“How well you’re feeling to-day, Maria!” said the other lady, with a gentle smile.
“Certainly. I have been talking for twenty minutes.” I was now presented to Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael, also old, also charming, in widow’s dress no less in the bloom of age than Mrs. Gregory, but whiter and very diminutive. She shyly welcomed me to Kings Port. “Take him home with you, Julia. We pulled your bell three times, and it’s too damp for you to be out. Don’t forget,” Mrs. Gregory said to me, “that you haven’t told me a word about your Aunt Carola, and that I shall expect you to come and do it.” She went slowly away from us, up the East Place, tall, graceful, sweeping into the distance like a ship. No haste about her dignified movement, no swinging of elbows, nothing of the present hour!
“What a beautiful girl she must have been!” I murmured aloud, unconsciously.
“No, she was not a beauty in her youth,” said my new guide in her shy voice, “but always fluent, always a wit. Kings Port has at times thought her tongue too downright. We think that wit runs in her family, for young John Mayrant has it; and her first-cousin-once-removed put the Earl of Mainridge in his place at her father’s ball in 1840. Miss Beaufain (as she was then) asked the Earl how he liked America; and he replied, very well, except for the people, who were so vulgar. ‘What can you expect?’ said Miss Beaufain; ‘we’re descended from the English.’ I am very sorry for Maria—for Mrs. St. Michael—just at present. Her young cousin, John Mayrant, is making an alliance deeply vexatious to her. Do you happen to know Miss Hortense Rieppe?”
I had never heard of her.
“No? She has been North lately. I thought you might have met her. Her father takes her North, I believe, whenever any one will invite them. They have sometimes managed to make it extend through an unbroken year. Newport, I am credibly informed, greatly admires her. We in Kings Port have never (except John Mayrant, apparently) seen anything in her beauty, which Northerners find so exceptional.”
“What is her type?” I inquired.
“I consider that she looks like a steel wasp. And she has the assurance to call herself a Kings Port girl. Her father calls himself a general, and it is repeated that he ran away at the battle of Chattanooga. I hope you will come to see me another day, when you can spare time from the battle of Cowpens. I am Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael, the other lady is Mrs. Gregory St. Michael. I wonder if you will keep us all straight?” And smiling, the little lady, whose shy manner and voice I had found to veil as much spirit as her predecessor’s, dismissed me and went up her steps, letting herself into her own house.
The boy in question, the boy of the cake, John Mayrant, was coming out of the gate at which I next rang. The appearance of his boyish figure and well-carried head struck me anew, as it had at first; from his whole person one got at once a strangely romantic impression. He looked at me, made as if he would speak, but passed on. Probably he had been hearing as much about me as I had been hearing about him. At this house the black servant had not gone home for the night, and if the mistress had been out to take a look at the steam yacht, she had returned.
“My sister,” she said, presenting me to a supremely fine-looking old lady, more chiselled, more august, than even herself. I did not catch this lady’s name, and she confined herself to a distant, though perhaps not unfriendly, greeting. She was sitting by a work-table, and she resumed some embroidery of exquisite appearance, while my hostess talked to me.
Both wore their hair in a simple fashion to suit their years, which must have been seventy or more; both were dressed with the dignity that such years call for; and I may mention here that so were all the ladies above a certain age in this town of admirable old-fashioned propriety. In New York, in Boston, in Philadelphia, ladies of seventy won’t be old ladies any more; they’re unwilling to wear their years avowedly, in quiet dignity by their firesides; they bare their bosoms and gallop egregiously to the ball-rooms of the young; and so we lose a particular graciousness that Kings Port retains, a perspective of generations. We happen all at once, with no background, in a swirl of haste and similarity.
One of the many things which came home to me during the conversation that now began (so many more things came home than I can tell you!) was that Mrs. Gregory St. Michael’s tongue was assuredly “downright” for Kings Port. This I had not at all taken in while she talked to me, and her friend’s reference to it had left me somewhat at a loss. That better precision and choice of words which I have mentioned, and the manner in which she announced her opinions, had put me in mind of several fine ladles whom I had known in other parts of the world; but hers was an individual manner, I was soon to find, and by no means the Kings Port convention. This convention permitted, indeed, condemnations of one’s neighbor no less sweeping, but it conveyed them in a phraseology far more restrained.
“I cannot regret your coming to Kings Port,” said my hostess, after we had talked for a little while, and I had complimented the balmy March weather and the wealth of blooming flowers; “but I fear that Fanning is not a name that you will find here. It belongs to North Carolina.”
I smiled and explained that North Carolina Fannings were useless to me. “And, if I may be so bold, how well you are acquainted with my errand!”
I cannot say that my hostess smiled, that would be too definite; but I can say that she did not permit herself to smile, and that she let me see this repression. “Yes,” she said, “we are acquainted with your errand, though not with its motive.”
I sat silent, thinking of the Exchange.
My hostess now gave me her own account of why all things were known to all people in this town. “The distances in your Northern cities are greater, and their population is much greater. There are but few of us in Kings Port.” In these last words she plainly told me that those “few” desired no others. She next added: “My nephew, John Mayrant, has spoken of you at some length.”
I bowed. “I had the pleasure to see and hear him order a wedding cake.”
“Yes. From Eliza La Heu (pronounced Layhew), my niece; he is my nephew, she is my niece on the other side. My niece is a beginner at the Exchange. We hope that she will fulfil her duties there in a worthy manner. She comes from a family which is schooled to meet responsibilities.”
I bowed again; again it seemed fitting. “I had not, until now, known the charming girl’s name,” I murmured.
My hostess now bowed slightly. “I am glad that you find her charming.”
“Indeed, yes!” I exclaimed.
“We, also, are pleased with her. She is of good family—for the up-country.”
Once again our alphabet fails me. The peculiar shade of kindness, of recognition, of patronage, which my agreeable hostess (and all Kings Port ladies, I soon noticed) imparted to the word “up-country” cannot be conveyed except by the human voice—and only a Kings Port voice at that. It is a much lighter damnation than what they make of the phrase “from Georgia,” which I was soon to hear uttered by the lips of the lady. “And so you know about his wedding cake?”
“My dear madam, I feel that I shall know about everything.”
Her gray eyes looked at me quietly for a moment. “That is possible. But although we may talk of ourselves to you, we scarcely expect you to talk of ourselves to us.”
Well, my pertness had brought me this quite properly! And I received it properly. “I should never dream—”