The Lifting of a Finger/Chapter 3

FRANCIS was not far wrong in his conjecture that Margaret's drive home would not be an enjoyable one. The carriage had scarcely started when Mrs. Winthrop said,—

"Margaret, do you so enjoy the conspicuous position you are in that you try to make it worse?"

"I don't think I have made it worse," Margaret replied calmly.

Mrs. Winthrop began again. "I fail to see how you could so far forget your position as a Winthrop as to go through a fancy dance with a man of Francis Bellamy's stamp."

Margaret leaned back in her seat and watched the lights flash past the carriage. ​"What has Mr. Bellamy done?" she asked curiously. "I never heard of him except as a brother of Mrs. Westlake's who spent most of his time in remote corners of the earth."

"He has done everything that he ought not to have done, and he is everything that he ought not to be," rejoined Mrs. Winthrop, sure that her reply would bring Margaret to a proper realization of her folly, for the girl had always resolutely refused to have anything to do with men who did not come up to her standard of what a man should be. Her mother was, therefore, astonished when Margaret merely said in response,—

"He is very good-looking."

Mrs. Winthrop sank back in her seat with something like a gasp. "Well," she remarked in an acid voice, "the ​thing is done and it can't be undone, but I am sure I don't know what your father will say when I tell him about it."

Although the crowd in the lower rooms of Mrs. Westlake's house had thinned out considerably, Bellamy found the little Turkish apartment on the top floor filled with men. The host pushed a box of cigars towards him as he entered, but Francis shook his head, and walking over to the mantel stood leaning against it.

His coming had put every other man in the room at a disadvantage, perhaps because he showed no consciousness of his unusual dress. The others, now that they were alone together, looked as though they secretly felt ashamed of themselves: each had the apologetic air ​of a trick-animal dressed in grotesque clothes.

"You quite distinguished yourself to-night, Frank," observed Bellamy's brother-in-law.

Mr. Westlake was a handsome man, with something in his manner which commanded the respect and admiration of everyone he met: even Bellamy admired him. Now he turned to his host and bestowed on him one of the smiles he usually kept for women as he answered:

"Miss Winthrop deserves the credit, I think. She not only danced gracefully, but she entered into the spirit of the thing. Her charming little half-shy, half-coquettish airs were very fetching, and if I were an eighteenth-century gallant instead of a nineteenth-century ​reprobate, I should have fallen in love with her."

"It's lucky for her you didn't," observed a man at the other side of the fireplace with a short laugh. He was one of the few men there who knew Bellamy or cared to know him.

Francis laughed too. "I'm not so sure of that," he said. "I shouldn't treat her as Somers did; she's too pretty to run away from."

"It is a mystery to me," remarked one of a group who sat at a table playing cards, "why Miss Winthrop's brother didn't thrash Somers."

"He couldn't find him," answered Stanton, who was the last speaker's partner. "Somers and Violet have dropped out of sight and there's no way of locating them. Jack tried, I ​know, because I helped him in the search, but he couldn't get even a clue to where they went from Southampton. The police are after him too."

"Well, Violet Dare is a fine-looking woman and a jolly companion—as long as a man's money holds out," said Francis in the assured manner of one who knows whereof he speaks. "This Margaret Winthrop is a pretty girl too," he went on. The group at the other side of the fireplace were in the midst of a noisy argument, and Francis was obliged to raise his voice to make himself heard. "I was quite taken with her, I tell you. I was just trying to devise some way of luring her into the conservatory where I could steal a kiss when——"

Stanton's right-hand opponent sprang ​to his feet, with such haste that his chair overturned, and confronted Francis with a white face and blazing eyes.

"How dare you talk of Miss Winthrop in that light way?" he cried hotly. "She is not a woman to be kissed on mere acquaintance."

The speaker was a young fellow of twenty-two or three, with light hair that curled slightly and a clean-shaven, earnest countenance, in strong contrast with Bellamy's older, sneering face.

Francis smiled at him in a kindly, indulgent fashion.

"My dear boy," he said, "you never know what you can do with a woman until you try."

The young man took a step forward and his right hand clenched. "How dare you?" he cried again. "How ​dare you? You insult Miss Winthrop when you speak her name."

Those in the room who knew Bellamy's quick temper scarcely breathed for a moment, but Francis did not grow angry. He still smiled as he answered soothingly, as one speaks to a child not old enough to be reasoned with or a woman not sensible enough.

"Come, come," he said; "don't glare at me like a wild animal. This is not a matter to quarrel about. I never quarrel about women, anyway: they're not worth it."

"Well, you shall quarrel about this," retorted Hatfield; "you shall retract what you said."

"What did I say?" inquired Francis coolly. "Merely that I wanted to kiss the girl, but that—if you had allowed ​me to finish—her indignant mamma flounced up and carried her off before I had a chance to try."

"Your next speech insinuated all sorts of things," was Hatfield's response, "and now you are trying to sneak out of the consequences of it because you see plainly"—here the speaker glanced at the circle of darkening faces gathered around them—"that every man here is willing to fight for Miss Winthrop."

At this implication of cowardice Bellamy's face became like a thundercloud. "So I am trying to crawl, am I?" he said. "Well, since you object to insinuations that prove nothing, I'll give you something better, and also give the woman you are defending so blunderingly a chance to convince me ​she is all you say she is." Francis paused a moment to look from Hatfield round the circle, then continued: "I'll wager a thousand dollars to any one's five that before a month goes by I shall have kissed this Margaret Winthrop with her consent."

Angry murmurs and expostulations broke out among the spectators, and Mr. Westlake came forward and laid a hand on his brother-in-law's arm.

"This won't do, Frank," he said. "You go too far, even for you, from whom we have learned to expect little. I won't have any such wager made in my house. And you, Hatfield, are too impulsive. You should remember that it never does a woman's reputation any good to make her the subject of a ​quarrel. We all know what Miss Winthrop is and——"

"Yes, we all know what she is," broke in Hatfield; "her purity, her goodness, are beyond question. That is why I could not stand by and hear her insulted by a man like him. Isn't even Miss Winthrop to be safe from his sneers?"

"I have just offered you an opportunity to let the lady in question win my good opinion for herself," observed Francis. His anger had passed and he was smiling once more, a calm smile that maddened young Hatfield. "Why don't you take my wager?" Francis added.

"And have you win it and defame her still further—by lying?"

"No." Bellamy's lips had whitened ​a little, though he still smiled. "I never lie; Westlake here will tell you that."

"Is that so?" asked the boy, turning to his host.

"Yes, it is so," the older man answered, "but I tell you I will not have such a wager made in my house. Hatfield, I say again: you are showing more heart than head in this affair, and as for you, Frank, you ought to be ashamed of yourself to taunt the boy and carry your love of teasing so far as to trifle with the name of a good woman."

"Since Mr. Westlake assures me you will speak the truth," said Hatfield, who had by this time grown calmer, "I will take your wager, sir, without odds. A thousand dollars is all I have in the world, but I'll risk it willingly."

​"Harry, I know your motive is a good one, but you are doing a very foolish thing," interposed Stanton kindly.

A murmur of assent to this speech went round the circle. There was not a man there who did not like Hatfield and pity him because his boyish, absorbing love for Margaret was hopeless.

"If Miss Winthrop could know the circumstances, I think she would choose to have me do just as I have done." Hatfield spoke quietly, but with a conviction that silenced further argument.

A pause followed his speech, during which the circle broke into smaller groups and Francis moved towards the door.

"I think I will go," he said to Westlake. "Good-night, Jim. As the ladies say, 'I've had a delightful evening!'"

​"Good-night," returned his host. "It is a pity you can enjoy yourself only when you are causing someone else pain and humiliation, and until you change in this respect my doors are no longer open to you."

If Francis felt any shame at his brother-in-law's dismissal, he kept that shame carefully concealed. He continued his journey to the door, saying: "As you please, of course. 'Every man's house is his castle.'"

At the threshold Bellamy turned to look back into the room, his handsome face and satin-clad figure, framed in by the door-way, making a picture well worth looking at.

"Good-night, gentlemen," he said, and waited a moment, but no response came. Nothing daunted, Francis turned ​again and went out, and a second later those in the room heard him apologize to Jack Winthrop, whom he ran against just outside the door.

Jack came in humming an air from an opera, but the song died on his lips as he noted the overturned chair, the flushed face of young Hatfield, the stern look Mr. Westlake wore, and the suppressed excitement in the faces of the other men.

"What's the matter?" he asked as his glance fell on the deserted card table with the half-played hands thrown on it face upward. "Has Bellamy be cheating at cards?"

As Jack received no answer to his question, he assumed that his surmise was correct and that his host did not wish the matter talked about.