 | CHAPTER XLVII.
EXORCISING A SON OF BELIAL. The Wetherel affair |  |
47. CHAPTER XLVII.
EXORCISING A SON OF BELIAL.
When Poloski entered the parlor Alice neither answered his bow nor evaded
his glance, but sat with burning cheeks and sparkling eyes, biting her lips
and tossing her foot and staring at him, an incarnation of frank, hearty, quivering,
feverish scorn and indignation.
For an instant the visitor of course supposed himself at home, and advanced
with proffered hand and his usual cordial show of glistening teeth, uttering
salutations and compliments to right and left. But when no hand was put
forth to take his, and when he saw that all present eyed him with unfriendliness,
he was perforce driven to guess that some event adverse to him had befallen.
The discovery seemed to startle him quite wonderfully; he became as
pale an “aristo” as a communist could wish to look upon.
“I do not understand this deportment,” he stammered, glancing hurriedly
from face to face. “I demand to know the meaning of this deportment.”
Edward Wetherel, with an imperious gesture which commanded the others
to be silent, advanced close to the noble foreigner and looked him instantaneously
out of countenance.
“Mr. Poloski, if that is your real name —” he began deliberately.
“Count Poloski, sir!” interrupted the Pole, making a spring to recover the
upper hand in the dialogue. “In view of this deportment I claim to be addressed
by my title.”
“It is my duty to charge you with an imposture,” continued Wetherel,
taking no notice of Poloski's reclamation. “You have betrothed yourself to a
young lady, my relative, under pretence of being a man of fortune, while you
were so utterly penniless and even without credit, that you were obliged to
charge your engagement presents, and even your own wedding outfit, to this
young lady's mother.”
“It is not so!” screamed the Count, turning from pale to crimson. “There
is some ridiculous error. I said to charge them to myself. Mrs. Dinneford,
I appeal to you, I protest to you, there is some error.”
“Six men would not make the same mistake,” Wetherel observed.
There have been six tradesmen here, all with bills against Mrs. Dinneford,
and all declaring that they presented them by your order.”
The Count swore in a whisper under his moustache, like a panther spitting
softly through his whiskers.
“Your engagement ring,” continued Wetherel, “all your betrothal presents,
the clothes you have on your back, the clothes you meant to be married
in, the trunks for the wedding journey, your new revolver, dirk, and sword-cane—we
got the bills for all of them a few minutes since, all charged to Mrs.
Dinneford.”
“It was a mistake, it was a mistake,” repeated Poloski. “I do assure you
solemnly, and upon my sacred honor, it was a stupid, cruel mistake.”
“Oh, I know it,” smiled his pitiless antagonist. “You ordered that these
accounts should be presented on the 27th, two days after the wedding, and they
arrived on the 24th, the day before it. That was the mistake.”
“I will not talk with you; I have nothing to do with you!” declared the
Count, turning his back on Edward and trying to subdue the women with a
glare; for though he was wretchedly cowed and even frightened, he still had
some spirit left. “I claim my rights. I demand my betrothed wife.”
“Go away, sir!” cried Mrs. Dinneford, rushing in front of her daughter.
She was really alarmed—had, as we remember, an old, native suspicion and
fear of foreigners; half expected to see the Pole grab up Alice and run out of
doors with her.
Poloski fell back and began to wheedle, bowing and extending his arms
deprecatingly, and beaming out with such smiles as he could get together in
his trouble. “Oh, my dear Mrs. Dinneford!” he implored. “How can you
behold in me an object of terror? I offer no violence; I menace no harm. I
but ask an interview with Miss Dinneford.”
By dint of dodging about he caught several glimpses of Alice's face, and
meanwhile he made her a series of short speeches, backing them up with
smiles and gestures.
“Miss Dinneford!” in a tone of reproach. “My dear Miss Dinneford!”
in a tone of entreaty, “Alice!” in a tone of romantic sweetness. “Will you
A chance to reassure you? Oh, for the sake of the vows we have interchanged,
give me one instant of interview!”
Alice continued to gnaw her lips without opening them. In this talkative
young lady silence was an unmistakable sign of extreme, ungovernable irritation
in the way of wrath. Mrs. Dinneford, who of course knew all her
daughter's moods, absolutely trembled at seeing her speechless, fearing lest
the next thing might be hysterics or some act of violence. “Edward! Edward!”
she called eagerly, at the same time signing Poloski away.
Wetherel advanced, and before him the Count retreated, halting, however,
near the door. There he surveyed his foes with a perplexed expression, obviously
very anxious to make his peace with them and reëstablish the engagement,
but quite as obviously doubtful whether he had best utter all that was
upon his mind. His eyes wandered; his lips parted and closed again several
times; he had something to say, and did not know how to put it.
“You must excuse me,” he began at last with an apologetical smile, “I
have to tell you one thing which it seems you know not. You are all laboring
under a social misapprehension. What I have done is not strange in Europe.
When a nobleman goes to espouse a—how shall I say it?—I mean no offence
—a bourgeoise—she always pays the bills. That is understood; that is the
bargain; everybody understands it so—that is, everybody in Europe. The nobleman
has rank and the bourgeoise has money; and they swap, as you Americans
say; they swap. She gives him her money and he gives her his rank.
I have known of many young nobles who have had all their wedding expenses
paid by their betrotheds when the latter were bourgeoises. It is nothing new
in Europe. It is understood.”
It may easily be guessed that Mrs. Dinneford and Alice were thunderstruck
by what seemed to them the outrageous insolence of this business-like
explanation. I do not know what they would have said if they could have
spoken; probably there would have been a scornful and angry outburst to the
effect that an American lady is the equal of any noble; but the lucky fact is
that they were stricken dumb, and so preserved their dignity by not uttering a
word. Edward answered for them, and not without a certain moderation and
considerateness of tone, for he was half inclined now to believe that he had a
real aristocrat before him, so patrician-like was the Count's cool assumption of
social superiority.
“You are quite right, Poloski,” he said. “You have stated the European
idea correctly. But it makes no difference. My relatives do not want an alliance
with you on such an understanding, or on any understanding. You
should not have acted in this matter covertly. As things are, you are a confessed
liar, and, I think I may add, swindler. Now go, and let us hear no
more of you.”
“A liar! a swindler!” grinned Poloski furiously, jumping forward three
inches or thereabouts. “But no!” he added, checking his mad career “You
know nothing of honor. You would call the police. You are a coward.”
“Go away and don't be noisy, or I shall call the police,” continued Wetherel
in a quiet, resolute voice.
“Ha!” hissed the Count, slowly retreating. “Call the police! You? A
murderer call the police! What a joke is that!”
Both men were ghastly white now, but Wetherel advanced and Poloski recoiled.
When the latter found himself in the hall he grappled up his hat,
himself into it, and, emboldened by this action of defiance, turned to blaze out
a last word.
“Revenge!” he shouted, in a style which italics, capitals, and exclamation
points can but faintly symbolize. “Revenge!! Revenge!!!”
It was such a salvo of menacing elocution as perhaps was never paralleled
before in real life, not even among the Count's own rhetorical countrymen.
We can only account in full for his preposterous emphasis by supposing that he
was familiar with our drama, and imagined that certain popular American actors
do really and truly hold the mirror up to American nature, and inferred
that, if he did not roar, his anger would not be believed in. It is a pity that
Miss Imogen Eleonore Jones could not have heard him; she would have found
in him a hero of the sort which she had learned to admire in the “Spasmodic”;
she would have joyed in such a rich and rare manifestation of the ideal.
Well, he had scarcely exploded ere he was gone, tearing open the street door,
skipping briskly out of it, slamming it behind him, and flying down the steps
as if he were exemplifying the chorus, “Rig a jig, jig, and away we go.”
When Wetherel reëntered the parlor, with an irrepressible smile of Anglo-Saxon
scorn on his lips, he found that Alice had leaped from her seat on the
sofa, and was gazing out of a window. She turned a flushed face toward him,
and asked in an eager, panting, way, “Did you kick him out, Edward?”
“No,” replied the young man, wondering if he had come short of the girl's
expectations. “He seemed to kick himself out. He went off like a shilling
cannon, loaded to the muzzle. He gave a great bang in one direction and
vanished like lightning in the other.”
“Oh, how I hate him!” burst out Alice, thoroughly disgusted with her discharged
lover and with herself. A moment later she began to cry violently—
an altogether bewildered and hysterical and nearly demented young lady,
beset at once by grief, humiliation, anger, and no one can tell what other emotions.
“Dear me, if the brazen nature of sin hasn't been uncovered and revealed
to-day most wonderfully!” exclaimed and moralized Mrs. Dinneford, as she
led Alice away to her bedroom to administer soothing and repose. “I really
thought, in my simplicity, that fraud and lying and all wickedness were mistrustful
and timorous and shamefaced, fearing the eye of the upright and the
injured. And here I have seen a son of Belial as bold as if he were the lion
of the tribe of Judah. I do believe that that impostor would have the front to
walk into the New Jerusalem and claim the highest saintly throne there, and
put a crown on his head and go to singing.”
After the two women had retired, Wetherel turned to Lehming and observed,
“Apparently this battle is won.”
“You have won it,” replied the meek and gentle manikin. “I have done
nothing. I have no nerve for combats. Do you know that I actually pitied
that exposed swindler, and could hardly look in his degraded, wretched face?”
“I have not done with him,” said Wetherel. “He must be followed up
and driven out of New York society, before he victimizes another innocent.”
“Of course,” nodded Lehming. “And, by the way, perhaps a word more
may be needed here to keep our friends from readmitting him. You know
that, after Diabolus was chased out of the city of Mansoul, he got in again.
You must be monitor to the Dinnefords, and make them promise not to let Poloski
into the house; for if he once gets a chance to lick them with his slimy
must go.”
He was anxious to get back to his lodgings and see to the safety of Nestoria.
Of late he was always troubled about her when she was out of his sight,
imagining that she had been discovered by the police, or had been suddenly
frightened into running away, or in some other way had stumbled down the
steeps of calamity. We must understand that she had by this time grown terribly
precious to him, and had become the centre and cause of nearly all his
thoughts and emotions.
Quitting the Dinneford house, he made for Fourth avenue at the best pace
permissible to his shortness of limb and of breath, and jumped into a street
car which was humming and droning, like a huge, slow bumblebee, in the direction
of his lodgings. From time to time the heavy vehicle halted, or perhaps
only slackened its lumbering jog, to take on or put off other passengers.
He was moralizing over the matter; he was saying to himself that this was
like the great chariot of human life, every second souls born into it and souls
dying out of it, yet the chariot always full and seemingly of much the same
people; he was thinking of these things in his imaginative, tender, serious
way, when two persons in the car suddenly aroused his earnest attention.
One of them was his fellow lodger, Imogen Eleonore Jones, and the other was
that no doubt useful but not altogether agreeable official, Mr. Sweet.
What startled Lehming was the fact that these two individuals appeared to
have some understanding; either they knew each other already, or they were
in a state of mind to strike up an acquaintance; at all events they exchanged
frequent and interested glances. If they were intimates, or if they should become
such, would Nestoria's secret remain hidden? Would it not tumble out
of Miss Jones's shallow “bread-basket” into the dangerous hands of detective
Sweet?
| CHAPTER XLVII.
EXORCISING A SON OF BELIAL. The Wetherel affair | |