Captains and The Kings (55 page)

over her shoulder. The carriage had crossed the intersection, and had halted at the doorway of the small and expensive hotel on the corner. Joseph and Elizabeth were alighting from the carriage. Bernadette saw Elizabeth's violet watered-silk suit with its lace ruffles and bustle, her velvet slippers, and the violets pinned on her breast. Joseph was gallantly, if a little stiffly, assisting her, and very briefly he held her in his arms as she stepped down. She looked up at him, her face tremulous with love and desire, and he looked down at her as he held her. Then they entered the hotel together. "Fie," said Bernadette's friend, very crossly. "What is wrong now, dear? You look like death. Here are my smelling salts, but let us move to the shop window. People are staring at us. Are you faint? Well, it is very warm for autumn, isn't it?" Through the haze of her enormous suffering Bernadette heard herself say, "I thought I saw--someone--I knew, going into that hotel. he looked like Joseph. Perhaps he is staying here, which is very unusual. Would you mind if I inquired?" "Not at all," said her friend, who had suddenly spied an intriguing hat in a window. I'll go in this shop and wait for you. But why should you think your husband is here? Aren't his offices in Philadelphia?" "He has interests in New York, too," said Bernadette. There was such a great and crushing pain in her throat. She left her friend and entered the hotel. It had a small rich lobby, which hinted of discreet money and even more discreet privacy. A manager and a clerk, in Prince Albert coats, were standing at the counter and Bernadette, conscious all at once both of her new infirmity and her plumpness, went to them. They courteously watched her approach, and with curiosity, for ladies did not enter hotels unaccompanied, and Bernadette was obviously a lady even if a little dowdy in spite of the Worth suit and the light sable boa on her shoulders, and her expensive black velvet millinery and her jewels. Her throat and mouth were as dry and parched as hot summer stone. She tried to wet lips that felt swollen and thick, and tried to smile. "Pardon me," she said, "but I thought I saw my--my brother--enter just now with his--wife. I--I didn't know they were in town." "The name, madam?" asked the manager, who had a beautiful set of whiskers. "Uh," said Bernadette. "Mr. Armagh." The manager consulted the book on the counter, and looked through his pince-nez. He shook his head regretfully. "The name seems familiar," he said. "But there are no Mr. and Mrs. Armagh registered. Are you certain you saw them enter, madam?" He looked at her with eyes at once glaucous and secret. "Yes. I am sure. Just a moment ago. Please," said Bernadette and gave him a heart-breaking smile. "Oh, please." The manager regarded her for a long moment, then closed the book. "I am sorry, madam. You must have been mistaken." "But--the lady and gentleman who just entered--" The manager said, "You must be mistaken, madam. No one has entered here for the past half hour." Bernadette stared at him and he stared back, like a basilisk. Then Bernadette turned and left the lobby and went out into the street again and looked about her with glazed eyes and did not, for several minutes, know where she was or why she was here. People jostled her. One or two swore at her. She saw and heard nothing. Her arm was taken, and her friend said, "The hat wasn't in the least becoming. Bernadette! What is wrong with you? Are you ill?" "Yes," Bernadette whispered, and looked at her friend with such blind and tortured eyes that the other woman was appalled and frightened. "I want to go to the hotel. I--I must lie down. I may have had a seizure of some sort." She did not return to Green Hills for two days. She could not move from her bed. Her friend called a physician who feared that she had had a stroke. If Joseph had died she could not have suffered more torment, more consuming grief, more anguished incredulity. His other infidelities, though they had humiliated her, had not been too difficult to condone. Gentlemen were gentlemen, as her own father had taught her through his own conduct. But gentlemen, though they might frolic with other women cocasionally, and find them agreeable, still loved their wives, and did not love the other ladies. They were only passing pleasures, passing interests. So they were not very important, certainly not important enough to threaten a wife.
But Bernadette had seen Elizabeth's and Joseph's faces, and she knew they were in love and now in some way she guessed they had been lovers for a long time. This was no passing frivolity of Joseph's. He was not "toying" with Elizabeth. He loved her. She, in turn, had given him glances of adoration. They had entered the hotel engrossed only with each other, she clinging to him, his head bent to listen to what she was saying. Once Bernadette thought, Incest! Of course it was incest, it was vile, it was intolerable, it was filthy beyond imagining. A man and the woman who was his father-in-law's widow. It was not to be borne. Abhorrent. But Bernadette knew she had to bear it. With the powerful instinct of love, she understood that a single word from her to Joseph would cause him to leave her finally, and forever, and that she would never see him again. A word to Elizabeth, and it would be the same. Nothing could part them, not public outrage, not public condemnation, nor probably any legal sanctions, or society's horror. Bernadette knew that out of some primeval knowledge. She began to live in terror that her own temper, her own sorrow and pain, would cause her inadvertently to speak, and so she watched all her words with Joseph. She avoided Elizabeth, and though they were neighbors both contrived not to see each other more than once or twice a year, and if they saw each other in distant gardens they affected not to be aware. This was not hard. They had scarcely encountered each other over the past few years, and then had exchanged only a cold word or two. Now Bernadette fled into her house at the mere far flick of a skirt on lawns, which might be Elizabeth's. "Ah, God," she would whisper to herself, "if it had been anyone, anyone at all, but that woman! I might have borne it." Bernadette had known hatred before for Elizabeth. Now she hated her with so powerful a hatred that it was like a fire in her, never extinguished. For her husband she could only helplessly feel an enlargement of her love, and her continued determination to have him love her in return. At last she persuaded herself that as Elizabeth was a "light woman" Joseph would eventually grow tired of her. Strumpets did not engage the affections of gentlemen for an excessive period of time. To the end of her life she would say, "My husband never even glanced at another woman but me. He was most devoted, always. As for myself, I lived for no one else. We were all the world to each other. Our life together was an idyl."
One day when Joseph and Charles Devereaux had finished a long conference with Harry Zeff in Philadelphia Harry slipped a note into Charles's hand, with a wink. It asked Charles to come back into Harry's office as soon as possible, confidentially. It took Charles an hour to arrange this, and Harry smiled with relief and nodded. Though he was hardly fifty, his hair was a glossy riot of white curls which made the swarthiness of his face much more striking, but he had not lost his cherubic look of mischief and humor. He had grown stout with good living, satisfaction with life, the love and adoration of Liza and the affection of his children. Nor did the fact that he was now twice a millionaire distress him. "Holy you stay so young," he said to Charles. "You're almost Joe's age but you don't look more than thirty-five. Not dyeing your hair, are you, Charlie?" "Hardly," said Charles, seating his elegant body into the chair opposite Harry. Harry's offices were lavish with leather, fine pictures on the painted walls, rich carpets, and a fire chuckling on the black marble hearth this cold and snowy winter day. Harry leaned back in his chair and puffed on his big cigar and put his thumbs in the armholes of his vest. "You look like the damned swollen capitalistic plutocrat the Populist newspapers are always cartooning and shouting about," Charles remarked. "Striped trousers and black silk embroidered vest and long black coat--all of it, and big belly too. 'Wall Street Exploiter of the Poor and Oppressed.' That's you, Harry." Harry laughed. "I suppose," he said, "there are people in this country who have been as poor as I have been, but there's none who has been poorer. The next step would have been starvation--to death. Funny how so many howlers about the poor have never known poverty or struggle or hard work or misery or hunger. I'd like to give them a taste of it, that I would, as Joe would say.." But there was no bitterness in his lustrous black eyes and his red-lipped smile. Harry could endure even Populists and Socialists with a merry gaiety, as rather immature and ignorant frothers who did not know the nature of man nor the tree predicament of mankind, or were malcontents who had too little intelligence to grasp reality, too few natural endowments and too little energy for anything but envy. "If a man's a failure," Harry would say, "he thinks that entitles him to tell the government how to run the country." (Harry, himself, did not care much for the government, because he understood it, but he had a jovial contempt for those who hated it only on vague principle and without a practical reason.) "It seems we have a problem," he said to Charles, and now he looked as serious as it was possible for him to be. "You've beard of Sean, Joe's brother, who disappeared somewhere in the slums of Boston a long time ago?" "Yes," said Charles. "It is also my job to destroy, unread, the twice- yearly letters Joe receives from his sister. He won't even give the poor woman the satisfaction of knowing that at least he saw them, by returning them to her." Harry frowned at the tip of his cigar. "Well, you know Joe, Charles." "Indeed I do," said Charles. "He never forgives nor forgets. Look what he did to Handell of the Handell Oil Company a few years ago. Cornered all the stock and threw Handell out, almost a bankrupt." "Um," said Harry. "I know. But you've got to remember that Handell tried a little fast trickery on Joe, in the matter of Joe's invention of the kerosene fueling for industrial machinery. It wasn't a big sum, as money goes, but it was still considerable. Joe never accepts treachery in the jolly way it is thought up--iust a prank between friends, of course. Maybe that's because he has little sense of humor, eh?" Charles's seamed face colored a trifle. "Look here, Harry, you know how I feel about Joe. I know how my father felt. To my father Joe was another son, and Joe took a huge loss in buying the land next to my father's and selling it to him for half the price the Yankee scalawags were asking." He smiled. "On the coat of arms of the Devereaux's is the inscription, 'We remember friend and foe.'" "Well, that's burned in on Joe's soul, too," said Harry. "Perhaps Joe was a little hard on old Handell, but Handell knew Joe very well and he had no sense doing what he did. Had he stolen from Joe frankly and impudently it might have been another matter, but it was done slyly and meanly, and then denied. Well, we aren't discussing Handell, who's dead now anyway. It's Sean Paul Armagh, Joe's brother." "Dead, too?" Harry scratched his fat chin. "No. But I have yesterday's Boston paper here and you can read it for yourself." He grumbled, "Damn it, why didn't the fool keep his mouth shut?" Charles took the newspaper. Prominently featured on the second page under the headline GREAT SUCCESS FOR TENOR, SINGER (OF IRISH BALLADSt was a photograph of a slight, rather pretty middle- aged man with a charming deprecatory smile and thin fair hair, alleged to be Scan Paul. The lively story then went on to explain that Mr. Paul had sung for many years "in various of our public establishments which cater to the workingmen who drink beer and liquors--a somewhat deplorable habit of those of that class;" and then had come to the attention of a kindly gentleman whom Mr. Paul designated only as "Mr. Harry," who had, to quote Mr. Paul, "rescued me from penury and failure and assisted and encouraged me, with money and consolations beyond a mere expression of gratitude." It was "Mr. Harry" who had had him taught formal music and voice, "in various musical establishments and under the best of teachers, two of operatic fame," and had then "launched me on the road to success." The success, at first, had meant only minor musical halls in Boston which the Irish favored. It had, however, been more tban enough to sustain Mr. Paul. He had also sung on many occasions in other New England towns, "and enthralled the devotees of Irish songs with his musical genius and his magnificent and poignant voice, moving all to tears and rapture." ttowcver, under the aegis of "Mr. Harry" Mr. Paul had increased his repertoire to include not only Irish ballads but "the songs of all the people," and "exquisite operatic selections, rendered with deep feeling and tender passion." Now, exclaimed the report in superlatives, "Mr. Paul has been engaged by the Academy of Music in New York, and in Chicago and Philadelphia and other cities, for a series of concerts, all of which are now oversubscribed. His accompanist is--" Charles laid down the paper and looked at Harry with suppressed amusement. "I gather," he said, "that you are the enigmatic benefactor of Scan Armagh, the modest gentleman who avoids the limelight." "How could you have possibly guessed," said Harry, with more gloom than Charles had ever seen before. "Well, damn it, I was in Boston, and I like beer and I went to a pub, as Joe calls saloons, and there was Scan singing like an angel--and not drinking. Like a damned angel. He looks like one, too. That's a bad photograph. He reeks with charm and softness and ingratiation, and all of it's sincere. Every man jack there was crying in his beer, and I cried too. Voice like a soaring sweet horn, or maybe it's a flute. Never could tell the difference between instruments. But it rang back from the walls and the ceiling, and no one moved except to wipe his eyes and sob a little." Harry paused. "I knew I had to help him." "Why didn't you tell Joe? Wouldn't he have been glad to know his brother had a little success then, such as it was?" "My God," said Harry, with emotion. "Joe had been preparing his brother to help him in The Armagh Enterprises for ages, for years. When Scan was at home in Green Hills, Joe would drag him away from the piano and wouldn't let him sing. Scan was going to be a shrewd businessman, that he was, to quote Joe's exact words again, right here with his brother. That's what Joe had been working for all his life--making sure his brother would be a multimillionaire entrepreneur like himself. He forced Scan almost through Harvard. Scan despised it. I think he was just bewildered, myself. He had no more taste for this business than a simpering schoolgirl, and that was nay first impression of him anyway. "I believe they had a--disagreement," Harry said judiciously, giving a slight cough. "There was some rumor they came to blows. It goes back a long time. Joe's not a man who confides in anybody, but one day he did tell me that his father was what he called a 'ne'er-do-well,' who liked to sing in pubs, too, and treat one and all with his last handful of shillings, and he let his farm be taken for taxes, and he came to America and died before his family arrived. "In any event I knew that Joe would hate his brother more than ever for doing what their 'feckless' father--another phrase of Joe's--did in the old country. Any reminder of his father had a way of almost driving him out of his mind. I think that is what makes him so adamant and infuriated when he encounters any weakness or softness or lack of interest in good solid success--like his." "I see," said Charles. "Well, perhaps you do, and perhaps you don't," said Harry, shaking his head. "You've got to be in Joe's position, with his memories and his starving years and his struggles and the persecutions he endured because he is Irish. Yes, sir, you've got to know what real bloody persecution means. You've got to know what your own people suffered." He sighed. "Everything he did was for his family. He never really lived for himself. Though he was a good one for advising others to do that! He just lived for Scan and Regina. It's only lately that he seems to have become a little more human--over the past fifteen years or so. I guess there's a woman behind it all," and Harry's eyes became secret. "'Find the woman.' Isn't that what they say? Anyway, I'm glad of it. First time he's ever looked happy, and I've known him since I was under fifteen. That's a long time for a man to be miserable." Charles spoke with unusual gentleness. "And you are afraid that Joe will blow up when he finds out about his brother, as he will very soon?" "Look," said Harry, "I've known Joe since we were boys together. He saved my life. I saved his. I'd give my life for him, and he knows it. But he can't stand deceit. He can't stand treachery. He won't stand underhandedness. That's not his way. He's got his own code of honor. He'll think I deceived him, diddled him, had a joke at his expense, betrayed him." "For rescuing his brother?" "Charles, if I'd told him in the beginning he'd have raised hell with me. He might have thrown me out. I was a rich man by then. I could have gone on without Joe. I have interests, too. Joe couldn't have hurt me. It was just the thought of him throwing me out, putting me out of his life forever, never speaking to me again, never looking at me, that gave me nightmares." "He's done dozens of things that weren't ethical," said Charles, "and many more that were illegal. Why should he cavil at what you've done, out of compassion for his brother?" Harry shook his head dismally. "You don't understand. He did those things to other businessmen. It was dog eat dog. But he won't take treachery or slyness from anyone he has trusted to some extent." Charles mused. "I suppose it never occurred to him that his brother and sister had the right to live their own rives. Harry sighed again. "I guess you don't understand." "I understand all right," said Charles. "You're in a good hot pickle, Harry." He scrutinized the unhappy man. "If you know his fancy lady, why not confide in her, very fast? You think she has a lot of influence over him." Harry's dusky face sharpened and came alive with anger. "Don't call her a 'fancy lady!'" he shouted. "I know her. I saw him with her several times. She is a great lady!" "Well, ask her advice. And you'd better be quick about it, Harry. He sometimes looks at the Boston papers when he has time." "Um," said Harry, but a little hope had come into his eyes. He chewed his cigar. "At any rate," said Charles, "Sean isn't using his surname. Joe might overlook the whole thing, not recognizing his brother." "You forget," said Harry. "He's going to sing soon in Philadelphia and New York, and Joe won't miss the posters. He's always going to concerts. He has his own boxes now. Once he's seen Sean on the stage, singing his heart out, bang goes Harry out the front door, probably half dead, too. Why didn't that damned Scan keep his mouth shut and not mention me in the papers? He'll probably talk the same way in New York and Philadelphia, too." "Well, they call that gratitude," said Charles. "Better consult that lady, Harry." He stood up and looked down at Harry. "Sometimes, in this naughty world, a candle lighted in the darkness gets smashed, contrary to Slrakespeare. I wish I knew more how to help, but I don't." "You've given me an idea," said Harry, and tore up the newspaper and put it into his wastebasket. Elizabeth, when Harry called upon her, knew at once from his manner that he had more than guessed at the liaison between her and Joseph Armagh. She knew Harry well, liked his Liza and himself, and had admiration for both and the utmost courtesy. Still, his almost boyish awkwardness at approaching her now made her color a little, then she resumed her dignity and listened with her special attentiveness. At last she said, "Yes, I understand, Harry. I also understand Joseph, and your predicament. I will do my very best." She paused. "I am to be in New York next Tuesday. I will do my best." She smiled at the stout relieved man. "It was so kind, so good of you, Harry, so compassionate. Compassion is a rare thing in this world. I am sure we can bring Joseph to respect it and not condemn it. He isn't quite as formidable as--as he once was. At least I like to believe that." Harry was depressed again, thinking of an episode only two weeks ago. loseph had shown no signs of "softening." However, it had been a business matter-- There was a blizzard in New York the next Tuesday, almost as severe as the Great Blizzard of '88 a few years before, and Elizabeth's rooms in the quiet small hotel were warm with lamplight and firelight. She had dressed carefully in Joseph's favorite color which matched the pale green of her eyes, and the long gown, with its tight bodice and draped bustle, twinkled with brilliant buttons. She ignored style in the dressing of her hair, and it was arranged in smooth light yellow wings about her calm face and knotted in a large chignon at her nape. She wore the emeralds he had given her, which she never wore in Green Hills. She had, over the years, improved his appreciation for food, which always remained simple, however, and so there was roast chicken with savory dressing and a hearty soup and salad, a ros6 wine, plain pastries and a great deal of tea. His consumption of tea always surprised her. In