Part 5

Catherine smiled bitterly. “No,” she answered, “he has not. He cares nothing for me. But I can’t marry Lord Frothingham--and I won’t.”

“You must not say that, Catherine,” said her mother sternly. “It is a great shock to me to find that you cannot be trusted. If you refused to marry the man you have voluntarily engaged yourself to, I should never forgive you.”

Catherine’s eyes sank before her mother’s. “The engagement must be announced at once,” her mother went on. “You will change your mind when you have thought it over, and when you realise what my feelings are.”

“I can’t----” began Catherine monotonously.

“I wish to hear no more about it, child,” interrupted her mother, her eyes glittering a forewarning of the hate she would have for a daughter who disobeyed her. “To-morrow we will talk of it again.”

Catherine and her mother arose, and each faced the other for a moment--two inflexible wills. For Mrs. Hollister had made one error, and that fatal, in training her daughter. She had not broken her will in childhood, when the stiffest inherited will can be made to yield; she had only subdued it, driven it to cover. She had left her her individuality. But she did not know this; so, she saw her daughter’s looks, saw her daughter leave the room with resolution in every curve of her figure, and was not in the least disturbed as to the event. The idea that she, Maria Hollister, could be defied by anyone in her family--or out of it--could not form in her mind. “It is fortunate,” she said to herself, “that Wallingford is leaving early in the morning. I’ll announce the engagement at dinner to-night.”

Catherine went to change her dress, and then searched for Frothingham. He was alone in the billiard room, half asleep, on one of the wall lounges. At sight of him--she saw him before he saw her--her courage wavered. Yes, he was a decent sort of chap; and she was treating him badly, despicably--had bargained fairly with him, had used the contract publicly to aggrandise herself at his expense, was about to break her contract and humiliate him, injure him, through no fault of his. He had been fair with her, she had been false with him, was about to be base. “I can’t,” she said to herself. “At least, not in cold blood.”

He saw her, and his face lighted up. She smiled, nodded, hurried through the billiard room, and disappeared into the hall beyond. As she turned its angle her knees became shaky and her face white. Then Wallingford suddenly appeared at the conservatory door. He came toward her as if he were going to pass without stopping. But he halted.

“Well?” he said.

She leaned against the wall. Her throat was dry and her eyelids were trembling.

“What is it?” he asked gently.

She hung her head.

“Don’t be afraid to say it to _me_,” he urged. “There isn’t anything you couldn’t say to me.”

“Do you--do you--do you care for me?” she said, in a queer little choked, squeaky voice.

He laughed slightly, and came close to her and looked down at her. “You’re the only thing in all this world I do care for,” he said. “Why?”

“Oh, nothing--don’t follow me,” and she darted back toward the billiard room.

Frothingham was still there, seated now at the open fire. “Ah--you! I’m glad you’ve come back,” he drawled.

“I want you to release me from my engagement,” she said.

His jaw dropped, and he stared stupidly at her. He could hardly believe that this impetuous, energetic creature was the languorous, affected, dreamy Catherine.

“I mean it,” she sped on. “I’ve no excuse to make for myself. But I can’t marry you. And you ought to be glad you’re rid of me.”

Her tone instantly convinced him that he was done for. He turned a sickly yellow, and put his head between his hands and stared into the fire. His brain was in a whirl. “Just my rotten luck,” he muttered.

“I don’t hope that you’ll forgive me,” she was saying. “You couldn’t have any respect for me. I’m only saving a few little shreds of self-respect. I’m----”

“You mustn’t do it, Catherine. You mustn’t, you----” he interrupted, rising and facing her.

“I must be free. I care for someone else. Don’t discuss it, please. Just say you let me go.”

“It ain’t right.” Cupidity and vanity were lashing his anger into a storm. “You can’t go back--you’ve gone too far. Why, we’re as good as married.”

“Don’t make me any more ashamed than I am,” she pleaded humbly.

“No, I can’t release you,” he said with cold fury. “I can’t permit myself to be trifled with.” He knew that he was taking the wrong tack, that he ought to play the wounded lover. But his feeling for her was so small, and his anger so great, that he could not.

She was almost hysterical. She felt as though she were struggling desperately against some awful force that was imprisoning her. “Let me go. Please, let me go,” she gasped.

“No!” he said, arrogance in his voice--the arrogance of a man used to women who let men rule them.

Her eyes flashed. “Then I release myself!” she exclaimed haughtily, with a change of front so swift that it startled him. “And don’t you dare ever speak of it to me again!”

She slowly left the room, her head high. But her haughtiness subsided as rapidly as it had risen, and by the time she reached her own apartment she was ready to fling herself down for a miserable cry--and she did. “If I could _only_ get him out of the house,” she wailed.

Frothingham debated his situation. “The thing to do,” he concluded, “is to go straight off to her father.” He had not yet become convinced that in America man occupies a position in the family radically different from his position in England. He found Hollister writing in his study.

“Mr. Hollister,” he began.

Hollister raised his head until it was tilted so far back that he could see Frothingham through the glasses that were pinching in the extreme end of his long nose. “Oh--Lord Frothingham--yes!” He laid down his pen. “What can I do for you?”

Frothingham seated himself in a solemn dignity that hid his nervousness. “For several weeks your daughter and I have been engaged. We--we----”

Hollister smiled good-humouredly. “Before you go any further, my boy,” he interrupted kindly, “I warn you that you’re barking up the wrong tree.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Frothingham stiffly.

“The person you want to see is the girl’s mother. She attends to all that end of the business. I’ve got enough trouble to look after at my own end.”

“What I have to say can be said properly only to her father as the head of the family.”

“But I’m _not_ the head of the family. I’m not sure that I know who is. Sometimes I think it’s my wife, again I suspect Catherine.”

“Your daughter now refuses to abide by her engagement,” said Frothingham, in desperation at this untimely levity.

Hollister took off his glasses and examined them on both sides with great care. “Well,” he said at last, “I suppose that settles it.”

Frothingham stared. “I beg pardon, but it does not settle it.”

Hollister gave him a look of fatherly sympathy. “I guess it does. You can’t marry her if she won’t have you. And if she won’t have you--why, she won’t.”

“You treat the matter lightly.” Frothingham had a bright red spot in either cheek. “You do not seem to be conscious of the painful position in which she places you.”

“Good Heavens, Frothingham! What have I got to do with it? You ain’t engaged to _me_. She’s got the right to say what she’ll do with herself.”

Frothingham rose. “I was under the impression, sir, that I was dealing with a gentleman who would appreciate the due of a gentleman.”

Hollister’s eyebrows came down, and a cruel line suddenly appeared at each corner of his mouth. Just then Mrs. Hollister entered. Intuitively she leaped to the right conclusion. “The idiot!” she said to herself. “Why didn’t he come to me?” Then she said smoothly, almost playfully, to “the idiot”: “Has Catherine been troubling you with her mood this morning?”

Frothingham’s face brightened--her mood! Then there was hope.

“You ought not to pay any attention to her moods,” Mrs. Hollister went on with a smile. “She’s very nervous at times. But it passes.”

“She told me flat that our engagement was off,” said Frothingham. “I came to her father, naturally. She seemed to be in earnest.”

Mrs. Hollister continued to smile. “Don’t concern yourself about the matter, Lord Frothingham,” she replied in her kindliest voice. “Catherine will be all right again to-morrow at the latest. She has been doing too much lately for a young girl under the excitement of an engagement.”

Hollister, who had been looking hesitatingly from his wife to Frothingham, went to the wall and pressed an electric button. When the servant appeared he said: “Please ask Miss Catherine to come here.”

Mrs. Hollister turned on him, her eyes flashing. “Catherine is in no state to bear----”

Hollister returned her look calmly, then repeated his order. The servant looked uneasily from the husband to the wife, saw that Mrs. Hollister was not going to speak, made a deprecating bow, and withdrew. In a few minutes--it seemed a long time to the three, waiting in silence--Catherine appeared. Her eyes were swollen slightly, but that was the only sign of perturbation. Mrs. Hollister said to Frothingham: “I think it would be best that her father and I talk with her alone first.”

Frothingham instantly rose. With eyes pleadingly upon Catherine he was nearing the door when Hollister spoke--it was in a voice neither Frothingham nor even Catherine had heard from him or suspected him of having at his command. “Please be seated, Lord Frothingham. The best way to settle this business is to settle it.”

Frothingham could not have disobeyed that voice, and he saw with a sinking heart that at the sound of it Mrs. Hollister looked helpless despair.

“Catherine,” said her father, “do you, or do you not, wish to marry Lord Frothingham?”

“I won’t marry him,” replied Catherine. She gave Frothingham a contemptuous look. “I told him so a while ago.”

Mrs. Hollister’s eyes blazed. “Have you forgotten what I said to you?” she demanded of her daughter, her voice shrill with fury.

“No, mother,” Catherine answered slowly; “but--I cannot change my mind. I cannot marry Lord Frothingham.”

An oppressive silence fell. After a moment Frothingham bowed coldly, and left the room. Mrs. Hollister started up to follow him. “One word, Maria,” said her husband. “I wish you to understand that this matter is settled. Nothing more is to be said about it either to Catherine or to that young man--not another word.”

Mrs. Hollister was white to the lips. “I understand,” she replied, with a blasting look at her daughter. And she followed Frothingham to try to pacify him--she knew her husband too well not to know that her dream of a titled son-in-law was over.

When she was gone Catherine sank limp into a chair. “She’ll never forgive me,” she exclaimed despondently.

Hollister nodded in silent assent. After a few minutes he said: “It’s been fifteen years since she made me cross her in a matter I sha’n’t speak of. And she remembers it against me to-day as if it had happened an hour ago. The sooner you find your man, Katie, and marry him, the better off you’ll be--that’s _my_ advice.” He smiled with grim humour as he added, “And I ought to know.” Then he patted her encouragingly on the shoulder with a hand that looked as if it could hold the helm steady through any tempest.

VII

Frothingham had gone direct to his apartment. “Get my traps together at once,” he said to his man--Hutt, whose father had been his father’s man. He threw himself into a chair in his sitting room, and tried to think, to plan. But he was still dazed from the long fall and the sudden stop. Presently Hutt touched him.

“Well--well--what is it?” he asked, looking stupidly up at the round, stupid face.

“Beg pardon, my lord,” replied the servant, “but Hi’ve spoke to you twice. Mrs. Hollister wishes to know hif you’ll kindly come to ’er in ’er sitting room.”

Frothingham found Mrs. Hollister’s maid waiting for him in the hall. He followed her to the heavily perfumed surroundings of pale blue silk, both plain and brocaded, in which Mrs. Hollister lived. He listened to her without hearing what she said--thinking of it afterward he decided that she had been incoherent and not very tactful, and that her chief anxiety had been lest he might do something to cause scandal. He remembered that when he had said he would go at once she had tried to persuade him to stay--as if leaving were not the only possible course. He gradually recovered his self-command, and through weakness, through good nature, through contempt of his hosts, and through policy, he acted upon the first principle of the code for fortune-hunters of every degree and kind: “Be near-sighted to insults, and far-sighted to apologies.”

Surveying the wreck from his original lodgings at the Waldorf, he found three mitigations--first, that the engagement had not been announced; second, that he had not written Evelyn anything about it; third, that it was impossible for “middle-class people” such as the Hollisters to insult him--“if I wallow with that sort, I can’t expect anything else, can I?” To cheer himself he had several drinks and took an account of stock. He found he was ninety-three pounds richer than when he landed--he played “bridge” well, and had been in several heavy games at Lake-in-the-Wood, and had been adroit in noting the stupid players, and so arranging partners that he could benefit by them; also he had been lucky in a small way at picking the numbers at Canfield’s the few times he had trusted himself to go there. “Not so bad,” he said. “It’s a long game, and that was only the first hand.” He hesitated at the indicator, then instead of ordering another drink went to the telephone and called up Longview’s house. It gave him courage, and a sense that he was not altogether friendless and forlorn, to hear Honoria’s voice again. “Shall you be in late this afternoon?” he asked.

“Why! I didn’t know you were in town--or are you calling me from Catherine’s?”

“Yes--I’m in town,” he replied, and he felt that she must notice the strain in his voice.

“Oh!”

“I’m up to stay,” he went on, his voice improving.

“Oh--yes--come at half-past five.”

“Thank you--good-by.” He held the receiver to his ear until he heard her ring off. “Good girl, Honoria,” he muttered. “Not like those beastly cads.” He went to the club, lunched with Browne, whom he found there, was beaten by him at billiards, losing ten dollars, and returned to the hotel to dress.

At a quarter-past five he started up the avenue afoot--a striking figure in clothes made in the extreme of the English fashion; but he would have been striking in almost any sort of dress, so distinguished was its pale, rather supercilious face, with one of his keen eyes ambushed behind that eyeglass, expressive in its expressionlessness. The occupants of every fifth or sixth carriage in the fashionable parade bowed to him with a friendliness that gave him an internal self-possession as calm as the external immobility which his control of his features enabled him always to present to the world.

He told Honoria his story in outline--“the surest way to win a woman’s friendship is to show her that you trust her,” he reflected. She was sympathetic in a way that soothed, not hurt, his vanity; but she sided with Catherine. “I half suspected her of being in love with Joe,” she said, “but I thought he was a confirmed bachelor. He played all round you--that’s the truth. I’m going to say something rather disagreeable--but I think it’s necessary.”

“I want--I need your advice,” he replied.

“You’ve been relying entirely too much on your title. You’ve let yourself be misled by what the newspapers say about that sort of thing. You don’t understand--I didn’t understand until I’d been here a while, and had got my point of view straight. They’re not so excited about titles now as they used to be when they had no fashionable society of their own, and had to look abroad to gratify their instinct for social position. If you’d come five years ago----”

“Just my rotten luck,” he muttered.

“Your title is a good thing--properly worked. It will catch a woman, especially if she’s not well forward ‘in the push,’ as they say. But it won’t hold her. She’s likely to use you to strengthen her social position, and then to drop you, unless she has lived in England, and has had her head turned, and has become--like your middle-classes.”

“But my family is away better than Surrey’s.”

“Your family counts for nothing here. New York knows nothing and cares nothing about birth. Englishmen count by title only.”

“Then they ran after Surrey because he was a Duke?”

“Perhaps to a certain extent,” replied Honoria. “But I fancy the principal reason was that they wished to see what it was Helen had paid such a tall price for. If he had come here quietly to marry a poor girl there’d have been no stir.”

“Money--money--nothing but money--always money,” sneered Frothingham. He saw the twinkle in Honoria’s eyes. “But, I say,” he protested, “you know that we over there do care for other things, too.”

“So do they here, but what do they care for, first and most, in both countries?”

He smiled.

“It’s money first--there and here, and the world over,” she went on with bitterness under her raillery. “And among our kind of people everything else--sentiment, art, good taste even--is far behind it. How could it be otherwise? We’ve got to have money--lots of money--or we can’t have the things we most crave--luxury, deference, show. But--where are you dining to-night?”

“Probably at the club.”

“Excuse me a minute. I’ll just see if Mrs. Galloway will let me bring you. We’re going to the opera afterward.” She looked at him quizzically. “I think I’ll arrange to ship you off to Boston. A little vacation just now will do you no harm. And--Boston might interest you.”

When she returned from the telephone it was with a cordial invitation for him from Mrs. Galloway. He said: “I’ve a letter to a Mrs. Saalfield in Boston. Do you know her?”

“Yes--she’s here now, I think. But you would better keep away from her. She wouldn’t do you the least good.”

“Is she out of ‘the push’?”

“Oh, no--she leads it there, I believe. But she wouldn’t let you look at a girl or a widow, or any woman but herself. She’s about forty years old--it used to be the woman of thirty, but it’s the woman of forty now. Everywhere she goes she trails a train of young men. They’re afraid to look away from her. They watch her like a pack of hungry collies, and she watches them like a hen-hawk.”

There was more than the spirit of friendly helpfulness in Honoria’s plan to send him away to Boston. The bottom fact--hidden even from herself--was that she was tired of him. He seemed to her helpless and incapable, worse in that respect than any but the very poorest specimens of men she had met in New York. She felt that he was looking to her to see him through an adventure of which she disapproved rather than approved. She had no intention of accepting such a burden, yet she was too good-natured and liked him too well to turn him abruptly adrift.

Mrs. Galloway took him in to dinner, and it was not until the second act of the opera that he had a chance to talk with the Boston woman in the party--Mrs. Staunton. Then he slipped into the chair behind her; but she would not talk while the curtain was up. Grand opera bored him, so he passed the time in gazing round the grand-tier boxes--the Galloway box was to the left of the centre. The twilight was not dark enough to hide the part of the show that interested him. He knew New York fashionable society well now, and as he looked he noted each woman and recalled how many millions she represented. “Gad, how rich they are--these beggars,” he thought enviously. And he was seized by a mild attack of what an eminent New York lawyer describes as “the fury of the parasite”--that hate which succeeds contempt in the parasite as its intended victim eludes it.

When the curtain went down on the last of seven uproarious calls--the opera was “Carmen,” and Calvé was singing it--Mrs. Staunton’s disdainful expression gave him the courage to say: “Ghastly row they make, eh?”

Mrs. Staunton was perhaps fifty years old, long and thin, with a severe profile and a sweet and intelligent, if somewhat too complacent, front face. “Calvé sings rather well--in spots,” she said. “But I doubt if Boston would have given her seven calls.”

The mirthful shine of Frothingham’s right eye might have been a reflection from his glass; again, it might have been really in his eye where it seemed to be--Mrs. Staunton was so seated that she could not see him as he talked over her shoulder into her ear. “Really,” was all he said.

“You’ve not been at Boston?” asked Mrs. Staunton.

“Not yet. I thought it would be well to get acclimated, as it were, before I ventured away from New York.”

“You will have it to do over again,” said Mrs. Staunton. “We are very different. Here money is king and god, and----” Mrs. Staunton cast a supercilious glance round the brilliant and beautiful, and even dazzling, grand tier. “You see the result. Really, New York is becoming intolerably vulgar. I come here rarely, and leave as soon as I decently can. But one can’t stay here even for a few days without being corrupted. The very language is corrupt here, and among those who call themselves the best people.”

“Really! Really, now!” said Frothingham.

“Indeed, yes. In Boston even the lower classes speak English.”

“You don’t say.” Frothingham’s drawl was calm; he put upon his eyeglass the burden of looking astonished interest.

“It must fret your nerves to listen to the speech here,” continued Mrs. Staunton. “It’s a dialect as harsh and vulgar--as most of the voices.”

“It will be a great pleasure to hear the language spoken as it is at home--though I can’t say that I mind it here. Yes--I shall be glad to see Boston.”

Mrs. Staunton lifted her eyebrows and looked politely amused. “But _we_ don’t speak as you speak in England. I didn’t say _that_.”

“Oh--I thought you were by way of saying they spoke English at Boston.”

“So I did. I meant that we speak correctly. You English speak very incorrectly. Your upper class is even more slovenly in that respect than your middle class.”

Frothingham looked interest and inquiry. “Ah--yes--quite so,” he said. “I believe we do let our middle-class look after all that sort of thing. It saves us a lot of bother.”

“I’m glad you admit the truth.” Mrs. Staunton looked gracious and triumphant. “Last winter we had the president of one of the colleges at Oxford with us--a very narrow man.”

“Frightful persons, all that sort, _I_ think,” said Frothingham.

“I’m not astonished that you think so,” replied Mrs. Staunton. “He--it was Mr. Stebbins--scoffed at the idea that Boston spoke English. He insisted that whatever your upper class speaks is English, that they have the right to determine the language.”

That was Frothingham’s own notion, but he gave no sign. “Stebbins is a hideous old jabberwock,” he said, glad that the orchestra was beginning.