From facts later learned, Dolores was able at this point to shift the
viewpoint of her earth story from performer to audience. The incidents
of that first morning’s payment in service of her financial debt she
presented through the eyes of John Calvin Cabot, sole scion of a
seventh generation of New Yorkers and a financier who, through his
inherent aversion to idleness, was rated many times a millionaire.
* * * * *
The Cabots were late motoring down town, having been detained at
their upper Fifth Avenue home by a domestic contretemps. The distress
of it still hardened the lines of the man’s somewhat grim-featured
face. Through the downward rush of many blocks, he pondered the first
personal favor he had considered asking his wife in years.
“Catherine,” he said at last, “I wish you’d come with me to some toy
shop and help in the selection.”
Catherine Cabot glanced into the limousine mirror, hung near the
vase of her favorite yellow orchids, “to double,” as she put it,
their beauty. She looked a good deal like the orchids, golden-haired,
delicate of outline, fragile of texture, flower-eyed. John glanced
into the mirror, too, rather than straight at her. During their ten
years together he had come to prefer the reflection of his wife to the
original. It was softer.
“My day is so full. John, you order any toys you like. Have them sent
by special messenger.”
“You don’t get my idea, Catherine. Jack would be touched and perhaps
punished more than in any other way for his outbreak this morning, if
you selected a birthday present for him yourself.”
“Can’t you tell him that I did, anyhow?”
“I could, yes. But I won’t. I expected you’d suggest that lie.”
“_John!_ I sometimes think Jackie inherited his viciousness straight
from you.”
A moment the man considered this effective, if unconvincing reproach of
the mother of his only child.
“I wish you could feel some of my indignation over that statement,”
he made quiet comment. “Now and then you have caprices for the most
unique frankness I ever have noticed in a woman. Tell me, do you have
no yearnings whatever over our unfortunate boy?”
She looked interested, as if at a compliment.
“I pride myself on my frankness. Of course any woman has a natural
affection for her own child. But, as you know, I am a beauty lover. It
is not my fault that I can’t love Jack as I should if he looked like
me, or even you.”
“Perhaps, Catherine, he inherited something from you. Perhaps he
also is a beauty lover. Should you consider the suggestion that the
‘viciousness’ you accredit to me may be in him an extreme case of
nerves--of a suffering over his deformity older than you’d expect at
eight years?”
She was thumbing the pages of her morocco-bound engagement book and
omitted to reply.
With a sadness too complete for contempt, he added: “You often have
wondered where Jack’s ugliness comes from. I’ll tell you--from the
ill-favored spirit of our marriage.”
Catherine looked startled. Then she looked indignant. After that, with
a sigh of long-sufferance, she looked very sweet.
In a voice gentle as his had been--“Since you take my refusal so hard
as to resort to your semi-occasional marital recriminations, _dear_
John, I’ll yield. I will go with you to the toy-shop, although probably
I’ll have to break a luncheon engagement in consequence. You can’t ever
say that I am unwilling to do my part. Just a minute until I see what
I have on to-day.”
Soon and coaxingly she glanced up at him. Her upper lip shortened over
mouse-like teeth which gleamed, sharp and white, between their crimson
guards. Even with the husband who claimed to know her, Catherine never
was chary of her ingenuous, confiding smiles.
“It’s your turn to make a concession. On our way to the toy-shop,
stop in with me at a showing of underwear at Seff’s. It lasts only
from twelve to one and I’ll miss it if I go further down town. Even
puritanical you may be amused. Seff is rather sensational in his
advertising, but he does import lovely things. Here is the invitation
for the latest of his shows. Do you mind?”
She handed him a card, engraved and dictioned in the very best form.
She looked rather pleased than otherwise at the manner of her husband’s
consent.
“How like you, Catherine, to make your concessions C. O. D.! For Jack’s
sake, I shall try not to ‘mind.’”
A flutter of interest greeted the Cabot’s appearance on the top floor
of the lingerie establishment, for no more discussed pair trod the
made-up scenery of the ways and by-ways of Gotham’s rich.
Catherine, despite the irregularity of that short upper lip and the
tortured, metallic brilliancy of the yellow of her hair and the
demand for public notice made by her clothes, often was pronounced
the most beautiful matron “among those present”; at least, always was
conspicuous. To-day her perquisitory air of excelling even her splendid
mink coat won her distinction in the fashionable gathering of many
women and a few men.
John--as his wife was given to explaining--she had married for his
looks. She called him the “handsomest unhandsome man” she knew. Tall,
clean-shaved, black-haired, with dark eyes of a singular intensity,
he wore a manner as unpretentious as his clothes. This was heightened
to-day by an air of detachment from the enforced situation.
Above greetings and introductions, tintillated comment over the setting
of Seff’s top floor. Arranged as a miniature auditorium, its rows of
ashwood chairs faced a small stage, equipped with footlights. Wrought
on the gray velvet curtain that concealed the exact nature of this
adventure in advertising was the title--
THE LITTLE OLD LADY OF LORRAINE
At the twelfth chime of a concealed clock, an orchestral whisper
of the _Marseillaise_ caused the audience, creatures of habit, to
seek their places. John Cabot, although offended as always by the
commercialization of patriotism in cafés and music halls and the like,
stood in front of the prominent chairs to which an usher had led his
wife and himself. Those about him also stood, if with treasonable
sighs; as the music died away relievedly sank into their chairs.
The curtain parted. Vincent Seff appeared and lifted the right of his
artistic hands.
“Patrons--may I say friends?” he began when their mannerly palm-patting
had ceased.
The silence of curiosity greeted his hesitant, yet pleasantly delivered
announcement. Only Mrs. Hutton understood his need of courage, his
desire for pseudo-sincerity. Virulently though she appeared to
condemn him, she evidently wished him to succeed in this, his monster
imposition. She had poured the stiff drink which lubricated his voice
to that especial smoothness. She stood in the improvised wings, an
expression which would have defied a mental analyst hardening her face,
as she listened to the delivery of the brief speech which she had
helped him prepare.
“Always have we admired the lingerie from Lorraine, you and I. But how
many of you have stopped to wonder whose hands are responsible for its
textile exquisiteness, its chic and the needlework that makes it more
lovely than any other in the world? With the many changes which war
has wrought, came the fear that our American fair would be reduced to
less attractive underwear. Imagine, then, my joy when there arrived
recently, unsolicited and in trust, a shipment from my little old lady
of Lorraine.”
The speaker smiled upon the interested faces below in humid,
self-deprecatory appeal.
“The pluck as well as the embroidery of this maker was, all through the
war, a marvel to the trade. For weeks her home was under enemy fire
and the grand dame herself in constant danger of her devoted life. But
alone in her cellar workshop she plied her needle as industriously as
the _Boches_ laid down their shells. Such heroism swells the heart and
chokes the voice.”
After a brief substantiating pause, the shopman continued, as if
glorying in his show of emotion.
“Why did she do it? Not for herself, surely, since the value of
her work would have counted little against the loss of her life.
Patrons--friends--_she did it for France_. Every mite that she
earned was tossed into the coffers of her country. And now that the
reconstruction period is on, she still finds work for her withered
hands to do--still not for herself--but for the war orphans of the
French. Every cent which this shipment yields will be spent on children
whom the great struggle has deprived of their natural protectors. Not
even a commission will be subtracted. No price has been set upon the
things which I am about to show you. I feel that they are priceless. In
the name of that little old lady of Lorraine I shall give them to you
for what you offer and have no fear for the net results. To show them
from boxes on my counters--the mere thought has seemed unworthy the
trust placed in me. Will you try to like the more unique method which I
have devised?”
Bowing deeply and repeatedly in response to perfunctory applause,
Vincent Seff backed from view. Orchestral whispers of the _Marche
Lorraine_ accompanied a flurry of exclamation. The gray velvet curtain
parted; lifted.
The set was a bedchamber. Through a half-open door showed the
suggestion of a tiled bathroom. Another door and the two windows were
closed. Once the eyes became accustomed to the indeterminate light,
they made out rare hangings and furniture that looked to wear the stamp
of Louis XIV. Beneath the satin coverlet of the bed, an elongated lump
suggested a human figure asleep. Upon one pillow a lace cap indicated
rather than covered a mass of murky hair.
For minutes the orchestral rendition of Schumann’s _Traumerei_ was
the only action of the piece. In time the pantomime of a morning’s
awakening began--a shudder of the coverlet, a stretching of legs
beneath and rounded arms above. The face which uplifted from its
background of locks and lace suggested a loathful emergence from
dreams. With some degree of energy a hand reached out and pressed a
bell. That accomplished, the luxurious sleeper slipped beneath the
eider-down and again drowsed off.
The entrance of a soft-treading, black-garbed, middle-aged maid brought
diversion. Her lips moved in a supposed good-morning. She drew up the
window blinds, flooding the room with light. Her disappearance into the
bathroom was followed by the plash of water in a tub.
Her simulation of annoyance on returning to the bedside, to find the
dreamer reclaimed, was a nice histrionic bit. She reminded; urged;
finally shook. At last the lady of lethargy, smiling deliciously,
aroused to a sitting posture. The thrown coverlet bared two rosy feet
for the enclosure of satin mules. She deserted the nest of the night,
crossed the room front stage and stood with arms uplifted as an aid to
her yawns.
The spotlight found her some seconds before the maid could throw over
her a bathrobe of silk so pliant that it might have been drawn through
a bracelet.
Inhalations and forward-leanings moved the audience.
Indeed, there was cause for comment. The daring of Seff in his
presentation, the novelty of the crêpe sleeping-gown which, innocent of
_filet_ or ribbons, depended solely upon its Empire lines and girdling
silken cord--even the type of the model was rare.
Pretty of face beyond question, with a luminous sort of pallor, red
lips delicately full and purplish, child-wide eyes, she stood revealing
through the sheer a body both slender and rounded. Discussions of
her as frank as they were low-pitched proved that the pantomime was
“taking” from the start.
John Cabot was of the few who suppressed remark, but none watching him
could have doubted his interest.
Catherine curved an amused smile at him.
“_Et tu, Brute_,” she murmured.
At first from natural endowment and later from deliberate effort,
John always had believed in the virtue of women until compelled to
disbelieve. To-day he was studying neither the exquisite, hand-stitched
garment nor the “points” of the manikin who wore it.
Had he really seen lines of suffering at the corners of that smiling
mouth? Had he imagined a look of distress in eyes which momentarily had
met, but now evaded his? He was no sentimentalist. Yet he wondered.
Vincent Seff, from a chair at the far right of the first row, looked
entertained by his own entertainment. He sat slouched forward, knees
crossed, elbow on them, chin in palm, eyes up-gazing. A flush was on
his rather anaemic skin. Occasionally his cheeks twitched in an odd,
carefully controlled smirk. He nodded, now and then, as if well pleased.
John, glancing toward the shopman, saw the tip of his tongue appear and
wipe both lips. About Seff, too, he wondered.
From the wings, Mrs. Hutton watched all--the play, the “house,” the man
who had conceived and perpetrated the coup and the newspaper reporters
upon whom he depended to give it city-wide circulation. She, however,
did not wonder about Seff. Only too well she understood why he was off
guard at the moment, showing tendencies which, ordinarily, his policy
would have concealed.
She did not wonder, no. But she feared for him as much as, with a
reaction that crushed the fear, she hotly, contemptuously resented him.
As she studied the look fixed upon the girl whom he had chosen at first
glance from a room full of attractive applicants, almost did she hate
him. The chains of the hideous relationship which shackled together him
and her seemed to clank as she turned from his unconscious pantomime to
that which he had foreplanned.
The playlet proceeded.
The model trailed her bath robe to the door of the tiled room, there
to throw it off and disappear within. Presumedly she plunged into her
tub. At any rate, her next appearance, although fleeting, enhanced that
impression. Just a glimpse of her was caught, as the maid pushed wider
the door to supply a bath towel, but a glimpse that brought gasps from
the audience sharp as though they, too, had taken a cold plunge.
With hair twisted in a Grecian knot atop her head, she showed for the
brief moment before the door was closed, garbed only in the flimsiest
of silken undervests. By comparison she looked amply clad when, some
seconds later, she reëntered the bedroom, stockinged, slippered and
girdled, her outer garment a confection of the chemise persuasion
which laid claim to modesty only in its blush hue. The length lack of
this costume was remedied by the maid. After a chase whose obvious
object was further to show the cut and texture of the display, the
woman succeeded in noosing the head of her charge with a hemstitched
petticoat.
Upon the door sounded a knock of that portentiousness met only on
the stage. In effective dismay, the manikin paused front stage,
the spotlight obligingly following her example. The maid, moved by
belated prudery, scurried to a closet, from which, after a search
whose duration would not have recommended her either for system or
dispatch, she emerged with a negligee that matched the morning set.
This she draped about her young mistress and stood off to admire with a
deliberation accented by repetitions of the portentious knock.
When the door at last was opened, expectation of the unusual was
gainsaid by the man-servant who laid several ribbon-bedizened boxes
upon the couch and departed. Mistress and maid became animated by
curiosity. The parcels were undone and their contents examined--a dozen
sets of lingerie only less lovely than the one worn by the model in
that they were less attractively displayed.
These still lay about the room on chairs, tables and bed when,
at entertainment’s end, Vincent Seff himself appeared before the
footlights. His face was noticeably flushed, his voice thicker than
before in his invitation that all ascend the stage and personally
inspect the shipment from Lorraine.
If applause meant appreciation, he must have been gratified. And, in
fact, the tribute was sincere. The hour’s advertising whimsy had been
amusing and artistic. Commendatory chatter lifted as the spectators
disturbed their chairs.
John Cabot was preoccupied by an analysis of the look seen on the face
of the master of ceremonies, a look which had intensified as Seff
studied, not so much the piece as the star. Since a certain incidental
which the financier had noticed, the elaborate exhibition had become
offensive to him.
In the manikin’s small tussle over the adjustment of her
petticoat, just when she had been laughing with most abandon, two
somethings--gleaming, small yet large in suggestion--had dropped from
her eyes and been absorbed by the crêpe.
That she could weep for shame, while successfully playing her
frolicsome part, meant a great deal. Many young girls might have wept
before entering upon such a career. Most could be imagined as weeping
afterward. But to realize and suffer enough for tears in what evidently
was an initial step--Although Catherine often had told John that he was
losing his sense of humor, nobody could have declared him deficient in
vision.
He was recalled to the immediate present by the lifted voice of his
wife addressing Seff.
“I will give five hundred dollars,” she was saying, “for the set
shown on the model. The things are exquisite and the charity deserves
response.”
“My _dear_ Mrs. Cabot!” The shopman over-accented that familiarity
which the lofty seem so to appreciate from traffic-policemen, waiters,
hotel clerks and the like. “The identical set is yours. I thank you
from my heart and from the hearts of those orphans of France.”
“I’ll take them with me,” stipulated Catherine. “Have the box put in my
car, please. And, Seff, I am in something of a hurry.”
The crispness of her conclusion was like frost on a sunlit window pane.
The merchant showed himself nipped by it.
“I’ll attend to your order at once, Mrs. Cabot.”
Disregarding the importunities of less prominent would-be purchasers,
he hurried back to the stage.
“Mary--_Mary_!” His voice was pitched several notes above its wonted
mellifluence.
Mrs. Hutton appeared.
“Take charge out here, Mary,” he directed. “Have the ladies step up and
examine the lot. Every garment has the inimitable chic attained only
by the French, and the sizes vary, so that---- _You_ know, Mary. Take
anything that is offered. Such patrons aren’t going to fail our lady of
Lorraine.”
Far too elated was he to notice the composite of his chief aide’s
expression as she observed his uneven manner, his flushed face and
the glitter of his eyes. In the same thought, she sneered, pitied and
suspected. She turned to attend the gathering patrons.
Seff had not noticed, but another had. John Cabot had followed to the
stage and now stood contemplating the closed door that gave upon the
suppositious bathroom. Through it the shopman had disappeared. A mental
reminder that the whole circumstance was doubtless gross chicanery and,
at the worst, none of his affair, seemed somehow dampened by his memory
of those two small, enlightening somethings which he had seen drip from
the eyes of a laughing girl. From within he could hear fragments in
Seff’s thick tones.
“A hit.... Five hundred for the set you adorn.... Let me help, you
dream.... No time--she’s in a hurry.... I _will_.... Hush, dear heart,
they’ll hear you.”
Ensued a duet of his chuckles and gasped protests in a softer voice.
The end unmistakably was a scuffle.
John turned away, disagreeably impressed. Many of the fashionables had
ascended the stage, where Mrs. Hutton was offering the Seff confections
for sale. He advised himself that he must be imagining the alert turn
of the forewoman’s head toward the closed door and the annoyance that
falsified her smile. Then he flouted the advice. He didn’t imagine--_he
saw_. The woman _was_ alert and annoyed.
The conclusion was substantiated. Sounds that might have been laughter
or sobs percolated through the key-hole. Rasped gutterals interrupted,
plead, threatened. There followed a rushing sound and a thump against
the inside of the door.
John recrossed the stage. As he hesitated, he saw Mrs. Hutton drop the
garment under discussion and approach him.
Next moment a scream rent all uncertainty.
The most cynical scarcely could have mistaken the cry for anything
but one of terror, even without the words--intense, jumbled,
regardless--that translated it.
“No.... _No_.... I hate you.... Father, help me--_save me_!”
Before Mrs. Hutton could force the resisting handle of the door, John
Cabot had put his shoulder against the panel and broken the lock.