Aladdin & Co.: A Romance of Yankee Magic
right in a day or two, or I'll be eternally wrong. I'm going to make one
final cast of the die. I may go down to bottomless perdition, or I may
be caught up to the battlements of heaven; but such a mass of doubts and
miseries as I've been lately, I'll no longer be! Pray for me, Barslow,
pray for me!"
This despairing condition of Giddings's was a sort of continuing
sensation with us at that time. We discussed it quite freely in all its
aspects, humorous and tragic. It was so unexpected a development in the
young man's character, and, with all due respect to the discretion and
resisting powers of Miss Addison, so entirely gratuitous and factitious.
"He has ability as a writer," said the Captain; "but in such a mattah
anybody but a fool ought to see that the thing to do is to chahge the
intrenchments. I trust that I may not be misunde'stood when I say that,
in my opinion, a good rattling chahge would not be a fo'lo'n hope!"
"It bothers," said Jim; "and if it weren't for that, I'd feel
conscience-stricken at doing anything to rob the idiot of a most
delicious grief."
The coolness of early autumn was in the air the night of Jim's
house-warming. To describe his dwelling, in these days when fortunes are
spent on the details of a stairway, and a king's ransom for the
tapestries of a salon, all of which luxuries are spread before the eyes
of the public in the columns of Sunday papers and magazines, would be to
court an anticlimax. But this was before the multimillionaire had made
the need for an augmentative of the word "luxury"; and Jim's house was
noteworthy for its beauty: its cunningly wrought iron and wood; and
columned halls and stairways; and wide-throated fireplaces, each a
picture in tile, wood, and metalwork; and vistas like little fairylands
through silken portieres; and carven chairs and couches, reminiscent of
royal palaces; and chambers where lovely color-schemes were worked out
in rug, and bed, and canopy. There were decorations made by men whose
names were known in London and Paris. From out-of-the-way places Mr.
Elkins had brought collections of queer and interesting and pretty
things which, all his life, he had been accumulating; and in his library
were broad areas of well-worn book-backs. Somehow, people looked upon
the Mr. Elkins who was master of all these as a more important man than
the Elkins who had blown into the town on some chance breeze of
speculation, and taken rooms at the Centropolis.
It was all light and color, that night. Even the formal flower-beds of
the grounds and the fountain spouting on the lawn were like scenery in
the lime-light. Only, back in the shrubbery there were darker nooks in
summer-houses and arbors for those who loved darkness rather than light,
because their deeds, to the common mind, were likely to seem foolish. I
remember thinking that if Mr. Giddings really wanted a chance to take
the high dive of which he had spoken to me, the opportunity was before
him.
His Laura was there, her devotee-like expression striving with an
exceedingly low-cut dress to sound the distinguishing note of her
personality. Giddings was at the punch-bowl as on their arrival she
swept past with the General. When he saw the nun-like glance over the
swelling bosom, the poor stricken cynic blushed, turned pale, and
wheeled to flee. But Cecil, as if following orders, arrested him and
began plying him with the punch--from which Giddings seemed to draw
courage: for I saw him, soon, gravitate to her whom he loved and so
mysteriously dreaded.
"It's a pe'fect jewel-case of a house!" said the Captain, as he moved
with the trooping company through the mansion.
"Indeed, indeed it is," said Mrs. Tolliver to Alice; "the jewel, whoever
it may be, is to be envied."
"I hope," said Jim to Josie, "that you agree with Mrs. Tolliver?"
"Oh, yes," said Josie, "but you attach far too much importance to my
judgment. If it is any comfort to you, however, I want to
praise--everything--unreservedly."
"I won't know, for a while," said Jim, "whether it is to be my house
only, or home in the full sense of the word."
"One doesn't know about that, I fancy," said Cecil; "for a long time--"
"I mean to know soon," said Jim.
Josie was looking intently at the carving on one of the chairs, and paid
no heed, though the remark seemed to be addressed to her.
"What I mean, you know," said Cecil, "is that, no matter how well the
house may be built and furnished, it's the associations, the history of
the place, the things that are in the air, that makes 'Ome!"
There was in the manner of his capitalizing the word as he uttered it,
and in the unwonted elision of the H, that tribute to his dear island
which the exiled Briton (even when soothed by the consolation offered by
street-car systems to superintend, and rose-pink blondes to serve),
always pays when he speaks of Home.
"Associations," said Jim, "may be historical or prophetic. In the former
case, we have to take them on trust; but as to those of the future, we
are sure of them."
"Yahs," said Cecil, using the locution which he always adopted when
something subtle was said to him, "I dare say! I dare say!"
"Well, then," Jim went on, "I have this matter of the atmosphere or
associations under my own control."
"Just so," said Cecil. "Clever conceit, Miss Trescott, isn't it, now?"
But Miss Trescott had apparently heard nothing of Jim's speech, and
begged pardon; and wouldn't they go and show her the bronzes in the
library?
"This mansion, General," said the Captain, "takes one back, suh, to the
halcyon days of American history. I refeh, suh, to those times when the
plantahs of the black prairie belt of Alabama lived like princes, in the
heart of an enchanted empire!"
"A very interesting period, Captain," said the General. "It is a pity
that the industrial basis was one which could not endure!"
"In the midst of fo'ests, suh," went on the Captain, "we had ouah
mansions, not inferio' to this--each a little kingdom with its complete
wo'ld of amusements, its cote, and its happy populace, goin' singin' to
the wo'k which supported the estate!"
"Yes," said the General, "I thought, when we were striking down that
state of things, that we were doing a great thing for that populace. But
I now see that I was only helping the black into a new slavery, the
fruits of which we see here, around us, to-night."
"I hahdly get youah meaning, suh--"
"Well," said the General, looking about at the little audience. (It was
in the smoking-room, and those present were smokers only.) "Well, now,
take my case. I have some pretty valuable grounds down there where I
live. When I got them, they were worthless. I could build as good a
mansion as this or any of your ante-bellum Alabama houses for what I can
get out of that little tract. What is that value? Merely the expression
in terms of money of the power of excluding the rest of mankind from
that little piece of ground. I make people give me the fruits of their
labor, myself doing nothing. That's what builds this house and all these
great houses, and breeds the luxury we are beginning to see around us;
and the consciousness that this slavery exists, and is increasing, and
bids fair to grow greatly, is what is making men crazy over these little
spots of ground out here in the West! It is this slavery--"
"Suh," exclaimed the Captain, rising and grasping the General's hand,
"you have done me the favo' of making me wisah! I nevah saw so cleahly
the divine decree which has fo'eo'dained us to this opulence. Nothing so
satisfactory, suh, as a basis and reason foh investment, has been
advanced in my hearing since I have been in the real-estate business!
Let us wo'k this out a little mo' in detail, if you please, suh--"
"Let us escape while there is yet time!" said Cornish; and we fled.
After supper there was a cotillion. The spacious ballroom, with its roof
so high that the lights up there were as stars, was a sight which could
scarcely be reconciled with the village community which he had found and
changed. The palms, and flowers, and lights which decorated the room;
the orchestra's river of dance-music; the men, all in the black livery
which--on the surface--marks the final conquest of civilization over
barbarism; the beautiful gowns, the sparkling jewels, and the white
shoulders and arms of the ladies--all these made me wonder if I had not
been transported to some Mayfair or Newport, so pictorial, so
decorative, so charged with art, it seemed to be. The young people,
carrying on their courtships in these unfamiliar halls, their
disappearances into the more remote and tenebrous outskirts of the
assembly--all seemed to me to be taking place on the stage, or in some
romance.
I told Alice about this as we walked home--it was only across the
street--to our own new house.
"Don't tell any one about this feeling of yours," said she. "It betrays
your provincialism, my dear. You should feel, for the first time in your
life, perfectly at home. 'Armor, rusting on his walls, On the blood of
Clifford calls,' you know."
"Mine didn't hear the call," said I; "I'm probably the first of my race
to wear this--But I enjoyed it."
"Well, I am too full of something that took place to discuss the
matter," said she, as we sat down at home. "I am perplexed. You know
about Mr. Cornish and Josie, don't you?"
She startled me, for I had never told her a word.
"Know about them!" I cried, a little dramatically. "What do you mean?
No, I don't!"
"Why, what's the matter, Albert?" she queried. "I haven't charged them
with midnight assassination, or anything like that! Only, it seems that
he has been making love to her, for some time, in his cool and
self-contained way. I've known it, and she's been perfectly conscious,
that I knew; but never said anything to me of it, and seemed unwilling
even to approach the subject. But to-night Cecil and I found her out in
the canopied seat by the fountain, and I knew something was the matter,
and sent Cecil away. Something told me that Mr. Cornish was concerned
in it, and I asked her at once where he went.
"'He is gone!' said she. 'I don't know where he is, and I don't care! I
wish I might never see him any more!'
"You may imagine my surprise. When a young woman uses such language
about a man, it is a certainty that she isn't voicing her true feelings,
or that it isn't a normal love affair. So I wormed out of her that he
had made her an offer."
"'Well,' said I, 'if, as I infer from your conversation, you have
refused him, there's an end of the matter; and you need not worry about
seeing him any more.'
"'But,' said she, 'Alice, I haven't refused him!'
"That took me aback a little," went on Alice, "for I had other plans for
her; so I said: 'You haven't accepted the fellow, have you?'
"'Oh, no, no!' said she, in a sort of quivery way, 'but what right have
you to speak of him in that way?' And that is all I could get out of
her. She was so unreasonable and disconnected in her talk, and the
others came out, and I tell you what, Albert Barslow, that man Cornish
will do evil yet, among us! I have always thought so!"
"I don't see any ground for any such prediction," said I, "in anything
you have told me. Her inability to make up her mind--"
"Means that there's something wrong," said my wife dogmatically. "It
means that he has some sinister influence over her, as he has over
almost everybody, with those coal-black eyes of his and his satanic
ways. And worse than all else, it means that he'll finally get her, in
spite of herself!"
"Pshaw!" said I.
"Go away, Albert!" said she, "or we shall quarrel. Go back and find my
fan--I left it on the mantel in the library. The house is lighted yet;
and I was going to send you back anyhow. Kiss me, and go, please."