Part 21

Mr. Vanderdyke, whose to-days were just as monotonous and uninspired as his yesterdays, was unexpectedly emotional. He held his only child closely and kissed her several times and said, "My dear, my dear," a little brokenly. His little girl was returning from her honeymoon. It might mean so much in the history of the family.

And then it was Aunt Honoria's turn. With eager tenderness and pride she gathered into her warm arms the girl she would have given so much to own. Her broken romance lived again at that moment. Her eyes were blurred with tears.

Not her father and not her mother gave Beatrix a sudden feeling of being a fraud and an impostor, but this kind, sweet woman whose silence was so eloquent. How different everything might have been if only she had been her mother!

With what she intended to be marked cordiality Mrs. Vanderdyke gave both her hands to Franklin, who had never been so uncomfortable in his life. She wanted to convey to him the fact that even in the face of rumors and anonymous letters she believed in him. "My dear Pelham," she said, "it is kind of you to cut your honeymoon so short in deference to our wishes."

"Not at all," replied Franklin. He pulled himself up as he was about to add, "I'm only too delighted."

Mr. Vanderdyke seemed anxious to support his wife. "My dear fellow," he said, "my dear fellow," and stuck.

Franklin returned his grip. "I'm awfully glad to see you, sir," he said. "Er--what stunning weather." He caught the impish look which Beatrix darted at him and gave it up.

"My dear lad," said Aunt Honoria, so kindly and with a smile that was so maternal that Franklin put her hand to his lips. It was only as they all went into the hall that he turned cold under the realization that he was little better than a cheat among these people. All the same, with one refreshing glance at Beatrix, whose impression of half-shy, half-defiant young wifehood was amazingly perfect, he played the son-in-law to the best of his ability.

Once more they were back, these two, in the place where life had taken a sudden and astonishing twist. Months seemed to have gone by since they had been there before.

"The Bannermans, Mrs. Gordon and Ethel, the Duc de la Faucheroucould and Roy Stanton have been staying," said Mrs. Vanderdyke. "By a very lucky chance we shall be alone to-night and to-morrow. We will have a family council after dinner."

Beatrix looked at Franklin over her father's shoulder, and drew down the corners of her mouth. No, he was not the man to make her take things seriously.

Mr. Vanderdyke let out some of the uneasiness that he had done his best to disguise during the welcome. "I wish I'd acted on my intuition to telephone to my lawyer," he said petulantly. "Eventually we shall have to take legal advice, I feel sure."

Aunt Honoria broke in. "Now, now," she said, "we agreed not to go into this matter until our young people had settled down. It is far too serious to take up in a desultory manner. Personally, my opinion is that as soon as Pelham has all the facts and has dined well and is smoking a cigar he will bring his practicality to bear and possibly do away with any recourse to the law. I have great confidence in Pelham," and she smiled at him in a way that made him cold again.

And then Mrs. Lester Keene came in and was greeted graciously by the two ladies.

Beatrix went across casually to Franklin. "What on earth has happened?" she asked, in an anxious whisper.

"I wish I knew," he whispered back.

"Do you feel curious? I do."

He nodded gravely. Beatrix and scandal,--they were never meant to run in double harness.

And then the imp of mischief that was never very far away from Beatrix took its old accustomed place on her shoulder, and her eyes began to dance. "I'm not surprised at my family's confidence in you," she said. "There's something in your appearance that could win you orders even for an encyclopedia. What fills me with surprise and amusement is the confidence they seem to feel in _me_. That's quite new."

"Not so loud," he said.

She sent out a ripple of laughter. "Well, you certainly are practical. That, I know."

"Do you?"

"Don't I?" She looked straight into his eyes and her laughter ceased.

Mrs. Vanderdyke joined them. "You have twenty minutes for a little rest before you dress for dinner, Beatrix. You must be tired after your hot drive."

"No, Mother, thanks," said Beatrix airily. "Pelham talked all the way here and was so merry and bright that the journey seemed short." But she went upstairs to the suite that he would never forget, and her little touch of sarcasm found its mark.

"Come into my room," said Mr. Vanderdyke, "and we'll smoke a cigarette."

Franklin followed him.

It was a curious room in which he presently found himself,--a room which gave a pathetic keynote to the character and life of the man who spent so many hours in it. Very large and lofty, it was crammed with ideas at which he appeared to have made a beginning, dabbled in and wearied of. There were leather-bound manuscript books in dozens, several of which had labels on the back,--"Notes on Old China," "Impressions of European Labor Conditions," "Butterflies," "Songs and Sonnets," "A Life of Russell Vanderdyke, Book I.," "Trout Streams," "The Improvement of Factories,"--it would have taken an hour to examine them all. The note of the dilettante was everywhere,--in the pieces of rare silver that were mixed with old pottery, Japanese lacquer, Jacobean chests, Oriental curios, ancient Bibles, first editions, faded prints, modern etchings, and one or two appalling examples of so-called Cubist work which appealed to Franklin merely as pervertism or the attempt of men who had never been taught to paint to illustrate delirium tremens. It was the room of a man of confirmed irresolution, of an inherited lack of grip, of an intellect that was as unconcentrated as a flight of pigeons. It showed a scattering of interest that could only belong to some-one who had never felt the splendid urge of achieving an object in the face of dire necessity. It provided the most unobservant eye with a complete history of an ambitious but vacillating life. It conveyed to workers the impression of many acres of dead-level ground long ago carefully staked out as a garden city, with neat boards indicating here an avenue, here a public library, here a country club, here a huge hotel, here a railroad station, all very neat and well weeded but without the fulfilment of one single promise.

Franklin didn't get the feeling of the room at once. It seemed to him to be rather intimate though somewhat uninhabitable. It was only while Mr. Vanderdyke was talking in his vague impersonal way that the pathetic incompleteness of it all came to him and hit him hard. Good Heavens, what if he, too, dwindled, for the same reason, into a similar dabbler! What if he, too, scattered away his life with the same kind of uselessness!

He was glad to get away to change and to think. He was pretty certain that the time was near, whatever might be the way out of the maze that he was in with Beatrix, for him to do a good deal of thinking. He was pretty certain that when he left the Vanderdyke house alone,--he couldn't see how else he could leave it,--the effect that Beatrix had had upon him would impel him to hitch himself on to life in some other capacity than that of a mere observer. For her sake, in her honor, he would dedicate his life to a job that should relieve the pressure in some way on the toilers of the earth and help things forward.

When he returned to the hall he found the punctual, punctilious family ready and waiting to go into dinner. Beatrix followed him down almost immediately, wearing a simple and charming frock. Aunt Honoria met her and brought her into the group. There was something about the girl, a new dignity, a riper air, an uncharacteristic quietude that was caught at once by the three Vanderdykes and especially by Aunt Honoria. Her words to Franklin in the garden before the honeymoon came back into her mind and with an emotion that she was unable to suppress she said, "This is a good night in the history of the family. Our little girl has found herself as we have prayed that she would. I speak for my brother and sister when I say that we are grateful to you, Pelham." She bowed to him with old-fashioned grace.

Mr. Vanderdyke, obviously disconcerted, murmured approval, and Mrs. Vanderdyke smiled. She was a little resentful of the way in which Aunt Honoria always took the lead but this was outweighed by her immense relief at the fact that Beatrix was happy and disposed of.

Franklin was the most uncomfortable man on earth.

And then Beatrix did a thing that once more made him wish that they were back in the stone age. "Let me speak for myself," she said quietly. "Pelham, I am very grateful, too," and put her hand on his shoulder, stood on tiptoes and kissed him.

He was wrong, once more, when he told himself, angrily, that she was deliberately fooling, getting a thrill of amusement at his expense. If he had known her as she was now, he would have realized that she had seized the public moment to do something she would not have dared to do privately, that she was thanking him for what he had done for her and saying "Good-bye." She had made up her mind to tell the truth at the family council that night.

*XLI*

While Helene had been brushing her hair and getting her ready for dinner Beatrix had gone in for honest thinking too.

She came at once to the conclusion that from every point of view the sham that she had created in that wild moment of self-preservation and devil-may-care must be smashed. Scandal had driven her into it. Scandal was following at her heels and in a blaze of scandal the episode must end. The futile punishment, which, as a girl, she had been so keen to dodge mattered nothing to her now as a woman. Let Aunt Honoria drag her into the back of beyond. She would go gladly. In silent lonely places she could sit in dreams and live over again those wonderful moments during which she had burst into womanhood. What did it matter now if she missed a season, many seasons in New York? She had looked into the eyes of life. She had no longer any desire to take her part among the silly sheep that ran about in droves. She was sorry for the pain and humiliation that she must cause her family to suffer. There seemed to be no way to prevent that. To enter into Franklin's scheme of marriage only meant a postponement of scandal. Divorce would provide the gossipers with an even more succulent morsel than the one that was waiting for them. Out of this smash, bad as it must be, she would at any rate preserve her pride and set Franklin free.

There were three things that hit her hard as she sat in front of her looking glass that evening. Her failure to make Franklin eat the words that he had flung at her vanity as he stood at the foot of her bed. Her failure to turn the sex attraction that she had deliberately stirred in him into love. Her failure to compete with such a woman as Ida Larpent. In fact it was the word failure that seemed to her to be written all over the episode into which she had entered without a thought for anyone except herself,--and it was the one word which had, till then, never been allowed to have a place in her dictionary.

It was a bad hour that she went through as she summed things up, and she came out of it startled at the knowledge that she, even she, was required to pay for her mistakes to the uttermost cent.

Well, she _would_ pay and pay smiling. She would prove to Franklin that he was right when he said that she had courage.

Dinner was a rather pompous, long drawn out affair, watched, as usual, by several of Romney's rosy-cheeked men, a beautiful Gainsborough woman, and a Reynolds' legal luminary, cynical beneath a heavy wig. Conversation was conducted, rather than allowed to run easily, through the superfluous courses. The butler, with the air of a bishop, held an aloof place in the background and silent-footed men-servants hovered like hawks over the shoulders of the diners.

To Mr. Vanderdyke dinner was an institution, the land-mark in his vacant days. He trained for it with assiduous care and self-restraint, enjoyed it with his characteristic halfheartedness and took his punishment and his tabloids as a matter of course. To Mrs. Vanderdyke it was a severe temptation which, for the most part, she resisted with great pluck. The smallest increase of weight meant hours of treatment. Aunt Honoria just ate and let it go at that and so did Franklin, whose appetite was the envy and wonder of many of his less healthy friends. Beatrix pecked a little and said a little but smiled at everybody. She was keeping up the bluff until her cards were called.

How different and how wonderful it would all have been if instead of acting parts she and Franklin were playing them in reality!

After the ladies had left Franklin smoked a cigarette with Mr. Vanderdyke and did his best to show interest in his host's rather petulant criticisms of the ways and methods of the Government. He was very glad to follow him into the drawing-room in whose stiff immensity the ladies were almost lost.

He went straight up to Mrs. Vanderdyke, who was leaning on a Tudor mantelpiece, torn from Little Claverings in Essex. She always stood for twenty minutes after dinner. It was part of her regime. "I'm very keen to hear what there is to be told, Mrs. Vanderdyke," he said. "May we get to it now?"

"Isn't it a little early yet?" Mrs. Vanderdyke turned to Aunt Honoria, who was talking to Beatrix. The energy of this tall, tanned man was a little disconcerting. "Will you----"

"I have everything here," said Aunt Honoria, "and I agree with Pelham that there is no time like the present. I have given orders that we are on no account to be disturbed. You will sit down, won't you?"

Mrs. Vanderdyke did so, having glanced at the clock. Mr. Vanderdyke lay back in a low chair with the fingers of his long, thin hands together. He would far rather have been in the hands of a dentist than in that room at that time. Franklin sat bolt upright next to Beatrix, who had her metaphorical bomb all ready to throw into the middle of the group. Only to these two did the underlying drama of this curious meeting appeal fully.

And then Aunt Honoria opened the proceedings quietly, calmly and with all the dignity of which she was a mistress. "I have here," she said, "a bundle of anonymous letters and a cutting from a scurrilous paper. The first letter came addressed to me. Others are written to my brother and sister, and there are half a dozen which were sent to intimate friends of ours and placed in my hands by them. They are all in the same handwriting, which looks to me as though it were disguised. They began to arrive the morning after you left on your honeymoon, my dear, and have come every morning since. They take the form of a series of questions. This is the first one. "Have you taken the trouble to discover at which Church or registry your niece Beatrix and Pelham Franklin were married?" And then they run in this order. You will see that I have copied them out. "What will you do when you find that your daughter, who imagines herself to belong to the salt of the earth, is a common wanton and liar? What will you do to repair the damage that she has done to your prestige in society by humbugging the papers into printing the story of a marriage that never took place? How is it that sophisticated people of your type have accepted a man as a son-in-law without evidence of his legal right to call himself so? Do you think you set a good example to all the people who copy your ways and manners by allowing your daughter to go on the loose with any man she takes a fancy to? Have you a grudge against society in which you assume a leading position and have you made yourselves party to an unmoral and disgraceful transaction in order to hold it up to the ridicule of the world? Would you speak to a young girl, however well-born and wealthy, who to hide a love affair with one man bluffed a marriage with a mere acquaintance? What decent man will marry your daughter after she has been 'honeymooning' with another? Don't you know that truth will out and that already tongues are busy with the names of Vanderdyke and Franklin? Aren't you sufficiently worldly to have learned that people who condone are classed with people who commit? Why not, if you have been as gullible as press and public, set things right and make what reparation you can to the members of your class? Do you want the name of Beatrix Vanderdyke to be placed among those of notorious chorus girls? Why not at once institute a search among the registrations of marriages and force the guilty couple, now basking in the light of a mock honeymoon, to confession and penitence?"

"Don't go on, don't go on," cried Mr. Vanderdyke. "I can't stand it, I tell you. I can't stand it!" His voice was almost hysterical and his gesture almost feminine.

"These dreadful questions," said Mrs. Vanderdyke, in a low voice, "give me mental sickness."

Franklin sat quite still, with his hands clenched.

Beatrix looked as though she had been turned to stone. Had all these hideous things grown out of one impetuous moment?

"I will gladly pass over the rest," said Aunt Honoria, "and come to the cutting from the paper that was sent to me three days ago. This," she added in a voice that became suddenly sharp with anger, "calls for immediate action, Pelham, and is the reason of your being here to-night."

"Please read it," said Franklin.

Aunt Honoria read, holding the clipping as though it held contamination. It was written in the usual smart manner with the usual lascivious snigger. "There is a very precious high life scandal in the offing, so to speak,--one which will, it is said on the best authority, flutter the dovecotes of all our Best Families. Much satisfaction was recently expressed, and gallons of ink expended in fulsome congratulation, upon the marriage of a well-known amateur yachtsman to the beautiful and adventurous daughter of a multi-millionaire. No recent royal marriage was more widely commented upon. It is rumored, however, that the high-spirited young lady who, even as a debutante had shown a certain lofty disregard for the conventions, is now conducting an ultra-modern experiment with the good-looking amateur yachtsman by honeymooning with him before the legal prescription has been made out, with the view, perhaps, to ultimate marriage. This sort of thing has been perpetrated, it is true, though without any attempt to mislead the public, by persons of artistic temperament and no social position to lose, but the question is being very generally asked as to how this peculiar proceeding will presently be viewed by American Society, which still clings to one or two hard and fast standards. I shall certainly watch the outcome with immense curiosity and shall be especially interested to see how soon the matrons on and near Fifth Avenue will show how the wind is blowing in their treatment of a certain member of the girl's family who has constituted herself the guide and mentor of her set for many years."

Although he had read this cunningly offensive thing over many times, Mr. Vanderdyke squirmed in his chair and put one hand over his eyes. His fastidious and beautiful wife, usually too self-centered to be concerned with the troubles of other people, gave him a glance of very genuine sympathy. It had been the fetish of them both to regard convention as a sort of religion, and she knew, unable herself to translate her indignation and disgust into words, how deeply her husband took this utterly undeserved scurrility to heart. Like him and like Aunt Honoria she had no suspicion of there being anything in the least out of order in the marriage.

Beatrix still sat as though she had been turned to stone.

But Franklin got up. This poisonous collection of sniggering words made him see red. Oh, God, for five minutes with that fat brute York! He walked up and down, watched with grim satisfaction by the family, especially by Mr. Vanderdyke, who poked himself up on his elbow and with a flush on his face and an eager light in his pale eyes saw in that tall, wiry, sun-burned man all the symptoms of an overwhelming desire for the sort of physical vengeance in which he himself would never be able to indulge.

Franklin got himself under control, stood in front of the fireplace and asked himself what he was going to do. The moment had come when he could get free of the girl who tortured his lonely hours and compelled his adoration and was further away than Heaven. In a few words he could give her people, who deserved most of the blame, the story of the result of spoiling. Should he seize it? Should he cut loose from an empty tie and become his own master again? Once, at school, he had been summoned before the Head Master to give evidence against Malcolm Fraser, who had broken bounds. He had lied through his teeth to save his friend. Under the eyes of these people the feeling came back to him and pervaded him like a perfume that he was standing again in the sanctum of that stern, old task-master. Not for a friend this time, not for a man who could take his punishment and grin, but for a girl who would be stained in the sight of unbelievers, the girl of all living girls whom he loved beyond words and whom, under any circumstances, he must hold, he would lie himself black in the face to defend. That was settled. It was almost laughable to have supposed that there had been any other solution. He turned. There was a curious smile in his eyes. "What is your proposition?" he asked.

Aunt Honoria took a sheet of note paper from the little table at her elbow. There was something about this man Franklin that reminded her of the one who had taken her heart with him beyond the outpost of eternity. With some difficulty she steadied her voice. "When we first read that paragraph with its abominable suggestiveness," she said, "we had no intention of being drawn into making a statement. We agreed that it would be undignified. But since then, having talked of nothing else, we have come to the conclusion that we must send something to the leading papers. What we suggest is this, if it meets with your approval."

"Please read it." He noticed that Beatrix was opening and closing her hands as though she had pins and needles.

"My brother drew this up and he left the spaces for you to fill in, Pelham." Aunt Honoria then read the statement which her brother had written and re-written at least a dozen times. "'From the recent account of the romantic and closely-guarded marriage of Miss Beatrix Vanderdyke and Mr. Pelham Franklin published by us we omitted to give the name of the church in which it was celebrated and the date of the ceremony. 'The Church was ---- and the date ----.' All you have to do is to fill in the facts and I will send the necessary copies to town to-night by messenger. If this doesn't put an end to letters and paragraphs we must then claim the protection of the law."