THE MISCHIEF OF A LETTER
The meditations of Mrs. Neligage in the watches of the night which followed the polo game must have been interesting, and could they be known might afford matter for amusement and study. It must be one of the chief sources of diversion to the Father of Evil to watch the growth in human minds and hearts of schemes for mischief. He has the satisfaction of seeing his own ends served, the entertainment of observing a curious and fascinating mental process, and all the while his vanity may be tickled by the reflection that it is he who will receive the credit for each cunningly developed plot of iniquity. That the fiend had been agreeably entertained on this occasion was to be inferred from the proceedings of Mrs. Neligage next morning, when the plans of the night were being carried into effect.
As early in the day as calling was reasonably possible, Mrs. Neligage, although it was Sunday, betook herself to see May Calthorpe. May, who had neither father nor mother living, occupied the family house on Beacon street, opposite the Common, having as companion a colorless cousin who played propriety, and for the most part played it unseen. The dwelling was rather a gloomy nest for so bright a bird as May. Respectability of the most austere New England type pervaded the big drawing-room where Mrs. Neligage was received. The heavy old furniture was as ugly as original sin, and the pictures might have ministered to the Puritan hatred for art. Little was changed from the days when May's grandparents had furnished their abode according to the most approved repulsiveness of their time. Only the brightness of the warm April sun shining in at the windows, and a big bunch of dark red roses in a crystal jug, lightened the formality of the stately apartment.
When May came into the room, however, it might have seemed that she had cunningly retained the old appointments as a setting to make more apparent by contrast her youthful fresh beauty. With her clear color, her dark hair, and sparkling eyes, she was the more bewitching amid this stately, sombre furniture, and in this gloomy old lofty room.
"My dear," Mrs. Neligage said, kissing her affectionately, "how well you look. I was dreadfully afraid I should find you worried and unhappy."
May returned her greeting less effusively, and seemed somewhat puzzled at this address.
"But why in the world should I look worried?" she asked.
Mrs. Neligage sat down, and regarded the other impressively in silence a moment before replying.
"Oh, my dear child," she said dramatically, "how could you be so imprudent?"
May became visibly paler, and in her turn sank into a chair.
"I don't know what you mean," she faltered.
"If you had lived in society abroad as much as I have, May," was the answer, delivered with an expressive shake of the head, "you would know how dreadfully a girl compromises herself by writing to a strange gentleman."
May started up, her eyes dilating.
"Oh, how did you know?" she demanded.
"The Count thinks the most horrible things," the widow went on mercilessly. "You know what foreigners are. It wouldn't have been so bad if it were an American."
Poor May put her hands together with a woeful gesture as if she were imploring mercy.
"Oh, is it the Count really?" she cried. "I saw that he had a red carnation in his buttonhole yesterday, but I hoped that it was an accident."
"A red carnation?" repeated Mrs. Neligage.
"Yes; that was the sign by which I was to know him. I said so in that letter."
It is to be doubted if the Recording Angel at that moment wrote down to the credit of Mrs. Neligage that she regretted having by chance stuck that flower in the Count's coat at the County Club.
"You poor child!" she murmured with a world of sympathy in her voice.
The touch was too much for May, who melted into tears. She was a simple-hearted little thing or she would never have written the unlucky letters to Christopher Calumus, and in her simplicity she had evidently fallen instantly into the trap set for her. She dabbed resolutely at her eyes with her handkerchief, but the fountain was too free to be so easily stanched.
"It will make a horrid scandal," Mrs. Neligage went on by way of comfort. "Oh, I do hate those dreadful foreign ways of talking about women. It used to make me so furious abroad that I wanted to kill the men."
May was well on the way to sobs now.
"Such things are so hard to kill, too," pursued the widow. "Everybody here will say there is nothing in it, but it will be repeated, and laughed about, and it will never be forgotten. That's the worst of it. The truth makes no difference, and it is almost impossible to live a thing of that sort down. You've seen Laura Seaton, haven't you? Well, that's just what ruined her life. She wrote some foolish letters, and it was found out. It always is found out; and she's always been in a cloud."
Mrs. Neligage did not mention that the letters which the beclouded Miss Seaton had written had been to a married man and with a full knowledge on her part who her correspondent was.
"Oh, Mrs. Neligage," sobbed May. "Do you suppose the Count will tell?"
"My dear, he showed me the letter."
"Oh, did he?" moaned the girl, crimson to the eyes. "Did you read it?"
"Read it, May? Of course not!" was the answer, delivered with admirable appearance of indignation; "but I knew the handwriting."
May was by this time so shaken by sobs and so miserable that her condition was pitiful. Mrs. Neligage glided to a seat beside her, and took the girl in her arms in a fashion truly motherly.
"There, there, May," said she soothingly. "Don't give way so. We must do something to straighten things out."
"Oh, do you think we could?" demanded May, looking up through her tears. "Can't you get that letter away from him?"
"I tried to make him give it to me, but he refused."
It really seemed a pity that the widow was not upon the stage, so admirably did she show sympathy in voice and manner. She caressed the tearful maiden, and every tone was like an endearment.
"Somebody must get that letter," she went on. "It would be fatal to leave it in the Count's possession. He is an old hand at this sort of thing. I knew about him abroad."
She might have added with truth that she had herself come near marrying him, supposing that he had a fortune to match his title, but that she had luckily discovered his poverty in time.
"But who can get it?" asked May, checking her tears as well as was possible under the circumstances.
"It must be somebody who has the right to represent you," Mrs. Neligage responded with an air of much impressiveness.
"Anybody may represent me," declared May. "Couldn't you do it, Mrs. Neligage?"
"My dear," the other answered in a voice of remonstrance, "a lady could hardly go to a man on an errand like that. It must be a man."
May dashed her hands together in a burst of impatience and despair.
"Oh, I don't see what you gave it to him for," she cried in a lamentable voice. "You might have known that I wouldn't have written it if I'd any idea that that old thing was Christopher Calumus."
"And I wouldn't have given it to him," returned Mrs. Neligage quietly, "if I'd had any idea that you were capable of writing to men you didn't know."
May looked as if the tone in which this was said or the words themselves had completed her demoralization. She was bewitching in her misery, her eyes swimming divinely in tears, large and pathetic and browner than ever, her hair ruffled in her agitation into tiny rings and pliant wisps all about her temples, her cheeks flushed and moist. Her mouth, with its trembling little lips, might have moved the sternest heart of man to compassion and to the desire at least of consoling it with kisses. The more firm and logical feminine mind of Mrs. Neligage was not, however, by all this loveliness of woe turned away from her purpose.
"At any rate," she went on, "the thing that can't be altered is that you have written the letter, and that the Count has it. I do pity you terribly, May; and I know Count Shimbowski, so I know what I'm saying. I came in this morning to say something to you, to propose something, that is; but I don't know how you'll take it. It is a way out of the trouble."
"If there's any way out," returned May fervently, "I'm sure I don't care what it is; I'm ready for it, if it's to chop off my fingers."
"It isn't that, my dear," Mrs. Neligage assured her with a suggestion of a laugh, the faint suggestion of a laugh, such as was appropriate to the direful situation only alleviated by the possibility which was to be spoken. "The fact is there's but one thing to do. You must let Jack act for you."
"Oh, will he, Mrs. Neligage?" cried May, brightening at once.
It has been noted by more than one observer of life that in times of trouble the mere mention of a man is likely to produce upon the feminine mind an effect notably cheering. Whether this be true, or a mere fanciful calumny of those heartless male writers who have never been willing to recognize that the real glory of woman lies in her being able entirely to ignore the existence of man, need not be here discussed. It is enough to record that at the sound of Jack's name May did undoubtedly rouse herself from the abject and limp despair into which she was completely collapsing. She caught at the suggestion as a trout snaps at the fisherman's fly.
"He will be only too glad to," said Mrs. Neligage, "if he has the right."
She paused and looked down, playing with the cardcase in her hands. She made a pretty show of being puzzled how to go on, so that the most stupid observer could not have failed to understand that there was something of importance behind her words. May began to knit her white forehead in an evident attempt to comprehend what further complication there might be in the affair under discussion.
"I must be plain," the widow said, after a slight, hesitating pause. "What I have to say is as awkward as possible, and of course it's unusual; but under the circumstances there's no help for it. I hope you'll understand, May, that it's only out of care for you that I'm willing to come here this morning and make a fool of myself."
"I don't see how you could make a fool of yourself by helping me," May said naïvely.
The visitor smiled, and put out a trimly gloved hand to pat the fingers of the girl as they lay on the chair-arm.
"No, that's the truth, May. I am trying to help you, and so I needn't mind how it sounds. Well, then; the fact is that there's one thing that makes this all very delicate. Whoever goes to the Count must have authority."
"Well, I'm ready to give Jack authority."
"But it must be the authority of a betrothed, my dear."
"What! Oh, Mrs. Neligage!"
May sat bolt upright and stiffened in her chair as if a wave of liquid air had suddenly gone over her.
"To send a man for the letters under any other circumstances would be as compromising as the letters in the first place. Besides, the Count wouldn't be bound to give them up except to your fiancé."
"That horrid Count!" broke out May with vindictive irrelevancy. "I wish it was just a man we had to deal with!"
"Now Jack has been in love with you for a long time, my dear," pursued Jack's mother.
"Jack! In love with me? Why, he's fond of Alice."
"Oh, in a boy and girl way they've always been the best of friends. It's nothing more. He's in love with you, I tell you. What do you young things know about love anyway, or how to recognize it? I shouldn't tell you this if it weren't for the circumstances; but Jack is too delicate to speak when it might look as if he were taking advantages. He is furious about the letter."
"Oh, does he know too?" cried poor May. "Does everybody know?"
Her tears began again, and now Mrs. Neligage dried them with her own soft handkerchief, faintly scented with the especial eastern scent which she particularly affected. Doubtless a mother may be held to know something of the heart and the opinions of her only son, but as Jack had not, so far as his mother had any means of knowing, in the least connected May Calthorpe with the letter given to Count Shimbowski, it is perhaps not unfair to conclude that her maternal eagerness and affection had in this particular instance led her somewhat far. It is never the way of a clever person to tell more untruths than are actually needed by the situation, and it was perhaps by way of not increasing too rapidly her debit account on the books of the Recording Angel that Mrs. Neligage replied to this question of May's with an evasion,—an evasion, it is true, which was more effective than a simple, direct falsehood would have been.
"Oh, May dear, you don't know the horrid way in which those foreign rakes boast of what they call their conquests!"
The idea of being transformed from a human, self-respecting being into a mere conquest, the simple, ignominious spoils of the chase, might well be too much for any girl, and May became visibly more limp under it.
"The simple case is here," proceeded the widow, taking up again her parable with great directness. "Jack is fond of you; he is too delicate to speak of it, and he knows that this is a time when nobody but a fiancé has a right to meddle. If you had a brother, of course it would be different; but you haven't. Something must be done, and so I came this morning really to beg you, for Jack's sake and your own, to consent to an engagement."
"Did Jack send you?" demanded May, looking straight into the other's eyes.
Mrs. Neligage met the gaze fairly, yet there was a little hesitation in her reply. It might be that she considered whether the risk were greater in telling the truth or in telling a lie; but in the end it was the truth that she began with. Before she had got half through her sentence she had distorted it out of all recognition, indeed, but it is always an advantage to begin with what is true. It lends to any subsequent falsifying a moral support which is of inestimable value.
"He knows nothing of it at all," she confessed. "He is too proud to let anybody speak for him, just as under the circumstances he is too proud to speak for himself. Besides, he is poor, and all your friends would say he was after your money. No, nothing would induce him to speak for himself. He is very unhappy about it all; but he feels far worse for you than for himself. Dear Jack! He is the most generous fellow in the world."
"Poor Jack!" May murmured softly.
"Poor Jack!" the widow echoed, with a deep-drawn sigh. "It frightens me so to think what might happen if he hears the Count boasting in his insolent way. Foreigners always boast of their conquests! Why, May, there's no knowing what he might do! And the scandal of it for you! And what should I do if anything happened to Jack?"
Perhaps an appeal most surely touches the feminine heart if it be a little incoherent. A pedant might have objected that Mrs. Neligage in this brief speech altered the point of view with reckless frequency, but the pedant would by the effect have been proved to be wrong. The jumble of possibilities and of consequences, of woe to Jack, harm to May, and of general inconsolability on the part of the mother finished the conquest of the girl completely. She was henceforth only eager to do whatever Mrs. Neligage directed, and under the instigation of her astute counsellor wrote a note to the young man, accepting a proposal which he had never heard of, and imploring him as her accepted lover to rescue from the hands of Count Shimbowski the letter addressed to Christopher Calumus. It is not every orator, even among the greatest, who can boast of having achieved a triumph so speedy and so complete as that which gladdened the heart of Mrs. Neligage when, after consoling and cheering her promised daughter-in-law, she set out to find her son.