He smiled. “We did that here in 1861.”
“Oh, no! You left the Union, but you loved what you considered was your country, and you love it still. That’s just my point, just my strange discovery in Kings Port. You retain the thing we’ve lost. Our big men fifty years ago thought of the country, and what they could make it; our big men to-day think of the country and what they can make out of it. Rather different, don’t you see? When I walk about in the North, I merely meet members of trusts or unions—according to the length of the individual’s purse; when I walk about in Kings Port, I meet Americans.—Of course,” I added, taking myself up, “that’s too sweeping a statement. The right sort of American isn’t extinct in the North by any means. But there’s such a commercial deluge of the wrong sort, that the others sometimes seem to me sadly like a drop in the bucket.”
“You certainly understand it all,” John Mayrant repeated. “It’s amazing to find you saying things that I have thought were my own private notions.”
I laughed. “Oh, I fancy there are more than two of us in the country.”
“Even the square piano and Mr. Pinckney,” he went on. “I didn’t suppose anybody had thought things like that, except myself.”
“Oh,” I again said lightly, “any American—any, that is, of the world—who has a colonial background for his family, has thought, probably, very much the same sort of things. Of course it would be all Greek or gibberish to the new people.”
He took me up with animation. “The new people! My goodness, sir, yes! Have you seen them? Have you seen Newport, for instance?” His diction now (and I was to learn it was always in him a sign of heightening intensity) grew more and more like the formal speech of his ancestors. “You have seen Newport?” he said.
“Yes; now and then.”
“But lately, sir? I knew we were behind the times down here, sir, but I had not imagined how much. Not by any means! Kings Port has a long road to go before she will consider marriage provincial and chastity obsolete.”
“Dear me, Mr. Mayrant! Well, I must tell you that it’s not all quite so—so advanced—as that, you know. That’s not the whole of Newport.”
He hastened to explain. “Certainly not, sir! I would not insult the honorable families whom I had the pleasure to meet there, and to whom my name was known because they had retained their good position since the days when my great-uncle had a house and drove four horses there himself. I noticed three kinds of Newport, sir.”
“Three?”
“Yes. Because I took letters; and some of the letters were to people who—who once had been, you know; it was sad to see the thing, sir, so plain against the glaring proximity of the other thing. And so you can divide Newport into those who leave to sell their old family pictures, those who have to buy their old family pictures, and the lucky few who need neither buy nor sell, who are neither goin’ down nor bobbing up, but who have kept their heads above the American tidal wave from the beginning and continue to do so. And I don’t believe that there are any nicer people in the world than those.”
“Nowhere!” I exclaimed. “When Near York does her best, what’s better?—If only those best set the pace!”
“If only!” he assented. “But it’s the others who get into the papers, who dine the drunken dukes, and make poor chambermaids envious a thousand miles inland!”
“There should be a high tariff on drunken dukes,” I said.
“You’ll never get it!” he declared. “It’s the Republican party whose daughters marry them.”
I rocked with enjoyment where I sat; he was so refreshing. And I agreed with him so well. “You’re every bit as good as Miss Beaufain,” I cried.
“Oh, no; oh, no! But I often think if we could only deport the negroes and Newport together to one of our distant islands, how happily our two chief problems would be solved!”
I still rocked. “Newport would, indeed, enjoy your plan for it. Do go on!” I entreated him But he had, for the moment, ceased; and I rose to stretch my legs and saunter among the old headstones and the wafted fragrance.
His aunt (or his cousin, or whichever of them it had been) was certainly right as to his inheriting a pleasant and pointed gift of speech; and a responsive audience helps us all. Such an audience I certainly was for young John Mayrant, yet beneath the animation that our talk had filled his eyes with lay (I seemed to see or feel) that other mood all the time, the mood which had caused the girl behind the counter to say to me that he was “anxious about something.” The unhappy youth, I was gradually to learn, was much more than that—he was in a tangle of anxieties. He talked to me as a sick man turns in bed from pain; the pain goes on, but the pillow for a while is cool.
Here there broke upon us a little interruption, so diverting, so utterly like the whole quaint tininess of Kings Port, that I should tell it to you, even if it did not bear directly upon the matter which was beginning so actively to concern me—the love difficulties of John Mayrant.
It was the letter-carrier.
We had come, from our secluded seats, round a corner, and so by the vestry door and down the walk beside the church, and as I read to myself the initials upon the stones wherewith the walk was paved, I drew near the half-open gateway upon Worship Street. The postman was descending the steps of the post-office opposite. He saw me through the gate and paused. He knew me, too! My face, easily marked out amid the resident faces he was familiar with, had at once caught his attention; very likely he, too, had by now learned that I was interested in the battle of Cowpens; but I did not ask him this. He crossed over and handed me a letter.
“No use,” he said most politely, “takin’ it away down to Mistress Trevise’s when you’re right here, sir. Northern mail eight hours late to-day,” he added, and bowing, was gone upon his route.
My home letter, from a man, an intimate running mate of mine, soon had my full attention, for on the second page it said:—
“I have just got back from accompanying her to Baltimore. One of us went as far as Washington with her on the train. We gave her a dinner yesterday at the March Hare by way of farewell. She tried our new toboggan fire-escape on a bet. Clean from the attic, my boy. I imagine our native girls will rejoice at her departure. However, nobody’s engaged to her, at least nobody here. How many may fancy themselves so elsewhere I can’t say. Her name is Hortense Rieppe.”
I suppose I must have been silent after finishing this letter.
“No bad news, I trust?” John Mayrant inquired.
I told him no; and presently we had resumed our seats in the quiet charm of the flowers.
I now spoke with an intention. “What a lot you seem to have seen and suffered of the advanced Newport!”
The intention wrought its due and immediate effect. “Yes. There was no choice. I had gone to Newport upon—upon an urgent matter, which took me among those people.”
He dwelt upon the pictures that came up in his mind. But he took me away again from the “urgent matter.”
“I saw,” he resumed more briskly, “fifteen or twenty—most amazing, sir!—young men, some of them not any older than I am, who had so many millions that they could easily—” he paused, casting about for some expression adequate—“could buy Kings Port and put it under a glass case in a museum—my aunts and all—and never know it!” He livened with disrespectful mirth over his own picture of his aunts, purchased by millionaire steel or coal for the purposes of public edification.
“And a very good thing if they could be,” I declared.
He wondered a moment. “My aunts? Under a glass case?”
“Yes,