Owen Wister - Lady Baltimore

In Royal Street, not many steps from South Place, there stands a quiet house a little back, upon whose face sorrow has struck many blows, but made no deep wounds yet; no scorch from the fires of war is visible, and the rending of the earthquake does not show too plainly; but there hangs about the house a gravity that comes from seeing and suffering much, and a sweetness from having sheltered many generations of smiles and tears. The long linked chain of births and deaths here has not been broken and scattered, and the grandchildren look out of the same windows from which the grandsires gazed, whose faces now in picture frames still watch serenely the sad present from their happy past. Therefore the rooms lie in still depths of association, and from the walls, the stairs, the furniture, flows the benign influence of undispersed memories; it sheds its tempered radiance upon the old miniatures, and upon every fresh flower that comes in from the garden; it seems to pass through the open doors to and fro like a tranquil blessing; it is beyond joy and pain, because time has distilled it from both of these; it is the assembled essence of kinship and blood unity, enriched by each succeeding brood that is born, is married, is fruitful in its turn, and dies remembered; only the balm of faith is stronger to sustain and heal; for that comes from heaven, while it is earth that gives us this; and the sacred cup of it which our native land once held is almost empty.

Amid this influence John and Eliza were made one, and the faces of the older generations grew soft beneath it, and pensive eyes became lustrous, and into pale cheeks the rosy tint came like an echo faintly back for a short hour. They made so little sound in their quiet happiness of congratulation that it might have been a dream; and they were so few that the house with the sense of its memories was not lost with the movement and crowding, but seemed still to preside over the whole, and send down its benediction.

When it was my turn to shake the hands of bride and groom, John asked —

"What did your friend do with your advice?"

And I replied. "He has taken it."

"Perhaps not that," John returned, "but you must have helped him to see his way."

When the bride came to cut the cake, she called me to her and fulfilled her promise.

"You have always liked my baking," she said.

"Then you made it after all," I answered.

"I would not have been married without doing so," she declared sweetly.

When the time came for them to go away, they were surrounded with affectionate God-speeds; but Miss Josephine St. Michael waited to be the last, standing a little apart, her severe and chiselled face turned aside, and seeming to watch a mocking-bird that was perched in his cage at a window halfway up the stairs.

"He is usually not so silent," Miss Josephine said to me. "I suppose we are too many visitors for him."

Then I saw that the old lady, beneath her severity, was deeply moved; and almost at once John and Eliza came down the stairs. Miss Josephine took each of them to her heart, but she did not trust herself to speak; and a single tear rolled down her face, as the boy and girl continued to the hall-door. There Daddy Ben stood, and John's gay good-by to him was the last word that I heard the bridegroom say. While we all stood silently watching them as they drove away from the tall iron gate, the mocking-bird on the staircase broke into melodious ripples of song.

And now here goes my language back into the small-clothes that it wore at the beginning of all, when I told you something of that colonial society, the Selected Salic Scions, dear to the heart of my Aunt. It were beyond my compass to approach this august body of men and women with the respect that is its due, did I attire myself in that modern garment which, in the phrase of the vulgar, is denoted pants.

You will scarce have forgot, I must suppose, the importance set by my Aunt Carola upon the establishing of the Scions in new territories, wherever such persons as were both qualified by their descent and in themselves worthy, should be found; and you will remember that I was bidden by her to look in South Carolina for members of the Bombo connection which she was inclined to suspect existed in that state. My neglect to make this inquiry for my kind Aunt now smote me sharply when all seemed too late. John Mayrant had spoken of Kill-devil Bombo, the very personage through whom lay Aunt Carola's claim to kingly lineage, and I had let John Mayrant go away upon his honeymoon without ever questioning him upon this subject. As I looked back upon the ease with which I might have settled the matter, and forward to my return empty-handed to the generous relative to whom I owed this agreeable experience of travel, I felt guilty indeed. I wrote a letter to follow John Mayrant into whatever retreat of bliss he had betaken himself to, and I begged him earnestly to write me at his early convenience all that he might know of Bombos in South Carolina. Consequently, I was able, on reaching home, to meet Aunt Carola with some sort of countenance, and to assure her that I expected presently to be furnished with authentic and valuable particulars.

I now learned that the Selected Salic Scions had greatly increased in numbers during my short absence. It appeared that the origin of the whole movement had sprung from a needy but ingenious youth in some manufacturing town of New England. This lad had a cousin, who had amassed from nothing a noble fortune by inventing one day a speedy and convenient fashion of opening beer bottles; and this cousin's achievement had set him to looking about him. He soon discovered that in our great republic everywhere there were living hundreds and thousands of men and women who were utterly unaware that they were descended from kings. Borrowing a little money to float him, he set up The American Almanach de Gotha and began (for the minimum sum of fifty dollars a pedigree) to reveal to these eager people the chain of links that connected them with royalty. Thus, in a period of time the brevity of which is incredible, this young man passed from complete indigence to a wife and four automobiles, or an automobile and four wives — I don't remember which he had the four of. There was so much royal blood about that it had spilled into several rival organizations, each bitterly warring with the other; but my Aunt assured me that her society was the only one that any respectable person belonged to.

I am minded to announce a rule of discreet conduct: Never read aloud any letter that you have not first read to yourself. Had I observed this rule — but listen —

It so happened that Aunt Carola was at luncheon with us when the postman brought John Mayrant's answer to my inquiry, and at the sight of his handwriting I thoughtlessly exclaimed to my Aunt that here at last we had all there was to be known concerning the Bombos in South Carolina; with this I tore open the missive and embarked upon a reading of it for the edification of all present. I pass over the beginning of John's communication, because it was merely the observations of a man upon his honeymoon, and was confined to laudatory accounts of scenery and weather, and the beauty of all life when once one saw it with his eyes truly opened.

"No Bombos ever came to Carolina," he now continued, "that I know of, or that Aunt Josephine knows of, which is more to the point. Aunt Josephine has copied me a passage from the writings of William Byrd, Esq., of Westover, Virginia, in which mention is made, not of the family, but of a rum punch which seems to have been concocted first by Admiral Bombo, from a New England brand of rum so very deadly that it was not inaptly styled 'kill-devil' by the early planters of the colony. That the punch drifted to Carolina and still survives there, you have reason to know. Therefore if any remote ancestors of yours contracted an alliance with Kill-devil Bombo, I can imagine no resulting offspring of such union but a series of severe attacks of delir—"