not looking at him to indulge in a glance of contemptuous amusement.
“Nobody but an American,” he said to himself, “could have dragged
‘un-American’ into such a discussion as this. The cad is dickering over
his daughter like an old-clothes dealer over a bag of rags.”
Hooper was talking again--talking loudly: “Not a cent more! Not a
d----n cent more! If they need more after they’re married, let ’em
come to me for it. They’ll get it. But I ain’t fool enough to make ’em
independent of me. I ain’t going to give ’em a chance to forget the
hand that feeds ’em. No, sir; I want my daughter to continue to love
me and think of me.”
There was no affectation in Lawrence’s astonishment at this view of
affection and the way to keep it. “Poor devil,” he said to himself
pityingly, “he’s been so perverted by his wealth that he actually
doesn’t see he’s taking the very course that’ll make his children hate
him.” But he ventured only, “I’m certain, sir, from what I know of your
daughter and Lord Frothingham that money could have no influence with
them one way or the other.”
Hooper smiled cynically. “It’s human nature,” he said. “The hand that
feeds is the hand that’s licked. I’ll give ’em all they need whenever
they need it. Do you suppose I’ve no pride in my daughter, in seeing
that she makes a good appearance over there? But a million and a half
is my outside figure for settlements.”
“Practically less than a hundred thousand over and above the debts,”
replied Lawrence, irritatingly reverting to pounds. “That is, about
four thousand a year for them to live on.”
“Forty to fifty thousand a year, including Jenny’s income,” corrected
Hooper, standing up for dollars. “And while I don’t promise, still, if
they behave, they can count on as much more from me.”
“Nine thousand a year,” said Lawrence, translating into pounds, “would
hardly keep up Beauvais Hall in a pinched fashion. It would leave
nothing for restoring the property; the Hall, for example, needs fifty
thousand pounds at once to restore it.”
The reasonableness, the unanswerableness of this presentation of the
case exasperated Hooper. “They’ll have to look to me afterward for
that,” he said angrily. “I’ve said my last word.”
But Lawrence didn’t believe him. He saw that, though avarice was
uppermost for the moment, the “cad’s craving” was a close second--then
there was the daughter’s aid. She would have something to say to
her father when she knew of the hitch in the negotiations. He rose.
“There’s nothing further at present, Mr. Hooper. I shall be compelled
strongly to advise Lord Frothingham against going on and engaging
himself. I cannot do otherwise, consistently with my duty as the, as
it were, guardian for the moment of his dignity and the dignity of his
house. It may be that he will disregard my advice. But I don’t see how
he can, careless in sordid things and impetuous though he is. The
prospect for an unhappy marriage would be too clear. Good-morning, sir.”
Hooper shook hands with him lingeringly. Avarice forbade him to speak.
“The Earl will come to your terms,” it and shrewdness assured him. “If
he don’t the deal is still open, anyhow.” His parting words were, “Give
my regards to the young man. Tell him we hope to see him as usual, no
matter how this affair comes out.”
“The coarse brute,” muttered Lawrence, as he stood without the doors
of the granite palace. “The soul of a ham-seller, of a pig-sticker.”
And he took out his handkerchief and affectedly wiped the hand which
Hooper had shaken. “Always a nasty business, this, of American upstarts
buying into our nobility. If they weren’t a lot of callous traders and
money-grabbers they couldn’t do it. And they usually negotiate at first
hand, so that they can drive a closer bargain. And their best society,
too! Beastly country--no wonder the women want to be traded out of it
into civilisation.”
XVIII
There was a family council at the Hoopers’ after luncheon that day--Mr.
Hooper, his wife, and Jeanne. The two women followed Hooper from the
dining room into his study, where he was pulling sullenly at his cigar
and awaiting the attack. It was his wife who began: “Do you know why
Lord Frothingham sent word he couldn’t come to lunch, pa? Jenny here is
worried about it.”
Mr. Hooper grunted. Finally he said: “I’m willing to do anything in
reason to please Jenny. I don’t approve of this title business. It
ain’t American. But as long as the young fellow has turned her head I
was not disposed to stand in the way.” He frowned fiercely. “But I tell
you flat, I won’t be held up! And that fellow he sent here this morning
was a plain highwayman.”
Mrs. Hooper and Jeanne looked significantly each at the other--they had
had many talks about his growing stinginess, and they suspected him at
once. “What did he want?” inquired Mrs. Hooper.
“I don’t propose to talk this thing over before Jenny. It’s disgraceful
that she should have gone into such a business. It ain’t right that she
should know about such things.”
Jeanne’s eyes filled with tears. “And I’ve told all the girls!” she
exclaimed. “Everybody knows it. I can’t back out now. The whole town’d
be laughing at us. I’d be ashamed ever to show my face in the street
again. You don’t want to break my heart, do you, pa?”
“You’ve made a sweet mess of it!” snarled her father. “You ought to
have had better sense than to have told anybody till the business side
of it was settled. I warned your ma about that--I knew what was coming.
Now, here you two’ve gone and given him the whip hand!”
“She got at the telephone before she told me,” said Mrs. Hooper.
Neither she nor her husband suspected that Jeanne had thought of just
this emergency of a wrangle over settlements and had decided that the
best way to overcome her father’s avarice was to put him in a position
from which he could not recede. If Frothingham had not insisted on
liberal settlements she would have prompted him to it. She was no more
eager than was he to embark with small supplies in the hold when it was
possible to lay in supplies a plenty. And as her father had acted all
her life upon his principle of paternal affection--“The hand that feeds
is the hand that’s licked”--she saw no harm in guiding her conduct
toward him by principles from the same practical code. As she was about
to engage in business, wasn’t it common sense to get as large a capital
as she could? “We can’t back out now,” she repeated tearfully, watching
him shrewdly through her tears.
“A pretty mess!” growled her father. But he was not really offended,
partly because he was fond of his daughter and would have forgiven her
almost anything, partly because he understood and sympathised with her
eagerness to proclaim her triumph, chiefly because, now that he had
thought it over, he was ready to accept Frothingham’s terms. “The hope
of getting more and the need of it will keep ’em tame,” he reasoned.
And he said, addressing the two women: “When that Lawrence fellow comes
again to-morrow, as I’m dead sure he will, I’ll close the matter. But
you two keep your hands off!”
[Illustration: _As soon as her father and mother were out of the way_]
As soon as her father and mother were out of the way Jennie went
into the library and called up the Barneys. “Is Lord Frothingham
there?” she asked.
“I’ll put you on the switch to his room,” was the reply. And presently
a voice she recognised as Hutt’s said: “Who wishes to speak to ’Is
Lordship?”
“Say that Miss Hooper’s at the telephone.”
There was a pause, a murmur of voices--she was sure one of them was
Frothingham’s. Then Hutt answered: “’Is Lordship hain’t ’ere just now,
ma’am. Hany message, ma’am?”
She was trembling with alarm. “Just tell him that I called up, and
that I’d like to speak to him when he comes in”--this in a rather
shaky voice, for a great fear was gathering in around her, a fear that
he had become offended at her father’s stinginess and bartering and
bargaining, and had decided to withdraw.
She wandered uneasily from room to room. She sat at the telephone
several times--once she had the receiver off the hook before
she changed her mind about trying to reach him. She ordered her
victoria and got ready for the street, to drive about in the hope of
accidentally meeting him. At the door she changed her mind again. As
she was turning back a boy came by, shouting an extra--“All about the
Earl of Frothingham! Big sensation!” She saw that the boy knew who
she was, knew that she was supposed to be engaged to Frothingham, was
clamouring in that neighbourhood because he thought sales would be
briskest there. She fled into the house--but sent a servant out by the
basement way to buy the paper.
The headlines were large and black. Frothingham, the story ran, had got
into debt in England so deeply that his creditors found he could not
pay more than a few pence in the pound; they had consulted as to ways
and means of recovering, had organised themselves into a syndicate, had
put up five thousand pounds to “finance” him for a hunt for a rich wife
in America. “And,” concluded the account, “this exposure comes barely
in time to block his attempt to marry the beautiful daughter of one of
the richest meat packers in Chicago, moving in our smartest smart set.”
She did not know that this tale was a deliberately false diversion of
the facts about a syndicated German prince who had visited Chicago
several years before and had almost married there. The truth as to his
enterprise had just come out on the other side through the collapse of
the Rontivogli syndicate; and the newspaper, relying for immunity on
Frothingham’s aloneness, and on his well-understood mercenary designs,
had substituted his name for the German’s. She read and believed. She
had known from the outset that his main motive was money. But she had
succeeded in disguising this unsightly truth in the same flowers of her
crudely romantic imagination in which she disguised the truth as to her
craving for a coronet. Now it was as if the flowers had been torn away
to the last concealing petal and had left exposed things more hideous
than she thought were there.
She hid her face and cried a little--“I despise him. Besides, if I went
on and married him, what would people say?”
It would have taken finer scales than those available for weighing
human motives to decide which of the two reasons embodied in those two
sentences was the heavier. She dried her eyes and sat with her elbow on
the table and her chin in her hand.
“That’s the best thing to do, every way I look at it,” she said aloud
slowly at the end of half an hour’s thought.
She went to the telephone, called up the offices of the Great Western
and Southern Railway, asked and got the General Manager. “Is that
you, Mr. Burster? Is that you, Tom? Meet me in the parlours of the
Auditorium right way.” And she rang off and telephoned to the stable
for her victoria.
Ten minutes later she was driving down the avenue in her largest, most
beplumed black hat and a pale blue carriage-coat that produced the
wonted effect of her public appearances--Burster once said to her:
“Jeanne, you’re the only thing on earth than can stop traffic in the
streets of Chicago. You can do in two seconds more than a blizzard
could do in a week.”
She returned at half-past five. Her father and mother were in the front
sitting room upstairs, gloomy as the lake in the dusk of a cloudy day.
She entered, whistling and tilting her big hat first over her right
eye, then over her left. “Don’t look so cheerful,” she said, patting
her mother on the cheek and pulling her father’s beard.
He tried to scowl, but it was a failure; and his voice was not in the
least formidable as he said: “A pretty mess you got yourself into,
miss, with your telephoning.”
“What telephoning?” she asked with a start.
“Tattling your engagement.”
“Oh!” She threw herself into a chair and laughed.
“Your father telephoned to Mr. Lawrence after he left us----” began her
mother.
“What did you do that for, pa?” she interrupted. “He’ll think we
haven’t any pride.”
“You ungrateful, thoughtless child! I did it for your sake.”
“What did Mr. Lawrence say?”
Her father hesitated and his face showed how he hated to inflict upon
his daughter the pain he thought his words would cause. “He said it was
useless to continue our discussion, as Lord Frothingham had definitely
and finally decided not to renew his proposal.” The old man’s voice
almost broke as he went on: “Jenny, here’s a note that came a few
minutes ago--I think the address is in Frothingham’s handwriting.”
Neither he nor her mother dared to look at her as she was hearing
these awful disclosures of the downfall of her hopes and the impending
brutalities to her pride and vanity. She picked up the note, opened it
slowly, read it--a few polite formal sentences, setting forth that he
had “yielded to the insuperable obstacles interposed by your father.”
She dropped the sheet and pirouetted round the room in and out between
the chairs occupied by her frightened parents--they thought her
suddenly gone mad from the shock. “Who says I ain’t the luckiest girl
on earth?” she exclaimed.
“What are you talking about, Jenny?” demanded her mother sharply.
“Why, I married Tom Burster half an hour ago. He’s putting the notices
in all the papers for to-morrow morning. Everybody’ll think I changed
my mind and shook Frothingham. And I did, too!”
“Jenny!” exclaimed her father. “Tom Burster!”
“And he’s coming here to dinner, if you don’t object,” she continued.
“If you do, why I’ll join him and we’ll go away and give you a chance
to cool off.” She caught her father by the beard. “What do you say,
daddy? Say yes, or I’ll pull.”
“Yes,” replied her father with a huge sigh of relief--his daughter was
contented; her and their vanity would be spared; Tom Burster would not
demand or want a dower; he was not only independent, but also one of
the most forward young “self-made” rich men in Chicago. “You’ve got
more sense than all the rest of the family put together,” he exclaimed
proudly, patting her on the head.
And in an absent, reflective tone she said: “I always felt I’d have
some use for Tom sooner or later.”
XIX
Frothingham’s abrupt change of tactics had been caused by a cablegram
from Evelyn which reached him at the Barneys’ even as his diplomatic
agent was in the heat and toil of the negotiations with Amzi Hooper. It
read:
Break off everything and return. Have written you New York. Best
possible news. Gwen sends love.
“Why didn’t she say what it was?” he wondered. And he decided that it
must be news of too private a nature to be trusted to the telegraph
station at Beauvais. Why had she written if he was to go at once? “I
suppose,” he concluded, “she was afraid I mightn’t obey orders. ‘Gwen
sends love’--that must mean that the news is about me and Gwen.”
But he had no uplifting of spirits--instead, he felt a sense of
impending misfortune. He called up Lawrence’s office and told one of
the clerks that he wished Lawrence to call him as soon as he came in.
In a few minutes Lawrence was relating over the wire the favourable
progress of the negotiation.
“It’s off,” said Frothingham. “I want nothing more to do with it. I’m
glad it’s in good form for the break. I can drop it decently.”
This so delighted Lawrence that he laughed aloud. “Hooper’s certain to
send for me,” he said. “I’ll give him the shock of his life.”
Frothingham cautioned him against any transgression of the most
courteous politeness, then went down to luncheon--with Nelly, alone.
While she was talking and he listening and looking, all in a flash he
understood why the “best possible news” from home depressed him, why
“Gwen sends love” did not elate him. He asked Nelly to take him to her
school.
“Oh, you wouldn’t be interested,” she said.
But he insisted, and they set out immediately after luncheon. As they
went--in a street car--she explained her work:
When her mother lay dying she said to the man beside whom she had
worked for thirty-six years, mostly cloud and rain: “Henry, I don’t
want a big, showy monument over me. If you should do something for me,
build a school of some kind, a school where girls can be taught how to
be useful wives and mothers, instead of spending their whole lives at
learning.” And Nelly’s father had put by money, a large sum each year,
until his daughter’s education was finished. Then he had said to her,
“I want you to help me carry out your ma’s memorial.” And he turned
over to her a mass of plans and hints and schemes which he had been
accumulating for seven years. “Get up a plan,” he had said, “on the
lines your ma would have liked. It’s a woman’s work--it’s your natural
work. I’ll supply the money.” And after two years’ labour, one year of
it abroad, she had perfected a scheme for a great school where several
hundred girls could be instructed in all that a woman as a woman should
know--housework, sewing, cooking, shopping, marketing, the elements of
business and of art, the care of babies, the training and education of
children. And she had so planned it that the girls could and should
support themselves while they were learning.
Frothingham did not take his eyes from her face as she talked. She
seemed to him the most wonderful, the noblest human being in the
world. “A fine, a beautiful idea,” he said. “But aren’t you afraid of
spoiling those girls for workingmen’s wives? You’re educating entirely
too much in this country, I should say, as it is. You’re making the
lower classes restless and discontented. They’ll pull everything down
about your ears the first thing you know.”
Nelly smiled--he saw that she was not seeing him at all, was looking
far, far past him. “I’m not worrying about the consequences,” she
said. “If we did that we should never move. You must remember that
we haven’t any classes here, but are all of one class--we differ in
degree, but not in kind. One can’t look into the future. I only know it
was intended for the light to shine on the whole human race, and that
it’s our duty to help all we can. And knowledge is light, and ignorance
is darkness, isn’t it? I’m not afraid of light, anywhere. Whether it’s
little or much, it’s better than darkness.”
He looked at her strangely. “I had never thought of that,” he said in a
low voice. Then, after a few minutes: “How good you are! I didn’t know
there was anybody in the world like you. How generous of you to give
your life to these people.”
“No--no!” she protested. They were walking now through a maze of
homely streets lined with flat-houses large and small and odourous of
strong-smelling cookery, of decaying food, of stale whiskey and beer--a
typical tenement district. “When I first began on this scheme,” she
went on, “I thought as you do. But I soon saw how false, how foolishly
false, that was. And if I had continued to think as at first, if I had
gone into the work to patronise and to feed my vanity, I should have
injured myself and all whom I wished to help. I should have made a snob
of myself and parasites of them.”
She paused and into her eyes came a look which he thought “glorious.”
She went on: “But fortunately, I got the right sort of guidance from
the very start. And I discovered that I had more to learn than these
people. I was actually more ignorant than they.” She turned her face
toward him. “Did you ever think,” she asked, “what would become of you
if you had all the props taken from under you, and were cast upon the
world and were forced to make the fight alone--without a penny or a
friend or a relative or any outside help of any kind?”
“Thought of it? Well, rather!” he exclaimed. “And I know what would
happen to me--jolly quick!”
“That was my first discovery--about myself. I found that I was in the
world without any fit equipment to live. I found that if the props
were taken from under me I’d be no match for the working people, that
I’d perish or else have to live on the charity of rich people by doing
the sort of pottering work they give the poor of their own class. And
I said to myself, ‘You are a fine human being, aren’t you--to pose as
the superior of those who are independent and self-respecting? You
call them ignorant, yet they are conforming to nature’s laws and to
the conditions of life infinitely better than you, with your boasted
intelligence and your fancied refinement.’ I saw that I was not a real
woman, as my mother had been, but was only a parasite on the labour and
the intelligence of others.”
“And what did you do?”
“I went to school with my girls. And----” Her face lighted up with
enthusiasm--“oh, you don’t know what a--a magnificent--sensation it
is to be conscious that one can swim alone on the sea of life without
fear of drowning or of having to call for help. You spoke as if I were
giving these people something. Why, I owe everything to them! It is
they who gave and are giving. And I am and always shall be in their
debt.”
He tried to think of some satirical phrase with which to lessen the
impression what she had said was making upon him. But he could only
blink into the flooding light which seemed to him to surround her and
to blaze upon his pettiness and worthlessness and the tawdriness of
all upon which his life had been based. In his own country, in his
surroundings of alternating dulness and dissipation, his naturally
good mind had become a drowsy marsh with pale lights gleaming in it
occasionally here and there. Unconsciously, he had been slowly rousing
ever since he landed in New York.
The people he had met were like enough to those he had met at home, and
also like enough to the people of the real America from which they were
offshoots, to form for him a mental bridge on which he could pass from
his England of narrow and bigoted caste to Nelly’s America of alert
and intelligent and self-respecting, level-eyed humanity. And he was
now feeling in this restless Chicago the fierce impact of energies and
aspirations of which he had had no conception, of which he could never
have a clear conception. Through the eyes of this earnest, unaffected
girl with her lived ideal of self-forgetfulness he had been getting
confused, dazzling glimpses of a new world.
But he did clearly see and feel that he loved her. And she now saw
in his curiously changed face what was in his mind. She looked away
instantly--her expression was uneasy, almost frightened. “Here we
are--at the school,” she said nervously as they turned a corner and
came in sight of three great buildings--plain yet attractive--which
faced three sides of a broad lawn in the centre of which a large and
artistic fountain was playing.
He never could give a clear account of that school. He remembered
the manager--a Mr. Worthington, with a strong and serious, yet
anything but solemn face, with rather homely features except a pair of
extraordinary eyes. He remembered many classrooms where all sorts of
feminine enterprises were going forward with energetic informality. He
remembered many girls--uncommonly clean, bright, well-dressed girls
with agreeable voices and manners. He remembered many smiles and other
evidences of health and spirits. He remembered many babies--all in
one big, sunny room, chirping and crowing and gurgling, balancing
on uncertain little lumps of feet or crawling toilsomely. “Practice
babies,” Nelly called them, and he thought, “If this is the way her
girls succeed with mere ‘practice babies,’ what won’t they make of
their own?” Finally, he remembered--Nelly. All his other memories were
a hazy background for her tall, graceful figure and wonderful, luminous
face. Her he never forgot in the smallest detail of look or gesture.
When they were once more in the street, walking toward the car,
he began abruptly: “I came over here--to America--because I was
ruined--because we were going to be sold up and chucked out in the
autumn. I came--I’m ashamed to put it into words--I’d rather you’d
imagine--you can, easy enough. It’s often done and nothing’s thought
of it--at least on our side of the water. This morning--in fact, just
before luncheon--I got a cable from my sister. Our luck has turned,
and----”
“I’m very glad,” she murmured as he paused.
“I don’t wish to go back,” he went on impetuously, his drawl gone. “I
wish--it’s you I want. And I ask you to give me a chance. I don’t think
I’m such a frightfully bad sort, as men go. And while I ain’t fit for
you to walk on, where’s the man that is? And perhaps if I were less
fit I couldn’t care for you--all the height from down where I am to up
where you are.”