The Price She Paid Part 5

"Yes, he'll want you," he said. "You'll strike him as just the show piece he needs. And he's too shrewd not to be aware that his choice is limited."

"You can't frighten me," said Mildred, with a radiant, coquettish smile--for practice. "Nothing could frighten me."

"I'm not trying," replied Presbury. "Nor will Siddall frighten you. A woman who's after a bill-payer can stomach anything."

"Or a man," said Mildred.

"Oh, your mother wasn't as bad as all that," said Presbury, who never lost an opportunity.

Mrs. Presbury, seated beside her daughter in the cab, gave an exclamation of rage. "My own daughter insulting me!" she said.

"Such a thought did not enter my head," protested Mildred. "I wasn't thinking of anyone in particular."

"Let's not quarrel now," said Presbury, with unprecedented amiability.

"We must give Bill a spectacle of the happy family."

The cab entered the porte-cochere of a huge palace of white stone just off Fifth Avenue. The house was even grander than they had antic.i.p.ated. The wrought-iron fence around it had cost a small fortune; the house itself, without reference to its contents, a large fortune. The ma.s.sive outer doors were opened by two lackeys in cherry-colored silk and velvet livery; a butler, looking like an English gentleman, was waiting to receive them at the top of a short flight of marble steps between the outer and the inner entrance doors.

As Mildred ascended, she happened to note the sculpturing over the inner entrance--a reclining nude figure of a woman, Cupids with garlands and hymeneal torches hovering about her.

Mildred had been in many pretentious houses in and near New York, but this far surpa.s.sed the grandest of them. Everything was brand new, seemed to have been only that moment placed, and was of the costliest--statuary, carpets, armor, carved seats of stone and wood, marble staircase rising majestically, tapestries, pictures, drawing-room furniture. The hall was vast, but the drawing-room was vaster. Empty, one would have said that it could not possibly be furnished. Yet it was not only full, but crowded-chairs and sofas, ha.s.socks and tete-a-tetes, cabinets, tables, pictures, statues, busts, palms, flowers, a mighty fireplace in which, behind enormous and costly andirons, crackled enormous and costly logs. There was danger in moving about; one could not be sure of not upsetting something, and one felt that the least damage that could be done there would be an appallingly expensive matter.

Before that cavernous fireplace posed General Siddall. He was a tiny mite of a man with a thin wiry body supporting the head of a professional barber. His black hair was glossy and most romantically arranged. His black mustache and imperial were waxed and brilliantined. There was no mistaking the liberal use of dye, also.

From the rather thin, very sharp face looked a pair of small, muddy, brown-green eyes--dull, crafty, cold, cruel. But the little man was so insignificant and so bebarbered and betailored that one could not take him seriously. Never had there been so new, so carefully pressed, so perfectly fitting evening clothes; never a shirt so expensively got together, or jeweled studs, waistcoat b.u.t.tons and links so high priced.

From every part of the room, from every part of the little man's perfumed and groomed person, every individual article seemed to be shrieking, "The best is not too good for Bill Siddall!"

Mildred was agreeably surprised--she was looking with fierce determination for agreeable surprises--when the costly little man spoke, in a quiet, pleasant voice with an elusive, attractive foreign accent.

"My, but this is grand--grand, General Siddall!" said Presbury in the voice of the noisy flatterer. "Princely! Royal!"

Mildred glanced nervously at Siddall. She feared that Presbury had taken the wrong tone. She saw in the unpleasant eyes a glance of gratified vanity. Said he:

"Not so bad, not so bad. I saw the house in Paris, when I was taking a walk one day. I went to the American amba.s.sador and asked for the best architect in Paris. I went to him, told him about the house--and here it is."

"Decorations, furniture, and all!" exclaimed Presbury.

"No, just the house. I picked up the interiors in different parts of Europe--had everything reproduced where I couldn't buy outright. I want to enjoy my money while I'm still young. I didn't care what it cost to get the proper surroundings. As I said to my architect and to my staff of artists, I expected to be cheated, but I wanted the goods.

And I got the goods. I'll show you through the house after dinner.

It's on this same scale throughout. And they're putting me together a country place--same sort of thing." He threw back his little shoulders and protruded his little chest. "And the joke of it is that the whole business isn't costing me a cent."

"Not a cent less than half a dozen or a dozen millions," said Presbury.

"Not so much as that--not quite," protested the delightedly sparkling little general. "But what I meant was that, as fast as these fellows spend, I go down-town and make. Fact is, I'm a little better off than I was when I started in to build."

"Well, you didn't get any of MY money," laughed Presbury. "But I suppose pretty much everybody else in the country must have contributed."

General Siddall smiled. Mildred wondered whether the points of his mustache and imperial would crack and break of, if he should touch them. She noted that his hair was roached absurdly high above the middle of his forehead and that he was wearing the tallest heels she had ever seen. She calculated that, with his hair flat and his feet on the ground, he would hardly come to her shoulder--and she was barely of woman's medium height. She caught sight of his hands--the square, stubby hands of a working man; the fingers permanently slightly curved as by the handle of shovel and pick; the skin shriveled but white with a ghastly, sickening bleached white, the nails repulsively manicured into long white curves. "If he should touch me, I'd scream," she thought. And then she looked at Presbury--and around her at the evidences of enormous wealth.

The general--she wondered where he had got that t.i.tle--led her mother in to dinner, Presbury gave her his arm. On the way he found opportunity to mutter:

"Lay it on thick! Flatter the fool. You can't offend him. Tell him he's divinely handsome--a Louis Fourteen, a Napoleon. Praise everything--napkins, tablecloth, dishes, food. Rave over the wine."

But Mildred could not adopt this obviously excellent advice. She sat silent and cold, while Presbury and her mother raved and drew out the general to talk of himself--the only subject in the whole world that seemed to him thoroughly worth while. As Mildred listened and furtively observed, it seemed to her that this tiny fool, so obviously pleased by these coa.r.s.e and insulting flatteries, could not possibly have had the brains to ama.s.s the vast fortune he apparently possessed.

But presently she noted that behind the personality that was pleased by this gross fawning and bootlicking there lay--lay in wait and on guard--another personality, one that despised these guests of his, estimating them at their true value and using them contemptuously for the gratification of his coa.r.s.e appet.i.tes. In the glimpse she caught of that deeper and real personality, she liked it even less than she liked the one upon the surface.

It was evidence of superior ac.u.men that she saw even vaguely the real Bill Siddall, the money-maker, beneath the General William Siddall, raw and ignorant and vulgar--more vulgar in his refinement than the most shocking b.u.m at home and at ease in foul-smelling stew. Every man of achievement hides beneath his surface--personality this second and real man, who makes the fortune, discovers the secret of chemistry, fights the battle, carries the election, paints the picture, commits the frightful murder, evolves the divine sermon or poem or symphony. Thus, when we meet a man of achievement, we invariably have a sense of disappointment. "Why, that's not the man!" we exclaim. "There must be some mistake." And it is, indeed, not the man. Him we are incapable of seeing. We have only eyes for surfaces; and, not being doers of extraordinary deeds, but mere plodders in the routines of existence, we cannot believe that there is any more to another than there is to ourselves. The pleasant or unpleasant surface for the conventional relations of life is about all there is to us; therefore it is all there is to human nature. Well, there's no help for it. In measuring our fellow beings we can use only the measurements of our own selves; we have no others, and if others are given to us we are as foozled as one knowing only feet and inches who has a tape marked off in meters and centimeters.

It so happened that in her social excursions Mildred had never been in any of the numerous homes of the suddenly and vastly rich of humble origin. She was used to--and regarded as proper and elegant--the ordinary ostentations and crudities of the rich of conventional society. No more than you or I was she moved to ridicule or disdain by the silliness and the tawdry vulgarity of the life of palace and liveried lackey and empty ceremonial, by the tedious entertainments, by the displays of costly and poisonous food. But General Siddall's establishment presented a new phase to her--and she thought it unique in dreadfulness and absurdity.

The general had had a home life in his youth--in a coal-miner's cabin near Wilkes-Barre. Ever since, he had lived in boarding-houses or hotels. As his shrewd and rapacious mind had gathered in more and more wealth, he had lived more and more luxuriously--but always at hotels.

He had seen little of the private life of the rich. Thus he had been compelled to get his ideas of luxury and of ceremonial altogether from the hotel-keepers and caterers who give the rich what the more intelligent and informed of the rich are usually shamed by people of taste from giving themselves at home.

She thought the tablecloth, napkins, and gaudy gold and flowery cut gla.s.s a little overdone, but on the whole not so bad. She had seen such almost as grand at a few New York houses. The lace in the cloth and in the napkins was merely a little too magnificent. It made the table lumpy, it made the napkins unfit for use. But the way the dinner was served! You would have said you were in a glorified palace-hotel restaurant. You looked about for the cashier's desk; you were certain a bill would be presented after the last course.

The general, tinier and more grotesque than ever in the great high-backed, richly carved armchair, surveyed the progress of the banquet with the air of a G.o.d performing miracles of creation and pa.s.sing them in review and giving them his divine endors.e.m.e.nt. He was well pleased with the enthusiastic praises Presbury and his wife lavished upon the food and drink. He would have been better pleased had they preceded and followed every mouthful with a eulogy. He supplemented their compliments with even more fulsome compliments, adding details as to the origin and the cost.

"Darcy"--this to the butler--"tell the chef that this fish is the best yet--really exquisite." To Presbury: "I had it brought over from France--alive, of course. We have many excellent fish, but I like a change now and then. So I have a standing order with Prunier--he's the big oyster- and fish-man of Paris--to send me over some things every two weeks by special express. That way, an oyster costs about fifty cents and a fish about five or six dollars."

To Mrs. Presbury: "I'll have Darcy make you and Miss Presbury--excuse me, Miss Gower--bouquets of the flowers afterward. Most of them come from New York--and very high really first-cla.s.s flowers are. I pay two dollars apiece for my roses even at this season. And orchids--well, I feel really extravagant when I indulge in orchids as I have this evening. Ten dollars apiece for those. But they're worth it."

The dinner was interminably long--upward of twenty kinds of food, no less than five kinds of wine; enough served and spoiled to have fed and intoxicated a dozen people at least. And upon every item of food and drink the general had some remarks to make. He impressed it upon his guests that this dinner was very little better than the one served to him every night, that the increase in expense and luxury was not in their honor, but in his own--to show them what he could do when he wished to make a holiday. Finally the grand course was reached. Into the dining-room, to the amazement of the guests, were rolled two great restaurant joint wagons. Instead of being made of silver-plated nickel or plain nickel they were of silver embossed with gold, and the large carvers and serving-spoons and forks had gold-mounted silver handles.

When the lackeys turned back the covers there were disclosed several truly wonderful young turkeys, fattened as if by painstaking and skillful hand and superbly browned.

Up to that time the rich and costly food had been sadly medium--like the wines. But these turkeys were a genuine triumph. Even Mildred gave them a look of interest and admiration. In a voice that made General Siddall ecstatic Presbury cried:

"G.o.d bless my soul! WHERE did you get those beauties, old man!"

"Paris," said Siddall in a voice tremulous with pride and self-admiration. You would have thought that he had created not merely the turkeys, but Paris, also. "Potin sends them over to me. Potin, you know, is the finest dealer in groceries, fruit, game, and so on in the world. I have a standing order with him for the best of--everything that comes in. I'd hate to tell you what my bill with Potin is every month--he only sends it to me once a year. Really, I think I ought to be ashamed of myself, but I reason that, if a man can afford it, he's a fool to put anything but the best into his stomach."

"You're right there!" mumbled Presbury. His mouth was full of turkey.

"You HAVE got a chef, General!"

"He ought to cook well. I pay him more than most bank-presidents get.

What do you think of those joint wagons, Mrs. Presbury?"

"They're very--interesting," replied she, a little nervous because she suspected they were some sort of vulgar joke.

"I knew you'd like them," said the general. "My own idea entirely. I saw them in several restaurants abroad--only of course those they had were just ordinary affairs, not fit to be introduced into a gentleman's dining-room. But I took the idea and adapted it to my purposes--and there you are!"

"Very original, old man," said Presbury, who had been drinking too much. "I've never seen it before, and I don't think I ever shall again. Got the idea patented?"

But Siddall in his soberest moment would have been slow to admit a suspicion that any of the human race, which he regarded as on its knees before him, was venturing to poke fun at him. Drunk as he now was, the openest sarcasm would have been accepted as a compliment. After a gorgeous dessert which n.o.body more than touched--a molded mousse of whipped and frozen cream and strawberries--"specially sent on to me from Florida and costing me a dollar apiece, I guess"--after this costly wonder had disappeared fruit was served. General Siddall had ready a long oration upon this course. He delivered it in a disgustingly thick tone. The pineapple was an English hothouse product, the grapes were grown by a costly process under gla.s.s in Belgium. As for the peaches, Potin had sent those delicately blushing marvels, and the charge for this would be "not less than a louis apiece, sir--a louis d'or--which, as you no doubt know, is about four dollars of Uncle Sam's money."

The coffee--"the Queen of Holland may have it on her PRIVATE table--MAY, I say--but I doubt if anyone else in the world gets a smell of it except me"--the coffee and the brandy came not a moment too soon.

Presbury was becoming stupefied with indigestion; his wife was nodding and was wearing that vague, forced, pleasant smile which stands propriety-guard over a mind asleep; Mildred Gower felt that her nerves would endure no more; and the general was falling into a besotted state, spilling his wine, mumbling his words. The coffee and the brandy revived them all somewhat. Mildred, lifting her eyes, saw by way of a mirrored section of the enormous sideboard the English butler surveying master and guests with slowly moving, sneering glance of ineffable contempt.

In the drawing-room again Mildred, requested by Siddall and ordered by Presbury, sang a little French song and then--at the urging of Siddall--"Annie Laurie." Siddall was wiping his eyes when she turned around. He said to Presbury:

"Take your wife into the conservatory to look at my orchids. I want to say a word to your stepdaughter."