Write it down. Beales Chadsey, Hotel Buckingham, or Louisville, Kentucky. See me any time you want to. Tha's Hattie Starr. She knows me. I couldn't make a mistake about her--not once in a million. Many's the night I spent in her house."
Braxmar was quite ready to lunge at him had not the officer intervened.
Back in the dining-room Berenice and her mother were sitting, the latter quite flustered, pale, distrait, horribly taken aback--by far too much distressed for any convincing measure of deception.
"Why, the very idea!" she was saying. "That dreadful man! How terrible! I never saw him before in my life."
Berenice, disturbed and nonplussed, was thinking of the familiar and lecherous leer with which the stranger had addressed her mother--the horror, the shame of it. Could even a drunken man, if utterly mistaken, be so defiant, so persistent, so willing to explain? What shameful things had she been hearing?
"Come, mother," she said, gently, and with dignity; "never mind, it is all right. We can go home at once. You will feel better when you are out of here."
She called a waiter and asked him to say to the gentlemen that they had gone to the women's dressing-room. She pushed an intervening chair out of the way and gave her mother her arm.
"To think I should be so insulted," Mrs. Carter mumbled on, "here in a great hotel, in the presence of Lieutenant Braxmar and Mr.
Cowperwood! This is too dreadful. Well, I never."
She half whimpered as she walked; and Berenice, surveying the room with dignity, a lofty superiority in her face, led solemnly forth, a strange, lacerating pain about her heart. What was at the bottom of these shameful statements? Why should this drunken roisterer have selected her mother, of all other women in the dining-room, for the object of these outrageous remarks? Why should her mother be stricken, so utterly collapsed, if there were not some truth in what he had said? It was very strange, very sad, very grim, very horrible. What would that gossiping, scandal-loving world of which she knew so much say to a scene like this? For the first time in her life the import and horror of social ostracism flashed upon her.
The following morning, owing to a visit paid to the Jefferson Market Police Court by Lieutenant Braxmar, where he proposed, if satisfaction were not immediately guaranteed, to empty cold lead into Mr. Beales Chadsey's stomach, the following letter on Buckingham stationery was written and sent to Mrs. Ira George Carter--36 Central Park South:
DEAR MADAM:
Last evening, owing to a drunken debauch, for which I have no satisfactory or suitable explanation to make, I was the unfortunate occasion of an outrage upon your feelings and those of your daughter and friends, for which I wish most humbly to apologize. I cannot tell you how sincerely I regret whatever I said or did, which I cannot now clearly recall. My mental attitude when drinking is both contentious and malicious, and while in this mood and state I was the author of statements which I know to be wholly unfounded.
In my drunken stupor I mistook you for a certain notorious woman of Louisville--why, I have not the slightest idea. For this wholly shameful and outrageous conduct I sincerely ask your pardon--beg your forgiveness. I do not know what amends I can make, but anything you may wish to suggest I shall gladly do. In the mean while I hope you will accept this letter in the spirit in which it is written and as a slight attempt at recompense which I know can never fully be made.
Very sincerely, BEALES CHADSEY.
At the same time Lieutenant Braxmar was fully aware before this letter was written or sent that the charges implied against Mrs.
Carter were only too well founded. Beales Chadsey had said drunk what twenty men in all sobriety and even the police at Louisville would corroborate. Chadsey had insisted on making this clear to Braxmar before writing the letter.
