“Really I couldn’t tell you,” replied Dunlevy calmly, “Sandy makes it for me. He used to brew it or mix it or distill it, whichever you please, for my father before me. Didn’t you, Sandy?”
“Yess, maarstar,” said Sandy, “that ah did! Right h’eh in this ole bowl, too, that Gin’rl La Fayette give to ole maarstar’s maarstar.”
“Sandy,” interrupted Dunlevy, “I wish you would go down and tell the janitor that I wish to see him tonight.”
It occurred to me, not only from this remark, but from the fact that I noticed a large writing book open on the centre table, that I had interrupted Dunlevy in his work, whatever it might be, and that it was high time for me to depart. The book was an odd looking volume as large as an office ledger, only very thin, and bound in sheepskin like a law book. Dunlevy had evidently been writing in it or was just about to do so, for a wet pen lay in the crotch between its pages.
“Pray don’t hurry,” he said conventionally, as I took my hat.
“I came up merely to give you the book on Ethics,” I answered, “and I would not have stopped at all, had you not asked me to join you in that beverage, and had I not felt that I needed some stimulant on this howling first of March. Good-night.—I say, would you mind giving me the receipt for your sangaree some day?”
“Aha!” he smiled, “that’s a secret which I have never been able to worm out of Sandy.”
And so Dunlevy and I separated practically at the point where we had met. Sandy escorted me to the door, and as he closed it upon me, I thought of both him and his master as two of the last representatives of an epoch, an epoch of landed proprietors, of loyal passionate blood, full of warmth and of color and of stately grace, into which a modern American may never hope to enter. I, for one, gave up the attempt. With generations of slaveholders behind him, it was not hard for Dunlevy to become a Sybarite. I would I were mistaken, but it struck me that the only live color of his college days were these nights of revery, nights such as when Omar awakened. From his appearance that night, I feared that in this respect he lived without constraint according to his inclinations. Here surely was one man who had determined to let the world go by.
As I walked down Holyoke Street that night to my room, I tried to phrase the attractive impression that Dunlevy had made upon me; and from thinking of him many times since then, I have finally found words which describe his elusive nature, a nature leading me by eluding me. The words were said of Grimm in his day: