Lady Baltimore | Page 6

you to adopt such a manner to me,
when I am trying to do something for you."
I hastened to strengthen my apologies with a manner becoming the
possible descendant of a king toward a lady of distinction, and my Aunt
was pleased to pass over my recent lapse from respect. She now
broached her favorite topic, which I need scarcely tell you is genealogy,
beginning with her own.
"If your title to royal blood," she said, "were as plain as mine (through
Admiral Bombo, you know), you would not need any careful research."
She told me a great deal of genealogy, which I spare you; it was not
one family tree, it was a forest of them. It gradually appeared that a
grandmother of my mother's grandfather had been a Fanning, and there
were sundry kinds of Fannings, right ones and wrong ones; the point
for me was, what kind had mine been? No family record showed this. If
it was Fanning 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 of indulgent stateliness, referring to the Bon Homme Richard
species, "but of entirely bourgeois extraction--Paul Jones himself, you
know, was a mere gardener's son--while the Alamance Fanning was
one of those infamous regulators who opposed Governor Tryon. Not
through any such cattle could you be one of us," said my Aunt.
But a dim, distant, hitherto uncharted Henry Tudor Fanning had fought
in some of the early Indian wars, and the last of his known blood was
reported to have fallen while fighting bravely at the battle of Cowpens.
In him my hope lay. Records of Tarleton, records of Marion's men,
these were what I must search, and for these I had best go to Kings Port.
If I returned with Kinship proven, then I might be a Selected Salic
Scion, a chosen vessel, a royal seed, one in the most exalted circle of
men and 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, "sufficient
personal presentability since your life in Paris, of which I had rather not
know too much, Augustus. It is a pity," she repeated, "that you will
have so much research. With my family it was all so satisfactorily clear
through Kill-devil Bombo--Admiral Bombo's spirited, reckless son."
You will readily conceive that I did not venture to betray my ignorance
of these Bombos; I worked my eyebrows to express a silent and
timeworn familiarity.
"Go to Kings Port. You need a holiday, at any rate. And I," my Aunt
handsomely finished, "will make the journey a present to you."
This generosity made me at once, and sincerely, repentant for my
flippancy concerning Charles the Second and Elizabeth. And so, partly
from being tempted by this apple of Eve, and partly because recent
overwork had tired me, but chiefly for her sake, and not to thwart at the
outset her kindly-meant ambitions for me, I kissed the hand of my Aunt
Carola and set forth to Kings Port.
"Come back one of us," was her parting benediction.

II: I Vary My Lunch
Thus it was that I came to sojourn in the most appealing, the most
lovely, the most wistful town in America; whose visible sadness and
distinction seem also to speak audibly, speak in the sound of the quiet
waves that ripple round her Southern front, speak in the church-bells on
Sunday morning, and breathe not only in the soft salt air, but in the
perfume of every gentle, old-fashioned rose that blooms behind the
high garden walls of falling mellow-tinted plaster: Kings Port the
retrospective, Kings Port the belated, who from her pensive porticoes
looks over her two rivers to the marshes and the trees beyond, the
live-oaks, veiled in gray moss, brooding with memories! Were she my
city, how I should love her!
But though my city she cannot be, the enchanting image of her is mine

to keep, to carry with me wheresoever I may go; for who, having seen
her, could forget her? Therefore I thank Aunt Carola for this gift, and
for what must always go with it in my mind, the quiet and strange
romance which I saw happen, and came finally to share in. Why it is
that my Aunt no longer wishes to know either the boy or the girl, or
even to hear their names mentioned, you shall learn at the end, when I
have finished with the wedding; for this happy story of love ends with a
wedding, and begins in the Woman's Exchange, which the ladies of
Kings Port have established, and (I