Nothing definite followed. They lived for a month or two at a delightful roomy boarding-house in London, where the modest meals Clara ordered appeared as if by magic, and where Miss Fairfax never sullied her pretty hands with dishwashing. Then they went to visit "Aunt Elsie" in a suburban villa for several weeks, a visit Rachael never thought of afterward without a memory of stuffy, neat, warm rooms, and a gushing of canaries' voices. Then they went down to Sussex, in the delicious fullness of spring, to live with several other persons in a dark country house, where "Cousin Harold" died, and there was much odorous crepe and a funeral. Cousin Harold evidently left something to Gerald. Rachael knew money was not an immediate problem. Hot weather came, and they went to the seaside with an efficient relative called Ethel, and Ethel's five children. Later, back in London, Gerald said, in his daughter's hearing, that he had made "rather a good thing of that little game of Bobbie's. Enough to tide us over--what? Especially if the Dickies ask us down for a bit," he had added. The Dickies did ask them down for a bit. They went other places. Gerald made a little money on the races, made "a good thing" of this, and "turned a bit over on that." Weeks made months and months years, and still they drifted cheerfully about, Gerald happier than he had ever been in exile, Clara fearful, admiring, ill at ease, Rachael in a girl's paradise.
She grew beautiful, with a fine and distinguished beauty definite in its appeal; before she was seven-teen she had her little reputation for it; she moved easily into a circle higher than even her father had ever known. She was witty, young, lovely, and in this happier atmosphere her natural gayety and generosity might well develop. She went about continually, and every year the circle of her friends was widened by more distinguished names.
At seventeen Mrs. Gouveneur Pomeroy of New York brought the young beauty back with her own daughter, Persis, for a winter in the great American city, and when Persis died Rachael indeed became almost as dear to the stricken parents. When she went back to London they gave her not only gifts but money, and for two years she returned to them for long visits. So America had a chance to admire the ravishing Miss Fairfax, too, and Rachael had many conquests and one or two serious affairs. The girls had their first dances at the Belvedere Club; Rachael met them all, who were later to be her neighbors: the Morans and Parmalees, the Vanderwalls and the Torrences, and the Chases. She met Clarence Breckenridge and his wife, and the exquisitely dressed little girl who was Billy to-day.
And through all her adventures she looked calmly, confidently, and with conscious enjoyment for a husband. She flirted a little, and danced and swam and drove and played golf and tennis a great deal, but she never lost sight for an instant of the serious business of life. Money she must have--it was almost as essential to her as air--and money she could only secure through a marriage.
The young Englishman who was her first choice, in her twentieth year, had every qualification in the world. When he died, two or three months before the wedding-day, Rachael's mother was fond of saying in an aside to close friends that the girl's heart was broken. Rachael, lovely in her black, went down to stay with Stephen's mother, and for several weeks was that elderly lady's greatest comfort in life. Silent and serious, her manner the perfection of quiet grief, only Rachael herself knew how little the memory of Stephen interfered with her long reveries as she took his collies about in the soft autumn fogs. Only Rachael knew how the sight of Trecastle Hall, the horses, the servants, and the park filled her heart with despair. She might have been Lady Trecastle! All this might so easily have been her own!
She had loved Stephen, of course, she told herself; loving, with Rachael, simply meant a willingness to accept and to give. But love was of course a luxury; she was after the necessities of life. Well, she had played and lost, but she could play again. So she went to the Pomeroys' for the winter, and in the spring was brought back to London by her father's sudden death.
Gerald Fairfax's life insurance gave his widow a far more secured income than he had ever given his wife. It was microscopic, to be sure, but Clara Fairfax was a practised economist. The ladies settled in Paris, and Rachael was seriously considering a French marriage when, by the merest chance, in the street one day, a small homesick girl clutched at her thin black skirt, and sent her an imploring smile. Rachael, looking graciously down from under the shade of her frilly black parasol, recognized the little Breckenridge girl, obviously afflicted with a cold and lonesomeness and strangeness. Enslaving the French nurse with three perfectly pronounced sentences, Rachael went home with the clinging Carol, put her to bed, cheered her empty little interior with soup, soothed her off to sleep, and was ready to meet her crazed and terrified father with a long lecture on the care of young children, when, after an unavoidable afternoon of business, he came back to his hotel.
The rest followed. Rachael liked Clarence, finding it agreeable that he knew how to dress, how to order a dinner, tip servants, and take care of a woman in a crowd. His family was one of the oldest in America, and he was rich. She was sorry that Billy's mother was living, but then one couldn't have everything, and, after all, she was married again, which seemed to mitigate the annoyance. Rachael said to herself that this was a wiser marriage than the proposed one with poor Stephen: Stephen had been a wild, romantic boy, full of fresh passion and dazed with exultant dreams; Clarence was a man, longing less for moonshine and roses and the presence of his beloved one than for a gracious, distinguished woman who would take her place before the world as mistress of his home and guardian of his child.
She had sometimes doubted her power to make Stephen happy--Stephen, who talked with all a boy's heavenly shyness of long days tramping the woods and long nights over the fire, of little sons and daughters romping in the Trecastle gardens; but she entered into her marriage with Clarence Breckenridge with entire self-confidence. She had been struggling more or less definitely all her life toward just such a position as this; it was a comparatively easy matter to fill it, now that she had got it.
Carol she considered a decided asset. The child adored her, and her services to Carol were so much good added to the beauty, charm, and wisdom that she brought into the bargain. That Clarence could ask more in the way of beauty, wisdom, and charm was not conceivable; Rachael knew her own value too well to have any doubts on that score.