CHAPTER XLV.
I greatly fear that when I stated, somewhere in the course of the foregoing narrative, that I had firmly resolved to exclude love-making from its pages,—I greatly fear that none of my readers gave me credit for sincerity. Yet it was not a stroke of Bushwhackerish humor; I was in sober earnest, and was never more convinced than at this moment of the folly of breaking my original resolution. Here I am with three pairs of lovers on my hands,—all sighing like very furnaces—I, who am quite incapable of managing one couple. I suppose I have only myself to blame. I assembled a number of young Virginians in a country house. I should have known better. Yet, when I brought them together, it was an understood thing (on my part, at least) that there was to be no nonsense.
The truth is, I think I have a just right to complain of my characters. I had a little story to tell,—the simplest in the world—the merest monograph,—and I introduced the main body of my personages as a setting, merely; just as a jeweller surrounds a choice stone with small pearls to bring its color into fuller relief.
And here they are, upsetting everything.
Look at Billy, for instance. I could not have gotten on at all without him. In the first place, no Christmas party at Elmington could have been complete without him and his jovial laugh. It would have been against all nature not to have invited him, and equally against Billy’s nature to have stayed away. But as ill luck would have it, his girl, though of a different county, must needs be of the party; but I, knowing nothing of this, caused him to gallop up to the Hall, that cold Christmas Eve, simply that he might enliven the company with his “Arkansas Traveller” and the rest of his not very classic repertoire, and still more by his memorable dive under the table. Now I like my Billy; but his loves are not to our purpose. And so—for I cannot have the course of my story marred any longer by his antics—I have shipped him off to the University. Imagine him bursting into No. 28, East Lawn, and shaking his room-mate’s hand to the verge of dislocation. Five or six cronies have crowded in to welcome the truant back (writhing, each in turn, under the grasp of his obtrusively honest hand).
“No, Tom, you need not take that old gourd out of the box. My fiddling days are over.”
“What!” exclaimed an indignant chorus.
“Come back solemn?” asked Tom. “Bad luck?”
Billy colored a little. “Solemn? Not I. But oh, boys, I have such a story to tell you! You like to hear me scrape,—wh-e-e-w!”
“What is it?”
Jones threw back his head and gave a roar as though Niagara laughed. While he is telling the story of his discomfiture we will take our leave of him; for as soon as the chorus have departed, he will begin to tell his friend Tom about his girl, and we have no time to listen to any more of that. But he is such a good fellow that I think we may forgive him the delay his loves have cost us.
It is somewhat harder to pardon Charley’s falling in love so inopportunely; but even as to him my heart relents when I remember that it was his first offence, and how penitent, how sheepish, even, were his looks, whenever I alluded to his fall. Let him go on casting out of the corners of his eyes timid, admiring glances at the inimitable Alice; drinking in deep, intoxicating draughts of her merry, laughter-spangled talk; happy in her presence; in her absence fiercely wondering why, in this otherwise wisely-ordered world (as we Virginians have been taught to believe it), he alone was a stammering idiot. Let all this go on, and more; but as with Jones, so with Charley, their loves must equally be brushed from the path of this story.
The case of lover No. 3 presents greater difficulties. When I recall certain passages of the preceding narrative, I am forced to acknowledge that, in the case of the Don, I have unwittingly entered into an implied obligation to my readers. Unwittingly, for I solemnly assure them that when (for instance) I described the gallant rescue of Alice and Lucy by the stalwart stranger, it did not so much as cross my mind what tacit promise I thereby held out. Had I been a novel-writer or even a novel-reader, instead of the philosopher and bushwhacker that I am, it could not have escaped me that by suffering two of my heroines to be valiantly rescued from deadly peril by a handsome, nay, a mysterious and hence painfully interesting young man, I had, in effect, signed a bond to bring about a marriage between the rescuer and one of the rescued, or both; the more charming of the two being reserved for the end of the book, the less to be thrown in earlier as a sort of matrimonial sop to Cerberus,—an hymeneal luncheon, as it were. Yes, I allowed one of my heroes to rescue two of my heroines, while a third gazed trembling upon the scene from her latticed window. Nay, worse; for whether drawn on insensibly by the current of events, or hurried thereto by the entreaties of my friend and collaborator, Alice, who, woman-like, declared that she would have nothing to do with my book unless I put some love in it,—whether inveigled, therefore, or cajoled, it is a fact that I have made allusion here and there, in the course of these pages, to such sighings and oglings and bosom-heavings and heart-flutterings, accompanied by such meaning starts and deep ineffable glances, that I am willing to admit what Alice claims: that it would be almost an actual breach of faith not to tell people what it all meant.
“If you are going to write a novel, Jack” (I have been plain Jack since she married Charley), “why don’t you write one and be done with it?”
“How many times must I tell you that I am not writing a novel, but a philosophico-bushwhackerian monograph on the theme—”
“Bushwhackerian fiddlestick!” cried Alice, impatiently, but unable to suppress a smile at the rolling thunder of my title. “You may write your monograph, as you call it, but who would read it?”
It was during this discussion that Alice agreed to edit the love-passages that illumine these pages. But what love-passages? After much debate we effected a compromise. If she would engage to spare the reader all save a mere allusion to the heart-pangs of the jovial Jones, she should have full liberty to revel through whole chapters in the loves of the Don. “As for your little affair with Charley,” I added, “I agree to dress that up myself.”
“Indeed, indeed, Jack, if you were to put Mr. Frobisher and myself in your book—and—and—make him—”
“Make him—” (Here I smiled.)
“You know, you villain!”
“Stammer forth praises of your loveliness?”
“You dare!”
And so we are reduced to a single pair of lovers: the Don and—