Chapter VI

Severance sauntered up and down the “Forty Steps,” the repose of his bearing belying the agitation within.

“Why on earth doesn’t she come?” he thought uneasily. “Can she be ill again? She is ten minutes behind time now. What did it mean—all those fellows there last night? She looked like an amused spectator at a play, and Miss Decker was nervous, actually nervous. Damn it! Here they all come. What do they mean by keeping under my heels like this?”

Dedham, Trent, and Boswell strolled up from various directions, and, although each had expectation in his eye, none looked overjoyed to see the other men. There were four cold nods, a dead pause, and then Teddy gave a little cough.

“Beautiful after—I mean morning.”

“It is indeed,” said Severance. “I wonder you are not taking your salt-water constitutional.”

“I always take a walk in the morning;” and Teddy glanced nervously over his shoulder.

Boswell and Trent, each with a little missive burning his pocket, turned red, fidgeted, glared at the ocean, and made no remark. Severance darted a glance at each of the three in succession, and then looked at the ground with a contemplative stare. At this moment Mrs. Pendleton appeared.

Three of the men advanced to meet her with an awkward attempt at surprise, but she waved them back.

“I have something to say to you,” she said.

The cold languor of her face had given place to an expression of haughty triumph. A gleam of conscious power lay deep in her scornful eyes. The final act in the drama had come, and the dénouement should be worthy of her talents. She looked like a judge who had smiled encouragement to a guilty defendant only to confer the sentence of capital punishment at last.

“Gentlemen,” she said, and even her voice was judicatorial, “I have asked you all to meet me here this morning”—(three angry starts, but she went on unmoved)—“because I came to the conclusion last night that it is quite time this farce should end. I am somewhat bored myself, and I have no doubt you are so, as well. Your joke was a clever one, worthy of the idle days of autumn. When I received your four proposals by the same mail, I appreciated your wit—I will say more, your genius—and felt glad to do anything I could to contribute to your amusement, especially as all the world is away and I knew how dull you must be. So I accepted each of you, as you know, had four charming interviews and one memorable one of a more composite nature; and now that we have all agreed that the spicy and original little drama has run its length I take pleasure in restoring your rings.”

She took from her handkerchief a beautiful little casket of blue onyx, upon which reposed the Pendleton crest in diamonds, touched a spring, and revealed four rings sparkling about as many velvet cushions. The four men stood speechless; not one dared protest his sincerity and see ridicule in the eyes of his neighbour.

Mrs. Pendleton dropped her judicial air, and taking the ruby between her fingers, smiled like a teacher bestowing a prize.

“Mr. Boswell,” she said, “I believe this belongs to you;” and she handed the ring to the stupefied author. He put it in his pocket with never a word.

She raised the emerald. “Mr. Trent, this is yours?—or is it the sapphire?”

“The emerald,” snorted Trent.

She dropped it in his nerveless palm with a gracious bend of the head, and turned to Teddy.

“You gave me a solitaire, I remember,” she said sweetly. “A most appropriate gift, for it is the ideal life.”

Teddy looked as if about to burst into tears, gave her one beseeching glance, then took his ring and strode feebly over the cliffs. Trent and Boswell hesitated a moment, then hurried after.

Jessica held the casket to Severance, with a little outward sweep of her wrist. He took it and, folding his arms, looked at her steadily. A tide of angry colour rose to her hair, then she turned her back upon him and looking out over the water tapped her foot on the rocks.

“Why do you not go?” she asked. “I hate you more than any one on earth.”

“No. You love me.”

“I hate you! You are a brute! The coolest, the rudest, the most exasperating man on—on earth.”

“That is the reason you love me. My dear Mrs. Pendleton,” he continued, taking the ring from the casket and laying the latter on a rock, “a woman of brains and headstrong will—but unegoistic—likes a brutal and masterful man. An egoistical woman, whether she be fool or brilliant, likes a slave. The reason is that egoism, not being a feminine quality primarily, but borrowed from man, places its fair possessor outside of her sex’s limitations and supplies her with the satisfying simulacrum of those stronger characteristics which she would otherwise look for in man. You are not an egoist.”

He took her hand and removed her glove in spite of her resistance.

“Don’t struggle. You would only look ridiculous if any one should pass. Besides, it is useless. I am so much stronger. I do not know or care what really possessed you to indulge in such a freak as to engage yourself to four men at once,” he continued, slipping the ring on her finger. “You had your joke, and I hope you enjoyed it. The dénouement was highly dramatic. As I said, I desire no explanation, for I am never concerned with anything but results. And now—you are going to marry me.”

“I am not!” sobbed Jessica.

“You are.” He glanced about. No one was in sight. He put his arm about her shoulders, forcing her own to her sides, then bent back her head and kissed her on the mouth.

“Checkmate!” he said.

GERTRUDE ATHERTON was born in San Francisco and received her
early education in California and Kentucky, but her best
training was in her grandfather’s library, a collection, it is
said, of English masterpieces only, containing no American
fiction whatever. Yet Mrs. Atherton is as thorough an American
as a niece, in the third generation, of Benjamin Franklin should
be.

It seems to have been the English critics who first recognised
her originality, power, intensity, vividness, and vitality, but
from her first book, “What Dreams May Come,” published in 1888,
her writings have revealed the unusual combination of brains and
feeling. This gives her work both keen, clever strength and
brilliancy of colour, developed through years of hard work, many
of which were spent abroad, and reaching their best
manifestation in her latest fiction, the one quality in “The
Conqueror” and the other in “The Splendid Idle Forties.” Both of
these books go to prove the foresight of Mr. Harold Frederic,
who, shortly before his death, declared her to be “the only
woman in contemporary literature who knew how to write a novel,”
and that her future work would be her best. Another eminent
English critic, Dr. Robertson Nicholl, spoke for some of the
best students of modern literature in saying:—

“Gertrude Atherton is the ablest woman writer of fiction
now living.”

In her most notable novel, “The Conqueror,” Gertrude Atherton
has chosen in “the true and romantic story of Alexander
Hamilton” a subject which would have attracted few woman
writers, and has handled those parts of it with which many men
have busied their brains in such a way that _The New York Times
Saturday Review_ remarked that it

“Holds more romance than nine-tenths of the imaginative
fiction of the day and more veracity than ninety-nine
hundredths of the history. She is master of her
material.”

“Certainly this country has produced no writer who approaches
Mrs. Atherton,” says one critic, while another adds that to have
so “re-created a great man as Mrs. Atherton has done in this
novel is to have written one’s own title to greatness.” All
alike regard it as “a thing apart” (_The Critic_); “a remarkable
production, full of force, vigour, brains, and insight” (_Boston
Herald_); “an entrancing book . . . brilliantly written”
(_Glasgow Herald_). “It is hardly too much to say that she has
invented a new kind of historical novel” is the comment of the
_Athenæum_ (London), with the addition that “the experiment is a
remarkable success.”

Equally strong in fascination and vigour is “The Splendid Idle
Forties,” but as far removed from “The Conqueror” as were the
Eastern and Western seaboards of this country in the times of
which the stories treat, “the long, drowsy, shimmering days
before the Gringo came,” to the California of which she writes.
“Pointed, spirited, and Spanish” are these “rich and impressive”
stories; “such as could hardly have been told in any other
country since the Bagdad of the ‘Thousand and One Nights.’ The
book is full of weird fascination, and will add to Mrs.
Atherton’s deservedly high reputation,” says _The Athenæum_.

“In this book even more than in her others is shown that
imaginative brilliancy so striking as to set one
wondering what is the secret of the effect. . . . For
the rest, her charm lies in temperament, magnetic,
restless, assertive, vivid.”—_Washington Times._

In close relation to “The Conqueror” stands Mrs. Atherton’s
still more recent selection of “A Few of Hamilton’s Letters,”
chosen from the great bulk of his state papers and other letters
in such a way as to bring to the average reader the means of
estimating the personality of this remarkable man from his own
words. Incidentally it is the surest refutation of some of the
hasty criticisms upon the picture of him in “The Conqueror,”
where, as Mr. Le Gallienne justly observes, “it was reserved for
Mrs. Atherton to make him really alive to the present
generation.”

The Macmillan Little Novels

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PHILOSOPHY FOUR
A STORY OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY
By Owen Wister
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MAN OVERBOARD
By F. Marion Crawford
Author of “Cecilia,” “Marietta,” etc.

MR. KEEGAN’S ELOPEMENT
By Winston Churchill
Author of “The Crisis,” “Richard Carvel,” etc.

MRS. PENDLETON’S FOUR-IN-HAND
By Gertrude Atherton
Author of “The Conqueror,” “The Splendid
Idle Forties,” etc.

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Transcriber’s Notes:

Spelling and hyphenation have been retained as in the original publication. Punctuation errors have been corrected without note.

End of Project Gutenberg's Mrs. Pendleton's Four-in-hand, by Gertrude Atherton