CHAPTER XI
A few days later I was surprised to receive a note from Annette van Elstine. It ran:
Dear Frank,—I have just heard that you are in New York—that you have been here some time. Why did you never come to see me? It was not kind. And didn’t you know that your mother has been heartbroken over your disappearance? Jerry and Jack knew you were somewhere in this country, but they’ve kept your mother in the dark. What does it all mean? Come to tea with me—just me—on Friday afternoon at five, and tell me all about it.Your affectionateAnnette.
Dear Frank,—I have just heard that you are in New York—that you have been here some time. Why did you never come to see me? It was not kind. And didn’t you know that your mother has been heartbroken over your disappearance? Jerry and Jack knew you were somewhere in this country, but they’ve kept your mother in the dark. What does it all mean? Come to tea with me—just me—on Friday afternoon at five, and tell me all about it.
Your affectionate
Annette.
As this was the first bit of connection with my own family since Jerry had practically kicked me down his steps, I was deeply perturbed by it. I am not without natural affection, and yet I seemed to have died to the old life as completely as Lovey to that with his daughters. I had never forgotten Jerry’s words: “And now get out. Don’t let any of us ever see your face or hear your name again.”
The very fact that he was justified had roused the foolish remnant of my pride.
I had loved my mother; I had reverenced my father; though my brothers were indifferent to me, I had felt a genuine tenderness for my sisters. But since that night on Jerry’s steps it had been to me as if I had put myselfon one side of a flood and left them on the other, and that there was no magic skiff that would carry me back whence I came. I cannot say that I grieved for them; and it was the last of my thoughts that they would grieve for me. I accepted the condition that we were dead to each other, and tried to bury memory.
And now came this first stirring of resurrection. It hurt me. I didn’t want it. It was like the return of life to a frozen limb. Numbness was preferable to anguish.
“Lovey,” I said, as the old man hung about me when I was undressing that night, “how would you feel if one of your daughters—”
He raised himself from the task of pulling off my boots, which to humor him I allowed him to perform, and looked at me in terror.
“They ain’t—they ain’t after me?”
“No, no! But suppose they were—wouldn’t you like to see them?”
He dropped the boot he held in his hand.
“Y’ain’t goin’ to ’ave them ’unted up for me, Slim?”
“I don’t know anything about them, Lovey. That isn’t my point at all. But suppose—just suppose—you could see them again; would you do it?”
He shook his bald head.
“They’re dead to me. I’m dead to them. If we was to see each other now ’twouldn’t be nothink but diggin’ up a corpse.”
“Nothink but diggin’ up a corpse,” I repeated to myself as I turned east from Fifth Avenue, leaving the brown trees of the Park behind me, and took the few steps necessary to reach my uncle Van Elstine’s door. He had married my mother’s sister, and during the lifetime of my aunt the families had been fairly intimate. Of lateyears they had drifted apart, as families will, though touch-and-go relations were still maintained.
I have to admit that while waiting for Annette in the library up-stairs I was nervous. I was coming back to that family life in which I should have interests, affections, cares, responsibilities. For the past three years I had had no one to think of but myself; and if in that freedom there were heartaches, there were no complexities.
Though it was not yet dark, the curtains were drawn and the room was lighted not only by a shaded lamp, but by the flicker of a fire. When Annette, wearing a tea-gown, appeared at last in the doorway she stood for a second to examine me.
“Why, Jack!” she exclaimed, then. “I didn’t know you were in New York. Have you brought Frank with you?”
“I am Frank,” I laughed, going forward to offer my hand. “I didn’t know Jack and I were so much alike. But you’re the second person who has said it within a few days.”
“It’s your mustache, I think,” she explained as we shook hands. “I never saw you wear one before.”
“I never did.”
“Do sit down. They’ll bring tea in a minute. I’m so glad to see you. But if it’s not a rude question, tell me why you’ve been here all this time and never let me know.”
It would be difficult to define the conditions which made Annette at the age of thirty-three what Cantyre styled one of the smartest women in New York, but the minute you saw her you felt that it was so. My uncle Van Elstine was only comfortably off; their house was not large; though they entertained a good deal, theirmanner of living was not showy. But my aunt Van Elstine had established the tradition—some women have the art of doing it—that whatever she had and did and said was “the thing,” and Annette, as her only child and heiress, had kept it up.
As far as I could understand the matter, which had been explained to me once or twice, my aunt was exclusive. In the rush of the newly come and the rise of the newly rich, which marked the last quarter of the nineteenth century in New York, she and a few like-minded friends had made it their business to pick and choose and form what might literally be called anélite. By 1913, however, theélitewas not only formed but founded on a rock as firm as the granite of Manhattan, and Annette’s picking and choosing could be on another principle. Hers was that more civilized American tendency to know every one worth knowing, which is still largely confined, so they tell me, to Washington and New York. Where her mother had withdrawn Annette went forward. Herflairfor the important or the soon to be important was unerring. Hers was one of the few drawing-rooms through which every one interesting, both domestic and foreign, was bound at some time to pass. Being frankly and unrestrainedly curious, she kept in touch with the small as well as with the great, with the young as well as with the old, maintaining an enormous correspondence, and getting out of her correspondents every ounce of entertainment they could yield her. On her side she repaid them by often lending them a helping hand.
The warmth of her greeting now was due not to the fact that I was her cousin, but to her belief that I had been up to something. It was always those who hadbeen up to something with whom she was most eager to come heart to heart. Without temptations of her own, as far as I could ever see, she got from the indiscretions of others the same sort of pleasure that a scientist finds in studying the wrigglings of microbes under a microscope.
Having some inkling of this, I answered her questions not untruthfully, but with reservations, saying that I had not come to see her because I had been down on my luck.
“And how did you come to be down on your luck?”
“Can’t you guess?”
“You don’t look it now.”
“I’ve been doing better lately. I’ve made two or three friends who’ve given me a hand.” Carrying the attack in her direction, I asked, “How did you hear that I was in New York?”
“Hilda Grace told me. She said you’d been working on that memorial of hers. She thought it awfully strange—you won’t think me rude in repeating it?—that a man like you should be only in a secondary position.”
“If she knew how glad I was to get that—”
She changed the subject abruptly.
“When did you last hear from home?”
I thought it sufficient to say: “Not for a long time. I may as well admit that nowadays I never hear from home at all.”
“And, if it’s not a rude question, why don’t you?”
“Partly, I suppose, because I don’t write.”
“So I understood from Jack. But, Frank dear, do you think it kind?”
I broke in with the question, the answer to which I had really come to get, “When did you last see Jack?”
“About eighteen months ago; just before he wasmarried. He knew you were somewhere about, but he wasn’t confidential on the subject.”
“No; he wouldn’t be. Did he seem all right?”
“Quite; and awfully in love with Mary Sweet. What’s she like, really?”
I described my new sister-in-law as I remembered her, going on to say: “I suppose you gave Jack a good time. Did you—did you take him about anywhere?”
“Let me see. I took him to—where was it? I took him to the Wynfords’—and—and—oh, yes!—to the Barrys’. And it’s too funny! I really think Regina fell in love with him at first sight. For a month or two she questioned me about him every time we met. Then all of a sudden she stopped. If she was struck by the thunderbolt, as the French put it—well, all I can say is that it serves her right.”
“Serves her right—what for?”
“Oh, the way she’s carried on. It’s disgraceful. Do you know her? Her father is an architect, like you.”
Annette’s round, dusky face, which had no beauty but a quick, dimpling play of expression, was one that easily betrayed her ruling passion of curiosity. It was now so alight with anticipation that I tried to be more than ever casual.
“I’ve—I’ve just met her.”
“Where?”
“Once at the memorial, when she came with Mrs. Grace; and a few nights ago I dined with her at the Coningsbys’.”
“I wonder she didn’t take you for Jack.”
To this I was not obliged to make a response for the reason that, the man having arrived with the tea, Annette had to give her attention to the placing of the tray.
When I had taken a cup of tea from her hand I created a diversion with the question, “What did you mean by saying the way she carried on was disgraceful?”
“Why, the way she gets engaged and disengaged. It’s been three times in as many years, and goodness knows how many more experiments—”
“I suppose she’s trying to find the right man.”
“It’s pretty hard on those she takes up and puts down in the process. She’ll get left in the end, you’ll see if she doesn’t.”
“Isn’t it better to get left than to marry the wrong man?”
“The very day I took Jack to see her she’d broken off her engagement to Jim Hunter. I didn’t know it at the time. It was two or three days later before it came out. If I had known it and told Jack—”
“Well, what then?”
“Oh, I don’t say anything. They were awfully taken with each other. But I’m glad he was saved. If he hadn’t gone straight back to Montreal he might now be in the place of poor Stephen Cantyre.”
“I see a good deal of Cantyre.”
“So I understand.”
“Who told you?”
“Elsie Coningsby.”
“You seem to have got a good deal of information about me all of a sudden.”
“Because you’ve dropped right into the little circle in which we all know one another with a kind of village-like intimacy. New York is really a congeries of villages.”
“But any one could see that Cantyre would never make a husband for a high-spirited girl like Miss Barry.”
“How do you know she’s high-spirited, if it’s not a rude question?”
“Oh, one can tell.”
“You’ve seen her only twice. You must have noticed her very particularly.”
“I’ve noticed Cantyre very particularly; and just as he wouldn’t make her the right kind of husband she wouldn’t make him the right kind of wife.”
When Annette said anything in which there was a special motive a series of concentric shadows fled over her face like ripples from the spot where a stone is thrown into a pool.
“Well, I’m glad you don’t like her, if it isn’t a rude thing to say.”
“What has my liking her or not liking her got to do with it?”
“Nothing but the question of your own safety. If she notices how much you’re like Jack—”
“If she was going to notice that,” I said, boldly, “she would have done it already.”
“And so much the worse for you if she has—unless you’re put on your guard.”
“If you mean put on my guard against the danger of being Cantyre’s successor in a similar experience—”
“That was my idea.”
“Well, I can give you all the reassurance you need, Annette. In the first place, I’ve got no money—”
The relevance of her interruption did not come to me till nearly a year later.
“Frank dear, I must ask you, while I think of it, didn’t you know that your mother was very, very ill?”
All the blood in my body seemed to rush back to my heart and to stay there. We talked no more of ReginaBarry, nor of anything but stark fundamental realities. In an instant they became as much the essentials of my life as if Regina Barry had never existed. Annette showed herself much better informed as to my career than she pretended to be, giving me to understand that the day on which I disappeared my mother had received a kind of death-blow. She was of the type to leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness to go after that which was lost; and in her inability to do so she had been seized, so Annette told me, with a mortal pining away. With her decline my father was declining also, and all because of me.
“I’ve been the most awful rotter, Annette,” I groaned, as I staggered to my feet. “You know that, don’t you?”
“Yes, Frank, I do know it. That’s why I’ve been so glad to get hold of you at last, and ask you to—to redeem yourself.”
“Redeem myself by going back?”
She looked up at me and nodded.
“Oh, but how can I?”