MISS BOYTON PLAYS A CARD.
NEXT morning, as Nea was busy packing, Faith burst unexpectedly into her room with a sudden impulse. To say the truth, girl that she was, she couldn’t resist the temptation of showing Nea her ring, though she said nothing as yet about the note that accompanied it. Nea admired it with a placid sigh. It would be long before Paul could give her such a ring. Not that she wanted one, of course; nobody was less likely to think that than Nea; but then, poor Paul must feel the difference so keenly!
She folded up the dress that lay stretched on the bed, and laid it neatly into her small portmanteau. Faith glanced at it all at once with a sharp glance of surprise.
“Why, Nea,” she cried, taking it out once more and holding it in her hand, “whatever do you call this, you bad, bad creature?”
Nea blushed a guilty blush of conscious shame. She was caught in the act — fairly found out. It was an evening-dress she had never worn all the time she was at Oxford.
Faith looked down into the portmanteau once more, and there in its depths caught a passing glimpse of yet another one.
“Oh, Nea,” she cried, half-tearful with vexation, taking it out in turn, “this is really too wicked of you. You had these two nice evening-gowns here all the time, and you’ve only worn the old cashmere ever since you’ve been here on purpose not to be better dressed than I was!”
Nea gazed at these two mute witnesses to her guilt with an uncomfortable glance. Her tender little conscience would have smitten her greatly had she allowed that simple explanation of Faith’s to pass unqualified.
“It wasn’t altogether that,” she answered, fixing her eyes on the carpet. “It was partly on your account, Faith, I don’t deny, that I wouldn’t wear them; but partly, also” — she hesitated for a second— “to tell you the truth, I didn’t want — your brother to think I was — well — so very much more expensively dressed than you were.”
She said it so simply that Faith guessed the rest, and made no answer, save to fling her arms round Nea’s neck and kiss her passionately. For now she felt they were almost sisters.
They drove to the station together, and went up — both third — in the same train to Paddington. There they parted, Nea to Cornwall, Faith to Waterloo, for Hillborough and the infants.
Her dream was over. She must go back now to the workaday world again.
But always with that ring and note in her pocket. For she dared not wear the ring; that would attract attention. Still, what a difference it made to her life! It would sweeten the days with the infants to feel it furtively from time to time. It would bring the dream back to her, and she would work the more easily.
Thistleton and Paul had come down to see them off at the station, and with them Miss Boyton and her inseparable momma. Poor Isabel couldn’t deny herself the pleasure of watching her victorious rival safe out of Oxford, and waving her a farewell from Paul’s side of the platform. Not out of any ill-will or unkindness — of that Isabel was wholly incapable — but simply as a sort of salve to her own feelings. Nea had engaged Paul’s heart, and Isabel accepted her defeat with good grace. Not only did she bear Nea no grudge for having thus wholly ousted her, but she kissed her a kiss of exceptional tenderness, and pressed her hand with a friendly pressure as she entered the carriage. Nea knew what the kiss and pressure meant. Among women words are very seldom necessary to pass these little confidences from one to the other.
From the station Isabel walked back to the Mitre with Thistleton, allowing her momma to take possession of Paul. She had reasons of her own for this peculiar arrangement. She wanted, in fact, to apply once more that familiar engine, the common pump, to Thistleton. And the blond young man, being by nature a frank and confiding personage, was peculiarly susceptible to the pumping operation.
When they reached the Mitre, Isabel deposited the obedient momma in her own room.
“I’m going a turn round the Meadow with Mr. Thistleton,” she said abuptly.
“You’ve a lecture at twelve, Thistleton, haven’t you?” Paul asked, anxious to spare his friend Miss Boyton’s society if he didn’t want it.
“Oh, I’ll cut the lecture,” Thistleton answered good-humoredly. “It’s Aristotle’s Ethics; and I daresay Aristotle don’t mind being cut. He must be used to it now after so many centuries. Besides, a just mean between excessive zeal and undue negligence was his own ideal, you know. He should be flattered by my conscientious carrying out of his principles. I haven’t missed a lecture for a whole week now. I think it’s about time I should begin to miss one.”
For, in fact, the blond young man vaguely suspected, from what Isabel had told him on her way from the station, she hoped to benefit the Gascoyne family, and taking now a profound interest in all that concerned that distinguished house, of which, in spite of Faith’s disclaimer, he almost considered himself at present a potential member, he was anxious to learn what her scheme might be, and to see how far it might be expected to lighten the burden of the family difficulties. Isabel, however, was too thoroughbred an American to let Thistleton see too much of her own intentions. She led him dexterously to the round seat in Christ Church Meadows that overlooks the Cherwell, and, seating him there at close quarters, proceeded to work the pump-handle with equal skill and vigor. She succeeded so well that even Armitage himself, the past master in the art of applied hydrostatics, could hardly have surpassed her. At the end of an hour she had got out of Thistleton almost all he knew about the strange compact between the Gascoynes and Mr. Solomons. Motives of delicacy, indeed, restrained the blond young man from mentioning the nature of the security on which Mr. Solomons reposed his hopes of ultimate repayment — Paul’s chance of marrying an heiress. He thought such a disclosure might sound a - trifle personal, for the name and fame of Isabel’s prospective dollars had been noised abroad far and wide both in Mentone and in Oxford. Nor did he allude in passing to his own possible future relations with the heir-apparent to the baronetcy and his handsome sister. Other personal motives tied his tongue there; while as to the state of affairs between Nea and Paul he knew or guessed far less than Isabel herself did. But with these few trifling exceptions, he allowed the golden-haired Pennsylvanian to suck his brains of all his private acquaintance with the Gascoyne affairs, being thoroughly convinced, like an innocent, good young man that he was, that Isabel could desire this useful knowledge for no other purpose than to further the designs of the Gascoyne family. If Mme. Ceriolo had got hold of a young man like Thistleton, she might have twisted him round her little finger; and used his information to very bad account; fortunately the American heiress had no plans in her head but such as deserved the unsuspicious undergraduate’s most perfect confidence.
When Isabel had sucked her orange quite dry, she rose at last, and, remarking in the cheerful American tone of virginal discovery, “It must be getting on for one: I feel like lunching,” led the way back direct to the city.
As soon as she found herself in her own room at the Mitre, however, she took out a small Russia leather notebook from her pocket and entered in it with a neat gold pencil-case, and not without some rising tears, three short memoranda: “Judah Solomons, High Street, Hillborough, Surrey. Faith Gascoyne, 5 Plowden’s Court. Drexel, Morgan & Co., bankers, Paris.”
Then she dried her eyes with a clean white handkerchief, hummed a cheerful tune for a moment or two to herself to restore her spirits, and having satisfied herself in the glass that all traces of recent weeping had disappeared, descended, smiling, to her momma in the coffee-room.
“On Toosday,” she said to her mother with an abstracted air, as they sat down to a lunch of transatlantic splendor, “I shall go back to London. Appears to me as if I’d had about enough now of these Oxford colleges. There’s too many of ’em at once. They run into the monotonous.”
“Very well, Izzy,” her mother responded dutifully.
And Tuesday morning, in real earnest, they were back again once more, with all their boxes, at Hatchett’s Hotel in Piccadilly.
That afternoon as Isabel, somewhat disconsolate, strolled along Bond Street, she saw a familiar figure steering its way toward her loungily on the opposite side of the street. The figure was attired in a faultless frock coat and a shiny tall hat, and was booted, gloved, and cuffed to match with irreproachable exactitude. As a faint smile began to develop itself by premonition on Isabel’s countenance the figure displayed some momentary symptoms of nascent hesitation, not unmixed with an evident tendency to turn away, without the appearance of observing her, into Burlington Gardens. Miss Boyton might be very good fun on the Promenade du Midi, but was she quite the right sort of person to acknowledge on Bond Street? The authority on the meaning of the word scallywag had his doubts on the subject.
Before he could carry his hesitancy into effect, however, Isabel had darted promptly across the street with American irrepressibility, and was shaking the limp gloved hand with good-humored fervor.
“Oh, my! Mr. Armitage,” she said, “how funny I should meet you — you of all people in the world, right here in London!”
Armitage drew himself up with stiff politeness.
“One usually does expect to meet one’s friends in Bond Street,” he retorted with dignity. “And, indeed, I was here this very afternoon on the lookout for another old Mentone acquintance whom I often meet about these parts. I mean Mme. Ceriolo.”
“Oh, she’s in London, is she?” Isabel asked with languid interest.
“Well, yes, she’s in London,” Armitage answered cautiously. “Where, L don’t know; perhaps it would be wisest not to inquire too deep. Mme. Ceriolo’s movements should be judged, I take it, with tolerant leniency. But she amuses me, you know — she undoubtedly amuses me.” He spoke with a marked apologetic tone, as one who feels half ashamed of his own undeveloped taste. “I like to meet her and have a little chat with her now and again. She gives me a fillip. After all, one can forgive much to a person who amuses you.”
“I guess that’s about what we all want out of one another in this vale of tears,” Isabel answered frankly.
“The philosophy of life in a nutshell,” Armitage retorted reassured. “And really, in her way, the little woman’s quite presentable.”
“Oh, quite presentable,” Isabel answered, smiling.
“So why shouldn’t one know her?” Armitage went on with the timid air of a man who desires to be backed up in a heretical opinion. “I mean to find her out and look her up, I think. And you, Miss Boyton, what have you been doing with yourself since you left Mentone.”
The devil entered into Isabel Boyton (as he frequently does into her saucy fellow-countrywomen) and prompted her to respond with incisiveness.
“I’ve been up to Oxford, to see the scallywag.”
“No?” Armitage cried with a look of profound interest. “And tell, me, Miss Boyton, what did you see or hear there?”
Isabel took a cruel revenge for his desire to avoid her.
“I saw Nea Blair,” she said, “who was stopping at a house in Oxford with Faith Gascoyne, the scallywag’s sister; and we went out a great deal together, and saw Mr. Gascoyne and Mr. Thistleton, and a great many more. And no end of engagements and things have happened; and there’s lots of news; but I’m so sorry I’m busy. I must call a hack!”
And, quick as thought, she hailed a hansom, and left the poor scandalmonger lifting his hat, alone, on the pavement, tantalized.
It was a cruel revenge, but perhaps he deserved it.
Armitage would have given five pounds that moment to know all about these rumored engagements.
Had that fellow Gascoyne succeeded in bagging the American heiress who was so sweet upon him at Mentone?
And had Thistleton fallen a victim to the seeming innocence of Nea Blair? He rather suspected it. These innocent bread-and-butter misses often know at any rate on which side their bread’s buttered. So, twenty minutes later, Armitage was expounding both apocryphal engagements to little Mme. Ceriolo, whom he happened to run up against, quite by accident, of course, near the corner of Piccadilly. And little Mme. Ceriolo, smiling her most winning smile, remarked confidentially that it’s often the women of the world, whom everybody suspects, that have after all the most profound and disinterested affections.
As she said so, she looked most meaningly at Armitage.