do in a _civilized city_!"
His opinion was a matter of indifference to the couple.
They are supposed to have talked very little, but danced frequently
together. As the young ladies were putting on their capes and cloaks,
just before the dawn, one among them shrieked suddenly across the room.
"Why, Lilda! where is your flame-coloured scarf! You've lost it!"
"I gave it away," she said briefly.
They gasped.
"Good heavens!" said another. "He'll be proposing before you know it!"
"He proposed at twelve," Miss Appleyard said placidly, "and I accepted
him. Will you be maid-of-honour, Evelyn?"
No one had ever told her of John I and his gypsy.
They had a wonderful wedding-tour among the Italian lakes and came back
after a three months' honeymoon to the solid "brown stone front" of the
period, which, furnished from cellar to attic, had been John's wedding
gift to his daughter.
"Well!" some gossip had cried, "it's big enough, in all conscience!
But I suppose Mr. Appleyard was thinking of the size of Elliot's
family." (He was one of eight children and had nine uncles and aunts.)
"None of us has ever had but two," said Lilda calmly, "and the
Appleyards don't change, papa says."
And as a matter of fact little Elliot Lestrange never had but one
contestant for nursery rights--his fair-haired, gentle sister.
"I wonder which of the children will be the 'wild one'?" Lilda asked
her husband one night, as they sat opposite each other in the great,
high-ceilinged dining-room. They were, for a marvel, alone, and unlike
the ordinary quiet jog-trot couple who welcome any casual stranger to
break the monotony of five years of table tete-a-tete, they delighted
in this happy chance that recalled their honeymoon meals together.
They were so much sought after, and Lestrange's position required so
much and such varied entertaining, that they could not remember when,
before, the attentive coloured butler had had but two glasses to fill.
Lestrange looked admiringly at his handsome wife. Never had he ceased
to bless the day he married her. He was a proud man, conventional and
ambitious to a degree, and at moments during his short betrothal period
he had felt threatening chills of doubt when away from his enchantress
as to the wisdom of such a feverishly short acquaintance, such a
sudden, almost dramatic alliance. Never for a moment would he have
been satisfied with the standing of an ordinary lawyer; the career he
had set before himself needed a larger background than any one city,
even his country's metropolis, could offer, and in his future the
position and qualities of his wife would count enormously. Money,
breeding and beauty he had always told himself he must marry, but to
win brains and a loving heart into the bargain was more than even he
could have expected, and he admitted the justice of his friends'
half-earnest jealousy.
To-night he raised his glass gallantly and drank to her bright dark
eyes, noting with pleasure that she had remembered to have her new gown
of the filmy black material he fancied so much!
"Why should either of them be 'wild,' dearest?" he asked.
"Papa told me once, when I was a child, that every Appleyard that he
had ever heard of had two children, a son and a daughter," she said
thoughtfully, "and one of them was always staid and steady and--oh,
well, looked up to in the community, you know, and the other always
flighty and ... unusual, to put it mildly. And certainly, as far back
as _I_ can remember, it has been so.
"There was Aunt Adelaide. Grandpapa found her one day acting in a play
in the town hall in the little village where they went for the
summer--right on the stage with all those travelling actors. She
actually wanted to go with them!"
"Absurd!" said her husband, selecting and peeling for her a specially
fine peach.
"But grandpapa himself," she went on thoughtfully, "threatened to go as
a common sailor before the mast, rather than be tied down to
business--papa showed me a letter he wrote once; he said it was
sickening to him to think of putting up the shutters every night and
heaping up money in a strong-box."
"How about your great-grandfather?" he asked idly. "I don't know about
him," she said, "except that I am named for my great-grandmother. They
were the first Appleyards to come to this country, you know."
"I know," he said politely. He himself traced his ancestry to a cousin
of Henry of Navarre, and was furiously proud of it, though wild horses
could not have dragged from him an allusion to it.
They dipped into the heavy crystal finger bowls in silence. Then, as a
sudden curious idea struck him,
"But how do you account, on that theory, for your own generation?" he
asked. "Certainly no one could call Johnny wild?"
"Poor old Johnny!" she said, laughing, "no, indeed! The wildest step
he ever took was to put type-writing machines in the bank!"
"Then, is it you?" he demanded, and smiled gravely, for her dignified
young matronhood was his pride.
"It may come out in me later," she threatened, "for Appleyards don't
change, you know."
But old Mr. Appleyard, who perhaps knew more instances of the tradition
than he imparted to his daughter, died peacefully at seventy-two, the
accepted Appleyard age for that process, convinced that he, at last,
had produced two steady children: he was a little worried about his
grandson, young Elliot, who displayed a freakish talent for composing
and performing music for the violin, and an unfortunate preference for
the society of professional musicians, of which his mother seemed
almost culpably tolerant, not to say proud. The arts were rising,
socially, in that generation, and Elliot was actually excused from an
examination in ethics for the purpose of attending a concert by the
Boston Symphony Society.
By this time, of course, they had returned from their European period.
It had been a brilliant ten years, and Mrs. Lestrange had met most
royalties and all travelling Americans of any consequence--all with the
same gracious dignity, the same delicate balance of charm and reserve
that delighted foreigner and compatriot alike. Her portrait was
painted by a great German, her bust was modelled by a great Frenchman,
the words of a little lullaby she had composed for her baby girl was
set to music and made famous through Europe by a great Italian. Queen
Victoria complimented her on her devoted personal care of her children,
and sent her an autographed _carte de visite_, as they were still
called then, framed in brilliants. The silver trowel with which she
laid the foundation stone of her school for instructing the
peasant-girls of her adopted country in the simple household arts is
still a bone of contention between her two proud children. A duke
stood godfather to her little Wilhelmina and Royalty herself
embroidered at least one frill of the baby's christening robe.
When the children were twelve and fourteen, however, the family
returned; papered, painted and decorated the house anew from top to
bottom, and settled down to the task that had brought them back--the
bringing up of their boy and girl in an American tradition. If Mrs.
Lestrange ever missed the polish and variety of European social life,
if she found the "Anglo-mania" (just then so fashionable in New York) a
little shallow and unconvincing, she never showed it. Handsome and
serene, a trifle more matronly than women of her age appear to-day,
perhaps, but none the less admired for it, she moved through her duties
of household, nursery, ballroom and _salon_, omitting nothing,
excelling in all.
No charity bazaar, no educational exhibition, no welcoming of
distinguished foreigners, no celebration of the arts, was complete
without Mrs. Elliot Lestrange. For her son's sake she patronized music
extensively, for her daughter's, she sat through endless balls and
garden parties. By the time they were both married, her dark hair was
powdered with silver.
"What a beautiful old lady mamma is going to make," Wilhelmina said to
her brother, who had made a flying visit across the Atlantic and left
the old Italian villa where he made music all day among the birds and
orange-trees, to see his sister's baby son.
"You think so?" he answered quickly, with his darting, foreign air. "I
am myself far from certain."
"Why, Elly, what do you mean?" she cried, looking up a moment from the
lace-trimmed bassinet. "What a thing to say!"
He laughed indulgently.
"Oh, you know everything I say always shocked you, Sister Mina," he
said. "What a joy it must have been to you and father when I left
these Puritan shores for good!"
"No, no," she began, but he tapped her lips.
"Yes, yes!" he contradicted. "Even to marry an opera singer, you were
glad to see me go! But about mamma: I suppose you mean that she will
sit in a Mechlin cap and knit, with a blue Angora cat on the rug beside
her, and hear this little lady in the bassinet here say her lessons?"
Something very like this had been in Wilhelmina's mind and she admitted
it.
"Well," young Elliot said, reflectively, "all I can say is, I don't
think so. There's something about mamma that you can't be sure of."
"Why, Elly, what do you mean?"
"I can't explain it exactly," he said, "but she's very deep--mamma.
Father doesn't understand her, you know."
"Now, Elliot, that is rank nonsense!" his sister contradicted. "You
remind me of that nurse Dr. Stanchon sent up when mamma had that fit of
not sleeping last year. She and mamma got on famously, from the first;
she stayed out of doors all night with her till mamma got to sleeping
again. She was used to it--the nurse, I mean--and didn't mind, she
said, she'd been doing it in the Adirondacks.
"I remember asking her why she thought mamma should have insomnia--for
there was nothing whatever on her mind, and they say that's the cause,
you know. She gave me the strangest look.
"'Are you sure your mother has nothing on her mind?' she asked me,
'your mother's very deep, you know!'
"'What nonsense, Miss Jessop!' I told her. 'Mamma's as open as the
day!'"
Elliot laughed.
"Sensible woman, your Miss Jessop," he said.
"Oh, I don't know. She was very decided, certainly, and easy in her
ways. More so than I quite like in a trained nurse. I will say for
her, though, that the out-of-doors idea was hers. Though father was
quite alarmed about it."
"That's what I say. Father doesn't understand her."
"Oh, Elly, how can you? Every one says there never were two people so
suited to each other. There's not one wish of father's she doesn't
carry out, and never has been."
"I don't say not," he agreed, "but that merely shows what a good,
clever wife she is. That doesn't say he understands her. He certainly
never understood me, I know; Uncle John didn't either."
"But you were always--always--_queer_, you know, Elly," she explained
deprecatingly.
"Was I?" he questioned lightly. "Mamma understood me, all the same.
So perhaps she's 'queer,' too."
"Nonsense," Wilhelmina said briefly. "Mamma is like anybody else, only
a great deal cleverer."
"Maybe, maybe," he repeated thoughtfully. "But she always gives me the
impression of having something up her sleeve. She said a strange thing
to me after my little girls--the twins, you know--were born. She was
holding them out in the orange grove, and saying such sweet things to
Maddelina, and then she turned to me suddenly and said,
"'Have I been a good mother to you, Elliot?'
"'Why, madre, you've been perfect,' I said.
"'Is there anything more you think I could ever do for you?' she asked.
"'Honestly, dear, I don't think there is,' I said.
"'That's all I wanted to know,' she said, and sailed the next day....
What's the matter? How strange you look!"
"It's only that she said just that to me, last week," Wilhelmina told
him, "and left the next day for New York. But I supposed it was to get
back to father. She depends so on him."
"Do you really think so?" he asked curiously.
But every one agreed with Wilhelmina--perhaps because Wilhelmina very
seldom said anything that any one was likely to disagree with--and so
every one was much surprised at the comparatively short time that Mrs.
Lestrange spent in retirement after her husband's sudden death. He had
not the Appleyard habit of living to be seventy-two, it appeared, and
succumbed to pneumonia, following fatigue and exposure.
His wife's hair turned quickly to an iron-grey, soon after, but she
moved steadily on among the many educational and philanthropic schemes
with which she had begun to fill her time after her daughter's
marriage. Organized charity was developing rapidly, just then, and
Mrs. Lestrange's clear common sense, executive ability and knowledge of
European institutions of the sort made her, with her wealth and
leisure, a leader on New York boards and councils.
It was noted that the year after her widowhood found her less
frequently in the public meetings, less willing to organise new centres
of work, more determined to avoid presidencies and chairmanships. For
this she gave as an excuse the frequent trips abroad, which seemed to
have no special purpose and displeased Wilhelmina, who frequently
offered her a home in Boston.
"I cannot understand why she refuses," said Wilhelmina, on the occasion
of Elliot's last flying trip to America. "The children would love
their granny to be with us, and she could have her own sitting-room.
Can't you persuade her, Elly?"
"I'm afraid not," he answered absently. "You know she's winding up all
those boards and trade-schools and hospitals and things?"
"And a good thing, too," said his sister. "Mamma's done enough for the
community. She ought to settle down. And you see she's going to."
"So that's the way it looks to you, Mina?" he asked, looking
searchingly into her pale blue eyes, and shrugging his shoulders
slightly.
"Gracious, Elliot, if you know so much more about mamma than I do, why
don't you ask her to live with you and Maddelina?" she suggested
sharply.
"It wouldn't do any good--she'd never think of it," he answered simply.
"Well, of course, she and Maddelina..."
"Exactly," he agreed with his teasing foreign smile.
"And I'll tell you another thing," she went on; "all these sudden trips
about the country and to Europe--what is the sense? Mamma will be
fifty in a few days, and anything might happen----"
"Oh, nonsense, Mina," he laughed at her. "Mamma is stronger than
either of us, and you know it."
"Of course she's never been ill," his sister admitted. "But all this
travel makes her nervous, just the same. She's not like herself. Why,
yesterday, we drove out through the suburbs--she seems to want to be
out doors all the time, you know--and under a big tree there was a camp
of those horrid gypsies. The horses were unhitched, and the dirtiest
children playing all about, and they were cooking over a fire. Nothing
would do but we must stop the horses--the new bays, you know, and they
hate anything queer--and mamma actually made quite a visit among them!
They were English gypsies, from Sussex, they said. One of the women
ladled out some mess or other from the great pot and mamma actually ate
it. And it was odd, too, but they wouldn't take any money.
"'Not from you, lady, not from you!' they said. The woman put her
hands behind her back."
"That _was_ odd," said Elliot.
"Yes. And as we drove off she looked after them and said the strangest
things. 'Could any one be happier, do you think?' she said, and
afterward: 'Life seems so unwrinkled, somehow, when one sees it lived
that way!'"
"And what did you say to that?" asked her brother.
"Why, of course, there was nothing to say. I only said that I couldn't
conceive how any educated woman could be happy without a bath-tub."
He chuckled.
"Of course you did," he murmured.
"That's what mamma said," she sighed.
"What?"
"Why, she looked at me so queerly and said, 'Of course you would say
that, Mina!'"
"Do you know what I've come over for?" he asked abruptly.
"On business, I suppose," she answered idly.
"Yes. Uncle John sent for me, to ask if I had any idea of mamma's
intentions. And then there were papers to sign."
"Papers?" she looked alarmed.
"Yes. I think you might as well know. But we're not to discuss it
with her, understand. She's disposing of all her property."
"Why, Elly!"
"It's divided into thirds. One-third to me, one-third to you, and the
other third cut up into servants' legacies, one or two charities and
enough for herself to give her a hundred pounds a year."
"Pounds?"
"It's in English securities. It looks as if she meant to live in
England. Uncle John asked if he might tell us, and she said only on
condition that we didn't discuss it. She meant to travel for some
years, she said, and she had arranged to have us notified immediately
in case of any accident or difficulty. She expected to write
occasionally, too, she said. You know how mamma is--she simply
hypnotised the old gentleman."
"Why, Elly! you don't think her mind..."
"Bosh! Her mind's better than ours will ever be! Uncle John went to
Dr. Stanchon about it and he said that mamma was in perfect health,
good for twenty-five years more----"
"She always says 'twenty-two,'" Wilhelmina interrupted.
"--And that she was not to be bothered or crossed in any way. He said
that at her age women often took odd fancies, and that with a woman so
capable and determined as mamma, the best thing was to give her her
way. 'Mind you, now, Appleyard,' he said, 'your sister consulted me
long before you did, and whatever she does I justify in every way!'"
"Well, of course, with mamma, there's nothing else to do," sighed
Wilhelmina, "but--five hundred dollars a year! Why, it's impossible!
She can't travel on that!"
"No, but she can't starve, either," said Elliot, philosophically, "and
everybody was always telling her she could have earned her own living
in a dozen ways--perhaps she's going to do that."
"Oh, Elly!" cried poor Wilhelmina. He turned to go, then picked up a
small blue-print from the top of a pile on a camera.
"What's all this?"
"Oh, that's one of the photographs the children are always taking
nowadays. That one--why, that's one of mamma and the gypsies, that I
told you about! See, there's the gypsy woman handing her out the soup.
They get very clear prints, now, don't they?"
"But what an extraordinary likeness!" he exclaimed. "Isn't it
remarkable!"
"Oh, you mean mamma and the gypsy," she said indifferently. "Yes, the
children both noticed it at once. The other gypsies did, too, I'm
sure, from the way they pointed and stared. Well, she always was that
dark type, you know. Would you like to keep it?"
"Thanks, if you don't mind," he said, and put it carefully in his
pocketbook. "It's better of mamma than any of the professional ones."
* * * * *
Nobody who attended the great dinner-party given for Mrs. Elliot
Lestrange on the occasion of her fiftieth birthday will forget it
readily. It was as much a public as a private function, and around the
great hotel dining-room used for the occasion stood many different
tables for many different classes of people. Between the party of
girls trained years ago in her trade-school and the long table of
boards of directors of different movements in which she had long been
prominent, sat the entire cast of one of the theatrical successes of
the season, the play being openly founded on one of the dramatic
incidents of her life as a diplomat's wife, a generation ago, in
Europe. The old composer of her famous cradle-song shared with the
publisher of her "Letters from an Attache's Wife," and the prima-donna
she had discovered and educated, a merry little Italian table where her
musician son made the proud fourth. A party of old pupils from the
convent school where she had spent a year surprised the room with the
valedictory verses she had written for the class, and at her
bridesmaid's table only one was lacking--the saucy maid-of-honour,
Evelyn, of thirty years ago!
A goodly fraction of what was just about to be known as the famous
"Four Hundred" of New York society chattered and stared at the poets
and novelists from Boston; and, for the sake of future memories,
Wilhelmina's children and the olive twins from Florence gazed curiously
from under their governesses' wings at the lights and roses and jewels
and tinted glass that made the great room a scented fairyland to their
round eyes.
At every table was a vacant chair, and to each of these she moved in
turn for the space of one of the courses of the elaborate dinners of
the end of the nineteenth century, a majestic figure in black velvet,
frosted to the waist with her grandmother's wonderful point-lace, her
shoulders, firm and creamy still, twinkling with her father's wedding
diamonds, her neck soft under her husband's birthday pearls.
It was said of her on that night that she was the one person in the big
room who could have been perfectly at ease at every table there, and
the pride of the children as she took her nuts and coffee among them
was delightful to witness.
"You have, indeed, lived every moment of a rich life, Signora," said
the composer to her, in Italian, as he sat again after their graceful
bows on the rendering of his now almost classic lullaby by the great
singer. "Is it not so?"
"It may be, _Maestro_, but there is, after all things, and for all
people, a rest at last," she answered gravely.
Her son, who was dressing them one of his inimitable salads, looked up
sharply at this, though the others only smiled.
"And you start on your travels, it appears, after this triumph?" the
_Maestro_ inquired.
"To-morrow," she said.
"And may we know..."
"I go alone," she answered, smiling.
About each of her ecstatic granddaughters' necks she gravely clasped
her pearl or diamond chains, as they stood at the foot of the stairs in
her brownstone house long after midnight; in each grandson's hot,
astonished palm lay a glittering ring or bracelet, "For your wife, some
day!"
"How strangely mamma is acting," Wilhelmina complained to her brother.
"I suppose she is excited by all this?"
"She appears perfectly calm to me," he answered. "I have always told
you, Mina, that you have a tendency to call any one excited who does
anything that you don't expect."
Their mother sat in silence in her room while her maid, a faithful
mulattress of many years' service, undressed her.
"Is that little tin box where I can get it?" she asked at last, when
all was done.
"Yes, madam."
"Are the house-keys here?"
"Yes, madam."
"Then I shall not want you any more. You have always been all that I
could wish, Ella, and I shall miss you. Take this, to remember me by,"
and the woman stared at the watch and chain in her hand.
"But--but--when you come back, Mrs. Lestrange, shan't I--shan't I----"
"If ever I come back, yes. But Miss Wilhelmina will make a good home
for you. Good-night."
Amazed, the woman closed the door, and the house lay in darkness, but
for one lighted room--the room of its mistress.
Mrs. Lestrange went to a wardrobe, dragged out a small tin trunk, no
larger than a leather case, opened it with a key from a private drawer,
and turned out the contents.
These were two sets of plain, warm underclothing, some stout boots, a
heavy skirt and jacket of coarse dark blue stuff, a mackintosh, a cheap
wooden brush and rubber comb. A sensible wallet for her hand and a
canvas bag on a belt under the clothes which she put on quickly, held
some notes and gold. She fingered the coarse, plain handkerchiefs, the
brown Windsor soap, the stout cotton umbrella, lovingly. Over her
thick iron-grey hair, twisted firmly into a plain knot behind the ears,
she pinned a small round hat with a twist of cheap ribbon around it,
slipped her hands into a pair of new cotton gloves, took a seat by her
window overlooking the Central Park, and sat silently for an hour. Her
eyes were fixed on the shadowy bulk of the trees in the park; her hands
were still on her lap: she waited.