Mrs. James Hawley-Crowles, more keenly perceptive than her sister, had seized upon Carmen with avidity bred of hope long deferred. The scourge of years of fruitless social striving had rendered her desperate, and she would have staged a ballet on her dining table, with her own ample self as premiÈre danseuse, did the attraction but promise recognition from the blasÉ members of fashionable New York’s ultra-conservative set. From childhood she had looked eagerly forward through the years with an eye single to such recognition as life’s desideratum. To this end she had bartered both youth and beauty with calculated precision for the Hawley-Crowles money bags; only to weep floods of angry tears when the bargain left her social status unchanged, and herself tied to a decrepit old rounder, whose tarnished name wholly neutralized the purchasing power of his ill-gotten gold. Fortunately for the reputations of them both, her husband had the good sense to depart this life ere the divorce proceedings which she had long had in contemplation were instituted; whereupon the stricken widow had him carefully incinerated and his ashes tenderly deposited in a chaste urn in a mausoleum which her architect had taken oath cost more than the showy Ames vault by many thousands. The period of decorous mourning past, Mrs. Hawley-Crowles blithely doffed her weeds and threw 66 herself again into the terrific competition for social standing, determined this time that it should be a warfare to the death.

And so it bade fair to prove to her, when the eminent nerve specialist, Dr. Bascom Ross, giving a scant half hour to the consideration of her case, at the modest charge of one hundred dollars, warned her to declare a truce and flee to the Alps for unalloyed rest. She complied, and had returned with restored health and determination just as her sister came up from South America, bringing the odd little “savage” whom Reed had discovered in the wilds of GuamocÓ. A prolonged week-end at Newport, the last of the summer season, accounted for her absence from the city when Reed brought Carmen to her house, where he and his wife were making their temporary abode. Six months later, in her swift appraisal of the girl in the Elwin school, to whom she had never before given a thought, she seemed to see a light.

“It does look like a desperate chance, I admit,” she said, when recounting her plans to her sister a day or so later. “But I’ve played every other card in my hand; and now this girl is going to be either a trump or a joker. All we need is a word from the Beaubien, and the following week will see an invitation at our door from Mrs. J. Wilton Ames. The trick is to reach the Beaubien. That I calculate to do through Carmen. And I’m going to introduce the girl as an Inca princess. Why not? It will make a tremendous hit.”

Mrs. Reed was not less ambitious than her sister, but hitherto she had lacked the one essential to social success, money. In addition, she had committed the egregious blunder of marrying for love. And now that the honeymoon had become a memory, and she faced again her growing ambition, with a struggling husband who had neither name nor wealth to aid her, she had found her own modest income of ten thousand a year, which she had inherited from her mother, only an aggravation. True, in time her wandering father would pass away; and there was no doubt that his vast property would fall to his daughters, his only living kin. But at present, in view of his aggressively good health and disregard for his relatives, her only recourse was to attach herself to her wealthy, sharp-witted sister, and hope to be towed safely into the social swim, should that scheming lady ultimately achieve her high ambition.

Just why Mrs. Hawley-Crowles should have seen in Carmen a means of reaching a woman of the stamp of the Beaubien, and through her the leader of the most exclusive social set in the metropolis, is difficult to say. But thus does the human mind often seek to further its own dubious aims through guileless 67 innocence and trust. Perhaps Mrs. Hawley-Crowles had likewise a slight trace of that clairvoyance of wisdom which so characterized the girl. But with this difference, that she knew not why she was led to adopt certain means; while Carmen, penetrating externals, consciously sought to turn those who would employ her into channels for the expression of her own dominant thought. Be that as it may, the Beaubien was now the stone before the door of their hope, and Carmen the lever by which these calculating women intended it should be moved.

“The Beaubien, my dear,” explained Mrs. Hawley-Crowles to her inquisitive sister, whose life had been lived almost entirely away from New York, “is J. Wilton Ames’s very particular friend, of long standing. As I told you, I have recently been going through my late unpleasant husband’s effects, and have unearthed letters and memoranda which throw floods of light upon Jim’s early indiscretions and his association with both the Beaubien and Ames. Jim once told me, in a burst of alcoholic confidence, that she had saved him from J. Wilton’s clutches in the dim past, and for that he owed her endless gratitude, as well as for never permitting him to darken her door again. Now I have never met the Beaubien. Few women have. But I dare say she knows all about us. However, the point that concerns us now is this: she has a hold on Ames, and, unless rumor is wide of the truth, when she hints to him that his wife’s dinner list or yachting party seems incomplete without such or such a name, why, the list is immediately revised.”

The position which the Beaubien held was, if Madam On-dit was not to be wholly discredited, to say the least, unique. It was not as social dictator that she posed, for in a great cosmopolitan city where polite society is infinitely complex in its make-up such a position can scarcely be said to exist. It was rather as an influence that she was felt, an influence never seen, but powerful, subtle, and wholly inexplicable, working now through this channel, now through that, and effecting changes in the social complexion of conservative New York that were utterly in defiance of the most rigid convention. Particularly was her power felt in the narrow circle over which Mrs. J. Wilton Ames presided, by reason of her own and her husband’s aristocratic descent, and the latter’s bursting coffers and supremacy in the realm of finance.

Only for her sagacity, the great influence of the woman would have been short-lived. But, whatever else might be said of her, the Beaubien was wise, with a discretion that was positively uncanny. Tall, voluptuous, yet graceful as a fawn; black, wavy, abundant hair; eyes whose dark, liquid depths 68 held unfathomable mysteries; gracious, affable, yet keen as a razor blade; tender, even sentimental on occasions, with an infinite capacity for either love or hate, this many-sided woman, whose brilliant flashes of wit kept the savant or rouÉ at her table in an uproar, could, if occasion required, found an orphanage or drop a bichloride tablet in the glass of her rival with the same measure of calculating precision and disdain of the future. It was said of her that she might have laid down her life for the man she loved. It is probable that she never met with one worth the sacrifice.

While yet in short dresses she had fled from her boarding school, near a fashionable resort in the New Hampshire hills, with a French Colonel, Gaspard de Beaubien, a man twice her age. With him she had spent eight increasingly miserable years in Paris. Then, her withered romance carefully entombed in the secret places of her heart, she secured a divorce from the roistering colonel, together with a small settlement, and set sail for New York to hunt for larger and more valuable game.

With abundant charms and sang-froid for her capital, she rented an expensive apartment in a fashionable quarter of the city, and then settled down to business. Whether she would have fallen upon bad days or not will never be known, for the first haul of her widespread net landed a fish of supreme quality, J. Wilton Ames. On the plea of financial necessity, she had gone boldly to his office with the deed to a parcel of worthless land out on the moist sands of the New Jersey shore, which the unscrupulous Gaspard de Beaubien had settled upon her when she severed the tie which bound them, and which, after weeks of careful research, she discovered adjoined a tract owned by Ames. Pushing aside office boy, clerk, and guard, she reached the inner sanctum of the astonished financier himself and offered to sell at a ruinous figure. A few well-timed tears, an expression of angelic innocence on her beautiful face, a despairing gesture or two with her lovely arms, coupled with the audacity which she had shown in forcing an entrance into his office, effected the man’s capitulation. She was then in her twenty-fourth year.

The result was that she cast her net no more, but devoted herself thenceforth with tender consecration to her important catch. In time Ames brought a friend, the rollicking James Hawley-Crowles, to call upon the charming Beaubien. In time, too, as was perfectly natural, a rivalry sprang up between the men, which the beautiful creature watered so tenderly that the investments which she was enabled to make under the direction of these powerful rivals flourished like Jack’s beanstalk, and she was soon able to leave her small apartment and take a suite but a few blocks from the Ames mansion.

At length the strain between Ames and Hawley-Crowles reached the breaking point; and then the former decided that the woman’s bewitching smiles should thenceforth be his alone. He forthwith drew the seldom sober Hawley-Crowles into certain business deals, with the gentle connivance of the suave Beaubien herself, and at length sold the man out short and presented a claim on every dollar he possessed. Hawley-Crowles awoke from his blissful dream sober and trimmed. But then the Beaubien experienced one of her rare and inexplicable revulsions of the ethical sense, and a compromise had to be effected, whereby the Hawley-Crowles fortune was saved, though the man should see the Beaubien no more.

By this time her beauty was blooming in its utmost profusion, and her prowess had been fairly tried. She took a large house, furnished it like unto a palace, and proceeded to throw her gauntlet in the face of the impregnable social caste. There she drew about her a circle of bon-vivants, artists, littÉrateurs, politicians, and men of finance––with never a woman in the group. Yet in her new home she established a social code as rigid as the Median law, and woe to him within her gates who thereafter, with or without intent, passed the bounds of respectful decorum. His name was heard no more on her rosy lips.

Her dinners were Lucullan in their magnificence; and over the rare wines and imperial cigars which she furnished, her guests passed many a tip and prognostication anent the market, which she in turn quietly transmitted to her brokers. She came to understand the game thoroughly, and, while it was her heyday of glorious splendor, she played hard. She had bartered every priceless gift of nature for gold––and she made sure that the measure she received in return was full. Her gaze was ever upon the approaching day when those charms would be but bitter memories; and it was her grim intention that when it came silken ease should compensate for their loss.

Ten years passed, and the Beaubien’s reign continued with undimmed splendor. In the meantime, the wife of J. Wilton Ames had reached the zenith of her ambitions and was the acknowledged leader in New York’s most fashionable social circle. These two women never met. But, though the Beaubien had never sought the entrÉe to formal society, preferring to hold her own court, at which no women attended, she exercised a certain control over it through her influence upon the man Ames. What Mrs. Ames knew of the long-continued relations between her husband and this woman was never divulged. And doubtless she was wholly satisfied that his 70 wealth and power afforded her the position which her heart had craved; and, that secure, she was willing to leave him to his own methods of obtaining diversion. But rumor was persistent, maliciously so; and rumor declared that the list of this envied society dame was not drawn up without the approval of her husband and the woman with whom his leisure hours were invariably spent. Hence the hope of Mrs. Hawley-Crowles, whose doting mate had once fawned in the perfumed wake of the luxurious Beaubien.

Carmen, whose wishes had not been consulted, had voiced no objection whatever to returning to the Hawley-Crowles home. Indeed, she secretly rejoiced that an opportunity had been so easily afforded for escape from the stifling atmosphere of the Elwin school, and for entrance into the great world of people and affairs, where she believed the soil prepared for the seed she would plant. That dire surprises awaited her, of which she could not even dream, did not enter her calculations. Secure in her quenchless faith, she gladly accepted the proffered shelter of the Hawley-Crowles mansion, and the protection of its worldly, scheming inmates.

In silent, wide-eyed wonder, in the days that followed, the girl strove to accustom herself to the luxury of her surroundings, and to the undreamed of marvels which made for physical comfort and well-being. Each installment of the ample allowance which Mrs. Hawley-Crowles settled upon her seemed a fortune––enough, she thought, to buy the whole town of SimitÍ! Her gowns seemed woven on fairy looms, and often she would sit for hours, holding them in her lap and reveling in their richness. Then, when at length she could bring herself to don the robes and peep timidly into the great pier glasses, she would burst into startled exclamations and hide her face in her hands, lest the gorgeous splendor of the beautiful reflection overpower her.

“Oh,” she would exclaim, “it can’t be that the girl reflected there ever lived and dressed as I did in SimitÍ! I wonder, oh, I wonder if Padre JosÈ knew that these things were in the world!”

And then, as she leaned back in her chair and gave herself into the hands of the admiring French maid, she would close her eyes and dream that the fairy-stories which the patient JosÈ had told her again and again in her distant home town had come true, and that she had been transformed into a beautiful princess, who would some day go in search of the sleeping priest and wake him from his mesmeric dream.

Then would come the inevitable thought of the little newsboy of Cartagena, to whom she had long since begun to send 71 monetary contributions––and of her unanswered letters––of the war devastating her native land––of rudely severed ties, and unimaginable changes––and she would start from her musing and brush away the gathering tears, and try to realize that her present situation and environment were but means to an end, opportunities which her God had given her to do His work, with no thought of herself.

A few days after Carmen had been installed in her new home, during which she had left the house only for her diurnal ride in the big limousine, Mrs. Hawley-Crowles announced her readiness to fire the first gun in the attack upon the Beaubien. “My dear,” she said to her sister, as they sat alone in the luxurious sun-parlor, “my washerwoman dropped a remark the other day which gave me something to build on. Her two babies are in the General Orphan Asylum, up on Twenty-third street. Well, it happens that this institution is the Beaubien’s sole charity––in fact, it is her particular hobby. I presume that she feels she is now a middle-aged woman, and that the time is not far distant when she will have to close up her earthly accounts and hand them over to the heavenly auditor. Anyway, this last year or two she has suddenly become philanthropic, and when the General Orphan Asylum was building she gave some fifty thousand dollars for a cottage in her name. What’s more, the trustees of the Asylum accepted it without the wink of an eyelash. Funny, isn’t it?

“But here’s the point: some rich old fellow has willed the institution a fund whose income every year is used to buy clothing for the kiddies; and they have a sort of celebration on the day the duds are given out, and the public is invited to inspect the place and the inmates, and eat a bit, and look around generally. Well, my washerwoman tells me that the Beaubien always attends these annual celebrations. The next one, I learn, comes in about a month. I propose that we attend; take Carmen; ask permission for her to sing to the children, and thereby attract the attention of the gorgeous Beaubien, who will be sure to speak to the girl, who is herself an orphan, and, ten to one, want to see more of her. The rest is easy. I’ll have a word to say regarding our immense debt of gratitude to her for saving Jim’s fortune years ago when he was entangled in her net––and, well, if that scheme doesn’t work, I have other strings to my bow.”

But it did work, and with an ease that exceeded the most sanguine hopes of its projector. On the day that the General Orphan Asylum threw wide its doors to the public, the Hawley-Crowles limousine rubbed noses with the big French car of the Beaubien in the street without; while within the building the 72 Beaubien held the hand of the beautiful girl whose voluntary singing had spread a veil of silence over the awed spectators in the great assembly room, and, looking earnestly down into the big, trusting, brown eyes, said: “My dear child, I want to know you.” Then, turning to the eager, itching Mrs. Hawley-Crowles, “I shall send my car for her to-morrow afternoon, with your permission.”

With her permission! Heavens! Mrs. Hawley-Crowles wildly hugged her sister and the girl all the way home––then went to bed that night with tears of apprehension in her washed-out eyes, lest she had shown herself too eager in granting the Beaubien’s request. But her fears were turned to exultation when the Beaubien car drew up at her door the following day at three, and the courteous French chauffeur announced his errand. A few moments later, while the car glided purring over the smooth asphalt, Carmen, robed like a princess, lay back in the cushions and dreamed of the poor priest in the dead little town so far away.