Frances Waldeaux, by Rebecca Harding Davis
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Rebecca Davis >> Frances Waldeaux, by Rebecca Harding Davis
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8 A REMEMBRANCER
OF
BRITTANY
FOR THE BEST FELLOW-TRAVELLER
IN THE WORLD
FRANCES WALDEAUX
----
CHAPTER I
In another minute the Kaiser Wilhelm would push off
from her pier in Hoboken. The last bell had rung, the
last uniformed officer and white-jacketed steward had
scurried up the gangway. The pier was massed with people
who had come to bid their friends good-by. They were all
Germans, and there had been unlimited embracing and
kissing and sobs of "Ach! mein lieber Sckatz!" and
"Gott bewahre Dick!"
Now they stood looking up to the crowded decks, shouting
out last fond words. A band playing "The Merry Maiden
and the Tar" marched on board.
The passengers pressed against the rails, looking down.
Almost every one held flowers which had been brought to
them: not costly bouquets, but homely bunches of
marigolds or pinks. They carried, too, little German
or American flags, which they waved frantically.
The gangways fell, and the huge ship parted from the
dock. It was but an inch, but the whole ocean yawned in
it between those who went and those who stayed. There
was a sudden silence; a thousand handkerchiefs fluttered
white on the pier and the flags and flowers were waved on
the ship, but there was not a cry nor a sound.
James Perry, one of the dozen Americans on board, was
leaning over the rail watching it all with an amused
smile. "Hello, Watts!" he called, as another young man
joined him. "Going over? Quite dramatic, isn't it? It
might be a German ship going out of a German port. The
other liners set off in as commonplace a way as a Jersey
City ferryboat, but these North German Lloyd ships always
sail with a certain ceremony and solemnity. I like it."
"I always cross on them," said Dr. Watts. "I have but a
month's vacation--two weeks on board ship, two on land.
Now you, I suppose, don't have to count your days?
You cross every year. I can't see, for my part, what
business the assistant editor of a magazine has abroad."
"Oh, we make a specialty of articles from notorieties
over there; statesmen, scientific fellows, or people with
titles. I expect to capture a paper from Lorne and some
sketches by the Princess Beatrice this time."
"Lorne? It throws you into contact with that sort of
folk, eh?" said the doctor, looking at him enviously.
"How do they strike you, Jem?"
"Well," said Perry importantly, "well-bred people are the
same the world over. I only see them in a business way,
of course, but one can judge. Their voices are better
than ours, but as to looks--no! It's queer, but American
women--the wives and daughters of saddlers or farmers,
perhaps--have more often the patrician look than English
duchesses. Now there, for example," warming to the
subject, "that woman to whom you bowed just now, the
middle-aged one in blue cloth. Some Mrs. Smith or Pratt,
probably. A homely woman, but there is a distinction in
her face, a certain surety of good breeding, which is
lacking in the heavy-jawed English royalties."
"Yes; that is a friend of mine," said Watts.
She is a Mrs. Waldeaux from Wier, in Delaware. You could
hardly call her a typical American woman. Old French
emigre family. Probably better blood than the Coburgs
a few generations back. That priggish young fellow is
her son. Going to be an Episcopalian minister."
Mr. Perry surveyed his friend's friends good-humoredly.
"Brand new rugs and cushions," he said. "First voyage.
Heavens! I wish it were my first voyage, and that I had
their appetite for Europe."
"You might as well ask for your relish of the bread and
butter of your youth," said Watts.
The two men leaned lazily against the bulwark watching
the other passengers who were squabbling about trunks.
Mr. Perry suddenly stood upright as a group of women
passed.
"Do you know who that girl is?" he said eagerly. "The
one who looked back at us over her shoulder."
"No. They are only a lot of school-girls, personally
conducted. That is the teacher in front."
"Of course, I see that. But the short, dark one--surely
I know that woman."
The doctor looked after her. "She looks like a dog
turning into a human being," he said leisurely. "One
often sees such cases of arrested evolution. D'ye see?
Thick lips, coarse curls, flat nostrils----"
Perry laughed. "The eyes, anyhow, are quite human," he
said. "They challenge the whole world of men. I can't
place her!" staring after her, perplexed. "I really
don't believe I ever saw her before. Yet her face brings
up some old story of a tragedy or crime to me."
"Nonsense! The girl is not twenty. Very fetching with
all her vulgarity, though. Steward, send some coffee to
my stateroom. Let's go down, Jem. The fog is too
chilly."
Frances Waldeaux did not find the fog chilly. She had
been thinking for thirty years of the day when she should
start to Europe--ever since she could think at all.
This was the day. It was like no other, now that it
had come. The fog, the crowd, the greasy smells of the
pier, all familiar enough yesterday, took on a certain
remoteness and mystery. It seemed to her that she was
doing something which nobody had ever done before. She
was going to discover the Old World.
The New was not more tremendous or unreal before the eyes
of Columbus when he, too, stood on the poop of his ship.
Her son was arguing with the deck steward about chairs.
"Now, mother," he said at last, "it's all right. They
are under cover so that the glare will not strain your
eyes, and we can keep dry while we watch the storms."
"How did you know about it all? One would think you had
crossed a dozen times, George."
"Oh, I've studied the whole thing up thoroughly," George
said, with a satisfied little nod. "I've had time
enough! Why, when I was in petticoats you used to tell
me you would buy a ship and we would sail away together.
You used to spoil all my school maps with red lines,
drawing our routes."
"Yes. And now we're going!" said Frances to herself.
He sat down beside her and they watched the unending
procession of passengers marching around the deck.
George called her attention by a wink to any picturesque
or queer figure that passed. He liked to watch her quiet
brown eyes gleam with fun. Nobody had such a keen sense
of the ridiculous as his mother. Sometimes, at the mere
remembrance of some absurd idea, she would go off into
soft silent paroxysms of laughter until the tears would
stream down her cheeks.
George was fond and proud of his childish little mother.
He had never known any body, he thought, so young or so
transparent. It was easily understood. She had married
at sixteen, and had been left a widow little more than a
year afterward. "And I," he used to think, "was born
with an old head on my shoulders; so we have grown up
together. I suppose the dear soul never had a thought in
her life which she has not told me."
As they sat together a steward brought Mrs. Waldeaux a
note, which she read, blushing and smiling.
"The captain invites us to sit at his table," she said,
when the man was gone.
"Very proper in the captain," said George complacently.
"You see, Madam Waldeaux, even the men who go down in
ships have heard of you and your family!"
"I don't believe the captain ever heard of me," she said,
after a grave consideration," nor of the Waldeaux. It is
much more likely that he has read your article in the
Quarterly, George."
"Nonsense!" But he stiffened himself up consciously.
He had sent a paper on some abstruse point of sociology
to the Quarterly last spring, and it had aroused quite
a little buzz of criticism. His mother had regarded it
very much as the Duchess of Kent did the crown when it
was set upon her little girl's head. She always had
known that her child was born to reign, but it was
satisfactory to see this visible sign of it.
She whispered now, eagerly leaning over to him. "There
was something about that paper which I never told you.
I think I'll tell you now that the great day has come."
"Well?"
"Why, you know--I never think of you as my son, or a man,
or anything outside of me--not at all. You are just
ME, doing the things I should have done if I had not
been a woman. Well,"--she drew her breath
quickly,--"when I was a girl it seemed as if there was
something in me that I must say, so I tried to write
poems. No, I never told you before. It had counted for
so much to me I could not talk of it. I always sent them
to the paper anonymously, signed `Sidney.' Oh, it was
long--long ago! I've been dumb, as you might say, for
years. But when I read your article, George--do you know
if I had written it I should have used just the phrases
you did? And you signed it `Sidney'!" She watched him
breathlessly. "That was more than a coincidence, don't
you think? I AM dumb, but you speak for me now. It is
because we are just one. Don't you think so, George?"
She held his arm tightly.
Young Waldeaux burst into a loud laugh. Then he took her
hand in his, stroking it. "You dear little woman! What
do you know of sociology?" he said, and then walked
away to hide his amusement, muttering "Poems? Great
Heavens!"
Frances looked after him steadily. "Oh, well!" she said
to herself presently.
She forced her mind back to the Quarterly article. It
was a beginning of just the kind of triumph that she
always had expected for him. He would soon be recognized
by scientific men all over the world as their confrere,
especially after his year's study at Oxford.
When George was in his cradle she had planned that he
should be a clergyman, just as she had planned that he
should be a well-bred man, and she had fitted him for
both roles in life, and urged him into them by the same
unceasing soft pats and pushes. She would be delighted
when she saw him in white robes serving at the altar.
Not that Frances had ever taken her religion quite
seriously. It was like her gowns, or her education, a
matter of course; a trustworthy, agreeable part of her.
She had never once in her life shuddered at a glimpse of
any vice in herself, or cried to God in agony, even to
grant her a wish.
But she knew that Robert Waldeaux's son would be
safer in the pulpit. He could take rank with scholars
there, too.
She inspected him now anxiously, trying to see him with
the eyes of these Oxford magnates. Nobody would guess
that he was only twenty-two. The bald spot on his crown
and the spectacles gave him a scholastic air, and the
finely cut features and a cold aloofness in his manner
spoke plainly, she thought, of his good descent and high
pursuits.
Frances herself had a drop of vagabond blood which found
comrades for her among every class and color. But there
was not an atom of the tramp in her son's well-built and
fashionably clothed body. He never had had a single
intimate friend even when he was a boy. He will probably
find his companions among the great English scholars,"
she thought complacently. Of course she would always be
his only comrade, his chum. She continually met and
parted with thousands of people--they came and went.
"But George and I will be together for all time," she
told herself.
He came up presently and sat down beside her, with an
anxious, apologetic air. It hurt him to think that he
had laughed at her. "That dark haze is the Jersey
shore," he said. "How dim it grows! Well, we are really
out now in the big world! It is so good to be alone
there with you," he added, touching her arm
affectionately. "Those cynical old-men-boys at Harvard
bored me."
"I don't bore you, then, George?"
"You!" He was very anxious to make her forget his
roughness. "Apart from my affection for you, mother," he
said judicially, "I LIKE you. I approve of you as I
never probably shall approve of another woman. Your
peculiarities--the way your brown hair ripples back into
that knot "--surveying her critically. "And the way you
always look as if you had just come out of a bath, even
on a grimy train; and your gowns, so simple--and rich.
I confess," he said gravely, "I can't always follow your
unsteady little ideas when you talk. They frisk about
so. It is the difference probably between the man's mind
and the woman's. Besides, we have been separated for so
many years! But I soon will understand you. I know that
while you keep yourself apart from all the world you open
your heart to me."
"Wrap the rug about my feet, George," she said
hastily, and then sent him away upon an errand, looking
after him uneasily.
It was very pleasant to hear her boy thus formally sum up
his opinion of her. But when he found that it was based
upon a lie?
For Frances, candid enough to the world, had deceived her
son ever since he was born.
George had always believed that she had inherited a
fortune from his father. It gave solidity and comfort to
his life to think of her in the stately old mansion on
the shores of Delaware Bay, with nothing to do except to
be beautiful and gracious, as befitted a well-born woman.
It pleased him, in a lofty, generous way, that his father
(whom she had taught him to reverence as the most
chivalric of gentlemen) had left him wholly dependent
upon her. It was a legal fiction, of course. He was the
heir--the crown prince. He had always been liberally
supplied with money at school and at Harvard. Her income
was large. No doubt the dear soul mismanaged the estates
fearfully, but now he would have leisure to take care of
them.
Now, the fact was that Colonel Waldeaux had been a
drunken spendthrift who had left nothing. The house and
farm always had belonged to his wife. She had supported
George by her own work all of his life. She could not
save money, but she had the rarer faculty of making it.
She had raised fine fruit and flowers for the
Philadelphia market; she had traded in high breeds of
poultry and cattle, and had invested her earnings
shrewdly. With these successes she had been able to
provide George with money to spend freely at college.
She lived scantily at home, never expecting any luxury or
great pleasure to come into her own life.
But two years ago a queer thing had happened to her. In
an idle hour she wrote a comical squib and sent it to a
New York paper. As everybody knows, fun, even vulgar
fun, sells high in the market. Her fun was not vulgar,
but coarse and biting enough to tickle the ears of the
common reader. The editor offered her a salary equal to
her whole income for a weekly column of such fooling.
She had hoarded every penny of this money. With it she
meant to pay her expenses in Europe and to support George
in his year at Oxford. The work and the salary were
to go on while she was gone.
It was easy enough to hide all of these things from her
son while he was in Cambridge and she in Delaware. But
now? What if he should find out that his mother was the
Quigg" of the New York ----, a paper which he declared to
be unfit for a gentleman to read?
She was looking out to sea and thinking of this when her
cousin, Miss Vance, came up to her. Miss Vance was a
fashionable teacher in New York, who was going to spend
a year abroad with two wealthy pupils. She was a thin
woman, quietly dressed; white hair and black brows, with
gold eye-glasses bridging an aquiline nose, gave her a
commanding, inquisitorial air.
"Well, Frances!" she began briskly, "I have not had time
before to attend to you. Are your bags hung in your
stateroom?"
"I haven't been down yet," said Mrs. Waldeaux meekly.
"We were watching the fog in the sun."
"Fog! Mercy on me! You know you may be ill any minute,
and your room not ready! Of course, you did not take
the bromides that I sent you a week ago?
"No, Clara."
Miss Vance glanced at her. "Well, just as you please.
I've done what I could. Let me look at your itinerary.
You will be too ill for me to advise you about it later."
"Oh, we made none!" said George gayly, coming up to his
mother's aid. "We are going to be vagabonds, and have no
plans. Mother's soul draws us to York Cathedral, and
mine to the National Gallery. That is all we know."
"I thought you had given up that whim of being an
artist?" said Miss Vance, sharply facing on him.
Young Waldeaux reddened. "Yes, I have given it up. I
know as well as you do that I have no talent. I am going
to study my profession at Oxford, and earn my bread by
it."
"Quite right. You never would earn it by art," she said
decisively. "How long do you stay in York, Frances?"
"Oh, a day, or a month--or--years, as we please," said
Frances, lazily turning her head away. She wanted to set
Clara Vance down in her proper place. Mrs. Waldeaux
abhorred cousinly intimates--people who run into your
back door to pry into the state of your larder or your
income. But Miss Vance, as Frances knew, unfortunately
held a key to her back door. She knew of George's
wretched daubs, and his insane desire, when he was a boy,
to study art. He gave it up years ago. Why should she
nag him now about it? By virtue of her relationship she
knew, too, all of Mrs. Waldeaux's secrets. It was most
unfortunate that she should have chosen to sail on this
vessel.
"Well, mother," George said, uneasy to get away, "no
doubt Miss Vance is right. We should set things in
order. I am going now to give my letter of credit to the
purser to lock up; shall I take yours?"
Mrs. Waldeaux did not reply at once. "No," she said at
last. "I like to carry my own purse."
He smiled indulgently as on a child. "Of course, dear.
It IS your own. My father was wise in that. But, on
this journey, I can act as your paymaster, can't I? I
have studied foreign money----"
"We shall see. I can keep it as safe as any purser now,"
she said, obstinately shaking her head.
He laughed and walked away.
"You have not told him, then?" demanded Clara.
"No. And I never will. I will not hurt the boy by
letting him know that his mother has supported him, and
remember, Clara, that he can only hear it through you.
Nobody knows that I am `Quigg' but you."
Miss Vance lifted her eyebrows. "Nothing can need a
lie," she quoted calmly. Presently she said earnestly,
"Frances, you are making a mistake. Somebody ought to
tell you the truth. There is no reason why your whole
being should be buried in that man. He should stand on
his own feet, now. You can be all that he needs as a
mother, and yet live out your own life. It is broader
than his will ever be. At your age, and with your
capabilities, you should marry again. Think of the many
long years that are before you."
"I have thought of them," said Mrs. Waldeaux slowly. "I
have had lovers who came close to me as friends, but I
never for a moment was tempted to marry one of them.
No, Clara. When the devil drove my father to hand me
over--innocent child as I was--to a man like Robert
Waldeaux, he killed in me the capacity for that kind of
love. It is not in me." She turned her strenuous face
to the sea and was silent. "It is not in me," she
repeated after a while. "I have but one feeling, and
that is for my boy. It is growing on me absurdly, too."
She laughed nervously. "I used to be conscious of other
people in the world, but now, if I see a boy or man, I
see only what George was or will be at his age; if I read
a book, it only suggests what George will say of it. I
am like one of those plants that have lost their own sap
and color, and suck in their life from another. It
scares me sometimes."
Miss Vance smiled with polite contempt. No doubt Frances
had a shrewd business faculty, but in other matters she
was not ten years old.
"And George will marry some time," she said curtly.
"Oh, I hope so! And soon. Then I shall have a daughter.
I know just the kind of a wife George will choose,"
she chattered on eagerly. "I understand him so
thoroughly that I can understand her. But where could he
find her? He is so absurdly fastidious!"
Miss Vance was silent and thoughtful a moment. Then she
came closer. "I will tell you where to find her," she
said, in a low voice. "I have thought of it for a long
time. It seems to me that Providence actually made Lucy
Dunbar for George."
"Really?" Mrs. Waldeaux drew her self up stiffly.
"Wait, Frances. Lucy has been with me for three years.
I know her. She is a sincere, modest, happy little
thing. Not too clever. She is an heiress, too. And her
family is good; and all underground, which is another
advantage. You can mould her as you choose. She loves
you already."
"Or is it that she----?"
"You have no right to ask that!" said Miss Vance quickly.
"No, I am ashamed of myself." Mrs. Waldeaux reddened.
A group of girls came up the deck. Both women scanned
the foremost one critically. "I like that wholesome,
candid look of her," said Miss Vance.
"Oh, she is well enough," said Frances. "But I am sure
George does not like yellow hair. Nothing but an
absolutely beautiful woman will attract him."
"An artist," said Miss Vance hastily, "would tell you her
features were perfect. And her flesh tints----"
"For Heaven's sake, Clara, don't dissect the child. Who
is that girl with the red cravat? Your maid?"
"It is not a cravat, it's an Indian scarf. If it only
were clean----" Miss Vance looked uneasy and perplexed.
"She is not my maid. She is Fraulein Arpent. The Ewalts
brought her as governess from Paris, don't you remember?
They sent the girls to Bryn Mawr last week and turned her
adrift, almost penniless. She wished to go back to
France. I engaged her as assistant chaperone for the
season."
Mrs. Waldeaux's eyebrows went up significantly. She
never commented in words on the affairs of others, but
her face always was indiscreet. George, who had come up
in time to hear the last words, was not so
scrupulous. He surveyed the young woman through his
spectacles as she passed again, with cold disapproval.
"French or German?" he asked.
"I really don't know. She has a singular facility in
tongues," said Miss Vance.
"Well, that is not the companion _I_ should have chosen
for those innocent little girls," he said
authoritatively, glad to be disagreeable to his cousin.
"She looks like a hawk among doves."
"The woman is harmless enough," said Miss Vance tartly.
"She speaks exquisite French."
"But what does she say in it?" persisted George. "She is
vulgar from her red pompon to her boots. She has the
swagger of a soubrette and she has left a trail of
perfume behind her--pah! I confess I am surprised at
you, Miss Vance. You do not often slip in your
judgment."
"Don't make yourself unpleasant, George," said his mother
gently. Miss Vance smiled icily, and as the girls came
near again, stopped them and stood talking to Mlle.
Arpent with an aggressive show of familiarity.
"Why do you worry Clara?" said Mrs. Waldeaux. "She
knows she has made a mistake. What do you think of that
little blonde girl?" she asked presently, watching him
anxiously. "She has remarkable beauty, certainly; but
there is something finical--precise----"
"Take care. She will hear you," said George. "Beauty,
eh? Oh, I don't know," indifferently. "She is passably
pretty. I have never seen a woman yet whose beauty
satisfied ME."
Mrs. Waldeaux leaned back with a comfortable little
laugh. "But you must not be so hard to please, my son.
You must bring me my daughter soon," she said.
"Not very soon. I have some thing else to think of than
marriage for the next ten years."
Just then Dr. Watts came up and asked leave to present
his friend Perry. The doctor, like all young men who
knew Mrs. Waldeaux, had succumbed to her peculiar charm,
which was only that of a woman past her youth who had
strong personal magnetism and not a spark of coquetry.
George's friends all were sure that they would fall in
love with a woman just like her--but not a man of
them ever thought of falling in love with her.
Young Perry, in twenty minutes, decided that she was the
most brilliant and agreeable of companions. He had
talked, and she had spoken only with her listening,
sympathetic eyes. He was always apt to be voluble. On
this occasion he was too voluble.
"You are from Weir, I think, in Delaware, Mrs. Waldeaux?"
he asked. "I must have seen the name of the town with
yours on the list of passengers, for the story of a woman
who once lived there has been haunting me all day. I
have not seen nor thought of her for years, and I could
not account for my sudden remembrance of her."
"Who was she?" asked George, trying to save his mother
from Perry, who threatened to be a bore.
"Her name was Pauline Felix. You have heard her story,
Mrs. Waldeaux?"
"Yes" said Frances coldly. "I have heard her story. Can
you find my shawl, George?"
But Perry was conscious of no rebuff, and turned
cheerfully to George. "It was one of those dramas of
real life, too unlikely to put into a novel. She was
the daughter of a poor clergyman in Weir, a devout, good
man, I believe. She had marvellous beauty and a devilish
disposition. She ran away, lived a wild life in Paris,
and became the mistress of a Russian Grand Duke. Her
death----"
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