Chapter 54

INTERFERENCE.

When Peter returned from his ride the next day, he found Leonore reading the papers in the big hall. She gave him a very frigid “good-morning,” yet instantly relaxed a little in telling him there was another long telegram for him on the mantel. She said nothing of his reading the despatch to her, but opened a new sheet of paper, and began to read its columns with much apparent interest. That particular page was devoted to the current prices of “Cotton;” “Coffee;” “Flour;” “Molasses;” “Beans;” “Butter;” “Hogs;” “Naval Stores;” “Ocean Freights,” and a large number of equally kindred and interesting subjects.

Peter took the telegram, but did not read it. Instead he looked down at all of his pretty “friend” not sedulously hidden by the paper; He recognized that his friend had a distinctly “not-at-home” look, but after a moment’s hesitation he remarked, “You don’t expect me to read this alone?”

Silence.

“Because,” continued Peter, “it’s an answer to those we wrote and sent yesterday, and I shan’t dare reply it without your advice.”

Silence.

Peter coolly put his hand on the paper and pushed it down till he could see Leonore’s face. When he had done that he found her fairly beaming. She tried to put on a serious look quickly, and looked up at him with it on.

But Peter said, “I caught you,” and laughed. Then Leonore laughed. Then they filled in the space before lunch by translating and answering the telegram.

As soon as that meal was over, Peter said, “Now will you teach me waltzing again?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not going to spend time teaching a man to dance, who doesn’t dance.”

“I was nearly wild to dance last night,” said Peter.

“Then why didn’t you?”

“Dorothy asked me to do something.”

“I don’t think much of men who let women control them.”

“I wanted to please Dorothy” said Peter, “I was as well off talking to one girl as to another. Since you don’t like my dancing, I supposed you would hardly choose to dance again with me, or ropes wouldn’t have held me.”

“I can talk Italian too,” said Leonore, with no apparent connection.

“Will you talk it with me?” said Peter eagerly. “You see, there are a good many Italians in the district, now, who by their ignorance and their not speaking English, are getting into trouble all the time. I want to learn, so as to help them, without calling in an interpreter.” Peter was learning to put his requests on grounds other than his own wishes.

“Yes,” said Leonore very sweetly, “and I’ll give you another lesson in dancing. How did you enjoy your ride?”

“I like Dorothy,” said Peter, “and I like Miss Biddle. But I didn’t get the ride I wanted.”

He got a very nice look from those slate-colored eyes.

They set a music-box going, and Peter’s instruction began. When it was over, Leonore said:

“You’ve improved wonderfully.”

“Well enough to dance with you?”

“Yes,” said Leonore. “I’ll take pity on you unless you’d rather talk to some other girl.”

Peter only smiled quietly.

“Peter,” said Leonore, later, as he was sipping his tea, “do you think I’m nothing but a foolish society flutterbird?”

“Do you want to know what I think of you?” asked Peter, eagerly.

“No,” said Leonore hastily. “But do you think of me as nothing but a society girl?”

“Yes,” said Peter, truth speaking in voice and face.

The corners of Leonore’s mouth descended to a woeful degree.

“I think you are a society girl,” continued Peter, “because you are the nicest kind of society.”

Leonore fairly filled the room with her smile. Then she said, “Peter, will you do me a favor?”

“Yes.”

“Will you tell Dorothy that I have helped you translate cipher telegrams and write the replies?”

Peter was rather astonished, but said, “Yes.”

But he did it very badly, Leonore thought, for meeting Dorothy the next day at a lawn party, after the mere greetings, he said:

“Dorothy, Miss D’Alloi has been helping me translate and write cipher telegrams.”

Dorothy looked startled at the announcement for a moment. Then she gave a glance at Leonore, who was standing by Peter, visibly holding herself in a very triumphant attitude. Then she burst out into the merriest of laughs, and kept laughing.

“What is it?” asked Peter.

“Such a joke,” gasped Dorothy, “but I can’t tell you.”

As for Leonore, her triumphant manner had fled, and her cheeks were very red. And when some one spoke to Dorothy, and took her attention, Leonore said to Peter very crossly:

“You are so clumsy! Of course I didn’t mean that way.”

Peter sighed internally. “I am stupid, I suppose,” he said to himself. “I tried to do just what she asked, but she’s displeased, and I suppose she won’t be nice for the rest of the day. If it was only law or politics! But women!”

But Leonore didn’t abuse him. She was very kind to him, despite her displeasure. “If Dorothy would only let me alone,” thought Peter, “I should have a glorious time. Why can’t she let me stay with her when she’s in such a nice mood. And why does she insist on my being attentive to her. I don’t care for her. It seems as if she was determined to break up my enjoyment, just as I get her to myself.” Peter mixed his “hers” and “shes” too thoroughly in this sentence to make its import clear. His thoughts are merely reported verbatim, as the easiest way. It certainly indicates that, as with most troubles, there was a woman in it.

Peter said much this same thing to himself quite often during the following week, and always with a groan. Dorothy was continually putting her finger in. Yet it was in the main a happy time to Peter. His friend treated him very nicely for the most part, if very variably. Peter never knew in what mood he should find her. Sometimes he felt that Leonore considered him as the dirt under her little feet. Then again, she could not be too sweet to him. There was an evening—a dinner—at which he sat between Miss Biddle and Leonore when, it seemed to Peter, Leonore said and looked such nice things, that the millennium had come. Yet the next morning, she told him that: “It was a very dull dinner. I talked to nobody but you.”

Fortunately for Peter, the D’Allois were almost as new an advent in Newport, so Leonore was not yet in the running. But by the time Peter’s first week had sped, he found that men were putting their fingers in, as well as Dorothy. Morning, noon, and night they gathered. Then lunches, teas, drives, yachts and innumerable other affairs also plunged their fingers in. Peter did not yield to the superior numbers, he went wherever Leonore went. But the other men went also, and understood the ropes far better. He fought on, but a sickening feeling began to creep over him of impending failure. It was soon not merely how Leonore treated him; it was the impossibility of getting her to treat him at all. Even though he was in the same house, it seemed as if there was always some one else calling or mealing, or taking tea, or playing tennis or playing billiards, or merely dropping in. And then Leonore took fewer and fewer meals at home, and spent fewer and fewer hours there. One day Peter had to translate those despatches all by himself! When he had a cup of tea now, even with three or four men about, he considered himself lucky. He understood at last what Miss De Voe had meant when she had spoken of the difficulty of seeing enough of a popular girl either to love her or to tell her of it. They prayed for rain in church on Sunday, on account of the drought, and Peter said “Amen” with fervor. Anything to end such fluttering.

At the end of two weeks, Peter said sadly that he must be going.

“Rubbish,” said Watts. “You are to stay for a month.”

“I hope you’ll stay,” said Mrs. D’Alloi.

Peter waited a moment for some one else to speak. Some one else didn’t.

“I think I must,” he said. “It isn’t a matter of my own wishes, but I’m needed in Syracuse.” Peter spoke as if Syracuse was the ultimate of human misery.

“Is it necessary for you to be there?” asked Leonore.

“Not absolutely, but I had better go.”

Later in the day Leonore said, “I’ve decided you are not to go to Syracuse. I shall want you here to explain what they do to me.”

And that cool, insulting speech filled Peter with happiness.

“I’ve decided to stay another week,” he told Mrs. D’Alloi.

Nor could all the appeals over the telegraph move him, though that day and the next the wires to Newport from New York and Syracuse were kept hot, the despatches came so continuously.

Two days after this decision, Peter and Leonore went to a cotillion. Leonore informed him that: “Mamma makes me leave after supper, because she doesn’t like me to stay late, so I miss the nice part.”

“How many waltzes are you going to give me?” asked Peter, with an eye to his one ball-room accomplishment.

“I’ll give you the first,” said Leonore, “and then if you’ll sit near me, I’ll give you a look every time I see a man coming whom I don’t like, and if you are quick and ask me first, I’ll give it to you.”

Peter became absolutely happy. “How glad I am,” he thought, “that I didn’t go to Syracuse! What a shame it is there are other dances than waltzes.”

But after Peter had had two waltzes, he overheard his aged friend of fifteen years say something to a girl that raised him many degrees in his mind. “That’s a very brainy fellow,” said Peter admiringly. “That never occurred to me!”

So he waited till he saw Leonore seated, and then joined her. “Won’t you sit out this dance with me?” he asked.

Leonore looked surprised. “He’s getting very clever,” she thought, never dreaming that Peter’s cleverness, like so many other people’s nowadays, consisted in a pertinent use of quotations. Parrot cleverness, we might term it. Leonore listened to the air which the musicians were beginning, and finding it the Lancers, or dreariest of dances, she made Peter happy by assenting.

“Suppose we go out on the veranda,” said Peter, still quoting.

“Now of what are you going to talk?” said Leonore, when they were ensconced on a big wicker divan, in the soft half light of the Chinese lanterns.

“I want to tell you of something that seems to me about a hundred years ago,” said Peter. “But it concerns myself, and I don’t want to bore you.”

“Try, and if I don’t like it I’ll stop you,” said Leonore, opening up a line of retreat worthy of a German army.

“I don’t know what you’ll think about it,” said Peter, faltering a little. “I suppose I can hardly make you understand it, as it is to me. But I want you to know, because—well—it’s only fair.”

Leonore looked at Peter with a very tender look in her eyes. He could not see it, because Leonore sat so that her face was in shadow. But she could see his expression, and when he hesitated, with that drawn look on his face, Leonore said softly:

“You mean—about—mamma?”

Peter started. “Yes! You know?”

“Yes,” said Leonore gently. “And that was why I trusted you, without ever having met you, and why I wanted to be friends.”

Peter sighed a sigh of relief. “I’ve been so afraid of it,” he said. “She told you?”

“Yes. That is, Miss De Voe told me first of your having been disappointed, so I asked mamma if she knew the girl, and then mamma told me. I’m glad you spoke of it, for I’ve wanted to ask you something.”

“What?”

“If that was why you wouldn’t call at first on us?”

“No.”

“Then why did mamma say you wouldn’t call?” When Peter made no reply, Leonore continued, “I knew—that is I felt, there was something wrong. What was it?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Yes,” said Leonore, very positively.

Peter hesitated. “She thought badly of me about something, till I apologized to her.”

“And now?”

“Now she invites me to Grey-Court.”

“Then it wasn’t anything?”

“She had misjudged me.”

“Now, tell me what it was.”

“Miss D’Alloi, I know you do not mean it,” said Peter, “but you are paining me greatly. There is nothing in my whole life so bitter to me as what you ask me to tell.”

“Oh, Peter,” said Leonore, “I beg your pardon. I was very thoughtless!”

“And you don’t think the worse of me, because I loved your mother, and because I can’t tell you?” said Peter, in a dangerous tone.

“No,” said Leonore, but she rose. “Now we’ll go back to the dancing.”

“One moment,” begged Peter.

But Leonore was already in the full light blazing from the room. “Are you coming?” she said.

“May I have this waltz?” said Peter, trying to get half a loaf.

“No,” said Leonore, “it’s promised to Mr. Rutgers.”

Just then mine host came up and said. “I congratulate you, Mr. Stirling.”

Peter wanted to kick him, but he didn’t.

“I congratulate you,” said another man.

“On what?” Peter saw no cause for congratulation, only for sorrow.

“Oh, Peter,” said Dorothy, sailing up at this junction, “how nice! And such a surprise!”

“Why, haven’t you heard?” said mine host.

“Oh,” cried Leonore, “is it about the Convention?”

“Yes,” said a man. “Manners is in from the club and tells us that a despatch says your name was sprung on the Convention at nine, and that you were chosen by acclamation without a single ballot being taken. Every one’s thunderstruck.”

“Oh, no,” said a small voice, fairly bristling with importance, “I knew all about it.”

Every one laughed at this, except Dorothy. Dorothy had a suspicion that it was true. But she didn’t say so. She sniffed visibly, and said, “Nonsense. As if Peter would tell you secrets. Come, Peter, I want to take you over and let Miss Biddle congratulate you.”

“Peter has just asked me for this waltz,” said Leonore. “Oh, Mr. Rutgers, I’m so sorry, I’m going to dance this with Mr. Stirling.”

And then Peter felt he was to be congratulated.

“I shan’t marry him myself,” thought Leonore, “but I won’t have my friends married off right under my nose, and you can try all you want, Mrs. Rivington.”

So Peter’s guardianship was apparently bearing fruit. Yet man to this day holds woman to be the weaker vessel!