2. II.
The soaring of the octave flute in “Hail Columbia,”
with which the band was patriotically opening the
ball, woke me from the midst of a long apologetic letter
to my friend's sister, and I found Van Pelt's black
boy Juba waiting patiently at the bed-side with curling-tongs
and Cologne-water, ordered to superintend
my toilet by his master, who had gone early to the
drawing-room to pay his respects to Miss Ellerton.
With the cold cream disappeared entirely from my
face the uncomfortable redness to which I had been a
martyr, and, thanks to my ebony coiffeur, my straight
and plastered locks soon grew as different to their
“umquhile guise” as Hyperion's to a satyr's. Having
appeared to the eyes of the lady, in whose favor I
hoped to prosper, in red and white (red phiz and white
jacket), I trusted that in white and black (black suit
and pale viznomy), I should look quite another person.
Juba was pleased to show his ivory in a complimentary
smile at my transformation, and I descended to
the drawing-room, on the best terms with the coxcomb
in my bosom.
Horace met me at the door.
“Proteus redivivus!” was his exclamation. “Your
new name is Wrongham. You are a gentle senior,
instead of a bedeviled sophomore, and your cue is to
be poetical. She will never think again of the monster
in the white jacket, and I have prepared her for
the acquaintance of a new friend, whom I have just
described to you.
I took his arm, and with the courage of a man in a
mask, went through another presentation to Miss Ellerton.
Her brother had been let into the secret by
Van Pelt, and received me with great ceremony as his
college superior; and, as there was no other person at
the Springs who knew Mr. Slingsby, Mr. Wrongham
was likely to have an undisturbed reign of it. Miss
Ellerton looked hard at me for a moment, but the
gravity with which I was presented and received, dissipated
a doubt if one had arisen in her mind, and
she took my arm to go to the ball-room, with an
undisturbed belief in my assumed name and character.
I commenced the acquaintance of the fair Alabamian
with great advantages. Received as a perfect
stranger, I possessed, from long correspondence with
her, the most minute knowledge of the springs, of her
character, and of her favorite reading and pursuits,
and, with the little knowledge of the world which she
had gained on a plantation, she was not likely to penetrate
my game from my playing it too freely. Her
confidence was immediately won by the readiness
with which I entered into her enthusiasm and anticipated
her thoughts; and before the first quadrille was
well over, she had evidently made up her mind that
she had never in her life met one who so well “understood
her.” Oh! how much women include in that
apparently indefinite expression, “He understands
me!”
The colonnade of Congress Hall is a long promenade
laced in with vines and columns, on the same
level with the vast ball-room and drawing-room, and
(the light of heaven not being taxed at Saratoga)
opening at every three steps by a long window into
the carpeted floors. When the rooms within are lit
in a summer's night, that cool and airy colonnade is
thronged by truants from the dance, and collectively
by all who have anything to express that is meant for
one ear only. The mineral waters of Saratoga are no
less celebrated as a soporific for chaperons than as a
tonic for the dyspeptic, and while the female Argus
dozes in the drawing-room, the fair Io and her Jupiter
(represented in this case, we will say, by Miss Ellerton
and myself) range at liberty the fertile fields of
flirtation.
I had easily put Miss Ellerton in surprised good
humor with herself and me during the first quadrille,
and with a freedom based partly upon my certainty of
pleasing her, partly on the peculiar manners of the
place, I coolly requested that she would continue to
dance with me for the rest of the evening.
“One unhappy quadrille excepted,” she replied,
with a look meant to be mournful.
“May I ask with whom?”
“Oh, he has not asked me yet; but my brother has
bound me over to be civil to him—a spectre, Mr.
Wrongham! a positive spectre.”
“How denominated?” I inquired, with a forced indifference,
for I had a presentiment I should hear my
own name.
“Slingsby—Mr. Philip Slingsby—Tom's fidus
Achates, and a proposed lover of my own. But you
don't seem surprised!”
“Surprised! E-hem! I know the gentleman!”
“Then did you ever see such a monster! Tom
told me he was another Hyperion. He half admitted
it himself, indeed; for to tell you a secret, I have corresponded
with him a year!”
“Giddy Miss Fanny Ellerton!—and never saw
him!”
“Never till to-night! He sat at supper in a white
jacket and red face, with a pile of bones upon his plate
like an Indian tumulus.”
“And your brother introduced you?”
“Ah, you were at table! Well, did you ever see in
your travels, a man so unpleasantly hideous?”
“Fanny!” said her brother, coming up at the moment,
“Slingsby presents his apologies to you for not
joining your cordon to-night—but he's gone to bed
with a head-ache.”
“Indigestion, I dare say,” said the young lady.
“Never mind, Tom, I'll break my heart when I have
leisure. And now, Mr. Wrongham, since the spectre
walks not forth to-night, I am yours for a cool hour
on the colonnade.”
Vegetation is rapid in Alabama, and love is a weed
that thrives in the soil of the tropics. We discoursed
of the lost Pleiad and the Berlin bracelets, of the five
hundred people about us, and the feasibility of boiling
a pot on five hundred a year—the unmatrimonial sum
total of my paternal allowance. She had as many negroes
as I had dollars, I well knew, but it was my cue
to seem disinterested.
“And where do you mean to live, when you marry,
Mr. Wrongham?” asked Miss Ellerton, at the two
hundredth turn on the colonnade.
“Would you like to live in Italy?” I asked again,
as if I had not heard her.
“Do you mean that as a sequitur to my question,
Mr. Wrongham?” said she, half stopping in her walk;
and though the sentence was commenced playfully,
dropping her voice at the last word, with something, I
thought, very like emotion.
I drew her off the colonnade to the small garden
between the house and the spring, and in a giddy
dream of fear and surprise at my own rashness and
success, I made, and won from her, a frank avowal of
preference.
Matches have been made more suddenly.
