There was a pause. "It would be a new dilemma," Mrs. Gregory then said slowly, "if she turned out to care for him, after all."
Throughout all this I was getting more and more the sense of how a total circle of people, a well-filled, wide circle of interested people, surrounded and cherished John Mayrant, made itself the setting of which he was the jewel; I felt in it, even stronger than the manifestation of personal affection (which certainly was strong enough), a collective sense of possession in him, a clan value, a pride and a guardianship concentrated and jealous, as of an heir to some princely estate, who must be worthy for the sake of a community even before he was worthy for his own sake. Thus he might amuse himself — it was in the code that princely heirs so should pour se deniaiser, as they neatly put it in Paris — thus might he and must he fight when his dignity was assailed; but thus might he not marry outside certain lines prescribed, or depart from his circle's established creeds, divine and social, especially to hold any position which (to borrow Mrs. Gregory's phrase) "reflected ignominy" upon them all. When he transgressed, their very value for him turned them bitter against him. I know that all of us are more or less chained to our community, which is pleased to expect us to walk its way, and mightily displeased when we please ourselves instead by breaking the chain and walking our own way; and I know that we are forgiven very slowly; but I had not dreamed what a prisoner to communal criticism a young American could be until I beheld Kings Port over John Mayrant.
And to what estate was this prince heir? Alas, his inheritance was all of it the Past and none of it the Future; was the full churchyard and the empty wharves! He was paying dear for his princedom! And then, there was yet another sense of this beautiful town that I got here completely, suddenly crystallized, though slowly gathering ever since my arrivaclass="underline" all these old people were clustered about one young one. That was it; that was the town's ultimate tragic note: the old timber of the forest dying and the too sparse new growth appearing scantily amid the tall, fine, venerable, decaying trunks. It had been by no razing to the ground and sowing with salt that the city had perished; a process less violent but more sad had done away with it. Youth, in the wake of commerce, had ebbed from Kings Port, had flowed out from the silent, mourning houses, and sought life North and West, and wherever else life was to be found. Into my revery floated a phrase from a melodious and once favorite song: O tempo passato perche non ritorni?
And John Mayrant? Why, then, had he tarried here himself? That is a hard saying about crabbed age and youth, but are not most of the sayings hard that are true? What was this young man doing in Kings Port with his brains, and his pride, and his energetic adolescence? If the Custom House galled him, the whole country was open to him; why not have tried his fortune out and away, over the hills, where the new cities lie, all full of future and empty of past? Was it much to the credit of such a young man to find himself at the age of twenty-three or twenty-four, sound and lithe of limb, yet tied to the apron strings of Miss Josephine, and Miss Eliza, and some thirty or forty other elderly female relatives?
With these thoughts I looked at the ladies and wondered how I might lead them to answer me about John Mayrant, without asking questions which might imply something derogatory to him or painful to them. I could not ever say to them a word which might mean, however indirectly, that I thought their beautiful, cherished town no place for a young man to go to seed in; this cut so close to the quick of truth that discourse must keep wide away from it. What, then, could I ask them? As I pondered, Mrs. Weguelin solved it for me by what she was saying to Mrs. Gregory, of which, in my preoccupation, I had evidently missed a part —
"— if he should share the family bad taste in wives."
"Eliza says she has no fear of that."
"Were I Eliza, Hugh's performance would make me very uneasy."
"Julia, John does not resemble Hugh."
"Very decidedly, in coloring, Maria."
"And Hugh found that girl in Minneapolis, Julia, where there was doubtless no pick for the poor fellow. And remember that George chose a lady, at any rate."
Mrs. Weguelin gave to this a short assent. "Yes." It portended something more behind, which her next words duly revealed. "A lady; but do — any — ladies ever seem quite like our own?
"Certainly not, Julia."
You see, they were forgetting me again; but they had furnished me with a clue.
"Mr. John Mayrant has married brothers?"
"Two," Mrs. Gregory responded. "John is the youngest of three children."
"I hadn't heard of the brothers before."
"They seldom come here. They saw fit to leave their home and their delicate mother."
"Oh!"
"But John," said Mrs. Gregory, "met his responsibility like a Mayrant."
"Whatever temptations he has yielded to," said Mrs. Weguelin, "his filial piety has stood proof."
"He refused," added Mrs. Gregory, "when George (and I have never understood how George could be so forgetful of their mother) wrote twice, offering him a lucrative and rising position in the railroad company at Roanoke."
"That was hard!" I exclaimed.
She totally misapplied my sympathy. "Oh, Anna Mayrant," she corrected herself, "John's mother, Mrs. Hector Mayrant, had harder things than forgetful sons to bear! I've not laid eyes on those boys since the funeral."
"Nearly two years," murmured Mrs. Weguelin. And then, to me, with something that was almost like a strange severity beneath her gentle tone: "Therefore we are proud of John, because the better traits in his nature remind us of his forefathers, whom we knew."
"In Kings Port," said Mrs. Gregory, "we prize those who ring true to the blood."
By way of response to this sentiment, I quoted some French to her. "Bon chien chasse de race."
It pleased Mrs. Weguelin. Her guarded attitude toward me relented. "John mentioned your cultivation to us," she said. "In these tumble-down days it is rare to meet with one who still lives, mentally, on the gentlefolks' plane — the piano nobile of intelligence!"
I realized how high a compliment she was paying me, and I repaid it with a joke. "Take care. Those who don't live there would call it the piano snobile."
"Ah!" cried the delighted lady, "they'd never have the wit!"
"Did you ever hear," I continued, "the Bostonian's remark—'The mission of America is to vulgarize the world'?"
"I never expected to agree so totally with a Bostonian!" declared Mrs. Gregory.
"Nothing so hopeful," I pursued, "has ever been said of us. For refinement and thoroughness and tradition delay progress, and we are sweeping them out of the road as fast as we can."
"Come away, Julia," said Mrs. Gregory. "The young gentleman is getting flippant again, and we leave him."
The ladies, after gracious expressions concerning the pleasure of their stroll, descended the steps at the north end of High Walk, where the parapet stops, and turned inland from the water through a little street. I watched them until they went out of my sight round a corner; but the two silent, leisurely figures, moving in their black and their veils along an empty highway, come back to me often in the pictures of my thoughts; come back most often, indeed, as the human part of what my memory sees when it turns to look at Kings Port. For, first, it sees the blue frame of quiet sunny water, and the white town within its frame beneath the clear, untainted air; and then it sees the high-slanted roofs, red with their old corrugated tiles, and the tops of leafy enclosures dipping below sight among quaint and huddled quadrangles; and, next, the quiet houses standing in their separate grounds, their narrow ends to the street and their long, two-storied galleries open to the south, but their hushed windows closed as if against the prying, restless Present that must not look in and disturb the motionless memories which sit brooding behind these shutters; and between all these silent mansions lie the narrow streets, the quiet, empty streets, along which, as my memory watches them, pass the two ladies silently, in their black and their veils, moving between high, mellow-colored garden walls over whose tops look the oleanders, the climbing roses, and all the taller flowers of the gardens.