Lady Baltimore. Owen Wister

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ of good intentions, was not always a pattern of wisdom. Moreover, how should a spinster bring up a boy fitly?

      Of the Rieppes, father and daughter, I also learned a little more. They did not (most people believed) come from Georgia. Natchez and Mobile seemed to divide the responsibility of giving them to the world. It was quite certain the General had run away from Chattanooga. Nobody disputed this, or offered any other battle as the authentic one. Of late the Rieppes were seldom to be seen in Kings Port. Their house (if it had ever been their own property, which I heard hotly argued both ways) had been sold more than two years ago, and their recent brief sojourns in the town were generally beneath the roof of hospitable friends—people by the name of Cornerly, “whom we do not know,” as I was carefully informed by more than one member of the St. Michael family. The girl had disturbed a number of mothers whose sons were prone to slip out of the strict hereditary fold in directions where beauty or champagne was to be found; and the Cornerlys dined late, and had champagne. Miss Hortense had “splurged it” a good deal here, and the measure of her success with the male youth was the measure of her condemnation by their female elders.

      Such were the facts which I gathered from women and from the few men whom I saw in Kings Port. This town seemed to me almost as empty of men as if the Pied Piper had passed through here and lured them magically away to some distant country. It was on the happy day that saw Miss Eliza La Heu again providing me with sandwiches and chocolate that my knowledge of the wedding and the bride and groom began really to take some steps forward.

      It was not I who, at my sequestered lunch at the Woman’s Exchange, began the conversation the next time. That confection, “Lady Baltimore,” about which I was not to worry myself, had, as they say, “broken the ice” between the girl behind the counter and myself.

      “He has put it off!” This, without any preliminaries, was her direct and stimulating news.

      I never was more grateful for the solitude of the Exchange, where I had, before this, noted and blessed an absence of lunch customers as prevailing as the trade winds; the people I saw there came to talk, not to purchase. Well, I was certainly henceforth coming for both!

      I eagerly plunged in with the obvious question:—

      “Indefinitely?”

      “Oh, no! Only Wednesday week.”

      “But will it keep?”

      My ignorance diverted her. “Lady Baltimore? Why, the idea!” And she laughed at me from the immense distance that the South is from the North.

      “Then he’ll have to pay for two?”

      “Oh, no! I wasn’t going to make it till Tuesday.

      “I didn’t suppose that kind of thing would keep,” I muttered rather vaguely.

      Her young spirits bubbled over. “Which kind of thing? The wedding—or the cake?”

      This produced a moment of laughter on the part of us both; we giggled joyously together amid the silence and wares for sale, the painted cups, the embroidered souvenirs, the new food, and the old family “pieces.”

      So this delightful girl was a verbal skirmisher! Now nothing is more to my liking than the verbal skirmish, and therefore I began one immediately. “I see you quite know,” was the first light shot that I hazarded.

      Her retort to this was merely a very bland and inquiring stare.

      I now aimed a trifle nearer the mark. “About him—her—it! Since you practically live in the Exchange, how can you exactly help yourself?”

      Her laughter came back. “It’s all, you know, so much later than 1812.”

      “Later! Why, a lot of it is to happen yet!”

      She leaned over the counter. “Tell me what you know about it,” she said with caressing insinuation.

      “Oh, well—but probably they mean to have your education progress chronologically.”

      “I think I can pick it up anywhere. We had to at the plantation.”

      It was from my table in the distant dim back of the room, where things stood lumpily under mosquito netting, that I told her my history. She made me go there to my lunch. She seemed to desire that our talk over the counter should not longer continue. And so, back there, over my chocolate and sandwiches, I brought out my gleaned and arranged knowledge which rang out across the distance, comically, like a lecture. She, at her counter, now and then busy with her ledger, received it with the attentive solemnity of a lecture. The ledger might have been notes that she was dutifully and improvingly taking. After I had finished she wrote on for a little while in silence. The curly white dog rose into sight, looked amiably and vaguely about, stretched himself, and sank to sleep again out of sight.

      “That’s all?” she asked abruptly.

      “So far,” I answered.

      “And what do you think of such a young man?” she inquired.

      “I know what I think of such a young woman.”

      She was still pensive. “Yes, yes, but then that is so simple.”

      I had a short laugh. “Oh, if you come to the simplicity!”

      She nodded, seeming to be doing sums with her pencil.

      “Men are always simple—when they’re in love.”

      I assented. “And women—you’ll agree?—are always simple when they’re not!”

      She finished her sums. “Well, I think he’s foolish!” she frankly stated. “Didn’t Aunt Josephine think so, too?”

      “Aunt Josephine?”

      “Miss Josephine St. Michael—my greet-aunt—the lady who embroidered. She brought me here from the plantation.”

      “No, she wouldn’t talk about it. But don’t you think it is your turn now?”

      “I’ve taken my turn!”

      “Oh, not much. To say you think he’s foolish isn’t much. You’ve seen him since?”

      “Seen him? Since when?”

      “Here. Since the postponement. I take it he came himself about it.”

      “Yes, he came. You don’t suppose we discussed the reasons, do you?”

      “My dear young lady, I suppose nothing, except that you certainly must have seen how he looked (he can blush, you know, handsomely), and that you may have some knowledge or some guess—”

      “Some guess why it’s not to be until Wednesday week? Of course he said why. Her poor, dear father, the General, isn’t very well.”

      “That, indeed, must be an anxiety for Johnny,” I remarked.

      This led her to indulge in some more merriment. “But he does,” she then said, “seem anxious about something.”

      “Ah,” СКАЧАТЬ