Hugh Benton had lost no time (nor had the widow allowed him, for that matter) after obtaining his divorce decree, in marrying Geraldine DeLacy. Some of their intimates, many of the more conservative element or the society in which they moved, believed that the marriage had occurred indecently soon after Marjorie had been put aside. But in general society let them alone to go their own way. Shoulders were raised eloquently in a few quarters, in others the names of Hugh Benton and the former Mrs. DeLacy were quietly erased from invitation lists, but the scandal was (as is so often the case among the busy four or five thousand who were once four hundred) not long in giving place to something more recent. Society was beginning to yawn when the name of Benton was mentioned.
The financier, happy in the possession of the woman with whom he was so deeply infatuated; his new wife, elated at the good fortune she had so triumphantly maneuvered, apparently cared not a whit for what society might say. Knowing most of them as she did, Geraldine DeLacy Benton smiled knowingly into her dressing table mirror, as she told herself that all would come in good time. With Hugh Benton’s money at her command, she was more than willing to wait her time to take the social leadership she felt so confidently would be hers before long.
Only Elinor was dissatisfied. The freedom she had been so happy over having had not brought her the joy she had expected it to. Even before leaving for Europe with her father and newly acquired step-mother, she had felt the sting of disapproval, and it had only made her more misanthropic than she was already speedily becoming. She could not help noticing that many of her own friends were avoiding her. Invitations were noticeably scarce. But it was some time before she took notice of this, since, in her new freedom, she had taken to visiting the more public tea and dance rooms in company with her various admirers, all of whom seemed to flock around her more than ever, in contradistinction to the cooling ardor for her friendship of their sisters and mothers. It was not until she met Rosebud Greely in the Plaza one afternoon that the truth of the matter was brought home to her, though. Elinor touched the girl on the arm as Rosebud passed through the aisle on her way to a table on the other side of the room, where her mother and some friends were sitting.
“Hello, Rosebud!” she greeted. “I’ve been waiting and waiting for you to come and see my new quarters. Come down to the hotel and have tea with me to-morrow, won’t you?”
Rosebud Greeley, usually so open, so ready for anything, was noticeably uncomfortable. She cast a furtive glance across the room toward her mother.
“ ’Fraid I can’t, Elinor,” she said nervously. “The mater—you know——”
Elinor lifted surprised eyebrows.
“Why, what can she have against me?” was her hurt query.
Rosebud shook her head and turned to hurry along. But the hurt look in Elinor’s eyes touched the girl’s tender heart, and she gently brushed Elinor Benton’s arm. “Don’t you worry, old dear,” she advised. “It’ll all blow over—it’s so silly anyhow—but you must know what everyone is saying because you’re flying around unchaperoned, and you know my mater. Just the same, I wish I could do what you’re doing for a while!” She took Elinor in enviously and nodded her head toward the table the Benton heiress had left where a blasé youth was sitting waiting for her. “Try to see you some more, some time. Bye!”
Elinor could hardly realize it. So they were saying things about her, were they? Well, she’d show them! Her father——
She could hardly get out of the place quickly enough to tell him. With head held haughtily high, she left the tea room, looking neither to right nor left at the many she knew who were seeing her. But her cheeks flamed hotly as instinct told her she was the subject of conversation at more than one table that she swept by.
Hugh Benton was sympathetic and gentle as he had been since Elinor had chosen to go with him. But he did not take the matter as seriously as she had thought he should. There were matters on his own mind clamoring for attention. One of these was that he had not told his daughter of his intended marriage to Geraldine DeLacy—for the incident of the Plaza tea had occurred before Elinor had any idea her father contemplated re-marriage. Elinor had known, of course, of his infatuation for the widow, and that she had been the cause of the differences between her father and mother. Equally, of course, she had heard much of the gossip concerning the two. But, loving her father as she did, knowing him as she believed she did, it had not entered her head that Hugh Benton would really marry Mrs. DeLacy. And this Hugh Benton knew.
He seized on his daughter’s humiliating experience for an entering wedge for his confession.
“Poor little girl,” he sympathized. “So she’s seeing that her old dad isn’t accepted as a proper chaperon, is she? I was afraid of as much—but never mind, dear,” and he pulled her to him and seated her on his knee. “We’ll fix all that! There really ought to be an older woman to look after you——”
Elinor squirmed about to face him.
“Why, Daddy!” she exclaimed. “Whatever do you mean—” Then as her eyes searched his face, and she saw the half shamed, half triumphant look there, the truth slowly dawned on her. She drew back as if stung. She was surprised, angry by turns. She caught his two arms and shook him furiously.
“Oh, Daddy! Daddy!” she cried. “Surely, you don’t mean to say that you really intend to marry Geraldine DeLacy?”
“Surely, I speak plainly enough, Elinor,” he answered irritably.
“But Daddy—she doesn’t love you! She’ll never make you happy!”
“Please permit me to be the judge of that.” He was very stern as he lifted her from his knees and set her on her feet. “What right have you to say anything about it?”
“The right of one who really loves you, dear.” She threw her arms around his neck in spite of his move to turn away. “One who wants you to be happy. Besides, you’re all I have in the world. I—I can’t bear to lose you.”
“You’ll not lose me, baby!” Once more he was all gentleness. “I’ll be just as close to you as ever. Only you do need a woman’s hand, you know, and Geraldine loves you so devotedly. She’ll be just like a sister to you.”
“I’m glad, Daddy,” Elinor smiled almost sadly, “that you didn’t say she’d be like—a mother—to me. Oh, well, I suppose you’ve quite made up your mind, so nothing I could say would influence you?”
“As you say, I’ve quite made up my mind. I’m not a child; and I never allow anyone to influence me.”
But if Elinor Benton liked the idea of her father’s marriage so little at the time he told her of it, she liked it still less as the days grew into weeks. On the day of the wedding, she knew that the emotion that she held toward Geraldine was hatred; and it increased day by day with the closer relationship. At first, it was prompted by self-pity. She could not overlook the fact that Geraldine had appropriated her place in her father’s heart; but, before long, she began to realize just how little her father really meant to this vain, selfish creature, who had forced herself—yes, she had always been certain of that—into her mother’s place. Her mother! The woman she had held in contempt and ridicule because of her old-fashioned ideas. Why, it seemed almost like sacrilege to even think of her in the presence of this woman!
She was positively astounded at her father’s actions. He was an enigmatical problem, impossible of solution. He permitted himself to be dragged about like a toy poodle. If he passed his opinion about anything or anyone, and it failed to coincide with Geraldine’s—well, he changed it, that was all! And in an apologetical and almost cringing manner that fairly nauseated Elinor.
What had happened to this big, powerful, handsome man, of whom she had once been so proud? There were times when she pitied him. There was something pathetic in his anxiety to please this parasite, who with a smile, or a few words of endearment, could send him to the seventh heaven of delight, or with a frown cast him into the very depths of despair.
But if Elinor Benton was astonished at the change that came over her father in less than a year, she would have been more astonished could she have realized the change that had occurred in herself. She would not have known herself—nor would any of her former friends have known her—for the gay, careless, laughter-loving, joyous creature who had played the butterfly for those few months after her début.
She was at outs with the world. It seemed that everyone plotted against her. Constant brooding over her “wrongs” soon changed the butterfly into a cynical woman of the world. Her brother had “wronged” her terribly by killing the man she loved, or rather, thought she loved, for now as she looked back upon it all, she realized that what she had felt for Templeton Druid had not been love at all, but merely a schoolgirl’s infatuation. Her mother had “wronged” her by refusing ever to see her, and simply shutting her out of her heart and life; and now her father—her Daddy, whom she had idolized had “wronged” her by marrying this clever, designing woman. Geraldine DeLacy had been a most desirable chaperon for her—while she remained Mrs. DeLacy, but as her father’s wife—That was an entirely different matter.
So she consoled herself as best she could with violent flirtations with the foreign gallants with which Paris swarmed. Neither her father nor Geraldine appeared either to know or care what she was doing. But somehow, the sweetness of her freedom had palled, and there came times that she wished for a restraining hand. There were more times when she more bitterly wished herself away from her father and his new wife than she had ever, back there in the security of her own boudoir in her sheltered home in “The Castle,” wished herself away from it.
One thing she made up her mind to, though, and that was that never would she return with them to her former home. This was the bitterest pill of all. They were going back, her father told her. It was Geraldine’s wish. Their year in Paris was almost over when he told them at breakfast one morning that he had cabled Griggs to re-open the place.
He would have preferred disposing of it and purchasing a new place; but Geraldine had firmly made up her mind—a long time ago—that one day she should be mistress of “The Castle”; therefore she insisted upon re-opening it, declaring that she would redecorate it anew, just as soon as they were settled.
But though things had gradually been shaping themselves for a general cataclysm for months, it was not until just before their preparations for sailing were completed that a crisis came. Only Hugh Benton had been placidly unaware of anything wrong. He believed he held the world. He did not know, could not seem to realize, that he was like a child, or a weakling in the hands of his wife. She ruled his every act, his every thought. Like an avalanche, she swept everything before her in the one mad desire to satisfy her unappeasable greed. But her native subtlety had aided her to hide this from Hugh Benton, if not from his daughter. He went about like a man in a dream. He imagined himself to be the happiest of men. He had a young and beautiful wife, who loved him devotedly. What more could he ask? He put the past from him like a bad dream, and lived only in the present. And then suddenly—the awakening!
He had been for a long walk with Geraldine in the afternoon. He had fairly reveled in her gayety, her bubbling wit, the fact that she was his own, and that every man they passed paused to give the dazzling dark-eyed beauty an admiring glance. He had made a note of her admiration of a string of pearls they saw at a famous jeweler’s where they had stopped to get a ring she had left for resetting. Then she had gone home before him, as even in Paris, the calls of his vast business across the water took more of his time than he would like to have taken from his wife’s side.
When he hurried into the luxurious sitting room of the suite they were occupying, he found Elinor there alone. She was already dressed, and stood looking out of the window in a bored fashion. She did not even turn as she greeted her father, hastening to add:
“Hello, dad. You’ll have to hustle and dress for dinner. You know we’re going to the opera to-night.” She couldn’t have shown less enthusiasm had she announced that it was time to retire.
“It will only take me a few minutes,” he said. “Where’s Geraldine?”
Elinor shrugged her shoulders indifferently. “I’m sure I don’t know. Dressing, I suppose.”
Geraldine swept into the room, magnificently gowned in a striking costume of cloth of silver.
“You’re very late, Hugh,” she said peevishly. “Where have you been all afternoon?”
“Now, darling. You mustn’t be cross—I had something to do. My! How beautiful you are!” He attempted to caress her.
“Please, Hugh,” she held him off, “I wish you wouldn’t paw all over me! Nanette simply couldn’t arrange my hair to suit me to-night! I had to do it myself and it was exasperatingly stubborn!”
“It looks wonderful, darling.”
“No, it doesn’t!” She walked to the mantel and stared into the mirror. “It looks a fright, but I can’t help it, and I did want to look particularly nice to-night.”
“Why to-night?” Hugh asked curiously. “To me you always look particularly nice,” he added gallantly.
“There are some people here from New York,” Geraldine answered his question without paying the slightest heed to his compliment—“people who had the impertinence deliberately to cut me—before we were married. I am looking forward to the pleasure of retaliating. I think the women will feel it a great deal more, if I am looking my best.”
“What a disgusting parvenu!” was Elinor’s thought as she still stared into the lighted streets.
“What a child you are,” Hugh laughed indulgently. “Well, I have something here,” and he pulled a long box from his pocket, “that may help you a little. This is what delayed me.”
He held the long string of perfectly matched, lustrous pearls before her.
“Oh, you darling!” she exclaimed, as she threw her arms about him, hair forgotten. “You are too good to me! Here, put them on me!”
She stood still while he clasped the pearls and kissed her neck.
“Aren’t they wonderful?” She fingered them caressingly, and then rushed to the mirror again. “Elinor!” she turned suddenly. “What do you think of them?”
“I think they are very beautiful,” the girl answered simply, as she turned slowly to take in the scene.
Hugh walked over and placed his arm lovingly about his daughter. “I’ve ordered a string as near like them as possible for you, baby. They promised to have them for me in a few days.”
“Oh—no, Daddy—you shouldn’t have done that. I really don’t care for them, for myself.”
“Nonsense! Of course you do! Besides, I want my two treasures to always share alike,” he beamed joyously, glancing across at Geraldine.
She stood in the center of the room, two bright red spots burning in each cheek, as she tugged frantically at the clasp at the back of her neck.
“Why, darling, what is the matter?” He hastened to her.
“Take these things off!” Geraldine screamed. “I won’t have them! If you can’t buy me a thing without immediately ordering a duplicate of it for her,” she pointed her finger dramatically at Elinor, “then I don’t want you to give me anything!”
“Why, Geraldine—” Elinor stepped forward anxiously. She could scarcely control her voice. “You just heard me tell Daddy I didn’t want them. Please keep yours on and don’t make a scene. I assure you, even if Daddy gets them for me, I’ll not accept them.”
“Stop playing the self-sacrificing little angel with me!” She turned on Elinor fiercely. “I know perfectly well how you hate me, and you know how I feel about you. I’m sick and tired of keeping up this pretense any longer!”
“But—my dear.” Hugh was even whiter than Elinor. “I—I thought that you loved Elinor devotedly, and that you two would be just like sisters. You’re—you’re nervous and upset to-night. You don’t know what you’re saying——”
“Please! Don’t make excuses for me, Hugh,” Geraldine interrupted savagely. “I don’t love her! I never have loved her, and I never will love her! And you might as well know it right now!”
“You gave me to understand one night in New York that you had only Elinor’s interest at heart—when you persuaded me to do—something—I didn’t think was quite fair. Do you remember it, Geraldine?” Hugh set his lips in their old grim line, as memory flashed back the picture.
Geraldine tossed aside her necklace. A look of pure contempt, all but hatred, distorted her features as she looked at her husband slowly. Then her lip curled and she laughed.
“For a clever and brilliant business man, you’re the biggest fool I’ve ever met in all my life!” she flung at him. She rushed into her own room and banged the door after her.
For a moment Hugh stood and stared at the closed door, too astonished to move. When the realization of the miserable scene he had just passed through, finally dawned upon his numbed consciousness, he sank heavily down upon the nearest chair and groaned aloud.
Elinor was on her knees beside him instantly. “Oh, Daddy,” she murmured soothingly, “Daddy—dear.”
He buried his head in his hands. “Oh—my God!” His body shook convulsively. “I can’t believe it! I can’t believe it!”
The sound of his daughter’s heart-broken sobs roused him from his own misery. Her head was buried on his knee, her whole figure a picture of abject misery. He bent over and touched her tumbled hair, idly tried to arrange the torn lace of her bodice.
“There! There, dear!” he begged, but his tone was one of hopelessness as he tried to give the sympathy he was himself so much in need of. “Don’t cry, sweetheart—it’ll all be all right!”
Elinor lifted a tear-stained face to her father’s. She shook her head. Then the sobbing burst out afresh.
“Oh, Daddy! Daddy!” she wailed, “I—want—my—mother!”
Hugh Benton was wrong in believing that matters would right themselves when Geraldine’s nerves should be soothed. He was to learn that she had but dropped the mask that had irked her through all the year that she had been making for herself the place that she was determined to have—bringing Hugh Benton to an abject posture beneath her feet. For the scene she had made about the string of pearls had been but the woman’s opening gun in her new campaign. It was the first of her quarrels with her husband, but others followed in such rapid succession that the first was not long in being lost sight of.
Elinor left them the week following her denunciation by her step-mother. She met some friends who invited her to spend the winter in Italy. She was delighted at the chance to escape from her unhappy surroundings, and Hugh was glad to let her go. He had come to know the impossibility of keeping her under the same roof with Geraldine.
Alone with his new wife, there began a life so terrible for Hugh Benton, that at times he was almost certain it could not be true. He was merely having a dreadful nightmare from which he would suddenly awaken.
Geraldine seemed fairly to thrive upon quarrels and violent scenes. At first, Hugh attempted to plead or remonstrate, or argue with her; but he soon found that that was the thing she craved, so he simply lapsed into silence until the tirade was over. But oh! how it told on him! How it crushed the manhood within him and made of him a thing he himself despised!
Hugh Benton (Huntly Gordon) comes to his daughter’s assistance.
(“The Valley of Content” screened as “Pleasure Mad.”)
On their return to New York Geraldine had redecorated “The Castle,” but he never entered it without seeing before him a vision of Marjorie, as she stood in the library that never-to-be-forgotten night, completely rejuvenated and beautiful, trying to rekindle his love and pleading with him to give up his engagement and take her to the theater.
Surely that was the night on which God had forsaken him, or he would have listened to her pleadings, and have been spared all this torture.
Hugh Benton knew he was nearing the end of the road. His associates recognized the change in the man, but there was little sympathy such as might have been expected for a man, old and broken before his time, from any other cause than the one which had aged and grayed the financier. For the first time in his life, he bowed his head, content to take the lashings of Fate because of sheer inability longer to fight. He had been vanquished by a woman—a woman for whose sake he had driven wife and children from him, had outlawed his friends, cut short his life.
As he drooped into his office one morning, he felt that the end could not be far off. And he welcomed it. One more blow from the hand of Fate——
He started to look over the opened letters his secretary had left in front of him. There was one, a personal letter, unopened. He recognized Elinor’s handwriting. What would he give for one sight of her! A thought came to him. Why not cut it—go back to Europe with Elinor, let Geraldine do as she pleased. The very thought cheered him. It was worthy of more than passing consideration. Eagerly he opened the letter. But the eagerness turned to pain as he read; the white face turned ashen. The letter dropped with the hand to his knee, and he sat staring at it as though the writing stared out at him in letters of fire.
“Dear Daddy:” Elinor had written:
I know that you are expecting me home soon, but this is to tell you that I am not coming back—ever. What I have to tell you will certainly surprise you, perhaps shock you (or are you past the time of shocks and surprises?) I have been married a month to Signor Guglielmo Bellini, a young baritone in the opera here, of whom you have perhaps never heard, but who is well known and thought of here. Do I love him? I am not sure—any more than I am sure there is any such thing as love. But he is kind and—— He is not exactly what you might call of our kind, but I am through with our kind—forever—and he can give me all that I now crave; constant change and forgetfulness.
So it’s good-by, Daddy, and don’t forget your baby. I shall never forget you. You have always been so kind to me and have given me everything, except—my mother.
So, if in the future you don’t hear from me often, just remember that I am fluttering about the world, for that is how I shall find peace.
Your loving daughter,
ELINOR.
The letter fluttered from the man’s nerveless fingers to the floor. His head drooped forward until it rested on the edge of his great mahogany desk, the sharp edge of the glass pressing into his forehead unheeded. His whole body shook with sobs.
“ ‘That is how I shall find peace!’ ” he quoted. “Oh, Marjorie! Marjorie!” he groaned aloud, “if you could see me now, you could find it in your great heart to forgive me!”
Wearily he lifted his head and his hand searched out a desk button. The clerk who answered was told to send Bryson, the manager. When the man stood deferentially before the financier, Benton asked him hurriedly:
“Bryson, I wonder if you will be able to take complete charge here, while I go to California?”
“To California? Shall you be gone long, Mr. Benton?”
“I can’t tell exactly—probably all summer.”
“It would be quite a responsibility for me,” Bryson answered uneasily. “You know what a peculiar state the market is in, Mr. Benton.”
“But you’ve been with me so many years, Bryson,” Hugh argued. “You know my methods. I have every confidence in your judgment.”
“Thank you, sir, I appreciate your faith in me,” Bryson acknowledged gratefully. “When do you intend starting?”
“The day after to-morrow.”
“Why, Mr. Benton! That’s impossible! You have that gigantic deal on hand with Randall, Small & Company! It might be disastrous for you to leave before it is completed.”
Hugh shook his head stubbornly. “Come back in an hour, and we’ll talk this thing over again,” he ordered.
But on the man’s return at the end of the hour, he found Hugh Benton’s private office empty. A note on the desk informed him that Mr. Benton had gone. He was leaving for Chicago at once, and from there to San Francisco. He left everything in Bryson’s hands, and he would write him particulars as soon as he arrived.
“Strangest thing I ever heard of,” Bryson muttered, reading the note again. “Chances are, he’ll think better of it and hurry right back.”
In her boudoir in “The Castle,” Geraldine DeLacy Benton stopped in her preparations for a gay party to scan the telegram her maid handed her.
“Hmmph!” was her comment, as she dipped deeply into her gold powder box. “California, eh? Rather sudden—wonder how long he’ll stay? Well,” and she held out her slender foot for the velvet slipper the long-suffering maid held, “he needn’t hurry back on my account!”
The only one who knew he never intended to come back at all was—Hugh Benton!
