MARGARET leaned over the glass show-counter in Daddy Lerwick’s
curiosity-shop and looked down at the pathetic medley within.
Her figure, in its usual elaborate elegance, was in sharp contrast to
the dingy surroundings. The fine camel’s-hair shawls hung up behind
her, the old velvet curtain with its tapestry border, the moth-eaten
furs, the tarnished Mexican sombrero, the ancient horse-pistols, the
innumerable curious articles which heaped every corner of the room,
down to the chintz curtain, screening the rear end of the shop in a
weak-minded and fluttering way, formed a patchwork background.
In the case was an ivory fan of antique workmanship which had drifted
here at last, carrying with it a history which might frame many a tale,
and with it a tortoise-shell comb, with a top eight inches high, some
gold link cuff buttons, a string of pearls that had clasped the throat
of a beauty in 1776, but lay now, pale and lustreless and forgotten,
the price, perhaps, of a week’s lodging or of a grave, God knows!
But Margaret was interested in a bracelet set with topaz, still
beautiful, still radiant, still warm with a life’s history. She passed
the stones to and fro between her slender fingers, pricing them with
careless indifference. The romance and the sorrow of it would have
touched Rose Temple and sent her shuddering from the purchase. To
Margaret they signified nothing but jewels and the value of jewels, for
her life of selfish ease, of social prominence, her endless quest for
pleasure, had nearly atrophied those finer and more tender emotions of
sympathy and love for her fellow creatures.
Daddy Lerwick himself waited on her. He was a short, thickset man with
the face of an underdone pudding, his gray whiskers attached like wings
below the ears. His small dull eyes seemed to observe little, but he
was notorious for driving a shrewd bargain and nothing really escaped
him.
“The stones are good stones,” he commented, clasping his fat creased
hands on the case in an attitude which displayed the solitaire on his
little finger, “and the price very low, madam.”
Margaret laughed, her eyes haggard again. “You get them second-hand,”
she observed carelessly; “who brought these?”
He looked at her without surprise and unclasped his hands. “I have the
name,” he said; “the law requires that we take the name, but I don’t
think they ever give the right one, and we don’t tell it--usually. It
was a young girl, madam, quite a young girl.”
“Never mind!” Margaret dropped the chain, her mood changing. “I really
didn’t want to know,” she said with a shrug, “why should I? I don’t
know why I asked. I’ll take the gold cigarette-case, if you can get the
monogram off, and the tea-pot. Bring them over and I’ll send the check.”
The man bowed and rubbed his hands. He knew Margaret very well and
profited largely by her careless and profuse use of money. Knowing
the world too, as he did, and the people in it, he thought her more
wretched than the girl who had traded the bracelet, or the owner of the
gold cigarette-case who, he happened to know, had since shot himself
and now lay in an unmarked grave. Daddy Lerwick, indeed, knew more than
was good for him but, perhaps, not more than many others who stand thus
at the gateway between the upper stratum of gilded pleasure and the
lower stratum of sordid misery, and receive the tolls!
Meanwhile, unconscious of his eyes and certainly proudly disdainful
of his thoughts, the society beauty, the Cabinet minister’s wife,
trailed through the dingy shop and passed out by the side door, which
Lerwick opened for her, to the stairs of Allestree’s studio. As she
ascended, the cloud which had rested on her face slightly cleared and
her expression grew more decisive; the desolate misery of her heart had
taken a more concrete form, she had arrived at last at a resolution.
She had reached a point where she must resist or die. Her bruised
heart throbbed with continuous pain and she was proudly aware that she
was losing all--losing it, too, without an apparent struggle. She,
Margaret, who had always borne herself proudly and defiantly to the
world, was she to be a mendicant asking the alms of love and asking it
in vain?
She swept on, crossed the landing under Aunt Hannah’s accustomed
window, and thrusting aside the portière entered upon a tableau of the
artist and his two new clients, Mrs. and Miss Vermilion, and her enemy,
Mrs. Wingfield. The two older women stout, tightly laced, gorgeously
over-dressed, the younger, slender and well done by the best French
art and with that indescribable air of disdain which, commonly assumed
by the parvenu to be the sign manual of birth and breeding, might be
called the bar sinister of society. At the sight of Margaret, however,
she unbent with an alacrity which was as amazing as it was sudden.
“Dear Mrs. White,” she chirped, “do come and advise me; mamma wants
me painted, and really I can’t choose a pose! I saw a picture of the
Duchess of Leinster which was lovely, but Mr. Allestree says he never
copies even attitudes! Isn’t it confusing?”
Margaret shrugged one shoulder and held out two fingers to the elder
women. “Try Aphrodite rising from the sea,” she suggested with a
provoking drawl, “I dare say Bobby can do waves, he’s admirable on
flesh tints.”
The girl colored furiously and bit her lip. It was impossible to know
where to meet Mrs. White, she reflected, without daring to provoke
another catastrophe by retaliation.
But Mrs. Wingfield had felt the sting of Margaret’s rudeness too often.
She moved to the door with the rustle of silk draperies. “I hear Mr.
Fox is to marry Miss Temple,” she said pointedly, looking Margaret full
in the face.
“And I heard that Mr. Wingfield was to get the mission to Brazil,”
retorted Margaret unmoved.
Mrs. Wingfield’s cheek crimsoned and the feathers on her bonnet
trembled. “Nothing of the sort! You don’t mean to tell me you heard
that?”
Margaret shrugged her shoulders again. “One hears everything, you
know!” she said, with a dangerous smile.
Mrs. Wingfield breathed hard and opened her lips, but Mrs. Vermilion
was a wiser if a duller woman; she laid a restraining hand on her arm
and propelled her gently but firmly toward the exit.
“You’re coming to my ball next week, Mrs. White?” she ventured with a
propitiating smile.
“Oh, is it next week?” drawled Margaret, with elevated brows, “I never
know. Little Miss English keeps my books; if she didn’t I should go to
the wrong place every night and forget the White House.”
“I thought your memory more accommodating,” Mrs. Wingfield retaliated
pointedly; “I remember when you forgot to come to my dinner after you’d
accepted.”
Margaret laughed. “Did I?” she said, “I’m evidently a sinner. Tell
Mr. Wingfield that I heard who wrote in those corrections in that
paragraph of the message--but I really can’t tell.”
Mrs. Wingfield turned away with a red cheek.
“Margaret!” remonstrated Allestree sharply, as the three women
withdrew, “how can you? Good Lord, talk about the brutality of men!
Women are Malays and North American Indians--you have no mercy! I’m
blushing all over now at the thought of it!”
She laughed, her short, even white teeth set close together, her eyes
sparkling. “Wasn’t I horrid?” she said, “I haven’t any manners and they
hate me.”
“I should think they would!” he replied warmly, “Margaret, why do you
do such things? It isn’t like you, it isn’t--”
“Well bred!” she concluded dryly, “I know it. The other night, too, I
did something that horrified Wicklow. We were dining at Mrs. O’Neal’s;
I knelt, and kissed the cardinal’s ring. Wicklow was wild; he seemed to
have an A. P. A. nightmare at once. It was all in the New York papers
yesterday,” Margaret laughed again, resting her arms on the back of the
carved chair where Rose had sat.
Allestree laid down his brushes; he had been working on a sketch of
Margaret herself, and, lighting a cigarette, he passed his case to
her. She took one mechanically and lit it at his. As the spark flamed
up between them, he caught the hollowness of her eyes, the startling
pallor of her face.
“What in the world is it, Margaret?” he asked sharply; “you’re ill.”
She turned and looked over her shoulder into the mirror. “Do I look
so?” Something she saw in her own image, in the deeply shadowed eyes,
the sharpened curve of the cheeks startled her. “What a fright I grow
to be! No wonder that Vermilion girl stared. What an Aphrodite she’d
make--in French corsets and a trail!” Margaret laughed silently.
Then catching a look on Allestree’s face which she read too easily.
“Were you born proper, Bobby?” she said, knocking the ashes from her
cigarette, “or did you achieve it, or was it thrust upon you?”
“I can’t paint you in this mood, Margaret,” he said dryly, “you
wouldn’t look like yourself; you’d remind me of a malicious elf.”
She leaned her elbow on the chair back again, resting her chin in the
hollow of her hand. “There!” she said, “I told William Fox that you’d
make me the imp to Rose’s angel.”
“I’d like to make you what you are, a fascinating, wilful woman with no
heart at all!” he retorted.
“No heart!” she laughed, tossing her cigarette away; “that’s true,
Bobby, I’ve no heart!”
As she spoke she moved over to Rose’s portrait which still rested
on an easel in the corner. It was a magnificent piece of work, the
artist had dreamed his heart into it; the young head symbolized youth,
purity, hope. The figure had the simplicity and loveliness of some
beautiful Greek inspiration when the art of Greece was young. Margaret
stood looking at it in silence, herself unaware of the sharp contrast
between the pictured youth and enthusiasm of this girl and her own slim
beauty, her subtly charming and unhappy face, which seemed to have
lost that magic touch which is like a breath from the Elysian fields,
the presence of belief, of hope, most of all of love. She turned at
last and met Allestree’s thoughtful glance. “Bobby,” she said briefly,
“you’re a fool.”
He smiled. “What else, oh, mine enemy?” he asked.
“Everything;” Margaret threw out both hands with a gesture which seemed
to appeal to earth and heaven; “a blind fool, Bobby! You love her, she
probably loves you, and yet you stand by and let her go! Fool, fool!”
Margaret drew her brows down, her cheeks flaming:
“‘He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
Who fears to put it to the touch,
To win or lose it all!’”
she quoted defiantly.
Allestree lighted another cigarette. “My dear Margaret,” he said, “let
me show you this sketch of my mother.”
Margaret bit her lip and stood watching as he turned over two or three
sketches. As he did so her quick eye caught familiar outlines. “So,
that is Lily Osborne?” she said, with a hard little laugh; “I’m not
sensitive, Bobby, let me see it. Did you know the latest gossip about
her?”
Allestree shook his head. “Spare me!” he said smiling.
“Not a bit of it, you deserve no quarter!” Margaret took the sketch
and looked at it, ignoring the one of Mrs. Allestree; “it’s good,” she
commented with amusement; “how fine and full blooded she looks, and
reptilian. The gossip is that she’s caused the recall of the Russian
Ambassador; she’s been telling tales out of school, the female
diplomatist, you know! What did you do, by the way, when she met Rose
here?”
“Oh, we got on,” said Allestree laughing; “what of it?”
“You haven’t heard?” Margaret laughed; “Rose went there to one of
madame’s small and earlies; you know the kind? It seems they played
bridge and Rose didn’t understand it was for money; imagine a lamb in
the hands of wolves! Poor little simpleton! Well, Lily told her at last
that she owed two hundred. Rose fled home, and the judge--” Margaret
laughed and shrugged her shoulders. “Old Testament Christian, you know!
He sent the check but he told Rose to cut her dead.”
“I knew there was something; Rose never told me, but they speak,” he
rejoined, “the way you women do! In spite of your shrugs, Margaret, you
know the ethics of the thing were abominable; it’s swindling.”
Margaret continued to laugh. “My dear Bobby,” she said, “Rose isn’t
sixteen and we all play bridge; I lost six hundred last night; she
should have known. It’s tiresome to be a madonna on a pillar!”
“Still Rose was right,” he said bluntly.
“Oh, granted!” Margaret touched his arm lightly; “and you love her!”
Allestree made an impatient movement. “Don’t torture me, Margaret!” he
said sharply.
She whirled around and held out both hands, her eyes moist. “I’m a
brute, Bobby!” she cried; “forgive me--I always say the wrong thing
unless some one sets me a copy; let’s talk about Mahomet’s coffin!”
X
WITH Margaret things had reached a crisis long before that culminating
moment of remorseful emotion in Allestree’s studio; at last the
realities of life--as they appear separated from its pleasures and its
follies--were forced upon her. Too young at the time of her marriage to
comprehend its full significance, as a mere act of barter and exchange,
she had never seriously anticipated her position as White’s wife; it
had been shrouded in a nebulous haze of gratified vanity, of pleasures
and indulgences, for she was glad to shirk the thought of it. Her
awakening, therefore, had been accompanied with a shock of horror and
disgust.
White had been kind to her at first; even the most common and violent
of brute creatures is often kind to its chosen mate, and he was proud
of her beauty, determined to get the value of his money out of her
social distinction; but her capricious temper, her bitter tongue and
her indifference soon had their natural effect. His kindness wore
itself out and when angry he could be tolerably brutal, for his temper,
at best, was coarse and exacting. She had come at last to look upon the
beautiful house, the lavish display, the sumptuous living as so much
gilded misery, and, possessing no talisman to give her contentment, her
stormy nature spent itself in rebellion and in a growing regret for
her own folly. She saw, at last, in Fox all the qualities which she
most admired; her mind answered his with a subtilty, a kindred sympathy
which seemed to assure her of his love, to justify her assumption that
his feeling had never changed. In her eager pursuit of happiness she
had thought to purchase it first with beauty, then with money and now
with love--the beggar’s price! It was the absorbing impulse of her
being; religion she had none, except the religion of self-indulgence.
Standing on the brink of disaster she still demanded happiness; it was
her creed, her gospel, her divine right. The temptation of it, too,
pursued her; how easy to obtain a divorce from Wicklow, a word almost
and it was done! It was true that there would be a great scandal but,
after all, the scandal could only add a zest to her social success; she
was young, beautiful, distinguished, and if she broke the shackles that
bound her could she not begin all over again? Intoxicating dream,--how
full of temptation it was, of alluring sweetness! After all, does not
the devil appear to us in the shape of an angel of light?
What were ethics compared with her inalienable right to be happy? The
thought of it made her draw a keen breath of relief. Free!--She alone
knew the value of that word.
The children crossed her mind only occasionally; Estelle was more and
more like her father every day, and as for the baby? Margaret had only
vague conceptions of his possibilities; she had seen but little of him
since his birth, except in his nurse’s arms, but she had recognized
that odious likeness to the Whites. Of course old Mrs. White would
take them; she adored them, and Margaret felt that she knew more about
them than she did. After a while when they grew up--but Margaret could
not afford to dwell upon it. They were associated with her misery, her
captivity, as she chose to call it, and she could not love them; she
shrank, indeed, from the thought of them, and the responsibility that
their existence had thrust upon her, as so many links in her chains.
She returned from her interview with Allestree in a curious frame
of mind. Her unreasonable discourtesy to the Vermilions and Mrs.
Wingfield--people who really only hovered on the edge of her
horizon--her insistent attacks upon Allestree’s sore heart, had all
been prompted by her own feverish misery. Once alone in her room she
went to the mirror, and holding up one of the candelabra, gazed long
and fixedly at her own reflection, asking over again the question she
had asked herself on the night of Mrs. O’Neal’s dinner. Had she lost
her beauty? Was the potency of her spell destroyed in some mysterious
way? Hideous thought--was she growing old?
She saw, indeed, all that she had seen in Allestree’s mirror, and more;
the misery that looked out of her own eyes frightened her, and there
were more delicate lines than there had been on that previous occasion,
or else the light was stronger. This was the reason then of the
senseless stare of Miss Vermilion’s china blue eyes--Margaret wondered
vaguely why girls of that sort always had china blue eyes?
She set down the candelabrum, and sinking into a chair by the open fire
began to brood over her troubles, forgetful that she must be dressed
soon for her own reception; it was the night when her weekly guests
assembled at those already famous evenings. Her thoughts reverted to
Fox; the remembrance of his love for her was like the sudden fragrance
of violets in a desolate place.
He had loved her; it never seemed possible for a moment that a word, a
sign, could not reanimate his passion, as a breath of air will strike
fire from the smouldering embers. Now, too, she could appreciate and
understand his love; she was no longer a raw slip of a girl or a stiff
little Puritan like Rose Temple! But she knew the barrier which existed
between them; never by a word or a sign had Fox trespassed against
White’s hospitality, he would never urge her to desert her husband, but
if she were free--
She rose and began to walk about the room, touching first one object
and then another with restless fingers; the thought of freedom was
like wine, it went to her brain; the vision of the divorce court, the
lawyers, the judges, the newspapers, floated into space. She stretched
her clasped hands high above her head and drew a long breath, her soul
almost shouted for joy. Freedom!
It was, next to happiness, the desired of the gods! And after all did
not one involve the other, was not one absolutely essential to the
other?
She wondered, with a smile, why they talked so much cant about
marriage and divorce? Had they suffered as she had suffered they would
rejoice, as she did, at the thought that there were divorces, that one
could be free again!
Free--good heavens! Not to see him every day, not to hear his voice,
with that mean, trivial rasp in it, not to be one of his chattels!
And Rose? Margaret did not allow herself to dwell too long upon that
vision of the girl’s young figure, her fair, animated face against the
background of the cedars and the sky. Was she jealous of her? That was
an ignominy too deep to contemplate without bitter self-abasement; she
refused to believe it! The shuddering certainty which had drained the
life-blood from lip and cheek became now, on reflection, a fancy of her
feverish brain. Such a raw, simple creature as Rose was no mate for
William Fox; that indisputable attraction of opposites, which is one of
the laws of nature, for a moment lost its significance in her eyes; she
would not believe it. It was not quite natural for her, though, to take
this view, even for a moment, for a woman, as a rule, has less faith in
the endurance of a man’s love than he has in it himself, because she
has usually discovered that the heart of the ordinary male creature is
uncommonly like a pigeon-cote!
She was determined to forget all these things; she walked to and fro
battling with herself, her restless hands sometimes at her throat and
sometimes clasped behind her head. The strong passion of rebellion
which shook her being amazed even herself. She would never give him
up! She could not--to Rose or to any one; her starved heart cried out
against surrender and defeat, he was hers--_hers_.
Her maid’s knock at the door startled her, she stopped short and passed
her hands over her eyes, her face burned; she no longer lacked color,
her cheeks had the flush of fever. The girl, coming in to dress her,
was surprised by her high colored beauty, the brilliance of her eyes,
and began to lay out the gown and its accessories with nervous fingers,
half expecting one of Margaret’s wild bursts of temper. But her
mistress seemed only concerned with her toilet; one gown after another
was tried on and rejected until at last she was arrayed in a shimmering
dress of violet and silver which was as delicate as the tints of the
sky at moonrise. She allowed no ornament on her white neck and arms
except a single diamond star which clasped the ribbon around her throat.
Nothing could have been more perfect than her manner to her guests. It
was one of those occasions, growing constantly more rare, when White
had no reason to complain. She was charming to all, from the most
distinguished to the most socially obscure, she forgot her prejudices,
she even forgot to snub her husband’s political protégés--to their
infinite and undisguised relief--and to her own particular coterie she
was the old, charming, inimitable Margaret. As on the occasion of her
musicale, men predominated, and among those men were all the notables
at the capital. Speaking several languages, Margaret had made her house
a Mecca for all Europeans; it was an open secret that she espoused
the cause of the Russian ambassador against his secret enemy, Lily
Osborne, and espoused it with a zeal which caused a whispered sensation
in official circles. It was an anxious question what Mrs. White might
not dare to do, for it was believed that she would pause at nothing in
her determination to defeat Mrs. Osborne. Yet it was never hinted that
she concerned herself even remotely with White’s devotion to the fair
_divorcée_. Her indifference to her husband was a fact too generally
accepted to cause even a ripple in the stream.
There had been much secret comment on her changed and haggard looks,
but her dryadlike loveliness to-night silenced every whisper, and her
gayety, her ease, her clever, reckless talk proclaimed her the same
Margaret they had always known and loved and feared, whose wit was as
keen as it was cruel.
Mrs. O’Neal was the first to bid her good-night. The old lady in her
gorgeous panoply of silk and velvet tottered on, like an ancient
war-horse answering the bugle call, her white head vibrating as she
talked. Still athirst for social power and success, no one was a keener
judge of achievements, and she patted Margaret’s hand.
“My dear,” she whispered, “you’re the most charming creature in the
world when you choose! I’m old enough to tell you.”
“I can never equal you,” Margaret retorted lightly, “even when I
choose!”
“There! It was worth the risk to get the compliment!” the older woman
laughed back; “and your husband, he looked most distinguished to-night,
and those dear children--I saw them in the park! Be good, my child,
and you’ll be happy!” and she smiled complacently at the axiom as she
moved away, a figure of ancient gayety in tight shoes and costly stays.
An hour later when her maid had taken her to pieces, she presented a
spectacle at once instructive and amazing.
Following Mrs. O’Neal’s exit, the accepted signal for departure,
Margaret’s guests began to flow past her in a steady stream, stopping a
moment for the individual farewells or congratulations on the pleasures
of a brilliant evening. She was standing just inside the ballroom door
alone, for White had been summoned unexpectedly to the White House a
half-hour previously, his departure adding to the zest of gossip and
speculation upon the political situation. Margaret’s slim figure in
its shimmering dress, her animated face, the peculiar charm of her
smile, had never been more observed; she was beautiful. Those who had
questioned it, those who had been only half convinced and those who had
denied it, were alike overwhelmed with its manifestation. It seemed as
if the intangibility of her much disputed charm had vanished and her
beauty had taken a visible shape, was crystallized and purified by some
fervent emotion which made her spirit illuminate it as the light shines
through an alabaster lamp.
One by one they pressed her hand and passed on, feeling the inspiration
of her glance; one white haired diplomat bent gracefully and kissed
her fingers, an involuntary tribute which brought a faint blush to her
cheek.
Fox was among the last to approach, and as he did so she stopped him
with a slight but imperative gesture. “Stay a moment, William,” she
murmured, with almost a look of appeal, “I want to speak to you.”
Thus admonished he turned back, conscious that by so doing he startled
a glance of comprehension in the eyes of Louis Berkman, who was
following him, which annoyed him for Margaret’s sake. He went over to
the fireplace and stood watching the falling embers while the remaining
guests made their adieux, then as the rustle and murmur of their
departure grew more distant and lost itself in the rooms beyond, he
turned and saw her coming down the long room alone and was startled
by the extreme youthfulness and fragility of her appearance, and by
the discovery, which came to him with the shock of surprise, that her
radiant aspect had slipped from her with her departing guests, that her
face was colorless and pinched, though her eyes were still feverishly
bright.
“It was good of you to stay,” she said, coming to the fire and holding
out her hands to the blaze; “how cold it is for the first of April.
Sit down, William, and let me send for wine and cigarettes; you look
tired.”
He raised a deprecating hand. “No more hospitality,” he said firmly;
“you’ve done enough; you’ve lost all your color now.”
“Except what I put on with a brush,” she said dryly, clasping her hands
and letting her long white arms hang down before her as she looked
across at him with a keen glance. “I know--you’ve eaten nothing here
since Wicklow broke his word and the rest of it. You won’t eat his
bread!”
Fox colored. “Should I be here in that case?” he asked.
She shook her head, glancing at the fire. “You can’t fool me--I
understand.”
“Come, I must go,” he said firmly; “it is very late and you look
wearied to death. You must be, you were absolutely the life of it
to-night; you should have heard old de Caillou rhapsodize!”
“Did I do well--did I look my best?” she asked, her lip quivering like
a child’s, her eyes still on the fire.
“You were your own happy self!” he replied.
She looked up, her slight figure swaying a little as she wrung her
hands together; the tears rained down her cheeks. “Billy,” she sobbed,
“I’m wretched--I--I can’t stand it any longer, it will kill me!”