Ruggles of Red Gap Part 30

I could detect that his eyes were still gla.s.sy, but his head was erect. He seemed to flaunt his shame. And the guilty partner of his downfall drove with an affectation of easy carelessness, yet with a lift of the chin which, though barely perceptible, had all the effect of binding the prisoner to her chariot wheels; a prisoner, moreover, whom it was plain she meant to parade to the last ignominious degree.

She drove leisurely, and in the little infrequent curt turns of her head to address her companion she contrived to instill so finished an effect of boredom that she must have goaded to frenzy any matron of the North Side set who chanced to observe her, as more than one of them did.

Thrice did she halt along our main thoroughfare for bits of shopping, a mere running into of shops or to the doors of them where she could issue verbal orders, the while she surveyed her waiting and drugged captive with a certain half-veiled but good-humoured insolence. At these moments--for I took pains to overlook the shocking scene--the Honourable George followed her with eyes no longer gla.s.sed; the eyes of helpless infatuation. "He looks at her," Cousin Egbert had said. He had told it all and told it well. The equipage graced our street upon one paltry excuse or another for the better part of an hour, the woman being minded that none of us should longer question her supremacy over the next and eleventh Earl of Brinstead.

Not for another hour did the effects of the sensation die out among tradesmen and the street crowds. It was like waves that recede but gradually. They talked. They stopped to talk. They pa.s.sed on talking.

They hissed vivaciously; they rose to exclamations. I mean to say, there was no end of a gabbling row about it.

There was in my mind no longer any room for hesitation. The quite harshest of extreme measures must be at once adopted before all was too late. I made my way to the telegraph office. It was not a time for correspondence by post.

Afterward I had myself put through by telephone to Belknap-Jackson.

With his sensitive nature he had stopped in all day. Although still averse to appearing publicly, he now consented to meet me at my chambers late that evening.

"The whole town is seething with indignation," he called to me. "It was disgraceful. I shall come at ten. We rely upon you."

Again I saw that he was concerned solely with his humiliation as a would-be host. Not yet had he divined that the deluded Honourable George might go to the unspeakable length of a matrimonial alliance with the woman who had enchained him. And as to his own disaster, he was less than accurate when he said that the whole town was seething with indignation. The members of the North Side set, to be sure, were seething furiously, but a flippant element of the baser sort was quite openly rejoicing. As at the time of that most slanderous minstrel performance, it was said that the Bohemian set had again, if I have caught the phrase, "put a thing over upon" the North Side set. Many persons of low taste seemed quite to enjoy the dreadful affair, and the members of the Bohemian set, naturally, throughout the day had been quite coa.r.s.ely beside themselves with glee.

Little they knew, I reflected, what power I could wield nor that I had already set in motion its deadly springs. Little did the woman dream, flaunting her triumph up and down our main business thoroughfare, that one who watched her there had but to raise his hand to wrest the victim from her toils. Little did she now dream that he would stop at no half measures. I mean to say, she would never think I could bowl her out as easy as buying c.o.c.kles off a barrow.

At the hour for our conference Belknap-Jackson arrived at my chambers m.u.f.fled in an ulster and with a soft hat well over his face. I gathered that he had not wished to be observed.

"I feel that this is a crisis," he began as he gloomily shook my hand.

"Where is our boasted twentieth-century culture if outrages like this are permitted? For the first time I understand how these Western communities have in the past resorted to mob violence. Public feeling is already running high against the creature and her unspeakable set."

I met this outburst with the serenity of one who holds the winning cards in his hand, and begged him to be seated. Thereupon I disclosed to him the weakly, susceptible nature of the Honourable George, reciting the incidents of the typing-girl and the Brixton milliner. I added that now, as before, I should not hesitate to preserve the family honour.

"A dreadful thing, indeed," he murmured, "if that adventuress should trap him into a marriage. Imagine her one day a Countess of Brinstead!

But suppose the fellow prove stubborn; suppose his infatuation dulls all his finer instincts?"

I explained that the Honourable George, while he might upon the spur of the moment commit a folly, was not to be taken too seriously; that he was, I believed, quite incapable of a grand pa.s.sion. I mean to say, he always forgot them after a few days. More like a child staring into shop-windows he was, rapidly forgetting one desired object in the presence of others. I added that I had adopted the extremest measures.

Thereupon, perceiving that I had something in my sleeve, as the saying is, my caller besought me to confide in him. Without a word I handed him a copy of my cable message sent that afternoon to his lords.h.i.+p:

_"Your immediate presence required to prevent a monstrous folly."_

He brightened as he read it.

"You actually mean to say----" he began.

"His lords.h.i.+p," I explained, "will at once understand the nature of what is threatened. He knows, moreover, that I would not alarm him without cause. He will come at once, and the Honourable George will be told what. His lords.h.i.+p has never failed. He tells him what perfectly, and that's quite all to it. The poor chap will be saved."

My caller was profoundly stirred. "Coming here--to Red Gap--his lords.h.i.+p the Earl of Brinstead--actually coming here! My G.o.d! This is wonderful!" He paused; he seemed to moisten his dry lips; he began once more, and now his voice trembled with emotion: "He will need a place to stay; our hotel is impossible; had you thought----" He glanced at me appealingly.

"I dare say," I replied, "that his lords.h.i.+p will be pleased to have you put him up; you would do him quite nicely."

"You mean it--seriously? That would be--oh, inexpressible. He would be our house guest! The Earl of Brinstead! I fancy that would silence a few of these serpent tongues that are wagging so venomously to-day!"

"But before his coming," I insisted, "there must be no word of his arrival. The Honourable George would know the meaning of it, and the woman, though I suspect now that she is only making a show of him, might go on to the bitter end. They must suspect nothing."

"I had merely thought of a brief and dignified notice in our press,"

he began, quite wistfully, "but if you think it might defeat our ends----"

"It must wait until he has come."

"Glorious!" he exclaimed. "It will be even more of a blow to them." He began to murmur as if reading from a journal, "'His lords.h.i.+p the Earl of Brinstead is visiting for a few days'--it will surely be as much as a few days, perhaps a week or more--'is visiting for a few days the C.

Belknap-Jacksons of Boston and Red Gap.'" He seemed to regard the printed words. "Better still, 'The C. Belknap-Jacksons of Boston and Red Gap are for a few days entertaining as their honoured house guest his lords.h.i.+p the Earl of Brinstead----' Yes, that's admirable."

He arose and impulsively clasped my hand. "Ruggles, dear old chap, I shan't know at all how to repay you. The Bohemian set, such as are possible, will be bound to come over to us. There will be left of it but one unprincipled woman--and she wretched and an outcast. She has made me absurd. I shall grind her under my heel. The east room shall be prepared for his lords.h.i.+p; he shall breakfast there if he wishes. I fancy he'll find us rather more like himself than he suspects. He shall see that we have ideals that are not half bad."

He wrung my hand again. His eyes were misty with grat.i.tude.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Three days later came the satisfying answer to my cable message:

_"d.a.m.n! Sailing Wednesday_.--BRINSTEAD."

Glad I was he had used the cable. In a letter there would doubtless have been still other words improper to a peer of England.

Belknap-Jackson thereafter bore himself with a dignity quite tremendous even for him. Graciously aloof, he was as one carrying an inner light. "We hold them in the hollow of our hand," said he, and both his wife and himself took pains on our own thoroughfare to cut the Honourable George dead, though I dare say the poor chap never at all noticed it. They spoke of him as "a remittance man"--the black sheep of a n.o.ble family. They mentioned sympathetically the trouble his vicious ways had been to his brother, the Earl. Indeed, so mysteriously important were they in allusions of this sort that I was obliged to caution them, lest they let out the truth. As it was, there ran through the town an undercurrent of puzzled suspicion. It was intimated that we had something in our sleeves.

Whether this tension was felt by the Honourable George, I had no means of knowing. I dare say not, as he is self-centred, being seldom aware of anything beyond his own immediate sensations. But I had reason to believe that the Klondike woman had divined some menace in our att.i.tude of marked indifference. Her own manner, when it could be observed, grew increasingly defiant, if that were possible. The alliance of the Honourable George with the Bohemian set had become, of course, a public scandal after the day of his appearance in her trap and after his betrayal of the Belknap-Jacksons had been gossiped to rags. He no longer troubled himself to pretend any esteem whatever for the North Side set. Scarce a day pa.s.sed but he appeared in public as the woman's escort. He flagrantly performed her commissions, and at their questionable Bohemian gatherings, with their beer and sausages and that sort of thing, he was the gayest of that gay, mad set.

Indeed, of his old a.s.sociates, Cousin Egbert quite almost alone seemed to find him any longer desirable, and him I had no heart to caution, knowing that I should only wound without enlightening him, he being entirely impervious to even these cruder aspects of cla.s.s distinction.

I dare say he would have considered the marriage of the Honourable George as no more than the marriage of one of his cattle-person companions. I mean to say, he is a dear old sort and I should never fail to defend him in the most disheartening of his vagaries, but he is undeniably insensitive to what one does and does not do.

The conviction ran, let me repeat, that we had another pot of broth on the fire. I gleaned as much from the Mixer, she being one of the few others besides Cousin Egbert in whose liking the Honourable George had not terrifically descended. She made it a point to address me on the subject over a dish of tea at the Grill one afternoon, choosing a table sufficiently remote from my other feminine guests, who doubtless, at their own tables, discussed the same complication. I was indeed glad that we were remote from other occupied tables, because in the course of her remarks she quite forcefully uttered an oath, which I thought it as well not to have known that I cared to tolerate in my lady patrons.

"As to what Jackson feels about the way it was handed out to him that Sunday," she bluntly declared, "I don't care a----" The oath quite dazed me for a moment, although I had been warned that she would use language on occasion. "What I do care about," she went on briskly, "is that I won't have this girl pestered by Jackson or by you or by any man that wears hair! Why, Jackson talks so silly about her sometimes you'd think she was a bad woman--and he keeps hinting about something he's going to put over till I can hardly keep my hands off him. I just know some day he'll make me forget I'm a lady. Now, take it from me, Bill, if you're setting in with him, don't start anything you can't finish."

Really she was quite fierce about it. I mean to say, the glitter in her eyes made me recall what Cousin Egbert had said of Mrs. Effie, her being quite entirely willing to take on a rattlesnake and give it the advantage of the first two a.s.saults. Somewhat fl.u.s.tered I was, yet I hastened to a.s.sure her that, whatever steps I might feel obliged to take for the protection of the Honourable George, they would involve nothing at all unfair to the lady in question.

"Well, they better hadn't!" she resumed threateningly. "That girl had a hard time all right, but listen here--she's as right as a church.

She couldn't fool me a minute if she wasn't. Don't you suppose I been around and around quite some? Just because she likes to have a good time and outdresses these dames here--is that any reason they should get out their hammers? Ain't she earned some right to a good time, tell me, after being married when she was a silly kid to Two-spot Kenner, the swine--and G.o.d bless the trigger finger of the man that b.u.mped him off! As for the poor old Judge, don't worry. I like the old boy, but Kate Kenner won't do anything more than make a monkey of him just to spite Jackson and his band of lady knockers. Marry him? Say, get me right, Bill--I'll put it as delicate as I can--the Judge is too darned far from being a mental giant for that."

I dare say she would have slanged me for another half-hour but for the constant strain of keeping her voice down. As it was, she boomed up now and again in a way that reduced to listening silence the ladies at several distant tables.

As to the various points she had raised, I was somewhat confused.

About the Honourable George, for example: He was, to be sure, no mental giant. But one occupying his position is not required to be.

Indeed, in the cla.s.s to which he was born one well knows that a mental giant would be quite as distressingly bizarre as any other freak. I regretted not having retorted this to her, for it now occurred to me that she had gone it rather strong with her "poor old Judge." I mean to say, it was almost quite a little bit raw for a native American to adopt this patronizing tone toward one of us.

And yet I found that my esteem for the Mixer had increased rather than diminished by reason of her plucky defence of the Klondike woman. I had no reason to suppose that the designing creature was worth a defence, but I could only admire the valour that made it. Also I found food for profound meditation in the Mixer's a.s.sertion that the woman's sole aim was to "make a monkey" of the Honourable George. If she were right, a mesalliance need not be feared, at which thought I felt a great relief. That she should achieve the lesser and perhaps equally easy feat with the poor chap was a calamity that would be, I fancied, endured by his lords.h.i.+p with a serene fort.i.tude.

Curiously enough, as I went over the Mixer's tirade point by point, I found in myself an inexplicable loss of animus toward the Klondike woman. I will not say I was moved to sympathy for her, but doubtless that strange ferment of equality stirred me toward her with something less than the indignation I had formerly felt. Perhaps she was an entirely worthy creature. In that case, I merely wished her to be taught that one must not look too far above one's station, even in America, in so serious an affair as matrimony. With all my heart I should wish her a worthy mate of her own cla.s.s, and I was glad indeed to reflect upon the truth of my a.s.sertion to the Mixer, that no unfair advantage would be taken of her. His lords.h.i.+p would remove the Honourable George from her toils, a made monkey, perhaps, but no husband.