CHAPTER XV.
“Jack,” said Charley that night at my rooms, “have you any message for the old gentleman? I am off for home to-morrow.”
“Indeed! Why this sudden resolution?”
“Too many people in Richmond for me.”
“It seems to me that you like some of them a good deal. Isn’t she bright?”
“P-p-p-pass me the tobacco.” He filled his pipe very deliberately and walked across the room. “Where do you keep your matches? Ah, here they are. Who,” added he, striking one—“puff—do you—puff, puff—think so—puff, puff, puff—bright? Confound the thing!—puff—puff—it has gone out!” And he struck another. Lighting his pipe, and throwing himself upon a lounge, he looked the picture of content.
“Say, old boy,” said I, “own up. Those hazel eyes—”
“Do you know, Jack-Whack” (whenever he called me that he was in the best possible humor), “that you are making a howling ass of yourself?” And he shot a pillar of smoke straight towards the ceiling, following its eddying curves with contemplative eyes.
“‘Howling ass’ is a mixed metaphor.”
“Yes, but an unmixed truth, my boy. Did it ever occur to you, Jack,” said he, removing the Powhatan pipe, with its reed-root stem, from his lips, “that cigars are essentially vulgar? You never thought of it? But they are. So are dress-coats. You have only to put them into marble to see it. Look at the statue of Henry Clay in the Square. Was ever anything so absurd! Posterity will inevitably regard Henry as an ass.”
“Of the howling variety?”
“Of course. Now, just picture to yourself Phidias’ Jove with a cigar stuck into his mouth.”
Charley shot upwards a circling wreath of smoke, watched it till it dissipated itself, and then turned his head, with a little jerk, towards me: “H’m? How would the Olympian Zeus look with a Parian Partaga between his ambrosial lips?”
“I have seen lips that—”
“Howling and so forth.” And he turned over on his back and commenced pulling away at his pipe.
“I think she likes you.”
Charley pursed up his mouth, and, taking aim, with one eye, at a spot on the ceiling, projected at it a fine-spun thread of smoke. I detected a tremor in his extended lips.
“I may say I know she likes you.”
With an explosive chuckle the pucker instantly dissolved. I had taken him at a disadvantage. His features snapped back into position as suddenly as those of a rubber mask.
“I was thinking,” said he, “how great a solace and bulwark a pipe would have been to Socrates, during his interviews with Xantippe,—and it made me smile.”
“Yes,” said I, carelessly.
“Yes!” said he, rising up on his elbow,—“what do you mean by ‘yes’?”
“I merely meant to agree with you, that a pipe would have been a great solace and bulwark to Socrates during his interviews with Xantippe.”
He fell back on the lounge. “Let’s go to bed,” said he.
“Good!” said I; and I began to remove my coat. “So the Don is to leave the Carters to-morrow and go to his own quarters.”
“Yes,” said he, rising from the lounge. “I like that chap.”
That was a great deal for Charley to say. It was the very first expression of his sentiments towards the Don.
“I am glad you do,” said I; “I thought you did.”
“Yes, he is a man. Do you know what I am going to do? I shall invite him to Elmington. Uncle Tom will like him. He says he is fond of hunting, and this is just the time for that; and he will be strong enough soon. Suppose we go up to-morrow, before I leave town, and invite him jointly. You will be down for the Christmas holidays, you know. By the way, I hope he will accept?”
“I am quite sure of it. He has betrayed an unaccountable interest in Leicester County on every occasion that I have alluded to it, notwithstanding an obvious effort to appear indifferent. He has a way of throwing out innocent, careless little questions about the county and the people that has puzzled me not a little. Who the deuse is he?”
“Roll into that bed! it is too late for conundrums. Here goes for the light!” And he blew it out.
“Jack!” said he, about half an hour afterwards; “Jack, are you asleep?”
“H’m?”
“Are you asleep?”
“H’m? H’m? Confound it, yes!”
“No, you’re not!”
“Well, I was!” And I groaned.
“Jack, I suppose Uncle Tom will have his usual Christmas party of girls and young men at Elmington this Christmas?”
“S’pose so, umgh!”
“I say—”
“Don’t! Don’t! Those are my ribs! Good Lord, man! you don’t know how sleepy I am. What on earth are you talking about?”
“Do you know what girls Uncle Tom is going to have to spend Christmas with us this winter?”
“And you woke me up to ask me such a question as that? Thunder! And you see him to-morrow evening, too! Oh, I understand,” said I, being at last fully awake, and I burst out laughing. “You want me to say something about Alice with the merry-glancing hazel eyes.”
“About whom? Alice? That’s absurd,—perfectly absurd! Why, she thinks me an idiot because I don’t jabber like one of you lawyers. All women do. Unless you gabble, gabble, gabble, you are a fool. They are all alike. A woman is always a woman; a man may be a philosopher.”
“My dear boy, your anxieties are misplaced.”
“Who spoke of anxieties?”
“Don’t you—a philosopher—know that talkative girls prefer taciturn men? I am perfectly certain that Alice thinks your silence admirable,—dotes on it, in fact.”
“Jack-Whack,” said Charley, rising up in bed and—rare sight—though I felt rather than saw or heard it—shaking with laughter, “you are the most immeasurable, the most unspeakable, the most—”
Down came a pillow on my head. Down it came again and again as I attempted to rise. We grappled, and for a few minutes no two school-boys could have had a more boisterous romp.
“Now just look at this bed,” said Charley, out of breath; “see what you have done!” And he fell back exhausted, as well with the struggle as from his unwonted laughter. “We have not had such a tussle since I used to tease you as a boy. Whew! Let’s go to sleep now.”
“She’s a bewitching creature.”
“Idiot!” said Charley, turning his back to me with a laugh, and settling himself for the night.
“Poor fellow! Well, he got me to pronounce her name, at any rate, by his manœuvring.”
“Do you know this is rather coolish? Where on earth are the blankets? Find one, won’t you? and throw it over me.”
“Here they are, on the floor! There! Sleep well, poor boy!
‘Oh don’t you remember sweet Alice, Ben Bolt?
Sweet Alice with h-a-i-r so brown.’”
“You rhyme with the sinners who came to scoff, but remained to pray. You seem to yourself to sing, but appear to me to b-b-b-bray.”
“Good! There is life in the old boy yet!”