CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Three days later came the satisfying answer to my cable message:
“Damn! Sailing Wednesday.—BRINSTEAD.”
Glad I was he had used the cable. In a letter there would doubtless have been still other words improper to a peer of England.
Belknap-Jackson thereafter bore himself with a dignity quite tremendous even for him. Graciously aloof, he was as one carrying an inner light. “We hold them in the hollow of our hand,” said he, and both his wife and himself took pains on our own thoroughfare to cut the Honourable George dead, though I dare say the poor chap never at all noticed it. They spoke of him as “a remittance man”—the black sheep of a noble family. They mentioned sympathetically the trouble his vicious ways had been to his brother, the Earl. Indeed, so mysteriously important were they in allusions of this sort that I was obliged to caution them, lest they let out the truth. As it was, there ran through the town an undercurrent of puzzled suspicion. It was intimated that we had something in our sleeves.
Whether this tension was felt by the Honourable George, I had no means of knowing. I dare say not, as he is self-centred, being seldom aware of anything beyond his own immediate sensations. But I had reason to believe that the Klondike woman had divined some menace in our attitude of marked indifference. Her own manner, when it could be observed, grew increasingly defiant, if that were possible. The alliance of the Honourable George with the Bohemian set had become, of course, a public scandal after the day of his appearance in her trap and after his betrayal of the Belknap-Jacksons had been gossiped to rags. He no longer troubled himself to pretend any esteem whatever for the North Side set. Scarce a day passed but he appeared in public as the woman’s escort. He flagrantly performed her commissions, and at their questionable Bohemian gatherings, with their beer and sausages and that sort of thing, he was the gayest of that gay, mad set.
Indeed, of his old associates, Cousin Egbert quite almost alone seemed to find him any longer desirable, and him I had no heart to caution, knowing that I should only wound without enlightening him, he being entirely impervious to even these cruder aspects of class distinction. I dare say he would have considered the marriage of the Honourable George as no more than the marriage of one of his cattle-person companions. I mean to say, he is a dear old sort and I should never fail to defend him in the most disheartening of his vagaries, but he is undeniably insensitive to what one does and does not do.
The conviction ran, let me repeat, that we had another pot of broth on the fire. I gleaned as much from the Mixer, she being one of the few others besides Cousin Egbert in whose liking the Honourable George had not terrifically descended. She made it a point to address me on the subject over a dish of tea at the Grill one afternoon, choosing a table sufficiently remote from my other feminine guests, who doubtless, at their own tables, discussed the same complication. I was indeed glad that we were remote from other occupied tables, because in the course of her remarks she quite forcefully uttered an oath, which I thought it as well not to have known that I cared to tolerate in my lady patrons.
“As to what Jackson feels about the way it was handed out to him that Sunday,” she bluntly declared, “I don’t care a——” The oath quite dazed me for a moment, although I had been warned that she would use language on occasion. “What I do care about,” she went on briskly, “is that I won’t have this girl pestered by Jackson or by you or by any man that wears hair! Why, Jackson talks so silly about her sometimes you’d think she was a bad woman—and he keeps hinting about something he’s going to put over till I can hardly keep my hands off him. I just know some day he’ll make me forget I’m a lady. Now, take it from me, Bill, if you’re setting in with him, don’t start anything you can’t finish.”
Really she was quite fierce about it. I mean to say, the glitter in her eyes made me recall what Cousin Egbert had said of Mrs. Effie, her being quite entirely willing to take on a rattlesnake and give it the advantage of the first two assaults. Somewhat flustered I was, yet I hastened to assure her that, whatever steps I might feel obliged to take for the protection of the Honourable George, they would involve nothing at all unfair to the lady in question.