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The
extent of the calamity left Mr. Letterblair white and incapacitated.
"I've seen bad things in my time; but nothing as bad as this.
Everybody we know will be hit, one way or another.
And what will be done about Mrs. Beaufort? What CAN be done about her?
I pity Mrs. Manson Mingott as much as anybody: coming at her age,
there's no knowing what effect this affair may have on her.
She always believed in Beaufort--she made a friend of him!
And there's the whole Dallas connection: poor Mrs. Beaufort is
related to every one of you. Her only chance would be to leave her
husband--yet how can any one tell her so?
Her duty is at his side; and luckily she seems always to have been
blind to his private weaknesses."
There
was a knock, and Mr. Letterblair turned his head sharply.
"What is it? I can't be disturbed."
A
clerk brought in a letter for Archer and withdrew. Recognising his wife's
hand, the young man opened the envelope and read:
"Won't you please come up town as early as you can?
Granny had a slight stroke last night.
In some mysterious way she found out before any one else this awful
news about the bank. Uncle Lovell is away shooting, and the idea of the
disgrace has made poor Papa so nervous that he has a temperature and can't
leave his room. Mamma needs you
dreadfully, and I do hope you can get away at once and go straight to
Granny's."
Archer
handed the note to his senior partner, and a few minutes later was crawling
northward in a crowded horse-car, which he exchanged at Fourteenth Street
for one of the high staggering omnibuses of the Fifth Avenue line.
It was after twelve o'clock when this laborious vehicle dropped him
at old Catherine's. The sitting-room window on the ground floor, where she
usually throned, was tenanted by the inadequate figure of her daughter, Mrs.
Welland, who signed a haggard welcome as she caught sight of Archer; and at
the door he was met by May. The
hall wore the unnatural appearance peculiar to well-kept houses suddenly
invaded by illness: wraps and furs lay in heaps on the chairs, a doctor's
bag and overcoat were on the table, and beside them letters and cards had
already piled up unheeded.
May
looked pale but smiling: Dr. Bencomb, who had just come for the second time,
took a more hopeful view, and Mrs. Mingott's dauntless determination to live
and get well was already having an effect on her family.
May led Archer into the old lady's sitting-room, where the sliding
doors opening into the bedroom had been drawn shut, and the heavy yellow
damask portieres dropped over them; and here Mrs. Welland communicated to
him in horrified undertones the details of the catastrophe.
It appeared that the evening before something dreadful and mysterious
had happened. At about eight
o'clock, just after Mrs. Mingott had finished the game of solitaire that she
always played after dinner, the door-bell had rung, and a lady so thickly
veiled that the servants did not immediately recognise her had asked to be
received.
The
butler, hearing a familiar voice, had thrown open the sitting-room door,
announcing: "Mrs. Julius
Beaufort"--and had then closed it again on the two ladies.
They must have been together, he thought, about an hour.
When Mrs. Mingott's bell rang Mrs. Beaufort had already slipped away
unseen, and the old lady, white and vast and terrible, sat alone in her
great chair, and signed to the butler to help her into her room.
She seemed, at that time, though obviously distressed, in complete
control of her body and brain. The
mulatto maid put her to bed, brought her a cup of tea as usual, laid
everything straight in the room, and went away; but at three in the morning
the bell rang again, and the two servants, hastening in at this unwonted
summons (for old Catherine usually slept like a baby), had found their
mistress sitting up against her pillows with a crooked smile on her face and
one little hand hanging limp from its huge arm.
The
stroke had clearly been a slight one, for she was able to articulate and to
make her wishes known; and soon after the doctor's first visit she had begun
to regain control of her facial muscles.
But the alarm had been great; and proportionately great was the
indignation when it was gathered from Mrs. Mingott's fragmentary phrases
that Regina Beaufort had come to ask her--incredible effrontery!--to back up
her husband, see them through--not to "desert" them, as she called
it--in fact to induce the whole family to cover and condone their monstrous
dishonour.
"I
said to her: "Honour's
always been honour, and honesty honesty, in Manson Mingott's house, and will
be till I'm carried out of it feet first,'" the old woman had stammered
into her daughter's ear, in the thick voice of the partly paralysed.
"And when she said: `But
my name, Auntie--my name's Regina Dallas,' I said:
`It was Beaufort when he covered you with jewels, and it's got to
stay Beaufort now that he's covered you with shame.'"
So
much, with tears and gasps of horror, Mrs. Welland imparted, blanched and
demolished by the unwonted obligation of having at last to fix her eyes on
the unpleasant and the discreditable. "If
only I could keep it from your father-in-law: he always says: `Augusta, for
pity's sake, don't destroy my last illusions' --and how am I to prevent his
knowing these horrors?" the poor lady wailed.
"After
all, Mamma, he won't have SEEN them," her daughter suggested; and Mrs.
Welland sighed: "Ah, no;
thank heaven he's safe in bed. And
Dr. Bencomb has promised to keep him there till poor Mamma is better, and
Regina has been got away somewhere."
Archer
had seated himself near the window and was gazing out blankly at the
deserted thoroughfare. It was
evident that he had been summoned rather for the moral support of the
stricken ladies than because of any specific aid that he could render. Mr. Lovell Mingott had been telegraphed for, and messages
were being despatched by hand to the members of the family living in New
York; and meanwhile there was nothing to do but to discuss in hushed tones
the consequences of Beaufort's dishonour and of his wife's unjustifiable
action.
Mrs.
Lovell Mingott, who had been in another room writing notes, presently
reappeared, and added her voice to the discussion. In THEIR day, the elder ladies agreed, the wife of a man who
had done anything disgraceful in business had only one idea: to efface
herself, to disappear with him. "There
was the case of poor Grandmamma Spicer; your great-grandmother, May.
Of course," Mrs. Welland hastened to add, "your great-
grandfather's money difficulties were private--losses at cards, or signing a
note for somebody--I never quite knew, because Mamma would never speak of
it. But she was brought up in
the country because her mother had to leave New York after the disgrace,
whatever it was: they lived up the Hudson alone, winter and sum- met, till
Mamma was sixteen. It would
never have occurred to Grandmamma Spicer to ask the family to `countenance'
her, as I understand Regina calls it; though a private disgrace is nothing
compared to the scandal of ruining hundreds of innocent people."
"Yes,
it would be more becoming in Regina to hide her own countenance than to talk
about other people's," Mrs. Lovell Mingott agreed.
"I understand that the emerald necklace she wore at the Opera
last Friday had been sent on approval from Ball and Black's in the
afternoon. I wonder if they'll
ever get it back?"
Archer
listened unmoved to the relentless chorus. The idea of absolute financial
probity as the first law of a gentleman's code was too deeply ingrained in
him for sentimental considerations to weaken it.
An adventurer like Lemuel Struthers might build up the millions of
his Shoe Polish on any number of shady dealings; but unblemished honesty was
the noblesse oblige of old financial New York.
Nor did Mrs. Beaufort's fate greatly move Archer.
He felt, no doubt, more sorry for her than her indignant relatives;
but it seemed to him that the tie between husband and wife, even if
breakable in prosperity, should be indissoluble in misfortune.
As Mr. Letterblair had said, a wife's place was at her husband's side
when he was in trouble; but society's place was not at his side, and Mrs.
Beaufort's cool assumption that it was seemed almost to make her his
accomplice. The mere idea of a woman's appealing to her family to screen
her husband's business dishonour was inadmissible, since it was the one
thing that the Family, as an institution, could not do.
The
mulatto maid called Mrs. Lovell Mingott into the hall, and the latter came
back in a moment with a frowning brow.
"She
wants me to telegraph for Ellen Olenska.
I had written to Ellen, of course, and to Medora; but now it seems
that's not enough. I'm to
telegraph to her immediately, and to tell her that she's to come
alone."
The
announcement was received in silence. Mrs.
Welland sighed resignedly, and May rose from her seat and went to gather up
some newspapers that had been scattered on the floor.
"I
suppose it must be done," Mrs. Lovell Mingott continued, as if hoping
to be contradicted; and May turned back toward the middle of the room.
"Of
course it must be done," she said.
"Granny knows what she wants, and we must carry out all her
wishes. Shall I write the
telegram for you, Auntie? If it
goes at once Ellen can probably catch tomorrow morning's train." She pronounced the syllables of the name with a peculiar
clearness, as if she had tapped on two silver bells.
"Well,
it can't go at once. Jasper and
the pantry-boy are both out with notes and telegrams."
May
turned to her husband with a smile. "But
here's Newland, ready to do anything. Will
you take the telegram, Newland? There'll
be just time before luncheon."
Archer
rose with a murmur of readiness, and she seated herself at old Catherine's
rosewood "Bonheur du Jour," and wrote out the message in her large
immature hand. When it was
written she blotted it neatly and handed it to Archer.
"What
a pity," she said, "that you and Ellen will cross each other on
the way!--Newland," she added, turning to her mother and aunt, "is
obliged to go to Washington about a patent law-suit that is coming up before
the Supreme Court. I suppose
Uncle Lovell will be back by tomorrow night, and with Granny improving so
much it doesn't seem right to ask Newland to give up an important engagement
for the firm--does it?"
She
paused, as if for an answer, and Mrs. Welland hastily declared:
"Oh, of course not, darling.
Your Granny would be the last person to wish it."
As Archer left the room with the telegram, he heard his mother-in-
law add, presumably to Mrs. Lovell Mingott:
"But why on earth she should make you telegraph for Ellen
Olenska--" and May's clear voice rejoin:
"Perhaps it's to urge on her again that after all her duty is
with her husband."
The
outer door closed on Archer and he walked hastily away toward the telegraph
office.
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