VII
FROTHINGHAM had gone direct to his apartment. “Get my traps together at once,” he said to his man—Hutt, whose father had been his father’s man. He threw himself into a chair in his sitting room, and tried to think, to plan. But he was still dazed from the long fall and the sudden stop. Presently Hutt touched him.
“Well—well—what is it?” he asked, looking stupidly up at the round, stupid face.
“Beg pardon, my lord,” replied the servant, “but Hi’ve spoke to you twice. Mrs. Hollister wishes to know hif you’ll kindly come to ’er in ’er sitting room.”
Frothingham found Mrs. Hollister’s maid waiting for him in the hall. He followed her to the heavily perfumed surroundings of pale blue silk, both plain and brocaded, in which Mrs. Hollister lived. He listened to her without hearing what she said—thinking of it afterward he decided that she had been incoherent and not very tactful, and that her chief anxiety hadbeen lest he might do something to cause scandal. He remembered that when he had said he would go at once she had tried to persuade him to stay—as if leaving were not the only possible course. He gradually recovered his self-command, and through weakness, through good nature, through contempt of his hosts, and through policy, he acted upon the first principle of the code for fortune-hunters of every degree and kind: “Be near-sighted to insults, and far-sighted to apologies.”
Surveying the wreck from his original lodgings at the Waldorf, he found three mitigations—first, that the engagement had not been announced; second, that he had not written Evelyn anything about it; third, that it was impossible for “middle-class people” such as the Hollisters to insult him—“if I wallow with that sort, I can’t expect anything else, can I?” To cheer himself he had several drinks and took an account of stock. He found he was ninety-three pounds richer than when he landed—he played “bridge” well, and had been in several heavy games at Lake-in-the-Wood, and had been adroit in noting the stupid players, and so arranging partners that he could benefit by them; also he had been lucky in a small way atpicking the numbers at Canfield’s the few times he had trusted himself to go there. “Not so bad,” he said. “It’s a long game, and that was only the first hand.” He hesitated at the indicator, then instead of ordering another drink went to the telephone and called up Longview’s house. It gave him courage, and a sense that he was not altogether friendless and forlorn, to hear Honoria’s voice again. “Shall you be in late this afternoon?” he asked.
“Why! I didn’t know you were in town—or are you calling me from Catherine’s?”
“Yes—I’m in town,” he replied, and he felt that she must notice the strain in his voice.
“Oh!”
“I’m up to stay,” he went on, his voice improving.
“Oh—yes—come at half-past five.”
“Thank you—good-by.” He held the receiver to his ear until he heard her ring off. “Good girl, Honoria,” he muttered. “Not like those beastly cads.” He went to the club, lunched with Browne, whom he found there, was beaten by him at billiards, losing ten dollars, and returned to the hotel to dress.
At a quarter-past five he started up the avenue afoot—a striking figure in clothes made in theextreme of the English fashion; but he would have been striking in almost any sort of dress, so distinguished was its pale, rather supercilious face, with one of his keen eyes ambushed behind that eyeglass, expressive in its expressionlessness. The occupants of every fifth or sixth carriage in the fashionable parade bowed to him with a friendliness that gave him an internal self-possession as calm as the external immobility which his control of his features enabled him always to present to the world.
He told Honoria his story in outline—“the surest way to win a woman’s friendship is to show her that you trust her,” he reflected. She was sympathetic in a way that soothed, not hurt, his vanity; but she sided with Catherine. “I half suspected her of being in love with Joe,” she said, “but I thought he was a confirmed bachelor. He played all round you—that’s the truth. I’m going to say something rather disagreeable—but I think it’s necessary.”
“I want—I need your advice,” he replied.
“You’ve been relying entirely too much on your title. You’ve let yourself be misled by what the newspapers say about that sort of thing. You don’t understand—I didn’t understand until I’d been here awhile, and had got my point of view straight. They’re not so excited about titles now as they used to be when they had no fashionable society of their own, and had to look abroad to gratify their instinct for social position. If you’d come five years ago——”
“Just my rotten luck,” he muttered.
“Your title is a good thing—properly worked. It will catch a woman, especially if she’s not well forward ‘in the push,’ as they say. But it won’t hold her. She’s likely to use you to strengthen her social position, and then to drop you, unless she has lived in England, and has had her head turned, and has become—like your middle-classes.”
“But my family is away better than Surrey’s.”
“Your family counts for nothing here. New York knows nothing and cares nothing about birth. Englishmen count by title only.”
“Then they ran after Surrey because he was a Duke?”
“Perhaps to a certain extent,” replied Honoria. “But I fancy the principal reason was that they wished to see what it was Helen had paid such a tall price for. If he had come here quietly to marry a poor girl there’d have been no stir.”
“Money—money—nothing but money—always money,” sneered Frothingham. He saw the twinkle in Honoria’s eyes. “But, I say,” he protested, “you know that we over there do care for other things, too.”
“So do they here, but what do they care for, first and most, in both countries?”
He smiled.
“It’s money first—there and here, and the world over,” she went on with bitterness under her raillery. “And among our kind of people everything else—sentiment, art, good taste even—is far behind it. How could it be otherwise? We’ve got to have money—lots of money—or we can’t have the things we most crave—luxury, deference, show. But—where are you dining to-night?”
“Probably at the club.”
“Excuse me a minute. I’ll just see if Mrs. Galloway will let me bring you. We’re going to the opera afterward.” She looked at him quizzically. “I think I’ll arrange to ship you off to Boston. A little vacation just now will do you no harm. And—Boston might interest you.”
When she returned from the telephone it was witha cordial invitation for him from Mrs. Galloway. He said: “I’ve a letter to a Mrs. Saalfield in Boston. Do you know her?”
“Yes—she’s here now, I think. But you would better keep away from her. She wouldn’t do you the least good.”
“Is she out of ‘the push’?”
“Oh, no—she leads it there, I believe. But she wouldn’t let you look at a girl or a widow, or any woman but herself. She’s about forty years old—it used to be the woman of thirty, but it’s the woman of forty now. Everywhere she goes she trails a train of young men. They’re afraid to look away from her. They watch her like a pack of hungry collies, and she watches them like a hen-hawk.”
There was more than the spirit of friendly helpfulness in Honoria’s plan to send him away to Boston. The bottom fact—hidden even from herself—was that she was tired of him. He seemed to her helpless and incapable, worse in that respect than any but the very poorest specimens of men she had met in New York. She felt that he was looking to her to see him through an adventure of which she disapproved rather than approved. She had no intention of accepting such aburden, yet she was too good-natured and liked him too well to turn him abruptly adrift.
Mrs. Galloway took him in to dinner, and it was not until the second act of the opera that he had a chance to talk with the Boston woman in the party—Mrs. Staunton. Then he slipped into the chair behind her; but she would not talk while the curtain was up. Grand opera bored him, so he passed the time in gazing round the grand-tier boxes—the Galloway box was to the left of the centre. The twilight was not dark enough to hide the part of the show that interested him. He knew New York fashionable society well now, and as he looked he noted each woman and recalled how many millions she represented. “Gad, how rich they are—these beggars,” he thought enviously. And he was seized by a mild attack of what an eminent New York lawyer describes as “the fury of the parasite”—that hate which succeeds contempt in the parasite as its intended victim eludes it.
When the curtain went down on the last of seven uproarious calls—the opera was “Carmen,” and Calvé was singing it—Mrs. Staunton’s disdainful expression gave him the courage to say: “Ghastly row they make, eh?”
Mrs. Staunton was perhaps fifty years old, long and thin, with a severe profile and a sweet and intelligent, if somewhat too complacent, front face. “Calvé sings rather well—in spots,” she said. “But I doubt if Boston would have given her seven calls.”
The mirthful shine of Frothingham’s right eye might have been a reflection from his glass; again, it might have been really in his eye where it seemed to be—Mrs. Staunton was so seated that she could not see him as he talked over her shoulder into her ear. “Really,” was all he said.
“You’ve not been at Boston?” asked Mrs. Staunton.
“Not yet. I thought it would be well to get acclimated, as it were, before I ventured away from New York.”
“You will have it to do over again,” said Mrs. Staunton. “We are very different. Here money is king and god, and——” Mrs. Staunton cast a supercilious glance round the brilliant and beautiful, and even dazzling, grand tier. “You see the result. Really, New York is becoming intolerably vulgar. I come here rarely, and leave as soon as I decently can. But one can’t stay here even for a few days withoutbeing corrupted. The very language is corrupt here, and among those who call themselves the best people.”
“Really! Really, now!” said Frothingham.
“Indeed, yes. In Boston even the lower classes speak English.”
“You don’t say.” Frothingham’s drawl was calm; he put upon his eyeglass the burden of looking astonished interest.
“It must fret your nerves to listen to the speech here,” continued Mrs. Staunton. “It’s a dialect as harsh and vulgar—as most of the voices.”
“It will be a great pleasure to hear the language spoken as it is at home—though I can’t say that I mind it here. Yes—I shall be glad to see Boston.”
Mrs. Staunton lifted her eyebrows and looked politely amused. “Butwedon’t speak as you speak in England. I didn’t saythat.”
“Oh—I thought you were by way of saying they spoke English at Boston.”
“So I did. I meant that we speak correctly. You English speak very incorrectly. Your upper class is even more slovenly in that respect than your middle class.”
Frothingham looked interest and inquiry. “Ah—yes—quiteso,” he said. “I believe we do let our middle-class look after all that sort of thing. It saves us a lot of bother.”
“I’m glad you admit the truth.” Mrs. Staunton looked gracious and triumphant. “Last winter we had the president of one of the colleges at Oxford with us—a very narrow man.”
“Frightful persons, all that sort,Ithink,” said Frothingham.
“I’m not astonished that you think so,” replied Mrs. Staunton. “He—it was Mr. Stebbins—scoffed at the idea that Boston spoke English. He insisted that whatever your upper class speaks is English, that they have the right to determine the language.”
That was Frothingham’s own notion, but he gave no sign. “Stebbins is a hideous old jabberwock,” he said, glad that the orchestra was beginning.
He had accidentally, but naturally, stumbled into the road to Mrs. Staunton’s good graces. She wanted acquiescent listeners only; he disliked talking and abhorred argument. She was living at the Waldorf also, and this gave him his opportunity. She found him most agreeable. He had the great advantage ofbeing free all day, while her New York men friends were at work then—and she did not like women. She insisted it was only the New York woman—“so trivial, so childish in her tastes for show and for farcical amusements”—that she did not like; but the fact was that she did not like any women anywhere. Nominally, she was in New York to visit her sister, Mrs. Findlay, but she rarely saw her. “I can’t endure staying in Henrietta’s house,” she explained to Frothingham. “She has fallen from grace. If anything, she out-Herods the New York women—always the way with renegades. And she lets her housekeeper and her butler run her household—dust everywhere, things going to ruin, the servants often drunk. If I were in the house I could not be silent; so I stay at a hotel when I make my annual visit to her.”
She invited Frothingham to come to her at Boston in the second week in January—and he accepted. She had said never a word to him about her niece, Cecilia Allerton, and for that very reason he knew that she was revolving some plan for bringing them together. He also knew that Cecilia Allerton’s father, head of the great Boston banking house of Allerton Brothers & Monson, was rich enough to give his daughter thedower necessary to admission into the Gordon-Beauvais family.
In the two weeks between Mrs. Staunton’s departure and his engagement to follow her he did not neglect his business. But his assiduity was wasted. He saw chances to marry, and marry well—but no dowers worth his while. Many mothers beamed on him, and their daughters brightened at his approach; but not one of the families that might have had him for the faintest hinting showed any matrimonial interest in him. One mother, Mrs. Brandon, actually snubbed him as if he were a mere vulgar, poor, and untitled fortune-hunter—and the snub was unprovoked, as he was only courteous to Miss Brandon. When Frothingham laughed over this incident to Honoria she said: “Mrs. Brandon purposes to marry Estelle to Walter Summit.”
“That chuckle-head? Why, I found him in the cloak-room at the Merivale dance the other night sitting with his big damp hands in his lap, and his mouth hanging open. And he wasn’t screwed, either.”
“But Estelle isn’t marryinghim. She’s marrying his forty millions. With what she’ll inherit from her father and her uncle that will make her the third richestwoman in New York. The fact that Walter is slightly imbecile is rather in his favour—she’ll have a free hand, and that’s everything where a woman’s ambitious. If you Englishmen hadn’t the reputation of being masterful in your own households you’d have less difficulty in marrying here. It was a bad day for English marriages when the American woman learned that England is a man’s country. A girl brought up as are the girls here nowadays hates to abdicate—and she don’t have to if she marries an American.”
“I’ve heard that all women like a master,” suggested Frothingham.
“So do men. Everyone likes to bow to real superiority and serve it, when he or she finds it. But the difficulty comes in trying to convince a man or a woman that he or she has met a superior.”
“Well, then—perhaps women are more easily convinced than men.”
Honoria smiled satirically. “Theyseemto be,” she replied, “because they are prudent. But if some husbands only knew what their wives really thought, they might be less easy in their vanity than they are.”
“That ain’t true of our English women,” said Frothingham.
“No—and why? Because, milord, they don’t think.”
“Well—mywife can do as she jolly well pleases if she’ll only let me alone.”
“If she’s an American you may be sure shewilldo as she jolly well pleases—and you may also be sure that it won’t please you to be jolly as she does it.”
Just then a servant came in to say that Catherine was at the door in her carriage, and wished to know whether Honoria was at home. Honoria looked at Frothingham inquiringly.
“As you please,” said Frothingham, settling his eyeglass firmly, and clearing his face of expression.
Honoria left him in the large drawing room, and waited for Catherine in the adjoining smaller room. “Lord Frothingham is here,” she said in an undertone, after they had kissed each the other.
Catherine paled and her eyes shifted. “Does he know I’m here?” she asked.
“Yes,” replied Honoria, “but you needn’t see him if you don’t wish.”
Catherine reflected. “I’m certain to meet him again some time, ain’t I, dear?” she said. “And it might be more awkward than this.”
She advanced boldly with Honoria and put out her hand to him, her face flushing, and a delightful pleading look in her eyes. “I’m so glad to see you again, Lord Frothingham,” she said.
“Ah—thank you—a great pleasure to me also, I’m sure,” he answered in his most expressionless tone. “Are you staying in town?”
“We came up yesterday—to stay. Won’t you come to see us? Are you at the Waldorf? I do hope we can get you for a dinner mamma’s arranging for the latter part of next week.”
“Very good of you. But I’m just off to Boston.”
He shook hands with her, then with Honoria. At the door he turned, and a faint smile showed in his eyeglass and at the comers of his mouth. “Oh, I almost forgot—give my regards to Wallingford—when you see him—won’t you?”
Catherine looked gratefully at him. “Thank you—thank you,” she said. “I know he’ll he glad of a friendly message from you. He’s very fond of you.”
“Really?” drawled Frothingham. “That’s charming!” He smiled with good-natured raillery. “He had such a quaint way of showing it that I wasn’tquitecertain.”
When he had bowed and dropped the heavy portière behind him Catherine went to the window. She stood there until she had seen him enter his hansom and drive away.
“How beautifully he dresses,” she said absently to Honoria. “And what distinguished manners he has—as if he’d been used to being a gentleman for ages and ages.”
She seated herself near the fire—the tea-table was between her and Honoria. “You didn’t know that we were engaged, did you?” she went on, looking dreamily into the fire.
“Were you?” said Honoria—she never betrayed confidences.
“Yes. But I broke it off.”
“Why?”
“I think,” Catherine answered slowly, “I think perhaps it was because I didn’t feel at home with him—and I do with—Joe. He knows how to manage me.”
“Joe? Why, you used to act as if you disliked him.”
“So did I—think so.” Catherine sighed. “I wish,” she said after a moment, “that Joe had Beauvais House and—the title.”