Saratoga Trunk (25 page)

There they all were—the Rhinelanders, the Forosinis, the Vanderbilts, the Lorillards, the Chisholms, Mrs. Porcelain. Mrs. Coventry Bellop, looking more than ever like a cook, was squired by three young dandies who seemed to find her conversation vastiy edifying, judging by their bursts of laughter. No sign anywhere of that meager figure, those burning eyes.

“They’re all here except Mr. Gould. Doesn’t he care for races?”

“Gould, he doesn’t care for anything that’s fixed as easy as a horse race. He’s been playing with millions and whole railroads and telegraph companies and hundreds of thousands of human beings and foreign empires so long he wouldn’t get any feeling about whether a horse came in first or not. Do you know what he does for a pasdme? Grows orchids out at his place in the country. Nope, you can’t figure him out the way you can other people. Or get the best of him.”

“There is a way,” Clio persisted; “a very simple way. We will find it. No big thing. Something childish.”

“I just like to hear you talk, honey. I don’t care what you say.”

“You will listen, though, won’t you? And if we have a plan you will help? You promised.”

“Why, sure thing. Fact is, I have got an idea, like I said to Van Steed. Don’t know’s it’s any good, though. It came to me while I was talking to him. I was so riled at the way you’d gone and mixed me up with him that it came into my head, just like that.”

“Listen,
chéri,
we won’t stay here long at the races. There are other things to talk about much more excidng than this. Are you going to enter Alamo sometime soon?”

“He hasn’t got much of a chance in this field. He’s a little too young, anyway. And I haven’t got a jockey I just like.”

“Cupide will ride him.”

“You’re crazy.”

“I say he can. He can ride anything. In France he used to be always around the stables; they called him their mascot at Longchamp and Auteuil; they let him exercise the horses at the tracks. He used to run off and be gone for days. Mama was always threatening to send him back to America. It would be chic to enter your horse; it would look successful and solid. Cupide knows a hundred ways, if Alamo is good and has a chance. Cupide would get something from Kaka; he would give the other horse something; no one would suspect it.”

“Holy snakes!” Maroon glanced quickly around in horror. “If anybody hears you say a thing like that! We’d be run out of town on a rail.”

“Pooh! These piazza millionaires they cheat and rob and kill people, even. You’ve said so yourself.”

“That’s different. If you steal five millions and a railroad, that’s high finance. But if you cheat on a horse race, that’s worse than murder.”

“I just thought you’d like to win. And you said Alamo wasn’t very good yet. Why did you have him sent up here then?”

“Because. A hundred reasons. God A’mighty, women are the most immoral people there is. Don’t seem to know right from wrong.”

“Such a fuss about a horse race.”

“Look, Clio, be like you were in New Orleans that first month, will you?”

“But how is that possible, Clint? I am at least ten years older since then.”

“Let’s be young again, just for now. Let’s quit figuring and contriving. Here it is, midday, middle of the summer. Look at that pretty little race track! Even if you had you your million right now what could you get with it you haven’t got this minute?”

Half-past eleven in the morning. Saratoga managed somehow to assemble its sporting blood at this matutinal hour. Even rakish New Yorkers whose lives were adjusted to a schedule in which night ended at noon were certain to appear at the Saratoga track by eleven, haggard perhaps, and not quite free of last night’s fumes, but bravely armed with field-glasses, pencil, and strong black cigars. Even those imported flowers of the frailer species arrived in wilted clusters, buttressed by their stout black-satin madams and looking slightly ocherous in spite of the layers of rouge and rice powder.

Against the background of elms and pungent pines, richly green, the little track lay like a prim nosegay with its pinks and blues and heliotropes and scarlet of parasols and millinery.

Descended from their gaudy coach, Clint and Clio prepared to take their places, but not before a stroll in the paddock so that Clint could inspect the horses and the feminine world could inspect Clio’s Paris
poult-de-soie
glowing under the rosy shade of the scarlet embroidered parasol.

Smiling, exquisite, seeming to glance neither to right nor left, Clio saw everything, everyone. “Who’s that?” she said again and again, low-voiced, and she pinched Clint’s arm a sharp little tweak to take his attention from the horses. “Who’s that? Who’s that? Why are they standing around that stout, homely litde peasant? There, with the red face.”

“Because that’s Willie Vanderbilt, that’s why.”

“That!
Dieu!
That clod is a millionaire!”

“Only about a hundred and fifty million, that’s all.”

“But he looks wretched!”

“Sure does. They call him Public-Be-Damned Vanderbilt on account of what he said. They hate him. He’s scared of his life. I bet he wishes he could have stayed there on Staten Island, farming, and hauling scows full of manure across the bay from the old Commodore’s stables. He and Gould, they’re dead enemies. In Texas they’d be shooting it out. Here they just try to steal each other’s railroads.”

“I’m almost sorry that I must marry a millionaire. They are so unattractive.”

“You can’t have everything, honey. Little Van Steed isn’t so bad looking,” he observed, with irritating tolerance. “Get him to grow a beard, now, hide that place where his chin ought to be, why—”

She pinched his arm now, in sheer spitefulness. Leisurely, they strolled toward the grandstand. Suddenly there was a tug at Clio’s skirt. She turned quickly, but she knew even before she turned that she would see the goggle-eyed Cupide looking up at her. His voice was a whisper.

“Ma’m’selle, bet on Mavourneen in the third. Everything. Fixed.
Mais soyez sur de là.
Tell to Monsieur Clint.”

“Heh! What the hell you doing away from those horses! Who—”

But the little man had darted off, was lost in the crowd.

“It’s all right,” Clio assured him placidly. “He would not neglect them. He has someone watching them, be sure of that. He has found valuable information, little Cupide. How much money have you? Here is my purse. In the third—Mavourneen—everything. He has ways of knowing, that
diablotin.
He has just now found out.”

Together they walked to their places, a thousand eyes followed them. Curiously enough, aside from Clio the most distinguished feminine figure to be peered at by the crowd was not that of the beflowered Mrs. Porcelain or the overdramatic Guilia Forosini but the stout black-clad Mrs. Coventry Bellop, whose rollicking laugh boomed out as she chatted and joked with her three attendant swains.

“She is good company, that one,” Clio observed to Clint, very low. She was shutting her rosy parasol and adjusting her draperies as she looked about her languidly. “I’ve seen her sort in France, she is like one of those fat, mustached old women who sell fruit in the Paris market—tough and gay and impudent and full of good bread and soup. I like her, that one.”

The first race was about to start. Suddenly, above the buzz of voices in the grandstand there could be heard the booming chest tones of Mrs. Bellop calling, “Countess! Countess!”

“She means you, Clio,” said Clint out of the corner of his mouth. “The old trollop!”

“Countess!”

Clio turned her head ever so slightly. Sophie Bellop’s ugly, broad face was grinning cheerily down at her. “Are you betting, Countess? You look to me like somebody who’d be lucky at picking winners.”

“I am,” said Clio, very quietly, just forming the words with her lips. Smiled her slow, sad smile for the benefit of the crowd and turned back to Maroon. “I think she means me well, that cow. I feel her friendly.”

“I wouldn’t give you a plugged nickel for any of ‘em,” Clint observed, morosely.

“Oh, come now,
chéri.
How could she harm me, that one?”

“She runs this place, I tell you.”

“All the more reason, then. She took care to call me Countess though she surely knows—”

“She’s after something. When an old coyote comes prowling around the chicken roost it ain’t because she’s friendly to the hens.”

“Clint, Clint! You are suspicious of everyone. You probably are suspicious of me, even.”

“No, sugar, I’m not suspicious of you. I’m dead sure of you. I know you’re crooked, so I don’t have to worry none.”

Her lovely leisurely laugh rang out.

It was just after the second race that she said, “Your pencil,” as Clint was leaving to place his bet and hers. “I want to write a note.”

“Don’t be foolish,” he said.

“Wait a moment. I will go with you. Look, there is Van Steed arriving. How hot and cross he looks. There, the little Porcelain is happy; see how she grows all pink, like a milkmaid; and the one you tell me is the Forosini she shows all her teeth with happy hunger. Let us place our bet and go.”

“Now!”

“After this race. Let us watch it from the carriage, standing. This grows a little tiresome, don’t you think? After all, I know that one horse can run faster than another.”

She scrawled one word in her childish hand on a scrap of paper, she folded it tight and cocked one corner. As they rose to leave she tossed it swiftly and accurately into Sophie Bellop’s capacious lap. As that surprised face looked up at her, Clio put a finger to her lips, the ageless gesture of caution and secrecy. They had scarcely regained the carriage when they saw the stout black-clad figure rushing toward the window.

“Did you tell her Mavourneen?”

“Yes.”

“Kind of foolish, weren’t you? It’s all right us throwing away a few hundred dollars on a chance. But what does that litde imp know!”

“He doesn’t always know. Only sometimes. But when he says he knows, like today, then you can be sure. He has ways, that little one.”

“What kind of ways?”

“Never mind. You will see Mavourneen come in. And we shall leave here, and the Bellop will tell everyone she has won. There will be great
réclame.
And we will have—how much will we have in our pockets?”

“Thousand, maybe. I don’t know’s I like it, myself. I—there they are. Wait a minute. Here, take the glasses. That one. Seven. Green and white.”

“M’m. Seven is lucky for me. And I adore green. But I think I must be like this Mr. Gould and even that litde stubborn Van Steed. I would find it more exciting to gamble with railroads and millions and people and the law than with horses running. You see, I am by nature mercenary. How lucky for you that we are not serious, you and I.”

“Yeh,” said Maroon. “I’d just as soon take up steady with a rattlesnake.” But his tone was hollow.

XII

By the end of that first week the women had their knives out. A prick
here, a prick there, the ladies of Saratoga’s summer society were intent on drawing blood from their thrusts at the spectacular, the unpredictable Mrs. De Chanfret. But as yet they had been no match for her. She parried every thrust, she disarmed them by her sheer audacity. She was having a superb time, she was squired by the two most dashing bachelors in Saratoga. If she went to the races with Clint Maroon in the morning, then she drove to the lake with Van Steed in the afternoon. Occasionally she vanished for twenty-four hours. Resting. Madame is resting, Kakaracou said, barring the cottage suite doorway with her neat black silk, her stony white-fichued bosom, her basilisk eye. Bart Van Steed stood at the door; he actually found himself arguing with the woman.

“But Mrs. De Chanfret was going to have dinner with me at Moon’s Lake House. I’ve ordered the dinner, exactly as she wanted it. Lobster shipped down specially from Maine.” As though the mention of this dish could somehow bring her out of her retirement.

“Madame is very sorry.” Kaka was being very grand. “Madame Le Com—Madame De Chanfret is fatigued. She asked me to tell you she is
désolée
she cannot go. Madame De Chanfret is resting today.”

No one had ever before done a thing like this to the most eligible bachelor in New York—in the Western Hemisphere. He was piqued, bewildered, angered, bewitched.

When later he reproached her she said, “You are angry.
Vous avez raison.
You will never again ask me to dine with you.”

“You know that isn’t true.”

“After all, why should you bother about a poor weary widow about whom you know nothing? I may be an adventuress for all you know. And there are such lovely creatures just longing for a word with you—that pretty little Porcelain, and that big handsome Forosini with the rolling dark eyes, and those really sweet little McAllister sisters. And Mr. Maroon tells me that there has come to town a new litde beauty, Nellie Leonard. He says she is escorted by a person called Diamond Jim Brady. What a freshness of language you have here in America! But surely a man like that would have no chance if you happened to fancy this pretty little Leonard.”

“Thank you.” He was stammering with rage. The amber eyes were like a cat’s, the pink cheeks were curiously white. “I am quite capable of selecting my own company. You needn’t dictate to me the company I may or may not keep. It’s bad enough that my mother——” He stopped, horrified at what he had almost said.

Instinct told her the right thing to do. As though to hide her hurt, she lowered her eyelids a moment in silence; the long lashes were dewy when she raised them.

“Why will you misunderstand me! You are so strong and powerful. I have known such unhappiness in my marriage—I mean, you have been from the first so kind when you rescued me at the station—I only want you to be happy. Forgive me if I seemed presumptuous and managing. Women are like that, you know, with men they—they admire and respect. Especially women who have known misfortune, perhaps, in—in love.”

Mollified, bewildered, but still sulky, he floundered deeper in confusion. “But suppose I don’t like the kind of women you keep throwing at my head! You and my mother.”

“Do you think of me as of your mother, dear Mr. Van Steed! Oh, that is sweet of you. But though I have seen so much of the world I am, after all, young and sympathetic and at least I hope—” She faltered, stopped.