Produced by Louise Pryor, Janet Blenkinship and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
[Illustration: 'My dear Mr. Kane, I do congratulate you,' Helen said.]
FRANKLIN
KANE
BY
ANNE DOUGLAS
SEDGWICK
(MRS. BASIL DE SELINCOURT)
T. NELSON & SONS
LONDON AND EDINBURGH
PARIS: 189, rue Saint-Jacques
LEIPZIG: 35-37 Koenigstrasse
FRANKLIN KANE.
CHAPTER I.
Miss Althea Jakes was tired after her long journey from Basle. It was a
brilliant summer afternoon, and though the shutters were half closed on
the beating Parisian sunlight, the hotel sitting-room looked, in its
brightness, hardly shadowed. Unpinning her hat, laying it on the table
beside her, passing her hands over the undisordered folds of her hair,
Miss Jakes looked about her at the old-gold brocade of the furniture,
the many mirrors in ornate gold frames, the photographs from Bougereau,
the long, crisp lace curtains. It was the same sitting-room that she had
had last year, the same that she had had the year before last--the same,
indeed, to which she had been conducted on her first stay at the Hotel
Talleyrand, eight years ago. The brocade looked as new, the gilded
frames as glittering, the lace curtains as snowy as ever. Everything was
as she had always seen it, from the ugly Satsuma vases flanking the ugly
bronze clock on the mantelpiece, to the sheaf of pink roses lying beside
her in their white paper wrappings. Even Miss Harriet Robinson's choice
of welcoming flowers was the same. So it had always been, and so, no
doubt, it would continue to be for many years to come; and she, no
doubt, for many summers, would arrive from Basle to sit, jadedly,
looking at it.
Amelie, her maid, was unpacking in the next room; the door was ajar, and
Miss Jakes could hear the creaking of lifted trays and the rustling of
multitudinous tissue-paper layers. The sounds suggested an answer to a
dim question that had begun to hover in her travel-worn mind. One came
back every summer to the Hotel Talleyrand for the purpose of getting
clothes; that, perhaps, was a sufficient answer. Yet, to-day, it did not
seem sufficient. She was not really so very much interested in her
clothes; not nearly enough interested to make them a compensation for
such fatigue and loneliness as she was now feeling. And as she realised
this, a further question followed: in what was she particularly
interested? What was a sufficient motive for all the European
journeyings with which her life, for the past ten or twelve years, had
been filled? In a less jaded mood, in her usual mood of mild, if rather
wistful, assurance, she would have answered at once that she was
interested in everything--in everything that was of the best--pictures,
music, places, and people. These surely were her objects.
She was that peculiarly civilised being, the American woman of
independent means and discriminating tastes, whose cosmopolitan studies
and acquaintances give, in their multiplicity, the impression of a full,
if not a completed, life. But to-day the gloomy question hovered: was
not the very pilgrimage to Bayreuth, the study of archaeology in Rome,
and of pictures in Florence, of much the same nature as the yearly visit
to Paris for clothes? What was attained by it all? Was it not something
merely superficial, to be put on and worn, as it were, not to be lived
for with a growing satisfaction? Miss Jakes did not answer this
question; she dismissed it with some indignation, and she got up and
rang rather sharply for tea, which was late; and after asking the
garcon, with a smile that in its gentleness contrasted with the
sharpness of the pull, that it might be brought at once, she paused near
the table to lean over and smell her sheaf of roses, and to read again,
listlessly, Miss Harriet Robinson's words of affectionate greeting. Miss
Robinson was a middle-aged American lady who lived in Paris, and had
long urged Althea to settle there near her. Ten years ago, when she had
first met Miss Robinson in Boston, Althea had thought her a brilliant
and significant figure; but she had by now met too many of her kind--in
Rome, in Florence, in Dresden--to feel any wish for a more intimate
relationship. She was fond of Miss Robinson, but she prayed that fate
did not reserve for her a withering to the like brisk, colourless
spinsterhood. This hope, the necessity for such hope, was the final
depth of her gloomy mood, and she found herself looking at something
very dark as she stood holding Miss Robinson's expensive roses. For,
after all, what was going to become of her? The final depth shaped
itself to-day in more grimly realistic fashion than ever before: what
was she going to do with herself, in the last resort, unless something
happened? Her mind dwelt upon all the visible alternatives. There was
philanthropic lunch-going and lunch-giving spinsterhood in Boston; there
was spinsterhood in Europe, semi-social, semi-intellectual, and
monotonous in its very variety, for Althea had come to feel change as
monotonous; or there was spinsterhood in England established near her
friend, Miss Buckston, who raised poultry in the country, and went up to
London for Bach choir practices and Woman's Suffrage meetings. Althea
couldn't see herself as taking an interest in poultry or in Woman's
Suffrage, nor did she feel herself fitted for patriotic duties in
Boston. There was nothing for it, then, but to continue her present
nomadic life. After seeing herself shut in to this conclusion, it was a
real relief to her to hear the tea-tray chink outside, and to see it
enter, high on the garcon's shoulder, as if with a trivial but cheerful
reply to her dreary questionings. Tea, at all events, would always
happen and always be pleasant. Althea smiled sadly as she made the
reflection, for she was not of an Epicurean temperament. After she had
drunk her tea she felt strengthened to go in and ask Amelie about her
clothes. She might have to get a great many new ones, especially if she
went home for the autumn and winter, as she half intended to do. She
took up the roses, as she passed them, to show to Amelie. Amelie was a
bony, efficient Frenchwoman, with high cheek-bones and sleek black hair.
She had come to Althea first, many years ago, as a courier-maid, to take
her back to America. Althea's mother had died in Dresden, and Althea had
been equipped by anxious friends with this competent attendant for her
sad return journey. Amelie had proved intelligent and reliable in the
highest degree, and though she had made herself rather disagreeable
during her first year in Boston, she had stayed on ever since. She still
made herself disagreeable from time to time, and Althea had sometimes
lacked only the courage to dismiss her; but she could hardly imagine
herself existing without Amelie, and in Europe Amelie was seldom
disagreeable. In Europe, at the worst, she was gruff and ungracious, and
Althea was fond enough of her to ignore these failings, although they
frightened her a little; but though an easily intimidated person, and
much at a loss in meeting opposition or rudeness, she was also
tenacious. She might be frightened, but people could never make her do
what she didn't want to do, not even Amelie. Her relations with Amelie
were slightly strained just now, for she had not taken her advice as to
their return journey from Venice. Amelie had insisted on Mont Cenis, and
Althea had chosen the St. Gothard; so that it was as a measure of
propitiation that she selected three of the roses for Amelie as she went
into the bedroom. Amelie, who was kneeling before one of the larger
boxes and carefully lifting skirts from its trays, paused to sniff at
the flowers, and to express a terse thanks and admiration. 'Ah, bien
merci, mademoiselle,' she said, laying her share on the table beside
her.
She was not very encouraging about the condition of Althea's wardrobe.
'Elles sont defraichies--demodees--en verite, mademoiselle,' she
replied, when Althea asked if many new purchases were necessary.
Althea sighed. 'All the fittings!'
'Il faut souffrir pour etre belle,' said Amelie unsympathetically.
Althea had not dared yet to tell her that she might be going back to
America that winter. The thought of Amelie's gloom cast a shadow over
the project, and she could not yet quite face it. She wandered back to
the sitting-room, and, thinking of Amelie's last words, she stood for
some time and looked at herself in the large mirror which rose from
mantelpiece to cornice, enclosed in cascades of gilt. One of the things
that Althea, in her mild assurance, was really secure of--for, as we
have intimated, her assurance often covered a certain insecurity--was
her own appearance. She didn't know about 'belle,' that seemed rather a
trivial term, and the English equivalent better to express the
distinctive characteristic of her face. She had so often been told she
was nobly beautiful that she did not see herself critically, and she now
leaned her elbow on the mantelpiece and gazed at herself with sad
approbation. The mirror reflected only her head and shoulders, and Miss
Jakes's figure could not, even by a partisan, have been described as
beautiful; she was short, and though immature in outline, her form was
neither slender nor graceful. Althea did not feel these defects, and was
well satisfied with her figure, especially with her carriage, which was
full of dignity; but it was her head that best pleased her, and her
head, indeed, had aspects of great benignity and sweetness. It was a
large head, crowned with coils of dull gold hair; her clothing followed
the fashions obediently, but her fashion of dressing her hair did not
vary, and the smooth parting, the carved ripples along her brow became
her, though they did not become her stiffly conventional attire. Her
face, though almost classic in its spaces and modelling, lacked in
feature the classic decision and amplitude, so that the effect was
rather that of a dignified room meagrely furnished. For these
deficiencies, however, Miss Jakes's eyes might well be accepted as
atonement. They were large, dark, and innocent; they lay far apart,
heavily lidded and with wistful eyebrows above them; their expression
varied easily from lucid serenity to a stricken, expectant look, like
that of a threatened doe, and slight causes could make Miss Jakes's eyes
look stricken. They did not look stricken now, but they looked
profoundly melancholy.
Here she stood, in the heartless little French sitting-room, meaning so
well, so desirous of the best, yet alone, uncertain of any aim, and very
weary of everything.