The Gorgeous Girl. Nalbro Bartley
the crash came and debts surrounded the entire Vondeplosshe estate.
He was small and frail, a trifle bow-legged to be exact, with pale and perpetually weeping eyes, a crooked little nose with an incipient moustache doing its best to hide a thick upper lip. His forehead sloped back like a cat’s, and his scanty, sandy hair was brushed into a shining pompadour, while white eyelashes gave an uncanny expression to his face. Abortive lumps of flesh stuck on at careless intervals sufficed for ears, and his scrawny neck with its absurdly correct collar and wild necktie seemed like an old, old man’s when he dresses for his golden-wedding anniversary. Everything about Gaylord seemed old, exhausted, quite ineffectual. His mother had never tired boasting that Gaylord had had mumps, measles, chicken pox, whooping cough, St. Vitus dance, double pneumonia, and typhoid, had broken three ribs, his left arm, his right leg, and his nose––all before reaching the age of sixteen. And yet she raised him!
Coupled with this and the fact of his father’s failure people were lenient to him.
33
“He’s Vondeplosshe’s boy,” they said; so they gave him a position or a loan or a letter of introduction, and thought at the same time what a splendid thing it was Vondeplosshe was out of it instead of having to stand by and see his son make a complete foozle. For some time Gaylord had been scampering up and down the gauntlet of sympathy, and as long as he could borrow more money in Hanover than he could possibly earn he refused to go to work.
Originally he would have been almost as rich as the Gorgeous Girl herself, but as it was he was poor as Trudy Burrows, only Trudy was a nobody, her family being a dark and uncertain quantity in the wilds of Michigan.
Whereas Gaylord was Vondeplosshe and he could––and did––saunter past a red-brick mansion and remark pensively: “I was born in the room over the large bay window; the one next to it was my nursery––a dear old spot. Rather tough, old dear, to have to stand outside!” Or: “Father was a charter member of the club, so they carry me along without dues. Decent of them, isn’t it? Father was a prince among men, robbed right and left, y’know––always the way when a gentleman tries to be in business. Some say it was Constantine himself who did the worst of it. Of course never repeat it, will you? It takes a man with Steve O’Valley’s coarseness to forge ahead.”
His wobbly, rickety little body always wore the most startling of costumes. A green paddock coat, well padded, a yellow walking stick in the thin fingers, a rakish hat, patent-leather boots, striped suits, silk shirts with handkerchiefs to match, a gold cigarette case, and a watch chain like a woman’s, were a few of 34 Gaylord’s daily requisites. He lived at a club called The Hunters of Arcadia, where he paid an occasional stipend and gambled regularly, sometimes winning. He also promoted things in half-dishonest, half-idiotic fashion, undertaking to bring on opera singers for a concert, sometimes realizing a decent sum and sometimes going behind only to be rescued by an old family friend.
Gaylord was always keen on dinner invitations. And because he was a son of Vondeplosshe the same family friends endured his conceited twaddle and his knock-kneed, wicked little self, and sighed with relief when he went away. It would be so much easier to send these dethroned sons of rich men a supply of groceries and an order for coal!
Besides these lines of activity Gaylord wrote society items for the paper, and as he knew everyone and everything about them he was worth a stipend to the editor. He was considered a divine dancer by the buds, and counted as a cutey by widows. But his standing among creditors was: If he offered a check for the entire amount or a dollar on account, pass up the check!
Steve had destroyed several IOU’s with Gaylord’s name attached for the sole reason that Gay had been a playmate of Beatrice’s and she rather favoured him.
“He is so convenient,” she had defended. “You can always call him up at the last minute if someone has disappointed for cards or dinner, and he is never busy. He can shop with you as well as a woman, lunch with you, dance with you––and he does know the proper way to handle small silver. Besides, he loves Monster.” Monster was Bea’s pound-and-a-half 35 spaniel, which barked her wonder at the silken beauty of Beatrice’s boudoir.
So Gaylord travelled his own peculiar gait, with his married sister occasionally sending him checks; as busy as a kitten with a ball of yarn in making everyone tolerate though loathing him. When he visited Steve’s office in the first flush of Steve’s success, to ask the thousandth favour from him, and spied Trudy Burrows in all her lemon-kid booted, pink-chiffon waisted, red-haired loveliness––as virile and bewitching as any one Gaylord’s pale little mind could picture––he proved himself a “true democrat,” as he boasted at the club, and offered her his hand in marriage in short order.
Having just despaired of winning a moneyed bride Gaylord chose Truletta, reasoning that if she were a little nobody it would give him the whiphand over her, since she would feel that to marry a Vondeplosshe was no small triumph. Besides, a chic red-haired wife who knew how to make the most of nothing and to smile, showing thirty-two pearly teeth as cleverly as any dental ad, would not be a bad asset among his men friends. Had the Vondeplosshe fortunes remained intact and Gay met Trudy he would still have pressed his attentions upon her, though they might not have taken the form of an offer of marriage. Trudy’s virile, magnetic personality would have commanded this weakling’s attention and admiration at any time and in any circumstances––which is the way of things.
Very wisely Trudy kept the engagement somewhat of a secret. She estimated that by being seen with Gay she might meet a not impoverished and real man; and Gay––who still hoped for an heiress to fall 36 madly in love with him––was willing to let the matter be a mere understanding. So this oversubscribed flirt and this underendowed young gentleman had been waiting for nearly two years for something to live on in order to be married or else two new affinities in order that they might part amicably.
They did not speak until they were in the café, where it looked well for Gaylord to be attentive and Trudy gracious.
Under the mask of a smile Trudy began: “I’m cross. You were gambling again––yes, you were! Never mind how I know. I know!... I’ll have macaroni, ripe olives, and a cream puff.”
“The same,” Gay said, mournfully; adding: “Well, deary, I have to live!”
“Why not work? I do. You sponge along and waste everyone’s time. I’m not getting any younger, and it’s pretty rough to be in an office with horrid people ordering you round––to have to hear all about Beatrice Constantine and her wonderful wedding. I’m as good as she is––yet I’ll not be asked, and you will be.”
“Of course I am. I’m her oldest playmate,” he said, proudly.
Trudy’s temper jumped the stockade. “So, you paste jewel, you’ll go mincing into church and see her married and dance with everyone afterward; and I’ll sit in the office licking postage stamps while you kiss the bride! I’m better looking than she is; and if you are good enough to go to that wedding so am I!”
“Why, Trudy,” he began, in a bewildered fashion, “don’t make a scene.”
“No use making a scene in a fifty-cent café,” she told him, bitterly, “but I’m plenty good looking 37 enough to have a real man buy me a real dinner with a taxi and wine and violets as extras. Don’t think you are doing me a big favour by being engaged to me.”
“Oh, you’re a great little girl,” he said, nervously; “and it’s all going to come out right. It does rile me to think of your working for Steve. Never mind, my ship will come in and then we’ll show them all.”
“I’m twenty-three and you’re twenty-six, and my eyes ache when I work steadily. I’ll have to wear glasses in another year––but I’ll wash clothes before I’ll do it!”
“When it gets that bad we’ll be married,” he said, seriously.
The humour passed over Trudy’s head. “Married on what?” She was her prettiest when angry and she stirred in Gaylord’s one-cylinder brain a resolve to play