Part 12

He left the room, muttering as he reached the hall, “The miserable swindler! He knows we won’t have any further scandal, no matter what it costs.” When he returned he had in his hand the emerald he and Elsie had bought at Tiffany’s. He laid it on the corner of the desk nearest the nobleman.

“This is _a_ genuine emerald,” he said, his voice neither hot nor cold. “You may take _it_--if you like.”

“I thank you,” replied the nobleman with a slight bow of acknowledgment, as if a wrong to him had been righted.

He put the emerald and the ring in his waistcoat pocket; he put the box, with the false emerald in it, on the corner of the desk exactly where Senator Pope had laid the genuine stone. Then he went on, in a way that was the perfection of courtesy: “May I presume further on your kindness? This German cur has placed me in a distressing position. I wish to leave America at once, to return where a gentleman cannot be thus attacked without defence. Unfortunately----” He hesitated with a fine affectation of delicacy.

Senator Pope’s eyes were more disagreeable to look at than any human being had ever before seen them. “I shall be glad to give you any _reasonable_ assistance,” he said with resolute self-control.

“You are most kind!” Rontivogli was almost effusive. “I shall return any advance you may make as soon as I am at home.”

“How much?” asked Pope with a trace of impatience.

“I have many obligations which must be settled before I leave. I had just cabled for a remittance, but I wish to go before it can arrive. Might I trouble you for an advance of, perhaps, five thousand--I think that will be enough.”

Senator Pope unlocked and opened a drawer, took out a flat package of bills. “Here is a thousand dollars,” he said. “I cannot advance you more. And I trust you will sail the day after to-morrow.” He looked hard at the Prince. “That will spare me the necessity of making a _private_ appeal to the Italian Embassy through our State Department.”

“You are most kind, _mon cher_ Senator,” replied Rontivogli.

He put the package of bills in the inside pocket of his coat. He reflected a few seconds, then took his top hat. “Will you do me the honour of presenting my compliments and regrets to Madame Pope--and to Mademoiselle?” he said with steady eyes and elaborate politeness. “I thank you again. I regret that we part in circumstances so unhappy. I shall send your little advance within the month.”

He bowed profoundly, and Senator Pope inclined his head. He went to the door, turned there, bowed again. “_Au revoir_, my dear Senator,” he said cordially, and was gone--a fascinating patrician figure of handsome ease and dignity.

XV

Frothingham let three days pass, and on the fourth called at Senator Pope’s. Elsie was in Philadelphia--was visiting an aunt. It had not occurred to him that she would run away and hide herself, so little did he think of the matter in any other light than that of a game between himself and Rontivogli. He was much upset, and did not know what move to make next. Fate helped him the evening of the same day--the mail brought a note from Elsie:

MY DEAR FRIEND:

I can’t help writing to thank you. You warned me, and you were good and kind about it, and I was very disagreeable. I should like to say so to you, but I don’t suppose you’ll be in Philadelphia, will you? And it will be many a day before I see Washington. Indeed, I hope I shall never see it again. I didn’t deserve your friendship.

E. W. P.

Frothingham had not reflected on this letter long before he was telling Hutt to get his belongings together. The next afternoon found him at the Bellevue in Philadelphia, and a few hours later he was dining at the Hopkins’ with Elsie and her uncle and aunt. He liked the Hopkinses--stiff and shy, but kindly. He liked the dark furniture, and walls and woodwork, suggesting old English; liked the faces in the family portraits--English faces; liked surroundings where there was nothing new or new-fashioned except his own and Elsie’s dress, where there was so much that was fine as well as old. And he had never liked Elsie so well as now that she was chastened into an appealing gentleness and humility.

He saw that he had been right in thinking her note an apology, and an attempt to recall him. And when the Hopkinses left them alone in the parlour after dinner he soon said: “I’ve come for an answer to that question I asked you--down by the monument.”

She hung her head and flushed deeply. “Oh, I wish to get away from all this,” she said in a low voice. “I’ll be glad to go far away--far as--as you care to take me.”

He sat beside her and took her hand. But he made no effort to show “temperament.” “I’ll go back to Washington and see your father to-morrow--if you wish,” he said, after a silence.

“Yes,” she replied.

She wrote a long letter to her father as soon as Frothingham was gone--her maid posted it at midnight. So it came to pass that Senator Pope was expecting him. He received him with the benign courtesy he gave to the humblest negro. He liked Frothingham--but, for that matter, it was impossible for him to dislike any member of the human race, even Rontivogli, or any well-disposed domestic animal; ever since he had “gathered his bunch,” his content and complacence had, with a few brief pauses, been bubbling over in words and acts of kindness. But when Frothingham said, “I’ve come to see you, sir, about something of which I and your daughter have been talking,” his face clouded with a look of apologetic distress--almost the same look as that with which he had received Rontivogli for the final interview.

Frothingham would not have attributed it to embarrassment had he known Senator Pope better. It was the look he wore whenever the exigencies of fate forced him to do anything unpleasant--whether to refuse a small favour, or to cut a rival’s throat, or to scuttle a financial or political ship. For, being a good man, and a lover of smoothness, it pained him exceedingly to cause his fellow-beings any other emotion than happiness. In the present instance the cause of his distress was the discovery that an alliance with nobility would destroy his chances for the Vice-Presidential nomination which he was plotting to get. He had not confided his ambition to his closest political lieutenant. But when Rontivogli was exposed and cast out, his colleague and boss had said to him: “I’m glad to hear you’re not going to take a foreign nobleman into your family, Senator. Until the engagement was announced we were hoping you could be induced to make the race for the Vice-Presidency. While an Italian wouldn’t have been as bad as an Englishman on account of the Irish vote, I don’t think the party would have stood for even an Italian. The people don’t like that sort of thing.”

That settled Senator Pope’s aristocratic ambitions.

“I’ve come, sir,” Frothingham was saying, “to ask your consent to marrying your daughter.”

Senator Pope’s eyes swam, so strong was his emotion. “I am highly honoured, Lord Frothingham. But I cannot give you an answer in so important a matter at once. I must consult with her mother.” Mrs. Pope was a shadowy nonentity, flitting nervously in the wake of father and daughter.

He detained Frothingham for a long talk on England and America, and sent him away in an almost jubilant mood--no applicant ever left him downcast. The next day Frothingham got a telegram from Elsie asking him to come to her as soon as he could. He assumed that her father had decided to convey his consent through her, and his spirits rose higher. But the first glimpse of her disturbed him--hers was not the face of a bearer of good news.

“I saw your father,” he began.

“Yes,” she interrupted. “He has written me.”

“Does he consent?”

“Yes and no.” She hesitated. “He asked me not to tell, but I know I can trust you. He has been planning to be nominated for Vice-President. And he has found that he can’t have the nomination if I marry a titled foreigner--especially an Englishman, because of the Irish. They say it would kill the ticket.”

Frothingham retreated behind a vacant look.

“He found it out only a few days ago.” She did not feel equal to telling him that her father had learned this fatal fact through the exposure of Rontivogli. “So,” she ended, “we couldn’t marry until after the election. For he says he’s sure of the nomination.”

“And when is this election?”

“A year from next fall.”

Fortunately Frothingham had not the habit of letting his face speak for him. After a pause he said: “But surely you can persuade him.”

“It’s useless to try. You don’t know him as I do. He seems yielding, and usually he is. But where he’s set he’s hard as granite.”

“Nearly two years,” he repeated. And to himself: “Impossible! I might weather six months, but two years--the creditors would laugh at me.”

“And I wish to go away at once,” she said with a long sigh, looking at him mournfully.

“I--we--can’t wait two years,” he replied.

“We needn’t, need we? We might----” she began, then halted, blushing vividly.

He pretended not to understand--though he did, for he had already thought of that plan.

“You know--I’m of age,” she went on, seeing that he was not going to help her out. “We--we needn’t wait for his consent.” He did not change expression, but he was saying to himself, “Here’s a mess. She’s so mad to get away that she’s ready to do anything.”

“I think he’d forgive us,” she went on. “But even if he didn’t, I’d never regret.”

He knew that he must say something, must say it quickly, and that it must be appreciative but noncommittal. “I couldn’t accept such a sacrifice,” he said. “It wouldn’t be decent to take advantage of you in that fashion. I know it sounds unromantic to say it, but, by Jove, I don’t go in for the sort of romance that makes a fellow a blackguard.” And he frankly told enough of his financial difficulties to make the situation clear to her. “I believe you can talk your father round,” he ended. “He thinks the world of you.”

Elsie smiled--melancholy and cynical. “Yes--so long as I don’t interfere. But I know how he feels about the Vice-Presidency. And that--that other affair has made him----” She shook her head.

This chilled Frothingham. “He’d never forgive her if she ran off with me and lost him the office,” he reflected. “Besides, I can’t afford to go in without settlements arranged beforehand. I must chuck it--quick as ever I can.”

He urged persuading her father, and she promised to try. He saw her the next day, and the next, both afternoons and evenings. On the third day he did not see her until late in the afternoon--her father had come from Washington, and had spent the morning with her. And while they were talking Frothingham was reading a letter from Honoria which had been languidly pursuing him for a week. Part of it was:

I think you met Cecilia Allerton in Boston. Had you heard of her bolting with Frank Mortimer?

“Frank Mortimer!” he exclaimed, sitting upright in bed in his astonishment. “That brute with the big teeth and the empty head!”

Her father was angry with her for something or other and treated her cruelly. Everyone was pitying her. Frank fell in love with her out of sympathy, and she was so miserable that, when her father wouldn’t consent, she ran off with him. Mr. Allerton has changed his will, they say, leaving everything to colleges and charities. But Frank has an income and will have more when his uncle dies, and she has a rich aunt who loathes her father, and so may leave her something.

Cecilia’s quite mad about Frank, now that they’re married. Willie Kennefick was dining with us last night. He says she was in love with Stanley Huddiford, who died a year or so ago. He says she believes Stanley’s soul has entered into Frank! She’s a clever girl, they say, but a bit eccentric, like so many of them down Boston way----

Frothingham looked on this news as a direct, providential warning to him. “I’ll take no risks with Pope,” he said. “It would be sheer madness.”

And before he left his rooms he wrote to Barney, fixing the next day but one for his arrival at Chicago. He felt that there was no hope of winning Pope--at least not at present. “If she by chance succeeds after I’m gone--and I’ll leave her in a good humour--I can easily return. But I know there’s nothing in it.”

Failure was mourning in her eyes when he called at five o’clock. They went for a walk, and in reluctant words she told him that her father was immovable, that their only choice was between disobeying him and breaking the engagement. She listened coldly while he explained his position again; when he had finished she sneered. “You are--unanswerable,” she said bitterly.

“No doubt I do lack ‘temperament,’” he drawled, an ironic gleam on his eyeglass.

She was humble at once. “Oh--I understand,” she answered.

But she was too heartsick to talk; and he forgot that he was walking with her, could only feel ruin’s arm linked firmly in his. It was dusk when they reached the house.

In the doorway he took her hand and held it.

“I shall see you when I return?” he asked. “Will you answer if I write now and then?”

“Yes,” she replied gratefully.

She sent away the servant who came at her ring. She detained Frothingham, hoping against reason and instinct that he would tear off that tranquil mask of his, would forget his responsibilities as the bearer of a proud and ancient name, would say: “I care for only you. Come!” Even after he had left her she lingered, holding the door ajar, listening for returning footsteps. At last she shut the door, and went forlornly and wearily to her great, lonely, sombre dressing room. She stood before the mirror of her dressing table, studying her plain, wistful, woeful little face. “You aren’t pretty,” she said to it, with that candour which has its chance in those rare moments when vanity is quite downcast. “And one can’t expect much when men think of nothing but looks in a woman.” She could no longer see herself for tears. “And I believe he’d have been--at least kind to me.”

She rang for her maid, and began listlessly and mechanically to dress for dinner.

XVI

At Chicago Barney came down the platform to meet Frothingham. “Here you are!” he exclaimed. “Six months in the country, but not a bit changed. And if an American goes over to your side and stays a week he has to learn the language all over again when he gets back.”

It was still daylight, and Barney told his coachman to drive home by way of “the store”--the great “Barney and Company Emporium--seventy stores and a bank, three restaurants, a nursery, and an emergency hospital, all under one roof.” Frothingham watched the throngs pouring torrent-like through the cañons made by the towering buildings. “Don’t it remind you of New York?” asked Barney.

“Yes--and no,” he replied. It seemed to him in the comparison that New York was a titanic triumph, Chicago a titanic struggle; New York a finished or at least definite creation, Chicago a chaos in convulsion. There was in the look and the noise of it an indefinable menace which oppressed him, filled him with vague uneasiness. When Barney told him the site of it was a swamp a few years before, he thought of a fairy story his nurse had told him--of a magic city that used to rise from an enchanted morass at dusk, live a single night, and vanish with the dawn. And as the daylight waned, he wondered whether this inchoate, volcanic unreality of a city would not soon be again engulfed in the bosom of its mother, the swamp. But he began to note here and there traces of form, civilised form, peering from the chaos to indicate the trend of the convulsion--that it was upward, not downward.

“It is tremendous,” said Frothingham. “Is it bigger than New York?”

“No,” Barney reluctantly answered. Then he added with curious, defiant energy: “But it _will_ be! And it’s American, which New York ain’t. It’s full of people that think for themselves, and do as they d----n please. We ain’t got many apes out here. We run more to humans.”

They were now driving past Barney and Company’s--a barrack-like structure, towering story on story from a huge base bounded by four streets, where surged a seemingly insane confusion of men, women, children, horses, vans, automobiles, articulate in the demoniac voices of boys shrieking extras and drivers bawling oaths. And the sky blackened suddenly, and from the direction of the lake came a storm, cruelly cold, bitter as hate, seizing the struggling, swearing, shouting mass of men and animals, lashing it with whips of icy rain, and pelting it with bullets of hail.

“That’s my little place,” said Barney, pride oozing through his offhand tone.

“It’s tremendous,” was all Frothingham could say. The “Emporium” and its surroundings dazed him. He muttered under his breath, “And it’s Hell.”

Barney told the story of creation as it read for him. He had been a drummer for a suspender house--eighteen hundred a year for touring the cities and towns of northern Indiana and Illinois; four thousand dollars put by after twelve years of toil; eyes ever alert for a chance to go into business on his own account. One of his towns was Terre Haute--he called it Terry Hut. In it was a dry-goods shop kept by a man named Meakim. Barney found that of all the retailers he visited, Meakim was by far the shrewdest, the most energetic, and, above all, that he had an amazing talent for “dressing” his show windows and show cases. He persuaded Meakim to sell out and adventure Chicago with him. They set up in a small way, and in an obscure corner. But both toiled; Barney was shrewd and almost sleepless, and Meakim “dressed” the windows and displayed the goods on and over the counters. They prospered, spread too rapidly for their capital, failed, gathered themselves together, prospered again. “I’ve built three stores in fourteen years,” said Barney. “This last one was finished only five years ago--the year Meakim died. And already it’s too small--we’re moving our wholesale department to another building.”

Presently they were in Michigan Avenue and at Barney’s house. It was a mass of Indiana limestone which he--with the assistance of a builder, audaciously “branched out” as an architect--had fashioned into a fantastic combination of German mediæval fortress and Italian renaissance villa. “Here’s where I live,” said Barney as the carriage stopped before the huge doors studded with enormous bronze nails. “And don’t you dare back up Nelly when she jeers about it. She says she can’t look at it without laughing, or come into it without blushing. I suppose it _is_ no good, in the way of art. But it keeps out the rain, and that’s the main point in a house, ain’t it?”

As he was getting out his keys the door was opened by a maid in a black dress, a white apron and cap. “Jessie,” said he, in a tone which suggested that she might be his daughter, “this is the Earl of Frothingham, and I want you to take good care of him, and of the young man who’s coming with his trunks.”

Frothingham took off his hat and bowed vaguely to the maid, who smiled cordially. “I’ll show you your room,” she said.

“Never mind, Jessie,” interrupted Barney. “You needn’t bother. I’ll take him up myself. But I know everything’s all right--Nelly looked after that.”

Frothingham was impressed by the astonishing difference between the exterior and the interior of the house. He felt at home at once in this interior--handsome, cheerful, the absurd splendours of the architect-builder’s devising softened into comfort and good taste. “We thought you’d like your young man near you,” explained Barney, “so we put a bed in the dressing room.”

“Thank you,” replied Frothingham. “This is charming.”

“Nelly knows her business.” Barney’s good-natured face, with its many dignifying scars from his wars with destiny, beamed paternal enthusiasm. “You needn’t dress for dinner unless you want to,” he went on. “I never do unless we have company or I go out somewhere to something swell and formal. Wickham sometimes does and sometimes don’t.”

“I think I’ll dress, if you don’t mind,” said Frothingham diplomatically.

“Suit yourself. This is Liberty Hall. We ain’t got any rules.” He looked at his watch. “That clock on the mantel there is four minutes fast. It’s seven minutes to seven by the right time. We’re having dinner at half-past seven, but you can come down just as soon as you feel like it.”

Frothingham descended at five minutes before the dinner hour and found Nelly alone in the front parlour. Superficially she was like the women he had met in the Eastern cities. Like them she was dressed in a gown obviously imported from Paris; like them she wore it as only American and French women wear their clothes. He saw instantly that she was a well-bred girl of a most attractive American type. She was tall and long of limb--her arms were almost too long. She had a great deal of dark brown hair shading fascinatingly into black here and there. She had dark eyes--not brown, as he at first glance thought, but dark grey--a humour-loving mouth, a serious brow, a clear, delicate, olive skin. As she and Frothingham were shaking hands, her father and her brother entered--the brother, Wickham, a huge fellow, topping his father by several inches and having his father’s keen, good-natured dark grey eyes and his father’s features, except that the outline was more refined without being less strong.

Barney put his arm round his daughter and, with a foolish-fond expression, said: “Didn’t I tell you, Frothingham? Wasn’t I right?”

If Frothingham had been new to “the States” he would have thought this the strongest kind of a bid for him to enter the family. But he understood the American character in its obvious phases now. “The old chap’s mad about her,” was all Barney’s speech suggested to him. “And,” he admitted to himself, “I think he has reason to be. She’s got the look I like.” He noted the humourous comment on her father’s flattery in Nelly’s dark eyes, as he examined her through his eyeglass with ostentatiously critical minuteness. “Quite up to the mark, I should say,” he replied with polite audacity, adding apologetically, “though I don’t pretend to be an expert.”

“You see, I did put on my dress suit, after all,” said Barney, looking down at his old-fashioned, ill-fitting evening clothes. “The children would have it. I always feel like a stranded fish in these togs. You see, I never wore ’em in my life till I was past forty.”

Wickham looked a little nervously at Frothingham; Nelly was smiling with frank amusement. Then Wickham looked ashamed of himself--but he carefully observed the peculiar stripes down the legs of Frothingham’s trousers and the curious cut of his waistcoat and coat--“I must find out who’s his tailor,” he thought. “Poole don’t send me over the real thing. I wish I dared wear a monocle. It’s a whole outfit of brains and manners by itself. I don’t believe he takes it out, even at night.”

A maid announced dinner--not “Dinner is served,” but “Dinner, Mr. Barney.” And Barney jumped up with, “I’m glad to hear it. I’m hungry as a wolf.” The dining room was done in old English fashion--and the dinner, too, though an American would have called it the American fashion. The feature of its four courses was a huge roast, set before Barney on a great platter, with a mighty carving knife like a cimetar and a fork like a two-pronged spit. Barney himself carved--an energetic performance, lacking in grace perhaps, but swift and sure. On the table between him and the platter was a pile of plates. He put a slice of the roast into the top plate and the waitress removed it, carried it to Nelly’s place and set it down before her. This was repeated until all were served.