The two dark figures stood an instant, breathless, in the dark mouth of the cavern beneath the marble balustraded stairway that ascended with chaste dignity to Mrs. De Peyster's noble front door. Swiftly they surveyed the scene. Not a policeman was in sight: no one save, across the way on Washington Square benches, a few plebeian lovers enjoying the soft calm of a May eleven o'clock.
The pair, with veils down, each looking a plagiarism of the other, slipped out of the servants' entrance, through the gate of the low iron fence, and arm clutching arm hastened eastward to University Place. Thus far no one had challenged them. Here they turned and went rapidly northward: past the Lafayette, where Mrs. De Peyster's impulse to take a taxicab was instantly countermanded by the fear that so near her home there was danger of recognition: and onward, onward they went, swiftly, wordlessly, their one commanding impulse to get away—to get away.
At Fourteenth Street they passed a policeman. Again they choked back their breath; shiveringly they felt his eyes upon them. And, indeed, his eyes were—interestedly; for to that Hibernian, with hisnative whimsicality, they suggested the somewhat unusual phenomenon of the same person out walking with herself. But he did not speak.
At the head of Union Square they caught a roving taxicab. Their next thought, after bare escape, was necessarily concerned with shelter, a hiding-place. To the chauffeur's "Where to, ladies?" Mrs. De Peyster said, "Hotel Dauphin." The instinct, the Mrs. De Peyster of habit, which was beneath her surface of agitation, said the Dauphin because the Dauphin was quite the most select hotel in New York. In fact, six months before, when Mrs. De Peyster desired to introduce and honor the Duke de Crécy in a larger way than her residence permitted, it was at the Dauphin that she had elected to give the ball that had brought her so much deferential praise—which occasion was the first and only time she had departed from her strict old-family practice of limiting her social functions to such as could be accommodated within her own house. She had then been distinctly pleased; one could hardly have expected good breeding upon so large a scale. And her present subconscious impression of the Dauphin was that it was ducal, if not regal, in its reserved splendor, in its manner of subdued, punctilious ceremony.
She could remain at the Dauphin, in seclusion, until she had time to think. Then she could act.
As she sped smoothly up Fifth Avenue—her second ride on the Avenue that night—she began, in the cushioned privacy of the taxi, to recover somewhatfrom the panic of dire necessity that had driven them forth. Other matters began to flash spasmodically across the screen of her mind. One of these was William. And there the film stopped. The cold, withering look William had given Matilda a few minutes before remained fixed upon the screen. That look threatened her most unpleasantly as to the future. What if William should learn who was the real Matilda to whom he had made love!
"Matilda," she began, calling up her dignity, "I desire to instruct you upon a certain matter."
"Yes, ma'am," whispered Matilda.
"I expressly instruct you not to mention or hint to any one, particularly William, that it was I and not you who went out driving with him to-night."
"I'll not, ma'am."
"You swear?"
"I swear, ma'am. Never!"
"Remember, Matilda. You have sworn." And relieved of that menace, she leaned back.
The taxi drew up before the Dauphin. A grenadier-lackey, who seemed bulk and brass buttons and braid of gold, handed them out with august white gloves.
"Pay the fare, Matilda," ordered Mrs. De Peyster.
Mrs. De Peyster's bills, when she had a servant with her, were always paid by the attendant. Matilda did so, out of a square black leather bag that was never out of Matilda's fingers when Matilda wasout of the house; it seemed almost a flattened extension of Matilda's hand.
They entered the Dauphin, passing other white-gloved lackeys, each a separate perfection of punctiliousness; and passed through a marble hallway, muted with rugs of the Orient, and came into a vast high chamber, large as a theater—marble walls and ceiling, tapestries, moulded plaster and gilt in moderation, silken ropes instead of handrails on the stairways, electric lights so shaded that each looked a huge but softly unobtrusive pearl. The chamber was pervaded by, was dedicated to, splendid repose.
Mrs. De Peyster, Matilda trailing, headed for a booth of marble and railing of dull gold—the latter, possibly, only bronze, or gilded iron—within which stood a gentleman in evening dress, with the bearing of one no lower than the first secretary of an embassy.
"A suite," Mrs. De Peyster remarked briefly across the counter, "with sitting-room, two bed-rooms and bath."
"Certainly," said the distinguished gentleman. "I have a most desirable suite on the fifteenth floor, with a splendid outlook over the park."
"That will do."
"The name, please?" queried the gentleman, reaching for a pen.
"Mrs. David Harrison," invented Mrs. De Peyster.
"When do your employers wish to occupy thesuite?" pursued the courtly voice of the secretary of the embassy.
"Our employers!" repeated Mrs. De Peyster. And then with wrathful hauteur: "The apartment is for ourselves. We desire to occupy it at once."
The gentleman glanced her up and down; then up and down his eyes went over Matilda, just behind her. There was no doubting what Matilda was; and since the two were patently the same, there could be no doubt as to what Mrs. De Peyster was.
"I'm sorry—but, after all, the suite is not available," he said courteously.
"Not available?" cried Mrs. De Peyster. "Why not?"
"I prefer to say no more."
"But I insist!"
"Since you insist—the Dauphin does not receive servants, even of the higher order, as regular guests." The hotel clerk's voice was silken with courtesy; there was no telling with what important families these two were connected; and it would not do to give offense. "We receive servants only when they accompany their employers, and then assign them to the servants' quarters. You yourself must perceive the necessity of this," he added hastily, seeing that Mrs. De Peyster was shaking, "to preserve the Dauphin's social tone—"
"The servants' quarters!" gasped Mrs. De Peyster. "You mean—"
"You'll excuse me, please," interrupted the clerk,and with a bow ended the scene and moved to the rear of the office where he plainly busied himself over nothing at all.
Mrs. De Peyster, quivering, gulping, glared through her veil at him. A hotel clerk had turned his back on her! And this mere clerk had dared refuse her a room!Refuse her!Because she,she, Mrs. De Peyster had not the social tone!
Nothing like it had ever happened to her before.
Her desire to annihilate that clerk with the suave ambassadorial look, and the Dauphin, and all therein and all appertaining thereunto, was mounting toward explosion, when Matilda clutched her arm.
"It's awful, ma'am,—but let's go," she whispered. "What else can we do?"
Yes, what else could they do? Mrs. De Peyster's wrath was still at demolitory pressure, but she saw the sense in that question. The next moment the two figures, duplicates of somberness, one magnificently upright, the other shrinking, were re-passing over the muting rugs, through the corridor of noble marble, by the lackeys between whose common palms and the hands of patrician guests was the antiseptic intermediary of white thread gloves.
"Perhaps it's just as well, ma'am," Matilda began tremulously as soon as they were in the street, before Mrs. De Peyster's black storm could burst. "How much would that suite have been?"
"Perhaps fifty dollars a day."
"I only just now thought about it—but—butplease, ma'am, did you happen to bring your purse?"
"My purse!" Mrs. De Peyster stopped short. "Matilda!"—in a voice chilled with dismay—"I never thought of my purse until this moment! There wasn't time! I haven't a cent!"
"And after paying for the cab, ma'am, I have only a little over fifteen dollars."
"Matilda!"
"Perhaps, ma'am," repeated Matilda, "it was just as well they wouldn't take us."
Mrs. De Peyster did not speak.
"And what's worse," Matilda faltered, as though the blame was hers, "the hotels won't trust you unless you have baggage. And we have no baggage, ma'am."
"Matilda!" There was now real tragedy in Mrs. De Peyster's voice. "Whatarewe going to do?"
They walked along the Park, whispering over their unforeseen and unforeseeable predicament. It had many aspects, their situation; it was quickly clear to them that the most urgent aspect was the need of immediate refuge. Other troubles and developments could be handled as they arose, should any such arise. But a place to hide, to sleep, had to be secured within the hour. Also they needed two or three days in which to think matters over calmly, and to apply to them clear reason. And they had only the fifteen dollars in Matilda's black bag.
"It seems to me, ma'am," ventured Matilda,"that a rooming-house or a boarding-house would be cheapest."
"A boarding-house!" exclaimed Mrs. De Peyster. "But where?"
Matilda remembered and reached into her slit pocket. "Yesterday I happened to pick up the card of a boarding-house in the library—I've no idea how it came there. I saved it because my sister Angelica, who lives in Syracuse, wrote me to look up a place where she might stay."
They examined the address upon the card, and twenty minutes later, now close upon midnight, Matilda was pressing the bell of a house on the West Side. Visible leadership Mrs. De Peyster had resigned to Matilda, for they were entering a remote and lowly world whose ways Mrs. De Peyster knew not. In all her life she had never been inside a boarding-house.
The door opened slightly. A voice, female, interrogated Matilda. Then they were admitted into a small hall, lighted by an electric bulb in a lantern of stamped sheet-iron with vari-colored panes and portholes. From this hall a stairway ascended, and from it was a view into a small rear parlor, where sat a clergyman. The lady who had admitted them was the mistress; a Junoesque, superior, languid sort of personage, in a loose dressing-gown of pink silk with long train. To her Matilda made known their desire.
"Excuse me, Mr. Pyecroft," she called to the clergyman. "So you and your friend want boardand room," the landlady repeated in a drawling tone, yet studying them sharply with heavy-penciled eyes. "I run a select house, so I've got to be careful about whom I admit. Consequently you will not object to answering a few questions. You and your friend are working-women?"
"Yes."
The heavy eyes had concluded their inventory. "Perhaps both housekeepers?"
"Ye—yes."
Matilda had a double impulse to explain, first to clear Mrs. De Peyster of this unmerited indignity, and second to prevent their being once more turned away as servants. But something kept her still. And perhaps it was just as well. Mrs. Gilbert, considering the two, did have a moment's thought about refusing them; she, too, liked to maintain the social tone of her establishment, and certainly servants as guests did not help; but then the arid season for boarding-houses was at hand, and she was not one to sacrifice real money to mere principle.
"How long do you want to stay?"
"We don't know yet. Per—perhaps several months."
This was agreeable news to Mrs. Gilbert. But it was not boarding-house policy to show it.
"When would you want to come in?"
"Now."
"To-night!" The penciled eyebrows lifted in surprise. "And your baggage?"
"We came to New York without any," Matilda lied desperately. "We're—we're going to buy some things here."
"Naturally, then, you expect to pay in advance."
"Ah—er—at least a deposit."
"One room or two?"
"One." One would come cheaper.
"Excuse me, Mr. Pyecroft," she called again to the clergyman. "This way." And she collected her silken skirt, and swished up two flights of stairs and into a bedroom at the back, where she turned on the light. "A very comfortable room," she went on in the voice of a tired and very superior auctioneer. "Just vacated by a Wall Street broker and his wife; very well-connected people. Bed and couch; easy-chairs; running hot and cold water. And for it I'm making a special summer rate, with board, of only twenty-five dollars a week for two."
"We'll take it," said Matilda.
"Very well. Now the deposit—how much can you pay?"
"Ah—er—say fifteen dollars?"
Mrs. Gilbert's hands that tried to seem indifferent to money and that yet were remarkably prompt, took the bills Matilda held out and thrust them into the folds of her voluminous gown.
"Thank you. Breakfast Sunday mornings from eight to ten. Good-night." And with that her large pink-tinted ladyship made a rustling exit.
Mrs. De Peyster sank overcome into a chair, drewup her veil, and gazed about her. The other of Mrs. Gilbert's "easy"-chairs had a seat of faded and frayed cotton tapestry; there was a lumpy and unstable-looking couch; a yellow washstand with dandruffy varnish and cracked mirror; wall-paper with vast, uncataloguable flowers gangrenous in suggestion; on the ceiling a circle of over-plump dancing Cupids; and over against one wall a huge, broad, dark box that to Mrs. De Peyster's amazed vision suggested an upended coffin, contrived for the comfort of some deceased with remarkable width of shoulder.
"Matilda!" she shiveringingly ejaculated. "I didn't know there was anything like it in the world!"
"I know, ma'am, that it's not fit for you," grieved Matilda. "But—it's better than nothing."
"And that thing there!" pointing a shaking finger at the abnormal coffin. "What's that?"
"That's your bed, ma'am."
"My bed!"
"It lets down, ma'am. Like this."
Whereupon Matilda proceeded to let down thatsine qua nonof a profitable boarding-house, while Mrs. De Peyster, dismayed, looked for the first time in her life upon the miracle of the unfolding of a folding-bed. Her mistress's slumber prepared for Matilda then softened the inaccuracies of the couch's surface for her own more humble repose.
Neither felt like talking; there was too much to talk about. So soon both were in their beds, the lights out. Mrs. De Peyster lay dazed upon thisstrange bed that operated like a lorgnette: tremulously existing, awake, yet hardly capable of coherent thought.
For a space she heard Matilda toss about, draw long, tremulous breaths; then from the couch of that elderly virgin sounded the incontrovertible tocsin of deep sleep. But for Mrs. De Peyster there was no sleep; not yet.
She now was thinking; casting up accounts. Exactly twenty-four hours since, she had officially sailed. Jack and that Mary person were now in sweet and undisturbed possession of her house; Olivetta, on board the Plutonia, was this minute reposing at ease amid the luxuries of hercabin de luxe; and she, herself, Mrs. De Peyster, was lying on a folding-bed, a most knobby bed,—the man who invented cobblestone paving must have got his idea from such a bed as this,—in a boarding-house the like of which till this night she had never imagined to exist.
And only twenty-four hours!...
She stared up toward where, in the dark, the corpulent Cupids were dancing their aerial May-ring ... and stared ... and stared....
The next morning there was a long, whispered discussion as to whether Mrs. De Peyster should go down to breakfast or have all her meals sent up to this chamber of distempered green. In the end two considerations decided the matter. In the first place, meals sent to the room would undoubtedly be charged extra. In the second, it was possible that Mrs. De Peyster's remaining in her room might rouse suspicion. It seemed the cheaper and safer course to try to merge herself, an unnoticed figure, in the routine of the house.
The dining-room was low-ceilinged and occupied the front basement and seemed to be ventilated solely through the kitchen. Mrs. De Peyster hazily saw perhaps a dozen people; from among whom a bare arm, slipping from the sleeve of a pink silk wrapper, languidly waved toward a small table. Into the two chairs Mrs. Gilbert indicated the twain sank.
A colored maid who had omitted her collar dropped before Mrs. De Peyster a heavy saucer containing three shriveled black objects immured in a dark, forbidding liquor that suggested some wry tincture from a chemist's shop. In response to Mrs. De Peyster'sglance of shrinking inquiry Matilda whispered that they were prunes. Next the casual-handed maid favored them with thin, underdone oatmeal, and with thin, bitter coffee; and last with two stacks of pancakes, which in hardly less substantial incarnation had previously been served them by every whiff of kitchen air.
While she pretended to eat this uneatable usurper of her dainty breakfasts, Mrs. De Peyster glanced furtively at the company. Utterly common. And with such she had to associate—for months, perhaps!—she who had mixed and mingled only with the earth's best!
Mrs. Gilbert—naturally Mrs. Gilbert was a widow—did not give Mrs. De Peyster a second glance. The other boarders, after their first scrutiny, hardly looked at her again. The effect was as if all had turned their backs upon her.
Certainly this was odd behavior.
Then, in a flash, she understood. They were snubbing her as a social inferior!
Mrs. De Peyster was beginning to flame when the clergyman they had glimpsed the night before entered and pronounced a sonorous good-morning, all-inclusive, as though intended for a congregation. He seated himself at a small table just beyond Mrs. De Peyster's and was unfolding his napkin when his eyes fell upon Mrs. De Peyster. And then Mrs. De Peyster saw one of the oddest changes in a man's face imaginable. Mr. Pyecroft's eyes, which had beenlarge with benedictory roundness, flashed with a smile. And then, at an instant's end, his face was once more grave and clerically benign.
But that instant-long look made her shiver. What was in this clergyman's mind? She watched him, in spite of herself—strangely fascinated; stole looks at him during this meal, and the next, and when they passed upon the stairway. He had a confusingly contradictory face, had the Reverend Herbert E. Pyecroft—for such she learned was his full name; a face customarily sedate and elderish, and then, almost without perceptible change, for swift moments oddly youthful; with a wide mouth, which would suddenly twist up at its right corner as though from some unholy quip of humor, and whose as sudden straightening into a solemn line would show that the unseemly humor had been exorcised. In manner he was bland, ornate, gestureish, ample; giving the sense that in nothing less commodious than a church could he loose his person and his powers to their full expression. He was genially familiar; the church-man who is a good fellow. Yet never did he let one forget the respect that was due his cloth.
He was at present without a charge, as she learned later. It was understood that he was waiting an almost certain call from a church in Kansas City.
As Mrs. De Peyster came out of her room that first Sunday at supper-time, there emerged from the room in front of hers the Reverend Mr. Pyecroft. He held out his hand, and smiled parochially.
"Ah, Miss Thompson,"—that was the name she had given the landlady,—"since we are neighbors we should also be friends." And on he went, voluminously, in his full, upholstered voice.
Somehow Mrs. De Peyster got away from him. But thereafter he spoke to her whenever he could waylay her in the hallway or upon the stairs. And his attentions did not stop with words. Flowers, even edibles, were continuously found against her door, his card among them. The situation somehow recalled to her the queer gentleman in shorts who threw vegetables over Mrs. Nickleby's garden wall. Mrs. De Peyster felt outraged; she fumed; yet she dared not be outspokenly resentful.
She had at first no inkling of the meaning of these attentions. It was Matilda who suggested the dismaying possibility.
"Don't you think, ma'am, he's trying to make love to you?"
"Make love to me!" rising in horror from one of Mrs. Gilbert's veteran "easy"-chairs.
"I'm sure it's that, ma'am," said the troubled Matilda.
"Matilda! Of all the effrontery!"
"Indeed, it is an insult to you, ma'am. But that may not be the worst of it. For if he really falls in love with you, he may try to follow you when you get ready to leave."
"Matilda!" gasped Mrs. De Peyster.
Thereafter, whenever he tried to speak to her inthe hallways she shrank from him in both fear and indignation. But her rebuffs did not lessen by one ray the smiling amicability of his bland countenance He tried to become confidential, tried to press toward intimacy; one evening he even had the unbelievable audacity to ask if he might call upon her! She flamed with the desire to destroy him with a look, a word; Mrs. De Peyster knew well how thus to snuff out presuming upstarts. But caution warned her that she dared not unloose her powers. So she merely turned and fled, choking.
But the reverend gentleman's unperturbed overtures continued.
Mrs. De Peyster and Matilda did not speak of money at first; but it was constantly in both their minds as a problem of foremost importance. Their failure to buy fresh outfits, as they had told Mrs. Gilbert they intended doing, thus supplying "baggage" that would be security for their board, caused Mrs. Gilbert to regard them with hostile suspicion. Matilda saw eviction in their landlady's penciled eyes, and without a word as to her intention to Mrs. De Peyster, she slipped out on the third day, returned minus her two rings, and handed Mrs. Gilbert ten dollars.
They were secure to the week's end. After that—?
Fitfully Mrs. De Peyster pondered this matter of finances. She had money so near, yet utterly unreachable. Her house was filled with negotiable wealth, but she dared not go near it. Judge Harveywould secure her money gladly; but if the previous Friday she could not accept his aid, then a thousand times less could she accept it now. To ask his aid would be to reveal, not alone her presence in America, but the series of undignified experiences which had involved her deeper and deeper. That humiliation was unthinkable.
But on Thursday, locked in their room, they spoke of the matter openly.
"Please, ma'am," said Matilda, who had been maturing a plan, "you might make out a check to me, dated last week, before you sailed, and I could get it cashed. They'd think it was for back wages."
"I told you last Friday, when everything happened, that I had drawn out my balance."
"But your bank won't mind your overdrawing for a hundred or two," urged Matilda.
"That," said Mrs. De Peyster with an air of noble principle, "is a thing I will not do."
Matilda knew nothing of the secret of Mrs. De Peyster's exhausted credit at her bank.
"My own money," Matilda remarked plaintively, "is all in a savings bank. I have to give thirty days' notice before I can draw a penny."
There was a brief silence. Matilda's gaze, which had several times wandered to a point a few inches below Mrs. De Peyster's throat, now fixed themselves upon this spot. She spoke hesitantly.
"There's your pearl pendant you forgot and kept on when you put on my dress to go out riding withWilliam." It was not one of the world's famous jewels; yet was of sufficient importance to be known, in a limited circle, as "The De Peyster Pearl." "I know the chain wouldn't bring much; but you could raise a lot on the pearl from a pawnbroker."
Mrs. De Peyster tried to look shocked. "What! I take my pearl to a pawnbroker!"
"Of course, I wouldn't expect you to go to a pawnshop, ma'am," Matilda apologized. "I'd take it."
Mrs. De Peyster had a moment's picture of Matilda's laying the pearl before a pawnbroker and asking for a fraction of its worth, a mere thousand or two; and of the hard-eyed usurer glancing at it, announcing that the pearl was spoof, and offering fifty cents upon it.
"Matilda, you should know that I would not part with such an heirloom," she said rebukingly.
"But, ma'am, in a crisis like this—"
"That will do, Matilda!"
Matilda said no more about the pearl then. She went to her bank and gave due notice of her desire to withdraw her funds. That, however, was provision merely for the next month and thereafter. It did not help to-day.
But all the rest of that day, and all of the following, Mrs. De Peyster felt Matilda's eyes, aggrieved, bitterly resentful, upon the spot where beneath her black housekeeper's dress hung the pearl she was unwilling to pawn to save them.
It was most uncomfortable.
The next evening, Friday, as they left the dining-room, draped with the heavy odor of a dark, mysterious viand which Matilda in a whisper had informed Mrs. De Peyster to be pot-roast, Mrs. Gilbert stopped them on the stairs. In her most casual, superior tone, she notified Mrs. De Peyster that she would thank them for another week's pay in advance the following day, or their room.
Here was a crisis that had to be faced at once. Up in their room they discussed finance, going over and over their predicament, for two hours. There seemed no practical solution.
A heavy rain had begun to fall. The night was hot, close. The unaccustomed high collar of Matilda's dress had seemed suffocating to Mrs. De Peyster, and she had loosened it, and also she had taken off the pearl pendant which had chafed her beneath the warm, heavy cloth. The pearl and its delicate chain of platinum were now lying on their center-table.
Several times Matilda's eye had gone furtively toward the pendant. "I don't see why," she at length said doggedly, "you shouldn't let me pawn that pearl."
"I believe I have requested you not to refer to this again." Mrs. De Peyster's tone was stiff.
Matilda's face showed stubborn bitterness. But the habit of obedience was too old and strong for her to speak further.
There was another silence. Both sat in desperate thought. Suddenly Mrs. De Peyster looked up. "Matilda, I think I have it."
"What is it, ma'am?"—with faintly reviving hope.
"You have the keys to my house. You slip back there to-night, find my purse, or bring something that you might sell."
Matilda slumped down, aghast.
"It's perfectly simple," Mrs. De Peyster reassured her. "We should have thought of it at first."
"But, ma'am!" quaveringly protested Matilda. "Suppose a policeman should see me! They watch those closed houses. And suppose—suppose he should shoot!"
"Nonsense, Matilda! No one will see you if you are careful."
"But if—if—Mr. Jack should hear me and come down and see me—"
"We shall prepare for such an emergency some kind of plausible explanation that will satisfy Jack."
"But, ma'am, please! I don't think I could ever do it!"
"Matilda, it is the only way"—in the voice of authority. And then more emphatically, and in somedesperation: "Remember, we have got to do something! We have simply got to have money!"
Matilda was beginning to whimper yieldingly, when a knock sounded at their door. They clutched each other, but did not answer.
The knuckles rapped again.
They continued silent.
The knock sounded more loudly.
"It's the landlady, come to throw us out," quaked Matilda.
"Open the door," ordered Mrs. De Peyster, decorously rearranging the throat of her dress, "and tell her she shall have her money in the morning."
Matilda unlocked the door, partially opened it, then fell back with a little cry. There entered the Reverend Mr. Pyecroft. He smiled at them, put a finger to his lips. Then he locked the door behind him.
"Please leave this instant!" commanded Mrs. De Peyster.
"It is not in my nature," he returned in his bland voice, "to go and leave behind me fellow creatures in distress."
"Fellow creatures in distress?" repeated Mrs. De Peyster.
"I was passing," said he, "and chanced to overhear you say a moment since that you simply had to have money."
Mrs. De Peyster's face filled with suspicion. "You have been listening all the while?"
"Possibly," said Mr. Pyecroft, with the same bland smile.
"Eavesdropper!"
His smile did not alter. "I did not hear very much, really. Miss Thompson, may I beg the favor of a few minutes with you alone?"
"Most certainly not!"
"I am sure when you learn what it is, Miss Thompson, you would prefer that it be between yourself and myself."
"Matilda, don't go!"
He shrugged his shoulders pleasantly. "I had really hoped that the matter might be between just you and me, Miss Thompson. However, if you prefer Miss Perkins"—Matilda's name at Mrs. Gilbert's—"to be present, yours is the right to command. Shall we be seated?"
Matilda had already subsided upon her couch. Mrs. De Peyster sank into one of the chairs. The Reverend Mr. Pyecroft drew the other up to face her and sat down.
"Miss Thompson," he began, "I have a very serious proposition to lay before you."
Mrs. De Peyster shrank away. An awful premonition burst upon her. It was coming! This impudent, pompous, philandering clergyman was about to propose to her! Toher!She gave a swift horrified glance at Matilda, who gave back a look of sympathetic understanding.
Then Mrs. De Peyster's horror at the indignitychanged to horror of quite another sort; for the Reverend Mr. Pyecroft was leaning confidentially close to her, eyes into hers, and was saying in a low voice:—
"I suppose, Miss Thompson, you are not aware how much you look like a certain great lady, a famous social leader? To be explicit, like Mrs. De Peyster?"
She sank back, mere jelly with a human contour. So she was discovered! She rolled her eyes wildly toward Matilda; Matilda rolled wild eyes toward her.
"It is really a remarkable likeness," went on the low voice of the Reverend Mr. Pyecroft. "I've seen Mrs. De Peyster, you know; not more than six yards away; and the likeness struck me the very moment I saw you. You haven't the grand-duchess dignity she had on when I saw her—say, but you should have seen the figure she made!—but it's a wonderful coincidence. Dressed right, and with some lofty spirit pumped into you, you could pass anywhere as Mrs. De Peyster, provided they did not know Mrs. De Peyster too intimately. That likeness is the foundation of my proposition."
IT IS REALLY A REMARKABLE LIKENESS"IT IS REALLY A REMARKABLE LIKENESS"
Mrs. De Peyster stared at him, and began to clutch at consciousness. After all, was it possible that he hadn't recognized her as Mrs. De Peyster? Perhaps he hadn't—for every one knew Mrs. De Peyster was abroad, and, furthermore, all the social world yawned inimitably between Mrs. De Peyster andthis apparent nobody that she was, in an obscure boarding-house, and in a housekeeper's gown. But if he hadn't recognized her, then what was he driving at?
While she gazed she became aware of an amazing change in his face, of the possibility of which she had previously had only hints. The bland, elderish, clerical look faded; the face grew strangely young, the right corner of his mouth twisted upward, and his right eyelid drooped in a prodigious, unreverend wink.
"Friend," he remarked, "what's you two ladies' game?"
"Our game?" Mrs. De Peyster repeated blankly.
"Now don't try to come Miss Innocence over me," he said easily. "I sized you two up from the first minute, and I've been watching you ever since. The other one could get away with the housekeeper's part O.K., but any one could see through your makeup. What are the bulls after you for?"
"The—the what?"
"Oh, come,—you're dodging the police, or why the disguise?" he queried pleasantly. He picked up Mrs. De Peyster's pearl pendant. "Housekeepers don't sport this kind of jewelry. What are you? Housebreakers—sneak thieves—confidence game?"
Mrs. De Peyster gaped at him. "I—I don't understand."
"It's really a pretty fair front you're putting up," he commented with a dry indulgent smile. "Butmight as well drop it, for you see I'm on. But I think I understand." He nodded. "You don't want to admit anything until you feel you can trust me. That's about the size of it, isn't it, friends?"
Mrs. De Peyster stared, without speaking.
"Now I know I can trust you," he went on easily, "for I've got something on you and I give you away if you give me away. Well, sisters, of course you know you're not the only people the police are after. That's why I am temporarily in the ministry."
He grinned widely—a grin of huge enjoyment.
"Who are you?" demanded Mrs. De Peyster.
"Well, you don't hesitate to ask, do you?" He laughed, lightly. "Say, it's too good to keep! I always was too confiding a lad; but I've got you where you won't squeal, and I suppose we've got to know each other if we're going to do business together. You must know, my dear ladies, that every proposition I've handled I've gone into it as much for the fun as for the coin." He cocked his head; plainly there was an element of conceit in his character. "Well, fair ones—ready?"
Mrs. De Peyster nodded.
"Ever heard of the American Historical Society's collection of recently discovered letters of a gentleman named Thomas Jefferson?"
Mrs. De Peyster started.
"Yes."
"And perhaps you have heard that authorities now agree that said Thomas Jefferson was dead almosta hundred years when said letters were penned; and that he must have been favored with the assistance of an amanuensis of, so to say, the present generation?"
"Yes."
"That being the case you may have heard of one Thomas Preston, alleged to be said amanuensis?"
"Yes."
He put his hand across his clerical vest, and bowed first to Mrs. De Peyster, then to Matilda.
"It gives Mr. Preston very great pleasure to meet you, ladies. Only for the present he humbly petitions to be known as Mr. Pyecroft."
Mrs. De Peyster was quite unable to speak. So this was the man Judge Harvey was trying to hunt down! Her meeting him like this, it seemed an impossible coincidence—utterly impossible! She little dreamed that the laws of chance were not at all concerned in this adventure; that this meeting was but the natural outcome of Matilda's trifling act in picking up from the library rug a boarding-house card and slipping it into her slit-pocket.
The young man, for he now obviously was a young man, plainly delighted in the surprise he had created.
"I like to hand it to these pompous old stiffs," he went on gleefully—"these old boys who will come across with sky-high prices for old first editions and original manuscripts, and who don't care one little wheeze of a damn for what the author actually wrote. I'm sorry, though,"—in a tone of genuinecontrition,—"that Judge Harvey was the man finally to be stung; they say he's the real thing." Suddenly his mood changed; his eye dropped in its unreverend wink. "There's a Raphael that the Metropolitan is solemnly proud of. It cost Morgan a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It cost me an even five hundred to have it made."
He laughed again: that gay, whimsical, irresponsible laugh. Mrs. De Peyster was recovering somewhat from her first surprise.
Mr. Pyecroft leaned forward. "But this isn't getting down to our business. I've got a plan that's more fun than the Jefferson letters, and that will make us a lot of money, Miss Thompson. And it's easy and it's sure fire. It depends, as I said, upon the remarkable coincidence of your likeness to Mrs. De Peyster."
"Yes?" Mrs. De Peyster managed to say.
"You've read of her, of course; stiffest swell of the lot," went on the young gentleman rapidly, in clipped phrases oddly unlike the sonorous sentences of the Reverend Mr. Pyecroft. "Looks down on most of the Four Hundred ashoi polloi. She's in Europe now, and the papers say she won't be back until the very end of summer. We can't do a thing till then; have to lie low and wait. You need money, I heard you say; I suppose you're afraid to hock this twinkler"—touching the pearl pendant. "Police probably watching the pawnshops and would nab you. Well, I'll stake you till Mrs. De Peyster comes back."
"Stake me?" breathed Mrs. De Peyster.
"Yes. Give you, both of you, what money you need."
"And—and when—Mrs. De Peyster comes back?"
Young Mr. Pyecroft chortled with delight.
"Say, this scheme's the best ever! The day we learn Mrs. De Peyster has landed, we dress you up as a top-notcher—gad, but we can make you look the part!—we put you in a swell carriage, with her coat of arms painted on it—and you go around to Tiffany's and all the other swell shops where in the mean time I'll have learned Mrs. De Peyster has charge accounts. You select the most valuable articles in the shop, and then in the most casual, dignified manner,—I can coach you on how to put on the dignity,—you remark, 'Charge to my account, and I'll just take it along with me.' And off you go, with a diamond necklace under your arm. And same thing at all the shops. Then we duck before the thing breaks, and divide the fruits of our industry and superior intelligence, as the economists say. Isn't that one great little game!"
Mrs. De Peyster stared at his face, grinning like an elated gargoyle; herself utterly limp, her every nerve a filament of icy horror.
"Well, what do you say, girls?" prompted Mr. Pyecroft.
Mrs. De Peyster at first could say nothing at all. Whereupon the young man, gleeful over his invention, prompted her again.