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Title: Golden Fleece: The American Adventures of a Fortune Hunting Earl

Author: David Graham Phillips

Illustrator: Harrison Fisher

Release date: January 15, 2021 [eBook #64301]

Language: English

Credits: D A Alexander, David E. Brown, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK GOLDEN FLEECE: THE AMERICAN ADVENTURES OF A FORTUNE HUNTING EARL ***




GOLDEN FLEECE




OTHER BOOKS BY DAVID GRAHAM PHILLIPS

[Illustration]


_The Great God Success_, _Her Serene Highness_, _A Woman Ventures_


[Illustration: _The three descended the grand stairway rapidly_]




  _GOLDEN FLEECE_

  _The American Adventures of a
  Fortune Hunting Earl_

  _By_

  _David Graham Phillips_

  [Illustration]


  _Illustrations by Harrison Fisher_

  [Illustration]

  _McClure, Phillips & Co._
  _New York_
  _1903_


  COPYRIGHT, 1903, BY
  McCLURE, PHILLIPS & CO.

  COPYRIGHT, 1903, BY CURTIS PUBLISHING CO.

  Published, April, 1903, R




ILLUSTRATIONS


                                                                  Facing
                                                                    page

  The three descended the grand stairway rapidly  _Frontispiece_

  A strongly-built, fairish young man of perhaps six and thirty        4

  “My name is Longview”                                               16

  Barney half a dozen chairs away glowering at Longview               26

  He liked the very first glimpse of her                              46

  “As if we were a pair of new chimpanzees in a zoo”                  70

  “Just my rotten luck,” he muttered                                  90

  “Then you’re not a Buddhist or a Spiritualist?”                    130

  “Forgive me--it was all my fault--yet not mine--good-bye--”        164

  Cosimo, Prince di Rontivogli                                       200

  “I can imagine many extenuating circumstances”                     224

  “I’ll give the guinea one more chance”                             230

  Found Nelly alone in the front parlour                             258

  “You may _ask_, sir, but I’ll not answer”                          284

  As soon as her father and mother were out of the way               296

  “I take to it like a duck to water”                                314




GOLDEN FLEECE




I


Two hours after Surrey’s letter came his sister Gwen rode over to
Beauvais House eager to tell Evelyn the news of his luck in America.
It was almost five o’clock in the beautiful autumn afternoon, and she
found Evelyn at tea on the porch that looks out upon the Italian garden.

“It’s settled,” she said. “They’re to be married on the 5th of
November--only two months! And George says she is sweet and lovely--not
at all like the Americans we know. And her dot is a million and a
half--he calls it seven and a half, but he means in their money, which
sounds bigger, but counts smaller, than ours. She’ll get twice that
when her father dies--and he’s nearly seventy and not strong. And I’m
so glad and so sorry that I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”

“What’s her name? You told me, but I forget.” Evelyn’s hand was
trembling just a little as she gave Gwendoline a cup of tea. She spoke
slowly, in the clear, monotonous, but agreeable, English tone. Her
voice, always calm, seemed stagnant.

“Dowie--Helen Dowie. He sent me a proof of a photograph they had taken
together.” Gwendoline took a letter from the bosom of her shirtwaist,
drew from it the proof, and handed it to Evelyn. She took it, lowered
her head so that Gwen could not see her face. She looked long and
intently, and, if Gwen had seen, she would have wondered how eyes could
be so full of tears without shedding a single one.

“Quite aristocratic,” she said at last, giving it back. “How much style
those American girls have!”

“But don’t you think her rather pert-looking?” asked Gwen
discontentedly. “She looks ill-tempered, too. I’m sure we sha’n’t get
on. Mother and I are making ready to go to Houghton Abbey at once. We’d
have a jolly uncomfortable time of it, I wager, if she were to catch us
at the Hall.”

Evelyn was gazing into her tea and stirring it absently.

“It seems a shame to have an American nobody come in,” continued Gwen,
“and throw us out neck and crop from a house where we’ve always lived.
Now, if it were an English girl of our own class,--you, Evelyn,--we
shouldn’t mind--at least, not so much, or in the same way.”

Evelyn paled, and her lips contracted slightly.

“But it’s of no use to think of that. We need her money--everything is
in tatters at the Hall, and poor George is down to the last seventy
pounds.” Gwen laughed. “Do you remember what a time there was getting
the five hundred for his expenses out of Aunt Betty? We’ve got to cable
him another five hundred--he can’t begin on her money the very minute
he’s married, can he now?”

“Arthur must go over,” said Evelyn suddenly, with conviction.
“We’re worse off than you are. Old Bagley was down yesterday. He
and Arthur were shut in for two hours, and Arthur’s been off his
feed--horribly--ever since.”

Gwen, two years younger than Evelyn, could not conceal her feelings so
well. She winced, and a look of terror came into her big blue eyes.

“We can’t hold on another year,” continued Evelyn. “And it’s quite
impossible for Arthur to take Miss Cadbrough. She’s too hideous, and
too hideously, hopelessly middle-class. She could never, never learn
not to speak to ladies and gentlemen as if she were a servant.”

Evelyn pretended not to notice Gwen’s unhappiness. She glanced in
at the great drawing room, with splendid furniture, and ceiling
wonderfully carved by a seventeenth-century Italian. Then her eyes
wandered away to the left, to the majestic wing showing there, then on
to the brilliant gardens, the fountains and statuary. Her expression
became bitter. “And we’ve been undisturbed for nine centuries!” she
exclaimed.

Gwen, in spite of her inward tumult, remembered that this boast was
rather “tall,” that the Beauvais family had, in fact, been changed
radically several times, and only the name had been undisturbed. Her
mind paused with a certain satisfaction on these little genealogical
discrepancies, because, though she was the sister and the daughter of a
duke, she was the granddaughter of a brewer, who had begun life as an
apprentice.

“George wishes Arthur to go over to the wedding,” she said reluctantly,
after a silence.

[Illustration: _A strongly-built, fairish young man of perhaps six and
thirty_]

A servant appeared--his gaudy livery was almost shabby, but his manners
were most dignified, and his hair was impressively--or ridiculously,
if you please--plastered and streaked with powder. “His Lordship says
he will have tea in his study, Your Ladyship.”

“Please tell him that Lady Gwendoline Ridley is here,” said Evelyn.

A few minutes later, a strongly-built, fairish young man of perhaps six
and thirty came lounging out upon the porch. He had pleasing, but far
from handsome, features--a chin that was too long, and hung weakly,
instead of strongly, forward; uncertain blue eyes, with a network
of the wrinkles of dissipation at the corners. A large, frameless,
stringless monocle was wedged, apparently permanently, into the angle
of his right eye-socket. He was dressed in shabby light grey flannels,
and he looked as seedy as his clothes. He shook hands with Gwen.
“Thanks. No tea. I’m taking whiskey,” he said to Evelyn. And he seated
himself sprawlingly. The servant brought his whiskey and a note for his
sister.

“Is the man waiting for an answer?” she asked, when she had read it.

“Yes, your ladyship.” She left her brother and Gwen alone.

“George is marrying the heiress,” Gwen began.

“So he wrote me,” replied Frothingham sullenly.

“Evelyn says you must go and do likewise.”

He scowled. “But I’d rather stay here and marry you.”

“Don’t be silly,” said Gwen, with a shrug of her athletic young
shoulders. “You’ve got nothing. I’ve got nothing. So--you must do your
duty.”

“Duty go hang!” said Frothingham fretfully. “Sometimes, do you know,
Gwen, I come jolly near envying those beggars that live in cottages,
and keep shops, and all that.”

“Now, you’re slopping, Arthur. You know you don’t envy them; no more do
I.”

“Did Eve tell you old Bagley was down?”

“Yes. Ghastly--wasn’t it?”

Frothingham sighed. “I shouldn’t be so cut up if I’d had the fun of
spending it.”

“You did spend a lot of it.” She was thinking what a great figure
the young Earl had cut in her girlhood days; she had always listened
greedily when her brother, with admiring envy, or Evelyn, with sisterly
pride, talked of his exploits on the turf, and let us say elsewhere, to
shorten a long story.

“Only a few thousands that weren’t worth the keeping,” said
Frothingham, a faint gleam of satisfaction appearing in the eye that
was shielded by the monocle--he liked to remember his “career,” and
he liked the women to remind him of it in this flattering way. “All I
really got was the bill for the governor’s larks, and his governor’s,
and his governor’s governor’s. It’s what I call rotten unfair--jolly
rotten unfair. The fiddling for them--the bill for me.”

“Buck up, Artie,” said Gwen, stroking him gently with her riding whip.
“See how Georgie has faced it. And perhaps you won’t draw such a bad
one, either. She couldn’t be worse than Cadbrough.”

“But I want _you_, Gwen. I’m used to you, you know--and that’s
everything in a wife. I hate surprises, and these American beggars are
full of ’em.”

Evelyn came back. “Go away somewhere, both of you,” she said. “Charley
Sidney’s just driving up. I wish to talk with him about the States.”

Gwen paled and flushed; Frothingham grunted and scowled. They rose,
made a short cut across the garden, and were hidden by the left wing
of the house. Almost immediately the servant announced “Mr. Sidney,”
and stood deferentially aside for a tall, thin American, elaborately
Anglicised in look and dress, and, as it soon appeared, in accent. He
had a narrow, vain face, browned and wrinkled by hard riding in hard
weather in those early morning hours that should be spent in bed if one
has lingered in the billiard room with the drinks and smokes until past
midnight.

“Ah, Lady Evelyn!” He shook hands with her, and bowed and smirked. “I’m
positively perishing for tea.”

“You mean whiskey?”

“Ah, yes--to be sure. I see there is whiskey.”

Evelyn’s manner, which had been frank and equal before her friend and
her brother, had frozen for Sidney into a shy stiffness not without a
faint suggestion of superior addressing inferior. She had known Sidney
for the ten years he had lived within two miles of Beauvais House,
but--well, he wasn’t “one of us” exactly; he had a way of bowing and of
pronouncing titles that discouraged equality. The conversation dragged
in dreary, rural fashion through gossip of people, dogs, and horses,
until she said:

“Have you heard the news of Surrey?”

“No--is His Grace coming home?”

“He’s marrying--a Miss Dowie, of New York. Do you know her?”

“I’ve heard of her. You know, I’ve not been there longer than a week at
a time for fifteen years.” Sidney put on his extreme imitation-English
air. “I loathe the place. They don’t know how to treat a gentleman.
And the lower classes!” He lifted his eyebrows and shook his head. He
was at his most energetic when, in running down his native land to his
English acquaintances, he reached the American “lower classes.”

Evelyn concealed the satire which longed to express itself in her
face. She despised Sidney and all the Anglicised Americans; and,
behind their backs, she and her friends derided them--perhaps to repay
themselves for the humiliation of accepting hospitalities and even
more concrete favours from “those American bounders.” The story among
Sidney’s upper-class English tolerators was that his father had kept
a low public house in New York or San Francisco, or “somewhere over
there”--they were as ignorant of the geography of the United States as
they were of the geography of Patagonia.

“So he’s to marry Dowie’s daughter?” continued Sidney. “He was
brakeman on a railway thirty years ago.”

“How you Americans do jump about!” said Evelyn, forgetting that Sidney
prided himself on no longer being an American. “He must be clever.”

“A clever rascal, probably,” replied Sidney spitefully. “Over here he’d
have been put into jail for what they honour him for over there.”

“We’ve many of the same sort, no doubt,” said Evelyn, thinking it
tactful to hold aloof when a son was abusing his mother.

“Yes, but usually they’re gentlemen and do things in a gentlemanly way.”

“Mr. Dowie is rich?”

“Just now he is--they say.” Sidney had the rich man’s weakness for
denying, or at least casting doubt upon, the riches of other rich men.
He knew that his was the finest and most valuable wealth in the world,
and he would have liked to believe that it was the only wealth in the
world. “I trust the Duke has looked sharp to the settlements.”

“Why?” asked Evelyn, preparing to make mental notes.

“He may never get anything but what’s settled on him and her now.
Dowie is more or less of a speculator and may go broke. But that’s
not the only danger in marrying an American heiress. You see, Lady
Evelyn, over there they have the vulgarest possible notions of rank
and titles. And often, if there isn’t a cash settlement when they ‘buy
the title,’ as they describe it, they refuse to give up anything. Many
of their rich men have the craze for founding colleges and asylums
and libraries. They reason that they’ve got the title in the family,
therefore it isn’t necessary to pay for it; and so they leave all their
money to build themselves a monument. Dishonourable, isn’t it? But they
stop at nothing.”

“Then,” said Evelyn, “an American heiress isn’t an heiress so long as
her father is alive?”

“Exactly. It’s misleading to call her an heiress. She simply has hopes.”

“I hope Surrey knows this.”

“If he doesn’t it’s his own fault. I cautioned His Grace before he
sailed.”

“That reminds me, Mr. Sidney. Arthur may be going over to the wedding.
Could you----”

“I’d be delighted,” interrupted Sidney. “Anything I could do for Lord
Frothingham it would be a pleasure to do. I can give him some useful
letters, I think. Will he travel?”

“Possibly--I don’t know. He has no plans as yet.”

“I shall give him--if he will do me the honour of accepting them--only
a few letters. The wisest plan is a proper introduction to the very
best people. Then all doors will be open to him.”

“The Americans are hospitable to everyone, are they not?”

“Not to younger sons any more. And not to unaccredited foreigners.
They’ve had their fingers jolly well burned. I knew of one case--a
girl--quite a ladylike person, though of a new family from the
interior. She married a French valet masquerading as a duke.”

“Poor creature,” said Evelyn, smiling with amused contempt.

“Yes, and another girl married--or thought she married--a German royal
prince. And when she got to Germany she found that she’d bought a place
as mere morganatic wife, with no standing at all.”

“Fancy! What a facer!”

“And she never got her money back--not a penny,” continued Sidney.
“But, like you, I don’t sympathise with these upstart people who try to
thrust themselves out of their proper station. The old families over
there--and there are a few gentlefolk, Lady Evelyn, though they’re
almost lost in the crowd of noisy upstarts--never have such humiliating
experiences in their international marriages.”

“Naturally not,” said Evelyn.

“But, as I was about to say, a foreigner with a genuine title, the
head of a house of gentle people, is received with open arms. Lord
Frothingham would be overwhelmed with hospitalities. My friends would
see to that.”

After a few minutes, without any impoliteness on Evelyn’s part, Sidney
began to feel that it was time for him to go. As he disappeared Gwen
and Arthur came strolling back.

“What a noisome creature Sidney is!” said Evelyn. “But he’ll be of use
to you, Arthur.”

“Did he talk about the old families of America and the gentle birth?”
asked Gwen. Her eyes were curiously bright, and her manner and tone
were agitated.

“All that again.”

“He’s an ass--a regular tomtit,” growled Frothingham.

“I should think he’d learn,” said Evelyn, “that we don’t take him and
his countrymen up because they’re well born--we know they aren’t.”

“If those that are sensible enough to fly from that beastly country are
like Sidney,” said Gwen, “what a rowdy lot there must be at home.” She
spoke so nervously that Evelyn, abstracted though she was, glanced at
her and noticed how pale and peaked she was. When she had ridden away
Evelyn looked at her brother severely--she was only three and twenty,
but she managed him, taking the place of both their parents, who were
long dead.

“You’ve been making love to Gwen,” she exclaimed reproachfully. “You
should be ashamed of yourself.”

Frothingham removed his monocle, wiped it carefully in a brilliant
plaid silk handkerchief, and slowly fitted it in place. Then he sent
a mocking, cynical gleam through it at his sister. “You forget,” he
drawled, “that I caught you and Georgie kissing each other and crying
over each other the day he went off to the States.”

Evelyn flushed. “How does that excuse you?” she demanded, undismayed.

He was silent for a moment, then with tears in his eyes and a break in
his habitual cynical drawl, “I can’t go, Eve. I can’t give her up.”

Evelyn’s heart ached, but she did not show it. She simply asked in her
usual tone of almost icy calm, “Where’s the cash to come from?”

He collapsed helplessly into a chair. There was no alternative--he must
go; he must marry money. He owed it to his family and position; also,
he wanted it himself--what is a “gentleman” without money? And--why,
if he did not bestir himself he might actually have to go to work! And
“what the devil could I work at? I might go out to service--I’d shine
as a gentleman’s gentleman--or I might do something as a billiard
marker----”

With such dangers and degradations imminent, to think of love was sheer
madness. Frothingham sighed and stared miserably through his monocle at
the peacocks squawking their nerve-jarring predictions of rain.




II


On the second day out, in the morning, Frothingham was at the rail,
his back to the sea, his glassed gaze roaming aimlessly up and down
the row of passengers stretched at full length in steamer chairs. He
became conscious of the manœuvrings of a little man in a little grey
cap and little grey suit, with little grey side-whiskers that stood
out like fins on either side of his little grey face. Each time this
little person passed it was with a nervous smile at Frothingham, and
a nervous wiping of the lips with the tip of his tongue. When he saw
that Frothingham, or, rather, Frothingham’s monocle, was noting him, he
halted in front of him. He was too painfully self-conscious to see that
the Englishman’s look was about as cordial as that of a bald-headed man
watching the circlings of a bluebottle fly.

“The Earl of Frothingham, is it not?” said he in a thin, small voice,
his American overlaid with the most un-English of English accents.

[Illustration: “_My name is Longview_”]

Frothingham moved his head without relaxing from his stolid, vacant
look.

“My name is Longview. I had the honour of meeting you at the hunt at
Market Harboro two years ago--my daughter and I.”

Frothingham stared vaguely into space, little Longview looking up at
him with an expression of ludicrously alarmed anxiety. “Oh, yes,”
he drawled finally. And he extended his hand with condescending
graciousness. “I remember.”

Longview expelled a big breath of relief. He was used to being
forgotten, was not unused to remaining forgotten. “You may recall,” he
hastened on, eager to clinch himself in an earl’s memory, “we had your
cousin, Lord Ramsay’s place, Cedric Hall, that year.”

Frothingham remembered perfectly--the rich, Anglicised American who fed
his neighbours well, was generous in lending mounts and traps, and was,
altogether, a useful and not unamusing nuisance. Rich, but--how rich?

“And your daughter?” said Frothingham--he recalled her indistinctly as
young, hoydenish, and a daring jumper.

“She is with me,” said Longview, delighted to be convinced that he was
remembered, and remembered distinctly--and by a Gordon-Beauvais! “It
would give me great pleasure to present you.”

As they went down the deck the little man peered at everyone with a
nervous little smile--“as if he were saying, ‘Don’t kick me, please. I
mean well,’” thought Frothingham. In fact, back of the peering and the
smile was the desire that all should see that he had captured the Earl.
They entered the library and advanced toward a young woman swathed in a
huge blue cape, her eyes idly upon a book.

“Honoria, my dear,” said Longview, as uneasy as if he were speaking to
the young woman without having been introduced to her, “you remember
Lord Frothingham?”

Honoria slowly raised her eyelids from a pair of melancholy,
indifferent grey eyes, and slightly inclined her head. The men seated
themselves on either side of her; Longview rattled on in his almost
hysterical way for a few minutes, then fluttered away. Honoria and
Frothingham sat silent, she looking at her book, he looking at her.

“You are going home?” he said when he saw that she would not “lead,”
no matter how long the silence might continue.

“No,” she replied. “We are English--at least, my father is.”

“And you?”

She just moved her shoulders, and there was the faintest sneer at the
corner of her decidedly pretty mouth. “I don’t know--what does it
matter about a woman? I’ve lived in England and France since I was
five, except a year and a half in America. Father detests the country
and the people. He was naturalised in England last year. I believe he
decided that his social position, won through his being an American,
was sufficiently established to make it safe for him to change.”

Frothingham smiled. As he was used to the freest and frankest
criticisms of parents and other near relatives by fellow-countrymen
of his own class, it did not impress him as unfilial that a daughter
should thus deride a father. Honoria became silent, and apparently
oblivious of his presence.

“I’ve never been to America,” he said, hoping to resurrect the dead
conversation. “I’m looking forward to it with much pleasure. We have
many Americans in our neighbourhood--such jolly people.”

“I know few Americans.” Honoria looked disdainful. “And they are
like us, the most of them--expatriated. They say their country is a
good place to make money in, but a horrible place to live--crude and
ill-mannered, full of vulgar people that push in everywhere, and the
servants fancying they’re ladies and gentlemen.”

“I hope it’s no worse to live in than England,” said Frothingham. “You
know we’re always flying to the Continent to escape the climate and the
dulness. And our middle-classes are very uppish nowadays, don’t you
think?”

“I detest England.” Honoria put the first emphasis into her voice, but
it was slight.

“Beastly hole, except for a few weeks in the spring, ain’t it? If it
wasn’t for the hunting it would be deserted.”

He saw her cold, regular features light up. “I love hunting,” she said.
“It’s the one thing that can make me forget myself, and everything
except just being alive and well.” Then her face shadowed and chilled,
and she looked at her book so significantly that Frothingham was
forced to rise and leave.

At luncheon the man in the chair next him--Barney, who had told him in
the first half-hour of their acquaintance all about his big dry-goods
shop in Chicago--said: “I saw you talking to Longview on deck. Is he a
friend of yours?”

“An acquaintance,” replied Frothingham. He rather liked Barney because
he was shrewd and humourous, and treated him in an offhand fashion that
was amusing in a “tradesman”--from America.

“He’s a low-down snob,” said Barney, encouraged by Frothingham’s
disclaimer. “One of those fellows that think their own country ain’t
good enough for them. I was glad when he got himself naturalised over
in your country. You’re welcome to him. What kind of people does he
herd with in England?”

“We like him very well, I believe. He seems to be an agreeable chap.”

“I suppose he kowtows and blows himself, and so they let him hang
onto the tailboard--he ain’t heavy and don’t take up much room. His
grandfather stole with both hands, and put it in real estate. Then his
father made quite a bunch in the early railroad days. And now this
fellow’s posing as an aristocrat. If he wasn’t rich who’d notice him?”

“Then he’s rich?” inquired Frothingham.

“Yes and no,” replied Barney, his rich man’s jealousy visibly roused.
“There was a big family of them. He’s got maybe a couple of millions or
three. That ain’t much in these days. You heard about his knockout?”

“Has he lost part of his money?”

“I thought everybody knew that story--it was in all the papers.
No, it wasn’t money--worse than that, from his point of view. His
daughter--she’s with him on the ship--fell in love with the second
son of some marquis or other. But he didn’t have anything, and
I believe you titled people ain’t allowed to work. Longview was
red-headed--wouldn’t give his daughter a cent unless she married a big
title. And then the young man’s older brother died.”

“Was it the Marquis of Dullingford?”

“Yes, that was it. And right on top of it his elder brother’s two sons
were drowned, and he came into the title and estates. And what does he
do but up and marry an English girl that he’d been struck on all the
time, but couldn’t marry because he was so poor. Longview nearly went
crazy at missing the chance. And his daughter--it must have made her
mighty sour to find out that the fellow had been only pretending to be
in love with her, and was really out for her cash, and didn’t care a
rap about her. A low pup, wasn’t he?”

Frothingham began to detest Barney--“an impudent, malicious beggar,” he
thought. He gave him his monocle’s coldest stare.

“No,” went on Barney, unchilled, “Longview’s not so rich. I could buy
him twice over, and not take a cent of it out of my business. But I
want to see any scamp, foreign or domestic, hanging round my daughter
for her money. She’ll get nary a red till I shuffle off. And she’ll get
mighty little then if she don’t marry to suit me. That’s _our_ way.”

Frothingham changed his mind about dropping Barney. He had begun
to modify the low view of him as soon as he heard that he had a
daughter, and “could buy Longview twice over,” and leave the big
business--“seventy stores under one roof”--intact. “Miss Barney may
be worth looking at,” he reflected. “And her papa might relent about
settlements. I suspect he isn’t above loving a lord--he’s too good an
American for that.”

What Barney had told gave him the key to Honoria. He felt genuine
sympathy for her--their sorrows were similar. “Poor creature,” he
thought. “No wonder she’s so down in the mouth.” After luncheon he met
her father on deck, and did not repel his advances. “But,” he said to
himself, “it don’t do to be too friendly with these beggars. It’s like
shaking hands with your tailor. He don’t think you’ve pulled him up,
but that you’ve let yourself down.”

To the “beggar” he said:

“I looked all round the dining room, but I didn’t see you and your
daughter.”

Longview smiled proudly. “We have our meals in our sitting room,” he
replied. “We dislike being stared at, and mixed in with a crowd of
eating people. We like privacy. We’d be glad to have you join us.”

Frothingham’s first impulse was to accept. It would cost him
nothing--probably he’d get his wine and mineral water and cigars free.
And he’d have a rare chance at Honoria. But her face came before his
mind. He decided that he would do well to wait until he could learn
whether she was really part of the inviting “we.”

Although he was not welcomed, but merely tolerated, he seated himself
on the extension of a vacant chair beside her and talked--hunting,
which, as she had shown him, was her weakness. She was soon interested,
and she unbent toward him so far that, when her father came and renewed
his invitation, she joined in it. Just as Frothingham accepted he saw
Barney half a dozen chairs away glowering at Longview. “I’ll offend
Barney, no doubt,” he said to himself. “But I’ll risk it. I must play
the cards I have in my hand.”

Barney came into the smoke-room late in the evening as he was sitting
there, having a final whiskey and water before going to bed. “Won’t
you have a high ball or something?” he asked, making room for Barney’s
broad form.

“No, I never touch liquor. Don’t allow it in my house. It’s no good--no
business man ought to touch it.”

“I suppose not,” replied Frothingham, feeling that here was new
evidence of the essentially degrading nature of business.

“I missed you at dinner,” Barney went on.

“The Longviews invited me to feed with them,” replied Frothingham
carelessly. “They eat in their sitting room. Sorry to leave you, but
the service is much better.”

Barney’s maxillary muscles expanded and contracted with anger. He
half snorted, half laughed. “You might know,” he said, “that that
shark-faced snob would invent a new way of making himself ridiculous.
So, the general dining room ain’t good enough for him, eh? He _is_ a
swell, ain’t he? I should think he and his--no, leave the young lady
out of it--I should think he’d be ashamed to fish for you so openly.”
Barney’s tone softened apologetically, greatly to Frothingham’s
surprise, as he added: “I don’t blame you, Mr. Frothingham. I
understand how it is with you titled people in your country. I don’t
blame anybody for walking round on human necks if their owners’ll allow
it. But _we_ feel differently about all those kind of things.”

Frothingham smiled conciliatingly. “Oh, I say, now! I don’t see
anything to make a row over. The beggar’s a right to eat where he
pleases, hasn’t he?”

[Illustration: _Barney half a dozen chairs away glowering at Longview_]


“Of course he has, and to stick his tongue out at all the rest of us,
as he does it. You don’t understand. It ain’t _what_ he does. It’s
_why_ he does it. We Americans can’t stand those kind of airs.”

“It seems very mysterious to me,” confessed Frothingham. “I admit I
don’t understand your country.”

“Oh, you’re all right,” reassured Barney, slapping Frothingham’s leg
cordially. “I never thought I’d like one of you titled fellows. I
despised you all for a useless set of nobodies and nincompoops. And
whenever my womenfolks got to talking about that kind of thing I always
sat on ’em, and sat hard--I’m a hard sitter when I want to be. But I
like you, young man. You’re more an American than an Englishman, just
as Longview’s more English than American--he ain’t American at all. You
talk like an American. You behave like an American. And when you’ve
been in America long enough to wear your clothes out, and get some that
fit you, you’ll look like an American.”

“Thanks,” said Frothingham drily.

“You don’t like it?” Barney laughed good-humouredly. “Well, I don’t
blame you. You’re judging America by Longview and me. That ain’t
fair. I’m a rough one--never had a chance--first thing I remember is
carrying the swill buckets out to feed the hogs before sun-up when I
still wore slips. But I mean right. And I’ve got a son and a daughter
that are a real gentleman and a real lady, and don’t you forget it.”

“Oh, you’re all right,” said Frothingham, slapping Barney on the
leg--Frothingham was a sentimental dog where his pocket and his
pleasure were not concerned, and he liked Barney’s look as he spoke of
himself and the hogs, and his children.

“You don’t want to go back to that little old island of yours,”
continued Barney, “without seeing Chicago. _There’s_ a town! And I’ll
give you the time of your life. I want you to meet my family.”

“I hope I shall,” said Frothingham. He was smiling to
himself--evidently Barney wasn’t above a weakness for a lord. “It was
a good stroke any way you look at it, my going with the Longviews,” he
reflected. “It’s made Barney jealous, and he thinks more of me than
ever.”

He divided his time unevenly between the Longviews and Barney. He
wished to introduce Barney to them, but Longview hysterically refused.
“It’s all right for you, Frothingham,” he explained. “But we can’t
afford to do it. How’d you like to be introduced to middle-class
English?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t mind. I’d just forget ’em the next time we met. The
beggars ’d expect it and wouldn’t think of annoying me.”

“Precisely--precisely,” said Longview. “But our--that is--the American
middle-classes are different. They don’t understand differences
of social position, or pretend not to. If this Barney person were
presented to us, he probably wouldn’t take the cut when we met again,
but would come straight up to us. You’ve no idea how impudent they are.”

“But why do you call him middle-class? Ain’t he rich?” asked
Frothingham.

Longview looked at him tragically. “Birth and breeding count with us
just as--I mean count in America just as in England.”

“Gad, they don’t count in England any more, except against one. But we
can’t get it out of our heads that you Americans go in for equality and
all that sort of thing.”

“Not at all. Not at all,” Longview protested. “The lines are the more
closely drawn because there are no official lines.”

“But what’s the matter with Barney? He seems right enough. I’ve got
uncles that are worse. Gad, there’s one of ’em I could get rich on if I
could cage him and show him at a shilling a look.”

“My dear Frothingham, this Barney keeps a retail shop. Even in New York
they draw the line at retail shops.”

“It’s very mysterious.” Frothingham shook his head. “I fear I shall
never learn. Why don’t they put it all in a book, as we do? Then we
could take it at the university instead of Greek.”

He looked at Honoria. She was giving her plate a scornful smile. Her
father looked at her also, and reddened as he noted her expression,
and shifted the conversation abruptly to the day’s run. Frothingham
was becoming interested in Honoria, now that he had assured
himself of her eligibility. She was not beautiful, not especially
distinguished-looking. But she had as little interest in him as in the
rest of her surroundings, and that piqued him. Then, too, her figure
was graceful and strong; and when her face did light up it showed
strength of character, and either what she said or the way she said it
created a vivid impression of personality. He soon felt that she liked
him. Her manner toward him was friendlier far than her manner toward
her father, her lack of respect for whom was scantily concealed.

The night before they landed she and Frothingham sat on deck late,
her father dozing in a chair at a discreet distance. Both were
depressed--the sense that they were once more about to plunge into the
whirlpool of life made each sad. Honoria was remembering the past;
Frothingham was brooding over the future. If he had dared he would have
proposed to her. “She’d make a satisfactory wife,” he said to himself.
“She’s just enough English to understand me and to make my people like
her. She wouldn’t get on their nerves. And she doesn’t talk through her
nose except when she’s excited. She’s a little too clever--but a steady
goer, once the harness is on. If I could get her it would be good
business, good swift business.”

“You’re a queer sort,” he said to her suddenly. “Most girls are full of
getting married. But I don’t believe you give it a thought.”

“I sha’n’t ever marry,” she replied.

He laughed. “Oh, I say, that’s nonsense. Every girl must marry. You may
as well make up your mind to it, close your eyes, shut your teeth, and
dash in.”

“You might not think it,” she said after a pause, “but I am like you
English--I’m horribly, incurably sentimental. I know it’s foreign to my
bringing up, but----” Her jaw set, and her eyes fixed upon something
visible only to her in the blackness beyond the rail. “My bringing up
was all wrong and rotten,” she went on presently. “I don’t know just
how or where, but I know it’s so. I began to feel it dimly when I
visited my aunt in America four years ago. My mother died when I was
a baby, and I was trained by my father and governesses--governesses
that suited him. My father---- But I needn’t tell you, and you probably
don’t sympathise with me. His one idea in life is social position. It
seems to me a contemptible ambition for a man. With women--there’s some
excuse for it. We’re naturally petty. And, so far as I can see it, as
the world is made up, if we haven’t got that we haven’t got anything.
We can’t have any other ambition--it’s the only one open to us. Well, I
haven’t got even ambition. I want--that is, I wanted----”

She paused again, resisting the mood that was urging her on to
confidence. “By Jove,” thought Frothingham, “it wouldn’t be hard for a
man to like her.”

“No matter what it was I wanted,” she went on, “I didn’t get it--and
sha’n’t, ever.” She turned her face toward him. “You may misunderstand
me--may think I am in love and hopelessly disappointed--there’s a story
of that kind going round. But I’m not in love. I was--but I’m not now.”

“Do you think one ever gets over it?” he asked absently.

She did not answer.

“I’m afraid not--at least, not thoroughly,” he answered himself. There
were two faces out there in the blackness into which they were staring,
but each was seeing only one.

“One ought to get over it--one _must_,” she said slowly, “when one
finds that the person one cared for is a bad lot. But”--she sighed
under her breath--“I might marry, yes, would, if I needed a home or
money. But I don’t. So I shall be much better contented alone. I’ll
never believe deeply in any human being again.”

“You mustn’t take life so seriously,” he said gently. “You’ll change
before----”

“So my father thinks.” She looked at Frothingham with a mischievous,
audacious smile. “He thinks I shall change immediately--and marry--you!”

Frothingham gasped.

“How funny and fishlike you look,” she said, laughing at him. “You are
in no danger. Do you suppose I’d have said that if I’d had you on my
list? No, I like you, _but--but_!”

“You may change your mind,” he recovered himself sufficiently to say.

“No--you’re safe. I spoke out because I wish to be friends with you. I
don’t especially admire your purpose in going to America. But at least
you’re frank about it.”

“I? Why, Miss Longview--I----” Frothingham began to protest, pushing at
his dislodging eyeglass.

“Don’t prevaricate. You wouldn’t do it well. As I was about to say, I
wish to be friends with you. And it’s impossible for a woman and a man
to be friends when either is harbouring matrimonial designs against the
other, or fancies the other is harbouring them.”

“I certainly have to marry somebody,” said Frothingham mournfully.

“Yes--I know. Father explained about you. He’s up on every titled
family in England above the baronets. And he’s determined that I
shall be a countess at the very least. He says he has the money to
buy it--and possibly he has. But”--she was intent upon the blackness
again--“I shall never go back to England. I shall stay in America--with
a visit to Paris and the Riviera now and then.”

“That’ll cheer your father when he hears it,” drawled Frothingham. He
coughed and stammered, and added in an embarrassed, apologetic tone,
“And I don’t like to hear a girl as young and attractive as you are
talk in that ghastly way.”

She looked at him with a teasing smile.

“You’ll make some woman a good husband,” she said. “Selfish and
flighty, perhaps, but on the whole good. I’ll be glad to help you--with
some other girl. In fact, I’ve one in mind--an acquaintance in New
York--we call each the other friend, and I’m fond of her, as that sort
of thing goes with women.”

He began to stammer again, and she saw that he was still hanging
hopefully over her father’s plan. “If I were a marrying woman and
ambitious,” she went on, “I’d think seriously of having a cast at you.
But I’m neither, so I can appreciate your assets quite impartially.”

“I’ve got nothing,” he said, “nothing but debts.”

“Debts are an asset--if contracted in a way that would seem romantic to
a girl. Then, there’s your title. That’s a big asset either in England
or America. And you’ve got a fairly good disposition and nice manners,
and you pretend indifference charmingly, assisted by your eyeglass. And
your character is not too bad. Not too good, either. I’ve heard one or
two rather thick stories of you. If I were your wife I’d keep an eye
on the money--you _will_ gamble. But your character is well up to the
average for our kind of people.”

“I’ve been rather bad, I’m afraid,” he said, in the shallowly penitent
tone in which human beings glory in the sins they are proud of. “I’ve
been as bad as I knew how to be.”

“All of us are that, I fancy,” replied Honoria, rising. “I sha’n’t
trouble you to confess to me. Save it for--her. Good-night.” She put
out her hand friendlily. “I think we shall be friends.”

Frothingham looked after her as she went with her father down the deck
toward the main companion-way. “She _is_ a queer lot,” he muttered. “I
suppose that’s American. Well, if it’s a fair specimen, I certainly
sha’n’t be bored in America.”




III


                                                   NEW YORK, 6 November.

_My Dear Eve_:

I’m just sending you off the newspapers with the accounts of George’s
wedding. Don’t show them about, please, as he’s frightfully cut up over
them. He swears he’ll never set foot in this country again, or let his
Duchess come. You’ll be tremendously amused as you read. You’ll never
have seen anything so frank and personal. And the illustrations! We’ve
done nothing but dodge cameras when we weren’t dodging reporters. I
don’t agree with George--I think it’s great fun.

They let me off easy, as you’ll see, and some of the pictures of me are
not half bad. But I don’t wonder that George is furious. Just read the
descriptions of his looks--and really he’s looking horribly seedy. And
don’t neglect the accounts of the new Duchess’ papa, and how he came by
his cash. He must be a gory old vulture--though really he doesn’t look
it, and except when he gets to going it hard his English is fairly
good, of the nosey, Yankee kind.

George came down to the dock to meet me. He was in a _blue fury_. It
seems the newspapers had been making a fearful row over him from the
moment he left the other side. And then by illustrated accounts of his
houses, his property, his family, and himself, not to speak of what
they printed about the Dowies’ past and present, they set the crowds to
collecting at his hotel, and to following him round the streets. They
published even what he ate and drank, and the size of the tips he gave
the servants. And after the engagement was announced the excitement
became something incredible. He couldn’t poke his nose out of his
rooms that somebody didn’t collect the crowd by shouting, “There’s his
Dooklets, there’s the little fellow”--and you know Georgie is a _bit_
sensitive about his size.

Well, the newspapers published everything--his height and weight, the
tooth he has out on the left side, every rag in his boxes, pictures of
them, everything in Miss Dowie’s trousseau--columns and columns. And
how he _did_ hop round when he found that the Dowies had actually hired
a fellow and a woman to give out facts to the press! What do you think
of that for a Yankee notion?

You can’t imagine the presents. You’d have thought the crown princess
was marrying. The newspapers say they alone were worth a million and
a half, American money. I and Cleggett went over them, and we decided
they’d fetch more. You know, Cleggett--he’s Georgie’s solicitor--is
over here looking after the settlements. He simply had to put the
screws onto old Dowie. I got a good many hints from him on how to deal
with these beggars in money matters. Dowie’s a shrewd chap. He and
Cleggett did all the money talk. Georgie was supposed to know nothing
about it. But maybe he wasn’t in a funk when it began to look as if the
whole business were off at the last minute. I had to work hard to keep
him up to the mark. Cleggett won out, though--got a hundred thousand
pounds more than Georgie expected.

To go back to the presents, her uncle--one of the ha’penny rags here
said he’s been in the penitentiary, but I hear it’s not true--he gave
her a yacht, a regular ocean steamer. You’ll admire the necklace her
aunt sent her--it can’t have cost less than fifty thousand, our money.
It makes me ill to see these beggars wading and wallowing in money. By
the way, I notice that while they talk of spending money, they talk of
making it as much as they talk of spending it, if not more.

Wallingford, a fellow I’ve met here, said to me at dinner the other
night, a few minutes after the women had gone: “Shall we stay here with
the men and discuss making money, or shall we go up to the women and
discuss spending it?”

But to go back to Georgie and his coming down to meet me. I saw him on
the pier, his face like a sunset and his arms going like mad. He was
haranguing a crowd in which there were several cameras. I shouted to
him--I and Miss Longview and her father were at the rail together. As
I shouted the crowd looked, and the cameras were pointed at us. Miss
Longview darted away, and her father pulled at me.

“Come, come!” he said, all in a flurry and a sweat. “They’ll take your
picture if you stay.”

“Who?” said I. “And why should they take my picture?”

“The reporters,” he answered, dragging at me. “You don’t understand
about American newspapers.” I let him drag me away, and then he
explained. “They know you are coming to the wedding,” he said, “and
they’ll photograph you and interview you and print everything about
you--insulting, impudent things. There’s no such thing as privacy in
this horrible country. Didn’t I tell you they haven’t the faintest
notion what a gentleman is, or what is due a gentleman?”

Barney,--I’m sure I told you about him in the letter I wrote you on
the way over,--Barney was sitting near us. He burst in with, “I think
your friend is unduly alarmed, Earl.” (He always calls me Earl. He says
he’ll be blanked if he’ll call any man lord.) “_You_ haven’t committed
a crime, or done what you’d be ashamed to see in print. No _honest_ man
objects to having his face published, or anything else about him that’s
true.” And he glared at Longview, who sniffed and walked away. Barney
sent a jeering laugh after him, and said, “The scrawny little chipmunk!”

“What’s a chipmunk?” said I.

“A kind of squirrel,” said he, “only littler, and even easier to scare.”

We went to the rail, and there was George, with his crowd pushing and
jostling him. As soon as the gangway was let down he rushed aboard, the
crowd with the cameras on his heels. At the top he turned like Marius,
or whoever it was, at the bridge. And he shouted to the officers, in
a funny, shrill voice, “Drive those ruffians back!” But the officers
were smiling at him, and only pretended to restrain the reporters
and photographers. On they came, reaching us about as soon as George
did. They poured round and between us, and began to ask me questions.
I must admit they were polite, in the Yankee way, and friendly, and
good-natured.

I said to one of ’em: “I say, my good fellow, can’t you give me time to
get my breath?”

“No, I can’t, Lord Frothingham,” he said, laughing. “What would you do
if you were I, and your paper were going to press in ten minutes and
you were five minutes from a telephone?”

I got on famously with them. I didn’t in the least mind. They must have
liked me, as you’ll read. But Georgie! _How_ they have been dishing him!

It wasn’t until we got into the carriage that I and he had chance at
each other. “Did you ever see or hear of anything like it?” he said.
His hands were shaking, and the sweat was rolling down his cheeks.
“They act like a lot of South Sea savages when a whale comes ashore.
They _are_ savages. I had heard it was a beastly country, but----” And
he actually ground his teeth.

You know George is very touchy on his dignity, and has old-fashioned
ideas of what’s due a Duke from his inferiors. It seems he got into a
huff when he first came because they treated him in offhand fashion,
as they treat everybody. And he tried to snub them. And when they
snubbed back, only they had illustrated newspapers to do it in, he went
wild, and has been making matters worse and worse for himself. Some of
the papers have had leaders pitying Miss Dowie, and predicting that
she’ll have him in the divorce court for brutality shortly--think of
it--Georgie, quiet Georgie! Everyone is hating him, for he assumed that
even Miss Dowie’s friends were like the newspapers that had slated him,
and he snubbed right and left.

He took me to his hotel. He had an apartment that costs him fifteen
pounds a day--ain’t that cruel? But he said he didn’t propose that
these savages should sneer at his poverty--they’re doing it, anyhow,
and they hint that the Dowies are paying his hotel bill, or will have
to pay it. However, I think he did well to spread himself. There’s
something about this country that makes you ashamed to seem poor. You
spend money and pretend you’ve got plenty of it. They call it “throwing
a bluff,” or “making a front.”

George had taken an apartment for me at a tall price, but I wouldn’t
have it, as I wouldn’t saddle him with the expense--he hadn’t her money
in hand then. Besides, I knew that as soon as he was gone I’d have
to come down, and that would have looked bad. After I was installed
in a very comfortable little apartment thirteen floors up--think of
that!--at three pounds a day, we drove to Dowie’s. A crowd saw us
off at the hotel, people pointed and stared at us all the way up the
street, and there was a crowd waiting for us at Dowie’s. They live in
a huge greystone castle,--there is no end of smart houses here, but a
queer jumble--samples of everything. I hadn’t known old Dowie an hour
before he told me the house and ground and all cost him six hundred
thousand, our money.

The girl--but you’ll judge her for yourself. I rather fancied her.
Affected, of course, and trying to act a duchess out of one of Ouida’s
novels. Rather fat, too, and her hair is thin, and a _mussy_ shade
of yellow. I think she’ll waddle in about five years. Still, she’s
sensible and quick, and dresses well. All the women here do that. But
the money! It’s heart-rending to see it parade by. And they seem to be
throwing it away, but they don’t. Everything is horribly dear here. I
must look sharp or I sha’n’t last long.

The newspapers will give you all you want to know about the wedding--it
was quite a show--perhaps vulgar and overdone, but really gorgeous. I
like America, and I like the people. They’re jolly good-natured, and
the nice ones here are much the same as nice people anywhere else. The
Longviews have taken a big furnished house, and I’m staying with them.
Next week a friend of Miss Longview--a Miss Hollister, who lives here,
but her people are still in the country--is coming to visit her. Her
(Miss Hollister’s) father owns a lot of railways and mines, and is no
end of a financial swell. I’m too sleepy to write another word, except

                                                                 ARTHUR.

How is Gwen? Be good to me, Evelyn--with love--

                                                                      A.

[Illustration: _He liked the very first glimpse of her_]




IV


Honoria took Frothingham to the Grand Central Station to meet
Catherine, and he liked the very first glimpse of her as she came
striding down the platform. She was tall and narrow, and she wore
dresses and wraps that emphasised both these characteristics. She had
a long, thin neck and a small, delicately coloured face, which she
knew how to frame most fascinatingly in her hair, with or without the
aid of her hat. She had dreamy young eyes, long and narrow, and her
red lips and her slender, nervous fingers made it clear that she lived
in her senses rather than in her intellect--that she would neither
say nor think anything brilliant, but would feel intensely, and could
be powerfully appealed to through her imagination. She was wearing a
light brown, brightly lined coat that trailed to her heels; and she was
holding up from the dust and close about her many folds of soft, fine
materials, cloth and silk and linen and lace. In her wake came a maid
and a porter, each laden with her belongings, an attractive array of
comforts and luxuries of travel.

“I’m glad you brought a closed carriage,” she said, with a shiver, as
they started for home. “It’s raw, and the sky seems to weigh upon one’s
shoulders and head. This is a day to hide in the house, close by an
open fire.”

Frothingham was surprised by this fairy-princess delicateness in so
robust a creature. He thought the day mild, and as for the sky, why
bother about anything that far away, so long as it sent nothing down to
bother one?

“You forget we are English,” said Honoria. “We call this good weather.
I must confess the closed carriage was a happy accident.”

“So like you, Honoria! Isn’t it, Lord Frothingham?” Catherine gave him
a sweet smile. “She never permits one to keep agreeable illusions. Now,
I was loving her for being so thoughtful for me.”

As Frothingham only stared, shy and stolid, through his eyeglass, the
two girls began to talk each to the other--they had not met in two
years, not since Catherine and her mother visited Honoria at Longview’s
place in Bucks.

“What a beautiful place it was!” said Catherine. “I often dream of it.
But then, I love England. It is of such a wonderful, vivid shade of
green, and everything is so cultivated, and refined, and--and--like a
fairy garden. Don’t you find the contrast very great, Lord Frothingham?
We are very new and wild.”

“I’ve seen only people since I’ve been here. I must say the people--at
least, those I’ve met--remind me of home, except that they speak the
language differently. As for the city, it’s not at all as I fancied.
It’s much like Paris--more attractive than London, not so gloomy.”

“Paris!” Catherine smiled, with gently reproachful satire. “Oh, you
flatter us.”

“I like it better,” insisted Frothingham. “It’s Paris with English in
the streets--I hate Frenchmen.”

“No, they’re not nice to look at--the men,” admitted Catherine. “But I
adore what they’ve done. What would the world be without France?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Frothingham, with his cynical,
enthusiasm-discouraging drawl. “They’re hysterical beggars, always
exploding for no reason. It makes me nervous. I like quiet and comfort.”

“Lord Frothingham isn’t so sensible as he pretends,” put in Honoria.
“He’s really almost as sentimental and emotional as you are, Catherine.”

“Oh, but I’m neither,” replied Catherine. “I don’t dare to be. If I
find myself the least bit enthusiastic I catch myself up and look
round, frightened lest somebody may have noticed. I’m such a liar--we
all are over here. Don’t you like sincerity, Lord Frothingham?”

“I--I suppose so.” Frothingham looked vague. “What do you mean?”
Catherine’s “intensity” confused him.

“I mean being true to one’s self, and not ashamed to show one’s self as
one is, and never afraid to tell the truth.”

“But all of us do that, don’t we?” said Frothingham. There was a
twinkle in his eye--or was it only the reflection of light from his
glass?

Honoria gave him her “candid friend” look. “Nobody does,” said she.
“That is, nobody who has temperament enough to lead any sort of life
above an oyster’s.”

“But I can see at a glance that Lord Frothingham has temperament.”
Catherine looked at him with intensely sympathetic appreciation. “Yes,
men can be sincere and truthful. But women must always repress their
real selves.”

Frothingham looked stolid and hopeless. Whenever conversation turned
on abstractions he felt like a man fumbling and stumbling about in a
London fog. “Really?” he said. “Really, now?”

“I don’t know why women fancy they must be liars,” said Honoria. “Do
you mind dining at Sherry’s to-night?” Catherine in her psychological
moods bored her. She sometimes ventured on aërial flights, but had no
fancy for aërial flounderings.

“Sherry’s? That will be delightful! I like dining at restaurants--I’m
very American in that respect.”

“But so do I,” said Frothingham. “That is, in your restaurants here.
The people are interesting, and they talk a lot, and loud enough so
that one hears every word and isn’t annoyed by missing the sense. And
how they do waste the food!”

“Food!” Catherine repeated the word with a smile that was
half-humourous, half pleading. “Please don’t use that word, Lord
Frothingham. It always makes me shiver. It sounds so--so animal!”

Frothingham put on the blank look behind which he habitually sheltered
himself when he did not know what to say, or to do, or to think.
Honoria was disgusted with him and with Catherine. “They’re not going
to like each other, not even enough to marry,” she said to herself.
“And it’s a pity, as they’re exactly suited. If Catherine only wouldn’t
pose!”

She was, therefore, somewhat surprised when, immediately she and
Catherine were alone, Catherine burst into rhapsody on Frothingham.
“What a fine, strong face! So much character! What a sincere,
sensitive, pure nature. He’s a splendid type of true gentleman, isn’t
he, Nora? How well he contrasts with our men! Doesn’t he?”

Honoria smiled to herself. “She wants to marry him,” she thought, “and
she’s building a fire under her imagination. I might have known it.
She’s the very person to weave romance over a title and imagine it all
gospel. What a poser!” To Catherine she said: “He’s a decent enough
chap, Caterina. And you’ll admire him more than ever when you’ve read
him up in Burke’s Peerage and looked at the pictures he’s given me of
Beauvais House.”

“How do you spell it? B-e-v-i-s?”

“No, that’s the way you pronounce it. You spell it B-e-a-u-v-a-i-s.”

“Isn’t that interesting? It’s so commonplace to pronounce a word the
way it’s spelt, don’t you think?”

“I never thought of it, my dear. Why not marry him?”

“You are so abrupt and--and practical, Honoria,” said Catherine
plaintively. “But you are a dear. I should never marry a man unless I
loved him.”

Honoria looked faintly cynical. “Certainly not. But surely you can love
any man you make up your mind to marry. What is your imagination for?”

At Sherry’s that night, besides Honoria, Catherine, Longview, and
Frothingham, there were at Longview’s table Mrs. Carnarvon, of the
hunting set, and Joe Wallingford--he hunts and writes verse, both
badly, and looks and talks, both extremely well. Honoria devoted
herself to Wallingford and so released Catherine and Frothingham each
upon the other--she listened for a few seconds now and then to note
their progress.

“It’s a go,” she said to herself with the matchmaker’s thrill of
triumph, as the cold dessert was served. She saw that Frothingham
had ceased to listen, and so had ceased to puzzle; his eyeglass was
trained steadily and sympathetically upon Catherine’s fascinating
beauty--why weary the brain when it might rest and enjoy itself through
the eyes? Catherine was talking on and on, quoting poetry, telling
Frothingham of her emotions, telling him of his emotions--he did not
have them, but she was so earnest that he was half convinced.

“When you said this afternoon that you liked things quiet and
comfortable,” she said, “I felt that it was splendidly in keeping with
your character. I saw that you hated all this noise and display, that
you like to get away in your own corner of your beautiful England and
live grandly and quietly--near Nature.”

If Catherine had not been beautiful and rich he would have said to
himself, “What rubbish!” But, as it was, he thought her profound and
spiritual. And he said, trying to touch bottom and get a firm stand
upon firm earth, “I think you’d like Beauvais.”

“I’m sure I should,” replied Catherine with enthusiasm. “Honoria was
showing me the photographs of it. I admire the great, stately old
house. But I liked best of all the picture of the woods and the
brook. It reminded me of those lines of Coleridge’s--they are so
beautiful--where he speaks of the brook--

  “‘_In the leafy month of June
  That to the sleeping woods all night
  Singeth a quiet tune._’

Don’t you think those lines fine? Do I quote them right?”

“Yes--I think so--that is,” stammered Frothingham, “it’s a jolly
brook, but we call it a river.” Then to himself: “What an ass she’ll
think me!” But the starting sweat stayed, for she asked him no more
questions; and he, freed from the anxiety of having to try to soar with
her, was able to sit quietly and enjoy her beauty, and the murmurous
rush of her low, musical voice--“It’s like the brook that brute she
quoted wrote about,” he thought.

He did not drive home with his party, but accepted Wallingford’s
invitation to walk in the fresh night air to his club. “Your American
women are tremendously clever,” he said, as they were strolling along.
He was feeling dazed and dizzy from the whirl of his emotions, the
whirls and shocks Catherine Hollister had given his brain.

“Yes, they’re clever,” replied Wallingford, “but not in the way they
think they are. Take Kitty Hollister, for example. She’s all right when
she wants to be. She thinks sense. But what a raft of fuzzy trash she
does float out when she gets a-going. I pitied you this evening. She
laid herself out to impress you. You’re staying in the house with her,
aren’t you? I suppose she whoops it up whenever you’re round?”

“I find her very clever--and interesting,” said Frothingham somewhat
stiffly.

“Of course she is. I’ve known her for seventeen of the nineteen years
she’s gladdened the earth--and I ought to know her pretty well. But
she’s like a lot of the women in this town. They haven’t any emotions
to speak of--nothing emotional happens. But they think they ought to
have emotions such as they read about, and so they fake ’em. Then,
they’ve got the craze for culture. They haven’t the time to get the
real thing--they’re too busy showing off. Besides, they’re too lazy. So
they fake culture, too. Oh, yes, they’re clever. And they look so well
that you like the fake as they parade it better than the real thing.”

“We have that sort in London,” said Frothingham.

“So I’ve observed. But it’s done rather better there--they’re older
hands at it. If you weren’t an Englishman, I’d say it fitted in better
among the other shams. I suppose you’ve noticed that many people
here are imitation English or French? You’ve seen the tags ‘Made in
England,’ ‘Made in France,’ ‘Made in England, finished in France’?”

“I’ve noticed similarities,” replied Frothingham tactfully.

“It’s all imitation stuff--the labels are frauds. We over here don’t
know how to be gracefully idle and inane, as your upper classes do.
It’s not in us anywhere. We haven’t the tradition--our tradition is all
against it. Whenever we do produce a thoroughly idle and inane person,
he or she goes abroad to live, or else loses all his money to some
sharp, pushing fellow, and drops out of sight. All this aristocracy you
see is pure pose. Underneath, they’re Americans.”

“What is an American?” asked Frothingham. “Every time I think I’ve
seen one, along comes some native and tells me I’m wrong. Are you an
American?”

“Underneath--yes. On the surface--no. I used to be, but now I’m posing
with the rest of ’em. You’ll have to get out of New York to see
Americans. There are droves of ’em here, but they’re so scattered in
places you’ll never go to that you couldn’t find them. You’d better go
West if you wish to be sure of seeing the real thing.”

“It’s very confusing. How shall I know this American when I see him?”

“When you see a man or a woman who looks as if he or she would do
something honest and valuable, who looks you straight in the eyes, and
makes you feel proud that you’re a human being and ashamed that you
are not a broader, better, honester one--that’s an American.” And then
he smiled with his eyes so queerly that Frothingham could not decide
whether or not he was jesting.

At the club Wallingford introduced him into a large circle of young
men, seated round two tables pushed together, and covered with “high
balls,” and bottles of carbonated water, and silver bowls of cracked
ice. He said little, drank his whiskey and water, and listened. “It’s
the talk of stock brokers and tradesmen,” he said to himself. “Yet
these fellows are certainly gentlemen, and they don’t talk business in
the least like our middle-class people. It’s very confusing.”

After he left the others were most friendly, and even admiring, in
their comments upon him.

“He’s monotonous, and poor, and will never have anything unless he
marries it,” said Wallingford. “If he were a plain, poor, incapable,
rather dull American, is there one of us that would waste five minutes
on him?”

There was silence, then a laugh.




V


Wallingford and Frothingham developed a warm friendship. Wallingford
was extremely suspicious of himself in it, but after a searching
self-analysis decided that his liking for the Earl was to a certain
extent genuine. “He doesn’t know much--at least, he acts as if he
didn’t. But he’s clever in a curious way, and a good listener, and not
a bit of a fakir. No doubt he’s on the lookout for a girl with cash,
but English ideas on that subject are different from ours--that is,
from what ours are supposed to be. He’s a type of English gentleman,
and not a bad type of gentleman without any qualification.”

When he expressed some such ideas to Catherine Hollister, at a dance
given for her by Mrs. Carnarvon, she went so much further in praise of
Frothingham that he laughed. “So that’s the way the wind blows, eh?” he
said, grinning at her satirically.

She coloured, and put on the look of an offended saint.

“Countess of Frothingham,” he went on, undisturbed. “That _would_ sound
romantic, wouldn’t it? Catherine, Countess of Frothingham!”

“How can you be so coarse-fibred in some ways, Joe, and so fine in
others?” she said reproachfully.

“I don’t know, dear lady. I suppose because I’m human--just like you.”

“Let us dance,” was her only reply. She had known Joe so long that she
couldn’t help liking him, but he certainly was trying.

Later in the evening, remembering Joe’s cruelty and sordidness, she
said to Frothingham: “You don’t know what a pleasure it is to the finer
women over here to meet foreign men. They are so much more subtle
and sympathetic. They are not coarsened by business. They are not
mercenary.”

She raised her dreamy eyes to his as she spoke the word “mercenary,” He
reddened and stumbled--they were dancing the two-step. “I wish _you_
wouldn’t look at me like that,” he said, with an ingenuousness wholly
unconscious. “It reminds me of my sins, and--and--all that.”

She trembled slightly, as he could plainly feel in his encircling arm.
He looked down at her--she always was ethereally beautiful in evening
dress. In his admiration he almost forgot how rich she was; he quite
forgot how oppressively intellectual she was. “Do you--do you----” he
began. Then he stopped dancing and led her into the hall, through the
hall to the library. Two other couples were there, but far enough from
the corner to which he took her.

“May I smoke?” he asked.

“I love the odour of a cigarette,” she replied, in a voice that
encouraged him to resume where he had abruptly left off.

“Perhaps you will smoke?”

“No,” she said, in a tone that was subtly modulated to mean apology or
reproach, according as he liked or disliked women smoking.

“Do you really like England?” he began nervously, seeing to it that his
glass was firmly adjusted.

“I adore it!” Usually she would have gone on into poetical prose
unlimited. But this, she felt, was a time for short answers.

“Would you--mind England--with--with----”

He halted altogether, and she slowly raised her heavy lids until her
eyes met his.

“Catherine!” He seized her hand, and the thrill of her touch went
through him. “You are so lovely. I--I’m horribly fond of you.”

She sighed. “Isn’t it beautiful?” she said. “This lovely dance--these
fascinating surroundings--the music--the dim lights--and--and----” She
lifted her eyes to his again.

He murmured her name, threw away his cigarette, looked round to see
where the other eyes in that room were, then clasped her round the
waist for an instant. “Will you? Will you?” he exclaimed.

“Yes,” she replied, in a tone so faint that he barely heard.

“You have made me happy.” And he meant it.

“How satisfactory she is in every way,” he was saying to himself.
“Looks, money, everything. I’m a lucky dog.” And she was saying to
herself, “Countess of Frothingham! How strong and fine and simple he
is. I love him!” But when he suggested speaking to her father at once
she would not have it. “No--I want it to be just our secret for a
little while,” she pleaded. “Don’t _you_?” He did not see any reason
for it, but he said “Yes” with a surface reflection of her earnestness.

“It’s a pity the world ever should know anything about it, don’t you
think so?” she went on.

“I’m very impatient to claim my countess,” he answered.

She liked the “countess,” but the “my” jarred slightly in her sensitive
ear--she was “acquiring” an earl, not he a countess.

“Not too long,” he remonstrated. It was all very well for her to
be romantic--he wouldn’t have liked it if he had not inspired some
romance. But why should either of them wish to delay ratifying the
bargain that was the real purpose in view? Certainly he wished no
delay. And there was much to be arranged--settlements, a trousseau,
a host of time-consuming preliminaries. Not a day should be lost in
getting under way. His creditors, impatiently awaiting the event of
his American adventure, might become ugly. He hated ugly letters and
cablegrams almost as much as he hated ugly “scenes.” No, he felt
strongly on the subject of long engagements.

His heart was full of her beauty--he had drunk a good deal at supper
half an hour before. His head was full of her dowry--he never drank
so much that he forgot business. “How could I evade if anyone should
congratulate me?” he asked. And then he wished he had not said it, but
had made that the excuse for not obeying her.

“You must deny it, as I shall. You know, we’re not really fully engaged
until I’m ready to have it announced. Besides, as Joe Wallingford says,
a lie in self-defence isn’t a lie. And self-defence isn’t either a
crime or a sin, is it? I think self-defence against prying is a virtue,
don’t you?”

A man came to claim her for a dance. She smiled sweetly at him,
plaintively at Frothingham, and went back to the ballroom. Frothingham
stood in the doorway watching her for a few minutes, then went away
from the dance to walk and think and enjoy. But his mind was depressed.
“Too much supper,” he grumbled. “I ought to be tossing my hat. I
don’t deserve her and my luck. Her cash will put us right for the
first time since my great-grandfather ruined us by going the Prince
Regent’s gait. We shall restore Beauvais House and take the place in
Carlton Terrace again. Gad! what a relief it will be to feel free in
my mind about cab fares, and not to claim commissions from my tailor
when I send him customers. I shall be able to live up to the title
and the traditions----” He painted vividly, but in vain. He caught
himself looking away from the glowing pictures and sighing. “Yes, she’s
pretty--devilish pretty--and a high stepper, but--Gwen would be so
comfortable, so _d----n_ comfortable!”

Honoria suspected their secret, yet doubted the correctness of her
intuitions. “She’d parade it,” she reflected, “if she were really
engaged to him. There must be a hitch somewhere.” And her wonder grew
as the report of their engagement spread only to be strenuously denied
by Catherine.

Catherine was almost tearful in lamenting this “impertinent gossip”
to her. “Isn’t it hateful, Honoria,” she said, “that a young man and
a young woman can’t be civil and friendly to each other when they’re
visiting in the same house, without all the busybodies trying to
embarrass them? Did you see the papers this morning? How _dare_ they
print it!”

Honoria smiled at this mock indignation. “Where’s the injury to you in
crediting you with landing an earl?” she asked.

Catherine gave her a look of melancholy reproach. “Do you know,”
she said dreamily, “I don’t think of him as an earl any longer? His
character makes everything else about him seem of no consequence.
Don’t you think he is a _remarkable_ man?”

“A little less remarkable than a marquis, a little more remarkable than
a viscount--and in comparison with a baronet or a plain esquire, a
positive genius!” replied Honoria.

Frothingham was more and more uncomfortable. Catherine took him
everywhere in her train and, with seeming unconsciousness of what
she was doing, fairly flaunted him as her devoted attendant. Yet
only when they were alone did she ever betray that she had more than
a polite, friendly interest in him. He would have got angry at her,
would have made vigorous protest, but how was it possible to bring such
sordidness as mere vulgar appearances to the attention of so innocent
and high-minded a creature? He restrained himself, or, rather, was
restrained--until Horse Show week.

Those afternoons and evenings of dragging at the divine Catherine’s
chariot wheels before the eyes of the multitude were too much for him.
It was one of the years when the Horse Show was the fashion for the
fashionable. Not only the racing set and the hunting set, but also
the dancing and the dressing and the literary and artistic sets, and
the fadless, but none the less frivolous, set, flocked there day and
evening to crowd the boxes with a dazzling display of dresses, wraps,
jewels, and free-and-easy manners. At first Frothingham gaped almost
as amazedly as the multitude that poured slowly and thickly round the
promenade, eyes glued upon the occupants of the boxes, never a glance
to spare for the ring from the cyclorama of luxury and fashion. “And at
a horse show!” he muttered, as he noted the hats and gowns made to be
shown only in houses, or in carriages on the way to and from houses,
but there exhibited amid the dust of the show ring. “What rotten bad
taste!”

He was astounded to find Catherine outdone by none in extravagant
out-of-placeness of ostentation--as he regarded it. Day after day,
night after night, she showed herself off to her friends and to
the craning throngs of the promenade in a kaleidoscopic series of
wonderful “creations.” And she insisted that he should always be in
close attendance. As he sat beside her he heard the comments of the
crowd--there was always a crowd in front of Longview’s box: “That’s the
girl.”--“Yes, and the fellow beside her, with the eyeglass, he’s the
Earl.”--“I don’t know how much--some say a million--some say two or
three.”--“He looks dull, but then all Englishmen look that.”--“I’ll bet
he could be a brute. Look what a heavy jaw he’s got.”--“She’ll be sick
of him before she’s had him a year.”

Did Catherine hear? he wondered. Apparently not. He never surprised
in her face or manner a hint of consciousness of self or of being
stared at and commented upon. “But she can’t avoid hearing,” he said to
himself. “These asses are braying right in her ears. And why should she
get herself up in all these clothes, if it ain’t to be stared at?”

And, between performances, the performers in the Longview box dined
in the palm garden at the Waldorf, with their acquaintances at the
surrounding tables, and gossip of their engagement flying, and curious
glances straying toward them over the tops of wine-glasses, and
whispers and smiles--and Catherine soulful and unconscious. On Friday
night, as they drove from the Waldorf to the Garden--she had given him
her hand to hold under cover of the lap-robe--she said, with a sigh:
“I’m so glad it’s nearly over. Only to-night and to-morrow night.”

“Not to-morrow afternoon?” asked Frothingham. “Why do we miss a chance
to exhibit?”

“Only the servants and the children go to-morrow afternoon,” replied
Catherine sweetly. “I’m worn out and sick of it all. So many go merely
for self-display; so few of us, not to speak of those dreadful people
in the promenade, care anything about the dear, beautiful, noble
horses.”

“Why look at horses,” said Honoria, “when there’s a human show that’s
so much more interesting? It may be vulgar, but it’s amusing. I’m
afraid my tastes are not refined.”

Frothingham looked at her with the expression of a thirsty man who is
having a glass of cold water. “That’s what I think,” said he. “And I’m
fond of horses.” A faint sneer in his satirical drawl made Catherine
give him a furtive glance of anxiety--was the worm thinking of turning?

When they were in the box and the others were busy she said to him, in
her tenderest tone: “You’re dreadfully bored by all this, aren’t you?
And I thought it would give you pleasure for us to be together so much.”

[Illustration: “_As if we were a pair of new chimpanzees in a zoo_”]

The surliness cleared from his face somewhat. “No, I’m not bored.
But I hate to be shown off. And, while you’ve been unconscious of it,
the fact is that you and I have been sitting here in this cage five or
six hours a day, gaped at as if we were a pair of new chimpanzees in
a zoo.” As he remembered his wrongs, his anger rose upon the wine he
had freely drunk at dinner. “It’s what I call low--downright rotten,
Catherine,” he finished energetically.

“I wish you wouldn’t use that dreadful word,” she said, tears in her
eyes, but a certain sting in her voice. “I know it’s all right in
England--some of us use it here. But it--every time you or anyone says
it I feel as if someone had thrust a horrid-smelling rag under my nose.
You don’t mind my saying so, do you, dear?”

“Beg pardon,” he said. “We do use rowdy words nowadays. I’m so
accustomed to it I don’t notice.”

Just then up to his ears from the promenade and the crowd gaping at the
“new chimpanzees” came a voice: “They’re fighting--look! look! Hasn’t
he got an ugly scowl? And she’s almost crying.”

He flushed scarlet and sent a glowering glance down into the crowd.
He turned upon Catherine: “Just hear that! They think I’m rowing you.
By--beg pardon, but--well--I sha’n’t endure it another instant.” And
he rose, brushed past Catherine’s mother and Longview, Honoria and two
men hanging over her, and stalked along the aisle down into and through
the recognising crowd, and out of the Garden.

The boxes ate greedily of this sensation, and the crowd in the
promenade scrambled frantically for the crumbs. It was presently noised
round that the Englishman had become angered, had struck someone.
Rumour at first said it was Catherine; but the crowd by the use of
its legs and eyes, and the boxes by the use of their glasses, learned
that this was false. There sat Catherine, calm, absorbed in the ring,
applauding the jumpers, and turning now and then to her companions
with outbursts of ladylike enthusiasm for some particularly clever
performance. However, crowd and boxes saw that the Englishman was gone,
felt that he must have gone in anger.

The Longview party stopped at the Waldorf for supper, and Frothingham,
calmer and a little embarrassed, joined them. Catherine received him as
if nothing had taken place, and the next night they appeared together
at the Garden as usual.

Late in the evening she said to him: “I’ve told mother of our
engagement. Do you mind, dear?”

His face lighted up.

“She wishes you to come down to the country with us on Sunday to stay a
week or two. It is beautiful there, and we shall be very quiet. Shall
you like that?”

“And I may speak to your father?” he asked. “In my country it wouldn’t
be regarded as honourable for me to act as I’ve been acting with you.
I can’t help feeling uncomfortable because I’ve said nothing to your
father.”

“I’ll speak to him first, Arthur. He lets me do as I please. And he’ll
be contented with whatever makes me happy. He’s _such_ a dear!”

Frothingham looked faintly annoyed. It was not in his plan to
include “father” in their romance. Romance with daughter, business
with father--that was the proper and discreet distribution of the
preliminaries to the formal engagement. He had, deep down, a horrible,
nervous fear that he might be drawn into matrimony without definite
settlements--the father might be as difficult to pin down in his way as
was the daughter in her way. “I must take this business in hand,” he
said to himself, “or I’ll be in a ghastly mess.”

Catherine, her mother, and he went down on the one-o’clock train.
The Hollister country place--Lake-in-the-Wood--was a great pile of
brick and stone, impressive for size rather than for beauty, filled
with expensive furnishings and swarming servants in showy livery, and
surrounded by a handsome, well-ordered park, with winding walks and
drives, and romantically bridged streams flowing to and from a large
lake. They lived with more ceremony than did Surrey at Heath Hall--but
there was an air of newness and stiffness and prodigal profusion about
it all, a suggestion of a creation of yesterday that might find a
grave to-morrow. This impression, which had often come to him in the
palaces of New York, began to form as the porter opened the huge gates
between the park and the highway. It grew stronger and stronger as
he penetrated into the gaudy, if tasteful, establishment. Everything
was too new, too grand, too fine. The daughter alone was at her ease;
the mother was not quite at her ease; the father was distinctly, if
self-mockingly, ill at ease.

The two women left Frothingham alone with him, and the old man soon
vented his dissatisfaction. “I suppose _you_ like this sort of
thing,” he said, with a wave of the arm to indicate that he meant
the establishment. “But I don’t. If I had my way we’d be simple and
comfortable--no, I don’t mean that exactly. I suppose at bottom I’m as
big a fool as the women. But, all the same, French cooking gives me
indigestion. That infernal frog-eater in the right wing has it in for
me. He’s killing me by inches. And I’m so afraid of him and the butler
and all the rest of ’em that I don’t kick the traces more than once
a week.” He laughed. “My wife and daughter have got me well trained.
Whenever they tell me to, I sit up on my hind legs and ‘speak’ for
crackers and snap ‘em off my nose.”

Frothingham liked him at once--he was a big, handsome old fellow, with
keen, steel-grey eyes, and the strong look of the successful man of
affairs. “I fancy he’s almost one of those Americans Wallingford talked
about,” he thought.

After a smoke with Hollister he went to his rooms--a suite of vast
chambers, like the show rooms of a palace, with a marble bathroom that
had a small swimming pool sunk in the middle of it. He looked out upon
the drive and the park and the half-hidden streams glittering in the
sunshine. “These people will beat us out at our own game when they get
used to the cards,” he said.

There was the sound of wheels and horses--many wheels and many
horses. He looked down the drive--one after another came into view a
three-seated buckboard, a stylish omnibus, a waggon with the seats
taken out to make room for a huge pile of luggage. In the buckboard
and the omnibus he recognised men and women whom he had met in New
York--the Leightons, the Spencers, the Farrells, the Howards, Mrs.
Carnarvon, Wallingford, Gresham, Browne, a man whose name he could not
recall, Miss Lester, Miss Devenant. “I thought Catherine and I were to
be ‘very quiet,’” he muttered.

There were thirty-two people at dinner that night, sixteen of whom,
including himself, were guests in the house for stays of three days, a
week, ten days. “You said you were to be alone,” he said to Catherine,
with ironic reproach.

She gave him her pathetic, helpless look. “I did hope so. But I asked
some, and mamma asked others, and the rest asked themselves.”

The days passed, and he had only fleeting glimpses of her. Everybody
was hunting, riding, driving, going to luncheons, teas, dinners,
through a neighbourhood ten miles square. Every moment from early
until late was more than occupied--it was crowded, jammed. His idea
of country life was the quiet, lazy ease of England; a week of this
rushing about fagged him, body and mind. He ceased to try for a moment
alone with her; he saw that it was hopeless to expect so much in a
place where he could not get a moment alone with himself.

“You never rest in this country?” he said, addressing the men in the
library at midnight, as they were having a final nightcap.

“Why should we?” replied Browne. “Why anticipate the grave’s only
pleasure?”

“You see,” explained Wallingford, “on this side of the water we take
our pleasures energetically. When we work, we work hard; when we play,
we play hard. If we’re having a good time, we crowd our luck, in the
hope of having a better time. If we’re bored, we hurry, to get it over
with.”

“Do you keep this up the year round?”

“Except on ocean steamers. But we’ll close that gap when we get the
‘wireless’ installed, with a telephone to the head of every berth.”




VI


On a Monday morning--Frothingham’s eighth day at Lake-in-the-wood--only
Wallingford and the tireless Catherine appeared for the early ride.
“It’s cold,” said Wallingford. “Shall we canter?” And they swept
through the gates and on over the frost-spangled meadows for several
miles before they drew their horses in to a walk. Catherine’s cheeks
were glowing, and her eyes were not dreamy and soulful, but bright with
vigorous, wide-awake life.

“I haven’t seen you looking so well in years, Kitty.”

Wallingford was examining her with the slightly mocking, indifferent
eyes that had piqued not a few women into trying to make him like them.
“You look positively human. And it’s becoming--most becoming.”

Catherine began to scramble into her pose. She did not like to be
caught lapsing from her ideals.

“Why _do_ you do it?” Wallingford dropped his mockery for an instant.
“Your own individuality, no matter how poor you may think it, is far
better than any you could possibly invent--or borrow.”

Catherine looked hurt. “Why do you charge deception against everyone
who lives above your level?” she asked. “I hope you’re not going to be
nasty this morning, Joe. I’m blue.”

“What’s the matter? Something real, or----”

“Don’t tease. This is real.”

“What is it? I see you wish to be encouraged to tell me.”

“No--I couldn’t tell anyone.” Catherine’s eyes were tragic. “It’s one
of those things that can’t be told, but must be----”

“Go on. What is it?” Wallingford refused to be impressed by tragedy. “I
see you’re dying to tell me. Why not get it over with?”

“You are so sympathetic, Joe. You pretend not to understand me, but I
feel that you always do.”

“You mean that I refuse to be misled by your charming little pretences.
But how could I? Why, don’t I remember the day, the very hour, you went
in for the ‘soulful’? I must say, I never could see why you took that
up as your fad. Being natural is much harder to win out at--few people
are interesting, or even endurable, when they’re natural.”

“Joe,” she said absently, as if she had not heard him, “I’m afraid I’m
making a--a dreadful--mistake.”

“Well?” he asked almost gruffly, after a short pause.

“About--about--Lord Frothingham,” she confessed, lowering her eyelids
until her long lashes shadowed her cheeks.

“Oh, I think you’ll land him all right,” said Wallingford
encouragingly. “He’s a bit gone on you; and then, too, he needs the
cash.”

“Please don’t speak of him in that way, Joe. He’s not a vulgar
fortune-hunter, but a high, sensitive, noble man.”

“Who said he was a vulgar fortune-hunter? On the contrary, he’s an
honest British merchant, taking his title to market. And he’s been
lucky enough to find a good customer.”

Catherine ignored this description of her knight and her romance. “You
know I’m engaged to him?” she asked.

“Ever since the first time I saw your mother look at him.”

“Yes--she approves it.”

“I should say she would,” said Wallingford judicially. “She’s got the
best part of it. She’ll have all the glory of having an earl in the
family, and she won’t have to live with him.”

“I’m--afraid--I don’t love him as I ought,” said Catherine, with a sigh.

Wallingford laughed. “Now, of what use is it to talk this over, Kitty,
if you won’t be frank? It can’t be a question of loving him that’s
troubling you. Of course you don’t love him. You love his title, and
that would prevent you from loving him for himself, no matter how
attractive he was. But why bother about love? He’s giving you what you
really want.”

“What _do_ I want?” She looked at Wallingford with sincere appeal,
slightly humourous, but earnest.

“I once thought that you wanted to be a real woman. But ever since
your mother took you abroad to fill her own and your head with foreign
notions I’ve been losing faith. What do you want now? Why, the trash
you’re buying.”

“Joe, how can you think I’d sell myself?”

“Why not? It’s generally regarded as a reputable transaction--unless
one is vulgar enough to sell out for the mere necessaries of life. Oh,
I’m not criticising you, Kitty. Perhaps I’d sell myself if I could get
any sort of price. Never having been tempted, I can’t say what I’d do.”

“Please don’t talk in that way, even in jest. It isn’t true. I know it
isn’t true. And it’s knowing that that makes me----” She hesitated,
then went on--“despise myself! It’s of no use to lie to _you_, Joe. I’m
glad there’s somebody I can’t lie to, somebody that sees into me and
forces me to look at myself as I am. And sometimes I _hate_ you for
it. Yes, I hate you for it _now_!” She was sitting very erect upon her
horse, her head thrown back, tears of anger in her eyes.

“Hate?” He shook his head teasingly at her. “I envy you. I’ve tried
every other emotion, and I’d like to try that. But I can’t. I can’t
hate even Frothingham. On the contrary, I like him. If you must have a
title, you’ve got to take a husband with it. And I must say, I think
you’ll be able to harness Frothingham down to a fairly reliable family
horse.”

“How can you jest so coarsely about such a serious matter?” she
exclaimed indignantly.

“But is it? What does it matter whom you marry, so long as you have no
purpose in life other than to make a show and to induce shallow people
to admire you and envy you for the things you’ve got that can be bought
and sold? It’s better, on the whole, isn’t it, my friend, that you
should carry out these purposes through a foreigner, and in a foreign
country, than that you should spoil some promising American and be a
bad influence here?”

“You are cruel, Joe. And I thought you’d sympathise with me, and help
me!”

There was a pause, then he demanded abruptly: “What does your father
say?”

She flushed--partly at the memory of the interview with her father,
partly through shame in recollecting that she had led Frothingham to
believe she had not told him. “He said--but why should I tell you?”

“I don’t know, I’m sure, unless because you wish to.”

“Well--I _will_ tell you. He said” (she imitated his nasal drawl): “‘If
your ma and you want to make the deal I’ll sign the papers. I reckon
you know what you’re about. And all our money’s for is to make us
happy. Buy what you please--I’ll settle for it.’”

“Was that all?”

Catherine lowered her eyes. “Yes, that was all he _said_. But he
looked--Joe, it was his look that upset me.”

“I understand.” Wallingford’s voice was gentle and sympathetic now.
“And what answer are you going to make to that look?”

“I’d rather not say,” she replied, giving him a brilliant smile. “Let’s
canter again. We must get home.”

As soon as she reached the house she went to her mother’s rooms.
Mrs. Hollister was finishing her morning’s work with her secretary.
Catherine waited, impatiently playing with her riding whip. When the
secretary left she said: “Mother, I’m going to throw him over.”

Mrs. Hollister paused for an instant in putting away some of her
especially private papers, then went on. Presently she said tranquilly:
“You will do nothing of the sort.”

Catherine quailed before that tone--she had been ruled by her mother
all her life, had never been interfered with in any matter which her
mother regarded as unimportant, had never been permitted to decide any
matter which her mother regarded as important. And her mother’s rule
was the most formidable of all tyrannies--the tyranny of kindness.

“But, mother, I should be wretched with him.”

“Why?”

On the basis of their method of thought and speech each with the other,
it was impossible for her to erect “Because I don’t love him” into
a plausible objection. So she said: “We have nothing in common. His
laziness and cynicism irritate me. He makes me nervous. He bores me.”

“All men are objectionable in one way or another,” replied her mother.
“If you married the ordinary man you would have nothing after you had
grown tired. But marrying him, you’ll have, first, last, and all the
time, the solid advantages of your position and your title. And you’ll
like him better when you’re used to him--he has admirable qualities for
a husband.”

“I can’t marry him,” said Catherine doggedly. She knew it was useless
to argue with her mother.

“You can’t refuse to marry him. It would be dishonourable. Your word is
pledged. It would be impossible for a child of mine to be guilty of a
dishonourable action.”

“When I tell him how I feel he will release me.”

“You mean he would refuse to marry a woman who, after treating a man
as you have treated him, would show herself so light and so lacking in
honour. No, my daughter will not disgrace herself and her family.” Mrs.
Hollister seated herself beside Catherine and put an arm round her.
“She has had her every whim gratified, and that has made her careless
of responsibilities. But she will not show herself in serious matters
light and untrustworthy.”

Catherine stiffened herself against the gentle yet masterful force that
seemed to be stealing in upon her from her mother’s embrace and tone.

“You’ve come to one of those rough places in life,” Mrs. Hollister went
on, “where young people need the help of some older, more experienced
person. And some day soon you’ll be glad I was here to see you safely
over it.”

“I can’t marry him, mother.”

Mrs. Hollister frowned for a second, then her face cleared, and
she said quietly: “Your father and I have put you in a position to
establish yourself well in life. You have engaged yourself to an
honourable man, who has something to offer you, who can assure you a
position that will be a satisfaction to you all your life and to your
children after you. I know I have not brought you up so badly that you
would throw away your career, would disregard the interests of those
you may bring into the world, all for a mere whim.”

Catherine was silent.

“Even if you cared for someone else----”

“But I do,” interrupted Catherine impetuously.

Mrs. Hollister winced and reflected before she went on: “It cannot be
a serious attachment, Catherine, or I should have noticed it. Is it
Joseph Wallingford?”

Catherine did not answer.

“Even if you had been attracted for a moment by a man who had something
to offer besides a little sentiment, that would be gone a few brief
months after marriage, still it would be your duty to yourself and to
your family to make the sensible marriage. You are not a foolish girl.
You are not a child. You know what the substantial things in life are.”

“I can’t marry him,” repeated Catherine stubbornly.

“Has Wallingford been making love to you?” The anger was close to the
surface in Mrs. Hollister’s voice.

Catherine smiled bitterly. “No,” she answered, “he has not. He cares
nothing for me. But I can’t marry Lord Frothingham--and I won’t.”

“You must not say that, Catherine,” said her mother sternly. “It is a
great shock to me to find that you cannot be trusted. If you refused to
marry the man you have voluntarily engaged yourself to, I should never
forgive you.”

Catherine’s eyes sank before her mother’s. “The engagement must be
announced at once,” her mother went on. “You will change your mind when
you have thought it over, and when you realise what my feelings are.”

“I can’t----” began Catherine monotonously.

“I wish to hear no more about it, child,” interrupted her mother, her
eyes glittering a forewarning of the hate she would have for a daughter
who disobeyed her. “To-morrow we will talk of it again.”

Catherine and her mother arose, and each faced the other for a
moment--two inflexible wills. For Mrs. Hollister had made one error,
and that fatal, in training her daughter. She had not broken her will
in childhood, when the stiffest inherited will can be made to yield;
she had only subdued it, driven it to cover. She had left her her
individuality. But she did not know this; so, she saw her daughter’s
looks, saw her daughter leave the room with resolution in every curve
of her figure, and was not in the least disturbed as to the event.
The idea that she, Maria Hollister, could be defied by anyone in her
family--or out of it--could not form in her mind. “It is fortunate,”
she said to herself, “that Wallingford is leaving early in the morning.
I’ll announce the engagement at dinner to-night.”

Catherine went to change her dress, and then searched for Frothingham.
He was alone in the billiard room, half asleep, on one of the wall
lounges. At sight of him--she saw him before he saw her--her courage
wavered. Yes, he was a decent sort of chap; and she was treating him
badly, despicably--had bargained fairly with him, had used the contract
publicly to aggrandise herself at his expense, was about to break her
contract and humiliate him, injure him, through no fault of his. He had
been fair with her, she had been false with him, was about to be base.
“I can’t,” she said to herself. “At least, not in cold blood.”

He saw her, and his face lighted up. She smiled, nodded, hurried
through the billiard room, and disappeared into the hall beyond. As
she turned its angle her knees became shaky and her face white. Then
Wallingford suddenly appeared at the conservatory door. He came toward
her as if he were going to pass without stopping. But he halted.

“Well?” he said.

She leaned against the wall. Her throat was dry and her eyelids were
trembling.

“What is it?” he asked gently.

She hung her head.

“Don’t be afraid to say it to _me_,” he urged. “There isn’t anything
you couldn’t say to me.”

“Do you--do you--do you care for me?” she said, in a queer little
choked, squeaky voice.

He laughed slightly, and came close to her and looked down at her.
“You’re the only thing in all this world I do care for,” he said. “Why?”

“Oh, nothing--don’t follow me,” and she darted back toward the billiard
room.

[Illustration: _“Just my rotten luck,” he muttered_]

Frothingham was still there, seated now at the open fire. “Ah--you!
I’m glad you’ve come back,” he drawled.

“I want you to release me from my engagement,” she said.

His jaw dropped, and he stared stupidly at her. He could hardly believe
that this impetuous, energetic creature was the languorous, affected,
dreamy Catherine.

“I mean it,” she sped on. “I’ve no excuse to make for myself. But I
can’t marry you. And you ought to be glad you’re rid of me.”

Her tone instantly convinced him that he was done for. He turned a
sickly yellow, and put his head between his hands and stared into the
fire. His brain was in a whirl. “Just my rotten luck,” he muttered.

“I don’t hope that you’ll forgive me,” she was saying. “You couldn’t
have any respect for me. I’m only saving a few little shreds of
self-respect. I’m----”

“You mustn’t do it, Catherine. You mustn’t, you----” he interrupted,
rising and facing her.

“I must be free. I care for someone else. Don’t discuss it, please.
Just say you let me go.”

“It ain’t right.” Cupidity and vanity were lashing his anger into a
storm. “You can’t go back--you’ve gone too far. Why, we’re as good as
married.”

“Don’t make me any more ashamed than I am,” she pleaded humbly.

“No, I can’t release you,” he said with cold fury. “I can’t permit
myself to be trifled with.” He knew that he was taking the wrong tack,
that he ought to play the wounded lover. But his feeling for her was so
small, and his anger so great, that he could not.

She was almost hysterical. She felt as though she were struggling
desperately against some awful force that was imprisoning her. “Let me
go. Please, let me go,” she gasped.

“No!” he said, arrogance in his voice--the arrogance of a man used to
women who let men rule them.

Her eyes flashed. “Then I release myself!” she exclaimed haughtily,
with a change of front so swift that it startled him. “And don’t you
dare ever speak of it to me again!”

She slowly left the room, her head high. But her haughtiness subsided
as rapidly as it had risen, and by the time she reached her own
apartment she was ready to fling herself down for a miserable cry--and
she did. “If I could _only_ get him out of the house,” she wailed.

Frothingham debated his situation. “The thing to do,” he concluded, “is
to go straight off to her father.” He had not yet become convinced that
in America man occupies a position in the family radically different
from his position in England. He found Hollister writing in his study.

“Mr. Hollister,” he began.

Hollister raised his head until it was tilted so far back that he could
see Frothingham through the glasses that were pinching in the extreme
end of his long nose. “Oh--Lord Frothingham--yes!” He laid down his
pen. “What can I do for you?”

Frothingham seated himself in a solemn dignity that hid his
nervousness. “For several weeks your daughter and I have been engaged.
We--we----”

Hollister smiled good-humouredly. “Before you go any further, my boy,”
he interrupted kindly, “I warn you that you’re barking up the wrong
tree.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Frothingham stiffly.

“The person you want to see is the girl’s mother. She attends to all
that end of the business. I’ve got enough trouble to look after at my
own end.”

“What I have to say can be said properly only to her father as the head
of the family.”

“But I’m _not_ the head of the family. I’m not sure that I know who is.
Sometimes I think it’s my wife, again I suspect Catherine.”

“Your daughter now refuses to abide by her engagement,” said
Frothingham, in desperation at this untimely levity.

Hollister took off his glasses and examined them on both sides with
great care. “Well,” he said at last, “I suppose that settles it.”

Frothingham stared. “I beg pardon, but it does not settle it.”

Hollister gave him a look of fatherly sympathy. “I guess it does. You
can’t marry her if she won’t have you. And if she won’t have you--why,
she won’t.”

“You treat the matter lightly.” Frothingham had a bright red spot in
either cheek. “You do not seem to be conscious of the painful position
in which she places you.”

“Good Heavens, Frothingham! What have I got to do with it? You ain’t
engaged to _me_. She’s got the right to say what she’ll do with
herself.”

Frothingham rose. “I was under the impression, sir, that I was dealing
with a gentleman who would appreciate the due of a gentleman.”

Hollister’s eyebrows came down, and a cruel line suddenly appeared at
each corner of his mouth. Just then Mrs. Hollister entered. Intuitively
she leaped to the right conclusion. “The idiot!” she said to herself.
“Why didn’t he come to me?” Then she said smoothly, almost playfully,
to “the idiot”: “Has Catherine been troubling you with her mood this
morning?”

Frothingham’s face brightened--her mood! Then there was hope.

“You ought not to pay any attention to her moods,” Mrs. Hollister went
on with a smile. “She’s very nervous at times. But it passes.”

“She told me flat that our engagement was off,” said Frothingham. “I
came to her father, naturally. She seemed to be in earnest.”

Mrs. Hollister continued to smile. “Don’t concern yourself about
the matter, Lord Frothingham,” she replied in her kindliest voice.
“Catherine will be all right again to-morrow at the latest. She has
been doing too much lately for a young girl under the excitement of an
engagement.”

Hollister, who had been looking hesitatingly from his wife to
Frothingham, went to the wall and pressed an electric button. When the
servant appeared he said: “Please ask Miss Catherine to come here.”

Mrs. Hollister turned on him, her eyes flashing. “Catherine is in no
state to bear----”

Hollister returned her look calmly, then repeated his order. The
servant looked uneasily from the husband to the wife, saw that Mrs.
Hollister was not going to speak, made a deprecating bow, and withdrew.
In a few minutes--it seemed a long time to the three, waiting in
silence--Catherine appeared. Her eyes were swollen slightly, but that
was the only sign of perturbation. Mrs. Hollister said to Frothingham:
“I think it would be best that her father and I talk with her alone
first.”

Frothingham instantly rose. With eyes pleadingly upon Catherine he
was nearing the door when Hollister spoke--it was in a voice neither
Frothingham nor even Catherine had heard from him or suspected him of
having at his command. “Please be seated, Lord Frothingham. The best
way to settle this business is to settle it.”

Frothingham could not have disobeyed that voice, and he saw with a
sinking heart that at the sound of it Mrs. Hollister looked helpless
despair.

“Catherine,” said her father, “do you, or do you not, wish to marry
Lord Frothingham?”

“I won’t marry him,” replied Catherine. She gave Frothingham a
contemptuous look. “I told him so a while ago.”

Mrs. Hollister’s eyes blazed. “Have you forgotten what I said to you?”
she demanded of her daughter, her voice shrill with fury.

“No, mother,” Catherine answered slowly; “but--I cannot change my mind.
I cannot marry Lord Frothingham.”

An oppressive silence fell. After a moment Frothingham bowed coldly,
and left the room. Mrs. Hollister started up to follow him. “One word,
Maria,” said her husband. “I wish you to understand that this matter is
settled. Nothing more is to be said about it either to Catherine or to
that young man--not another word.”

Mrs. Hollister was white to the lips. “I understand,” she replied, with
a blasting look at her daughter. And she followed Frothingham to try to
pacify him--she knew her husband too well not to know that her dream
of a titled son-in-law was over.

When she was gone Catherine sank limp into a chair. “She’ll never
forgive me,” she exclaimed despondently.

Hollister nodded in silent assent. After a few minutes he said: “It’s
been fifteen years since she made me cross her in a matter I sha’n’t
speak of. And she remembers it against me to-day as if it had happened
an hour ago. The sooner you find your man, Katie, and marry him, the
better off you’ll be--that’s _my_ advice.” He smiled with grim humour
as he added, “And I ought to know.” Then he patted her encouragingly
on the shoulder with a hand that looked as if it could hold the helm
steady through any tempest.




VII


Frothingham had gone direct to his apartment. “Get my traps together
at once,” he said to his man--Hutt, whose father had been his father’s
man. He threw himself into a chair in his sitting room, and tried to
think, to plan. But he was still dazed from the long fall and the
sudden stop. Presently Hutt touched him.

“Well--well--what is it?” he asked, looking stupidly up at the round,
stupid face.

“Beg pardon, my lord,” replied the servant, “but Hi’ve spoke to you
twice. Mrs. Hollister wishes to know hif you’ll kindly come to ’er in
’er sitting room.”

Frothingham found Mrs. Hollister’s maid waiting for him in the hall. He
followed her to the heavily perfumed surroundings of pale blue silk,
both plain and brocaded, in which Mrs. Hollister lived. He listened to
her without hearing what she said--thinking of it afterward he decided
that she had been incoherent and not very tactful, and that her chief
anxiety had been lest he might do something to cause scandal. He
remembered that when he had said he would go at once she had tried to
persuade him to stay--as if leaving were not the only possible course.
He gradually recovered his self-command, and through weakness, through
good nature, through contempt of his hosts, and through policy, he
acted upon the first principle of the code for fortune-hunters of
every degree and kind: “Be near-sighted to insults, and far-sighted to
apologies.”

Surveying the wreck from his original lodgings at the Waldorf, he found
three mitigations--first, that the engagement had not been announced;
second, that he had not written Evelyn anything about it; third, that
it was impossible for “middle-class people” such as the Hollisters to
insult him--“if I wallow with that sort, I can’t expect anything else,
can I?” To cheer himself he had several drinks and took an account
of stock. He found he was ninety-three pounds richer than when he
landed--he played “bridge” well, and had been in several heavy games
at Lake-in-the-Wood, and had been adroit in noting the stupid players,
and so arranging partners that he could benefit by them; also he had
been lucky in a small way at picking the numbers at Canfield’s the few
times he had trusted himself to go there. “Not so bad,” he said. “It’s
a long game, and that was only the first hand.” He hesitated at the
indicator, then instead of ordering another drink went to the telephone
and called up Longview’s house. It gave him courage, and a sense that
he was not altogether friendless and forlorn, to hear Honoria’s voice
again. “Shall you be in late this afternoon?” he asked.

“Why! I didn’t know you were in town--or are you calling me from
Catherine’s?”

“Yes--I’m in town,” he replied, and he felt that she must notice the
strain in his voice.

“Oh!”

“I’m up to stay,” he went on, his voice improving.

“Oh--yes--come at half-past five.”

“Thank you--good-by.” He held the receiver to his ear until he heard
her ring off. “Good girl, Honoria,” he muttered. “Not like those
beastly cads.” He went to the club, lunched with Browne, whom he found
there, was beaten by him at billiards, losing ten dollars, and returned
to the hotel to dress.

At a quarter-past five he started up the avenue afoot--a striking
figure in clothes made in the extreme of the English fashion; but he
would have been striking in almost any sort of dress, so distinguished
was its pale, rather supercilious face, with one of his keen eyes
ambushed behind that eyeglass, expressive in its expressionlessness.
The occupants of every fifth or sixth carriage in the fashionable
parade bowed to him with a friendliness that gave him an internal
self-possession as calm as the external immobility which his control of
his features enabled him always to present to the world.

He told Honoria his story in outline--“the surest way to win a woman’s
friendship is to show her that you trust her,” he reflected. She was
sympathetic in a way that soothed, not hurt, his vanity; but she
sided with Catherine. “I half suspected her of being in love with
Joe,” she said, “but I thought he was a confirmed bachelor. He played
all round you--that’s the truth. I’m going to say something rather
disagreeable--but I think it’s necessary.”

“I want--I need your advice,” he replied.

“You’ve been relying entirely too much on your title. You’ve let
yourself be misled by what the newspapers say about that sort of thing.
You don’t understand--I didn’t understand until I’d been here a while,
and had got my point of view straight. They’re not so excited about
titles now as they used to be when they had no fashionable society of
their own, and had to look abroad to gratify their instinct for social
position. If you’d come five years ago----”

“Just my rotten luck,” he muttered.

“Your title is a good thing--properly worked. It will catch a woman,
especially if she’s not well forward ‘in the push,’ as they say. But
it won’t hold her. She’s likely to use you to strengthen her social
position, and then to drop you, unless she has lived in England, and
has had her head turned, and has become--like your middle-classes.”

“But my family is away better than Surrey’s.”

“Your family counts for nothing here. New York knows nothing and cares
nothing about birth. Englishmen count by title only.”

“Then they ran after Surrey because he was a Duke?”

“Perhaps to a certain extent,” replied Honoria. “But I fancy the
principal reason was that they wished to see what it was Helen had paid
such a tall price for. If he had come here quietly to marry a poor girl
there’d have been no stir.”

“Money--money--nothing but money--always money,” sneered Frothingham.
He saw the twinkle in Honoria’s eyes. “But, I say,” he protested, “you
know that we over there do care for other things, too.”

“So do they here, but what do they care for, first and most, in both
countries?”

He smiled.

“It’s money first--there and here, and the world over,” she went on
with bitterness under her raillery. “And among our kind of people
everything else--sentiment, art, good taste even--is far behind it.
How could it be otherwise? We’ve got to have money--lots of money--or
we can’t have the things we most crave--luxury, deference, show.
But--where are you dining to-night?”

“Probably at the club.”

“Excuse me a minute. I’ll just see if Mrs. Galloway will let me
bring you. We’re going to the opera afterward.” She looked at him
quizzically. “I think I’ll arrange to ship you off to Boston. A little
vacation just now will do you no harm. And--Boston might interest you.”

When she returned from the telephone it was with a cordial invitation
for him from Mrs. Galloway. He said: “I’ve a letter to a Mrs. Saalfield
in Boston. Do you know her?”

“Yes--she’s here now, I think. But you would better keep away from her.
She wouldn’t do you the least good.”

“Is she out of ‘the push’?”

“Oh, no--she leads it there, I believe. But she wouldn’t let you look
at a girl or a widow, or any woman but herself. She’s about forty years
old--it used to be the woman of thirty, but it’s the woman of forty
now. Everywhere she goes she trails a train of young men. They’re
afraid to look away from her. They watch her like a pack of hungry
collies, and she watches them like a hen-hawk.”

There was more than the spirit of friendly helpfulness in Honoria’s
plan to send him away to Boston. The bottom fact--hidden even from
herself--was that she was tired of him. He seemed to her helpless
and incapable, worse in that respect than any but the very poorest
specimens of men she had met in New York. She felt that he was looking
to her to see him through an adventure of which she disapproved rather
than approved. She had no intention of accepting such a burden, yet
she was too good-natured and liked him too well to turn him abruptly
adrift.

Mrs. Galloway took him in to dinner, and it was not until the second
act of the opera that he had a chance to talk with the Boston woman in
the party--Mrs. Staunton. Then he slipped into the chair behind her;
but she would not talk while the curtain was up. Grand opera bored
him, so he passed the time in gazing round the grand-tier boxes--the
Galloway box was to the left of the centre. The twilight was not dark
enough to hide the part of the show that interested him. He knew New
York fashionable society well now, and as he looked he noted each woman
and recalled how many millions she represented. “Gad, how rich they
are--these beggars,” he thought enviously. And he was seized by a mild
attack of what an eminent New York lawyer describes as “the fury of the
parasite”--that hate which succeeds contempt in the parasite as its
intended victim eludes it.

When the curtain went down on the last of seven uproarious calls--the
opera was “Carmen,” and Calvé was singing it--Mrs. Staunton’s
disdainful expression gave him the courage to say: “Ghastly row they
make, eh?”

Mrs. Staunton was perhaps fifty years old, long and thin, with a severe
profile and a sweet and intelligent, if somewhat too complacent, front
face. “Calvé sings rather well--in spots,” she said. “But I doubt if
Boston would have given her seven calls.”

The mirthful shine of Frothingham’s right eye might have been a
reflection from his glass; again, it might have been really in his eye
where it seemed to be--Mrs. Staunton was so seated that she could not
see him as he talked over her shoulder into her ear. “Really,” was all
he said.

“You’ve not been at Boston?” asked Mrs. Staunton.

“Not yet. I thought it would be well to get acclimated, as it were,
before I ventured away from New York.”

“You will have it to do over again,” said Mrs. Staunton. “We are very
different. Here money is king and god, and----” Mrs. Staunton cast
a supercilious glance round the brilliant and beautiful, and even
dazzling, grand tier. “You see the result. Really, New York is becoming
intolerably vulgar. I come here rarely, and leave as soon as I decently
can. But one can’t stay here even for a few days without being
corrupted. The very language is corrupt here, and among those who call
themselves the best people.”

“Really! Really, now!” said Frothingham.

“Indeed, yes. In Boston even the lower classes speak English.”

“You don’t say.” Frothingham’s drawl was calm; he put upon his eyeglass
the burden of looking astonished interest.

“It must fret your nerves to listen to the speech here,” continued Mrs.
Staunton. “It’s a dialect as harsh and vulgar--as most of the voices.”

“It will be a great pleasure to hear the language spoken as it is at
home--though I can’t say that I mind it here. Yes--I shall be glad to
see Boston.”

Mrs. Staunton lifted her eyebrows and looked politely amused. “But _we_
don’t speak as you speak in England. I didn’t say _that_.”

“Oh--I thought you were by way of saying they spoke English at Boston.”

“So I did. I meant that we speak correctly. You English speak very
incorrectly. Your upper class is even more slovenly in that respect
than your middle class.”

Frothingham looked interest and inquiry. “Ah--yes--quite so,” he said.
“I believe we do let our middle-class look after all that sort of
thing. It saves us a lot of bother.”

“I’m glad you admit the truth.” Mrs. Staunton looked gracious and
triumphant. “Last winter we had the president of one of the colleges at
Oxford with us--a very narrow man.”

“Frightful persons, all that sort, _I_ think,” said Frothingham.

“I’m not astonished that you think so,” replied Mrs. Staunton. “He--it
was Mr. Stebbins--scoffed at the idea that Boston spoke English. He
insisted that whatever your upper class speaks is English, that they
have the right to determine the language.”

That was Frothingham’s own notion, but he gave no sign. “Stebbins is a
hideous old jabberwock,” he said, glad that the orchestra was beginning.

He had accidentally, but naturally, stumbled into the road to Mrs.
Staunton’s good graces. She wanted acquiescent listeners only; he
disliked talking and abhorred argument. She was living at the Waldorf
also, and this gave him his opportunity. She found him most agreeable.
He had the great advantage of being free all day, while her New York
men friends were at work then--and she did not like women. She insisted
it was only the New York woman--“so trivial, so childish in her tastes
for show and for farcical amusements”--that she did not like; but the
fact was that she did not like any women anywhere. Nominally, she was
in New York to visit her sister, Mrs. Findlay, but she rarely saw
her. “I can’t endure staying in Henrietta’s house,” she explained to
Frothingham. “She has fallen from grace. If anything, she out-Herods
the New York women--always the way with renegades. And she lets her
housekeeper and her butler run her household--dust everywhere, things
going to ruin, the servants often drunk. If I were in the house I could
not be silent; so I stay at a hotel when I make my annual visit to her.”

She invited Frothingham to come to her at Boston in the second week
in January--and he accepted. She had said never a word to him about
her niece, Cecilia Allerton, and for that very reason he knew that she
was revolving some plan for bringing them together. He also knew that
Cecilia Allerton’s father, head of the great Boston banking house of
Allerton Brothers & Monson, was rich enough to give his daughter the
dower necessary to admission into the Gordon-Beauvais family.

In the two weeks between Mrs. Staunton’s departure and his engagement
to follow her he did not neglect his business. But his assiduity was
wasted. He saw chances to marry, and marry well--but no dowers worth
his while. Many mothers beamed on him, and their daughters brightened
at his approach; but not one of the families that might have had him
for the faintest hinting showed any matrimonial interest in him. One
mother, Mrs. Brandon, actually snubbed him as if he were a mere vulgar,
poor, and untitled fortune-hunter--and the snub was unprovoked, as he
was only courteous to Miss Brandon. When Frothingham laughed over this
incident to Honoria she said: “Mrs. Brandon purposes to marry Estelle
to Walter Summit.”

“That chuckle-head? Why, I found him in the cloak-room at the Merivale
dance the other night sitting with his big damp hands in his lap, and
his mouth hanging open. And he wasn’t screwed, either.”

“But Estelle isn’t marrying _him_. She’s marrying his forty millions.
With what she’ll inherit from her father and her uncle that will make
her the third richest woman in New York. The fact that Walter is
slightly imbecile is rather in his favour--she’ll have a free hand,
and that’s everything where a woman’s ambitious. If you Englishmen
hadn’t the reputation of being masterful in your own households you’d
have less difficulty in marrying here. It was a bad day for English
marriages when the American woman learned that England is a man’s
country. A girl brought up as are the girls here nowadays hates to
abdicate--and she don’t have to if she marries an American.”

“I’ve heard that all women like a master,” suggested Frothingham.

“So do men. Everyone likes to bow to real superiority and serve it,
when he or she finds it. But the difficulty comes in trying to convince
a man or a woman that he or she has met a superior.”

“Well, then--perhaps women are more easily convinced than men.”

Honoria smiled satirically. “They _seem_ to be,” she replied, “because
they are prudent. But if some husbands only knew what their wives
really thought, they might be less easy in their vanity than they are.”

“That ain’t true of our English women,” said Frothingham.

“No--and why? Because, milord, they don’t think.”

“Well--_my_ wife can do as she jolly well pleases if she’ll only let me
alone.”

“If she’s an American you may be sure she _will_ do as she jolly well
pleases--and you may also be sure that it won’t please you to be jolly
as she does it.”

Just then a servant came in to say that Catherine was at the door in
her carriage, and wished to know whether Honoria was at home. Honoria
looked at Frothingham inquiringly.

“As you please,” said Frothingham, settling his eyeglass firmly, and
clearing his face of expression.

Honoria left him in the large drawing room, and waited for Catherine in
the adjoining smaller room. “Lord Frothingham is here,” she said in an
undertone, after they had kissed each the other.

Catherine paled and her eyes shifted. “Does he know I’m here?” she
asked.

“Yes,” replied Honoria, “but you needn’t see him if you don’t wish.”

Catherine reflected. “I’m certain to meet him again some time, ain’t I,
dear?” she said. “And it might be more awkward than this.”

She advanced boldly with Honoria and put out her hand to him, her face
flushing, and a delightful pleading look in her eyes. “I’m so glad to
see you again, Lord Frothingham,” she said.

“Ah--thank you--a great pleasure to me also, I’m sure,” he answered in
his most expressionless tone. “Are you staying in town?”

“We came up yesterday--to stay. Won’t you come to see us? Are you at
the Waldorf? I do hope we can get you for a dinner mamma’s arranging
for the latter part of next week.”

“Very good of you. But I’m just off to Boston.”

He shook hands with her, then with Honoria. At the door he turned, and
a faint smile showed in his eyeglass and at the comers of his mouth.
“Oh, I almost forgot--give my regards to Wallingford--when you see
him--won’t you?”

Catherine looked gratefully at him. “Thank you--thank you,” she said.
“I know he’ll he glad of a friendly message from you. He’s very fond of
you.”

“Really?” drawled Frothingham. “That’s charming!” He smiled with
good-natured raillery. “He had such a quaint way of showing it that I
wasn’t _quite_ certain.”

When he had bowed and dropped the heavy portière behind him Catherine
went to the window. She stood there until she had seen him enter his
hansom and drive away.

“How beautifully he dresses,” she said absently to Honoria. “And what
distinguished manners he has--as if he’d been used to being a gentleman
for ages and ages.”

She seated herself near the fire--the tea-table was between her and
Honoria. “You didn’t know that we were engaged, did you?” she went on,
looking dreamily into the fire.

“Were you?” said Honoria--she never betrayed confidences.

“Yes. But I broke it off.”

“Why?”

“I think,” Catherine answered slowly, “I think perhaps it was because
I didn’t feel at home with him--and I do with--Joe. He knows how to
manage me.”

“Joe? Why, you used to act as if you disliked him.”

“So did I--think so.” Catherine sighed. “I wish,” she said after a
moment, “that Joe had Beauvais House and--the title.”




VIII


At half-past four o’clock in a raw January afternoon Frothingham
descended from a Pullman fiery furnace to adventure upon Boston. As he
drove to Mrs. Staunton’s the rain sifted through the cracks round the
windows and doors of the musty cab, and was deposited upon his face in
a greasy coating by currents of the iciest air he had felt since he
was last in Scotland. It was air that seemed to mangle as it bit, that
sent the chilled blood cowering to the depths of the body instead of
bringing it to the surface in healthful reaction.

“Loathsome!” he muttered as he looked out on either side. “Looks
something like London--no, Liverpool. The people look English, too.” A
big, dingy street car with bell wildly clanging darted from a narrow
side street into the narrow main street which the cab was following.
There was a bare escape from a disastrous collision. “It’s America,
right enough,” he said.

The rain was whirling in the savage wind, umbrellas were tossing and
twisting, impeding without in the least sheltering the sullen throngs
on the sidewalks. Everything looked wet, and sticky, and chilly,
and forbidding. “They certainly are English,” he said as he noted
the passing faces; and he did not like it. In New York he had been
amused by the variety--specimens of all nationalities, often several
nationalities struggling for expression in the same face. Here the
sameness was tiresome to him, and he missed the alert look of New
Yorkers of all kinds.

He began to feel somewhat better, however, when he reached the wide
front hall of Mrs. Staunton’s big, old-fashioned, comfortable house
on the water side of Beacon Street. And he felt still better when the
butler showed him to the room he was to occupy--the furniture and
hangings, the woodwork and wall paper, sombre yet homelike in the light
and warmth of an open fire. At half-past five he entered the drawing
room in fairly good humour now that he and Hutt were established and
safe from the weather. He joined Mrs. Staunton and her daughter-in-law
at the fire, where they were cosily ensconced with a tea-table between
them.

“You must have a cheerful impression of Boston,” said young Mrs.
Staunton, called Mrs. Ridgie--her husband’s name was Ridgeway.

“That wind _was_ a bit nasty,” admitted Frothingham. “But I’ve forgiven
and forgotten it. I always spill my troubles as soon as ever I can.”

“You’ll detest Boston after New York,” continued Mrs. Ridgie. “I’ve
lived here ten years. It’s--it’s a hole.”

Her mother-in-law’s expression was not pleasant, and Frothingham saw
at a glance that they disliked each the other. “Virginia is from New
York,” she said to him apologetically. “She determined in advance not
to like us, and she does not change her mind easily.”

“Us.” Virginia smiled mockingly. “Mother here,” she said to
Frothingham, “was born at a place a few miles away--Salem, where they
burned witches----”

“Hanged witches--none was burned,” interrupted Mrs. Staunton.

“Thank you, dear--hanged witches. At any rate she was born at Salem.
And her people removed to this very house more than forty years ago.
The other day I was talking to old Judge Arkwright, and spoke of my
mother-in-law as a Bostonian. ‘But,’ said he, ‘she’s not a Bostonian.
She’s of Salem town.’ Think of it, Lord Frothingham! She’s lived here
nearly half a century, and she married a man whose family has lived
here two hundred years. And they still speak and think of her as a
stranger. That’s Boston.”

“It reminds me of home,” said Frothingham. “Very different from New
York, isn’t it? I asked the woman I took in to dinner the other night
where her parents came from. ‘Good Lord, don’t ask _me_!’ she said.
‘All I know about it is that they came in a hurry and never went back.’”

“How sensible!” said Mrs. Ridgie, the more enthusiastically for her
mother-in-law’s look of disgust. “You’ll notice that people on this
side never talk of their ancestors unless there’s something wrong
somewhere with themselves.”

Mrs. Staunton restrained herself. “You’ll give Lord Frothingham a very
false idea of this country, Virgie,” she said with softness in her
voice and irritation in her eyes.

“Oh, he’s certain to get that anyhow. He’ll only see one kind of people
while he’s here, and though they think they’re the whole show they
don’t amount to _that_.” At “that” she snapped her fingers so loudly
and suddenly that both Mrs. Staunton and Frothingham started. “If you
came really to know this country,” she went on, “you’d find out that
just as soon as people here begin to pose as ‘our best people,’ ‘our
best society,’ and all that rot, they begin to amount to nothing.
They’re has-beens, or on the way to it. We don’t stand still here--not
even in Boston. We’re always going up or coming down.”

After a silence Mrs. Staunton ventured to say, “I think you’ll find,
Lord Frothingham, that the tone of Boston is, as I told you, far higher
than New York’s.”

“Really!” Frothingham looked slightly alarmed. “That’s bad news,” he
said. “I don’t go in for a very high tone, you know. I’m keyed rather
low, I should say.”

“You needn’t be frightened,” said Mrs. Ridgie. “They beat the air
a good deal here. But, if you’ll be patient and not encourage
’em, they’ll soon get down to the good old business of ravelling
reputations. At that they’re far superior to New York.”

Mrs. Staunton looked vigorous dissent, but said nothing. They listened
for a few minutes to the drowsy crackling of the wood fire, and to
the futile beat of the storm against the windows. Then Mrs. Ridgie
rose. “I’ll see you at dinner,” she said to Frothingham. “I’ll forgive
you for being so cross to me, belle-mère,” she said to Mrs. Staunton,
patting her on the cheek. Then her pretty little figure and pretty,
pert face vanished. Mrs. Staunton frowned at the place where she had
been--she disliked Virgie’s hoydenish movements almost as much as her
demonstrativeness; in her opinion, “no thoroughly respectable woman
laughs loudly, uses slang, or indulges in public kissing and embracing.”

They were ten at dinner that night, and Frothingham, seated between
Mrs. Staunton and a middle-aged, stiff, and homely Mrs. Sullivan,
fought off depression by drinking the champagne steadily--“vile stuff,”
he said to himself, “and bad cooking, and a dull old woman on either
side. And what’s this rot they’re talking?”

The conversation was of a Buddhist priest who was making converts among
“the very best people.” Mrs. Sullivan was contending that he was a
fraud, and that his teachings were immoral. Mrs. Staunton was defending
him, assisted by a sallow, black-whiskered, long-haired young man on
the opposite side of the table--a Mr. Gilson.

Frothingham would not even pretend to listen. His look and his thoughts
wandered down the table to Cecilia Allerton.

Her slender paleness was foiled by two stout red and brown
men--Ridgeway Staunton and Frank Mortimer. They were eating steadily,
with the slow, lingering movements of the jaw which proclaim the man
or the beast that wishes to get food into the mouth rather than into
the stomach. Between forkfuls they drank champagne, holding it in the
mouth and swallowing deliberately. Cecilia was evidently oblivious of
them and of the rest of her surroundings. “She looks sickly,” thought
Frothingham, “and an iceberg.”

She had a small head, a high, narrow forehead, a long, narrow
face--pale, almost gaunt. The expression of her mouth was prim to
severity. But her eyes, large and brilliant brown, and full of
imagination, contradicted the coldness of the rest of her face,
and gave her a look that was certainly distinction, if not beauty.
“I wonder what she’s thinking about?” said Frothingham to himself.
“Buddhism, I wager. How English she looks. But they all do, for that
matter, except this long-haired beast opposite. He looks a Spaniard,
or something else Southern and dirty.”

“Did you find that the New York women swore much, Lord Frothingham?”

He started. It was the Puritanic-looking Mrs. Sullivan. “I beg pardon,”
he said, turning his head so that his entrenched eye was trained upon
her.

“The New York women,” replied Mrs. Sullivan. “Were they very profane?”

“Ah--well--that is---- Now, what would you call profane?” asked
Frothingham in his driest drawl. “Damn, and devil, and that sort?”

“I should call them profane in a woman, and worse. I should call them
vulgar.”

“Really!”

“Shouldn’t you?”

“Ah, I don’t know. I don’t call things. What’s the use?”

“But you must have opinions.”

“Lots of ’em--lots of ’em--a new set every day. It’s a good idea to
look at everything from all sorts of directions, don’t you think?”

“If one has no sense of responsibility. But I know you have. One of
the characteristics I particularly admire in the English upper class
is their sense of responsibility. I think it splendid, the way they
support the Church, and so set an example to the lower classes.”

“I don’t go in for that yet--I stop in bed. It’s not expected of one
until he’s head of a family. When I am, of course I’ll tuck my book
under my arm and toddle away on Sunday morning to do my duty. I think
it’s rather funny, don’t you? We do as we jolly please all week and
then on Sunday, when there’s nothing naughty going on, anyhow, we do
our duty. Cleverest thing in the British Constitution, that!”

“But you believe in your--your church, don’t you?”

“Believe? To be sure. Everyone does, except ghastly middle-class
cranks. Some of ’em go crazy and are pious every day. Others go crazy
and chuck it all. They run to extremes--that’s bad form. I don’t like
extremes.”

Mrs. Sullivan looked at Frothingham suspiciously. His face was always
serious, but the eyeglass and the drawl and the shadow of a hint
of irony in his tone raised a doubt. She returned to her original
question: “They tell me that the women--the fashionable women--swear a
great deal in New York now--that it’s the latest fad.”

“I can’t say that they ever swore at me--much,” replied Frothingham.
“But then, you know, I’m rather meek. It’s possible they might if I’d
baited ’em.”

“A few of our women here--those that hang round horses and stables all
the time--have taken up swearing. It is said that they contracted the
habit in New York and Newport. But I doubted it.”

“Perhaps it’s the horses that make ’em swear,” suggested Frothingham.
“Horses are such stupid brutes.”

“And they smoke--but that’s an old story. All the women smoke in New
York, don’t they?”

“I’m not observant. You see, I don’t see well unless I look sharp.”

Mrs. Sullivan smiled amiably. “You’re very discreet, Lord Frothingham.
You don’t gossip--I detest it myself.”

She talked to the man at her left, but soon turned to him with:
“Doesn’t it shock you, the way divorce is growing nowadays? It’s
almost as bad in England, I understand, as it is with us. We’re taking
up all the habits of the common sort of people. Really, I try to be
broad-minded, but I can’t keep up with the rising generation. A young
married woman called on me this afternoon--she and her husband are of
our best families. She told me she was engaged to a young married man
in New York. ‘But,’ said I, ‘you’re both married.’ ‘We’re going to get
our divorces in the spring,’ she said. She asked me not to say anything
about her engagement--‘for,’ said she, ‘we haven’t announced it. I’ve
not told my husband yet that I’m going to get a divorce, and my fiancé
hasn’t told his wife.’ What do you think of that, Lord Frothingham?”

“Devilish enterprising, isn’t it, now? That’s what we call a Yankee
notion. Do you think it’ll be a go?”

“I’ve no doubt of it. She’s extremely energetic--and
conscienceless--I’d say brazen, if she weren’t a lady.”

When the women went into the drawing room Ridgeway Staunton brought to
Frothingham a tall, ascetic-looking man, with the bald, smooth, bulging
temples and the sourly curled lips of habitual bad temper. “Lord
Frothingham, Mr. Allerton.” They bowed stiffly, and looked each at the
other uncertainly.

“I’ve heard much of you from my sister-in-law, Mrs. Staunton,” said
Allerton.

“She’s been very good to me,” replied Frothingham cordially.

“She’s an admirable woman,” said Allerton. “She has been a mother--more
than a mother--to my little girl for years.”

“Your daughter was most fortunate,” replied Frothingham, in a tone that
was for him enthusiastic.

Allerton began to talk English politics; and Frothingham, who, like
Englishmen of all classes, knew his country’s politics thoroughly, was
astonished at the minuteness and accuracy of the American’s knowledge.
But he was amazed to find that Allerton, though an aristocrat and a
Tory in the politics of his own country, with narrow and bitter class
views, was in English politics a Liberal of the radical type--a “little
Englander” and a “Home Ruler.” And he presently discovered that there
were other inconsistencies equally strange. For example, Allerton was
savage in his hatred of all social innovations, was fanatical against
the morals and manners of the younger people in the limited Boston set
which he evidently regarded as the pinnacle and pattern of the whole
world, yet was almost a sensualist in literature, art, and music.
He sneered at superstition, yet believed in ghosts and in dreams.
Intolerant with the acidity of a bad digestion and a poor circulation,
he would cheerfully have jailed and hanged all who were intolerant of
those things of which he was tolerant--and he thought himself tolerant
to the verge of laxness. Finally, he was a theoretical democrat, yet
had a reverence for his own ancestry, and for the title and ancestry of
Frothingham, that even to Frothingham seemed amusing and contemptible.

At first Frothingham feared lest he should express some opinion that
would rouse the cold and tenacious dislike of Allerton. But he soon
saw that, because of his title and descent, he was regarded by the
banker as privileged and exempt from criticism. Just as Mrs. Staunton
and Mrs. Sullivan thought Frothingham’s slang even when it trenched on
profanity not only tolerable but proper in him, so Allerton smiled with
frosty indulgence upon his light, and not very reverent, criticisms in
politics, religion, morals, and art.

“What do you think of him?” Mrs. Staunton asked her brother-in-law,
when the men rejoined the women.

“A fine type of English gentleman,” replied Allerton; “manly and
dignified, and his mind is keen. I like him.”

“I’m going to take him to Cecilia,” said she.

“I’m sure Cecilia will like him. I don’t think she’s looking well,
Martha.”

“Poor child! You can’t expect a girl of her depth of feeling, her
spirituality, to recover soon. You must remember, it’s been only a year
and three months. This is the first time she’s been out, isn’t it?”

“I should not have believed she could be so disobedient as she has been
in the past year,” said Allerton sourly. “The night of the opening of
the gallery I ordered her to come down and help me receive. I shall
never forget that she locked herself in her room. It shows how the
poison of the example of the young people nowadays permeates.”

“But that was nearly a year ago, Edward. Be careful not to be harsh to
her. She inherits--your imperiousness.” Mrs. Staunton hesitated after
“inherits,” because the look in her brother-in-law’s eyes reminded
her that his wife--her sister--after enduring for eight years the
penitentiary he made of his home, fled from him and refused to return,
and lived by herself in a cottage at Brookline until her death.

After talking to several of her guests, so that her action might
not seem pointed, Mrs. Staunton took Frothingham where Cecilia was
listening to Gilson’s animated exposition of the true, or Gilson,
theory of portrait painting. A moment after Frothingham was introduced
Mrs. Staunton took the reluctant Gilson away.

Cecilia looked after him, a quizzical expression in her eyes. “Do you
know Mr. Gilson?” she asked.

“No; I’ve only just met him.”

“What do you think of him?”

“I can’t say. I’ve barely seen him.”

“But isn’t Schopenhauer right where he says, ‘Look well at a human
being the first time you see him, for you will never see _him_ again?’”

“I should say Gilson was--not very clean, then. Who is he?”

[Illustration: “_Then you’re not a Buddhist or a Spiritualist?_”]

“He came here four years ago from we don’t know where, and exhibited
a lot of his own paintings, most of them portraits of himself in all
sorts of strange attitudes and clothes. Everybody ran after him--we
have a new craze here each year, you know. That year it was Gilson.
A girl, a Miss Manners, married him. If it hadn’t been for that, he’d
have been forgotten, and would have disappeared. As it is, we still
have him with us. That’s his wife on the sofa in the corner.”

Frothingham looked toward the enormously fat woman disposed there, and
gazing round vaguely, with a sleepy, comfortable, complacent smile.
“How do you know it’s a sofa she’s sitting on?” he asked.

“Because I saw it before she sat down,” replied Cecilia. “Her fad is a
diet of raw wheat. If she’d been where you could see her at the table,
you’d have noticed that she ate only raw wheat. She’s served specially
everywhere since she got the idea last autumn. She brings her wheat
with her.”

“And what is your fad?--you say everyone has a fad.”

“Everyone except me.” She smiled pensively. “I’m too serious for fads,
I fear.”

“Then you’re not a Buddhist or a Spiritualist?” he said, with a feeling
of relief.

The colour flared into her face. “Spiritualism!” Her lips compressed,
and seemed even thinner. Her expression vividly suggested her father.
“But _that_ is not a fad! Only the thoughtless and the ignorant call
it a fad.”

Frothingham’s face became blank. “This is a time to sit tight,” he said
to himself. “She’s looking at me as if I were a witch and she were
about to burn--no, hang--me.”

“It would be a dreary world, it seems to me,” she went on, her voice
low, and a queer light in her softening eyes, “if it were not for the
friendship and guidance of those in the world beyond.”

“Really!” His tone might have meant almost anything except the wonder
and amusement it concealed.

Her father came to take her home. “We should be glad to see you, Lord
Frothingham, at our house,” he said graciously. “I hope you will let
Mrs. Staunton bring you.”

“Thank you--I’ll ask her to.”

As he watched Cecilia leave he said to himself, “She’s mad as a
hatter--or is it just Boston?”




IX


About a week after he met Lord Frothingham at Mrs. Staunton’s, Edward
Allerton left his bank an hour before luncheon time and went to the
Public Library. His look as he entered was undoubtedly furtive; and as
he drifted aimlessly round the reading-room, declining the offers of
assistance from the polite and willing attendants, his manner was such
that had he been a stranger he would have been watched as a suspicious
character. He took several reference books from the cases, finally and
most carelessly of all, a Burke’s Peerage. Half concealing it with his
overcoat, he bore it to a table and seated himself. He turned the pages
to where “Frothingham” appeared in large letters. There he stopped and
read--at first nervously, soon with an attention that shut out his
surroundings:

  Frothingham--George Arthur Granby Delafere Gordon-Beauvais, seventh
  earl of Frothingham, Baron de Beauvais, b. at Beauvais House, Surrey,
  March 9, 1865, s. of Herbert Delafere Gordon-Beauvais, sixth earl
  of F., and Maria Barstow, 2nd dau. of the Marquess of Radbourne.
  Succeeded on the death of his father, Aug. 4, 1890.

Allerton studied the coat of arms, which originated, in part, in the
tenth century, so Burke said. He read on and on through the description
of the secondary titles and other honours of his sister-in-law’s
guest, into the two columns of small type which set forth the history
of the Gordon-Beauvais family--its far origin, Godfrey de Beauvais, a
great lord in the time of Charlemagne, so Burke declared; its many and
curious vicissitudes of fortune, its calamities in old France through
the encroachments of the Dukes of Burgundy, which finally drove it,
in poverty, but with undiminished pride and unabated resolution to
live only by the sword and the tax-gatherer, to England in the wake of
William the Conqueror; its restoration there, and long and glorious
lordship, so glorious that it scorned the titles a mere Tudor, or
Stuart, or German nobody could give until 1761, when it condescended
to receive from George III the Earldom of Frothingham. There were
places in the narrative so weak that even the adroit and sympathetic
Burke could not wholly cover them. But the Milk Street banker saw them
not. No child ever swallowed a tale of gnomes and fairies and magic
vanishings and apparitions with a mind more set upon being fooled. He
read slowly to prolong the pleasing tale. And when he came to the end
he read it through again, and found it all too short.

He started from his trance, glanced at his watch, noted that no
attendants were in sight, and stole hastily away from the scene of
his orgie. But in his agitation he was guilty of the stupidity of the
novice--he left the book on the reading-desk; he left it open at the
second page of “Frothingham.” An attendant was watching afar off;
as soon as Allerton had slipped away he swooped, full of idle yet
energetic curiosity.

When he saw that the book was a Burke’s Peerage he was puzzled; then
he turned back a page, and his eye caught the name “Frothingham.” Like
all Boston he knew that the Earl was in town, was staying at _the_ Mrs.
Staunton’s, “on the water side of Beacon Street.” And like all Boston,
he had heard the rumour that the Earl was trying to marry “Celia”
Allerton, the second heiress of Boston. Thus, the sight of that name
caused a smile of delight to irradiate his fat, pasty face with its
drapery of soft, scant grey whiskers. He looked round for someone to
enable him to enjoy his discovery of a great man’s weakness by tattling
it. He saw Gilson, industriously “loading up” for a lecture on “colour
in Greek sculpture and architecture.”

He hastened to him and touched him on the shoulder. “Come with me,” he
whispered.

Gilson, a natural gossip, had not lived four years in Boston without
becoming adept in the local sign language of his species. He rose
and followed to the table whereon was spread the damning proof of
Allerton’s guilt.

“Look at this,” whispered the attendant, pointing to the name
“Frothingham.”

Gilson looked, first at the page, then at the attendant. His expression
was disappointment--he cared not a rap about Frothingham or about
Burke’s genealogical romances.

“But who do you think was sitting here?” whispered the attendant, his
eyes sparkling. “Sitting here, reading away at this for more than an
hour?”

“Frothingham?” said Gilson, in the reading-room undertone. “Those
adventurers are always crazy about themselves.”

“No--it was--Edward--_Allerton_!” As he hesitated on the name the
attendant shot his big head forward; at the climax he jerked it back,
regarding the artist with delighted eyes.

“You don’t _say_ so!” exclaimed Gilson, and then they had a fit of
silent laughter.

“Don’t give _me_ away,” cautioned the attendant.

By nine o’clock the next night there was not a member of the Beacon
Street set, whether living in Boston or in Brookline and the other
fashionable suburbs, who had not heard the news; and the mails were
carrying it to those at a distance. And wherever it was repeated there
was the same result--derision, pretended contempt of such vulgar
snobbishness, expressions of wonder that an Allerton had descended to
such low trafficking. Of course none dared tell the Stauntons and the
Allertons or Frothingham. But Frothingham, who saw everything through
that monocle of his, noted the covert smiles that now peeped at him,
the grins and nudgings and cranings when he and Cecilia Allerton
appeared in public together.

One of the many rules which Mr. Allerton had ordained for the
guidance of his household in the lines he regarded as befitting
the establishment of a gentleman of family and tradition was that
Cecilia must be at the half-past seven o’clock breakfast with her
father. Usually he did not speak after his brief, formal salutation--a
“Good-morning, Cecilia,” and a touch of his dry, thin lips to her
forehead. But he might wish to speak, and it would be a grave matter
if he should wish to speak and no one were there for him to speak
to. Besides, he always gave his orders at breakfast--his comments on
the shortcomings in the servants, or in Cecilia’s housekeeping; his
criticisms of her conduct. These “breakfasts of justice” were not held
often, because Cecilia made few mistakes, and the maids--Allerton kept
no men servants but a coachman--had been long in the family service,
and had therefore been long cowed and trimmed and squeezed to the
Edward Allerton mould for menials. But when a “breakfast of justice”
was held it was memorable.

Toward the end of the second week of Frothingham’s Boston sojourn Mr.
Allerton laid aside his paper at breakfast and looked at Cecilia.
Agnes, the second waitress, who always attended at breakfast,
understood the signal, and at once left the room, closing the door
behind her. Cecilia gave a nervous little sigh, dropped her eyes, and
put on the pale, calm expression behind which she hid herself from her
father.

“You were at Dr. Yarrow’s lecture yesterday afternoon, I believe?”
Allerton began.

Cecilia’s nerves visibly relaxed as she noted that his voice was not
the dreaded voice of justice. “Yes, sir,” she replied.

“It was on the evidences of communication with the spirit world, was it
not?”

“Yes, sir--the fourth in the series.”

“Who accompanied you?”

“Aunt Martha and Lord Frothingham.”

There was a pause, then Mr. Allerton coughed slightly and said: “How do
you like the young Englishman, Cecilia?”

Cecilia lifted her eyes in a frightened glance that dropped instantly
before her father’s solemn, rigid gaze. “He’s--well-mannered and
agreeable,” she replied. “I like him as much as one can like a
foreigner.”

“I’m surprised at your speaking of him as a foreigner. He--in fact,
he seems to me quite like one of our own young men, except that he
lives upon a higher plane, and shows none of the degeneration, the
vulgarisation, I may say, with which our young men have become
infected through the overindulgence of their parents and contact with
New York.”

Another long pause, and when Allerton spoke there was a suggestion of
combating opposition in his voice. “I have been much impressed with the
young man. Titles are very deceptive. As you know, I have no regard for
them, or for the system which produces and maintains them. But, his
title aside, the young man comes of a family that has the right sort of
blood. You must have noticed the evidences of it in his face, and in
his manners and character?”

As the statement was put interrogatively, Cecilia knew her duty too
well not to reply. “He has a strongly featured face,” she said. “But
it seemed to me to indicate rather a race that had been great, but was
now--small.”

Allerton frowned. “I am sure that, properly established, he would have
a distinguished career.” He paused, then went on in a tone Cecelia
understood and paled before: “It would be most satisfactory to me to
have my daughter married to him. I should regard it as satisfactory in
every way. You would be established in an honourable and dignified
position. You would exert in society and the wider world the influence
to which your birth and breeding entitle you. You would maintain the
traditions of your family and strengthen his.”

Cecilia shivered several times as he was speaking; but when she spoke
her low voice was firm. “But, father, you know my heart is with
Stanley.”

Her father looked steadily at her--the look she felt like a withering
flame. “I requested you more than two years ago--months before he
died--never to mention his name to me, and never to think of him
seriously again. I repeat, it would be gratifying to me if you were to
marry Lord Frothingham. When is he leaving your Aunt Martha’s?”

“Next Monday, I believe. He goes down to Brookline--to Mrs. Ridgie.”

“You are invited for the same time?”

“Yes.”

“I shall expect you to go.” Mr. Allerton rose. “I trust, in thinking
the matter over, you will appreciate that I am more capable to judge
what is best for you than you are, with your limited experience and the
narrow views of life and duty not unnatural in youth.” He left the
room, severe and serene, master of himself and of his household.

The Allertons were traditionally Chinese in their beliefs in the
sacredness of the duty of obedience from children to parents, and the
duty of despotic control by parents over children.

Theirs was one of the old houses in Mount Vernon Street--a traditional
New England home for a substantial citizen. There was no ostentation
about them--the carriage in which they drove forth was deliberately
ancient in style and in appointments, looked modest even among the very
modest or, if you choose, “badly turned out,” equipages of the Boston
“aristocracy.” Mr. Allerton’s public expenditures--on an art gallery,
in partial support of an orchestra and a hospital, in subscriptions to
colleges, lectures, charities--were greater by thirty thousand a year
than his private expenditures. Cecilia had few clothes, and, while
they were of the very best, and were in good taste and style, they
modestly asserted that in the Allerton conception of dress for a lady
conspicuousness for inconspicuousness was the prime requirement. Mrs.
Ridgie, who often complained that she “hated to live in a town where
the best people didn’t wear their best clothes every day,” called
Cecilia a “dowd”; but that was unjust, because Cecilia was most careful
in her dress, and adapted it admirably to her peculiar charms.

If Honoria had not forewarned Frothingham he would have been deceived
by the modesty and frugality of the Allerton establishment. After New
York, it seemed to him most un-American for people of great wealth
to live thus obscurely. But, having been pointed by Honoria, he soon
discovered that Allerton was indeed enormously rich. And he also
discovered that he was favourably inclined to a titled son-in-law. But
Cecilia----

“There’s some mystery about her,” he reflected. “She acts as if she
were walking in her sleep. But if I could get her, I’d do even better
than if I’d taken a wife from among those nervous New Yorkers. She’s
meek and a stay-at-home. She’d not bother me a bit, and she and Evelyn
would hit it off like twins. She’s not exactly stupid, but she’s
something just as good. It doesn’t matter whether one’s wife is stupid
or absent-minded--the effect’s the same.”

But he walked round and round the fence between her personality and
the world in vain. He found no low place, no place where he could
slip under, no knot-hole or crack even. They went down to Brookline
together--he was more puzzled than ever by her attitude toward him
that morning. She was less friendly, but also less forbidding. She
seemed to him to be awaiting something--he suspected what. He tried to
muster courage to put his destiny to the touch when a chance naturally
offered; but he could not--her expression was too strongly suggestive
of a statue.

Instead, he said: “What do you think about--away off there--wherever it
is?”

“Think?” She smiled peculiarly. “I don’t think--I feel.”

“Feel what?”

She looked mocking. “Ah--that’s my secret. You would stay where I do if
you could go there and it made you as happy as it makes me.”

“You’re mysterious,” he drawled. “I’m a block-head at riddles and all
that.”

But she did not assist him.

Mrs. Ridgie herself was waiting for them in a two-seated trap with a
pair of exceedingly restless thoroughbreds. Halfway to the house they
shied at an automobile and started to run. She got them under control
after a struggle, and glanced round at Frothingham for approval--he
looked calm and seemed unconscious that anything disturbing had
happened. “Ridgie told me not to take this pair out,” she said. “But
I make it a rule never to obey an order from him. In that way we get
on beautifully. He loves to give orders--and I never object. I love to
disobey orders--and he never objects.”

The Ridgie Stauntons lived in what seemed to Frothingham little more
than an exalted farmhouse, though it was regarded in that neighbourhood
as a sinful flaunting of luxury, the worst of Mrs. Ridgie’s many
sins of ostentation and extravagance. These were endured because she
was married to a Staunton, and because she was from New York, and
therefore could not be expected to know what was vulgar and what well
bred. But Frothingham was more comfortable than he had been since
the day before he left Lake-in-the-Wood. Mrs. Ridgie would live in
free-and-easy fashion--one could smoke through all the house; there
were drinks and plenty of good cigars and cigarettes available at all
times; and the talk was the unpretentious gossip and slang of fast sets
everywhere--intelligent people intelligently frivolous.

Frothingham thought Ridgie Staunton “a harmless sort, a bit loud and
noisy,” but well-meaning, and good enough except when he had his
occasional brief spasmodic fits of remembering his early training, and
feeling that his mode of life was all wrong. He was, in his wife’s
opinion, a perfect husband, except that he hung about so much.

“What do your English women do with their husbands, Lord Frothingham?”
she said. “It’s a horrible nuisance, having a man--a husband--round all
day long with nothing to do. I try to drive Ridgie out to work. But
he’s a lazy dog. He goes a few steps and then comes slinking back. I’m
opposed to a leisure class--of men.”

“And you said only yesterday,” complained Ridgie, “that Englishmen make
better lovers than Americans because they have leisure and the sense of
leisure, while Americans are forever looking at watches and clocks.”

“Did I? But that was yesterday,” retorted his wife. “Besides, I said
lovers--not husbands. Give me an English lover, but a hard-working,
stay-away-from-home American husband.”

“Do you wonder that I watch a wife who talks like that?” said Ridgie
cheerfully.

Frothingham and Cecilia rode the next morning. Getting away from the
staid old house in Mount Vernon Street seemed to have revived and
cheered her. There was colour in her cheeks, life in her eyes, and she
showed by laughing and talking a great deal that she was interested
in the earth for a moment at least. Ridgie had given Frothingham a
difficult horse, but as he rode well he succeeded in carrying on a
reasonably consecutive conversation with Cecilia. She asked him many
questions about country life in England, and drew him on to tell her
much of his own mode of living. And he ended with, “Altogether, I’d be
quite cheerful and happy if I were properly established.”

Cecilia became instantly silent and cold--and again he had the feeling
that she was expecting something to happen.

“What the place needs,” he went on boldly, “what I need, is--a
woman--such a woman as you.”

His horse reared, leaped in the air, tried to bolt. It was full
a minute before he got it under control. “Nasty brute,” he said,
resettling his eyeglass, and turning his face toward her again. He
thrilled with hope. “Is there a chance for me?” he asked. “I have
not spoken to your father--that isn’t the American way, is it? And I
sha’n’t trouble you with a lot of--of the usual sort of talk--until I
know whether it’s welcome. You’re not the sort of girl a man ventures
far with unless he’s jolly sure he knows where he’s going.”

“Thank you,” she said simply. “I shall be frank with you. My father
wishes me to marry you. If his will were not stronger than mine I
shouldn’t think of it. It is only fair to tell you why.” She was
looking at him tranquilly. “I loved a man--loved him well enough
to have, where he was concerned, a stronger will than my father.
But he died. I love him still. I shall always love him. When my
father told me that he wished me to marry you, I asked my lover--and
he--said that I ought to obey. He has been urging me to marry--except
occasionally--ever since he died.”

Frothingham stared at her in utter amazement. “Do you mind----” he
began, but again his horse tried to throw him. When he got it under
control he saw that she was much amused--apparently at him. She rode up
close beside him, laid her hand on his horse’s neck and said, “Please,
Stanley, don’t!” in a curiously tender tone. The horse instantly
became quiet.

“You were saying?” she asked.

“Do you mind if I admit that---- Really, I’m not sure that I heard you
aright a few minutes ago.”

“You mean when I spoke of talking to Stanley after he was dead?”

“Stanley----” Frothingham regarded her quizzically. “Is this horse
named after--him?”

“No--I don’t know what the horse’s name is. The reason it was so
restless was that Stanley was teasing him to make him a little
troublesome for you.”

Frothingham paled and glanced round.

“The second night after he died,” she went on, a far-away look in her
eyes, “he came to me in a dream. He assured me that he was happy, and
that I must be so, too, and that he would always be with me, nearer, in
more perfect communion, than if he had remained alive. It was just when
Dr. Yarrow was beginning his experiments to establish communication
with the other world. Stanley and I had been most interested. And when
he appeared to me after his death he explained that he had been able,
through the intensity of his love for me, to pierce the barrier and
bring his soul and my soul face to face.”

Frothingham showed that he was profoundly moved. “When I was a little
chap,” he said in a low voice, “I ran bang into the ghost of an
ancestor of mine--old Hoel de Beauvais. He has paced a hall in the east
wing of Beauvais House the night before the head of the family dies,
for hundreds of years. They laughed me out of it, but, by gad, I knew
I saw him--and my grandfather was thrown from his horse and killed the
next day. I pretend not to believe in that sort of thing, but I do--all
we English do.”

“Nothing could be more certain,” said Cecilia, radiant at this prompt
acceptance of what she expected him to try to laugh her out of. “I have
told no one--I shouldn’t have told you if it hadn’t seemed the only
course I could honestly take.”

“Can you see him now?” asked Frothingham in an awe-stricken voice.

“No--I _see_ him only in dreams--and sometimes when I go to Mrs.
Ramsay. But we talk together at any time. You noticed how he stopped
teasing the horse?”

The horse was, indeed, perfectly quiet. Frothingham nodded. His
habitual look of vacancy and satire had given place to earnestness and
intense interest. “And does he wish you to marry?” he asked.

“Yes--he has said it, and he has written it--in one of the first
letters he sent me through Mrs. Ramsay. I’ve only asked him verbally
about you, and he consents and approves. I’ll take you to Mrs. Ramsay,
and we’ll get his written permission.”

“But why does he consent?” asked Frothingham. “Is there no--no
jealousy--_there_?”

“Jealousy? Impossible! Don’t you see, he can look into my soul--he
knows that I am his. And all the interest he has in this gross mortal
life of mine is that it shall be honourable and that I shall do my duty
as a daughter and as a woman.”

Frothingham said no more. He was overwhelmed with a sense of the
imminence of an unseen world--that world which had been made real to
him by his nurses, bred in the legends and superstitions of England,
and by his similarly trained companions at school, at the university,
and ever since. It was a shock, but nothing incredible to him, this
revelation of a daily and hourly commerce with that other world of
which, he was certain from his own childhood experience, everyone
had glimpses now and then. From time to time he looked at Cecilia,
now returned to her wonted expression of abstraction. She seemed the
very person to have such an experience. He was filled with awe of her;
he was fascinated by her; he began to feel the first faint, vague
stirrings of jealousy which he dared not express, even to himself, lest
the spirit eyes of Cecilia’s lover should peer into his soul, and see,
and punish.




X


At dinner that night Willie Kennefick, who was staying in the house,
began to tell his experiences in New York--he had just come from a
little visit there. “The woman I took in to dinner,” said he, “gave
me a solar plexus while I was busy with the oysters. She said to
me, ‘I went to see such a wonderful man to-day. He told me the most
astonishing things about my past and future, and he sold me a little
wax image that I’m going to burn for my gout.’ ‘What!’ said I. ‘For my
gout,’ said she. ‘I have to burn it slowly, and when it’s consumed my
gout will be gone. I got it _so_ cheap! Only twenty-five dollars.’”

“And what did you say, Willie?” asked Mrs. Thayer.

“I said ‘Cheap? It was a shame to cheat the poor devil in that
fashion.’ And she said, ‘Wasn’t it a bargain? He wanted a hundred, but
I brought him down.’”

“You must have been keeping queer company in New York,” said Henrietta
Gillett.

“Not at all. It was at Mrs. Baudeleigh’s house, and the woman--well,
her husband’s one of the biggest lawyers in New York. But, then, that’s
no worse than the astrology some of us here have gone daft over.”

“Oh--astrology--that’s a different matter,” objected Mrs. Thayer. “You
evidently haven’t looked into it. That is a science--not at all the
same as palmistry and spiritualism, and those frauds.”

Cecilia smiled--the amused, pitying smile of wisdom in the presence
of ludicrous ignorance--and looked at Frothingham. He returned her
look--pleased to have a secret, and such an intimate secret, in common
with her. “But don’t you think you’re a bit rash, Mrs. Thayer?” he
drawled. “You certainly believe in ghosts, now, don’t you?”

Miss Gillett’s handsome, high-bred face expressed astonishment. “Do
_you_?” she asked, before Mrs. Thayer could answer him.

“We can’t doubt it over on our side. We’ve too much evidence of
it. And--I was listening to an old chap from Cambridge--your
Cambridge--very clever old fellow, _I_ thought--Yarrow, wasn’t it?
Yes, Yarrow.”

“Yarrow!” Miss Gillett’s eyes flashed scorn. “He’s a disgrace to New
England. We pride ourselves on having the culture of Emerson and the
other great men of our past. What would they think of us if they
could look in on us with our Yarrows and our Gonga Sahds and our Mrs.
Ramsays. All the sensible people in the country must be laughing at us.
Pardon me, Lord Frothingham--I’m very indignant at what I regard as
superstitions and impostors. It’s only my view.”

“Not at all, not at all,” said Frothingham with an uneasy glance at
Cecilia’s angry face. “I’m not one of those who wish all to believe
alike. What the devil should we do if we hadn’t each other’s opinions
to laugh at?”

“You’re such an ardent disciple,” continued Miss Gillett, “you ought
to go to Yarrow’s Mrs. Ramsay. She’ll put you in communication with
spirits, as many as you like, or rather as many as you care to pay for.
I think she gets ten a ghost--twenty for letters.”

The discussion was raging hotly round the table, all but two of the
men, and all but four of the women deriding astrology, palmistry,
Buddhism, spiritualism; and the respective devotees of these cults
deriding each the others. “Cut it out,” said Mrs. Ridgie finally.
“We’ll have ‘rough house’ here the first thing you know.”

Everyone laughed. They liked slang, and Mrs. Ridgie’s was the boldest
and quaintest. When the men and women were separated, “metaphysics”
was again attempted by both. But the men who did not believe summarily
laughed it down in the smoking room. “Those fads are all well enough
for the women,” said Kennefick. “They’ve got to do something to pass
the time, and they won’t do anything serious, or, if they do, they make
a joke of it. But our men, Lord Frothingham”--he was addressing himself
to the Earl, whose spiritualistic views he had not heard and did not
suspect--“are too busy for such nonsense.”

“That’s a libel on the woman,” said Thayer--his fad was a militant
socialism that had a kindly eye for a red flag. “It’s only women of the
so-called fashionable class who go in for such silliness. The great
mass of American women have something better to do.”

“That’s a libel on the women of the better class,” retorted Kennefick.
“Precious few of them are so silly.”

“If it isn’t that it’s something else equally idle,” said Thayer.
Except Frothingham he was the best dressed man in the room. “I’ve no
time for idlers.”

“Why don’t you give your money away and shoulder a pick?” asked
Kennefick teasingly.

“I’m not fit even to wield a pick”--Thayer was one of the ablest
lawyers in Massachusetts--“and I’d give my money away if I
could without doing more harm than good. There are two kinds of
parasites--the plutocrats and the paupers. I’m ‘agin’ ’em both. And, as
for spiritualism, I will admit that I don’t think we know enough about
mind or the relations of mind and matter to dogmatise as you fellows
have been doing.”

Kennefick winked at Frothingham as if saying: “Another proof that
Thayer’s a crank.”

When Frothingham was beside Cecilia in the drawing room she said:
“Would you like to go to Mrs. Ramsay?”

“Yes--will you take me?” he replied.

“I’ll write to-night making an appointment for Wednesday.”

He was liking her immensely now, and, while he believed--not nearly so
vividly as at first--in her connections with the other world, he felt
growing confidence that they would rapidly fade before reawakening
interest in this world. Meanwhile, he reasoned, his cue was to
ingratiate himself by sympathising with her and encouraging her to
closer and closer confidence. “It’s only a step from best friend to
lover,” he said to himself. And he made admirable use of the two days
between her tentative acceptance of him and their visit to Mrs. Ramsay.
He was justly proud of his manner toward her--a little of the brother,
a great deal of the best friend, the tenderness and sympathy of the
lover, yet nothing that could alarm her.

Mrs. Ramsay lived in an old brick cottage in a quiet street near
Louisburg Square. In the two days Frothingham had become somewhat
better acquainted with Henrietta Gillett and had got a strong respect
for her intelligence. As he and Cecilia entered the dark little parlour
he remembered what Henrietta had said about Mrs. Ramsay, and was on
guard. The first impression he received was of a perfume, unmistakably
of the heaviest, most suspicious Oriental kind. “Gad!” he said to
himself, “that scent don’t suggest spirits. It smells tremendously of
the world, the flesh, and the devil, especially the devil.”

As his eyes became accustomed to the faint light he discovered the
radiating centre of this odour--a small blackish woman of forty or
thereabouts, with keen shifty black eyes and a long face as hard and
fleshless from the cheekbones down as from the cheekbones up. The
mouth was wide and cold and cruel. She was dressed in a loose black
woollen wrapper, tight at the wrists, and her scanty black hair was in
a careless oily coil low on the back of her head. Her eyelids lifted
languidly and she gave Cecilia her hand--a pretty hand, slender and
sensitive.

“Good-morning, my dear,” she said. “This is the Earl of Frothingham, is
it not?”

At this both Cecilia and Frothingham started--Cecilia because it was
another and impressive evidence of Mrs. Ramsay’s power; Frothingham
because he knew that voice so well. His knees weakened and he looked at
Mrs. Ramsay again.

But she was not looking at him. She was saying to Cecilia: “Dr. Yarrow
was here for two hours--he left not twenty minutes ago. I am _so_
exhausted!”

“Perhaps we would better come to-morrow,” said Cecilia, appeal,
apology, and disappointment in her voice.

“No--no,” replied Mrs. Ramsay wearily. “Dr. Yarrow tells me he has
never known me to be so thoroughly under control as to-day. And”--she
smiled faintly at Cecilia--“you know I would do anything for _you_.”

“You _have_ done everything for me,” said Cecilia, and her tone of
humble, even deferential, gratitude filled Frothingham with pity and
disgust. He was staring stolidly at Mrs. Ramsay, but if the room had
been lighter his changed colour and white lips might have been noted.
Cecilia seated herself, and Frothingham gladly sat also, where he could
see Mrs. Ramsay’s face without her seeing him unless she turned her
head uncomfortably.

She rang a small silver bell on the table at her elbow. A girl
answered. “The light, please,” said Mrs. Ramsay.

The girl went away and returned in a moment with a lamp whose strong
flame was completely and curiously shielded by a metal sphere except
at one point underneath. When it was set upon the table it threw a
powerful light in a flood upon a part of the surface of the table
about six inches in diameter. The girl went to the windows and drew
the heavy curtains across them. It was now impossible to see anything
in the room except that small disc of intense light. In it presently
appeared the slender, sensitive right hand of Mrs. Ramsay--it seemed
to end at the wrist in nothingness. It laid upon the brightness a
pad of white scribbling paper and a thick pencil with the heavy lead
slightly rounded at the end; then it vanished. There was a long
silence--Frothingham was sure he could hear Cecilia’s faint breathing.
His own breath hardly came at all and his heart was beating crazily. He
stared at those inanimate objects in the circle of dazzling light until
his brain whirled.

A long sigh, apparently from Mrs. Ramsay, as if she were sinking into
a deathlike sleep; a quick catching of the breath from the direction
of Cecilia. He heard her move her chair to the light and then in it
appeared her hand--long and narrow, looking waxen white, its nails,
beautifully rounded, the most delicate blush of pink. It took the
pencil and moved across the paper. Frothingham bent forward--she had
written large, and he could easily read:

  Dearest!

Her hand disappeared, and again there was in that unearthly light, only
the pad, the pencil, and the heart-call into the infinite--“Dearest!”

A long pause, then the weird, severed hand--Frothingham could not
associate it with Mrs. Ramsay--crawled haltingly into the light,
hovered over the pencil, took it, began to make its blunt point scrawl
along the paper--a loose, shaky handwriting. With the hair on the back
of his head trembling to rise, Frothingham read:

  My wife--I am glad you have come, though you bring another with you
  to profane our holy secret.

In the darkness a sharp exclamation from Cecilia, then a sound like a
sob. The hand ceased to write, dropped the pencil, vanished instantly.
In the light appeared Cecilia’s hand, trembling, its veins standing up,
blue and pulsing--Frothingham was amazed that a hand by itself could
express so much; it was as perfect a mirror of her feelings as her face
would have been. She wrote eagerly:

  But, dearest, you told me only this morning that he might, should,
  see all.

Her hand lifted the sheet, now filled with writing, laid it beside the
pad, then disappeared. Again there was a long silence, and again the
mysterious hand crawled out of the darkness, loosely held the pencil,
and wrote slowly, staggeringly, faintly:

  No, I have not spoken to you, seen you, since he came into your
  life--It has been hard for me to push my way through to-day--There is
  a barrier between us--You have been deceived--Can it be that you--but
  no, I trust my wife--

The hand paused. “Oh! oh!” sobbed Cecilia. The hand was moving again:

  My friends here tell me that you are going away across the sea with
  an English fortune-hunter--with him. You have been cruel enough to
  bring him here to our bridal chamber--Oh, Cecilia----

The end of the sheet had been reached, but the hand wrote on for a few
seconds, making vague markings in space, then vanished, dropping the
pencil with a noise that in the strained silence sounded like a crash
and made both Cecilia and Frothingham leap in their chairs. After a
moment Cecilia’s trembling, eager, pathetic hands lifted off the filled
sheet and withdrew. But the hand did not return. After a long wait her
right hand--it seemed bloodless now--appeared once more upon the paper
and wrote:

  I have been deceived. I love only you. I thought I was obeying you.
  Speak to me, dearest. You see into my heart. Speak to me. Do not
  leave me alone.

Her hand laid the sheet upon the other filled sheets and withdrew from
that neutral ground of dazzling light between the two great mystery
lands. Immediately the other hand darted into the light, caught the
pencil, and scrawled in great, tottering letters:

  Yes, yes--but I cannot until he has gone far from you--Then come
  again--Good-b----

The hand vanished and there was a moan from the darkness that enveloped
the medium--a moan that ended in a suppressed shriek. Frothingham
saw Cecilia’s hands hastily snatch the written sheets from under the
light. Then he heard a voice in his ear--he hardly knew it as hers:
“Come--come quickly!”

He rose, and with his hand touching her arm followed her. The door
opened--the dim hallway seemed brightly lighted, so great was the
contrast. The maid was seated there. She at once rose, entered the
medium’s room, and closed the door behind her. Cecilia and Frothingham
went into the quiet little street--the enormous sunshine, the white
snow over everything, in the distance the rumble of the city. He gave a
huge sigh of relief, and wiped the sweat from his face--his very hair
was wet and his collar was wilted. He was sickly pale.

[Illustration: “_Forgive me--it was all my fault--yet not
mine--good-bye--_”]

“She always wishes to be left that way,” said Cecilia, as if she did
not know what she was saying.

They walked to the corner together. “I am not well,” she said. He
ventured to look at her; she was wan and old, and her eyes were
deep circled in blue-black and she was blue-black at the corners of
her mouth, at the edges of her nostrils. “I must go home--they will
telephone Mrs. Ridgie. Don’t say where I was taken ill. Forgive me--it
was all my fault--yet not mine--good-bye----” She did not put out her
hand to him, but stood off from him with fear and anguish in her eyes.

“The woman’s a fraud--a----” he began.

She turned upon him with a fury of which he would not have believed her
capable. “Go! go!” she exclaimed, as if she were driving away a dog.
“Already you may have lost me my love. Go!”

He shrank from her. She walked rapidly away, and he saw her hail a cab,
enter it, saw the cab drive away. With his head down he went in the
opposite direction. “I think I must be mad,” he muttered. He thrust
his hands deep into the outside pockets of his ulster. He drew out
his right hand--in it was her purse, which she had given him to carry
because it did not fit comfortably into her muff. “No,” he said, “she
_was_ with me.”

He put the purse in the pocket and strode back the way he had come. He
turned into the quiet little street, went to Mrs. Ramsay’s door, lifted
and dropped the knocker several times. The maid opened the door a few
inches and showed a frowning face.

Frothingham widened the space by thrusting himself into it. “Tell Mrs.
Ramsay that Lord Frothingham wishes to speak to her,” he said in a tone
that made her servant his servant.

She went into the ghost-chamber and soon reappeared. “Mrs. Ramsay is
too exhausted to see anyone to-day.”

“Bah!” exclaimed Frothingham, and stalked past the maid and into the
ghost-chamber.

The curtains were back and the slats of the shutters were open. Mrs.
Ramsay, in her great chair by the table, was using a bottle of salts.
She did not look in Frothingham’s direction as he closed the door
sharply behind him.

He went to her and scowled down at her. “What the devil did you do that
for, Lillian?”

Mrs. Ramsay did not change expression and did not answer.

“No one ever treated you decenter than I did. _You_----”

“No names, please, Slobsy,” said Mrs. Ramsay, shaking her bottle and
sniffing it again.

At “Slobsy” he shivered--he was not a lunatic on the subject of his
dignity, but he did not fancy this nickname of his Oxford days, thus
inopportunely flung at him. He felt that at one stroke she had cut the
ground from under his feet.

“I was sorry to do it,” she continued. “But I couldn’t have you
poaching on my preserves, could I now, Slobsy? It cut me to do it”--she
looked at him with friendly sympathy--“but you could better afford
to lose her than I could. You forgive me, don’t you? You always were
sensible.”

“I’ll expose you,” he said--he was once more imperturbable, and was
looking at her calmly through his eyeglass and was speaking in his
faintly satirical drawl.

“Expose--what?” asked Mrs. Ramsay, sniffing at her salts.

He reflected. Suppose he denounced her, put himself in a position
where he could, probably would, be forced to tell all he knew about
her, roused her anger and her vindictiveness--whom would he expose?
Clearly, no one but himself to Cecilia, or Cecilia to the public. He
knew nothing about Mrs. Ramsay that would prove her a fraud--in fifteen
years she might have become the properest person in the world, might
have developed into a medium. He turned and left the room and the
house. Halfway to the corner he paused; a faint, dreary smile drifted
over his face.

“It’s really a new sensation--to settle a bill,” he said to himself.
“An outlawed bill, too. What luck--just my rotten luck!”




XI


At Mrs. Ridgie’s they guessed that Frothingham had proposed to Cecilia
and that she had been unnerved by the shock to her widowed heart. He
stayed on until the following Monday, neither amused nor amusing,
then returned to Mrs. Staunton’s for two days. He found her intensely
curious as to the trouble between Cecilia and him--she brought up the
subject again and again, and with expert ingenuity at prying tried
to trap him into telling her; she all but asked him point-blank.
But he looked vague or vacant, pretended not to understand what she
wanted, expressed lively interest in Cecilia’s progress toward health,
professed keen regret that he must leave before she would be well
enough to receive him.

As he was about to go Mrs. Staunton became desperate. “Allerton is
a stern man,” she said, with an air that forbade the idea that mere
vulgar curiosity was moving her. “He has the notion that Cecilia was
not polite to you--you know, she gives way to strange moods. And he is
so irritated against her that he is treating her harshly.”

Frothingham looked astonished. “Really!” he said. “How extraordinary. I
can’t conceive how he happened to wander off into that. Nothing could
be farther from the truth.”

“I confess,” Mrs. Staunton went on, “I’m much disappointed. I’ve taken
a fancy to you. I had rather hoped that you and Cecilia would like each
other--you understand.”

Frothingham reflected. It was possible, yes, probable, that Cecilia’s
father could drive her into marrying him, would do it if he should hint
to Mrs. Staunton that he did fancy Cecilia and was “horribly cut up”
because she didn’t fancy him. “What the devil do her feelings matter
to me?” he demanded of himself. “A month after we were married she’d
forget all this ghost nonsense and would be thanking me for pulling her
out of it.”

“And,” Mrs. Staunton was saying, “I know her father would have liked it
as well as I.”

But Frothingham didn’t follow his impulse and her unconscious leading.
“What am I thinking of?” he said to himself in the sharp struggle
that was going on behind his impassive exterior. “I’m not that sort
of blackguard--at least, not yet.” Then he drawled his answer to
Mrs. Staunton: “I’m tremendously flattered, but really, I fear the
young lady and I would never hit it off. I’ve no great fancy for
marrying--never had. I’ve always thought it a poor business--one of the
sort of things that are good for the women and children, you know, but
not for the men.”

Mrs. Staunton looked mild and humourous disapproval. “What is the world
coming to? A man asked me the other day why all the nice women were
married and all the nice men single. I hadn’t thought of it until he
spoke. But I must say it’s true of my acquaintances.”

“I hope you’ll let Mr. Allerton know he’s wrong,” said Frothingham. “I
hate it that the poor girl’s had the screws put on her on my account.”

“Certainly--I’ll tell him. But I’m sorry it’s not to be as we hoped.”
She was studying him with a puzzled expression. She had heard from
what she regarded as a thoroughly trustworthy source that he had come
over especially to get him a rich wife. If that wasn’t his object, why
was he wandering about here? Titled foreigners didn’t come to America
except for the one thing of interest to them which America has--money.
She could not understand his unbusiness-like conduct.

He couldn’t understand it himself. “I always was an ass,” he thought.
“Here am I, sinking straight to the bottom--or, what’s worse, the
bottomless. Yet I’m squeamish about the kind of line that pulls me
ashore. Yes--I’m an ass. Even Lillian, well as I knew her at Oxford,
took me in a bit with her trumpery tricks to make a living. She
completely foozled me--that is----” Did she “foozle” him? He couldn’t
banish the doubt. And there was the incident of the horse--Lillian had
nothing to do with that, yet it fitted in with her professions as to
the spirit world. But hadn’t she as good as owned up by apologising for
breaking it off between him and Cecilia? Perhaps she hadn’t meant that;
perhaps she had meant she was sorry to be the medium for such a letter.
“There was a lot of truth in that letter. And there must be something
in witches and ghosts and all that, or the whole world wouldn’t believe
in ’em. But what ghastly luck that Lillian should turn up after fifteen
years--no, seventeen, by Jove! Gad, how she has gone off since she was
bar-maid at the Golden Cross and the prettiest girl that walked the
High Street.”

He paused in New York a few hours, long enough to get a disagreeable
mail from the other side--a dismal letter from old Bagley, a
suspiciously cheerful note from Evelyn, a few lines from Surrey with a
postscript about Gwen--“I’ve shipped her off to Mentone. She’s a bit
seedy this winter, poor girl.” Frothingham quarrelled at Hutt, drank
himself into a state of glassy-eyed gloom and took the three-o’clock
express for Washington. As he sat in the smoking car a man dropped
into the next chair with a “How d’ye do, Frothingham?” Frothingham’s
features slowly collected into an expression of recognition, of
restrained pleasure. “Glad to see you, Wallingford. Going to
Washington?”

“Yes--I’m in Congress, you know.”

“No, I didn’t know.” And it struck him as uncommonly modest in
Wallingford never to have spoken of so distinguished an honour.

“My father put me in last year.”

“Oh, you’ve a seat in your family.” Frothingham nodded understandingly.
“That’s very nice. They’ve almost abolished that sort of luxury with
us. Nowadays, to get into Parliament a fellow has to put up a good
many thousand pounds. Even then he must take his chances of winning a
lot of noisy brutes. They often shout for him and vote for the other
fellow.”

Wallingford’s face had flushed when Frothingham said “a seat in your
family,” and the flush had deepened as he went on. “You haven’t
got it quite straight, Frothingham--about us, I mean. No one can
have a Congressional seat in his family in America. My father has
some influence with the party in New York City. He always puts up a
lot of money for campaigns. And they give him the chance to name a
Congressman--if he’s willing to pay for it. That’s between us, you
understand. It’s a bad system. But it applies only to a few districts
in New York and perhaps one or two other cities.”

“It sounds like our system,” said Frothingham. “A devilish good system,
I call it. If it weren’t for that the lower classes would be chucking
us all out and putting their own kind in.”

“Well, we think it bad. I feel something like a fellow who knows he
wouldn’t have won the race if he hadn’t bribed the other fellow’s
jockey.”

“That’s your queer American way of looking at things. You are
always pretending that birth and rank and wealth aren’t entitled to
consideration. But that’s all on the surface--all ‘bluff,’ as you say.
They get just as much consideration here as among us.”

“You’re judging the whole country by the people in one small class--and
not by any means all of them.”

“Human nature is human nature,” replied Frothingham, with a cynical
gleam in his eyeglass.

“If you go out West----”

“I’ll find what I’ve found in the East, no doubt--perhaps in a little
different form. I’m visiting Western people at Washington--after I’ve
stopped at the Embassy a few days--some people I’m meeting through an
American acquaintance of ours in England--Charles Sidney.”

“Sidney!” Wallingford laughed. “He’s my second cousin. Ain’t he a
shouting cad?”

“Oh, I think he’s a well-meaning chap--most obliging.”

“I should say so--to anybody he crawls before. And who are these
Westerners he’s sending you to?”

“The Ballantynes. I think Mr. Ballantyne’s a Senator, is he not?”

Wallingford laughed again. “That’s one on me,” he said. “Yes, they’re
from the West. But for everything that isn’t American they lay it over
anybody you’ve seen in New York. Ballantyne! I sha’n’t say any more.
It’s of no use to tell you you’re going round and round in a circle
that’s in America but not really of it.”

“Do you know the Ballantynes?”

“I’ve met Mrs. Ballantyne--and the daughter that’s married to a
Spaniard--the Duke of Almansa. They were at Monte Carlo three years ago
when I was there. A handsome woman--amusing, too. She spent most of her
time in the gambling rooms--used to come in always dressed in something
new and loud--and what tremendous hats she did wear! She’d throw on
the table a big gold purse blazing with diamonds. Then she’d seat
herself and open the purse, and it would be stuffed with thousand-franc
notes. She’d plunge like a Russian. Every once in a while she’d go out
on the balcony and walk up and down smoking a cigarette. She forbade
her husband the Casino unless she was with him; even then he wasn’t
allowed to stake a single louis. He’d slip away and play in one of
those more private rooms upstairs.”

Frothingham smiled reminiscently.

“You know, the play’s higher there,” continued Wallingford. “But the
crowd of spectators was too small and indifferent for Her Grace of
Almansa. When she found out what he was up to she made a scene right
before everybody--‘How dare you squander _my_ money?’ she said, and she
led him off like a spaniel on its way to a whipping.”

“Charming person,” said Frothingham. “Must have been amusing.”

“Indeed she was. They’d talk of her all day without growing tired--and
always a new freak. You’ll be amused by her.”

“Ah--she’s here?”

“Yes--left the Duke two years ago--paid him off and came home to her
father. She’s quite quiet now, they say--educating her children.”

Frothingham’s three days at the British Embassy were to him days upon
an oasis in the desert. It was literally as well as legally part of
the British domain--Britain indeed, as soon as the outside door were
passed. The servants at most of the houses at which he had been
entertained were direct and recent importations from England, yet they
had already lost an essential something--even his faithful Hutt was not
the docile, humble creature he had been. But here in the Embassy the
servants, like the attachés, like the Ambassador’s family, like the
Ambassador himself, were as English in look, in manner, in thought,
as if they had never been off the island. The very furniture and the
arrangement of it, the way the beds were made and the towels were hung
in the bathrooms, represented the English people as thoroughly as did
the Ambassador.

From this miniature Britain Frothingham on the third day was
transferred to the international chaos beneath the turrets and
battlements of the Ballantyne castle. When the house was finished,
twelve years before Frothingham saw it, the various suites were
furnished each on a definite scheme--French or English or Italian
of different periods, classical, Oriental, Colonial American. But
the Ballantynes had the true American weariness of things that are
completed. They were not long interested in their house after it was
done. They felt like strangers in it, lived in it only for the sake
of show, were positively uncomfortable. More through carelessness
and indifference than through ignorance, the movable objects in the
suites had become changed about--a gradual process, imperceptible to
the inhabitants. There were now specimens of every style and every
period in each suite; and Frothingham, who knew about interiors, seeing
this interior for the first time, thought it the work of an eccentric
verging on lunacy.

“Awful, isn’t it?” said Madame Almansa, as she was called. She had
noted Frothingham’s glance roaming the concourse of nations and periods
that thronged the walls and floor space of the vast parlour--the
Ballantynes used the American term instead of the British “drawing
room.”

Frothingham looked at her inquiringly. “What?” he said, pretending not
to understand.

“Do you wonder I refuse to live here?” she went on, as if he had
not spoken. “There’s some excuse for the great houses on the other
side. At least the present tenants didn’t build them and can put the
responsibility upon their ignorant semi-barbaric ancestors.”

“That _has_ struck me as a bit queer,” replied Frothingham. “Over on
our side we’re cursing our ancestors for having burdened us with huge
masses of brick and stone--beastly uncomfortable, aren’t they?”

“Worse--unhealthful,” she answered. “And as dwelling places for human
beings, ridiculous.”

“Yes--and it takes an army to keep ’em clean, and then it isn’t half
done. And it does cost such a lot to keep ’em up. And there’s no way of
heating them. We don’t build ’em any more--except new people that must
show off.”

“That’s the trouble here,” said Madame Almansa. “The new people who
know nothing of the art of living build palaces as soon as ever they
can afford it. It’s supposed to be the badge of superiority. Instead,
it’s the badge of ignorance and vulgarity. I refuse to permit my
children to live in the midst of such nonsense. You must come to see
us, Lord Frothingham, in our little house just through this square.”

Her sister, Isabella, who called herself Ysobel because she fancied
it more aristocratic, laughed queerly--almost a sneer, though
good-natured. And when Frothingham went away to her father’s sitting
room, she laughed again. “It’s all very well for you, Susanna----”

“Susan,” interrupted Madame Almansa.

“Well, Susan, then--though I hate to pronounce such a common word in
addressing anyone above the rank of servant. It’s all very well for you
to talk in that fashion. You’ve established yourself. You can afford to
affect simplicity, and to insist on being called Susan, and on dropping
your title, and on living in a plain little house, and on bringing up
your children as if they were tradesmen’s sons instead of the sons of
one of the proudest nobles in----”

“You know Almansa,” interrupted “Susan.” “How _can_ you speak of him as
proud or a noble?”

“He _is_ a weazened, oily creature,” admitted Ysobel, delighted to make
her sister wince by agreeing with her and “going her one better.” “And
I jumped for joy when you shook him, because I shouldn’t have to let
him kiss me any more. But, all the same, he’s a great noble. And you
know perfectly well, Madame Almansa, that if you had it to do all over
again you’d marry him--yes, if he were ten times worse----”

“Don’t, Bella--please!” exclaimed “Susan” in a large, tragic way.
“Mon Dieu!” She clasped her hands and in heroic agitation swept
magnificently up and down the small, clear space. “When I think of the
heritage of my boys--my Emilio and my Alfonso----”

“My Prince Rio Blanco and my Marquis Calamar,” mocked Ysobel. “Cut it
out, Sue. I loathe--_cant_!”

“Instead of filling your head with these false notions of nobility,”
said “Sue,” sarcastically, “you would better look to your English, at
least. But the vulgar speech you and your girl friends use nowadays is
in keeping with your vulgar ideas of aristocracy.”

“Yes, Madame la Duchesse,” said Ysobel, her good nature unruffled. “And
when I’ve married a title and then shaken the man I’ll talk in the same
top-lofty way that you do.”

Madame Almansa raised and lowered her superb shoulders and changed
the subject to dress--she affected an extreme of simplicity, and that
required a great deal more time and thought than her former easily
gratified craze for the startling. Presently her father came with
Frothingham. “You’re going to Senator Pope’s to dinner, aren’t you?”
he said absently. Frothingham thought he looked like the pictures of
“Brother Jonathan,” except that his white chin whiskers were rooted in
a somewhat larger chin space.

“Not I,” replied Madame Almansa. “You know, father, I’m to stay here
and do the honours at your dinner.”

“Yes, yes, Susie--I remember.” Senator Ballantyne seemed pleased, but
uneasy. “But you must be careful--very careful. Your grand airs will
frighten ’em.”

Ysobel laughed. “Mamma and I are going to Mrs. Pope,” she said, “and
Lord Frothingham, too. And then we all go to the White House dance
afterward.”

“No, the White House dance is to-morrow night,” said Madame Almansa. “I
am going.”

“Well, well--no matter,” interposed Senator Ballantyne. “All I want is
to be sure that you get out of the way before my constituents come.
Your mother ought to be ashamed of herself to desert me. But I suppose
they won’t mind it so long as Sue is here.”

“What time’s your dinner, pa?” asked Ysobel.

“Half-past six,” replied the Senator, and he turned to Frothingham: “At
home they have dinner--no, they call it supper--at five o’clock.”

“That’s ’way, ’way out West, Lord Frothingham,” explained Ysobel,
“where papa and mamma come from.”

“And you, too, young lady,” said her father teasingly. “You were born
there.”

“Yes, but I was caught young and taken to France,” retorted Ysobel. “I
spoke French before I spoke English.”

Senator Ballantyne frowned, became abstracted, was presently sighing.
His eldest daughter heard it and gave a theatrical sigh of sympathy.
Ballantyne seemed not to hear, but _something_ had irritated him, for
he frowned heavily.

Mrs. Ballantyne came in from her drive. She was a fine-looking woman,
had all the outward appearance of the _grande dame_, and acted the
part so well that not even herself had caught her in a slip for many
years--a notable triumph in the art of pose when it is considered that
she was a country-school teacher until she was twenty-four and had
never seen a city or been east of the Alleghenies until she was past
thirty. Frothingham helped her relieve herself of a great sable-lined
cloak which he handed to a servant. The servant bent double in a
bow--Mrs. Ballantyne paid well for obsequiousness. “When do those
people of yours begin to come, Samuel?” she asked, framing her
sentence and her manner to impress Frothingham.

Ballantyne looked annoyed, and, with a furtive glance at him, said:
“Lord Frothingham will carry away a strange notion of democratic
institutions as represented by Senators, mother.”

Mrs. Ballantyne permitted him to call her mother because it was the
only word of address that did not rasp her aristocratic nature. Her
name was Jane--that she could not endure even before the days of her
grandeur. She had made him call her Mrs. Ballantyne before people until
she discovered that it was “shocking bad form.” She decided upon mother
because the old Austrian Ambassador, whose title was of the oldest and
whose blood was of the thin and pale bluest, said to her one day, “I
like your American fashion of husbands and wives calling each other
mother and father. It has a grand old patriarchal ring. My wife and I
have adopted it.”

“You must get out of the way by six o’clock,” continued Ballantyne,
addressing himself to “mother.” “Several of them said they’d come round
early for half an hour’s chat before supper.”

“I’m sorry we’re to be driven out,” said Frothingham. “I fancy I’d like
to see your constituents.”

“Oh, no, you wouldn’t, Lord Frothingham,” Mrs. Ballantyne answered
him--for his benefit she was “laying it on with a trowel,” as Ysobel
would have said. “They’re--but you know how it is in politics. I wish
Samuel would leave public life.”

“What!” exclaimed Ballantyne, in mock horror. “And have all our poor
relations that I’ve got nicely placed at the public crib bounced in a
body, and come grunting and squealing to me to be supported! One of the
objects in getting public office in this country, Lord Frothingham,
is to relieve one’s self of the support of one’s poor relations and
friends. The late President Arthur said to me when he was at the White
House: ‘The degradation of it! That I should have to lower myself for
six hours every day to keeping an employment agency!’”

“But we can’t dress and drive round the streets from six o’clock until
eight,” said Ysobel.

“They’ll be in the reception room by eight,” replied her mother, “or
else they won’t be through dinner. We can get out unseen.”

Frothingham maintained his look of blank indifference, but underneath
he was vastly amused--“And they’re quite unconscious what cads
they are,” he thought. As if in answer to this, Senator Ballantyne
said to him, in a tone of humourous apology: “Our constituents are
plain people, Lord Frothingham--honest, simple. They lead quiet,
old-fashioned lives. I always send my family away or make them ‘come
off their perch’ when I have to receive anyone from home--that is, any
but my regular political lieutenants. To tell you the gospel truth, I’m
ashamed to have my old friends see how absurd we’ve become.”

At six o’clock Frothingham was idling in a small smoking room in
the rear of the great parlour--it was on the second floor. Senator
Ballantyne came in and grew red in the cheeks. “Oh, I didn’t expect to
see you,” he said, with an embarrassed laugh.

Frothingham pretended not to notice, but he instantly saw the
embarrassment, and the cause of it as well. The Senator was not in
evening dress, nor even in his uniform of “statesman’s frock.” To
combat the unfavourable impression his great castle would make upon the
excursionists from his distant State he had got himself up in an old
blue sack suit with torn pocket and ragged cuff, in trousers bagging
at the knees and springing fantastically where they covered his
boot-legs.

He seated himself and talked absently until there was a ring of the
front doorbell. He started up. “I must go,” he said. “That’s the first
ones.” And he hurried away.

Frothingham waited a few seconds, then went into the hall and leaned
carelessly on the banister where it commanded a view of the front
door. He chuckled. Not the pompous and liveried butler was opening
it, but Senator Ballantyne himself in his impressive livery of the
“plain people.” And Frothingham grinned as his great hearty voice--how
different, how much more natural, than his usual voice--rolled out a
“Why, hello, boys! Hello, Jim! Hello, Rankin. How d’ye do, Mrs. Fisher.
Glad to see you, Miss Branigan. The maid wasn’t about, so I thought
I wouldn’t keep you waitin’. Come right in and take off your things.
Ladies, I’m sorry to say my wife’s run off and left me--had to go to a
dinner where the President and his wife are to be. You know, we ain’t
allowed to decline. But we won’t miss her. My oldest girl Sue’s in the
parlour. You remember Sue?”

They all went into the “parlour”--that is, the little first-floor
reception room, which had been partly refurnished, or rather,
dismantled, for the occasion. The bell rang. Frothingham chuckled
again, as he saw, not butler nor manservant nor Senator, but a neatly
dressed upstairs girl, without a cap, hasten to open the door. As he
heard the rustle of skirts on the stairway leading to the sleeping
rooms, he prudently strolled into the smoking room.

When he went up to dress Hutt said to him: “Beg pardon, my lord, but
my, it’s queer, the dinner party they’re ’avin hin the little back
room.”

Frothingham went on shaving. Hutt took silence as permission to gossip.

“They’ve sent hoff hall the servants, hexceptin’ the maids, my lord.
They’ve got heverythink on the table at once and they’re waitin’ on
themselves.”

“Last night,” said Frothingham, “you gave me a shirt with a spot on the
collar. You’re getting careless and impudent, Hutt.”

When he reached the parlour Mrs. Ballantyne and Ysobel were
waiting--Mrs. Ballantyne ablaze with rubies and diamonds, Ysobel slim
and white and golden in an expensively plain white dress with golden
spangles. Mrs. Ballantyne rang for a servant. “See that the doors
leading into the hall downstairs are closed,” she said.

The servant returned and announced that the way was clear. The three
descended the grand stairway rapidly, entered the carriage, and drove
away--“with two on the box.”

Presently Ysobel laughed. “You should have seen Susan, Lord
Frothingham,” she said. “She was rigged up in a black alpaca made with
a basque.”

“Alpaca?” asked Frothingham. “What’s that? And what’s a basque?”

“Alpaca is--well, it’s a stuff they wear out West in the country when
they dress up. I suppose they wear it because the country is so dusty,
and black alpaca catches and shows every bit of dust. And when you
touch it it makes your teeth ache and the gooseflesh rise all over you.
A basque--it’s a sort of waist, only it’s little and tight and short on
the hips and low in the collar, and it pulls under the arms--I can’t
describe a basque. It has to be seen. My idea of future punishment is
to dress for a thousand years in black alpaca made with a basque, and
to have to rub your hands over it every five minutes.”




XII


Pope, as Mrs. Ballantyne explained to Frothingham, was an Eastern
Senator--a multi-millionaire, sent to the Senate because he practically
supported, that is, “financed,” the machine of his party in his State,
besides making large contributions to its national machine. “So the
‘Boss,’ as they call the leader of the party in that State,” she said,
“sold Mr. Pope one of the Senatorships, keeping the other for himself.
Mr. Ballantyne is the leader, the master, of his party in _his_ State
and, while he’s too modest to tell it, is one of the masters of the
party in the nation. He could be President if it weren’t for the
disgusting prejudice among the people against all who happen to have a
little something”--“a little something” being Mrs. Ballantyne’s modest
way of speaking of their millions. “But,” she went on, “old Mr. Pope is
a nonentity. He sits in his seat and votes the way they tell him to and
is nice to everybody. Mr. Ballantyne suspects he’s getting ready to buy
the Vice-Presidency.”

“How much does that cost?” asked Frothingham.

“It’ll cost him half a million if the chances of our party’s carrying
the election are good; if they’re not so good, perhaps he can get it
for a quarter of a million. But they may not dare nominate him. They
may have to take some popular poor man. The ‘many-headed monster,’ as
Shakespeare calls it, has been grumbling of late. We have a hard task
in our country, Lord Frothingham, to keep the people with property in
control.”

“It’s the same all over the world nowadays, I fancy,” said Frothingham.
“One has to apologise for being well born or for living in decent
style. The trouble with the lower classes at home is that they don’t
have to work hard enough. They used to be too busy to look about and
make themselves and everybody uncomfortable by doing what they call
thinking.”

“That’s the trouble with our lower classes, too,” answered Mrs.
Ballantyne, in her grandest manner. “We educate too much.”

The carriage rushed into the brilliantly lighted entrance of Senator
Pope’s house. Frothingham saw Ysobel’s face, saw that she was having a
violent attack of silent laughter. And he understood why. “The young
’un has a sense of humour,” he said to himself. “It’s ridiculous for
these beggars to pose and strut before they’ve had time to brush the
dirt off their knees and hands.”

As they entered the drawing room Frothingham’s attention riveted upon
two gilt armchairs ensconced in a semicircle of palms and ferns.
“For the President and his wife,” said Ysobel. “They’re dining here
to-night, you know. This is the first President in a long time who has
accepted invitations below the Cabinet circle. He comes to Senator
Pope’s because they’re old friends. It’s quite an innovation and has
caused a great deal of scandal. But I don’t blame him. Where’s the use
in being President if you can’t do as you please?”

Mrs. Pope, stout and red and obviously “flustered,” came bustling up.
After she had greeted them she said: “Lord Frothingham, you’re to take
my daughter Elsie in to dinner.” Then to Mrs. Ballantyne: “Oh, my dear,
why didn’t you warn me of the quarrel between the Cabinet women and the
Speaker’s family. Whatever _shall_ I do? Mrs. Secretary Mandon’s here,
and so are the Speaker and his wife.”

“I’d send Grace Mandon in ahead of the Speaker’s wife, if I were you,”
replied Mrs. Ballantyne. “I’ve no patience with the pretensions of the
House. It’s distinctly the commonest branch of the Government, while
the Cabinet is next to the President.”

“But,” objected Mrs. Pope plaintively, “the Speaker is _so_ influential
and really fierce about precedence, and his wife has _such_ a tongue
and _such_ a temper, and neither he nor she _ever_ forgives.”

“Do as you like, of course,” said Mrs. Ballantyne stiffly. Being of the
Senate it exasperated her that the House should be placed ahead of it.

Just then a murmur ran around the room--“The President! The President!”
Those who were seated rose, conversation stopped, and the orchestra
began to play. “Bless my soul,” muttered Frothingham, “they’re playing
‘God Save the King’!” And then he remembered that the Americans had, as
he put it, “stolen our tune and set a lot of rot about themselves to
it.” The President and his wife entered, he frowning and red and intent
upon the two gilt chairs. Mrs. Pope curtsied, her husband contracted
his stiff old figure in a comical half-salaam. All bent their heads
and a few of the young people, among them Ysobel, curtsied.

“See him looking at those chairs?” said she to Frothingham.

Frothingham nodded.

“He’s awfully sour at the etiquette here,” she went on. “I suppose he’s
afraid the country’ll find out about it and cut up rough. He’s smashing
right and left, and everyone’s wondering when he’ll throw out the gilt
chairs.”

But his courage apparently failed him, for he and his wife advanced to
the “thrones” and seated themselves. No one else sat, the men moving
about to get the partners indicated on the little gilt-edged crested
cards they had found in envelopes addressed to them and laid upon the
tables in the coat-rooms. Frothingham examined Elsie Pope and saw
that she was small and slight, square in the shoulders, thin in the
neck, her hair of an uncertain shade of brown, her eyes commonplace,
her features irregular. “She looks a good-tempered soul,” he said to
himself, searching resolutely for merits. And then he noted that her
hands were red, and that she had flat, rather wide wrists. “A good,
plain soul,” he added. He sat silent, waiting for her to begin to
entertain him--he hadn’t got used to the American custom of the men
entertaining the women; and the New York and Boston women, acquainted
with the British way, had humoured him. But he waited in vain. At last
he stole a glance at her, and noted a gleam in the corner of her eye,
the flutter of a humour-curve at the corner of her mouth. “A shrewd
little thing, I suspect,” he thought. And he said to her, “No--really,
I don’t bite.”

Her eyes twinkled. “I was beginning to be afraid you didn’t bark,
either,” she said.

His expression retired behind his eyeglass. “Nor do I, unless I’m bid.”

“I like to be talked to--I’d so much rather criticise than be
criticised.”

“What do you like to hear about?” he asked.

“About the man who’s talking. It’s the only subject he’ll really put
his heart into, isn’t it?”

Frothingham smiled faintly, as if greeting an old and not especially
admired acquaintance.

“I’m so disappointed,” she said presently. “All winter I’ve had the
same man take me in everywhere--you know, we follow precedence very
closely here in Washington. And, when I found I was to have a new man,
I had _such_ hopes. The other man and I had got bored to death with
each other. And now--you’re threatening to be a failure!”

Frothingham did not like this--it was pert for a woman to speak thus to
him; he resented it as a man and he resented it as Lord Frothingham.
“That’s a jest, ain’t it?” he drawled. “We English, you know, have a
horribly defective sense of American humour.”

“No, it wasn’t a jest,” she replied. “It was a rudeness, and I beg your
pardon. I thought to say something smart, and--I missed. Let’s change
the subject. Do you see that intellectual-looking man with the beard on
the other side of the table--next to Ysobel Ballantyne?”

“The surly chap?”

“Yes--and he’s surly because mamma has made a dreadful mistake. She’s
put him two below the place his rank entitles him to. He’ll act like a
savage all evening.”

“Fancy! What a small matter to fly into a rage over.”

“A small matter for a large man, but a large matter for a small man.
Sometimes I think all men are small. They’re much vainer than women!”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because of what I’ve seen in Washington. They say the women started
this craze for precedence. I don’t know whether that’s so or not. But I
do know that in the three years I’ve been out I’ve found the men worse
than the women. And those things look so much pettier in a man, too.”

“But I thought there wasn’t any rank in this country.”

“So I thought--I was educated in France. I believe in rank and all
that--it seems to me absurd to talk about equality. But I despise this
silly squabble over little places that last only a few years at most.
As Mr. Boughton was saying--you know Mr. Boughton?”

“You mean the Second Secretary at our Embassy?”

“Yes. He said to me only last night: ‘America has an aristocracy just
as we have, but gets from it all the evils and none of the good, all
the pettiness, none of the dignity and sense of responsibility.’”

“But they tell me it’s different--out West.”

“I don’t know. I can only speak of the East--especially of Washington.
There isn’t a capital in Europe or Asia, the diplomats say, with so
elaborate a system of rank and precedence as we have. Why, do you know,
it’s so bad that the fifteen-hundred-dollar-a-year clerks and their
families have a society of their own between the circles of those who
get eighteen hundred and those who get twelve hundred. And they’d
rather die than mix with those who get less than they do.”

“Really! Really, now!”

“And anything like a good time is almost impossible. It’s precedence,
precedence everywhere, always. You can’t entertain informally.”

“It must be as if one were laced in a straight jacket.”

“I’m going abroad next year and am never coming back, if I can help it.
I’m going where at least there’s real rank to get excited about. I’ll
go with Ysobel and her mother--unless Ysobel decides to marry on this
side.”

Frothingham was internally agitated, but gave no sign of it.

“She’s marrying either Mr. Boughton or that handsome Italian sitting
next to Mrs. Ballantyne--the Prince di Rontivogli.”

“Ah,” said Frothingham. And to himself, “Just my rotten luck!”

“She makes no secret of it,” continued Miss Pope, “so I’m not violating
her confidence. She says she’s determined to marry higher than her
sister did. She likes Mr. Boughton better, though I should think she’d
prefer the Prince--his face is ideal, and such manners! But, while
Mr. Boughton is his granduncle’s heir and his granduncle is old and
a widower--still--well, the dukedom might slip away from him. For
instance, he might die before his granduncle.”

“That would be ghastly for her, wouldn’t it, now?” said Frothingham.

“It would kill poor Ysobel. She’s _so_ proud and ambitious! And
that’s why she has an eye for the Prince--he’s of a frightfully old
family, you know. One of his ancestors tried to poison Cesare Borgia
and did succeed in getting himself poisoned or smothered or something
thrilling. And they were an old, old family then. Oh, Ysobel is flying
high. If her father would give her mother and her a free hand, I think
she’d land a prince of some royal family.”

[Illustration: _Cosimo, Prince di Rontivogli_]

Behind his mask Frothingham was hastily reforming his line of battle.
The Ballantyne fortune was apparently inaccessible to an attack from
a mere Earl; but he could keep it under surveillance while employing
his main force against the Pope citadel, which seemed to be inviting
attack. He did not fancy Miss Pope--she was too patently conscious of
her cleverness and it was of a kind that did not attract him, was not
what he regarded as feminine; nor was she physically up to his standard
for his Countess-to-be. But--she had the essential; and he had been in
America nearly five months and had had two, practically three, failures.

For the rest of his two weeks at the Ballantynes’ he spent as much
time as he courteously could with Miss Pope. And when he joined Joe
Wallingford at the New Willard, sharing his suite--and paying less
than a third of the expenses--he was with her a large part of each
day, driving with her, riding with her, lunching where she lunched,
dining where she dined, dancing with her, walking with her, sending
her flowers. In Boston and New York he had been somewhat hindered by
the chaperon system, careless though it was. Here chaperoning was the
flimsiest of farces, and he and Elsie were together almost as freely
as if she were a man.

In his fourth week in Washington he called one afternoon to keep an
engagement to walk with her at half-past four. She had not returned
from a girl’s luncheon to which she had gone. At ten minutes past five
she came, full of apology for her delay--“I really couldn’t leave.
The lunch was over before three o’clock, but the Secretary of State’s
daughter was enjoying herself and, though we were all furious with
her, as we had other engagements, she wouldn’t leave; and, of course,
none of us could leave until she left. When she did finally take
herself away the Secretary of the Treasury’s daughter had given up her
engagement and had settled herself for the rest of the afternoon. She
didn’t leave until ten minutes ago. So there we were, penned in and
forced to stay.”

“Precedence again?” said Frothingham.

“Precedence. It’s outrageous that those two girls should show so little
consideration.”

“I’ve known the same sort of thing to happen at home,” Frothingham
assured her. “Once when I’d gone to a house only for dinner I had to
stay until half-past four in the morning. The Prince of Wales was
there, and he was just then mad about ‘bridge.’ He insisted on playing
and playing. Several of us were asleep in the next room--the hostess
was nodding over her cards.”

“But he must have seen,” said Elsie. “Why didn’t he take the hint?”

“Well, you see, the poor chap led such a deadly dull life in those
days. When he found himself having a bit of fun he didn’t care a rap
what it cost anyone else. It’s a mistake to bother with other people’s
feelings, don’t you think?”

“It only makes them supersensitive and hard to get on with,” replied
Elsie. “I used to be considerate. Now I’m considerate only when it’s
positively rude not to be. Besides, I must expect to buy my way through
the world. I never had any friends--though I used to think I had, when
I was a fool and didn’t know that just the sight of wealth makes human
beings tie up their good instincts and turn loose the worst there is in
them. Even when rich people are friendly with each other it’s usually
in the hope of getting some sordid advantage.”

“Do you apply that to yourself or only to others?”

“It applies to me--it has applied to me ever since I found what sort of
a world I was living in.”

“I don’t believe it, my dear girl,” drawled Frothingham, the more
convincingly for the lack of energy in his tone. And he gave her a
quick, queer look through his eyeglass and was stolid again.

She coloured just a little. “Oh, I suppose I’d be as big a goose as
ever if I should fall in love again.”

“Again?”

She laughed. “I’ve been in love four times in the last four years, and
almost in love three times more. That’s a poor record for a Washington
girl--there are so many temptations, with all these fascinating
foreigners streaming through. But I’m not counting the times I’ve been
made love to in half a dozen modern languages--I and my father’s money.”

“Possibly you were unjust to some of the men who’ve said they admired
you. They may not have attached so much importance to your father’s
money as--you do.”

The thrust tickled her vanity--nature had given her an over-measure
of vanity to compensate for her under-measure of charm. She looked
pleased, though she said: “I don’t deceive myself as to myself.”

“A man might have been attracted to you because you had money,”
continued Frothingham dispassionately, “and might have stayed on for
your own sake.”

Elsie lifted her eyebrows. “Perhaps,” she said. “I’ll admit it’s
possible.”

“And, honestly now, do you pretend that you’d marry a man who had
nothing but love to offer you? What has attracted you in the men you
thought well of? You say there have been four--or, rather, four and
three halves. Has any one of ’em been a poor devil of a nobody?”

Elsie hesitated; in the twilight he saw from the corner of his eye that
her upper lip was trembling. They were walking near the tall, white,
glistening monument, in the quiet street that skirts the grounds of the
White House. “One,” she said, at last, in a low voice. “I didn’t care
especially for him. But sometimes I think he really did care for me--he
was a wild, sensitive creature.” She looked at Frothingham and smiled.
“And when I get in my black moods I’m half sorry I sent him away.”

“But you did send him away, didn’t you?” Frothingham’s expression and
tone were satirical, yet sympathetic, too. “And you complain of men
for being precisely as you are!”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” she admitted.

“I take it for granted the girl who consents to marry me will consent
because she wishes to be a Countess.” He drew closer to her--she
looked her best in twilight hours, and he succeeded in putting as
much tenderness into his voice as was necessary to enable so drawling
and indifferent a person to create an impression of sentiment. “If
I were walking here with the girl I wished to win, I’d say nothing
of sentiment. I’d simply trust to the only thing I have that could
possibly induce her to listen to me.”

She glanced shyly up at him--he thought her almost pretty.

“Do you think that would win her?” he asked in a low tone.

“I--don’t--know,” she replied slowly. Her commonplace voice had also
been touched with the magic that had transformed her face.

“Won’t you think of it?”

“If you wish,” she murmured.

They went on in silence a few minutes, then she spoke in an attempt at
her usual voice: “But we must turn back. I’ll have just time to dress
for dinner.”

And he decided that he would say no more on the principal subject for
several days. He thought he understood how to deal with American girls
rather better now. “I’ll give her a chance to walk round the trap,” he
thought. And then he reminded himself that it was hardly a trap--wasn’t
she getting the better of the bargain? “She’s indulging in a luxury,
while I’m after a desperate necessary. And, by Jove, it won’t be easy
not to make a face, if I get it--with her.”




XIII


So confident was he--and so out of conceit with his impending
success--that he took a day’s vacation, going up to New York with
Wallingford to attend a ball for which Longview had hired half of
Sherry’s, and otherwise to amuse himself. The revisiting of the scene
of his early failure depressed him; he lost nearly a thousand dollars
at Canfield’s; he borrowed a thousand from Wallingford; he returned to
Washington in the depths of the blues. And he found the posture of his
affairs completely changed.

On the very day he gave Elsie the chance to become a Countess, Prince
Rontivogli had discovered that Ysobel Ballantyne had decided that she
was sufficiently in love with Boughton to take the risk of his not
succeeding to the title. Rontivogli was not the man to waste time on
impossibilities--indeed, he had no time to waste. He turned away from
the beautiful Miss Ballantyne instantly, and with all the ardour of
his fiery Southern nature laid siege to Elsie Pope. And, while Elsie
was somewhat reserved in her welcome, he found an ally in her father,
who thought it would sound extremely well to be able to say, “My
daughter, the Princess.”

Rontivogli was tall, had a clear, pallid skin, eloquent black eyes, the
brow and nose and chin of an Italian patrician, the manners and speech
of chivalrous adoration for women which disguise profound contempt for
their intelligence.

When Frothingham, just returned from New York, and still enshrouded in
surly gloom, drove up to Pope’s door, he saw Rontivogli’s cabriolet
standing a few yards down the drive. Rontivogli was conducting himself
in Washington as if he were rich, so plausibly that only the foreign
element was without doubts as to the object of his visit to America.
At sight of this trap Frothingham scowled. “What’s that Italian doing
here?” he said to himself, and his fear answered the question. When
they came face to face in the parlour Elsie greatly enjoyed it. The
Italian was smooth and urbane; Frothingham, careless of the feelings
of a man he despised and thoroughly English in his indifference to the
demands of courtesy to Elsie, was almost uncivil. He and Elsie talked
for a few minutes, then she drew Rontivogli into the conversation. The
Prince answered in French, and French became the language. Frothingham
spoke it far worse than Rontivogli spoke English, so he was practically
excluded. He sat dumb and stolid, wondering why “the brute hasn’t the
decency to take himself off when I came last.”

But “the brute” drew Elsie into a lively discussion on a book he had
sent her and, because there was no break in the argument, was seemingly
not impolite in lingering. It was almost an hour before he rose, kissed
her hand, gave her an adoring look, said “_À bientôt_,” and departed.
But, although he was physically gone, he was actually still there--if
anything Frothingham was more acutely conscious of him.

“I don’t believe Miss Ballantyne could stand that fellow,” he said,
aware of his tactlessness, but too angry to care. “I think all those
Latins unendurable. They’re a snaky lot and their manners suggest
waiters and valets.”

Elsie flushed and slightly drew in the corners of her mouth, a sure
sign that her temper had been roused in the worst way--through wounded
vanity. “Oh, you British are so insular,” she replied, “and so
self-satisfied. Here in Washington we learn to appreciate all kinds of
foreigners and to make allowances even for Englishmen”--that last with
a mere veneer of good nature. “I think Rontivogli charming. He’s so
intelligent, and has so much temperament.”

Frothingham recovered his self-control in presence of obvious danger.
He looked calmly at her through his eyeglass. “Dare say you’re right,”
he drawled. “Rontivogli’s a decent enough chap, so far as I know, and
for an Italian devilish clean-looking.”

Elsie had no intention of driving him off; in spite of the
Italian’s superiority in title and “temperament,” she preferred the
Englishman--she knew him better and in a more candid way. She became
conciliatory, and they were soon amicable again. But Frothingham saw
that his vacation had been perilously costly, that he must work to
reinstate himself, that it was not a wise moment for reopening the
matter of the engagement which only four days ago seemed all but
settled. He found that Elsie was dining at the Italian Embassy, to go
afterwards to a ball at the Vice-President’s to which he was invited.
He arranged to see her there and left.

Boughton and he dined together at the Metropolitan Club. While they
were having a before-dinner cocktail Boughton told him, in confidence,
that he was engaged to Ysobel Ballantyne. “So that’s why I find
Rontivogli poaching,” thought Frothingham. And he said presently: “What
do you know about that chap Rontivogli? He _looks_ a queer ’un.”

“Not a thing,” replied Boughton. “I had all our fellows writing over
to the other side, following him up. The answers thus far show nothing
downright shady. He’s down to a box of a house and a few acres just
north of Milan. And that’s swamped in mortgages. No one knows how he
raised the wind for this trip. He seems to have a good bit of cash,
doesn’t he?”

“I’m particularly interested in knowing about him,” continued
Frothingham. “He’s developed an astonishing interest in a girl friend
of mine. I’d hate to see her taken in by a scamp. And I’m sure he’s
that.”

“Oh,” said Boughton. “Miss Pope?”

“Yes,” replied Frothingham. “And she thinks well of him.”

“I’ll be glad to help you, old man. I sha’n’t drop my inquiry as I’d
intended.”

“Thanks,” said Frothingham. And they talked of other matters.

When he looked Elsie up at the Vice-President’s that night for the
first of the dances she had promised him, he found her on a rustic
bench in the garden, almost screened from observation, Rontivogli
beside her. The Italian’s classic face was aglow, and Frothingham saw
that he had checked a torrent of enamoured eloquence. He saw, also,
that Elsie was not pleased by the interruption. However, she left
Rontivogli and went with him. As they entered the ballroom he said: “I
don’t care for this music, do you? Let’s sit it out. Only”--he gave
her a look of quiet raillery--“you must engage not to go back to your
volcano until _my_ dance is over.”

“Volcano?” A smile of pleased vanity strayed into her eyes and out
again.

“Yes--your Vesuvius, whose eruption I was brute enough to interrupt.
Beastly of me, wasn’t it?”

“Rontivogli seems to annoy you a great deal.”

“He? Not in the least.” And his tranquil eyeglass affirmed his
falsehood. “But I assure you he’ll spout all the fiercer for the
interruption. I know those Southern chaps. I don’t wonder we stand no
show against ’em. I tossed the sponge as soon as I saw what he was
about.”

They were sitting on the stairs now and could talk without being
overheard. “Possibly you may remember,” he went on, “I said something
that was rather important to me--last Thursday, down near the
monument--at half-past six precisely, to be exact--I heard a clock
strike as I finished. Do you recall it?”

Elsie was puzzled by his light, satirical tone. “Yes,” she said. “I do
vaguely recall that you said something vague.”

“I didn’t mean to be vague. But that doesn’t matter now. I see there’s
no chance for me--at present. And I wished to say to you that at
least I sha’n’t give up our delightful friendship. No matter what you
do with your Italian, you’ll feel that I’m your friend, won’t you?”
Frothingham said it as if he meant it; and to a considerable extent
he did mean it--chagrined though he was, he fancied her so little in
the rôle he had invited her to play that his prospective defeat found
him not utterly despondent. He had reasoned out his course carefully
and had come to the conclusion that his chance lay in posing as her
disinterested friend. Perhaps she would confide in him, would give him
the opportunity to advise and criticise--an admirable position from
which to undermine and destroy his rival.

As Elsie had not fully made up her mind to Rontivogli, and as she saw
nothing but advantage to her in keeping Frothingham “on the string,”
she responded to his frank and manly appeal. And she believed what he
said, as she believed pretty much everything men told her; and she
liked him better than ever. “If he were only a prince,” she said to
herself regretfully, “and had temperament.”

That same night she accepted Rontivogli; when Frothingham came to
lunch the next day she told him. “Well,” he drawled, “I can’t say I’m
shouting glad. But I can honestly congratulate _him_. And--I hope you
won’t regret.”

“We’re not announcing the engagement for several days,” she said.

“That’s good. You don’t mind my saying--you know we’ve agreed to be
friends--but I think you--your father ought to make careful inquiry
about him. I’m sure everything’s all right, but--it’s prudent.”

Elsie smiled. “Oh, we have made inquiries,” she said. “Besides, anyone
can see what sort of man he is--anyone but a prejudiced Englishman.”

“I don’t deny prejudice. Is it surprising?” And he gave her a long
look that might have meant anything or nothing. “But--one can’t be too
careful about foreigners.”

“Foreigners!” Elsie laughed with good-humoured mockery. “And what are
_you_?”

“Why, an Englishman. We don’t count as foreigners here.”

“No--but as--as”--Elsie had “poor relations” on the tip of her tactless
tongue, but she caught it and changed it to “step-brothers.” And she
went on, “Which is much more suspicious.”

Frothingham found encouragement in her willingness to discuss her
fiancé with him--it showed plainly how foreign she felt to Rontivogli,
how friendly to him. A few afternoons later--it was the day after the
dinner at which her engagement was formally announced--she went with
Frothingham to call on “Madame Almansa” in her surroundings of Spartan
simplicity. They found Ysobel and Boughton there also, and when Ysobel
took Frothingham and Boughton into the small library adjoining the
smaller drawing room to look at some old prints “Sue” had brought with
her from Spain, Elsie talked with “Sue” of the engagement.

Madame Almansa was chary of congratulations, full of cautionings and
doubts. “I don’t wish to cast a shadow on your happiness, dear--for you
_are_ happy, aren’t you?”

“Indeed I am,” replied Elsie convincingly--Rontivogli was an ideal
lover; he could even sing his mad passion in a voice that was
well-trained and thrilling.

“But--you know my sad experience.” Madame Almansa sighed like Medea
thinking on the treachery of Jason. Her glance fell upon the engagement
ring. She took Elsie’s hand. “How beautiful!” she exclaimed. “I love
emeralds and that is a magnificent one. And only a tiny flaw.”

Elsie coloured with annoyance. “I think you are mistaken,” she said.
“It’s a perfect stone.”

“Certainly it is perfect, dear,” replied Madame Almansa in her
superior, informative tone. “Perfect for an emerald. But, you know,
there are no emeralds of size anywhere in the world that haven’t flaws.
At least, I never heard of one. Emeralds are valuable in spite of
their flaws.”

Elsie coloured again, this time with annoyance at having exposed her
ignorance.

“A superb setting,” continued Madame Almansa. “It must be very, very
old. I love that kind of setting--beautifully engraved, dull gold.
The only objection is that it’s the best kind for deceiving one as
to genuineness, isn’t it? One could not tell whether that stone was
genuine or imitation. You know, they make such wonderful imitations.
When I was going out in the world I had all my best jewels reproduced
in imitation stuff, and usually I wore the imitation. One felt so much
safer.”

Elsie drew her hand away, smiling sweetly. She was inwardly
raging--“The cat!” she said to herself. “Clawing me viciously, and
purring as if she hadn’t a claw.”

She left in a few minutes, Rontivogli calling for her. To relieve
her feelings, and also because she was in the habit of saying nearly
everything that came into her head, she told him what Madame Almansa
had said, making vigorous comments as she related.

Rontivogli, half turned toward her as they sat side by side in her
victoria, regarded her with his luminous smile. “That is the way of
the world, _ma belle et bonne_,” he said in his gentlest manner. “It
is difficult to harden one’s self to such wickedness. But there is
also much that is beautiful and fine. And we--you and I--will shut
everything else out of our lives, will we not?”

He made her feel unworthy, almost “common,” when he talked in that
fashion--she realised painfully that she was sadly lacking in
“temperament,” and she dreaded that he might find her out.

“The ring,” he went on, “has been in the family for eight hundred
years--perhaps longer. It is unchanged. No question of its genuineness
has ever been raised, so far as I know. We are not so suspicious as
some of you Americans.”

“She didn’t question it’s genuineness,” replied Elsie. “She simply
wished to make me uncomfortable with a malicious insinuation. Or,
maybe, she was just talking. It was silly of me to tell you.”

He protested that he was not disturbed. But he seemed unable long to
keep off the subject, returning to it as the cleverest habitual liar
will fatuously return to his unquestioned lie to weaken it by trying
further to bolster it up. So persistent was he that he at last made
her uneasy--not that she suspected him, or was conscious of having been
disturbed by his unnecessary reassurances. The next morning she went
down to a jeweller’s in Pennsylvania Avenue--she had other business
there and thought it her sole object in going, forgetting that she had
intended to send her mother. She discussed several proposed purchases
with the manager, whom she knew well. As she talked she had her elbows
on a show case, and her ungloved hands clasped so that the ring was in
full view--curiously, it was not on the engagement finger. He noted it,
thought she wished him to speak of it, because as she exhibited it she
often glanced at it.

“Would you mind letting me look at that beautiful ring?” he asked.

“Certainly.” She drew it off with some nervousness, gave it to him,
and, as he looked, watched him and it alternately with vague anxiety.

“A very old, a very quaint setting,” he said, “and a fine----”

He paused; her mouth was dry and her skin hot.

“A fine stone--a beautiful stone,” he continued. “One of the finest I
ever saw. The flaw is slight.”

Elsie drew a long breath--she felt an unaccountable sense of relief.
The manager took his glass, went to the window, and studied the stone
and the setting. “I’m glad to hear you say the stone’s genuine,” said
she, now admitting to herself that Madame Almansa’s poison had been
lurking far down in her mind. “Someone doubted it, and as it was
important to me to know, I intended to ask you.”

“In that case,” said the manager, “I feel it’s my duty to tell you the
stone’s an imitation.”

Elsie grew rigid and cold from amazement and rising horror.

“A good imitation,” continued the manager, intent upon the stone,
“but unquestionably not genuine. The setting makes it additionally
deceptive.”

“How much is the ring worth?” she asked, gathering herself together
heroically.

“Well--the stone, of course, is worthless--a few dollars. But the
setting is old and quite beautiful. It might bring a hundred or so from
a collector if it hit his fancy and had an authentic history. If the
stone were genuine, the ring would be worth about--five thousand, I
should say, as a rough guess.”

“Fortunately, I haven’t bought it yet,” she said carelessly. And she
took it from him and put it--in her pocketbook. “The stone seems to
have been undisturbed in that setting for a long time,” she added, as
she closed the pocketbook.

“Oh, there’s no telling as to that. It was manufactured by the newest
process. It has been only two or three years, I believe, since they
learned to put in the flaws so cleverly. They make them very well in
New York now.”

“Thank you so much, Mr. Macready,” said Elsie. “You won’t say anything
about it, will you?”

“You needn’t have asked that, Miss Pope,” answered Macready with a
reproachful smile.

“Thank you again,” she said. It was not until she was driving away,
that her cheeks began to burn fiercely and the hot tears of shame and
anger to scald her eyes.




XIV


She went straight to her father with the whole story. He listened
sitting at his desk, balancing a broad ivory paper-cutter on his
forefinger. She felt much better when she had finished; her anger
seemed to have been carried off in her words.

After a long silence her father said: “What do you wish to do?”

She looked foolish. “I don’t know, papa,” she said feebly. “What do you
think we ought to do?”

“He may have been honestly deceived.”

“But Mr. Macready said----”

“That was merely his offhand opinion,” he interrupted. “They’ve been
making imitation jewels of all kinds for years. I know the Italians
have long been clever at it.”

Elsie was silent. She could not help remembering Rontivogli’s stupid,
over-crafty reiterations. She knew that he knew.

“And,” continued her father, examining the paper-cutter critically,
“there isn’t the slightest doubt as to the genuineness of Prince
Rontivogli himself.”

Another long silence during which neither father nor daughter showed
the slightest curiosity as to what thoughts the other’s face might be
revealing.

“Even if he did wilfully deceive in this--not vitally
important--matter,” continued the aspirant for a princess-daughter, “I
can imagine many extenuating circumstances. It isn’t the young man’s
fault that he’s poor. It isn’t unnatural that he shouldn’t wish to
expose his poverty--especially if he”--the Senator’s face took on a
smile of fatherly benevolence--“happened to care for the young lady.
‘All’s fair in love and war,’ you know. And we must not judge harshly
those who have less than we have. Still----”

Rontivogli’s “temperament” was vigorously reinforcing his title in
repairing the havoc the false jewel had played with him in Elsie’s
mind. He had been a convincing lover; Elsie had too much vanity and
too much desire to be loved madly not to be a credulous young woman.
“I don’t know what to do, papa,” she said in the tone that proclaims a
decision reached and a wish for support in it.

[Illustration: “_I can imagine many extenuating circumstances_”]

“Perhaps,” replied the Senator slowly, the personification of
forgiving charity, “it might be best to let the matter drop.”

“But I simply can’t _wear_ the ring! I’d feel such a fraud, and I’d
soon be disliking him, though this may not be at all his fault.
Besides, someone might----”

“That could be easily arranged.” Her father’s eyes twinkled--he was
preparing to treat the discovered deception as a little private joke on
the prince between his daughter and himself. “We can get Tiffany to set
an emerald in the ring. No one will know. And some day you can tease
him about it. If he is innocent it would mortify him to learn the truth
now, wouldn’t it?”

Elsie smiled somewhat cheerfully. She was trying hard to make herself
doubt the prince’s guilty knowledge. “It must be done right away,” she
said.

She wore her gloves that afternoon. But Rontivogli, with nerves like a
sensitive plant’s leaves, felt a change in her, hard though she tried
to seem unchanged. In the clear light of hind-sight he had been cursing
himself for saying so much to her of Madame Almansa’s insinuations;
and at first he feared that by his blundering he had roused suspicion
in her. But she showed that she was still in the mood to marry him,
and the negotiations for settlements went smoothly on between Senator
Pope’s lawyer and the attorney to the Italian Embassy, whom he had
engaged to represent him. He dismissed his fear as a wild imagining of
guilt and set himself to remove the coolness just under Elsie’s surface
of warmth by lavishing his “temperament” upon her. And he was rewarded
with swift success. A flaw in such a lover was as inconsequential as a
flaw in an emerald--and was it not as much a matter of course?

Toward the end of the week she went with her father to New York, and
in two days Tiffany changed the setting for a consideration of four
thousand eight hundred dollars. She returned fully restored--but she
kept the false stone, hid it far back in the bottom of her jewel-safe.

The shock and its after-effects were soon over. She was a little
astonished that she, so used to the quaint ways of foreigners, should
have attached importance to the quaintness of this foreigner--a lover
who was fiery and infatuated, a lover who sang, a lover who was a
Prince of a “house” that ruled and plotted and patronised the arts
when Europe beyond the Alps was a savage wilderness. Rontivogli
had not been studying women for twenty years--or ever since he was
eighteen--aided by a classic face, a classic figure, a classic name,
and classic recklessness, without learning thoroughly the business he
was now following.

Frothingham had ceased to hope, and, for lack of any other opening, was
arranging to go to Chicago, there to visit his steamer friend Barney,
whom he had not permitted to forget him--Barney had a marriageable
daughter and was rated at eleven millions; also, Chicago was reputed
to be a promising field for titled foreigners. He felt that he was
neglecting business in lingering at Washington. He saw no signs, heard
no news, of available rich girls or rich men’s daughters. Half a
dozen questions about any girl and he would get an answer that would
force him to strike her from his list--the father was opposed to
large settlements; the family was opposed to international marriages;
the family’s social ambitions were of the new cis-Atlantic kind; the
daughter was already engaged; the mother’s aim was for princely or
ducal rank. And he was kept in low spirits by the spectacle of the
triumphant Rontivogli and was exasperated by Elsie’s treating him as
an object of pity, a rejected and inconsolable lover.

As he sat alone in a corner of the club, staring with grim satire into
the ugly face of his affairs, upon him intruded a man whom he had often
described as the most viciously tiresome person he had ever met--Count
Eitel zu Blickenstern. He disliked Blickenstern because he was a
German; he avoided him because he was dull, because he was a chronic
and ingenious borrower of small sums of money, and because every remark
that seemed to him to have been intended humourously was hailed by him
with a loud, mirthless laugh--the laugh of those who have no notion of
wit or humour and fear their deformity will be discovered.

Frothingham had first met Blickenstern in the Riviera, where he was
living on the last lees of tolerance. He would have cut him when he ran
across him in New York had he not found him in high favour with the
women who dominated fashionable society. They admitted Blickenstern as
they admitted almost any of the few available men with no occupation
but idleness. They needed escorts, attendants, fetch-and-carry men;
Blickenstern was idle and willing, was big and always well-dressed, was
useful to do the hard work of arranging an entertainment once it had
been planned. And his noisy convulsions flattered those unaccustomed to
having their jokes appreciated.

Frothingham’s cold stare did not disturb Blickenstern, born insensible
to mental temperatures. He posed for a moment to give Frothingham a
chance to admire his fashionable array of new light grey frock suit,
white spats, orchid in buttonhole, and dark red tie; then he dropped
upon the lounge with the good-natured, slightly condescending greeting
he gave men when he had money in his pockets. He explained that he had
come the night before in a private car with a party of distinguished
New Yorkers who had to testify before a Senate committee. “And, do
you know,” said he--his English was idiomatic American and almost
without accent, “the first person I ran into was that Italian scalawag,
Rontivogli.”

Frothingham’s eyeglass glistened; otherwise he did not change
expression. “D’you know ’im?” he asked languidly. “What’ll you drink?”

“Brandy and soda,” replied Blickenstern. “Know ’im? Rather! I’m
responsible for him in this country. He landed without a friend and the
people he had letters to shut the door in his face--they don’t fancy
Italians in New York. I introduced him round and got him in everywhere.
And, by gad, he not only refused to pay a note he gave me, but when
I met him here last night he stared at me as if he’d never seen me
before.”

“Rough, wasn’t it?”

Blickenstern laughed cheerfully, without a trace of irritation. Insults
did not disturb him; he had killed one man and had wounded several
in duels, but he fought only because it was the “proper thing for a
gentleman”--and respect-inspiring in certain countries and in certain
circumstances. “I’m off for home next week,” he said, “never to return
to this bounder-land. I think, just before I go, I’ll get the face
value of that note and interest--and not in money, either.”

Blickenstern had several drinks “on” Frothingham--half a dozen in
as rapid succession as Frothingham could induce. But he refused to
disclose his proposed revenge, only chuckled, “I’ll bet the dago’ll
leave on the first steamer after I sail.”

[Illustration: “_I’ll give the guinea one more chance_”]

Frothingham got Boughton to attempt Blickenstern, and Boughton not
only tried it himself, but also put at work a friend of his in the
German Embassy. Blickenstern, however, would not go beyond wagging
his big blond head and saying, “Wait! I don’t want to spoil the fun.”
The military attaché at the German Embassy was with him when he met
Rontivogli again. “I’ll give the guinea one more chance,” said he,
overflowing with good nature as always when he had drunk to excess.
It was the office of the Shoreham, and Rontivogli was on his way out;
Blickenstern bore down upon him, caught him by the lapel.

“I’m giving you your last chance, Cosimo,” he said. “You’d better pay
up.”

“If you don’t take your hands off me,” exclaimed Rontivogli in French,
“I’ll have you put into the street.” The look in his black eyes
suggested the glitter of a stiletto.

Blickenstern shook him gently. “If you don’t pay that note,” he replied
with unruffled good nature, “I’ll publish it and the contract also. I’m
leaving the country, and don’t care what they think of me here. But
you--I hear you’re about to marry?”

Rontivogli grew yellow under the bronze of his clear, pale skin. “I
tell you, I can’t pay the note. You know it. You drove me out of New
York with your dogging and dunning me. In a few weeks I can pay, and
will.”

“Yes--when you’re married.” Blickenstern laughed loudly and not
hollowly--here was a joke he could see. “What do you think I am--an
imbecile? Don’t I know that as soon as you’re married you can snap your
fingers--and will?”

Rontivogli disengaged himself and readjusted his close-fitting coat.
“I’m certain you will not lay yourself liable to arrest for blackmail,”
he said with calm contempt, and went on to his carriage.

Blickenstern looked after him, nodding and laughing. “Just wait!” he
said, addressing his fellow-German, and including the curious loungers
in the office.

Frothingham searched for Blickenstern--he had a vague idea of
taking him to call at the Popes’. But he could not find him. He did
see Rontivogli, however--one glance was enough to tell him that
Blickenstern’s threats had devoured his high spirits and were eating
into his courage. He waited impatiently for the explosion--a five-days’
wait, for it did not come until the following Tuesday. That morning,
as Hutt went out of his bedroom after fixing his bath, Joe Wallingford
called from their common sitting room:

“You’re awake, aren’t you?”

“Almost,” answered Frothingham.

“Then just read that.” He flung a newspaper through the crack in
Frothingham’s door onto his bed.

Frothingham took the paper and instantly caught the names of Rontivogli
and Blickenstern in the largest headlines. He began eagerly upon a
three-column article, the most of it under a New York date line.

“Ain’t that cruel?” called Wallingford. “Ain’t it a soaker?”

“Um,” replied Frothingham, too busy to pause.

It was an account of a suit brought by Blickenstern against Rontivogli
to collect a note for twenty-five hundred dollars. The “sensation” lay
in a document which Blickenstern had attached to the note and had filed
with the papers in the suit--a contract, reading:

  I, Cosimo di Rontivogli, hereby agree to pay Count Eitel zu
  Blickenstern twenty-five hundred dollars as soon as he has introduced
  me to the persons whose names are written upon the back of this
  contract in my handwriting. And I further agree to pay him an
  additional twenty-five hundred dollars within one month after I
  become engaged to an American lady, whether or not I am introduced to
  her by him. And I further agree to pay him an additional ten thousand
  dollars within three months after my marriage with an American lady,
  whether or not he introduced me to her.

                                          (Signed) COSIMO DI RONTIVOGLI.

This contract, the newspaper said, was in Rontivogli’s autograph,
and was witnessed by two clerks at the Holland House; on the back of
the contract, and also in Rontivogli’s autograph, were the names of
fifteen fashionable and rich New York women. Frothingham glanced at
the names--he knew the bearers of most of them--and hastened on into
Blickenstern’s interview. “In Europe,” he had said to the reporter,
“I should call the fellow out and kill him. Here, where the duel does
not exist, I must take the only redress open to me for his betrayal of
my friendship. I asked him to pay only the note. In fact he owes me
five thousand, as he is now engaged to a Washington heiress. He is a
black rascal. If you will send to Milan you can get a fine tale of how
he happened to come to your country. I owe all my American friends an
apology for introducing him. I confess with shame that but for me he
would have known no one.”

The article went on with an account of Rontivogli’s engagement to
“Miss Elsie Pope, one of the best known young women in Washington,
Philadelphia, and New York society, the only daughter of Senator John
C. Pope, reputed to be the third richest man in the Millionaires’ Club,
as the Senate is called.” Then followed Rontivogli’s sweeping denial,
and his denunciation of the Prussian as a “blackmailer,” a “notorious
card-sharp,” a “thorough scoundrel.”

When Frothingham finished he said, “Gad, what a facer for Miss Pope!”

“Isn’t it, though?” replied Wallingford. “And for her father. I always
blame the fathers.”

“But I thought it was the mothers who hankered after European
marriages,” said Frothingham.

“That’s what is usually said,” Wallingford answered, “because only the
mothers appear in the public part of the business. But who gives up the
money for the settlements? The women ain’t a nose ahead of the men in
the race of snobbishness. Poor little Elsie Pope! This ought to be a
lesson to our girls against----”

He paused abruptly and reddened, though Frothingham could not see him.
“I almost forgot that Frothingham’s one of ’em,” he said to himself.

Frothingham was grinning in the seclusion of his bedroom. “I should say
so!” he exclaimed in his drawling, satirical voice. “Wonder what the
Milan yarn is?”

He learned in a few hours, for the Washington afternoon papers had a
long Associated Press despatch from Milan. Rontivogli, heavily in debt
and ruined, had been backed by a syndicate of his creditors for an
American tour in search of an heiress. They had risked in the venture
forty thousand lire and, within a month, an additional twenty thousand.
They regarded it as a by no means desperate investment for the recovery
of the very large sum which Rontivogli had got out of them before they
discovered his financial plight--certainly with such a title and so
much personal beauty and charm he could win the daughter of one of the
multitude of rich men among those title-crazy American vulgarians. The
Milan despatch set forth that the correspondent had had no difficulty
in getting the facts, as “everyone here knows the story. The formation
of such syndicates is said to be common in England, France, Germany,
Austria, and Italy, and many of them have been successful.”

“Poor Frothingham!” Wallingford thought as he read. “This is bad for
his business. I fancy it’ll be many a day before I see my thousand
again.” And then he delicately gave Frothingham a hint that if he
needed another thousand he could have it. But Frothingham didn’t need
it just then--and, it should be set down to his credit, he would have
hesitated long before taking it, had he needed it. Wallingford was not
wrong in thinking there had been since he met Frothingham a marked
decline in his “honour as a gentleman,” and a marked rise in his
“honour as a man.”

Rontivogli went to the Popes’ at eleven o’clock that morning. The
look of the flunky who opened the door foreshadowed to him his fate.
He was shown not into the drawing room, but into a reception room--a
small alcove to the left of the door, intended for wraps rather than
for callers. The servant returned with a package on his tray. “Miss
Pope is not at ’ome,” he said haughtily, omitting the customary “Your
’Ighness,” and not even substituting so much as a “Sir” for it, “and
she left this to be given to you.”

Rontivogli ignored the impudences of omitting his title and of
addressing him as “you,” and took the package. The servant held aside
the portière with the broadest possible hint in his face and manner.

“Tell Senator Pope that the Prince di Rontivogli wishes to see him,”
said Rontivogli in a tone which at once reduced the servant, in
spite of himself, from a human being to a mechanical device for the
transmission of messages.

When he hesitatingly withdrew Rontivogli opened the package--his ring
with the stone unset and loose in the box. He solved the puzzle almost
as soon as it was presented to him. He scowled, then gave a short,
sneering laugh, put the lid on the box, and thrust it into the tail
pocket of his frock coat.

Senator Pope received him in his study, rising and bowing without
advancing or extending his hand. He was serious, but bland--he did not
know how to be brusque, or even unkind in manner; he did know how to be
diplomatic.

“I have come, sir, to repel the lies of that infamous Prussian,” began
Rontivogli with suppressed passion.

“You will, I trust, not distress me with the painful subject,” said
Pope slowly and gently. “We know that the Count has maligned you. But
you, as a gentleman, must appreciate how terrible the notoriety is to
us all. I assume that you have come to relieve the young lady of the
embarrassment of the situation.”

Rontivogli lost control of himself, raved, paced the floor, pleaded,
denounced, threatened even. But Pope, sympathetic and in the proper
places tenderly sorrowful, pressed in upon the Prince his and Elsie’s
unchangeable determination. At last Rontivogli gave up the useless
battle and drew the box from his pocket. “Your daughter,” he said,
“sent me by a servant this broken ring. The stone has been removed and
to my astonishment I find that a false emerald has been substituted.”
His voice and manner were apologetic, deprecatory, as if Senator Pope
owed him an explanation which he was loath to demand.

He opened the box and exhibited its contents to Pope, who looked with
polite interest. “The stone has become detached,” was all he said.

“But why was it not returned to me?” asked Rontivogli. “Why this false
emerald in its place?”

“It is the same stone,” said Pope. His tone was absent, as if he were
thinking of something else.

“It is not!” Rontivogli’s voice was bold and hard, a covert threat in
it.

They looked each the other straight in the eyes--Pope inquiringly, the
Prince defiantly. Then Pope said: “Ah! Excuse me one moment.”

He left the room, muttering as he reached the hall, “The miserable
swindler! He knows we won’t have any further scandal, no matter what it
costs.” When he returned he had in his hand the emerald he and Elsie
had bought at Tiffany’s. He laid it on the corner of the desk nearest
the nobleman.

“This is _a_ genuine emerald,” he said, his voice neither hot nor cold.
“You may take _it_--if you like.”

“I thank you,” replied the nobleman with a slight bow of
acknowledgment, as if a wrong to him had been righted.

He put the emerald and the ring in his waistcoat pocket; he put the
box, with the false emerald in it, on the corner of the desk exactly
where Senator Pope had laid the genuine stone. Then he went on, in a
way that was the perfection of courtesy: “May I presume further on your
kindness? This German cur has placed me in a distressing position. I
wish to leave America at once, to return where a gentleman cannot be
thus attacked without defence. Unfortunately----” He hesitated with a
fine affectation of delicacy.

Senator Pope’s eyes were more disagreeable to look at than any human
being had ever before seen them. “I shall be glad to give you any
_reasonable_ assistance,” he said with resolute self-control.

“You are most kind!” Rontivogli was almost effusive. “I shall return
any advance you may make as soon as I am at home.”

“How much?” asked Pope with a trace of impatience.

“I have many obligations which must be settled before I leave. I had
just cabled for a remittance, but I wish to go before it can arrive.
Might I trouble you for an advance of, perhaps, five thousand--I think
that will be enough.”

Senator Pope unlocked and opened a drawer, took out a flat package of
bills. “Here is a thousand dollars,” he said. “I cannot advance you
more. And I trust you will sail the day after to-morrow.” He looked
hard at the Prince. “That will spare me the necessity of making a
_private_ appeal to the Italian Embassy through our State Department.”

“You are most kind, _mon cher_ Senator,” replied Rontivogli.

He put the package of bills in the inside pocket of his coat. He
reflected a few seconds, then took his top hat. “Will you do me the
honour of presenting my compliments and regrets to Madame Pope--and to
Mademoiselle?” he said with steady eyes and elaborate politeness. “I
thank you again. I regret that we part in circumstances so unhappy. I
shall send your little advance within the month.”

He bowed profoundly, and Senator Pope inclined his head. He went to
the door, turned there, bowed again. “_Au revoir_, my dear Senator,”
he said cordially, and was gone--a fascinating patrician figure of
handsome ease and dignity.




XV


Frothingham let three days pass, and on the fourth called at Senator
Pope’s. Elsie was in Philadelphia--was visiting an aunt. It had not
occurred to him that she would run away and hide herself, so little did
he think of the matter in any other light than that of a game between
himself and Rontivogli. He was much upset, and did not know what move
to make next. Fate helped him the evening of the same day--the mail
brought a note from Elsie:

  MY DEAR FRIEND:

  I can’t help writing to thank you. You warned me, and you were good
  and kind about it, and I was very disagreeable. I should like to say
  so to you, but I don’t suppose you’ll be in Philadelphia, will you?
  And it will be many a day before I see Washington. Indeed, I hope I
  shall never see it again. I didn’t deserve your friendship.

                                                                E. W. P.

Frothingham had not reflected on this letter long before he was
telling Hutt to get his belongings together. The next afternoon found
him at the Bellevue in Philadelphia, and a few hours later he was
dining at the Hopkins’ with Elsie and her uncle and aunt. He liked
the Hopkinses--stiff and shy, but kindly. He liked the dark furniture,
and walls and woodwork, suggesting old English; liked the faces in
the family portraits--English faces; liked surroundings where there
was nothing new or new-fashioned except his own and Elsie’s dress,
where there was so much that was fine as well as old. And he had never
liked Elsie so well as now that she was chastened into an appealing
gentleness and humility.

He saw that he had been right in thinking her note an apology, and an
attempt to recall him. And when the Hopkinses left them alone in the
parlour after dinner he soon said: “I’ve come for an answer to that
question I asked you--down by the monument.”

She hung her head and flushed deeply. “Oh, I wish to get away from
all this,” she said in a low voice. “I’ll be glad to go far away--far
as--as you care to take me.”

He sat beside her and took her hand. But he made no effort to show
“temperament.” “I’ll go back to Washington and see your father
to-morrow--if you wish,” he said, after a silence.

“Yes,” she replied.

She wrote a long letter to her father as soon as Frothingham was
gone--her maid posted it at midnight. So it came to pass that Senator
Pope was expecting him. He received him with the benign courtesy he
gave to the humblest negro. He liked Frothingham--but, for that matter,
it was impossible for him to dislike any member of the human race, even
Rontivogli, or any well-disposed domestic animal; ever since he had
“gathered his bunch,” his content and complacence had, with a few brief
pauses, been bubbling over in words and acts of kindness. But when
Frothingham said, “I’ve come to see you, sir, about something of which
I and your daughter have been talking,” his face clouded with a look
of apologetic distress--almost the same look as that with which he had
received Rontivogli for the final interview.

Frothingham would not have attributed it to embarrassment had he known
Senator Pope better. It was the look he wore whenever the exigencies
of fate forced him to do anything unpleasant--whether to refuse a
small favour, or to cut a rival’s throat, or to scuttle a financial or
political ship. For, being a good man, and a lover of smoothness, it
pained him exceedingly to cause his fellow-beings any other emotion
than happiness. In the present instance the cause of his distress was
the discovery that an alliance with nobility would destroy his chances
for the Vice-Presidential nomination which he was plotting to get. He
had not confided his ambition to his closest political lieutenant.
But when Rontivogli was exposed and cast out, his colleague and
boss had said to him: “I’m glad to hear you’re not going to take a
foreign nobleman into your family, Senator. Until the engagement was
announced we were hoping you could be induced to make the race for
the Vice-Presidency. While an Italian wouldn’t have been as bad as an
Englishman on account of the Irish vote, I don’t think the party would
have stood for even an Italian. The people don’t like that sort of
thing.”

That settled Senator Pope’s aristocratic ambitions.

“I’ve come, sir,” Frothingham was saying, “to ask your consent to
marrying your daughter.”

Senator Pope’s eyes swam, so strong was his emotion. “I am highly
honoured, Lord Frothingham. But I cannot give you an answer in so
important a matter at once. I must consult with her mother.” Mrs. Pope
was a shadowy nonentity, flitting nervously in the wake of father and
daughter.

He detained Frothingham for a long talk on England and America, and
sent him away in an almost jubilant mood--no applicant ever left him
downcast. The next day Frothingham got a telegram from Elsie asking
him to come to her as soon as he could. He assumed that her father had
decided to convey his consent through her, and his spirits rose higher.
But the first glimpse of her disturbed him--hers was not the face of a
bearer of good news.

“I saw your father,” he began.

“Yes,” she interrupted. “He has written me.”

“Does he consent?”

“Yes and no.” She hesitated. “He asked me not to tell, but I know I can
trust you. He has been planning to be nominated for Vice-President.
And he has found that he can’t have the nomination if I marry a titled
foreigner--especially an Englishman, because of the Irish. They say it
would kill the ticket.”

Frothingham retreated behind a vacant look.

“He found it out only a few days ago.” She did not feel equal to
telling him that her father had learned this fatal fact through the
exposure of Rontivogli. “So,” she ended, “we couldn’t marry until
after the election. For he says he’s sure of the nomination.”

“And when is this election?”

“A year from next fall.”

Fortunately Frothingham had not the habit of letting his face speak for
him. After a pause he said: “But surely you can persuade him.”

“It’s useless to try. You don’t know him as I do. He seems yielding,
and usually he is. But where he’s set he’s hard as granite.”

“Nearly two years,” he repeated. And to himself: “Impossible! I might
weather six months, but two years--the creditors would laugh at me.”

“And I wish to go away at once,” she said with a long sigh, looking at
him mournfully.

“I--we--can’t wait two years,” he replied.

“We needn’t, need we? We might----” she began, then halted, blushing
vividly.

He pretended not to understand--though he did, for he had already
thought of that plan.

“You know--I’m of age,” she went on, seeing that he was not going to
help her out. “We--we needn’t wait for his consent.” He did not change
expression, but he was saying to himself, “Here’s a mess. She’s so mad
to get away that she’s ready to do anything.”

“I think he’d forgive us,” she went on. “But even if he didn’t, I’d
never regret.”

He knew that he must say something, must say it quickly, and that
it must be appreciative but noncommittal. “I couldn’t accept such a
sacrifice,” he said. “It wouldn’t be decent to take advantage of you in
that fashion. I know it sounds unromantic to say it, but, by Jove, I
don’t go in for the sort of romance that makes a fellow a blackguard.”
And he frankly told enough of his financial difficulties to make the
situation clear to her. “I believe you can talk your father round,” he
ended. “He thinks the world of you.”

Elsie smiled--melancholy and cynical. “Yes--so long as I don’t
interfere. But I know how he feels about the Vice-Presidency. And
that--that other affair has made him----” She shook her head.

This chilled Frothingham. “He’d never forgive her if she ran off with
me and lost him the office,” he reflected. “Besides, I can’t afford to
go in without settlements arranged beforehand. I must chuck it--quick
as ever I can.”

He urged persuading her father, and she promised to try. He saw her
the next day, and the next, both afternoons and evenings. On the third
day he did not see her until late in the afternoon--her father had come
from Washington, and had spent the morning with her. And while they
were talking Frothingham was reading a letter from Honoria which had
been languidly pursuing him for a week. Part of it was:

  I think you met Cecilia Allerton in Boston. Had you heard of her
  bolting with Frank Mortimer?

“Frank Mortimer!” he exclaimed, sitting upright in bed in his
astonishment. “That brute with the big teeth and the empty head!”

  Her father was angry with her for something or other and treated her
  cruelly. Everyone was pitying her. Frank fell in love with her out
  of sympathy, and she was so miserable that, when her father wouldn’t
  consent, she ran off with him. Mr. Allerton has changed his will,
  they say, leaving everything to colleges and charities. But Frank has
  an income and will have more when his uncle dies, and she has a rich
  aunt who loathes her father, and so may leave her something.

  Cecilia’s quite mad about Frank, now that they’re married. Willie
  Kennefick was dining with us last night. He says she was in love with
  Stanley Huddiford, who died a year or so ago. He says she believes
  Stanley’s soul has entered into Frank! She’s a clever girl, they say,
  but a bit eccentric, like so many of them down Boston way----

Frothingham looked on this news as a direct, providential warning
to him. “I’ll take no risks with Pope,” he said. “It would be sheer
madness.”

And before he left his rooms he wrote to Barney, fixing the next day
but one for his arrival at Chicago. He felt that there was no hope of
winning Pope--at least not at present. “If she by chance succeeds after
I’m gone--and I’ll leave her in a good humour--I can easily return. But
I know there’s nothing in it.”

Failure was mourning in her eyes when he called at five o’clock.
They went for a walk, and in reluctant words she told him that her
father was immovable, that their only choice was between disobeying
him and breaking the engagement. She listened coldly while he
explained his position again; when he had finished she sneered. “You
are--unanswerable,” she said bitterly.

“No doubt I do lack ‘temperament,’” he drawled, an ironic gleam on his
eyeglass.

She was humble at once. “Oh--I understand,” she answered.

But she was too heartsick to talk; and he forgot that he was walking
with her, could only feel ruin’s arm linked firmly in his. It was dusk
when they reached the house.

In the doorway he took her hand and held it.

“I shall see you when I return?” he asked. “Will you answer if I write
now and then?”

“Yes,” she replied gratefully.

She sent away the servant who came at her ring. She detained
Frothingham, hoping against reason and instinct that he would tear off
that tranquil mask of his, would forget his responsibilities as the
bearer of a proud and ancient name, would say: “I care for only you.
Come!” Even after he had left her she lingered, holding the door ajar,
listening for returning footsteps. At last she shut the door, and went
forlornly and wearily to her great, lonely, sombre dressing room. She
stood before the mirror of her dressing table, studying her plain,
wistful, woeful little face. “You aren’t pretty,” she said to it, with
that candour which has its chance in those rare moments when vanity is
quite downcast. “And one can’t expect much when men think of nothing
but looks in a woman.” She could no longer see herself for tears. “And
I believe he’d have been--at least kind to me.”

She rang for her maid, and began listlessly and mechanically to dress
for dinner.




XVI


At Chicago Barney came down the platform to meet Frothingham. “Here you
are!” he exclaimed. “Six months in the country, but not a bit changed.
And if an American goes over to your side and stays a week he has to
learn the language all over again when he gets back.”

It was still daylight, and Barney told his coachman to drive home by
way of “the store”--the great “Barney and Company Emporium--seventy
stores and a bank, three restaurants, a nursery, and an emergency
hospital, all under one roof.” Frothingham watched the throngs pouring
torrent-like through the cañons made by the towering buildings. “Don’t
it remind you of New York?” asked Barney.

“Yes--and no,” he replied. It seemed to him in the comparison that New
York was a titanic triumph, Chicago a titanic struggle; New York a
finished or at least definite creation, Chicago a chaos in convulsion.
There was in the look and the noise of it an indefinable menace which
oppressed him, filled him with vague uneasiness. When Barney told him
the site of it was a swamp a few years before, he thought of a fairy
story his nurse had told him--of a magic city that used to rise from
an enchanted morass at dusk, live a single night, and vanish with the
dawn. And as the daylight waned, he wondered whether this inchoate,
volcanic unreality of a city would not soon be again engulfed in the
bosom of its mother, the swamp. But he began to note here and there
traces of form, civilised form, peering from the chaos to indicate the
trend of the convulsion--that it was upward, not downward.

“It is tremendous,” said Frothingham. “Is it bigger than New York?”

“No,” Barney reluctantly answered. Then he added with curious, defiant
energy: “But it _will_ be! And it’s American, which New York ain’t.
It’s full of people that think for themselves, and do as they d----n
please. We ain’t got many apes out here. We run more to humans.”

They were now driving past Barney and Company’s--a barrack-like
structure, towering story on story from a huge base bounded by four
streets, where surged a seemingly insane confusion of men, women,
children, horses, vans, automobiles, articulate in the demoniac
voices of boys shrieking extras and drivers bawling oaths. And the
sky blackened suddenly, and from the direction of the lake came a
storm, cruelly cold, bitter as hate, seizing the struggling, swearing,
shouting mass of men and animals, lashing it with whips of icy rain,
and pelting it with bullets of hail.

“That’s my little place,” said Barney, pride oozing through his offhand
tone.

“It’s tremendous,” was all Frothingham could say. The “Emporium” and
its surroundings dazed him. He muttered under his breath, “And it’s
Hell.”

Barney told the story of creation as it read for him. He had been a
drummer for a suspender house--eighteen hundred a year for touring
the cities and towns of northern Indiana and Illinois; four thousand
dollars put by after twelve years of toil; eyes ever alert for a chance
to go into business on his own account. One of his towns was Terre
Haute--he called it Terry Hut. In it was a dry-goods shop kept by a
man named Meakim. Barney found that of all the retailers he visited,
Meakim was by far the shrewdest, the most energetic, and, above all,
that he had an amazing talent for “dressing” his show windows and
show cases. He persuaded Meakim to sell out and adventure Chicago with
him. They set up in a small way, and in an obscure corner. But both
toiled; Barney was shrewd and almost sleepless, and Meakim “dressed”
the windows and displayed the goods on and over the counters. They
prospered, spread too rapidly for their capital, failed, gathered
themselves together, prospered again. “I’ve built three stores in
fourteen years,” said Barney. “This last one was finished only five
years ago--the year Meakim died. And already it’s too small--we’re
moving our wholesale department to another building.”

Presently they were in Michigan Avenue and at Barney’s house. It
was a mass of Indiana limestone which he--with the assistance of a
builder, audaciously “branched out” as an architect--had fashioned
into a fantastic combination of German mediæval fortress and Italian
renaissance villa. “Here’s where I live,” said Barney as the carriage
stopped before the huge doors studded with enormous bronze nails. “And
don’t you dare back up Nelly when she jeers about it. She says she
can’t look at it without laughing, or come into it without blushing. I
suppose it _is_ no good, in the way of art. But it keeps out the rain,
and that’s the main point in a house, ain’t it?”

As he was getting out his keys the door was opened by a maid in a
black dress, a white apron and cap. “Jessie,” said he, in a tone
which suggested that she might be his daughter, “this is the Earl of
Frothingham, and I want you to take good care of him, and of the young
man who’s coming with his trunks.”

Frothingham took off his hat and bowed vaguely to the maid, who smiled
cordially. “I’ll show you your room,” she said.

“Never mind, Jessie,” interrupted Barney. “You needn’t bother. I’ll
take him up myself. But I know everything’s all right--Nelly looked
after that.”

Frothingham was impressed by the astonishing difference between the
exterior and the interior of the house. He felt at home at once in
this interior--handsome, cheerful, the absurd splendours of the
architect-builder’s devising softened into comfort and good taste. “We
thought you’d like your young man near you,” explained Barney, “so we
put a bed in the dressing room.”

“Thank you,” replied Frothingham. “This is charming.”

“Nelly knows her business.” Barney’s good-natured face, with its
many dignifying scars from his wars with destiny, beamed paternal
enthusiasm. “You needn’t dress for dinner unless you want to,” he
went on. “I never do unless we have company or I go out somewhere to
something swell and formal. Wickham sometimes does and sometimes don’t.”

“I think I’ll dress, if you don’t mind,” said Frothingham
diplomatically.

“Suit yourself. This is Liberty Hall. We ain’t got any rules.” He
looked at his watch. “That clock on the mantel there is four minutes
fast. It’s seven minutes to seven by the right time. We’re having
dinner at half-past seven, but you can come down just as soon as you
feel like it.”

[Illustration: _Found Nelly alone in the front parlour_]

Frothingham descended at five minutes before the dinner hour and found
Nelly alone in the front parlour. Superficially she was like the women
he had met in the Eastern cities. Like them she was dressed in a gown
obviously imported from Paris; like them she wore it as only American
and French women wear their clothes. He saw instantly that she was a
well-bred girl of a most attractive American type. She was tall and
long of limb--her arms were almost too long. She had a great deal
of dark brown hair shading fascinatingly into black here and there.
She had dark eyes--not brown, as he at first glance thought, but dark
grey--a humour-loving mouth, a serious brow, a clear, delicate, olive
skin. As she and Frothingham were shaking hands, her father and her
brother entered--the brother, Wickham, a huge fellow, topping his
father by several inches and having his father’s keen, good-natured
dark grey eyes and his father’s features, except that the outline was
more refined without being less strong.

Barney put his arm round his daughter and, with a foolish-fond
expression, said: “Didn’t I tell you, Frothingham? Wasn’t I right?”

If Frothingham had been new to “the States” he would have thought
this the strongest kind of a bid for him to enter the family. But he
understood the American character in its obvious phases now. “The old
chap’s mad about her,” was all Barney’s speech suggested to him. “And,”
he admitted to himself, “I think he has reason to be. She’s got the
look I like.” He noted the humourous comment on her father’s flattery
in Nelly’s dark eyes, as he examined her through his eyeglass with
ostentatiously critical minuteness. “Quite up to the mark, I should
say,” he replied with polite audacity, adding apologetically, “though I
don’t pretend to be an expert.”

“You see, I did put on my dress suit, after all,” said Barney, looking
down at his old-fashioned, ill-fitting evening clothes. “The children
would have it. I always feel like a stranded fish in these togs. You
see, I never wore ’em in my life till I was past forty.”

Wickham looked a little nervously at Frothingham; Nelly was smiling
with frank amusement. Then Wickham looked ashamed of himself--but he
carefully observed the peculiar stripes down the legs of Frothingham’s
trousers and the curious cut of his waistcoat and coat--“I must find
out who’s his tailor,” he thought. “Poole don’t send me over the real
thing. I wish I dared wear a monocle. It’s a whole outfit of brains and
manners by itself. I don’t believe he takes it out, even at night.”

A maid announced dinner--not “Dinner is served,” but “Dinner, Mr.
Barney.” And Barney jumped up with, “I’m glad to hear it. I’m hungry
as a wolf.” The dining room was done in old English fashion--and the
dinner, too, though an American would have called it the American
fashion. The feature of its four courses was a huge roast, set before
Barney on a great platter, with a mighty carving knife like a cimetar
and a fork like a two-pronged spit. Barney himself carved--an energetic
performance, lacking in grace perhaps, but swift and sure. On the table
between him and the platter was a pile of plates. He put a slice of the
roast into the top plate and the waitress removed it, carried it to
Nelly’s place and set it down before her. This was repeated until all
were served.

Frothingham watched Barney’s movements attentively, surprised that any
of the American upper classes condescended to eat in such simplicity.
He was almost startled when a bottle of wine was brought, for he had
not forgotten Barney’s denunciation of drink and drinkers. He had
seen so many concessions of real or reputed principle for his benefit
since he had been moving about in American “high life” that he was
somewhat cynical as to principle in America. But he had not expected
to find this degree, or even kind, of weakness in Barney. “He told
me he wouldn’t permit the stuff to come into his house,” he thought,
laughing to himself. Then he noticed that none of the family drank it.
One taste was enough for him--“No wonder he’s opposed to wine,” he said
to himself. Then aloud: “If you don’t mind, I’ll just take whiskey--a
little Scotch.”

Barney showed amused embarrassment; Nelly and Wickham laughed. “We
don’t have anything to drink,” she explained. “Father doesn’t approve.
But he told us you’d been brought up differently--that you must have
wine. So we’ve got wine, but there isn’t any whiskey.”

Frothingham looked vague--he was relieved to find that his friend
Barney was not quite so weak as he had feared. “It doesn’t in the least
matter,” he replied. “I shall get on famously with this.”

“I’ll take you down to the club after a while,” said Wickham, “and you
can have all you want. And to-morrow--eh, father?”

“Yes--yes--of course,” answered Barney. “I never do try to put on style
that I don’t get left.”

He winked at one of the maids significantly, and when she drew near
and bent her head whispered to her. She left the dining room; in about
five minutes she reappeared with a decanter of Scotch whiskey, a tall
glass, a bowl of ice, and a bottle of imported soda on her tray.

“Why, father!” exclaimed Nelly, “where did that come from?”

Barney beamed, triumphant. “We’ve got neighbours, haven’t we?”

“But what _will_ they think of you?” she asked, pretending to be
shocked.

“I don’t know--and I don’t care,” he answered. “I never did spend much
time in worrying about what my neighbours thought of me. Probably
that’s why we’re here, and not in the poorhouse.”

After dinner Frothingham stayed with Nelly in the parlour instead of
going to the club with Wickham. He had found many girls in America
who thought they were natural or who affected naturalness as a pose:
but here was the first girl, it so happened, who was really natural,
without thinking anything about it. She had all the charm of the girls
of his own country for him--he liked ingenuousness; and in addition
she had the charm of knowledge. She knew the world, but she looked at
it with ingenuous eyes--and he would not have believed this a possible
combination. “How do these Americans manage it?” he said to himself.
“Her father comes from well down in the lower classes, yet he has all
the assurance of an aristocrat. And as for the girl, she reminds me of
Evelyn--and Gwen.”

“Do you know,” he said to her, “you don’t suggest an American girl at
all--that is, you do and you don’t. You women over here are cleverer
than ours, but a good many of ’em lack a certain something--a--I don’t
know just what to call it. It seems to me that--well, they are ladies,
of course. But many of ’em--not all--but a great many of those I’ve
chanced to meet--make me feel as if they were not exactly sure of
themselves, as if they were trying to live up to something they’d read
about or seen somewhere. I don’t know that I make myself clear.”

“Perfectly,” replied Nelly. “You mean that they act as if they weren’t
satisfied with being the kind of lady they were born, and are trying to
be some other kind--and don’t succeed at it especially well.”

“Exactly,” said Frothingham. “I feel like saying to them, ‘Oh, come
now, chuck it, won’t you, and let’s see what you’re really like.’
But you--you remind me of our women, except that they’re so ghastly
dull--the most of ’em. Gad, they sit about in the country until
they’re feeble-minded. After a certain age, about all there is left of
’em is the match-making instinct. You’d understand if you’d been over
there.”

“I have been there,” answered Nelly. “I spent more than a year in
Europe--nearly half of it in your country. I liked it, but--well, one
likes one’s own country best, of course.”

“I thought you American women preferred the other side.”

“Oh, a few of us do--those who aren’t happy unless they have somebody
bowing and scraping to them or are bowing and scraping to somebody. You
know, the poor we have always with us--the poor in spirit as well as
the other kind of poor.”

Before they had talked an hour Frothingham felt that the outlook for
his campaign in the Barney house was not promising. Nelly was frank and
friendly, and he saw that she liked him. But there was something in her
atmosphere which made him know that she cared little for the things
which were everything to him and which must be everything to the woman
he might hope to win. He feared that she was not for him. “She ain’t in
my class--or perhaps I’d better say, I ain’t in hers.”

When Wickham came, at half-past ten, she left them. After suppressing
yawns for fifteen minutes he said: “I’m off to bed. I was at a dance
last night and owe myself five hours sleep. You see, father and I get
up at half-past six. We have to be at the store at eight.”

At the store! At eight! “And he hasn’t in the least the look of
that sort of chap,” thought Frothingham. As for rising at half-past
six, one might do it to hunt or shoot. But to do it morning after
morning “merely to set a lot of bounders to selling a lot of
cloth”--preposterous!




XVII


After a few days of Chicago Frothingham felt utterly out of place.
There were no idlers, no idling places. To idle meant to sit in lonely
boredom.

Barney and his son were busy all day--they grudged the half-hour of
that precious time of theirs which they spent at luncheon. Nelly,
too, had her work--some sort of a school she was running, away off
somewhere in the poorer part of the town. He was sensitive enough soon
to discover, in spite of her courtesy, that he was interrupting her
routine seriously and was in the way to becoming a burden. He saw as
much of her as he dared--she had for him a charm that became the more
difficult to resist as his hope of winning her decreased. He relieved
her of himself during her busy hours so tactfully that she did not
suspect him of penetrating what she honestly tried to conceal.

He betook himself to the club. It was usually deserted; if a man did
enter, he raced through and away as if pursued by demons; at luncheon
all ate as if struggling for a prize offered to him who should chew
the least, swallow the fastest, and finish the soonest. He called on
the women he met--they were out or just going out, or just coming in to
busy themselves at home.

In New York, Boston, Washington he had thought the leisure class a lame
imitation of the European class of industrious, experienced idlers,
had found it small and peculiarly unsatisfactory because its men
were inferior to its women in numbers and especially in brains. But
here--there wasn’t a pretence of a leisure class except the loungers in
the parks; and they were threatening, so it was said, to organize and
do all sorts of dreadful things if they weren’t given something to do.
“This is a howling wilderness,” he said to himself. “I should be better
off in a desert. These lunatics make my head swim.”

Wherever he went, all seemed possessed of and pursued by fever-demons.
If it was a dinner, the diners were eager to despatch it. The courses
were served swiftly, the waiters snatching one’s plate if he for a
second ceased the machine-like lifting of food; the conversation was
nervous and in the shrill tones of acute mental excitement. Words
were cut short and slapped together almost incoherently. Sentences
were left unfinished, the speaker leaping on to another sentence or
submerged by the breaking of the flimsy speech-dam of the person he was
addressing. Often all were talking at the same time. “Surely you can
listen as you talk,” said a woman to whom he complained. “Think how
much time it saves!”

If it was a dance, the orchestra detonated the notes like cartridges
from a Maxim gun; the dancers whirled or raced furiously. “Why this
hurry?” he gasped to a handsome, powerful girl, who had dragged him
round a ballroom twice, had flung him into a chair, and was dashing
away with another man to finish the waltz.

“I’ve got to catch the train for the millennium,” she screamed back
over her shoulder and disappeared in the maelstrom.

Even at the play the audience shuffled uneasily while the players sped
through their lines or the orchestra rattled off the between-the-acts
music; and afterward all rushed from the theatre as if it were afire.
The blank expression habitual to Frothingham’s face was now less a
disguise than a reflection of his internal state.

“I must get out of this,” he said to himself at the end of two weeks.
“The disease may be catching. Now I understand that fellow who went
from here to tear London up by the roots and put in his tuppenny tubes.
A Chicagoan should be barred from a country like any other plague.” And
he wrote his sister that he was “beginning to twitch with the Chicago
disease.”

Evelyn had written him regularly--a letter by each Wednesday’s steamer.
She had put a brave face upon their affairs, had tried to make him
picture life at Beauvais House as smooth, almost happy. But he had
more than suspected that a far different story ran between the lines;
and when she wrote that she had engaged herself to Charley Sidney he
understood.

Seven months before he would have grumbled and cursed, and would have
accepted the sacrifice. Now, it roused in him a fierce protest, a
feeling of abhorrence of which he would not have been capable before
he visited America--and the Barneys. “She sha’n’t sell herself to that
creeping cad,” he said, and on impulse he cabled: “Sidney impossible
and unnecessary. You must break it. Answer.”

The answer came a few hours later: “Shall do as you wish.”

Instead of being relieved he repented his impulse, wondered where
it had come from, fell into a profound depression. Seven months of
stalking; nothing to show for it but three ridiculous, sickening
misses. And here he was with an empty bag; and what little heart he
once had for the game was gone; in its place a disgust for it and for
himself. “How Nelly Barney would scorn me if she knew what a creature
I am,” he said. He was now thinking a great deal on the subject of
Nelly Barney’s standards for men and also on the subject of Nelly
Barney as a standard for women. In neither direction did he find any
encouragement. He knew her through being in the same house with her day
after day, through seeing her at all hours and in all moods--and she
never made the slightest attempt to conceal her real self. He felt that
such a woman could not be attracted by his title, would not be likely
to be attracted by himself; he felt that she was at the same time more
worth the winning than any other woman he knew in America--“Yes, or in
England,” he confessed at last.

“What a pity, what a beastly, frightful shame,” he thought. “She’s got
everything that I must have, and everything that I want, too.”

But he had only twelve hundred dollars left, including the thousand
from Wallingford. “I must be gone clean mad,” he exclaimed whenever he
wasn’t with her and was alone with his affairs. Finally he was able
to goad himself into dashing feverishly about in Chicago society. He
sought the set she avoided--it was to him an additional charm in her
that she did avoid it, for he had at bottom the extra-prim ideas of
women which have never lost their hold upon Englishmen. There was,
however, no alternative to seeking this set. He thought it the only one
in which he was likely to succeed--those among the fashionable young
women of the rich families who carried the “free-and-easy” pose in
speech and manner to the point where it looked far worse to a foreigner
than it really was, who laughed and talked noisily in public, who wore
very loud and very clinging dresses, very big hats and very tight shoes.

The newspapers gave him columns of free advertising and, with the
Barneys vouching for him and “Wick” Barney pushing him, he immediately
became a figure. Some of the young women of the “lively” set pursued
him with an ardour which he would have mistaken when he first landed
for evidence of serious attachment or intentions. But he had learned
something of the ways of American flirts, married and single, and he
had had experience of that American curiosity as to foreigners of rank
which he had at first regarded as the frankest kind of title-worship.

Presently he found a girl he thought he could not be mistaken in
fancying he could get--Jane or Jenny (Jeanne, she wrote it) Hooper, the
daughter of that famous Amzi Hooper whose “Hooper’s High-class Hams”
and “Hooper’s Excelsior Dressed Beef and Beef Extract” are trumpeted
from newspaper, billboard, and blank wall throughout the land.

Her older sister had married a Papal duke under the impression that he
was a noble of ancient and proud family. To her horror, to her family’s
humiliation, and to her friends’ hilarity, it came out that the Duke
of Valdonomia was the son of a Swiss hog-packer of as humble origin as
Amzi Hooper and of less than one-fifth his wealth. The family longed
to possess a genuine nobleman, and Jane, a devourer of the English
novels which are written by the middle classes for the middle classes
about the upper classes--seemed to be in sympathy with her father’s
and mother’s ambition and keenly eager to become a “real lady.” It was
assumed by her set that Frothingham had come for her--the newspapers
hinted as much several times each week.

But Frothingham, grown extraordinarily sensitive, shied at the amazing
high heels on which she tottered like a cripple, at the skin-like
fit of her clothes, at the suspicious brilliance of her cheeks and
blackness of her brows and lashes. Whenever she spoke to him suddenly
in her shrill dialect he felt as if a file had been drawn across his
pneumogastric nerve. And she constantly used a slang expression which
seemed to him--in her--the essence of vulgarity. She could not speak
ten sentences without saying that she or somebody or everybody had
nearly or quite “thrown a fit.”

It struck him as a biting irony of fate that the woman whom of all
he knew well in America he least approved should be the one who was
frankly throwing herself at his head in his hour of desperation. When
he learned that her father was an Englishman born and bred in the
“lower middle class,” he felt that he had solved the problem of the
family’s over-eagerness to get him. “That’s why the old beggar almost
cringes as he talks to me,” he said to himself.

“D----n their impudence!” And the next time he met Hooper he treated
him not as an American and an equal, but as an Englishman and an
inferior. And Amzi at once fell into his “place,” just as a car horse,
though elevated to be a coach horse, will halt at one ring of a bell.
“It’s in the blood,” thought Frothingham. “It can’t be hid or got out.”
But--he didn’t venture the experiment with the daughter.

The climax came one morning when he met her by chance in the Lake Park
Drive. She was perched high on a red and black dog-cart in which she
was driving a bay and a gray tandem. Her hat was the biggest he had
seen her wear, and she was swathed in a silver-grey dust-coat with a
red embroidered collar. She stopped and invited him to join her.

“I needed you to complete my turnout,” she said, when they were under
way. Her dazzling smile took part of the edge off her unconscious
insolence--or was it conscious? He found her a puzzle, with her flashes
of good taste and flashes of good sense, with her wit that seemed
accidental and her folly that seemed her real self.

He set his teeth and tried to think only of how much “I need her to
complete _my_ turnout,” and of how pretty she was--for there was no
denying her beauty, or her style for that matter, in spite of its
efflorescence. He saw that everyone was looking at them, but he did
not appreciate that his own striking costume and his eyeglass were as
magnetic as were her hat, her bright skin, and her dust-coat with its
gaudy collar. She was supremely happy. The most conspicuous girl in
Chicago, driving with the most conspicuous man, in the most conspicuous
trap and on the most conspicuous highway--what more could a young woman
ask?

“Wonder why everyone stares so?” she said with deliberate intent to
provide an opening for compliment. She wished to hear him say the
flattering things she was thinking about herself.

“I fancy they’re staring at what I can’t take my eyes off of,” he
replied. “You _do_ look swift this morning.”

“Swift! I don’t like that.” She was frowning. “You Englishmen come over
here and think you can say what you please.”

“I can’t see where’s the harm in telling a girl she’s pretty and well
got up, and looks a stunner.”

“That isn’t what ‘swift’ means in Chicago.”

“Really! You don’t say! That’s what it means in London.”

“But you’re not in London.”

“No.” His tone strongly suggested a wish that he were.

“Wouldn’t it be jolly if this were Hyde Park!” she exclaimed.

He did not show enthusiasm at this--but then his face was made to
suppress, not to express, emotion.

“I simply adore London,” she went on.

“It ain’t bad--for a while, now and then.”

“There’s so much atmosphere about London--I don’t mean the fog and
soot. Here, they’re all crazy about making money and working and all
those kind of things. Whereas, over there, everybody’s for having a
good time and--all those kind of things. Sometimes I think I’ll throw a
fit if I don’t get away from here.”

He looked gloom, then brightened--yes, she was tremendously pretty, and
her mouth was like a red-ripe cherry; yes, she might be toned down into
a fairly decent countess. “They’re quick to adapt themselves, these
American girls. The minute she sees Evelyn she’ll begin to learn.”

“I don’t see how you stand it,” she continued. “When are you going
away? Not that I sha’n’t be sorry--you’ve been awfully nice to me, and
I like to see a really well-dressed man once in a while.”

“Ah, I don’t mind it here.” He paused for fully a minute, then said:
“And I’d like it, you know, if I could take you with me when I go.” He
followed this speech with a slow turning of the head until his eyeglass
was full upon her. “By Jove, her colour’s genuine,” he said to himself.

She had been happy a few minutes before; now she was all thrills and
palings and flushings of ecstacy. She glanced at her conquest with
sparkling eyes and laughing lips. She made him forget what “bad form”
he had been thinking her. “Is that a joke?” she asked, as if she were
assuming that it was.

“We don’t go in for joking about that sort of thing where I come from,”
he drawled.

“But you oughtn’t to have said it here.” She was radiant, but her hands
were trembling--it seemed most romantic to her, quite like a chapter
out of a novel. Nobility and titles and genuine aristocracy, that
not only recognised itself, but also was recognised as aristocracy by
everybody, seemed to her as dream-like as fairyland. “And he does so
look the part!” she said to herself. “Anyone could see that he is the
real thing.”

“If you’ll drive home I’ll ask you again there,” he continued.

And he did, and she accepted him; and he was halfway to Barney’s
before he came from the spell of her fresh young beauty and her frank
admiration of him, and began to think of Nelly and to see Jeanne from
Nelly’s standpoint again. At that moment Jeanne was busily telephoning
her engagement to her intimates, her head full of castles and coronets
and crests and peeresses’ robes. It seemed to her that she could
not wait to begin her triumph--the congratulations of friends, the
receptions, dinners, dances in honour of her and her fiancé, the
flare of newspaper brasses, the big wedding, and the crescendo of
her gorgeous entry into English society as Countess of Frothingham.
Cinderella was no more enraptured when the prince lifted her from the
ashes than was Jenny Hooper with her ill-fed and exuberant imagination,
her ill-directed and energetic ambition, her ill-informed and earnest
conception of “being somebody.”

“And he’s coming to see you to-morrow, pa,” she said to Amzi Hooper,
after delighting his ears with the great news. “He says your consent is
necessary before the engagement’s announced.”

“I guess he and I won’t quarrel over it, Jenny,” replied her father.
“If he suits you, I can stand him.”

Frothingham came the next afternoon and made his formal request. Mr.
Hooper shook hands with him cordially. “I guess my girl knows what
she’s about,” said he. “I’m pleased to have you as a son.”

“Thanks,” replied Frothingham--he could not altogether banish from
his manner the instinctive haughtiness of English upper class toward
English lower class. “When could you receive my representative? Or
shall I send him to someone who represents you?”

Mr. Hooper looked embarrassed and rubbed his jawbone vigorously with
his thumb and forefinger. “Yes--yes--certainly--any time you say. I’ll
talk to him, myself. Can he come to-morrow? I don’t think it’ll take
him long to satisfy me you’re all right.”

Frothingham stared, thinking “D----n his impudence!” He said only,
“To-morrow, at eleven, then,” shook hands as warmly as he thought wise,
and went back to the parlour where Jeanne was waiting for him.

       *       *       *       *       *

Frothingham’s “representative” was Lawrence, attorney to the British
Consulate at Chicago, a brother of Gerald Boughton’s mother. He had
come to America thirty years before because he could make a living here
and could not make a living at home. He had renounced allegiance to
the British throne because by doing so his income was doubled. But at
heart he regarded himself as a British subject and, while he pretended
to be an American, was so savagely critical of things American that
everyone disliked him. He wore the long, slim side-whiskers which were
the fashion when he left home; he talked with the lisp then affected
as the “hall mark” of a gentleman. He disliked Americans; he despised
Anglo-Americans of the Hooper type; Hooper himself he loathed as an
intolerable upstart, successful where he, of the “upper class,” was
barely able to keep chin above water.

When he came into Hooper’s study at the hour fixed by Frothingham
he was an accurate representation of the supercilious, frozen-faced
“swell” of the Piccadilly district a quarter of a century before.
Hooper knew that he was of the “upper class,” but had not the faintest
deference for him. Hooper had been Americanised to the extent of caring
nothing for mere family. It took a title to stir his dormant instincts
of servility; the untitled Lawrence was a man to be judged by American
standards, as he understood them. Lawrence was not a millionaire and
not on the way toward that goal of every rational ambition; Hooper,
therefore, had no more respect for him than he had for any other
“failure.”

“You’ve come to explain about the Earl of Frothingham,” began Hooper in
the arrogant voice he used at business. “But it’s not necessary. I’m
well informed as to Lord Frothingham’s family and am satisfied he’s
what he represents himself to be.”

Lawrence combed his long lean “Dundrearys” with his slim white
fingers. The joy of battle gleamed in his eyes. “I can’t imagine,”
he replied--he had a broad accent and drawl, said “cawn’t” and
“fawncy”--“why you should fancy I came here to insult Lord
Frothingham, whose representative I have the honour to be.”

“Insult? What do you mean, Mr. Lawrence?” demanded Hooper, his voice
courageous, but not his eyes.

Lawrence felt he had been right in thinking that no American would
negotiate for the purchase of a title unless he were at bottom a
“grovelling snob.” “There could not be a question of Lord Frothingham’s
character,” he said. “And as for his family, there’s none more
illustrious in England.”

“Certainly, certainly. I admitted all that. I assumed that Lord
Frothingham was sending you through over-anxiety--not unnatural when
he’s so far from home.”

“My business with you, Mr. Hooper,” continued Lawrence, “relates
to settlements.” Hooper’s pretence--“the shallow device of a
bargain-hunter”--disgusted him.

Hooper waved his hand--a broad, thick, stumpy-fingered hand. “Oh, I’ve
no doubt Lord Frothingham will do the right thing by my daughter. And
besides, I intend to do something for her--no one ever accused Amzi
Hooper of stinginess.”

“That is gratifying,” said Lawrence. “We shall no doubt have not the
slightest difficulty in reaching an understanding. What, may I ask,
is the--aw--extent of the settlement you purpose to make--upon your
daughter and--and Lord Frothingham.”

Hooper’s face grew red. “You may _ask_, sir, but I’ll not answer. I’m
not in the habit of discussing my private affairs with _any_body.”

Lawrence was angry also--“the fellow’s taking me for a fool,” he
thought. But he knew he must control himself, so he answered smoothly:
“This is extraordinary--most extraordinary, Mr. Hooper. You’ve had some
experience--aw--in foreign marriages----”

Hooper dropped sullenly before this poisoned shaft.

“And,” continued Lawrence, “you must know that settlements are the
matter of course.”

“No, sir!” exclaimed Hooper, pounding the desk, “I know nothing of
the sort. When my oldest daughter married they talked to me about
settlements, but I refused to have anything to do with it.”

[Illustration: “_You may_ ASK, _sir, but I’ll not answer_”]

Lawrence, in fact all Chicago, knew that Hooper, who was not nearly so
rich then, had settled a quarter of a million upon the Papal nobleman
and half a million on his daughter, and had engaged to settle a
quarter of a million more upon the first male child of the marriage.
“We should, of course, not be satisfied with the settlements you made
upon the Duke of Valdonomia,” said he, ignoring Hooper’s falsehood.

Hooper winced, looked bluster, thought better of it, said quietly:
“You’ve been misinformed, Mr. Lawrence. I made no settlements. But I
gave the young people enough to set them up comfortably.”

“Lord Frothingham’s position forbids him to consider any such
arrangement as that, Mr. Hooper. You know how it is with the great
families. They have station, rank, tradition to maintain. They----”

“I won’t bribe any man to marry my daughter. That ain’t the American
way.” This was said, not fiercely, but, on the contrary, in a
conciliatory tone and manner.

Lawrence sneered--inwardly--at this “cheap claptrap,” and said:
“That’s sound--and eminently creditable to you, sir. But you will bear
in mind that Lord Frothingham is an English nobleman, the head of a
distinguished family, and that your daughter is about to become his
Countess, an Englishwoman, the mother of a line of English noblemen. Do
I make myself clear?”

“Perfectly. Perfectly. And I’ve not the least objection to doing what’s
right. I want to make it clear that I’m giving only out of generosity
and affection, and a desire to see my girl properly established.”

“No one who knows you will doubt that,” said Lawrence so blandly
that Hooper could find no fault, could not understand why he was
irritated. “And now that we’re on common ground I hope you’ll give me
some--aw--data--so that I may draw up the necessary papers.”

“Has Frothingham any debts?” asked Hooper abruptly, after a thoughtful
pause.

“There are about fifteen thousand pounds of personal obligations,”
replied Lawrence carelessly, “and a matter of perhaps a hundred
thousand pounds as a charge on the entailed estate. I understand the
entailed part is all that’s left; but the estates can be, should be,
restored to what they were until a hundred or a hundred and fifty years
ago.”

“Um!” muttered Hooper.

“The debt represents, I believe,” continued Lawrence, “the wild oats
and careless management of previous generations. The present Earl has
been--remarkably steady, they tell me, considering his station and
opportunities, and the example of his father and grandfather.”

Hooper had read with an attention that made his memory leechlike every
word of every sketch of Frothingham and the Gordon-Beauvais family in
the Chicago papers. Lawrence’s aristocratic allusions were, therefore,
full of suggestion and moved him profoundly. “Well,” said he, “I should
say, in round numbers, that a million would straighten the young man
out and set them housekeeping in good style.”

There was a queer gleam in Lawrence’s eyes as he replied: “Very
handsome, Mr. Hooper. Most satisfactory. Your daughter can take the
position in England to which the Earl’s rank entitles her.” He looked
as if he were reflecting; then, as if thinking aloud: “Let me see--a
million pounds--five million----”

Hooper sprang to his feet. “You misunderstood me, Mr. Lawrence,” he
protested angrily, but nervously. “My daughter will have that--perhaps
more than that--ultimately. But I meant dollars, not pounds.”

Lawrence put on a expression of amazement. “I beg your pardon, Mr.
Hooper, but really--_really_--you can’t mean that. Two hundred thousand
pounds would barely fetch them even. They’d have nothing to live on.”

“Oh, of course I don’t mean that I’d not give ’em anything in addition.
We were talking only of settlements.”

“Certainly. And you must see, Mr. Hooper, that it would be impossible
for us to accept any settlement so inadequate. Some misfortune might
overtake you and--you would be unable to carry out your present
generous intentions.”

“A million dollars is a big sum of money. It looks even bigger in
England than here.”

“But you are making a great alliance. A million dollars is a small sum
in the circumstances--I mean, in view of the necessity of enabling
your daughter to take all that her position as Countess of Frothingham
entitles her to.”

“Permit me to ask,” said Hooper with some sarcasm, but not enough to
conceal his anxiety, “what did Lord Frothingham expect in the way of
settlement?” The multi-millionaire had developed two powerful passions
with age--avarice and social ambition. These were now rending each the
other and both were rending him.

“Lord Frothingham, of course, did not discuss the matter with me--a
gentleman is, naturally, delicate in matters of money. He simply stated
the posture of his affairs and left me in full charge. When I suggested
to him that eight hundred thousand--_pounds_--would be adequate, he
protested that that was too much. ‘I wish Mr. Hooper to appreciate
that it is his daughter I want,’ said he. ‘Make the least possible
conditions. I’d be glad to marry her without a penny if my position
permitted. It’s hard to have to consider such things at this time,’ he
said. ‘I’m sure we can pull through with seven hundred thousand.’ I did
not and do not agree with him, but I assented because I knew that you
would liberally supplement the settlements.”

Every sentence in that speech exasperated Mr. Hooper--perhaps
Lawrence’s persistence in expressing himself in pounds instead of in
dollars most of all. Pounds made the huge sum demanded seem small, made
his resistance seem mean and vulgar. He reflected for several minutes.
“I won’t do it!” he said in a sudden gust of temper. “Half that is
my final figure. I’ll settle the obligations--the five hundred and
seventy thousand dollars--and I’ll entail five hundred thousand and
give Jenny five hundred thousand for her lifetime, it to go afterward
to the younger children.”

Lawrence combed his whiskers with his fine fingers, shaking his head
slowly as he did so. “But, Mr. Hooper----”

“That’s final,” interrupted Hooper. “It’s bad enough--it’s
shameful--it’s un-American, sir, to make any settlement at all.”

At “un-American” Lawrence took advantage of the fact that Hooper was
not looking at him to indulge in a glance of contemptuous amusement.
“Nobody but an American,” he said to himself, “could have dragged
‘un-American’ into such a discussion as this. The cad is dickering over
his daughter like an old-clothes dealer over a bag of rags.”

Hooper was talking again--talking loudly: “Not a cent more! Not a
d----n cent more! If they need more after they’re married, let ’em
come to me for it. They’ll get it. But I ain’t fool enough to make ’em
independent of me. I ain’t going to give ’em a chance to forget the
hand that feeds ’em. No, sir; I want my daughter to continue to love
me and think of me.”

There was no affectation in Lawrence’s astonishment at this view of
affection and the way to keep it. “Poor devil,” he said to himself
pityingly, “he’s been so perverted by his wealth that he actually
doesn’t see he’s taking the very course that’ll make his children hate
him.” But he ventured only, “I’m certain, sir, from what I know of your
daughter and Lord Frothingham that money could have no influence with
them one way or the other.”

Hooper smiled cynically. “It’s human nature,” he said. “The hand that
feeds is the hand that’s licked. I’ll give ’em all they need whenever
they need it. Do you suppose I’ve no pride in my daughter, in seeing
that she makes a good appearance over there? But a million and a half
is my outside figure for settlements.”

“Practically less than a hundred thousand over and above the debts,”
replied Lawrence, irritatingly reverting to pounds. “That is, about
four thousand a year for them to live on.”

“Forty to fifty thousand a year, including Jenny’s income,” corrected
Hooper, standing up for dollars. “And while I don’t promise, still, if
they behave, they can count on as much more from me.”

“Nine thousand a year,” said Lawrence, translating into pounds, “would
hardly keep up Beauvais Hall in a pinched fashion. It would leave
nothing for restoring the property; the Hall, for example, needs fifty
thousand pounds at once to restore it.”

The reasonableness, the unanswerableness of this presentation of the
case exasperated Hooper. “They’ll have to look to me afterward for
that,” he said angrily. “I’ve said my last word.”

But Lawrence didn’t believe him. He saw that, though avarice was
uppermost for the moment, the “cad’s craving” was a close second--then
there was the daughter’s aid. She would have something to say to
her father when she knew of the hitch in the negotiations. He rose.
“There’s nothing further at present, Mr. Hooper. I shall be compelled
strongly to advise Lord Frothingham against going on and engaging
himself. I cannot do otherwise, consistently with my duty as the, as
it were, guardian for the moment of his dignity and the dignity of his
house. It may be that he will disregard my advice. But I don’t see how
he can, careless in sordid things and impetuous though he is. The
prospect for an unhappy marriage would be too clear. Good-morning, sir.”

Hooper shook hands with him lingeringly. Avarice forbade him to speak.
“The Earl will come to your terms,” it and shrewdness assured him. “If
he don’t the deal is still open, anyhow.” His parting words were, “Give
my regards to the young man. Tell him we hope to see him as usual, no
matter how this affair comes out.”

“The coarse brute,” muttered Lawrence, as he stood without the doors
of the granite palace. “The soul of a ham-seller, of a pig-sticker.”
And he took out his handkerchief and affectedly wiped the hand which
Hooper had shaken. “Always a nasty business, this, of American upstarts
buying into our nobility. If they weren’t a lot of callous traders and
money-grabbers they couldn’t do it. And they usually negotiate at first
hand, so that they can drive a closer bargain. And their best society,
too! Beastly country--no wonder the women want to be traded out of it
into civilisation.”




XVIII


There was a family council at the Hoopers’ after luncheon that day--Mr.
Hooper, his wife, and Jeanne. The two women followed Hooper from the
dining room into his study, where he was pulling sullenly at his cigar
and awaiting the attack. It was his wife who began: “Do you know why
Lord Frothingham sent word he couldn’t come to lunch, pa? Jenny here is
worried about it.”

Mr. Hooper grunted. Finally he said: “I’m willing to do anything in
reason to please Jenny. I don’t approve of this title business. It
ain’t American. But as long as the young fellow has turned her head I
was not disposed to stand in the way.” He frowned fiercely. “But I tell
you flat, I won’t be held up! And that fellow he sent here this morning
was a plain highwayman.”

Mrs. Hooper and Jeanne looked significantly each at the other--they had
had many talks about his growing stinginess, and they suspected him at
once. “What did he want?” inquired Mrs. Hooper.

“I don’t propose to talk this thing over before Jenny. It’s disgraceful
that she should have gone into such a business. It ain’t right that she
should know about such things.”

Jeanne’s eyes filled with tears. “And I’ve told all the girls!” she
exclaimed. “Everybody knows it. I can’t back out now. The whole town’d
be laughing at us. I’d be ashamed ever to show my face in the street
again. You don’t want to break my heart, do you, pa?”

“You’ve made a sweet mess of it!” snarled her father. “You ought to
have had better sense than to have told anybody till the business side
of it was settled. I warned your ma about that--I knew what was coming.
Now, here you two’ve gone and given him the whip hand!”

“She got at the telephone before she told me,” said Mrs. Hooper.

Neither she nor her husband suspected that Jeanne had thought of just
this emergency of a wrangle over settlements and had decided that the
best way to overcome her father’s avarice was to put him in a position
from which he could not recede. If Frothingham had not insisted on
liberal settlements she would have prompted him to it. She was no more
eager than was he to embark with small supplies in the hold when it was
possible to lay in supplies a plenty. And as her father had acted all
her life upon his principle of paternal affection--“The hand that feeds
is the hand that’s licked”--she saw no harm in guiding her conduct
toward him by principles from the same practical code. As she was about
to engage in business, wasn’t it common sense to get as large a capital
as she could? “We can’t back out now,” she repeated tearfully, watching
him shrewdly through her tears.

“A pretty mess!” growled her father. But he was not really offended,
partly because he was fond of his daughter and would have forgiven her
almost anything, partly because he understood and sympathised with her
eagerness to proclaim her triumph, chiefly because, now that he had
thought it over, he was ready to accept Frothingham’s terms. “The hope
of getting more and the need of it will keep ’em tame,” he reasoned.
And he said, addressing the two women: “When that Lawrence fellow comes
again to-morrow, as I’m dead sure he will, I’ll close the matter. But
you two keep your hands off!”

[Illustration: _As soon as her father and mother were out of the way_]

As soon as her father and mother were out of the way Jennie went
into the library and called up the Barneys. “Is Lord Frothingham
there?” she asked.

“I’ll put you on the switch to his room,” was the reply. And presently
a voice she recognised as Hutt’s said: “Who wishes to speak to ’Is
Lordship?”

“Say that Miss Hooper’s at the telephone.”

There was a pause, a murmur of voices--she was sure one of them was
Frothingham’s. Then Hutt answered: “’Is Lordship hain’t ’ere just now,
ma’am. Hany message, ma’am?”

She was trembling with alarm. “Just tell him that I called up, and
that I’d like to speak to him when he comes in”--this in a rather
shaky voice, for a great fear was gathering in around her, a fear that
he had become offended at her father’s stinginess and bartering and
bargaining, and had decided to withdraw.

She wandered uneasily from room to room. She sat at the telephone
several times--once she had the receiver off the hook before
she changed her mind about trying to reach him. She ordered her
victoria and got ready for the street, to drive about in the hope of
accidentally meeting him. At the door she changed her mind again. As
she was turning back a boy came by, shouting an extra--“All about the
Earl of Frothingham! Big sensation!” She saw that the boy knew who
she was, knew that she was supposed to be engaged to Frothingham, was
clamouring in that neighbourhood because he thought sales would be
briskest there. She fled into the house--but sent a servant out by the
basement way to buy the paper.

The headlines were large and black. Frothingham, the story ran, had got
into debt in England so deeply that his creditors found he could not
pay more than a few pence in the pound; they had consulted as to ways
and means of recovering, had organised themselves into a syndicate, had
put up five thousand pounds to “finance” him for a hunt for a rich wife
in America. “And,” concluded the account, “this exposure comes barely
in time to block his attempt to marry the beautiful daughter of one of
the richest meat packers in Chicago, moving in our smartest smart set.”

She did not know that this tale was a deliberately false diversion of
the facts about a syndicated German prince who had visited Chicago
several years before and had almost married there. The truth as to his
enterprise had just come out on the other side through the collapse of
the Rontivogli syndicate; and the newspaper, relying for immunity on
Frothingham’s aloneness, and on his well-understood mercenary designs,
had substituted his name for the German’s. She read and believed. She
had known from the outset that his main motive was money. But she had
succeeded in disguising this unsightly truth in the same flowers of her
crudely romantic imagination in which she disguised the truth as to her
craving for a coronet. Now it was as if the flowers had been torn away
to the last concealing petal and had left exposed things more hideous
than she thought were there.

She hid her face and cried a little--“I despise him. Besides, if I went
on and married him, what would people say?”

It would have taken finer scales than those available for weighing
human motives to decide which of the two reasons embodied in those two
sentences was the heavier. She dried her eyes and sat with her elbow on
the table and her chin in her hand.

“That’s the best thing to do, every way I look at it,” she said aloud
slowly at the end of half an hour’s thought.

She went to the telephone, called up the offices of the Great Western
and Southern Railway, asked and got the General Manager. “Is that
you, Mr. Burster? Is that you, Tom? Meet me in the parlours of the
Auditorium right way.” And she rang off and telephoned to the stable
for her victoria.

Ten minutes later she was driving down the avenue in her largest, most
beplumed black hat and a pale blue carriage-coat that produced the
wonted effect of her public appearances--Burster once said to her:
“Jeanne, you’re the only thing on earth than can stop traffic in the
streets of Chicago. You can do in two seconds more than a blizzard
could do in a week.”

She returned at half-past five. Her father and mother were in the front
sitting room upstairs, gloomy as the lake in the dusk of a cloudy day.
She entered, whistling and tilting her big hat first over her right
eye, then over her left. “Don’t look so cheerful,” she said, patting
her mother on the cheek and pulling her father’s beard.

He tried to scowl, but it was a failure; and his voice was not in the
least formidable as he said: “A pretty mess you got yourself into,
miss, with your telephoning.”

“What telephoning?” she asked with a start.

“Tattling your engagement.”

“Oh!” She threw herself into a chair and laughed.

“Your father telephoned to Mr. Lawrence after he left us----” began her
mother.

“What did you do that for, pa?” she interrupted. “He’ll think we
haven’t any pride.”

“You ungrateful, thoughtless child! I did it for your sake.”

“What did Mr. Lawrence say?”

Her father hesitated and his face showed how he hated to inflict upon
his daughter the pain he thought his words would cause. “He said it was
useless to continue our discussion, as Lord Frothingham had definitely
and finally decided not to renew his proposal.” The old man’s voice
almost broke as he went on: “Jenny, here’s a note that came a few
minutes ago--I think the address is in Frothingham’s handwriting.”

Neither he nor her mother dared to look at her as she was hearing
these awful disclosures of the downfall of her hopes and the impending
brutalities to her pride and vanity. She picked up the note, opened it
slowly, read it--a few polite formal sentences, setting forth that he
had “yielded to the insuperable obstacles interposed by your father.”

She dropped the sheet and pirouetted round the room in and out between
the chairs occupied by her frightened parents--they thought her
suddenly gone mad from the shock. “Who says I ain’t the luckiest girl
on earth?” she exclaimed.

“What are you talking about, Jenny?” demanded her mother sharply.

“Why, I married Tom Burster half an hour ago. He’s putting the notices
in all the papers for to-morrow morning. Everybody’ll think I changed
my mind and shook Frothingham. And I did, too!”

“Jenny!” exclaimed her father. “Tom Burster!”

“And he’s coming here to dinner, if you don’t object,” she continued.
“If you do, why I’ll join him and we’ll go away and give you a chance
to cool off.” She caught her father by the beard. “What do you say,
daddy? Say yes, or I’ll pull.”

“Yes,” replied her father with a huge sigh of relief--his daughter was
contented; her and their vanity would be spared; Tom Burster would not
demand or want a dower; he was not only independent, but also one of
the most forward young “self-made” rich men in Chicago. “You’ve got
more sense than all the rest of the family put together,” he exclaimed
proudly, patting her on the head.

And in an absent, reflective tone she said: “I always felt I’d have
some use for Tom sooner or later.”




XIX


Frothingham’s abrupt change of tactics had been caused by a cablegram
from Evelyn which reached him at the Barneys’ even as his diplomatic
agent was in the heat and toil of the negotiations with Amzi Hooper. It
read:

  Break off everything and return. Have written you New York. Best
  possible news. Gwen sends love.

“Why didn’t she say what it was?” he wondered. And he decided that it
must be news of too private a nature to be trusted to the telegraph
station at Beauvais. Why had she written if he was to go at once? “I
suppose,” he concluded, “she was afraid I mightn’t obey orders. ‘Gwen
sends love’--that must mean that the news is about me and Gwen.”

But he had no uplifting of spirits--instead, he felt a sense of
impending misfortune. He called up Lawrence’s office and told one of
the clerks that he wished Lawrence to call him as soon as he came in.
In a few minutes Lawrence was relating over the wire the favourable
progress of the negotiation.

“It’s off,” said Frothingham. “I want nothing more to do with it. I’m
glad it’s in good form for the break. I can drop it decently.”

This so delighted Lawrence that he laughed aloud. “Hooper’s certain to
send for me,” he said. “I’ll give him the shock of his life.”

Frothingham cautioned him against any transgression of the most
courteous politeness, then went down to luncheon--with Nelly, alone.
While she was talking and he listening and looking, all in a flash he
understood why the “best possible news” from home depressed him, why
“Gwen sends love” did not elate him. He asked Nelly to take him to her
school.

“Oh, you wouldn’t be interested,” she said.

But he insisted, and they set out immediately after luncheon. As they
went--in a street car--she explained her work:

When her mother lay dying she said to the man beside whom she had
worked for thirty-six years, mostly cloud and rain: “Henry, I don’t
want a big, showy monument over me. If you should do something for me,
build a school of some kind, a school where girls can be taught how to
be useful wives and mothers, instead of spending their whole lives at
learning.” And Nelly’s father had put by money, a large sum each year,
until his daughter’s education was finished. Then he had said to her,
“I want you to help me carry out your ma’s memorial.” And he turned
over to her a mass of plans and hints and schemes which he had been
accumulating for seven years. “Get up a plan,” he had said, “on the
lines your ma would have liked. It’s a woman’s work--it’s your natural
work. I’ll supply the money.” And after two years’ labour, one year of
it abroad, she had perfected a scheme for a great school where several
hundred girls could be instructed in all that a woman as a woman should
know--housework, sewing, cooking, shopping, marketing, the elements of
business and of art, the care of babies, the training and education of
children. And she had so planned it that the girls could and should
support themselves while they were learning.

Frothingham did not take his eyes from her face as she talked. She
seemed to him the most wonderful, the noblest human being in the
world. “A fine, a beautiful idea,” he said. “But aren’t you afraid of
spoiling those girls for workingmen’s wives? You’re educating entirely
too much in this country, I should say, as it is. You’re making the
lower classes restless and discontented. They’ll pull everything down
about your ears the first thing you know.”

Nelly smiled--he saw that she was not seeing him at all, was looking
far, far past him. “I’m not worrying about the consequences,” she
said. “If we did that we should never move. You must remember that
we haven’t any classes here, but are all of one class--we differ in
degree, but not in kind. One can’t look into the future. I only know it
was intended for the light to shine on the whole human race, and that
it’s our duty to help all we can. And knowledge is light, and ignorance
is darkness, isn’t it? I’m not afraid of light, anywhere. Whether it’s
little or much, it’s better than darkness.”

He looked at her strangely. “I had never thought of that,” he said in a
low voice. Then, after a few minutes: “How good you are! I didn’t know
there was anybody in the world like you. How generous of you to give
your life to these people.”

“No--no!” she protested. They were walking now through a maze of
homely streets lined with flat-houses large and small and odourous of
strong-smelling cookery, of decaying food, of stale whiskey and beer--a
typical tenement district. “When I first began on this scheme,” she
went on, “I thought as you do. But I soon saw how false, how foolishly
false, that was. And if I had continued to think as at first, if I had
gone into the work to patronise and to feed my vanity, I should have
injured myself and all whom I wished to help. I should have made a snob
of myself and parasites of them.”

She paused and into her eyes came a look which he thought “glorious.”
She went on: “But fortunately, I got the right sort of guidance from
the very start. And I discovered that I had more to learn than these
people. I was actually more ignorant than they.” She turned her face
toward him. “Did you ever think,” she asked, “what would become of you
if you had all the props taken from under you, and were cast upon the
world and were forced to make the fight alone--without a penny or a
friend or a relative or any outside help of any kind?”

“Thought of it? Well, rather!” he exclaimed. “And I know what would
happen to me--jolly quick!”

“That was my first discovery--about myself. I found that I was in the
world without any fit equipment to live. I found that if the props
were taken from under me I’d be no match for the working people, that
I’d perish or else have to live on the charity of rich people by doing
the sort of pottering work they give the poor of their own class. And
I said to myself, ‘You are a fine human being, aren’t you--to pose as
the superior of those who are independent and self-respecting? You
call them ignorant, yet they are conforming to nature’s laws and to
the conditions of life infinitely better than you, with your boasted
intelligence and your fancied refinement.’ I saw that I was not a real
woman, as my mother had been, but was only a parasite on the labour and
the intelligence of others.”

“And what did you do?”

“I went to school with my girls. And----” Her face lighted up with
enthusiasm--“oh, you don’t know what a--a magnificent--sensation it
is to be conscious that one can swim alone on the sea of life without
fear of drowning or of having to call for help. You spoke as if I were
giving these people something. Why, I owe everything to them! It is
they who gave and are giving. And I am and always shall be in their
debt.”

He tried to think of some satirical phrase with which to lessen the
impression what she had said was making upon him. But he could only
blink into the flooding light which seemed to him to surround her and
to blaze upon his pettiness and worthlessness and the tawdriness of
all upon which his life had been based. In his own country, in his
surroundings of alternating dulness and dissipation, his naturally
good mind had become a drowsy marsh with pale lights gleaming in it
occasionally here and there. Unconsciously, he had been slowly rousing
ever since he landed in New York.

The people he had met were like enough to those he had met at home, and
also like enough to the people of the real America from which they were
offshoots, to form for him a mental bridge on which he could pass from
his England of narrow and bigoted caste to Nelly’s America of alert
and intelligent and self-respecting, level-eyed humanity. And he was
now feeling in this restless Chicago the fierce impact of energies and
aspirations of which he had had no conception, of which he could never
have a clear conception. Through the eyes of this earnest, unaffected
girl with her lived ideal of self-forgetfulness he had been getting
confused, dazzling glimpses of a new world.

But he did clearly see and feel that he loved her. And she now saw
in his curiously changed face what was in his mind. She looked away
instantly--her expression was uneasy, almost frightened. “Here we
are--at the school,” she said nervously as they turned a corner and
came in sight of three great buildings--plain yet attractive--which
faced three sides of a broad lawn in the centre of which a large and
artistic fountain was playing.

He never could give a clear account of that school. He remembered
the manager--a Mr. Worthington, with a strong and serious, yet
anything but solemn face, with rather homely features except a pair of
extraordinary eyes. He remembered many classrooms where all sorts of
feminine enterprises were going forward with energetic informality. He
remembered many girls--uncommonly clean, bright, well-dressed girls
with agreeable voices and manners. He remembered many smiles and other
evidences of health and spirits. He remembered many babies--all in
one big, sunny room, chirping and crowing and gurgling, balancing
on uncertain little lumps of feet or crawling toilsomely. “Practice
babies,” Nelly called them, and he thought, “If this is the way her
girls succeed with mere ‘practice babies,’ what won’t they make of
their own?” Finally, he remembered--Nelly. All his other memories were
a hazy background for her tall, graceful figure and wonderful, luminous
face. Her he never forgot in the smallest detail of look or gesture.

When they were once more in the street, walking toward the car,
he began abruptly: “I came over here--to America--because I was
ruined--because we were going to be sold up and chucked out in the
autumn. I came--I’m ashamed to put it into words--I’d rather you’d
imagine--you can, easy enough. It’s often done and nothing’s thought
of it--at least on our side of the water. This morning--in fact, just
before luncheon--I got a cable from my sister. Our luck has turned,
and----”

“I’m very glad,” she murmured as he paused.

“I don’t wish to go back,” he went on impetuously, his drawl gone. “I
wish--it’s you I want. And I ask you to give me a chance. I don’t think
I’m such a frightfully bad sort, as men go. And while I ain’t fit for
you to walk on, where’s the man that is? And perhaps if I were less
fit I couldn’t care for you--all the height from down where I am to up
where you are.”

The storm which had burst from deep down within him, deeper far than he
thought his nature extended, was so sweeping and whirling him that he
could not see her face distinctly.

When she spoke it was in a voice that took away hope, but gently,
soothing the wound it made. “I’m sorry,” she said, “and yet I’m not.
No woman could help being pleased to hear what you’ve said to me, and
hear it from such a man as you are. Oh, yes!”--this in answer to his
expression--“for I’ve found out what sort of man lives behind your look
of irony and indifference. A so much better man than he lets himself
know--or show. And I understand how differently you’ve been brought up,
how different your system is from ours. But----”

She hesitated, and somehow he felt that he must give her sympathy
instead of asking it.

“You remember, I told you that when I began with the school I had the
right sort of help?”

He looked away from her and it was black before him for an instant.
“That fairish chap with the eyes--Mr. Worthington?” he asked, cutting
his words off sharp.

She nodded, her cheeks bright. “I simply couldn’t help it,” she said.
“He _was_ what I longed to be. And he didn’t preach the things I
believed in--he just lived them.”

They were silent until they were in the car, then she went on: “I don’t
want you to misunderstand. He has never even looked--what I’d like
him to look--and say. I don’t know whether he cares--probably not.
Sometimes I think he cares only for his work, and----”

“He does care--I saw it,” interrupted Frothingham, and then he was
astonished at himself for being so “ridiculously decent.”

“I don’t know,” she said doubtfully. “Thank you for saying so.” She
looked at him shyly. “You’ll think me queer for telling you about it
when he has said nothing to me.”

[Illustration: “_I take to it like a duck to water_”]

“I understand why you tell me,” Frothingham answered. “It was--like
you.” He smiled faintly, his frequent, self-satirising smile. “Don’t
mind me. I’m used to bad luck. I take to it like a duck to water.”

Nelly’s instinct told her that she had said enough, and they rode in
silence. When she spoke again it was of the dance to which they were
going that night. An hour and a half later as they were separating
for dinner he said earnestly: “Thank you for what you said. And thank
you--even more--for what you didn’t say.”




XX


On the way to Mrs. Grafton’s ball that night he sent Evelyn a cablegram
asking her to cable him £175 he needed to help him to pay Wallingford
and fixing the next day week for his sailing. He might have sailed
three days earlier, but he wished to get her letter and so not carry an
unsatisfied curiosity on a six-days’ voyage.

At the ball everyone was talking of the Frothingham “exposure” and
of Jenny Hooper’s marriage. The “exposure” had appeared in but two
editions of the “yellow” that invented it. “Wick” Barney had seen it
and had lost not a moment in forcing its suppression and a denial
and in warning the other papers. He said nothing to Frothingham, and
Frothingham did not know of it then, or indeed until several years had
passed. But even if it had not been suppressed and had been everywhere
believed, Frothingham’s social position would not have suffered. His
title was genuine and his family and his position at home were of
the best--more, American fashionable society never asks about upper
class foreigners who come to it for no apparent, or, rather, no avowed
purpose. It expects them to be somewhat “queer” in other respects. It
assumes that they will be “queer” in money matters.

Frothingham did, however, hear of Jenny’s marriage--heard of it from
Jenny herself. At the Graftons’ the dressing rooms are at opposite
ends of the hall from which the grand stairway ascends to the drawing
room and the ballroom. It chanced that Jenny and Frothingham came
along this hall from the dressing rooms at the same time and, to the
delight of the few guests and the many servants who witnessed, met at
the foot of the stairway. As Frothingham’s face habitually expressed
nothing beyond a suggestion that he had nothing to express, he and his
eyeglass withstood the shock admirably. Jenny had intended to “cut him
dead” the next time she saw him. But as she tottered suddenly into his
presence on her monstrous tall heels she was not prepared for a course
so foreign to her nature as the cut direct. Before she knew what she
was doing or saying she had smiled and nodded. She instantly shifted
to a frown; but it was too late--Frothingham had spoken, had subdued
her with that “perfectly splendid, so aristocratic” monocle of his.
“What’s the use of throwing a fit over a thing that’s past and done?”
she reflected. “He’s all right in his way. And won’t it give Tom and
everybody a jolt if we enter the ballroom together?”

Frothingham had called her “Miss Hooper.” This gave her the opening.
“Miss Hooper!” she said with her jauntiest air. “That’s ancient
history. I ain’t been called that for ages and ages. Why, I’m an old
married woman--for Chicago.”

“Really,” said he, thinking it “some stupid, silly sell or other.” He
was hardly listening. He was more interested in the rope of pearls and
diamonds that swung from her neck to far below her waist. The pearls
were large and were once perfect; but each pearl had been mutilated by
having a diamond set in it--a very nightmare of sacrifice of beauty and
taste in an effort to make more expensive the most expensive.

“Yes, indeed--truly. I’m Mrs.----” She stopped short and gave him a
look of horror.

“Dear me!” exclaimed Frothingham with satiric sympathy. “Have you
forgotten his name, or did you forget to ask it?”

“No--but I never _thought_ of it before--thought how it sounds. My,
but it’s awful! I’d never in the world have married him if I’d have
pronounced it beforehand. Mrs. _Burster_! Ain’t that horrible?”
Frothingham had lifted “ain’t” from the slough of doubtful grammar to
the pinnacle of fashion in fashionable Chicago.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he drawled, still imagining she was jesting. “It
might be worse, mightn’t it, now?”

At this seeming impertinence her eyes flashed. “Yes--it might. It might
be Bursted--or ‘Busted’--mightn’t it?” Then, seeing that her “shot” at
his financial condition as described in the newspaper she had read and
believed apparently did not touch him, she relented and was in a good
humour again. “I’ve been engaged to Tom for a year or so on and off,”
she went on. “When I woke up this morning it came into my head to marry
him. And I did it while your lawyer and papa were squabbling.” She said
this so convincingly that she herself began to feel that it was “as
good as true.”

The news that she and Frothingham were advancing together preceded
them to the ballroom, but had not spread far enough from its doors to
impair the sensation made by their entrance with every appearance of
friendliness. And the much discussed mystery of that day’s doings is
here solved for the first time.

The next afternoon Frothingham and Wickham drove up to Barney’s door
as Nelly and Worthington were arriving on foot. One glance at their
faces and he knew that they understood each the other now. “All I
accomplished,” he said to himself mournfully, “was to force the fellow
to play his hand. What ripping luck I do bring--other people!” He
paused only long enough to make his passing on seem natural. Presently
she followed him to the library, where he was standing on the rug
before the closed fireplace with a cigarette drooping dejectedly from
the corner of his mouth. She moved restlessly about the room, evidently
seeking a way to begin telling him something.

“I saw it in your face--at the door,” he said, in answer to an
appealing glance from her.

She put her hand on his arm and her eyes were wistful. “I know you
did, and I hoped--I thought--I saw in your face that you were generous
enough to be glad I’m happy.”

“No, I can’t say that you did. The most I can do is to bear it--without
the grin.” He seated himself on the edge of the big table and smoked
and looked at her reflectively. “I say,” he began at last, “do you see
how it’s possible to be in love with two at the same time?”

She nodded, smiling a little. “Yes--I--I think--if I hadn’t met someone
first--I should have been in love with--someone else.”

“That’s something,” he said in his satirical drawl. But he kept
his eyes down and his eyelids were trembling. “Do you know,” he
went on after a pause full of cigarette smoke, “I’ve been thinking
about--caring for two people and that sort of thing. I don’t mind
saying to you--you’ll understand, I’m sure--there’s a girl over on the
other side----”

“I’m _so_ glad!” she exclaimed--and then she wasn’t.

“I care for her--in a different way, but it’s quite a real way. And
when I go back home, it may be--you know what I wish to say. I’m
telling you because I don’t wish you to think I’m disloyal to you”--his
expression was half-satirical, half-mournful--“or to her either.”

“I appreciate your telling me,” she said. “But I’d have understood, if
you hadn’t. I believe I recognise a _man_ when I see him, and--you know
that’s what I think you.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “I dare say I’m much like other people. I
show everyone the side that matches the side they show me.”

After a moment he went to her and lifted her hand and kissed it. She
stood and turned her face, sweet and friendly, up to him. “I’d rather
you’d kiss _me_,” she said.

He winced and paled and let go her hand. “No, thanks,” he replied. “If
you don’t mind, I’d rather not.”

With this Mr. Barney bustled into the room--no one had ever seen him
make a slow movement of any kind. At sight of them standing thus
suspiciously, he halted and, as they flushed and moved apart, he
laughed in such a way that Nelly felt impelled to explain:

“I was talking to Lord Frothingham of my engagement, and he was
congratulating me.”

“_Bless_ my soul!” ejaculated Barney. “This _is_ news!”

“I haven’t had a chance to tell you, father. It’s Mr. Worthington.”

Barney seemed depressed. “Well--I guess he’s all right,” he said
slowly. “I’ve got nothing against him. But----”

“And,” interrupted Nelly, afraid of her father’s frankness, “he was
telling me of his engagement.”

Barney looked at Frothingham sharply. “American?” he asked, showing
that he wouldn’t like it if he got an affirmative answer.

“No--a neighbour of ours in England,” replied Frothingham.

“Delighted to hear it. You ought to have been married and settled long
ago. I still think you’d have done better to sell your farm over there
and settle down here in Chicago.” Barney would have scorned to apply
such words as estate and plantation to a farm--though he did call his
shop an “Emporium.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Wickham went to New York with Frothingham the next day but one; and
on the day after they arrived they had Honoria, chaperoned by Mrs.
Galloway, at dinner and at theatre, and, because Wickham insisted,
at supper. It was almost two o’clock when they put the two women in
their carriage at the Waldorf and went to bed--Frothingham refused to
sit up listening to Wickham on Honoria. He was surprised that Wickham
had invited her for luncheon the next, or, rather, the same day--was
astonished when he found that she had accepted. His last three days in
America were spent in studying--and encouraging--an infatuation.

The morning of his departure came, and the steamer which he assumed
must be bringing Evelyn’s letter, as it had not arrived on Friday, was
just getting in. He decided that he would not put off his sailing to
get the letter--“Why wait merely to satisfy my curiosity? Evelyn sent
me over here. She knows what she’s about in recalling me.” He left
Hutt at the hotel to stay until the last moment on the chance of the
mail arriving; he and Wickham went down to the pier--Mrs. Galloway and
Honoria and Joe Wallingford and his wife were already there. He had a
few sentences aside with Honoria.

“I’m so glad you introduced Mr. Barney to me,” she said. He trained his
eyeglass upon her mockingly. “Really! How extraordinary! Precisely what
_he_ said on Wednesday.”

“Don’t be a silly ass,” protested Honoria in an unconvincing voice.
“He’s only a big, nice boy. I’m four years older than he. Or, rather,
he’s four years younger than I--I don’t fancy the word old.”

“That’s as it should be. If a young chap _will_ marry, he should be
several years the younger. She’ll keep him straight and bring him up
properly. She’ll be patient with his ignorance and know how to handle
the reins when he frets or frisks. Good business, this you’re planning,
Honoria.”

“Do you think he likes me?”

“_Likes?_ He’s positively drivelling. Look at ’im!”

Honoria’s glance met Wickham’s--he was at the rail, pretending to
listen to Catherine. His “drivelling” expression as he came at the
call in her eyes seemed to please Honoria mightily. With the last
going-ashore gong Hutt came bringing Evelyn’s letter. Frothingham at
once read enough of it to interpret her cablegram:

  As you doubtless know, Georgie’s father-in-law died in New York a few
  weeks ago. He left them I don’t know how much--something huge. And
  George is giving Gwen a dot of three hundred thousand. She was just
  here with the news--she came to me the instant she heard it. As she
  was leaving she said: “Won’t you give Arthur my love when you write?”
  It’s the first time she’s spoken of you to me since you left. And
  when I said, “I’ll _cable_ it to him,” she blushed--you should have
  seen her, Arthur--and heard her say, “Oh, _thank_ you, dear!”

“Good chap, George,” murmured Frothingham. “The right sort clean
through. He wouldn’t let Gwen and me be cheated as he and Evelyn
were.... Poor Evelyn!... Gwen and me!” He began a sigh that changed
into his faint smile of self-mockery. “Just my beastly, rotten
luck--not to be sure it’s good luck when it finally does come.”

He went to the rail and his glance sought out and rested upon the
little group of his friends on the crowded pier across the widening
gap between Nelly’s land and him. Wickham took Honoria’s blue chiffon
parasol and waved it; Catherine fluttered her handkerchief. He lifted
his hat and bowed. Long after they were lost to him in the merge of the
crowd they could make out his loud light tweeds and scarlet bow, and
once they caught the flash of a ray of sunlight on his eyeglass--like a
characteristic farewell look.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was five o’clock in a late September afternoon. As usual, on the low
table on the porch viewing the Italian garden at Beauvais Hall was the
big tea tray with its array of antique silver and old porcelain, the
cake and the toast and the slices of bread and butter. Round it were
Evelyn and Gwen and Frothingham--Gwen in a shirtwaist and riding skirt,
Frothingham in the slovenly, baggy flannels of an English gentleman in
the seclusion of his country-seat. No one was speaking and the quiet
was profound. Presently Evelyn rose and went through the open French
window into the drawing room. Gwen was watching Frothingham; he was
watching the peacocks as they strutted with tails spread in splendour.

“I’m always wondering that one of those clever, handsome American women
didn’t steal your heart--if you’ve got one,” said Gwen.

He slowly withdrew his gaze from the peacocks and fixed it upon her
with his monocled expression that might mean everything or nothing. She
chose to read everything into it and flushed with pleasure. And her
left hand, moving nervously among the silver and porcelain, revealed on
its third finger a narrow, gold band.

He drew a long, slow breath of lazy content and drawled:

“You’re so _d----n_ comfortable, Gwen!”


THE END




By James Weber Linn

Author of “The Second Generation”


THE CHAMELEON

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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.



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