York's man-servant, of whom he was so inordinately proud, had gone to bed. Otherwise, he would have been astonished to hear the sound of smashing china. The portrait painter took it out on a Dresden bowl which, in his impotent rage, he dashed with a characteristically coarse oath to the polished floor of the room in which most of his love episodes had ended with peculiar success.
II
The Vanderdyke house on Fifth Avenue faced the Park.
It aroused the admiration of most people not because it was an accurate reproduction of the famous De la Rochefoucauld mansion in Paris, but because on one side of it enough space upon which to build a high apartment house was given up to a stilted garden behind a high arrangement of wrought iron. It did not require a trained real-estate mind to know how valuable was such "waste" ground.
The suite of rooms belonging to Beatrix overlooked this large, square patch, with its well-nursed lawn, its elaborate stonework and its particular sparrows. In the spring, what appeared to be the same tulips suddenly and regularly appeared, standing erect in exact circles, and lilacs broke into almost regal bloom every year about the time that the family left town. A line of balloon-shaped bay trees always stood on the terrace and, whatever the weather, a nude maiden of mature charms watched over a marble fountain in an attitude of resentful modesty.
When her windows were open, as they mostly were, Beatrix and her English companion could hear the pathetic whimpers of the poor caged beasts in the Zoo in front of the house, and the raucous cries of the Semitic-looking parrots above the ceaseless cantata of motor traffic.
The morning after her lucky escape from York's studio, Beatrix slept late. Mrs. Lester Keene had breakfasted alone with the Times, saving Town Topics for her final cup of coffee. She had heard her charge, whom she made no effort to manage, return comparatively early the night before, and could hardly contain her curiosity to know what had happened. It was obvious that something had taken place, because, as a rule, Beatrix came back anywhere between one and two from her visits to the portrait painter. From a sense of duty and a fear of losing her comfortable position, Mrs. Lester Keene forced herself to remain awake on these occasions, sitting over a novel in a Jaeger dressing-gown or writing a long, rambling letter to a friend in London, in which, with tearful pride in her former independence, she wallowed in reminiscence.
Mrs. Lester Keene was the widow of a man of excellent family who had devoted all the best years of his life to the easy and too-well-paid pursuit of winding and unwinding "red tape" in a government office in London. He had died of it before he could retire to a stucco house at Brighton on a pension, and Amelia Keene had found herself in the tragic position of being alone in the world in the middle forties with nothing to bless herself with but an aged pomeranian, her undisputed respectability and the small sum paid to her on her husband's life policy. This, with the laudable and optimistic idea of placing herself forever out of the reach of the lean hand of penury, she had entrusted to the care of a glib city shark whom she had met in a boarding-house and who guaranteed that he would get her in on the ground floor of a new company exploiting the Eldorado Copper Mine and bring her in a regular three hundred and fifty-five per cent. on her capital. With this neat sum and others, however, the expert philanthropist with the waxed moustache and white spats paid his first-class fare to the Argentine and set up a matrimonial bureau for temperamental South Americans. Poor Amelia Keene sold her modest jewels and applied for work at the Employment Agency for Impoverished Gentlewomen, in George Street, Hanover Square.
It so happened that Mr. and Mrs. Vanderdyke were in London at that time and in need of a refined companion for their only daughter. Mrs. Lester Keene was one of the several dozen applicants and had the great good fortune to secure the much coveted post owing to the fact that her hair was grey, her complexion her own and her accent irreproachably Kensington. As Mrs. Vanderdyke intended to be the only made-up woman in any of her numerous houses, the other applicants were naturally turned down.
Like most English people the new companion had never been farther away from her native land than Boulogne. She thrilled with excitement, fright and the spirit of adventure when she joined the Vanderdyke entourage on board the Olympic. To be five or six days at sea was in itself an almost unbelievable exploit, full of hidden dangers and obvious terrors. The mere thought of shipwreck and the possibility of floating for days on a raft, in perhaps most unconventional attire, appalled her. But the thing that filled her nightly dreams with phantasmagoria was the knowledge that she was, God and the elements willing, to live in the United States,—a great wild country in which, she had been led to believe, men shot each other in the fashionable restaurants, broncho busters galloped madly along the principal streets of the big cities and lassoed helpless virgins, murderers in masks held up trains, black men were hanged to lamp-posts, as a matter of course, and comic creatures with large feet hammered people on the head with mallets. She had arrived at this point of view from several visits to the moving picture theatres in London, where American films do much to prejudice untravelled Europeans against the United States. Her astonishment when finally she arrived in New York and found herself in what she described to her friends at home as the Vanderdyke Palace, was almost childish.