 | CHAPTER XXXIV.
REAPPEARANCE OF THE FLIRTING PHILOLOGIST. The Wetherel affair |  |
34. CHAPTER XXXIV.
REAPPEARANCE OF THE FLIRTING PHILOLOGIST.
For a moment Lehming was on the verge of saying to Mrs. Dinneford
that he thought he had found Nestoria Bernard.
But just then Alice Dinneford entered, fluttering and rustling and babbling
in her usual lively way, like all the breezes and brooks of springtime. This
young lady, as we perhaps remember, was sufficiently clever, and more than
sufficiently talkative, to be quite diverting, or at least occupying; no matter
how fallen and withered conversation might be, she could arouse it and send
it flying and fill the air with it, like a gamesome urchin kicking up a bed of
autumn leaves.
“Is it you, Cousin Walter?” she prattled, while her willowy figure so
swayed and her feathery head so tossed that she reminded him of a cypress in
a high wind. “Where have you been these three weeks? I thought you
must be dead. I have expected every day to find you decapitated, with your
body flopping about like a chicken's, and your head under some policeman's
arm, smiling benignantly, as much as to say it was all right and you bore nobody
any grudge. Now, mamma, don't go to making a gravestone of your
face, and setting it up over me. I won't be buried alive while I can catch my
breath. You talked a great deal more at my age, and you say everything you
can think of yet. Cousin Walter, I know why you are always so cheerful and
never have the doldrums. You are not a young lady. Young ladies must be
proper, and propriety always gives the doldrums, just as measles bring weak
eyes. Such hencoops of old patched-up decorums as we women live in! And if
you stick your head out for a grain of corn, somebody is ready to grab you and
pull off your feathers and eat you up and pick your bones. Here is mother in
a clucking state because I sit up, as they say in the country, with a count. I
told her I should leave it to you, the very first time you came in. Now do
you think counts and foreigners are necessarily horrid? Are we Yankees
commissioned and chosen to abhor them as the Jews abhorred the Canaanites?
Do speak, Walter. Don't stop to meditate. I hate a sober second thought.
It's a doleful, preachy phrase, as wizened and mean as a string of dried apples.
Now tell me whether there is any sense to this prejudice against foreigners.”
“I share the prejudice,” said Lehming gently.
“Walter, I am ashamed of you,” answered Alice, beginning to color with
a real excitement. “Oh, Walter, to have a prejudice! How unphilosophical
and uncharitable!”
“Not because a stranger is not an American do I mistrust him,” continued
Lehming; “but because he is not at home; because he is surrounded by no
public opinion to which he feels responsible; because he is too free from restraint
for the good of human nature. We mortals are just so weak that we
need all the social bonds to keep us from being wicked. Let us suppose a
Turk in New York. He is far away from the judgment of his brother Ottomans,
and he has not yet learned to care for the judgment of Yankees. Don't
you see that he has fewer guards against temptation than I have, or than he
himself would have at home? It seems to me that he runs great risk of becoming
a naughty Turk.”
“But are we so very good?” broke in Alice eagerly. “What do you think
of our city government? What do you think of the Ring?”
“Take away the foreign vote of New York, and no ring could live long,”
replied Lehming.
“So you think,” said Alice, beginning to pout, for the argument seemed to
be against her. “But I hate polities, and don't want to talk about it. What
I can't bear is that mother has a special dislike to this man because he is a
count. As if he would be any better if he were a butcher and the son of a baker
and the nephew of a candlestick-maker!”
“I don't want to be bewildered with words that I am not used to,” declared
Mrs. Dinneford. “When a man tells me that he is a count, I don't
know what to expect of him. It's as perplexing as if he should tell me that
he was a jabberwok. And especially when he has no county! A count in a
republic, getting his living nobody knows how, seems to me what our marketman
calls a dubersome character, and I am always wondering what he was
Tupper, `O degenerate scion of a stock so excellent and noble,' which I dare
say would bother the head of our poor man tremendously, for his brains are
no thicker than batter, in my opinion.”
“Wait and see, wait and see,” retorted Alice. “I dare say he may be here
this evening,” she added, coloring with the consciousness that she knew very
well that he would be there. “He is odd, but he is no fool. I used to think
him one, and used to delight in making fun of him; but I have learned to
know him better, and so will mamma some day; you see if she doesn't. I
want you to talk to him, Walter; you will find that he has plenty of sense;
that is, after you have got used to his ways. Why, I suppose the cats and
dogs don't think that we know anything till they learn how to take us. And
now don't go to imagining that I am smitten. No such thing; I am not. I
just defend the poor man because mother is unjust to him.”
“I hope that justice wouldn't be worse for him than injustice,” replied Mrs.
Dinneford, with an earnestness which had a taint of irritation. Apparently
this matter of the Count had been discussed between mother and daughter until
it had become a sore subject to both of them.
Just then the street bell rang, causing Alice to say, “There he is!” with a
slightly hysterical giggle, and to sway and flutter in a way that was characteristic
of her in moments of excitement. Presently the door opened, and a tall,
blond gentleman, glorious with jewels and with glossy expanses of fine linen
and with elaborate tailoring, entered the parlor, bowing and smirking in a
style to strike most Anglo-Saxons dumb with astonishment. It was the first
time that Lehming had beheld our old acquaintance, Count Poloski. The intelligent,
natural, and quiet pygmy—himself, as we believe, one of nature's
grandees—looked on the pretentious apparition with amazement and instantaneous
distrust. It did not seem possible to him that a man who wore such
millinery and went through such posturings could be a born patrician. However,
he had seen the “Grande Duchesse”; he remembered that grotesque
specimen of nobility, Prince Paul; and, conceding the resemblance between
the two men, he suspended his judgment.
Bowing and “tetering” across the room, the Count advanced to Mrs. Dinneford,
took her hand, bent himself double over it, and said, “Madam, I once
more do myself the honor of calling upon you.”
“I hope you have been well, sir?” replied the good lady, with a brevity
which we know was not natural to her, and which sprang from embarrassment.
“Madam, it is impossible for me to thank you sufficiently for your good
wishes,” the Count bowed again. “Never better. All the better for seeing
you, as the song says. I need not inquire after your health. Your glowing
countenance” (Mrs. Dinneford was fairly blushing for him) “reassures me.
Miss Alice,” and here he doubled up over the hand of the daughter, “your
mother is a favorable augury for you. I trust that you will be—to use your
vigorous American idiom—a chip of the old hickory.”
We have never heretofore seen in Poloski so much “manner” as he had on
this occasion. An avowed suitor now of the “dashing Miss Alice,” and anxious
to make an impression upon the parent as well as upon the young lady,
he had put on the airs of a continental Turveydrop. No turkeycock, gobbling
and strutting and ruffling his feathers among female turkeys, was ever a more
wonderful “model of deportment.” Lehming was unable to understand how
harlequin. He did not know how far the excitement of a debated conquest
may carry a young lady. The noble foreigner had made great inroads
into Miss Dinneford's esteem, because she had found him a favored guest
among the fashionables of Fifth Avenue, and because plenty of other girls
were setting their caps at him.
“Count Poloski, this is my cousin,” she said, fluttering through an incomplete
introduction. “My cousin, Mr. Lehming,” she added hastily.
Poloski bowed and smiled as if he were being presented to a peer of the
British realm or a luminary of the French Academy.
“My cousin is an author,” continued Alice, anxious to impress the patrician
favorably in regard to her family.
“And a schoolmaster,” added Lehming, which was the most malicious
speech that he ever made in his life.
“Professor, I am honored in making your acquaintance,” salaamed the imperturbable
Poloski.
Alice triumphed over her cousin, and nearly laughed at him outright.
“I am in the condition of a boy who gets a man's hat slipped over his little
head,” smiled Lehming. “The title of professor is too big for me.”
“But you teach,” cajoled the Count, determined to make things pleasant.
“What branch, may I inquire? Latin? Your common schools, as you wrongly
call them, are wonderful. They deserve a higher name. I am sincerely
delighted to meet one who holds such a post in such a distinguished arena. I
have some inquiries to make of you, if you permit them, and if these ladies
permit.”
And here he commenced a catechism concerning the origins of the Latin
speech; inquiring particularly whether it were purely Oscan, or whether the
long domination of the Tarquins had introduced Etruscan elements; and
showing a knowledge of the subject which argued at least some intimacy with
encyclopædias.
“You are too much for me,” confessed Lehming. “I have no such learning
as will solve those problems.”
He looked at the fluent Poloski in surprise, wondering whether he were indeed
a scholar and a gentleman.
“I have beaten him,” triumphed the Count to himself. “He was doubting
me, but now he holds me in respect.”
“I wrote an essay on this topic,” he said aloud. “I will show it to you
some day.”
“But not to me,” put in Alice, with the excusable petulance of a young lady
who has been kept over-long out of the conversation.
“Miss Dinneford, I humbly beg your pardon!” exclaimed Poloski, spreading
out deprecating hands. “I am the most degraded of imbeciles. How
can a man pass his time in talking of dead tongues when he might learn from
the loveliest of teachers the noblest of living tongues!”
“With all its beautiful slangs, Count,” added Alice, laughing. But she
did not banter him as freely as of old. He was no longer in her eyes the purely
comical personage which he had been in the days of their earlier acquaintance.
In spite of her frolicsomeness and her affectation of flippant domination,
it was obvious that she was very anxious to please him, and even considerably
in awe of him. Lehming perceived all this, and was sorry to perceive
it. He feared nothing worse for Alice than a marriage with a man who might
a sufficiently ugly outlook to make the smallest glimpse of it a worry to this
sympathetic and kindly spirit; and before he left the house he had resolved to
keep an eye on the noble foreigner. As he walked homeward he thought the
little drama over, and became more interested in it with every heart-beat.
Here was a piece of home philanthropy to be attended to, and it might be that
it needed instant and earnest vigilance.
“We are always saving the heathen,” he said to himself. “I must save
my relative.”
To whom could he go to inquire about the antecedents and actualities and
probabilities of this Poloski? Of fashionable people Lehming only knew Wolverton,
whom he had met but twice, and Edward Wetherel. As it was still
far from late, he decided to make one more attempt to find Edward, and he set
off at the longest stretch of his brief legs toward the young man's lodgings.
Unsuccessful again, he turned toward his own sombre quarter of the city, and
walked on with a still quicker step than before, anxious not to miss his customary
“good-night” from Nettie Fulton. He had fallen to thinking of her,
and was querying whether she could possibly be Nestoria Bernard, when a
voice behind him called him by name. He turned and waited; it was Edward
Wetherel.
“How lucky I am to meet you!” said Lehming. “I have been twice to
your lodgings.”
“And I was just searching for yours,” replied Edward. “Is it too late to
make you a call?”
“Come along,” urged Lehming. “I want very much to see you about
something which concerns us nearly.”
Presently it occurred to him that Wetherel might stumble upon Nettie Fulton
in the reading-room, and that there might be a recognition. If so, then
what? Would the scene be joyful or horrible? He could not tell; but it
seemed to him that it would be best to risk it; that the sooner this mystery was
cleared up the better.
| CHAPTER XXXIV.
REAPPEARANCE OF THE FLIRTING PHILOLOGIST. The Wetherel affair | |