Part 11 (1/2)

”The only Miss Grayson I ever met in Was.h.i.+ngton, my dear, was an old maid, the niece of the Secretary of State. She kept house for him after his wife died. She held herself very high, let me tell you. A very grand lady, indeed. But she must be an old woman now, if she is still living.

What did you say her first name was?”

Corinne took the open letter from Jack's hand. ”Felicia... Yes, Felicia.”

”And what does she want?--money for some charity?” Almost everybody she knew, and some she didn't, wanted money for some charity. She was loosening her cloak as she spoke, Frederick standing by to relieve my lady of her wraps.

”No; she's going to give a tea and wants us all to come. She's the sister of that old man who came to see Jack the other night, and--”

”Going to give a tea!--and the sister of--Well, then, she certainly isn't the Miss Grayson I know. Don't you answer her, Corinne, until I find out who she is.”

”I'll tell you who she is,” burst out Jack. His face was aflame now.

Never had he listened to such discourtesy. He could hardly believe his ears.

”It wouldn't help me in the least, my dear Jack; so don't you begin. I am the best judge of who shall come to my house. She may be all right, and she may not, you can never tell in a city like New York, and you can't be too particular. People really do such curious pus.h.i.+ng things now-a-days.” This to Garry. ”Now serve tea, Parkins. Come in all of you.”

Jack was on the point of blazing out in indignation over the false position in which his friend had been placed when Peter's warning voice rang in his ears. The vulgarity of the whole proceeding appalled him, yet he kept control of himself.

”None for me, please, aunty,” he said quietly. ”I will join you later, Garry,” and he mounted the stairs to his room.

CHAPTER VIII

Peter was up and dressed when Miss Felicia arrived, despite the early hour. Indeed that gay cavalier was the first to help the dear lady off with her travelling cloak and bonnet, Mrs. McGuffey folding her veil, smoothing out her gloves and laying them all upon the bed in the adjoining room--the one she kept in prime order for Miss Grayson's use.

The old fellow was facing the coffee-urn when he told her Jack's story and what he himself had said in reply, and how fine the boy was in his beliefs, and how well-nigh impossible it was for him to help him, considering his environment.

The dear lady had listened with her eyes fixed on Peter. It was but another of his benevolent finds; it had been the son of an old music teacher the winter before, and a boy struggling through college last spring;--always somebody who wanted to get ahead in one direction or another, no matter how impracticable his ambitions might be. This young man, however, seemed different; certain remarks had a true ring.

Perhaps, after all, her foolish old brother--foolish when his heart misled him--might have found somebody at last who would pay for the time he spent upon him. The name, too, had a familiar sound. She was quite sure the aunt must be the same rather over-dressed persistent young widow who had flitted in and out of Was.h.i.+ngton society the last year of her own stay in the capital. She had finally married a rich New York man of the same name. So she had heard.

The tea to which Jack and Corinne were invited was the result of this conversation. Trust Miss Felicia for doing the right thing and in the right way, whatever her underlying purpose might be; and then again she must look this new protege over.

Peter at once joined in the project. Nothing pleased him so much as a function of any kind in which his dear sister was the centre of attraction, and this was always the case. Was not Mrs. McGuffey put to it, at these same teas, to know what to do with the hats and coats, and the long and short cloaks and overshoes, and lots of other things beside--umbrellas and the like--whenever Miss Felicia came to town? And did not the good woman have many of the cards of the former function hidden in her bureau drawer to show her curious friends just how grand a lady Miss Felicia was? General Waterbury, U.S.A., commanding the Department of the East, with headquarters at Governors Island, was one of them. And so were Colonel Edgerton, Judge Lambert and Mrs. Lambert; and His Excellency the French Amba.s.sador, whom she had known as an attache and who was pa.s.sing through the city and had been overjoyed to leave a card; as well as Sir Anthony Broadstairs, who expected to spend a week with her in her quaint home in Geneseo, but who had made it convenient to pay his respects in Fifteenth Street instead: to say nothing of the Coleridges, Thomases, Bordeauxs and Worthing tons, besides any number of people from Was.h.i.+ngton Square, with plenty more from Murray Hill and be yond.

Peter in his enthusiasm had made a mental picture of a repet.i.tion of all this and had already voiced it in the suggestion of these and various other prominent names, ”when Miss Felicia stopped him with:

”No, Peter--No. It's not to be a museum of fossils, but a garden full of rosebuds; n.o.body with a strand of gray hair will be invited. As for the lame, the halt and the blind, they can come next week. I've just been looking you over, Peter; you are getting old and wrinkled and pretty soon you'll be as cranky as the rest of them, and there will be no living with you. The Major, who is half your age”--I had come early, as was my custom, to pay my respects to the dear woman--”is no better. You are both of you getting into a rut. What you want is some young blood pumped into your shrivelled veins. I am going to hunt up every girl I know and all the boys, including that young Breen you are so wild over, and then I'll send for dear Ruth MacFarlane, who has just come North with her father to live, and who doesn't know a soul, and n.o.body over twenty-five is to be admitted. So if you and the Major want to come to Ruth's tea--Ruth's, remember; not yours or the Major's, or mine--you will either have to pa.s.s the cake or take the gentlemen's hats. Do you hear?”

We heard, and we heard her laugh as she spoke, raising her gold lorgnon to her eyes and gazing at us with that half-quizzical look which so often comes over her face.

She was older than Peter--must have been: I never knew exactly. It would not have been wise to ask her, and n.o.body else knew but Peter, and he never told. And yet there was no mark of real old age upon her. She and Peter were alike in this. Her hair, worn Pompadour, was gray--an honest black-and-white gray; her eyes were bright as needle points; the skin slightly wrinkled, but fresh and rosy--a spare, straight, well-groomed old lady of--perhaps sixty--perhaps sixty-five, depending on her dress, or undress, for her shoulders were still full and well rounded. ”The most beautiful neck and throat, sir, in all Was.h.i.+ngton in her day,” old General Waterbury once told me, and the General was an authority. ”You should have seen her in her prime, sir. What the devil the men were thinking of I don't know, but they let her go back to Geneseo, and there she has lived ever since. Why, sir, at a ball at the German Emba.s.sy she made such a sensation that--” but then the General always tells such stories of most of the women he knows.

There was but little left of that kind of beauty. She had kept her figure, it is true--a graceful, easy moving figure, with the waist of a girl; well-proportioned arms and small, dainty hands. She had kept, too, her charm of manner and keen sense of humor--she wouldn't have been Peter's sister otherwise--as well as her interest in her friend's affairs, especially the love affairs of all the young people about her.

Her knowledge of men and women had broadened. She read them more easily now than when she was a girl--had suffered, perhaps, by trusting them too much. This had sharpened the tip end of her tongue to so fine a point that when it became active--and once in a while it did--it could rip a sham reputation up the back as easily as a keen blade loosens the seams of a bodice.

Peter fell in at once with her plan for a ”Rosebud Tea,” in spite of her raillery and the threatened possibility of our exclusion, promising not only to a.s.sist her with the invitations, but to be more than careful at the Bank in avoiding serious mistakes in his balances--so as to be on hand promptly at four. Moreover, if Jack had a sweetheart--and there was no question of it, or ought not to be--and Corinne had another, what would be better than bringing them all down together, so that Miss Felicia could look them over, and Miss Ruth and the Major could get better acquainted, especially Jack and Miss Felicia; and more especially Jack and himself.

Miss Felicia's proposal having therefore been duly carried out, with a number of others not thought of when the tea was first discussed--including some pots of geraniums in the window, red, of course, to match the color of Peter's room--and the freshening up of certain swiss curtains which so offended Miss Felicia's ever-watchful eyes that she burst out with: ”It is positively disgraceful, Peter, to see how careless you are getting--” At which Mrs. McGuffey blushed to the roots of her hair, and washed them herself that very night before she closed her eyes. The great day having arrived, I say the tea-table was set with Peter's best, including ”the dearest of silver teapots”