IXFAMILY BEHIND-THE-SCENES
Richmond, shrewd student of human nature and well versed in his favorite child’s peculiarities of will and temper, did not underestimate what she had revealed to him—neither that which she had revealed consciously nor the no less important things she had unconsciously implied. Also, he had seen the man for whom she confessed infatuation, had measured his physical attractions and had got a fair notion of the inner charms which made the physical charms so potent. It was a time for swift and summary action; this adventurer must be got rid of before he could use the foolish child’s infatuation to put himself in a position where he might cause scandal and, if he chose, could exact heavy blackmail. Theoretically, Richmond regarded his daughter as lovely and fascinating enough to bring any man in the world to her feet. Practically, he believed feeling for her had no part in the doings of “that fortune-hunting hound.” He had been young and now was not far from old, yet he had not seen any exception to the rule he held axiomatic—thatwherever money is involved at all it is the only real factor.
Yes, it was a time for action, instant and drastic. As he drove back toward Wade’s studio he strove with his rage, trying to calm it so that his sly brain might plot one of those subtle tricks which had got him his vast fortune and had made him about the most admired, most hated and most denounced man in American finance. But every time he thought of his child’s weak-minded lack of self-respect or of the brazen impudence of the penniless artist he fell to grinding his teeth again and to cursing his inability to lock her up until she recovered her senses, and to horsewhip the artist out of the neighborhood. Richmond had been so long used to having his will of any and every human being he happened to need that he latterly had become really insane when opposed. It was enough for a man to appear in his pathway; at once he began to take the worst possible view of that man’s character, a method which greatly assisted him in stifling the voice of conscience. Time was when he, like all men who have built themselves up from small beginnings, had his temper well under control, a bloodhound to be released only when it was prudent and advantageous to do so. But the habit of power had wrought as destructively in him as it has in almost all those who have become rulers.His temper was fast becoming a dangerous weakness—that traitor within who overthrows where foes without could never prevail.
When he arrived in sight of the studio there sat “the hound” on the doorsill, smoking a pipe. Roger did not move until Richmond was within, perhaps, twenty yards—reasonable speaking distance; then he rose and waited in large tranquillity. Richmond advanced until he was about ten feet away. There he halted. To have gone nearer would have been to put himself, the small of stature and the spare of build, absurdly in contrast to the towering Roger—like a meager little bush at the base of a tree. Across the space between them he hurled at Roger one of those glances which Roger himself had described as “aimed to kill.”
“What can I do for you, sir?” inquired the young man at length. He showed not a hint that he was aware of the wrath storming in the small man.
“You—you damn scoundrel!” ejaculated Richmond between his teeth—for the feeling of futility acted on his rage like oil on fire.
Richmond’s mien had prepared Roger for something like this, so he bore the shock with infuriating composure. He eyed his insulter without moving a muscle of his face, then turned and crossed thethreshold of his studio, reaching for the door to close it.
“Hold on there!” cried Richmond. “I’ve got something to say to you.”
Roger went on in and closed the door. Richmond stared at it with mouth ajar. What sort of a scheme was this? What did the fellow calculate to gain toward his ends by making such a move? Richmond could not but admire its audacity. “No wonder he has succeeded in convincing the little fool that he is sincere.” He advanced and opened the door. He entered the big, bare room; Roger, crayon in hand, was standing before the sketch that had been upon the easel when they left. He did not glance toward Richmond; he did not pause in his work. Richmond had not entered without having thought out a plan of procedure. Plain talk was the thing—not insulting, but plain. He must frankly assume that the artist was a detected and baffled plotter of a marriage for money.
“My daughter has confessed to me,” said Richmond in a tone that was at least not insulting. “I have talked with her, and she is already ashamed of herself. So I have come from her to inform you that it will be useless for you to pursue your projects further.”
“‘There ought to be a law that could reach fellows like you.’”
The big, young man stood back from his sketch,eyed it critically. A thin stream of smoke curled from the pipe in the corner of his mouth. He went on drawing as if he were alone in the room.
“I wish you clearly to understand,” pursued Richmond, “that your attentions are distasteful to her and to her family. Acquaintance with her must cease.”
Roger sketched on.
As physical violence was out of the question, Richmond did not know what to do—how to extricate himself from the absurd position into which his wrath had hurried him. He glowered at the big artist. The sense of impotence set his rage to steaming. “And I must tell you that if you had not had the cleverness to hold off—if you had lured that foolish child into marriage—you’d never have got a cent—not a cent! I’d cast off a child of mine who so disgraced her family. I’d forget she existed. But now that she realizes how she was trapped—what a slick citizen you are—she’s ashamed of herself—ashamed of herself. There ought to be a law that could reach fellows like you.”
While he was talking Roger was pushing his easel into the huge closet. He now closed and locked it, threw his coat over his arm and strode calmly past Richmond and out at the door. Not a word, not a glance, not a sign. Richmond followed him slowly. Roger marched at a long, swinging gait down the hilltoward the east and disappeared into the woods. Richmond stared after him. When the undergrowth hid him from view Richmond took out his handkerchief and mopped his face. In a long life dotted with many an unusual scene between him and sundry of his fellow-men he had never experienced the like of this.
“The scoundrel!” he said, a look of reluctant respect in his wrathful eyes. “The best game I ever ran up against.”
He must hurry his girl out of the country—and not give her an unwatched moment until the steamer was clear of the dock.
Meanwhile, Beatrice had gone to her mother.
Mrs. Richmond was taking advantage of a lull in the entertaining to give herself a thorough physical overhauling. The lower part of the west wing was fitted up as a complete gymnasium, with a swimming pool underneath. She had played basket ball with her secretary and companion, Miss Cleets, had fenced ten minutes, had swum twenty, and was now lying on a lounge in her boudoir, preparing to go off into a delicious sleep. In came Beatrice.
“Well, mamma,” said she, “the fat’s in the fire.”
Mrs. Richmond opened her drowsy eyes. “You’ve told your father?”
Beatrice nodded. “And he promptly blew up.”
“I was sure he would.”
Beatrice’s expression—strange, satirical, sad, bitterly sad—could not but have impressed her mother had she not been more than half asleep. “You knew him better than I did,” said the girl. “Still—no matter.”
“We’ll talk about it after I’ve had my nap.”
“Oh, there’s nothing to talk about.”
“That’s true,” said her mother comfortably, as she slid luxuriously down the descent into unconsciousness—or is it an ascent? “You know there’s nothing to do but to obey your father. And he’s right. You’ll be better satisfied with Peter.” And Mrs. Richmond was asleep.
Beatrice stood looking at her mother. Her expression of somewhat undaughterly pity vanished and there was a rush of tears to her eyes, an uncontrollable tremor of the fresh, young lips usually curved in response to emotions in which tenderness had little part. “Dear mother,” she murmured. She understood her mother’s lot now, and sympathized in a way which Daniel Richmond’s wife, unconscious what havoc those years of gradually deepened slavery had wrought in her mind, her heart, her whole life, would have regarded as hysterical and silly. Love had lifted Beatrice abovethe narrow environment in which she had been bred and had quickened her to a sense of values she could hardly have got otherwise. She saw her mother as she was, as her mother could no more have seen herself than the lifelong drunkard, happy in his squalid sottishness, could reconstruct and regret the innocence from which he has dropped into the depths by a gradient so easy that it was unnoted. The girl realized that her mother’s chief substantial happiness was inability to comprehend her own fate. “Thank God,” said she to herself, “I had my eyes opened in time.” And one by one before her passed faces of fashionable matrons, young and old, whom she knew well—hard or hardening features, like landscapes upon which only bleak winds blow and only meager light from cold, gray skies falls; eyes from which looked shriveled souls, souls in which all human sympathy, save the condescending charity that is vanity rather than sympathy, had dried up; lives filled with shams and pretenses; trim and showy gardens in which no flower had perfume, no fruit had taste, and where shone not one of the free, beautiful blossoms of genuine love. Not hard hearts really, but shriveled; not unhappy lives, but stunted and sunless, like plants grown in the luxury of a rich loam—in a dark cellar. The shock of disillusionment as to her father completed for Beatrice thetransformation that had been started by the undermining effect of Roger upon her conventional ideas—as a thunderbolt crashes down a weakened dam and releases its floods.
Beatrice passed a light and caressing hand over her mother’s beautifully arranged hair, bent and kissed her. Then she stole from the room—with a lingering glance of tenderest sweetness back from the threshold.
An hour and a quarter ticked away in that splendid room, with its wall coverings and upholsteries of dark-red brocaded silk. In stepped Richmond, brisk and bristling. He frowned at his sleeping wife, tapping his foot impatiently upon the floor. “Lucy!” he called sharply.
Mrs. Richmond’s eyes opened, saw him. Over her face flitted an expression as primeval and as moving as that of a weary slave awakened from delightful sleep to resume the hated toil. “Why did you wake me?” she cried peevishly.
“Where’s Beatrice?”
Mrs. Richmond resumed her normal expression of haughty discontent. “She was in here a while ago,” replied she. “In her rooms, probably.”
“Did she tell you?” asked he.
“About Wade?”
“Yes,” snapped her husband. “What else isthere, pray? Has she been up to something else disgraceful?”
“Why, Dan, she’s done nothing disgraceful,” cried the mother. “Every girl has those passing fancies. But she’ll not oppose you. Anyhow, her own good sense——”
Richmond gave an impatient snort. “She’s a fool—an impetuous fool.”
His wife ventured a sly, catlike look from the corner of her eye into his back. “You always say she’s the most like you of any of——”
“She takes her impetuosity from me. I hardly need say from whom she inherits her folly.”
“I can see nothing to get excited about.” And Mrs. Richmond stretched herself in preparation for a leisurely sitting up.
Richmond regarded his wife with his habitual expression of disdain for her uselessness. He said peremptorily: “You are going to town this evening with her, and you take her abroad day after to-morrow.”
Mrs. Richmond sat up as if she had been prodded with a spike. “I can’t do it!” she cried. “I can’t get ready. And we’ve got invitations out for——”
“I’m going to send my own secretary—Lawton—along with you, to watch her and report to me,” said Richmond. “You have shown that you are unable totake care of her. Excited? Indeed I am excited. To find that a wretched fortune hunter has just about foisted himself on me. And what of our plans for the girl’s future? Have bridge and these masseuses and hair women and all the rest of the fiddle-faddle that you fuddle about with taken from you the last glimmerings of sense?” He was storming up and down the room. “Good Heaven! Have I got to take one eye off my business to keep guard over my family? Are you good fornothing, Lucy?”
“I hope you were careful what you said to her,” exclaimed Mrs. Richmond, alarmed by his complete lack of self-control. There had been many bitter scenes between them since their love waned as their wealth waxed. But theretofore he had attacked her with irony and sarcasm, with sneer and jeer. Never before had he used straight denunciation, made coarse and brutal by a manner he had hitherto reserved for the office. “You can’t treat her as you treat the rest of us,” she warned him.
“And why not, pray?” demanded he. As she was silent, he repeated. “Why not? I said!” he cried in a tone so menacing, so near a blow, that she flushed a deep and angry red.
“Because you have made her independent,” the wife was stung into replying.
“What imbecility!” scoffed he, enraged by this home truth that had been tormenting him for several hours. “She’s got less than any of the rest of you. I’ve purposely kept her where she’d have to behave herself and love me. Your mind never was strong, Lucy. It has become flabby.”
Mrs. Richmond was completely possessed by her anger. A cowed creature is hardest to provoke, cannot be roused until it is literally crazed; then it is like any other lunatic. She laughed in the face of her tyrant. “Love!” she jeered. “Love you! You haven’t the least sense of humor, Dan, or you couldn’t say that.”
Richmond quailed.
“It’s true, Beatrice has less than the rest of us. But Rhoda and I need more than she does. Anyway, my life’s practically over. I’ve got no future—no hope elsewhere, or”—she sprang up and her eyes glittered insanely at him—“or do you suppose I’d stay on with you—you who have become nothing but a slave driver? Then there’s Rhoda. She and her husband need quantities of money. The little you’ve given her is nothing to what she wants and fawns on you to get. As for the boys, they’re too fond of being rich and showing off to dare do anything but cringe——”
“A nice brood you’ve brought up, haven’t you?” frothed her husband.
“They’reyourchildren at heart—all of them. You’ve ruined them. Yes, you—not I, but you!”
He turned his back on her. “You go to Europe day after to-morrow, all the same,” he cried.
“I’ll do nothing of the sort!” retorted she.
“You will spend the money I allow you in the way I direct, or you will not get it,” rejoined he. “Ring for your secretary and your maid and the housekeeper. Set this swarm of idlers in motion. There’s no time to be lost.”
“I’ll not go!”
“Do you want me to give the orders? Do you want the servants to——”
“Oh, you—devil!” she screamed. Then she burst into hysterical tears. “And I’ve got no will. I’m a weak, degraded nothing. If I were a dozen years younger! Oh—oh—oh!”
Richmond rang the bell. “I’ve rung for your maid,” said he. “Stop that slopping—and get busy.” His tone indicated that he was not wholly pleased with himself.
His wife hastily dried her tears and hurried into her dressing-room to remove the traces and to hearten herself with a stiff drink of brandy. Richmond continued to pace the boudoir. Marthe, the suave and ladylike, appeared with a note on her tray. She curtsiedto Richmond and moved toward the dressing-room door. “What have you got there?” demanded Richmond.
“A note for madame—from mademoiselle.”
Richmond snatched it from the little, silver tray, tore it open. His hand shook as he read. “Where did you get this?” he asked, in a voice from which all the passion had died.
“Mademoiselle gave it to Fillet as she was driving away.”
“Go!” said Richmond; and as she went into the hall he entered the dressing-room. His wife was before the dressing-table mirror powdering her nose. He flung the note down before her. “Read that,” he cried.
Mrs. Richmond read:
Dearest Mother:This is to say good-by—for the present. I’ve gone to New York to stop with Allie Kinnear and look about. I’ve no plans except not to come under father’s roof again. I thought he loved me. I’ve found that he hasn’t any heart to love anybody. He can’t bribe me into putting up with his tyranny. I’m afraid he’ll be cowardly enough to vent on you the rage for what’s all his own fault. But he’d do that if I stayed on. So, I don’t make it worse for you by going. Forgive me,mamma. I love you better than I ever did in my life. I’m so sorry to go—yet glad, too.Beatrice.
Dearest Mother:
This is to say good-by—for the present. I’ve gone to New York to stop with Allie Kinnear and look about. I’ve no plans except not to come under father’s roof again. I thought he loved me. I’ve found that he hasn’t any heart to love anybody. He can’t bribe me into putting up with his tyranny. I’m afraid he’ll be cowardly enough to vent on you the rage for what’s all his own fault. But he’d do that if I stayed on. So, I don’t make it worse for you by going. Forgive me,mamma. I love you better than I ever did in my life. I’m so sorry to go—yet glad, too.
Beatrice.
Mrs. Richmond laid the note calmly aside and resumed powdering her nose. She turned her head this way and that, to study effects from different lights. Apparently the note had made upon her no stronger impression than would have been made by the swift passage of a fly between her and the mirror.
“She’s gone,” said Richmond, in a dazed way.
“And I doubt if she’ll come back,” said his wife.
“You must bring her back.”
Mrs. Richmond was searching in the drawer for some toilet article. “I can do nothing with her,” said she absently. “You know that.Wherehas Marthe put——”
“You act as if you did not care,” snarled he.
“And I don’t,” replied the wife indifferently. “She’s better off. I hope she’ll marry Wade.”
“Marry?” sneered Richmond. “Do you suppose he’d marry her when he finds out that she has cut herself off?”
“Maybe so,” replied Mrs. Richmond, with intent to infuriate.
Richmond, with the wounds to his vanity inflicted by Roger open again and burning and bleeding, gavea kind of howl of rage. “Don’t be a fool!” he shouted. “I say he will not marry her!”
“Then you ought to be satisfied,” said his wife pleasantly.
“Satisfied?” Richmond, white with rage, shook his hand in her very face. “Satisfied? With the only one of my family that was worth while gone—you talk about my beingsatisfied!”
“Then why did you drive her out?” inquired she coldly.
Richmond flung out his arms in a vague, wild gesture, and rushed to the open window.
“You might go to Kinnear’s and talk with her,” suggested his wife.
“Say what?” demanded Richmond over his shoulder.
“How should I know?”
He wheeled round. “Are you on her side or on mine?”
“Oh, I’m just a fool,” said Lucy.
Richmond’s scowl at her changed to a scowl into vacancy. The scowl faded into a mere stare. Suddenly he burst out in a voice from which grief had washed every trace of anger: “I’ve got to have her back! I’ve got to have her back.”
Mrs. Richmond’s expression of amazement slowlyyielded to one of sullen jealousy. “That’s right,” sneered she. “Go and apologize to her. Knuckle down to her.”
The husband, a wholly different figure from the bristling, bustling, self-assured tyrant of a few minutes before, went out without another word. The wife looked after him. The humiliation of having her daughter exalted while she herself was in the dust under his contemptuous foot had one consolation—the tyrant had met his match and might himself soon be abased.