Part 2

"My poor Bob," she said, holding the lapels of his coat, and looking up at him; "do you not know that Phyllis may meet a man to-day at dinner, and to-morrow at tea, and the day after drive with him for an hour in the Park--and then what's father or mother or anything in the world if she loves him? Bob, dear, just get it out of your head that you are going to keep Phyllis. When the right man comes you will no more count to her than--than that chair!--Oh, yes, of course, every girl loves her father in a way--but you have only been keeping her heart warm--and once it's set on fire--good-by! And, Bob, dear, listen, is it not common sense to let her see the right kind of young men; to sift them and weigh them a bit? Is it a marriage-market to admit none but those who are presentable and well-bred and come of nice people? Is that a show-window? No, it's giving a girl a chance to choose--the chance I wish to Heaven I'd had. We simply try to get the nicest man there is, and you are more apt to get a prize from a hundred than from six!"

"That applies just as much to Carthage as to Washington."

"Bob, you don't know what you've been risking. Your whole way of living is utterly crazy. Why, anybody--_anybody_ could come here, and make love to her, and carry her off under your nose--some awful commercial traveler or cheap pianist with frowzy hair--Oh, Bob, girls are such fools--such crazy, crazy fools!"

"Phyllis isn't."

"Was I?"

"No, I don't think you were."

"But didn't I marry Sam Fensham?"

"I don't see that that--"

Sally laughed; and it was not a pleasant laugh to hear in its self-revelation. Sam was notoriously more successful as a treasury official than as a husband.

"Bob, she has to go to Washington with me, and you must put your hand in your pocket, and do things handsomely."

"Against her will?"

Again Sally laughed, more harshly and cynically than before.

"Just you ask her," she said.

That night Mr. Ladd did so, and saw with a sinking heart the electrifying effect it had on her.

Go! Why, she'd jump out of her shoes to go, and wasn't daddy the dearest, darlingest, adorablest person in the world to propose it! And Aunt Sally's kindness--wasn't it wonderful! She would meet senators and ambassadors, and dance in the White House with lovely barons and counts, and try out her French on a real Frenchman and see if he could understand it!--A winter in Washington! What could be more exciting, more delirious!

Mr. Ladd affected to share her delight, and manfully concealed his true feelings, which were altogether bitter and sad. But he was a brave old fellow, and knew how to take his disappointments smilingly. Besides, what claim had he to resist the inevitable? What right? What justification? He would have bitten his tongue out before he would have reproached her, or marred, by the slightest word, her overflowing and girlish exuberance. It was only as they kissed each other good night that the pent-up appeal came.

"Don't forget your old dad in the shuffle," he said. "It's--it's going to be very hard for him without you, Phyllis."

Her instant contrition was very sweet to him, very comforting and dear. In fact, he had to struggle pretty desperately to allay the storm of tenderness he evoked.--No, no, he wanted her to go to Washington. It was the right thing to do--the only thing to do. A girl ought to see something of the big world before she married and settled down.--Oh, every girl said that to herself, but you couldn't get away from the fact that they were made for men, and men for them, and a father just held the fort till the Golden Young Man arrived.

How they laughed, with tears in their eyes! How infinitely precious was the love that bound them together! Dad was never to be lost in the shuffle--never, never; and he was to write every day, and she was to write; and if it were a hundred Washingtons she'd come straight back to him if he were lonely, for to her there was only one real Golden Young Man, and that was her darling, darling father.

Yet as Mr. Ladd shut the study door, and returned to his seat beside the lamp, he knew in spite of himself that he had said good-by. His guardianship was over; near, now, was that unknown man, that unknown rival, for whose pleasure he had lavished twenty years of incessant care and devotion. Though Ladd was hardly a believer, the wish came out with the fervency of a prayer: "Oh, my God, let him be worthy of her!"

*CHAPTER III*

She did write every day; sometimes the merest snippets, sometimes long, graphic letters, full of the new life and the new people. Her debut had been an immense success. Eddie Phelps, a horrid, tallowy, patronizing person, but socially a dictator, had put the stamp of his approval on her, and she had managed to receive it and not burst--which, if Papa only knew it, was a very remarkable feat. But, anyway, she had been hall-marked "sterling," and was enjoying herself furiously. And the young men were so different from Carthage, so much more polished and elegant--and pertinacious. Washington young men simply didn't know what "No" meant, and it was like shoveling snow to get rid of them. But Aunt Sarah was a regular White Wings, and the poor, the detrimental, and the fast--every one, in fact, who wasn't a first-class _parti_ with references from his last place--got carted away before he knew what had struck him.

And Aunt Sally! "Why, Papa, we didn't know her at all. She is as young as I am, and twice as eager, and dances her stockings through every other night. Washington is divided between the people who hate her, and the people who love her, and they put a tremendous zip into either end of it. What she really wants is to marry me at the cold end, and strengthen her position as she calls it; and though I say it, who shouldn't, the cold-end young men are coming in fast. When one proposes to me, she calls it a scalp, and looks, oh, so pleased! But if I see any of them working up to that I try to stop him in time, though it's awfully exciting just the same. That's why I've only three scalps to report instead of about eight. Oh, Papa, what fun it is!"

In time her letters began to change, and there were little signs of disillusionment. One was almost a tract on worldliness, in which she talked about Vanity Fair, and dancing on coffins, and the inner hunger of the soul. There were also increasing references to J. Whitlock Pastor, always coupled with "ideals." J. Whitlock Pastor was quite a remarkable young man of thirty, with "a beautiful austerity," and "fine mind." His people were immensely wealthy, and immensely fashionable--even in Carthage there was a sacredness about the name of Pastor--and Phyllis said there was something splendid in his taking up forestry as a life work, and devoting himself to it, heart and soul, when he had been born--not with a silver spoon--but with a bird's-egg diamond in his mouth.

If there was anything to be said against J. Whitlock Pastor, it was that he was almost too good to be true. He wanted to leave the world better for his having been, and all that--and seemed to have what might be called an excruciating sense of duty. "A very quiet and rather a sad man," wrote Phyllis, "whom one might easily mistake for a muff if one hadn't seen him on horseback. He rides superbly, and I never saw a ring-master in a circus who could come anywhere near him."

All this worked up to a telegram that reached Mr. Ladd a few weeks later: "I accepted him last night, and, Papa, please come on quick and bless us."

Mr. Ladd hastened to Washington as speedily as his affairs would allow, which was five days later, and arrived just in time to dress for the introductory dinner at Mrs. Pastor's--J. Whitlock's mother's. He tried to imagine he was delighted, and caught his daughter in his arms with the enthusiasm of a stage parent. But Phyllis was so pale, so calm, so undemonstrative that he hardly knew what to make of her. He put her cool indifference down to Washington training, but still it puzzled and troubled him. It was so unlike a girl who had met her fate--so unlike another pair of lovers that had been so much in his head that day--Genivieve de Levancour, and a certain Bob Ladd. The contrast gave him a certain sense of foreboding.

In the carriage she was very silent, and nestled against him like a tired child. He repeated his congratulations; he strove again to be delighted; joked, not without effort, about the exalted position of the Pastors, and what a come-down it was for them to marry such poor white trash as the Ladds. Then it occurred to him that perhaps this jarred upon her! "Forgive me, Phyllis," he said humbly. "I--I hardly know what I am saying. I--I guess I'm trying to hide what this recalls to me--what this means to me."

She pressed his hand, and snuggled it against her cheek, but still shrouded herself in reserve.

"Papa," she said suddenly, "you'd stick to me through thick and thin, wouldn't you? Whatever I did--however foolish or silly I might be, you'd always love me, wouldn't you?"

"By God, yes," he answered, "though why on earth you should ask--"

"Only to make sure," she exclaimed, brightening. "Just to be certain that my old-dog father hadn't changed. Now say bow-wow, just to show that you haven't!"

Mr. Ladd, very much mystified, and not at all comfortable in his mind, obediently bow-wowed. It set Phyllis off in a peal of laughter, and it was with apparent hilarity that both descended at the Pastor's front door.

Whitlock's mother received them in the drawing-room. She was a stately, gray-haired woman, with a subdued voice, and a graciousness that was almost oppressive. Her guests had hardly been seated, when J. Whitlock himself appeared, and excused himself, with faultless and somewhat unnecessary courtesy, for not having been found awaiting their arrival. Mr. Ladd saw before him a tall, thin young man, of a polished and somewhat cold exterior, with a dryness of expression that was positively parching. Like one of those priceless enamels of the Orient, one felt that J. Whitlock Pastor had been roasted and glazed, roasted and glazed, roasted and glazed until the substance beneath had become but a matter of conjecture. The enamel was magnificent--but where was the man? Mr. Ladd, with a choking sense of disappointment, began to suspect there was none.

J. Whitlock opened the proceedings much as the czar might have opened a Duma. He recited a neat, dry, commonplace little address of welcome, and sounded a key-note of constraint and formality that was rigorously maintained throughout the evening. The address was seconded by the empress-dowager, and then it was Mr. Ladd's turn to swear loyalty to the throne, and burst into cheers. He did so as well as he could, but it was a poor, lame attempt; and when, almost in despair, he went up to J. Whitlock, and impulsively wrung the Imperial hand, the very atmosphere seemed to shiver at the sacrilege.

A frigid dinner followed in a dining-room of overpowering magnificence. There was a high-class conversation to match, interrupted from time to time by a small British army--small in number--but prodigal of inches, and calves, and chest-measure--who stealthily pounced on plates, obtruded thumbs, and stopped breathing when they served you. Mr. Ladd, smarting with an inexplicable resentment, compounded of jealousy, scorn and chagrin, writhed in his chair, and tugged at his mustache, and gazed from his daughter to his prospective son-in-law with melancholy wonder.

Yet Phyllis seemed to be perfectly contented, sitting there so demure, elegant and self-possessed at the terrible board of the Romanoffs. Mr. Ladd could have wished that she had shown a little more assertion, a little more--well, he hardly knew what but something to offset the unconscious arrogance of these people, and to show them that a Ladd was as good as they were, if not a darned sight better! But Phyllis, if anything, was too much the other way. There was a humility in her sweetness, her deference, her touching desire to please. To her father she seemed to have accepted too readily, too gratefully, her beggar-maid position at that kingly table.

But as he watched her some doubts assailed him. He remembered how singular she had been in the carriage, how over-wrought, and unlike her usual self. Her eyes, fixed so constantly on her intended's, had in them more pleading than love; more a curious, studying, seeking look, as though she, too, was trying to penetrate the enamel, and see beneath. But her voice softened as she spoke to him; she smiled and colored at his allusions to "us" and "our"; she shyly referred to their projected honeymoon in the western forests, and spoke rapturously of galloping through the glades at the head of twenty rangers, all sunburned and jingling and armed to the teeth.

What was an old fellow to make of it, anyway? One could bring up a girl from a baby, and still not know her. Mr. Ladd was very much perplexed.

After dinner, the ladies left the two men at their coffee, and retired. The British Army set out liqueurs, cigars, a spirit-lighter, and then noiselessly vanished. Now that they were alone together, Mr. Ladd hoped that J. Whitlock would unbend; hoped that the long-deferred process of making his acquaintance would begin. He might not be an ideal son-in-law, but it was horse-sense to make the best of him. You had to take the son-in-law God gave you. Besides, the man that Phyllis loved was bound to have a fine nature; and if he could unveil it to her, he surely could unveil it to her father. So, between sips of Benedictine, and through the haze of a good cigar, Mr. Ladd essayed the task.

He commenced by describing his own early manhood; his courtship of Phyllis' mother; his marriage in face of a thousand difficulties. Again and again he faltered; it was all so sacred; his eyes were often moist--but he persevered; he had to win this young man, and how better than by appealing to the sentiment that unites all true lovers? The elderly railroad president could not bear utterly to be left out of these two young lives. His daughter was lost to him; at best a husband leaves little for a father; this stranger had it now in his power to make that little almost nothing. Small wonder, then, that Mr. Ladd struggled for his shred of happiness; put pride on one side; exerted every faculty he possessed to attract the friendship of Phyllis' master. For a husband is a master; a woman is the slave of the man she loves; forty centuries have changed nothing but the words, and the size and metal of the ring.

It used to be of iron, and was worn on the neck.

Mr. Ladd's gaze, that had been fixed in vacancy, of a sudden fell full on J. Whitlock's face. What he saw was an expression so cold, so delicately supercilious, so patiently polite, that he stopped as suddenly as though he had been struck by lightning. Was it for this, then, that he had opened this holy of holies, into which no human being before had ever looked,--this inmost recess of his soul, now profaned, it seemed to him, for ever? For a second his shame transcended even his disappointment. He had dishonored the dead, besides dishonoring himself. He had allowed this tall, thin, bored creature to hear things too dear, too intimate, to be spoken even to Phyllis. My God, what an old fool he had been, what an ass!

"Had we not better join the ladies?" inquired J. Whitlock, after the pause had lasted long enough to redeem the proposal from any appearance of rudeness.

"I suppose we had," returned Mr. Ladd, in a tone as dry as his host's; and together they both sought the drawing-room.

A long, long hour followed before, in decency, a very flustered, embittered, and upset middle-aged gentleman could dare to say his adieux. From the frescoed ceiling the painted angels must certainly have wept at the sight beneath; or, if they did not weep, they surely yawned. The labored conversation, the make-believe cordiality, the awful gap when a topic fell to rise no more, certainly made it an evening that never could be forgotten. Blessed Briton who said: "Mr. Ladd's kerridge!" Twice blessed Briton who handed them into it, and uttered the magic word "'Ome!"

"Did you like him, Papa?"

"A delightful young man, Phyllis, perfectly delightful."

"And his mother?"

"Charming, charming!"

"I never saw either one of them unbend as they did to you."

"It was a great compliment. I appreciate it."

"You don't think I could have done better?"

"No, indeed. Not if you love him."

"Papa?"

"Yes, dearest?"

"Papa, I've done something awful. Shut your eyes, and I'll try to tell you."

"Phyllis, what do you--?"

"Are they shut--tight--_tight_?"

"Yes, but I don't--"

"Now, don't talk, Papa, but listen like a good little railroad president, and I'll tell you what I think of J. Whitlock Pastor, and that is he's _unbearable_! No, no, I'm not joking--I mean it, I mean it! He's unbearable, and his mother's unbearable, and the forty yards around them is unbearable, and I wouldn't marry him for anything under the sun, no, not if he was the only man in the world except the clergyman who would do it; and Papa, I'm so mortified and ashamed and miserable that I don't know what to do. Didn't you notice me to-night, and how shy and crushed I was, sitting there like a little Judas, and feeling, oh, horribly wicked and treacherous? It was _all_ I could do not to scream out that I hated him, just as loud as I could: I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!--I was trying to tell you that when we started, but I didn't have the courage. I wanted you to see him for yourself; to realize how unendurable he is; I--I--wanted you not to blame me too much, Papa."

To Mr. Ladd it was like a reprieve at the gallows' foot. Blame her? Why, elation ran to his head like wine; he caught her in his arms and hugged her; had he saved her from drowning he could not have been more passionately thankful. His opinion of the young man came out in a torrent of unvarnished Anglo-Saxon. To every epithet he applied to him, Phyllis added a worse. In their wild humor, and bubbling over with a laughter that verged on the hysterical, they vied with each other in tearing J. Whitlock to pieces.

"But, Phyllis, Phyllis, how did you ever come to do it?"

"I don't know, Papa."

"But you must have liked him?"

"I thought I did."

"Was it the attraction of his position--his name--and all that kind of thing?"

"No, I thought I loved him."

"How _could_ you have thought such a thing?"

"It's incredible, but I did, Papa. I loved him right up to the moment when he kissed me. And how could I stop him after having looked down at my toes, and said 'Yes.' He's been kissing me for five days--and, Papa, I hate him."

The fierceness she put into these three words was vitriolic. Disgust, revulsion, outraged pride flooded her cheek with carmine.

"Papa, I can't make any excuses for myself. It's not prudery; it's not that; but somehow the real _me_ didn't like the real _him_, and that's all I can say about it!"

"You'll have to write to him, and break it off."

"But what am I to tell him, Papa? It's so awful and humiliating for him. I guess I'll just put it down to insanity in my family."

"But, good Lord, we haven't any--we've a very decent record."

"Oh, Papa, I simply must have been insane to have got engaged to him.--I'll write him a beautiful letter of regret, and inclose a doctor's certificate!"

Her incorrigible humor was again asserting itself. She outlined the letter, her eyes dancing with merriment. Mr. Ladd, in no mood to criticize these swift transitions, joined in whole-heartedly. They laughed and laughed till the tears came, and arrived home like noisy children from a party.

Mrs. Fensham, in a very decollete gown, and looking like a sylph of twenty-five, was waiting for the carriage to take her to a ball. She swam up in front of Bob, and raised her two little hands to his shoulders--a graceful gesture, and one she was very fond of.

"And you found him a perfect dear, didn't you?" she murmured ecstatically.

"Well, I don't know that I did," faltered Brother Bob, placing a kiss on the top of her head. "The fact is, Sally, we've decided to call it off!"

"Bob, you haven't broken the engagement!"

Her lisping voice turned suddenly metallic. She stared from her brother to her niece, a sylph no longer, but a woman of forty-five, pale with apprehension and anger.

"Phyllis has made a mistake, that's all," he said. "He looked very nice in the show-window, but now we are going to take him back, and get a credit-slip for something we want more."

"A new automobile coat for Papa," put in Phyllis mischievously.

"And you can both laugh about it!" exclaimed Aunt Sarah in appalled accents. "Laugh at throwing over J. Whitlock Pastor! Oh, you little Carthage nobodies--haven't you any sense at all--don't you know what you are doing--isn't he as much a duke with us as any Marlborough or Newcastle in England? He was too good; he was too nice; he wasn't enough of a snob to blow and brag--and that's what he gets for it, the 'No' of a silly girl, who'd prefer a barber's block clerk to the greatest gentleman in America!"

She tottered to the mantelpiece and burst into tears--the first tears she had shed in twenty worldly and scheming years--and the only tears that did attend the rupture of the Pastor-Ladd engagement.

*CHAPTER IV*

There was the usual chatter, the usual slanders, the usual innuendoes that follow such an event. Charming little assassins, in Paquin gowns and picture hats flew about sticking pins into Phyllis' reputation. Those worse gossips, the clubs, were not behindhand either; and old gentlemen, who ought to have known better, unctuously laid their heads together and passed the lies along. It is so much the custom to dwell on the good side of human nature that we are apt to forget the existence of another--that cruel malignancy, which, in embryo, may be seen any time at the monkey-house in the Zoo. In its more developed human form it jostles at our elbows every day.

The American duke himself behaved with a beautiful propriety. Publicly he took all the blame on his own shoulders, and hied him to the western wilds to scourge the campers and cigarette-smokers who infested his beloved forests. Thus congenially employed, he was quite willing to wait for Time's healing hand to do the rest. In a year he was completely reenameled, and took a finer polish than ever.

Mr. Ladd hoped that Phyllis would return to Carthage to hide her head from the storm. But she insisted on staying in Washington, and "seeing it through," which she did with the prettiest defiance imaginable, returning pin for pin with gay insouciance, and dancing the night out in all manner of lions' dens. In her veins there ran the blood of that old aristocratic South--of those fighting-cock Frenchmen, dark, lithe and graceful, who had loved, gambled and gone the pace with headlong recklessness and folly; of those fiery Spaniards, more grave and still more dissolute, to whom pride was the very breath of life, and who could call out a man and shoot him with the stateliest of courtesy.--What a race it had been in the heyday of its wildness and youth, the torment of women, the terror of men, alluring even now through the haze of by-gone pistol-smoke! And though it has been dead and gone these hundred and fifty years, the strain yet persists in some Phyllis here, some stripling there, attenuated perhaps, but far, far from lost.