Chapter XXIV
The next day dawned clear and bright; a beautiful morning in early spring after a night of storm. Upon Elizabeth's spirits as she dressed the weather produced the illogical effect that it does upon most of us. Reviewed by daylight, the situation seemed to her many degrees less desperate. The night before, there had seemed to her only one way out, and that a tragical one; but now there were—there must be—a hundred ways, if only she could gain the time to think of them.
The first thing was to obtain the money; but this in itself was no easy matter. She had promised it to Paul as if it were a mere trifle; yet, as a matter of fact, she was as badly off herself at the time as was to be expected of a young woman who had gone out a great deal, and established and lived up to an expensive reputation for being always well and appropriately gowned.
She reviewed her resources. Mrs. Bobby would have lent her the money at once and asked no questions; but from this course Elizabeth's pride shrank uncontrollably. She preferred to take a sum she had just laid aside to satisfy to some extent the claims of a long-suffering and complaisant dressmaker; but even with this sacrifice determined on, she was still far short of the amount required. She took out, in desperation, her various jewels and trinkets, and looked them over, wondering how much they were worth. There were many pretty things her aunts had given her, none of them probably of any great intrinsic value, and there were the beautiful gifts that Mrs. Bobby had showered upon her; and, finally, there was the string of pearls which she always wore about her neck, one of the few heirlooms which old Madam Van Vorst had once kept under lock and key, and which her daughters had of course made over to Elizabeth. The girl stood now hesitating with the pearls in her hand. She had worn them to every ball that winter, she was wont to say, with her half-joking, half-real touch of superstition, that they brought her luck; as if, with their possession, something of the spirit of that proud beauty of a by-gone day had entered into her, enabling her to conquer the world in which the older woman had been naturally at home. Would the power leave her with the pearls? The fantastic thought lingered for a moment, and then impatiently she thrust it aside, and put the precious heirloom in with the rest of her possessions, which she had resolved to sacrifice. It was not a moment when she could afford to dally with sentiment.
Yet what a strange, disreputable proceeding it seemed! She was haunted with a vague sense of losing caste, as she took her trinkets to one of the smaller jewelry-shops, and faltered out her improbable tale of their being unbecoming and of no use to her. The jeweler, well used to the straits of fashionable young women, listened without a smile, and offered her on the whole a fair price, though it was much less than she expected. There was nothing that she was not obliged to part with—from the jeweled watch which Mrs. Bobby had given her at Christmas, to the pearls, which proved to be the most valuable of all. When she left the shop she had deprived herself of all her ornaments, but she held the necessary bribe in her hand, and as the simplest way of conveying it to Halleck, she got on a cable car and went up at once to his studio at Carnegie. There was nothing startling in the proceeding, for he had now a number of pupils, who came to him at his studio; and though the girls whom Elizabeth knew always brought their maids, or a chaperone of some sort, she was not in the mood to waste much thought on conventionalities. Her one idea was to fulfil her share of the bargain before he should, perchance, have repented of his, and she did not think of the chance of meeting any one. Her own affairs had reached a crisis which blinded her to the fact that to other people, the world was progressing peacefully, in the usual order of events.
This dream-like state of indifference to all but the one anxiety continued till she reached Carnegie and was borne up in the elevator to Paul's studio, which was directly opposite to Mr. D'Hauteville's. And here, for the first time, she paused, seized by a sudden panic. From behind the closed curtain at the end of the small vestibule, there came the sound of a woman's voice, strained, nasal, raised high in what seemed a tirade of denunciation. To Elizabeth's mind, as she heard it, there arose an involuntary recollection of Bassett Mills, and of the gaudy little parlor behind her aunt's shop, and some bitter words directed against herself, in what seemed a past period of her history. She stood hesitating, terrified; then the curtain was pushed aside, and a woman came out. It was her cousin Amanda. Her face was white and set, her eyes blazing. She stared at Elizabeth for a moment as if dazed, then brushed past her without a word.
Paul stood on the threshold, a picturesque object in his velveteen coat and turned-down collar, against the artistic background of the luxuriously-furnished studio. He looked flushed, annoyed; the scene which had just taken place had evidently been a trying one. But when he saw Elizabeth standing doubtful in the hall, his face cleared and he came forward to greet her with effusion.
"Darling, how good of you to come here!" He evidently hailed the visit as an overture towards reconciliation. She hastened to disabuse him.