Then the conversation turned to the Horse Show, and for quite a while they talked about who was going to wear what. Finally Oliver rose, saying that they would have to get a bite to eat before leaving for the Havens’s. “You’ll have a good time,” said Reggie. “I’d have gone myself, only I promised to stay and help Mrs. de Graffenried design a dinner. So long!”
Montague had heard nothing about the visit to the Havens’s; but now, as they strolled down the Avenue, Oliver explained that they were to spend the weekend at Castle Havens. There was quite a party going up this Friday afternoon, and they would find one of the Havens’s private cars waiting. They had nothing to do meantime, for their valets would attend to their packing, and Alice and her maid would meet them at the depot.
“Castle Havens is one of the show places of the country,” Oliver added. “You’ll see the real thing this time.” And while they lunched, he went on to entertain his brother with particulars concerning the place and its owners. John had inherited the bulk of the enormous Havens fortune, and he posed as his father’s successor in the Steel Trust. Some day some one of the big men would gobble him up; meantime he amused himself fussing over the petty details of administration. Mrs. Havens had taken a fancy to a rural life, and they had built this huge palace in the hills of Connecticut, and she wrote verses in which she pictured herself as a simple shepherdess—and all that sort of stuff. But no one minded that, because the place was grand, and there was always so much to do. They had forty or fifty polo ponies, for instance, and every spring the place was filled with polo men.
At the depot they caught sight of Charlie Carter, in his big red touring-car. “Are you going to the Havens’s?” he said. “Tell them we’re going to pick up Chauncey on the way.”
“That’s Chauncey Venable, the Major’s nephew,” said Oliver, as they strolled to the train. “Poor Chauncey—he’s in exile!”
“How do you mean?” asked Montague.
“Why, he daren’t come into New York,” said the other. “Haven’t you read about it in the papers? He lost one or two hundred thousand the other night in a gambling place, and the district attorney’s trying to catch him.”
“Does he want to put him in jail?” asked Montague.
“Heavens, no!” said Oliver. “Put a Venable in jail? He wants him for a witness against the gambler; and poor Chauncey is flitting about the country hiding with his friends, and wailing because he’ll miss the Horse Show.”
They boarded the palatial private car, and were introduced to a number of other guests. Among them was Major Venable; and while Oliver buried himself in the new issue of the fantastic-covered society journal, which contained the poem of the erotic “Ysabel,” his brother chatted with the Major. The latter had taken quite a fancy to the big handsome stranger, to whom everything in the city was so new and interesting.
“Tell me what you thought of the Snow Palace,” said he. “I’ve an idea that Mrs. Winnie’s got quite a crush on you. You’ll find her dangerous, my boy—she’ll make you pay for your dinners before you get through!”
After the train was under way, the Major got himself surrounded with some apollinaris and Scotch, and then settled back to enjoy himself. “Did you see the ‘drunken kid’ at the ferry?” he asked. “(That’s what our abstemious district attorney terms my precious young heir-apparent.) You’ll meet him at the Castle—the Havens are good to him. They know how it feels, I guess; when John was a youngster his piratical uncle had to camp in Jersey for six months or so, to escape the strong arm of the law.”
“Don’t you know about it?” continued the Major, sipping at his beverage. “Sic transit gloria mundi! That was when the great Captain Kidd Havens was piling up the millions which his survivors are spending with such charming insouciance. He was plundering a railroad, and the original progenitor of the Wallings tried to buy the control away from him, and Havens issued ten or twenty millions of new stock overnight, in the face of a court injunction, and got away with most of his money. It reads like opera bouffe, you know—they had a regular armed camp across the river for about six months—until Captain Kidd went up to Albany with half a million dollars’ worth of greenbacks in a satchel, and induced the legislature to legalize the proceedings. That was just after the war, you know, but I remember it as if it were yesterday. It seems strange to think that anyone shouldn’t know about it.”
“I know about Havens in a general way,” said Montague.
“Yes,” said the Major. “But I know in a particular way, because I’ve carried some of that railroad’s paper all these years, and it’s never paid any dividends since. It has a tendency to interfere with my appreciation of John’s lavish hospitality.”
Montague was reminded of the story of the Roman emperor who pointed out that money had no smell.
“Maybe not,” said the Major. “But all the same, if you were superstitious, you might make out an argument from the Havens fortune. Take that poor girl who married the Count.”
And the Major went on to picture the denouement of that famous international alliance, which, many years ago, had been the sensation of two continents. All Society had attended the gorgeous wedding, an archbishop had performed the ceremony, and the newspapers had devoted pages to describing the gowns and the jewels and the presents and all the rest of the magnificence. And the Count was a wretched little degenerate, who beat and kicked his wife, and flaunted his mistresses in her face, and wasted fourteen million dollars of her money in a couple of years. The mind could scarcely follow the orgies of this half-insane creature—he had spent two hundred thousand dollars on a banquet, and half as much again for a tortoise-shell wardrobe in which Louis the Sixteenth had kept his clothes! He had charged a diamond necklace to his wife, and taken two of the four rows of diamonds out of it before he presented it to her! He had paid a hundred thousand dollars a year to a jockey whom the Parisian populace admired, and a fortune for a palace in Verona, which he had promptly torn down, for the sake of a few painted ceilings. The Major told about one outdoor fete, which he had given upon a sudden whim: ten thousand Venetian lanterns, ten thousand metres of carpet; three thousand gilded chairs, and two or three hundred waiters in fancy costumes; two palaces built in a lake, with sea-horses and dolphins, and half a dozen orchestras, and several hundred chorus—girls from the Grand Opera! And in between adventures such as these, he bought a seat in the Chamber of Deputies, and made speeches and fought duels in defence of the Holy Catholic Church—and wrote articles for the yellow journals of America. “And that’s the fate of my lost dividends!” growled the Major.
There were several automobiles to meet the party at the depot, and they were whirled through a broad avenue up a valley, and past a little lake, and so to the gates of Castle Havens.
It was a tremendous building, a couple of hundred feet long. One entered into a main hall, perhaps fifty feet wide, with a great fireplace arid staircase of marble and bronze, and furniture of gilded wood and crimson velvet, and a huge painting, covering three of the walls, representing the Conquest of Peru. Each of the rooms was furnished in the style of a different period—one Louis Quatorze, one Louis Quinze, one Marie Antoinette, and so on. There was a drawing-room and a regal music-room; a dining-room in the Georgian style, and a billiard-room, also in the English fashion, with high wainscoting and open beams in the ceiling; and a library, and a morning-room and conservatory. Upstairs in the main suite of rooms was a royal bedstead, which alone was rumoured to have cost twenty-five thousand dollars; and you might have some idea of the magnificence of things when you learned that underneath the gilding of the furniture was the rare and precious Circassian walnut.