She made a graceful leap and flung her arms about his neck. “You don’t mind a bit, do you? It isn’t as if I were a poor girl angling for a rich man; and I should have been as wild about you if your brother had a dozen children. Now you can always tell yourself that you didn’t marry me for my horrid money, but really fell in love. That is much nicer. You are too funny. You might have fallen in love with me in the course of a year or two if left to yourself, but in such a short time—without pilots—oh, never! And now it has turned out so wonderfully for the best.”
“I wonder.” He disengaged himself and walked the length of the room again. He felt a fool in a world of liars.
Mabel tactfully returned to her chair and bided her time. She had a shrewd albeit a small brain, and suddenly guessed that he felt some natural resentment at having been piloted, even for his own happiness. She had wisely yielded to the impulse to confess what he must have discovered in time (she had no belief in her ability to keep any secret for long), and never could man be more complacent than during his honeymoon. What the silliest woman does not know instinctively up to a certain point is not worthy of record, and Mabel felt that she had every reason to be sure of herself. Not only was she beautiful and accomplished, but she had all the arrogance of new-world wealth. Reared in luxury, she would have found it difficult to recall an ungratified wish, save possibly for unlimited sweets, but nevertheless she had a very keen sense of the value and power of money; and as she watched the nervous figure of her husband perambulating the upper end of the room and then glanced slowly about the immense apartment with its thousands of volumes, many of them priceless, the ceiling with its carved and pictured panels and gilded rosettes, its gallery supported on Corinthian pillars, carved in suave and flowing lines, and its stone mantel in three stories cut with the arms of the house, the upper panel set with a faded picture of the Ordham that fell at Towton in 1461, she concluded that no man in his senses would quarrel for long with a ruse that had given him while still in his first youth one of the greatest properties in England. Their income was something over four hundred thousand dollars a year, and Mrs. Cutting’s was at their disposal. To spend such a sum on the Continent was practically impossible. A mere attaché could not outshine his chief in the splendour of his establishment; and as for continental society, Mabel had all that contempt for it peculiar to the ambitious American who knows nothing of the inner circles of the European aristocracies and whose Mecca is London. With what might be called the American dollar instinct she had aimed straight for the top. To an immediate title she was indifferent, for she knew that Bridgminster would not marry. With all the strength of her slender equipment—and youth is always strong—she loved Ordham. She would have spurned strawberry leaves for his sake; but live in England and be a great lady and a “beauty” she would. These were legitimate ambitions, quite compatible with love, and as she had brought so much to her husband, she was entitled to much in return. Indeed, he should be eager to give all the equivalent in his power for the fortune that had been placed at his independent disposal. Mabel would have settled her ultimate penny on him instead of the solitary million upon which both sides, without bringing the young people into the sordid discussion, had agreed; but she was too American not to feel that when a penniless young man, with no earning capacity whatever, marries a wealthy and generous girl, he should give her something besides love in return.
It was true that Ordham, supported by his mother, could give her as definite a place in London society as if his brother were already dead; but Mabel’s position was already brilliant, no girl had ever received more flattering attentions, and she was too young to be affected by her mother’s occasional lament that they did not, even under Lady Bridgminster’s wing, “go everywhere,” that there were peaks inaccessible to the Cutting millions and proud descent until some great permanent connection cleared the way as a matter of course. Nevertheless, that cool little brain, inherited from money-makers and money-conservers, reminded Mabel that her Jackie, in not yet being able to make her Countess of Bridgminster, was not giving value received; therefore should he live in England and permit her to derive every possible advantage from this marriage. Mabel’s character was not built about a deeply embedded steel frame like Ordham’s, but she was thoroughly spoilt, although so well brought up that she had never dared to snub or contradict her mother in the vulgar American style. One private little resource she had, however, which she had often brought to bear when her doting and unsuspecting parent would have spared her the fatigue of pleasures beyond her years: she could not only weep beautifully, but work herself up into a condition bordering upon hysteria; and she had invariably terrified her parent into submission when driven to this extreme, as well as her teachers and governesses,—every one, in fact, whose pleasant duty it was to keep the little feet of the amiable heiress upon the strait and narrow way that leads to perfect success.
Mabel arranged herself gracefully in her chair and spread out her voluminous white skirts as a bed for LaLa, complacently sure of her victory in this engagement with her equally spoilt young husband. In the course of a few moments he walked down the room and stood before her.
“You are so wonderfully clever,” he said, with his charming smile. “It only makes me the more confident that you were born to be the wife of a diplomatist. But I cannot loaf here on your money. You are not the first American I have known, and I have absorbed a few ideas that might not have bothered me a year or two ago. I am now all the more disposed to make a career for myself that I may in a measure balance this great fortune of yours. Bridg is not yet forty. We are a long-lived race. It may be twenty, thirty, years before I can offer you any other equivalence. I hate politics. I have passed my examinations by a miracle. The diplomatic path is almost as miraculously smoothed for me by family influence. We have been for generations what is known as one of the diplomatic families; and just now one of my mother’s cousins is prime minister and another secretary for the colonies. A year hence and they may be in opposition. I saw in this morning’s Times that one of my own cousins has been appointed ambassador to St. Petersburg. He will do anything for my mother. We can go there if you dislike the idea of Rome. My promotion should be very rapid. When you are the wife of an ambassador you will find it vastly more entertaining than giving tiresome house parties in England.”
“But even if your promotion were rapid, we’d be frightfully old before you became ambassador—forty-five you’d be at the very least. Lady Bridgminster—I’ve heard all that discussed—” She had looked at him steadily during his long speech, at first with smiling incredulity, then with growing apprehension. For the first time she took note of the long line of his jaw, of the coldness of which those large ingenuous blue eyes were capable. Her brain worked rapidly. She recalled Lady Bridgminster’s amused comments upon the driving of “Johnny” in any direction by employing the right sort of opposition, that distinguished dame’s tactical use of Rosamond Hayle. But something deep down within her trembled a little—hinting of impotence, so new a sensation that she barely recognized it, although she fully understood that her Jackie had made up his mind. Therefore, postponing the higher tactics, she did what all sensible women mated to obstinate men ever do, she burst into tears.
But Ordham had seen women cry easily before, and was not as moved as a husband of four short weeks should be while his lovely bride wept and sobbed over the arm of her chair. He was ice-cold with anger; Mabel’s betrayal of the secret that his mother also was indifferent to his career was the final indignity; and he reflected cynically that the sooner a man discovered just how much a woman’s tears were worth the better.
But he was always courteous. He was also quite aware that underneath his wrath he was as much in love as ever. He was young and this exquisite creature was his; he appreciated the force of that subtle argument of hers, that if she had lent herself to the plot it had been through love alone. It would be some time before he forgot that she was an accomplished liar, and that he had been made a fool of by three clever women; but there was no particular reason why either he or his wife should be miserable when they still had much to make them happy. But they should be happy in his way, not hers. So he bent down and patted her head, somewhat awkwardly, for he felt anything but affectionate, and said very kindly:
“Don’t cry, Mabel. We will think no more about it.”