Jacqueline Asked Hoarsely, “What are You Doing Here?”
III
JACQUELINE was possessed by joy at the prospect of spending three hours of this cloudless afternoon with Dormier at a contest, of which she was, indeed, utterly ignorant, but the excitement of which was somehow in the air. Some joy, too, rose from her belief that her stepmother was irritated at Dormier's absence from the picture exhibition. She was so much absorbed in her own happiness that she did not notice a small but significant incident as the three of them—Dormier and she and Miss Salisbury—got into the car. One of the McMannis cars was always at the disposal of the duke. There was a momentary dispute as to whether Miss Salisbury or the duke should sit on the little seat. The duke sat there. But hitherto, when there was a question of this kind, it was Jacqueline who had taken the strapontin. The present arrangement brought Dormier opposite to Jacqueline. Every time her eyes, looking over the edge of her high chinchilla collar, met his eyes, she beamed upon him, She could not help it. Fortunately, Miss Salisbury spent most of her time looking out of the window.
“Polio Grounds,” said the duke to the chauffeur.
“Which entrance, sir?” said the chauffeur, who would not recognize the existence of titles.
“Lower,” said the duke, while the two ladies marveled at this information.
“Did you ever know such a day!” said Jacqueline.
“Ah,” said Miss Salisbury patriotically, “these hard dry bright American days!”
“Heavy dew, though—at night,” said Dormier. “Heccles tells me the coat I wore last night was quite damp this morning.”
Jacqueline simply couldn't believe her ears.
“Damp ail over?” she said.
“No,” replied Dormier, looking so blank that he looked almost stupid; “no, just one shoulder—the left, I think Heccles said.”
Of course it wasn't necessary that he should have this talent. too, but how divine! And to make it better, Miss Salisbury protested:
“These climatic changes are very unhealthy.”
“I don't find them so,” replied the duke, and added, “How did you enjoy your evening, Miss McMannis?”
“It had its ups and downs,” answered Jacqueline from behind a wall of fur.
“But how did it end? That's the important thing.”
“Ah, how true that is!” said Miss Salisbury. “It's always the end that counts.”
“It ended well,” answered Jacqueline; “quite on a peak, in fact.”
“It ended rather unnecessarily suddenly, didn't it?” said the duke, glancing casually out of the window.
“I thought so—afterward,” returned Jacqueline.
“A lot of good that did.”
“I'm sure,” said Miss Salisbury, “that everyone would have waited if they had known Your Grace was coming in.”
“I shouldn't have asked that. Indeed, I shouldn't have wanted it,” said the duke very graciously.
Jacqueline tucked her chin down to hide a smile that threatened to develop into a laugh. Miss Salisbury thought he meant to indicate that he had not cared for the guests, and she thought that the dear duchess would not quite have approved of her son's speaking so frankly.
Although they were early, the traffic while they were still in the park was unusually thick, and by the time they had reached Seventh Avenue—or, as the duke called it, “the” Seventh Avenue—they were in packed lines of moving cars—taxis full of seedy-looking elderly men, taxis full of well-dressed young clerks, great touring cars skillfully driven and completely filled with beautifully attired negroes, little French cars with two men on the box, and trucks and delivery wagons pressed into family service for this historic day. As they turned in under the Elevated tracks, men with megaphones rushed out upon them, offering them parking space, though the offering sounded fiercer and more authoritative than the commands of dozens of policemen directing the traffic, some of them so great that they had velvet collars on their uniforms.
As they got out, gray-coated officials herded them into the emptiest aisles and hopeful little boys appealed to be taken in on extra tickets.
Once inside the gates, the crowd spread out a little so that Dormier had time to buy three score cards and three bags of peanuts. Then they began their long walk round to their box, which was behind third base.
Jacqueline had not only never been to a baseball game before; she had never been before in such an immense crowd, There must have been fifty thousand people in that great arena. They were almost all men. The fashion that year was for gray clothes; gray mitigated the general blackness of the background. A light haze of bluish tobacco smoke floated out on the pure clear afternoon air. To her left Jacqueline could see the stalled lines of orange-colored trains of the Elevated railroad, swarming with fortunate employes. Even the roofs of neighboring apartment houses were well filled.
Hearing shouts, yells and groans as they entered, and seeing the field so actively occupied, Jacqueline assumed that they were late and had missed the beginning of the game. Glancing down one of the aisles as they made their slow way toward third base, she saw a net in the middle of the field.
“Good!” she thought. “It must be something like tennis.”
She was confused to find by the time they were in their places that the net had disappeared, and that two men dragging strange matlike objects were approaching from the side. She had been reading a historical novel of ancient Rome and found herself thinking of nets and tridents, but saw presently that these mats were not part of the game, but merely a way of preparing the diamond for play. She could not but admire the skill and care of the man who marked out the white lines—an artist at heart. The little hole in the ground where the balls were kept delighted her.
“So snug,” she thought: “like eggs in a nest.”
She said nothing of all this, partly because she did not want to make a fool of herself, partly because Miss Salisbury was saying “How strange! Quite different from cricket,” as if the difference measured a certain criminal quality in the game.
Then the coin was tossed, the umpire, with that strange familiar nautical hitch to his armor, bent over and the game began.
Jacqueline's confusion of mind was increased by a wrong supposition she made at the beginning—that a New York crowd would be in favor of the New York team. There was loud applause when the first of the visitors to go to the bat hit what looked like a single, but a very young man on the base immediately in front of Dormier's box leaped into the air and caught it. This, too, was applauded, even by the same people who had applauded the hit. Dormier observed that that was a clever young lad. But the stands went wild with enthusiasm when the great pitcher of the visiting team went to the bat and drove a ball toward the left field—only to see it rebound from the wall and drop into the hands of the Giants' left fielder.
By the time the Giants scored in the third inning Jacqueline had learned enough of the game to follow it, with a good deal of assistance from the duke and the score board. As much as the game itself, she enjoyed the running comment of the crowd. She was fortunate in having a local wit, with a carrying voice, sitting not far behind her.
“Where's the fire, Frankie?” he kept calling over and over again to the stalwart second baseman of the home team.
The day being chilly, several of the players showed red flannel sleeves below their normal uniforms. And when in the eighth the splendid pitching of Bentley began to weaken and Gowdy went forward to speak a word to him, the same gay spirit called out, “That's right, you two boys ought to see more of each other.” The duke took this opportunity of telling her that both men had been in France in the Army, one of them in a battle he himself had been in. They had talked of it in Washington.
There was a proud moment for everyone in the box, when one of the coaches, once as great a player as any of them, nodded to Dormier in passing and said, “I see you got your box, duke.” It spread almost instantly through the crowd that the slim young man in the box behind third was the Duke of Dormier; but no one had time to take much interest in dukes when such a game was playing, particularly as it was just before that moment in the fifth inning when Bentley made a home run—a home run that missed being a foul by inches, and everyone stood up and yelled and seemed to go quite mad.
When they sat down again a reporter was in the box, asking the duke what he thought about baseball, and the duke answered, “My dear fellow, do leave me in peace. I'm keen about it. If I were an American, I should be a fan.”
The reporter, having an honest heart but an inaccurate ear, reported that the duke had said, “If I 'was' an American, I 'would' be a fan.”
In the eighth inning Jacqueline saw another home run—more and wilder enthusiasm. This time she whispered to Dormier, “But why do they call him Goose? He seems to be such a wonderful player—almost the best.”
The duke told her the player's name. She saw a procession of pitchers put in on both sides and presently the game was over.
It was great fun to stream with the crowd across the field where late the great game had taken place, under the clubhouse and out to where the car was parked.
Driving home, Miss Salisbury said sadly, “It's not really like cricket.” And then she added her final condemnation: “It would never do at home.”
“Prolly not,” said the duke.
Jacqueline was still all excitement. It seemed to her the most wonderful and skillful and exciting contest she had ever imagined—nothing could be better.
“Ah,” said Dormier, “you must try cricket when you come to England.”
“If I ever do,” she answered, and immediately colored deeply and hoped that he did not suspect the thought that flashed through her mind.
At the hall door they were greeted by the intelligence that Mrs. McMannis was having tea in the drawing-room, but it was news intended for Dormier alone. Jacqueline was never expected at tea unless especially invited; and, as a matter of fact, did not ordinarily desire to be invited, for tea was a beverage for which she had no inclination. Dormier urged her to come with him, but she shook her head.
“You have your tea upstairs?” he asked.
“I don't have it at all.”
“You don't have your tea?” The duke was open to new ideas, but the thought of a young and beautiful girl going without her tea “Ah, come with me,” he said, “I'll protect you.”
Jacqueline's throat grew longer at the word.
“I don't need to be protected,” she returned quickly. “I'm not afraid.” She hesitated. It is difficult sometimes at eighteen to explain the policies that underlie your con-duct. “She has her rights. The drawing-room in my father's house is hers. I won't invade her territory and I want her not to invade mine,”
“You don't like your stepmother?”
“I hate her,” Jacqueline answered in a violent whisper,
The next moment she regretted her candor—she had probably shocked and alienated him, though it was difficult to tell what he was thinking behind that long pale mask of his. English girls—English girls, at least, as represented by Miss Salisbury—never would permit themselves to hate their stepmothers.
The spot was not adapted to confidences, They were standing by the hall door, with the servant laying Dormier's hat and coat in a convenient position, and Miss Salisbury, unwrapping the striped muffler from her neck because of the heat of these American houses, waiting on the lowest step of the stair.
It seemed hopeless to explain, so Jacqueline just said recklessly, “Well, I do anyhow,” and turned away and went upstairs; and then, as usual, wished that she had not been quite so hasty.
A Reporter Was in the Box, Asking the Duke What He Thought About Baseball, and the Duke Answered, “My Dear Fellow, Do Leave Me in Peace, I'm Keen About It”
The grown-up people were going out to dinner, and so Jacqueline had the whole uninterrupted evening to worry about what Dormier thought of her, and then about what she really was—just a bitter disagreeable girl; that probably explained why she was so much alone and so unloved; she apparently was the sort of person that repelled affection. Dormier had undoubtedly begun by being attracted to her because she was young and, as Mr. Winters had said, nice looking; but now he had had a glimpse of this ugly side of her nature She must be prepared to face the fact that everything was over—perhaps at that very moment Mrs. McMannis was filling his mind with poison.
When she came in to luncheon the next day Dormier was not there.
Her stepmother looked at her and said, “You look tired, Jacqueline. Has anything gone wrong?”
Her life had simply gone to pieces, but she answered, “Wrong? Why, no! What could go wrong?”
“All this excitement is a great strain,” said Miss Salisbury.
Jacqueline gave her brief scowl.
“What excitement?” she said contemptuously.
Miss Salisbury answered, but Jacqueline did not hear her, for at that moment Dormier came into the room, apologizing in tones hardly audible. Jacqueline became aware that she was going to do one of her cataclysmic blushes, during which she felt as if she looked like a featureless red beacon. No one seemed to notice it; and when she was again able to listen to the conversation about her, she found that they were talking about an expedition downtown to see the closing of the Stock Exchange and the heights of the Woolworth tower.
“Are you going with us?” said the duke.
He used names so rarely that you were obliged to watch him every second to know who it was he was addressing; but there was, from Jacqueline's point of view, no trouble about this. The direction of her eyes were never more than about six inches away from his face whenever they were in the same room. She knew now that he was speaking to her, even if he had not looked at her, for there was—she could not deceive herself—something a little different in his tone. She shook her head, without even glancing in the direction of her stepmother. She would not stoop to plead.
“I suppose you've seen it so often you'd find it tarsom to go again.”
“I've never seen it,” answered Jacqueline with bitter tragic emphasis.
“Then you're coming with us, aren't you?”
At this she could not help a quick glance at Mrs. McMannis, and saw there exactly what she had expected to see—that look of suave negation—stubbornness, Jacqueline called it.
“No, I'm afraid not, Tac,” said the older lady.
“No, Mrs. Mac?” said the duke quietly, and yet as if nothing had ever been refused him before in all his life.
Mrs. McMannis offered him an explanation: “It's so public—the Stock Exchange—under the circumstances.”
To Jacqueline, this sounded like the feeblest nonsense she had ever heard, and she expected to hear the duke demolish it in a few well-chosen words. Instead she saw to her horror that he was accepting it—with regret, but accepting it—giving in. In another second he and her step-mother were leaving the table. A few minutes later, from an upper window, she saw them getting into the car and being wheeled away from her.
This, to Jacqueline, seemed to be war. All through the afternoon her rage mounted. She was not to be treated like that; she was a woman—and a woman in love. She had never before given this name to the pervading joy of the last few days. How could she tell what this other woman might do to her? Perhaps she would poison Dormier's mind; perhaps she would in some way spirit him away; perhaps never again would she and he meet. She would speak to her father about the way she was treated.
No, she would ask him, she would make him answer—the Socratic method, though Jacqueline was not philosophically minded and did not call it that.
At half past six she was sitting rigid in her father's bedroom, waiting for his entrance. Mr. McMannis' room was a solemn, depressing room. It had many tall doors leading into closets that nobody opened but the manservant, and a great deal of heavy, valuable furniture that nobody used. There was about it the flavor of a spare room, and yet the mingled scent of tobacco and tweeds and the sharp smell of Russia leather polish was in its air. It contained two enormous armchairs done in bright scarlet leather, fresh as the day on which they were bought, for Mr. McMannis was not a man who spent any of his time sitting in his bedroom. On one of these Jacqueline had taken up a slippery position.
Presently she heard voices and Mr. and Mrs. McMannis came in together. The girl had one of her rare glimpses of them as friends, companions; they were talking as she and Lucy might talk with their shoulders leaning against each other. Then as they saw her Jacqueline noticed with pain that her father's expression changed. He assumed the paternal and she knew in another second he would say, “Ah, Jacqueline, have you been a good girl?”—or one of those freezing phrases of his. She sprang up.
“Father,” she said, “I want to ask you what my position in this house is. Am I a daughter or a poor relation? Am I a child, to be shoved out of the way, or a grown person, to be asked down to entertain your guests when you find it convenient? I want to know. I can't go on like this, never knowing what to expect.”
The longer she talked, the angrier she grew and the worse she put it. The serried ranks of her parents had been a good deal disordered by her sudden attack, but now they were reforming their columns, exchanging significant glances, ready to repel the guerrilla.
Her father cleared his throat.
“My dear Jacqueline,” he said, now every inch the father, “I am very willing to answer your question. It comes quite apropos.... No, no, Estelle, don't go. I want you here. The fact is, my dear, that something very flattering, very important, has happened. Dormier—the Duke of Dormier—has—has”
Then she knew—knew before her father could choose between the various phrases at his disposal.
“has asked for your hand—has asked you to marry him—has proposed to me for you.” She never was clear as to which he had finally elected.
Her knees gave way under her and she sank down into the red leather chair, which gave first a flop and then a deep sigh, as is the habit of leather chairs.
To her surprise, her sensations were not at all pleasurable. She felt much as if she had been dreaming about making a great success as an opera singer and suddenly found herself confronting a Metropolitan audience. Her father had stopped speaking, and she felt the pressure upon her to make some answer, and she said the first thing that occurred to her:
“I don't want to live in England.”
“I'm afraid you might have to do that,” returned Mr. McMannis, very genial and amused.
Jacqueline glanced at her stepmother, prepared to hate her for smiling too; but she was not smiling; she was staring at the girl with calm level eyes.
There was a silence. Jacqueline felt intolerably the weight of these two iron wills pressing her for an answer.
“I don't say anything!” she cried. “I don't say yes or no!”
“Perhaps you would like to see Dormier,” suggested Mrs. McMannis.
“About the last thing I want,” answered Jacqueline. “I don't want to see him or anyone. I won't come down to dinner, and don't let Miss Salisbury come near me—grinning and groveling about dukes. I want to be alone,” she cried, and, aware as she spoke that this was her supreme need, she sprang up and left the room. She had always made her decisions alone, and she must have solitude.
Out in the corridor, she found she was shaking; but she managed to induce her knees to bear her stiffly up until she was inside her own sitting-room door. She locked it, leaned against it, covering her face with her hands and indulging in a first-rate nervous chill; her teeth chattered, her hands were like ice.
Then some faint undefined sound made her look up, and there was Dormier sitting in her own big chair.
He was sitting relaxed; the reading light shining down on his yellow hair made it look like ridged brass, one long hand was hanging from the arm of the chair, one slim ankle crossed over the other—he had very handsome hands and feet.
Jacqueline asked hoarsely, “What are you doing here?”
“Reading,” he answered, “But I must confess, dear girl, you don't offer a tremendous choice—algebras and Vergil in the original, and I don't seem to remember much of him but arma virumque and that bit about Laocoön and something about black and white gates. So I picked up your Scott—glad I did too. I haven't read it since I was a lad. Let me read you what I was reading.”
She knew perfectly what he was doing—giving her time to recover—and if before she had loved him for being the hero of a fairy tale, now she began to love him with a doglike devotion for being kind—kind in a way no one else had ever been kind to her. She sat down on the only other chair in the little room—the chaise longue—and he began to read.
It was that celebrated passage in Guy Mannering which Stevenson has named as the very flower of romantic fiction—the moment when Bertram, still ignorant of his name and property, stands again on the Ellangowan estate and talks with the villainous usurper:
- “'Would you destroy this fine old castle, sir?' His tone and manner were so exactly those of his father in his best days that Glossin”
Jacqueline unclosed her eyes and looked at the duke. No man except her father had ever been in her little sitting room before; strange that there was something soothing about him. She found she could draw a long breath again.
- “'In the name of God, how came you here?' said Glossin.”
She thought how beautifully he said the word “Bertram”—the “er” had a new value in her ears.
- “'And how do you read the half defaced motto, sir,' said Bertram, 'which is upon the scroll above the entablature with the arms?'
- “'I—I—I really do not exactly know,' replied Glossin.'
- “'It is odd enough,' said Bertram, fixing his eyes upon the arms over the gateway and addressing Glossin partly, as it were, thinking aloud; 'it is odd the tricks which our memory plays us. The remnants of an old prophecy or song or rhyme of some kind or other return to my recollection on hearing that motto—'”
On and on he read in his wonderful low English voice; but by the time he had reached the great climax of the scene, when the servant maid, hanging out the clothes beside a near-by spring, takes up the song, and Bertram, beginning to recall his childhood, exclaims, “By heaven, it is the very ballad!—before this point had been reached Jacqueline had fallen asleep. She found out afterward that she had slept about half an hour. She was wakened by a knock at her door.
The butler's voice said, “Will you have your dinner upstairs, miss?”
“I don't want any dinner,” said Jacqueline.
Dormier, who was now sitting beside her, whispered, “Say you want a cup of soup in half an hour.”
“I want a cup of soup in half an hour,” said Jacqueline.
They heard the man's steps going away. Dormier took her hand.
“Are you going to marry me, Jacqueline?” he said.
It was extraordinary how all the frenzy and terror had gone out of the situation.
“I feel pretty young to be married,” she answered. He nodded, and they sat hand in hand in silence.
“Has your castle a secret passageway?” she asked suddenly.
“Balliecouchan? Rather! One that ends in an open field nowadays, and one that leads down to a cave by the sea.”
“To a cave!” exclaimed Jacqueline. It seemed to her strange that while she could talk like this in a natural way and be really interested in what they were saying, she was unable to lift her eyelids high enough to look at him. She stared at their clasped hands. “Have you a ghost?” she said.
“Oh, half a dozen!”
“Do you believe in ghosts?”
“I suppose you'd call it believing in them,” he answered, without a trace of that embarrassment which an American feels in discussing the subject. “One sees them in Ireland, you know.”
Surprise enabled her to look at him.
“One sees them? You mean you do—you have?”
“Often and often. You will too.”
“Oh, Dormier!”
“Don't call me Dormier.'
“What shall I call you?” Again it had become difficult to raise her eyes.
“My mother calls me Aubrey, but it's rather sickening. My friends call me Tac.”
With the frankness of an Englishman when he sees no reason for concealment—quite as conspicuous a characteristic as his reserve when he does—the duke told her all about his relations and his youth; and she, in the space of the same half hour, told him all about hers. For they had developed the technic, so necessary to those in love, of being able to speak—or at least to communicate ideas—simultaneously. Then another knock came on her door, and opening it on a suspicious crack, Jacqueline took in a tray with her modest cup of soup and a few slices of toast on it, and thought to inquire the hour. It was nine o'clock.
“And you haven't had anything to eat!” she said. “Where do you suppose they think you are?”
“Out, prolly.”
“Don't you suppose they waited dinner for you?”
“I hope not.” But he did not take it too hard. She nobly offered him some of her toast and he even more heroically refused it. He said he would go to the club later and get something. “Only,” he said, “you haven't told me yet whether you are going to marry me or not.”
“Well, now,” said Jacqueline, very practical and sane in her manner, “I'll tell you just how I feel about it.”
“By all means,” replied the duke, sitting down again.
“It's like this: I don't want to marry you—indeed, I don't think I can—but I don't want you ever to leave me. I know that sounds silly, but it's just exactly the way I feel.”
This answer affected the duke strangely. He gave a little laugh, and yet if he had not belonged to a nation reputed to be unemotional, Jacqueline would have said that tears came into his eyes. He got up, put his hand on her little black head, and then took two rapid turns about the room.
Then he said, “Perhaps it's looking at it that makes it alarming—like plunging into cold water, you know. How would you like to run away with me, say, tomorrow?”
Jacqueline gave a squeal.
“That's simply terrible!” she replied.
The duke made a little gesture.
“It was just an idea,” he said apologetically. He took another turn and had another idea. “Could we put it like this?” he said: “That when you do make your mind up you'll prolly decide to do it?”
Jacqueline looked at him, and nodding her head gave vent to an affirmative noise—something between yep and yaw.
And then, for on the entrance of the tray the door had been left unlocked, Miss Salisbury came in; and far from being either grinning or groveling, she was obviously displeased at finding the duke there, and made Jacqueline giggle by administering a rebuke to His Grace, which he could not or did not answer:
“I'm very much surprised to find Your Grace here. This is no place for Your Grace to be—not what I should have expected—not what your mother would have expected, if I may say so.”
The duke moved toward the door.
“I'd rather like to cable my mother,” he said.
“All right,” said Jacqueline, “cable her.”
She knew, without particularly feeling it, that she was deciding her whole future life.
It did not occur to her the next morning not to get up and go to school as usual, and even at luncheon that day nothing seemed to be changed. Her father was there, and afterward he was to take the two Englishmen to the Bronx Zoo, and this time she was asked to go too. She knew the zoo well and was prepared to act as guide; but to her surprise, she found the visitors interested less in living animals than in the roomful of heads and horns. This collection roused in Dormier and Pitts-Cave, even in her father, the primitive emotions of the hunter, so that Jacqueline, standing aside and watching them, felt intensely feminine—an outsider,
When they reached the house again she found she was expected to have tea in the drawing-room. A good many people had come in to tea, paying their dinner visits after the party, and Jacqueline had no chance to talk to Dormier, though he settled down in a low chair beside her. She was not discontented with these arrangements; she would not have asked anything more of life than endless days exactly like this one. She was too happy to examine the situation closely; only it did seem as if her willingness to allow Dormier to cable to his mother had not had any such definite results. Perhaps she wasn't quite engaged after all.
But that evening after dinner she discovered that life had made one of those enormous bounds forward—further even than she had feared. Pitts-Cave was out, and she and Dormier and Mr. and Mrs. McMannis were sitting by the fire in the library; coffee had been served and the servants had taken away the cups, when Dormier had said very quietly, “Is it necessary, sir, that Jacqueline should go on going to school? It's such a bore. I hardly see her at all.”
“Oh, you'll see her enough before you die,” said Mr. McMannis genially.
From which Jacqueline perceived for the first time that interviews had taken place behind her back—miracles, it seemed to her, had been accomplished by her lover.
“The time is rather short, you know,” said Dormier.
Her stepmother answered, “We thought it better she should keep on at school until the engagement is announced.”
“I shall be sailing in three weeks,” said the duke.
“You're going away?” cried Jacqueline in a tone that brought a smile to her father's face and a courteous explanation from Dormier.
“I'm only going home to get my mother,” he said.
“Your mother is coming?” asked Jacqueline.
“For our wedding, of course.”
It appeared that some political crisis in his party necessitated the duke's presence in England before Christmas, and the wedding was to take place about the middle of December. Jacqueline thought of a piece of needlework she had begun last August as a Christmas present to her father. She was to be married before it was finished! She wanted to protest, and it was not timidity that prevented her, but a certain dignity of character that made her recognize that, having consented, there would be something trivial in quarreling about times and places.
She had told Lucy nothing of what had happened. Lucy had, of course, heard from her brother that the duke had not been at the party, and imagined that she was pleasing Jacqueline in condemning him violently. The scene on the stairs had not been for Lucy's ears. But now that things were reaching this definite public status, Jacqueline asked permission to invite Lucy to luncheon the next day and tell her the news. Mr. and Mrs. McMannis were inclined to disapprove, but the duke brought them round. His simple method seemed to be to bring about whatever it happened to be that Jacqueline wanted.
So the next day Lucy came to luncheon and had her first sight of the Duke of Dormier, still ignorant that her best friend was to be a duchess. Unhappily, Pitts-Cave seemed to Lucy supremely comic, and when Lucy thought anything comic she giggled, and when she had once giggled she found it impossible to stop giggling. Every time Pitts-Cave spoke he began with a few low grunts, worked up to louder ones, exclaimed “Oh-ah” a few times, and then said what he had to say. The first time he did it Lucy stared at him with large wondering eyes; the second time she shook with silent, well-suppressed laughter; the third time she snorted loudly through her nose, and though she pretended she had choked, she deceived no one—except perhaps Pitts-Cave, who was not in the least interested in her anyhow. Miss Salisbury was disgusted and raised her own thin nose in the air, thinking, “Oh, these American children!” Even the duke looked rather coldly at her.
While they were at table Heccles brought the duke a cable.
“Oh, oh, is it from Scroggles?” said Pitts-Cave.
Lucy put her napkin to her face and shook, and even Jacqueline was somewhat infected.
“Yes,” said Dormier, and he gave the cable to Jacqueline. It read:
“Congratulations. Love to Jacqueline.
Jacqueline looked up and beamed at Dormier. It seemed to her a beautiful message.
It was then given to Pitts-Cave, who, feeling for his monocle and placing it in his eye with a tremendous convulsion of his jaw, observed, “Very nice, very nice. Fancy dear old Scroggles cabling!” At which Lucy simply had to be led from the room. Jacqueline herself thought it strange that a duchess should be known as Scroggles. At the same time, she did not like Lucy's laughing so much. She found herself thinking that her friend showed her gums too much when she laughed.
In the shelter of her own little room, she asked, “Well, what did you think of him?”
“I think he's the funniest man except Ed Wynn that I ever saw.”
“I mean of the duke.”
“Just nothing at all.”
“Lucy, what do you mean?”
“That long thin face and nothing to say for himself? I think he's the limit, duke or no duke,” said Lucy. “I like a man to have something to say for himself, and not to sit there thinking how great he is. Every now and then he glanced at me as if I were a new kind of worm. And he has no sense of humor—you can see that—or he couldn't keep his face straight either.”
Jacqueline made a great discovery at this. Heretofore she had always been immensely influenced by what Lucy thought of young men; several had been wiped out by her disapproval. Now she found she cared nothing at all about what Lucy thought of Dormier. She merely pitied her ignorance.
“Lucy,” she said seriously, “I want to tell you, though it's a deep secret, that I'm going to marry him.”
She was surprised and shocked by the violence of Lucy's disapproval—“horror” would be more exact.
“Oh,” Lucy cried, “to think that you, Jacqueline, should become a snob, captured by a title—to desert your own country!”
“Lucy, I love him.”
“Love him? What nonsense!” said Lucy. “No one could love that stick. You love my brother—and he adores you. Oh, Jack, the grandest person that ever was! How can you throw him over like this?”
“He has never said a word to me.”
“Don't make that excuse, my dear. You know just as well as I do how Paul feels about you. Only Paul is afraid of your money—very different from this bird, who doesn't care for anything else, who came out just hunting for it, and got it. It makes me sick!”
But Jacqueline could not allow her to say this, and the two girls quarreled and parted on bad terms. Jacqueline was haunted, not by Lucy's judgment of the engagement, but by doubt of her treatment of Paul. It was horrible to her to think that she might have been disloyal or unkind.
Within a few days the inevitable happened, and the news known to only a few began to leak out; it was decided to announce the engagement. It was strange to Jacqueline to see her name in the headlines of newspapers—strange, but not interesting. All outer aspects of life were a little vague to her in these days—everything except Dormier. He was not only her first lover but her first comrade, and except for Mr. Winters, her first true friend. She gave him her complete trust. They were not very often alone together; but she did not mind that, for wherever she was she had a sense of his love and protection. His caresses were rare. Only once had he kissed her—a memorable moment.
They had been running upstairs rather late to dress for dinner after a day of sightseeing. The duke had said to her apropos of some tablet he had been shown that afternoon commemorating a crushing British defeat, “Aren't there any brass plates in this country except for having licked us?”
Mrs. McMannis had laughed and gone on into her room and shut the door, and Jacqueline, standing on the famous landing, had sketched a little square on the wall and said, “On this spot Thomas Aubrey Cecil Edward Fitzgrady first met and fell in love with Jacqueline McMannis.” Standing behind her, he drew her long throat back until her head rested on his shoulder and kissed her on the lips.
“Put that on the tablet, too,” he said, and went on very quietly upstairs.
Jacqueline was so struck with the fact that her heart began to beat in an utterly new way that she did not stop to think that she had not said quite what she meant. It was rather bold to assume he had loved her at first sight, and yet he must have.
With the announcement of her engagement, letters began to pour in—letters from her teachers at school, from Miss Grigsby, full of interesting items about other Duchesses of Dormier; a letter from Mr. Winters.
“So I hear that dukes have become something in your life after all,” he wrote. “Tell His Grace that he is not good enough for you no matter how good he is.”
Dormier, of course, had heard all about Mr. Winters, and seemed not displeased at the message.
A letter from Paul:
- “My dear Jacqueline: I want to be among the first to wish you joy. I hope this new life of yours will be a very happy one. I consider the Duke of Dormier the most fortunate of men. I hope he knows he is. May I add that something in my own life has changed profoundly with the knowledge that you are to be married and go out of the country forever?
“Paul.”
She stuck the letter into the front of her dress, for all of her engagement letters were shown to her family, and this one she intended not to show. It dropped out presently, and Dormier picked it up and gave it back to her. She felt guilty and unhappy, but she could detect no suspicion in his face. She thought that some day she must tell him all about it.
Some time before, pursuing the idea of Anglo-American unity, the duke had promised to attend a dinner of war veterans at Chicago. He was to be away two days. Jacqueline attempted to conceal how tragic she felt. She said to herself that a month ago she had been comparatively happy, not knowing that such a person existed. It was not that she expected him to be killed on the journey, or to find an older, more sophisticated, alluring woman, though both possibilities rather forcibly occurred to her, but she could not imagine how she would spend the time—those terrible hours and minutes and seconds stretching themselves out into two days. If only she could sleep through them instead of being obliged to live them, consciously suffering from this sense of his absence. She almost wished she were still at school, the morning hours were so long and dreary.
After luncheon the first day she wandered into the library, thinking she would find it empty, but Major Pitts-Cave was there. Usually to be with the major was much the same as being alone, particularly while he was slowly consuming his after-luncheon cigar.
He had the instinct for the most comfortable chair in the room sometimes seen in pet cats. Without looking about him, Pitts-Cave moved imperceptibly toward it, sank into it; and who would then think of disturbing that vast bulk?
He was lying back in a great chair now, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, pulling at long intervals on one of Mr. McMannis' excellent Havanas—not, as the major was even then thinking, in quite as good condition as he was accustomed to in those he bought at his Pall Mall tobacconist's—but still a very good cigar.
Jacqueline, seeing him, did not address him. She had developed a technic to mitigate her suffering, as most sensitive young people who live alone must. Her plan was to plunge into some well-remembered and much-loved book, and read and read until some of the ache had gone out of real life. This was what she was now contemplating, when, much to her surprise, she heard herself addressed by Pitts-Cave.
“Rather a bore having Tac away, eh, what?” he said.
Jacqueline's heart went out to him for the first time.
“A bore?” she returned. “It's simply frightful; it's just about all I can bear.” And then, because talking of him was next best to being with him, she added, “Oh, Major Pitts-Cave, I'm so afraid of the duchess!”
“Frightened of Scroggles?” said the major. “Oh, no! Oh, no!”
“But suppose she doesn't like me,” the girl suggested, longing to hear the answer.
“Oh, certain to like you,” said the major exactly as desired. But then he added something else: “As a matter of fact, it was her idea from the beginning.”
“From the beginning?” said Jacqueline.
The major corrected himself:
“No, no, not the very first go; but as soon as she had Miss Salisbury's report she was keener than anyone about it. She said at once it was just what she had been wanting for Tac.”
There was a short silence. The point of the major's chin was turned to Jacqueline, for his eyes had never left the ceiling; but if he had looked at her he would have seen only a rigid little figure and eyes staring at him as if to pierce his soul. She knew that if she betrayed astonishment, or even lack of understanding, she might stop the unfolding of this terrible thing, and she felt she must know at all costs.
She said presently, with the subtlety of the serpent, “Oh, it was to the duchess Miss Salisbury wrote?”
“No; as a matter of fact, it was to her father—the Reverend What's-His-Name. You see, he had once held one of the Dormier livings, and so, of course, when the duchess heard the girl was your governess, she wrote straight off to her”
“for my character,” said Jacqueline,
Her tone was perfect, but Pitts-Cave felt a twinge of doubt, for he said protestingly, “Tac could have had his choice of all the girls in England, you know.”
“Really?” answered Jacqueline. She was speaking mechanically, hardly knowing what she said. “Yes, I suppose so—and none of them would do?”
“Well, now,” said the major, very just and accurate, “Miss Sampson wouldn't. Quite a nice girl, but a bit Oriental for Tac. And Lady Betty—Lady Betty is a fair corker; but when you divide the Meddenton fortune up among the five, you see, that didn't do either.”
Her father's fortune, Jacqueline thought, need not be divided at all; it would all be hers. Pitts-Cave staggered on with his conversation, dropping his monosyllables until they made a sort of chain of meaning.
Jacqueline sat still, with that queer rigidity. Yes, Miss Salisbury had deceived her. Her father had sold her for a title. How could he have done such a thing to her? How could he? And yet it was as nothing compared to what Tac had done. Her lover—her only friend—had utterly fooled and betrayed her. And, oh, how she had lent herself to it! “On this spot Thomas Aubrey Cecil Edward Fitzgrady first met and fell in love” How could he have let her say that? Oh, if he had had one spark of honesty in his make-up he would have told her then! He had not loved her. No one had ever loved her. She knew what people meant when they said their hearts broke—her heart broke then. How different from any sorrow about which she could talk or cry! She felt as if all joy and calm and happiness had been drawn out of her veins forever and in their place she was filled with a cold solid despair.
There was just one more fact that she felt she must know. She said—and her voice sounded not like Jacqueline McMannis' but like the voice of a normal cheerful girl—“It must have been in the summer that Miss Salisbury wrote.”
“Let me see,” said the major in exactly the same calm contemplative tone. “It was the end of July, for I remember we were going to Bonny Brigg in about a sennight.”
There was a silence after this, during which Jacqueline rose and left the room. The major knew she had gone, but did not move. He remained with his feet crossed and his eyes on the ceiling, drawing long satisfactory inhalations on his cigar. He would have been immensely surprised if anyone had told him that he had just wrecked his young cousin's marriage.
(TO BE CONCLUDED)