The Cheat

Front matter

The Cheat

By Russell Holman

Illustrated with scenes from the Paramount picture

Chapter 1

When spring comes to Paris the city is like a stately, beautiful woman donning her most youthful and most becoming gown and going out into the boulevards to dance in the sunlight to the sprightly strains of Mendelssohn. Even the gargoyles upon Notre Dame and the gargoyles who drive the Paris taxicabs seem to sense the blood-stirring effect of the season. The sidewalks in front of the cafés are cluttered with drowsing drinkers and philosophers. The brown, swollen waters of the Seine glisten as they flow slowly from the shadows of the many bridges. And one cannot walk a hundred yards upon the Champs Elysees without encountering more pretty girls than one ever thought existed.

It was late in such an exhilarating spring afternoon that a luxurious De Dion landaulet swept around a corner into the Rue de la Paix bearing in its blue-gray cushioned tonneau an exquisitely gowned young woman whom even the most exacting boulevardier would have admitted to be arrestingly beautiful. The late afternoon sun seemed to have saved its last full radiance to provide the proper setting for her as she lounged gracefully behind the trim, black-uniformed chauffeur and looked out through the lowered window with lively, dark eyes.

Had you remarked to her about the sun's seeming benevolence, she would doubtless have dismissed it with a charming and very Latin shrug of her slim shoulders as little more than her due. Carmelita de Cordoba was used to kindness and to service and to the world in general going to a great deal of trouble for her. In her native Argentine very rich and very attractive young women are assured of a slavelike devotion from everybody except their older relatives. Should the only daughter of one of the richest and most distinguished Spanish families in South America expect less when she journeys abroad with unlimited resources to Paris, the haven of gowns, to select her wedding trousseau?

Carmelita de Cordoba had spent a month in Paris now upon this delightful mission, dipping into the expensive treasures of the famous shops—Poiret, Paquin, Cartier, Coty—spending the delightful spring days amid fawning, thin-waisted men modistes and fawning thick-waisted lady ones, with an occasional afternoon of sight-seeing or Longchamps to vary the routine, and her nights at theaters, the opera, cabarets, and supper clubs. Her day began at noon when her suite at the Ritz, sun-drenched but lifeless until then except for the softly moving French maid and the withered Spanish duenna whom her father had insisted upon sending with her as a chaperone and general factotum, became gay with the musical, insistent voice of its owner summoning her two attendants in two languages. With the sound of water rushing into the tub and later the appearance of a dainty tray breakfast at her pillow and an array of gowns spread out for her approval at her feet, Carmelita's busy round was on anew.

The climax of her visit was now approaching. This very afternoon and evening it would be reached. For, Carmelita was to leave for Cherbourg and the ship for Buenos Aires, via New York, on the morrow.

In the flattery which the Paris shopkeepers did not have to be prompted to lavish upon Señorita de Cordoba there was rather less insincerity than is the lot of the average rich lady customer. With her perfect ivory-like complexion, large, warm black eyes to match her lustrous, almost purple-black hair, a lithe figure to excite any Parisian modiste into ex- plosive ecstasies, and an astute taste in clothes that tempered her Spanish flair for bright color with an acquired American dislike for the flagrantly gaudy—Carmelita, despite her decided opinions and her flashes of South American temper at times, was a pleasure to serve. In the good modiste there is something of the artist that responded instantly at the sight of her.

The landaulet, flowing smoothly through the mellow sunshine of the Rue de la Paix at length glided toward the curbing and came to a stop. The impassive French chauffeur held open the door and Carmelita alighted. Across the concrete sidewalk another uniformed Frenchman was holding aside another door, the entrance to the famous and, on the outside, quite somber establishment of Doucet et Cie, gowns. But within all was mellow color, soft carpets, velvet tapestries, and bowing attendants with frock coats.

Carmelita had hardly made her entrance when a small, bald-headed man with a funny, waxed moustache and a flower in his buttonhole came twittering up to meet her.

"Carmelita, my dear," he exclaimed, "we thought you would never get here." Even as he uttered his complaint his little sea-blue eyes flitted momentarily to a good-looking manni- kin who was passing, and Carmelita was not disturbed. Her small delinquencies never disturbed her. She laughed.

"I don't believe you've been bored, Jackie," she chided him, with a nod at the mannikin's back. Her voice was low, rich, with the trace of an accent. "Where is the distracted Lucy?"

Jack Hodge waved his cane down the center of the shop. A tall blonde woman of thirty-five or thereabouts, obviously American, sat cross-legged upon one of M. Doucet's gilt chairs. Eyes half closed, she was smoking a cigarette in an incredibly long black-lacquered holder.

"I can see that Lucy is worried to death about me," bantered Carmelita. She had been calmly ignoring the shop attendants who bowed and fluttered around her. With Jack Hodge she approached the third member of their party.

Lucy Hodge drew deeply upon her cigarette and raised lazy gray eyes to acknowledge Carmelita's presence. She was the soul of languor, pampered languor that is never forced to hurry. "Ah, my dear, you are here at last. Do let's start your show and get it over with."

Carmelita at last admitted the existence of the manager of the shop, who had been standing with discreet anxiety a little aloof. She spoke sharply.

"Where is Monsieur Doucet? Why is he not here?"

Her dark eyes were narrowed a little and her tone had a note of the imperious in it. The manager disappeared and returned shortly with a small Frenchman and a large Frenchwoman, M. de Doucet and his chief assistant, both sputtering apologies.

"Mademoiselle desires to inspect her trousseau?" asked the man.

"Mademoiselle will come with me?" suggested the woman.

"The show begins," smiled Carmelita, recovering her good humor, to the Hodges and started toward the dressing parlors, followed by the subservient duo.

When she reappeared fifteen minutes later, swinging slowly, gracefully toward them, she was gowned as a beautiful bride—a lovely symphony blended of white silks and laces. Her two attendants hovered near, adjusting, admiring.

"It's wonderful, Carmelita," Jack exclaimed.

"Very good, my dear," Lucy Hodge admitted, attesting the success of the costume by really opening her eyes and removing the cigarette from her carmined lips to get a better view.

Carmelita surveyed herself in a cluster of glistening mirrors, her hand unconsciously stroking the soft, rich material. She was beautiful, unusually beautiful in this most romantic of all costumes, she told herself. Her father would be pleased. He would not be sorry he had yielded to her and allowed her to journey to Paris, to buy her wedding trousseau. And her fiancé—here Carmelita sighed. She turned to M. Doucet and suggested a few minor alterations, then retired to change back into her chic afternoon attire.

"Mademoiselle desires to see the rest of her trousseau?" the modiste asked when she reappeared.

"That was the arrangement, was it not?" Carmelita asked coldly.

"Heavens, is there another act?" Lucy sighed.

"We've hardly begun, my dear," the bride-to-be smiled, tapping her American friend consolingly upon her thin shoulder. Carmelita was thoroughly enjoying herself among these dainty, extravagant things.

The brightening eye of Jack Hodge forecasted what was coming. Carmelita had arranged to inspect her purchases by means of a private fashion show of carefully selected mannikins. Over the soft carpets they presently sauntered with their gracefully professional slouch. A stunning evening costume, a trim gray traveling suit, afternoon gowns, sport clothes, filmy lingerie and, at the last, a sheer, fluffy nightgown of crêpe de chine passed in slow, dazzling array—Carmelita's complete trousseau. Jack Hodge stood entranced until Carmelita broke the spell.

"It was worth waiting for, was it not, my Jack?" she smiled.

"You bet," he said, too forcefully, so that Lucy raised a questioning eyebrow toward her husband.

"You are a very lucky girl, my dear," said Lucy. She yawned. "And all this for an old man whom you do not love."

Carmelita sighed thoughtfully. "Why is it always impossible to combine money and love, Lucy?" she asked.

"It isn't," replied the American blandly. "But why insist upon them both in the same man? You know my advice—marry for money and position as your fussy old father wants you to,—and seek your romance where you can find it."

Carmelita shook her head.

"In a way, dear Carmelita, you are unfortunate," Lucy continued upon her favorite subject. "You have your Spanish love for the outward show of romance, the tinkling mandolin and serenading lover sort of thing, combined with the American attitude toward marriage. My countrywomen, as you know, expect husband, lover, amusing companion, good provider, and father for their children all in one poor, frail man—and, Carmelita dear, it simply cannot be done. Men are not constructed that way. One goes to one man for one thing and to another for another. And if one is discreet—"

"What a frightfully wicked lady for a prospective bride to be receiving advice from," Carmelita chaffed. She knew that in reality Lucy was far too busy keeping check upon Jack's philandering to have time for affaires du cœur of her own.

"Oh, you'll come to it, my dear. I know you so well. You cannot do without money and you love love. And one is so seldom able to find the two together." Lucy was gathering her light, gray cloak from the back of the chair. "Meantime let us disperse to our homes. You are with us to the Folies and supper to-night, of course. Your farewell party, you know. I have left it to Jackie, and he promises something extraordinary. Managing parties seems his sole accomplishment. Dudley Drake and Prince Rao-Singh, glaring at each other as usual, and the rest of your admirers will be there. Paris will be a barren place for the men when you leave, Carmelita." She lifted her long, lazy body from the chair. "Come along, Jackie, you're to buy me the peignoir I told you about, you know."

Carmelita spoke for a few moments to M. Doucet regarding the delivery of her purchases, then accompanied the Hodges to the street before taking her leave of them. The first shadows of twilight were beginning to slant across the Rue de la Paix—a warm clear evening in May, breathing of Spring. Carmelita settled with a sigh into the cushions of the landaulet.

Chapter 2

Despite the pleasure she had taken in the visit to Doucet's, there was a plaintive touch in the heart of Carmelita de Cordoba as the limousine bore her through the busy streets, now streaked with the first shadows of twilight, in the direction of the Ritz, and her lovely face bore a trace of discontent. This vague dissatisfaction of life and particularly her approaching marriage had been increasing within her as the day of her departure from Paris grew nearer.

Carmelita had not troubled to conceal from her intimate friends the fact that she did not love the man to whom she was affianced. How could she?

Don Pablo Mendoza, her fiancé, was over fifty, her father's closest friend, their neighbor, and, like the de Cordobas, the possessor of considerable wealth and its South American concomitant, power. Since the earliest memories of her girlhood her life had been more or less intermingled with his. Her first recollection of him was when he was thirty—handsome, swarthy, a disfiguring dueling scar upon one cheek—picking her up in her father's house and bestowing kisses and presents upon her. She was a little dark flower of five.

But Carmelita did not grow older quite as fast as Señor Mendoza. Don Pablo, it was said in Buenos Aires, lived his life to the full in the unstinted Spanish fashion. An unattached bachelor of unlimited means, he was a favorite among the aristocratic bon vivants of the Argentine capital, a free spender, a frequenter of gambling clubs and the racetrack. His hair grayed rapidly, his never very stalwart frame bent under the strain his mode of living was placing upon it. Even at forty-five, when a man is at his prime, the rich Don Pablo, drinking wine in the study of Don Caesar de Cordoba, Carmelita's father, would wheeze and make much ado as he attempted to rise from his favorite easy chair. Nevertheless, Señor de Cordoba would never permit any criticism of his crony. Their friendship had been one of the few points of mild contention between the worthy señor and his wife, who had died when Carmelita was eight. She had never been able to understand why her husband, a man of the most austere habits, should be filled with such a passionate loyalty and liking for a shallow pleasure-seeker of Mendoza's rather streaky reputation. She admitted that the man was a sprightly, intel- ligent companion and of an old and distinguished family. But Theresa de Cordoba, a woman of quiet good sense, had never been deceived by these surface charms.

If her mother were living, Carmelita now reflected, tenderness trembling about her little mouth, she would probably not be in her present dilemma of heart. Her mother could have imposed a quiet but firm resistance to the engagement that might, as it generally did, induce her father in the long run to abandon his long-cherished ideal of a union between the de Cordoba and Mendoza families, between his only daughter and his dearest and oldest friend.

In the matter of marriage, Don Caesar de Cordoba was wholly Spanish. A girl married the man whom her parents chose for her, and money and position and honor were the chief points to consider. Don Pablo Mendoza met these requirements admirably. And was he not, in addition, the one man whom Don Caesar had for so many years loved like a brother, the friend who, though nearly Don Caesar's own age, had compensated in some measure for the fact that there was no son and heir in the de Cordoba family? At the time of Carmelita's birth, her father had ardently wished for a son. He had not troubled to conceal his disappointment, and there had never been between Carmelita and him an intense bond of sympathy or understanding. He bestowed upon her, as a matter of duty, all the luxuries that his great wealth commanded, but he did not trouble to read her heart. She loved him dutifully but not warmly, and in her respect for him there was mingled much that was fear.

At the death of her mother Carmelita had been placed in charge of strait-laced duennas, at times under the supervision of unsympathetic female relatives of her father's who came to the Hacienda de Cordoba for long visits. She had been surrounded with every luxury but love and freedom. No wonder she came to divide all people into two classes—servants, whom one treated firmly and a little contemptuously; relatives and friends of her father, whom one avoided as much as possible and feared. Don Pablo Mendoza, the only member of the latter class who unbended himself to be friendly with her, she regarded with embarrassment and awe, even after their engagement.

Don Caesar de Cordoba had indirect business connections in the United States that contributed in an important measure to his fortune. Once each year he usually made a combined social and business visit to New York, occupying about three months. It was during these periods of her father's absence that Car- melita's naturally exuberant spirits were allowed their freest rein. She bullied her tutors and guardians with practical impunity and lived something approximating the life which a nine- or ten-year-old girl of excellent health and growing natural charm should. Don Caesar's social entrées in the metropolis were of the best and, although there was much about the rather hectic and undisciplined American life as lived in New York, which he did not at all approve, he rather enjoyed the busy round of dinners, opera and theater that supplemented his business conferences.

It was during one of these periodical visits to America that he had become acquainted with the Hodges. Jack Hodge had inherited from his father a partnership in the firm of Hodge and Story, Don Caesar's American representatives in one of the important and very lucrative lines in which he was interested. Hodge, a waster and seeker after the froth of life, contributed nothing to the old-established concern except the luster and reputation of his surname, which his grandfather and father had won. Jack merely drew a periodical stipend from the business and asked no questions. The importance of Don Caesar de Cordoba and his good will had been many times impressed upon the irresponsible Hodge by his father, and upon the death of the latter Jack had made an effort to cultivate the dignified Argentinian upon the occasions of his visits by the only means he knew—lavish entertainment.

Lucy Hodge, a clever woman of no particular family but, at the time she first married Jack and was not so sure of him, of an alert ambition, was wiser. She perceived the possibilities in the business connection between the wealthy de Cordoba and her husband's firm and the importance of retaining the Spaniard's friendship. She played up to him skillfully, and she was a very good actress. Don Caesar admired her good looks, her carefully modulated manners, her clothes, and the slow, lazy, almost Spanish grace of her.

Lucy had been largely responsible for his decision, when Carmelita was fifteen years old, to send his daughter to an American convent to be educated. This, to Don Caesar's mind, would serve two purposes. It would enable the girl to receive the advantage of an American education, and he was a great admirer of education in general and the American educational system in particular. And it would, to put it plainly, rid him of the necessity of exercising a personal vigilance over Carmelita's welfare for a while.

So Carmelita, a dark, slender girl with the awkward grace of fifteen, her large black pools of eyes bright with excitement, proud of her gray, immaculately dressed father and the quiet, effective calm with which he directed porters and other menials about and inserted order amid the chaos of departing passengers at the dock as far as their own voluminous luggage was concerned, boarded the steamer at Buenos Aires for the first great adventure of her thus far rather uneventful life. There was some regret in her heart at leaving the trim, broad acres of the de Cordoba estate, ten miles away in distance and a century away in everything else from this bustling metropolitan confusion. But she had never been very happy at home, and, though she was under no delusion regarding the hilarious life one leads at a convent, knowing something about Spanish ones, still the future was alluring.

The convent which Carmelita's father and Lucy Hodge had selected for his daughter was located some thirty miles from New York in a region of trimly kept wealthy estates of Wall Street millionaires and lesser moneyed and golfing gentry. The modern buildings of fieldstone in a setting of green lawns and symmetrically planted shrubbery, were located a mile from the nearest road and isolated by a high, ivied wall as effectively as if they were in the midst of a wilderness. There was here none of the cold, indigent austerity of European convents. Indeed the name "convent" was nearly a misnomer. The official title was the College of Saint Isabella; it was a parochial college for Catholic girls which merely aspired to the rigid discipline and self-denials of the traditional convent without succeeding very well.

Carmelita spent four rather happy impressionable years there and acquired many things that had a permanent influence upon her. Among these spirited, healthy American girls for the most part, chafing under restraint and guarded with understanding tolerance by their teachers and spiritual guides, the pretty Spanish girl was at first timid and confused. But Carmelita had never been by nature bashful, given half a chance. She was the daughter of a man of unlimited resources, and she had always been taught to be conscious of the position and power which these afforded her. She made friends easily—not close friends, to be sure, for the type of quick-witted, American girl which appealed to her was not long in detecting something a little arrogant and selfish about Carmelita. There were possibilities for slipping through the rigid régime of the convent and learning something about the great, "bustling American world outside, Carmelita found.

New and quite revolutionary ideas began piling up in Carmelita's alert brain. She learned that the delicious germ of romance attacks the American girl early and is not to be denied by such an earthly impediment as a convent wall. Her roommate, a blonde and buxom girl two years older than she and the daughter of a Chicago millionaire meat packer with the impossible name of Fleischer, confided to Carmelita one evening after lights during the first month of their association that she was in love with a Yale sophomore and was smuggling letters out to him. Carmelita was thrilled. The wide-eyed Spanish girl and the sophisticated Chicago miss discussed romance in the dark for several weeks. Carmelita was permitted to read the collegian's ardent and misspelled letters. It was all very wonderful.

"My father hates him," declared the confiding Miss Fleischer. "If he ever caught sight of Bob he would probably kill him. At least there would be a frightful row. But I am going to marry him just the same."

Carmelita was shocked. Did American girls then marry against their parents' wishes? It was very strange. She recalled with amusement now how utterly aghast she had been when her roommate did not return from the Christmas vacation and she learned that the heiress of the house of Fleischer had carried, out her impossible threat and eloped with her young man.

At the New York home of the Hodges, where Carmelita spent her vacations, she had opportunities to learn more about the American notions of romance contrasted with parentally supervised love of the Spanish type. For while during her first year at the College of Saint Isabella she was just an awkwardly pretty girl of sixteen and rather an incumbrance upon Lucy's social activities while at the Hodge house, during the next three years she underwent a characteristically rapid Spanish maturing. Lucy now found that she had at her disposal an unusually attractive young lady of a warm brunette beauty. She was a welcome addition to the Hodge entourage.

Within the hulking brownstone of the Hodge home on Riverside Drive, and the twenty-room Hodge "cottage" at Newport, Carmelita met men who were neither to be treated as servants nor to be feared. At first she was flattered at the attentions they paid her. But as she grew older and more sophisticated through the lore retailed to her by her school chums and through the worldly observations of Lucy and through her own swiftly developing savoir faire in her relations with men, a new Carmelita flowered—a Carmelita of radiant beauty, soft black eyes that could look coquettishly over a colorful Spanish fan, a Carmelita who could hold her own with the most blasé American flapper when it came to flirtations with vacationing college boys, a Carmelita who loved exquisite clothes and the admiring eyes which focused upon her when she entered the dining-room at the Ritz or the Hodge box at the Metropolitan, a Carmelita who had never been denied anything that she wanted which wealth and power could buy.

There had been a short, rather desperate affair with a Princeton junior who had met her at the Hodge home during the Christmas holidays in her third year in America and had thereafter for two weeks besieged her day and night with flowers and tons of expensive candy and invitations. For forty-eight hours Carmelita fancied herself rather hard hit also, especially during their twenty-dollar midnight taxi ride through Central Park. But, returning to college, the young man, who enjoyed the decidedly American name of Harkness, evidently permitted memories of Carmelita's loveliness to exclude everything else from his head, for he failed ingloriously at mid-years and was expelled from the college to his Indiana home. Gradually his ardent letters, which Carmelita had smuggled in to her through secret channels and enjoyed but did not bother to answer, grew fewer. And eventually she said a little sadly to Lucy Hodge, who had regarded the affair with watchful and amused indulgence, "I don't think I shall ever love just one man. I'm too selfish. I want them all to love me and let me choose a particular one for each occasion as I do my gowns." Which pleased Lucy very much.

Don Caesar de Cordoba made it a point to visit his daughter at least once a year. At intervals he professed to be alarmed at the worldly polish she was acquiring. But in reality he was pleased. She had developed into an alluring woman of quite evident poise and sophistication, a slightly arrogant little tilt to her smooth chin, an ease with older people that was quite different from the ungainly girl of fifteen whom he had brought to Lucy and the convent. A true de Cordoba—and an admirable wife for his old chum, Don Pablo, the charming connecting link between the fortunes and power of the honorable and ancient families of de Cordoba and Mendoza.

So thought Don Caesar as his old friend and he sat smoking and occasionally sipping wine and talking of the intricacies of Argentine politics upon the broad piazza of the Hacienda de Cordoba.

But when Carmelita's four years of American education that had taught her so much that is not read in books were completed and Carmelita came home, her father received an unpleasant shock. Don Pablo had now grown very gray but his small eyes brightened at the sight of the new Carmelita and he was more determined than ever to marry her.

"Give her a chance, my friend, to become Spanish again," Don Caesar warned him. They waited two years, when Carmelita was twenty-two and lovelier than ever, and then Don Caesar broached the subject of marriage to her. He was surprised to meet opposition. Marry old Don Pablo? Carmelita was incredulous that her father was in earnest. Convinced that it was indeed so, she protested vehemently. Life, having been so lately offered her so richly, was about to be snatched away. It was impossible! But she did not protest so vigorously as would an American girl under the circumstances.

Carmelita was still at heart Spanish, and daughters of rich Argentine families do not usually balk at their parents' attempts at matchmaking. Moreover, she was in the back of her pretty head not unaware of the advantages of pleasing her father and marrying a man of fortune and position.

In the end her opposition affected her father's temper so badly that he even mentioned the Spanish word for "disinheritance" in pun- ishment for her disobedience, and Carmelita, who could never conceive of herself as anything but a daughter of wealth, was finally frightened into the decision which all along she had feared she would have to make. Weeping bitterly, she consented to her betrothal to Don Pablo, permitted herself to be kissed by him that evening and was present when her father and he drank their health with a very special vintage of wine. Then she retired to her boudoir to write a tear-splotched and utterly wretched letter to Lucy about it. The reply she received cheered her up. It congratulated her upon making a great catch and concluded, "Why so keen for love? We can't have everything. Besides, the right man will come later probably. Meantime, why not persuade your wise old father to permit you to come to Paris for your trousseau? Jackie and I are sailing next week. You can do the shops and have a final fling. But please do not let your father see this letter." The always cautious Lucy.

Don Caesar de Cordoba allowed Carmelita to go to Paris because his conscience troubled him a little for having forced her into the engagement against her will, though he was convinced that it was for her advantage as well as his own and that her opposition was a mere girlish whim and unworthy of her. Meanwhile he would reward her for yielding and he would impress Don Pablo with the fact that only the most famous modistes in the world were worthy to gown a de Cordoba bride.

In Paris, Carmelita, now twenty-three and quite breathlessly beautiful, had met the Hodges—and, under their auspices, Prince Rao-Singh and Dudley Drake.

Lucy Hodge made a specialty of entertaining personages. Prince Rao-Singh, an Indian potentate of, reported, fabulous wealth, educated at Oxford, a tall, dark, suave and somewhat sinister man of thirty-five, of excellent breeding and manners, was the most talked about notable who associated with the wealthy American social colony in Paris. He was a bachelor who seemed to prefer the company of Americans to that of the English or his own people. Lucy, who had at one time boasted confidentially to Carmelita that she could meet anybody in the world, including kings, if she wanted to and flippantly furnished the formula, had cultivated him assiduously because he added a bizarre note to her parties and because his acceptance of her invitations, to the exclusion of so many others, aroused the envy of rival hostesses.