sale at a high price; and it grew clearer to me what Beverly had innocently brought upon Mrs. Weguelin, and how he had brought it. The little quiet, particular lady had been pleased with his visit, and pleased with him. His good manners, his good appearance, his good English-trained voice, all these things must have been extremely to her taste; and then--more important than they--did she not know about his people? She had inquired, he told me, with interest about two of his uncles, whom she had last seen in 1858. ”She's awfully the right sort,”
said Beverly. Yes, I saw well how that visit must have gone: the gentle old lady reviving in Beverly's presence, and for the sake of being civil to him, some memories of her girlhood, some meetings with those uncles, some dances with them; and generally shedding from her talk and manner the charm of some sweet old melody--and Beverly, the facile, the appreciative, sitting there with her at a correct, deferential angle on his chair, admirably sympathetic and in good form, and playing the old school. (He had no thought to deceive her; the old school was his by right, and genuinely in his blood, he took to it like a duck to the water.) How should Mrs. Weguelin divine that he also took to the nouveau jeu to the tune of Bohm and Charley and Kitty and Gazza? And so, to show him some attention, and because she couldn't ask him to a meal, why, she would take him over the old church, her colonial forefathers'; she would tell him the little legends about them; he was precisely the young man to appreciate such things--and she would be pleased if he would also bring the friends with whom he was travelling.
I looked across the street at Bohm and Charley and Kitty and Gazza.
They were now staring about them in all their perfection of stare: small Charley in a sleek slate-colored suit, as neat as any little barber; Bohm, ma.s.sive, portentous, his strong shoes and gloves the chief note in his dress, and about his whole firm frame a heavy mechanical strength, a look as of something that did something rapidly and accurately when set going--cut or cracked or ground or smashed something better and faster than it had ever been cut or cracked or ground or smashed before, and would take your arms and legs off if you didn't stand well back from it; it was only in Bohm's eye and lips that you saw he wasn't made entirely of bra.s.s and iron, that champagne and shoulders decolletes received a punctual share of his valuable time. And there was Kitty, too, just the wife for Bohm, so soon as she could divorce her husband, to whom she had united herself before discovering that all she married him for, his old Knickerbocker name, was no longer in the slightest degree necessary for social acceptance; while she could feed people, her trough would be well thronged. Kitty was neat, Kitty was trig, Kitty was what Beverly would call ”swagger ”; her skilful tailor-made clothes sheathed her closely and gave her the excellent appearance of a well-folded English umbrella; it was in her hat that she had gone wrong--a beautiful hat in itself, one which would have wholly become Hortense; but for poor Kitty it didn't do at all. Yes, she was a well folded English umbrella, only the umbrella had for its handle the head of a bulldog or the leg of a ballet-dancer. And these were the Replacers whom Beverly's clear-sighted eyes saw swarming round the temple of his civilization, pus.h.i.+ng down the aisles, climbing over the backs of the benches, walking over each other's bodies, and seizing those front seats which his family had sat in since New York had been New York; and so the wise fellow very prudently took every step that would insure the Replacers' inviting him to occupy one of his own chairs. I had almost forgotten little Gazza, the Italian n.o.bleman, who sold old furniture to new Americans. Gazza was not looking at the old furniture of Kings Port, which must have filled his Vatican soul with contempt; he was strolling back and forth in the street, with his head in the air, humming, now loudly, now softly ”La-la, la-la, E quando a la predica in chiesa siederia, la-la-la-la;”
and I thought to myself that, were I the Pope, I should kick him into the Tiber.
When Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael came back with the keys and their custodian, Bohm was listening to the slow, clear words of Charley, in which he evidently found something that at length interested him--a little. Bohm, it seemed, did not often speak himself: possibly once a week. His way was to let other people speak to him when there were signs in his face that he was hearing anything which they said, it was a high compliment to them, and of course Charley could command Bohm's ear; for Charley, although he was as neat as any barber, and let Hortense walk on him because he looked beyond that, and purposed to get her, was just as potent in the financial world as Bohm, could bring a borrowing empire to his own terms just as skillfully as could Bohm; was, in short, a man after Bohm's own--I had almost said heart: the expression is so obstinately embedded in our language! Bohm, listening, and Charley, talking, had neither of them noticed Mrs. Weguelin's arrival; they stood ignoring her, while she waited, casting a timid eye upon them.
But Beverly, suddenly perceiving this, and begging her pardon for them, brought the party together, and we moved in among the old graves.
”Ah!” said Gazza, bending to read the quaint words cut upon one of them, as we stopped while the door at the rear of the church was being opened, ”French!”
”It was the mother-tongue of these colonists,” Mrs. Weguelin explained to him.
”Ah! like Canada!” cried Gazza. ”But what a pretty bit is that!” And he stood back to admire a little glimpse, across a street, between tiled roofs and rusty balconies, of another church steeple. ”Almost, one would say, the Old World,” Gazza declared.
”Our world is not new,” said Mrs. Weguelin; and she pa.s.sed into the church.
Kings Port holds many sacred nooks, many corners, many vistas, that should deeply stir the spirit and the heart of all Americans who know and love their country. The pa.s.sing traveller may gaze up at certain windows there, and see History herself looking out at him, even as she looks out of the windows of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. There are also other ancient buildings in Kings Port, where History is shut up, as in a strong-box,--such as that stubborn old octagon, the powder-magazine of Revolutionary times, which is a chest holding proud memories of blood and war. And then there are the three churches. Not strong-boxes, these, but shrines, where burn the venerable lamps of faith. And of these three houses of G.o.d, that one holds the most precious flame, the purest light, which treasures the holy fire that came from France. The English colonists, who sat in the other two congregations, came to Carolina's soil to better their estate; but it was for liberty of soul, to lift their ardent and exalted prayer to G.o.d as their own conscience bade them, and not as any man dictated, that those French colonists sought the New World. No Puritan splendor of independence and indomitable courage outs.h.i.+nes theirs. They preached a word as burning as any that Plymouth or Salem ever heard. They were but a handful, yet so fecund was their marvelous zeal that they became the spiritual leaven of their whole community. They are less known than Plymouth and Salem, because men of action, rather than men of letters, have sprung from the loins of the South; but there they stand, a beautiful beacon, s.h.i.+ning upon the coasts of our early history. Into their church, then, into the shrine where their small lamp still burns, their devout descendant, Mrs.
Weguelin St. Michael led our party, because in her eyes Kings Port could show nothing more precious and significant. There had been nothing to warn her that Bohm and Charley were Americans who neither knew nor loved their country, but merely Americans who knew their country's wealth and loved to acquire every penny of it that they could.
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