Again She Turned to Her Door, But This Time Dormier Took Her Hand. “Please Don't Go,” He Said
II
AND so Jacqueline, into harmony bribed like a politician with an appointive office, began to take an interest in the duke's dinner party. From a contemptuous and critical outsider, she became an interested guest. The duke was to have returned from Washington the day before the dinner, but at luncheon Pitts-Cave announced with several haw-haws that Tac had stayed over one day, having become keen about “your American baseball.”
“Fancy Tac keen about baseball!” said he.
“How very, very amusing!” said Miss Salisbury not to be forthputting, but loud enough to assure the major that there was a countrywoman present who understood perfectly the oddity of the situation.
Mrs. McMannis caught her red underlip in her teeth.
“I hope,” she said, “that there is no doubt of his coming tomorrow.”
A thrill of horror pierced Jacqueline's heart, but Pitts-Cave answered confidently, “Oh, there's no doubt of that in the circumstances.”
The circumstances evidently were not the, party, for Mrs. McMannis said, “Perhaps after ail it would have been wiser to let him know we are having a few people to dine to meet him.” It was her nearest approach to losing her courage.
“No, no,” said the major; “believe me, Tac's an obstinate little beggar, you know—very likely not to come at all.”
it was Jacqueline's first knowledge that the party was being given without the assent of the duke.
She could not help worrying about it a good deal. What would be more humiliating than the party without the duke? How everyone would laugh! And what could she say at school the next day if he didn't appear?
She drew a long breath at hearing, when she came in from her afternoon walk, that Dormier was in the drawing-room having tea.
She went on up to her own room to do her studying for the next day—to go through the motions, at least—in happy ignorance of the scene being enacted in the drawing-room.
Mrs. McMannis, like all great generals, never calmer than in the moment of crisis, was sitting behind the tea urn and saying, “So glad you're back, Tac. Let me see—it's strong, with milk and sugar, isn't it?”
“Yes—luck to get milk. Everyone offers you cream here, I find.”
“Cream!” cried Pitts-Cave. “In tea? Rather filthy eh, what?”
“Yes, I'm glad you're back,” Mrs. McMannis went on, handing the duke a brimming cup with a perfectly steady hand, “because I don't seem to have been able to avoid entirely asking a few people to dine tonight, and I confess I want you.”
“Frightfully sorry,” said the duke, “but I'm dining with a chap.”
Pitts-Cave's prominent blue eyes rolled alarmingly in Mrs. McMannis' direction, but, quite unruffled, she answered, “Oh, really? Well, bring him here too.” She said it quite calmly, although one more guest meant incredible rearrangement; for twenty-four was the limit of the gold plate and the engraved goblets from Venice, and the old Sèvres plates. But how much better a few odd plates and glasses than the absence of the guest of honor!
“Frightfully kind of you,” said Dormier, selecting a muffin, “but I'm afraid I can't do that.”
“Upon my word, Tac,” said his cousin, “you really can't let Mrs. Mac down like that.”
“Let her down?” said the duke, questioning not the words but the idea behind them.
“The cat's out of the bag,” replied Pitts-Cave. “She's asked people to meet you. You must chuck this other chap—or bring him.”
Every ray of expression left the duke's face—not an enormous change, for he had always great powers of looking blank, but intensely alarming. He sat leaning the points of his elbows on the arms of his chair and staring straight before him, inclined a trifle forward, and fathomleasly silent.
Pitts-Cave, who knew the minute he saw that look on his young cousin's face that the situation was hopeless, said again, “No, no, rather not—oh, no.”
“Why cannot you bring your friend here?” asked Mrs. McMannis.
The reason was unanswerable—his friend was a wounded comrade of the late war—a member of the company which Dormier, then Lord Fitzgrady, had commanded, He had heard of this man through the embassy, and after some difficulty had traced him to a hospital in New York. The next day he was to undergo his eleventh operation. This was perhaps his last night on earth. The duke could not—he did not wish to—break his engagement with him. If Mrs. Mac had let him know earlier he would have told her at once that it was impossible for him to dine at home that evening. It was not said, but clearly understood by all three, that the reason they had not let him know was they had trusted to last-minute pressure to make him do something they knew very well he would not want to do.
Mrs. McMannis did not argue, but she allowed tears to rise and stand unshed in her large brown eyes. These tears might have had their effect upon the duke; for, though he was an Englishman, a peer, obstinate, as his cousin had said, and, as he himself would have said, entirely in the right, the tears of a woman whom he respected as deeply as he respected his hostess did move him; but as ill luck would have it, at this moment McMannis entered.
McMannis was fresh from a directors' meeting in which he had not only rectified all the mistakes made during his absence but by a sudden assumption of his most genial manner—almost going as far as a brogue—he had contrived to put everyone into a good humor again. He came in, therefore, in a mood to believe that the American business man can resolve any difficulty.
He saw at once that a difficulty was before him. Though he did not notice his daughter's humors, he knew all the chances and changes in his wife's temper. He saw those rare tears of hers at once. He looked at the duke's face—blank as the wall of a mausoleum. He looked at Pitts-Cave, standing on the hearth rug with his hands in his pockets, rocking from his toes to his heels, thrusting out his lips until his mustache bristled, swelling with sorrow and embarrassment and remorse.
“What's wrong?” McMannis said, still genial.
“Dormier has made an engagement for dinner this evening.”
“Well, he must break it,” said McMannis. “A cup of your best tea, Estelle. The tired business man must be fed, my dear, as well as these pampered aliens.”
It was clear that the duke would have preferred to continue to sit silent; but putting some constraint upon himself, he wriggled slightly forward in his chair and explained to his host, as he had already explained to his hostess, the reason why he could not be at home to dinner. If it had been a poor excuse McMannis would probably have been very tactful and subtle; but the fact that it was sound, unanswerable—armored against even American efficiency—annoyed the older man. There was really nothing for him to do but to lose his temper, which he proceeded to do.
He laid down those general principles which sometimes seem to be the bane of American conversation—he said that hospitality had its obligations; that American women were accustomed to having what they wanted.
“Oh, quite—quite,” Pitts-Cave said at this point, feeling someone must say something and seeing that Dormier intended never to speak again.
The host said that Dormier's absence from a dinner party designed to do him honor was unthinkable—simply unthinkable. In fact, he talked the sort of nonsense that he would never have dreamed of talking in relation to any business matter, and yet he expected to be as effective as if talking sense.
When he stopped—or, more accurately—paused for a reply, Dormier got to his feet.
“So sorry,” he said; but this time all the sincere cordiality which he usually managed to inject into these two much used words had gone.
Mrs. McMannis saw that just a little more of this sort of thing and the ducal visit would come to an end. To avert this final catastrophe, she yielded the main point. She came rapidly over to the duke's side, explained that she had been in the wrong and succeeded in getting her husband out of the room.
Left alone with his traitorous cousin, in whose weakness the whole situation had arisen, the duke administered a deserved rebuke.
“A bit thick, Pittsy, considering that I told you not.”
The major grunted in extreme agony, but did not let his side go wholly undefended.
“But after all, Tac,” he said—“but after all”
The duke gave a short nod, intimating that he saw something in the point.
Then Heccles, the duke's servant, appeared at the door and said he begged pardon but it was time His Grace was dressing.
Heccles had a long pale face, straight black hair that grew hair by independent hair on his long narrow skull, and a slightly pendulous nose.
“I'm not dressing,” said Dormier, and there was a faint note of defiance in his tone, as if he were a child and Heccles were his nurse.
“Your Grace is not dressing?” asked Heccles; and though he controlled himself perfectly, it was clear what he thought of that.
Dormier did not answer, but Heccles bowed as if he had, and went upstairs and laid out the duke's evening clothes, for he, like the duke, was an obstinate man.
When Jacqueline had wriggled into that white dress that looked as if chosen for a celestial garden party, she looked not a little like an archangel painted by an Italian master; her throat was so very long and white and slender, and her crisp dark hair was just the right length for angels, and the shining excitement in her eyes might almost have been religious ecstasy, though of course it wasn't.
She looked at herself in the long mirror in her room, and was so startled and delighted at the result that instantly a whole scene leaped into her mind.
A voice with a slightly eighteenth-century flavor was saying, “And who, may I ask, is the lovely young creature in white?”
Her stepmother's voice: “Do you mean Mrs. Emden, in diamonds, or Mrs.”
“No, the young lady I mean is not married, or else”
“Surely you can't mean that child—my husband's daughter by an earlier marriage?” Perhaps a hint here of the Cinderella motive.
“I must ask you to introduce me at once. I have seen many women, but never any who so completely” The Duchess of Dormier—Duchess Jacqueline—“Your Grace has of late neglected the most humble of her adorers.” Jacqueline curtsied to her image in the glass.
Another scene quickly succeeded:
“Good-by, Paul. Another life—other duties.”
“Good-by, Jacqueline. Ah, how I have loved you!”
“Hush, my friend, my dear friend! Not another word! I am absolutely loyal to the duke.”
A dark head was bowed over her hand. Was that a tear? Oh, surely not! A strong man
There was a sound at the door, and Jacqueline, hastily removing from her speaking countenance the look of mournful dignity suitable to a duchess parting from an old love, pretended she was fastening a bracelet as Miss Salisbury entered.
“How sweet you look!” said Miss Salisbury. “So youthful, so girlish.”
This was the last way Jacqueline wanted to look. She thought to herself, “Wouldn't it be the breath of life to Salisbury to have been a governess to a duchess? She'd tell her next victims how gracious I had always been—the dear, de-ah duchess.” The idea made Jacqueline giggle as she ran downstairs. For all she knew Dormier might be married—very probably was engaged to some long-nosed Lady Wilhelmina Sophia Dorothea Something-or-Other. Well, between here and the drawing-room door she could do a scene on that too: “Were I a free man and able to choose where my heart leads me”
“In this country, your grace, we have little time or respect for men who are not free to follow their hearts' choice.”
“Dear girl—that tone of scorn!”
The butler opened the door for her and she walked into the immense drawing-room, paneled with the woodwork of a Florentine palace—and found tragedy. She saw at once that something was wrong.
Her father, cross, jerky, making a low irritating repetitious sound behind his teeth, like the rattle of the rattlesnake; Mrs. McMannis showing traces of tears behind the powder about her eyes,
Neither of them noticed Jacqueline's entrance, and it was not until the arrival of the first guest that she learned the reason.
“Poor Dormier,” Mrs. McMannis said—said with variation more than a dozen times before the evening was over. “So disappointed—asked me particularly to tell you how disappointed he was not to see you; but a wounded comrade of the war—dying, I'm afraid. If you know Dormier at all, you know how he would react to such a situation.... You don't know him? Oh, I fancied you had known him on the other side, He's a dear boy. You'd like him.”
“Rather a bore for the poor lad,” said Pitts-Cave in his accustomed formula; but whether he meant Dormier or the comrade whom Mrs. McMannis reported dying—though as a matter of fact, he was never in any danger—no one knew or particularly cared.
Jacqueline—not recognized as a member of the family—heard many comments not meant for her ears.
“Serves one right for coming, doesn't it?”
“Do you suppose he's really staying here at all?”
“Oh, well, my dear, there is no penalty for extracting an acceptance under false pretense.”
“No legal penalty, but I think a little something can be done.... What time did you order the car back? Telephone for it earlier. I shall go at ten.”
“We shall probably have a good dinner and vintage wines.”
“I should hope so; though with new people you never can be sure even of that.”
“Oh!” Cried Jacqueline. “How Clever to Know That! Do You Know Lots of Things Like That?”
Before dinner was announced Jacqueline had passed through a scorching sea of shame. Romance had gone out of life and nothing remained but bitter hatred of the man who had so publicly humiliated her and her family.
To her surprise, she saw Paul Traver enter. No one had mentioned to her that he was coming. Probably he had been asked at the last minute to fill a place. She was happy at knowing he was there; he was solid, dependable, her own countryman. She looked at him with shining eyes. Suddenly she thought of a scene twenty years ahead—she and Paul, now a distinguished lawyer, in London, to try a case involving all the Dormier interests “No, Your Grace, I will not use my influence with my husband to let you off, nor would he listen to me if I did. His sense of duty”
Great goodness! Paul was not going to take her in to dinner! How idiotic! The only man there that she had ever seen before! The doors were thrown open, the company was moving toward the stairway. A tall thin man, with a head perfectly bald and a mustache heavier than was fashionable among the younger set, was approaching her, bowing, offering her his arm. She took it, feeling suddenly shy and rather silly,
He seemed to be a kind man, persuaded that the way to be agreeable to the young was to be absolutely artificial.
“We are all very curious, you know,” he said as they went down the stairs. “You must tell me all about the absent guest—how he looks and speaks and what he eats for breakfast.”
“Dukes are nothing in my life,” said Jacqueline. “I have not even spoken to him.
“Oh, I see we shall get on,” said the bald-headed gentleman. “You are very democratic, aren't you?”
“What else is there to be—in a democracy?” answered Jacqueline, not meaning to coin an epigram.
But a gray-headed gentleman just ahead of them, going down to dinner with an elderly lady, turned his head over his shoulder and said, “She rather had you there, Reddington.”
“Had me? Had me? I don't know what you mean by that, Winters,” said Jacqueline's companion, in rather a shrill tone of protest.
“No one is more democratic than I. Why, only last summer, at Deauville, the King of Spain said to me, 'No es verdad, Reddington, que los Americanos.'”
But Jacqueline, who did not understand Spanish, and did not know that she ought to be interested in the fact that Mr. Reddington spoke Spanish and knew the King of Spain, had ceased to listen; for through the open dining-room doors she saw a sight that intoxicated her with its beauty—the long white table, the pink and red roses in ale-gold urns and the fruits with dangling bunches of grapes in shinier gold bowls, the branched candlesticks, the flickering of the fire on the tapestries of the high walls. It all made her think of a poem of Mr. Walter De La Mare's about a feast, and she sat down absorbed in trying to remember it.
As she did so she turned her head away from Mr. Reddington, and found herself smiling into the shrewd light-blue eyes of the old gentleman who had spoken on the stairs, who now said, “That's right, talk to me. No use in trying to talk to Reddington. He's one of these fellows who uses conversation as an opportunity for rolling his own flattering experiences under his tongue.”
“Oh!” cried Jacqueline, much struck with this. “How clever to know that! Do you know lots of things like that?”
He nodded.
“I know practically everything there is to know in the world—just as I am about to leave it. Hard luck, isn't it? Conversation is a partnership, not a relation of master and slave, as most people try to make it.”
“Oh,” cried the girl, “I've always wanted someone to tell me things like this, but no one ever does. Why not?”
“Well,” said the old gentleman, “partly because not everyone knows them, and partly because not many young people want to hear them.”
Jacqueline's gaze flattered him a moment before she said wonderingly, “Tell me who you are?”
“Now there's a good way for a real conversation to begin,” said the old man. He had wonderfully fine lips that curved easily into a faint sketch of a smile. His upper lip was very long; so long, particularly in the middle, that his mouth suggested a flat elongated W. His hair was white and very thick, except on the forehead, where it had grown back. “My name is Winters,” he went on—“Joshua Winters—New England, you notice. I am what is called a leader of the New York bar, by which is meant that I am pretty well up in the most futile of the learned professions, though I don't wish to be quoted as saying so. I am seventy-one years old, and I feel eighteen except for being so infernally wise. And now tell me who you are—besides being the daughter of my host—young, beautiful and indifferent to dukes.”
“Not beautiful,” said Jacqueline, going instantly to the most important of all the statements made.
“Oh, come—among friends?”
Jacqueline smiled a little.
“I thought only pretty—pretty at the best.”
The old gentleman shook his head.
“Wrong,” he said. “I should be willing to put it to the vote of all the men here present—our young friend opposite, who has never taken his eyes from your face.”
“Paul?”
She did not need to turn her head to know where Paul was sitting, or that he had been staring at her.
“Oho, you call him Paul!”
“Yes,” answered Jacqueline, rather proud of this proof of her intimacy with an older man like Paul, “although, of course, he's a great deal older than I am.”
“Yes,” said the old gentleman, “he's a great deal older than we are. He's quite like a father to me. I can tell you—he works in my office.”
“Don't you think he's wonderful?” said Jacqueline. “You wouldn't tell him I said that, would you?”
Mr. Winters laughed and studied her in a rather alarming way, throwing his head back and turning squarely toward her.
“Do you think I shall send for him to come to my room tomorrow and say, 'Traver, a beautiful young woman, whom I discovered better late than never in my life, told me last evening you were wonderful?' No, I'm much more likely to sack him.”
“I'm sure he's too valuable for that.”
“Valuable? Valuable? There are dozens like that. Don't tell me,” he went on crossly, “that you've been nice to me just because I have that solemn young plodder in my office!” He was quite upset at the idea, and Jacqueline was obliged to exert herself to prove that she had not even known that Paul worked for him—that she liked him for himself alone—that she had never had a friend before—not one like him. He nodded.
“Go on,” he said. “I'm beginning to feel better.”
Thus encouraged, Jacqueline, wildly excited and stimulated by this her first experience of contact with an admiring and brilliant mind, went on:
“You see, I have had friends. Lucy Traver is my friend and equal because we are the same age and doing the same things and we like each other; but you are my friend and equal because you stoop down from your great height and snatch me up to your own pinnacle and show me things—and facts—and wisdom.”
“You are a divine woman,” said the old gentleman, “and Paul Traver shall never have you—never. I shall go out and look for a young prince for you, or perhaps a king in a red cloak on a white horse with a string of pearls as big as—as” He looked down at her and scowled. “No dukes,” he said.
And a few minutes later she was telling him all her troubles. She had never been instructed that at dinner parties you are expected to divide your attention between your two neighbors, and did not notice that Mr. Reddington was making bids for her notice, moving his wineglasses about and bending forward to catch Winters' eye. Winters, however, was perfectly aware that the old lady on his right, who had had a most satisfactory chat about foreign spas as a cure for rheumatism with a great doctor on her other side, was now entirely neglected; she too was silently—and justly—claiming his attention. But he and Jacqueline talked to each other unceasingly from oysters to hothouse grapes—only toward the end Jacqueline was doing all the talking. She had never told anyone what she told him. Some of the things she said she was hardly aware were true until she told him. It was quite extraordinary, the complete picture of her life which in this short space of time she was able to give him with the aid of his subtle and sympathetic understanding—the freedom of her early childhood, the present loveless routine, her loneliness, her remoteness from her father, her stepmother. Only once he stopped her.
He said gently, “I think you're wrong about your stepmother. I think she's a real person.”
“I don't just know what you mean by that—a good person or a bad person?”
“She is,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “a lady destined to be the captain of any ship on which she finds herself. Your father is abler, but that has nothing to do with it. The captain is not always the ablest man on the ship, or the best or the wisest; he's just the captain. There's a hint of greatness about Mrs. McMannis.”
Jacqueline protested, “How can anyone be great who is taken up with such a contemptible thing as—as social ambition?” She felt ashamed even of mentioning it.
“Is it contemptible?” he asked, to her great astonishment. “I suppose so, and yet it is almost universal. It's like jealousy—everyone condemns it and everyone feels it. The people who entirely lack jealousy don't know what love is, and the people who are entirely without social ambition entirely lack the social art. If you know social values you must have social ambition in some form or another; the more human your values are, the less discreditable your ambition.”
“She makes me ashamed,” whispered Jacqueline.
“Don't waste time being ashamed of what other people do and say,” he answered.
He gave her immense consolation. She had never thought before that anyone but her own family suffered from this hideous vice. Of course, if almost everyone was ambitious They were still talking when Mrs. McMannis rose from the table.
Her new confidence was immediately put to the test, for when the ladies were alone in the drawing-room the question of the duke's absence came up again. Mrs. McMannis had taken the position that he would come in late if he could get away, and had left the place on her right hand ostentatiously empty. So that now again she was—to explain—to apologize. Jacqueline felt that she was too humble, too much on the defensive with some of her guests. She herself felt like crying out, “Who cares whether he came or not?” The obvious reply would have been that Mrs. McMannis cared immensely.
As soon as the men entered, Paul Traver came straight to her side. From the door Mr. Winters gave a smile, but sat down beside one of the ladies who, on account of her persistent silence, had been most trying of all to Mrs. McMannis. She was a long, pale, elegant creature, who began to laugh and talk as soon as Winters was beside her. Watching him, Jacqueline saw that he was sought for—a great man. She turned her eyes from him to raise them to Paul.
“He's wonderful,” she said, with awe.
No man likes to hear that tone of hushed adoration for another man in the voice of a woman he himself admires.
Paul answered, “Yes, he can make himself very agreeable.”
It was not criticism, but Jacqueline was not content with it as praise.
“I think he's the grandest person I ever met,” she said.
“Yes,” said Paul, still with that flat tone, “a penetrating legal mind.”
At last it came out. Paul thought Mr. Winters lacking in seriousness.
It would have amused Winters, eagerly discussing a new book of French memoirs with the pale lady, to know that he was being passionately defended by a girl of seventeen against the attack of frivolity brought against him by one of his own clerks.
And then Paul, who had been standing, sat down beside her and, drawing his chair forward, said, “But that's enough about the old man. I want to ask you something, Jacqueline.”
Jacqueline's heart seemed to leap out into the open air and back again into her breast.
“To ask me something?” she managed to say. So Lucy had been right after all.
“I suppose I oughtn't to—I have no right to ask it.” There was a pause. All about the room people were laughing and talking, and yet perfect stillness seemed to inclose these two. “Is it true—I heard it at dinner—has this duke come out to marry you, Jacqueline?”
“To marry me?” cried Jacqueline, and began to laugh. “That's amusing. I'll tell you something—I have not even spoken to him. I have not been allowed in the august presence as yet.”
Paul's relief was obvious.
“Thank God for that,” he said. “The idea of your being sacrificed to one of these accursed international marriages!”
“When I marry,” said Jacqueline, “you may be sure I shall marry an American.”
Traver was entirely in sympathy with this resolve. He knew half a dozen terrible stories of American girls married by designing foreigners for their money. Jacqueline suggested that it was unkind to assume it would be only for her money, but Paul was not in a jesting mood. He explained to her that only American men were capable of appreciating American girls.
He had not, when they were interrupted, asked her to marry him, and she was left a little disappointed, a little relieved, and entirely convinced of his affection. She had a few more words with Mr. Winters, and then everyone was gone and she and her father re stepmother were left alone.
Pitts-Cave, who had discovered that an amount of champagne which at home he would have described as a drop, here, in this climate, rendered him sleepy and inert, had gone to bed as soon as the train of the last lady was out of the room.
McMannis stood on the hearth rug. He had exactly the same attitude toward his wife's social ambitions that she had toward his business life. She profited by it, she coöperated in it as far as she could, but she did not attempt to master the detail of it. So with McMannis. He bore out Mr. Winters' theory that those who lacked social ambition lacked social instincts. To McMannis it seemed that the party had been a great success. The food and drink had been excellent, and though he had found the lady on his right—the pale languid lady—difficult to talk to—heavy, he called it—the lady on his left had been charming.
“She wants a job for her brother,” said his wife, yawning.
“It all went off well,” said McMannis, using his genial manner; “great success in spite of Dormier's absence—very pleasant—don't you think so?”
Mrs. McMannis gave a short laugh.
“Did you?” she said, and swept out of the room.
This was too much for Jacqueline. That the originator of all the trouble should not be able to keep a civil tongue in her head, that Mr. McMannis should not resent it-should not apparently recognize the insult She gave a stamp of her foot and was out of the room too.
The white shining dress did not require the assistance of a maid for its removal; it was easy. One stooped and took the right hem in the left hand and the left hem in the right, and with a swift upward motion of crossed hands it was over the head and off—wrong side out. Jacqueline understood this process perfectly, but she did not immediately begin it. She had come to the conclusion that someone really must tell the duke a few home truths. She remembered Mr. Winters' advice not to be ashamed of anyone's conduct but your own. She was ashamed of her own; she had acquiesced in this situation, since she had not spoken out. Some time tomorrow or the day after she must meet Dormier and have a moment to express her opinion of his conduct. Only she never could say the right thing on the spur of the moment; she must think it out first. She began to move about her room, with telling sentences upon her lips:
“Your Grace” No, darned if she'd call him that. “Dormier,” that was the thing. She had never called any man by his last name without the mister, except the butler, and she derived a certain courage from that. “Dormier,” she would say. She stopped in front of her long well-lit mirror. She stood erect, drawing up that long throat of hers and slightly contracting her brows. “Dormier, do you suppose insolence like this—-do you actually imagine that you show superiority by being insolent and inconsiderate?” She grew more and more fiery, drew her breath through trembling nostrils, patted her feet defiantly on the thick carpet, twitched her shoulders about. “Dormier, I want you to know that there is one person in this house who appreciates your insolence.” That was it—simple, direct, true. She knew she would be able to say that, to rip it out in a second wherever they met. She said it again, this time aloud.
“Yes?” said a voice from the corridor. “Did someone speak to me?”
Turning rapidly, she saw that she had omitted to shut her door. It was open on a crack—he must be there. The moment had come. She sprang to the door and flung it wide open.
The duke was not in the corridor, but was walking upstairs to his room on the fourth floor. There was an elevator in the McMannis house, but the duke never remembered it. Heccles would not use it because—unlike the duke—he disapproved of lifts. Pitts-Cave was the only member of the party whose physical laziness overcame his natural distaste for innovations. So the duke was walking up, with his hands in his pockets, and every now and then taking two steps at a time in a long easy stride. Suddenly he heard his own name, distinct yet mysterious. He stopped short on a little landing two or three steps below the corridor itself and spoke the words recorded above, and the next instant a door was flung open and a young angel seemed to stand before him, the bright light from the bedroom streaming out and fringing her figure with light.
“Dormier,” she said in a low vibrant voice, “I want you to know that there is one person in this house who understands your insolence.”
The duke was very much astonished. Several surprising things had happened to him since he had been in this country—a taxi driver had refused a tip, a policeman had taken him by the arm and said “Say, bub, you want to watch your step,” and in a pleasant chat he was having with a fruit peddler from whom he had bought a beauteous but flavorless apple he had heard himself described as a foreigner. Dormier, who had not thought of himself as a foreigner in an English-speaking nation, protested; but the vender, whose name was Amedeo Amorio, or something that sounded like that, had given a shake to his head and answered with a brilliant kindly Latin smile, “You spika vera queer for American.” Dormier asked civilly whether Amedeo was an American. “Oh, sure.” He had been born in a street he described as Pella Street.
“Insolent?” he now murmured. “I'm not conscious of having been insolent.”
Jacqueline dropped the grand manner just a little.
“Of course you're conscious of it,” she said—“that is, if you are not crazy. What else is it to let my family ask people to meet you and then not take the trouble to come home at all? It's more than insolent; it's ill-bred—that's what it's called in this country.”
“Wait a bit,” said the duke.
“I won't wait a bit,” returned Jacqueline. “Somebody may interrupt us before I have a chance to tell you how I feel.”
“I've a good notion of that already,” answered Dormier. Standing on the landing, he looked up at her as she continued:
“You accept all their kindness and hospitality as if it were your right, and in return you offer them an insult. If it were my house I'd turn you out. I see what you're thinking—that they wouldn't dare and wouldn't want to. Well, I would.”
“No, really, that wasn't what I was thinking. I was thinking that perhaps before you chucked me out you might like to hear my side of it.”
“Oh,” said the girl, with devastating contempt, “have you a side?”
“Rather!”
There was a short pause. Then Jacqueline said, like an empress, “Very well, I'll hear it.”
“Very decent of you,” he replied.
He spoke perfectly sincerely, but the unfamiliar inflection made it sound patronizing in Jacqueline's ears, and she grew angry all over again.
“Yes, it is decent of me,” she said, nodding her head rapidly at every word, “if you knew how unlikely I think it is that you can have anything to say that's any good in such a mess as this is.”
This amused Dormier. First he had a little smile with himself over it, and then, looking up, he shared it with her.
“I'm afraid,” he said, “that you'd be rather disappointed if I had good reason. I'm afraid you've rather made up your mind to hate me.”
“Ha-ha!” said Jacqueline. “I have not thought about you at all.”
“No?” said Dormier. “Then wasn't it my name I heard just now?”
She now wished that she had not spoken so hastily. There was a discrepancy difficult to explain, but she attempted to.
“Oh, of course I thought of you as someone who had been rude, when there was an empty place at table, when” She broke off. “But I won't be apologetic,” she said angrily. “And if I sound so, it's because I'm young and have always been sat upon, and not because you're a duke—believe me.”
Dormier was now leaning squarely against the wall, occasionally knocking the pack of his head lightly against it in a slow, thoughtful manner.
“I shouldn't say,” he observed contemplatively, “that you had been so tremendously sat upon.”
“Perhaps not in comparison with wretched English girls,” she answered, recalling Miss Salisbury's anecdotes of the young female's position in the British Isles. She was beginning to find that something about him, not his title, but his complete calm, was beginning to affect her a little. She was not quite so angry as she had been. “I suppose I've been more persistently sat upon” She began to be sorry for herself, and found her voice shaking. This would never do. She reassumed the empress. “Tell me this excuse you say you have.”
“I didn't say I had an excuse,” said the duke. Of course she had used the word on purpose. “I said there was another side to the case. Shall I tell you?” An imperial nod. “I had particularly asked your people not to give any parties for me. I had told Pittsy to refuse everything.”
“Oh, our entertainments do not interest Your Grace?” Pretty fairly bitter, that was.
“The fact is,” said the duke, “it's frightfully stupid of me; but I'm rather—I'm rather—rather shy. At home it isn't so bad, because one knows what one's expected to do. But over here, where one hasn't naturally any particular job—and one feels the empire is being judged by one's own wretched performance—it's rather frightful. But of course,” he went on more briskly, “when I found Mrs. Mac was having a party I'd have come to it if I hadn't promised to dine with a poor chap who may be having his arm off tomorrow morning—the bravest man I ever knew and having a fairly murky time of it.”
He went on telling her about the deeds of this bravest man, while she sank into tragic depression. Passionately demanding justice from the world, she was also prepared to yield it. She believed every word Dormier said. No one knew better than she did how probable it all was—how probable, as she expressed it in her own mind that Mrs. McMannis had been trying to put one over. How terrible to be dependent on such people—to be identified with them—so that even your fine impulses of honorable anger subject you to fresh humiliations! She had just made a fool of herself—nothing more than that.
Despair is not companionable, and despair was welling up within her, involving tears and stampings of the feet and all sorts of convulsions. She turned away in the middle of his sentence, and would have been inside her own door, but he managed to catch the hem of the white dress.
“Don't go,” he said. “Did I say something more to offend you?”
“It's not what you said; it's what they are,” she answered, and overcome by the pathos of her own words, she burst out crying—not a pretty purling weeping, but a convulsed sobbing, so that she covered her face to hide its contortions. Dormier came up the two steps and stood beside her.
“I'm so sorry,” he said,
A complication had arisen. Jacqueline had left her handkerchief in a little white-beaded bag on her dressing table. She needed it desperately. The need of it absorbed her attention, and again she turned to her door, but this time Dormier took her hand.
“Please don't go,” he said.
“I must get a handkerchief,” said Jacqueline. The duke produced one, unfolded, from his breast pocket.
It is difficult to be haughty and aloof with a person whose handkerchief you have been obliged to borrow—especially when you are seized with an almost insane curiosity to know whether it has a coronet on it. She blew her nose, wiped her eyes and glanced at the corner where the monogram was. It didn't have a coronet.
“I thought dukes always had coronets on their handkerchiefs,” she said.
“You've been reading penny dreadfuls,” said the duke.
“I don't even know what they are,” answered Jacqueline with a sort of mild hoot of amusement.
The next instant they were sitting side by side on the narrow stairs and Jacqueline was crying very comfortably on the lapel of the duke's serge coat. It may seem strange that a girl, not by any means averse to weeping, should have reached the age of seventeen and ten months without ever having experienced the immense comfort of weeping on a convenient shoulder. But such was Jacqueline's case. Her tears were many, but they had always been shed in solitude. Before her father it had been her ambition to appear a strong, rational equal; Mrs. McMannis' shoulder, broad and ample though it was, had never invited her tears. Miss Salisbury was an enemy, Lucy a dependent. No, this was her first experience of the primitive comfort of human contact in a moment of grief. She enjoyed it to the full, burrowing her nose as her sorrow became wilder, lifting her head to brush her nose lightly with the ducal handkerchief as she felt a little better—not considering him as a duke, or even as a man, but as a fellow creature who was letting her cry.
At last she sat up. Her eyes felt hot, her hair was ruffled, her right cheek was reddened by the contact with rough serge; but she was at peace.
“Oh,” she said, with a long, long trembling breath, “I feel a lot better.”
“Good!” said Dormier.
She had tried to smile, but he looked serious. There was a short silence. Then far down in the lower hall a clock initiated an elaborate series of chimes, like the opening phrases of a pompous orator, and then began to strike midnight.
The sound recalled to Jacqueline's mind all the sleepers in that great house—her father, Pitts-Cave, Miss Salisbury, Mrs. McMannis, even Heccles. What would any one of them think if, emerging from their rooms, they should see her and Dormier? She sprang to her feet and, stuffing a warm soft damp ball of cambric into the duke's hand, said “Here's your handkerchief” and went into her own room and shut the door. Then she immediately wished that she hadn't. After a few moments she heard Dormier's feet going on up to his own room on the floor above. She thought that there was nothing in the world so much to be regretted as ill-considered prudence. If only she hadn't been so quick—she might still be there with him; he had looked at her as if he had had something to say. Perhaps he would have kissed her.
She stood quite still in the exact middle of her room, with her hand laid against her right cheek. The most rare and extraordinary thing in human experience had happened to her—romance and real life for a few minutes had met and coalesced. She did not think, but she felt over and again the emotions of the last hour, and she became aware of the incredible yet indisputable fact that surely as the sun rose tomorrow she would see him again; not at breakfast, for she and Miss Salisbury took that early and alone, but certainly at luncheon. There would be those long weary hours at school—and then she would see him. How stupendous!
She was not supposed to have a fire in her room in the evening. In the morning, when the housemaid came in to wake her and shut the windows and pull back the curtains she lit the fire. But now Jacqueline herself put a match to the paper and kindling and sank down on the floor before it. She sat there all night. Once or twice she fell asleep, and waked again through pure joy. At seven, anticipating the arrival of the housemaid, she rose, undressed, opened the windows and got into bed. She had not had two hours' sleep but felt in superb health.
As she came downstairs the clock was again giving vent to its self-conscious chiming and then proceeding to strike eight. Eight hours ago! Jacqueline entered the dining room with a smile in the corners of her mouth. Miss Salisbury was down already, stirring her tea.
“And how was the party?” she asked almost gayly.
“All right,” said Jacqueline.
She did not feel the least need of breakfast, but stood while she poured out a cup of coffee.
“And did you have a little talk with the duke?” said Miss Salisbury, and there was something coquettish in her tone.
Jacqueline dropped two lumps of sugar into the cup in slow sequence.
“He did not come,” she said.
It is a great mistake to think that youth cannot be extremely guileful when it wants. No one, except perhaps criminals in relation to the law, has so urgent and frequent necessity to deceive as young people in relation to interfering elders. Jacqueline had learned ways of keeping her own counsel before she was ten. The most finished diplomat could not have put a colleague off the track more completely than she did Miss Salisbury.
The pantry door opened, and the voice of Heccles could be heard demanding porridge for His Grace, and shut again in the midst of his general condemnation of “your American breakfast foods.”
Walking to school, Miss Salisbury made another effort to probe into the facts. She asked why the duke had not been at dinner. Jacqueline replied that Mrs. McMannis had said he had another engagement.
“How very odd!” said Miss Salisbury.
“I thought perhaps it was an English custom,” said Jacqueline, looking like a young saint.
“An English custom—to break engagements!” exclaimed Miss Salisbury. “No, indeed!' And she went on to explain how practically everything of any dignity or worth in American social life was a remnant of English customs. This brought them very contentedly to school.
And in school a most incredible thing happened. The first two hours dragged out their course, with Jacqueline aware of the passing of every second. The third lesson was Miss Grigsby's. Her desk was piled with beautifully bound books, single volumes in vermilion leather, tooled in gold, a dark maroon patterned with its own shade, and a pale calf with one pink and one blue label. The lesson was to be about eighteenth-century dedications. The books on the desk contained various examples. Miss Grigsby did not read from all of them, but she said the girls might examine them. Jacqueline, who sat near the desk, picked up one and found that it was dedicated to “The Right Honorable Lord Fitzgrady: My lord, your lordship's critical judgment is as widely known as it is duly appreciated.” A flood of color rushed over Jacqueline's face. She had a bad habit of blushing. But no one noticed her, for who could suspect an eighteenth-century dedication of rousing emotion?
She was late for luncheon that day, partly because they were lunching early in deference to some engagement of Dormier's, partly because she had made a more careful toilet than usual. The result was that she entered the dining room alone when the others were seated.
Her stepmother said quietly, “Here you are at last. I don't think you've met Jacqueline, have you, Dormier?”
Dormier got up with his napkin in his hand and bowed very formally. Jacqueline sank silently into her chair, which fortunately was against the light, so that no one but Heccles, passing behind her chair, saw the color that flooded even to the back of her neck. She felt annoyed with herself for blushing when she was so good at other forms of inscrutability.
“Heccles,” said the duke, “did you get the box?”
“Yes, Your Grace,” said Heccles, “at a price.”
“Haven't all your boxes come, Dormier?” asked his hostess anxiously.
“Do you suppose Mrs. Mac, that having been ten days in this country, I am still calling my trunks boxes? Not at all. This is a box for the game this afternoon.”
“Is there polo this afternoon?” said Mrs. McMannis. She was almost sure there was not.
“Polo—no,” said Dormier; “the World-Series baseball.”
Mrs. McMannis wrinkled her brow. This English interest in all forms of sport!
“I'm trying to think of someone who can go with you and explain it to you,” she began, but the duke cut her short.
“Nobody need explain baseball to me,” he said; “not that I mean to swank at all, but I saw it twice in Washington, and I must say it seems to me a tremendously good game. I met some of the players; they let me come up in the same train with them—delightful chaps—they explained some of the finer points to me. In fact,” said the duke, “I'm a fan.”
“Oh, Your Grace!” said Miss Salisbury, tittering behind a curved hand. The titter maddened Jacqueline.
“It's a better game than cricket,” she said.
“Have you ever seen a game of cricket?” asked her governess.
Jacqueline did not answer, for her situation was even worse than this; she had never seen a game of baseball.
“As a matter of fact,” said Dormier, “it is a better game; though not, I think, so well suited to the English temperament. I shouldn't like Heccles to hear me say so.” The duke craned his neck to see that Heccles was not behind the screen. Heccles had been told a number of times that his presence wasn't necessary in the dining room at meals, as the McMannis servants were capable of serving the McMannis guests, but Heccles had never allowed himself to be influenced by any consideration except his own inherent knowledge of how things ought to be done. “Heccles bowled for Crumbelly in his youth. He'd have me shot at daybreak for saying it wasn't the best game in the world. I had rather hoped, Mrs. Mac, that you'd go with me.”
“I've promised to go to that exhibition of Italian primitives,” answered his hostess. “I think you'd enjoy them, Tac. There's a Piero della Francesca, very like that one at Coney House.”
The duke was shaking his head.
“I can see plenty of primitives at home,” he said, “but this is the only chance I may ever have of seeing the World Series.”
He bent across the table and looked at Jacqueline.
“Would you care to come with me?” he said.
“I'd adore to,” said Jacqueline. She felt sure her stepmother would refuse to let her go. She would say, “I'm afraid schoolgirls have no time” The process of hating her stepmother was cut short by the discovery that Mrs. McMannis was answering, “I'm sure Jacqueline and Miss Salisbury would enjoy going. It's such a lovely day vo be out.”
Just for a second Jacqueline and the duke looked at each other. He had not mentioned taking Miss Salisbury.
“Oh, yes, indeed. Baseball—how amusing!” said Miss Salisbury.
“We must look sharp,” said the duke. “The game's called at two. Where is the Polo Grounds, Heccles? Did you find out?”
“Yes, Your Grace,” said Heccles, as if it were hardly worth inquiring as to whether he had done his duty. “It is at the Hundred and Fifty-fifth Street and an avenue called, I believe, the Eighth.” His tone suggested that he made no statement as to what the name of the avenue actually was.
“Shall we go?” cried the duke. “Have you had enough to eat?”
“Oh, yes, indeed!” cried Jacqueline. Again she had eaten hardly anything, but it seemed to make no difference in her feeling of complete well-being.
(TO BE CONTINUED)