Page:Frank Stockton--Adventures of Captain Horn.djvu/216

ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN HORN would have had if her affairs in Valparaiso had been satisfactorily settled.

Edna and Ralph had come to be looked upon at the Palmetto Hotel as persons of distinction. They lived quietly, but they lived well, and their payments were always prompt. They were the wife and brother-in-law of Captain Philip Horn, who was known to be a successful man, and who might be a rich one. But what seemed more than anything else to distinguish them from the ordinary hotel guests was the fact that they were attended by two personal servants, who, although, of course, they could not be slaves, seemed to be bound to them as if they had been born into their service.

Cheditafa, in a highly respectable suit of clothes which might have been a cross between the habiliments of a Methodist minister and those of a butler, was a person of imposing aspect. Mrs. Cliff had insisted, when his new clothes were ordered, that there should be something in them which should indicate the clergyman, for the time might come when it would be necessary that he should be known in this character; and the butler element was added because it would harmonize in a degree with his duties as Edna's private attendant. The old negro, with his sober face, and woolly hair slightly touched with gray, was fully aware of the importance of his position as body-servant to Mrs. Horn, but his sense of the responsibility of that position far exceeded any other sentiments of which his mind was capable. Perhaps it was the fact that he had made Edna Mrs. Horn which gave him the feeling that he must never cease to watch over her and to serve her in every 202