When Teddie left Gerald Rhindelander West’s office she left behind her
more than a blue-fox canteen muff. She left the last of her confidence
in life, the last of her belief in mankind. She found herself compelled
to face a world that seemed too big and brutal for even the valorous
spirit of youth. And after a vast amount of frantic and quite fruitless
thinking she also found herself compelled to eat crow. The current was
too strong for her. It had tired her out, and baffled her, and broken
down both her will-power and her pride. Much as she hated to do it, she
felt that her only way out was to compromise with Raoul Uhlan. Right or
wrong, she would pay the man’s claim and get the thing over with.
A quick assessment of her immediate means, however, showed her that she
had little more than half enough money to meet his demand. So she
promptly stopped in at the Waldorf telegraph desk and sent a message to
her Uncle Chandler at Hot Springs.
“Please wire my banker,” she said, “eleven thousand dollars without
delay or foolish questions, as it is urgent. Lovingly, Teddie.”
Her Uncle Chandler, after frowning for a full hour over this unexpected
message, none too willingly wired instructions for eleven thousand
dollars to be placed to the credit of his niece. Then, after still
another hour of troubled thought, he sent a day-letter off to old
Commodore Stillman at the Nasturtium Club explaining that he had reason
to believe that Theodora was in some sort of trouble and requesting him
to drop quietly down to the girl’s studio and have a look around to see
just what was wrong.
And the Commodore in question, instead of being upset by this calamitous
intimation of beauty in distress, adjusted his cravat and stopped in at
Thorley’s for the insertion of a Richmond rose-bud in the button-hole of
his right-hand lapel. Then he toddled blithely down to the wilds of
Greenwich Village, where he arrived at Teddie’s studio just in time to
see an urbane old gentleman pocket, with an air of quiet but unqualified
satisfaction, a narrow slip of paper which looked remarkably like a
bank-check. He stood aside, however, until this triumphant-eyed old
gentleman had bowed himself triumphantly out, whereupon it came to his
attention that his somewhat abstracted young hostess remained undeniably
divorced from the customary buoyancies of youth.
He was so impressed, in fact, by the shadows of fatigue about Teddie’s
starry eyes and the world-weariness in her forlorn little smile that he
concluded the gravest fears of his old friend the Major to be quite well
founded. But Teddie, accepting him as an emissary from a world of pomp
and order which seemed eternally lost to her, was glad enough to
ensconce him in the brown velvet armchair and make tea for him in the
battered old samovar. It was not particularly good tea, he soon
discovered, but that in no way dampened his ardor or discouraged him in
the object of his visitation. So he hummed and hawed, and touched
lightly on the prerogatives of the elderly, and ventured the assertion
that New York was an extremely bewildering city, especially for the
young, and he became paternal and platitudinous over the perils of the
wide, wide world in general, and then with rather awkward unconcern
announced his hope that Teddie was making a go of it.
But Teddie wasn’t making a go of it, as she very well knew, and for one
weak moment she was tempted to take this kindly-eyed and clean-hearted
old gentleman into her confidence and exteriorate her troubles by freely
and frankly talking them over with one of her own kind. But a revival of
her old spirit of independence nipped this impulse in the bud, so she
merely gave the Commodore another cup of tea and somewhat pensively
asked if the autumn ball at Tuxedo had been a success this year.
Whereupon the old Commodore admitted that it had been a success, if you
could call such things a success. But they weren’t like the good old
days of the Patriarchs and the Assemblies and The Howling Swells. The
spirit of the times had changed, had lamentably changed, and the
relationship of the sexes in the younger generation seemed disturbing to
the survivors of the older era when a lady was accepted as a lady and
treated as one. And from this diatribe on the degeneration of the
present day Teddie’s counsellor glided easily and eloquently into the
advantages, for the girl of to-day, of early marriage and adequate
guardianship. Every girl of spirit ought to marry. Even Teddie herself,
he finally ventured, ought to marry.
“No young whippersnapper, mind you,” discreetly qualified the old
Commodore, “but some older and steadier man who knows the world and its
ways, a man to be relied on in times of trouble, a man who’d be a harbor
of refuge when the seas got to kicking up a bit!”
But this didn’t seem to impress Teddie as he had hoped it would.
“I’ve seen all I want to of men,” she announced with unexpected passion.
“I despise ’em, the whole pack of them!”
“And you don’t intend to marry?” demanded the scion of the statelier
years.
“Never!” retorted Teddie, staring fixedly at her unfinished sketch of
the Macauley Mission by Moonlight.
“Then what, may I ask, do you intend doing?” inquired her
stiff-shouldered old visitor.
She had intended to say that she wanted to live for Art. But she
hesitated. For Art, at that particular juncture, seemed a very anemic
and elusive thing to live for. She had no idea, in fact, just what she
_did_ intend living for. She was less impatient of others than she might
once have been. She even recognized kindliness under the intentions of
that over-personal emissary from her older world, however heavy-handed
he may have been in his executions of those intentions. And that,
impinging on her desolated young spirit, intrigued her into a brief but
depressing mood of self-pity. There was no trace of tears in her eyes,
for Teddie was not habitually lachrymose. But before she found that mood
conquered and killed she was unable to resist the temptation to let her
bobbed head sink wearily into the crooked arm which rested on one end of
the none-too-orderly cherrywood table.
“Oh, I say, you know; this sort of thing won’t do!” ejaculated her
obviously disturbed visitor. “It won’t do, my dear,” he repeated as he
patted what was left of the bobbed hair with his fatherly old hand.
Teddie, however, was without the spirit either to agree or disagree with
that statement. And her unhappiness so melted the heart of the benignant
old Commodore that he took her hand and stroked it as he talked to her.
And so gratified was he to see even the ghost of a grim little smile
about her lips that a paternally commiserative impulse prompted him to
stoop down and kiss the magnolia-white cheek.
So intent, indeed, had he been on his contemplation of this white cheek,
faintly shot through with its shell-pink, that the door had opened and a
third person had stepped into the studio without his being conscious of
the fact. And it was the voice of this intruder, more than Teddie’s
sudden recoil of startled wonder, that promptly brought the Commodore to
attention.
“So _he’s_ doin’ it too!” called out Gunboat Dorgan, with a quaver of
incredulity in his Celtic young voice. Whereupon he threw down his hat
and advanced slowly toward the table-end. “Say it quick,” he commanded.
“D’ yuh want me to knock his block off?”
“No, no,” cried Teddie, already on her feet. “There’s been too much of
that already!”
“But I saw the old bird tryin’ to kiss yuh!” proclaimed the indignant
youth.
“Who is this young jackanapes?” interrupted the older man, in no way
intimidated by the interloper with the cauliflower ear.
“Didn’t I see this old mutt pullin’ that muggin’-stuff?” persisted
Gunboat, ignoring the stately old gentleman with the rose-bud in his
lapel. But Teddie was herself by this time and she fixed her champion
from the East Side with a cold and steely stare.
“I want to talk to you!” she said, with great deliberation. And she made
that announcement with such an unlooked-for note of masterfulness that,
unimpressed as it left the newcomer, it rather bewildered the old
Commodore.
“And I guess I gotta earful or two to unload to yuh!” countered Gunboat,
betraying that he was laboring under an excitement which more recent
events had only temporarily eclipsed.
“I should be obliged to know just who this young bounder is,” repeated
the older man, in his most authoritative quarter-deck manner. But that
manner was entirely lost on Gunboat Dorgan.
“Yuh just play dead, yuh old Has-Been, until I say a word or two to me
lady-friend here,” he proclaimed as he confronted Teddie and gave his
back to an all too negligible enemy. “I came here to find out what right
a law-sharp named West has got to take that car of yours away from me. I
wantta know what call he’s got to load Ruby up wit’ a lot o’ talk about
me goin’ to State’s Prison. And I may be a prize-fighter, but I’ve got
the right to ask if I ain’t lived decent and done my work on the square.
I’ve got——”
“A prize-fighter?” interrupted the older man in the background. Then he
strode valorously in between the two. “Do you mean to tell me, Miss
Hayden, that a girl of your antecedents has—has come to have dealings
with——”
But he in turn was destined to interruption.
“Say, d’ yuh want me to throw this old cuff-shooter out o’ here?” was
Gunboat Dorgan’s crisp and angry demand of the girl.
“Stop it!” cried Teddie, with a stamp of the foot. “Stop it, right here
and right now! I’m tired of all this. I’m so tired of it I can’t stand
another moment of it!” Then, with a deep breath, she turned about to the
old gentleman with the rose-bud in his button-hole. “It’s been very kind
of you, I’m sure,” she said in a voice of laboriously achieved patience,
“but you can’t possibly help me, and you can’t possibly do any good by
remaining here. So if you’ll permit Mr. Dorgan and me to talk this
quietly over, by ourselves——”
“You are requesting me to leave you?” her would-be benefactor inquired,
as he reached for his hat.
“You must,” announced Teddie.
“Then permit me, Miss Hayden,” said the other with dignity, “to bid not
only you, but also your—your professional boxer, a good afternoon.”
And the old Commodore buttoned his coat and took his departure. He
sallied forth with considerable trepidation, trepidation which remained
with him even until he stopped in at a telegraph-office on lower Fifth
Avenue and despatched a none too carefully worded message to the old
Major in Hot Springs, announcing that things looked very dark indeed, as
Theodora seemed to be mixed up with a young prize-fighter by the name of
Dorgan, and suggesting that the sooner Theodora’s uncle could get back
to the city the better it might be for all concerned.