THE RALSTONS

BY
F. MARION CRAWFORD
Author of “A Roman Singer,” “Pietro Ghisleri,”
“Katharine Lauderdale,” etc.

TWO VOLUMES IN ONE


New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd.
1902

All rights reserved


Copyright, 1893,
By F. MARION CRAWFORD.

Twenty-second Thousand

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing & Co.—Berwick & Smith
Norwood Mass. U.S.A.

THE RALSTONS

CHAPTER I.

Alexander Lauderdale Junior was very much exercised in spirit concerning the welfare of his two daughters, of whom the elder was Charlotte and the younger was Katharine. Charlotte had been married, nearly two years before the opening of this tale, to Benjamin Slayback, the well-known member of Congress from Nevada, and lived in Washington. Katharine was still at home, living with her father and mother and grandfather, in the old house in Clinton Place, in the city of New York.

Mr. Lauderdale, the son of the still living philanthropist, and the nephew of the latter’s younger brother, the great millionaire, Robert Lauderdale, sat in his carefully swept, garnished and polished office on a Saturday morning early in April. In outward appearance, as well as in inward sympathy, he was in perfect harmony with his surroundings. He resembled a magnificent piece of mechanism exhibited in a splendid show-case—a spare man, extremely well proportioned, with a severe cast of face, hard grey eyes, and a look all over him which recalled a well-kept locomotive. He sat facing the bright light which fell through the clear plate glass. One of his hands, cool, smooth, lean, lay perfectly still, spread out upon the broad sheet of a type-written letter on the table; the other, equally motionless, hung idly over his knee. They were grasping hands, with long, curved nails, naturally highly polished. It was not probable that the great Trust Company, in which Alexander Junior held such an important position, should ever lose the fraction of a fractional interest through any oversight of his.

So far as his own fortune was concerned, he often said that he was poor. He lived in an old house which had been his grandfather’s and father’s in turn, but which, although his father was alive and continued to live in it, had become his own property some years previous to the beginning of this story. For Alexander Lauderdale Senior was a philanthropist; and although his brother, the rich Robert, gave liberally toward the support of the institutions in which he was interested, Alexander had little by little turned everything he possessed into money, applying it chiefly to the education of idiots. The consequence was that he depended, almost unconsciously, upon his only son for the actual necessities of life. The old house was situated on the north side of Clinton Place, which had never been a fashionable street, though it lay in what had once been a most fashionable neighbourhood. No one need be surprised if the near relatives of such a very rich man as Robert Lauderdale lived very quietly, so far as expenditure was concerned. He was a very generous man, and would have done much more for his nephew and the latter’s family if he had believed that they wished or expected it. But in his sensible view, they had all they needed,—a good house, a sufficient amount of luxury, and a very prominent position in society. He knew, moreover, that, however much he might give, the money would either find its way into the vast charities in which his brother was interested, or would disappear, as other sums and bits of property had disappeared before now, to some place—presumably one of safety—of which his nephew never spoke. For he suspected that Alexander Junior was not nearly so poor as he represented himself to be, and he was not exactly pleased with the fact that he himself was the only person before whom Alexander Junior bowed down and offered incense.

For this younger Lauderdale was a very rigid man in almost all respects: in his religion, which took the Presbyterian form, and took it in earnest; in his uprightness, which was cruelly sincere; and in his outward manner, which was in the highest degree conventionally correct.

It was this extreme correctness which lay at the root of his present troubles, since, in his opinion, both his daughters had departed from it in opposite directions and in an almost equal degree. He did not recognize himself in either of them, and, as he believed his own character to be an excellent model for his family, his vanity was wounded by nature’s perverseness. Furthermore, he distinctly disliked that sort of social prominence which is the portion of those who are not like the majority, or who do not think with the majority and say so. Both Mrs. Slayback and Miss Lauderdale attracted attention in that way.

Mrs. Slayback was handsome and vain, and believed herself to be proud in the better sense of the word. She had married her husband for two reasons: because she found the paternal home intolerable, and because, besides being rich, Benjamin Slayback was thought to be a man who had a brilliant future before him in the world of politics. Charlotte had believed that she could rule him, and herself become a power. In this she had been disappointed at the outset, having been deceived by a certain almost childlike simplicity of exterior, which was in reality one of Slayback’s strongest weapons. He admired her very much; he looked up to her with admiration for her superior social acquirements, and he treated her with a sort of barbaric liberality to which she had not been accustomed. But within himself he followed his own political devices without consulting her, and with a smiling reticence which convinced her most unpleasantly that she was not intellectually a match for him. This was all the more painful as she considered him to be her social inferior, a point of view which was popular with some of her intimate friends in New York, but much less so in Washington, and not at all in Nevada.

The immediate consequence of this state of affairs was that Charlotte and her husband did not agree. Both were disappointed, though in an unequal measure. Slayback claimed that any woman should be contented who had what he gave his wife. Charlotte thought that she showed great forbearance in not leaving a man whom she could not rule. It was not worth while, she said to herself, to have accepted a man who had, at her first acquaintance with him, worn a green tie; whose speech at home was remarkable rather for its ‘burr’ than for its grammar, and who did queer things with his knife and fork—unless his undeniable intelligence and force were to be at her service in such a way as to make her feel that she was at least as powerful a person as he. She had condemned the green tie, and he had submitted, and she had successfully conveyed hints against cutting fish and potatoes with a steel knife; but in the matter of grammar she had been less successful. When Benjamin was on his legs on the floor of the House, as he often was, he could speak very well indeed, which made it all the more unpleasant when he relapsed into the use of dialect, not to say slang, at his own table. He was a jovial man over his dinner, too, and she particularly detested jovial men, especially when they spoke English not altogether