The Saturday Evening Post/The Reluctant Duchess/Part 1
“Not on Your Tintype, Pittsy,” Said the Duke, and He Emerged From Behind the Great Bulk of His Cousin's Outer Garments
I
JACQUELINE McMANNIS was walking down Fifth Avenue, busily engaged in hating her governess. It was one of those mornings in early October which make Americans so particularly offensive about their climate—that is to say, it was as clear as rock crystal, as bright as a Spanish shawl and as still as a church. Later in the day probably a wind would rise and great white clouds come ballooning up from the west, but now not a leaf stirred in the green-and-gold foliage, and jets of white steam and plumes of black smoke rose straight into the motionless air.
The Avenue was almost empty. It was too early for babies to be out, their perambulators spreading in magnificent insolence across the sidewalk. A few children were on their way to school; the boys—dangerous projectiles—flying along on roller skates; the girls leading long-haired white terriers that looked up at Jacqueline out of shrewd bright eyes and pranced a little, like small hobbyhorses, as an indication that the weather had gone even to their dignified Scotch heads. A few young men strode by with pipes in their mouths and soft hats well down on their heads, trying to perpetuate as clerks the traditions of their so recent college days.
Jacqueline looked down the long vista of the Avenue and felt that, with just one more breath of this fresh pure air, her feet might leave the ground and she go floating to school six feet above the earth, as in her dreams she so often did. A verse—for she secretly wrote poetry—began to form itself in her mind without any apparent assistance from her consciousness:
The towers of the city stand
Like pinnacles in fairyland,
So very tall
The inevitable hitch had arrived. “So very tall”—“so high.” “From thence a fay—or no, an angel—from those tall tops” Ah, there it was:
So tall one well might hope to see
Blue vistas of eternity.
She felt excited and surprised, as every creator does; not at the beauty of the creation, but at the mere act. And then she became aware that Miss Salisbury was raising her eyebrows, flickering her eyelids and remarking, “Oh, this glare—this terrible glare!” In Jacqueline's ears it sounded as if she said “Glay-ah.” Instantly the girl became transformed. The look of peace left her smooth forehead, her brows contracted, her mouth grew sullen, and she said quite rudely, “Oh, you don't like the sun?”
“Oh, in moderation; one likes it in moderation,” said Miss Salisbury. “But not this glay-ah. The English climate is the only one. In England it is possible to be out-of-doors all the year round.” And Miss Salisbury sighed, recalling the equable moisture cf her native island.
“If you don't mind being soaked to the skin,” answered Jacqueline, a little hampered in her attack by the fact that she had never been in England and knew its climate only from hearsay.
“Better,” replied her governess, “than being alternately parched and frozen as in America.”
And so they fell to quarreling.
lt was quite extraordinary the number of subjects which these two found to quarrel about, besides these questions of manners and pronunciation about which every girl naturally quarrels with her governess. Last week, for instance, they had quarreled about whether or not George Washington was an Englishman. The worst of this discussion had been that Miss Salisbury, defending the affirmative, had had a good deal the best of it. Jacqueline had been obliged to shift to other grounds, such as the conduct of the Hessians during the Revolution, the burning of the city of Washington during the War of 1812, and the hostile attitude of the British cabinet toward the North during the Civil War. But even here Miss Salisbury did net yield, She regarded the Revolution as having been not won but conceded by a generous government, She seemed never to have heard of the War of 1812, and made it clear that she rather doubted its existence, while she remembered a great deal more about the magnificent friendliness of John Bright and the cotton spinners than she did of the insolence of Palmerston.
And only two days before this they had had a particularly bitter disagreement. At breakfast they had found letters—an English mail. Mr. and Mrs. McMannis had been spending the summer in England. Jacqueline, looking up from a short two pages from her father, containing nothing but a perfunctory description of St. Paul's, had heard a little cry from Miss Salisbury, who was engaged with a letter from Mrs. McMannis, longer and more closely written,
“Only fancy!” she exclaimed. “The Duke of Dormier is coming over with your parents!”
Jacqueline's Heart Gave a Bound, But Remembering Her Disapproval, She Said, “I Don't Want to Come to Your Dinner Party, Thank You”
Everything about this announcement was repugnant to Jacqueline. In the first place they were not her parents, for Mrs. McMannis was her stepmother; in the second place, she noticed, and loathed, a certain note of tremulous excitement in her governess' voice, as if a duke were something of supreme importance; and third, she was bruised in an old wound at not having been told directly. She never was told. The butler, the chauffeur, Mr. Williams, her father's secretary, always knew the family plans before she did. But stronger than all these emotions was her aching humiliation at each fresh proof that her family—even her great democratic practical father—were subject to ambition which seemed to Jacqueline the most contemptible in all human experience—social ambition.
Besides which, she had heard the news already—had learned it most painfully on the opening day of school. A certain weekly publication which she was strictly forbidden to read—and in which, as a matter of fact, she took no interest whatsoever—had been smuggled into her hands by her friend, Lucy Traver, and the action had been accompanied by a giggle—a giggle Jacqueline could still hear. She had read the following paragraph:
“The Peter McMannises—we beg their pardon, the P. Leslie McMannises—are, we understand, even now returning to their more or less native shores with a certain great peer in tow. The McMannises, having failed to conspicuously to make good their social ambitions in these United States, have met, so we are told, with great success in England, where so little is expected of Americans except quaint speech and an ability to pay the bills. We understand that the enormous new Italian palace in the East Eighties—so strangely out of harmony with the background of the McMannises—is to be opened for a series of entertainments in the hope that many people will go there to meet a duke who have been obdurate heretofore.”
To be wroth with those we love is, as the poet has said, maddening; but to be ashamed of them is almost worse. Jacqueline dropped the paper on the floor by the simple method of unclosing her long fingers.
“Don't ever give me such stuff as that to read again,” she said severely.
“But is it true?” asked Lucy. “Are you really going to have a tame duke in the house?”
Jacqueline would not even answer. As a matter of fact, she did not know whether it was true or not, but she feared the worst. She knew only too well the joy it would be to Mrs. McMannis to bring home a duke, for the girl had a terrible detached clarity of vision. She had seen her stepmother's eyes lighten at reading her name in the right list of names, and had heard her father roll a great name under his tongue, telling a story that had no point except the friendliness of some foreign celebrity toward Peter Leslie McMannis.
All through the summer their letters from England had been full of a high clear note of triumph—yes, even her father's letters. Names were mentioned which one still in the process of studying English history could not help knowing were historic names. They stayed at castles in Scotland, steel engravings of which were in the edition of the Waverley Novels which Mr. McMannis had given his daughter the Christmas she was fourteen. They had even spent the night at St. Giles's Grange, where, as every child knows, Charles II had lain concealed in a secret room between the walls. Jacqueline felt an emotion of envy when she read the letter that described that visit. She longed to see the mysterious sliding panel and the tiny circular stair behind the chimney piece.
She could have understood an interest in the English aristocracy from this romantic, historical point of view. But her parents' interest was not like that, nor was Miss Salisbury's. So the girl had not taken the slightest notice of her governess' announcement, but had gone on reading about the dangerous condition of the dome of St. Paul's—a subject, it must be owned, in which she took no interest at all; and when Miss Salisbury exclaimed “Won't it be delightful?” Jacqueline looked up and said, “Won't what be delightful?”
“To watch the duke over here—to see what he thinks of it all.”
“Not to me,” answered the girl; “because, you see, I don't care what he thinks. Is he particularly clever, that we should want to know what he thinks?”
No, Miss Salisbury had never heard that the duke was brilliant. She said it as if it were hardly the function of the aristocracy to be brilliant.
So they had fallen to arguing. Whenever their conversation began, whether with English dukes or American weather, they always ended with an argument.
Now, as they passed the little round pond in the park, upon which already eager shipowners were launching their craft, Miss. Salisbury was asserting with calm finality, “As a matter of fact, England is a far more democratic country than the United States.”
“A queer kind of democracy that has a House of Lords, if you ask me,” replied Jacqueline, with a most irritating sort of crow in her voice.
“Better than a plutocracy—an irresponsible plutocracy like this,” said Miss Salisbury. “Our aristocracy has its recognized responsibilities.”
“What are they?” asked the girl. “Opening bazaars—isn't that it?”
“Charity is certainly one of their duties,” replied Miss Salisbury with dignity. “Upholding traditions is another.”
“How you all do bow down to them!” cried Jacqueline, feeling as usual a certain lack of first-hand information.
“Indeed, we don't make half such fools of ourselves as you do over here,” answered Miss Salisbury; and Jacqueline, conscious of her parents' ignominy, did not reply, but sank into a remoteness of sulky pain.
They passed the bust of Richard Hunt, late architect of the late Lenox Library. On that great pile of granite it was optimistically supposed that the sightless eyes of the bust would gaze as long as New York stood; but now, by one of those rapid changes so characteristic of Manhattan, those eyes are fixed upon a long low private house, the creation of quite a different architect.
Jacqueline glanced at the apartment houses and marble palaces about her—not a sliding panel or secret stairway in the whole lot probably. She began to plan a castle of her own, and by this means regained her inner poise before they turned east again and reached the Montross School.
At the door Miss Salisbury left her charge and returned to the McMannis house, secure of an uninterrupted morn- ing for that occupation upon which the British Empire has been so largely built—the letter home. Every week she wrote sixteen pages in her clear handsome handwriting to the Rev. Ethelbert Salisbury, rector of St. Margaret's Church, in a small Kentish village, where he lived with wife, two sisters and his remaining five daughters.
Meantime the locker room at school was filled with short-haired, straight-backed girls, big and little, from seven to eighteen—all engaged in snatching off their hats and coats and exchanging greetings.
“Done your algebra?”
“Haven't tried.”
“Is it true Grigsby has had a bob?”
“I thought not.”
“Who was that sheik you were with at the movies?”
“An uncle My cricks!”
“That's new, isn't it?”
“No; the old one with a new collar.”
“It makes you look just like that last picture of Constance's.”
“Oh, you dear, isn't she divine—simply divine?”
Jacqueline took off her things in silence and alone—she was a person of importance, but not exactly popular. She had two qualities which her schoolmates valued—beauty and maturity. Her beauty was obvious, a matter of deep-gray eyes, fringed with black, a little short face on a long throat—almost too long. But her maturity was harder to explain, for of course she had been protected from life by riches and comfort and nurses and governesses and an ordered routine; but that other protection—the irrational and unchanging love of parents—Jacqueline had not had. She had learned to judge for herself, to think for herself, to find methods of calming her own spirits, a technic of self-control that children who know there is always an adult bosom to weep upon never discover. She led her own inner life; which gave her preëminence among the other girls, who were all thinking and acting in instinctive accord with their families' wishes or in equally instinctive opposition to them.
The dark sullenness on Jacqueline's brow justified the greeting of her friend Lucy:
“Hullo, my little local thunderstorm, what's wrong with you?”
“I hate the English,” said Jacqueline. “I leave the house every morning enjoying the weather and my own thoughts, and I never get ten blocks before this rabbit-toothed creature whom my family have imported for me says something to enrage me.” And Jacqueline obliged with a representation of Miss Salisbury's enunciation, her slight difficulty in getting her lips to close over her projecting teeth.
Lucy enjoyed the show, but her mind was on something more serious. She had not as yet looked at her English poetry, which she was almost certain to be called upon to recite. “Puss-Puss is certain to call on me,” she said, thus referring to Miss Grigsby, she who was falsely reported to have had a bob, “for she's let me alone for a week. Put the great bean to work on that, Jackie, and see what can be done.”
Jacqueline nodded silently, meaning that she would give the matter her full attention during the opening exercises.
It was no empty promise. When the senior class in English Poetry since Pope—“And what's wrong with Pope?” as Lucy had inquired—took its place in the class-room, Miss Grigsby—alias Puss-Puss—had actually opened her mouth to say “Lucy, will you recite the first stanza of the Intimations of Immortality?” when Jacqueline's long thin arm shot up with her hand fluttering at the end of it like a tiny banner.
“Oh, Miss Grigsby, I do want to ask you something.”
Miss Grigsby had the sort of grateful affection for Jacqueline that every teacher has for a pupil who takes an independent interest in a subject. Jacqueline actually read more of a poet sometimes than the prescribed amount. She was allowed to go on:
“I heard a discussion the other day—awfully interesting. But is it true that no poet has ever been a good man?”
For a hasty composition, this was not bad—a teacher of English verse really was obliged to take note of this.
“I should rather say,” replied Miss Grigsby, smiling with a false sweetness which she herself was the last person to know was false, “that no great poet had ever been anything but a good man. Milton”
“was horrid to his daughters, Miss Grigsby.”
“We have very little evidence on that point. Tennyson”
“Oh, but not a great poet, Miss Grigsby.”
“There I disagree with you, Jacqueline—most humbly, of course.”
The girls' thoughts:
“Why does she try being sarcastic, when Jackie can write poetry and she can't?”
“How about Swinburne, Miss Grigsby?”
Swinburne was the curse of Miss Grigsby's existence. She admired him extravagantly; not only A Forsaken Garden and Proserpine but other poems less respectable. It annoyed her unspeakably that the modern generation did not care for him; yet what could she do? She could not go about recommending him to growing girls. She simply ignored the name.
“Except for the boyish peccadillo with Justice Shallow,” she said, a little less sugary than before, “we have in Shakspere”
“If he isn't really Bacon,” said Jacqueline reflectively. “If he is, why, then we know a good deal against his moral character.”
Nothing more was necessary, and Jacqueline sat back, conscious of a friend well served. Miss Grigsby explained that Shakspere was not Bacon—could not have been Bacon; the moral characters of the two men were so different. Could anyone imagine that the author of Hamlet had ever accepted a bribe?
Lucy, under cover of a rather large sleeve, was able to learn her verse very comfortably, before at last, in the final minutes of the period, she was called on to recite. The girls admired the art of Jacqueline's performance. Miss Grigsby herself was dimly aware of what was happening, but the Bacon-Shakspere controversy so maddened her, she could not have resisted replying even if the whole plot had been made clear to her eyes.
Lucy, full of gratitude, went home to lunch with Jacqueline. She was one of the friends approved of by the McMannises, and even Miss Salisbury, who had said, “I confess that Lucy seems to me to have been very nicely brought up.”
The use of “I confess” annoyed Jacqueline.
“Why should she confess approving of you, Lucy?” she demanded fiercely. “As if it were something to her discredit!'
Lucy, who had Dutch ancestors, was of a calm imperturbable nature, disturbed only by occasional attacks of the giggles. Her friend's deep though concealed storminess took her by surprise. They had met first as little girls at the Montross School. In the Roman History class, during some story of Roman courage, Lucy had observed that Jacqueline was crying. She looked at her in wonder and then whispered, “It isn't sad—he wasn't killed.”
To which Jacqueline had replied, “Idiot! If it were a sad story I wouldn't cry! It's his being so brave.”
To this day Lucy pondered over this incident without understanding it. The friendship was cemented by the fact that the next year Jacqueline, then eleven, had fallen deeply in love with Lucy's brother—an older man of eighteen—a college man; to speak accurately, a god. It began one day by Mrs. Traver's making him, much against his inclination, take the two children to the theater in her place. He was kind, but he did not allow them to imagine he enjoyed their society. He left them in the entr'acte, saying, “Now you two kids behave yourselves while I go and have a cigarette.” To Jacqueline this, like everything else he did, appeared romantic; and as the play was a romantic drama in which a beautiful young man disguised as an Indian maharaja stole jewels and maidens, only to return them unharmed to their rightful guardians, Paul Traver became inextricably enmeshed in her mind with romance. He did not directly address her during the afternoon, but Lucy reported the next day that he had said “The kid has great eyes.” Jacqueline lived entirely nourished by this for months. She even began a sonnet:
He told me that my eyes were beautiful
And all the earth grew beautiful to me
It never went very well. The necessity of riming “”gull”—sea gull, of course—with “beautiful” rather spoiled it as a sonnet.
Paul had been succeeded by a handsome young officer with only one arm, who gave a course of lectures to the whole school on the military history of the Great War, and then by a tenor at the Metropolitan, and then by a wonderful young violinist, with none of whom did Jacqueline ever exchange a word. For the next six years she hardly saw Paul, who went through the law school and the first years in a law office. Yet when they met occasionally a spark of the old fire would flash up again. The summer before this Lucy had told her that Paul was in love with her. The news created a distinct flutter, but not the wild surge of emotion that she had felt years before at hearing he had praised her eyes.
“He keeps it to himself,” she had answered, Lucy nodded.
“He probably would never propose to a rich girl—certainly not until he had made his own mark in the world.”
“How about the rich girl?” said Jacqueline. “It would be rather hard on her if she cared.”
Her interest was academic, but she saw that Lucy took it seriously.
But it wasn't about Paul that Lucy wanted to talk this day. She was profoundly interested in the idea of the duke. She wanted to question Miss Salisbury, but Jacqueline forbade it. Her governess would take it as a sign of American hysteria—the snobbish American interest in titles.
“And anyhow,” Jacqueline added bitterly, “what does it matter to me? I shall probably never be allowed even to speak to him. I shall be kept out of the way, as usual. My stepmother will contrive it somehow.”
But like many placid people, Lucy was persistent; and after luncheon, under pretense of looking up an article on William Blake in an encyclopedia, the two girls went down to the library to see what they could find out about the Duke of Dormier. Lucy knew that there was a book called a Peerage, and owing to the fact that the McMannis books were well classified and seldom disturbed, they soon found among the reference books that broad red-and-gold back.
The library was a beautiful room in dark paneled wood, lined from top to bottom with books. The whole second floor of the house was kept shut up during the absence of the elder members of the family, but when Jacqueline opened the inner shutters the afternoon sun came flooding in. The two girls sat down side by side on the window seat; and Jacqueline, more expert with books than Lucy, soon found the name the were looking for and began to read aloud, as follows:
“'Dormier, Duke of; Fitzgrady-Stewart; sits as Marquess—'”
Lucy gave a faint hoot at this—Lucy was by nature a giggler—but Jacqueline, endlessly capable of taking an interest in the printed page, began to feel something ancient and romantic and suggestive. She read on:
“'Patrick Albert Edward Shawmus Fitzgrady-Stewart, fourth duke and thirteenth baron, born July 2, 1850'”
“That's 'nuff!” cried Lucy. “The man is seventy-five years old. Let's go and do our Latin prose.”
“I don't care if he's a thousand,” answered Jacqueline. “Just listen to the things he is, Lucy: 'Educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, lord lieutenant of the county and president of its Territorial Forces Association. J. P.' Do you happen to know what a J. P. is?”
Lucy absolutely declined to put her mind on the problem, and Jacqueline continued:
“Well, don't strain your mind, for if you knew what that was we'd then have to meet the problem that he's a D. L. too. 'Patron of seven livings, formerly lieutenant colonel and honorable colonel of the King's Own Seventeenth Balliecouchan (Civil Ser.) Light Dragoons'”
“You're making it up,” said Lucy.
“Flatterer!” answered Jacqueline. “'Was honorable equerry to Edward VII and president and gold stick'”
“I shall simply die if you go on!” cried Lucy, but Jacqueline went on:
“'Married, first, in 1880, died in 1888, the Honorable Pamela Georgina Sybil Pitts-Cave, eighth daughter of Viscount Bunbury of Brede; and second, in 1895, Lady Imogen Augusta Lettice'”
“Let me see!” cried Lucy. “Let me see if it is really there!”
“It is, and more,” said Jacqueline. “'Augusta Lettice Alice Leath-Meadows, fifth daughter of the eleventh duke of Clamborough, by whom he has issue.'”
“What an awful word for children!”
“I think it has a lot of style,” answered Jacqueline. “Shall I read on?” Lucy said no and Jacqueline went on: “'Arms: Quarterly, first and fourth quarters counterquartered; a fesse wavy”
“Come, come,” said Lucy, “this is going too far.”
“Well,” said her friend, “perhaps that bit is a trifle obscure. 'Seats'”
“Where he sits as a marquess?”
“*Seats: Fitzgrady Castle, Balliecouchan. Coney House, near Crumbelly, Hants, The ge, Bonny Brigg, Midlothian. Town residence: Dormier House, Grosvenor Square.' As a special favor, Lucy, I'll omit his clubs, which are simply thrilling, and pass to: 'Son, living: Thomas Aubrey Cecil Edward, Lord Fitzgrady, born May 25, 1897; educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge; was captain of Grenadier Guards and served throughout European war; wounded three times'”
Lucy, who had been counting on her fingers, now interrupted.
“That sounds more like it,” she said. “He's young.”
Jacqueline demurred a little.
“He's almost thirty,” she said.
“Better than seventy-five.”
They examined the date of the Peerage and found that it was 1918. They agreed that a good deal might have happened since then. Thomas Aubrey Cecil Edward might well have succeeded in place of Patrick Albert Edward Shawmus.
Before long, Lucy was called for and went away, but Jacqueline stayed, sitting on one foot, dangling the other, and staring down into what in space was a small back yard, but in latticework, marble seats and busts of Roman emperors was an Italian garden.
Balliecouchan Castle! That would have a secret passage, leading perhaps into a ruined abbey, a ruined tower with a stairway that broke off short like the stair in Kidnapped. And a ghost—a pale queen—a pale queen on a ruined stair that begins at naught and leads nowhere and vanishes in empty air.
Then she thought of a ballad about the young lord going away to fight, with fifty henchmen at his back, though she was not clear as to what henchmen were.
The library door opened and Miss Salisbury came in.
“Ah, there you are,” she said. “Doing your Latin prose, I hope.”
Jacqueline turned her head slowly and stared at her governess as if she saw her for the first time. She was coming back from distant places. After an appreciable pause she said she had not been doing her Latin prose. Miss Salisbury, after expressing great surprise at this, volunteered a piece of information:
“Your father's office has telephoned. I've good news for you. The boat will arrive about ten on Saturday morning.”
A cloud descended on Jacqueline's brow.
“Wouldn't you know it?” she said. “Of course they'd get in on a holiday, when a morning off doesn't do me any good.”
Miss Salisbury, not gifted with an instinctive knowledge of the human heart, was shocked at this example of filial cold-heartedness. She thought how she would have felt if she had had word that the Reverend Ethelbert was approaching these shores. She expressed her opinion that that was no way to receive news of her family's return. Jacqueline hardly heard her, She was thinking:
“Must he always wireless the office? Does he think I'm not old enough to read? Does he forget I exist, or is it that woman who won't let him admit that I am more interested in his return than anyone else?”
She thought about not going to the pier to meet them. And when he asked her at the house, as she kissed him coldly, “Why were you not at the pier, Jacqueline?” she would answer with dignity, “I had no knowledge that you were coming, father.” “What? Did not Williams let you know?” “Why did not you yourself let me know?” But then perhaps he wouldn't ask her. That was the worst of these rehearsed scenes—so often the other person did not ask the right question.
She went to bed resolved to administer this well-deserved rebuke to her parent; but when she woke up to another glorious clear morning she felt differently about the whole problem. She was so glad her father was coming home, and there was no question that it was fun to meet a boat. She had almost forgotten about the duke until she discovered that Miss Salisbury was in a flutter about him.
“Aren't you interested to see the duke?” she asked with quite a girlish enthusiasm.
Jacqueline turned a dark glance upon her.
“No,” she answered. “I can't say I am particularly interested in dukes.”
By half past nine they were on the pier. Miss Salisbury's long slender nose, which betrayed so many different intentions between the bridge and the tip, was a decided pink—just the shade that fresh air and excitement had put into Jacqueline's cheeks. The great vessel was already pushing its nose past the openings in the walls of the pier like some prehistoric animal looking into a cave.
Williams, Mr. McMannis' secretary, was there, talking to the reporters. Almost immediately Jacqueline caught sight of her father standing at the railing.
McMannis was rather a heavy figure in a large dark-blue overcoat. His hair was white for fifty. He was clean-shaven and the lower part of his face was thrust forward pugnaciously. He was a man who presented many manners to the world—a genial manner, a blustering manner, ancient business man's manner, a paternal manner. His daughter's heart gave a great bound and then seemed to melt with love at the sight of him.
One of her happiest—and perhaps least likely—dreams was that some day a real vital relation was going to be established between her and her father; not this smooth impersonal affection, but something honest and intimate....
Then, glancing a little farther along the ship's rail, she saw her stepmother, and her heart hardened again.
“New sables, if I'm not mistaken,” she observed to Miss Salisbury.
“And very nice too,” said Miss Salisbury; and then, fearing that this might be interpreted as an envy of American luxury, she added, “That is, if one can wear fur. I find wool keeps one warmer.” And she wrapped a striped muffler, brought her from Scotland by a friend, closer about her neck.
Standing beside her parents was an enormously tall man with a red face, a mustache and prominent blue eyes—a man more than twenty-eight and yet obviously less than seventy-five, unless there was some truth in the story of the vigorous preservation of elderly Englishmen. If that were the duke romance was dead.
A very young man in a high hat and cutaway rushed up to Mr. Williams and announced himself as a representative from the embassy to meet the duke. Jacqueline began to look sullen.
“Why must a duke be met?” she said.
“Of course he must be met,” said Miss Salisbury.
Her tone admitted of no argument; and so Jacqueline at once fell to arguing the point, which led to a more general argument on the subject of whether there was or was not an inherent right way to do things. This occupied all the time until the gangway was lowered and the passengers began to descend; and Jacqueline, forgetting her grievances, flung herself into her father's arms. She received a bright bland smile from her stepmother and was allowed to bury her nose for an instant in the sables. They smelled delicious, as everything about Mrs. McMannis always did.
Then she had a second to turn her head and look more closely at the third member of the party, who in a search for his keys was unbuttoning layer upon layer of slightly different tweeds, and saying, “Yes—yes—yes—quite—quite—your American customs—oh, yes—quite so.”
Then her father, holding her by the arm, as if she were likely to escape, said, “This is my little daughter. Major Pitts-Cave, Jacqueline.”
Not the duke! Good!
“Ah?” said Mr. Pitts-Cave, putting a lot of cordiality into the monosyllable. Then deciding it had been successful, he said it again: “Ah!”
A faint sound was heard from Miss Salisbury recalling her existence, and Mr. McMannis continued: “And Miss Salisbury, a countrywoman of yours.”
“Oh!” said Mr. Pitts-Cave, not quite so cordial, but still very nice indeed. “Oh!”
Jacqueline felt glad Lucy was not there—she would have giggled.
Mrs. McMannis looked about her.
“What's become of the duke?” she said.
So that was how you spoke of him, was it? Jacqueline looked about too.
“Hiding from your American reporters, prolly,” said Pitts-Cave.
At the time Jacqueline thought “prolly” was the name of an American reporter, but later was to become familiar with it as the English equivalent of the American word “probably.”
“Not on your tintype, Pittsy,” said the duke, and he emerged from behind the great bulk of his cousin's loosened outer garments
Jacqueline saw a slender and not very tall figure in a distinctly shabby tweed overcoat, with the collar turned up, and a felt hat not in its first youth, pulled well down, If she had looked down, she would have seen the most beautiful pair of brown boots which that fellow in St. James's Street had ever made, But she didn't look down; she looked up and saw a long narrow face, not at ail handsome, but delicately modeled—a job which it had taken several centuries to accomplish—a pale clear skin, a penetrating blue eye—enough to assure her that this was Thomas Aubrey Cecil Edward, and not Patrick Albert Edward Shawmus. Oh, no!
Her father laughed.
“Not on your tintype!” That's old stuff, Dormier. You can do better than that.”
“I learned it last night in the smoking room,” said the duke gently, “from a lad who called me Say-Duke, as if it were my name.” He turned civilly as a representative of the press approached him and said, “”Say-Duke.”
“Here you are, Pittsy,” said the duke, again slipping behind his cousin's ample back. “My cousin, Major Pitts-Cave—simply full of good things for the papers eager to tell you what he thinks of the Woolworth Building.”
The giant form of Pitts-Cave was instantly surrounded by notebooks and from the midst came the sound, “Ah—ah—quite—quite”
The valet and the maid and the secretary were left to attend to declarations and customs duties; and the McMannis party, as free from care and even from hand luggage as if they were stepping off e ferry-boat, moved toward the entrance of the pier. Jacqueline's heart was swelling within her.
She knew it would be like that—she had not even been introduced. If she had been a maid they could not have more completely ignored her. The duke must think she was half-witted.
Mrs. McMannis and Pitts-Cave and the duke and the young man from the embassy al! disappeared into one of the McMannis motors, and Mr. McMannis and his daughter and Miss Salisbury got into the other—the older car, driven by the second chauffeur.
“How handsome His Grace is!” exclaimed Miss Salisbury, and her voice shook with emotion.
“He's a nice young fellow,” said Mr. McMannis. “But I shouldn't call him handsome. Would you, Jacqueline?”
There was a chance and Jacqueline took it.
“I'm not sure I knew which one he was,” she answered haughtily.
Quite unnecessarily, they described him to her, while she maintained a baffling silence.
“His mother,” said Miss Salisbury, “was a celebrated beauty in her day—Lady Augusta Leath-Meadows. She came down to Shrewsbury-Crewe once as a bride to open a bazaar.”
“Surely,” said Mr. McMannis politely, “you can't remember his mother as a bride.”
“Oh, no,” answered the governess; “but my father has often told us about it—her graciousness and beauty”
For some reason the picture of the rector, with that same tremolo in his voice, describing to his children gathered about his knee the arrival of the young duchess to open his bazaar was repugnant to Jacqueline. She flung herself back in the car until her head against her father's shoulder. She felt a sudden need of her own country, her own family.
“Well,” said her father, “have you been a good girl?”
That was what he always did to her. When they were apart she could imagine herself pouring her soul out to him, telling him everything she had ever done or thought; but as soon as they were together he said something like this:
“Haven't you grown a little? Have you been a good girl? Have you been learning your lesson? Where are the roses in those cheeks?”—harmless, well-intended phrases which seemed to raise a partition like a wall of glass between them, through which she could see him without being able to communicate with him.
She attributed this in some way to the evil influence of her stepmother. It never crossed her mind that her father was embarrassed in her society. He loved her deeply, but he had an ideal of what a young girl should be; and this did not include her knowing anything, or feeling anything, or having anything to confide. He wanted her always near him. It hurt him to leave her, but it would have shocked him slightly to know that she had a turbulent inner life of her own. His affection for her was no more dependent on understanding her than a mother's love for an infant is chilled by the a that that infant cannot converse with her.
When they reached the house, there was no sign of the other party. Mr. McMannis moved toward his own office on the ground floor, but a reproachful “Oh, father, aren't you coming to sit with me?” made him change his direction.
“Oh, of course, of course,” he answered guiltily.
Jacqueline had a tiny sitting room on the third story, next to her room. The rooms of her parents were on the same floor, but in the front of the house. It was a pretty room, done over by Mrs. McMannis with faultless taste in pale blues and pinks, with old prints and aquatints in black-and-gold frames, and a gay chintz.
The girl pulled forward a comfortable armchair and put her father into it, and then herself sat down at his feet on the floor.
“Now,” she said, “we can have a good talk before the others get here.” And as she spoke, a despairing knowledge came over her that they had nothing whatever to say to each other.
He was not so clear-sighted.
“Yes, indeed,” he answered; “you must tell me all about what you did this summer.”
But there was nothing to tell. Of course, there had really been a hundred incidents each day which it would have interested her to repeat; but now she could not think of one of them.
She and Miss Salisbury had spent the summer at the McMannis place in the Adirondacks, swimming and camping and climbing mountains, She tried to say this, hoping that something would revive as she talked; but after a few minutes she saw that he was not even listening, and she did not blame him; what she was saying was dull. She broke off.
“But all that isn't interesting,” she said, “compared to what you've been doing and seeing. Tell me about that, father.”
He answered with a careful list of places and dates. In the middle a faint bell began to buzz. It was a private telephone in his own room, and he rose with an alacrity that did not suggest regret. When he had gone Jacqueline put her head down in the chair and cried. Why did she always look forward to his return when it was always like this when he came?
Perhaps one of the things that were wrong from Jacqueline's point of view—one of the things so difficult for a child to understand in a parent—was that he was still very busy with his own career, still excited and surprised and occupied by success.
He was the son of Irish immigrant parents. After a high-school education he had gone to work as a clerk in a small shop in a town on the bye of the West. There, in a moment of tribal generosity, he had lent one hundred dollars, carefully saved, to a fellow clerk who had come from the same county in Ireland. He had received in lieu of payment an interest in a building lot at the edge of the town. This consideration, apparently valueless, had turned out to contain the only sand in the neighborhood. By selling sand McMannis had been repaid many times the amount of the original debt. Hardly had the sand been exhausted when an oil fever struck the town, and McMannis had rented his lot for a high price to prospective drillers. The oil had never materialized, but by the time the excitement was over the town had begun to grow in the right direction, and McMannis sold his lot as a fashionable building site for the colossal sum of two thousand dollars.
On this capital he had married—married, like Napoleon, a little above him—a young school-teacher of good New England family. Unlike Josephine, she had the tact to die before McMannis' growing greatness rendered her a detriment instead of an advantage. His wild grief at her loss was a new element in his success. Hard work and speculation became his only distractions. By a combination of these he made his fortune, principally in copper stocks. He had been eight years a widower and Jacqueline was a child of nine, when, in the city of Mobile, he fell under the domination of his present wife.
She was a remarkable woman. Ten years before she had been beautiful, and even now, though nearing fifty, not a single line was written on that camellia-white brow—perhaps because, although she had been known to weep, she never worried. Her will and her beauty had carried her steadily upward without one stain upon her moral character.
Her career in its way had been more remarkable than McMannis'. As a young girl in a small Southern town, she had married a handsome shifty young lawyer and had pushed him into politics, until finally he was sent to Washington as a congressman. Here he behaved so badly, particularly to her, that, under the advice of her senator, she had little trouble in obtaining a divorce from him; and no one was astonished when a year later she married the senator, a man thirty years her senior. He died promptly and left his widow in a position to condescend to McMannis. From the moment of their meeting she became the dominant member of the partnership. It was not perhaps that she was cleverer than he; but she was clearer-sighted, unhampered by sentiments and tribal loyalties. Yet she was not unkind, except to those who stood in her path. She was just, and even generous. She had in all probability deliberately destroyed her first husband; but he was hardly worth saving; and she still supported his old mother—an obligation which he on his downward path had long since repudiated. She had made the senator perfectly happy during their brief marriage. Her care of Jacqueline was carefully thought out and wise—exactly what she would have given her own daughter if she had had one. But to a child who for the first ten years of her life had been neglected, but free, the succeeding years under Mrs. McMannis' routine had seemed nothing short of tyranny, and cold tyranny at that. She was the only person of whom the child had ever been afraid—afraid, as of some great engine moving slowly upon its appointed way.
She was frightened now, when, raising her head from the seat of the chair, she saw that her stepmother had come silently into the room.
Mrs. McMannis was one of those calm smooth women who look like blancmange and possessed of wills of iron. She looked all about the room now with a steady competent glance, and Jacqueline became aware that she had changed the arrangement of the furniture without permission.
“You've changed things,” said Mrs. MecMannis, and then added, “It's better—much better.”
Jacqueline was a little ashamed of breathing a sigh of relief. She had a right to arrange her own room her own way, she thought. Her stepmother's eyes flashed across her once and saw, the girl knew, that her eyes were red. Unlike her father, her stepmother saw everything.
Mrs. McMannis did not comment on what she saw. She said, “I've brought you some clothes—when the trunks come.”
It was useless to pretend that this was not good news—surprising too.
“Clothes?” she cried.
“Quantities,” said Mrs. McMannis; and then, as if she did not want to be questioned, she left the room as suddenly as she had entered.
So the girl was left thinking not about tragedy but about clothes. Those dresses selected by Mrs. McMannis would be right; Jacqueline knew that. But why had they been bought—and quantities too? Could it be she was to be allowed to come out this winter?
She wished that some of these new garments were already in her wardrobe. She wanted something beautiful and mature for the inevitable meeting with the duke at luncheon. Then certainly the family would be obliged to recognize her existence.
She stood in front of her looking-glass, staring into it with a stern concentrated gaze. Sometimes she could get a certain wave of the hair at her left temple, but the air was too dry and clear today.
When she went downstairs she found the duke had gone off to Washington with the young attaché and would not be back for several days. Jacqueline felt bored and flat, and threatened the duke in her own mind with never being able to rouse any interest in her again.
“It's rather a bore for the poor lad,” Pitts-Cave said civilly.
On Monday morning at school Jacqueline did not admit generally that she had not even spoken to him.
“What's he like?” she said, with a slight shrug of the shoulders. “About like every other pale thin young man you ever saw, only he speaks in a funny sort of way.”
“What do you call him?” asked one of the girls.
This, too, Jacqueline skillfully avoided.
“Well, his servant calls him Your Grace and my father calls him Dormier and his cousin calls him Tac, and I guess I shall call him just 'you.'”
But to Lucy she was more communicative.
“It isn't that I want to be introduced to the creature, or have anything to do with him,” she explained, “but it's so insolent to ignore me, as if she were ashamed of me. I dare say she is. I'm too American for her taste perhaps. Perhaps he hasn't even been told that there is a stepdaughter. It makes me feel like a fool that I have not even spoken to him. I believe she does it on purpose.” There was never any doubt in these conversations as to who “she” was. She added presently, as if Lucy were now to hear the very depth of human infamy, “She's going to have a party for him as soon as he gets back.”
“Maybe he'll never come back,” said Lucy gayly.
“Wouldn't it serve her right if he didn't?” said Jacqueline, and yet the idea was not entirely satisfactory to her either.
Lucy thought the party itself would be fun, but Jacqueline corrected her:
“Don't suppose, you poor innocent, that I shall be allowed down, to contaminate the festivities with my presence. Oh, no! I've known her to send up for Salisbury in a tight place, but never for me.”
Mrs. McMannis was putting into the arrangement of that dinner an executive genius which, if she had been a man, would have gone to the building of an empire or a business corporation. She knew very few people in New York—hardly any of those whom she intended to have at her party, for the detestable weekly had been right when it said that the social campaign of the McMannises in New York had been a failure. She knew none of these people personally; but by some instinctive perception she knew exactly which twenty-four people out of the million she must have about her table. More than that, she knew how to get them.
The first point was to prevent any of them first getting the duke for themselves. She was wise enough to foresee that each one of the ladies whom she was inviting to her party would attempt to give the duke a smarter, smaller party than hers, to which they would not dream of inviting her. She was safeguarded in this by Dormier's dislike of parties. He had given positive instructions to Pitts-Cave that everything was to be refused.
The preparations for this dinner were a long agony of humiliation to Jacqueline. She did not care so much to what depths her stepmother sank, but to see her father interested—even elated at some of the names on the list—that was intolerable. She stood scowling in a corner, with folded arms like a young Napoleon, at hearing him cry, “What? You are asking Mrs. Emden?” His wife nodded.
“Do you think she'll come?”
The corner of Mrs. McMannis' mouth moved upward in a contemptuous little smile.
“I know she'll come as soon as she finds she can't get at Dormier in any other way.”
“Has she tried?”
His wife waved toward the mantelpiece, where a bundle of letters and telegrams for the duke were standing.
“Five telegrams from her, Pittsy says. She's waiting to answer my invitation until she's sure.”
“I should be tempted to tell her I had filled her place.”
“I am tempted,” answered Mrs. McMannis. “But I need her.”
A new secretary had been engaged; a stout, solemn, middle-aged woman, who was recommended as knowing that most subtle and ephemeral of all categories—the social grades in the metropolis of a great republic. She had seen many new fortunes through their first social adventures and came prepared to advise and admonish. But a far wiser head than hers was in control, and she found herself permitted to do nothing but the routine work of looking up addresses and directing envelopes. She was amazed at the success of methods of which she often disapproved, and confided to a former employer that Mrs. McMannis was a great personality—almost a genius.
Two days before the dinner an evening dress appeared in Jacqueline's room. She walked in late one afternoon, and there it was extended on her bed, simple, shimmering, soft; the sort of garment a smart young archangel might have worn to a celestial garden. Jacqueline had wondered many times what had become of those quantities of clothes, but she was too proud and too alienated from her stepmother to inquire for them. But this dress, prone upon the bed, was not to be viewed without emotion.
She was holding it up at arm's length, feasting on it, when her stepmother and Miss Salisbury entered together.
“I think that's what she had better wear tomorrow night,” said Mrs. McMannis.
Jacqueline's heart gave a bound, but remembering her disapproval, she said, “I don't want to come to your dinner party, thank you.”
“Oh, dear, we are very indifferent!” said Miss Salisbury, rather foolishly.
“There are some silver slippers that go with it,” said Mrs. McMannis to Miss Salisbury.
“I tell you I don't want to come,” said Jacqueline. “Do I have to come if I don't want to?”
“And nothing in the hair,” said Mrs. McMannis. “No bands, you know.”
“Ah, no; so much more girlish without,” said the governess.
Mrs. McMannis did not answer this, feeling that it was not necessary for her to listen to Miss Salisbury's views on dress.
Jacqueline broke out as the door closed behind her stepmother. She hated her—she hated society—a lot of false people trying to knife one another—she wished she were free—she'd rather go into a convent or work in a shop—she'd like to go West and teach school as her mother had done—she hated the English—little grafting noblemen who took advantage of American kindness and generosity and thought they were doing you a favor by accepting your hospitality
Miss Salisbury, not unnaturally irritated by this description of a class she had been brought up to revere, from the lips of a young barbarian, was ill-advised enough to say at this point that the Duke of Dormier wass doing anyone he stayed with a great honor.
“An honor? What honor?” cried Jacqueline. “What has he ever done but be born? My father has done something in the world—has created a great company—a great fortune.”
“I don't say no to that,” Miss Salisbury began, but was interrupted.
“You can't,” shouted Jacqueline, “because it's true. My father is known all the world over for his ability; but if you took oer, this boy's title, what would he be? Nothing at all—no one! That's what your aristocracy is—a title and nothing else. And I won't be tied to his chariot wheels like Cleopatra! I won't come down to this dinner party!”
But, of course, she knew she would come down; more ignominious still, she knew she wanted to.
Quite independent of the duke, she had never been to a real party and she wanted to wear that white dress.
(TO BE CONTINUED)