“Why, hello, Hattie!” he called, leeringly and jeeringly. “What are you doing down here in New York? You haven’t given up your business in Louisville, have you, eh, old sport? Say, lemme tell you something. I haven’t had a single decent girl since you left—not one. If you open a house down here, let me know, will you?”
He bent over her smirkingly and patronizingly the while he made as if to rummage in his white waistcoat pocket for a card. At the same moment Cowperwood and Braxmar, realizing quite clearly the import of his words, were on their feet. While Mrs. Carter was pulling and struggling back from the stranger, Braxmar’s hand (he being the nearest) was on him, and the head waiter and two assistants had appeared.
“What is the trouble here? What has he done?” they demanded.
Meanwhile the intruder, leering contentiously at them all, was exclaiming in very audible tones: “Take your hands off. Who are you? What the devil have you got to do with this? Don’t you think I know what I’m about? She knows me—don’t you, Hattie? That’s Hattie Starr, of Louisville—ask her! She kept one of the swellest ever run in Louisville. What do you people want to be so upset about? I know what I’m doing. She knows me.”
He not only protested, but contested, and with some vehemence. Cowperwood, Braxmar, and the waiters forming a cordon, he was shoved and hustled out into the lobby and the outer entranceway, and an officer was called.
“This man should be arrested,” Cowperwood protested, vigorously, when the latter appeared. “He has grossly insulted lady guests of mine. He is drunk and disorderly, and I wish to make that charge. Here is my card. Will you let me know where to come?” He handed it over, while Braxmar, scrutinizing the stranger with military care, added: “I should like to thrash you within an inch of your life. If you weren’t drunk I would. If you are a gentleman and have a card I want you to give it to me. I want to talk to you later.” He leaned over and presented a cold, hard face to that of Mr. Beales Chadsey, of Louisville, Kentucky.
“Tha’s all right, Captain,” leered Chadsey, mockingly. “I got a card. No harm done. Here you are. You c’n see me any time you want—Hotel Buckingham, Fifth Avenue and Fiftieth Street. I got a right to speak to anybody I please, where I please, when I please. See?”
He fumbled and protested while the officer stood by read to take him in charge. Not finding a card, he added: “Tha’s all right. Write it down. Beales Chadsey, Hotel Buckingham, or Louisville, Kentucky. See me any time you want to. Tha’s Hattie Starr. She knows me. I couldn’t make a mistake about her—not once in a million. Many’s the night I spent in her house.”
Braxmar was quite ready to lunge at him had not the officer intervened.
Back in the dining-room Berenice and her mother were sitting, the latter quite flustered, pale, distrait, horribly taken aback—by far too much distressed for any convincing measure of deception.
“Why, the very idea!” she was saying. “That dreadful man! How terrible! I never saw him before in my life.”
Berenice, disturbed and nonplussed, was thinking of the familiar and lecherous leer with which the stranger had addressed her mother—the horror, the shame of it. Could even a drunken man, if utterly mistaken, be so defiant, so persistent, so willing to explain? What shameful things had she been hearing?
“Come, mother,” she said, gently, and with dignity; “never mind, it is all right. We can go home at once. You will feel better when you are out of here.”
She called a waiter and asked him to say to the gentlemen that they had gone to the women’s dressing-room. She pushed an intervening chair out of the way and gave her mother her arm.
“To think I should be so insulted,” Mrs. Carter mumbled on, “here in a great hotel, in the presence of Lieutenant Braxmar and Mr. Cowperwood! This is too dreadful. Well, I never.”
She half whimpered as she walked; and Berenice, surveying the room with dignity, a lofty superiority in her face, led solemnly forth, a strange, lacerating pain about her heart. What was at the bottom of these shameful statements? Why should this drunken roisterer have selected her mother, of all other women in the dining-room, for the object of these outrageous remarks? Why should her mother be stricken, so utterly collapsed, if there were not some truth in what he had said? It was very strange, very sad, very grim, very horrible. What would that gossiping, scandal-loving world of which she knew so much say to a scene like this? For the first time in her life the import and horror of social ostracism flashed upon her.
The following morning, owing to a visit paid to the Jefferson Market Police Court by Lieutenant Braxmar, where he proposed, if satisfaction were not immediately guaranteed, to empty cold lead into Mr. Beales Chadsey’s stomach, the following letter on Buckingham stationery was written and sent to Mrs. Ira George Carter—36 Central Park South:
DEAR MADAM:
Last evening, owing to a drunken debauch, for which I have no satisfactory or suitable explanation to make, I was the unfortunate occasion of an outrage upon your feelings and those of your daughter and friends, for which I wish most humbly to apologize. I cannot tell you how sincerely I regret whatever I said or did, which I cannot now clearly recall. My mental attitude when drinking is both contentious and malicious, and while in this mood and state I was the author of statements which I know to be wholly unfounded. In my drunken stupor I mistook you for a certain notorious woman of Louisville—why, I have not the slightest idea. For this wholly shameful and outrageous conduct I sincerely ask your pardon—beg your forgiveness. I do not know what amends I can make, but anything you may wish to suggest I shall gladly do. In the mean while I hope you will accept this letter in the spirit in which it is written and as a slight attempt at recompense which I know can never fully be made.
Very sincerely,
BEALES CHADSEY.
At the same time Lieutenant Braxmar was fully aware before this letter was written or sent that the charges implied against Mrs. Carter were only too well founded. Beales Chadsey had said drunk what twenty men in all sobriety and even the police at Louisville would corroborate. Chadsey had insisted on making this clear to Braxmar before writing the letter.
Chapter LII.
Behind the Arras
Berenice, perusing the apology from Beales Chadsey, which her mother—very much fagged and weary—handed her the next morning, thought that it read like the overnight gallantry of some one who was seeking to make amends without changing his point of view. Mrs. Carter was too obviously self-conscious. She protested too much. Berenice knew that she could find out for herself if she chose, but would she choose? The thought sickened her, and yet who was she to judge too severely?
Cowperwood came in bright and early to put as good a face on the matter as he could. He explained how he and Braxmar had gone to the police station to make a charge; how Chadsey, sobered by arrest, had abandoned his bravado and humbly apologized. When viewing the letter handed him by Mrs. Carter he exclaimed:
“Oh yes. He was very glad to promise to write that if we would let him off. Braxmar seemed to think it was necessary that he should. I wanted the judge to impose a fine and let it go at that. He was drunk, and that’s all there was to it.”
He assumed a very unknowing air when in the presence of Berenice and her mother, but when alone with the latter his manner changed completely.
“Brazen it out,” he commanded. “It doesn’t amount to anything. Braxmar doesn’t believe that this man really knows anything. This letter is enough to convince Berenice. Put a good face on it; more depends on your manner than on anything else. You’re much too upset. That won’t do at all; you’ll tell the whole story that way.”