_Copyright, 1917,_
BY COSMO HAMILTON.
_All rights reserved_
"For life, with all it yields of joy and woe,
And hope and fear (believe the aged friend),
Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love,--
How love might be, hath been indeed, and is."
ROBERT BROWNING.
*LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS*
Fraser immediately became the object of Beatrix' whole attention . . .
_Frontispiece_
"Don't you think we make a charming picture of connubial felicity?"
"It won't be many days before we find scandal rearing its head at us"
In this picture stood the vital figures of Beatrix and Franklin, hand in
hand
*SCANDAL*
*I*
"By Jove, there's Beatrix Vanderdyke!"
"Why not?"
"What on earth is she doing in New York at this time of year?"
There was a laugh and a shrug. "If it comes to that, my dear fellow,
what on earth are we doing in New York at this time of year? Anyway,
I'm not interested."
"I am. She's with that unpleasant brute, Sutherland York again. I wish
to Heaven she wouldn't go about with a second-rate portrait painter who
only gets commissions by licking people's boots, or any other man, for
the matter of that, at this time of night."
Pelham Franklin laughed. "I'm sorry I can't squeeze up any interest in
Miss Vanderdyke," he said. "I've seen her going into York's studio round
about midnight several times, but it's her life. She has to lead it.
There's no accounting for tastes, you know. You and I, for instance,
have a penchant for the Ziegfeld Follies. I vote we walk, it's a little
cooler now."
And as the only son of the famous millionaire Franklin, sauntered away
with his friend, Sutherland York, the "unpleasant brute," followed Miss
Vanderdyke into the elevator.
York had cultivated a peculiar habit of looking at a woman as though she
were the only one alive, and by doing so had achieved a list of clients
which made the mouth of every other portrait painter in New York water
with envy. He also had a way, which amounted to a gift, of running his
eyes over women which made them feel that they had nothing on. It
caused some to shudder, some to preen themselves, and some--the coarser,
indelicate type--to feel a pleasant thrill of excitement. Like many men
who paint portraits for a living, Sutherland York had discovered that in
order to pay the rent of a very expensive apartment, keep a man, dress
to perfection and dine frequently at Sherry's and the Ritz, it is
necessary to know something more than how to paint. Women were his
clients. They provided him with his butter as well as his bread, and he
catered to them with artfulness rather than with art. Miss Vanderdyke
came in for all this man's eye-play in the elevator, but without a
flicker of a lash bore up against it.
The city had baked beneath a hot June sun that day. The night was
airless and oppressive. Beatrix dropped her cloak and went over to one
of the open windows and stood there with the discreet lights showing up
the smooth whiteness of her shoulders, arms and back. Her dress was one
of those so-called smart things that one sees in the windows of
fashionable shops which affect French names. It left very little to the
imagination and was as short as it was low. In between it was ugly and
foolish, and required a very beautiful young body to live it down and
put a check on the ribald laughter of sane people. On the other side of
Fifth Avenue the Plaza, with its multitudinous windows all gleaming,
reared its head up to the clear sky. Along the glistening street below
intermittent automobiles glided like black beetles. The incessant hum
of the city came like music to the girl's ears. She preferred that
sound to the God-sent quietude of the country from which she had just
come.
While a bottle of champagne was opened and cigarettes were placed on the
table, York stood with his back against a heavily carved oak armoire in
an attitude of carefully considered gracefulness and watched the girl
with a sense of extreme triumph. The fact that she was young--very
young,--not very much more than twenty,--and was generally acknowledged
as having been the most beautiful debutante who had come out in New York
society in many years, did not matter. He had painted her portrait and
had quieted his numerous trades-people with a certain portion of the
very substantial cheque which he had received, but that also did not
matter. What did matter was the fact that he, himself, had proved
attractive to a Vanderdyke--to the only daughter of the man whose name
was known all over the world as the head of one of the richest and
certainly the most exclusive family in the United States, whose house on
Fifth Avenue contained art treasures which made it more notable than the
houses of European royalty, and whose country places with their racing
stables, their kennels, their swimming pools and tennis courts, golf
courses and polo grounds were the pride of all the little eager people
who write society paragraphs. It meant a good deal to the son of the
man who had kept a dusty-looking antique shop with dirty windows on
Fourth Avenue to be able to assure himself that he exercised enough
attraction over this girl to make her run the risk of gossip in order to
spend a few stolen hours from time to time in his company alone. With
the use of consummate tact, his well-practiced flattery, and at the
right moment a sudden outburst of passionate words culled from the works
of Byron and Swinburne, what might he not achieve!
As these thoughts ran through his brain he turned to the oval glass in
an Italian frame that hung on the wall and looked at himself with close
examination. He certainly wore his forty-seven years admirably well. His
dark, thick, wavy hair was all the more picturesque for its sprinkling
of white. His high forehead lent him an air of intellectuality which
was most misleading. His straight, black eyebrows and large,
almond-shaped eyes gave him a Latin touch which seemed to indicate
temperament. His nose, he told himself, was undoubtedly aristocratic,
and his moustache--scrupulously lifted away from his lip--added to the
effect of a well-shaped mouth and large white, regular teeth. There was
a slit in his chin of which he had always been proud. Striking was the
word that he applied to himself, and handsome was the one which he knew
was generally used about him. The touch of humor which was his saving
grace made him very well aware of the fact that with any clothes less
well cut and carefully considered he might easily fall in line with the
glossy villain of melodrama or with the conventional desperado so
necessary to the producers of moving pictures.
With fingers as expert as those of a woman he smoothed his hair here and
there, made a quick sign to his man to get out, and moved across the
expensively rugged studio to the window. "I was on the point of going
out to supper," he said, "when you called me up. It was very kind of
you."
Beatrix turned towards him with the most disconcerting air of candor.
Not for the first time he was astonished at her perfect finish, her
audacious self-possession. This baby was a complete woman of the world.
"No, it wasn't," she said. "I was bored. I only got to town at
half-past eight and the mere thought of spending the evening with a
garrulous companion--a sort of toothless watch-dog--in a house among
Holland covers and the persistent smell of camphor was more than I could
stand. I had no intention of being kind. Do we smoke?"
"Oh, please!" he said.
She followed him across the large, lofty room to the refectory table
which had stood in the back room of the shop on Fourth Avenue for so
many years, there acquiring all the age of which it could boast. A
silver Jacobean box was open and in it there were Russian cigarettes
upon which York's imaginary crest had been stamped. He had himself
designed it.
"Thank you. How is it that you're here? The last time I saw you, you
said you were going to Gloucester for the summer."
York put his face as near to the girl's round shoulder as he dared. "I
went there," he said, "on the last of April, but I had to come back last
week to see the architects of a new theatre. They've asked me to paint
a series of panels for the foyer. It's a nuisance; but--although I dare
say it's never occurred to you--there are some people in the world who
must work to live." He raised his glass, adopted an expression of
adoration in which there was a mixture of humbleness and confidence, and
added: "I'd have come from the ends of the earth for the pleasure of
seeing you to-night."
Beatrix looked at him with a smile of amused appreciation. "How well
you do that sort of thing," she said. "Better than any man I know. Was
it born in you, or did you achieve it?"
York placed what purported to be a Wolsey chair just out of the line of
light thrown by a lamp on the table, and metaphorically hauled himself
up for having gone a little too far. This imperious girl, as spoiled as
a Royal Princess, who had been brought up in the belief that all she had
to do was to put her finger on a bell to bring the moon and the sun and
the stars to her service, needed more careful handling than a
thoroughbred yearling. So York, whose business had taught him far more
than the rudiments of psychology, hastened to become general again.
Like the filibuster who starts out on an expedition to find hidden
treasure, he had always before him the vague, exciting hope that some
day he might stand towards this girl in a very different relationship.
"How long are you to be in the city?"
"I must go back the day after to-morrow," said Beatrix. "I've only come
in to see about a costume for a Shakespeare Pastoral that mother has
arranged to give in the Queen Anne gardens. It's going to be produced
by one of the long-haired tribe, and the house-party's to be assisted by
a sprinkling of professionals. As it'll break the monotony of country
life I'm looking forward to it, especially as I'm going to play
opposite,--I think that's the word,--to a matinee idol whose profile is
Grecian, though his accent is Broadway. You must come and see us."
"I should love to," said York. His interest in pastorals was
infinitesimal, but his desire to be included in one of Mrs. Vanderdyke's
house-parties was as keen as that of any woman whose whole life is
devoted to the difficult gymnastic feat of climbing into society. "When
d'you begin rehearsing?"
"The day after to-morrow. The people who are at home at present
scattered to-day and the new lot, or many of them, will probably go by
train on Wednesday. Pelham Franklin is to be there. D'you know him?"
"Very slightly," said York. "He lives in the twin studio to this, on
the other side, but as he is mostly away, either in Europe or big game
hunting, there has been very little opportunity for us to meet. I
caught sight of him just now leaving the house. He's a good-looking
fellow, isn't he?"
"Is he? Yes, I suppose he is. I've met him once or twice and danced
with him, but it struck me that he needed some sort of crisis in his
life to shake him into becoming a man. At present he's a sort of
undergraduate, skimming through life with his feet above the earth. I
believe mother entertains secret hopes that he'll one day ask me to
marry him." She laughed. "I hear her talking about the union of the
two families as though they were the only two families in the world.
Aunt Honoria is all in favor of it, too. The question of my marriage
seems to affect them as though I were the daughter of King George or
someone. Who would suppose that we live in a democracy? It's a joke,
isn't it? Probably I shall run away with a good-looking chauffeur with
kinky hair, regular teeth, a straight nose and a vocabulary which would
put even George Ade to shame. Or, I may fall in love with the matinee
idol and fly off with him in a motor-car at midnight, and so be in the
fashion. My romantic-minded companion, Mrs. Lester Keene, who lives on
novels, cherishes the idea that I'm going to elope with you."
"My God!" cried York. "If only such a thing could come true!"
The passion in the man's voice, the sudden flame in his eyes and the
sort of picturesque hunger which suddenly pervaded him filled the girl
with interest. She had always regarded him as a sort of Shaw play,--a
mixture of easy cynicism, self-conscious cleverness and an obvious pose.
She had been leading a quiet life since the season in town had ended,
riding and playing tennis and swimming in the pool. She had had no
opportunity of trying her powers upon any man who had been worth while.
Her parents' friends were all rather pompous, responsible people who
talked politics gravely and whose wealth had taken the sting of joy and
effort out of life. It was good to be able to play with fire again. It
exercised her wits. So she seized the opportunity of leading on this
handsome person with whom so many married women had been in love, to see
what he would do.
"Is that how you feel?" she asked, instinctively going into the light so
that her slim triumphant beauty and bewitching youth should be in full
challenging view.
York lost his head. His inherent conceit led him to believe that there
was encouragement in the girl's voice and attitude. "You know it is.
You know that ever since you came here to sit for me, from the very
first instant that I caught sight of you I've been drunk with love.
You've revolutionized my life--almost ruined me as painter--because to
paint any other woman is sacrilege." He caught her hands and kissed
them hotly.
It was all very well done. His words carried most amazing sincerity.
His attitude was extremely graceful, and his simulated passion lent a
temporary youthfulness to his face and tall, tightly compressed figure.
He managed to look the complete lover. The stage had lost a great actor
in him.
Beatrix rescued her hands and stood up very straight. This transpontine
outburst was foolish. She had merely hoped for a witty passage of arms.
"My dear Mr. York," she said, "you and I are very good friends. Please
don't run away with the idea that I'm a young married woman in search of
adventure."
York was angry. He knew that he had made a fool of himself. He hated
to look a fool at any time and he was not sufficiently master of himself
to recover his ground by making a well-turned apology. "Women don't come
here to be friends," he said thickly. "They certainly don't come alone
at this time of night to talk ethics. You've no right to snub me--to
lead me on and then cover me with ice-cold water. I'm not the man to
stand that sort of thing."
"Your cigarettes are very nice," said Beatrix. "May I have another?"
He held out the box and struck a match. He stood so close to the girl
that the fragrance of her hair and the gleam of her white flesh went to
his brain. All the sensuality of the man was churned up and stirred and
his veneer fell from him like dry plaster. He really did forget for the
moment that she was the daughter of one of America's richest men and was
not simply the most exquisite young thing that he had ever seen during
his long career. He bent down and put his lips on her shoulder, with a
hoarse, inarticulate murmur. He had always been very successful in his
love-making. The type of woman with whom he came most in contact
couldn't resist the primeval. He must have imagined that this unbridled
and daring outbreak would carry the girl off her feet. It had happened
before.
He was mistaken. Beatrix was as completely mistress of herself as
though she were talking to a hairdresser.
"That's a pity," she said. "I'm afraid it puts an end to my coming
here. I'm sorry, because I liked the atmosphere of your studio and it
broke the monotony of my gilded exclusiveness to indulge in this sort of
mild Bohemianism, although I thought that you were clever. Will you
please let me have my wrap?"
"Do you mean that?"
"Yes."
York obeyed. He saw that he had completely spoiled his very remote
chance. Also it was obvious that his name would not now be included
among Mrs. Vanderdyke's list of guests. "You fool!" he said to himself.
"You damned infernal fool. This girl's an aristocrat--an autocrat--a
hot-house plant. You've treated her like the wife of a Wall Street
broker from the Middle West." He put the wrap about the girl's
shoulders and stood back endeavoring to assume a dignity that he did not
feel.
That kiss on her shoulder was like the touch of a slug on the petal of a
rose. Beatrix resented it from the bottom of her soul, but her
training, her breeding and her inherent pluck gave her the power to hide
her feelings and maintain an air of undisturbed indifference. Her
knowledge of men, already great, made her very well aware of the fact
that the least show of temper might bring about a most unpleasant
scuffle. She dropped her cigarette into a silver bowl. "I shall look
forward to seeing your panels in the new theatre with great interest,"
she said. "Will you come down with me to the car?"
Realizing that he was no match for this young privileged person and
cowed by her superbly unconscious sense of quality, York led the way
across his elaborate studio in which suits of armor gleamed dully and
massive pieces of oak reflected the light, to the door. He rang the bell
of the elevator and stood silently waiting for it to come up. Nothing
else was said, except by Beatrix, who gave him the one cool word
"Good-bye," as he shut the door of the limousine.
York's man-servant, of whom he was so inordinately proud, had gone to
bed. Otherwise, he would have been astonished to hear the sound of
smashing china. The portrait painter took it out on a Dresden bowl
which, in his impotent rage, he dashed with a characteristically coarse
oath to the polished floor of the room in which most of his love
episodes had ended with peculiar success.
*II*
The Vanderdyke house on Fifth Avenue faced the Park.
It aroused the admiration of most people not because it was an accurate
reproduction of the famous De la Rochefoucauld mansion in Paris, but
because on one side of it enough space upon which to build a high
apartment house was given up to a stilted garden behind a high
arrangement of wrought iron. It did not require a trained real-estate
mind to know how valuable was such "waste" ground.
The suite of rooms belonging to Beatrix overlooked this large, square
patch, with its well-nursed lawn, its elaborate stonework and its
particular sparrows. In the spring, what appeared to be the same tulips
suddenly and regularly appeared, standing erect in exact circles, and
lilacs broke into almost regal bloom every year about the time that the
family left town. A line of balloon-shaped bay trees always stood on
the terrace and, whatever the weather, a nude maiden of mature charms
watched over a marble fountain in an attitude of resentful modesty.
When her windows were open, as they mostly were, Beatrix and her English
companion could hear the pathetic whimpers of the poor caged beasts in
the Zoo in front of the house, and the raucous cries of the
Semitic-looking parrots above the ceaseless cantata of motor traffic.
The morning after her lucky escape from York's studio, Beatrix slept
late. Mrs. Lester Keene had breakfasted alone with the _Times_, saving
_Town Topics_ for her final cup of coffee. She had heard her charge,
whom she made no effort to manage, return comparatively early the night
before, and could hardly contain her curiosity to know what had
happened. It was obvious that something had taken place, because, as a
rule, Beatrix came back anywhere between one and two from her visits to
the portrait painter. From a sense of duty and a fear of losing her
comfortable position, Mrs. Lester Keene forced herself to remain awake
on these occasions, sitting over a novel in a Jaeger dressing-gown or
writing a long, rambling letter to a friend in London, in which, with
tearful pride in her former independence, she wallowed in reminiscence.
Mrs. Lester Keene was the widow of a man of excellent family who had
devoted all the best years of his life to the easy and too-well-paid
pursuit of winding and unwinding "red tape" in a government office in
London. He had died of it before he could retire to a stucco house at
Brighton on a pension, and Amelia Keene had found herself in the tragic
position of being alone in the world in the middle forties with nothing
to bless herself with but an aged pomeranian, her undisputed
respectability and the small sum paid to her on her husband's life
policy. This, with the laudable and optimistic idea of placing herself
forever out of the reach of the lean hand of penury, she had entrusted
to the care of a glib city shark whom she had met in a boarding-house
and who guaranteed that he would get her in on the ground floor of a new
company exploiting the Eldorado Copper Mine and bring her in a regular
three hundred and fifty-five per cent. on her capital. With this neat
sum and others, however, the expert philanthropist with the waxed
moustache and white spats paid his first-class fare to the Argentine and
set up a matrimonial bureau for temperamental South Americans. Poor
Amelia Keene sold her modest jewels and applied for work at the
Employment Agency for Impoverished Gentlewomen, in George Street,
Hanover Square.
It so happened that Mr. and Mrs. Vanderdyke were in London at that time
and in need of a refined companion for their only daughter. Mrs. Lester
Keene was one of the several dozen applicants and had the great good
fortune to secure the much coveted post owing to the fact that her hair
was grey, her complexion her own and her accent irreproachably
Kensington. As Mrs. Vanderdyke intended to be the only made-up woman in
any of her numerous houses, the other applicants were naturally turned
down.
Like most English people the new companion had never been farther away
from her native land than Boulogne. She thrilled with excitement,
fright and the spirit of adventure when she joined the Vanderdyke
entourage on board the _Olympic_. To be five or six days at sea was in
itself an almost unbelievable exploit, full of hidden dangers and
obvious terrors. The mere thought of shipwreck and the possibility of
floating for days on a raft, in perhaps most unconventional attire,
appalled her. But the thing that filled her nightly dreams with
phantasmagoria was the knowledge that she was, God and the elements
willing, to live in the United States,--a great wild country in which,
she had been led to believe, men shot each other in the fashionable
restaurants, broncho busters galloped madly along the principal streets
of the big cities and lassoed helpless virgins, murderers in masks held
up trains, black men were hanged to lamp-posts, as a matter of course,
and comic creatures with large feet hammered people on the head with
mallets. She had arrived at this point of view from several visits to
the moving picture theatres in London, where American films do much to
prejudice untravelled Europeans against the United States. Her
astonishment when finally she arrived in New York and found herself in
what she described to her friends at home as the Vanderdyke Palace, was
almost childish.
In no sense of the word was she a companion to Beatrix. Her narrow and
insular point of view, her characteristic English method of clinging to
shibboleths and rococo ideas, and her complete and triumphant ignorance
of all fundamental things made her, to Beatrix, more of a curiosity,
like an early Victorian stuffed canary in a glass case, than a useful
and helpful person. Beatrix had been born sophisticated. As a child
and a young girl her arresting and palpable beauty had made her an
irresistible mark for boys and young men, and one or two only of her
early episodes, nearly all of which began well enough but ended in
sometimes very rough attempts at seduction, would have crowded out of
Mrs. Lester Keene's whole humdrum, drone-like life every incident that
she could recall. Beatrix at once became her companion's guide,
philosopher, friend and guardian, and derived constant amusement from
the little garrulous, plump, hen-like woman, who knew no more about life
than the average dramatist knows about people, and who, though
completely dazzled by the hard, almost casual magnificence of her
present surroundings, delighted to live in the past, telling long and
pointless stories of "my house in Clanricarde Gardens, you know," "Mrs.
Billings, my cook," "The summer when Algernon and I took the Edward
Jones's house at Bognor," "My drawing-room was always crowded every
second and fourth Thursday, quite a Salon, in fact," and so on, in a
glorification of the commonplace that was as pathetic as it was
tiresome.
Before Mrs. Keene had waded through the first few pages of her favorite
weekly paper, a maid disturbed her. "Miss Vanderdyke would be glad to
see you," she said, conveying the kindly but nevertheless royal command
with full appreciation.
Mrs. Lester Keene was glad to obey. Even if dear Beatrix had nothing
exciting to tell her, she had a very curious piece of news to impart to
dear Beatrix. So she gathered herself together, rather in the same way
as her prototype, the barnyard hen rising from a bath of sun-baked
earth, and made her way along a wide passage hung with the priceless old
prints which had overflowed from the lower rooms, to the bedroom of the
daughter of the house.
Beatrix was sitting on the edge of a four-post bed, in a pink,
transparent nightgown, her little feet in heelless slippers. On a table
at her elbow there was a just placed breakfast tray and a new copy of
_Town and Country_. Fresh from sleep, with her fair hair all about her
shoulders, Beatrix, the one alive and exquisite thing in that too-large,
too-lofty, pompous room, looked like a single rosebud in a geometrically
designed garden.
"Come along, Brownie," she said, stretching herself with catlike grace,
"and talk to me while I feed."
"You'll put something on, dear, won't you?"
"No, dear Brownie, I won't. No one can spy into the room and there
isn't a single portrait of a man on the walls. So please don't fuss.
It's far too hot for a dressing-gown and in my case why should I hide my
charms from you?" She laughed at her wholly justified conceit, gave
herself a very friendly nod in a pier-glass in the distance and poured
out a cup of coffee.
Amelia Keene could never at any time, even in her isolated spinster days
in the heart of the country, have brought herself to wear such an excuse
for a nightgown. Flannel was her wear. She was, as usual, more than a
little uneasy at the all-conquering individualism and supreme
naturalness of the girl to whom she utterly subjected herself. With the
slightest shrug of her shoulders,--she dared to do nothing further,--she
put the dressing-gown that she had offered back in its place, and sat
down. At any rate she could assure herself that she had endeavored to
do her duty.
"You came in earlier than I expected last night, dear," she said,
throwing the obvious bait of her insatiable curiosity.
Beatrix laughed again. "Why don't you say that you're dying to know
what happened and lay awake all night making up exciting stories,
Brownie?"
Mrs. Keene almost succeeded in looking dignified. "You know that I'm
very, very much against these late visits to bachelor rooms," she said,
"and have always done my best to dissuade you from making them.
Therefore I can truly say that I'm far from being curious and am unable
to feel any sort of excitement."
Beatrix bent forward and touched her companion's cheek with an
affectionate hand. "Good for you, dear old wise-acre. _You'll_ never
have to take any blame for my blazing indiscretions, so don't worry, and
as you don't feel any interest in my adventures I won't bother you with
them."
Keen disappointment took the place of dignity. "I hope the time will
never come," said Mrs. Keene, "when you'll cease to make me your
confidante, dear."
Feeling that she had teased the little, naive, narrow-minded,
well-meaning and very human woman enough, Beatrix finished her coffee
and lit a cigarette. "Last night, Sutherland York dropped his pose,"
she said. "I hadn't ever taken the trouble to analyze the reason why I
went to his studio, but thinking it over now I see that it was because I
knew that sooner or later his assumption of super-refined Bohemianism
would break down and I wanted to be there to see the smash. Well, dear
Brownie, I saw it. I also heard it and, to go into the exact details, I
felt it,--on my shoulder." She put her right hand on the spot as though
the touch of his sensual lips still stung her.