Chapter 85
Ring if you have a sudden desire for anything funny like peac.o.c.k feathers on toast. There's cold grouse somewhere underground if you're going to be an owl.... And don't feed that cat on the rugs....
Good-night."
"Good-night," nodded Selwyn, relighting his cigar.
He had no intention of remaining very long; he supposed that his sister and Eileen would be out late, wherever they were, and he merely meant to dream a bit longer before going back to bed.
He had been smoking for half an hour perhaps, lying deep in his chair, worn features dully illuminated by the sinking fire; and he was thinking about going--had again relighted his partly consumed cigar to help him with its fragrant companions.h.i.+p on his dark route homeward, when he heard a footfall on the landing, and turned to catch a glimpse of Gerald in overcoat and hat, moving silently toward the stairs.
"h.e.l.lo, old fellow!" he said, surprised. "I didn't know you were in the house."
The boy hesitated, turned, placed something just outside the doorway, and came quickly into the room.
"Philip!" he said with a curious, excited laugh, "I want to ask you something. I never yet came to you without asking something and--you never have failed me. Would you tell me now what I had better do?"
"Certainly," said Selwyn, surprised and smiling; "ask me, old fellow.
You're not eloping with some nice girl, are you?"
"Yes," said Gerald, calm in his excitement, "I am."
"What?" repeated Selwyn gravely; "what did you say?
"You guessed it. I came home and dressed and I'm going back to the Craigs' to marry a girl whose mother and father won't let me have her."
"Sit down, Gerald," said Selwyn, removing the cigar from his lips; but:
"I haven't time," said the boy. "I simply want to know what you'd do if you loved a girl whose mother means to send her to London to get rid of me and marry her to that yawning Ellis...o...b.. fellow who was over here.... What would you do? She's too young to stand much of a siege in London--some Englishman will get her if he persists--and I mean to make her love me."
"Oh! Doesn't she?"
"Y-es.... You know how young girls are. Yes, she does--now. But a year or two with that crowd--and the d.u.c.h.ess being good to her, and Ellis...o...b.. yawning and looking like a sleepy Lohengrin or some d.a.m.ned prince in his Horse Guards' helmet!--Selwyn, I can see the end of it.
She can't stand it; she's too young not to get over it.... So, what would you do?"
"Who is she, Gerald?"
"I won't tell you."
"Oh!... Of course she's the right sort?"
"Perfectly."
"Young?"
"Very. Out last season."
Selwyn rose and began to pace the floor; Kit-Ki, disturbed, looked up, then resumed her purring.
"There's nothing dishonourable in this, of course," said Selwyn, halting short.
"No," said the boy. "I went to her mother and asked for her, and was sent about my business. Then I went to her father. You know him. He was decent, bland, evasive, but decent. Said his daughter needed a couple of seasons in London; hinted of some prior attachment. Which is rot; because she loves me--she admits it. Well, I said to him, 'I'm going to marry Gladys'; and he laughed and tried to look at his moustache; and after a while he asked to be excused. I took the count. Then I saw Gladys at the Craigs', and I said, 'Gladys, if you'll give up the whole blooming heiress business and come with me, I'll make you the happiest girl in Manhattan.' And she looked me straight in the eyes and said, 'I'd rather grow up with you than grow old forgetting you.'"
"Did she say that?" asked Selwyn.
"She said,'We've the greatest chance in the world, Gerald, to make something of each other. Is it a good risk?' And I said, 'It is the best risk in the world if you love me.' And she said, 'I do, dearly; I'll take my chance.' And that's how it stands,
"Around the corner. I know. Did you telephone?"
"Yes."
There was a pause; the older man dropped his hands into his pockets and stepped quietly in front of Gerald; and for a full minute they looked squarely at one another, unwinking.
"Well?" asked Gerald, almost tremulously. "Can't you say, 'Go ahead!'?"
"Don't ask me."
"No, I won't," said the boy simply. "A man doesn't ask about such matters; he does them.... Tell Austin and Nina.... And give this note to Eileen." He opened a portfolio and laid an envelope in Selwyn's hands. "And--by George!--I almost forgot! Here"--and he laid a check across the note in Selwyn's hand--"here's the balance of what you've advanced me. Thank G.o.d, I've made it good, every cent. But the debt is only the deeper.... Good-bye, Philip."
Selwyn held the boy's hand a moment. Once or twice Gerald thought he meant to speak, and waited, but when he became aware of the check thrust back at him he forced it on Selwyn again, laughing:
"No! no! If I did not stand clear and free in my shoes do you think I'd dare do what I'm doing? Do you suppose I'd ask a girl to face with me a world in which I owed a penny? Do you suppose I'm afraid of that world?--or of a soul in it? Do you suppose I can't take a living out of it?"
Suddenly Selwyn crushed the boy's hand.
"Then take it!--and her, too!" he said between his teeth; and turned on his heel, resting his arms on the mantel and his head face downward between them.
So Gerald went away in the pride and excitement of buoyant youth to take love as he found it and where he found it--though he had found it only as the green bud of promise which unfolds, not to the lover, but to love. And the boy was only one of many on whom the victory might have fallen; but such a man becomes the only man when he takes what he finds for himself--green bud, half blown, or open to its own deep fragrant heart. To him that hath shall be given, and much forgiven. For it is the law of the strong and the prophets: and a little should be left to that Destiny which the devout revere under a gentler name.
The affair made a splash in the social puddle, and the commotion spread outside of it. Inside the nine-and-seventy cackled; outside similar gallinaceous sounds. Neergard pored all day over the blue-pencilled column, and went home, stunned; the social sheet which is taken below stairs and read above was full of it, as was the daily press and the mouths of people interested, uninterested, and disinterested, legitimately or otherwise, until people began to tire of telling each other exactly how it happened that Gerald Erroll ran away with Gladys Orchil.
Sanxon Orchil was widely quoted as suavely and urbanely deploring the premature consummation of an alliance long since decided upon by both families involved; Mrs. Orchil snapped her electric-blue eyes and held her peace--between her very white teeth; Austin Gerard, secretly astounded with admiration for Gerald, received the reporters with a countenance expressive of patient pain, but downtown he made public pretence of busy indifference, as though not fully alive to the material benefit connected with the unexpected alliance. Nina wept--happily at moments--at moments she laughed--because she had heard all about the famous British invasion planned by the Orchils and abetted by Anglo-American aristocracy. She did not laugh too maliciously; she simply couldn't help it. Her set was not the Orchils' set, their ways were not her ways; their orbits merely intersected occasionally; and, left to herself and the choice hers, she would not have troubled herself to engineer any such alliance, even to stir up Mrs. Sanxon Orchil.
Besides, deep in her complacent little New York soul she had the faintest germ of contempt for the Cordova ancestors of the house of Orchil.
But the young and silly pair had now relieved her as well as Mrs. Orchil of any further trouble concerning themselves, the American d.u.c.h.ess, the campaign, and the Horse Guards: they had married each other rather shamelessly one evening while supposed to be dancing at the Sandon Craigs', and had departed expensively for Palm Beach, whither Austin, grim, reticent, but inwardly immensely contented, despatched the acc.u.mulated exclamatory letters of the family with an intimation of his own that two weeks was long enough to cut business even with a honeymoon as excuse.
Meanwhile the disorganisation in the nursery was tremendous; the children, vaguely aware of the household demoralisation and excitement, took the opportunity to break loose on every occasion; and Kit-Ki, to her infinite boredom and disgust, was hunted from garret to cellar; and Drina, taking advantage, contrived to over-eat herself and sit up late, and was put to bed sick; and Eileen, loyal, but sorrowfully amazed at her brother's exclusion of her in such a crisis, became slowly overwhelmed with the realisation of her loneliness, and took to the seclusion of her own room, feeling tearful and abandoned, and very much like a very little girl whose heart was becoming far too full of all sorts of sorrows.
Nina misunderstood her, finding her lying on her bed, her pale face pillowed in her hair.
"Only horridly ordinary people will believe that Gerald wanted her money," said Nina; "as though an Erroll considered such matters at all--or needed to. Clear, clean English you are, back to the cavaliers whose flung purses were their thanks when the Cordovans held their horses' heads.... What are you crying for?"
"I don't know," said Eileen; "not for anything that you speak of.
Neither Gerald nor I ever wasted any emotion over money, or what others think about it.... Is Drina ill?"
"No; only sick. Calomel will fix her, but she believes she's close to dissolution and she's sent for Boots to take leave of him--the little monkey! I'm so indignant. She's taken advantage of the general demoralisation to eat up everything in the house.... Billy fell downstairs, fox-hunting, and his nose bled all over that pink Kirman rug.... Boots _is_ a dear; do you know what he's done?"
"What?" asked Eileen listlessly, raising the back of her slender hand from her eyes to peer at Nina through the glimmer of tears.
"Well, he and Phil have moved out of Boots's house, and Boots has wired Gerald and Gladys that the house is ready for them until they can find a place of their own. Of course they'll both come here--in fact, their luggage is upstairs now--Boots takes the blue room and Phil his old quarters,... But don't you think it is perfectly sweet of Boots? And isn't it good to have Philip back again?"