Truly, when Mrs. Radigan sets her mind on accomplishing anything, one might as well get out of her way. But I die hard myself.
"Has the Duke proposed?" I asked.
"Pearl tells me not," was the quiet reply. "But you know his Highness is waiting for his solicitor, and when Sir Charles Wigge arrives from London, we can look for doings, real doings. I tell you, any girl might well be proud of having a 'Sir' come to her to lay the hand of a duke at her feet."
"A ghastly ceremony," said I, thinking of one thing.
"You are not qualified to judge," said she smiling, and evidently misinterpreting my remark.
But how clever she is! Most women conducting such a campaign would seek to separate the Duke from the Bumpschuses and bring him entirely within their own sphere of influence. But Mrs. Radigan regards Ethel Bumpschus as her chief ally, though an unwitting one, and when she gets possession of his Grace she likes to have the great heiress around. She says Pearl shows so well against a plain background. The poor Duke is almost distracted. What with Pearl's beauty and my insidious remarks to him about the enormous wealth of the house of Bumpschus and the speculative character of the Radigan fortunes, he flutters about as aimlessly as a wounded butterfly and has about as much to say. When the dog-fancier is particularly pressing for a payment on the bull pups his Grace will concentrate his attentions on one heiress or the other for a day at a time, then he will go all to pieces again and aimlessly wander up and down the Park Mall or stand on the Battery wall watching the steamships come in.
Mrs. Radigan told him the other day that she could see by his face that he was working too hard, and insisted that the bracing air of Hempstead Plain could alone save him to his country. So we all went down to the Westbury place for a week-end, even Miss Bumpschus, with Constance Wherry and Williegilt Mint, a youngish chap, who is studying at Harvard, and so has not much to do except go about. Pearl took some of us down in her car in the afternoon, while the rest went by train, arriving in time for dinner. The Duke was in our party, but I doubt if ever again he will trust himself to the mercy of our fair chauffeuse, for Pearl is an expert with her car and can run as close to a hub without scraping it as can the Frenchman who looks after the Radigan machine-shop. We put the Duke and Miss Bumpschus behind, with Gascan as chaperone, and we should never have known they were there as we ran down the avenue to Thirty-fourth Street had not the Duke once remarked that it was "jolly." Then I gave Pearl a gentle nudge and she made a figure S around two rapidly approaching trolley cars. I expected a scream, but there was an ominous silence. Covertly I turned my head, first to look into the expressionless face of Gascan, his eye set along the track, then into the pale eyes of the great Englishman. He was terror-stricken, but to do him justice, I think he was not so much frightened by the smartness with which Pearl ran across the fender of the trolley car, as by Miss Bumpschus, who lay gasping in one of his arms. I could not help smiling, and in smiling I aroused him to action. With the bull-dog perseverance that is the characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon, he propped Ethel up in her corner.
"That was a jolly close call," he said, speaking, we supposed, of the delightful way Pearl handled the car.
"Another like that and you lose the Duke," I whispered. I could see just a bit of pink cheek turn pinker, just the full mouth curling at the corners, for all the rest was hidden from me by fur and goggles.
We shot between a vegetable truck and an elevated post, at top speed, and came to a standstill within an inch of the ferry-gate; and when on the other side of the river, we whirled away again at the legal speed, going like the wind. The keen air put the mischief in Pearl's veins, and she ran with a recklessness that at times even disturbed my equanimity, though, of course, I did not dare show it, for I have noticed that these silent women set more store by nerve than by brains. We turned corners on one tire; we ran up to trolley cars at a forty-mile clip, then circled around them with a wild scream of the horn; over crossings we bowled with a succession of shocks that were likely to hurl his Grace off into the sky, but he clung to the hem of the silent Gascan's cow-skin coat. Just once the noble Englishman spoke. The mud, gentle harbinger of spring, was rising around us in clouds, and the engine, called on for double exertion, was roaring demoniacally.