"I"m going to read it if you don"t mind," the Violet said with a smile of pleasure instead of the frown of anger which had so lately rested on her fair face. Mr. Vandeford laughed inwardly; she was about as transparent as a very young kitten in its eagerness for a saucer of cream.
"Good girl," answered G.o.dfrey, as together they entered the dark house.
Together they climbed the steps, and with a kiss executed by the Violet he left her to turn into the door of her room while he went on to his just beyond.
Out of her sight the lazy, care-free manner left his lithe body, and in an instant every muscle stiffened to action. The smoulder of anger in his eyes blazed. He looked at his watch.
"Thirty-five minutes to catch that eleven-fifteen train to town. Never again. I"m done!" he murmured and looked about him at his belongings strewn around his room. "I"ll send Dolph out to pack to-morrow. A jump into tweeds and a sprint down the beach will make it."
And after vigorously suiting his actions to his words for twenty minutes he was running swiftly down the beach well ahead of the time of the eleven-fifteen train. Just as the headlight cast a red ray down the long track he stepped on the platform and in ten seconds more he was being whirled away from the moonlight and sands and white arms, having accomplished his purpose of the spanking, cut forever chains that galled, and was well content with himself and the world.
Back at Highcliff the beautiful Violet had been undergoing the rites of retirement, a.s.sisted by her very well-skilled maid, deep in an exciting dream of conquest. As she let her soft, perfumed, silken garments be taken from her one at a time until her pearly body was exposed to the brisk sea air, for which tonic Susette had thrown wide both broad windows, she was weighing in her shrewd little gutter-gamin mind the advantages of the road to the right against the turn to the left. The Hilliard "Rosie Posie Girl" in the fall produced by Weiner with all his trained staff, command of a big new theatre and three others, and following road prestige appealed strongly to her cupidity, which had been well trained in getting dimes from tight pockets in cheap cafes and ten, twenty and thirty theatres, but she had seen a grouping of Dennis Farraday"s name in the paper a few days ago with the names of some young New York multimillionaires in a National Commission, and she knew that he and his "pile" were worthy of the effort of her charms. Also she had seen big, broad, breezy, gallant Dennis himself at luncheon with Mr.
Vandeford in the Astor not ten days before, and her designs had been decidedly set in his direction. To her thinking, big, broad, breezy, gallant men were always easy. As Susette enveloped her rosiness from the sea air in a soft white cloud of chiffon and embroidery, removed the rose mules from her feet, helped her in between the fragrant linen sheets that were as soft as rich silk, threw over her a rose-colored puff of silk and lace and down, turned on her reading lamp, upon whose shade wanton fauns and nymphs sported, piled her pillows high and left her, the scales were about going down on the side in which was placed "The Purple Slipper," Mr. Dennis Farraday--and Miss Patricia Adair, who at that time was the unknown quant.i.ty which Fate often throws in any balance.
With a luxurious sigh and flexing of her long, supple body the Violet picked up the business-like copy of the Violet ma.n.u.script which Mr.
Adolph Meyers had sent her instead of the beribboned, purple "Renunciation of Rosalind," and began to read the first page when the telephone beside her bed rang with a soft tinkle. She picked up the ivory receiver and into it murmured a softly tentative:
"Yes?"
"Oh, Mr. Farraday! How are you?"
"Yes, this is Violet Hawtry."
"Deliciously well, thank you."
"Yes, he"s here, but the gay young thing has gone to bed hours ago."
"Most interesting for me, but I have to submit."
"Oh, lovely. Do come. I"ll adore having him routed out for you. Of course we"ll go with you. I had forgot that Simone was to dance at the Beach Inn to-night."
"No indeed, I have not undressed at all. I was going to study a part to-night."
"I"m sure G.o.dfrey can be dressed in half an hour, and it will take even your Surreness that time to get here. Take the beach road; it"s fine.
Good-by then. In half an hour."
With which ending and beginning the Violet hung up the ivory receiver and rang for Susette. The summons was answered by Mrs. Aline Hawtry, _nee_ Maggie Murphy the first, an embarra.s.sing but in a manner cherished relict of the Hawtry past life in Weehawken.
"Sure, and the little Frinchy is a-bed, Mag! What be ye wanting? The night is after sneaking out the back door of the morning." Mrs. Hawtry, once Murphy, was a big bonny edition of the Violet grown into a cabbage rose and her voice was also of the same rich texture.
"Rout out G.o.dfrey, Ma, and then stir up Susette with a hot stick. Mr.
Dennis Farraday is coming down to take us over to see Simone dance at the Beach Inn. I want him to see me instead of Simone. Hurry!"
"The poor dear boy, after a hard day in the cruel hot city. Alack!"
moaned Mrs. Maggie as she billowed across to Mr. Vandeford"s door and knocked. Then she paused and knocked again. From neither knock did she receive an answer as the moment was just about the one in which he had boarded the New York bound train a half mile up the beach down which Mr.
Dennis Farraday was racing.
When a search of the unresponsive room had convinced the Violet of his flight, for a moment her eyes were stormy, then her face cleared with a smile of delight, and as she padded back to her room and the waiting Susette, to herself she purred:
"n.o.body can beat my luck."
CHAPTER II
There is a certain kind of man over whom all other men smile inwardly.
The tone of voice in which they speak of him has an affectionate growl, which, once heard, cannot be mistaken. Such a man is apt to cherish what other men call "impossible ideals about women," and it behooves his masculine friends to watch out for him carefully lest he come a cropper.
Mr. Dennis Farraday was such a man among men, and Mr. G.o.dfrey Vandeford loved him deeply. They had met when they were both twenty-three, on board a tramp steamer, bound for adventure in South Africa, and in the seven years that had elapsed since then they had spent periods of time together, in various kinds of sports. Killing time on Broadway was about the only sport that they had not tried together. By very solid banking and brokering Mr. Vandeford enjoyed and increased for himself and an aristocratic, Knickerbocker-descended mother a few ancestral millions.
Incidentally, he took care of the sole hundred thousand dollars of which Mr. Vandeford"s high financiering on Broadway had left him possessed.
Mr. Farraday and Mrs. Justus Farraday represented the sole family ties possessed by Mr. Vandeford, and he considered them both most valuable.
In fact, the maternal regard of Mrs. Justus Farraday was looked upon by Mr. Vandeford as his chief treasure and sheet-anchor in times of the high winds of life.
"What makes you do it, Van?" questioned Mr. Farraday, as he sat with Mr.
Vandeford in the early morning in the latter"s rooms after the tumult of the first night of the unsuccessful "Miss Cut-up."
"Excitement," answered Mr. Vandeford, as he put his bare heels, protruding from his Chinese slippers, up on the edge of the mahogany reading-table in his living-room, and began to pull at a long, evil-smelling, briar pipe. "Nothing like it."
"Do you really care for all that noise, those explosions of chorus girls, sweating stage hands, cursing director and cursing star, paint, powder, electricity, paper walls and furniture, call-bells and hand-clapping from boozy critics in front?"
"I do," answered Mr. G.o.dfrey Vandeford, with a glint in his eyes deep back in his head. "And so would you if you had bet about twenty thousand on that combination and could see the people begin to eat it up right before your eyes as you sat in a box and watched "em. When you"ve backed your own combination of inferno on riot, it gives you a thrill to stand before the box-office and watch a line of people that stretches to the next block plunk down dollars that they have earned at their own particular combinations of life to see the combination you have made of yours. Why, tears come into my eyes when I see some little, old, dried-up seamstress pay a dollar to sit in the roost to see Gerald Height love the powder off of Violet while she is cursing him under her breath for so doing, and it tickles me under my ribs to see some fat, jolly, lonely, old party buy a front seat two days hand-running to sit and watch Mazie Villines dance over her own head and take the child out to supper afterward in all propriety. It does him good all over after selling white goods in Squeedunck, Illinois, eleven and three-quarter months of every year. It"s all to the good, Denny, and I wish you could get the drag of it."
"Perhaps it would be well if I could," agreed Mr. Farraday, as he rose and shook his big, lithe body with the agility of a frolicsome puppy who knows he is going into mischief, and looked cautiously at G.o.dfrey. "Is backing the life of the Violet sport, too?" he ventured.
"Best I know. Took nothing and made it into something in five years. If it bites my hand that"s all in the game."
"Same force could beget and train about eleven small Vandefords into pretty good American citizens," Mr. Farraday snapped out, and then backed away.
"Absinthe c.o.c.ktails ruin the taste for sweet milk. Don"t talk about things you know nothing about; thank G.o.d for that same ignorance," Mr.
Vandeford commanded. "Go to bed and sleep like the cherub you are, while I expiate here with my pipe."