He shrugged his shoulders.
"That"s between you to, of course," he said. "It"s not up to me. Tell him yourself, if you"ve changed your mind. I don"t intend," he went on, impressively, "to have any share in ruining his life."
"Oh piffle," I said. I am aware that this is slang, and does not belong in a Theme. But I was driven to saying it.
I got through the crowd by using my elbows. I am afraid I gave the Bishop quite a prod, and I caught Mr. Andrews on his rotateing waistcoat. But I was desparate.
Alas, I was too late.
The caterer"s man, who had taken Patrick"s place in a hurry, was at the punch bowl, and father was gone. I was just in time to see him take H.
into his library and close the door.
Here words fail me. I knew perfectly well that beyond that door H, whom I had invented and who therefore simply did not exist, was asking for my Hand. I made up my mind at once to run away and go on the stage, and I had even got part way up the stairs, when I remembered that, with a dollar for the picture and five dollars for the violets and three dollars for the hat pin I had given Sis, and two dollars and a quarter for mother"s handkercheif case, I had exactly a dollar and seventy-five cents in the world.
I WAS TRAPPED.
I went up to my room, and sat and waited. Would father be violent, and throw H. out and then come upstairs, pale with fury and disinherit me?
Or would the whole Familey conspire together, when the people had gone, and send me to a convent? I made up my mind, if it was the convent, to take the veil and be a nun. I would go to nurse lepers, or something, and then, when it was too late, they would be sorry.
The stage or the convent, nun or actress? Which?
I left the door open, but there was only the sound of revelry below.
I felt then that it was to be the convent. I pinned a towel around my face, the way the nuns wear whatever they call them, and from the side it was very becoming. I really did look like Julia Marlowe, especialy as my face was very sad and tradgic.
At something before seven every one had gone, and I heard Sis and mother come upstairs to dress for dinner. I sat and waited, and when I heard father I got cold all over. But he went on by, and I heard him go into mother"s room and close the door. Well, I knew I had to go through with it, although my life was blasted. So I dressed and went downstairs.
Father was the first down. HE CAME DOWN WHISTLING.
It is perfectly true. I could not beleive my ears.
He approached me with a smileing face.
"Well, Bab," he said, exactly as if nothing had happened, "have you had a nice day?"
He had the eyes of a bacilisk, that creature of Fable.
"I"ve had a lovely day, Father," I replied. I could be bacilisk-ish also.
There is a mirror over the drawing room mantle, and he turned me around until we both faced it.
"Up to my ears," he said, referring to my heighth. "And Lovers already!
Well, I daresay we must make up our minds to lose you."
"I won"t be lost," I declared, almost violently. "Of course, if you intend to shove me off your hands, to the first Idiot who comes along and pretends a lot of stuff, I----"
"My dear child!" said father, looking surprised. "Such an outburst! All I was trying to say, before your mother comes down, is that I--well, that I understand and that I shall not make my little girl unhappy by--er--by breaking her Heart."
"Just what do you mean by that, father?"
He looked rather uncomfortable, being one who hates to talk sentament.
"It"s like this, Barbara," he said. "If you want to marry this young man--and you have made it very clear that you do--I am going to see that you do it. You are young, of course, but after all your dear mother was not much older than you are when I married her."
"Father!" I cried, from an over-flowing heart.
"I have noticed that you are not happy, Barbara," he said. "And I shall not thwart you, or allow you to be thwarted. In affairs of the Heart, you are to have your own way."
"I want to tell you something!" I cried. "I will NOT be cast off! I----"
"Tut, tut," said Father. "Who is casting you off? I tell you that I like the young man, and give you my blessing, or what is the present-day equivelent for it, and you look like a figure of Tradgedy!"
But I could endure no more. My own father had turned on me and was rending me, so to speak. With a breaking heart and streaming eyes I flew to my Chamber.
There, for hours I paced the floor.
Never, I determined, would I marry H. Better death, by far. He was a scheming Fortune-hunter, but to tell the family that was to confess all.
And I would never confess. I would run away before I gave Sis such a chance at me. I would run away, but first I would kill Carter Brooks.
Yes, I was driven to thoughts of murder. It shows how the first false step leads down and down, to crime and even to death. Oh never, never, gentle reader, take that first False Step. Who knows to what it may lead!
"One false Step is never retreived." Gray--On a Favorite Cat.
I reflected also on how the woman in the book had ruined her life with a letter. "The written word does not change," she had said. "It remains always, embodying a dead truth and giving it apparent life."
"Apparent life" was exactly what my letter had given to H. Frankenstein.
That was what I called him, in my agony. I felt that if only I had never written the Letter there would have been no trouble. And another awful thought came to me: Was there an H after all? Could there be an H?
Once the French teacher had taken us to the theater in New York, and a woman sitting on a chair and covered with a sheet, had brought a man out of a perfectly empty Cabinet, by simply willing to do it. The Cabinet was empty, for four respectible looking men went up and examined it, and one even measured it with a Tape-measure.
She had materialised him, out of nothing.
And while I had had no Cabinet, there are many things in this world "that we do not dream of in our Philosophy." Was H. a real person, or a creature of my disordered brain? In plain and simple language, COULD THERE BE SUCH A PERSON?
I feared not.
And If there was no H, really, and I married him, where would I be?
There was a ball at the Club that night, and the Familey all went. No one came to say good-night to me, and by half past ten I was alone with my misery. I knew Carter Brooks would be at the ball, and H also, very likely, dancing around as agreably as if he really existed, and I had not made him up.
I got the book from Sis"s room again, and re-read it. The woman in it had been in great trouble, too, with her husband cleaning his revolver and making his will. And at last she had gone to the apartments of the man who had her letters, in a taxicab covered with a heavy veil, and had got them back. He had shot himself when she returned--the husband--but she burned the letters and then called a Doctor, and he was saved. Not the doctor, of course. The husband.
The villain"s only hold on her had been the letters, so he went to South Africa and was gored by an elephant, thus pa.s.sing out of her life.
Then and there I knew that I would have to get my letter back from H.
Without it he was powerless. The trouble was that I did not know where he was staying. Even if he came out of a Cabinet, the Cabinet would have to be somewhere, would it not?
I felt that I would have to meet gile with gile. And to steal one"s own letter is not really stealing. Of course if he was visiting any one and pretending to be a real person, I had no chance in the world. But if he was stopping at a hotel I thought I could manage. The man in the book had had an apartment, with a j.a.panese servant, who went away and drew plans of American Forts in the kitchen and left the woman alone with the desk containing the Letter. But I daresay that was unusualy lucky and not the sort of thing to look forward to.