The Spinners' Book of Fiction Part 4

At Madame Delmonti's _conversazione_, given a few evenings later, Faraday again saw Miss. Ryan. On the first of these occasions this independent young lady was dressed simply in a high-necked gown and a hat. This evening with her habitual disregard of custom and convention, some whim had caused her to array herself in full gala attire, and, habited in a gorgeous costume of white silk and yellow velvet, with a glimmer of diamonds round the low neck, she was startling in her large magnificence.

Jack Faraday approached her somewhat awe-stricken, but her gravely boyish manner immediately put him at his ease. Talking with her over commonplaces, he wondered what she would say if she knew of her mother's conversation with him. As if in answer to the unspoken thought, she suddenly said fixing him with intent eyes:

"Mommer said she told you of Mr. Courtney. Do you think he'll come back?"

Faraday, his breath taken away by the suddenness of the attack, felt the blood run to his hair, and stammered a reply.

"Well, you know," she said, leaning toward him confidentially, "I _don't_. Mommer is possessed with the idea that he will. But neither popper nor I think so. I got sort of annoyed with the way he acted--hanging about for a whole winter, and then running away to see his grandfather, like a little boy ten years old! I like men that are their own masters. But I suppose I would have married him. You see, he would have been a lord when his grandfather died. It was genuine--we saw it in the _Peerage_."

She looked into Faraday's eyes. Her own were as clear and deep as mountain springs. Was Miss. Genevieve Ryan the most absolutely honest and outspoken young woman that had ever lived, or was she some subtle and unusual form of Pacific Slope coquette?

"Popper was quite mad about it," she continued. "He thought Mr. Courtney was an ordinary sort of person, anyway. I didn't. I just thought him dull, and I suppose he couldn't help that. Mommer wanted to go over to England last summer. She thought we might stumble on him over there. But popper wouldn't let her do it. He sent us to Alaska instead." She paused, and gave a smiling bow to an acquaintance. "Doesn't Mrs. Peck look sweet tonight?" She designated the society editress of the _Morning Trumpet_, whose fragile figure was encased in a pale blue Empire costume. "And that lady over by the door, with the gold crown in her hair, the stout one in red, is Mrs. Wheatley, a professional Delsarte teacher. She's a great friend of mine and gives me Delsarte twice a week."

And Miss. Genevieve Ryan nodded to the dispenser of "Delsarte," a large and florid woman, who, taking her stand under a spreading palm tree, began to declaim "The Portrait" of Owen Meredith, and in the recital of the dead lady's iniquitous conduct the conversation was brought to a close.

From its auspicious opening, Faraday's acquaintance with the Ryans ripened and developed with a speed which characterizes the growth of friends.h.i.+p and of fruit in the genial Californian atmosphere. Almost before he felt that he had emerged from the position of a stranger he had slipped into that of an intimate. He fell into the habit of visiting the Ryan mansion on California Street on Sunday afternoons. It became a custom for him to dine there _en famille_ at least once a week. The simplicity and light-hearted good-nature of these open-handed and kindly people touched and charmed him. There was not a trace of the sn.o.b in Faraday. He accepted the lavish and careless hospitality of Barney Ryan's "palatial residence," as the newspapers delighted to call it, with a spirit as frankly pleased as that in which it was offered.

He came of an older civilization than that which had given Barney Ryan's daughter her frankness and her force, and it did not cross his mind that the heiress of millions might cast tender eyes upon the penniless sons of New England farmers. He said to himself with impatient recklessness that he ought not to and would not fall in love with her. There was too great a distance between them. It would be King Cophetua and the beggar-maid reversed. Clerks at one hundred and fifty dollars a month were not supposed to aspire to only daughters of bonanza kings in the circle from which Faraday had come. So he visited the Ryans, a.s.suring himself that he was a friend of the family, who would dance at Miss Genevieve's wedding with the lightest of hearts.

The Chinese butler had grown familiar with Faraday's attractive countenance and his unabbreviated English, when late one warm and sunny afternoon the young man pulled the bell of the great oaken door of the Ryans' lion-guarded home. In answer to his queries for the ladies, he learned that they were out; but the Mongolian functionary, after surveying him charily through the crack of the door, admitted that Mr.

Ryan was within, and conducted the visitor into his presence.

Barney Ryan, suffering from a slight sprain in his ankle, sat at ease in a little sitting-room in the back of the house. Mr. Ryan, being irritable and in some pain, the women-folk had relaxed the severity of their dominion, and allowed him to sit unchecked in his favorite costume for the home circle--s.h.i.+rt sleeves and a tall beaver hat. Beside him on the table stood bare and undecorated array of bottles, a gla.s.s, and a silver water-pitcher.

Mr. Ryan was now some years beyond sixty, but had that tremendous vigor of frame and const.i.tution that distinguished the pioneers--an attribute strangely lacking in their puny and degenerate sons. This short and chunky old man, with his round, thick head, bristling hair and beard, and huge red neck, had still a fiber as tough as oak. He looked coa.r.s.e, uncouth, and stupid, but in his small gray eyes shone the alert and unconquerable spirit which marked the pioneers as the giants of the West, and which had carried him forward over every obstacle to the summit of his ambitions. Barney Ryan was restless in his confinement; for, despite his age and the completeness of his success, his life was still with the world of men where the bull-necked old miner was a king.

At home the women rather domineered over him, and unconsciously made him feel his social deficiencies. At home, too, the sorrow and the pride of his life were always before him--his son, a weak and dissipated boy; and his daughter, who had inherited his vigor and his spirit with a beauty that had descended to her from some forgotten peasant girl of the Irish bogs.

Faraday, with his power of listening interminably, and his intelligent comments, was a favorite of old Ryan's. He greeted him with a growling welcome; and then, civilities being interchanged, called to the Chinaman for another gla.s.s. This menial, rubbing off the long mirrors that decorated the walls, would not obey the mandate till it had been roared at him by the wounded lion in a tone which made the chandelier rattle.

"I never can make those infernal idiots understand me," said old Ryan, plaintively. "They won't do a thing I tell them. It takes the old lady to manage 'em. She makes them skip."

Then after some minutes of discourse on more or less uninteresting matters, the weary old man, glad of a listener, launched forth into domestic topics.

"Gen and the old lady are out buying new togs. I got a letter here that'll astonish them when they get back. It's from that English cuss, Courtney. D'ye ever hear about him? He was hanging about Genevieve all last winter. And this letter says he's coming back, that his grandfather's dead, and he's a lord now, and he's coming back. Do you mind that now, Faraday?" he said, looking with eyes full of humor at the young man.

Faraday expressed a sharp surprise.

"You know, Jack," continued the old man, "we're trained up to having these high-priced Englishmen come out here and eat our dinners, and sleep in our spare rooms, and drink our wines and go home, and when they meet us there forget they've ever seen us before; but we ain't trained up to havin' 'em come back this way, and it's hard to get accustomed to it."

"It's not surprising," said Faraday, coldly.

"I'm not so dead sure of that. But I can tell you the old lady'll be wild about this."

"Does Mrs. Ryan like him so much?" said the visitor, still coldly.

"All women like a lord, and Mrs. Ryan ain't different from the rest of her s.e.x. She's dead stuck on Gen marrying him. I'm not myself, Jack. I'm no Anglomaniac; an American's good enough for me. I'm not spoiling to see my money going to patch up the roof of the ancestral castle of the Courtneys, or pay their ancestral debts--not by a long chalk."

"Do you think he's coming back to borrow money from you to pay off the ancestral debts?" asked Faraday.

"Not to borrow, Jack. Oh no, not to borrow--to get it for keeps--it, and Genevieve with it. And I don't just see how I'm to prevent it. Gen don't seem to care much, but the old lady's got it on her mind that she'd like to have a lord in the family, no matter how high they come; and she can work on Gen. Last summer she wanted to go after him--wanted to track him to his lair; but I thought she might's well stop there, and put m' foot down. Gen don't seem to care about him one way or the other, but then 'Lady Genevieve' sounds pretty nice----"

Here a rustle of millinery, approaching through the drawing-room beyond, cut short old Ryan's confidences. Faraday stood up to receive the ladies, who entered jubilant and unwearied from an afternoon's shopping.

Genevieve, a magnificent princess, with the air of fas.h.i.+on given by perfectly setting clothes, much brown fur and velvet, a touch of yellow lace, and a quant.i.ty of fresh violets pinned to her corsage, looked as if she would make a very fine Lady Genevieve.

As soon as she heard the news she demanded the letter, and perused it intently, Faraday covertly watching her. Raising her eyes, she met his and said, with a little mocking air, "Well, Mr. Faraday, and what do you think of that?"

"That your mother seems to have been right," said Faraday, steadily eyeing her. An expression of chagrin and disappointment, rapid but unmistakable, crossed her face, dimming its radiance like a breath on a mirror. She gave a little toss to her head, and turning away toward an adjacent looking-gla.s.s, took off her veil and settled her hat.

Mrs. Ryan watched her with glowing pride already seeing her in fancy a member of the British aristocracy; but old Ryan looked rather downcast, as he generally did when confronted by the triumphant gorgeousness of the feminine members of his household. Faraday, too, experienced a sudden depression of spirits so violent and so uncalled for that if he had had room for any other feeling he would have been intensely surprised. Barney Ryan, at the prospect of having to repair the breaches in the Courtney exchequer and ancestral roof-tree, may have experienced a pardonable dejection. But why should Faraday, who a.s.sured himself a dozen times a day that he merely admired Miss. Genevieve, as any man might admire a charming and handsome girl, feel so desperate a despondency?

To prove to himself that his gloom did not rise from the cause that he knew it did rise from, Faraday continued to be a constant guest at the Ryan mansion, continued to see Miss. Genevieve at Madame Delmonti's and at the other small social gatherings, where the presentable young New Englander found himself quite a lion. When Mrs. Ryan saw him alone she flattered his superior intelligence and experience of the world by asking his opinion of the approaching Lord Hastings's matrimonial plans.

This frank and outspoken lady was on the thorns of uncertainty, Lord Hastings's flight on his former visit having shaken her faith in him.

Quite unconsciously she impressed upon Faraday how completely both she and Genevieve had come to trust him as a tried friend.

With the exaltation of a knight of old, Faraday felt that their trust would never be misplaced. He answered Mrs. Ryan's anxious queries with all the honesty of the calmest friends.h.i.+p. Alone in the great gold drawing-room, he talked to Genevieve on books, on music, on fas.h.i.+on, on society--on all subjects but that of love. And all the while he felt like the nightingale who sings its sweetest music while pressing its breast against a thorn.

Lord Hastings seemed to have lost no time in repairing to the side of the fair lady who was supposed to be the object of his fondest devotions, and whom destiny appeared to have selected as the renovator of Courtney Manor. Four weeks from the day Faraday had heard of his intended visit, the Bostonian received a letter from Mrs. Ryan bidding him to dinner to meet the ill.u.s.trious guest. It seemed to Faraday that to go to see the newcomer in converse with Genevieve, beautiful in her costliest robes, to view the approving smiles of Mrs. Ryan, and perhaps the happy blushes of Miss. Ryan, was the manly upright course for one who could never be more than the avowed friend and silent wors.h.i.+pper of Barney Ryan's only daughter.

Arriving ten minutes late, he found the party already at the table. It was an inflexible rule of Barney Ryan's to sit down to dinner at the stroke of half-past six, whether his guests were a.s.sembled or not--a rule which even his wife's cajoleries and commands were powerless to combat.

Tonight the iron old man might well regard with pride the luxury and splendor that crowned a turbulent career begun in nipping poverty. The round table, glowing beneath the lights of the long crystal chandeliers, sparkled with cut-gla.s.s, and shone with antique silverware, while in the center a ma.s.s of pale purple orchids spread their fragile crepe-like petals from a fringe of fern. Opposite him, still unfaded, superbly dressed, and admirably self-possessed, was his smiling consort, toward whom, whatever his pride in her might have been, his feelings this evening were somewhat hostile, as the ambitious and determined lady had forced him to don regulation evening dress, arrayed in which Barney's peace of mind and body both fled.

On either side of the table sat his son and daughter, the latter handsomer than Faraday had ever seen her, her heavy dress of ivory-tinted silk no whiter than her neck, a diamond aigret trembling like spray in her hair. Her brother Eddie, a year and a half her senior, looked as if none of the blood of this vigorous strong-thewed, st.u.r.dy stock could run in his veins. He was a pale and sickly looking lad, with a weak, vulgar face, thin hair and red eyelids. Faraday had only seen him once or twice before, and judged from remarks made to him by acquaintances of the family that Eddie did not often honor the parental roof with his presence. Eddie's irregular career appeared to be the one subject on which the family maintained an immovable and melancholy reserve. The disappointment in his only son was the bitter drop in Barney Ryan's cup.

There were other guests at the table. Faraday received a coy bow from Mrs. Peck, who had given her hair an extra bleaching for this occasion, till her pinched and powdered little face looked out from under an orange-colored thatch; Mrs. Wheatley was there too, with a suggestion of large white shoulders s.h.i.+ning through veilings of black gauze; and with an air of stately pride, Mrs. Ryan presented him to Lord Hastings. This young man, sitting next Genevieve, was a tall, fair, straight-featured Englishman of gravely unresponsive manners. In the severe perfection of his immaculate evening dress he looked a handsome, well-bred young fellow of twenty-five or six.

As the late guest dropped into his seat, the interrupted conversation regathered and flowed again. Barney Ryan said nothing. He never spoke while eating, and rarely talked when women were present. Genevieve too was quiet, responding with a gently absent smile, when her cavalier, turning upon her his cold and expressionless steely-blue eyes, addressed to her some short regulation remark on the weather, or the boredom of his journey across the plains. The phlegmatic calm of his demeanor remained intact even under the coquettish onslaughts of Mrs. Peck and Mrs. Wheatley, who extracted from him with wheedling perseverance his opinions on the State, the climate, and the country. Lord Hastings replied with iron-bound and unsmiling brevity, his wide cold glance resting with motionless attention upon the painted physiognomy of Mrs.

Peck and the broad and buxom one of Mrs. Wheatley, and his head turning with dignified difficulty in his exceedingly high and tight collar, as one and the other a.s.sailed him with queries. Meanwhile the object of his journey, slowly moving her great fan of white ostrich feathers, looked across the table at Faraday and made a little surrept.i.tious _moue_.

The conversation soon became absorbed by the two married ladies, Faraday, and Lord Hastings. Only the Ryans were silent, Genevieve now and then throwing a lazy sentence into the vortex of talk, and Mrs. Ryan being occupied in lending a proud ear to the coruscations of wit that sparkled around the board, or in making covert gestures to the soft-footed Mongols, who moved with deft noiselessness about the table.

Eddie Ryan, like his father, rarely spoke in society. In the glare of the chandelier he sat like a strange uncomfortable guest, taking no notice of any one. Toward the end of the feast he conversed in urgent whispers with his mother--a conversation which ended in her surrept.i.tiously giving him her keys under the edge of the table. Before coffee, Eddie left, on the plea of an important engagement, retiring through the drawing-room, softly jingling the keys.

After this dinner, when Lord Hastings's presence had banished all his doubts, when the young Englishman's attractive appearance had impressed itself upon his jealous eye, and Genevieve's gentle indifference had seemed to him but a modest form of encouragement. Faraday found but little time to pay visits to the hospitable home of Barney Ryan.

The family friend that they had all so warmly welcomed and taken to their hearts withdrew himself quietly but firmly from their cheerful circle. When, at rare intervals, he did drop in upon them, he pleaded important business engagements as the reason of his inability to accept their numerous invitations to dinners and theater parties. After these mendacious statements he would wend a gloomy way homeward to his Pine Street boarding-house, and there spend the evening pretending to read, and cursing the fate which had ever brought him within the light of Genevieve's _beaux yeux_. The fable of being the family friend was quite shattered. Faraday had capitulated.

Nearly two months after the dinner, when rumors of Genevieve Ryan's engagement to Lord Hastings were in lively circulation, Faraday called at the lion-guarded mansion on California Street, and, in answering to his regulation request for the ladies, received the usual unintelligible Chinese rejoinder, and was shown into the gold drawing-room. There, standing in front of a long mirror, looking at her skirts with an eye of pondering criticism, was Miss Genevieve, dressed to go out. She caught sight of him in the gla.s.s, turned abruptly, and came forward, a color in her face.

"Is that you?" she said, holding out her hand. "I am so glad. I thought it was somebody else." Having thus, with her customary candor, signified to Faraday that she was expecting Lord Hastings, she sat down facing him, and said, abruptly, "Why haven't you been here for so long?"

Faraday made the usual excuses, and did quail before her cold and steady eyes.

"That's rather funny," she said, as he concluded "for now you're used to your new position, and it must go more easily, and yet you have less time to see your friends than you did at first."

Faraday made more excuses, and wondered that she should take a cruel pleasure in such small teasing.

"I thought p'r'aps," she said, still regarding him with an unflinching scrutiny, her face grave and almost hard, "that you'd begun to find us too Western, that the novelty had worn off, that our ways were too--too--what shall I say?--too wild and woolly."

A flush of anger ran over Faraday's face. "Your suppositions were neither just nor true," he said, coldly.