  LITTLE NOVELS BY FAVOURITE AUTHORS
Mrs. Pendleton’s Four-in-hand
GERTRUDE ATHERTON Gertrude Atherton Mrs. Pendleton’s Four-in-hand
BY GERTRUDE ATHERTON
AUTHOR OF “THE CONQUEROR,” ETC. New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY London: Macmillan & Co., Ltd. 1903
All rights reserved Copyright, 1902, By MRS. GERTRUDE ATHERTON.
Copyright, 1903, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up, electrotyped, and published June, 1903. Norwood Press J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. ILLUSTRATIONS
MRS. PENDLETON’S FOUR-IN-HAND IJessica, her hands clenched and teeth set, stood looking with hard eyes at a small heap of letters lying on the floor. The sun, blazing through the open window, made her blink unconsciously, and the ocean’s deep voice rising to the Newport sands seemed to reiterate:— “Contempt! Contempt!” Tall, finely pointed with the indescribable air and style of the New York woman, she did not suggest intimate knowledge of the word the ocean hurled to her. In that moss-green room, with her haughty face and clean skin, her severe faultless gown, she rather suggested the type to whom poets a century hence would indite their sonnets—when she and her kind had been set in the frame of the past. And if her dress was conventional, she had let imagination play with her hair. The clear evasive colour of flame, it was brushed down to her neck, parted, crossed, and brought tightly up each side of her head just behind her ears. Meeting above her bang, the curling ends allowed to fly loose, it vaguely resembled Medusa’s wreath. Her eyes were grey, the colour of mid-ocean, calm, beneath a grey sky. Not twenty-four, she had the repose and “air” of one whose cradle had been rocked by Society’s foot; and although at this moment her pride was in the dust, there was more anger than shame in her face. The door opened and her hostess entered. As Mrs. Pendleton turned slowly and looked at her, Miss Decker gave a little cry. “‘I HAVE BEEN INSULTED.’” “Jessica!” she said, “what is the matter?” “I have been insulted,” said Mrs. Pendleton, deliberately. She felt a savage pleasure in further humiliating herself. “Insulted! You!” Miss Decker’s correct voice and calm brown eyes could not have expressed more surprise and horror if a foreign diplomatist had snapped his fingers in the face of the President’s wife. Even her sleek brown hair almost quivered. “Yes,” Mrs. Pendleton went on in the same measured tones; “four men have told me how much they despise me.” She walked slowly up and down the room. Miss Decker sank upon the divan, incredulity, curiosity, expectation, feminine satisfaction marching across her face in rapid procession. “I have always maintained that a married woman has a perfect right to flirt,” continued Mrs. Pendleton. “The more if she has married an old man and life is somewhat of a bore. ‘Why do you marry an old man?’ snaps the virtuous world. ‘What a contemptible creature you are to marry for anything but love!’ it cries, as it eats the dust at Mammon’s feet. I married an old man because with the wisdom of twenty, I had made up my mind that I could never love and that position and wealth alone made up the sum of existence. I had more excuse than a girl who has been always poor, for I had never known the arithmetic of money until my father failed, the year before I married. People who have never known wealth do not realise the purely physical suffering of those inured to luxury and suddenly bereft of it: it makes no difference what one’s will or strength of character is. So—I married Mr. Pendleton. So—I amused myself with other men. Mr. Pendleton gave me my head, because I kept clear of scandal: he knew my pride. Now, if I had spent my life demoralising myself and the society that received me, I could not be more bitterly punished. I suppose I deserve it. I suppose that the married flirt is just as poor and paltry and contemptible a creature as the moralist and the minister depict her. We measure morals by results. Therefore I hold to-day that it is the business of a lifetime to throw stones at the married flirt.” “For Heaven’s sake,” cried Miss Decker, in a tone of exasperation, “stop moralising and tell me what has happened!” “Do you remember Clarence Trent, Edward Dedham, John Severance, Norton Boswell?” “Do I? Poor moths!” “They were apparently devoted to me.” Dryly: “Apparently.” “How long is it since Mr. Pendleton’s death?” “About—he died on the sixteenth—why, yes, it was six months yesterday since he died.” “Exactly. You see these four notes on the floor? They are four proposals—four proposals”—and she gave a short hard laugh through lips whose red had suddenly faded—“from the four men I have just mentioned.” Miss Decker gasped. “Four proposals! Then what on earth are you angry about?” Mrs. Pendleton’s lip curled scornfully. She did not condescend to answer at once. “You are clever enough at times,” she said coldly, after a moment. “It is odd you cannot grasp the very palpable fact that four proposals received on the same day, by the same mail, from four men who are each other’s most intimate friends, can mean but one thing—a practical joke. Oh!” she cried, the jealously mastered passion springing into her voice, “that is what infuriates me—more even than the insult—that they should think me such a fool as to be so easily deceived! O—h—h!” “If I remember aright,” ventured Miss Decker, feebly, “the intimacy to which you allude was a thing of the past some time before you disappeared from the world. In fact, they were not on speaking terms.” “Oh, they have made it up long ago! Don’t make any weak explanations, but tell me how to turn the tables on them. I would give my hair and wear a grey wig—my complexion and paint—to get even with them. And I will. But how? How?” She paced up and down the room with nervous steps, glancing for inspiration from the delicate etchings on the walls to the divan that was like a moss bank, to the carpet that might have been a patch of forest green, and thence to the sparkling ocean. Miss Decker offered no suggestions. She had perfect faith in the genius of her friend. Suddenly Mrs. Pendleton paused and turned to her hostess. The red had come back to her curled mouth. Her eyes were luminous, as when the sun breaks through the grey sky and falls, dazzling, on the waters. “I have it!” she said. “And a week from to-day—I will keep them in suspense that long—New York will have no corner small enough to hold them.” IIThe hot September day was ten hours old. The office of the St. Christopher Club was still deserted but for a clerk who looked warm and sleepy. The postman had just left a heap of letters on his desk, and he was sorting them for their various pigeonholes. A young man entered, and the clerk began to turn over the letters more rapidly. The newcomer, tall, thin, with sharp features and shrewd American face, had an extremely nervous manner. As he passed through the vestibule a clerk at a table put a mark opposite the name “Mr. Clarence Trent,” to indicate that he was in the Club. “Any letters?” he demanded of the office clerk. The man handed him two, and he darted into the morning-room and tore one open, letting the other fall to the floor. He read as follows:— “Mon ami!—I have but this moment received your letter, which seems to have been delayed. [“Of course! Why did I not think of that?”] I say nothing here of the happiness which its contents have given me. Come at once. “Jessica Pendleton. “Our engagement must be a profound secret until the year of my mourning is over.” Trent’s drab and scanty whiskers seemed to curl into hard knots over the nervous facial contortion in which he indulged. Nature being out of material when at work upon him had seemingly constructed his muscles from stout twine. An inch of it joining his nose to the upper lip, the former’s pointed tip was wont to punctuate his conversation and emotions with the direct downward movement of a machine needle puncturing cloth. He crumpled the letter in his bony nervous fingers, and his pale sharp grey eyes opened and shut with sudden rapidity. “I knew I could not be mistaken,” he thought triumphantly. “She is mine!” In the vestibule another name was checked off,—“Mr. Norton Boswell,”—and its owner made eagerly for the desk. His dark intellectual face was flushed, and his sensitive mouth twitched suddenly as the clerk handed him a roll of Mss. “Never mind that,” he said hastily. “Give me my letters.” The clerk handed him several, and, whisking them from left to right through his impatient hands, he thrust all but one into his pocket and walked rapidly to the morning-room. Seating himself before a table, he looked at the envelope as if not daring to solve its mystery, then hastily tore it apart. “Mon ami! [Boswell, despite his ardour, threw a glance down a certain corridor in his memory and thought with kindling eyes: “Oh! with what divine sweetness did she use to utter those two little words!” Then he fixed his eyes greedily on the page once more.] I have but this moment received your letter, which seems to have been delayed.” [“Ah!” rapturously, the paper dancing before his eyes, “that accounts for it. I knew she was the most tender-hearted creature on earth.”] “I say nothing here of the happiness which its contents have given me. Come at once. “Jessica Pendleton. “Our engagement must be a profound secret until the year of my mourning is over.” Boswell, with quivering nostrils, plunged a pen into the ink-well, and in that quiet room two hearts thumped so loudly that only passion and scratching pens averted mutual and withering contempt. As Boswell left the office a very young man entered it. He possessed that nondescript blond complexion which seems to be the uniform of the New York youth of fashion. The ciphers of the Four Hundred have achieved the well-scrubbed appearance of the Anglo-Saxon more successfully than his accent. Mr. Dedham might have been put through a clothes-wringer. Even his minute and recent moustache looked as if each hair had its particular nurse, and his pink and chubby face defied conscientious dissipation. He sauntered up to the clerk’s desk with an elaborate affectation of indifference, and drawled a demand for his mail. The clerk handed him a dainty note sealed with a crest. He accepted it with an absent air, although a look of genuine boyish delight thrust its way through the fishy inertness of his average expression. It took him a minute and a half to get into the morning-room and read these fateful lines:— “Mon ami,—[“Enchanting phrase! I can hear her say it.”] I have but this moment received your letter, which seems to have been delayed. [“Ah! this perfume! this perfume!”] I say nothing here of the happiness which its contents have given me. Come at once. “Jessica Pendleton. “Our engagement must be a profound secret until the year of my mourning is over.” A rosy tide wandered to the roots of Mr. Dedham’s ashen locks, and he made a wild uncertain dab at his upper lip. Again there was no sound in the morning-room of the St. Christopher Club but the furious dashing of pens, the rending of parchment paper, the sudden scraping of a nervous foot. A tall broad-shouldered young man, with much repose of face and manner, entered the office from the avenue, glanced at the pigeon-holes above the clerk’s desk, then sauntered deliberately into the morning-room and looked out of the window. A slight rigidity of the nostrils alone betokened the impatience within, and his uneasy thoughts ran somewhat as follows:— “What a fool I have been! After all my experience with women to make such an ass of myself over the veriest coquette that ever breathed; but her preference for me last winter was so pointed—oh, damnation!” He stood gnawing his underlip at the lumbering ’bus, but turned suddenly as a man approached from behind and presented several letters on a tray. The first and only one he opened ran thus:— “Mon ami!—I have but this moment received your letter, which seems to have been delayed. I say nothing here of the happiness which its contents have given me. Come at once. “Jessica Pendleton. “Our engagement must be a profound secret until the year of my mourning is over.” Severance folded the note, his face paling a little. “Well, well, she is true after all. What a brute I was to misjudge her!” He strolled back to the office. “I will go home and write to her, and to-morrow I shall see her! Great Heaven! Were six months ever so long before?” As he turned from the coat-room Boswell entered the office by the opposite door. “The fellow looks as gay as a lark,” he thought. “He hasn’t looked like that for six months. I believe I’ll make it up with him—particularly as I’ve come out ahead!” “Give me that package,” demanded Boswell dreamily of the clerk. Then he caught sight of Severance. “Why, Jack, old fellow!” he cried, “how are you? Haven’t seen you looking so well for an age. Don’t go out. It’s too hot.” “Oh, hang it! I’ve got to. I’m off for Newport to-morrow. It’s so infernally dull in town.” “Going to Newport to-morrow! So am I. My aunt is quite ill and has sent for me. I’m her heir, you know.” “No? Didn’t know you had an aunt. I congratulate you. Hope she’ll go off, I’m sure.” “Hope so. Here comes Teddy,—looks like an elongated rubber ball. It’s some time since I’ve seen him so buoyant. How are you, Teddy?” “How are you, Norton, old boy?” explained Dedham, rapturously. “How glad I am to hear the old name once more! You’ve given me the cold shoulder of late.” “Oh, well, my boy, you know men will be fools occasionally. But give by-gones the go-by. I’m going to Newport to-morrow. Can I take any messages to your numerous—” “Dear boy! I’m going to Newport to-morrow. Sea-bathing ordered by my physician.” “Jove! I am in luck! Severance is going over, too. We’ll have a jolly time of it.” “I should say so!” murmured Teddy. “Heaven! Hello, Sev, how are you? Didn’t see you. As long as we are all going the same way we might as well bury our hatchet. What do you say, dear boy?” “Only too happy,” said Severance, heartily. “And may we never unearth it again. Here comes Trent. He looks as if he had just been returned for the Senate.” “How are you?” demanded Trent, peremptorily. “You have made it up? Don’t leave me out in the cold.” Dedham made a final lunge for his deserting dignity, then sent it on its way. “I should think not,” he cried, with dancing eyes. “Give me your fist.” In a moment they were all shaking each other’s hand off, and good-fellowship was streaming from every eye. “Come over to my rooms, all of you,” gurgled Teddy, “and have a drink.” “With pleasure, my boy,” said Trent. “But native rudeness will compel me to drink and run. I am off for Newport—” “Newport!” cried three voices. “Yes; anything strange in that? I’m going on vital business connected with the coming election.” “This is a coincidence!” exclaimed Boswell, with the appreciation of the romanticist. “Why, we are all going to Newport. Dedham in search of health, Severance of pleasure, and I of a fortune—only the old mummy is always making out her cheques, but never passes them in. Well, I hope we’ll see a lot of each other when we get there.” “Oh, of course,” said Severance, hastily. “We will have many another game of polo together.” “Well,” said Dedham, “come over to my rooms now and drink to the success of our separate quests.” IIIMiss Decker paced restlessly up and down the sea-room waiting for the mail. Mrs. Pendleton, more composed but equally nervous, lay in a long chair, with expectation in her eyes and triumph on her lips. “Will they answer or will they not?” exclaimed Miss Decker. “If the mail would only come! Will they be crushed?—furious?—or—will they apologise?” “I care nothing what they do,” said Mrs. Pendleton, languidly. “All I wanted was to see them when they received my notes, and later when they met to compare them. I hold that my revenge is a masterpiece—to turn the joke on them and to let them see that they could not make a fool of me at the same time! Oh! how dared they?” “Well, they’ll never perpetrate another practical joke, my dear. You have your revenge, Jessica; you have blunted their sense of humour for life. I doubt if they ever even read the funny page of a newspaper again. Here comes the postman. There! the bell has rung. Why doesn’t Hart go? I’ll go myself in a minute.” Mrs. Pendleton’s nostrils dilated a little, but she did not turn her head even when the manservant entered and held a silver tray before her. Four letters lay thereon. She placed them on her lap but did not speak until the man had left the room. Then she looked at Miss Decker and gave the letters a little sweep with the tips of her fingers. “They have answered,” she said. “Oh, Jessica, for Heaven’s sake don’t be so iron-bound!” cried her friend. “Read them.” “You can read them if you choose. I have no interest beyond knowing that they received mine.” Miss Decker needed no second invitation. She caught the letters from Mrs. Pendleton’s lap and tore one of them open. She read a few lines, then dropped limply on a chair. “Jessica!” she whispered, with a little agonised gasp, “listen to this.” Mrs. Pendleton turned her eyes inquiringly, but would not stoop to curiosity. “Well,” she said, “I am listening.” “It is from Mr. Trent. And—listen:— “‘Angel! I think if you had kept me waiting one day longer you would have met a lunatic wandering on the Newport cliffs. Last night I attended a primary and made such an egregious idiot of myself (although I was complimented later upon my speech) that I shall never understand why I was not hissed. But hereafter I shall be inspired. And how you will shine in Washington! That is the place for our talents. After reading your reserved yet impassioned note, I do not feel that I can talk more rationally upon politics than while in suspense. What do you think I did? I made it all up with Severance, Dedham, and Boswell, whom I met just after receiving it. I could afford to forgive them. They, by the way, go to Newport to-morrow. Farewell, most brilliant of women, destined by Heaven to be the wife of a diplomatist—for I will confide to you that that is my ultimate ambition. Until to-morrow, “‘Clarence Trent.’” “Well! What do you think of that?” A pink wave had risen to Mrs. Pendleton’s hair, then receded and broken upon the haughty curve of her mouth. “Read the others,” she said briefly. “Oh! how can you be so cool?” and Miss Decker opened another note with trembling fingers. “It is from Norton Boswell:— “‘You once chided me for looking at the world through grey spectacles, and bade me always hope for the best until the worst was decided. When you were near to encourage me the sky was often pink, but even the memory of the last six months has faded before the agonised suspense of these seven days. Oh! I shall be an author now, if suffering is the final lesson. But what incoherent stuff I am writing! Loneliness and despair are alike forgotten. I can write no more! To-morrow! To-morrow! “‘Boswell.’” “Read Severance’s,” said Jessica, quickly. “I believe you like that man!” exclaimed Miss Decker. “I think he’s a brute. But you’re in a scrape. This is from the lordly Severance:— “‘An Englishman once said of you, with a drawl which wound the words about my memory—“Y-a-a-s; she flirts on ice, so to speak.” Coldest and most subtle of women, why did you keep me in suspense for seven long days? Do you think I believe that fiction of the delayed letter? You forget that we have met before. But why torment me? Did I not in common decency have to wait six months before I dared put my fate to the test? How I counted those days! I had a calendar and a pencil—in short, I made a fool of myself. Now the chess-board is between us once more: we start on even ground; we will play a keen and close game to the end of our natural lives. I love you; but I know you. I will kiss the rod—until we marry; after that—we shall play chess. I shall see you to-morrow. “‘S.’” “Well, that’s what I call a beast of a man,” said Miss Decker. “I hate him!” said Jessica, between her teeth. She looked hard at the ocean. Under its grey sky to-day it was the colour of her eyes, as cold and as unfathomable. The glittering Medusa-like ends of her hair seemed to leap upward and writhe at each other. “I should think you would hate him,” said Miss Decker; “he is the only living man who ever got the best of you. But listen to what your devoted infant has to say. Nice little boy, Teddy:— “‘Dearest! Sweetest! Do you know that I am almost dancing for joy at this moment? Indeed, my feet are going faster than my pen. To think! To think!—you really do love me after all. But I always said you were not a flirt. I knocked a man down once and challenged him to a duel because he said you were. He wouldn’t fight, but I had the satisfaction of letting him know what I thought of him. And now I can prove it to all the world! But I can’t write any more. There are three blots on this now—the pen is jumping and you know I never was much at writing letters. But I can talk, and to-morrow I will tell you all. “‘Your own Teddy. “‘P.S.—Is it not queer—quite a coincidence—Severance, Trent, and Boswell are going to Newport to-morrow, too. How proud I shall be! But no, I take that back; I only pity them, poor devils, from the bottom of my heart; or I would if it wasn’t filled up with you. “‘T.’” “Well, madam, you’re in a scrape, and I don’t envy you. What will you do?” Mrs. Pendleton pressed her head against the back of the chair, straining her head upward as if she wanted the salt breeze to rasp her throat. “I have been so bored for six months,” she said slowly. “Let them come. I will see each of them alone, and keep the farce going for a week or so. It will be amusing—to be engaged to four men at once. You will command the forces and see that they do not meet. Of course, it cannot be kept up very long, and when all resources are failing I will let them meet and make them madly jealous. It will do one of them good, at least.” “Well, you have courage,” ejaculated Miss Decker. “You can’t do it. But yes, you can. If the woman lives who can play jackstraws with firebrands, that woman is you. And what fun! We are so dull here—both in mourning. I’ll help you. I’ll carry out your instructions like a major.” Mrs. Pendleton rose and walked up and down the room once or twice. “There is only one thing,” she said, drawing her brows together: “if I am engaged to them they will want to—h’m—kiss me, you know. It will be rather awkward. I never was engaged to any one but Mr. Pendleton, and he used to kiss me on my forehead and say, ‘My dear child.’ I am afraid they won’t be contented with that.” “I am afraid they won’t! But you have tact enough. Come, say you will do it.” “Yes,” said Jessica, “I will do it. In my boarding-school days I used to dream of being a tragedy queen; I find myself thrust by circumstances into comedy. But I have no doubt it will suit my talents better.” IV |
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