Chapter XLI

The Daughter of Mrs. Fleming

Berenice Fleming, at the time Cowperwood first encountered her mother, was an inmate of the Misses Brewster’s School for Girls, then on Riverside Drive, New York, and one of the most exclusive establishments of its kind in America. The social prestige and connections of the Heddens, Flemings, and Carters were sufficient to gain her this introduction, though the social fortunes of her mother were already at this time on the down grade. A tall girl, delicately haggard, as he had imagined her, with reddish-bronze hair of a tinge but distantly allied to that of Aileen’s, she was unlike any woman Cowperwood had ever known. Even at seventeen she stood up and out with an inexplicable superiority which brought her the feverish and exotic attention of lesser personalities whose emotional animality found an outlet in swinging a censer at her shrine.

A strange maiden, decidedly! Even at this age, when she was, as one might suppose, a mere slip of a girl, she was deeply conscious of herself, her sex, her significance, her possible social import. Armed with a fair skin, a few freckles, an almost too high color at times, strange, deep, night-blue, cat-like eyes, a long nose, a rather pleasant mouth, perfect teeth, and a really good chin, she moved always with a f,eline grace that was careless, superior, sinuous, and yet the acme of harmony and a rhythmic flow of lines. <…>

You would not have called Berenice Fleming sensuous – though she was – because she was self-controlled. Her eyes lied to you. They lied to all the world. They looked you through and through with a calm savoir faire, a mocking defiance, which said with a faint curl of the lips, barely suggested to help them out, “You cannot read me, you cannot read me.” She put her head to one side, smiled, lied (by implication), assumed that there was nothing. And there was nothing, as yet. Yet there was something, too – her inmost convictions, and these she took good care to conceal. The world – how little it should ever, ever know! How little it ever could know truly!

The first time Cowperwood encountered this Circe daughter of so unfortunate a mother was on the occasion of a trip to New York, the second spring following his introduction to Mrs. Carter in Louisville. Berenice was taking some part in the closing exercises of the Brewster School, and Mrs. Carter, with Cowperwood for an escort, decided to go East. Cowperwood having located himself at the Netherlands, and Mrs. Carter at the much humbler Grenoble, they journeyed together to visit this paragon whose picture he had had hanging in his rooms in Chicago for months past. When they were introduced into the somewhat somber reception parlor of the Brewster School, Berenice came slipping in after a few moments, a noiseless figure of a girl, tall and slim, and deliciously sinuous. Cowperwood saw at first glance that she fulfilled all the promise of her picture, and was delighted. She had, he thought, a strange, shrewd, intelligent smile, which, however, was girlish and friendly. Without so much as a glance in his direction she came forward, extending her arms and hands in an inimitable histrionic manner, and exclaimed, with a practised and yet natural inflection: “Mother, dear! So here you are really! You know, I’ve been thinking of you all morning. I wasn’t sure whether you would come to-day, you change about so. I think I even dreamed of you last night.”

Her skirts, still worn just below the shoe-tops, had the richness of scraping silk then fashionable. She was also guilty of using a faint perfume of some kind.

Cowperwood could see that Mrs. Carter, despite a certain nervousness due to the girl’s superior individuality and his presence, was very proud of her. Berenice, he also saw quickly, was measuring him out of the tail of her eye – a single sweeping glance which she vouchsafed from beneath her long lashes sufficing; but she gathered quite accurately the totality of Cowperwood’s age, force, grace, wealth, and worldly ability. Without hesitation she classed him as a man of power in some field, possibly finance, one of the numerous able men whom her mother seemed to know. She always wondered about her mother. His large gray eyes, that searched her with lightning accuracy, appealed to her as pleasant, able eyes. She knew on the instant, young as she was, that he liked women, and that probably he would think her charming; but as for giving him additional attention it was outside her code. She preferred to be interested in her dear mother exclusively. <…>

And as he viewed Berenice Fleming now he felt her to be such – a born actress, lissome, subtle, wise, indifferent, superior, taking the world as she found it and expecting it to obey – to sit up like a pet dog and be told to beg. What a charming character! What a pity it should not be allowed to bloom undisturbed in its make-believe garden! What a pity, indeed!

Chapter XLII

F. A. Cowperwood, Guardian

It was some time after this first encounter before Cowperwood saw Berenice again, and then only for a few days in that region of the Pocono Mountains where Mrs. Carter had her summer home. <…>

Rolfe was a cheerful, pleasant-mannered youth, well bred, genial, and courteous, but not very brilliant intellectually. Cowperwood’s judgment of him the first time he saw him was that under ordinary circumstances he would make a good confidential clerk, possibly in a bank. Berenice, on the other hand, the child of the first husband, was a creature of an exotic mind and an opalescent heart. After his first contact with her in the reception-room of the Brewster School Cowperwood was deeply conscious of the import of this budding character. He was by now so familiar with types and kinds of women that an exceptional type – quite like an exceptional horse to a judge of horse-flesh – stood out in his mind with singular vividness. Quite as in some great racing-stable an ambitious horseman might imagine that he detected in some likely filly the signs and lineaments of the future winner of a Derby, so in Berenice Fleming, in the quiet precincts of the Brewster School, Cowperwood previsioned the central figure of a Newport lawn fête or a London drawing-room. Why? She had the air, the grace, the lineage, the blood – that was why; and on that score she appealed to him intensely, quite as no other woman before had ever done. <…>

Before dinner Berenice made her appearance, freshened by a bath and clad in a light summer dress that appeared to Cowperwood to be all flounces, and the more graceful in its lines for the problematic absence of a corset. Her face and hands, however – a face thin, long, and sweetly hollow, and hands that were slim and sinewy – gripped and held his fancy. He was reminded in the least degree of Stephanie; but this girl’s chin was firmer and more delicately, though more aggressively, rounded. Her eyes, too, were shrewder and less evasive, though subtle enough. <…>

“Mother, the Haggertys have invited me for the last week in August. I have half a mind to cut Tuxedo and go. I like Bess Haggerty.”

“Well, you’ll have to decide that, dearest. Are they going to be at Tarrytown or Loon Lake?”

“Loon Lake, of course,” came Berenice’s voice.

What a world of social doings she was involved in, thought Cowperwood. She had begun well. The Haggertys were rich coal-mine operators in Pennsylvania. Harris Haggerty, to whose family she was probably referring, was worth at least six or eight million. The social world they moved in was high.

They drove after dinner to The Saddler, at Saddler’s Run, where a dance and “moonlight promenade” was to be given. On the way over, owing to the remoteness of Berenice, Cowperwood for the first time in his life felt himself to be getting old. In spite of the vigor of his mind and body, he realized constantly that he was over fifty-two, while she was only seventeen. Why should this lure of youth continue to possess him? She wore a white concoction of lace and silk which showed a pair of smooth young shoulders and a slender, queenly, inimitably modeled neck. He could tell by the sleek lines of her arms how strong she was.

“It is perhaps too late,” he said to himself, in comment. “I am getting old.”

The freshness of the hills in the pale night was sad.

Saddler’s, when they reached there after ten, was crowded with the youth and beauty of the vicinity. Mrs. Carter, who was prepossessing in a ball costume of silver and old rose, expected that Cowperwood would dance with her. And he did, but all the time his eyes were on Berenice, who was caught up by one youth and another of dapper mien during the progress of the evening and carried rhythmically by in the mazes of the waltz or schottische. There was a new dance in vogue that involved a gay, running step – kicking first one foot and then the other forward, turning and running backward and kicking again, and then swinging with a smart air, back to back, with one’s partner. Berenice, in her lithe, rhythmic way, seemed to him the soul of spirited and gracious ease – unconscious of everybody and everything save the spirit of the dance itself as a medium of sweet emotion, of some far-off, dreamlike spirit of gaiety. He wondered. He was deeply impressed.

“Berenice,” observed Mrs. Carter, when in an intermission she came forward to where Cowperwood and she were sitting in the moonlight discussing New York and Kentucky social life, “haven’t you saved one dance for Mr. Cowperwood?”

Cowperwood, with a momentary feeling of resentment, protested that he did not care to dance any more. Mrs. Carter, he observed to himself, was a fool.

“I believe,” said her daughter, with a languid air, “that I am full up. I could break one engagement, though, somewhere.”

“Not for me, though, please,” pleaded Cowperwood. “I don’t care to dance any more, thank you.”

He almost hated her at the moment for a chilly cat. And yet he did not.

“Why, Bevy, how you talk! I think you are acting very badly this evening.”

“Please, please,” pleaded Cowperwood, quite sharply. “Not any more. I don’t care to dance any more.”

Bevy looked at him oddly for a moment – a single thoughtful glance.

“But I have a dance, though,” she pleaded, softly. “I was just teasing. Won’t you dance it with me?

“I can’t refuse, of course,” replied Cowperwood, coldly.

“It’s the next one,” she replied.

They danced, but he scarcely softened to her at first, so angry was he. Somehow, because of all that had gone before, he felt stiff and ungainly. She had managed to break in upon his natural savoir faire – this chit of a girl. But as they went on through a second half the spirit of her dancing soul caught him, and he felt more at ease, quite rhythmic. She drew close and swept him into a strange unison with herself.

“You dance beautifully,” he said.

“I love it,” she replied. She was already of an agreeable height for him.

It was soon over. “I wish you would take me where the ices are,” she said to Cowperwood.

He led her, half amused, half disturbed at her attitude toward him.

“You are having a pleasant time teasing me, aren’t you?” he asked.

“I am only tired,” she replied. “The evening bores me.

Really it does. I wish we were all home.”

“We can go when you say, no doubt.”

As they reached the ices, and she took one from his hand, she surveyed him with those cool, dull blue eyes of hers – eyes that had the flat quality of unglazed Dutch tiles.

“I wish you would forgive me,” she said. “I was rude. I couldn’t help it. I am all out of sorts with myself.”

“I hadn’t felt you were rude,” he observed, lying grandly, his mood toward her changing entirely.

“Oh yes I was, and I hope you will forgive me. I sincerely wish you would.”

“I do with all my heart – the little that there is to forgive.”

He waited to take her back, and yielded her to a youth who was waiting. He watched her trip away in a dance, and eventually led her mother to the trap. Berenice was not with them on the home drive; someone else was bringing her. Cowperwood wondered when she would come, and where was her room, and whether she was really sorry, and —

As he fell asleep Berenice Fleming and her slate-blue eyes were filling his mind completely.