So the ice was broken between them; which filled Montague with a vast relief. But he was still dimly touched with awe—for he realized that this must be the great Mrs. Billy Alden, whose engagement to the Duke of London was now the topic of the whole country. And that huge diamond ornament must be part of Mrs. Alden’s million-dollar outfit of jewellery!
The great lady volunteered not to tell on him; and added generously that when he came to dinner with her she would post him concerning the company. “It’s awkward for a stranger, I can understand,” said she; and continued, grimly: “When people get divorces it sometimes means that they have quarrelled—and they don’t always make it up afterward, either. And sometimes other people quarrel—almost as bitterly as if they had been married. Many a hostess has had her reputation ruined by not keeping track of such things.”
So Montague made the discovery that the great Mrs. Billy, though. forbidding of aspect, was good-natured when she chose to be, and with a pretty wit. She was a woman with a mind of her own—a hard-fighting character, who had marshalled those about her, and taken her place at the head of the column. She had always counted herself a personage enough to do exactly as she pleased; through the course of the dinner she would take up the decanter of Scotch, and make a pass to help Montague—and then, when he declined, pour out imperturbably what she wanted. “I don’t like your brother,” she said to him, a little later. “He won’t last; but he tells me you’re different, so maybe I will like you. Come and see me sometime, and let me tell you what not to do in New York.”
Then Montague turned to talk with his hostess, who sat on his right.
“Do you play bridge?” asked Mrs. Winnie, in her softest and most gracious tone.
“My brother has given me a book to study from,” he answered. “But if he takes me about day and night, I don’t know how I’m to manage it.”
“Come and let me teach you,” said Mrs. Winnie. “I mean it, really,” she added. “I’ve nothing to do—at least that I’m not tired of. Only I don’t believe you’d take long to learn all that I know.”
“Aren’t you a successful player?” he asked sympathetically.
“I don’t believe anyone wants me to learn,” said Mrs. Winnie.—“They’d rather come and get my money. Isn’t that true, Major?”
Major Venable sat on her other hand, and he paused in the act of raising a spoonful of soup to his lips, and laughed, deep down in his throat—a queer little laugh that shook his fat cheeks and neck. “I may say,” he said, “that I know several people to whom the status quo is satisfactory.”
“Including yourself,” said the lady, with a little moue. “The wretched man won sixteen hundred dollars from me last night; and he sat in his club window all afternoon, just to have the pleasure of laughing at me as I went by. I don’t believe I’ll play at all to-night—I’m going to make myself agreeable to Mr. Montague, and let you win from Virginia Landis for a change.”
And then the Major paused again in his attack upon the soup. “My dear Mrs. Winnie,” he said, “I can live for much more than one day upon sixteen hundred dollars!”
The Major was a famous club-man and bon vivant, as Montague learned later on. “He’s an uncle of Mrs. Bobbie Walling’s,” said Mrs. Alden, in his ear. “And incidentally they hate each other like poison.”
“That is so that I won’t repeat my luckless question again?” asked Montague, with a smile.
“Oh, they meet,” said the other. “You wouldn’t be supposed to know that. Won’t you have any Scotch?”
Montague’s thoughts were so much taken up with the people at this repast that he gave little thought to the food. He noticed with surprise that they had real spring lamb—it being the middle of November. But he could not know that the six-weeks-old creatures from which it had come had been raised in cotton-wool and fed on milk with a spoon—and had cost a dollar and a half a pound. A little later, however, there was placed before him a delicately browned sweetbread upon a platter of gold, and then suddenly he began to pay attention. Mrs. Winnie had a coat of arms; he had noticed it upon her auto, and again upon the great bronze gates of the Snow Palace, and again upon the liveries of her footmen, and yet again upon the decanter of Scotch. And now—incredible and appalling—he observed it branded upon the delicately browned sweetbread!
After that, who would not have watched? There were large dishes of rare fruits upon the table—fruits which had been packed in cotton wool and shipped in cold storage from every corner of the earth. There were peaches which had come from South Africa (they had cost ten dollars apiece). There were bunches of Hamburg grapes, dark purple and bursting fat, which had been grown in a hot-house, wrapped in paper bags. There were nectarines and plums, and pomegranates and persimmons from Japan, and later on, little dishes of plump strawberries-raised in pots. There were quail which had come from Egypt, and a wonderful thing called “crab-flake a la Dewey,” cooked in a chafing-dish, and served with mushrooms that had been grown in the tunnels of abandoned mines in Michigan. There was lettuce raised by electric light, and lima beans that had come from Porto Rico, and artichokes brought from France at a cost of one dollar each.—And all these extraordinary viands were washed down by eight or nine varieties of wines, from the cellar of a man who had made collecting them a fad for the last thirty years, who had a vineyard in France for the growing of his own champagne, and kept twenty thousand quarts of claret in storage all the time—and procured his Rhine wine from the cellar of the German Emperor, at a cost of twenty-five dollars a quart!
There were twelve people at dinner, and afterward they made two tables for bridge, leaving Charlie Carter to talk to Alice, and Mrs. Winnie to devote herself to Montague, according to her promise. “Everybody likes to see my house,” she said. “Would you?” And she led the way from the dining-room into the great conservatory, which formed a central court extending to the roof of the building. She pressed a button, and a soft radiance streamed down from above, in the midst of which Mrs. Winnie stood, with her shimmering jewels a very goddess of the fire.
The conservatory was a place in which he could have spent the evening; it was filled with the most extraordinary varieties of plants. “They were gathered from all over the world,” said Mrs. Winnie, seeing that he was staring at them. “My husband employed a connoisseur to hunt them out for him. He did it before we were married—he thought it would make me happy.”
In the centre of the place there was a fountain, twelve or fourteen feet in height, and set in a basin of purest Carrara marble. By the touch of a button the pool was flooded with submerged lights, and one might see scores of rare and beautiful fish swimming about.
“Isn’t it fine!” said Mrs. Winnie, and added eagerly, “Do you know, I come here at night, sometimes when I can’t sleep, and sit for hours and gaze. All those living things; with their extraordinary forms-some of them have faces, and look like human beings! And I wonder what they think about, and if life seems as strange to them as it does to me.”
She seated herself by the edge of the pool, and gazed in. “These fish were given to me by my cousin, Ned Carter. They call him Buzzie. Have you met him yet?—No, of course not. He’s Charlie’s brother, and he collects art things—the most unbelievable things. Once, a long time ago, he took a fad for goldfish—some goldfish are very rare and beautiful, you know—one can pay twenty-five and fifty dollars apiece for them. He got all the dealers had, and when he learned that there were some they couldn’t get, he took a trip to Japan and China on purpose to get them. You know they raise them there, and some of them are sacred, and not allowed to be sold or taken out of the country. And he had all sorts of carved ivory receptacles for them, that he brought home with him—he had one beautiful marble basin about ten feet long, that had been stolen from the Emperor.”