' V LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT IWJt. OF CALIF. LIBRARY. LOS ANGELES LORD ALINGHAM BANKRUPT By MARIE MANNING NEW YORK DODD, MEAD & COMPANY MDCCCCII Copyright, igo2, by DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY First edition published April, 1902 UNIVERSITY PRESS JOHN WILSON AND SON CAMBRIDGE, U.S. A. To H. S. 2131728 CONTENTS BOOK ONE CHAPTER PAGE I. Through English Monocles i II. The Intervention of Progressive Journalism, some- times Called " Yellow " 8 III. Containing the Reflections of a Prodigal, and a Theatrical Encounter 13 IV. Extr' ordinarily Small Place the World ! " . 25 V. "The Matrimonial Limited to Prosperity" . . 34 VI. " London Meant the Deluge and the Deluge Was at Hand" 41 VII. In the Eleventh Hour of Adversity .... 49 VIII. A Day in the Life of a Well- Preserved Gentleman 56 IX. In Which Two Ladies Employ Many Words for the Purpose of Concealing Thought ... 66 X. Containing Some Mediaeval History and a Sordid Modern Dilemma 82 XI. Some Painful Makeshifts of an Aristocratic Family 92 vii CONTENTS XII. The Star Effects a Carefully Delayed Entrance . 98 XIII. Mrs. Gordon Studies Graphology with a Purpose 108 XIV. The Tossing of a Coin Decides Several Important Matters 114 XV. Love Strains at the Leash of Prudence . . . 136 XVI. The Tormenting Clairvoyance of Love . . . 154 XVII. A Situation Contrived by the Management Proves Fruitless 161 XVIII. A Proposal Minus Thought-Transference . . 168 XIX. Containing Some Talk of an Impending An- nouncement 176 XX. The Antipodal Anguish of a Midnight Conference 184 XXI. Uncle Reginald Explains Business to a Prospective Niece 192 BOOK TWO FIVE YEARS LATER XXII. The " Arrival" of Mrs. Hennessy . . . . 201 XXIII. A Chance Samaritan 215 XXIV. A Prairie Point of View 230 XXV. Where the World Looks Young 247 XXVI. To Go, or not to Go ?........ 274 Vlll LORD ALINGHAM EANKR UPT OBoofe >ne CHAPTER I THROUGH ENGLISH MONOCLES I HE " Calabria" lacked but half an hour of her sailing time; dense blackness belched from her stacks and floated wide across the bay in smoky pennants. It was September, and out of season for the eastward trip, and the first-cabin passengers were few, and not of the class who occupy deck staterooms and depend largely on their own private supplies for sustenance. Under the circum- stances, the white-capped, brass-buttoned contingent below stairs was less obtrusively active than usual ; it did not promise to be a voyage of large bounties. On the forward deck a party of tourists booked for six weeks of European culture at three hundred dollars per head were unconsciously demonstrating that it was their maiden trip by the helpless way they stood about waiting for something to happen, now that they had really started. Their friends who had come to see them off seemed stricken with the same poverty of resource, and beyond much urging to " Take care of yourself;" could think of nothing to I I LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT do or say. At the sound of a bell or the blast of a whistle the tourist escort would rush to the gang- way, only to return, smiling and embarrassed, on being assured by some one in brass buttons that they still had another five minutes. The younger of two Englishmen, who for some minutes had been watching with indulgent tolerance these brilliant dashes for the shore, remarked in unmistakable Mayfair accents: "I've always understood that that sort of American lived on tarts. One could n't possibly sprint like that on tarts at home. Most extr'ordinary people." It was characteristic of the older man to resent anything like chaff in the morning as he would have resented beer on the breakfast-table. He waved a bony and aristocratic hand, to dismiss the entire subject, America, her tarts, her trippers, and said with as much enthusiasm as he ever permitted himself: " One week more, and then Piccadilly. Fancy living in a country where one can't even get a sole for breakfast. Call for sole, they give you flounder." A lifting of the shoulders, almost Gallic in signifi- cance, expressed his bitter recollection of the loss of identity of so important an item in an English- man's daily menu. Lord Alingham judiciously considered the dearth of soles in the States before replying: " Y-e-s, but their little-neck clams and women are adorable." " The little-necks I admit. Their women have become our women to such an extent that we have had to make their beauty an article of faith." 2 THROUGH ENGLISH MONOCLES " A Victorian courtesy order conferred for moneys advanced to a distressed aristocracy ? " inquired his Lordship, dryly. " Exactly," grinned the Honourable Reginald Howard ; " all rich American girls are beautiful by the grace of God and the will of impecunious Eng- lishmen. There goes the gangway, and we shall be home in time for plenty of good shooting," he added with a little burst of satisfaction, as the last mail-sack was hauled up, and the stately liner began to steam slowly down the bay. His rheumatism and gout had kept him off the moors for the last ten years, yet, at a reasonably safe distance from a grouse, he never lost an opportunity to bewail the loss of a day's sport. " Does n't it impress you as singular," said Lord Alingham, looking furtively about him, "the way Americans leave their luxurious houses for months at a time and live in dreary little lodgings off Piccadilly? In fact, they never seem to feel at home unless they are travelling." " Is that a bull or an epigram ? " " But an epigram is a trained bull." "It's all too exacting for e very-day wear; their houses, their crests, their money, are all too com- plicated and colossal. No wonder they like to run over to England for a little simplicity and inci- dentally, to leave their daughters " He looked away in sudden confusion, but there was no sign that the shaft had hit home. Lord Alingham's tone was comfortably languorous as he drawled : LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT " There is somewhat of a ' round-the-world-in- eighty-days ' effect about their houses, now that you mention it. They seem unable to make a home without introducing the four quarters of the globe, the middle ages, the apostles, the red Indians, the salon and anything else that costs money." " It 's not singular they can't live in the places they have spent fortunes on. Who could stand a tamed and domesticated Cook's tour?" " And, speaking of crests, do you suppose that story we heard at the Knickerbocker, the other night, about their buying their crests at the stationer's, like so much sealing-wax or ink, was true? I can never quite tell whether they are in earnest or chaffing." " I don't doubt it in the least, my dear boy. Everything in the States is reduced to a commercial basis. We support our Heralds' College with its traditions, they support their Tiffany with their cash." " By Jove," laughed Lord Alingham, " they do work the Heraldic Zoo to a finish. I used to be afraid to open my mail in the morning, the way their symbolic beasts, birds, and fishes would leap at my throat. However, the more American girls Tiffany proves I 'm cousin to, the better, if I may claim a cousin's privileges." " My word, with all due deference to the con- ventional loveliness of American women, there 's no one here I would care to claim as kin." The lady-trippers, who had retired to their state- rooms immediately after sailing, in the firm con- viction that nautical life demands certain tribute in 4 THROUGH ENGLISH MONOCLES the matter of costume, now reappeared on deck in an assortment of blue veils, travelling-caps, and shabby furs that seemed to have all the sorrows of homeless tabbies. They began to absorb guide- books and salt air with an aggressive eagerness that left no room for doubt that culture, both mental and physical, was the object of their trip. " You are not quite fair, my dear Reggie. You would not ask an American to judge Englishwomen by a Bank Holiday crowd." She came through the companionway as if to reward this alien champion for his defence of her countrywomen's beauty. She was tall and broad- shouldered, a woman who could wear ermine as if she had a right to it. She swept toward them with deliberate grace. She had the distinction of a racing yacht at full sail on a winning breeze. There was no time for detail. The force of the flyer was irresistible. Both men unconsciously paid her the tribute of a more alert attitude, and when the last flutter of her skirts had disappeared around the bow, they involuntarily relaxed. It was almost as if a member of the Royal Family had passed. " By Jove," said the Honourable Mr. Howard, " it 's marvellous where they get it ; that sort of thing could not be done at home in less than six generations." Half an hour later, when Lord Alingham and the Honourable Mr. Howard discovered that she sat next to them at the Captain's table, they felt them- selves in luck but really, Providence and the Head 5 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT Steward could hardly do less for such distinguished passengers. The Captain's " Good-morning, Mrs. Gordon," upset their mental filing of the lady and her affairs. From their preconceived point of view, it seemed unaccountable that so handsome a girl could be going to England on any other errand than that of spending the parental dollars and eventually marrying an Englishman ; so firm was their faith in American social conditions as they are portrayed on the English stage and in English weeklies, that they were already generously reconciled to the impossible mother who would breakfast in diamonds, and the millionaire father who would wear a chin- whisker and speak the Americanese of the London music-halls. But there was no suggestion of low- comedy parents with vast wealth and meagre gram- mar, in the wake of Mrs. Gordon. Neither was there a model of marital acquiescence in the person of Mr. Gordon, American husband, nor yet a wedding ring on the white restless hand that looked unable to hold even a small measure of content, the liberality of the gods notwithstanding. The Honourable Mr. Howard scanned the pas- senger list and read the simple announcement " Mrs. Elizabeth Gordon." " Neither hyphen nor initials ! She can't be an American ! " She was travelling with a Miss Dean, who during the progress of the meal proved to be her cousin. Miss Dean had the fly-about, tawny hair that looks better in disorder than when tamed with comb and hairpins. It blew about her face in crisply waving 6 THROUGH ENGLISH MONOCLES strands, and more than reconciled one to the fine powdering of light freckles that were distributed over a face half saucy, half sad. " Don't look so distressed about your coffee, dear," Lord Alingham heard her say to her cousin. " Remember you are travelling with a line that never lost a life." " They are welcome to mine as a record-breaker," said Mrs. Gordon, helping herself to the best peach in the dish, after the manner of people who have no interest in things mundane. There was also at the Captain's table a lady from Topeka who wore a blue satin shirt-waist and who felt her patriotism soar beyond control at the mere passive presence of the two Englishmen. Breakfast was an idle form to her till she had extorted from Lord Alingham the confession that ice water was comparatively unknown on English tables, and that he had never seen high office buildings before he came to New York. Then, apparently satisfied that she had done her duty to her God and her country, she gave her undivided attention to chops and blue- fish. The Honourable Reginald Howard, though he was once more eating sole beneath the British flag, was not altogether happy. Flounder had so often been his portion in New York, that even now he had his misgivings, the flutter of the Union Jack notwithstanding. CHAPTER II THE INTERVENTION OF PROGRESSIVE JOUR- NALISM, SOMETIMES CALLED "YELLOW" THE Honourable Reginald Howard was a widower of some eighteen months' nicely graduated grief. During the first black enshrouded days of his bereavement he had mourned even to the exclusion of wearing patent leather shoes. But of late there was creeping into his wardrobe a black-and-white resignation, at once submissive, nay, almost cheerful. Despite the fact that the late Mrs. Howard was remembered even in his travelling- rug, their life together had belonged to that marital classification known as cat-and-dog. But no sooner had the cat laid down the ninth of her sorely tor- mented lives than all the black stuff in London could not do justice to the dog's grief. In appearance the Honourable Mr. Howard was a clean-bred aristocrat, lean, aquiline, delicately fin- ished. In the matter of age he pleaded guilty to fifty-two with such ingenuousness that the lenient judge was apt to let him off with an extra ten years. He had an ambition to be considered a " sad dog," a perennial Don Juan, who, like wine, improved with age. And while his doctor con- demned him to a diet mainly consisting of charcoal 8 " PROGRESSIVE JOURNALISM biscuits and mineral water, he made a great point of ostentatiously ordering unwholesome food and then condemning it on epicurean grounds. His chief hobby was pride of lineage: that he was the sole survivor who could consistently boast a drop of Plantagenet blood, was his fixed con- viction, and while the Heralds' College granted him, together with nineteen others, the right to use the Plantagenet quarterings, he could prove, if one could spare him the requisite number of years, that the right belonged to him alone, and that the other nineteen were interlopers. In the book that has been described as " the best thing the English have ever done in fiction " you will find that the present head of the house of Alingham is Baron Arthur Charles Stuart Seymour, of , County , United Kingdom, born February 16, 1870. And then follows a dissertation on the family of Alingham, its ancient descent and much that is not to the point of this story. Suffice to say that Baron Arthur Charles and all the rest of it was sailing away from New York, fully convinced that his ruin had been wrought by the " yellow " journalism of the States, and that some- thing ought to be done to suppress the American editor, his work and enterprise. Lord Alingham was big and blond, with a com- plexion that had mocked the ravages of brandy-and- soda for years. There was a legend at the " Bache- lors " to the effect that H. R. H. had once said to Alingham, in a burst of after-dinner geniality, that he ought to cultivate a flaw, as he was too good- 9 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT looking for anything but the hero of a " shilling shocker." Alingham straightway promised, like the loyal Briton he was, to drown his beauty in brandy- and-soda, but it continued to remain as proverbial as his capacity for the antidote. It was always a moot question whether his Lord- ship's financial constitution went to pieces on the spicy diet of the Gaiety Theatre or contracted rapid consumption in the heart of Mayfair. Suffice to say, that his bankruptcy was an established fact, and he became a member of that coterie of failures who serve to point the necessary moral to all good little English boys who are disposed to rail at the meagreness of the parental dole. There was also some distressing talk, just before the bankruptcy, about a threatened breach-of-promise suit and a young person who sang something about " High Tiddle Tiddle " at the Halls. But everyone was heartily thankful that the rumour amounted to nothing, that is, heartily thankful after the manner of people who discuss every phase of every scandal. Seeing that his chances of making a good match at home were limited, his mother, his uncle Regi- nald, and the family solicitor rallied about him and begged him, for the honour of the family, for his name, for his sisters' marriage portions, and for everything else in the domestic litan)^ that he held sacred, to pay a visit to the States, where rich girls were a-plenty and no questions were asked of the titled. As poor Lord Alingham had an undeniable talent for getting himself into mischief, and could never 10 PROGRESSIVE JOURNALISM be trusted to manage his own affairs, his uncle, the Honourable Reginald Howard, undertook to accom- pany him to the States as envoy extraordinary of the Alingham family. And for a time it looked as if his Lordship, under the diplomatic machinations of his uncle, would receive the coveted seven figures, the net price demanded at home for his titles. But they had reckoned without the New York press. His acquaintance with the daughter of a multi- millionaire had progressed to the point where an Englishman feels justified in discussing his mother's favourite brand of tea, and subjects of similar sacredness, when a Sunday paper turned out its space-filling pack in full cry against him. The American public was asked in flaring headlines if a bankrupt Lord was worth $5,000,000. The con- tention that had pleasantly agitated London, as to whether it was Mayfair or St. Johns' Wood that had proved the ditch of the undoing, was revived with this difference, that the Sunday paper gave equal credit to both localities as factors in his Lordship's bankruptcy, whereas London gossip had wavered between the two. Alingham was described as a degenerate who could get no one in his own country to marry him. There was a graphic cartoon showing bevies of English girls pointing the finger of scorn at him, their titles and nationality being indicated by coronets resembling the royal insignia of the stage. There was also a chapter of vivacious venom devoted to the family history of the multi-millionaire, wherein it was shown that the nest egg of the family millions had been laid as the result of a happy II LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT speculation in mouse-traps. The attack relied for its backbone on a tabulated account of the number of millions that had gone out of the country within the past five years as the portions of American girls who had married titles, and the ill uses to which such moneys had been put. A rival paper, not to be behindhand, took the matter up, and subpoenaed the American eagle and the Pilgrim Fathers to witness its sorrows at having exclusively to inform the public that another Ameri- can girl would take millions of dollars out of the country. The first paper returned to the attack by publishing portraits of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and their probable opinion on the subject had they not died before it was asked. And so his Lordship's past became the subject of a bitter newspaper rivalry, and the rhetoric of Park Row won the day against the peer and his ambitions. The father of the girl who hoped to be My Lady was terribly afraid of the quill. " No damn Dukes," he thundered, waving the latest edition on the sub- ject; "a plain every-day American is good enough for us." His knowledge of the peerage was of the vaguest, and he imagined the English Duke occurred with the frequency of the Kentucky colonel. To face New York society as the bull's eye on which two progressive papers had tried their crack marks- men, was not to Lord Alingham's taste ; he engaged passage on the next out-going steamer, and twelve of his Lordship's seventeen " boxes " were never opened on American soil, except by the custom-house officials. 12 CHAPTER III CONTAINING THE REFLECTIONS OF A PRODI- GAL, AND A THEATRICAL ENCOUNTER THE ship see-sawed through the night, cleaving the blackness with broad white sweep. Lights from within threw long washy reflections of yellow on the wet deck, the one human note in the sombre nocturne of sea and sky. The wind wailed fitfully and was still, then shrieked and sobbed again in hopeless grief. " It 's a banshee in at my finish," decided Aling- ham; with which reflection he turned up his coat collar and lit a cigar. His sense of humour was delicately tickled at times by his recent failure to adjust social liabilities without other assets than those of a fine old name and an abundance of good looks. " Brother Jonathan is no longer satisfied by reading in Burke that his prospective son-in-law is registered stock ; he 's got to be sure daughter can drive him before he '11 hand over his dollars." In the panic which had followed the shattering of his plans in the States, as he felt himself drawn, helpless, into the whirlpool of misfortunes, Aling- ham's one definite thought had been to escape the present, with its horrors of newspaper publicity and 13 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT personalities ; to grasp some friendly floating spar and drift with the tide. He was drifting back to his own world. London, Piccadilly, his clubs, his friends, grew nearer with each advancing length of the ship. The thought of meeting them was like the blast of a furnace on burned flesh. And yet in the smoking- room idiots were making bets about the speed of this grimy monster of the deep, and the number of days, hours, and minutes she would take to bring him to his reckoning. If time could be petrified, and it could always be as now, the blessed calm, the lulling motion of the ship, and the failure of his life seen through the blue haze of a Havana ! Oh, to wrench wide the clenched fist of fortune, to grasp a second time the golden horde, to have and to hold by the grace of bitter experience! Never again would he fear a footpad in silken stockings and high-heeled slippers. Cinderella's twinkling feet no longer haunted him with their mystery: he had stayed until the magic slippers turned into old boots, and thus reaped experience, the reward of constancy. But the thought that stung him like a thousand nettles was the pity that awaited him as one of life's failures. He had had his chance and he had lost the race. What a damnable figure to cut, that of an eternal illustration of the follies of plunging! He knew how it would be. " Glad to see you, old man ! " and when his back was turned, " A man can't go on like Alingham, and expect pater- familias, even an American paterfamilias, to shower rice and dollars to the tune of Lohengrin." He looked back along the avenue of his life, down 14 REFLECTIONS OF A PRODIGAL the dim perspective through which the chubby-faced boy passed into manhood ; and he saw him jealously guarded at every point until his coming of age; and it seemed to him now that he might have been better prepared for the liberty, the latch-key, and the free- dom of the city that were then given him as an unquestioned right, if his previous privileges had been other than ten shillings a week and the con- stant attendance of a tutor. " Good God, what was to be expected from such a system but untold bitter- ness, the bankruptcy court, and the beginning of life over again in the colonies ? " The boat rolled heavily; water broke over her bows and scattered into a stinging needle-point spray, and her white wake stretched out eerily across the blackness of the night. He swung about, intend- ing to go below and forget in the forgetfulness that is poured out of a bottle. Things were bad enough without staying there, courting bleaker thoughts. The boat gave a sudden lurch that almost deprived him of his footing, and the next moment he was balancing frantically to preserve his equilibrium and that of the person or persons into whom he had stumbled, a blinding shower of spray prevented him from seeing clearly. The door of the companion- way was flung open, scurrying skirts disappeared within, and by the light that streamed through the open doors for a moment, he made out that the little freckle-faced girl who sat opposite him at the table was holding his arm in a vise. Not doubting that the arm she held belonged to Mrs. Gordon, of whose ignominious flight she was unconscious, Alice 15 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT Dean mopped the water from her face, chuckled merrily, and said : " Good gracious, it was the Lord, and we nearly upset him. My, doesn't that sound sacrilegious?" And she chuckled again. Alingham contemplated forcibly freeing himself from her grasp, and bolting below before she should make the awful discovery. Meantime she had blinked her eyes free from spray and found herself clinging desperately to his arm. Both might have been standing there yet, petrified by the horror of the situation, but for another merciful lurch of the vessel that again put them on their acrobatic mettle and left them grasping the deck-rail, buffeted by wind and spray, laughing heartily. " I hope all this tossing about has not hurt you or made you giddy," he inquired with solicitude. " Oh, I 'm all right," she said with the slight drawl and the distinct " r " that come from the other side of the Rockies. He was singularly susceptible to voices. Hers was deep and resonant with a beautiful singing quality like a 'cello. A most remarkable voice for a woman : a full octave below the usual feminine squeak, and subtly seductive. " I came up here to get a little air. Besides, some one had almost persuaded a lady to sing. I hate to hear people sing when they know how. They make such faces and seem to be in pain." " Really? Then perhaps you 'd like to go forward, where you can't hear it," said Alingham, feeling that the situation was delightfully irregular. 16 REFLECTIONS OF A PRODIGAL " I would," she said, with appalling simplicity. The deck alternately eluded and anticipated their steps. Progress, under the circumstances, became no mean accomplishment, and had it not been for Alingham's able assistance, Miss Dean would un- doubtedly have had to listen while the lady pro- claimed her love " dark as the night and deep as the sea." After the manner of man, he was both pleased and disappointed at the prompt way she dropped his arm at reaching the deck-rail, over which she leaned watching the black prow cut the seething whiteness. The cowl-like hood of her long cloak had blown back, and the crisply waved hair blew about her head in beautiful swirling lines. The modelling of the face was absolutely simple, three lines would have drawn the profile. She reminded him of the pictured initials of some fantastic poem as she stood beside him, with eyes down-bent and wind-blown locks. " She 's deucedly like one of Vedder's things," was the way his Lordship put it to himself. She looked down into the boiling caldron so long without speaking that Alingham concluded she must be homesick and unhappy. " It 's awfully creepy, all this water ; I 've never felt anything like it before." " Oh, I say," said his Lordship, because he did n't know in the least what to say. " Now the prairies, where my home is, are a lot nicer. They don't seem as if they were going to swallow you up every moment. When things don't 2 17 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT suit me at home, I get on Chester, that 's my colt, and go and have it out with the ' infinite.' That 's what my governess used to call the prairies. She wrote poems." " And did you hate to leave it all, your colt, the infinite, and that sort of thing? " inquired Aling- ham, with the rising inflection and breathless tension with which a well-bred Briton always asks the most casual question. She answered with eyes full of sorrow, " Yes, I hated to leave it, but I had to be civilised." " My word," said his Lordship. " They are sending me to France to sandpaper me down, and when I am the same size, shape, and consistency as all the other young misses, I 'm to come out." " Oh, I say, it would be a shame to sandpaper you down like all the rest." " But you see my father wants me to go into society, and society is protective, it won't admit the raw material." " But don't you think you 'd find it a bore to go on riding your colt out into the wilderness all your life. Young ladies have to be presented, and you 'd enjoy that greatly, would n't you ? It 's much better than nursery teas, and coming in to dessert and that sort of thing." " I guess you don't know much about ranch life, when you talk about nursery teas and coming in to dessert. Now, if you had said lynchings, it would have been much more to the point. But I doubt if being presented would be half as exciting as a 18 REFLECTIONS OF A PRODIGAL good ' necktie party ' that is the proper social name for them; only newspapers and Englishmen call them lynchings it 's such a crude term, don't you think?" " I say, you never saw anything so dreadful as that, did you ? " " Dozens of times," and the fantastic little face was absolutely grave. " Why, we take baskets and make regular picnics of them. You 've no idea how exciting they are, particularly when the doomed man has supper with you." " I say now, you 're chaffing." " Chaffing ? But you Englishmen have such a sense of humour. Why, we 're nothing if not hos- pitable in the West, and because you 're going to hang a man is no reason why you should n't ask him to tea. Suppose he should alter the brand on one of your cows, you 're bound to hang him on principle. What 's more natural than that you should invite him to supper, just to show there 's nothing personal in the matter?" "Don't the authorities interfere?" " Oh dear, no, it is n't etiquette to go to a necktie- party unmasked and it 's impossible to tell who 's authorities and who is n't." " My word, I never knew it was as bad as that." " You did n't go West at all, did you? " " No." " I thought not. Did n't you go beyond New York?" " No," answered his Lordship, with a brevity that was akin to curtness. 19 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT " How funny ! I thought Englishmen always came over here to hunt things." Silence on the part of his Lordship. " You did n't get a chance to do any hunting about New York, did you? I hear it isn't good." " I see you 've been reading the New York papers." " No, I never see them. Why do you say that? " Then, after a pause, and a rippling crescendo of laughter, " You did n't try to hunt bears in Wall Street with a gun, did you, and get into the papers ? " " No, I did not try to hunt bears in Wall Street, Miss Dean. There are other ways open to a man of making an ass of himself." " Have we been offering extra facilities in that line to our English cousin?" His laugh was an unpleasant travesty on merri- ment. She looked up at him, half frightened, half sorry, at her discovery that what she had dealt in play hit hard and hurt. The droop of his shoulders as he stood beside her, silent and embarrassed, looking out on the black sweep of water, was pathetically significant of defeat; and being wholly feminine, she wished with all her heart that he would hit back, instead of standing there, helpless and colossal. She was sorry, and wanted to make instant repa- ration, after her own impulsive fashion. But what could she say to this man whom she had never seen before to-day? Involuntarily, she reviewed her methods of making peace. When she had offended her father, she went up behind him, put her arms about his neck, and said : " Guess who 's been a bad girl?" 20 REFLECTIONS OF A PRODIGAL How absurd! What had the way she made up with her father to do with this? The thought of it made a warm flush creep into her face and burn there. When she made up with Chester she patted his nose and gave him a lump of sugar, a mani- festly impossible course in the present instance. His Lordship's hand rested on the deck-rail. She was uncomfortably conscious of an impulse to cover it with her own and say : "I am sorry that in trying to be smart I have said something that hurt you." But newly awakened maiden instinct restrained her. For the first time she realised that there were other and subtler relations than those of good-fellowship and camaraderie. Was it because he was a stranger, or was it because he was so uncomfortably good to look at, or was it a combination of both? The inquiry put a new and interesting aspect on the question of her absolution. Her sudden interest in this new and attractive personality alarmed her. She looked at the strong white hand lying on the deck-rail, and was at a loss to explain her curiosity regarding it, yet she found herself connecting it vaguely with the solution of the unexplained. Her mind swung back to her babyhood, and she remembered how she wanted to touch everything new that she saw, and how her nurse used to say " Must n't touch " so often that she believed it was all one big word, and that it was the name of all the pretty things she wanted to play with and could not. She could remember a whole shelf full of " Must n't touches " and some more that used to be on a little table. And as she thought of this 21 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT big man beside her being a " must n't touch," the incongruity of the situation flashed upon her and threatened to convulse her with laughter. It was so ridiculous. He was so big to be a " must n't touch." She was conscious of her inability to control her merriment much longer. She struggled, but it would not be suppressed. She bit her lips, but they perversely curved and puckered, and she burst into ripples of laughter that would not be held back. " Perhaps you will share it with me," he said, without the least possible trace of ill-humour. " It was n't anything, indeed it was n't. I just happened to remember that when I was very little I used to think ' must n't touch ' was all one long word and that it was the name of everything beauti- ful in the world." " It is, Miss Dean, but is n't it a bit early for you to have found it out?" All her youth vibrated in the laughter with which she answered him. " I 've just discovered it," she said, " and is n't it a pity ? " She looked at him with the undisguised admira- tion of a child. And he, who had come on deck for the sole purpose of assuring himself that he was a bankrupt who had no further interest in anything, gripped the deck-rail hard to keep from moving one inch nearer. For Alingham knew women as some men know their Bibles and others know mathematics, and the artless admiration of this girl was too ephem- erally beautiful to be met with the crude tactics of the ordinary flirtation. 22 REFLECTIONS OF A PRODIGAL " If I were you," and there was just a faint note of motherly warning in her voice, " I would n't believe everything people told me about America." " Thanks. I have been misinformed about a few things." " You remember what er I told you about making up parties to go to lynchings?" " It made a singularly deep impression on me." " Please don't believe a word of it. I was just fooling you. Because Englishmen will believe anything savage about America and I 've always felt that I was serving my country by supplying them with plenty of exercise for their imaginations. But I am sorry I fibbed to you." He knew the confession cost her something by the complicated system of knots she was tying in her handkerchief. He, too, had once been young enough to know the agonies implied by writhing pocket-handkerchiefs. And while he hesitated be- tween a choice of equally gracious acquittals, he was conscious of the meekest of voices appealing from the darkness : " You 're not mad, are you? " " Mad ? I ? Good gracious, I hope not. Do you notice anything strange? " He laughed heartily. " I beg your pardon. I did not at first understand that you meant angry. No, indeed, I 'm not mad." "What's the difference, I'd like to know?" she demanded with considerable superiority. " With us, in England, mad means insane, crazy, daft, in fact, you can't blame me for getting into a bit of a funk at the suggestion." 23 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT " How funny you English people talk ! " she remarked, with the satisfaction of one whose ideals are still contentedly domestic. " It must seem a bit queer to you," he said, with fine courtesy in which there was no trace of sarcasm. " I really must go in. Mrs. Gordon will be awfully mad angry, I mean with me for staying on deck so late. But if I have fibbed to you, you are revenged, for I 'm bound to catch it for staying out here alone." She seemed undecided about her method of taking leave. She half extended her hand and withdrew it. While he waited to follow her lead, she turned from him, and ran down the deck at full speed, only stopping to call " Good-night " from the darkness. Down the lurching staircase, at the peril of her equilibrium, she flew. It was as if some dread danger pursued. At her stateroom door she paused and looked back over her shoulder. From what had she been running? 24 CHAPTER IV "EXTR' ORDINARILY SMALL PLACE THE WORLD ! " MRS. GORDON, Lord Alingham, and the Honourable Mr. Howard, feeling them- selves the only people of moment on board the " Calabria," lost no time in constructing a tem- porary aristocracy, in which they found refuge. Miss Dean, however, by no means confined her interests to this triple alliance, but distressed Mrs. Gordon and amused the two Englishmen by the deep and insatiate craving she developed for the society of the trippers, whose history she knew even to the personal sacrifices they had made to broaden their lives by travel. Mrs. Gordon did her best to console herself for her cousin's promiscuous intimacies on the ground that they were bound to be ephemeral : she cherished no illusions regarding the stability of ships' friendships, and thanked Heaven that they invariably outgrew their strength, and died young enough to enable the survivors to cut each other comfortably at their next meeting. The day following her chaff and confidences by the deck-rail, Alice had shunned Alingham for reasons that even to her own tribunal seemed insufficient justification of her conduct. She had remained in LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT her stuffy stateroom all day, reading words from a book she had selected from the ship's library for apparently no other reason than that it looked dull and was liberally endowed with impenetrable foot- notes, a book of books for rigid mental discipline. She would raise her eyes from its meaningless page to protest vehemently to a swaying skirt that hung from a peg opposite : " I hate him ! " But hate, in the feminine vocabulary, is a word of many synonyms, and the farther one goes from the primary definition, the nearer the truth he is likely to be. As a matter of fact, she was more afraid of the incense of her own imagination than of the man for whom it was burnt. For the young vestal had found a strange and disconcerting god set up in her temple, and finding herself more dis- posed to resent his intrusion than to mend fires for his greater honour and glory, she had confided her " hatred " to the swaying skirt. The next day, her craving for air and exercise made a chance encounter with her unintentional tor- mentor less to be dreaded than the confined quarters of the stateroom. She ventured out, and met him on the staircase coming up from a slothfully late breakfast. His perfect composure adjusted the situation for her, better than months of reasoning could have done. It was impossible to crown with a halo a man who wore a yachting cap so well, who, in fact, represented the symbolic in yachting caps throughout the world of leisure. His casual inquiries as to her health during yesterday's absence evoked such tragic 26 "SMALL PLACE, THE WORLD!" recollections of her illness that he wondered how she could seem to glory in the degradation of being a bad sailor. It was clear, crisp, and sunshiny. The sea was the green of a turquoise that has changed colour, and the sunlight wrought miracles of enamel on its placid surface. Sunlight dispelled the fantastic quality of her beauty: at 10 P.M. she had been a picture in a poem; at 10 A.M. she was a modern girl with freckles. He again decided on her extreme youth. An older woman with claims to so unique a type of beauty would have made concessions to the day- light, in a hat and spotted veil, while waiting to loosen her hair for the evening role. He thought Alice's frankness in facing the sun, freckled and unashamed, as charming as it was unflattering. The ingenue type was an unknown quantity to Lord Alingham in real life. He had never met it off the stage, where he remembered he had watched with unfailing boredom the invariable transformation of the white muslin and blue ribbons of the first act into the silken rustle of experience in the last. The reality he found intensely interesting. The fact that life, from his point of view, was practically over, and that he had missed one of its sweetest experi- ences, made him look momentarily serious. " Lord Alingham," she said, noticing the change in his expression, " I believe you 're going to be seasick." And before he had a chance to realise what was happening, ten thousand arrows shot through his brain. 27 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT " I thought it would bring you round," she said triumphantly. " It 's the very strongest smelling- salts made." " Thanks, I 'm better now," said Alingham; " that vitriol, or whatever it was you had in your vinai- grette, has killed the mal de mer, though I have survived." " It 's mean of you to call it names when it cured you," she said, adjusting her chatelaine, while Aling- ham continued to mop his tears, cough, and splutter. The last of the Plantagenets made his way toward them, with the senile hop that constituted his manner of walking. His ancient and aristocratic legs were always a bit uncertain in the morning, but after a certain amount of brandy and soda had been con- sumed, would show symptoms of getting into running order. That morning, having mistaken the first flush of second childhood for the rejuvenating effect of the sea air, the Honourable Mr. Howard selected a black and white mourning tie that bordered on the hilarious, and was conscious of its stimulating influ- ence. Mrs. Gordon joined them on deck, and after the usual conventional inquiries had elicited corre- spondingly reassuring answers, they settled down to the day's business of killing time. Miss Dean with absolute seriousness began to tell them of the disappointment of a lady tourist whose brand-new trunk was too slippery to retain its steamer label, and who was a prey to anxiety lest the foreign officials might not give her a duplicate set of clean labels to paste on when she returned home; in which event she feared that neighbourly 28 "SMALL PLACE, THE WORLD!" opinion might discredit the extent of her foreign travel. " Does she call Europe ' the other side ' ? " inquired Mrs. Gordon. " Why, yes." " Then there is no hope for her. When they begin to speak of it as Moody and Sankey do of Heaven, they are lost. And Lord Alingham will put her down as the typical American girl in his forthcoming book, ' Forty-eight Hours in the United States.' You Englishmen are driving native Ameri- can humourists to despair, with your ' Five-Minutes- in- America ' series, and we have no * Times ' at home, to write protests to." "You are to be the heroine of what is it? ' Forty-eight Hours in the United States ' ; the lady with the slippery trunk shall not supplant you." " The box was made slippery, no doubt, as a con- cession to your custom-house formalities, Mrs. Gordon. It is easier, you know, for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a box to go through your American custom-house," explained Uncle Reginald, who was old school and always pointed out the ' ladies' entrance ' to a joke, no matter how harmless. " For my part," said Mrs. Gordon, " I love the lady with the trunk. If it were not for her, we might all be discussing books or music or the ' higher foolishness.' ' " Is n't it singular," said Lord Alingham, " that music is such a success to talk to, and such a bore to talk about? Why don't debating societies hire 29 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT orchestras ? and halting ministers might have the choir sing during the sermon." " Really now," observed the last of the Plantage- nets, " I Ve heard that it is quite common for your millionaires to have the De Reszkes in to sing during afternoon tea, just to promote family conversation." " Yes, Jean and Edouard are a great improvement on the English muffin as a conversational whetstone. No American really understands English repose until he has met the English muffin. I hear there is a bill before Congress now to annex it." " My dear lady," said the Honourable Reginald, with British blandness, " you could not possibly annex our muffin. I fear some one has been mischievously chaffing you about politics." " Our friends have resumed their studies in antici- patory geography," said Lord Alingham, as the trippers emerged from their cocoon-like bundles of rugs, and spreading out maps, began to trace with their noses the routes they were going to take, ex- claiming with delight when their keenness of scent had taken them to cities they were booked to visit. Alice Dean, who was sensitively patriotic, resented their jocular superiority. " You are snobs, all of you, and ought to be ashamed. Europe is as far from the United States as the United States is from Europe, and I 'd like to know whether Lord Alingham did not believe me when I told him that lynchings were our principal social functions, and half the Englishmen who come here expect to hunt buffalo in the suburbs of New York." 30 "SMALL PLACE, THE WORLD!' " Hear ! Hear ! " they said. " Now I am going to ask you people who are so superior to a little provincialism a few questions. What does P-o-t-o-m-a-c spell, Lord Alingham?" " Pot-a-mac," promptly responded his Lordship. "What does P-o-t-o-m-a-c spell, Mr. Howard?" " I 'm blest if I know, if it is not Pot-a-mac," said the last of the Plantagenets. " Neither of you presume to criticise a party of American tourists again. It 's Po-to'mac, just plain Po-to'mac." " Your turn now, Betty. If you were presented to the Prince of Wales, how would you address him?" " Good gracious, I was never good at guessing conundrums. Besides, why do you take this moment, when two Englishmen are present, to force the humiliating confession from me that I have never met him?" "No hedging, what would you say?" " Your Royal Highness, I suppose." " Then you would be wrong. You ought to say ' Sir,' just plain ' Sir,' and the Queen likes to be called ' Ma'am ' by members of her own household. I know, because the Englishman who told me used to be a page. He was awfully nice; he taught me lots about England and I taught him how to make walnut- taffy, but he would always call it ' toffy,' try as I would to make him say it right." " And where may you have had lessons in court etiquette?" inquired Mrs. Gordon, highly amused. " Don't you remember the Spring you spent with LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT Mr. Gordon, in Montana? He went to attend the Spring ' round-up/ and you went with him, and Uncle Dick, the governess, and I were all alone on the ranch, till Mr. Talbot Guest came to buy the ' X. Y. L.' brand from your father for an English syndicate. He did not close the deal for a long time, and it was while they were talking and bar- gaining and riding all over the country that Mr. Guest told me so much about England, and I taught him how to make walnut-taffy in the evenings." " Really, Mrs. Gordon," broke in Lord Alingham, " did Talbot Guest buy the ' X. Y. L.' brand from your father? He was my cousin, and I had several letters from him while he was in the States. Ah, yes, Dean was the name, I remember. Dean was your maiden name?" " Yes," answered Mrs. Gordon, with pale lips ; but the two Englishmen were too amazed at what they had just learned to notice. The finely graven nostrils of the last of the Plantagenets grew tense and white. His self- possessed hands fumbled foolishly with the travelling- rug, that was black, white, and spectacular, like everything connected with his bereavement. The whimsical handwriting of his nephew, that had never quite outgrown its university struggles with Greek, flashed before him again : " This damned old screw of a cattle-man is holding out for two hundred pounds when he could write his cheque for five million sterling and hardly miss it." When he spoke, his voice took the required sym- pathetic note with rare skill. Not even the woman 32 "SMALL PLACE, THE WORLD!" beside him, who had just discovered that he knew all about her husband's suicide, could have demanded more in the way of inflection. It was fully a minute before he could pull himself together and drawl : " Extr'ordinary small place, world is. Coinci- dence, we met. Guest was my nephew. He was killed tiger-shooting in Africa, two years after he was in the States, the property went to cousin in Ireland." " Really," exclaimed Mrs. Gordon, " how extra- ordinarily all this is like a novel with a plot ! " Mr. Howard excused himself, he needed brandy- and-soda, a good deal of it, and very quickly. " And yet," he reflected, " people can be agnostics, in the face of a special Providence like this. A bankrupt, Heaven only knows how many millions sterling, and a week of propinquity ! " 33 CHAPTER V " THE MATRIMONIAL LIMITED TO PROSPERITY " " "M AfY dear boy," said Uncle Reginald, in |\/| his nephew's stateroom half an hour -L T A later, "it's not often that Providence is so dramatic. Here you were, on your way to the Devil or the suburbs, when a charming widow with ever so many millions sterling turns up on the same boat with you. I say, a man 's got to believe in something after a supernatural interposi- tion like this." His Lordship, who was sprawling on a sofa a foot too short for him, answered, laughing: " It 's confoundedly theatrical, to have Algy Gordon's widow turn up like this in the last act. But I could never live up to the situation. I should feel obliged to make love with grimaces and gestures, like Beerbohm Tree." " There was a nasty bit of business about Gordon's suicide. Was it money or a woman? " " Both, I fancy. Old E>ean gave him nominal control of a great amount of money, and sent him back to England to raise capital for some mines he was opening up. The old duffer did n't know Gordon's people made him an allowance for living out of England, or, in fact, what a scoundrel he was. He raised the Devil and squandered the capital 34 "THE LIMITED TO PROSPERITY 5 on what was the name of that girl with the big eyes who danced her clothes inside out at the halls ? " " So many ladies at the halls answer to that description " " At all events, Gordon was an ass to go back to the States after more money. The old man was very rude, said his daughter should have a divorce, and all sorts of nasty things. Gordon, the poor devil, had the decency to shoot himself, it was the only civil way out of it at the time, though old Dean died shortly after." Howard looked at his nephew anxiously for a moment or two, and then said, with a seriousness he seldom bestowed on anything but his family tree: " A vulgar business, suicide. No one but a cad would throw up his cards and quit the game because he had drawn a bad hand." " When a man 's played his cards and lost like a gentleman, I suppose he may leave quietly by the back door, instead of exhibiting himself to the crowd as a failure." " You don't defend Gordon as a gentleman, do you?" " I was n't defending Gordon, but the only sensible thing he ever did." The last of the Plantagenets had no wish to pro- long a discussion on the ethics of suicide. He was in the position of a dowager who in the last quarter of the season still has an unengaged daughter on her hands. It was the time for action, not ethics. " This is Monday," he began, sugar-coating his 35 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT strategy with elaborate jocularity. " We sha'n't land before Saturday ; blessing the boat 's a tub. Any- thing can be arranged in five days with propinquity : why, a man might make his own wife fall in love with him aboard an ocean steamer, if there was n't another man aboard." " I 'm glad, Reggie, you 've found something to divert you. She 's as safe from me as if she were guarded by a staff of New York reporters. I 'm done with the ' matrimonial limited to prosperity,' as I heard an American say." " Don't be an ass, my dear boy," said the surviving Plantagenet. " You might as well say that you would never eat another meal because one disagreed with you, or fall in love with a woman because one refused you, or " : ' Yes, I know the situation is bad enough without garnishing it up with Low Church rhetoric; but, personally, I prefer the Devil or the suburbs. Besides, clergymen and socialists are the only people who really marry for money. The rest of us only play at it till the right woman comes along, and the right woman is always penniless. Why is the right woman always penniless, Reggie? just as one's affinity is always married." The Honourable Reginald greeted these sentiments with a smile that disclosed a magnificent service of gold plate. ' Then what the Devil are you going to do ? You can't afford to stay single with your debts." " My dear boy, I 've lived with debt so long that it would be like losing an old friend to part 36 "THE LIMITED TO PROSPERITY" with it, ready money would make me miserable. Besides, I 'm going in for something new in the way of a career. Other bankrupts marry Americans, earn their dinners as jesters, or prey upon their landladies. None of these things attracts me. I shall go down to posterity a warning of the follies of plunging. No British youth will be allowed to attain his majority without passing an examination on my decline and fall. I even aspire to a tract : ' The Moth of the Footlights, or The Fall of the Foolish Lord.' A modern social Lucifer, I shall fall from Park Lane to Bloomsbury, from Bloomsbury to Hackney, it will be sublime." " Have a brandy-and-soda, do," urged Uncle Reginald, haunted by a vision of a borrowing relative. " I don't want a B. and S., old man, any more than I want a rich wife. God knows, I may yet have to take both." The gloom with which he made this statement lightened perceptibly as he contem- plated his well-fitting boot; he could nearly always find consolation for the afflictions of a common day in some one of his innumerable perfections. " There is such an appalling finality about the situation," he went on, still studying the spring of his instep. " A bankrupt and several millions sterling both at large on the high seas. Some one ought to tell the captain, so he could put me in irons to keep me from proposing." Howard regarded his nephew's badinage as little short of insanity. The situation had been appalling; the advent of Mrs. Gordon at least presented the 37 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT possibility of a dignified exit. And here was this silly young ass bandying jokes about it. " I can't understand why you don't get up some enthusiasm about her. She 's the best looking woman we 've seen since we left England." " She 's a too stimulating. She 's like those abominable cocktails that Americans are always tossing off; fancy always gulping cocktails." Reginald looked as if he had contemplated more formidable prospects. " She 's rich, young, clever, and handsome. What more can you possibly want ? " " That 's it, she 's clever. She 's too deuced clever for me. She belongs to that third sex that 's in at the death of the century, women with heads instead of hearts, theories instead of passions, careers instead of children. They are like paper flowers ; neither age nor sorrow can wither them, they can only become stale, dusty, and shop-worn." The surviving Plantagenet strove to calm his upset nerves. It was some moments before he felt equal to saying: " One is at home so seldom nowadays, my dear boy, that the domestic paper-rose ought not to jar ; especially when a other kinds of roses may be so successfully cultivated elsewhere." Lord Alingham gathered up his long legs from the extreme corner of the stateroom whither they had strayed from the diminutive sofa, stood up, yawned, and said : " Don't let 's talk about it any more, Reggie, who knows but the boat may go down and settle the whole question?" 38 "THE LIMITED TO PROSPERITY' Uncle Reginald, who had no desire to become involved in his nephew's affairs to such an extent, looked apprehensive and lapsed into a gloomy silence. He was thinking that for a man who made boredom his religion and who was a bankrupt and a failure to boot, Alingham looked too cheerful too vulgarly cheerful for the part. " I say, old man," said Lord Alingham, after blowing some abortive rings of smoke, " have you ever noticed her hair ? It 's the most wonderful bronze there 's sunlight in it at night, in the dark. Why, I 've seen that head glow the length of the ship." "What the Devil are you talking about? Why, her head 's as black as a crow's." "Whose head?" " God bless my soul, then it 's the little two-year- old that 's already several lengths ahead in your affections? I might have known as much from the sublime unfitness, the folly of the thing. You must be mad, Ally. You could n't keep out of trouble in a strait- jacket. A man with your debts can't af- ford affections. Don't you know that affections are the prerogative of the squalid poor and the ultra rich ? Besides, a boy of seven-and-twenty could n't possibly fall in love with an ingenue it 's unnat- ural. No one falls in love with an ingenue till he 's in his dotage, has gout, and family prayers. It 's a hideous confession on your part." " ' None but the infirm deserve the ingenue,' that 's what you were going to say, is n't it, Reggie? It 's so easy to be epigrammatic nowadays. All 39 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT that is necessary is to transpose the copybook: ' Honesty is the worst policy,' ' Never do to-day that which you can put off till to-morrow/ ' Marry in haste, rejoice at leisure.' See, I can almost keep up with Mrs. Gordon." " You are an ass, Ally," said Uncle Reginald, exercising a fine restraint in the matter of epigram and subtlety generally. " Well, I 'm off, and with the help of Providence, I won't succumb to the ingenue type for twenty years to come." 40 CHAPTER VI "LONDON MEANT THE DELUGE AND THE DELUGE WAS AT HAND" THE men took the situation with British impassiveness ; neither again referred to the subject that most completely absorbed his thoughts. Howard had lived long enough to know that Folly has no more eloquent advocate than the friendly adviser with his well-meant homily against cap and bells, and that, apart from any attraction Miss Dean might have had for his nephew in her own right, Alingham from a sheer love of the perverse, would have found it difficult to resist falling in love with a situation so inopportune as the present. When Howard told Lord Alingham that the latter would get into trouble in a strait- jacket, he spoke from the fulness of long-suffering experience. The widowed lady who, in the eleventh hour of his Lordship's adversity, unwittingly introduced suspense to complicate the situation further as far as the Honourable Reginald Howard was concerned, was not inclined to quarrel with the fates for writing her name on the same passenger list with those of the two Englishmen. She found them interesting, 41 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT Alingham so much so that time never passed so quickly as when they nibbled together at one of those barmecide feasts of unreason designated by Mr. Zangwill as the " Philosophy of Topsyturvy- dom " ; in which automatic process of witticism neither was without considerable skill. And if he found the game of balancing saws on their venerable heads tedious, he did it with so successful an affecta- tion of enjoyment as to deceive even such an expert as she. To Miss Dean, however, when opportunity af- forded, he chatted about himself, fluently, and with no cleverness aforethought. These annals did not include the difficulties of the last few years, nor the financial abyss that yawned for him in London. They were confined chiefly to innocuous escapades at Harrow and Magdalen, the style of manly autobiography that a knowing matron would have welcomed as hopeful, had Lord Alingham been an eligible. For Alice the light had entered and the world begun. It was the Garden of Eden while the apple- trees were still in blossom. The day's idling usually ended with tea, which Miss Dean always made for the others in a grotesque little teapot that had a fat Chinaman for a body and his twisted pigtail for a handle. Alingham used to watch with half-closed eyes as she fussed about the tea, and wonder how long it had been since the teapot had supplanted dolls in her affec- tions, where even now, however, it did not stand supreme; for marmalade and plum-cake she also 42 "THE DELUGE AT HAND" cherished with the unbridled passion of youth and innocence. Alingham grinned whenever he thought of Uncle Reginald's comment on the absurdity of a man of seven-and-twenty falling in love with an ingenue. He grinned unwholesomely. His laughter was too frequent to be hearty these days, and too suggestive of nerves for a man who looked as if he might have walked out of a Norse mythology. A miserly greed possessed him for every moment of these last days of certainty, and set him seri- ously to weighing trifles in the hope that the chosen triviality would make him forget that London meant the deluge and the deluge was at hand. His nerves had picked up an abominable trick of late that kept him continually changing his occupa- tion and sent him from one part of the ship to the other. Whether he walked the decks, lounged in the smoking-room, or swung below to his quarters for sleep, there was ever a phantom gentleman at his elbow seeking to serve him with phantom papers. And at night, in the dark, the ship's whirling screw spelled out fateful words that made cold fear gnaw at the pit of his stomach. Then the " yellow devil " of whiskey stood by him and scattered the pack of terrors baying at his heels. He called up the yellow devil often, and it did not fail him; he wanted his swan song to have a laughing chorus, whether it violated the dramatic proprieties or not. When the yellow devil proved riotous good company, Alingham would joke hila- riously with him about the deluge. Would it be 43 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT landlady-baiting in Bloomsbury, or a bullet and a neat notice in a morning paper, beginning : " The many friends of the late Lord Alingham are deeply pained, etc."? When Alice was available for walks, talks, deck- games, and tea, the yellow devil was neglected ; with a smile she could reconstruct his tottering world. With Alice it was the first opportunity to exchange coin of the realm of confidence, and no sleek-pursed spendthrift, long exiled from the sights and sounds of money-clinking in the market-place, could have changed and spent with keener delight than she who for the first time in her pent-up young life knew the relief of letting herself gush out in words. The lack of sympathy that had made her eighteen years of life but a bleak excursion into the inevitable had not been without its lesson of pitiless stoicism. It had taught her the ways of solitude and the gait and bearing of self-restraint. She had learned to meet the equinoctials of youth alone and dry-eyed, and the experience had given her a mellowness beyond her years. Even Alingham, who all his life had been anointed with the approval of women, and had nice taste in sympathy and the other votive offerings of the sex, could not understand the perfection of such an early vintage. And so the week slipped by in the drowsy uniformity of days spent 'twixt sky and sea. Liverpool loomed up one fine morning, out of a blue-gray sea, and with it came to Alingham reaction, and a delightful sense of irresponsibility; with the death warrant at hand, his attitude became that of 44 "THE DELUGE AT HAND" a stoical murderer, stunned into indifference to his fate. The sight of a little Italian hunchback who crawled up from the steerage put him in the best of spirits. " It 's a good omen," he said, and gave the boy a sovereign, carefully patting him on the back. The urchin bit, then pocketed, the coin, and grinned sardonically. He knew his misfortune was reckoned as bringing luck to the rest of the world. He took the big blond man for a gambler. The four persons who constituted the " Calabria's " upper stratum came up to London in the same com- partment. As it was Miss Dean's first English experience, she was not reserved in her comments. " Oh, is n't it cute ? " she said of the surrounding landscape. " It looks like the ' bird's-eye-view ' maps in the geography, or city parks, that 's it, city parks. And don't those two-and-six and one-and- nine signs sound simply ruinous? I keep thinking they are dollars." " They '11 translate them into dollars for you, fast enough, in the shops," said Mrs. Gordon, smiling. " That 's getting to be the national arithmetic," said Lord Alingham. Uncle Reginald was unusually quiet; Alice found her whirl of questions slow down whenever she glanced in his direction. In Liverpool Alingham bought all the illustrated magazines that the news-stand offered, and when Alice grew tired of watching racing fields, hedges, and spinning farmhouses, she turned her attention to the pictures. He was smiling at the instinctive way 45 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT she reached for her hat-pin and pressed it into service as a paper-cutter, when she called out to him, "Oh, isn't she lovely? Look, did you ever see anyone so beautiful ? " Together they bent over the open pages of a London weekly, and a full-lipped, narrow-eyed woman smiled up at them insolently. The pose of the head a deliberate delight in its own perfec- tion would have been repulsive in a less beautiful woman. In her it was but supreme satisfaction in loveliness so great as to permit of impersonal enjoy- ment. There were diamonds on her breast and in her hair and on her arms. She was of no particular age, she might have been anywhere in the per- ennial youth of heartlessness. A line beneath gave her name and the information that it was her latest photograph. " Please don't spoil your eyes by looking at these things while the train is moving," he said with the tenderest smile and the faintest little pressure of the hand, and closed the magazine. She looked up at him gratefully, the rest of her small world was not given to bothering its head over such trifles as her eyes. He looked across the fields where a white cottage spun like a dying top, and remarked to himself, men- tally, that innocence was an uncommonly fine thing. He said it with an air of conviction, as he might have announced a preference of peaches to pine- apples. A more experienced woman would have wondered at his closing the book, asked questions, tried and convicted him in the supreme court of her 46 "THE DELUGE AT HAND" intuition. Unquestionably, innocence was a beautiful thing. With the blind resentment of the irresponsible, who, as a class or individuals, are never without the necessary matches to kindle their own private and particular hells, Alingham felt that in the matter of practical jokes the fates had gone far enough without allowing the best woman that had come into his life to stumble across a picture of the worst, decked out in diamonds his diamonds. Mrs. Gordon was looking out of the window, and Mr. Howard was absorbed in illustrated papers; neither had noticed the incident. " What are you thinking of, Alice ? " It was the first time that Alingham had spoken to her by her Christian name, and the shaky manner in which his voice pumped the words out reminded him of the first time he had attempted a speech. " I was thinking what a funny train this is, and how it seems as if we were all playing stage-coach. We are the passengers, Betty, Mr. Howard, and I, and you ought to be the conductor and take up the tickets, and toot on a horn and show off, the little boy who plays conductor always shows off. And Mr. Howard my, how mad he looks at me for talking to you ! No, he sha'n't be a passenger, he shall be the aunt who raps the window and makes the children stop playing and come into the house." Alingham laughed. " Reggie, Miss Dean and I are playing a game, and you are the aunt who raps the window and makes us stop." " You will excuse me, I know, Miss Dean," the 47 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT golden grin became almost wolfish, " but I have given up rapping the window; the children never hear nor care to know when they have played too long." His nephew winced. The first straggling sub- urban villas began to reel and stagger past the car windows. He realised that London was at hand, waiting to confer on him its degree of failure. He was the modern prodigal, clad in purple and fine linen, who returned first-class, and would presently partake of fatted calf if a remnant of credit remained. He knew that the beaked money-lenders were already circling around his lodgings in Half Moon Street, awaiting his last financial gasp. And there, opposite him, sat Algy Gordon's widow, whose little pink hand might have saved him if he had but asked for it. And yet, he was rather proud of himself for having dangled round her penniless relative it was his nearest approach to being a hero, and though he was not happy, he felt he deserved a great deal of lime light. 48 CHAPTER VII IN THE ELEVENTH HOUR OF ADVERSITY ALINGHAM had been in London a week, and triumphant failure no longer appealed to him as a career. His friends had been kind, too obviously kind. He recognised the rally of well-bred curiosity politely disguised as friendly interest that invariably follows in the wake of calamity. They asked him to dinner, they walked across the street to speak to him, and they refrained from discussing the latest Anglo-American engage- ment in his presence; Alingham knew that later on, when his linen should become frayed, they would do none of these things. At the clubs, " Alingham, poor devil " was already past tense. And the ex- pression about his mouth settled into an unpleasant grin, half apologetic, half defiant, as he went about pretending to enjoy his social obsequies. If he had consulted his own inclinations, he would have left it all and joined one of Jimmy Musgrove's tinned-meat expeditions. Jimmy Musgrove, who was a younger son of Lord Reginald Falmouth, was always exploring strange quarters of the earth, and leaving Crosse and Blackwell's bottles to mark the spots where nothing had been discovered. Mus- grove was getting up an expedition to the North 4 49 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT Pole and urged Alingham to accompany him. His Lordship thought very well of it at first, but learning incidentally that in all probability it would be too cold to dress for dinner after leaving 180 latitude, he decided to take the advice of his family and stop at home. Cork Street knew all about Mrs. Gordon before she had been settled twenty-four hours at the Cecil. It was she, an unconscious Rizpah, who staved off these birds of prey. Temperamentally, Mrs. Gordon had so great an aversion to unadorned facts that she exercised great ingenuity in concealing them with elegant but irrel- evant drapery. This doubtless accounted for her unwillingness to admit, on any other ground than that of her artistic temperament, her undeniable talent for drawing, in imagination, ideal sketches of every attractive man she met. Alingham had been duly added to this mental portfolio, as a simple study in three tones, handsome, interesting, titled. She looked at the sketch till she became fascinated with her own handiwork; a not uncommon proceeding with the imaginative women who occupy a middle place in the latter-day progress of their sex, the non-productive idealists who are too gifted to find expression in the baking of a frosted cake or the working of a bit of embroidery, and who are insuf- ficiently endowed to contribute to the world's store of aesthetics. It was significant of Mrs. Gordon's optimism in all matters pertaining to the affections, that, despite the disastrous wreck of her first marriage, she could 50 IN THE ELEVENTH HOUR still sketch, in fact, this accomplishment was prominent among the small stock of resources with which she began her widowhood. Alingham's family, which was wholly feminine, and unusually gifted in the wordless expression of grievance, gave him to understand that, as head of the house, he left much to be desired. His oldest sister, Millicent, who was six-and-twenty by the parish register and two-and-twenty by a system of common enough subtraction, announced her engage- ment to Baron Eppstein, a Hungarian banker, with a shade too much profile to suit her family. She had met Eppstein the winter previous on the Riviera, and her acceptance of him had depended on her brother's luck in the States. Lady Alingham had lost her nerve, and feeling that she must econo- mise, frantically drank tea at two-and-six the pound, instead of her usual five-shilling blend. The twins, the Honourables Maude and Muriel, feared that their presentation would have to be deferred another season, a contingency which, in view of poor Mil- licent's fate, considerably worried these prudent damsels of nineteen. Alingham heard about the two-and-six tea, the Hebrew banker, and the cost of court gowns, every time he dined with his mother and sisters, and would come away from these little family affairs feeling that he owed it to his womankind to propose to Mrs. Gordon immediately, and that should she refuse him, duty would compel him to abduct her and demand a ransom. Dinner en famille invariably drove him to the Cecil, LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT framing jaded proposals on the way. He felt that, considering Mrs. Gordon's late bereavement and his own interest in another woman, an ardent pro- posal would be in decidedly bad form. But the first glimpse of Alice, glowing radiant in the sorcery of his presence, killed loyalty to his womankind, wiped out the mental drafting of his offer, even shook his sublime faith in what he had to barter. His arrival at the Cecil was always the signal for tea-brewing on the part of Alice, whose ideas on the subject of tea were American, and unrestricted as to time or cir- cumstance. The fact that he willingly sacrificed his digestion, his nerves, his British prejudice, and drank tea before luncheon or after dinner with the impar- tiality of an Irish maidservant, was greater proof of his infatuation than the writing of sonnets or the twanging of guitars beneath her window would have been. Mrs. Gordon chose to see nothing in Lord Aling- ham's insatiable thirst for tea, nor in her young cousin's appeal for longer frocks and high-heeled slippers. Some men liked tea, and all girls had a weakness for pretty slippers. It did not behoove the Cleopatras, the Ninon d'Enclos, and the Eliza- beth Gordons of this world to cultivate wrinkles in tracing the sequence in such facts as these. Some- times the grim humour of the situation even tickled a smile from Alingham, and he felt hopeful, for no particular reason but that absolute despair is difficult to cultivate at seven-and-twenty. But there were times when he floundered in the depths and it would take the yellow devil half the 52 IN THE ELEVENTH HOUR night to renew his faith in himself, and persuade him that he really was a good sort of chap and it was not his fault if the world was awry and a man went bankrupt because he had inherited luxurious tastes. And once the yellow devil got a hearing, he invariably proved himself an eloquent attorney. His pleading would take the sting out of living, and Alingham was content to sit and sip and sip while the clock ran away with the night and the yellow devil fought his battles, crushed his enemies, and whispered something in his ear about the Prime Ministership. And when he had sipped till he lost his sense of humour, which was his substitute for a conscience, he would see himself, in honoured old age, the patron saint of wild-oat sowers of a later generation, young men whose fathers would take heart in remem- bering that Alingham had run his course and been a bankrupt before achieving the exalted position he afterwards occupied in the Government. And when the day would look in at the window, gray and haggard, like the uprising of sorrow, and the yellow devil was exhausted from much miracle- working, a blue-lipped sodden thing would fling itself on the bed to enjoy forgetting that it lived. And not a mile away, Alice, too uplifted by the exaltation of the rainbow world into which she had wandered to know the profounder unconsciousness of sleep, would dream of this soulless thing as her mind floated lightly down the shoals of slumber. Alingham, despite his ill luck in the States, still had faith in his name and title as a matrimonial 53 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT talisman. In this his faith never wavered. He might tease his bothersome old uncle about landlady baiting, he might speculate as to the sensations of a cold kiss from a revolver's muzzle on his temple, these possible alternatives, however, were of his own seeking; but the fact remained that he was a peer of the realm, and that the demand for peeresses American peeresses was never supplied. His childlike and British faith in his name and title kept him loitering at Mrs. Gordon's side, an unavowed but most attentive cavalier. Why anticipate the inevitable? Mrs. Gordon was a woman of excellent taste, and according to the higher standards of her own country, it was better to marry a bankrupt peer and lift his mortgages than to wander aimlessly over the earth. Rich Americans appeared to have no other alternatives. He felt a dim pity for himself, as one might feel who was forced to sell a splendid heritage under foreclosure, and found even the magnificence of the price inadequate to compensate for old asso- ciation and other purely sentimental considerations. The woman was going to get the better of the barter. She was to have an honoured name, one illustrious in history. She was going to walk with ease and grace to a dignified niche in society, where she might look down on the struggles of her countrywomen and be amused when it suited her whim, or extend a helping hand if she should be disposed to be kind. And she was to walk thus to the goal, unhampered, because she was by his side and because his arm would protect her from the jostling crowd of social aspirants who struggled, fought, and fell by the way- 54 IN THE ELEVENTH HOUR side; and he was there, with his right of way, because, some centuries ago, one of his ancestors had amused himself by making and unmaking kings. For what could she buy, in that raw, crude country of hers beyond the sea, that would equal in value the home he was about to give her? She might build up stone upon stone, and fill it with the treasures of Ormuz and of Ind; but, after all, there would then be nothing left to her but to shut up her palace, after the manner of her people, and sail away to the older countries, in search of the some- thing beyond the reach of the dollar in all its almightiness. So, if he hesitated to say the words that were to put beyond reach the dearest thing that had come into his life, it was, so he persuaded himself, be- cause he was in a position to dictate; he was offer- ing much for little. This was Alingham's point of view in regard to Mrs. Gordon, the point of view, however, be it said in justice to him, that a man reserves for his solitary pipe, and is then obliged to remember all the buffets of fortune as an excuse for holding. 55 CHAPTER VIII A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A WELL-PRESERVED GENTLEMAN THE pressure to which Uncle Reginald had been subjected as guardian to a bankrupt peer, with the anxieties incident to such a wardenship, did not present their depleting account for settlement till he had been for some days com- fortably settled in his well-appointed lodgings in Half-Moon Street, Piccadilly, where he made the alarming discovery that his bite at life was feebler than before he went to the States. His morning bacon had lost its savour, and his nights were turned into nerve-racking vigils of unrest. His assumption of a frantic interest in life, which for the last ten years had been becoming more and more of a painful pretence, settled into a pitiful farce from which any exit would have been welcome. If the last of the Plantagenets had consulted his own will in the matter, he would have taken to his bed and sent for a spiritual adviser; his bones ached from the youthful capering demanded by the role he had been playing for nearly the allotted span. But family pride would not permit him to give up while there was the faintest hope of disentangling his sister's affairs. According to his philosophy, it 56 A WELL-PRESERVED GENTLEMAN would be better to sacrifice health, digestion, and the last pretension to a semblance of youth than to be branded with the stigma of a poverty-stricken family connection. But it was telling on him horribly. He could see in the cunning arrangement of mirrors by which he daily studied his face to find what progress time was making with his account, that the hieroglyphics about his mouth and nose spelled truths that not only he who ran might read, but that the swiftest runner could not well avoid reading. He bought a bottle of Bloom of Youth at an American chemist's in Trafalgar Square, and applied it every night according to the directions, but, despite its insinuating title, it made no appreciable difference in his appearance. The preparations for Mr. Howard's first appear- ance in the morning were as complicated with for- malities as a state ceremony. Trescott, his man, who assisted in the capacity of first gentleman of the bedchamber, was acquiring a liberal education in diplomacy. The great four-poster in which Mr. Howard slept bore about the same relation to his matutinal transformation as does the cabinet to a materialising medium. A bell within its curtained recess would convey to Trescott that his master was ready for his tepid plunge. The necessary preparations for this function completed, Trescott would retire, after having announced to the four- poster that the bath was ready. His bath over, Reggie would again retire to the cabinet and ring for breakfast. In all the years of his service Tres- 57 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT cott had never yet had a glimpse of his master in those early morning hours when the worn-out wheels of being were gathering their impetus for another effort. Trescott, on the particular morning in question, having arranged the breakfast on the table, with the morning papers and a little sheaf of letters close at hand, retired a second time, and again his master emerged from the cabinet after he had heard the servant close the door. Among the letters, there was a despairing wail from his sister, Lady Alingham, who had just heard of their arrival in England; two invitations to second-best houses, which he decided to refuse ; and a long, ill-spelled letter from Delphine, asking what was the matter. Delphine was French. Inci- dentally, she was bad from her boots, which were several sizes too small, to her hats, which were several sizes too large. She was the type of lady that chronically inquires if anything is the matter. Reggie breakfasted slowly; in the art of mastica- tion he was a disciple of the late Mr. Gladstone. Again he went back to the " cabinet," rang for Trescott, told him to remove the dishes, and not to disturb him for two hours. When the last of the Plantagenets was again alone, he locked the door, went to a ponderous writing- desk, unlocked it, opened a secret drawer, and took therefrom a pair of heavy, steel-rimmed spectacles, and glancing furtively around to make sure that no lurking eye observed him, adjusted them, and then proceeded to answer his sister's letter: 58 A WELL-PRESERVED GENTLEMAN MY DEAR SISTER, Ally and I returned from the States sooner than we expected, owing to the outrageous attacks made on the poor boy by their sensational press. And while we were assured by some of the best people that this sort of personal attack is quite common and by no means restricted to strangers, and that we should do well to ignore it absolutely, Alingham was so distressed by the unpleasant notoriety it gave him that he insisted on returning by the next steamer. And very fortunate was the decision, as subsequent events proved, my dear sister. We met Algy Gordon's widow aboard the steamer, and from the beginning she and Alingham seemed to find much in common. Algy Gordon, you will remember, was the black sheep of the Herefordshire Gordons, who made him quite a handsome allowance for living out of England. He went to the States and married one of the richest of American heiresses, a daughter of the eccentric old chap who got the better of poor Guest in that cattle deal. Gordon's suicide was the result of a difficulty with the old man about money. He came back to England as the promoter of plumbago mines, squandered the funds, and returned to the States for more. The result may be surmised from Gordon's suicide a fort- night after his return. And that is really all I know of the matter. And now, my dear sister, I beg of you to lose no time, nor hesitate, at any sacrifice, to return to England imme- diately, open Dunstan, and invite Mrs. Gordon to stop with you. She will be delighted with the place. It has, you know, a strong Baedeker element, and Baedeker has become the Bible of Americans. Personally, I was glad to return to England. As a coun- try, America is a vast, incoherent continent, burdened by its own bulk. The better class lives in Europe. Its politics 59 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT are run by the Irish in the East and the Germans in the West. Its better social life has no individuality, being but a clever imitation of ours. Their leisure class is an avowed failure. The men have no idea, either of sport or of respon- sibility. They spend their time drinking cocktails and mak- ing farcical attempts at country life. It is all very stupid and pathetic to an onlooker. But of this more when I see you. My regards to the girls and to Baron Eppstein, and thank Heaven, my dear sister, that Millicent is acting so sensibly in the matter. Your affectionate brother, REGINALD. Reggie then declined the two invitations to second- best country houses, and again locked his skeleton in its closet. He took a hand-mirror, carefully examined his face to see if the spectacles had left a mark on his nose and temples, saw that they had, and concluded not to ring for Trescott for a quarter of an hour, the which time he whiled away with the wickedest of French novels. There was no trace of the skeleton when Tres- cott came to shave him. And an hour later he was walking in the direction of his club, it being his first appearance since his return to England. He forgot his own anxieties, momentarily, in two abso- lutely new scandals, made an excellent luncheon, and picked up a good tip that sent him to see his man of business in the city. As he was returning in a hansom, he noticed the Duchess of Denborough's carriage outside of Gerard's in Regent Street. And he remembered, coincident with seeing the Duchess' 60 A WELL-PRESERVED GENTLEMAN liveries, that he had not ordered flowers to be sent to his wife's grave for some time. It was just the sort of errand to have the Duchess surprise one in. Her views on conjugal fidelity were modelled on those of Her Majesty, and while the Duchess' wine was eloquent of her widowhood, it was worth drink- ing without a grimace for an invitation to Dunbarton Castle. But the great lady did not seem disposed to dwell on her former friendship with the Hon. Mr. Howard. She gave him two fingers and bade the florist carry her purchases to the carriage. Reggie, who had expected quite another sort of greeting, ordered his orchids, but in reply to the shopman's, " Where shall I send them, sir?" Reggie did not mention the last resting-place of the departed Mrs. Howard. The Duchess' rebuff had made him very low-spirited, and sending flowers to a cemetery was not exactly an avenue to conviviality. With barely a perceptible hesitation, Reggie gave the address of Delphine, and added a brief note to the effect that he would call, and that nothing was the matter. He left Gerard's feeling that life was indeed " daily," as a celebrated Frenchman once described it. There was no more important function in Regi- nald's daily routine than his afternoon nap. He would not have sacrificed it for a royal audience. Accordingly, after despatching the flowers to Del- phine, he drove back to his Half-Moon Street lodg- ings, took a good drink of Scotch whiskey, and proceeded to court slumber. Delphine, with whom he had made an appointment 61 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT to dine, followed as her profession the gentle art of making courtesies to the patrons of a fashionable milliner. She would meet them at the door and display her wolfish white teeth in a smile that was intended to be amiable, then lead them, as lambs, to the slaughter. She could tell, at a glance, just how many guineas could be wrung from a victim for a hat, and she never relaxed her hold for a shilling less. Delphine knew that Reggie was a most guileless old gentleman, but so profound was her knowledge of human nature, and so great her skill in applying it, that she never let slip an opportunity of impressing him with her faith in his ideal state of wickedness. This childlike belief in his depravity touched the respectable old man as few things could have done. Like the rest of us he had his unattainable ideal, the next best thing to a realisation of which was the confidence of encouraging friends. But this particular dinner with Delphine was not a success : it lagged. The host was an unwitting death's head at his own feast. His doleful attempts to be devilish only accentuated the depressing dul- ness of the occasion. He was so tired that a bowl of hot gruel would have been much more acceptable than the champagne that he sipped with such pitiful pretence of relish; and Delphine, as she looked at his glazed eyes and noted his trembling hand, thought how awkward it would be if the recording angel should suddenly close his account as they sat at table, " Mon Dieu, and there would be coroners and such," and out of pity she gave him her wickedest smile. 62 A WELL-PRESERVED GENTLEMAN " Ah, poor Grandpa," she thought sympathetically, " he is, as the English say, ' the flesh wilting, and the spirit weak.' ' But the lingering leaden-footed moments devoted to the pursuit of pleasure came to an end at last, and Reggie was once more in his own rooms in Half-Moon Street, fretful and peevish as an ailing child, Trescott bearing the brunt of the iced champagne and grouse which were already beginning to dispute their account with tired nature. Reggie swore at Trescott roundly, at the same time making excuses to detain him ; he was so ill and weary of it all, yet he dreaded the darkness with its suggestion of death. What if the dread summons should be waiting for him to-night ? the summons whither ? The sweat rolled off his wrinkled old forehead at the thought, and something seemed to grip his entrails with an icy hand. The curtained bed seemed to close in upon him like a leaden coffin ; in his terror- quickened mind, he saw it all rehearsed, the comedy of his passing. The bell within the cabinet would not ring at his accustomed time. Trescott would wait half an hour, talk it over with the cook, dawdle away another half hour telling cheerful yarns of gentlemen found dead in their beds. Then Trescott would force the door, fling aside the curtains of the bed, and find him stark, with staring eyes and gaping mouth. He could hear Trescott give the alarm, and see the foolish con- sternation of the women who would call him " it," and frivol away the morning talking of the shoVk it gave them. And there would not be an eye in 63 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT all the world to shed a real tear. His sister would drink tea, much of it, and babble of him, but in the secret drawer of her soul she would be glad of the pittance that would come to her undowered brood. She would mourn him in crepe, but in her heart rejoice. And Trescott would be glad to get his clothes, and Mrs. Grabbitt would be glad to get his rooms to rent to Americans at double the price, she dare not cheat him. What Hell's brew had he drunk to-night to make him think these things ? But they were true. Had it not been true of his wife? She had gone to her bed the Honourable Mrs. Reginald Howard, and upbraiding him, and had left it, " it." Death had given her the whip hand; the invulnerable dead woman he had looked at the next morning had had the better of it, the ashen face that had stared up at him accusingly had had the incontrovertible last word. The long silence, the lack of interference, the unmolested freedom, in which he lived were more terrible than my lady's tongue. The only ones who would care, should he die, would be the men of his own age at the club, and they would care through fear. Howard gone ? Who next ? He saw them mop their foreheads, and smiled grimly. It was as if he were already beyond the reach of fear. " O God, O God," he called from out the dark- ness; but no God answered. Then he thought of the woman, the one in all his life who had loved him for himself. She had asked no favours, no questions, for that matter. 64 A WELL-PRESERVED GENTLEMAN He had been enough. But he had shoved her aside, and she had been dead years ago. There was no woman, not one in all the world, who cared. And again he called " O God " ; and again no God answered. He tossed in the great four-poster. Then the thought of the chloral bottle came to him like an inspiration. He poured out a dose and slept long and dreamlessly. IN WHICH TWO LADIES EMPLOY MANY WORDS FOR THE PURPOSE OF CONCEALING THOUGHT MRS. GORDON, through the medium of the cottage piano that occupied a corner of her sitting-room at the Hotel Cecil, was interpreting Chopin with a timid wrist and a hysterical intensity that would have amazed the composer; Alice was staring into the open fire with wide, unseeing eyes, thinking thoughts that excluded even the tumult of sound at her elbow. Alingham's departure, some few minutes previous, to keep a dinner engagement with Musgrove, who still held out tinned meats and the North Pole as alternatives to matrimony, had left both ladies silent and engrossed, each with her own thoughts. He had mentioned during the course of his call that his mother would be in town the following week, and that she hoped to have the pleasure of calling; and while Elizabeth Gordon had murmured nicely restrained conventional delight at the prospect, still four nocturnes, two waltzes, and one mazourka had not furnished sufficient exercise to put her in com- plete possession of herself. This recognition by the titled lady Mrs. Gordon regarded in the light of social chrism administered 66 MANY WORDS CONCEAL THOUGHT by one who had the power to confer many temporal blessings upon one who stood sorely in need of them. Not only had she the zeal of the true devotee, but also the humility ; for what she was about to receive, she would willingly have endured the flagellations of the early martyrs. Furthermore, she was unembar- rassed by Quixotic notions regarding the prolonga- tion of her widowhood. Her marriage to Algernon Gordon had been so conspicuously unfortunate as to make a retrieval of the blunder almost a duty of vindication to her sex. It ill behooved the victim of so humiliating a covenant to perpetuate the memory of its failure by a too obvious loyalty. A year of becoming weeds, she felt, was a sufficient concession to the melancholy circumstance. Again, Alingham was, she reminded herself, a suitor of whom any woman might well be proud, superlatively handsome, of unimpeachable lineage, not rich, perhaps, but with a competence she knew nothing of his bankruptcy and with the ability to make a career; what more could woman want? His title it was that sharply pointed the apex of his perfections ; coming from a country where nine-tenths of the population are titled, where gen- erals, majors, honourables, and captains are gener- ously awarded these distinctions by others holding similar patents of nobility, where the very chiropo- dist is a " doctor," and the alderman is made " Hon- ourable " for life, she chiefly valued that which could not be imitated by admiring fellow-citizens, despite the sincerity of their admiration. She was infatuated with the notion of him, and 67 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT having decided that love is the most diverting ingre- dient in the daily portion allotted us by the gods, she decided to be loved, since she had no further capacity for loving. Her former matrimonial adven- ture had sapped for all time her limited capacity for affection. She was a miser of her own emotions, but she could take another's with both hands; Alingham, she believed, could give unsparingly and never count the cost. In return, she would preside at the head of his house, never wear unbecoming clothes, and help him toward his career. The prospective call of the Baroness seemed to promise realities in place of day-dreams. Cinder- ella's visit from the fairy godmother who turned the pumpkin into the coach could not have been more opportune. No wonder she played nocturnes as if they had been triumphal battle marches; for her, time seemed written in a jig tune; the battle march was the most dignified compromise of which she was capable. But with Alice the growing complexity of the situa- tion was forgotten in the one supreme fact, she was going to see his mother. The hallowed joy she felt at the thought of Lady Alingham's coming dig- nified the prospective visit into one of sacramental importance. His mother was no alien in that new world that love had constructed from the sordid monotony of her existence, but rather a sheltering divinity that supplied her crudest need, that of being understood. Alice used to think of his mother in the darkness, in her little white bed, while the sleep goddess stood 68 MANY WORDS CONCEAL THOUGHT without hour after hour, trying to steal in and seal the eyes that could not close on the wonder and beauty of it all. And she would see the outline of his face, dimmed a little by age, but of miraculous sweetness. The mouth more patient, the beauty of the bow broken somewhat by the bit of restraint. The eyes would look into her own with a steadier glow than his, and there was always perfect understanding. " Lady Alingham is to call," said Mrs. Gordon, wheeling round from the piano, nicely adjusting her democratic lips to a beautiful pronunciation of the title, and repeating it with the lingering labial gusto with which a hungry man might pronounce the various items of the bill of fare while waiting for dinner. " It 's really quite a concession for her to come to town to call," she continued, " because she could have sent me an invitation to a week-end visit, or a little house-party or something of that sort. And, personally, I prefer to have her come up to town to look at me than to be sent to her, for inspection, in the country. It would give me an uncomfortable feeling of ' carriage prepaid.' ' " And there would be the anxiety about being returned," Alice could not resist the temptation of saying. " Really, Alice, you are beginning to talk at last. Do you know, I was dreadfully afraid you were going to be a ' sweet girl.' Of course, you can afford eccentricities, but sweetness is such an unfor- tunate pose there is really no demand for the eau sucre e type." 69 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT " But the pyrotechnic is so universal. Besides, if I attempted it in your vicinity, I should feel like the fifth of July." " I wonder to which type Lady Alingham belongs. It 's a dreadful bore to have to meet a strange woman, anyhow; Schopenhauer was quite right when he said it was a case of Guelph meeting Ghibelline. And one woman with a title is equal to two without. The handle is to the woman what the claws are to the cat. It 's different with a man. If his family has had a title long enough to forget it, it 's no more bother to him than pedigree is to a prize Durham. It 's only women, linoleum lords, and mustard baronets who believe in the Divine Inspiration of the Peerage. And, oh, I almost forgot Americans." Despite her flippancy on the subject of titles, Mrs. Gordon made a pilgrimage the following morning from book-shop to book-shop in search of much literature of the " court-guide " school, and spent many hours in reading up titles and the proper and improper way of addressing them. She even went the length of locking her sitting-room door, and rehearsing, four times in one morning, the ceremony of receiving Lady Alingham, with a corpulent armchair doing duty as her ladyship. She meant to come through this affair with brilliancy, but she no more knew how it was going to be accomplished than the rider with a fence, a ditch, and a nasty up-hill scramble before him, it was neck or nothing to Mrs. Gordon, and she meant it to be neck. 70 MANY WORDS CONCEAL THOUGHT Poor Lady Alingham had called on so many probable daughters-in-law that the situation began to have all the perfunctoriness of church-going. The Honourable Millicent, having made up her mind to marry the Hebrew banker, did not feel called upon to attend the ceremony of receiving this latest heiress into the fold. She was weary of extending a prospective sisterly hand to every rich woman she met, and later of having to withdraw it. Moreover, she blamed her brother for the distasteful marriage she was about to make, and was in no mood to further his interests. She could not forget the long period of economical exile she had been forced to spend in continental towns, months and years that ate up youth and opportunity, and had no more definite results than the scraping together of a few pounds to enable the head of the house to plunge more deeply into folly, propose to heir- esses who rejected him, and try to retrieve the family fortunes at Monte Carlo and the race-courses. Millicent, therefore, did not feel obliged to do further violence to her British prejudices by calling on the ladies in question. She had lived away from the scene of the American invasion so long as quite to overlook the fact that the money of the invaders was very well received in the best circles. Her ideas on America and the Americans were still in the rudimentary or comic-paper stage; she regarded them as a singular people whose great wealth alone kept managers from capturing and exhibiting them at Earl's Court in the intervals between Kaffir and Dahomey displays. 71 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT In the meantime Mrs. Gordon worked feverishly to preserve the necessary appearance of boredom regarding Lady Alinghanrs call. She invested in palms and photographs to soften the by-the-week look of the drawing-room; and, at the last minute, she decided in favour of a study in extravagant simplicity at Liberty's, in preference to anything her own elaborate wardrobe afforded in the way of a requisite toilet. She was already word-perfect in her lines; she had decided, after an exhaustive study of the little books of the " Court-guide " school, that she must address her Ladyship by her title once, or maybe twice, and then not refer to it again. The con- versation, she felt sure, would almost immediately turn on the bleakness of town in Autumn and the desirability of settling elsewhere as soon as possible. Then she must deftly turn the talk, like the clever hostess she meant to be, into the guileless paths of the Zoo, for the benefit of the Honourables Maude and Muriel. The Zoo and Charlotte M. Yonge's books, she understood, were two of the really trust- worthy subjects given to the young British female for discussion, before her presentation. " Well, Alice, and what would you like to do with yourself this afternoon ? " asked Mrs. Gordon at luncheon, on the day fixed for Lady Alingham's call. " Drive, or wander about sight-seeing with your nose in a Baedeker ? Do you know, you ' sight- see ' so conscientiously that I fancy you intend to write a book, one of those ready-made books that are so popular at home for holiday gifts, MANY WORDS CONCEAL THOUGHT Somebody's London, Cardinal Wolsey's London, for instance, Dickens' London, or something like that. Why don't you do ' Chauncey Depew's Lon- don,' with the jokes expurgated? I think it would take. When I write a book, I am going in for the hand-me-down school of literature. No one has yet written on ' The Grandmother in Mediaeval Art.' That is one thing in art that they have not yet attacked. I must begin on it right away, or some popular clergyman will do it before I get a chance. Or I might do a William Waldorf Astor calendar." Luncheon had been an oppressively silent meal. Both Mrs. Gordon and Alice ate little and seemed abstracted. Mrs. Gordon's monologue had been in the nature of an attack on the silence, rather than a desire to beguile Alice into conversation. ;< You forget, Betty, Lady Alingham is coming to call this afternoon. I don't think we would better go out, do you ? " " Oh, so she is ! What a bore ! " drawled Mrs. Gordon, quite overdoing the expression of ennui she selected for the occasion. " Do have another chop, Alice. No? I must order stout for your luncheon hereafter. You are looking quite pale." After luncheon, Alice arranged some flowers in the drawing-room vases, and Mrs. Gordon vented her superfluous energy on the piano, thundering out Liszt's " Rhapsodic Hongroise " till it sounded like the expulsion scene from " Rip Van Winkle." Mrs. Gordon was one of those women who, while they agree with Talleyrand that " conversation is the art 73 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT of concealing thought," deprive their pianos of any such fine reserve. Her late husband invariably gauged her moods by her music, which was largely pedal execution. The piano bore the brunt of it, all the afternoon, so that when the bit of pasteboard that was to be a social passport to Mrs. Gordon did arrive, that lady was subdued to just the social pitch she had worried the piano to attain. Lady Alingham felt her British assurance recoil for a moment in the presence of this imposing young woman whose slender neck rose so majestically from the caressing draperies at her throat, whose perfect hand was extended at just the right angle, and whose " So good of you, Lady Alingham," was all the most exacting Englishwoman could demand in the way of intonation. " Thank Heaven, she has not the American voice," her Ladyship thought, as she responded to Mrs. Gordon's greeting, and with a dignity quite Episcopal presented the twins, the Honourables Maude and Muriel. At their coming Alice had started up, confused, like a dreamer who feels the flash of a light on his closed eyes. The flood of tenderness she felt for this woman who had given life to him who made the world worth while, snapped all restraining fetters. She loved Alingham in the simple, un- ashamed way that women loved when the world was younger, and she could have said with Ruth, had she followed her first blind impulse, " Thy country shall be my country, and thy people my people, and thy God my God." 74 MANY WORDS CONCEAL THOUGHT But as she bowed in response to Mrs. Gordon's introduction, which stated no relationship to " Miss Dean," the reverent impulse was checked by the chilling sweep of her Ladyship's lashes. For his mother had nodded with the sublime condescension that the British lady of quality reserves for the young person whose talents have been cultivated that the more fortunate may benefit therefrom, and whose innumerable advantages in the gentle arts have a market value somewhere in the neighbourhood of twenty pounds a year. The portrait of his dream mother disappeared in the presence of this typical Belgravian hack. And in its place was bitter mockery. For a moment her brain rebelled and there was chaos and the baf- fling sense of loss; then the mental grappling-hooks took up the situation and deliberately began to adjust things to fit her dazed perception. She realised it was a chill afternoon in Autumn and the street lamps were feebly struggling with the London fog, and that, within, a hard old woman was chattering to an equally hard young one, and that two girls of her own age were sitting up as straight as was consistent with their attitude of effacement in the maternal presence. But, oh, the ache of it all! For the first time she recognised the mask they were all grinning behind, and understood their language, and how easy it would be to grow proficient in it, and how the barbed speech eased the barb-pricked soul. The room, with its bowing, smiling women, began to grow unstable, it spun like a top, and the flowers 75 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT the flowers she had lingered over arranging because his mother was coming grew sickening in their sweetness. And the voices of the two women bandying their eternal compliments sounded far off, like voices that mock and chatter in a fever. Her sense of humour, seldom so laggard, stepped in to take matters in charge, and she could feel herself grinning, partly to hide the hurt, and partly because she was deciding that a sense of humour is the laughing-gas administered by a merciful fate before wrenching the unyielding tooth. She was conscious of a growing weakness for the young ladies, they were so very like their brother. She noticed they were dressed exactly alike, in smoke-coloured coats and skirts, and that the pink Liberty scarfs about their throats matched perfectly the fine blush that ebbed and flowed in their cheeks every time they spoke or were spoken to. Alice found their pink-and-white prettiness most attractive, and while they were about her own age, the way they blushed and effaced themselves made them seem years younger. Their coils of light brown hair were fastened up as tight and slick at the back of their Honourable little heads as if they had been dressed for a brisk canter, and from the topmost quill of their hats to the toes of their little walking-boots, there was not a loose thread, hair, or button to be seen. Their toilets were planned and executed with the mathematical exactness of a mechanical drawing, and Alice felt her own sartorial efforts hasty and irrelevant by contrast. They were so young and soft and shrinking that 76 MANY WORDS CONCEAL THOUGHT it was almost impossible to conceive of any process of social evolution that could convert them into matrons of the class of which their mother was typical, red of face, rotund of outline from the bearing of many children and the drinking of much brown sherry, battling fiercely for establishments for their young, religious, bigoted, self -satisfied, and arrogant. But they gave no promise of these painful develop- ments as they sat demurely contemplating the pattern of the carpet. It was the Honourable Muriel who gathered her courage to break the long silence on the part of Alice with: " Were you bad, coming across ? " Alice nobly resisted the temptation of saying: " Not half as bad as I was a moment ago, when I wanted to make a face at you and your helpless little sister, just to prove I was as shocking as your mother seemed to think." But she answered quite properly : " Oh, no, it was delightful. I grew very fond of the ocean after I got over being afraid of it." " Really," chorused the Misses Alingham. They pronounced it " rilly." Their mother's eyes wandered in their direction, and they instantly relapsed into a pink-and-white silence, during which they heard her say to Mrs. Gordon : " I hope you will be able to come to us for the shooting. We 're having quite a small party this Autumn. Dunstan, you know, has been closed for several years. We have been living on the Continent, and Alingham is not fond of it. The 77 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT shooting is not particularly good, and he usually spends the Autumn in our place in Scotland." " We shall be delighted," murmured Mrs. Gordon, remembering Alice as the primary cause of her European junketing. And the Dowager's eyes wandered, enquiringly this time, to the young person who was of sufficient importance to command a share in the personal pronoun. Slight pause, during which Mrs. Gordon decides that things can't be as bad with the family of Aling- ham as the head of the house has been hinting, as it must cost tremendously to entertain at Dunstan, even on a small scale. Aloud : " I have always wanted to stay at an English country house. When I was here before, with Mr. Gordon, he had a great deal of business on hand and we had n't time to accept any of our county invitations." Imperceptible pause, during which the Dowager wonders at her effrontery : " Does n't she know I knew her husband was absolutely under the ban before he married her ? County invitations, fiddlesticks!" Aloud, and with gratified surprise : " Really, and are we to have the pleasure of enjoying your first experience of English country life? That will be delightful." Imperceptible pause, during which Mrs. Gordon speculates on the probable motive of the house-party, decides things are developing too simply, and con- cludes there is more in the plot than she understands. Aloud : " So good of you." 78 MANY WORDS CONCEAL THOUGHT Imperceptible pause, during which the Dowager hopes Mrs. Gordon is not expecting any lavish entertaining at Dunstan. Aloud : " We are to have quite a small party, you know, just a bit of the place will be open. It 's far more cosey. My health has not been equal to the responsibilities of Dunstan for several years." " U-m-m-m," murmurs Mrs. Gordon, sympa- thetically, while her eyelashes droop at half-mast for the departed health of the Baroness, that has certainly left no traces of its passing in her brick- dust cheeks and bright blue eyes. " You find the Continent agrees better with you than the uncertainties of of the English climate ? " Mrs. Gordon finishes with deep solicitude, after floundering a bit. Imperceptible pause, during which the Baroness asks herself if Mrs. Gordon intended that for a fling at their financial straits. Aloud, and with perfect truth : " I find the Continent far less trying than England. But I am really looking forward to Dunstan. It 's quite an interesting place, if one can forget its bleakness." Imperceptible pause, during which Mrs. Gordon decides that Dunstan is probably no exception to the majority of English houses built before the Victorian accession, in laying claim to a bed slept in by Queen Elizabeth. Aloud : " It must be full of historical associations." "Queen Elizabeth visited it in 1598 and wrote her name on the window of the room she occupied, Queen's room it has been called ever since." 79 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT Mrs. Gordon greeted this information with properly awed silence. Not a muscle of her well- trained face responded to her inward hilarity. Imperceptible pause, during which the Baroness decides it is fortunate Americans delight in guide- book episodes, there being little else left at Dunstan. " I hope it is haunted," said Mrs. Gordon, sweetly. " I should like my first country house to be haunted." " There used to be a ghost, a secret chamber, and a dungeon with an echo," smiled Lady Alingham, with charming indulgence. " Really," answered Mrs. Gordon, " one could hardly hope for anything more than the ghost." Imperceptible pause, during which she decides to ring for tea; and speculates if the Alinghams have a family skeleton, in the shape of a royal scandal; makes up her mind that they could hardly escape it, having complied so conscientiously with other requisite traditions of a great family, and rings for tea. The Dowager was delighted that the refreshment was confined to tea, thin bread-and-butter, and cake of an innocuous species. Americans, she had been given to understand, carried their ostentation even to plum-cake, pate de fois gras and bonbons at tea. In which case she would have felt obliged to attempt a gastronomic feat or two in the interests of her son's prospects. And that would have spoiled her dinner, and dinner was the first article of the Dowager's domestic faith, even when it consisted of but a joint and vegetables, served in the sitting-room of her London lodgings. The tea-cake and thin bread-and- 80 MANY WORDS CONCEAL THOUGHT butter disposed the Baroness in Mrs. Gordon's favour as few things could have done. When they had gone, Mrs. Gordon played a bril- liant scherzo on the piano, but it was inadequate to express her elation. She picked up the trailing skirt of her Liberty gown, and danced a wild pas seul. Alice sat still and watched her with bright hard eyes; her mouth all smiling pretence, the soul within her languishing with sick distaste for all things. 81 CHAPTER X CONTAINING SOME MEDIAEVAL HISTORY AND A SORDID MODERN DILEMMA IT is a long stretch from the tea-drinking of the Baroness of Alingham with Mrs. Gordon, in the Hotel Cecil, back to the turbulent reign of his Majesty Henry VIII. of England, " Defender of the Faith," and, later, arch-enemy to that which he had defended; but one follows the other on the slender thread of sequence that slips as unobtrusively through the centuries as the silken thread that holds together a rope of pearls. For it was in the reign of the royal Blue-beard that the Alinghams first became great folk, and waxed fat on the confiscated church lands that the " Defender of the Faith " appropriated, to reward his faithful. The root, however, from which sprang the family of Alingham, or, as it was originally spelled, Alleyn- hame, was one Geoffrey Alleynhame, who flourished some centuries earlier. Geoffrey was casting about for a lever with which to lift the world, when the voice of Peter the Hermit crying, as one in the wilderness, for gallant knights and true to go to Palestine and wrest the Holy Sepulchre from the hands of the unbeliever, sent Geoffrey vaulting to his horse ere Peter's cry was done ringing. Let 82 A SORDID MODERN DILEMMA scoffers who are pleased to regard crusading ances- tors as the first parents of Mrs. 'Arris study the Alingham arms, and they will find the three Saracens' heads. Geoffrey, therefore, with one sweep of his sword, having smitten off the heads of three Saracens, took therefrom his cognisance, returned to England, and left a hardy crop of descendants to prick their way down the centuries, joust and tourney, fight and sometimes fall, beneath the blazonry of his triple infidel harvest. They were good friends and bad enemies, these roystering, fighting, drinking, love-making Aling- hams, who at least swaggered picturesquely in the chorus of English history, if they left the middle of the stage to their betters. But the Wars of the Roses, with their great names, crowded out lesser Thespians, like the Alinghams, and decades slipped by, till the rosary of years was nearly all told, and we hear of Hugo Alingham, student of law, in the reign of that jolly Bowler of Skulls, " Bluff King Hal." Hugo was a brilliant student of the law, but a better student of men ; he watched the game with a shut mouth and open ears, and the king watched him. Henry had need of eloquence at the bar to reconcile the people to his tastes for novelty, a new religion, a new wife every time he saw a pretty face, a new aristocracy when the old proved troublesome, till the eyes of England ached with novelty. Young Hugo must have been a most discreet gentleman for these trying times, when to lose one's head was to have it picked up by the headsmen. 83 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT For not only did he retain that indispensable member intact, but lived to cover it with a Lord Chief Justice's wig, and write himself Baron Alingham of Dunstan. And the confiscated abbey of St. Dun- stan's, with all the lands appertaining thereto, were his by royal grant. The student of the law had done well. John Sylvester, twenty-fifth and last abbot, did some wonderful cursing of the king, before they cut his tongue out, which was manifestly bad repartee, and apparently served no purpose, as the tradition goes that he still walks about Dunstan on stormy nights, scolding, threatening, and complaining, having the last word with a vengeance. The Lord Chief Justice died in his bed, where it is eminently proper for Lord Chief Justices to die. His monument may be seen in Westminster to-day; there is a fine bit of carving, showing him borne upward toward lowering storm clouds, by four cor- pulent angels; the epitaph says all England wept, while Heaven rejoices in the judicial presence. Queen Elizabeth visited Dunstan many years after the death of her sainted father, to be exact, in 1598, and she wrought her stately signature the royalest woman ever writ on the window of her bedchamber. The Barons Alingham, of Dunstan, having passed through the needle's eye to royal favour, by means of the countersign discretion, should have remem- bered their watchword. In fact, their politics and religion were reckoned trusty barometers of the royal mind for several generations, but they fell 84 A SORDID MODERN DILEMMA away from prudence with the Protectorate, and it is not till the reign of Queen Anne that we find them again really prosperous. The old manor that had been partially rebuilt from Dunstan Abbey in the reign of Henry, had been a marvel of early Tudor architecture, a two- storied house with gables and attics, the whole sur- mounted by a balustrade and pinnacles, the windows bays divided with stone mullions, and over the door the arms of the family and the motto. But Cromwell's soldiers sacked and burnt it; and Dunstan was but a sorry wreck, with a century's added infirmities, when Baron William mended the family fortunes by marrying a lady of vast wealth but scant lineage, in the reign of Queen Anne. My lady, whose money still smelled of the shop in which it had been coined, was for restoring the old Tudor house, that " had been in our family so long," as nearly as possible to the Dunstan of the reign of Henry. Not so her lord. He had known the dismal makeshifts of the old manor so long that he craved a " restoration " that would include the more diffuse splendour of a modern dwelling. So Dunstan became the anachronic medley that it is to-day; the Tudor manor, with its fine old gardens laid out to suit the varying weathers of an English climate, became but a supplementary con- sideration in the ambitious scheme of renewal that relegated the original building to the indignity of a back wing. The architectural medley that frowned, incoherently impressive, in place of the sturdy Tudor structure, was as wonderfully ornate within as with- 85 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT out. There were furlongs of corridors, labyrinths of rooms, cellars that would have held regiments everything on the most Titanic scale. The building demon had taken possession of the Lord of Dunstan, and his Lady's money, that wrought the miracles, seemed as inexhaustible as his whims. In the white salon, however, culminated Baron William's mania for the extraordinary and the magnificent. This room, designed from his own inspiration, was an oval apartment sixty feet in length, with a classic frieze in alto relievo by Valdre embracing its entire circumference. Its classic severity was the wonder of an age wearied by the lavish extravagance that had supplanted the sim- plicity of the Protectorate. They were all there, forever young, forever beautiful by the divine inspiration of Maestro Valdre's art, the gods and the mortals that they loved and hated. Paris, forever contemplative, holds the apple and ponders on the surpassing loveliness of women. Diana, petrified in joyous abandon, pauses, through endless ages, in the speeding of her arrow. Ceres, consumed through an eternity by imperishable grief, seeks Proserpine. And so all about the vast hall, the smiling, weeping throngs remain as they were wrought, and may not die and forget their loves and hates and hopes and griefs, and find rest, as we of the flesh. The white salon was further beautified by a crystal chandelier, or, as it was then called, a lustre. It held a hundred candles, and flooded the room with a snowy radiance that suggested the chill glitter of 86 A SORDID MODERN DILEMMA winter sunshine on Alpine snows. The furniture was in palest blue damask, that added to, rather than diminished, the chill effect. The white salon was used only on formal occasions, but even at these brief seasons the society of the Olympians proved depress- ing, and everyone was glad to retire to the cosey Tudor wing, with its low ceilings, wide grates, and polished wood floors. It was the Tudor wing that Lady Alingham pro- posed to open for her autumnal house-party. It was smaller, cosier, easier to heat than the big eighteenth-century portions of the house. Besides, the Honourable Reginald had told her that the Baedeker element of the Tudor wing would appeal to the Americans, and while the Baroness had not the faintest idea of what he meant by the Baedeker element, she decided that the Tudor wing should accordingly be opened, with perhaps the " white salon." Abridged as was Lady Alingham's list for the Dunstan house-party, she had had considerable difficulty in compiling it. One name after another came up at the family councils, only to be rejected. " Why not ask the Gorham-Greys, Mamma ? " Mil- licent would suggest. " My dear," Lady Alingham would whimper, " we can't have the Gorham-Greys, the last time they were here everything was so different. The entire house was open, there were plenty of well-trained servants, and the piano was in tune," she would conclude, rather feebly, hardly knowing what to select for a climax from out such general dilapi- 87 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT dation. " And we can't have the Northamptons, or the Bensons, or the Knolleys, or scores of other people, for the same reason." Her Ladyship sighed ; she found it more to her taste to tickle and cajole the demon poverty in some obscure lodging on the Continent than even to recognise it before a friendly audience at home. " Have the Hasletts, Mamma; they go everywhere. His portraits are becoming quite famous ; I hear the Princess Christian is going to sit to him." " Millicent, we can't afford to entertain uncertain people, like artists and writers and conjurors, now. People can do that when they are prosperous and it merely passes for eccentricity, but if they are poor, as we are, it gives the impression of having begun to associate with queer people." " Why not have some church people? " suggested her brother Reginald, in the capacity of advisory counsel. " You might have a bishop. Bishops make a house look as cosey as a cat does a cottage. Or even an earnest young curate who works in the London slums. They always tell such interesting stories of drunken cabmen and how they beat their wives." " H-a-h," sighed Lady Alingham, " I have n't got the courage to ask any church people. We Ve got such a bad cook. Your poor father and I, Millicent, used to dine with Bishop and Mrs. Damer every Friday in Lent, such beautiful dinners, always ten courses, and not a bit of meat in any of them. Ah, the Darners were truly religious people." Uncle Reginald, who knew his sister's love for 88 A SORDID MODERN DILEMMA a wordy ramble in preference to anything that might require her immediate attention, gently tried to bring her back to the subject in hand with: " My dear sister, if you are afraid your cuisine is not good enough to entertain a bishop or a curate, why don't you have a Ritualist? I hear they never take anything but water and potatoes." " Good gracious ! " said Lady Alingham, " how do they manage to preach on such a diet?" " Potatoes are an incentive to talk, look at the Irish." " Well, invite a Ritualist if you like," said Lady Alingham, sighing and contemplating her own hands. " I only hope it won't be depressing to see him eat his potatoes and water." " Mamma," said Millicent, " let us have Boadicea Byng." " Why, certainly," assented Lady Alingham. " I wonder why we did not think of Boadicea before." Boadicea Byng was a poor relation, poor even to the trained indigence of the Allinghams. She had fought that depressing, meat-tea, penny-bus sort of poverty with the dull weapons of gentility since the death of her father, the Reverend " Druid " Byng, as he was called, owing to his life-long devotion to his favourite study of early British history. Boadicea was the type of Englishwoman that always looks three-and-thirty. She had looked that age since she put on long frocks, and it was probable that she would totter to her grave at a ripe scriptural age and still look a petrified specimen of elderly young- ladyhood. She did her hair in a door-mat, like 89 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT the Princess of Wales, and she had an acute profile that looked better in a photograph than in real life. She would be certain to accept the invitation to Dunstan. A fortnight with " my cousins the Alinghams " was an oasis to Boadicea, in the desert of boarding-house life. She, having no background of magnificently squandered patrimony to pose against, like her cousins, envied them with a flattering bitterness. " There are the Hamiltons," said the Baroness, " and Lady Hamilton is an American. I should think Americans would be glad to meet over here, - though I have heard they seem never to know one another when they are introduced." Her brother showed his teeth with amiable con- descension. " Having Americans under the same roof in England, frequently has all the excitement of a chance meeting of a couple of gamecocks. They have the most deliciously amusing distinctions of family and caste in the States; and they can never make out why their standards are not accepted here. It 's a hard blow for them to see their nobodies exalted, while their aristocrats are put down." " How very singular ! " said Lady Alingham vaguely. She was apt to be vague at all times. " I think, however, I shall put the Hamiltons down. We can cross them off later if we think of any one better." The people in question were Sir Henry and Lady Hamilton of The Bucks, Tyworth, Staffordshire. He was a baronet, and she had been an American before her marriage, since which event she had devoted her untiring energy to obliterating any 99 A SORDID MODERN DILEMMA traces of her nationality. Her English was a persis- tent, if painful, effort to introduce the broad a into every word she uttered. Lady Hamilton did not have "hands" like the rest of mankind; she was such a loyal Briton as to rejoice in " hahnds," to the amusement of her friends. She would twitter away in this language of her own discovery on all English topics from the Royal family down to cab- men's shelters. " Good gracious, Mamma," said Millicent, petu- lantly, " if you are going to have the Hamiltons, do ask Lady Hamilton to bring an interpreter. I never can understand a word she says." 1 " Alingham intends to ask Usher and Forbes, and, if you like, I will ask Conygam; with Ally and myself, that ought to be enough men." " Baron Eppstein is coming," interposed Millicent, with chilling dignity. " Of course he is, my dear," said Uncle Reginald, soothingly ; he was far too shrewd to throw any ob- stacles in the way of her marriage with the wealthy Hungarian. But it was hard on the old aristocrat to remember always to include in the family circle a man with the obsequious manners of a head-waiter. Lady Alingham sighed wearily. " That will make eight, without the Ritualist. Don't you think that will be enough ? The servants we have been able to get are rather hopeless." Her brother and daughter agreed that eight guests was a sufficient tax on their limited hospitality, and Lady Alingham frantically rang for tea with which to fortify herself before she wrote the invitations. CHAPTER XI SOME PAINFUL MAKESHIFTS OF AN ARISTOCRATIC FAMILY IT was the last desperate rally of the Alinghams, and individual rights and wrongs were sunk in a common issue. The Baroness' surviving jewels and such available property as had escaped the entail were sold or pawned for the final coup. The Tudor wing was hastily put in order from such resources as were at hand ; the result upset his Lord- ship's sang-froid as few things could have done. He winced when he saw the bloom of centuries in his beautiful old home replaced by a depressing cheer- fulness suggestive of a Tottenham Court Road furniture shop. His follies never confronted him so remorselessly as when he saw the old Tudor rooms stripped of their furniture for the first time, and his mother tearfully explained that most of it had gone to pay his Derby losses of the year before. Poor Lady Alingham! The years she had spent on the Continent cajoling poverty in one pension, hob- nobbing with debt in another, had blunted any sense of decorative congruity she might have had to begin with, and her efforts to make the sixteenth-century part of the house habitable from available materials in the more modern building, resulted in reproducing 92 SOME PAINFUL MAKESHIFTS the architectural incongruities of Dunstan on a smaller scale. The martial blood of the Howards stirred in the Baroness' veins as she personally led marauding expeditions to the latter-built portions of Dunstan, where gold-framed brocaded furniture representing the florid taste of the eighteenth century abounded. And carrying off such specimens as had a leg to stand on, she courageously set them down among their sombre Tudor surroundings. Louis Seize monstrosities in gilt and brocade threw brazen reflections on the brown polished floor of what had once been the monks' refectory. Grim armour, swords, shields, trophies of the chase, hang- ing from the great oaken beams overhead, were mul- tiplied in frivolous Venetian mirrors. And there, on either side of the huge fireplace, like English and Frenchmen who meet on a journey and glower be- cause they do not speak the same language, a sturdy oaken settle with high carved back scowled at a fauteuil of the Empire period. Chippendale chairs and sofas, perching on long thin legs, like pullets, apparently pricked their way through the heterogeneous melee. Ugly modern draperies, in Oriental design from Manchester, hung irrelevantly where fine old tapestries had been, or covered gaps from which pictures had departed to take their place beneath the auctioneer's hammer. Plants from London that would bloom once with the lavish prodigality of a horticulturist's catalogue, added a note of theatrical cheerfulness. It was like a stage scene, this bringing together the best for the 93 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT climax, and the unreal quality of it sometimes haunted the Baroness like a nightmare. And this theatrical effect was not diminished by the appearance of the servants' hall, that added the necessary comic element. Drillford village had been hastily canvassed for the necessary domestic staff, but Drillford had not responded to the call of its bankrupt lord with the alacrity of the loyal villagers of fiction. The faith of the Baroness, however, remained secure in Tripps, now landlord of the " Alingham Arms," but once butler to the family. Tripps had prospered in the service of the Alinghams, and was still sufficiently awed to grow pink and feel unworthy whenever any of the family nodded to him. Tripps not only agreed to resume the Alingham livery for the house-party, but to help Brackett, the housekeeper, secure the necessary domestic staff at Drillford. Lady Alingham graciously inquired after Mrs. Tripps and the baby it was always safe to inquire after the baby in the Tripps household; babies were perennial there. The Alingham liveries had been gorgeous affairs in the days when the family had been a power in the county. Yellow small-clothes and claret-coloured coats made the Alingham Jeemes an object of envy in Drillford circles, below stairs; but it had been many a day since the liveries had been replaced. Tripps' hastily mustered staff were of a size and shape wholly at variance with their predecessors. Even Tripps himself was short and rotund, while the last butler had been tall and spare. The yellow small- 94 SOME PAINFUL MAKESHIFTS clothes gripped poor Tripps, and would not have done with him at the knee but pursued him half-way down the calf. The footmen were each misfitted according to his size; a glance at the servants' hall led one to expect jokes and a chorus. The pathetic humour of the servants' hall goaded Lady Alingham to desperation. At sight of it she lost her nerve, took to her room, and wept inter- mittently for a day and a night. She was one of those women who would as willingly appear without their clothes as without their martyr's halo. The dignity of her sacrifices was always marred by a slightly reddened nose or a damp pocket-handker- chief; her tragedies were always prolonged to comedies. She would undoubtedly have walked to the scaffold for her children if occasion called for it, but she would have whimpered on her way thither about the poor quality of her last cup of tea or of something equally trivial. Having pawned her remaining jewels, sold the pictures, and grasped occasion with no uncertain hand, it was characteristic of her that she should take to her room and weep, because the liveries were shabby and did not fit. The Baroness belonged to that most unfortunate of all types, that which heroically bears the heat and burden of the day, only to fall by the wayside when success is at hand. Boadicea Byng's early arrival at Dunstan with one neat spinsterial trunk from which she extracted gowns suitable for all the exigencies of social life, each in exactly the same state of crystallised shabbi- 95 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT ness as to the others,, struck cold chills to the heart of Millicent, and added new charms to the profile of Baron Eppstein. She was almost fond of him; was he not the avenue of escape from the horrors of poverty-stricken spinsterhood ? The twins, who shared the roseate temperament of their brother, regarded life at Dunstan in the nature of a holiday ; the absurdly fitting liveries, the incongruities of the furniture, seemed comparatively luxurious to a taste moulded on the banalities of Continental pensions. Even Boadicea conveyed no awful warning to them, such being the heavenly optimism of youth. The various party invited to Dunstan for autumnal diversion was beginning to arrive; the guests were typically illustrative of that modern blending of social strata that seems to be replacing the distinct aloofness of caste characteristic of more primitive social periods. The only repre- sentatives of the old aristocracy were the hostess and her immediate family; Baron Eppstein ex- pressed the passing deification of Mammon; politics and Anglomania, reduced to their simplest terms, were represented by Sir Henry and Lady Hamilton ; the obligatory bachelor element by Captain Usher and Clyde Forbes, the eminent counsel ; and Boadicea filled the role of faded spinsterial foil for the more vivid charms of her cousins. Uncle Reginald missed the presence of those useful persons in society who are nothing particular in themselves but are under- stood to be acquainted with the best of everything, nonchalant social connoisseurs who fill up the gaps of autumnal entertainments and stand in the same 96 SOME PAINFUL MAKESHIFTS relationship to house-parties as do the well-dressed supers to a brilliant stage tableau. The deferred arrival of Mrs. Gordon and her young cousin added an element of tension to the company already assembled ; their attempts at serious diversion were hampered by a consciousness that the star had not yet arrived, and the expectation mingled with curiosity absorbed them to the exclusion of other things. 97 CHAPTER XII THE STAR EFFECTS A CAREFULLY DELAYED ENTRANCE ALINGHAM met the ladies at Drillford in response to a wire, and handed them into the old family brougham, that impressed Mrs. Gordon as being a cross between a hearse and a stage-coach. It was heavily padded and smelt faintly musty, despite its lowered windows. " We were so disappointed at not being able to come down on Friday, as we at first expected," began Mrs. Gordon, " but I was detained in town by a stupid solicitor whom I really had to see; and he was as slow as an hour-glass; we have nothing in the States, not even excepting its geological forma- tion, that is as slow as your English law and its interminable processes. So you see why I was cruelly cut off from last Sunday at Dunstan, and I adore a Sunday in the country. I can never make up my mind whether it is the service or the mid-day dinner that makes me feel so sanctified, but I forgot, you don't have mid-day dinner in England. It 's only in the United States that we sacrifice our digestion to our religion." Mrs. Gordon's dramatic work was invariably so excellent that it was hardly necessary for her to make out such an elaborate case regarding the apoc- 98 A DELAYED ENTRANCE ryphal solicitor. She had carefully timed her visit to Drill ford so as to be the last to arrive. She wanted them all to be a little bored with each other before she should appear on the scene to revive flagging interest, challenge criticism, and win ap- plause, in short, be the heroine in an admired play without the pangs of art. The incident of the solici- tor only serves to show what a conscientious worker she was. The drive through .the park was obscured by a cloud-like mist that hung heavily on the earth after the long rain, filling the humid air with the smell of fallen leaves mingled with rain-soaked earth. The timber in the park was magnificent, giant oaks whose time-blackened trunks recalled the peace- ful solitude of another age. In all the ups and downs of the family history no Alingham had ever permitted the wanton swing of a woodsman's axe, since the day that Henry took the Abbey from the monks and gave it to his Lord Chief Justice. The carriage rolled heavily along the drive, the ill-repair of which was made apparent now and then by a lurch, as the heavy vehicle passed over some bad spot in the road. The monotonous whirr of the wheels soothed Alice into a state of dreamy con- tent in which she was conscious of an undefinable pleasure, a subtle sense of kinship in being with Alingham in his own country, in rumbling along with him in this ridiculous old coach over his own land. Nor was he wholly unconscious of her thoughts, that fluttered toward him like a flock of homing birds, each bearing its message of tenderness. 99 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT Her mind wandered back to a certain fairy-tale that had been a favourite in her pinafore days, a tale in which the conventionally beautiful princess with the trailing golden hair had, after a series of disheartening adventures, finally stepped into the car- riage with the prince, and was whirled off to be happy forever afterward. Just why the princess should have had no Betty Gordon to put up with on her drive, Alice had wandered too far into the land of Nod to answer. The lumbering old coach seemed to rise and fall through the autumnal twilight, Mrs. Gordon disappeared in the delightful manner the de trop have of disappearing in dreams, and the golden journey through time and space that had begun so gloriously for her and the prince was abruptly ter- minated by the sudden stop of the carriage before Dunstan Hall. Before her she saw a great mass of stone squarely outlined against a leaden sky, a flight of many steps ending in huge columns, the whole looking dark and inhospitable but for the broad stream of light that flowed through the open doors. " Please stop in the carriage till I come for you, Miss Dean," Lord Alingham said, as he offered his arm to Mrs. Gordon ; " these steps are treacherously slippery in wet weather." She waited for him without stirring, unconsciously following an impulse of blind obedience. He came back a moment later. The twilight had deepened, and the gathering darkness was full of vague formless shadows, like the fantastic impression of night we know in dreams. The deeply penetrating 100 A DELAYED ENTRANCE stillness seemed to throb in its intensity. The exul- tation of this moment snatched from the dreary mechanism of days and duties in which neither had heart nor interest, was upon them. There was a litany of love in the way he spoke her name, and an eloquent response in her shy silence. " We are home at last, Alice," he said, as they began to mount the slippery steps with slow prolonga- tion. The light streamed down from the open doors in welcome. In the hall they could discern expec- tant figures. It would have been thus if he had been bringing her home his bride. To the man with his head already in a noose of his own knotting, there was an agony of realisation in this home-coming that made him draw his breath sharply as if he were under the surgeon's knife. But the girl asked no questions of the fates. She was with him for the moment. What mattered the future? " Are you tired? " he said, when they had reached the top. " No," she answered, with that appalling sim- plicity that was more dangerous to him than the most subtle coquetry. " I am sorry there are no more." And he who had fed on the honeycomb of women since he was a stripling, and could checkmate their every move by one more skilful, found himself blushing like a rustic in the hands of a village coquette. Lady Alingham greeted them in the great hall that was bleak and bare and brilliantly lighted, then led the way through low-ceiled, oak-beamed passages 101 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT to the sixteenth-century portion of the house, that was imposing despite its incongruities. The room in which tea was being served was at its best at this hour; firelight and wax tapers are good to things of a past generation. The logs that burned and crackled in the wide fireplace threw shifting lights on the bits of armour and trophies of the chase, for the Aling- hams had been mighty Nimrods in their day, and the proofs of their skill lived after them. Full-length portraits with deep backgrounds inserted in the oaken panelling enlarged the scene and mellowed the crude makeshifts of the present. The ceiling was low enough to enable the observer to decipher the various coats of arms that glowed with rich colours between the oaken sockets when a flare of firelight threw an illuminating beam toward them. The rose-shaded waxen tapers in their quaint wooden sconces dispensed marvellous complexions, irrespective of age, to the assembled company. The faint tinkle of tea-things mingled with the subdued murmur of English voices, with now and then a low ripple of laughter, produced a delightful impression of warmth and comfort on the travellers, who were tired and chilled with their long drive. Alice thought Lady Alingham less like a petti- coated edition of the Duke of Wellington than when she had called at the Cecil ; the atmosphere of roseate domesticity robbed even her Ladyship's profile of some of its austerity. Millicent poured out tea for them in flowered Sevres cups which Baron Eppstein brought to them with servile politeness. " Confound the fellow," thought Alingham, " why 1 02 A DELAYED ENTRANCE is he always bowing like a head-waiter? I know I shall forget some time and give him a tip." Eppstein's manner toward Millicent was that of a grateful cat, who, while enjoying the privilege of purring in the family circle, does not forget the time he wandered a pariah, and realises that he might be wandering yet, had not the daughter of the house vouchsafed him her protection. He never seemed to be at ease with the family of his betrothed, unless he was handing a cup of tea or picking up something that had accidentally dropped. Millicent tried to restrain him from performing these social chores with such unflagging diligence, but he accomplished them with so much celerity that she seldom had a chance to interfere. Mrs. Gordon could not have wished for a more satisfactory impression than she created at Dunstan. She had barely entered the room before the men decided she was " stunning," and the women hastened to assure themselves that she was not really beautiful, only effective. The lines in Lady Alingham's face relaxed. She looked ten years younger as she saw the impression Mrs. Gordon had made. Things were so much better than she had expected. This prospective daughter- in-law might have talked through her nose, or been uncomfortably intellectual or stupidly philanthropic. It was indeed providential that she had escaped the nine-and-ninety panaceas that seem to be the resource of the rich nowadays to make their money bearable. Lady Alingham drank her second cup of tea with gratitude. 103 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT Uncle Reginald, who had been obliged to take to his bed after his little indisposition and revert to a milk diet, together with the constant attendance of a nurse, had now sufficiently recovered to appear at Dunstan without medical custody. His faded aspect of perfect distinction was a trifle more marked than before his illness, but his neckties were younger by ten years, and in the desk in his Half-Moon Street lodgings the desk that held the skeleton in the shape of steel-rimmed spectacles there were many samples of brown tweed Reggie was thinking of leaving off his mourning. His method of gently insinuating into his welcome of Mrs. Gordon the hope that she would like Dunstan despite the fact that its long period of unoccupation made it appear at a disadvantage, had in it some- thing of the confidential wink of an obliging auc- tioneer communicating the value of an article to a connoisseur with whom he is on good terms. " To my mind the old place is far more interest- ing as it is," he continued in the same strain, " the Tudor manor intact as a back wing, distinct from that which is frankly three centuries later, than if the more modern additions were chipped and scratched to match it. Dressed up antiquity was never to my taste." And Mrs. Gordon, looking at the wilting face upheld by the most youthful of collars, forbore to make the retort relevant from very pity. " It is a beautiful old room," she admitted, with a finality that seemed to imply a long and familiar acquaintance with fifteenth-century architecture. 104 A DELAYED ENTRANCE Captain Usher, of the White Hussars, was sitting in the window-seat with Boadicea Byng, listening to her talk about ideals. Usher was a big defenceless man, with a blond moustache and yellow hair that gave him a downy, newly hatched appearance that his huge shoulders and long legs did not counteract to any extent. He had been in India for six years, was a famous soldier, still a bachelor, and was as shy as a fawn in the society of women. Lady Hamilton thought that Boadicea' s method of getting him behind the curtained window-seat had almost the crudeness of a collie rounding up a sheep; it appealed to her sense of justice, and she looked at the big yellow man critically, and wondered if she should save him, but he was too homely to enlist her sympathy, and she continued to chatter with Clyde Forbes, and at the same time to give the bulk of her attention to Lord Alingham, who was talking to Mrs. Gordon at the opposite end of the room. Boadicea continued to talk ideals. She considered them a most womanly subject, and Boadicea was aggressively womanly. And while she could never have said anything so unrefined as that ideals " pay," she must have assured herself of the fact in the terms of some elegant equivalent. While her aimless flutterings toward the platitudinous in speech and the innocuous in conduct, which represented her con- ception of the much abused term, still went unre- warded, she persevered in her course with pitiful pertinacity. Usher was not happy. All that he knew about 105 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT ideals was that they could not be eaten or shot; he fired his guns wildly, not knowing in the least at what he was expected to aim. " And as for saying that one can never be happy till one has lost one's ideals," continued Boadicea, " it 's pessimism, pure pessimism." " Great mistake to lose 'em," said Usher, getting redder and more uncontrollable as to feet every mo- ment ; " ought to be kept where a man can lay his hands on 'em in a minute, like his rifle or despatch box." " Oh, Captain Usher," said Boadicea, breaking out into a mirthless scale of laughter, " you are so abso- lutely droll." And she encouragingly retained a grimace, indicative of merriment. Usher, who knew that he never made people laugh unless he made a particularly bad break, looked helpless and frightened. But Boadicea assured him, playfully, that if he was going to be cynical and witty she would avoid him in future, as she was afraid of clever people. And the honest soldier believed that he had been unintentionally brilliant. Boadicea had scored a point. Alice stole a glance at Alingham, and finding his eyes on her, blushed and looked away. She was talking to the twins at the time, and both young ladies observed the phenomenon. The master of the house was thinking that the bloom of centuries was an ideal quality for a home if there was a young face near by to prevent one's thoughts from becoming mouldy. The cheering influence of the blazing logs, the 1 06 A DELAYED ENTRANCE rosy lights, the chatter, the indefinable something that goes to make afternoon tea in England the most sociable function of the day beguiled every one into prolonging the tea hour till the dressing-bell sounded for dinner; and then there was the usual mild consternation over the flight of time, letters unwritten, and all the rest of the things one always intends to do between tea and dinner in England, and never accomplishes, owing to the beguilements of the imp of procrastination that seems to preside over that function. 107 CHAPTER XIII MRS. GORDON STUDIES GRAPHOLOGY WITH A PURPOSE IT was a perfect winter's day, with just enough frosty tingle in the air to make the more prompt appearance at breakfast, covenanted the night before in the glow of after-dinner enthusi- asm, rather less of a hardship than the guests at Dunstan might otherwise have found it. The men had arranged to shoot, and the women were to drive over and join them at luncheon. Mrs. Gordon was already at the table when Alingham sauntered in, looking the typical country gentleman in his home- spun Norfolk jacket, knickerbockers, and brown boots. She thought, as she watched him go to the sideboard and help himself to a cut of cold ham, that for the strain of a continual breakfast-table vis-a-vis, he was certainly the least objectionable of his sex. As he took his place beside her and glanced at the superscription of the uppermost envelope beside his plate, she noticed a faint pallor replace the ruddy colour in his cheek, he had that tell-tale English skin that is an unfailing barometer of the emotions. The letter in question had not been without interest to Mrs. Gordon, even before her host showed such evident concern at sight of it. The familiarity of the 1 08 GRAPHOLOGY WITH A PURPOSE handwriting, together with the marked individuality of its character, had teased the flame of her curiosity into a hungry blaze. It was undoubtedly a woman's hand, and yet she was unaware of having any common acquaintance with Alingham ; the swag- geringly independent scrawl was as familiar to her as her own, and still she could not place it. Aling- ham slipped the grey envelope into his pocket without a second glance, made a hasty breakfast, and excused himself. Uncle Reggie came in a moment later, and announced that Alingham had been called to town on most urgent business, but hoped to return that evening. Mrs. Gordon permitted her brows to con- tract with charming distress. The others showed similar outward signs of well-bred bereavement. Apparently she alone had noticed the incident of the fat grey envelope, there had been no telegram among the letters by his plate. Of that she was positive. Mrs. Gordon was not only unusually proficient in that branch of social mathematics known as putting two and two together and getting four, but was also able to obtain equally prompt and satisfactory results from the addition of any other set of numerals that might appear to correspond to a given case. But in the present instance she had only one factor to work with, the superscription on an envelope. The other the identity of the writer was as yet an unknown quantity. While Alingham was speeding to town in a blasphemous humour, and his mother lay prone on her bed wretched even beyond the solace of tea, as the result of the inopportune 109 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT arrival of the mysterious missive, Mrs. Gordon went through her portfolio, carefully scrutinising such specimens of handwriting as it contained, in the hope of identifying the insolent curls and flourishes that had attracted her attention during breakfast. But her quest went unrewarded, and she was forced to curtail her graphological studies and drive off with the other women to meet the shooting-party. Had not Mrs. Gordon, on the day of their arrival in England, temporarily relaxed her habit of con- tinual observation and permitted herself the luxury of dreaming as they rushed through the peaceful land- scape, she might now have had less difficulty in determining the missing factor. Lord Alingham's concern for Alice's eyes as she had bent over the picture of the beautiful woman in the magazine would not have passed unchallenged with the widow. A glance at the pictured face would have settled the identity of the handwriting, with which Mrs. Gordon was familiar, because at that time the writer of the grey envelope was the most talked-of woman in Europe ; an emperor had tied her shoe ; she had made a laughing-stock of the first gentleman of Europe at his own table; and the suicides, bank- ruptcies, and other testimonials of her fascinations were numberless. Hence her handwriting had natur- ally become greatly in demand in attestation of the excellence of numberless commercial products. In- deed, there was hardly a soap in Christendom to which the lady had not attributed the matchless beauty of her complexion. Alingham, as one of a swarm of moths, had cheer- no GRAPHOLOGY WITH A PURPOSE fully burnt his wings financial wings hovering near the candle. Considering the candle's brilliancy, he was getting off rather well with his bankruptcy, suicide having been the portion of many an excellent young moth that had fluttered contemporaneously with him. But Alingham the lady was always pleased to regard in the light of a weakness. For her he had put himself in the hands of the Jews, become bankrupt, and lost caste socially ; and yet, with incred- ible generosity, she was always willing to receive him when she had no more profitable moth to singe. He had not been brushed up with the others, for the very obvious reason that his beauty was a toy of which the lady was not yet weary. A penniless Adonis furnished a welcome variation in the monoto- nous dynasty of Dives'. When Alingham had first known her, he had be- sought her, with all the eloquence of twenty-three, to leave the stage and marry him. He had written her innumerable letters to this effect, and the lady had had such a nice appreciation of the proprieties that she had even consented to an engagement while the process of reducing one of the wealthiest young men in England to the indignity of bankruptcy was being accomplished. She still had these letters referring to her as his betrothed. It was her gentle reminder of this fact that had brought him to town. She had written to say that their engagement was not broken, and if it were true that he was engaged or about to become engaged, she proposed to sue him for breach of promise. And as the wretched man read and reread the grey letter on his way to in LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT town, he felt that the Furies had indeed caught up with him. At his lodgings he found a curt note written in the same exaggerated flourishes that had arrested Mrs. Gordon's eye that morning, telling him to call that evening after the theatre. The knowledge that she had been sufficiently sure of her victim's obedi- ence to write a second note to his town lodgings did not add to his peace of mind, as he bent his energies toward killing the time that intervened before the appointed hour. In the meantime Mrs. Gordon had arrived at no conclusion in regard to the handwriting. She was tantalised by its familiarity, that hung just beyond the grasp of her recognition, leading her to attempt varied feats of ingenuity that brought nothing but vexation. Was she jealous? she asked herself a dozen times that morning as the wheels of the dog- cart ploughed the waves and billows of frozen mud that a night of hard frost had created. Was she jealous? The question made her heart quicken as she had not hoped ever to feel it quicken again. - Was it pang, or pleasure? or a blending of both? Who was this woman at the sight of whose letter he turned pale and rushed away from a house full of guests ? What was her hold over him ? The startled scuttle of a rabbit through the brown bracken, the quick tapping of a pheasant, became obtrusive realities in a world of such vital inquiries. The day was not going well with Mrs. Gordon. She would have preferred the quiet of her own room, where, properly gowned in something soft 112 GRAPHOLOGY WITH A PURPOSE and clinging, she could have flung herself on the many-pillowed couch and thought out the situation according to her own interpretation of its dramatic requirements. Luncheon with the shooting-party became a weariness to the flesh. CHAPTER XIV THE TOSSING OF A COIN DECIDES SEVERAL IMPORTANT MATTERS FROM the room above Alingham could hear a plaintive tinkling that, as the ear grew accustomed to the sound, spelled out dis- tinct rhythmic cadences flowing on into a lamenting melody that only an unquiet soul could bring out of silver strings. The prayer of the forsaken was in the keening cry that rose and swelled into ringing protest, then grew hushed to the diminuendo of sob- bing supplication. Harmonies, regular as the beat of soldiers' feet, followed; laughter and tears were in their rhythmic mockery, and all the bliss and bit- terness of living. He listened as the children of Hamelin might have listened to the music of the pied piper. He was no longer a failure shrinking under cover of darkness to do the bidding of a wanton. He was in a land of poppies and the sun, where the minutes slip to the twinkle of brown feet, and the perfumes of the East the nard and the sandalwood were in his nostrils. The music flowed on like tears to hear it was to listen to a penitent's confession, and to listen was to absolve. 114 THE TOSSING OF A COIN Already the tenseness that is the forerunner of all great emotion had taken hold of him; but beneath the serenity of his granite exterior he responded with the quickened perception of supreme experience to every incident of this painful epilogue of their story. He told himself that his love for her was as dead as the music of a broken flute; but he knew the memory of such music can linger on, promising to outlive the shattered instrument by an eternity. For it had all come back to him, her sordid acceptance of his sacrifice, and steeled his heart against the sham contrition in her singing. He had been but a slender stripling of whom his world expected great things when the lingering ap- probation of her eyes drew him as the will-o'-the-wisp draws travellers to quicksands and destruction by its false light. And his brief biography was summed up in his squandering of a splendid heritage to do her lackeying. After the inevitable bankruptcy that followed, his life had become a futile effort to descend from the concert pitch to which it had been tuned for my lady's better accompaniment, to the flat tinkle of every-day existence. It was the presence of the inscrutable lackey, bid- ding him go upstairs, and not conveying by so much as the quiver of an eyelash the faintest show of sur- prise or recognition at his return after an absence of three months, that recalled Alingham to his sur- roundings. The music had not ceased, not even for the requisite moment in which to announce the guest. For all its Oriental trickery, it was her voice that LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT had sent his soul poppy-gathering; yet he was bid- den to go up without a pause in her singing. It was all a part. She had rehearsed it beforehand, tried it on some poor devil and not found it wanting. He smiled grimly being in a humor to hug suspi- cion and assured himself that it is a very primi- tive order of fool that is duped twice by the same knave. He made his way to the room where she sat on a tiger skin singing her heathen songs to the accom- paniment of a heathen instrument. She barely glanced up at his entrance. How the association of every object smote through his senses with its thrilling message of joy or pain! He was but an automaton here, amid the wreck of it all, and the skilled fingers of association made his nerves tingle to their bidding as obediently as the silver-stringed toy rang to the touch of the woman before him. Was it in the power of mere material things to hurt so much ? the sight of them was like pressure on a bruise. Here were the prayer rugs on which no prayers were said, the divans with their heaped-up burdens of rose, cinnamon, and pale gold stuffs ; the carved brass incense burners casting wraith-like spirals of per- fumed smoke against dull blue curtains. Flowers everywhere, massed in vases, scattered loosely about, showers of petals on low tables holding beaten silver lamps. They were all there, from the hyacinth, waxen and heavy with the perfumed sweetness of a hot-house spring, to the faintly bitter-smelling chrysanthemum, autumn's created emblem, the 116 THE TOSSING OF A COIN florist's promises for a year redeemed in a single night. And there was the woman herself, queen of this pseudo-orient, satin-skinned, gauze-clad, warm-tinted as old ivory, sitting cross-legged on a tiger skin, sing- ing as she alone could sing. To hear her again was to dream of ecstasy and to know the waking. Memory lashed and caressed him in turn, cried out to him pleadingly, all her sorcery in the cry; but he fought it, as a drowning man fights engulf- ing waters, and with outward calmness awaited her commands. Apparently she was in no hurry to issue them or to conclude her disquieting songs. Being well versed in the wisdom of the serpent, she knew the value of her music. For the swerving of Lord Alingham in his alle- giance to the lovely Mrs. Harrington presented a contingency that the latter was not only unprepared to face, but ready to exhaust all the possibilities of her art to avert. She had permitted him to linger on, when the frankness of his poverty was sufficient proof, she believed, of the genuineness of her affec- tion. But, in truth, the deliberate straying of a lamb from her fold was an unheard-of occurrence, and suggested the advent of a painful epoch in her his- tory. Lambs were to be slaughtered or driven forth, according to will, but permitted to wander never. In this instance, therefore, her sovereignty was at stake, and Alingham was unconsciously to decide her supremacy. If he should again bend the knee, 117 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT she would be still all-powerful; if he should refuse but she did not intend that he should refuse. Alingham had decided, on his way thither, that he would hold the reins of this interview with no uncertain hand. He knew to a word how he would open and close it. And he intended it to be short and without sentiment. Let the dead thing they had called their love be put in the grave where it be- longed, with no lingering farewells. They knew its unloveliness too well for mawkish manifestations. That she had sent for him because it was her whim further to humiliate him, Alingham had no doubt. And he would go only that he would be the better prepared to defend himself, what was the use of fighting in the dark ? If she intended to carry out the threat in her letter, he wanted to know it. And then, there was just a possible chance that she might be in a reasonable mood and return his letters. No lurking suspicion of weakness suggested to him that perhaps other considerations than those already recorded were bringing him to Mrs. Har- rington's. His faith in a deliverance from further temptation, as is the case with any man who has suffered a change of feminine ideal, was sublime. And yet, the tribute levied by association, the piti- less claims of inanimate things, the rack and tor- ture demanded by these household gods of wood and stone ! He had been waiting for his chance to say, with chilling dignity, " You have sent for me ! " - when she turned her head, and signified she saw him. " How stupid of me to be so completely carried 118 THE TOSSING OF A COIN away by my music," was charmingly expressed in the petulant manner with which she threw aside the lute, lyre, vegetable marrow, or whatever it was from which she was drawing her devilish music, and stood up, tall, fair, regal of outline as the Milo Venus before her lamentable accident. Her eyes it was that gave her the advantage of the lady of the Louvre; grey, shadowy-lidded eyes they were, and full of black angel beauty and a something besides that drew, and drew again, like a magnet, all passing glances to decide whether their apparent diablerie was real, or but the illusion of thick, curling lashes and extraordinarily long corners, with their trick of free-lance flash, half challenge, half appeal. Alingham never got the chance to repeat his piti- ful little preface, "You have sent for me." A slender sandalled foot kicked the zither out of her way, and she walked to him, a queen who is sure of her sub- ject. A queen, perhaps, who is in a yielding mood, and not in the humour for state ceremony, but never- theless a queen. She threw an arm with the texture of a rose-petal about his neck, and drew his mouth down to her with rough tenderness, just a sip of madness was all she vouchsafed him, and the reins of the interview that he meant to hold with such a cool light hand trailed at the peril of his heels. He was conscious only of her presence; subtly narcotic as the fumes of chloroform, it stole the pur- pose from his will, and set at defiance every obliga- tion. She listened amazed at the thick-tongued tor- rent of affection and protest. 119 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT The pitiable eagerness of the man who but a mo- ment before had regarded her with the chilling serenity of an unsympathetic judge entrenched in his official rectitude, alternately amused and disap- pointed her. The utter routing of his reserve by the merest in- sinuation of a kiss was too suggestive of middle- class ardour for a lady in the humour for a scene that should include good magazine dialogue, an abun- dance of dramatic pose, with perhaps a sentimental finale. She had appeared in a brilliant role for which apparently there was no demand. The challenger had turned mendicant, and alms-giving was not to her present fancy. He was like all the rest of the sheep, and sheep were tiresome toys. She poutingly assured him that he was a " dear old idiot," and turned away to examine some orchids. But her reading of him was at fault. She dallied too long with her disappointment. The kiss grew cold, and the man again girt himself with the armour of his grievance. Obligations apart from her favours obtruded themselves, and when she decided to be amiable just a moment too late, he had himself suf- ficiently in hand to feel sure that what he had felt was but the response to a deliberately contrived at- mosphere, a shrewd playing at Cleopatra ; Colling- wood and Locke furniture playing at the Orient : he knew it was Collingwood and Locke, for had he not paid the bill. He had been over-responsive to the pantomime that was all. But he did not resume the parliamentary attitude in which he had waited for her to finish singing. 120 THE TOSSING OF A COIN And the little speeches that he had cut with the nice exactness of children's blocks were scattered and forgotten when he turned wearily and waited for her lead. " And are n't you glad to see me, Booty ? " she said, coming over to the divan where he sat and ap- propriating a cushion at his feet, all unconscious of the momentary miscalculation that had undone her plans. Booty was her own particular pet name, and a variation of " Beauty," the bantering appellation that his Bertie Cecil type of good looks won for him from some of his men friends. " Of course I 'm glad to see you, old girl," he said, assuming a tone of almost aggressive heartiness. " I hope the world, the box-office, and may I say ? the devil are treating you well." It was far too hearty to please Blanche, who now had made up her mind to be amiable, even to the exclusion of the good magazine dialogue. " I did not ask you here to talk with the cheerful- ness of a greengrocer selling a head of cabbage I asked you here because I wanted to see you." And a faint suggestion of a sob made all the jingling things about her throat quiver. "Blanche, dear," the aggressive heartiness grew, " you know we 've quarrelled, quarrelled abom- inably, and we 've been over all this ground before, many times, and it 's bad medicine for us both. 'Bad medicine ' ! Is n't that a lovely one ? An American taught it to me on the way over." The shoulders bearing their burdens of jewelled 121 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT ropes went up almost to the ears, then dropped with contemptuous weariness. " You 've learned more than slang from an Ameri- can coming over, from all accounts. What is she like? Is her husband rich and complacent, and are you going to float her in society in return for favours received? " For a moment anger deprived him of words, that this woman should dare drag Alice into this, enraged him; it never entered his head that she might have reference to Mrs. Gordon. " It 's not likely I 'm going to discuss it with you," he said brutally. " I 'm sure you Ve far too much consideration. Confessions are so monotonously virtuous, that is, all but Jean Jacques'." She got up from the cushion at his feet and broke into a whining hymn-tune, one they had both heard at a Salvationists' meeting where they had once gone to scoff and remained to accomplish their purpose. " Brother Alingham," she continued, pitching her voice to high-keyed eagerness, " will not give us his experience to-night, owing to his fear of a certain unregenerate sister now present, but I am in a posi- tion to state that he who formerly made a companion of play actresses has now found the narrow way and has in consequence grown as dull as other gen- tlemen making a similar discovery. To make a time- honoured joke, he is prepared to settle down as soon as the discovery is prepared to settle up. In the mean time ladies of the stage will please bear in mind that 122 THE TOSSING OF A COIN Hell has no fury like a man reformed. And in con- clusion the tambourine will be passed as usual." It was impossible to be angry with a woman who met his brutality with such good-natured banter. Besides, there was the surviving effect of the power she had had over him, an effect that sharply em- phasised the zest now missing from life. Perhaps it was an unconscious partaking of his thought or the dreary awakening to a sense of loss of love flung to the four winds and scattered past gathering, that made her say with something akin to real feeling: " She won't care half so much for you as I do, Booty. We Ve had our rows, nasty ones too, I '11 admit, and it was horrid of me to threaten you with the suit. Babbitt talked me into it and then told about it for the advertisement. Those managers have not an atom of conscience." " Can't say I care about your way of showing affection, Blanche. As a bit of tenderness, for in- stance, a breach of promise suit does not appeal to me." " You are worse than a woman for raking up the past," she declared with a charming pout at having the eccentricities of her affection misunderstood. " Cross old bear ! as if I did not know you have not a farthing, a single brass farthing." " My poverty was hardly cause for further humil- iation " " Dear old boy, don't be stupid and dwell on your wrongs, or you will bore me. You know I could have Blount to-morrow, and his father 's not good for a year I Ve that on the best of authority. I 123 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT know you are broke ; but you see I 'm fond of you, Booty, and I don't give a sou for Blount." " Poor Blount, why don't you make him happy? " " That is n't pretty for you to say, it really is n't. What's the good of our squabbling? It's going to end in kisses any way it turns out. All our squab- bling does. You got in a nasty temper at the end of the season because I 'd been gadding about with Blount ; you would n't answer my letters ; you were horrid, you know you were, Booty. And I said to Babbitt one day in a fit of temper, ' I '11 sue him ! ' Babbitt was delighted. It was just so much ad- vertising for him, and he told that very night. I threatened to break my contract. I would n't go on the day I heard you 'd gone to the States ; but you 're back again, Booty what does anything else matter ? " Evidently a great many other things did matter to Booty, who was seated on the divan with his head resting in his hands. He was conscious of a soft nuzzling at his arm, as she made a resting-place for her head on his knee. He knew from experience what she intended to do next, and he smiled sardonically, as he saw her pre- pare to fulfil his expectations. She slipped her head back till the long, slender, ivory-tinted neck dropped backward over his knee, slightly convex, wholly kiss- able ; and she gave him the wealth of earth from her half-closed lids. Looking down on her, he remem- bered that once he had said, as she lay thus, with her neck thrown backward, that she was like a violet whose head drooped over the rim of a bowl. He 124 THE TOSSING OF A COIN grinned horribly at the simile. Blanche a violet ! as well sing of the revels of pastoral Piccadilly at eventide. She looked up and caught him grinning; he might have been Time the inexorable, whetting his scythe for a harvest, so grim was his complacency. It filled her with chill sickness, and the beauty that but a moment before had bloomed so profusely paled before the half-amused, half-contemptuous tolerance of his glance. She read in that first unsoftened look the dread decree that women have quailed before since the beginning: "Give place." And she knew that younger shoulders had jostled her aside, and that the greater wisdom did not lie in protest. She shrank from testing her helplessness by a further appeal; feeling intuitively that he would protest, prevaricate, act the lovelorn youth to save a scene it was the unobserved look, in which she had de- tected him, that told the truth. Unconscious of everything but her own wretchedness, she rose and walked to the long mirror in her boudoir, but lacked the courage to face its possible revelations. She raised her eyes with painful hesitancy at length to the beautiful reflection that smiled back at her with such reassuring consciousness of power. "Not yet," the red lips whispered to the reflection, and the reflection framed the reply " Not yet." There were no tell-tale lines, no sunken hollows to mark the feeding-ground of fretfulness and care. " Not yet," she said, turning with a revival of exaltation, a sense of carrying everything before her, and swept back to Alingham like an accusing goddess. 125 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT " Booty, what made you look at me as if I were a hag? I saw you don't deny it. I flew to the glass expecting to find crow's feet and a bald spot." The unavailing search for the bald spot seemed to have loosened the coil of brown hair that held in its heavy strands the reddish lights of polished mahogany. Alingham hoped desperately that she was not going to let it fall, which she did with beautifully contrived deliberation. " It 's lovely, Blanche but why don't you get some hairpins ? " " I must get a beau who has the price of a package I 'm so unworldly," she answered, twisting it up with exquisite deftness. His manner filled her with haunting doubts. Had he lied to save a scene; had the mirror lied because her eyes would not see the truth? She had known women, old, decrepit, plas- tered with falseness from head to heels, take joy in the contemplation of their hideous faces. Had it come, the first blast of withering winter? His in- difference made her desperate. She had no further interest in him as a toy. She hated him. He had shown her that her power was waning. And if over him, over them all; they were but so many sheep, with a sheep's ways. If he strayed off, others would follow. It was the history of woman brought home to her. Oh, to make him sweat out the price of this in coin of equal value! " I was just thinking," she said, " that the stage quite spoils the domestic side of a woman did you 126 THE TOSSING OF A COIN notice how dramatic I was a moment ago ? That 's what I call playing shop after hours." " But then you did it so well, it was quite a treat," he said, welcoming her change of mood. " We were talking of the wisdom of going our several ways when I interrupted you to look in the glass. You may continue but I don't want any County Council, or ' Best for you and best for me ' in it." " Since you put it that way, there is really nothing for me to say but good-bye." " We are growing respectable in our old age and poverty, like the awful examples the Salvationists bring up for exhibits. Are you going to be an ex- hibit, Booty ? a matrimonial exhibit, with a rich, ugly wife who will tell everyone through her nose how she converted you ? " He did not answer, and his silence irritated her more than any words could have done. " Why don't you answer me ? Why don't you open your mouth and say something, and not stand there like a blooming supe, ' a friend, Roman or countryman,' in a tin hat, at a bob a night." " Because I have about the same income, I sup- pose. Blanche dear, we have been happy, let us part as comrades should." " So you can go off comrading with the other lady? I think Babbitt was right. I 'm going to sue, but out of consideration for your distressed cir- cumstances, I will make the damages one farthing." " Is that the estimate of the damage I have done your affection ? " 127 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT " I 'm putting a good round sum on it, dearest ; London will die of laughing." He knew she had been crouching for a spring, but he had ceased to expect it from this quarter. Money he had none to offer; to degrade himself further by pleading was impossible. There was but one way out of it, and this was not the time or place to think out the details. " I don't think much of your method, Blanche ; you know it 's been done before. You ought to have thought out something more original." " But your letters will add the originality, and the poetry you remember the poetry that '11 add the fun." She clapped her hands and laughed delight- fully. " I really owe something to the public, Booty. It 's been so awfully good to me, and I intend to keep it in a good humour." She might have been discussing a bit of stage business, referring the wisdom of some little by-play to an indulgent manager, so appealingly ingenuous was she. There was not an apparent trace of malice about her fiendish, deliberate cruelty which disgusted Alingham to the point of reckoning his release cheap at any price. " And do you already find your art inadequate to repay the indulgence of your audience? Sensation, as you are aware, is the acknowledged refuge of mediocrity." " My dear Booty," she said with charming good humour, " your little platitude reminds me of the mis- sionary who, when asked by the cannibal if there was anything he would care to say before finally 128 THE TOSSING OF A COIN stepping into the soup pot, remarked that he would like to preach one more sermon on the advantage of vegetable diet." He smiled. " It is useless to warn so conscien- tious an artist of the danger of burning the candle at both ends. Good-night." He bowed as cere- moniously as if she had been the traditional princess, and left the room. She stared stupidly at the place where he had stood but a moment before, then listened eagerly as his footsteps grew fainter on the stair, and threw herself on a divan in utter bewilderment. She con- sidered tears, but there was no one to cry to. What manner of man was this who upset all her calculations of men ? She began to doubt her knowl- edge of his sex, as humiliating an admission of weakness as woman is capable of. She would have understood if he had coaxed or tried to cajole her into a relinquishment of her outrageous claim and outrageous she knew it to be with promises of a share in the brilliant prospects that awaited him. That, she felt, was the language of his kind. Or if his indignation had found expression through the medium of blows or physical violence, that, she knew, would have been the language of another kind. But this reserve, the self-contained speech, the most deferential " Good-night," what did it mean? Blanche was typical of the class which re- spects that which it cannot understand, and through all the whirling why and wherefore there loomed the mystery of his behaviour, at which she could only look and wonder. 9 I2 9 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT She began to think of him regretfully. He was a thoroughbred, if he was broke. He knew how to go down splendidly, without a danger signal. Poor devil ! Poor Booty ! He had been so generous, and he never once cast up how much he had spent on her or that she had broke him grit and good breeding were hard to beat. These reflections finally landed her at the foot of the staircase. She reached the hall door just as his hand was turning the knob. " Booty, come back ! not to make up, not to quarrel, but to get justice ! " She finished the sen- tence with a mock-melodramatic gesture. " There now, that was worthy of the Adelphi, was n't it ? Who says I 'm not versatile ? Booty, I liked your exit. It was fine. No playing to galleries. It was thoroughbred, and I 'm proud of you. I mean to give you another chance. Listen, we '11 toss for this thing, and if you win, I '11 burn your letters and it 's done for, as far as I am concerned." "What's the use?" " Much. I 'm not going to put a premium on de- sertion by burning your letters and helping to sing ' The Voice that Breathed o'er Eden ' over you and the other lady; but I am willing to give you a chance, old man, just for the sport of the thing, and because I like your grit. I suppose I can be generous, can't I?" " I '11 not avail myself of it, Blanche, thank you." " Now don't be sulky and stupid. You 've thrown me over and I hate you for it, because, you see, it makes me lose faith in myself, and when a woman begins to do that, there's nothing left but religion 130 THE TOSSING OF A COIN and knitting. But you did it well, you threw me over and took your medicine like a thoroughbred, and I 'm willing to be generous, to give you another chance. We '11 toss for it. You '11 have to make two out of three. Come on, it '11 be jolly good fun." " I don't feel like gambling. You 've given your ultimatum, let it stand." " As you like. But if you throw away your last chance, don't blame me. As I said before, I 'm not going to put a premium on my own jilting. I feel it would be unlucky. But I '11 take chances with you." She unfastened a purse, fashioned out of tiny gold links, that hung at her waist, and first emptying its contents into one rosy palm, poured half of it into the other, and, holding her hands high above her head, clinked the coin like castanets. She might have been the goddess of fortune, with that smile of insolent indifference parting her lips, and the coin clinking an accompaniment to the song she hummed. It was : " They 're hanging Danny Deever in the Morning." A clock struck one somewhere in the house, and the sound recalled the wandering wits of the man of whom she had made a pauper. What should he do? Here was a woman with the instincts of the gutter, who was going to sue him for a farthing, for the purpose of amusing London; she would do it with- out passion, in no ecstasy of hate, but purely for the commercial reason that it would advertise her. And now some gambler's impulse had prompted her to call him back and offer to toss a coin with him, whether she should drag his name through the LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT muck of a breach of promise suit, or burn his letters, could the draught of degradation hold bitterer dregs ? As far as personal inclination went, he would never submit to such a condition. Five minutes in his lodg- ings would settle the question, and put him beyond the reach of this woman's malice. Neither would the thought of Alice have altered his resolution. She was the reward that comes just once in a man's life; the perfect recompense for the dreariness of days long drawn out. He had not been worthy. Yet he was thankful to know that such as she lived. She was worthy of a Sir Galahad. Ah, well, perhaps the gods would provide one. At least she took the tang off many a frail sister. Even this woman was robbed of some of her brazenness because she was of her kind. " * What makes you look so white, so white ? ' said Files-on Parade. 4 1 'm dreadin' what I Ve got to watch,' the Colour Sergeant said." She clinked her coins in perfect accompaniment to the minor in which she sang. Alingham listened, as one who hears the death penalty meted out to another. He was thinking of his mother and the girls, with all their pitiful plans and plottings, dependent on him. What could become of these helpless women? The entail would revert to a cousin. There was barely a shil- ling left among them. He saw them huddled to- gether, helpless, desperate, defeated. His mother 132 THE TOSSING OF A COIN wailing her tragedy in some triviality, as usual; the girls bravely turning their pitiful little accomplish- ments over, in the hope that they might suggest some monetary solution. It was late in the day for these reflections, he was dismally aware. " Sir," said Blanche, " I do not propose to stand in the hall all night awaiting your Lordship's deci- sion; bankrupts, you know, should not be choosers, or is it beggars ? " " I can answer, in either case," he said, bowing. " I am quite ready to toss when you are." She led the way upstairs. Again they stood in the familiar room. Blanche motioned him to draw up a table, at which she took her place. He seated himself op- posite. She looked over the heap of coin in her hand and selected a sovereign. Alingham no longer had any interest in the pro- ceeding. His head felt light and swimming; it was not he who was about to play, it was a hunted wretch with the world against him, and he, Alingham, was to look on at the sport while this Harpy made a game of his desperation. He saw as through a fog that she was shaking the coin in her clasped palms for the first toss, and he heard a far-off voice say, " Heads you win ; " then the slap of the fleshy palm on the table, and the " You 've won the first, Booty. See, you '11 get it; respectability has marked you for her own." The voice babbled on. " Would you like something to drink ? A B-and-S ? No ? A liqueur, then ? Good gracious, but you have gone to the good. Well, here goes the second." 133 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT Again the flutter of the white hands, again the thud of the thick-palmed hand, a sharp drawing-in of the breath through clenched teeth. " Ah, little me, this time, they '11 teach you to throw me over. This is n't bad, you know, Booty. As a bit of sport, I 've not been so entertained since Derby Day. I wish you 'd drink something, this is devilish dry work. No, I don't want you to ring for me, if you won't have anything yourself. Well, here goes the final trial." Alingham felt he was going to lose. He saw the white hands beat the air as a bird beats the bars of its prison, down slapped the coin. " Which of us? " said the voice of his tormentor. Her nostrils were white, and her breathing was laboured. " My God, Booty, think of this, and for you and me." She kept her hand over the coin. She looked up at him. Her eyes were full of tears. She lifted up her hand. It was heads he had won ! The tears splashed down her cheeks, the mouth quivered pitifully : " I suppose it 's all for the best, old man ; " and she ran out of the room. He felt as if his nerves were dancing witches' dances. His hand shook, his head throbbed wildly. It was a good omen. Fortune, the fickle jade, meant to give him another chance. It meant an- other start. It was like the tearing away by a skilled hand of some terrible blight that had overgrown his brain. It wanted but this particular turn of events to con- 134 THE TOSSING OF A COIN vince Blanche that she had loved Alingham always, and could never love anyone else. And for the time being, the compunction of contrariety consumed her with the bitterness of a real sorrow. The tears she forced back were more real than any she had ever shed. The smiling indifference of the proud loser was too close to real grief to be well played. Her pride was wounded to the quick. He wanted to go, he, the tame cat who had blinked content- edly on the hearth rug for so long, taking the kicks with equanimity, and purring up thanks for the pats received. Men had no gratitude, sighed the lady on whom he had wasted his heritage. Oh, the agony of it! He was going to someone else who would adopt him legally, and give him a beautiful silver collar, or indeed, maybe, one of gold. Cleopatra, struggling between her tears and a dog- in-the-manger instinct for the cat, went to her desk, and taking out the packet of letters, burned it before him. He mewed a " God bless you," they looked at each other with something like affection in their eyes, and for the last time he crossed the threshold of the house in St. John's Wood. 135 CHAPTER XV LOVE STRAINS AT THE LEASH OF PRUDENCE ALINGHAM did not return to Dunstan till two days later. He felt that his jangled nerves required a respite from the corrosive presence of Mrs. Gordon; and that, under the cir- cumstances, it would not be prudent to risk a clash of their antagonistic temperaments while his nerves had the reins. Solitude in London assumed hideous proportions. It became a thing to flee from; and he fled accord- ingly to a certain small and much restricted club where it was possible to fling temptation indiscrimi- nately in the way of one's good or evil genius, and forget the burning issue of the hour in watching the two fight it out on a green cloth table. He had little to throw, and what he had was not his own, but such trifles have never yet disturbed the poise of the born gambler, whose motto is, and always will be : Throw coin and consequence to the winds, but never lose a chance. On this occasion good luck seemed to have made a crony of him, withdrawing the cold shoulder that of late years had greeted his attempts at familiarity. He played and won, and played and won again, then risked every- thing and won, and continued to risk everything 136 LOVE STRAINS AT THE LEASH and win till he broke the bank for the sum of two thousand pounds. The sum was not particularly large, the game was not so high as some he had lost, at that very table; yet, in his present condition, it seemed that for him the miracle had been wrought ; that in his behalf the maxims of ink-stained childhood regarding reaping and sowing, gathering and scattering, work and play, had been inverted. The Fates had decreed that he should walk through bitter waters, and eat the husks of the prodigal only that his experience might be wide; for great things were presently in store for Alingham of Dunstan, and it was but seemly that he should meet them with wide experience to his credit. Every prosperity was possible to the spendthrift with a check for two thousand pounds in his purse; he dropped into a carriage at Victoria Station, with the helpless sensation of the stupidly rich, the check conferring at least temporary boredom. So engrossing had been Lord Alingham's London experiences that after wiring to Dunstan regrets at his unavoidable detention in town for a few days, he was glad to dismiss the house-party entirely from his consciousness, and forget in the tension incident to such stimulating events as awaited him, the com- plications he had left behind. So admirably did he succeed that not till the train began to slow down at Drillford did he remember his omission to wire the house of his arrival, and that, in all probability, there would be no one at the station to meet him. The truth of this dismal surmise was forced on 137 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT him by a species of grotesque pantomime on the part of the venerable village fly whose agitated cir- clings in his vicinity indicated a consciousness of his predicament. But Alingham would have none of its squalid agility; not having outgrown the propensity to sulk, he took a real infantile pleasure in heaping further discomforts on himself in the hope of thwart- ing the perpetration of real or fancied injuries. Walk- ing would the better preserve his pique, and when he should present himself a subdued and travel-stained martyr, his family would thereby be brought to a more perfect realisation of its selfishness in not hav- ing sent the carriage on chance. The bright side of bankruptcy and impending ruin that had been re- vealed to him by the cheering blaze of his letters to Mrs. Harrington was momentarily overcast by the humiliation to which he had been submitted before the leaven of his humour asserted itself. And he smiled boyishly at the thought that a three-mile walk could be taken seriously by a young giant who amused himself daily with all manner of titanic pastimes. On either side of the high-road that wandered through the village and stretched away, a narrow- ing grey thread, through the winter landscape, were small cottages standing undetermined on the bedrag- gled outskirts of Drillford, as if the question of pushing on to a more metropolitan environment or lingering in the peaceful atmosphere of rusticity were too complicated for immediate decision. Many a fringed head expectantly bobbing at cottage win- dows that melancholy November morning in hope 138 LOVE STRAINS AT THE LEASH of possible happenings was thrust out farther as Alingham of Dunstan was recognised in the solitary pedestrian swinging along in soldierly fashion. And many a recurrent blush bore witness to the charm of his Lordship's salutation long after he had gone his way and forgotten the fringed heads now fur- nished with the absorbing topic of his advent. For Alingham always excited more than his share of feminine flutterings, a circumstance which had not served to increase his popularity with men of his own, or even of the nether class that tipped its hats to him while complaining of his bad management as a landlord. The cottages gave place to market gardens which, in turn, were succeeded by the more depressing splen- dours of a suburban villa neighbourhood with its dismal accompaniment of infinitesimal gardens, and metal lions to guard the prosperity that had come to Drillford with the opening of the woollen mills, a prosperity that the bankrupt young squire resented as fiercely as a personal affront. A series of cuts and by-paths, familiar to him from earliest boyhood, led him from sights and sounds of the clustering villas through winding muddy lanes to his own demesne. Almost as sharply definite as arti- ficial boundary could have made it, was the differ- ence between the Dunstan acres and the adjoining farm lands. The creeping paralysis of neglect was apparent in everything that was Alingham's, in the dragging gates, the reeling fences, the bleak and mel- ancholy stretches of land that revealed, even in the frost-bound desolation of winter, that no recent at- 139 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT tempt at cultivation had been made. He turned impatiently from the accusing reminders of his bad stewardship, to a bend in the road from which he could see the long black lines of weather-beaten trees that marked the boundary of his park. More reas- suring were these towering sentinels of the ages, splendid witnesses of the enduring qualities of his race. He could never see them without a restoration of courage, a quickening of family pride that almost imparted to present straits the excitement of a game of chance. And was there not the consciousness of a change of luck, most significant of assurances to the born gambler, the folded check in his purse, the knowledge of important if inglorious victory in accusing documents burned to ashes? Blanche was a good sort, after all, but too in- cessantly dramatic for every-day life. Who but Blanche would have got up an Arabian-night show for such a finale ? And the coin-tossing could any- thing have been more ridiculously theatrical? Had she thought it all out before? That was the trouble with stage women; they would insist on bringing home the lime-light and the make-up. But what eyes she had! He could hardly have told whether the sigh he drew was of relief or regret at the final parting. She absorbed a man, wiped him out like a bad drawing, did him over her own way, left him a mannikin marked with a cipher, the iron she kept for branding her pet sheep. The glitter of her personality would dazzle any boy, but there was an overawing majesty in her all but absolute loveliness too exacting for the more 140 LOVE STRAINS AT THE LEASH sufficient man of the world. She was a glorious creature to have kept her beauty so miserly. Why, Blanche must be and the calculation ended in a smile that had in it something of a wink at that newly emancipated Alingham whose letters were burnt and who, for the first time, could do mental arithmetic regarding the long reign of his quondam divinity. The Blanche Harringtons were well enough for callow youth and capering age, but the tantalis- ing emptiness of such splendid stage banquets did not commend itself to the reverential grace of com- pleter years. He threw his head back as he walked and turned his face to the drizzling rain, the move- ment was that of a neck released from a yoke. "Poor old Reggie, poor old boy!" Alingham's pity was not elicited by the discomforts of his elderly relative, dragged from the solace of his gruel bowls, his medical man, the almost nursery wholesomeness of his Half Moon Street existence to the makeshifts of poverty-racked Dunstan ; but by the remembrance of Uncle Reggie's sinister aphorism : " None but the infirm deserve the ingenue." Such philosophy could not turn the scale a feather's weight against youth and the knowledge that there lived a certain freckle- faced girl who could blush, and who had no convic- tions about life but that bread and butter were good and bread and jam better. The Queen is dead, long live the Queen! Her present majesty is young, all her history is a white page on which the Fates have purposely refrained from scribbling; there was joy and perturbation in the thought. LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT Heretofore Alingham had taken his clay as he had found it moulded, other hands had wrought the frail vessels that had invoked his young raptures. But this first gift of yielding substance, his to make or mar, was he worthy ? Who was ? Should the potter be required to render account of that which he had broken on the wheel? She was gathering acorns in the skirt of her frock, and when she saw him, skirt and acorns fell simul- taneously, but whether through agitation at see- ing him, or maidenly modesty at being surprised in a petticoat, perhaps even she could not tell. She came toward him illumined with a swift sudden joy she had no art to conceal, her radiance took the sullen- ness from the day. " I felt you were going to come, but I did not think it would be so soon," she said with that prehistoric simplicity that to Alingham was her chief charm. " Do you want these things ? " indicating the fallen acorns with the toe of his boot. " I have no further use for them if you are going to stay." " I shall be honoured indeed if you will accept me as a substitute for a lapful of acorns but what were you doing with them? and why do you al- ways play out in the rain ? so you will grow up soon? Don't, Alice, the world is full of grown-up young ladies in long frocks; and one in a scarlet Red Riding Hood ungrown is too delightful an in- novation to go the way of all the rest. Don't play in the rain after to-day; and tell me why you were gathering acorns." 142 LOVE STRAINS AT THE LEASH " It was a game." "A game of solitaire?" " It was n't going to be solitaire right straight through." " Was someone going to turn up at the end? " " Someone did." " The right someone ? " " He will answer, if he behaves well." Hopefully : " It is n't a game of forfeits, is it ? " Indignantly : " No, it is n't. Do you think I 'd make up a game like that? " Apologetically : " Someone had to make it up in the beginning." As Doctor Watts says : " For Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do ! " " To return to the game you pick up stones, acorns, or anything else that happens to be plentiful " "You don't oh, you don't." " And when you get the right number your wish comes true. A young lady told me all about it one day aboard the ' Calabria/ adding that she had in- vented it herself far away iij her prairie home. I say, you were a regular little brick to wish for me, Alice." "What!" " I did n't mean you wished for me to come. I mean you turned your trial over to me. I 've been wishing to see you for over a week." " No," she said, " I only wished for myself, but that was wishing for both of us. I played I was in an enchanted forest, and that a witch guarded me 143 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT day and night, and one day my fairy godmother came to me and told me to gather acorns, and if I could gather a thousand before sunset, a beautiful prince would come and release me. He came at the one hundred and twenty-seventh. Was n't he prompt for a prince ? " " Not considering what was awaiting him and he took her away and they were happy for ever afterward," concluded his Lordship. " He took her away and they had tea and tea- cakes," she said. " You know you told me aboard ship that you would take me to someone's cottage, a keeper or something like that, whom you used to play with when you were a little chap." " So I did. We '11 walk to Mrs. Sawyer's and ask for a cup of tea. But, I say, do you think tea and cakes are enough of a climax for a beautiful story like this? Let's make it they were happy for ever afterward." " But we are real people." " Pessimist, let us be the exception." " All right." " Then, say it." " They were happy for ever afterward." " Thank you," said his Lordship, thinking that russet-gold hair a-sparkle with raindrops was finer than all the tiara-crowned heads in the world. To walk with her was to share in the inspiration of her being, to catch something of the full-pulsed power that seemed to speed her along, unconscious of effort. It was as inspiring as the skyward sweep of a bird. The man unconsciously straightened his 144 LOVE STRAINS AT THE LEASH shoulders. It was as if the load they bent beneath slipped off in such goodly company. " And whither does my lady Red Riding Hood think she is going? To carry butter and eggs to her grandmother ? " " Alas, Sir Wolf, I have no grandmother to whose cottage I can direct you for a tough and simple meal." " So much the better, my dear," in a properly gruff voice, "I know where to find a daintier one." " It 's not ' my dear ' in the book. It 's ' my child/ now." " It 's ' my dear ' in real life, though at least, that is my reading of the text," he answered with episcopal gravity. The reward of his audacity was a blush like red wine poured into a goblet of water, a moment's filtering and the crimson suffusion was complete. " Are you trying to discover a cipher in ' Red Riding Hood ' ? Someone is always trying to dis- cover a cipher in something, the copy-book, Shake- speare, the Bible; only Mother Goose seems to have escaped." She spoke wildly, hardly knowing what she in- tended to say ; a blind impulse to recover the equili- brium that had gone when the flood-tide of maidenly consciousness engulfed her, being the desperate need of the moment. " Red Riding Hood would make a most alluring life study, leaving the cipher entirely out of the ques- tion. Its possibilities are endless ; the naive charm of the heroine, her true feelings toward the wolf, 10 145 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT - has she a spark of pity for him ? If so, is it but a compassionate crust flung to a social pariah, or is it that rare sympathy that women give to those with whom the world has gone wrong? At least it is pity, and pity works miracles in the rosy fingers of girlhood. What wolf worthy of the name that would not gladly fight the world for his chance with it ? What do you say ? " The dallying blush swept back, wave-like, irresist- ible, carrying away her pitiful defences. She could not answer, the labour of the lips to forge a weapon from the inward chaos ended in trembling defeat. She hurried ahead, defiant of attitude, incapable of replying. These maiden crudities were so many God-given gifts to Alingham; he followed, loath to break the silence that spoke so eloquently. The light drizzling rain, hardly more than mist, clung to the round young cheeks where the red burned like two warning signals, telling the plight of a maiden craft, heading recklessly for deep waters, conscious of danger, yet helpless. " What do you say ? " he repeated, after the long pause. " What were we doing, looking for acorns ? No, ciphers." " Ciphers are too easy to find. Let 's look for something else. The wolf got ahead of me, he made a cipher of the grandmother; the gods did the same unfriendly turn by me elsewhere. Ciphers are in everything, except where they belong, at the tail of one's bank account. We '11 not look for them in anything. Say rather that in Little Red Riding 146 LOVE STRAINS AT THE LEASH Hood I have found a sphinx, as inscrutable as the lady of Egypt, yet most adorably young, what man could ask for more?" " It sounds rather like new wine in old bottles." " There is scriptural warrant for that." " I thought it was scriptural warning. But you are conferring dangerous titles. Sphinxes are famous for asking questions, propounding riddles, and other- wise making themselves objectionable." She fell back into step with him, her heavy de- fences offered no resistance; but there was a saucy curl to the lips that suggested much small ammuni- tion comfortably at hand, ready at a moment's notice. "Objectionable? adorable, let me always be interrogated by a sphinx who is young, lovely, and asks questions only with her eyes. It 's true that no one but the angels could answer her riddles, but the trying, Alice, gives one a winged feeling." He spoke with the mock gravity that men some- times affect when they dare not say seriously that which they feel so strongly that it will not be gain- said, and must be spoken in jest if in no other way. " A winged feeling, indeed ! Then that is why I 've seen nothing of you since I 've been here. I 'm done with ocular questionings, hereafter you shall be interrogated like a witness." They had come almost to a standstill ; and he no- ticed the miracles of design that the rain had wrought beneath her scarlet hood, rings within rings, ten- drils, loops, swirls, some no larger than a wedding ring and as golden; others, larger, and jewelled 147 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT with rain drops, would have held a lady's wrist. It seemed to him that the gods had nothing more to give in the way of maiden sweetness. "There was some talk of questions?" said his Lordship. " I am going to begin on the witness immediately." " You will find him intelligent, I trust." " I feel encumbered by all the aliases you have given me. Yet, as a sphinx, I have the right to ask questions." " It is certainly your privilege." " Then why are all your gates like this ? " She indicated with the toe of a very positive-looking little brown boot the disreputable structure, hanging from its hinges, that divided the park from the planta- tion. " I should think a man of your size would repair a gate like that. Why, I could do it myself." It was his Lordship's turn for blushing, and he did it in a British and altogether unreserved sort of manner, that did full justice to his fine skin and his full-bloodedness. " Give it up, little sphinx; it 's one of those riddles that was only made up for fun. There is n't any an- swer to it. Or it 's too stupid to remember I 've forgotten which." She knew she had blundered, and hit him hard, as she had the night aboard ship when she had asked him about his hunting. Again she was overcome by her helplessness to plead for forgiveness, to follow the blind bent of inclination, to take the big white hand; the impulse had not grown less with repres- sion, yet was she restrained. 148 LOVE STRAINS AT THE LEASH They walked in silence, almost in seeming indif- ference; the lull of rebellious pulses before a gather- ing storm deceived them. Each brooded on the cause that kept them from their divine inheritance. The girl was nailed to the conventions prescribed for her sex. She must hang on the cross, seemingly impenitent. The words prompted by kindly impulse must not be said. She felt the shame of it, yet all the dead and gone generations of women within her clamoured to keep up the farce. And the man. He had a name and a title to sell, because it was all that was left of his riotous living. And the woman he loved had not the wherewithal to buy. And he had retained one or two decent principles from out the wreck of his life, and one of them was that a good woman must be loved or left. And yet, the sorcery of her presence, the hour, the circumstance, they two battling along in the wind and the rain. He bent toward her, as the oak sways to the reed when tempests are a-riot and not to be argued with nor stayed by platitudes. The little reed was the steadier of the two, it was her hour. He drew her arm through his and spoke her name caressingly. Perhaps it was the glimpse of Dunstan revealed by the dip of the hill. Perhaps it was the spirit of prudence that ever glides at the heels of happiness, a lank shadow that cannot be shaken off. At all events, the oak, bending, deliciously conscious of the acquiescence of the reed, felt a shock of the realities. He winced from the galling of his chains. Pale, 149 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT filmy, there floated before his mind a shadow pic- ture of his mother and her brother as he had often seen them bending in consultation, beak to beak, the chins sloping away to the vanishing point, the degenerating genius of the family reduced to jug- gling shillings. And he ran away from duty, made a holiday over a slip of a girl who added only new complications to the situation. What right had he to a thought of this girl? Might not his fruitless wooing be as disastrous as those vagrant summer winds that blow in winter, wooing the trees to blossom by their false spring- time, then wandering away, leaving the blossoms to blacken and die in the unprotected blast ?^ " Women are to be loved or left," spoke up the chorus of experience, inexorably. " Love her," pleaded inclination. " Leave her," said prudence, coldest and most persistent of counsellors. " Love her," and the cry was echoed till he was deaf with its clamour. It was like the cry of "bread" to the hungry mob. The craving throve on the demand. " What makes you so quiet ? Are you sorry that you came?" He was conscious of an additional pressure on his arm. " No, Little Red Riding Hood," he answered ; " we are to have a whole hour together, what could trouble me ? " " Then please talk," she said. " I have to do so much make-believe when you 're not around, that I should like a little reality when you are." 150 LOVE STRAINS AT THE LEASH " Reality, reality," he repeated ; " this all seems terribly real to me." They walked in silence through the rain that a moment before had served, with its smiting gusts and rude buffetings, to make them the merrier; but now the autumn shivered in their blood and the death of things was in their souls, that seemed to be going down, down, to the uttermost darkness. They were like brave souls in a sinking ship who make no de- spairing cry to the Deaf One who answers not. It seemed to the man that their walking through the rain-rotten desolation of autumn, together, yet apart, was the brief summing up of their own pitiful story. He had never known till now what she was to him, that it was to her his soul had been calling all these weary years, as the voice of one crying in the wilder- ness. The thought of it was like the grip of death on his throat; and fear the fear of being robbed of her struggled with nameless foes of her un- protected future, foes that would blot out his memory and take her from him. His first grief found him as unschooled as the tiger of the jungle. No one had yet crossed him be- cause he had had heretofore the price to pay for his caprices, he had bought his way ; and his pur- chase he had called strength of will. His instinct, like the tiger's, was to fling a paw across that which he called his own, and snarl defiance; but this, this, he had no philosophy to meet the present instance. Oh, the doubly distilled agony of meeting her too late ! It was as if she had been sent by some hellish LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT fate to make a mock of the lame fragment of his ill- spent life. To have found the princess and to have awakened her with a kiss, and to leave her for another, this was indeed the extremity of satire, the apotheosis of humour. And yet, they spoke no word. The rain had stopped, and the day was going out, grey and dry-eyed, like grief that feels the unavailingness of tears, and is hushed from very despair. Along the horizon pale tips of flame burnt about the edges of the leaden clouds, like the candles that burn in a chamber of death, giving light without heat. A flock of caw- ing rooks wheeled out against the sullen sky, cawing, cawing, black omens of good luck that was not for them. They faced the inevitable, that must be faced, because the mill of convention must whirl on, and human lives are the grist it feeds on. They knew that the end had come to their story; that in the book of fate it was already down as a fragment, told, perhaps, in a score of words, a chance meeting, a suggestion of what might have been, and that was all. And yet they were together. Why not make the most of the moment? dance as they did in the East while the plague raged within the city's walls, and to-morrow's victims whirled the night away and met the old man of the scythe smiling ? At least their story had not been spoiled in the tell- ing, and, after all, the best of love is the unspoken. Reaction! commanded nature, when sorrow had broken them on her wheel, and that strange, inex- plicable exaltation that seems reserved for the stricken 152 LOVE STRAINS AT THE LEASH took possession of them. The Tarantula of folly had bitten them to the quick. The girl broke the silence that had bound them so long with a laugh that was as deliciously vibrant with life as her voice. It rung out limpid and trickling as a silver chime, and there was no note of bitterness to mar its music. Aling- ham joined in. " Why, we 've wasted the whole afternoon," she said. " We '11 make the most of the dregs." " Then shall we race down the hill, and play we 're leaving all our troubles behind ? " " It sounds like a beautiful game to me," he answered. 153 CHAPTER XVI THE TORMENTING CLAIRVOYANCE OF LOVE THE grim poverty of Dunstan appealed to Alice as no magnificence could have done. It was impressive, despite its ill-concealed penury, and its emptiness was full of dignity. There seemed to be no active force at work in the old place unless the slow, silent destroyer that crumbled con- stantly with untiring fingers could be called active. Dunstan was dozing away peacefully to its last sleep, and if some beautiful princess with a golden wand did not soon hasten to restore it, Dunstan would be too far gone in its dozing to awaken. The ghost of a dead and gone prosperity seemed to wander restlessly through the empty portions of the house, rudely awakening slumbering echoes in picture galleries in which there were no pictures, corridors that never echoed to a human footfall, and rooms that were never opened to the light of day. The air of autumnal decline that was in everything cried out to Alice's housewifely instincts, and made her impatient to lift the poverty that hung like a pall over the place. Her young enthusiasm craved the privilege of opening the sealed windows, and the supervision of a general sweeping and garnishing 154 THE CLAIRVOYANCE OF LOVE that would replace the accumulated dry rot and cob- webs of the ages. And, for the first time, she re- membered with a thrill of absolute worldliness cer- tain details of her family history. The vast, vague tenderness she felt for everything even remotely connected with Alingham began to subside into a devout veneration for his ruinous old home. The traditions, the bits of history, that cropped up daily in connection with some old por- trait, weapon, or lumbering bit of furniture, recreated for her with subtle charm a world of enchanting romance. With his woman-folk she was unaccountably shy; his mother's almost fierce fulfilment of maternal duties to her own daughters well-nigh annihilated the small weed that had grown up with never a guiding suggestion. Millicent, who accepted the servile devotion of her betrothed with something of a martyr's resignation, froze her into morbid self-consciousness with elaborate and perfunctory courtesies. With the twins there were indications, at times, that all three would eventually arrive at some girlish medium of communication. But the restrictions in which the Misses Alingham lived and had their being raised impregnable barriers to anything like real in- timacy. Notwithstanding the ephemeral quality of the home atmosphere at Dunstan, lessons in the gentler arts were unflaggingly pursued by the twins. Not a syllable of the foreign tongues in which they conversed at guileless length was abated, not a bar in the long intricate duets for violin and piano, 155 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT whose supervision was at once the Baroness's duty and pleasure, that not a note might be slighted. From which it will be seen that the Misses Alingham be- longed to that old school of young ladyhood, now happily passing, that tortured its victims into every species of refined accomplishment, with the inevitable result that it bred ladies with a finger in every art and an interest in none. The morning hours were devoted to the more serious pursuits of music and languages; after luncheon there was lace work, em- broidery, or fine cambric stitching, which the twins accepted each in characteristic fashion. Maude pricked her fingers, bit off threads, and sometimes, when the maternal presence was absent, flung the offending task to the other end of the room. But Muriel, who was a more patient soul, slowly and carefully rendered to needlework the time that was needlework's, and being thrifty withal, presented the results of her painstaking to friends at birthdays and Christmas. Alice was sitting with them one afternoon while the stitching was in progress. Each twin was en- gaged on some sight-destroying task that was accom- plished by pulling out multitudinous threads and replacing them with infinite difficulty in order to get some slight and pitiful variation on the original weave of the linen, doubtless a source of great revenue to the oculist but otherwise of uncertain utility. " Maude, you will never be able to do your wheel when you come to the corner. I reminded you of it last week when you cut the wrong threads." 156 THE CLAIRVOYANCE OF LOVE Muriel laid down her own embroidery hoop with satisfaction; her wheel was beautifully under way. " I know you did," said Maude, stifling a yawn. " I mean to lose it hoop and all to-night. I always lose it when I get to the wheel," she said, turning to Alice for sympathy ; " what is the use of wheels ? They only make one's eyes ache. I envy you in not having to do them." Muriel raised a pair of pained eyebrows in distress that her sister should be guilty of such heresy in an alien presence. But Alice basked in this human weak- ness to which she felt akin. After that day she al- ways loved Maude best. She had not seen Alingham alone since their walk in the park, on the day of his return to Dunstan. And when their eyes met by chance she fancied that he averted his more quickly than had hitherto been his habit. Her experiences, these days, were not without their growing pains. Life had taken on a keener, finer edge. There was greater potentiality of joy and suffering. She no longer awakened in the morning confusedly happy before her sleep-dulled brain could grasp at the deeper, fuller meaning of the world that awaited her. These up-risings, that had been so joyous, were now shadowed by vague alarms that waited by her bed like bearers of ill-tidings. And in these first moments of haggard consciousness she would stretch out her arms as if to summon back the tranquillity of those days in which there had been no heaviness of spirit, no withering uncertainty, but only the lulling calm and the joyous anticipations of girlhood. 157 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT The ever-present personality that had invaded her life, dispelling its serenity, demanding incessantly of that innermost self that had no volition but to give, give was at once a delight and torment. It vi- brated through all her waking hours like the memory of some superb hallelujah chorus its vast indwell- ing rhythm now subdued, now dominant, but never wholly relinquishing its insistent harmonies. That doubtful gift of the gods the perfect clair- voyance of a genuine love enabled her to know broadly all that Alingham did, little as she saw of him. When he went off shooting for the day, after an early breakfast, then, indeed, did the house warn her by its emptiness even before she heard the news. Unerring premonition would keep her at the little window in her bedroom by the hour for the exqui- sitely barren pleasure of seeing him walk by with Mrs. Gordon or Lady Hamilton. And his footsteps sounded for her with a mingled joy and terror that seemed to suspend the beating of her heart. There was no sleep for her at night till she heard the fami- liar step pass along the corridor outside her door to his rooms beyond. Why had he stayed so late in the smoking-room? Did they play for large stakes as she had once heard old Reggie hint to the Baroness ? If so, had he lost? She knew, by reason of the exquisite perception that was hers in all matters pertaining to Alingham, that dangers were impending at Dunstan, and she would lie tossing in the bed besieged by burdensome thoughts, battling with perplexities of the very nature of which she was ignorant. 158 THE CLAIRVOYANCE OF LOVE Sometimes she resented with maiden fierceness the continual hunger and thirst for his presence. Why should she always be on the rack ? why should he disturb her days and nights till her tormented soul was but the anticipation of his comings and goings? She would be a fool no longer. She had grown to be but a barometrical device that told whether the king was absent or at home, whether he had smiled or been ill-pleased oh, the degradation of it! She would arise, all the woman in her responsive to the call for coquetry, pretty pretence, smiling in- difference, and go in search of him, in livid pertur- bation, to wag a saucy tongue and flaunt a gay indifference to his presence. For her, the world had begun to whirl about Aling- ham in a series of concentric circles. Her youth no longer lagged, a state of colourless being; it had become the orbit through which he coursed, planet- like, triumphant, a brother to the stars. And what of the man who had brought out the best a woman has to give? His affection for her was the utmost of which a man is capable at the eleventh hour of his experience; and the pleasure he took in her youth and innocence had in it, as his uncle had said, more of the mature apprecia- tion of a threescore worldling than most men of thirty would have been capable of offering; while she, out of the fulness of her inexperience, devoutly said grace for the dregs. Love lent him no wings with which to follow her in her wild young flights. Much living had made him a denizen of lower earth. He had out- 159 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT lived the exquisite madness that is the dower of a first great passion, so long ago that he could not have told you on whom it had been squandered. There had been so many episodes in his life with which the present could be compared, and com- parison is the reduction of sentiment to a commodity. Still the importance with which he regarded all mat- ters appertaining to the affections gave to every pass- ing passion the dignity of a finality. And while the other women that he had cared for now dwindled into satellites, still they twinkled softly in the even- ing of his experience ; not so with the girl there was but one sun in her sky, and no stars could shine for its glory. 160 CHAPTER XVII A SITUATION CONTRIVED BY THE MANAGE- MENT PROVES FRUITLESS ALINGHAM had begun to feel that his role of host to the Dunstan house-party was be- ginning- to resemble the bad quarter of an hour before dinner indefinitely prolonged. There was a tension in the atmosphere that ate into the reserve force of the guests, even as the entertain- ment ate into the borrowed cash of the Alinghams. The Honourable Reginald made up his mind to go to Egypt after it was all over, whichever way it turned out; he always went to Egypt after a great crisis. The last time he had been there was immedi- ately after his wife's death, when, on discovering that pleasures are apt to pall if there is no one to object to them, he lost no time in canonising himself, a martyr to conjugal fidelity. The suspense at Dun- stan was ruining what was left to him in the way of nerves, and the opera-bouffe cook was depriving him of his last remnant of digestion. He felt that the limit of avuncular self-sacrifice had been reached. In the opinion of the Board of Strategy, consist- ing of the Dowager and himself, the engagement of Lord Alingham and Mrs. Gordon could not be brought about too quickly, as the cost of a prolonged n 161 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT siege was absolutely incompatible with the family credit. His Lordship could never quite make up his mind, during these days of uncertainty, which he resembled the more closely; a political candidate in the hands of his friends, or a prize-fighter in the hands of his trainer. When the time came, he meant to be accepted or rejected as befitted a man of his particular social stratum; in the mean time he was glad to leave the responsibilities of the campaign to other hands. The guests at Dunstan were not slow in discover- ing that the Management never saw Lord Alingham unoccupied for a moment without sending him to Mrs. Gordon on some flimsy pretence, and, partly realising the exigency of the situation, they fell in with the Managerial tactics. If Mrs. Gordon entered the drawing-room (C) the entire company, with the exception of Lord Alingham, would make irrelevant excuses and file out (D) ; the whole performance had the frankness of stage directions that read, " Exit all but lover and heroine." On these occasions Alingham would turn with a finely concealed weariness to Mrs. Gordon, thankful that his order countenanced a self-restraint that had much of the same outward semblance as boredom. Mrs. Gordon never lacked the necessary tact wherewith to meet these exigencies. She was one of those women whose audacity is robbed of evi- dent presumption by an apparent frankness. The otherwise embarrassing exodus she would turn into a jest, telling Alingham that as they had been left to themselves by so strange and unlooked-for a com- 162 CONTRIVED by the MANAGEMENT bination of circumstances, there was really nothing left for him but to make pretty speeches, in which case she would take the most becoming chair and endeavour to do her part. " My skirt falls with a great deal of expression, with the train to the left, don't you think? No, I shall not allow the toe of my slipper to protrude; good actresses don't do it any more. I might be opening and shutting a fan, or just closing a book that would furnish us with a nice little topic for discussion." On the occasion in question, Alingham was re- minded of his rather heavy luncheon with its accom- panying bottle of stout by a benumbing inability to fall to the necessary nonsensical depths. " And now for our Ollendorf but you need not clear your throat. I 'm not the House of Lords and you don't have to make a speech." Alingham wondered if she knew that his bank- ruptcy debarred him from addressing that august assemblage, and, feebly struggling with his cue, decided that if he were permitted a black cigar, he might yet evade the stigma of utter imbecility. "Ollendorf did you make it, Mrs. Gordon? How will this do? Would the bewildered man whom the considerate friends left alone with the beautiful lady be considered presumptuous if he asked a favour?" There was the least possible hurrying of Mrs. Gordon's extremely self-contained pulses. It had come, at last; but why had he not led up to it with more circuitous grace? It would serve him right if she refused, but then she was rather fond of this 163 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT handsome irresponsible boy, who invariably upset one's calculations. " It would depend on the nature of the question, and how prettily the bewildered man asked it." " It is a very presumptuous favour but the gra- cious lady is kind: would she object if I smoked? " Had he done it to make fun of her? These sleek men who always played at being bored were hard to fathom. She struggled to keep the petulant note from her voice, and answered: " By all means ; I never aspired to rival black coffee in a man's after-luncheon estimation." " It 's awfully good of you but why talk of rivals ? A cigar is never a lady's rival ; it 's her greatest ally. Each is just a shade more perfect with the other." " It sounds rather like a tobacconist's testimo- nial, does n't it ? The Something or other cigar, woman's greatest friend; or, how he was induced to remain at home after meals." "Induced? I supposed the modern man's 'time was up ' after meals, and he was forced to flee his garden of Eden." "To get pepsin for the apple-tart? or to keep an appointment with Lilith ? " " Are n't you getting your chronology mixed ? Lilith, I believe, anticipated Eve and the apple-tart." " And Adam discovered that the anticipation was better than the reality, the appetizer than the feast, and so on through the whole alphabet of pessimism. Why is the modern woman always a pessimist?" She smiled, but there was an eloquent suggestion of 164 tears about her long lashes. She could not have done more to bring about a declaration, but Alingham smoked on steadily. " I 'm blest if I know, unless it 's because they don't smoke after meals." " Is there always so much nicotine in your point of view ? You '11 be acquiring a smoker's heart." " If you only indulged in the filthy weed, Mrs. Gordon, hope would make me the happiest of men, but you have no heart not even a tobacco heart." She had the abstracted air of one who is worry- ing something clever out of her consciousness. He waited patiently as a cat beside a rat-hole. At last it came, after the faintest little suggestion of by-play. " A heart, Lord Alingham, in a woman of the world is like a tail on a fox-terrier; both are born with these appendages, and both are sacrificed to conventionality. ' ' He felt certain that it was the stout he had had for luncheon that kept his faculties from rallying to a reply, stout was filthy stuff to talk nonsense on ; and it was a scurvy trick of the Management to send him off to make love to Mrs. Gordon immediately after meals. It was playing the deuce with his diges- tion and he meant to protest. Aloud, he said with heavy sweetness: " But, dear lady, why are you so cynical ? A pretty mouth dispensing cynicism is like a delicious peach er withering on a wall." " Getting bitter because no one takes it, you are unflattering, Lord Alingham." " I 'm only lamenting that such a mouth " 165 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT " We '11 keep to cynicism, if you please." " But I don't know anything about it ; please de- fine a cynic, Mrs. Gordon." "The cynic is the Peeping Tom, the Spy; he takes his view of life at the key-hole, and sees things as they are, not as they ought to be." The mere metaphorical mention of these things made his Lordship look apprehensive. " But I make it a rule to leave the key in the door," he began absently. " Really, Mrs. Gordon " There was a faint chuckle from a corpulent arm- chair that stood with its back to them in the window recess. Glancing round, Mrs. Gordon saw the pale gold head of Lady Hamilton, who had not left with the chorus for reasons of her own. "Won't you join us? We are trying to define a cynic," said Mrs. Gordon sweetly. " Do you agree with me that he is a Peeping Tom, Lady Hamilton? your opinion would be so interesting." She was very skilful at handling her weapons, and there was not the faintest trace of murder in her tones. " Thanks but do you know, I was so absorbed in my book that I did not know anyone was here." It was a copy of Jeremy Taylor's Sermons she was holding upside down. " I really must go and write some letters in time for the afternoon post." " Do postpone your letters," begged Mrs. Gordon, nicely poising her weapon for the attack. " You have no idea how good it is to hear a real American again, Lady Hamilton, it quite makes me homesick to hear you talk." The titled American writhed a moment. " You 1 66 CONTRIVED by the MANAGEMENT are from Arizona, are you not, Mrs. Gordon ? How interesting. I never supposed anyone really came from Arizona but the rich uncle in plays, who dies and leaves one all his money. It must be so pic- turesque with the dear little prairie dogs, cowboys, and things. You are the only American I have ever met from Arizona." " Really? And I have never been in Hoboken." Unconscious of the storm, Alingham continued to smoke with British blandness. " How singular, really, that there should be places in your own country that neither of you knows about. It must be tremendous." " It offers unusual social opportunity," Mrs. Gor- don said, with the faintest suggestion of a nod toward Lady Hamilton. " Hardly so much as England," responded her Ladyship ; " but really my letters will never be written." 167 CHAPTER XVIII A PROPOSAL MINUS THOUGHT-TRANSFERENCE LORD ALINGHAM and Mrs. Gordon had driven to Drillford station in the dog-cart to meet a belated guest, one Dickey Win- chester, who had written that he would arrive on the 4:27. In place of Dickey's rotund cheerfulness, however, there was a wire regretting that he had missed his train, and stating that he would arrive on the 5:13. Alingham showed the telegram to Mrs. Gordon, who decided that the only thing to do, under the cir- cumstances, was to wait for the later train. The 4:27 thundered by, and with it went his Lordship's last hope of escape. The Management had planned the details of this little expedition to the station ; and Alingham was by no means certain that his uncle had not wired Dickey to take a later train. Alingham had acquiesced in their arrangement from sheer inability to contend further against the inevitable. Since their arrival at Dunstan, Mrs. Gordon had been constantly thrown at his head by the Management, who seemed in league with her to such an extent as to give no hope of quar- ter from the fair missile, who not only gave every 168 A PROPOSAL indication of enjoying the exercise, but continually put herself in positions to be thrown. In his utter recklessness he had, that very after- noon, gone the length of introducing a little fictitious eagerness into his invitation to Mrs. Gordon to ac- company him to the station for Dickey. Yet it had been enough to justify her in making a special toilet for the occasion, heliotrope and chinchilla, with gold and orange in the small toque. The sartorial appeal escaped his attention, but he noticed, as they paced the length of the station platform, that her hair was over-crimped ; it conjured up on his mental retina visions of her boudoir; he saw the heating- iron and sniffed the odour of singed hair ; he bit his lips to conceal a smile, the grotesque had turned the edge of his tragedy. There was none of the tension associated with travel about the waiting-room of Drillford station; it was musty, depressing, and seemed full of the petrified tediousness of expecting trains that were late, and the poignant regret of missing those that were on time. The fresh air was preferable, despite the December chill. Brackett, one of Alingham's tenants, was the only occupant of the platform be- sides themselves; he burrowed out of sight in a third-class waiting-room as soon as Alingham had acknowledged his obsequious salutation. Brackett was a tenant of the fine old school; he would not have dreamed of breathing the same air as his land- lord. If the latter preferred the platform, the place for Brackett was manifestly the waiting-room. 169 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT Alingham had a gambler's superstition about doing anything to change the current of his luck, when it seemed disposed to be favourable. Instinctively he felt that the Fates were smiling, and the thing for him to do was to drift with the tide. Had he not won two thousand pounds? had not Blanche burned his letters and relinquished all claims on him? And was he not honestly in love for the first time in his life? Why cut across his luck by proposing to a woman to whom he had an aversion? What if she did have money ? a few more lucky turns at rou- lette, a little run to Monte Carlo who could tell ? - perhaps he could again break the bank. His courage rose as the distance between himself and his family increased, and yet, he did not dare to meet the accusing eye of the two Howards and say it was undone. They were pacing the station platform. Mrs. Gordon attributed his abstraction and monosyllabic attempts at conversation to the preoccupation of the prospective suitor. She held her peace and looked demure; it was her conception of the eternal femi- nine, her favourite role for sentimental situations. While she decided to accept him, for the reasons already stated, he endured the agony of a hunted thing. To give himself countenance, he read the signs with which the station at Drillford was plas- tered. He read that a certain brand of cocoa was invigorating and nutritious; that a single spoonful of custard powder would accomplish the work of twelve eggs; and that hair curled on the Princess Victoria curling-iron never lost its curl, he was 170 A PROPOSAL certain that the woman he was about to ask to be his wife had used one. His feeling was that of an actor who in the last week of a long season feels bored with his lines, and has to summon to his aid all the art of which he is master to say the stupid, meaningless words. " Elizabeth," he began with studied tenderness, and then stopped. The name sounded strange to him, he had never thought of her Christian name before. She seemed to him to have been born a Mrs. Gordon. " Elizabeth," he repeated, still under the spell of its impersonality. " Why, what have I done? " she asked tentatively. " No one ever calls me Elizabeth unless I am to be reproved." Her inward question was : " Is he going to ask me to marry him, or if he may smoke ? " " It is I who deserve the reproof I 'm going to be abominably daring." The ring of their footsteps on the station plat- form, as they doubled it in silence, lacked unison; the lighter footfall never fell in harmony with the heavier. But each was too deeply engrossed with the inner significance of the situation to heed such trifling externals. They continued their walk un- mindful of the discordance of mismated footsteps. Her pulses beat with decorous precision, the inci- dent of the grey envelope and of Lady Hamilton's interruption of their last tete-a-tete had, for the time being, exhausted her supply of sentimental gratuities. Her position was that of a pauper who has been reck- less with the stray pennies the Fates have sent him, 171 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT and must needs forego the pleasures of spending when the great occasion presents itself. Imperturb- able, she awaited the turn of events, diverting her- self with maxims of her own construction. If he asked the privilege of smoking, well and good; if he asked her to be his wife, well and better. A widow who has not discovered a better place to keep her heart than her sleeve, deserves all she loses. It was intolerable that woman had to find her happiness in being normal, but since the fact was incontrover- tible, it was better to marry a husband and let him mildly bully one than to go philandering after a career on one's own responsibility. Some sort of home anchor was necessary to keep one from wandering too far. And if one man did not offer these things, the next did. She assured herself that the contemplation of such every-day truths could bring no wild heart-bounds to the woman of the world who regarded them through the lorgnette of convention. With such philosophy did she stay herself, while he began to choose the words of his declaration with extreme deliberateness. His head was like an echoing cavern that rung with stupid reiterations of protest against the thing he was about to do. There was no sound in the still December air but the ring of their mismated steps on the station platform. A growing petulance at the turn affairs had taken robbed him of the necessary tolerance wherewith to dally longer with the inevitable. Since he was to be married to meet the exigencies of his family, why 172 A PROPOSAL delay their convenience ? He began to take a morbid pleasure in the thought of precipitating the affair. Should he persuade her to elope with him, and be married, in London, next day, by special license? His intolerance of the finality was momentarily checked by the enlivening prospect through which it might be approached. It would be amusing to give the Management with its eternal espionage and conniving the slip. But Alice? He tore out the hope that had slowly and unconsciously been taking root in his life since he had known her, and regarded it despairingly as a mother might look on the face of her dying child, her only one. Why had it to be? Why must the best of him be put away, like a dead thing, to rot in the ground unseen? Why, why? The instinct of escape which leads a man to jump from a burning ship into the black ocean was on him; behind were the crackling timbers, before the black, still depths in which he might at least hope for peace. But what peace could there be for him, with these women to provide for? There could be no open door when duty chained him. Their plight was of his making; he had not the heart to make it worse. "Of what is he thinking?" she asked herself. " Do his thoughts run parallel to mine ? Does he consider marrying me as I consider accepting him? Do I represent some dismal makeshift in his life, as he does in mine? " And the woman in her the dependent, loving, in- consequent Eve could have wept in her loneliness. " Elizabeth is too formal a name for me to make 173 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT my prayer with, dear lady; may I call you Betty, like the little girl?" " I can hardly fancy Alice with such a bass voice," she answered, struggling to assume a lightness of tone she was far from feeling. " Is n't chaff a waste of time between us ? I come to you a mendicant, asking many alms I shall spare you a beggar's whine or a boy's sentimen- tality. We have both lived our lives, and the best is no longer ours to give. It is only the shadows of twilight I am asking you to share with me, dear, a ruined old house and the heart of an old-young man, but if you will say yes, I shall try to be worthy of you. I shall try to make you, at least, content." Alingham was conscious of the melodramatic quality of this declaration, and half expected that Mrs. Gordon would immediately charge him with the insincerity with which he felt branded. But, on the contrary, his unheard-of seriousness, the sudden dropping of the banter with which he habitually addressed her, the ring of regret for the something that was not his to give, appealed to her despite the painful frankness of his avowal. She liked what she considered his bold sincerity; they had lived the best of their lives, they had met as travellers in the noonday glare of the wilderness, and their way across the parched wastes was to be the pleasanter for their comradeship that was all they asked. She was so weary of her worldliness. She had been asking for bread and receiving stones for so long that the poor little crust just flung to her went A PROPOSAL to her head like wine. Had they been anywhere but on the platform of a railway station, she would have cried out her sorrows and joys on his shoulder like the crudest school-girl. For answer she gave him her hand. The 5 113 rounded the curve, Dickey's rubicund face showed at one of the windows. There was no time for tender exchanges, it was the one thing Alingham felt he had to be thankful for, in the wreck of his life that stared him in the face. His greeting to Dickey was absurd in its cordiality, considering that the two men were by no means in- timate friends. As a matter of fact, Alingham had never been so glad to see anyone as he was to see Dickey at that particular time. It prevented him from keeping up the farce for the time being, at least, and he was in a frame of mind where every moment's respite counts. Mrs. Gordon, who was in the humour for consol- ing thoughts, attributed the unusual warmth of her fiance's greeting to his rapture at having just been accepted by her. She liked him the better for his simple, unaffected joy, it was just the one neces- sary human touch that she had always felt he lacked. And so they drove to Dunstan, Dickey pluming himself on some unexpected charm, Alingham thank- ing Heaven he had been spared love-making with a woman he could never love, and Mrs. Gordon smil- ingly complacent in her triumph over the most in- different man in England, whose love for her gave him the enthusiasm of a butcher-boy. Thought- transference was not of the party. CHAPTER XIX CONTAINING SOME TALK AND AN IMPENDING ANNOUNCEMENT FOR the unaccountable, but nevertheless suffi- cient reason that events are given to pro- claiming themselves in assemblages before their due announcement, the guests at Dunstan knew, on the day Lord Alingham asked Mrs. Gor- don to be his wife, that the occurrence for which they had been gathered together had come to pass. Had she accepted or rejected him? Surmise was rife. Everyone had his individual reasons for antici- pating congratulations or a bland unconsciousness, in the event of urgent telegrams that would dissolve the house-party, in the interests of mythical business. Nothing could have been less luminous than the demeanour of the chief dramatis personae, and their social small change was neither of greater nor less value than that which they had dealt and returned, to the amusement of their friends, from the begin- ning. To expect, however, that such verbal experts as Lord Alingham and Mrs. Gordon would barter words in so slovenly a manner as to permit the hazarding of guesses regarding their specific value, was to admit a naivete more than childish. 176 AN IMPENDING ANNOUNCEMENT The desperation of their host's plight was as visible to his guests through the dismally sincere attempts at hospitality as is the formation of the skull seen through the lightening flesh of wasting disease. To witness the final gasps of the spendthrift was to take issue for or against him, and the consequent uncer- tainty of the result drove spontaneity from the board, and gave to the meal something of the grewsome conviviality of a funeral feast. And as the ladies rose in obedience to a signal from their hostess at the conclusion of the meal, it was with a feeling of gratitude to Providence that the blessing for which they were accounted thankful was at an end, rather than for the bounty thereof. The crystal lustre in the white salon had been lighted for the first time since the opening of Dun- stan, and its chilling illumination of the classic frieze added not a little to the almost theatrical anticipation of impending climax. Later, coffee imparted an at- mosphere of ephemeral domesticity, despite the frigid impassivity of the Olympians. " Ugh," said Mrs. Gordon, with a little shiver, as Lord Alingham came up smiling languidly. " All these marble ladies and gentlemen quite frighten me. I feel as if I were drinking coffee with the gods, and had not the proper social credentials." " I 'd back you to hold your own, even then," he answered with almost marital equivocality. Their bearing seemed an ineffectual struggle against bore- dom ; seeing them thus together, the bulk of opinion disfavoured the idea of an engagement. " I should not like it even with the credentials ; 12 177 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT it would be terribly depressing for me to live con- tinually in the society of a lady who, like Diana opposite, for instance, spends her entire life aiming, but never hits anything, how diagnostic of her sex, the eternal aiming, the never hitting ! " " I fancied the modern woman not only hit the bull's eye, but broke the machine, the record, and everything in the vicinity." He wondered hopelessly whither they were drifting in those labyrinths of verbiage of which she seemed never to weary. " I like people to do and have done with what- ever they are doing," she added briskly, " and then begin on something else. That is why the stage in- terests me more than real life; the climaxes come more swiftly, the actors do not get all their heroism ground out of them by the long strain. Almost anyone could be heroic if the opportunity came about dramatically and quickly, it 's the long, weary grind that takes the potentiality for heroism out of all of us." " Another advantage that the stage has over real life is the curtain. No home should be without its curtain to ring down on embarrassing situations." " But your curtain would stunt social development. What is a better test of good breeding than the art of meeting embarrassing situations gracefully ? " " Then you would divide the ill-behaved from the well-used, who, of course, would have no embarrass- ing situations to cover." " Indeed, no, I should not divide them. Life is far too dull as it is." Alingham, who had no interest in the tete-a-tete, 178 AN IMPENDING ANNOUNCEMENT welcomed the sight of Boadicea Byng and the de- fenceless Usher, who were wandering about looking at the frieze with a conscientious resignation that required only a Baedeker to fill out the tableau of a continental honeymoon. Lady Hamilton had put out her cigarette on en- tering the white salon, which vaguely reminded her of the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore, and though she racked her canary brain, she could not decide whether the cigarette had been extinguished in re- spect to the Royal family, or in memory of a certain happy day she had once spent there, as a tripper, with a man whom she would always believe she loved for no other reason, apparently, but that she had married some one else. The others drifted in and contributed cheerful vacuities on the subject of the Olympians, and Aling- ham realised with a thrill of joy that British conven- tion frowned on a man's making love to a woman before a room full of people. The evil moment was again averted. The affianced pair drifted apart, he to talk grouse with a man, and she to spar with Lady Hamilton, who, like most ostentatiously femi- nine women, displayed no skill in argument, or in- deed in warding off vicious attacks in these inglorious one-sided combats, and who could only ruffle her feathers and peck back personalities. On the whole, the white salon was not conducive to smoothly undulating social intercourse; it was too coldly and impersonally eloquent of the departed glory of the Alinghams to promote perfect equanim- ity among the guests that were partaking of the 179 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT present restricted hospitality of the house. It drove their imaginations back to a past before which the present could only cringe, mute and apologetic. So they strolled away from the Olympians to surround- ings that demanded less in the way of sympathy to their host than did the chilling severity of the white salon. Alingham dreaded lest Alice should hear of his engagement through the medium of general gossip, or, indeed, in any other way than that of his own telling. He saw himself softening the bald announce- ment with devices old as Genesis; he did not mean to be theatrical, the situation was too sacred for stage-craft, but he had a manly faith in his own presentation of a bad situation. Yet in characteristic fashion he permitted successive opportunities to slip by, while he alternately cursed his moral cowardice and his misfortunes. Already his mother and Mrs. Gordon were en- sconced together on a sofa; the autumnal softness that lighted up the bleak profile of the older woman he interpreted as benign acquiescence in the confi- dences of the younger. He knew that Uncle Regi- nald awaited but the first premonitory signal to proclaim the glad tidings. Moments were precious. He rose and went in search of Alice. He found her alone in the grim white room, ex- pectation written in every line of the lithe young body. Never had he seen her so pale, and as the faint colour began to flitter into her cheeks, a votive offering to his presence, she was like one of Valdre's figures in the frieze slowly flushing into life. He 1 80 AN IMPENDING ANNOUNCEMENT saw that her gown was white, and soft, and silken, with reflected lights among its folds like the cool shimmer of moonlight on mountain snow; and that her russet gold hair caught the light from the crys- tal lustre and returned it in a flash. She seemed to fill the room with a holy radiance that to him was like a benediction. She had the poetry of dead legends. She might have been a snow maiden, a daughter of the erl-king, whose heaped up whiteness woos the traveller to his last slumber, and whose sweetness is that of the early spring flowers. The pure white flame of his passion burned away the dross; he knew at last the wild white peace that comes from unselfish resignation. Never had he been able to grasp at it under the name of religion. He had been incapable of sacrificial tribute to the god, in a black cap, who doled out punishment, sen- tenced, and continued to sentence, that his divine justice might be appeased. He had turned long ago from this vengeful god, and everything else in life had been the making merry, for to-morrow he was to die. She had awakened the potentiality for better living, had called forth the sacrifices, the burnt offerings that the hanging judge had never received from him. And yet the irony of offering to the shrine of her who should have been bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh, such pale, cold wraiths of the soul she had awakened! He took her hand, that was no pale, undeveloped fragment of fragile young lady- hood, but a hand full of life and promises of eternal tenderness, a hand that would bind up the hurts of a common day. It lay contentedly passive in his 181 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT ruggeder palm, and yet he might not take it to have and to hold, for better, and best, there could be no other reading of the lines with her. He could not take it, because it held out no money to him, it had not the price of his follies, it could not keep him in the wine, women, and all the other neces- saries of life. Yet in that brief moment, when he confronted the mass of his follies rising like a wall before him, a wall that kept him from her, he had experienced the keenest anguish of which his soul was capable. In her presence, the explanations by which he had hoped to justify his course rose up and mocked him. His insincerity recoiled like the backward fling of a badly handled rifle. His weakness expended itself in childish blasphemy. " Alice, have you ever thought what a humourist the god they give us to worship is, what a practical joker? He scourges a man through the valley of death, and his feet are cut with the stones, and torn by the thistles, and he sees never a face that he is not glad to turn from in the hope that the next may make the heat and the sweat and the toiling worth while. But he does not find it, and when he goes to the mouth of the pit, he 's glad, glad to be done with it all, to slip down to the unknown darkness, glad to take his chances with anything against life; and when he is on the quicksand and it 's too late to run back, he sees the face that makes his strug- gles but a memory, just a bitter memory to laugh about and forget in the light of her eyes. And he cannot turn back because the sands are slipping, and 182 AN IMPENDING ANNOUNCEMENT the pit yawns, and he goes down to make room for the next man who is the victim of the next joke. And that is life, by the merciful dispensation of providence." " You don't mean that." She slipped from the chair to her knees at his feet. She reached up her bare white arms and wound them around his neck. Her mouth quivered, as the blind god's bow might quiver before the arrow is loosed, she kissed him. " I do not know why you are troubled, but I am so sorry, so sorry." He felt her hot tears on his hand, and a moment later she had gone. CHAPTER XX THE ANTIPODAL ANGUISH OF A MIDNIGHT CONFERENCE ALICE had a curiously vivid impression of the externals of the scene, many radiat- ing lights, chill white figures, and the pom- pous formality of the old furniture, rather than of the man with whom she was parting. She knew now that it was all over, that hence- forth some invincible barrier would keep them apart and her first impulse, like that of some small wounded thing, was to escape to cover. There was no shame for the unsought kiss she had given him for very pity; it was the unconscious mother in her that had responded to the avowal of failure and weakness. She had realised that it was her part to bear the greater burden by reason of her greater strength. It was the mother in her that loved him the better for his weakness. But of this she was ignorant, as she sank beneath the influx of compel- ling forces. She mounted the narrow winding staircase that led to her own room with the uncertain nimbleness of one who is pursued. With tear-blinded eyes she groped through the grateful darkness for the, little white bed and buried her head in the pillow, that 184 A MIDNIGHT CONFERENCE no listening ear might hear the confession of her sobbing. To her untried youth it was the end, and life rolled before her a grey and endless perspective, whose meaning she could not see. She was too in- experienced to know the value of the blessed gift of time, the all-healing unguent, or of that cynical school of ethics that undertakes to adjust all heart- hunger by the dismal system of substitution. She sank beneath the weight of a first sorrow that was the more crushing because it was without the com- forting remembrance of other griefs met and con- quered, or the assurance of compensation, or the knowledge of greater fulness that comes to the tried soul. The tragedy of her youth terrified her: she was so young and strong it could not kill her; she must go on through all the allotment of years dying inch by inch under the burden of it. Then came fierce rebellion and the despairing knowledge that it availed nothing to beat against the bars of the inevitable. She had never been taught to pray, nor, indeed, had she ever felt the need of su- pernatural aid. But now she begged deliverance of she knew not what, sending out her child's soul in frantic appeal, crouching closer as she felt the un- availingness of her supplication sweep back engulf- ingly. Hours after the abandonment of her grief had left her incapable of further suffering, she knelt there, grateful for the darkness, the silence, the free- dom from contact with her kind; dreading the pre- tence that must be kept up lest these people might 185 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT know she had given her best unsought, and had it flung back at her. She hastened with her preparations for bed, that she might pretend sleep and evade her cousin's cross- questionings as to the cause of her sudden flight. To-morrow she would offer the plea of a headache, comprehensive barrier behind which the hunted sex may gain brief respite from prying eyes and clack- ing tongues. She had barely completed her prepara- tions and found refuge once more in the grateful darkness when her ear caught the swishing rustle of Mrs. Gordon's trailing skirts. "Are you asleep, dear?" she asked, pausing at Alice's door; but the girl did not reply, and Mrs. Gordon rustled on to her own room, an eminently proper one for the chief guest, being no other than the room which the august Elizabeth had honoured with her presence nearly three centuries before. But Mrs. Gordon gave scant attention to the carven bed that had been pressed by the limbs of the great queen, nor yet to the royal signature on the leaded pane, these things she already regarded indifferently as her property. The disappointment of her first marriage, the bit- terness of her dependence, the uncertainties of her widowhood were all forgotten in the supreme tri- umph of the present. She must write to Alice's father ; he would, of course, do something handsome, and Alingham, poor boy, evidently had none too much, surely Uncle Caspar could be depended on, now that she was in a position to do so well by Alice. She went to her desk and began to write: 186 A MIDNIGHT CONFERENCE DEAR UNCLE CASPAR, You will be glad, I know, to hear of my engage- ment to She stopped, and considered critically. " Would he?" Uncle Caspar had been the chief loser when her late husband's entanglements had all but wrecked the name that had been the equivalent of money in the Northwest for the last quarter of a century. Her own father had died penniless of the shame of it, leaving her nothing but the hope that his brother would " do the square thing " by her. Hence the trip to Europe with Alice, at something more than a munificent salary. What would Uncle Caspar think of this second matrimonial venture with an English- man, particularly one who already had a reputation as a spendthrift? " Would he provide or advise? " The question ill accorded with her self-gratulatory mood. To-night she wanted to enjoy the sensation of triumph re- duced to its simplest elements, to swell with it, as a soaking sponge, and think of naught but the swelling. She closed her portfolio and again began to walk with shoulders back and neck arched, but she could not get the effect, and dragged a chair to the mirror to enjoy a little solitary gloating, fall- ing easily from one pose to the other as she remem- bered photographs of certain titled beauties. But it was pitifully inadequate, this playing to the gallery without a single god. She wanted to be ad- mired, applauded, envied, better an audience of one small, sleepy girl than the post-midnight stillness of 187 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT this old Tudor house. The situation justified an especial toilet, her choice was perhaps a trifle too conventional for so painstaking an artist, loosely braided hair, clinging white robe, and noiseless fur shoes. She stood in front of a pier glass, candle in hand, and tried the effect of her braids thrown first over the bosom, then back. She liked the effect of her dressing-gown caught up at the waist as she had seen it arranged in classic statuary; there was some difficulty in getting just the proper thing to secure it, but finally the " confidential toilet," as she called it, was complete, and with a final glance at the mirror she went to Alice's door, and rapped with increasing violence till bidden to enter. She approached the bed with a sort of floating motion. She had seen Ellen Terry float in the same fashion in the sleep- walking scene in Macbeth. She put her candle down on the little spindle- legged table near Alice's bed and, bending over, kissed her on the forehead. " Were you ill, dearie, that you slipped away so quietly to-night? I was quite worried about you." Alice asured her that her indisposition was of the slightest, and awaited disclosures, vaguely wonder- ing what such extravagant negligee could signify. " My dear," said Mrs. Gordon, crossing her hands and nestling them in the voluminous folds of either opposite sleeve, " I could not resist the temptation of coming in for a little chat with you. I knew you would not mind my waking you up. Youngsters, like you, can always go to sleep again, and I had to talk it all out to someone to-night." 1 88 A MIDNIGHT CONFERENCE "Are we going away?" Eagerly, "Oh, do say yes, Betty; let's go to Paris." "We are going to Paris on the jolliest errand; you and Maude and Muriel are all to have Louis XIV. frocks alike and picture hats. Lady Alingham and I talked it all over this evening." "Picture hats, what for? I don't understand. Why should I have hats like the Alinghams?" " How stupid of me ! I quite forgot I had n't told you. Because I am going to marry Alingham, and you are all to be my attendants or still-life studies, or whatever widows have. I am sorry for your sakes I am a widow, and can't have you for out and out bridesmaids." ' You are going to marry him, has he asked you ? When ? How long ago ? " Her voice was strange and sounded far off, but Mrs. Gordon was too engrossed with her own affairs to notice. " You don't suppose I did the proposing, do you? He asked me this afternoon at the station waiting for Dickey Winchester's train." Alice lay still, and all thought was taken from her, before realisation grew from out the whirling chaos. " At the railway station Alingham and are you happy ? " " Happiness means different things, dear, at dif- ferent times. At your time of life it means every- thing, at mine nothing. Do you think that sounds disloyal to Alingham? I do not mean it so. Living is the death of expectation, and we have both lived, dear; we are not like you, a little bear with all its troubles before it." 189 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT Alice lay still, and her throat ached as if tighten- ing fingers were closing about it. " And shall I feel like that some day, that noth- ing matters? " "If you are human, yes. But many escape the common lot because they live and have their being in success, in society, in art. But the real woman in her wretchedness is always trying to escape some- thing, her home, her family, her obligations, to reproduce the typical modern woman in all her agonised perplexity. One should paint her fleeing; I am fleeing my ennui " And still Alice lay in the half light without strength for reply, her body felt numb, only the brain re- sponded to the call for suffering. " Sometimes I have felt, dear, that you must think me a hard woman, that I should at least have made the pretence of caring; but I was too honest to pre- tend. Every woman must break her heart just once, it must be gone through with like those hideous infant ailments that wreck so many little lives for no apparent purpose. Every woman has to break her heart just once, the process is to her what time is to a violin, what colour is to sunset, flavour to wine. If she survives she is seasoned, and every other man is her amusement, or not, just as she wills it. It is like the system of fagging at the English public schools; she serves her bitter 'prenticeship that she may serve a bitterer to others. " So I, you see, dearie, have had my little story, so has Alingham, so will you some day ; only remember when it comes that no man is worth it. 190 A MIDNIGHT CONFERENCE All my chatter won't help you a bit when the time comes. A more perfect knowledge of the symptom never yet stayed the disease. " Good-night, dear." She stooped and kissed her. The shadowy greyness of morning found Alice still staring at the darkness. She had not moved. It was as if a great stone had been rolled on her and crushed out life and youth. 191 CHAPTER XXI UNCLE REGINALD EXPLAINS BUSINESS TO A PROSPECTIVE NIECE BY luncheon, next day, the engagement had been duly announced, and each of the guests had offered to Lord Alingham and Mrs. Gordon such flowers of speech as the forcing-house of his mentality afforded. These tributes had been accepted apparently more in that spirit of chastened resignation that accompanies the taking of funeral emblems, than the gladsome occasion would seem to warrant. At least, so ran the bulk of opinion at Dunstan, where constant observation of each step of the betrothal had, in all probability, morbidly sen- sitized the impressions of the guests. Uncle Reginald was much in evidence. While not exactly usurping the pivotal position of the event, he bore about the same relation to the romance as does the undertaker to the funeral, an indispen- sable master of ceremonies, more conspicuous than that to which he owes his importance. The bride to be, poor lady, had been bred to hor- rors till she throve upon them, a hardy plant that seemed to grow but the more luxuriant from the in- cessant lopping and pruning of a malign fate. Her 192 REGINALD EXPLAINS BUSINESS husband's shortcomings and subsequent suicide, fol- lowed closely by the failure and death of her father, had given her a distorted perspective of life. She learned to anticipate it in headlines of the modern sort that exhaust the possibilities of a chamber of horrors in a single day's news. If there were lack- ing certain elements in the reception of the announce- ment of her betrothal, she attributed it to the universal tragedy of things rather than to any sentimental shortcomings in her own romance. Alingham sustained his part so well that no one accused him of anything less common than the en- gaging of himself to an attractive woman with money, in preference to one without. A venial sin, according to the Dunstan code, and one from which the most orthodox might well pray for the oppor- tunity to be shriven. He had grown yellow white, like tallow, when Alice had put her little cold hand into his colder one with the wish that he might be happy. He did not look at her, even for a moment, while she repeated the words convention prompted. The undertow of the situation was too strong even for a semblance of equilibrium. Beyond the girl's trite wish that they might be happy, there had been no bandying of words. But he noticed, as she turned from him, the tighter clasp of the young, soft mouth, and he knew she had served her woman's novitiate. Uncle Reggie hung about the " happy couple " like a fly. By tea-time he had forsworn his facetious mourning and paid the romance the compliment of a red tie. 13 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT Some few days later, Uncle Reginald, as master of ceremonies, concluded that the engagement, as a purely romantic event, had had sufficient sentimental tribute, and that it was now high time to lead it gently into those practical channels where, through the instrumentality of the family solicitor, such minor details as the prospective bride's marriage portion, his nephew's bankruptcy and consequent debts could be fully discussed by means of that mer- cifully impersonal language known as legal. On two or three occasions he had hinted at the bleakness of these forthcoming formalities to Mrs. Gordon, re- gretting that so charming a romance could not be as free from prosy details as is the courtship of 'Arry and 'Arriet. " The penalty of your position, my dear lady," he would remark in consoling accents; bidding her, at the same time, to make the most of this happy lapse from responsibility, as much tedious discussion of family affairs was to come with the arrival of Aling- ham's man of business. " Poor Ally, he 's managed his affairs shockin'ly, shockin'ly; but what could one expect of so eligible a young man ? No one but a prig or a St. Anthony could have withstood his temptations. Really, some- one ought to introduce a bill to protect the eligible young man, Mrs. Gordon. Foundlings, blindmen, street-musicians are all adequately protected by law, but the hope of the mothers and daughters of a great nation is left to the mercy of chance, I as- sure you I am not jesting, my dear lady ; the matter needs instant attention. Ally 's come out of his wild- 194 REGINALD EXPLAINS BUSINESS oats harvest surprisingly well considering his un- usual advantages. He 's lived, dear Mrs. Gordon, but he 's all the better for it. The man who marries without having had his little glimpse of the green- room is never quite certain whether the fairy's wings are made of tinsel or something much better. His grandmother said tinsel, and she really ought to know, but then there is the eternal temptation of finding out for himself. Ally has no doubts on the subject. Tinsel offers him no further inducement than the butter-scotch and ginger beer of an earlier stage of development. I may have to plead guilty to being old-school, dear lady, but I am a sincere advocate of a complete curriculum of human experi- ence. The pang of a green apple is better than a score of lectures on the evils of orchard robbing. You are so thoroughly a woman of the world, Mrs. Gordon, that I know it is unnecessary for me to explain my frankness." She smiled encouragingly; the point of view of the last of the Plantagenets always amused her. " In a somewhat varied experience, I have yet to see a more efficacious means of leading the most obstinate of bachelors into the straight and narrow aisle that leads to the altar than by means of of those ephemeral attempts at domesticity that, say what you will, are the best guarantee of a final settlement." Mrs. Gordon had much similar philosophy served up to her during the early days of her engagement. In fact her prospective uncle never seemed so entirely happy as when expatiating on the advantages of 195 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT marrying a man who, despite his youth, was so dis- mally precocious as to have wearied of viciousness. By this time Mrs. Gordon was sufficiently ac- quainted with the mental processes of the last of the Plantagenets to recognise in these avowals something in the nature of a preface to disclosures that would follow at that leisurely gentleman's discretion. With him the circuitous was always preferable to the di- rect. To such an extent had he cultivated the habit of throwing off the scent, that it was impossible for him to come to the point, in any matter, till he had exhausted the possibilities of circumlocution. Under the circumstances, it was with a feeling almost akin to satisfaction, that Mrs. Gordon grasped from out the labyrinthal mazes of Uncle Reggie's innuendoes the one concrete fact that Dunstan could not be kept open, even on the most unpretentious scale, for a sum less than thirty thousand pounds a year. Thirty thousand pounds a year, and yet these people jested of poverty! Perhaps it was the tentative way in which Reggie was fitting his tapering fingers together, perhaps it was mental telepathy, perhaps it was the lag- gardly uprising of a surprisingly keen intelligence that had slumbered long and wilfully, content to drift in roseate dreamland. For a moment she fought the hideous truth with the strength of a starveling who sees his last crust swept from him by some whimsy of fate. Then she faced the inevitable with a lip smile and the pitiful prop of wounded pride. " And all this requires money in large sums for readjustment?" 196 REGINALD EXPLAINS BUSINESS Reggie fitted his taper fingers with even more ex- quisite exactness before replying: " My nephew's debts exceed four hundred thou- sand pounds. We are most anxious for him to appear, as speedily as possible, before the bankruptcy commissioner." To her stare of utter bewilderment he replied : " You know, of course, of Ally's bankruptcy ; he was declared insolvent before he went to the States." " And these debts must be paid, of course, before there is any question of settlement?" " In such a decided transition as that from bach- elorhood to matrimony, it is a universally con- ceded to be a wiser policy, my dear lady, to begin the new order of things with a clean slate." She was almost comically judicious as she replied, " And the cost of the sponge would be about two million dollars ? " Reggie acquiesced with a bow, and another fitting of finger tips. " And Dunstan, one hundred and fifty thousand dollars on a small scale; the place in Scotland fifty thousand dollars to make it livable, broadly speak- ing, three hundred thousand dollars a year ? " " If it were well managed, my dear lady. Ally's things have gone to the dogs on twice the amount." There was a whimsical little pucker in Mrs. Gor- don's white forehead, the distress signal one sees in the face of a shopper nerved to stoicism at the passing of some great and unusual bargain. " Mr. Howard, I can't afford the necessary sponge 197 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT (o wipe the slate, we have been playing a game of unintentional misunderstanding. Alingham 's mis- understood the situation, so have I, we have both builded on a quicksand. I have not a farthing beyond the allowance Miss Dean's father makes me for looking after her. My husband involved every sou of my money; I am merely a dependant of my uncle's. It 's too bad Alice and Alingham could not have fallen in love. She will have more than five million sterling in her own right." The last of the Plantagenets appeared like a lamp that is flickering out in a strong wind. He flared up wildly two or three times, but shed no light on the dismal situation. His face worked mechanically, like an automaton, then dropped without a word. They sat staring at each other across the width of the green cloth table in the library where there were no books. Mrs. Gordon displayed no intention of extricating herself, it was as if she had played her last card and sat indifferent to consequences. " My dear lady," repeated Uncle Reginald mechani- cally, " you and Alingham have my deepest sym- pathy." He passed his fine old hand across his wrinkled forehead as if to wrest away swarming gnats. There was an invertebrate limpness about his entire frame. Nothing seemed to have with- stood the crucial moment but the youthful collar into which his working face seemed sinking. Mrs. Gordon arose. " My dear Mr. Howard, I am so sorry that you have been put to the trouble of this useless explana- 198 REGINALD EXPLAINS BUSINESS tion of your family affairs. I shall write immedi- ately to Lord Alingham." He held open the door, and she completed an exit that would have done credit to an Empress. " My dear boy," said Uncle Reginald, after the hideous news had been broken, " it 's terrible, but then it might have been worse. Suppose, for instance, some mad impulse had prompted you to marry this lady by special license, as you admit having consid- ered. The catastrophe would then have been more complete than at present." His Lordship was bearing up wonderfully. " If it were not for mother and the girls " he ex- claimed, striding up and down the room. " I shall wire Musgrove, join him and his abominable Cross and Blackwell bottles. Thank Heaven, I can get away from the gossiping cats " " My dear boy, forgive me if I seem cruelly pre- cipitate, but there have been times when I have thought you not wholly indifferent to the charms of Mrs. Gordon's young cousin. You may recall " " God in Heaven, Reggie ! There is a limit even to my degradation. Whatever else you may feel at liberty to discuss, spare me the mention of Miss Dean." " They are leaving for London early to-morrow. The necessary wire has already been received. Miss Dean is to go to the Sacre Cceur for a time, and Mrs. Gordon will remain in Paris to be near her." " Poor boy, poor Ally ! you might have been 199 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT spared the infernal plot, plots are so vulgar," said the last of the Plantagenets. " Ring the bell for a brandy-and-soda, and let 's thank Heaven there is something to avert the edge of this realism." Alingham went to the desk and scrawled rapidly for some minutes, then handed the wire to his uncle. PHILIP EDGERLY MUSGROVE, Stockholm, Sweden. Join you Tuesday. ALINGHAM. 2OO 'BOOfe CtDO FIVE YEARS LATER CHAPTER XXII THE "ARRIVAL" OF MRS. HENNESSY LONDON had enjoyed a week of June sun- shine. Passing cabs were hailed by walk- ing-sticks instead of the perennial umbrella, London was getting reckless. An old gentleman had written a querulous letter to the Times, deprecating the unusual heat wave then passing over the city, and intimating that the climate was not what it had been twenty-five years ago. The annual prevaricator had again heard the fabled nightingale, whose apocryphal warblings, somewhere within the confines of Hyde Park, wooed him again to print and reminiscent periods. To the teeming world of London that rides in 'buses, prays with due seriousness for the Royal Family, takes its pleasures sadly, and thanks Heaven it is the greatest nation on earth, it was merely the spring. To the august assemblage of leisurely, well-dressed people who make up London proper, or improper, according to one 's point of view, it was merely the Season. The season of hopes and fears to portly matrons with fragile wares to dispose of, ere the market should be closed and the purchasers supplied and scattered. 201 The season of hopes and fears to the socially ambi- tious who risked fortunes on the turn of a card, a card stating that Lady Flora Flub-Dub would be at home, etc. The arrival of such a card had received its due tribute of flutterings in a certain house that par- ticular June morning; when, at least, the sparrows chirped long and loudly in default of the fabled song- sters heard in the columns of the British press, and it was spring, lovely and tender, for all the soot and grime of London. " Listen to this, Alice," said the older of two ladies who had been dawdling over a late breakfast in a charming room, the windows of which faced Park Lane, and commanded an impressionistic view of the Parade on Sunday morning. " Have we arrived? " enquired the younger lady, showing a great expanse of scornful eyelid. " Arrived ? Why, my dear, we 've barely time to straighten our hats. Listen " Reads in theatrical tones " The Duchess of Ventnor at home. Ty- rolean Yodlers, eleven o'clock. June the twenty- seventh." " I don't want to listen," answered the lady of the fatigued eyebrows ; " it will be bad enough to have to listen on the twenty-seventh. How we 've slaved for this yodling! Subscriptions to charities, regular attendance at church, and pounds and pounds to the Victorian Memorial Fund." " Duchesses do come high," mused the other lady, who was Mrs. Terence Hennessy, wife of the South African millionaire, but who, as the delightful Mrs. 202 MRS. HENNESSY "ARRIVES" Gordon, had had such a narrow escape from marry- ing Arthur Alingham, but why quote stale gossip, when the lady, either as Mrs. Gordon or Mrs. Hen- nessy, is entirely capable of keeping us supplied with fresh topics of interest ? " Only a Duchess would dare to have yodling. You have to give them Melba at two hundred and fifty pounds per evening, two songs, one encore. It must be so economical to be a Duchess, don't you think so, Betty?" " To return yodling for Melba does seem to be an excellent example of British thrift; however, I believe lions are going out, everyone 's used them for live bait till they 've palled. The success- ful hostess has got to think of something new." " Why not have tigers ? begin with Mr. Croker, at present in Wantage other Tammanyites might be induced to emigrate why not have a tiger salon?" Again Mrs. Hennessy mused for a while : " Bet- ter one Tammany salon in London doing society, than nine-and-ninety Tammany saloons in New York doing a rushing business. Why, Alice Dean, is n't that a letter from Gilchrist lying by your plate, and not even opened ? " The younger lady lifted up a dish cover with mournful solemnity, and placed it over the unopened letter. She did it with the air of one concluding a funeral rite. " Poor Gilchrist, what are you going to do about it? such a nice old title, too." " You speak as if I were making a collection of old 203 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT titles, Betty ; " and there was a trifle more eyelid in evidence. " You ought not to treat him like that. Do, please, Alice, ring the bell and let 's try to get a bit of hot toast ; cold toast is as prevalent in England as the Garter motto. But, as I was saying, poor Gilchrist simply devours you with his eyes. Preston, some hot toast; be sure it 's hot." Alice smiled indulgently. " My dear girl, your demands for toast and your plea for the Earl of Gil- christ are so curiously interwoven that I am con- fused." " I said Gilchrist devoured you with his eyes." " It 's a way they have, my dear, a mere social usage, like bowing or lifting their hats. I 'd be the last to interfere with their pretty ways." " You will have to marry sooner or later, my dear girl. This Sister of St. John business that you talk about is absurd, you are a little tired, and the grey habits and dim chapel seem restful, that 's all. It doesn't mean anything, really; I've felt that way myself, scores of times." " But you invariably decided in favour of matri- mony," tossed off Alice. Mrs. Hennessy's brow clouded for a moment, but she said with perfect good-humour, " Matrimony al- ways seemed a more human sacrament than holy orders and I 'm very human." " The difference between marrying and staying single," and Miss Dean assumed the gravity requi- site to settling the vexed question for all time, " is the choice between dining table d'hote or d la carte. 204 MRS. HENNESSY "ARRIVES" At table d'hote you take what 's coming, that is matri- mony irrevocable, indissoluble, binding, and as many synonyms as you please. A la carte permits of a greater choice, more solitude for reflection, but among other advantages you don't have to wait for coffee. If you don't want coffee, you can push your chair from the table and go your way." ;< You can afford spinsterhood, my dear ; it 's one of the few prerogatives of the wealthy woman. Poor women have to marry, willy-nilly and that 's what he is usually to prove they 've had the chance ; no one would believe it otherwise. Good gracious, is this Thursday ? and I 've four gowns to be fitted at eleven. Alice, what made you let me run on like this ? " There was little of Delsarte's theories visible in the manner in which Mrs. Hennessy left the room. The years that had brought to the former Mrs. Gordon the welcome transition from penniless de- pendence to practical social security had dealt kindly with her. She had mellowed in the process, like wine kept in a cosey cellar. Her glance was more steadfast; her rapid movements, that had not been without a suggestion of anxiety, had settled into a self-satisfied languor, enviously interpreted as the equivalent of British repose by the ladies of the Amer- ican colony in London. The congenial exercise of writing checks agreed with her; there were fewer hollows about her throat than when the Fates played her so scurvy a trick at Dunstan. She could dispense with a few pearls in her necklace at dinner. Miss Dean looked her age with perhaps the accu- mulated interest of a year or two. Not that her eyes 205 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT wore sinister crescents, nor her cheeks the pallid livery of romance; she would have fought such attributes gallantly. Perhaps it was the ability to fight them that infused an indefinable flavour into her personal- ity. In her robust slenderness she looked the typical modern Diana, who sees in life many targets worth her arrows, and who rejoices in a good aim and a full quiver ; but she was clearly a Diana who cherished no illusions regarding the spoils. You read that in the half-amused, half-ironical glance that flashed up at you from eyes that had lowered their lids and reserved much of their wealth of expression. She tilted at life with her visor down, and had acquired considerable coolness and skill in handling her weapons. Of that eerie quality that was too intangible for actual beauty, and was perhaps but an illusion of fly-about tawny hair and absolutely simple modelling, not a suggestion remained. It had gone like the early morning dew on a peach, when the delicate fruit has been exposed over- long to the glare. In appearance she was modern almost to the verge of caricature. The tawny hair no longer blew about her face in appealing tendrils; it was twisted into a wonderful structure that suggested crimping-pins, the coiffeur's " art," and the ladies of the Royal Family. The smiling reserve perpetually at the corners of her mouth lightened or deepened as the passing panoramas proved dull or amusing laughter or tears were too hearty a tribute for so toler- ant an observer. All London knew of her as a great heiress. The fatal blunder of the house of Alingham did not promise to be repeated. There was hardly a week that the American papers failed to print an ac- 206 MRS. HENNESSY "ARRIVES" count of her alleged engagement to one title or an- other; but Alice Dean continued to remain the hope and despair of those bachelors to whom marriage means the legal appropriation of moneys by the sanc- tion of Holy Writ. Mrs. Hennessy, whose cordial reception by the remotely exclusive since her marriage had inclined her if possible to a less lenient view of her fellow- creatures, used to say: " If a man does not propose to Alice within a week of his introduction, it 's safe to congratulate him on his own engagement." And doubtless that was Miss Dean's most plausible excuse for remaining single. In a country in which all the roads are sign-marked as leading to Rome, a high-spirited girl might be expected to seek some less frequented highway. The Alingham episode had been resolutely thrust back in that Blue-beard chamber of sinister experience that she had happened on through innocence rather than the curiosity which prompts ladies of maturer observation to fit chance locks with ever convenient keys. In those first haggard days of rebellious bending to the yoke of the inevitable, she might have failed ut- terly but for that quivering, wounded pride that cried out to her for screening shelter louder than her own heart-break. After their parting, her life revealed bare, withered patches, like a forest over which a de- vastating fire has swept, leaving the blackened tree- trunks to bear aloft dead branches, apparently for no other reason but that of grimly illustrating one of fate's most ruthless acts of vandalism. She came 207 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT from the ordeal withered to the core by the blight of indifference. It was not only her inability to give the smallest atom of affection, but she could no longer take such gift in simple faith. In that first fearless giving of the treasures of youth, the largess of love had been poured into a sieve. Their value and her own lavish waste she was tardy in rec- ognising, but she was not the woman for prudent pros and cons, when love was at the bar. You read that in the ripple of her mouth and the quick kindling of the eye. Neither was she a woman to require the same lesson twice. Hence the highly interesting Miss Dean of several London seasons. Her attitude of brilliant aloofness was not without its peculiar charm to men who saw in her indifference a challenge to their strategic powers, added to the zest of conquest and the glory of spoils. Nor was she beyond the wanton sport of throwing tempting crumbs to those tame birds of prey that have their feeding ground in the London season, a bit here, a bit there, to the shyer members of the flock as a " come-on ; " nothing to the bolder ones who flour- ished without such gentle encouraging; then, splen- did impartiality, double-handfuls for all, till the last crumb is dusted away, and the lady bountiful is off in search of fresher amusement. As likely as not she will look for it at Monte Carlo ; she loved to feel her pulse quicken with the tension that was as much a quality of the air as its southern softness. And she forgot racking introspection in seeing the greed-transformed faces growing grey with the sudden sweeping-away of hope, or the exultant 208 MRS. HENNESSY "ARRIVES" flush at the temples, the extended hand, greedy, claw- like, in its lust to clutch the spoils ; and the Russians who gambled like Sphinxes, and the Jews who gam- bled as if their mournful souls were on the green cloth ; and the croupiers with their monotonous dron- ing, and the mild old ladies with systems. I blush to say it but she loved Monte Carlo. She never com- bated the temptation of risking her next quarter's allowance, indifferent alike whether she lost or won the stake; she played for a little quickening of the pulse, a momentary throb of something that was not the foreordained dulness, in which her youth seemed going down like a swimmer in a drowning clutch. Her wit sometimes had the saltness of brine, and the corroding cynicism of her maxims the flavour of spoiled sentiment. This was the mask she took refuge behind when her lip quivered and her eyes were dimmed with tears. But the world saw only the mask it judged her a hard young woman, and she was thankful for the false judgment. When Philip Edgerly Musgrove, commonly called " Jimmy," with whom Lord Alingham sailed on the Polar expedition, in which nothing had been discov- ered, returned to England with little more than a budget of good stories and some valuable furs, he answered all inquiries regarding the whereabouts of Alingham with, " He stepped off somewhere in Alaska yes, I think it was Alaska. He '11 turn up some day." And everyone was content with the meagre information. In fact, Alaska was considered an excellent place for a bankrupt to " step off." His world had managed to get on without him. Other H 209 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT bankrupts claimed the ephemeral sympathy or illus- trated the parental homilies to the son of the house : the utilitarian purpose of the bankrupt is restricted. Alingham was dead as Pharaoh. And this was all that Alice Dean had heard of him since they parted at Dunstan. Alice had forgotten him. In her life he had dwindled to the vanishing point ; yet the bitter recol- lection of that which he had evoked, the essence of heart and soul and brain, the waking and sleeping thought of him, these were memories bitten deep as the etcher's acid bites the plate, and she re- coiled from the thought of loving, because she had loved much. She was not wilfully hard, nor con- sciously morbid, but she recognised the iron with which her youth had been branded, and it did not seem a pretty toy to tie a ribbon to and play with. With unaccountable indifference to imminent social opportunities, Alice had gone to Devonshire, the week after the arrival of the Duchess of Ventnor's card, to visit the daughter of a country parson, for whose ex- cessive worthiness she had lately developed a great fondness. Since the beginning of the season she had swung, restless as a pendulum, between the asceticism of the Reverend John Colton's household and the fri- volities of London. A week of early breakfasts, mothers' meetings, and church politics would be suc- ceeded by days in which many social engagements had to be fitted with the exactness of puzzles. It was while she was under the austere influence of Margaret Colton that she thought of entering the Sisterhood of St. John, a nursing sisterhood whose conventual rule 210 MRS. HENNESSY "ARRIVES" bound the lives of many of the ladies of the nobility. Alice fancied that she had a real vocation for the aus- terities of Good Hope House, and enlisted the sym- pathy of the clergyman's daughter in her behalf, Margaret shyly confessing that inclination led her also in search of the peace that the world could not give, but that to yield to the temptation in her case would be weakly self-indulgent, as innumerable duties bound her to the rectory. They had many exalted moments during these days, Margaret piously envying Alice her freedom of choice, Alice confiding that she feared her father's bitter objection tp the Sisterhood. Margaret's sympathy suffered a rude shock one day when she entered Alice's room and found the pro- spective novice pinning handkerchiefs and a black shawl about her head to see if the habit was becoming. Alice, all unconscious of the desecration, wheeled about from the mirror with : " How do I look, Margaret ? " Margaret smiled in pained exaltation, as a martyr at the stake. " Your own pretty hair is much more becom- ing, dear ; " and she removed the handkerchief and shawl. Nor would the rector's daughter again dis- cuss the advisability of Alice's entering the Sisterhood of St. John. She would deftly turn the talk if it veered in that direction, and Alice felt small and reproved. Margaret was even more sympathetic over the hol- lowness of the world than before; but Alice felt that the quality of her sympathy had suffered a change. Never were they again on that lofty plane of yearn- 211 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT ing: Margaret inclined to her as a dignified ecclesi- astic; Alice unconsciously found herself playing the role of restless parishioner, eager for she knew not what. Suddenly she remembered a pink and gold frock that she had never worn. It was a very lovely gown, and had come from the couturiere's several days ago. She bade a hurried adieu to Margaret, and returned to London by the next train. It was nine o'clock when Alice reached the station. She had neglected to wire Betty of her arrival, and there was no one to meet her. She knew that in all probability Mrs. Hennessy would be deeply annoyed. Betty considered it " very American " for a young woman to arrive or depart from a railroad station unaccompanied. Attendance for the young person, under all circumstances, was the first article of Mrs. Hennessy's faith. The cab whirled rapidly through the blurring fog; the lights in the buildings burned in long yellowish lines, like splashes of water-colour roughly applied to the paper. Alice wondered about the lives of the people in the houses they were passing. Were they happy ? Was it some deficiency within herself that prevented her from get- ting more out of life ? She felt she must fight against these thoughts. She was getting too narrowly intro- spective. Perhaps Betty, not expecting her, would have gone out, in which case Alice would have to spend a dreary evening at home. She put her hand up through the window in the roof and told the cab- man to hurry, promising him an extra shilling if he made good time, and under a swing of the whip the horse started off at a rocking gallop. 212 MRS. HENNESSY "ARRIVES" Mrs. Hennessy, a miracle of the works and pomps of Bond Street, had left the house a few minutes be- fore Alice's arrival. " Had Mr. Hennessy gone with her? " " He had, Miss." She resigned herself, with ill grace, to a melancholy evening. It was easier to yield to the imp of unquiet- ness that possessed her than to compose herself by reading or calm reflection. Without removing her hat or jacket she began to walk up and down the long drawing-room, over the time-mellowed Aubusson car- pet that was but a detail of the general extravagant simplicity. There was a Watteau on the wall where all the bonbonniere gentlemen smiled with mock def- erence at the bonbonniere ladies who accepted this mimic obeisance with smiling reserve. How like the season it was! The season was the Watteau gown dull and haggard ; the satin coats of the gentlemen had turned black, the ladies had grown a trifle worn and wrinkled from much smiling but the tableau was still the same. There was a Romney, too, in the drawing-room, a portrait of a lady in white, with a sweetly grave mouth and eyes that were deep wells of tenderness. She had doubtless been stripped from the panelling of some old house. Some one's ances- tress gone to pay the debts of the prodigal heir. She was their ancestress now, and Alice blushed as she looked up at the white lady. They the Hen- nessys and Deans belonged to that splendid aris- tocracy of money, the aristocracy that acquires its ancestors in a night. Aladdin's lamp would make fine quarterings for them; Aladdin's lamp on a dollar rampant. LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT Alice continued her walk up and down the beauti- ful room, with its Sheraton sofa of satinwood inlaid with delicate tracery and its Chippendale cabinets. The old furniture exhaled a tender melancholy; money could buy even the subtle aroma of romance. How skilfully the trail of the dollar had been con- cealed! Yet it was there, omnipresent. How easily they had wrapped themselves in this luxury ! It was like a satin-lined garment that slipped on easily, and covered much. But the satin-lined garment was getting a bit monotonous for daily wear. When one wore it, one always met the same people, smiling ladies with charming voices and hair dressed like Queen Alexandra, slightly vacuous gentlemen with expressions of self-satisfied boredom. She felt as if she were shutting up her soul in a fortress of her own building, a stone here, a bar there, and soon the prison would be complete. Yet she dared not stop putting stone on stone, it was preferable to idle- ness, and there seemed no alternative. She longed for the courage to rebel, the courage to stop doing empty, foolish things that only complicated life. But how or where was she to begin? 214 CHAPTER XXIII A CHANCE SAMARITAN LIKE the sound of the sea from a shell, the dull roar of the city came to her murmur- ously. London's great orchestra was tuning up its instruments for the night's symphony. Across the slowly moving volume of sound, her ear detected a melancholy motive, a great wave of desolation that surged and beat up from the city like grief that is beyond tears, the woe of existence, singing its chant into the symphony of the city. The uncouth music, throbbing with life, stirred her till the house seemed to contract in its efforts to expel her into the clamouring babel. Above the tumult she seemed to hear one small voice, fright- ened as a child in the dark, calling to her for help. She leaned far out of the window; the night was blue and softly blurred; through the light drizzling rain the lights burned dull yellow, like the golden ornaments the Etruscans fashioned. Again she heard the cry, and now it had a desper- ate note that called to her woman's mercy to hasten. Yet she shrank in terror from the streets, the crowd, and all the gaunt spectres of the London night. She turned from the window impatiently. It was only a fancy, a morbid fancy; this clammy, unhealthful 215 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT depression must be shaken off. But again it came, distinct, actual, as if it had been in the room with her, but now so faintly feeble that it seemed but a moan. She was no longer mistress of herself; something stronger than her terror of the night, the streets, was sending her forth. She had no will, but was as one who falls shudderingly through the dark abysses of sleep. The jarring of the front door as it closed behind her startled Alice back to clear-headed consciousness for a moment, so that she stood looking at it, amazed at her own plight. Then above the hoarse crescendo of conflicting sounds that dinned its discord with many repetitions, she heard the voice faintly be- seeching. And this time she hesitated no longer, but went down the quiet street without turning to the left or right. She followed the lights as resist- lessly as a hypnotic subject turns toward the bril- liant object that, for the time, controls his brain. With the nimbleness of a somnambulist she threaded her way among the hansoms, the lumber- ing omnibuses, the skurrying crowds that poured from theatres and music-halls and were swallowed up in the congested currents of humanity making their way along the pavements. The lights were multiply- ing, the streets were full of the chill blue glitter of in- numerable sparks of electricity. All the instruments in the London orchestra crashed fortissimo. The symphony of the city had not a note of music now; it beat at the brain, a meaningless din. She seemed to have been caught on the outer edge of a whirlpool, that slowly and deliberately with- 216 A CHANCE SAMARITAN out effort or volition on her part carried her to a certain destination. The cry grew stronger; she could make it out now : a woman's voice, weak with illness and suffering. Her consciousness, that had been like a paralysed thing, began to stir; she could feel the pavements beneath her feet; the buildings were no longer the fantastic structures of a dream; and then, with a flash of shuddering self -conscious- ness, she realised she was walking along Piccadilly Circus alone, and it was past midnight. London's midnight output claimed every inch of the narrow pavement. The respectable and the dis- reputable were herded together as one flock; the British family, estimable, dull, exemplified by the stout matron, the red-faced father, the daughters with their marvellous complexions, complacently elbowed their way in quest of the 'Ammersmith bus, through a mob of prostitutes. The frog-faced continental, who is as much a part of Piccadilly as its pavement, twirled his mustachios in front of the St. James. The crowds flitted by, some dull and homely, some sinister and menacing, like faces in an evil dream. The rouge bloomed strangely on the haggard coun- tenances of the sisterhood of the streets, some of whom wore the grey weariness of dawn, and some- times despair looked behind the stereotyped laughter in their eyes, like a second face at a window. Their hats, crowned with towering bunches of flowers, concessions to the spring, were matted into damp, pulpy masses, and their skirts swished disconsolately in the mud. It was sin shorn of every illusion, sin told in the dull prose of a municipal report. 217 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT They walked tentatively, with staring faces and free-lance eyes, their clothes clamorous, their faces daubed vermilion and sometimes white, leper white, and Alice realised that these were the out- cast women of whom she had but vaguely heard, the women who are born to sing the chorus of de- spair in the symphony of the city. The knowledge rose to her lips with the bitterness of a salt wave. Oh, the pity of it! and her heart went out to these poisoned blossoms of the London night. What had brought her out? Was it one of these women who had called, whose cry had reached her above the tumult of London? Then she noticed that immediately in front of her a girl dropped out of the dismal pageant, clutched at a barred shutter, and coughed convulsively, the spasmodic paroxysms that are nature's last gasping protest at the tightening fingers of death on a throat. She saw the girl hold her skirts aside, that the tawdry livery of the streets might not be despoiled by the blood that spurted from the painted mouth. She tugged at her red skirts with a rigid hand, holding them well away with a determined grasp that sug- gested the petty tradesman saving his small stock in the face of desperate chances. What was life's blood when her only dress was at stake, the red dress and all that depended on it? The night moths circled by, with eyes glazed and dull by much staring; of their charity they gave the girl a generous allowance of the pavement; there was other business afoot in Piccadilly besides that of Samaritanism. The blood continued to flow, till 218 A CHANCE SAMARITAN the strength in the rigid arm was spent and the red skirt went the way of many a cherished thing. In her struggles for breath, the girl even regarded its fate with indifference, and leant back against the closed shutter, unconscious of the blurring wetness of the night, the flitting human swarm. She was exhausted, the closed shutter of the shop afforded a momentary prop, and with the grim philosophy of the streets, she made the most of it. Alice knew, in a flash of immediate cognition, that she had found the one of whom she had come in quest, the one in all London, in all the world, perhaps, who needed what she had to give. It had been this woman's voice, thin with suffering, that had found its way to Alice's heart, and made it sen- sible of something beside its own ache. Nor had its cry the abject note of mendicancy; it offered help for help; it asked and it promised to Alice, foundering in a sea of self, relief from that painful inturning of thought that is so perilous. She went to the assistance of the night moth that had nearly fluttered out its little span ; and there was in her heart no pharisaical thankfulness for her own goodness. She slipped her arm about the girl's waist, she wiped the stained gown with her cambric handker- chief, she spoke to her words of sisterly cheer. And when the girl opened her eyes and smiled, Alice saw that she was pretty, and that the pitifully crude clothes sat ill on her, as a child who dresses himself in the attic's spoils and plays a part he does not understand. 219 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT "Where do you live?" The girl gave the number of a house in Maryle- bone Road ; Alice beckoned a passing hansom, helped her in, slipped in beside her, and told the cabman where to drive. The incident had created no ripple of interest on the surface of Piccadilly ; each swarming night thing had business of its own. It is there, as it is in the thickly multiplying life of a noisome pool; when one of the darting swarm goes down, there is one more chance for the survivors, and there are many swarming things with life to fight for in Piccadilly and the pool. Alice never gave a passing thought to the equivocal position in which she was placing herself by being alone on Piccadilly at midnight, by entering a cab with a painted woman of the streets. If you had remonstrated with her as she whirled along with the night moth, she would have answered you, with a fine uplifting of the chin, " And pray of what use is my respectability if I may not help a sick woman because she has not that which I have? " There was about the girl an alkali of uncompro- mising honesty that fizzled up at the least admixture of pharisaical doctrine. In a mood of absolute de- pression something beyond her ken had called her out into the street, where she found a woman sick and in want, and Alice intended to help her, rouge and red skirts notwithstanding. The girl was too ill to give any conscious thought to the chance Samaritan. She lay back in the cab 220 A CHANCE SAMARITAN with eyes closed, breathing hard, and from time to time moistening her dry lips, on which the blood had caked in little flecks. Neither had spoken since they entered the cab. Row after row of houses slipped by them in the darkness, some huddled to- gether in respectable family slumber; some blinking at the night with one red eye that disclosed the word " Hotel." The house of which they were in quest seemed a shade more dreary than its fellows, a gaunt, smooth-shaven house, secretive in every feature. A gas jet flared above the front door, throwing grotesque shadows on the word " Apart- ments " painted in white letters around the half-cir- cular transom. Miss Dean told the cabman to wait, and offered her arm to the girl; they entered together. And now, let me tell you that Alice, for all her uplifting thoughts of universal sisterhood, knew that grim fear that stalks about strange places and makes the victim's skin grow tight about the roots of his hair. Together they mounted the dark staircase, Alice with her arm about the girl's waist, fairly dragging her two steps at a time, the sick girl gasping pitifully at the enforced exertion. Alice felt the cruelty of hurrying her, but of unknown terrors lurking in the dark landings she did not trust herself to think. It seemed an intolerable time till the girl recovered her breath, found her key, and opened the door; she groped about for a match, lighted a lamp, then threw herself into a chair with the abandon of utter exhaustion. The room smelt of London, poverty, and drugs. 221 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT It was a sitting-room, and opened on a bedroom beyond. There was a sofa in which the springs towered aloft into mountain peaks with valleys be- tween; an arm-chair presenting the same geograph- ical inequalities of surface matched the sofa; the rest of the furniture a table, a couple of chairs was of deal. There was no gilded ease nor flouting luxury ; visible poverty made itself at home in every corner of the place. A group of medicine bottles herded together on the mantelpiece; among them a flask of whiskey. Alice poured a little in a glass, added water from a carafe, and gave it to the girl, who sipped it slowly, regarding Alice narrowly as she busied herself about the room. The trained eye of the woman of the streets, which learns to take a passing impression with the precision and fidelity of a camera, registered Alice correctly. She was unmistakably conscious of the presence of a gentle- woman. " I don't know how to thank you," the girl said when Alice had taken off her wet boots, mud- splashed and down at the heel with much tramping of the streets. " Don't try." And Alice went on with her prepa- rations, heating water over a spirit lamp, turning down the covers of the bed, shaking out the folds of the red dress. Neither referred to the stark circumstance that had brought them together; and each, in avoiding a reference to it, acquiesced in what she felt to be the inclination of the other. " Is a doctor looking after you ? " " I go to the hospital for medicine," the girl 222 A CHANCE SAMARITAN answered, expecting the next question would be: " Have you any relatives? " But Alice asked no questions; she had no wish to cross-examine, urge repentance, offer tracts, and demand a dramatic story of downfall, she simply wanted to make things a little easier for the sick girl. " I hope you will sleep well ; would you like me to stay with you, or would you rest better if I went away?" There were tears in the girl's eyes as she said : " Would would you stay ? " " Then I will send the cabman away. I told him to wait." Again Alice plunged down the dark stairs. She considered sending a message to Mrs. Hennessy, but decided on its impracticability. Betty would come home late and imagine that Alice was still in Devon- shire; if she should hear of her return from any of the servants, she would imagine Alice had gone to bed hours ago; they were not given to midnight confidences. She paid the cabman, then loitered, waiting for a fresh impulse of courage to bear her up the stairs, finally running as if a thousand perils were in pur- suit. On regaining the room, she locked the door and quietly slipped the bolt, she was fully aware of the danger of her position. The girl heard the bolt slip, for all Alice's quiet precaution. " There is no danger. You will be quite safe." And nothing further was said in explanation of their sudden fellowship. The street girl was 223 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT strangely shy in the presence of a good woman who further complicated the situation by an avoid- ance of proselyting. Alice combed out the girl's hair; it was black and abundant, and as each strand slipped through the comb it twisted into tender little spirals. " How lovely it is," said Alice in sincerest admiration. " It 's strange I don't lose it when I 'm so ill," and there was a faint echo of pride in the state- ment, " but it does n't fall out." The girl was wonderfully pretty in her white night-dress, and Alice wondered if she had been less pretty, would she have been here in this wretched room dying alone. Miss Dean made the most of her Samaritan duties as a substitute for conversation. It was difficult to talk to this girl without stumbling on some chance reference to her mode of life, or the circumstances in which she had been found. And this Alice shrank from as she would have shrunk from the inflicting of a wound. Again, the girl's personality compli- cated the situation. Her voice had the controlled modulation of good breeding; a certain delicacy that evinced itself in a dozen ways when Alice had as- sisted her in her preparations for bed, these things made Miss Dean feel akin to her. And yet, the shrieking scarlet frock, the rouged cheeks, the un- mistakable errand on which she had been bent, were too horrible to think of. Alice reproached herself with a lack of real charity for her inability to break down the constraint. 224 A CHANCE SAMARITAN The girl turned uneasily in her bed, and Alice, fearing an impending confidence, said: " Try to sleep now ; I '11 put out the light." " Don't think me ungrateful because I can't say more to thank you. I am not even surprised you are here. I dreamed of you twice, and once when I sat here alone, I felt your hand touch me. Just as it did to-night." " Then you expected me? " " Perhaps it 's because I 'm so ill that I dream strange things, and the other night I dreamed I died, and they were taking me to Potter's Field, and I would not go, I was afraid. They tried to carry me, and I struggled with them I who am so weak but they could not overcome me and I called and called to a crowd of women, but they only looked at me and would not come. Then, a girl came I do not remember her face and took me away to such a nice quiet place; and when you spoke to me to-night, I knew you must be she." Alice racked her brain to think of something cheer- ing to say to this girl, but what was to be said? At least she had youth. " The absurdity of a girl of your age talking of Potter's Field, now go to sleep ; " and stooping over, Alice kissed her on the forehead. " Not an- other word to-night. No, don't even ask if I 've wound the clock." Miss Dean sat in the dark chilly room and listened to the symphony of the city die away in the clatter of hoofs pattering past, fainter and fainter ; then still. 15 22 5 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT To keep up her courage, she permitted herself a little mental soliloquy : " Alice, my dear," she said, " like our namesake we appear to have fallen into Wonderland, not the dear wholesome Wonderland of the March Hare and the Mock Turtle, but a hide- ous place full of night things and one poor sick girl. But we think our trip to Wonderland, or Uglyland, has done us good. We needed some awful illustra- tion of misery, some brutal page torn out of life and thrust on our attention, to make us realise our own selfish sorrows, and if we get out of Ugly- land alive, we intend to go back to our old Dad in the West, and leave the ' nobility, gentry, and clergy ' to their own devices." The lagging hours grew ominous, the gnawing of a rat in the wainscoting was full of sinister sig- nificance. Alice turned the situation over repeatedly -the girl was only a frayed-off thread from the skirts of London, and a great city must trail her skirts through ugly places, and frayed-off threads are snipped by Fate's relentless scissors. But she in- tended to see that the passing of this street waif should be less desolate than the passing of a street dog. It was nearly seven o'clock when Miss Dean took leave of the girl, promising to come again in the afternoon. At the corner of Park Lane she dis- missed the cab that had brought her home. A sleepy house-maid was scrubbing the steps as she entered. " Good-morning, Parker." " Good-morning, Miss," the maid answered, think- ing Miss Dean had been for an early morning walk, 226 A CHANCE SAMARITAN and deciding that gentlefolk take little advantage of their comforts. In Miss Dean's place, Parker would have slept later. Mrs. Hennessy noticed that after Alice returned from Devonshire she was less often available for social engagements than formerly, and Mrs. Hen- nessy feared the worst. By the worst, she meant the Sisterhood of St. John. A haunting dread lest Alice should join the order filled her, and it was not les- sened by the presence of Margaret Colton in the house. Margaret and Alice were continually away attending to some mysterious business, regarding which they kept close council. When Mrs. Hennessy questioned Alice, the girl only said with a smile: " Humanity, Betty; and, you know, that does not interest you." " Slums, I suppose ; I only hope you will not be bringing home germs." " Don't worry ; there is nothing so beneficial to the little busy germ as worry." The mystery continued for a fortnight. Margaret and Alice were hardly ever at home at the same time. Betty's curiosity could stand it no longer; in her capacity of chaperone she demanded to know the cause of the mystery. And at last the explanation was forthcoming: a friend of theirs was dying of consumption. She was without relatives, and they had secured lodgings for her in Kensington; they went to read to her daily, and that was all there was about it. Mrs. Hennessy suddenly lost interest in the case, there were so many poor young girls, without 227 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT relatives, dying of consumption; really something ought to be done about it. One day neither of the girls came home to lun- cheon, and when Mrs. Hennessy encountered them late in the afternoon, Alice repudiated the idea of going to a Paderewski recital. And then she did something that Mrs. Hennessy never remembered her to have done before, in all their years together. She broke down and cried miserably. " The girl we spoke of died this afternoon," Mar- garet said in explanation, and there was a sugges- tion of tears about her own eyes. And so the street waif lacked neither friends nor tears in her passing. ****** It was a fortnight later that Alice announced one morning her intention of returning to her father in the West. " But, my dear, you can't possibly go now ; I can't leave London, and there is no one to go with you." " I rather think an American girl can take care of herself anywhere." " But to cross the ocean without a chaperone, my dear, it is not decent." " Dear Betty, suppose our mothers had reasoned that way. Why, they would never have gone West in search of sage-brush schools and incidentally our fathers. How punctilious we have grown in one generation ! " Then Mrs. Hennessy showed her teeth with per- fect good-humour, as she always did when brought to bay. 228 A CHANCE SAMARITAN " Of course, there are hordes of battered old gen- tlewomen who would be delighted to take you over for a consideration." " Not for worlds. I '11 cable Dad to-day to meet me in New York, and sail Saturday week." " Oh, you incorrigible ! " was all that Mrs. Hen- nessy permitted herself, with " Poor Gilchrist ! " as an afterthought. And believe me, there was grief under many a splendid waistcoat when it became definitely known that the prize of several London seasons was return- ing to the States fancy free. She was not the type of girl one associated with meditation in any form. 229 CHAPTER XXIV A PRAIRIE POINT OF VIEW ONCE a day, or, to speak with tiresome ex- actness, at 5 130 P. M., the west-bound train stopped for a brief moment at the little town of Puma, and then continued on its way toward the Pacific Coast with a derisive shriek at such pas- sengers as had been sufficiently intrepid to make Puma their stopping-place. Well might it shriek derisively at those stranded souls left to accommo- date themselves to the makeshifts of that raw prairie town, whose sole claim to civic responsibility rested in a post-office, a brace of rival saloons, and a hotel maintained by the railroad that stopped, jeered at, and then ran away from Puma once in the twenty- four hours. Sometimes the " Overland," as the train was con- scientiously called by the more conservative element, would stop at 'the prematurely aged little town, day after day, without contributing a single passenger for discussion. And the frontier loungers gathered about the door of the Interocean as the railroad hotel was not inaptly called, it having no ocean nearer than fifteen hundred miles would solemnly file to the bar of one of the saloons to irrigate such arid topics as were still left to them. After a particularly long and trying hiatus be- 230 A PRAIRIE POINT OF VIEW tween human topics, in which the group exhibited all the symptoms of expecting some definite food for discussion, there alighted from the train one after- noon two passengers whose appearance had evidently been anticipated. The man was all of sixty, but he wore his three- score with such an unconscious agility as to convey the impression that his was, at least, the ideal age in man, even if lighter feminine vintages ripened in fewer years. Furthermore, this deluding old man with his secret of perpetual youth stored away in a ruddy cheek, like a derisive tongue curled at an indifferently preserved contemporary, had shaggy grey hair that hung about the shrewdest face in Christendom. His baggy tweed clothes, undoubt- edly once grey, had been submitted to such repeated processes of smoke absorbing that they had acquired as fine an amber bloom as a meerschaum. The lady who accompanied him was in the flowering of early twenty-hood, but this amenity of ruthless time was lost sight of, perhaps, in the extreme modishness of her attire, which anticipated Paris fashions by a year, a circumstance most distressingly ignored in Puma. The gentlemen of the jury, gathered on the steps of the Interocean for a verdict, agreed loyally that she was the handsomest yearling ever seen in the State. And as the buckboard that had been await- ing the arrival of the train swept by the hotel, every sombrero bounded up like a rocket, and there arose three cheers that would have insured the 'election of any candidate for political honours. 231 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT Alice Dean had not forgotten prairie chivalry and what was due it. She leaned out of the buckboard, bowed graciously, and waved a slim hand to the gentlemen of the jury. " Can't stop, boys," called out old Dean ; " there is near fifty miles between this filly and her box stall." You may be sure the jury retired to do its duty by so important an event as the return of Caspar Dean's daughter; in fact, the town celebrated long and gloriously. The road from Puma to the Dean ranch wound over the prairies like an undulating snake, it had been the original Indian trail, and it curved and writhed around almost imperceptible inequalities on the flat country in true Indian fashion. Huge fields of waving grain soon replaced the crisp prairie-grass, and when the wind swept down from the mountains, - great northwesterly gusts of it searching out the bottomest crannies of the lungs and awarding in- stant testimonial in a deeper hue of cheek and a brighter flash of eye, it lashed the yellow sea of grain into billows that rose and fell to the limits of dim perspective. Giant wheatfields they were that take days to sow and days to reap, and where the huge machines crawling over them in the reaping-sea- son bear about the same proportion to the fields that they reap as a fly to the ceiling that he crawls across. Alice had begged to be allowed to drive the broncos, and old Dean was admiring the practical way in which she handled the ribbons, sitting up very straight as she would have done in the park. 232 A PRAIRIE POINT OF VIEW " Not bad," he had remarked to himself two or three times with evident approval. "Dad, do you own that wheat?" she asked, neatly flicking a fly off one of the broncos. His wink was positively saturnine as he answered : " Accordin' to the deeds appurtainin' to them wheat fields, they belong to the ' Puma Agricultural Company/ which is alias for Caspar Dean. Yes, miss, the alias is an amiable device for them as pros- pers ; it don't do to let your name get too common in bizness if you do, life 's one long ante-up for art- galleries, libraries, and town halls, and no thanks to the human Jack-pot, either. It 's the assessment he pays for a whole skin, which as likely as not he fails to maintain." Alice felt a bit chilled by the philosophy of this re- mark, and she resolved to bide her time and attempt a little filial proselyting. " There 's another alias of mine lurking in the vitals of that mountain the third there to the right of the butte yes, clear into the range. That mine is known as ' The Young Hopeful.' An Eastern syn- dicate draws the glory for workin' it, but between me an' you, that syndicate ain't no more likely to de- mand dividends than one of them lost tribes of Israel." They had left the wheatfields to reflect the chang- ing glories of sunset golden, amethystine, red, dy- ing away, then flaming vermilion, changeable in form and hue as the contents of a kaleidoscope, and wound away toward the cowering foothills that crouched to- gether like a herd in a storm. The flat stretches of country between the gradual rise and fall of the land 233 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT bloomed deep purplish in the twilight, and the long washes of orange light splashed close to the horizon produced a twilight study, vividly impressionistic. The recollection of this Western country swept back to Alice on the gusts of keen northwestern air. But she missed something from the landscape as the long, melancholy stretches of land, the embodi- ment of enduring monotony, rolled away in violet perspective, the bunches of cattle grazing as quietly in the deepening twilight as cattle in a picture. " There 's something gone from this, Dad, something wild; I can't quite make it out." " It 's the buffalo and cattle bones that were strewn all over the place ; but we 've had a housecleaning since your day, and we picked a dollar or two out of the sweepings." " Why, what could you do with those poor sun- bleached bones ? " " Grind 'em up to manure them God-forsaken cemetery lots back East, that goes by the name of farms. I heard about the trick up in Montana, and I says, * Caspar, my boy, what 's the matter with you givin' yourself a masquerade party, and attendin' as F. E. A. Fertilizin' Company not that you are rejuced to beggin' your grub but just by way of keepin' your hand in practice ? ' " And what does the F. E. A. stand for? " asked Alice. " Why, ' Fool 'Em Again,' to be sure." " Oh, Daddy, Daddy, and why do you have to fool them?" " You see, when I acquired this land about here, 234 A PRAIRIE POINT OF VIEW the process was about as informal as a lynching. I took up all the grants the Government was willing to treat me to, and it took a herd o' aliases to do it. Why, Alice, I boasted more names than one o' them effete monarchs settin' round waitin' for some one to make war on him. I had a couple of good hustlers in black clothes at Washington purifyin' public life, or it never would have gone through. Well, a good many o' the deeds to this here land is locked in my own breast, and there they are likely to stay, since you could n't affix a signature to them any more than you could to a mountain zephyr. So, you see, when it came to pickin' bones off these yere lands, it seemed to require the co-operation of a syndicate." Alice breathed a little harder and thought of the Watteau that had been her father's last Christmas present. " I wish you 'd left the bones here, Daddy ; I miss them." " By , you shall have 'em back again. Alice, excuse my language, which is sorely in need of a woman to round it up ; but if you want bones, I '11 send up north and get 'em." " I don't want them as bad as that ; besides, I 'm afraid they would n't look natural if they were ar- ranged around the prairie; but I am just as much obliged." Alice resigned the reins to her father, and gave herself up to the undivided pleasure of watching night sweep down from the mountains into the val- leys and over the flat stretches of land, where their team followed the undulating snake road that coiled 235 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT and uncoiled itself before them in the darkness. Hour after hour the little broncos kept it up, with hardly a pause for a breathing spell. A crescent moon hung over the foothills, a silver bauble set on the brow of night, and behind the fringes of cottonwoods on the creek a lonely coyote kept up his uncanny laughter, that weirdest of Western sounds, that makes the stillness echo with eerie sug- gestion of banshees. The loneliness of the drive was broken only once by a passing glimpse of human life, and this gleamed faintly from the windows of a little cottonwood house that was not far from the mine her father called " The Young Hopeful." She asked no questions regarding the cabin, which had been lately built, fearing further tales of aliases, with their accompanying unpleasant suggestion of business not quite honest. It was not far from midnight when the dim out- line of the ranch buildings, sharply etched against the darkness, suggested a town of far larger girth than Puma. Tucked away in an obscure corner of the wilderness, it flourished in an absolute, if somewhat primitive, state of independence. Its storehouses, squat cottonwood buildings burrowing into the foot- hills like badgers, could have withstood a six months' siege and hardly have missed the provisions. Its blacksmith shop turned out shoes for every horse that bore a Dean brand, and the Dean brands were more numerous than the Dean aliases. Every bit of beef and mutton consumed by the vast army of employees was butchered in that slouching building at the ex- treme left. There was ice a-plenty in the ice-houses 236 A PRAIRIE POINT OF VIEW to temper the summer heat to the shorn lamb who came to make "business" deals with old Caspar; and there was never a better hand at the shears than he. The house itself had no definite plan of existence, architecturally or otherwise. It was a thing of ex- tensions and additions, and resembled nothing so much as a collection of primitive buildings blown to- gether by a cyclone. The most primitive of them was little more than twenty-five years old. It had been built by Caspar Dean when his worldly goods represented little more than a pruning-knife and the courage that is its own excuse for being. This log- house of two rooms he had built with his own hands when he had had the good fortune or the effrontery to win the affections of the pretty school-teacher, over the head of every fellow in the country. The rest of it had been added to suit the exigencies of ever-accumulating prosperity; to-day it was as bar- ren of luxury as it had been in the genesis of its existence. Old John Vail, the foreman of the ranch and gen- eral factotum, felt that Miss Dean's return demanded something special in the way of celebration. He had held her on a pony when she was still in the creeping stage of her development, and his intentions were sincere, if vague. He swept out the gaunt en- trance hall four times with his own hands, and he lit every lamp the place afforded, with the result that the air was heavy with the odour of coal oil, a votive offering to Alice's arrival. But it seemed inadequate ; there was nothing to denote that the soft- ening and refining presence of woman was imminent. 237 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT " Confound it," said John Vail, only he put it more forcibly, "the place ain't got a homelike air; it's bleak as a gallows." But presently his rugged coun- tenance blossomed into light : he had had an inspira- tion. " She was blamed fond of 'em when she was a papoose. I should n't wonder if some of them wild old feline Mormons stampedin' wild round the place ain't the descendants of some of her pets." And for the next fifteen minutes John Vail spent as lively a time catching one of the huge cats that prowled about the outbuildings of the Dean ranch as he ever put in roping a steer for the branding-pen. The cats were absolutely wild and never came near the house, but what was feline reticence when will and chivalry hung in the balance? John Vail presently returned to the ranch with something that spit and struggled, but nevertheless was expected to create a roseate home atmosphere. " Here, quit that psalm-singin', you old Mormon elder, and set by that fire and blink while I go and get you a necktie. There 's going to be ladies present or at least one lady but she 's worth a herd of 'em." The home influence thus apostrophised refused to blink ; in fact, he seemed to take pride in embodying a spirit of unrest, leaping about the room, snarling, spitting, turning himself into a catapult of fury and bristling fur. John Vail presently returned with several neck- ties, from which he selected one which, according to his taste, would be most becoming to his rebellious victim. The cat was black, even a witch could 238 A PRAIRIE POINT OF VIEW not have found the necessary white hair with which to work her charm; so John did well in his choice of a red necktie. But when it came to the labour of tying a bow, he would have made a better business of the Gordian knot. So the feline pariah had to take a four-in-hand, and his trailing haberdashery complicated matters and made him more bitter every moment. John was trying to win his affections by raw meat when the door opened and Alice and her father en- tered. The air was warm and viscid with the odour of coal oil, and with one mighty caterwaul the home influence leapt out into the night, four-in-hand and all. " Johnnie Vail, Johnnie Vail, I 'm so glad to see you, and the ranch and and all the lamps, but you '11 make me vain if you celebrate my return in this lavish way. I feel like a candidate for gover- nor. Let 's put out five or six of them and save the coal oil." Alice had forgotten, during her long absence, the stark conditions at home. Existence reduced to its simplest terms seemed to be the working principle of the Dean ranch. Many of the rooms were even unplastered, the crevices between the cottonwood logs being daubed with mud, no very effectual protec- tion against heat and cold. The greater part of the furniture had been constructed at the ranch carpenter shop, cumbrous benches, unpainted and rubbed smooth as satin from long usage; heavy chairs built to stand much tilting and the strain of titanic laugh- ter; bunks constructed with no more pretence of 239 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT luxury than those in a last-century sailing-ship. Old Caspar would have been as uncomfortable in the presence of the ordinary comforts of life as he was with his neck in a tall collar. " We 're rough, Alice, rough as a log with the bark on, but that ain't sayin' you can't take a plane to us whenever you d blame, please. Say, Alice, I can say ' blame/ can't I ? Give a man something to taper off on." " Poor Daddy ! ' Blame ' does stand for a good deal of water in the conversational toddy; yes, you can say ' blame.' ' Alice found the little bedroom that she had always occupied practically unchanged; except that some kindly disposed soul John Vail perhaps had painted the bed a vivid and sight-destroying blue as a tribute to her return. The iron wash-stand was still the same, and the little bureau that she had grown a foot too tall for. Her father accompanied her to the door, gallantly bearing one of the smoking lamps. "If there had been time, Alice, I would have sent back East for a couple of plush parlour sets, but you made up your mind so quickly, I did n't have time to more 'n catch the train." " I 'm glad you did n't, Dad ; we 've got to have a general overhauling here, and I 'm glad you did n't get the fine furniture." Left to herself, Alice drew a chair to the window and looked out on the sleeping wilderness. Yes, she had not come back a day too soon. It was horrible to think of her father with his almost inestimable 240 A PRAIRIE POINT OF VIEW wealth getting his greatest pleasure out of life in evading taxes, or taking advantage of another's ne- cessity to transact some particularly profitable deal. It was not that he had grown penurious, but that the gathering in of more than his due, and the evasion of every financial responsibility, represented the one pleasure he had in life. She had been too young when she went away to realise these conditions, if they then existed; and with the firm conviction that there was work at hand, Alice lay down in the maz- arine blue bed and slept soundly, the smell of fresh paint notwithstanding. The easy days of letting the house run itself were no more for the Dean ranch. Each morning, like a goddess of the storm, there swept down on that unfortunate and easy-going household a vision in an all-over apron, and, at her bidding, clouds of dust flew, windows rattled in their frames under the manipulation of cloth and pail. Tobacco ashes were rooted from the stronghold of years, and the voice of the housewife was heard in the land. Old Dean, suddenly finding his vocabulary shorn of its profanity by the presence of his daughter, and the pitiful remnant of the English tongue thus left at his command quite inadequate to express his meaning, eked out his scanty verbiage by much thigh- slapping and the composing of harmless expletives which he thought any lady might hear with propriety. " Da blanky dash see here, Alice, you don't mind my saying blanky dash, do you ? You 'd make a fine foreman for this here place. The way you have taken this old shack in hand, and made it look like 16 241 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT a ole-fashioned hawg-killing inside of a week, does credit to your executive powers. There 's no lack of action in your gait, blamed if there is." " I 'm prepared to accept the job of foreman, Dad, if you make it worth my while." " It 's a d blanked shame, Alice, you ain't a boy. That 's what I said when me and you was first in- troduced, an' I won't hide it ; I did n't set much store on the pleasure of your acquaintance. Woman is mostly like the joker in a pack of cards, in most deals she gets thrown out. But you are playing a bad hand well. I dunno, if you keep on like this, I '11 have to be reconciled to your being a girl, after all." " So you 've had a grudge against me for being a girl all these years? " " Not a grudge exactly, but I was plumb disap- pointed, somewhere about twenty-three years ago, when trumps turned up girls. I knew it was low down to hold it up ag'in a lone infant that never had a hand in the deal, me and you did n't mingle much in them days, but you Ve made an out an' out conquest of your old Dad now, Alice." The old man looked at her solemnly for a moment and then said : "I dare say I was makin' a good bargain without knowing it. If you 'd bin a boy, you 'd be looking for me to take a back seat 'bout this time, an' it ain't my way to cash my chips 'til the game is done, no, it ain't, by God." " I suppose I '11 have to forgive you, Dad, for your injustice. I will paraphrase Henri Quatre and say, ' It would be unworthy Miss Dean to resent the injustice done to a crying infant.' ' 242 A PRAIRIE POINT OF VIEW " ' Henry Cat ' ! Why, that 's the first man's name I 've heard you mention ; was he one of them toad- eatin' foreigners ? I'm glad you did n't take him ; I don't like his name. ' Cat ' might be a good name for a mother-in-law, but I would n't stand for it in my daughter's husband." " Don't give a second thought to Henri Quatre," said Alice, with deepening dimples. " Now, as we 're carving up this here subject, Alice, I '11 take the occasion to remark that there was a time when I was under a considerable misap- prehension of uneasiness regardin' the tender quality of your affections. I remember you askin' me once, when you was a kid and had done something naughty, to give you a licking, so you 'd feel as if you b' longed to someone. God a'mighty, I says, here 's this girl turnin' soft on my hands, and she ain't in long frocks." " Oh, Dad, I say, let 's forget that nonsense, I 'm hard as nails." " Glad of it ; them females as has no more affec- tions than a blizzard are the ones that retain the affections of the sterner sex by the simple process of cold storage. But women are like cattle: they don't realise their power, they bellow out their love 'til a man is sick o' hearing it, then they wait on him as if he was a new-born babe. Them tactics has about the same relation to the subjuga- tion of man as the smearing on of war paint has to real fighting." "Oh, Daddy, Daddy!" " Yes, miss, the scientific way for wooman to 243 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT subdue man is to load him with burdens like a pack-horse. There was a widow yonder, on Birds- eye Creek. She had no more claims to beauty than a mouse-trap, but she was a fine bleater. She bleated about her family responsibilities, her cares and wor- riments, the whole enduring time, stopping only long enough for meals. What happens? The most blankety dash selfish cuss in the country up and mar- ries her." " How do you account for it ? " " By the amiable process of first principles. This here selfish cuss ain't got no more real manhood than a hitchin'-post, but by the simple act of that female bleatin' to him of her trials and tribulations, he is made to regard hisself in a manly light. It in- creased his self-respect; he seen hisself the stalwart oak supportin' the droopin' vine. An' that 's what he 's doin' ever since, supportin' the whole outfit." Alice's laughter had a curious little ring to it, and she suddenly remembered an errand that took her upstairs. In transforming the ranch from the crude frontier shelter into a comfortable dwelling, Alice drew largely on the tact that had enabled her to slip through life without giving offence. She had no intention of dispelling the simplicity without which old Caspar would not have felt at home; frivolous upholstery and petty decoration would have exasperated him, and rather than face this alternative, Alice would have slept in the blue bed for the rest of her life. 244 A PRAIRIE POINT OF VIEW The big bare room by which one gained access to the house, and which had no more definite mission than that of a sort of general lounging-place, was a most uninviting sort of barracks, with the frankest of frank pegs about the walls, on which hung bat- tered and demoralised sombreros ; a couple of clumsy benches in front of the great fireplace, which, of course, would have roasted whole the traditional ox; a battered desk containing a few soiled and yellow papers, cartridges, tobacco, pipes, ashes, a garrison of empty bottles along the top; within, bits of string, rusty pens, dried ink-bottles, rusty knives; in fact, the neglected desk was the potter's field of a household where there was no woman to prosecute the domestic inquisition of spring cleaning. These primitive devices for home making were replaced by oaken chests and settles which, at least, boasted the grim dignity of the Jacobean period, if other certificates of genuineness were wanting. Bearskins were substituted for the carpets that old Caspar regarded as health-destroying institutions. Shelves of books helped to thaw the air of austerity, and the great fireplace sounded the home note. The spirit of reform paused before one room only in that household, the master begged to keep his cot bed, his iron wash-stand, and the scrap of mirror that had given back a grim and wavy reflection of his shrewd face, in the process of being lathered, every morning since he had been old enough to wield a razor. " I 'm plumb proud o' this place, Alice, since you have branded it with the refinin' inflooence of woman, 245 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT an' you ain't cluttered it up with a houseful of squaw truck, either." Alice, who was in the middle of a letter to Mrs. Hennessy, the first long one she had had an op- portunity of writing since her return, smiled up at her father, and continued writing : " I am sure I don't know what will become of Dad if he does not restrain his acquisitive propensity. He is lavish to a fault with me, and most generous to all his work- ing people; but the only thing that gives him any real pleasure is the acquiring of something for a fraction of its value. I feel that this is largely my fault; I left him alone so long that the habit has fastened itself on him. Heaven knows, in writing this, I feel as hypocritical as a little Eva, or the child with the graphophone voice on the stage, who urges its warring parents to kiss and make up, but I feel so guilty about it. Just at present he is on the trail of another mine. Some eccentric English- man who is holding down the claim for a syndicate is there. I am trying to urge him to let me go with him when he looks over the ground, and my scheme is, to balk the bargain. Daddy has too many things on hand now ; he is worn out with them ; he does n't need another mine any more than I need a title. I have come home a better American than ever." And here the letter branched off on other matters. When it was finished, Alice went in search of her father. She had made up her mind that if she could dissuade him from buying the mine, she would be saving him considerable worry. 246 CHAPTER XXV WHERE THE WORLD LOOKS YOUNG THERE was no railroad from Puma to that far-off corner of Wyoming where Caspar Dean contemplated buying a mine. The journey thither had to be accomplished in a series of detached trips that included railroading, staging, and finally a horseback ride across a section of that arid waste of alkali plain marked on the atlas as the Great American Desert. But Alice delighted her father by making a crony of hardship, and de- manded no more time to prepare for any expedition than the most weather-seasoned cowboy. The mine in question had a somewhat legendary reputation for vast wealth that extended back to the days of the French missionary priests; and the campfire stories of its fabulous wealth and elusive locality had lost nothing in a century's tradition. But this mine, as well as Captain Kidd's buried treasure, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and other plums of fortune that are to be had for the finding, required but an exact location these hundred years to give it an owner. Explicit direc- tions as to its precise situation had not been lacking, but they had yielded nothing more profitable than disappointment, death, and the squandering of vast 247 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT sums of money. There are few legends of the Shoshone tribe into which some tradition of the mine has not been woven. They are the gold thread that still catches the light in the faded tapestry where all the warrior figures are dim. They claimed the mine by right of inheritance ; their fathers' fore- fathers knew of it before they had ever seen a pale- face, but they kept their own counsel as to its location, spite of the fire-water given with no stinting hand by the pale-faces when the question of the " Lost Shoshone," as it had come to be called, arose. In common with every gold mine of fabulous wealth but indefinite location, it claimed the story of the priest and his rosary, that charming tale of Indian craft and Jesuitical wile which met with all the shock of an irresistible force coming in con- tact with an immovable body. Many years ago, so runs the tale, when this great Republic was still in its swaddling clothes, a fever broke out among the Indians of the Shoshone tribe, gathering them into the happy hunting-grounds by thousands. A French priest travelling among them at the time warded off the dread disease with Jesuit's bark and with simples that he knew how to brew to great advantage when the body ached and the head throbbed as from the unfriendly tapping of a tomahawk. The simple redmen were thankful to the padre and wished to make him sensible of their gratitude, but sickness and want had reduced them and they had little to give. So they smoked over it, and de- cided to show the holy man their mine, the one 248 WHERE WORLD LOOKS YOUNG glory left their fast-decaying race. No pale-face had seen its treasured wealth before, and no pale- face would again ; of that the redmen took precious care. So they bound up the padre's eyes, set him on a horse, and led him back and forth through the tangle of foothills till the good man could not have told whither they were leading him, and so gained the mine; and when they were within the bowels of the earth they took the bandages off his eyes, and there was gold enough to make him blink, and his palms itch, too, all his vows of poverty notwithstanding. The noble redmen played the host handsomely on that occasion. They filled up the pockets of the padre's gown with such nuggets as one does not see twice in a lifetime, and then replaced the ban- dages and led him forth. When the padre was again on his horse, and the Indian guide was leading him back and forth in a manner calculated to addle any plan of location that might have been hatching in the holy man's head, he most piously bethought him- self of his rosary and began to tell his beads. At length the Indian guide, after winding back and forth through a great track of foothill country, unbandaged the priest's eyes. " I thank you for your gift to the Holy Church," said the good man, smiling down at his bulging pocket. " Padre, you dropped these," said the Indian, re- storing every bead that his reverence had scattered on his blindfolded way. 249 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT There were other legends more modern and less general. One of these told of a party of prospectors, in the middle seventies, who succeeded in locating the mine and working it stealthily. But the Indians knew. Some said an old chief rose up from his grave and warned them that the white man had discovered their treasure, and with that discovery calamity would come to the tribe, calamity greater than it had ever known. Be that as it may, it is easy to blame Indians for all the lawlessness in a frontier community. At all events, the prospectors were found murdered, their very cabin was razed to the ground and the timbers scattered, so that even the approximate location of the mine should not be guessed. A summer never passed without bringing hundreds of prospectors in search of the mine, but the treasure of that handful of rapidly dwindling savages was never found. Was there a mine? The question had been asked over and over. Could the Indians have kept the secret all these years, or were they enjoying a little jest at the white man's expense, in return for many an old score? That was what Caspar Dean was turning over in his shrewd old head as he sat opposite his daughter in the red stage that crawled over the alkali plains that hot afternoon. He had had a tip that a syndicate of Englishmen had bought a mine in the Wind River Country, and the chances were ninety-nine in a hundred that it was the famous " Lost Shoshone." Unlike the ma- jority of purchases made by guileless Britons in the 250 WHERE WORLD LOOKS YOUNG far West, this syndicate knew nothing of the re- puted richness of its bargain. And Caspar yearned to buy it of these aliens before their heads should become swollen by legends and the cheerful tales of many a winter's campfire. They were journeying thither to interview an Englishman on Battle Creek, in whom the power of attorney was reputed to be vested. In the mean time he looked at his daughter sitting opposite him in the cramped stage, and felt a kin- dling parental pride in that indefinable something about her, that elusive quality that was, to him, at once vague and definite, the subtle something that goes toward the making of a gentlewoman. She wore a blue linen skirt and shirt waist, as plain in design as the uniform of a hospital nurse, and from time to time fanned herself with the broad leaf of a sombrero. Old Caspar began a sentence with picturesque pro- fanity, then looked quickly at his mentor. "It's the heat, my dear, it's the heat; it melts the language in a man, the presence of a lady notwithstanding." " Poor Daddy ! it 's been a trying journey, be- tween the plush of the Pullmans and the dust of the desert, but we '11 be there to-morrow." " 'T ain't that I 'm complainin' on account of the fatigue," and the old cattleman threw up his head like a colt ; " that 's a word I 'm acquainted with only by the hearsay of lowing tender feet full o' saddle sores and homesick for Ma's doughnuts. It 's the heat that sends my language out melted, 251 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT and I 've always contended that to ride over this here desert, a day like this, is like gitten free trans- portation through " " Purgatory," she interrupted. " Call it any fancy name you please, daughter." The dust, full of biting alkali, drifted across the vast waste lands, imposing as the cloud that led the Israelites by day, but utterly menacing in effect. It burned and reddened the eyes of the travellers, and filled their mouths with a parched bitterness. The dusty sagebrush flourished pallid but rankly luxuriant, and the cacti, spiked and sinister, bloomed red and yellow in the glaring stillness. " Well, daughter, when God A'mighty made this corner of the world, he was plumb out of sorts with scenery." The sombrero had fallen from Alice's hand, and old Caspar noticed that she dozed. He bent over her clumsily, and held the hat so as to shade her eyes. The long hot afternoon burned itself out slowly as a fever, but the old man never changed his cramped attitude, though his muscular arm ached from the thraldom of maintaining one position. He neglected even to swear at the heat, but sat in the jostling stage gazing at his daughter with something of the gratified pride of young motherhood. It was past sunset when they drew up at the road ranch, the crude frontier hostelry that was to furnish them with supper and a bed. It was a rude shelter, built of logs, and not yet submitted to the test of winter, as its rough-hewn edges, still bleed- ing from the axe, abundantly testified. The woman 252 WHERE WORLD LOOKS YOUNG who left the housework that was never done and rushed out nervously to greet them was the usual feminine product of frontier drudgery and the strain of living at a high altitude. She had cooked three suppers that night, and was in an agony of apology at having to present Mr. Dean and his daughter of whose financial importance she was fully aware with what was left. She reiterated her apologies and complaints at the lack of convenience, run- ning on as inconsequently as the bubbling of a tea- kettle; and Alice, looking at the haggard eyes and the deep lines written on the face that had not yet lost the down of adolescence, was reminded of a hard- worked piano on which a round dozen of children have accomplished the rudiments of music, but which responds to the least touch, shrill and clattering. Old Caspar spent the evening with the top-booted, sombrero-crowned group who lounged and smoked about the front door. He shone by reflected glory that evening; he was the father of a stunning girl who had just come back from Europe and had n't married a blanky dash title, by . And stunning girls were scarce in that country, where the refining influence of women was confined chiefly to a few migratory squaws and the ladies of the dance-halls. Alice remained with her hostess in the kitchen. There was bread to set, and innumerable prepara- tions to be made for the breakfast that would be served at sunrise; and the ranch chatelaine com- plained so pitifully about the dearth of feminine companionship, and asked so persistently what kind of hats they wore in Europe, that Alice devoted the 253 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT evening to describing the European hat, and listen- ing to her hostess give vent to her one gnawing am- bition, which was to have a plush parlour set from Omaha. Next morning they were in the saddle by six o'clock, wending their way toward the snowy peaks of the Wind River Mountains that stretched away in serpentine outline and finally melted into the deep blue of a cloudless sky. Alice listened to the " chug, chug " of the sweating horses, and wished the dis- tance were no further than it looked; but a good thirty-five-mile ride lay before them, and miles in that country of unlimited space are measured with a prodigal hand. As they wound higher and higher among the foothills, nature laid aside the stern aspect she had worn in the desert. In the sweltering heat of Box Canon some called it Hell's Pit she played the tragic muse, wrapping herself in the trap- pings of woe, hiding her face in a veil of alkaline dust. But here, far from the desert and the parched foothills, she wore the gladsome raiment of summer, the buffalo grass was green and moist, the mountain streams, fed from breasts of snow, purled with liquid crystal. Yet the days of summer were numbered; you read it in the hectic flush that burned upon her cheek. The rose-berries along the creek glowed more scar- let than drops of blood, the ox-eyed daisies were yellower than a miser's treasure, the cacti flamed out its little span, it was the last flush of midsummer carnival, the last glow before the long, cold, wintry sleep; already the clematis that climbed in and out 254 WHERE WORLD LOOKS YOUNG among the cottonwoods had faded; it hung but an ashen feathery wraith of its white bridal beauty. Every few miles brought its welcome change of scene. Sometimes the broad-backed sheep cropping the close buffalo grass robbed the picture of its wild- ness, their plaintive bleating breaking a silence that seemed to throb as with the vibrations of sound. The swaying pines might have been chanting the opening verses of Genesis, so big, so majestically simple was their country; its whole history might have been written in : " And the evening and the morning were the second day." With the lengthening of the shadows on the moun- tain, Alice felt her old melancholy steal upon her like an enemy from ambush. The sun had sunk to rest behind the tallest mountain peak, and already the pil- fering clouds were contending for his splendid ves- ture, rending the crimson and gold among themselves, flaunting the coveted glory, snatching right and left, losing, gaining, till the west glowed in wanton rev- elry and the peaceful shadows hid, past their time, in the valleys. But the wistful twilight was at hand with its troop of vague longings, shadowy things, of no more substance than a sigh, but real as flesh and blood when marshalled in battle array. Alice felt that she was seeing her little world epitomised. She and her father, travelling alone through this vast wild coun- try, he to make his bargains, that were as the breath of life to him; she to sniff at the bargain in regard to which she was developing a querulously sensitive nostril; neither understanding the other, 255 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT the greater strangers for their closer tie, but each making the best of things, and feeling some pride in the other. " Say, Alice, I 'm allowin' to myself that this yere Britisher we 're after burrows himself away in the scenery with the shyness of a prairie dog. We oughter sighted his cabin by now." " He knows you are after his mine, Daddy; he's gone to hide." " 'T ain't his; he just watches it t' see it don't run off, we do our primitive dickerin' with him just to keep up the formalities." Old Caspar brought his plainsman's experience to bear on a pin-prick in the landscape that he hoped would prove to be the cabin in question. " That 's his shack, but he 's away from home, or eatin' a cold supper," he announced, after a few moments' scrutiny. "How do you make that out?" " No smoke in his chimney." And they urged on their drooping horses with the impetus of travellers whose goal is in sight. It needed but a casual glance to convince them that the object of their quest was not the sketchy makeshift the frontiersman builds as inconsequently as a house of cards. It was as rudely neat of aspect as the little wooden houses old-fashioned Noah's Arks used to boast in those benighted days when little folk had not the consolations of " real " sewing-ma- chines and " real " refrigerators. It was finished as neatly as a lady's slipper, and it wore its stone chim- ney as coquettishly as a high heel. 256 WHERE WORLD LOOKS YOUNG " Judas Iscariot ! " blandly remarked old Caspar, " if he knows as much about mines as he does about building a shack, ' The Lost Shoshone ' 's as good as in in, well, anywheres but my pocket." The windows were open, and Alice could make out the interior neatly ceiled with some dark wood. Caspar's repeated halloaing brought no response. He put his shoulder against the door, but it refused to yield an inch. " Suspicious, tea-swillin' Britisher, d' you think a white man 'd lock up his shanty in a country where there 's more blamed snow-capped mountains than chairs? No, miss, an American would have left his door open, and run his chances on the escape of his canned tomatters." " Dear Daddy, I 'm thankful enough for the door- step ; " and Alice sank down with the willingness of fatigue to accommodate itself to circumstances. " I '11 hobble the horses and turn 'em loose before he gets back to begrutch the grass." Alice took off her hat, grateful for the cooling breeze at her temples. The stark landscape, rearing mountains shelv- ing down to crouching foothills, then space, vast, illimitable as the ocean, but tranquil as untroubled sleep. It was the epic of creation told in splen- did numbers. The soul of the night began to stir in the wilderness; through endless repetition of serried mountain file, marching in white-capped mo- notony, it moved from peak to peak. Then to the waste lands, where desolation melts into desolation, and the scroll of space is never unrolled. It stirred 17 2 57 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT among the foothills herding close as beasts in fear of darkness and their great sides seemed to heave in answer to its coming. Parched " Hell's Pit " felt the thrill of it, and forgot its aching thirst, its thorned crown of cactus, and the bitter taste of alkali. The spirit of the night brooded long and tenderly over this undiscovered world, then gath- ered it softly in a long embrace. The spoils of sunset had been divided; the clouds moved stealthily now, holding fast to their shreds of splendour, and the blackness bit deeper into the red, etching out grotesque pictures, a shifting panorama of dream things, filing across the night in fantastic procession. It was not the marching mountains, nor the pictures in the coals of sunset, nor the sweeping space that gave to the on-coming night the strangeness of other spheres, but the silence it fairly sang, attuning its choral imploration to the soul that listens. Allegro, penseroso, there is all music in the silence of those desert nights. Alice, with hat cast aside, sat in the doorway of the cabin, listening with hurrying pulses to the music of the singing stillness. Now it is like the roll of some great cathedral organ echoing through vaulted arches; now it fades away to the plaintive shrilling of a pipe, Pan's, perhaps. And perad- venture a naked goddess will steal by in the twilight, and a satyr leer from the grove. What may not happen where the world still pulses in her hoyden youth ? What may not happen but Alice hoped for no quarter from the unexpected. She hoped not at all, 258 WHERE WORLD LOOKS YOUNG but gave herself to the tranquillising influence of night, and of the great still stars of that undiscov- ered country, whose gaze is steady and steadying. Again the silence took up the thread of song; now a homely theme, a bit of folk lore turned into a ballad, Alingham and she had heard a Scotch sailor sing it on the " Calabria " when they first knew each other. Its rueful rhythm knit up the intervening years, and dreamfully she again lived through the wonder of that first awakening. It grew dark in the valleys and on the moun- tains, only the embers of sunset burned dim as a neglected fire. A strange disquieting joy stirred at her heart, was it the music of the wilderness stirring her memory, like wind in tall pine-trees? Was it the star-strewn night whose beauty racked and tormented, then bewitched with subtle sorcery? Life seemed to call her, there, down the valley, where the purple shadows were vague and formless, and all her youth rose up to make glad answer; but youth calls to youth, and there came back to her only the whisper of the pines and the music of the world primeval. Her thoughts went back to that evening in early summer when she had come up from Devonshire to be diverted with frivolity, and finding herself alone in the house, had sat by an open window and heard the small thin voice call to her above all the din of London. There were family traditions of a Scotch grandmother who had had the gift of second sight, and Alice wondered if she had inherited some variation of this doubtful advantage. Her premoni- 259 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT tions made eerie company at times, company of which it was difficult to rid one's self. She tried to turn a deaf ear to the voice from the valley; she tried to stay the tumultuous beating of her heart, but the music of the singing stillness rang only the more joyously. It swelled into exul- tant crescendos, chords vibrant with anticipation echoed down through valley, crag, and canon, every voice in that choir invisible seemed to burst into hallelujahs of his coming. She got up and walked down the pathway that led to the valley where the purple shadows over- lapped. She reached out her hands to the darkness that seemed to brim with his presence, his voice, his laughter, the way he spoke her name; her groping arms moved about for the man and the love that called her. And from the valley came Alingham, swinging up the path with the same soldierly tread that she could never see without a momentary suspension of the beating of the heart. Oh, the world is a wide, wide place, but love has mastered the trick of laughing at more things than locksmiths; time and space and place are just a few of them. Her hand went to his, straight as a homing bird, her hand that held the secret of her personality in fee, warm, elastic, trembling with eagerness to give a hundredfold its woman's tenderness. They feared to look into each other's eyes, lest dim twilight shadows should lurk there in mock- ing emptiness. Was it real, this meeting in the 260 WHERE WORLD LOOKS YOUNG wilderness, or only the hungry yearning for each other's presence? Yet her hand fluttered in his, warm as a nesting bird, each loath to break the clasp that spanned the weary void. He hardly dared breathe her name; it was as if his insatiate desire to see her again had wrought her image here, in the wilderness, and at a word it might steal away with the shadows. She could not be real; it was only a trick of slow-consuming longing that had fixed her here 'twixt him and that black gaping solitude, fixed her with the skill of sun, lens, and plate, down to the littlest curl. " Most dear," he said, " tell me you are not a wraith of loneliness ; tell me you won't end like a dream and leave only the grey morning, the darkness, or the sun and silence of this wilderness." She raised her eyes to his for the fraction of a second, then looked away down the valley where the shadows wrapped the vague spaces sombrely. The eyes he caught glimpse of were no dream- eyes ; on that he would have staked his highest hopes, and they were towering just then. " Most dear," he said, " you have not told me ; is it a dream ? " Again she raised her eyes, but this time full of challenging banter that gave no hint of the perilous racing of her heart. " You have n't told me," he persisted. " Told you what ? " she answered. " Whether it 's a dream or not." " The proof of the dream lies in the pinching, you know." 261 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT " Of course it does," agreed Alingham ; " but if I am dreaming how can I be certain about the pinch ? Would it be a real pinch, or just a dream pinch? " It was dark as a chasm on the mountain; you could not possibly have seen the two little white finger-marks that presently glowed on the ruddy cheek of the Briton. "Are you convinced?" she questioned. " Ah unless it is a particularly vicious ghost." " Has n't it been a beautiful evening? " she asked, trying to inject the conventional note into a situa- tion that threatened to be a trifle overwhelming. " The most beautiful of ' all the glad new year ' to me," he answered, hoping the conventional note would stay where it belonged, a thousand miles hence. " I meant the sunset," she affirmed with a fine disinterestedness. " I should be the last to object to it," he assured her. "The landscape, just a trifle bleak?" she ques- tioned with a fine showing of eyelid. " Never, with such a figure in the foreground," he bowed to her. And then they heard old Caspar calling " Alice," and there was scarce time to assume the role of casual acquaintanceship. Perhaps it was too false a part to be well played, or maybe such radiant countenances could not deceive so close an observer as old Caspar, at all events, he looked from one to the other, perturbed, anxious, conscious, too, of the gnawing fangs of jealousy. How does a father 262 WHERE WORLD LOOKS YOUNG look when confronted by the indisputable rival of chance circumstance? " Father, I knew this gentleman in England ; he is a friend of mine." " 'Tain't Henry Cat, is it?" demanded Caspar, slightly humping his shoulders. " No, it 's not Henri Quatre." :< You seemed so partickilar blame glad to see him, thought maybe it was." Embarrassment now threatened to wreck the little company playing at casual acquaintances. " My name is Alingham," and his lordship blushed as if there had been felony in the admission; but there was fine courtesy in the way he extended his hand, against which even churlishness found it diffi- cult to contend. " Mister Alingham," old Caspar made the most of the syllables, flinging them back as so many mis- siles, " since you seem to have staked out your claim in my daughter's acquaintance, there is noth- ing left but for me to stake out mine in yours. Me and her has the same outfit of friends." The old man offered his hand as if he were show- ing off the tricks of some thoroughly trusty weapon. But the imp of constraint made merry at the ex- pense of the trio. The serpent had entered Eden, neither Alice, her father, nor Alingham would now have had the courage to maintain even that there had been an exceptionally fine sunset. Miss Dean lost no time in turning the talk into the wake of the " Lost Shoshone ; " her sensitive ear detected the far-off rumble of thunder in more personal topics. 263 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT But the mine, as a subject for healing discourse, proved as elusive as its own location ; Alingham had merely held the power of attorney pending the arrival of her owners from England; they could be seen at Bingham, the next town; he (Alingham) was un- certain as to their intentions, but rather fancied they did not care to sell. Old Caspar would have started immediately for Bingham had the horses been capable of resuming their journey after such brief respite, but, this being manifestly impossible, Alice and her father accepted Alingham' s invitation to supper, in fact, there was no other alternative, and concluded to resume their saddles when the moon should rise, somewhere in the neighbourhood of midnight. Like the knight in the ballad, Alingham would have cheerfully wrung the neck of his sole com- panion the jackdaw to furnish the board for his lady's entertainment. But when it came to prof- fering his hospitality for the night, the dismal ex- pedients that confronted him on every side prevented him from urging that which he would have preferred to a premiership. The road ranch that was barely ten miles beyond would, in all probability, offer no more comforts than his own cabin, but old Caspar yearned for the goal that would put him nearer his bargain, and Alingham lacked the courage to urge his own poor claim as host. Alice was having rather a bad quarter of an hour examining her pride, the maidenly barometer which answered all the practical purposes of a con- science. Why had she let him see she was so abso- 264 WHERE WORLD LOOKS YOUNG lutely and unfeignedly glad to see him? why, why, and again why? Men were to be received with a cordiality in inverse ratio to one's pleasure or in- difference at seeing them. Else why the delectable game of cat-and-mouse, most perfect of all feminine accomplishments? She could not tell which she wanted more, to punish him by going or to please herself by staying, in other words, a lady may not have her sentimental cake and eat it. Thus reasoned Miss Dean with a trifle more eyelid in evidence than usual. A dawning perception of the realities contrived to burst the soap-bubble that Alingham had been taking quite seriously for the world. And even while he made himself agreeable, in a somewhat hollow fashion, which was indeed the best of his ability, imps of inner consciousness grimly re- minded him that he was still a bankrupt who fre- quently dined on philosophy when a chance shot failed to furnish forth the camp larder. He assured himself that he had been a fool, an ass, and other compliments of the season of foolish confiding. If he had had the least intimation of this most amazing meeting, if it had been any- where but in this naked and unashamed wilderness that mocked at convention and made of love just a simple solving of Life's riddle, he would not have said what he had not the right to say. Oh, a civi- lised pavement beneath a man's feet is a fine curb on those mad fledglings of heart and brain that fly before they have learned to think. " But what could she expect/' Alingham alone, in * ' 36$ LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT his al fresco kitchen, apostrophised the jack-rabbit he had just finished skinning, " coming across a man, out here, in this illustrated-Old-Testament sort of a country it might be the identical spot where Adam and Eve began housekeeping, mightn't it?" and the jack-rabbit did not contradict. " I maintain the situation is grotesque in the twentieth century," he continued, neatly cutting up his confidant. " We ought to have lived in the Ruth and Boaz period, and her father and I should have amicably discussed the number of camels requisite to our station of life. But why is there always a but when a man 's in love ? I have n't any camels." And now occurred one of those absurd situations that men and women frequently bring about through a desire to ignore the irrevocable word, look, or hand-clasp that has a trick of writing itself in let- ters of fire when all parties concerned are least in favour of illumination. Alingham, smarting under the triple burden of bankruptcy, Alice's wealth, and the memory of his sordid proposal to Mrs. Gordon at Dunstan, would have given his right hand to recall what had been fairly wrested from him by " the diabolical land- scape." He did not lack terms to describe those hapless mountains. And while he prepared his jack-rabbits and ex- coriated what he had said, looked, done, and the country, time, place that had led him to say and do it, Alice was deciding how she could offer to assist in the preparation of supper, and, at the same time, convince him that her apparent delight at seeing him, 266 WHERE WORLD LOOKS YOUNG a few moments since, was, in reality, nothing more substantial than a bit of very pretty acting. And so there was a splendid aloofness about the very swing of her skirts as she swept into the room and offered her services. She might have been say- ing: " My good man, tell me where you keep your hemlock and I '11 not only brew you a draught but hold the cup to your lips." What she realty said was: " We are making you a tremendous amount of trouble. If you will tell me where you keep the knives and things, I '11 set the table." " Er I should be delighted," he said, relapsing into his most elegant Mayfair accents, " but there are n't any." And she, to hide her confusion at bolting into his poverty-stricken expedients, blurted out: " And, pray, how do you eat ? " " I do not conform to the customs of the coun- try," he said with his best London obeisance. " The knife is still a comparatively unknown implement to me." Then he remembered that in all probability her father was no stranger to this west-country art, and the last condition of his predicament was worse than the first. Alingham, with the furtive embarrassment of a school-boy who has drawn a prize at least five years too young for him, produced a flat pine box, coquet- tishly striped in red, and bearing the inscription " Friendship's offering." The lid of this treasure trove, on being pushed back, disclosed a solitary knife, a pewter fork and spoon, which comprised 267 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT the camp's best plate, the couple of unmatched knives and forks about the mess-box being abso- lutely disreputable. " Would you mind using these, Miss Dean? " and he proffered " Friendship's offering " tentatively. She tried to relieve the strain of the situation by a jest, but the little box of cutlery was so ruthless in its stern simplicity she could only take it, and sink deeper in the quicksands of abashed silence. They were like rival cooks working together under protest, each absorbed in a frenzy of preoccupation that almost excluded knowledge of each other's pres- ence. Alingham broiled his rabbits, Alice made biscuits and coffee, as if it had been the most natural thing in the world that they should be cook- ing supper together, so natural, indeed, that both were a trifle bored at the ceremony. And presently they sat down to a meal that Alingham characterised to himself as " fried funeral meats." For though his lady was sitting at his table and her hat hung on the adjoining peg to his in a fashion at once intimate and distracting, yet she had never seemed so remote not even in those seasons of loneliness when he had wandered through these mountain passes and thought her on the other side of the world. For then not all the miles nor all the men in Christendom could take from him the memory of that first tender flowering of her whole nature, that had seemed to endow him with some- thing of the powers of a magician. But here she sat in the flesh, aloof, inaccessible, robbing him, by her very reality, of that dream-companion who 268 WHERE WORLD LOOKS YOUNG wandered with him far and wide through the wil- derness, and sometimes mocked and sometimes teased, but who was his always, indisputably his, beyond the powers of gods and men to put asunder. Old Caspar looked from one to the other. He was not deceived by the edifice of indifference each was building so conscientiously ; he knew that lovers build that sort of structure, as children build houses of cards for the pure joy of sweeping them down. But the savour had gone out of his prospective bar- gain, and when he thought of sharing his daughter with this stranger, this man of chance circumstance, he felt cheated, robbed, angry beyond the consola- tions of profanity. Alingham told of the Musgrove expedition, the year in the Klondike that had been fruitful only in hardship and experience, and finally, how he had stopped off in this far corner of the world to see some fellow countrymen and shoot antelope, and then lingered on, year after year, trapping in winter, hunting and fishing in summer, and finding the life interesting at all seasons. Alice made duty inquiries for his family. They were well. But Dunstan had been sold; in fact, he believed it had been turned into some sort of hydropathic institution. "And Mr. Howard?" she asked. " Reggie, poor old Uncle Reggie, the family are much worried over him. He has already an- nounced his intention of marrying a girl of seven- teen. She was in a hat-shop. It is really too bad; the poor old boy is quite in his dotage." The men smoked after supper, chiefly in silence. 269 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT Alice caressed the ears of an old setter who made good his place in the family circle by reason of a thing or two he knew about finding birds. To Alice shorn of her coquetry, and Alingham shorn of his hope, the marvel of their meeting was but the cul- mination of fate's stupid jest of five years ago; a feeling of helplessness held all their senses in thrall and made it possible for them to say good-bye with something akin to resignation to the inevitable. It was past eleven when Caspar and his daughter rode down the valley; the moon sailed high over the white peaks, a stringless kite with all the world for its wanderings. Neither spoke till they were well down the path, which was steep and treacherously uneven. Alice noticed that after Aling- ham had helped her on her horse and said good- bye to her, her father injected a little cordiality into his manner ; never had she seen him so churlish. Old Dean cleared his throat. " A friend of yours, in England, you said. I hoped as much from the way you giv' him your hand. Yes, miss, when a girl gives a man her hand as if she was pawning it, why, any one who don't belong to the Grand High Chapter o' Partickilar Blame Fools kin see she 's a friend o' his." Alice cantered a bit ahead. " Dear father," she said, with something very like a sob in her voice, " don't you see it 's all over? Please don't speak of it. Had I known he was there, I would not have come with you." " Is he married ? " and old Caspar jerked up his horse so suddenly as to succeed almost in dismount- ing himself. WHERE WORLD LOOKS YOUNG " No of course not." " Then why in in the name of this everlastin' blue scenery ain't you good enough for a busted Lord gettin' his living out 'n the landscape, like a coyote ? " " Father," she bridled, " you know he 's dropped his title, and calls himself plain Mr. Alingham." " I wager you don't call him plain Mr. Alingham. I wager you call him handsome enough for a wall-paper." " Oh, Daddy, let 's change the subject," she said with something very like petulance. " I don't think he 's a bad sort of a subject ; there don't appear to be anything ag'in him, except he seems to be of a gentle, roominatin' turn of mind." Alice appeared to be giving her undivided atten- tion to her horse. " If that 's his natchur, I don't know as there 's much use in any woman's takin' him off 'n the range an' try in' to domesticate him, range cattle don't make good household pets." He wheeled about in his saddle and looked at her searchingly. " But if he 's took to roominatin' on account of a purticular girl, I don't say but he '11 wear his bell and ribbon same as any other man." There was a slight suggestion of frost in his daughter's voice as she answered: " Really, Daddy, I never heard of a man taking to the wilderness on account of love, outside of a novel. Lord Alingham stays in the mountains, I believe, because he likes to kill things." " Well, p'r'aps he does, my dear, but it 's been 1271 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT done. Look at that pore young Frenchman that named them mountains Coeur d'Alene after the girl that went back on him, honourin' her with a place in American joggraphy." " I am certainly not eligible to a place in the geography on those grounds, Daddy." They rode along in silence for a mile or more; then old Caspar, who had apparently been turning over something in his mind, said: " Marriage, my dear, is like any other bargain, you want to start in plumb carried away with your investment. You need all the glory to look back on when you see something else that seems a heap more gilt-edged and such occasions do arise in the best- regulated of households. An' then what saves the family waggon, and brings it through the ruts and gullies, but remembering what you Ve been through with the other old horse in the harness ? " "But, father " " I ain't done yet. Sometimes it seems like mar- riage is a slouchy sort of a job, but such as it is, there don't seem to be any improvement on it. As it stands, it is the physic of society, and sometimes physic is palatable and sometimes it ain't." " But, father, why all this long argument in favour of something of which there is not the remotest possi- bility? A few minutes ago you were quite out of patience with this young man and me for shaking hands; now you appear to be urging a suit which he himself has never urged." Old Caspar noted the tear tremolo, and pressed the subject no further. The road ranch which they 272 WHERE WORLD LOOKS YOUNG reached after much similar discourse, for the old cattleman was at all times the most voluble of com- panions, was like the majority of its frontier fellows, rough-hewn, and rude as a magpie's nest But Alice was unconscious of the house, the room, the frowsy hostess, in the sketchy costume that com- bined day and night garments with expedience and frankness. She knew only that he was there down the road and over the shoulder of the smallest peak, and there Alice's world began and ended. 18 273 CHAPTER XXVI TO GO, OR NOT TO GO? ALINGHAM watched them from the door of his cabin till they were one with the shadows, the silence, and the space, then he lighted his pipe, and smoked automatically. " Nick," the old setter, who had been showered with such unusual attentions the entire evening, found it difficult to resume the monotony of his life, interrupted as it had been by so beautiful and congenial a divinity. Why should he not have more head-pattings, and more assurance of his intelligence and the great beauty of his eyes ? His master was generous enough with meat and drink, but Nick felt that his life was deficient in sympathy and those gentle amenities which, all said and done, are more than bones. Nevertheless he determined to try his luck with the graven figure that from time to time sent out huge clouds of smoke. Why should there not be mutual understanding in the home circle? But Nick's blan- dishments met with no response, no, not even when he rested his head on the knee of the graven figure and gave it the wealth of his eyes. Such eyes as they were, too; had not the divinity told 274 TO GO, OR NOT TO GO? him of their beauty? He kept his head on his mas- ter's knee he knew the value of persistence and when Alingham began to knock the ashes from his pipe, he felt the touch of a cold nose and Nick got his reward. "Do you miss her, old chap? So do I; we are companions in misery no, on second thoughts, we are not. You Ve got nothing to be miserable over. I should n't be, if she had patted my head and assured me of my innumerable charms; but she did n't, old boy, she merely asked me where I kept the knives." Nick heaved a long sigh, the sigh of a man who has known troubles of his own. " But it was beautiful to hear her skirts frou-frou- ing about, was n't it ? Even if she did ask for knives, and look 'em too, by Jove ! But she did n't look knives in the beginning no, how did she look? It would take a poet to tell, and he 'd make a bad job of it. We can only look at her from afar, Nick, as your life-long enemy the cat may look at the king. She 's a great heiress, and if her father buys that mine, some day she '11 own the land on which our wretched shack is situated. Your master is a vagabond reduced to living by his rod and gun, - he having no wits to live by. He is furthermore a bankrupt, a failure, a social cypher, and several other unpleasant things that he won't hurt your feelings by mentioning Nick's cold muzzle slipped a bit closer into Aling- ham's hand. 275 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT "Oh, you don't mind; that's white of you, old chap. But we 've got to scuttle; we can't keep our cabin on her father's land, even if he 'd let us. We 've got to keep our pride ; can't tamper with that, can we, dogalums? " What are you wagging your tail about and licking your lips for that there are plenty of jack- rabbits in the neighbourhood? You greedy beggar! But life 's a simpler proposition to you, Nick, than it is to me. Jack-rabbits or no jack-rabbits, cotton- tails, quails, partridges, prairie chickens, or sage-hens - 1 know all your arguments. We leave here, sir ; we go to England and try for some small civil appointment. "What does that whine mean? that you don't like to go to England ? Neither do I, my boy ; but we can't stay here vassals on the land of the lady with whom we happen to be in love. We would go now, and not destroy the peace of mind we have been get- ting out of this blessed wilderness, but the beautiful lady would get no supper on her way back. True, we might leave the house in order, with the mess-box stocked, and betake ourselves eastward, leaving a polite note on the pincushion saying we had been called away and we hoped she could put up with our late residence. But, Nicholas, we have no pin- cushion on which to pin the note, and the front door does not seem exactly a hospitable sort of place on which to affix an announcement of the departure of the .host. And, Nicholas, my boy, let 's be quite square with one another, your master would not 276 TO GO, OR NOT TO GO? lose the chance of seeing her again, no, not for twenty years of his life." " Alice," said the old cattleman, as they drove along toward Bingham in a light buckboard next morning, the saddle horses having been left at the road ranch for rest and refreshment, " Alice, I 've been turning it over in my head about you and this yere Englishman ; if he 's been roominatin' 'round the scenery because he lacks the natchrul gall to offer to endow you with his fryin'-pan, coffee-pot, an' the rest of his worldly goods which, I take it, is few an' far between the same is a strangely modest play fer a Britisher, an' ought to be encour- aged. In all my experience with 'em an' it has been abundant I never knowed one of 'em to quit the matrimonial game because the girl held a full hand. No, miss, their modesty don't, in general, expend itself in humility before the fair sex. If an Englishman had got the drop on King Solomon in his tatytate with the late Queen of Sheba, what would he have done ? He 'd have said, ' Mamie,' or ' Bessie,' or whatever the name was that Holy Writ fails to record ' you 're not a bad looker, by Jove! Come over an' fry my bacon an' eggs of a morning, and while you 're at it, you might clean my boots." Alice, remembering a few London episodes, laughed. " Last night, when I seen him hold your hand, I wanted to break his neck over my knee; but when 277 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT I seen him look kinder faded out as he helped you onto your horse, I felt blame sorry for him." But still she said nothing, and as he looked at her from the corner of his eye, he noted her pallor. " As I round-up my recollections I come across one or two of 'em bearin' the brand o' this yere Britisher. An' there ain't one of 'em to his dis- credit holds his liquor neat as a quart flask ; sticks to a horse like a cactus burr, a trial horse, too, kept for the accommodation of strangers, one holdin' the same position o' honour, in the camp to which I have reference, as our time-honoured friend the goat holds in the ha'nts o' masonry. Yes, miss, a stranger settin' that horse is entitled to the grip o' friendship in any settlement where men an' horses is judged by merit. Tells a good story, too, one to make a coyote or even a woman laugh." " Why, father, I believe you are anxious to get rid of me. You don't know how superfluous all these arguments make me feel." " You got to be settled some day, 't ain't no use in me humpin' my back ag'in it, an' I like the idea o' that Englishman's doubtin' his rights to you as a conquerin' hero. When you told me last night that he had never asked you to marry him, an' I saw the way he looked as you rode away, I says to myself, ' Caspar, here 's some one that loves your daughter for herself an' won't be settin' up nights waitin' for her old father to die, or sug- gestin' to him that he 's gettin' old, and it would be a clearance to his mind to make his settlements. It ain't my way to cash my chips till the game is done, 278 TO GO, OR NOT TO GO? as I Ve said before, though a heap o' son-in-laws don't play it that way." " Daddy," said Alice, and there was a return of all her old bantering manner, " it 's manners to wait till you 're asked." That night old Caspar wrote a letter beginning: " Ld. Alingham : Friend and Sir The abbreviation of the title he considered par- ticularly happy, combining as it did a certain def- erence for the alien designation with a republican unconcern, neatly evinced for such formality, by the abridgment. The letter was a marvel of composi- tion, orthography, and punctuation; it taxed and cramped old Caspar's mighty arm as the felling of a forest would not have done. And when he had sealed and directed it, in huge, redundant chirog- raphy, he reflected long on the pangs of authorship. The letter was sent by the stage-driver, who stopped three times a week at the road ranch where Alice and her father had spent the night, after their visit to Alingham's cabin. From thence it was to be forwarded by the first traveller going that way. Alice knew nothing of the letter, and Caspar spoke no more of the Englishman. He flattered himself that he knew a thing or two about women, if he knew little about the composition of a letter; and old Caspar regarded it as fine policy " to let a female think she is getting her head, when there is no par- ticular reason for urging her down a certain road." So Alice, having no idea of the diplomatic machina- tions of which she was the subject, accommodated herself to the makeshifts of the frontier town, and 279 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT thought long and uninterruptedly, with no idea that she was " getting her head " for the purpose. No place could have been more conducive to thought than the " Ladies Parlour " of the dismally sophisticated frontier hotel known as the Great Western Palace. It had a scarlet carpet and blue plush chairs, whose corpulence was restricted by buttons, arranged in a geometrical design, from which the plush sprang in obese diamond-shaped patterns. On the back of the door there was a neatly framed set of rules dealing chiefly with the penal- ties incurred by guests who attempted to evade their financial responsibility. It began with : " It is a misdemeanour to defraud an inn-keeper, punishable by Act of Congress," etc., and then dropped into personalities. There were a few pictures on the walls, belonging chiefly to the chocolate-box school of art, ladies with faultless profiles and large feathered hats. Alice wondered if she would ever be able to eradicate the memory of this depressing magnificence from her mind. The bar of the Great Western Palace was directly beneath the " Ladies Parlour," which had been placed exclusively at her disposal by the management, and all day long the clank of spurred boots came up from below, mingled with clinking glasses and great gusts of laughter. From early morning till late at night, prospectors sat in the hotel office, with suspiciously rich specimens of mines of which they were elo- quently anxious to dispose. There was no other woman in the hotel but Alice, nor apparently in the town, unless one included the painted wisps of hu- 280 TO GO, OR NOT TO GO? manity that filed back and forth from the dance-hall to the trading-store. Young and vicious was Bingham, a swaggering, brawling, money-spending youngster of uncertain parentage and vast wealth. There life was held cheap, and what passed as honour, dear. Home- sick, heartsick cow-punchers, sheep-herders, pro- spectors came to Bingham to forget, in riotous dis- sipation, the loneliness of the desert, and to hear again the tinkle of a piano and to see lights and cards and drinks instead of scenery. There a good woman might walk abroad at any hour of day or night, and find some hundreds of top-booted, som- brero-covered cavaliers to do her lightest bidding, with the chivalry of crusaders; and a bad woman made a crony of death by reason of her very frailty. Apart from the heat, the echoes of sordid dissi- pation, and the crude magnificence of the Great Western Palace, Alice found much in Bingham that was interesting. It was the pivot on which mag- nificent possibilities turned; opulence and indigence came up with the sublime impartiality of prizes and blanks in a lottery. Some of these picturesque lads who looked like bandits in mufti would undoubt- edly in the course of a few years be buying Watteaus and Romneys for wives who in all probability would have preferred chromolithographs. Alice saw them going to London for the social game; the stakes in New York were not big enough. She saw their pallid envy of Betty, Betty, who had already passed through the eye of the needle, and was en- joying the kingdom of England. 281 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT She had time for more personal reflections, too, at the Great Western Palace, and they were not so conducive to peace of mind as her social specula- tions regarding the prospectors and cattlemen. She was sitting one evening by the window of the blue and scarlet parlour, watching the mountains tower in lofty unconsciousness of the vicious little town cowering at their feet. From the dance-hall across the way came the scraping of fiddles; wide- eyed, eager, the town was hurrying on to the busi- ness of diverting itself. " I think," she said to herself, " I am that extinct product of the human species, that dodo of the race, a woman, just a woman. I hate the very names of ' career ' and ' life-work,' and I am practically cer- tain the world is not waiting for any message from me. Even the saving grace of egoism has been denied me. I am shamelessly without pride where one man is concerned, and there never was any other man " Of course," she continued, addressing the small- est and most approachable-looking of the distant peaks, " if I had an atom of pride or a scrap of conscience, I should lose no time in putting myself into the hands of those estimable ladies who lecture, to the battered fragments of slum wifehood, on the folly of clinging to the man who has kicked it down- stairs. But cherchez I'homme, none of us has a conscience where the right man is concerned. I even sympathise with slum wifehood I under- stand its preference for the kicks of the beloved to the kisses of the. unloved. 282 TO GO, OR NOT TO GO? " But let us devoutly thank Heaven, Alice Dean, that we are making this particularly disgraceful con- fession to a dignified white mountain instead of to a more sympathetic and perhaps more loquacious sort of confidant." The rattle of the cracked piano over the way at the dance-hall grew more hysterical; some one, with a Durham-like quality of voice, was calling out the figures of a dance the rhythmical shuffle of feet was borne along on the evening breeze, that had a suggestion of pines. What a mingling of defiled and undefiled floated in through the windows of the Great Western Palace ! A hand was rattling the knob of the sitting-room door, which Alice invariably kept locked, and she got up to open it, a trifle resentfully at having her revery interrupted. " Why, father, I did n't expect you so early." She was impressed with her father's expression; he seemed to be on particularly good terms with him- self; she wondered vaguely what he had been buy- ing at half its value. " We got company to supper," he announced, but there was a wealth of plot in the brief state- ment. " Indeed," said Alice, supposing it was some of the " Lost Shoshone " syndicate, " you are a cour- ageous host to entertain at the Great Western Palace." " This here guest would n't know if he was eatin' prairie dog or prairie chicken." 283 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT " I suppose you 've been persuading some unfor- tunate to take something worthless off your hands." " Why, have you seen him " Old Caspar posi- tively blushed. ''Seen whom?" she asked. " Why, the man that 's coming to supper, of course." " I have n't seen any one. I Ve been talking to the mountains, telling them secrets." "If you got to talk, a mountain makes a blame fine confidant I always let the other fellow do the talking myself, or, at least, the talking that counts. But the identity of this here guest don't seem to worry you none, Alice." " Of course I sympathise with him, fried steak, blue coffee, but I can't be expected to disguise my- self and warn him ; it would n't be kind to the cour- ageous host, who happens to be my father." " Alice," and the old cattleman's eyes twinkled with a cunning almost diabolical, " there are times when you can feed a man fried steak and blue coffee with impunity, by reason of the fact that he ain't in a condition to know what he 's eatin', or if he 's eatin' anything " " Nice sort of person you are asking me to play hostess to, I must say, Daddy. Has he been cele- brating getting the better of you in a bargain, or is he just a plain idiot?" " 'T ain't for me to pass judgment on him, Alice; I '11 leave that to you, being as he 's a friend of yours." 284 TO GO, OR NOT TO GO? Old Caspar, for all his bravado, looked as guilty as a boy caught robbing an orchard. He tried to meet her chill glance unflinchingly, but made a lamentable business of it. " I suppose you mean Lord Alingham," she said with a deliberately contrived calmness. " Oh, I say now, you are altogether too quick at guessing, considering he 's the only man you are ac- quainted with in a round-up of a thousand miles." " One is prone to jump at rather disagreeable conclusions " " Then don't jump, my dear, keep ca'm," he in- terrupted her. " But I was going to say, father, that, as you came in, I was deciding I would n't have any sup- per. I 've a bit of a headache." Caspar decided on lightness and jocularity, but the outlook was not promising. Alice frightened him with his own expression of reserve, but he flung danger signals to the wind and blundered on: " My pore child, and do you care so much as that? Drink is the sole refuge of man when his heart is a torn and lacerated bull's-eye, due to the unfailing marksmanship of love. But woman, lovely woman, entrenches herself behind a headache and hits back." The dormant pride of maidenhood, roughly awak- ened, sprang fiercely to the attack. The fury in the girl seemed to burn up the red blood in her veins and left her cold and white. Tornado-like in sweep and intensity, she turned on him. 285 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT "In Heaven's name, what am I? Something that will spoil on your hands and must be peddled to the first man who comes along " " Alice, my dear, if I have been a blundering old fool, forgive me; but I thought " She did not let him finish, she was too absolutely contrite. " Father, if you have asked this man to supper, there is nothing to do but to bring him, and - she recovered something of herself " we '11 all go and eat fried steak." Old Caspar went in search of his guest, and when he had found him and sent him to the blue and scarlet sitting-room, he sought for something to steady his nerves. That his plans had miscarried, there was not a doubt in the world. " Let 'em fight it out," he said to himself with real philoso- phy ; " they are young." Alice waited for their guest in chill dignity; by an unaccountable process of reasoning, or perhaps unreasoning, she had arrived at the conclusion that Alingham was to blame for her father's violent partisanship, and this she resented. Her manner eyebrows raised, face unsmiling was so absurdly out of keeping with the atmosphere of the Great Western Palace that it is surprising its incongruity could have escaped them both. She greeted him with frigid aloofness, and as he took her finger-tips in the most casual way, they might have posed for one of those banal illustrations where supremely scornful young women make speeches of surpassing rudeness to men of great height and breadth of shoulder. 286 TO GO, OR NOT TO GO? She thought he seemed a trifle haggard; it smote her sharply as physical pain, but of this there was no evidence, nor of the fact that her heart was thun- dering like a besieging mob, thundering to let down every bar and chain. There was more than a hint of Mayfair in her accent : " And do you find this kind of thing amusing?" The sweep of her eyelids might have included in the diversions of Bingham the congested luxury of the sitting-room, or the babel of the street that floated up through the open windows. He met her eyes unflinchingly. " Mr. Dean sent for me; he is having difficulty in completing his negotiations with the owners of the ' Lost Shoshone.' They are friends of mine, and he wants me to talk it over with them. I was glad to come, too, for another reason. I am going back to England, and I wanted to say good-bye to you." She raised her eyes to his for the fraction of a second, and from what she saw there, knew he was beyond the ken of her father's plotting. He meant what he said; he would go to England, and she she would stay here and ride about the wilderness. There was a wail of winter in the night wind, as it swept down from the mountains. She tried to face it in imagination, the early dusk, the long evenings, the storm-battered house, but she could not, it was too dreary. Her eyes were down, her voice was very low: "Must you go back?" " I think so. Nothing is ever gained by tucking one's head in the sand, you know. I Ve been think- 287 LORD ALINGHAM, BANKRUPT ing it out since I saw you. I am going to try for some small civil appointment." All the glow and softness of the love that had grown but the deeper in repression was in her eyes as she gave them to his. " Please don't go/' she pleaded. THE END 288 " A 000 111 276 2