Owen Wister - Lady Baltimore

The visitors accepted tea, and the beauty in Hortense's face was now supreme. The old lady sat, forgetting to drink her tea, but very still in outward attitude, as she talked with Hortense; and the sight of one hand in its glove lying motionless upon her best dress, suddenly almost drew unexpected tears to my eyes. John was nearly as quiet as she, but the glove that he held was twisted between his fingers. I expected that he would stay with his Hortense when his aunt took her leave; he, however, was evidently expected by the old lady to accompany her out and back, I suppose, to her house, as was proper.

But John's departure from Hortense differed from his meeting her. She gave no left hand to him now; she gazed at him, and then, as the old lady began to go toward the house, she moved a step toward him, and then she cast herself into his arms! It was no acting, this, no skilful simulation; her head sank upon his shoulder, and true passion spoke in every line of that beautiful surrendered form, as it leaned against her lover's.

"So that's why!" I exclaimed, once more aloud.

It was but a moment; and John, released, followed Miss Eliza. The old lady walked slowly, with that half-failing step that betokens the body's weariness after great mental or moral strain. Indeed, as John regained her side, she put her arm in his as if her feebleness needed his support. Thus they went away together, the aunt and her beloved boy, who had so sorely grieved and disappointed her.

But if this sight touched me, this glimpse of the vanquished leaving the field after supreme acknowledgment of defeat, upon Hortense it wrought another effect altogether. She stood looking after them, and as she looked, the whole woman from head to foot, motionless as she was, seemed to harden. Yet still she looked, until at length, slowly turning, her eyes chanced to fall upon Mrs. Gregory St. Michael's card-case. There it lay, the symbol of Kings Port's capitulation. She swooped down and up with a flying curve of grace, holding her prey caught; and then, catching also her handsome skirts on either side, she danced like a whirling fan among the empty chairs.

But a little while, and all that I had just witnessed in such vivid dumb-show might have seemed to me in truth some masque; so smooth had it been, and voiceless, coming and going like a devised fancy. And after the last of the players was gone from the stage, leaving the white cloth, and the silver, and the cups, and the groups of chairs near the pleasant arbor, I watched the deserted garden whence the sunlight was slowly departing, and it seemed to me more than ever like some empty and charming scene in a playhouse, to which the comedians would in due time return to repeat their delicate pantomime. But these were mental indulgences, with which I sat playing until the sight of my interrupted letter to Aunt Carola on the table before me brought the reality of everything back into my thoughts; and I shook my head over Miss Eliza. I remembered that hand of hers, lying in despondent acquiescence upon her lap, as the old lady sat in her best dress, formally and faithfully accepting the woman whom her nephew John had brought upon them as his bride-elect — formally and faithfully accepting this distasteful person, and thus atoning as best she could to her beloved nephew for the wrong that her affection had led her to do him in that ill-starred and inexcusable tampering with his affairs.

But there was my letter waiting. I took my pen, and finished what I had to say about the negro and the injustice we had done to him, as well as to our own race, by the Fifteenth Amendment. I wrote —

"I think Northerners must often seem to these people strangely obtuse in their attitude. And they deserve such opinion, since all they need to do is come here and see for themselves what the War did to the South.

"You may have a perfectly just fight with a man and beat him rightly; but if you are able to go on with your work next day, while his health is so damaged that for a long while he limps about as a cripple, you must not look up from your busy thriving and reproach him with his helplessness, and remind him of its cause; nor must you be surprised that he remembers the fight longer than you have time for. I know that the North meant to be magnanimous, that the North was magnanimous, that the spirit of Grant at Appomattox filled many breasts; and I know that the magnanimity was not met by those who led the South after Lee's retirement, and before reconstruction set in, and that the Fifteenth Amendment was brought on by their own doings: when have two wrongs made a right? And to place the negro above these people was an atrocity. You cannot expect them to inquire very industriously how magnanimous this North meant to be, when they have suffered at her hands worse, far worse, than France suffered from Germany's after 1870.

"I do think there should be a different spirit among some of the later-born, but I have come to understand even the slights and suspicions from which I here and there suffer, since to their minds, shut in by circumstance, I'm always a 'Yankee.'

"We are prosperous; and prosperity does not bind, it merely assembles people — at dinners and dances. It is adversity that binds — beside the gravestone, beneath the desolated roof. Could you come here and see what I have seen, the retrospect of suffering, the long, lingering convalescence, the small outlook of vigor to come, and the steadfast sodality of affliction and affection and fortitude, your kind but unenlightened heart would be wrung, as mine has been, and is being, at every turn."

After I had posted this reply to Aunt Carola, I had some fears that my pen had run away with me, and that she might now descend upon me with that reproof which she knew so well how to exercise in cases of disrespect. But there was actually a certain pathos in her mildness when it came. She felt it her duty to go over a good deal of history first, but —

"I do not understand the present generation," she finished, "and I suppose that I was not meant to."

The little sigh in these words did great credit to Aunt Carola.

This vindication off my mind, and relieved by it of the more general thoughts about Kings Port and the South, which the pantomime of Kings Port's forced capitulation to Hortense had raised in me, I returned to the personal matters between that young woman and John, and Charley. How much did Charley know? How much would Charley stand? How much would John stand, if he came to know?

Well, the scene in the garden now helped me to answer these questions much better than I could have answered them before its occurrence. With one fact — the great fact of love — established, it was not difficult to account for at least one or two of the several things that puzzled me. There could be no doubt that Hortense loved John Mayrant, loved him beyond her own control. When this love had begun, made no matter. Perhaps it began on the bridge, when the money was torn, and Eliza La Heu had appeared. The Kings Port version of Hortense's indifference to John before the event of the phosphates might well enough be true. It might even well enough be true that she had taken him and his phosphates at Newport for lack of anything better at hand, and because she was sick of disappointed hopes. In this case, Charley's subsequent appearance as something very much better (if the phosphates were to fail) would perfectly explain the various postponements of the wedding.

So I was able to answer my questions to myself thus: How much did Charley know? — Just what he could see for himself, and what he had most likely heard from Newport gossip. He could have heard of an old engagement, made purely for money's sake, and of recent delays created by the lady; and he could see the gentleman — an impossible husband from a Wall Street standpoint! — to whom Hortense was evidently tempering her final refusal by indulgently taking an interest in helping along his phosphate fortune. Charley would not refuse to lend her his aid in this estimable benevolence; nor would it occur to Charley's sensibilities how such benevolence would be taken by John if John were not "taken" himself. Yes, Charley was plainly fooled, and fooled the more readily because he had the old version of the truth. How should he suspect there was a revised version? How should he discover that passion had now changed sides, that it was now John who allowed himself to be loved? The signs of this did not occur before his eyes. Of course, Charley would not stay fooled forever; the hours of that were numbered, — but their number was quite beyond my guessing!