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<h2>Chapter XXIV</h2> Barbara was late for breakfast. Miss Walbrook, the aunt, was scanning the morning paper, her refined, austere Americanism being as noticeable in the dining-room as elsewhere in the house. Everything was slender and strong; everything was American, unless it was the Persian rug. On the paneled walls there were but three portraits, a Boston ancestress, in lace cap and satins, painted by Copley; a Philadelphia ancestor in the Continental uniform, painted by Gilbert Stuart; and her New York grandmother, painted by Thomas Sully, looking over her shoulder with the wild backward glance that artist gives to the girl Victoria in the Metropolitan Museum. In a flat cabinet along a wall was the largest collection of old American glass to be found in the country. Barbara rushed in, with apologies for being late. “I didn’t sleep a wink. It doesn’t seem to me as if I should ever sleep again. Where’s my cup?” “Wildgoose will bring it. As the coffee had grown cold he took that and the cup to keep warm. What’s the matter?” Wildgoose stepped in with the missing essentials. A full-fed, round-faced, rubicund man of fifty-odd he looked a perennial twenty-five. Barbara began to minister to herself. “Oh, everything’s the matter. I told you yesterday that that girl had run away. Well, I begin to wish she’d run back again.” Miss Walbrook, the elder, had this in common with Miss Henrietta Towell, that she believed it best for everyone to work out his own salvation. Barbara had her personal life to live, and while her aunt would help her to live it, she wouldn’t guide her choice. She continued, therefore, to scan the paper till her niece should say something more. She said it, not because she wanted to give information, but because she was temperamentally outspoken. “I begin to wish there were no men in the world. If women are men in a higher stage of development, why didn’t men die out, so that we could be rid of them? Isn’t that what we generally get from the survival of the fittest?” Miss Walbrook’s thin, clear smile suggested the edge of a keenly tempered blade. “I’ve never said that women were men in a higher stage of development. I’ve said that in their parallel states of development women had advanced a stage beyond men. You may say of every generation born that women begin where men leave off. I suppose that that’s what’s meant by the myth of Eve springing from Adam’s side. It was to be noticed even then, in the prehistoric, in the age that formed the great legends. Adam was asleep, when Eve as a vital force leaped away from him. If it wasn’t for Eve’s vitality the human race would still be in the Stone Age.” Barbara harked back to what for her was the practical. “Some of us are in the Stone Age as it is. I’m sure Rash Allerton is as nearly an elemental as one can be, and still belong to clubs and drive in motorcars.” Miss Walbrook risked her principles of non-interference so far as to say: “It’s part of our feminine lack of development that we’re always inclined to look back on the elemental with pity, and even with regret. The woman was never born who didn’t have in her something of Lot’s wife.” “Thank you, Aunt Marion. In a way that lets me out. If I’m no weaker than the rest of my sex––” “Than many of the rest of your sex.” “Very well, then; than many of the rest of my sex; if I’m no weaker than that I don’t have to lose my self-respect.” “You don’t have to lose your self-respect; you only risk—your reason.” Barbara stared at her. “That’s the very thing I’m afraid of. I’d give anything for peace of mind. How did you know?” “Oh, it doesn’t call for much astuteness. I don’t suppose there’s a married woman in the world in full command of her wits. You’ve noticed how foolish most of them are. That’s why. It isn’t that they were born foolish. They’ve simply been addled by enforced adaptation to mates of lower intelligence. Oh, I’m not scolding. I’m merely stating a natural, observed, psychological fact. The woman who marries says good-bye to the orderly working of her faculties. For that she may get compensations, with which I don’t intend to find fault. But compensations or no, to a clear-thinking woman like––” “Like yourself, Aunt Marion.” “Very well; like myself, if you will; but to a clear-thinking woman it’s as obvious as daylight that her married sisters are partially demented. They may not know it; the partially demented never do. And it’s no good telling them, because they don’t believe you. I’m only saying it to you to warn you in advance. If you part with your reason, it’s something to know that you do it of your own free will.” Once more Barbara confined herself to the case in hand. “Still, I don’t believe every man is as trying as Rash Allerton.” “Not in his particular way, perhaps. But if it’s not in one way then it’s in another.” “Even he wouldn’t be so bad if he could control himself. At the minute when he’s tearing down the house he wants you to tell him that he’s calm.” “If he didn’t want you to tell him that it would be something equally preposterous. There’s little to choose between men.” Barbara grew thoughtful. “Still, if people didn’t marry the human race would die out.” “And would there be any harm in that? It’s not a danger, of course; but if it was, would anyone in his senses want to stop it? Looking round on the human race to-day one can hardly help saying that the sooner it dies out the better. Since we can’t kill it off, it’s well to remember––” “To remember what, Aunt Marion?” Miss Walbrook reflected as to how to express herself cautiously. “To remember that—in marrying—and having children—children who will have to face the highly probable miseries of the next generation—Well, I’m glad there’ll be no one to reproach me with his being in the world, either as his mother or his ancestress.” “They say Rash’s father and mother didn’t want him in the world, and I sometimes wish they’d had their way. If he wasn’t here—or if he was dead—I believe I could be happier. I shouldn’t be forever worrying about him. I shouldn’t have him on my mind. I often wonder if it’s—if it’s love I feel for him—or only an agonizing sense of responsibility.” The door being open Walter Wildgoose waddled to the threshold, where he stood with his right hand clasped in his left. “Mr. Steptoe at Mr. Allerton’s to speak to Miss Barbara on the telyphone, please.” Barbara gasped. “Oh, Lord! I wonder what it is now!” Left to herself Miss Walbrook resumed her scanning of the paper, but she resumed it with the faintest quiver of a smile on her thin, cleanly-cut lips. It was the kind of smile which indicates patient hope, or the anticipation of something satisfactory. “Oh!” The exclamation was so loud as to be heard all the way from the telephone, which was in another part of the house. Miss Walbrook let the paper fall, sat bolt upright, and listened. “Oh! Oh!” It was like a second, and repeated, explosion. Miss Walbrook rose to her feet; the paper rustled to the floor. “Oh! Oh!” The sound was that which human beings make when the thing told them is more than they can bear. Barbara cried out as if someone was beating her with clubs, and she was coming to her knees. She was not coming to her knees. When her aunt reached her she was still standing by the little table in the hall which held the telephone, on which she had hung up the receiver. She supported herself with one hand on the table, as a woman does when all she can do is not to fall senseless. “It’s—it’s Rash,” she panted, as she saw her aunt appear. “Somebody has—has killed him.” Miss Walbrook stood with hands clasped, like one transfixed. “He’s dead?—after all?” Barbara nodded, tearlessly. She could stammer out the words, but no more. “Yes—all but!” <hr class='tb' /> In the flat at Red Point there was another and dissimilar breakfast scene. For the first time in her life Letty was having coffee and toast in bed. The window was open, and between the muslin curtains, which puffed in the soft May wind, she could see the ocean with steamers and ships on it. The room was tiny, but it was spotless. Everything was white, except where here and there it was tied up with a baby-blue ribbon. Anything that could be tied with a baby-blue ribbon was so tied. Letty thought she had never seen anything so dainty, though her experienced eye could detect the fact that nothing had really cost money. As an opening to the career on which she had embarked the setting was unexpected, while the method of her treatment was bewildering. In the black recesses of her heart Miss Henrietta Towell might be hiding all those feline machinations which Mrs. Judson Flack had led Letty to believe a part of the great world’s stock-in-trade; but it couldn’t be denied that she hid them well. Letty didn’t know what to make of it. “There’s quite a trick to it,” Steptoe had warned her; but the explanation seemed inadequate to the phenomena. Sipping her coffee and crunching her toast she was driven to ponder on the ways of wickedness. She had expected them to be more obvious. All her information was to the effect that an unprotected girl in a world of males was a lamb among lions, a victim with no way of escape. That she was a lamb among lions, and a victim with no way of escape, she was still prepared to believe; only the preliminaries puzzled her. Instead of being crude, direct, indelicate, they were subtle and misleading. After twenty-four hours in Miss Towell’s spare room there was still no hint of anything but coddling. “You see, my dear,” Miss Towell had said, “if I don’t nurse you back to real ’ealth, him that gave you the thimble might be displeased with me.” It was not often that Miss Towell dropped an h or added one; but in moments of emotion early habit was too strong for her. Coming into the room now, on some ermine’s errand of neatness, she threw a glance at Letty, and said: “You don’t look like a Rashleigh, do you, dear? But then you never can tell anything about families from looks, can you?” It was her nearest approach as yet to the personal, and Letty considered as to how she was to meet it. “I’m not a Rashleigh—not really—only by—by marriage. Rashleigh isn’t my real name. It’s—it’s the name I’m going by in pictures.” “Oh!” Miss Towell’s exclamation was the subdued one of acquiescence. She knew that ladies in pictures often preferred names other than their own, and if Letty was not a Rashleigh it “explained things.” That is, it explained how anyone called Rashleigh could be wandering about in this friendless way, though it made ’Enery Steptoe’s intervention the more mysterious. It was conceivable that he might act on behalf of a genuine Rashleigh, however out at elbow; but that he should take such pains for a spurious one, and go to the length of sending the sacred silver thimble as a pledge, rendered the situation puzzling. Schooled by her religious precepts to taking her duties as those of a minute at a time Miss Towell made no effort to force the girl’s confidence, and especially since Letty, like most young people in trouble, was on her guard against giving it. So long as she preferred to be shut up within herself, shut up within herself she should remain. Miss Towell felt that, for the moment at least, her own responsibility was limited to making the child feel that someone cared for her. At the same time she couldn’t have been a lonely woman with a love-story behind her without the impulse to dwell a little longingly on the one romantic incident in her experience. Though it had never come to anything, the fact that it had once opened its shy little flower made a sweet bright place to which her thoughts could retire. The references came spasmodically and without context, as the little white lady busied herself in waiting on Letty or in the care of her room. “I haven’t seen him since a short time after the mistress went away.” Letty felt herself coloring. Though not prudish there were words she couldn’t get used to. Besides which she had never thought that Steptoe.... But Miss Towell pursued her memories. “It always worried him that I should hold views different from his but I couldn’t submit to dictation, now, could I, dear?” Once more Letty felt herself awkwardly placed. The only interpretation she could put on Miss Towell’s words referring to moral reformation on her hostess’s part she said, as non-committally as might be: “He’s a good deal of a stickler.” “He’s been so long in a high position that he becomes—well, I won’t be ’arsh—but he becomes a little harbitrary. That’s where it was. He was a little harbitrary. With a mistress who allowed him a great deal of his own way—well, you can hardly blame him, can you, dear?” Letty forced herself to accept the linguistic standard of the world. “I suppose if she hadn’t allowed him a great deal of his own way he’d have looked somewhere else.” “That he could easily have done. He had temptations enough—a man like him. Why, dear, there was a lady in Park Avenue did everything she could that wasn’t positively dishonorable to win him away––” “He must have been younger and better looking than he is now,” Letty hazarded, bluntly. “Oh, it wasn’t a question of looks. Of course if she’d considered that, why, any foolish young fellow—but she knew what she would have got.” Not being at her ease in this kind of conversation, and finding the effort to see Steptoe as Lothario difficult, Letty became blunt again. “He must have had an awful crush on the first one.” “It wasn’t her exactly; it was the boy.” “Oh, there was a boy?” “Why of course, dear! Didn’t you know that?” “Whose boy was it?” “Why, the mistress’s boy; but I don’t think he––” Letty understood the pronoun as applying to Steptoe—“I don’t think he ever realized that he wasn’t his very own.” Straightening the white cover on the chest of drawers Miss Towell shook her head. “It was a sad case.” “What made it sad?” “A lovely boy he was. Had a kind word for everyone, even for the cat. But somehow his father and mother—well, they were people of the world, and they hadn’t wanted a child, and when he came—and he so delicate always—I could have cried over him.” Letty’s heart began to swell; her lip trembled. “I know someone like that myself.” “Do you, dear? Then I’m sure you understand.” Partly because the minute was emotional, and partly from a sense that she needed to explain herself, Letty murmured, more or less indistinctly: “It’s on his account that I’m here.” Failing to see the force of this Miss Towell was content to say: “I’m glad you were led to me, dear. There’s always a power to shepherd us along, if we’ll only let ourselves be guided.” To Letty the moment had arrived when plainness of speech was imperative. Leaning across the tray, which still stood on her lap, she gazed up at her hostess with eager, misty eyes. “He said you’d teach me all the ropes.” Miss Towell paused beside the bed, to look inquiringly at the tense little face. “The ropes of what, dear?” “Of what—” it was hard to express—“of what you—you used to be yourself. You don’t seem like it now,” she added, desperately, “but you were, weren’t you?” “Oh, that!” The surprise was in the discovery that an American girl of Letty’s age could entertain so sensible a purpose. “Why, of course, dear! I’ll tell you all I know, and welcome.” “There’s quite a trick to it, isn’t there?” “Well, it’s more than a trick. There are two or three things which you simply have to be.” “Oh, I know that. That’s what frightens me.” “You needn’t be afraid, once you’ve made up your mind to it.” She leaned above the bed to relieve Letty of the tray. “For instance—you don’t mind my asking questions do you?” “Oh, no! You can ask me anything.” “Then the first thing is this: Are you pretty good as a needle-woman?” Letty was astounded. “Why—why you don’t have to sew, do you?” “Certainly, dear. That’s one of the most important things you’d be called on to do. You’d never get anywhere if you weren’t quick with your needle and thread. And then there’d be hair-dressing. You have to know something about that. I don’t say that you must be a professional; but for the simpler occasions—after that there’s packing. That’s something we often overlook, and where French girls have us at a disadvantage. They pack so beautifully.” Letty was entirely at sea. “Pack what?” “Pack trunks, dear.” “What for?” “For travel; for moving from town to country; or from country to town; or making visits; you see you’re always on the go. Oh, it’s more than a trick; it’s quite an art; only—” She smiled at Letty as she stood holding the tray, before carrying it out—“only, I shouldn’t have supposed you’d be thinking of that when you act in moving pictures.” “I—I thought I might do both.” “Now, I should say that that’s one thing you couldn’t do, dear. If you took up this at all you’d find it so absorbing––” “And you’re very unhappy too, aren’t you? I’ve always heard you were.” “Well, that would depend a good deal on yourself. There’s nothing in the thing itself to make you unhappy; but sometimes there are other women––” Letty’s eyes were flaming. “They say they’re awful.” “Oh, not always. It’s a good deal as you carry yourself. I made it a point to keep my position and respect the position of others. It wasn’t always easy, especially with Mary Ann Courage and Janie Cakebread; but––” Letty’s head fell back on the pillow. Her eyes closed. A merry-go-round was spinning in her head. Where was she? How had she come there? What was she there for? Where was the wickedness she had been told to look for everywhere? Having gone in search of it, and expected to find it lying in wait from the first minute of passing the protecting door, she had been shuffled along from one to another, with exasperating kindness, only to be brought face to face with Jane Cakebread and Mary Ann Courage at the end. Miss Towell having borne away the tray, Letty struggled out of bed, and put on the woollen dressing gown thrown over a chair by the bedside. This was no place for her. Beehive Valley was not far off, and her forty-five cents would more than suffice to take her there. She would see the casting director. She would get a job. With food to eat and a place to sleep as a starting point she would find her own way to wickedness, releasing the prince in spite of all the mishaps which kept her as she was. But she trembled so that having wrapped the dressing gown about her she was obliged to sit down again. She would have to be crafty. She must get this woman to help her with her dressing, without suspecting what she meant to do. How could she manage that? She must try to think. She was trying to think when she heard the ring of the telephone. It suggested an idea. Some time—not this time, of course—when the telephone rang and the woman was answering it, she, Letty, would be able to slip away. The important thing was to do her hair and get her clothes on. “Yes?... Yes?” There was a little catch to the breath, a smothered laugh, a smothered sigh. “Oh, so this is you!... Yes, I got it.... Seeing it again gave me quite a turn.... I never expected that you’d keep it all this time, but.... Yes, she’s here.... No; she didn’t come exactly of her own accord, but I—I found her.... I could tell you about it easier if you were—it’s so hard on the telephone when there’s so much to say—but perhaps you don’t care to.... Yes, she’s quite well—only a little tired—been worked up somehow—but a day or so in bed.... Oh, very sensible ... and she wants me to teach her how to be a lady’s maid....” So that was it! Steptoe had been treacherous. Letty would never believe in anyone again. She could make these reflections hurriedly because the voice at the telephone was silent. “Oh!” It was the same exclamation as that of Barbara Walbrook, but in another tone—a tone of distress, sharp, sympathetic. Pulling the dressing gown about her, frightened, tense, Letty knew that something had gone wrong. “Oh! Oh!... last night, did you say?... early this morning....” Letty crept to where her hostess was seated at the telephone. “What is it?” But Miss Towell either didn’t hear the question or was too absorbed to answer it. “Oh, ’Enery, try to remember that God is his life—that there can be no death to be afraid of when––” Letty snatched the receiver from the other woman’s hands, and fell on her knees beside the little table. “Oh, what is it? What is it? It’s me; Letty! Something’s happened. I’ve got to know.” Amazed and awed by the force of this intrusion Miss Towell stood up, and moved a little back. Over the wire Steptoe’s voice sounded to Letty like the ghost of his voice, broken, dead. “I think if I was madam I’d come back.” “But what’s happened? Tell me that first.” “It’s Mr. Rash.” “Yes, I know it’s Mr. Rash. But what is it? Tell me quickly, for God’s sake.” “’E’s been ’it.” Her utterance was as nearly as possible a cry. “But he hasn’t been killed?” “Madam’d find ’im alive—if she ’urried.” When Letty rose from her knees she was strong. She was calm, too, and competent. She further surprised Miss Towell by the way in which she took command. “I must hurry. They want me at once. Would you mind helping me to dress?” <hr class='major' /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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