The Carcellini Emerald, With Other Tales

by Mrs. Burton Harrison

Of Lilian, the elder, it had been customary to say that in a matrimonial point of view she might be expected to do “anything.” Beautiful, accomplished, fine of grain, cradled and bred in polished luxury, she was the traditional princess who could not sleep for the crumpled roseleaf in her couch of down. Since she had made her appearance before the world her friends had watched, open-mouthed, to see who would carry off the prize. Of the half a dozen men prominently in her train, none could be adjudged exactly fit for her. “Dancing men and dips”—meaning diplomats—was the way they were summed up. Of course it was not to be expected that a mere diner-out and frequenter of cotillons—a man whose boast it was not to have missed a ball or banquet during the season—could presume to mate with this very choice specimen of the leading set in Manhattan’s aristocracy. Lilian Foljambe was destined to high place, name, fame, and representative position. She was of the stuff—declared some enthusiasts—of which the wives of our ambassadors to foreign courts should be made. Though if ever there was a head for which nature intended a tiara—inherited, not bought—it was Lilian Foljambe’s.

But Lilian had come to be four-and-twenty—an age in woman when the insolence of youth must needs begin to curb itself and look about to reckon the comparative values of its chances for actual establishment in life, without realizing any of the hopes fixed upon her. She had, needless to say, her full complement of unemotional offers from the kind of young men whom she met nightly wearing evening dress with white waistcoats, who talked afterward at the club together concerning their ill-luck with her, and wondered “what the deuce the girl was waitin’ for.” She went abroad year after year with her family, was presented at various courts, made many titled acquaintances, was extolled for her good looks, and reputed to have twice her actual fortune. And still there was no hint of the “great match,” or of any kind of a match, for the fair Miss Foljambe.

Olive, on the contrary, with not half Lilian’s beauty or style or grand air, had at twenty-one her quiver full of admirers who would have liked to be something more. Olive’s chief possessions were a brown skin, a pair of laughing hazel eyes, a bewitching mouth and teeth, plenty of common sense, a merry nature, and a nimble wit. During her first winter “out” she had announced to her family her intention to marry Stephen Luttridge, a clever young architect, who had nothing in particular a year. Mrs. Foljambe—ranking the outcome of Luttridge’s profession, together with those of art and literature, as in some way connected with food cooked in chafing-dishes and a maid-servant receiving cards between thumb and finger—looked honestly alarmed. She induced her husband to declare that he would give nothing “down” with either daughter unless she should marry to please her parents.

Olive smilingly declared that she could very well afford to wait until Luttridge should have three thousand a year, at which time she meant to take the matter into her own hands. Mr. Foljambe, egged on by his wife, had stipulated that the affair should not be called an engagement. And Olive had answered, laughing, that she did not care what they called it, provided no other girl got Stephen Luttridge.

Now a crash had come. Foljambe’s name, hitherto most familiar to a set of men who had confidence in his probity and were dazzled by his schemes, had been seen of late in every newspaper in connection with the story of his stupendous, over-confident, and rash speculations. And such a tremendous failure had not been chronicled in years! It was a curious fact that the men who commented on it said generally, in conclusion, “If he could only have gone on for one week longer, by George, he’d have been safe!”

Foljambe was not afraid to meet his creditors. He had chosen a trusty and capable friend to be his assignee for their benefit, and was sure he could more than pay his debts—though his remaining assets were not all of a kind to be immediately turned into cash, and he could hardly expect much of a surplus for himself. Indeed, nobody else expected his assignee to be even able to satisfy the creditors; and so his credit, even with his friends, was entirely gone. He had given to his sons good educations with which to fight the world on their own account—for most young Americans a more fatherly benefaction than a balance at a bank and leisure to haunt clubs. And they were manly young fellows. It was, in plain words, his womenkind of whom Martin Foljambe was afraid.

His wife, with whom he had begun life in the narrowest fashion—who had helped herself with both hands to the accretions of his successful business career—would never, he knew, be able to forgive the folly of his downfall. With women of her type, to have is to forget all previous deficiencies, to claim prosperity as a right, to resent reverses as a personal wrong. Sweet, beautiful Lilian, who was the poetry of his prosy existence, she would be gentle and forbearing with him. But Lilian, deprived of her luxuries, was an image he could not bear to contemplate. He knew her to be so utterly unfitted for the world of work-a-day. Olive, now, was in some way different. She, like her sister, had been an extravagant little puss. But Olive had a way of pulling herself together and facing contingencies that gave him more hope for her endurance of the change.

Those were sad days in the great stately house off the Park, and so well known to the world of fashion, following the Foljambe failure. The large staff of servants was prompt to desert the sinking ship. A buxom kitchen-maid officiated over the copper stew-pans of the departed chef. Mrs. Foljambe, in her bed with nervous prostration, in charge of a trained nurse, complained that she could not get a cup of bouillon fit to eat since Lenormand had left. Next the stables were depopulated. Then the pictures and curios and ceramics were sold at auction, and the house was offered for sale by the assignee, to whom everything had been surrendered. As there is always in the great metropolis some family stepping up to replace one that chances to step down, the agents effected a prompt “arrangement” by which the Foljambe mansion, furniture and all, passed into other ownership.

In less than two months after his misfortune Mr. Foljambe stepped out alone into the street, and looked back upon a dwelling in which he had no belongings save a couple of modest trunks and several portmanteaux to be called for by an expressman later on.

Who shall say that Martin Foljambe did not feel a lump of bitterness in his throat as he gave his final instructions to a care-taker and walked hurriedly away into the avenue whence he could no longer see his home? It had been at his wife’s instigation that he had built it; she had devised, superintended, ordered everything on a scale that outshone most of his predecessors in such constructions in their neighborhood. The only things she had not concerned herself about were the bills. Enormous as they were, he had paid them without a hint to her that she must have been cheated in various quarters. But it had been many a long year since Mrs. Foljambe had concerned herself about the sum total of a bill!