The Gilded Chair: A Novel

by Melville Davisson Post

"Oh, no," replied the Marchesa, "no, it is not that."

"Then," he said, "you will tell me what it is that I can do."

The woman's color deepened. "It is so common, so sordid," she said, "that I am ashamed to ask."

"And I," replied the Duke, "shall be always ashamed if you do not. I shall feel that by some discourtesy I have closed the lips of one who came trusting to a better memory of me. What is it?"

The woman's face took on a certain resolution under its color. "I have come," she said, "to ask you for money."

The Duke's features cleared like water under a lifting fog. He arose, went into an adjoining room, and returned with a heavy pigskin dispatch case. He set the case on the table, opened it with, a little brass key, took out a paper blank, wrote a moment on it and handed it with the pen to the Marchesa. The woman divining that he had written a check did not at first realize why he was giving her the pen. Then she saw that the check was merely dated and signed and left blank for her to fill in any sum she wished. She hesitated a moment with the pen in her fingers, then wrote "five hundred pounds."

The Duke, without looking at the words that the Marchesa had written, laid the check face downward on a blotter, and ran the tips of his fingers over the back to dry the ink. Then he crossed to the mantel, and pulled down the brass handle of the bell. When the footman entered, he handed the check to him, with a direction to bring the money at once. Then he came back, as to his chair, but pausing a moment at the back of it, followed the footman out of the room.

A doubt of the man's striking courtesy flitted a moment into the woman's mind. Had he gone, then, after this delicate unconcern, to see what sum she had written into the body of the check? She arose quickly and looked out of the high window. What she saw there set her blushing for the doubt. The footman was already going down the road to the village. She was hardly in her chair, smarting under the lesson, when the Duke returned.

"I have taken the liberty to order a bit of luncheon," he said. "This village is not celebrated for its inn."

The Marchesa wished to thank him for this new courtesy, but she felt that she ought to begin with some word about the check, and yet she knew, as by a subtle instinct, that she could not say too little about it.