The Woman With a Past/A Case of Blackmail

IPPA CARPENTER despised the morning paper. She could not have held it in more bitter scorn if she had once been a reporter. Like everybody else in the world, she always took a daily newspaper, but days went by without her having opened it. Evening after evening her maid removed a neatly folded square of black and white and threw it in the ash bin. Pippa paid for the papers, and occasionally looked up in them the hour for the rising of the curtain at some theater; there ended her interest in such sordid commodities.

This is not entirely irrelevant, for it presents a pretty psychological question as to why Mrs. Carpenter did actually open her newspaper that particular morning, and, skimming over Balkan difficulties, suffragette outrages, and the newest criminal trial, swooped with a deadly certainty upon the “society page.”

She had been vouchsafed no prophetic dream, nor yet a foreboding; she had no interest in society, and still less in the silly page that purported to record its doings; yet there she sat, bolt upright in bed, her coffee untasted on the table beside her, reading rather crossly through a variety of useless items that did not appeal to her in the least.

“Papers should be suppressed!” she murmured fretfully. “Don't shut the windows, Lucille; it's muggy to-day. And society reporters should be suppressed. And society should be Good heavens!”

She sat bolt upright a moment longer, transfixed by what she had just seen; then suddenly she crumpled back in a tired, rather childlike, little heap. Pippa looked ridiculously young in bed. She was very pale, and her purple-gray eyes were as wide as if she had seen a ghost.

“I don't believe I want any coffee this morning, Lucille,” she said faintly, from the depths of white pillows and streaming red hair.

After Lucille had taken the little tray away, she propped herself on her elbow, and took up the paper again:

The paper dropped once more from Philippa's hand, and she sank back upon the pillow. For a long, a very long, time she lay there, staring at the ceiling, trying to think, trying to see clearly, trying to decide justly. The noise from the street below did not reach her ears. She hardly noticed the telephone ringing in the next room until Lucille answered it, and came in with a trivial message about a luncheon.

“Yes, I'll be there, of course No; I can't come to-day!” Pippa pressed her hands against her temples and collected her thoughts rapidly. “Tell her I'm very sorry, but I have—I have a bad headache. And, Lucille, when you have rung off, please switch the telephone in here, and then don't disturb me till I ring.”

After a few minutes, she got out of bed slowly, almost painfully, as if all the nerves of her body were bruised, and went across the room to her desk. From a locked box she took a bundle of papers, and went back to bed. The telephone transmitter stood on the table beside her, and now it jangled shrilly; but she frowned and let it ring. It hardly penetrated her consciousness, so absorbed was she in the bundle of papers, though at any other time the continued ringing would have driven her wild with nervousness.

Her heavy hair, hanging over her shoulders, was in her way, and she looped and knotted it back with impatient fingers. Crowned with that disheveled, burnished mass, she had never looked so beautiful in her life. Faint shadows had been suddenly painted beneath her eyes; her red mouth was set in a curve most sorrowful, but strangely firm.

Half an hour later she tied the papers up again, sat thinking for a moment longer, and reached slowly for the transmitter. No need to look up this number! No need even to search her memory for it, though it was fifteen years and more since she had called it.

Very clearly and quietly she spoke:

“Please give me Cortlandt nine, six, three, two, five.”

And then:

“I wish to speak to Mr. Burroughs—immediately, yes. Simply say a lady. Oh, I see! Very well, if those are your instructions, you may tell him that it is—his wife.”

When, in twenty minutes' time, Lucille hastily answered an imperative ring, she was almost startled by the change in her mistress. All the languor, all the weariness, all the outward and visible signs of headache had vanished. Mrs. Carpenter, as if she were too restless to wait even for a moment, had already turned on her bath, and was at her wardrobe door, looking over frocks.

“Hurry, Lucille! Is the morning room in order? Flowers? I didn't ask who has sent them, and I don't care; but I want flowers in the room somewhere. Orchids—that will do. And the gray frock with the Persian embroidery. Watch the clock for me; I am expecting some one at twelve.”

At twelve to the dot Howard Burroughs was shown into the little morning room—the room that an enthusiast had declared to be the most perfect feminine setting in New York. It gave him an odd and instant sense of hush, though the street sounds were no more conspicuously absent here than in other houses. The quiet half light that yet gave no effect of dimness, the soft tones of gray and mauve and silver, the fire lazily burning on the hearth, the inscrutable Mona Lisa above the mantel, the heavy, exotic orchids lavishly massed in one corner of the room—all these things seemed to combine to muffle external, jarring things, and to create an atmosphere almost of suspended breath.

Burroughs was a big, handsome man, who did not at first glance look his fifty-odd years. It was only in his eyes that he carried the betrayal; they were world-weary, and not quite direct in their gaze. His fresh color and muscular body remained vigorous and suggestive of something rather better than the prime of life; but his eyes were old.

As usual, he was admirably dressed, in loose-fitting, English clothes; a hasty bracer had dissipated a slightly jaded air that he feared might have lingered from last night; and his strong and well-shaped chin had just the arrogant, conquering-hero tilt that experience had taught him was likely to go well with even the best of women. Some one had once said of Howard Burroughs that, while no one could ever be quite sure of him, it didn't really matter since he was so sure of himself.

Nevertheless, in spite of all his sublime self-confidence and male complacency, he did have a qualm or two of something that he called “nerves,” as he waited for the woman who had once borne his name. He walked restlessly from the fireplace to the window and back again, picked up a slim book from the table—it was poetry, and he dropped it hastily with a grimace—and slapped his gloves against his hand as if to whip himself into another frame of mind.

And then the curtains parted, and Philippa, pale, but entirely composed and calm, and looking like a lovely and rather mondaine nun in her gray Parisian gown, came into the room.

She held out her hand quite simply and naturally, and said, in the voice that he remembered as well as he remembered that of his mother:

“Well, Howard, it's been a long time, hasn't it?”

For a moment he stood speechless, merely holding her hand hard and staring at her.

“You—you are very much changed,” was all his worldliness could find to say at last.

“Naturally—in fifteen years!” She smiled quietly. “I don't think that you are changed at all, Howard. Aren't you going to sit down?”

When they were both seated, he still stared at her.

“Well?” she smiled questioningly.

“I didn't mean changed in that way,” he said. “You are a hundred times more—beautiful.”

Pippa's laugh was soft and without bitterness.

“What a pity you never said things like that to me when we were—married!” she said, with gentle mockery.

“Didn't I?”

She shook her head, still smiling.

“Not”

He finished for her, as she paused:

“Not after the first! What a brute I was! Oh, God, Phil, what a brute and what a fool!”

He was not looking at her now, but past her, as if he saw tragic and evil shapes of the past crowding up.

“Let the ghosts rest, Howard,” Pippa said gently, but her eyes were full of a pity that she had not expected to feel for him. “We had our youth, and our chance, and we lost it between us. It wasn't that I sent to speak to you about.”

But the man did not seem to hear her.

“I didn't know it would make me feel like this to see you again,” he said huskily. “I didn't know!”

Impulsively she put out her hand to him, and he caught it and pressed it violently against his lips.

“Phil—Phil!” he muttered. “There never was any woman that could touch you! If I thought I'd have a chance with you now, I'd chuck everything! Phil!”

Though she tried to draw her hand away, he held it fast, and pressed it against his eyes.

“To have to wait fifteen years to wake up!” he almost groaned. “And then to make a howling fool of myself! Phil, how you must despise me!”

The heart of a certain type of woman is a strange thing. It is built and shaped to be used exclusively as a shrine, and when the one god has been broken or stolen from the altar, the woman will dig up all the other fractured and defaced gods and ikons of her youth and weep over them, recalling in what gracious fashion this one took to incense and marigolds, and how beautiful that one was before the testing fires scorched him. This is beside the point, except to explain why it was that the little name, “Phil,” not heard for over fifteen years, should have brought back to Pippa a vision of a bay at night, a stalled motor boat floating softly in the wake of the moon, and a voice whispering: “Phil—please! Phil!”

There was just a second filled with that aching sense of a dead joy.

Then the impression passed, and Pippa was entirely practical again. She drew her hand resolutely away, and said, in a matter-of-fact tone:

“I hear you are engaged, Howard?”

The man started as if she had flicked him with a whip. A slow and dusky flush crawled up from his collar to his hair.

“I—I—yes!” he stammered baldly.

“A young girl, I believe?”

Pippa was not looking at him. She sat on a low fauteuil, leaning forward to play with a great pinkish orchid that drooped from a bowl on the low table before her. As he did not answer, she went on, in even tones:

“A young, charming girl, unusually pretty. Her first season, isn't it?”

“Yes.”

Pippa dropped the orchid and faced him.

“Why?” she asked.

He was disconcerted.

“'Why?' I don't believe I understand what you mean”

“Oh, yes, you do! Why are you marrying this exquisite young creature? Her picture, even in that wretched paper, nearly made me cry, it. looked so innocent and so gay! You're not in love with her. I don't believe she's in love with you.”

He started quickly to speak, but stopped.

“Go on,” he said rather grimly.

“I'm merely trying to see what the girl is going to get out of it,” said Philippa. “Of course, I see what you're going to get. John Eagan would be the most useful kind of a father-in-law. With this uncertainty in railroad stocks just now, the inside track would of course be”

Burroughs started up savagely.

“Damn it, Phil, you go too far!” he cried. “It's true; it is a good match for both sides. John Eagan and I can help each other financially; I admit it. But if that were all, I'd see him in—in Hades before I'd marry his daughter!”

“Well, then,” said Pippa, unimpressed by this outburst, “what is it? Love? She's about eighteen, I suppose?”

“Twenty,” he corrected her. “Her début was postponed two years because her people were in mourning. Phil”—he hesitated, walked across to the window, and came quickly back—“Phil, you're such a good fellow that I'm going to say something to you that may make me sound like the worst cad and bounder you've ever known.”

“I don't believe that, Howard,” she returned, looking up at him frankly. “You have been, and doubtless still are, a number of bad things, but I never knew you to be either a cad or a bounder.”

“Thanks!” His flush deepened in surprised gratitude. “It's this way: Rosamond cares for me.”

“She would get over that,” said Pippa calmly. “Twenty can get over anything.”

“Doubtless. There is just this to add: The alternative that her mother is holding over her head is—Ranway.”

Philippa started. Lord Ranway's reputation was notorious on two continents, and its unsavory nature had kept most decent men far afield from him.

“But—but he is a monster!” she exclaimed, in horror.

“I believe you! Just the same, if Rosamond doesn't marry me, Mrs. Eagan will see to it that Ranway gets her. She—the old woman—prefers him, as it is, because he has a title, but Eagan is on his daughter's side, and we've succeeded in getting the engagement announced at last. You see, for the moment—strange as it may appear to you”—he smiled somewhat bitterly “Rosamond regards me in the light of a deliverer—Perseus rescuing her from the dragon!”

Philippa was silent for a space. At last she drew a deep breath, as if she had made up her mind.

“Of course you must marry her,” she said. “I had meant to prevent you” her assurance was really rather amazing, he thought—“but I see that you must go through with it. Only, Howard”—her eyes were grave and searching as they met his—“are you going to run straight?”

“Straight?” He stared at her. “You mean Oh, I—I've quite reformed, Phil!” He laughed a little. “I don't any longer make love to every pretty woman I see. I—I'm not often such an unspeakable, insufferable idiot as I was when I came in here first to-day. I'll be a model Benedick, Phil! That's what you meant, isn't it?”

“No,” she said, and her eyes remained very serious. “That isn't what I meant. At least, it isn't all that I meant. Are you going to run straight about—money, Howard?”

“Money! Are you crazy? Who says I ever was anything but straight about money?”

“Only—I.”

His jaw dropped as he stood looking down at her. Suddenly he seated himself.

“Now, then,” he said bluntly, “let's have this thing out. So you think I haven't been square about money, eh?”

“I know it, Howard.”

“Pouf!” He tried to laugh it off. “Say that to any man in the Street, and he'll tell you you're raving!”

Philippa was wearing one of the recently fashionable flat bags, heavily embroidered in silver, and swinging by silver cords from her girdle. With the same grave and rather sad look, she reached into it, and took out the bundle of papers that had so engrossed her earlier in the morning. She untied the bundle, and selected a letter that she held out to the man.

“From Senator Cowden,” she said simply, “acknowledging your help in his campaign, and inclosing, so he says, a check for”

With a smothered ejaculation, Burroughs snatched the letter; the veins stood out on his forehead as he read it.

She carefully selected another.

“This is from Mr. Dacre, about that New Orleans transaction”

Burroughs glared at her from congested eyes.

“Where did you get all this stuff?” he demanded.

“Does it matter?” she said, a trifle wearily. “All these letters were brought to me long ago. It—it was thought that I might want to make use of them. They seem to be genuine?”

His face was answer enough.

“And you have had these things all the time?” he said, with an effort.

“All the time.”

The blood poured more and more darkly into the man's heavy, handsome face.

“Then, why in Heaven's name didn't you produce them during the divorce suit? With a big pull for sympathy like this”

She looked at him—quite a gentle look.

“Did you ever know me to be really ungenerous, Howard?”

“No, hang it, I never did! Besides—you wanted to be free, anyhow.”

“Yes,” she said quietly, “I wanted to be free. But—I shouldn't have shown those letters, in any case, Howard.”

“Why did you keep them, then?” he demanded suddenly and violently. “Why didn't you put them in the fire or the waste-paper basket? Since you say you've tried all through to be generous, why did you keep them?”

“I don't know, Howard—I don't really know!” she said, knitting her brows. “I never meant to use them, and yet I kept them. I Oh, I wonder if you will believe me when I say that it seems to be almost psychical? Something made me keep these letters, would not let me throw them away. have not even looked at them for fifteen years until this morning. Then I decided, if necessary, to use them.”

“With what object?” he demanded tersely.

“To save that girl, if there should be no other way. She is so young! And—you made me so very, very unhappy, Howard! I could not bear to think of another sensitive, loving, young thing being broken on the wheel of your egotism, and crushed by your sledge-hammer methods. I—I meant to frighten you into giving her up.”

He was so angry that he forgot himself.

“You talk like a sort of guardian angel!” he said, with an unpleasant laugh. 'No one would guess from your tone and attitude that you were”

He had the grace to check himself.

Pippa rose quietly, slipping the papers back into the hanging bag with hands that shook a little.

“Don't you understand,” she said, “that it's because of that—that I must act as I do? If I were—above reproach—I should have just so much less responsibility. It's because I have sinned that I must guard others from being hurt by sin. Oh, you don't understand-you don't understand! And I don't blame you! But try—try, Howard, to understand a little! The wrongs I have done and the mistakes I have made make me afraid of wrongs and mistakes! I must watch—always watch, and try to catch up ravelings wherever I find them. That is why”—she hesitated for just a breath, and then looked him full in the eyes—“that is why I—who would never have dreamed of using those papers for myself, or even of threatening the use of them—am not ashamed to make that very threat for the sake of another woman.”

He said nothing as he faced her, but his eyes held a furious question.

“I mean,” said Pippa, “that I hold those letters! As long as you run straight, as long as you are faithful to your—wife—and do nothing in any degree disgraceful or dishonest—you have nothing to fear from me, and I wish you luck and happiness. But if I find out anything about you that is hurting her life and spoiling her youth—I'll publish them in every paper in New York!” 

“A case of blackmail, I see!” he said sardonically. His florid face had turned as white as ashes.

“I suppose—that's—what it is!” said Pippa. She was very tired. “A case of blackmail”

Suddenly, to the man's surprise, she began to cry.

“Be good to her, Howard!” she whispered through her tears. “Be good to her, and be good to yourself! I—I'd rather die than have to use those horrible letters!”