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Ebook has 381 lines and 15966 words, and 8 pages
Mrs. Pendleton's Four-in-hand
GERTRUDE ATHERTON
Mrs. Pendleton's Four-in-hand
BY GERTRUDE ATHERTON
New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD. 1903
Set up, electrotyped, and published June, 1903.
Norwood Press J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.
FACING PAGE
"'I have been insulted'" 11
"'Well, why don't you go?'" 87
MRS. PENDLETON'S FOUR-IN-HAND
Jessica, 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.
"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."
The 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. 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! 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."
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