Infatuation
elegant and self-possessed at the terrible board of the Romanoffs. Mr.
Ladd could have wished that she had shown a little more assertion, a
little more--well, he hardly knew what but something to offset the
unconscious arrogance of these people, and to show them that a Ladd was
as good as they were, if not a darned sight better! But Phyllis, if
anything, was too much the other way. There was a humility in her
sweetness, her deference, her touching desire to please. To her father
she seemed to have accepted too readily, too gratefully, her beggar-maid
position at that kingly table.
But as he watched her some doubts assailed him. He remembered how
singular she had been in the carriage, how over-wrought, and unlike her
usual self. Her eyes, fixed so constantly on her intended's, had in
them more pleading than love; more a curious, studying, seeking look, as
though she, too, was trying to penetrate the enamel, and see beneath.
But her voice softened as she spoke to him; she smiled and colored at
his allusions to "us" and "our"; she shyly referred to their projected
honeymoon in the western forests, and spoke rapturously of galloping
through the glades at the head of twenty rangers, all sunburned and
jingling and armed to the teeth.
What was an old fellow to make of it, anyway? One could bring up a girl
from a baby, and still not know her. Mr. Ladd was very much perplexed.
After dinner, the ladies left the two men at their coffee, and retired.
The British Army set out liqueurs, cigars, a spirit-lighter, and then
noiselessly vanished. Now that they were alone together, Mr. Ladd hoped
that J. Whitlock would unbend; hoped that the long-deferred process of
making his acquaintance would begin. He might not be an ideal
son-in-law, but it was horse-sense to make the best of him. You had to
take the son-in-law God gave you. Besides, the man that Phyllis loved
was bound to have a fine nature; and if he could unveil it to her, he
surely could unveil it to her father. So, between sips of Benedictine,
and through the haze of a good cigar, Mr. Ladd essayed the task.
He commenced by describing his own early manhood; his courtship of
Phyllis' mother; his marriage in face of a thousand difficulties. Again
and again he faltered; it was all so sacred; his eyes were often
moist--but he persevered; he had to win this young man, and how better
than by appealing to the sentiment that unites all true lovers? The
elderly railroad president could not bear utterly to be left out of
these two young lives. His daughter was lost to him; at best a husband
leaves little for a father; this stranger had it now in his power to
make that little almost nothing. Small wonder, then, that Mr. Ladd
struggled for his shred of happiness; put pride on one side; exerted
every faculty he possessed to attract the friendship of Phyllis' master.
For a husband is a master; a woman is the slave of the man she loves;
forty centuries have changed nothing but the words, and the size and
metal of the ring.
It used to be of iron, and was worn on the neck.
Mr. Ladd's gaze, that had been fixed in vacancy, of a sudden fell full
on J. Whitlock's face. What he saw was an expression so cold, so
delicately supercilious, so patiently polite, that he stopped as
suddenly as though he had been struck by lightning. Was it for this,
then, that he had opened this holy of holies, into which no human being
before had ever looked,--this inmost recess of his soul, now profaned,
it seemed to him, for ever? For a second his shame transcended even his
disappointment. He had dishonored the dead, besides dishonoring
himself. He had allowed this tall, thin, bored creature to hear things
too dear, too intimate, to be spoken even to Phyllis. My God, what an
old fool he had been, what an ass!
"Had we not better join the ladies?" inquired J. Whitlock, after the
pause had lasted long enough to redeem the proposal from any appearance
of rudeness.
"I suppose we had," returned Mr. Ladd, in a tone as dry as his host's;
and together they both sought the drawing-room.
A long, long hour followed before, in decency, a very flustered,
embittered, and upset middle-aged gentleman could dare to say his
adieux. From the frescoed ceiling the painted angels must certainly
have wept at the sight beneath; or, if they did not weep, they surely
yawned. The labored conversation, the make-believe cordiality, the
awful gap when a topic fell to rise no more, certainly made it an
evening that never could be forgotten. Blessed Briton who said: "Mr.
Ladd's kerridge!" Twice blessed Briton who handed them into it, and
uttered the magic word "'Ome!"
"Did you like him, Papa?"
"A delightful young man, Phyllis, perfectly delightful."
"And his mother?"
"Charming, charming!"
"I never saw either one of them unbend as they did to you."
"It was a great compliment. I appreciate it."
"You don't think I could have done better?"
"No, indeed. Not if you love him."
"Papa?"
"Yes, dearest?"
"Papa, I've done something awful. Shut your eyes, and I'll try to tell
you."
"Phyllis, what do you--?"
"Are they shut--tight--_tight_?"
"Yes, but I don't--"
"Now, don't talk, Papa, but listen like a good little railroad
president, and I'll tell you what I think of J. Whitlock Pastor, and
that is he's _unbearable_! No, no, I'm not joking--I mean it, I mean
it! He's unbearable, and his mother's unbearable, and the forty yards
around them is unbearable, and I wouldn't marry him for anything under
the sun, no, not if he was the only man in the world except the
clergyman who would do it; and Papa, I'm so mortified and ashamed and
miserable that I don't know what to do. Didn't you notice me to-night,
and how shy and crushed I was, sitting there like a little Judas, and
feeling, oh, horribly wicked and treacherous? It was _all_ I could do
not to scream out that I hated him, just as loud as I could: I hate you!
I hate you! I hate you!--I was trying to tell you that when we started,
but I didn't have the courage. I wanted you to see him for yourself; to
realize how unendurable he is; I--I--wanted you not to blame me too
much, Papa."
To Mr. Ladd it was like a reprieve at the gallows' foot. Blame her?
Why, elation ran to his head like wine; he caught her in his arms and
hugged her; had he saved her from drowning he could not have been more
passionately thankful. His opinion of the young man came out in a
torrent of unvarnished Anglo-Saxon. To every epithet he applied to him,
Phyllis added a worse. In their wild humor, and bubbling over with a
laughter that verged on the hysterical, they vied with each other in
tearing J. Whitlock to pieces.
"But, Phyllis, Phyllis, how did you ever come to do it?"
"I don't know, Papa."
"But you must have liked him?"
"I thought I did."
"Was it the attraction of his position--his name--and all that kind of
thing?"
"No, I thought I loved him."
"How _could_ you have thought such a thing?"
"It's incredible, but I did, Papa. I loved him right up to the moment
when he kissed me. And how could I stop him after having looked down at
my toes, and said 'Yes.' He's been kissing me for five days--and, Papa,
I hate him."
The fierceness she put into these three words was vitriolic. Disgust,
revulsion, outraged pride flooded her cheek with carmine.
"Papa, I can't make any excuses for myself. It's not prudery; it's not
that; but somehow the real _me_ didn't like the real _him_, and that's
all I can say about it!"
"You'll have to write to him, and break it off."
"But what am I to tell him, Papa? It's so awful and humiliating for
him. I guess I'll just put it down to insanity in my family."
"But, good Lord, we haven't any--we've a very decent record."
"Oh, Papa, I simply must have been insane to have got engaged to
him.--I'll write him a beautiful letter of regret, and inclose a
doctor's certificate!"
Her incorrigible humor was again asserting itself. She outlined the
letter, her eyes dancing with merriment. Mr. Ladd, in no mood to
criticize these swift transitions, joined in whole-heartedly. They
laughed and laughed till the tears came, and arrived home like noisy
children from a party.
Mrs. Fensham, in a very decollete gown, and looking like a sylph of
twenty-five, was waiting for the carriage to take her to a ball. She
swam up in front of Bob, and raised her two little hands to his
shoulders--a graceful gesture, and one she was very fond of.
"And you found him a perfect dear, didn't you?" she murmured
ecstatically.
"Well, I don't know that I did," faltered Brother Bob, placing a kiss on
the top of her head. "The fact is, Sally, we've decided to call it
off!"
"Bob, you haven't broken the engagement!"
Her lisping voice turned suddenly metallic. She stared from her brother
to her niece, a sylph no longer, but a woman of forty-five, pale with
apprehension and anger.
"Phyllis has made a mistake, that's all," he said. "He looked very nice
in the show-window, but now we are going to take him back, and get a
credit-slip for something we want more."
"A new automobile coat for Papa," put in Phyllis mischievously.
"And you can both laugh about it!" exclaimed Aunt Sarah in appalled
accents. "Laugh at throwing over J. Whitlock Pastor! Oh, you little
Carthage nobodies--haven't you any sense at all--don't you know what you
are doing--isn't he as much a duke with us as any Marlborough or
Newcastle in England? He was too good; he was too nice; he wasn't
enough of a snob to blow and brag--and that's what he gets for it, the
'No' of a silly girl, who'd prefer a barber's block clerk to the
greatest gentleman in America!"
She tottered to the mantelpiece and burst into tears--the first tears
she had shed in twenty worldly and scheming years--and the only tears
that did attend the rupture of the Pastor-Ladd engagement.
*CHAPTER IV*
There was the usual chatter, the usual slanders, the usual innuendoes
that follow such an event. Charming little assassins, in Paquin gowns
and picture hats flew about sticking pins into Phyllis' reputation.
Those worse gossips, the clubs, were not behindhand either; and old
gentlemen, who ought to have known better, unctuously laid their heads
together and passed the lies along. It is so much the custom to dwell
on the good side of human nature that we are apt to forget the existence
of another--that cruel malignancy, which, in embryo, may be seen any
time at the monkey-house in the Zoo. In its more developed human form
it jostles at our elbows every day.
The American duke himself behaved with a beautiful propriety. Publicly
he took all the blame on his own shoulders, and hied him to the western
wilds to scourge the campers and cigarette-smokers who infested his
beloved forests. Thus congenially employed, he was quite willing to
wait for Time's healing hand to do the rest. In a year he was
completely reenameled, and took a finer polish than ever.
Mr. Ladd hoped that Phyllis would return to Carthage to hide her head
from the storm. But she insisted on staying in Washington, and "seeing
it through," which she did with the prettiest defiance imaginable,
returning pin for pin with gay insouciance, and dancing the night out in
all manner of lions' dens. In her veins there ran the blood of that old
aristocratic South--of those fighting-cock Frenchmen, dark, lithe and
graceful, who had loved, gambled and gone the pace with headlong
recklessness and folly; of those fiery Spaniards, more grave and still
more dissolute, to whom pride was the very breath of life, and who could
call out a man and shoot him with the stateliest of courtesy.--What a
race it had been in the heyday of its wildness and youth, the torment of