Felix O'Day

by Francis Hopkinson Smith

That the eminent financier—it might be better perhaps to say the LATE eminent financier—was one of those same unselfish beings who had “loved her for herself alone,” and that he had, at once and without the delay of an hour, flown to her side followed as a matter of course, as did the gossip, men and women in and about the clubs and drawing-rooms nodding meaningly or hinting behind their hands.

“Rather rough on O'Day,” the men had agreed. “That comes of marrying a woman young enough to be your daughter.” “She ought to have known better,” was the verdict of the women. “So many other ways of getting what you want without making a scandal,” this from a duchess from behind her fan to a divorcee. But few words of sympathy for the deserted husband escaped any of them and, except from his old servants, Felix allowed himself to receive none.

He had made no move to win her back. To him she was, at the worst, only the same wilful and spoiled child she had always been, while he was over twenty years her senior. What he hoped for was that her common sense, her breeding, and her pride would come to the rescue, and that after her pique had spent itself, she would become once more the loving wife.

And it is quite possible that this hope might have been realized had it not been for one of those unfortunate and greatly to be regretted concurrences which so often precede if they do not precipitate many of life's catastrophes.

One of Lord Carnavon's grooms was the unfortunate match that caused this explosion. He had been sent down to Dorsetshire for a horse and, in an out-of-the-way inn in one corner of the county, had stumbled—early the next morning—into a cosey little sitting-room. When he came to his senses—he never recovered the whole of them until he was safe once more inside his lordship's stables—he told, with bulging eyes and bated breath, what he had seen. Whereupon the head coachman forthwith informed his wife, who at once poured it into the ears of the housekeeper, who, being jealous of my lady, fearing her dominance, lost no time in amplifying the details to Lord Carnavon. That gentleman had walked his library the rest of the night and, on my lady's return from Scotland, two mornings later (she had “spent the night with her aunt”), had denounced her in tones so shrill that every word was heard at the end of the long gallery; the tirade, to his lordship's amazement, being cut short by his daughter's defiant answer: “And why not, if I love him?”

All of which accounts for the infamous order roared five minutes later by the distinguished nobleman to his coachman, who, having known her ladyship from a child and loved her accordingly, had not set her down on the main road, but had taken her to a cottage on an adjoining estate—her second change of roofs—from whence Dalton carried her off next day to Ostend, a refuge she had herself selected, the season there being then at its height.

Had either of them kept a diary, it is safe to say that the delirious hours which filled that first week at Ostend would have been checked off in gold letters. Neither of them had ever been so blissfully happy, nor so passionately enamoured of the other, nor so overjoyed that the dreary past, with all its misunderstandings, calumnies, and injustice, had been wiped out forever.

There had, of course, been a few colorless moments. On a certain Saturday, for instance, the eminent ex-financier, having lost his head after the manner of some born gamblers, had, at the Casino, played the wrong number—a series of wrong numbers, in fact—an error which resulted in his pushing a crisp bundle of Bank of England notes—almost all he had with him—toward the spidery hands of a suave gentleman with rat eyes and bloodless face, who gathered them up with a furtive, deadly smile.

The gold Letters might have been omitted here, and, in their stead, my lady could have made a common pinhole to remind her, if she ever cared to remember, that it was on that very night that her passionately enamoured lover had helped her unfasten from her throat a string of pearls which O'Day had given her, and which, strange to say, for a woman so injured, so maligned, and so misunderstood, she, with Dalton's advice, had carried off when she deserted both her husband and her husband's bed and board. And she might have inserted just below the pinhole the illuminating note that, after unfastening the string, Dalton had forgotten to return it.

And then there had come an August morning—the following Monday, to be exact—when, his coffee untasted, he had sat staring at a paragraph in the financial column of a London paper, not daring to lay it down for fear she would pick it up. It gave a full and detailed account of the discovery of a series of certificates bearing duplicate numbers, said duplicates claiming to be the genuine shares of the Bawhadder Rubber Co., Ltd. It also hinted at a searching investigation about to be made by a financial committee of the highest standing at its next regular meeting, but a few days off. More important still was a crisp editorial, charging the directors of the aforesaid company, and particularly its promoter—name withheld—with irregularities of the gravest import.