"That old Gwynne feller's crazy, ain't he?" the old woman said to him as the doctor sat at the Pallinder dinner-table that evening. There were a number of other guests, for the colonel's hospitalities were already well known; it was a pleasing picture of evening-coats, white shoulders, brilliant glassware, and cutlery; and Mrs. Pallinder at the head, lent the table a distinction like that of some expensive ornament or flower. Across the way sat her mother, shovelling in French peas on the blade of her knife, that being one of the phases of her eccentricity, and disposing of everything from soup to sweets with an audible gusto. "It's astonishing!" said the doctor to himself, his glance travelling from one woman to the other. "Pardon me, Mrs. Botlisch, you were saying——?"
"I say that old Gwynne feller's crazy," said Mrs. Botlisch. "He ain't dangerous, is he?"
"What? Steven?" said the doctor, and although she was very nearly right, he recoiled inwardly. "Why, no, he's not crazy, he's a little—a little eccentric," he finished, conscious of a wretched irony in the phrase.
"Pooh, pshaw, don't you tell me, Doc., he's as crazy as a bedbug," said Mrs. Botlisch coolly. "It's a pity about that young Peters' folks being that way, so many of 'em, ain't it?"
CHAPTER SEVEN
It will be seen that, by the close of their period, Doctor Vardaman had grown to be pretty familiar in the Pallinder household. Mazie professed a prodigious admiration for him. "He does say the cutest things!" she remarked enthusiastically. But Mazie's attitude toward the other sex was never anything but that of complete appreciation. I have seen her turn her eyes on the coloured butler when commanding a fresh relay of waffles with an expression to draw from him rubies, let alone waffles! Her liking for the doctor was perhaps as sincere a sentiment as she could harbour; who could forbear a fondness for that genial, tolerant, grey-headed satirist? In him were to be found all the strangely dissonant yet most manly qualities of his generation. In the early eighties there was still extant a tribe of hearty old gentlemen who wore black silk stocks, swore freely, and knew Henry Clay. You may see their strong humorous faces, shirt-frills, and waving forelocks upon scores of cracked canvases in how many Middle-Western homes! Grandfather rode circuit with Swayne and Tom Ewing; he sat in Congress with that Southern statesman of whom it was said that when he took snuff all South Carolina sneezed. Perhaps he remembered Chapultepec and the heights of Monterey; it is likely that he surveyed the first turnpike, designed the first Courthouse, performed the first mastoid operation in the State, in the country. In all things I think he played a man's part, and maybe something more, without any heroics; I knew many of him, and it cannot be denied that he would sometimes get a sheet in the wind's eye, and tell robustly indecorous stories after the second glass of whisky-punch sitting around the hearth of a winter's evening. There was that one about the English visitor at Niagara, who, being conducted around the place by the guide, out to the little tower on Table Rock, and down on the Maid of the Mist like everyone else, wrote his name in the guests' book, and a conundrum: "Why am I like Desdemona? Because——" But, at this point, by an ingenious manœuvre, someone invariably called me from the room! And, strange to say, I was not suffered to return; Desdemona was in the nature of a prelude, I suspect. We have changed all that; who so plain-spoken as the lady-novelist of to-day, whom everybody reads, and, what is more, discusses? Who so wise as our young people? Nobody would be at the pains to banish them from the room. They would not laugh at or with grandpa; they would only wonder a little and pity him. They are all gone, all these humane old lads with their whisky-punches, their dreadful old fly-blown anecdotes, their extraordinary, innocent coarseness of mind. The type has vanished from among us, extinct like the dinosaur, dead as Desdemona! It is hard to figure them pacing beneath the cloudy porticos of that rather shoddy gilt Heaven in which they stoutly believed; but do they then wander the empty house of Dis, the idle, idle land? That were a doom at once unkind and unjust; rather let me fancy them beside the cheerful hearth in some comfortable limbo of good companionship and honest material pleasures; and if that too be a heresy and interdict, may the sod rest light where they sleep!
Doctor Vardaman differed signally from his contemporaries in being not at all disposed to punch and pruriency. He would have reddened like a winter apple at Desdemona; and I am bound to say that here Colonel Pallinder met him on equal ground. It would be worth a moralist's while to inspect that stout piece of goods which is men's modesty beside the curiously flimsy fabric we call the modesty of women. "It's funny about men," Kitty Oldham confided to me once. "They can be as bad as they want to, and so, when they're good they seem an awful lot better than we are!" That may be the root of the matter; Kitty was undeniably astute and observant in various small and eminently feminine ways. "Nobody's all good anyhow," was another of her sayings, "nor all bad either. I know by myself!" Colonel Pallinder was an example, too, had we been aware of it. I have heard since from many indignant sufferers that he was a swindling adventurer; yet Bayard himself could not have walked more circumspectly in certain paths. He believed with all his heart that his wife and daughter were beautiful and gifted above the ordinary lot of mortals; I think they never had a wish ungratified. That hand of his which they tell me was so ruthlessly busy about other peoples' pockets, was forever emptying his own for the satisfaction of his womenkind; the trait does not make any the better man of him, but I am sure there have been worse. His behaviour toward Mrs. Botlisch was a lesson in forbearance and good manners. He did more than endure her; he showed her precisely the same chivalric deference as the rest of us. Perhaps he was a little florid in the Southern style, and as became a military man, but I think he was never ridiculous. It happened one day that an ill-advised or maybe merely ill-bred young man having blurted out some joke, high-flavoured, derogatory to Mrs. Botlisch, over one of those famous juleps in the Pallinder dining-room, the colonel rose up and with a severe countenance, laid his hand upon the joker's arm and jerked him upright without much ceremony. "Don't mind him, Colonel," interposed an onlooker. "He—he's not used to ladies' society, you know." "Sir," said the colonel sedately, "I should have said he was not used to the society of gentlemen!" and with that bundled the offender out of the room and the house. Nor did the action make him enemies; the rest of the male company expressed an unqualified approval.
"I was a little afraid that he might want to resort to the 'code' as practised in Virginia or Mississippi, or wherever he hails from," said Doctor Vardaman, commenting on this occurrence, "and call upon my services as surgeon; but he was too shrewd, or in his way, too large-minded for that. On the whole Pallinder was the most attractive as well as the most diverting humbug I ever knew or can imagine. I liked him against my will. He was generous to the last penny—with money that was shadily come by, to be sure, but what would you have? He might have been as tight as the bark on a tree. He was a brave man and had borne himself gallantly on the field, and I am sure uncomplainingly in defeat. There was no sham about that limp of his at any rate. But he never spoke of these things, nor ever flourished the Lost Cause in your face, that I know of. Maybe it was all part of his policy, but I like better to think that he had the qualities of his defects."