"Oh, very clever," she said, with superb sarcasm. "You've evidently made
a hobby of fighting with women."
That stung Franklin. "I don't call you a woman," he blurted out.
"There's been nothing of the woman in you since the day you knew enough
words to order one of your nurses about. You're a hybrid, the
production of a mixture of two species,--labor and wealth. The labor in
you, inherited from the man who made your first millions, is tainted
with revolt, the wealth with the damned despotism that creates it.
You're no more a woman than this barrack is a home, or this absurd place
a bedroom. You're a grotesque who has been brought up in a nightmare.
You walk on a world that is too small for your feet. You're out of
drawing like a woman in a fashion-plate. You're a sort of female
Gulliver on an earth peopled with pigmies. You almost believe that
you're Almighty and that when you raise your finger life must be reset
like a chess-board. And you're perfectly right. It can and is and will
be so long as money counts. I know it and do it, for you and I hold a
piece each of the same wand. But you're up against _me_ now, and you've
used me as you might have used a trained servant, or an eager parasite,
ready and willing to lick the blacking off your boots for the sake of
what may fall unnoticed from your purse, and, by God, you're not going
to get away with it."
He controlled her across to the door of the maid's room and pushed it
open with his foot. "Come out," he said, "and get Mrs. Franklin ready
for the night." Then he marched Beatrix to and into the dressing-room,
followed by Helene. Reflected in the mirrors there were not three, but
thirty people. "I'll give you fifteen minutes," he continued, "and for
the sake of all concerned don't be longer. Is that agreed?"
Beatrix met his eyes. Her spirit was unbroken, her chin at the same
tilt, her attitude not one whit less contemptuously assured, but he saw
in the slight inclination of her golden head the acknowledgment that he
held all the cards.
He turned on his heel and left the room, went over to an open window and
drew in long breaths of air.
He and she, children of the same nightmare, as he had called it, had
both used the word vanity about the thing which impelled him to punish.
But as he looked out into the sane night, magic only from the moon's
touch, it came to him that to dismiss it as vanity was to slur over the
true meaning of that before which he was urged. It was the labor in
him, the revolt against the despotism of wealth that had come back again
in his fight with his fellow-hybrid, and once more labor was top-dog.
How would he use his power?
For fifteen minutes he stood there with his heart thumping, his hands
hot, the exhilaration of success running through his blood like alcohol.
And then, to the second, came the sweet diaphanous figure, which, with
the dignity of a brave but conquered enemy, crossed to the foolish bed.
Franklin watched her go, her gleaming hair all about her like a bridal
veil, her head held high, her lovely face untouched by fear. He watched
her pause while the maid opened up the bed, and then slip in. He called
the French girl, gave her the key to her door and waited until she had
gone. Then he walked to the foot of the bed and stood there silently
until Beatrix raised her eyes.
"If you and I," he said, with extreme distinctness, "were the only two
living people on a desert island and there was not the faintest hope of
our ever being taken back to the world, I would build you a hut at the
farthest end of it and treat you as a man."
He wheeled round, unlocked the door, went out into the passage and away.
Only by having seen the expression on Beatrix's face after he had gone
would he have known how tremendously well he had revenged himself.
*VIII*
Franklin's bare statement to Malcolm Fraser that he was going to the
Vanderdyke pastoral party merely to meet Ida Larpent left his friend
interested and speculative. The lady's name was as familiar to Fraser
as to the other men who dined at houses a little to the east and rather
less than that to the west of Fifth Avenue. The lady's arresting face
had often stirred his dormant sense of psychology, but he never had had
the opportunity of saying more than "How do you do?" or "Good-bye" to
her. He so obviously didn't count in the scheme of things as they
appealed to Mrs. Larpent.
According to the Social Register, however, Mrs. Larpent lived in East
Fifty-sixth Street and was the widow of Captain Claude Elcho Larpent of
the 21st Lancers, a nephew of Field Marshal Viscount Risborough. That
was all. If this precious volume, which is the vade-mecum of so many
people who murmur the word society with a hiss that can be heard from
one end of the town to the other, had attempted to do justice to the
beautiful Ida, at least one-half of the volume would have been devoted
to the story of her antecedents and career. Born at Paterson, New
Jersey, the only daughter of a pushing and energetic little chemist
named McKenna, who had married in a moment of the wildest kind of
romance a little, slight, white-faced Russian girl who had left her
country among a batch of unsavory emigrants and found employment in a
button factory, Ida,--who can tell why?--was marked out from her tiniest
years for the oldest profession in the world. One would have thought,
to look at her parents,--the father a pugnacious, industrious, thrifty,
red-headed Scotch-American, the mother a wistful, grateful,
self-effacing little woman who, if there were any justice in this world,
would several times have received the distinguished service order for
her many acts of unnoticed heroism,--she would have been a bright,
brave, practical and perhaps even pretty little girl. Instead of which,
to everyone's astonishment and to the utter confusion of the chemist and
his wife, Ida resembled nothing so much as a child of the aristocracy.
She was thoroughbred from head to foot, perfectly made, with a small
oval face and large wide-apart eyes, tiny wrists and ankles and black
hair as fine as silk. The paradox of her having been born in the small
common-place quarters above a second-rate store, amidst all the
untidiness of a place in which the mother did her own housework, was not
lost on the parents. They were proud of this fairy-like baby, but they
were also frightened of her. They realized that she was in the nature
of a freak. It seemed to them that she had come by accident; that, as a
matter of fact, they had no right to her. They almost persuaded
themselves into the belief, as the child grew up, that she was a
changeling; that an unseen hand must have stolen their own sturdy,
freckled and rampagious infant, and for some unaccountable reason
slipped this exquisite little thing into her place.
There was, as time passed, an element of tragedy about this miracle or
accident or mistake,--these words and others were used,--especially when
Ida began to find her tongue and her feet. More and more she seemed to
be an indignant hot-house plant in a little cabbage-patch. Her parents,
poor souls, grew more and more awkward and unhappy in her presence. They
had the uncanny feeling always that she was criticising them and their
mode of speech and their slummachy way of life. The affection and love
which they had been only too willing to give her after the shock of her
early appearance wore away, turned into reluctant deference and a
constant self-conscious desire to make their apartment and themselves
more tidy for her. Even at the age of ten she turned her mother into a
maid, quietly insisted that her hair should be brushed every night and
saw to it that she was dressed and undressed, manicured and shampooed.
She demanded bath salts and scent from the store and the best of soaps
and powders. "Do this! Do that!" she would say, and if they were not
done she raised her voice and stamped her foot, while a sort of flame
seemed to come from her eyes. No one had ever seen her cry after she
had learned to walk.
The McKenna circle of friends, consisting of fellow-storekeepers and the
Austro-Hungarian musician who was the leader of the little orchestra at
the Paterson Theatre, watched Ida's early years with almost breathless
astonishment and a kind of disbelief. They accepted her much in the
same way as they would, under the pressure of warm friendship, have
accepted a pet marmoset or a cursing parrot or a dog with a cat's tail.
They noticed, with many comments, that she grew up altogether without
filial affection; that she treated her parents as though they were paid
attendants, calling her father "Sandy," as his particular friends did,
and her mother "Alla," and with the most startling self-assurance making
them conform to all her wishes. It was most uncanny. Michlikoff, the
bird's-nest-headed musician, who had a sneaking belief in the occult and
who read up all that he could find on the subject of transmigration of
souls, endeavored to persuade his friends, in voluble broken English,
that Ida was a princess born again. With all those who came from places
other than Missouri, he succeeded.
It was a perturbed and constrained household in which this unexpected
child grew up,--a household that, to the little bandy Scot's
never-quite-hidden disgust, was the subject of steady gossip in the
town. His first ambition naturally was to see the list of his customers
swell, but not at the expense of his pride and self-respect. Those two
things, frequently mentioned, were very dear to him. It seemed to him,
too, that the family affairs of a man who kept a drug-store should be
out of the region of gossip. He and his still pretty wife were glad,
infinitely glad, when the time arrived for their daughter to attend the
public school. It was only while she was out of the apartment that the
mother could go about her work in comfort and without being constantly
called away from her domestic duties. The freckled, red-headed little
chemist only felt happy when he saw this girl sail out with her books
and turn down the street towards the school-house, with her chin held
high and her astonishing eyes filled with a sort of scorn for all the
passers-by. At school she was not a success. She didn't mix well. The
other children held aloof from her. She was obviously out of place
amongst them and they resented her presence in the class-rooms. The
boys admired her from a distance, fell into self-conscious silence when
she approached and whispered about her when she passed by. The girls
were antagonistic. They were jealous of her pretty clothes, awed by her
lofty silences and surprised at her proficiency with her books. On her
seventeenth birthday Ida went to New York, saying that she would be back
to supper. But with supper came a cold-blooded note which ran like
this:
"Dear Sandy and Alla:
"I'm through with your one-eyed town and the drug-store and
provincialism. I'm going to begin to live and dress as I ought to, and
there's only one way to do it,--the easiest way. I applied for a job in
the chorus of the Winter Garden for the new show and got it. It was
easy. I looked very nice in my Sunday clothes and the stage manager
said I was a peach. Rehearsals start to-morrow and I shall stay at a
boarding-house with some of the other girls. So please send me thirty
dollars to go on with and the rest of my things. The address is 302
West 46th Street. I will let you know when to send me more money. You
will both be glad to get rid of me, but not so glad as I am to be out of
Paterson. I am starting on the bottom rung of the ladder and I am going
to climb to the top, whatever I have to pay for it. Judging from the
way the men in the office look at me they will have to do most of the
paying.
"IDA."
This was read by Mr. and Mrs. McKenna in horrified silence, but with a
mutual deep sigh of relief, and put away in a secret place. The only
time they ever saw her again was once when they made a pilgrimage to
Manhattan and watched her from the balcony of what was once a show ring
in Broadway, and saw her, almost nude, flitting like a butterfly in the
glare of light.
One other note they received from this curious person, and this,
enclosing a cheque for two hundred dollars, contained the news that Ida
was going to England with a musical comedy company in which she was
playing a small part. And that was the last they ever heard of her.
She had come like a stranger and like a stranger she departed. The
cheque they never used. With an odd sensation of having been insulted
by it they put it in a drawer among receipts and specimens of patent
medicines and left it there. And then, happy again, they returned to
their habitual untidiness and the daily routine of hard work and
endeavored to forget. They regarded it as a blessing that nature had
punished them only once. And when eventually they removed themselves to
a larger and more pretentious store they left a photograph of a little
wide-eyed girl among their debris and felt as though a weight had been
lifted from their shoulders.
If they had been able to watch the London newspapers, especially the
_Sketch_ and _Tatler_, they would have quivered at the sight of this
strange girl in many graceful attitudes and in the scantiest of costumes
as she appeared in almost weekly photographic studies, and they would
have gasped if they had presently read the glowing accounts of the
marriage of Ida McKenna to Captain Claude Elcho Larpent, nephew of Field
Marshal Viscount Risborough, at St. George's, Hanover Square. The
headings of these paragraphs had it that Society had once more made an
alliance with the stage, but the gushing paragraphs that came beneath
stated (how amazed the chemist would have been) that the bride came of
one of the best American families, her father being a famous scientist
whose country house was at Paterson, New Jersey, and her mother a
distant connection of the Russian Chancellor.
Ida Larpent took her place in English society as though to the manner
born. She became the beautiful Mrs. Larpent without turning a hair.
She ran a little house in Mayfair on her husband's excellent income as
though Mayfair had been her playground since childhood. She entertained
the younger set and a sprinkling of duchesses with all the insouciance
of minor royalty, and plunged her husband into debt in the same
cold-blooded way that she had run up bills in her native town, from
which on clear days one can see the Simelike unbelievable buildings of
the great city.
Claude Larpent was passionately in love with his beautiful and expensive
wife. With all the careless pride of a mere boy of twenty-six he gave
her the reins, and so long as she made some return for his love never
grumbled at her recklessness or her intimacy with men whom he, before
marriage, would not have touched with the end of a barge-pole. He
trusted her. She was his wife. She had chosen him from among all the
men who would eagerly have knelt at her feet. In his weakness he stood
lovingly by while she relentlessly ran him on the rocks and into
bankruptcy. But it was not until one bad night when he discovered by
accident that she had sold herself for diamonds to a most atrocious
vieux marcheur that he confessed himself broken, exchanged from his
crack regiment to the Houssa Police and disappeared to the West Coast of
Africa, the white man's grave. It was exactly three years after the
bells of St. George's had rung their merry peal that the obituary notice
in the London papers contained a few lines to the effect that Claude
Elcho Larpent had fallen a victim to black water fever. The truth was
that this foolish young man had died of whisky and a broken heart, and
had been buried in the bush mourned and respected by the sturdy little
men whom he had treated with that mixture of firmness and camaraderie
characteristic of the English officer. His widow, still in the first
flush of youth and beauty, was left penniless, but bejewelled, and in
the ordinary course of events,--men being awake to the fact that they
need not marry her,--came under the protection of a wealthy railway man
who planted her temporarily in a pleasant portion of Mayfair, rather
sarcastically named Green Street, Berkeley Square. The beautiful Mrs.
Larpent thereupon lost a certain amount of caste, but not very much.
Duchesses dropped her, but semi-society drank her wines without a twinge
and enjoyed many week-ends at her beautiful house on the banks of the
Thames near Henley. Younger sons and the stage herded about her,
accepting gladly enough her lavish hospitality. The only thing that Ida
Larpent had inherited from her father was thrift. And before the
railway magnate disappeared from his surroundings in an apoplectic fit,
she had managed to put by a large enough sum of money to bring her in
somewhere about six hundred pounds a year, and upon that, feeling the
need of a change of air and surroundings, she returned to America.
When Franklin met her first, during one of his brief visits to New York,
he found her very cosily ensconced in a tiny apartment, gracefully
furnished, over a dressmaker's shop in East Fifty-sixth Street, from
which, clothed to perfection, she drove forth nightly in her limousine
to dine at the best houses. She had come to the United States to catch a
husband. Her experience had taught her that a husband is a more
permanent institution than a protector. She was determined to marry
money. The need of it, in bulk, was essential to her comfort and peace
of mind. In order to do so, she lived on her capital, thus conveying
the impression that she was very well off. Time after time she could
have marched fairly rich young men off to church by their ears, but she
was very fastidious,--not so much in regard to them, as men, as to their
bank accounts. She didn't intend to make a second mistake. Then she met
Pelham Franklin at that sort of sham Bohemian supper at which all the
women wear diamonds and all the men are clean and civilized. She fell
in love with him before she found out who he was. His brown face and
outdoor manner and the air he had about him of not carrying a
superfluous ounce of flesh, his utter incompetency as a drawing-room
man, which was proved by his not paying her a single compliment or
saying anything personal, delighted her. She was sick of those others
who all looked alike and said the same things and counted for nothing.
Franklin came as a change. His masculinity appealed to her. For the
first time in her life passion stirred and her self-complacency was
shaken. Before the night was out she heard his name and gave thanks to
all her gods for putting him in her way. He came at the moment when her
money was running out and the greater part of her morning mail consisted
of demands for payment from impatient and long-suffering trades-people.
During the fortnight that Franklin remained in town she concentrated
upon him, using all her wiles to bring him up to the scratch. Malcolm
Fraser was not in town at that time, nor were any of the other men with
whom Franklin was on terms of intimate friendship. Feeling lonely and at
a rather loose end he saw a good deal more of Mrs. Larpent, under those
circumstances, than he would have done in normal conditions. He took
her to dinner at Sherry's and the Ritz, night after night, and was
delighted at her readiness to do the theatres with him. It was too
cold-blooded a business to see the plays alone. Several times, too, he
spent a late hour after supper in her charming little drawing-room
smoking and chatting. They knew many of the same people in London and
Paris. He flirted a little with her--certainly. Why not? Her beauty
was unique, her way of expressing herself quite brilliant and amusing,
and that air of regal mystery that was all about her piqued curiosity.
He had never the least intention of doing more than merely flirt, and
not being a lady's man and being therefore without conceit it never
occurred to him that his quick friendship could be misconstrued or his
frank admiration could possibly lead her to believe that he nourished
even the germ of an idea of following these pleasant evenings up with
anything serious. He went away under the impression that he would be
forgotten as quickly as he had been taken up, and was utterly and
blissfully unaware of the fact that Mrs. Larpent had fallen in love with
him. He would have roared with incredulous laughter at the mere
suggestion.
Thus things had been left when Franklin felt the call of the sea and
took Malcolm Fraser for a cruise in the yacht on which he spent the best
hours of his life. He wrote a little letter to Mrs. Larpent on the
morning he went out of town and thanked her warmly for her kindness and
"looked forward tremendously to seeing her directly he got back." Into
these few rather boyish and certainly sincere words Ida, making a most
uncharacteristic blunder in psychology, read what she most wanted to
read,--love, and, of course, eventually marriage. During his absence
she marked time impatiently, but with a new smile on her red lips and a
gentler manner towards those about her, keeping her tradesmen in a good
temper by throwing out tiny hints of impending good fortune. It was
solely to meet Franklin again that this sophisticated, ambitious,
luxury-loving, unscrupulous woman became a member of the Vanderdyke
house-party,--to see again the man who, alone among men, had touched her
heart and awakened her passion. Like a girl from a Convent school,
young and sweet and inarticulate, she went. Imagine her anger and
distress at finding on her arrival at the Vanderdyke barrack that she
was asked to add her congratulations to those of the family and their
friends on the marriage of Franklin and that "damn girl," as she called
her. Imagine it! The shock, the disappointment, the shattering of her
one good dream----
*IX*
When Franklin left the bedroom in which he had gone through the
strangest hour of his life, he went into the room which had been
allotted to him and from which some of his things had been taken, and
stood for a little while at an open window taking in long, deep breaths.
His mind was in too chaotic a state to permit him to think patiently of
going to sleep, and in the back of it, now that his anger had cooled,
there was a growing feeling of self-disgust at the way in which he had
treated Beatrix Vanderdyke. He was sorry that he had allowed himself to
be carried in front of a wave of extreme indignation and he told
himself, a little ruefully, that after all it wasn't for him to take the
law into his own hands. He called himself, with unusual sarcasm, an
egotist, an individualist, and cursed his vanity which rose up whenever
anyone attempted to make a fool of him, and was aghast to discover how
very little it took to make a man lose the effects and influence of
civilization.
And when he endeavored to look into the future that was staring him in
the face--the future all disturbed and upset by the unexpected entrance
into his life of the girl who had treated him merely as a pawn upon her
lightly considered chess-board, he found himself wholly unable to see
through the maze that stretched out in front of him. He was no longer
in the splendid position of a free lance. He was no longer able to pass
through his days unencumbered with any sort of responsibility. He saw
that he was to pay the full price for that moment of aberration during
which he had permitted himself to fall in with Beatrix's daringly
manufactured lie. It was with a feeling that gave him back something of
his self-respect that he realized that it was impossible to give Beatrix
away until he had her permission to do so. She had appealed to him as a
sportsman and it was as a sportsman, as a man who stuck to the rules of
whatever game he played, that he endeavored to report daily to the
particular god that he worshipped.
Sick of himself, sick of his room, sick of everything, he went out
presently into the passage,--a wide, dimly lit passage hung with old
masters and carpeted with Persian rugs which were beautiful and rare
enough to hang upon the walls of an art gallery,--and went slowly
down-stairs into the hall. For some moments he paced up and down this
deserted place asking himself how he was to kill the night. He had no
patience for books,--he very rarely read anything except technical
things on hunting and fishing,--but eventually he made his way to the
library, the nicest and most reasonable room in that uncomfortable,
luxurious house. He was aware immediately of the presence of someone
standing at the window. The moonlight fell on a dark head and a tall,
graceful figure. He turned up the lights and found himself looking into
the reproachful and rather sarcastic eyes of Ida Larpent.
She was still in the noticeably simple and very perfect dress that she
had worn at dinner,--a soft, black thing not cut slavishly to the
existing fashion, but made to suit her peculiar beauty and slender,
hipless lines. Cut down to the waist at the back, it seemed to retain
its place in front by a miracle. One large, star-shaped brooch studded
as closely with diamonds as a clear sky with stars was fastened between
her breasts, and jet beads glinted here and there about the graceful
skirt that hid her feet. A band of small pearls was placed like an
aureola round her head, from which hung one large insolent diamond just
where her hair was parted on her low forehead. She wore no rings.
She moved away from the window and leaned lightly against one of the
pillars, running her eyes slowly up and down Franklin's tall, wiry
figure. She might easily have been standing for an artist as the modern
representation of Lucretia Borgia.
"Well!" she said, with a just perceptible upward inflection of her
bell-like voice.
To Franklin she seemed to be symbolical of his lost freedom, the
unconscious reminder of the good days when he could go and come at will,
answer immediately to a whim and move to a fancy as a sail to a breeze.
During the course of that afternoon and evening he had not attempted to
do more than pass the time of day with her, and had forgotten, in the
sudden whirlpool into which he had been dragged by Beatrix, that he had
arranged to meet her under that roof to renew a very charming
friendship. It was now easy enough to see from her expression and
manner that he was to undergo a bad quarter-of-an-hour for his lack of
attention. He deeply regretted to have hurt her feelings but was not
sorry that he had gone into the room. If there was anything unpleasant
to be faced it was his habit to face it and get it over. He did not
suffer from moral cowardice.
"Well!" he said.
"I've just finished writing you a letter."
"That's very nice of you."
There was a kind of laugh. "I hope you'll think so after you've read
it."
"I'll read it now, if I may," Said Franklin, holding out his hand.
"You may as well." But she tore the letter into small pieces and
dropped them at her feet. "No. Why should I give you the pleasure of
seeing how much you've made me suffer?"
The word suffer and the unconcealed break in the woman's voice puzzled
and surprised Franklin. Was she acting? He saw no reason why she
should. It never entered into the very recesses of his mind that there
could be any sentiment on her part. Why should there be? "That
wouldn't give me any pleasure," he said, with a sort of boyish
sincerity.
She looked at him a little eagerly, saw that there was nothing in his
eyes that she needed, nodded two or three times and shrugged her
shoulders. It was a hard thing to be made to confess that this man who
was so desirable had merely passed a few hours with her for the lack of
a friend. A new thing, too, after her wide experience of men.
Nevertheless, she had run through the last of her remaining money. This
was no hour for pride. She stood in dire and urgent need of funds. It
was impossible for him to be her husband, but well within the range of
her ability to see that he became her banker.
"Did you know that I was in the library?" she asked, making one more
effort to prove herself wrong in her quick intuition. This was
probably, she told herself, a marriage of convenience.
"No."
"You just came in by accident?"
"Yes."
"I see. Well, then, as we're here and we're both obviously in no mood
for sleep, shall we while away the time with a little discussion on the
short memories of men,--some men?"
"Why not?" replied Franklin, and drew up a chair for her.
But Mrs. Larpent gave a sharp, eloquent gesture. The chair ought rightly
to have wheeled itself into the darkest corner. "I'll stand, thanks.
Oddly enough I feel volcanic like most women at the end of their tether
who have been chucked."
The abrupt, descriptive colloquialism came strangely from her. She was
so finished, so apparently fastidious. Also she spoke with the slight
drawl and affectation that some English people acquire after much
practice, and imagine to be smart.
"Chucked?" he echoed. "How? By whom?"
This gave Mrs. Larpent a double opportunity to get rid of her spleen and
chagrin in an outburst of hysteria and to work on Franklin's sympathies
by letting him see that she must have money or sell her jewels. It
didn't matter to her what he thought of her now.
"By you! By you!" she said, her voice all broken with emotion. "You
came into my life when I was most lonely, most in need of tenderness and
kind treatment and on the very edge of a crumbling cliff. I didn't
believe that you were playing the usual game with me. You didn't seem
to be that kind of man. I thought,--yes, even I, who have grappled with
life and am without much faith in human nature,--that you saw all that
is good and decent in me and answered to the love that you had set
alight in my heart. Why else, I asked myself, did you come day after
day and night after night, in a city reeking with people who would have
been eager to amuse you, and claim me in a loneliness that was almost
equal to mine? Why else did you let me see the best of yourself and
treat me with the respect that a man only shows to the woman whom he is
going to ask to be his wife? Most of the men I meet are different.
They only see in me an unattached woman living on a shoe-string, willing
enough to sell her beauty for cash. But in you I thought I saw honesty
and sincerity and chivalry, and whether you knew it or not you let me
wander into a fool's paradise and dream of a home and a great love and
peace. And on the strength of the little note you wrote before you
sailed I saw the promise of security from dunning creditors and hope
rising over my unhappy horizon. I blurt all this out now only because
I'm still suffering from the shock of finding you married. You must
forgive me."
She turned abruptly on her heel, with her hands over her face, and stood
once more in the window silvered by the moon. Even with those tears on
her face and that pain in her heart she was able to congratulate herself
on having made the speech of her life.
Franklin was appalled. His knowledge of women was as small as that of
most men whose lives are spent in the open. Of the Larpent type he was
wholly ignorant. He believed that she was telling the truth and her
confession, made with trembling lips and streaming eyes and a broken
voice, hurt him. He had never listened to anything so painful or so
horribly embarrassing. What could he do or say? How could he possibly
explain that her beauty had only made a skin-deep impression and that he
had only regarded her as a most delightful companion. And so he said
nothing. It was too difficult. He just remained standing with his
shoulders squared and his hands behind his back and willed that woman,
for God's sake, to stop crying and tell him what he could do to make
things easier for her. And the thing that he wished with all his soul
was that he was back on his yacht, with the clean night air brushing
across his face and the laughter of his intimate pals ringing in his
ears.
During the curious, uneasy moments that followed he let his eyes wander
about the huge room with its pseudo-Gothic ceiling and pillars, its
book-lined walls and its numerous cases of old Bibles and first
editions, collections of rare and wonderful bindings, and the assortment
of deep arm-chairs and silky rugs which gave it the appearance of a room
in a public library rescued from its cold formality by a lover of books,
who saw no reason why they should not be enjoyed in comfort. Only one
end of it was lit, and the rest was in shadow except for a shaft of
silver light that pierced one of the high windows and spilt itself on
the plinth of a pillar. He wondered what Mrs. Larpent would say next.
He hadn't missed her hint of the need of money. He felt more than ever
unhappy and uncomfortable. But on that point, at any rate, she could
count on his help, difficult as it would be to put it into practice.
Mrs. Larpent gave another curious little laugh, turned and came back.
Franklin glanced quickly at her. She moved closer and there was
something about her mouth and nostrils that showed him that he was right
in thinking that she had read his thoughts.
"What are you going to do about it?" she asked, taking advantage of the
light so that the softness and whiteness of her body should not be lost.
One of her smiles had never failed. She adopted it then. Even she
retained her optimism.
"What you say goes," said Franklin.
"You mean that, Pelham?" Two or three steps took her within arm's
reach. The light remained upon her. If this was merely a marriage of
convenience he might make a suggestion that would, at any rate, give her
a brief happiness.
"Of course. I only want you to--to tell me what I can do."
Optimism could not live under that suggestion, however generously meant
and delicately put, of payment by cheque. Nevertheless, Ida Larpent sat
down. It was bitter to see that her love was not to be returned, but
good to feel that her diminished bank account was likely to be
substantially refreshed. She felt like a woman who had swum out of her
depth, lost her nerve, made a mighty effort and feels at last the sand
against her knees. Metaphorically she drew herself wearily out of the
water and with a renewed sense of confidence felt the warm sun upon her
limbs.
There was something detestably cold-blooded in all this, and Franklin
hated it. He had hitherto managed to keep himself free from women.
They interfered with his pursuits. Why fate should have gone suddenly
out of its way to plunge him into the midst of this woman stuff, as he
impatiently called it, was more than he could understand.
He looked down at Ida Larpent. She was sitting in a low, red-leather
chair,--the sort of thing that is supposed to belong to a room inhabited
by men. Her amazing hair, as black as the wing of a crow, had been
touched here and there with the tongs. It framed a face as white as
marble,--a curiously small oval face,--with eyes remarkably wide apart
and large and luminous; a small aristocratic nose, with sensitive
nostrils which indicated passion as well as impatience, and a mouth
whose lips were full and artificially red. Her small round white
shoulders were more daringly bare than those of any woman he had seen,
and her two fine hands looked like those in the old French pictures
which hang in those houses in Paris that were spared by the
Sans-Culottes. Indeed, the whole figure, from head to foot, looked like
an oil painting of a period in French history when aristocracy had
reached its acme. As a companion for a man of enforced leisure and
unlimited means and no ties she had everything in her favor, physically
and mentally. As Franklin stood looking at her, however, with all the
admiration that was due to her, he found himself unconsciously comparing
her,--this exotic--this most exquisite of rare orchids,--with the fresh,
buoyant, healthy, clean, proud, spoilt girl who called herself his wife.
"Will you be honest with me?" she asked.
"I haven't got much to bless myself with except that," he answered.
"Were you married when you came to my apartment in March?"
"No."
"Well, that's something," she said. "When _were_ you married?"
"Does that matter?"
"Perhaps not. The fact remains. I'm naturally interested and curious,
so tell me this: Was it a sudden infatuation for that child who rules
the roost here,--a sudden burst of sentimentality that doesn't seem part
of you, or--what? I think I have the right to ask."
"You have," said Franklin. "It was all very sudden. That's all I can
tell you about it."
"I see. And now that you are tied up and more than ever under the
microscopic eye of the public--what?"
"Well--what?"
"Are you going to be a little careless in the matter of marriage vows,
or carry them out to the letter?" She stretched herself a little and
smiled up at him, still fighting for the dream that had made her for a
little while so young and gentle and unworldly.
"I asked you to believe that I am honest," said Franklin, who had never
in his life been so puzzled as to a choice of words.
And then Mrs. Larpent got up. "I see," she said, and held out her hand.
"Well, I, at any rate, have not beaten about the bush, and you have
spared my feelings with very real kindness. And so good night!"
"Good night!" said Franklin.
"You can think of nothing else that you would like to say?"
Franklin had something else to say,--the question of a certain sum of
money. But, like a horse brought nose up to a high jump, he refused,
shook his head, and immediately added, "Yes. I'm awfully sorry about
all this. Please accept my humble apologies."
Mrs. Larpent bowed, but the gracious smile on her lips was contradicted
by her eyes. They were full of pain and anger. And while she still
held Franklin's hand she registered an oath that she would leave no
stone unturned to make him forget his honesty before many months had
passed and lead her willingly into a new and beautiful dream.
"How long are you staying here?" he asked.
"I'm leaving to-morrow," she said. "It isn't awfully amusing to go
through the jealous agonies of hell."
"I'll write to your apartment," said Franklin, stumbling a little over
the words.
"Thank you." She took his meaning and was certain of his generosity.
He watched her go, moving with a sort of medieval dignity, an almost
uncanny suggestion of having stepped out of an old frame to return to it
before the finger of dawn began to rub away the night.
*X*
It was eleven o'clock before Beatrix opened her eyes to a new day. For
two hours Mrs. Lester Keene had hovered about the room like an elderly
beetle, settling here and there for a moment or two and then continuing
her aimless and irresolute flitting. Two or three times she had stood
over the sleeping girl and gazed with a sort of amazement at a face that
looked strangely childlike, with long lashes like fans upon her cheeks
and lips a little parted. Then she would take a magazine to one of the
windows, read a few lines here and there without taking in their meaning
and gaze at the illustrations intently without knowing what they
intended to represent. The truth was that the loyal and well-meaning
lady was not herself. Her constitution, not of a very sound order, had
been almost shattered by her experience the night before. She had kept
watch and had seen Franklin leave the bedroom shortly after he had
evicted her from it, and then, with inexpressible relief and
thankfulness, gone to bed, but the terrible anxiety had told upon her.
Hitherto she had never been called upon to undergo more nerve-strain
than is endured by a hen in a well-regulated chicken run, seeing life
and adventure and passion only through the eyes of her favorite
novelists. She had, however, slept very little and given orders that
she should be called at half-past seven, so that she might go early to
Beatrix and give her the benefit of her advice. She still remained
under the impression, poor little lady, that her advice was of the
greatest assistance to the wilful, headstrong girl, even though she
never made the merest pretence to follow it.
Beatrix awoke, finally, as a flower opens to the sun. "Oh! Hello,
Brownie," she said, "ever-faithful! Heigh-ho! I've had such a lovely
sleep. All in one piece without a dream. I feel about fifteen." She
stretched herself lazily and put her arms behind her head. "Will you
please tell Helene that I want a cup of tea at once,--at once, Brownie.
If it doesn't come in five minutes it won't be of any use to me. You're
a dear old thing to bother." She gave a little musical yawn as the
fluffy-minded woman hurried to the maid's room and gave the order with
that sort of mysterious urgency which is connected with embassies in
moments of national crises and theatres during a dress rehearsal.
When she returned, which she did at once,--her mind being all astir with
curiosity,--she saw that Beatrix was sitting up in bed with her hands
clasped about her knees, her eyebrows meeting in a frown, her lips set
tightly and her eyes full of anger. Mrs. Keene had never seen this
expression on the girl's face before. If she had heard Franklin's
parting remark she would have known the reason for it.
"It's very late, dear," said Mrs. Keene; "after eleven, and all the
people have been rehearsing in the gardens for an hour."
"Oh, well, it's a charming morning. It will do them good. I wonder if
the matinee idol has shaved himself! I understand that they don't do
that thing until about four o'clock in the afternoon." And then she
began to laugh, more to hide her feelings than anything else.
Not even to Brownie did she intend to show what she felt about the
episode of the previous night, or how deeply she resented the
humiliation to which Franklin had subjected her. Never in all her life
would she forget that, or forgive,--never.
"We certainly may be said to be living on the top of a volcano, Brownie.
No monotony about life just now, is there?" And then she suddenly
slipped out of bed, alert and full of a new idea, "Go down and see
what's happening," she added. "Be my secret agent and come back with a
full report of what Franklin has been doing since breakfast. Be very
discreet and smile,--smile all the time, bearing in mind that you are
the closest friend of a girl who has just been happily married."
"Oh, my dear," cried Mrs. Keene, "don't talk like that! Please, please
don't!"
Just for one instant Beatrix allowed her companion to get a glimpse of
the strain under which she was laboring. "How else should I talk?" she
said, sharply. "Do you think I'm going about with my tail down like a
whipped dog----? Run along, Brownie, run along like a good little soul
and do this thing for me. In the meantime I'll get up. I feel in my
bones that things are going to happen to-day. Thank Heaven I'm on the
top of my form, ready for anything and everybody, even Franklin. We do
manage to live, you and I, don't we?"
She escorted the amiable, fluttering woman to the door and closed it
upon her, quite certain that she would return with full information. If
there was one thing in which Mrs. Lester Keene was really proficient it
was in spying out the lay of the land.
While bathing in the pool whose hideous Byzantine decorations were never
more inappropriate than when they made a background for that sweet, slim
form, Beatrix ran her mind over the position. She felt convinced that
Franklin, angry and disgusted as he was, would continue to play up until
he had her permission to give away the game. She knew a sportsman when
she saw one. But she knew also, instinctively, that he was a poor liar,
and if,--as was quite likely,--Aunt Honoria and her mother had been
pumping him during the morning as to when the marriage took place and
for the other details of this great romance, he had probably made a very
poor showing. There might have been inconvenient questions asked by her
father as to settlements, and so forth. If so, she could imagine how
badly Franklin had come out without her at his side to prompt and evade
and put tangents into the conversation. She was anxious and owned to
it.
When Mrs. Lester Keene returned to the bedroom, slipping into it with an
air of almost comic mystery, she was surprised to find Beatrix fully
dressed and swinging up and down the room impatiently like a boy.
"What news on the Rialto?" she cried, with a touch of burlesque in her
voice.
There was a very serious and even scared look on Brownie's face. "My
dear," she said, "listen! I fear that the worst has happened." In a
sort of way, Mrs. Keene reveled in the drama of it all. "Mr. Franklin
was the first guest in the breakfast-room. He was very quiet and short
with the servants. He drank two cups of coffee and ate hardly anything.
He was joined on the veranda by your father and they walked up and down
together talking earnestly for thirty-six minutes. They were then sent
for by Aunt Honoria. They have been closeted----"
"Closeted is excellent," said Beatrix. "Well done, Brownie! I thought
so," she added mentally, with a sharp intake of breath.
"They have been in Miss Honoria's room,--your mother was there
too,--until about ten minutes ago, when Mr. Franklin came out alone,
hurried downstairs and out on the veranda, kicking one of the cane
chairs on his way into the garden. My dear, God only knows what took
place in that interview! Your father, Aunt Honoria and your mother are
still talking. I don't understand--I really utterly fail to comprehend
how you can stand there with that smile on your face, being in the midst
of what seems to me to be a very terrible situation."
Beatrix whistled a little tune to keep up her courage, sat on the edge
of a heavily carved table and swung her legs. "Well, what would you
have me do?" she asked, with consummate coolness. "Stand on my head,
wail like one of the fat ladies in _Tristan and Isolde_, or sink back on
the sofa in an attitude of Early Victorian despair?" She got up and
walked to one of the open windows and stood for a moment in the sun as
though to get a little necessary warmth and sympathy. Then she went
back to the table and looked rather eagerly and girlishly at her
altogether useless but very faithful friend. "What d'you think it all
means, Brownie dear?"
Mrs. Lester Keene gave the question her serious consideration. She was
one of those women who looked most ludicrous when most worried. "If you
ask me," she said, "I believe that Mr. Franklin has given you away and
told the truth."
This answer came as rather a shock to Beatrix, but only for a moment.
"Well, I don't," she said. "Shall I tell you why?"
"Indeed I wish you would."
"If Franklin had given me away he wouldn't have kicked that cane chair."
Brownie gave another gesture of despair. "If only you had it in you to
take things seriously."
"Seriously! You dear old thing, I'm most serious. I have every reason
to be. But that was a fine piece of deduction and my spirits have gone
up with a rush. I'm now going to find Franklin, and I'll bet you a
diamond bracelet that he has stood by me like a Trojan and is as angry
as a caged hawk. Now, the all-important point is this: What hat shall I
wear,--a simple, naive, garden thing, or this sophisticated effort? I
must please his eye."
"Wear the smart hat," said Mrs. Keene.
Beatrix wore the other. That almost went without saying.
She sang on her way down-stairs. She chose Santuzza's song from
_Cavalleria_, which she ragged in the most masterly manner. She did
this to give the impression, to anyone who might hear her, of
light-heartedness. Her lithe, young, white-clad figure was reflected by
many mirrors as she passed. She made sure that none of her people were
in the hall, and then darted out to the veranda to look for Franklin.
The members of the house-party had dispersed to pass the morning away in
tennis and with the rehearsals for the pastoral. She could see a number
of people under the trees to the left. She swung round the veranda,
walking on the balls of her feet like a young Diana, singing as she
went, but darting quick, anxious glances to the right and left. There
was no sign of Franklin. She was about to make her way through the Dutch
garden, all aflame with flowers, to the summer-house which overlooked
the Sound shining beneath the sun, when a footman came out carrying one
of her mother's petulant spaniels.
"Do you happen to know where Mr. Franklin is?" she asked, pulling up
short.
"Yes, madam."