Part 6

A lugubrious clock that was somewhere in that unsuitable room struck twelve. Through the open windows came the raucous enthusiasm of the frogs on a close-by pond. Their imitation of the mechanical noises made by a factory in full blast was more exact than usual. A local cock flung out his throaty challenge to other barn-yard sheiks and was answered from near and far. A full moon in a sky that was very mosaic of stars laid a magic light upon the earth and water.

Beatrix heaved a little sigh. She was beginning to feel tired. Excitement was burning low, and Nature, whom she was in the habit of ignoring with characteristic imperiousness, demanded sleep. Franklin was not to be beaten by tricks, it seemed, or turned off by sarcasm. She must change her tactics and see how honesty would work.

"You'll go now, won't you?" she said quietly, with an offer of friendship that was usually irresistible.

Franklin shook his head and stood firm.

"No? Oh, I think so. There isn't any need to carry your strong man performance any farther. You've quite convinced me that education and all the advantages of civilization mean nothing to me. I'll take it for granted that they mean just as little to you. In a word, I'll own myself punished and give you the game. Will that do?"

"No," said Franklin. "That's not good enough."

Beatrix stood thoughtfully in front of him, with her hands behind her back, drooping a little like a flower in the evening. Her new and utter naturalness made her seem startlingly young and immature and different. Franklin hardly recognized in this Beatrix the brilliant, sparkling, insolent, triumphant creature who had turned the tables on her family and claimed his help as a sportsman without one iota of consideration for him or the future. But he refused to weaken. He realized that if he allowed himself to drift even into the approach of sympathy she would twist him round her little finger. She deserved no mercy. He would give her none. She had had the temerity to place him high up among the world's fools and she must pay the full price for the privilege.

"Perhaps you don't know," she said, "how much it costs me to retire from any sort of contest until the result is hopelessly against me. I've only done it once before, and that was in a tennis tournament at Palm Beach last winter, when I went on playing, with a sprained ankle, and fainted. I don't intend to faint now, but I'm very, very tired. Won't you let me give up?"

Franklin shook his head again. "This is not anything like the little games that you kill time with," he said. "I'm not Sutherland York, nor am I one of the green youths who help you to get through monotonous days. I have been just as spoiled as you have and this can't end until my vanity has been healed. You know that as well as I do."

"Oh, yes," she said frankly, "I understand. If I stood in your shoes I should feel as you do and be just as brutal in my desire for revenge. But put yourself in mine for a minute. You can if you will. You have imagination. The mere fact that you've been in my room for an hour and made me undergo the worst sort of humiliation before my maid and my companion ought to be sufficient to heal any ordinary type of vanity, however severe the wound. Come, now. I don't ask you to be fair. I don't deserve that. But be big and get off that awfully high horse. What d'you say? Shall I cry quits?" She held out her hand with the charming smile which had never failed since the time when she was the little queen of her big nursery.

Franklin compelled himself to ignore it. "No," he said. "I'm here to make you feel the spurs for the first time in your life, and I shall stay."

In a flash Beatrix changed back to the personality behind which she hid her best and undiscovered self. She threw back her head and squared her shoulders and brought her exquisite slim young body into an attitude of audacious challenge and ran her eyes over Franklin with an expression in which there was contempt and amusement.

"Then you may make up your mind to a long and arduous job," she said. "It'll take a better man than you to break me in."

"We'll see about that," he said.

She burst into a derisive laugh. Her blood was up. This man had frightened her, amused her, interested her. He had won her admiration, even a little of her sympathy. Now he bored her. He had stayed too long, harped on one subject too steadily. She might consent to play at something else, but this game was threadbare. She refused to entertain the possibility of his attempting to carry out his threat beyond taking possession of her room, which, in itself, was impertinent enough.

"What precisely do you imagine that you can do?" she asked, with the very essence of scorn.

Franklin's patience had almost run out, too. "I don't _imagine_ that I can do anything. I know exactly what I'm _going_ to do."

"Is that so? Do tell me."

"Conform in detail to the right you've given me," he said, "without any further argument."

"Beginning how, pray?"

"By tearing that frock off your back, unless you have your maid in right away."

"You wouldn't dare!" she said, scoffing at him.

That was the worst word she could have chosen. To dare Franklin to do a thing was to guarantee that it was done. With the blood in his head he laid instant hands on her and ripped the chiffon from one soft white shoulder.

There was an inarticulate cry, a brief, breathless struggle, and the next instant he received a blow on the face that made him see stars.

"You little tyrant!" he said, with a short laugh. "That's your spirit, is it?"

He made for her again, angrier than he had ever been in his life. But she darted away like a beautiful fish, and with her round shoulder gleaming in the moonlight stood close to an open window, her breasts rising and falling, her nostrils distended, her eyes like two great stars, her face as white as the feathers of a white dove.

"Touch me again and I'll jump out of this window!"

"I don't believe you," he said, but remained standing.

"I swear to God I will!"

He knew that she meant it. "You'd break every bone in your body," he said.

"That would be better than having your hands on me again."

He made a spring and caught her by the wrists. "Now jump!"

"Oh, very clever," she said, with superb sarcasm. "You've evidently made a hobby of fighting with women."

That stung Franklin. "I don't call you a woman," he blurted out. "There's been nothing of the woman in you since the day you knew enough words to order one of your nurses about. You're a hybrid, the production of a mixture of two species,--labor and wealth. The labor in you, inherited from the man who made your first millions, is tainted with revolt, the wealth with the damned despotism that creates it. You're no more a woman than this barrack is a home, or this absurd place a bedroom. You're a grotesque who has been brought up in a nightmare. You walk on a world that is too small for your feet. You're out of drawing like a woman in a fashion-plate. You're a sort of female Gulliver on an earth peopled with pigmies. You almost believe that you're Almighty and that when you raise your finger life must be reset like a chess-board. And you're perfectly right. It can and is and will be so long as money counts. I know it and do it, for you and I hold a piece each of the same wand. But you're up against _me_ now, and you've used me as you might have used a trained servant, or an eager parasite, ready and willing to lick the blacking off your boots for the sake of what may fall unnoticed from your purse, and, by God, you're not going to get away with it."

He controlled her across to the door of the maid's room and pushed it open with his foot. "Come out," he said, "and get Mrs. Franklin ready for the night." Then he marched Beatrix to and into the dressing-room, followed by Helene. Reflected in the mirrors there were not three, but thirty people. "I'll give you fifteen minutes," he continued, "and for the sake of all concerned don't be longer. Is that agreed?"

Beatrix met his eyes. Her spirit was unbroken, her chin at the same tilt, her attitude not one whit less contemptuously assured, but he saw in the slight inclination of her golden head the acknowledgment that he held all the cards.

He turned on his heel and left the room, went over to an open window and drew in long breaths of air.

He and she, children of the same nightmare, as he had called it, had both used the word vanity about the thing which impelled him to punish. But as he looked out into the sane night, magic only from the moon's touch, it came to him that to dismiss it as vanity was to slur over the true meaning of that before which he was urged. It was the labor in him, the revolt against the despotism of wealth that had come back again in his fight with his fellow-hybrid, and once more labor was top-dog. How would he use his power?

For fifteen minutes he stood there with his heart thumping, his hands hot, the exhilaration of success running through his blood like alcohol. And then, to the second, came the sweet diaphanous figure, which, with the dignity of a brave but conquered enemy, crossed to the foolish bed.

Franklin watched her go, her gleaming hair all about her like a bridal veil, her head held high, her lovely face untouched by fear. He watched her pause while the maid opened up the bed, and then slip in. He called the French girl, gave her the key to her door and waited until she had gone. Then he walked to the foot of the bed and stood there silently until Beatrix raised her eyes.

"If you and I," he said, with extreme distinctness, "were the only two living people on a desert island and there was not the faintest hope of our ever being taken back to the world, I would build you a hut at the farthest end of it and treat you as a man."

He wheeled round, unlocked the door, went out into the passage and away.

Only by having seen the expression on Beatrix's face after he had gone would he have known how tremendously well he had revenged himself.

*VIII*

Franklin's bare statement to Malcolm Fraser that he was going to the Vanderdyke pastoral party merely to meet Ida Larpent left his friend interested and speculative. The lady's name was as familiar to Fraser as to the other men who dined at houses a little to the east and rather less than that to the west of Fifth Avenue. The lady's arresting face had often stirred his dormant sense of psychology, but he never had had the opportunity of saying more than "How do you do?" or "Good-bye" to her. He so obviously didn't count in the scheme of things as they appealed to Mrs. Larpent.

According to the Social Register, however, Mrs. Larpent lived in East Fifty-sixth Street and was the widow of Captain Claude Elcho Larpent of the 21st Lancers, a nephew of Field Marshal Viscount Risborough. That was all. If this precious volume, which is the vade-mecum of so many people who murmur the word society with a hiss that can be heard from one end of the town to the other, had attempted to do justice to the beautiful Ida, at least one-half of the volume would have been devoted to the story of her antecedents and career. Born at Paterson, New Jersey, the only daughter of a pushing and energetic little chemist named McKenna, who had married in a moment of the wildest kind of romance a little, slight, white-faced Russian girl who had left her country among a batch of unsavory emigrants and found employment in a button factory, Ida,--who can tell why?--was marked out from her tiniest years for the oldest profession in the world. One would have thought, to look at her parents,--the father a pugnacious, industrious, thrifty, red-headed Scotch-American, the mother a wistful, grateful, self-effacing little woman who, if there were any justice in this world, would several times have received the distinguished service order for her many acts of unnoticed heroism,--she would have been a bright, brave, practical and perhaps even pretty little girl. Instead of which, to everyone's astonishment and to the utter confusion of the chemist and his wife, Ida resembled nothing so much as a child of the aristocracy. She was thoroughbred from head to foot, perfectly made, with a small oval face and large wide-apart eyes, tiny wrists and ankles and black hair as fine as silk. The paradox of her having been born in the small common-place quarters above a second-rate store, amidst all the untidiness of a place in which the mother did her own housework, was not lost on the parents. They were proud of this fairy-like baby, but they were also frightened of her. They realized that she was in the nature of a freak. It seemed to them that she had come by accident; that, as a matter of fact, they had no right to her. They almost persuaded themselves into the belief, as the child grew up, that she was a changeling; that an unseen hand must have stolen their own sturdy, freckled and rampagious infant, and for some unaccountable reason slipped this exquisite little thing into her place.

There was, as time passed, an element of tragedy about this miracle or accident or mistake,--these words and others were used,--especially when Ida began to find her tongue and her feet. More and more she seemed to be an indignant hot-house plant in a little cabbage-patch. Her parents, poor souls, grew more and more awkward and unhappy in her presence. They had the uncanny feeling always that she was criticising them and their mode of speech and their slummachy way of life. The affection and love which they had been only too willing to give her after the shock of her early appearance wore away, turned into reluctant deference and a constant self-conscious desire to make their apartment and themselves more tidy for her. Even at the age of ten she turned her mother into a maid, quietly insisted that her hair should be brushed every night and saw to it that she was dressed and undressed, manicured and shampooed. She demanded bath salts and scent from the store and the best of soaps and powders. "Do this! Do that!" she would say, and if they were not done she raised her voice and stamped her foot, while a sort of flame seemed to come from her eyes. No one had ever seen her cry after she had learned to walk.

The McKenna circle of friends, consisting of fellow-storekeepers and the Austro-Hungarian musician who was the leader of the little orchestra at the Paterson Theatre, watched Ida's early years with almost breathless astonishment and a kind of disbelief. They accepted her much in the same way as they would, under the pressure of warm friendship, have accepted a pet marmoset or a cursing parrot or a dog with a cat's tail. They noticed, with many comments, that she grew up altogether without filial affection; that she treated her parents as though they were paid attendants, calling her father "Sandy," as his particular friends did, and her mother "Alla," and with the most startling self-assurance making them conform to all her wishes. It was most uncanny. Michlikoff, the bird's-nest-headed musician, who had a sneaking belief in the occult and who read up all that he could find on the subject of transmigration of souls, endeavored to persuade his friends, in voluble broken English, that Ida was a princess born again. With all those who came from places other than Missouri, he succeeded.

It was a perturbed and constrained household in which this unexpected child grew up,--a household that, to the little bandy Scot's never-quite-hidden disgust, was the subject of steady gossip in the town. His first ambition naturally was to see the list of his customers swell, but not at the expense of his pride and self-respect. Those two things, frequently mentioned, were very dear to him. It seemed to him, too, that the family affairs of a man who kept a drug-store should be out of the region of gossip. He and his still pretty wife were glad, infinitely glad, when the time arrived for their daughter to attend the public school. It was only while she was out of the apartment that the mother could go about her work in comfort and without being constantly called away from her domestic duties. The freckled, red-headed little chemist only felt happy when he saw this girl sail out with her books and turn down the street towards the school-house, with her chin held high and her astonishing eyes filled with a sort of scorn for all the passers-by. At school she was not a success. She didn't mix well. The other children held aloof from her. She was obviously out of place amongst them and they resented her presence in the class-rooms. The boys admired her from a distance, fell into self-conscious silence when she approached and whispered about her when she passed by. The girls were antagonistic. They were jealous of her pretty clothes, awed by her lofty silences and surprised at her proficiency with her books. On her seventeenth birthday Ida went to New York, saying that she would be back to supper. But with supper came a cold-blooded note which ran like this:

"Dear Sandy and Alla:

"I'm through with your one-eyed town and the drug-store and provincialism. I'm going to begin to live and dress as I ought to, and there's only one way to do it,--the easiest way. I applied for a job in the chorus of the Winter Garden for the new show and got it. It was easy. I looked very nice in my Sunday clothes and the stage manager said I was a peach. Rehearsals start to-morrow and I shall stay at a boarding-house with some of the other girls. So please send me thirty dollars to go on with and the rest of my things. The address is 302 West 46th Street. I will let you know when to send me more money. You will both be glad to get rid of me, but not so glad as I am to be out of Paterson. I am starting on the bottom rung of the ladder and I am going to climb to the top, whatever I have to pay for it. Judging from the way the men in the office look at me they will have to do most of the paying.

"IDA."

This was read by Mr. and Mrs. McKenna in horrified silence, but with a mutual deep sigh of relief, and put away in a secret place. The only time they ever saw her again was once when they made a pilgrimage to Manhattan and watched her from the balcony of what was once a show ring in Broadway, and saw her, almost nude, flitting like a butterfly in the glare of light.

One other note they received from this curious person, and this, enclosing a cheque for two hundred dollars, contained the news that Ida was going to England with a musical comedy company in which she was playing a small part. And that was the last they ever heard of her. She had come like a stranger and like a stranger she departed. The cheque they never used. With an odd sensation of having been insulted by it they put it in a drawer among receipts and specimens of patent medicines and left it there. And then, happy again, they returned to their habitual untidiness and the daily routine of hard work and endeavored to forget. They regarded it as a blessing that nature had punished them only once. And when eventually they removed themselves to a larger and more pretentious store they left a photograph of a little wide-eyed girl among their debris and felt as though a weight had been lifted from their shoulders.

If they had been able to watch the London newspapers, especially the _Sketch_ and _Tatler_, they would have quivered at the sight of this strange girl in many graceful attitudes and in the scantiest of costumes as she appeared in almost weekly photographic studies, and they would have gasped if they had presently read the glowing accounts of the marriage of Ida McKenna to Captain Claude Elcho Larpent, nephew of Field Marshal Viscount Risborough, at St. George's, Hanover Square. The headings of these paragraphs had it that Society had once more made an alliance with the stage, but the gushing paragraphs that came beneath stated (how amazed the chemist would have been) that the bride came of one of the best American families, her father being a famous scientist whose country house was at Paterson, New Jersey, and her mother a distant connection of the Russian Chancellor.

Ida Larpent took her place in English society as though to the manner born. She became the beautiful Mrs. Larpent without turning a hair. She ran a little house in Mayfair on her husband's excellent income as though Mayfair had been her playground since childhood. She entertained the younger set and a sprinkling of duchesses with all the insouciance of minor royalty, and plunged her husband into debt in the same cold-blooded way that she had run up bills in her native town, from which on clear days one can see the Simelike unbelievable buildings of the great city.

Claude Larpent was passionately in love with his beautiful and expensive wife. With all the careless pride of a mere boy of twenty-six he gave her the reins, and so long as she made some return for his love never grumbled at her recklessness or her intimacy with men whom he, before marriage, would not have touched with the end of a barge-pole. He trusted her. She was his wife. She had chosen him from among all the men who would eagerly have knelt at her feet. In his weakness he stood lovingly by while she relentlessly ran him on the rocks and into bankruptcy. But it was not until one bad night when he discovered by accident that she had sold herself for diamonds to a most atrocious vieux marcheur that he confessed himself broken, exchanged from his crack regiment to the Houssa Police and disappeared to the West Coast of Africa, the white man's grave. It was exactly three years after the bells of St. George's had rung their merry peal that the obituary notice in the London papers contained a few lines to the effect that Claude Elcho Larpent had fallen a victim to black water fever. The truth was that this foolish young man had died of whisky and a broken heart, and had been buried in the bush mourned and respected by the sturdy little men whom he had treated with that mixture of firmness and camaraderie characteristic of the English officer. His widow, still in the first flush of youth and beauty, was left penniless, but bejewelled, and in the ordinary course of events,--men being awake to the fact that they need not marry her,--came under the protection of a wealthy railway man who planted her temporarily in a pleasant portion of Mayfair, rather sarcastically named Green Street, Berkeley Square. The beautiful Mrs. Larpent thereupon lost a certain amount of caste, but not very much. Duchesses dropped her, but semi-society drank her wines without a twinge and enjoyed many week-ends at her beautiful house on the banks of the Thames near Henley. Younger sons and the stage herded about her, accepting gladly enough her lavish hospitality. The only thing that Ida Larpent had inherited from her father was thrift. And before the railway magnate disappeared from his surroundings in an apoplectic fit, she had managed to put by a large enough sum of money to bring her in somewhere about six hundred pounds a year, and upon that, feeling the need of a change of air and surroundings, she returned to America.