He sighed. “There’s where you puzzle me, Lydia. If you found out something ruinous about Mrs. Braithwaite, as you say, and if she knows you did — you intimated she knows it, I think?”
“Absolutely.”
“Then I should think you’d be the last person in the world she’d want to annoy. I should think she’d do everything on earth to please you and placate you. She’d want to keep you from telling. That’s the weak point in your theory, Lydia.”
“It isn’t a theory. I’m speaking of facts.”
“But if she knows you’re aware of what might ruin her,” he insisted, “she would naturally be afraid of you. Then why would she do a thing that might infuriate you?”
“Because she’s a woman,” said Mrs. Dodge. “And that’s something you’ll never understand!”
“But even a woman would behave with some remnants of caution, under the circumstances, wouldn’t she?”
“Some women might. Mrs. Braithwaite doesn’t because she’s so sure of her lofty position she thinks she can deliberately insult me and I won’t dare to do anything about it. She wanted to show me that she isn’t afraid of me.”
Mr. Dodge looked thoughtfully at that point upon his long cigar where a slender ring of red glow intervened between the adhering gray ash and the brown tobacco. “Well, at least she shows a fiery heart,” he said. “In a way, you’d have to consider her action quite the sporting thing. You mean she’s sent you a kind of declaration of war, don’t you?”
“If you want to look at it that way. I don’t myself. I take it just as she meant it, and that’s as a deliberate insult.”
“But it isn’t an ‘insult’ if she only meant it to show she isn’t afraid of you, Lydia.”
“It is, though,” Mrs. Dodge insisted. “What she means is derision of me. It’s the same as if she said: ‘Here’s a slap in the face for you. I have the satisfaction of humiliating you as your punishment for knowing what you do know about me, and you can’t retaliate, because you aren’t important enough to be able to injure me!’ It’s just the same as if she’d said those words to me.”
“It seems quite a message,” he observed. “Of course, I can’t grasp it myself because I haven’t any conception of this ruinous proceeding of hers. You were the only witness, I assume?”
“There was a third person present,” Mrs. Dodge said, stiffly. “But not as a witness.”
“Then what was the third person present doing?” Mrs. Dodge looked at him with severity, as if she reproved him for tempting her to do something wrong; then she took from a basket in her lap a square piece of partly embroidered linen and gave it her attention, not relaxing this preoccupation where her husband began to repeat his question.
“What was the third person—”
“I heard you,” Mrs. Dodge interrupted, frowning at her embroidery. “If I told you that much I’d be virtually telling the whole thing; and I’ve decided not to do that, even under her deliberate provocation. If I let myself be provoked into telling, I’d be as small as she is, so you needn’t hope to get another word out of me on the subject. The only answer I’ll make to your question is that the third person present was not her husband.”
“Oh!” Mr. Dodge said, loudly, and, in his sudden enlightenment, whistled “Whee-ew!” again. “So that’s it!”
“Not at all,” she said. “You needn’t jump to conclusions, and you’ll never know anything more about it from me. The only way you could ever know about it would be through her husband’s making a fuss and its getting into the papers or something.”
“I see,” Mr. Dodge said, apparently not much discouraged. “And, since it’s something he hasn’t yet made any fuss about, it’s evidently because he doesn’t know.”
“He!” Mrs. Dodge cried, and, in her scorn of Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite’s consort, dropped the embroidery into the basket and stared fiercely at Mr. Dodge; though it was really at an invisible Mr. Braithwaite that she directed this glare of hers. Apparently the unfortunate gentleman was one of those mere husbands whose existence seems either to amuse or to incense the wives of more dominant men: Mrs. Dodge certainly appeared to be incensed. “That miserable little pale shadow of a man!” she cried. “His name’s Leslie Braithwaite, but do you ever hear him spoken of except as ‘Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite’s husband’? He goes down to his little brass-rod works at eight o’clock every morning and gets money for her until six in the evening. Then he comes home and works on the account books of her uplifts until bedtime. If they go out, he stands around with her wrap over his arm and doesn’t speak unless you ask him a question. If you do, he begins his answer by saying, ‘My wife informs me’ — How could that poor little creature know anything about anything?”
“But you know,” Mr. Dodge persisted. “You do know, do you, Lydia?”
“I know what I know,” she replied, and resumed her preoccupation with the embroidery.
“But you couldn’t substantiate it by another witness, I take it,” he said, musingly. “That is, she feels safe against you because if you should ever decide to tell what you know, she would deny it and put you in the position of an accuser without proofs.
It would simply be your word against hers, and she’d have the sympathy that goes to the party attacked and also the advantage of her wide reputation for lofty character and—”
“Go on,” his wife interrupted. “Amuse yourself all you like; you’ll not find out another thing from me. Perhaps, if you should ever spend the morning at home digging around in our flower border along the hedge between her yard and ours, you might happen to hear her talking to her chauffeur, and in that case you might get to know something more. Otherwise, I don’t see how you ever will.”
“Lydia!”
“What?”
“I’m not going to dig in any flower border! I’m not going to spy around any hedge just to—”
“Neither did I!” she cried, indignantly. “Did you ever know me to do any spying?”
“Certainly not. But you said—”
“I said ‘If you happen to.’ You don’t suppose I hid and listened deliberately? I was down on my hands and knees planting tulip bulbs, and the thick hedge was between us. That’s how it happened, and why, she never dreamed anybody was near her. I didn’t even hear her come in that part of the yard until I heard her speaking right by me, on the other side of the hedge. Please don’t be quite so quick to think your wife would be willing to spy on another woman.”
“I didn’t,” Mr. Dodge protested, hastily. “What did she say to the chauffeur?”
“That,” his wife replied, severely, “is something you’ll never hear from me!”
“From whom shall I hear it, then?”
“I’ve just told you how you might hear it,” she said, plying her needle and seeming to give it all her attention.
“But I can’t spend my time in the tulip bed, Lydia.”
“That’s not what I meant. I said, ‘If her husband ever makes such a fuss that it gets into the papers.’”
“If he does, I might find out what she said to the chauffeur?”
“Oh, maybe,” Mrs. Dodge said; and she gave him a sidelong glance of some sharpness, then quickly seemed to be busy again with her work.
“I don’t make it out at all,” the puzzled gentleman complained. “Apparently you overheard Mrs. Braithwaite saying something to her chauffeur that would be ruinous to her if it were known — something that might cause her husband to make a public uproar if he had heard it himself. Is that it?”
Mrs. Dodge began to hum fragmentarily to herself and seemed concerned with nothing in the world except the selection of a proper spool of thread from her basket.
“Is that it, Lydia?”
“You’ll never find out from me,” she said, searching anxiously through the basket. “Anyhow, I shouldn’t think you’d need to ask such simple questions.”
“So that is it! What you heard her say to her chauffeur would ruin her if people knew about it. Was she talking to
the chauffeur about her husband?”
“Good gracious!” Mrs. Dodge cried, derisively. “What would she be talking to anybody about that poor little thing for? She never does. I don’t believe anybody ever heard her mention him in her life!”
“Then was she talking to the chauffeur about some other man?”
“Of all the ideas! If a woman were in love with a man not her husband, do you think she’d tell her servants about it? Besides, they’ve only had this chauffeur about two weeks. Have you noticed him?”
“Yes,” said Mr. Dodge. “I’ve seen him sitting in their car in front of the house several times, and I was quite struck with him. He seemed to be not only one of the handsomest young men I ever saw, but to have rather the look of a gentleman.”
“So?” Mrs. Dodge said, inquiringly; and her tone was the more significant because of her appearing to be wholly preoccupied with her work-basket. “You noticed that, did you?”
“You don’t mean to say — —”
“I don’t mean to say anything at all,” she interrupted, crisply. “I’ve told you that often enough for you to begin to understand it.”
“All right, I do. Well, when she’d said whatever she did say to the chauffeur, what happened?”
“Oh, that,” she returned, “I’m perfectly willing to tell you. I got up and looked at her over the hedge. I wasn’t going to stay there and listen — and I certainly wasn’t going to crawl away on my hands and knees! I just looked at her quietly and turned away and came into the house.”
“What did she do?”
“She was absolutely disconcerted. Her face just seemed to go all to pieces; — it didn’t look like her face at all. She was frightened to death, and I never saw anything plainer. That’s one reason she hates me so — because I saw her looking so afraid of me and she couldn’t help it. Of course, as soon as I got into the house I looked out through the lace curtains at a window — you could hardly expect me not to — and I saw her just going back into her own house by the side door. She’d braced up and looked all stained-glass Joan of Arc again by that time.”
Mr. Dodge sat waggling his head and muttering in wonder. “Of all the curious things!” he said. “Human nature is so everlastingly full of oddities it’s always turning up new ones that you sit and stare at and can’t believe are real. There they are, right before your eyes, and yet they’re incredible. What did she say to the chauffeur?”
“No, no,” Mrs. Dodge said, reprovingly. “That’s what I can’t tell you.” And she added, “I should think you could guess it, anyhow.”
“Was there—” He paused a moment, pondering. “Did she use any specially marked terms of endearment in addressing him?”
“No,” Mrs. Dodge replied, returning her attention to her work; “not terms.”
“Oh,” he said. “Just one term, then. She used a single term of endearment in addressing him. Is that correct?”
Again Mrs. Dodge became musical: she hummed a cheerful tune, but her face was overcast with a dour solemnity.
“So she did!” her husband exclaimed. “Did she call him ‘dear’?”
“No, she didn’t.”
“‘Dearest’?”
“No, she didn’t.”
“Not,” he said, incredulously, “not— ‘darling’?”
Mrs. Dodge instantly resumed her humming.
“By George!” her husband cried. “Why, that’s just awful! What else did she say to him besides calling him ‘darling’?”
“I didn’t say she said anything else,” Mrs. Dodge returned, primly. “The rest wasn’t so important, anyhow, and she was speaking in a low voice. I thought the rest of it was, ‘Rosemary, that’s for remembrance.’ I couldn’t be sure because I didn’t hear it distinctly.”
“But you did distinctly hear her call him ‘darling’?”
“What I heard distinctly,” Mrs. Dodge replied, “I heard distinctly.”
“So what Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite said to the chauffeur was this: ‘Rosemary, that’s for remembrance, darling’?”
“You must draw your own conclusions,” she advised him, severely.
“I do — rather!” he returned, and in a marvelling tone slowly pronounced their neighbour’s name, “Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite! Of all the women in the world, Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite! And when you rose up, and she saw you, she just went all to pieces and didn’t say a word?”
“I told you.”
“What did the handsome chauffeur do?”
“Just stood there.”
“It’s beyond anything!” Mr. Dodge’s amazement was not abated; — he shook his head and uttered groaning sounds of pessimistic wonderment. “I suppose the true meaning of the saying, ‘It’s the unexpected that happens,’ is that life is always teaching us to accept the incredible. How long ago was it?”
“A week ago yesterday.”
“Have you seen her since?”
“I never talk to her or she to me. We say, ‘How do you do? What lovely weather!’ and that’s all we ever do say. We haven’t even any neighbourly contact through congenial servants, because of our having coloured people; — hers are white. I haven’t caught a glimpse of her since it happened until this afternoon, when she came to Mrs. Cromwell’s tea. Of course, she knew I was looking at her, and she knew perfectly what I was thinking — particularly about her insult to me in making such a goose of my husband.”
“But, Lydia—”
“She was having the time of her life over that!”
“Well,” he said, reflectively, “leaving out the question of whether or not I was a goose especially, and considering her without personal bias, I must say that under the circumstances she’s shown a mighty picturesque intricacy of character, as well as a pretty dashing kind of hardihood. If, as you believe, she sent her note to me as really a derisive taunt — a gauntlet flung at you with mocking laughter — and all the while she knows you know of her philandering with a good-looking varlet—”
“She’s a bad woman!” Mrs. Dodge exclaimed, angrily. “That’s all there is to it, and you needn’t be so poetical about her!”
“Good gracious, Lydia, I wasn’t—”
“Never mind! We can talk of her just as well without any references to gauntlets and mocking laughter and varlets. That is, if you insist upon talking about her at all. For my part, I prefer just to keep her entirely out of my mind.”
“Very well,” he assented, meekly. “I don’t know that I can keep anything so singular out of my mind; but I won’t speak of it if it annoys you. What else shall we talk of?”
“Anything in the world except that detestable woman,” Mrs. Dodge replied. Then, after some moments of silence over her embroidery, she added abruptly, “Of course, you don’t think she’s detestable!”
“I only said—”
“‘Picturesque’ was what you said. ‘Dashing’ was another thing you said. You’re quite fascinated with her derisive gauntlets and her mocking laughter! Dear me, if that isn’t like men!”
“But I only—”
“Oh, murder!” Mrs. Dodge moaned, interrupting him. “I thought you said you weren’t going to talk about her any more!”
At this he showed spirit enough to laugh. “You know well enough we’re both going to keep on talking about her, Lydia. What do you intend to do?”
“About what?” Mrs. Dodge looked surprised. “About her, you mean? Why, naturally, I intend to keep on doing what I have been doing, and that’s nothing whatever except to hold my peace; — I don’t descend to the level of feuds with intriguing women. She gave me a clew, though, this afternoon.”
“What sort of a clew, Lydia?”
“I don’t suppose a man could understand, but I’ll try to give you a glimmering. When she wrote that note to you, there was one thing she hadn’t thought of. She thought of it this afternoon at that tea: it struck her all of a sudden that I could make things a little unpleasant for her if I took the notion to. She just happened to remember that Mrs. Cromwell is my most in
timate friend, and that she is the grandest old rock-bottomed mountain this community can boast. That woman all at once remembered, and got afraid I might tell my friends.”
“How do you know she did?”
“That’s what a man couldn’t see. I knew it by a lot of little things I couldn’t put into words if I tried, but principally I knew it by watching her manner with Mrs. Cromwell.”
“You mean she tried to ingratiate herself?” he asked. “Her manner was more winsome or flattering than usual?”
“No, not exactly. Not so open — you couldn’t understand — but it was perfectly clear to me she was having the time of her life thinking of what she’d done to me through my husband’s weakness, when all at once she thought of my influence with the Cromwells. Well, she’s afraid of it, and it made her wish she hadn’t gone quite so far with me. She’d give a whole lot to-night, I’ll wager, if she’d been just a little less picturesque with her gauntlet throwing and her mocking laughter! You asked me what I was going to do and I told you ‘Nothing.’ But she’ll do something. She’s afraid, and she’ll make a move of some sort. You’ll see.”
“But what? What could she do?”
“I don’t know, but you’ll see. You’ll see before long, too.”
“Well, I’m inclined to hope so,” he said. “It would certainly be interesting; but I doubt her making any move at all. I’m afraid you won’t turn out to be a good prophet.”
On the contrary, he himself was a poor prophet; for sometimes destiny seems to juggle miraculously with coincidences in order to attract our attention to the undiscovered laws that produce them. In fact, Mr. Dodge was so poor a prophet — and so near to intentional burlesque are the manners of destiny in its coincidence juggling — that at this moment Mrs. Leslie Braithwaite’s husband had just rung the Dodges’ front-door bell. Two minutes later a mulatto housemaid appeared in the doorway of the library and produced a sensational effect merely by saying, “Mrs. Braithwaite and Mr. Braithwaite is calling. I showed ’em into the drawing-room.”
She withdrew, and the staggered couple, after an interval of incoherent whispering, went forth to welcome their guests.
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 372
