A Sensational Turn in the Milbrey Fortunes
It was a morning early in November. In the sedate Milbrey dining-room a
brisk wood-fire dulled the edge of the first autumn chill. At the
breakfast-table, comfortably near the hearth, sat Horace Milbrey. With
pointed spoon he had daintily scooped the golden pulp from a Florida
orange, touched the tips of his slender white fingers to the surface of
the water in the bowl, and was now glancing leisurely at the headlines
of his paper, while his breakfast appetite gained agreeable zest from
the acid fruit.
On the second page of the paper the names in a brief item arrested his
errant glance. It disclosed that Mr. Percival Bines had left New York
the day before with a party of guests on his special car, to shoot
quail in North Carolina. Mr. Milbrey glanced at the two shells of the
orange which the butler was then removing.
"What a hopeless brute that fellow was!" he reflected.. He was
recalling a dictum once pronounced by Mr. Bines. "Oranges should never
be eaten in public," he had said with that lordly air of dogmatism
characteristic of him. "The only right way to eat a juicy orange is to
disrobe, grasp the fruit firmly in both hands and climb into a bath-tub
half full of water."
The finished epicure shuddered at the recollection, poignantly, quite
as if a saw were being filed in the next room.
The disagreeable emotion was allayed, however, by the sight of his next
course--_oeufs aux saucissons_. Tender, poetic memories stirred within
him. The little truffled French sausages aroused his better nature. Two
of them reposed luxuriously upon an egg-divan in the dainty French
baking-dish of dull green. Over them--a fitting baptism, was the rich
wine sauce of golden brown--a sauce that might have been the tears of
envious angels, wept over a mortal creation so faultlessly precious.
Mrs. Milbrey entered, news of importance visibly animating her. Her
husband arose mechanically, placed the chair for her, and resumed his
fork in an ecstasy of concentration. Yet, though Mrs. Milbrey was full
of talk, like a charged siphon, needing but a slight pressure to pour
forth matters of grave moment, she observed the engrossment of her
husband, and began on the half of an orange. She knew from experience
that he would be deaf, for the moment, to anything less than an alarm
of fire.
When he had lovingly consumed the last morsel he awoke to her presence
and smiled benignantly.
"My dear, don't fail to try them, they're exquisitely perfect!"
"You really _must_ talk to Avice," his wife replied.
Mr. Milbrey sighed, deprecatingly. He could remember no time within
five years when that necessity had not weighed upon his father's sense
of duty like a vast boulder of granite. He turned to welcome the
diversion provided by the _rognons sautees_ which Jarvis at that moment
uncovered before him with a discreet flourish.
"Now you really must," continued his wife, "and you'll agree with me
when I tell you why."
"But, my dear, I've already talked to the girl exhaustively. I've
pointed out that her treatment of Mrs. Wybert--her perverse refusal to
meet the lady at all, is quite as absurd as it is rude, and that if
Fred chooses to marry Mrs. Wybert it is her duty to act the part of a
sister even if she cannot bring herself to feel it. I've assured her
that Mrs. Wybert's antecedents are all they should be; not illustrious,
perhaps, but eminently respectable. Indeed, I quite approve of the
Southern aristocracy. But she constantly recalls what that snobbish
Bines was unfair enough to tell her. I've done my utmost to convince
her that Bines spoke in the way he did about Mrs. Wybert because he
knew she was aware of those ridiculous tales of his mother's
illiteracy. But Avice is--er--my dear, she is like her mother in more
ways than one. Assuredly she doesn't take it from me."
He became interested in the kidneys. "If Marie had been a man," he
remarked, feelingly, "I often suspect that her fame as a _chef_ would
have been second to none. Really, the suavity of her sauces is a
never-ending delight to me."
"I haven't told you yet the reason--a new reason--why you must talk to
Avice."
"The money--yes, yes, my dear, I know, we all know. Indeed, I've put it
to her plainly. She knows how sorely Fred needs it. She knows how that
beast of a tailor is threatening to be nasty--and I've explained how
invaluable Mrs. Wybert would be, reminding her of that lady's generous
hint about the rise in Federal Steel, which enabled me to net the neat
little profit of ten thousand dollars a month ago, and how, but for
that, we might have been acutely distressed. Yet she stubbornly clings
to the notion that this marriage would be a _mesalliance_ for the
Milbreys."
"I agree with her," replied his wife, tersely.
Mr. Milbrey looked perplexed but polite.
"I quite agree with Avice," continued the lady. "That woman hasn't been
right, Horace, and she isn't right. Young Bines knew what he was
talking about. I haven't lived my years without being able to tell that
after five minutes with her, clever as she is. I can read her. Like so
many of those women, she has an intense passion to be thought
respectable, and she's come into money enough--God only knows how--to
gratify it. I could tell it, if nothing else showed it, by the way in
which she overdoes respectability. She has the thousand and one
artificial little rules for propriety that one never does have when one
has been bred to it. That kind of woman is certain to lapse sooner or
later. She would marry Fred because of his standing, because he's a
favourite with the smart people she thinks she'd like to be pally with.
Then, after a little she'd run off with a German-dialect comedian or
something, like that appalling person Normie Whitmund married."
"But the desire to be respectable, my dear--and you say this woman has
it--is a mighty lever. I'm no cynic about your sex, but I shudder to
think of their--ah--eccentricities if it should cease to be a factor in
the feminine equation."
"It's nothing more than a passing fad with this person--besides, that's
not what I've to tell you."
"But you, yourself, were not averse to Fred's marrying her, in spite of
these opinions you must secretly have held."
"Not while it seemed absolutely necessary--not while the case was so
brutally desperate, when we were actually pressed--"
"Remember, my dear, there's nothing magic in those ten thousand
dollars. They're winged dollars like all their mates, and most of them,
I'm sorry to say, have already flown to places where they'd long been
expected."
Mrs. Milbrey's sensation was no longer to be repressed. She had toyed
with the situation sufficiently. Her husband was now skilfully
dissecting the devilled thighs of an immature chicken.
"Horace," said his wife, impressively, "Avice has had an offer of
marriage--from--"
He looked up with new interest.
"From Rulon Shepler."
He dropped knife and fork. Shepler, the man of mighty millions! The
undisputed monarch of finance! The cold-blooded, calculating sybarite
in his lighter moments, but a man whose values as a son-in-law were so
ideally superb that the Milbrey ambition had never vaulted high enough
even to overlook them for one daring moment! Shepler, whom he had known
so long and so intimately, with never the audacious thought of a union
so stupendously glorious!
"Margaret, you're jesting!"
Mrs. Milbrey scorned to be dazzled by her triumph.
"Nonsense! Shepler asked her last night to marry him."
"It's bewildering! I never dreamed--"
"I've expected it for months. I could tell you the very moment when the
idea first seized the man--on the yacht last summer. I was sure she
interested him, even before his wife died two years ago."
"Margaret, it's too good to be true!"
"If you think it is I'll tell you something that isn't: Avice
practically refused him."
Her husband pushed away his plate; the omission of even one regretful
glance at its treasures betrayed the strong emotion under which he
laboured.
"This is serious," he said, quietly. "Let us get at it. Tell me if you
please!"
"She came to me and cried half the night. She refused him definitely at
first, but he begged her to consider, to take a month to think it
over--"
Milbrey gasped. Shepler, who commanded markets to rise and they rose,
or to fall and they fell--Shepler begging, entreating a child of his!
Despite the soul-sickening tragedy of it, the situation was not without
its element of sublimity.
"She will consider; she _will_ reflect?"
"You're guessing now, and you're as keen at that as I. Avice is not
only amazingly self-willed, as you intimated a moment since, but she is
intensely secretive. When she left me I could get nothing from her
whatever. She was wretchedly sullen and taciturn."
"But why _should_ she hesitate? Shepler--Rulon Shepler! My God! is the
girl crazy? The very idea of hesitation is preposterous!"
"I can't divine her. You know she has acted perversely in the past. I
used to think she might have some affair of which we knew
nothing--something silly and romantic. But if she had any such thing
I'm sure it was ended, and she'd have jumped at this chance a year ago.
You know yourself she was ready to marry young Bines, and was really
disappointed when he didn't propose."
"But this is too serious." He tinkled the little silver bell.
"Find out if Miss Avice will be down to breakfast."
"Yes, sir."
"If she's not coming down I shall go up," declared Mr. Milbrey when the
man had gone.
"She's stubborn," cautioned his wife.
"Gad! don't I know it?"
Jarvis returned.
"Miss Avice won't be down, sir, and I'm to fetch her up a pot of
coffee, sir."
"Take it at once, and tell her I shall be up to see her presently."
Jarvis vanished.
"I think I see a way to put pressure on her, that is if the morning
hasn't already brought her back to her senses."
At four o'clock that afternoon, Avice Milbrey's ring brought Mrs. Van
Geist's butler to the door.
"Sandon, is Aunt Cornelia at home?"
"Yes, Miss Milbrey, she's confined to her room h'account h'of a cold,
miss."
"Thank heaven!"
"Yes, miss--certainly! will you go h'up to her?"
"And Mutterchen, dear, it was a regular bombshell," she concluded after
she had fluttered some of the November freshness into Mrs. Van Geist's
room, and breathlessly related the facts.
"You demented creature! I should say it must have been."
"Now, don't lecture!"
"But Shepler is one of the richest men in New York."
"Dad already suspects as much."
"And he's kind, he's a big-hearted chap, a man of the world,
generous--a--"
"'A woman fancier,' Fidelia Oldaker calls him."
"My dear, if he fancies you--"
"There, you old conservative, I've heard all his good points, and my
duty has been written before me in letters of fire. Dad devoted three
hours to writing it this morning, so don't, please, say over any of the
moral maxims I'm likely to have heard."
"But why are you unwilling?"
"Because--because I'm wild, I fancy--just because I don't like the idea
of marrying that man. He's such a big, funny, round head, and
positively no neck--his head just rolls around on his big, pillowy
shoulders--and then he gets little right at once, tapers right off to a
point with those tiny feet."
"It isn't easy to have everything."
"It wouldn't be easy to have him, either."
Mrs. Van Geist fixed her niece with a sudden look of suspicion.
"Has--has that man anything to do with your refusal?"
"No--not a thing--I give you my word, auntie. If he had been what I
once dreamed he was no one would be asking me to marry him now, but--do
you know what I've decided? Why, that he is a joke--that's all--just a
joke. You needn't think of him, Mutterchen--I don't, except to think it
was funny that he should have impressed me so--he's simply a joke."
"I could have told you as much long ago."
"Tell me something now. Suppose Fred marries that Wybert woman."
"It will be a sorry day for Fred."
"Of course! Now see how I'm pinned. Dad and the mater both say the same
now--they're more severe than I was. Only we were never in such straits
for money. It must be had. So this is the gist of it: I ought to marry
Rulon Shepler in order to save Fred from a marriage that might get us
into all sorts of scandal."
"Well?"
"Well, I would do a lot for Fred. He has faults, but he's always been
good to me."
"And so?"
"And so it's a question whether he marries a very certain kind of woman
or whether I marry a very different kind of man."
"How do you feel?"
"For one thing Fred sha'n't get into that kind of muss if I can save
him from it."
"Then you'll marry Shepler?"
"I'm still uncertain about Mr. Shepler."
"But you say--"
"Yes, I know, but I've reasons for being uncertain. If I told you you'd
say they're like the most of a woman's reasons, mere fond, foolish
hopes, so I won't tell you."
"Well, dear, work it out by your lonely if you must. I believe you'll
do what's best for everybody in the end. And I am glad that your father
and Margaret take your view of that woman."
"I was sure she wasn't right--and I knew Mr. Bines was too much of a
man to speak of her as he did without positive knowledge. Now please
give me some tea and funny little cakes; I'm famished."
"Speaking of Mr. Bines," said Mrs. Van Geist, when the tea had been
brought by Sandon, "I read in the paper this morning that he'd taken a
party to North Carolina for the quail shooting, Eddie Arledge and his
wife and that Mr. and Mrs. Garmer, and of course Florence Akemit.
Should you have thought she'd marry so soon after her divorce? They say
Bishop Doolittle is frightfully vexed with her."
"Really I hadn't heard. Whom is Florence to marry?"
"Mr. Bines, to be sure! Where have you been? You know she was on his
yacht a whole month last summer--the bishop's sister was with her--
highly scandalised all the time by the drinking and gaiety, and now
every one's looking for the engagement to be announced. Here, what did
I do with that _Town Topics_ Cousin Clint left? There it is on the
tabouret. Read the paragraph at the top of the page." Avice read:
"An engagement that is rumoured with uncommon persistence will put
society on the _qui vive_ when it is definitely announced. The man in
the case is the young son of a mining Croesus from Montana, who has
inherited the major portion of his father's millions and who began to
dazzle upper Broadway about a year since by the reckless prodigality of
his ways. His blond _innamorata_ is a recent _divorcee_ of high social
standing, noted for her sparkling wit and an unflagging exuberance of
spirits. The interest of the gossips, however, centres chiefly in the
uncle of the lady, a Right Reverend presiding over a bishopric not a
thousand miles from New York, and in the attitude he will assume toward
her contemplated remarriage. At the last Episcopal convention this
godly and well-learned gentleman was a vehement supporter of the
proposed canon to prohibit absolutely the marriage of divorced persons;
and though he stoutly championed his bewitching niece through the
infelicities that eventuated in South Dakota, _on dit_ that he is
highly wrought up over her present intentions, and has signified
unmistakably his severest disapproval. However, _nous verrons ce que
nous verrons."_
"But, Mutterchen, that's only one of those absurd, vulgar things that
wretched paper is always printing. I could write dozens of them myself.
Tom Banning says they keep one man writing them all the time, out of
his own imagination, and then they put them in like raisins in a cake."
"But, my dear, I'm quite sure this is authentic. I know from Fidelia
Oldaker that the bishop began to cut up about it to Florence, and
Florence defied him. That ancient theory that most gossip is without
truth was exploded long ago. As a matter of fact most gossip, at least
about the people we know, doesn't do half justice to the facts. But,
really, I can't see why he fancied Florence Akemit. I should have
thought he'd want some one a bit less fluttery."
"I dare say you're right, about the gossip, I mean--" Miss Milbrey
remarked when she had finished her tea, and refused the cakes. "I
remember, now, one day when we met at her place, and he seemed so much
at home there. Of course, it must be so. How stupid of me to doubt it!
Now I must run. Good-bye, you old dear, and be good to the cold."
"Let me know what you do."
"Indeed I shall; you shall be the first one to know. My mind is really,
you know, _almost_ made up."
A week later Mr. and Mrs. Horace Milbrey announced in the public prints
the engagement of their daughter Avice to Mr. Rulon Shepler.