sure you’ll want to marry him. But I’m not going to force you--or try
to.”
“But listen. I haven’t changed my mind about Roger, either.”
“Well--well,” said Richmond, still good-humored though not so easily.
“It’d be foolish for us to quarrel about him. You say he has refused
you.”
“Yes--but I haven’t given him up.”
“That isn’t a very nice way for a girl to talk--is it now, my dear?”
said Richmond, laughing with some constraint.
“Why not?” said she.
“It’s the man’s place to do the courting and the proposing. And if the
man doesn’t want you I’m sure you’ve got too much modesty and pride
to----”
“I don’t know whether I have or not,” interrupted Beatrice. “I’ve got
a lot of you in me. I can’t imagine anything I wouldn’t do to get him
if I thought it would help. And I haven’t thought of much else but of
different schemes to bring him round. I’m like you are when you see a
railroad you want.”
“But there’s nothing you can do, Beatrice,” remonstrated her father.
“No--it seems not,” she assented despondently. “Oh, how it enrages me
to be a woman! When a man sees a girl he recognizes as the very best
for him, one he can’t and won’t do without, he goes after her--straight
out--and everybody applauds. It ought to be so with a girl.”
“God forbid!” cried Richmond, laughing.
“Oh, the men wouldn’t be bothered as much as you seem to think. Not
many of them are tremendously worth while. The women feel about most of
them like----”
“Like they do about mashed potatoes in Indiana--don’t care whether
they’re eating ’em or not?”
“Just so,” laughed she.
Once more he was at the hall door. He turned for a last look and smile.
“I’ll be back in an hour, and out home we’ll plan something to take
your mind off this unappreciative man.”
Beatrice looked disappointed. “I thought you were going to say plan
something to bring him round. That’s what we must do.”
This was the fatal one prod too many at the leashed temper of Richmond.
“Don’t irritate me, Beatrice,” he said sharply--a plea verging on a
rebuke. “Please try to be a little tactful with me.”
“I see you haven’t changed at all,” cried she, tears in her eyes
again--hot tears of a very different kind from those before.
“I thought you wanted to go home,” cried he, struggling with his temper.
“I do--if you are willing to grant me the dearest right a woman
has--the right to select her own husband.” She came closer to him,
clasped her hands and laid them against his shoulder. And into
his eyes gazed hers, innocent, anxious. “Oh, father, won’t you be
sensible--reasonable? I’ve got to live with him--not you.”
“I’d do almost anything to please you, my dear. If he were in your
class----”
“But that’s just why I want him,” cried she. “Do you think a man like
that could grow up in my class?”
“There are lots of clever painters about--lots of ’em.”
“I don’t care anything about his painting,” exclaimed she impatiently.
“I don’t know anything about it. I’m speaking of him as a man. A woman
doesn’t marry a talent--or a family--or a fortune. She wants a _man_.
Of course, if she can’t get a man, why, one of the other things is
better than nothing. But _I_ can get a _man_, father--if you’ll help
me!”
“Peter’s almost as tall--and quite as handsome--and much more like your
sort of looking man.”
“Father--father--how can you! And you have a sense of humor, too!”
“It’s fortunate for you, my dear, that Wade has the good sense to see
he would be ill at ease out of his own class. If he were willing, and
I were foolish, and you married him--how wretched you’d be when the
awakening came!”
The girl turned sadly away. “You don’t believe in love,” she said with
bitterness. “You don’t believe in anything but money.”
“I want to see my daughter happy,” said Richmond with a melancholy,
reproachful dignity that made her ashamed of herself.
“Yes--I know you do, father,” said she. “But”--with a look of
hesitation that might readily have been mistaken for weakness--“I see I
must go my own way.”
Richmond reflected that this did not mean much, as Roger Wade was
firmly set against marriage. So he said, with hypocritical resignation:
“Very well, my dear. Do as you like. All I want is you to come home.”
Beatrice slowly shook her head. “I can’t go,” said she.
Her father stared, astounded; her expression made her words as far as
possible from impulsive or careless.
“I see you haven’t changed at all. If I went back the same trouble
would break out again--only worse. Besides, what chance would I have
to get him? You’d work against me secretly if you didn’t openly. No--I
don’t trust you. I must make up my mind to shift for myself.”
“What on earth are you talking about?” he ejaculated. “Are you stark
mad?”
“No. I’m becoming sane,” said she quietly. “Won’t you sit down a
minute?”
Richmond seated himself meekly. The fear that had brought him there to
apologize was chilling his hot temper.
“I left home partly because of Roger Wade,” she proceeded to explain,
“but not altogether. There was another reason--as strong--maybe
stronger. You had opened my eyes to the truth about myself--to what a
degraded position I was in.”
“Degraded?” echoed he wonderingly. Then, somewhat like an alienist
humoring an insane patient: “But go on, my dear.”
“I had been imagining all along that I was free. I suddenly found
that I wasn’t free at all--that I had to do what you said--even about
the things that meant my whole life--had to do as you ordered or
lose all the things you had made necessities to me--all the luxury
and the enjoyments and the friends even. I saw I wasn’t anything
in myself--nothing at all--and I had been going round with my head
high, so proud and so pleased with myself! I understood why Roger
Wade didn’t think me worth while. I understood why you could treat me
contemptuously.”
“Is that all?” inquired her father, when she paused for a reflective
silence.
“No--just a little more. So--I’m not going back home with you--not just
now. I’m going on with the dressmaking.”
“With the--_what_?”
“Oh, I forgot I hadn’t told you,” said she with a smile. “Valentine and
I--and Monsieur Léry, whom she is marrying--are starting a dressmaking
shop.”
Richmond stood up straight, and his scanty hair and thick eyebrows
seemed to be assisting materially in making him the embodiment of
horrified amazement.
“Don’t be alarmed, father. The name over the door is not to be Richmond
or Beatrice, but Valentine--though, of course, I’ll take part openly.
I want everybody to know, because I intend to make loads and loads
of money. You’ve no idea of the profits in fashionable dressmaking.
Eighty--a hundred--a hundred and fifty per cent!”
“You are joking!”
She pretended to misunderstand. “No--fully that,” she cried delightedly.
“Beatrice! I forbid it.”
“But I’m not asking you to invest,” laughed she. “In fact, we don’t
want any more capital or partners. Personally, I wish Léry were an
employee instead of a partner. But Valentine would insist, I’m sure----”
“You will drive me mad!” exclaimed her father, throwing his arms about
wildly. “This folly is worse than the infatuation for that artist!” And
he started up, fumed about the room, sank exhausted and trembling into
a chair. “You’ll be the death of me!” he gasped.
“Now, do be reasonable, father,” she urged. “Why shouldn’t I use my
talents for business and for dress and make myself rich? Don’t talk
to me about what people will think. I don’t care. I’ve found out what
people are worth. Why, even my friend, Allie Kinnear, hasn’t been near
me.”
“I forbid it! I forbid it!” her father cried, shaking his fists in the
air. And off again he went into one of his paroxysms of fury.
“But I’m of age.”
“I’ll have you locked up as insane! I’ll have a commission appointed to
take charge of your property!”
“When I showed them my plans for the shop I think they’d let me alone.
We’ll make barrels of money. New York hasn’t seen such a shop as I’d
run. The trouble with the dressmaking business is that no woman who
really knows----”
He seized her by the arm, glared into her face. “This is an infernal
scheme to bring me to terms! Has that artist put you up to it?”
“How absurd! I haven’t seen him. I doubt if he knows I’ve left home.
Father, since I seem not to be able to get him I’ve simply got to do
something--something that will keep me so busy I shan’t have time to
think. For I’m not--as you imagine--the victim of a foolish girl’s
infatuation. I’m really in love, father dear--sensibly in love.”
“No one is sensible who’s in love,” said he in a far gentler tone.
His rages had about exhausted his strength. He was feeling an ominous
feebleness of limb and heart that alarmed him. “Nobody’s sensible who’s
in love,” he repeated.
“Nobody’s sensible who isn’t--if they get half a chance,” replied she.
“It’s the only thing in life.”
And his haggard face and the hungry misery of his eyes contained no
denial of her confident assertion. “Is there _nothing_ that will
induce you to come home, Beatrice?” he pleaded with the weakness of
exhaustion. “I’ll never speak of Peter--of marriage--again. I’ll give
you whatever income you want--in your own right.”
“And Roger?”
Richmond winced; but those inward reminders of oncreeping old age,
lonely and loveless if this girl turned from him, forbade him to draw
back. “You think you could get him if I were to consent?”
“Perhaps.” There was the ecstatic quiver of a newborn hope in her voice.
“That is, you would marry him, even though you were convinced he was a
fortune hunter?”
“He might be afraid to undertake the support of as expensive a girl as
I am. He doesn’t dream how inexpensive I could be.”
A long pause, he gazing at the floor, she anxiously watching him.
“Well--I consent,” burst from her father. His tone suggested a false
admission wrung under torture.
Another long pause, she eying him dubiously, he avoiding her gaze. “I
don’t trust you,” said she. “It’s your own fault. You can’t blame me.
I couldn’t ever trust you, after the thing you did against Roger--and
your threats to Peter and to me.”
“I am an old fool--a weak old fool!” he shouted, seizing his hat. “I
wash my hands of you! I’m done with you!”
And out he bolted, running squarely into a woman who was just entering
the parlor. He did not pause to apologize.
* * * * *
In the afternoon Mrs. Richmond came--beautifully dressed and diffusing
a strong but elegant odor of concentrated essence of lilies of the
valley. “I’d have been here long ago,” she explained as she kissed and
embraced her daughter and shed a few cautious tears, “but I didn’t
dare. This was my first chance. Your father has absolutely forbidden
me. And I had always thought he was rather partial to you. But then, I
might have known. He cares for nobody--for nothing--but those schemes
and plans of his. You’d never believe he was the same man as the one I
married. And he isn’t. Success has turned his head.”
“He was here this morning,” said Beatrice.
“Here!” exclaimed her mother. “What for?”
“For me.”
Jealousy sparkled in her mother’s hastily veiled eyes. “Trying to get
you into his power again,” she sneered.
“I suppose so,” said Beatrice. “Yes--that must have been it.”
“Then you are coming home?”
“Oh, no.”
The jealousy passed; the mother returned. “But, Beatrice--he has
changed his will and has cut you off. He’s leaving your portion to
Hector.”
Beatrice looked uncomfortable. “I shan’t say I like that,” said she,
“for it’d be false. But I’m not coming home, just the same. There’s
been a great change in me, mother.”
“You always were headstrong,” said her mother. “I used to feel, when
you were a baby, that the day would come when there’d be a clash
between you and your father.”
“Well--the clash is over. We’ll let each other alone after this.”
“But what is to become of you? Of course, I’ll have something; and as
long as I have anything--” Mrs. Richmond checked herself, flushed. “In
fact, I have got a little, Beatrice. I put by in case there ever should
be this kind of trouble between him and the children. I can let you
have a good income--enough, with what you’ve got, to make a showing you
needn’t be ashamed of. Have you seen Mr. Wade?”
Beatrice put her arms around her mother and kissed her--tenderly, but
with that carefulness which one woman never neglects in caressing
another who has made a careful toilet. “If I need the money I’ll tell
you, dear,” said she. “No, I haven’t seen him. Have you?”
“Late yesterday afternoon. He was striding along the road--didn’t see
me.”
“How was he looking?”
“Anxious and depressed, I thought.”
Beatrice beamed. “You’re not telling me that--just to make me feel
good?”
“No--no, indeed. He looked almost haggard.”
Beatrice kissed her mother again. There could not be the slightest
doubt. Her mother, in the habit of siding with her children against
their aggressive father and of protecting them from him, was moving in
her direction. “Why don’t _you_ go to see him?” she boldly suggested.
“If your father should find out!”
“You’ve got the picture as an excuse. You know, father thinks we met
Roger in Europe.”
“Yes--yes--I had forgotten.... I don’t know what possesses me! I can’t
understand myself, even thinking of helping you in such an absurd,
idiotic thing as marrying a poor artist.”
“A poor man--not a poor artist,” laughed Beatrice.
“I suppose,” went on Mrs. Richmond, “it must be for the pleasure of
seeing your father defeated in something he has set his heart on. He
has trampled me so often I’d like to see him humbled once.”
“You ought to have seen him when I told him I was going into the
dressmaking business.”
“Beatrice!” cried her mother--and her expression of horrified amazement
was a fit companion for that of Richmond.
“I’m going to make stacks of money,” said Beatrice carelessly. “You
know I’ve got taste--and a good business head.”
“Didn’t your father forbid you?” demanded her mother, quivering with
agitation.
“Yes--and I reminded him I was of age.”
“Why, it’ll ruin us all!” wailed Mrs. Richmond. “Beatrice, I do believe
you’ve lost your mind.”
“Just what father said.”
“Surely you won’t do it, now that I’ve offered you a good income. You
can have fifteen thousand--in addition to what you’ve got.”
“And how would I pass the time?”
“Why, as you always have.”
The peculiar, romantic--“crazy,” her father called it--look drifted
into the girl’s face, completely transforming it. “Yes,” replied she
dreamily, “but that was before I knew Roger.”
“What _shall_ I do!” moaned Mrs. Richmond. She was anything but a keen
observer, but she was woman enough to understand that look. “If you
married him you’d give this up--wouldn’t you?”
“I hadn’t thought. Yes--I suppose I’d have to. Looking after him would
take all my time.”
“Then you _must_ marry him!” cried her mother resolutely. “I shall see
your father at once.”
“You’ll simply get yourself into trouble, mother dear.”
“I’m not afraid of him now!” exclaimed Mrs. Richmond with militant eyes
and nostrils. “He has made a fool of himself--and he knows it. I’ll
not have all I’ve spent my life in building up torn down just because
he is such a monstrous snob. Why should he object to a distinguished
artist as a son-in-law? Why, Mr. Wade would be an addition to the
family, socially.”
And so on and on, Beatrice letting her mother rave herself into a
fitting state of mind for a struggle with her husband. Whenever she
paused Beatrice brought up the dressmaking to set her off again. And
when she was about to leave Beatrice called in Valentine and presented
her as “My partner, Miss Clermont.” Mrs. Richmond was quite done for.
Her daughter’s maid treated as an equal--and become her daughter’s
business partner! “I’ll telephone you to-night--or see you to-morrow,”
said she as she was leaving. She did not dare offend Beatrice by
ignoring “Miss Clermont.” So she made a bow that was a highly amusing
specimen of those always amusing compromises which no sentient thing in
the universe but the humorless human animal would attempt to carry off.
XVIII
MRS. RICHMOND REBELS
For some time after her mother left Beatrice sat in a brown study, her
ex-maid and partner seated across the table from her and not venturing
to interrupt. At last, Beatrice said: “I don’t understand it at all.
I’d never have believed mother would take it that way.”
“You could hardly expect her to be pleased, Miss Richmond,” replied
Valentine.
“Oh, I knew she’d blow up and sail into me,” said Beatrice. “I’m
puzzling over the way she acted about father. I never before knew her
to revolt against him.”
“Probably--when Mrs. Richmond sees him--” was Miss Clermont’s highly
suggestive, unfinished comment.
“No doubt,” said Beatrice. “And yet--Mamma was mad through and
through--fighting mad. I never saw her like that--with him. I shouldn’t
have believed it was in her. I suspect--I hope--she’ll make trouble.”
Beatrice was right in her diagnosis of her mother’s rage. Mrs. Richmond
was indeed fighting mad. Everything that lives, even a human being
weakened by luxury and by long and meek servitude, has its limit
of endurance, its point at which it will cease to run or to cower
and will fight to the last gasp. That limit, that point had been
reached by Mrs. Richmond. There were many things she liked in varying
degrees--her children, society novels, half a dozen friends, her maid
Marthe, an occasional man--the Count d’Artois just at that time. There
were three things only to which she was deeply attached--three besides
herself. The first was her youthful appearance, which she struggled so
assiduously to retain. The second was wealth, which gave her so many
delightful moral, mental and physical sensations. The third and dearest
was social position. The mania of social position habitually seizes
upon persons of great affluence and small intelligence; it manifests
itself early, often in a grave form: but it does not become virulent
until middle life. With Mrs. Richmond the mania was aggravated by her
not having been born to fashionable society. Patiently, resolutely,
toilsomely she had built herself up socially year by year. She had
endured humiliations, snubs, insults, as a gallant soldier endures the
blows and buffetings of battle. And her virtue had been rewarded. She
had attained social position--not, indeed, security, for in America
social security is impossible; but an envied rank among the very first,
reasonably assured so long as Richmond retained his wealth and no
degrading scandal undermined and toppled. Like the prudent soul that
she was, she remained sleeplessly vigilant lest some such scandal
should come from an unexpected quarter.
There were obscure relations--vulgar--no, worse--positively low. True,
everybody was cursed with such; but to Mrs. Richmond her own and her
husband’s impossible kin seemed more awful than anyone else’s. Then,
Richmond, industrious social climber though he was and as careful about
matters of social position as any of the other big men of finance
who graciously permitted their families to be fashionable--Richmond
occasionally broke loose and offended by coarse and greedy snatching at
wealth owned by persons of social power. Also, he occasionally almost
overreached himself in his contempt for law and public opinion, and put
in jeopardy his reputation. But this danger was not now haunting her as
it once had. Through the constant infractions of Richmond and his like
the moral code was no longer what it used to be, was a mere collection
of old tatters. Pretty much everybody who socially was anybody despised
it in private and professed public respect for it only out of habit and
for the benefit of the lower classes.
Finally, there were the children. One could never tell what one’s
children would grow up into. Of the four, she had regarded the
younger daughter as the safest because she was intensely proud, fond
of social position, of fashionable luxury--fonder of them than of
anything--except, perhaps, of having her own way where opposed. Yes,
Beatrice would never cause her social anxiety. In the irony of fate it
was she and only she who had become troublesome. The refusal to marry
Peter Vanderkief was bad. The infatuation for an artist, eminent though
he seemed to be--at least, in France--was worse. This dressmaking
was worst. To Mrs. Richmond’s excited fancy it seemed to foreshadow
social downfall--not from the fashionable set, but from leadership
in it. If there had been so much as a single previous generation of
fashionable Richmonds, or if their own fashion were a matter of twenty
years instead of a scant ten, the thing wouldn’t matter. Beatrice would
be regarded as eccentric--and eccentricity is a mark of aristocratic
blood. But, in the circumstances, for Beatrice to become a dressmaker
in partnership with a French maid and a chauffeur----
Mrs. Richmond burst in upon her husband at his office with her fury
intact. Richmond knew at a glance that he had to deal with a revolt
and a dangerous one. He showed that he understood all about its origin
by saying as soon as his secretary had gone: “You’ve been to see
Beatrice.”
“She told you this morning that she was going into the dressmaking
business?” said the wife, nostrils dilating, eyes blazing at him.
“Yes.” And Richmond concentrated himself in a corner of his big chair.
It looked like a gesture of shrinking, of timidity. In fact, it was
simply his way of gathering himself together at the first onslaught of
danger.
“Here in New York!”
“Yes.”
“With Valentine!”
Richmond made a slight gesture of assent.
“And--_Léry!_”
Richmond from the corner of his chair stretched out one hesitating hand
to the papers on the desk before him.
“What are you going to do about it?” demanded the wife in a low tone
that sounded as if it had forced its way through clinched teeth.
Richmond leaned back in his chair, clasped his hands behind his big
head, stared out of the window.
“What are you going to do about it?” repeated his wife.
Still no reply.
“Are you going to sacrifice all that I’ve spent so many years in
building up?”
“You?” snapped Richmond, with contemptuous sarcasm. “What have _you_
done?”
“I’ve made our social position--that’s what I’ve done.”
“You mean _I_’ve built it--my money and my power. People recognize us
because they don’t dare anger _me_.” This in the voice of axiomatic
truth.
But Mrs. Richmond was too angry--too alarmed. Panic has its courage
more dangerous than valor’s. “Look at the Galloways,” cried she.
“They’ve got more money than we have. Look at the Roebucks--more money
than we have--and Roebuck a man you’re afraid of.”
“I’m afraid of nobody!” blustered he.
She answered this with a maddening, little, sneering laugh, and went
on: “Look at the Fosdicks--and the Bellinghams--and the Ashforths. More
money than we have.”
“Yes--and they’re received.” But his tone was not all it might have
been.
“You know the difference,” said she, in open contempt of his flimsy
evasion. “They’re _in_ but not _of_. We’re both in and of. And why?...
Why?” she repeated fiercely. “Why are we in and of, in spite of the
enemies you’ve made--in spite of the shady things you’ve done--in spite
of----”
“Now, see here, Lucy--I’ve not complained of your way of managing your
side of the family affairs. You’ve done very well.” This was said
patronizingly, but with a mildness that, issuing from Daniel Richmond,
made it sound almost like a whimper.
“And since I got the Earl of Broadstairs away from Sally Peyton and
married him to Rhoda we’ve been right in the front rank. There aren’t
but two big families that still hold out.”
“The Vanderkief marriage might have got them,” said Richmond.
“If Beatrice starts up as a dressmaker--with those two servants----”
“But--what can _I_ do?” he interrupted violently. “She’s
insane--insane!”
“It’s you that are insane, Dan,” cried his wife. “You knew the girl.
You knew you’d made her hard to manage. Why did you goad her?”
“I suppose you’d have let her marry that painter fellow,” sneered the
husband.
“Anything but such a scandal as this,” declared she. “And it’s got to
be stopped!”
Richmond shrugged his shoulders. “I offered to drop the Vanderkief
marriage. I offered to take her back. I begged her to come back.”
“But you didn’t tell her she could marry Wade.”
“Yes, I did!” confessed he. “Yes--I did even that.”