he turned back a page, and his eye caught the name “Frothingham.” Like
all Boston he knew that the Earl was in town, was staying at _the_ Mrs.
Staunton’s, “on the water side of Beacon Street.” And like all Boston,
he had heard the rumour that the Earl was trying to marry “Celia”
Allerton, the second heiress of Boston. Thus, the sight of that name
caused a smile of delight to irradiate his fat, pasty face with its
drapery of soft, scant grey whiskers. He looked round for someone to
enable him to enjoy his discovery of a great man’s weakness by tattling
it. He saw Gilson, industriously “loading up” for a lecture on “colour
in Greek sculpture and architecture.”
He hastened to him and touched him on the shoulder. “Come with me,” he
whispered.
Gilson, a natural gossip, had not lived four years in Boston without
becoming adept in the local sign language of his species. He rose
and followed to the table whereon was spread the damning proof of
Allerton’s guilt.
“Look at this,” whispered the attendant, pointing to the name
“Frothingham.”
Gilson looked, first at the page, then at the attendant. His expression
was disappointment--he cared not a rap about Frothingham or about
Burke’s genealogical romances.
“But who do you think was sitting here?” whispered the attendant, his
eyes sparkling. “Sitting here, reading away at this for more than an
hour?”
“Frothingham?” said Gilson, in the reading-room undertone. “Those
adventurers are always crazy about themselves.”
“No--it was--Edward--_Allerton_!” As he hesitated on the name the
attendant shot his big head forward; at the climax he jerked it back,
regarding the artist with delighted eyes.
“You don’t _say_ so!” exclaimed Gilson, and then they had a fit of
silent laughter.
“Don’t give _me_ away,” cautioned the attendant.
By nine o’clock the next night there was not a member of the Beacon
Street set, whether living in Boston or in Brookline and the other
fashionable suburbs, who had not heard the news; and the mails were
carrying it to those at a distance. And wherever it was repeated there
was the same result--derision, pretended contempt of such vulgar
snobbishness, expressions of wonder that an Allerton had descended to
such low trafficking. Of course none dared tell the Stauntons and the
Allertons or Frothingham. But Frothingham, who saw everything through
that monocle of his, noted the covert smiles that now peeped at him,
the grins and nudgings and cranings when he and Cecilia Allerton
appeared in public together.
One of the many rules which Mr. Allerton had ordained for the
guidance of his household in the lines he regarded as befitting
the establishment of a gentleman of family and tradition was that
Cecilia must be at the half-past seven o’clock breakfast with her
father. Usually he did not speak after his brief, formal salutation--a
“Good-morning, Cecilia,” and a touch of his dry, thin lips to her
forehead. But he might wish to speak, and it would be a grave matter
if he should wish to speak and no one were there for him to speak
to. Besides, he always gave his orders at breakfast--his comments on
the shortcomings in the servants, or in Cecilia’s housekeeping; his
criticisms of her conduct. These “breakfasts of justice” were not held
often, because Cecilia made few mistakes, and the maids--Allerton kept
no men servants but a coachman--had been long in the family service,
and had therefore been long cowed and trimmed and squeezed to the
Edward Allerton mould for menials. But when a “breakfast of justice”
was held it was memorable.
Toward the end of the second week of Frothingham’s Boston sojourn Mr.
Allerton laid aside his paper at breakfast and looked at Cecilia.
Agnes, the second waitress, who always attended at breakfast,
understood the signal, and at once left the room, closing the door
behind her. Cecilia gave a nervous little sigh, dropped her eyes, and
put on the pale, calm expression behind which she hid herself from her
father.
“You were at Dr. Yarrow’s lecture yesterday afternoon, I believe?”
Allerton began.
Cecilia’s nerves visibly relaxed as she noted that his voice was not
the dreaded voice of justice. “Yes, sir,” she replied.
“It was on the evidences of communication with the spirit world, was it
not?”
“Yes, sir--the fourth in the series.”
“Who accompanied you?”
“Aunt Martha and Lord Frothingham.”
There was a pause, then Mr. Allerton coughed slightly and said: “How do
you like the young Englishman, Cecilia?”
Cecilia lifted her eyes in a frightened glance that dropped instantly
before her father’s solemn, rigid gaze. “He’s--well-mannered and
agreeable,” she replied. “I like him as much as one can like a
foreigner.”
“I’m surprised at your speaking of him as a foreigner. He--in fact,
he seems to me quite like one of our own young men, except that he
lives upon a higher plane, and shows none of the degeneration, the
vulgarisation, I may say, with which our young men have become
infected through the overindulgence of their parents and contact with
New York.”
Another long pause, and when Allerton spoke there was a suggestion of
combating opposition in his voice. “I have been much impressed with the
young man. Titles are very deceptive. As you know, I have no regard for
them, or for the system which produces and maintains them. But, his
title aside, the young man comes of a family that has the right sort of
blood. You must have noticed the evidences of it in his face, and in
his manners and character?”
As the statement was put interrogatively, Cecilia knew her duty too
well not to reply. “He has a strongly featured face,” she said. “But
it seemed to me to indicate rather a race that had been great, but was
now--small.”
Allerton frowned. “I am sure that, properly established, he would have
a distinguished career.” He paused, then went on in a tone Cecelia
understood and paled before: “It would be most satisfactory to me to
have my daughter married to him. I should regard it as satisfactory in
every way. You would be established in an honourable and dignified
position. You would exert in society and the wider world the influence
to which your birth and breeding entitle you. You would maintain the
traditions of your family and strengthen his.”
Cecilia shivered several times as he was speaking; but when she spoke
her low voice was firm. “But, father, you know my heart is with
Stanley.”
Her father looked steadily at her--the look she felt like a withering
flame. “I requested you more than two years ago--months before he
died--never to mention his name to me, and never to think of him
seriously again. I repeat, it would be gratifying to me if you were to
marry Lord Frothingham. When is he leaving your Aunt Martha’s?”
“Next Monday, I believe. He goes down to Brookline--to Mrs. Ridgie.”
“You are invited for the same time?”
“Yes.”
“I shall expect you to go.” Mr. Allerton rose. “I trust, in thinking
the matter over, you will appreciate that I am more capable to judge
what is best for you than you are, with your limited experience and the
narrow views of life and duty not unnatural in youth.” He left the
room, severe and serene, master of himself and of his household.
The Allertons were traditionally Chinese in their beliefs in the
sacredness of the duty of obedience from children to parents, and the
duty of despotic control by parents over children.
Theirs was one of the old houses in Mount Vernon Street--a traditional
New England home for a substantial citizen. There was no ostentation
about them--the carriage in which they drove forth was deliberately
ancient in style and in appointments, looked modest even among the very
modest or, if you choose, “badly turned out,” equipages of the Boston
“aristocracy.” Mr. Allerton’s public expenditures--on an art gallery,
in partial support of an orchestra and a hospital, in subscriptions to
colleges, lectures, charities--were greater by thirty thousand a year
than his private expenditures. Cecilia had few clothes, and, while
they were of the very best, and were in good taste and style, they
modestly asserted that in the Allerton conception of dress for a lady
conspicuousness for inconspicuousness was the prime requirement. Mrs.
Ridgie, who often complained that she “hated to live in a town where
the best people didn’t wear their best clothes every day,” called
Cecilia a “dowd”; but that was unjust, because Cecilia was most careful
in her dress, and adapted it admirably to her peculiar charms.
If Honoria had not forewarned Frothingham he would have been deceived
by the modesty and frugality of the Allerton establishment. After New
York, it seemed to him most un-American for people of great wealth
to live thus obscurely. But, having been pointed by Honoria, he soon
discovered that Allerton was indeed enormously rich. And he also
discovered that he was favourably inclined to a titled son-in-law. But
Cecilia----
“There’s some mystery about her,” he reflected. “She acts as if she
were walking in her sleep. But if I could get her, I’d do even better
than if I’d taken a wife from among those nervous New Yorkers. She’s
meek and a stay-at-home. She’d not bother me a bit, and she and Evelyn
would hit it off like twins. She’s not exactly stupid, but she’s
something just as good. It doesn’t matter whether one’s wife is stupid
or absent-minded--the effect’s the same.”
But he walked round and round the fence between her personality and
the world in vain. He found no low place, no place where he could
slip under, no knot-hole or crack even. They went down to Brookline
together--he was more puzzled than ever by her attitude toward him
that morning. She was less friendly, but also less forbidding. She
seemed to him to be awaiting something--he suspected what. He tried to
muster courage to put his destiny to the touch when a chance naturally
offered; but he could not--her expression was too strongly suggestive
of a statue.
Instead, he said: “What do you think about--away off there--wherever it
is?”
“Think?” She smiled peculiarly. “I don’t think--I feel.”
“Feel what?”
She looked mocking. “Ah--that’s my secret. You would stay where I do if
you could go there and it made you as happy as it makes me.”
“You’re mysterious,” he drawled. “I’m a block-head at riddles and all
that.”
But she did not assist him.
Mrs. Ridgie herself was waiting for them in a two-seated trap with a
pair of exceedingly restless thoroughbreds. Halfway to the house they
shied at an automobile and started to run. She got them under control
after a struggle, and glanced round at Frothingham for approval--he
looked calm and seemed unconscious that anything disturbing had
happened. “Ridgie told me not to take this pair out,” she said. “But
I make it a rule never to obey an order from him. In that way we get
on beautifully. He loves to give orders--and I never object. I love to
disobey orders--and he never objects.”
The Ridgie Stauntons lived in what seemed to Frothingham little more
than an exalted farmhouse, though it was regarded in that neighbourhood
as a sinful flaunting of luxury, the worst of Mrs. Ridgie’s many
sins of ostentation and extravagance. These were endured because she
was married to a Staunton, and because she was from New York, and
therefore could not be expected to know what was vulgar and what well
bred. But Frothingham was more comfortable than he had been since
the day before he left Lake-in-the-Wood. Mrs. Ridgie would live in
free-and-easy fashion--one could smoke through all the house; there
were drinks and plenty of good cigars and cigarettes available at all
times; and the talk was the unpretentious gossip and slang of fast sets
everywhere--intelligent people intelligently frivolous.
Frothingham thought Ridgie Staunton “a harmless sort, a bit loud and
noisy,” but well-meaning, and good enough except when he had his
occasional brief spasmodic fits of remembering his early training, and
feeling that his mode of life was all wrong. He was, in his wife’s
opinion, a perfect husband, except that he hung about so much.
“What do your English women do with their husbands, Lord Frothingham?”
she said. “It’s a horrible nuisance, having a man--a husband--round all
day long with nothing to do. I try to drive Ridgie out to work. But
he’s a lazy dog. He goes a few steps and then comes slinking back. I’m
opposed to a leisure class--of men.”
“And you said only yesterday,” complained Ridgie, “that Englishmen make
better lovers than Americans because they have leisure and the sense of
leisure, while Americans are forever looking at watches and clocks.”
“Did I? But that was yesterday,” retorted his wife. “Besides, I said
lovers--not husbands. Give me an English lover, but a hard-working,
stay-away-from-home American husband.”
“Do you wonder that I watch a wife who talks like that?” said Ridgie
cheerfully.
Frothingham and Cecilia rode the next morning. Getting away from the
staid old house in Mount Vernon Street seemed to have revived and
cheered her. There was colour in her cheeks, life in her eyes, and she
showed by laughing and talking a great deal that she was interested
in the earth for a moment at least. Ridgie had given Frothingham a
difficult horse, but as he rode well he succeeded in carrying on a
reasonably consecutive conversation with Cecilia. She asked him many
questions about country life in England, and drew him on to tell her
much of his own mode of living. And he ended with, “Altogether, I’d be
quite cheerful and happy if I were properly established.”
Cecilia became instantly silent and cold--and again he had the feeling
that she was expecting something to happen.
“What the place needs,” he went on boldly, “what I need, is--a
woman--such a woman as you.”
His horse reared, leaped in the air, tried to bolt. It was full
a minute before he got it under control. “Nasty brute,” he said,
resettling his eyeglass, and turning his face toward her again. He
thrilled with hope. “Is there a chance for me?” he asked. “I have
not spoken to your father--that isn’t the American way, is it? And I
sha’n’t trouble you with a lot of--of the usual sort of talk--until I
know whether it’s welcome. You’re not the sort of girl a man ventures
far with unless he’s jolly sure he knows where he’s going.”
“Thank you,” she said simply. “I shall be frank with you. My father
wishes me to marry you. If his will were not stronger than mine I
shouldn’t think of it. It is only fair to tell you why.” She was
looking at him tranquilly. “I loved a man--loved him well enough
to have, where he was concerned, a stronger will than my father.
But he died. I love him still. I shall always love him. When my
father told me that he wished me to marry you, I asked my lover--and
he--said that I ought to obey. He has been urging me to marry--except
occasionally--ever since he died.”
Frothingham stared at her in utter amazement. “Do you mind----” he
began, but again his horse tried to throw him. When he got it under
control he saw that she was much amused--apparently at him. She rode up
close beside him, laid her hand on his horse’s neck and said, “Please,
Stanley, don’t!” in a curiously tender tone. The horse instantly
became quiet.
“You were saying?” she asked.
“Do you mind if I admit that---- Really, I’m not sure that I heard you
aright a few minutes ago.”
“You mean when I spoke of talking to Stanley after he was dead?”
“Stanley----” Frothingham regarded her quizzically. “Is this horse
named after--him?”
“No--I don’t know what the horse’s name is. The reason it was so
restless was that Stanley was teasing him to make him a little
troublesome for you.”
Frothingham paled and glanced round.
“The second night after he died,” she went on, a far-away look in her
eyes, “he came to me in a dream. He assured me that he was happy, and
that I must be so, too, and that he would always be with me, nearer, in
more perfect communion, than if he had remained alive. It was just when
Dr. Yarrow was beginning his experiments to establish communication
with the other world. Stanley and I had been most interested. And when
he appeared to me after his death he explained that he had been able,
through the intensity of his love for me, to pierce the barrier and
bring his soul and my soul face to face.”
Frothingham showed that he was profoundly moved. “When I was a little
chap,” he said in a low voice, “I ran bang into the ghost of an
ancestor of mine--old Hoel de Beauvais. He has paced a hall in the east
wing of Beauvais House the night before the head of the family dies,
for hundreds of years. They laughed me out of it, but, by gad, I knew
I saw him--and my grandfather was thrown from his horse and killed the
next day. I pretend not to believe in that sort of thing, but I do--all
we English do.”
“Nothing could be more certain,” said Cecilia, radiant at this prompt
acceptance of what she expected him to try to laugh her out of. “I have
told no one--I shouldn’t have told you if it hadn’t seemed the only
course I could honestly take.”
“Can you see him now?” asked Frothingham in an awe-stricken voice.
“No--I _see_ him only in dreams--and sometimes when I go to Mrs.
Ramsay. But we talk together at any time. You noticed how he stopped
teasing the horse?”
The horse was, indeed, perfectly quiet. Frothingham nodded. His
habitual look of vacancy and satire had given place to earnestness and
intense interest. “And does he wish you to marry?” he asked.
“Yes--he has said it, and he has written it--in one of the first
letters he sent me through Mrs. Ramsay. I’ve only asked him verbally
about you, and he consents and approves. I’ll take you to Mrs. Ramsay,
and we’ll get his written permission.”
“But why does he consent?” asked Frothingham. “Is there no--no
jealousy--_there_?”
“Jealousy? Impossible! Don’t you see, he can look into my soul--he
knows that I am his. And all the interest he has in this gross mortal
life of mine is that it shall be honourable and that I shall do my duty
as a daughter and as a woman.”
Frothingham said no more. He was overwhelmed with a sense of the
imminence of an unseen world--that world which had been made real to
him by his nurses, bred in the legends and superstitions of England,
and by his similarly trained companions at school, at the university,
and ever since. It was a shock, but nothing incredible to him, this
revelation of a daily and hourly commerce with that other world of
which, he was certain from his own childhood experience, everyone
had glimpses now and then. From time to time he looked at Cecilia,
now returned to her wonted expression of abstraction. She seemed the
very person to have such an experience. He was filled with awe of her;
he was fascinated by her; he began to feel the first faint, vague
stirrings of jealousy which he dared not express, even to himself, lest
the spirit eyes of Cecilia’s lover should peer into his soul, and see,
and punish.
X
At dinner that night Willie Kennefick, who was staying in the house,
began to tell his experiences in New York--he had just come from a
little visit there. “The woman I took in to dinner,” said he, “gave
me a solar plexus while I was busy with the oysters. She said to
me, ‘I went to see such a wonderful man to-day. He told me the most
astonishing things about my past and future, and he sold me a little
wax image that I’m going to burn for my gout.’ ‘What!’ said I. ‘For my
gout,’ said she. ‘I have to burn it slowly, and when it’s consumed my
gout will be gone. I got it _so_ cheap! Only twenty-five dollars.’”
“And what did you say, Willie?” asked Mrs. Thayer.
“I said ‘Cheap? It was a shame to cheat the poor devil in that
fashion.’ And she said, ‘Wasn’t it a bargain? He wanted a hundred, but
I brought him down.’”
“You must have been keeping queer company in New York,” said Henrietta
Gillett.
“Not at all. It was at Mrs. Baudeleigh’s house, and the woman--well,
her husband’s one of the biggest lawyers in New York. But, then, that’s
no worse than the astrology some of us here have gone daft over.”
“Oh--astrology--that’s a different matter,” objected Mrs. Thayer. “You
evidently haven’t looked into it. That is a science--not at all the
same as palmistry and spiritualism, and those frauds.”
Cecilia smiled--the amused, pitying smile of wisdom in the presence
of ludicrous ignorance--and looked at Frothingham. He returned her
look--pleased to have a secret, and such an intimate secret, in common
with her. “But don’t you think you’re a bit rash, Mrs. Thayer?” he
drawled. “You certainly believe in ghosts, now, don’t you?”
Miss Gillett’s handsome, high-bred face expressed astonishment. “Do
_you_?” she asked, before Mrs. Thayer could answer him.
“We can’t doubt it over on our side. We’ve too much evidence of
it. And--I was listening to an old chap from Cambridge--your
Cambridge--very clever old fellow, _I_ thought--Yarrow, wasn’t it?
Yes, Yarrow.”
“Yarrow!” Miss Gillett’s eyes flashed scorn. “He’s a disgrace to New
England. We pride ourselves on having the culture of Emerson and the
other great men of our past. What would they think of us if they
could look in on us with our Yarrows and our Gonga Sahds and our Mrs.
Ramsays. All the sensible people in the country must be laughing at us.
Pardon me, Lord Frothingham--I’m very indignant at what I regard as
superstitions and impostors. It’s only my view.”
“Not at all, not at all,” said Frothingham with an uneasy glance at
Cecilia’s angry face. “I’m not one of those who wish all to believe
alike. What the devil should we do if we hadn’t each other’s opinions
to laugh at?”
“You’re such an ardent disciple,” continued Miss Gillett, “you ought
to go to Yarrow’s Mrs. Ramsay. She’ll put you in communication with
spirits, as many as you like, or rather as many as you care to pay for.
I think she gets ten a ghost--twenty for letters.”
The discussion was raging hotly round the table, all but two of the
men, and all but four of the women deriding astrology, palmistry,
Buddhism, spiritualism; and the respective devotees of these cults
deriding each the others. “Cut it out,” said Mrs. Ridgie finally.
“We’ll have ‘rough house’ here the first thing you know.”
Everyone laughed. They liked slang, and Mrs. Ridgie’s was the boldest
and quaintest. When the men and women were separated, “metaphysics”
was again attempted by both. But the men who did not believe summarily
laughed it down in the smoking room. “Those fads are all well enough
for the women,” said Kennefick. “They’ve got to do something to pass
the time, and they won’t do anything serious, or, if they do, they make
a joke of it. But our men, Lord Frothingham”--he was addressing himself
to the Earl, whose spiritualistic views he had not heard and did not
suspect--“are too busy for such nonsense.”
“That’s a libel on the woman,” said Thayer--his fad was a militant
socialism that had a kindly eye for a red flag. “It’s only women of the
so-called fashionable class who go in for such silliness. The great
mass of American women have something better to do.”
“That’s a libel on the women of the better class,” retorted Kennefick.
“Precious few of them are so silly.”
“If it isn’t that it’s something else equally idle,” said Thayer.
Except Frothingham he was the best dressed man in the room. “I’ve no
time for idlers.”
“Why don’t you give your money away and shoulder a pick?” asked
Kennefick teasingly.
“I’m not fit even to wield a pick”--Thayer was one of the ablest
lawyers in Massachusetts--“and I’d give my money away if I
could without doing more harm than good. There are two kinds of
parasites--the plutocrats and the paupers. I’m ‘agin’ ’em both. And, as
for spiritualism, I will admit that I don’t think we know enough about
mind or the relations of mind and matter to dogmatise as you fellows
have been doing.”
Kennefick winked at Frothingham as if saying: “Another proof that
Thayer’s a crank.”
When Frothingham was beside Cecilia in the drawing room she said:
“Would you like to go to Mrs. Ramsay?”
“Yes--will you take me?” he replied.
“I’ll write to-night making an appointment for Wednesday.”