Part 5 (1/2)
Margaret went upstairs with a burning heart, cast her bills haphazard on her own desk, and flung herself, dry-eyed and furious, on the bed.
She was far too angry to think, but lay there for perhaps twenty minutes with her brain whirling. Finally rising, she brushed up her hair, straightened her collar, and, full of tremendous resolves, stepped into her little sitting room, to find Mrs. Carr-Boldt in the big chair, serenely eyeing her.
”I'm so sorry I spoke so, Peggy,” said her employer, generously. ”But the truth is, I am not myself when--when Mr. Carr-Boldt--” The little hesitating appeal in her voice completely disarmed Margaret. In the end the little episode cemented the rapidly growing friends.h.i.+p between the two women, Mrs. Carr-Boldt seeming to enjoy the relief of speaking rather freely of what was the one real trial in her life.
”My husband has always had too much money,” she said, in her positive way. ”At one time we were afraid that he would absolutely ruin his health by this--habit of his. His physician and I took him around the world,--I left Victoria, just a baby, with mother,--and for too years he was never out of my sight. It has never been so bad since. You know yourself how reliable he usually is,” she finished cheerfully, ”unless some of the other men get hold of him!”
As the months went on Margaret came to admire her employer more and more. There was not an indolent impulse in Mrs. Carr-Boldt's entire composition. Smooth-haired, fresh-skinned, in spotless linen, she began the day at eight o'clock, full of energy and interest. She had daily sessions with butler and house-keeper, shopped with Margaret and the children, walked about her greenhouse or her country garden with her skirts pinned up, and had tulips potted and stone work continued.
She was prominent in several clubs, a famous dinner-giver, she took a personal interest in all her servants, loved to settle their quarrels and have three or four of them up on the carpet at once, tearful and explanatory. Margaret kept for her a list of some two hundred friends, whose birthdays were to be marked with carefully selected gifts. She pleased Mrs. Carr-Boldt by her open amazement at the latter's vitality. The girl observed that her employer could not visit any inst.i.tution without making a few vigorous suggestions as she went about, she accompanied her cheques to the organized charities--and her charity flowed only through absolutely reliable channels--with little friendly, advisory letters. She liked the democratic att.i.tude for herself,--even while promptly snubbing any such tendency in children or friends;--and told Margaret that she only used her coat of arms on house linen, stationery, and livery, because her husband and mother liked it. ”It's of course rather nice to realize that one comes from one of the oldest of the Colonial families,” she would say. ”The Carterets of Maryland, you know.--But it's all such bos.h.!.+”
And she urged Margaret to claim her own right to family honors: ”You're a Quincy, my dear! Don't let that woman intimidate you,--she didn't remember that her grandfather was a captain until her husband made his money. And where the family portraits came from I don't know, but I think there's a man on Fourth Avenue who does 'em!” she would say, or, ”I know all about Lilly Reynolds, Peggy. Her father was as rich as she says, and I daresay the crest is theirs. But ask her what her maternal grandmother did for a living, if you want to shut her up!” Other people she would condemn with a mere whispered ”Coal!” or ”Patent bath-tubs!” behind her fan, and it pleased her to tell people that her treasure of a secretary had the finest blood in the world in her veins. Margaret was much admired, and Margaret was her discovery, and she liked to emphasize her find.
Mrs. Carr-Boldt's mother, a tremulous, pompous old lady, unwittingly aided the impression by taking an immense fancy to Margaret, and by telling her few intimates and the older women among her daughter's friends that the girl was a perfect little thoroughbred. When the Carr-Boldts filled their house with the reckless and noisy company they occasionally affected, Mrs. Carteret would say majestically to Margaret:--
”You and I have nothing in common with this riff-raff, my dear!”
Summer came, and Margaret headed a happy letter ”Bar Harbor.” Two months later all Weston knew that Margaret Paget was going abroad for a year with those rich people, and had written her mother from the Lusitania. Letters from London, from Germany, from Holland, from Russia, followed. ”We are going to put the girls at school in Switzerland, and (ahem!) winter on the Riviera, and then Rome for Holy Week!” she wrote.
She was presently home again, chattering French and German to amuse her father, teaching Becky a little Italian song to match her little Italian costume.
”It's wonderful to me how you get along with all these rich people, Mark,” said her mother, admiringly, during Margaret's home visit. Mrs.
Paget was watering the dejected-looking side garden with a straggling length of hose; Margaret and Julie sh.e.l.ling peas on the side steps.
Margaret laughed, coloring a little.
”Why, we're just as good as they are, Mother!”
Mrs. Paget drenched a dried little dump of carnations.
”We're as good,” she admitted; ”but we're not as rich, or as travelled,--we haven't the same ideas; we belong to a different cla.s.s.”
”Oh, no, we don't, Mother,” Margaret said quickly. ”Who are the Carr Boldts, except for their money? Why, Mrs. Carteret,--for all her family!--isn't half the aristocrat Grandma was! And you--you could be a Daughter of The Officers of the Revolution, Mother!”
”Why, Mark, I never heard that!” her mother protested, cleaning the sprinkler with a hairpin.
”Mother!” Julie said eagerly. ”Great-grandfather Quincy!”
”Oh, Grandpa,” said Mrs. Paget. ”Yes, Grandpa was a paymaster. He was on Governor Hanc.o.c.k's staff. They used to call him 'Major.' But Mark--”
she turned off the water, holding her skirts away from the combination of mud and dust underfoot, ”that's a very silly way to talk, dear! Money does make a difference; it does no good to go back into the past and say that this one was a judge and that one a major; we must live our lives where we are!”
Margaret had not lost a wholesome respect for her mother's opinion in the two years she had been away, but she had lived in a very different world, and was full of new ideas.
”Mother, do you mean to tell me that if you and Dad hadn't had a perfect pack of children, and moved so much, and if Dad--say--had been in that oil deal that he said he wished he had the money for, and we still lived in the brick house, that you wouldn't be in every way the equal of Mrs. Carr-Boldt?”
”If you mean as far as money goes, Mark,--no. We might have been well to-do as country people go, I suppose--”
”Exactly!” said Margaret; ”and you would have been as well off as dozens of the people who are going about in society this minute! It's the merest chance that we aren't rich. Just for instance: father's father had twelve children, didn't he?--and left them--how much was it?--about three thousand dollars apiece--”
”And a G.o.dsend it was, too,” said her mother, reflectively.
”But suppose Dad had been the only child, Mother,” Margaret persisted, ”he would have had--”
”He would have had the whole thirty-six thousand dollars, I suppose, Mark.”