The Wetherel affair :: :: University of Virginia Library

“Oh, Count Poloski!” she added, with a hearty laugh as the two men
clambered the face of the little bluff and reached her side. “Who could have
imagined meeting you here! Isn't this romantie! Isn't it bully!” she paraphrased,
remembering the Count's appetite for slang. “Did you sail all the
way from Newport? Where do you hail from and where are you bound?”

Like a youthful veteran in flirtations, as she was, she was not a bit embarrassed,
much less frightened.

“I have hailed from clouds of despair and I am bound in chains of admiration,”
replied Poloski, somewhat elaborately polite and complimentary, as
continental Europeans are apt to be in our judgment.

Alice laughed again very merrily, immensely amused with his turn of her
inquiry, and amused too with the situation.

“I know, I know,” she said. “You are always in chains for every lady
you see. I thought you were at Newport, worshipping a hundred of them.”

“I was at Newport,” admitted the Count, with a look which seemed to cast
scorn upon the place. “But how could I stay at Newport when Miss Dinneford
was not there?”

“Oh, of course you couldn't,” declared Alice with renewed laughter.
“Who could? Of course the men are leaving Newport by hundreds because
I am not there. Oh, Count, how you gentlemen from Europe do flatter! You
tell us simple American girls all the fine things that you used to tell the grand
ladies of all the courts. And some of us believe every word you say.”

She laughed at his compliments, and yet she was gratified by them; she
laughed at the man himself, and yet she liked to have him about her; was he
not an admirer, and was he not a noble? While Poloski was fishing in the
depths of his fancy for another scrap of adulation, she turned to her relative
with a graver air than she had worn hitherto, and asked, “Where are you
staying, Cousin Edward?”

“At Brown's, on the other side of the bay,” he said. “The Count and Mr

Frank Wolverton are with me. We thought we could amuse ourselves there
for a while. How is your mother?”

“She is very well, thank you,” the girl replied mechanically. “Always
well and in good spirits, you know.”

“And my uncle?” he added after a pause.

“As usual,” she said. It was not easy for her to talk with Edward on that
subject. In the first place, it suddenly occurred to her that if the strict and
prudent old gentleman should hear of her being out alone with her present
company, he would not take the adventure in an approving spirit. Furthermore,
she knew of the family quarrel; and she guessed that there might be a
last will and testament of a retributive character; a will, possibly, that would
lead Edward some day to denounce her and her mother as unprincipled and
grasping intriguers.

“Are you coming to see him?” she faltered.

“Some day I may venture,” he replied moodily.

“Will you!” she exclaimed cheerfully; for she was not selfish, knowing indeed
too little of the value of money to be greedy about it; and she would
have been heartily glad of a reconciliation between the young man and the
old one, even though it cost her much filthy lucre. “I wish you would,” she
added. “Mamma and I will do our best to make the visit pleasant to you.”

“You are a good cousin,” said Edward, taking her hand and pressing it.

This unexpected praise, uttered in such a moving tone of honest thanks,
brought a little flash of moisture into the girl's eyes. She was profoundly
gratified that her generosity of feeling had been understood and appreciated.
Light-headed trifler as she was, there was a solid foundation of goodness and
kindness in her, discoverable to serious souls by dint of happy accident or severe
delving. Perhaps we may venture to affirm that every woman has as
many characters as a cat has lives.

Her utterance of friendship brought her a reward which she had not desired
and for which she was not thankful. Wetherel had intended to give her a little
season of lovely flirtation with Poloski; he had been mean enough and
hard enough to decide that she might fall a victim, if she chose, to the fellow's
fortune hunting blandishments; but now his finer feelings and moralities recovered
their power, and he decided to watch over her. Seating himself on a
bowlder, with his face toward the shining of the sea, he said, “Go on with your
talk about Newport, you two, and don't mind a dull fellow who wants to
mope.”

“Miss Alice, when you speak of courts, you speak of your own proper
sphere,” put in the Count, who had at last discovered the compliment for
which he had been searching. “I should be most glad to see you in regal circles.
I should take high pleasure in introducing you. It would give me the
greatest satisfaction to behold your triumphs over all those ladies that we have
to pay our compliments to when we are at home.”

“Oh, don't!” said Alice, who was still thinking of the Wetherel imbroglio,
and could not at once recover her frolicsomeness. “You are piling up the
agony a little too high, as the comic men in the newspapers express it.”

“Piling up the agony!” echoed the rejoiced Count. “That is another
slang, isn't it? How expressive it is, and diverting! Yes, Miss Dinneford, I
will pile up the agony; I will pile it up as high as the clouds. My heart shall
be crushed under it.”

Alice could be grave no longer; she shouted with laughter.

“You mustn't do it,” she said. “It would be too painful to contemplate.
There wouldn't be a dry eye on earth.”

“But I must,” persisted Poloski enthusiastically. “It is in my nature to
do it. And it is in yours to—to——”

“To grin and bear it,” suggested Alice.

“Another slang!” fairly yelled the delighted nobleman and linguist.
“What a language! It is so rich, so flashing, that it makes me wink. This
English tongue is one vast orientalism. It is one tangled forest of metaphor.
I have written a work on the Migrations of Metaphor, which was published in
German by order of the Imperial Society of Vienna. I will give you a beautiful
copy of it, Miss Alice.”

“Don't fail,” urged Alice, who did not understand a word of German, and
never read anything more solid than a book of travels.

After a short silence Poloski added, with a mazed and helpless expression
of countenance, “I have forgot what I was wanting to say.”

“You were talking about your great work,” suggested the young lady.

“No, no; it was not that. Ah, I remember. Your nature. You did not
let me conclude. I was going to say it was in your nature to make men pile
up the agony. And then comes the question, What shall they do? How
shall they be relieved?”

“Why, let them go up to the top of their respective agonies and jump off,”
laughed the girlish trifler.

“Capital!” roared the Count. “It is true; there is no other escape; and
now, see me, I shall jump off,” he concluded, swinging his arms as if he were
about to leap into the harbor.

“Oh, do stop him,” laughed Alice, almost in convulsions. “I shall have
hysterics in a minute. Count Poloski, you will certainly get a tumble if you
are not more careful, and then all the fashionable watering-places will cry
their eyes out.”

At this moment Edward asked, “Who is that up the beach, Alice?”

Miss Dinneford uttered a little cry. “Dear me! And I have left her alone
all this time. The darling little dove will fly back to Mount Ararat.”

“Is it Miss Bernard?” continued Wetherel, rising and facing toward the
dimly seen figure. “I wondered you should be out without her. But I supposed
she was dutifully reading the `Puritan Recorder' to the elder people.”

“And you didn't like to ask about her because you wanted so much to hear.
I understand the timorous ways of young gentlemen. But how well you know
her! She does read the `Puritan Recorder' to the elder people. Isn't she a
good, dear little thing? I think her queer name just suits her. Nestoria—
isn't it odd—and pretty?”

“What is Nestoria?” put in the Count.

“A visitor and friend of mine,” explained Alice. “And, oh, such a perfect
little angelic beauty!”

“Is she rich?” eagerly queried the noble foreigner.

“No,” petulantly responded Miss Dinneford, turning cool at once. “What
a question to ask about a good, lovely girl!”

“It is a pity,” persisted Poloski, firm in his own opinion concerning the
desirableness of lucre. “Every beauty deserves to be rich. A philosopher
desires to see completeness. It is a shame to fortune when a beauty cannot
dress beautifully. What did you say is her queer name?”

“Nestoria.”

“There is a people called Nestorians,” commented the omniscient Count.
“I wrote an Inquiry into the Origin of the Nestorians. I will give it to you
some day.”

“Where are you going?” called Alice to Wetherel, who was strolling
away.

“He is going to make an inquiry into the Nestorian future,” simpered the
gallant Poloski, even more ready than a woman to suspect a courtship.

Edward could not resist the temptation of an interview with Nestoria. Indeed,
he never even thought of trying to resist it; fighting temptation was not
his favorite spiritual warfare; if he could be said to fight at all it was on the
side of desire. A creature of impulse, he rarely asked himself whether a thing
were right or wrong, but simply whether it would be pleasant and easy to do;
and if it so seemed, he did it. It was lucky for him that his impulses were in
general not such as the world has agreed to consider inhuman, degraded, and
dishonorable. It was not moral principle and not self-control, it was merely
an innate kindliness and that species of moral culture which is called a sense
of honor, that had saved him from being a violator of laws and a criminal.
He had a sort of conscience, but its main strength lay in self-respect and in
respect for the name of Wetherel, and its boundaries of action were neither
large nor well defined. He had also profound possibilities of moral and sentimental
energy; but those abysses had never yet been stirred into action by
either events or teachings.

We see what he was now doing, and how impulsively he set about it.
Neither his speaking to Nest ria nor his leaving Alice with the Count was
likely to conduce to good, and either might bring about trouble and evil. But
he did not reflect upon that; he simply followed his inclination.

“I am going to talk to Miss Bernard,” he said over his shoulder. “You
two can come on at your leisure.”

The flighty Alice fluttered a moment, seemed to be upon the point of following
him, and at last, entangled by her love of flirtation and frolic, loitered.

“Tell her I will be with her in a minute,” she called, and then turned a
coquettish smile upon the joyful face of the fortune-hunting Poloski.

Thus it happened that Edward Wetherel, striding hastily through the deep,
noiseless sand, came unseen and unheard upon Nestoria.