“And in the morning, behold” the kindly L-------- smiling upon her guests, and remarking: “Dat was a real big drunk you all having on the veràndah, after I gone to bed!”
“Good heavens, L--------!” exclaims Mrs. New England, pale with horror, “what do you mean?”
“Surely, Mrs. L--------, you do not suppose for an instant any of our party were--I can hardly say it!” expostulates a delicate-looking minister from the Southern States, here for his lungs, who was very prominent last night in arguing Ireland’s right to “secede” if she liked.
“That’s a good one, I must say,” remarks John Bull, rather indignantly.
But L-------- only smiles on. She is always smiling.
“Dat don’t go, Mr. ----------” she says pleasantly. “I couldn’t sleep last night, for the way you all kicking up, and the girl, she say you fighting. Madame ---------- she trying to kill Mr. Bull, all the gentlemen smashing the leg of the chairs, the lady scream--and dis mornin’, I findin’ a large whisky bottle, all drunk up.”
I am privately choking with laughter in a corner, but I cannot help feeling sorry for Mrs. New England, who really looks as if about to faint.
“_I_ don’ mind!” declares L-------- delightedly. “Why, I been thinking all dis time you haven’t been enjoyin’ yourself at all. I like every one here they having a real good time. Every one,” she smiles--and melts away into the soft gloom of the drawing-room, where she sits down, and begins to play softly thrumming, strangely intoxicating Tahitian dance music on the piano.
“_Elle est impayable!_” says the Frenchwoman, shrugging her shoulders. “From all I hear of Tahiti, my dear friends, I think you shall find yourselves without a chiffon of character to-morrow.... But courage! it is a thing here the most superfluous.”
Madame was a true prophet, I have reason to know; for many months after, the story of the orgy, held on L--------‘s verandah by the English and French and American ladies and gentlemen, reached me in a remote corner of the Pacific, as “the latest from Papeete.” What I wanted to know, and what I never shall know, for my boat came in next day, and took me away to Raratonga--was whether the minister from the South eventually died of the shock or not. I do not want to know about the lady from New England, because I am quite certain she did--as certain as I am that I should have, myself, and did not.