Part 15

But he insisted, and they set out immediately after luncheon. As they went--in a street car--she explained her work:

When her mother lay dying she said to the man beside whom she had worked for thirty-six years, mostly cloud and rain: “Henry, I don’t want a big, showy monument over me. If you should do something for me, build a school of some kind, a school where girls can be taught how to be useful wives and mothers, instead of spending their whole lives at learning.” And Nelly’s father had put by money, a large sum each year, until his daughter’s education was finished. Then he had said to her, “I want you to help me carry out your ma’s memorial.” And he turned over to her a mass of plans and hints and schemes which he had been accumulating for seven years. “Get up a plan,” he had said, “on the lines your ma would have liked. It’s a woman’s work--it’s your natural work. I’ll supply the money.” And after two years’ labour, one year of it abroad, she had perfected a scheme for a great school where several hundred girls could be instructed in all that a woman as a woman should know--housework, sewing, cooking, shopping, marketing, the elements of business and of art, the care of babies, the training and education of children. And she had so planned it that the girls could and should support themselves while they were learning.

Frothingham did not take his eyes from her face as she talked. She seemed to him the most wonderful, the noblest human being in the world. “A fine, a beautiful idea,” he said. “But aren’t you afraid of spoiling those girls for workingmen’s wives? You’re educating entirely too much in this country, I should say, as it is. You’re making the lower classes restless and discontented. They’ll pull everything down about your ears the first thing you know.”

Nelly smiled--he saw that she was not seeing him at all, was looking far, far past him. “I’m not worrying about the consequences,” she said. “If we did that we should never move. You must remember that we haven’t any classes here, but are all of one class--we differ in degree, but not in kind. One can’t look into the future. I only know it was intended for the light to shine on the whole human race, and that it’s our duty to help all we can. And knowledge is light, and ignorance is darkness, isn’t it? I’m not afraid of light, anywhere. Whether it’s little or much, it’s better than darkness.”

He looked at her strangely. “I had never thought of that,” he said in a low voice. Then, after a few minutes: “How good you are! I didn’t know there was anybody in the world like you. How generous of you to give your life to these people.”

“No--no!” she protested. They were walking now through a maze of homely streets lined with flat-houses large and small and odourous of strong-smelling cookery, of decaying food, of stale whiskey and beer--a typical tenement district. “When I first began on this scheme,” she went on, “I thought as you do. But I soon saw how false, how foolishly false, that was. And if I had continued to think as at first, if I had gone into the work to patronise and to feed my vanity, I should have injured myself and all whom I wished to help. I should have made a snob of myself and parasites of them.”

She paused and into her eyes came a look which he thought “glorious.” She went on: “But fortunately, I got the right sort of guidance from the very start. And I discovered that I had more to learn than these people. I was actually more ignorant than they.” She turned her face toward him. “Did you ever think,” she asked, “what would become of you if you had all the props taken from under you, and were cast upon the world and were forced to make the fight alone--without a penny or a friend or a relative or any outside help of any kind?”

“Thought of it? Well, rather!” he exclaimed. “And I know what would happen to me--jolly quick!”

“That was my first discovery--about myself. I found that I was in the world without any fit equipment to live. I found that if the props were taken from under me I’d be no match for the working people, that I’d perish or else have to live on the charity of rich people by doing the sort of pottering work they give the poor of their own class. And I said to myself, ‘You are a fine human being, aren’t you--to pose as the superior of those who are independent and self-respecting? You call them ignorant, yet they are conforming to nature’s laws and to the conditions of life infinitely better than you, with your boasted intelligence and your fancied refinement.’ I saw that I was not a real woman, as my mother had been, but was only a parasite on the labour and the intelligence of others.”

“And what did you do?”

“I went to school with my girls. And----” Her face lighted up with enthusiasm--“oh, you don’t know what a--a magnificent--sensation it is to be conscious that one can swim alone on the sea of life without fear of drowning or of having to call for help. You spoke as if I were giving these people something. Why, I owe everything to them! It is they who gave and are giving. And I am and always shall be in their debt.”

He tried to think of some satirical phrase with which to lessen the impression what she had said was making upon him. But he could only blink into the flooding light which seemed to him to surround her and to blaze upon his pettiness and worthlessness and the tawdriness of all upon which his life had been based. In his own country, in his surroundings of alternating dulness and dissipation, his naturally good mind had become a drowsy marsh with pale lights gleaming in it occasionally here and there. Unconsciously, he had been slowly rousing ever since he landed in New York.

The people he had met were like enough to those he had met at home, and also like enough to the people of the real America from which they were offshoots, to form for him a mental bridge on which he could pass from his England of narrow and bigoted caste to Nelly’s America of alert and intelligent and self-respecting, level-eyed humanity. And he was now feeling in this restless Chicago the fierce impact of energies and aspirations of which he had had no conception, of which he could never have a clear conception. Through the eyes of this earnest, unaffected girl with her lived ideal of self-forgetfulness he had been getting confused, dazzling glimpses of a new world.

But he did clearly see and feel that he loved her. And she now saw in his curiously changed face what was in his mind. She looked away instantly--her expression was uneasy, almost frightened. “Here we are--at the school,” she said nervously as they turned a corner and came in sight of three great buildings--plain yet attractive--which faced three sides of a broad lawn in the centre of which a large and artistic fountain was playing.

He never could give a clear account of that school. He remembered the manager--a Mr. Worthington, with a strong and serious, yet anything but solemn face, with rather homely features except a pair of extraordinary eyes. He remembered many classrooms where all sorts of feminine enterprises were going forward with energetic informality. He remembered many girls--uncommonly clean, bright, well-dressed girls with agreeable voices and manners. He remembered many smiles and other evidences of health and spirits. He remembered many babies--all in one big, sunny room, chirping and crowing and gurgling, balancing on uncertain little lumps of feet or crawling toilsomely. “Practice babies,” Nelly called them, and he thought, “If this is the way her girls succeed with mere ‘practice babies,’ what won’t they make of their own?” Finally, he remembered--Nelly. All his other memories were a hazy background for her tall, graceful figure and wonderful, luminous face. Her he never forgot in the smallest detail of look or gesture.

When they were once more in the street, walking toward the car, he began abruptly: “I came over here--to America--because I was ruined--because we were going to be sold up and chucked out in the autumn. I came--I’m ashamed to put it into words--I’d rather you’d imagine--you can, easy enough. It’s often done and nothing’s thought of it--at least on our side of the water. This morning--in fact, just before luncheon--I got a cable from my sister. Our luck has turned, and----”

“I’m very glad,” she murmured as he paused.

“I don’t wish to go back,” he went on impetuously, his drawl gone. “I wish--it’s you I want. And I ask you to give me a chance. I don’t think I’m such a frightfully bad sort, as men go. And while I ain’t fit for you to walk on, where’s the man that is? And perhaps if I were less fit I couldn’t care for you--all the height from down where I am to up where you are.”

The storm which had burst from deep down within him, deeper far than he thought his nature extended, was so sweeping and whirling him that he could not see her face distinctly.

When she spoke it was in a voice that took away hope, but gently, soothing the wound it made. “I’m sorry,” she said, “and yet I’m not. No woman could help being pleased to hear what you’ve said to me, and hear it from such a man as you are. Oh, yes!”--this in answer to his expression--“for I’ve found out what sort of man lives behind your look of irony and indifference. A so much better man than he lets himself know--or show. And I understand how differently you’ve been brought up, how different your system is from ours. But----”

She hesitated, and somehow he felt that he must give her sympathy instead of asking it.

“You remember, I told you that when I began with the school I had the right sort of help?”

He looked away from her and it was black before him for an instant. “That fairish chap with the eyes--Mr. Worthington?” he asked, cutting his words off sharp.

She nodded, her cheeks bright. “I simply couldn’t help it,” she said. “He _was_ what I longed to be. And he didn’t preach the things I believed in--he just lived them.”

They were silent until they were in the car, then she went on: “I don’t want you to misunderstand. He has never even looked--what I’d like him to look--and say. I don’t know whether he cares--probably not. Sometimes I think he cares only for his work, and----”

“He does care--I saw it,” interrupted Frothingham, and then he was astonished at himself for being so “ridiculously decent.”

“I don’t know,” she said doubtfully. “Thank you for saying so.” She looked at him shyly. “You’ll think me queer for telling you about it when he has said nothing to me.”

“I understand why you tell me,” Frothingham answered. “It was--like you.” He smiled faintly, his frequent, self-satirising smile. “Don’t mind me. I’m used to bad luck. I take to it like a duck to water.”

Nelly’s instinct told her that she had said enough, and they rode in silence. When she spoke again it was of the dance to which they were going that night. An hour and a half later as they were separating for dinner he said earnestly: “Thank you for what you said. And thank you--even more--for what you didn’t say.”

XX

On the way to Mrs. Grafton’s ball that night he sent Evelyn a cablegram asking her to cable him £175 he needed to help him to pay Wallingford and fixing the next day week for his sailing. He might have sailed three days earlier, but he wished to get her letter and so not carry an unsatisfied curiosity on a six-days’ voyage.

At the ball everyone was talking of the Frothingham “exposure” and of Jenny Hooper’s marriage. The “exposure” had appeared in but two editions of the “yellow” that invented it. “Wick” Barney had seen it and had lost not a moment in forcing its suppression and a denial and in warning the other papers. He said nothing to Frothingham, and Frothingham did not know of it then, or indeed until several years had passed. But even if it had not been suppressed and had been everywhere believed, Frothingham’s social position would not have suffered. His title was genuine and his family and his position at home were of the best--more, American fashionable society never asks about upper class foreigners who come to it for no apparent, or, rather, no avowed purpose. It expects them to be somewhat “queer” in other respects. It assumes that they will be “queer” in money matters.

Frothingham did, however, hear of Jenny’s marriage--heard of it from Jenny herself. At the Graftons’ the dressing rooms are at opposite ends of the hall from which the grand stairway ascends to the drawing room and the ballroom. It chanced that Jenny and Frothingham came along this hall from the dressing rooms at the same time and, to the delight of the few guests and the many servants who witnessed, met at the foot of the stairway. As Frothingham’s face habitually expressed nothing beyond a suggestion that he had nothing to express, he and his eyeglass withstood the shock admirably. Jenny had intended to “cut him dead” the next time she saw him. But as she tottered suddenly into his presence on her monstrous tall heels she was not prepared for a course so foreign to her nature as the cut direct. Before she knew what she was doing or saying she had smiled and nodded. She instantly shifted to a frown; but it was too late--Frothingham had spoken, had subdued her with that “perfectly splendid, so aristocratic” monocle of his. “What’s the use of throwing a fit over a thing that’s past and done?” she reflected. “He’s all right in his way. And won’t it give Tom and everybody a jolt if we enter the ballroom together?”

Frothingham had called her “Miss Hooper.” This gave her the opening. “Miss Hooper!” she said with her jauntiest air. “That’s ancient history. I ain’t been called that for ages and ages. Why, I’m an old married woman--for Chicago.”

“Really,” said he, thinking it “some stupid, silly sell or other.” He was hardly listening. He was more interested in the rope of pearls and diamonds that swung from her neck to far below her waist. The pearls were large and were once perfect; but each pearl had been mutilated by having a diamond set in it--a very nightmare of sacrifice of beauty and taste in an effort to make more expensive the most expensive.

“Yes, indeed--truly. I’m Mrs.----” She stopped short and gave him a look of horror.

“Dear me!” exclaimed Frothingham with satiric sympathy. “Have you forgotten his name, or did you forget to ask it?”

“No--but I never _thought_ of it before--thought how it sounds. My, but it’s awful! I’d never in the world have married him if I’d have pronounced it beforehand. Mrs. _Burster_! Ain’t that horrible?” Frothingham had lifted “ain’t” from the slough of doubtful grammar to the pinnacle of fashion in fashionable Chicago.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he drawled, still imagining she was jesting. “It might be worse, mightn’t it, now?”

At this seeming impertinence her eyes flashed. “Yes--it might. It might be Bursted--or ‘Busted’--mightn’t it?” Then, seeing that her “shot” at his financial condition as described in the newspaper she had read and believed apparently did not touch him, she relented and was in a good humour again. “I’ve been engaged to Tom for a year or so on and off,” she went on. “When I woke up this morning it came into my head to marry him. And I did it while your lawyer and papa were squabbling.” She said this so convincingly that she herself began to feel that it was “as good as true.”

The news that she and Frothingham were advancing together preceded them to the ballroom, but had not spread far enough from its doors to impair the sensation made by their entrance with every appearance of friendliness. And the much discussed mystery of that day’s doings is here solved for the first time.

The next afternoon Frothingham and Wickham drove up to Barney’s door as Nelly and Worthington were arriving on foot. One glance at their faces and he knew that they understood each the other now. “All I accomplished,” he said to himself mournfully, “was to force the fellow to play his hand. What ripping luck I do bring--other people!” He paused only long enough to make his passing on seem natural. Presently she followed him to the library, where he was standing on the rug before the closed fireplace with a cigarette drooping dejectedly from the corner of his mouth. She moved restlessly about the room, evidently seeking a way to begin telling him something.

“I saw it in your face--at the door,” he said, in answer to an appealing glance from her.

She put her hand on his arm and her eyes were wistful. “I know you did, and I hoped--I thought--I saw in your face that you were generous enough to be glad I’m happy.”

“No, I can’t say that you did. The most I can do is to bear it--without the grin.” He seated himself on the edge of the big table and smoked and looked at her reflectively. “I say,” he began at last, “do you see how it’s possible to be in love with two at the same time?”

She nodded, smiling a little. “Yes--I--I think--if I hadn’t met someone first--I should have been in love with--someone else.”

“That’s something,” he said in his satirical drawl. But he kept his eyes down and his eyelids were trembling. “Do you know,” he went on after a pause full of cigarette smoke, “I’ve been thinking about--caring for two people and that sort of thing. I don’t mind saying to you--you’ll understand, I’m sure--there’s a girl over on the other side----”

“I’m _so_ glad!” she exclaimed--and then she wasn’t.

“I care for her--in a different way, but it’s quite a real way. And when I go back home, it may be--you know what I wish to say. I’m telling you because I don’t wish you to think I’m disloyal to you”--his expression was half-satirical, half-mournful--“or to her either.”

“I appreciate your telling me,” she said. “But I’d have understood, if you hadn’t. I believe I recognise a _man_ when I see him, and--you know that’s what I think you.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “I dare say I’m much like other people. I show everyone the side that matches the side they show me.”

After a moment he went to her and lifted her hand and kissed it. She stood and turned her face, sweet and friendly, up to him. “I’d rather you’d kiss _me_,” she said.

He winced and paled and let go her hand. “No, thanks,” he replied. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather not.”

With this Mr. Barney bustled into the room--no one had ever seen him make a slow movement of any kind. At sight of them standing thus suspiciously, he halted and, as they flushed and moved apart, he laughed in such a way that Nelly felt impelled to explain:

“I was talking to Lord Frothingham of my engagement, and he was congratulating me.”

“_Bless_ my soul!” ejaculated Barney. “This _is_ news!”

“I haven’t had a chance to tell you, father. It’s Mr. Worthington.”

Barney seemed depressed. “Well--I guess he’s all right,” he said slowly. “I’ve got nothing against him. But----”

“And,” interrupted Nelly, afraid of her father’s frankness, “he was telling me of his engagement.”

Barney looked at Frothingham sharply. “American?” he asked, showing that he wouldn’t like it if he got an affirmative answer.

“No--a neighbour of ours in England,” replied Frothingham.

“Delighted to hear it. You ought to have been married and settled long ago. I still think you’d have done better to sell your farm over there and settle down here in Chicago.” Barney would have scorned to apply such words as estate and plantation to a farm--though he did call his shop an “Emporium.”

* * * * *

Wickham went to New York with Frothingham the next day but one; and on the day after they arrived they had Honoria, chaperoned by Mrs. Galloway, at dinner and at theatre, and, because Wickham insisted, at supper. It was almost two o’clock when they put the two women in their carriage at the Waldorf and went to bed--Frothingham refused to sit up listening to Wickham on Honoria. He was surprised that Wickham had invited her for luncheon the next, or, rather, the same day--was astonished when he found that she had accepted. His last three days in America were spent in studying--and encouraging--an infatuation.

The morning of his departure came, and the steamer which he assumed must be bringing Evelyn’s letter, as it had not arrived on Friday, was just getting in. He decided that he would not put off his sailing to get the letter--“Why wait merely to satisfy my curiosity? Evelyn sent me over here. She knows what she’s about in recalling me.” He left Hutt at the hotel to stay until the last moment on the chance of the mail arriving; he and Wickham went down to the pier--Mrs. Galloway and Honoria and Joe Wallingford and his wife were already there. He had a few sentences aside with Honoria.

“I’m so glad you introduced Mr. Barney to me,” she said. He trained his eyeglass upon her mockingly. “Really! How extraordinary! Precisely what _he_ said on Wednesday.”

“Don’t be a silly ass,” protested Honoria in an unconvincing voice. “He’s only a big, nice boy. I’m four years older than he. Or, rather, he’s four years younger than I--I don’t fancy the word old.”

“That’s as it should be. If a young chap _will_ marry, he should be several years the younger. She’ll keep him straight and bring him up properly. She’ll be patient with his ignorance and know how to handle the reins when he frets or frisks. Good business, this you’re planning, Honoria.”

“Do you think he likes me?”

“_Likes?_ He’s positively drivelling. Look at ’im!”

Honoria’s glance met Wickham’s--he was at the rail, pretending to listen to Catherine. His “drivelling” expression as he came at the call in her eyes seemed to please Honoria mightily. With the last going-ashore gong Hutt came bringing Evelyn’s letter. Frothingham at once read enough of it to interpret her cablegram:

As you doubtless know, Georgie’s father-in-law died in New York a few weeks ago. He left them I don’t know how much--something huge. And George is giving Gwen a dot of three hundred thousand. She was just here with the news--she came to me the instant she heard it. As she was leaving she said: “Won’t you give Arthur my love when you write?” It’s the first time she’s spoken of you to me since you left. And when I said, “I’ll _cable_ it to him,” she blushed--you should have seen her, Arthur--and heard her say, “Oh, _thank_ you, dear!”

“Good chap, George,” murmured Frothingham. “The right sort clean through. He wouldn’t let Gwen and me be cheated as he and Evelyn were.... Poor Evelyn!... Gwen and me!” He began a sigh that changed into his faint smile of self-mockery. “Just my beastly, rotten luck--not to be sure it’s good luck when it finally does come.”

He went to the rail and his glance sought out and rested upon the little group of his friends on the crowded pier across the widening gap between Nelly’s land and him. Wickham took Honoria’s blue chiffon parasol and waved it; Catherine fluttered her handkerchief. He lifted his hat and bowed. Long after they were lost to him in the merge of the crowd they could make out his loud light tweeds and scarlet bow, and once they caught the flash of a ray of sunlight on his eyeglass--like a characteristic farewell look.

* * * * *

It was five o’clock in a late September afternoon. As usual, on the low table on the porch viewing the Italian garden at Beauvais Hall was the big tea tray with its array of antique silver and old porcelain, the cake and the toast and the slices of bread and butter. Round it were Evelyn and Gwen and Frothingham--Gwen in a shirtwaist and riding skirt, Frothingham in the slovenly, baggy flannels of an English gentleman in the seclusion of his country-seat. No one was speaking and the quiet was profound. Presently Evelyn rose and went through the open French window into the drawing room. Gwen was watching Frothingham; he was watching the peacocks as they strutted with tails spread in splendour.