IX
MARGARET leaned over the glass show-counter in Daddy Lerwick’s curiosity-shop and looked down at the pathetic medley within.
Her figure, in its usual elaborate elegance, was in sharp contrast to the dingy surroundings. The fine camel’s-hair shawls hung up behind her, the old velvet curtain with its tapestry border, the moth-eaten furs, the tarnished Mexican sombrero, the ancient horse-pistols, the innumerable curious articles which heaped every corner of the room, down to the chintz curtain, screening the rear end of the shop in a weak-minded and fluttering way, formed a patchwork background.
In the case was an ivory fan of antique workmanship which had drifted here at last, carrying with it a history which might frame many a tale, and with it a tortoise-shell comb, with a top eight inches high, some gold link cuff buttons, a string of pearls that had clasped the throat of a beauty in 1776, but lay now, pale and lustreless and forgotten,the price, perhaps, of a week’s lodging or of a grave, God knows!
But Margaret was interested in a bracelet set with topaz, still beautiful, still radiant, still warm with a life’s history. She passed the stones to and fro between her slender fingers, pricing them with careless indifference. The romance and the sorrow of it would have touched Rose Temple and sent her shuddering from the purchase. To Margaret they signified nothing but jewels and the value of jewels, for her life of selfish ease, of social prominence, her endless quest for pleasure, had nearly atrophied those finer and more tender emotions of sympathy and love for her fellow creatures.
Daddy Lerwick himself waited on her. He was a short, thickset man with the face of an underdone pudding, his gray whiskers attached like wings below the ears. His small dull eyes seemed to observe little, but he was notorious for driving a shrewd bargain and nothing really escaped him.
“The stones are good stones,” he commented, clasping his fat creased hands on the case in an attitude which displayed the solitaire on his little finger, “and the price very low, madam.”
Margaret laughed, her eyes haggard again.“You get them second-hand,” she observed carelessly; “who brought these?”
He looked at her without surprise and unclasped his hands. “I have the name,” he said; “the law requires that we take the name, but I don’t think they ever give the right one, and we don’t tell it—usually. It was a young girl, madam, quite a young girl.”
“Never mind!” Margaret dropped the chain, her mood changing. “I really didn’t want to know,” she said with a shrug, “why should I? I don’t know why I asked. I’ll take the gold cigarette-case, if you can get the monogram off, and the tea-pot. Bring them over and I’ll send the check.”
The man bowed and rubbed his hands. He knew Margaret very well and profited largely by her careless and profuse use of money. Knowing the world too, as he did, and the people in it, he thought her more wretched than the girl who had traded the bracelet, or the owner of the gold cigarette-case who, he happened to know, had since shot himself and now lay in an unmarked grave. Daddy Lerwick, indeed, knew more than was good for him but, perhaps, not more than many others who stand thus at the gateway between the upper stratum of gilded pleasure andthe lower stratum of sordid misery, and receive the tolls!
Meanwhile, unconscious of his eyes and certainly proudly disdainful of his thoughts, the society beauty, the Cabinet minister’s wife, trailed through the dingy shop and passed out by the side door, which Lerwick opened for her, to the stairs of Allestree’s studio. As she ascended, the cloud which had rested on her face slightly cleared and her expression grew more decisive; the desolate misery of her heart had taken a more concrete form, she had arrived at last at a resolution. She had reached a point where she must resist or die. Her bruised heart throbbed with continuous pain and she was proudly aware that she was losing all—losing it, too, without an apparent struggle. She, Margaret, who had always borne herself proudly and defiantly to the world, was she to be a mendicant asking the alms of love and asking it in vain?
She swept on, crossed the landing under Aunt Hannah’s accustomed window, and thrusting aside the portière entered upon a tableau of the artist and his two new clients, Mrs. and Miss Vermilion, and her enemy, Mrs. Wingfield. The two older women stout, tightly laced, gorgeously over-dressed, the younger, slender and well done by the best Frenchart and with that indescribable air of disdain which, commonly assumed by the parvenu to be the sign manual of birth and breeding, might be called the bar sinister of society. At the sight of Margaret, however, she unbent with an alacrity which was as amazing as it was sudden.
“Dear Mrs. White,” she chirped, “do come and advise me; mamma wants me painted, and really I can’t choose a pose! I saw a picture of the Duchess of Leinster which was lovely, but Mr. Allestree says he never copies even attitudes! Isn’t it confusing?”
Margaret shrugged one shoulder and held out two fingers to the elder women. “Try Aphrodite rising from the sea,” she suggested with a provoking drawl, “I dare say Bobby can do waves, he’s admirable on flesh tints.”
The girl colored furiously and bit her lip. It was impossible to know where to meet Mrs. White, she reflected, without daring to provoke another catastrophe by retaliation.
But Mrs. Wingfield had felt the sting of Margaret’s rudeness too often. She moved to the door with the rustle of silk draperies. “I hear Mr. Fox is to marry Miss Temple,” she said pointedly, looking Margaret full in the face.
“And I heard that Mr. Wingfield was to getthe mission to Brazil,” retorted Margaret unmoved.
Mrs. Wingfield’s cheek crimsoned and the feathers on her bonnet trembled. “Nothing of the sort! You don’t mean to tell me you heard that?”
Margaret shrugged her shoulders again. “One hears everything, you know!” she said, with a dangerous smile.
Mrs. Wingfield breathed hard and opened her lips, but Mrs. Vermilion was a wiser if a duller woman; she laid a restraining hand on her arm and propelled her gently but firmly toward the exit.
“You’re coming to my ball next week, Mrs. White?” she ventured with a propitiating smile.
“Oh, is it next week?” drawled Margaret, with elevated brows, “I never know. Little Miss English keeps my books; if she didn’t I should go to the wrong place every night and forget the White House.”
“I thought your memory more accommodating,” Mrs. Wingfield retaliated pointedly; “I remember when you forgot to come to my dinner after you’d accepted.”
Margaret laughed. “Did I?” she said, “I’m evidently a sinner. Tell Mr. Wingfield that Iheard who wrote in those corrections in that paragraph of the message—but I really can’t tell.”
Mrs. Wingfield turned away with a red cheek.
“Margaret!” remonstrated Allestree sharply, as the three women withdrew, “how can you? Good Lord, talk about the brutality of men! Women are Malays and North American Indians—you have no mercy! I’m blushing all over now at the thought of it!”
She laughed, her short, even white teeth set close together, her eyes sparkling. “Wasn’t I horrid?” she said, “I haven’t any manners and they hate me.”
“I should think they would!” he replied warmly, “Margaret, why do you do such things? It isn’t like you, it isn’t—”
“Well bred!” she concluded dryly, “I know it. The other night, too, I did something that horrified Wicklow. We were dining at Mrs. O’Neal’s; I knelt, and kissed the cardinal’s ring. Wicklow was wild; he seemed to have an A. P. A. nightmare at once. It was all in the New York papers yesterday,” Margaret laughed again, resting her arms on the back of the carved chair where Rose had sat.
Allestree laid down his brushes; he had been working on a sketch of Margaret herself, and,lighting a cigarette, he passed his case to her. She took one mechanically and lit it at his. As the spark flamed up between them, he caught the hollowness of her eyes, the startling pallor of her face.
“What in the world is it, Margaret?” he asked sharply; “you’re ill.”
She turned and looked over her shoulder into the mirror. “Do I look so?” Something she saw in her own image, in the deeply shadowed eyes, the sharpened curve of the cheeks startled her. “What a fright I grow to be! No wonder that Vermilion girl stared. What an Aphrodite she’d make—in French corsets and a trail!” Margaret laughed silently.
Then catching a look on Allestree’s face which she read too easily. “Were you born proper, Bobby?” she said, knocking the ashes from her cigarette, “or did you achieve it, or was it thrust upon you?”
“I can’t paint you in this mood, Margaret,” he said dryly, “you wouldn’t look like yourself; you’d remind me of a malicious elf.”
She leaned her elbow on the chair back again, resting her chin in the hollow of her hand. “There!” she said, “I told William Fox that you’d make me the imp to Rose’s angel.”
“I’d like to make you what you are, a fascinating, wilful woman with no heart at all!” he retorted.
“No heart!” she laughed, tossing her cigarette away; “that’s true, Bobby, I’ve no heart!”
As she spoke she moved over to Rose’s portrait which still rested on an easel in the corner. It was a magnificent piece of work, the artist had dreamed his heart into it; the young head symbolized youth, purity, hope. The figure had the simplicity and loveliness of some beautiful Greek inspiration when the art of Greece was young. Margaret stood looking at it in silence, herself unaware of the sharp contrast between the pictured youth and enthusiasm of this girl and her own slim beauty, her subtly charming and unhappy face, which seemed to have lost that magic touch which is like a breath from the Elysian fields, the presence of belief, of hope, most of all of love. She turned at last and met Allestree’s thoughtful glance. “Bobby,” she said briefly, “you’re a fool.”
He smiled. “What else, oh, mine enemy?” he asked.
“Everything;” Margaret threw out both hands with a gesture which seemed to appeal to earth and heaven; “a blind fool, Bobby! Youlove her, she probably loves you, and yet you stand by and let her go! Fool, fool!” Margaret drew her brows down, her cheeks flaming:
“‘He either fears his fate too much,Or his deserts are small,Who fears to put it to the touch,To win or lose it all!’”
“‘He either fears his fate too much,Or his deserts are small,Who fears to put it to the touch,To win or lose it all!’”
“‘He either fears his fate too much,
Or his deserts are small,
Who fears to put it to the touch,
To win or lose it all!’”
she quoted defiantly.
Allestree lighted another cigarette. “My dear Margaret,” he said, “let me show you this sketch of my mother.”
Margaret bit her lip and stood watching as he turned over two or three sketches. As he did so her quick eye caught familiar outlines. “So, that is Lily Osborne?” she said, with a hard little laugh; “I’m not sensitive, Bobby, let me see it. Did you know the latest gossip about her?”
Allestree shook his head. “Spare me!” he said smiling.
“Not a bit of it, you deserve no quarter!” Margaret took the sketch and looked at it, ignoring the one of Mrs. Allestree; “it’s good,” she commented with amusement; “how fine and full blooded she looks, and reptilian. The gossip is that she’s caused the recall of the Russian Ambassador; she’s been telling tales out of school,the female diplomatist, you know! What did you do, by the way, when she met Rose here?”
“Oh, we got on,” said Allestree laughing; “what of it?”
“You haven’t heard?” Margaret laughed; “Rose went there to one of madame’s small and earlies; you know the kind? It seems they played bridge and Rose didn’t understand it was for money; imagine a lamb in the hands of wolves! Poor little simpleton! Well, Lily told her at last that she owed two hundred. Rose fled home, and the judge—” Margaret laughed and shrugged her shoulders. “Old Testament Christian, you know! He sent the check but he told Rose to cut her dead.”
“I knew there was something; Rose never told me, but they speak,” he rejoined, “the way you women do! In spite of your shrugs, Margaret, you know the ethics of the thing were abominable; it’s swindling.”
Margaret continued to laugh. “My dear Bobby,” she said, “Rose isn’t sixteen and we all play bridge; I lost six hundred last night; she should have known. It’s tiresome to be a madonna on a pillar!”
“Still Rose was right,” he said bluntly.
“Oh, granted!” Margaret touched his arm lightly; “and you love her!”
Allestree made an impatient movement. “Don’t torture me, Margaret!” he said sharply.
She whirled around and held out both hands, her eyes moist. “I’m a brute, Bobby!” she cried; “forgive me—I always say the wrong thing unless some one sets me a copy; let’s talk about Mahomet’s coffin!”