Exactly at this minute Rashleigh Allerton was standing outside Miss
Walbrook's door, glancing up and down Fifth Avenue and over at the
Park. It was the hour after luncheon when pedestrians become numerous.
For his purpose they could not be very numerous; they must be
reasonably spaced apart.
And already a veritable stream of women had begun to flow down the
long, gentle slope, while a few, like fish, were stemming the current
by making progress against it. None of them was his "affair." Young,
old, short, tall, blond, brunette, they were without exception of the
class indiscriminately lumped as ladies. Since you couldn't go to the
devil because you had married a lady, even on the wild hypothesis that
one of these sophisticated beings would without introduction or
formality marry him, it would be better not to let himself in for the
absurdity of the proposal. When there was a break in the procession,
he darted across the street and made his way into the Park.
Here there was no one in sight as far as the path continued without a
bend. He was going altogether at a venture. Round the curve of the
woodland way there might swing at any second the sibyl who would point
his life downward.
He was aware, however, that in sibyls he had a preference. If she was
to send him to the devil, she must be of the type which he qualified
as a "drab." Without knowing the dictionary meaning of the word, he
felt that it implied whatever would contrast most revoltingly with
Barbara Walbrook. Seeing with her own eyes to what she had driven him,
her heart would be wrung. That was all he asked for, the wringing of
her heart. It might be a mad thing for him to punish himself so
terribly just to punish her, but he was mad anyhow. Madness gave him
the satisfaction which some men got from thrift, and others from
cleverness. He would keep the vow with which he had slipped out of
Miss Walbrook's drawing room. It was all that life had left for him.
That was, he wouldn't pick and choose. He would take them as they
came. He had not stipulated with himself that she must be a "drab." It
was only what he hoped. She must be the first woman he met who would
marry him. Age, appearance, refinement, vulgarity were not to be
considered. Picking and choosing on his part would only take his
destiny out of the hands of Fate, where he preferred that it should
lie.
Had any one passed him, he would have seemed the more perturbed
because of his being so well-dressed. He was one of the few New
Yorkers as careful of appearances as many Londoners. With the finish
that comes of studied selection in hat, stick, and gloves, as well as
all small accessories of the costliest, he might have been going to or
coming from a wedding.
He was imposing, therefore, to a short, stout, elderly woman with whom
he suddenly found himself face to face as the path took a sharp sweep
to the south. The shrubs which had kept them hidden from each other
gave place here to open stretches of lawn. When Allerton paused and
lifted his hat, the woman naturally paused, too.
She was a red-faced woman crowned with a bonnet of the style
introduced by Mrs. Langtry in 1878, but worn on this occasion some
degrees off center. On her arm she carried a flat basket of which the
contents, decently covered with a towel, might have been freshly
laundered shirts. Being stopped by a gentleman of Allerton's
impressiveness and plainly suffering expression, her face grew
motherly and sympathetic.
"Madam, I wish to ask if you'll marry me?"
Even a dull brain couldn't fail to catch words hammered out with this
force of precision. The woman didn't wait to have them repeated.
Dropping her basket as it was, she took to flight. Flight was the
word. A modern Atalanta of Wellesley or Bryn Mawr might have envied
the chamois leaps which took the good creature across the grass to the
protection of a man with a lawn-mower.
Allerton couldn't pause to watch her, for a new sibyl was advancing.
To his disgust rather than not, she was young and pretty, a nursemaid
pushing a baby-cart into which a young man of two was strapped. While
far more likely to take him than the stout old party still skipping
the greensward like a mountain roe, she would be much less plausible
as a reason for going to the evil one. But a vow was a vow, and he was
in for it.
His approach was the same as on the previous occasion. Lifting his hat
ceremoniously, he said with the same distinctness of utterance,
"Madam, I wish to ask if you'll marry me?"
The girl, who had paused when he did, leaned on the pusher of her
go-cart, studying him calmly. Chewing something with a slow, rotary
movement of the lips and chin, she broke the action with a snap before
quite completing the circle, to begin all over again. "Oh, you do, do
you?" was her quiet response.
"If you please."
She studied him again, with the same semi-circular motion of the jaw.
She might have been weighing his proposal.
"Say, is this one of them club initiation stunts, or have you just got
a noive?"
"Am I to take that as a yes or a no?"
"And am I to take you as one of them smart-Alecks, or a coily-headed
nut?"
He saw a way out. "I'm generally considered a curly-headed nut."
"Then it's me for the exit-in-case-of-fire, so ta-ta." She laughed
back at him over her shoulder. "Wish you luck with your next."
But fate was already on him in another form. A lady of fifty or
thereabouts was coming up the path, refined, sedate, mistress of
herself, the one type of all others most difficult to accost. All the
same he must do it. He must keep on doing it till some one yielded to
his suit. The rebuffs to which he had been subjected did no more than
inflame his will.
Approaching the new sibyl with the same ceremoniousness, he repeated
the same words in the same precise tone. The lady stood off, eyed him
majestically through a lorgnette, and spoke with a force which came
from quietude.
"I know who you are. You're Rashleigh Allerton. You ought to be
ashamed with a shame that would strike you to the ground. I'm a friend
of Miss Marion Walbrook's. I'm on my way to see her and shall _not_
mention this encounter. We work on the same committee of the League
for the Suppression of Men's Clubs. The lamentable state in which I
see you convinces me once more of the need of our work, if our men are
to become as we hope to see them. I bid you a good afternoon."
With the dignity of a queen she passed on and out of sight, leaving
him with the sting of a whiplash on his face.
But the name of Miss Walbrook, connected with that of the League which
was her pet enthusiasm for the public weal, only served as an
incitement. He would go through with it now at any cost. By nightfall
he would be at police-headquarters for insulting women, or he would
have found a bride.
Walking on again, the path was clear before him as far as he could
see. Having thus a few minutes to reflect, he came to the conclusion
that his attacks had been too precipitate. He should feel the ground
before him, leading the sibyl a little at a time, so as to have her
mentally prepared. There were methods of "getting acquainted" to which
he should apply himself first of all.
But getting acquainted with the old Italian peasant woman, bowed
beneath a bundle, who was the next he would have to confront, being
out of the question, he resolved to side-step destiny by slipping out
of the main path and following a branch one. Doing so, he came into
less frequented regions, while his steps took him up a low hill
burnished with the tints of mid-October. Trees and shrubs were
flame-colored, copper-colored, wine-colored, differing only in their
diffuseness of hue from the concentrated gorgeousness of amaranth,
canna, and gladiolus. The sounds of the city were deadened here to a
dull rumble, while the vibrancy of the autumn afternoon excited his
taut nerves.
At the top of the hill he paused. There was no one in sight who could
possibly respond to his quest. He wondered for a second if this were
not a hint to him to abandon it. But doing that he would abandon his
revenge, and by abandoning his revenge he would concede everything to
this girl who had so bitterly wronged him. Ever since he could
remember they had been pals, and for at least ten years he had vaguely
thought of asking her to marry him when it came to his seeking a wife.
It was true, the hint she had thrown out, that he had felt himself in
no great need of a wife till his mother had died some eighteen months
previously, and he had found himself with a cumbrous old establishment
on his hands. That had given the decisive turn to his suit. He had
asked her. She had taken him. And since then, in the course of less
than ten weeks, if they had had three quarrels they had had thirty. He
had taken them all more or less good-naturedly--till to-day. To-day
was too much. He could hardly say why it was too much, unless it was
as the last straw, but he felt it essential to his honor to show her
by actual demonstration the ruin she had made of him.
Looking about him for another possibility, he noticed that at the spot
where the path, having serpentined down the little hillside, rejoined
the main footway there was a bench so placed that its occupant would
have a view along several avenues at once. Since it was obviously a
vantage point for such strategy as his, he had taken the first steps
down toward it when a little gray figure emerged from behind a group
of blue Norway spruces. She went dejectedly to the bench, sitting down
at an extreme end of it.
Wrought up to a fit of tension far from rare with him, Allerton stood
with his nails digging into his clenched palms and his thin lips
pressed together. He was sure he was looking at a "drab." All the
shoddy, outcast meanings he had read into the word were under the
bedraggled feathers of this battered black hat or compressed within
the forlorn squirrel-trimmed gray suit. The dragging movement, the
hint of dropping on the seat not from fatigue but from desperation,
completed the picture his imagination had already painted of some
world-worn, knocked-about creature who had come to the point at which,
in his own phrase, she was "all in."
As far as this described Letty Gravely, he was wrong. She was not "all
in." She was never more mentally alert than at that very minute. If
she moved slowly, if she sank on the seat as if too beaten down by
events to do more, it was because her mind was so intensely centered
on her immediate problems.
She had, in fact, just formed a great resolution. Whatever became of
her, she would never go back to Judson Flack, her stepfather. This had
not been clearly in her mind when she had gone down his steps and
walked away, but the occasion presented itself now as one to be
seized. In seizing it, however, the alternatives were difficult. She
was without a cent, a shelter, a job, a friend, or the prospect of a
meal. It was probable that there was not at that minute in New York a
human being so destitute. Before nightfall she would have to find some
nominal motive for living or be arrested as a vagrant.
She was not appalled. For the first time in her life she was
relatively free from fear. Even with nothing but her person as she
stood, she was her own mistress. No big dread hung over her--that is,
no big dread of the kind represented by Judson Flack. She might jump
into the river or go to the bad, but in either case she would do it of
her own free will. Merely to have the exercise of her own free will
gave her the kind of physical relief which a human being gets from
stretching limbs cramped and crippled by chains.
Besides, there was in her situation an underlying possibility of
adventure. This she didn't phrase, since she didn't understand it. She
only had the intuition in her heart that where "the world is all
before you, where to choose your place of rest, and Providence your
guide," Providence _becomes_ your guide. Verbally she put it merely in
the words, "Things happen," though as to what could happen between
half-past three in the afternoon and midnight, when she would possibly
be in jail, she could not begin to imagine.
So absorbed was she in this momentous uncertainty that she scarcely
noticed that some one had seated himself at the other end of the
bench. It was a public place; it was likely that some one would. She
felt neither curiosity nor resentment. A lack of certain of the
feminine instincts, or their retarded development, left her without
interest in the fact that the newcomer was a man. From the slight
glance she had given him when she heard his step, she judged him to be
what she estimated as an elderly man, quite far into the thirties.
She went back to her own thoughts which were practical. There were
certain measures which she could take at once, after which there would
be no return. Once more she was not appalled. She had lived too near
the taking of these steps to be shocked by them. Everything in life is
a question of relativity, and in the world which her mother had
entered on marrying Judson Flack the men were all so near the edge of
the line which separates the criminal from the non-criminal that it
seemed a natural thing when they crossed it, while the women....
But as her thoughts were dealing with this social problem in its
bearing on herself, her neighbor spoke.
"Funny to watch those kids playing with the pup, isn't it?"
She admitted that it was, that watching children and young animals was
a favorite sport with her. She answered simply, because being
addressed by strange men with whom she found herself in proximity was
sanctioned by the etiquette of her society. To resent it would be
putting on airs, besides which it would cut off social intercourse
between the sexes. It had happened to her many a time to have engaging
conversations with chance young men beside her in the subway, never
seeing them before or afterward.
So Allerton found getting acquainted easier than he had expected. The
etiquette of _his_ society not sanctioning this directness of response
on her part, he drew the conclusion that she was accustomed to
"meeting fellows halfway." As this was the sort of person he was
looking for, he found in the freedom nothing to complain of.
With the openness of her social type she gave details of her biography
without needing to be pressed.
"You're a New York girl?"
"I am now. I didn't use to be."
"What were you to begin with?"
"Momma brought me from Canada after my father died. That's why I ain't
got no friends here."
At this appeal for sympathy his glance stole suspiciously toward her,
finding his first conjectures somewhat but not altogether verified.
She was young apparently, and possibly pretty, though as to neither
point did he care. He would have preferred more "past," more
"mystery," more "drama," but since you couldn't have everything, a
young person utterly unfit to be his wife would have to be enough. He
continued to draw out her story, not because he cared anything about
hearing it, but in order to spring his question finally without making
her think him more unbalanced than he was.
"Your father was a Canadian?"
"Yes; a farmer. Momma used to say she was about as good to work a farm
as a cat to run a fire-engine. When he died, she sold out for four
thousand dollars and come to New York."
"To work?"
"No, to have a good time. She'd never had a good time, momma hadn't,
and she was awful pretty. So she said she'd just blow herself to it
while she had the berries in her basket. That was how she met Judson
Flack. I suppose you know who he is. Everybody does."
"I'm afraid I haven't the pleasure."
"Oh, I don't know as you'd find it any big pleasure. Momma didn't, not
after she'd give him a try."
"Who and what is he?"
"He calls hisself a man about town. I call him a bum. Poor momma
married him."
"And wasn't happy, I suppose."
"Not after he'd spent her wad, she wasn't. She was crazy about him,
and when she found out that all he'd cared about was her four thousand
plunks--well, it was her finish."
"How long ago was that?"
"About four years now."
"And what have you been doing in the meanwhile?"
"Keepin' house for Judson Flack most of the time--till I quit."
"Oh, you've quit?"
"Sure I've quit." She was putting her better foot forward. "Now I'm in
pitchers."
He glanced at her again, having noticed already that she scarcely
glanced at him. Her profile was toward him as at first, an irregular
little profile of lifts and tilts, which might be appealing, but was
not beautiful. The boast of being in pictures, so incongruous with
her woefully dilapidated air, did not amuse him. He knew how large a
place a nominal connection with the stage took in the lives of certain
ladies. Even this poor little tramp didn't hesitate to make the
claim.
"And you're doing well?"
She wouldn't show the white feather. "Oh, so so! I--I get along."
"You live by yourself?"
"I--I do now."
"Don't you find it lonely?"
"Not so lonely as livin' with Judson Flack."
"You're--you're happy?"
A faint implication that she might look to him for help stirred her
fierce independence. "Gee, yes! I'm--I'm doin' swell."
"But you wouldn't mind a change, I suppose?"
For the first time her eyes stole toward him, not in suspicion, and
still less in alarm, but in one of the intenser shades of curiosity.
It was almost as if he was going to suggest to her something "off the
level" but which would nevertheless be worth her while. She was used
to these procedures, not in actual experience but from hearing them
talked about. They made up a large part of what Judson Flack
understood as "business." She felt it prudent to be as non-committal
as possible.
"I ain't so sure."
She meant him to understand that being tolerably satisfied with her
own way of life, she was not enthusiastic over new experiments.
His next observation was no surprise to her. "I'm a lawyer."
She was sure of that. There were always lawyers in these subterranean
affairs--"shyster" was a word she had heard applied to them--and this
man looked the part. His thin face, clear-cut profile, and skin which
showed dark where he shaved, were all, in her judgment, signs of the
sinister. Even his clothes, from his patent leather shoes with spats
to his dark blue necktie with a pearl in it, were those which an actor
would wear in pictures to represent a "shark."
She was turning these thoughts over in her mind when he spoke again.
"I've an office, but I don't practise much. It takes all my time to
manage my own estate."
She didn't know what this meant. It sounded like farming, but you
didn't farm in New York, or do it from an office anyhow. "I guess he's
one of them gold-brick nuts," she commented to herself, "but he won't
put nothin' over on me."
In return for her biography he continued to give his, bringing out his
facts in short, hard statements which seemed to hurt him. It was this
hurting him which she found most difficult to reconcile with her gold
brick theory and the suspicion that he was a "shark."
"My father was a lawyer, too. Rather well known in his day. One time
ambassador to Vienna."
Ambassador to Vienna! She didn't know where Vienna was or the nature
of an ambassador, but she did know that it sounded grand, so she
looked at him attentively. It was either more gold brick or else....
Then something struck her--"smote her" would be perhaps the more
accurately descriptive word, since the effect was on her heart. This
man was sick. He was suffering. She had often seen women suffer, but
men rarely, and this was one of the rare instances. Something in her
was touched. She couldn't imagine why he talked to her or what he
wanted of her, but a pity which had never yet been called upon was
astir among her emotions.
As for the minute he said no more, her next words came out only
because she supposed them to betray the kindly interest of which he
was in need.
"Then I suppose he left you _a_ big fat wad."
"Yes; but it doesn't do me any good. I mean, it doesn't make me
happy--when I'm not."
"I guess it'd make you a good deal less happy if you didn't have it."
"Perhaps so; I don't think about it either way." He added, after tense
compression of the lips; "I'm all alone in the world--like you."
She was sure now that something was coming, though of what nature lay
beyond her speculative power. She wondered if he could have fallen in
love with her at first sight, realizing a favorite dream she often had
in the subway. Hundreds of times she had beguiled the minutes by
selecting one or another of the wealthy lawyers and bankers, whom she
supposed to be her fellow-travelers there, seeing him smitten by a
glance at her, following her when she got out, and laying his heart
and coronet at her feet before she had run up the steps. If this man
were not a shyster lawyer or a gold brick nut, he might possibly be
doing that.
"It's about a girl," he burst out suddenly. "Half an hour ago she
kicked me out."
"Did she know you had all that dough?"
"Yes, she knew I had all that dough. But she said that since I was
going to the devil, I had better go." He drew a long breath. "Well,
I'm going--perhaps quicker than she thinks."
"Will you do yourself any good by that?"
"No, but I'll do her harm."
"How?"
"I'll show her what she's made of me."
"She can't make anything of you in half an hour or in half a year--not
so long as you've got your wad back of you. If you was to be kicked
out with your pay-envelope stole, and your mother's rings pulled off
your fingers, and her wrist-watch from your wrist, and even your
carfare----"
"Is that what's happened to you?"
"Sure! Half an hour ago, too. Judson Flack! But why should I worry?
Something'll happen before night."
He became emphatic. "Yes, and I'll tell you what it will be. You put
your finger on it just now when you said she couldn't make anything
out of men in half an hour. Well, it's got to be something that would
take just that time--an hour at the most--_and fatal_. Now do you
see?"
She shook her head.
He swung fully round on her from his end of the bench. "Think," he
commanded.
As if with a premonitory notion of what he meant, she answered coldly:
"What's the good o' me thinkin'? I've got nothin' to do with it."
"You might have."
"I can't imagine what, unless it'd be----" Realizing what she had been
about to say, she broke off in confusion, coloring to the eyes.
He nodded. "I see you understand. I want you to come off somewhere and
marry me."
She took it more calmly than if she hadn't thought him mad. "But--but
you said you'd be--be goin' to the devil."
"Well?"
His look, his tone, conveyed the idea, which penetrated to her mind
but slowly. When it did, the surging color became a flush, hot and
painful.
So here it was again, the thing she had been running away from. It had
outwitted and outrun her, meeting her again just at the instant when
she thought she was shaking it off. She was so indignant with the
_thing_ that she almost overlooked the man. She too swung round from
her end of the bench, so that they confronted each other, with the
length of the seat between them. It was her habit to put things
plainly, though now she did it with a burning heart.
"This is the way you mean it, isn't it?--you'd go to the devil because
you'd married _me_."
The half-minute before he answered was occupied not merely in thinking
what to say but in noticing, now that he had her in full-face, that
her large, brown irises seemed to be sprinkled with gold dust.
Otherwise her appearance struck him simply as blurred, as if it had
been brightly enough drawn as to color and line, only rubbed over and
defaced by the hand of misery.
"I don't want you to get me wrong," he explained. "It's not a question
of my marrying you in particular. I've said I'd marry the first girl I
met who'd marry me."
The gold-brown eyes scintillated with a thousand tiny stars. "Say, and
am I the first?"
"No; you're the fourth." He added, so that she should be under no
misconception as to what he was about: "You can take me or leave me.
That's up to you. But if you take me, I want you to understand that
it'll be on a purely business basis."
She repeated, as if to memorize the words, "A purely business basis."
"Exactly. I'm not looking for a wife. I only want a woman to marry--a
woman to whom I can point and say, See there! I've married--that."
"And _that'd_ be me."
"If you undertook the job."
"The job of--of bein' laughed at--jeered at----"
"I'd be the one who'd be laughed at and jeered at. Nobody would think
anything about you. They wouldn't remember how you looked or know your
name. If you got sick of it after a bit, and decided to cut and run,
you could do it. I'd see that you were well treated--for the rest of
your life."
She studied him long and earnestly. "Say, are _you_ crazy?"
"I'm all on edge, if that's what you mean. But there's nothing for you
to be afraid of. I shan't do you any harm at any time."
"You only want to do harm to yourself. I'd be like the awful kind o'
pill which a fellow'll swaller to commit suicide." She rose, not
without a dignity of her own. "Well, mister, if I'm your fourth, I
guess you'll have to look about you for a fifth."
"Where are you going?"
He asked the question without rising. She answered as if her choice of
objectives was large.
"Oh, anywheres."
"Which means nowhere, doesn't it?"
"Oh, not exactly. It means--it means--the first place I fetch up."
"The first place you fetch up may be the police-station, if the things
you said just now are true."
"The police-station is safe, anyways."
"And you think the place I'd take you to wouldn't be. Well, you're
wrong. It'll be as safe as a church for as long as you like to stay;
and when you want to go--lots of money to go with."
Facing away from him toward the city, she said over her shoulder:
"There's things money couldn't pay you for. Bein' looked down on is
one."
She was about to walk on, but he sprang after her, catching her by the
sleeve.
"Look here! Be a sport. You've got the chance of your lifetime. It'll
mean no more to you than a part they'd give you in pictures--just a
role--and pay you a lot better."
She was not blind to the advantages he laid before her. True, it might
be what she qualified as "bull" to get her into a trap; only she
didn't believe it. This man with the sick mind and anguished face was
none of the soft-spoken fiends whose business it is to ensnare young
girls. She knew all about them from living with Judson Flack, and
couldn't be mistaken. This fellow might be crazy, but he was what he
said. If he said he wouldn't do her any harm, he wouldn't. If he said
he would pay her well, he would. The main question was as to whether
or not, just for the sake of getting something to eat and a place to
sleep, she could deliberately put herself in a position in which the
man who had married her would have gone to the devil _because_ he had
married her.
As he held her by the sleeve looking down at her, and she, half
turned, was looking up at him, this was the battle she was fighting.
Hitherto her impulse had been to run away from the scorn of her
inferiority; now she was asking herself what would happen if she took
up its challenge and fought it on its own ground. What if I do? was
the way the question framed itself, but aloud she made it.
"If I said I would, what would happen first?"
"We'd go and get a license. Then we'd find a minister. After that I
should give you something to eat, and then I'd take you home."
"Where would that be?"
He gave her his address in East Sixty-seventh Street, only a few doors
from Fifth Avenue, but her social sophistication was not up to the
point of seeing the significance of this. Neither did her imagination
try to picture the home or to see it otherwise than as an alternative
to the police-station, or worse, as a lodging for the night.
"And what would happen to me when I got to your home?"
"You'd have your own room. I shouldn't interfere with you. You'd
hardly ever see me. You could stay as long as you liked or as short as
you liked, after the first week or two."
There was that about him which carried conviction. She believed him.
As an alternative to having nowhere to go, what he offered her was
something, and something with that spice of adventure of which she had
been dreaming only a few minutes earlier. She couldn't be worse off
than she was now, and if it gave her the chance of a hand-to-hand
tussle with the world-pride which had never done anything but look
down on her, she would be fighting what she held as her worst enemy.
She braced herself to say,
"All right; I'll do it."
He, too, braced himself. "Very well! Let's start."
The impetuosity of his motion almost took her breath away as she tried
to keep pace with him.
"By the way, what's your name?" he asked, before they reached Fifth
Avenue.
She told him, but was too overwhelmed with what she had undertaken to
dare to ask him his.