_ The most serious difficulty confronting Cowperwood from now on was
really not so much political as financial. In building up and
financing his Chicago street-railway enterprises he had, in those
days when Addison was president of the Lake City National, used
that bank as his chief source of supply. Afterward, when Addison
had been forced to retire from the Lake City to assume charge of
the Chicago Trust Company, Cowperwood had succeeded in having the
latter designated as a central reserve and in inducing a number
of rural banks to keep their special deposits in its vaults.
However, since the war on him and his interests had begun to
strengthen through the efforts of Hand and Arneel--men most
influential in the control of the other central-reserve banks of
Chicago, and in close touch with the money barons of New York
--there were signs not wanting that some of the country banks
depositing with the Chicago Trust Company had been induced to
withdraw because of pressure from outside inimical forces, and
that more were to follow. It was some time before Cowperwood fully
realized to what an extent this financial opposition might be
directed against himself. In its very beginning it necessitated
speedy hurryings to New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Baltimore,
Boston--even London at times--on the chance that there would be
loose and ready cash in someone's possession. It was on one of
these peregrinations that he encountered a curious personality
which led to various complications in his life, sentimental and
otherwise, which he had not hitherto contemplated.
In various sections of the country Cowperwood had met many men of
wealth, some grave, some gay, with whom he did business, and among
these in Louisville, Kentucky, he encountered a certain Col.
Nathaniel Gillis, very wealthy, a horseman, inventor, roue, from
whom he occasionally extracted loans. The Colonel was an interesting
figure in Kentucky society; and, taking a great liking to Cowperwood,
he found pleasure, during the brief periods in which they were
together, in piloting him about. On one occasion in Louisville
he observed: "To-night, Frank, with your permission, I am going
to introduce you to one of the most interesting women I know. She
isn't good, but she's entertaining. She has had a troubled history.
She is the ex-wife of two of my best friends, both dead, and the
ex-mistress of another. I like her because I knew her father and
mother, and because she was a clever little girl and still is a
nice woman, even if she is getting along. She keeps a sort of
house of convenience here in Louisville for a few of her old friends.
You haven't anything particular to do to-night, have you? Suppose
we go around there?"
Cowperwood, who was always genially sportive when among strong
men--a sort of bounding collie--and who liked to humor those who
could be of use to him, agreed.
"It sounds interesting to me. Certainly I'll go. Tell me more
about her. Is she good-looking?"
"Rather. But better yet, she is connected with a number of women
who are." The Colonel, who had a small, gray goatee and sportive
dark eyes, winked the latter solemnly.
Cowperwood arose.
"Take me there," he said.
It was a rainy night. The business on which he was seeing the
Colonel required another day to complete. There was little or
nothing to do. On the way the Colonel retailed more of the life
history of Nannie Hedden, as he familiarly called her, and explained
that, although this was her maiden name, she had subsequently
become first Mrs. John Alexander Fleming, then, after a divorce,
Mrs. Ira George Carter, and now, alas! was known among the exclusive
set of fast livers, to which he belonged, as plain Hattie Starr,
the keeper of a more or less secret house of ill repute. Cowperwood
did not take so much interest in all this until he saw her, and
then only because of two children the Colonel told him about, one
a girl by her first marriage, Berenice Fleming, who was away in a
New York boarding-school, the other a boy, Rolfe Carter, who was
in a military school for boys somewhere in the West.
"That daughter of hers," observed the Colonel, "is a chip of the
old block, unless I miss my guess. I only saw her two or three
times a few years ago when I was down East at her mother's summer
home; but she struck me as having great charm even for a girl of
ten. She's a lady born, if ever there was one. How her mother
is to keep her straight, living as she does, is more than I know.
How she keeps her in that school is a mystery. There's apt to
be a scandal here at any time. I'm very sure the girl doesn't
know anything about her mother's business. She never lets her
come out here."
"Berenice Fleming," Cowperwood thought to himself. "What a pleasing
name, and what a peculiar handicap in life."
"How old is the daughter now?" he inquired.
"Oh, she must be about fifteen--not more than that."
When they reached the house, which was located in a rather somber,
treeless street, Cowperwood was surprised to find the interior
spacious and tastefully furnished. Presently Mrs. Carter, as she
was generally known in society, or Hattie Starr, as she was known
to a less satisfying world, appeared. Cowperwood realized at once
that he was in the presence of a woman who, whatever her present
occupation, was not without marked evidences of refinement. She
was exceedingly intelligent, if not highly intellectual, trig,
vivacious, anything but commonplace. A certain spirited undulation
in her walk, a seeming gay, frank indifference to her position in
life, an obvious accustomedness to polite surroundings took his
fancy. Her hair was built up in a loose Frenchy way, after the
fashion of the empire, and her cheeks were slightly mottled with
red veins. Her color was too high, and yet it was not utterly
unbecoming. She had friendly gray-blue eyes, which went well with
her light-brown hair; along with a pink flowered house-gown, which
became her fulling figure, she wore pearls.
"The widow of two husbands," thought Cowperwood; "the mother of two
children!" With the Colonel's easy introduction began a light
conversation. Mrs. Carter gracefully persisted that she had known
of Cowperwood for some time. His strenuous street-railway operations
were more or less familiar to her.
"It would be nice," she suggested, "since Mr. Cowperwood is here,
if we invited Grace Deming to call."
The latter was a favorite of the Colonel's.
"I would be very glad if I could talk to Mrs. Carter," gallantly
volunteered Cowperwood--he scarcely knew why. He was curious to
learn more of her history. On subsequent occasions, and in more
extended conversation with the Colonel, it was retailed to him in
full.
Nannie Hedden, or Mrs. John Alexander Fleming, or Mrs. Ira George
Carter, or Hattie Starr, was by birth a descendant of a long line
of Virginia and Kentucky Heddens and Colters, related in a definite
or vague way to half the aristocracy of four or five of the
surrounding states. Now, although still a woman of brilliant
parts, she was the keeper of a select house of assignation in this
meager city of perhaps two hundred thousand population. How had
it happened? How could it possibly have come about? She had been
in her day a reigning beauty. She had been born to money and had
married money. Her first husband, John Alexander Fleming, who had
inherited wealth, tastes, privileges, and vices from a long line
of slave-holding, tobacco-growing Flemings, was a charming man
of the Kentucky-Virginia society type. He had been trained in the
law with a view to entering the diplomatic service, but, being an
idler by nature, had never done so. Instead, horse-raising,
horse-racing, philandering, dancing, hunting, and the like, had
taken up his time. When their wedding took place the Kentucky-Virginia
society world considered it a great match. There was wealth on
both sides. Then came much more of that idle social whirl which
had produced the marriage. Even philanderings of a very vital
character were not barred, though deception, in some degree at
least, would be necessary. As a natural result there followed the
appearance in the mountains of North Carolina during a charming
autumn outing of a gay young spark by the name of Tucker Tanner,
and the bestowal on him by the beautiful Nannie Fleming--as she
was then called--of her temporary affections. Kind friends were
quick to report what Fleming himself did not see, and Fleming,
roue that he was, encountering young Mr. Tanner on a high mountain
road one evening, said to him, "You get out of this party by night,
or I will let daylight through you in the morning." Tucker Tanner,
realizing that however senseless and unfair the exaggerated chivalry
of the South might be, the end would be bullets just the same,
departed. Mrs. Fleming, disturbed but unrepentant, considered
herself greatly abused. There was much scandal. Then came quarrels,
drinking on both sides, finally a divorce. Mr. Tucker Tanner did
not appear to claim his damaged love, but the aforementioned Ira
George Carter, a penniless never-do-well of the same generation
and social standing, offered himself and was accepted. By the
first marriage there had been one child, a girl. By the second
there was another child, a boy. Ira George Carter, before the
children were old enough to impress Mrs. Carter with the importance
of their needs or her own affection for them, had squandered, in
one ridiculous venture after another, the bulk of the property
willed to her by her father, Major Wickham Hedden. Ultimately,
after drunkenness and dissipation on the husband's side, and finally
his death, came the approach of poverty. Mrs. Carter was not
practical, and still passionate and inclined to dissipation.
However, the aimless, fatuous going to pieces of Ira George Carter,
the looming pathos of the future of the children, and a growing
sense of affection and responsibility had finally sobered her.
The lure of love and life had not entirely disappeared, but her
chance of sipping at those crystal founts had grown sadly slender.
A woman of thirty-eight and still possessing some beauty, she
was not content to eat the husks provided for the unworthy. Her
gorge rose at the thought of that neglected state into which the
pariahs of society fall and on which the inexperienced so cheerfully
comment. Neglected by her own set, shunned by the respectable,
her fortune quite gone, she was nevertheless determined that she
would not be a back-street seamstress or a pensioner upon the
bounty of quondam friends. By insensible degrees came first
unhallowed relationships through friendship and passing passion,
then a curious intermediate state between the high world of fashion
and the half world of harlotry, until, finally, in Louisville, she
had become, not openly, but actually, the mistress of a house of
ill repute. Men who knew how these things were done, and who were
consulting their own convenience far more than her welfare, suggested
the advisability of it. Three or four friends like Colonel Gillis
wished rooms--convenient place in which to loaf, gamble, and bring
their women. Hattie Starr was her name now, and as such she had
even become known in a vague way to the police--but only vaguely
--as a woman whose home was suspiciously gay on occasions.
Cowperwood, with his appetite for the wonders of life, his
appreciation of the dramas which produce either failure or success,
could not help being interested in this spoiled woman who was
sailing so vaguely the seas of chance. Colonel Gillis once said
that with some strong man to back her, Nannie Fleming could be put
back into society. She had a pleasant appeal--she and her two
children, of whom she never spoke. After a few visits to her home
Cowperwood spent hours talking with Mrs. Carter whenever he was
in Louisville. On one occasion, as they were entering her boudoir,
she picked up a photograph of her daughter from the dresser and
dropped it into a drawer. Cowperwood had never seen this picture
before. It was that of a girl of fifteen or sixteen, of whom he
obtained but the most fleeting glance. Yet, with that instinct
for the essential and vital which invariably possessed him, he
gained a keen impression of it. It was of a delicately haggard
child with a marvelously agreeable smile, a fine, high-poised head
upon a thin neck, and an air of bored superiority. Combined with
this was a touch of weariness about the eyelids which drooped in
a lofty way. Cowperwood was fascinated. Because of the daughter
he professed an interest in the mother, which he really did not
feel.
A little later Cowperwood was moved to definite action by the
discovery in a photographer's window in Louisville of a second
picture of Berenice--a rather large affair which Mrs. Carter had
had enlarged from a print sent her by her daughter some time before.
Berenice was standing rather indifferently posed at the corner of
a colonial mantel, a soft straw outing-hat held negligently in one
hand, one hip sunk lower than the other, a faint, elusive smile
playing dimly around her mouth. The smile was really not a smile,
but only the wraith of one, and the eyes were wide, disingenuous,
mock-simple. The picture because of its simplicity, appealed to
him. He did not know that Mrs. Carter had never sanctioned its
display. "A personage," was Cowperwood's comment to himself, and
he walked into the photographer's office to see what could be done
about its removal and the destruction of the plates. A half-hundred
dollars, he found, would arrange it all--plates, prints, everything.
Since by this ruse he secured a picture for himself, he promptly
had it framed and hung in his Chicago rooms, where sometimes of
an afternoon when he was hurrying to change his clothes he stopped
to look at it. With each succeeding examination his admiration
and curiosity grew. Here was perhaps, he thought, the true society
woman, the high-born lady, the realization of that ideal which Mrs.
Merrill and many another grande dame had suggested.
It was not so long after this again that, chancing to be in
Louisville, he discovered Mrs. Carter in a very troubled social
condition. Her affairs had received a severe setback. A certain
Major Hagenback, a citizen of considerable prominence, had died
in her home under peculiar circumstances. He was a man of wealth,
married, and nominally living with his wife in Lexington. As a
matter of fact, he spent very little time there, and at the time
of his death of heart failure was leading a pleasurable existence
with a Miss Trent, an actress, whom he had introduced to Mrs.
Carter as his friend. The police, through a talkative deputy
coroner, were made aware of all the facts. Pictures of Miss Trent,
Mrs. Carter, Major Hagenback, his wife, and many curious details
concerning Mrs. Carter's home were about to appear in the papers
when Colonel Gillis and others who were powerful socially and
politically interfered; the affair was hushed up, but Mrs. Carter
was in distress. This was more than she had bargained for.
Her quondam friends were frightened away for the nonce. She herself
had lost courage. When Cowperwood saw her she had been in the
very human act of crying, and her eyes were red.
"Well, well," he commented, on seeing her--she was in moody gray
in the bargain--"you don't mean to tell me you're worrying about
anything, are you?"
"Oh, Mr. Cowperwood," she explained, pathetically, "I have had so
much trouble since I saw you. You heard of Major Hagenback's
death, didn't you?" Cowperwood, who had heard something of the
story from Colonel Gillis, nodded. "Well, I have just been notified
by the police that I will have to move, and the landlord has given
me notice, too. If it just weren't for my two children--"
She dabbed at her eyes pathetically.
Cowperwood meditated interestedly.
"Haven't you any place you can go?" he asked.
"I have a summer place in Pennsylvania," she confessed; "but I
can't go there very well in February. Besides, it's my living I'm
worrying about. I have only this to depend on."
She waved her hand inclusively toward the various rooms. "Don't
you own that place in Pennsylvania?" he inquired.
"Yes, but it isn't worth much, and I couldn't sell it. I've been
trying to do that anyhow for some time, because Berenice is getting
tired of it."
"And haven't you any money laid away?"
"It's taken all I have to run this place and keep the children in
school. I've been trying to give Berenice and Rolfe a chance to
do something for themselves."
At the repetition of Berenice's name Cowperwood consulted his own
interest or mood in the matter. A little assistance for her would
not bother him much. Besides, it would probably eventually bring
about a meeting with the daughter.
"Why don't you clear out of this?" he observed, finally. "It's
no business to be in, anyhow, if you have any regard for your
children. They can't survive anything like this. You want to put
your daughter back in society, don't you?"
"Oh yes," almost pleaded Mrs. Carter.
"Precisely," commented Cowperwood, who, when he was thinking,
almost invariably dropped into a short, cold, curt, business manner.
Yet he was humanely inclined in this instance.
"Well, then, why not live in your Pennsylvania place for the
present, or, if not that, go to New York? You can't stay here.
Ship or sell these things." He waved a hand toward the rooms.
"I would only too gladly," replied Mrs. Carter, "if I knew what
to do."
"Take my advice and go to New York for the present. You will get
rid of your expenses here, and I will help you with the rest--for
the present, anyhow. You can get a start again. It is too bad
about these children of yours. I will take care of the boy as
soon as he is old enough. As for Berenice"--he used her name
softly--"if she can stay in her school until she is nineteen or
twenty the chances are that she will make social connections which
will save her nicely. The thing for you to do is to avoid meeting
any of this old crowd out here in the future if you can. It might
be advisable to take her abroad for a time after she leaves school."
"Yes, if I just could," sighed Mrs. Carter, rather lamely.
"Well, do what I suggest now, and we will see," observed Cowperwood.
"It would be a pity if your two children were to have their lives
ruined by such an accident as this."
Mrs. Carter, realizing that here, in the shape of Cowperwood, if
he chose to be generous, was the open way out of a lowering dungeon
of misery, was inclined to give vent to a bit of grateful emotion,
but, finding him subtly remote, restrained herself. His manner,
while warmly generous at times, was also easily distant, except
when he wished it to be otherwise. Just now he was thinking of
the high soul of Berenice Fleming and of its possible value to him. _