CHAPTER XXVII.
A Sensational Turn in the Milbrey Fortunes
It was a morning early in November. In the sedate Milbrey dining-room a brisk wood-fire dulled the edge of the first autumn chill. At the breakfast-table, comfortably near the hearth, sat Horace Milbrey. With pointed spoon he had daintily scooped the golden pulp from a Florida orange, touched the tips of his slender white fingers to the surface of the water in the bowl, and was now glancing leisurely at the headlines of his paper, while his breakfast appetite gained agreeable zest from the acid fruit.
On the second page of the paper the names in a brief item arrested his errant glance. It disclosed that Mr. Percival Bines had left New York the day before with a party of guests on his special car, to shoot quail in North Carolina. Mr. Milbrey glanced at the two shells of the orange which the butler was then removing.
"What a hopeless brute that fellow was!" he reflected.. He was recalling a dictum once pronounced by Mr. Bines. "Oranges should never be eaten in public," he had said with that lordly air of dogmatism characteristic of him. "The only right way to eat a juicy orange is to disrobe, grasp the fruit firmly in both hands and climb into a bath-tub half full of water."
The finished epicure shuddered at the recollection, poignantly, quite as if a saw were being filed in the next room.
The disagreeable emotion was allayed, however, by the sight of his next course—oeufs aux saucissons. Tender, poetic memories stirred within him. The little truffled French sausages aroused his better nature. Two of them reposed luxuriously upon an egg-divan in the dainty French baking-dish of dull green. Over them—a fitting baptism, was the rich wine sauce of golden brown—a sauce that might have been the tears of envious angels, wept over a mortal creation so faultlessly precious.
Mrs. Milbrey entered, news of importance visibly animating her. Her husband arose mechanically, placed the chair for her, and resumed his fork in an ecstasy of concentration. Yet, though Mrs. Milbrey was full of talk, like a charged siphon, needing but a slight pressure to pour forth matters of grave moment, she observed the engrossment of her husband, and began on the half of an orange. She knew from experience that he would be deaf, for the moment, to anything less than an alarm of fire.
When he had lovingly consumed the last morsel he awoke to her presence and smiled benignantly.
"My dear, don't fail to try them, they're exquisitely perfect!"
"You really must talk to Avice," his wife replied.
Mr. Milbrey sighed, deprecatingly. He could remember no time within five years when that necessity had not weighed upon his father's sense of duty like a vast boulder of granite. He turned to welcome the diversion provided by the rognons sautees which Jarvis at that moment uncovered before him with a discreet flourish.
"Now you really must," continued his wife, "and you'll agree with me when I tell you why."
"But, my dear, I've already talked to the girl exhaustively. I've pointed out that her treatment of Mrs. Wybert—her perverse refusal to meet the lady at all, is quite as absurd as it is rude, and that if Fred chooses to marry Mrs. Wybert it is her duty to act the part of a sister even if she cannot bring herself to feel it. I've assured her that Mrs. Wybert's antecedents are all they should be; not illustrious, perhaps, but eminently respectable. Indeed, I quite approve of the Southern aristocracy. But she constantly recalls what that snobbish Bines was unfair enough to tell her. I've done my utmost to convince her that Bines spoke in the way he did about Mrs. Wybert because he knew she was aware of those ridiculous tales of his mother's illiteracy. But Avice is—er—my dear, she is like her mother in more ways than one. Assuredly she doesn't take it from me."
He became interested in the kidneys. "If Marie had been a man," he remarked, feelingly, "I often suspect that her fame as a chef would have been second to none. Really, the suavity of her sauces is a never-ending delight to me."
"I haven't told you yet the reason—a new reason—why you must talk to Avice."
"The money—yes, yes, my dear, I know, we all know. Indeed, I've put it to her plainly. She knows how sorely Fred needs it. She knows how that beast of a tailor is threatening to be nasty—and I've explained how invaluable Mrs. Wybert would be, reminding her of that lady's generous hint about the rise in Federal Steel, which enabled me to net the neat little profit of ten thousand dollars a month ago, and how, but for that, we might have been acutely distressed. Yet she stubbornly clings to the notion that this marriage would be a mesalliance for the Milbreys."
"I agree with her," replied his wife, tersely.
Mr. Milbrey looked perplexed but polite.
"I quite agree with Avice," continued the lady. "That woman hasn't been right, Horace, and she isn't right. Young Bines knew what he was talking about. I haven't lived my years without being able to tell that after five minutes with her, clever as she is. I can read her. Like so many of those women, she has an intense passion to be thought respectable, and she's come into money enough—God only knows how—to gratify it. I could tell it, if nothing else showed it, by the way in which she overdoes respectability. She has the thousand and one artificial little rules for propriety that one never does have when one has been bred to it. That kind of woman is certain to lapse sooner or later. She would marry Fred because of his standing, because he's a favourite with the smart people she thinks she'd like to be pally with. Then, after a little she'd run off with a German-dialect comedian or something, like that appalling person Normie Whitmund married."
"But the desire to be respectable, my dear—and you say this woman has it—is a mighty lever. I'm no cynic about your sex, but I shudder to think of their—ah—eccentricities if it should cease to be a factor in the feminine equation."
"It's nothing more than a passing fad with this person—besides, that's not what I've to tell you."
"But you, yourself, were not averse to Fred's marrying her, in spite of these opinions you must secretly have held."
"Not while it seemed absolutely necessary—not while the case was so brutally desperate, when we were actually pressed—"
"Remember, my dear, there's nothing magic in those ten thousand dollars. They're winged dollars like all their mates, and most of them, I'm sorry to say, have already flown to places where they'd long been expected."
Mrs. Milbrey's sensation was no longer to be repressed. She had toyed with the situation sufficiently. Her husband was now skilfully dissecting the devilled thighs of an immature chicken.
"Horace," said his wife, impressively, "Avice has had an offer of marriage—from—"
He looked up with new interest.
"From Rulon Shepler."
He dropped knife and fork. Shepler, the man of mighty millions! The undisputed monarch of finance! The cold-blooded, calculating sybarite in his lighter moments, but a man whose values as a son-in-law were so ideally superb that the Milbrey ambition had never vaulted high enough even to overlook them for one daring moment! Shepler, whom he had known so long and so intimately, with never the audacious thought of a union so stupendously glorious!
"Margaret, you're jesting!"
Mrs. Milbrey scorned to be dazzled by her triumph.
"Nonsense! Shepler asked her last night to marry him."
"It's bewildering! I never dreamed—"
"I've expected it for months. I could tell you the very moment when the idea first seized the man—on the yacht last summer. I was sure she interested him, even before his wife died two years ago."
"Margaret, it's too good to be true!"
"If you think it is I'll tell you something that isn't: Avice practically refused him."
Her husband pushed away his plate; the omission of even one regretful glance at its treasures betrayed the strong emotion under which he laboured.
"This is serious," he said, quietly. "Let us get at it. Tell me if you please!"
"She came to me and cried half the night. She refused him definitely at first, but he begged her to consider, to take a month to think it over—"
Milbrey gasped. Shepler, who commanded markets to rise and they rose, or to fall and they fell—Shepler begging, entreating a child of his! Despite the soul-sickening tragedy of it, the situation was not without its element of sublimity.
"She will consider; she will reflect?"
"You're guessing now, and you're as keen at that as I. Avice is not only amazingly self-willed, as you intimated a moment since, but she is intensely secretive. When she left me I could get nothing from her whatever. She was wretchedly sullen and taciturn."
"But why should she hesitate? Shepler—Rulon Shepler! My God! is the girl crazy? The very idea of hesitation is preposterous!"
"I can't divine her. You know she has acted perversely in the past. I used to think she might have some affair of which we knew nothing—something silly and romantic. But if she had any such thing I'm sure it was ended, and she'd have jumped at this chance a year ago. You know yourself she was ready to marry young Bines, and was really disappointed when he didn't propose."
"But this is too serious." He tinkled the little silver bell.
"Find out if Miss Avice will be down to breakfast."
"Yes, sir."
"If she's not coming down I shall go up," declared Mr. Milbrey when the man had gone.
"She's stubborn," cautioned his wife.
"Gad! don't I know it?"
Jarvis returned.
"Miss Avice won't be down, sir, and I'm to fetch her up a pot of coffee, sir."
"Take it at once, and tell her I shall be up to see her presently." Jarvis vanished.
"I think I see a way to put pressure on her, that is if the morning hasn't already brought her back to her senses."
At four o'clock that afternoon, Avice Milbrey's ring brought Mrs. Van Geist's butler to the door.
"Sandon, is Aunt Cornelia at home?"
"Yes, Miss Milbrey, she's confined to her room h'account h'of a cold, miss."
"Thank heaven!"
"Yes, miss—certainly! will you go h'up to her?"
"And Mutterchen, dear, it was a regular bombshell," she concluded after she had fluttered some of the November freshness into Mrs. Van Geist's room, and breathlessly related the facts.
"You demented creature! I should say it must have been."
"Now, don't lecture!"
"But Shepler is one of the richest men in New York."
"Dad already suspects as much."
"And he's kind, he's a big-hearted chap, a man of the world, generous—a—"
"'A woman fancier,' Fidelia Oldaker calls him."
"My dear, if he fancies you—"
"There, you old conservative, I've heard all his good points, and my duty has been written before me in letters of fire. Dad devoted three hours to writing it this morning, so don't, please, say over any of the moral maxims I'm likely to have heard."
"But why are you unwilling?"
"Because—because I'm wild, I fancy—just because I don't like the idea of marrying that man. He's such a big, funny, round head, and positively no neck—his head just rolls around on his big, pillowy shoulders—and then he gets little right at once, tapers right off to a point with those tiny feet."
"It isn't easy to have everything."
"It wouldn't be easy to have him, either."
Mrs. Van Geist fixed her niece with a sudden look of suspicion.
"Has—has that man anything to do with your refusal?"
"No—not a thing—I give you my word, auntie. If he had been what I once dreamed he was no one would be asking me to marry him now, but—do you know what I've decided? Why, that he is a joke—that's all—just a joke. You needn't think of him, Mutterchen—I don't, except to think it was funny that he should have impressed me so—he's simply a joke."
"I could have told you as much long ago."
"Tell me something now. Suppose Fred marries that Wybert woman."
"It will be a sorry day for Fred."
"Of course! Now see how I'm pinned. Dad and the mater both say the same now—they're more severe than I was. Only we were never in such straits for money. It must be had. So this is the gist of it: I ought to marry Rulon Shepler in order to save Fred from a marriage that might get us into all sorts of scandal."
"Well?"
"Well, I would do a lot for Fred. He has faults, but he's always been good to me."
"And so?"
"And so it's a question whether he marries a very certain kind of woman or whether I marry a very different kind of man."
"How do you feel?"
"For one thing Fred sha'n't get into that kind of muss if I can save him from it."
"Then you'll marry Shepler?"
"I'm still uncertain about Mr. Shepler."
"But you say—"
"Yes, I know, but I've reasons for being uncertain. If I told you you'd say they're like the most of a woman's reasons, mere fond, foolish hopes, so I won't tell you."
"Well, dear, work it out by your lonely if you must. I believe you'll do what's best for everybody in the end. And I am glad that your father and Margaret take your view of that woman."
"I was sure she wasn't right—and I knew Mr. Bines was too much of a man to speak of her as he did without positive knowledge. Now please give me some tea and funny little cakes; I'm famished."
"Speaking of Mr. Bines," said Mrs. Van Geist, when the tea had been brought by Sandon, "I read in the paper this morning that he'd taken a party to North Carolina for the quail shooting, Eddie Arledge and his wife and that Mr. and Mrs. Garmer, and of course Florence Akemit. Should you have thought she'd marry so soon after her divorce? They say Bishop Doolittle is frightfully vexed with her."
"Really I hadn't heard. Whom is Florence to marry?"
"Mr. Bines, to be sure! Where have you been? You know she was on his yacht a whole month last summer—the bishop's sister was with her— highly scandalised all the time by the drinking and gaiety, and now every one's looking for the engagement to be announced. Here, what did I do with that Town Topics Cousin Clint left? There it is on the tabouret. Read the paragraph at the top of the page." Avice read:
"An engagement that is rumoured with uncommon persistence will put society on the qui vive when it is definitely announced. The man in the case is the young son of a mining Croesus from Montana, who has inherited the major portion of his father's millions and who began to dazzle upper Broadway about a year since by the reckless prodigality of his ways. His blond innamorata is a recent divorcee of high social standing, noted for her sparkling wit and an unflagging exuberance of spirits. The interest of the gossips, however, centres chiefly in the uncle of the lady, a Right Reverend presiding over a bishopric not a thousand miles from New York, and in the attitude he will assume toward her contemplated remarriage. At the last Episcopal convention this godly and well-learned gentleman was a vehement supporter of the proposed canon to prohibit absolutely the marriage of divorced persons; and though he stoutly championed his bewitching niece through the infelicities that eventuated in South Dakota, on dit that he is highly wrought up over her present intentions, and has signified unmistakably his severest disapproval. However, nous verrons ce que nous verrons."
"But, Mutterchen, that's only one of those absurd, vulgar things that wretched paper is always printing. I could write dozens of them myself. Tom Banning says they keep one man writing them all the time, out of his own imagination, and then they put them in like raisins in a cake."
"But, my dear, I'm quite sure this is authentic. I know from Fidelia Oldaker that the bishop began to cut up about it to Florence, and Florence defied him. That ancient theory that most gossip is without truth was exploded long ago. As a matter of fact most gossip, at least about the people we know, doesn't do half justice to the facts. But, really, I can't see why he fancied Florence Akemit. I should have thought he'd want some one a bit less fluttery."
"I dare say you're right, about the gossip, I mean—" Miss Milbrey remarked when she had finished her tea, and refused the cakes. "I remember, now, one day when we met at her place, and he seemed so much at home there. Of course, it must be so. How stupid of me to doubt it! Now I must run. Good-bye, you old dear, and be good to the cold."
"Let me know what you do."
"Indeed I shall; you shall be the first one to know. My mind is really, you know, almost made up."
A week later Mr. and Mrs. Horace Milbrey announced in the public prints the engagement of their daughter Avice to Mr. Rulon Shepler.