Part 58

“I might have known better,” murmured the understanding Beverly.

But Charley now had his question. “How many, did you say?”

“How many?” Mrs. Weguelin did not quite understand him.

“Were killed?” explained Charley.

Again there was a little pause before Mrs. Weguelin answered, “My four brothers met their deaths.”

Charley was interested. “And what was the percentage of fatality in their regiments?”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Weguelin, “we did not think of it in that way.” And she turned aside.

“Charley,” said Kitty, with some precipitancy, “do make Mr. Bohm look at the church!” and she turned after Mrs. Weguelin. “It is such a gem!”

But I saw the little lady try to speak and fail, and then I noticed that she was leaning against a window-sill.

Beverly Rodgers also noticed this, and he hastened to her.

“Thank you,” she returned to his hasty question, “I am quite well. If you are not tired of it, shall we go on?”

“It is such a gem!” repeated Kitty, throwing an angry glance at Charley and Bohm. And so we went on.

Yes, Kitty did her best to cover it up; Kitty, as she would undoubtedly have said herself, could see a few things. But nobody could cover it up, though Beverly was now vigilant in his efforts to do so. Indeed, Replacers cannot be covered up by human agency; they bulge, they loom, they stare, they dominate the road of life, even as their automobiles drive horses and pedestrians to the wall. Bohm, roused from his financial torpor by Kitty’s sharp command, did actually turn his eyes upon the church, which he had now been inside for some twenty minutes without noticing. Instinct and long training had given his eye, when it really looked at anything, a particular glance--the glance of the Replacer--which plainly calculated: “Can this be made worth money to me?” and which died instantly to a glaze of indifference on seeing that no money could be made. Bohm’s eye, accordingly, waked and then glazed. Manners, courtesy, he did not need, not yet; he had looked at them with his Replacer glance, and, seeing no money in them, had gone on looking at railroads, and mines, and mills,--and bare shoulders, and bottles. Should manners and courtesy come, some day, to mean money to him, then he could have them, in his fashion, so that his admirers and his apologists should alike declare of him, “A rough diamond, but consider what he has made of himself!”

“After what, did you say?” This was the voice of Gazza, addressing Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael. It must be said of Gazza that he, too, made a certain presence of interest in the traditions of Kings Port.

“After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes,” replied Mrs. Weguelin.

“Built it in Savannah,” Charley was saying to Bohm, “or Norfolk. This is a good place to bury people in, but not money. Now the phosphate proposition--”

Again I dragged my attention by force away from that quiet, relentless monologue, and listened as well as I could to Mrs. Weguelin. There had come to be among us all, I think--Beverly, Kitty, Gazza, and myself--a joint impulse to shield her, to cluster about her, to follow her steps from each little lecture that she finished to the new point where the next lecture began; and we did it, performed our pilgrimage to the end; but there was less and less nature in our performance. I knew (and it was like a dream which I could not stop) that we pressed a little too close, that our questions were a little too eager, that we overprinted our faces with attention; knowing this did not help, nothing helped, and we went on to the end, seeing ourselves doing it; and it must have been that Mrs. Weguelin saw us likewise. But she was truly admirable in giving no sign, she came out well ahead; the lectures were not hurried, one had no sense of points being skipped to accommodate our unworthiness, it required a previous familiarity with the church to know (as I did) that there was, indeed, more and more skipping; yet the little lady played her part so evenly and with never a falter of voice nor a change in the gentle courtesy of her manner, that I do not think--save for that moment at the window-sill--I could have been sure what she thought, or how much she noticed. Her face was always so pale, it may well have been all imagination with me that she seemed, when we emerged at last into the light of the street, paler than usual; but I am almost certain that her hand was trembling as she stood receiving the thanks of the party. These thanks were cut a little short by the arrival of one of the automobiles, and, at the same time, the appearance of Hortense strolling toward us with John Mayrant.

Charley had resumed to Bohm, “A tax of twenty-five cents on the ton is nothing with deposits of this richness,” when his voice ceased; and looking at him to see the cause, I perceived that his eye was on John, and that his polished finger-nail was running meditatively along his thin mustache.

Hortense took the matter--whatever the matter was--in hand.

“You haven’t much time,” she said to Charles, who consulted his watch.

“Who’s coming to see me off?” he inquired.

“Where’s he going?” I asked Beverly.

“She’s sending him North,” Beverly answered, and then he spoke with his very best simple manner to Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael. “May I not walk home with you after all your kindness?”

She was going to say no, for she had had enough of this party; but she looked at Beverly, and his face and his true solicitude won her; she said, “Thank you, if you will.” And the two departed together down the shabby street, the little veiled lady in black, and Beverly with his excellent London clothes and his still more excellent look of respectful, sheltering attention.

And now Bohm pronounced the only utterance that I heard fall from his lips during his stay in Kings Port. He looked at the church he had come from, he looked at the neighboring larger church whose columns stood out at the angle of the street; he looked at the graveyard opposite that, then at the stale, dusty shop of old furniture, and then up the shabby street, where no life or movement was to be seen, except the distant forms of Beverly and Mrs. Weguelin St. Michael. Then from a gold cigar-case, curved to fit his breast pocket, he took a cigar and lighted it from a gold match-box. Offering none of us a cigar, he placed the case again in his pocket; and holding his lighted cigar a moment with two fingers in his strong glove, he spoke:--

“This town’s worse than Sunday.”

Then he got into the automobile. They all followed to see Charley off, and he addressed me.

“I shall be glad,” he said, “if you will make one of a little party on the yacht next Sunday, when I come back. And you also,” he added to John.