The horrible little tug,or ferry,or wherry,or whatever its contemptible inconvenience makes it fitting that this unclean and snail-like craft should be styled,cast off and began to lumber along the edges of the town with its dense cargo of hats and parasols and lunch parcels.We were a most extraordinary litter of man and womankind.There was the severe New England type,improving each shining hour,and doing it in bleak costume and with a thoroughly northeast expression;there were pink sunbonnets from (I should imagine)Spartanburg,or Charlotte,or Greenville;there were masculine boots which yet bore incrusted upon their heels the red mud of Aiken or of Camden;there was one fat,jewelled exhalation who spoke of Palm Beach with the true stockyard twang,and looked as if she swallowed a million every morning for breakfast,and God knows how many more for the ensuing repasts;she was the only detestable specimen among us;sunbonnets,boots,and even ungenial New England proved on acquaintance kindly,simple,enterprising Americans;yet who knows if sunbonnets and boots and all of us wouldn't have become just as detestable had we but been as she was,swollen and puffy with the acute indigestion of sudden wealth?
This reflection made me charitable,which I always like to be,and Iimparted it to the bride.
"My!"she said.And I really don't know what that meant.
But presently I understood well why people endured the discomfort of this journey.I forgot the cinders which now and then showered upon us,and the heat of the sun,and the crowded chairs;I forgot the boat and myself,in looking at the passing shores.Our course took us round Kings Port on three sides.The calm,white town spread out its width and length beneath a blue sky softer than the tenderest dream;the white steeples shone through the enveloping brightness,taking to each other,and to the distant roofs beneath them,successive and changing relations,while the dwindling mass of streets and edifices followed more slowly the veering of the steeples,folded upon itself,and refolded,opened into new shapes and closed again,dwindling always,and always white and beautiful;and as the far-off vision of it held the eye,the few masts along the wharves grew thin and went out into invisibility,the spires became as masts,the distant drawbridge through which we had passed sank down into a mere stretching line,and shining Kings Port was dissolved in the blue of water and of air.
The curving and the narrowing of the river took it at last from view;and after it disappeared the spindling chimneys and their smoke,which were along the bank above the town and bridge,leaving us to progress through the solitude of marsh and wood and shore.The green levels of stiff salt grass closed in upon the breadth of water,and we wound among them,looking across their silence to the deeper silence of the woods that bordered them,the brooding woods,the pines and the liveoaks,misty with the motionless hanging moss,and misty also in that Southern air that deepened when it came among their trunks to a caressing,mysterious,purple veil.Every line of this landscape,the straight forest top,the feathery breaks in it of taller trees,the curving marsh,every line and every hue and every sound inscrutably spoke sadness.I heard a mocking-bird once in some blossoming wild fruit tree that we gradually reached and left gradually behind;and more than once I saw other blossoms,and the yellow of the trailing jessamine;but the bird could not sing the silence away,and spring with all her abundance could not hide this spiritual autumn.
Dreams,a land of dreams,where even the high noon itself was dreamy;a melting together of earth and air and water in one eternal gentleness of revery!Whence came the melancholy of this?I had seen woods as solitary and streams as silent,I had felt nature breathing upon me a greater awe;but never before such penetrating and quiet sadness.I only know that this is the perpetual mood of those Southern shores,those rivers that wind in from the ocean among their narrowing marshes and their hushed forests,and that it does not come from any memory of human hopes and disasters,but from the elements themselves.
So did we move onward,passing in due time another bridge and a few dwellings and some excavations,until the river grew quite narrow,and there ahead was the landing at Live Oaks,with negroes idly watching for us,and a launch beside the bank,and Charley and Hortense Rieppe about to step into it.Another man stood up in the launch and talked to them where they were on the landing platform,and pointed down the river as we approached;but evidently he did not point at us.I looked hastily to see what he was indicating to them,but I could see nothing save the solitary river winding away between the empty woods and marshes.
So this was Hortense Rieppe!It was not wonderful that she had caused young John to lose his heart,or,at any rate,his head and his senses;nor was it wonderful that Charley,with his little bulging eyes,should take her in his launch whenever she would go;the wonderful thing was that John,at his age and with his nature,should have got over it--if he had got over it!I felt it tingling in me;any man would.Steel wasp indeed!
She was slender,and oh,how well dressed!She watched the passengers get off the boat,and I could not tell you from that first sight of her what her face was like,but only her hair,the sunburnt amber of its masses making one think of Tokay or Chateau-Yquem.She was watching me,I felt,and then saw;and as soon as I was near she spoke to me without moving,keeping one gloved hand lightly posed upon the railing of the platform,so that her long arm was bent with perfect ease and grace.I swear that none but a female eye could have detected any toboggan fire-escape.
