The Lifting of a Finger/Chapter 1

FRANCIS BELLAMY leaned with easy grace against the newel-post at the foot of the broad stairway of his sister's house. He was clad in a long coat and knee-breeches of lavender satin, with a waistcoat of white brocade, and lace ruffles falling over his white hands.

Through the hall and up and down the stairs moved other figures wearing the costume of the last century, and beyond curtained door-ways in adjoining rooms Francis caught glimpses of ever-changing vistas of powdered heads and ​periwigs. The sounds that met his ears were low laughter and the hum of many voices and, coming from the ballroom at his right, the sweetly plaintive wailing of violins.

With a bored air the young man shifted his position slightly, and as he did so the sword at his side got in his way. "I wonder if all these people feel the fools in their clothes that I do," he muttered to himself. "How silly of Alice to give this colonial ball. I believe women enjoy nothing so much as an opportunity to make their friends feel ridiculous."

However Francis felt in his unaccustomed attire, he looked well. His stalwart, broad-shouldered figure, brought to the high degree of development made possible by the athletics of the ​nineteenth century, showed to advantage in the costume of the eighteenth.

Now and then he caught snatches of the conversation of those who passed. "Yes, she is actually here; I saw her myself," he heard one woman say. "It scarcely seems possible," began her companion as they moved on out of earshot.

A moment later a couple paused near Bellamy and began to talk in low tones. "Yes, she is here," the woman said. "I would not have believed it if I hadn't seen her. Were I in her place, I'm sure I couldn't be induced to stir out of the house."

"It must have been a blow to the old lady; she's as proud as Lucifer," murmured the man at her side.

"'Pride always goes before a fall,'" said his companion reflectively, trying ​to keep her voice free from malice, but not wholly succeeding. "Poor girl," the woman said in a tone that Francis thought must have made the object of her pity writhe had she been there to hear it.

"Oh, these velvet-clawed cats," he muttered as the couple moved away.

Presently he left his position by the stairs and moved in a somewhat aimless fashion towards the drawing-room. Most of the faces he passed were strange to him, for Francis Bellamy was better known at race-tracks and behind the scenes of theatres than among the society people who were his sister's friends.

At the other end of the hall the young man heard himself accosted, and turned to face Bob Stanton, a sleek club​man of middle age, whose legs seemed too small to support his rotund body.

"What are you doing here?" Stanton asked as the two men shook hands. "I thought you always fought shy of affairs of this sort."

"I generally do. I don't know what induced me to come to-night unless it was the opportunity to show off a pair of rather good legs."

Stanton glanced from Bellamy's well-shaped calves to his own spindly ones with a rueful face.

"You ought to ride your bicycle," remarked Bellamy, speaking in the half-insolent fashion of one who is careless of giving offence.

The two men had entered the drawing-room and were standing in the curtained recess of a window. Bellamy's ​black eyes roved about the room, now and then pausing to bestow a bold glance upon some beautiful face. One woman in passing chanced to raise her eyes to his: she crimsoned under his gaze and moved a trifle closer to the man at her side.

"You don't know many of the people here?" said Stanton, the rising inflection of his voice indicating inquiry.

"No, nor they me," returned Bellamy.

Stanton made no reply. He knew that the other was known to most people by reputation, if not by sight, and that the news of his presence had already spread through the rooms. The rumors of Francis Bellamy's wild, roving life which reached the higher world in which his sister moved were just ​vague enough to stimulate curiosity as to whether or not they could be true.

"Who is that girl sitting alone in front of this nearest mantel?" Bellamy asked suddenly, "and what color would you call her gown?"

"The color of skim-milk, I should say," returned Stanton, answering the other's second question first. "The girl is Miss Margaret Winthrop. You must know of the Winthrops."

"Yes, I think I do," Francis answered somewhat doubtfully. "Rather poor people who pride themselves upon family, aren't they?"

"Yes."

"Well, Miss Margaret is a deuced pretty girl, and I wish you'd introduce me to her. I like the way she carries her head: it shows spirit."

​"Oh, Margaret Winthrop has spirit, plenty of it. It's a good thing too, for just now she has need of all she has."

"Why?" asked Francis.

"She has had a blow that would have crushed most women. But whatever she feels, Margaret carries her head high."

"What was the trouble?" asked Bellamy, his eyes roving again.

"She was to be married on the first of June to Jack Somers."

"Ah!" said Bellamy. "He is the man who set up for a saint and, just as admirers had a crown ready for him, turned out to be the devil himself in disguise."

"Yes, that's the man," returned Stanton. "Somers was highly educated, of fine principles, apparently, and even taught a class in some Sunday-school: ​just the kind of man to appeal to a girl of Miss Winthrop's type. And she loved him with all her heart and soul. Everyone, even the men, liked Somers and thought him worthy of Margaret, who is as good as God ever made a woman, and that is saying a great deal."

"And Somers turned out a greater rascal than myself, and that also is saying a great deal," declared Francis, laughing. "What was it he did? Robbed his firm, didn't he?"

"Yes, after first losing a lot of money for his employers by betraying a trust, and then ran away with a woman who——"

"I know: with Violet Dare," interrupted Bellamy. "Well, he needed to rob someone before going away with her. ​How did the girl over there take the discovery of all this?"

"She read it in the paper one morning and fainted. Since then she has not spoken of Somers even to her mother, they say; but instead of leaving town or shutting herself up, as most women would have done, she has gone on as though nothing had happened."

Again Francis glanced over to where the girl sat, just in front of a mantel that was banked with roses, her head held high and a smile upon her lips.

At that moment someone stopped to speak with her and the smile became a laugh, but Bellamy saw that there was no mirth in her eyes, and that the hand which held her fan clutched its pearl sticks tightly.

"She knows how to dress," he re​marked, after a leisurely survey of the girl from her powdered hair to the tip of a satin slipper.

"I believe she had that gown made expressly for this occasion," Stanton replied. "She was to dance a minuet with Somers in the dining-room after supper. They had practised the dance together and had consented to go through it to-night to please your sister. There are to be a number of old-fashioned dances, including a quadrille performed by 'first families' only, but this minuet, in particular, was looked on as the feature of the evening: I suppose because Somers and Miss Winthrop were such a handsome couple. Then too the nearness of the wedding-day helped to centre interest on them."

Francis laughed,—a reckless, dare​devil laugh, that still had a note of contagion in it. Stanton frowned. He could not understand how anyone could see cause for mirth in Margaret Winthrop's plight.

"I should say she did need plenty of spirit," Bellamy remarked. "By George, she was plucky to come here to-night! I like a woman with spirit. I like horses with spirit too, and I enjoy taking it out of them."

Stanton gave a slight shiver of disgust. He felt as a man does who unexpectedly touches cold marble in the darkness.

"I want to meet her; take me over and present me," went on Bellamy.

Stanton hesitated. His companion was not the sort of man Miss Winthrop ought to meet; yet how could he ​refuse Bellamy's request in his sister's house?

Seeing Stanton's indecision, Francis fixed his black eyes on his companion with a look of amusement.

"Come," he said; "I'm not going to eat your paragon. If she's been engaged to Somers, I guess five minutes' conversation with me won't hurt her."