No. 13 Washington Square Part 20

"I swear, ma'am. Never!"

"Remember, Matilda. You have sworn." And relieved of that menace, she leaned back.

The taxi drew up before the Dauphin. A grenadier-lackey, who seemed bulk and bra.s.s b.u.t.tons and braid of gold, handed them out with august white gloves.

"Pay the fare, Matilda," ordered Mrs. De Peyster.

Mrs. De Peyster's bills, when she had a servant with her, were always paid by the attendant. Matilda did so, out of a square black leather bag that was never out of Matilda's fingers when Matilda was out of the house; it seemed almost a flattened extension of Matilda's hand.

They entered the Dauphin, pa.s.sing other white-gloved lackeys, each a separate perfection of punctiliousness; and pa.s.sed through a marble hallway, muted with rugs of the Orient, and came into a vast high chamber, large as a theater--marble walls and ceiling, tapestries, moulded plaster and gilt in moderation, silken ropes instead of handrails on the stairways, electric lights so shaded that each looked a huge but softly un.o.btrusive pearl. The chamber was pervaded by, was dedicated to, splendid repose.

Mrs. De Peyster, Matilda trailing, headed for a booth of marble and railing of dull gold--the latter, possibly, only bronze, or gilded iron--within which stood a gentleman in evening dress, with the bearing of one no lower than the first secretary of an emba.s.sy.

"A suite," Mrs. De Peyster remarked briefly across the counter, "with sitting-room, two bed-rooms and bath."

"Certainly," said the distinguished gentleman. "I have a most desirable suite on the fifteenth floor, with a splendid outlook over the park."

"That will do."

"The name, please?" queried the gentleman, reaching for a pen.

"Mrs. David Harrison," invented Mrs. De Peyster.

"When do your employers wish to occupy the suite?" pursued the courtly voice of the secretary of the emba.s.sy.

"Our employers!" repeated Mrs. De Peyster. And then with wrathful hauteur: "The apartment is for ourselves. We desire to occupy it at once."

The gentleman glanced her up and down; then up and down his eyes went over Matilda, just behind her. There was no doubting what Matilda was; and since the two were patently the same, there could be no doubt as to what Mrs. De Peyster was.

"I'm sorry--but, after all, the suite is not available," he said courteously.

"Not available?" cried Mrs. De Peyster. "Why not?"

"I prefer to say no more."

"But I insist!"

"Since you insist--the Dauphin does not receive servants, even of the higher order, as regular guests." The hotel clerk's voice was silken with courtesy; there was no telling with what important families these two were connected; and it would not do to give offense. "We receive servants only when they accompany their employers, and then a.s.sign them to the servants' quarters. You yourself must perceive the necessity of this," he added hastily, seeing that Mrs. De Peyster was shaking, "to preserve the Dauphin's social tone--"

"The servants' quarters!" gasped Mrs. De Peyster. "You mean--"

"You'll excuse me, please," interrupted the clerk, and with a bow ended the scene and moved to the rear of the office where he plainly busied himself over nothing at all.

Mrs. De Peyster, quivering, gulping, glared through her veil at him. A hotel clerk had turned his back on her! And this mere clerk had dared refuse her a room! _Refuse her!_ Because she, _she_, Mrs. De Peyster had not the social tone!

Nothing like it had ever happened to her before.

Her desire to annihilate that clerk with the suave amba.s.sadorial look, and the Dauphin, and all therein and all appertaining thereunto, was mounting toward explosion, when Matilda clutched her arm.

"It's awful, ma'am,--but let's go," she whispered. "What else can we do?"

Yes, what else could they do? Mrs. De Peyster's wrath was still at demolitory pressure, but she saw the sense in that question. The next moment the two figures, duplicates of somberness, one magnificently upright, the other shrinking, were re-pa.s.sing over the muting rugs, through the corridor of n.o.ble marble, by the lackeys between whose common palms and the hands of patrician guests was the antiseptic intermediary of white thread gloves.

"Perhaps it's just as well, ma'am," Matilda began tremulously as soon as they were in the street, before Mrs. De Peyster's black storm could burst. "How much would that suite have been?"

"Perhaps fifty dollars a day."

"I only just now thought about it--but--but please, ma'am, did you happen to bring your purse?"

"My purse!" Mrs. De Peyster stopped short. "Matilda!"--in a voice chilled with dismay--"I never thought of my purse until this moment!

There wasn't time! I haven't a cent!"

"And after paying for the cab, ma'am, I have only a little over fifteen dollars."

"Matilda!"

"Perhaps, ma'am," repeated Matilda, "it was just as well they wouldn't take us."

Mrs. De Peyster did not speak.

"And what's worse," Matilda faltered, as though the blame was hers, "the hotels won't trust you unless you have baggage. And we have no baggage, ma'am."

"Matilda!" There was now real tragedy in Mrs. De Peyster's voice.

"What _are_ we going to do?"

They walked along the Park, whispering over their unforeseen and unforeseeable predicament. It had many aspects, their situation; it was quickly clear to them that the most urgent aspect was the need of immediate refuge. Other troubles and developments could be handled as they arose, should any such arise. But a place to hide, to sleep, had to be secured within the hour. Also they needed two or three days in which to think matters over calmly, and to apply to them clear reason.

And they had only the fifteen dollars in Matilda's black bag.

"It seems to me, ma'am," ventured Matilda, "that a rooming-house or a boarding-house would be cheapest."

"A boarding-house!" exclaimed Mrs. De Peyster. "But where?"

Matilda remembered and reached into her slit pocket. "Yesterday I happened to pick up the card of a boarding-house in the library--I've no idea how it came there. I saved it because my sister Angelica, who lives in Syracuse, wrote me to look up a place where she might stay."

They examined the address upon the card, and twenty minutes later, now close upon midnight, Matilda was pressing the bell of a house on the West Side. Visible leadership Mrs. De Peyster had resigned to Matilda, for they were entering a remote and lowly world whose ways Mrs.

De Peyster knew not. In all her life she had never been inside a boarding-house.

The door opened slightly. A voice, female, interrogated Matilda. Then they were admitted into a small hall, lighted by an electric bulb in a lantern of stamped sheet-iron with vari-colored panes and portholes.

From this hall a stairway ascended, and from it was a view into a small rear parlor, where sat a clergyman. The lady who had admitted them was the mistress; a Junoesque, superior, languid sort of personage, in a loose dressing-gown of pink silk with long train. To her Matilda made known their desire.

"Excuse me, Mr. Pyecroft," she called to the clergyman. "So you and your friend want board and room," the landlady repeated in a drawling tone, yet studying them sharply with heavy-penciled eyes. "I run a select house, so I've got to be careful about whom I admit.

Consequently you will not object to answering a few questions. You and your friend are working-women?"

"Yes."

The heavy eyes had concluded their inventory. "Perhaps both housekeepers?"

"Ye--yes."