MORNING
The Starkweather mansion was a large dwelling. Built some years before the
Civil War, it had been one of the "great houses" in its day, to be pointed
out to the mid-nineteenth century visitor to the metropolis. Of course,
when the sightseeing coaches came in fashion they went up Fifth Avenue and
passed by the stately mansions of the Victorian era, on Madison Avenue,
without comment.
Willets Starkweather had sprung from a quite mean and un-noted branch of
the family, and had never, until middle life, expected to live in the
Madison Avenue homestead. The important members of his clan were dead and
gone and their great fortunes scattered. Willets Starkweather could barely
keep up with the expenditures of his great household.
There were never servants enough, and Mrs. Olstrom, the very capable
housekeeper, who had served the present master's great-uncle before the
day of the new generation, had hard work to satisfy the demands of those
there were upon the means allowed her by Mr. Starkweather.
There were rooms in the house--especially upon the topmost floor--into
which even the servants seldom went. There were vacant rooms which never
knew broom nor duster. The dwelling, indeed, was altogether too large for
the needs of Mr. Starkweather and his three motherless daughters.
But their living in it gave them a prestige which nothing else could. As
wise as any match-making matron, Willets Starkweather knew that the
family's address at this particular number on Madison Avenue would aid his
daughters more in "making a good match" than anything else.
He could not dower them. Really, they needed no dower with their good
looks, for they were all pretty. The Madison Avenue mansion gave them the
open sesame into good society--choice society, in fact--and there some
wealthy trio of unattached young men must see and fall in love with them.
And the girls understood this, too--right down to fourteen-year-old
Flossie. They all three knew that to "pay poor papa" for reckless
expenditures now, they must sooner or later capture moneyed husbands.
So, there was more than one reason why the three Starkweather girls leaped
immediately from childhood into full-blown womanhood. Flossie had already
privately studied the characters--and possible bank accounts--of the boys
of her acquaintance, to decide upon whom she should smile her sweetest.
These facts--save that the mansion was enormous--were hidden from Helen
when she arose on the first morning of her city experience. She had slept
soundly and sweetly. Even the rustling steps on the ghost walk had not
bothered her for long.
Used to being up and out by sunrise, she could not easily fall in with
city ways. She hustled out of bed soon after daybreak, took a cold sponge,
which made her body tingle delightfully, and got into her clothes as
rapidly as any boy.
She had only the shoddy-looking brown traveling dress to wear, and the
out-of-date hat. But she put them on, and ventured downstairs, intent upon
going out for a walk before breakfast.
The solemn clock in the hall chimed seven as she found her way down the
lower flight of front stairs. As she came through the curtain-hung halls
and down the stairs, not a soul did she meet until she reached the front
hall. There a rather decrepit-looking man, with a bleared eye, and dressed
in decent black, hobbled out of a parlor to meet her.
"Bless me!" he ejaculated. "What--what--what----"
"I am Helen Morrell," said the girl from Sunset Ranch, smiling, and
judging that this must be the butler of whom the housekeeper had spoken
the night before. "I have just come to visit my uncle and cousins."
"Bless me!" said the old man again. "Gregson told me. Proud to see you,
Miss. But--you're dressed to go out, Miss?"
"For a walk, sir," replied Helen, nodding.
"At this hour? Bless me--bless me--bless me----"
He seemed apt to run off in this style, in an unending string of mild
expletives. His head shook and his hands seemed palsied. But he was a
polite old man.
"I beg of you, Miss, don't go out without a bit of breakfast. My own
coffee is dripping in the percolator. Let me give you a cup," he said.
"Why--if it's not too much trouble, sir----"
"This way, Miss," he said, hurrying on before, and leading Helen to a cozy
little room at the back. This corresponded with the housekeeper's
sitting-room and Helen believed it must be Mr. Lawdor's own apartment.
He laid a small cloth with a flourish. He set forth a silver breakfast
set. He did everything neatly and with an alacrity that surprised Helen in
one so evidently decrepit.
"A chop, now, Miss? Or a rasher?" he asked, pointing to an array of
electric appliances on the sideboard by which a breakfast might be "tossed
up" in a hurry.
"No, no," Helen declared. "Not so early. This nice coffee and these
delicious rolls are enough until I have earned more."
"Earned more, Miss?" he asked, in surprise.
"By exercise," she explained. "I am going to take a good tramp. Then I
shall come back as hungry as a mountain lion."
"The family breakfasts at nine, Miss," said the butler, bowing. "But if
you are an early riser you will always find something tidy here in my
room, Miss. You are very welcome."
She thanked him and went out into the hall again. The footman in
livery--very sleepy and tousled as yet--was unchaining the front door. A
yawning maid was at work in one of the parlors with a duster. She stared
at Helen in amazement, but Gregson stood stiffly at attention as the
visitor went forth into the daylight.
"My, how funny city people live!" thought Helen Morrell. "I don't believe
I ever could stand it. Up till all hours, and then no breakfast until
nine. _What_ a way to live!
"And there must be twice as many servants as there are members of the
family---- Why! more than that! And all that big house to get lost in,"
she added, glancing up at it as she started off upon her walk.
She turned the first corner and went through a side street toward the
west. This was not a business side street. There were several tall
apartment hotels interspersed with old houses.
She came to Fifth Avenue--"the most beautiful street in the world." It had
been swept and garnished by a horde of white-robed men since two o'clock.
On this brisk October morning, from the Washington Arch to 110th Street,
it was as clean as a whistle.
She walked uptown. At Thirty-fourth and Forty-second streets the crosstown
traffic had already begun. She passed the new department stores, already
opening their eyes and yawning in advance of the day's trade.
There were a few pedestrians headed uptown like herself. Some well-dressed
men seemed walking to business. A few neat shop girls were hurrying along
the pavement, too. But Helen, and the dogs in leash, had the avenue mostly
to themselves at this hour.
The sleepy maids, or footmen, or pages stared at the Western girl with
curiosity as she strode along. For, unlike many from the plains, Helen
could walk well in addition to riding well.
She reached the plaza, and crossing it, entered the park. The trees were
just coloring prettily. There were morning sounds from the not-far-distant
zoo. A few early nursemaids and their charges asleep in baby carriages,
were abroad. Several old gentlemen read their morning papers upon the
benches, or fed the squirrels who were skirmishing for their breakfasts.
Several plainly-dressed people were evidently taking their own
"constitutionals" through the park paths. Swinging down from the north
come square-shouldered, cleanly-shaven young men of the same type as Dud
Stone. Helen believed that Dud must be a typical New Yorker.
But there were no girls abroad--at least, girls like herself who had
leisure. And Helen was timid about making friends with the nursemaids.
In fact, there wasn't a soul who smiled upon her as she walked through the
paths. She would not have dared approach any person she met for any
purpose whatsoever.
"They haven't a grain of interest in me," thought Helen. "Many of them, I
suppose, don't even see me. Goodness, what a lot of self-centred people
there must be in New York!"
She wandered on and on. She had no watch--never had owned one. As she had
told Dud Stone, the stars at night were her clock, and by day she judged
the hour by the sun.
The sun was behind a haze now; but she had another sure timekeeper. There
was nothing the matter with Helen's appetite.
"I'll go back and join the family at breakfast," the girl thought. "I hope
they'll be nice to me. And poor Aunt Eunice dead without our ever being
told of it! Strange!"
She had come a good way. Indeed, she was some time in finding an outlet
from the park. The sun was behind the morning haze as yet, but she turned
east, and finally came out upon the avenue some distance above the gateway
by which she had entered.
A southbound auto-bus caught her eye and she signaled it. She not only had
brought her purse with her, but the wallet with her money was stuffed
inside her blouse and made an uncomfortable lump there at her waist. But
she hid this with her arm, feeling that she must be on the watch for some
sharper all the time.
"Big Hen was right when he warned me," she repeated, eyeing suspiciously
the several passengers in the Fifth Avenue bus.
They were mostly early shoppers, however, or gentlemen riding to their
offices. She had noticed the number of the street nearest her uncle's
house, and so got out at the right corner.
The change in this part of the town since she had walked away from it soon
after seven, amazed her. She almost became confused and started in the
wrong direction. The roar of traffic, the rattle of riveters at work on
several new buildings in the neighborhood, the hoarse honking of
automobiles, the shrill whistles of the traffic policemen at the corners,
and the various other sounds seemed to make another place of the
old-fashioned Madison Avenue block.
"My goodness! To live in such confusion, and yet have money enough to be
able to enjoy a home out of town," thought Helen. "How foolish of Uncle
Starkweather."
She made no mistake in the house this time. There was Gregson--now spick
and span in his maroon livery--haughtily mounting guard over the open
doorway while a belated scrubwoman was cleaning the steps and areaway.
Helen tripped up the steps with a smile for Gregson; but that wooden-faced
subject of King George had no joint in his neck. He could merely raise a
finger in salute.
"Is the family up, sir?" she asked, politely.
"In Mr. Starkweather's den, Miss," said the footman, being unable to leave
his post at the moment. Mr. Lawdor was not in sight and Helen set out to
find the room in question, wondering if the family had already
breakfasted. The clock in the hall chimed the quarter to ten as she passed
it.
The great rooms on this floor were open now; but empty. She suddenly heard
voices. She found a cross passage that she had not noticed before, and
entered it, the voices growing louder.
She came to a door before which hung heavy curtains; but these curtains
did not deaden the sound entirely. Indeed, as Helen hesitated, with her
hand stretched out to seize the portiere, she heard something that halted
her.
Indeed, what she heard within the next few moments entirely changed the
outlook of the girl from Sunset Ranch. It matured that doubt of humanity
that had been born the night before in her breast.
And it changed--for the time being at least--Helen's nature. From a frank,
open-hearted, loving girl she became suspicious, morose and secretive. The
first words she heard held her spell-bound--an unintentional eavesdropper.
And what she heard made her determined to appear to her unkind relatives
quite as they expected her to appear.