ABOUT a week after he met Lord Frothingham at Mrs. Staunton’s, Edward Allerton left his bank an hour before luncheon time and went to the Public Library. His look as he entered was undoubtedly furtive; and as he drifted aimlessly round the reading-room, declining the offers of assistance from the polite and willing attendants, his manner was such that had he been a stranger he would have been watched as a suspicious character. He took several reference books from the cases, finally and most carelessly of all, a Burke’s Peerage. Half concealing it with his overcoat, he bore it to a table and seated himself. He turned the pages to where “Frothingham” appeared in large letters. There he stopped and read—at first nervously, soon with an attention that shut out his surroundings:
Frothingham—George Arthur Granby Delafere Gordon-Beauvais, seventh earl of Frothingham, Baron de Beauvais, b. at Beauvais House, Surrey, March 9, 1865, s. of Herbert Delafere Gordon-Beauvais, sixth earl of F., and Maria Barstow, 2nd dau. of the Marquess of Radbourne. Succeeded on the death of his father, Aug. 4, 1890.
Allerton studied the coat of arms, which originated, in part, in the tenth century, so Burke said. He read on and on through the description of the secondary titles and other honours of his sister-in-law’s guest, into the two columns of small type which set forth the history of the Gordon-Beauvais family—its far origin, Godfrey de Beauvais, a great lord in the time of Charlemagne, so Burke declared; its many and curious vicissitudes of fortune, its calamities in old France through the encroachments of the Dukes of Burgundy, which finally drove it, in poverty, but with undiminished pride and unabated resolution to live only by the sword and the tax-gatherer, to England in the wake of William the Conqueror; its restoration there, and long and glorious lordship, so glorious that it scorned the titles a mere Tudor, or Stuart, or German nobody could give until 1761, when it condescended to receive from George III the Earldom of Frothingham. There were places in the narrative so weak that even the adroit and sympathetic Burke could not wholly cover them. But the Milk Street banker saw them not. No child ever swallowed a tale of gnomes and fairies and magic vanishings and apparitions with a mind more set upon being fooled. He read slowly to prolong the pleasing tale. And when he came to the end he read it through again, and found it all too short.
He started from his trance, glanced at his watch, noted that no attendants were in sight, and stole hastily away from the scene of his orgie. But in his agitation he was guilty of the stupidity of the novice—he left the book on the reading-desk; he left it open at the second page of “Frothingham.” An attendant was watching afar off; as soon as Allerton had slipped away he swooped, full of idle yet energetic curiosity.
When he saw that the book was a Burke’s Peerage he was puzzled; then he turned back a page, and his eye caught the name “Frothingham.” Like all Boston he knew that the Earl was in town, was staying at the Mrs. Staunton’s, “on the water side of Beacon Street.” And like all Boston, he had heard the rumour that the Earl was trying to marry “Celia” Allerton, the second heiress of Boston. Thus, the sight of that name caused a smile of delight to irradiate his fat, pasty face with its drapery of soft, scant grey whiskers. He looked round for someone to enable him to enjoy his discovery of a great man’s weakness by tattling it. He saw Gilson, industriously “loading up” for a lecture on “colour in Greek sculpture and architecture.”
He hastened to him and touched him on the shoulder. “Come with me,” he whispered.
Gilson, a natural gossip, had not lived four years in Boston without becoming adept in the local sign language of his species. He rose and followed to the table whereon was spread the damning proof of Allerton’s guilt.
“Look at this,” whispered the attendant, pointing to the name “Frothingham.”
Gilson looked, first at the page, then at the attendant. His expression was disappointment—he cared not a rap about Frothingham or about Burke’s genealogical romances.
“But who do you think was sitting here?” whispered the attendant, his eyes sparkling. “Sitting here, reading away at this for more than an hour?”