A Lion in an ass's skin is still a lion in spite of his disguise.
Conversely, the same might be said of an ass in a lion's skin. The
Celebrity ran after women with the same readiness and helplessness that
a dog will chase chickens, or that a stream will run down hill. Women
differ from chickens, however, in the fact that they find pleasure in
being chased by a certain kind of a man. The Celebrity was this kind
of a man. From the moment his valet deposited his luggage in his rooms,
Charles Wrexell Allen became the social hero of Asquith. It is by
straws we are enabled to tell which way the wind is blowing, and I first
noticed his partiality for Miss Trevor from the absence of the lively
conflicts she was wont to have with Farrar. These ceased entirely
after the Celebrity's arrival. It was the latter who now commanded the
conversation at our table.
I was truly sorry for Farrar, for I knew the man, the depth of his
nature, and the scope of the shock. He carried it off altogether too
well, and both the studied lightness of his actions and the increased
carelessness of his manner made me fear that what before was feigned,
might turn to a real bitterness.
For Farrar's sake, if the Celebrity had been content with women in
general, all would have been well; but he was unable to generalize, in
one sense, and to particularize, in another. And it was plain that he
wished to monopolize Miss Trevor, while still retaining a hold upon the
others. For my sake, had he been content with women alone, I should have
had no cause to complain. But it seemed that I had an attraction for
him, second only to women, which I could not account for. And I began
to be cursed with a great deal of his company. Since he was absolutely
impervious to hints, and would not take no for an answer, I was
helpless. When he had no engagement he would thrust himself on me. He
seemed to know by intuition--for I am very sure I never told him--what
my amusement was to be the mornings I did not go to the county-seat, and
he would invariably turn up, properly equipped, as I was making my way
with judge Short to the tennis court, or carrying my oars to the water.
It was in vain that I resorted to subterfuge: that I went to bed early
intending to be away before the Celebrity's rising hour. I found he had
no particular rising hour. No matter how early I came down, I would find
him on the veranda, smoking cigarettes, or otherwise his man would be
there with a message to say that his master would shortly join me if I
would kindly wait. And at last I began to realize in my harassed soul
that all elusion was futile, and to take such holidays as I could get,
when he was off with a girl, in a spirit of thankfulness.
Much of this persecution I might have put up with, indeed, had I not
heard, in one way or another, that he was doing me the honor of calling
me his intimate. This I could not stand, and I soberly resolved to
leave Asquith and go back to town, which I should indeed have done if
deliverance had not arrived from an unexpected quarter.
One morning I had been driven to the precarious refuge afforded by the
steps of the inn, after rejecting offers from the Celebrity to join
him in a variety of amusements. But even here I was not free from
interruption, for he was seated on a horse-block below me, playing with
a fox terrier. Judge Short had gone to town, and Farrar was off for a
three days' cruise up the lake. I was bitterly regretting I had not gone
with him when the distant notes of a coach horn reached my ear, and
I descried a four-in-hand winding its way up the inn road from the
direction of Mohair.
“That must be your friend Cooke,” remarked the Celebrity, looking up.
There could be no doubt of it. With little difficulty I recognized on
the box the familiar figure of my first important client, and beside him
was a lady whom I supposed to be Mrs. Farquhar Fenelon Cooke, although
I had had no previous knowledge that such a person existed. The horses
were on a brisk trot, and Mr. Cooke seemed to be getting the best out
of them for the benefit of the sprinkling of people on the inn porch.
Indeed, I could not but admire the dexterous turn of the wrist which
served Mr. Cooke to swing his leaders into the circle and up the hill,
while the liveried guard leaned far out in anticipation of a stumble.
Mr. Cooke hailed me with a beaming smile and a flourish of the whip as
he drew up and descended from the box.
“Maria,” he exclaimed, giving me a hearty grip, “this is the man that
won Mohair. My wife, Crocker.”
I was somewhat annoyed at this effusiveness before the Celebrity, but I
looked up and caught Mrs. Cooke's eye. It was the calm eye of a general.
“I am glad of the opportunity to thank you, Mr. Crocker,” she said
simply. And I liked her from that moment.
Mr. Cooke at once began a tirade against the residents of Asquith for
permitting a sandy and generally disgraceful condition of the roads.
So roundly did he vituperate the inn management in particular, and with
such a loud flow of words, that I trembled lest he should be heard on
the veranda. The Celebrity stood by the block, in an amazement which
gave me a wicked pleasure, and it was some minutes before I had the
chance to introduce him.
Mr. Cooke's idea of an introduction, however, was no mere word-formula:
it was fraught with a deeper and a bibulous meaning. He presented the
Celebrity to his wife, and then invited both of us to go inside with him
by one of those neat and cordial paraphrases in which he was skilled. I
preferred to remain with Mrs. Cooke, and it was with a gleam of hope at
a possible deliverance from my late persecution that I watched the two
disappear together through the hall and into the smoking-room.
“How do you like Mohair?” I asked Mrs. Cooke.
“Do you mean the house or the park?” she laughed; and then, seeing my
embarrassment, she went on: “Oh, the house is just like everything else
Fenelon meddles with. Outside it's a mixture of all the styles, and
inside a hash of all the nationalities from Siamese to Spanish. Fenelon
hangs the Oriental tinsels he has collected on pieces of black baronial
oak, and the coat-of-arms he had designed by our Philadelphia jewellers
is stamped on the dining-room chairs, and even worked into the fire
screens.”
There was nothing paltry in her criticism of her husband, nothing she
would not have said to his face. She was a woman who made you feel this,
for sincerity was written all over her. I could not help wondering why
she gave Mr. Cooke line in the matter of household decoration, unless
it was that he considered Mohair his own, private hobby, and that she
humored him. Mrs. Cooke was not without tact, and I have no doubt she
perceived my reluctance to talk about her husband and respected it.
“We drove down to bring you back to luncheon,” she said.
I thanked her and accepted. She was curious to hear about Asquith and
its people, and I told her all I knew.
“I should like to meet some of them,” she explained, “for we intend
having a cotillon at Mohair,--a kind of house-warming, you know. A party
of Mr. Cooke's friends is coming out for it in his car, and he thought
something of inviting the people of Asquith up for a dance.”
I had my doubts concerning the wisdom of an entertainment, the success
of which depended on the fusion of a party of Mr. Cooke's friends and
a company from Asquith. But I held my peace. She shot a question at me
suddenly:
“Who is this Mr. Allen?”
“He registers from Boston, and only came a fortnight ago,” I replied
vaguely.
“He doesn't look quite right; as though he had been set down on the
wrong planet, you know,” said Mrs. Cooke, her finger on her temple.
“What is he like?”
“Well,” I answered, at first with uncertainty, then with inspiration,
“he would do splendidly to lead your cotillon, if you think of having
one.”
“So you do not dance, Mr. Crocker?”
I was somewhat set back by her perspicuity.
“No, I do not,” said I.
“I thought not,” she said, laughing. It must have been my expression
which prompted her next remark.
“I was not making fun of you,” she said, more soberly; “I do not like
Mr. Allen any better than you do, and I have only seen him once.”
“But I have not said I did not like him,” I objected.
“Of course not,” said Mrs. Cooke, quizzically.
At that moment, to my relief, I discerned the Celebrity and Mr. Cooke in
the hallway.
“Here they come, now,” she went on. “I do wish Fenelon would keep
his hands off the people he meets. I can feel he is going to make an
intimate of that man. Mark my words, Mr. Crocker.”
I not only marked them, I prayed for their fulfilment.
There was that in Mr. Cooke which, for want of a better name, I will
call instinct. As he came down the steps, his arm linked in that of
the Celebrity, his attitude towards his wife was both apologetic and
defiant. He had at once the air of a child caught with a forbidden
toy, and that of a stripling of twenty-one who flaunts a cigar in his
father's face.
“Maria,” he said, “Mr. Allen has consented to come back with us for
lunch.”
We drove back to Mohair, Mr. Cooke and the Celebrity on the box, Mrs.
Cooke and I behind. Except to visit the boathouses I had not been to
Mohair since the day of its completion, and now the full beauty of the
approach struck me for the first time. We swung by the lodge, the keeper
holding open the iron gate as we passed, and into the wide driveway,
hewn, as it were, out of the virgin forest. The sandy soil had been
strengthened by a deep road-bed of clay imported from the interior,
which was spread in turn with a fine gravel, which crunched under the
heavy wheels. From the lodge to the house, a full mile, branches had
been pruned to let the sunshine sift through in splotches, but the wild
nature of the place had been skilfully retained. We curved hither and
thither under the giant trees until suddenly, as a whip straightens in
the snapping, one of the ancient tribes of the forest might have sent an
arrow down the leafy gallery into the open, and at the far end we caught
sight of the palace framed in the vista. It was a triumph for Farrar,
and I wished that the palace had been more worthy.
The Celebrity did not stint his praises of Mohair, coming up the drive,
but so lavish were his comments on the house that they won for him a
lasting place in Mr. Cooke's affections, and encouraged my client to
pull up his horses in a favorable spot, and expand on the beauties of
the mansion.
“Taking it altogether,” said he, complacently, “it is rather a neat box,
and I let myself loose on it. I had all these ideas I gathered knocking
about the world, and I gave them to Willis, of Philadelphia, to put
together for me. But he's honest enough not to claim the house. Take,
for instance, that minaret business on the west; I picked that up from
a mosque in Algiers. The oriel just this side is whole cloth from Haddon
Hall, and the galleried porch next it from a Florentine villa. The
conical capped tower I got from a French chateau, and some of the
features on the south from a Buddhist temple in Japan. Only a little
blending and grouping was necessary, and Willis calls himself an
architect, and wasn't equal to it. Now,” he added, “get the effect. Did
you ever see another house like it?”
“Magnificent!” exclaimed the Celebrity.
“And then,” my client continued, warming under this generous
appreciation, “there's something very smart about those colors. They're
my racing colors. Of course the granite's a little off, but it isn't
prominent. Willis kicked hard when it came to painting the oriel yellow,
but an architect always takes it for granted he knows it all, and a--”
“Fenelon,” said Mrs. Cooke, “luncheon is waiting.”
Mrs. Cooke dominated at luncheon and retired, and it is certain that
both Mr. Cooke and the Celebrity breathed more freely when she had gone.
If her criticisms on the exterior of the house were just, those on the
interior were more so. Not only did I find the coat-of-arms set forth on
the chairs, fire-screens, and other prominent articles, but it was even
cut into the swinging door of the butler's pantry. The motto I am afraid
my client never took the trouble to have translated, and I am inclined
to think his jewellers put up a little joke on him when they chose it.
“Be Sober and Boast not.”
I observed that Mrs. Cooke, when she chose, could exert the subduing
effect on her husband of a soft pedal on a piano; and during luncheon
she kept, the soft pedal on. And the Celebrity, being in some degree a
kindred spirit, was also held in check. But his wife had no sooner left
the room when Mr. Cooke began on the subject uppermost in his mind. I
had suspected that his trip to Asquith that morning was for a purpose at
which Mrs. Cooke had hinted. But she, with a woman's tact, had aimed to
accomplish by degrees that which her husband would carry by storm.
“You've been at Asquith sometime, Crocker,” Mr. Cooke began, “long
enough to know the people.”
“I know some of them,” I said guardedly. But the rush was not to be
stemmed.
“How many do you think you can muster for that entertainment of mine?
Fifty? I ought to have fifty, at least. Suppose you pick out fifty, and
send me up the names. I want good lively ones, you understand, that will
stir things up.”
“I am afraid there are not fifty of that kind there,” I replied.
His face fell, but brightened again instantly. He appealed to the
Celebrity.
“How about it, old man?” said he.
The Celebrity answered, with becoming modesty, that the Asquithians were
benighted. They had never had any one to show them how to enjoy life.
But there was hope for them.
“That's it,” exclaimed my client, slapping his thigh, and turning
triumphantly to me, he continued, “You're all right, Crocker, and know
enough to win a damned big suit, but you're not the man to steer a
delicate thing of this kind.”
This is how, to my infinite relief, the Celebrity came to engineer the
matter of the housewarming; and to him it was much more congenial. He
accepted the task cheerfully, and went about it in such a manner as to
leave no doubt in my mind as to its ultimate success. He was a master
hand at just such problems, and this one had a double attraction. It
pleased him to be thought the arbiter of such a worthy cause, while he
acquired a prominence at Asquith which satisfied in some part a craving
which he found inseparable from incognito.
His tactics were worthy of a skilled diplomatist. Before we left Mohair
that day he had exacted as a condition that Mr. Cooke should not appear
at the inn or in its vicinity until after the entertainment. To this my
client readily pledged himself with that absolute freedom from suspicion
which formed one of the most admirable traits of his character. The
Celebrity, being intuitively quick where women were concerned, had
surmised that Mrs. Cooke did not like him; but as her interests in
the affair of the cotillon coincided with those of Mr. Cooke, she was
available as a means to an end. The Celebrity deemed her, from a social
standpoint, decidedly the better part of the Mohair establishment, and
he contrived, by a system of manoeuvres I failed to grasp, to throw her
forward while he kept Mr. Cooke in the background.
He had much to contend with; above all, an antecedent prejudice against
the Cookes, in reality a prejudice against the world, the flesh, and
the devil, natural to any quiet community, and of which Mohair and its
appurtenances were taken as the outward and visible signs. Older people
came to Asquith for simplicity and rest, and the younger ones were
brought there for these things. Nearly all had sufficient wealth to
seek, if they chose, gayety and ostentation at the eastern resorts. But
Asquithians held gayety and ostentation at a discount, and maintained
there was gayety enough at home.
If any one were fitted to overcome this prejudice, it was Mrs. Cooke.
Her tastes and manners were as simple as her gowns. The Celebrity, by
arts unknown, induced Mrs. Judge Short and two other ladies to call at
Mohair on a certain afternoon when Mr. Cooke was trying a trotter on the
track. The three returned wondering and charmed with Mrs. Cooke; they
were sure she had had no hand in the furnishing of that atrocious house.
Their example was followed by others at a time when the master of Mohair
was superintending in person the docking of some two-year-olds, and
equally invisible. These ladies likewise came back to sing Mrs. Cooke's
praises. Mrs. Cooke returned the calls. She took tea on the inn veranda,
and drove Mrs. Short around Mohair in her victoria. Mr. Cooke being seen
only on rare and fleeting occasions, there gradually got abroad a most
curious misconception of that gentleman's character, while over his
personality floated a mist of legend which the Celebrity took good
care not to dispel. Farrar, who despised nonsense, was ironical and
non-committal when appealed to, and certainly I betrayed none of
my client's attributes. Hence it came that Asquith, before the
house-warming, knew as little about Farquhar Fenelon Cooke, the man, as
the nineteenth century knows about William Shakespeare, and was every
whit as curious. Like Shakespeare, Mr. Cooke was judged by his works,
and from these he was generally conceded to be an illiterate and
indifferent person of barbarous tastes and a mania for horses. He was
further described as ungentlemanly by a brace of spinsters who had been
within earshot on the veranda the morning he had abused the Asquith
roads, but their evidence was not looked upon as damning. That Mr. Cooke
would appear at the cotillon never entered any one's head.
Thus it was, for a fortnight, Mr. Cooke maintained a most rigid
seclusion. Would that he had discovered in the shroud of mystery the
cloak of fame!
VOLUME 2.