Chapter 29

THE IRONY OF LIFE.

I've been feverishly gay since I came to Meg. I have walked between stormwinds--grief behind and grief that I must enter. I've dined and danced, and I've clenched my hands lest I might shriek, and I've longed to hide away and die.

But I won't die. I'm not like other women--a silly, whining pack, their hearts the same fluttering page blotted with the same tears wept in Hell or Heaven. Love is a draught for two--or one; wretched one!--to drink. My life is for the world.

Oh, I've been a child, caring only for the lights and the pretty things and the music; but I'm not blind now. I understand many things that were hidden from the plain girl from the West. I have lived a year in every day. I see as they are these people I have thought so kind. So rich I call them now; so smug, so socially jealous.

There's Meg Van Dam, now; surely she knows why I have come to her, and she was Milly's friend; yet she fawns upon me. I thought her a great person, but now I know she's eager to rise by hanging at my skirts, and I amuse myself with her joy that I've rejected Ned, as she thinks; with her talk of Strathay, her dismay at John Burke's wooing.

John's so persistent. He called to see me the very day--almost in the hour I came here; the hour I was pacing the dainty little room Meg assigns me, picturing the scene on board the Bermuda boat, wondering if Ned had gone to the dock on the chance of a parting word with Milly, torturing myself with the vision of a lovers' reconciliation.

When John's card was brought, I was tempted to refuse to see him. But at the thought that he would know too well how to interpret reserves, I went down, nerved to meet him with a smile.

"Why, John," I said with my most pleased expression, "back from the West so soon? You've heard the news, I suppose--my cousins sailed this morning."

He had turned from the window at the rustle of my dress, and the grimness of his square-set jaws, warning me of a coming struggle, relaxed into a look of perplexity. Men have so little insight; he could not see that, as I sank, still smiling, into a chair, my breath came in gasps that almost choked me. After a moment's silence he said sharply:--

"Helen, we must be married."

"Married! Didn't you get my letter? John--"

"Listen!" he interrupted. "I must have the right to take care of you. You need me."

"Indeed?"

My tone was purposed insolence; I met his look with bravado. I hated him because he--because I--because he dared to know--because he offered to come to my relief when my aunt--Ned--perhaps he thought me deserted--lovelorn. His awkward figure woke in me a sudden physical repulsion.

"_I_ need _you_?" I repeated with a cool laugh. "And except the good deed of providing me with a husband, what services do you propose to--"

"Nelly," he said, disregarding my taunts, "I have just come from the _Orinoco_. When I reached the office this morning and heard that the party was starting, I assumed that you would be with it and hurried to the pier. If I'd missed the boat, I might not have learned the truth until--when? Why have they gone without you? What does it all mean?"

I pulled a flower nonchalantly from a vase beside me, but I felt my cheeks burn and grow white with deadly cold and fever.

"Didn't Mrs. Baker tell you," I said, "that 'Nelly dear' thought Bermuda unfashionable? You got my letter?"

"No; you did write, then? You so far recognised the claim of your promised husband--"

"Not now; not one minute--"

In a blind frenzy of rage I held out his ring; but he knew the master word to my heart. I stopped short as, ignoring what I said, he hurried on.

"Why wasn't Hynes at the boat?" he demanded. "Did he know what I didn't--that it was not the place to seek you?"

He grasped my wrists, he looked into my bloodless face--caught the defiant, exultant look that flashed upon it at the news he gave; then he dropped my hands but immediately seized them again.

"If he dares come near you, he shall answer! Speak!" he said. "Is it for his sake that you've stayed here?"

"If you will let me go--"

He loosed his grasp and I ostentatiously chafed my wrists. I was in a fury. I was driven to madness by the thought that John might force a quarrel upon Ned--the man I had rejected and the man that had rejected me!

"I'll never marry you nor any poor man!" I cried out. "What have you to offer me? What can you do? Oh, yes, you can come and insult me, and talk to me of love--Love! The love that would make me a poor man's drudge!"

Again I thrust his ring at him, the opal spitting angry blue and orange fires. I thought he would have struck at it. Heaven knows what mad instinct was at the back of his brain. I believe every man's a brute when the woman he loves defies him. I think his fingers tingled for the Cave man's club. At any rate, I shrank in terror from his eyes.

But quickly the red light sank in them, and a puzzled look grew there instead, turning them very soft and pitiful.

"Nelly, I cannot think you serious," he said. "We have always talked of marriage, and--is it an insult to press you for the day? Heart of me, I've been so much worried about you! Are you very sure that you have chosen the wisest part? If you are, I can only leave you to think it over, perhaps to--"

"Don't preach!"

I flung out at him a torrent of abusive words, resolved that he should think about me what he chose, so long as it was not the truth.

He had no plea for himself; he saw that it would be useless. I stabbed him the more viciously as the anger died out of his face and left it only grave and pained. He looked older than I had ever seen him before; and on his temple, where he turned toward the window, gleamed a little streak of gray.

"But, Nelly, what will you do?" he said at last.

His tone was as level as if he were discussing some trivial matter. He had given up the fight, and, paying no heed to my unkindness, had fallen back upon the old habit, the instinct of looking out for me, smoothing my way after his own fashion that is so irritating.

"You can't stay among these--these strangers, can you?" he continued. "Are you going home?"

"To the farm? Never, I hope. Mrs. Van Dam, my chaperon, has many plans for me--better form than talking things over with a man. In the spring we may go abroad."

He tried--poor, foolish fellow--to read from my face the riddle of a woman's heart before he answered:--

"I'm afraid I don't altogether understand you, Nelly."

Presently he left me, wondering, even as I wonder now: Why don't I care for John? He's a strong man and he loves me. Just another of Nature's sorry jests, isn't it?

It was all so hopeless, so tangled. I leaned against the mantel, relieved by his going, but unutterably lonely. Just for a moment I feared the brilliant future that stretched in vista--without love, it looked an endless level of tedium and weariness. My bitterness towards John melted and the years we had known each other unrolled themselves before me--happy, innocent years. I felt his strength and gentleness, and of a sudden something clutched at my throat. Sob followed sob; I shook in a tearless convulsion.

Only for an instant. Then I, too, turned to leave the room, but fate or instinct had brought John back and I was startled by his voice:--

"Nelly, tell me!"

He did not come near me. There was no gust of passion in his tone, yet I felt as never before the depth of his tenderness. He had not come back to woo, but as the old friend, ambitious of helpfulness.

"Helen," he said, "how can I leave you, who need protection more than any other woman, so terribly alone?"

I didn't fear I might be tempted, but I quavered out:--

"John, go away. I've wronged you enough. I never loved you; I've no faith in love. I never loved you at all, and--you must have seen, lately, that I have changed--that I've become a very--a very mercenary woman. I can't afford to marry a poor man."

My lips quivered, for this was the cruelest lie of all; I have changed, but I'm not money loving. And I couldn't deceive him. He smiled queerly, but he must have thought time his ally, for he only said:--

"Money can buy you nothing; you might leave gewgaws to other women. But you are less mercenary than you think yourself; and you will always know that I love you; let it rest with that, for now."

So he went away the second time, leaving me with my hands clenched and my teeth set--so fierce had been my fight to seem composed. As I sank breathless into a chair, and my tense fingers relaxed, out from my right hand rolled the little opal ring. I hadn't returned it, after all; had been gripping it all the time, unknowing. At sight of it, I burst into hysterical laughter.

And that madly merry laughter is the end. I should go crazy if I yielded to love that I can't return, and I should despise him if he accepted. A husband not too impassioned, a fair bargain--beauty bartered for position, power, for a name in history--that is all there is left to me, now that love has vanished.

The farm! I couldn't go back, to isolation and dull routine! I told John I might go abroad. Why not? I might see the great capitals, and in the splendour of palaces find a fitting frame for my beauty. There may be salve for heartache in the smile of princes. At any rate, the seas would flow between me and Ned Hynes.

I had forgotten my ambitions. I'd have said to Ned: "Whither thou goest I will go;" but if what he feels for me is not love--if in his heart he hates me for the witchery I've put upon him--

I could go abroad with a title, if I chose. If love lies not my way, there is Strathay.

How listless I am, turning from my sorrow to write of what to most girls would be a delight--of that pathetic little figure, toadied and flattered, but keeping a good heart through it all; of his marked attentions, which I permit because they keep other men away; of his efforts to see me--for the Van Dams' position isn't what I imagined it, and we are not invited to many houses where I could meet him; of Meg's rejoicings over a few of the cards we do receive.

Oh, I win her triumphs, triumphs in plenty! Because the Earl admires me, hasn't she once sat at the same table with Mrs. Sloane Schuyler, who refuses to meet intimately more than a hundred New York women; and hasn't she twice or thrice talked "autos" with Mrs. Fredericks; and isn't she envied by all the women of her own set because the Earl and his cousin shine refulgent from her box at the Opera?

Triumphs, certainly; doesn't Mrs. Henry wrangle with Meg over my poor body, demanding that I sit in her box, and that I join Peggy's Badminton club, and bring the Earl, who would bring the youths and maidens who would bring the prestige that would, some day, make a Newport cottage socially feasible?

That's her dream, Meg's is Mayfair; she thinks of nothing but how to invest me in London and claim her profit when I am Strathay's Countess, or mistress of some other little great man's hall. Oh, I understand them; Mrs. Henry's the worst; oily!

I wonder if London is less petty than New York; if I should be out of the tug and scramble there. But I mustn't judge New York, viewing it through the Van Dams' eyes. If I did, I should see a curious pyramid.

At the top, a sole and unapproachable figure, the twelfth Earl of Strathay, just out of school;

Next a society, two-thirds of whose daughters will marry abroad, and to all of whose members an Earl's lack of a wife is a burning issue;

Hanging by their skirts a thousand others, like the General and Mrs. Henry, available for big functions, pushing to get into the little ones;

Hanging by these in turn, ten thousand others outside the pale, but flinging money right and left in charity or prodigality to catch the eyes of those who catch the eyes of those who nod to Earls;

And after them nobody!

And the problem: "How high can we climb?"

Why, there are twenty thousand families in New York rich enough to be Elect, if wealth were all. I could almost marry Strathay to save him from the ugly millioned girls! How they hate me!

I know what love is like, now; Strathay means to speak. If Ned would only--but three weeks--three long, long weeks, and he doesn't--oh, I won't believe that, deep in his heart he does not love me. It's not time--not time, yet, to think about the little Earl!

At any rate I won't be flung at his head; last night I taught Meg a lesson she'll remember. She meant to bring him home to supper after the Opera, where, in spite of my first experience, we're constant now in attendance; but, to her surprise, then dismay, then almost abject remonstrance, I prepared to go out before dinner to inspect the new studio Kitty and Cadge have taken.

"Be back in good season?" she pleaded. "How _could_ you make an engagement for the night when Strathay.--Not wait for you! Why Helen, you can't--what would Strathay think if I allowed you to arrive alone at the Opera?"

"Then can't you and Peggy entertain him?"

"Peggy?" She looked at me with blank incredulity. "You wouldn't stay away when Strathay--why, Helen, you didn't mean that. Drive straight to the Metropolitan when you leave your--those people, if you don't wish to come back for me. Where do they live?" she groaned despairingly.

"Top of a business block in West Fourteenth Street."

I thought she would have refused me the carriage for such a trip, but she didn't venture quite so far as that; and the hour I spent with the girls was a blessed breathing spell.

"What a barn!" I cried, when I had climbed more stairs than I could count to the big loft where I found them. "Girls, how came you here?"

"Behold the prodigal daughter! Shall we kill the fatted rarebit?" And Kitty threw herself upon me; while Cadge, waving her arms proudly at the Navajo rugs, stuffed heads of animals and vast canvasses of Indian braves and ponies that made the weird place more weird, replied to my query:--

"Borrowed it of an artist who's wintering in Mexico; cheap; just as it stands."

Then they installed me under a queer tepee, and we had one of the old time picked-up suppers, and for an hour my troubles were pushed into the background. The girls are in such frightful taste that I really should drop them, but they're loyal and so proud of me!

"Princess," said Cadge, "time you were letting contracts for the building of fresh worlds to shine in. You're the most famous person in this, with all the women thirsting for your gore; and you've a real live Lord for a 'follower.'"

"That's nothing."

Cadge thinks me still betrothed to John, so she affected to misunderstand.

"Nearly nothing, for a fact," she said; "it isn't ornamental, but we seldom see specimens and mustn't judge hastily. And it is a Lord.--See the hand-out he gave me for last Sunday--full-page interview: 'Earl of Strathay Discusses American Society?'

"Some English won't stand for anything but a regular pie-faced story, but Strathay's a real good little man."

"You said he had sixty-nine pairs of shoes," said Kitty reminiscently.

"No; twenty-nine."

"What's His Lordlets doing in New York?" inquired Pros., who was there as usual, a queer and quiet wooer.

"Tinting the town a chaste and delicate pink, assisted and chaperoned by his cousin, the Hon. Stephen Allardyce Poultney. Ugh! Glad the _Star_ doesn't want an interview with _His_ Geniality; don't like S.A.P. Esq.," said Cadge energetically. "But, Helen, now you've got people where you want 'em, you play your own hand. You don't want any Van Dam for a bear leader. That crowd's been working every fetch there is to get in with the top notchers, and they just couldn't. Knowing you is worth more to them than endowing a hospital. You're a social bonanza."

Perhaps I shouldn't have let her talk so about Meg, but, after all, she told me nothing new.

"Did I send you a marked paper with the paragraph I wrote about the important 'ological experiments you couldn't leave, even for the 'land of the lily and the rose?'" she proceeded. "Don't wonder you didn't want to go to Bermuda, everything coming so fast your way. I crammed your science into the story because it's good advertising. Don't really study at Barnard now, do you? I wouldn't; would you, Kitty?"

Her white, mobile face gleaming with animation, Cadge declaimed upon one of her thousand hobbies:--

"What's women's science good for but dribbling essays to women's clubs? If some 'Chairwoman of Progress' were to grab off the Princess, does it take science to give 'em 'Fresh Evidence that Woman was Evolved from a Higher Order of Quadrumanous Ape than Man?' We all know what the clubs want, and if they get it, they'd vote any one of us as bright a light as Haeckel.--Pros., you saved any clippings for the Princess?"

Pros. gave me a quantity of articles about my beauty cut from out-of-town and foreign papers. I believe I'll subscribe to a clippings bureau. I hadn't thought of that.

I stayed and stayed; it was so pleasant in the eyrie; but when at last I rose to go, Kitty sighed:--

"Why, you've only been here a minute, and in that gorgeous dress, you're like a real Princess, not my chum. I shall suggest a court circular--'The Princess Helen drove out yesterday attended by Gen. Van Dam.'--'Her Serene Highness, Princess Helen, honoured the Misses Reid and Bryant last evening at a soiree.'--leaded brevier every morning on the editorial page. Oh, Nelly, can't I have your left-off looks? A homely girl starves on bread and water, while a pretty one wallows in jam."

"Princess must be wallowing in wealth," said Cadge, inspecting my evening dress; "suspect she didn't dress for us; it's Opera night. Stockholders share receipts with you? Beauty show in that first tier box must sell tickets."

"Wish they would divide; I'm as poor as a church mouse," I said, laughing.

I didn't go to the Opera, though the girls had cheered me up until I hurried home prepared to do Meg's bidding; but she had gone--angry, I suppose--and I didn't follow.

I gained nothing; the Opera gives me my best chance to see and be seen. I might as well have had my hour of triumph, the men in the box, the jealous glances of the women. I might as well have scanned with feverish expectation the big audience that turns to me more eagerly than to the singers, searching--oh, I'm mad to think that Ned might come there again to look upon me.

I didn't even escape the Earl. Meg and her husband came home early, bringing him and Poultney; we had the supper, and, for my sins, I made myself so agreeable that Meg forgave me, almost.

It was easy; I just let the poor boy talk to me about his mother and sisters, and watched his face light up as he spoke of them in a simple, hearty way that American boys don't often command. He is really very nice. One of his sisters is a beauty.

"But not like you," he said.

He's as boyishly honest as if he were sixteen; and as modest. To be Countess of Strathay would be a--

Of course Mrs. Henry and Peggy were here, smiling on Mr. Poultney, Strathay's cousin. Oh, I'm useful! I believe Mrs. Marmaduke is the only Van Dam who's kind to me without a motive; they're not Knickerbockers at all, as I supposed.

Cadge is right; I gain nothing socially by remaining with Meg; and her guesses come too close to my heart's sorrow. She watches and worries, forever concerned lest some "folly" on my part interfere with her ambitions. Why, I'm frantic at times with imagining that even the maid she lends me--an English "person"--reports upon my every change of mood.

Oh, I ought to be independent, independent in all ways. With a little money I could manage it.

There's a Mrs. Whitney, a widowed aunt of Meg's husband, who lives alone in an apartment where a paying guest, if that guest were I, might be received. Meg would raise an outcry, of course, but I can't keep on visiting her indefinitely; and I should still be partly in her hands.

But I have no money. My allowance is the merest nothing, spent before it comes. Why, I owe Meg's dressmaker, for the dress Cadge admired and for others--Mrs. Edgar was cheaper; I must go back to her. And in the Nicaragua, where Mrs. Whitney lives, the cost of--but it wouldn't be for long.

If Ned doesn't--

I won't think about Strathay. I must wait. It's my fault that I haven't plenty of money. I've been so unhappy that I haven't explained to Father how my needs have increased, how my way of life has changed. But I'll write to-night; he refuses me nothing. He must send me a good sum at once; as much as he can raise.

Mrs. Whitney's a harmless tabby--a thin, ex-handsome creature struggling to maintain appearances; but I can put up with her. I will go to the Nicaragua. I'll go at once.