I laughed, for I’d forgotten about that.
Then S. K. said: “I beg pardon, Nat; I seem to have borrowed your hand. Perhaps you’ll want it to-morrow.” After which he folded my fingers up and laid my hand in my lap. I love his nonsense.
We had a good time, and he told me about Madam Jumel’s marriage. The talk had run in that direction, and that, I suppose, started it. . . . It seemed that she was a great flirt, and I think M. Jumel did not think she would make a good wife, for although he made love to her, S. K. said, he did not ask her to marry him. But on one occasion, when Stephen Jumel returned to his home after a little absence, he found that Eliza Bowen was ill and, the doctor said, dying. He went to her bedside, where the lady besought him to marry her. S. K. didn’t tell me why she wanted to be married so much, but I suppose she wanted “ ‘Mrs.’ on her tombstone,” as we say in Queensburg. Anyway, M. Jumel was so touched that the priest then and there married them, and--the next day Eliza Bowen Jumel arose from her bed, and went driving in high state. She wasn’t really sick at all!
“What do you think of that, Nat?” S. K. asked.
I said I didn’t think it was entirely upright.
“Right, my dear,” said S. K., reaching for a buttered scone, and then he went on to tell me how she had robbed Stephen Jumel, who, during his absence abroad, had given her power to administer his affairs. And how, when he came back, he found himself a poor old man and a dependent. I said it was sad, and I hated Madam Jumel’s being buried by one of the most beautiful drives in all America, and having a splendid monument (we had seen it before we had tea), while her husband’s grave is in one corner of a little churchyard, neglected and worn, and so hurt by time that only “Stephen” is left to remind one of a name that once was famous. Heavy trucks lumber by that spot, and very poor people hurry past, while their children, half clothed and hungry, scream over their games, which must be played on the kerb.
“S. K.,” I said, “I wish it might have been different.”
“He bought that plot,” S. K. answered, “when he married Eliza Bowen. You would not understand, but she had done things that made good people distrust her. You know, hard as it may seem, Nat, you usually give yourself the dose that makes the pain.”
I knew that, and said so.
Then I asked why people, such great people, should have come to visit a woman who was not all that she should have been.