第75章 Again the Replacers(1)

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.Iremembered 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 con-valescence,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 Isuppose 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.