Part 2

As for the ladies, Elizabeth, on removing her cloak, was dismayed to find that her fresh white muslin gown had more than one spot of mud on it, and it took ten minutes of diligent rubbing, washing, and pressing to get it out. She realized that she must have got it from the boots of the man who stood behind her, whose dark and striking face had fixed her attention at first and in whose neighborhood she had felt strangely influenced. And then the loss of her little pearl heart—But the Marine Band was playing loudly a rhythmic waltz, there were partners at the door waiting for her. She had two desirable men, both strangers, whom she might consider her property for that evening. She was young and beautiful, and in a little while all of her unpleasant sensations passed away. She found herself whirling around the room in Darrell’s arms. For a wonder, although an Englishman, he knew how to dance, and Elizabeth was intensely susceptible to rhythm and music. She felt when she began to waltz with Darrell, as if she would like to waltz forever with him. He was so strong, so supple, so graceful,—so susceptible, like herself, to that charm of dance music in which two people dancing together are conscious of that sensuous counterpart of real love which makes a man and a woman feel as if they constituted one being with a single heart and a single soul.

Darrell realized the first moment that he held Elizabeth in his arms and floated with her to the languorous waltz music, that he had never really been in love at all before; but, as he frankly confessed to himself, it was all up with him now. He knew not who or what she was, but it could make but little difference to him. He loved her and he knew it. He would have liked not to leave her side once during the evening, and in fact he was near her most of the time and danced with her six times.

Pelham, on the contrary, only sat out a single dance with her, as he was not a dancing man. He too felt a charm about her which he had never known in any other woman. Sitting out dances with young ladies had been a species of torment to him, but not so this time. He thought the charm that Elizabeth exercised over him was that she was the first of all unmarried English–speaking women that he had known who was perfectly and entirely at her ease with an unmarried man. She assumed an attitude openly and yet most delicately flattering towards him. He had known Englishwomen of fascination who were entirely at ease with men, but never flattering; and he had known other women who were very flattering to men, but never at ease with them. Here was a woman who treated him with the frankness she would have shown towards a younger brother, with the confidence she would have shown a respected elder brother, and with the deference she would have shown the greatest Duke in England. Pelham rightly judged that here he had met the true American type. A woman with an ancestry of gentle people, dating back two or three hundred years, and developed in a country where respect for women is so insisted upon as to be professed by those who neither believe in it nor practise it,—as such Elizabeth was to him the most interesting woman he had ever met. He was himself a reading man, and Elizabeth Brandon at twenty had read only a few books, but these were the English classics and they had given her the capacity to talk to a reading man like Pelham. He foresaw that at thirty Elizabeth would have read a great many books, and with the untrammelled association with men of all ages and in the free American atmosphere, her mind, naturally good, would have developed admirably.

As Pelham and Elizabeth sat at the foot of the stairs, a cabinet officer passed them slowly, as they sat under a bower of great palms, with the throbbing music far enough away not to interrupt their talk; and Elizabeth spoke to the cabinet officer. He was an elderly man from the West, manly and even gentlemanly, though not polished. Pelham noticed with what ease Elizabeth spoke to this type of man, the smiling, tactful answers she gave to his pleasant but rather blunt questions. She introduced Pelham promptly to him, accompanying the introduction with a request that he would be very nice to Captain Pelham while he was in Washington; and when the cabinet officer asked her what she wanted him to do for Captain Pelham, she replied promptly:—

“Send him a card to the club.”

Pelham was aghast at the boldness of this, and tried to imagine the daughter of a half–pay officer in England asking a cabinet minister to send a card to White’s and Brooke’s to a chance acquaintance she had just picked up.

Elizabeth continued placidly: “Of course I could get a card through papa. He does not belong to the club,—it is too expensive,—but he knows a great many men in the club. You know he can’t afford anything except me; and there are plenty of other men who would send Captain Pelham a card if I asked them, but you happen to be the biggest man I know and that is why I am asking you.”

At which the cabinet officer, laughing, said, “Will you be kind enough, Captain Pelham, to give me the name of your hotel?—and I will have a card sent to you to–morrow morning.”

“And he has a cousin, Captain Darrell,” added Elizabeth, promptly, “and he must have a card, too.”

“Certainly,” replied the cabinet officer, taking out his note–book and writing down the two names. “His brothers, cousins, and his uncles and all his relations, if you like,” and after taking the names down the cabinet officer walked away, laughing. This was an experience that Pelham thought his comrades would doubt when he told it at the mess–table of the 178th Foot.

Pelham spent much more time with Mrs. Luttrell than with Elizabeth, and the two were mutually charmed. Mrs. Luttrell’s daring and positive language and her air of command were accompanied with a fascination of smile and voice which was effective even with her snow–white hair and crow’s feet around her eyes, still full of light and life. Pelham noticed that she was always surrounded by men, young and old. She treated the young men like patriarchs and the patriarchs like boys.

Baskerville, quiet, rather sedate, and seeking the middle–aged rather than the young, struck Pelham as one of the pleasantest fellows he had ever met. It looked as if this chance incursion of the Charity Ball would reveal more of the real American life to Pelham and Darrell than they might have met in a month of ordinary traveller’s advantages. Mrs. Luttrell had already engaged them for a couple of dinners and Baskerville for a club breakfast. Most of the people they met were agreeable, and they noticed that buoyancy of spirit and gayety of heart which a great writer on America, and another writer who was the most patronizing literary snob ever seen in North America, mutually agreed to be characteristic of American society. The ball itself, which was described by the society correspondents as of surpassing brilliancy, hardly reached that mark; but to three persons, Elizabeth Brandon, Pelham, and Darrell, it was an evening of delight, never to be forgotten.

Meanwhile, James Clavering still stood outside in the sharp, starlit night, listening to the bursts of music which came at intervals from the ball–room and watching the great lighted windows. He saw Elizabeth Brandon float past in Darrell’s arms, and watched them enviously. His exterior showed that the price of a ball–ticket was nothing to him, but he knew that he had no place then in a ball–room. He had taken no part in searching for the trinket which Elizabeth had dropped, but presently, moving a little, he saw under his heel the crushed fragments of pearls. He had unconsciously ground the little heart under his foot. It gave him a spasm of regret and even of sentiment, and he thought to himself, with an odd smile flitting across his well–cut features, “Suppose some day I should give that girl a diamond heart, five times as big and a thousand times as costly as this. It wouldn’t be so strange, after all.”

He had stood watching the last stragglers to the ball and searching the windows for a passing glimpse of the beautiful Elizabeth. Meanwhile, outside, General Brandon had returned to the sidewalk. He would have dearly liked to go, himself; but it had been all that he could do to buy a ticket for Elizabeth,—a ticket and seventeen yards of white muslin, which she herself had fashioned with her own fingers into a beautiful gown and had trimmed with her grandmother’s old lace.

As General Brandon was moving off, a hand touched his elbow, and James Clavering, who had been standing a little in the background, spoke to him.

“This is General Brandon?” he said.

“Yes,” replied General Brandon, looking into the clear–cut face of the man before him, who towered a head above him. “And you, I cannot at this moment call your name.”

“It’s Clavering. Don’t you remember me when I was a sutler at Fort Worth in Texas, and you were a captain of cavalry at the same post?”

A light dawned upon General Brandon. He grasped the ex–sutler’s hand as cordially as if he had been an officer of the British Army. “Certainly I do. You knew me before the war.” All Virginians divide time into three epochs, before the war, during the war, and after the war. “And a very excellent sutler you were. I recall that you had a good, industrious wife and several promising children. You look prosperous. The world seems to have gone well with you.”

“Pretty well,” replied Clavering, ignoring the mention of his wife and children. He had a voice of music which added to his other personal advantages. “I hope the same is the case with you?”

The General smiled placidly. “I resigned from the army when my state seceded, and went through four years on the battlefields of Virginia, and I attained the rank of brigadier–general. Then I entered the service of the Khedive of Egypt and served in Egypt for eight years, but you know what has fallen out there. So I have returned to Washington, and through the influence of old army friends I have secured a clerkship in the War Department.”

“Pretty hard lines, isn’t it?” asked Clavering, looking at General Brandon’s seedy greatcoat, and knowing what stupendous changes were involved in the story told so smilingly by the time–worn veteran.

“Scarcely that,” answered General Brandon, with the same gentleness of tone and smile. “I have a small house here in rather a good part of the town, and my salary is sufficient for my simple wants and those of my daughter, who has no extravagant tastes. Thanks to my old army friends I am here, and they have met me with extraordinary kindness and good–will and shown me much hospitality. On the whole I think myself decidedly well off, all things considered.”

Clavering looked at General Brandon with pity and good–natured contempt. He seemed to Clavering about as guileless and innocent as a boarding–school miss or a college sophomore; and yet he had commanded three thousand fighting men, during four fierce years of a bloody war, and had been relied upon by no less a man than Stonewall Jackson himself. All this Clavering knew, as he knew most of the contemporary history of his own country.

“And that charming young lady,” he asked after a moment, “was your daughter?”

“Yes, my only child and as good as she is beautiful. May I ask if Mrs. Clavering is alive? I remember her as a most worthy woman.”

“Yes,” answered Clavering, shortly. “Now will you come with me to one of the up–town hotels and have a smoke and a drink? In the old days when I was a sutler and you were a captain, I should have known better than to ask you; but I never expected to remain a sutler always. I have made money in the West, and I have ambitions of various sorts. Some day you will hear of me.”

“Nothing,” said General Brandon, impressively, “should be or is, in this country, out of reach of any man with brains and solid worth.” The General himself was an aristocrat from the crown of his head to the sole of his feet, but he never dreamed of it.

“And some education,” added Clavering. He knew his man thoroughly. “Brains are the first requisite, and solid worth is all very well. But a man must have some other qualifications. A man must know something beyond the common school of his youth and the bigger common school of his manhood, in order to make a lasting impression on his time. Of course I don’t include geniuses in this category, but men of talent only. I have not what I call education, but I have the next best thing to it. I know my own limitations. I have a boy on whom I shall put a twenty–thousand–dollar education, but I am very much afraid that he is a twenty–dollar boy.”

General Brandon did not exactly understand this, and Clavering said no more about his boy. They walked off together, and in a little while they were seated in the lobby of an up–town hotel and Clavering was telling the story of his life—or what he chose to tell of it—to General Brandon. It was not an instinctive outpouring of the truth, but as a matter of fact Clavering was rehearsing for the rôle he intended to play in a few years’ time,—that of the rich man who has hewn his way through a great forest of difficulties and has triumphed in the end. He was astute enough not to despise men of General Brandon’s stamp, simple, quiet, brave, having little knowledge of affairs but perfectly versed in ethics. Clavering in short knew the full value of a gentleman, although he was not one himself.

They sat late, and when the General reached his own door in a tall old house far up town, Elizabeth was just descending from Mrs. Luttrell’s carriage, escorted by Richard Baskerville.

“Oh, papa,” she said, running up the steps, her white muslin skirts floating behind her, “I have had the most glorious evening.” She was quite unaware that the hour of fate had struck for her, and that she had entered the portals of destiny—a new and strange destiny.

_Chapter Two_

Pelham and Darrell had reckoned upon spending three weeks in Washington, but it became a full month. They were practically adopted by Mrs. Luttrell, and found her large, handsome, old–fashioned house a centre of the best society, where they saw all that was worth seeing in Washington. At their own Embassy they soon became favorites, and it was after a ball there that a revelation came to Pelham. He had seen Elizabeth Brandon every day of their stay in Washington, and every day she had absorbed a little more of his strong, reserved, and silently controlled nature and had gained an inch or two in his reserved, tender, but devoted heart. He discovered that Elizabeth had both goodness and intelligence as well as charm and beauty. She was very young to him,—that is, in his own thirty years he had seen and known, realized and suffered, ten times more than Elizabeth during her twenty years of life. He recognized in her a naturally fine mind and taste for reading, a delightful and subtle power of accommodating herself to the mode and manner of any man she wished to please. How attractive this would make her to the man she loved and married! The thought almost dazzled Pelham’s strong and sober brain. He saw that she was a little intoxicated with the new wine of life, her beauty, her grace and popularity; she was quite unburdened with the cares and anxieties of richer girls who wore finer gowns and sighed for the partners who crowded around Elizabeth.

Pelham was not in the least disturbed by the fact that Darrell had fallen violently in love with Elizabeth and proclaimed it to him a dozen times a day. It was Darrell’s normal condition to be violently in love with some pretty girl; but frankly admitting that his pay and allowance were not enough for one, much less for two, there was small danger of his actually committing himself, so Pelham thought. Nor did he observe any difference in Elizabeth’s acceptance of Darrell’s attentions from those of any other man whom she liked—her manner was uniformly flattering and complaisant; in truth, he had very little conception of Elizabeth’s feminine power of concealment.

On the night of the ball at the British Embassy, Pelham, on his return to his hotel, sat in his own room, smoking and turning over an important question in his mind, which was “when should he ask Elizabeth Brandon to marry him.” He had not much to offer her in a worldly point of view. His own position was good, but no better than hers, and he discovered that General Brandon, who had been to England once or twice, had hobnobbed with persons of higher rank even than the peer of the realm who was grandfather to both Darrell and himself; but Pelham realized with an admiration as deep as his love that Elizabeth was not the woman to marry for either money or position. He was reflecting on what he should say to General Brandon next day, before speaking to Elizabeth, for he had old–fashioned notions as to the rights of fathers. He was wondering, in case Elizabeth accepted him, how General Brandon would take the proposition that she should come out to India and marry him there after the English fashion, and was in doubt whether General Brandon would fall on his neck and embrace him or kick him downstairs.

While he was considering these things, the door opened and Darrell walked in. He threw himself in a chair close to Pelham and, closing his eyes, went into a revery. Pelham looked at him goodhumoredly. No doubt he was dreaming about Elizabeth. He was a handsome fellow, no denying that, and candor, courage, and honesty were writ large all over him. Presently he roused himself, and leaning over towards Pelham, and blushing like a girl, for the first time in his life, he said in a whisper, “She loves me.”

Pelham received a shock such as he had never known before. He knew Darrell’s sincerity and real modesty too well to doubt him, and his mind took in immediately and quietly the calamity to himself which Darrell’s words implied. He sat still, so still that Darrell shook him. “Do you hear, old man? It was all settled to–night at the ball, not two hours ago, behind a big hydrangea in a flower–pot, and you’ve got to help me out. I am to see the Ambassador to–morrow and ask him to cable for two weeks’ additional leave, so we can be married before sailing.”

Yes, with Pelham the dream was over, the fairy palace had crumbled. The heavenly music had dissolved in air. The world had suddenly grown bleak and cold and commonplace, but pride and common sense still remained.

“It seems to me,” said Pelham, in a quiet voice, after a pause, “that there isn’t much left for me to do. You and—Miss Brandon have agreed, and the Ambassador can no doubt get you two weeks more leave—” Pelham stopped with a choking in his throat which he had never felt before in all his life.

“But why don’t you congratulate me?” cried Darrell. They had been like brothers all their lives, and Pelham was to Darrell his other self; while Darrell was to Pelham a younger brother whose excellence of heart and delicacy of soul made up for a very meagre understanding.

“I do congratulate you,” said Pelham, grasping Darrell’s hand, the old habit of love and brotherly kindness overwhelming him. “I think Miss Brandon the most charming girl I ever knew. Any man is fortunate to get her. But I don’t think you are half good enough for her, Jack.”

“That is just what I think,” answered Darrell, with perfect sincerity. “But no man is good enough for her as far as that goes, and I am not the man to be running away from an angel; but there are lots of things to be attended to. I must give my whole time to Elizabeth, and I cannot ask the Ambassador to see about transportation, tickets, and transferring luggage. You must do that, and pay for it all; and I will pay you back when we get our respected aunt’s fortune—fifty years or more from to–day.”

“Of course I shall do all that is necessary,” replied Pelham, “and there will be plenty to do. Getting married is heavy business, and taking a girl away to India at a fortnight’s notice—How did you have the courage to ask so much of such a woman?”

“I don’t know. It happened, that’s all, and I was in heaven. I shall be there again to–morrow morning at eleven o’clock, when I shall see Elizabeth.” He spoke her name as if it were a saint’s name.

The two men sat talking for an hour or two. Darrell’s manner in speaking of his acceptance by Elizabeth was not gushing, but expressed a deep and sincere passion, which he told Pelham, with perfect simplicity, was the first and only love of his life; and Pelham believed him. After parting from Darrell, Pelham sat up until dawn, wrestling with his own heart; but when the day broke he had conquered his anguish. He saw that Elizabeth had possibly entered upon a thorny path by marrying Darrell. He saw all the pitfalls which awaited a young and beautiful woman, the wife of a subaltern in a foot regiment in India. He foresaw that Elizabeth’s charming freedom of manner, her flattering attitude towards men of all sorts and conditions, which might answer well enough in America, would probably be misunderstood by others more or less strict than herself, and he determined to be her friend, and felt sure that she would soon need one. Darrell was the best fellow alive, but he was not the man to manage that complicated problem, a pretty, vivacious, innocent, intelligent, admiration–loving American girl, without family or friends, cast loose at an Indian station.

In the afternoon of that day, Pelham paid his first call on Elizabeth as the prospective bride of Darrell. He thought her more love–compelling in her new relation of a promised bride than he had ever seen her before; her shyness, her pallor, her tears, her deep feeling, her constant remembrance of what her father would suffer, endeared her to Pelham, and yet her willingness, like the Sabine women of old, to go with the man she loved was deeply touching. It was a deliciously old–fashioned love match, both Elizabeth and Darrell looking forward to an uninterrupted honeymoon for the rest of their lives—Elizabeth quite as much so as Darrell. Pelham at this interview was kindness and sympathy itself, and even in the midst of her dream of love Elizabeth felt the serious value of such a friendship as this quiet, silent, rather ugly young officer, sparing of words, but full of tact, was offering her.

When Pelham came out of the shabby old house which was Elizabeth’s home, he met General Brandon face to face on the steps. Pelham grasped his hand cordially. He felt acutely for the poor father who had to give up such a daughter, to go upon such a lifelong journey. Something prompted Pelham to say, “I congratulate my friend and cousin Darrell with all my heart, but for you who are to give up your daughter, I can only say that I feel for you more than I can express.”