Next afternoon, while Hawkins, by request, draped
Andrew Jackson’s portrait with crape, the rightful
earl, wrote off the family bereavement to the usurper
in England—a letter which we have already
read. He also, by letter to the village authorities
at Duffy’s Corners, Arkansas, gave order that
the remains of the late twins be embalmed by some St.
Louis expert and shipped at once to the usurper—with
bill. Then he drafted out the Rossmore arms
and motto on a great sheet of brown paper, and he
and Hawkins took it to Hawkins’s Yankee furniture-mender
and at the end of an hour came back with a couple
of stunning hatchments, which they nailed up on the
front of the house—attractions calculated
to draw, and they did; for it was mainly an idle and
shiftless negro neighborhood, with plenty of ragged
children and indolent dogs to spare for a point of
interest like that, and keep on sparing them for it,
days and days together.
The new earl found—without surprise—this
society item in the evening paper, and cut it out
and scrapbooked it:
By a recent bereavement our esteemed
fellow citizen, Colonel Mulberry Sellers, Perpetual
Member-at-large of the Diplomatic Body, succeeds,
as rightful lord, to the great earldom of Rossmore,
third by order of precedence in the earldoms
of Great Britain, and will take early measures,
by suit in the House of Lords, to wrest the title
and estates from the present usurping holder of them.
Until the season of mourning is past, the usual
Thursday evening receptions at Rossmore Towers
will be discontinued.
Lady Rossmore’s comment-to herself:
“Receptions! People who don’t rightly
know him may think he is commonplace, but to my mind
he is one of the most unusual men I ever saw.
As for suddenness and capacity in imagining things,
his beat don’t exist, I reckon. As like
as not it wouldn’t have occurred to anybody else
to name this poor old rat-trap Rossmore Towers, but
it just comes natural to him. Well, no doubt
it’s a blessed thing to have an imagination that
can always make you satisfied, no matter how you are
fixed. Uncle Dave Hopkins used to always say,
’Turn me into John Calvin, and I want to know
which place I’m going to; turn me into Mulberry
Sellers and I don’t care.’”
The rightful earl’s comment-to himself:
“It’s a beautiful name, beautiful.
Pity I didn’t think of it before I wrote the
usurper. But I’ll be ready for him when
he answers.”
CHAPTER V.
No answer to that telegram; no arriving daughter.
Yet nobody showed any uneasiness or seemed surprised;
that is, nobody but Washington. After three
days of waiting, he asked Lady Rossmore what she supposed
the trouble was. She answered, tranquilly:
“Oh, it’s some notion of hers, you never
can tell. She’s a Sellers, all through—at
least in some of her ways; and a Sellers can’t
tell you beforehand what he’s going to do, because
he don’t know himself till he’s done it.
She’s all right; no occasion to worry about
her. When she’s ready she’ll come
or she’ll write, and you can’t tell which,
till it’s happened.”
Copyrights
The American Claimant from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.
