Begun half in fun, the pretty widow’s advance towards the physician had
grown a little out of her own entire control, and she found herself in
some danger of being hoist by her own petard. Easy enough she found it
to handle the man—she had handled men from her cradle—but she found
her own wild heart not quite so manageable.
Helen half expected Angela to make the proposal which Latham, the girl
felt sure, never would. She was sure that Angela was in deadly earnest
now, and she was confident that in love, as in frolic, Angela would
stick at nothing.
And Angela was in deadly earnest now—the deadliest. But she had no
intention of proposing to Horace. She knew a trick worth ten of that.
Wah-No-Tee still stood to Mrs. Hilary for friend, philosopher and guide,
but, believed in as staunchly as ever, she was sought rather less
frequently, and on the affair-Latham the disembodied spirit, who was
also “quite a lady,” was consulted not at all. For the subjugation of
the physician Angela Hilary besought no sibyl, bought no love-philter.
She lived, when in London, in a tiny private hotel, just off Bond
Street, and as expensive as it was small. In her sitting-room there
Latham and she were lounging close to the log-heaped fire one dark
December day, exploiting an afternoon tea transatlantically
heterogeneous.
“You know, I don’t approve of this at all,” the medico said, shaking his
head at hot muffins heavy with butter and whipped cream, his hand
hovering undecidedly over toasted marshmallows and a saline liaison of
popcorn and peanuts. “We deserve to be very ill, both of us—and my
country is at war, and the _Morning Post_ says——”
“Food-shortage! Eat less bread!” Angela gurgled, burying her white teeth
in a very red peach. “Well, there’s no bread here, not a crust. And the
children in the East End and badly wounded Tommies might not thrive on
this fare of mine.”
“They might not,” the physician said cordially. “Yes, please, I will
have two lumps and cream: my constitution requires it.”
As she poured his tea, all her rings flashing in the fire-flicker, her
face, usually so white, just flushed with rose from the flecks of the
flames, he fell to watching her silently.
“Talk!” she commanded.
He smiled, and said nothing.
“Oh, a penny, then, for your thoughts, Mr. Man, if you want to be
bribed.”
“I wonder if I dare.”
“Be bribed? What nonsense.”
“It takes a great deal of courage sometimes. But that was not what I
meant.”
“What did you mean?—if you meant anything.”
“Oh! yes—I meant.”
“What? Hurry up!”
“I meant that I wondered if I dared tell you my thoughts—what I was
thinking just then.”
“H’m,” was all the help she vouchsafed him.
“Will you be angry?”
“Very like—how can I tell?”
“Shall I plunge, and find out?”
“As you like. But I don’t mind making it six-pence.”
“The fee nerves me. I was wishing I knew, and could ask without
impertinence, something about your first marriage.”
“My first marriage indeed!” she cried indignantly. “How often are you
pleased to imagine I have been married? I’ve only been married once, I’d
have you know.”
Latham flushed hotly, and she tilted back in her chair and laughed at
him openly. Then the dimpling face—her dimples were
delightful—sobered, and she leaned towards the fire—brooding—her
hands clasped on her knees, her foot on the fender. “I’ll tell you,
then, as well as I can—why not? John was quite unlike any man you’ve
known. You don’t grow such men in England. It isn’t the type. He was
big, and blond and reckless—‘all wool and a yard wide.’ I loved my
husband very dearly. We American women usually do. We can, you know, for
we don’t often marry for any other reason. Why should we? Mr. Hilary was
a lawyer—a great criminal pleader. He saved more murderers than any
other one man at the Illinois bar. He was a Westerner—every bit of him.
His crying was wonderful, and oh! how he bullied his juries. He made
them obey him. He made every one obey him.”
“You?” Latham interjected.
“Me! Good gracious, man, American women don’t obey. Me! I wouldn’t obey
Georgie Washington come to life and richer than Rothschild. Obey!” Only
an American voice could express such contempt, and no British pen convey
it. “But the juries obeyed him all right—as a rule! Those were good
days in Chicago. There’s no place like Chicago.”
“So I’ve heard,” Latham admitted.
“But they didn’t last long. An uncle of John’s died out in California,
and left us ever so many millions.”
“I say—that was sporting!”
“What was?”
“Leaving his money to you as well as to his nephew.”
“Land’s sake, but you English are funny! Of course Ira Hilary did
nothing of the sort. I don’t suppose he’d ever heard of me—though he
might if he read the Chicago papers; a dress or two of mine were usually
in on Sunday—or something I’d done. But I dare say he didn’t even know
if John had a wife. He’d gone to the Pacific coast when he was a boy,
before John was born—and he’d never been back East, or even written,
till he wrote he was dead. It’s like that in America. _Our_ men are
busy.”
“I see,” Latham asserted.
“No, you don’t. No one could who hadn’t lived there. Throw another log
on.”
Latham did, and she continued, half chatting to him, half musing: “My!
how it all comes back, talking about it. Well, he left us all that
money, left it to me as much as if he’d said so, and very much more than
he left it to John. That’s another way we have in America that you
couldn’t understand if you tried; so I wouldn’t try, if I were you.”
“I won’t,” her guest said meekly. “Go on, please. I am interested.”
“Well, Uncle Ira died, and I made John retire.”
“Retire?”
“Give up the bar. And we traveled. I love to travel, I always have. And
now we could afford to go anywhere and do everything. Of course I’d
always had money, heaps and heaps. Papa was rich, and he left me
everything. Oh! Richard Bransby wasn’t the only pebble on that beach.
Gracious! we run to such fathers in America. But, of course, we’d had to
live on John’s money.”
“Why?”
“Why?” she blazed at him. “Why? Why, because my money wasn’t his. He
hadn’t earned it. John Hilary never had so much as a cigar out of my
money. He dressed shockingly. I had to burn half the ties he bought. And
his hats! But he supported me, I didn’t support him. American men don’t
sponge on their wives. They wouldn’t do it. And if they would, we
wouldn’t let them—not we American women. I say, Dr. Latham, you’ve a
lot to learn about America—all Englishmen have.”
“Go on. Teach me some more. I like learning.”
“There’s not much more to tell. We were not together long, John and I.
It was like a story my father used to tease me with, when he was tired
and I teased him to tell me stories. ‘I’ll tell you a story about Jack
A’Manory, and now my story’s begun. I’ll tell you another about Jack and
his brother, and now my story’s done.’ I was eighteen, nearly, when I
was married. It was four years after that that John said good-by to his
murderers and absconders. Just a year after he died in Hong
Kong—cholera. That teased me some.” The pretty lips were quivering and
Latham saw a tear pearl on the long lashes.
After a pause he said gently, “Will you ever give any one else his
place, do you think?”
“John’s place? Never. No one could.” She did not add that there were
other places that a man—the right man—might make in her heart, and
that she was lonely. But the thought was clear in her mind, and it
glanced through Latham’s.
“How long is it—since you were in Hong Kong?” he ventured presently.
Angela Hilary dimpled and laughed. “I’ll be twenty-eight next week.”
“And I was forty-seven last week.” And then he added earnestly, “Thank
you for telling me.”
“Oh, I was glad to.” Neither referred to her confidence about her age,
or thought that the other did.
At that moment “Mr. Pryde” was announced. Angela welcomed him
effusively, brewed him fresh tea and plied him with molasses candy and
hot ginger-bread.
Latham watched her; it was always pleasant to watch this woman,
especially when plying some womanly craft, as now, but he spoke to
Stephen. “I am glad to have this chance of offering you my
congratulations, Pryde.”
Stephen raised a puzzled eyebrow. “Your congratulations?”
“I hear that since you have become the head of the house of Bransby you
have done great things.”
“Oh,” Stephen said non-committally.
“They tell me that you are the big man in the Aeroplane World, and that
you are going to grow bigger. Perhaps success means nothing to you,
but——”
“Success means everything to me, to every man worth his salt. The people
who say it doesn’t are liars.”
“So, after all, you were right and Bransby was wrong.”
“Yes, I was right, and Uncle Dick was wrong. But as for my rising to
great heights—well—after all, it is the house of Bransby that will
reap the benefit. It was very trusting of Uncle Dick to leave me the
management of the business, but Helen is the house of Bransby.”
“But surely she won’t interfere with your management,” said Latham.
And Angela cried, “Oh no, she must never do that.”
“No—she must never do that,” Pryde said, more to himself than to them,
stirring his tea musingly and gazing wistfully, stubbornly into the
fire. He looked up and caught Mrs. Hilary’s eye, and spoke to them both,
and more lightly. “I dare say I shall find a way to persuade her to let
me go on as I have.”
Their hostess sprang up with a cry. Latham just saved her cup, and an
almonded eclair tumbled into the fire—past all saving. “Oh! it is
lovely, perfectly lovely!”
“What?” the men both asked.
“To fly like a bird. I used to dream I was flying when I was a child. It
was perfectly sweet. I used to dream it, too, sometimes when I first
came out and went to Germans (cotillions, you call ’em) and things every
night—oh!”
“Perhaps that came from your dancing,” Pryde said gallantly. Angela
danced well.
“More probably it was the midnight supper she’d eaten,” laughed Latham,
pointing a rueful professional finger at the tea-table.
“Perhaps it was both,” the hostess said cheerfully. “And my, it was
beautiful. But oh, we never had supper at midnight. No fear! Two or
three was nearer the hour. But such good suppers. You don’t know how to
eat over here,” she added sadly. “For one thing, you simply don’t know
how to cook a lobster—not one of you.”
“How should a lobster be cooked?” Pryde said lazily.
“Hot—hot—hot. Or it’s good in a mayonnaise. But who ever saw a
mayonnaise in London? No one.”
“I am not greatly surprised that you dreamed at some height, if you
regularly supped off lobster, Mrs. Hilary, at three in the morning,
either frappé or sizzling hot,” Latham told her.
“And champagne with it,” Stephen ventured.
“Never! I detest champagne with shellfish.”
“Stout?” Pryde quizzed.
Angela made a face.
“What, then, was the beverage? If one is permitted to ask,” Stephen
persisted meekly.
“Cream—when I could get it. I do love cream.”
The physician groaned. “I wonder,” he said severely, “that instead of
dreaming of flying you did not in reality fly.”
She giggled, and helped herself to a macaroon, still standing on the
hearthrug, facing them. “Oh, I knew a lovely poem once—we all had to
learn it by heart at school—probably you did too?”
“I think it highly improbable,” Latham protested.
“I am positive I did not,” Pryde asserted.
“Not learn to recite ‘Darius Green and His Flying Machine’! My, you do
neglect your children in this country. You poor things! I wonder if I
can remember it and say it to you.”
She clasped her hands behind her back and faced them with dancing eyes.
“‘Darius Green and His Flying Machine,’” she declaimed solemnly. And
very solemnly, but with now and then a punctuation point of giggle, she
recited in its entirety the absurd classic which has played no
inconspicuous part in the transatlantic curriculum. Her beautiful Creole
voice, now pathetic and velvet, now lifted as the wing of a bird in
flight, her face dimpling till even Stephen was bewitched, and Latham
could have kissed it, and might have been tempted to essay the
enterprise had only they been alone. Richard Bransby, whose fond fancy
had compared the women of his love each to some distinct flower, might
have thought her like some rich magnolia of her own South as she swayed
and postured in the gleaming firelight. But perhaps all beautiful women
are rather flower-like.
She ended the performance with a shiver and sigh of elation. “Oh, isn’t
it a love of a poem? Have some more tea.”
Stephen came to see Mrs. Hilary not infrequently. She liked him
genuinely, and her liking soothed and helped him. He was terribly
restless often. Never once had he repented. He had loved Hugh, and loved
him still. He would have given a great deal to have known where he was,
and to have helped him. He would have given far more to know that the
brother would never come back—come back to thwart him of Helen—perhaps
to expose him of crime. He loved Hugh and he mourned him; but two things
to him were paramount: to make Helen his wife, and to be an “Air-King.”
One goal was in sight, the other he could not, and would not,
relinquish. And to gain these two great desires, soul-desires both, he
would hesitate at nothing, regret nothing, and least of all their cost
to any other, no matter how dear to him that other, no matter how
terrible that cost.
Latham left a few moments after the tragic descent of Darius into the
barnyard mud. Angela Hilary went to the door to speed her parting guest,
and gave him her hand, her right hand, of course. Latham dropped it
rather abruptly and took her left hand in his. “How many rings do you
own?” he demanded.
“Dozens. I’ve not counted them for years. There’s a list somewhere.”
“You need two more,” he said softly—and went.