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.