Scandal: A Novel

by Cosmo Hamilton

The sound of the key turning in the lock of her door had an instant and peculiar effect on Beatrix. It awoke in her the same primeval spirit which had carried Franklin into her bedroom on the wave of an infuriated impulse. It made her realize that the time for protest was over; that the moment when she could appeal (with any hope of success) to this man's sense of honor had passed. It was through her own action, and she knew it, that she had cracked the skin-deep veneer of civilization and rendered Franklin the mere savage which most men become under the influence of one or other of the passions.

Self-preservation was the instinct which was now uppermost in her mind. Alone, without help, with only her native wit to fall back on, she had to save herself from the almost unbelievable crisis that she had so lightly brought about. She grasped this fact quickly enough. One look at Franklin's face made it plain,—his blazing eyes, his set mouth, the squareness of his jaw.

It was characteristic of her, however, that while still under the first shock of his threat, his presence and the knowledge that he intended to carry out his purpose with all the cold-bloodedness and cruelty which comes from wounded vanity, the thought of the fight which faced her filled her with a sort of mental delight. Here, if you like, was something new upon which she could bend her whole ingenuity—something which sent the monotony of her all-too-complete existence flying as before a cyclone. Her blood danced. Her spirits rose. Her eyes sparkled like those of the mountaineer who stands at the foot of a summit which has hitherto been unclimbed. She gave a little laugh as all these things flashed through her brain. She thrilled with the sense of adventure which had always been latent in her character and which was the cause of the amazing position in which she now found herself. Like a superb young animal brought to bay, she turned to defend herself, strung up to fight with every atom of her mental and physical strength for that which counted for more than life. That she regarded her antagonist with respect surprised her a little, but she was glad to make the discovery, because it made the fight all the more worth while. She recognized in this tall, wiry, dark-haired man, who looked in the very pink of condition and bore on his well-cut young face the tan of sun and wind, someone who had in him every single one of her own faults, whose training and environment were the same as her own, who had been made as impatient of control from the possession of excessive wealth as she was, and whose capacity for becoming untamed the very moment that the thin layer of culture which education gives falls in front of passionate resentment was similar in every way to that which had made her lie to her family.

It was with the feeling that she was leading lady in an extremely daring society drama, that she took what she inwardly called the stage, as much mistress of herself as she had been in the rooms of the portrait painter. When she turned up the shaded lights on her dressing-table and over the fireplace she did so with the rhythmic movement and the sense of time which would have been hers had she rehearsed the scene and been now playing it to a crowded house on the first night of a metropolitan production. She seemed to hear the diminuendo of the orchestra and to feel that curious nervous exhilaration that comes from the knowledge of being focused by thousands of unseen eyes. It was surely an almost uncanny sense of humor which allowed her to stand outside herself in this way and watch all her movements as though they were those of another person. But,—she knew her part. She had the confidence of one who has completely memorized her lines. Her triumph would be complete when she succeeded in making Franklin put the key back into the lock of her door and remove himself from her presence.

As Franklin examined the room in which he never imagined that he would find himself and had no desire to be his determination to get even with the spoiled girl who had used him to get herself out of a family fracas grew stronger and stronger. It seemed to him that the room,—almost insolent in its evidences of wealth,—was symbolic. It was not, he saw, the room of a young, healthy, normal girl so much as of a woman of the world, a highly finished, highly fastidious mondaine, who had won the right to live in an atmosphere of priceless tapestries, historic furniture, and a luxury that was quite Roman. He ran his eyes scornfully about and scoffed at the four-poster bed in which a French queen might have received, and probably did receive, the satellites and flatterers of her court; and saw through an open door not a mere bathroom, but a pool, marble-lined, with florid Byzantine decorations, discreetly lit. This thing angered him. It stood, he thought, as the reason for this girl's distorted idea of life—of her myopic point of view. It stood for many thousands of misplaced dollars which would, if sanely used, have provided much-needed beds for the accident wards of a hospital.

Not for the first time in his life, Franklin staggered at the sight of the abnormality of excessive wealth, and felt that he himself, like Beatrix, was nearer to lunacy than the ordinary human being because of the possession of it. The queer paradox of his having been made the instrument to bring this girl down from the false pedestal upon which she had stood ever since she was born, also struck him. He had never been much given to self-analysis or to the psychological examination of social conditions; but as he sat there in that large, lofty and extravagant, almost grotesquely furnished bedroom, more closely resembling that of one or other of the great courtezans than of an American girl in the first exquisite flush of youth, he came to the conclusion, with a savage sense of justice, that he would be doing something for civilization by bringing this millionaire's daughter face to face with the grim truth of things.

It was Beatrix who broke a silence which had only lasted a few minutes. "There are cigarettes at your elbow," she said. "Won't you smoke?"

Franklin looked up. The note of camaraderie in her voice surprised him. The last time he had heard her speak it was in a tone of agonized appeal. "No, thanks," he replied, "I've smoked enough."

"In training for one of your much-paragraphed athletic feats, perhaps," she said, a quizzical smile playing round her lips.

"I am," said Franklin. "Though I doubt whether this one will be as much advertised as the others." He looked steadily at her as he said this thing, caught the merest flick of her eyes and marked up to his credit the fact that she understood his meaning.