I
Meantime, Elsa Utterbourne’s ball had certainly proved the turning point for Stella! All at once her life seemed packed with romance, and the bewildered girl who had rebelled so bitterly against the eventlessness of everything hadn’t time half to realize the wonders that were taking place.
The whole house seemed the brighter for Stella’s having gone to the party. Yes, even near-sighted Ted smiled quite knowingly after Maud had whispered a mysterious something in his ear behind the pantry door—for Maud was shrewder than most people imagined, despite her fatal plainness. She had guessed there were happy secrets in the air.
As for Stella—she refused to give in to those darker promptings which suggested that Mr. King might, alas, have been merely amusing himself, and had no intention really of calling. No, it was too wonderful to turn out thus. Even Irmengarde would be thrilled—she couldn’t help herself.
The evening after the party Jerome came, and wanted to make it up. “I don’t see what I’ve done all of a sudden,” he said, “to make you turn against me like this!” And a moment later he was assuring her, with most unusual vigour, that he didn’t intend to let a girl throw him down just because she “gets an idea in her head.” Indeed, as he urged his cause, Jerome looked quite roused and fiery. He rather amazed her, and finally, by way of overwhelming climax, produced a ring. “I got to thinking,” he covered it very simply. “Not such a big stone, of course—the big ones cost like a house and lot. But the clerk at Ascher’s said we could trade it in toward a larger one any time, and he told me it was a good little diamond, even if it’s not so very showy.”
“Oh, Jerome—!” She clasped her hands in bewilderment.
“Let’s see how it fits!” he pleaded.
So she let him slip it on to her finger—how life galloped! And after that—well, since she knew less now than ever which way to turn, Stella ended by consenting to keep the ring, at least until she’d definitely made up her mind. Tenderness and remorse and tears nearly overcame her. “You must let me think.... I—I’ll send you a note!” Her eyes were soft with romance. And they kissed—for one may kiss, even if one doesn’t know which way to turn.
From the time he left her until the next morning when the florist’s boy arrived, Stella’s mind was indeed in a state of quandary, and Jerome had at least a fair fighting chance. However, the florist’s boy brought a small but authentic box of violets, and a note from Mr. King written on the stationery of Captain Utterbourne’s club; he was going to call that evening! And then—had Jerome but known it as he sat poring over the ledger, he might just as well have withdrawn from the arena altogether.
The only drawback, except that Mr. King must necessarily learn what a shabby house she lived in, was the fact that Stella would have to receive him in the same gown she had worn to the ball, and which fortunately hadn’t yet been returned. Nothing in her wardrobe would suffice. However, capable Maud found that the neck of Elsa’s gown could be temporarily built up with a bit of chiffon so that it would appear a less formal creation; and in fact, her mouth mumblingly impeded with pins, Maud very soon proved how surprisingly it might be disguised as another gown altogether.
Just at the last minute Stella ran to her sister and pressed a tiny package into her hand. “Won’t you please ask Ted to run around to the Stewarts’ and give this to Jerome? There won’t be any answer—he’ll understand.” Then she turned up the gas in the parlour and sat in glittering state to receive her caller.
After a quarter of an hour of more or less breathless readjustment, the situation began to show signs of growing manageable. His ample charm and magnetism carried everything before them. Their talk led them by degrees into a simpler intimacy than it had been possible to establish at the ball. He told her, discreetly, more of his romantic life; and she managed to tell him of her life, too, without quite letting the cat out of the bag—that is, without quite letting him see that what she showed him was the wistful all.... He left with reluctance, but they were to meet again the next afternoon, at the matinée.
The house was still and dark; yet she was partly mistaken in deciding all the family were asleep at the time of Mr. King’s departure. Hardly had she turned out her light on an image in the glass which had become strangely tolerable, when she heard slippered feet, and Maud was kneeling beside the bed, searching her hand.
“Oh, Stella!” she whispered in tones of throbbing and unselfish delight, “I think Mr. King’s just grand, dear!”
II
It all seemed so bewildering—so utterly incredible. They went to the matinée. They strolled in Golden Gate Park and watched the swans and laughed a great deal over hot tamales on the beach. He became a frequent caller—and sometimes it seemed to the delighted girl that the florist’s box was even more frequent. He seemed to know so expertly how everything should be done: such intoxicating manners, such style! He seemed to have dropped right from the skies into her dazzled heart. From this time forward her little romance moved swiftly indeed.
Before she had half time to realize—yes, even begin to realize—what was really taking place, he had asked her to become his wife. “You’re the first girl I’ve cared enough for,” was the way he phrased it; though it goes without saying that a man of Mr. King’s temperament must more or less have cared for a good many girls in his day. “I guess I can manage to make you happy, little girl,” he assured her, with a certain splendid imperiousness, “though perhaps you might come to long for a more settled life....” He had just arrived from a secret conference with Captain Utterbourne under the shadow of an august map of the world. But of course Stella was up in arms at once: “I never want to stop! I want to go on and on, out in the world, seeing new things, meeting new people...!” And, in his graceful way, he allowed her to carry the point.
Oh, life! Oh the forces of life—and the world—and human destiny!
“I just have to blush right to his face every time he looks at me, he is so handsome!” was one of Aunt Alice’s voluble confidences shared by Maud out in the kitchen. “I’ve got a psychic feeling he’s just the one for our little Stella, and yet don’t it beat all! My gracious, Maud, you’d think he’d never look at any one less than a countess! And his side view makes me think of a picture I saw once in the paper of a man who was going to marry a duchess!”
Oh, life! Oh the forces of life—and the world—and human destiny!
The afternoon was idyllic. Mr. King and Stella were sitting together before a tiny fire, and there was tea. It was very cosy and romantic. She had been doing some mending before he came, and had hurriedly laid her basket aside. Breaking off in the midst of a very glowing description of the Riviera when at its gayest, however, he suddenly begged her to go on with her sewing. She demurred, naturally: “It’s such awfully plain and uninteresting work!” But he insisted that it completed the “domestic picture,” and added: “You don’t know how charming it is to see a woman sitting before the fire busy with needlework.” At length she complied; but it vaguely alarmed the girl. “All I want to do is to get away!” she cried throwing her arms wide, though she still grasped the garment she was mending, bringing it thus a little whimsically into the gesture. “What you’ve told me of your life sounds so wonderful!” she sighed happily.
“Well, it’s adventurous,” he conceded. And then he asked her: “What does your father think about it?”
“Why, what could he think but what every one thinks?”
King might have asked, not perhaps egregiously or unreasonably, what every one did think; but he merely amplified: “I had in mind my immediate prospects.”
“With Captain Utterbourne?”
“Yes—and its having to be handled in so hushed and confidential a way.”
“Oh, but to me the mystery—that is the most wonderful part!” she cried. “I love having everything mysterious!”
He gave her hand a little squeeze, and she looked up at him, happily thrilled. She pictured herself going through life with him like this, thrilled, always thrilled, each day full of delicious mystery and romance.
He began murmuring a bit of nursery jingle, which sounded in her charmed ears like the rarest music:
“Oh, I wonder,” she laughed softly, “—will it really be like that? How did this wonderful thing ever happen to me?”
III
As he rather suspected, Mr. King was destined to encounter a brief impediment in the person of Stella’s father. Who was Mr. King? What did any one really know about him, and why so much mystery about the future? But the answer was always simply: “Why, Utterbourne—your old friend Captain Utterbourne.” Mr. Meade’s position was certainly not a simple one, especially since he seemed to be the only one attempting, even hesitatingly, to stand in the way of true love. And, though he tried to see the situation all clearly and advise what seemed best, the worst of it was he felt Mr. King’s peculiar fascination, too, in a sense, and so seemed unable to make up his mind as to the values of an unusual situation.
“Stella,” he said, in his grave way, “are you sure—that’s the point—dead sure, girlie?”
And Stella was thinking excitedly: “If father really makes a fuss, we’ll elope!” It was just the tang of fire which completed the romance of this whole unbelievable circumstance.
Captain Utterbourne, as a matter of fact, was inclined, in his faintly quizzical and even petulant way, to dissuasion, when he learned the length to which affairs had run. He tried delicately to ease his mind. Meade was so simple.
“King’s all right, of course—h’m? Though perhaps romantic....” It was as near as he could come to uttering platitudes like Iago. “The trouble with King is, he’s too irresistible. How he’s managed to escape all these years is beyond my comprehension! I must say,” the Captain complained, “it’s something of a calamity he should have chosen this particular time—h’m? But the man, it seems, refuses to listen to reason, just as the woman refuses. However,” he added, in a thin, hand-washing tone, “from your point of view I can see how it may appear something of a catch—h’m?” And he left, humming To a Wild Rose.
But at length the creases were quite ironed out. Mr. Meade called King into the back parlour and told him it was all right—though his voice broke just a little as he added: “I only want my girl to be happy.”
They were definitely to be married, and Stella naturally didn’t have time for anything any more. Even sleep was an indulgence almost crowded out. How life tore along!
One day she unexpectedly met Jerome downtown. The contrast between them was really startling. It seemed unbelievable a man so hopelessly obscure and a girl so conspicuously important could have been engaged to each other only a few short weeks ago. What a pace she had gone! But Jerome, with the clip on his tie and his jaunty little pipe between his lips, looked more than ever irrevocably fixed in a certain niche. He tried still to flatter his ego into believing that, despite appearances, Stella would be the heavier loser; but such flattery was obviously growing harder every day.
When they met, Stella was bound for a tea engagement with Elsa. Indeed, just as they were speaking, Elsa herself came along.
“Ah?” she said, with cool uplifting voice and cool down-drooping eyes.
“Oh, am I late, Elsa?”
“No. But even if you were, a bride-to-be is always forgiven anything.” She gave Jerome a glancing look.
“I’d like you to meet my friend Miss Utterbourne,” said Stella, turning to Jerome, and feeling that the situation might possibly develop embarrassments.
The two nodded formally, Elsa’s eyes merely drooping a little more. Then Jerome felt so profoundly unhappy that he just mumbled something, raised his hat, and left them. But as he walked he unconsciously straightened his shoulders a little, and held his head surprisingly high.
“Isn’t that the young man you threw over, Stella?”
“Yes, we were engaged for awhile,” Stella replied with a tone of attempted lightness.
Elsa gazed after him. “Something tells me you’ll never see him again.”
Her friend appeared rather startled. “What do you mean, Elsa?”
“I don’t know,” the other shrugged. “The way his back looked, I guess. Things come to me like that, and I always speak them out.”
“Do you mean he might do something—something desperate?” faltered Stella.
Then Elsa laughed. “No, little one, you miss my meaning. What I meant was he’d never give you another chance.” She chuckled cryptically.
“I suppose, in a way, it does look like rushing into matrimony,” observed Stella happily, sipping her tea and trying to be convincingly sophisticated.
Elsa stared in her blank way. “Everybody admits he’s wonderful,” she etched. “Still, to be perfectly frank, it does seem somewhat pell-mell, even assuming the man to be wealthy and—well, a kind of prince.” Her eyes were whimsical. But since Mr. King had to dash away to parts unknown in the Star of Troy, without giving any one a chance to catch one’s breath, was there anything to be done about it, after all? “Parts unknown,” mused Elsa. Yes, rather a complete mystery, all round.
“I can’t tell you any more about it, Elsa, because I don’t know any more. Hasn’t your father even mentioned it?”
Elsa smiled with not a little of the parental cynicism, though it flickered more warmly upon her kindlier mouth and in her cow-brown eyes. “I haven’t a bit of pull, dear child. The Captain, though he’s a sort of an old dear, is just about as communicative as a clam, even with me.”
“Whenever I say anything about it all,” admitted Stella, but with shining eyes, “Ferdinand tells me to remember what happened in the case of Lohengrin. What did happen, do you remember?” she smiled.
Still, though she had coaxed very prettily at times, especially toward the last, she had also come, perhaps even a bit consciously, as the closer intimacy developed, to live up to that doll-like ideal King seemed rather to nurse in his high-sailing heart. “Leave everything to me, little lady,” he had urged, in his magnetic, irresistible fashion. “Never you worry that dear little head of yours about business. It doesn’t belong in a woman’s sphere. Does it, peaches? You just leave things to me, and if we’re successful in this deal, I’ll take you to Paris and buy you all the hats in the rue de la Paix!”
Elsa warned her young friend against “letting any man make a ninny” of her. “You seem to be quite hypnotized, Stella. It’s all very well,” she observed, her eyes drooping so much that it looked as though she were pulling the corners down with her fingers, “to let a man think he can run his business without you to begin with. They always lead off like that. But unless you mean to be a traitor to your sex, you can’t begin too soon letting it be known (I don’t care if he is a prince!) that the old lord-and-master idea has been converted into a sieve.” She paused, then smilingly dropped in an extra lump. “It’s because I refuse to be a traitor that I’m no longer wearing my engagement ring.”
“What!” cried Stella in real dismay.
Elsa held up the vacant finger with a philosophic grimace.
“But—”
“I’d rather not go into it now, if you don’t mind,” she half yawned. “It’s rather a boring business, and I’m trying to forget I was ever such a fool as to be taken in.”
“Oh, but Elsa—after starting off so splendidly—the dance....”
“Well, isn’t it better to wake up now than too late? Besides, it’s merely an episode. Love is only an episode, little one. Don’t you hang on so hard to your dangerous ideals!”
And she reached across and pinched Stella’s cheek in her vaguely rough way.
IV
The wedding was a very quiet and modest affair—a little quieter and more modest, to tell the truth, than quite appealed to Stella’s ambitious notions of grandeur, though it was a church wedding, too, with a small reception afterward.
Of course every one was tremendously impressed by the bridegroom, and everybody said how sweet the bride looked. Aunt Alice wept happy tears on people’s shoulders, and between whiles talked faster than any one else.
Meade gave his daughter away, and looked very proud, though also a little pathetic in his dress suit.
There were all sorts of nice gifts for the bride, most of which, for the time being, would have to be left behind. And one of the gifts gave Stella a real momentary, ungraspable heartache. It was a small cut-glass fruit bowl, and within lay a blank card on which, in cramped scrawl, appeared the single word: Jerome.