Lady Baltimore

by Owen Wister

  I: A Word about My Aunt

  Like Adam, our first conspicuous ancestor, I must begin, and lay theblame upon a woman; I am glad to recognize that I differ from the fatherof my sex in no important particular, being as manlike as most of hissons. Therefore it is the woman, my Aunt Carola, who must bear the wholereproach of the folly which I shall forthwith confess to you, since sheit was who put it into my head; and, as it was only to make Eve happythat her husband ever consented to eat the disastrous apple, so I, saveto please my relative, had never aspired to become a Selected SalicScion. I rejoice now that I did so, that I yielded to her temptation.Ours is a wide country, and most of us know but our own corner of it,while, thanks to my Aunt, I have been able to add another corner. This,among many other enlightenments of navel and education, do I owe her;she stands on the threshold of all that is to come; therefore I werelacking in deference did I pass her and her Scions by without duemention,--employing no English but such as fits a theme so stately.Although she never left the threshold, nor went to Kings Port with me,nor saw the boy, or the girl, or any part of what befell them, she knewquite well who the boy was. When I wrote her about him, she rememberedone of his grandmothers whom she had visited during her own girlhood,long before the war, both in Kings Port and at the family plantation;and this old memory led her to express a kindly interest in him. How oddand far away that interest seems, now that it has been turned to colddispleasure!

  Some other day, perhaps, I may try to tell you much more than I can tellyou here about Aunt Carola and her Colonial Society--that apple whichEve, in the form of my Aunt, held out to me. Never had I expected tofeel rise in me the appetite for this particular fruit, though I hadknown such hunger to exist in some of my neighbors. Once a worthy dameof my town, at whose dinner-table young men and maidens of fashion sitconstantly, asked me with much sentiment if I was aware that she wasdescended from Boadicea. Why had she never (I asked her) revealed thisto me before? And upon her informing me that she had learned itonly that very day, I exclaimed that it was a great distance to havedescended so suddenly. To this, after a look at me, she assented, addingthat she had the good news from the office of The American Almanach deGotha, Union Square, New York; and she recommended that publicationto me. There was but a slight fee to pay, a matter of fifty dollars orupwards, and for this trifling sum you were furnished with your rightfulcoat-of-arms and with papers clearly tracing your family to the Druids,the Vestal Virgins, and all the best people in the world. Therefore Ifelicitated the Boadicean lady upon the illustrious progenitrixwith whom the Almanach de Gotha had provided her for so small aconsideration, and observed that for myself I supposed I should continueto rest content with the thought that in our enlightened Republic everyAmerican was himself a sovereign. But that, said the lady, after givingme another look, is so different from Boadicea! And to this I perfectlyagreed. Later I had the pleasure to hear in a roundabout way that shehad pronounced me one of the most agreeable young men in society, thoughsophisticated. I have not cherished this against her; my gift of humorpuzzles many who can see only my refinement and my scrupulous attentionto dress.

  Yes, indeed, I counted myself proof against all Boadiceas. But you havenoticed--have you not?--how, whenever a few people gather together andstyle themselves something, and choose a president, and eight or ninevice-presidents, and a secretary and a treasurer, and a committee onelections, and then let it be known that almost nobody else is qualifiedto belong to it, that there springs up immediately in hundreds andthousands of breasts a fiery craving to get into that body? You maytry this experiment in science, law, medicine, art, letters, society,farming, I care not what, but you will set the same craving afire indoctors, academicians, and dog breeders all over the earth. Thus, whenmy Aunt--the president, herself, mind you!--said to me one day thatshe thought, if I proved my qualifications, my name might be favorablyconsidered by the Selected Salic Scions--I say no more; I blush, thoughyou cannot see me; when I am tempted, I seem to be human, after all.

  At first, to be sure, I met Aunt Carola's suggestion in the way that Iam too ready to meet many of her remarks; for you must know she once,with sincere simplicity and good-will, told my Uncle Andrew (herhusband; she is only my Aunt by marriage) that she had married beneathher; and she seemed unprepared for his reception of this candidstatement: Uncle Andrew was unaffectedly merry over it. Ever since thenall of us wait hopefully every day for what she may do or say next.

  She is from old New York, oldest New York; the family manor is stillhabitable, near Cold Spring; she was, in her youth, handsome, I amassured by those whose word I have always trusted; her appearance evento-day causes people to turn and look; she is not tall in feet andinches--I have to stoop considerably when she commands from me thefamiliarity of a kiss; but in the quality which we call force, in moralstature, she must be full eight feet high. When rebuking me, she canpronounce a single word, my name, "Augustus!" in a tone that rendersfurther remark needless; and you should see her eye when she says ofcertain newcomers in our society, "I don't know them." She can makeher curtsy as appalling as a natural law; she knows also how to "takeumbrage," which is something that I never knew any one else to takeoutside of a book; she is a highly pronounced Christian, holding allUnitarians wicked and all Methodists vulgar; and once, when she wastalking (as she does frequently) about King James and the Englishreligion and the English Bible, and I reminded her that the Jewswrote it, she said with displeasure that she made no doubt King Jameshad--"well, seen to it that all foreign matter was expunged"--I give youher own words. Unless you have moved in our best American society (andby this I do not at all mean the lower classes with dollars and nograndfathers, who live in palaces at Newport, and look forward toevery-thing and back to nothing, but those Americans with grandfathersand no dollars, who live in boarding-houses, and look forward tonothing and back to everything)--unless you have known this haughty andimproving milieu, you have never seen anything like my Aunt Carola.Of course, with Uncle Andrew's money, she does not live in aboarding-house; and I shall finish this brief attempt to place herbefore you by adding that she can be very kind, very loyal, verypublic-spirited, and that I am truly attached to her.

  "Upon your mother's side of the family," she said, "of course."

  "Me!" I did not have to feign amazement.

  My Aunt was silent. "Me descended from a king?"

  My Aunt nodded with an indulgent stateliness. "There seems to be thepossibility of it."

  "Royal blood in my veins, Aunt?"

  "I have said so, Augustus. Why make me repeat it?"

  It was now, I fear, that I met Aunt Carola in that unfitting spirit,that volatile mood, which, as I have said already, her remarks oftenrouse in me.

  "And from what sovereign may I hope that I--?"

  "If you will consult a recent admirable compilation, entitled TheAmerican Almanach de Gotha, you will find that Henry the Seventh--"

  "Aunt, I am so much relieved! For I think that I might have hesitatedto trace it back had you said--well--Charles the Second, for example, orElizabeth."

  At this point I should have been wise to notice my Aunt's eye; but I didnot, and I continued imprudently:--

  "Though why hesitate? I have never heard that there was anybody presentto marry Adam and Eve, and so why should we all make such a to-doabout--"

  "Augustus!"

  She uttered my name in that quiet but prodigious tone to which I havealluded above.

  It was I who was now silent.

  "Augustus, if you purpose trifling, you may leave the room."

  "Oh, Aunt, I beg your pardon. I never meant--"

  "I cannot understand what impels you to adopt such a manner to me, whenI am trying to do something for you."

  I hastened to strengthen my apologies with a manner becoming thepossible descendant of a king toward a lady of distinction, and my Auntwas pleased to pass over my recent lapse from respect. She now broachedher favorite topic, which I need scarcely tell you is genealogy,beginning with her own.
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br />   "If your title to royal blood," she said, "were as plain as mine(through Admiral Bombo, you know), you would not need any carefulresearch."

  She told me a great deal of genealogy, which I spare you; it was notone family tree, it was a forest of them. It gradually appeared thata grandmother of my mother's grandfather had been a Fanning, and therewere sundry kinds of Fannings, right ones and wrong ones; the point forme was, what kind had mine been? No family record showed this. If it wasFanning of the Bon Homme Richard variety, or Fanning of the Alamance,then I was no king's descendant.

  "Worthy New England people, I understand," said my Aunt with her nod ofindulgent stateliness, referring to the Bon Homme Richard species, "butof entirely bourgeois extraction--Paul Jones himself, you know, wasa mere gardener's son--while the Alamance Fanning was one of thoseinfamous regulators who opposed Governor Tryon. Not through any suchcattle could you be one of us," said my Aunt.

  But a dim, distant, hitherto uncharted Henry Tudor Fanning had foughtin some of the early Indian wars, and the last of his known blood wasreported to have fallen while fighting bravely at the battle of Cowpens.In him my hope lay. Records of Tarleton, records of Marion's men, thesewere what I must search, and for these I had best go to Kings Port. If Ireturned with Kinship proven, then I might be a Selected Salic Scion, achosen vessel, a royal seed, one in the most exalted circle of menand women upon our coasts. The other qualifications were already mine:ancestors colonial and bellicose upon land and sea--

  "--besides having acquired," my Aunt was so good as to say, "sufficientpersonal presentability since your life in Paris, of which I had rathernot know too much, Augustus. It is a pity," she repeated, "that you willhave so much research. With my family it was all so satisfactorily clearthrough Kill-devil Bombo--Admiral Bombo's spirited, reckless son."

  You will readily conceive that I did not venture to betray my ignoranceof these Bombos; I worked my eyebrows to express a silent and timewornfamiliarity.

  "Go to Kings Port. You need a holiday, at any rate. And I," my Aunthandsomely finished, "will make the journey a present to you."

  This generosity made me at once, and sincerely, repentant for myflippancy concerning Charles the Second and Elizabeth. And so, partlyfrom being tempted by this apple of Eve, and partly because recentoverwork had tired me, but chiefly for her sake, and not to thwart atthe outset her kindly-meant ambitions for me, I kissed the hand of myAunt Carola and set forth to Kings Port.

  "Come back one of us," was her parting benediction.