at breakfast, three mornings later, mr. laban skinner and his daughter dallied over their plates, and sent the waiter out again with some asperity when he, taking it for granted they must have finished the meal, came in to clear the table.
each had been reading a letter, from the early morning mail.
“it is an invitation from the earl of drumpipes,” remarked the father, regarding his daughter over his pince-nez, “expressing, in what i am constrained to describe as somewhat abrupt and common-place terms, his desire that we should consider ourselves as his guests during the entire day upon the approaching 24th instant, the occasion being the anniversary of his birth.” he handed over the note for her inspection as he spoke. “the impression which his phraseology produces upon me,” he added, “is that of one performing a perfunctory act of courtesy to foreigners of his acquaintance, to whom he extends the ceremonial proffer of a hospitality which he assumes will be declined.”
“oh, not at all, papa,” commented adele, briefly glancing at the note. “all noblemen write in that formal way. it is a part of their bringing-up. no; he wants us to come, right enough. i have a letter here from mr. linkhaw, explaining the thing. of course it was a suggestion of his.”
“i venture the hope,” said mr. skinner, “that he improves the opportunity to also explain the otherwise unintelligible fact that during an entire week we have had neither ocular evidence nor any other tangible manifestation of his presence upon this side of the atlantic. i do not hesitate to avow my surprise at what, after his manifold and, i might say, even importunate professions of eagerness to place his services at our disposal in london, i find myself unable to refrain from regarding as his indifference to our—our being here.”
“no,” said adele, confidently, “it’s all right. he was kept longer in scotland than he expected—very urgent family business of some sort—and only arrived in london a couple of days ago, and has been up to his eyes in work since he came. besides,” she continued with a little smile, “he is very frank; he says he has no clothes fit to go about in london with, but his tailor is working at some new ones for him day and night, and they are promised for the 23d, so that at the birthday party next day——”
“i am far from presuming, adele,” interrupted the father, gravely, “to ascribe to you a deficiency or obtuseness of perception where considerations of delicacy are involved; but i think i am warranted in pointing out that at home, at least in the social environment to which you have been from your infancy accustomed, a young gentleman would intuitively eschew a subject of this nature in his correspondence with a young lady.”
“oh, they’re different here,” explained the daughter, with nonchalance. “they talk quite openly over here of lots of things which we never dream of mentioning. you remember that lady in front of us at the theatre last night—when the men in their dress suits came over to talk with her between the acts—how she told them right out, that although it was so hot she had to fan herself all the while, still her legs felt quite shivery. now, a speech like that would stand louisville on its head, let alone paris, kentucky, but here it passes without the slightest notice. it’s the custom of the country. i rather like it myself.”
mr. skinner sighed, and pecked timorously at his egg with a spoon. “i am not wanting, i trust, in tolerance for the natural divergences of habit and manner which distinguish the widely-separated branches of the anglo-saxon race, or in a desire to accommodate myself to their peculiarities when i confront them in the course of foreign travel; but i with difficulty bring myself to contemplate with satisfaction the method of partaking of a soft-boiled egg which obtains favour in these islands. to my mind, the negation of the principle of a centre of gravity involved in the construction of this egg cup, combined with the objectionably inadequate dimensions of the spoon——”
“dig it out on to your plate, then; the waiter won’t come in again till i ring,” suggested the daughter.
“i prefer the alternative of abstention,” he answered. “the spectacle of stains upon the cloth or upon the plate would be equally suggestive to the servant’s scrutiny.”
he rose as he spoke. adele, gathering up the letters, did likewise, and rang the bell.
mr. skinner, having glanced out at the river panorama from the balcony window for a little, and then looked over the market columns of a newspaper, turned again to his daughter.
“i gather that we are to accept the invitation of the earl of drumpipes,” he remarked, tentatively.
adele nodded. “why, of course,” she said; “that’s to be the formal beginning of everything. it is intended to make our position here perfectly regular. lord drumpipes is the head of mr. linkhaw’s family. it is entirely becoming that he should take the initiative in recognising us.”
“ah yes, in recognising us,” he repeated. “i suppose, adele, it would be futile for me to recur to the question whether you have sufficiently weighed the opposing considerations with regard to mr. linkhaw, and the——”
“mercy, yes!” interposed adele, with promptitude. “don’t let’s have that all over again. i’ve quite settled everything in my own mind.”
“since i was afforded the opportunity of personally observing and conversing with the earl of drumpipes,” pursued the father, “and of thus forming authoritative conclusions as to the british nobility in general, i have devoted much thought to the subject. while i do not suggest that my well-known views upon the aristocratic institution, as a whole, have undergone any perceptible transformation, i do not shrink from the admission that the thought of being connected by marriage with the bearer of an hereditary title no longer presents itself to me in such repulsive colours as was formerly the case. if, therefore, with your undoubted advantages, it should occur to you to entertain the idea of a possible alliance with the nobility, i would not have you feel that my convictions formed a necessarily insuperable barrier to——“,
“no, no!” the daughter broke in, with a laugh. “i’ll promise to disregard your convictions as much as you like. but now i want you to go out, and kill time by yourself somewhere till luncheon. i want to be left alone. there is some place where elderly american gentlemen can go, isn’t there, without getting into mischief? oh yes, you must go, and not just downstairs to hang about the hotel entrance, but straight away somewhere. why? my dear papa, i have my secrets as well as you.”
“but that secret of mine,” he protested feebly, “i assure you, adele, that it is really nothing at all. that is, it does involve matters both interesting and important; but the fact that i am precluded from mentioning them is in the nature of a pure accident, and wholly without significance.”
“good-bye till luncheon time,” answered adele, with affable firmness. “and mind you quit the premises.”
mr. skinner found his hat, smiled dubiously at his daughter, and without further parley took himself off.
adele, left alone, looked at the watch in her girdle, and compared its record with that of the ornate clock on the mantel. she took up the paper and ran an aimless eye over one page after another. then she walked about with a restless movement, pausing from time to time to bend a frowning yet indifferent inspection upon the scene spread out beyond the balcony.
at last there came a tap on the door, and at sound of this, even as she called out a clear, commanding “come!” she withdrew all signs of perturbation, or of emotion of any sort, from her beautiful dark countenance.
it was vestalia who entered the room—vestalia, clad in daintily unpretentious and becoming garments, neatly gloved, and with much radiant self-possession upon her pretty face. she paused upon the threshold, nodded rather than bowed to her hostess, and let a little smile sparkle in her eyes and play about her rosebud of a mouth.
“your father does not succeed very well in keeping his secrets, i observe,” she remarked, pleasantly, by way of an overture to conversation.
“won’t you please to be seated,” said adele, with exaggerated calmness. she herself took a chair, and slowly surveyed her visitor as she went on: “my father has no secrets from me. he tries to have—once in a blue moon—but it doesn’t come off. i may tell you frankly, however, that he has in this case told me nothing. i found your address, and other information, in looking through his pockets. i am under no obligation to tell you this: i simply feel like it, that’s all. i hate dissimulation.”
“and i suppose you have your things made up without pockets,” suggested vestalia, amiably.
adele put some added resolution into her glance. “i wrote asking you to call,” she said coldly, “because it became a nuisance not to know what you were up to.”
“ah,” replied vestalia, “it looks as if your father must have destroyed some of our correspondence. how thoughtless of him!”
miss skinner paused, and knitted her queenly brows a trifle. she did not seem to be getting on. “i have no wish to waste time in trying to be funny,” she avowed, after some hesitation. “now that you are here, have you any objection to telling me why you swore my father to keep a secret from me?”
“oh, just a whim of mine, nothing more,” vestalia assured her, lightly. “i frequently have notions like that, that i can’t in the least account for.”
“no, you had a reason,” insisted the other, with gravity. “and you must tell me what it was. i have been frank with you.”
“and i will not be behind you in candour,” said vestalia, as if won by an appeal to her better self. “it was because you looked at me in the museum as if you thought my hair was dyed.”
“well, so it is, isn’t it?” demanded adele, bluntly.
“upon my honour, no!” the other replied. “and now you look at me as if you thought that that wasn’t much to swear by. it’s possible that you do not realise it, but your eyes leave something to be desired in the matter of politeness.”
“i’m afraid that’s true,” adele assented. “i have an effect of looking very hard at things, simply because i’m near-sighted. i ought to wear glasses, but they do not suit me.”
“yes,” said vestalia, with a meditative look, “it would be a pity for you to put them on. they would detract from your face. it is very beautiful as it is—for a dark style.”
“sometimes i feel that i am almost tired of being dark,” confessed adele. “your hair is the most wonderful thing i ever saw. i could see that your gentleman-friend at the museum admired it immensely.”
“oh yes, he said so repeatedly,” vestalia replied, with a demure display of pleasure at the recollection.
again there was a little pause. then miss skinner essayed another opening. “your name—peaussier—would indicate french extraction,” she remarked. “and french people are so very dark, as a rule, aren’t they? my mother was a creole—from louisiana, you know—and i suppose that accounts for my colour.”
“well, my mother was scotch,” explained vestalia, “and they are sandy.”
“the scotch gentleman that you were with at the museum—he was decidedly a dark man,” suggested adele, with a casual manner.
“now that i think of it, so he was,” said vestalia.
the measured and ceremonious ticking of the expensive clock on the mantel had the silence to itself for a space, while the two ladies looked at each other.
“so you won’t tell me anything?” miss skinner exclaimed at last.
“the trouble is, don’t you see, that i am quite in the dark as to what you want to know. if you will tell me just what was in your father’s pockets, i can judge then what gaps exist in your information.”
adele laughed aloud. “i believe you are really a tip-top good fellow, in spite of everything,” she declared. “do tell me what it is you are doing! i assure you you’re utterly wrong in thinking that i am a person to guard against, to keep secrets from. come, don’t you see how much i really like you? and you won’t trust me! i suppose it is the blonde temperament, suspicious and unresponsive and calculating. or no, i don’t mean that, you know i don’t, but you might repose more confidence in me, when i have told you everything.”
“everything?” murmured vestalia, sweetly.
“about papa’s pockets, you know.”
“ah, yes.”
“it was all your fault,” urged adele. “it was you who drove me to it. and if you don’t tell now, goodness only knows what crimes i may not be driven to commit, in addition.”
“let me hasten to avert this woful catastrophe,” cried vestalia. “the matter is simplicity itself. i am by profession, trade, whatever you call it, a tracer of pedigrees, genealogies. i served my apprenticeship under an american lady, who worked entirely for american customers. she is dead now, and the business is broken up, and i have been idle for a long time. when i saw your father and heard his name, a thought occurred to me. i know a good deal about the skinners in england.”
“papa was born in england himself, you know,” interposed adele, with rising interest.
“yes, i know,” vestalia went on. “as i said, i have exceptional sources of information about the family, and it occurred to me that very likely he would be glad to have the records searched, and a full pedigree drawn up. i wrote to him, accordingly—he had mentioned this hotel—and i came and saw him downstairs in the reception-room, and he seemed delighted with the idea, and gave me a commission at once. what was more important still, he was kind enough to pay me something in advance. it came just at the moment to—to supply a very urgent want, too, i can tell you.”
“ah, poor girl!” said adele, tenderly. “but why on earth were you afraid that i should know? i don’t believe your story about the hair, you know.”
“really it was that,” protested vestalia. “i could see that you didn’t like me. i was afraid of you—that is, of your prejudicing your father against me. and if you only knew how desperately i was in need of the job! don’t you remember, you did look very sharply at me.”
“if i did, it was because i was surprised to—to—see who you were with.”
“how do you mean?” queried vestalia, puzzled. “we were both entire strangers to you, surely.”
“no. i recognised the gentleman from a picture i had seen of him. i had a kind of idea that he was not precisely a nice gentleman for you to be with.”
“then you had a preposterous and wickedly mistaken kind of idea,” said vestalia, with decision. “there isn’t a truer or nobler-spirited gentleman on this earth than he is. i have reason to know what i say. if anybody has told you otherwise, you have been lied to, that’s all.”
“dear, dear, how much you are in earnest,” cried adele. “you must be my friend, and defend me behind my back like that, too. if he liked your hair immensely, why, so do i.”
“don’t let us joke about him,” put in vestalia, with seriousness. “i feel very keenly about my obligation to him. he saved my life—and—and i’d rather talk about something else. we were speaking of the skinners—and their pedigree.”
adele assented, with an inclination of the head, to the diversion, though her eyes retained their gleam of surprised curiosity. “yes, the skinners,” she said, vaguely.
“i can trace them up to sir theobald skinner, knight, who obtained a grant of the abbey lands of coggesthorpe, suffolk, in 1541—who in turn was the grandfather of walter skinner, who married elizabeth, daughter and co-heir of john banstock, esquire, of meechy, norfolk, and became first lord gunser.”
adele pricked up her ears. “what is that? are we related to the nobility? oh, that is what papa meant by something interesting and important! who would have supposed he could be so sly? oh, sure enough, that would account for——” she broke off short, and smiled, first knowingly to herself, then with frank cordiality to vestalia. “oh, go on,” she urged. “tell me about our lords.” vestalia shook her head. “we—that is, you have no lords nowadays,” she admitted, ruefully. “the gunser peerage became extinct in the male line nearly two hundred years ago. the collateral branches of the family sank to be yeomen on the soil their ancestors had owned—some of them became even peasants, agricultural labourers. there are no prosperous or polite skinners nowadays—except your immediate branch.”
“and even i haven’t got polite eyes,” laughed adele. “yes, i remember papa telling how poor his people were. he hardly knew the taste of meat, he said, till he went to america as a boy. and so you have traced all his relations out. are there any cousins or near connections living now, do you know? he had a brother older than himself, abram was his name, i fancy, and he enlisted in the army and went to the dogs, i think. at least, father never heard of him afterward.”
“he is dead,” vestalia re-assured her. “he did go to the dogs, as you say. he had some sons, but they are dead too.”
“and so there were actually skinners in the peerage!” mused adele, aloud. the thought seemed to excite her. she rose and looked at herself in the mirror, over vestalia’s head. the latter stood up as well.
“oh, must you be going?” said adele. “there was so much i wanted to say to you. we must meet soon again. i am going to insist upon that. you see, i know absolutely no one over here of my own sex, except you. it will be different in a few days, now, but that won’t make any difference with my liking you. oh, yes—i wanted to ask you—do you know a mr. linkhaw?”
vestalia looked blankly at her interrogator for a moment, then flushed a little and smiled confusedly. “i have heard the name,” she replied, “but i have never seen the gentleman bearing it.”
adele drew her brows together in a half-frown. “he is a great friend of the gentleman who was with you at the museum,” she said, doubtingly.
“yes, i gathered that,” answered vestalia. “it was in that way that i heard the name.”
“really, how curiously we two are mixed up together!” cried the other, with dawning impatience. “you could tell me ever so many things that i am dying to know, if you only chose to. it is provoking to have to grope about in the dark like this. and you won’t even get vexed with me, and talk back. even that way i might learn something—and we could make it up afterward, as easy as not.”
“ah, but that is what i came resolved under no circumstances to do,” explained ves-talia, with affable placidity. “nothing would tempt me to get vexed with you.”
“suppose i insisted upon talking unpleasantly about the gentleman at the museum,” suggested adele, with potential malice in her tone.
“i don’t say you can’t grieve me and hurt me, but you can’t make me angry with you. you see, i know things which you don’t know, which would entirely alter your views about me, and about other matters, if you were aware of them. so it would be unfair in me to blame you for remarks made in ignorance of the truth.”
“but it is precisely against this ignorance that i protest with all my might!” said adele with vehemence. “it is that that is unfair. it makes me ridiculous.”
“i don’t see the sense of it myself,” agreed vestalia, simply. “i always thought it would be the simplest course to tell you everything at once. or no—what have i said?” she hastened to add, in deprecation of the other’s kindling eye; “i didn’t feel that way at first. it was i who originally suggested that you shouldn’t be told, at the start. i was afraid of you, you know. but now i feel quite differently. i would gladly have you know everything—but your father has other views. it is his secret, now, much more than it is mine. i don’t think there is any reason why i shouldn’t tell you that much.”
“oh-h!” groaned adele, in wrath at her helplessness. “well, tell me this, anyway, how long is this tomfoolery to be kept up?”
“no, don’t ask me,” answered vestalia, sympathetically at last. “i don’t know. i can only say that i’m as tired of it now as you are. i wish you would believe that. it would make me easier in my mind.”
“well, i do believe it, then,” the dark girl replied, with impulsive readiness. “oh, and something occurs to me that i daresay you can tell me. you remember the day at the museum. well, the gentleman who was with you called here next day, papa having in the meantime seen you secretly, downstairs. now, papa seemed clearly annoyed with that gentleman, when he came up and found him here. now, why was that?”
vestalia reflected. it was evident enough that the question honestly puzzled her. “all i can think of,” she replied, after consideration, “is that your father had taken it for granted that this gentleman was my husband—and when it came out in our interview that he wasn’t then your father questioned me very closely about him, and it happened that it was a subject upon which i couldn’t very well tell him much, and i daresay he formed an unfavourable opinion of mr. mosscrop on that account. that is the only explanation i can think of. i know he said he thought it would be well for me not to see him again, or even hold communication with him—but i did write him a letter that very day all the same.” it was adele’s turn to ponder. “but why,” she began, hesitatingly, “why should papa take it upon himself to tell you what to do and not to do? what business is it of his? and, if he disliked the thing, why should he remain friendly to you, and snub the gentleman you call mr. mosscrop? not that he minded it, or that it amounted to anything, but it puzzles me that papa should behave in that curious fashion.”
“yes, it would have been more natural to show the woman the cold shoulder, and think nothing amiss of the man,” assented vestalia, gravely. “i quite agree with you there.”
“well, that is the way of the world, isn’t it?” put in adele, in apologetic tones. “don’t dream that i suggest anything wrong.”
“oh no,” said the other patiently, but with a note of weariness in her voice. “it doesn’t matter, one way or the other.”
“you love him, then?” adele’s black eyes glowed with a sudden kindly warmth which went to vestalia’s heart.
“oh, how can i tell you?” she faltered. “it is all so stupid—and i am so unhappy? he was goodness itself to me, and he must think that i behaved like a brute—a common girl of the streets—or meaner still, for at least it’s said they have some sense of gratitude. he came like providence itself to help me, when i was absolutely starving and turned out of doors like a dog—and i was grateful, and yet here he must be thinking that i’m the very scum of the earth!”
she gazed at her companion out of swimming eyes, and for answer adele kissed her.
“i will go now,” she stammered, hastily, as if the caress had further unnerved her. “i’ve stayed longer than i meant. yes, i will come again—if you tell your father that i’ve been, and he says i may come.”
“i’d like to see him say anything else!” cried the young lady from paris, kentucky. “the idea!”
and when the door had closed upon vestalia, this dark beauty clenched her hands, and strode indignantly about the room, and repeated between set teeth, “the very idea!”