Part 10

“I’m so disappointed,” she said presently. “All winter I’ve had the same man take me in everywhere--you know, we follow precedence very closely here in Washington. And, when I found I was to have a new man, I had _such_ hopes. The other man and I had got bored to death with each other. And now--you’re threatening to be a failure!”

Frothingham did not like this--it was pert for a woman to speak thus to him; he resented it as a man and he resented it as Lord Frothingham. “That’s a jest, ain’t it?” he drawled. “We English, you know, have a horribly defective sense of American humour.”

“No, it wasn’t a jest,” she replied. “It was a rudeness, and I beg your pardon. I thought to say something smart, and--I missed. Let’s change the subject. Do you see that intellectual-looking man with the beard on the other side of the table--next to Ysobel Ballantyne?”

“The surly chap?”

“Yes--and he’s surly because mamma has made a dreadful mistake. She’s put him two below the place his rank entitles him to. He’ll act like a savage all evening.”

“Fancy! What a small matter to fly into a rage over.”

“A small matter for a large man, but a large matter for a small man. Sometimes I think all men are small. They’re much vainer than women!”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because of what I’ve seen in Washington. They say the women started this craze for precedence. I don’t know whether that’s so or not. But I do know that in the three years I’ve been out I’ve found the men worse than the women. And those things look so much pettier in a man, too.”

“But I thought there wasn’t any rank in this country.”

“So I thought--I was educated in France. I believe in rank and all that--it seems to me absurd to talk about equality. But I despise this silly squabble over little places that last only a few years at most. As Mr. Boughton was saying--you know Mr. Boughton?”

“You mean the Second Secretary at our Embassy?”

“Yes. He said to me only last night: ‘America has an aristocracy just as we have, but gets from it all the evils and none of the good, all the pettiness, none of the dignity and sense of responsibility.’”

“But they tell me it’s different--out West.”

“I don’t know. I can only speak of the East--especially of Washington. There isn’t a capital in Europe or Asia, the diplomats say, with so elaborate a system of rank and precedence as we have. Why, do you know, it’s so bad that the fifteen-hundred-dollar-a-year clerks and their families have a society of their own between the circles of those who get eighteen hundred and those who get twelve hundred. And they’d rather die than mix with those who get less than they do.”

“Really! Really, now!”

“And anything like a good time is almost impossible. It’s precedence, precedence everywhere, always. You can’t entertain informally.”

“It must be as if one were laced in a straight jacket.”

“I’m going abroad next year and am never coming back, if I can help it. I’m going where at least there’s real rank to get excited about. I’ll go with Ysobel and her mother--unless Ysobel decides to marry on this side.”

Frothingham was internally agitated, but gave no sign of it.

“She’s marrying either Mr. Boughton or that handsome Italian sitting next to Mrs. Ballantyne--the Prince di Rontivogli.”

“Ah,” said Frothingham. And to himself, “Just my rotten luck!”

“She makes no secret of it,” continued Miss Pope, “so I’m not violating her confidence. She says she’s determined to marry higher than her sister did. She likes Mr. Boughton better, though I should think she’d prefer the Prince--his face is ideal, and such manners! But, while Mr. Boughton is his granduncle’s heir and his granduncle is old and a widower--still--well, the dukedom might slip away from him. For instance, he might die before his granduncle.”

“That would be ghastly for her, wouldn’t it, now?” said Frothingham.

“It would kill poor Ysobel. She’s _so_ proud and ambitious! And that’s why she has an eye for the Prince--he’s of a frightfully old family, you know. One of his ancestors tried to poison Cesare Borgia and did succeed in getting himself poisoned or smothered or something thrilling. And they were an old, old family then. Oh, Ysobel is flying high. If her father would give her mother and her a free hand, I think she’d land a prince of some royal family.”

Behind his mask Frothingham was hastily reforming his line of battle. The Ballantyne fortune was apparently inaccessible to an attack from a mere Earl; but he could keep it under surveillance while employing his main force against the Pope citadel, which seemed to be inviting attack. He did not fancy Miss Pope--she was too patently conscious of her cleverness and it was of a kind that did not attract him, was not what he regarded as feminine; nor was she physically up to his standard for his Countess-to-be. But--she had the essential; and he had been in America nearly five months and had had two, practically three, failures.

For the rest of his two weeks at the Ballantynes’ he spent as much time as he courteously could with Miss Pope. And when he joined Joe Wallingford at the New Willard, sharing his suite--and paying less than a third of the expenses--he was with her a large part of each day, driving with her, riding with her, lunching where she lunched, dining where she dined, dancing with her, walking with her, sending her flowers. In Boston and New York he had been somewhat hindered by the chaperon system, careless though it was. Here chaperoning was the flimsiest of farces, and he and Elsie were together almost as freely as if she were a man.

In his fourth week in Washington he called one afternoon to keep an engagement to walk with her at half-past four. She had not returned from a girl’s luncheon to which she had gone. At ten minutes past five she came, full of apology for her delay--“I really couldn’t leave. The lunch was over before three o’clock, but the Secretary of State’s daughter was enjoying herself and, though we were all furious with her, as we had other engagements, she wouldn’t leave; and, of course, none of us could leave until she left. When she did finally take herself away the Secretary of the Treasury’s daughter had given up her engagement and had settled herself for the rest of the afternoon. She didn’t leave until ten minutes ago. So there we were, penned in and forced to stay.”

“Precedence again?” said Frothingham.

“Precedence. It’s outrageous that those two girls should show so little consideration.”

“I’ve known the same sort of thing to happen at home,” Frothingham assured her. “Once when I’d gone to a house only for dinner I had to stay until half-past four in the morning. The Prince of Wales was there, and he was just then mad about ‘bridge.’ He insisted on playing and playing. Several of us were asleep in the next room--the hostess was nodding over her cards.”

“But he must have seen,” said Elsie. “Why didn’t he take the hint?”

“Well, you see, the poor chap led such a deadly dull life in those days. When he found himself having a bit of fun he didn’t care a rap what it cost anyone else. It’s a mistake to bother with other people’s feelings, don’t you think?”

“It only makes them supersensitive and hard to get on with,” replied Elsie. “I used to be considerate. Now I’m considerate only when it’s positively rude not to be. Besides, I must expect to buy my way through the world. I never had any friends--though I used to think I had, when I was a fool and didn’t know that just the sight of wealth makes human beings tie up their good instincts and turn loose the worst there is in them. Even when rich people are friendly with each other it’s usually in the hope of getting some sordid advantage.”

“Do you apply that to yourself or only to others?”

“It applies to me--it has applied to me ever since I found what sort of a world I was living in.”

“I don’t believe it, my dear girl,” drawled Frothingham, the more convincingly for the lack of energy in his tone. And he gave her a quick, queer look through his eyeglass and was stolid again.

She coloured just a little. “Oh, I suppose I’d be as big a goose as ever if I should fall in love again.”

“Again?”

She laughed. “I’ve been in love four times in the last four years, and almost in love three times more. That’s a poor record for a Washington girl--there are so many temptations, with all these fascinating foreigners streaming through. But I’m not counting the times I’ve been made love to in half a dozen modern languages--I and my father’s money.”

“Possibly you were unjust to some of the men who’ve said they admired you. They may not have attached so much importance to your father’s money as--you do.”

The thrust tickled her vanity--nature had given her an over-measure of vanity to compensate for her under-measure of charm. She looked pleased, though she said: “I don’t deceive myself as to myself.”

“A man might have been attracted to you because you had money,” continued Frothingham dispassionately, “and might have stayed on for your own sake.”

Elsie lifted her eyebrows. “Perhaps,” she said. “I’ll admit it’s possible.”

“And, honestly now, do you pretend that you’d marry a man who had nothing but love to offer you? What has attracted you in the men you thought well of? You say there have been four--or, rather, four and three halves. Has any one of ’em been a poor devil of a nobody?”

Elsie hesitated; in the twilight he saw from the corner of his eye that her upper lip was trembling. They were walking near the tall, white, glistening monument, in the quiet street that skirts the grounds of the White House. “One,” she said, at last, in a low voice. “I didn’t care especially for him. But sometimes I think he really did care for me--he was a wild, sensitive creature.” She looked at Frothingham and smiled. “And when I get in my black moods I’m half sorry I sent him away.”

“But you did send him away, didn’t you?” Frothingham’s expression and tone were satirical, yet sympathetic, too. “And you complain of men for being precisely as you are!”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” she admitted.

“I take it for granted the girl who consents to marry me will consent because she wishes to be a Countess.” He drew closer to her--she looked her best in twilight hours, and he succeeded in putting as much tenderness into his voice as was necessary to enable so drawling and indifferent a person to create an impression of sentiment. “If I were walking here with the girl I wished to win, I’d say nothing of sentiment. I’d simply trust to the only thing I have that could possibly induce her to listen to me.”

She glanced shyly up at him--he thought her almost pretty.

“Do you think that would win her?” he asked in a low tone.

“I--don’t--know,” she replied slowly. Her commonplace voice had also been touched with the magic that had transformed her face.

“Won’t you think of it?”

“If you wish,” she murmured.

They went on in silence a few minutes, then she spoke in an attempt at her usual voice: “But we must turn back. I’ll have just time to dress for dinner.”

And he decided that he would say no more on the principal subject for several days. He thought he understood how to deal with American girls rather better now. “I’ll give her a chance to walk round the trap,” he thought. And then he reminded himself that it was hardly a trap--wasn’t she getting the better of the bargain? “She’s indulging in a luxury, while I’m after a desperate necessary. And, by Jove, it won’t be easy not to make a face, if I get it--with her.”

XIII

So confident was he--and so out of conceit with his impending success--that he took a day’s vacation, going up to New York with Wallingford to attend a ball for which Longview had hired half of Sherry’s, and otherwise to amuse himself. The revisiting of the scene of his early failure depressed him; he lost nearly a thousand dollars at Canfield’s; he borrowed a thousand from Wallingford; he returned to Washington in the depths of the blues. And he found the posture of his affairs completely changed.

On the very day he gave Elsie the chance to become a Countess, Prince Rontivogli had discovered that Ysobel Ballantyne had decided that she was sufficiently in love with Boughton to take the risk of his not succeeding to the title. Rontivogli was not the man to waste time on impossibilities--indeed, he had no time to waste. He turned away from the beautiful Miss Ballantyne instantly, and with all the ardour of his fiery Southern nature laid siege to Elsie Pope. And, while Elsie was somewhat reserved in her welcome, he found an ally in her father, who thought it would sound extremely well to be able to say, “My daughter, the Princess.”

Rontivogli was tall, had a clear, pallid skin, eloquent black eyes, the brow and nose and chin of an Italian patrician, the manners and speech of chivalrous adoration for women which disguise profound contempt for their intelligence.

When Frothingham, just returned from New York, and still enshrouded in surly gloom, drove up to Pope’s door, he saw Rontivogli’s cabriolet standing a few yards down the drive. Rontivogli was conducting himself in Washington as if he were rich, so plausibly that only the foreign element was without doubts as to the object of his visit to America. At sight of this trap Frothingham scowled. “What’s that Italian doing here?” he said to himself, and his fear answered the question. When they came face to face in the parlour Elsie greatly enjoyed it. The Italian was smooth and urbane; Frothingham, careless of the feelings of a man he despised and thoroughly English in his indifference to the demands of courtesy to Elsie, was almost uncivil. He and Elsie talked for a few minutes, then she drew Rontivogli into the conversation. The Prince answered in French, and French became the language. Frothingham spoke it far worse than Rontivogli spoke English, so he was practically excluded. He sat dumb and stolid, wondering why “the brute hasn’t the decency to take himself off when I came last.”

But “the brute” drew Elsie into a lively discussion on a book he had sent her and, because there was no break in the argument, was seemingly not impolite in lingering. It was almost an hour before he rose, kissed her hand, gave her an adoring look, said “_À bientôt_,” and departed. But, although he was physically gone, he was actually still there--if anything Frothingham was more acutely conscious of him.

“I don’t believe Miss Ballantyne could stand that fellow,” he said, aware of his tactlessness, but too angry to care. “I think all those Latins unendurable. They’re a snaky lot and their manners suggest waiters and valets.”

Elsie flushed and slightly drew in the corners of her mouth, a sure sign that her temper had been roused in the worst way--through wounded vanity. “Oh, you British are so insular,” she replied, “and so self-satisfied. Here in Washington we learn to appreciate all kinds of foreigners and to make allowances even for Englishmen”--that last with a mere veneer of good nature. “I think Rontivogli charming. He’s so intelligent, and has so much temperament.”

Frothingham recovered his self-control in presence of obvious danger. He looked calmly at her through his eyeglass. “Dare say you’re right,” he drawled. “Rontivogli’s a decent enough chap, so far as I know, and for an Italian devilish clean-looking.”

Elsie had no intention of driving him off; in spite of the Italian’s superiority in title and “temperament,” she preferred the Englishman--she knew him better and in a more candid way. She became conciliatory, and they were soon amicable again. But Frothingham saw that his vacation had been perilously costly, that he must work to reinstate himself, that it was not a wise moment for reopening the matter of the engagement which only four days ago seemed all but settled. He found that Elsie was dining at the Italian Embassy, to go afterwards to a ball at the Vice-President’s to which he was invited. He arranged to see her there and left.

Boughton and he dined together at the Metropolitan Club. While they were having a before-dinner cocktail Boughton told him, in confidence, that he was engaged to Ysobel Ballantyne. “So that’s why I find Rontivogli poaching,” thought Frothingham. And he said presently: “What do you know about that chap Rontivogli? He _looks_ a queer ’un.”

“Not a thing,” replied Boughton. “I had all our fellows writing over to the other side, following him up. The answers thus far show nothing downright shady. He’s down to a box of a house and a few acres just north of Milan. And that’s swamped in mortgages. No one knows how he raised the wind for this trip. He seems to have a good bit of cash, doesn’t he?”

“I’m particularly interested in knowing about him,” continued Frothingham. “He’s developed an astonishing interest in a girl friend of mine. I’d hate to see her taken in by a scamp. And I’m sure he’s that.”

“Oh,” said Boughton. “Miss Pope?”

“Yes,” replied Frothingham. “And she thinks well of him.”

“I’ll be glad to help you, old man. I sha’n’t drop my inquiry as I’d intended.”

“Thanks,” said Frothingham. And they talked of other matters.

When he looked Elsie up at the Vice-President’s that night for the first of the dances she had promised him, he found her on a rustic bench in the garden, almost screened from observation, Rontivogli beside her. The Italian’s classic face was aglow, and Frothingham saw that he had checked a torrent of enamoured eloquence. He saw, also, that Elsie was not pleased by the interruption. However, she left Rontivogli and went with him. As they entered the ballroom he said: “I don’t care for this music, do you? Let’s sit it out. Only”--he gave her a look of quiet raillery--“you must engage not to go back to your volcano until _my_ dance is over.”

“Volcano?” A smile of pleased vanity strayed into her eyes and out again.

“Yes--your Vesuvius, whose eruption I was brute enough to interrupt. Beastly of me, wasn’t it?”

“Rontivogli seems to annoy you a great deal.”

“He? Not in the least.” And his tranquil eyeglass affirmed his falsehood. “But I assure you he’ll spout all the fiercer for the interruption. I know those Southern chaps. I don’t wonder we stand no show against ’em. I tossed the sponge as soon as I saw what he was about.”

They were sitting on the stairs now and could talk without being overheard. “Possibly you may remember,” he went on, “I said something that was rather important to me--last Thursday, down near the monument--at half-past six precisely, to be exact--I heard a clock strike as I finished. Do you recall it?”

Elsie was puzzled by his light, satirical tone. “Yes,” she said. “I do vaguely recall that you said something vague.”

“I didn’t mean to be vague. But that doesn’t matter now. I see there’s no chance for me--at present. And I wished to say to you that at least I sha’n’t give up our delightful friendship. No matter what you do with your Italian, you’ll feel that I’m your friend, won’t you?” Frothingham said it as if he meant it; and to a considerable extent he did mean it--chagrined though he was, he fancied her so little in the rôle he had invited her to play that his prospective defeat found him not utterly despondent. He had reasoned out his course carefully and had come to the conclusion that his chance lay in posing as her disinterested friend. Perhaps she would confide in him, would give him the opportunity to advise and criticise--an admirable position from which to undermine and destroy his rival.

As Elsie had not fully made up her mind to Rontivogli, and as she saw nothing but advantage to her in keeping Frothingham “on the string,” she responded to his frank and manly appeal. And she believed what he said, as she believed pretty much everything men told her; and she liked him better than ever. “If he were only a prince,” she said to herself regretfully, “and had temperament.”

That same night she accepted Rontivogli; when Frothingham came to lunch the next day she told him. “Well,” he drawled, “I can’t say I’m shouting glad. But I can honestly congratulate _him_. And--I hope you won’t regret.”

“We’re not announcing the engagement for several days,” she said.

“That’s good. You don’t mind my saying--you know we’ve agreed to be friends--but I think you--your father ought to make careful inquiry about him. I’m sure everything’s all right, but--it’s prudent.”

Elsie smiled. “Oh, we have made inquiries,” she said. “Besides, anyone can see what sort of man he is--anyone but a prejudiced Englishman.”

“I don’t deny prejudice. Is it surprising?” And he gave her a long look that might have meant anything or nothing. “But--one can’t be too careful about foreigners.”

“Foreigners!” Elsie laughed with good-humoured mockery. “And what are _you_?”

“Why, an Englishman. We don’t count as foreigners here.”

“No--but as--as”--Elsie had “poor relations” on the tip of her tactless tongue, but she caught it and changed it to “step-brothers.” And she went on, “Which is much more suspicious.”

Frothingham found encouragement in her willingness to discuss her fiancé with him--it showed plainly how foreign she felt to Rontivogli, how friendly to him. A few afternoons later--it was the day after the dinner at which her engagement was formally announced--she went with Frothingham to call on “Madame Almansa” in her surroundings of Spartan simplicity. They found Ysobel and Boughton there also, and when Ysobel took Frothingham and Boughton into the small library adjoining the smaller drawing room to look at some old prints “Sue” had brought with her from Spain, Elsie talked with “Sue” of the engagement.

Madame Almansa was chary of congratulations, full of cautionings and doubts. “I don’t wish to cast a shadow on your happiness, dear--for you _are_ happy, aren’t you?”

“Indeed I am,” replied Elsie convincingly--Rontivogli was an ideal lover; he could even sing his mad passion in a voice that was well-trained and thrilling.

“But--you know my sad experience.” Madame Almansa sighed like Medea thinking on the treachery of Jason. Her glance fell upon the engagement ring. She took Elsie’s hand. “How beautiful!” she exclaimed. “I love emeralds and that is a magnificent one. And only a tiny flaw.”

Elsie coloured with annoyance. “I think you are mistaken,” she said. “It’s a perfect stone.”

“Certainly it is perfect, dear,” replied Madame Almansa in her superior, informative tone. “Perfect for an emerald. But, you know, there are no emeralds of size anywhere in the world that haven’t flaws. At least, I never heard of one. Emeralds are valuable in spite of their flaws.”

Elsie coloured again, this time with annoyance at having exposed her ignorance.

“A superb setting,” continued Madame Almansa. “It must be very, very old. I love that kind of setting--beautifully engraved, dull gold. The only objection is that it’s the best kind for deceiving one as to genuineness, isn’t it? One could not tell whether that stone was genuine or imitation. You know, they make such wonderful imitations. When I was going out in the world I had all my best jewels reproduced in imitation stuff, and usually I wore the imitation. One felt so much safer.”

Elsie drew her hand away, smiling sweetly. She was inwardly raging--“The cat!” she said to herself. “Clawing me viciously, and purring as if she hadn’t a claw.”

She left in a few minutes, Rontivogli calling for her. To relieve her feelings, and also because she was in the habit of saying nearly everything that came into her head, she told him what Madame Almansa had said, making vigorous comments as she related.