The Boss of Little Arcady/Chapter 16
The spectre of scandal is raised
A graver charge than frivolity was soon to be brought against the widow of the late Colonel Jere Lansdale. Not with her antiquated gown, her assisting staff, the gay bonnet, nor yet with the showy small slippers and silken hose tinted unseasonably to her years did scandal engage itself; but rather with the circumstance that she drank.
To "drink" meant in Little Arcady to get drunk, as "Big Joe" Kestril did every pay-day. Clarence Stull, polishing a stove in the rear of Pierce's hardware store, was swift to divulge that Mrs. Lansdale had "asked Chet Pierce to have a glass of wine,—and him a-bowin' and a-scrapin' like you'd think he was goin' to fly off the handle!"
It was enough for the town. The unfortunate woman had not yet reeled through its streets, but Little Arcady would give her time, and it knew there could be but one result. That sort of thing might be done in tales of vicious high life to point a moral, but in the real world it could not compatibly exist with good conduct. Even Aunt Delia McCormick, good Methodist as she was, who "put up" a little elderberry wine each year for communion purposes, was thought by more than one to strain near to the breaking point the third branch of that concise behest to "Touch not, taste not, handle not!"
The ladies were at once dismayed about Miss Caroline, from Aunt Delia herself to Marcella Eubanks, who kept conspicuous upon her dressing-table a bedizened motto of the Daughters of Rebecca,—"The lips that touch wine shall never touch mine." It is true that this legend appeared to Marcella to be a bit licentious in its implications as to lips not touched by wine. It had, indeed, first been hung in the parlor; but one Creston Fancett, in the course of an evening call upon Miss Eubanks, had read the thing aloud, twice over, and then observed with a sinister significance that wine had never touched his own lips. Whereupon, in a coarsely conceived spirit of humor, he proceeded to act as if he had forgotten that he was a gentleman.
Hence the card's seclusion in Marcella's boudoir. Hence, likewise, Marcella's subsequent preference, in her temperance propaganda, for straightforward means which no gentleman could affect to misunderstand. She relied chiefly thereafter upon some highly colored charts depicting the interior of the human stomach in varying stages of alcoholic degeneration. According to these, "a single glass of wine or a measure of ale," taken daily for a year, suffices to produce some startling effects in color; while the result of "unrestrained indulgence for five years" is spectacular in the extreme.
Besides these disconcerting color effects Marcella enacted a brief but pithy drama in which she touched a lighted match to a tablespoonful of alcohol, to show the true nature of the stuff and to symbolize the fate of its votaries.
With charts and with blazing spirit, with tracts and with figures to prove that we spend "more for the staff of death than for the staff of life," Marcella was prepared to move upon the unsuspicious Miss Caroline. Nor was she alone in such readiness for a good work. The ladies all felt that their profligate sister should be brought to sign the pledge.
And they called upon Miss Caroline with precisely this end in view—called singly, and by twos and threes. But for some reason they seemed always to find obstacles in the way of bringing forward this most vital topic. If they had only discovered Miss Caroline in her cups, or if her shaded rooms had been littered with empty rum bottles and pervaded by the fumes of strong drink, or if she had audaciously offered them wine, doubtless the thing would have been easy. But none of these helpful phenomena could be observed, and Miss Caroline had a way of leading the talk which would have made any reference to her unfortunate habits seem ungraceful. It would be far too much to say that she charmed them, but all of her callers were interested, many of them were entertained, and a few became her warm defenders. Aunt Delia McCormick surprised every one by aligning herself with this latter minority. She declared, after her first call, that Miss Caroline was "a dear"; and after the second call, that she was "a poor dear," and she forthwith became of service to the newcomer in a thousand ways known only to the masonry of housekeeping.
And since none of the ladies, for one reason or another, had found a way to say those things that Mrs. Lansdale sorely needed to hear, it was agreed among them that the minister must say them.
"The minister" in Little Arcady meant him of the Methodist church, the two other clergymen being so young and unimportant as to need identification by name.
Of the official and inspired visit of this good man to Miss Caroline, the version that reached the public was one thing: its secret and true history was another. The latter has never been told until now. It was known abroad only that the minister had called on a warm afternoon in July; that Miss Caroline had received him out of doors, on the shaded east side of the house, where the heat had driven her to await a cooling breeze from the river. One of the dingy rugs had been spread upon the grass close to the lilac clump, and by an unfashionable little table Miss Caroline sat, in a chair sadly out of date, reading of Childe Harold. It was understood that the minister had there sat in another antiquated chair of capacious arms and upholstered in faded green velvet, a chair brought by Clem; and that he had weakly chatted away a pleasant hour or two without ever once daring to bring Miss Caroline's evil state to that attention which it merited from her. His difficulty seemed to have been similar to that experienced by the calling ladies. He could observe no opening that promised anything but an ungracious plunge or an awkward stumble, and the ladies had been wrong in suspecting that his authority as a cleric would nerve him to either of these things.
There was despair next day when it was known that he had come away even lavisher in praise of Miss Caroline than Aunt Delia had become; that he refused with a gentle but unbreakable stubbornness, a thing he was known to be cursed with latently, ever again to approach the lady with a concealed purpose or with aught in his heart but a warm and flagrant esteem.
So much for the public's knowledge; and doubtless the public in every case knows all that it ought to know. But these are the facts as they came to my privileged ears, and to what, I believe, are gifts of interpretation not below the average.
When Clem brought the chair for the minister, Miss Caroline gave him a brief, low-toned order, which he hurried away to execute. Within ten minutes, and before Miss Caroline had finished telling how altogether beautiful she found Arcady of the Little Country, Clem returned, bearing breast-high a napkin-covered tray, from which towered twin pillars of glass, topped with fragrant leafage and pierced each by a yellow straw. This tray he placed upon the table beside the poems of Lord Byron, and the minister permitted himself an oblique look thereat, even though this involved deserting the eyes of his agreeable hostess. The ice in the glasses tinkled a brief phrase of music, the tops burgeoned with a luxuriant summer green, and the straws were of a sweetly pastoral suggestiveness. The fragrance moved one to the heart of some spice-scented dell where a brooklet purled down a pebbled course. The ensemble was indeed overwhelming in its message of a refreshment joyous, satisfying, timely, and of a consummate innocence.
"The day is warm," said Miss Caroline, receiving one of the glasses from her servant, and with a bright look at her guest.
"It is intensely warm, and quite unusually so for this time of year," said the minister, absently taking the other glass now proffered him.
"We shall combat it," said Miss Caroline with some vivacity. She delicately applied her lips to the straw, and a slight depression appeared in each of her acceptable cheeks.
"A cooling beverage at this hour is most grateful," said the minister, rejoicing in the icy feel of the glass, and falling hopefully to his own straw.
"Clem makes them perfectly," said Miss Caroline.
"What do you call them?" asked the minister. He had relinquished his straw, and his kind face shone with a pleased surprise.
"Why, mint juleps," replied Miss Caroline, glancing quickly up.
"Ah, mint! that explains it," said the minister with satisfaction, his broad face clearing of a slight bewilderment.
"Clem found a beautiful patch of it by a spring half a mile up the river," volunteered Miss Caroline, between dainty pulls at her straw.
"It is a lovely plant—a lovely plant, indeed!" rejoined the minister, for a moment setting down his glass to wipe his brow. "I remember now detecting the same fragrance when I watered my horse at that spring. But I did not dream that it—I wonder—" he broke off, taking up his glass—"that its virtues are not more widely apprehended. I have never heard that an acceptable beverage might be made from it."
"Not every one can make a mint julep as Clem can," said his hostess.
A moist and futile splutter from the bottom of the minister's glass was his only reply.
He set the glass back on the table with a pleasant speculation showing in his eyes. The talk became again animated. Chiefly the minister talked, and his hostess found him most companionable.
"Let me offer you another julep," she said, after a little, noting that his eyes had swept the empty glass with a chastened blankness. The minister let her.
"If it would not be troubling you—really? The heat is excessive, and I find that the mint, simple herb though it be, is strangely salutary."
The minister was a man of years and weight and worth. He possessed a reliant simplicity that put him at once close to those he met. Of these, by his manner, he asked all: confidence without reserve, troubles, doubts, distresses, material or otherwise. And this manner of his prevailed. The hearts of his people opened to him as freely as his own opened to receive them. He was a good man and, partly by reason of this ingenuous, unsuspicious mind, an invaluable instrument of grace.
When he had talked to Miss Caroline through the second julep,—digressing only to marvel briefly again that the properties of mint should so long have been Nature's own secret in Little Arcady,—telling her his joys, his griefs, his interests, which were but the joys and griefs and interests of his people, he wrought a spell upon her so that she in turn became confiding.
She was an Episcopalian. Her line had been born Episcopalians since a time whereof no data were obtainable; and this was, of course, not a condition to meddle with in late life, even if one's mind should grow consenting. For that matter, Miss Caroline would be frank and pretend to no change of mind. She was an old woman and fixed. She could not at this day free herself of a doubtless incorrect notion that the outside churches—meaning those not Episcopal—had been intended for people other than her own family and its offshoots. Clem had once been a Baptist, and it was true that he was now a Methodist. He had told her that his new religion was distinguished from the old by being "dry religion." But these were intricacies with which a woman of Miss Caroline's years could not be expected to entangle herself. This she would say, however, that during her residence in Little Arcady she would fling aside the prejudice of a lifetime and worship each Sabbath at the minister's Methodist church.
It did not seem to the minister that she said it as might an explorer who consents for a time to adopt the manner and customs of the tribe among which a spirit of adventure has led him. He accepted her implied tribute modestly and with unaffected gratification, again wiping his brow and his broad, good face.
When I joined them at four o'clock, having been moved by hope of a cooling chat with Miss Caroline, the minister was slightly more flushed, I thought, than the day could warrant. He was about to leave, was, in fact, concluding his choicest anecdote of "Big Joe" Kestril—for he was a man who met all our kinds. "Big Joe," six feet, five, a tower of muscled brawn, standing on a corner, pleasantly inebriated, had watched go feebly by the tottering, palsied form of little old Bolivar Kent, our most aged and richest man. The minister, also passing, had observed Kestril's humorous stare.
"The big fellow called to me," he was saying to Miss Caroline as I came up. "'Parson,' said he—they all know me familiarly, madam—'Parson,' said he, 'I wish I could take all I'm worth and all old Kent is worth and put it in a bunch on the sidewalk there and then fight the old cuss for it!'"
It was a favorite anecdote of the minister's, but I had never known him before to tell it to a lady on the occasion of his first call. Miss Caroline laughed joyously as she turned to greet me.
"I can't tell you how finely I've been entertained," she said to me.
"Nor can I tell him for myself, madam," retorted the minister. I thought indeed he spoke with an effort that made this gallantry seem not altogether baseless in fact.
"I was on the point of leaving," said the minister.
"Are you returning home, or have you more calls in the neighborhood?" I asked, feeling just a tinge of uneasiness about his expansive manner.
"No more calls, no. I had planned, instead, a pleasant walk up along the riverside to a spring some distance above. I mean to procure a supply of this delicious mint—for mint juleps," he added affably.
"Come with me," I urged. I was about to walk out myself. Together we bade adieu to Miss Caroline.
But the minister's walk ended at my own door. In the cool gloom of my little library I asked him if he would be good enough to excuse me a moment, indicating the broad couch beneath the window.
"With pleasure, Major!" and he sank among the restful pillows. I am ashamed to say that the heat has rendered me a trifle indolent."
When I came softly back five minutes later, he lay in deep slumber, his face cherubically innocent, his breathing soft as a babe's. He awoke freshly two hours later. He apologized for his rudeness and expressed a wish for a glass of cool water. Three of these he drank with evidences of profound relish. Then he drew his large silver watch from his pocket.
"On my word, Major, it's after six, and I shall be late for tea! I have trespassed shamefully upon you!"
"The heat was very trying," I said.
"Quite enervating, indeed! I seem only now to be feeling its effects."
As he walked briskly down the now cooling street, he bared his brow to the gentle breeze of evening.
To the ladies, solicitous about Miss Caroline, who called upon him a few days later, he said, "She is a most admirable and lovely woman not at all a person one could bring one's self to address on the painful subject of intoxicants. Had she offered me a glass of wine or other stimulant, a way might have been opened, but I am delighted to say that her hospitality went no farther than this innocent beverage." The minister indicated on his study table a glass containing sweetened ice-water in which some leaves of mint had been submerged.
"It is called a mint julep," he added, "though I confess I do not get the same delicate tang from the herb that her black fellow does. As he prepared the decoction I assure you its flavor was capital!"