Part 5 (1/2)

”Well, I do remember Mrs. Sheridan as a lovely sort of person,” Alice contributed. ”Plain, you know, but quite wonderful for--well, _goodness_. It's funny--but then you know Mama is terribly excitable,”

she added, ”she gets frightfully worked up over nothing, or almost nothing. It's quite possible that when Kate recalled old times to her she suddenly wished that she had done more for Kate--something like that. She'd think nothing of sending for Judge Lee on the spot. You remember her recalling us from our wedding-trip because she couldn't find the pearls? All the way from Lake Louise to hear that they had been lost!”

”I know,” Christopher smiled. ”She is--unique, _ma belle mere_. By George, I'll never forget our rus.h.i.+ng into the house like maniacs, not knowing what had happened to Leslie or Acton, and having her fall sobbing into your arms, with the pearls in her hands!”

”Mama's wonderful,” Alice laughed. ”Chris, did you eat any dinner?”

He considered.

”But I'm really not hungry, dear,” he protested.

Alice, superbly incredulous, rang at once. Who was in the kitchen? Well, she was to be asked to send up a tray at once to Mr. Liggett. ”Now that you asked me, the dinner had reached the point of ice-cream in a paper tub, as I sat down,” he remembered. ”You're a little miracle of healing to me, Alice. When I came in here I didn't know _what_ we were up against, as a family. Your mother wished the girl pensioned----”

”Oh, Chris, not really?”

”I give you my word!” But he was enough his usual self to have taken his seat at the piano, now, and was looking at her across it, while his fingers fitted themselves lazily to chords and harmonics.

”I'll tell you something, if you'll promise to stop playing the instant your supper comes up!”

”I'll promise!”

”Well, then--the new Puccini is there!” She nodded toward the music-shelves, and he turned to the new score with an eager exclamation.

Fifteen minutes later she had to scold him to bring him to the fire again, and to the smoking little supper. While Alice sipped ginger ale, Christopher fell upon his meal, and they discussed the probable presentation of the opera, and its quality.

But an hour later, when she was in bed, and Christopher was going back to the piano for another half-hour of music, she caught his hand.

”Chris, you're not worried about this Sheridan matter?”

”Worried? No, dearest child, what is there to worry about? It isn't blackmail, apparently it's nothing but an overdose of imagination on your mother's part. If the girl really was promised something, or has--for example!--old stock, or if her father was an employee who did this or that or the other--Mrs. Sheridan's husband was employed by your father at the time of his death, by the way--why, it's easy enough to pay the claim, whatever it is! The girl seems to have made a nice impression--your mother tells me she's sold me books, but that doesn't mean much, I buy books everywhere! No, I don't think you'll ever hear of her again. But your mother will be here in a day or two; see what you can make of it all!”

”Oh, of course, it's nothing _wrong_!” Alice said, confidently.

And Christopher returned to his beloved piano, relieved in mind by his wife's counsel, refreshed in body by the impromptu supper, and ready for the music that soothed in him all the restless and unsatisfied fibres of his soul.

CHAPTER IV

Annie, who signed herself ”Anne Melrose von Behrens,” was the real dictator in the various circles of the allied families, and had a fas.h.i.+on of finding herself supreme in larger circles, as well. Annie was thirty-seven or eight, tall, thin, ash-blonde, superb in manner and bearing. Nature had been generous to her, but she had done far more for herself than Nature had. Her matchless skin, her figure, her hands, her voice, were all the result of painstaking and intelligent care. Annie had been a headstrong, undisciplined girl twenty years ago. She had come back from a European visit, at twenty-three, with a vague if general reputation of being ”a terror.” But Annie was clever, and she had real charm. She spoke familiarly of European courts, had been presented even in inaccessible Vienna. She spoke languages, quoted poets, had great writers and painters for her friends, and rippled through songs that had been indisputably dedicated, in flowing foreign hands, to the beautiful Mademoiselle Melrose. Society bowed before Annie; she was the sensation of her winter, and the marriage she promptly made was the most brilliant in many winters.

Annie proceeded to bear her sober, fine, dull, and devoted Hendrick two splendid sons, and thus riveted to herself his lasting devotion and trust. The old name was safe, the millions would descend duly to young Hendrick and Piet. The family had been rich, conspicuous, and respected in the city, since its st.u.r.dy Holstein cattle had browsed along the fields of lower Broadway, but under Annie's hands it began to s.h.i.+ne.

Annie's handsome motor-cars bore the family arms, her china had been made in the ancestral village, two miles from Rotterdam, and also carried the s.h.i.+eld. Her city home, in Fifth Avenue, was so magnificent, so chastely restrained and sober, so sternly dignified, that it set the cue for half the other homes of the ultra-aristocratic set. Annie's servants had been in the Von Behrens family for years; there was nothing in the Avenue house, or the Newport summer home, that was not as handsome, as old, as solid, as carven, as richly dull, or as purely s.h.i.+ning, as human ingenuity could contrive to have it. Collectors saved their choicest discoveries for Annie; and there was no painter in the new world who would not have been proud to have Annie place a canvas of his among her treasures from the old.

If family relics were worth preserving, what could be more remarkable than Annie's Was.h.i.+ngton letter, her Jefferson tray, her Gainsboroughs of the Murisons who had been the only Americans so honoured by the painter?

Melrose and Von Behrens honours crowded each other--here was the thin old silver ”shepherdess” cup awarded that Johanna von Behrens who had won a prize with her sheep, while Was.h.i.+ngton was yet a boy; and here the quaint tortoise-sh.e.l.l snuff-box that a great prince, homeless and unknown, had given the American family that took him in; and the silver b.u.t.tons from Lafayette's waistcoat that the great Frenchman had presented Colonel Horace Murison of the ”Continentals.”

These things were not thrust at the visitor, nor indeed were they conspicuous among the thousand other priceless souvenirs that Annie had gathered about her.

”Rather nice, isn't it?” Annie would say, abstractedly, when some enthusiastic girl pored over the colonial letters or the old portraits.

”See here, Margaret,” she might add, casually, ”do you see the inside of this little slipper, my dear? Read what's written there: 'In these slippers Deborah Murison danced with Governor Winthrop, on the night of her fifteenth birthday, July 1st, 1742.' Isn't that rather quaint?”