“And I think, my dear,” she added, turning to Honora, “that I'll ask you to excuse me, and show me to my room.”
“Certainly, Mrs. Holt,” said Honora, breathlessly.
“Howard, ring the bell.”
She led the way up the stairs to the guest-chamber with the rose paper and the little balcony. As she closed the door gusts of laughter reached them from the floor below, and she could plainly distinguish the voices of May Barclay and Trixton Brent.
“I hope you'll be comfortable, Mrs. Holt,” she said. “Your maid will be in the little room across the hall and I believe you like breakfast at eight.”
“You mustn't let me keep you from your guests, Honora.”
“Oh, Mrs. Holt,” she said, on the verge of tears, “I don't want to go to them. Really, I don't.”
“It must be confessed,” said Mrs. Holt, opening her handbag and taking out the copy of the mission report, which had been carefully folded, “that they seem to be able to get along very well without you. I suppose I am too old to understand this modern way of living. How well I remember one night—it was in 1886—I missed the train to Silverdale, and my telegram miscarried. Poor Mr. Holt was nearly out of his head.”
She fumbled for her glasses and dropped them. Honora picked them up, and it was then she perceived that the tears were raining down the good lady's cheeks. At the same moment they sprang into Honora's eyes, and blinded her. Mrs. Holt looked at her long and earnestly.
“Go down, my dear,” she said gently, “you must not neglect your friends. They will wonder where you are. And at what time do you breakfast?”
“At—at any time you like.”
“I shall be down at eight,” said Mrs. Holt, and she kissed her.
Honora, closing the door, stood motionless in the hall, and presently the footsteps and the laughter and the sound of carriage wheels on the gravel died away.
CHAPTER XI. CONTAINING SOME REVELATIONS
Honora, as she descended, caught a glimpse of the parlour maid picking up the scattered cards on the drawing-room floor. There were voices on the porch, where Howard was saying good-by to Mrs. Chandos and Trixton Brent. She joined them.
“Oh, my dear!” cried Mrs. Chandos, interrupting Honora's apologies, “I'm sure I shan't sleep a wink—she gave me such a fright. You might have sent Trixy ahead to prepare us. When I first caught sight of her, I thought it was my own dear mother who had come all the way from Cleveland, and the cigarette burned my fingers. But I must say I think it was awfully clever of you to get hold of her and save Trixy's reputation. Good night, dear.”
And she got into her carriage.
“Give my love to Mrs. Holt,” said Brent, as he took Honora's hand, “and tell her I feel hurt that she neglected to say good night to me. I thought I had made an impression. Tell her I'll send her a cheque for her rescue work. She inspires me with confidence.”
Howard laughed.
“I'll see you to-morrow, Brent,” he called out as they drove away. Though always assertive, it seemed to Honora that her husband had an increased air of importance as he turned to her now with his hands in his pockets. He looked at her for a moment, and laughed again. He, too, had apparently seen the incident only in a humorous light. “Well, Honora,” he remarked, “you have a sort of a P. T. Barnum way of doing things once in a while—haven't you? Is the old lady really tucked away for the night, or is she coming down to read us a sermon? And how the deuce did you happen to pick her up?”
She had come downstairs with confession on her lips, and in the agitation of her mind had scarcely heeded Brent's words or Mrs. Chandos'. She had come down prepared for any attitude but the one in which she found him; for anger, reproaches, arraignments. Nay, she was surprised to find now that she had actually hoped for these. She deserved to be scolded: it was her right. If he had been all of a man, he would have called her to account. There must be—there was something lacking in his character. And it came to her suddenly, with all the shock of a great contrast, with what different eyes she had looked upon him five years before at Silverdale.
He went into the house and started to enter the drawing-room, still in disorder and reeking with smoke.
“No, not in there!” she cried sharply.
He turned to her puzzled. Her breath was coming and going quickly. She crossed the hall and turned on the light in the little parlour there, and he followed her.
“Don't you feel well?” he asked.
“Howard,” she said, “weren't you worried?”
“Worried? No, why should I have been? Lula Chandos and May Barclay had seen you in the automobile in town, and I knew you were high and dry somewhere.”
“High and dry,” she repeated.
“What?”
“Nothing. They said I had run off with Mr. Brent, didn't they?”
He laughed.
“Yes, there was some joking to that effect.”
“You didn't take it seriously?”
“No—why should I?”
She was appalled by his lack of knowledge of her. All these years she had lived with him, and he had not grasped even the elements of her nature. And this was marriage! Trixton Brent—short as their acquaintance had been—had some conception of her character and possibilities her husband none. Where was she to begin? How was she to tell him the episode in the automobile in order that he might perceive something of its sinister significance?
Where was she to go to be saved from herself, if not to him?
“I might have run away with him, if I had loved him,” she said after a pause. “Would you have cared?”
“You bet your life,” said Howard, and put his arm around her.
She looked up into his face. So intent had she been on what she had meant to tell him that she did not until now perceive he was preoccupied, and only half listening to what she was saying.
“You bet your life,” he said, patting her shoulder. “What would I have done, all alone, in the new house?”
“In the new house?” she cried. “Oh, Howard—you haven't taken it!”
“I haven't signed the lease,” he replied importantly, smiling down at her, and thrusting his hands in his pockets.
“I don't want it,” said Honora; “I don't want it. I told you that I'd decided I didn't want it when we were there. Oh, Howard, why did you take it?”
He whistled. He had the maddening air of one who derives amusement from the tantrums of a spoiled child.
“Well,” he remarked, “women are too many for me. If there's any way of pleasing 'em I haven't yet discovered it. The night before last you had to have the house. Nothing else would do. It was the greatest find in New York. For the first time in months you get up for breakfast—a pretty sure sign you hadn't changed your mind. You drag me to see it, and when you land me there, because I don't lose my head immediately, you say you don't want it. Of course I didn't take you seriously—I thought you'd set your heart on it, so I wired an offer to Shorter to-day, and he accepted it. And when I hand you this pleasant little surprise, you go right up in the air.”
He had no air of vexation, however, as he delivered this somewhat reproachful harangue in the picturesque language to which he commonly resorted. Quite the contrary. He was still smiling, as Santa Claus must smile when he knows he has another pack up the chimney.
“Why this sudden change of mind?” he demanded. “It can't be because you want to spend the winter in Quicksands.”
She was indeed at a loss what to say. She could not bring herself to ask him whether he had been influenced by Trixton Brent. If he had, she told herself, she did not wish to know. He was her husband, after all, and it would be too humiliating. And then he had taken the house.
“Have you hit on a palace you like better?” he inquired, with a clumsy attempt at banter. “They tell me the elder Maitlands are going abroad—perhaps we could get their house on the Park.”
“You said you couldn't afford Mrs. Rindge's house,” she answered uneasily, “and I—I believed you.”
“I couldn't,” he said mysteriously, and paused.
It seemed to her, as she recalled the scene afterwards, that in this pause he gave the impression of physically swelling. She remembered staring at him with wide, frightened eyes and parted lips.
“I couldn't,” he repeated, with the same strange emphasis and a palpable attempt at complacency. “But—er—circumstances have changed since then.”
“What do you mean, Howard?” she whispered.
The corners of his mouth twitched in the attempt to repress a smile.
“I mean,” he said, “that the president of a trust company can afford to live in a better house than the junior partner of Dallam and Spence.”
“The president of a trust company!” Honora scarcely recognized her own voice—so distant it sounded. The room rocked, and she clutched the arm of a chair and sat down. He came and stood over her.
“I thought that would surprise you some,” he said, obviously pleased by these symptoms. “The fact is, I hadn't meant to break it to you until morning. But I think I'll go in on the seven thirty-five.” (He glanced significantly up at the ceiling, as though Mrs. Holt had something to do with this decision.) “President of the Orange Trust Company at forty isn't so bad, eh?”
“The Orange Trust Company? Did you say the Orange Trust Company?”
“Yes.” He produced a cigarette. “Old James Wing and Brent practically control it. You see, if I do say it myself, I handled some things pretty well for Brent this summer, and he's seemed to appreciate it. He and Wing were buying in traction stocks out West. But you could have knocked me down with a paper-knife when he came to me—”
“When did he come to you?” she asked breathlessly.
“Yesterday. We went down town together, you remember, and he asked me to step into his office. Well, we talked it over, and I left on the one o'clock for Newport to see Mr. Wing. Wonderful old man! I sat up with him till midnight—it wasn't any picnic”...
More than once during the night Honora awoke with a sense of oppression, and each time went painfully through the whole episode from the evening—some weeks past when Trixton Brent had first mentioned the subject of the trust company, to the occurrence in the automobile and Howard's triumphant announcement. She had but a vague notion of how that scene had finished; or of how, limply, she had got to bed. Round and round the circle she went in each waking period. To have implored him to relinquish the place had been waste of breath; and then—her reasons? These were the moments when the current was strongest, when she grew incandescent with humiliation and pain; when stray phrases in red letters of Brent's were illuminated. Merit! He had a contempt for her husband which he had not taken the trouble to hide. But not a business contempt. “As good as the next man,” Brent had said—or words to that effect. “As good as the next man!” Then she had tacitly agreed to the bargain, and refused to honour the bill! No, she had not, she had not. Before God, she was innocent of that! When she reached this point it was always to James Wing that she clung—the financier, at least, had been impartial. And it was he who saved her.
At length she opened her eyes to discover with bewilderment that the room was flooded with light, and then she sprang out of bed and went to the open window. To seaward hung an opal mist, struck here and there with crimson. She listened; some one was whistling an air she had heard before—Mrs. Barclay had been singing it last night! Wheels crunched the gravel—Howard was going off. She stood motionless until the horse's hoofs rang on the highroad, and then hurried into her dressing-gown and slippers and went downstairs to the telephone and called a number.
“Is this Mr. Brent's? Will you say to Mr. Brent that Mrs. Spence would be greatly, obliged if he stopped a moment at her house before going to town? Thank you.”
She returned to her room and dressed with feverish haste, trying to gather her wits for an ordeal which she felt it would have killed her to delay. At ten minutes to eight she emerged again and glanced anxiously at Mrs. Holt's door; and scarcely had she reached the lower hall before he drove into the circle. She was struck more forcibly than ever by the physical freshness of the man, and he bestowed on her, as he took her hand, the peculiar smile she knew so well, that always seemed to have an enigma behind it. At sight and touch of him the memory of what she had prepared to say vanished.
“Behold me, as ever, your obedient servant,” he said, as he followed her into the screened-off portion of the porch.
“You must think it strange that I sent for you, I know,” she cried, as she turned to him. “But I couldn't wait. I—I did not know until last night. Howard only told me then. Oh, you didn't do it for me! Please say you didn't do it for me!”
“My dear Honora,” replied Trixton Brent, gravely, “we wanted your husband for his abilities and the valuable services he can render us.”
She stood looking into his eyes, striving to penetrate to the soul behind, ignorant or heedless that others before her had tried and failed. He met her gaze unflinchingly, and smiled.
“I want the truth,” she craved.
“I never lie—to a woman,” he said.
“My life—my future depends upon it,” she went on. “I'd rather scrub floors, I'd rather beg—than to have it so. You must believe me!”
“I do believe you,” he affirmed. And he said it with a gentleness and a sincerity that startled her.
“Thank you,” she answered simply. And speech became very difficult. “If—if I haven't been quite fair with you—Mr. Brent, I am sorry. I—I liked you, and I like you to-day better than ever before. And I can quite see now how I must have misled you into thinking—queer things about me. I didn't mean to. I have learned a lesson.”
She took a deep, involuntary breath. The touch of lightness in his reply served to emphasize the hitherto unsuspected fact that sportsmanship in Trixton Brent was not merely a code, but assumed something of the grandeur of a principle.
“I, too, have learned a lesson,” he replied. “I have learned the difference between nature and art. I am something of a connoisseur in art. I bow to nature, and pay my bets.”
“Your bets?” she asked, with a look.
“My renunciations, forfeits, whatever you choose to call them. I have been fairly and squarely beaten—but by nature, not by art. That is my consolation.”
Laughter struck into her eyes like a shaft of sunlight into a well; her emotions were no longer to be distinguished. And in that moment she wondered what would have happened if she had loved this man, and why she had not. And when next he spoke, she started.
“How is my elderly dove-coloured friend this morning?” he asked. “That dinner with her was one of the great events of my life. I didn't suppose such people existed any more.”
“Perhaps you'll stay to breakfast with her,” suggested Honora, smiling. “I know she'd like to see you again.”
“No, thanks,” he said, taking her hand, “I'm on my way to the train—I'd quite forgotten it. Au revoir!” He reached the end of the porch, turned, and called back, “As a 'dea ex machina', she has never been equalled.”
Honora stood for a while looking after him, until she heard a footstep behind her,—Mrs. Holt's.
“Who was that, my dear?” she asked, “Howard?”
“Howard has gone, Mrs. Holt,” Honora replied, rousing herself. “I must make his apologies. It was Mr. Brent.”
“Mr. Brent!” the good lady repeated, with a slight upward lift of the faint eyebrows. “Does he often call this early?”
Honora coloured a little, and laughed.
“I asked him to breakfast with you, but he had to catch a train. He—wished to be remembered. He took such a fancy to you.”
“I am afraid,” said Mrs. Holt, “that his fancy is a thing to be avoided. Are you coming to Silverdale with me, Honora?”
“Yes, Mrs. Holt,” she replied, slipping her arm through that of her friend, “for as long as you will let me stay.”
And she left a note for Howard to that effect.
BOOK III.
Volume 5.
CHAPTER I. ASCENDI.
Honora did not go back to Quicksands. Neither, in this modern chronicle, shall we.
The sphere we have left, which we know is sordid, sometimes shines in the retrospect. And there came a time, after the excitement of furnishing the new house was over, when our heroine, as it were, swung for a time in space: not for a very long time; that month, perhaps, between autumn and winter.
We need not be worried about her, though we may pause for a moment or two to sympathize with her in her loneliness—or rather in the moods it produced. She even felt, in those days, slightly akin to the Lady of the Victoria (perfectly respectable), whom all of us fortunate enough occasionally to go to New York have seen driving on Fifth Avenue with an expression of wistful haughtiness, and who changes her costumes four times a day.
Sympathy! We have seen Honora surrounded by friends—what has become of them? Her husband is president of a trust company, and she has one of the most desirable houses in New York. What more could be wished for? To jump at conclusions in this way is by no means to understand a heroine with an Ideal. She had these things, and—strange as it may seem—suffered.
Her sunny drawing-room, with its gathered silk curtains, was especially beautiful; whatever the Leffingwells or Allisons may have lacked, it was not taste. Honora sat in it and wondered: wondered, as she looked back over the road she had threaded somewhat blindly towards the Ideal, whether she might not somewhere have taken the wrong turn. The farther she travelled, the more she seemed to penetrate into a land of unrealities. The exquisite objects by which she was surrounded, and which she had collected with such care, had no substance: she would not have been greatly surprised, at any moment, to see them vanish like a scene in a theatre, leaning an empty, windy stage behind them. They did not belong to her, nor she to them.
Past generations of another blood, no doubt, had been justified in looking upon the hazy landscapes in the great tapestries as their own: and children's children had knelt, in times gone by, beside the carved stone mantel. The big, gilded chairs with the silken seats might appropriately have graced the table of the Hotel de Rambouillet. Would not the warriors and the wits, the patient ladies of high degree and of many children, and even the 'precieuses ridicules' themselves, turn over in their graves if they could so much as imagine the contents of the single street in modern New York where Honora lived?
One morning, as she sat in that room, possessed by these whimsical though painful fancies, she picked up a newspaper and glanced through it, absently, until her eye fell by chance upon a name on the editorial page. Something like an electric shock ran through her, and the letters of the name seemed to quiver and become red. Slowly they spelled—Peter Erwin.
“The argument of Mr. Peter Erwin, of St. Louis, before the Supreme Court of the United States in the now celebrated Snowden case is universally acknowledged by lawyers to have been masterly, and reminiscent of the great names of the profession in the past. Mr. Erwin is not dramatic. He appears to carry all before him by the sheer force of intellect, and by a kind of Lincolnian ability to expose a fallacy: He is still a young man, self-made, and studied law under Judge Brice of St. Louis, once President of the National Bar Association, whose partner he is”....
Honora cut out the editorial and thrust it in her gown, and threw the newspaper is the fire. She stood for a time after it had burned, watching the twisted remnants fade from flame colour to rose, and finally blacken. Then she went slowly up the stairs and put on her hat and coat and veil. Although a cloudless day, it was windy in the park, and cold, the ruffled waters an intense blue. She walked fast.
She lunched with Mrs. Holt, who had but just come to town; and the light, like a speeding guest, was departing from the city when she reached her own door.
“There is a gentleman in the drawing-room, madam,” said the butler. “He said he was an old friend, and a stranger in New York, and asked if he might wait.”
She stood still with presentiment.
“What is his name?” she asked.
“Mr. Erwin,” said the man.
Still she hesitated. In the strange state in which she found herself that day, the supernatural itself had seemed credible. And yet—she was not prepared.
“I beg pardon, madam,” the butler was saying, “perhaps I shouldn't—?”
“Yes, yes, you should,” she interrupted him, and pushed past him up the stairs. At the drawing-room door she paused—he was unaware of her presence. And he had not changed! She wondered why she had expected him to change. Even the glow of his newly acquired fame was not discernible behind his well-remembered head. He seemed no older—and no younger. And he was standing with his hands behind his back gazing in simple, silent appreciation at the big tapestry nearest the windows.
“Peter,” she said, in a low voice.
He turned quickly, and then she saw the glow. But it was the old glow, not the new—the light in which her early years had been spent.
“What a coincidence!” she exclaimed, as he took her hand.
“Coincidence?”
“It was only this morning that I was reading in the newspaper all sorts of nice things about you. It made me feel like going out and telling everybody you were an old friend of mine.” Still holding his fingers, she pushed him away from her at arm's length, and looked at him. “What does it feel like to be famous, and have editorials about one's self in the New York newspapers?”
He laughed, and released his hands somewhat abruptly.
“It seems as strange to me, Honora, as it does to you.”
“How unkind of you, Peter!” she exclaimed.
She felt his eyes upon her, and their searching, yet kindly and humorous rays seemed to illuminate chambers within her which she would have kept in darkness: which she herself did not wish to examine.
“I'm so glad to see you,” she said a little breathlessly, flinging her muff and boa on a chair. “Sit there, where I can look at you, and tell me why you didn't let me know you were coming to New York.”
He glanced a little comically at the gilt and silk arm-chair which she designated, and then at her; and she smiled and coloured, divining the humour in his unspoken phrase.
“For a great man,” she declared, “you are absurd.”
He sat down. In spite of his black clothes and the lounging attitude he habitually assumed, with his knees crossed—he did not appear incongruous in a seat that would have harmonized with the flowing robes of the renowned French Cardinal himself. Honora wondered why. He impressed her to-day as force—tremendous force in repose, and yet he was the same Peter. Why was it? Had the clipping that even then lay in her bosom effected this magic change? He had intimated as much, but she denied it fiercely.
She rang for tea.
“You haven't told me why you came to New York,” she said.
“I was telegraphed for, from Washington, by a Mr. Wing,” he explained.
“A Mr. Wing,” she repeated. “You don't mean by any chance James Wing?”
“The Mr. Wing,” said Peter.
“The reason I asked,” explained Honora, flushing, “was because Howard is—associated with him. Mr. Wing is largely interested in the Orange Trust Company.”
“Yes, I know,” said Peter. His elbows were resting on the arms of his chair, and he looked at the tips of his fingers, which met. Honora thought it strange that he did not congratulate her, but he appeared to be reflecting.
“What did Mr. Wing want?” she inquired in her momentary confusion, and added hastily, “I beg your pardon, Peter. I suppose I ought not to ask that.”
“He was kind enough to wish me to live in New York he answered, still staring at the tips of his fingers.
“Oh, how nice!” she cried—and wondered at the same time whether, on second thoughts, she would think it so. “I suppose he wants you to be the counsel for one of his trusts. When—when do you come?”
“I'm not coming.”
“Not coming! Why? Isn't it a great compliment?”
He ignored the latter part of her remark; and it seemed to her, when she recalled the conversation afterwards, that she had heard a certain note of sadness under the lightness of his reply.
“To attempt to explain to a New Yorker why any one might prefer to live in any other place would be a difficult task.”
“You are incomprehensible, Peter,” she declared. And yet she felt a relief that surprised her, and a desire to get away from the subject. “Dear old St. Louis! Somehow, in spite of your greatness, it seems to fit you.”
“It's growing,” said Peter—and they laughed together.
“Why didn't you come to lunch?” she said.
“Lunch! I didn't know that any one ever went to lunch in New York—in this part of it, at least—with less than three weeks' notice. And by the way, if I am interfering with any engagement—”
“My book is not so full as all that. Of course you'll come and stay with us, Peter.”
He shook his head regretfully.
“My train leaves at six, from Forty-Second Street,” he replied.
“Oh, you are niggardly,” she cried. “To think how little I see of you, Peter. And sometimes I long for you. It's strange, but I still miss you terribly—after five years. It seems longer than that,” she added, as she poured the boiling water into the tea-pot. But she did not look at him.
He got up and walked as far as a water-colour on the wall.
“You have some beautiful things here, Honora,” he said. “I am glad I have had a glimpse of you surrounded by them to carry back to your aunt and uncle.”
She glanced about the room as he spoke, and then at him. He seemed the only reality in it, but she did not say so.
“You'll see them soon,” was what she said. And considered the miracle of him staying there where Providence had placed him, and bringing the world to him. Whereas she, who had gone forth to seek it—“The day after to-morrow will be Sunday,” he reminded her.
Nothing had changed there. She closed her eyes and saw the little dining room in all the dignity of Sunday dinner, the big silver soup tureen catching the sun, the flowered china with the gilt edges, and even a glimpse of lace paper when the closet door opened; Aunt Mary and Uncle Tom, with Peter between them. And these, strangely, were the only tangible things and immutable.
“You'll give them—a good account of me?” she said. “I know that you do not care for New York,” she added with a smile. “But it is possible to be happy here.”
“I am glad you are happy, Honora, and that you have got what you wanted in life. Although I may be unreasonable and provincial and—and Western,” he confessed with a twinkle—for he had the characteristic national trait of shading off his most serious remarks—“I have never gone so far as to declare that happiness was a question of locality.”
She laughed.
“Nor fame.” Her mind returned to the loadstar.
“Oh, fame!” he exclaimed, with a touch of impatience, and he used the word that had possessed her all day. “There is no reality in that. Men are not loved for it.”
She set down her cup quickly. He was looking at the water-colour.
“Have you been to the Metropolitan Museum lately?” he asked.
“The Metropolitan Museum?” she repeated in bewilderment.
“That would be one of the temptations of New York for me,” he said. “I was there for half an hour this afternoon before I presented myself at your door as a suspicious character. There is a picture there, by Coffin, called 'The Rain,' I believe. I am very fond of it. And looking at it on such a winter's day as this brings back the summer. The squall coming, and the sound of it in the trees, and the very smell of the wet meadow-grass in the wind. Do you know it?”
“No,” replied Honora, and she was suddenly filled with shame at the thought that she had never been in the Museum. “I didn't know you were so fond of pictures.”
“I am beginning to be a rival of Mr. Dwyer,” he declared. “I've bought four—although I haven't built my gallery. When you come to St. Louis I'll show them to you—and let us hope it will be soon.”
For some time after she had heard the street door close behind him Honora remained where she was, staring into the fire, and then she crossed the room to a reading lamp, and turned it up.
Some one spoke in the doorway.
“Mr. Grainger, madam.”
Before she could rouse herself and recover from her astonishment, the gentleman himself appeared, blinking as though the vision of her were too bright to be steadily gazed at. If the city had been searched, it is doubtful whether a more striking contrast to the man who had just left could have been found than Cecil Grainger in the braided, grey cutaway that clung to the semblance of a waist he still possessed. In him Hyde Park and Fifth Avenue, so to speak, shook hands across the sea: put him in either, and he would have appeared indigenous.
“Hope you'll forgive my comin' 'round on such slight acquaintance, Mrs. Spence,” said he. “Couldn't resist the opportunity to pay my respects. Shorter told me where you were.”
“That was very good of Mr. Shorter,” said Honora, whose surprise had given place to a very natural resentment, since she had not the honour of knowing Mrs. Grainger.
“Oh,” said Mr. Grainger, “Shorter's a good sort. Said he'd been here himself to see how you were fixed, and hadn't found you in. Uncommonly well fixed, I should say,” he added, glancing around the room with undisguised approval. “Why the deuce did she furnish it, since she's gone to Paris to live with Rindge?”
“I suppose you mean Mrs. Rindge,” said Honora. “She didn't furnish it.”
Mr. Grainger winked at her rapidly, like a man suddenly brought face to face with a mystery.
“Oh!” he replied, as though he had solved it. The solution came a few moments later. “It's ripping!” he said. “Farwell couldn't have done it any better.”
Honora laughed, and momentarily forgot her resentment.
“Will you have tea?” she asked. “Oh, don't sit down there!”
“Why not?” he asked, jumping. It was the chair that had held Peter, and Mr. Grainger examined the seat as though he suspected a bent pin.
“Because,” said Honora, “because it isn't comfortable. Pull up that other one.”
Again mystified, he did as he was told. She remembered his reputation for going to sleep, and wondered whether she had been wise in her second choice. But it soon became apparent that Mr. Grainger, as he gazed at her from among the cushions, had no intention of dozing, His eyelids reminded her of the shutters of a camera, and she had the feeling of sitting for thousands of instantaneous photographs for his benefit. She was by turns annoyed, amused, and distrait: Peter was leaving his hotel; now he was taking the train. Was he thinking of her? He had said he was glad she was happy! She caught herself up with a start after one of these silences to realize that Mr. Grainger was making unwonted and indeed pathetic exertions to entertain her, and it needed no feminine eye to perceive that he was thoroughly uncomfortable. She had, unconsciously and in thinking of Peter, rather overdone the note of rebuke of his visit. And Honora was, above all else, an artist. His air was distinctly apologetic as he rose, perhaps a little mortified, like that of a man who has got into the wrong house.
“I very much fear I've intruded, Mrs. Spence,” he stammered, and he was winking now with bewildering rapidity. “We—we had such a pleasant drive together that day to Westchester—I was tempted—”
“We did have a good time,” she agreed. “And it has been a pleasure to see you again.”
Thus, in the kindness of her heart, she assisted him to cover his retreat, for it was a strange and somewhat awful experience to see Mr. Cecil Grainger discountenanced. He glanced again, as he went out, at the chair in which he had been forbidden to sit.
She went to the piano, played over a few bars of Thais, and dropped her hands listlessly. Cross currents of the strange events of the day flowed through her mind: Peter's arrival and its odd heralding, and the discomfort of Mr. Grainger.
Howard came in. He did not see her under the shaded lamp, and she sat watching him with a curious feeling of detachment as he unfolded his newspaper and sank, with a sigh of content, into the cushioned chair which Mr. Grainger had vacated. Was it fancy that her husband's physical attributes had changed since he had attained his new position of dignity? She could have sworn that he had visibly swollen on the evening when he had announced to her his promotion, and he seemed to have remained swollen. Not bloated, of course: he was fatter, and—if possible pinker. But there was a growing suggestion in him of humming-and-hawing greatness. If there—were leisure in this too-leisurely chronicle for what might be called aftermath, the dinner that Honora had given to some of her Quicksands friends might be described. Suffice it to recall, with Honora, that Lily Dallam, with a sure instinct, had put the finger of her wit on this new attribute of Howard's.
“You'll kill me, Howard!” she had cried. “He even looks at the soup as though he were examining a security!”
Needless to say, it did not cure him, although it sealed Lily Dallam's fate—and incidentally that of Quicksands. Honora's thoughts as she sat now at the piano watching him, flew back unexpectedly to the summer at Silverdale when she had met him, and she tried to imagine, the genial and boyish representative of finance that he was then. In the midst of this effort he looked up and discovered her.
“What are you doing over there, Honora?” he asked.
“Thinking,” she answered.
“That's a great way to treat a man when he comes home after a day's work.”
“I beg your pardon, Howard,” she said with unusual meekness. “Who do you think was here this afternoon?”
“Erwin? I've just come from Mr. Wing's house—he has gout to-day and didn't go down town. He offered Erwin a hundred thousand a year to come to New York as corporation counsel. And if you'll believe me—he refused it.”
“I'll believe you,” she said.
“Did he say anything about it to you?”
“He simply mentioned that Mr. Wing asked him to come to New York. He didn't say why.”
“Well,” Howard remarked, “he's one too many for me. He can't be making over thirty thousand where he is.”
CHAPTER II. THE PATH OF PHILANTHROPY
Mrs. Cecil Grainger may safely have been called a Personality, and one of the proofs of this was that she haunted people who had never seen her. Honora might have looked at her, it is true, on the memorable night of the dinner with Mrs. Holt and Trixton Brent; but—for sufficiently obvious reasons—refrained. It would be an exaggeration to say that Mrs. Grainger became an obsession with our heroine; yet it cannot be denied that, since Honora's arrival at Quicksands, this lady had, in increasing degrees, been the subject of her speculations. The threads of Mrs. Grainger's influence were so ramified, indeed, as to be found in Mrs. Dallam, who declared she was the rudest woman in New York and yet had copied her brougham; in Mr. Cuthbert and Trixton Brent; in Mrs. Kame; in Mrs. Holt, who proclaimed her a tower of strength in charities; and lastly in Mr. Grainger himself, who, although he did not spend much time in his wife's company, had for her an admiration that amounted to awe.
Elizabeth Grainger, who was at once modern and tenaciously conservative, might have been likened to some of the Roman matrons of the aristocracy in the last years of the Republic. Her family, the Pendletons, had traditions: so, for that matter, had the Graingers. But Senator Pendleton, antique homo virtute et fide, had been a Roman of the old school who would have preferred exile after the battle of Philippi; and who, could he have foreseen modern New York and modern finance, would have been more content to die when he did. He had lived in Washington Square. His daughter inherited his executive ability, many of his prejudices (as they would now be called), and his habit of regarding favourable impressions with profound suspicion. She had never known the necessity of making friends: hers she had inherited, and for some reason specially decreed, they were better than those of less fortunate people.
Mrs. Grainger was very tall. And Sargent, in his portrait of her, had caught with admirable art the indefinable, yet partly supercilious and scornful smile with which she looked down upon the world about her. She possessed the rare gift of combining conventionality with personal distinction in her dress. Her hair was almost Titian red in colour, and her face (on the authority of Mr. Reginald Farwell) was at once modern and Italian Renaissance. Not the languid, amorous Renaissance, but the lady of decision who chose, and did not wait to be chosen. Her eyes had all the colours of the tapaz, and her regard was so baffling as to arouse intense antagonism in those who were not her friends.
To Honora, groping about for a better and a higher life, the path of philanthropy had more than once suggested itself. And on the day of Peter's visit to New York, when she had lunched with Mrs. Holt, she had signified her willingness (now that she had come to live in town) to join the Working Girls' Relief Society. Mrs. Holt, needless to say, was overjoyed: they were to have a meeting at her house in the near future which Honora must not fail to attend. It was not, however, without a feeling of trepidation natural to a stranger that she made her way to that meeting when the afternoon arrived.
No sooner was she seated in Mrs. Holt's drawing-room—filled with camp-chairs for the occasion—than she found herself listening breathlessly to a recital of personal experiences by a young woman who worked in a bindery on the East side. Honora's heart was soft: her sympathies, as we know, easily aroused. And after the young woman had told with great simplicity and earnestness of the struggle to support herself and lead an honest and self-respecting existence, it seemed to Honora that at last she had opened the book of life at the proper page.
Afterwards there were questions, and a report by Miss Harber, a middle-aged lady with glasses who was the secretary. Honora looked around her. The membership of the Society, judging by those present, was surely of a sufficiently heterogeneous character to satisfy even the catholic tastes of her hostess. There were elderly ladies, some benevolent and some formidable, some bedecked and others unadorned; there were earnest-looking younger women, to whom dress was evidently a secondary consideration; and there was a sprinkling of others, perfectly gowned, several of whom were gathered in an opposite corner. Honora's eyes, as the reading of the report progressed, were drawn by a continual and resistless attraction to this group; or rather to the face of one of the women in it, which seemed to stare out at her like the eat in the tree of an old-fashioned picture puzzle, or the lineaments of George Washington among a mass of boulders on a cliff. Once one has discovered it, one can see nothing else. In vain Honora dropped her eyes; some strange fascination compelled her to raise them again until they met those of the other woman: Did their glances meet? She could never quite be sure, so disconcerting were the lights in that regard—lights, seemingly, of laughter and mockery.
Some instinct informed Honora that the woman was Mrs. Grainger, and immediately the scene in the Holland House dining-room came back to her. Never until now had she felt the full horror of its comedy. And then, as though to fill the cup of humiliation, came the thought of Cecil Grainger's call. She longed, in an agony with which sensitive natures will sympathize, for the reading to be over.
The last paragraph of the report contained tributes to Mrs. Joshua Holt and Mrs. Cecil Grainger for the work each had done during the year, and amidst enthusiastic hand-clapping the formal part of the meeting came to an end. The servants were entering with tea as Honora made her way towards the door, where she was stopped by Susan Holt.
“My dear Honora,” cried Mrs. Holt, who had hurried after her daughter, “you're not going?”
Honora suddenly found herself without an excuse.
“I really ought to, Mrs. Holt. I've had such a good time-and I've been so interested. I never realized that such things occurred. And I've got one of the reports, which I intend to read over again.”
“But my dear,” protested Mrs. Holt, “you must meet some of the members of the Society. Bessie!”
Mrs. Grainger, indeed—for Honora had been right in her surmise—was standing within ear-shot of this conversation. And Honora, who knew she was there, could not help feeling that she took a rather redoubtable interest in it. At Mrs. Holt's words she turned.
“Bessie, I've found a new recruit—one that I can answer for, Mrs. Spence, whom I spoke to you about.”
Mrs. Grainger bestowed upon Honora her enigmatic smile.
“Oh,” she declared, “I've heard of Mrs. Spence from other sources, and I've seen her, too.”
Honora grew a fiery red. There was obviously no answer to such a remark, which seemed the quintessence of rudeness. But Mrs. Grainger continued to smile, and to stare at her with the air of trying to solve a riddle.
“I'm coming to see you, if I may,” she said. “I've been intending to since I've been in town, but I'm always so busy that I don't get time to do the things I want to do.”
An announcement that fairly took away Honora's breath. She managed to express her appreciation of Mrs. Grainger's intention, and presently found herself walking rapidly up-town through swirling snow, somewhat dazed by the events of the afternoon. And these, by the way, were not yet finished. As she reached her own door, a voice vaguely familiar called her name.
“Honora!”
She turned. The slim, tall figure of a young woman descended from a carriage and crossed the pavement, and in the soft light of the vestibule she recognized Ethel Wing.
“I'm so glad I caught you,” said that young lady when they entered the drawing-room. And she gazed at her school friend. The colour glowed in Honora's cheeks, but health alone could not account for the sparkle in her eyes. “Why, you look radiant. You are more beautiful than you were at Sutcliffe. Is it marriage?”
Honora laughed happily, and they sat down side by side on the lounge behind the tea table.
“I heard you'd married,” said Ethel, “but I didn't know what had become of you until the other day. Jim never tells me anything. It appears that he's seen something of you. But it wasn't from Jim that I heard about you first. You'd never guess who told me you were here.”
“Who?” asked Honora, curiously.
“Mr. Erwin.”
“Peter Erwin!”
“I'm perfectly shameless,” proclaimed Ethel Wing. “I've lost my heart to him, and I don't care who knows it. Why in the world didn't you marry him?”
“But—where did you see him?” Honora demanded as soon as she could command herself sufficiently to speak. Her voice must have sounded odd. Ethel did not appear to notice that.
“He lunched with us one day when father had gout. Didn't he tell you about it? He said he was coming to see you that afternoon.”
“Yes—he came. But he didn't mention being at lunch at your house.”
“I'm sure that was like him,” declared her friend. And for the first time in her life Honora experienced a twinge of that world-old ailment—jealousy. How did Ethel know what was like him? “I made father give him up for a little while after lunch, and he talked about you the whole time. But he was most interesting at the table,” continued Ethel, sublimely unconscious of the lack of compliment in the comparison; “as Jim would say, he fairly wiped up the ground with father, and it isn't an easy thing to do.”
“Wiped up the ground with Mr. Wing!” Honora repeated.
“Oh, in a delightfully quiet, humorous way. That's what made it so effective. I couldn't understand all of it; but I grasped enough to enjoy it hugely. Father's so used to bullying people that it's become second nature with him. I've seen him lay down the law to some of the biggest lawyers in New York, and they took it like little lambs. He caught a Tartar in Mr. Erwin. I didn't dare to laugh, but I wanted to.”
“What was the discussion about?” asked Honora.
“I'm not sure that I can give you a very clear idea of it,” said Ethel. “Generally speaking, it was about modern trust methods, and what a self-respecting lawyer would do and what he wouldn't. Father took the ground that the laws weren't logical, and that they were different and conflicting, anyway, in different States. He said they impeded the natural development of business, and that it was justifiable for the great legal brains of the country to devise means by which these laws could be eluded. He didn't quite say that, but he meant it, and he honestly believes it. The manner in which Mr. Erwin refuted it was a revelation to me. I've been thinking about it since. You see, I'd never heard that side of the argument. Mr. Erwin said, in the nicest way possible, but very firmly, that a lawyer who hired himself out to enable one man to take advantage of another prostituted his talents: that the brains of the legal profession were out of politics in these days, and that it was almost impossible for the men in the legislatures to frame laws that couldn't be evaded by clever and unscrupulous devices. He cited ever so many cases....”
Ethel's voice became indistinct, as though some one had shut a door in front of it. Honora was trembling on the brink of a discovery: holding herself back from it, as one who has climbed a fair mountain recoils from the lip of an unsuspected crater at sight of the lazy, sulphurous fumes. All the years of her marriage, ever since she had first heard his name, the stature of James Wing had been insensibly growing, and the vastness of his empire gradually disclosed. She had lived in that empire: in it his word had stood for authority, his genius had been worshipped, his decrees had been absolute.
She had met him once, in Howard's office, when he had greeted her gruffly, and the memory of his rugged features and small red eyes, like live coals, had remained. And she saw now the drama that had taken place before Ethel's eyes. The capitalist, overbearing, tyrannical, hearing a few, simple truths in his own house from Peter—her Peter. And she recalled her husband's account of his talk with James Wing. Peter had refused to sell himself. Had Howard? Many times during the days that followed she summoned her courage to ask her husband that question, and kept silence. She did not wish to know.
“I don't want to seem disloyal to papa,” Ethel was saying. “He is under great responsibilities to other people, to stockholders; and he must get things done. But oh, Honora, I'm so tired of money, money, money and its standards, and the things people are willing to do for it. I've seen too much.”
Honora looked at her friend, and believed her. One glance at the girl's tired eyes—a weariness somehow enhanced—in effect by the gold sheen of her hair—confirmed the truth of her words.
“You've changed, Ethel, since Sutcliffe,” she said.
“Yes, I've changed,” said Ethel Wing, and the weariness was in her voice, too. “I've had too much, Honora. Life was all glitter, like a Christmas tree, when I left Sutcliffe. I had no heart. I'm not at all sure that I have one now. I've known all kinds of people—except the right kind. And if I were to tell you some of the things that have happened to me in five years you wouldn't believe them. Money has been at the bottom of it all,—it ruined my brother, and it has ruined me. And then, the other day, I beheld a man whose standards simply take no account of money, a man who holds something else higher. I—I had been groping lately, and then I seemed to see clear for the first time in my life. But I'm afraid it comes too late.”
Honora took her friend's hand in her own and pressed it.
“I don't know why I'm telling you all this,” said Ethel: “It seems to-day as though I had always known you, and yet we weren't particularly intimate at school. I suppose I'm inclined to be oversuspicious. Heaven knows I've had enough to make me so. But I always thought that you were a little—ambitious. You'll forgive my frankness, Honora. I don't think you're at all so, now.” She glanced at Honora suddenly. “Perhaps you've changed, too,” she said.
Honora nodded.
“I think I'm changing all the time,” she replied.
After a moment's silence, Ethel Wing pursued her own train of thought.
“Curiously enough when he—when Mr. Erwin spoke of you I seemed to get a very different idea of you than the one I had always had. I had to go out of town, but I made up my mind I'd come to see you as soon as I got back, and ask you to tell me something about him.”
“What shall I tell you?” asked Honora. “He is what you think he is, and more.”
“Tell me something of his early life,” said Ethel Wing.