Frances Waldeaux | Page 6

lofty, generous way, that his father (whom she had
taught him to reverence as the most chivalric of gentlemen) had left
him wholly dependent upon her. It was a legal fiction, of course. He
was the heir--the crown prince. He had always been liberally supplied
with money at school and at Harvard. Her income was large. No doubt
the dear soul mismanaged the estates fearfully, but now he would have
leisure to take care of them.
Now, the fact was that Colonel Waldeaux had been a drunken
spendthrift who had left nothing. The house and farm always had
belonged to his wife. She had supported George by her own work all of
his life. She could not save money, but she had the rarer faculty of
making it. She had raised fine fruit and flowers for the Philadelphia
market; she had traded in high breeds of poultry and cattle, and had
invested her earnings shrewdly. With these successes she had been able
to provide George with money to spend freely at college. She lived
scantily at home, never expecting any luxury or great pleasure to come
into her own life.
But two years ago a queer thing had happened to her. In an idle hour
she wrote a comical squib and sent it to a New York paper. As
everybody knows, fun, even vulgar fun, sells high in the market. Her
fun was not vulgar, but coarse and biting enough to tickle the ears of
the common reader. The editor offered her a salary equal to her whole
income for a weekly column of such fooling.
She had hoarded every penny of this money. With it she meant to pay
her expenses in Europe and to support George in his year at Oxford.
The work and the salary were to go on while she was gone.

It was easy enough to hide all of these things from her son while he
was in Cambridge and she in Delaware. But now? What if he should
find out that his mother was the Quigg" of the New York ----, a paper
which he declared to be unfit for a gentleman to read?
She was looking out to sea and thinking of this when her cousin, Miss
Vance, came up to her. Miss Vance was a fashionable teacher in New
York, who was going to spend a year abroad with two wealthy pupils.
She was a thin woman, quietly dressed; white hair and black brows,
with gold eye-glasses bridging an aquiline nose, gave her a
commanding, inquisitorial air.
"Well, Frances!" she began briskly, "I have not had time before to
attend to you. Are your bags hung in your stateroom?"
"I haven't been down yet," said Mrs. Waldeaux meekly. "We were
watching the fog in the sun."
"Fog! Mercy on me! You know you may be ill any minute, and your
room not ready! Of course, you did not take the bromides that I sent
you a week ago?
"No, Clara."
Miss Vance glanced at her. "Well, just as you please. I've done what I
could. Let me look at your itinerary. You will be too ill for me to
advise you about it later."
"Oh, we made none!" said George gayly, coming up to his mother's aid.
"We are going to be vagabonds, and have no plans. Mother's soul
draws us to York Cathedral, and mine to the National Gallery. That is
all we know."
"I thought you had given up that whim of being an artist?" said Miss
Vance, sharply facing on him.
Young Waldeaux reddened. "Yes, I have given it up. I know as well as
you do that I have no talent. I am going to study my profession at

Oxford, and earn my bread by it."
"Quite right. You never would earn it by art," she said decisively.
"How long do you stay in York, Frances?"
"Oh, a day, or a month--or--years, as we please," said Frances, lazily
turning her head away. She wanted to set Clara Vance down in her
proper place. Mrs. Waldeaux abhorred cousinly intimates--people who
run into your back door to pry into the state of your larder or your
income. But Miss Vance, as Frances knew, unfortunately held a key to
her back door. She knew of George's wretched daubs, and his insane
desire, when he was a boy, to study art. He gave it up years ago. Why
should she nag him now about it? By virtue of her relationship she
knew, too, all of Mrs. Waldeaux's secrets. It was most unfortunate that
she should have chosen to sail on this vessel.
"Well, mother," George said, uneasy to get away, "no doubt Miss
Vance is right. We should set things in order. I am going now to give
my letter of credit to the