over by Farmer Wise himself, with his poor eyes bandaged and the sturdy farmer’s hand to guide him into the little back parlor where Mr. George and Mildred sat alone, for Mrs. Cox had been ordered out by that exacting gentleman as early as eight o’clock. Nothing but the presence of Mildred herself and the love divine and human that filled Mr. George’s breast to overflowing could have saved him from succumbing to the painful shock.
“Well, I should think you are cured now, my poor Joseph!” said his brother presently.
“Of what, in heaven’s name?” said poor Mr. Joseph. “By Jove to think– to think of some men, George! What had I done, what had I done?”
“I do think of them,” said Mr. Foxley gravely. “I do think of them. And but for my happiness here,” touching Mildred’s dress reverently, “I could wish–” wistfully, “That we had never come here–’twas I who brought you my poor Joseph, ’twas I, ’twas I.”
“Oh! that’s rubbish!” pronounced Mr. Joseph energetically. “The main point is now, how am I to get my living. God! I am perfectly useless! They won’t take me back in town there.”
“Dear Mr. Joseph,” said Mildred, with her eyes shining on the brother of her lover. “You will live with us of course, with–Dacre, Dacre and me, and my aunt. We all love you–see,” and Milly rose, first pressing Mr. George’s fingers as they touched her dress in passing and giving him a look which was meant to keep him in order for a few moments, “no one can nurse you as well as I can–ask Dacre– let me take off that bandage and put it on again more comfortably for you! Will you, dear Mr. Joseph?” Mr. Joseph groaned and hid his face against Milly’s heaving breast.
“She is to be your angel as well as mine, perhaps,” murmured his brother.
“I have always been so active,” groaned poor Mr. Joseph, “What is to become of me? To live here with you would have been beautiful, but now–the simple thought of existence at all anywhere is unbearable! And the money–good God, George, how can I Help giving way!”
Some few other such scenes had naturally to be gone through before any course could be suggested to Mr. Joseph. Mrs. Cox had been taken into confidence, and Farmer Wise made to understand that nothing must be said about the unhappy affair. Mr. Joseph wrote into town explaining in some way his resignation of the rather important clerkship he had but just begun to fill creditably, and sending for all his belongings took to Mrs. Cox’s remaining little room under the roof in the character of an invalid. The secret was admirably kept, even by the doctor who had been written to and who had seen a similar case some years ago.
“A jealous devil, I suppose,” said he, when he read Mr. George Foxley’s note.
“Well, he might have come off worse. But I should like to know who the country lass was that he’d been sparkin’, and who revenged herself like that.”
A few weeks afterwards Mildred was married to George Albert Dacre Foxley, of Foxley Manor, Notts, by the Rev. Mr. Higgs in the village church. Her lover looked wonderfully well and strong on the occasion and was so happy that he was actually mischievously inclined during the ceremony, nearly causing his bride to laugh out audibly. Handsome and distinguished and aristocratic a gentleman as he looked, Mildred was not unworthy of him, as a straighter, firmer, more composed and more smiling a bride never entered a church. The girl was too happy to know what nervousness meant nor self-consciousness. She sat with her lover after he was dressed and had lain down a few moments to rest, until it was time to start in the carriage which Mr. Rattray had in the most unexpected manner offered them and which Mr. George accepted with the easy languid grace that characterized his acceptance of most things in this world excepting Milly. He had plenty of force and passion and to spare concerning _that_ gift. Stipulating that “Squires” must sit on the box seat, he and Milly and Mrs. Cox, an ideal little wedding party, drove off in actually high glee, laughing and chatting and joking immoderately to the amazement of the villagers, prominent among whom were Mrs. Woods and “Woods” himself, rescued in a dazed condition from the back premises of the “Temperance Hotel” according to popular local tradition, and Mrs. Lyman, B. Rattray, _nee_ Maria Higgs. Mr. Joseph alas! could not be present.
In the year that followed this remarkable marriage, the relative positions of the Mr. Foxleys underwent a great change. So much love and so much care lightened the elder brother’s existence so materially, that his health actually improved, and by the end of the sixth month of marriage he was able to shoot and fish once more, and walk with his adoring wife without the help of her strong arm and shoulder. Indeed it was she who about this time began to need his assistance during those long strolls by the side of the brook or through the tall grain grown meadows–a matter which astonished them both to the extent of stupefaction. Mr. George took his trouble to Mrs. Cox.
“I don’t know what you expected, Mr. George, I don’t indeed,” said she, secretly amused at his simplicity. “You went and got married, as was only natural, and now you are frightened at the results, as is only natural.”
“But, my dear lady,” expostulated the perplexed gentleman, “it involves so many things, all manner of complications. For instance, money. I shall have–I really believe, my dear good Mrs. Cox–I shall have to make some money.”
“You!” ejaculated Mrs. Cox.
“I know. It appears hopeless. I never turned a penny, honest or otherwise in my life. Joseph you see–ah! poor Joseph!”
Poor Joseph indeed, darkness for light, solitude for society, enforced idleness for long-continued habits of activity, who could enjoy life under these circumstances–and careful of him as Mildred was, and sympathetic as his brother was, these two were too intensely absorbed in each other to give him all the amusement and attention he craved. He grew thin and weak and slightly perverse and seemed to care more for Mrs. Cox’s company than for his brother’s. And yet there was nothing wrong with him except his terrible affliction. Mrs. Cox was sure he had something on his mind, and one day she ventured to tell him so. He flushed all over his pale freckled skin, and feeling for her motherly hands took them in his own.
“There is,” he said. “I wonder no one has ever guessed it. Miss Dexter, where is she? Does anyone ever see her?”
“My poor boy, my dear Mr. Joseph,” cried Mrs. Cox. “You did not really care for her, did you? Surely! You did not care for her!”
“No,” said he decidedly. “No, I did not care for her–I didn’t, never could have cared for her as George cares for Mildred, say–but she was a lady and kind to me, and I liked to go there, and the fact is–I miss her–and I am so sorry for her! and yet, you know, I am half frightened of her too and afraid to go out, thinking she may meet me and I wouldn’t see her coming, you know! Yet she wouldn’t do it again, I think!”
“Heaven save us, no, Mr. Joseph! And you so forgiving! Mercy me, and people say men make all the trouble!”
“It’s half-and-half, Mrs. Cox, dear old soul,” muttered Mr. Joseph, leaning back on his cushions. “I suppose we were both to blame. I can’t, for the life of me, fall to talking of it as a judgment, for before heaven, I had done nothing. Yet I forgot how lonely she was and how proud, and I forgot too, that Ellen–that Ellen–”
“Ay, Mr. Joseph. It was Ellen too. Poor Ellen, that passed away out of it all!”
“And she–Miss Dexter–is still here, still living by herself in the cottage by the oak! I remember so well, Mrs. Cox, the first time my brother and I ever saw that oak!”
“I daresay, Mr. Joseph, I daresay. Yes, she is still there, living in her cottage unloved and unheeded, Mr. Joseph. And may she ever continue so!”
“Oh! don’t say that, dear old soul! Don’t say that! Do you know, I should like to see her–I mean–meet her once again!”
Mrs. Cox was certain he was not in “his right head” as she said to herself.
“See her again! Meet her, talk to her! The woman who served ye like this! what can you be thinking of? Let me call your brother. There he is coming along the road, brown and bonny, with his wife on his arm, bless them both?”
“Did you say he was brown, Mrs. Cox? My brother brown! What a change! He looks so well then, dear old soul!”
“If you could but see him, Mr. Joseph, you would see how well.”
“Well and brown! And Mildred, she is pale, I suppose, and with her eyes turned up to his and her lips brushing his shoulder every now and then–O I can see them–I suppose they go on a worse than ever.”
“Indeed and they do, Mr. Joseph. After, breakfast this morning I sent them up into the drawing-room to be out of the way of the drover’s meeting to be held in the bar, and when I went up to ask them about the lunch they would take with them on the river this. afternoon I heard no sound like and just whispered at the door a bit if I might come in. When I went in, there was your brother standing behind her in a chair, with all her hair down, and a brush in his hand and his wife fast asleep! He looked frightened for a minute when he saw me and I besought him to bring her to, thinking he’d mesmerized her. He’d been brushing it and playing with it and the morning over warm–she had fallen asleep. And I left them, Mr. Joseph, I left them, for they love each other so. And when I think of the honor he has done my girl, and how particular he is that she shall be called Mrs. Foxley–it–”
“Well, well, Mrs. Cox, ours is a good name, and I do not think my brother would have ever allowed any but a good girl to bear it. And if a girl is lovely and gentle and pure-minded, and innocent, and neat, and clean, and refined as your niece was, it matters not about her birth. Birth! O my dear old soul, I am sick of the word! Miss Dexter now, is a lady, you know.”
“Ay.”
“And I must see her again,” enforced Mr. Joseph, brought back to his one idea. “I must see her again.”
Mrs. Cox communicated this intelligence to her niece, Mrs. Foxley.
“I think I can understand why,” said she, lying back in her husband’s arms one hot summer night under the trees at the back of the blouse. “It seems a hard wish to understand and a harder one to comply with, but it may have to be done. Dacre–”
“What my darling!”
“When are you going to tell me about your life in England and–and– about the woman who sent you out of it?”
“The woman! I never told you about a woman, child!”
“No. But I guessed. It is sure to have been a woman, Dacre.”
“Well, I don’t mind when I tell you. Nothing of all that time is anything to me now. Shall I tell you now?”
“If you please, dearest Dacre. For I must be close to you when I listen to that, and must not have you see me, for I know I shall cry.”
“Dearest child! Well then, it shall be now, for you could scarcely be closer to me than you are now? And if you cry, as you must try not to do, you shall be allowed to cry here upon my breast and I will not look. I can hardly see you as it is, it is so dark. Let me think, how I shall begin. You know Joseph–our poor Joseph–is my only brother and I never had any sisters. My father–you know this too–is an English country gentleman living in one of the most beautiful seats in England. If I were to describe the old place to you, you would want to go, and I could not spare you, so I will only say–well, you have seen those photographs?”
“Yes, dearest Dacre.”
“They only give you a faint idea of what it is. It is Tudor you know– do you know what Tudor is, Mrs. Foxley–and all red brick, weathered all colors, and terraced, with lots of little windows and some big ones with stained glass in them, and urns on the terrace, and a rookery, and an old avenue of poplars, haunted too, and so on, and so on–there’s no end to it, Mildred! Yes, it’s a fine old place, without doubt Well, that is where I was born. I don’t remember my mother. I wish I did. She died when Joseph was born, he is just four years younger than I am. Our youth was passed there–at the Manor, of course, and we had the usual small college education not extending to a university career that gentleman’s sons have in England, you know. I didn’t make many friends at school, and where we lived, there was no one to visit, and we had very few relations. It is quite unusual I believe for two boys to grow up as we did, in comparative isolation. My father was a kind of Dombey–you know Dombey, Mildred–wrapped up in his old place and the associations of his youth and in his family pride. The Foxleys are better born I believe than half of the aristocracy; we go back to the Conquest on my father’s side–a thing which he never permits himself to forget for an instant. 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 cushion, 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 nobody 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 circumspect 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 passion of a young man. I say to you now, Mildred, my wife, that the woman who tramples on the passion 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 damned 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 damned 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 Saturday 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 brushing 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 nobody?
She reclines now in her latest craze–a hammock made of pure gold wire, fine and strong and dazzling as the late October sun shines 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 sunshine. Cushions 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 nobody 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 fashionable 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 brass 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. Nobody 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 friendship the tiger-skin remained as a _souvenir_. The heir to the crown was not generous. Next came various members of embassies, 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 friendship 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 goddess, 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, fashionable, 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 classes.
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 fashion 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 fashionable 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 metaphored to distraction now waited upon her, if at all in an entirely different manner. Strange how all classes 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 Duchess 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 Duchess. 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 cushions 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.
“True,” replied the minister gravely. “Yet to one like myself that seems a long time. You sent for me, cousin.” His gaze wandered round the room and then fastened once more upon Miss De Grammont.
“Yes,” she said faintly. “I could not tell you all in my letter. I wanted–I want still–somebody’s help.”
“And it is very natural you should apply for mine, cousin, I will do anything I can. I have”–the minister grew sensibly more severe, more grave–“I have this day, on the train, seen a paper–a new kind of paper to me, I confess,–a _Society Journal_ it calls itself, in which a name is mentioned. Is your–trouble–connected with that?”
Miss De Grammont blushed deeply. “Yes. That is my name. I would not have troubled you–but I must ask your advice, for you are the only one of the family, of my mother’s family–” Her voice broke.
“Yes, cousin, you are right.”
The minister rose and stood up before her, a stern though not unsympathetic figure in his stiff black coat and iron gray hair. “I know what you are going to ask me to do. You will ask me to see these people, these editors, reviewers, whatever they are, to talk to them, to impress upon them what you are and who you are, and who your mother was, and what is the end of the base man who imagines lies and the end of all the workers of iniquity. You will ask me to tell them that it is all false, all abominable intrigue and treachery and I shall demand in your name and in my own as your only near relative and a minister of the Gospel, an apology. It is but jealousy, cousin. Forgive me, but you are too beautiful and too young to live alone in such a house, in such a manner. You must marry. Or else you must give up such a life. It maketh enemies within your gates and behold! there shall be no man to say a good thing of thee!”
The minister had lifted up his voice as if he had been in the pulpit and for one instant laid his hand on his cousin’s hair. Then he went back to his seat.
Miss De Grammont was profoundly moved. Great tears coursed down her cheeks and until they had stopped she could not trust herself to speak.
“The paper!” she said dismally. “You have seen a paper, you say, with– my–my name in it! There is nothing new in that. I have been in the papers for months past. I am never out of them. And this one says–”
The minister drew it out of his pocket.
“That with you, in this house lives, in the character of a butler, an exiled Italian Prince who committed grave personal and political offences many years ago and was sent to prison. That you are married to him. My dear cousin, it is monstrous!”
Miss De Grammont took out her handkerchief already wet through with her tears and pressed it to her eyes.
“It is not monstrous,” she said, “but it is most extraordinary. He _is_ an Italian Prince, and I _am_ married to him.”
To use a hackneyed phrase, the room swam around Mr. Fielding for an instant When he recovered he could only sit and gaze at the beautiful woman before him. The details of village life, in Vermont had not educated him up to exigencies of this sort. A fearful chasm seemed to have opened under his feet, and he began to comprehend dimly that there were other lives than his own and that of his estimable but commonplace wife being daily lived out in this world.
“Yes,” said Miss De Grammont, a little more bravely now that the worst shock was over. “That is quite true. And the extraordinary part of it is that they can only have guessed at it; evolved it, as it were from the depths of their inner consciousness, they can’t possible have discovered it. It isn’t known anywhere, save perhaps to one or two in Italy.”
“In Italy,” murmured the Rev. Mr. Fielding. “You met him in Italy? And why keep it secret? My dear cousin, you have made a great mistake. And all this sad and singular story is true?”
“Very nearly true. All but the offences. They never happened.”
“Your husband is not a political character then?”
“Oh! not in the least. He knows nothing of politics. My Jose! he couldn’t hurt anything, moreover!”
“Jose is a Spanish name, surely,” said Mr. Fielding.
“His mother was a Castilian, fair and proud as only a Castilian can be. She named him Jose–But he has other names, three, all Italian– Antonio–”
“I see,” said the minister dryly. “I am sorry that I cannot give you all the sympathy in this matter that you may desire, but you have entered on a course of action which is perplexing at least, to say no more. I feel, my dear cousin, that as a–married woman–your confidences are–ill placed and I must ask you to withdraw them. You must settle this matter with your–ahem–husband.” Mr. Fielding took up his hat and in another moment would have been gone forever, but that turning at the door he saw such intense supplication in his cousin’s eyes that his orthodox heart melted.
“Forgive me cousin,” he said coming back. “There may be still a way out of it. Will you tell me all?” Miss De Grammont then related her different heart episodes abroad, entanglements, half-engagements, desperate flirtations and all the rest of it to this sober, black-coated gentleman. Such a revelation poured forth in truly feminine style nearly drove him away the second time, but true to his word, he remained nevertheless, sitting bolt upright in a padded chair only meant for lounging. Finally, she told him of her snares to catch lovers and how one day she was caught herself by the dark-browed, eloquent Prince Corunna.
She fell in love herself for the first time in her life, and he with her, so he declared. But he was miserably poor and with the pride of a Castilian would not woo her because of her money. She hated it, yet she could not live without it.
The minister smiled pityingly.
However she made him marry her, and then proposed as a test, in which he joyfully acquiesced, that he should make himself of use to her, be in fact, her major-domo, steward, butler, amanuensis, anything and everything.
“It is most unprecedented,” sighed the minister. “That a man with Castilian blood in his veins–”
Miss De Grammont interrupted him. “He was happier so, dear cousin. But I–I grew most unhappy. And since I have been here, I have been very unhappy still. We are both in a false position and now–thanks to that unlucky hammock–our secret has become common property.”
“The hammock!” said Mr. Fielding. “What has that got to do with it? It is a pretty idea.”
“So I think,” said Miss De Grammont, delighted beyond measure. Then she told him about the paragraphs, large and small, the confidential friends, the small beginnings that had lead insensibly up to the culminating point–that of scandal.
“I am being dropped gradually,” she said.
“Of course you are,” said the minister. “Of course you are. Soon you will be–forgive me–a dead letter. There is only one thing to be done and that I can do at once. A letter must be written to this paper, stating calmly in as few words as possible that this paragraph is true, that you _are_ married to Prince–ah–Corunna, that he _is_ a political offender and for that reason the marriage _was_ kept secret, but that now of course as informers must already have given the secret away, you are obliged to endorse it yourself.”
“But Jose is not a political offender! Never did anything wrong in his life!”
“Of course not,” said the minister. “Some of us others, even clergymen, are not so fortunate. Now that must be included, else there is no good reason for having kept your marriage secret. Other explanations will not be taken. Besides this will entitle you to sympathy at once. Will you write the letter and I can leave it at the office for you? There is time for me to do that before my train starts.”
Miss De Grammont wrote her letter as dictated by her cousin. He put it in his pocket and rose to go.
“Will you not stay and see my husband?” she said timidly.
“Thank you, no.” returned Mr. Fielding. “I haven’t met many foreigners. I don’t think, perhaps, we should get on. Down in Phippsville–well, my circle is so different from yours, Isabel. It is the fashion I hear to live abroad now, and desert America–at least to depreciate it, and not to care about its opinion–but that hasn’t spread yet to our little village. It seems as if it might have been better for instance, had you stayed in Europe. You see, having married an Italian, all this trouble would have been avoided– I mean–it could have gone on over there–but now–well, riches are a snare, my dear cousin, as you have by this time found. Good-bye, dear cousin, and God be with you.”
When a letter addressed to the editor of the Society Journal appeared the next day signed Isabel Corunna (nee De Grammont) with its paralysing statement in a few concise words, New York was startled to its foundation. Public opinion which for a week had been at the culminating point of distrust, malevolence and resentment, turned the corner in a moment and for the moment believed implicitly in the faith of the lady it had abandoned. The greatest sympathy was shown Madame La Princesse Corunna, or Princess Corunna, or Miss De Grammont that was, or whatever her friends chose to call her. The butler disappeared for ever and the Prince came in. It was a transformation scene equal to Beauty and the Beast. Dark-browed and eloquent as ever, the Prince was a social success whenever he chose to be, but as time went on, he and his wife became more and more absorbed in each other and the world saw little of either of them. For a time he posed as a political offender which gave his wife no end of amusement. They were so far reinstated into public favor that the hammock–source of mingled joy and woe–was again considered as a thing of beauty and a thing to be imitated. There are a dozen such hammocks now in New York City.
But there are still a few ill-natured people, dowagers, matrons, an old love or two, and a handful of shrivelled spinsters who declare that the Prince is no Prince at all, but a Pastrycook.