The White Lady (3 page)

“Tie it up, Susanne, and send it back,” she said as she walked over to the gown that lay upon the foot of her couch, its sheeny folds taking delicate lights from the morning sun streaming in at the window.

“Oh Miss Constance!” exclaimed Susanne in dismay. “Don’t you like it? Just try it on, do. I’m sure it suits you nicely. It is a beautiful hat.”

“Yes, Susanne, it’s pretty, but I’ve changed my mind. They are all to go back. Tie them up, and see that they are sent back at once.”

Susanne was disappointed. She delighted in assisting to robe her young mistress in these beautiful creations of dressmakers and milliners. No event of the week was pleasanter than when a delivery wagon arrived at the door with a new lot of lovely things. But she knew by the tone of Constance’s voice that there was no use in arguing the matter. For some reason her young lady chose to scorn these purchases. Hers was but to obey. So with a sigh she put them all back in their wrappings.

As for Constance, she went gravely into the next room and sat down to think. There were more things to be changed than she had reckoned upon. Every little item of her daily life must be dealt with, and that right speedily. She stepped to her desk and glanced over the day’s memoranda. There was an appointment with the dressmaker. She had put that down for the morning. The dress was to be finished in time for a dinner next week. But, if she was to make a change in her life, she would not need the dress nor the dinner. Ruthlessly the pencil crossed off that engagement. She would make no shopping tour that morning. She reached for the telephone and called up the dressmaker. “I have changed my plans,” she told the woman, “and shall not need the dress at present.” Then she went back to the memoranda.

Her pencil traveled down the list, crossing off everything that was not an absolute demand upon her time. She paused as she came to the last. It was the orchestra concert that evening. She always had the same pleasant seat for the season. She was a passionate lover of music. To be sure, the friends who shared the box were not those she would have chosen to be with under her present stress of mind, but that could not be helped, and if she wished to keep up appearances, it would be better to go straight ahead and appear in public as usual until she could slip out of this old world of hers altogether. That was the problem before her today—how to slip out, and where to slip to. It must be decided today. She would have no long delay. Maybe the music would help her to think, if no answer to the question came sooner.

So, leaving the evening engagement standing in her little book, she went down to breakfast.

But the answer was nearer at hand than she knew. On the breakfast table lay a pile of letters. Her grandmother was already reading the morning paper, and Constance, looking over her mail, shoving aside society notes and bills and recognizing at a glance the handwriting on several invitations, took up a letter in a hand that stirred her memory pleasantly. It was from a friend in Chicago, one whom she had known but a short time, and then but slightly, but one to whom she had taken a great fancy. She was surprised to get the letter, as she had not expected the girl to write. She opened it with a flutter of anticipation. It was an invitation to her to visit the friend in her western home and take part in a number of society functions that were being planned.

There was a spirit of real desire on the writer’s part to have her come, and a freshness of eagerness that touched Constance. It was this in the other girl that had first drawn Constance toward her. A sudden impulse seized her to accept this invitation and thus get away from her home and make her plans, free from numberless little interruptions. Might she not even linger on the way in some quiet country place and get a chance to think?

“Grandmother,” she said, looking up impulsively, “I have an invitation to visit Marion Eastlake, who was here last winter. Do you remember her? You said she had eyes like forget-me-nots.”

“Oh yes, I think I remember her,” said Grandmother, looking up with her gentle patrician smile. “Well, why don’t you go, dear? It will do you good to have a bit of a change.”

Constance breathed more freely when she saw how easy it was going to be to have this little thinking time without being questioned. She wondered what her grandmother would think if she knew what was being contemplated. But now that her mind was made up, she felt almost happy about it. There was an exhilaration in seeing something ahead besides the monotonous round of social functions. With a zest she had not known for a long time, she set about her preparations, and all through the day her voice could be heard singing snatches of gay little songs.

She wrote her note of acceptance to Marion Eastlake and helped her maid pack. She had told her friend that she would start in a few days, naming the last of the week as the time of her arrival, but as the trunks began to fill and the noon mail brought in other wearisome invitations, the desire to be gone came upon her, and she resolved to leave home the next morning. There was no reason why she should not and every reason why she should. She could take the journey slowly, stopping on the way if the fancy took her.

There was an old aunt, her father’s eldest sister, who lived in a small village on the way. She told her grandmother that perhaps she would stop off and make a little visit, and the quiet old lady got into quite a flutter, preparing little messages and a delicate collar of real lace to send as a gift. Constance was almost sorry she had bound herself to this much, because now that the desire to get away from things had come over her, she felt a great longing to go until she saw a place that attracted her and then get off and stay there for a day or two. The thought of having a little adventure all by herself on the way excited her. She put it aside during dinner lest her face should show some sign that would betray her, but she need not have feared. Her grandmother was too much interested in telling over a timeworn tale of the Assembly ball the year she had come out, and Constance had heard it too often to need to listen in order to make the right responses at the right time.

Now and then she stole a glance at the correct butler, who with impassive watchfulness stood sentinel behind her grandmother’s chair. How shocked he would be, she thought, if he knew she was planning to break away from her world of dignity and tradition.

And all the while she answered her grandmother’s gentle chat and gave low orders to the butler and wondered how it would seem to have no butler and no stately dinner served at precisely the right moment. Would she have to do the cooking herself?

She went to the concert, but she heard no symphony, for long before they had reached that part of the program, her rapid thoughts were hurrying on her journey, which she had now determined to begin on the morrow. The music became a sweet, dreamy, lulling sound that belonged to the world she was leaving. She would regret it, she knew, when it was gone, but now she felt impatient of it, of everything that kept her from taking some decided step and putting herself out of this awful dread of the future. She wanted to walk boldly up to that future and take it by the throat before it had opportunity to turn upon her and rend her.

Morris Thayer was there, of course. She had known he would be. But the chairs on either side of her were occupied. He could get no nearer than to lean across from the back of the box. She thanked him for the flowers in her usual pleasant manner, but he felt somehow that she was holding him at a distance once more. He watched her face to see whether he might read her thoughts as the grand chords of the music swept on, but he could make nothing of it. He marked her highbred features, as he had done many times before, and each dainty and expensive detail of her toilet, and his soul rejoiced in her. There was no discount on her. Her grandfather and her bank account, as well as her taste and beauty, were all right. He would win her.

But Constance’s thoughts were about the morrow and her journey.

At home again, she spent half the night sitting at her desk, going over a number of little matters that had to be attended to before she went away; and when she went to bed, everything was in readiness for her departure on the eight o’clock train in the morning.

This necessitated an unusually early breakfast. Mrs. Wetherill did not come down but bade her good-bye in her room. Constance forced herself to swallow a few mouthfuls of breakfast, gave her orders to the dignified butler and maid, and almost gleefully drove to the station with the chauffeur. She felt that she was escaping everything—calls, flowers, parties, dinners, and all perplexing questions—albeit she was going out to face something more momentous than any of those could ever have been.

T
he train drew up with a dull chug of relief, like a lazy person who is thankful to lay down a burden even for a little while. It seemed to doze, and snort in its sleep.

Constance looked out from the window of the parlor car for relief from her perplexing problems.

She was almost sorry already that she had taken the journey, yet it had to be. What she had to do and decide could not be done at home, submerged as she was in an ocean of society. It was absolutely necessary for her to detach herself from the life she had been living if she hoped to accomplish the desired end of hiding the downfall of the family wealth.

She had been four hours on her way and had reached no definite conclusions except the manner in which she would cut herself off from the world. That much she had determined. They would close the house in which they were living, indefinitely, and rent it, perhaps, or sell it if the lawyer thought—ah! The lawyer had said that everything was gone except five thousand dollars! How she kept forgetting that! The house, too, was probably gone, then—sold already or belonged to them only in name. But surely some way could be found to keep that from becoming apparent to the world. The lawyer would know how.

Yes, they would shut up the house and go away, traveling, supposedly, for Grandmother’s health or her own—or both. Everybody went summering, often wandering away on a far western or European ramble, and no one thought it strange if they chose to stay a year. After a year was passed, who would remember to inquire more than casually, except perhaps a few personal friends who might easily be managed by evasion?

That part was plain enough. But it would be hard to make Grandmother fall in with her plans.

Still, Grandmother was not an overwhelming problem. She could be managed. She should be told that they were going to travel. Grandmother must know no more than that, or she would surely confide it to some of her dear old gossipy friends. It would take money to get away thus, or perhaps even a thousand of the precious five thousand dollars to get started somewhere else. Constance thought it would be well spent if it saved them from the ignominy and humiliation of being a family of fallen fortunes.

Morris Thayer’s words were constantly in her mind, so that by this time, the loss of her money had assumed enormous proportions. She shrank most painfully from facing it in her world. Everything must be sacrificed to escape that.

But having settled this much, Constance could get no further. How were they to live elsewhere without touching their capital, after the borrowed thousand or so went? Was there any way in the wide world that she could earn money?

Her music? Horrors! No. To think of bringing down her high love of the old masters to the humdrum business of teaching stupid, unwilling little fingers to drum out exercises. Every nerve in her sensitive body quivered at the mere anticipation of the discord that would arise. She felt instantly that she was not cut out for that. No. She could never teach anything. She was certain of that.

She ran over the entire list of her accomplishments, both public and private, and decided that they were all impossible. The life she had heretofore led would fit her to be an able assistant to some overburdened society woman, and she knew it, but her whole soul shrank pitiably from any such dependent position. She longed to be something worthwhile, something independent. Of course, there were typewriting and stenography, of which she knew nothing and could probably earn a little if she tried, and there was the ribbon counter in some department store, but from them all she shrank in turn, not from any contempt for the work, for she had begun in the last few hours to honor greatly the woman who earned her living in any respectable way, but somehow none of them appealed to her as being things she could do successfully. Her conservative, sheltered life had made her unfit to succeed in these ways.

So she turned with a sigh toward the train window, and wondered where she was.

The place on which her eyes rested was full of greenness and beauty. There was a bit of an artificial lake, or possibly it was a natural pond, with a tiny island in the center, which barely held a rustic summerhouse, built of the rough limbs of trees. But it was in a state of dilapidation, as if no one had cared for it in many a day and the boys of the village had played there unmolested. Below its steps was an old boat half filled with water, and a bird stood daintily on the bow and stooped to drink in the water below, which rippled out in a merry circle like a dimple in the laughing pond.

The grassy bank sloped up from the pond at the right toward an old house half hidden in cedars. The house was of rough stone, and it looked as if it might have been a fine old home sometime in the past. There were wide verandas running across the front and sides, but the posts were rotting away, and some of the shutters hung by one hinge. It had evidently been the country place of some rich person who had been driven away by the railroad coming so near. The house stood perhaps three hundred feet away from the tracks, with a thick shelter of trees. An old broken beer sign on the way that led to the house suggested that an attempt had once been made to transform this place into a wayside inn, but for some reason it had failed. Above the beer sign there now hung one that said, F
OR
S
ALE OR
R
ENT
C
HEAP
. But even this sign looked as if it had been there a good many years and was likely to remain as many more.