The Uncle of an Angel 1891

When Mr. Hutchinson. Port, a single gentleman who admitted that he was forty-seven years old and who actually was rising sixty, of strongly fixed personal habits, and with the most positive opinions upon every conceivable subject, came to know that by the death of his widowed sister he had been placed in the position of guardian of that sister’s only daughter, Dorothy, his promptly formed and tersely expressed conception of the situation was that the agency by which it had been brought about was distinctively diabolical. The fact may be added that during the subsequent brief term of his guardianship Mr. Port found no more reason for reversing this hastily formed opinion than did the late King David for reversing his hastily expressed views in regard to the general tendency of mankind towards untruthfulness.

The two redeeming features of Mr. Port’s trying situation were that his duties as a guardian did not begin at all until his very unnecessary ward was nearly nineteen years old; and did not begin actively--his ward having elected to remain in France for a season, under the mild direction of the elderly cousin who had been her mother’s travelling companion--until she was almost twenty. When she was one-and-twenty, as Mr. Port reflected with much satisfaction, he would be rid of her.

Neither by nature nor by education had Mr. Hutchinson Port been fitted to discharge the duties which thus were thrust upon him. His disposition was introspective--but less in a philosophical sense than a physiological, for the central point of his introspection was his liver. That he made something of a fetich of this organ will not appear surprising when the fact is stated that Mr. Port was a Philadelphian. In that city of eminent good cheer livers are developed to a degree that only Strasburg can emulate.

Naturally, Mr. Port’s views of life were bounded, more or less, by what he could eat with impunity; yet beyond this somewhat contracted region his thoughts strayed pleasantly afield into the far wider region of the things which he could not eat with impunity; but which, with a truly Spartan epicureanism, he did eat--and bravely accepted the bilious consequences! The slightly anxious, yet determined, expression that would appear upon Mr. Port’s cleanshaven, ruddy countenance as he settled himself to the discussion of an especially good and especially dangerous dinner betrayed heroic possibilities in his nature which, being otherwise directed, would have won for him glory upon the martial field.

In minor matters--that is to say, in all relations of life not pertaining to eating--Mr. Port was very much what was to be expected of him from his birth and from his environment. Every Sunday, with an exemplary piety, he sat solitary in the great square pew in St. Peter’s which had been occupied by successive generations of Ports ever since the year 1761, when the existing church was completed. Every other day of the week, from his late breakfast-time for some hours onward, he sat at his own particular window of the Philadelphia Club and contemplated disparagingly the outside world over the top of his magazine or newspaper. At four, precisely, for his liver’s sake, he rode in the Park; and for so stout a gentleman Mr. Port was an excellent horseman.

On rare occasions he dined at his club. Usually, he dined out; for while generally regarded as a very disagreeable person at dinners--because of his habit of finding fault with his food on the dual ground of hygiene and quality--he was in social demand because his presence at a dinner was a sure indication that the giver of it had a good culinary reputation; and in Philadelphia such a reputation is most highly prized. An irrelevant New York person, after meeting Mr. Port at several of the serious dinnerparties peculiar to Philadelphia, had described him as the animated skeleton; and had supplemented this discourteous remark with the still more discourteous observation that as a feature of a feast the Egyptian article was to be preferred--because it did not overeat itself, and did keep its mouth shut. However, Mr. Port’s obvious rotundity destroyed what little point was to be found in this meagre witticism; and, if it had not, the fact is well-known in Philadelphia that New Yorkers, being descended not from an honorable Quaker ancestry but from successful operations in Wall Street, are not to be held accountable for their unfortunate but unavoidable manifestations of a frivolity at once inelegant and indecorous.

In regard to his summers, Mr. Port--after a month spent for the good of his liver in taking the waters at the White Sulphur--of course went to Narragan-sett Pier. It may be accepted as an incontrovertible truth that a Philadelphian of a certain class who missed coming to the Pier for August would refuse to believe, for that year at least, in the alternation of the four seasons; while an enforced absence from that damply delightful watering-place for two successive summers very probably would lead to a rejection of the entire Copernican system.

II.

“Poor dear mamma and I did not have a harsh word for years, Uncle Hutchinson,” Miss Lee explained, in the course of the somewhat animated discussion that arose in consequence of Mr. Port’s declaration that a part of their summer would be passed, in accordance with his usual custom, at the White Sulphur, and of Dorothy’s declaration that she did not want to go there. This, her first summer in America, was the third summer after Mrs. Lee’s translation; and since Dorothy had come into colors again she naturally wanted to make the most of them. “No, not a single harsh word did we ever have. We always agreed perfectly, you know; or if mamma thought differently at first she always ended by seeing that my view of the matter was the right one. The only serious difference that I remember since I was quite a little girl was that last autumn in Paris; when I had everything so perfectly arranged for a delightful winter in St. Petersburg, and when mamma was completely set in her own mind that we must go to the south of France. Her cough was getting very bad then, you know, and she said that a winter in Russia certainly would kill her. I don’t think it would have killed her, at least not especially; but the doctor backed mamma up--and said some horrid things to me in his polite French way--and declared that St. Petersburg was not even to be thought of.

“And so, when I found that they were both against me that way, of course I sacrificed my own feelings and told mamma that I would do just what she wanted. And mamma cried and kissed me, and said that I was an angel: wasn’t it sweet of her? To be sure, though, she was having her own way, and I wasn’t; and I think that I was an angel myself, for I did want to go to Russia dreadfully. After all, as things turned out, we might almost as well have gone; for poor dear mamma, you know, died that winter anyway. But I’m glad I did what I could to please her, and that she called me an angel for doing it. Don’t you think that I was one? And don’t you feel, sir, that it is something of an honor to be an angel’s uncle?

“Now suppose I kiss you right on your dear little bald spot, and that we make up our minds not to go to that horrid sulphur place at all. Everybody says that it is old-fashioned and stupid; and that is not the kind of an American watering-place that I want to see, you know. It would have been all very well if we’d gone there while I was in mourning, and had to be proper and quiet and retired, and all that; but I’m not in mourning any longer, Uncle Hutchinson--and you haven’t said yet how you like this breakfast gown. Do you have to be told that white lace over pale-blue silk is very becoming to your angel niece, Uncle Hutchinson? And now you shall have your kiss, and then the matter will be settled.” With which words Miss Lee--a somewhat bewildering but unquestionably delightful effect in blond and blue--fluttered up to her elderly relative, embraced him with a graceful energy, and bestowed upon his bald spot the promised kiss.

“But--but indeed, my dear,” responded Mr. Port, when he had emerged from Miss Lee’s enfolding arms, “you know that going to the White Sulphur is not a mere matter of pleasure with me; it is one of hygienic necessity. You forget, Dorothy”--Mr. Port spoke with a most earnest seriousness--“you forget my liver.”

“Now, Uncle Hutchinson, what is the use of talking about your liver that way? Haven’t you told me a great many times already that it is an hereditary liver, and that nothing you can do to it ever will make it go right? And if it is bound to go wrong anyway, why can’t you just try to forget all about it and have as pleasant a time as possible? That’s the doctrine that I always preached to poor dear mamma--she had an hereditary liver too, you know--and it’s a very good one.

“Anyhow, I’ve heard mamma say countless times that Saratoga was a wonderfully good place for livers; now why can’t we go there? Mamma always said that Saratoga was simply delightful--horse-racing going on all the time, and lovely drives, and rowing on the lake, and dancing all night long, and all sorts of lovely things. Let’s go to Saratoga, Uncle Hutchinson! Mamma said that the food there was delicious--and you know you always are grumbling about the food those sulphur people give you.

“But what really would be best of all for you, Uncle Hutchinson,” Miss Lee continued, with increasing animation, “is Carlsbad. Yes, that’s what you really want--and while you are drinking the horrid waters I can be having a nice time, you know. Then, when you have finished your course, we can take a run into Switzerland; and after that, in the autumn, we might go over to Vienna--you will be delighted with the Vienna restaurants, and they do have such good white wines there. And then, from Vienna, we really can go on and have a winter in Russia. Just think how perfectly delightful it will be to drive about in sledges, all wrapped up in furs”--Mr. Port shuddered; he detested cold weather--“and to go to the court balls, and even, perhaps, to be present the next time they assassinate the Czar! Oh, what a good time we are going to have! Do write at once, this very day, Uncle Hutchinson, to Carlsbad and engage our rooms.”

To a person of Mr. Port’s staid, deliberate temperament this rapid outlining of a year of foreign travel, and this prompt assumption that the outline was to be immediately filled in and made a reality, was upsetting. His mental processes were of the Philadelphia sort, and when Miss Lee had completed the sketch of her European project he still was engaged in consideration of her argument in favor of throwing over the White Sulphur for Saratoga. However, he had comprehended enough of her larger plan to perceive that by accepting Saratoga promptly he might be spared the necessity of combating a far more serious assault upon his peace of mind and digestion. Travel of any sort was loathsome to Mr. Port, for it involved much hasty and inconsiderate eating.