“He is a remarkable man,” continued my grandfather, warming up.
“He has points about him,” said Charley, driven to say something.
“Yes, and characteristic points, highly characteristic points,” said the old gentleman, with a sort of defiant emphasis.
“He has, beyond question.”
“Charley,” began Mr. Whacker, rising and taking a lighter,—for he had suffered his pipe to go out,—“don’t you think”—and he lit the taper—“what do you say,” he continued, in a hesitating manner, which he tried to cover up under pretence of strict attention to the feat of adjusting the blaze to the tobacco,—“how would it do to invite him here,—just for a week or so, you know?”
It is, I dare say, a mere whim on my part, but I must now beg the contemporary reader to obliterate himself for a few pages.
I must tell you, my descendant-to-the-tenth-power—no, you will be that much of a grandson,—my descendant-to-the-twelfth-power, therefore—I must tell you, as a matter of family history, why your ascendant-to-the-fourteenth-power hesitated.
Our common ancestor was a Virginian,—which means, you will doubtless know, that he was hospitable. Again, he was a Virginian of Leicester County,—and that is as much as to say, as I trust a dim tradition, at least, shall have informed you, that he was a Virginian of Virginians. But, lastly and chiefly, he was Mr. Thomas Whacker of Elmington. What that amounts to you can learn from me alone.
Our common ancestor was, then, the soul of hospitality,—hospitality in a certain sense boundless, though it was strictly limited and exclusive in a certain direction. No dull man or woman was welcome at Elmington. But his nets seemed to bring in all the queer fish that floated about Virginia. I suppose there must have been something inborn in him that made odd people attractive to him, and him to them, but I have no doubt that this trait of his was in part due to the kind of Bohemian life he led in Europe for several years, when he was a young man, mingling, on familiar terms, with musicians, actors, painters, and all manner of shiftless geniuses,—so that the average humdrum citizen possessed little interest for him. If a man could only do or say anything that no one else could do or say, or do it or say it better than any one else, he had a friend in Mr. Whacker. All forms of brightness and of humor—any kind of talent, or even oddity—could unlock that door, which swung so easily on its hinges. And not only men of gifts, but all who had a lively appreciation of gifts, were at liberty to make Elmington their headquarters; so that, as my memory goes back to those days, there rises before me a succession of the drollest mortals that were ever seen in one Virginia house. Now, I need hardly remind you that company of this character has its objections. Men such as I have rapidly outlined are not always very eligible visitors at a country house. It happens, not unfrequently, that a man who is very entertaining to-day is a bore to-morrow,—the day after, a nuisance; so that our grandfather, who was the most unsuspicious of mortals, and who always took men for what they seemed to be on a first interview, was frequently most egregiously taken in, and was often at his wit’s end as to how to get rid of some treasure he had picked up. In fact, Charley used to dread the old gentleman’s return from the springs in autumn, or the cities in winter; for he was quite sure to have invited to Elmington some of the people whom he had met there; and they often proved not very profitable acquaintances. In fine, wherever he went, he rarely failed to gather more or less gems of purest ray serene, many of which turned out, under Charley’s more scrutinizing eyes, very ordinary pebbles indeed.
Unqualified, however, what I have written would give a very erroneous idea of the people our grandfather used to gather around his hospitable board; for I must say that after all deductions have been made, he managed, certainly, to get beneath his vine and fig-tree more really clever and interesting people than I have ever seen in any one house elsewhere. And then, too, as there were no ladies at Elmington, I don’t know that his mistakes mattered much. Still, they were sufficiently numerous; and he had begun to lose, not indeed his faith in men, so much as in his own ability to read them. And just in proportion as waned his confidence in his own judgment in such matters, he placed an ever-heightening estimate upon Charley’s; so that, in the end, he was always rather nervous upon the arrival of any of his new-found geniuses, till his taciturn friend had indicated, in some way, that he thought them unexceptionable.