“Why, I may be able to protect you from the crafts and assaults of your sister. You seem to forget, Ardy, that I’m not one of your American leisure class. I’m always delighted to meet Mrs. Atchison, but I’m a person of occupations. I have a consultation in Richmond to-morrow, then me for Charlottesville. We have examinations coming on, and while I like to play with you, I’ve positively got to work.”
“Not if I endow all the chairs in the university! You’ve not only got to come, but you’re going to be there the day they arrive.”
Thomas Ardmore, of New York and Ardsley, struck his heavy stick—he always carried a heavy stick—smartly on the cement platform in the stress of his feeling. He was much shorter than Griswold, to whom he was deeply attached—for whom he had, indeed, the frank admiration of a small boy for a big brother. He sometimes wondered how fully Griswold entered into the projects of adventure which he, in his supreme idleness, planned and proposed; but he himself had never been quite ready to mount horse or shake out soil, and what Griswold had said about indecision rankled in his heart. He was sorry now that he had told of this new enterprise to which he had pledged himself, but he grew lenient towards Griswold’s lack of sympathy as he reflected that the quest of a winking girl was rather beneath the dignity of a gentleman wedded not merely to the law, but to the austere teaching profession as well. In his heart he forgave Griswold, but he was all the more resolved to address himself stubbornly to his pursuit of the deity of the car Alexandra, for only by finding her could he establish himself in Griswold’s eyes as a man of action, capable of carrying through a scheme requiring cleverness and tact.
Ardmore was almost painfully rich, but the usual diversions of the wealthy did not appeal to him; and having exhausted foreign travel, he spent much time on his estate in the North Carolina hills, where he could ride all day on his own land, and where he read prodigiously in a huge library that he had assembled with special reference to works on piracy, a subject that had attracted him from early youth.
It was this hobby that had sealed his friendship with Griswold, who had relinquished the practice of law, after a brilliant start in his native city of Richmond, to accept the associate professorship of admiralty in the law department of the University of Virginia. Marine law had a particular fascination for Griswold, from its essentially romantic character. As a law student he had read all the decisions in admiralty that the libraries afforded, and though faithfully serving the university, he still occasionally accepted retainers in admiralty cases of unusual importance. His lectures were constantly attended by students in other departments of the university for sheer pleasure in Griswold’s racy and entertaining exposition of the laws touching the libelling of schooners and the recovery of jettisoned cargoes. Henry Maine Griswold was tall, slender, and dark, and he hovered recklessly, as he might have put it, on the brink of thirty. He stroked his thin brown moustache habitually, as though to hide the smile that played about his humorous mouth—a smile that lay even more obscurely in his fine brown eyes. He did violence to the academic traditions by dressing with metropolitan care, gray being his prevailing note, though his scarfs ventured upon bold colour schemes that interested his students almost as much as his lectures. The darkest fact of his life—and one shared with none—was his experiments in verse. From his undergraduate days he had written occasionally a little song, quite for his own pleasure in versifying, and to a little sheaf of these things in manuscript he still added a few verses now and then.
“Don’t worry, Ardy,” he was saying to his friend as “all aboard” was called, “and don’t be reckless. When you get through looking for the winking eye, come up to Charlottesville, and we’ll plan The True Life of Captain Kidd that is some day going to make us famous.”
“I’ll wire you later,” replied Ardmore, clinging to his friend’s hand a moment after the train began to move. Griswold leaned out of the vestibule to wave a last farewell to Ardmore, and something very kind and gentle and good to see shone in the lawyer’s eyes. He went into the car smiling, for he called Ardmore his best friend, and he was amused by his last words, which were always Ardmore’s last in their partings, and were followed usually by telegrams about the most preposterous things, or suggestions for romantic adventures, or some new hypothesis touching Captain Kidd and his buried treasure. Ardmore never wrote letters; he always telegraphed, and he enjoyed filing long, mysterious, and expensive messages with telegraph operators in obscure places where a scrupulous ten words was the frugal limit.
Griswold lighted a cigar and opened the afternoon Atlanta papers in the smoking compartment. His eye was caught at once by imperative headlines. It is not too much to say that the eye of the continent was arrested that evening by the amazing disclosure, now tardily reaching the public, that something unusual had occurred at the annual meeting of the Cotton Planters’ Association at New Orleans on the previous day. Every copy-reader and editor, every paragrapher on every newspaper in the land, had smiled and reached for a fresh pencil as a preliminary bulletin announced the passing of harsh words between the Governor of North Carolina and the Governor of South Carolina. It may as well be acknowledged here that just what really happened at the Cotton Planters’ Convention will never be known, for this particular meeting was held behind closed doors; and as the two governors were honoured guests of the association, no member has ever breathed a word touching an incident that all most sincerely deplored. Indeed, no hint of it would ever have reached the public had it not been that both gentlemen hurriedly left the convention hall, refused to keep their appointments to speak at the banquet that followed the business meetings, and were reported to have taken the first trains for their respective capitals. It was whispered by a few persons that the Governor of South Carolina had taken a fling at the authenticity of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence; it was rumoured in other quarters that the Governor of North Carolina was the aggressor, he having—it was said—declared that a people (meaning the freemen of the commonwealth of South Carolina) who were not intelligent enough to raise their own hay, and who, moreover, bought that article in Ohio, were not worth the ground necessary for their decent interment. It is not the purpose of this chronicle either to seek the truth of what passed between the two governors at New Orleans, or to discuss the points of history and agriculture raised in the statements just indicated. As every one knows, the twentieth of May (or was it the thirty-first?), 1775, is solemnly observed in North Carolina as the day on which the patriots of Mecklenburg County severed the relations theretofore existing between them and his Majesty King George the Third. Equally well known is the fact that in South Carolina it is an article of religious faith that on that twentieth day of May, 1775, the citizens of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, cheered the English flag and adopted resolutions reaffirming their ancient allegiance to the British crown. This controversy and the inadequacy of the South Carolina hay crop must be passed on to the pamphleteers, with such other vexed questions as Andrew Jackson’s birthplace—more debated than Homer’s, and not to be carelessly conceded to the strutting sons of Waxhaw.
Griswold read of the New Orleans incident with a smile, while several fellow-passengers discussed it in a tone of banter. One of them, a gentleman from Mississippi, presently produced a flask, which he offered to the others, remarking, “As the Governor of North Carolina said to the Governor of South Carolina,” which was, to be sure, pertinent to the hour and the discussion, and bristling with fresh significance.
“They were both in Atlanta this morning,” said the man with the flask, “and they would have been travelling together on this train if they hadn’t met in the ticket office and nearly exploded with rage.”