_LITTLE NOVELS BY_
_FAVOURITE AUTHORS_
Mrs. Pendleton’s
Four-in-hand
GERTRUDE ATHERTON
[Illustration: Gertrude Atherton]
[Illustration]
Mrs. Pendleton’s
Four-in-hand
BY
GERTRUDE ATHERTON
AUTHOR OF “THE CONQUEROR,” ETC.
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1903
_All rights reserved_
[Illustration]
COPYRIGHT, 1902,
BY MRS. GERTRUDE ATHERTON.
COPYRIGHT, 1903,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
* * * * *
Set up, electrotyped, and published June, 1903.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
ILLUSTRATIONS
Portrait of Gertrude Atherton _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
“‘I have been insulted’” 11
“‘Well, why don’t you go?’” 87
[Illustration]
MRS. PENDLETON’S
FOUR-IN-HAND
I
Jessica, her hands clenched and teeth set, stood looking with hard
eyes at a small heap of letters lying on the floor. The sun, blazing
through the open window, made her blink unconsciously, and the ocean’s
deep voice rising to the Newport sands seemed to reiterate:—
“Contempt! Contempt!”
Tall, finely pointed with the indescribable air and style of the New
York woman, she did not suggest intimate knowledge of the word the ocean
hurled to her. In that moss-green room, with her haughty face and clean
skin, her severe faultless gown, she rather suggested the type to whom
poets a century hence would indite their sonnets—when she and her kind
had been set in the frame of the past. And if her dress was
conventional, she had let imagination play with her hair. The clear
evasive colour of flame, it was brushed down to her neck, parted,
crossed, and brought tightly up each side of her head just behind her
ears. Meeting above her bang, the curling ends allowed to fly loose, it
vaguely resembled Medusa’s wreath. Her eyes were grey, the colour of
mid-ocean, calm, beneath a grey sky. Not twenty-four, she had the repose
and “air” of one whose cradle had been rocked by Society’s foot; and
although at this moment her pride was in the dust, there was more anger
than shame in her face.
The door opened and her hostess entered. As Mrs. Pendleton turned slowly
and looked at her, Miss Decker gave a little cry.
[Illustration: “‘I HAVE BEEN INSULTED.’”]
“Jessica!” she said, “what is the matter?”
“I have been insulted,” said Mrs. Pendleton, deliberately. She felt a
savage pleasure in further humiliating herself.
“Insulted! You!” Miss Decker’s correct voice and calm brown eyes could
not have expressed more surprise and horror if a foreign diplomatist had
snapped his fingers in the face of the President’s wife. Even her sleek
brown hair almost quivered.
“Yes,” Mrs. Pendleton went on in the same measured tones; “four men have
told me how much they despise me.” She walked slowly up and down the
room. Miss Decker sank upon the divan, incredulity, curiosity,
expectation, feminine satisfaction marching across her face in rapid
procession.
“I have always maintained that a married woman has a perfect right to
flirt,” continued Mrs. Pendleton. “The more if she has married an old
man and life is somewhat of a bore. ‘Why do you marry an old man?’ snaps
the virtuous world. ‘What a contemptible creature you are to marry for
anything but love!’ it cries, as it eats the dust at Mammon’s feet. I
married an old man because with the wisdom of twenty, I had made up my
mind that I could never love and that position and wealth alone made up
the sum of existence. I had more excuse than a girl who has been always
poor, for I had never known the arithmetic of money until my father
failed, the year before I married. People who have never known wealth do
not realise the purely physical suffering of those inured to luxury and
suddenly bereft of it: it makes no difference what one’s will or
strength of character is. So—I married Mr. Pendleton. So—I amused
myself with other men. Mr. Pendleton gave me my head, because I kept
clear of scandal: he knew my pride. Now, if I had spent my life
demoralising myself and the society that received me, I could not be
more bitterly punished. I suppose I deserve it. I suppose that the
married flirt is just as poor and paltry and contemptible a creature as
the moralist and the minister depict her. We measure morals by results.
Therefore I hold to-day that it is the business of a lifetime to throw
stones at the married flirt.”
“For Heaven’s sake,” cried Miss Decker, in a tone of exasperation, “stop
moralising and tell me what has happened!”
“Do you remember Clarence Trent, Edward Dedham, John Severance, Norton
Boswell?”
“Do I? Poor moths!”
“They were apparently devoted to me.”
Dryly: “Apparently.”
“How long is it since Mr. Pendleton’s death?”
“About—he died on the sixteenth—why, yes, it was six months yesterday
since he died.”
“Exactly. You see these four notes on the floor? They are four
proposals—four proposals”—and she gave a short hard laugh through lips
whose red had suddenly faded—“from the four men I have just mentioned.”
Miss Decker gasped. “Four proposals! Then what on earth are you angry
about?”
Mrs. Pendleton’s lip curled scornfully. She did not condescend to answer
at once. “You are clever enough at times,” she said coldly, after a
moment. “It is odd you cannot grasp the very palpable fact that four
proposals received on the same day, by the same mail, from four men who
are each other’s most intimate friends, can mean but one thing—a
practical joke. Oh!” she cried, the jealously mastered passion springing
into her voice, “that is what infuriates me—more even than the
insult—that they should think me such a fool as to be so easily
deceived! O—h—h!”
“If I remember aright,” ventured Miss Decker, feebly, “the intimacy to
which you allude was a thing of the past some time before you
disappeared from the world. In fact, they were not on speaking terms.”
“Oh, they have made it up long ago! Don’t make any weak explanations,
but tell me how to turn the tables on them. I would give my hair and
wear a grey wig—my complexion and paint—to get even with them. And I
will. But how? How?”
She paced up and down the room with nervous steps, glancing for
inspiration from the delicate etchings on the walls to the divan that
was like a moss bank, to the carpet that might have been a patch of
forest green, and thence to the sparkling ocean. Miss Decker offered no
suggestions. She had perfect faith in the genius of her friend.
Suddenly Mrs. Pendleton paused and turned to her hostess. The red had
come back to her curled mouth. Her eyes were luminous, as when the sun
breaks through the grey sky and falls, dazzling, on the waters.
“I have it!” she said. “And a week from to-day—I will keep them in
suspense that long—New York will have no corner small enough to hold
them.”
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
II
The hot September day was ten hours old. The office of the St.
Christopher Club was still deserted but for a clerk who looked warm and
sleepy. The postman had just left a heap of letters on his desk, and he
was sorting them for their various pigeonholes. A young man entered, and
the clerk began to turn over the letters more rapidly. The newcomer,
tall, thin, with sharp features and shrewd American face, had an
extremely nervous manner. As he passed through the vestibule a clerk at
a table put a mark opposite the name “Mr. Clarence Trent,” to indicate
that he was in the Club.
“Any letters?” he demanded of the office clerk.
The man handed him two, and he darted into the morning-room and tore one
open, letting the other fall to the floor. He read as follows:—
“Mon ami!—I have but this moment received your letter, which
seems to have been delayed. [“Of course! Why did I not think of
that?”] I say nothing here of the happiness which its contents
have given me. Come at once.
“Jessica Pendleton.
“Our engagement must be a profound secret until the year of my
mourning is over.”
Trent’s drab and scanty whiskers seemed to curl into hard knots over the
nervous facial contortion in which he indulged. Nature being out of
material when at work upon him had seemingly constructed his muscles
from stout twine. An inch of it joining his nose to the upper lip, the
former’s pointed tip was wont to punctuate his conversation and emotions
with the direct downward movement of a machine needle puncturing cloth.
He crumpled the letter in his bony nervous fingers, and his pale sharp
grey eyes opened and shut with sudden rapidity.
“I knew I could not be mistaken,” he thought triumphantly. “She is
mine!”
In the vestibule another name was checked off,—“Mr. Norton
Boswell,”—and its owner made eagerly for the desk. His dark
intellectual face was flushed, and his sensitive mouth twitched suddenly
as the clerk handed him a roll of Mss.
“Never mind that,” he said hastily. “Give me my letters.”
The clerk handed him several, and, whisking them from left to right
through his impatient hands, he thrust all but one into his pocket and
walked rapidly to the morning-room. Seating himself before a table, he
looked at the envelope as if not daring to solve its mystery, then
hastily tore it apart.
“Mon ami! [Boswell, despite his ardour, threw a glance down a
certain corridor in his memory and thought with kindling eyes:
“Oh! with what divine sweetness did she use to utter those two
little words!” Then he fixed his eyes greedily on the page once
more.] I have but this moment received your letter, which seems
to have been delayed.” [“Ah!” rapturously, the paper dancing
before his eyes, “that accounts for it. I knew she was the most
tender-hearted creature on earth.”] “I say nothing here of the
happiness which its contents have given me. Come at once.
“Jessica Pendleton.
“Our engagement must be a profound secret until the year of my
mourning is over.”
Boswell, with quivering nostrils, plunged a pen into the ink-well, and
in that quiet room two hearts thumped so loudly that only passion and
scratching pens averted mutual and withering contempt.
As Boswell left the office a very young man entered it. He possessed
that nondescript blond complexion which seems to be the uniform of the
New York youth of fashion. The ciphers of the Four Hundred have achieved
the well-scrubbed appearance of the Anglo-Saxon more successfully than
his accent. Mr. Dedham might have been put through a clothes-wringer.
Even his minute and recent moustache looked as if each hair had its
particular nurse, and his pink and chubby face defied conscientious
dissipation. He sauntered up to the clerk’s desk with an elaborate
affectation of indifference, and drawled a demand for his mail.
The clerk handed him a dainty note sealed with a crest. He accepted it
with an absent air, although a look of genuine boyish delight thrust its
way through the fishy inertness of his average expression.
It took him a minute and a half to get into the morning-room and read
these fateful lines:—
“Mon ami,—[“Enchanting phrase! I can hear her say it.”] I have
but this moment received your letter, which seems to have been
delayed. [“Ah! this perfume! this perfume!”] I say nothing here
of the happiness which its contents have given me. Come at once.
“Jessica Pendleton.
“Our engagement must be a profound secret until the year of my
mourning is over.”
A rosy tide wandered to the roots of Mr. Dedham’s ashen locks, and he
made a wild uncertain dab at his upper lip. Again there was no sound in
the morning-room of the St. Christopher Club but the furious dashing of
pens, the rending of parchment paper, the sudden scraping of a nervous
foot.
A tall broad-shouldered young man, with much repose of face and manner,
entered the office from the avenue, glanced at the pigeon-holes above
the clerk’s desk, then sauntered deliberately into the morning-room and
looked out of the window. A slight rigidity of the nostrils alone
betokened the impatience within, and his uneasy thoughts ran somewhat as
follows:—
“What a fool I have been! After all my experience with women to make
such an ass of myself over the veriest coquette that ever breathed; but
her preference for me last winter was so pointed—oh, damnation!”
He stood gnawing his underlip at the lumbering ’bus, but turned suddenly
as a man approached from behind and presented several letters on a tray.
The first and only one he opened ran thus:—
“Mon ami!—I have but this moment received your letter, which
seems to have been delayed. I say nothing here of the happiness
which its contents have given me. Come at once.
“Jessica Pendleton.
“Our engagement must be a profound secret until the year of my
mourning is over.”
Severance folded the note, his face paling a little.
“Well, well, she is true after all. What a brute I was to misjudge her!”
He strolled back to the office. “I will go home and write to her, and
to-morrow I shall see her! Great Heaven! Were six months ever so long
before?”
As he turned from the coat-room Boswell entered the office by the
opposite door.
“The fellow looks as gay as a lark,” he thought. “He hasn’t looked like
that for six months. I believe I’ll make it up with him—particularly as
I’ve come out ahead!”
“Give me that package,” demanded Boswell dreamily of the clerk. Then he
caught sight of Severance. “Why, Jack, old fellow!” he cried, “how are
you? Haven’t seen you looking so well for an age. Don’t go out. It’s too
hot.”
“Oh, hang it! I’ve got to. I’m off for Newport to-morrow. It’s so
infernally dull in town.”
“Going to Newport to-morrow! So am I. My aunt is quite ill and has sent
for me. I’m her heir, you know.”
“No? Didn’t know you had an aunt. I congratulate you. Hope she’ll go
off, I’m sure.”
“Hope so. Here comes Teddy,—looks like an elongated rubber ball. It’s
some time since I’ve seen him so buoyant. How are you, Teddy?”
“How are you, Norton, old boy?” explained Dedham, rapturously. “How glad
I am to hear the old name once more! You’ve given me the cold shoulder
of late.”
“Oh, well, my boy, you know men will be fools occasionally. But give
by-gones the go-by. I’m going to Newport to-morrow. Can I take any
messages to your numerous—”
“Dear boy! I’m going to Newport to-morrow. Sea-bathing ordered by my
physician.”
“Jove! I am in luck! Severance is going over, too. We’ll have a jolly
time of it.”
“I should say so!” murmured Teddy. “Heaven! Hello, Sev, how are you?
Didn’t see you. As long as we are all going the same way we might as
well bury our hatchet. What do you say, dear boy?”
“Only too happy,” said Severance, heartily. “And may we never unearth it
again. Here comes Trent. He looks as if he had just been returned for
the Senate.”
“How are you?” demanded Trent, peremptorily. “You have made it up? Don’t
leave me out in the cold.”
Dedham made a final lunge for his deserting dignity, then sent it on its
way. “I should think not,” he cried, with dancing eyes. “Give me your
fist.”
In a moment they were all shaking each other’s hand off, and
good-fellowship was streaming from every eye.
“Come over to my rooms, all of you,” gurgled Teddy, “and have a drink.”
“With pleasure, my boy,” said Trent. “But native rudeness will compel me
to drink and run. I am off for Newport—”
“Newport!” cried three voices.
“Yes; anything strange in that? I’m going on vital business connected
with the coming election.”
“This is a coincidence!” exclaimed Boswell, with the appreciation of the
romanticist. “Why, we are all going to Newport. Dedham in search of
health, Severance of pleasure, and I of a fortune—only the old mummy is
always making out her cheques, but never passes them in. Well, I hope
we’ll see a lot of each other when we get there.”
“Oh, of course,” said Severance, hastily. “We will have many another
game of polo together.”
“Well,” said Dedham, “come over to my rooms now and drink to the success
of our separate quests.”
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
III
Miss Decker paced restlessly up and down the sea-room waiting for the
mail. Mrs. Pendleton, more composed but equally nervous, lay in a long
chair, with expectation in her eyes and triumph on her lips.
“Will they answer or will they not?” exclaimed Miss Decker. “If the mail
would only come! Will they be crushed?—furious?—or—will they
apologise?”
“I care nothing what they do,” said Mrs. Pendleton, languidly. “All I
wanted was to see them when they received my notes, and later when they
met to compare them. I hold that my revenge is a masterpiece—to turn
the joke on them and to let them see that they could not make a fool of
me at the same time! Oh! how dared they?”
“Well, they’ll never perpetrate another practical joke, my dear. You
have your revenge, Jessica; you have blunted their sense of humour for
life. I doubt if they ever even read the funny page of a newspaper
again. Here comes the postman. There! the bell has rung. Why doesn’t
Hart go? I’ll go myself in a minute.”
Mrs. Pendleton’s nostrils dilated a little, but she did not turn her
head even when the manservant entered and held a silver tray before her.
Four letters lay thereon. She placed them on her lap but did not speak
until the man had left the room. Then she looked at Miss Decker and gave
the letters a little sweep with the tips of her fingers.
“They have answered,” she said.
“Oh, Jessica, for Heaven’s sake don’t be so iron-bound!” cried her
friend. “Read them.”
“You can read them if you choose. I have no interest beyond knowing that
they received mine.”
Miss Decker needed no second invitation. She caught the letters from
Mrs. Pendleton’s lap and tore one of them open. She read a few lines,
then dropped limply on a chair.
“Jessica!” she whispered, with a little agonised gasp, “listen to this.”
Mrs. Pendleton turned her eyes inquiringly, but would not stoop to
curiosity. “Well,” she said, “I am listening.”
“It is from Mr. Trent. And—listen:—
“‘Angel! I think if you had kept me waiting one day longer you
would have met a lunatic wandering on the Newport cliffs. Last
night I attended a primary and made such an egregious idiot of
myself (although I was complimented later upon my speech) that I
shall never understand why I was not hissed. But hereafter I
shall be inspired. And how you will shine in Washington! That is
the place for our talents. After reading your reserved yet
impassioned note, I do not feel that I can talk more rationally
upon politics than while in suspense. What do you think I did? I
made it all up with Severance, Dedham, and Boswell, whom I met
just after receiving it. I could afford to forgive them. They,
by the way, go to Newport to-morrow. Farewell, most brilliant of
women, destined by Heaven to be the wife of a diplomatist—for I
will confide to you that that is my ultimate ambition. Until
to-morrow,
“‘Clarence Trent.’”
“Well! What do you think of that?”
A pink wave had risen to Mrs. Pendleton’s hair, then receded and broken
upon the haughty curve of her mouth.
“Read the others,” she said briefly.
“Oh! how can you be so cool?” and Miss Decker opened another note with
trembling fingers.
“It is from Norton Boswell:—
“‘You once chided me for looking at the world through grey
spectacles, and bade me always hope for the best until the worst
was decided. When you were near to encourage me the sky was
often pink, but even the memory of the last six months has faded
before the agonised suspense of these seven days. Oh! I shall be
an author now, if suffering is the final lesson. But what
incoherent stuff I am writing! Loneliness and despair are alike
forgotten. I can write no more! To-morrow! To-morrow!
“‘Boswell.’”
“Read Severance’s,” said Jessica, quickly.
“I believe you like that man!” exclaimed Miss Decker. “I think he’s a
brute. But you’re in a scrape. This is from the lordly Severance:—
“‘An Englishman once said of you, with a drawl which wound the
words about my memory—“Y-a-a-s; she flirts on ice, so to
speak.” Coldest and most subtle of women, why did you keep me in
suspense for seven long days? Do you think I believe that
fiction of the delayed letter? You forget that we have met
before. But why torment me? Did I not in common decency have to
wait six months before I dared put my fate to the test? How I
counted those days! I had a calendar and a pencil—in short, I
made a fool of myself. Now the chess-board is between us once
more: we start on even ground; we will play a keen and close
game to the end of our natural lives. I love you; but I know
you. I will kiss the rod—until we marry; after that—we shall
play chess. I shall see you to-morrow.
“‘S.’”
“Well, that’s what I call a beast of a man,” said Miss Decker.
“I hate him!” said Jessica, between her teeth.
She looked hard at the ocean. Under its grey sky to-day it was the
colour of her eyes, as cold and as unfathomable. The glittering
Medusa-like ends of her hair seemed to leap upward and writhe at each
other.
“I should think you would hate him,” said Miss Decker; “he is the only
living man who ever got the best of you. But listen to what your devoted
infant has to say. Nice little boy, Teddy:—
“‘Dearest! Sweetest! Do you know that I am almost dancing for
joy at this moment? Indeed, my feet are going faster than my
pen. To think! To think!—you really _do_ love me after all. But
I always said you were not a flirt. I knocked a man down once
and challenged him to a duel because he said you were. He
wouldn’t fight, but I had the satisfaction of letting him know
what I thought of him. And now I can prove it to all the world!
But I can’t write any more. There are three blots on this
now—the pen is jumping and you know I never was much at writing
letters. But I can talk, and to-morrow I will tell you all.
“‘Your own Teddy.
“‘P.S.—Is it not queer—quite a coincidence—Severance, Trent,
and Boswell are going to Newport to-morrow, too. How proud I
shall be! But no, I take that back; I only pity them, poor
devils, from the bottom of my heart; or I would if it wasn’t
filled up with you.
“‘T.’”
“Well, madam, you’re in a scrape, and I don’t envy you. What will you
do?”
Mrs. Pendleton pressed her head against the back of the chair, straining
her head upward as if she wanted the salt breeze to rasp her throat.
“I have been so bored for six months,” she said slowly. “Let them come.
I will see each of them alone, and keep the farce going for a week or
so. It will be amusing—to be engaged to four men at once. You will
command the forces and see that they do not meet. Of course, it cannot
be kept up very long, and when all resources are failing I will let them
meet and make them madly jealous. It will do one of them good, at
least.”
“Well, you have courage,” ejaculated Miss Decker. “You can’t do it. But
yes, you can. If the woman lives who can play jackstraws with
firebrands, that woman is you. And what fun! We are so dull here—both
in mourning. I’ll help you. I’ll carry out your instructions like a
major.”
Mrs. Pendleton rose and walked up and down the room once or twice.
“There is only one thing,” she said, drawing her brows together: “if I
am engaged to them they will want to—h’m—kiss me, you know. It will be
rather awkward. I never was engaged to any one but Mr. Pendleton, and he
used to kiss me on my forehead and say, ‘My dear child.’ I am afraid
they won’t be contented with that.”
“I am afraid they won’t! But you have tact enough. Come, say you will do
it.”
“Yes,” said Jessica, “I will do it. In my boarding-school days I used to
dream of being a tragedy queen; I find myself thrust by circumstances
into comedy. But I have no doubt it will suit my talents better.”
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
IV
SCENE I
Severance strode impatiently up and down the room overlooking the
ocean.
“‘Will be down in a minute.’ I suppose that means the usual thirty for
reflection and contemplation of bric-à-brac. What a pretty room! No
bric-à-brac in it, by the way. I wonder if this is the room my lady
Jessica is said to have furnished to suit herself? It looks like a
woodland glade. She must look stunning against those moss-green
curtains. I wonder how madam liked my letter? It was rather brutal, but
to manage a witch you have got to be Jove astride a high horse. Here she
comes. I know that perfume. She uses it to sweeten the venom of those
snakes of hers.”
Mrs. Pendleton entered and gave him her hand with frank welcome. Her
“snakes” seemed vibrant with life and defiance, and her individuality
pierced through her white conventional gown like a solitary star in a
hueless sky.
“How do you do?” she asked, shaking his hand warmly; then she sat down
at once as a matter of course.
He understood the manœuvre.
“Let us play chess, by all means,” he said and took a chair opposite.
“Your seclusion has done you good,” he added, smiling as the crest of a
wave appeared in her eyes. “You have lost your fagged look and are more
like a girl than a widow. Dissipation does not agree with you. Two more
winters! You would try to make up for it by your wit, and then your nose
would get sharp, and you would have a line down the middle of your
forehead and another on each side of your mouth.”
“You are as rude as ever,” said Jessica, coldly; but the wave in her
eyes threatened to become tidal. “If you marry a blonde and incarcerate
her, however, you may find the effect more bleaching than Society.”
“Was that a reflection upon my own society? I do not incarcerate; I only
warn.”
“So do I,” said Mrs. Pendleton, significantly; “I have occasionally got
the best of a bad bargain.”
“And as you will find me the worst in the world you are already on the
defensive,” said Severance, with a laugh. “Come, I have not seen you for
six months, and I am hard hit. I wrote you that I marked off each day
with a pencil—a red one at that; I bought it for the occasion. Don’t
take a base advantage of the admission, but give me one kind syllable. I
ask for it as humbly as a dog does for a bone.”
“You do, indeed. I began by making disagreeable remarks about your
personal appearance, did I not? If you will be a brute, I will be
a—cat.”
“You will acquit yourself with credit. But I will not quarrel with you
to-day.” He rose suddenly and went over to her, but she was already on
her feet. She dropped her eyes, then raised them appealingly; but the
sea was level.
“Do not kiss me,” she said.
“Why not?”
“I would rather not—yet. Do you know that I have never kissed a man—a
lover, I mean—in my life? And this is so sudden—I would rather wait.”
He raised her hand chivalrously to his lips. “I will wait,” he said;
“but you will wear my ring?” And he took a circlet from his pocket and
slipped it on her finger.
“Thank you,” she said simply and touched it with a little caressing
motion.
He dropped her hand and stepped back. Miss Decker had pushed aside the
portière.
“How do you do, Mr. Severance?” she said cordially; “I did not interrupt
even to congratulate, but to take Jessica away for a moment. My dear,
your dressmaker came down on the train with Mr. Severance and has but a
minute. You had better go at once, for you know her temper is not
sweet.”
“Provoking thing!” said Jessica, with a pout. It was the fourth mood to
which she treated Severance in this short interview, and he looked at
her with delight. “But I will get rid of her as soon as possible. Will
you excuse me for a few moments? I will be back in ten.”
“A dressmaker is the only tyrant to whom I bow, the only foe before whom
I lay down my arms. Go; but come back soon.”
“In ten minutes.”
“Which is it, and where is he?” she whispered eagerly as they crossed
the hall.
“Mr. Trent. He is in the library.”