WHEN women tell us men that we'll never be able to understand them, as they pretty often do, I think they usually mean that it's because we idealize them; though they aren't likely to admit this to be their meaning precisely. Anyhow, they get quite a little pleasure out of our not understanding them, and on that account it seems queer how seldom they mystify us on purpose.
The most mystifying woman I ever knew was one who hadn't the slightest idea she was puzzling anybody, and she showed genuine amazement when she found out that her conduct was generally thought impossible to understand.
What's more, the other women were as befogged about her as the men were; or at least they said so. They talked about her by the hour—there were times when they didn't seem able to talk about anything else—and I don't suppose that in the whole history of the world one particular question has been asked oftener than the question the women in our town were always asking one another: “Well, what do you think of Geraldine now?”
For my part, I never pretended to understand Geraldine Wygate at all. That is to say, I sometimes understood what her motives were, I suppose; but I didn't understand why she had them. I knew her well, too; I knew her even before she was old enough to have any motives. Our house was only two doors and a vacant lot north of the big stone-trimmed brick “Wygate Mansion.”
SHE was an only child, but not a spoiled one; though she was born when her parents were both well along in middle-age, and they were certainly as indulgent with her as she wished them to be. Her father was what a moderate-sized town used to call “a fairly rich man;” and he was able and willing to give Geraldine just about anything a young girl could ask for; but she didn't ask him for a great deal. I remember when he gave her a pony and a basket-cart on her fourteenth birthday, she took so little interest in them that after a month or so he sold them. About all that Geraldine seemed to want was a fox terrier. She always had one kind or another of a little dog with her, wherever she went.
She kept to herself a good deal, though she was sprightly enough when she happened to be with other young people; and at the age when the rest of us were beginning to be susceptible, and the girls talked boy and the boys talked girl—I mean from about fifteen on to the time of getting seriously engaged and married, in the twenties—Geraldine really didn't appear to understand what it was all about.
She didn't once show the slightest personal interest in any of the boys or young men, and none of us exhibited any symptoms of that kind of interest in her. Moreover, this was at the time when all of the young people she'd been growing up with were “pairing off,” so to speak, and weren't much interested in anything else or talking about anything else. She was amiable; but the talk seemed to bore her, as if it were about some technical subject she'd never studied and couldn't feel any interest in at all. When it came to that, Geraldine lived inclosed on the other side of a blank wall, and at twenty-four she was still living in the same inclosure.
She wasn't a beautiful girl by any means, but she wasn't homely, either. She was small, and light-stepping and quick, with bright dark eyes that never seemed to look at anything more than a second or two. She had pretty hands and wavy hair-colored hair; and her features were pleasant—the type we used to call “piquant.” So it wasn't her looks that kept the young men from falling in love with her. It was that queer invisible wall surrounding her; though she hadn't put it there herself on purpose, by any means.
The mothers of the young men liked Geraldine Wygate. They were always telling us what a “self-respecting” girl she was—so much more admirable than the “pushing” sort we seemed to favor—and they wondered why we didn't show her more attention. When they asked us about that, we weren't able to give very satisfactory answers, though my cousin Joe Buell once came pretty near the truth of the matter.
IT was a Sunday afternoon, not long after lunch; and Joe and I were lounging in their library, killing time until it got late enough for us to start on a round of “Sunday calls'—a customary procedure with us. Aunt Sallie asked us if we were going to the Wygates', and when we said, “No,” she asked Joe, “Why not?” a little sharply.
“I don't see any reason you can't show Geraldine more attention than you do,” she said. “Geraldine is a fine, self-respecting girl.”
“You might as well ask me to show more attention to sister Bella,” Joe told his mother. “Bella would be just as pleased, and so would I.”
“Geraldine Wygate will make some man a good wife,” Aunt Sallie said; and she glanced over to where Bella sat on the arm of a big chair, swinging her feet and looking out of the window. “I wish Bella were like her—in certain ways! It's greatly to Geraldine's credit that instead of seeking out the young men herself, she lets them do the seeking.”
“Yes, but they don't,” Bella remarked. “They don't seek, Mamma.”
“Then it's all the more dignified of her to hold aloof,' her mother said; and I could tell by her tone that she was making a reference more pointed than appeared upon the surface. “I'm sure she'd never make positive advances to a virtual stranger.”
“Oh, dear!” Bella said; then she laughed and turned to me. “I suppose you understand Mamma's scolding me. Do you know what she means by 'positive advances'?”
“No, Bella.”
“She means a formal note I wrote and mailed last night to an old friend,” Bella explained. “That is to say, I never met him until yesterday afternoon; but within half an hour I felt I'd known him always. He's that kind of a man. So, of course, since I was so well acquainted with him, I wrote him a note as soon as I got home and asked him to drop in before long. That's what Mamma means. In her day it was unmaidenly not to wait until the gentlemen begged the privilege of calling. Times have changed Mamma, especially when a truly glorious person comes to town!”
“Who is he?” I asked.
“He's a godlike creature whose beautiful name is Bellworthy Cameron,” she said, intentionally extravagant. “He's related to the Camerons that live here, and he's just come to make his fortune in our thriving city. He's going to be in old Judge Cameron's law office. Lida Cameron let some of us meet him yesterday, and he's absolutely a regal vision!”
“He sounds pretty awful,” Joe said, “the way you tell it!”
Bella laughed. 'I'm not sure he isn't. That's why I wrote the note; I wanted to find out if any man could be as gorgeous=looking as Mr. Bellworthy Cameron and be anything else.”
“You mean he's one of those 'pretty' men, don't you?” Joe asked. “Hasn't he got 'well-chiseled features' and 'unruly golden curls,' Bella?”
“Well—” Bella said, beginning indefinitely. “Not golden; no. He's—” She had turned to look out of the window again, as she talked, and her feet were again swinging as they had been; but they began to slow down as something outdoors caught her attention; then they stopped, and her French heels clicked together suddenly. She leaned forward, staring out at the sidewalk. “Speaking of Satan!” she said. “Well, of all!”
“What is it?” I asked. her. “You mean your gorgeous friend's heaved in sight just as we were speaking of him?”
“I mean more than that,” she answered. “Who do you think is with him?”
JOE and I joined her at the window, and I must say we fully shared her surprise when we saw the couple strolling on the sidewalk. She'd told the truth about the astonishing good looks of Mr. Bellworthy Cameron, though his looks weren't what astonished us. He was one of those almost beautiful black-and-white-and-pink young men you see sometimes; he had wavy jet-black hair, blue-black eyes, a “Greek profile,” and a high rosy color, like a girl's, in his cheeks, with the rest of his complexion like white enamel. He was tall, graceful, broad-shouldered and small-waisted—you couldn't imagine him being foolish enough to trade his looks for the Apollo Belvedere's.
As a matter of fact, he was too handsome for Joe and me not to share Bella's doubt that any man could be so good-looking and be anything else at the same time. He was dressed a step or two ahead of the fashion, Joe and I thought, and just the least bit loudly—there was something glossy about his clothes and about his beauty, too. So, all in all, we weren't alarmed, because even at first sight of him, we were pretty sure he was one of those young men who come to a town and make a short-lived sensation; the girls are all excited for the first few days; then they begin to get used to the he-beauty, and after that his looks don't appear to signify a great deal to them—not so much, usually, as a good singing-voice.
But what so surprised the three of us at the window wasn't the coincidence of Mr. Bellworthy Cameron's appearing just as we were speaking of him; it was the identity of the lady with him—and, also, the strange manner and changed appearance of that lady. It was Geraldine Wygate.
It was Geraldine; but not the Geraldine familiar to us. In the first place, she was walking with her white-gloved hand reposing upon the inner crook of her escort's elbow—arm-in-arm with him in the public afternoon sunshine! In the second place, she was continuously blushing, her expression being worshipful and visibly rapturous; and as they went by, she looked up at him and saw nothing else in the world, not once removing her eyes from his—she, whose will-o'-the-wisp glance rested nowhere long, and never at all, until now, upon the eyes of a man! Joe Buell and I were ordinary young men, none too shrewd, but even we could see what had happened to Geraldine.
“How long has she known him?” I asked Bella.
“Since yesterday. She came into the Camerons' just as I left.”
“And she's already like that!” I said, nodding toward the sidewalk. “What'll she be like a month from now?”
It was Joe who answered, not Bella. “She'll be even more beautiful,” he said; and to Bella's and my surprise, as we turned to look at him, we saw that he was perfectly serious. “I never knew that she was beautiful before,” he went on; “but now I see that she is. She's charming! I always thought she was just a moving statuette; but she's come to life.”
It was not the Geraldine familiar to us....she was blushing, worshipful and visibly rapturous.
}
“Rather!” Bella said. “So have you, it seems. What's got you so sentimental, all of a sudden?” Then, as he didn't answer, she turned again to the window. “Geraldine's always been queer,” she went on; “but this afternoon's walk of hers, with her hand and heart openly on a man's sleeve for all the world to see— well, it's simply the queerest thing she ever has done or will do!”
Bella didn't stick to that opinion long, however, for Geraldine did queerer things than to make it clear she'd fallen heels over head in love with Bellworthy Cameron at first sight. For a while some of the other girls were inclined to follow her example, and they gave him what they called “a great rush;” but after they'd seen a little more of him, most of them lost interest rather suddenly. My cousin Bella was one of these, and she giggled in a sickish sort of way when she told me about it.
“Of course I was right in guessing that he wasn't anything except something to look at,” she said. “He's just so many pretty pounds of conceit and mush! I've no doubt that quite a number of inferior type girls have lost their heads over him, and so that's what he expects of all of us. It's all he does expect, and all that interests him. He called me, 'Dear Little Girl,' affectionately, the second time I met him, and 'Big Blue Eyes' the third! He takes it for granted that one yearns to be caressed! He's really pretty awful—and practically all the girls have found it out, except Geraldine.”
Bella shook her head, like a person gloomy over an unanswerable riddle. “It's the most unaccountable thing I ever knew,” she went on. “Geraldine Wygate was the most fastidious girl in town, the most purely mental, of all of us, and the most remote from mushiness. Since the rest have cooled down and just about dropped him flat, she sees him all the time! Wouldn't you think she'd see what he is? The rest of us have. No; he's nothing but a glossy-looking bad egg, and Geraldine's wilder about him every day of her life.”
Bella was almost right; Bellworthy Cameron's looks were probably responsible for many of his lacks and faults; but young people don't often make allowances for causes, and he hadn't been in town a full year before he was pretty thoroughly unpopular with all of us. The young men found him a little bit too smilingly sleek and superior; he wanted us to feel that he'd been about the world rather more than we had; and probably he had, too; but it's never tactful to make such things evident. As for the girls, what Bella said of him spoke for all—except Geraldine, of course.
I think Geraldine was glad when the other girls dropped him; but her view of the dropping was the opposite of theirs. In fact, she told me what her own view was, one day when I had a talk with her. I was passing her house, on my way home in the afternoon, and the handsome Cameron was just saying good-by to her at her front gate as I came up. I never liked him, and after I'd lifted my hat to Geraldine I gave him a rather cool nod, I suppose, as I went by; but before I'd passed the other end of the Wygates' iron fence, Geraldine called to me.
At that, I turned back, of course; Cameron had gone on his way down the street and Geraldine stood in the yard beckoning to me. When I reached the gate, she asked me if I wouldn't come in and have a little chat with her. She looked rather conscious—shy and a little troubled, yet happy too—and I wondered what on earth she wanted of me; but I went in and sat down with her on a willow-ware sofa on the veranda, as she asked me to.
“You're such an old friend and neighbor,” she said, “I thought you wouldn't mind talking with me about something—about something—” She faltered, and blushed; and her eyelashes kept flickering up and down as she'd look at me a second and then at the stone floor of the veranda. “Well—I thought you wouldn't mind if I'd talk to you about it,” she went on. “It's something— something I—”
I laughed. “What is it, Geraldine?”
“It's something—it's something very near my heart!” she said, with a little half-gasp and half-laugh together. It seemed to relieve her, for she didn't show any embarrassment after that, but talked eagerly in the quick, bright way she usually did. “It's about Mr. Cameron.”
“I just barely suspected it might be,” I told her; but she didn't notice that I meant anything jocular.
“Yes,” she said. “There are several things I wanted you to understand about him, and the first one is probably the most unimportant. It's this. When you came along just now, I noticed you spoke to him rather timidly.”
“Did I?” I asked her, and I looked at her a little closely, surprised to hear this interpretation of the nod I'd given the beautiful gentleman; but Geraldine was perfectly simple and genuine. I could see she really believed I'd spoken to him timidly.
“Yes,” she said. “I've noticed it before, both with you and others. It's the most natural thing in the world for the rest of you to be rather timid with him, I know; but he really isn't so haughty as you think he is, and I'm sure he'd be as glad to be cordial as the rest of you would.”
“Well,” I said, “I hadn't thought of him as haughty exactly. It was more—”
She interrupted me. “I know! I know you don't think of him as repellently haughty or lofty in his manner; but of course I can see you all feel he's a man of so much greater experience—so much more a man of the world and all that—you naturally think he might be rather stand-offish if you made advances to him. Well, he is a man of the world, and of course we've never before had anybody in the town quite in his class, so to speak; but he's not really stand-offish at all. He's perfectly simple, as important people always are; he doesn't wish to assert his superiority in the slightest, and I'm sure he'd be gracious and cordial if the rest of you would just take him as one of yourselves. I'm sure he'd like that much better than to have you stand in awe of him.”
“Do we? I mean, would he?” I said, for Geraldine's sincerity in this hallucination of hers confused me. “Did he want you to ask us not to stand in awe of him, Geraldine?”
She didn't give me a direct answer. “Nobody but a woman could see these things,” she said. “If I don't speak of them, who would? None of the other girls would now, of course, because they wouldn't regard that as their privilege.”
“They wouldn't?” I said; and I was getting more confused than ever. “The other girls wouldn't regard it as their privilege to point out how cordial Mr. Cameron wants to be?”
“Not now, they wouldn't. Not since—” She paused, drew a long breath, and then sat looking upward like St. Cecilia at the (illegible text)gan. “Not since he dropped the rest to single me out above them.”
Geraldine's infatuation had become our principal topic. Her extravagances were quoted around, and “Geraldine's latest” came to be an everyday joke.
}
I stared at her, too nonplused to do anything else; and I could see how rapt she was in a kind of meek pride. She drew some more long breaths and hardly seemed to know I was there; her face was uplifted and shining with the wondering exaltation that came upon her. “Oh!” she said. “How strange it is that it should have been I! I'll never, never, get used to that! They were all so eager—like a garden full of flowers, every one begging to be taken and worn—but he came to the little wall-flower in the corner—to me! It's incredible, incredible!”
I didn't say anything; but she seemed to realize again that I was there, and she came out of her rapture and turned to me. “I'm afraid they all hate me,” she said gently; but she smiled as if she didn't mind this supposed hatred very much.
“The other girls?” I asked her. “I don't think they do, Geraldine.”
She laughed, and shook her head. “A man couldn't see it,” she said. “Of course they do. They couldn't help it. I don't blame them for it in the least, because if it had been one of them who was singled out, instead of me, I'd have hated her. Absolutely, I couldn't have helped it!” She laughed again, and then her expression reverted to that St. Cecilia look she'd worn a moment before. “I suppose you think I'm queer to talk to you this way, even though you are an old friend and we've lived almost next door to each other all our lives. But I tell you I believe I'd talk the same way almost to a stranger. When such a glory comes into a woman's life, shouldn't it be known?”
“You mean you're engaged to him, Geraldine?”
“'Engaged'?” she said in a low voice. “It doesn't seem the word. 'Consecrated,' I think I'd say, instead.”
This left me pretty blank for a minute or two; she spoke in such a hushed way, and yet with so much fervor that it was difficult to think of anything appropriate to say in response. Finally, however, I coughed, and told her I hoped she'd be happy. Then I asked her if she wanted me to do something else besides understand that Mr. Cameron wasn't really haughty. She'd implied she had something more in mind.
“Yes,” she told me. “He's anxious to show what he can do in his profession. He's held down by the older men in Judge Cameron's office, and not given a chance, except in matters of very small importance not worth his attention. Of course he should be at the head of a firm of his own, and that's what I wanted to speak to you about. I've already got Papa to put all of our own legal affairs in his hands, and that's a little bit of a start for him. Now of course I know that your family and the Buells own the rolling mills—he says the mills have a great many lawsuits—but he says that the Buells practically control the street-car lines, and the legal business of the car-lines alone would be enough for most law firms. If you—”
“Wait a minute,' I said. “Did Mr. Cameron tell you to—”
“No,” she said. “We were just talking about it; that was all.” And she went on to ask me if 1 wouldn't exert my influence with my family and relatives to get the legal business of the car-lines and the rolling mills put into the hands of Mr. Bellworthy Cameron. Not only that, she virtually begged me to turn myself into a walking advertisement of the gentleman's legal ability and to solicit all my friends in his behalf. Moreover, as she went on, I found I wasn't the only person she'd invited to perform this office. She said she'd “spoken” to Joe Buell and one or two others, and that her father was “using all his influence” in Mr. Cameron's behalf; which really meant that she had the old gentleman limping around to his friends' offices recommending the talents of the beautiful Bellworthy. Mr. Wygate wasn't the man he had been. After Mrs. Wygate's death the previous year, he'd suffered a “stroke;” and ever since then, he'd crept about on two canes, pretty feebly, his head not much stronger than his body.
“Papa considers it the highest privilege,” Geraldine said. “And isn't it? Isn't it the highest possible privilege we commonplace people can have, to help genius find its opportunity?”
That was her state of mind. Cameron's good looks meant to her that he was supremely endowed with every other gift, as well. If he'd played a tune on the piano, with one finger, Geraldine would have thought Paderewski's only advantage was in having practiced more.
A DAY or two after I had this talk with her, my cousin Bella told me she'd seen Cameron and Geraldine driving in Geraldine's new open car. Cameron's hat flew off, and Geraldine jumped out and ran back and got it for him. It was muddy, and she cleaned it carefully with a lace handkerchief before she gave it to him. “She looked like an acolyte permitted to perform some high ceremony in a church,” Bella said. “What I'll never understand is how any woman can fall so slavishly in love! Everybody's talking about it.”
She was right about that. Geraldine's infatuation had become our principal topic; and every day or so you heard of some new manifestation. She talked about Bellworthy Cameron to everybody, much as she had talked about him to me. In fact, she didn't talk about anything else, and of course her extravagances were quoted around, and “Geraldine's latest” came to be an everyday joke. The girls went to see her just to get something new to rush about and giggle and marvel over.
“He's her 'saint' now!” one of them would say. “She found a picture of St. George, and she says it's more like him than his photographs are, so she's having a silver frame made for it, and she speaks of him as her saint. That's what she actually told me, my dear! She said: 'The only difference is that my saint is so much more beautiful.' If you don't believe me, go on over there and listen if she doesn't say the same thing to you. She will! I shouldn't be surprised if she'd told the ice-man about it.”
Geraldine certainly told a large number of people about it; but she didn't confine her worship to describing Bellworthy as a saint, or as a “Sir Galahad,”—another description she found for him. She went to Joe Buell again, and to each of the other directors, to get the street-car company's legal business for Cameron: she went to almost everyone she knew, to get favors for him: and she had her father put him up for membership in the club where we weren't enthusiastic about admitting him.
“I believe it would be wiser to go rather slow,” Joe said one evening, when some of us were there, talking privately of the proposed new member. “I have some information that leads me to think action on his name had better be postponed for a time.”
One of the others spoke up. “I don't see any need of postponement. What I most object to is his letting a girl do so much for him. It's too much like making use of something a man oughtn't to use. I'd like to see him blackballed right away.”
“No,” Joe said. “We're all friends of the Wygates, and we don't want to hurt people's feelings. Let's just postpone the matter for a time.”
THE rest of us agreed to that, after a little argufying; and when the others had gone, I asked Joe what was the information he'd mentioned; and he spoke his mind pretty freely. He got red. “This fellow's really no good,” he said. “It's not my business, of course; but I've felt differently about Geraldine ever since that Sunday afternoon when we first saw her out walking with him. You know how I'd always thought of her. I told Mother that very day, I'd be just as interested in 'showing attention' to my own sister as I would to Geraldine. I'd always thought of her that way—as if she were a person you couldn't have any really personal interest in at all. But when I saw her coming by the house with this fellow and looking up at him in that pretty, glowing way—all changed and so alive—why, I felt differently about her; that's all.”
I was surprised. “You mean you thought more of her, so to speak?” I asked him.
“Yes—'so to speak,'” he answered in a slow, dry way; but he was serious; in fact, he was solemn. “I thought it was—well, rather touching. To me, it was as if she'd never been in the sunshine before, and the minute she did get in it, she—well, she blossomed just beautifully!”
“Golly!” I said, and I sat staring at him; but he was looking at the wall, and didn't notice me.
“You see, I haven't sympathized with all these jokes about her,” he went on. “I haven't enjoyed them at all.”
“I suppose not,” I said. “What have you been hearing about Cameron? You haven't told me.”
“He's a low life!” Joe got redder than he had been, and he threw away the cigar he was pretending to smoke. He threw it into the fireplace as if he were trying to break a lump of coal with it. “He's the worst kind of masher, and that's all he is; though I'm bound to say old Judge Cameron says he has got the makings of a good lawyer in him. Well—he may need to be.”
“How's that?” I asked; for he spoke with a bitter kind of significance. “Outside of everybody's need of success, has he any special necessity to be a good lawyer?”
“Yes, he has. And soon too, I hear.”
“What for?”
Joe turned and looked at me, and I was astonished to see how savage his frown was. “Cameron's in trouble,” he said. “It's over a girl.”
“You don't mean it?”
“Don't I?” Joe said, and he used some strong language, before I got him to tell me what he knew. “It's that old rascal Louie Crispwell's daughter,” he said.
LOUIS CRISPWELL was what's called a “police-court character,” a professional bondsman, and his daughter was pretty well known by sight about town. She was a big, fine-looking girl, of the high-colored type; and she was all up and down the street every day in a secondhand “roadster” her father'd bought for her and painted bright red—like Miss Una Crispwell's cheeks. “One of our foremen lives next door to the Crispwells,” Joe told me. “He says Cameron's been there so much the neighbors concluded he and Una must be married; they thought Cameron must be Louie's son-in-law. He'd spend most of the evening at Geraldine's and then go down there to see Una Crispwell. Well, he hasn't been there so much lately, except when they've sent for him—to scare him! They swear they're going to have a breach-of-promise suit brought against him. Cameron declares it's sheer blackmail, and it may be, for all I know; but he's got an ugly customer to deal with in Louie Crispwell, and that's why I say he needs to be a good lawyer.”
“Well, yes!” I said, agreeing pretty strongly. “I should say he does. If this gets out, I'm afraid it'll just about kill Geraldine.”
Joe looked at me again, with that savage frown on his face; and then his expression changed so that I almost thought he was going to cry. But he didn't, of course; he laughed most unenjoyably, instead. Then he got up from his chair without saying a word, and stalked out of the club.
He left me so surprised, and in such a state of guessing about him, that the next afternoon I cut my work short and went uptown early to see what I could find out from Bella about it. By good luck she was at home and Aunt Sallie wasn't around.
“Look here,” I said. “What's got into old Joe he's so exercised about Geraldine Wygate and her affairs?”
“Nothing,” Bella told me. “He's just like everybody else. Isn't the whole town exercised about Geraldine and the ridiculous exhibition she's making of herself?”
“Joe doesn't think it's ridiculous, Bella.”
“What makes you think he doesn't?”
“Quit pretending,” I said. “You know he doesn't. You've got pretty sharp eyes, and you've probably known for some time what I've only been guessing since last night. To come out with it right flat-footed, I've got a suspicion that Joe Buell's about as queer as Geraldine. If he hasn't gone and fallen in love with her, what is the matter with him?”
At that, Bella looked angry, but not with me. “It makes me perfectly raging!” she said. “He's a sentimental idiot, and that's the only explanation I know. Here he's lived within a block of that girl all his life and never noticed her; but the minute she falls in love with somebody else, he proceeds to lose his head about her! 'That's a sensible proceeding!”
“They sent for him—to scare him! They swear they're going to have a breach-of-promise suit brought against him.”
}
“I never heard that falling in love had anything to do with sensibleness,” I told her. “So it's true, and you did know it.”
“I couldn't very well live in the same house and not know it,” she said. “He wont listen to a thing about her, and if Mamma and I begin talking about her, he gets furious—and if we keep it up, he walks straight out of the house. It began the very day when we looked at her and Cameron out of that window yonder. Don't you remember Joe took it rather queerly? He said she looked beautiful—he'd always thought she was just a walking statuette, or something, but now she'd come to life. Then he got quite silent and thoughtful after they'd gone by. I think it began to happen to him right then and there, and it gets worse the longer it runs on. Joe's always been a romanticist, and he says Geraldine is lofty—he thinks her obliteration of self is a holy medieval passion, or something, and the only 'heroism on the grand scale' we've ever seen in this dull town. Did you ever hear of anything more preposterous? To pay no attention whatever to a girl until she begins to make a ninny of herself over another man, and then go and make a ninny of yourself over her!”
“I wouldn't put it quite that strongly, Bella. Joe isn't exactly making a ninny of himself.”
“Isn't he?” she asked dryly. “Probably you didn't know he got Cameron appointed one of the attorneys for the street-railway company, simply because she asked him to.”
I didn't know that, as a matter of fact; Joe hadn't mentioned it to me, and I hadn't heard of it; but I saw that Bella knew what she was talking about and it must be true. “Queer he'd do that,” I said. “Last night he was arguing for a postponement of taking up Cameron's name at the club.”
“Yes,” she told me. “It's because of something that's turned up lately.”
“Did Joe tell you what it was, Bella?”
“No,” she said. “He didn't need to. Cameron's in a terrible mess over that loud girl you see all over the place in a red car, Una Crispwell, and her father's going to have her sue him for breach-of-promise. Mrs. Thomas R. Cloope heard about it yesterday, so it's all over town, today.”
“It must be,” I said, because I recognized that as accurate. If Mrs. Thomas R. Cloope heard a piece of news one day, it would certainly be all over town by the next afternoon. “You don't suppose anybody will think Geraldine ought to be—”
“Oh, yes, I do!” Bella interrupted. “There are too many kind souls excited about how she'll take it. They wont all be able to resist the temptation to feel that it's somebody's duty to tell her. Besides, her father would hear of it, if she didn't.”
“Murder!” I said. “How will she take it?”
BELLA shook her head, and there was some compassion in her expression. “Poor thing!” she said. “If I were in her place, I believe about the hardest thing of all would be to know that everybody was watching me—staring, with all their mouths open, ready to begin the gabble!—to see how I stood up under it. You and Joe will probably be the first to know, I suspect. She regards you as her two best friends, and she'll probably send for you both, if she sends for anybody. For my part, I admit I'm as base as my neighbor and just as curious to know how Geraldine takes it. Joe wont tell me—he'll consider it too heroic or sacred, or something, to be talked about—so I'll have to find out from you.”
But Bella didn't have to wait to find out from me. As it happened, she didn't have to wait five minutes. Aunt Sallie came in just then, and she knew all about it and was full of it.
“People are just buzzing!” she said. “I mean over this scandal about that relative of the Camerons. It seems the Cameron family are hurrying around to everybody, explaining that he's only their third cousin once or twice removed, and that they really hardly knew him until he came here, and they intend to have nothing to do with him from now on. Mrs. Tom Cloope tells me she decided last night that Geraldine Wygate had a right to know what was being said, so she went over there and started to tell her; but Geraldine already knew all about it, and took a very high hand with her. She told Mrs. Cloope that it was the most absolute slander and persecution; but that it was going to be stopped at once and wouldn't amount to anything. Mrs. Cloope says she's just demented to talk that way—with poor old Mr. Wygate lying at the point of death on account of it!”
“What?” Bella cried. “Why, he only goes around doing what Geraldine tells him to.”
“Not in this case, it seems,” her mother said. “Mrs. Cloope told me he had a terrible scene with Geraldine after lunch—not two hours ago—and the end of it was that he fell on the floor, and Geraldine had to call the servants in and get him to bed and send for the doctor. Mrs. Cloope's cook has a sister who's housemaid at the Wygates'—a nice way for me to be passing on information! But anyhow, the housemaid said they could hear the old man shouting something about Cameron and telling Geraldine she was crazy. They could hear him clear out in the kitchen—and the last thing he said was 'Never!' They heard him just screaming, 'Never! Never! Never!' He must have fallen down then, because he was still mumbling 'Never!' when Geraldine called for help and they came running in. That's all they know about it; but my own belief is that Geraldine had been telling him she was going right ahead and marry this Cameron in spite of the scandal.”
Bella shook her head. “No,” she said. “It must have been something else.”
“Why must it?”
“Because it would be so much a matter-of-course with Geraldine that she's going to marry him anyhow, it wouldn't occur to her to say so. It was something else.”
“Well, whatever it was,” Aunt Sallie said, “it's just about killed that poor old man. The doctor's car is still standing in front of their house, I noticed, as I came by.”
Aunt Sallie didn't exaggerate when she said the trouble between Geraldine and her father had 'just about killed that poor old man'—it did more than that. The doctor's car was still in front of the Wygates' when I left Bella and Aunt Sallie, half an hour later, and went home. By eight o'clock that evening, though, the doctor's car had gone—but there was another one standing there in place of it. This one was the undertaker's.
IT was Geraldine herself who called me up the next day and asked me to be one of the pallbearers. Her voice was a little tremulous and sorrowful, but she seemed to be perfectly self-possessed, and not at all in the tragic condition that might have been expected. She was the same way at the funeral, too; and this was the more remarkable because it was in the strange arrangements for the ceremony that she reached the climax of her queerness and gave every gossip in town a thrill that would never be forgotten.
She and her father had been almost alone in the world, so far as kinsfolk were concerned—the only relatives present at the funeral were some cousins on her mother's side, and they were sitting in the front row of chairs near the coffin. There were two vacant chairs in front of them, and just before the minister was ready to begin, there was a rustle on the stairs, and I heard Joe Buell, who was sitting next to me, with the pallbearers, say something to himself that sounded awe-stricken.
Geraldine came down the stairs leaning on the arm of Bellworthy Cameron, and they went to the two chairs nearest the coffin and sat there.
Even in that place and in that hour, you could almost hear the people thinking, their thoughts were so loud. Geraldine was as calm as if she and Bellworthy Cameron were sitting in the Wygate pew in church on any Sunday morning; she touched her eyes with her handkerchief once or twice, toward the close of the minister's remarks, but that was all. As for the beautiful Cameron, he was solemnly imperturbable; no one could have guessed a thought of his, except that he was not dissatisfied.
Geraldine took his arm again when the ceremony at the house was over; they went out and got into the carriage next behind the hearse; they drove to the cemetery together as chief mourners; he stood with her beside the grave; and when that final part of the funeral was over, he got into the carriage to go back to the house with her. Just then she beckoned to me. “Will you please come to see me in about half an hour?”
I told her I would, and when I got there, Cameron had gone. She'd taken off her black veil, and she was pale, but not downcast. She smiled as she invited me to sit down.
“I've got to ask somebody's advice,” she said. “I did ask your cousin Joe's—I sent for him last night—but he refused to give it to me. It's about raising quite a large sum of money on property and securities in a quiet way. Mr. Cameron could do it for me, but we both feel it would be better if he didn't appear in the matter.”
“Why?” I asked her.
She frowned a little, but not as if in great distress. “I shall have to explain it to you. You've heard something of this—this,”—she hesitated,—“of this talk about him?”
“Yes,” I said. “Something.”
She looked at me sharply. “Do you know the truth about it?”
I was embarrassed. “I don't know that I do,” I told her. “I understand you don't think it amounts to anything—”
“I didn't say that,” she interrupted. “I said it wouldn't amount to anything. I meant it wouldn't because I intend taking measures to see that it doesn't.”
I was confused, not following her thought exactly. “But I understood you said it was a persecution, and slander and—”
“Yes,” she said. “The truth is often slander in the mouths of those who don't understand it. It's quite true that Mr. Cameron has become involved with the Crispwell girl; but just to say that, isn't to tell the truth about it.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “I'm getting mixed up. You say he's involved. Do you mean—”
“I mean the girl pestered him to death,” Geraldine said calmly. “She fell violently in love with him, of course, as soon as she saw him; she managed to get herself introduced to him. After that she sought him continuously; she put herself in his way a dozen times a day. Women simply besiege him, of course, and naturally he can't prevent them from making love to him. In this case it's resulted in his becoming seriously involved with Una Crispwell.”
I stared at her. “And you—you don't resent it, Geraldine?”
“Resent it?” she cried, speaking loudly all of a sudden. “Who am I to expect to be given every single look and thought of a man like that? Do you think a great musician would be allowed to play all his life for nobody except his wife? Here's a man all women can't help adoring; every woman who ever sees him will struggle to make him care for her; and if he isn't actually harsh or unkind to her, she may believe she's succeeded. Well, it isn't his nature to be harsh, and at times his kindness is certain to be taken advantage of, to entrap him. That's what's happened now.”
“He's asked you to help him?” I said.
“No. He told me all about it—everything—and I am proud that he came to me, proud that I can help, and that I'm the only one who can. He didn't ask me; he simply told me that he was worried on my account because he didn't see how to avoid a great deal of notoriety for himself, and he knew it would hurt me. The girl's father has asked a large sum of money; otherwise he'd bring this suit, and Bellworthy had no way to raise such a sum.”
“How much is it?” I asked her.
“A hundred thousand dollars,” she said. “But he told me they would accept ninety, he was sure.”
“He told you that, Geraldine? When?”
“Just before I spoke to poor Papa about it.” Her eyes began to wink a little, and she touched them with her handkerchief. “Papa had been very kind in other matters; I didn't dream he'd refuse me in this. I told him it was something I simply must do—and he got terribly upset. I couldn't quiet him.” She winked harder then, and had to stop and cry a little before she could go on. “Poor man!” she said. “He oughtn't to have let himself get so excited; it wasn't good for him.”
“No,” I told her. “I suppose not.”
I WAS just sitting there, looking at her, and wondering if anybody could believe me if I ever related the facts about this interview—about how she had said it hadn't been “good” for poor old Mr. Wygate to “get so excited!” And I wondered if anybody who didn't know her could believe the truth about Geraldine generally: Most people are pretty queer, I suppose, when we get right down to the bedrock truth about them; but that doesn't often happen, and we fall into the way of believing that most of us are rational. Probably we are, part of the time; but it's my belief that pretty few of us are that way all the time.
Geraldine wiped her eyes and quit crying; she even smiled a little. “Of course, everything's different now,” she said. “It's all mine now, to do as I please with; Papa's will left it to me without any restrictions, and the first thing I want to do is to raise this money. That's what I want you to help me about.”
I got up. “I'm sorry,” I told her.
“You wont?” she said, and she sat looking up at me solemnly. “That's just what your cousin Joe said—'I'm sorry'—and he walked out of the house.. It doesn't seem very kind.”
“Yet Joe Buell would do more for you than he would for anybody else in the world,” I told her, looking at her pretty seriously.
“I know it,” she said. “But he wont do this, and so I'm asking you. Wont you?”
“Not in a thousand years, Geraldine,” I told her. “What's more, I'd do anything I could to stop you. If I could manage it, I'd get a guardian appointed for you. Look here! Do you know how much of your estate would have to be put up to raise ninety thousand dollars? And aside from that, how are you going to feel about it a few years from now? Do you want to marry a man who's cost you—”
But there she stopped me, and stopped me pretty sharply, too. She jumped up, red and angry. “Please do what your cousin did!” she said; and I obeyed her. I bowed to her, and I walked out of the house.
I wasn't angry, of course; I was too sorry for her; and naturally I knew I'd wasted my breath. She intended to raise that money—I think she felt that such a great sacrificial generosity was the one thing to bind Cameron to her and keep him from playing fast and loose with any more Una Crispwells—and it wasn't difficult for her to get somebody else to do the job for her. In fact, it was only a few days afterward that I heard the thing had been done.
A BANKER friend of mine told me confidentially at lunch that the money had been turned over to Miss Una Crispwell in the form of certified checks, that morning, in his own bank. “We couldn't do anything about it,' he said. “There was no ground on which we could interfere, though I'd have liked to. Of course the Crispwell girl is only camouflage for that dirty, fat old man of hers. He'll make her deposit the money to his credit in some other bank, and maybe let Una have enough to buy a fur coat. He put the whole thing over, and probably he's laughing his head off right now, to think how easily it worked!”
But this was a mistake. My banker friend was shrewd; but he didn't know Una Crispwell, or how much she really cared for Bellworthy Cameron. In her way, I think she was as desperate about him as Geraldine was; and the reason she'd let her father use her to annoy him was her belief that it might be the only way to keep Bellworthy for herself. Old Crispwell wasn't laughing, as my friend guessed; he was cursing, and he had a black eye. Una wouldn't give him a cent! What's more, before they were through with the argument, she manhandled him pretty severely, for he was nothing but fat, and she was a big, powerful girl.
Then she went straight to Cameron. “Why wont you marry me now?” she said. “I've got more than your other girl has.”
Crispwell went raving around town, cursing them both and telling the whole story. Of course, by that time, almost everybody believed that the whole thing was a mere ordinary swindle, and that Bellworthy Cameron had actually been in it, and had played a part from the start, like any professional crook. But that was a mistake. I don't mean he ever really cared anything in particular about Geraldine; he was much more taken with Una—she was really “his style of girl;” but he did mean to marry Geraldine until Una came up in his office and captured him with that bold bit of drama: “Why wont you marry me now?”
I imagine she must have looked pretty handsome when she said it, and there certainly was something magnificent in the size of her nerve and her unscrupulousness. Anyhow, it captured him, because they left that night for San Francisco. Cameron wanted plenty of space between him and his father-in-law.
SO there was a doctor's car in front of the old Wygate house again, pretty soon after it had been there before; for Geraldine took her tragedy about as hard as any woman could take anything and survive. Bella told me the trained nurse thought Geraldine was out of her head most of the time, but that she really wasn't. The nurse thought so because she wouldn't lie quiet unless she had a picture of St. George on her breast; and she'd talk to it and call it her saint—and say how sorry she was her saint had been “trapped!” She was always talking about her saint's having been “trapped,” the nurse told Bella.
Of course when Geraldine got up and began going about again, nobody ever spoke of Cameron in her presence; and for my part I never heard her refer to him again except once—but the way she did it that once almost knocked me off my feet. It wasn't so long ago; it was at Aunt Sallie's seventieth-birthday dinner, and Geraldine had been married to Joe Buell for ten years. Somebody mentioned that old Judge Cameron had spent the winter in California; and before Bella thought, she said impulsively: “Yes, and he says Bellworthy Cameron has become a moving-picture actor. He says—oh!” She broke off, staring around the table; everybody was looking at her agonizingly.
“Oh, dear!” Bella mumbled. “Oh, dear me!”
But Geraldine wasn't even embarrassed. “Bellworthy Cameron?” she said inquiringly, as if she didn't immediately identify that name with a person. Then she laughed with the reminiscent kind of amusement we feel when we remember some absurdity of long ago. “The silly thing,” she said.
And she turned to her eight-year-old son, sitting beside her. “You eat that drumstick!” she told him.
To my way of thinking, this was the most mystifying thing she ever did; but I know that if I'd had the bad taste to tell her so, Geraldine wouldn't have had the faintest idea what I meant.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1946, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 77 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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