“Yes,” she affirmed, “Mr. Buckingham was one of you too, I guess, though he is the Rev. Mr. Buckingham now. Oh, he has told me.”
“You remember old Buck?” put in Armstrong. “He is preaching near here—settled over a church at Bobtown.”
“Yes,” I answered, “I remember there was such a man in the class, but really I didn’t know that he was—ah—such a character as you seem to infer, Mrs. Armstrong.”
“Oh, he has quieted down now, I assure you,” said the lady. “He is as prim and proper as a Methodist meeting-house. Why, he has to be, you know.”
This amusing fiction of the wildness of Armstrong’s youth had evidently become a family tradition, and even, by a familiar process, an article of belief in his own mind. It reminded me grotesquely of Justice Shallow’s reminiscences with Sir John Falstaff: “Ha, Cousin Silence, that thou hadst seen that, that this knight and I have seen.... Jesu, Jesu, the mad days that I have spent!”
The resemblance became still stronger when, as we rose from the table, the good fellow beckoned me into a closet which opened off the dining-room, saying, in a hoarse whisper:
“Here, Polisson, come in here.”
He was uncorking a large bottle half-filled with some red liquid, and as he poured a portion of this into two glasses he explained:
“I don’t have this sort of thing on the table, you understand, on account of the children and my—ah—position. It would make talk. But I tell you this is some of the real old stuff. How!” And he held his glass up to the light, regarding it with the one eye of a connoisseur, and then drank down its contents with a smack. I was considerably astonished, on doing the same, to discover that this dark beverage—which, from Armstrong’s manner, I had been prepared to find something at least as wicked as absinthe—was simply and solely Bordeaux of a mild quality. After this Bacchanalian proceeding we went out into the orchard, which was reserved for family use, and sat on a bench under an apple-tree. Armstrong called his little boy who had been at supper with us and gave him a whispered message, together with some small change. The messenger disappeared, and after a short absence returned with two very domestic cigars, transparently bought for the nonce from some neighboring grocer. “Have a smoke,” commanded my host, and we solemnly kindled the rolls of yellow leaf, Armstrong puffing away at his with the air of a man who, though intrusted by destiny with the responsibility of molding the characters of youth, has not forgotten how to be a man of the world on occasion.
“Well, Charley,” I began, after a few preliminary draughts, “you seem to have a good thing of it. Your school is prosperous, I understand; the work suits you; you have a mighty pretty family of children growing up, and your health appears to be perfect.”