A lion had risen in the path. To be more accurate, a lioness. To my unsuccessful rôle of Horatius, a Horatia better fitted for the fray had succeeded, in the austere and superb person of Madame Rachel Pinckney Pemberton Tallafferr, aforetime of the sovereign State of Virginia.
Where all my eloquence had failed, she checked that joyously anticipative rabble by the simple query, set in the chillest and most peremptory of aristocratic tones, as to what they were doing.
I like to think--the Bonnie Lassie says that I am flattering myself thereby--that it was the momentary halt caused by my abortive effort to hold the gate, which gave time for a greater than my humble self to intervene.
Madame Tallafferr, in the glory of black silk, the Pinckney lace, the Pemberton diamond, and accompanied by that fat relic of slavery, Black Sally, had been taking the air genteelly on a bench when the disturbance grated upon her sensitive ear.
"What is that rabble about, Sally?" she inquired.
The aged negress reconnoitered. "Reckon dey's ridin' a gentmun on a rail," she reported.
"A _gentleman_, Sally? Impossible. No gentleman would endure such an affront. Look again."
"Yessum. It's dat po' white trash dey call Plooie. Mainded yo' umbrella oncet."
"My umbrella-mender!" (The mere fact that the victim had once tinkered for her a decrepit parasol entitled him in her feudal mind to the high protection of the Tallafferr tradition.) "Tell them to desist at once."
Apologetically but shrewdly Sally opined that the neighborhood of the advancing mob was "no place foh a niggah."
With perfect faith in the powers of her superior she added: "You desist 'em, mist'ess."
Sally's confidence in her mistress was equaled or perhaps even excelled by her mistress's confidence in herself.
Leaning upon her cane and attended by the faithful though terrified servitor, Madame Tallafferr rustled forward. She took her stand upon the brink of the fountain in almost the exact spot where she had disarmed MacLachan, the tailor, drunk, songful, and suicidal, two years before. Since that feat an almost mythologic awe had attached itself to her locally.
She waited, small and thin, hawk-eyed, imperious, and tempered like steel. The ring of tempered steel, too, was in her voice when, at the proper moment, she raised it.