Chapter LXXVIII

“You have a noble place here,” said a gentleman to Ruth’s brother, Hyacinth, as he seated himself on the piazza, and his eye lingered first upon the velvet lawn, (with its little clumps of trees) sloping down to the river, then upon the feathery willows now dipping their light green branches playfully into the water, then tossing them gleefully up to the sunlight; “a noble place,” said he, as he marked the hazy outline of the cliffs on the opposite side, and the blue river which laved their base, flecked with many a snowy sail; “it were treason not to be poetical here; I should catch the infection myself, matter-of-fact as I am.”

“Do you see that steamer yonder, floating down the river, Lewis?” said Hyacinth. “Do you know her? No? well she is named ‘Floy,’ after my sister, by one of her literary admirers.”

“The ——! your sister? ‘Floy’—your sister! why, everybody is going mad to know who she is.”

“Exactly,” replied Hyacinth, running his white fingers through his curls; “‘Floy’ is my sister.”

“Why the deuce didn’t you tell a fellow before? I have wasted more pens, ink, and breath, trying to find her out, than I can stop to tell you about now, and here you have kept as mum as a mouse all the time. What did you do it for?”

“Oh, well,” said Hyacinth, coloring a little, “‘Floy’ had an odd fancy for being incog., and I, being in her confidence, you know, was on honor to keep her secret.”

“But she still wishes it kept,” said Lewis; “so her publishers, whom I have vainly pumped, tell me. So, as far as that goes, I don’t see why you could not have told me before just as well as now.”

Hyacinth very suddenly became aware of “an odd craft in the river,” and was apparently intensely absorbed looking at it through his spy-glass.

“Hyacinth! I say, Hyacinth!” said the pertinacious Lewis, “I believe, after all, you are humbugging me. How can she be your sister? Here’s a paragraph in —— Sentinel, saying—” and Lewis drew the paper from his pocket, unfolded it, and put on his glasses with distressing deliberation: “‘We understand that “Floy,” the new literary star, was in very destitute circumstances when she first solicited the patronage of the public; often wandering from one editorial office to another in search of employment, while wanting the commonest necessaries of life.’ There, now, how can that be if she is ‘your sister’? and you an editor, too, always patronizing some new contributor with a flourish of trumpets? Pooh, man! you are hoaxing;” and Lewis jogged him again by the elbow.

“Beg your pardon, my dear boy,” said Hyacinth, blandly, “but ’pon my honor, I haven’t heard a word you were saying, I was so intent upon making out that craft down the river. I’m a little afraid of that fog coming up, Lewis; suppose we join Mrs. Ellet in the drawing-room.”

“Odd—very odd,” soliloquized Lewis. “I’ll try him again.—

“Did you read the panegyric on ‘Floy’ in ‘The Inquisitor’ of this morning?” said Lewis. “That paper, you know, is decidedly the highest literary authority in the country. It pronounces ‘Floy’s’ book to be an ‘unquestionable work of genius.’”

“Yes,” replied Hyacinth, “I saw it. It is a great thing, Lewis, for a young writer to be literarily connected;” and Hyacinth pulled up his shirt-collar.

“But I understood you just now that nobody knew she was your sister, when she first published the pieces that are now collected in that book,” said Lewis, with his characteristic pertinacity.

“There’s that craft again,” said Hyacinth; “can’t you make her out, Lewis?”

“No—by Jove,” replied Lewis, sarcastically; “I can’t make anything out. I never was so be-fogged in my life;” and he bent a penetrating glance on the masked face before him. “It is past my finding out, at least just now; but I’ve a Yankee tongue in my head, so I don’t despair, with time and perseverance;” and Lewis followed Hyacinth into the house.

“Confounded disagreeable fellow,” soliloquized Hyacinth, as he handed him over to a knot of ladies in the drawing-room; “very awkward that paragraph; I wish I had the fellow who wrote it, at pistol-shot distance just now; well, if I am badgered on the subject of ‘Floy’s’ poverty, I shall start a paragraph saying, that the story is only a publisher’s trick to make her book sell; by Jove, they don’t corner me; I have got out of worse scrapes than that before now, by the help of my wits and the lawyers, but I don’t think a paper of any influence would attack me on that point; I have taken care to secure all the more prominent ones, long ago, by judicious puffs of their editors in the Irving Magazine. The only one I fear is the ——, and I will lay an anchor to windward there this very week, by praising the editor’s last stupid editorial. What an unmitigated donkey that fellow is.”