The bright smile of the dark-eyed enthusiast haunted him all the way to New York. “Talleyrand was right,” he murmured, at ease in the parlor car, “Point de zèle! She will make all the running for me.” He enjoyed the salutations showered right and left on him, as the train picked up the men of note carrying the hopes and fears of a new week to Gotham. “I am a somebody now!” he grinned.
The rising light of the Sentinel and Locust clubs, the man who had superbly engineered the brilliant Hathorn-VanSittart’s nuptials—“the great Montana capitalist,” was surely a man of mark, and Nature’s easy gifts had earned him a warm welcome in the slightly jaded circles of the Four Hundred. He was, moreover, a “new face,” and several spasms of unrest under aristocratic corsages had already proved that there were eyes “which brightened when he came.”
As for his false rôle of man of leisure and élégant—“custom of it, had made a property of easiness.” “I am a fraud—and—half these anæmic swells are fools as well as frauds!—I am content!” he smilingly decided, as he reviewed his plans for a daring course during the next trying week.
As he had surmised, a telegram awaited him at the Waldorf from the returned Hathorn. It was of a simple directness.
“Meet me to-night, seven. Old York Club. Must have your answer reconsidered. Every inducement possible.” The subtle smile of triumph which played around his lips recalled Private Ortheri’s stern remark, “See that beggar—got him!”—as he dropped the faraway Pathan with the “long shot.”
All day, Frederick Hathorn secretly tormented himself over the curt answer, “Will be there. Vreeland.” There was much before the tortured bridegroom to arrange. The mutinous Dickie Doubleday, phantom of audacious and unrestful beauty, was now driving Mr. James Potter out of his wits.
He longed for a “boat upon the shore and a bark upon the sea!” He had learned that in some distant Afghan hole called “Swat,” there were neither post-offices, telegraphs, banks, detectives, song and dance theatres, nor any of the machinery of a “bastard civilization” which the reckless Miss Dickie could work to ensnare or follow him.
“By Gad! Just the place! I’ll get a white shirt—brown myself up like parched coffee, and turn into a Ghazi, or Dervish, or fighting Mollah—or, any old thing. She is a hummer. Pray God, that some other good-looking fellow will soon catch her ‘wandering eye.’ Her constancy is an ‘abnormal feature’ of later development. This is the only time in her life that she has stuck to a victim—for over three months. Other fellows should help me bear the burden.”
There was all the details of Hathorn’s newly enhanced social state to arrange. The Union and Metropolitan clubs were to be haunt of Benedick—the married man. And—the war to the knife, the fight of Marius and Sylla now lay before him.
There was Oakwood, his wife’s magnificent place at Ashmont, awaiting its social monture. Her Imperious Ladyship Alida had ordered him to go in for the pennant-bearing honors of Vice Commodore of the Ashmont Yacht Club, and her beautiful schooner, “L’Allouette,” was awaiting his practical hand.