Mrs. Darrell
by Foxcroft Davis · English · Gutenberg #47378 · 493,544 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Mrs. Darrell
Author: Foxcroft Davis
Illustrator: William Sherman Potts
Release date: November 17, 2014 [eBook #47378]
Most recently updated: October 24, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MRS. DARRELL ***
MRS. DARRELL
[Illustration]
[Illustration: “‘I DON’T THINK MRS. DARRELL CAN SEE YOU AGAIN.’”]
MRS. DARRELL
BY
FOXCROFT DAVIS
AUTHOR OF “DESPOTISM AND DEMOCRACY”
_WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
WILLIAM SHERMAN POTTS_
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1905
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1905,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published May, 1905.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
CONTENTS
PAGE
_Chapter One_ 1
_Chapter Two_ 30
_Chapter Three_ 49
_Chapter Four_ 63
_Chapter Five_ 71
_Chapter Six_ 80
_Chapter Seven_ 95
_Chapter Eight_ 118
_Chapter Nine_ 150
_Chapter Ten_ 175
_Chapter Eleven_ 210
_Chapter Twelve_ 220
_Chapter Thirteen_ 245
_Chapter Fourteen_ 269
_Chapter Fifteen_ 289
_Chapter Sixteen_ 307
_Chapter Seventeen_ 356
_Chapter Eighteen_ 370
ILLUSTRATIONS
“‘I don’t think Mrs. Darrell can see you again’” _Frontispiece_
FACING PAGE
“‘Oh, papa!’ she said, ‘save my little pearl heart’” 6
“... She caught him by the arm and whispered, ‘And
could you leave me?’” 64
“Baskerville took Anne out to dinner” 138
“The little park was wholly deserted except for themselves” 236
“The next minute she was fast in Baskerville’s arms” 280
MRS. DARRELL
_Chapter One_
Time was, not so long ago, when Washington had some primitive aspects.
This was when the city was merely a political capital and society
was made up of the high government officials, the diplomatic corps,
the army and navy, and senators were very great personages and even
the now despised members of the House of Representatives had a place
on the social chess–board. This was before the influx of recently
acquired wealth and the building of splendid mansions wherein to house
the retired trade. There were few private ball–rooms, and certain
subscription dances were reckoned to be very smart. To these dances
young ladies were not ashamed to wear muslin gowns, nor to go in the
tram, carrying with them a contrivance known as a “party–bag,” which
held their white slippers, fans, and gloves.
The young ladies were just as beautiful then as now, as certainly
Captain Reginald Darrell and Captain Hugh Pelham, officers of the
178th Foot Regiment, then stationed in India, thought one night as
they watched from the street those charming Washington girls thronging
to the big Charity Ball of the season. It was a cold, clear January
night, and the two young officers, cousins and chums, who had wandered
idly from their hotel, watched with profound interest this phase of an
American ball.
The event being a great Charity Ball, tickets were on sale at all the
hotels. Pelham and Darrell had invested in a couple of tickets, and
were now standing outside the building, doubting whether after all they
should go in or not. They had heard and read much of American splendor,
and this had come nearly deterring them from coming to America at all,
considering their small allowance and modest pay in a foot regiment.
Both of them, it was true, were the grandsons of a peer, but a peer
almost as poor as Lazarus. Each had the enormous advantage of good
birth, good breeding, and the urgent necessity of making his own way
in the world. There was, it is true, some shadowy expectation of a
fortune which Darrell might inherit as heir–at–law, and Pelham was next
heir after Darrell. But the chance was so remote that the only present
benefit they had out of it was mess–table joking, and a declaration
on Darrell’s part that his love–affairs were always cruelly interfered
with by Pelham. In fact, Pelham’s interference—that is to say,
influence—with Darrell in every way was complete, Darrell being simple,
brave, polite, handsome, and commonplace, while Pelham was short, dark,
rather homely, of uncommon powers of mind and character. Pelham was
much favored by women, whom he treated with remarkable gentleness and
courtesy, but for whom he had felt a secret indifference.
Darrell, on the contrary, was devoted to the whole sex, their petted
and curled darling. He thought a woman the object of the highest
consequence,—that is to say, next to sport, which he regarded as
something sacred, ranking with Church and State. He always had a dozen
love–affairs on hand, and like the man in the old song, “He loved the
ladies, every one.” In Darrell’s eyes, Pelham’s only fault was that
he considered these love–affairs legitimate subjects of chaffing and
laughing, while Darrell took them all with perfect seriousness.
It was Pelham who, in his desire to see the world, so far as his narrow
purse would permit, had induced Darrell to plunge, so to speak, to the
extent of going to India by way of the United States and spending
three weeks in Washington, relying upon economy for the next five years
when they would be with their regiment in India in the Punjaub.
They were somewhat surprised, however, to find that in the capital of
the richest country in the world there was no great amount of splendor
in those days, but rather a modest standard of living for a capital. In
particular it appeared to them this evening that the splendor of the
ball was conspicuous by its absence. It must be premised, however, that
they had not then seen the supper, which was truly regal. Exteriorly,
they could not but compare the scene with the real magnificence of
such an occasion in London during the season, with the superb coaches
magnificently horsed, the gorgeous–liveried footmen, the army of
servants lining the stairways and the approaches, and the universal
elegance which pervades these balls of the summer nights given under
the sky of London. At the Washington ball, however, they saw only a
moderate number of private carriages, ordinary in every way, a vast
number of shabby old cabs,—known then as “hacks,”—gentlemen arriving on
foot, and even young ladies, their ball–dresses discreetly covered with
large cloaks, tripping along the streets, with their escorts of father
or brother carrying a party–bag. This, remember, was before the Deluge,
that is to say at least fifteen years ago.
The building in which the ball was held was large and plain, both
inside and out, but blazing with lights. The street itself had long
since been deserted by fashion. The negroes, never absent from a
spectacle in Washington, with their white teeth shining in the wintry
moonlight lined the sidewalk. A few white persons loitered under the
gas–lamp, watching the long line of carriages discharging their inmates
at the big, wide–open door, from whence the strains of the Marine Band
floated out into the cold, still night.
The two young Englishmen entered the street and stood watching the
scene with interest, leaning against the tall iron railings of the
old–fashioned quarter. Pelham and Darrell noticed near them, also
leaning against the iron railings, a man of about middle age, with a
sort of leonine beauty and handsomely dressed, though far too showily.
His fur–lined greatcoat brought out the clean–cut outlines of his
clean–shaven face, his iron–gray hair, and straight, narrow brows over
eyes of singular eloquence. Both young officers observed him, for it
was difficult at any time to look once at James Clavering without
looking at him twice.
In the circle of light made by two flashing gas–lamps in the front
entrance, suddenly appeared a young girl leaning on the arm of an
elderly gentleman. At the same instant the eyes of Pelham and Darrell
and Clavering fell upon her, and each thought her the most beautiful
woman that he had ever seen—which was, however, a very great mistake.
Elizabeth Brandon had, it is true, hair of satin blackness and skin of
milky whiteness, and eyes that reminded one of a summer night, so soft,
so dark with occasional flashes of starlike brilliancy, and a figure as
slight and graceful as a lily–stalk. Other women have as much beauty of
feature as Elizabeth Brandon, but she had that which is beauty itself,
the power to charm at a glance. She was not really as handsome as her
father, General Brandon, on whose arm she leaned, and who carried her
party–bag.
[Illustration: “‘OH, PAPA!’ SHE SAID, ‘SAVE MY LITTLE PEARL HEART.’”]
Both Pelham and Darrell saw at a glance that General Brandon was a
military man. And Clavering recognized him as the Captain Brandon he
had known twenty–five years before at a post in Texas, where Clavering
was at the time a sutler. He had heard that, at the breaking out of
the Civil War, Captain Brandon, who was a Southern man, had resigned
and had become a brigadier–general in the Confederate Army. Since the
war, Brandon had disappeared in the great, black gulf that opened where
once stood a government which called itself the Confederate States of
America. But Clavering gave no thought to this, as under the cover of
darkness he surveyed the charming girl who clung to General Brandon’s
arm. The two stood directly in front of Pelham and Darrell, who
bestowed upon Elizabeth those glances of respectful admiration which is
the homage due to beauty.
“My dear,” said General Brandon, in a peculiarly musical voice, to
his daughter, “I think we had better wait here until Mrs. Luttrell’s
carriage arrives. It is in line down the street, but will not be here
for five minutes or more.”
Darrell and Pelham moved a little aside so that the young lady and her
father might be somewhat out of the way of the passing throng. General
Brandon recognized this civility by lifting his hat punctiliously
to each, which courtesy both of them returned. At the same moment,
Elizabeth lifting her hand to her white throat, her sleeve caught in a
slender gold chain around her neck and a sudden movement broke it.
“Oh, papa!” she said, “save my little pearl heart. I would not lose it
for the world.”
General Brandon immediately looked down on the wet sidewalk for the
trinket, a search in which he was joined by both Pelham and Darrell.
Clavering, who was in the shadow, did not move, but his eyes followed
every movement of the group. Elizabeth unconsciously brushed against
him. There was some mud on his boots, and it became transferred to her
white muslin skirts, which she let fall in the anxiety of her loss. The
trinket, it would seem, had fallen at their very feet, but it was not
to be found. Elizabeth’s eyes filled with tears, and she mourned for
her little pearl heart as if it had been a lost child.
“It is of no real value,” she said to Pelham, raising her soft, dark
eyes to his, “but I would not have lost it for anything.”
Both Pelham and Darrell were keen–eyed and searched diligently for the
lost trinket, but unavailingly. Pelham, usually the most unimpressed of
men where women and their fallals were concerned, felt that he would
have given a month’s pay to have found the little ornament and thereby
dry the tears that glistened on Elizabeth’s long, black lashes; but
it was soon obvious that there was no finding her lost treasure. Its
disappearance, though mysterious, was instant and complete.
General Brandon said in his slow, suave voice: “My dear child, all our
efforts are vain. I think your little treasure must have been stolen by
an unseen hand at the instant you dropped it; but you, gentlemen,” he
said, turning to Pelham and Darrell, “have been most kind, and I beg to
introduce myself to you. I am General Brandon of Virginia, formerly of
the United States Army and lately of the Confederate Army. Here is my
card, and I shall be most pleased to see you at my house.”
Pelham and Darrell were nearly knocked down by this unexpected
invitation. They did not know that a Virginian never loses the habit of
asking Thomas, Richard, and Henry to call upon him, on the slightest
provocation and often without any provocation at all. But they
recognized in a moment that this handsome and courtly person who went
around recklessly inviting street acquaintances to visit his house,
was a gentleman of purest rays serene, and being of the same caste
themselves, and thereby made free, both of them promptly accepted.
Pelham, who was quick of wit where Darrell was slow, introduced himself
and his friend, each handing his card.
“Ah!” cried General Brandon, “so you are officers of the British Army.
I am more than pleased to meet you. I am, like most persons in my
native state, of unmixed English descent, my family being a younger
branch of the Suffolk–Brandons; and I also am of the profession of
arms. I was in the old army, where I held the rank of major, and
afterward, when I followed my state out of the Union, I had the honor
of being brigadier–general in the army of the Southern Confederacy.
Permit me to introduce you to my daughter.” And this General Brandon
proceeded to do. Elizabeth bowed and smiled and was not at all taken
aback by the suddenness of the acquaintance. Virginians think that
all well–bred persons constitute a sort of national and international
oligarchy, whereof every member is or ought to be known to every other
member.
Pelham and Darrell were perfectly delighted, Darrell at the chance of
meeting so beautiful a girl as Elizabeth, and Pelham charmed with the
courtesy and innocent simplicity of General Brandon, who, while a man
of the world in its best sense, was yet unworldly.
“And may I ask,” said the General, “if you are attending the ball
to–night?”
“Yes,” said Pelham, “we understood it was a Charity Ball, and bought
tickets at the hotel; but as we are entire strangers, we were doubtful
whether after all it would be judicious for us to show our faces in the
ball–room.”
“My dear sir,” replied General Brandon, earnestly, “do not give
yourself the least uneasiness, I beg of you. I myself am not going, and
a friend Mrs. Luttrell will chaperon my daughter; but Mrs. Luttrell
will likewise chaperon you, and I shall have pleasure in introducing
you to any one whom you may desire to meet. My daughter also will do
the same.”
“With pleasure,” said Elizabeth, quickly and sweetly.
“If you will do me the honor to dance with me,” said Darrell to
Elizabeth, thinking to cut Pelham out.
“I can’t compete with Captain Darrell on that ground,” said Pelham,
quickly, with a certain grimness in his smile, “but if Miss Brandon
will only condescend to notice me in the ball–room, I shall feel that I
am well established.”
Elizabeth looked at Pelham closely. He was not at all handsome, but
he was far from insignificant, and he had one of those beautifully
modulated English voices and a look and a smile which were extremely
winning to women, children, and lost dogs. Darrell on the contrary
was as handsome as a dream, with the unmistakable blond, clean,
Anglo–Saxon beauty.
By this time, among the slow procession of carriages, ever moving, a
big, old–fashioned landeau, with a pair of long–tailed horses to it
and a colored coachman and footman, halted directly in front of them.
A lady with very dark eyes and very white hair and a voice sweet, but
with a singular carrying quality which could make itself heard over all
the clatter of the street, called out:—
“My dear General Brandon, I am mortified to death almost. I meant to
bring Elizabeth to the ball with me, but I declare I forgot all about
it until it was too late, and my nephew has been scolding me about it
ever since I left home. Richard, go and fetch Elizabeth now.”
The carriage door opened, and Richard Baskerville got out. He was a
little better looking than Pelham, though not half so good looking as
Darrell; but he belonged in the category of Pelham,—that class of men
who can attract notice and admiration without the aid of good looks. He
advanced and, bowing to General Brandon, offered his arm to Elizabeth,
saying with the air of old acquaintanceship, “My aunt has really
behaved shockingly to you, and I am ashamed of her.”
“Stop, Richard,” said General Brandon, detaining him. “I wish to
present to you two friends of mine.” General Brandon had never laid
eyes on Darrell or Pelham in his life until five minutes before; but
Richard Baskerville, who understood General Brandon thoroughly, would
not have been the least surprised if he had introduced a bootblack who
had obliged him and was therefore a valued friend. “May I introduce you
to Captain Pelham of the 178th Foot, and Captain Darrell of the same
regiment,—British officers? I need say no more.”
Baskerville politely shook hands with both Pelham and Darrell,
who discerned in him one of the most agreeable traits of American
character, cordiality to strangers—a cordiality which prevails in all
American society among the retired tradespeople, the newly rich.
“And,” continued General Brandon, “they are both going to the ball. I
intrust them to Mrs. Luttrell to make acquaintances among the young
ladies, and to you for the same duties among the gentlemen.”
Then Mrs. Luttrell’s penetrating voice was heard calling to General
Brandon, “Come here this minute, General Brandon.” And when he was
about halfway across the muddy street to her carriage, she inquired,
in a tone perfectly audible to both Pelham and Darrell, “Who are those
two nice–looking men standing with Elizabeth?”
“English officers,” replied General Brandon. “I hope you find yourself
very well this evening.”
“Bring them here this instant. I shall take them to the ball with me!”
was Mrs. Luttrell’s reply to this information—Mrs. Luttrell being a
pirate and freebooter of the worst description whenever desirable men
were discerned.
“Just what I was about to ask you, but as usual you anticipate
everything.”
Pelham, Darrell, and Baskerville, who were looking gravely at each
other, exchanged glances, which were equivalent to winks, and
Baskerville said:—
“You might as well give in to my aunt. She is a very determined
woman, but she will do a good part by you with the young ladies. I
need not say I shall be most happy to introduce you to any one of
my acquaintances you may wish to know. Come, Miss Brandon.” He gave
Elizabeth his arm and escorted her, with Pelham and Darrell following,
across the street to where Mrs. Luttrell’s big coach, with the lamps
flowing out in the darkness, had its place in the line of carriages.
Elizabeth had felt from the beginning the strange influence of the
unknown man in the shadow, whose eyes had been fixed upon her from the
moment of their arrival. She had glanced back half a dozen times at his
tall and imposing figure and had been acutely conscious of his keen
observation. She felt it still as she walked away from him.
Elizabeth felt as if in a dream. She was distressed and even
superstitious about the loss of her little ornament. It not only
distressed her, but had given her a presentiment of evil, and she was
vaguely conscious of some malign influence near her and likewise of
the admiration and incipient tenderness which Darrell and Pelham felt
towards her, of her father’s deep and protecting love, of being the
object of solicitude to Mrs. Luttrell and Baskerville. She was at that
moment surrounded by admiration and love and care, but she was haunted
by a sudden sense of evil close to her. She stepped silently into the
carriage, and took her seat by Mrs. Luttrell’s side. General Brandon
then presented the two young British officers as if they were his
long–lost brothers. Mrs. Luttrell received them, not as if they were
her long–lost brothers, but like a perfect woman of the world, born to
command, and who, seeing what she wanted, took her own, wherever she
found it, as Molière says. And now she said to them: “Please get into
the carriage. It holds four very comfortably. I do not care for these
miniature broughams and coupés, meant to hold a woman and a poodle.
I like a good big carriage, the sort our great–grandfathers had when
everybody had fourteen children and generally took seven with them when
they went visiting. My carriage holds four, and I could pack six away
in it if I chose. I can take you in, General Brandon,” she said.
“A thousand thanks, my dear Mrs. Luttrell,” replied General Brandon,
who did not have at that moment the price of a ticket either at home or
in his pocket. “I have no intention of going to the ball since you are
so kind as to chaperon my child. Good night.”
“Good night.”
Baskerville then shut the door. “You needn’t ask me to get in. I shall
walk down. It is only a step anyhow, but I know your propensities for
packing your carriage as full as an omnibus, and I don’t believe in
encouraging you in your vices.”
“The way my nephew talks to me is perfectly shocking,” said Mrs.
Luttrell, resignedly, to her new–found guests; “but he is the best and
dearest fellow in the world.”
Pelham and Darrell were more and more delighted at every turn in
their adventure. Darrell recognized by instinct and Pelham by his
naturally thorough reasoning powers that here they had come across an
American lady—no sham Englishwoman, with the sham English manner, sham
affectation of speech, and with all the defects of an exact imitation.
And each of them felt a strange joy at being so close to Elizabeth
Brandon. She sat back in the carriage, and they could see her white
breast rising and falling as she threw back her large gray cloak; and
the soft beauty of her eyes was visible in the half darkness of the
carriage. Elizabeth, who, like most Southern women, was naturally
talkative, kept singularly quiet. Her gaze was turned towards the
spot where they had just been standing, and she was conscious rather
than actually saw the dark brown eyes of the man who had stood just
behind her and whose presence near her she had felt without seeing
him. But she recovered herself and began to talk with a graceful ease
and familiarity at once charming and flattering to the two young
Englishmen. Mrs. Luttrell, however, held the centre of the stage,
according to her invariable custom, and gave Pelham and Darrell a
pretty fair idea of what they would meet at the Charity Ball.
In a few minutes more the carriage reached the door of the hall, where
Baskerville was awaiting them, and he escorted them up the stairs.
He utilized the time when Mrs. Luttrell and Elizabeth were in the
dressing–room, to introduce the two young officers to several of the
men best worth knowing in Washington.
As for the ladies, Elizabeth, on removing her cloak, was dismayed to
find that her fresh white muslin gown had more than one spot of mud on
it, and it took ten minutes of diligent rubbing, washing, and pressing
to get it out. She realized that she must have got it from the boots of
the man who stood behind her, whose dark and striking face had fixed
her attention at first and in whose neighborhood she had felt strangely
influenced. And then the loss of her little pearl heart—But the Marine
Band was playing loudly a rhythmic waltz, there were partners at the
door waiting for her. She had two desirable men, both strangers, whom
she might consider her property for that evening. She was young and
beautiful, and in a little while all of her unpleasant sensations
passed away. She found herself whirling around the room in Darrell’s
arms. For a wonder, although an Englishman, he knew how to dance, and
Elizabeth was intensely susceptible to rhythm and music. She felt when
she began to waltz with Darrell, as if she would like to waltz forever
with him. He was so strong, so supple, so graceful,—so susceptible,
like herself, to that charm of dance music in which two people dancing
together are conscious of that sensuous counterpart of real love which
makes a man and a woman feel as if they constituted one being with a
single heart and a single soul.
Darrell realized the first moment that he held Elizabeth in his arms
and floated with her to the languorous waltz music, that he had never
really been in love at all before; but, as he frankly confessed to
himself, it was all up with him now. He knew not who or what she was,
but it could make but little difference to him. He loved her and he
knew it. He would have liked not to leave her side once during the
evening, and in fact he was near her most of the time and danced with
her six times.
Pelham, on the contrary, only sat out a single dance with her, as he
was not a dancing man. He too felt a charm about her which he had never
known in any other woman. Sitting out dances with young ladies had
been a species of torment to him, but not so this time. He thought
the charm that Elizabeth exercised over him was that she was the first
of all unmarried English–speaking women that he had known who was
perfectly and entirely at her ease with an unmarried man. She assumed
an attitude openly and yet most delicately flattering towards him. He
had known Englishwomen of fascination who were entirely at ease with
men, but never flattering; and he had known other women who were very
flattering to men, but never at ease with them. Here was a woman who
treated him with the frankness she would have shown towards a younger
brother, with the confidence she would have shown a respected elder
brother, and with the deference she would have shown the greatest
Duke in England. Pelham rightly judged that here he had met the true
American type. A woman with an ancestry of gentle people, dating back
two or three hundred years, and developed in a country where respect
for women is so insisted upon as to be professed by those who neither
believe in it nor practise it,—as such Elizabeth was to him the most
interesting woman he had ever met. He was himself a reading man, and
Elizabeth Brandon at twenty had read only a few books, but these were
the English classics and they had given her the capacity to talk to a
reading man like Pelham. He foresaw that at thirty Elizabeth would have
read a great many books, and with the untrammelled association with men
of all ages and in the free American atmosphere, her mind, naturally
good, would have developed admirably.
As Pelham and Elizabeth sat at the foot of the stairs, a cabinet
officer passed them slowly, as they sat under a bower of great palms,
with the throbbing music far enough away not to interrupt their
talk; and Elizabeth spoke to the cabinet officer. He was an elderly
man from the West, manly and even gentlemanly, though not polished.
Pelham noticed with what ease Elizabeth spoke to this type of man, the
smiling, tactful answers she gave to his pleasant but rather blunt
questions. She introduced Pelham promptly to him, accompanying the
introduction with a request that he would be very nice to Captain
Pelham while he was in Washington; and when the cabinet officer asked
her what she wanted him to do for Captain Pelham, she replied promptly:—
“Send him a card to the club.”
Pelham was aghast at the boldness of this, and tried to imagine the
daughter of a half–pay officer in England asking a cabinet minister to
send a card to White’s and Brooke’s to a chance acquaintance she had
just picked up.
Elizabeth continued placidly: “Of course I could get a card through
papa. He does not belong to the club,—it is too expensive,—but he knows
a great many men in the club. You know he can’t afford anything except
me; and there are plenty of other men who would send Captain Pelham a
card if I asked them, but you happen to be the biggest man I know and
that is why I am asking you.”
At which the cabinet officer, laughing, said, “Will you be kind enough,
Captain Pelham, to give me the name of your hotel?—and I will have a
card sent to you to–morrow morning.”
“And he has a cousin, Captain Darrell,” added Elizabeth, promptly, “and
he must have a card, too.”
“Certainly,” replied the cabinet officer, taking out his note–book and
writing down the two names. “His brothers, cousins, and his uncles
and all his relations, if you like,” and after taking the names down
the cabinet officer walked away, laughing. This was an experience
that Pelham thought his comrades would doubt when he told it at the
mess–table of the 178th Foot.
Pelham spent much more time with Mrs. Luttrell than with Elizabeth,
and the two were mutually charmed. Mrs. Luttrell’s daring and positive
language and her air of command were accompanied with a fascination
of smile and voice which was effective even with her snow–white hair
and crow’s feet around her eyes, still full of light and life. Pelham
noticed that she was always surrounded by men, young and old. She
treated the young men like patriarchs and the patriarchs like boys.
Baskerville, quiet, rather sedate, and seeking the middle–aged rather
than the young, struck Pelham as one of the pleasantest fellows he had
ever met. It looked as if this chance incursion of the Charity Ball
would reveal more of the real American life to Pelham and Darrell than
they might have met in a month of ordinary traveller’s advantages.
Mrs. Luttrell had already engaged them for a couple of dinners and
Baskerville for a club breakfast. Most of the people they met were
agreeable, and they noticed that buoyancy of spirit and gayety of
heart which a great writer on America, and another writer who was the
most patronizing literary snob ever seen in North America, mutually
agreed to be characteristic of American society. The ball itself,
which was described by the society correspondents as of surpassing
brilliancy, hardly reached that mark; but to three persons, Elizabeth
Brandon, Pelham, and Darrell, it was an evening of delight, never to be
forgotten.
Meanwhile, James Clavering still stood outside in the sharp, starlit
night, listening to the bursts of music which came at intervals from
the ball–room and watching the great lighted windows. He saw Elizabeth
Brandon float past in Darrell’s arms, and watched them enviously. His
exterior showed that the price of a ball–ticket was nothing to him,
but he knew that he had no place then in a ball–room. He had taken no
part in searching for the trinket which Elizabeth had dropped, but
presently, moving a little, he saw under his heel the crushed fragments
of pearls. He had unconsciously ground the little heart under his foot.
It gave him a spasm of regret and even of sentiment, and he thought
to himself, with an odd smile flitting across his well–cut features,
“Suppose some day I should give that girl a diamond heart, five times
as big and a thousand times as costly as this. It wouldn’t be so
strange, after all.”
He had stood watching the last stragglers to the ball and searching the
windows for a passing glimpse of the beautiful Elizabeth. Meanwhile,
outside, General Brandon had returned to the sidewalk. He would have
dearly liked to go, himself; but it had been all that he could do to
buy a ticket for Elizabeth,—a ticket and seventeen yards of white
muslin, which she herself had fashioned with her own fingers into a
beautiful gown and had trimmed with her grandmother’s old lace.
As General Brandon was moving off, a hand touched his elbow, and James
Clavering, who had been standing a little in the background, spoke to
him.
“This is General Brandon?” he said.
“Yes,” replied General Brandon, looking into the clear–cut face of the
man before him, who towered a head above him. “And you, I cannot at
this moment call your name.”
“It’s Clavering. Don’t you remember me when I was a sutler at Fort
Worth in Texas, and you were a captain of cavalry at the same post?”
A light dawned upon General Brandon. He grasped the ex–sutler’s hand as
cordially as if he had been an officer of the British Army. “Certainly
I do. You knew me before the war.” All Virginians divide time into
three epochs, before the war, during the war, and after the war. “And
a very excellent sutler you were. I recall that you had a good,
industrious wife and several promising children. You look prosperous.
The world seems to have gone well with you.”
“Pretty well,” replied Clavering, ignoring the mention of his wife and
children. He had a voice of music which added to his other personal
advantages. “I hope the same is the case with you?”
The General smiled placidly. “I resigned from the army when my
state seceded, and went through four years on the battlefields of
Virginia, and I attained the rank of brigadier–general. Then I entered
the service of the Khedive of Egypt and served in Egypt for eight
years, but you know what has fallen out there. So I have returned
to Washington, and through the influence of old army friends I have
secured a clerkship in the War Department.”
“Pretty hard lines, isn’t it?” asked Clavering, looking at General
Brandon’s seedy greatcoat, and knowing what stupendous changes were
involved in the story told so smilingly by the time–worn veteran.
“Scarcely that,” answered General Brandon, with the same gentleness of
tone and smile. “I have a small house here in rather a good part of
the town, and my salary is sufficient for my simple wants and those
of my daughter, who has no extravagant tastes. Thanks to my old army
friends I am here, and they have met me with extraordinary kindness and
good–will and shown me much hospitality. On the whole I think myself
decidedly well off, all things considered.”
Clavering looked at General Brandon with pity and good–natured
contempt. He seemed to Clavering about as guileless and innocent as a
boarding–school miss or a college sophomore; and yet he had commanded
three thousand fighting men, during four fierce years of a bloody
war, and had been relied upon by no less a man than Stonewall Jackson
himself. All this Clavering knew, as he knew most of the contemporary
history of his own country.
“And that charming young lady,” he asked after a moment, “was your
daughter?”
“Yes, my only child and as good as she is beautiful. May I ask if Mrs.
Clavering is alive? I remember her as a most worthy woman.”
“Yes,” answered Clavering, shortly. “Now will you come with me to one
of the up–town hotels and have a smoke and a drink? In the old days
when I was a sutler and you were a captain, I should have known better
than to ask you; but I never expected to remain a sutler always. I
have made money in the West, and I have ambitions of various sorts.
Some day you will hear of me.”
“Nothing,” said General Brandon, impressively, “should be or is, in
this country, out of reach of any man with brains and solid worth.” The
General himself was an aristocrat from the crown of his head to the
sole of his feet, but he never dreamed of it.
“And some education,” added Clavering. He knew his man thoroughly.
“Brains are the first requisite, and solid worth is all very well. But
a man must have some other qualifications. A man must know something
beyond the common school of his youth and the bigger common school of
his manhood, in order to make a lasting impression on his time. Of
course I don’t include geniuses in this category, but men of talent
only. I have not what I call education, but I have the next best thing
to it. I know my own limitations. I have a boy on whom I shall put a
twenty–thousand–dollar education, but I am very much afraid that he is
a twenty–dollar boy.”
General Brandon did not exactly understand this, and Clavering said no
more about his boy. They walked off together, and in a little while
they were seated in the lobby of an up–town hotel and Clavering was
telling the story of his life—or what he chose to tell of it—to General
Brandon. It was not an instinctive outpouring of the truth, but as
a matter of fact Clavering was rehearsing for the rôle he intended
to play in a few years’ time,—that of the rich man who has hewn his
way through a great forest of difficulties and has triumphed in the
end. He was astute enough not to despise men of General Brandon’s
stamp, simple, quiet, brave, having little knowledge of affairs but
perfectly versed in ethics. Clavering in short knew the full value of a
gentleman, although he was not one himself.
They sat late, and when the General reached his own door in a tall old
house far up town, Elizabeth was just descending from Mrs. Luttrell’s
carriage, escorted by Richard Baskerville.
“Oh, papa,” she said, running up the steps, her white muslin skirts
floating behind her, “I have had the most glorious evening.” She was
quite unaware that the hour of fate had struck for her, and that she
had entered the portals of destiny—a new and strange destiny.
_Chapter Two_
Pelham and Darrell had reckoned upon spending three weeks in
Washington, but it became a full month. They were practically adopted
by Mrs. Luttrell, and found her large, handsome, old–fashioned house a
centre of the best society, where they saw all that was worth seeing
in Washington. At their own Embassy they soon became favorites, and it
was after a ball there that a revelation came to Pelham. He had seen
Elizabeth Brandon every day of their stay in Washington, and every day
she had absorbed a little more of his strong, reserved, and silently
controlled nature and had gained an inch or two in his reserved,
tender, but devoted heart. He discovered that Elizabeth had both
goodness and intelligence as well as charm and beauty. She was very
young to him,—that is, in his own thirty years he had seen and known,
realized and suffered, ten times more than Elizabeth during her twenty
years of life. He recognized in her a naturally fine mind and taste
for reading, a delightful and subtle power of accommodating herself
to the mode and manner of any man she wished to please. How attractive
this would make her to the man she loved and married! The thought
almost dazzled Pelham’s strong and sober brain. He saw that she was a
little intoxicated with the new wine of life, her beauty, her grace
and popularity; she was quite unburdened with the cares and anxieties
of richer girls who wore finer gowns and sighed for the partners who
crowded around Elizabeth.
Pelham was not in the least disturbed by the fact that Darrell had
fallen violently in love with Elizabeth and proclaimed it to him a
dozen times a day. It was Darrell’s normal condition to be violently
in love with some pretty girl; but frankly admitting that his pay and
allowance were not enough for one, much less for two, there was small
danger of his actually committing himself, so Pelham thought. Nor
did he observe any difference in Elizabeth’s acceptance of Darrell’s
attentions from those of any other man whom she liked—her manner was
uniformly flattering and complaisant; in truth, he had very little
conception of Elizabeth’s feminine power of concealment.
On the night of the ball at the British Embassy, Pelham, on his return
to his hotel, sat in his own room, smoking and turning over an
important question in his mind, which was “when should he ask Elizabeth
Brandon to marry him.” He had not much to offer her in a worldly point
of view. His own position was good, but no better than hers, and he
discovered that General Brandon, who had been to England once or twice,
had hobnobbed with persons of higher rank even than the peer of the
realm who was grandfather to both Darrell and himself; but Pelham
realized with an admiration as deep as his love that Elizabeth was not
the woman to marry for either money or position. He was reflecting
on what he should say to General Brandon next day, before speaking
to Elizabeth, for he had old–fashioned notions as to the rights of
fathers. He was wondering, in case Elizabeth accepted him, how General
Brandon would take the proposition that she should come out to India
and marry him there after the English fashion, and was in doubt whether
General Brandon would fall on his neck and embrace him or kick him
downstairs.
While he was considering these things, the door opened and Darrell
walked in. He threw himself in a chair close to Pelham and, closing
his eyes, went into a revery. Pelham looked at him goodhumoredly. No
doubt he was dreaming about Elizabeth. He was a handsome fellow, no
denying that, and candor, courage, and honesty were writ large all over
him. Presently he roused himself, and leaning over towards Pelham, and
blushing like a girl, for the first time in his life, he said in a
whisper, “She loves me.”
Pelham received a shock such as he had never known before. He knew
Darrell’s sincerity and real modesty too well to doubt him, and his
mind took in immediately and quietly the calamity to himself which
Darrell’s words implied. He sat still, so still that Darrell shook him.
“Do you hear, old man? It was all settled to–night at the ball, not two
hours ago, behind a big hydrangea in a flower–pot, and you’ve got to
help me out. I am to see the Ambassador to–morrow and ask him to cable
for two weeks’ additional leave, so we can be married before sailing.”
Yes, with Pelham the dream was over, the fairy palace had crumbled. The
heavenly music had dissolved in air. The world had suddenly grown bleak
and cold and commonplace, but pride and common sense still remained.
“It seems to me,” said Pelham, in a quiet voice, after a pause, “that
there isn’t much left for me to do. You and—Miss Brandon have agreed,
and the Ambassador can no doubt get you two weeks more leave—” Pelham
stopped with a choking in his throat which he had never felt before in
all his life.
“But why don’t you congratulate me?” cried Darrell. They had been like
brothers all their lives, and Pelham was to Darrell his other self;
while Darrell was to Pelham a younger brother whose excellence of heart
and delicacy of soul made up for a very meagre understanding.
“I do congratulate you,” said Pelham, grasping Darrell’s hand, the old
habit of love and brotherly kindness overwhelming him. “I think Miss
Brandon the most charming girl I ever knew. Any man is fortunate to get
her. But I don’t think you are half good enough for her, Jack.”
“That is just what I think,” answered Darrell, with perfect sincerity.
“But no man is good enough for her as far as that goes, and I am
not the man to be running away from an angel; but there are lots of
things to be attended to. I must give my whole time to Elizabeth, and
I cannot ask the Ambassador to see about transportation, tickets, and
transferring luggage. You must do that, and pay for it all; and I will
pay you back when we get our respected aunt’s fortune—fifty years or
more from to–day.”
“Of course I shall do all that is necessary,” replied Pelham, “and
there will be plenty to do. Getting married is heavy business, and
taking a girl away to India at a fortnight’s notice—How did you have
the courage to ask so much of such a woman?”
“I don’t know. It happened, that’s all, and I was in heaven. I shall
be there again to–morrow morning at eleven o’clock, when I shall see
Elizabeth.” He spoke her name as if it were a saint’s name.
The two men sat talking for an hour or two. Darrell’s manner in
speaking of his acceptance by Elizabeth was not gushing, but expressed
a deep and sincere passion, which he told Pelham, with perfect
simplicity, was the first and only love of his life; and Pelham
believed him. After parting from Darrell, Pelham sat up until dawn,
wrestling with his own heart; but when the day broke he had conquered
his anguish. He saw that Elizabeth had possibly entered upon a thorny
path by marrying Darrell. He saw all the pitfalls which awaited a
young and beautiful woman, the wife of a subaltern in a foot regiment
in India. He foresaw that Elizabeth’s charming freedom of manner, her
flattering attitude towards men of all sorts and conditions, which
might answer well enough in America, would probably be misunderstood
by others more or less strict than herself, and he determined to be her
friend, and felt sure that she would soon need one. Darrell was the
best fellow alive, but he was not the man to manage that complicated
problem, a pretty, vivacious, innocent, intelligent, admiration–loving
American girl, without family or friends, cast loose at an Indian
station.
In the afternoon of that day, Pelham paid his first call on
Elizabeth as the prospective bride of Darrell. He thought her more
love–compelling in her new relation of a promised bride than he had
ever seen her before; her shyness, her pallor, her tears, her deep
feeling, her constant remembrance of what her father would suffer,
endeared her to Pelham, and yet her willingness, like the Sabine women
of old, to go with the man she loved was deeply touching. It was a
deliciously old–fashioned love match, both Elizabeth and Darrell
looking forward to an uninterrupted honeymoon for the rest of their
lives—Elizabeth quite as much so as Darrell. Pelham at this interview
was kindness and sympathy itself, and even in the midst of her dream
of love Elizabeth felt the serious value of such a friendship as this
quiet, silent, rather ugly young officer, sparing of words, but full
of tact, was offering her.
When Pelham came out of the shabby old house which was Elizabeth’s
home, he met General Brandon face to face on the steps. Pelham grasped
his hand cordially. He felt acutely for the poor father who had to
give up such a daughter, to go upon such a lifelong journey. Something
prompted Pelham to say, “I congratulate my friend and cousin Darrell
with all my heart, but for you who are to give up your daughter, I can
only say that I feel for you more than I can express.”
“You should congratulate me, too,” replied General Brandon, gently. “It
was written that I should have to give up my child, and since it had to
be, I am glad to give her to a man as admirable in every way as Captain
Darrell.” General Brandon would have said this about any son–in–law not
an absolute blackguard. But accidentally he happened to be right, for
Darrell was indeed admirable in many ways. “She will go far from me,”
said the General, with a sudden break in his voice, “but that a father
must be prepared for. May she be happy,—that is all I ask. Captain
Darrell came to see me this morning and mentioned settlements. At the
words I was somewhat offended, not being used to having such matters
mentioned in connection with marriage; but I speedily found that his
intentions were most generous, he merely wanted to give my daughter
everything he had. On my part I endowed my daughter with all I had,
seven bonds of the Egyptian government, for which I paid a thousand
pounds in English money, the best part of what I received during my
service with the Khedive Ismail. I believe they would now bring very
little in the market, but no doubt in the course of time the Egyptian
government will meet all of its obligations in full. We must not lose
our faith, my dear Pelham, in human nature. I also wished to make over
to my daughter the equity in my house, for I have never been able
to pay off the mortgage which I acquired when I bought it; but this
Captain Darrell most generously refused to accept. And when he told me
that his pay and allowances would amount to something like five hundred
pounds a year, I felt that it should be quite enough to support a young
couple in India, at least for the present.”
Pelham had to look away and laugh, at the bare idea of two such
innocents as General Brandon and Jack Darrell attempting to transact
business, and the gravity with which General Brandon mentioned the
Egyptian bonds would have provoked a laugh from a dead horse. But there
was so little money concerned in the transaction that it really did not
make much difference.
In the course of twenty–four hours, through the good offices of the
British Ambassador at the Washington office with the War Office in
London, a cablegram arrived, granting an extension of leave for
fourteen days to both Pelham and Darrell. Their prolonged stay in
Washington had already made it necessary for them to return to India
by way of Suez, and to give up their transcontinental trip. The
additional two weeks gave time for the wedding preparations, which were
necessarily simple for a wedding tour of two days and the sailing from
New York in time to catch the next steamer of the Messageries Maritimes
at Marseilles.
Pelham saw Elizabeth nearly every day during the two weeks preceding
the marriage, and every time he saw her the melancholy conviction came
over him that she was the woman he was never to forget and never to
cease to love.
Mrs. Luttrell took charge of affairs, as much as Pelham would let her.
She gave the newly engaged pair a large and splendid dinner in honor
of their engagement, and there were other festivities of the same
nature given by other persons on a smaller scale. All of Elizabeth’s
former admirers, and they were legion, sent her wedding presents, and
the shabby house was nearly swamped with them.
Richard Baskerville was of great assistance to Pelham in putting things
through, for it was Pelham who made the marriage possible. Darrell
could do nothing but gaze into Elizabeth’s beautiful black eyes, and if
Pelham would have let him, would have spent all the money necessary for
their first–class passage to India in buying bouquets for Elizabeth.
Between Richard Baskerville, already known as one of the cleverest
young lawyers in Washington, and Pelham a sincere friendship sprang up,
as the two men were alike in many respects.
On a bright, sunny day in February, Elizabeth Brandon became the wife
of Jack Darrell. The wedding took place at a little suburban church
where the seats were cheap enough for General Brandon, who was a strong
churchman, to afford seats for two. There were neither bridesmaids
nor groomsmen, nor any of the showy paraphernalia of a smart wedding.
Elizabeth, as much in love as she was, yet felt too much the coming
parting from her father to make her wedding a merry one; it was,
rather, sad, as are many of the sweetest things in life. Pelham was
best man, and the Ambassador, who had good–naturedly helped the matter
along, was present. Also there were half a dozen fossils, old comrades
and Virginia relations of the Brandons. Richard Baskerville and Mrs.
Luttrell were there, and the society newspapers described Mrs. Luttrell
as wearing a superb black–velvet gown and a magnificent ermine cape.
Mrs. Luttrell’s black–velvet gown and ermine cape were a uniform which
she had worn for the last forty years, replacing each velvet gown and
ermine cape, as fast as they wore out, with new ones.
Her carriage took the bride and her father to the church, the
bridegroom and his best man having preceded them in a cab. Elizabeth,
in her simple white wedding gown, with magnificent old lace and her
grandmother’s pearls, made an exquisite bride, and Darrell looked
every inch a soldier in his scarlet tunic. It was a wedding where love
and honor presided, yet Pelham’s heart was heavy at what might be the
outcome.
There was a simple wedding breakfast at Elizabeth’s home, where were
assembled a few persons, some of them, like the Ambassador and a
couple of cabinet officers, sufficiently important to have delighted
the newly rich to have secured as guests, and others, like the old
comrades and the decayed Virginia relatives, so unimportant that the
newly rich would not have touched them with a ten–foot pole. The
bride’s health was drunk in cheap champagne. When she departed in her
travelling gown for her two days’ wedding trip before sailing on that
other tremendous journey to India, tears were in the eyes of most
present, but General Brandon was dry–eyed and smiling. When he had
bidden the last guest farewell and turned into his lonely home, which
had that strange look of emptiness that follows a wedding or a funeral,
Pelham returned with him.
General Brandon, seeing the sympathy in the eyes of Pelham, who had his
own heartache, laid both hands on his shoulders and said, “My dear sir,
believe me, I am at this moment a perfectly happy and delighted man,”
and then suddenly wept like a child.
Pelham spent the next two days comforting and uplifting General
Brandon, and felt himself comforted and uplifted by association with
such a man. He said earnestly, at parting with the General: “Believe
me, your daughter has the best of friends as well as husbands in
Darrell, but she shall never want a friend as long as I live. India
is a treacherous place to men who are out in the hot sun, and life is
held there by a very uncertain tenure. So your daughter may survive us
both; but as long as either one of us is alive, she shall be as well
protected as if she were in your house.”
Two days after the wedding Pelham saw Elizabeth on the deck of the
steamer which was to carry them to Havre. Her first words were, “How is
my father?” and despite the deep glow of happiness which radiated from
her soul through her eyes, she could not speak of him without tears.
Nor did she at any time show any forgetfulness of him. She wrote him
every day, and posted her letters at every stopping–place on that long
journey to India.
Travelling makes people as well acquainted as marriage does, and by the
time Captain and Mrs. Darrell and Pelham reached Marseilles, Pelham
knew Elizabeth quite as well as Darrell did, and understood her far
better. It was a delightful but saddening joy to Pelham when he found
Elizabeth soon turning to him, rather than to Darrell, to answer her
intelligent questions. In fact, Darrell himself, when she asked him,
would say, “Pelham will tell you; he knows a lot more about those old
classic beggars and Greek cads and ruffians than I do.” Elizabeth still
found Darrell the most charming man in the world.
It was at Marseilles on a late afternoon in early March that Darrell
said this to Elizabeth. The three were sitting at a table on the
terrace of a café overlooking the old harbor, with its crumbling Vauban
forts. The ships’ lights were twinkling against the dark blue of the
water and the darker blue of the sky, while afar off they could see
faintly the outline of the Château d’If, where Monte Cristo learned his
language of the Abbé. Pelham had been telling Elizabeth the story of
the city. The ancient Massilia, inhabited by a people whose talk was
not, as the old Greek wrote, of seed–time or ploughing or harvest, but
of
“Mast and helm and oar–bench,
And the stately ships wherein
They have all joy and pleasure
O’er the wet sea way to win.”
Elizabeth, with the keen delight of a mind newly awakened to books and
travel, was capable of enjoying both. Her childhood and first girlhood
had been spent in a secluded country house, where the books were few
and old and of little value. The two or three years she had spent in
Washington since her father’s return from Egypt, enriched only by
his Egyptian bonds, had not been of a sort to develop her mind. They
had chiefly been spent in dancing and flirting; but Elizabeth, with
the Southern girl’s inevitable tendency both to dance and flirt, had
that which often goes with it, a depth of intelligence and a serious
understanding. It was a like seriousness of understanding in Pelham
which attracted her so powerfully. Darrell, whom she still thought, and
was to think for some time to come, the most charming man in the world,
was never serious about anything except dogs and horses and Elizabeth.
He took everything easily, especially life and death, and would have
ridden up to a roaring battery or into any other of the many mouths
of hell with a smile upon his lips. He did not quite understand why
Elizabeth, in the midst of her bridal joy, often shed tears for her
father, and although never showing the least impatience at it, or aught
but the tenderest kindness, wondered why she should want anybody but
him, as he wanted no one but her.
He was, like many men of his kind, perfectly modest, too high–minded
if not too large–minded for jealousy, and thought it the most natural
thing in the world that Elizabeth should turn to Pelham for sympathy
and information, as Darrell himself had always done. At this moment
he was very much interested in Pelham’s account of the ancient tunny
fisheries, as they had just had among their _hors–d’œuvres_ dried
tunny fish, as well as their bouillabaisse. Elizabeth knew something
of the man of yesterday who had made bouillabaisse immortal, but
Darrell was surprised to hear that Thackeray had ever written verse.
Pelham, sitting next Elizabeth and, although habitually a silent man,
doing most of the talking, began to wonder sadly how long it would be
before Elizabeth became desperately bored by her lover husband. No
such thought entered Elizabeth’s mind; she only deemed herself twice
fortunate in having the companionship of such a friend as Pelham as
well as the love of her hero husband Darrell.
Next morning they sailed through Suez for Bombay. Elizabeth proved a
good sailor and spent most of her waking hours on deck. Darrell lay
back in his steamer chair and smoked, being quite satisfied with the
spectacle of his charming Elizabeth tripping up and down the deck and
talking with Pelham. The other passengers were not quite certain at
first whose wife she was.
As they sailed over the blue Mediterranean, it was Pelham who told
Elizabeth when they would come in sight of Stromboli; and it was on
his arm that she watched before daybreak a great, pallid moon sinking
into the black world of waters on the west, while on the east the dun
sky, across which fled great ragged masses of dark clouds, was lighted
by the vast torches of Stromboli waving like a blazing head of Medusa.
Meanwhile Darrell was sound asleep in his berth. It would have taken
more than ten Strombolis to have gotten him up on deck at that hour.
But a gun, a dog, or a fishing–rod would have kept him up all night
and made him as alert and watchful as if his life depended upon the
issue. It was Pelham who showed to Elizabeth the sickle–shaped port
of Messina, and told her of the ancient coins of the city, which bore
a sickle upon them. And together, as they sailed along the desolate
shores of Crete, they followed the itinerary of Paul of Tarsus.
When the ship made its slow way through the Canal to Suez, Darrell
was roused to study it from the aspect of a military man. But it was
Pelham, who had more military science in his ugly head than Darrell
had in his whole handsome young body, who watched with Elizabeth the
red flamingoes rising from amid the tamarisk trees. Once out of the
Canal, Darrell again resumed his life of smoking, sleeping, eating, and
adoring Elizabeth; but Elizabeth, who was being educated by Pelham,
listened with the eagerness of an intelligent child to Pelham’s stories
of those historic lands whose bleak, black–scarred, and rocky shores
border the Red Sea. He told her of those strange Mohammedan people
who inhabit this country, where nature is as fierce as man, and where
“Allah is God of the great deserts,” as Pierre Loti says,—those people
in whom Islam is incarnate. Together Elizabeth and Pelham watched the
passage around Bab–el–Mandeb, the “Gate of tears.”
At last, on a hot, bright morning, they landed at Bombay, the great
busy, dirty city, and after a week’s travel by night and day they
finished their journey at Embira, in one of the remotest depths of
the Punjab. Elizabeth had travelled far and fast, since that January
night when both Pelham and Darrell had searched for the little pearl
heart, dropped from around her milk–white throat; but she had travelled
farther and faster than she knew.
_Chapter Three_
Embira was like most second and third rate Indian stations, neither
better or worse. There were a dirty native city, where plague and
famine alternated; a river that was either a rushing torrent or as
dry as a bone; and cantonments which had seen little change since the
Mutiny. A battalion of Pelham and Darrell’s regiment was stationed
there, with large detachments of artillery and cavalry.
The only remarkable thing about the station was that, although it was
very far from being garrisoned by any part of a crack regiment, the
social status of the officers and their wives appeared to be almost
on a level with that of the household troops. The wife of the Colonel
commanding was the niece of an Earl besides being the commanding
officer of the C. O. There were a couple of titled women among the
officers’ wives, and no less than two subalterns would inherit
baronetcies. Neither Pelham nor Darrell stood any chance of inheriting
his grandfather’s title, nor did there seem much more possibility of
Darrell’s inheriting the problematical fortune which was the staple
joke between Pelham and himself.
Darrell, who would have been classed as a detrimental in London, was
of the sort to be adored by the young ladies of the post; and his
appearance with a bride, and that with scarcely a day’s warning, was
both a slight and a grievance to the ladies of Embira. And an American
wife, too! It was the aim and object of the ladies to maintain the
social tone of the regiment, of which they were enormously proud, and
here was Darrell, the grandson of a peer, introducing a person among
them whom it was taken for granted he had met in the wilds of the Rocky
Mountains near Philadelphia, or who was perhaps a miner’s daughter in
the vicinity of Boston.
It was in this critical and even hostile circle that Elizabeth made her
first appearance, three days after her arrival at Embira. It was on
the occasion of the regimental sports, which were rendered brilliant
by the presence of a large party of visitors from England, including
the noble Earl who was uncle to the C. O.’s wife, a commissioner who
had brought his own new wife on purpose to eclipse the pretty wife of
the deputy–commissioner, and a vice–regal aide–de–camp,—all together a
brilliant party for a remote Indian station.
The afternoon was hot and bright, but the gardens which were reserved
for tea and flirtations were still unparched and the white polo grounds
adjoining were not as yet dust blinded. When Elizabeth, at five o’clock
in the afternoon, appeared dressed for the occasion, on the veranda
of their quarters, Darrell surveyed her with pride and pleasure, not
unmixed with apprehension. She looked, it is true, exquisitely charming
in her pale green muslin, her rose–crowned hat, her white parasol, and
with her little, black, silver–buckled shoes, a model of daintiness
to the eyes of the Englishmen. But Darrell also felt some anxiety; he
suspected that she would be coldly received by the unkind women and
patronized by the kind ones, and he feared that Elizabeth might be as
crushed by both as an English girl might have been. Pelham, on the
contrary, who understood Elizabeth far better than her husband did and
felt even a deeper pride in her as his silent adoration for her had
grown deep and strong, felt not the slightest fear. Elizabeth was in
manner and bearing, as well as in beauty, far above the most patrician
woman at the station. Every other woman except herself realized and
recognized that there was some one above her in station, she was of
necessity the social inferior of somebody. Not so with Elizabeth. As
an American woman of good birth, she had never seen or heard of any
one who was above her, and would have been perfectly at her ease with
royalty itself. The admiring glances and compliments of Pelham and
Darrell flattered Elizabeth and brought the wild–rose color to her
creamy cheeks; and with the consciousness of looking her best, she
entered the gardens with her husband walking on one side of her and
Pelham on the other, and was duly presented to the Colonel’s lady.
There is perhaps nowhere in the world that the inability of
Englishwomen to dress well and their total subjection to their
dressmakers are so obvious as in India. There the woollen gowns which
look well on an autumn day among the Scotch hills, and the tailor–made
dresses which are suited for Regent Street on a dull morning, the
elaborate silks and laces which are fit for London drawing–rooms and
theatres, are worn with a serene unconsciousness of unfitness. On this
hot afternoon the ladies of Embira had put on their best,—that is to
say, their worst clothes as far as unsuitability went. Hats bristling
with feathers, large white boas, rustling silks, and gorgeous parasols
made the gardens bright, but made the wearers look half–baked. Among
these came Elizabeth’s delicate green muslin and airy lightness of
attire. The men, on looking at her, felt as if they had just had an
iced drink. The ladies saw that she had accomplished something quite
beyond them in the way of dress, which, as Darrell half feared, made
the unkind determine to be more icy to her and the kind even more
patronizing.
The Colonel’s lady, a vast person in purple silk and a collection
of diamond ornaments which made her appear as if covered with a
breastplate of jewels, was one of the latter kind. She greeted
Elizabeth as if she were a fifteen–year–old schoolgirl who must needs
be awed by all she saw around her. Elizabeth, who knew well the
cosmopolitan society of Washington and was accustomed to see power and
importance classed together, was in no way terrified; nor was she even
astonished when the Earl, a shabby person who had a turbulent wife
whom he was very glad to leave at home, asked to be introduced to Mrs.
Darrell.
The Colonel’s wife, who had spent the whole time of her uncle’s visit
trying to induce him to be introduced to people against his will, was
staggered, but promptly agreed to his proposition. She whispered his
name and rank in Elizabeth’s ear and advanced a step or two towards the
Earl, but Elizabeth quite unconsciously stood perfectly still and had
the Earl brought to her to be introduced, receiving him exactly as she
would have done some of the numerous pleasant elderly gentlemen whom
she had met in Washington. The Earl, who was not without humor, saw
the look of amazement on the face of the Colonel’s lady at Elizabeth’s
calm attitude and secretly enjoyed the situation. He was an easy–going
person who had but one requirement on the face of the earth, and that
was to be perpetually amused and entertained. And this one requirement
of his soul was amply satisfied by the charming young American girl.
She was not in the least like most of the American girls he had
known and met in England, who were usually the daughters of retired
tradesmen and rather poor imitations of Lady Clara Vere de Vere. The
Earl, however, much to his chagrin was not allowed to have Elizabeth
all to himself and was compelled to share her society with a couple of
impudent subalterns, who in the pursuit of a pretty face and a dainty
foot feared neither man nor devil.
This was only the beginning of an afternoon of triumph for Elizabeth, a
triumph which she enjoyed without appreciating its true significance.
She had the enormous advantage of being distinctly different from the
women around her, and of having the perfect ease which comes from the
feeling of perfect equality. She was perhaps the best–born woman of all
those present, reckoning good birth to mean many generations of people
at the top of the ladder. Ever since the first Brandon, a decayed
gentleman, had set foot on American soil in the days of Charles I., the
Brandons had been in the front rank, with none better than themselves.
The Earl himself had a great–grandmother who began life as a milliner’s
apprentice and thence progressed to the London stage. But Elizabeth’s
great–grandmothers were all of the Brahmin caste in her own country.
The ancestry of the titles in the regiment went back only as far as
the early part of the eighteenth century, while Elizabeth’s ancestors
had behind them already some hundreds of years as gentle people,
before their advent into the new country. It was that perhaps which
gave Elizabeth the patrician nose and her delicate hands and feet, and
it certainly gave her that perfect composure of manner which, unlike
Lady Clara Vere de Vere’s icy stateliness, could not be successfully
imitated by any parvenu who ever walked the earth.
Darrell was secretly delighted at the admiration which Elizabeth
excited. He had not felt so great a sensation of triumph since he had
introduced into the regimental mess a certain Irish setter with a
pedigree which could be proved back to the time of Queen Elizabeth.
Pelham, who would have been a favorite among the ladies had he allowed
it, saw everything out of the tail of his eye and was rather sorry when
he saw the drift of men towards Elizabeth. When the trio returned to
Darrell’s quarters through the soft Indian twilight, Darrell was openly
elated and Elizabeth secretly so, but Pelham felt that Elizabeth’s
course lay in dangerous waters.
And Pelham was right. Englishwomen have their charms and their virtues,
both of which are great and admirable, but they have no sense of
comradeship. Elizabeth was to them an alien, but instead of appealing
to their sympathies, they saw her without effort easily become the
acknowledged belle of the regiment. There was little in common beyond
the mere formal exchange of courtesies between herself and even those
women and girls at the station who wished to be kind to her. She had no
accomplishments in the usual sense. She neither played, nor sang, nor
drew, nor painted, either on china, fans, screens, or picture frames,
nor could she do anything in water colors. She had no taste for games,
and would not take the trouble even to play tennis. She disliked cards
and would not play bridge, nor was she in any sense the athletic woman
and had no tales of prowess to tell of tremendous mountain walks or
long excursions on horseback. She rode well in a graceful, untaught
manner which improved distinctly under Darrell’s masterly coaching,
but she did not give up her days to it as did some of the girls with
statuesque figures who looked their best on horseback.
The ladies wondered how Mrs. Darrell disposed of her time. If they
could have taken a look into Elizabeth’s own sitting room, they would
have seen a big sewing–table; and the beautiful and dainty gowns which
from time to time Mrs. Darrell appeared in, and the immense variety of
hats which caused the other women to think that she was squandering
her husband’s substance, came forth from that sewing room. Instead
of drawing trashy pictures and embroidering mats and picture frames,
Elizabeth with an artist’s eye designed and made beautiful little
costumes which looked as if they came from Regent Street or the Rue de
la Paix. Her housekeeping, too, was well attended to, and the little
dinners which she occasionally gave were remarkably good. Her mind
had not been much cultivated, but under Pelham’s direction she learned
with avidity—much to the amusement of Darrell, who protested against
a learned wife and predicted that Elizabeth would soon be writing a
novel or doing some other unholy thing likely to result from women who
meddled with books.
Meanwhile Elizabeth’s belle–ship in the regiment became firmly
established. Her charming appearance and her graceful and affable
manners with men, the subtle way she had of making every man believe
that he was her favorite, went farther with the officers of the 178th
Foot than the sketching, painting, playing, and singing of the other
women. Her manners had that fascinating combination known only to
American women, and possibly the secret of their ascendency over men,
of something between an appeal and a command; it was like the rule of a
favorite and delightful child in a household. It may be imagined that
this did not enhance Elizabeth’s popularity with her own sex.
Elizabeth wondered and was piqued at the coldness of the women towards
her. She made faint, ineffectual attempts at intimacy with the
Colonel’s daughters and the wives of various subalterns, but it was of
no avail. She was the daughter of the regiment as far as the officers
were concerned, but by no means a sister of the regiment to the ladies.
Pelham was surprised that the tongue of scandal passed her by, but with
innocence on Elizabeth’s part, and a couple of able–bodied men like
Pelham and Darrell to stand by her, the gossips found it safe to let
Mrs. Darrell alone.
Elizabeth was for a time quite happy in her new life, her only sorrow
being the separation from her father. She wrote him passionate
letters imploring him to come to see her; but it costs money to get
from Washington to Embira in the Punjaub, and General Brandon was
chronically hard up. And so her life moved on, almost as closely linked
with Pelham’s as with Darrell’s, for two years. It was, however, moving
in a direction which Elizabeth only dimly foresaw and understood. By
Pelham’s tact and judgment rather than her own there never was a breath
of scandal concerning their deep and obvious intimacy. Pelham was a man
to be feared as well as respected, and such people are tolerably safe
from criticism.
Every day of these two years found Pelham more and more deeply and
hopelessly in love with Elizabeth, with the knightly love which
would guard her not only against the whole world but against himself
and herself; for in those two years Elizabeth’s mind, ripening and
developing, perceived that she had married a man with every grace and
virtue joined to a tiresome and amiable commonplaceness. It frightened
her sometimes when she discovered how bored she grew by her husband’s
conversation, and she was still more frightened at the prospect which
sometimes occurred to her of being separated from Pelham, on whom she
had learned to depend as other women depend upon a brother or a father
or even a husband. But she was not unhappy, although she gradually
found her way out of the lover’s paradise into which she had embarked
with Darrell.
For Darrell himself she never lost the slightest respect. He was as
truthful and honorable and truly unselfish as Pelham himself was.
Nevertheless, at the end of two years came the beginning of a crisis.
A beautiful boy was born to Elizabeth, a child of fairness and of
delightful temper. “The jolliest little chap I ever saw,” swore Darrell
at the club, when the baby was less than a week old.
Elizabeth was a devoted mother, but Darrell was the most passionately
fond father imaginable. The child merely as a pet was worth to him more
than all the dogs and horses in existence, including the Irish setter.
In him there was a deep well–spring of fatherhood. He had thought
himself perfectly happy before the boy was born, but afterwards he
felt he had never known what true happiness was until then; and when
the child was a year old Darrell, proudly calling him “my soldier,”
used to put his own cap on the baby’s pretty head and his sword in its
little hand, and throw his military cloak around it and sit and gaze
in rapture at the child as it laughed and crowed, delighted with its
trappings.
At the end of a year, like a judgment from heaven, the child died,
after a day’s illness. In general it is the father who consoles the
heart–broken mother, but in this case it was Elizabeth who kept Darrell
sane in the midst of his terrible grief, who sat by him day and night,
who checked by her own tears his strange cries of grief, and who upheld
him when he passed through the deep waters. She herself was stricken in
heart as only mothers can be, and she had a presentiment that she would
never again have a child.
Pelham, who would cheerfully have borne all of Elizabeth’s sorrow at
the boy’s death, was amazed and even indignant that Darrell should not
have sustained her in this dreadful hour. Silently and with a sleepless
vigilance and constancy Pelham supported and comforted Elizabeth.
_Chapter Four_
There was no one else to sustain Elizabeth. Darrell needed comforting
even more than herself. She had formed no intimacies with any of
the ladies of the station. There were among them many kind and
tender–hearted women, but a barrier had grown up between them and the
stranger from America.
Gradually the truth was beginning to dawn upon Elizabeth, that she
depended more upon Pelham than upon Darrell; that is to say, she had
married the wrong man, and the full revelation of this terrible truth
came to her within two months of the time that she was left childless.
It was in the heat of summer, and Elizabeth was one of those two or
three of the officers’ wives, who braved the terrors of the hot season
away from the hills in order to be with their husbands.
One stifling August evening, about ten o’clock, as Elizabeth was
walking in the small grounds around their bungalow, the moon shining
upon the tops of the great cypress trees which skirted the grounds,
Pelham came down the steps of the veranda at the back of the house
and joined her. The night was hot, as only Indian nights can be, but
Elizabeth in her filmy white gown looked cool. She was as graceful
and charming as ever, for the touch of sorrow, the knowledge of
disappointment, and the necessity of keeping ceaseless watch and ward
upon her own heart had added a deeper interest to her beauty while
robbing her of some of her girlish fairness. Pelham, who was in mufti,
wore a suit of white linen, and the two white figures could be seen for
half a mile. They had not met since morning, a long time for them to be
apart, because Pelham, who had lived with Darrell after the manner of
a brother before his marriage, had continued it ever since. As he came
up, holding his straw hat in his hand, Elizabeth said to him:—
“Where have you been all day? We waited dinner for you until at last we
could wait no longer, as I wanted my poor Jack to go to the club. It
doesn’t do for him to stay in this house too much.”
[Illustration: “...SHE CAUGHT HIM BY THE ARM AND WHISPERED, ‘AND COULD
YOU LEAVE ME?’”]
“I have been hard at work all day,” replied Pelham, in a tired voice.
“I got a letter at noon to–day, offering me a staff appointment. It
would be a very good thing, a great thing, and I have been studying it
over and looking things up concerning it all the afternoon and evening.
It would take me away from the regiment for a good many years, but
still—“
Elizabeth’s face was quite plain to him in the white moonlight. She was
already pale from the heat and from her months of suffering, but he saw
a total change of expression, a look of terror, come into her eyes. It
was unmistakable. Pelham himself had long known how things were with
him, and it was chiefly from despair that he had seriously considered
that day tearing himself from Elizabeth. He thought she would miss him
as a woman misses a friend and brother, but something in her sad and
lovely eyes suddenly revealed to him that it was not as a friend and
brother she would miss him, but as the being dearest to her on earth;
and Pelham, being then tempted of the devil, asked in a low voice:—
“Elizabeth, would it be painful to you if we parted?”
Elizabeth, staggered at the quick blow which had been dealt her,
made full revelation of all she felt; she caught him by the arm and
whispered: “And could you leave me? What would become of me? I think it
would half kill me. First my child was taken, and now you—“
She paused, recalled to herself by the sound of her own words. She
dropped Pelham’s arm as quickly as she had taken it and withdrew from
him a step. They looked away from each other, alarmed and ashamed that
they had drawn so near the brink of the gulf. But the winged word had
been spoken; it was now gone, never to be recalled. Neither one of them
could move or speak for a time. Pelham was a strong man and Elizabeth
was a strong woman, and they loved not as weaklings love; their hearts
were not to be conquered in an instant. They remained thus for what
seemed to them an interminable time. It was really not five minutes.
Then Pelham said quietly:—
“I shall remain with the regiment.”
And Elizabeth, without in the least knowing what she was saying,
replied, “Thank God!”
Then, involuntarily and unable to bear longer the stress of the
situation, they both turned back to the house. The scene had lasted
all told five minutes; it was in full sight of many eyes if any
had cared to look; but for both of them it had changed the face of
creation itself. It had not, however, changed their natures, which were
singularly delicate and high–minded; nor had it involved them in any
dishonor.
As they entered the bungalow together, they met Darrell, who had
noticed them walking through the shrubbery. Elizabeth went up to him,
and placing her hand on his shoulder, a familiarity she had never used
before in the presence of Pelham or any other human being, said: “I am
so glad you have come back; I was beginning to feel so lonely without
you. After this you must stay with me more than you have done, because
I am never really happy away from you.”
This was one of the most stupendous lies ever uttered by a woman’s
lips; but the recording angel had no occasion to shed a tear over it,
as he inscribed it on the records of high heaven. A look of pleasure
came into Darrell’s honest, sombre eyes. It was not often that love
like this survived the honeymoon, and Elizabeth must indeed be deeply
in love with him, if she used such language before Pelham. He put his
arm around her slender waist, and spoke to Pelham instead of her.
“You miserable dog,” he said, “why don’t you get a wife like mine?”
Pelham, with a smile upon his dark, expressive, and somewhat homely
face, answered quite naturally, “Because I can’t find a wife like
yours.”
From that day, in spite of the fact that Elizabeth was a true wife of
an honorable man, her whole life was irradiated by the joy of knowing
that she was loved by Pelham and even that she loved him in return. It
made them both careful in a thousand ways where heretofore they had
been without thought. It made Elizabeth the sweetest as well as the
most dutiful wife imaginable to Darrell. Her constant ministrations
to him, her untiring efforts to please him, did more than he thought
possible to soothe his grief over the dead child.
Elizabeth had always been kind and flattering to Darrell’s friends, not
only out of respect for him, but from the pleasure which every woman
takes in exercising the conscious power to please. But now she was
if anything more attractive to them than ever, and Darrell enjoyed a
delight most gratifying to his pride in finding himself the preferred
admirer of a charming wife who was admired by every man who knew her.
Elizabeth felt, without one word being spoken, that her conduct was
approved by Pelham. She sometimes suspected what Pelham never did, that
he, rather than she, deserved credit for the lofty purity of their
relations, and doubted whether after all Pelham were not stronger in
a sense of honor and rectitude even than herself, so great was his
mastery over her. For, after all, the greatest power which one human
being can exercise over another is the power of uplifting and making
better; and such Elizabeth felt was Pelham’s influence over her, just
as Pelham felt that Elizabeth was his guardian angel.
The Darrells and Pelham spent all together four years at Embira. Every
year Elizabeth thought she would be able to return to America to
see her father, if for only a few weeks, but every year the Darrell
exchequer showed the impossibility of this. Their narrow means did not
permit them to travel, or even to entertain except in the simplest
manner, and Elizabeth only remained well dressed from the fact that
she knew how to make her own gowns better than most Regent Street
dressmakers. They often joked and laughed about their old relative Lady
Pelham’s fortune, which was to come first to Darrell, and, failing a
son and heir, to Pelham. Darrell dolefully related how Lady Pelham’s
mother had lived to be ninety–six, and her father to be ninety–seven,
and not one of her uncles or aunts had died under ninety years of
age, while the lady herself was not more than fifty years of age and
reckoned the most robust woman in England. They built castles in
the air, of what they would do when they got the Pelham fortune, and
Darrell tried to induce Pelham to agree to a division of the spoils
in advance. It was a great joke; but one day, nearly nine years after
Elizabeth’s marriage, death came to the three lives which stood between
Darrell and Lady Pelham’s money, and Darrell came into the life estate
of a fortune of forty thousand pounds.
_Chapter Five_
After nine years in India one is glad to get back to England,
particularly as Darrell, in spite of the large stock of health and
spirits which he took from England with him, had found as most men
do in India that he had a liver. Elizabeth had remained perfectly
well during all the nine years of her life under the hard blue Indian
skies. She was now in her thirtieth year, and Darrell was nearly forty.
Their attachment had assumed the fixed and settled form which nine
years of constant association and respect must inevitably produce in
every marriage. There were no jars or disagreements between them, and
except for the absence of children Darrell reckoned his domestic life
absolutely perfect.
Pelham, who like Darrell was now a major with a lieutenant–colonelcy
in sight, knew that the time had come, if he was ever to see anything
of the world beyond India, England, and his flying trip to the United
States, for him to start upon his travels. In one way he was no longer
necessary to Elizabeth, as she was now a trained and experienced
woman,—the least likely, he thought, of any woman in the world, to make
a false step of any kind. Elizabeth herself, although she had never
ceased to depend on Pelham, had developed under his tutelage, so that
she was in many ways able to stand without him; and, not being a woman
to keep a man at her side without cause, she encouraged Pelham in his
desire to travel.
The three returned to England together. After being established in the
fine London house which was a part of their inheritance, Elizabeth’s
first thought was for her father. It was in the spring–time that the
Darrells arrived in Europe, and a delightful plan was arranged by which
Elizabeth was to send for General Brandon, and he with the Darrells
and Pelham were to begin in August a three months’ journey on the
Continent. Elizabeth, whose mind was now well formed and furnished,
looked forward with eagerness to seeing the brilliant capitals of
Continental Europe,—those spots of romantic beauty and poetic sights,
of which she had first read and dreamed in the old country house in
Virginia and afterwards under the solemn deodars and in the shady
bungalows of the Punjaub.
Darrell’s health improved wonderfully from the day he arrived in
England, and it was thought that this Continental tour would restore
him to the physical perfection which he originally possessed. They
found London delightful, as London is apt to be with youth, good looks,
beauty, and forty thousand pounds. Pelham had his own lodgings near
them, but Darrell’s house was home to him. He saw almost as much of
Elizabeth as in the years when they lived in cantonments together, but
both Elizabeth and Darrell were fonder of society than Pelham. After
they had breakfasted, Darrell and Elizabeth went together shopping, a
novel and delightful experience to both of them; and they generally
carried Pelham along with them, much to his disgust. They always
referred things to him and never took his advice.
Darrell loved to adorn Elizabeth’s beauty, and one of the things which
gave him the most pleasure was the making of a fine diamond and pearl
necklace for his wife’s white throat. He had inherited a diamond
necklace along with the Pelham properties. To these he added other
stones and some fine pearls. Elizabeth insisted that the pretty pearl
brooch which had been her wedding gift from Darrell should be included
in the necklace, and they spent hours together at the jeweller’s
planning the making of the necklace. Pelham stood by listening
good–naturedly, and never suggesting any reduction in expense where
Elizabeth’s wishes were concerned.
When August came, however, Darrell was not so well, but he was eager
for the Continental tour, upon which Elizabeth had set her heart.
Elizabeth, however, would not hear of his going, and as Pelham’s leave
was limited he would be forced to go without the Darrells. The doctors
had not absolutely said that Darrell should not go, but considered it
best that he remain in England; it was Elizabeth’s over–solicitude for
Darrell which really induced her to give up a plan so dear not only
to her, but, as she well knew, to Pelham also. It cost her far more
to deny Pelham than to deny herself, and this he well understood; for
by that time they read each other like an open book, although no word
of love had been spoken between them after that sudden out–break of
their hearts on that night now eight years past when, standing in the
solemn gloom of the cypress trees in the sultry Indian night, they had
uttered unforgetable words. Pelham never felt prouder of Elizabeth and
her forgetfulness of self than on the day she told him of her decision
about the Continental tour, in her pretty London drawing–room, in which
she fitted beautifully. It was so, as Pelham thought, that she fitted
every place in which he had seen her.
“You know how delightful it would be for us to go,”—she always spoke
of “us,” Darrell and herself being in fact never separated,—“but the
doctor says it wouldn’t be the best thing for Jack; he would be sure to
overdo it, and that is what I don’t intend to let him do.”
“Elizabeth,” said Pelham, after a pause, “I think you are all in all
the best wife I ever knew.”
“Why shouldn’t I be a good wife—haven’t I the best husband in the
world? Jack often reminds me of my father, who has just such an open,
frank, simple nature as Jack’s,—one of those natures which nobody fears
and yet of which everybody is a little afraid.”
“That is true,” replied Pelham. “Jack as a little fellow was the
straightest lad I ever knew. If your boy had lived, I think he would
have been as straight a little fellow as Jack.”
Elizabeth’s eyes filled. She had not yet learned to bear unmoved any
mention of the child, who was quite forgotten by all except Darrell,
Pelham, and herself. Just then Darrell entered from riding. He was
neither as handsome nor as young–looking as he had been ten years
before; and Pelham, who never had been handsome or particularly
good–looking, was now quite gray and looked as if he had been baked
in an oven, but he had the clearest, kindest eye and the firmest
thin–lipped, sensible mouth, which redeemed his face from positive
ugliness. Elizabeth was no longer a girl, but with the same striking
and touching beauty of her girlhood.
“So,” said Darrell, after kissing Elizabeth’s hand, “you are leaving
us next week. By gad, I wish I were going with you, but Elizabeth
won’t hear of it. Now if I had married an English wife instead of an
American, she would have let me do as I please.”
“And make yourself ill,” replied Elizabeth. “But if you will take care
of yourself and do all I tell you, perhaps in the autumn I may take you
to the Continent.”
“But Pelham won’t be with us.”
“You’re very complimentary,” replied Elizabeth, with a cheering air of
coquetry. “Ten years ago you could get along with only me. Now you must
have Pelham and I don’t know how many other men to keep you from being
bored to death.” Such speeches are common when husband and wife are
sure of each other.
It was the next evening at dinner time that around the table Darrell
began to tell of an expedition into West Africa which he had
heard talked of at the club. It would be partly private and partly
governmental, and would require more than a year’s absence from
England. Pelham’s grave eyes lighted up as the story went on. He
had an indestructible love of bold adventure, and he had no more
been able to indulge his fondness and taste than he had been able to
indulge his fondness for intelligent travel. Elizabeth, with prophetic
intuition, saw that the idea had taken hold of Pelham’s imagination.
She felt assured that if she were to make the same appeal that she had
done unconsciously in the garden that night at Embira, Pelham would
not resist it, and would remain in England with her; but she was of
too generous a nature to wish to hold him back from what would be
an advantage as well as a strong man’s delight to him. She was not
surprised, therefore, when Pelham turned up next day, to hear that he
had been to the War Office and had been looking into the West African
expedition.
Pelham spent a fortnight making inquiries, and then one night, as he
and Darrell, with Elizabeth sitting by them, sat over their cigars on
the balcony of the morning–room, he told the story of what he had heard
of the expedition. The command of the expedition had practically been
offered him, and it was a tremendous opportunity and one not likely to
occur again to a man of his age, for his fortieth birthday was upon
him. It would mean much to him in the way of his profession, upon which
he was entirely dependent,—that is, unless Darrell should die without
an heir. Its opportunities in every way were such, and the offer made
him so flattering, that it was out of the question that he should
decline them unless there were some specific reason. Darrell told him
so.
There were steps from the balcony leading down into a little lawn with
a bench at the farther end. Elizabeth quietly rose and, walking down
the steps, passed to the farther end of the gravelled path and back
again. It was a June night, warm for London, but cool compared with
that other sultry night when the question had first been raised of
Pelham’s departure from her for a long time. After a while Pelham rose
and said to Darrell, “I will go and ask Elizabeth what she thinks of
it.”
“Do,” said Darrell. “I bet you five to one she will tell you, just as I
have done, that it is the greatest chance you ever had in your life.”
Pelham followed Elizabeth down the gravelled path to the little iron
bench under an odorous hedge of rose trees, where she sat. There was
no moon, but the starlight made a softened radiance around them. He
sat down by her and said in his usual quiet voice and laconic manner,
“Elizabeth, what do you think of my accepting the West African offer?”
“I think you ought to accept it,” replied Elizabeth, in a soft voice.
Not another word was spoken for five minutes, and then they rose and
walked back to the balcony, where Darrell’s cigar still glowed. Each
understood the other perfectly. That day fortnight Pelham started for
West Africa, giving up his Continental tour. The London season was in
full swing, and Darrell, who was naturally fond of society, liked to
go out; nor was this prohibited, in moderation, by the medical men.
Elizabeth, too, liked society; and besides, now that Pelham was gone,
she felt the need of contact with other minds and natures.
_Chapter Six_
Elizabeth was under no uneasiness concerning Pelham. The West African
expedition was one of great responsibility, but of trifling danger, and
Elizabeth had the highest respect for Pelham’s ability to take care
of himself. The thought had been in her mind, as it was in Pelham’s,
that she was far better prepared to do without him then than in those
earlier days when she had been a stranger in a strange land. Such
indeed was the case, but ten years of close companionship and reliance
on Pelham’s judgment and kindness for almost every act of her life
had bred in Elizabeth a dependence which she did not fully realize
until he was gone. It was as if the sun had dropped out of the heavens
when he was away. In Darrell she had the companionship of a husband
who adored her, but who except for his love could not give her the
least assistance in any other way; while with Pelham it was, besides
the intimacy of a great, unspoken love, the ever present aid of sound
sense, good judgment, and a cultivated mind.
Elizabeth, with her youth and beauty and her natural taste for gayety
and admiration, could not but find the London season charming; and as
for Darrell, it seemed the very wine of life to him to be once more in
England. They were invited everywhere, and had pleasure in returning
the hospitality offered them. As regarded their income the Darrells, it
is true, had a large one, as the late Lady Pelham was supposed to have
left about forty thousand pounds; but it was hampered in many ways,
as the late Lady Pelham was one of those persons who try to transact
business after they are dead and buried.
Darrell knew nothing of business, and seemed incapable of learning.
He spent money liberally for himself and more liberally still for
Elizabeth. She had only to express a wish for it to be gratified.
Darrell desired to cover her with jewels, but Elizabeth with better
taste preferred to wear only one ornament, the handsome diamond and
pearl necklace which seemed so peculiarly hers. Of the new gems in it,
she and Darrell and Pelham had spent hours examining and deciding; and
the idea of inserting in it her wedding gift of a pearl brooch, was
Elizabeth’s entirely and she was proud of it. Darrell, who grew more in
love with his wife each day, was charmed at this bit of sentiment, on
which they had united in defeating the jeweller.
On the night before the Goodwood races, there was a great ball at
Marlborough House, to which Elizabeth and Darrell were commanded. Never
had Elizabeth looked handsomer. A black evening gown showed off the
perfections, the exquisite beauty, of her white shoulders and slender
arms. The necklace around her milky white throat looked like moonlight
and starlight combined.
“You will make a sensation to–night, my girl,” said Darrell, kissing
her.
“If you like my looks, that is the main point,” replied Elizabeth. She
habitually made him these pretty speeches, which was gratifying to
Darrell, as the husband of a beauty.
They went to the ball, which had a gayety unsurpassed in balls. It
established Elizabeth’s place in society as one of the beauties of the
season. She received vast attention from those London exquisites who
claim to fix a woman’s place in beauty’s calendar. She was noticed,
admired, and conversed with by royalty itself, and the Prince having
thus set his mark of approval on her, Elizabeth’s title as a London
beauty was settled beyond cavil. She enjoyed it thoroughly, of course;
but the image of Pelham did not leave her mind. She would turn her
head in the midst of the splendor and magnificence of the ball, wishing
to herself, “Could I but see him now!”
The ball lasted late, and it was not over until night had flown and the
rosy dawn had come. Elizabeth was one of the few women sufficiently
natural to look well after a night of dancing, and she looked as fresh
as the dawn itself when she stepped into her carriage. Not so Darrell,
who appeared so wearied that Elizabeth reproached herself at not having
left earlier.
“I didn’t wish to bring you away,” he said with his usual kindness of
tone. “Nine years in the Punjaub entitles you to some indulgences, and
besides I was proud of you. I like to see you happy and admired.”
Elizabeth laid her head on his shoulder in the seclusion of the
brougham, and Darrell, after a pause, said in a low voice: “This is
the anniversary of the boy’s death. I wouldn’t speak of it before,
Elizabeth, but I hadn’t forgotten it.”
“And I,” said Elizabeth, her heart suddenly turning to the dead child,
sleeping under the cypress trees in the military cemetery at Embira,
“had not forgotten it, but I hoped that you had, dearest.”
They talked together for a little while of their lost darling, as the
parents of dead children do, and then Darrell suddenly grew quiet.
Elizabeth thought he was asleep, and would not move for fear she might
disturb him. When she reached their own door, she raised her head from
his shoulder. Darrell was dead.
* * * * *
Of all that happened in the succeeding weeks, Elizabeth had afterward
but a confused recollection. She was stunned by the blow and deeply
grieved. Although she had long ceased to return Darrell’s affection
in kind, yet she had a deep love for him. It was so deep, so sincere,
so unselfish, that his death could not fail to be a heavy grief to
her,—the heaviest but one that she could know: that other was Pelham’s.
Her sorrow was not joined with remorse. She had honestly and earnestly
devoted her life to Darrell, and felt sure that she had made him happy;
but nevertheless it was a deep and sincere sorrow.
Her first thought had been naturally and inevitably for Pelham. She
was so ignorant of business, so absolutely untrained in affairs, and
so much a stranger in England, that she scarcely knew where to turn.
Darrell had plenty of relatives, but Elizabeth had never known them,
except during her few short months in England, and none of them
were particularly near Darrell either in blood or friendship. His
grandfather was long since dead, and the cousin who inherited the title
was in West Africa. From the beginning Elizabeth seemed overwhelmed
with difficulties, with annoying details which she was called upon
to decide without having the slightest experience in them. She knew
nothing of the value of money, having had but little until she came
into what seemed to both Darrell and herself an enormous fortune. She
knew not what she had spent nor what she was spending. Thus, as in
everything else, could she have only turned to Pelham and asked him
what to do, everything would have gone right. But Pelham was in West
Africa; it would possibly take anywhere from four to five months to
communicate with him, nor was it possible for him to return for at
least a year from the time he had started.
It was Pelham, however, who inherited everything that came from Lady
Pelham. The sole provision for Elizabeth was about one hundred pounds
a year, which was Darrell’s own small inheritance. But the fact that
Pelham was the sole heir relieved Elizabeth’s mind when it was brought
home to her that she would be obliged to account for everything Darrell
and she had received,—every chair and table in Lady Pelham’s house,
and every jewel, however trifling. Elizabeth, who was as high–minded
as she was inexperienced, desired to hand over everything to Pelham
direct, but she knew him, or thought she knew him, too well to suppose
it possible that he should make her position the least painful or
embarrassing to her. In the first weeks of her widowhood, when she had
wished to remain alone in her London house, entirely secluded from the
world and its affairs, she was forced to see solicitors, attorneys,
business men, and persons of all sorts. Some of these presented unpaid
bills for large amounts, and foremost among the intruders was one
Andrew McBean, a Scotch attorney who was Pelham’s agent.
This man, with his persistence and insistence, annoyed Elizabeth
almost beyond endurance; but the thing which troubled her most was the
continual presenting of unpaid bills. She gave up her carriage and sold
it with the horses, imagining in her simplicity that she could use this
money for the payment of the accounts which rained upon her every day;
and she actually did so use this money until informed by McBean that
she had sold Pelham’s property and misused the proceeds. This McBean
said to her one day in her own drawing–room, or what she supposed was
her own drawing–room. Elizabeth’s heart fluttered with terror as McBean
warned her that she would be required to account for every penny of
this money—in fact of all the money that she was spending.
She had that morning, in despair, taken her diamond and pearl necklace
to a jeweller’s agent, who really acted as an amateur pawn–broker, and
who had advanced her five hundred pounds on it. Had McBean asked her
then about the necklace, she would have fainted on the floor; but he
did not. As soon as he had gone, Elizabeth, in her widow’s dress, flew
pale and panting to the agent to whom she had intrusted the necklace,
and told him what McBean had said to her. The agent, who saw that he
had a frightened woman in his power and a valuable piece of property
worth four times what he had advanced on it, soothed Elizabeth by
telling her that McBean had no right to demand the necklace from
her, as it was hers, being partly her husband’s wedding gift to her.
Elizabeth returned home, in that hour of darkness, with but one thought
uppermost in her mind. Could she but see Pelham, he would not suffer
her thus to be persecuted. She knew quite well how he would wish her to
act,—to pay off the pressing debts which humiliated her, and to take
the small balance of money left and remain in England until he should
return. This she determined to do.
She had not heard from him either by cable or by letter since
Darrell’s death, but that was nothing. Communication with him would
be necessarily slow. It might be weeks or even months before she
should hear, but she was certain of what the purport of his letter
would be, and of what his wishes already were. So, dismissing her
servants and turning the house over to McBean, she went to live in
a small lodging–house, there to await Pelham’s return. She put away
from her all the thoughts about him as a lover,—thoughts which would
occasionally force themselves upon her, but from which she turned
steadfastly,—and thought of him only as a brother and friend, the man
most anxious to help her in the world, not even excepting her own
father. General Brandon had written to her urgent and affectionate
letters, telling her that his heart and hand and home were open to
her as the best of daughters; and Elizabeth, whose heart yearned
unceasingly for her father, found in the thought of once more being
held in her father’s arms the heartiest consolation she could have at
that moment. But she knew it was useless to tell General Brandon any
of her money difficulties. She understood his straitened circumstances,
his mortgaged house, and the story of his Egyptian bonds. The only
thing to do was to write Pelham frankly and fully every circumstance of
her affairs, and to await his reply in England. She did this, and set
herself to the task of waiting.
It was now autumn, a dull London autumn, and it seemed to Elizabeth as
if she were living in a bad dream. Only the other day she had a devoted
husband in Darrell, a friend in Pelham who was all that a friend could
be to a woman, a home, servants, carriages, jewels, everything that the
heart of woman could ask, with the prospect of having her father as an
honored guest; and now she was widowed, alone, and in deep poverty. She
had brought her expenses down to the lowest possible penny. Friendless,
overwhelmed with debts of which she understood nothing, and in the
clutches of a Scotch attorney and a jeweller’s agent, she felt a
certainty of relief when Pelham should write and then should come.
Every time the lodging–house bell rang, she thought it was Pelham’s
letter, but it did not come. Instead came McBean, first hinting
and then threatening legal proceedings, especially in regard to
the necklace. This seemed to Elizabeth an undeserved outrage and,
reënforced by the counsel of the jeweller’s agent, she said firmly, her
dark eyes flashing: “That necklace was my husband’s gift to me, his
last gift to me, and part of it was his wedding gift. It is to me the
most valuable thing on earth apart from what it cost, and it is mine
and I shall not give it up. When Major Pelham returns, I promise you he
will see the matter as I do.”
This conversation occurred in Elizabeth’s dingy room at the
lodging–house, in an unfashionable part of Bayswater. “I judge Major
Pelham will take the same view as I do, the only possible view,”
replied McBean, a wizened, fox–eyed man, who loved a five–pound note
better than his own soul. “I am following out Major Pelham’s exact
directions when I demand of you the return of the necklace.” At these
words Elizabeth felt as if a knife had been thrust into her heart. She
understood McBean to mean that he had received from Pelham explicit
instructions in the matter of the necklace, while as a matter of fact
he had heard nothing from Pelham any more than Elizabeth had. McBean
had honestly thought that he was acting exactly in Pelham’s interests
and as Pelham would have wished him to do, who had in general terms
authorized him to collect all debts due Pelham and pay all authorized
bills.
McBean noticed Elizabeth’s pallor and shock at his words, and rightly
judged that he had hit upon the means of alarming her. He continued to
talk as if repeating Pelham’s words. Elizabeth listened with horror.
Was there then no such thing as love and faith in the world? Could
she have known Pelham for all these years, have felt the assurance of
his devotion, and yet after all not known him? No word of McBean’s
was lost upon her, dazed as she was; but, feeling that she was unable
to bear the scene longer, she got up and walked out of the room like
an insulted queen, leaving McBean still talking. Not by one Scotch
attorney, nor in one hour, could Elizabeth’s belief in Pelham be
shattered; and after the first horror caused by McBean’s words,
Elizabeth experienced a revulsion of feeling. She reproached herself
for believing that Pelham could, for the sake of a few hundred pounds,
so persecute and humiliate her. If she lost faith in Pelham, she would
lose faith in humanity, even in her own father. McBean must be lying.
What he had said to her was incredible. It stiffened her resolution
to remain in England at any cost until she could hear from Pelham,
and of eventually hearing she could have no doubt. She wrote him a
few lines, simply asking if he had received her letter and recounting
the circumstances under which she remained in England after Darrell’s
death. This letter she forwarded to the War Office, and then set
herself to the task of waiting three months, or perhaps five, until
she could get a reply. Meanwhile she continued to receive tender and
affectionate letters from her father, imploring her to return to him.
Elizabeth replied, saying that she would come to him as soon as the
condition of her affairs permitted, and merely adding that there were
certain things to be settled up in connection with the estate which
required her presence in England.
The dull autumn deepened into a winter of fierce cold, with scarcely a
ray of sunshine. Elizabeth suffered from this as only one can suffer
who has spent many winters under an Indian sun. Even if her pride had
permitted her to call for assistance from their former friends, of
whom she had scarcely one among the women, but many among the men, she
dared not; she was afraid that McBean’s story had gone far and wide and
that every action of hers might be under suspicion. And then came the
crowning blow. The time passed when she might have returned the five
hundred pounds advanced on the necklace. She could not pay it, having
barely enough out of the one hundred pounds left her by Darrell to keep
body and soul together. And no word came from Pelham.
The spring advanced, and the trees in the Bayswater district grew
green. The time returned when only a year before she had been adored
by her husband and loved and revered by the man who was now treating
her with insulting neglect,—for to this belief Elizabeth had at last
been forced. She spent many nights walking up and down her narrow room
wringing her hands at the thought of the last letter she had written
Pelham. The first she had no regrets for. It had been sent under the
impression that Pelham was not only a sincere man but a gentleman; for
certainly, knowing as he did every circumstance of Elizabeth’s life and
condition, it was ungentlemanlike of him to seize everything on which
the law permitted him to lay his hands and to leave her destitute,
alone, and a stranger. She felt that she could no longer doubt McBean’s
word, of which nothing could have convinced her short of Pelham’s own
conduct. Hope died hard within her, and she lingered in London during
the spring and late summer; but as autumn came on she realized there
was but one refuge left her, her father’s roof in Washington.
She dared not let her intention of leaving London be known, for fear
she might be stopped and a scandal might ensue. She raised money enough
to take a second–class passage on a cheap steamer, and on a gloomy day
in the last part of September she started upon her homeward journey.
She had endured grief, anxiety, and privations, and especially that
last overwhelming blow, the admission of Pelham’s faithlessness. It had
transformed her delicate and seductive beauty, but strangely enough
it had not rendered her less delicately seductive. The pathos of her
eyes, the sadness of her smile, the droop of her beautiful mouth, her
mourning attire, refined and even elegant, in spite of her poverty,
marked her out. She was not less beautiful than in her days of joy, and
was far more interesting.
_Chapter Seven_
The return of a woman once married to a home under her father’s roof
is always a tragic episode. It implies death or disaster, and means
the giving up of the prestige and independence a woman is supposed to
attain by marriage. It may be the most sordid or the most dignified
of tragedies that brings her back. Nevertheless it is a tragedy, and
almost invariably has its sordid aspects, because it is oftenest
poverty, to the accompaniment of divorce or death, which leads her,
wounded and smarting and hungering, to that last remaining refuge, her
father’s house.
To Elizabeth Darrell, on the gloomy October day when she reached
Washington from England, it seemed as if all the cruel reasons which
ever brought a woman to such a pass existed in her case. She pondered
over all the sources of her unhappiness with that curious passion for
the analysis of their own misfortunes which is peculiar to women and
poets. Her general and specific quarrel against fate had not been
absent for a moment from her memory since she first undertook that
long journey overseas. As every hour brought her nearer to her old
home, the pain and the apprehension of pain increased. One mitigation
she had hoped for, the sight of her father’s kind, handsome old face as
soon as she reached Washington; his courtly placing of his hand within
her own; his valiant pretence that her home–coming was a happy one. But
her despatch on leaving the steamer had not arrived in time, and when
she reached the station there was no one to meet her.
It was a cool, damp autumn afternoon; a fine rain was falling and
a general air of misery brooded over everything. With that dazed
intelligence about places which were once well known but are now half
forgotten, Elizabeth watched the streets and squares through which
her cab rolled. She was forced to observe that Washington had become
a fine city in the ten years since she had seen it. But as she was
accustomed to the crowded thoroughfares of foreign cities, the quiet
streets seemed to her dreary and deserted beyond expression. Was
everybody dead in those silent, handsome houses? The cab stopped at
last before the tall, plain house, quite far out in the northwest, in
which Elizabeth had passed the beautiful though happy–go–lucky days of
her girlhood. The finer residences were crowding the poor house in an
unseemly manner. Elizabeth remembered it as surrounded by vacant lots,
tenanted only by real estate agents’ signs. Now the region was well and
handsomely built up. The house, commonplace and shabby, looked still
more commonplace and shabby from its fashionable surroundings. It was
near the end of the square, where the smaller street debouched into a
splendid avenue. On the corner was a fine white stone house, with an
entrance on the avenue and a porte–cochère on the side street.
It made Elizabeth Darrell feel more of a forlorn stranger than ever
when she saw the new luxury that surrounded her father’s poor old
house. She descended from the cab and with a faltering hand rang the
bell. Her ring was answered by a negro woman, stout, elderly, and
decent, but far removed from the smart English maids and native Indian
servants to whom Elizabeth had been long accustomed. However, so
strong is early habitude that the sight of this honest black face gave
Elizabeth the first sentiment of home she had felt since her widowhood.
In that black face was a doglike softness and kindness, and in the
voice a compassionate yet deprecatory quality, which is not heard often
in any but an African voice.
“You is Mis’ ‘Lisbeth,” she said kindly, holding the door wide. “De
Gin’l, he ear’n lookin’ fer you ’twell to–morrer—but come right in
heah.”
There were signs of preparation within, but the room designed for
Elizabeth—the best bedroom in the house—was not ready. Serena—for so
she informed Elizabeth was her name—was full of humble, soft apologies.
“De Gin’l will be mighty worried dat he war’n home when you come; he
was countin’ on meckin’ you mighty comfortable.”
To which Elizabeth, her spirit dying within her at the aspect of
things, answered: “Is not the front bedroom in the third story
furnished? Perhaps I could go there.”
Serena eagerly led the way. It was the room which had been Elizabeth’s
ten years ago. She had chosen it because General Brandon was always
entertaining some of his relations, and had the old–time idea that
hospitality to a guest meant the upsetting of all family arrangements;
so Elizabeth had chosen this upper room for her own, secure in not
being turned out of it to accommodate some ex–Confederate general,
judge, or other person distinguished in “our great Civil War,” as
General Brandon always spoke of it. The windows had a good outlook
upon the blue Potomac and on the misty line of the Virginia hills far
beyond. Otherwise it had not a single recommendation.
Serena, her heart in her beady black eyes, was all sympathy and
attention. She brought tea, called Elizabeth “honey,” and talked in her
slow and soothing voice of “de Gin’l.” Evidently General Brandon was a
hero to his maid–of–all–work.
At last Serena went out, and Elizabeth was alone. She sat down before
the little dressing–table and removed her widow’s bonnet and veil. And
remembering that when she had last seen herself in that mirror she had
been a bride and in the glory of her youth, she could not but study the
changes in herself. She had then been beautiful, in a vivid, irregular
manner, and ought to have been so still, as she was but little past
her thirtieth birthday. But she saw plainly that she was haggard,
that she was sallow, that she was painfully thin. She looked at her
own reflection with self–pity, thinking, “I should be handsome still
if I had but some flesh and color, and if life were not so hard and
disappointing.” She sat a long while, leaning her head on her hand, and
seeing in the mirror, not her own reflection, but the hapless story
of her own life passing before her. Then, recalling herself, like a
person waking from a dream, she went to the window and looked out upon
the quiet street.
It was already dusk, and the mist of the late autumn afternoon made
mysterious shadows, through which the houses loomed large and near.
Directly before her towered the great stone house, and just above
the porte–cochère was a large, square window, with delicate lace
draperies. It was quite dark enough for the wood fire, sparkling in
the white–tiled fireplace, to show the interior of the room, which was
evidently a boudoir of the most beautiful and luxurious character.
Elizabeth was keen of sight, and she could not refrain from looking
into so charming a room placed under her eyes. The walls were panelled
with flowered silk; the furniture was of gold and spindle–legged; there
was a delicious little sofa drawn up to the fire; everything spoke of
wealth informed by taste.
In a minute more the mistress of this delightful room entered—a
graceful, girlish figure, enveloped in a long, full cloak of a
shimmering, silvery satin and wearing a flower–decked white hat. She
threw aside her cloak and sat down for a moment on the sofa before
the fire. Her air was not that of happy abandon, but rather of
thoughtfulness, even of sadness. She was not beautiful, but Elizabeth,
with a woman’s ready appraisement of another woman’s charms, saw at
a glance that this girl’s appearance was interesting. Her features
were delicate, but her face was too pale for beauty; her thin–lipped
mouth was large, though redeemed by perfect teeth; but her air, her
figure, her walk, were full of grace and elegance. She remained only
a few minutes in the room, then passed into the inner room and closed
the door after her. And in a moment a maid came in and drew the silk
curtains, leaving only a rosy glow from the window instead of a
captivating picture.
Elizabeth, distracted for only a little while from her own thoughts,
went back to the sad employment of casting up her sorrows and
disappointments. She remembered her childhood on the old Virginia
plantation with her father’s mother. The war was not many years past
then, and over all her life hung that great black shadow of chaos
following defeat, the wreck of fortune, the upheaval of society, the
helplessness, the despair of millions of people, with their whole
social fabric a wreck, all values destroyed, everything disrupted and
out of joint. She had realized later on how General Brandon had stinted
himself for the little dark–eyed daughter on the Virginia plantation,
and his magnanimous investment of his savings in Egyptian bonds, which
made Elizabeth smile faintly in the midst of her wretchedness. In those
years of separation and of learning from the great, wide–open book of
life, Elizabeth had come to understand her father better than during
that part of her life passed with him.
The General was a West Point graduate, and had been the best–loved
man in his class, in spite of having been also the handsomest and one
of the dullest. So when his old classmates in the army had heard of
his straits, they all agreed that “something must be done for Dick
Brandon.” Although a West Point man, he was not a scientific man; he
was too handsome to know much. His old friends did the best they could
for him by getting him a clerkship in Washington; and General Brandon,
who had commanded a brigade of three thousand fighting men, during
four years of unremitting warfare, found himself subject to a chief of
division young enough to be his son and as ignorant as men are made.
The old soldier had borne his lot with a fine patience and a sweet
calmness that placed him well up in the ranks of unrecorded heroes.
He had a superb courage, a charming temper; he remained incurably
handsome, and likewise he was and always remained incurably simple in
every way. Anybody could hoodwink him, and most people did. When he
had come to Washington, bringing with him his daughter Elizabeth, then
eighteen, and some remnant of property coming to him, he bought the
shabby house. Or, rather, he thought he bought it, for it had a heavy
mortgage on it, which General Brandon never had the least expectation
of lifting—mortgages being as natural to Virginians as sparks flying
upward.
Washington in those days was a simple, merry place, with a delightful
and unique society based upon official rank, and a few old resident
families, who were in society when Abigail Adams had the clothes dried
in the East Room of the White House. Elizabeth remembered that she
had been a great belle with gay young army and navy men and sprigs of
diplomats and was not unhappy, although she had felt at every turn
the prick of poverty. She had been ashamed to complain, however, in
the presence of General Brandon’s cheerful submission. He had his
compensations, though,—chiefly his evening visits to and from other
grizzled officers of both sides, when they sat and talked gravely and
tensely of issues as dead as Julius Cæsar, and solemnly discussed
what might have been, to an accompaniment of whiskey and cigars.
General Brandon’s whiskey and cigars were poor—he smoked a pipe
himself, declaring he preferred it. But no army man of any rank ever
animadverted on the General’s whiskey or cigars; and, although both
were evilly cheap, they drank and smoked cheerfully, with a relish for
the man if not for his entertainment.
General Brandon had no knowledge of the words “getting on in society,”
or anything like them. He belonged to that sturdy oligarchy in Virginia
which, whatever might be its shortcomings, knew nothing of snobs or
snobbery, because everybody was just as good as everybody else. But his
social career had been such that the newly rich might have asked him
his patent for knowing everybody worth knowing. He was asked everywhere
in those days, which he took as a matter of course, just as, during his
occasional brief sojourns in England during his Egyptian days, he was
asked everywhere and took it as a matter of course. Your true Virginian
has many faults and some vices, but he is socially the wisest person in
the world because he is the simplest. Nobody can patronize him, nobody
can snub him. He takes the notice of royalty with the same unconscious
ease that he does the rapturous salutation of a negro barber who
belonged to him “befo’ de war, sir,”—always polite, considerate,
mindful of the small, sweet courtesies of life.
There is but one section of society with which he cannot get on. This
is the newly rich smart set, fresh from the forge, the shop, the mine,
the liquor saloon—that rapid fungus which has grown up in America
during the last forty years, of which it has been said that no parallel
exists to its license and irresponsibility, unless one goes back to
the later Roman and Byzantine emperors. This class is free with a
freedom that is staggering to contemplate; free from any traditions
of the past, any responsibility in the present, any accountability to
the future; free to marry, to be divorced, to live where it likes, to
change its residence every week in the year; free from the care of
the few children they have, free from taxes as far as rank perjury
goes, and free to command all the science of the world to keep death
at bay as long as possible. The advent of this class anywhere changes
the aspect of things, and therefore when it moved in columns upon
Washington, the people of General Brandon’s class and Elizabeth’s time
became “Cave–dwellers,” and the General was asked “nowhere,”—that is,
he was still asked, but it was “nowhere.” The General, however, did
not know this at the time, or ever afterwards.
Elizabeth sat at the window and, looking out upon the murky evening,
continued that sad review of her life.
There is a French school of moralists which says that a man may love
two women at once. Elizabeth Darrell had certainly loved two men at
once. Pelham was always and forever the man she would have married,
but Darrell’s honest love was not thrown away on her. She mourned him
as she had mourned for her child, neither one infringing in the least
on Pelham’s place in her heart. She had been a wife and a mother, she
had suffered a real and lasting passion for a man not her husband, but
she had not transgressed a hair’s–breadth; she had experienced both
poverty and wealth, she had known and felt more in her thirty years
than most women do in a lifetime; and yet it seemed to her as if she
had only turned over, without the opportunity to read and study, those
glowing pages in the book of a woman’s life—the love of a man, the love
of a child, the beauty of the world. Now all was over—even Pelham’s
love and tender consideration, which had been hers for so long that she
scarcely recognized the face of life without them. Nothing was left for
her except her father, the best of men and fathers; but this was not
enough for a nature like Elizabeth Darrell’s.
While these thoughts were passing through Elizabeth’s mind, darkness
had fallen. Lights were twinkling everywhere. The great house opposite
radiated brightness from many windows, and it occurred to Elizabeth,
as to every sorrowful and disappointed person, that every one in that
luxurious and brilliant home must be happy. Probably the girl of the
boudoir, whose attitude had expressed such dejection, was grieving
over some trifle like a disappointment in a dance or the failure of
some plan of pleasure. Then she heard the street door open and a step
which she recognized as her father’s, and she had the first sensation
of gladness she had felt for so long that she had almost forgotten what
gladness was.
General Brandon, standing under the flaring gas–jet in the narrow
hall, saw the black figure flying down the stairs towards him. He
stopped, trembling with emotion; he who had without a tremor faced
death a hundred times was shaken at the sight of his child in her
mourning garments. The next minute her head was on his shoulder and he
was patting it, saying, “My child,—my ever dear child,—welcome at all
times, more welcome in your sorrow.”
Elizabeth looked up, smiling and weeping. It was the first time since
her husband’s death that she had not seemed in everybody’s way. General
Brandon gazed at her, at the changes that ten years had made, at the
marks of the recent shipwreck of her hopes and joys, at the pallor and
thinness that brooding over her misfortunes had brought upon her; and
then he said, with a tremulous smile and with tears in his honest eyes,
“It is doubly sweet to have you back unchanged.”
He led her into the dingy, well–remembered drawing–room, and they
sat hand in hand on the sofa, talking, Elizabeth dwelling upon her
husband’s goodness to her, and mentioning none of her woes and
perplexities in that first hour of meeting. Then Serena announced
dinner, and General Brandon, with the air of escorting a queen regent,
placed his daughter at the head of the table. “And never, since the day
of your marriage, my love, have I ever sat down to this table without
remembering you and wishing that you were seated at this place,” he
said.
To Elizabeth it seemed that the place she had in that dull dining room
was the only spot she had had any right to, except under sufferance,
since that June morning, now nearly a year and a half past, when
her husband had died. Not only was General Brandon glad to see her,
but Serena seemed equally so. Serena was a distinct acquisition to
Elizabeth. When the dinner was fairly begun the General produced a
bottle of that doubtful champagne which had been served at Elizabeth’s
wedding. “Saved to celebrate your return, my dearest,” he said.
Elizabeth could scarcely drink it for the tears that threatened to
overflow.
The dining room was just as it had been ten years ago, only duller and
dingier; but it was scrupulously neat. General Brandon’s joy at seeing
her was not troubled by any apprehensions as to the shortcomings of his
household. All during dinner his spirits did not flag, and insensibly
Elizabeth’s turbulent heart grew more composed. Her father asked her
minute particulars concerning her married life, and when Elizabeth
told of Darrell’s unvarying goodness to her, a singular look of relief
came into her father’s face. He had always had a dim apprehension
that Elizabeth was not rightly mated with Darrell—which was true. He
delicately refrained from asking any questions about her means, but
Elizabeth told him frankly that the sole provision available for her,
after Pelham inherited the property, was about one hundred pounds a
year, contingent on her remaining a widow.
“Why, that is opulence!” said General Brandon, with the ideas of
opulence of an ex–Confederate officer in a government clerkship. “That
will suffice amply for your needs; and whatever I can supply, my dear,
is yours, and my house and all in it are at your complete disposal.”
Elizabeth rose and went over to him and kissed him. After all, there
was some goodness left in the world. She did not once mention Pelham’s
name; but presently her father asked: “And in your trouble, where was
Major Pelham, of whom you so often wrote me in years past, as being
most kind and brotherly to you? As he was the next heir, he owed you
much consideration.”
Elizabeth, by an effort, spoke calmly. “He had just started for West
Africa when Jack died. I have heard nothing from him, but I know
through his solicitor—a very rude person—that Major Pelham has not been
to England.”
“And Major Pelham has not even written you a letter of condolence?”
“No.”
“Most strange. And his solicitor is in communication with him?”
“Yes.” Elizabeth was surprised at the steadiness of her voice in
answering these questions, but General Brandon noticed for the first
time a tremor in her tones.
“I cannot understand such conduct, and particularly as I retain a most
agreeable recollection of Major Pelham,—Captain Pelham he was at the
time of your marriage.”
Then, to Elizabeth’s relief, her father left off speaking of Pelham
and gave her a minute account of all her Virginia relations and their
doings during the last ten years. Elizabeth listened, her head on
her hand, the light from the flaring chandelier falling upon her
rich hair, one of her beauties left unimpaired. She appeared to be
strictly attentive, but in truth she scarcely heard one word of what
her father, in his soft, well–bred voice, was saying. Her mind was
going over, as it had done many hundreds of times, the strange problem
about Pelham. Was it possible that a mere matter of money and an
estate had so changed him that he could forget her, after nine years
of devotion—silent, it is true, but none the less eloquent? Or was it,
after all, mere lip service he had paid her? This she could not quite
believe, and so was ever tormented between longing and regret on one
hand, and a silent but furious resentment on the other. Pelham at
least was a gentleman, and yet he had not observed any sentiment of
courtesy or attention to her when he was under every obligation to do
so. He must know what sort of man Mr. McBean was, and yet he had left
her completely in the solicitor’s power. And the remembrance of McBean
brought back the recollection of the money she owed on the necklace of
which McBean had tried to rob her. She went over the whole weary story
again, that strange, contradictory story of Pelham’s agent, technically
and actually—and she was glad to take refuge from her perplexing and
contradictory thoughts by paying more heed to what her father was
saying. He had got through with a part of his relations, and with
a view to interesting Elizabeth in her future home was telling her
something of those friends and acquaintances left in Washington.
“You remember Sara Luttrell, my dear?” asked General Brandon, with a
smile. “Well, she is the same Sara Luttrell I danced with forty–five
years ago at West Point. Nobody knew her age then and nobody knows
it now—and time seems to have passed her by. She still lives in her
fine old house, gives two dinners a week herself and goes out to dine
the remaining five evenings, and nobody dares cross her except her
nephew—her husband’s nephew, I should say—Richard Baskerville.”
“I remember Mr. Baskerville perfectly. He was always very kind to me,
and so was Mrs. Luttrell.”
“Richard Baskerville, my dear, is a very remarkable man. He has
developed a comfortable fortune of his own, and will inherit every
stiver of Sara Luttrell’s money. But he works hard at his profession of
the law and has made a name for himself. His fortune and position make
it possible for him to devote himself to civics, and he is frequently
engaged in the investigations of violations of the civil service law
and in matters coming before Congress in which there is reason to
suspect fraud. Just now he is in the thick of a fight with my neighbor
in the fine house across the way, Senator Clavering, who is under fire
at the present time before a senatorial committee concerning some
alleged gigantic frauds with railway land grants in the Far West. I
knew Clavering well before the war, when I was a captain of infantry
and he was a sutler,—post–traders they now call themselves, and I
understand that at army posts their daughters aspire to be visited by
the young officers.”
So the big, beautiful house belonged to this man Clavering. Elizabeth
felt an immediate and strange interest on hearing about the people who
lived in that charming abode. She wondered why she should wish to hear
more of these people whose names she had heard only at that moment,
but nevertheless she did. Nothing pleased General Brandon so much as
to talk of things which happened before the war, except to talk about
those which happened during the war.
“Clavering, however, was not the man to remain a sutler very long.
He made money at the business—they all do; Napoleon Bonaparte was
the only man who knew how to treat a man supplying soldiers. In the
days when I knew Clavering, a sutler was a sutler; nevertheless,
Clavering was such a remarkable man that no one who knew him could
forget him. I used often to talk with him, and he professed to be
under some obligations to me for certain small acts of kindness.
After giving up the post–tradership for something better, I heard of
him at intervals. I even saw him once here in Washington just before
your marriage—sometimes he was up and sometimes he was down. Then he
went into mining, prospecting, and land buying on a great scale and
developed what I had always observed in him, a remarkable capacity for
men and affairs. Five years ago he came to the Senate, built this
splendid house you saw on the corner, and set up for a statesman and a
gentleman. Ha, ha! I must say, however, that he had some qualifications
for both. His family are conspicuous socially. He has three daughters
and a deadly pious son, a confirmed ritualist like most of those common
people. He goes to St. Bartholomew’s Chapel, where I attend service
still, as I did when I had the joy of having you with me, my child.”
The General was a strict churchman, and it was no small recommendation
that Clavering had a son who was also a strict churchman.
“And one of Clavering’s daughters—Miss Anne Clavering—is very much
admired and respected. Another of his daughters has had the misfortune
to be divorced. His wife is little seen in society. She was a plain
but most excellent woman when I knew her thirty years ago. This
investigation of which Richard Baskerville is one of the leading
spirits must be extremely painful to the ladies of Clavering’s family.”
General Brandon prattled on until ten o’clock came, when he always went
to his modest club for an hour. He escorted Elizabeth to her door and
said good night, giving her a blessing like the patriarchs’ of old.
As soon as she was alone Elizabeth put out the gas and, opening the
window, looked out upon the night. It was a damp and chilly night,
with a few vagrant stars in the sky and a sickly moon setting. The
vast mass of foliage which makes Washington a great park still hung
upon the trees, but was yellowing and decaying. There were not many
lights in the houses round about, except in the Clavering mansion, for
it was not yet the full season in Washington. But while Elizabeth was
looking a carriage drove under the Clavering porte–cochère, an alert
footman opened the huge street door and spread a carpet down the steps.
In a moment the girl Elizabeth had seen in the boudoir came out in an
evening costume, with a white silk mantle enveloping her. Elizabeth
had a perfectly clear view of her as she passed down the steps under
a great swinging lantern. She was not beautiful, but interesting,
graceful, and with an air of perfect breeding. After her came one of
the handsomest men Elizabeth had ever seen. He was well past middle
age, but his figure was noble, his features without line or wrinkle,
his complexion ruddy with health, and his close–cropped iron–gray hair
abundant. Elizabeth divined that it was Clavering, and what was more,
the instant her eyes rested upon him she knew that she had seen him
before; that she had seen him at some crisis in her life and seen
him so as never to have forgotten him. She drew back from the window
when the shock of surprise struck her. She could not recall at what
particular crisis her eyes and this man’s had met, except that it was
long ago. She had not once during all those intervening years recalled
him, but now his face was as instantly recognized by her as had been
her own father’s. It was as if, sailing upon the ocean, she had passed
a beacon light upon a headland, which she remembered perfectly having
seen in a remote past, but of which nothing was known to her except the
fact that she had once seen it and the sight of it was at a crucial
point in her life. The girl had by no means the beauty of the man, but
there was sufficient likeness to indicate that they were father and
daughter.
Elizabeth watched them with singular interest as the carriage rolled
off. She had never expected to feel an interest in anything again,
and that which she felt in these strange people seemed ominous. For
Elizabeth, being a woman, was superstitious, and where before had she
seen the face and figure of that man?
_Chapter Eight_
Sara Luttrell, as General Brandon called her, was sitting in her fine,
old–fashioned drawing–room, enjoying her invariable Saturday evening
gossip with her nephew–in–law, Richard Baskerville, preparatory to
her customary Saturday evening dinner. This Saturday dinner was as
much of an institution with Mrs. Luttrell as her ermine cape and her
black–velvet gown, which were annually renewed, or her free–spoken
tongue, all of them being Medic and Persian in nature.
Nobody knew how many decades this Saturday evening dinner had been
established, just as nobody knew Mrs. Luttrell’s age, except that it
was somewhere between sixty and ninety. This dinner, which no more than
six persons attended, took place at the unfashionable hour of seven.
But seven had been the fashionable hour when Mrs. Luttrell began her
Saturday dinners, and although she conceded much to the new fashions
introduced by the smart set—more indeed than she ever admitted—and had
advanced her formal dinner hour to half–past eight, yet she clung to
seven for this Saturday evening institution. No other dinner invitation
could lure Mrs. Luttrell from her own table on Saturday evenings, and
it was one of the incidents of the warfare which had once raged between
her and the then lady of the White House that Mrs. Luttrell should
have been asked to dine at the White House on a Saturday evening. Mrs.
Luttrell, however, came off triumphant. She could not have her own
dinner that night, but in the very nick of time she heard of the death
of a seventeenth cousin in Maryland. Mrs. Luttrell immediately asked
to be excused from the White House on the ground of the death of a
relative, and clapped herself, her coachman, and footman in mourning
for a seventeenth cousin she had not seen in thirty years and had
always cordially detested.
To be in ignorance of the sacredness of Mrs. Luttrell’s Saturday
evenings was a crime of grave magnitude in her eyes, and to respect her
rights on Saturday was to take a toboggan slide in her favor. It was
the law that Richard Baskerville should dine with her on Saturday, and
although that young gentleman maintained a perfect independence towards
her in every other respect, in spite of the fact that she had made a
will giving him every stiver of her fortune, he was careful to reserve
his Saturday evenings for her.
The old lady and the young man sat opposite each other before a
glowing wood fire in the great drawing–room. Mrs. Luttrell was a
small, high–bred, handsome woman, with snow–white hair, perfect teeth,
a charming smile, a reckless tongue, and a fixed determination to
have her own way twenty–four hours out of the day and three hundred
and sixty–five days in the year, with an additional day thrown in
at leap–year. Time had left a few external marks upon her, but in
essentials she was the same woman General Brandon had danced with
forty–five years before. She was in love with the same man, who even
then was in his early grave,—Richard Luttrell, the husband of her
youth. He had been dead unnumbered years, and only one person on
earth—his nephew, Richard Baskerville—suspected that Mrs. Luttrell
cherished her husband’s memory with a smouldering and silent
passion,—the only thing she was ever known to be silent about in her
life.
Mrs. Luttrell sat bolt upright, after the ancient fashion, in her
carved ebony chair, while Richard Baskerville lounged at his ease
on the other side of the marble mantel. He was a well–made man of
thirty–five, without any particular merit in the way of beauty; but
so clear of eye, so clean cut of feature, so expressive of a man’s
intelligence and a man’s courage, that people forgot to ask whether he
was handsome or not. Mrs. Luttrell always maintained that he was very
handsome, but found few to agree with her. Her belief came, however,
from his resemblance to the miniature of her husband which she kept in
her capacious pocket—for she still insisted on pockets in her gowns,
and this miniature never left her by day or night.
Mrs. Luttrell’s drawing–room was the admiration and the despair of
people who knew something about drawing–rooms. It might have been taken
bodily from the Second French Embassy, of which Mrs. Luttrell had
seen a good deal, for she had known the third Napoleon well at some
indefinite period in her history. The room was large and square and
high–pitched, and wholly innocent of bay–windows, cosey corners, and
such architectural fallals. The ceiling was heavily ornamented with
plaster in the Italian style, and the cornice was superb. Over the
fireplace was a great white marble mantel with a huge mirror above it,
and in one corner of the room a grand piano something under a hundred
years old looked like a belle in hoopskirts. There was a wealth of
old rosewood furniture, pictures, candelabra, girandoles, Dresden
ornaments, and other beautiful old things which would have made a
collector turn green with envy.
Mrs. Luttrell was vain about her drawing–room, and with reason. She
proudly claimed that there was not a single technical antique in it,
and frequently declared she could tell the age of any family by a
glance at their drawing–room. The newer the family the more antique
the furniture, and when a family was absolutely new their house was
furnished with antiques, and nothing but antiques, from top to bottom.
Mrs. Luttrell was gossiping hard as she sat before her drawing–room
fire, shading her eyes from the leaping blaze with an old–fashioned
lace fan and waiting for her guests to arrive. When Mrs. Luttrell
gossiped, she was happy. One of the compensations to her for the new
dispensations in Washington society was that it gave her plenty to
gossip about. Ever since the advent in Washington society of pickles,
dry–goods, patent medicines, shoes, whiskey, and all the other brands
of honest trade, she had been engaged in a hand–to–hand fight to
maintain her prestige as a leading hostess of Washington, against
the swarms of newcomers, whose vast fortunes made Mrs. Luttrell’s
hitherto ample income seem like genteel poverty. The rest of the
“Cave–dwellers,” as the original society of Washington is now called,
had never made any fight at all. They regarded the new influx with
haughty disdain in the first instance, laughed at their gaucheries, and
spoke of them pityingly as, “Poor Mrs. So–and–so,” “Those queer persons
from nobody knows where.” The first accurate knowledge, however, that
came to them of the “smart set,” as the new people are called, was
when the Cave–dwellers were seized by the backs of their necks and
were thrown over the ramparts of society, leaving the smart set in
possession of the citadel.
Mrs. Luttrell, however, was not so easily disposed of as the rest. She
saw that the Chinese policy of ignoring the enemy and representing a
total rout as a brilliant victory would never do; so she set about
holding her own with intelligence as well as courage. She called upon
the new people, invited to her house those she liked, and Baskerville,
who was the only living person who dared to contradict her, declared
that Mrs. Luttrell never was known to decline an invitation to dine
with any form of honest trade, no matter how newly emancipated. Her
strongest weapon was, however, the capacity she had always possessed
of bringing men about her. She was one of those men’s women whom age
cannot wither nor custom stale. Her esprit, her knowledge of how to
make men comfortable in mind and body when in her house, her insidious
flattery, which usually took the form of delicate raillery, had charmed
successive generations of men. Her kingdom had been long established,
and she knew how to reign.
In her early widowhood she had been much pestered with offers of
marriage, but it had not taken many years to convince her world that
she would die Sara Luttrell. Every cause except the right one was
given for this, for of all women Mrs. Luttrell was the last one to be
suspected of a sentiment so profound as the lifelong mourning for a
lost love. But it was perhaps just this touch of passionate regret,
this fidelity to an ideal, which constituted half her charm to men.
At an age when most are content to sink into grandmotherhood, Mrs.
Luttrell was surrounded by men of all ages in a manner to make a
débutante envious. Other hostesses might have to rack their brains
for dinner men; Mrs. Luttrell was always embarrassed with riches in
this respect. An afternoon visit at her house meant finding a dozen
desirable men whom hospitable hostesses languished for in vain. Even a
tea, that function dreaded of women because it means two women to one
man, became in Mrs. Luttrell’s splendid, old–fashioned drawing–room a
company in which the masculine element exactly balanced the feminine.
She could have made the fortune of a débutante, and hence ambitious
mothers sought her favor. Mrs. Luttrell, however, never had made a
débutante’s fortune and never intended to, holding that the power to
grant a favor is more respected than the favor itself.
Then, too, it was well known that Richard Baskerville, one of the most
desirable and agreeable men in Washington, was always to be found at
her house, and was certain to inherit her fortune; and he had the
ability, the wit, and the grace to be an attraction in himself. The old
lady would have liked it well if Baskerville had consented to live in
a suite of the big, unused rooms in the house, but this he would not
do. He agreed as a compromise, however, to buy a small house back of
Mrs. Luttrell’s, and by using an entrance in her large, old–fashioned
garden, it was almost as if he were in the same house.
Mrs. Luttrell followed the new customs and fashions so far as she
thought judicious, and no farther. She knew the power of old customs
and fashions when properly used. She held to her big landau, with her
long–tailed black horses and her portly negro coachman and footman,
because it gave her opportunities to intimidate the newly rich while
apparently apologizing for her antique equipage.
“My carriage and horses and servants haven’t varied much for forty
years, and I can’t change now. It’s all very well for you people who
are accustomed to sudden changes to have your smart broughams and
victorias, and your pink–and–white English coachmen and footmen, but it
would look perfectly ridiculous in Sara Luttrell, don’t you see?” This
to some aspiring newcomers whose equipage had been in a steady process
of evolution from the time that a Dayton wagon was a luxury until now
every season saw a complete revolution in their stables. Or, “I know my
ermine cape looks as if it was made in Queen Elizabeth’s time, but I
can’t afford to throw it away; and, Lord bless you, what does it matter
whether one is in the fashion or not?” This to a lady who knew that her
whole social existence depended upon her being in fashion.
It was insolent, of course, but Mrs. Luttrell meant to be insolent, and
was so successfully, smiling meanwhile her youthful smile, showing
her perfect teeth and certain of an answering smile from the men who
were always at her elbow. Her whole world then thought she defied and
laughed at the smart set; but Richard Baskerville saw, and had the
assurance to tell her, that she secretly liked them very much and even
sought their countenance by unique means.
“Well,” said Mrs. Luttrell, settling herself and adjusting the immortal
ermine cape around her lace–covered shoulders, “I have a surprise in
store for you to–night. Who do you think is to dine here?”
“Myself number one, Senator and Mrs. Thorndyke, and Judge Woodford. I
believe you are in love with that man, Sara Luttrell.” This calling her
by her first name Mrs. Luttrell reckoned a charming piece of impudence
on Richard Baskerville’s part, and in saying it his smile was so
pleasant, his voice so agreeable, his manner so arch, that he conveyed
extreme flattery by it. It made her the same age as himself.
“No, my dear boy, you are mistaken in that particular; but I have a
surprise in store for you.”
A pause.
“Why don’t you ask me who it is?”
“Because you’ll tell me in two minutes, if I just let you alone. You
never could keep anything to yourself.”
“It is—Anne Clavering.”
Richard Baskerville sat up quickly. Surprise and pleasure shone in his
face. “Why, Sara, I didn’t think you could do anything as decent as
that.”
“I don’t know why. I’ve always liked the girl. And I believe you are
about half in love with her.”
“You are such a suspicious old woman! But considering the share I am
taking on the part of the original mortgages in those K.F.R. land
grants, which may land Senator Clavering in state’s prison, I feel some
delicacy in paying any attention to his daughter.”
“Naturally, I should think. But you were deep in the land–grant
lawsuits before you ever met Anne Clavering.”
“Yes, that’s true. She once asked me to call but I never felt I could
do so under the circumstances, though Clavering himself, who is a
pachyderm so far as the ordinary feelings of mankind go, is as chummy
as you please with me whenever we meet. And he actually invited me to
visit his house! Miss Clavering probably knows nothing of the specific
reason that keeps me away, but Clavering does, you may be sure. I have
met Miss Clavering everywhere, and every time I see her I am lost in
wonder as to how she came to be Senator Clavering’s daughter or the
sister of Mrs. Denman and that youngest daughter, Lydia.”
“A couple of painted Jezebels, that are enough to drag any family to
perdition. The old woman, I hear, murders the king’s English and eats
with her knife, but is a good soul. And if it wasn’t for the determined
stand Anne Clavering has taken for her mother, I don’t imagine there is
much doubt that Senator Clavering would have divorced her long ago. But
Anne stands up for her mother and makes them all treat her properly,
and is assisted by the brother,—a poor rag of a man, but perfectly
respectable,—Reginald Clavering. Did you ever notice how common people
run to high–flown names? None of our plain Johns and Georges and Marys
and Susans and Jameses for them—they get their names, I think, out of
Ouida’s novels.”
Richard Baskerville rose and stood in front of the fire. Mrs. Luttrell
could not complain of any want of interest on his part in the subject
under discussion. “Miss Clavering, as I told you, invited me to call on
her, when I first met her. However, I had scruples about going to the
house of a man I was fighting as I am fighting Senator Clavering. So I
never went, and she never repeated the invitation. She is a very proud
woman.”
“Very. And she is the only one of her class I have ever seen who was
really a scientific fighter.”
“How pitiable it is, though, for a girl to have to fight her way
through society.”
“Yes—but Anne Clavering does it, and does it gallantly. Nobody can be
impertinent to her with impunity. Do you know, the first thing that
made me like her was the way that she hit back when I gave her a gentle
correction.”
“I am delighted to hear it, and I hope she whipped you well.”
“Not exactly—but she stood up before me long enough to make me respect
her and ask her to come to one of my little Saturday dinners.”
“Mrs. Thorndyke is always asking her to dinner, and I know of no woman
more discerning than Mrs. Thorndyke.”
“Yes, Constance Thorndyke knows a great deal. But you see her husband
is in the Senate and so she has to have some sorts of people at her
house that I don’t have. However, I know she is really a friend of
Anne Clavering, and it is perfectly plain that although Miss Clavering
is a _nouveau riche_ herself, she hasn’t any overwhelming respect for
her own ‘order,’ as Ouida would say. She is ten times more flattered
to be entertained by people like the Thorndykes and myself than by the
richest pork–packing or dry–goods family in Washington.”
“Certainly she is, as a woman of sense would be.”
“As for that divorcée, Élise Denman, and that younger girl, Lydia, they
are the two greatest scamps, as they are the two handsomest women, in
this town. They are not deficient in their own peculiar sort of sense
and courage, and they have whipped the Brentwood–Baldwins handsomely
about that pew in St. John’s Church. The religion of these brand–new
people is the most diverting thing about them, next to their morals!”
“They also are the sons of God!” replied Baskerville, quoting.
“Don’t believe that for a moment! Most of ’em are sons and daughters
of Satan and nobody else. If ever the Episcopal Church—the Anglican
Church, they call it—comes out squarely against divorce, I don’t know
where it will land the smart set or what they will do for a religion.
They will have to become esoteric Buddhists or something of the sort.
At present a pew in a fashionable church is the very first round on the
social ladder. I have gone to St. John’s all my life, and my father
was one of the original pew–holders; but I declare, if I could find a
well–warmed Episcopal church in southeast Washington or Anacostia even,
I’d go to it.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
“Yes, I would. I don’t know how the dispute with the Brentwood–Baldwins
came about, but there was a pew near the President’s which both the
Claverings and the Brentwood–Baldwins wanted, and those two pagan
daughters of Senator Clavering got it. You ought to have seen the
Brentwood–Baldwin girl and those other two girls pass each other last
Sunday morning coming out of church; they exchanged looks which were
equivalent to a slap in the face.”
“And you wouldn’t have missed seeing it for worlds.”
“Why, it’s true I like to see a fight.”
“For pure love of fighting I never saw your equal, Sara Luttrell.”
“I come by it honestly. I am of as good fighting stock as you are,
Richard Baskerville. But the Clavering–Brentwood–Baldwin row is not
the only religious war in this town. You know Mrs. James Van Cortlandt
Skinner—I know her husband was originally Jim Skinner before he went to
glory.”
“Now who told you that?”
“Oh, nobody; I just felt it in my bones. Well, Mrs. Skinner has a new
and original fad—that woman is clever! She has seen the automobile
fad, and the fancy–ball fad, and the monkey–dinner fad, and the
dining–on–board–the–Emperor’s–yacht fad, and the exclusive–school
fad, and the exclusive–theatrical–performance fad, and the
marrying–of–a–daughter–to–a–belted–earl–like–a–thief–in–the–night fad.
She has done horse shows and yacht races and dinners to the Ambassador,
and now she has outfooted New York and Newport, and left Chicago at
the post. She has a private chapel, and she’s going to have a private
chaplain!”
“Oh, Lord, you dreamed it!”
“No, I didn’t, Richard, my dear. You see, the Jim Skinners”—Mrs.
Luttrell pronounced it as if it were “jimskinners”—“were originally
honest Methodists; but these people shed their religion along with
their old clothes and plated forks. And now Mrs. Jimskinner has become
Mrs. James Van Cortlandt Skinner and an ardent Episcopalian, and so
has Gladys Jimskinner, and Gwendolyn Jimskinner, and Lionel Jimskinner,
and Harold Jimskinner, and I believe that woman has set her heart on
having what she calls an Anglican archbishop in these United States.”
“If she has, I know it was you who put the microbe in her head.”
It was a chance shot, but it hit the white. “I think I did, Richard,”
meekly replied Mrs. Luttrell. “Mrs. Jimskinner—I mean Mrs. James Van
Cortlandt Skinner—was urging me to join the Order of St. Monica; that’s
an order in which widows pledge themselves not to get married again. I
told her there wasn’t the least reason for me to join, for, although
I’ve never told my age to any living person, I hardly consider myself
on the matrimonial list any longer. And then Mrs. Van Cortlandt Skinner
told me of the various beautiful brand–new orders in the Church, and
said she thought of getting an order founded for one of her boys; the
other would have to marry and perpetuate the family. And I suggested a
contemplative order with a nice name, like the Order of St. Werewolf.”
“Oh, Sara!”
“Yes, I did. I told her St. Werewolf was much respected in the Middle
Ages; one heard a good deal of him; and she swallowed the wolf and
the saint at one gulp. She said she rather liked the notion and might
build a beautiful monastery on her estate on the Hudson, and whichever
one of her boys she decided to indulge in a life of celibacy she would
have made the first superior. And then I said—now, Richard, don’t be
rude—I said how much simpler all these delightful things would be if
we only had an archbishop like the Archbishop of Canterbury; and Mrs.
Van Cortlandt Skinner said that she had often longed for an archbishop
and had always thought that the development of the Church in America
required one; and then I caught Senator Thorndyke’s eye—we were coming
out of church—and I ran away.”
“You wicked old woman! What will you do next!”
“I haven’t done anything. You see, Mrs. Jimskinner belongs to that
class who don’t see any reason why they shouldn’t have anything they
happen to fancy. If they get married and don’t like it, they get a
divorce and a new husband or a new wife as they get a new butler when
they discharge the one they have. If they want a title, they go and buy
one. If they want a crest, they simply take one. They can’t understand
why they shouldn’t do anything or have anything they want. I declare,
Mrs. Jimskinner was talking to me with the simplicity of a child,
and she’s as bent on that private chaplain and that archbishop as if
each was the latest style of automobile. I don’t wonder the London
newspapers guy Americans, remembering what kind of Americans find their
way into London society.”
“That reminds me—I met General Brandon two days ago, and his daughter
Mrs. Darrell.”
“Yes, Elizabeth Darrell has come back, as poor as a church mouse, and
dreadfully changed. I shall call to see her. She will find a very
different Washington from the one she left ten years ago.”
“Miss Clavering,” announced the negro butler.
Anne Clavering, graceful and self–possessed, entered the room. She had
not the sumptuous beauty of her sisters, nor remarkable beauty at all;
yet, as Elizabeth Darrell had seen in that first accidental view of
her, she was more than beautiful—she was interesting. She had no marks
of race, but she had every mark of refinement. Her gown was simple, but
exquisite, and she wore no jewels. Mrs. Luttrell received her amiably
and even affectionately, and her quick eye noted that both Anne and
Baskerville blushed at meeting.
“So you are not above coming out to an unfashionable dinner with an old
fogy,” she said, taking Anne’s hand.
“I believe it is considered one of the greatest privileges of
Washington to dine with you at one of your ‘unfashionable dinners,’”
Anne replied, with her pleasant smile. This made Anne’s fortune with
Mrs. Luttrell.
In a minute or two more Senator and Mrs. Thorndyke were announced,
and they were promptly followed by Judge Woodford, a handsome antique
gentleman, who had for forty years counted on being one day established
as the head of Mrs. Luttrell’s fine house. The Thorndykes were not
a young couple, although they had not been long married. Their
love–affair had covered a long period of separation and estrangement,
and at last when fate had relented and had brought them together in
their maturity, it gave them by way of recompense a depth of peace, of
confidence, of quiet happiness, and a height of thrilling joy at coming
into their own inheritance of love, that made for them a heaven on
earth. Thorndyke was a high–bred, scholarly man of the best type of New
England, who hid under a cool exterior an ardent and devoted nature.
Constance Thorndyke was exteriorly the scintillant, magnetic Southern
woman, but inwardly she was as strong and as sustaining as Thorndyke
himself. Neither of them had a grain of mawkish sentimentality,
and they were always differing playfully when they really differed
seriously; but they never differed in their love and admiration of what
was good.
Baskerville took Anne out to dinner. He had several times had that good
fortune, especially in Mrs. Thorndyke’s house, and so far as dinner
companions went he and Anne were well acquainted. Anne had been deeply
mortified at Baskerville’s ignoring her invitation to call, and the
reason she at once suspected—his knowledge of her father’s character
and his share in furnishing information to the senatorial committee
which was investigating Senator Clavering. She did not for one moment
suspect that Baskerville put compulsion on himself to keep away from
her house. She was conscious of a keen pleasure in his society, and
a part of the gratification she felt at being asked to one of Mrs.
Luttrell’s intimate dinners was that Baskerville should know how Mrs.
Luttrell esteemed her.
[Illustration: “BASKERVILLE TOOK ANNE OUT TO DINNER.”]
The dinner fulfilled all of Anne’s expectations. The Thorndykes were
socially accomplished, and Judge Woodford had been a professional
diner–out since the days when President Buchanan had made him a third
secretary of legation at Paris. Anne Clavering found herself adopted
into the small circle, so different in birth and rearing from her
own, by the freemasonry of good sense and good manners—in which she,
however, was the equal of anybody.
Mrs. Luttrell shone at her own table, and the restraint she put
upon her own tongue revealed her to be, when she chose, a person of
perfect tact. And, indeed, her most courageous speeches were matters
of calculation, and were in themselves a species of tact. When
entertaining guests in her own house, however, she showed only the
amiable side of her nature; and she was always amiable to Richard
Baskerville, the one human being in the world whom she really loved
and feared. Anne was extremely amused at the attitude of Baskerville
to Mrs. Luttrell, shown by such things as calling her by her first
name and hectoring her affectionately,—all of which Mrs. Luttrell took
meekly, only prophesying that if he ever married, he would make an
intolerable husband.
Anne Clavering noted that among these people of old and fixed positions
there was a great deal of chaff, while among the new people there was
always great formality. The manners of the one set were simple, and of
the latter elaborate. She also saw, being of a quick eye, that there
were many differences in little things between the old and the new.
The new had a different and complex fork for every course, but Mrs.
Luttrell had, except some very old–fashioned oyster forks, the same
handsome, plain old forks which had been in use in her family since
silver forks were first adopted. There was no opportunity, if she
had wished, to emulate a brand–new Washington hostess, who mentioned
to a distinguished guest that he was eating his fish with the wrong
fork. And Mrs. Luttrell had the temerity to have on the table her
splendid old decanters, in which was served the very last old port in
Washington, “laid down by papa in ’59.”
When the dinner was over they closed around the drawing–room fire and
talked cosily, as people can seldom talk in the hurrying, rushing
twentieth century; and then Mrs. Thorndyke, at Mrs. Luttrell’s request,
went to the grand piano and sang sweetly some songs as old–fashioned
as the piano. Anne remembered with a blush the professional singers
who were considered essential to the Clavering house after one of the
large, magnificent, and uncomfortable dinners which were a burden and
an anxiety to all of the Clavering family.
When the carriages were announced, everybody was surprised at the
lateness of the hour. Anne went up to Mrs. Luttrell and thanked her
sincerely and prettily for one of the pleasantest evenings she had
ever spent in Washington. Mrs. Luttrell, who declared herself totally
indifferent to blame or praise from one of the new people, was hugely
flattered by this expression from a Clavering.
Baskerville, having antique manners, put Anne in her carriage, and
contrived to express in this small action a part of the admiration
and homage he felt for her. Anne, driving home in the November night,
experienced a strong and sudden revulsion of feeling from the quiet
enjoyment of the evening. Bitterness overwhelmed her. “How much happier
and better off are those people than I and all my kind!” she thought.
“They have no struggles to make, no slights to swallow or avenge, no
social mortifications, nothing to hide, to fear, to be ashamed of,
while I—“ She buried her face in her hands as she leaned back in the
carriage, and wept at the cruel thought that Baskerville would not come
to her house because he did not think her father a decent man.
As she entered her own street she caught sight of Count Rosalka, a
young attaché, helping Élise Denman out of a cab at the corner. Élise
ran along the street and under the porte–cochère as Anne got out of the
carriage and walked up the steps. Élise’s eyes were dancing, her mouth
smiling; she looked like a bacchante.
“Remember,” she said, catching Anne by the arm, “I’ve been out to
dinner, too.”
The door was opened, not by one of the gorgeous footmen, but by Lydia,
handsomer, younger, and wickeder–looking than Élise. “Good for you,
Lyd,” whispered Élise; “I’ll do as well by you sometime.” The footman
then appeared, and grinned openly when Lydia remarked that as she was
passing through the hall she recognized Miss Clavering’s ring and
opened the door.
Anne went upstairs, her heart sick within her. As she passed her
mother’s door she stopped, and a tremulous voice within called her. She
entered and sat awhile on her mother’s elaborate, lace–trimmed bed.
Mrs. Clavering, a homely and elderly woman, looked not less homely and
elderly because of her surroundings. But not all the splendor of her
lace and satin bed could eclipse the genuine goodness, the meekness,
the gentleness, in her plain, patient face. She listened eagerly to
Anne’s description of the dinner, which was cheerful enough, albeit her
heart misgave her cruelly about Élise and Lydia.
When she had finished speaking Mrs. Clavering said, patting Anne’s
head with a kind of furtive affection, “I think you know real nice,
well–behaved people, my dear, and I wish the other girls”—“gurls” she
called them—“were like you.”
At that moment Baskerville and Senator Thorndyke were sitting in
Baskerville’s library, discussing a bottle of prime old whiskey and
looking at some books from a late auction. Mrs. Thorndyke had driven
home, and Senator Thorndyke, preferring to walk, was spending an hour
meanwhile in masculine talk unrestrained by the presence of the ladies.
The two men were intimate, an intimacy which had originated when
Baskerville was a college senior and Thorndyke was on the committee
of their Greek–letter society. There was a strong sympathy between
them, although Thorndyke was a New Englander of New Englanders and
Baskerville a Marylander of Marylanders. Both were lawyers of the
old–time, legal–politico sort, both of them scholarly men, both of them
independent of popular favor; and both of them, while preaching the
purest democracy, were natural aristocrats. They belonged to opposite
political parties, but that rather added zest to their friendship. The
library in Baskerville’s home, across the garden from Mrs. Luttrell’s,
was in the second story and extended the full width of the house. It
was essentially a bachelor’s working library, plain, comfortable, well
warmed and lighted, and with an engaging touch of shabbiness. A big
leather–covered table was in the middle of the room, and under the
green light from a student lamp were displayed the books, the whiskey,
the water, and the glasses. Baskerville’s mind was not, however, on
the books he was showing, but on Anne Clavering, and incidentally on
Senator Clavering.
“How do you account for Miss Clavering being the daughter of Senator
Clavering?” he asked Thorndyke, as they pulled at their cigars.
“Those things can’t be accounted for, although one sees such strange
dissimilarities in families, everywhere and all the time. Miss
Clavering is, no doubt, a case of atavism. Somewhere, two or three
generations back, there was a strain of refinement and worth in her
family, and she inherits from it. But I see something in her of
Clavering’s good qualities—because he has some good qualities—courage,
for example.”
“Courage—I should think so. Why, the way that man has fought the courts
shows the most amazing courage. He is a born litigant, and it is
extraordinary how he has managed to use the law to crush his opponents
and has escaped being crushed himself. And in trying to follow his
turnings and windings in this K. F. R. swindle it is astounding to see
how he has contested every step of an illegal transaction until he
has got everybody muddled—lawyers, State and Federal courts, and the
whole kit of them. As fast as one injunction was vacated he would sue
out another. He seems to have brought a separate and distinct lawsuit
for every right in every species of property he ever possessed at any
time—of all sorts: lands, mines, railways, and corporations. He has
pocketed untold millions and has invoked the law to protect him when
ninety–nine men out of the hundred would have been fugitives from
justice. He is the most difficult scoundrel to catch I ever met—but we
will catch him yet.”
“I think you are hot on his trail in the K. F. R. matter,” answered
Thorndyke. “I believe myself that when the great exposé is made before
the investigating committee it will recommend his expulsion from the
Senate, and three–fourths of the senators will support the committee.
The legislature is safe, so the party won’t lose a seat; and in any
event I don’t believe we can afford to hold on to a man like Clavering
after the country knows about him—especially with a presidential
campaign coming on within the year. I think, with all his talents,
he would not be fitted for public life if he were as honest as he is
dishonest. He has no idea, after all his litigation, of sound legal
principles, and he is fully persuaded that any man, any court, any
legislature, may be bought; and a more dangerous fallacy doesn’t exist
for a public man than that. He has never submitted to party discipline
and has played politics with every party that has ever made a showing
in his state. For all his money, he has never been a contributor to
party funds; so I think, making due allowances for the weakness of
human nature, that a horrible example will be made of Clavering, and we
shall thereby deprive you of an effective party cry in the campaign.
You are really doing us a service by your course, because without your
unravelling the legal tangle I doubt if anything could have been made
out of the K. F. R. frauds. I have no sympathy to waste on Clavering
or any of his family that I know of, except Miss Clavering. It will go
hard with her.”
Baskerville’s tanned complexion grew a little pale, and he sat
silent for some moments; so silent that Thorndyke began to suspect
Mrs. Thorndyke’s idea was the right one after all—Baskerville was in
love with Anne Clavering. Thorndyke had laughed at it as a woman’s
fancy, saying to her that a woman couldn’t see a man pick up a girl’s
handkerchief without constructing a matrimonial project on the basis
of it; but Constance Thorndyke had stoutly maintained her opinion that
Baskerville was in love with Anne Clavering. His attitude now certainly
indicated a very strong interest in her, especially when he said, after
a considerable pause:—
“If I had known Miss Clavering before this K. F. R. matter was started,
perhaps I shouldn’t have gone into it. There is something very painful,
you must know, Thorndyke, in dealing a blow at a woman—and a woman like
Miss Clavering. By heaven, for all the luxury she lives in and all the
respect and admiration she commands, there is not a woman in Washington
whom I pity more!”
Thorndyke had been turning over the leaves of a beautiful Apuleius,
which was one of the treasures Baskerville was exhibiting to him. He
opened the volume at the fifth metamorphosis and read out of it a
single phrase which made Baskerville’s face gain color:“‘The bold,
blind boy of evil ways.’ There’s nothing in all those old Greek
literary fellows which excels this in humor, although what there is
humorous in modern love I can’t see. It’s the most tragic thing in
life, and if it is genuine, it draws blood every time.”
Thorndyke had reason to say this. He had spent the eighteen best years
of his life solitary and ill at ease because of a woman’s love and
another woman’s spite, and not all the happiness of married life could
ever make either him or Constance Thorndyke forget their starved hearts
in those eighteen years of estrangement and separation. But as normal
men deal with sentimentalities in a direct and simple manner, he added,
after a minute: “Miss Clavering ought to marry. If she could be cut
loose from Clavering himself and those two handsome and outrageous
sisters of hers, it would be an unmixed blessing. But with all Miss
Clavering’s merit and charms, that family of hers will always be a
handicap with a man of the sort she would be likely to marry.”
“Not if he really loved her, Thorndyke.” Senator Thorndyke smoked on
in silence. “And,” continued Baskerville, “her mother is a most worthy
woman, if uneducated; and although Reginald Clavering is a great fool,
I believe he is a thoroughly upright man and even a gentleman. So you
see it is not wholly a family of degenerates.”
Thorndyke, seeing which way the tide was setting, remarked with perfect
sincerity, “Miss Clavering is worthy of any man; and I say so not only
on my own judgment, but on my wife’s.”
“Sanest, soundest woman in Washington—except Miss Clavering herself,”
was Baskerville’s reply to this.
When Senator Thorndyke reached home an hour afterwards, he roused his
wife to tell her that he believed that Baskerville was in love with
Anne Clavering after all.
“And has been ever since he knew her; but men are so dense, he didn’t
know it himself—much less did you know it until it became as obvious as
the Washington Monument,” was Mrs. Thorndyke’s wifely reply.
_Chapter Nine_
The next day was a bright November Sunday, and after an early luncheon
Baskerville started out for a walk into the country. Anne Clavering
was much in his mind, and he was beginning to debate with himself in
this wise: if Senator Clavering had no delicacy about inviting him to
call, why should he be too delicate–minded to go? Which proves that
Baskerville was in love with Anne Clavering, or he would have said that
for him to go to a man’s house under the circumstances in which he
would enter Senator Clavering’s was an outrageous breach of propriety.
When he got well out of the town, he met the scanty congregation of a
small Episcopal chapel in the suburbs. Among those strolling homeward
he speedily recognized General Brandon and Elizabeth Darrell—and with
them Reginald Clavering. This only son of Senator Clavering’s was no
more like him than Anne was, and, indeed, very much resembled Anne,
except that he had neither her grace nor her intelligence. He had a
good and affectionate heart, and in a foolish, blundering way was
both an honest man and a gentleman. His life, however, was given over
to small and futile things, and even his piety, which was genuine,
embodied a childish worship of ecclesiastical trifles. He was the
mainstay, chief financial backer, and clerical man–of–all–work in the
little chapel, while his sisters, Élise and Lydia, fought with the
Brentwood–Baldwins at St. John’s, and Anne, after going to an early
morning service at the nearest church, devoted the rest of her Sunday
to her mother.
Baskerville stopped and spoke with great cordiality to the party. He
had known Elizabeth Darrell well in her girlhood, and there was a
remote, seventeenth–cousin, Maryland–Virginia connection between the
Baskervilles and the Brandons. His first glance at her in her mourning
costume showed him that she had suffered much, and her beauty was
partially eclipsed. She had gained interest, however, as the case often
is, by learning the hard lessons of life, and Baskerville saw that she
might regain all and more of her good looks with returning flesh and
color, and a loss of the wearied and forlorn expression in her still
glorious dark eyes. He asked permission to call upon her, and Elizabeth
assented with outward grace and cheerfulness; but, in truth, it
mattered little to her then whether she ever saw any one again, except
her father, and—humiliating thought!—Pelham, once more. For, deeply
incensed as she was with Pelham, the thought of ever again meeting him
was profoundly agitating to her. She inquired of Baskerville about Mrs.
Luttrell, and sent her a kind message; then they parted and went upon
their several ways.
Half an hour afterwards, when Elizabeth Darrell was nearing her own
door, Senator Clavering—who, sitting at his library window, caught
sight of her graceful black figure as she stopped with her father and
talked a few minutes with Reginald Clavering—started to his feet,
his keen, handsome eyes fixed upon her with admiring approval. He
remembered her perfectly well, that beautiful girl he had seen on the
icy night ten years ago when he had watched the gay people flocking to
the Charity Ball, and the little trinket he had unconsciously crushed
under his foot. He had wondered a dozen times since he had been in
Washington, and had often asked, what had become of General Brandon’s
beautiful daughter, and was told that she had married a British Army
man and had disappeared in the wilderness. He had never seen General
Brandon from that hour, although they lived opposite, General
Brandon’s hours being very different from Senator Clavering’s and their
habits being as dissimilar as could possibly be imagined.
Clavering was a connoisseur in feminine beauty, and all forms of it
appealed to him. He thought Elizabeth twice as beautiful as he had done
in that passing glimpse of her, ten years before, in the bloom of her
girlhood. Strange to say, the languid, interesting, and somewhat tragic
type which Elizabeth Darrell now represented was the most attractive to
him—perhaps because it is the rarest. “By Jove, what a woman! I must
know her,” was his inward comment. He watched Elizabeth intently, her
fragile figure, her peculiar grace of movement, the note of distinction
in her whole person and air; and then and there he determined to
resurrect his acquaintance with General Brandon, whose relationship to
her was obvious, and whom Clavering had no more forgotten than General
Brandon had forgotten him.
Presently Reginald Clavering entered the house, and the first sound
that met his ears was something between a wail and a shout which came
from the upper region. Reginald winced at the sound. His mother still
held to her original Baptist faith—about the only thing pertaining
to her early life which she had not meekly given up. She was at that
moment enjoying the spiritual ministrations of a Baptist minister
who came sometimes on Sundays to pray with her and sing camp–meeting
hymns—to the intense diversion of the smart English footman and gay
French maids, of whom Mrs. Clavering was in deadly fear. And to make it
worse for Reginald, Anne Clavering, instead of setting her face against
this unchurchmanlike proceeding, actually aided and abetted her mother
in her plebeian sort of religion, and joined her clear note to the Rev.
Mr. Smithers’ bellowing and Mrs. Clavering’s husky contralto. The whole
thing offended Reginald Clavering’s æsthetic sense; but it was a proof
that he had much that was good in him that he bore these proceedings
silently, as became a gentleman, a Christian, and an Anglican, and made
no complaint to any one except Anne.
As he passed the open library door, Senator Clavering called out to
him in that rich and melodious voice which the stenographers in the
Senate gallery declared the most agreeable and easily followed voice of
any member of the Senate: “Hello! What is the name of that infernally
pretty woman whom you were escorting just now?”
“Mrs. Darrell, the widowed daughter of General Brandon. General
Brandon is one of the vestrymen at St. Gabriel’s Chapel,” replied
Reginald, stiffly.
“Yes, fine old fellow. I knew him more than thirty years ago when he
was a captain of infantry out on the plains and I was a sutler, as it
was called then. Handsome old chap still, and his daughter is like
him. You show good taste, my boy. I thought you’d find something more
entertaining than religion out at that chapel.”
Reginald Clavering scorned to reply to this, but went on to his study
in another part of the house. In a few minutes he heard his father’s
step on the stair, and dutifully opened the door for him. Clavering
entered, threw himself in a great chair, and began to look around him
with an amused smile. The room was a museum of ecclesiastical pictures
and gimcracks.
“When I was your age,” said Clavering, laughing openly, “I hadn’t a
room like this—I shared a board shanty with a fellow from God knows
where, who had served a term in state’s prison. But he was the finest
smelter expert I ever saw, and had the best eye for a pretty woman. You
couldn’t see the boards in our walls for the pictures of ballet dancers
and the like. Nothing in the least like this.” And he laughed.
Reginald’s pale face flushed with many emotions. His father’s tone
and manner expressed a frank scorn for him and all his surroundings.
Clavering kept on:—
“My roommate—nobody had a room to himself in those diggings—taught me
how to differentiate among pretty women.” Clavering was diverted at
the spectacle of a man shrinking from such a discussion. “Now, of your
sisters, Anne is really the best looking—the most effective, that is.
Élise and Lydia are of the tulip variety. Anne is something more and
different.”
“Élise and Lydia are both of them strikingly like you, sir,” replied
Reginald. It was the nearest approach to sarcasm he had ever made in
his life. Clavering enjoyed the cut at himself immensely.
“Very neat; thank you. Now I should say that Mrs.—what’s her name?—old
Brandon’s daughter is a remarkably attractive, even beautiful woman,
although she strikes me at first glance as one of those women, not
exactly young, who haven’t yet found themselves. Perhaps you’ll show
the lady the way.”
“Sir,” said Reginald, after a pause, “you shock me!”
Clavering was not in the least annoyed at this. He looked at Reginald
as one studies an amusing specimen, and said, as if to himself, “Good
God! that you should be my son!” He then took up some of the books on
the table and began to turn them over, laughing silently to himself the
while. The books corresponded with the pictures and ornaments. Reginald
Clavering found all of his family a cross, except his sister Anne, and
his father the heaviest cross of all. He was sincerely relieved when
Clavering took himself downstairs to his own library again.
It was a handsome library, and quite what the library of a senator, if
not a statesman, should be. The walls were lined with encyclopædias,
histories, and the English classics. Clavering, however, was a student
of far more interesting documents than any ever printed in a book. He
had studied unceasingly the human subject, and knew men and women as a
Greek scholar knows his Sophocles. This knowledge of men had made him
not only dazzlingly and superbly successful, but even happy in his way.
The most saintly man on earth might have envied James Clavering his
mind, ever at ease; for he knew no morals, and was unmoral rather than
immoral.
Two things only in life disturbed him. One was that he would have
liked to get rid of his wife, whom he had married when he was barely
twenty–one. She had served his turn. Although homely, shapeless,
and stupid now, she had made him comfortable—in the days when his
miner’s wages barely kept a humble roof over his head. She had
brought her children up properly. Clavering had enough of justice in
him not to hold her accountable for the fastness, the vagaries, the
love of splendor, the lack of principle, that made his eldest and
youngest daughters the subject of frequent paragraphs in scandalous
newspapers, and had landed one in the divorce court. They were like
him—so Clavering admitted to himself, without a blush. His one fear
was that they would, as he expressed it, “make fools of themselves.”
He admired chastity in women and even respected it, so far as he could
feel respect for anything; and he would, if he could, have kept all the
women in his family strictly virtuous. But he never was quite at ease
about either Élise or Lydia; and when he saw the simple way in which
Élise had slipped off the matrimonial fetters, Clavering had begun to
fear greatly—those two girls were so extremely like himself!
He knew well enough from whom Reginald inherited his temperament. Mrs.
Clavering’s father had been a weak, well–meaning Baptist preacher, and
Reginald was a replica of him, plus a university education and a large
allowance superadded. Where Anne came in Clavering frankly acknowledged
himself beaten. She inherited his own strong will and her mother’s
gentleness of address. But she had an innate delicacy, a singular
degree of social sense, a power of making herself felt and respected,
that Clavering admired but the origin of which he could not trace. She
was the one person in the world whom he feared and respected. It was
due to her that the Claverings had any real social status whatever. It
was through her, and for her alone, that certain honest, dignified,
and punctilious senators and public officials came to the grand
Clavering dinners and musicals, and allowed their wives to come. It
was Anne who would have to be vanquished when, as Clavering had always
intended, he should get a divorce from his wife and marry again. He
had not attempted this, merely because, so far, the women who would
have married him he did not want or could get on easier terms, and the
women he might have wanted would not have him at any price. Anne was
known as her mother’s champion, and Clavering knew that she would fight
the divorce with all the skill, courage, and pertinacity which, as
Baskerville had truly said, was all she had inherited from her father.
She had in her, disguised by much suavity and sweetness, a touch of
aggressiveness, a noble wilfulness that would not be reasoned away.
Clavering knew that the tussle of his life would come when the divorce
was seriously mooted; but he was not the less ready for the tussle.
The first sight of Elizabeth Darrell had impressed him wonderfully, and
the second vision of her had determined him to renew his acquaintance
with General Brandon; and while he was turning the mode of this over
in his mind he was summoned to luncheon. At luncheon all of the family
assembled—Élise and Lydia in elaborate negligées, Anne simply but
properly dressed. She sat next her mother at the table and was that
poor creature’s only outspoken champion.
“So you had a nice morning, with the psalm–singing and all that,” said
Élise to Anne.
“Very nice,” replied Anne. “Mamma seemed to enjoy it very much.”
“We had a nice morning, too,” replied Élise. “The Brentwood–Baldwins
glared at us as we went into church; they will never forgive us for
getting that pew in the middle aisle, so close to the President’s.
Then, after church, Count Rosalka asked to walk home with me. Lydia
got Laurison, the new British third secretary; so we sent the carriage
on and walked out Connecticut Avenue with all the Seventh Street
shopkeepers. It was very amusing, though.”
“It must have been,” said Clavering, gravely. “You must have recalled
the time when you would have thought yourself as rich as Pierpont
Morgan and Rockefeller combined if you had been as well dressed as a
Seventh Street shopkeeper’s daughter. It was only twelve years ago, you
remember, since I struck pay dirt in mines and politics.”
Élise and Lydia both smiled pleasantly. They were their father’s own
daughters, and along with many of his vices they inherited his superb
good humor, which never gave way except to a preconcerted burst of
imposing wrath.
“I remember those days quite well,” said Anne. Her voice, as well as
her looks, was quite different from her sisters’. Instead of their rich
and sensuous tones, beautiful like their father’s, Anne’s voice had a
dovelike quality of cooing softness; but she could always make herself
heard. “I remember,” she continued, touching her mother’s coarse hand
outspread on the table, “when mamma used to make our gowns, and we
looked quite as nice as the girls who could afford to have their
clothes made by a dressmaker.”
“Them was happy days,” said Mrs. Clavering. It was her only remark
during luncheon.
They talked of their plans for the coming week, as people do to whom
pleasure and leisure are new and intoxicating things. Anne was plied
with questions about Mrs. Luttrell’s dinner. She told freely all about
it, being secretive only concerning Baskerville, merely mentioning that
he was present.
“A more toploftical, stuck–up F. F. V.—or F. F. M., I suppose he is—I
never saw than this same Mr. Baskerville, and as dull as ditchwater
besides,” said Lydia.
Here Reginald spoke. “Mr. Baskerville is very highly esteemed by the
bishop of the diocese,” he said.
“And by people of a good deal more brains than the bishop of the
diocese,” added Clavering. “Baskerville is one of the brainiest men of
his age I ever knew. He is fighting me in this K. F. R. business; but
all the same I have a high opinion of his gray matter, and I wish you
two girls—Élise and Lydia—knew men like Baskerville instead of foreign
rapscallions and fortune–hunters like Rosalka. And I wish you went to
dinners such as Anne went to last night, instead of scampering over
the town to all sorts of larky places with all sorts of larky people.”
To this Lydia replied. So far, she had achieved neither marriage nor
divorce, but she was not averse to either. “I think the dinners Anne
goes to must be precious dull. Now, our men and our parties, whatever
they are, they aren’t dull. I never laughed so much in my life as I did
at Rosalka’s stories.”
Clavering’s face grew black. He was no better than he should be
himself, and ethically he made no objection to his daughters’ amusing
themselves in any way but one; but old prejudices and superstitions
made him delicate on the one point upon which he suspected two of his
daughters were the least squeamish. He said nothing, however, nor did
Anne or Reginald; it was a subject none of them cared to discuss. When
luncheon was over, Mrs. Clavering and Anne made ready for their early
Sunday afternoon walk—a time to which Mrs. Clavering looked forward all
the week and with which Anne never allowed any of her own engagements
to interfere.
Meanwhile Clavering himself, interested for the first time in the
tall, shabby house across the way, walked out upon the broad stone
steps of his own place and watched the windows opposite, hoping for
a glimpse of Elizabeth Darrell’s face. While he stood there smoking
and apparently engaged in the harmless enjoyment of a lovely autumn
afternoon, Richard Baskerville approached. Baskerville denied himself
the pleasure of seeking Anne in her own home, but he often found
himself, without his own volition, in the places where he would be
likely to meet her, and so he was walking along the street in which she
lived. Seeing Clavering on the steps Baskerville would have passed with
a cool nod, but Clavering stopped him; and the younger man, thinking
Anne Clavering might be within sight or might appear, compromised
with his conscience and entered into conversation with Clavering.
It was always an effort on Baskerville’s part to avoid Clavering,
whose extraordinary charm of manner and personality was a part of his
capital. Baskerville, deep in the study of Clavering’s career, felt
a genuine curiosity about the man and how he did things and what he
really thought of himself and his own doings. He reckoned Clavering
to be a colossal and very attractive scoundrel, whom he was earnestly
seeking to destroy; and his relations were further complicated with
Clavering by the fact that Anne Clavering was—a very interesting
woman. This Baskerville admitted to himself; he had got that far on the
road to love.
The Senator, with the brilliant smile which made him handsomer than
ever, said to Baskerville, “We may as well enjoy the privilege of
speaking before you do me up in the matter of the K. F. R. land grants.”
The younger man cleverly avoided shaking hands with Clavering, but
replied, also smiling, “Your attorneys say we shan’t be able to ‘do you
up,’ Senator.”
“I hope they’re right. I swear, in that business the amount of lying
and perjury, if placed on end, would reach to the top of the Washington
Monument. Have a cigar?”
Such indeed was Baskerville’s own view of the lying and perjury, but he
opined that it was all o
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