In the world of clubs the "Staten" held its head proudly. It was a social union comprising the most exclusive men of family and fashion. Though its outward walls differed little from those of other clubs which lined the avenue, its muster-roll was sacredly guarded by the governors, and posted at the hall desk was a long list of waiting aspirants, each to undergo in his turn the scrutiny of the committee-room, where all antecedents must be known and approved before his card could bear "Staten Club" in the left-hand, lower corner. Other club buildings there were, in New York, of greater stateliness, with marble walls and galleries, and well filled libraries, but the "Staten" cared for none of these, and proudly pointed to its members' list, where were inscribed five hundred names which no other club could ever hope to equal. Three rooms, the restaurant, café, and billiard room, received their share of patronage, while the lounging room, upon the avenue, where a few papers were kept for respectability's sake, and others for use, was the daily haunt of some of the choicest spirits. In the early days of the club's history, to be sure, a thoughtless governor had inspired the foundation of a library. A room upstairs somewhere (few of the members knew where) was selected, and into this were placed a set of Dickens, the "Britannica," an atlas, a history or two, a dictionary, and perhaps a hundred other books, which together formed the nucleus of a store of knowledge. But no one went there except Simkins, Rynder and McLaughlin. They were a queer lot; none of the men could make them out; it was their families that got them elected, and they never seemed to have anything better to do than cuddle over musty books. But the choice clique were those whose names were most often signed to the wine-room tickets. It was they who ran the club and made it the popular place it was.
On a particular January afternoon, of a year not long since passed, one of the broad, front windows of the lounging room was occupied by three intimates of "the set." There was Rennsler Van Vort, whose ancestor had been a red-faced burgher at the time when old Peter Stuyvesant rigorously ruled New Amsterdam. His fortune was his name, for the family was too old to be wealthy and too proud to be in trade; yet he never lacked a berth on a yacht or a room in a country house, and wherever he went, he brought a collection of rare tales and a song or two which made him the friend of all. Like his burgher ancestor he had a red, round face and was bald, but behind his glasses there were two queer, little eyes which shone with kindly humor, and from lips half hidden by stubby black hairs, bright, timely words were sure to come. Rennsler was the senior by several years of his companions, and, if the truth were known, he probably cared little for them, but Roland Waterman owned the "Phrygia," and Clifford Howard-Jones was a coaching man with a shooting box and other convenient accessories.
It had been snowing in the morning, but the sun had turned the snow to slush, and the three men, for lack of more exciting sport, were watching the omnibus horses slide and struggle down Murray Hill, and the pedestrians splash and spatter in their vain efforts to dodge the cabs and reach the curbs with unsoiled feet. If the unfortunate wayfarer happened to be a woman, and a pretty one at that, the three friends would smirk and nudge each other, as the little feet tripped daintily from puddle to puddle, or splashed her white skirts with great mud blotches, while the owner folded them about her and pattered rapidly on her heels, foolishly fancying the more speed the less mud. An occasional witticism from Rennsler's lips would heighten the grotesqueness of a luckless passer's struggles. The other two would laugh and Howard-Jones would add some strained gibe, with the flat effect that forced wit always has. Perhaps half an hour was thus passed, when Howard-Jones spied a woman leaving a house in a side street. A carriage was waiting at the curb, and a footman was vainly endeavoring to protect her feathers from the rain; but forgetting the servant and his umbrella, she gathered her skirts up frantically and rushed from the bottom step to the carriage door, which, of course being closed, left her no alternative but to stand patiently in the drenching rain until the marked precision of the footman's steps brought relief and the umbrella.
"Look at that action!" shouted Howard-Jones. "Great for park work but too high for the open. Easy, my beauty, or you will come a cropper at the curb. By Jove, fellows, it is Mrs. Harry Osgood."
"So it is," replied Waterman. "I wonder what she is mousing about that street after? She must be searching for her Duncan. Dear girl, how pathetically lonesome she looked at Sherry's last night when Grahame left her to dance with Mrs. Rossy Platt."
This remark was hailed by Howard-Jones with the world-wise chuckle with which a man of narrow sympathy and ill-spent life invariably receives a pointed insinuation against a woman's character. Broad sentiments and heroic impulses are seldom nursed in clubs, and Howard-Jones had learned his ethics within the limits of the world in which he moved.
"If I were Osgood, I would go gunning for Grahame," he retorted. "A rounder like Duncan never hovers about a bird so long for nothing."
"He had far better give up dogs and horses and bestow a little attention on his wife," Rennsler Van Vort replied. He had the persuasive sympathy, possessed by few men, which told him that a woman's heart, though easily won by flattery may be as easily lost by neglect. The lack of fortune had brought him into contact with the petty meanness of life and if he had made friends whose hospitality helped out his meagre purse, he knew that without his postprandial accomplishments and unquestioned ancestry few boards would have a place for him. He did not imagine that a moral truism would deeply affect his companions, but his broad instincts prompted him to add that "when a married woman goes astray it is usually the fault of her mother or her husband."
"Nonsense, old chap," retorted Howard-Jones. "Mrs. Osgood is a pretty woman, and a pretty woman must have admiration. Duncan used to admire her, but Osgood had the money and she married him. Duncan Grahame keeps right on admiring her and Osgood doesn't, so there you are."
The argument thus incited might have been continued were it not for the interruption caused by the familiar voice of a man, who had just entered, hailing the group at the window with the somewhat pithy expression: "What are you sportsmen doing there? Staring at nothing, I'll wager, and I don't believe you have had one drink between you for a week."
The men at the window turned, and were startled to see standing in the door the man of whom they were speaking, Duncan Grahame. His clothes showed that he had just come from the city. His trousers were turned up and muddy, and his hat was sprinkled with rain. The merry familiarity of his expression told, however, that he had not heard the remark just made, but Howard-Jones, a trifle abashed at finding one of the objects of his insinuations appear so inopportunely, and feeling that something had better be said to remove the embarrassment, took it upon himself to reply. "I don't believe we have, but you are just in time to stir us up. Rennsler has been preaching and we are awfully dry; just punch that bell, won't you."
The appearance of the servant caused the four friends to draw as many chairs about a small cherry wood table, supplied with the usual complement of bell, match-box and ashtray, and as the servant put the familiar question—"What is the order, sir?" it was followed by the habitual meditative silence. Grahame threw himself back in his chair and pushed his hat back, doubtfully. "I have got a Sahara thirst," he finally said, "so I suppose it will have to be a long drink. Bring me a whiskey and soda."
"Split the soda with me, won't you?" interjected Howard-Jones.
"Couldn't think of it, my love," Grahame replied; "I have not had a drink to-day. Went to lunch with the senior partner and he ordered nothing more stimulating than unfiltered Croton. He took me out to talk business, and I nearly expired under the strain." Howard-Jones finally decided to indulge in a whole bottle of Delatour, but when Rennsler Van Vort quietly told the servant he would take an Apollinaris lemonade without sugar, it was too much for the dashing Duncan. "When do you take orders, old man?" he said. "All you need is a cowl and sandals, for nature has kindly tonsured your locks for you. I suppose you will soon be leading the singing at noon prayer meetings."
"I am off my liquor," Van Vort replied; "but if I do come to noon meetings I feel sure I'll do better with Sankey hymns than I do now with comic ditties."
"Don't start Rennsler preaching," Howard-Jones interjected, "he's primed with moral bosh and the atmosphere is too depressed already. What brings a hard-working man like you uptown at four o'clock? I thought you didn't knock off until five."
"I don't," Duncan replied, "but I am going out to Chicago to-morrow and I am taking a half holiday to prepare my nerves for the strain."
"Going to Chicago," the three interposed almost in a breath.
"Yes, and, worse luck, I don't know when I shall get back. I am going out for an English syndicate we have in tow. The Britons have bought all the breweries and stock-yards out there, and now they are after elevators."
"'Elevators'", exclaimed Waterman, "I should think they do need a few in London; those beastly 'lifts' they have in the hotels there are about the only British institution I don't admire. But what have you got to do with elevators?"
"Don't be an ass, Roland," Duncan replied. "It is about time you knew that the chief industry of 'the city of the future', as some fool journalist calls Chicago,—pork of course excepted,—is grain, and elevators are the warehouses where it is stored. I am going out to work a scheme to buy them all up, make a trust, and sell the stock in London. Our house are the middlemen between Chicago and the Britons. Now do you see?"
"Well, I'm deuced glad I didn't go into Wall Street," Roland replied. "I shouldn't care to be shut up in that beastly hole, Chicago. I don't believe there is a sportsman in the place. I stopped there a day once on my way to Minnesota, grouse shooting, and I never saw such a rum place. I put up at the biggest hotel in the town, and there wasn't much to complain of in the size of it; but the dirt and the niggers were too much for me. I had to eat dinner at two o'clock and I wish you could have seen how they managed it. I was met at the door by a six-foot black man in a waistcoat that was perhaps white in the year one, and a coat made in the days of Henry Clay. He waltzed us down the room with the airs of a drum major and put us at a table with a drummer and a cow-boy. There we were given in charge of another colored gentleman who polished off the plates with a greasy towel, and placed big tumblers of iced water at each place. He took our orders and brought us the soup in fairly good shape, except that his black fingers got into all the plates; but you ought to have seen the rest of the dinner. He started from the kitchen at a record-breaking pace, spinning a tray on the forefinger of his right hand. He galloped past us and deposited his implements on a side table, then he commenced to sling canary birds' bath tubs, filled with heaven knows what, across the table like poker chips, until we had a perfect collection of samples of the most villainously cooked truck I ever tasted. I tried to make out a 'feed', but I gave it up when the black gentleman appeared with all sorts of pie, floating island, ice cream and jelly. I then fled in despair and went out for a walk, but I didn't find anything but mud, smoke, and cable cars. I tell you, Duncan, old man, you don't know what Chicago is, or you wouldn't look so beautifully unconcerned."
A burst of laughter greeted Waterman's recital of his pathetic experience, and then Duncan, who little relished his coming exile, mournfully asked if any of the fellows knew some people of the right sort in the place.
"No one but a charming creature of the vintage of forty-nine whom I saw at the Pier last summer," retorted Howard-Jones. "She must ride sixteen stone, but she canters about like a yearling and plasters her hair all over her face in little curlycues, to say nothing of her voice, which used to run an effective opposition to the steam horn at the lighthouse. But speaking of lighthouses, you should have seen her diamond earrings; the light on Point Judith wasn't a circumstance to them. When the heat was too much for her, she used to mop her face with a piece of chamois and puff like a crippled hunter. The papers called her 'the beautiful and accomplished leader of Chicago society.' I tell you, old man, she is the girl for you; she'll enliven your weary hours."
Another laugh greeted this effusion, but Van Vort felt compelled to interpose an objection. "I don't believe any of you fellows know the first thing about the West," he said. "Your ideas are bounded by Bar Harbor on the north and Washington on the south, and as for their western limits, they don't extend beyond Orange County."
"Come, old chap, you're getting into deep water. Didn't I tell you I had been in Chicago?" objected Waterman.
"You went out West after chickens, and you didn't get beyond a Minnesota shooting club. As for Chicago, you admit that you were there on a muggy day and didn't stir two squares from an hotel which, I wager, wasn't the best in the place. As for the people, one of the best mannered women I ever met came from Chicago."
"Who was she?" Duncan interrupted. "If there is anybody decent in the place I want to know her."
"Her name is Mrs. Sanderson. I met her in Washington last winter. Her uncle was in the State Department and she was visiting him. She had a friend with her who is also from Chicago, I think, and they both of them were better read and had less affectation than any women I have met for a year, at least."
"That sounds encouraging," replied Duncan. "I think I have heard Sibyl Wright talk about that Mrs. Sanderson. If there is any sport in Chicago I am bound to have it. My old college chum, Harold Wainwright, has been living out there for three years and he must know the town by this time."
"I say, Duncan, won't you have some more liquor? You need it to fortify your nerves for that voyage of discovery."
"I think you are right, Roland," Duncan replied. "By Jove, though, I don't believe I have time; I have got a date before dinner."
"Oh, yes you have; just one more for luck. Here, waiter, take the orders."
The glasses were soon removed and freshly filled ones took their place. "When are you off?" said Waterman.
"To-morrow on the 'Limited'" was the reply.
"Then let's drink to the great Duncan and his success among the pork-packers," said Howard-Jones.
The four men quickly drained their glasses and Duncan took a hurried leave of his friends. "Good-by, Duncan, good-by," were the exchanged partings. Duncan hurried through the hall, hailed a cab at the door, gave an uptown address to the driver, jumped into the cab, and was off.
Duncan was dressing. It was already five minutes past the hour named for dinner on his invitation, but if Duncan were not late at dinner, it would deprive the guests of one stock topic of conversation, and he had never yet been so inconsiderate. No one waited for him, and when he finally appeared with some trumped up excuse, it was greeted with a round of laughter, and served to enliven the naturally trifling entrée conversation; so no one,—least of all the hostess,—blamed him. One who has been in an engine house when an alarm of fire is turned in can form some idea of Duncan's dressing accomplishments. There were, to be sure, no clanging gongs, stamping horses, and scurrying, half-dressed men, but there was the same instantaneous assumption of perfect order out of bewildering chaos. His servant was his faithful assistant, and when Duncan's steps were heard upon the stairs, he would seize a shirt in one hand and a pair of trousers in the other, which he held waiting for the arrival of his master. Duncan would make a wild rush through the door, and his top coat, coat and waistcoat would fly across the room at random, while Parker pulled off one pair of trousers and assisted him on with another. A dive into a face bath would give Parker time to change the odds and ends in Duncan's pockets; while on would go the shirt, and the tie would be adjusted and his hair smoothed while the servant replaced the muddy boots with evening shoes. Coat and waistcoat would go on together, hat, umbrella and overcoat be seized, and off Duncan would start in the official time of three minutes and seventeen seconds.
On the present occasion he desisted from his dressing long enough to read a small, blue note which he found upon his dressing table. It was worded as follows: "The coast is clear at nine, and will be so till after midnight. I will see you if you come." There was no signature or address. It had been left by a maid in the usual way, so Parker said, but even unsigned and non-committal as it was, it did not please Duncan. "I wish I could forget that woman," he muttered to himself. "But I suppose I will be there and play the fool, just as I always do. I have a mind to break away from her, though." Then, turning to Parker, he continued audibly, "I am going to Chicago to-morrow morning. Have my portmanteau and shirt box packed. You know about what I want, but put in plenty of shirts as I may be gone some weeks."
"Very good, sir," replied the taciturn Parker. "Hi suppose you will want your hulster for the journey, sir."
"Yes," replied Duncan; then putting on his coat and hat, and seizing a pair of gloves and a stick, he rushed down the stairs without stopping for that apartment elevator which was never running, jumped into the cab he had left waiting, and was off uptown to his dinner. He was only half an hour late but his rudeness was punished, for he was placed between a débutante and a dowager, and condemned for two mortal hours to endure alternately insipid zephyrs and chilling blasts of small talk. Stiff-backed chairs were there and stiff-backed people were in them. Shaded candles threw a flickering light upon a mass of plate and flowers, bonbons, almonds, fruit and glasses. Around the table was a circle of bare necks and diamonds, white shirts and ties; and behind the chairs solemn footmen silently moved from place to place passing the endless courses. Some of the guests were bright and others solemn; some brilliant and others stupid; but they were the component parts of a fashionable dinner. There was a banker, a broker, a yachtsman, a diplomat, a merchant, and a sprinkling of dawdling men of leisure, and their wives, daughters, and cousins. The forks rattled and the tongues clattered, while each strove to hide his inner nature behind an effective pose. The clever succeeded and the stupid failed. Coffee was brought; the women arose, a man or two sprawled beneath the table to find some fan or glove, and then the women filed slowly out to gossip and dissect their neighbors, and the men remained to drink and smoke and drink again, while a ribald wag related some choice but scandalous tale, and ardent sportsmen took sides in vain disputes about the "Poseidon's" time allowance and "Salvador's" Suburban chances.
Duncan was moodily indisposed for banter or dispute. His buoyant and careless spirit seldom deserted him, but this dinner only claimed his presence because his senior partner was the host, and none of his intimes being there, he fell readily into a state of passive ill-humor. He dosed over his glass of port, carelessly puffed his cigar and occasionally proffered an opinion with a superior air incited by his social ascendency over most of the men present. Duncan Grahame was a man whose dominant characteristic was assurance, tempered only by an intuitive knowledge of the social amenities. He was often bold but never vulgar. He was rude in the manner of most society men, but his rudeness was a pose prompted by the mannerisms of the age, and designed, as was his coat, after the latest London model. He possessed the rare fortune of being considered handsome both by men and women. His beauty was of the vigorous type, which wins admiration by its manliness rather than its perfection. His eyes were great, grey wells, which gave to women a Narcissus-like reflection of their own impulses. They charmed by their seeming sympathy, but were really the artful tools of conscious power. To most men's minds curly hair is a blemish which barbers' shears and bristly brushes may remove, but to women Duncan Grahame's short; crispy black curls were a seldom failing charm. Although his eyes might deceive even one who knew the countless evidences of breeding and career, his mouth, partly hidden by a short moustache, betrayed the hard, unmistakable markings of indulgence, and a student of life would have mentally described him by the trite, though significant expression, "a man of the world." And such was Duncan Grahame,—no better and no worse than scores whose names adorn the blue books of metropolitan life. There was once a time, not many years before, when he had been an innocent and confiding boy. He had gone to school and then to college,—a dangerous experiment at best, but, with a boy like Duncan, who had been brought up within the strictness of a Connecticut home and turned upon the world without a knowledge of it, pretty sure to result as it had turned out in his case. It was the old story of weakness, ignorance, and a desire to emulate his upper classmen and be a man. The first step was not taken without a struggle, but one by one the cards of which the Puritan moral structure was built were blown away, and, left without support, the edifice collapsed. What other result could be expected? His Christian ethics were but the expurgated teachings of the pulpit, tempered by dogmas and doctrines, and in his home the faintest whisperings of the real world brought blushes to his parents, and stilted, meaningless words of warning. His first intimations of worldly ways were gathered surreptitiously in the streets, and his first knowledge of the nature of sin came with the temptation. The struggle was brief; perhaps it was as strong as could be expected; and soon he was the careless, fearless leader of the mischievous, rollicking set to be found in every college. He became, he thought, a man, and knew the world. He left college and after two years in London and Paris came to New York. His family was excellent, his appearance attractive, his manners good, and his assurance unbounded,—all that was needed, except money, to win social success in the metropolis. Money he did not have, but he resolved to make it, so into Wall Street he went, and was so successful there, that at the end of three years he became the junior partner of a great brokerage house and was entrusted with the furtherance of many delicate schemes. In society he had won his way to a leadership in not the best, but the best advertised, set in New York. The plunge into the cold torrent of Wall Street deception was sufficient to chill even a stronger optimistic ardor than Duncan's, but when he was carried on into the whirling, flashing eddies of smart society, only to be left shivering upon the cruel reefs of selfishness and debauchery, every chivalrous sentiment was gone, and when he gathered courage for the second plunge, it was as a designing, selfish disciple of utility.
To return to the dinner. The men had left their coffee and cigars and the lucky ones had singled out attractive adversaries, with whom to thrust and parry bright, sharp phrases in those exhilarating practice-bouts of love, sure to precede the desperate encounters where mask and buttoned foil are cast aside. Others, to whom fortune was less kind, were striving to cull from unsympathetic neighbors some evidences of interest and intelligence, or had resigned themselves to the melancholy fate of being bored. Duncan wandered restlessly about awhile. He found no one to interest him, and being too selfish deliberately to resign himself to another dowager, he remembered that his intended journey to the West offered a plausible reason for retiring, so, making his excuses to the hostess, he took his departure, feeling, as he folded his muffler about his neck and buttoned his great-coat, that for a successful dinner more depends on the choice of guests than the choice of wines.
The little blue note found upon his dressing table turned his steps still farther uptown. The thaw of the afternoon was over; it was snowing, and cold blasts blew the flakes against his face, biting his cheeks and chilling his humor, so that when he had trudged the three squares he had to go, he felt the ill-temper which a raw wind invariably produces in one whose moods change with the barometer. He approached the particular flight of brown stone steps he sought, and observing that the street both ways was free from passers, and that the curtains of the adjoining houses were drawn, he ascended and rang the bell; a servant soon opened the door and he entered quickly. The door closed, and, instead of darkness and snowflake blasts, there was warmth and light, and a pretty woman standing just inside the drawing-room door, murmuring playfully in a soft tone: "Duncan, you cold, naughty fellow, I was willing to lay a dozen bottles of Houbigant that this wind would have blown away what little was left of your flighty heart."
"Don't chaff me. I'm in no mood for it. I wish you had sat out a stupid dinner and afterward had tramped three blocks in the snow."
"I actually believe that the usually serene nature of Mr. Duncan Grahame is a trifle, that is to say only a trifle, ruffled," she ironically replied. "I fancied that while Henry Stokes Osgood, Esquire, whom the laws designate my lord and master, was attending the Yacht Club election, Mr. Grahame might deign to amuse me. If I was not mistaken, his lordship, when he has removed his outer garments, can find me in the back drawing-room."
Duncan was left standing in the hallway. He had silently permitted her to retire because he had been unable to find a ready reply to her words. He had made up his mind to be disagreeable, and it angered him to have his guns silenced after the first fire.
He was in the habit of bullying women, but such tactics had invariably proved useless against Helen Osgood. When he was away from her he felt ashamed to think that her's was the stronger nature. He fancied, at times, that he did not care for her, and was resolved for policy's sake to break away from her influence, but each attempt of his to anger her, instead of producing tears and pleadings, ended, as he feared this would, in a meek surrender on his part. "That woman understands me," he muttered as he removed his great-coat. He was never sure of his ability to read her subtle blue-black eyes; even her soft, olive cheeks never changed their delicate shading, and her thin, languid lips were often determined and cold. Her hair was of a lustreless black, and her figure was delicately, but superbly, formed. She was the blended type of Celt and Creole, her father being Scotch and her mother of Louisiana French descent. In her the cold cunning of the North bridled the reckless warmth of the South. Her acts were prompted by impulse but masked by design, and if Duncan seemed at times to reach her Southern heart, the canny Scotch nature quickly veiled her feelings, and he was left at a loss to know whether he had inspired passion or merely aroused amusement.
But it was not his nature to analyze deeply or reflect long. He removed his coat, walked slowly down the long hallway, and entered the back drawing-room door. Mrs. Osgood was gracefully ensconced in the corner of a divan from the Orient, and her eyes were fixed apparently upon the latest work of Paul Bourget. A tall, bronze lamp was at her side and its rays were tempered by a carefully selected shade of the most becoming tinge. The other lights were dimmed, and beyond could be seen the subdued forms of graceful plants, while beneath her feet the yielding fur of an Arctic bear half hid two tiny bronze-tipped slippers and just enough of scarlet silk.
Duncan stood silently before her. Uncurbed natures are the most capricious, and as he gazed his anger turned to admiration, and he softly sat down beside her, took her hand, and said winningly, "Nell, dear, let's be friends."
She pushed him away, and with a quick, proud toss of her head coldly said, "Not till my lord Duncan has humbly sued for pardon."
"Pardon for what?"
"For intended flight to the West without permission and leave-taking."
"Am I not, then, the master of my actions?" Duncan replied in a somewhat ruffled tone.
"Not if you expect my favor." Then, lowering her large, black eyes, and pointing authoritatively to the floor, she continued: "Down on your knees and confess you were attempting to act without my knowledge."
Duncan started angrily. He was nettled at the tone of authority she assumed, so he replied: "I will do nothing of the kind. I see no reason why my actions should be accounted to, much less pardoned by, you."
"You big, foolish fellow," she laughingly said. "You have been spoilt by women. You expect that a declaration of independence delivered with so much bluster will anger me. Down on your knees and ask forgiveness."
Duncan jumped to his feet and paced the floor. He was too angry to speak at first, but he finally said in defiant tones: "I should think that my intended departure without your being informed of it, would be sufficient to advise you that your possible feelings on the subject were of supreme indifference to me."
"Indeed!" she replied, carelessly tossing aside the Bourget novel. "So I am to infer that Mr. Duncan Grahame, being weary of the woman upon whom he has previously pretended to bestow his favors, imagines that the easiest, and of course the most manly, way to rid himself of her is surreptitiously to steal away and leave her to discover his change of heart as best she can. Very well, so be it. But I really wish you would not molest that poor bear's head with the toe of your boot. If you have no regard for me, you should, at least, consider the feelings of my rug."