The Belle of Bowling Green
“That is charming,” cried St. Ange. Then he was in a hurry to leave, but
Mrs. Bloommaert insisted that he should stay and drink a glass of hot
negus ere he went into the cold air. While the negro boy was bringing in
a tray full of Christmas dainties, and Sappha spicing the Portugal wine,
they finished the dressing of the room; and then sat down round the fire
to refresh themselves.
And very soon St. Ange began to talk of certain Christmas feasts he had
spent in Europe--in Madrid, at the Christmas turkey fair, amid glorious
sunshine, the flower girls selling camillas and violets; everywhere
colour, beauty, music, barbarism, and dirt. At Rome in the antique fish
market, always brilliantly lighted with large torches on Christmas Eve.
“For I assure you,” he said, “the sumptuous fish supper of that night is
beyond anything that can be conceived of here.”--at Naples, where
Christmas is kept with confectionery, and the Toledo is a feast of sugar
and sweets.
“Are then the Neapolitans so fond of confectionery?” asked Annette.
“They must be very children,” she added.
“They are children among sweets,” he answered. “A Neapolitan noble told
me that the king was ever fearing revolution; ‘but,’ he added, ‘if he
will only present every Neapolitan with a box of sweets a revolution
will be impossible.’”
“I do not think a box of sweets to every American would have prevented
our Revolution,” said Sappha.
Every one laughed heartily at the idea, and then she pictured Washington
and Putnam, and her grandfather Bloommaert’s reception of these peace
offerings. And the scene was so funnily enacted that no one could help
laughing heartily at it. Yet in the very climax of the hilarious chorus
Sappha had a heavy heart; her mirth was only from the lips outward.
However, it seemed only too real to Leonard, who entered suddenly while
the peal of laughter was at its height. And he was so totally unexpected
that the moment’s sudden silence which followed was the most natural
consequence; especially as it ended in a rush of inquiries and
exclamations.
“So glad to see you!”
“Come and sit down, and have a glass of hot negus.”
“What good fortune sent you?”
“Is there any strange news?” And then Mrs. Bloommaert’s rather stiff
question: “Is anything wrong, Leonard?”
Leonard turned to her at once. “No, indeed,” he answered. “I met the
judge at the City Hall and he asked me to bring you this letter. I think
he expects to be detained. He was just going on to an important
committee. If there is any answer, I will carry it, if you wish me to do
so.”
And as Mrs. Bloommaert read the letter Sappha brought him some spiced
wine, but he would not take it. He said “he was going back to complete
some decorations, whose position required a very clear head and steady
foot.” But he knew in his heart that it was no fear of danger made him
refuse the proffered cup of good-will. It was jealousy that whispered to
him: “The cup was not mingled for you. There was no thought of you in
it. Others were expected and prepared for, and you were not even told.”
Under the influence of such thoughts he was constrained and quite unlike
himself, and an effectual destroyer of happiness. An uncomfortable
silence, broken by bungling attempts to restore the natural mirth he had
disturbed, were not happy efforts. He made himself an intruder, and then
blamed every one else for the position he had taken voluntarily, through
his own misconception. Sappha was painfully aware of the constraint,
and she wished for once that Annette would open her generally ready
stream of badinage. But Annette was busy advising, in a somewhat private
detail, St. Ange concerning his part of the game of _Yule Klap_; and St.
Ange, having received her instructions while Leonard was waiting, rose
when Leonard did, and proposed to walk part of the way with him.
“You will call this evening, will you not?” asked Sappha timidly, as
they stood by a little table full of mysterious packages.
“It will be impossible,” he answered. “Every part of the decorations are
in my charge, and I have a great deal to attend to.”
“To-morrow is Christmas Eve. You will be here for the _Yule Klap_?”
“If I am wanted!”
“Oh, Leonard! If you are wanted! If you are not present I shall not care
for anything, or any one else.”
“Then I will come, dearest.” This conversation had been held, almost in
whispers, as Sappha was supposed to be showing Leonard some of the _Yule
Klap_ offerings she was preparing. Then the young men went away
together, but the ocean between them could not really have set them more
apart. St. Ange made several attempts to open a conversation on _Yule
Klap_. He wanted Leonard’s advice about the gifts most suitable; but
Leonard professed both ignorance and indifference concerning a game so
childish; and at Vaarick Street St. Ange, having failed completely to
evoke anything like friendly intercourse, bid him good-morning. He was
worried over his friend’s evident displeasure; and over his own failure
to either account for or dispel it. He went westward to Greenwich
Street, and having made many purchases in the most fashionable stores,
rather wearily returned to his rooms at the City Hotel. He was depressed
and had a premonition of trouble.
After this little cloud the Christmas festivities went on with unalloyed
pleasure. Madame and Annette were to stay at the Bowling Green house
until Saturday, and when the judge saw his mother’s delight in her
anticipated visit to the theatre on Christmas night he had no heart to
say one opposing word. But Sappha was not now so eager. She felt sure
that in Leonard’s present temper he would not like her to be the guest
of St. Ange, and she resolved to forego the pleasure. “I shall have a
little headache in the morning, and it will grow worse towards night,
and I shall beg to be left at home that I may sleep it away. I do not
think it will be wrong,” she mused. “There is not room in the box St.
Ange has taken but for six; and if there was room, I am sure Leonard
would not accept the invitation to join us. Well, then, it is better to
make an excuse than to make trouble. Why did not Leonard rent a box? He
might have thought of it just as well as St. Ange. I wish I knew what it
is best, what it is right, to do.”
To such troubled thoughts she fell asleep, and when she awoke in the
morning the weather had settled the matter for her. It was bitterly
cold, and a furious snowstorm was blocking up the pathways and making a
visit to the theatre beyond a safe or pleasant probability. Madame sadly
admitted the condition, but the day went happily forward; and about two
o’clock Leonard and St. Ange and Peter arrived, and the judge opened the
Christmas room, and then there was two hours of pure mirth--of surprise
without end; of beautiful gifts whose donors were to speculate about;
half-guesses sent into conscious faces; questions asked with beaming
eyes; all the delightful uncertainties which love could make, and love
alone unravel. The Christmas dinner followed, and after it a dance,
which madame, with Peter for her partner, opened. Every one joined in
it, and the merriest of evenings was thus inaugurated. So nobody
regretted the theatre, not even madame, for she had been privately
informed by St. Ange that the box was reserved for the great naval
performance on the seventh of January; and that it would be one far more
worth seeing, one never to be forgotten. And madame kept this bit of
anticipatory pleasure as a little secret, and was as gay as a child over
it.
Leonard also was in his most charming mood, and Sappha was divinely
happy; her beauty was enchanting, and her manner so mild and sweet that
she diffused on all hands a sense of exquisite peace and felicity. For
Leonard had whispered to her such words of contrition and devotion as
erased totally and forever the memory of his unworthy temper and
suspicions. And after that confession there could be only sorrow for his
fault, and delight in pardoning and forgetting it.
All throughout the following week he preserved this sunny mood. He was
undoubtedly very busy, for the naval dinner was to be given on the
twenty-ninth of December, and he was the director of the committee of
young men who were turning the great dining room of the City Hotel into
a marine palace. It was his taste which colonnaded it with the masts of
ships wreathed with laurel and all the national flags of the
world--except that of Great Britain. It was Leonard who devised the
greensward, in the midst of which was a real lake, and floating on it a
miniature United States war frigate.
It was Leonard, also, who hung behind the dais on which Mayor Clinton,
Decatur, Hall, and the officers of the navy were to sit, the mainsail of
a ship thirty-three feet by sixteen, on which the American eagle was
painted, holding in his beak a scroll bearing these significant words:
“Our children are the property of our country.” There were many other
transparencies to attend to; besides which, every table was to bear a
miniature warship with American colours displayed. And to the five
hundred gentlemen of New York, who sat down to the dinner served in that
room, these were no childish symbols. They were the palpable, visible
signs of a patriotism that meant freedom or death, and nothing less.
In the midst of all the business connected with such preparations, in a
time when the things wanted were not always procurable, and had to be
supplied by the things that could be obtained, Leonard--whose heart was
hot in his work of patriotism--was naturally very busy and very much
occupied with the work on hand. Yet he found time sufficient to see
Sappha often enough to convince her he had not fallen away from the
promise he had made her--“to harbour no unworthy suspicions of any one
who loved him.”
At length New Year’s Eve arrived. More than three hundred of New York’s
loveliest women had been for weeks preparing for it, and all were eager
for the pleasure it promised them.
The Bloommaert party, consisting of the judge, Mrs. Bloommaert, Sappha,
and Annette, were early arrivals; and Leonard, who was one of the
directors, met them at the door. And he looked so noble, and so
handsome, and his manner was so fine and gracious, that even Judge
Bloommaert was impressed by his personality, and returned his greeting
with unusual warmth. But then, as Leonard reflected, any man who failed
in politeness, or even in cordiality, in the presence of three such
lovely women as Sappha, Annette, and Mrs. Bloommaert, would surely be
something less than human.
Mrs. Bloommaert’s beauty was yet in its ripe perfection. She was as the
full blown rose that has not yet dropped a single leaf. She wore a gown
of white satin covered with a netting of gold thread; and there was a
string of pearls round her throat, and a large comb in form the braids
and bows of her glossy black hair. She carried in her hand a little fan
of exquisite workmanship, and used it with a grace that no woman in the
room, old or young, could imitate.
Sappha’s gown was of white satin of so rich a quality that any trimming
on it would have been vulgar and superfluous. Her sandals also were of
white satin; and in her beautiful, brown hair there was one white rose;
and round her slender throat the necklace of pearls which had come to
her among the gifts of the _Yule Klap_. Annette was dressed in a slip of
pale blue satin, covered with white gauze of the most transparent
quality; a very mist of white over a little cloud of pale blue. Her
sandals were blue, and she wore a necklace of turquoise stones cut in
the shape of stars and united by a tiny ornament of frosted silver. Her
hair hung free, and was loosely curled and confined by a simple band of
blue ribbon.