Adrian Ducielooked in startled amazement down into her white, drawn face with its hollow, appealing eyes, and quivering lips that could not enunciate a word. He did not recognize her for one moment. Then his expression hardened, and his gaze grew steady. With dextrous fingers he took his hat from his head and his cigar from his lips with one hand, for she held the other arm with a grip as of steel. The moony luster of the electric lights shone down upon a scene as silent and as motionless as if, Gorgon-like, her entrance had stricken it into stone; the groups of men who had been smoking standing about the floor, the loungers in the armchairs, the clerks behind the counter were for the moment as if petrified, blankly staring.
“What can I do for you?” Adrian asked courteously, and the calm, clear tones of his voice pervaded the silence like the tones of a bell.
In her keen sensitiveness she noted the absence of any form of greeting or salutation. He would not call her name for the enlightenment of these gazing strangers in this public place, in the scene she had made. Oh, how could she have so demeaned herself, she wondered, as to need such protection, such observance on his part of the delicacy she had disregarded. She despised herself to have incurred the necessity, yet with both her little gloved hands she clung to his arm with a convulsive strength of graspwhich he could not have shaken off without a struggle that would have much edified the gazing crowd, all making their own inferences as to the unknown significance of the scene. Such good breeding as it individually possessed had begun to assert itself against the shock and numbing effects of surprise, and there was the sound of movement and the murmur of resumed conversation which induced Adrian Ducie to hope that the one word she suddenly gasped had not been overheard.
“Randal,” she began in a broken voice, and the look in his eyes struck her dumb. They held a spark of actual fire that scorched every delicate sensibility within her. But it was like the ignition of a fuse—it set the whole train of gunpowder into potentiality. With sudden intention he looked over his shoulder and signaled to a gentleman at a little distance, staring, too, but not in the least recognizing Mrs. Floyd-Rosney.
“We will go into the reception room and talk the matter over,” he said decisively. “Colonel Kenwynton will give us the benefit of his advice.”
Colonel Kenwynton had been trained in the school of maneuvers and strategy. Off came his hat from his old white head, and with a resonant “Certainly! Certainly!” he advanced on the other side of Paula, who noticed that he followed Ducie’s example and did not speak her name. “Good evening, good evening, madam, I trust I see you well!” was surely salutation enough to satisfy the most exacting requirements of etiquette.
Scarcely able to move, yet never for one instant relaxing her hold on Ducie’s arm, she suffered herself to be led, half supported, to the reception room,where she sank into an armchair while Ducie stood looking down at her.
“Oh, Mr. Ducie,” she cried plangently, “I had hoped to find Randal here—his arrival was in the paper. I am in such terrible trouble, and I know my old friend would feel for me. Oh, he loved me once! I know he would help me now!”
“I will do whatever Randal could,” said Ducie. His voice was suave and kind, but his face was stern, and doubtful, and inquiring.
“Oh, you look so like him—you might have a heart like his. But you are not like him. Oh, I have not another friend in the world!”
Adrian thought she had not deserved to account Randal Ducie her friend. But this was no occasion to make nice and formal distinctions. He only said:
“Randal is not in town. But if you will give me the opportunity to be of use to you, Mrs. Floyd-Rosney, I will do anything I can.”
Both her auditors thought for a moment that she was insane when she replied:
“I want you to lend me ten dollars.”
The two men exchanged a glance. Then Ducie heartily declared:
“Why, that is very easily done. But may I ask, Mrs. Floyd-Rosney, what use you wish to make of it?”
He was thinking the trifling sum was yet sufficient to work mischief if she were under some temporary aberration.
“I want to go to my aunt’s place in the uplands of Mississippi—my old home! Oh, how I wish I had never left it!”
She threw herself back in the chair and pressedher handkerchief to her streaming eyes. “Mr. Ducie, I have fled from my husband’s house. He has taken my child from me—spirited him away—and I don’t know where he is, nor how he will be cared for. He is only three years old—oh, just a little thing!”
“Mrs. Floyd-Rosney, you must control your voice,” said Ducie, embarrassed and reluctant. “I hate to say it—but you will bring the whole house about us.”
Once launched on a recital of her woes she had acquired a capacity to arrange her ideas, and was keenly noting the effect of her words. There was no alacrity to produce the money she had requested as a loan, corresponding to the prompt acquiescence of Adrian Ducie a moment or so ago. She marveled in humble anxiety, not knowing that the two men doubted her mental responsibility, and feared to trust her with money.
Her griefs, once released, strained for expression, and she went on in a meek, muffled tone that brought the tears to the old Colonel’s pitying eyes—his heart had grown very soft with advancing years—but Adrian Ducie held himself well in hand and regarded her with critical dispassionateness.
“My husband desires, for some reason which he does not explain, but which I suspect, to get me out of the country.”
Once more Colonel Kenwynton and Ducie exchanged a covert glance of comment.
“He has arranged an extensive European and Oriental tour for me—without my child—leaving my child for a year at least. Why, Colonel Kenwynton, tell me what would all the glories of foreigncapitals and all the associations of Palestine count for with me when the one little face that I care to see is far away, and the one little voice I cannot hear!”
“Oh, my dear madam”—the Colonel had a frog in his throat—“surely Mr. Floyd-Rosney would not insist. You must be mistaken!”
“Oh, it is all arranged—my passage taken; my letter of credit ready; my party—such a gay party—made up and prepared to start to-morrow, the Hardingtons——”
The Colonel’s face bore a sudden look of conviction.
“I recollect now—it had slipped my memory—Mr. Charles Hardington was telling me this evening of the tour his family have in contemplation, and he mentioned that they were to have the great pleasure of your company, starting to-morrow.”
“Oh, but I will not go! I will not!” cried Paula, springing from her chair and frantically clasping her hands. “I will not go without my child! If you will not help me I will hide in the streets—but he could find me and—as I have not one friend—he could lock me up as insane!” She turned her wild eyes from one to the other. Then she broke into a jeering laugh. “It would be very easy in this day to prove a woman insane who does not prefer the tawdry follies and frivolities of gadding and staring through Europe with a party of fashionable empty-pates to the care and companionship of her only child. But I will not! I will not be shipped out of the country!”
Adrian Ducie’s face had changed. He believed that Floyd-Rosney was capable of any domestictyranny, but however he moved the responsibility involved in her appeal was great. He could not consign her to whatever fate might menace her. Still, he dared not trust her with money. She might buy poison, she might buy a pistol.
“Colonel, we must do something,” he declared. Then he turned to her. “Mrs. Floyd-Rosney,” he said, “will you permit us, instead of handing you the small amount you mentioned, to buy your ticket for your aunt’s home and see you aboard the train?”
In one moment her face was radiant.
“Oh, if you only would! If you only would! I should bless and thank you to the end of my days!”
Adrian Ducie, with a clearing brow, crossed the room and touched the bell. The summons was answered so immediately as to suggest the prompting of a lurking curiosity.
“Time-table,” said Ducie, and when it was brought he rid himself of the officious bell-boy by commanding: “Taxi, at the ladies’ entrance.”
“We must be starting at once,” he said to Paula. “We have barely time to catch the train. Bring the lady’s suitcase,” to the returning servant; and to the veteran: “Come, Colonel, you will kindly accompany us.”
Then they took their way out into the night.
Paula felt as if she trod on air. It had been so long since she had done aught of her own initiative, so little liberty had she possessed, even in trifles, that it gave her a sense of power to be able to carry any plan of her own device into successful execution. She was suddenly hopeful, calm, confident of her judgment, and restored to her normal aspect and manner. As they stood for a moment on the sidewalk,while the cab came chugging to the curb, she looked as with the eyes of a restored vitality upon the familiar surroundings—the electric street lights, the brilliant, equidistant points far down the perspective, the fantastic illuminated advertisements, the tall canyon of the buildings, the obstructive passing of a clanging, whirring street car, and then she was handed into the vehicle by Adrian Ducie. The next moment the door banged, and she was shut in with the two who she felt were so judiciously befriending her. The taxicab backed out into the street and was off for Union Station at a speed as rapid as a liberal construction of the law would allow.
There was no word said, and for that she was grateful. Her eyes stung as if blistered by the bitter tears she had shed, but not for one moment would she let the restful lids fall, lest the face of the man before her vanish in the awakening from this dream of rescue. She watched the fluctuations of light on Ducie’s countenance as the arc lamp at every street intersection illuminated it, for she found a source of refreshment in its singular likeness to the one friend, she told herself, she had in the world. Adrian would not have lent himself as he had done to her aid, she felt sure, were he not Randal’s brother. She had been vaguely sensible of a reluctance that was to her inexplicable, of a reserve in both the men before her, that seemed to her inimical to her interest. She would venture no word to jar the accord they had attained.
When the taxicab drew up at the Union Station the glare of lights, the stir of the place enthused her. She was here at last, on her way, success almost attained. She did not share Ducie’s suddenfever of anxiety in noting the great outpouring of smoke from the shed where the train stood almost ready to start, the resonance of its bell and the clamors of the exhaust steam of the engine already beginning to jar the air. He ran swiftly up the stair to the ticket office, leaving her with Colonel Kenwynton, and was back almost immediately, taking her protectively by the arm as he urged her along into the great shed. At the gate she was surprised to see that he presented three tickets, but he voluntarily explained, not treating her as an unreasoning child, as was Floyd-Rosney’s habit, that he thought it best that he and the Colonel should accompany her to the first station, to see her fairly clear of the city. He was saying this as they walked swiftly down between the many rows of rails in the great shed where a number of cars were standing, and the train which she was to take was beginning to move slowly forward.
Her heart sank as she marked its progress, but Ducie lifted his arm and signed eagerly to the conductor just mounting the front step of the Pullman. The train slowed down a bit; the stool was placed by the alert porter, but the step passed before she could put her foot upon it. Ducie caught her up and swung her to the next platform as it glided by, and the two men clambered aboard as the cars went on.
They were laughing and elated as they conveyed her into its shelter. Then a deep shade settled on the face of the Colonel.
“Why, my dear madam, you have no luncheon!” He regarded the suitcase with reprobation, as affordingno opportunities of refreshment, save of the toilette.
“But, Colonel, I don’t lunch throughout the night,” she returned, with a smile. “I shall be glad to sleep,” she added plaintively.
The Colonel looked disconsolate for a moment. Then he took a handsome little flask from his pocket. “With my best compliments,” he said.
“But I don’t drink brandy, either,” she declared, strangely flattered, “and I have no pistol pocket.”
“Tuck it in your suitcase,” he insisted seriously. “Something might happen. You might—might—see fit to faint, you know.”
“Oh, no, I never faint,” she protested. “If I haven’t fainted so far I shall hold my own the rest of the way.”
As they sat in the section which Ducie had reserved for her the Colonel eyed him enigmatically, as if referring something for his approval. Then he said bluffly:
“I am sorry I haven’t the ten dollars which you did us the honor to wish to borrow. I have nothing less than a twenty, that you can get changed by the conductor and return to me at your good pleasure. I’m getting rich, Mrs. Floyd-Rosney,” he laughed gaily, at the incongruity of the jest. “And I never carry anything but large bills.”
He took the little empty mesh bag from her hand and slipped the money in it, despite her protest that she had now no need of it.
“It is never prudent to travel without an emergency fund,” he opined sagaciously. “My affairs are managed by Hugh Treherne now, for a share of the proceeds. He did not want any compensationat all, but I insisted on it. Wonderful head for detail he has, Ducie. I’d go to the asylum and stay there a term or two if it would educate me to make every edge cut as he can.”
When they had alighted on the platform of the first station and stood lifting their hats, as her pale face looked out of the window while the train glided on, Colonel Kenwynton spoke his mind.
“She is as sane as I am, and a fine, well-bred woman. She has married a brute of a husband, and if I were not such an excellent Christian, Ducie, I don’t know what I wouldn’t wish might happen to him.”
Ducie said nothing. Floyd-Rosney was a distasteful subject that he was averse to discuss. They took their places in the electric street car which would whisk them back to town speedily, and, as the train slowly backed on the switch, she saw them through the window, as yet the sole occupants on the return run.
IfFloyd-Rosney’s temper were less imperious, if he had had less confidence in the dictates of his will, which he misconstrued as his matured judgment, he could not have so signally disregarded the feelings of others; if only in obedience to the dictates of policy, he could not have been so oblivious of the possibility of adverse action, successfully exploited.
Maddened by his wife’s revolt against his plans, futile though he deemed it, he would not await her return from the nursery whither she had hurried to verify his words. He burned with rage under the lash of her fiery denunciation—“Brute!—Fiend!” How dared she! He wondered that he had not beaten her with his clenched fists! He had some fear of being betrayed into violence, some doubt of his own self-restraint that induced him to rush forth into the street and evade her frenzied jeremiad when she found the child was indeed gone.
What a fool of a woman was this, he was arguing before the banging of the front door behind him had ceased to resound along the street. What other one would turn down such a beautiful opportunity! As to leaving the child—why, it would have been to any except the perverse vixen he had married one of the special advantages of the outing—to be free for a time of domestic cares, of maternal duties.Had he not over and over heard women of her station congratulate themselves on a “vacation”—the children loaded off on somebody, Heaven knows whom, or where, a matter of minor importance. It was absolutely fantastic, the idea of dragging a child of Edward’s age around Europe and the Orient for a year’s travel. The very care of him, the necessary solicitude involved at every move, would destroy all possibility of pleasure. The mere item of infantile disorders was enough in itself to nullify the prospect. And he might die of some of these maladies in a foreign country, deprived of his father’s supervision and experience in the ways of the world.
Floyd-Rosney’s contention in the matter seemed to him eminently right and rational. It was desirable that she should not testify in the suit, he could not leave at this crisis, and she could not well take the child with her. He would not risk his son and heir to the emergencies, the vicissitudes of a year of foreign travel under the guidance merely of an inexperienced and careless woman. Paula herself was like a child. He had kept her so. Everything had been done for her. In any unforeseen, disastrous chance she would be utterly helpless to take judicious action and to protect the child from injury.
Floyd-Rosney was not more willing to be separated from the boy than the mother herself. He had, indeed, no unselfish love for the child, but his son’s beauty and promise flattered his vanity; the boy would be a credit to his name. His prospects were so brilliant that in twenty years there would be no young man in the Mississippi Valley who could vie with him in fortune and position.Floyd-Rosney had gloated on the future of his son. He was glad, he often said, that he was himself a young man, for he would be but in the prime of life when Edward would come to his majority. No dependent station would be his—to eat from his father’s hand like a fawning pet. With an altruistic consideration, uncharacteristic of him, the father had made already certain investments in his son’s name, and these, though limited in character, by a lucky stroke had doubled again and again, till he was wont to say proudly that his son was the only capitalist he knew who had an absolutely safe investment paying twenty per cent. He had a sort of respect for the boy, as representing much money and many inchoate values. His infancy must be carefully tended, his education liberal and sedulously supervised, and when he should go into the world, representing his father’s name and fortune, he should be worthy of both. Turn him over to Paula, in his tender callowness, to be dragged about from post to pillar for her behoof—he would not endure the idea.
As the cool air chilled his temper and the swift walk and change of scene gave the current of his thoughts a new trend he began to be more tolerant of her attitude in the matter. The truth was, he said to himself, they each loved the child too dearly, were too solicitous for his well being, to be willing to be separated from him, and, but for the peculiar circumstances of this lawsuit, he would never have proposed it. It was, however, necessary, absolutely necessary, and he would take measures to induce Paula to depart on this delightful journey without making public her disinclination. He had takenher, perhaps, too abruptly by surprise. She was overcome with frenzy to discover that the child was actually gone!—he should overlook her hasty words—though to his temperament this was impossible, and he knew it; they were burned indelibly into his consciousness. Never before, in all his pompous, prosperous life had he been so addressed. But he would make an effort—one more effort to persuade her; with a resolute fling he turned to retrace his way, coming into the broad and splendid avenue on which his palatial home fronted, he walked up the street as she was walking down the opposite side.
He let himself in with his latch-key, closing the door softly behind him. The great hall and the lighted rooms with their rich furnishings, glimpsed through the open doors, looked strangely desolate. For one moment silence—absolute, intense. Then a grotesque, unbecoming intrusion on the ornate elegance—a burst of distant, uncultured laughter from below stairs, and a clatter of dishes. Floyd-Rosney was something of an epicure, and it was a good dinner that went down untouched. The master of the house frowned heavily. He lifted his head, minded to ring a bell and administer reproof. Then he reflected that it well accorded with his interests that he should be supposed to be out of the house while the interview with his wife was in progress. She had a way of late of raising her voice in a keen protest that advertised domestic discordances to all within earshot. “Let the servants carouse and gorge their dinner; I’ll settle them afterward!” he said to himself grimly, as he noiselessly ascended the stairs.
Once more silence—he could not hear even hisown footfall. He had a vague sense of solitude, of uninhabited purlieus. With a sudden rush of haste he pushed open the door of the nursery, flaring with lights, but vacant, and strode through to his wife’s room, to find it vacant, too. He stood for a moment, mystified, anger in his eyes, but dismay, fear, doubt clutching at his heart. What did this mean? He went hastily from one to another of the suite of luxurious rooms devoted to her especial use, but in none save one was any token of her recent presence. He stood staring at the disarray. There was the gown of lavender gauze that she had donned for the opera, lying on a chair, while the silk slip that it had covered lay huddled on the floor. The slippers, hastily thrust off, tripped his unwary step as he advanced into the room. On the dressing table, glittering with a hundred articles of toilet luxury, lay the two strings of costly pearls “where anyone might have stolen them”; he mechanically reproved her lack of precaution. He strove to reassure himself, to contend against a surging sense of calamity. What did this signify? Only that the festivity of the evening relinquished she had laid aside her gala attire. Her absence—it was early—she might have gone out with some visitor; she might have cared to make some special call, so seldom did they have an evening unoccupied. Despite the incongruity of the idea with the recollection of her pale, drawn, agonized face, the frenzy of her grief and rage, he took down the receiver of the telephone and called up Hildegarde Dean. The moment the connection was completed he regretted his folly. Over the wire came the vibrations of a string-orchestra, and he recalled having noticed in the society columnsof the papers that Miss Dean was entertaining with a dinner dance to compliment a former schoolmate. He had lost his poise sufficiently, nevertheless, to make the query, “Is Mrs. Floyd-Rosney there?” and had the satisfaction to be answered by the butler, in the pomp and pride of the occasion: “No, sah. Dis entertainment is exclusively for unmarried people.”
“The devil it is!” Floyd-Rosney exclaimed, after, however, cautiously releasing the receiver.
His fuming humor was heightened by thiscontretemps, although a great and growing dismay was vaguely shadowed in his eyes, like a thought in the back of the mind, so to speak, too unaccustomed, too preposterous, to find ready expression. He endeavored to calm himself, although he lost no time in prosecuting his investigations. With a hasty hand he touched the electric bell for his wife’s maid and impatiently awaited the response. To his surprise it was not prompt. He stood amidst his incongruous surroundings of gowns, and jewels, and slippers, and laces, and revolving panels of mirrors, frowning heavily. How did it chance that her service should be so dilatory? He placed his forefinger on the button and held it there, and the jangling was still resounding below stairs when the door slowly opened and the maid, with an air of affronted inquiry, presented herself. Her face changed abruptly as she perceived the master of the house, albeit it was like pulling a cloak of bland superserviceableness over her lineaments of impudent protest.
“What do you mean by being so slow to answerthis bell?” he thundered, his angry eyes contemptuously regarding her.
“I came as soon as I heard it, sir. I think there must be something wrong with the annunciator.”
“What do you mean by leaving your mistress’s gowns lying around, and her room in this disorder?”
The girl’s beady eyes traveled in bewilderment from one article to another of the turmoil of toilet accessories scattered about the apartment. She had looked for a moment as if she would fire up at the phrase “your mistress,” and she said with a slight emphasis on the title:
“I didn’t know that Mrs. Floyd-Rosney had changed.”
“Where has she gone?”
Once more a dull and genuine bewilderment on the maid’s face.
“I am sure, sir, I don’t know—she didn’t ring for me.”
“I reckon you didn’t answer the bell,” Floyd-Rosney sneered. “She couldn’t wait forever. She hasn’t my patience.”
The girl glowered at his back, but, mindful of the mirrors, forbore the grimace so grateful in moments of disaffection to her type.
Floyd-Rosney was speaking through the house telephone.
“Have the limousine at the door—yes—immediately.”
The ready response of the chauffeur came over the wire.
“Now see what gown she wore, so that I can guess where to send for her. A nice business this is—that Mrs. Floyd-Rosney can’t get hold of hermaid to change her dress and leave a message. I don’t doubt there is a note somewhere, if I could find it.”
He affected to toss over themélangeon the dressing-table. He even looked at the evening paper lying on the foot-rest, which she had read while her hair was being dressed for the opera.
As he did so an item of personal mention caught his attention. Mr. Randal Ducie was in the city, doubtless in connection with the gathering of planters to consult with the Levee Commission in regard to river protection. A meeting would be held this evening at the Adelantado Hotel.
This was the most natural thing in the world. Half the planters in the river bottom were in active coöperation seeking to influence the Levee Commission, or the State Legislature, or the Federal Government to take some adequate measures to prevent the inundation of their cotton lands by a general overflow of the great Mississippi River, according to the several prepossessions relative to the proper plans, and means, and agency to that end.
But as he read the haphazard words of the paragraph the blood flared fiercely in Floyd-Rosney’s face; a fire glowed in his eyes, hot and furious; his hand was trembling; his breath came quick. And he was well nigh helpless even to conjecture if his wife’s absence had aught of connection with this ill-starred appearance of the lover of her girlhood. He—Edward Floyd-Rosney, baffled, hoodwinked, set at naught! Could this thing be!
For one moment, for one brief moment, he upbraided himself. But for his tyranny in sending off the child without her consent, without even consultingher, but for his determination that, willing or no, she should expatriate herself for a year, and, with neither husband nor child, tour a foreign country in company of his selection they might already be seated in their box at the opera, rapt by the concord of sweet sounds in the midst of the most elegant and refined presentment of their world, at peace with each other and in no danger of damaging and humiliating revelations of domestic discord.
He heard the puffing of the limousine at the curb below the windows, and he turned to the maid.
“I can find no scrape of a pen—no note here. Do you know what gown she wore?”
The girl had made a terrifying discovery. As she fingered the skirts hanging in the wardrobe, for she had thought first of the demi-toilette of usual evening wear, she was reflecting on the gossip below stairs, where it was believed that Mrs. Floyd-Rosney had not known of the departure of her little son till he was out of the house, and where it was surmised she would be all “tore up” when she should discover his absence—so much she made of the boy. Aunt Dorothy had been given permission to spend the night with her granddaughter who lived on the opposite side of the river, a favorite excursion with the ancient colored retainer. She was not popular with the coterie below stairs, and, being prone to report what went amiss, would certainly have notified her young mistress if any attempt had been made to spirit away the child while in her charge. The maid had found naught missing from among the dresses most likely to be worn on any ordinary occasion in the evening, and she was turning away reluctantly to examine the boxes in the closetwhere were stored those gowns of grander pretension, designed for functions of special note. She had a discontented frown on her face, for they were enveloped, piece by piece, in many layers of tissue paper; she could not ascertain what was there and what was gone, from the wrappers, save by actual investigation; among them were sachets of delicate perfumes that must not be mixed; they had trains and draperies difficult to fold, and berthas and sashes that must be laid in the same creases as before—a job requiring hours of work, and useless, for no gown of this sort could have been worn without assistance in dressing, and for an occasion long heralded. As she closed the wardrobe with a pettish jerk it started open the other door, and she paused with an aghast look on her face. She was afraid of Mr. Floyd-Rosney when he was angry.
“She has worn her coat-suit of taupe broadcloth,” she said in a bated voice, and with a wincing, deprecatory glance at him, “and the hat to match.”
Floyd-Rosney received this information in silence. Then—“Why do you look like that, you fool?” he thundered.
“’C—c—cause,” stuttered the girl, “she has taken her suit-case—it was always kept on the shelf here, packed with fresh lingerie, so she might be ready for them quick little auto trips you like to go on so often, and her walking boots is gone”—holding up a pair of boot-trees,—“and,” opening a glove box, “the suède taupe gloves is gone.” Her courage asserted itself; her temper flared up. “And it seems to me, Mr. Floyd-Rosney, that if there’s any fool here, ’taint me!”
“You will be paid your wages to-morrow,”foamed Floyd-Rosney, dashing from the room. “Clear out of the house.”
“Just as well,” the girl said to the gaping servants downstairs, who remonstrated with her for her sharp tongue, reproaching her with throwing away a good place, liberal wages and liberal fare. “Just as well. If there’s to be no lady there’s no use for a lady’s maid.”
“To the Union Station,” Floyd-Rosney hissed forth as he flung himself into the limousine. In the transit thither he took counsel within himself. Where could Paula be going?—Only on some fantastic quest for her child. He ran over, in his mind, any hint that he might have let drop as to the locality where he had bestowed him, and she, putting two and two together, had fancied she had discovered the place. If, by any coincidence, she had hit upon the boy’s domicile, he told himself, he would make no protest; he would let her have her way; he would give the world for all to be between them as it was this afternoon. As to the lawsuit—let come what might! If only he could intercept her in this mad enterprise; if he could reach her before she took the train! He called through the speaking tube to the chauffeur to go faster.
“Never mind the speed limit—do all you know how!”
Presently the great vehicle slowed up, panting and sizzling as if winded in the race. He sprang out before it had ceased to move and rushed up the stairs, patrolling the various apartments, the ladies’ waiting room, the refreshment room—he remembered that she could have had no dinner—the general ante-room, with its crowd of the traveling public.He was a notable figure, with his splendid appearance, his fur-lined overcoat, his frowning, intent brow, his long, swift stride.
All in vain—she was not there. The clamor of the train that was making ready for departure struck his absorbed attention. The place was full of the odor of the bituminous smoke from the locomotive; he heard the panting of the steam exhaust.
Floyd-Rosney rushed down the stairs and into the great shed which seemed, with its high vaulted roof, clouded with smoke dull and dim, despite the glare here and there of electric lights. He was stopped in the crowd at the gate. He had no ticket—money could not buy it here. He explained hastily that he wished to see a friend off. The regulations were stringent, the functionary obdurate; the crowd streaming through the gate disposed to stare, and a burly policeman, lounging about, regarded the insistent swell with an inimical glare. For there are those dressed like swells that are far from that puffed-up estate.
The suggestion calmed Floyd-Rosney for the nonce. It needed but this, he felt, to complete his folly—to involve himself in a futile fracas with a gateman and a cop. Moreover, he had no justification in fancying that Paula was likely to take a train—in fact, and he smiled grimly, she would not have the cash to buy a ticket. The whole theory that she might quit the city was a baseless fabrication of his fears, of the disorder of his ideas induced by the vexatious and unexpectedcontretemps. Doubtless, by this time she had returned from the stroll or the call, or whatever device she had adopted to quiet her spirit and divert her mind, he argued—he himself had found refreshment in a brisk walk in the night air—and was now sitting before the fire at home, awaiting his coming, possibly willing to discuss the matter in a more amicable frame of mind.
He was about to turn aside when suddenly down the line of rails within the shed and between the train standing still and the one beginning to move, the metallic clangor of its bell insistently jarring the air, he saw the figure of Paula, visible in the glare of the headlight of the locomotive beside her. Every detail was as distinct, as illuminated as in the portrayal of a magic lantern—her taupe gown, her hat with a plume of the same shade, her face flushed, laughing and eager. A man was assisting her to mount the platform of the coach and in him Floyd-Rosney was sure he recognized Randal Ducie, whose arrival in the city he had noted in the evening paper. The whole maneuver of boarding the train,—the placing of the stool by the porter, Paula’s failure to reach from it to the step of the car, the swift muscular effort by which Ducie seized her, swung her to the platform, and then sprang upon it himself,—was all as plain to the frenzied man watching the vanishing train from between the palings of the gate as if the scene had been enacted within ten feet of him.
Paulareached her destination early the next morning. She had not slept during the night and as soon as the light began to dawn she raised the blind at her window and lay in her berth looking out drearily at the face of the country, growing constantly more familiar, but yet dimly descried and colorless as a scene in sepia, with the lagging night still clinging to the earth. Belts of white vapor lay in every depression; the forests along the horizon made a dark circumference for the whole; the stars were wan and sad of aspect and faded from the sky, one by one, as the eye dwelt upon them. The characteristic features of the swamp region had vanished. In many places the land was deeply gullied, showing as the day waxed a richly tinted red clay that made the somber landscape glow. Everywhere were the hedges of the evergreen Cherokee rose, defining the borders of fields, often untrimmed and encroaching in a great green billow on spaces unmeet for a mere boundary mark. The trees were huge; gigantic oaks and the spreading black-gum; and she was ready, her hat on, her wrap and furs adjusted, looking out eagerly at these dense bosky growths when the red wintry sun began to cast long shafts of quiet dull sheen adown their aisles, showing the white rime on the rough bark of theboughs, or among the russet leaves, still persistently clinging. More than once the conductor came in to consult her as to the precise point of stoppage, and, when a long warning whistle set the echoes astir in the quiet matutinal atmosphere and the train began to slow down, she was alertly on her feet.
“You are sure of the place, ma’am?” said the conductor, helping her descend the step; he was new to the road, and there seemed to him nothing here but woods.
She reassured him as she lightly ran down the steep incline, and then she stood for a moment, mechanically watching the train, epitome of the world, sweeping away and leaving her here, the dense forest before her, the smoke flaunting backward, the sun emblazoning its convolutions, the wondering faces of the passengers at the windows.
She remembered the time when this wonder would have nettled her. She had wanted a station platform built here, but her uncle had utilitarian theories, and, somehow, “never got round to it,” as he was wont to phrase it. So seldom, indeed, they boarded the train, so seldom it brought a visitor, that it seemed to him the least and last needed appurtenance of the plantation. She wondered if the stoppage had been not noted at the house. The woods were silent, as with mystery, as she took her way through “the grove.” The frost lay white on the grass, and there was even a glint of ice in the water lurking in the ruts of a wagon wheel in the road. She walked on these frozen edges after a fashion learned long ago to keep her feet dainty when not so expensively shod as now. Suddenly she heard the deep baying of a hound.
“Oh, old Hero!” she exclaimed pettishly. “He will tell them all I have come!”
For she had wished to slip in unobserved. The humiliation of her return in this wise seemed less when the kindly old roof should be above her head. But the dog met her, fierce and furious, at the fence of the door yard—how she had hated that fence; she had wanted the grove and yard thrown together like some fine park. As the old retainer recognized her the complication of his barks which he could not forego, in view of her capacity as stranger, with his wheezes and whines of ecstasy, as greeting to an old friend, while he leaped and gamboled about her, brought her uncle and aunt, every chick and child, the servants from the outhouses, and all the dogs on the place to make cheerful acclaim of welcome.
So long had it been since she had heard this hearty, genuine note of disinterested affection that it came like balm to her lacerated heart, and suddenly there seemed no more need for pride, for dissimulation, for self-restraint. She broke down and burst into a flood of tears, the group lachrymose in sympathy and wiping their eyes.
She had planned throughout the night how best and when to tell her story, but it was disclosed without preface or method, before she had been in the house ten minutes, her aunt cautiously closing the door of the sitting-room the instant Mr. Floyd-Rosney’s name was mentioned and her uncle looking very grave.
“You were quite right in coming at once to us, my dear,” he said kindly. “Be sure you shall not be shipped out of the country.”
He was a tall, heavy man, somewhat spare and angular, and his large well-formed features expressed both shrewdness and kindness. He had abundant grizzled hair and his keen gray eyes were deeply set under thick dark eyebrows. He was a fair-minded man one could see at a glance, a thoroughly reliable man in every relation of life, a gentleman of the old school.
“Some arrangement will surely be made about the baby; I shall love to see the little fellow again. Set your heart at rest. I will communicate at once with Mr. Floyd-Rosney, as your nearest relative, standing inloco parentis.”
“And give me some breakfast,” said Paula, lapsing into the old childish whine of a spoiled household pet. “I have had nothing to eat since yesterday at lunch.”
The husband and wife exchanged a glance over her head.
“And before I forget it——” she raised herself to an upright position and took from her bag the twenty dollar bill. “Please write and return this to old Colonel Kenwynton. I should be ashamed to sign my name to such a letter. Hewouldlend it to me—though I didn’t need it after he and Adrian Ducie—Randal Ducie’s brother—had lent me the money to buy my ticket.”
Mrs. Majoribanks was a stern-faced woman with rigid ideas of the acceptable in conduct. Her dark hair, definitely streaked with gray, banded smoothly along her high forehead, her serious, compelling, gray eyes, the extreme neatness and accuracy of adjustment of her dress, her precise method of enunciation, intimated an uncompromising personality,possessing high ideals religiously followed,—somewhat narrow of view, perhaps, and severe of judgment, but unfalteringly, immovably upright.
“But, Paula, why didn’t you buy your own ticket with your own money? To allow another to buy it was inappropriate.”
“I had no money,” Paula explained humbly. “Mr. Floyd-Rosney lets me buy anything I want on account, but he never gives me any money to spend as I like.” Once more the husband and wife looked significantly at each other. All that they possessed was his, but the privileges of ownership were exercised in common, the expenditures a matter of mutual confidence and agreement, and it may be doubted if he ever took a step in business affairs without consultation with her.
The spare, sober decorum of the aspect of the house appealed to Paula in her present state of mind, her taste for magnificence glutted, and she remembered, with a sort of wonder, her intolerance of the stiff old furniture of the sitting-room covered with hair-cloth; the crimson brocade, well frayed, of the parlor glimpsed through the open door, with the old-fashioned lambrequins at the windows and carefully mended lace curtains, and the family portraits in oil on the walls; the linoleum on the floor of the hall that had been there seeming indestructible since she could remember; the barometer hanging over the long sofa; the grandfather’s clock in the corner, still allotting the hours, however lives might wax or wane; the dining-room, with the burly sideboard and the peacock fly-brush, and the white-jacketed waiter, and the brisk little darkey that ran in and out with the relays of hot buttered waffles.It all seemed so sane, so simple, so safe. Here and there, conspicuously placed, were gifts which she and Mr. Floyd-Rosney had made, ostentatiously handsome. She thought them curiously out of accord with the tone of the place, and, oddly enough, she felt ashamed of them.
She asked herself how and why had such an obsession as had possessed her ever come to her—the hankering for the empty life of show, and fashion, and wealth. Had she not had every reasonable wish gratified, enjoyed every advantage of a solid and careful education, had every social opportunity in a circle, limited, certainly, but characterized by refinement, and dignity, and seemliness, that was the gentility of long traditions of gentlefolks—not pretty manners, picked up the day before yesterday. She had come back to it now—her wings clipped, her feathers drooping.
She could not enter into the old home life as of yore—it seemed strangely alien, though so familiar. She would look vaguely at her young cousins, each altered and much more mature in the five years that had passed since she was an inmate of the household—well grown, handsome, intelligent boys they were, instead of the romping children she had left. They spent the mornings with a tutor who came from the neighboring town to read with them, and the eldest was much given to argument with his father, insisting vivaciously on his theories of government, of religion, of politics, of the proper method of construing certain Latin verses; the two younger were absorbed in their dogs, their rabbits, their games—the multitudinous little interests of people of their age, so momentous to them.Always their world was home—she wondered what the real world would seem to them when they should emerge into it, what the theories of government, the phrasing of Latin verses, the home absorptions would prove as preparation for life as she knew it. Certainly they did not formulate it. She said to herself that a more secluded existence could hardly be matched outside a monastery. She did not believe any of the three had ever seen a game of football or baseball; the life of cities, of travel, of association with their fellows was as a sealed book to them. In their minds Ingleside was a realm; their father was their comrade; their mother was the court of last resort.
But Paula’s absorbed thoughts refused all but the slightest speculation upon the subject of their future and she could urge herself to only the shadow of interest in her aunt’s pursuits and absorptions. Even the room of her girlhood—she could not enter there, she could not sleep there, for dreams—dreams—dreams! They might have there faculties of visualization or unseen they could stab her unaware. Never again should her spirit encounter these immaterial essences. She asked her aunt to give her her grandmother’s room. It was small comfort in laying her head on that pillow which had never known a selfish thought, an unsanctified desire, to feel the difference, the distance. But here all good influences abode, and she was consoled in a sort for the unappreciated affliction of that saintly death, to whisper into the downy depth—“I have come back—scourged—scourged!”
How she remembered that that good grandmother had so grievously deprecated the coursetoward Randal Ducie; that she had declared the greatest of all disasters is a marriage without love, and that a promise is a promise; many times she shook her head, and shed some shy, shy tears over Randal’s dismissal, though Paula wrote the letter in a frenzy of careless energy, without erasing a word or troubling to take a copy.
She would note with a sort of apologetic affection the details of this familiar room that she had early learned to stigmatize as old-fashioned, and in her schoolgirl phrase “tacky”—the chintz curtains with their big flowers; the hair-cloth covered rocking chairs; the four-poster mahogany bedstead with its heavily corniced tester, the red cloth goffered to the center to focus in a big gilt star; the mahogany bureau, so tall that the mirror made good headway to the ceiling; the floriated Brussels carpet so antique of pattern that she used to say she believed it was manufactured before the flood and so staunch of web that it was destined to last till doomsday; the little work-table, with its drawers still filled with spools, and buttons, and reels of embroidery silk, and balls of wool for knitting and crochet—doubtless some piece of her grandmother’s beautiful handiwork still lay where her busy fingers had placed it, with the needle yet in the stitch.
The rose curtained window gave on no smiling scene—it was one of the few outlooks from the house that was not of bosky presentment. But the grove had ceased ere these precincts were reached and the view was of a dull bit of pasture and beyond a dreary stretch of cornfields, in which the stalks still stood, stripped of the ears, pallid with frost and writhen into fantastic postures by windand weather. It was but a dreary landscape, trembling under slanting lines of rain, and later of sleet, for the halcyon weather had vanished at last, and winter had come in earnest. A mist hung much of the time between the earth and a leaden sky, and the woods that lay along the low horizon were barely glimpsed as a dull, indistinct smudge.
Nothing, she said to herself, could ever rehabilitate the universe for her. This crisis was so comprehensive, so significant. She clenched her hands when she reviewed the past few years with a nervous fury so intense that the nails marked the palms. Her memories and her self-reproach seared her consciousness like hot iron. Whelmed in the luxury of wealth, proud of her preëminence of station, sharing as far as might be her husband’s domineering assumptions toward others, cravenly submitting when his humor required her, too, to crook the knee, she had subverted her every opinion, her inmost convictions, to theories of life she would once have despised, to estimate as of paramount value the things she had been taught to hold as dross. She had cast aside all her standards of intrinsic worth. Sometimes she would spring from sleep and walk the floor, the red glow of the embers on the wall, the shadows glooming about her, the events of those tumultuous years, in the fierce white light of actuality rather than the glimpses of memories, deploying before her. Resist his influence——? She had flattered, she had surrounded him with an atmosphere of adulation. She had loved so much his possessions and her realized ambitions that she had imbibed the theory that she had loved him. True, she had admired him—his impressive presence, his domineeringhabit of mind, his expensive culture, his discrimination in matters of art and music, the cringing attitude toward him of his employees, his humble friends, and now and then a man on his own plane, unable to sustain his individuality before that coercive influence. Bring tribute—bring tribute! In every relation of life that fiat went forth. And she had permitted herself to believe that her craven acquiescence in this demand was—love! And, doubtless, the tyrant, unabashed by the glaring improbability, had believed it too.
The phases of fashionable life are never so minimized as in the presence of some great and grave actuality of human experience—she looked back upon them now with a disgusted wonder and an averse contempt. The world for which she had longed in her quiet rural home, which had opened its doors so unexpectedly, so beatifically, to her trembling entrance, seemed to her now full of dull and commonplace people, all eagerly pursuing some sordid scheme of advancement, regardful of their fellows only to envy values which they do not share, to cringe before consequence and station which only belittle them, to pull down, if occasion permit, those who are on the up-grade, to alternately court and decry their superiors, and to revile and baffle the humble. And for a share in this world, this outlook, this atmosphere, she had bartered her happiness, had destroyed her identity, as nearly as she might, had achieved the lot of a lifelong victim to intolerable tyranny.
In all her beclouded spiritual sky there had glowed the radiance of one single star, one pure and genuine emotion, her maternal love, bought byno price, asking naught, giving in an ecstasy of self-abnegation that made sacrifice a luxury and suffering a joy.
And now this light of her life was obscured by dense clouds, and who could say how and when it would emerge.
The change of place, the sense of escape acted in some sort as a respite, but there was possible no surcease of anguished solicitude. Her uncle began almost immediately the concoction of a letter to Mr. Floyd-Rosney, which should be a triumph of epistolary art to accomplish its ends. He desired to remonstrate against the enforced expatriation of Mrs. Floyd-Rosney, to insist on the propriety of restoring her son to her care, and to condemn the cruelty of the separation, all expressed in such soft choice locutions as to give no offense to the gusty temper of her husband and to make no reflections on the justice of his conduct. He wished to take a tone of authority and seniority as being the nearest and eldest relative of Mrs. Floyd-Rosney, and thus entitled to offer his views and advice in her behalf, yet to avoid seeming intrusive and guilty of interference between husband and wife.
As he wrote at his desk in the sitting-room, his intent grizzled head bent over the repeated drafts of this effort, Paula, passing in the hall without, catching a glimpse of his occupation, had space in her multifarious anguish for a sense of deep humiliation that this should be going forward in her interest. How she had flaunted the achievement of her great marriage in this her simple home, in the teeth of their misgivings, their covert reservations, their deprecation of her treatment of Randal Ducie.She had piqued herself on the fact that not many girls so placed, so far from the madding crowd, could have made such a ten-strike in the matrimonial game. Her standards were not theirs; her life was regulated on a plane which did not conform to their ideals, but as time went on they had ventured to hope for the best, and when Geoffrey Majoribanks had been asked occasionally if his niece had not made a very rich marriage he would add “and a very happy one.” This he had believed, although in view of Floyd-Rosney’s imperious temperament and the process of his wife’s evident subjugation, it must seem that the wish had constrained his credulity. Now the illusion was dispelled, the bubble had burst, and it devolved upon him to patch up from its immaterial constituent elements some semblance of conjugal reconciliation and the possibility of a degree of happiness in the future.
He was a ready scribe, as were most men of his day, and had a neat gift of expression. But he called for help continually in this instance, now from his wife, and throwing ceremony to the winds, in view of the importance of the missive, once his hearty, resonant voice summoned the party most in interest, Paula herself.
“Our object is to get the child restored to your care and to compass a cessation of this insistence that you shall go abroad,—not to win in an argument. Now do you think this phrasing could offend Mr. Floyd-Rosney, or wound his feelings?”
Paula, standing tall, pale, listless, beside the desk, leaning on one hand among the litter of discarded papers of the voluminous epistle, looked down into his anxious, upturned face, beneath his tousled, grizzledhair, pitying the limitations of his perceptions.
“Any phrasing will offend Mr. Floyd-Rosney if he wishes to be offended,” she replied languidly, “and he has no feelings to wound.”
She went slowly out of the room, leaving him meditatively biting the handle of his pen.
The letter bade fair to become a permanent occupation. He worked at it late at night and all the forenoon of the next day, and when, at the two o’clock dinner, his wife suggested that he should take Paula out for a drive about the country,—she would be interested in seeing how little it had changed since she was a resident here—he shook his head doggedly over the big turkey that he was deftly carving.
“No,—no,” he said, “I must get back to that—that document. You and one of the boys can take her to drive.”
The “document” was duly finished at last and duly mailed. Then expectation held the household to fever heat. The return mail brought nothing; the next post was not more significant; nor the next; nor the next. A breathless suspense supervened.
One Monday morning Major Majoribanks came into the sitting-room with a sheaf of newspapers in his trembling hand, a ghastly white face and eyes of living fire. He could not speak; he could scarcely control his muscles sufficiently to open a journal and point with a shaking finger to a column with great headlines. He placed the newspaper in the hands of his wife, who was alone in the room, then he went softly to the door, closed it, and sank down in an armchair, gasping for breath. His wife, too, turned pale as she read, but her hand was steady.
Mr. Edward Floyd-Rosney, the paper recited, to the great amazement of the city, had brought suit against his wife for divorce. The allegations of the bill set forth that she had fled from her home with Randal Ducie, who was named as co-respondent, and the husband made oath that in seeking to intercept and reclaim her, following her to the station as soon as he discovered her absence, he had witnessed her departure in company with Randal Ducie just as the train moved out of the shed.
Major Majoribanks presently hirpled, for he could scarcely walk, across the room, and laid his finger on another column in a different portion of the paper, and treating of milder sensations.
“I didn’t need this to prove that—that—a base lie——” his stiff lips enunciated with difficulty.
This paragraph treated of the current cotton interests, giving extracts from an address made by Randal Ducie in New Orleans at a banquet of an association interested in levee protection, on the evening and also at the hour when he was represented in Floyd-Rosney’s bill as fleeing with his neighbor’s wife in a city five hundred miles distant. He had made himself conspicuous as an advocate of certain methods of levee protection, and his views were both ardently upheld and rancorously contested even at the festive board. The occasion was thus less harmonious than such meetings should be, and the local papers had much “write-up” besides the menu and the toasts, in the views of various planters and several engineer officers, guests of the occasion, lending themselves to a spirited discussion of Randal Ducie’s recommendations.
Colonel Kenwynton, now at his home on his plantation on the bayou, also gazed with starting eyes and dumfounded amazement at the excerpt from the legal proceedings, within his own knowledge so palpably false. He read it aloud under the kerosene lamp to Hugh Treherne on the other side of the old-fashioned marble-topped center table.
“What do you think of that, sir?” and the Colonel gave the newspaper a resounding blow.
Treherne smiled significantly.
“I am impressed all the time, Colonel, with the insanity of the people outside the asylum in comparison with the patients under treatment.”
“Good God, sir,” cried the Colonel in great excitement, “this is a shotgun business, and Floyd-Rosney is the man of all others to brazen it out on a plea of the ‘unwritten law.’ He will shoot one or the other of the Ducies on sight, and they are as much alike as two black-eyed peas,—they really ought to wear wigs,—he is as likely to pot one as the other. And the poor lady! My heart bleeds for her. I must clear this matter up,” concluded the all-powerful. “I will send a communication to the newspapers.”
Now Colonel Kenwynton had, in his own opinion, the pen of a ready writer. It was not his habit tomince phrases or to revise. He wrote a swift, legible hand, for he was a relic of an age when gentlemen prided themselves on an elegant penmanship, in the days when the typewriter was not. He had no sort of fear of offending Floyd-Rosney, nor care for wounding his feelings. He recited in great detail the facts of Mrs. Floyd-Rosney’s entrance into the Adelantado Hotel, her disclosure of her husband’s desire that she should tour the Orient with the Hardingtons, who had already acquainted the writer that she was to be of their party, and her grief because of her separation from her child, who had been secretly removed from her home as a preparation for her departure. Now and then the Colonel cast his eyes upward for inspiration and waved his pen at arm’s length.
“Not too much hot shot, Colonel,” remonstrated Hugh Treherne, a little uneasy at these demonstrations.
“Attend to your own guns, sir,” retorted the Colonel.
With no regard for the awkwardness of the incident, he stated that the poor lady, although the wife of a millionaire, had not command of ten dollars in the world with which to defray the expenses of her journey to the home of her youth, and to her uncle who stood in the relation of a father to her, for his advice and protection against being shipped out of the country.
“It is my firm belief,” and the Colonel liked the words so well he read them aloud to his comrade, “that we do not live in Turkey, that the honored wives of our Southland do not occupy the position of inmates of a harem, and I could not regard Mrs.Floyd-Rosney as the favorite of a sultan. Therefore it afforded Mr. Adrian Ducie and me great pleasure to advance the money for her tickets to the home of her uncle, Major Majoribanks, and to see her on the train.” He explained, at great length, that the departure of the train was so imminent and immediate that Adrian Ducie bought tickets to the first station for himself and Colonel Kenwynton, in order that they might not be detained by any question at the gate, and, at the moment of boarding the cars, Mr. Floyd-Rosney, “hunting down the persecuted fugitive,” had mistaken Adrian Ducie for his brother, Randal Ducie, who at this moment was in New Orleans, making an address to the Mississippi River Association, giving them the benefit of his very enlightened views, which the whole country would do well to study and adopt, thereby saving many thousands of dollars to the cotton planters of the jeopardized delta.
Restraining himself with difficulty from pursuing this attractive subject, Colonel Kenwynton explained that while Randal Ducie was an old acquaintance of Mrs. Floyd-Rosney’s, Adrian Ducie was a stranger to her, and had met her only on one previous occasion. The undersigned and Adrian Ducie had accompanied the poor lady so far as the first station, and taking farewell of her they had returned to town in the interurban electric. He furthermore informed the public that in view of some possible unforeseen emergency he had taken the liberty of pressing upon this poor lady, absolutely unprovided with money for her necessities, a twenty dollar bill, to be returned at her pleasure, and had since received a letter from her uncle, inclosing that sum, and thankinghim for his consideration. At the home of this uncle—the home of her girlhood—she was now domiciled with him and her aunt, who was formerly the charming Miss Azalia Thornton, whom many elder members of society would well remember.
The Colonel was enjoying himself famously, and now and again Hugh Treherne looked anxiously over the top of the newspaper at him as he tossed the multiplying pages across his left hand, and took a fresh sheet.
The Colonel, with keen gusto, then entered on the subject of Floyd-Rosney, whom he handled without gloves. There ought to be some adequate criminal procedure, he argued, for a man who had offered such an indignity to the wife of his bosom as this. If an equivalent insult could have been tendered to a man Mr. Floyd-Rosney would have been shot down in his tracks—or, at the least, have been made to pay roundly for his brutality. But the wife, whom he has sworn to love, honor, and cherish, is defenseless against his hasty, groundless conclusions. She can only meekly prove her innocence of a guilt that it is like the torments of hell-fire to name in connection with her. Colonel Kenwynton solemnly commended to our lawmakers the consideration of this subject of a penalty of unfounded marital charges. The converse of the proposition never occurred to him. In his philosophy the women were welcome to say what they liked about the men.
If, he maintained, the gentleman accompanying Mrs. Floyd-Rosney had been Randal Ducie instead of his brother, the circumstance would have signified naught with a lady of Mrs. Floyd-Rosney’s character, which the good people of this city woulduphold against her husband even backed by all his filthy lucre. But Randal Ducie was in New Orleans making an address on levee conditions, on which subject his brother Adrian was peculiarly uninformed, and it did seem to Colonel Kenwynton that almost any man would have learned more from sheer observation, even though he had been absent from the country for the past six years. He was now in Memphis, where, being singularly like his twin brother, he was mistaken for Randal Ducie, well known here, and his arrival thus chronicled in the papers. Adrian Ducie was not widely acquainted in Memphis, having spent the last six years in the south of France, where he was interested in silk manufacture.
If Mr. Floyd-Rosney’s course, declared the Colonel, pursuing the subject, in forcing a ghastly round of pleasure on his wife, sighing for her absent child, was typical of his domestic methods, his wife was a martyr. When she would insist on having her child restored to her arms one could imagine his saying—“Go to, woman, where is your pug!” Colonel Kenwynton ardently hoped that the pressure of public opinion would force Mr. Floyd-Rosney to disregard no longer the holy claims of motherhood, and give back this child to the aching arms of his wife. The heart of every man that ever had a mother was fired in revolt against him, despite his wealth, that cannot buy sycophancy, and abject acquiescence and pusillanimous silence from us.
The Colonel admired the rolling periods of his production so much that he read aloud with relish the whole effort from the beginning.
“What do you think of it, Hugh?” he demanded.
“I think the paper won’t publish it,” said Hugh Treherne.
The paper, however, did publish it. The position of Floyd-Rosney in the affair, as the incontestable facts began to be elicited, took on so sorry an aspect that he was hardly in case to bring an action for libel, and the Colonel’s letter was good for the sale of a double edition. People read it with raised eyebrows and deprecation, and several said the Colonel was a dangerous man and ought to have his hands tied behind him. But the plain truth, so plainly set forth, the old traditions which he had invoked, which they had all imbibed more or less, went far to reinstating Mrs. Floyd-Rosney’s position, and to exhibit her husband’s character in a most damaged and disastrous disparagement. He was advised by his counsel, who were disconcerted in the last extreme by being connected in so disreputable a proceeding, that the only course open to policy and prudence and the prospect of conserving any place in public esteem, was to retract absolutely and immediately, frankly confessing a mistake of identity, and to restore the child to the custody of his mother.
“Even that won’t mend the matter,” said Mr. Stacey—his face corrugated with lines unknown to his placid sharpness when he and his firm had no personal concern. He had nerves for his own interest, though not an altruistic quiver for his client.
“All the world thinks,” he continued, “that you are as jealous as a Turk, and that will add a sensational interest to the Duciehurst suit, of a kind that I despise”—he actually looked pained—“when it is developed that your wife found and restored theDucie papers. I wish you had taken my advice; I wish you had taken my advice.”
And Floyd-Rosney said never a word.
He had come to be more plastic to counsel than of yore, and in a few days thereafter the train made its infrequent stoppage at Ingleside, and deposited Mrs. Floyd-Rosney’s favorite old colored servant and her little charge, who sturdily trudged through the grove of great trees—vast, indeed, to his eyes—and suddenly appeared in the hall before his mother, with a tale of wonder relating to the bears, which he believed might be skulking about among the giant oaks.