vividly as at first--in her connections with the other world, he felt
growing confidence that they would rapidly fade before reawakening
interest in this world. Meanwhile, he reasoned, his cue was to
ingratiate himself by sympathising with her and encouraging her to
closer and closer confidence. “It’s only a step from best friend to
lover,” he said to himself. And he made admirable use of the two days
between her tentative acceptance of him and their visit to Mrs. Ramsay.
He was justly proud of his manner toward her--a little of the brother,
a great deal of the best friend, the tenderness and sympathy of the
lover, yet nothing that could alarm her.
Mrs. Ramsay lived in an old brick cottage in a quiet street near
Louisburg Square. In the two days Frothingham had become somewhat
better acquainted with Henrietta Gillett and had got a strong respect
for her intelligence. As he and Cecilia entered the dark little parlour
he remembered what Henrietta had said about Mrs. Ramsay, and was on
guard. The first impression he received was of a perfume, unmistakably
of the heaviest, most suspicious Oriental kind. “Gad!” he said to
himself, “that scent don’t suggest spirits. It smells tremendously of
the world, the flesh, and the devil, especially the devil.”
As his eyes became accustomed to the faint light he discovered the
radiating centre of this odour--a small blackish woman of forty or
thereabouts, with keen shifty black eyes and a long face as hard and
fleshless from the cheekbones down as from the cheekbones up. The
mouth was wide and cold and cruel. She was dressed in a loose black
woollen wrapper, tight at the wrists, and her scanty black hair was in
a careless oily coil low on the back of her head. Her eyelids lifted
languidly and she gave Cecilia her hand--a pretty hand, slender and
sensitive.
“Good-morning, my dear,” she said. “This is the Earl of Frothingham, is
it not?”
At this both Cecilia and Frothingham started--Cecilia because it was
another and impressive evidence of Mrs. Ramsay’s power; Frothingham
because he knew that voice so well. His knees weakened and he looked at
Mrs. Ramsay again.
But she was not looking at him. She was saying to Cecilia: “Dr. Yarrow
was here for two hours--he left not twenty minutes ago. I am _so_
exhausted!”
“Perhaps we would better come to-morrow,” said Cecilia, appeal,
apology, and disappointment in her voice.
“No--no,” replied Mrs. Ramsay wearily. “Dr. Yarrow tells me he has
never known me to be so thoroughly under control as to-day. And”--she
smiled faintly at Cecilia--“you know I would do anything for _you_.”
“You _have_ done everything for me,” said Cecilia, and her tone of
humble, even deferential, gratitude filled Frothingham with pity and
disgust. He was staring stolidly at Mrs. Ramsay, but if the room had
been lighter his changed colour and white lips might have been noted.
Cecilia seated herself, and Frothingham gladly sat also, where he could
see Mrs. Ramsay’s face without her seeing him unless she turned her
head uncomfortably.
She rang a small silver bell on the table at her elbow. A girl
answered. “The light, please,” said Mrs. Ramsay.
The girl went away and returned in a moment with a lamp whose strong
flame was completely and curiously shielded by a metal sphere except
at one point underneath. When it was set upon the table it threw a
powerful light in a flood upon a part of the surface of the table
about six inches in diameter. The girl went to the windows and drew
the heavy curtains across them. It was now impossible to see anything
in the room except that small disc of intense light. In it presently
appeared the slender, sensitive right hand of Mrs. Ramsay--it seemed
to end at the wrist in nothingness. It laid upon the brightness a
pad of white scribbling paper and a thick pencil with the heavy lead
slightly rounded at the end; then it vanished. There was a long
silence--Frothingham was sure he could hear Cecilia’s faint breathing.
His own breath hardly came at all and his heart was beating crazily. He
stared at those inanimate objects in the circle of dazzling light until
his brain whirled.
A long sigh, apparently from Mrs. Ramsay, as if she were sinking into
a deathlike sleep; a quick catching of the breath from the direction
of Cecilia. He heard her move her chair to the light and then in it
appeared her hand--long and narrow, looking waxen white, its nails,
beautifully rounded, the most delicate blush of pink. It took the
pencil and moved across the paper. Frothingham bent forward--she had
written large, and he could easily read:
Dearest!
Her hand disappeared, and again there was in that unearthly light, only
the pad, the pencil, and the heart-call into the infinite--“Dearest!”
A long pause, then the weird, severed hand--Frothingham could not
associate it with Mrs. Ramsay--crawled haltingly into the light,
hovered over the pencil, took it, began to make its blunt point scrawl
along the paper--a loose, shaky handwriting. With the hair on the back
of his head trembling to rise, Frothingham read:
My wife--I am glad you have come, though you bring another with you
to profane our holy secret.
In the darkness a sharp exclamation from Cecilia, then a sound like a
sob. The hand ceased to write, dropped the pencil, vanished instantly.
In the light appeared Cecilia’s hand, trembling, its veins standing up,
blue and pulsing--Frothingham was amazed that a hand by itself could
express so much; it was as perfect a mirror of her feelings as her face
would have been. She wrote eagerly:
But, dearest, you told me only this morning that he might, should,
see all.
Her hand lifted the sheet, now filled with writing, laid it beside the
pad, then disappeared. Again there was a long silence, and again the
mysterious hand crawled out of the darkness, loosely held the pencil,
and wrote slowly, staggeringly, faintly:
No, I have not spoken to you, seen you, since he came into your
life--It has been hard for me to push my way through to-day--There is
a barrier between us--You have been deceived--Can it be that you--but
no, I trust my wife--
The hand paused. “Oh! oh!” sobbed Cecilia. The hand was moving again:
My friends here tell me that you are going away across the sea with
an English fortune-hunter--with him. You have been cruel enough to
bring him here to our bridal chamber--Oh, Cecilia----
The end of the sheet had been reached, but the hand wrote on for a few
seconds, making vague markings in space, then vanished, dropping the
pencil with a noise that in the strained silence sounded like a crash
and made both Cecilia and Frothingham leap in their chairs. After a
moment Cecilia’s trembling, eager, pathetic hands lifted off the filled
sheet and withdrew. But the hand did not return. After a long wait her
right hand--it seemed bloodless now--appeared once more upon the paper
and wrote:
I have been deceived. I love only you. I thought I was obeying you.
Speak to me, dearest. You see into my heart. Speak to me. Do not
leave me alone.
Her hand laid the sheet upon the other filled sheets and withdrew from
that neutral ground of dazzling light between the two great mystery
lands. Immediately the other hand darted into the light, caught the
pencil, and scrawled in great, tottering letters:
Yes, yes--but I cannot until he has gone far from you--Then come
again--Good-b----
The hand vanished and there was a moan from the darkness that enveloped
the medium--a moan that ended in a suppressed shriek. Frothingham
saw Cecilia’s hands hastily snatch the written sheets from under the
light. Then he heard a voice in his ear--he hardly knew it as hers:
“Come--come quickly!”
He rose, and with his hand touching her arm followed her. The door
opened--the dim hallway seemed brightly lighted, so great was the
contrast. The maid was seated there. She at once rose, entered the
medium’s room, and closed the door behind her. Cecilia and Frothingham
went into the quiet little street--the enormous sunshine, the white
snow over everything, in the distance the rumble of the city. He gave a
huge sigh of relief, and wiped the sweat from his face--his very hair
was wet and his collar was wilted. He was sickly pale.
[Illustration: “_Forgive me--it was all my fault--yet not
mine--good-bye--_”]
“She always wishes to be left that way,” said Cecilia, as if she did
not know what she was saying.
They walked to the corner together. “I am not well,” she said. He
ventured to look at her; she was wan and old, and her eyes were
deep circled in blue-black and she was blue-black at the corners of
her mouth, at the edges of her nostrils. “I must go home--they will
telephone Mrs. Ridgie. Don’t say where I was taken ill. Forgive me--it
was all my fault--yet not mine--good-bye----” She did not put out her
hand to him, but stood off from him with fear and anguish in her eyes.
“The woman’s a fraud--a----” he began.
She turned upon him with a fury of which he would not have believed her
capable. “Go! go!” she exclaimed, as if she were driving away a dog.
“Already you may have lost me my love. Go!”
He shrank from her. She walked rapidly away, and he saw her hail a cab,
enter it, saw the cab drive away. With his head down he went in the
opposite direction. “I think I must be mad,” he muttered. He thrust
his hands deep into the outside pockets of his ulster. He drew out
his right hand--in it was her purse, which she had given him to carry
because it did not fit comfortably into her muff. “No,” he said, “she
_was_ with me.”
He put the purse in the pocket and strode back the way he had come. He
turned into the quiet little street, went to Mrs. Ramsay’s door, lifted
and dropped the knocker several times. The maid opened the door a few
inches and showed a frowning face.
Frothingham widened the space by thrusting himself into it. “Tell Mrs.
Ramsay that Lord Frothingham wishes to speak to her,” he said in a tone
that made her servant his servant.
She went into the ghost-chamber and soon reappeared. “Mrs. Ramsay is
too exhausted to see anyone to-day.”
“Bah!” exclaimed Frothingham, and stalked past the maid and into the
ghost-chamber.
The curtains were back and the slats of the shutters were open. Mrs.
Ramsay, in her great chair by the table, was using a bottle of salts.
She did not look in Frothingham’s direction as he closed the door
sharply behind him.
He went to her and scowled down at her. “What the devil did you do that
for, Lillian?”
Mrs. Ramsay did not change expression and did not answer.
“No one ever treated you decenter than I did. _You_----”
“No names, please, Slobsy,” said Mrs. Ramsay, shaking her bottle and
sniffing it again.
At “Slobsy” he shivered--he was not a lunatic on the subject of his
dignity, but he did not fancy this nickname of his Oxford days, thus
inopportunely flung at him. He felt that at one stroke she had cut the
ground from under his feet.
“I was sorry to do it,” she continued. “But I couldn’t have you
poaching on my preserves, could I now, Slobsy? It cut me to do it”--she
looked at him with friendly sympathy--“but you could better afford
to lose her than I could. You forgive me, don’t you? You always were
sensible.”
“I’ll expose you,” he said--he was once more imperturbable, and was
looking at her calmly through his eyeglass and was speaking in his
faintly satirical drawl.
“Expose--what?” asked Mrs. Ramsay, sniffing at her salts.
He reflected. Suppose he denounced her, put himself in a position
where he could, probably would, be forced to tell all he knew about
her, roused her anger and her vindictiveness--whom would he expose?
Clearly, no one but himself to Cecilia, or Cecilia to the public. He
knew nothing about Mrs. Ramsay that would prove her a fraud--in fifteen
years she might have become the properest person in the world, might
have developed into a medium. He turned and left the room and the
house. Halfway to the corner he paused; a faint, dreary smile drifted
over his face.
“It’s really a new sensation--to settle a bill,” he said to himself.
“An outlawed bill, too. What luck--just my rotten luck!”
XI
At Mrs. Ridgie’s they guessed that Frothingham had proposed to Cecilia
and that she had been unnerved by the shock to her widowed heart. He
stayed on until the following Monday, neither amused nor amusing,
then returned to Mrs. Staunton’s for two days. He found her intensely
curious as to the trouble between Cecilia and him--she brought up the
subject again and again, and with expert ingenuity at prying tried
to trap him into telling her; she all but asked him point-blank.
But he looked vague or vacant, pretended not to understand what she
wanted, expressed lively interest in Cecilia’s progress toward health,
professed keen regret that he must leave before she would be well
enough to receive him.
As he was about to go Mrs. Staunton became desperate. “Allerton is
a stern man,” she said, with an air that forbade the idea that mere
vulgar curiosity was moving her. “He has the notion that Cecilia was
not polite to you--you know, she gives way to strange moods. And he is
so irritated against her that he is treating her harshly.”
Frothingham looked astonished. “Really!” he said. “How extraordinary. I
can’t conceive how he happened to wander off into that. Nothing could
be farther from the truth.”
“I confess,” Mrs. Staunton went on, “I’m much disappointed. I’ve taken
a fancy to you. I had rather hoped that you and Cecilia would like each
other--you understand.”
Frothingham reflected. It was possible, yes, probable, that Cecilia’s
father could drive her into marrying him, would do it if he should hint
to Mrs. Staunton that he did fancy Cecilia and was “horribly cut up”
because she didn’t fancy him. “What the devil do her feelings matter
to me?” he demanded of himself. “A month after we were married she’d
forget all this ghost nonsense and would be thanking me for pulling her
out of it.”
“And,” Mrs. Staunton was saying, “I know her father would have liked it
as well as I.”
But Frothingham didn’t follow his impulse and her unconscious leading.
“What am I thinking of?” he said to himself in the sharp struggle
that was going on behind his impassive exterior. “I’m not that sort
of blackguard--at least, not yet.” Then he drawled his answer to
Mrs. Staunton: “I’m tremendously flattered, but really, I fear the
young lady and I would never hit it off. I’ve no great fancy for
marrying--never had. I’ve always thought it a poor business--one of the
sort of things that are good for the women and children, you know, but
not for the men.”
Mrs. Staunton looked mild and humourous disapproval. “What is the world
coming to? A man asked me the other day why all the nice women were
married and all the nice men single. I hadn’t thought of it until he
spoke. But I must say it’s true of my acquaintances.”
“I hope you’ll let Mr. Allerton know he’s wrong,” said Frothingham. “I
hate it that the poor girl’s had the screws put on her on my account.”
“Certainly--I’ll tell him. But I’m sorry it’s not to be as we hoped.”
She was studying him with a puzzled expression. She had heard from
what she regarded as a thoroughly trustworthy source that he had come
over especially to get him a rich wife. If that wasn’t his object, why
was he wandering about here? Titled foreigners didn’t come to America
except for the one thing of interest to them which America has--money.
She could not understand his unbusiness-like conduct.
He couldn’t understand it himself. “I always was an ass,” he thought.
“Here am I, sinking straight to the bottom--or, what’s worse, the
bottomless. Yet I’m squeamish about the kind of line that pulls me
ashore. Yes--I’m an ass. Even Lillian, well as I knew her at Oxford,
took me in a bit with her trumpery tricks to make a living. She
completely foozled me--that is----” Did she “foozle” him? He couldn’t
banish the doubt. And there was the incident of the horse--Lillian had
nothing to do with that, yet it fitted in with her professions as to
the spirit world. But hadn’t she as good as owned up by apologising for
breaking it off between him and Cecilia? Perhaps she hadn’t meant that;
perhaps she had meant she was sorry to be the medium for such a letter.
“There was a lot of truth in that letter. And there must be something
in witches and ghosts and all that, or the whole world wouldn’t believe
in ’em. But what ghastly luck that Lillian should turn up after fifteen
years--no, seventeen, by Jove! Gad, how she has gone off since she was
bar-maid at the Golden Cross and the prettiest girl that walked the
High Street.”
He paused in New York a few hours, long enough to get a disagreeable
mail from the other side--a dismal letter from old Bagley, a
suspiciously cheerful note from Evelyn, a few lines from Surrey with a
postscript about Gwen--“I’ve shipped her off to Mentone. She’s a bit
seedy this winter, poor girl.” Frothingham quarrelled at Hutt, drank
himself into a state of glassy-eyed gloom and took the three-o’clock
express for Washington. As he sat in the smoking car a man dropped
into the next chair with a “How d’ye do, Frothingham?” Frothingham’s
features slowly collected into an expression of recognition, of
restrained pleasure. “Glad to see you, Wallingford. Going to
Washington?”
“Yes--I’m in Congress, you know.”
“No, I didn’t know.” And it struck him as uncommonly modest in
Wallingford never to have spoken of so distinguished an honour.
“My father put me in last year.”
“Oh, you’ve a seat in your family.” Frothingham nodded understandingly.
“That’s very nice. They’ve almost abolished that sort of luxury with
us. Nowadays, to get into Parliament a fellow has to put up a good
many thousand pounds. Even then he must take his chances of winning a
lot of noisy brutes. They often shout for him and vote for the other
fellow.”
Wallingford’s face had flushed when Frothingham said “a seat in your
family,” and the flush had deepened as he went on. “You haven’t
got it quite straight, Frothingham--about us, I mean. No one can
have a Congressional seat in his family in America. My father has
some influence with the party in New York City. He always puts up a
lot of money for campaigns. And they give him the chance to name a
Congressman--if he’s willing to pay for it. That’s between us, you
understand. It’s a bad system. But it applies only to a few districts
in New York and perhaps one or two other cities.”
“It sounds like our system,” said Frothingham. “A devilish good system,
I call it. If it weren’t for that the lower classes would be chucking
us all out and putting their own kind in.”
“Well, we think it bad. I feel something like a fellow who knows he
wouldn’t have won the race if he hadn’t bribed the other fellow’s
jockey.”
“That’s your queer American way of looking at things. You are
always pretending that birth and rank and wealth aren’t entitled to
consideration. But that’s all on the surface--all ‘bluff,’ as you say.
They get just as much consideration here as among us.”
“You’re judging the whole country by the people in one small class--and
not by any means all of them.”
“Human nature is human nature,” replied Frothingham, with a cynical
gleam in his eyeglass.
“If you go out West----”
“I’ll find what I’ve found in the East, no doubt--perhaps in a little
different form. I’m visiting Western people at Washington--after I’ve
stopped at the Embassy a few days--some people I’m meeting through an
American acquaintance of ours in England--Charles Sidney.”
“Sidney!” Wallingford laughed. “He’s my second cousin. Ain’t he a
shouting cad?”
“Oh, I think he’s a well-meaning chap--most obliging.”
“I should say so--to anybody he crawls before. And who are these
Westerners he’s sending you to?”
“The Ballantynes. I think Mr. Ballantyne’s a Senator, is he not?”
Wallingford laughed again. “That’s one on me,” he said. “Yes, they’re
from the West. But for everything that isn’t American they lay it over
anybody you’ve seen in New York. Ballantyne! I sha’n’t say any more.
It’s of no use to tell you you’re going round and round in a circle
that’s in America but not really of it.”
“Do you know the Ballantynes?”
“I’ve met Mrs. Ballantyne--and the daughter that’s married to a
Spaniard--the Duke of Almansa. They were at Monte Carlo three years ago
when I was there. A handsome woman--amusing, too. She spent most of her
time in the gambling rooms--used to come in always dressed in something
new and loud--and what tremendous hats she did wear! She’d throw on
the table a big gold purse blazing with diamonds. Then she’d seat
herself and open the purse, and it would be stuffed with thousand-franc
notes. She’d plunge like a Russian. Every once in a while she’d go out
on the balcony and walk up and down smoking a cigarette. She forbade
her husband the Casino unless she was with him; even then he wasn’t
allowed to stake a single louis. He’d slip away and play in one of
those more private rooms upstairs.”
Frothingham smiled reminiscently.
“You know, the play’s higher there,” continued Wallingford. “But the
crowd of spectators was too small and indifferent for Her Grace of
Almansa. When she found out what he was up to she made a scene right
before everybody--‘How dare you squander _my_ money?’ she said, and she
led him off like a spaniel on its way to a whipping.”
“Charming person,” said Frothingham. “Must have been amusing.”
“Indeed she was. They’d talk of her all day without growing tired--and
always a new freak. You’ll be amused by her.”
“Ah--she’s here?”
“Yes--left the Duke two years ago--paid him off and came home to her
father. She’s quite quiet now, they say--educating her children.”
Frothingham’s three days at the British Embassy were to him days upon
an oasis in the desert. It was literally as well as legally part of
the British domain--Britain indeed, as soon as the outside door were
passed. The servants at most of the houses at which he had been
entertained were direct and recent importations from England, yet they
had already lost an essential something--even his faithful Hutt was not
the docile, humble creature he had been. But here in the Embassy the
servants, like the attachés, like the Ambassador’s family, like the
Ambassador himself, were as English in look, in manner, in thought,
as if they had never been off the island. The very furniture and the
arrangement of it, the way the beds were made and the towels were hung
in the bathrooms, represented the English people as thoroughly as did
the Ambassador.
From this miniature Britain Frothingham on the third day was
transferred to the international chaos beneath the turrets and
battlements of the Ballantyne castle. When the house was finished,
twelve years before Frothingham saw it, the various suites were
furnished each on a definite scheme--French or English or Italian
of different periods, classical, Oriental, Colonial American. But
the Ballantynes had the true American weariness of things that are
completed. They were not long interested in their house after it was
done. They felt like strangers in it, lived in it only for the sake
of show, were positively uncomfortable. More through carelessness
and indifference than through ignorance, the movable objects in the
suites had become changed about--a gradual process, imperceptible to
the inhabitants. There were now specimens of every style and every
period in each suite; and Frothingham, who knew about interiors, seeing
this interior for the first time, thought it the work of an eccentric
verging on lunacy.
“Awful, isn’t it?” said Madame Almansa, as she was called. She had
noted Frothingham’s glance roaming the concourse of nations and periods
that thronged the walls and floor space of the vast parlour--the
Ballantynes used the American term instead of the British “drawing
room.”
Frothingham looked at her inquiringly. “What?” he said, pretending not
to understand.
“Do you wonder I refuse to live here?” she went on, as if he had
not spoken. “There’s some excuse for the great houses on the other
side. At least the present tenants didn’t build them and can put the
responsibility upon their ignorant semi-barbaric ancestors.”
“That _has_ struck me as a bit queer,” replied Frothingham. “Over on
our side we’re cursing our ancestors for having burdened us with huge
masses of brick and stone--beastly uncomfortable, aren’t they?”
“Worse--unhealthful,” she answered. “And as dwelling places for human
beings, ridiculous.”