The Cheat (Holman)/Chapter 13
It was the final evening, Saturday, of the greatest Charity Fête Hedgewood had ever witnessed. From the gayly decorated piazza of Rao Singh's villa to the waters of the Sound glimmering under a hundred lights the broad, smooth slope of the Hindu's grounds had been transformed into a scene out of the Arabian Nights. A broad grass avenue lined with striped canvas booths and tents and lighted with strikingly colored Chinese lanterns stretched from the house to the dock. There were fortune teller's tents, tents that advertised in lurid canvas posters the mysteries expounded by the Hindu fakirs within, booths where knitted goods, donated knick-knacks and even produce and fruit from the countryside was sold. Pretty society girls in Oriental costumes of odd batik design tried to cajole the crowd into open booths where they might risk small amounts on games of chance such as one finds at church bazaars. (Rao-Singh had inquired why he could not install roulette, with Hayden as croupier, but Carmelita turned that idea down.)
Near the water's edge a large dance platform had been constructed and decorated especially for the occasion, in the prevailing Oriental motif. A famous jazz band borrowed from one of the chief Broadway midnight-to-morning dance clubs offered a tumult of syncopation which all the dancers pronounced too wonderful to describe. At intervals the dance floor was cleared and stars and lesser celebrities of the New York theatrical world did their bits. The professional talent had been assembled by a remarkable young man named Grantland, lean and leather-lynged and seemingly everywhere at once. He was a sort of superpress agent for a chain of country-wide vaudeville theaters and boasted that he could induce any Broadway star to go anywhere. Dudley Drake had been the means of getting in touch with him through the fact that Drake and Porter were the financial backers of the concern for which he worked.
The water was aglitter with the lights of yachts and smaller power craft loaned by their owners for the purpose of selling rides at whatever price the passenger would pay "and no change given."
Outside in the deeper water several palatial yachts, aflame with light from stem to stern, owned mostly by the millionaire Peabody and Hurd crowd, slowly raked the gala scene with their powerful searchlights. And above a glorious full moon shown, though there was so much artificial light that hardly anybody noticed the moon, and the paled sky was dotted with myriad stars. It was a scene of rare and exotic, man-manufactured beauty that it would have taken an aviator a thousand feet aloft truly to appreciate.
This was by far the most crowded and prosperous evening of the Fair. One could move about with difficulty on account of the masses of people. Mrs. Peabody and Mrs. Hurd and their quiet, well-dressed friends could be glimpsed mostly upon the fringe of the hectic activity. They had loaned the influence of their names, and their daughters with their carefully modulated clothes and voices were playing the rôles of salesladies at the refreshment and fancy articles booths. They had given their money to help defray expenses. But they did not feel called upon to risk being trampled under foot by taking a more active part in the scene.
Carmelita's and Lucy Hodge's crowd, more loudly voiced and dressed, were laboring hard to have a good time in their own way, patronizing everything, especially the mild games of chance, buying everything in sight, dancing with each other's wives and promoting their little private intrigues upon the stern-seats of temporarily rented power boats. Many of them had supplemented the soft drinks sold by Miss Constance Peabody and the Misses Hurd with contributions from their own hip pockets.
Perhaps in the whole assemblage the element that was most thoroughly enjoying itself were the plain native Hedgewoodians from the village and the neighboring farms—calloused-handed laborers, clerks from the stores, commuting sons of merchants. This occasion seemed planned to order for them and they were as naïve and happy as children. To Carmelita, in whom there was still an element of child-likeness that responds to color and lights and din, and hence a sympathy with them, they had been a constant delight all during the week and she had done her best to see that they had a good time.
It had been a week of unceasing work and worry for Carmelita. Rain during the first three evenings of the Fête had cut the attendance down to a mere dribble and the receipts to barely anything. To-night it seemed that the affair was to be carried to success, but she was not happy. And the reasons were Dudley and her own guilty conscience.
He had arrived late that afternoon from the city laden down with last-minute bundles for the Fair which she had telephoned him to bring and she had snatched the time from her duties to borrow a car from Lucy and drive it herself to the station to meet him. As soon as he stepped from the train she saw there was something wrong. His kiss was perfunctory. She started the car, her warm welcoming smile extinguished by his manner, and asked him what was the trouble.
He stared straight ahead for a moment without answering and then, turning to her abruptly, asked, "Carmelita, you may think this a brutal question and perhaps I am a fool to ask it. But it is eating into my mind and I must: Is there anything between you and Rao-Singh that should cause gossip among people around here?"
She was startled. But she managed to say quietly, "I don't think I understand."
"I came down in the smoker and the two men in front of me—brokers I think they are, and I have seen one of them at Lucy's and at—your house—were talking about the summer crowd here. I heard them mention your name. I couldn't help it. They were talking loudly. 'Who is this alleged Indian prince, Rao-Singh, who has taken the Hillary place?' one of them said. And the other answered—a real nasty-mouthed chap he was—I should have liked a chance to smash him, 'The one who has the case upon Carmelita Drake?' And he went on to say with a sneer, 'I don't know anything about his past. But all I can say is if I were Carmelita's husband I would manage to get down for more than week-ends and keep a weather eye upon the dark lad.'"
She sat at the wheel, attending strictly to her driving, eyes hard and straight ahead. He wondered if she had heard what he said. She finally said calmly: "Dudley, there isn't a person in the world who isn't gossiped about at some time or other. There are filthy little beasts who can always read dirt in anything. But I really thought my husband cared more for me than to believe smoking-car talk about me. Rao-Singh is my neighbor and has been working with me on this Charity Fête. Naturally we have seen a lot of each other. You know everything about my relations with him since I first met him, because I met you at the same time."
But he was not quite satisfied. "Very well," he said with some heat, "you have been frank and I believe you. I'll be frank too. Thate this Hindu from the bottom of my heart, have hated him ever since I first saw him trying to make love to you in Paris, when I was in love with you and afraid to say so because I thought I had no chance. I hate him and I do not trust him. And he hates me. He is like a very clever snake working in the dark and he will strike at our love some day, Carmelita. I don't think he has given up wanting you. I want you to promise me to have nothing more to do with him."
Her cheeks were burning with insulted pride. Why was he sitting here talking to her, Carmelita de Cordoba, as if she were a very small child unable to take care of herself? This man he was maligning was her friend. True, she did not like Rao-Singh especially and she did distrust him a little, at times. But as for Dudley believing a slimy piece of men's gossip about her and Rao-Singh, working himself into a passion over it and giving her orders upon the strength of it—
She turned upon him, lips twitching with rage, and snapped, "Nonsense." They were swinging in front of Carmelita's cottage and before he could go further with the matter she had stopped the car and was flashing up the steps of the piazza without a backward glance at him. He sat for a moment in the seat of the runabout and then slowly followed her, but to another room.
Carmelita, thoroughly angered, could banish her commonsense and do almost any foolish thing. Carmelita, pride deeply wounded by the one man she loved and already taut nerves rasped by what she considered his implied aceusation, could yet mask her feelings under an outward show of spontaneous gayety and recklessness.
Such was the Carmelita of the last memorable night of the society Charity Fête upon Rao-Singh's lawn.
Cheeks flushed with excitement and a peach-colored evening gown accentuating the beauty of her body and a head-dress of jewel-studded metal cloth setting off the perfect oval of her dark Spanish loveliness, she stood chatting gayly in a circle of her friends who were resting temporarily from their excursions into the mulling crowds. Lucy and the others had taken little interest in the Fête when it was first planned and Carmelita was first trying to enlist their enthusiasm. "Charity is such a beastly bore when such a noise is made about it," Lucy had commented. "Why cannot Mrs. Peabody and her well-born ladies give their money to the wounded soldiers without asking us all to give up perfectly good evenings to mixing around with a lot of dusty, staring village people? It's so much simpler." But in the end they had decided that it really promised fun and they had in the past few days come out strongly in support of the Fair. They now confined their knocking to good-natured gibes at Carmelita as a member of the managing committee.
"Your jazz band is petering out, Carmelita," Jack Hodge remarked. "Perhaps I should slip down and lend the leader my flask or something."
"It's the band from the Rendezvous, Jackie," she countered. "You should know by experience that they do not get really good until about three in the morning. But perhaps if you present another fifty dollars to our treasury, I could do something."
"You might dance with me—that would inspire them," he suggested, with an admiring glance at her. By jove, he always knew she was a corker, but to-night she was absolutely devastating.
And Jack Hodge was an excellent judge of pretty women. She consented and was about to plunge into the crowd toward the dance platform with him when a gray-bearded man hailed her from the top step of Rao-Singh's lantern-hung piazza. He was Mr. Howard Church, the only male member of the arrangement committee and a prominent New York banker whose duties, now that the receipts for the week were almost all in, had just commenced. He had come from the study of Rao-Singh's house, which the Indian prince had set aside for the committee to use that evening as an office.
"Will you step in just a moment please, Mrs. Drake?" he asked and with an apology to Jack Hodge she obeyed. She returned to them about five minutes later.
"Mr. Church tells me we are still five thousand dollars short of our quota and the business of the evening is about over." She looked around among them for a likely victim. "Well, who's going to save the honor of the dear old committee by, what do you Americans call it, 'coming across'?"
"Well," drawled Jack for one, "the evening, as you say, is drawing late and personally I'm broke."
The others indicated that they were in a similar state. Carmelita cajoled a while but she soon saw it was no use. They had really spent all that they intended to. There was a limit.
"All right," she cried, "if you haven't money, perhaps some one can offer a suggestion how we're-going to get this five thousand within the next and last half hour. Because it will be Sunday in half an hour and the good folks of Hedgewood will disperse to their homes." Silence. "Who'll raffle off his Rolls-Royce, for instance?"
"Why don't you do something brilliant yourself, Carmelita? It's your funeral," drawled Lucy Hodge.
"For example?" Lucy was stumped for an instant.
"Well, I have heard of pretty ladies selling kisses and getting all sorts of prices for them—for charity's sake, of course."
The others insisted at once that here was an excellent idea though they hardly expected Carmelita to agree.
"I dare you, Carmelita," Jack Hodge cried. And that was what eventually fetched her.
"I'll do it if you'll make the first bid, Jack?" she flashed at him. He shouted assent. "All right. Come on!" She led the way toward the dance platform. In the wake of the crowd of her fellow conspirators Prince Rao-Singh walked more slowly than the rest and he seemed to be smiling to himself, if one could ever distinguish any emotion upon his inscrutable mask of a face.
Meantime Dudley Drake had been sitting alone in Rao-Singh's study. Mr. Church, who believed in functioning in an executive capacity exclusively even in his charitable pursuits as long as he could find a subordinate to do the actual work, had discovered Dudley standing moodily a little apart from Lucy's boisterous circle and had promptly requisitioned him. "Ah, Drake," he had hailed him, recognizing him from his occasional visits to Drake and Porter's offices as his friend Sanford Drake's chief assistant and nephew, "come in and give me a hand with this accounting business, won't you?" Dudley had hardly dared refuse and Church, having installed a capable man behind Rao-Singh's ornamental flat-topped desk, had promptly disappeared to a more congenial and lively atmosphere.
Dudley looked with intense distaste at the mass of papers in front of him. His eyes wandered to the odd furnishings on the desk top, mostly of ivory and ebony and of fantastic design. Among them was a heavy circular disk with a handle upon it. Dudley picked this up with absent-minded curiosity. Upon its surface was the head of a glaring Bengal tiger with some words in an Indian dialect under the beast. He recalled seeing this burnt into Rao-Singh's stationery, his saddle, everything that belonged to the Hindu. It was his personal seal and the follow seemed to take an almost fanatical pleasure in branding all his possessions with it.
Well he supposed he would have to accommodate Church and inject some sort of order into these scattered memos and bills dealing with the Fête. In search of a pencil he opened the long drawer of the desk with some hesitation. He was not surprised to find a long, businesslike looking revolver in one corner. That was quite in character. Rao-Singh would be sure to have a gun. Near it was a small picture frame lying face downward. The back of the frame bore the tiger seal of its owner. Dudley turned it over and instantly his face became livid with anger. It was a snapshot of Carmelita and Rao-Singh standing upon Lucy Hodge's raft together in bathing suits. The pose was innocent enough. The picture had probably been taken by Lucy and either she had given it to the Hindu or he had stolen it.
But the seal on the back! Whether or not there was any symbolism intended, whether Rao-Singh was thus indicating to his own mind at least that Carmelita was his, Dudley saw instantly an insulting significance in the presence of the burnt-in seal on the picture. He seized the frame and ripped out the film and thrust it into his pocket. He sprang from his chair and walked up and down the room for a few minutes trying to pull himself together. The talk in the smoking car, this picture—damn him!