Julia Magruder

“ As Margaret took her way homeward from the old negro’s cabin, she was conscious of a more than usual softness in her heart for Uncle Mose and his reminiscences, and all the customs and traditions of which he was the exponent. Even Charley Somers seemed less reprehensible than he had been an hour ago, for the old man’s talk had brought before her mind a system of things of which the inertia and irresponsibleness that jarred upon her so, in the people around her, seemed the logical outgrowth. ”

“ I have magnified my own people persistently, in talking to you, and depreciated yours. You mustn’t take me as a specimen of Southern courtesy. Wait till you see my father. I’m a degenerate daughter.”
“I hope I may see him some time. Knowing you has made me wish to know your people better. If I ask you, some day, to let me come and make their acquaintance, what will you say?”
“Come, and welcome,” said Margaret, heartily; and then, as a consciousness of the warmth of her tone dawned upon her, she added: “We are a hospitable race, you know, and hold it a sacred duty to entertain strangers. ”

“ Gaston!” said Margaret, reflectively.
“I can’t understand the inflection of your voice,” said Alan, rather eagerly; “do I seem that much older than he?”
“I hardly know,” answered Margaret, still in the same thoughtful tone. “Mr. Gaston is such a busy man that he bears the impress of cares and responsibilities, and that makes him seem older; but in his feelings he seems worlds younger than you.” ”

“ Margaret said. “When I hear beautiful music my pleasure in it is not impaired by any feeling of regret that [64] I cannot produce such a thing myself. It no more occurs to me to long for that, than to long to create a beautiful sunset when I see one.”
“The fact that one is attainable, while the other is not, would make a difference, I think.” He paused a moment, and then went on with his pleasant smile: “Do you know this discovery of mine—that of your fastidious appreciation of music—has been the thing that deterred me from inflicting any of my own upon you? ”

“ Margaret Trevennon, for her part, had never had a qualm of this sort in her life, and supposed, moreover, that only vulgar or uncertainly posed people could possibly be subject to them. And yet here were people who were not only not vulgar but more elegant and charming than any men and women she had ever known, who were entitled to, and actually held, an unimpeachable social position, and who yet seemed to find it necessary to struggle hard to maintain it, and were continually possessed by a positive anxiety to appear to be distinguished! ”

“ I can stand a good deal from you, Margaret, but this is a little too much!”
“Of course! His happening to be a Yankee puts him down at once. But I can tell you what it is, Charley, there is one lesson you might profitably learn from him, and that the most important in the world for you. It is, to make something of the powers you have. That poor little man has no possibilities, I suppose, beyond the attainment of a certain degree of skill in making clothing, on the one hand, and learning to play popular airs indifferently on a cracked little fiddle, on the other. ”

“ Decourcy finds Mrs. Vere amusing—most men do, indeed—and your cousin is the sort of man with whom that is paramount. With men of a certain type the woman who can furnish them most amusement will ever have the strongest hold upon them, and to that type I rather think your fascinating cousin belongs. As I said, most men find Mrs. Vere amusing, and as her husband does not look after her at all, the coast is clear for them to come and be amused; and they come.”
“I don’t think Mr. Gaston finds her amusing,” said Margaret. ”

“ Appreciation was one thing, but this was another. It transcended mere appreciation, and seemed, in some way, to be tinctured with the heroic.
“What an æsthete you would have made, Cousin Eugenia, if only the proper influences had been brought to bear!” said Margaret, laughing. “I can fancy you speaking, in awed and hushed accents, of a strange and mysterious color, or a significant and subtle bit of drapery. You consider yourself unemotional, but you have depths which may be stirred. ”

“ He turned to make his way out, as he had come, pausing merely to ask, with resolutely averted eyes:
“Excuse me, but can you tell me where Eugenia is?”
“In her dressing-room, I think,” said Margaret, in a voice that, in spite of her, was husky.
“I want to speak to her,” he said, and, without another word or look, he walked away.
Poor Margaret! Her heart was sore and troubled at the sad words of Charley Somers’ note. In her own state of happiness and hope, they struck her as a thousand times more [293] touching. ”

“ Of course, I should not venture to criticise a decision of yours, but when Eugenia urged you so, the other day, to stay a month longer, do you know, I almost held my breath to hear what you would say? And your positive refusal quite cut me. It’s rather hard on a man, to learn that his education is to be cut short at one fell blow like that; and I am in horrible fear of retrogression.”
“Oh, don’t laugh at me, Mr. Gaston,” said Margaret, rather confusedly. ”

“ I used to feel much as you do, before I went out into the world.”
“I should think a knowledge of the world would make one more fastidious instead of less so,” said Margaret, sturdily.
“I think you are wrong in that. One learns to take things as they come, and loses the notion of having all things exactly to one’s taste.”
“But surely such flagrant impoliteness as Mr. Gaston’s would be condemned anywhere,” said Margaret. “You should have seen his treatment of Major King.”
She then proceeded to give a spirited account of that episode, to her cousin’s manifest interest and amusement. ”

“ I would have been more just to you.”
“There has been no story told,” said Margaret. “If there were any stories to tell, they have been kept from me. Do not let us pursue this topic, Alan, and when we drop it now, let it be forever. It is quite out of the question that we can ever be more to each other than we are now.”
“As you have said it,” he replied, “my only course is a silent acquiescence. ”

“ The truth is, as to Louis,” Cousin Eugenia went on, after a moment’s pause, “that he’s radically cold-blooded. He’s affectionate to his friends and relatives, and really fond of many of them, but he’s absolutely unemotional—not to be roused to deep feeling. But for this fact I fear Mrs. Vere’s efforts would have been long since crowned with success. It is really a valuable trait for a man to have, if it were only for its uniqueness, but occasionally it’s a little bit exasperating. ”

“ Somers, and when he took occasion to mention the latter’s name, in speaking to Mrs. Gaston after dinner, he was scarcely surprised when she informed him that she had heard, through Margaret, that Mr. Somers had already left for South America, to be gone indefinitely.
“He goes to seek his fortune,” said Mrs. Gaston; “therefore I say his return is indefinite.”
“And if he finds it,” said Louis Gaston to himself, “and the girl he loves consents to share it with him, a man might well envy him. And if she consents not, what will the fortune avail him? It may be that she has already consented! ”

“ If Major King should come to call, however, she could feel confident that he would not betray the presence of this vindictive feeling, for, despite her disapproval of his tone and manner in general, she felt that she could count upon his possessing a spirit of courtesy, a hidden germ of which she had rarely found wanting in a Southern man’s breast.
Margaret mentioned, at breakfast next morning, the fact of her having met Major King, and inquired of her friends if they knew him. The two gentlemen were silent, and Mrs. Gaston replied by a simple negative. ”

“ CHAPTER IV. “EUGENIA,” said Louis Gaston, tapping at his sister-in-law’s door one morning, “I stopped to say that I will get tickets for Miss Trevennon and yourself for the opera Monday evening, if you say so.”
“I don’t say so, my dear Louis, I assure you,” returned Mrs. Gaston opening her door and appearing before him in a tasteful morning toilet. “If you take Margaret and me to the opera, it must be for your own pleasure; she is not the kind of guest to hang heavily on her hostess’ hands. ”

“ Somers’ voice,” said Margaret. “It is really a grand organ, but he scarcely knows how to sing anything with entire correctness, unless it is something in which he has been carefully drilled by some one who knows a little more than himself. I wish he could hear you sing.”
“I wish I could hear him,” said Louis. “If he has the voice, the cultivation can be acquired readily enough; but with me the utmost has been done. Much of this music is rather beyond me. ”

“ When the evening was growing old, and the flowers began to droop and the music to flag; when the girls began to look the worse for too much dancing, and the men, in many cases, the worse for too much wine, Miss Trevennon, finding herself a little weary, yielded to the suggestion of her companion for the moment, who happened to be Lord Waring, and allowed herself [202] to be led to a cool, dim recess in the conservatory, where she sank into a seat to wait, while Lord Waring went for a glass of water for her. ”

“ Gaston, while we are on this subject, I wonder how you can ignore one point, the agony that you caused me!”
“That I caused you, Miss Trevennon? It is hard, indeed, to lay at my door the discomfiture you endured last evening.”
“I think it was the most wretched evening I ever passed,” said Margaret, “and it was only your conduct that made it so.”
“My conduct? Now you are unjust!”
[135] “Not at all,” said Margaret. “I am not so wholly uninured to the necessity of sometimes hearing annoyances, as to be made miserable by having to talk for several hours with a man I do not like. ”

“ But the South, my sweet cousin, has never been a Utopia, any more than other lands. Wheat and tares must grow together everywhere.”
“I am glad you call them my beloved people,” said Margaret, after a little silence. “At home they do not think me very patriotic.”
“Whom do you mean by ‘they’?”
“I was thinking of Charley Somers——”
“Oh, by-the-way, I meant to ask about that pretty young fellow,” said Decourcy. “I used to make him very angry by telling him he ought to induce Bassett to take a newspaper, and suggesting that the name of the town should be changed to Cosmopolis. ”

“ This was the first time she had seen a decided indication of the feeling in Louis Gaston, and somehow [74] it hurt her more in him than in the others. Unconsciously she gave a little sigh.
“Dear me!” she thought to herself, “what an unpleasant idea! Why need people assume anything, when they actually have it all? It never occurred to me that really nice people could give themselves any concern of this sort.”
And then, as she turned and suddenly met Louis’ eyes, her face broke into a smile of sudden amusement. ”

“ Gaston’s being conceited, I really think he’s less so than you are, Charley, though he knows much more. As to his being a Yankee—well, yes, he is a Yankee, as we should say, and he’s a very capable and accomplished one. And as to the third point, of his being a dandy, you know very well he is simply a remarkably well-dressed man, whose appearance in your heart you admire, in spite of your tall talking. But what’s the use of all this? It isn’t dress, nor nationality, nor deportment even, that makes the man. ”

“ Gaston, carelessly, “I think something can be made of her.”
“And you are to have the pleasure of conducting the process of development, and Edward and I that of looking on at it—is that it? Where is she, by-the-way? Is there any danger of one’s meeting her on the stairs, and having to account for one’s self? A civilized man, encountered unexpectedly, might unsteady the nerves of the Importation—might he not?” ”

“ Margaret was perfectly aware of this, and secretly much amused at it. That Cousin Eugenia, or any one, should commiserate her upon her lot in life was something very strange to her, for she had always known herself to be a very happy and fortunate girl.
“The Kellers give such stupid parties!” said Cousin Eugenia one evening, as she and Margaret were returning from a large entertainment. “I haven’t missed one of them for the past five years, and they are asphyxiating affairs. I’m glad this one is well over.”
“Why do you go to them, then?”
“Oh, every one does. At least every one who can. ”

“ I have led a free, unrestricted life, and am accustomed to contact with those who come and go. No man has a finer feeling as to what is fitting for the ladies of his family than my father, but though I should live to reach old age, I shall never see him pay so great a price for my immunity from doubtful association as an act of rudeness to any one whomsoever.”
“I’ll tell you what it is, Miss Trevennon,” said Gaston, speaking rather warmly, “if you lived in Washington, you would see things differently. ”

“ It takes you away from everything else. Do you mean to work in this way always? Have you no other visions of the future?”
“Oh, I have had visions!” he said, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his sack-coat, and bracing himself against the end of the mantel, while he looked at her steadily as he spoke. “I have had visions—plenty of them! They mostly took the form of very simple, quiet dreams of life; for I have already told you, Miss Trevennon, by what a very demon of domesticity I am haunted. ”

“ Shortly before leaving, an acquaintance of General Reardon’s came up, to whom Margaret was presented. He was a Major King, a Southern man, as Margaret somehow divined at a glance, and a resident of Washington, as it soon appeared. Before the party separated, he inquired where Miss Trevennon was staying, and asked her permission to call upon her. Margaret yielded the permission, of course, but with a strange feeling of reluctance; she saw that, though a familiar type of Southern man, he was not a favorable one. ”

“ Have some. I’m sure he ought to be good to me,” she said, critically peering into the box from which Margaret had just helped herself, and selecting a plump chocolate drop; “I certainly spoil him sufficiently. Still, there isn’t very much one can do for a man like that. He has such frugal habits, it’s quite baffling. But tell me what you think of him, after a second encounter.”
“Why, nothing more than I thought before, except that he has a beautiful hand.”
“Margaret, you are never disappointing,” said Cousin Eugenia, warmly. ”

“ There is a fineness of grain in him that one meets with but rarely anywhere. With him the feeling is that every man must be regarded and treated as a gentleman, until he has proved himself not to be one. It is a better way. But I think, after all, Margaret, that absolute good-breeding is a thing we must look for in individuals, and not in classes. ”

“ She had been too long accustomed to the arrogant assumption that a Southern man had better take the wrong way in any issue than learn the right way from a Yankee, not to rejoice in the prospect of presenting to her friends a young Southerner who was really enlightened, and who, if he loved his own land best, did so because he had compared it with others, and not because he was ignorant of everything beyond it. ”

“ But she did not see it, and was therefore unprepared for the hard, cold tone in which his next words were uttered.
“I have felt and acknowledged my fault, where your cousin was concerned,” he said. “Mr. Decourcy is a gentleman, and nothing but the fact of my being preoccupied with the resentment I felt at certain words of yours at the time, would have caused me to act toward him as I did. This explains, but does not justify my conduct, which I have acknowledged to be unjustifiable. But in the other case, Miss Trevennon, I must maintain that I acted rightly.” ”

“ The fact was becoming more and more evident to her, that the nomadic life this elegant young gentleman had led had held him back from strong purposes, however much it had advanced him in social accomplishments and graces.
“If a man has done nothing, from choice, up to thirty,” she said to herself, reflectively, “the chances are that, if the power of choice remains, he will continue to do nothing.”
“I am so glad you are pleased with Baltimore, Margaret,” said her cousin, interrupting her reverie. ”