Owen Wister - Lady Baltimore

All this while Juno was looking at me, and I knew it, and therefore I ate my food in a kindly sort of unconscious way, until she fired another shot at me. "There is an absurd report that somebody fell overboard."

"Dear me!" I laughed. "So that is what it has grown to already! I did go out on the boat boom, and I did drop off — but into a boat."

At this confession of mine the up-country bride became extraordinarily arch on the subject of the well-known hospitality of steam yachts, and for this I was honestly grateful to her; but Juno brooded still. "I hope there is nothing wrong," she said solemnly.

Feeling that silence at this point would not be golden, I went into it with spirit I told them of our charming party, of General Rieppe's rich store of quotations, of the strict discipline on board the well-appointed Hermana, of the great beauty of Hortense, and her evident happiness when her lover was by her side. This talk of mine turned off any curiosity or suspicion which the rest of the company may have begun to entertain; but upon Juno I think it made scant impression, save causing her to set me down as an imbecile. For there was Doctor Beaugarcon when we came into the sitting-room, who told us before any one could even say "How-do-you-do," that Miss Hortense Rieppe had broken her engagement with John Mayrant, and that he had it from Mrs. Cornerly, whom he was visiting professionally. I caught the pitying look which Juno threw at me at this news, and I was happy to have acquitted myself so creditably in the manipulation of my secret: nobody asked me any more questions!

There is almost nothing else to tell you of how the splashes broke on Kings Port. Before the day when I was obliged to call in Doctor Beaugarcon's professional services (quite a sharp attack put me to bed for half a week) I found merely the following things: the Hermana gone to New York, the automobiles and the Replacers had also disappeared, and people were divided on the not strikingly important question as to whether Hortense and the General had accompanied Charley on the yacht, or continued northward in an automobile, or taken the train. Gone, in any case, the whole party indubitably was, leaving, I must say, a sense of emptiness: the comedy was over, the players departed. I never heard any one, not even Juno, doubt that it was Hortense who had broken the engagement; this part of the affair was conducted by the principals with great skill. Hortense had evidently written her version to the Cornerlys, and not a word to any other effect ever came from John's mouth, of course. One result I had not looked for, though it was a natural one: if the old ladies had felt indignation at Hortense for her determination to marry John Mayrant, this indignation was doubled by her determination not to! I fear that few of us live by logic, even in Kings Port; and then, they had all called upon her in that garden for nothing! The sudden thought of this made me laugh alone in my bed of sickness; and when I came out of it, had such a thing been possible, I should have liked to congratulate Miss Josephine St. Michael on her absence from the garden occasion. I said, however, nothing to her, or to any of the other ladies, upon this or any subject, for I was so unlucky as to find them not at home when I paid my round of farewell visits. Nor (to my real distress) did I see John Mayrant again. The boy wrote me (I received it in bed) a short, warm note of regret, with nothing else in it save the fact that he was leaving town, having become free from the Custom House at last. I fancy that he ran away for a judicious interval. Who would not?

Was there one person to whom he told the truth before he went? Did the girl behind the counter hear the manner in which the engagement was broken? Ah, none of us will ever know that! But, although I could not, without the highest impropriety, have spoken to any of the old ladies about this business, unless they had chosen to speak to me — and somehow I feel that after the abrupt close of it not even Mrs. Gregory St. Michael would have been likely to touch on the subject with an outsider — there was nothing whatever to forbid my indulging in a skirmish with Eliza La Heu; therefore I lunched at the Exchange on my last day.

"To the mountains?" she said, in reply to my information about my plans of travel.

"Doctor Beaugarcon says nothing else can so quickly restore me."

"Stay there for the rhododendrons, then," she bade me. "No sight more beautiful in all the South."

"Town seems deserted," I pursued. "Everybody gone."

"Oh, not everybody!"

"All the interesting people."

"Thank you."

"I meant, interesting to you."

I saw her decide not to be angry; and her decision changed and saved our conversation from the trashy, bantering tone which it was taking, and brought it to a pass most unexpected to both of us.

She gave me a charming and friendly smile. "Well, you, at any rate, are going away. And I am really sorry for that."

Her eyes rested upon me with perfect frankness. I was not in love with Eliza La Heu, but nearer to love than I had ever been then, and it would have been easy, very easy, to let one's self go straight onward into love. There are for a man more ways of falling into that state than romancers would have us to believe, and one of them is by an assent of the will at a certain given moment, which the heart promptly follows — just as a man in a moment decides he will espouse a cause, and soon finds himself hotly fighting for it body and soul. I could have gone out of that Exchange completely in love with Eliza La Heu; but my will did not give its assent, and I saw John Mayrant not as a rival, but as one whose happiness I greatly desired.

"Thank you," I said, "for telling me you are sorry I am going. And now, may I treat you more than ever as a friend, and tell you of a circumstance which Kings Port does not know?"

It put her on her guard. "Don't be indiscreet," she laughed.

"Isn't timely indiscretion discretion?"

"And don't be clever," she said. "Tell me what you have to say — if you're quite sure you'll not be sorry."

"Quite sure. There's no reason — now that the untruth is properly and satisfactorily established — that one person should not know that John Mayrant broke that engagement." And I told her the whole of it. "If I'm outrageous to share this secret with you," I concluded, "I can only say that I couldn't stand the unfairness any longer."

"He jumped straight in?" said Eliza.

"Oh, straight!"

"Of course," she murmured.

"And just after declaring that he wouldn't."

"Of course," she murmured again. "And the current took them right away?"

"Instantly."

"Was he very tired when you got to him?"

I answered this question and a number of others, backward and forward, until she had led me to cover the whole incident about twice-and-a-half times. Then she had a silence, and after this a reflection.

"How well they managed it!"

"Managed what?"

"The accepted version."

"Oh, yes, indeed!"

"And you and I will not spoil it for them," she declared.

As I took my final leave of her she put a flower in my buttonhole. My reflection was then, and is now, that if she already knew the truth from John himself, how well she managed it!

So that same night I took the lugubrious train which bore me with the grossest deliberation to the mountains; and among the mountains and their waterfalls I stayed and saw the rhododendrons, and was preparing to journey home when the invitation came from John and Eliza.

I have already said that of this wedding no word was in the papers. Kings Port by the war lost all material things, but not the others, among which precious privacy remains to her; and, O Kings Port, may you never lose your grasp of that treasure! May you never know the land where the reporter blooms, where if any joy or grief befall you, the public press rings your doorbell and demands the particulars, and if you deny it the particulars, it makes them up and says something scurrilous about you into the bargain. Therefore nothing was printed, morning or evening, about John and Eliza. Nor was the wedding service held in church to the accompaniment of nodding bonnets and gaping stragglers. No eye not tender with regard and emotion looked on while John took Eliza to his wedded wife, to live together after God's ordinance in the holy state of matrimony.