The American Claimant, Mark Twain [great novels to read txt] 📗

order of precedence in the earldoms of Great Britain, and will take early measures, by suit in the House of Lords, to wrest the title and estates from the present usurping holder of them. Until the season of mourning is past, the usual Thursday evening receptions at Rossmore Towers will be discontinued.

Lady Rossmore’s comment-to herself:

“Receptions! People who don’t rightly know him may think he is commonplace, but to my mind he is one of the most unusual men I ever saw. As for suddenness and capacity in imagining things, his beat don’t exist, I reckon. As like as not it wouldn’t have occurred to anybody else to name this poor old rat-trap Rossmore Towers, but it just comes natural to him. Well, no doubt it’s a blessed thing to have an imagination that can always make you satisfied, no matter how you are fixed. Uncle Dave Hopkins used to always say, ‘Turn me into John Calvin, and I want to know which place I’m going to; turn me into Mulberry Sellers and I don’t care.’”

The rightful earl’s comment-to himself:

“It’s a beautiful name, beautiful. Pity I didn’t think of it before I wrote the usurper. But I’ll be ready for him when he answers.”

 

CHAPTER V.

No answer to that telegram; no arriving daughter. Yet nobody showed any uneasiness or seemed surprised; that is, nobody but Washington. After three days of waiting, he asked Lady Rossmore what she supposed the trouble was. She answered, tranquilly:

“Oh, it’s some notion of hers, you never can tell. She’s a Sellers, all through—at least in some of her ways; and a Sellers can’t tell you beforehand what he’s going to do, because he don’t know himself till he’s done it. She’s all right; no occasion to worry about her. When she’s ready she’ll come or she’ll write, and you can’t tell which, till it’s happened.”

It turned out to be a letter. It was handed in at that moment, and was received by the mother without trembling hands or feverish eagerness, or any other of the manifestations common in the case of long delayed answers to imperative telegrams. She polished her glasses with tranquility and thoroughness, pleasantly gossiping along, the while, then opened the letter and began to read aloud:

KENILWORTH KEEP, REDGAUNTLET HALL, ROWENA-IVANHOE COLLEGE, THURSDAY.

DEAR PRECIOUS MAMMA ROSSMORE:

Oh, the joy of it!—you can’t think. They had always turned up their noses at our pretentions, you know; and I had fought back as well as I could by turning up mine at theirs. They always said it might be something great and fine to be rightful Shadow of an earldom, but to merely be shadow of a shadow, and two or three times removed at that—pooh-pooh! And I always retorted that not to be able to show four generations of American-Colonial-Dutch Peddler-and-Salt-Cod-McAllister-Nobility might be endurable, but to have to confess such an origin—pfew-few! Well, the telegram, it was just a cyclone! The messenger came right into the great Rob Roy Hall of Audience, as excited as he could be, singing out, “Dispatch for Lady Gwendolen Sellers!” and you ought to have seen that simpering chattering assemblage of pinchbeck aristocrats, turn to stone! I was off in the corner, of course, by myself—it’s where Cinderella belongs. I took the telegram and read it, and tried to faint—and I could have done it if I had had any preparation, but it was all so sudden, you know—but no matter, I did the next best thing: I put my handkerchief to my eyes and fled sobbing to my room, dropping the telegram as I started. I released one corner of my eye a moment— just enough to see the herd swarm for the telegram—and then continued my broken-hearted flight just as happy as a bird.

Then the visits of condolence began, and I had to accept the loan of Miss Augusta-Templeton-Ashmore Hamilton’s quarters because the press was so great and there isn’t room for three and a cat in mine. And I’ve been holding a Lodge of Sorrow ever since and defending myself against people’s attempts to claim kin. And do you know, the very first girl to fetch her tears and sympathy to my market was that foolish Skimperton girl who has always snubbed me so shamefully and claimed lordship and precedence of the whole college because some ancestor of hers, some time or other, was a McAllister. Why it was like the bottom bird in the menagerie putting on airs because its head ancestor was a pterodactyl.

But the ger-reatest triumph of all was—guess. But you’ll never. This is it. That little fool and two others have always been fussing and fretting over which was entitled to precedence—by rank, you know. They’ve nearly starved themselves at it; for each claimed the right to take precedence of all the college in leaving the table, and so neither of them ever finished her dinner, but broke off in the middle and tried to get out ahead of the others. Well, after my first day’s grief and seclusion—I was fixing up a mourning dress you see—I appeared at the public table again, and then—what do you think? Those three fluffy goslings sat there contentedly, and squared up the long famine—lapped and lapped, munched and munched, ate and ate, till the gravy appeared in their eyes—humbly waiting for the Lady Gwendolen to take precedence and move out first, you see!

Oh, yes, I’ve been having a darling good time. And do you know, not one of these collegians has had the cruelty to ask me how I came by my new name. With some, this is due to charity, but with the others it isn’t. They refrain, not from native kindness but from educated discretion. I educated them.

Well, as soon as I shall have settled up what’s left of the old scores and snuffed up a few more of those pleasantly intoxicating clouds of incense, I shall pack and depart homeward. Tell papa I am as fond of him as I am of my new name. I couldn’t put it stronger than that. What an inspiration it was! But inspirations come easy to him.

These, from your loving daughter, GWENDOLEN.

 

Hawkins reached for the letter and glanced over it.

“Good hand,” he said, “and full of confidence and animation, and goes racing right along. She’s bright—that’s plain.”

“Oh, they’re all bright—the Sellerses. Anyway, they would be, if there were any. Even those poor Latherses would have been bright if they had been Sellerses; I mean full blood. Of course they had a Sellers strain in them—a big strain of it, too—but being a Bland dollar don’t make it a dollar just the same.”

The seventh day after the date of the telegram Washington came dreaming down to breakfast and was set wide awake by an electrical spasm of pleasure.

Here was the most beautiful young creature he had ever seen in his life. It was Sally Sellers Lady Gwendolen; she had come in the night. And it seemed to him that her clothes were the prettiest and the daintiest he had ever looked upon, and the most exquisitely contrived and fashioned and combined, as to decorative trimmings, and fixings, and melting harmonies of color. It was only a morning dress, and inexpensive, but he confessed to himself, in the English common to Cherokee Strip, that it was a “corker.” And now, as he perceived, the reason why the Sellers household poverties and sterilities had been made to blossom like the rose, and charm the eye and satisfy the spirit, stood explained; here was the magician; here in the midst of her works, and furnishing in her own person the proper accent and climaxing finish of the whole.

“My daughter, Major Hawkins—come home to mourn; flown home at the call of affliction to help the authors of her being bear the burden of bereavement. She was very fond of the late earl—idolized him, sir, idolized him—”

“Why, father, I’ve never seen him.”

“True—she’s right, I was thinking of another—er—of her mother—”

“I idolized that smoked haddock?—that sentimental, spiritless—”

“I was thinking of myself! Poor noble fellow, we were inseparable com—”

“Hear the man! Mulberry Sel—Mul—Rossmore—hang the troublesome name I can never—if I’ve heard you say once, I’ve heard you say a thousand times that if that poor sheep—”

“I was thinking of—of—I don’t know who I was thinking of, and it doesn’t make any difference anyway; somebody idolized him, I recollect it as if it were yesterday; and—”

“Father, I am going to shake hands with Major Hawkins, and let the introduction work along and catch up at its leisure. I remember you very well in deed, Major Hawkins, although I was a little child when I saw you last; and I am very, very glad indeed to see you again and have you in our house as one of us;” and beaming in his face she finished her cordial shake with the hope that he had not forgotten her.

He was prodigiously pleased by her outspoken heartiness, and wanted to repay her by assuring her that he remembered her, and not only that but better even than he remembered his own children, but the facts would not quite warrant this; still, he stumbled through a tangled sentence which answered just as well, since the purport of it was an awkward and unintentional confession that her extraordinary beauty had so stupefied him that he hadn’t got back to his bearings, yet, and therefore couldn’t be certain as to whether he remembered her at all or not. The speech made him her friend; it couldn’t well help it.

In truth the beauty of this fair creature was of a rare type, and may well excuse a moment of our time spent in its consideration. It did not consist in the fact that she had eyes, nose, mouth, chin, hair, ears, it consisted in their arrangement. In true beauty, more depends upon right location and judicious distribution of feature than upon multiplicity of them. So also as regards color. The very combination of colors which in a volcanic irruption would add beauty to a landscape might detach it from a girl. Such was Gwendolen Sellers.

The family circle being completed by Gwendolen’s arrival, it was decreed that the official mourning should now begin; that it should begin at six o’clock every evening, (the dinner hour,) and end with the dinner.

“It’s a grand old line, major, a sublime old line, and deserves to be mourned for, almost royally; almost imperially, I may say. Er—Lady Gwendolen—but she’s gone; never mind; I wanted my Peerage; I’ll fetch it myself, presently, and show you a thing or two that will give you a realizing idea of what our house is. I’ve been glancing through Burke, and I find that of William the Conqueror’s sixty-four natural ah— my dear, would you mind getting me that book? It’s on the escritoire in our boudoir. Yes, as I was saying, there’s only St. Albans, Buccleugh and Grafton ahead of us on the list—all the rest of the British nobility are in procession behind us. Ah, thanks, my lady. Now then, we turn to William, and we find—letter for XYZ? Oh, splendid—when’d you get it?”

“Last night; but I was asleep before you came, you were out so late; and when I came to breakfast Miss Gwendolen—well, she knocked everything out of me, you know—”

“Wonderful girl, wonderful; her great origin is detectable in her step, her carriage, her features—but what does he say? Come, this is exciting.”

“I haven’t read it—er—Rossm—Mr. Rossm—er—”

“M’lord! Just cut it short like that. It’s the English way. I’ll open it. Ah, now let’s see.”

A. TO YOU KNOW WHO. Think I know you. Wait ten days. Coming to Washington.

The excitement died out of both men’s faces. There was a brooding silence for a while, then the younger one said with a