Kennedy Square

by Francis Hopkinson Smith

But it was the colonel who took possession of her when she reached the floor of the great hall, and not her father nor her lover.

“No, Harry—stand aside, sir. Out with you! Kate goes in with me! Seymour, please give your arm to Mrs. Rutter.” And with the manner of a courtier leading a princess into the presence of her sovereign, the Lord of Moorlands swept our Lady of Kennedy Square into the brilliant drawing-room crowded with guests.

It was a great ball and it was a great ballroom—in spaciousness, color, and appointments. No one had ever dreamed of its possibilities before, although everybody knew it was the largest in the county. The gentle hostess, with old Alec as head of the pulling-out-and-moving-off department, had wrought the change. All the chairs, tables, sofas, and screens, little and big, had either been spirited away or pushed back against the wall for tired dancers. Over the wide floor was stretched a linen crash; from the ceiling and bracketed against the white walls, relieved here and there by long silken curtains of gold-yellow, blazed clusters of candles, looking for all the world like so many bursting sky-rockets, while at one end, behind a mass of flowering plants, sat a quartette of musicians, led by an old darky with a cotton-batting head, who had come all the way from Philadelphia a-purpose.

Nor had the inner man been forgotten: bowls of hot apple toddy steamed away in the dining-room; bowls of eggnog frothed away in the library; ladlings of punch, and the contents of several old cut-glass decanters, flanked by companies of pipe-stem glasses, were being served in the dressing-rooms; while relays of hot terrapin, canvas-back duck, sizzling hot; olio, cold joints; together with every conceivable treatment and condition of oysters—in scallop shells, on silver platters and in wooden plates—raw, roasted, fried, broiled, baked, and stewed—everything in fact that could carry out the colonel's watchword, “Eat, drink, and be merry,” were within the beck and call of each and every guest.

And there were to be no interludes of hunger and thirst if the host could help it. No dull pauses nor recesses, but one continued round, lasting until midnight, at which hour the final banquet in the dining-room was to be served, and the great surprise of the evening reached—the formal announcement of Harry and Kate's engagement, followed by the opening of the celebrated bottle of the Jefferson 1800 Monticello Madeira, recorked at our young hero's birth.

And it goes without saying that there were no interludes. The fun began at once, a long line of merry talk and laughter following the wake of the procession, led by the host and Kate, the colonel signalling at last to the cotton-batting with the goggle spectacles, who at once struck up a polka and away they all went, Harry and Kate in the lead, the whole room in a whirl.

This over and the dancers out of breath, Goggles announced a quadrille—the colonel and St. George helping to form the sets. Then followed the schottische, then another polka until everybody was tired out, and then with one accord the young couples rushed from the hot room, hazy with the dust of lint from the linen crash, and stampeded for the cool wide stairs that led from the great hall. For while in summer the shadows on some vine-covered porch swallowed the lovers, in winter the stairs were generally the trysting-place—and the top step the one most sought—because there was nobody behind to see. This was the roost for which Kate and Harry scampered, and there they intended to sit until the music struck up again.

“Oh, Kate, you precious darling, how lovely you look!” burst out Harry for the hundredth time when she had nestled down beside him—“and what a wonderful gown! I never saw that one before, did I?”

“No—you never have,” she panted, her breath gone from her dance and the dash for the staircase. “It's my dear mother's dress, and her scarf too. I had very little done to it—only the skirt made wider. Isn't it soft and rich? Grandpa used to bring these satins from China.”

“And the pearls—are they the ones you told me about?” He was adjusting them to her throat as he spoke—somehow he could not keep his hands from her.