The Cheat (Holman)/Chapter 2
Despite the pleasure she had taken in the visit to Doucet's, there was a plaintive touch in the heart of Carmelita de Cordoba as the limousine bore her through the busy streets, now streaked with the first shadows of twilight, in the direction of the Ritz, and her lovely face bore a trace of discontent. This vague dissatisfaction of life and particularly her approaching marriage had been increasing within her as the day of her departure from Paris grew nearer.
Carmelita had not troubled to conceal from her intimate friends the fact that she did not love the man to whom she was affianced. How could she?
Don Pablo Mendoza, her fiancé, was over fifty, her father's closest friend, their neighbor, and, like the de Cordobas, the possessor of considerable wealth and its South American concomitant, power. Since the earliest memories of her girlhood her life had been more or less intermingled with his. Her first recollection of him was when he was thirty—handsome, swarthy, a disfiguring dueling scar upon one cheek—picking her up in her father's house and bestowing kisses and presents upon her. She was a little dark flower of five.
But Carmelita did not grow older quite as fast as Señor Mendoza. Don Pablo, it was said in Buenos Aires, lived his life to the full in the unstinted Spanish fashion. An unattached bachelor of unlimited means, he was a favorite among the aristocratic bon vivants of the Argentine capital, a free spender, a frequenter of gambling clubs and the racetrack. His hair grayed rapidly, his never very stalwart frame bent under the strain his mode of living was placing upon it. Even at forty-five, when a man is at his prime, the rich Don Pablo, drinking wine in the study of Don Caesar de Cordoba, Carmelita's father, would wheeze and make much ado as he attempted to rise from his favorite easy chair. Nevertheless, Señor de Cordoba would never permit any criticism of his crony. Their friendship had been one of the few points of mild contention between the worthy señor and his wife, who had died when Carmelita was eight. She had never been able to understand why her husband, a man of the most austere habits, should be filled with such a passionate loyalty and liking for a shallow pleasure-seeker of Mendoza's rather streaky reputation. She admitted that the man was a sprightly, intelligent companion and of an old and distinguished family. But Theresa de Cordoba, a woman of quiet good sense, had never been deceived by these surface charms.
If her mother were living, Carmelita now reflected, tenderness trembling about her little mouth, she would probably not be in her present dilemma of heart. Her mother could have imposed a quiet but firm resistance to the engagement that might, as it generally did, induce her father in the long run to abandon his long-cherished ideal of a union between the de Cordoba and Mendoza families, between his only daughter and his dearest and oldest friend.
In the matter of marriage, Don Caesar de Cordoba was wholly Spanish. A girl married the man whom her parents chose for her, and money and position and honor were the chief points to consider. Don Pablo Mendoza met these requirements admirably. And was he not, in addition, the one man whom Don Caesar had for so many years loved like a brother, the friend who, though nearly Don Caesar's own age, had compensated in some measure for the fact that there was no son and heir in the de Cordoba family? At the time of Carmelita's birth, her father had ardently wished for a son. He had not troubled to conceal his disappointment, and there had never been between Carmelita and him an intense bond of sympathy or understanding. He bestowed upon her, as a matter of duty, all the luxuries that his great wealth commanded, but he did not trouble to read her heart. She loved him dutifully but not warmly, and in her respect for him there was mingled much that was fear.
At the death of her mother Carmelita had been placed in charge of strait-laced duennas, at times under the supervision of unsympathetic female relatives of her father's who came to the Hacienda de Cordoba for long visits. She had been surrounded with every luxury but love and freedom. No wonder she came to divide all people into two classes—servants, whom one treated firmly and a little contemptuously; relatives and friends of her father, whom one avoided as much as possible and feared. Don Pablo Mendoza, the only member of the latter class who unbended himself to be friendly with her, she regarded with embarrassment and awe, even after their engagement.
Don Caesar de Cordoba had indirect business connections in the United States that contributed in an important measure to his fortune. Once each year he usually made a combined social and business visit to New York, occupying about three months. It was during these periods of her father's absence that Carmelita's naturally exuberant spirits were allowed their freest rein. She bullied her tutors and guardians with practical impunity and lived something approximating the life which a nine- or ten-year-old girl of excellent health and growing natural charm should. Don Caesar's social entrées in the metropolis were of the best and, although there was much about the rather hectic and undisciplined American life as lived in New York, which he did not at all approve, he rather enjoyed the busy round of dinners, opera and theater that supplemented his business conferences.
It was during one of these periodical visits to America that he had become acquainted with the Hodges. Jack Hodge had inherited from his father a partnership in the firm of Hodge and Story, Don Caesar's American representatives in one of the important and very lucrative lines in which he was interested. Hodge, a waster and seeker after the froth of life, contributed nothing to the old-established concern except the luster and reputation of his surname, which his grandfather and father had won. Jack merely drew a periodical stipend from the business and asked no questions. The importance of Don Caesar de Cordoba and his good will had been many times impressed upon the irresponsible Hodge by his father, and upon the death of the latter Jack had made an effort to cultivate the dignified Argentinian upon the occasions of his visits by the only means he knew—lavish entertainment.
Lucy Hodge, a clever woman of no particular family but, at the time she first married Jack and was not so sure of him, of an alert ambition, was wiser. She perceived the possibilities in the business connection between the wealthy de Cordoba and her husband's firm and the importance of retaining the Spaniard's friendship. She played up to him skillfully, and she was a very good actress. Don Caesar admired her good looks, her carefully modulated manners, her clothes, and the slow, lazy, almost Spanish grace of her.
Lucy had been largely responsible for his decision, when Carmelita was fifteen years old, to send his daughter to an American convent to be educated. This, to Don Caesar's mind, would serve two purposes. It would enable the girl to receive the advantage of an American education, and he was a great admirer of education in general and the American educational system in particular. And it would, to put it plainly, rid him of the necessity of exercising a personal vigilance over Carmelita's welfare for a while.
So Carmelita, a dark, slender girl with the awkward grace of fifteen, her large black pools of eyes bright with excitement, proud of her gray, immaculately dressed father and the quiet, effective calm with which he directed porters and other menials about and inserted order amid the chaos of departing passengers at the dock as far as their own voluminous luggage was concerned, boarded the steamer at Buenos Aires for the first great adventure of her thus far rather uneventful life. There was some regret in her heart at leaving the trim, broad acres of the de Cordoba estate, ten miles away in distance and a century away in everything else from this bustling metropolitan confusion. But she had never been very happy at home, and, though she was under no delusion regarding the hilarious life one leads at a convent, knowing something about Spanish ones, still the future was alluring.
The convent which Carmelita's father and Lucy Hodge had selected for his daughter was located some thirty miles from New York in a region of trimly kept wealthy estates of Wall Street millionaires and lesser moneyed and golfing gentry. The modern buildings of fieldstone in a setting of green lawns and symmetrically planted shrubbery, were located a mile from the nearest road and isolated by a high, ivied wall as effectively as if they were in the midst of a wilderness. There was here none of the cold, indigent austerity of European convents. Indeed the name "convent" was nearly a misnomer. The official title was the College of Saint Isabella; it was a parochial college for Catholic girls which merely aspired to the rigid discipline and self-denials of the traditional convent without succeeding very well.
Carmelita spent four rather happy impressionable years there and acquired many things that had a permanent influence upon her. Among these spirited, healthy American girls for the most part, chafing under restraint and guarded with understanding tolerance by their teachers and spiritual guides, the pretty Spanish girl was at first timid and confused. But Carmelita had never been by nature bashful, given half a chance. She was the daughter of a man of unlimited resources, and she had always been taught to be conscious of the position and power which these afforded her. She made friends easily—not close friends, to be sure, for the type of quick-witted, American girl which appealed to her was not long in detecting something a little arrogant and selfish about Carmelita. There were possibilities for slipping through the rigid régime of the convent and learning something about the great, "bustling American world outside, Carmelita found.
New and quite revolutionary ideas began piling up in Carmelita's alert brain. She learned that the delicious germ of romance attacks the American girl early and is not to be denied by such an earthly impediment as a convent wall. Her roommate, a blonde and buxom girl two years older than she and the daughter of a Chicago millionaire meat packer with the impossible name of Fleischer, confided to Carmelita one evening after lights during the first month of their association that she was in love with a Yale sophomore and was smuggling letters out to him. Carmelita was thrilled. The wide-eyed Spanish girl and the sophisticated Chicago miss discussed romance in the dark for several weeks. Carmelita was permitted to read the collegian's ardent and misspelled letters. It was all very wonderful.
"My father hates him," declared the confiding Miss Fleischer. "If he ever caught sight of Bob he would probably kill him. At least there would be a frightful row. But I am going to marry him just the same."
Carmelita was shocked. Did American girls then marry against their parents' wishes? It was very strange. She recalled with amusement now how utterly aghast she had been when her roommate did not return from the Christmas vacation and she learned that the heiress of the house of Fleischer had carried, out her impossible threat and eloped with her young man.
At the New York home of the Hodges, where Carmelita spent her vacations, she had opportunities to learn more about the American notions of romance contrasted with parentally supervised love of the Spanish type. For while during her first year at the College of Saint Isabella she was just an awkwardly pretty girl of sixteen and rather an incumbrance upon Lucy's social activities while at the Hodge house, during the next three years she underwent a characteristically rapid Spanish maturing. Lucy now found that she had at her disposal an unusually attractive young lady of a warm brunette beauty. She was a welcome addition to the Hodge entourage.
Within the hulking brownstone of the Hodge home on Riverside Drive, and the twenty-room Hodge "cottage" at Newport, Carmelita met men who were neither to be treated as servants nor to be feared. At first she was flattered at the attentions they paid her. But as she grew older and more sophisticated through the lore retailed to her by her school chums and through the worldly observations of Lucy and through her own swiftly developing savoir faire in her relations with men, a new Carmelita flowered—a Carmelita of radiant beauty, soft black eyes that could look coquettishly over a colorful Spanish fan, a Carmelita who could hold her own with the most blasé American flapper when it came to flirtations with vacationing college boys, a Carmelita who loved exquisite clothes and the admiring eyes which focused upon her when she entered the dining-room at the Ritz or the Hodge box at the Metropolitan, a Carmelita who had never been denied anything that she wanted which wealth and power could buy.
There had been a short, rather desperate affair with a Princeton junior who had met her at the Hodge home during the Christmas holidays in her third year in America and had thereafter for two weeks besieged her day and night with flowers and tons of expensive candy and invitations. For forty-eight hours Carmelita fancied herself rather hard hit also, especially during their twenty-dollar midnight taxi ride through Central Park. But, returning to college, the young man, who enjoyed the decidedly American name of Harkness, evidently permitted memories of Carmelita's loveliness to exclude everything else from his head, for he failed ingloriously at mid-years and was expelled from the college to his Indiana home. Gradually his ardent letters, which Carmelita had smuggled in to her through secret channels and enjoyed but did not bother to answer, grew fewer. And eventually she said a little sadly to Lucy Hodge, who had regarded the affair with watchful and amused indulgence, "I don't think I shall ever love just one man. I'm too selfish. I want them all to love me and let me choose a particular one for each occasion as I do my gowns." Which pleased Lucy very much.
Don Caesar de Cordoba made it a point to visit his daughter at least once a year. At intervals he professed to be alarmed at the worldly polish she was acquiring. But in reality he was pleased. She had developed into an alluring woman of quite evident poise and sophistication, a slightly arrogant little tilt to her smooth chin, an ease with older people that was quite different from the ungainly girl of fifteen whom he had brought to Lucy and the convent. A true de Cordoba—and an admirable wife for his old chum, Don Pablo, the charming connecting link between the fortunes and power of the honorable and ancient families of de Cordoba and Mendoza.
So thought Don Caesar as his old friend and he sat smoking and occasionally sipping wine and talking of the intricacies of Argentine politics upon the broad piazza of the Hacienda de Cordoba.
But when Carmelita's four years of American education that had taught her so much that is not read in books were completed and Carmelita came home, her father received an unpleasant shock. Don Pablo had now grown very gray but his small eyes brightened at the sight of the new Carmelita and he was more determined than ever to marry her.
"Give her a chance, my friend, to become Spanish again," Don Caesar warned him. They waited two years, when Carmelita was twenty-two and lovelier than ever, and then Don Caesar broached the subject of marriage to her. He was surprised to meet opposition. Marry old Don Pablo? Carmelita was incredulous that her father was in earnest. Convinced that it was indeed so, she protested vehemently. Life, having been so lately offered her so richly, was about to be snatched away. It was impossible! But she did not protest so vigorously as would an American girl under the circumstances.
Carmelita was still at heart Spanish, and daughters of rich Argentine families do not usually balk at their parents' attempts at matchmaking. Moreover, she was in the back of her pretty head not unaware of the advantages of pleasing her father and marrying a man of fortune and position.
In the end her opposition affected her father's temper so badly that he even mentioned the Spanish word for "disinheritance" in punishment for her disobedience, and Carmelita, who could never conceive of herself as anything but a daughter of wealth, was finally frightened into the decision which all along she had feared she would have to make. Weeping bitterly, she consented to her betrothal to Don Pablo, permitted herself to be kissed by him that evening and was present when her father and he drank their health with a very special vintage of wine. Then she retired to her boudoir to write a tear-splotched and utterly wretched letter to Lucy about it. The reply she received cheered her up. It congratulated her upon making a great catch and concluded, "Why so keen for love? We can't have everything. Besides, the right man will come later probably. Meantime, why not persuade your wise old father to permit you to come to Paris for your trousseau? Jackie and I are sailing next week. You can do the shops and have a final fling. But please do not let your father see this letter." The always cautious Lucy.
Don Caesar de Cordoba allowed Carmelita to go to Paris because his conscience troubled him a little for having forced her into the engagement against her will, though he was convinced that it was for her advantage as well as his own and that her opposition was a mere girlish whim and unworthy of her. Meanwhile he would reward her for yielding and he would impress Don Pablo with the fact that only the most famous modistes in the world were worthy to gown a de Cordoba bride.
In Paris, Carmelita, now twenty-three and quite breathlessly beautiful, had met the Hodges—and, under their auspices, Prince Rao-Singh and Dudley Drake.
Lucy Hodge made a specialty of entertaining personages. Prince Rao-Singh, an Indian potentate of, reported, fabulous wealth, educated at Oxford, a tall, dark, suave and somewhat sinister man of thirty-five, of excellent breeding and manners, was the most talked about notable who associated with the wealthy American social colony in Paris. He was a bachelor who seemed to prefer the company of Americans to that of the English or his own people. Lucy, who had at one time boasted confidentially to Carmelita that she could meet anybody in the world, including kings, if she wanted to and flippantly furnished the formula, had cultivated him assiduously because he added a bizarre note to her parties and because his acceptance of her invitations, to the exclusion of so many others, aroused the envy of rival hostesses.
Until the arrival of Carmelita, Prince Rao-Singh, though discharging the social proprieties with scrupulous politeness, for the most part had had the air of standing aloof and regarding the extravagant foibles of the Americans and the attempts of Lucy's flattering friends to cultivate him, with somber and somewhat disinterested eyes. But upon being introduced to Carmelita, her vibrant body on this occasion set off by a striking black Parisian evening gown that disclosed the creamy whiteness of her arms and neck and maturing bosom, the eyes of the Indian prince were at last aroused. For the first time he openly cultivated one of Lucy's coterie. He danced with her exclusively. He secluded her at a table for two at the smart cabaret which Lucy's party visited after the theater and talked with her gravely and interestingly. But there was a glint in his inscrutable dark eyes, an intense manner of looking at her, a something which thrilled Carmelita and made her a little afraid.
In the days that followed, Rao-Singh did not conceal his interest in her, to the growing uneasiness of Carmelita. She did not like him, she decided, though he had done nothing to offend her, and Lucy Hodge's bantering remarks about his infatuation for her did not help put her at her ease.
Dudley Drake did not like Prince Rao-Singh either. About Drake, Carmelita was uneasy also, but for a quite different reason. She was not sure whether or not she was in love with Dudley. If she were not affianced to Don Pablo and if Dudley were rich and of a distinguished family, like Don Pablo, it would have helped her to decide, Carmelita was quite sure.
On the same notable evening that had brought Prince Rao-Singh, now three weeks past, she had met Dudley Drake. He had attracted her at once. An American, tall, straight as a cavalry captain, about twenty-five, he had suddenly impressed her as just about what an American should be. Lucy, discreetly questioned about him, was not so enthusiastic. Yes, he came of a good family but through the wrong branch. Jack Hodge was a business friend of Dudley's uncle, a very wealthy Wall Street operator, but Dudley was just a clerk in his relative's establishment with no money and few prospects. "Not worth a glance from your pretty eyes, my dear. Good-looking but just a poor relation who will never get anywhere," she had summed him up.
And so the Parisian duel between the "poor relation" and the Indian prince for the affections of Carmelita, already promised to the rich Don Pablo Mendoza, started. Whatever Prince Rao-Singh's feelings toward her might be, Carmelita was sure that Drake was in love with her. Though as yet he had scrupulously avoided speaking a word of love to her, his every action betrayed him. Carmelita wondered, with an odd mixture of coquetry, uneasiness and guilty conscience, whether he would continue his restraint until her departure on the morrow and what she would do if he didn't.