The Man Between: An International Romance

“It is not only that I am tired, I am troubled about Fred Mostyn.”

“Why?”

“I do not know why. It is only a vague unrest as yet. But one thing I know, I shall oppose anything like Fred making himself intimate with Dora.”

“I think you will do wisely in that.”

But in a week Ethel realized that in opposing a lover like Fred Mostyn she had a task beyond her ability. Fred had nothing to do as important in his opinion as the cultivation of his friendship with Dora Denning. He called it “friendship,” but this misnomer deceived no one, not even Dora. And when Dora encouraged his attentions, how was Ethel to prevent them without some explanation which would give a sort of reality to what was as yet a nameless suspicion?

Yet every day the familiarity increased. He seemed to divine their engagements. If they went to their jeweler’s, or to a bazaar, he was sure to stroll in after them. When they came out of the milliner’s or modiste’s, Fred was waiting. “He had secured a table at Sherry’s; he had ordered lunch, and all was ready.” It was too great an effort to resist his entreaty. Perhaps no one wished to do so. The girls were utterly tired and hungry, and the thought of one of Fred’s lunches was very pleasant. Even if Basil Stanhope was with them, it appeared to be all the better. Fred always included Dora’s lover with a charming courtesy; and, indeed, at such hours, was in his most delightful mood. Stanhope appeared to inspire him. His mentality when the clergyman was present took possession of every incident that came and went, and clothed it in wit and pleasantry. Dora’s plighted lover honestly thought Dora’s undeclared lover the cleverest and most delightful of men. And he had no opportunity of noting, as Ethel did, the difference in Fred’s attitude when he was not present. Then Mostyn’s merry mood became sentimental, and his words were charged with soft meanings and looks of adoration, and every tone and every movement made to express far more than the tongue would have dared to utter.

As this flirtation progressed—for on Dora’s part it was only vanity and flirtation—Ethel grew more and more uneasy. She almost wished for some trifling overt act which would give her an excuse for warning Dora; and one day, after three weeks of such philandering, the opportunity came.

“I think you permit Fred Mostyn to take too much liberty with you, Dora,” she said as soon as they were in Dora’s parlor, and as she spoke she threw off her coat in a temper which effectively emphasized the words.

“I have been expecting this ill-nature, Ethel. You were cross all the time we were at lunch. You spoiled all our pleasure Pray, what have I been doing wrong with Fred Mostyn?”

“It was Fred who did wrong. His compliments to you were outrageous. He has no right to say such things, and you have no right to listen to them.”

“I am not to blame if he compliments me instead of you. He was simply polite, but then it was to the wrong person.”

“Of course it was. Such politeness he had no right to offer you.”

“It would have been quite proper if offered you, I suppose?”

“It would not. It would have been a great impertinence. I have given him neither claim nor privilege to address me as ‘My lovely Ethel!’ He called you many times ‘My lovely Dora!’ You are not his lovely Dora. When he put on your coat, he drew you closer than was proper; and I saw him take your hand and hold it in a clasp—not necessary.”

“Why do you listen and watch? It is vulgar. You told me so yourself. And I am lovely. Basil says that as well as Fred. Do you want a man to lie and say I am ugly?”

“You are fencing the real question. He had no business to use the word ‘my.’ You are engaged to Basil Stanhope, not to Fred Mostyn.”

“I am Basil’s lovely fiancee; I am Fred’s lovely friend.”

“Oh! I hope Fred understands the difference.”

“Of course he does. Some people are always thinking evil.”

“I was thinking of Mr. Stanhope’s rights.”

“Thank you, Ethel; but I can take care of Mr. Stanhope’s rights without your assistance. If you had said you were thinking of Ethel Rawdon’s rights you would have been nearer the truth.”

“Dora, I will not listen–”

“Oh, you shall listen to me! I know that you expected Fred to fall in love with you, but if he did not like to do so, am I to blame?” Ethel was resuming her coat at this point in the conversation, and Dora understood the proud silence with which the act was being accomplished. Then a score of good reasons for preventing such a definite quarrel flashed through her selfish little mind, and she threw her arms around Ethel and begged a thousand pardons for her rudeness. And Ethel had also reasons for avoiding dissension at this time. A break in their friendship now would bring Dora forward to explain, and Dora had a wonderful cleverness in presenting her own side of any question. Ethel shrunk from her innuendoes concerning Fred, and she knew that Basil would be made to consider her a meddling, jealous girl who willingly saw evil in Dora’s guileless enjoyment of a clever man’s company.

To be misunderstood, to be blamed and pitied, to be made a pedestal for Dora’s superiority, was a situation not to be contemplated. It was better to look over Dora’s rudeness in the flush of Dora’s pretended sorrow for it. So they forgave each other, or said they did, and then Dora explained herself. She declared that she had not the least intention of any wrong. “You see, Ethel, what a fool the man is about me. Somebody says we ought to treat a fool according to his folly. That is all I was doing. I am sure Basil is so far above Fred Mostyn that I could never put them in comparison—and Basil knows it. He trusts me.”

“Very well, Dora. If Basil knows it, and trusts you, I have no more to say. I am now sorry I named the subject.”

“Never mind, we will forget that it was named. The fact is, Ethel, I want all the fun I can get now. When I am Basil’s wife I shall have to be very sedate, and of course not even pretend to know if any other man admires me. Little lunches with Fred, theater and opera parties, and even dances will be over for me. Oh, dear, how much I am giving up for Basil! And sometimes I think he never realizes how dreadful it must be for me.”

“You will have your lover all the time then. Surely his constant companionship will atone for all you relinquish.”

“Take off your coat and hat, Ethel, and sit down comfortably. I don’t know about Basil’s constant companionship. Tete-a-tetes are tiresome affairs sometimes.”

“Yes,” replied Ethel, as she half-reluctantly removed her coat, “they were a bore undoubtedly even in Paradise. I wonder if Eve was tired of Adam’s conversation, and if that made her listen to—the other party.”

“I am so glad you mentioned that circumstance, Ethel. I shall remember it. Some day, no doubt, I shall have to remind Basil of the failure of Adam to satisfy Eve’s idea of perfect companionship.” And Dora put her pretty, jeweled hands up to her ears and laughed a low, musical laugh with a childish note of malice running through it.

This pseudo-reconciliation was not conducive to pleasant intercourse. After a short delay Ethel made an excuse for an early departure, and Dora accepted it without her usual remonstrance. The day had been one of continual friction, and Dora’s irritable pettishness hard to bear, because it had now lost that childish unreason which had always induced Ethel’s patience, for Dora had lately put away all her ignorant immaturities. She had become a person of importance, and had realized the fact. The young ladies of St. Jude’s had made a pet of their revered rector’s love, and the elder ladies had also shown a marked interest in her. The Dennings’ fine house was now talked about and visited. Men of high financial power respected Mr. Dan Denning, and advised the social recognition of his family; and Mrs. Denning was not now found more eccentric than many other of the new rich, who had been tolerated in the ranks of the older plutocrats. Even Bryce had made the standing he desired. He was seen with the richest and idlest young men, and was invited to the best houses. Those fashionable women who had marriageable daughters considered him not ineligible, and men temporarily hampered for cash knew that they could find smiling assistance for a consideration at Bryce’s little office on William Street.

These and other points of reflection troubled Ethel, and she was glad the long trial was nearing its end, for she knew quite well the disagreement of that evening had done no good. Dora would certainly repeat their conversation, in her own way of interpreting it, to both Basil Stanhope and Fred Mostyn. More than likely both Bryce and Mrs. Denning would also hear how her innocent kindness had been misconstrued; and in each case she could imagine the conversation that took place, and the subsequent bestowal of pitying, scornful or angry feeling that would insensibly find its way to her consciousness without any bird of the air to carry it.

She felt, too, that reprisals of any kind were out of the question. They were not only impolitic, they were difficult. Her father had an aversion to Dora, and was likely to seize the first opportunity for requesting Ethel to drop the girl’s acquaintance. Ruth also had urged her to withdraw from any active part in the wedding, strengthening her advice with the assurance that when a friendship began to decline it ought to be abandoned at once. There was only her grandmother to go to, and at first she did not find her at all interested in the trouble. She had just had a dispute with her milkman, was inclined to give him all her suspicions and all her angry words—“an impertinent, cheating creature,” she said; and then Ethel had to hear the history of the month’s cream and of the milkman’s extortion, with the old lady’s characteristic declaration:

“I told him plain what I thought of his ways, but I paid him every cent I owed him. Thank God, I am not unreasonable!”

Neither was she unreasonable when Ethel finally got her to listen to her own serious grievance with Dora.

“If you will have a woman for a friend, Ethel, you must put up with womanly ways; and it is best to keep your mouth shut concerning such ways. I hate to see you whimpering and whining about wrongs you have been cordially inviting for weeks and months and years.”

“Grandmother!”

“Yes, you have been sowing thorns for yourself, and then you go unshod over them. I mean that Dora has this fine clergyman, and Fred Mostyn, and her brother, and mother, and father all on her side; all of them sure that Dora can do no wrong, all of them sure that Ethel, poor girl, must be mistaken, or prudish, or jealous, or envious.”

“Oh, grandmother, you are too cruel.”

“Why didn’t you have a few friends on your own side?”

“Father and Ruth never liked Dora. And Fred—I told you how Fred acted as soon as he saw her!”

“There was Royal Wheelock, James Clifton, or that handsome Dick Potter. Why didn’t you ask them to join you at your lunches and dances? You ought to have pillared your own side. A girl without her beaux is always on the wrong side if the girl with beaux is against her.”

“It was the great time of Dora’s life. I wished her to have all the glory of it.”

“All her own share—that was right. All of your share, also—that was as wrong as it could be.”

“Clifton is yachting, Royal and I had a little misunderstanding, and Dick Potter is too effusive.”

“But Dick’s effusiveness would have been a good thing for Fred’s effusiveness. Two men can’t go on a complimentary ran-tan at the same table. They freeze one another out. That goes without saying. But Dora’s indiscretions are none of your business while she is under her father’s roof; and I don’t know if she hadn’t a friend in the world, if they would be your business. I have always been against people trying to do the work of THEM that are above us. We are told THEY seek and THEY save, and it’s likely they will look after Dora in spite of her being so unknowing of herself as to marry a priest in a surplice, when a fool in motley would have been more like the thing.”

“I don’t want to quarrel with Dora. After all, I like her. We have been friends a long time.”

“Well, then, don’t make an enemy of her. One hundred friends are too few against one enemy. One hundred friends will wish you well, and one enemy will DO you ill. God love you, child! Take the world as you find it. Only God can make it any better. When is this blessed wedding to come off?”

“In two weeks. You got cards, did you not?”

“I believe I did. They don’t matter. Let Dora and her flirtations alone, unless you set your own against them. Like cures like. If the priest sees nothing wrong–”

“He thinks all she does is perfect.”

“I dare say. Priests are a soft lot, they’ll believe anything. He’s love-blind at present. Some day, like the prophet of Pethor,1 he will get his eyes opened. As for Fred Mostyn, I shall have a good deal to say about him by and by, so I’ll say nothing now.”

“You promised, grandmother, not to talk to me any more about Fred.”

“It was a very inconsiderate promise, a very irrational promise! I am sorry I made it—and I don’t intend to keep it.”

“Well, it takes two to hold a conversation, grandmother.”

“To be sure it does. But if I talk to you, I hope to goodness you will have the decency to answer me. I wouldn’t believe anything different.” And she looked into Ethel’s face with such a smiling confidence in her good will and obedience, that Ethel could only laugh and give her twenty kisses as she stood up to put on her hat and coat.

“You always get your way, Granny,” she said; and the old lady, as she walked with her to the door, answered, “I have had my way for nearly eighty years, dearie, and I’ve found it a very good way. I’m not likely to change it now.”

“And none of us want you to change it, dear. Granny’s way is always a wise way.” And she kissed her again ere she ran down the steps to her carriage. Yet as the old lady stepped slowly back to the parlor, she muttered, “Fred Mostyn is a fool! If he had any sense when he left England, he has lost it since he came here.”

Of course nothing good came of this irritable interference. Meddling with the conscience of another person is a delicate and difficult affair, and Ruth had already warned Ethel of its certain futility. But the days were rapidly wearing away to the great day, for which so many other days had been wasted in fatiguing worry, and incredible extravagance of health and temper and money—and after it? There would certainly be a break in associations. Temptation would be removed, and Basil Stanhope, relieved for a time from all the duties of his office, would have continual opportunities for making eternally secure the affection of the woman he had chosen.

It was to be a white wedding, and for twenty hours previous to its celebration it seemed as if all the florists in New York were at work in the Denning house and in St. Jude’s church. The sacred place was radiant with white lilies. White lilies everywhere; and the perfume would have been overpowering, had not the weather been so exquisite that open windows were possible and even pleasant. To the softest strains of music Dora entered leaning on her father’s arm and her beauty and splendor evoked from the crowd present an involuntary, simultaneous stir of wonder and delight. She had hesitated many days between the simplicity of white chiffon and lilies of the valley, and the magnificence of brocaded satin in which a glittering thread of silver was interwoven. The satin had won the day, and the sunshine fell upon its beauty, as she knelt at the altar, like sunshine falling upon snow. It shone and gleamed and glistened as if it were an angel’s robe; and this scintillating effect was much increased by the sparkling of the diamonds in her hair, and at her throat and waist and hands and feet. Nor was her brilliant youth affected by the overshadowing tulle usually so unbecoming. It veiled her from head to feet, and was held in place by a diamond coronal. All her eight maids, though lovely girls, looked wan and of the earth beside her. For her sake they had been content with the simplicity of chiffon and white lace hats, and she stood among them lustrous as some angelic being. Stanhope was entranced by her beauty, and no one on this day wondered at his infatuation or thought remarkable the ecstasy of reverent rapture with which he received the hand of his bride. His sense of the gift was ravishing. She was now his love, his wife forever, and when Ethel slipped forward to part and throw backward the concealing veil, he very gently restrained her, and with his own hands uncovered the blushing beauty, and kissed her there at the altar. Then amid a murmur and stir of delighted sympathy he took his wife upon his arm, and turned with her to the life they were to face together.

Two hours later all was a past dream. Bride and bridegroom had slipped quietly away, and the wedding guests had arrived at that rather noisy indifference which presages the end of an entertainment. Then flushed and tired with hurrying congratulations and good wishes that stumbled over each other, carriage after carriage departed; and Ethel and her companions went to Dora’s parlor to rest awhile and discuss the event of the day. But Dora’s parlor was in a state of confusion. It had, too, an air of loss, and felt like a gilded cage from which the bird had flown. They looked dismally at its discomfort and went downstairs. Men were removing the faded flowers or sitting at the abandoned table eating and drinking. Everywhere there was disorder and waste, and from the servants’ quarter came a noisy sense of riotous feasting.

“Where is Mrs. Denning?” Ethel asked a footman who was gathering together the silver with the easy unconcern of a man whose ideas were rosy with champagne. He looked up with a provoking familiarity at the question, and sputtered out, “She’s lying down crying and making a fuss. Miss Day is with her, soothing of her.”

“Let us go home,” said Ethel.

And so, weary with pleasure, and heart-heavy with feelings that had no longer any reason to exist, pale with fatigue, untidy with crush, their pretty white gowns sullied and passe, each went her way; in every heart a wonder whether the few hilarious hours of strange emotions were worth all they claimed as their right and due.

Ruth had gone home earlier, and Ethel found her resting in her room. “I am worn out, Ruth,” was her first remark. “I am going to bed for three or four days. It was a dreadful ordeal.”

“One to which you may have to submit.”

“Certainly not. My marriage will be a religious ceremony, with half a dozen of my nearest relatives as witnesses.”

“I noticed Fred slip away before Dora went. He looked ill.”

“I dare say he is ill—and no wonder. Good night, Ruth. I am going to sleep. Tell father all about the wedding. I don’t want to hear it named again—not as long as I live.”

CHAPTER VI

THREE days passed and Ethel had regained her health and spirits, but Fred Mostyn had not called since the wedding. Ruth thought some inquiry ought to be made, and Judge Rawdon called at the Holland House. There he was told that Mr. Mostyn had not been well, and the young man’s countenance painfully confessed the same thing.

“My dear Fred, why did you not send us word you were ill?” asked the Judge.

“I had fever, sir, and I feared it might be typhoid. Nothing of the kind, however. I shall be all right in a day or two.”

The truth was far from typhoid, and Fred knew it. He had left the wedding breakfast because he had reached the limit of his endurance. Words, stinging as whips, burned like hot coals in his mouth, and he felt that he could not restrain them much longer. Hastening to his hotel, he locked himself in his rooms, and passed the night in a frenzy of passion. The very remembrance of the bridegroom’s confident transport put mur-der in his heart—murder which he could only practice by his wishes, impotent to compass their desires.

“I wish the fellow shot! I wish him hanged! I would kill him twenty times in twenty different ways! And Dora! Dora! Dora! What did she see in him? What could she see? Love her? He knows nothing of love—such love as tortures me.” Backwards and forwards he paced the floor to such imprecations and ejaculations as welled up from the whirlpool of rage in his heart, hour following hour, till in the blackness of his misery he could no longer speak. His brain had become stupefied by the iteration of inevitable loss, and so refused any longer to voice a woe beyond remedy. Then he stood still and called will and reason to council him. “This way madness lies,” he thought. “I must be quiet—I must sleep—I must forget.”

But it was not until the third day that a dismal, sullen stillness succeeded the storm of rage and grief, and he awoke from a sleep of exhaustion feeling as if he were withered at his heart. He knew that life had to be taken up again, and that in all its farces he must play his part. At first the thought of Mostyn Hall presented itself as an asylum. It stood amid thick woods, and there were miles of wind-blown wolds and hills around it. He was lord and master there, no one could intrude upon his sorrow; he could nurse it in those lonely rooms to his heart’s content. Every day, however, this gloomy resolution grew fainter, and one morning he awoke and laughed it to scorn.

“Frederick’s himself again,” he quoted, “and he must have been very far off himself when he thought of giving up or of running away. No, Fred Mostyn, you will stay here. ‘Tis a country where the impossible does not exist, and the unlikely is sure to happen—a country where marriage is not for life or death, and where the roads to divorce are manifold and easy. There are a score of ways and means. I will stay and think them over; ‘twill be odd if I cannot force Fate to change her mind.”

A week after Dora’s marriage he found himself able to walk up the avenue to the Rawdon house; but he arrived there weary and wan enough to instantly win the sympathy of Ruth and Ethel, and he was immensely strengthened by the sense of home and kindred, and of genuine kindness to which he felt a sort of right. He asked Ruth if he might eat dinner with them. He said he was hungry, and the hotel fare did not tempt him. And when Judge Rawdon returned he welcomed him in the same generous spirit, and the evening passed delightfully away. At its close, however, as Mostyn stood gloved and hatted, and the carriage waited for him, he said a few words to Judge Rawdon which changed the mental and social atmosphere. “I wish to have a little talk with you, sir, on a business matter of some importance. At what hour can I see you to-morrow?”

“I am engaged all day until three in the afternoon, Fred. Suppose I call on you about four or half-past?”

“Very well, sir.”

But both Ethel and Ruth wondered if it was “very well.” A shadow, fleeting as thought, had passed over Judge Rawdon’s face when he heard the request for a business interview, and after the young man’s departure he lost himself in a reverie which was evidently not a happy one. But he said nothing to the girls, and they were not accustomed to question him.

The next morning, instead of going direct to his office, he stopped at Madam, his moth-er’s house in Gramercy Park. A visit at such an early hour was unusual, and the old lady looked at him in alarm.

“We are well, mother,” he said as she rose. “I called to talk to you about a little business.” Whereupon Madam sat down, and became suddenly about twenty years younger, for “business” was a word like a watch-cry; she called all her senses together when it was uttered in her presence.

“Business!” she ejaculated sharply. “Whose business?”

“I think I may say the business of the whole family.”

“Nay, I am not in it. My business is just as I want it, and I am not going to talk about it—one way or the other.”

“Is not Rawdon Court of some interest to you? It has been the home and seat of the family for many centuries. A good many. Mostyn women have been its mistress.”

“I never heard of any Mostyn woman who would not have been far happier away from Rawdon Court. It was a Calvary to them all. There was little Nannie Mostyn, who died with her first baby because Squire Anthony struck her in a drunken passion; and the proud Alethia Mostyn, who suffered twenty years’ martyrdom from Squire John; and Sara, who took thirty thousand pounds to Squire Hubert, to fling away at the green table; and Harriet, who was made by her husband, Squire Humphrey, to jump a fence when out hunting with him, and was brought home crippled and scarred for life—a lovely girl of twenty who went through agonies for eleven years without aught of love and help, and died alone while he was following a fox; and there was pretty Barbara Mostyn–”