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He leaned over and presented a cold, hard face to that of Mr. Beales Chadsey, of Louisville, Kentucky. "Tha's all right, Captain," leered Chadsey, mockingly. "I got a card. No harm done. Here you are. You c'n see me any time you want Hotel Buckingham, Fifth Avenue and Fiftieth Street. I got a right to speak to anybody I please, where I please, when I please. See?"
He fumbled and protested while the officer stood by read to take him in charge. Not finding a card, he added: "Tha's all right. 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."
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. Behind the Arras
Berenice, perusing the apology from Beales Chadsey, which her mother very much fagged and weary handed her the next morning, thought that it read like the overnight gallantry of some one who was seeking to make amends without changing his point of view. Mrs. Carter was too obviously self-conscious. She protested too much.
He should dance attendance, whoever he was. Nevertheless, here she herself was, at twenty-two, unmarried, her background insecure, the very ground on which she walked treacherous. Braxmar knew, and Beales Chadsey, and Cowperwood. At least three or four of her acquaintances must have been at the Waldorf on that fatal night. How long would it be before others became aware?
Berenice had become at last too individual a figure to be overlooked. At an important luncheon given by the Harris Haggertys, some five months after the Beales Chadsey affair, she had been pointed out to Mrs. Haggerty by a visiting guest from Cincinnati as some one with whom rumor was concerning itself. Mrs. Haggerty wrote to friends in Louisville for information, and received it.
In so far as she was concerned it was plain that the Beales Chadsey incident was closed, but she did not accept his invitation. "Mother and I are planning to go to the country for a few days," she observed, genially. "I can't say just when we shall return, but if you are still here we shall meet, no doubt. You must be sure and come to see us."
He explained how he and Braxmar had gone to the police station to make a charge; how Chadsey, sobered by arrest, had abandoned his bravado and humbly apologized. When viewing the letter handed him by Mrs. Carter he exclaimed: "Oh yes. He was very glad to promise to write that if we would let him off. Braxmar seemed to think it was necessary that he should.
Carter, insisted that Berenice was quixotic, nervously awry, to wish to modify her state, to eschew society and invalidate her wondrous charm by any sort of professional life. By prearrangement with Mrs. Carter he hurried to Pocono at a time when he knew that Berenice was there alone. Ever since the Beales Chadsey incident she had been evading him.
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