XVIII
THERE was a family council at the Hoopers’ after luncheon that day—Mr. Hooper, his wife, and Jeanne. The two women followed Hooper from the dining room into his study, where he was pulling sullenly at his cigar and awaiting the attack. It was his wife who began: “Do you know why Lord Frothingham sent word he couldn’t come to lunch, pa? Jenny here is worried about it.”
Mr. Hooper grunted. Finally he said: “I’m willing to do anything in reason to please Jenny. I don’t approve of this title business. It ain’t American. But as long as the young fellow has turned her head I was not disposed to stand in the way.” He frowned fiercely. “But I tell you flat, I won’t be held up! And that fellow he sent here this morning was a plain highwayman.”
Mrs. Hooper and Jeanne looked significantly each at the other—they had had many talks about his growing stinginess, and they suspected him at once. “What did he want?” inquired Mrs. Hooper.
“I don’t propose to talk this thing over before Jenny. It’s disgraceful that she should have gone into such a business. It ain’t right that she should know about such things.”
Jeanne’s eyes filled with tears. “And I’ve told all the girls!” she exclaimed. “Everybody knows it. I can’t back out now. The whole town’d be laughing at us. I’d be ashamed ever to show my face in the street again. You don’t want to break my heart, do you, pa?”
“You’ve made a sweet mess of it!” snarled her father. “You ought to have had better sense than to have told anybody till the business side of it was settled. I warned your ma about that—I knew what was coming. Now, here you two’ve gone and given him the whip hand!”
“She got at the telephone before she told me,” said Mrs. Hooper.
Neither she nor her husband suspected that Jeanne had thought of just this emergency of a wrangle over settlements and had decided that the best way to overcome her father’s avarice was to put him in a position from which he could not recede. If Frothingham had not insisted on liberal settlements she wouldhave prompted him to it. She was no more eager than was he to embark with small supplies in the hold when it was possible to lay in supplies a plenty. And as her father had acted all her life upon his principle of paternal affection—“The hand that feeds is the hand that’s licked”—she saw no harm in guiding her conduct toward him by principles from the same practical code. As she was about to engage in business, wasn’t it common sense to get as large a capital as she could? “We can’t back out now,” she repeated tearfully, watching him shrewdly through her tears.
“A pretty mess!” growled her father. But he was not really offended, partly because he was fond of his daughter and would have forgiven her almost anything, partly because he understood and sympathised with her eagerness to proclaim her triumph, chiefly because, now that he had thought it over, he was ready to accept Frothingham’s terms. “The hope of getting more and the need of it will keep ’em tame,” he reasoned. And he said, addressing the two women: “When that Lawrence fellow comes again to-morrow, as I’m dead sure he will, I’ll close the matter. But you two keep your hands off!”
As soon as her father and mother were out of the way
As soon as her father and mother were out of theway Jennie went into the library and called up the Barneys. “Is Lord Frothingham there?” she asked.
“I’ll put you on the switch to his room,” was the reply. And presently a voice she recognised as Hutt’s said: “Who wishes to speak to ’Is Lordship?”
“Say that Miss Hooper’s at the telephone.”
There was a pause, a murmur of voices—she was sure one of them was Frothingham’s. Then Hutt answered: “’Is Lordship hain’t ’ere just now, ma’am. Hany message, ma’am?”
She was trembling with alarm. “Just tell him that I called up, and that I’d like to speak to him when he comes in”—this in a rather shaky voice, for a great fear was gathering in around her, a fear that he had become offended at her father’s stinginess and bartering and bargaining, and had decided to withdraw.
She wandered uneasily from room to room. She sat at the telephone several times—once she had the receiver off the hook before she changed her mind about trying to reach him. She ordered her victoria and got ready for the street, to drive about in the hope of accidentally meeting him. At the door she changed her mind again. As she was turning back a boy came by, shouting an extra—“All about the Earl of Frothingham!Big sensation!” She saw that the boy knew who she was, knew that she was supposed to be engaged to Frothingham, was clamouring in that neighbourhood because he thought sales would be briskest there. She fled into the house—but sent a servant out by the basement way to buy the paper.
The headlines were large and black. Frothingham, the story ran, had got into debt in England so deeply that his creditors found he could not pay more than a few pence in the pound; they had consulted as to ways and means of recovering, had organised themselves into a syndicate, had put up five thousand pounds to “finance” him for a hunt for a rich wife in America. “And,” concluded the account, “this exposure comes barely in time to block his attempt to marry the beautiful daughter of one of the richest meat packers in Chicago, moving in our smartest smart set.”
She did not know that this tale was a deliberately false diversion of the facts about a syndicated German prince who had visited Chicago several years before and had almost married there. The truth as to his enterprise had just come out on the other side through the collapse of the Rontivogli syndicate; and the newspaper,relying for immunity on Frothingham’s aloneness, and on his well-understood mercenary designs, had substituted his name for the German’s. She read and believed. She had known from the outset that his main motive was money. But she had succeeded in disguising this unsightly truth in the same flowers of her crudely romantic imagination in which she disguised the truth as to her craving for a coronet. Now it was as if the flowers had been torn away to the last concealing petal and had left exposed things more hideous than she thought were there.
She hid her face and cried a little—“I despise him. Besides, if I went on and married him, what would people say?”
It would have taken finer scales than those available for weighing human motives to decide which of the two reasons embodied in those two sentences was the heavier. She dried her eyes and sat with her elbow on the table and her chin in her hand.
“That’s the best thing to do, every way I look at it,” she said aloud slowly at the end of half an hour’s thought.
She went to the telephone, called up the offices of the Great Western and Southern Railway, asked and gotthe General Manager. “Is that you, Mr. Burster? Is that you, Tom? Meet me in the parlours of the Auditorium right way.” And she rang off and telephoned to the stable for her victoria.
Ten minutes later she was driving down the avenue in her largest, most beplumed black hat and a pale blue carriage-coat that produced the wonted effect of her public appearances—Burster once said to her: “Jeanne, you’re the only thing on earth than can stop traffic in the streets of Chicago. You can do in two seconds more than a blizzard could do in a week.”
She returned at half-past five. Her father and mother were in the front sitting room upstairs, gloomy as the lake in the dusk of a cloudy day. She entered, whistling and tilting her big hat first over her right eye, then over her left. “Don’t look so cheerful,” she said, patting her mother on the cheek and pulling her father’s beard.
He tried to scowl, but it was a failure; and his voice was not in the least formidable as he said: “A pretty mess you got yourself into, miss, with your telephoning.”
“What telephoning?” she asked with a start.
“Tattling your engagement.”
“Oh!” She threw herself into a chair and laughed.
“Your father telephoned to Mr. Lawrence after he left us——” began her mother.
“What did you do that for, pa?” she interrupted. “He’ll think we haven’t any pride.”
“You ungrateful, thoughtless child! I did it for your sake.”
“What did Mr. Lawrence say?”
Her father hesitated and his face showed how he hated to inflict upon his daughter the pain he thought his words would cause. “He said it was useless to continue our discussion, as Lord Frothingham had definitely and finally decided not to renew his proposal.” The old man’s voice almost broke as he went on: “Jenny, here’s a note that came a few minutes ago—I think the address is in Frothingham’s handwriting.”
Neither he nor her mother dared to look at her as she was hearing these awful disclosures of the downfall of her hopes and the impending brutalities to her pride and vanity. She picked up the note, opened it slowly, read it—a few polite formal sentences, setting forth that he had “yielded to the insuperable obstacles interposed by your father.”
She dropped the sheet and pirouetted round the room in and out between the chairs occupied by her frightened parents—they thought her suddenly gone mad from the shock. “Who says I ain’t the luckiest girl on earth?” she exclaimed.
“What are you talking about, Jenny?” demanded her mother sharply.
“Why, I married Tom Burster half an hour ago. He’s putting the notices in all the papers for to-morrow morning. Everybody’ll think I changed my mind and shook Frothingham. And I did, too!”
“Jenny!” exclaimed her father. “Tom Burster!”
“And he’s coming here to dinner, if you don’t object,” she continued. “If you do, why I’ll join him and we’ll go away and give you a chance to cool off.” She caught her father by the beard. “What do you say, daddy? Say yes, or I’ll pull.”
“Yes,” replied her father with a huge sigh of relief—his daughter was contented; her and their vanity would be spared; Tom Burster would not demand or want a dower; he was not only independent, but also one of the most forward young “self-made” rich men in Chicago. “You’ve got more sense than all the restof the family put together,” he exclaimed proudly, patting her on the head.
And in an absent, reflective tone she said: “I always felt I’d have some use for Tom sooner or later.”