Crowded Out! and Other Sketches Part 20

Well, Milly, it was a dull life for two lively, affectionate lads like Joseph and me, wasn't it, and had it not been for all this, child, nature, you know, and the trees and the streams and the out-door sports I love so well, I could never have got on at all. Then when I was nineteen--just your age, love--came a change. I, being the elder and heir to the estate was sent off to town--I mean, London, my dear--and the Continent, with a tutor. Joseph--well, I believe I have never fully understood what became of Joseph during the four years I was away, but I suppose he amused himself. He has a knack of doing that I never had, except when I am in the country. Well, this tutor wasn't a bad sort of a fellow and at first we got on splendidly, living in town in chambers, going to the plays and the opera, and dining all over, just wherever I liked or he knew, and excursions oat of London, you know--oh! jolly enough for a little while! Then we went across to Paris--"

"Yes, dearest Dacre?"

Mr. Foxley stopped a moment to lift his wife's face closer to his own.

He kissed it--a long long kiss that entranced them both to the degree of forgetting the story.

"If you would rather not go on--" said Mildred.

"Oh! I must now. Well, we did Paris, and then the other capitals and Nice--Nice was just then coming into vogue, and ran down into Italy--I remember I liked Genoa so much--and then we came back to Paris, for Harfleur--that was the tutor's name, and it doesn't sound like a real one, does it--preferred Paris to any other European town and of course so did I. About this time, his true character began to show itself. He went out frequently without me, smoked quite freely, would order in wine and get me to drink with him, and was very much given to calling me fresh, green, and all that you know. I began to think he was right. I was past twenty-one, and I had never even had a glimpse into the inside of life. Women, now and all that kind of thing--I was positively ignorant of--but to be sure, one quickly learns in Paris."

For one night, Harfleur asked me in his usual sneering tone how I was going to spend my evening.

"I am going out to a charming _soiree_ at the house of Madame de L'Estarre, the most charming woman in Paris," said he.

"'Then I shall accompany you,' I said, fired by his insulting tone. And I went, Mildred. I suppose I was good-looking, eh, my child--and had sufficient air of distinction about me to impress Madame de L'Estarre, for she left the crowd of waxed and perfumed Frenchmen and devoted herself entirely to me. Although she was--beautiful--she was not tall, and I, standing at her side all that evening, never took my eyes off her dazzling face and her white uncovered bosom. In a week, my child, I had learnt to know and love every feature in that dazzling face and began to dream of the day when I should be allowed to kiss that bosom. Yes, I certainly loved her."

"I am sure you loved her, Dacre my darling. And how could she help loving you, dear, in return?"

"Oh that is another thing entirely, quite another thing. After that night, Harfleur showed me more respect than he had done for some time previously and we began to hit it off again better. I went to her _hotel_--her house you know, every day. At first she would always receive me alone, sending anybody away who happened to be there and refusing to admit anybody who came while we were together.--It is difficult, even to my wife, to explain what kind of a woman she was. All that first time, when we would be alone, she would--make love, I suppose it must be called--with her eyes and her hands, and her very skirts and her fan, and the cus.h.i.+on, and the footstool. The room was always beautiful and always dim, and she would greet me with outstretched hands and a shy smile, making room for me beside her on the sofa--she always sat on a sofa. We would talk of nothing at all perhaps but look into each other's eyes, until the force of her look would draw me close, close to her till we were almost in one another's arms, and I could feel her breath coming faster every moment when just as I imagined she would sink upon my shoulder--she would draw herself up with a laugh and push me away, declaring somebody was coming. Then, if n.o.body came, she would go through the same farce again. This would happen perhaps two or three times a day. In the evening, I was again at her side, night after night regarding her with a devotion that amazed even my friend Harfleur.

"She treats you like a dog. It will kill you yet, George. Come away."

But of course I would not go. I accompanied her to the theatre, to the Bois, to the shops, to church--yes, even to church, Mildred, think of that--and she was very careful and circ.u.mspect and all that. I even believe as far as direct actions go, she may have been a virtuous woman, for she certainly, had no other lover when I knew her. She was a widow, enormously rich and nothing to do. Therefore, I suppose she went in for the torturing business as a profession. Her Frenchmen did not mind; that was the secret of her charm with them--so clever, they called her, but it nearly killed me, her cleverness. I grew pale and worn--sleep--I never slept. All my life I had lived without natural affection, and now I was pouring forth upon this woman the love I might have rendered friends, sister, brother, mother, as well as the pa.s.sion of a young man.

I say to you now, Mildred, my wife, that the woman who tramples on the pa.s.sion of a young man is as bad as the man who slays the innocence of a young girl. And that's what she did. Finally, when this had lasted for a year and a half, and Harfleur had gone back to England, one day, when I was perfectly desperate and could have killed her, Milly, as she lay at full length on her d.a.m.ned sofa--pardon, my dear, no, don't kiss my hand, child, don't--dressed in some rose-colored stuff all trailing about her and her hands clasped under her head, I fell by her on my knees and besought her to tell me what she meant and if she ever could care for me. I give you my word, my dear, and with my hand over your innocent heart, you know I dare not lie--in all that year and a half I had not even touched her lips. You cannot, happily imagine the torture of such a position.

Well, that day, she bent over to me on her side and said "What do you want, is it to kiss me? Chut! wait for that till we are married."

"Do you mean to marry me?" I gasped out. "She said 'yes,' Mildred, and brushed my cheek with her lips. What do you think I did then, Mildred?"

"How can I tell, dearest Dacre!"

"I fainted, dearest. Think of it. But I believed her, you see, and the revulsion was too great. In a moment or two I came to myself with the sounds of laughter in my ears. I was on her sofa--that d.a.m.ned sofa--pardon again, my dear--and she was standing with three of her cursed Frenchmen around her all laughing fit to kill themselves. I saw through it all in a moment. They had been on the other side of the curtains. I went straight up to her and said 'Did you say that you were ready to become my wife?' She only laughed and the men too with her.

Then I struck her--on her white breast, Milly--and struck the three Frenchmen on the face one after the other. They were so astonished that not one of them moved, and I parted the curtains, and left the house."

"Did you never see her again?"

"Never. I left Paris considerably wiser than I had entered it and avoided society generally. I had one year's life in London, and was considered no end of a catch by the mammas, I believe, but you can imagine I did not easily fall a victim. No. That is all my story, my dear, all at least that has been unguessed at by you. My health was very bad at home and beyond my love of sport I cared for nothing. I grew to hate my life in England, even England, though she had done me no harm.

Finally, I quarrelled with my father who married again, a woman we both disliked, Joseph and I, and so we turned our backs on the Old World and came out to Canada and to--you."

Mildred still lay, crying softly, in her husband's arms. "I had sometimes dreamt," continued Mr. Foxley, "of meeting some young girl who could love me and on whose innocence and sweetness I could rest and whom besides I should really love. It did not dawn upon me when I first saw you, that _you_ were the one I wanted, for we must confess, dear, that you were very plump and rather pink and spoke--"

"Why, Dacre, how can you? I was only fifteen! Cruel!"

"Yes, I know. And how you changed! Now, you are so different that it is not the same Mildred at all. Such is the power of a true love, my child, and we must always be happy,--ours is one of those marriages."

Theirs was indeed one of those marriages. Mr. Foxley took to farming and enriched his purse as well as his health. Mr. Joseph had an interview with Miss Dexter the nature of which I am not going to reveal, but which resulted in a placid intimacy between the two to the surprise of all save Milly who always said that "she thought she knew why." Miss Dexter frequently accompanied blind Mr. Joseph on his lonely walks or would sit with him when the others were out, as none but he cared to meet her.

Towards his death which occurred in about four years time, she was with him constantly, and died herself in a fortnight after, having left in her will, all her maiden belongings to her "good friend, Farmer Wise." The farmer was not much moved when informed of this fact, so incomprehensible to the rest of the village. He had always kept the little bottle with its cruel label, and had always feared and avoided poor, proud, foolish, wicked Charlotte Dexter since that Sat.u.r.day night.

As for Mr. George and his wife, I see a vision of a successful and happy husband and father in the prime of early old age (which means, that at fifty-three one is not old with a young wife and three sweet children) and of Mildred, who is always a little pale, has her eyes constantly turned up to her husband's with her lips brus.h.i.+ng her shoulder every now and then.

Still?

Ay, still and forever. And so ends my sketch of how the Mr. Foxleys came, stayed and never went away.

The Gilded Hammock.

Who does not know the beautiful Miss De Grammont? Isabel De Grammont, who lives by herself and is sole mistress of the brown-stone mansion in Fifth Avenue, the old family estate on the Hudson, the villa at Cannes, the first floor of a magnificently decayed palace at Naples, who has been everywhere, seen everything and--cared for n.o.body?

She reclines now in her latest craze--a hammock made of pure gold wire, fine and strong and dazzling as the late October sun s.h.i.+nes upon it stretched from corner to corner of her regally-furnished drawing-room.

Two gilded tripods securely fastened to the floor hold the ends of the hammock in which she lies. The rage for yellow holds her as it holds everyone who loves beauty and light and suns.h.i.+ne. Cus.h.i.+ons of yellow damask support her head, and a yellow tiger-skin is under her feet.

The windows are entirely hidden with thick amber draperies, and her own attire is a clinging gown of some soft silk of a deep creamy tint that as she sways to and fro in the hammock is slightly lifted, displaying a petticoat of darker tint, and Russian slippers of bronzed kid. Amber, large clear and priceless, gleams in its soft waxy glow in her hair, on her neck, round her waist, where it clasps a belt of thick gold cloth and makes a chain for a fan of yellow feathers.

Because you see, although it is autumn, it is very warm all through Miss De Grammont's mansion, as she insists on fires, huge bonfires, you may call them, of wood and peat in every room and on every hearth. Out of the fires grew the desire for the hammock.

"Why," says Miss De Grammont, with a faint yawn, "why must I only lie in a hammock in the Summer, and then, where n.o.body can see me? I will have a hammock made for the winter, to lie in and watch my fires by."

And so she did, for money is law and beauty creates duty, and one day, when the fas.h.i.+onable stream, the professional cliques and the artistic hangers-on called upon her "from three to six," they were confronted by the vision of an exquisitely beautiful woman dressed in faint yellow with great bunches of primroses in bra.s.s bowls from Morocco on a table by her side, who received them in a "gilded hammock," with her feet on a tiger-skin, and her chestnut hair catching a brighter tinge from the flames of her roaring fire, and the sunlight as it came in through the amber medium of the silken-draped windows.

The tea was Russian, like the slippers, and the butler who presented it was a mysterious foreigner who spoke five languages. The guests all wondered, as people always did, at De Grammont. n.o.body knew quite what she had done with herself since she had been left an orphan at the age of nineteen. She suddenly shot up into a woman, beautiful, with that patrician and clear-cut loveliness with yet a touch of the _bohemienne_ about it which only _les belles Americaines_ know. Then she took unto herself a maid, two dogs, and three Saratoga trunks and went over to Europe wandering about everywhere. At Cannes, she met and subjugated the heir to the crown; of this friends.h.i.+p the tiger-skin remained as a _souvenir_. The heir to the crown was not generous. Next came various members of emba.s.sies, all proud, all poor, and all frantically in love.

She laid all manner of traps for her lovers and discovered in nearly every case that these men were after her money. A certain Russian Grand Duke, from whom had come some superb amber ornaments--he being a man of more wealth than the others--never forgave her the insult she offered him. He sent her these ornaments from the same shop in Paris that he ordered--at the same time--a diamond star for a well-known ballet dancer, and the two purchases were charged to his account. Through some stupidity, the star came to her. She ordered her horses and drove the same day to the jewelers, who was most humble and anxious to retrieve his error. He showed her the amber. She examined it carefully. "It is genuine, and very fine," she said gravely. "I have lived in Russia and I know. I am very fond of amber. I will buy this myself from you, and you may inform His Highness of the fact."

The delighted shop-keeper did not ask her very much more than its genuine value and next day all Paris knew of the transaction and flocked to the Opera to see her in the ornaments which had cost the Russian Duke his friends.h.i.+p for the bearer. But though eccentric, impulsive and domineering, no whisper had ever attached itself to her name. On her return to her native New York, was she not welcomed, feted, honored, besieged with invitations everywhere? People felt she was different from the girl who went away. _She_ had been undecided, emotional, a trifle vain, self-conscious, guilty of moods--no small offence in society; this glorious creature was a queen, a G.o.ddess, always calm, always serene, always a trifle bored, always superbly the same. Her house she re-furnished altogether. The three Saratoga trunks were now represented by nine or ten English ones, dress baskets, large packing cases, and one mysterious long box which when opened contained several panels of old Florentine carved wood-work which interested all New York immensely.

Pictures and tapestries, armor and screens, and a gate of mediaeval wrought iron were all among her art treasures. The foreign butler was her _charge d'affaires_, and managed everything most wisely and even economically. He engaged a few servants in New York, her maid, housekeeper and the two housemaids she had brought out with her. Her house was the perfect abode of the most faultless aestheticism. It was perfection in every detail and in the _ensemble_ which greeted the eye, the ear, every sense, and all mental endowments, from the vestibule in marble and rugs to the inner boudoir and sanctum of the mistress of the house, hung with pale rose and straw-color in mingled folds of stamped Indian silks, priceless in color and quality. Two Persian cats adorned the lounge and one of her great dogs--a superb mastiff--occupied the rug before the door night and day, almost without rest.

Such were the general surroundings of Isabel de Grammont. Art and letters, music and general culture were inseparable from the daily life of such a woman as well as immediate beautiful presences, so that into this faultless house came everything new that the world offered in books, magazines, songs and new editions. Thanks to European travel, there was no language she could not read, no modern work she had not studied. Also came to her receptions the literary lions of New York.

Aspiring journalists, retiring editors, playrights and composers, a few actors and crowds of would-be poets flocked to the exquisite drawing-rooms hung with yellow, wherein the owner of so much magnificence lounged in her golden hammock. Sonnets were written of her descriptive of orioles flying in the golden west, and newspaper paragraphs indited weekly in her praise referred to her as the "Semiramus of a new and adoring society world." Baskets of flowers, tubs of flowers, barrels of flowers were sent weekly to her address, and she was solicited--on charitable, fas.h.i.+onable, religious, communistic, orthodox and socialistic grounds as lady patroness of this or member of that and subscriber to the other. In short, she was a success, and as nothing succeeds like success, we may take it that as the months rolled on, and the great house still maintained its superb hospitality and Miss De Grammont still appeared in her sumptuous carriage either smothered in furs or laces according to the seasons, she still maintained in like manner her position in society and her right to the homage and admiration of all cla.s.ses.

But this was not the case. Even a worm will turn and public opinion is very often a little vernacular, let us say. And it happened, that public opinion in the case of Miss De Grammont, began to turn, to raise itself up in fact and look a little about it and beyond it as we have all seen worms do--both in cheeses and out of them--when the fact that she lay most of the time in a gilded hammock swung in front of her drawing-room fire was announced from the pulpits of society journals. It may have been that her friends were devoid of imagination, that they were cold, prudish, satirical, unpoetical, unaesthetic, anything we like to call them, that will explain their action in the matter, for they clearly, one and all, disliked the notion of the hammock. One spoke of it disparagingly to another, who took it up and abused it to a third, who described it to a friend who "wrote for the papers." This gifted gentleman who lodged with a lady of the same temper and edited a fas.h.i.+on journal, concocted with her help a description of the thing which soon found its way into his paper and was then copied into hers. The public grew uneasy. It would swallow any story it was told about the Heir Apparent, for instance and a Russian Grand Duke--is it not the sublime prerogative of American women to dally with such small game as those gentlemen--but it kicked against the probability of such an actual fact as the hammock already described which seemed too ridiculous a whim to possess any real existence. However, the tongues of the fas.h.i.+onable callers, the professional cliques and the artistic hangers-on coincided in the affair to that extent that soon the existence of the gilded hammock was established and from that time Miss De Grammonts' popularity was on the wane. Dowagers looked askance and matrons posed in a patronizing manner, the flippant correspondents of society journals and the compilers of sonnets in which that very hammock had been eulogized and metaph.o.r.ed to distraction now waited upon her, if at all in an entirely different manner. Strange how all cla.s.ses began to recall the many peculiar or unaccountable things she had done, the extraordinary costumes she had worn, the fact that she lived alone, and the other fact that she made so few friends. From aspersions cast on her house, her equipage, her dresses, there came to be made strictures on her private character, her love affairs, her friends and career in Europe, her _menage_ at present in New York and the members thereof. Finally public opinion finding that all this made very little impression outwardly, upon the regal disdain of Miss De Grammont in her carriage or in her Opera-stall, however she might writhe and chafe when safely ensconced within that rose and straw-colored boudoir, made up its mind that the secret of the whole three volume novel, the key to the entire mystery lay with the--butler.

That black-moustached functionary, they whispered, had his mistress in his power. He had been a courier, and she had fallen in love with him abroad. Or he had been a well-known conjurer and coerced her through means little less than infernal to run away with him. He was a mesmerist, so they said, and could send her into trances at will. Then he had been the famous Man Milliner of Vienna, whose disappearance one fine day with the entire trousseau of an Austrian Grand d.u.c.h.ess had been a nine days' wonder. These dresses she wore, strange mixtures never seen on earth before of violet and blue, pink and pea-green, rose and lemon, were the identical ones prepared for the Grand d.u.c.h.ess. Finally, he was an Italian Prince rescued from a novel of "Ouida's," whom she had found living in exile, having to suffer punishment for some fiendish crime perpetrated in the days of his youth.

When the stories had reached this point, Miss De Grammont, to whom they were conveyed through papers, notes from "confidential friends," her maid and others, wrote a letter one day directed to the:

REV. LUKE FIELDING, Pastor, Congregational Church, Phippsville, Vermont.

A week or ten days after, Miss De Grammont, seated--not, in the gilded hammock though it still swung gracefully before the glowing fire--but in the cus.h.i.+ons which graced her window looking on the front of the house, saw a gentleman arrive in a cab. She rose hastily and opened the door of the room herself for her visitor. This was the Rev. Luke Fielding, a gentleman of the severest Puritanical cut and a true New Englander to boot. With his hat in his hand he advanced with an expression on his face of the deepest amazement and dismay which increased momentarily as he saw not only the gorgeous coloring and appointments of the room but the fair figure of its occupant. To be sure, she had with infinite difficulty selected the plainest dress she could find in her wardrobe to receive him in, a gown of dark green velvet made very simply, and high to the throat. But alas! there was no disguising the priceless lace at her wrists, or the gems that glittered on her firm white hands.

"My dear cousin!" said the lady, giving him both her hands.

"My dear cousin Isabel," returned the minister, laying his hat down on a plush-covered chair on which it looked curiously out of place, and taking her hands in his.

"My dear cousin Isabel, after so many years!"

"It is only eight years, cousin," returned the lady.