Tripping with the Tucker Twins

What was Dee driving at? Zebedee cross! Had she caught the young man's malady and gone a little off her hooks? Dum and I looked at each other wonderingly – then a light dawned on us: she wanted to get the young man entirely away from this terrible room, and felt if she made him think that he was to go along to protect us from an irate father, he would do it from a sense of chivalry. Having more experience with an irate father than any other kind, Louis was easily persuaded.

"Certainly, if I can be of any assistance!"

"Well, you can! Now let's hurry!"

CHAPTER VIII

TUCKER TACT

It was quite a walk back to the hotel but we did it in an inconceivably short time. It was only 1.10 as we stepped into the lobby. We walked four abreast wherever the sidewalk permitted it and when we had to break ranks we kept close together and chatted as gaily as usual. Louis was very quiet but very courteous. The fresh air brought some color back to his pale cheeks and the redness left his eyes. He was indeed a very handsome youth. He seemed to be in a kind of daze and kept as close to Dee as he could, as though he feared if she left him, he might again find himself in the terrible dream from which she had awakened him.

What was Dee to say to her father? How account for this young man? I was constantly finding out things about the Tuckers that astonished me. The thing that was constantly impressing me was their casualness. On this occasion it was very marked. What father would simply accept a situation as Zebedee did this one? We three girls had gone out in the morning to his certain knowledge knowing not one single person in the whole city, and here we were coming back late to lunch and bringing with us a handsome, excited looking young man and introducing him as though we had known him all our lives.

Mr. Tucker greeted him hospitably and took him to his room while we went to ours to doll up a bit for lunch. He had no opportunity to ask us where we got him or what we meant by picking up forlorn-looking aristocrats and bringing them home to lunch. He just trusted us. To be trusted is one of the greatest incentives in the world to be trustworthy.

Anyone with half an eye could see that Louis Gaillard needed a friend, and could also see that all of us had been under some excitement. Zebedee not only had more than half an eye, but was Argus-eyed. Louis must have been very much astonished at the irate old parent he had been led to expect. Mr. Tucker never looked younger or more genial. He had had a profitable morning himself, digging up political information that he considered most valuable, and now he was through for the day and had planned a delightful afternoon to be spent with us seeing the sights of Charleston.

"Was anyone in all the world ever so wonderful as our Zebedee?" asked Dum as she smoothed her bronze black hair and straightened her collar, getting ready for luncheon.

"I'm so proud of him, but I knew he would do just this way! Not one questioning glance! I know he is on tenter hooks all the time, too. The cat that died of curiosity has got nothing on Zebedee. I tell you, Page, Dum and I will walk into the dining room ahead with Louis and you make out you are expecting a letter and stop at the desk and try to put him wise. He is sure to wait for you."

"All right! But must I tell him everything? It will take time."

"Oh, don't go into detail, but just summarize. Give a synopsis of the morning in a thumb-nail sketch. You can do it."

"I can try."

We found Mr. Tucker and the youth waiting for us in the lobby. The appearance of the guest was much improved by soap and water and a hair brush. Whose appearance is not? We started into the dining room, and as per arrangement I had to go back to the desk. Zebedee of course went with me, and the twins kept on with Louis.

"I know you are not expecting a letter but want to tell me what's up," he whispered.

"Exactly! We were peeping into a garden and overheard the old fat man we saw in the bus this morning telling the pretty daughter that he intended that his son Louis should be a preacher at the Huguenot church here, where they often have a congregation of only six, boasting a membership of forty, many of them out-of-town members. Louis wants to be a landscape gardener, anyhow, to plant gardens, for which he has a great taste, but old Tum Tum thinks that is beneath the dignity of a Gaillard. Claire, the daughter, was very uneasy about Louis, as he seemed despondent. We were ashamed of having listened. Eavesdropping is not our line, but we did it before we knew we were doing it." Zebedee smiled, and I went on talking a mile a minute. "We walked around the Battery and then went into an old deserted hotel, where all the doors were open and all the windows gone. We wandered around and then went upstairs.

"Dee left us and went down a long corridor, where the bedrooms were, and when she got to Number Thirteen she went in and found Louis getting ready to hang himself. The rope was on the chandelier, and he had a pile of bricks to stand on. He was putting the noose on his neck when she opened the door, and then she screamed bloody murder, and we heard her and ran like rabbits until we got to Thirteen, and I knew it was the right door just because it was Thirteen. We found poor Louis crouching down on the floor, and Dee had her arms around him and was treating him just like a poor little sick kitten. He was sobbing to beat the band, and as soon as he could speak, he said: 'Claire must never know!' and then we knew that he was the boy who wanted to plant gardens. Dee called him Louis and talked to him in such a rational way that he pulled himself together. He seemed like some one out of his head, but we chatted away like we always do, and he kind of found himself. Dee asked him to come home to lunch to protect us from your rage at our being late. She knew you wouldn't mind, and she felt that if she put it up to him that way he would think he ought to come. She said you would not give way to anger before strangers. We are mighty proud of you for being so – so – Zebedeeish about the whole thing."

"Two minutes, by the clock!" cried Zebedee, when I stopped for breath. "How I wish I had a reporter who could tell so much in such a short time! I am mighty glad you approve of me, for I certainly approve of my girls. Now we will go in and eat luncheon and Louis shall not know I know a word. I will see what I can do to help him. Gee whiz! That would make a great newspaper story, but I am a father first and then a newspaper man."

We actually got in and were seated at the table before Tweedles and Louis had settled on what to order. Zebedee pretended to be very hungry and to be angry, and only his sense of propriety with a guest present seemed to hold back his rage at being kept waiting. He acted the irate, hungry parent so well that we almost exploded.

Louis ate like a starving man. As is often the case after a great excitement, a desire for food had come to him. His appetite, however, was not so much larger than ours. All of us were hungry, and I am afraid the hotel management did not make much on running their place on the American plan. Wherever there was a choice of viands, we ordered all of them.

"You must know Charleston pretty well, Mr. Gaillard, do you not?" asked our host, when the first pangs of hunger were allayed.

"Know it? I know every stone in it, and love it. But I do wish you would not call me Mr. Gaillard."

"All right, then, Louis! I wonder if you would not show us your wonderful old city this afternoon – that is, all of it we could see in an afternoon. You must not let us take up your time if you are occupied, however."

"I haven't a thing to do. I finished at the high school in February, and have nothing to occupy me until the graduating exercises in June. I'd think it a great honor and privilege to show you and the young ladies all I can about Charleston," and Louis looked his delight at the prospect. "I must let my sister know first, though. She may be wondering where I am."

"'Phone her!" tweedled the twins.

"We haven't a telephone," simply.

No telephone!

We might have known to begin with that such a modern vulgarity as a telephone would not be tolerated in the house belonging to his Eminence of the Tum Tum.

"You have plenty of time to walk down and tell her, and I think it would be very nice if she would consent to come with you. We should be overjoyed to have her join our party," said the ever hospitable Zebedee.

"I should like that above all things if she can come." Of course we knew that the obstacle to her coming would be the old father who would no doubt demand our pedigrees before permitting a member of his family to be seen on the street with us. "Mr. Tucker, I should like to have a few minutes' talk with you when we finish luncheon."

"I am through now, even if these insatiate monsters of mine have ordered pie on top of apple dumpling, so you come on with me, Louis, while they finish. No doubt they will be glad to get rid of us so they can order another help all around."

"What do you reckon he wants to say to Zebedee?" said Dee, biting a comfortable wedge out of her pie, which, in the absence of Zebedee, she picked up in her fingers to eat as pie should be eaten.

"Why, he is going to tell him all about this morning. Don't you see, he feels that maybe your father will not think he is a reliable person or something; anyhow, he is such a gentleman that he knows the proper thing to do is to make a clean breast of his acquaintance with us."

"Well, now, how do you know that?" asked Dum.

"I don't know it. I just imagine it."

"Do you know, Page, I believe you will be an author. You've got so much imagination."

"It is just nothing but thinking what you would do in a person's place provided you had the nature of that person. Now you are high-minded, too; fancy yourself in Louis' place – what would you do?"

"Go tell Zebedee all about it, of course."

"Exactly! So would anyone if he expected to continue the acquaintance begun in such a strange way."

"I want to see Louis before he goes for his sister. You see, we never did tell him how we happened to know his name and all about his affairs. I must tell him that and also let him know that we came up in the bus with his father and sister this morning. He can let her know something about us without divulging the terrible thing that came so near happening at the old hotel." Dee devoured the last morsel of pie and we went to the parlor, where we found Zebedee clasping hands with Louis, who was flushed and shiny-eyed but looked very happy.

"Poor boy!" exclaimed Zebedee to me, as Dee turned to Louis and drew him to a seat by the window. "He has told me the whole thing like the gentleman he is. He says he must have been demented. He has been very nervous lately, and all the time his sister was away his father has nagged him to death, and this morning, evidently after you monkeys listened to the talk in the garden, the old gentleman got him in a corner and pronounced the ultimatum: either law or the ministry. Of course, the ministry is out of the question, and the law means years of waiting, even if he had the money to go to college. He could begin and earn a livelihood tomorrow laying out these gardens and planting them, but the obdurate parent says if he does not obey he will withdraw the light of his countenance."

"I'd say withdraw it; the sooner the better."

"So would I; but I could not give that advice to Louis until I know more about him and his people. I hope the sister can come."

She did come, although I believe she did not inform her father of what she was going to do. She was more than a year younger than her brother, and he was evidently the pride of her heart. I prayed that she might never know the terrible calamity that had come so near to her life. I believe she could never have breathed a happy breath again as long as she lived if that knowledge had been hers.

Louis had just told her some Virginians whom he had met on the Battery – Mr. Tucker, his two daughters and their friend – had made friends with him, and had asked him to accompany them in their sightseeing expedition and had suggested his bringing her. He let drop that we had arrived that morning in the bus, and she immediately concluded that we were her companions in misery on that wet, bumpy drive.

CHAPTER IX

CHURCHYARDS

Graveyards seemed a strange place to want to spend the afternoon after our experience of the morning, but the cheerful Zebedee always made for them, just as a sunbeam seems to be hunting up the dark and gloomy corners.

"Saint Michael's first, as that is the nearest," suggested Louis.

We entered the churchyard through massive old iron gates, and, turning to the right, followed Louis to perhaps the most unique grave stone in the world: the headboard of an old cedar bed. It is a relic of 1770. The story goes that the woman buried there insisted that her husband should go to no trouble or expense to mark her grave. She said that she had been very comfortable in that same bed and would rest very easy under it and that it would soon rot away and leave her undisturbed. She little dreamed that more than a century later that old cedar bed would be preserved, seemingly in some miraculous way, and be intact while stones, reverently placed at the same time, were crumbling away.

"It seems like John Keats' epitaph: 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water.' Keats thought he was dead to the world, and see how he lives; and this poor woman's grave is the first one that tourists are taken to see," I mused aloud.

"I have often thought about this woman," said Claire, in her light, musical voice. "I have an idea that she must have been very hard-worked and perhaps longed for a few more minutes in bed every morning, and maybe the husband routed her out, and when she died perhaps he felt sorry he had not given her more rest."

"You hear that, Page?" asked Dum. "You had better have some mercy on me now. I may 'shuffle off this mortal coil' at any minute, and you will be so sorry you didn't let me sleep just a little while longer." (It had been my job ever since I started to room with the Tucker twins to be the waker-up. It was a thankless job, too, and no sinecure.) "See that my little brass bed is kept shiny, Zebedee dear."

"I wonder why it is that no one ever seems to feel very sad or quiet in old, old graveyards?" I asked, all of us laughing at Dum's brass bed.

"I think it is because all the persons who suffered at the death of the persons buried there are dead, too. No one feels very sorry for the dead; it is the living that are left to mourn. Old cemeteries are to me the most peaceful and cheerful spots one can visit," said Zebedee, leaning over to decipher some quaint epitaph.

"I think so, too!" exclaimed Claire, who had fitted herself into our crowd with delightful ease. "New graves are the ones that break my heart."

Louis turned away to hide his emotion. He had been too near to the Great Divide that very morning for talk of new-made graves and the sorrow of loved ones not to move him.

There was much of interest in that old burying ground, and Louis proved an excellent cicerone. He told us that the church was started in 1752; that the bells and organ and clock were imported from England, and that the present organ had parts of the old organ incorporated in it. The bells were seized during the Revolution and shipped and sold in England, where they were purchased by a former Charleston merchant and shipped back again. During the Civil War they were sent to Columbia for safekeeping, but were so badly injured when Columbia was burned that they had to be again sent to England and recast in the original mold. They chimed out the hour while Louis was telling us about them as though to prove to us their being well worth all the trouble to which they had put the worthy citizens of Charleston.

"Saint Philip's next, while we are in the churchly spirit," said Louis; "and then the Huguenot church."

St. Philip's was a little older than St. Michael's. The chimes for that church were used for making cannon for the Confederacy, and for lack of funds up to the present time they have not been replaced. On top of the high steeple is a beacon light by which the ships find their way into the harbor.

We had noticed at the hotel, both at our very early breakfast and at luncheon, a very charming couple who had attracted us greatly and who, in turn, seemed interested in us. The man was a scholarly person with kind, brown eyes, a very intelligent, comely countenance, and a tendency to baldness right on top that rather added to his intellectual appearance. His wife was quite pretty, young, and with a look of race and breeding that was most striking. Her hair was red gold, and she had perhaps the sweetest blue eyes I had ever beheld. Her eyes just matched her blue linen shirtwaist. What had attracted me to the couple was not only their interesting appearance, but the fact that they seemed to have such a good time together. They talked not in the perfunctory way that married persons often do, but with real spirit and interest.

As we entered the cemetery of St. Philip's, across the street from the church, we met this couple standing by the sarcophagus of the great John C. Calhoun. The lady bowed to us sweetly, acknowledging, as it were, having seen us in the hotel. We of course eagerly responded, delighted at the encounter. We had discussed them at length, and almost decided they were bride and groom; at least Tweedles had, but I thought not. They were too much at their ease to be on their first trip together, I declared, and of course got called a would-be author for my assertion.

"I hear there is a wonderful portrait of Calhoun by Healy in the City Hall," said the gentleman to Zebedee, as he courteously moved for us to read the inscription on the sarcophagus.

"Yes, so I am told, but this young man who belongs to this interesting city can tell us more about it," and in a little while all of us were drawn into conversation with our chance acquaintances.

Louis led us through the cemetery, telling us anything of note, and then we followed him to the Huguenot church, accompanied by our new friends.

A Huguenot church has stood on the site of the present one since 1667. Many things have happened to the different buildings, but the present one, an edifice of unusual beauty and dignity, has remained intact since 1845. The preacher, a dear old man of over eighty, who is totally blind, has been pastor of this scanty flock for almost fifty years. He now conducts the service from memory, and preaches wonderful, simple sermons straight from his kind old heart.

"Oh, Edwin, see what wonderful old names are on these tablets," enthused the young wife – "Mazyck, Ravenel, Porcher, de Sasure, Huger, Cazanove, L'Hommedieu, Marquand, Gaillard – "

"Yes, dear, they sound like an echo from the Old World."

"This Gaillard is our great, great grandfather, isn't he, Louis?" asked Claire. "My brother knows so much more about such things than I do."

"Oh, is your name Gaillard?"

And then the introductions followed, Zebedee doing the honors, naming all of us in turn; and then the gentleman told us that his name was Edwin Green and introduced his wife.

I fancy Claire and Louis had not been in the habit of picking up acquaintances in this haphazard style, and the sensation was a new and delightful one to them. The Tuckers and I always did it. We talked to the people we met on trains and in parks, and many an item for my notebook did I get in this way. Zebedee says he thinks it is all right just so you don't pick out some flashy flatterer. Of course we never did that, but confined our chance acquaintances to women and children or nice old men, whose interest was purely fatherly. Making friends as we had with Louis was different, as there was nothing to do but help him; and his sex and age were not to be considered at such a time.

"Are you to be in Charleston long?" asked Zebedee of Mr. Green.

"I can't tell. We are fascinated by it, but long to get out of the hotel and into some home."

"If I knew of some nice quiet place, I would put my girls there for a few days while I run over to Columbia on business. I can't leave them alone in the hotel."

"I should love to look after them, if you would trust me," said Mrs. Green, flushing for fear Zebedee might think her pushing.

"Trust you! Why, you are too kind to make such an offer!" exclaimed Zebedee.

"We have some friends who have just opened their house for – for – guests," faltered Claire. "They live only a block from us, and are very lovely ladies. We heard only this morning that they are contemplating taking someone into their home." Tweedles and I exchanged glances; mine was a triumphant one. The would-be author had hit the nail on the head again. "Their name is Laurens." I knew it would be before Claire spoke.

"Oh, Miss Gaillard, if you could introduce us to those ladies we would be so grateful to you!" said Zebedee. "You would like to stay there, wouldn't you, girls?"

"Yes! Yes!"

"And Mrs. Green perhaps will decide to go there, too, and she will look after you, will you not, Mrs. Green?"

"I should be so happy to if the girls would like to have me for a chaperone."

"Oh, we'd love it! We've never had a chaperone in our lives but once, and she got married," tweedled the twins.

And so our compact was made, and Claire promised to see the Misses Laurens in regard to our becoming her "paying guests."

Mr. Green, who, as we found out afterward, was a professor of English at the College of Wellington and had all kinds of degrees that entitled him to be called Doctor, seemed rather amused at his wife's being a chaperone.

"She seems to me still to be nothing but a girl herself," he confided to Zebedee, "although we have got a fine big girl of our own over a year old, whom we have left in the care of my mother-in-law while we have this much talked-of trip together."

"Oh, have you got a baby? Do you know, Dum and I just stood Page down that you were bride and groom!"

"Molly, do you hear that? These young ladies thought we were newlyweds."

"I didn't!"

"And why didn't you?" smiled the young wife.

"I noticed you gave separate orders at the table and did not have to pretend to like the same things. I believe a bride and groom are afraid to differ on even such a thing as food."

"Oh, Edwin, do you hear that? Do you remember the unmerciful teasing Kent gave you at Fontainbleu because you pretended to like the mustard we got on our roast beef in the little English restaurant, just because I like English mustard?"

"Yes, I remember it very well, and I also remember lots of other things at Fontainbleu besides the mustard."

Mrs. Green blushed such a lovely pink at her husband's words that we longed to hear what he did remember.

"Kent is my brother – Kent Brown."

"Oh! Oh!" tweedled the twins. "Are you Molly Brown of Kentucky?"

"Yes, I was Molly Brown of Kentucky."

"And did you go to Wellington?" I asked.

"Yes, and I still go there, as my husband has the chair of English at Wellington."

"Girls! Girls! To think of our meeting Molly Brown of Kentucky! We have been hearing of you all winter from our teacher of English at Gresham, Miss Ball."

"Mattie Ball! I have known her since my freshman year at college. Edwin, you remember Mattie Ball, do you not?"

"Of course I do. An excellent student! She had as keen an appreciation of good literature as anyone I know of."

"She used to tell us that she owed everything she knew to her professor of English at Wellington," said Dee, who knew how to say the right thing at the right time, and Professor Green's pleased countenance was proof of her tact.

Then Mrs. Green had to hear all about Miss Ball and the fire at Gresham, which Tweedles related with great spirit, laying rather too much stress on my bravery in arousing the school.

"I deserve no more credit than did the geese whose hissing aroused the Romans in ancient times," I declared. "Why don't you tell them how you got Miss Plympton out of the window in her pink pajamas?"

The Greens laughed so heartily at our adventures that we were spurred on to recounting other happenings, telling of the many scrapes we had got ourselves in. Claire listened in open-eyed astonishment.

"It must be lovely to go to boarding-school," she said wistfully.