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“Oh, possibly. He’d go as far as that, if he saw her doing anything he thought not respectable.”
“Barbara, please! You’re talking about a friend of mine, one of my colleagues. Let’s return to—I hope you won’t find the French phrase invidious—to our mutton.”
“Oh, very well! Rash found the girl homeless—penniless—with no friends. Her stepfather had turned her out. Another man would have left her there, or turned her over to the police. Rash took her to his own house, and since then we’ve both been helping her to—to get on her feet.”
“Helping her to get on her feet in a way that’s driven from the house the good old women who’ve been there for nearly thirty years.”
“Oh, you know that too, do you?”
“Why, certainly. Jane, that was the parlor maid, is very intimate with Augusta Chancellor’s cook; and she says—Jane does—that he’s actually married the creature.”
Barbara shrugged her shoulders. “I can’t help what the servants say, Aunt Marion. I’m trying to be a friend to the girl, and help her to pull herself together. Of course I recognize the fact that Rash has been foolish—quixotic—or whatever you like to call it; but he hasn’t kept anything from me.”
“And you’re still engaged to him?”
“Of course I’m still engaged to him.” She held out her left hand. “Look at his ring.”
“Then why don’t you get married?”
“Are you in such a hurry to get rid of me?”
The question being a pleasantry Miss Walbrook237took it with a gentle smile. When she resumed it was with a slight flourish of the document in her hand and another turn to the conversation.
“I went to the bank this morning. I’ve brought home my will. I’m thinking of making some changes in it.”
Barbara looked non-committal, as if the subject had nothing to do with herself.
“The question I have to decide,” Miss Walbrook pursued, “is whether to leave everything to you, in the hope that you’ll carry on my work––”
“I shouldn’t know how.”
“Or whether to establish a trust––”
“I should do that decidedly.”
“And let it fall into the hands of a pack of men.”
“It will fall into the hands of a pack of men, whatever you do with it.”
“And yet if you had it in charge––”
“Some man would get hold of it, Aunt Marion.”
“Which is what I’m debating. I’m not so very sure––”
“That I shall marry in the end?”
“Well, you’re not married yet ... and if you were to change your mind ... the world has such a need of consecrated women with men so unscrupulous and irresponsible ... we must break their power some day ... and now that we’ve got the opportunity ... all I want you to understand is that if you shouldn’t marry there’d be a great career in store for you....”
238Chapter XIX
By the end of twenty-four hours the possibility of this great career quickened Barbara’s zeal for taking a hand in Letty’s education. Not only did that impulse of furious jealousy, by which she meant at first to leave it wholly to Rash, begin to seem dangerous, but there was a world to consider and throw off the scent. Now that Augusta Chancellor knew that the girl was beneath Rash’s roof all their acquaintances would sooner or later be in possession of the fact. It was Barbara’s part, therefore, to play the game in such a way that a bit of quixotism would be the most foolish thing of which Rash would be suspected.
That she would be playing a game she knew in advance. She must hide her suspicions; she must control her sufferings. She must pretend to have confidence in Rash, when at heart she cried against him as an infant and a fool. Never was woman in such a ridiculous situation as that into which she had been thrust; never was heart so wild to ease itself by invective and denunciation; and never was the padlock fixed so firmly on the lips. Hour by hour the man she loved was being weaned and won away from her; and she must stand by with grimacing smiles, instead of throwing up her arms in dramatic gestures and calling on her gods to smite and smash and annihilate.
Since, however, she had a game to play, a game she would play, though she did it quivering with protest and repulsion.
239
“Do you mind if I take the car this afternoon, Aunt Marion, since you’re not going to use it.”
“Take it of course; but where are you going?”
“I thought I would ask that protégée of Rash Allerton’s, of whom we were speaking yesterday, to come for a drive with me. But if you’d rather I didn’t––”
“I’ve nothing to do with it. It’s entirely for you to say. The car is yours, of course.”
The invitation being transmitted by telephone Steptoe urged Letty to accept it. “It’ll be all in the wye of madam’s gettin’ used to things—a bit at a time like.”
“But I don’t think she likes me.”
“If madam won’t stop to think whether people likes ’er or not I think madam ’d get for’arder. Besides madam’ll pretty generally always find as love-call wykes love-echo, as the syin’ goes.”
Which, as a matter of fact, was what Letty did find. She found it from the minute of entering the car and taking her seat, when Miss Walbrook exclaimed heartily: “What a lovely dress! And the hat’s too sweet! Suits you exactly, doesn’t it? My dear, I’ve the greatest bother ever to find a hat that doesn’t make me look like a scarecrow.”
From the naturalness of the tone there was no suspecting the cost of these words to the speaker, and the subject was one in which Letty was at home. In turn she could compliment Miss Walbrook’s appearance, duly admiring the toque of prune-colored velvet, with a little bunch of roses artfully disposed, and the coat of prune-colored Harris tweed. In further discussing240the length of the new skirts and the chances of the tight corset coming back they found topics of common interest. The fact that they were the topics which came readiest to the lips of both made it possible to maintain the conversation at its normal give-and-take, while each could pursue the line of her own summing up of the other.
To Letty Miss Walbrook seemed friendlier than she had expected, only spasmodically so. Her kindly moods came in spurts of which the inspiration soon gave out. “I think she’s sad,” was Letty’s comment to herself. Sadness, in Letty’s use of words, covered all the emotions not distinctly cheerful or hilarious.
She knew nothing about Miss Walbrook, except that it appeared from this conversation that she lived with an aunt, whose car they were using. That she was a friend of the prince’s had been several times repeated, but all information ended there. To Letty she seemed old—between thirty and forty. Had she known her actual age she would still have seemed old from her knowledge of the world and general sophistication. Letty’s own lack of sophistication kept her a child when she was nearly twenty-three. That Miss Walbrook was the girl to whom the prince was engaged had not yet crossed her thought.
At the same time, since she knew that girl she brought her to the forefront of Letty’s consciousness. She was never far from the forefront of her consciousness, and of late speculation concerning her had become more active. If she approached the subject with the prince he reddened and grew ill at ease. The present seemed, therefore, an opportunity to be utilized.
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They were deep in the northerly avenues of the Park, when apropos of the dress topic, Letty said, suddenly: “I suppose she’s awfully stylish—the girl he’s engaged to.”
The response was laconic: “She’s said to be.”
“Is she pretty?”
“I don’t think you could say that.”
“Then what does he see in her?”
“Whatever people do see in those they’re in love with. I’m afraid I’m not able to define it.”
Dropping back into her corner Letty sighed. She knew this mystery existed, the mystery of falling in love for reasons no one was able to explain. It was the ground on which she hoped that at first sight someone would fall in love with her. If he didn’t do it for reasons beyond explanation he would, of course, not do it at all.
It was some minutes before another question trembled to her lips. “Does she—does she know about me?”
“Oh, naturally.”
“And did she—did she feel very bad?”
Barbara’s long eyes slid round in Letty’s direction, though the head was not turned. “How should you feel yourself, if it had happened to you?”
“It’d kill me.”
“Well, then?” She let Letty draw her own conclusions before adding: “It’s nearly killed her.”
Letty cowered. She had never thought of this. That she herself suffered she knew; that the prince suffered she also knew; but that this unknown girl, whatever her folly, lay smitten to the heart brought a242new complication into her ideas. “Even if he ever did come to—” she held up her unspoken sentence there—“I’d ha’ stolen him from her.”
There was little more conversation after that. Each had her motives for reflections and silences. They were nearing the end of the drive when Letty said again:
“What would you do if you was—if you were—me?”
“I’d do whatever I felt to be highest.”
To Letty this was a beautiful reply, and proof of a beautiful nature. Moreover, it was indirectly a compliment to herself, in that she could be credited with doing what she felt to be highest as well as anyone else. In her life hitherto she had been figuratively kicked and beaten into doing what she couldn’t resist. Now she was considered capable of acting worthily of her own accord. It inspired a new sentiment toward Miss Walbrook.
She thought, too, that Miss Walbrook liked her a little better. Perhaps it was the fulfillment of Steptoe’s adage, love-call wakes love-echo. She was sure that somehow this call had gone out from her to Miss Walbrook, and that it hadn’t gone out in vain.
It hadn’t gone out in vain, in that Miss Walbrook was able to say to herself, with some conviction, “That’s the way it will have to be done.” It was a way of which her experiences in Bleary Street had made her skeptical. Among those whom she called the lower orders innocence, ingenuousness, and integrity were qualities for which she had ceased to look. She didn’t look for them anywhere with much confidence;243but she had long ago come to the conclusion that the poor were schemers, and were obliged to be schemers because they were poor. Something in Letty impressed her otherwise. “That’s the way,” she continued to nod to herself. “It’s no use trusting to Rash. I’ll get her; and she’ll get him; and so we shall work it.”
Arrived in East Sixty-seventh Street she went in with Letty and had tea. But it was she who sat in dear Mrs. Allerton’s corner of the sofa, and when William brought in the tray she said, “Put it here, William,” as one who speaks with authority. Of this usurpation of the right to dispense hospitality Letty did not see the significance, being glad to have it taken off her hands.
Not so, however, with Steptoe who came in with a covered dish of muffins. Having placed it before Miss Walbrook he turned to Letty.
“Madam ain’t feelin’ well?”
Letty’s tone expressed her surprise. “Why, yes.”
“Madam’ll excuse me. As madam ain’t presidin’ at ’er own tyble I was afryde––”
It being unnecessary to say more he tiptoed out, leaving behind him a declaration of war, which Miss Walbrook, without saying anything in words, was not slow to pick up. “Insufferable,” was her comment to herself. Of the hostile forces against her this, she knew, was the most powerful.
Neither did Rash perceive the significance of Barbara’s place at the tea-table when he entered about five o’clock, though she was quick to perceive the significance of his arrival. It was not, however, a244point to note outwardly, so that she lifted her hand above the tea-kettle, letting him bend over it, as she exclaimed:
“Welcome to our city! Do sit down and make yourself at home. Letty and I have been for a drive, and are all ready to enjoy a little male society.”
The easy tone helped Allerton over his embarrassment, first in finding the two women face to face, then in coming so unexpectedly face to face with them, and lastly in being caught by Barbara coming home at this unexpected hour. Knowing what the situation must mean to her he admired her the more for her sangfroid and social flexibility.
She took all the difficulties on herself. “Letty and I have been making friends, and are going to know each other awfully well, aren’t we?” A smile at Letty drew forth Letty’s smile, to Rashleigh’s satisfaction, and somewhat to his bewilderment. But Barbara, handing him a cup of tea, addressed him directly. “Who do you think is engaged? Guess.”
He guessed, and guessed wrong. He guessed a second time, and guessed wrong. There followed a conversation about people they knew, with regard to which Letty was altogether an outsider. Now and then she recognized great names which she had read in the papers, tossed back and forth without prefixes of Mr. or Miss, and often with pet diminutives. The whole represented a closed corporation of intimacies into which she could no more force her way than a worm into a billiard ball. Rash who was at first beguiled by the interchange of personalities began to experience a sense of discomfort that Letty should245be so discourteously left out; but Barbara knew that it was best for both to force the lesson home. Rash must be given to understand how lost he would be with any outsider as his companion; and Letty must be made to realize how hopelessly an outsider she would always be.
But no lesson should be urged to the quick at a single sitting, so that Barbara broke off suddenly to ask why he had come home. In the same way as she had given the order to William she spoke with the authority of one at liberty to ask the question. Not to give the real reason he said that it was to write a letter and change his clothes.
“And you’re going back to the Club?”
He replied that he was going to dine with a bachelor friend at his apartment.
“Then I’ll wait and drop you at the Club. You can go on from there afterwards. I’ve got the time.”
This too was said with an authority against which he felt himself unable to appeal.
Having written a note and changed to his dinner jacket he rejoined them in the drawing-room. Barbara held out her hand to Letty, with a briskness indicating relief.
“So glad we had our drive. I shall come soon again. I wish it could be to-morrow, but my aunt will be using the car.”
“There’s my car,” Allerton suggested.
“Oh, so there is.” Barbara took this proposal as a matter of course. “Then we’ll say to-morrow. I’ll call up Eugene and tell him when to come for me.”
With Allerton beside her, and driving down Fifth246Avenue, she said: “I see how to do it, Rash. You must leave it to me.”
He replied in the tone of a child threatened with the loss of his rôle in a game. “I can’t leave it to you altogether.”
“Then leave it to me as much as you can. I see what to do and you don’t. Furthermore, I know just how to do it.”
“You’re wonderful, Barbe,” he said, humbly.
“I’m wonderful so long as you don’t interfere with me.”
“Oh, well, I shan’t do that.”
She turned to him sharply. “Is that a promise?”
“Why do you want a promise?” he asked, in some wonder.
“Because I do.”
“That is, you can’t trust me.”
“My dear Rash, whocouldtrust you after what––?”
“Oh, well, then, I promise.”
“Then that’s understood. And if anything happens, you won’t go hedging and saying you didn’t mean it in that way?”
“It seems to me you’re very suspicious.”
“One’s obliged to foresee everything with you, Rash. It isn’t as if one was dealing with an ordinary man.”
“You mean that I’m to give you carte blanche, and have no will of my own at all.”
“I mean that when I’m so reasonable, you must try to be reasonable on your side.”
“Well, I will.”
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As they drew up in front of the New Netherlands Club, he escaped without committing himself further.
If he dined with a bachelor friend that night he must have cut the evening short, for at half past nine he re-entered the back drawing-room where Letty was sitting before the fire, her red book in her lap. She sat as a lover stands at a tryst as to which there is no positive engagement. To fortify herself against disappointment she had been trying to persuade herself that he wouldn’t come, and that she didn’t expect him.
He came, but he came as a man who has something on his mind. Almost without greeting he sat down, took the book from her lap and proceeded to look up the place at which he had left off.
“Miss Walbrook’s lovely, isn’t she?” she said, before he had found the page.
“She’s a very fine woman,” he assented. “Do you remember where we stopped?”
“It was at, ‘So let it be, said the little mermaid, turning pale as death.’ You know her very well, don’t you?”
“Oh, very well indeed. I think we begin here: ‘But you will have to pay me also––’”
“Have you known her very long?”
“All my life, more or less.”
“She says she knows the girl you’re engaged to.”
“Yes, of course. We all know each other in our little set. Now, if you’re ready, I’ll begin to read.”
“‘But you will have to pay me also,’ said the witch; ‘and it is not a little that I ask. Yours is the loveliest voice in the world, and you trust to that, I dare say,248to charm your love. But you must give it to me. For my costly drink I claim the best thing you possess. I shall give you my own blood, so that my draught may be as sharp as a two-edged sword.’ ‘But if you take my voice from me, what have I left?’ asked the little mermaid, piteously. ‘Your loveliness, your graceful movements, your speaking eyes. Those are enough to win a man’s heart. Well, is your courage gone? Stretch out your little tongue, that I may cut it off, and you shall have my magic potion.’ ‘I consent,’ said the little mermaid.”
Letty cried out: “So that when she’d be with him she’d understand everything, and not be able to tell him anything.”
“I’m afraid,” he smiled, “that that’s what’s ahead of her, poor thing.”
“Oh, but that—” she could hardly utter her distress—“Oh, but that’s worse than anything in the world.”
He looked up at her curiously. “Would you rather I didn’t go on?”
“No, no; please. I—I want to hear it all.”
At The Hindoo Lantern Mr. Gorry Larrabin and Mr. Judson Flack found themselves elbow to elbow outside the rooms where their respective ladies were putting the final touches to their hats and hair before entering the grand circle. It was an opportunity especially on Gorry’s part, to seal the peace which had been signed so recently.
“Hello, Judson. What’s the prospects in oil?” Judson’s tone was pessimistic. “Not a thing doin’,249Gorry. Awful slow bunch, that lump of nuts I’m in with on this. Mentioned your name to one or two of ’em; but no enterprise. Boneheads that wouldn’t know a white man from a crane.” That he understood what Gorry understood became clear as he continued: “Friend o’ mine at the Excelsior passes me the tip that they’ve held up that play they were goin’ to put my girl into. Can’t get anyone else that would swing the part. Waitin’ for her to turn up again. I suppose you haven’t heard anything, Gorry?”
Gorry looked him in the eyes as straight as was possible for a man with a cast in the left one. “Not a thing, Judson; not a thing.”
The accent was so truthful that Judson gave his friend a long comprehending look. He was sure that Gorry would never speak with such sincerity if he was sincere.
“Well, I’m on the job, Gorry,” he assured him, “and one of these days you’ll hear from me.”
“I’m on the job too, Judson; and one of these days––”
But as Mademoiselle Coucoul emerged from the dressing-room and shed radiance, Gorry was obliged to go forward.
250Chapter XX
It was May.
In spite of her conviction that she knew what to do and how it to do it, Barbara perceived that at the end of seven months they were much where they had been in the previous October. If there was a change it was that all three, Rashleigh, Letty, and herself, had grown strained and intense.
Outwardly they strove to maintain a semblance of friendship. For that Barbara had worked hard, and in a measure had succeeded. She had held Rash; she had won Letty.
She had more than won Letty; she had trained her. All that in seven months a woman of the world could do for an unformed and ignorant child she had done. Her experience at Bleary Street had helped her in this; and Letty had been quick. She had seized not only those small points of speech and action foundational to rising in the world, but the point of view of those who had risen. She knew how, Barbara was sure, that there were certain things impossible to people such as those among whom she had been thrown.
Since it was May it was the end of a season, and the minute Barbara had long ago chosen for a masterstroke. Each of the others felt the crisis as near as she did herself.
“It’s got to end,” Letty confessed to her, as amid251the soft loveliness of springtime, they were again driving in the Park.
Barbara chose her words. “I suppose he feels that too.”
“Then why don’t he let me end it?”
“I fancy that that’s a difficult position for a man. If you ask his permission beforehand he feels obliged to say––”
“And perhaps,” Letty suggested, “he’s too tender-hearted.”
“That’s part of it. Heistender-hearted. Besides that, his position is grotesque—a man with whom two women are in love. To one of them he’s been nominally married, while to the other he’s bound by every tie of honor. No wonder he doesn’t see his way. If he moves toward the one he hurts the other—a man to whom it’s agony to hurt a fly.”
“Does the other girl still feel the way she did?”
“She’s killing herself. She’s breaking her heart. Nobody knows it but him and her—and even he doesn’t take it in. But she is.”
“I suppose she thinks I’m something awful.”
“Does it matter to you what she thinks?”
“I don’t want her to hate me.”
“Oh, I shouldn’t say she did that. She feels that, considering everything, you might have acted with more decision.”
“But he won’t let me.”
“And he never will, if you wait for that.”
“Then what do you think I ought to do?”
“That’s where I find you weak, Letty, since you ask me the question. No one can tell you what to252do—and he least of all. It’s a situation in which one of you must withdraw—either you or the other girl. But, don’t you see? he can’t say so to either.”
“And if one of us must withdraw you think it should be me.”
“I have to leave that to you. You’re the one who butted in. I know it wasn’t your fault—that the fault was his entirely; but we recognize the fact that he’s—how shall I put it?—not quite responsible. We women have to take the burden of the thing on ourselves, if it’s ever to be put right.”
In her corner of the car Letty thought this over. The impression on her mind was the deeper since, for several months past, she had watched the prince growing more and more unhappy. He was less nervous than he used to be, less excitable; and for that he had told her the credit was due to herself. “You soothe me,” he had once said to her, in words she would always treasure; and yet as his irritability decreased his unhappiness seemed to grow. She could only infer that he was mourning over the girl to whom he was engaged, and on whom he had inflicted a great wrong. For the last few weeks Letty’s mind had occupied itself with her almost more than with the prince himself.
“Do you think I shall ever see her?” she asked, suddenly now.
Barbara reflected. “I think you could if you wanted to.”
“Should you arrange it?”
“I could.”
“You’re sure she’d be willing to see me?”
253
“Yes; I know she would.”
“When could you do it?”
“Whenever you like.”
“Soon?”
“Yes; sooner perhaps than—” Barbara spoke absently, as if a new idea was taking possession of her mind—“sooner perhaps than you think.”
“And you say she’s breaking her heart?”
“A little more, and it will be broken.”
By the time Letty had been set down at the door in East Sixty-seventh Street the afternoon had grown chilly. In the back drawing-room Steptoe was on his knees lighting the fire. Letty came and stood behind him. Without preliminary of any kind she said, quietly:
“Steptoe, it’s got to end.”
Expecting a protest she was surprised that he should merely blow on the shivering flame, saying, in the interval between two long breaths: “I agrees with madam.”
“And it’s me that must end it.”
He blew gently again. “I guess that’d be so too.”
She thought of the little mermaid leaping into the sea, and trembling away into foam. “If he wants to marry the girl he’s in love with he’ll never do it the way we’re living now.”
He rose from his knees, dusting one hand against the other. “Madam’s quite right. ’E won’t—not never.”
She threw out her arms, and moaned. “And, O Steptoe! I’m so tired of it.”
“Madam’s tired of––?”
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“Of living here, and doing nothing, and just watching and waiting, and nothing never happening––”
“Does madam remember that, the dye when she first come I said there was two reasons why I wanted to myke ’er into a lydy?”
Letty nodded.
“The one I told ’er was that I wanted to ’elp someone who was like what I used to be myself.”
“I remember.”
“And the other, what I didn’t tell madam, I’ll tell ’er now. It was—it was I was ’opin’ that a woman’d come into my poor boy’s life as’d comfort ’im like––”
“And she didn’t come.”
“’E ain’t seen that she’s come. I said it’d be a tough job to bring ’im to fallin’ in love with ’er like; but it’s been tougher than what I thought it’d be.”
“So that I must—must do something.”
“Looks as if madam’d ’ave to.”
“I suppose you know that there’s an easy way for me to do it?”
“Nothink ain’t so very easy; but if madam ’as a big enough reason––”
She felt the necessity of being plain. “I suppose that if he hadn’t picked me up in the Park that day I’d have gone to the bad anyhow.”
“If madam’s thinkin’ about goin’ to the bad––”
She threw up her head defiantly. “Well, I am. What of it?”
“I was just thinkin’ as I might ’elp ’er a bit about that.”
She was puzzled. “I don’t think you know what I said. I said I was––”
255
“Goin’ to the bad, madam. That’s what I understood. But madam won’t find it so easy, not ’avin ’ad no experience like, as you might sye.”
“I didn’t know you needed experience—for that.”
“All good people thinks that wye, madam; but when you tackle it deliberate like, there’s quite a trick to it.”
“And do you know the trick?” was all she could think of saying.
“I may not know the very hidentical trick madam’d be in want of—’er bein’ a lydy, as you might sye—but I could put ’er in the wye of findin’ out.”
“You don’t think I could find out for myself?”
“You see, it’s like this. I used to know a young man what everythink went ag’in’ ’im. And one dye ’e started out for to be a forgerer like—so as ’e’d be put in jyle—and be took care of—board and lodgin’ free—and all that. Well, out ’e starts, and not knowin’ the little ins and outs, as you might sye, everythink went agin ’im, just as it done before. And, would madam believe it? that young man ’e hended by studying for the ministry. Madam wouldn’t want to myke a mistyke like that, now would she?”
Letty turned this over in her mind. A career parallel to that of this young man would effect none of the results she was aiming at.
“Then what would you suggest?” she asked, at last.
“I could give madam the address of a lydy—an awful wicked lydy, she is—what’d put madam up to all the ropes. If madam was to go out into the cold world, like, this lydy’d give ’er a home. Besides the256address I’d give madam a sign like—so as the lydy’d know it was somethink special.”
“A sign? I don’t know what you mean.”
“It’d be this, madam.” He drew from his pocket a small silver thimble. “This’d be a password to the lydy. The minute she’d see it she’d know that the time ’ad come.”
“What time?”
“That’s somethink madam’d find out. I couldn’t explyne it before’and.”
“It sounds very queer.”
“It’dbevery queer. Goin’ to the bad is always queer. Madam wouldn’t look for it to be like ’avin’ a gentleman lead ’er in to dinner.”
“What’s she like—the lady?”
“That’s somethink madam’d ’ave to wyte and see. She wouldn’tseemso wicked, not at first sight, as you might sye. But time’d tell. If madam’d be pytient—well, I wouldn’t like to sye.” He eyed the fire. “I think that fire’ll burn now, madam; and if it don’t, madam’ll only ’ave to ring.”
He was at the door when Letty, feeling the end of all things to be at hand, ran after him, laying her fingers on his sleeve.
“Oh, Steptoe; you’ve been so good to me!”
He relaxed from his dignity sufficiently to let his hand rest on hers, which he patted gently. “I’ve been madam’s servant—and my boy’s.”
“I shall never think of you as a servant—never.”
The frosty color rose into his cheeks. “Then madam’ll do me a great wrong.”
“To me you’re so much higher than a servant––”
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“Madam’ll find that there ain’t nothink ’igher than a servant. There’s a lot about service in the pypers nowadyes, crackin’ it up, like; but nobody don’t seem to remember that servants knows more about that than what other people do, and servants don’t remember it theirselves. So long as I can serve madam, just as I’ve served my boy––”
“Oh, but, Steptoe, I shall have gone to the bad.”
“That’d be all the syme to me, madam. At my time o’ life I don’t see no difference between them as ’as gone to the bad and them as ’as gone to the good, as you might sye. I only sees—people.”
Left alone Letty went back to the fire, and stood gazing down at it, her foot on the fender. So it was the end. Even Steptoe said so. In a sense she was relieved.
She was relieved at the prospect of being freed from her daily torture. The little mermaid walking on blades in the palace of the prince, and forever dumb, had known bliss, but bliss so akin to anguish that her heart was consumed by it. The very fact that the prince himself suffered from the indefinable misery which her presence seemed to bring made escape the more enticing.
She was so buried in this reflection as to have heard no sound in the house, when Steptoe announced in his stately voice: “Miss Barbara Walbrook.” Having parted from this lady half an hour earlier Letty turned in some surprise.
“I’ve come back again,” was the explanation, sent down the long room. “Don’t let William bring in tea,” the imperious voice commanded Steptoe. “We wish to be alone.” There was the same abruptness as258she halted within two or three feet of where Letty stood, supporting herself with a hand on the edge of the mantelpiece. “I’ve come back to tell you something. I made up my mind to it all at once—after I left you a few minutes ago. Now that I’ve done it I feel easier.”
Letty didn’t know which was uppermost in her mind, curiosity or fear. “What—what is it?” she asked, trembling.
“I’ve given up the fight. I’m out of it.”
Letty crept forward. “You’ve—you’ve donewhat?”
“I told you in the Park that one or the other of us would have to withdraw––”
“One or the other of—ofus?”
“Exactly and I’ve done it.”
With horror in her face and eyes Letty crept nearer still. “But—but I don’t understand.”
“Oh, yes, you do. How can you help understanding. You must have seen all along that––”
“Not that—that you were—the other girl. Oh, not that!”
“Yes, that; of course; why not?”
“Because—because I—I couldn’t bear it.”
“You can bear it if I can, can’t you—if I’ve had to bear it all these weeks and months.”
“Yes, but that’s—” she covered her face with her hands—“that’s what makes it so terrible.”
“Of course it makes it terrible; but it isn’t as terrible now as it was—to you anyhow.”
“But why do you withdraw when—when you love him—and he loves you––?”
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“I do it because I want to throw all the cards on the table. It’s what my common sense has been telling me to do all along, only I’ve never worked round to it till we had our talk this afternoon. Now I see––”
“What do you see, Miss Walbrook?”
“I see that we’ve got to give him a clean sheet, or he’ll never know where he is. He can’t decide between us because he’s in an impossible position. We’ll have to set him absolutely free, so that he may begin again. I’ll do it on my side. You can do—what you like.”
She went as abruptly as she came, leaving Letty clearer than ever as to her new course.
By midnight she was ready. In the back spare room she waited only to be sure that all in the house were asleep.
She had heard Allerton come in about half past nine, and the whispering of voices told that Steptoe was making his explanations, that she was out of sorts, had dined in her room, and begged not to be disturbed. At about half past ten she heard the prince go upstairs to his own room, though she fancied that outside her door he had paused for a second to listen. That was the culminating minute of her self-repression. Once it was over, and he had gone on his way, she knew the rest would be easier.
By midnight she had only to wait quietly. In the old gray rag and the battered black hat she surveyed herself without emotion. Since making her last attempt to escape her relation to all these things had changed. They had become less significant, less important.260The emblems of the higher life which in the previous autumn she had buried with ritual and regret she now packed away in the closet, with hardly a second thought. The old gray rag which had then seemed the livery of a degraded life was now no more than the resumption of her reality.
“I’ll go as I came,” she had been saying to herself, all the evening. “I know he’d like me to take the things he’s given me; but I’d rather be just what I was.”
If there was any ritual in what she had done since Miss Walbrook had left her it was in the putting away of small things by which she didn’t want to be haunted.
“I couldn’t do it with this on,” she said of the plain gold band on her finger, to which, as a symbol of marriage, she had never attached significance in any case.
She took it off, therefore, and laid it on the dressing table.
“I couldn’t do it with this in my pocket,” she said of the purse containing a few dollars, with which Steptoe had kept her supplied.
This too she laid on the dressing table, becoming as penniless as when Judson Flack had put her out of doors. Somehow, to be penniless seemed to her an element in her new task, and an excuse for it.
Since Allerton had never made her a present there was nothing of this kind to discard. It had been part of his non-committal, impersonal attitude toward her that he had never given her a concrete sign that she meant anything to him whatever. He had thanked261her on occasions for the comforting quality he found in her presence. He had, in so many words, recognized the fact that when he got into a tantrum of nerves she could bring him out of it as no one else had ever done. He had also imparted to her the discovery that in reading to her, and trying to show her the point of view of a life superior to her own, he had for the first time in his life done something for someone else; but he had never gone beyond all this or allowed her to think that his heart was not given to “the girl he was engaged to.” In that at least he had been loyal to the mysterious princess, as the little mermaid could not but see.
She was not consciously denuded, as she would have felt herself six months earlier. As to that she was not thinking anything at all. Her motive, in setting free the prince from the “drag” on him which she now recognized herself to be, filled all her mental horizons. So dominated was she by this overwhelming impulse as to have no thought even for self-pity.
When a clock somewhere struck one she took it as the summons. From the dressing-table she picked up the scrawl in Steptoe’s hand, giving the name of Miss Henrietta Towell, at an address at Red Point, L. I. She knew Red Point, on the tip of Long Island, as a distant, partially developed suburb of Brooklyn. In the previous year she had gone with a half dozen other girl “supes” from the Excelsior Studio to “blow in” a quarter looking at the ocean steamers passing in and out. She had no intention of intruding on Miss Towell, but she couldn’t hurt Steptoe’s feelings by leaving the address behind her.
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For the same reason she took the silver thimble which stood on the scrap of paper. On its rim she read the inscription, “H.T. from H.S.” but she made no attempt to unravel the romance behind it. She merely slipped the scrawl and the thimble into the pocket of her jacket, and stood up.
She took no farewells. To do so would have unnerved her. On the landing outside her door she listened for a possible sound of the prince’s breathing, but the house was still. In the lower hall she resisted the impulse to slip into the library and kiss the place where she had kissed his feet on the memorable morning when her hand had been on his brow. “That won’t help me any,” were the prosaic words with which she put the suggestion away from her. If the little mermaid was to leap over the ship’s side and dissolve into foam the best thing she could do was to leap.
The door no longer held secrets. She had locked it and unlocked it a thousand times. Feeling for the chain in the darkness she slipped it out of its socket; she drew back the bolt; she turned the key. Her fingers found the two little brass knobs, pressing this one that way, and that one this way. The door rolled softly as she turned the handle.
Over the threshold she passed into a world of silence, darkness, electricity, and stars. She closed the door noiselessly. She went down the steps.