THE COST OF WINGS
  AND OTHER STORIES




  THE
  COST OF WINGS
  AND OTHER STORIES

  BY
  RICHARD DEHAN

  AUTHOR OF
  “ONE BRAVER THING,” “BETWEEN TWO THIEVES,” ETC.

  [Illustration]

  NEW YORK
  FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
  PUBLISHERS




  _Copyright, 1914, by_
  FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY

  _All rights reserved_


[Illustration]




CONTENTS


                                     PAGE

  THE COST OF WINGS                     1

  A FADED ROMANCE                      11

  AN INDIAN BABY                       41

  YVONNE                               52

  THE DELUSION OF MRS. DONOHOE         70

  PONSONBY AND THE PANTHERESS          92

  A FAT GIRL’S LOVE STORY             104

  IN THE FOURTH DIMENSION             116

  THE GEWGAW                          122

  THE NIGHT OF POWER                  134

  THE MAN WHO COULD MANAGE WOMEN      145

  OBSESSED                            155

  A VANISHED HAND                     164

  AN ORDEAL BY FIRE                   179

  HOW THE MISTRESS CAME HOME          198

  THE MOTOR-BURGLAR                   212

  THE LOST ROOM                       219

  FATHER TO THE MAN                   226

  THE FLY AND THE SPIDER              235

  FOR VALOR!                          243

  MELLICENT                           248

  THE COLLAPSE OF THE IDEAL           263

  THE HAND THAT FAILED                272

  HIS SILHOUETTE                      280

  A NOCTURNE                          292

  THE LAST EXPEDITION                 298




THE COST OF WINGS


Sheldrick, returning, refreshed and exhilarated, from a spin with a
friend who had brought down a racing car of forty horse-power and an
enthusiasm to match, found his wife sitting in the same chair, in the
same attitude, as it seemed to him, in which he had left her, in the
bare, dull sitting-room of their quarters at the Pavilion Hotel, on
the edge of Greymouth Links, from which starting point Sheldrick, in
fulfillment of his recent engagement with the Aero Club of France, had
arranged to take wing for Cherbourg, wind and weather permitting, on
the morrow.

It would be difficult exceedingly to imagine Caruso as an engineer or a
bank manager, or in any capacity other than that of operatic star. It
would be equally difficult to picture Shackleton as a side-splitting
antic and quip-monger, or Pélissier in the rôle of the dauntless
explorer. Sheldrick, the most recent idol of the flying world, was the
type-ideal of the aviator.

Mathematician, engineer, meteorologist, and athlete, his tall, lightly
built but muscular frame carried the head of an eagle. The wide
forehead, sloping to the temples, the piercing prominently set eyes,
the salient nose, and the wide, firm, deep-cut mouth characterizing
the long-winged birds of powerful flight, were Sheldrick’s. His, too,
the long, supple neck, the curiously deceptive shoulder slope that
disguises depth of chest while his long arms looked as though, were
they clothed with feathers, they might cleave the air; and his feet
gripped the ground through the thin, soft boots he always wore, as the
eagle’s talons grip the rock.

Perhaps he was not unaware of the suggested resemblance. He had
certainly christened his recently completed monoplane “Aquila,” and
had piloted her to victory in two minor events at the Moncaster Spring
Flying Meeting in April of that year, and at the Nismes Concours
des Aviateurs of three weeks before had carried off the Grand Prix
of 25,000 francs for the longest flight under favorable weather
conditions. And at the Club dinner following the presentation of the
prizes, Sheldrick, flushed with conquest and congratulations, had given
that pledge whereby the soul of the woman who yet loved him was wrung
to torture anew.

“After all that I have borne,” Mrs. Sheldrick had said to herself,
sitting in her hideous red moreen-covered chair by the green
Venetian-blinded window of the staring hotel sitting-room--“after three
years of agony, silently, patiently endured--after all his promises, I
am still upon the rack.”

She looked rather like it as she sat by the window, the center one of
three that gave a view across the gray-green links, and the gray-brown
beach of smooth, sliding pebbles that gave place to the gray-white,
throbbing water of the English Channel. And the white, drawn face that
masked her frenzy of anguish, and the dark-gray, haunted eyes through
which her suffering spirit looked, greeted her husband as he burst into
the room, fresh from his banquet of speed and clean, salt, buoyant air,
and sympathetic, enthusiastic companionship, like an unexpected douche
of ice water.

“Haven’t you been out?”

Sheldrick uttered the words recorded, upon a pause implying the
swallowing of others less neutrally amiable. And his face, which
had already clouded, darkened sullenly as his wife replied: “I have
traveled some distance since you left here with your friend.”

“Where have you been?” asked Sheldrick unwillingly, as a man who
suspects that the question may open some unwelcome topic.

Mrs. Sheldrick looked at her husband full; and, though it had seemed
to him that he had read the book of her beauty from preface to finis,
there was something new to him in her regard as she answered:

“I have gone over in memory every week of the last three years that we
have spent together, Edgar; and the road has been a rough and stony
one, without one green patch of grass to rest on by the wayside, or one
refreshing spring at which to drink. But I was patient while I plodded
after you, because I saw an end to what I was enduring. Now it seems
that I am mistaken. It is only my endurance that is at an end.”

“Why do you talk in allegory, Ella?” Sheldrick broke out impatiently.
He threw down his leather motoring cap with the talc eye shields upon
the sofa, and pitched his heavy overcoat upon a chair in a corner of
the ugly room, and let his long, lithe body down into a hideous Early
Victorian plush armchair beside the empty fireplace, where nothing
crackled but some fantastically bordered strips of red and green
gelatine paper, shuddering under the influence of a powerful chimney
draught. “I’m not an imaginative man,” he went on. “Even if my mind
were not occupied with a dozen affairs of supreme urgency I should
still boggle at interpreting your cryptic utterances. If you want them
understood, make them to some minor poet at a garden party or an At
Home. You’ve stacks of invitations from the nicest people to all sorts
of functions ever since I pulled off those two events at Moncaster and
the Grand Prix at Nismes. And now that it’s May, and the season in full
swing, you might be having no end of a capital time at home in London
instead of----” She interrupted him with a passionate gesture.

“I have no home!”

“No?” said Sheldrick coolly, leaning back his head against the knobby
back of the Early Victorian armchair.

“No!” said Mrs. Sheldrick, and her passion seemed to dash itself
against and break upon the man’s composure as a wave beats and breaks
upon a rock. “It was a home, once, when you were working partner in the
firm of Mallard, Mallard and Sheldrick, Manufacturers of Automobiles;
and the life you led was a normal, ordinary, everyday life, and the
risks you ran were everyday, ordinary risks, such as a woman who
loved you--note that I say _who loved you_--might bear without going
mad or dying of terror. But it is a prison now. I cannot breathe in
it. Even when you are there with me--and when every postman’s knock,
or telegraph boy’s ring, or telephone message has for the moment
ceased to be fraught with hideous, often-dreamed-of, never-forgotten
possibilities ... when each newsboy’s voice, yelling in the streets,
has temporarily ceased to be the voice of Fate for me--it is no longer
home! It is a caravanserai, from which Hope and Content and Peace of
Mind may go out before the next day’s dawning, leaving the door open
that Death and Despair may the more freely enter in!”

“Ella!” exclaimed Sheldrick, looking at her open-eyed. She had always
been such a quiet, calm, self-possessed woman, that now, as she rose
up out of her chair suddenly, as though she had been prodded with a
bayonet, she was strange and new, and rather awe-inspiring. As she
stood before him, her passion-breathing face an ivory cameo between the
drooping folds of her rich blue-black hair, her gray eyes glittering
fiercely between the narrowed lids under the straight black brows, her
lips two bitterly straightened lines of scarlet showing the gleaming
teeth, her firm chin implacable in its set upon the dainty cravat of
muslin and black silk ribbon, her slight bosom panting fiercely under
her bodice folds, her slender limbs rigid beneath the sheath-fitting
gown of silken chestnut-colored cloth, the man, her husband, looked at
her more attentively than he had looked for years.

“Ella, what is the matter? What has upset you like this? If there is
anything I can do to put things right, why not tell me, and--and----”

Sheldrick’s voice faltered, and his eyes looked away from his wife’s
as he saw the reviving hope leap desperately into her face. It died
instantly, leaving her gray eyes more somber, and the lines of her
scarlet, parted lips more bitter than before.

“Ah, yes!” she said. “Why not tell you what you know already, and be
coaxed and patted into compliance and meek, patient submission for the
hundredth time! You will kiss me good-bye to-morrow morning, if the
weather permits of your starting, and make this flight. It is to be the
last, the very last, like the others that have gone before it; it is
only so much more daring, only so much more risky, only so much more
dangerous than the things that other aviators have dared and risked and
braved. If it blows from the north you will not dream of making the
venture--the jagged rocks and shoals, and the towering, greedy seas of
the Channel Islands threaten things too grim. You will wait, and I with
you--oh, my God!--for a favorable wind. Your successes at Brookfields
and at Nismes have made the ‘Aquila’ patent worth a moderate fortune;
they are turning out replicas of her at your workshops as rapidly as
they can make them--your manager took on twenty more skilled hands only
last week. You have done what you set out to do; we are freed from
poverty for the rest of our lives--we might live happily, peacefully
together somewhere, if this unnatural love of peril had not bitten you
to the bone. ‘One more contest,’ you will keep on saying; ‘one more
revenge I am bound to give this and that or the other man whom I have
beaten, or who has challenged me.’” Her bosom heaved, and the ivory
paleness of her face was darkened with a rush of blood. “Honor is
involved. You are bound in honor to keep your word to others, but free
to deceive, to defraud, to cheat and lie to--your wife!”

“Take care what you’re saying!”

Sheldrick leaped out of his chair, fiery red and glaring angrily. Mrs.
Sheldrick looked at him out of her glittering, narrowed eyes, and
laughed, and her laugh was ugly to hear.

“Your wife! Did you ever realize what it meant to me to be your wife?
When we were married, and for eighteen months after that! Heaven upon
earth! Have you ever dreamed what sort of life began for me when
you were first bitten by this craze of flying, three years ago?
Hell--sheer, unmitigated hell! To the public I am a woman in an ulster,
or in a dust cloak and a silk motor veil, thick to hide the ghastly
terror in my face!--a woman who kisses you before the start, and keeps
pace with your aeroplane in an automobile through the long-distance
flights, with what the English newspaper men describe as ‘unswerving
devotion,’ and the French press correspondents term ‘a tenderness of
the most touching.’ They are wrong! I am not conscious of any special
devotion. The springs of tenderness have frozen in me. I am like every
other spectator on the course, possessed, body and soul, by the secret,
poignant, momentary expectation of seeing a man hurled to a horrible
death. Only the man is--my husband! _Now_ I remember this, Edgar, but
a day will dawn--an hour will come to me--is coming as surely as there
is a God in heaven--when he will be no more than the flying man who may
possibly be killed!”

There was silence in the room, and the hoarse, dry sound that broke it
was not a sob. It came from Sheldrick, a single utterance, like the
sound of something breaking.

“I--understand!”

There was no response, for the woman, having unsealed and poured out
the last drop of her vials of bitterness and wrath, was dumb. Sheldrick
added, after a long pause:

“What do you ask? That I should give up the attempt to fly to
Cherbourg? That I should break the engagement with the Aero
Club--withdraw the challenge given to M. Ledru? Is that what you
demand?”

She said with a hopeless gesture:

“I ask nothing! I demand nothing!”

Sheldrick muttered an oath. But in his soul he was yielding. “Aquila
No. 1,” “Aquila No. 2,” and “Aquila No. 3” were dear to his soul. But
he had awakened to the fact that his dearest possession was the love
of his wife. And he had been killing it by inches. He met her eyes
now--the stern gray eyes that had learned to see him as he was and look
on the bare realities of life, shorn of its love glamour, and muttered:

“It is true. I have promised over and over.... And I owe it to you to
take no more risks, even more than if we had a living child to....
Where are those cable-forms?”

He strode to the ink-splashed writing table between the windows, and
routed the bundle of greenish papers out of the frowsy blotting book,
and dipped the blunt pen into the thick, dirty ink, and wrote:

  “_To Ledru, Hôtel National, Cherbourg, France._
    “Unavoidably compelled break engagement----”

He was struck by a sudden idea, ceased writing, and left the room,
going into the adjoining bedroom. His wife, standing dumb and frozen
on the gaudy hearthrug near the empty grate, heard him rummaging
for something. He came back in a few minutes with a heavy brow and
preoccupied look, and took a leather strap from the pocket of the heavy
overcoat he had thrown upon the sofa. With this he went back into the
bedroom. The door handle rattled as though something were being hitched
about it, the stout door groaned and creaked under a violent pull from
the other side, there was a horrible, suggestive crack, and a stifled
oath from Sheldrick. Next moment he was back in the room, dipping the
blunt pen into the bad ink, and finishing the cablegram:

  “Left wrist badly sprained--SHELDRICK, _Pavilion Hotel, Links,
  Greymouth, England_.”

Having finished writing, he brought the filled form to his wife. She
read, and looked at him in eloquent silence. And, in answer to the
question in her eyes, he held out his left hand, already swollen and
purple, and with a swelling of the dimensions of a cricket ball,
indicating the dislocated joint. A cry broke from her:

“Oh! how could you....”

“It was the easiest way,” said Sheldrick, flushed and scowling. “Call
me a coward, if you like. I deserve it--as well as the other names!” He
rang the bell, and fished with the sound hand for silver in a trouser
pocket.

“We’ll send the cable now,” he said.

She bit her lips, that were no longer scarlet, and went to the
blotted blotter, dipped the worn pen into the blobby ink, and made an
alteration in the cablegram. Then she showed it to him, and the message
ran:

  “_To Ledru, Hôtel National, Cherbourg, France._

  “Unavoidably compelled postpone engagement. Left wrist badly
  sprained.--SHELDRICK, _Pavilion Hotel, Links, Greymouth, England_.”

As Sheldrick looked at Mrs. Sheldrick, in intent amazement, the bell
was answered by a German waiter. Mrs. Sheldrick took the silver out
of Sheldrick’s sound hand, dismissed the attendant to dispatch the
message, closed and locked the door of the sitting-room against
intruders, and then went quickly to her husband and fell upon his
breast. He clasped her with his sound arm as she broke into passionate
weeping, and only whispered when at last she lifted her face to his:

“Why ‘postponed’?”

“Because,” whispered Ella Sheldrick, with her cheek against her
husband’s, “because you are not chained to your rock, my darling, with
iron bars between you and the free fields of space, forged by the wife
you love. You are free to give and take as many challenges as you
desire. When you have finished ‘Aquila No. 4,’ that shall be built with
a seat for a passenger beside you, run what risks you choose, brave as
many dangers as seem good to you; I will not say one word, provided
that I share the risk and brave the danger too.”

This is why the successful aviator Sheldrick never flies without a
passenger. And the story has a moral--of a kind.




A FADED ROMANCE

IN TWO PARTS


I

The ladies of the household at Charny les Bois usually sat in the
library on sunny mornings. At the southern end of the long room,
paneled in black walnut, and possessing a hooded stone fireplace of
the fifteenth century, there was a bay, with wide glass doors opening
upon a _perron_ of wrought iron and copper work, which led down into
the lovely garden--a piece of land originally reclaimed from the heart
of the ancient beech forest, whose splendid somberness set off the
dazzling whiteness of the _château_ and made the parterres glow and
sparkle like jewels--rubies, turquoises, emeralds, sapphires--poured
out upon the green velvet lap of princess or courtesan.

The Marquis de Courvaux, lord of the soil and owner of the historic
mansion, was absent. One must picture him leading the hunt through
the forest alleys, attired in a maroon and yellow uniform of the
most exquisite correctness, three-cocked hat, and immense spurred
jack-boots, and accompanied by a field of fifty or sixty, of which
every individual had turned out in a different costume: green corduroy
knickerbockers with gold braid accompanying cut-away coats and jockey
caps, and bowlers of English make, sported in combination with pink
and leathers, adding much to the kaleidoscopic effect. Half a dozen
_cuirassiers_ from the neighboring garrison town were upon their London
coach, driving a scratch four-in-hand and attired in full uniform;
various vehicles, of types ranging from the capacious _char-à-banc_ to
the landaulette, were laden with ardent votaries of the _chasse_.

The distant fanfare of the horns sounding the _ragot_ reached the
ears of the ladies sewing in the library at the _château_. One of
these ladies, detained by urgent nursery reasons from joining in the
morning’s sport, was the young and pretty wife of the Marquis; the
other, old as a high-bred French lady alone knows how to be, and still
beautiful, was his mother. Over the high-arched cover of the great
carved fireplace was her portrait by Varolan, painted at sixteen, in
the full ball costume of 1870. One saw, regarding that portrait, that
it was possible to be beautiful in those days even with a chignon
and waterfall, even with panniers or bustle, and absurd trimmings of
the ham-frill type. Perhaps some such reflection passed through the
calm mind behind the broad, white, unwrinkled forehead of Madame de
Courvaux, as she removed her gold spectacles and lifted her eyes,
darkly blue and brilliant still, to the exquisite childish flower face
of the portrait. The autumn breeze coming in little puffs between the
open _battants_ of the glass doors, savoring of crushed thyme, late
violets, moss, bruised beech leaves, and other pleasant things, stirred
the thick, waving, gold-gray tresses under the rich lace, a profusion
of which, with the charming coquetry of a venerable beauty, the
grandmamma of the chubby young gentleman upstairs in the nursery, the
thirteen-year-old schoolboy on his hunting pony, and the budding belle
but newly emancipated from her convent, was fond of wearing--sometimes
tied under her still lovely chin, sometimes floating loosely over her
shoulders.

“There again!” The younger Madame de Courvaux arched her mobile
eyebrows and showed her pretty teeth as she bit off a thread of
embroidery cotton. “The third time you have looked at that portrait
within ten minutes! Tell me, do you think it is getting stained with
smoke? In north winds this chimney does not always behave itself, and
Frédéric’s cigars and pipes----” The speaker shrugged her charming
shoulders. “But he is incorrigible, as thou knowest, _Maman_.”

“I was not thinking of Frédéric or the chimney.” The elder lady smiled,
still looking upward at the girlish face overhead. “It occurred to
me that forty years have passed since I gave Carlo Varolan the first
sitting for that portrait. His studio in the Rue Vernet was a perfect
museum of lovely things.... I was never tired of examining them.... My
_gouvernante_ fell asleep in a great tapestry chair.... Varolan drew a
caricature of her--so laughable!--with a dozen strokes of the charcoal
on the canvas, and then rubbed it all out with a grave expression that
made me laugh more. I was only just sixteen, and going to be married
in a fortnight.... And I could laugh like that!” The antique brooch of
black pearls and pigeons’ blood rubies that fastened the costly laces
upon the bosom of Madame la Marquise rose and fell at the bidding of a
sigh.

“I cried for days and days before my marriage with Frédéric,” the
little Marquise remarked complacently.

“And I should cry at the bare idea of not being married at all!” said
a fresh young voice, belonging to Mademoiselle Lucie, who came up
the steps from the garden with the skirt of her cambric morning frock
full of autumn roses, her cheeks flushed to the hue of the pinkest La
France. She dropped her pretty reverence to her grandmother, kissed her
upon the hand, and her mother on the forehead, and turned her lapful of
flowers out upon the table, where vases and bowls of Sèvres and China
ware stood to receive them, ready filled with water. “You know I would,
Grandmamma!”

“It is a mistake either to laugh or to weep; one should smile only, or
merely sigh,” said Grandmamma, with the charming air of philosophy that
so became her. “One should neither take life too much to heart, nor
make a jest of it, my little Lucie.”

“Please go on with the story. Your _gouvernante_ was asleep in the
chair; Monsieur Varolan caricatured her. You were laughing at the
drawing and at his droll face, as he rubbed it out, and then----”

“Then a gentleman arrived, and I did not laugh any more.” Grandmamma
took up her work, a delicate, spidery web of tatting, and the corners
of her delicately chiseled lips, pink yet as faded azalea blossoms,
quivered a little. “He was staying at the British Embassy with his
brother-in-law, who was Military Attaché, and whose name I have
forgotten. He came to see his sister’s portrait; it stood framed upon
the easel--oh! but most beautiful and stately, with the calm, cold
gaze, the strange poetic glamour of the North. He, too, was fair, very
tall, with aquiline features, and light hazel eyes, very piercing in
their regard, and yet capable of expressing great tenderness. For
Englishmen I have never cared, but Scotch gentlemen of high breeding
have always appeared to me quite unapproachable in _ton_, much like
the Bretons of old blood, with whom their type, indeed, has much in
common. But I am prosing quite intolerably, it seems to me!” said
Grandmamma, with a heightened tint upon her lovely old cheeks and an
embarrassed laugh.

Both Lucie and the little Marquise cried out in protestation. Lucie,
snipping dead leaves from her roses, wanted to know whether Monsieur
Varolan had presented the strange Scotch gentleman to Grandmamma.

“He did. At first he seemed to hesitate, glancing toward Mademoiselle
Binet. But she slept soundly, and, indeed, with cause, having
over-eaten herself that day at the twelve o’clock breakfast upon duck
stewed with olives, pastry, and corn salad. An excellent creature,
poor Binet, but with the failings of _ces gens-là_, and you may be
assured that I did not grudge her her repose while I conversed with
Monsieur Angus Dunbar, who spoke French almost to perfection. How it
was that I, who had been brought up by my mother with such absolute
strictness, yielded to the entreaties of Monsieur Varolan, who was
quite suddenly inspired with the idea of what afterward proved to be
one of his greatest pictures, I cannot imagine,” said Grandmamma;
“but it is certain that we posed together as the Lord of Nann and the
Korrigan standing in the forest by the enchanted well. It would have
been a terrible story to travel home to the Faubourg St. Germain,
I knew, but Mademoiselle still slept sweetly, and out of girlish
recklessness and _gaieté de cœur_ I consented, and down came my
long ropes of yellow hair, which had only been released from their
schoolroom plait, and dressed in grown young-lady fashion six months
before. Monsieur Varolan cried out, and clasped his hands in his
impulsive southern way. Monsieur Dunbar said nothing--then; but by
his eyes one could tell, child as one was, that he was pleased. But
when Varolan’s sketch was dashed in, and the painter cried to us to
descend from the model’s platform, Monsieur Dunbar leaned toward me
and whispered, as he offered me his hand, ‘If the fairy had been as
beautiful as you, Mademoiselle’--for Varolan had told him the story,
and he had pronounced it to be the parallel of an antique Highland
legend--‘had the fairy been as beautiful as you, the Lord of Nann would
have forgotten the lady in the tower by the sea.’ He, as I have told
you, my children, spoke French with great ease and remarkable purity;
and something in the earnestness of his manner and the expression of
his eyes--those light hazel, gleaming eyes”--Grandmamma’s delicate
dove-colored silks rustled as she shuddered slightly--“caused me a
thrill, but a thrill----”

“Young girls are so absurdly impressionable,” began the little
Marquise, with a glance at Lucie. “I remember when our dancing master,
hideous old M. Mouton, praised me for executing my steps with elegance,
I would be in the seventh heaven.”

“But this man was neither hideous, old, nor a dancing master, my dear,”
said Grandmamma, a little annoyed. She took up her tatting, which had
dropped upon her silver-gray lap, as though the story were ended, and
Lucie’s face fell.

“And is that all--absolutely all?” she cried.

“Mademoiselle Binet woke up, and we went home to the Faubourg St.
Germain to five o’clock tea--then the latest novelty imported from
London; and she overate herself again--upon hot honey cake buttered
to excess--and spoiled her appetite for supper,” said Grandmamma
provokingly.

“And you never saw Monsieur Varolan or Monsieur D ...--I cannot
pronounce his name--again?”

“Monsieur Varolan I saw again, several times in fact, for the portrait
required it; and Monsieur Dunbar, quite by accident, called at the
studio on several of these occasions.”

“And Mademoiselle Binet? Did she always fall asleep in the tapestry
chair?” asked the little Marquise, with arching eyebrows.

Grandmamma laughed, and her laugh was so clear, so sweet, and so
mirthful that the almost living lips of the exquisite child portrayed
upon the canvas bearing the signature of the dead Varolan seemed to
smile in sympathy.

“No, but she was occupied for all that. Monsieur Varolan had found out
her weakness for confectionery, and there was always a large dish of
chocolate _pralines_ and cream puffs for her to nibble at after that
first sitting. Poor, good creature, she conceived an immense admiration
for Varolan; and Monsieur Dunbar treated her with a grave courtesy
which delighted her. She had always imagined Scotchmen as savages,
painted blue and feeding upon raw rabbits, she explained, until she had
the happiness of meeting him.”

“And he--what brought him from his bogs and mountains?” asked the
little Marquise. “Was he qualifying for the diplomatic service, or
studying art?”

Grandmamma turned her brilliant eyes calmly upon the less aristocratic
countenance of her daughter-in-law. “He was doing neither. He was
staying in Paris in attendance upon his _fiancée_, who had come over to
buy her _trousseau_. I forget her name--she was the only daughter of a
baronet of Leicestershire, and an heiress. The match had been made by
her family. Monsieur Dunbar, though poor, being the cadet of a great
family and heir to an ancient title--his brother, Lord Hailhope, having
in early youth sustained an accident in the gymnasium which rendered
him a cripple for life.”

“So a wife with a ‘dot’ was urgently required!” commented the little
Marquise. “Let us hope she was not without _esprit_ and a certain
amount of good looks, in the interests of Monsieur Dunbar.”

“I saw her on the night of my first ball,” said Grandmamma, laying down
her tatting and folding her delicate, ivory-tinted hands, adorned with
a few rings of price, upon her dove-colored silk lap. “She had sandy
hair, much drawn back from the forehead, and pale eyes of china-blue,
with the projecting teeth which the caricatures of ‘Cham’ gave to all
Englishwomen. Also, her waist was rather flat, and her satin boots
would have fitted a _sapeur_; but she had an agreeable expression, and
I afterward heard her married life with Monsieur Dunbar was fairly
happy.”

“And Monsieur himself--was he as happy with her as--as he might have
been, supposing he had never visited Paris--never called at the studio
of Varolan?” asked the little Marquise, with a peculiar intonation.

Grandmamma’s rosary was of beautiful pearls. She let the shining things
slide through her fingers meditatively as she replied:

“My daughter, I cannot say. We met at that ball--the last ball given
at the Tuileries before the terrible events of the fifteenth of
July. I presented Monsieur Dunbar to my mother. We danced together,
conversed lightly of our prospects; I felt a _serrement de cœur_, and
he, Monsieur Dunbar, was very pale, with a peculiar expression about
the eyes and mouth which denoted violent emotion strongly repressed. I
had noticed it when Monsieur de Courvaux came to claim my hand for the
second State quadrille. He wore his uniform as Minister of Commerce
and all his Orders.... His thick nose, white whiskers, dull eyes, and
bent figure contrasted strangely with the fine features and splendid
physique of Monsieur Dunbar. Ah, Heaven! how I shivered as he smiled
at me with his false teeth, and pressed my hand within his arm....
He filled me with fear. And yet at heart I knew him to be good and
disinterested and noble, even while I could have cried out to Angus
to save me.... But I was whirled away. Everyone was very kind. The
Empress, looking tall as a goddess, despotically magnificent in the
plenitude of her charms, noticed me kindly. I danced with the Prince
Imperial, a fresh-faced, gentle boy. Monsieur de Courvaux was much
felicitated upon his choice, and _Maman_ was pleased--that goes without
saying. Thus I came back to Monsieur Dunbar. We were standing together
in an alcove adorned with palms, admiring the porphyry vase, once the
property of Catherine the Great, and given by the Emperor Alexander to
the First Napoleon, when for the first time he took my hand. If I could
paint in words the emotion that suddenly overwhelmed me!... It seemed
as though the great personages, the distinguished crowds, the jeweled
ladies, the uniformed men, vanished, and the lustres and girandoles
went out, and Angus and I were standing in pale moonlight on the shores
of a lake encircled by mountains, looking in each other’s eyes. It
matters little what we said, but the history of our first meeting
might have prompted the sonnet of Arvers.... You recall it:

  “Mon cœur a son secret, mon âme a son mystère,
  Un amour éternel dans un instant conçu:
  Le mal est sans remède.”

“_Sans remède_ for either of us. Honor was engaged on either side. So
we parted,” said Grandmamma. “My bouquet of white tea-roses and ferns
had lost a few buds when I put it in water upon reaching home.”

“And----”

“In three days I married Monsieur de Courvaux. As for Monsieur
Dunbar----”

“Lucie,” said the little Marquise, “run down to the bottom of the
garden and listen for the horns!”

“Monsieur Dunbar I never saw again,” said Grandmamma, with a smile,
“and there is no need for Lucie to run into the garden. Listen! One can
hear the horns quite plainly; the boar has taken to the open--they are
sounding the _débuché_. What do you want, Lebas?”

The middle-aged, country-faced house-steward was the medium of a humble
entreaty on the part of one Auguste Pichon, a forest keeper, that
Madame the Marquise would deign to hear him on behalf of the young
woman, his sister, of whom Monsieur le Curé had already spoken. This
time, upon the exchange of a silent intelligence between the two elder
ladies, Mademoiselle Lucie was really dismissed to the garden, and
Pichon and his sister were shown in by Lebas.

Pichon was a thick-set, blue-bearded, vigorous fellow of twenty-seven,
wearing a leather gun pad strapped over his blouse, and cloth gaiters.
He held his cap in both hands against his breast as he bowed to his
master’s mother and his master’s wife. His sister, a pale, sickly,
large-eyed little creature, scarcely ventured to raise her abashed
glance from the Turkey carpet as Pichon plucked at her cotton sleeve.

“We have heard the story from Monsieur le Curé,” cried the younger
lady, “and both Madame la Marquise and myself are much shocked and
grieved. Is it not so, Madame?”

Grandmamma surveyed the bending, tempest-beaten figure before her with
a sternness of the most august, yet with pity and interest too.

“We did not anticipate when we had the pleasure of contributing
a little sum to your sister’s dower, upon her marriage with the
under-gardener, Pierre Michaud, that the union would be attended with
anything but happiness.”

“Alas! Nor did I, Madame.... I picked out Michaud myself from half a
dozen others. ‘Here’s a sound, hale man of sixty,’ thinks I, ‘will make
the girl a good husband, and leave her a warm widow when he dies’; for
he has a bit put by, as is well known. And she was willing when he
asked her to go before the Maire and Monsieur le Curé and sign herself
Michaud instead of Pichon. Weren’t you, girl?”

No answer from the culprit but a sob.

“So, as she was willing and Michaud was eager, the wedding came off.
At the dance, for it’s a poor foot that doesn’t hop at a wedding,
what happens? Latrace, Monsieur le Marquis’s new groom, drops in. He
dances with the bride, drops a few sweet speeches in her ear. Crac!
’Tis like sowing mustard and cress.... Latrace scrapes acquaintance
with Michaud--more fool he, with respect to the ladies’ presence,
for when one has a drop of honey one doesn’t care to share with the
wasp! Latrace takes to hanging about the cottage. Ninette, the silly
thing, begins to gape at the moon, and when what might be expected to
happen happens, Michaud turns her out of house and home. What’s more,
keeps her dowry, to pay for his honor, says he. ‘Honor! leave honor
to gentlemen; wipe out scores with a stick!’ says I, ‘and eat one’s
cabbage soup in peace.’ But he’ll bolt the door and stick to the dowry,
and Ninette may beg, or worse, for all he cares. And my wife flies
out on the poor thing; and what to do with her may the good God teach
me.... Madame will understand that who provides for her keeps two! And
she so young, Madame, only seventeen!”

The little Marquise uttered a pitying exclamation, and over the face
of the elder lady passed a swift change. The exquisite faded lips
quivered, the brilliant eyes under the worn eyelids shone through a
liquid veil of tears. Rustling in her rich neutral-tinted silks, Madame
rose, went to the shrinking figure, and stooping from her stately
height, kissed Ninette impulsively upon both cheeks.

“Poor child! Poor little one!” whispered Grandmamma; and at the caress
and the whisper, the girl dropped upon her knees with a wild, sobbing
cry, and hid her face in the folds of what seemed to her an angel’s
robe. “Leave Ninette to us, my good Pichon,” said Grandmamma. “For
the present the Sisters of the Convent at Charny will take her, all
expenses being guaranteed by me, and when she is stronger we will talk
of what is to be done.” She raised the crying girl, passing a gentle
hand over the bowed head and the convulsed shoulders. “Life is not all
ended because one has made one mistake!” said Grandmamma. “Tell Madame
Pichon that, from me!”

Pichon, crushing his cap, bowed and stammered gratitude, and backed
out, leading the girl, who turned upon the threshold to send one
passionate glance of gratitude from her great, melancholy, black
eyes at the beautiful stately figure with the gold-gray hair, clad
in shining silks and costly lace. As the door closed upon the homely
figures, the little Marquise heaved a sigh of relief.

“Ouf! Pitiable as it all is, one can hardly expect anything better. The
standard of morality is elevated in proportion to the standard of rank,
the caliber of intellect, the level of refinement. Do you not agree
with me?”

Grandmamma smiled. “Are we of the upper world so extremely moral?”

The little Marquise pouted.

“_Noblesse oblige_ is an admirable apothegm, but does it keep members
of our order from the Courts of Divorce? My dear Augustine, reflect,
and you will come to the conclusion that there is really very little
difference in human beings. The texture of the skin, the shape of the
fingernails, cleanliness, correct grammar, and graceful manners do
not argue superior virtue, or greater probity of mind, or increased
power to resist temptation, but very often the reverse. This poor girl
married an uninteresting, elderly man at the very moment when her heart
awakened at the sight and the voice of one whom she was destined to
love.... Circumstances, environments, opportunities contributed to her
defeat; but I will answer for it she has known moments of abnegation as
lofty, struggles as desperate, triumphs of conscience over instinct
as noble, as delicate, and as touching as those experienced by any
Lucretia of the Rue Tronchet or the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. She has been
beaten, that is all, worsted in the conflict; and it is for us, who are
women like herself, to help her to rise. But I prose,” said Grandmamma;
“I sound to myself like a dull tract or an indifferent sermon. And
Lucie must be getting tired of the garden!”

Grandmamma moved toward the open _battants_ of the glass doors to call
Mademoiselle, but arrested her steps to answer the interrogation which
rose in the eyes, but never reached the lips, of the little Marquise.
“I have said, my dear, that we never met again. Whether Monsieur Angus
Dunbar was nobler and stronger than other men--whether I was braver and
purer than others of my sex--this was a question which never came to
the test. Fate kept us apart, and something in which Monsieur le Curé,
and perhaps ourselves, would recognize the hand of Heaven!”

Grandmamma went out through the glass doors and stood upon the
_perron_, breathing the delicious air. The sun was drowning in a sea of
molten gold, the sweet clamor of the horns came from an island in the
shallow river. “Gone to the water! Gone to the water!” they played....
And then the death of the boar was sounded in the _hallali_. But a
nobler passion than that of the hunter, who follows and slays for the
mere momentary lust of possession, shone in the exquisite old face that
lifted to the sunset the yearning of a deathless love.


II

The boar, a _ragot_, had met his end at the point of the Marquis’s
hunting knife, an ancestral _couteau de chasse_ with a blade about
three feet long. The field had dispersed, one or two of the _valets
de chien_ gone after the missing hounds, leading the decoy dogs on
leashes. Afternoon tea at the _château_ was a very lively affair,
the clatter of tongues, cups, and teaspoons almost deafening. A
_cuirassier_, whose polished boot had suffered abrasion from the
tusk of the wounded animal, recounted his adventure to a circle of
sympathetic ladies. A fire of beech logs blazed on the wide hearth,
the leaping flames playing a color symphony, from peacock green to
sapphire, from ruby to orange, dying into palest lemon-yellow, leaping
up in lilac, deepening to violet, and so _da capo_.... The silver
andirons had sphinx heads adorned with full-bottomed periwigs of the
period of Louis le Grand.... The exquisite Watteaus and Bouchers, set
in the paneling--painted white because the little Marquise had found
oak so _triste_--shone with a subdued splendor. The perfume of fine
tobacco, green tea, and many roses, loaded the atmosphere, producing a
mild intoxication in the brain of the tall, fair, well-dressed young
fellow, unmistakably British, whom a servant had announced as Monsieur
Brown....

“Monsieur Brown?” Monsieur de Courvaux read the card passed over to him
by his wife. “Who under the sun is Monsieur Brown?”

“Fie, Frédéric!” rebuked the little Marquise. “It is the English tutor!”

Then they rose together and welcomed the newcomer with hospitable
warmth. Charny les Bois was hideously difficult of access; the railway
from the junction at which one had to change was a single line, and a
perfect disgrace. Monsieur de Courvaux had long intended to bring the
question--a burning one--before the proper authorities. Both Monsieur
and Madame were horrified to realize that Monsieur Brown had walked
from the station, where cabs were conspicuous by their absence. A
conveyance had been ordered to be sent, but at the last moment it was
wanted for the hunt. Monsieur Brown had hunted in England, of course?

Mr. Brown admitted that he had followed the hounds in several counties.
Looking at the new tutor’s square shoulders, sinewy frame, long,
well-made limbs, and firmly knit, supple hands, tanned like his face
and throat by outdoor exercise, Monsieur de Courvaux did not doubt it.
Brown came of good race, that was clear at the first glance. Harrow
and Oxford had added the _cachet_ of the high public school and the
university. He had recommendations from the Duke of Atholblair, who
mentioned him as the son of a dear old friend. And Atholblair was
of the old _régime_, a great nobleman who chose his friends with
discretion. Clearly Brown would do. His French was singularly pure; his
English was the English of the upper classes. Absolutely, Brown was the
thing. He was, he said, a Scotchman. The late Queen of England, to whom
the little Marquise had the honor of being god-daughter’s daughter, had
had a valuable attendant--also a Scotchman--of the name of Brown! Did
Monsieur Brown happen to be any relation?

“Unhappily no, Madame!” said Mr. Brown, who seemed rather tickled by
the notion. He took the next opportunity to laugh, and did it heartily.
He was standing on the bear-skin before the fireplace, measuring an
equal six feet of height with Monsieur de Courvaux, when he laughed,
and several people, grouped about a central figure--that of the elder
Madame de Courvaux, who sat upon a gilt _fauteuil_ with her back to
the great windows, beyond which the fires of the sunset were burning
rapidly away--the people glanced round.

“What a handsome Englishman!” a lady whispered, a tiny brunette, with
eyes of jet and ebony hair, who consequently adored the hazel-eyed, the
tawny-haired, the tall of the opposite sex. Madame de Courvaux, superb
in her laces and dove-colored silks, sat like a figure of marble. Under
her broad white brow, crowned by its waves of gray-gold hair, her eyes,
blue and brilliant still, fixed with an intensity of regard almost
devouring upon the face of the new tutor, whom the Marquis, stepping
forward, presented to his mother with due ceremony, and to whom,
offering her white, jeweled hand, she said:

“Welcome once more to France, Monsieur Dunbar!”

“But, Mamma,” put in Monsieur de Courvaux, as young Mr. Brown started
and crimsoned to the roots of his tawny hair, “the name of Monsieur is
Brown, and he has never before visited our country.”

“Monsieur Brown will pardon me!” Madame de Courvaux rose to her full
height and swept the astonished young fellow a wonderful curtsy. “The
old are apt to make mistakes. And--there sounds the dressing gong!”

Indeed, the metallic _tintamarre_ of the instrument named began at that
instant, and the great room emptied as the chatterers and tea drinkers
scurried away. A rosy, civil footman in plain black livery showed Mr.
Brown to his room, which was not unreasonably high up, and boasted a
dressing cabinet and a bath. As Brown hurriedly removed the smuts of
the railway with oceans of soap and water, and got into his evening
clothes--much too new and well cut for a tutor--he pondered. As he
shook some attar of violets--much too expensive a perfume for a tutor,
who, at the most, should content himself with Eau de Cologne of the
ninepenny brand--upon his handkerchief, he shook his head.

“I’ll be shot if she didn’t, and plainly too! It wasn’t the
confusion of the beastly all-night train journey from Paris. It
wasn’t the clatter of French talk, or the delusion of a guilty
conscience--decidedly not! The thing is as certain as it is
inexplicable! I arrive under the name of Brown at a country house in
a country I don’t know, belonging to people I have never met, and the
second lady I am introduced to addresses me as Mr. Dunbar. There’s the
second gong! I wonder whether there is a governess for me to take in,
or whether I trot behind my superiors, who aren’t paid a hundred and
fifty pounds a year to teach English?”

And Mr. Brown went down to dinner. Somewhat to his surprise, he was
placed impartially, served without prejudice, and conversed with as an
equal. The De Courvaux were charming people, their tutor thought--equal
to the best-bred Britons he had ever met. His pupils--the freckled boy
with hair cropped _à la brosse_, and the pretty, frank-mannered girl
of sixteen--interested him. He was uncommonly obliged to the kind old
Duke for his recommendation; the bread of servitude eaten under this
hospitable roof would have no bitter herbs mingled with it, that was
plain. He helped himself to an _entrée_ of calves’ tongues stewed with
mushrooms, as he thought this, and noted the violet bouquet of the
old Bordeaux with which one of the ripe-faced, black-liveried footmen
filled his glass. And perhaps he thought of another table, at the
bottom of which his place had been always laid, and of the grim, gaunt
dining-room in which it stood, with the targets and breast-pieces,
the chain and plate mail of his--Brown’s--forebears winking against
the deep lusterless black of the antique paneling; and, opposite,
lost in deep reflection, the master of the house, moody, haggard,
gray-moustached and gray-haired, but eminently handsome still, leaning
his head upon his hand, and staring at the gold and ruby reflections
of the wine decanters in the polished surface of the ancient oak, or
staring straight before him at the portrait, so oddly out of keeping
with the Lord Neils and Lord Ronalds in tartans and powdered wigs,
the Lady Agnes and the Lady Jean in hoops and stomachers, with their
hair dressed over cushions, and shepherds’ crooks in their narrow,
yellowish hands.... That portrait, of an exquisite girl--a lily-faced,
gold-haired, blue-eyed child in the ball costume of 1870--had been the
object of Mr. Brown’s boyish adoration. Varolan painted it, Mr. Brown’s
uncle--whose name was no more Brown than his nephew’s--had often said.
And on one occasion, years previously, he had expanded sufficiently to
tell his nephew and expectant heir that the original of the portrait
was the daughter of a ducal family of France, a star moving in the
social orbit of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, married to a Minister of
the Imperial Government a few weeks previous to that Government’s
collapse and fall.

“I believe the dear old boy must have been in love with her before
Uncle Ronald died, and he came in for the family honors,” mused Mr.
Brown, and then began to wonder whether he had treated the dear old
boy badly or _vice versa_. For between this uncle and nephew, who,
despite a certain chilly stiffness and rigor of mental bearing, often
mutually exhibited by relations, were sincerely attached to each other,
a breach had opened, an estrangement had occurred. Hot words and bitter
reproaches had suddenly, unexpectedly been exchanged, old wrongs
flaming up at a kindling word, forgotten grudges coming to light in the
blaze of the conflagration....

And so it had come to pass that the son of Lord Hailhope’s younger
brother, named Angus after his uncle, had not been thrown, had hurled
himself upon his own resources. And the Duke of Atholblair had found
him the place of English tutor in the family of Madame de Courvaux.

“It is the only thing that presents itself,” the aged peer had
explained, “and therefore, my dear boy, you had better take it until
something better turns up.”

For the present. But the future? Mr. Brown wondered whether he and the
English grammar and lexicon--the phrase book, dictionary, and the other
volumes which constituted his tutorial equipment--were doomed to grow
gray and dog’s-eared, drooping and shabby together?

Then he looked up, for some one touched him upon the arm.

“The ladies permit us to smoke in the library, which is the best
room for music in the house,” said the pleasant voice of Monsieur de
Courvaux; “so we will take our _café_ and _chasse_ in their company, if
you please.”

Mr. Brown reached the door in time to open it, and to comprehend
that the act of gallantry was not expected of him. And the feminine
paroquets and the sable-coated male rooks went by, and Mademoiselle
Lucie gave the handsome, well-groomed Englishman a shy glance of
approval from under her black eyelashes, and Monsieur Frédéric, puffy
with incipient indigestion, grinned feebly. Brown put his hand upon the
boy’s shoulder, and followed the rest.

“You don’t want me to do any English to-night, do you, Monsieur Brown?”
young hopeful insinuated, as they went into the long walnut-paneled
room with another bay at the southern end with blinds undrawn,
revealing a wonderful panorama of moonlit forest and river and
champaign. “I can say ‘all-a-raight!’ ‘wat-a-rot!’ and ‘daddle-doo!’
already,” the youth continued. “The English groom of papa, I learned
the words of him, _voyez_! You shall know Smeet, to-morrow!”

“Thanks, old fellow!” said Mr. Brown, with a good-humored smile.

“Grandmamma is making a sign that you are to go and speak to her,
Monsieur,” said Mademoiselle Lucie, Brown’s elder pupil-elect.
“Everybody in this house obeys Grandmamma, and so must you. Mamma says
it is because she was so beautiful when she was young--young, you
comprehend, as in that portrait over the fireplace--that everybody fell
down and worshiped her. And she is beautiful now, is she not, sir? Not
as the portrait; but----”

“The portrait, Mademoiselle?... Over the fireplace.... Good Lord,
what an extraordinary likeness!” broke from Mr. Brown. For the
counterpart of the exquisite picture of Varolan that had hung in the
dining hall of the gray old northern castle where Mr. Brown’s boyhood,
youth, and earliest manhood had been spent, hung above the hooded
fifteenth-century fireplace of the noble library of this French château.

There she stood, the golden, slender, lily-faced, sapphire-eyed young
aristocrat of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, with her indefinable air of
pride and hauteur and exclusiveness mingled with girlish merriment
and mischief. And there she sat--the original in the flesh--Madame la
Marquise de Courvaux, the Grandmamma of these young people--regal in
sweeping folds of amethyst velvet and wonderful creamy Spanish point
lace.

Obedient to the bidding of her fan, Mr. Brown crossed the library and
took the chair she indicated near her. And the diamond cross upon her
still beautiful bosom moved quickly, with the beating of Grandmamma’s
heart, as he did this.

“How like he is!--how like!” she whispered to herself; and the electric
lights became crystal girandoles, and the library became a ballroom at
the Tuileries. The Empress, beautiful and cold, passed down the ranks
of curtsying, bare-backed, bejeweled women and bowing, gold-laced men.
Monsieur de Courvaux, with his orders, his bald forehead, and his white
whiskers, released mademoiselle at the claim of a tall, tawny-haired,
hazel-eyed, fair-faced partner, a Highland gentleman, in plaid and
philabeg, with sporran and claymore, the antique gold brooch upon his
shoulder set with ancient amethysts, river pearls and cairngorms. And
he told her how he loved her, there in the alcove of palms, and heard
her little confession that, had she not been bound by a promise of
marriage to Monsieur de Courvaux she would--oh, how gladly!--become the
wife of Monsieur Angus Dunbar.

“As you say.... Fate has been cruel to both of us.... And--and I am
engaged. She lives in Leicestershire. I met her one hunting season. She
is in Paris, staying at Meurice’s with her mother now. They’re buying
the trousseau.... God help me!” groaned Angus Dunbar.

But the little lady of the Faubourg Saint-Germain drew back the hand he
snatched at, and swept him a haughty little curtsy, looking straight
in his face: “The State Quadrille is beginning. Be so good as to take
me to Mamma.... And I wish you all happiness, sir, and your _fiancée_
also.” Another little curtsy he got, poor lad, with her “Adieu, and
a thousand thanks, Monsieur!” and then--he walked the dusty streets
of Paris until morning; while Mademoiselle lay sleepless on her
tear-drenched lace pillows. And----

Grandmamma awakened as though from a dream, to meet the frank hazel
eyes of Mr. Brown, the English tutor.

“Monsieur will forgive the curiosity of an old woman,” she said, with
her inimitable air of grace and sweetness. “I wished to ask whether
you were not of Northern race--a Scot, for example? Yes? Ah, I thought
I had guessed correctly. The type is not to be mistaken, and I once
had--a dear friend!--whom Monsieur resembles to identity. But his name
was not Brown.”

“I was within an ace of telling her mine was not, either,” reflected
the English tutor as, an hour or so later, he got into bed. “How
perfectly beautiful Madame--not the _agaçante, espiègle_ little Madame,
but the old one--must have been in the rich prime of her womanhood! Did
she and my uncle ever meet again, I wonder? No, I should think not. The
dear old boy is just the sort of character to hug a romance all his
life, and she--she is just the woman to be the heroine of one. Are
all French country-house beds in this style, and is one supposed to
draw these rosebudded chintz curtains modestly round one, or let them
alone?” Mr. Brown concluded to let them alone, and fell very soundly
asleep.

At the late breakfast, an elaborate meal, beginning with soup and
fish, and ending with tea and cakes, it was explained to the tutor
that no English lesson was to be given that day, as a costume ball of
the calico type was to take place that evening, and the children’s
study, a homely, comfortable little wainscoted parlor on the ground
floor, looking out upon a grass-grown courtyard with a bronze fountain
in the middle, was to be given up to hats, coats, and opera cloaks.
Monsieur Frédéric was to personate one of his own ancestors, page to
the Duke of Burgundy, killed in a jousting match in 1369, Monsieur le
Marquis and Madame respectively appearing as the Chevalier de Courvaux
and his lady, parents of the youth referred to, represented in a
miniature by Othea. Mademoiselle Lucie chose to be “Undine” in gauze
and water-lilies. For Monsieur Brown a character could surely be found,
a costume devised, even at the eleventh hour. There were jack-boots,
_salades_, and coats of mail innumerable in the great hall, Mr. Brown,
who shared the objection of his British countrymen to being made to
appear ridiculous, shook his head. He preferred not to dress up; but he
had, or thought he had, packed away in one of his portmanteaux (which
were too numerous for a tutor) something that would do. A Highland
costume, in fact, of the modified kind worn by gentlemen of Caledonia
as dinner dress or upon occasions of festivity.

Thus Mr. Brown unconsciously pledged himself to bring about a crisis
in the lives of two people, one of whom was actively engaged at that
moment in trying to find him. For Lord Hailhope was genuinely attached
to his nephew, and the basis of the quarrel between them, never very
secure, had been shaken and shattered, firstly, by the indifference
manifested by the young lady concerned, a rather plain young heiress,
at the news of the said nephew’s disappearance, and, secondly, by
her marriage with her father’s chaplain, a Presbyterian divine of
thunderous eloquence and sweeping predestinary convictions.

“Tell him that I was in the wrong--that I apologize--that everything
shall be as it was before, if he will come back! The money shall be
secured to him; I will guarantee that,” Lord Hailhope wrote to the
London solicitor employed in the search for Young Lochinvar, who had
sprung to the saddle and ridden away--without the lady. “If he will not
come to me, I will go to him. The insult _was_ gross; I admit it, and
will atone to the best of my ability!”

“The hot-headed old Highlander!” commented the man of law, as he filed
the letter. “He adopts the boy--his dead brother’s son--brings him up
in the expectation of inheriting his private fortune as well as the
title, and then turns him out of doors because he won’t marry a girl
with teeth like tombstones and a fancy for another man. If Master Angus
Dunbar is wise, he will hold out against going back until that question
of the money has been disposed of irrevocably. Though people never have
sense--lucky for my profession!”

Meanwhile, at Charny les Bois preparations for the ball--the materials
of which owed much more to the lordly silkworm than the plebeian cotton
pod--went on apace. Evening came, the band of the _cuirassiers_,
generously lent by Monsieur the Colonel, drove over from the barracks
in a couple of _chars-à-bancs_, the Colonel and the officers of that
gallant regiment, arrayed to kill in the green and gold costumes of
the hunt of the Grand Monarque, followed upon their English _drague_.
_Voitures_ of every description disgorged their happy loads. Monsieur,
Madame, the young ladies and the young gentlemen, hot, happy, smiling,
and fearfully and wonderfully disguised.

“Their unconsciousness, the entire absence of the conviction that they
are ridiculous, makes them quite lovable,” thought Mr. Brown. “That
fat, fair papa, with spectacles and large sandy whiskers, as Pluton,
from _Orphée aux Enfers_, in red satin tunic and black silk tights
spotted with yellow, a satin cloak with a train, a gilt pasteboard
crown and trident pleases me tremendously. He is, I believe, a
magistrate from Charny. His wife is the even fatter and fairer lady
attired as Norma, and those three little dumpy girls, flower girls of a
period decidedly uncertain.”

“Does not Monsieur dance?” said Mademoiselle Lucie, looking, with her
filmy green draperies, her fair locks crowned, and her slim waist
girdled with water-lilies and forget-me-nots, a really exquisite river
sprite.

“If Mademoiselle would accord me the honor of her hand in a valse,” Mr.
Brown began; then he broke off, remembering that in England the tutor
did not usually dance with the daughters of the house--if, indeed, that
functionary danced at all. But----

“Mamma has been telling me that Englishmen dance badly,” observed
Mademoiselle, with a twinkle in her blue eyes. “Grandmamma will have
it, by the way, that you are Scotch! Do not look round for her; she
was a little fatigued by so much conversation and fuss, and will not
come down to-night.... Heavens! look at Frédéric,” she added, in a
tone of sisterly solicitude, as the page of the Court of Burgundy
moved unsteadily into sight, clinging to the arm of a bosom friend in
a “celadon” costume and a condition of similar obfuscation. “Alas! I
comprehend!” she continued. “Those plums conserved in cognac have a
fatal fascination for my unhappy brother. Quick, Monsieur! make to
remove him from the view of Papa, or the consequences will be of the
most terrible.... Frédéric has been already warned....”

And outwardly grave and sympathetic, albeit splitting with repressed
laughter, Mr. Brown went in chase of the unseasoned vessels, and
conveyed them to the safe harbor of the small study on the second
floor, which had been allotted to him as a den. Locking them in, he
was about to descend in search of seltzer water, when, in the act of
crossing the gallery, unlighted save for the dazzling moonlight that
poured through the long mullioned windows, giving a strange semblance
of fantastic life to the dark family portraits on the opposite wall,
and lying in silver pools upon the shining parquet islanded with
threadbare carpets of ancient Oriental woof, he encountered the elder
Madame de Courvaux, who came swiftly toward him from the opposite end
of a long gallery, carrying a light and a book that looked like a
Catholic breviary. With the glamour of moonlight upon her, in a loose
silken dressing robe trimmed with the priceless lace she affected, her
wealth of golden-gray tresses in two massive plaits, drawn forward and
hanging over her bosom, almost to her knees, her beauty was marvelous.
Mr. Brown caught his breath and stopped short; Madame, on her part,
uttered a faint cry--was it of delight or of terror?--and would have
dropped her candle had not the tutor caught it and placed it on a
_console_ that stood near.

“Pardon, Madame!” he was beginning, when....

“Oh, Angus Dunbar! Angus, my beloved, my adored!” broke from Madame de
Courvaux. “There is no need that either of us should ask for pardon.”
Her blue eyes gleamed like sapphires, her still beautiful bosom heaved
and panted, her lips smiled, though the great tears brimmed one by one
over her underlids and chased down her pale cheeks. “We did what was
right. The path of honor was never easy. You married, and I also, and
all these years no news of you has reached me. But I understand now
that you are dead, and bound no longer by the vows of earth, and that
you have come, brave as of old, beautiful as of old, to tell me that
you are free!”

With an impulse never quite to be accounted for, Angus Dunbar, the
younger, stepped forward and enclosed in his own warm, living grasp
Madame’s trembling hands....

“My name is Angus Dunbar, Madame,” he said, “but--but I believe you
must be speaking of my uncle. He succeeded to the peerage twenty years
ago; he is now Lord Hailhope, but he--he never married, though I
believe he loved, very sincerely and devotedly, a lady whose portrait
by Varolan hangs in the dining-room at Hailhope, just as it hangs in
the library here at Charny les Bois.”

“I--I do not understand.... How comes it that----” Madame hesitated
piteously, her hands wringing each other, her great wistful eyes fixed
upon the splendid, stalwart figure of the young man. “You are so
like.... And the costume----”

“It is customary for Highland gentlemen to wear the kilt at social
functions; and when I left Hailhope--or, rather, was turned out of
doors, for my uncle disowned me when I refused to marry a girl who did
not care for me, and who has since married to please herself--Gregor
packed it in one of my kit cases. The cat is out of the bag as well
as the kilt.... I came here as English tutor to your grandchildren,
Madame, at the suggestion of an old friend, the Duke of Atholblair, to
whom I told the story of the quarrel with my uncle.”

Madame began to recover her courtly grace and self-possession. Her
hands ceased to tremble in Dunbar’s clasp; she drew them away with a
smile that was only a little fluttered.

“And I took you for a ghost ... a _revenant_.... I was a little
agitated.... I had been suffering from an attack of the nerves....
Monsieur will make allowances for a superstitious old woman. To-morrow,
after breakfast, in the garden Monsieur will explain the whole story to
me--how it came that Monsieur Dunbar, his uncle, now Lord Hailhope--ah,
yes! there was a crippled elder brother of that title--disowned his
nephew for refusing to give his hand to one he did not love.... I
should have imagined---- Good-night, Monsieur!”

In the garden, after breakfast, Angus Dunbar, no longer handicapped by
the plebeian name of Brown, told his story to a sympathetic listener.
Madame’s head was bent--perhaps her hearing was not so good as it
had been when, more than forty years previously, Angus Dunbar, the
elder, had whispered his secret in that delicate ear. But as footsteps
sounded upon the terrace, and one of the fresh-faced, black-liveried
footmen appeared, piloting a stranger, a tall, somewhat stern-featured,
gray-moustached gentleman, she started and looked round. In the same
moment the late Mr. Brown jumped up, over-setting his chair, the pugs
barked, and----

“I owed it to you to make the first move,” said Lord Hailhope, rather
huskily, as the uncle and nephew grasped hands. “Forgive me, Angus, my
dear boy!”

“Lady Grisel has married the Presbyterian minister, sir, and we’re all
going to be happy for ever after, like people in a fairy tale,” said
Angus Dunbar. Then he turned to Madame de Courvaux, and bowed with his
best grace. “Madame, permit me to present my uncle, Lord Hailhope, who
I believe has had the honor of meeting you before!”

And, being possessed of a degree of discretion quite proper and
desirable in a tutor, Mr. Angus Dunbar moved away in the direction of
a rose walk, down which Mademoiselle Lucie’s white gown had flitted a
moment before, leaving the two old lovers looking in each other’s eyes.




AN INDIAN BABY


When old Lovelace-Legge sank into a stertorous final coma which his
lovely marble tombstone called by a much prettier name, and the blinds
were drawn up after a decent interval, and a tremendous heraldic joke,
furnished by Heralds’ College, was dismounted from over the front door,
Mrs. Lovelace-Legge, after the requisite period of seclusion, took an
exquisite little gem of a house in Sloane Street, furnished it to a
marvel, and began, with discreetness, to enjoy herself. All her affairs
flourished, her pet plans prospered, her gratifications were many, her
disappointments nil; people began to call her “Lucky Lotta Legge.” She
took her good fortune as her due.

“Perhaps she feels she deserves something of Providence for putting up
patiently with old Lovelace-Legge during those ten awful years,” said
Lady Cranberry, her dearest friend, to another just a shade less dear,
as they walked up Sloane Street one fine morning.

“I suppose he _was_ awful?” hazarded the second-best beloved.

Lady Cranberry crumpled her eyebrows. “He had a complexion like New
Zealand meat,” she said. “Next time you walk up the King’s Road with
Lotta, watch her as you pass a cheap butcher’s shop. She will wince and
look the other way, and you may guess what she is thinking of, poor
darling!”

“She said to me once,” remarked the second-best one, “‘_I always
fretted for children, but perhaps they were wisely withheld._’”

“I should think so,” consented Lady Cranberry. “When there is a chance
of an infant’s coming into the world with three chins and a nose like
Punch, to say nothing of bandy legs and patent shoes like bicycle gear
cases----”

The second-best reminded Lady Cranberry that children were not usually
born with shoes.

“Of course, I meant feet,” said Lady Cranberry. “Feet of that size and
flatness, too. And if there is the merest chance of a child’s coming
into the world thus handicapped, it is infinitely better that the child
should keep out of it. Here we are at Lotta’s door. Isn’t that cream
enamel with the old Florentine copper-embossed knocker and bells too
divine for anything? Great Heavens!”

She had evidently received a shock, for she was paler than her powder,
and as she clutched her companion’s arm her eyes were fixed in quite a
ghastly stare.

“Mercy!” the next best-beloved friend of the owner of the cream-white
door with the Florentine copper work adjuncts exclaimed, “you saw
something--what?”

But Lady Cranberry, with more energy than her weak state seemed to
warrant, had ascended Mrs. Lovelace-Legge’s brown doorsteps, and was
plying the Florentine knocker. The servant who responded to the summons
thought that Mrs. Lovelace-Legge was at home, but knew her to be
profoundly engaged.

“Take up the names. We will wait,” said Lady Cranberry. Then, as the
respectful servant went upstairs, she drew her companion into the
shelter of a little reposeful niche, in Liberty draperies and Indian
carved wood, where palms and things flourished in pots, and an object
of familiar shape, in bamboo work, and newly freed from swathings of
brown paper, stood upon a table. To this she pointed with a neatly
gloved forefinger that trembled with emotion.

“Oh! Why,” cried the other, “it is A BABY’S CRADLE!”

“It was delivered,” said Lady Cranberry, “at this door as we came up.
It cannot be for a doll: it is full-sized. What on earth can Lotta want
with such a thing?”

As she uttered these words the servant returned. His mistress begged
the ladies to come upstairs. He delivered his message, and then, with
well-trained gravity, lifted the compromising cradle and led the way
upstairs. Mrs. Lovelace-Legge did not purpose to receive her friends
in the drawing-room, it appeared, or even on the floor above, where
her bedroom and boudoir were situated. The ladies were conducted by
their guide to regions more airy still; indeed, their progress knew
no pause until they reached the highest landing. Here Lady Cranberry
received another shock, for a gaily-painted wooden gate, newly hung,
gave access to a space where a rocking-horse stood rampant in all
the glory of bright paint and red leather trappings; and beyond,
through an open door, shone a glimpse of an infantile Paradise, all
rosebud dimity, blue ribbons, and brightness, in the midst of which
moved Mrs. Lovelace-Legge radiant in a lawn apron with Valenciennes
insertion, issuing directions to a head nurse of matronly proportions,
an under-nurse of less discretionary years, and a young person dressed
in blue baize, trimmed with red braid and buttons, whose functions were
less determinable.

“My dears!” Mrs. Lovelace-Legge fluttered to her friends and kissed
them, and nothing save Lady Cranberry’s imperative need of an
explanation kept that lady from swooning on the spot. “You find me all
anyhow,” said Lotta, with beaming eyes. “But come--come and look.”
She pioneered the way into the room beyond, with its Lilliputian
fittings, its suggestive cosiness, its scent of violet powder and new
flannel. “Do you think he will be happy here?” she asked, with a tender
quasi-maternal quaver of delightful anticipation.

“Who is--He?”

Lady Cranberry hardly recognized her own voice, so transformed was
it by the emotions she suppressed; but Mrs. Lovelace-Legge noticed
nothing. “Who?” she echoed, and then laughed with moist, beaming eyes.
“Who but the baby? Is it possible I haven’t told you? Or Lucy?” The
second-best-beloved shook her head. “No. You see--the news of his
coming was broken so suddenly that I was carried off my feet, and since
then I’ve done nothing but engage nurses and buy baby things. This is
Mrs. Porter”--she turned to the matronly person--“who will have entire
charge of my pet--when he arrives; and this is Susan, her assistant.
This”--she indicated the anomaly in blue baize and red braid--“is Miss
Pilsener, from the Brompton Kindergarten. She is going to teach me how
to open his little--_little_ mind, and be everything to him from the
very beginning!”

“Won’t you open _our_ little minds?” implored the second-best friend.
“You know we are in a state of the darkest ignorance.”

Mrs. Lovelace-Legge dismissed her attendants, and made her friends
sit down on the nursery sofa, and sank into a low nursing-chair. She
absently tried on an india-rubber apron as she spoke, and it was plain
her heart was with the invisible infant. “Ask me questions,” she
said. “I don’t seem able to keep my thoughts concentrated on anything
but--baby!”

“You must understand, Lotta,” said Lady Cranberry, “that to find you in
possession of”--she gulped--“a baby is a shock in itself to your most
intimate friends. And in the name of your regard for Lucy, supposing
myself to have no claim upon your confidence, I must ask you to explain
how you come to be in possession of such a--such a thing? And to--to
whom it belongs--and where it is coming from?”

“I came into possession of baby through a dear friend,” explained
Mrs. Lovelace-Legge. She added: “Perhaps you have heard of General
Carabyne--Lieutenant-General Ranford Carabyne of the Ordnance
Department, Calcutta?”

Her friends replied simultaneously: “Never!”

“He is the father of my child,” continued Mrs. Lovelace-Legge, “and, I
am given to understand, a charming person!”

Lady Cranberry’s lips moved soundlessly. She might have been breathing
a prayer for patience.

“The General,” went on Lotta, “married my old school-fellow, Julia
Daubeny, in the spring of last year. He had already been married--in
fact, had been twice a widower--when Julia met him at a Garrison
Gymkhana. It was a case of love at first sight, and I gave Julia her
trousseau as my wedding present. And now she is sending me home the
General’s baby--the child of his last wife--as it cannot stand the
climate, and she knows how I dote on little children.”

“How old is this child?” queried Lady Cranberry.

Mrs. Lovelace-Legge produced a thin crackling envelope from her pocket,
and unfolded Mrs. Carabyne’s letter. “Julia always writes without
punctuation, and all her capitals are in the wrong places,” she said,
apologizing for the hesitation with which she attacked the scrawled
pages. “‘_I forgot to mention_,’” wrote Julia, “‘_that the General
has one son quite a darling and a favorite with everybody. He was
christened Dampierre. There is French blood on the mother’s side, but
everybody calls him ‘Dumps.’ He has the sweetest nature and splendid
teeth until about six months old----_’”

“Incoherent, isn’t she, rather?” hinted Lady Cranberry.

“‘_Six months old when he was thrown out of his
bamboo-cart_’--Anglo-Indian for perambulator, I suppose--‘_thrown out
of his bamboo-cart with a woman who had got hold of him at the time a
most dreadful creature and sustained a severe concussion of the brain.
You will gather by this that the poor dear is inclined to be more than
a little child._’”

“Is not the sense of that rather--involved?”

Mrs. Lovelace-Legge held out the letter.

“It is ‘child’ or else ‘wild,’” Lady Cranberry said, dropping her
eyeglasses.

“As if an infant of six months old could be called ‘wild’!” giggled
Mrs. Lovelace-Legge. She read on:

“‘_Now the doctors have positively ordered him home, and we have not
the least idea where to send him. In this dilemma I thought of you. The
General shakes his head, but I have carried my point, and Dumps and
his nurse sail by the “Ramjowrah” next Thursday, and when arrived in
London will come straight to you. I have every faith in your goodness
of heart, and know that poor dear Dumps could be placed in charge of no
kinder friend. He is extremely affectionate--from pursuits which ruin
many of the most promising young._’”

“Humph!” ejaculated the puzzled Lady Cranberry.

“Perhaps Julia means tearing his clothes and sucking the paint off his
toys?” suggested the second-best dearest friend.

Mrs. Lovelace-Legge read on: “‘_Men in India if you have read Rudyard
Kipling I need not be more definite we shall look to your gentle
influence to wean him._’”

“One thing at least is clear,” remarked Lady Cranberry. “The child is
not yet weaned. As to your correspondent’s style, Lotta----” She said
no more, but in her mind she harbored a most definite conviction that
Julia Carabyne drank. “Eau de Cologne or red lavender,” she thought,
“or pure, unadulterated cognac. I pity the General from my heart!”

A few more confused and comma-less paragraphs, and the letter wound up.

“You think I did right?” Mrs. Lovelace-Legge glanced round at her
preparations. “But, indeed, I had no choice. How could any woman with a
heart--and a nursery----”

“Both unoccupied?” said Lady Cranberry.

“Close her doors against a little sick baby, coming all the
way from India in a nurse’s arms? The bare idea strikes one as
horrible! Besides, the poor darling may arrive at any moment!” Mrs.
Lovelace-Legge dried her pretty eyes with a fragment of gossamer
cambric, and then--rat-tatter, tatter, TAT! went the hall-door knocker.

The three ladies started to their feet. Mrs. Lovelace-Legge rushed to
the window.

“Can it be?”

“The baby--arrived?”...

“It has! I see the top of a cab piled with luggage!” cried Mrs.
Lovelace-Legge, leaning eagerly from the nursery window. “I can make
out the Harries Line label on the portmanteaux----”

The second-best friend joined her at the casement.

“One thing puzzles me,” she said, peering downward. “Would a child of
that age travel with gun-cases and a bicycle?”

“They may belong to a passenger friend who promised to see the dear
child delivered safely into my hands. Ah, here is Simmons!”

Simmons it was, with a salver and a card. He wore a peculiar, rather
wild expression, and his countenance was flushed and somewhat swollen;
perhaps with the effort of climbing so many stairs. All three ladies
hurried to meet him.

“He--it--the----”

“_They_ have arrived?” gasped little Mrs. Lovelace-Legge.

Simmons bowed his head. His mistress could not speak. She took the card
without looking at it, and turned away.

“Show them up here!” commanded Lady Cranberry, sympathetically
comprehending Lotta’s emotion.

“And pay the cabman,” added the second-best friend.

Left together, the three women broke out into anticipatory ejaculations:

“The pet!”

“The wumpsy!”

“Will it be pretty?”

“Oh, I hope so! But even if it is not,” cried little Mrs.
Lovelace-Legge, clasping her hands, “I feel that I shall love it. Ought
we”--her eyebrows crumpled inquiringly--“ought we to give it a warm
bath at once? Where is Nurse?”

Nurse and her understrapper appeared on the scene with the young lady
from the Kindergarten. Six eager feminine heads were projected over the
balusters of the top landing as masculine footsteps creaked upon the
staircase, and a tall young man, dressed in a rough yachting suit of
blue serge, raised his eyes--a handsome and ingenuous pair--and blushed
under the salvo of optical artillery which greeted his appearance.
Behind him followed a grizzled, middle-aged person, evidently a
soldier-servant in mufti.

“I--I presume ...,” the young gentleman began, “I--I have the honor....”

“I am Mrs. Lovelace-Legge,” cried the charming widow, craning forward,
“and where--oh, where is the baby?”

The young man turned pale. “The--the baby?”

“Haven’t you brought it?” cried all the ladies.

Tears welled up in Mrs. Lovelace-Legge’s lovely eyes.

“Don’t tell me it is dead!” she gasped. “Oh, if that were true, how
could I break the news to Julia and General Carabyne?”

“Madam,” stammered the young gentleman, “I am the only son of General
Carabyne--Dampierre Carabyne.” He blushed again. “People usually call
me ‘Dumps,’” he said, and broke off as all six women screamed at once:

“YOU! YOU THE BABY!”

And the nurses flung their clean cambric aprons over their heads, and
rushed in titters from the scene, as poor little Mrs. Lovelace-Legge
went into screaming hysterics in the arms of her second-dearest friend.

“It is all a ridi--a ridiculous misunderstanding!” gasped Lady
Cranberry, an hour later, as the recovered hostess, her friends, and
her newly-arrived guest sat together in the drawing-room. “Let him
see Mrs. Carabyne’s letter, Lotta. Perhaps he will be able to----
No! Better give it to me.” She mounted her gold eyeglasses upon her
aquiline nose, and conned the Runic scroll a while. “We were misled,”
she explained to the young man, “principally by a reference to your
nurse.”

“Molloy _is_ my nurse,” explained Mr. Dampierre Carabyne. “He was one
of the hospital orderlies at Calcutta, and looked after me when I was
ill. And the Pater thought it best that he should valet me on the
voyage, being a useful, experienced kind of man.”

“As to this illness you speak of?” said Lady Cranberry.

“It happened six months ago....”

“Ago! I see a glimmer,” said Lady Cranberry.

“When I was thrown out of a bamboo-cart in which I was driving a friend
of mine--a very great friend.”

Again the young man colored.

“_The woman who had got hold of him_,” murmured Lady Cranberry to
herself. “And ‘_more than a little child_’ means ‘_more than a little
wild_.’ I should have seen _that_ in his eye without a hint from Mrs.
Carabyne.”

Thus, bit by bit, the determined lady translated Julia’s letter, which
ran as follows:

“He was christened Dampierre (there is French blood on the mother’s
side); but everybody calls him ‘Dumps.’ He has the sweetest nature, and
splendid health until six months ago, when he was thrown out of his
bamboo-cart with a woman who had got hold of him at the time--a most
dreadful creature--and sustained a severe concussion of the brain.
(You will gather by this that the poor dear is inclined to be more than
a little wild.) Now the doctors have positively ordered him home, and
we have not the least idea where to send him. In this dilemma I thought
of you. The General shakes his head, but I have carried my point, and
Dumps and his nurse sail by the _Ramjowrah_ next Thursday, and when
arrived in London will come straight to you. I have every faith in your
goodness of heart, and know that poor dear Dumps could be placed in
charge of no kinder friend.... He is extremely affectionate.... From
pursuits which ruin many of the most promising young men in India (if
you have read Rudyard Kipling I need not be more definite) we look to
your gentle influence to wean him.”

Lady Cranberry took off her _pince-nez_ and refolded the letter. As
she did so she glanced toward the snug nook by the fireplace, where
the pretty widow, entrenched behind the barricade of her afternoon
tea-table, was making but a feeble show of resistance to the raking
fire of Dumps’s handsome eyes. In such a mood such a woman as Lady
Cranberry shares a corner of the mantle of the Prophets. It occurred to
her that the infantile Paradise upstairs might not, if all went merrily
as marriage bells, remain so very long untenanted.

And, indeed, at the expiration of a twelvemonth from that date Mrs.
Dampierre Carabyne----

Please see the left-hand top corner reserved in the morning papers for
these delicate and personal intimations.




YVONNE

IN TWO PARTS


I

A mile or so north of the fishy little Breton harbor town of Paimpol,
the hamlet of Pors Lanec is represented by a scattered cluster of
low-pitched, straggling cottages built of gray granite boulders
splashed with yellow lichen, their thatch of furze and reeds or
broom-bush secured by lashings of rope, and heavy flagstones from the
fierce assaults of the western gales. One in especial stands on an
incline trending toward the beach, below the level of the Paimpol road.
Its rear wall is formed by a low cliff against which it has been built,
and which, rearing some twenty feet above the level of its shaggy brown
roof, and throwing out a natural buttress toward the sea, protects the
poor dwelling from the icy northern winds. Three uneven steps, worn by
the feet of generations of fisher-dwellers, lead to the door, whose
inner latch is lifted by a length of rope-yarn, reeved through a hole.
On each side of the door a window has been hollowed out in the solid
masonry of the wall, and roughly glazed; and beneath the rude slate
ledge of each is a weather-beaten bench of drift-oak, blackened by age
and usage. The door standing open gives a glimpse of the usual Breton
interior, bunches of dried herbs, nets, and baskets depending from
the blackened rafters, carved sleeping-bunks set about the walls, a
few quaint pewter and copper flagons hanging on pegs driven into the
chimney, and reflecting the leaping blaze of the pine and beechwood
branches burning on the hearth.

I do not know who lives in Mademoiselle Yvonne’s cottage now, but a
year ago the western gale was churning the gray sea into futile anger,
and thrashing the stunted bushes into a more bending shape. The sky was
somber as the sea, with eastward-hurrying drifts of slaty cirrus, which
separated to reveal pale, sun-washed sky-spaces, and closed again,
making the gloom seem deeper than before.

It was the eighth of December, the Feast of the Immaculate
Conception--the day of the Pardon des Islandais--and the morning
Angelus was ringing from the storm-beaten little chapel on the heights
above, where nosegays of artificial flowers and strings of shells
adorned the image of Our Lady of Good Help, and white-capped women, and
rugged-faced, long-haired men knelt, rapt and serious, on the sandy
stone pavement. Others were hurrying into Paimpol, where the streets
were decorated with white sheets bordered with holly and ivy leaves in
readiness for the procession. And a fine, icy rain was driving before
the wind, and Yvonne’s tables and chairs stood out of doors while their
owner beat and scrubbed them vigorously with a birch-broom dipped in
soap-suds.

“She works upon the _fête_ day, yes; but for all that she is no
heretic, the poor Yvonne,” a passer-by explained to a companion--a
stranger who showed surprise at the unusual spectacle. “All days are
alike to her--and Our Lady understands.”

The speaker, a brown-faced, vigorous woman of fifty, paused on the
pathway, littered with brown trails of slippery seaweed, and cried:

“Hey! So you’re not going with us to Paimpol, Mademoiselle Yvonne?”

Mademoiselle Yvonne ceased flogging her table, and turned her face
toward the questioner. It was a full, straight-featured, rather massive
face, framed in the shell-fluted cap worn by unmarried women. The brows
were broad, and from under the straight eyebrows looked a pair of eyes
that were blue and clear and candid as those of the little boy who
clung to the skirts of the woman who addressed her. As she drew herself
up, resting on her birch-broom, it might be seen that she was tall and
deep-chested and broad-bosomed, and that the massive plaits of hair
coiled upon her temples were gray.

“Going to Paimpol! Sure, it is impossible,” said Mademoiselle Yvonne.
“There is so much to do getting the house ready.” A rich deep color
flushed her cheeks, staining her temples and tinting her full throat
to the edge of her bodice. “When one is to be married, Madame
understands----”

“So then! You have heard?” cried the neighbor with an elaborate
pantomime of delight at the good news. “You have had a letter from
Iceland at last?”

The clear blue eyes looked troubled for a moment.

“No. Not that,” said Mademoiselle Yvonne. “Not precisely a letter, but
I have made out why the _Marie au Secours_ delays so long. You see,
they must have had a great catch at the cod-fisheries, and, being a
man of brains, my Yann set out to make the most of his good luck. So
the _Marie au Secours_ will have merely touched at Paimpol, and then
sailed down to the Gulf of Gascony, where fish fetch high prices, or
even to the Sandy Isles.” One of her massive plaits, released by her
vigorous movements from the confining pin, uncoiled and fell below her
waist. “That is how it will have been, Madame Pilot!” exclaimed Yvonne,
smiling and coiling up the beautiful hair.

“Without doubt, that is how it will have been!” assented the other.

She drove her stout elbow into the ribs of the woman who had whispered
to her. “Not so loud! We people of the coast have sharper ears than you
folks from inland.”

“When did he sail?”

“Twenty years ago, when she was eighteen, and all that gray hair gold.”

“Pfui! There was a blast!”

“We shall have to pick the wind’s bones all the way to Paimpol. So
good-day, Mademoiselle.... Gaos, run and bid Mademoiselle Yvonne
good-day.”

Madame Pilot nudged the other woman again, as much as to say: “Watch
her with the child!”

Gaos obediently quitted his mother’s skirts, and Yvonne knelt down
to kiss him. She whispered in the child’s ear coaxingly, and, as
he hesitated, watched the innocent lips as though her fate in some
inexplicable way hung upon their utterance.

“She always tries to get him to say it, and he never will!” said Madame
Pilot under her breath.

“What?” mouthed the inland woman, with round, interested eyes.

The child spoke at that moment loudly and clearly.

“He will come back to-day!”

“Lord above! if he hasn’t said it!” cried Madame Pilot, and crossed
herself under her ample cloak as the boy came running to her.

She caught his hand, and clattered on in her heavy wooden shoes,
fighting her way resolutely against the wind, followed more slowly by
the gaping inlander.

“You rogue! You little villain!” she cried to the child she dragged.
“What made you say it?”

“Be-be-cause--bub--bub--boo--because it’s true!” roared Gaos, through
angry sobs.

His mother, with a hasty invocation of her patron saint, dropped his
hand, stopped where the beach-pathway merged in the Paimpol road, and
looked back. Mademoiselle Yvonne was nowhere to be seen at first, but
presently her figure mounted into view climbing the pathway to the
chapel.

“She has gone to burn a candle for her good news,” said Madame Pilot.
“Now which have I for a son ... a liar or a prophet? If one were
to mistake and smack the prophet, it’s enough to bring a judgment
down....” She shook her head mournfully. “But it is to be prayed for,
all the same, that that great rogue Yann may never come wheedling back.
Drowned, did you suppose? Dead? Not a bit of it!... He’s living on the
fat of the land in Ploubazou, where he landed his last cargo of fish
nineteen years ago, married a tavern-keeper’s daughter, and set up a
sailor’s drinking-house himself; ‘The Chinese Cider Cellars,’ they call
it. May Heaven punish such vagabonds!” panted Madame Pilot. “As for us
in Pors Lanec, we’re peace-lovers and law-abiders, but there are stones
and cudgels waiting for Monsieur Yann Tregnier whenever he shows his
nose here.”

Madame Pilot stopped, as a broad-shouldered young man in a sailor’s
cap and pilot-cloth jacket came tramping toward her along the puddly
Paimpol road, whistling a cheerful tune. He wore thick town-made
brogues instead of wooden _sabots_, and saluted the women in the
country fashion, though to him personally they were unknown, and passed
by, leaving the mother of the possible prophet staring; for he was
known to her as the son of the Ploubazou tavern-keeper Yann Tregnier,
christened Jean-Marie after his mother’s father. He was a well-looking,
sturdy young fellow of eighteen, who had always hankered to join the
Icelanders, as the cod-trawlers are called, and sail with the yearly
fleet on the last day of February for the big, dangerous fisheries in
the icy regions where the summers have no night. But Yann, his father,
would not hear of it, and Jean-Marie had been apprenticed to a cooper
in Paimpol. He had grumbled, but his fate appeared less hard now that
he was in love with Gaud. Gaud lived with an aunt in the village of
Pors Lanec, a place Jean-Marie knew as yet only by hearsay, since her
parents lived in Paimpol, and she had met her lover while upon a visit
to them. Pors Lanec lay by the beach a mile or two from Paimpol, Gaud
had told him. The cottage was built against a great rock, the doorstep
was the beach, and the sea the duck-pond before the door; he could not
fail to recognize the place, Gaud had described it so clearly.

Gaud was a little delicate creature, with hair of burning gold hidden
under her shell cap, and great violet-gray eyes, full of possible
adoration for any likely young fellow who should come wooing to Pors
Lanec, and the likely young fellow had come along in the person
of Jean-Marie. And he had won her promise, and meant to marry her
and settle down to the cooper’s trade in earnest. True, the girl
was without a dower, and his father, with whom he had had a talk
at Ploubazou last Sunday, had pulled a long lip at that piece of
information, and he had said to the old man straight out: “Either I get
Gaud or go to sea!”

“Either I get Gaud--or go to sea!” Jean-Marie repeated now in the
most deep and manly voice he had at command. For the cottage built
against the cliff had come in sight, a dwelling so weather-worn and
lichen-stained that it might have been an excrescence upon the side of
the rock that sheltered it. “Either I get Gaud....” Jean-Marie squared
his shoulders, and marched down upon the cottage where Gaud lived. As
his firm footsteps crossed the plateau of sandy rock that lay before
the cottage door he heard a cry from within, and before he could lift a
hand to the rope-yarn of the latch, the door was pulled violently back,
thrown open, and a woman fell upon his breast with a sobbing shriek of
joy.

“Yann! Oh, my beloved, at last!”

“Madame!” he stuttered.

“Our Lady sent me word you would return to-day, and even as I was upon
my way to thank her for such grace, I turned back thinking. ‘If he
should come and miss me!’”

The wind blew shrilly; the sky grew black with storm. Jean-Marie’s
cheek was wet with rain or the woman’s tears. He was conscious of a
dizziness. It was as though a web of some strange tissue were weaving
in the chambers of his brain, and the pattern grew more and more
familiar. The arms that clasped him were not those of a stranger; the
heart that throbbed upon his own had rested there before. Even the
cottage interior shown through the low doorway was familiar, and the
oaken benches to right and left, had he not carved his name on one of
them, his and another’s?

But even as these strange questions awakened in the mind of the young
man, he was thrust violently back, and Yvonne was gazing, with still
streaming eyes, at the face of a stranger, while, partly hidden by
the tall figure of her aunt, appeared the little shrinking figure of
Mademoiselle Gaud!

“Who is it?” asked Yvonne dully, without removing her eyes from that
unknown face of the man whose step was like Yann’s.

“I--I believe--I think--’tis Monsieur Jean-Marie,” panted Gaud. “Sweet
St. Agnes!” she prayed inwardly to her patron saint, “make her not ask
me his other name! If she does I am sure I shall lie and say I do not
know; so, sweetest St. Agnes, preserve me from sinning!” Next moment
she breathed freely, for Yvonne stepped aside, leaving the threshold
free to the stranger.

“Ask of his business, little one!” she said, without looking at Gaud,
“and let him know that he was mistaken for one who has a right to be
welcomed with open arms.”

She had a black woollen cloak loosely thrown about her shoulders. She
sat down upon the seat to the right of the door, her elbow on her
knee, her chin upon her hand, the dark folds half concealing the noble
outlines of her form, her eyes fixed upon the most distant turn in the
Paimpol road.

Jean-Marie was at liberty to proceed with his courting; Yvonne seemed
to hear and see him no longer. Only as the lover grew gayer, and the
clear laugh of Gaud sounded in unison with his, a quiver passed over
the face of Yvonne. At twelve o’clock, when the dinner was ready, Gaud
came dutifully to tell her. She only shook her head, and the midday
meal of salt fish, potatoes, and cider was shared by the lovers.

When the dishes were washed, Jean-Marie proposed a stroll to the chapel
on the cliff. Gaud, her pale cheeks tipped with a little crimson, like
the leaves of a daisy, came to ask Yvonne’s permission.

“My mother allowed him to visit us in Paimpol,” she said meekly,
flushing deeper as she remembered that she had introduced him as
Monsieur Jean-Marie, the cooper’s apprentice, and that her mother knew
nothing of his relationship to the man who had used her Aunt Yvonne
so wickedly. Through the crystal of Gaud’s nature ran a little streak
of deceptiveness. Like all weak things, she could be cunning where
her love or her interest was concerned, and what did it matter what
Jean-Marie’s father had done? she argued. He was not Jean-Marie. So she
and her sweetheart set out upon their walk, keeping a decorous distance
of at least six feet between them, and swinging unoccupied hands that,
when the path grew narrow, would meet and cling. And Yvonne saw two
figures appear in the distance upon the Paimpol road, neither of which
caused her any emotion. Monsieur Blandon, the Paimpol doctor, was
hirpling out upon his old white mare, to visit some of his Pors Lanec
patients; half an hour must elapse before he could dismount at Yvonne’s
door, the mare was so old and the road so stony. She looked away, far
out to sea, and watched a tossing white sail upon the inky horizon,
and with the instinct of one bred by the sea knew that there would be
weather yet more stormy, for the seagulls and kittiwakes were hurrying
inland. Then a heavy pair of wooden shoes clacked over the stones, and
a vinous voice gave her “good-day.” It was one Piggou Moan, once a
smart young fisherman and avowed rival of Yann, now the smuggler, the
loafer, the drunkard of the hamlet.

“A drop o’ cider, Mademoiselle Yvonne, for old friendship’s sake and
charity,” begged the toper. Yvonne scarcely looked at him, but made a
slight motion of her hand toward the cottage door. With a slobbered
blessing, red-nosed, ragged Piggou lurched in, lucky in the absence
of Gaud, who would have found enough courage, at need, to have driven
him forth with a broomstick. He reached a copper flagon from its peg,
and went as if by instinct to the cider-cask that stood by the great,
carved clothes-press. Minutes passed, and Piggou came out, brighter of
eye if redder of nose than when he entered, wiping his dripping beard
on his ragged sleeve.

“It’s long since you and Piggou had a crack together, Mademoiselle
Yvonne--years it is, and years! I’m not as fine a fellow as I used to
be, though you’re a comely figure of a woman still. Excuse the freedom,
Mademoiselle!...”

She looked at the drunkard with cold dislike, and moved toward the
farther end of the bench as his liquored breath and flaming face came
near her.


II

Piggou took the movement of Yvonne toward the end of the bench as an
invitation, and sat down, as the doctor, hidden by a bend in the road,
hirpled nearer on his old white mare.

“I bear no malice,” the toper went on, “though, I take the saints to
witness, what I am I owe to you, Mademoiselle Yvonne--for being so
handsome and so proud, for giving me the back of your hand, and the
whole of your heart to Monsieur Yann Tregnier, who went away with it
and never came back.”

“He is coming back!” said Yvonne quietly, her eyes upon the most
distant turn of the Paimpol road.

Piggou chuckled drunkenly.

“So you’ve said, Mademoiselle, for twenty years, since the _Marie au
Secours_ sailed for Iceland, Captain Yann aboard her.”

She repeated: “He is coming back to-night!”

Piggou leered drunkenly.

“Come, my old gossip, my handsome Yvonne, don’t play the fool with
Daddy Piggou. You’re not so cracked as you pretend to be, d’ye
comprehend me? You know this waiting game’s a farce. He, your Yann,
won’t come back; not because he’s dead, but because he’s alive. Alive
and married to Louet Kergueven, that he had an eye on because of her
dad’s money; and they’ve as many children as peas in a pod--the eldest
as fine a lad of eighteen as ever trod in his father’s footsteps all
the ways to Pors Lanec. Didn’t I see him just now with that little
white cat, Mademoiselle Gaud....”

The rest was strangled in the drunkard’s throat as upon the whitewashed
wall behind him fell the stout shadow of Dr. Blandon, and the
serviceable horn handle of an old-fashioned hunting-crop wielded by an
arm still muscular hooked itself in Piggou’s cravat and plucked him
from his seat. He sprawled, spluttering oaths.

“Begone, rascal! and if I ever hear of your trying this again, I’ll
poison you next time I catch you in hospital,” foamed the doctor.

“Why shouldn’t one tell the truth and shame the devil!” grunted Piggou.

“Would you like me to tell Messieurs les Douaniers at the Paimpol Quay
House the truth about those fine cod you were carrying when I met you
last month on the road to Ploubazou? Ten whopping fellows, each with
a box of prime Habanas in his gullet, and every box wrapped round in
Spanish lace?... Be off with you!” And, assisted by some additional
impetus from the toe of the doctor’s riding-boot, Piggou scrambled to
his feet and clattered away.

Yvonne had not stirred while this little scene was in action. Her elbow
on her knee, her chin upon her hand, she sat and watched that distant
bend in the Paimpol road as she had watched it, to quote Madame Pilot,
“when all that hair was gold.” Now she turned toward the doctor, who
was her good friend.

“That is done with,” Monsieur Blandon pointed to the ragged figure of
the receding Piggou. “He knows what he will get if he troubles you with
his rubbish again. And how is the heart, Mademoiselle? Those drops I
left last time.... You take them?”

“I take them; but,” said Yvonne, her quiet eyes upon the road, “they
make my heart beat.”

“That’s what they are for, Mademoiselle.”

“They make my heart beat,” she said, “until night and day, day and
night, the beating seems like the sound of footsteps coming to me
along the road. Nearer and nearer--louder and louder. Then they grow
hesitating, irregular, and stop. Stop, and then go back. And as they
become fainter in the distance, I seem to grow more quiet and more
cold.”

Said the doctor, possessing himself of Yvonne’s wrist and watching her
as he counted the pulse-beats as intently as she watched the road:

“They are footsteps of one you know, Mademoiselle?”

She turned on him those startlingly blue and brilliant eyes.

“Surely.... They are his!”

The doctor had often met a tall man muffled in a great country cape of
frieze walking on the Paimpol road. They had never exchanged words,
scarcely even looks, but the brass buttons in the back of Blandon’s old
riding-coat were eyes, and he had observed how the walker turned back
before reaching that last bend from which the cottage could be plainly
seen.

“His evil conscience keeps him restless--or he loves her still, though
he bartered her love for a tavern and a scolding wife,” the Doctor
thought, noting, without seeming to do so, the changes time had made in
the bold, handsome face and giant frame of Captain Yann Tregnier, late
of the _Maria au Secours_, now landlord of the Chinese Cider Cellars at
Ploubazou. “But to set foot in Pors Lanec he will not dare. The men and
women would rise up and stone him out of the village.”

And Monsieur Blandon bade Yvonne adieu, and turned up his collar and
got upon his shambling old white horse to ride back to Paimpol.

Yvonne sat where he had left her. The early winter evening was closing
in. The wind had fallen, and the sea had gone down; only it breathed
from time to time like a sleeping monster of the diluvian age. Through
the black curtains of the sky some pale stars looked forth, and white
spectral clouds, in shapes appalling to the sense, pursued a flying
moon. The lovers had not returned, the hearth-fire was dying out.
Guessing at this, Yvonne bestirred herself to go within and feed it
with fresh branches. The fading flame wakened again; she turned toward
the door, and as she did so the step for which she had waited twenty
years crashed over the gravel, sounded on the stone plateau before the
cottage, and the figure of a man--massive, almost a giant in height and
breadth, his great proportions increased in bulk by a heavy cape of the
country frieze--filled up the doorway.

It had come--the moment for which she had waited through the years. She
did not scream and fall upon his neck; he made no movement toward her.
Only he pulled his rough cap from his head with a deference that had
awe in it, and fear, and his heavy black curls, grizzled now, fell over
the brow that was lined and rugged, and the eyes that were no longer
bright with youth and hope, but bleared with a dull, sordid life and
much strong drink, and the hopeless outlook on a life that was bare of
all joy.

“Yann! My love ... Yann! You have come back to me at last!”

The words were not uttered in a cry, but almost whispered. As the light
of love and joy kindled in her eyes she became young once more. Her
arms swept out to clasp him and found him not, for he had sunk down
upon his knees; but he clutched her apron and drew her to him, and
broke into hoarse, uncouth weeping, his head hidden against her, his
arms clasping her, her love and pity overshadowing him like an angel’s
wings.

“He weeps for joy!” she thought, whereas he wept for shame; but had she
known the truth she would still have comforted him. After a while he
grew calmer, and they went out together into a night suddenly become
beautiful and glorious with stars--or it seemed so to Yvonne--and
sat together on the bench beneath the window, cheek to cheek and arms
entwined, and she poured out her brimming heart to him. How she had
waited, she told. Patiently, hoping always, loving him always, never
despairing, sure of his return. Had he been dead she would have known
it. But in the absence of the warning that never fails to come--the
midnight wail beneath the window, the midnight knock upon the door or
window-pane, given by no hand of mortal flesh--she had remained quite
certain that he was alive. Had she not been right in guessing that the
_Marie au Secours_ had only touched at Paimpol and sailed down into the
Gulf of Gascony, or even to Bayonne, to sell her cargo of salt cod?

“Ay. ’Twas as you thought, Yvonne!” he answered.

“And you sold well?”

“Ay!” he answered again. Truly, he had sold well, more than his fish.
Honor and love, both had gone into the scales against the dowry of
the tavern-keeper’s scolding wife, a houseful of children--a sordid
existence flavored with the fumes of stale drink and stale tobacco, a
few bags of dirty five-franc pieces stowed away in a safe hiding-place,
for the Breton is a hoarder by instinct, and distrusts the Bank of
France: for these rags and fardels he had bartered Yvonne. He was dully
conscious of such thoughts as these even as he was conscious of the joy
of being near her. Coarse-fibered as he was, this, the one pure passion
of his life, revived in all its old strength at the clasp of Yvonne’s
hands and the meeting of their eyes. He began to believe that the
desire to be near her once more again had brought him to Pors Lanec.
Perhaps he was right, but the motive, he had admitted to himself, was
mean and sordid. He wished to bring about a rupture between Jean-Marie
and Gaud. The girl was penniless; Jean-Marie a love-sick young fool.
Besides, his wife would never consent to a union of their families;
she had never ceased to be jealous of the sweetheart to whom Yann had
played false. “You threw her over for my money, rogue that you are!”
she would say to him, when red wine dashed with cider had made her
quarrelsome.

The night drew on. Drifting clouds no longer obscured the faces of the
stars; the December night might, for mildness, have been May, or so it
seemed to Yann and to Yvonne. There was a fragrance in the air like
hawthorn, and the shrill chirping of a cricket rose from the glowing
hearth in the darkened room behind them.

The lovers found few words to utter, but their silence was eloquent;
the air they breathed in unison seemed the revivifying essence of
joyous life. Yann yielded to the exquisite intoxication. In the glamour
of that meeting he was young again, clean of heart and soul, looking
forward to their wedding day with the eagerness of a true lover. He
found himself replying in low, eager tones to Yvonne’s questions....
No, he would not sail for Iceland in February as a bachelor; they must
get married before the Blessing of the Boats. The official papers must
be filled and signed, the banns put up ... there would be a honeymoon
for Yann and Yvonne before the _Marie au Secours_ (poor old vessel,
long ago cast up in driftwood on the shores of Iceland) should set sail.

“Ay, indeed, my love, we have waited long enough!” he said.

Yvonne laughed, a low melodious laugh of happiness, and owned that the
wedding dress, handsomely made and trimmed with broad bands of velvet,
just as he liked best--had been ready a long time. She took him back
to her pure heart, without a word, without a question.... He had been
long in coming, but he had come at last, and she was utterly content.
He drew her into his strong embrace, and she laid her head on his great
shoulder with the sigh of a child that is weary with too much bliss.
His arm encircled her; both her hands, clasped together, rested in
his large palm. Sleep came to her, and peace; even the breath that at
first had fluttered fitfully beneath his cheek could be felt no more.
And the night wore on apace, and the glamour fell from him, little by
little, and he was again the landlord of the Chinese Cider Cellars,
with a scolding wife, and an obstinate whelp of a son, mad to marry a
penniless little draggle-tail. Ay, he could speak now, and he would! He
unwound his arm from the waist of Yvonne and withdrew the support of
his rough palm from her clasped hands, and as he did so a long faint
sigh escaped her and her head fell back against the whitewashed wall.
Ay, he could speak, and did!

“Lord knows what nonsense we have been talking, you and me....
Something bewitched me.... The fine night or the sight of the old
place. In truth, Yvonne, you know as well as I do that I’m a married
man; that cat must ha’ got out of the bag long ago. And hearing that
you never would believe I’d played fast and loose with ye made me a bit
shamefaced, hence we never have clapped eyes on one another until now,
Yvonne. Though my young cub has been hanging about here after the girl
Gaud--threatening me with going to sea if she’s denied him--and seeing
as she hasn’t a sou of dowry, I look to you to stop that foolery. For
my good woman at home.... I’ll own her a bit of a Tartar, and, to tell
ye the truth, Yvonne----”

“Father!” said Jean-Marie, stepping forward out of the darkness, the
dimly-seen, shrinking figure of Gaud behind him.

Yann rose up, threatening and formidable, his clenched fist ready to
strike. Gaud cried out in fear; but Yvonne, the silvery moonlight
filling the hollows of her quiet eyes and resting in the curves of her
white cheeks, and kissing her closed, patient lips into the semblance
of a smile, never stirred. The night wind played with a little lock
of hair escaping from the edge of her shell-fluted cap, and her bosom
neither rose nor fell.

“Pretty goings on.... Look here, you cub!” Yann was beginning, but his
son’s eyes looked past his at the placid face of the sleeper on the
bench, and the fear and awe in them were not inspired by his father.
Yann looked round then, and a hoarse cry broke from him.

“Speak to her,” whispered Jean-Marie, and Gaud tremblingly touched
Yvonne’s clasped hands. They were cold as the smiling lips and the
sealed eyes on which rested the white peace that is the kiss of Death.

The cricket chirped within the cottage, and the deep slumbrous
breathing of the sea came from beyond a curtain of chill white mist.
Yvonne’s long time of waiting had ended at last.




THE DELUSION OF MRS. DONOHOE

IN TWO PARTS


I

It was in the spring of 19-- that the Dapple Grays returned from
South Africa, covered with wounds, glory, boils, and khaki, this last
presenting many solutions of continuity. One finds the arrival of H.
M. troopship _Paradise_ at Porthampton Dockyard referred to in the
newspapers bearing the date of that occurrence as an event calculated
to awaken emotions of gratitude and enthusiasm in the bosom of every
Briton. An illuminated address was presented to the Chief by the Mayor
and Corporation of the borough, and the Dapple Grays were subsequently
entertained, the Colonel and officers to a banquet, and the rank and
file to a blowout.

“You return to us, Captain,” the Mayor is reported to have said in
a complimentary rider addressed to the commanding officer of the
_Paradise_, “with a freight of heroes.”

“A freight of devils, sir!” the Captain remarked in loud-toned
confidence to the neighbor on his left. “If the Admiralty had any
sense of humor--or any sense of fitness, by George!--the name of the
ship would have been changed before we sailed. But the _Paradise_
has seemed almost like one, sir, since we disembarked ’em, and
that’s a fact. What’s the next toast on the list, did you ask? ‘The
united healths of the two regimental V. C.’s, Captain the Hon. Gerald
Garthside and Private Dancey Juxon.’”

“What were the special acts of gallantry, do you--ah!--happen
to--ah!--remember?” asked the Captain’s left-hand neighbor (a pompous
local magnate), “for which the Cross has been--ah!--conferred?”

“Usual thing. Garthside--that’s Garthside, on the Mayor’s left hand,
trying to look modest, and succeedin’ uncommon badly--Garthside rode
from Mealiekloof to Blitzfontein with despatches for the Brigadier,
peppered by Cronje’s outposts from overlooking ground nearly the whole
distance. Juxon was cut off while out on scout with a detachment, and
got away from twenty Boers with his officer on the crupper. Young
Bogle, next-of-kin to Lord Baverstone, died before Juxon got back to
the regiment, chipped in too many places for recovery! Better off if
he’d been left behind, do you say? Probably--probably. But Juxon has
the V. C., and they’re bringin’ him in to hear his health proposed....
Fine-lookin’ young Tommy, isn’t he? Looks quiet and well-behaved, you
think? Ah, you ought to have been with us on the voyage from the Cape.
The evil genius of the lower troop-deck, and that’s facts. Ringleader
in every act of insubordination, up to all sorts of devilment, a black
sheep, sir, a black--hip, hip, hurray! For he’s a jolly----”

“And so,” said the Colonel of the Dapple Grays to his Senior Major, a
few weeks later, when the regiment had shaken down in its old barracks
at Studminster; when its feminine complement had rejoined it; when
wives once more “upon the strength” were washing the tattered remains
of shirts which had seen more service than soap-suds, and husbands were
employing eloquence in the effort to convince civilian visitors to the
canteen that, despite the solemn warning recently issued from the most
authoritative quarters, to treat the newly-convalescent enteric patient
to beer or ardent spirits is to accelerate and not to retard his return
to perfect health---- “And so it’s a settled thing, the engagement
between your little girl and Garthside? Affair not jumped up in a
hurry? Began a year before the regiment was ordered to the Front? Of
course. My wife saw the attachment growing between ’em, and helped it
on, she tells me. Every married woman’s a match-maker, you know--don’t
you know--whether she’s put her own private pot on a bit of good blood,
with temper and stayin’ power and so forth, or a dee-d confounded showy
screw. And your little girl, not having a level-headed mother of her
own alive to look after her!... Deucedly raw weather, you know, don’t
you know!”

Sir Alured broke off, anticipating rather than seeing the gray change
in Major Rufford’s face, and remembering that the handsome wife, who
had died when Emmie was a hoyden of thirteen, had signalized the close
of her career upon earth as Major Rufford’s wife and the mother of
his children by an act of desperate folly. But the Senior Major’s
wounds had been cicatrized by the great healer Time, and he looked
back quietly enough as the Colonel cleared his throat with unnecessary
violence, and twisted the great moustache that had been iron-gray and
was now snow-white.

“Lady Gassiloe has been very kind, and Emmie doesn’t forget how much
she owes her. And there’s the right stuff in Garthside; I can trust
him to make my little girl a good husband. It’s odd, when one comes to
think of it, that our other Victoria Cross man is going to be married,
and to Emmie’s foster-sister, Peggy Donohoe.”

“The deuce!” said Sir Alured. “Is that dee-d young scoundrel, Juxon,
going to settle down? Seems too good to be true. Why, the old
_Paradise_ was hell when Juxon wasn’t in the cells. Nearest approach to
a rhyme I ever made in my life, by George! But Juxon’s character apart
it’s not a bad match. The young blackguard has plenty of good looks,
and Peggy’s as pretty a girl as you may see, look high or low. And she
thinks Juxon a _proo shevally_ with his V. C.; and so do poor Bogle’s
people, and so do the public, by Jove! You should have heard him when
he reported himself.... ‘_What did you mean, you dee-d idiot_,’ I asked
him, ‘_by picking up a man who’d had the top of his head shot clean
off, and couldn’t live five minutes? D’ye call that philanthropy? In
my opinion it’s dee-d foolery!_’ ‘Beggin’ your pardon, Colonel, sir!’
says Juxon, ‘I calls it precaution. When I ’oisted Mr. Bogle up be’ind
me, I see’d ’e’d ’ad ’is gruel, an’ the last breath went out of ’im
before old ’Andsome-Is--that’s wot I calls that ’ere spavined gray
o’ mine--’ad got into ’is stride. But the bullets was ’ummin’ round
me like ’ornets, an’ pore Mr. Bogle, lyin’ as ’e wos acrost my ’ams,
drawed fire an’ furnished cover.’ Furnished cover! The cool young
beggar fortifies his rear with the next in succession to one of the
oldest peerages in the United Kingdom, gets mentioned in despatches,
and receives his V. C.! Too dee-d funny, you know, don’t you know!”

And Sir Alured mixed a brandy and soda, and chose an enormous cigar
from a case resembling a young Gladstone bag. The conversation took
place in a curious ground-glass hutch, sacred to the inner mysteries of
Official business, and labeled “Private.” And as the second in command
charged and kindled a meerschaum of incredible age and foulness, there
came a knock at the door.

“C’min!” barked the Chief over the rim of the tilted tumbler, and the
regimental Doctor looked round the door. “Oh! it’s you, Assassin!” he
said, as he wiped the froth off the great white moustache. “How many
exenterics have you kicked out of the convalescent ward this morning?”

“Three,” said the Assassin--“Denver, Moriarty, and Jarman. Garthside’s
lambs all.”

“And dee-d malingerers, in my opinion!” said Sir Alured.

“I’m with you there, sir,” responded the Assassin with a twinkle. Then
he relapsed into professional gravity, and said as he accepted a cigar
and a peg, “There are one or two bad cases of relapse, I’m sorry to
say--as the result of incautious indulgence in alcoholic beverages.”

“Of course, of course!” growled Sir Alured. “When a man with a
granulated stomach uses the organ as a receptacle for whisky, beer,
and gin, contributed in unlimited quantities by admirin’ friends, he
oughtn’t to be surprised when he finds himself drivin’ to the cemetery
on a gun carriage to the tune of the Dead March in _Saul_, with his
boots following as chief mourners. Stands to reason!”

“I don’t anticipate any serious results, except in the case of Sergeant
Donohoe,” the Assassin said, with a worried look in his usually
cheerful countenance.

“Donohoe down again. Poor devil! I’m sorry to hear it!” The Chief
tugged at the ends of the great white moustache and looked grave.

“Only yesterday,” said the Senior Major, “I thought him looking about
as fit as a man needs to be. He told me about Juxon’s engagement to his
daughter, and went off as pleased as Punch----”

“To drink their healths,” interpolated the Assassin.

“Hah! That’s about it,” grumbled the Chief. “Well, I shall go round
and look Donohoe up presently. Can’t afford to lose my Senior
Color-Sergeant, you know, don’t you know!” Sir Alured frowned savagely,
and cleared his throat with ominous vigor.

“You’ll find him pretty low down,” said the Assassin, “and I fancy
Father Haggarty will be on duty. They’d sent for him before I came
away.”

“Is it as bad as that?” said the Senior Major, and there was a moment’s
silence, broken by a clinking step on the stone flags outside and a
respectful knock on the glass door.

“A ’ospital horderly, sir,” said the passage orderly to Major Rufford,
“with Color-Sergeant Donohoe’s respectful duty, and would you mind the
trouble of steppin’ over and hearin’ somethin’, sir, wot ’e ’as to say?
It’s Ward C., and a case of perforation--and, beggin’ your pardon, sir,
there ain’t much time to lose.”

“Of course I’ll come! Say, at once!” Major Rufford lumbered up out of
his chair, emptied the office kitten out of his undress cap, took his
cane, which the office puppy had been chewing, and went.

“Donohoe’s wife was Rufford’s girl’s foster-mother, you know, don’t you
know!” said Sir Alured. “There’s not more than a month’s difference
between Peggy Donohoe and Emmie Rufford in age. When they were babies
I’ve seen ’em sleepin’ in the same cradle; and dee me if I knew
which of ’em was which, though I suppose their mothers did. Not that
Rufford’s poor wife was over and above devoted to her babies. Odd now
if the little beggars had got mixed up somehow, and Donohoe had sent
for Rufford with the object of easin’ his conscience before he gave up
the number of his mess.”

“Oh, that’s all Gilbert and Sullivan!” said the Assassin, getting up.
“Such things don’t happen in real life, Colonel, and I’m going back to
the hospital.”

“You think not? Differ with you there. Walk over with you, if you’ve
no objection.” And the Chief and the Assassin followed in the wake of
Major Rufford, who had only a moment before received point-blank and
at short range from Sergeant Donohoe’s puffy blue lips--parted for
easier passage of the slow, painful breaths that were taken with such
agony--the second overwhelming surprise of his life.

For Sir Alured’s stray shot had registered a bull’s-eye. Donohoe,
conscious that the grim messenger who had beckoned and passed by so
many times--under the heights of Jagai, in the clammy Burmese hill
jungles, amid the muddy swamps of West Africa, or the karroo scrub or
grass veldt of the South--meant business on this occasion--had given
up the secret less hidden than forgotten for many years. Many years
since, according to her own confession, faltered out to the Sergeant
upon her dying bed, the pretty young wife of Private Donohoe, urged by
the promptings of motherly love, or incited, as Father Haggarty would
have said, by the temptation of the Devil, arrayed her own nursling in
the long-tailed cambric robe with insertion of Valenciennes, properly
appertaining to the foster-babe; enduing the said foster-babe, namely
Emmeline, infant daughter of Captain and Mrs. Rufford, not only with
the abbreviated cotton frock which was the birthright of a Donohoe,
but with all the privileges appertaining to a daughter of the rank and
file; including a share in the Christmas tree and bran-pie diversions
annually given under the patronage of the Colonel’s wife and other
ladies of the Regiment--including her own mother.

“Don’t say it, Donohoe,” pleaded the bewildered Major, sitting on
the foot of Donohoe’s cot-bed, holding the rigid hand, and shaken by
the throes that were rending the Sergeant’s soul from the Sergeant’s
body. “It’s an idea you’ve got into your head--nothing more! She--your
wife--never changed the babies.... For God’s sake, man, say you know
she didn’t!”

But Father Haggarty’s kindly, pitying look had in it knowledge,
religiously kept sacred, now freed by voluntary confession from the
sacramental seal. He held the Crucifix to Donohoe’s livid lips, and
they moved, and a living voice came forth as from a sepulchre:

“She did ut. Sure enough she did ut; but for the right rayson why,
sorr, I’m yet asthray. For wan thing--herself was a poor hard-workin’
woman--an’ the choild would be wan if ut lived. ’Twas ten years she
carried the saycret--a mortial weight for a wake crayture, an’ a
Prodesdan’ at that, wid no relief av clargy--and it wore her to the
grave. On her dyin’ bed she confessed ut to me. I had my thoughts av
makin’ a clane breast, and then--wurra! ’twas the divil at my elbow
biddin’ me whisht or I’d lose my Peggy that was the pride av me eyes
an’ the joy av me harrut. An’ I held off from Father Haggarty, till
I could hould no longer. That was six Aysthers back; and--‘Tell the
truth,’ says his Reverence, ‘or you’ll get no more of an absolution
from me, me fine man, than Micky-would-you-taste-it?’ An’ at that I
stiffened me upper lips an’ riz from me marra bones an’ wint me way.
But the Hand is on me now, an’ I’ve made my paice wid Thim above; an’
I’d be glad you’d send for my Peggy to be afther biddin’ her ould dada
good-bye--more by token she’s your Miss Emmeline by rights, and not my
purty Peggy at all, at all!”


II

Miss Margaret Donohoe--popularly known in the regiment as “Peggy,”
and, as it will be remembered, betrothed to Private Dancey Juxon,
V. C.--Miss Margaret Donohoe was not summoned to the bedside of her
hitherto-reputed father in time to hear from his own lips the secret
of her birth. She was trimming an old hat with new crape for mourning
exigencies, the day after the Sergeant had been consigned with the
usual military honors to the Catholic division of the cemetery, when
heavy footsteps sounded in the flagged passage of the Married Quarters,
and the Colonel and the Senior Major, both visibly disturbed, walked
into Donohoe’s clean sanded kitchen, and, in as few words as possible,
broke the news.

“It’s a terrible shock to you, my poor girl--as it has been to me!”
said the Major, very white about the gills. “And to--to another I
needn’t name!” He was thinking of his Emmie, and how piteously she had
sobbed last night and hung about his neck, with her pretty hair all
coming down over his mess waistcoat, as she begged him not to send her
away from him, because it wasn’t her fault that she had turned out to
be Donohoe’s daughter and not his own; and how at that moment she was
breaking the news to Garthside--that Junior Captain and Victoria Cross
hero to whom, it will be remembered, she was engaged. Poor Emmie, poor
darling Emmie!--or Peggy, as she ought now to be called! Major Rufford
felt that he never would be able to do it. “But--I’ll try and do my
duty to you as your father should, and--I must look to you to--to do as
much by me!” he concluded lamely.

“Oh, Major!” cried Peggy--Peggy with the hard, bright, black eyes, the
red lips, the tip-tilted nose, the Milesian upper lip, and the coarse
but plenteous mane of dark brown hair liberally “banged” in front and
arranged behind in massive rope coils, secured by hairpins of imitation
tortoiseshell as long as the farrier’s pincers. “Oh, Major! can you ax
it? Sure I’ll thrate you as dacent as ever I did him that’s gone, an’
the Colonel hears me say it!...”

She checked the inclination to weep for one who was, all said and
done, no relation, and put her crackling six-penny-three-farthings
black-bordered handkerchief back in her pocket with an air of
resolution. A flood of new ideas inundated her brain. All that she had
ever dreamed of in the way of the unattainable lay hence-forth within
her reach, and everything that had hitherto appeared most desirable
and possible was from this bewildering hour rendered impossible. Her
eyes fell on Private Dancey Juxon, V. C., who had been sitting on the
kitchen table when the tall shadow of Sir Alured fell upon the sanded
floor, and who had remained, from that moment until this, petrified
in an attitude of military respect, against the whitewashed wall; and
she realized that Dancey--Dancey, the Adonis of the rank and file,
the hero once desired above all others, wrested at the expense of the
most costly and variegated hats and the most dazzling toilettes from
the clutches of how many other women!--Dancey must now be numbered
among the impossibles. If a cold dash of regret mingled with the inward
exultation of Miss Peggy, it was excusable.

“Sure, the dear knows! ’Tis like a tale out av the _Pinny Romancir_,”
she said, “an’ troth it’s no wondher av my breath was tuk away wid the
surprise. To think of that bould craythur, Donohoe’s wife!----”

“Do you mean your mother, my girl?” began the Colonel, but Peggy gave
Sir Alured a look that put him in his place.

“I mane the woman that changed me in me cradle, bad cess to her for a
thrickster!” said Peggy, “an’ put her own sojer’s brat in the place av
me--me that belonged to the Quality by rights. Not that I’m not pityin’
Miss Emmeline--now that she’s Peggy Donohoe, a poor craythur sprung
from nothin’.” The Major turned a groan into a cough, and the Colonel
hauled at the ends of his huge white moustache, but the tide of Peggy’s
brogue was not to be stemmed. “It’ll be a change for her, it will so,
afther livin’ on the fat av the land--an orphan’s pinsion to find her
in stirabout, an’ never a chick nor a child in the woide wurruld but
her ould Aunt Biddy Kinsella!”

“Who--haw!--is Biddy Kinsella?” broke in the Colonel.

“Av’ she’s alive--an’ a bag av dhry bones she must be av she is,” says
Peggy--“it’s at Carricknaclee, in Aher, you may find her. She used to
live wid her niece--manin’ Mrs. Donohoe--an’ she wint back to Ireland
whin me mother died--manin’ Mrs. Donohoe agin--a matter av eight years
ago. An’ ’tis natural Donohoe’s daughter would call her to mind at
a time like this. Maybe the young woman would go to live wid her,”
continued Miss Peggy calmly. “An’ that brings to me own mind, Major--I
mane Papa--whin do ye want me to come home?”

“Home! Oh, Lord!” said the poor Major, before he could stop himself.

“Dee-d cool!” growled Sir Alured, under the huge moustache, squeezing
the Major’s arm with his great, gaunt, brown hand. “But she’s got the
right--got the right, Rufford, you know, don’t you know. Ha--hum!”

“You shall hear from me soon--very soon, Peggy,” said the Major
brokenly. “Good-bye for now, my girl.” He took her coarse red hand, so
unlike his Emmie’s, and kissed her equally red cheek; and as he did
so the petrified Juxon recovered the temporarily suspended powers of
speech and motion, stepped forward, and saluted.

“Beg pardon, gentlemen,” he began, “and pre-’aps I oughtn’t to take the
freedom; but ’avin’ over’eard....”

“Saw you, Juxon! Knew you were there! Thought you had a right to hear,
you know, don’t you know!” said Sir Alured.

But a shrill feminine note of indignation pierced the Colonel’s bass,
as Miss Peggy cried, “Right! I’d be glad you’d tell me what right you
have, Misther Dancey Juxon, to be afther pokin’ the nose av you into
business that doesn’t consarn you, let alone the privit affairs av an
officer’s daughther. Away wid you, an’ larn your place! your room’s
more welcome than your company; an’ if it’s a wife you’re lookin’
afther, maybe when wan av thim that’s av your own station stands up
before the priest wid you, I’ll be making you a little prisint toward
the housekeepin’, av the young woman’s dacent an’ respictable!”

And the bewildered Juxon found himself outside the black-painted
door--marked III. in large white numerals--in the character of a lover
dismissed.

“Well, I’m blowed!” he said, and said no more, but clinked away in
search of the Lethean streams of the canteen.

“Rufford,” said Sir Alured solemnly, as the Chief and the second in
command exchanged the atmosphere of coals and potato peels prevailing
in the Married Quarters for the open air of the barrack square, “I’m
confoundedly afraid she’s a Tartar! Sharp as a needle, sir, and knowing
as a pet fox, if you ask me!”

And the Major said in reply, “These things are supposed to be
hereditary. I wonder where she gets it from!” Then he broke out, “I
can’t believe it, Colonel! I couldn’t, if fifty dying men had taken an
oath to it. That my poor Clara’s girl! It’s impossible! If an angel
were to come down from Headquarters Above, with despatches confirming
the report, I couldn’t credit it!”

“And dee-d if I should blame you,” the Chief responded. “Breed’s bound
to show, somewhere, and there’s not a drop of good blood in the girl’s
veins, I’ll swear!”

“There’s an Irish strain in my family, too,” said poor Rufford
despondently, “and my Emmie has brown hair and eyes; and her nose,
bless it! is a little tilted at the end.”

“_A nay retroussy._ So it is, by George! But there are noses and noses,
y’know,” said Sir Alured. “And Emmie’s a Rufford, from the crown of
her head to the ends of her toes; and we’ll prove it, we’ll prove it,
sir! Donohoe hasn’t a leg to stand on”--which was true--“and as to that
Mullingar heifer”--thus the Chief designated Peggy--“she’ll be sorry
one day for throwing Juxon over, mark my words. Send for that old aunt
of Donohoe’s dead wife--the bag of bones Peggy talked of--and pump her
for all she’s worth. Turn her inside out!--it’s the only advice I can
give you, for my head’s in as dee-d a muddle as yours. And remember,
whatever happens, my Lady is staunch to Emmie! Game woman, my Lady.
Doesn’t care a dee what society says, as long as---- God bless me,
Rufford! I’m talkin’ as though Emmie wasn’t your daughter. But the
whole thing’s infernally confusin’, you know, don’t you know!”

An opinion in which the regiment concurred. An excited beehive would
have furnished but a poor comparison to the barracks upon the morrow,
when Peggy’s great news, imparted in ostentatious secrecy to Mrs.
Quartermaster Casey and a few other non-commissioned officers’ ladies,
had percolated through them. Visitors thronged the Donohoes’ quarters;
Peggy was the heroine of the hour. Press reporters from the town hung
about the barracks on the chance of seeing either of the heroines of
what was termed in the local paper “An Extraordinary Romance in Real
Life,” and the officers’ wives called in a body to condole with Emmie
Rufford, who, as we have heard, had broken off her engagement with
Captain Gerry Garthside.

“I shall not break my heart over things,” she had said, with an
attempt at being everyday and common-sensible that was plucky, if not
convincing, “and I hope you won’t dwell too much upon the collapse
of our house of cards. I hope--I pray you’ll build more solidly,
with--with somebody else. Don’t, Gerry! Oh, don’t! It’s not fair to
make my duty harder to do than----”

Then Emmie had broken down, wept wildly, been kissed, consoled, and
assured of her lover’s undying love and eternal fidelity. Part? Never!
Lose such a pearl of a wife! Not for all the Donohoes past, present,
or to come! I believe, in spite of Emmie’s woe and Captain Gerry
Garthside’s agitation, the young people secretly enjoyed the scene
dramatic; and when Lady Alured came rustling in, about the time when
Gerry’s eloquence attained its utmost pitch of fervor, and hugged and
cried over the hero and heroine of the little drama, that dear woman
was not the least happy of the three.

And later on, after returning to quarters, Captain Garthside found a
letter on his doormat. The contents of the soiled envelope, directed in
a sprawling hand, ran as follows:

                                     “DOOR NO. 3, GROUND FLOOR, BLOCK Q.

  “Miss E. Rufford presents comps And wold be Glad to see Cap Garthside
  & if Yu will call at 2 remane
                                              “Your Oblidged
                                                             “E. RUFFOR”

Of course the Captain knew Peggy Donohoe; had danced with her at
non-commissioned officers’ balls; given her gloves and chocolates,
and sipped the roses of her cheek in common with many another passing
admirer. “And who’d be the worse of a kiss,” as Peggy would have said,
“from a dacent girl?” “Dacent” she undoubtedly was, if not from pure
innate virtue, perhaps from the consciousness that a depreciation in
marketable value attaches to goods that have been soiled by handling.
Had it been otherwise, the state of Major Rufford had been less
gracious, thought Captain Gerry Garthside.

And he looked at Emmie’s photograph standing in a silver frame upon his
mantelshelf, and remembered the piteous smile with which she had told
him that everything must now be over between them, and mentally renewed
his vows of fealty before he went round to “look up Peggy.”

The rooms occupied by the late Sergeant Donohoe were three--a kitchen
and two bedchambers. One of these latter, Peggy, with the assistance
of Mrs. Quartermaster Casey, a dozen yards of cheap Liberty muslin, a
gross of Japanese fans, one or two pieces of Oriental drapery, and a
few articles of furniture of the tottery bamboo kind, had converted
for the time being into a boudoir. Only for the time being, she said
to herself, because when she got her rights she would enjoy all the
splendors now usurped by the real Peggy Donohoe--Miss Emmie, as she
called the usurper when she forgot, which was not often. She would
dress for dinner every evening, and attend balls and theaters in
low-necked, long-trained frocks, chaperoned by Lady Alured, adorned
with the late Mrs. Rufford’s diamond stars, and attended by Captain
Gerry Garthside, V. C. For not one, but all the possessions held and
prerogatives hitherto enjoyed by the false Miss Rufford would naturally
devolve to the real one, once formally recognized and received by
her papa and the regiment; the “ould duds” and bits of sticks once
pertaining to the supposed Margaret Donohoe being transferred to the
veritable Peggy, together with all rights in Private Dancey Juxon, V.
C. The topsy-turvy, comic-operatic whimsicality of her own idea did not
appeal to Peggy’s sense of humor. She was very much in earnest as she
waited for her visitor, seated in state upon one of her own ornamental
chairs, her red hands--hands which could not be transferred to the real
Peggy Donohoe with the other things--folded in her lap.

“She’s here, Captain,” Mrs. Quartermaster Casey--retained as chaperon
until Lady Alured should awaken to a sense of her duties--had said,
opening the door.

“Oh, Captain,” said Peggy, rising coyly, “is it yourself?”

And, owning the soft impeachment as he squeezed the red hand (Gerry
Garthside’s manners to the plainest woman were fatally caressing), the
Captain inquired how he could serve her.

“Sure,” said Peggy, making play with her fine eyes, “you’ll maybe
thinking me forward, Captain, for makin’ the first sign. But me
papa--the Major--will be takin’ up a great dale of me toime by-an’-by,
and wid Mrs. Casey sittin’ in the kitchen widin call, we’re givin’ no
handle to the tongue of scandal, as the sayin’ is----”

“My dear Miss Peggy!--” the Captain was beginning, when Peggy took him
up short.

“I’ll trouble you,” she said, “to remimber that I’m not takin’ any more
Peggy from anywan, high or low, an’ I’d be glad it was ginerally known.
‘Miss Emmeline,’ or ‘Emmie’ for short, you’re free to use, or any pet
name ye may pick.” She cast a languishing glance upon Captain Gerry.
“I’m not likely to quarrel wid it”--she moved nearer--“or wid you. Och,
thin! but ’tis quare how things have turned round wid me! Peggy Donohoe
a week ago, an’ walkin’ out wid Dancey Juxon--an’ now--the Major’s
daughter, an’ your promised bride, Captain jewel! Sure ’tis like a
dhrame, it is!”

And Peggy rested her rather large head upon the shoulder of the
astonished Captain, who hastily withdrew the support.

“Look here, Peggy, my girl!” he said hastily. “What’s this notion
you’ve got into your noddle? You don’t think....”

“I think that you’re a gintleman, Captain,” said Peggy, with a tender
smile, “and would never go back on the promise you gev to the Major’s
daughter. An’ now that I’m her, an’ she’s me, you’ll do your duty by
me, as Dancey Juxon will do his to Donohoe’s poor unfortunate girl. You
may thrust him. We’ve had it out betune us, an’ he’s with her now.”

“With--her--now?” repeated the bewildered Captain.

“I sent him to the Major’s--I mane papa’s--quarters ten minnits ago,
wid a flea in his ear!” said Peggy, folding her red hands about the
elbow of her captive, and rubbing her cheek against his shoulder strap.
“‘I dar’ you,’ sez I, ‘to hang about here,’ sez I, ‘makin’ sheep’s eyes
at a daughter av the Quality, whin that poor crayture you gev your
promise to is cryin’ her two eyes out for the gliff av a glimpse av
your red head. Away wid you,’ sez I, ‘an’ prove yourself a man av your
word, Dancey Juxon, or maybe Peggy Donohoe’ll be takin’ the law av you
wan av these fine days!’”

“My good girl,” said Gerry Garthside, almost pleadingly, “you can’t
really believe what you say you’ve told Juxon--that he is obliged
to marry Miss Rufford, or the lady who has borne that name until
now, because he happens to have given a promise of marriage to Peggy
Donohoe, and Miss Rufford and Peggy have changed places?”

“I mane that!” Peggy’s black eyes snapped out sparks of fire; as
she tossed her head, a loosened coil of black hair tumbled upon her
shoulder. Her fine bust heaved, her cheeks burned scarlet--she had
never looked finer in her life. “Do I not mane just that? Think! Isn’t
her father mine? Isn’t her home my home?--the dhress she wears upon
her back mine?--the ring she has upon the finger av her mine? Ah,
musha, an’ the man that put it there!” Her grasp on Captain Gerry’s
arm tightened, her eyes sought his and held his; her warm, fragrant
breath came and went about his face like a personal caress. “Sure,
dear, you’ll not regret ut,” said Peggy, “for I loved you iver since I
clapped my two eyes on you--I take the Blessed Saints to witness! An’
Dancey Juxon’ll be dacent to Donohoe’s daughter, an’ you an’ me will be
afther lendin’ the young couple a hand, lettin’ her have the washin’
maybe, or the waitin’ at our table--or by-an’-by”--she lowered her
black lashes--“she might come as nurse to the children. So, darlin’....”

The sentence was never finished, for the alarmed Captain broke from the
toils and fled. The Mess story goes that he double-locked his outer
door, barricaded the inner one with a chest of drawers and a portable
tin shower bath, and spent the rest of the day in reconnoitering from
behind the window curtains in anticipation of a descent of the enemy.
But in reality he bent his steps toward the North Quadrangle, where
the Major’s quarters were, and over the familiar blue crockery window
boxes full of daffodils, he caught a glimpse of Emmie’s sweet face, not
pale or bearing marks of secretly shed tears as when he last kissed it,
but bright-eyed, flushed, and dimpling with laughter as she nodded and
waved her hand to a departing visitor, who, absorbed in the charming
vision, glimpsed above the daffodils, collided with and cannoned off
the Captain.

“Hullo! You, Juxon?”

“Beg pardon, sir,” said Private Juxon, rigidly at the salute. “I ’ope I
’aven’t ’urt you!” He grinned happily.

“Have you come into a fortune, or inherited a title? You look pretty
chirpy!” said the Captain.

“Not a bad ’it of ’is by ’arf,” said Private Juxon critically to
Private Juxon, “about the comin’ into a title. ‘For,’ says she, ‘_the
greatest gentleman in the land couldn’t ’ave done more--and though I
can’t accept your offer, I shall always look up to you and respect you
as the most chivalrousest and honorablest man I ever met_!’ Wot price
me, after that?”

For, as may be guessed, Private Juxon had proposed, and been rejected.
Standing very stiff and red and upright on the passage door mat, he had
confessed his sense of responsibility and explained his views.

“The general run of feelin’ in the regiment bein’ the same, Miss, as
her own, that I’m bound as a man to keep my promise to Peggy Donohoe,
whether she’s you or you are ’er. I’ve took the freedom of callin’ to
say as wot I’m ready,” said Juxon. “An’ the weddin’ was to come off in
June; but you’ve only got to name an earlier day, Miss, an’ I’ll ’ave
the banns put up, you not bein’ a Catholic, like Peggy--which I ought
to call ’er Miss Rufford now, as owing to ’er station, Miss. But if you
think I’ll ever come short in duty an’ respect to the Major’s daughter,
because she’s turned out to be only the Sergeant’s, you’re wrong, Miss,
you’re wrong--upon my bloo----upon my ’tarnal soul!”

And then it was that Emmie Rufford conferred upon Private Juxon the
title of nobility, which made him a proud man--and unconditionally
refused his offer, making him a happy one.

She is now married to Captain Gerry Garthside, who yet fulfilled his
engagement to the Senior Major’s daughter in leading her to the altar.
For within a week the bubble had burst, topsy-turvydom reigned no more,
the barracks ceased to seethe like one of its own mess cauldrons, and
Peggy Donohoe was compelled to relinquish the privilege of calling
Major Rufford “Papa.” For old Aunt Biddy Kinsella had been discovered
in the smokiest corner of her grandson’s cottage at Carricknaclee, in
Aher, by a smart young solicitor’s clerk; and her sworn deposition,
duly marked with her cross and attested by her parish priest, dispersed
the clouds of doubt from the Major’s horizon, relieved Sir Alured’s
moustache from an unusual strain, and proved the deceased Mrs. Donohoe
to have been the victim of a delusion.

“For ’twas at Buttevant Barracks where the regiment was stationed
nineteen years ago, an’ me stayin’ on a visit wid me niece, that I saw
her--Maggie Donohoe--rest her unaisy soul, the misfortnit craythur!--I
saw her change the children’s clothes wid the two eyes I have in my
head,” said Aunt Biddy Kinsella, “barrin’ that only wan av thim was
at the keyhole. ‘Och, murdher!’ sez I, lettin’ a screech an’ flyin’
in on her--for I had the use av me legs in thim days--‘what have you
done, woman, asthore?’ ‘Made a lady av little Peggy,’ says she, wid the
fingers av her hooked like claws ready to fly at me, ‘an’ I dar’ you to
bethray me.’ ‘Bethray!’ sez I. ‘It’s bethrayed her to the divil, you
mane--that she’ll be brought up a black Prodesdan’, and not a dacent
Catholic, as a Donohoe should be by rights.’ ‘Holy Virgin, forgive me!
Sure, I never thought av that!’ sez herself, and all thrimblin’ we
undhressed the children an’ changed the clothes again. An’ a day or
so afther the Major’s baby was waned an’ wint back to uts mother. But
Maggie Donohoe was niver the same in her mind afther that day. Sit an’
brood she would, an’ hour by hour; an’ creep out av her own bed an’
into mine night afther night, and wake me wid her cowld hand upon me
mouth an’ the whisper in me ear to know had she given little Peggy’s
sowl to the divil or changed the childhren back afther all! An’ as
years wint on she kem to a quieter mind, but on her dyin’ bed the ould
fear and thrimblin’ got hould av her ag’in, an’ she tould Donohoe--not
what she’d done at all, at all!--but what she wanst had the intintion
av doin’, but that her heart failed her; an’ so made a fool av the man
that owned her, as many another woman has done before!”

Thus Aunt Biddy Kinsella, who, having spoken, may be dismissed to her
smoky corner under the turf thatch, where a greasy parcel reached her
in the middle of the following June, containing, not an olive branch,
but a concrete slab of wedding cake, with the joint compliments of Mr.
and Mrs. Dancey Juxon. For “the general run of feelin’ in the regiment”
was in favor of Private Juxon’s renewing his matrimonial engagements
to Peggy Donohoe, now that she had been proved, past all doubt, to be
herself. And by the last advices received from headquarters it appears
that Mrs. Lance-Corporal Juxon is acting at this moment as nurse to the
Garthside baby.




PONSONBY AND THE PANTHERESS


I have called this story “Ponsonby and the Pantheress,” because
Ponsonby’s nocturnal visitor undoubtedly belonged to the genus
_Carnaria_, species _F. pardus_, the _Pardalis_ of the ancients. The
whole thing hinges on Ponsonby’s getting a ticket of invitation to a
mighty dinner given by one of the great City Livery Companies. Had he
refused the invitation, and stayed at home with Mrs. Ponsonby, it would
have been better for him--and for her. He would not to-day have been
a silent, atrabilious man, who goes upon his way in loneliness--that
mated loneliness which is of all desolate conditions on this earth the
most desolate--with a vampire gnawing underneath his waistcoat. She
would not have been a much-wronged, cruelly neglected woman--or the
other type of sufferer, the woman who has been found out; and for ever
robbed of that which women hold dearest in life--the power to create
illusions.

It was a great dinner at that City Hall--a feast both succulent and
juicy, and upon a scale so prodigious as to put it utterly beyond the
power of a single-stomached man to do justice thereto. Many of the
guests had thoughtfully provided themselves with several of these
necessary organs, but Ponsonby--who had recently sold out of the Army,
and invested his commission money in business, and settled down with
Mrs. Ponsonby in a neat little house in Sloane Street--was still
young, and fairly slim.

The baked meats and confectionery were excellent, and “the drinks”--as
Betsey Prig might have observed--“was good.” It was revealed to
Ponsonby that he had absorbed a considerable quantity only by the
swollen condition of his latchkey when he tried to fit it into the
door of the little house in Sloane Street. But after a short struggle
the door opened, and Ponsonby paused a moment on the doorstep to
take some observations on the weather. It was just one o’clock as
he looked at his watch in the moonlight. Ponsonby was reminded of
Indian moons by the lucent brightness of the broad silver orb that
floated so majestically on the calm bosom of the dark overhead. She
was getting near her wane, but only notifying it by an exaggerated
handsomeness, like a professional Society beauty. Ponsonby thought of
that simile--all by himself--and was proud of it, as he had always been
a man more celebrated for his moustache than his intellect. He tied a
knot in his mental pocket handkerchief to remember it by, and, facing
round to go into the house, was a little disconcerted to find the hall
door gaping to receive him.

Then he went in, barred and bolted very carefully, and set the spring
burglar alarum--for once. Ponsonby was unusually careful and deliberate
in his movements on this particular night. Then he sat down on the hall
bench and took off his boots. Then he switched off the electric hall
light. Then he pondered whether he should or should not have just one
brandy and soda before going to bed--because he had come home so clear
and calm and cool-headed from that City dinner. Ay or No--and the Ayes
had it. He went into the dining-room. It had been furnished for the
Ponsonbys on the best authority; in oak, with Brummagem-Benares brass
pots and tea trays. The window curtains, and the drapery which hung
before a deepish recess in the wall to the left of the door as you
entered, were plush, of that artistic shade of olive-green which is so
shabby when it is new that you can’t tell when it gets old. The recess
had originally been intended for a book case; but young married people
just starting in life never have any books--they are too much bound up
in each other--and so it had been covered up. You can put things behind
a covering of this sort which you do not care to expose to the gaze of
the casual guest--a row of old slippers, or a pile of superannuated
Army Lists, or a collection of summonses--or the Family Skeleton.

Ponsonby switched on the light, and opened the liquor case with his
watch-chain key, and got a tumbler and soda siphon from the buffet,
and lighted a cigar. Then he sat down in an armchair, unbuttoned his
white waistcoat, loosened his collar, and prepared to be lonelily
convivial. He thought of his girl-like bride asleep upstairs, with her
cheek upon her hand, and her gold-brown hair swamping the pillow. It
says much for the state of Ponsonby’s affections, that while he knew
the uses of the monthly half pint of peroxide which was an unfailing
item on the chemist’s bill, he could still be poetical about that tinge
of gold. But newly married men seldom look into the roots of anything.
He lifted his glass and drank her health. “To Mamie!” he said, as the
frisky gas bubbles snapped at his nose. And then he glanced over the
edge of the tumbler at the curtained recess behind the door. And the
short hairs of his head rose up and began to promenade. And his teeth
clicked against the glass he held. For a bolt of ice had shot through
either ear orifice straight to his brain. In other words--Something had
laughed--an ugly laugh--behind that drawn curtain.

In another moment it was put aside. A woman came out of the recess that
had concealed her, and stood before him.

Not to mince matters, she belonged to the class we are content to
call unfortunate. From her tawdry bonnet to the mud-befouled hem of
her low-necked silk dress--a preposterous garment, grease-stained and
ragged, and partly hidden by an opera cloak of sullied whiteness--the
nature of her profession was written on her from head to foot. She was
not without beauty, or the archæological traces of what had been it;
but as she grinned at the astonished man, showing two rows of strong
square teeth, yellowed with liquor and cigarette smoking, and the
gathered muscles of her cheeks pushed up her underlids, narrowing her
fierce, greedy eyes to mere slits, and the hood of her soiled mantle
fell back from her coarsely dyed hair, she was a thing unlovely. She
seemed to snuff the air with her broad nostrils, as scenting prey; she
worked her fingers in their dirty white gloves, as though they were
armed with talons that longed to tear and rend; and, as she did so,
Ponsonby was irresistibly reminded of a panther.

Ponsonby had shot panthers in India, and had once been slightly mauled
by a female specimen. It was an odd coincidence that the old scars on
his left shoulder and thigh should have begun to burn and throb and
shoot unpleasantly as the yellow-white fangs of the intruder gleamed
upon him, framed in by her grinning, painted lips.

But Ponsonby recovered himself after a moment, and asked her, without
ceremony, how the devil she came there? He was not a particularly
bright man, but he knew, even as he asked. She had been crouching in
the shadow under the portico--some of the Sloane Street houses have
porticoes--when his cab drove up. She had watched him get out. Then,
when he had been standing with his foolish back to the open door,
gaping at the moon, the Pantheress had skulked in, with the noiseless,
cushioned step that distinguishes her race. And now he had to get rid
of her.

Which was not as easy a task as one might think.

He began by telling her that he was a married man.

“Knew that,” said the Pantheress. “Saw you take off your boots in the
hall. Saw you drink her health.” She mimicked him. “To Mamie!” And
laughed again--that unspeakably jarring laugh.

Ponsonby grew irate. He took his courage in both hands and went into
the hall, where he softly undid the door fastenings. Then he came back,
and offered to show his visitor out.

She was in the act of pocketing a silver race cup, won by Ponsonby at
a Pony Hurdle Handicap on the Bombay course in 1890, when Ponsonby
came back. He caught her wrist and bade her drop it. She gave it up
sullenly. Then, with a sudden accession of feminine meekness, she said
she would go--if he would stand her a drink.

It seemed a cheap bargain. The unwitting Ponsonby got out another glass
from the buffet cupboard, and mixed her a brandy and soda, not too
weak. She drew a chair--his wife’s chair--to the table, and sat down,
throwing her dingy cloak from her whitewashed shoulders. She put her
hand to her head, and drew thence a long steel pin with a blue glass
head, and took her gaudy bonnet off and threw it on the table. She did
not hurry over the consumption of the liquid, and Ponsonby began to
grow impatient. When he hinted this, she asked for a cigar.

He gave her one, and a light. And she drained the last drop in the
tumbler, and stuck the burning weed between her teeth, with a coarse
masquerade of masculinity. Ponsonby heaved a sigh of relief.

“Now, my girl, come along--time’s up!” He started for the door.

The Pantheress got up, and leaned against the mantelshelf, smoking. She
intimated that she had changed her mind--and would remain. Ponsonby
lost his temper, and threatened ejection by main force.

“Put me out? You daren’t!” rejoined the Pantheress. She added some
adjectives reflecting upon Ponsonby and the honor of his family--but
with those we have nothing to do.

Ponsonby’s under jaw came out, and his forehead lowered. He strode
toward the Pantheress; her sex was not going to plead for that delicate
piece of femininity, it was evident.

“I daren’t, eh?”

“You daren’t. Because I’d tear, and scratch, and scream, I would--till
the police came--till your wife woke up and came downstairs to see what
the row was about. Nice for you, then! Easy for you to explain--with
_two_ glasses on the table!”

Ponsonby broke into a cool perspiration. He spake in his soul and
cursed himself for a fool--of all fools the one most thoroughly
impregnated with foolery. For he saw that he had been trapped. The
Pantheress rocked upon her hips and laughed, shaking out a coarse aroma
of patchouli from her shabby garments.

“You had me in and stood me drinks. I can swear to that. My swell toff,
I think you’d better knock under!”

Ponsonby had to arrive at that conclusion, thinking of his wedded
happiness and the golden-brown hair scattered on the pillow upstairs.
He was awed to the pitch of making overtures--of asking the Pantheress
how much she would take to go?

The Pantheress sprang high. Twenty pounds.

Ponsonby had not as much in the house. With great difficulty, and much
exercise of eloquence, he got her to bate five. It was necessary that
she should be brought to forego another five, for all the ready cash he
could muster did not amount to much more than ten. How to attain this
desirable end? Ponsonby had a dramatic inspiration.

He had read many novels and seen many plays. In most of these the main
plot turned upon the ultimate victory of Human Virtue and Truth over
Vice and Disintegrity. In these books or dramas Vice was generally
personified by an adventuress--a brazen, defiant person, who had made
up her mind to ruin somebody or another; and Virtue, by an innocent
girl or pure young wife, who pleaded until the hardened heart was
melted, the fierce eyes moistened by an unaccustomed tear--until, in
short, the naughty woman abandoned her unhallowed purpose and left the
nice one mistress of the field. The theory is an admirable one in a
book or in a play, but in real life it does not hold good. Ponsonby has
since learned this; but at that time he was youngish and inexperienced.

He would weave a net, with those golden-brown tresses upstairs, in
which to catch the Pantheress. He begged her to listen, and told
his story quite prettily. He explained how, three years before, his
regiment having newly returned from India, he had met at a certain
South Coast resort, separated by a mile or two of arid common from
a great dockyard town, a lovely girl. She was a friendless orphan,
the daughter of a clergyman, had been a governess, had broken down
in health, and, with the last remnant of her little savings, taken a
humble lodging near the sea, in order to benefit by the ozone. How she
had found, during her innocent strolls on the beach, not only that
health of which she had been in search, but a husband. And, finally,
how every fiber of her soul, being naturally bound up in that husband,
and her present state of health delicate, the infliction of such a blow
as the Pantheress contemplated striking might not only strike at the
roots of love, but of life.

With which peroration counsel concluded, not wholly dissatisfied
with himself. He wiped his brow, and sent a hopeful glance at the
Pantheress. Her features had not softened, nor was her eye dimmed. Her
lips twitched, certainly, but the convulsive movement was merely the
herald of a yawn.

“You’re a good one to jaw!” she said, when he had finished. “Come, I’ll
not be hard on you. How much have you got?”

He named the amount.

“Hand out!” the Pantheress bade him.

He would give her half the sum then and there, Ponsonby said, with a
gleam of strategic cunning, and the other half when she was fairly
outside the hall-door--not before.

The Pantheress nodded, and clutched the first installment from his
hand greedily, and caught her dirty bonnet from the table and threw it
on her head. “No larks!” she said warningly--“come on!” and moved to
the room door, where she paused. “Ain’t you got manners enough to open
it for a lady?” she remarked in an aggrieved tone. Ponsonby, hastily
restoring the tell-tale second glass to the sideboard, sprang forward
and grasped the handle--and dropped it as though it had been red-hot,
for he had caught the sound of footsteps--light, regular, measured
footsteps--descending the stairs. He could not utter a word. He turned
a white face and glaring eyes upon the Pantheress. And the steps came
nearer. As the dining-room door opened, he fell back, helplessly,
behind it. The wall seemed to open and swallow him--thick, suffocating
folds fell before his face; he had backed into the curtained recess
whence the Pantheress had emerged thirty fateful minutes previously.
Through a three-cornered rent in the stuff, just the height of his eye
from the ground, and through which that beast of prey had probably
watched him, he looked--and saw his wife!

She wore a loose white wrapping gown; her hair--the hair--hung in waves
about her shoulders. Barring the bedroom candle she carried, and losing
sight of her prosaic nineteenth-century surroundings, she resembled one
of Burne Jones’s angels. But her calm expression changed, and her voice
was tuned to a key of unangelic indignation, as her glance lighted on
the painted, brazen Defiance, erect and bristling, before her.

“You ... a woman, what do you want? How did you?--how dared you come
here?”

The Pantheress was about, in answer, to launch the first of an
elaborate flight of insults, couched in the easy vernacular of
Leicester Square, when she stopped short. Her thick lips rolled back
from her gleaming fangs in a triumphant grin. She bent forward, with
her hands upon her thighs, and made a close inspection of the face of
Ponsonby’s wife.

“_What! Luce?_”...

The other recoiled, with a slight cry. And Ponsonby, in his retirement,
was conscious of a deadly qualm--for Mrs. Ponsonby’s Christian name
was Lucy! When he opened his shut eyes and peeped through the rent
again, it was only to receive a fresh shock--for Mrs. Ponsonby and the
Pantheress were sitting, one on either side of the table, chatting like
old friends.

“Luck was poor,” the Pantheress was saying, “and me low down in my
spirits. So when I found the door of a swell house like this open,
‘I’ll pop in,’ says I to myself, ‘and look about for a snack of
something and a drop to drink, and then make off if I can, clear,
or else go to quod--like a lady.’ And I did pop in--and I did look
about--and the first thing that turns up is--you! On a smooth lay,
ain’t you? Always a daring one, you were. A clergyman’s daughter, and
an orphan! We’ve most of us been clergymen’s daughters and orphans
in our time, but not a girl of us ever looked it more than you. And
you’re married! Ha! ha! With a swell church service, and singin’, and a
Continental tour to give the orphan a little change of scenery. She’d
seen so little in her time, the poor dear! Lord! I shall die of it!”

The woman rocked with silent laughter. It seemed to the man behind
the curtain that her eyes, across his wife’s shoulder, glared full
into his--that her coarse jeers were leveled at him. He could not
have uttered a sound, or stirred a finger, for the dear life. A kind
of catalepsy had possessed him. But he saw them drink together, and
heard them talk ... turning over with conversational pitchforks the
unspeakable horrors of the dunghill whence his white butterfly had
taken wing.... Ponsonby had never been an imaginative man, but that
midnight conference wrought his sensibilities to such a pitch that,
leaning against the wall in the corner of the curtained recess, he
quietly fainted.

       *       *       *       *       *

He came back to consciousness in darkness through which struggled no
gleam of light. He did not know where he was until he staggered out
from behind the stifling draperies and switched on the light with
shaking hands. Then he found himself in his own dining-room. There were
no glasses on the table--the spring bar of the liquor stand was in its
place, the brandy decanter was, as he remembered to have left it, half
full. He found his candle on the sideboard and lighted it, and went
into the hall. The hall-door was barred and bolted.

“Thank God, I _have_ been dreaming!” said Ponsonby, and went upstairs.

There she lay--a breathing picture of reposeful innocence--fast asleep.
Ponsonby stooped and kissed the hair that flooded her pillow and
invaded his own, and silently swore by all his deities that he would
never go to another City dinner as long as he lived. Before he crept
into bed he knelt down--a thing he had not done since he was a boy--and
said awkwardly, “O God, I’m glad it was a dream! Thank you!”

He slept the sleep of the weary, and rose, not a giant, it is true,
but very much refreshed. He dandered down to the breakfast table in
a leisurely way, humming a tune. As he shook out his newspaper, the
absurdity and improbability of his recent vision struck him for the
first time; he laughed until he ached. Then he dropped his newspaper,
and stooped to pick it up. Something bright that lay upon the carpet
under the table attracted his notice. The man put forth his hand and
took it, and his ruddy morning face underwent a strange and ghastly
alteration. For the thing was a long steel bonnet pin, with a vulgar
blue glass head! Men have died suddenly of pin pricks before now.

But Ponsonby’s tortures are lingering. He is alive still, and she
is still Mrs. Ponsonby. He has never spoken--the Secret of the Blue
Glass Pin is hidden from the woman who walks Life’s path with him. But
sometimes she is haunted by a dreadful Doubt, and at all times he is
bestridden by an overwhelming Certainty.




A FAT GIRL’S LOVE STORY

IN THREE PARTS


I

The first thing I remember being told is that I was a Parksop, and the
second that it was worth while living, if only to have that name. Some
years after, it dawned upon me that we had got very little else.

Father was a landed proprietor upon a reduced scale, and a parent on a
large one. There were twelve of us, counting Prenderby, who had passed
into the Army a few years previously, and passed out of it later on
at the unanimous request of his superior officers. Father cut him off
with a shilling--which he forgot to send him--and sternly forbade him
to bear the name of Parksop any more. He has done well since, and
attributes his rise in life entirely to that deprivation. Nobody ever
writes to Prenderby except Charlotte.

If an abnormally fat girl could possibly be the heroine of a romantic
love story, Charlotte--“Podge,” as she has been nicknamed ever since I
can remember--would stand in that relation to this narrative. But, you
know, such a thing isn’t possible. If it had been, Belle, who comes
in between Podge and Prenderby, and is the acknowledged beauty of the
family, having all the hereditary Parksop points besides several of her
own, nobody would have wondered.

How did the story begin? With Roderick and me--coming home to spend a
vacation. It was likely to be a pretty long one, for the Head of the
School had behaved in a most ungentlemanly way, showing absolutely
crass insensibility, as father said, to the advantage of having one of
the best names in England on his school list, while it remained written
at the bottom of a check for fifty-nine pounds, odd shillings, and
half-pence, marked by a groveling-spirited bank cashier “No Assets.”

You may guess Roddy and me didn’t grumble much--the Parksops have never
been strong in grammar and orthography, so I’m not going to apologize
for a slip here and there--didn’t grumble much at hearing that we were
to stay at home for the present, and be “brought on” by the curate in
Euclid and Latin and Greek, and all the rest of the rot. He wouldn’t
strike for wages, father knew, because for one thing he was very modest
and shy, and for another he was spoons on Belle. If he wasn’t, why was
he always glaring at our pew in church? And for the same reason we
shouldn’t be overworked--a thing the most reckless boys acknowledge
to be bad for them. So the morning after our return we went down to
breakfast feeling as jolly as could be.

Father shook hands with us in his lofty way. We could see that he was
deeply indignant with the Head from the way in which his aquiline
nose hooked itself when we gave him a letter we’d brought with us. We
almost wished we had torn it up, because, having made up our minds to
go fishing that morning, we had meant to ask him for the key of the
old boat house by the pond, where the punt was kept, which key, with a
disregard of opportunity quite unnatural, as Roddy said--in a man with
so large a family--he always kept hidden away.

Belle gave us two fingers to shake and her ear to kiss, and the others,
as many as were allowed to breakfast with the elders, crowded round,
and then Podge came bouncing in and hugged us for everybody. We didn’t
care about the hugging, because it was such a smothering business, like
sinking into a sea of eiderdown, Roddy used to say, who was imaginative
for a Parksop. And here, as it’s usual to describe a heroine--though I
don’t acknowledge her for one, you know--it would be best to describe
Podge a little.

It describes her kind of temper pretty well to say that she didn’t
mind being called Podge--even before strangers. The name describes her
exactly. You couldn’t tone it down and call her plump; she was simply
one of the fattest girls you ever saw. Her large face was rosy, and
usually beamed, as people say in books, with smiles and good temper.
Her hair was black, and done up in the way that took the least time,
and her eyes were black and bright, and would have been big if her face
had been a little less moonlike. She had little dumpy hands and little
dumpy feet, rather pretty--in fact, the only family landmarks, as Belle
said, that had not been effaced by the rising tide of fat. In a regular
story there is always something about the heroine’s waist: not that I
give in to Podge being--you know! I suppose she had a waist; at least,
it was possible to tell where her frock bodies left off and her skirts
began--then. It isn’t now! The frocks were always old, because whenever
Podge had a new one she gave it to Belle, and you couldn’t deny that
Belle did them more justice. Then, she had a nice kind of voice,
though the Parksop drawl had been left out of it, and I think that’s
all--except that, considering her beam, she moved about lightly, and
that she always sat down like a collapsing feather bed and got up like
an expanding balloon.

Breakfast didn’t make the school commons look very foolish. There
wasn’t much difference, except that the coffee wasn’t so groundy.
Father had his little dish of something special--kidneys, this
time--and Roddy, sitting at his right hand--we were treated as guests
the first day at home--dived in under his elbow when he was deep in
his coffee cup and harpooned half a one. Of course, he had to bolt it
before father came to the surface, and Podge was dreadfully anxious,
seeing him so purple in the face, lest he should choke.

I did as well as I could with my rasher of bacon and hers, and I
remember her whispering to me, just before Nuddles came in with the
Squire’s card, that the housekeeping money had been lately more limited
than ever. And as I looked across the table, out at the window, and
over the green, rolling Surrey landscape--all Parksop property in our
ancestors’ times--and remembered that such a small slice of it was
left to be divided between such a lot of us, it did occur to me that
it would have been better if they--meaning the ancestors--had been a
little less Parksopian in the way of not being able to keep what they
had got. Then Nuddles, the butler, came in with Squire Braddlebury’s
card, and the curtain drew up--we had had a performance of one of the
plays of Terence that very half year, and I had done the part of a dumb
slave to everybody’s admiration--and the curtain drew up on what would
have been “Podge’s Romance,” if Podge had only been thinner.


II

Father broke up the breakfast party with getting up and going out.
As a rule nobody dared push back his or her chair until _he_ had
finished, and when he took it into his head to read one of the leaders
in the _Times_ aloud to us, we had to make up our minds to spend the
afternoon. But as a rule he went to the library as soon as he’d done,
and worked until lunch. He usually worked leaning back in his armchair,
with his feet on a footstool, and a silk handkerchief thrown over his
head. He went to the library now, to meet the Squire, whose gruff
“Good-morning” Roddy and I heard as father opened the door. He didn’t
quite shut it afterward, and as Roddy and I stood by the hall table,
carefully sewing up the sleeves of the Squire’s covert coat--for Podge
had given us each a neat pocket needle-and-thread case, to teach us to
be tidy, she said, and a taste for practical joking isn’t incompatible
with lofty lineage--we couldn’t help hearing some of the conversation.

It was most of it on the Squire’s side, and the words “title deeds,”
“unentailed,” and “mortgage” occurred over and over again. Then
“unpaid,” “due notice,” “neglected,” and, finally, “foreclosure.”
Perhaps it was father’s giving a hollow groan at this, and being
seen by me through the crack of the library door to tear his hair,
beautifully white, without tearing any of it out, that made me listen.
At any rate, I left Roddy busy with the coat, and--any other boy, even
a Parksop by birth, would have done as much under the circumstances.

Well, I made out that Squire Braddlebury had got father on toast. It
became quite plain to me, boy as I was, that he could, whenever he
chose, strip us of the last remaining hundreds of our old acres, and
send us, generally, packing to Old Gooseberry--with a word. Then he
asked father why he thought he didn’t say the word then and there? and
father said something about respect for ancient title and hereditary
something or other; and Squire Braddlebury, who had made his vulgar
money in trade, said ancient title and hereditary something or other
might be dee’d. And then----

“I’ll tell you why, Parksop,” he blustered. “It’s because of your
girl! When you came to me for money to waste on your gobbling, selfish
old self, caring, not you, not one snap whether your family went bare
for the rest o’ their lives, so long as you got what you wanted for
the rest of yours, I lent you the cash on your title deeds, signed by
Edward Plantagenet--and more fool he to waste good land on you! I lent
you the cash, I say, because I knew you’d not come up to the mark when
pay day came, and I wanted your girl. What’s that you say? Belle! Not
if I know it! Sandy hair and aquiline profiles don’t agree with me.
I mean Miss Charlotte. She’s a fine, full figure of a woman; she’s a
good ’un, too! Don’t I know how she keeps your house a-going? Don’t I
know how she makes and mends, plans and contrives, teaches the children
when your foreign governesses take French leave, because they can’t get
their wages out of you, Parksop, and does the Lord knows what besides!
I shouldn’t have spoken so soon, but another fellow’s got his eye on
her--Noel, the parson--you know who I mean. I believe they’re secretly
engaged, or something.”

“Gracious Heavens!” cried father.

“If they are,” growled the Squire, “it don’t matter. We’ll soon put the
curate to the right-about, and on the day I take her to church you’ll
get your title deeds back. You’re reasonable, I see. It’s a bargain.
So go and fetch her, Parksop; go and fetch her.”

There was a scroop and shriek of overstrained springs and tortured
leather. The Squire had thrown himself into father’s armchair. I had
only time to drag Roddy behind the green baize door that shuts off the
servants’ wing from the rest of the house, when father came out of the
library.


III

The whole house was topsy-turvy. The secret of the mortgage was out,
for one thing. Everybody knew that the Squire had proposed to Podge,
that Podge had said “No” to him, in spite of father’s dignified
commands, and that the Squire had rushed out of the house, foaming at
the mouth, with his coat half on and half off, stormed his way round to
the stables, where he saddled his horse himself, and galloped homeward,
scattering objurgations, threats, and imprecations right and left.

“Stuck-up paupers! Make Parksop know better! Sell ’em up, stick and
stone! Prefer d--d curate to me, Thomas Braddlebury! Fool! Must be
crazy!”

Roddy and I and everybody else agreed with him, except Podge. She was
regularly downright obstinate. She had given in to all of us all her
life, and now, just when her giving in meant so much, she wouldn’t.
What was the good of beginning, we asked, if she didn’t intend to go
on? We were very severe with her, because she deserved it. Falling
in love at her size--like a milkmaid--and with an elderly curate--an
old-young man, with shabby clothes and a stoop! Belle had put up with
his staring at our pew when he read the Litany on Sundays, but now
that she was quite sure he hadn’t been doing it because of her, she
regarded it as an unpardonable insult. She stirred up father to write
to the Rector demanding Mr. Noel’s instant dismissal, and the Rector
sent back an old, unsettled claim for tithe money, and referred father
to the Bishop of the diocese.

Meanwhile, Podge was the victim of love. It was really funny. She cried
quarts at night, according to Belle. Her red nose and swollen eyes made
her funnier still. And old Noel stooped more going about his parish
work. He was a gentleman--that was one thing to be said for him--and if
two perfectly healthy lives had not stood between him and the title,
he’d have been a baronet, with a rent roll worth having, the Rector’s
wife said.

They say dropping wears away a stone. We dropped on Podge from morning
till night, and she gave in at last. She put on her hat and trotted
down to the Rectory--waddled would be the best word. She saw Noel, and
had it out _vivâ voce_. She’d tried to do it by letter--Belle found a
torn-up note of dismissal in her room, beginning “My lost Darling.” We
yelled over the notion of old Noel being Podge’s lost darling; almost
before we’d done yelling she was back again, and had smothered the
little ones all round, and gone to the library with a flag of truce--a
wet pocket handkerchief--to announce the capitulation to father. She
spoke to me afterward, looked appealing, as if she wanted to be praised
for doing a simple thing like that for her family! I didn’t praise her,
and Roddy gave her even less encouragement.

The Squire was sent for by special messenger, and came without
hurrying. He said he was glad she’d come to her senses and showed a
proper appreciation of the gifts Providence had placed within her
reach. He brought a diamond engagement ring, which wouldn’t go on the
proper finger. We laughed again at that; we were always laughing in
those days. And he gave father one of the title deeds back, and stayed
to dinner, and had a little music in the drawing-room afterward, and
kissed Podge when he went away, at which Roddy and I and Belle nearly
went into convulsions, and in a little time the wedding day was fixed.

As it came near, Podge didn’t get any thinner. She ate her dinner just
as usual, and smothered the children a good deal. She was to have half
a dozen or so of them to live with her; she stipulated for that, and
the Squire grinned and scowled and said, “All right, for the present!”
He turned out to be quite generous, and tipped us sovereigns and Belle
jewelry and new frocks, and she said every time she tried them on
that she had quite come to regard him as a relative. Everybody had
except Podge, and I dare say if you’d asked her she’d have said she
was the person whose opinion mattered most. You never know how selfish
unselfish people can be till they’re tried! It’s true the Squire was
awfully ugly and as rough as a bear, and a little too fond of drinks
that made his temper uncertain and his legs unsteady. But he had done a
great deal for the family, and women can’t expect us men to be angels.

Podge was a little too quiet as the wedding drew near. You know,
there’s no fun in pinning a cockchafer that doesn’t spin round lively.
The presents came in and the invitations went out, the breakfast was
planned, the cake came from London, with heaps of other things; but she
kept quiet. The night before the wedding it rained. Somebody wanted her
for one of the thousand things people were always wanting her for, and
she couldn’t be found. She stayed out so long that father sent word
to the stablemen and gardeners to take torches and drag the pond. Of
course, he was anxious, for you can’t have a wedding without a bride.
But why the pond? A thin girl might have tried that without seeming
ridiculous, but not a fat one, and Podge couldn’t have sunk if she’d
tried! She came in at last among us, looking very queer, and wet to the
skin, with only a thin cloak on over her evening dress. She said she’d
been to the churchyard, to mother’s grave, praying that we might be
forgiven. She laughed the next moment, catching a glimpse of her own
droll figure in the drawing-room glass.

Next day was the wedding day. Everybody had new clothes, and the
bridesmaids’ lockets had the initials of Podge and the Squire, “C” and
“R,” in diamonds. Roddy and I had pins to match--Hunt and Roskell’s. I
forget how many yards of white satin went into Podge’s wedding gown,
but it measured thirty-eight inches round the waist--no larks. She
cried all the way going to church, so that father was nearly washed out
of the brougham.

How did the wedding go off? It never came off at all! There were the
county people in the smart clothes they’d taken the shine off in
London; there were the school children, with washed faces and clean
pinafores, and baskets of rose leaves all ready to strew on the path of
the happy pair. There were the decorations, palms and lilies, as if the
occasion had been a kind of martyr’s festival; and there was the Bishop
at the altar rails, with the Rector, waiting to tie the knot; and the
Squire, in a blue frock-coat, buff waistcoat, and shepherd’s plaid
trousers, with a whole magnolia in his buttonhole, waiting for Podge.

Father tried to lead her up the aisle, but it was too narrow, so he
walked behind. Just as she put her foot on the chancel step, out comes
old Noel out of the vestry, to everybody’s surprise, looking flushed
and excited. He said something I didn’t hear, and then Podge calls
out, “Oh, I can’t! Have mercy!” or something like that, and surged down
with a flop, like the sound a big wave makes dashing into a cave’s
mouth, on the red and white tiles. Old Noel ran to lift her up, but
couldn’t do it. The Squire called out, “D---- you! Let my wife alone!”
And the Bishop rebuked him for swearing in a sacred edifice. Then
father and the Squire and old Noel hoisted Podge up--for two of ’em
weren’t strong enough--and tottered with her into the vestry.

What happened? I got in, and so I know all about it. We sprinkled
Podge with water, and set fire to a feather duster and held it under
her nose, and she came to, with her hair down, and her wreath and veil
hanging by one hairpin. And old Noel bent over her, and said, “Dearest
Charlotte, there is no need for the sacrifice now!” And he pulled a
newspaper out of his pocket and handed it to father, who said, “What!
what! how dare you, man?” and then dropped his eye on a paragraph
marked in red ink, and said in the best Parksop manner, “I really beg
your pardon, Sir Clement! Your uncle and his son both drowned yachting
in the Mediterranean? Most deplorable! but really affords you no excuse
for--ah--interrupting a solemn ceremony in so extraordinary a manner.”
And then he and old--I mean Sir Clement Noel--had a few confidential
words in a corner, and I heard old--I mean the Baronet--say, “On my
word and honor, a sacred pledge!” And father astounded everybody by
turning on the Squire, and telling him in the most gentlemanly way to
go about his business, which he did, swearing awfully, while Podge was
crying for joy, and Sir Noel comforting her with his arm round her
waist--I mean as far as it would go.

That happened three years ago, and Podge and Sir Clement Noel have
been married three years all but a week. We all live with Podge and
her husband--I don’t think they’ve ever been alone together for a day
since their honeymoon. Father is very fond of Charlotte now, and says
the baby is a real Parksop. That always makes Sir Clement Noel wild--I
can’t think why.

I’ve often thought since, after seeing what they call a domestic drama,
that what happened to Podge and Noel might have happened to the hero
and heroine of one. Only, a hero never has gray hair and a stoop, and
there never yet was a heroine who measured as much as thirty-eight
inches round the waist. It’s impossible!




IN THE FOURTH DIMENSION


The balloon ascended from the Chiswick Gasworks at twelve-thirty, amid
the thin cheers of an outer fringe of Works _employés_ and an inner
circle composed of members of the Imperial Air Club, who had motored
down expressly for the start. It was by courtesy a summer day, a June
gale having blown itself out over night, a June frost having nipped
vegetation over morn. Now there was not a breath of wind, and the
sky vault arching over London and the suburbs was of purplish-gray,
through which a broad ray of white-hot sunshine pierced slantingly with
weird effect as the order “Hands off!” was given, and the _Beata_,
of forty-five thousand cubic feet, owner Captain the Honorable H.
Maudslay-Berrish, of the I. A. C., soared rapidly upward.

Hitherto Maudslay-Berrish, occupied with the thousand cares devolving
on the aeronaut, had not looked directly at either of his traveling
companions. These were his wife’s friend and his wife. We all remember
the sumptuous Miss Fennis, of the Hyperion and other West End comedy
theaters. Many of the masculine readers of this truthful record
have laid offerings of hot-house flowers, jewelry, sweetmeats, and
settlements, at those high-arched insteps in their pre-nuptial days,
and not all have had cause to mourn the rejection of the same. But
Maudslay-Berrish, son of a philanthropic Nonconformist peer, to whom
the theater is the antechamber to the Pit, married her, and, as too
far south is north, the men of his set thenceforth tacked on “Poor
chap!” or “Poor beggar!” to the mention of his name, when another stage
triumph of his gifted wife, who did not resign her profession, was
recorded in the newspapers.

The friend of Mrs. Maudslay-Berrish, whom we may know as “Teddy,”
gasped one or two private gasps as the _Beata_ shot up to an altitude
of three thousand feet, and Chiswick Gasworks fell away underneath
her into a tinted relief map of West London, and then was buried
under a sea of swirling dun-gray vapors. The hoot of a motor-car--the
needle-sharp screech of a railway locomotive--were the last sounds
to reach the ears of the _Beata’s_ three passengers. Then the sounds
of Earth sank into the silence of Eternity. And the soul of Mrs.
Maudslay-Berrish’s friend felt very thin and small, knowing itself
adrift upon that tideless sea. The wicker car seemed also small--small
to unsafeness--and the ropes as frail as the strands of a spider web.
Cautiously Teddy put forth his immaculately gloved hand and touched
one. Madness, to have trusted limb and life to things like these.
Madness, to have left the good solid ground, where there were clubs
and comfort and other men to keep you from feeling alone--for Teddy
realized with vivid clearness that in this particular moment and at
this particular point Mrs. Maudslay-Berrish counted for nothing. He
even forgot to look to see if she was there. But she was there, and
looking at him across her husband’s back. For Maudslay-Berrish was in
the middle of the oblong basket, and he was leaning over, peering down
into the swirling gray sea below, his folded arms upon the wicker car
edge, his chin upon them.

As matter of fact, he did not wish his wife and her friend to see how
heartily he was laughing. When you have set a trap for two beings whom
you hate with an intensity beyond all the range of human expression,
and waited patiently for years--it had taken him, Maudslay-Berrish,
just three years to qualify as a member of the Air Club--to see them
fall into it, you laugh when it happens. And if they chance to see your
face while you are doing it, it makes them feel uncomfortable.... And
when they know!... The purple veins swelled upon his narrow forehead
under the leather peak of his Club cap. His muscles cracked, his
shoulders heaved with that hidden, terrible, convulsive laughter.

“Harwood,” cried his wife, her strong voice ringing loud in the thin,
untainted air, “what is the matter? Is anything wrong?”

“The balloon is not leaking, the valve is in proper order, there is
plenty of ballast on board, the car is sound, the ropes are new and
have been tested,” said Maudslay-Berrish. “There is scarcely a breath
of wind to move us, and yet something _is_ wrong. What are you trying
to ask me, Beryl ... whether we are in danger? At the risk of spoiling
your evident enjoyment of your first ascent, I answer ‘Yes!’”

Then he straightened his bowed figure and turned so as to face the
wife who had betrayed him so often, and Teddy, her friend. She, Beryl,
looked at him with wild eyes set in a face suddenly grown sharp and
thin. She clenched her gloved left hand upon a rope of the car, and the
splitting of the glove back revealed her wedding ring and its keeper
of sparkling diamonds. At the sight of that consecrated symbol another
gust of mad laughter seized Maudslay-Berrish, and the tears poured down
his purple face, and he roared and roared again, until every fiber of
the car vibrated with his ugly merriment.

“For God’s sake, Berrish, don’t laugh like that!” shrieked Teddy,
blue-white and gibbering. “Are you mad, or what?”

“Were you sane, you infernal fool--you two infernal fools--when you
got into this car with the man whom you have outraged?” shrieked
Maudslay-Berrish. “Haven’t you dragged my good name in the mud, made
me a by-word and a laughing-stock, a mockery even to myself--even to
myself, in the last five years! Why, you d---- ----” (he called Mrs.
Maudslay-Berrish an unlovely name) “my very servants sneer at me, the
people at the theater grin when I come loafin’ round behind the scenes.
They’re quite aware of what I’ve swallowed without gaggin’. They know
I’ve lived on your money when I’d got through my own, quite fly as
to where most of it came from”--he pointed a shaking finger at the
stricken Teddy--“and as downy as you pleased. Teddy, old chap, I’ve
_called_ that blue-gilled funker there, and half a dozen like him.
Well, Teddy, old chap, say your prayers quick, for you’re going to die
suddenly!”

The woman and her lover knew now what their late dupe and butt meant
to do. He had the ripping cord half-hitched about his left wrist--the
ripping cord, a sharp tug at which will, when a balloon is dangerously
dragged during a descent, take an entire panel out of the envelope
in two seconds, immediately deflating the bag. And in his right hand
Maudslay-Berrish manipulated a neat little revolver.

Certainly he played the star part in the drama, and held the audience
breathless. Half of the audience, that is, for Teddy, old chap, was at
his prayers. Down on his knees at the bottom of the car, his gloved
hands rigidly clasped, his handsome, weak face turned up to the
sustaining ball of gas that hovered in its imprisoning net above,
between him and the Illimitable Void, he cowered and slavered. In
pleading for Heaven’s mercy upon a miserable sinner, he set forth
that his Eve had tempted him; he asked for time to make up, another
chance, a year, six months, a week only of sweet life. Hearing him, Eve
herself grew sick with contempt of his infinite littleness, and even
Maudslay-Berrish half turned away his eyes.

“Why don’t _you_ pray?” he said, sneeringly, to his wife. “Why don’t
_you_ grovel like that thing you have kissed?”

Miss Fennis, of the Hyperion, would have held an audience mute and
breathless by the quiet scorn conveyed in Mrs. Maudslay-Berrish’s look
and tone.

“I dare say when you have done what you are going to do, I shall wake
up in Hell,” she said; “and I believe I shall have earned it!”

Teddy, still spinning out the smeared records of his Past, was now
prostrate and bathed in tears.

“If I doubted the existence of such a place before, I do not now. For I
have loved that man”--she bit her white underlip sharply--“and I have
seen and heard him. Henceforth there can be nothing worse to bear, here
or hereafter. Why do you delay? Pull the cord and have done with it, or
I shall say _you_ are afraid!”

       *       *       *       *       *

The _Beata_ came sailing gently down upon a delightful green expanse
of turf at Aldershot--the tennis ground, in fact, of a dandy Cavalry
Regiment. The anchor dropped and caught in a pollard oak; a dozen
delightfully pink lieutenants in correct flannels assisted the
handsome Miss Fennis, of the West End theaters, to alight from the
basket. Maudslay-Berrish, calm and imperturbable as usual, followed.
In the midst of congratulations and offers of luncheon, a lieutenant
exclaimed:

“Great Scott! Why didn’t you say you’d another passenger in the car?
Here’s a man lying in a dead faint at the bottom of it!”

And they brought out Teddy, very white and limp, and gave him brandy.

“Heart weak, what?” said the lieutenant who had exclaimed.

“He has certainly had some--cardiac trouble,” returned Maudslay-Berrish
placidly; “but I think he will be less liable to the--ahem!--the
weakness after this little trip of ours together in the Fourth
Dimension.”

And he smiled as he lighted a very large cigar.




THE GEWGAW


The iron doors of the auction-room were closed tightly as the valves
of an oyster shell; the forward rush of a smartly attired throng
awaited their rolling back in the polished steel grooves. It was
to be a woman’s field day; the contents of a notable jewel casket
were to be dispersed under the hammer. And the _bonne-mouche_ of the
occasion--a superb blue diamond of sixty-five carats, a gem worthy to
rank among the historic stones of the world, fit to be counted among
the treasures of a Sultan or to blaze upon the bosom of an Empress--was
discussed by watering mouths. Some of them were old and some of them
were young, but all were tinted with the newest shade in lip bloom,
and all wore the same expression of almost sensual desire. Paradise
plumes fought together as wonderfully hatted heads bent and swayed
and nodded in animated discussion. The stone had brought a hundred
thousand louis and the Grand Monarque’s own patent of nobility to the
Portuguese adventurer who had stolen it from a Hindu temple midway
in the seventeenth century. It had gleamed between the wicked, white
breasts of the Duchesse de Berry, the shameless daughter of the Régent
d’Orleans, at that final supper on the Terrace of Meudon. It had been
seized by the Revolutionists in the stormy days of 1792, and had
mysteriously vanished from the Garde Meuble, to reappear in the taloned
clutches of a London money lender and gem dealer, notorious as a rogue
among the spendthrift fine gentlemen of White’s and Crockford’s. And
it had been bought by a big banker, and bid for by a Tsar, and sold to
a great Tory nobleman, and left as an heirloom, and given to an Italian
opera singer, and got back by arbitration and made a ward in Chancery,
and sold in Paris by sanction of the Court; and now the woman who had
bought and owned and worn it--sometimes as the swinging central stone
of a tiara, at other times as the pendant to a matchless collar of
black pearls--was dead, and Briscoe’s famous auction-room, which is the
chief clearing-place of the world, was about to witness a new record in
progressive bidding.

The live women who had known and envied the dead owner of the blue
diamond clustered thick about the iron doors, and loaded the atmosphere
of the crowded place with their perfumes, and chattered like the
inmates of the parrot house at the Zoological Gardens. Not one of them
but would have given her soul in exchange for even a lesser jewel if
Satan had appeared at her elbow and suggested the exchange. He did
come to one of them. She was a pretty woman, still almost young; she
was beautifully dressed in painted silken muslin, and wore a whole
king bird of Paradise in her Paris hat. The bronze-gold wires of
the wonderful tail, tipped with vivid emerald at the ends, curved
and sprang about the wearer’s well-waved and well-dressed head like
living snakes of incredible slenderness. The rich red plumage of the
dead creature’s head and throat gleamed like rubies; the delicate
feather tufts that sprang from beneath the wings quivered with her
every movement; the orange bill held a seed, cunningly placed; the
cobalt-blue legs were perched upon a rose stem. To insure such
beauty in the plumage the skin must be torn from the living bird.
Any woman might be happy in possessing such a hat; but this one was
miserable.... She wanted the big blue diamond.... And this urbane,
polished person, elegantly attired, had told her that, if she chose, it
might be hers in exchange for a possession only half believed in--to
wit, the woman’s soul--disposed of to a personage held, until that
psychological moment, to be non-existent.

This was not the devil of St. Dunstan, with horns and a tail, or
the cloaked and ribald wine seller of St. Anthony, or the lubberly
fiend of Luther, or the clawed and scaly tempter of Bunyan. Nor
did this personage bear the least resemblance to the swaggering,
scarlet-and-black, sinister Mephistopheles of Goethe, as represented
by the late Sir Henry Irving--upon whom be the Peace of Heaven!--but
the woman entertained no doubt that it was the very devil himself. In
this urbane and polished gentleman in the light gray, tight-waisted
frock-coat and trousers of Bond Street cut, from beneath whose snowy,
polished double collar flowed a voluminous cascade of pearl-colored
cravat pinned with a small but perfect pigeon’s-blood ruby; whose lapel
bore a mauve orchid, whose immaculate white spats, perfectly polished
patent boots, slender watch-chain, jade-headed walking stick, and pale
buff gloves, betokened the most studied refinement and the most elegant
taste, the daughter of Eve recognized the hereditary enemy of the Human
Race.

She did not scream or turn ghastly with mortal fear; her Crême Magnolia
and Rose Ninon were quite too thick for that. But her heart gave a
sickening jolt, and fear immeasurable paralyzed her faculties, and her
veins ran liquid ice--or was it liquid fire?--and for one swooning
instant, under the regard of those intolerably mocking, unspeakably
hateful eyes, the life in her seemed to dwindle to a mere pin’s point
of consciousness. But she revived and rallied, and the terror passed.

“Come!” he said, “you do not fear me--we have been friends too long;
and to me, who know the world so well, and to you, who know it and are
of it, there is nothing so undesirable as to create a scene.” His voice
was polished, gracious. It caressed like the touch of velvet, even if
it crisped the nerves as velvet does. “You know me.... I know you, and
how your heart is set upon this jewel that is to be sold to-day. Rest
easy! Though you have with you in that gold chain purse-bag notes for
fifteen thousand pounds, ten thousand of it raised by what rigorous
moralists ... those unpleasant persons! ... might call unlawful
means....”

“Hush!” she cried, trembling, unable to remove her eyes from that
face--long, oval, benevolent--with wide, arched brows and features
exquisitely regular, framed in long waving hair--dark auburn mingled
with gray--which fell nearly to his collar and mingled with a curling
beard of natural growth. She trembled as the thought shot through her
that it caricatured a Face that hung, pictured with a Crown of Thorns,
above the cot in her child-daughter’s nursery; and her thought was
mirrored in those intolerable eyes, and the sculpturesque lips smiled
in impious mockery.

“Ah, yes! It seems to you I bear some likeness to--shall I say a
distant--or an estranged Friend of yours.... But I have many other
faces, and you have ... other friends. Do not be afraid, or waste time
in denying, the money is only borrowed; you are your young daughter’s
mother, as well as trustee and executor under her father’s will....
And, surely, you may borrow the ten thousand pounds at a pinch for
an investment? Besides, you will put it back before any unpleasant
inquiries are made by your fellow-guardian and co-trustee. The manager
of the Bank was quite deceived by the second signature upon the deed of
withdrawal, so admirably counterfeited, so.... No, no, I do not wish
to alarm you! Be quite at ease upon this matter, really so innocent
and easily explained away. But with regard to your project of buying
the Blue Diamond--you have no chance of carrying out your plan, not
the faintest. Between those sedate persons already assembled by high
privilege behind these shut iron doors an understanding has already
been arrived at. The Diamond will be put up to public auction and
actively bid for, it is true; but the Diamond is already bought and
sold.” His tone was of the gentlest sympathy, but the mockery in his
glance and the gibing irony of his dreadful smile were to the baffled
woman like white-hot irons laid upon a bleeding wound. “Mr. Ulysses
Wanklyn, whose great duel with Mr. Cupid Bose at the De Lirecourt sale
over that Régence commode of marqueterie thrilled all London, will be
the winner of the treasure at ninety-four thousand guineas. Paragraphs
in the afternoon papers--most excellent publications I find them, and
supremely useful--will refer to the coup as ‘the climax of screeching
finance,’ and ‘the hall-mark on an enhanced standard of jewel-values.’
And Messrs. Moreen and Blant, who will retire, ostensibly beaten, from
the field after a bid of eighty-eight thousand, will be condoled with
by writers who are quite aware that Wanklyn, Bose, Moreen, Blant, and
half a dozen others constitute the Blue Diamond Purchasing Syndicate,
capital ninety-four thousand guineas.”

The wearer of the king bird of Paradise caught a sharp breath, and
bit her sensuous, scarlet-dyed underlip fiercely. Stung to desperate
courage by baffled desire and the thwarted jewel-lust that had robbed
even her child and made of her a forger, she even dared to question....

“If that is so,” she said, with angry, dark eyes and a
rebelliously-heaving bosom, “why did you whisper to me just now that I
could have the Diamond for my own if I gave you ... as the people do in
the old German legends ... my Soul in exchange for it?”

He smiled, and caressed the strange, orchidaceous flower he wore with
perfectly-gloved fingers.

“Have you not heard me called the Father of Lies ... the Arch-Deceiver?”

Rage intolerable possessed and rent her. She said hoarsely, and in
tones unlike her own:

“You can give me the Blue Diamond, and I will have it--_at your price_!”

“You are really a woman of excellent sense,” he said--and she was
afraid to look because she knew how he was smiling. “Present good
for future gain!... Doubtless you will recall the quotation, but so
uncertain a futurity is well bartered for such a jewel as they have
in there. Think--you will snatch it from the great dealers--from the
private connoisseurs. You will hold and display and flaunt it in the
face of society. You will be beautiful--wearing it! You should be
envied, wearing it! You may be happy--doubtless you will be so! And
now, just as a mere form, prick your left wrist slightly with this
diamond-pointed pencil and inscribe your name upon a leaf of these
ebony tablets. First, though, be pleased to remove that ... ahem!...
miniature religious symbol from your golden chain. The Crucifix means
nothing to you--you do not even remove it when you draw your wedded
lover to your embrace--but I am an old-fashioned personage, and my
prejudice extends back over nineteen hundred years--to the reign of
Herod Antipas, and is practically unalterable. So ... thanks! That will
serve me excellently!”

From the woman’s hand something fell with a golden tinkle to the
parqueted floor. A surge of the crowd drove her forward, her French
heel crushed what she had dropped. The diamond pencil pricked the
white wrist between the buttons of her dainty glove; she withdrew it,
a little scarlet bead glistening on the shining point, and hesitated,
only an instant, looking at the offered tablets of ebony and gold.

“Come, sign!... It will be over in an instant, and, believe me, you
will feel far more comfortable afterward!” She remembered that her
dentist had employed the same phrases only a day or two before in
persuading her to consent to the removal of a decayed incisor. That
tooth’s successor--a perfect, polished example of human ivory--gleamed
as her lips drew back in a nervous laugh provoked by the absurdity of
the analogy. She scrawled her signature, and the promise was fulfilled.
She was calm--at ease--had no more worrying doubts and silly scruples.
He wore no indiscreet expression of proprietorship; his lips did
not even smile. And if there was mocking triumph in his eyes, his
discreetly dropped lids concealed it.... He bowed profoundly as he took
the ebony tablets, and then he lifted his gloved left hand and laid a
finger on the iron doors. And they rolled apart, revealing the great
safe with many patent locks, and the auctioneer at his desk, and the
clerk at his; and the chosen already in their seats, and the elaborate
preparations for the elaborate farce that was to be played, all ready.
A savage rage boiled up in her as she looked at the smug faces of the
secret Syndicate, actors well-versed in their separate parts. But the
pressure of the chattering, screaming, perfumed crowd behind her
carried her over the threshold, and her companion too. Packed tightly
as sardines in the confined space about the rostrum, Society waited
the great event. And a bunch of master-keys was produced by the senior
partner of Briscoe’s, and with much juggling of patent locks the
great safe gave up the big, square jewel-case containing the famous
collection, and a sibilant “_Ss’s!_” of indrawn breaths greeted the
lifting of its lid.

“Do not look at me! Listen--and look at the jewels,” whispered the
smooth, caressing voice in the ear of the woman who had just signed
away her soul in exchange for the sensation of the day. And as a giant
commissionaire bearing pearl ropes and tiaras, bracelets and rings and
necklaces, nervously paraded up and down the central aisle left for his
convenience, and the chattering and screaming of the society cockatoos
redoubled, in envious admiration of each swaggering, glittering,
covetable gewgaw, the devil told the woman very plainly how the thing
was to be done.

“The stone that I shall give you is an exact replica in a
newly-invented paste of the stone that is the price of what I have
bought from you. When the commissionaire brings round the Blue Diamond,
touch the jewel boldly--take it in your hand, as it is permissible to
do--and substitute the paste. Have no fear! I will undertake that the
act is undetected. Thenceforth wear your prize undismayed; boast of
it as you will. The one--the only--drawback to your perfect happiness
must be that society will believe your jewel to be false, while you
have the exquisite joy of knowing it to be genuine. So take _this_,
and act as I have counseled. Two hours to wait before you can dare to
escape with it, for the Blue Diamond will be the last lot of the day.
But what are two hours, even spent in a vitiated atmosphere, with
such a prize your own, hidden in your glove or in your hand? A mere
nothing! And here comes the commissionaire with the Diamond.... Only
an alumina in hexagonal arrangement crystallized in the cooling of
this planet you call ‘the World’ as arrogantly as though there were no
others, and yet how unique, how exquisite! See how the violet rays leap
from the facets, even the noblest sapphire looks cold and pale beside
the glorious gem. Murder has been committed for its shining sake over
and over again in ages of which your history has no cognizance. It has
purchased the faith of Emperors and the oaths of Kings. Rivers of blood
have flowed because of it. Peerless women have laid down their honor to
gain it. And it will be yours ... yours! Quick, the commissionaire is
coming. School your hand to steadiness; no need to hide your lust, for
all faces wear the same look here. Only be quick, and have no fear!”

The eyes of the commissionaire were fastened upon the woman’s white,
ringed, well-manicured hand, as in its turn it lifted the Blue
Diamond--slightly set in platinum as a pendant--from its pale green
velvet bed. But yet she effected the exchange. The substituted paste
jewel was borne on--the paroquets and cockatoos chattered and screamed
as loudly over the false stone as they had over the real, which lay
snugly hidden in the thief’s fair bosom. The syndicate of dealers
played out their farce to its end, and Mr. Ulysses Wanklyn, to the
infinite chagrin of Mr. Cupid Bose, and the gnashing discomfiture of
Messrs. Moreen and Blant, secured the paste diamond at ninety-four
thousand pounds. And amidst cries and congratulations the day ended.
And the woman, with her price in her bosom, escaped into the open
air, and signaled to the chauffeur waiting with her motor-brougham
and drove home. Fear and triumph filled her. When would the theft be
discovered? How soon would voices in the streets begin to clamor of the
stolen gem? How should she who had stolen it ever dare to wear or to
vaunt it, with Scotland Yard--with the detective eyes of all the world
upon her? She had been befooled, duped, defrauded; she moaned as she
bit her lace handkerchief through.... She reached her dainty boudoir
just in time to have hysterics behind its locked and bolted doors. And
when she had quieted herself with ether and red lavender, she drew the
Blue Diamond from its hiding-place, and it gleamed in her palm with a
diabolical splendor, as though the stone were sentient, and knew what
it had cost. Could the great dealers be deceived--a probability quite
impossible--she would be at liberty to wear this joy, this glory, to
see its myriad splendors reflected in envious eyes. She kissed it as
she had never kissed her child or any of her lovers--with passion,
until its sharp facets cut her lips. And, as she kissed it, her quick
ears were alert to catch the shoutings of the newsmen in the streets.
But there were none. She dined in her boudoir, and slept, with the aid
of veronal; and in the morning’s newspaper there was not a wail, not a
word! She gave the king bird of Paradise hat to her maid--she was so
pleased, so thankful! The afternoon papers, and those of the next day
and the next, were dumb upon the subject of the daring theft of the big
Blue Diamond from Briscoe’s famous auction-room. She grew more and more
secure. And one never-to-be-forgotten night she put on a Paquin gown
and went to a great reception at a ducal house with the Blue Diamond as
pendant to her pearl-and-brilliant collar. She counted on the cockatoos
screeching, but they did not screech. The eyes that dwelt on the Blue
Diamond were astonished, surprised, covertly amused, contemptuous.

“That is for luck, I suppose, dear?” cooed one of her intimate friends.
“I mean that large blue crystal you are wearing.... I bought some last
winter at a jeweler’s in the bazaar at Rangoon--they find them with
moonstones and olivines and those other things in the _débris_ at
the Ruby Mines, I understood. I must have mine mounted. By the way,
do you know that----” (she mentioned the name of a great financier
of cosmopolitan habits and international fame) “has bought the Blue
Diamond from Ulysses Wanklyn for a hundred and ten thousand pounds:
_She_”--her voice dropped a little as she referred to a lady upon
whom the great financier was reputed to have bestowed his plutocratic
affections--“will be here to-night. Probably she will wear it! They say
she was absolutely determined on his getting it for her, and so.... _À
porte basse, passant courbé_, especially when the circumstances are
pretty. _What_ do you say? You heard it had been discovered by the
dealers that the Blue Diamond had been found to be false ... a paste
imitation, or a cut crystal like that thing you are wearing? Oh, my
dear, how quite too frightfully absurd a _canard_! As though Ulysses
Wanklyn and Cupid Bose and Blant, and all the other connoisseurs,
could be deceived! What a very remarkable-looking man that is who is
bowing to you!... The graceful person with the Apostolic profile and
the beautiful silky beard”--and the intimate friend gave a little
shudder. “And the extraordinary eyes that give one a crispation of the
nerves?...”

It was he--her Purchaser--moving suddenly toward her through the throng
of naked backs and bare bosoms.

“I hope,” he said, and bowed and smiled, “that you are satisfied
with the result of our ... negotiations the other day?” Then, as the
fashionable crowd parted and the Great Financier walked through the
rooms, his imperious mistress upon his arm, her husband looking amiable
behind them, he added, indicating the swinging central pendant of the
lady’s superb diamond tiara, with a wave of a slender white-gloved
hand, “My substitute was convincing, you think; you suppose it has
deceived even the experts? Not in the least--the substitution of the
paste stone for the Blue Diamond was discovered as soon as the public
had quitted the auction-room. But Messrs. Wanklyn and Bose and my other
very good friends who lay down the law in jewels as in other things, to
Society, agreed not to lose by the fraud. The paste has the _cachet_ of
their approval, and has been sold for a great sum. ‘What water!’ the
world is crying. ‘What luster!’ ‘How superb a gem!’ While you, my poor
friend, who display upon your bosom the real stone, have merely been
credited with a meretricious taste for wearing Palais Royal jewelry.
Pardon! I have not deceived you--or not in the way you imagine.... I
said the Blue Diamond should be yours.... It is! I said you should be
envied; you should, certainly. It is a thousand pities you are only
sneered at. I said you might be happy.... It is most regrettable that
you do not find the happiness you looked for. _Au revoir_, dear lady,
_au revoir_!”

She felt indisposed, and went home....




THE NIGHT OF POWER

IN TWO PARTS


I

The Doctor, stepping softly forth from the sick-room, paused for a
brief confidential parley with the print-gowned, white-capped hospital
nurse, who had followed him. That functionary, gliding from his side,
evanished, with the falling of a curtain-sheet soaked in disinfectant
and the closing of a door, into the Blue-Beard chamber beyond, leaving
the man of medicine free to pursue his portly way downstairs.

At the bottom of the second flight one of the hotel servants stopped
him with a respectful murmur and a salver with a card upon it; and the
Doctor, reading the name thereon by the help of a pair of gold-rimmed
glasses, inclined his neatly-shaved, gray-blue chin toward the mourning
diamond discreetly twinkling amid the billows of black satin that
rolled into the bosom of his capacious waistcoat, saying:

“The wife of my patient upstairs? Certainly; I will see the lady at
once. Which way?”

His responsible, square-toed, patent-leather boots had not much farther
to carry him. The lady and her maid were waiting in a sitting-room
upon the next landing. Under the fashionable physician’s heavy yellow
eyelids--livery eyelids, if one might dare to hint so--lay the faculty
of keen observation. He noticed, in the moment of recovery from a
justly-celebrated bow, that the maid was in tears, and the mistress was
not.

He presupposed that he had the pleasure of addressing Mrs. Rosval.
Mrs. Rosval answered that he had. Then the maid uttered a sob like the
popping of a soda-water cork, and Mrs. Rosval said:

“Matilda, be quiet!”

She was a woman of supple figure and of medium height. She appeared
to be elegantly dressed, though no one garment that she wore asserted
itself as having been expensive. The eyes that looked at the Doctor
through her thick black veil struck him as being unnaturally brilliant.
This fact, together with the composure of her voice and manner,
confirmed him in the belief that the woman was in a highly-strung
condition of emotional excitement. He was mentally evolving a little
prescription--with bromide in it, to be taken every three hours--when
she lifted her hands and unpinned the veil. Then the Doctor looked in
the face of a woman who was as perfectly calm, cool, and composed as he
was himself. Even more so because the revelation rather surprised him.

She addressed him in clear, quiet tones:

“A telegraphic message was delivered to me this morning----”

“At Mirkwood Park, near Bradford,” the Doctor unconsciously quoted
aloud from the card he still held between his plump white thumb and
forefinger.

“It purported to come from the proprietor of this hotel. It said that
Mr.--that my husband was dangerously ill--that my presence was urgently
needed.” Mrs. Rosval’s lips--delicately chiseled lips, but totally
devoid of color--shaped themselves into something that might have been
a smile. And as the maid, who nursed a dressing-bag in the background,
at this juncture emitted a sniff, the mistress glanced again over her
shoulder, and said, with a slight accent of weariness or contempt, or
both together: “Really, Matilda, there is no need for that!”

The irrefragable Doctor had gauged the shallow depths of the woman’s
nature by this time. She was merely a polished and singularly
adamantine specimen of the unfeeling wife. He allowed a tinge of rebuke
to color the tone of his explanation.

“The proprietor acted upon my--ah--advice. The condition of my patient
may be truthfully described as--er--dangerous. The illness is--in
fact--typhoid fever. And your husband has it in a bad form. There are
complications which----”

The Doctor stopped short. For Mrs. Rosval was not listening. She was
crumpling a piece of pinkish paper into a ball--probably the telegram
to which she had alluded--and pondering. Then she leveled those
strangely brilliant, narrow-lidded eyes of hers point-blank at the
Doctor, and asked: “Am I to understand that Mr. Rosval has nothing to
do with--my being sent for?”

The Doctor conveyed the information that Mr. Rosval had not prompted
the step. Mr. Rosval had been--since the third day following on
the--ah--development of the illness--ringing the changes between
delirium and--ah--coma. For--as the Doctor had already said--there were
complications----

Mrs. Rosval neatly stopped the ball, for the second time.

“How did you know, if _he_ did not tell you, that there was a Mrs.
Rosval? How did you get at my address?”

The Doctor, swelling with the indignity of being supposed to have
got at anybody’s address, explained that the proprietor of the hotel,
having some faint inkling that Mr. Rosval belonged to the class of
landed gentleman, had looked up the name in _Burke_.

The sharp suspicion faded out of Mrs. Rosval’s eyes as she listened.
It was a perfectly credible, perfectly simple explanation. She tossed
the crumpled telegram into the fire--which devoured it at a gulp--and
began to pull off her gloves. That was her way of intimating that she
accepted the situation. Then she rang the bell. The decorous waiter
appeared, and she gave the man a quiet order, handing him some loose
silver and a slip of paper, upon which she had penciled a few words.

“A cab is waiting at the door. Pay the driver and send him away. A
person who is--not quite a gentleman--is waiting in the vestibule. Say
to him that Mrs. Rosval is satisfied, and there is no need to wait.
Give him that paper at the same moment, or he will not believe you!” As
the waiter vanished she turned to the Doctor with the faintest flicker
of a smile upon her sensitive pale lips. “I thought it wisest to keep
the cab, in case I required to leave this place hurriedly,” said Mrs.
Rosval. “The man waiting downstairs is a detective from a well-known
Agency. I judged it best to enlist his services--he would have proved
useful supposing this business of the telegram to have been a Trap.”

The Doctor spread his large white hands, danglingly, like a seal’s
flappers.

“A trap?” he repeated, helplessly. “My dear madam! You suspected that
some designing person or persons unknown might--possibly use your
husband’s name, invent a story of his illness as a ruse to--entrap you?”

“I suspected,” returned Mrs. Rosval, “no unknown person. The inventor
of the ruse would have been my husband. We separated some years ago
by mutual consent. At least, I refused to live with him any longer,
and he--knowing what grounds I had for the refusal--was obliged to
submit. But he resented my action in the matter.” Mrs. Rosval raised
her delicate dark eyebrows with weary disdain, and imparted to her
shoulders a mute eloquence of contempt which is not the prerogative of
an English-bred woman. “And he has, more than once, had recourse to
what, for want of a better word, I call Traps. That is all. Matilda,”
she addressed the tearful maid, “dry your eyes and tell the people
downstairs that I engage this suite of rooms. Two bedrooms, a bathroom,
and sitting-room at ten guineas a week, I think they said? Horribly
expensive, but it cannot be helped. And now, Doctor”--she turned again
to the Doctor--“when do you wish me to see your patient? At once? It
shall be at once if you say so! I am completely in your hands!”

The Doctor, a little staggered by the deftness of his patient’s wife
in transferring the onus of the situation from her shoulders to his
own, absolutely prohibited any suggestion of her entering the sick-room
until refreshed and rested. Mrs. Rosval acquiesced, with a repetition
of that compromising statement about being completely in his hands--and
the Doctor took his leave, promising to return later that evening. She
gave him her cool fingers, and they parted. He had no sooner reached
the door than she called him back.

“I only wanted to ask---- Of course, you have a library. Does the
catalogue of your library include a file of the _Daily Telegraph_?” It
did, the Doctor admitted. File in question extending some twelve years
back.

“Three will do,” said Mrs. Rosval, warming one slender arched foot
upon the fender. “Next time you are in want of a little light reading,
look in the Law Intelligence, Divorce Division, month of February,
1899, where you will find a case: ‘Ffrench _v._ Ffrench; Rosval cited.’
The details will explain a good deal that may appear puzzling to you
with regard to the strained relations between Mr. Rosval and myself.
Though doctors never allow themselves to be puzzled, do they? _Au
revoir!_”


II

The Doctor had had an unusually busy day of it. But he curtailed his
after-dinner nap in order to glance through the Law Intelligence
records of the month of February, 1899. There was much in the case to
which Mrs. Rosval had referred that went far toward justifying the
“strained relations” she had hinted at. And it is the duty of the
medical profession to rally at the war-cry of the outraged Proprieties.
But, when alone and unobserved, doctors have many points in common with
mere men. And as this Doctor stepped into his brougham he said, “Women
are very hard! In all human probability the man was innocent.” He said
again, “Women are hard!” as he creaked up the hotel staircase.

He found her in the sick-room. She had changed her dress for something
that gave out no assertive silken rustle in answer to her movements,
something that draped the charming contour of her figure--she had
a charming figure--with soft, quiet folds, like the wings of a dun
hawkmoth. That fell composure still walled her in as with ramparts of
steel. She held the bed-curtain back as the Doctor stooped over the
livid, discolored face upon the pillow. She took a linen cloth from
the nurse, and deftly, lightly wiped away the froth and mucus that
had gathered about the cracked and bleeding lips. But the hand that
rendered these offices was as steady as though it had been carved out
of white marble.

Disturbed from his lethargy by the invasion of candlelight upon his
haggard eyelids and the Doctor’s bass murmur in his ear, the sick man
began to talk a little. For the most part it was mere gabble, but some
sentences were plain. He moaned piteously for a barber, because he
was unshaven. Rosval had always been foolishly vain of his personal
appearance. And he damned the one glass of bad water, to the imbibition
of which he attributed his disease, promising, if he got well, never
to drink any more. To do him credit, he had never been addicted to
that particular form of liquid refreshment. The Doctor inferred as
much from his diagnosis--and from the faint sarcastic quiver of Mrs.
Rosval’s white lips. Then the tongue of the man ceased wagging--but
the burning head began to thresh to and fro upon the pillow, and the
claw-like hands to scratch at the bed-clothes in a fresh access of the
maddening enteric irritation. Alleviating measures proved as effective
as alleviating measures generally do prove; the head went on rolling,
and the crooked talons continued to tear. All at once they were quiet.
Mrs. Rosval had laid her hand upon the clammy forehead--about as
tenderly, to all appearance, as she would have laid it upon the back of
a chair. And the man was still. She placed the other hand beside the
first--the drawn lines about the nostrils relaxed, the clenched teeth
parted, the breast rose and fell with the indrawing and outgoing of a
sigh of relief. And the man slept. So soundly that she moved from him
presently, without disturbing him, and passed into the room adjoining,
where the Doctor and the nurse were holding a whispered confabulation.

There would be no need to send in another professional attendant, the
nurse said, now that the patient’s wife had arrived. She possessed
a remarkable ability for nursing, and extraordinary self-command.
She shrank from nothing--not even the most repugnant duties of the
sick-chamber. The nurse had met in her time with ladies who took things
coolly; but this lady really surprised her.

The Doctor was in the act of shaking his head--not from side to side,
but up and down--a gesture which expressed indulgent tolerance of the
nurse’s surprise while it repudiated the notion of his entertaining
any on his own account--when he jumped. For a calm, quiet voice at his
elbow said:

“You told me that Mr. Rosval was dangerously ill. Is he dying?”

The nurse had vanished into the carbolic-laden atmosphere of the
Chamber of Horrors.

“My dear madam, your husband is in the Hands----” So the Doctor was
beginning, when the obvious inappropriateness of the stereotyped
formula stopped him short. Then he admitted that the condition of the
man in the other room was very precarious. That he could not, when not
in _articulo mortis_, be said to be dying--but that, toward the small
hours of the morning, he might attain to a pitch of prostration closely
allied to that condition. And that nothing could be done for him but
to give him milk and medicine regularly, and---- The Doctor would have
ended “and trust in Providence,” but for obvious reasons he thought
better of it. Then he went away, feeling quite certain in his own mind
that Mrs. Rosval would be a widow before twenty-four hours were over.

That lady, meanwhile, returning to the sick-room, had persuaded the
fagged nurse to go and lie down. She understood how to do all that was
necessary, she whispered, and would call the attendant if any change
occurred. Then she sat down at the foot of the bed, and prepared to
keep her vigil with unshaken fortitude. The sleeping woman in the next
room breathed heavily, the sounds of rolling wheels and jarring voices
grew less and less--then all fell quiet. About three hours before the
dawn the sleeper awakened. The hollow eyes no longer turned on her with
the blind, glassy stare of delirium. There was reason in Rosval’s look,
and memory.

He seemed to beckon, and she came near. She had to stoop to catch the
moaning whisper that asked: “How--did you--come here?”

She answered steadily, “They sent for me.”

“They’d not have--if _I_ had known!” Rosval gasped.

“If I annoy you,” said Mrs. Rosval, with icy tolerance, “I can go!” She
turned, meaning to call the nurse; but a claw-like hand went weakly
out and caught at her skirts. The grasp was no stronger than that of a
newborn child, but, just for that it _was_ so feeble, it held her.

“You’ll not go! Three years--you’ve treated me--like a leper! Never
would--listen to what I’d got to say. But now ... I--tell you, she--sat
on--my knee and--kissed me! Before I knew it--and then--the husband
came in! A plant, by Gad!”

Mrs. Rosval said, “You must not talk. The Doctor says you are not to
talk,” and busied herself with the bottles and glasses that occupied a
little stand near the bedside.

Rosval condemned the Doctor. Mrs. Rosval measured out his medicine,
raised his head with professional skill, and offered him the glass. He
clenched his teeth, and defied her with gaunt eyes across the brim.

“No! No milk--no doctor’s stuff. I’ve been going to the devil--for
three years past,” proclaimed the sinner, feebly. “Why not go--at
once--and have done with it?” Then he fell back heavily on the pillow.

Mrs. Rosval summoned the nurse. The nurse could do nothing. For the
moribund was obdurate, and every fresh manifestation of obduracy
drove not one, but half a gross of nails into his coffin. That casket
was fast progressing toward completion, when Mrs. Rosval conceived
a desperate idea. The execution of it cost her a severe struggle.
Stooping down, she whispered to the sinking man:

“Jack!”

His faded eyes rolled in their sunken sockets until they rested on her.
He said with difficulty:

“Well?”

“What will make you take it?”

Something like a gleam of cunning came into the face. The answer came:

“Kiss me!”

She battled with herself for a moment silently, and then, bending
closer, touched his forehead with her lips.

“That isn’t all! You must say: ‘_I forgive you!_’”

“I can’t!”

“All--right, then!”

Silence ensued. The angles of the features were growing pinched and
sharp; a bluish shade was creeping about the mouth. She cast a glance
of scorn at her own reflection, caught in a mirror that hung against
the opposite wall, and said the words:

“I forgive you! Isn’t that enough?”

“Not quite. ‘_I love you--and----_’”

The voice was getting very faint.

“I love you--dear--and----”

“And ‘_I take you back!_’”

“I take you back.” Her iron fortitude was broken. She said it with a
sob, and gathered the weak head to her bosom, being the kind of woman
who does not do things by halves.

       *       *       *       *       *

A month later the Doctor received a check. It was a handsome check,
enclosed with the thanks and compliments of Mr. and Mrs. Rosval, on
leaving London.

“Carried him off with her into the country,” said the Doctor, tapping
his teeth with a paper-knife as he closed the volume of the _Daily
Telegraph_ which contained the case “Ffrench _v._ Ffrench; Rosval
cited.” “In other words, taken him back. And in all human probability
the man was guilty. Women are very weak!”




THE MAN WHO COULD MANAGE WOMEN


Or thought he could. Which comes to the same thing. His name was
Yethill, and he was a Junior Captain in the R. A.

Yethill belonged to the New School; he was a specimen of the latest
military development of the age. By their smoked spectacles shall ye
know Yethill and his peers; by the right foot, which is broadened
by the lathe; by the right thumb, which is yellowed with acids and
sticky with collodion; by the hard-bitten, pragmatical, theoretical,
didactic way of treating all mysteries in heaven--a locality which
is interesting only in virtue of the opportunities afforded to trick
aviators--and earth, in which mines may be dug, and upon which
experiments may be carried on. These men wake themselves in the
morning, and heat their shaving water by means of electrical machines
of their own invention. They carry kodaks in their bosoms, and are, in
the matter of imparting information, human volcanoes continually in
eruption.

Yethill was not behind his fellows in this respect. When he had said
his little say upon the Theory of Wireless Photophony, the Detection
of Subterranean Mines by the K Rays, and the irresponsibility of the
bedbug in connection with beri-beri; when he had told the Head of the
Electrical Department how many watts are equivalent to a horse-power,
and explained to the Colonel, who is sinfully proud of his men, that
the employment of the uneducated inferior in warfare will cease with
the century, and that the army of the future will consist entirely of
officers, he would drop his voice to a confidential whisper and control
his elbows. He talked heliographically as a rule, and if a man were
left to listen to him--he could, as a rule, clear the Mess smoking-room
in ten minutes from the start--he would dilate at length upon his
best-loved hobby, the art of managing women.

       *       *       *       *       *

Yethill was no Adonis. He had a knobby, argumentative head, a harlequin
set of features, each separate one belonging to a different order and
period of facial architecture; and a figure which was not calculated,
as his tailor observed with bitterness, to do justice to a good cut.
But it was wonderful to hear him talk in that conquering, masterful
way of his. He had an appalling array of statistics to prove that
the majority of marriages were miserable; that life, connubially
speaking, was dust and ashes in the mouths of nineteen Benedicts out
of twenty. But the darkest hour presaged the dawn. Let the man about
to marry, let the already-married, but adopt the Yethill system of
sweetheart-and-wife breaking, and thenceforth all would be well. And
thousands of voices arising from the uttermost ends of the civilized
earth would hail with one accord Yethill as their deliverer.

Then came an essay on the New Art of Courtship.

“To a man,” Yethill would say, jerking his knee and stammering a
little, as his custom was when excited, “who is a reasonable being,
the woman he loves is a woman--only spelt with a big ‘W’; the woman he
likes is a woman spelt in the ordinary way; and the woman he doesn’t
like is a mere creature of the female sex. To a woman,” Yethill
would continue, “who is, nineteen times out of twenty, a perfectly
unreasonable being;--the man she loves is a demi-god; the man she
doesn’t love is a man;--and the man she dislikes is a gorilla. She
quite overlooks the fact that in every individual human male these
three may be found united. And man is weak enough to humor her. So
that out of so many marriages that take place, a majority--a frightful
majority--are founded upon illusions. And the subsequent state of
conjugality may be called a state of evolution, in which these
primary illusions, after undergoing a process of disarrangement and
disintegration, are finally reduced to impalpable powder, and the Bed
Rock of Reality is laid bare. We know what happens after that!”

The listening man generally knew enough to grunt an affirmative. And
Yethill would, with many weird facial jerks and twitches, go on to
explain the system.

The great system was, like all other wonderful discoveries, involved
in a very simple plan of procedure. It consisted only in reversing
the accepted order of things. A man, supposedly desirous of getting
married, recognizing in himself the existence of the trinity above
mentioned, should assert the existence of the third person from the
very outset--suppress the demi-god, show the gorilla. Let the woman you
were about to make your wife see the worst of you before you showed her
the best. Let her pass through the burning fiery furnace before you
admitted her into the Paradise that is the reward of proved devotion.
Let her know what bullying meant before you took to petting--blame her
weaknesses before you praised her virtues. Under this _régime_ there
would be no illusions to commence with; and married life, instead
of being full of disappointments, would be replete with delightful
surprises. Your wife married you, believing you to be a gorilla.

“There’s the weak point,” the listener would interpolate. “What woman,
unless a lunatic of sorts, _would_ marry a gorilla?”

Yethill would not hear of this objection. He was always deaf when you
came to it. He would pound on--dilate on the surprise and joy with
which she found that she had married a man, and the rapture with which
she would greet the final discovery that she had got hold of a demi-god.

“It sounds splendid,” the other men would say, “but it won’t wash.
Look here, I’m going to take Miss So-and-So up to a Gaiety _matinée_
to-morrow. To follow up your system I ought to call for her in my worst
clothes, be surly on the way to the station, and neglectful in the
tunnels. I ought to dump her into her stall like a sack, go out to ‘see
a man’ between every act, and take it for granted that she doesn’t want
cool tea and warm ices. You know that’d never do! She’d give me the bag
to-morrow. And she’d be right!”

But Yethill hearkened not. There was excitement at the Arsenal, and
much babbling in barracks, the day on which it was publicly made known
that Yethill contemplated giving an object-lesson in support of his
great system very shortly.

The object was Miss Sallis.

Miss Sallis was a fluffy little pink-and-white girl, the daughter of a
retired Admiral, who lived near the Dockyard.

Men had dined with Miss Sallis, and played tennis with Miss Sallis,
and flirted with Miss Sallis, during several seasons past. Some of
them had asked for her hand--she wore fives in gloves--and had not got
it. Thus, Yethill’s announcement was received with a certain degree of
risibility. No bets were made upon the chances of Yethill’s getting
her, the odds against his acceptance were too tremendous. Yethill
proposed. He mentioned that his prospects of advancement in the Service
were not very promising; that his scientific pursuits would have to be
relinquished if he were to set up an establishment on even a moderate
scale, and that he did not intend to relinquish those pursuits; that
there were several hereditary diseases in his family; that, while
bestowing upon the lady he honored with the offer of his hand a regard
which justified his proposal, he should not have made that proposal
had the lady been poor--with other statements of equal candor. A more
wonderful proposal was never made.

What was more wonderful still, Miss Sallis accepted him! He bought
her a ring, containing three small fragments of petrified red-currant
jelly, embedded in fifteen-carat gold; and when she asked him to put it
on her finger said, “Oh, rot!” and wouldn’t. He spent a certain amount
of time with his betrothed, but invariably carried a scientific work in
his pocket, wherein he might openly take refuge when the primrose paths
of love proved wearisome. He forbade her to dance with other men, and
did not dance with her himself. He snubbed her when she asked questions
about his camera, his lathe, his batteries, and tried timidly to be
interested in magnets and inductors, acids and cells, because they
interested _him_. He carried out his system thoroughly. If Miss Sallis
_had_ any illusions about Yethill he bowled the poor little thing over,
right and left, like ninepins, long before the wedding day.

With the loss of her illusions went some of her good looks. She made a
pretty-looking little bride. With her fluffy pale hair, her pink nose,
and her pink eyelids, a not remote resemblance to an Angora kitten
was traced in her. She was married in a traveling-gown, without any
bridesmaids; and after the wedding-breakfast Captain and Mrs. Yethill
drove home to their lodgings on the Common. The wedding-trip had been
abandoned--from no lack of money, but because Yethill said he had had
enough of traveling, and the custom of carrying a bride away, as if
in triumph, to the accompaniment of rice and slippers, was “guff.” He
certainly played the gorilla as if to the manner born. The poor little
woman loved him; he loved her. But as his skull was made of seven-inch
armor-plate, he went on knocking it against his system. He had got
used to the gorilla-business, and couldn’t leave it off. Yet, out of
his wife’s sight and hearing, he was a doting husband. The Duke in the
_Story of Patient Griseldis_ must have been a man of Yethill’s stamp.

Mrs. Yethill, as time went on, began to be a walking manifestation of
the effects of the system. She lost her gaiety and her pink cheeks;
her smile became nervous and her dress dowdy. The little vanities, the
little weaknesses, the little affectations, which had helped to make
Miss Sallis charming, had been bullied out of Mrs. Yethill’s character
until it was as destitute of any blade of verdure as a skating-rink.
She had proved herself the most patient, loving, tolerant of wives; but
Yethill went on trying her. She stood the trials, and he invented new
tests--exactly as if she had been a Government bayonet or a regulation
sword-blade. A bright man Yethill!

They were called upon, and returned visits, at intervals. A taste for
society was one of the tendencies which were to be chastened. Female
friends were prohibited, as being likely to sow the seed of incipient
rebellion against the system.

“I don’t care, Tom, if I have you!” said Mrs. Yethill, patting her
gorilla, who, mindful of his own tenets, was careful not to exhibit any
appreciation of her attention. But he made up for it by boasting that
evening in the smoking-room, until those who hearkened with difficulty
prevented themselves from braining him with legs of chairs. Their wives
would have commended them for the deed. Yethill had not many admirers
about this period.

But he went on blindly. Can one ever forget how he crowed over having
cured Mrs. Yethill of a tendency toward jealousy, of the vague and
indiscriminating kind? The prescription consisted in posting to himself
letters highly scented and addressed in a variety of feminine scrawls.
Yethill was good at imitating handwriting!--and he absented himself
from the domestic hearth for several days together whenever there was
a recurrence of the symptoms. The method wrought a wonderful cure; but
Mrs. Yethill began to grow elderly from about this period. You could
hardly have called her a young woman, when the baby came, and brought
his mother’s lost youth back to her, clenched in one pudgy hand. The
vanished roses fluttered back and perched upon her thin cheekbones
again. She was heard to laugh. Her husband, who secretly adored her,
and who had continued to stick to the system more from a desire for
_her_ glorification than his own, feared a retrogression. So he thought
out a new torture or two, and put them into active application. He
sneered at the puerilities of nursery talk. He downcried the beauty
and attainments of the baby when she praised them. He pooh-poohed her
motherly fears, when the ailments inseparable from the joyous period
of infancy overtook his heir. This was the last straw laid upon Mrs.
Yethill’s aching shoulders. The downfall of the great system followed.

In this way. His wife came into his workshop one morning. The workshop
was forbidden ground, and Yethill dropped the negative he was
developing, and turned to stare. He saw that she was very pale, and
that her lips were bitten in. He heard her say that there was something
the matter with baby, and she wanted the doctor.

Solely in the interests of his wife whom he esteemed above all living
women, Yethill refused to allow the doctor to be sent for. The child
was as right as a trivet. Women were always worrying. She was to get
away with her nonsense, and leave him in peace. With more to the same
effect. She drooped her head, and went away obediently, only to return
in half an hour, with another version of the same prayer upon her lips.
Would he--would he come and look for himself? Yethill was thoroughly
annoyed. Yethill refused. Yethill went on, stubbornly, dabbling with
his negatives, until right from overhead--baby’s nursery was above the
workshop--Yethill had never heard a woman scream like that before....
Something like an ice-bolt shot down his spine. He dashed up to the
nursery, and looked in. The sight he saw there sent him tearing across
the Common, a hatless, coatless man, to the Doctor’s house.

When the Doctor came he said he could be of no use; he ought to have
been called in an hour ago. And Yethill, hearing this fiat, and meeting
his wife’s eyes across the table, felt the system totter to its
foundations.

He found himself wondering at her for taking baby’s end so quietly; but
he had schooled her to endure silently. There were no tears--he had
always jeered at tears. The Doctor took him aside before he left.

“You must treat your wife with kindness--and consideration, Yethill,”
said the Doctor, “or I won’t answer for the consequences!”

As if Yethill needed to be told to be kind or considerate! As if
Yethill had never loved--did not love--the late Miss Sallis! He planned
a revelation for her without delay. He would take her in his arms; kiss
her, and tell her that her time of trial was overpast; give her her
meed of praise for her heroism, her meed of sympathy for her grief--and
his. And he would own that he had made a mistake in the matter of baby
deceased. And she would forgive--as she always had forgiven.

As he decided this, she came into the room. She was quite composed. She
carried something behind her. She spoke to him very quietly in a dull,
strange, level voice--so strange a voice that, just as he was about to
open his arms and say, “Annie!” in the voice he had been saving up for
the Day of Revelation, the gesture and the word wouldn’t come.

“Tom,” said Mrs. Yethill, “what should you say if I told you that I had
made up my mind to kill myself?”

She brought her hand from behind her; it held one of Yethill’s
revolvers. She had been very much afraid of these lethal instruments
in the early days of her marriage, but under the system had learned to
clean them, and even drew the cartridges. But the thing she held wasn’t
loaded, Yethill was quite sure of that. It sealed up the fountain of
his admiring tenderness to have her treat him to commonplace, vulgar
heroics. It put her out of drawing, and Yethill out of temper.

She asked again:

“What would you say if I told you I mean to kill myself?”

Yethill ran his armor-plated head against the last wall. He answered
brutally:

“I should tell you, if you were such a fool as to threaten such a
thing, to do it, and have done with it!”

She said, “Very well!”--and did it.

       *       *       *       *       *

When people came running in, they found something--perhaps it was the
system--scattered on the walls, on the floor, everywhere. And Yethill
was howling, and beating his seven-inch skull against heavy pieces of
furniture, and calling on Annie to come back. But she had escaped, and
was in no hurry; and he hadn’t the pluck to follow her out of the world
and apologize.

“Was she mad?” somebody asked the Doctor; and the Doctor said:

“No; but she might have become so if she had lived much longer with a
lunatic!”

“You mean----?”

“I mean,” said the Doctor, “that Yethill has been suffering from
dementia for years. I mean that he will see the inside of a Lunatic
Asylum in six months from date.”

But the Doctor was wrong. He did--in three!




OBSESSED


Andrew Fenn is known to the world as an art critic and essayist of
unerring instinct and exquisite refinement, a writer of charming _vers
de société_, and teller of tales supposedly designed for children, but
in reality more appreciated by children of a larger growth. He is much
sought after, but little to be found, unless one has the _entrée_ to
his pleasant, roomy old house in Church Street, Chelsea, where he lives
in the midst of his library--the whole house is a library--his etchings
and Japanese curios. He is less of a traveler than he used to be;
getting old, he says, and lazy, content with old friends, soothed by
old pipes, fortified by old wine--he has a supreme _goût_ in wines--and
nourished by excellent cookery.

His household staff consists but of an elderly valet and butler, and a
housekeeper-cook. She has been in her master’s service twenty years,
and is beginning to grow handsome, Andrew is wont to say. Certainly,
if her master speaks the truth, she must have been, when comparatively
young, extraordinarily unlovely, this most excellent of women. Even now
she infallibly reminds the casual beholder of an antique ecclesiastical
gargoyle much worn by weather. Her name is Ladds. She has never been
married, but respect for the position of authority she occupies in
Andrew’s household universally accords her brevet rank. She might have
occupied another, and more important position, if----

“Yes,” Andrew says, when he is disposed to tell the story--and he
often does tell it to intimate friends, leaning back on the library
divan, after a cosy dinner, holding his gray beard in one big fist,
still brown with tropical sunshine--“Ladds is an excellent creature.
She might have married me, might Ladds!”

We invariably chorus astonishment. Then some of Ladds’ famous coffee
comes in, and Andrew gets up to hunt for precious liquors, and, having
found them, continues:

“I came _very_ near marrying her--once.”

Somebody growls: “Good job you pulled up in time!”

Andrew rounds on the somebody. “_I_ didn’t pull up. _She_ did. Refused
me!”

There is a general howl.

“I am telling you men the truth,” Andrew says, pulling the gray beard.
“Fifteen years ago I was infatuated with that woman. She possessed my
every thought; she dominated me, like----”

“Like a nightmare!”

“Apposite illustration,” says Andrew, nodding. “_Like_ a nightmare.
It was just about the time I published my book, _Studies of the Human
Grotesque in Art, Ancient and Modern_. You remember, some of you, I
was keen on the subject--had been for years. And I was a traveler
and collector in those days: I’d got together a wonderful show of
illustrative subjects. You won’t see many of ’em now. I gave them to
the Smoketown Mechanical Institute afterward.”

He pulls at his long cherrystick, and blows a cloud of Latakia, and
goes on:

“I’d the whole house full. Peruvian idols, Aztec picture writings,
Polynesian and Maori war masks; Chinese and Japanese, Burmese and
Abyssinian, Hindu and Persian monstrosities of every kind; Egyptian,
Carthaginian, Babylonian, Druidical, Gothic---- Well, well! I’m
thoroughgoing, and when I do a thing I do it thoroughly. It’s enough to
say that every variety of libel upon the human face and form that human
ingenuity or depravity has ever perpetrated, I’d carefully collected
and brought together here.”

He waves his hand, with a curious cabalistical ring upon it that once
belonged, it is said, to Eliphas Lévi, who had it from Albertus Magnus.
But this may be mere report.

“I worked hard, and drank a great deal of coffee,” says Andrew, “so
much that my old housekeeper began to be afraid something mysterious
was the matter with me. She expostulated at last, and I explained.
Then she got interested in the book; she was an intelligent woman,
poor dear old soul, and she got specially interested in that section
of the work which deals with the Grotesque in Nature. Everything in
humanity that is purely grotesque--not deformed, unnatural, outrageous,
but purely quaint and bizarre--I piled into those chapters. The work
is illustrative, you know, as well as descriptive, and the queer
photographs and engravings that scientific friends had contributed to
this particular portion of it absolutely fascinated the dear old lady.

“‘To be sure, Master Andrew’ (she had known me from my knickerbocker
and peg-top days), ‘but them are queer folk. And, my heart alive!’--she
uttered a sharp scream--‘if that picture isn’t the exact moral of Jane
Ladds!’

“I glanced over her shoulder. It _was_ a portrait of Jane, certainly--a
rude little wood cut of the sixteenth century, purporting to be a
portrait of a female jester, attached, in her diverting capacity, to
the Court of Mary Tudor, during the latter part of her reign, and
mentioned by name in some of the accounts of the Royal household as
‘Jeanne la Folle.’ Unless the long-dead delineator of her vanished
charms has shamefully belied them, Jeanne must have been one of the
most grotesquely hideous specimens of womanhood that ever existed.
Judge, then, whether the exclamation of my housekeeper awakened my
interest, excited my curiosity, or left me apathetic and unmoved!”

We are silent. Our interest, our curiosity, are urging us to hurry on
the conclusion of Andrew’s story.

“You may suppose that I bombarded my housekeeper with questions. What?
Did a living counterpart of the sixteenth-century joculatrix exist
in the nineteenth? What was her station in life? Where was she to be
found? In reply, I elicited the fact that Jane Ladds was a countrywoman
of my own, the daughter of a wheelwright living in the village of
Wickham, in Dorsetshire, where I myself had first seen the light. Jane
was some half dozen years my junior, it appeared. My mother had once
taken her into her service as under-scullerymaid, but in a casual
encounter with the last new baby (my brother Robert, now commanding
his battery of the Royal Horse Artillery at Jelalabad), Jane’s
facial eccentricities had produced such a marked effect (resulting
in convulsions) that the unfortunate _protégée_ had been hastily
dismissed. Since when she had kept house for her father, and was
probably keeping it still; there not being, said my housekeeper, the
slightest human probability that any potential husband would endeavor
to interfere with the wheelwright’s domestic arrangements.” There comes
a twinkle into Andrew’s brown eyes.

“‘No man would be mad enough!’ the old lady said. Judge of her surprise
when I turned upon her and ordered her to write--write at once to
Dorsetshire, ascertain whether Jane was still alive, still available,
willing to take service, under an old acquaintance, in a bachelor’s
London establishment? Stunned as she was, my housekeeper obeyed. The
wages I instructed her to offer were good. An answering letter arrived
within the space of a week, announcing Jane Ladds’ willingness to
accept the offered situation. The letter was nicely written. I read and
reread it with morbid excitement. I looked forward to the day of the
writer’s arrival with an excitement more morbid still. At last the day
came, and the woman....”

We inspire deep breaths, and unanimously cry, “Go on!”

“My writing table was piled high with books--I couldn’t see her until
she came round the corner,” says Andrew, “and stood by my chair. She
wore her Sunday clothes--Wickham taste inclines to garments of many
colors. In silence I contemplated one of the finest examples of the
Animated Grotesque it had ever been my fortune to look upon. Her hair
was then red--the brightest red. Her nose was not so much a nose as a
pimple. Her mouth was the oddest of buttons. Her forehead a ponderous
coffer of bone, overhanging and overshadowing the other features.
She was lengthy of arm, short of leg, dumpy of figure. She did not
walk--she waddled; she did not sit--she squatted. Her smile was a
gash, her curtsy the bob of an elder-pith puppet. She was, as she is
now, unique. You are all familiar with her appearance. Search your
memories for the moment when that appearance dawned upon you first,
intensify your surprise, quadruple your sensations of delight--add
to these, imagine yourself dominated by a fascination, weird,
strange--inexplicable. In a word----”

Andrew’s pipe is out; he is gesticulating excitedly, and his eyes have
an odd gleam under his shaggy brows.

“She took possession of me. I had her constantly about me. She brought
me everything I wanted. I was never tired of gloating over my new-found
treasure. Every accent of her voice, every odd contortion of her
features, every awkward movement of her body was a fresh revelation to
me. All this while I was working at my book. It was said afterward, in
the newspapers, that the entire work, especially the closing chapters
on the Human Grotesque, had been written in a fever of enthusiasm. The
reviewer never knew how rightly he had guessed. Some of the theories
I propounded and proved were curious. That Ugliness is in reality the
highest form of Beauty--beauty in the abstract--was one of the mildest.
I believed it when I wrote it; for I was madly, passionately infatuated
with the ugliest woman I had ever seen--my parlor maid, Jane Ladds!”

We hang upon his words so that our pipes go out, and our whisky and
sodas stand untasted at our elbows.

“Yes,” says Andrew, drawing a long, hard breath, “she possessed my
thoughts--dominated me--waking and sleeping. I had the queerest of
dreams, in which, with a joy that was anguish, a rapture that was
horror, I saw myself attending crowded assemblies with my wife,
Jane Fenn, _née_ Ladds, upon my arm. She wore my mother’s diamonds,
a _décolletée_ gown from Worth’s; and as we moved along together,
sibilant whispers sounded in my ears, and astonished eyes said as
plainly, ‘_What_ an ugly woman!’

“Then would come other visions ... Jane at the head of my table ...
Jane rocking the cradle of our eldest born--an infant who strongly
resembled his mother ... Jane here, Jane there--Jane everywhere!... My
nerves, you will guess, must have been in a very queer state.

“All the time Jane Ladds would be deftly moving about me, dusting
my books and curios, or going on with her sewing, or, to the utter
stupefaction of my housekeeper, I had issued orders that she should sit
in the window, where my glance might dwell upon her whenever I lifted
my head from my work. Late, late into the small hours, when the sky
began to gray toward the dawning, and the ink in my stand got low, she
used to keep me company. Not the faintest shadow of impropriety could
attach to the association in any sane mind. My housekeeper thought it
queer, but nothing more.

“She had--she has--very large, very rough, very red hands. I used to
imagine myself kissing one of those hands when I should ask her to
be my wife, and conjure up the grotesque smile of shy delight with
which she would accept the unheard-of honor. The temptation to snatch
and kiss that awful hand became so powerful that it cost me more
effort than I can explain to resist its ceaseless promptings. And I
would chuckle as I looked at it, and at the bizarre countenance that
bent over the stocking that was in process of being darned--Jane’s
peculiar, shuffling gait seemed to have a peculiarly wearing effect
on stockings--and wonder, _if she knew_, how she would look, what she
would say? Then she would thread her needle, or bite the end of her
worsted.... That hand! that hand! The struggle between the masterful
impulse to seize and kiss it, and the shuddering desire not to do
anything of the kind, would, upon these occasions, be perfectly
indescribable. And--one day--the very day that saw the completion of my
book--I yielded!”

“Yes?” we cry, interrogatively. All our eyes are rounded, all our
mouths wide open.

“She saw some of my papers flutter to the carpet as I pushed back my
chair,” Andrew continues, “and obligingly crossed the room, stooped
and gathered them up. A kind of mist came over my eyes, and when it
cleared away, she was there--by my side--holding the written sheets out
to me. That hand! I must--I must! Before the poor creature could hazard
a guess at my intentions, I seized it--I kissed it--with a resounding
smack. I cried deliriously, ‘Jane, will you be my wife? I adore you,
Jane!’”

“And what did she do? What did she say?...”

“I’m coming to that! She drew away from me, and turned very white,
and her poor red hands trembled, and her little button features
twitched absurdly with the effort she made to keep from crying. But,
as I seized her hands, and went on with my wild asseverations and
protestations--Heaven only knows what I said!--the absurdity of the
whole thing came on her, and she burst out laughing wildly. Then I
caught the infection, and followed suit. Once I began, I couldn’t
stop. I was shaken like a rag in the wind--torn, possessed by seven
devils of risibility. But I went on raging, all through it, that she
must marry me! At last she tore herself away, and ran out of the
room, breathlessly to burst upon my housekeeper with the information
that ‘Master was mad, and wanted the doctor.’ And she was not far
wrong, for by the time he came I was fit for nothing but to be carried
to bed. Twenty-four hours later I was raving in brain fever. Seven
weeks that red-hot torture lasted, and then I came to myself, and
found that through all the delirium and fever I had been patiently,
uncomplainingly, tenderly nursed by poor Jane....”

Andrew’s voice grows a little husky as he nears the finish.

“Well, when I was convalescent, and knew that I owed my life to her
devotion, it seemed to me that only one reparation was possible for the
wrong I had done Jane. It was a hard thing to do--the madness being
over--the morbid impulse that had swayed me being no longer in the
ascendant. But I did it! You may have noticed”--he clears his husky
throat--“that is, those among you who have spoken to Ladds--_that
she has a singularly sweet voice_--a voice curiously out of keeping
with her personality. Well, when she thanked me for my ‘kindness’
and--refused me, I might, supposing my eyes had been shut, have fancied
that I was listening to a beautiful woman. She had been ‘marked out
by the Lord’ to lead a lonely life, she said. When she was a young
girl it used to make her cry when the lads went by _her_, ‘wi’ their
vaices turned away,’ and the girls laughed when she put on a ribbon or
a flower. But she got used to it; and she quite understood that I was
trying to make up--like a gentleman as I was;--(a mighty poor kind of
gentleman, I felt)--‘for summat as I’d said when I didn’t know what I
was a-saying!’ Crazy people had queer ideas, and the village ‘softy’
had once taken it into his head that he was in love with Jane.... And
she thanked me for sticking to my word now that I was well, and she’d
be my faithful servant always and for ever, Amen! Years have passed
since then.... Well, she has kept her word. I hope, when the end of
everything comes for me, that honest, tender, devoted heart will be
beating by my pillow. I hope----”

Andrew breaks off abruptly, and gets up and wishes us all good night.




A VANISHED HAND


“_Why_,” Daymond wrote, “_do you imagine that I shall despise you for
this confession? None but a whole-souled, high-hearted woman could have
made it! You have said you love me, frankly; and I say in return that
had the fountains of my heart not been hopelessly dried up at their
sources, they must have sprung forth gladly at such words from you. But
the passion of love, dear friend, it is for me no more to know; and I
hold you in too warm regard to offer you, in exchange for shekels of
pure Ophir gold, a defaced and worthless coinage!”_

As Daymond penned the closing words of the sentence, the last rays of
the smoky-red London sunset were withdrawn. Only a little while ago
he had replenished the fire with fresh logs; but they were damp, and
charred slowly, giving forth no pleasant flame. He struck a match and
lighted a taper that stood upon his writing table. It created a feeble
oasis of yellow radiance upon the darkness of the great studio, and
the shadow of Daymond’s head and shoulders bending above it, was cast
upward in gigantesque caricature upon the skylight, reduced to frosty
white opacity by a burden of March snow.

Daymond poised the drying pen in white, well-kept fingers, and read
over what he had written. Underlying all the elegance of well-modeled
phrases was the sheer brutality of rejection, definitely expressed. His
finely strung mental organization revolted painfully at the imperative
necessity of being cruel.

“She asks for bread,” he cried aloud, “and I am giving her a stone!”
The lofty walls and domed roof of his workshop gave back the words to
him, and his sensitive ear noted the theatrical twang of the echo. Yet
the pang of remorse that had moved him to speech was quite genuine.

“_You have heard my story_,” he wrote on.

A great many people had heard it, and had been bored by it; but,
sensitive as Daymond’s perceptions were, he was not alive to this fact.

“_Seventeen years ago, while I was still a student dreaming of fame
in a draughty Paris studio, I met the woman who was destined--I felt
it then as I know it now--to be the one love of my life. She was an
American, a little older than myself. She was divinely beautiful to
me--I hardly know whether she was really so or not. We gave up all,
each for each. She left husband, home, friends, to devote her life to
me. I_----”

He paused, trying to sum up the list of his own sacrifices, and
ultimately left the break, as potent to express much, and went on:

“_Guilty as I suppose we were, we were happy together--how happy I dare
not even recall. Twenty-four months our life together lasted, and then
came the end. It was the cholera year in Paris; the year which brought
me my first foretaste of success in Art, robbed me of all joy in
life.... She died. Horribly! suddenly! And the best of me lies buried
in her grave!_”

The muscles of his throat tightened with the rigor that accompanies
emotion; his eyelids smarted. He threw back his still handsome head,
and a tear fell shining on the delicately scented paper underneath
his hand. He looked at the drop as it spread and soaked into a damp
little circle, and made no use of the blotting paper to remove the
stain. If any crudely candid observer had told Daymond that he dandled
this desolation of his--took an æsthetic delight in his devotion to
the coffined handful of dust that had once lived and palpitated at his
touch, he would have been honestly outraged and surprised. Yet the
thing was true. He had made his sorrow into a hobby-horse during the
last fifteen years of honest regret, of absolute faithfulness to the
memory of his dead mistress. It gratified him to see the well-trained
creature dance and perform the tricks of the _haute école_. He was
aware that the romance of that past, which he regretted with such real
sincerity, added something to the glamour of his achieved reputation,
his established fame, in the eyes of the world. The halo which it cast
about him had increased his desirability in the eyes of the great lady
who, after affording him numberless unutilized opportunities for the
declaration of a sentiment which her large handsome person and her
large handsome property had inspired in many other men, had written him
a frank, womanly letter, placing these unreservedly at his disposal....
And Daymond, in his conscious fidelity and unconscious vanity, must
perforce reply wintrily, nipping with the east wind of non-reciprocity
the mature passion tendrils which sought to twine themselves about
him. It was a painful task, though the obligation of it tickled him
agreeably--another proof of the inconsistency of the man, who may be
regarded as a type of humanity; for we are all veritable Daymonds, in
that the medium which gives us back to our own gloating eyes day by day
is never the crystal mirror of Truth, but such a lying glass as the
charlatans of centuries agone were wont to make for ancient Kings and
withered Queens to mop and mow in.

Daymond pushed back his chair, and got up, and began to pace from end
to end of the studio. The costly Moorish carpets muffled the falling of
his footsteps, which intermittently sounded on the polished interspaces
of the parqueted floor, and then were lost again in velvet silence.
In the same way, his tall figure, with its thoughtfully bending head
and hands clasped behind it, would be swallowed up among the looming
shadows of tall easels or faintly glimmering suggestions of sculptured
figures which here and there thrust portions of limbs, or angles of
faces, out of the dusk--to appear again with the twilit north window
for its background, or emerge once more upon the borders of the
little island of tapershine. So he moved amid the works of his genius
restlessly and wearily to and fro; and the incoherent mutterings which
broke from him showed that his thoughts were running in the beaten
track of years.

“If I could see her again--if our eyes and lips and hands and hearts
might meet for even the fraction of a minute, as they used to do, it
would be enough. I could wait then patiently through the slow decay
of the cycles for the turning of the key in the rusty wards, and the
clanking of my broken fetters on the echoing stone, and the burst of
light that shall herald my deliverance from prison!...” He lifted his
arms above his head. “Oh, my dead love, my dear love! if you are near,
as I have sometimes fancied you were, speak to me, touch me--once,
only once!...” He waited a moment with closed eyelids and outstretched
hands, and then, with a dry sob of baffled longing, stumbled back to
his writing table, where the little taper was flickering its last, and
dropped into his armchair.

“And other women talk of love to me. What wonder I am cold as ice to
them, remembering her!”

It was a scene he had gone through scores upon scores of times--words
and gestures varying according to the pathetic inspiration of the
moment. He knew that he was pale, and that his eyes were bleared with
weeping, and he had a kind of triumph in the knowledge that the pain
of retrospective longing and of present loneliness was so poignantly
real and keen. Out of the blackness behind his chair at that moment
came a slight stir and rustle--not the sough of a vagrant draught
stirring among folds of tapestry, but an undeniably human sound. But
half displeased with the suspicion that there had been a witness to his
agony, he turned--turned and saw Her, the well-beloved of the old, old
time, standing very near him.

Beyond a vivid sensation of astonishment, he felt little. He did not
tremble with fear--what was there in that perfectly familiar face to
fear? He did not fall, stammering with incoherent rapture, at her feet.
And yet, a few moments ago, he had felt that for one such sight of her,
returned from the Unknowable to comfort him--dragged back from the
mysterious Beyond by his strong yearnings--he would have bartered fame,
honor, and wealth--submitted his body to unheard-of tortures--shed his
blood to the last heart’s drop. He had prayed that a miracle might be
performed--and the prayer had been granted. He had longed--desperately
longed--to look on her once more--and the longing was satisfied. And he
could only stare wide-eyed, and gape with dropped jaw, and say stupidly:

“_You?_”

For answer she turned her face--in hue, and line, and feature, no one
whit altered--so that the light might illumine it fully, and stood
so regarding him in silence. Every pore of her seemed to drink in the
sight of him;--her lips were parted in breathless expectancy. Every
hair of the dark head--dressed in the fashion of fifteen years ago;
every fold of the loose dress she wore--a garment he knew again; every
lift and fall of her bosom seemed to cry out dumbly to him. There was
a half-quenched spark glimmering in each of her deep eyes, that might
have wanted only one breath from his mouth to break out into flame. Her
hands hung clasped before her. It seemed as if they were only waiting
for the signal to unclasp--for the outspread arms to summon him to
her heart again. But the signal did not come. He caught a breath, and
repeated, dully:

“You! It is you?”

She returned:

“It is I!”

The well-known tones! Recollection upsprang in his heart like a gush of
icy waters. For a moment he was thrilled to the center of his being.
But the smitten nerve chords ceased to vibrate in another moment, and
he rose to offer her a chair.

She moved across and took it, as he placed it by the angle of the wide
hearth; and lifted her skirts aside with a movement that came back
to him from a long way off, like her tone in speaking--and, shading
her deep gray eyes from the dull red heat with her white left hand,
looked at him intently. He, having pushed his own seat back into the
borders of the shadowland beyond the taper’s gleam and the hearth
glow, looked back at her. That hand of hers bore no ring. When he had
broken the plain gold link that had fettered it in time past, he had
set in its place a ruby that had belonged to his mother. The ruby was
on his finger now. He hid it out of sight in the pocket of his velvet
painting coat, not knowing why he did so. And at that moment she broke
the silence with:

“You see I have come to you at last!”

He replied, with conscious heaviness:

“Yes--I see!”

“Has the time seemed long?... We have no time, you know, where.... Is
it many days since?...”

“Many days!”

“My poor Robert!... Weeks?... Months?... Not years?...”

“Fifteen years....”

“Fifteen years! And you have suffered all that time. Oh, cruel! cruel!
If there was more light here, I might see your face more plainly. Dear
face! I shall not love it less if there are lines and marks of grief
upon it--it will not seem less handsome to me at forty than it did
at twenty-five! Ah, I wish there was more light!” The old pettishly
coaxing tones! “But yet I do not wish for it, lest it should show you
any change in _me_!”

“You are not changed in the least.” He drew breath hard. “It might be
yesterday----,” he said, and left the sentence unfinished.

“I am glad,” said the voice that he had been wont to recall to memory
as wooingly sweet. “They have been kinder than I knew.... Oh! it has
always been so painful to recall,” she went on, with the old little
half shrug, half shudder, “that I died an _ugly_ death--that I was not
pretty to look at as I lay in my coffin!...”

Daymond recoiled inwardly. That vanity, in a woman, should not be
eradicated by the fact of her having simply ceased to exist, was an
hypothesis never before administered for his mental digestion.

“How curiously it all happened,” she said, her full tones trembling a
little. “It was autumn--do you remember?--and the trees in the Bois and
the gardens of the Luxembourg were getting yellowy brown. There were
well-dressed crowds walking on the Boulevards, and sitting round the
little tables outside the restaurants. One could smell chloride of lime
and carbolic acid crossing the gutters, and see the braziers burning
at the corners of infected streets, and long strings of hearses going
by; but nothing seemed so unlikely as that either of us should be taken
ill and die. We were too wicked, you said, and too happy! ... only the
good, miserable people were carried off, because any other world would
be more suitable to them than this.... It was nonsense, of course, but
it served us to laugh at. Then, because you could not sell your great
Salon picture, and we could not afford the expense, you gave a supper
at the _Café des Trois Oiseaux_ (_Cabinet particulier No. 6_)--and
Valéry and the others joined us. I was so happy that night ... my new
dress became me ... I wore yellow roses--your favorite Maréchal Niel’s.
When I was putting them in my bosom and my hair you came behind and
kissed me on the shoulder. O, _mon Dieu! mon Dieu!_ I can feel it now!
We went to the Variétés, and then to supper. I had never felt so gay.
People are like that, I remember having heard, just when they are going
to die. Valéry gaped--I believe he was half in love with me--and I
teased him because I knew you would be jealous. In those days you would
have been jealous of the studio _écorché_. Ha! ha! ha!”

Daymond shuddered. The recurrent French phrases jarred on him;
something in her voice and manner scarified inexpressibly his sensitive
perceptions. He wondered, dumbly, whether she had always been like
this? She went on:

“And then, suddenly, in the midst of the laughter, the champagne, the
good dishes--the pains of hell!” She shuddered. “And then a blank, and
waking up in bed at the hospital, still in those tortures--and getting
worse and seeing in your white face that I was going to die! Drip-drip!
I could feel your tears falling upon my face, upon my hand; but I was
even impatient of you in my pain. Once I fancied that I heard myself
saying that I hated you. Did I really?”

“I think--I believe you did! But, of course----” Daymond stopped, and
shuddered to the marrow as she leaned across to him caressingly, so
near that her draperies brushed his knee and her breath fanned upon his
face.

“Imagine it!” she cried, “that I _hated_ you! _You_ to whom I had given
myself--you for whom I left my----”

He interrupted, speaking in an odd, strained voice: “Never mind that
now.”

“I had always wished to die first,” she resumed, “but not in that way;
not without leaving you a legacy of kind words and kisses. Ah!” (her
voice stole to his ears most pleadingly), “do you know that I have been
here, I cannot tell how long, and you have not kissed me once, darling?”

She rose up in her place--she would have come to him, but he sprang to
his feet, and thrust out both hands to keep her off, crying:

“No! no!”

She sank back into her seat, looking at him wide-eyed and wonderingly.
“Is he afraid of me?” she whispered to herself.

“I am not afraid of you,” Daymond returned almost roughly. “But
you must make allowances for me at first. Your sudden coming--the
surprise----”

“Ah yes! the surprise--and the joy----?”

He cleared his throat and looked another way. He was shamedly conscious
that the emotion that stiffened his tongue and hampered his gestures
was something widely different from joy. He spoke again, confusedly.
“This seems like old times--before----”

“Before I died,” she said, “without bidding good-bye to you. Dear! if
you guessed how I have longed to know what you said and did when it was
all over, you would not mind telling me.... ‘_Are they grieving--those
whom I have left behind?_’ is a question that is often asked in the
place I come from. You were sorry? You cried? Ah! I know you must have
cried!”

“I believe,” Daymond returned, moving restlessly in his chair, “that I
did. And I--I kissed you, though the doctors told me not to. I wanted
to catch the cholera and die, too, I believe!...”

“Yes?”

“And when the people came with--the coffin, I”--he bit his lip--“I
would not let them touch you!...”

“My poor boy!”

He winced from the tenderness. He felt with indescribable sensations
the light pressure of that well-known once well-loved touch upon his
arm.

“And then--after the funeral, I believe I had a brain fever.” He
passed his hand through his waving, slightly grizzled hair, as if to
assist his lagging memory--really, as an excuse for shaking off that
intolerable burden of her hand. “And when I recovered I found there was
no way to forgetfulness”--he heard her sigh faintly--“except through
work. I worked then--I am working still.”

“Always alone?”

“Generally alone. I have never married.”

“Of course not!”

A faint dissent began to stir in him at this matter-of-fact
acquiescence in his widowed turtle-like celibacy. “It may interest you
to know,” he observed, with a touch of the pompous manner which had
grown upon him with the growth of his reputation, “that my career has
been successful in the strongest sense of the word. I have become, I
may say, one of the leaders of the world of Art. Upon the decease or
resignation of the President of the ----, it is more than probable that
I shall be invited to occupy his vacant place. And an intimation has
reached me, from certain eminent quarters”--he paused weightily--“that
a baronetcy will be conferred upon me, in that event!”

“Yes?”

The tone betrayed an absolute lack of attention. She had once been used
to take a keen interest in his occupations; to be cast down by his
failures and elated by his successes. Had that enthusiasm constituted
the greater part of her charm? In its absence Daymond began to find
her--must it be confessed?--but indifferent company.

In the embarrassment that momentarily stiffened him, an old habit
came to his rescue. Before he knew it, he had taken a cigar from a
silver box upon the writing table, and was saying, with the politely
apologetic accent of the would-be smoker:

“May I? You used not to mind!”

She made a gesture of assent. As the first rings of bluish vapor
mounted into the air, Daymond found her watching him with those intent,
expectant eyes.

Feeling himself bound to make some observation, he said: “It is very
wonderful to me to see you here! It was very good of you to come!”

She returned: “They had to let me come, I think! I begged so--I prayed
so, that at last----” She paused. Daymond was not listening. He was
looking at her steadfastly and pondering....

It had been his whim, in the first poignancy of bereavement, to destroy
all portraits of her, so that with the lapse of years no faulty touch
should bewray the memory of her vanished beauty. It struck him now for
the first time that his brush had played the courtier, and flattered
her, for the most part, unblushingly. He found himself criticizing
unfavorably the turn of her throat and the swell of her bosom, and
the dark voluptuous languishment of her look. The faint perfume of
heliotrope that was shaken forth now, as of old time, from her hair and
her garments no longer intoxicated, but sickened him. This, then, was
the woman he had mourned for fifteen years! He began to feel that he
had murmured unwisely at the dispensation of Providence. He began to
revolt at this recrudescence of an outworn passion--to realize that at
twenty-five he had taken a commonplace woman for a divinity--a woman
whom, if she had not died when she did, he would have wearied of--ended
perhaps in hating. He found himself in danger of hating her now.

“At last they let me come. They said I should repent it--as if I
could!” Her eyes rested on him lingeringly; her hand stilled the
eager trembling of her lips. “Never! Of course, you seemed a little
strange at first. You are not quite--not quite yourself now; it is
natural--after fifteen years. And presently, when I tell you---- Oh!
what will you say when I tell you all?”

She left her chair and came toward him, so swiftly that he had not time
to avoid her. She laid her hand on his shoulder and bent her mouth to
his ear. One of her peculiarities had been that her lips were always
cold, even when her passion burned most fiercely. The nearness of
those lips, once so maddeningly desirable and sweet, made Daymond’s
flesh creep horribly. He breathed with difficulty, and the great drops
of agony stood thickly on his forehead--not with weak, superstitious
terror of the ghost; with unutterable loathing of the woman.

“Listen!” she said. “They are wise in the place I came from; they know
things that are not known here.... You have heard it said that once in
the life of every human being living upon earth comes a time when the
utterance of a wish will be followed by its fulfilment. The poor might
be made rich, the sick well, the sad merry, the loveless beloved--in
one moment--if they could only know when that moment comes! But not
once in a million million lifetimes do they hit upon it; and so they
live penniless and in pain, and sorrowful and lonely, all their lives.
I let my chance go by, like many others, long before I died; but yours
is yet to come.” Her voice thrilled with a note of wild triumph; the
clasp of her arm tightened on his neck. “Oh, love!” she cried; “the
wonderful moment is close at hand! It is midnight now”--she pointed
to the great north window, through which the frosty silver face of
the moon was staring in relief against a framed-in square of velvet
blackness, studded with twinkling star-points--“but with the first
signs of the dawn that you and I have greeted together, heart of my
heart!--how many times in the days that may come again!--with the
graying of the East and the paling of the stars comes the Opportunity
for you. Now, DO YOU UNDERSTAND?”

He understood and quailed before her. But she was blindly confident in
his truth, stupidly reliant on his constancy.

“When it comes, beloved, you shall take me in your arms--breathe your
wish upon these lips of mine, in a kiss. Say, while God’s ear is open,
‘Father, give her back to me, living and loving, as of old!’ and I
shall be given--I shall be given!”

She threw both arms about him and leaned to him, and sobbed and laughed
with the rapture of her revelation and the anticipation of the joy that
was to come.

“Remember, you must not hesitate, or the golden chance will pass beyond
recall, and I shall go back whence I came, never more to return--never
more to clasp you, dearest one, until you die too, and come to me (are
you cold, that you shudder so?)--and be with me for always. Listen,
listen!”

As she lifted her hand the greatest of all the great clock voices of
London spoke out the midnight hour. As other voices answered from far
and near Daymond shuddered, and put his dead love from him, and rose up
trembling and ghastly pale.

They moved together to the window, and stood looking out. The weather
was about to change; the snow was melting, the thaw drip plashed
heavily from roof gutters and balconies, cornices and window ledges. As
she laid her hand once more upon his shoulder the stars began to fade
out one by one, and in a little while from then the eastward horizon
quivered with the first faint throes of dawn.

“Wish!” she cried. “Now! now! before it is too late!” She moved as if
to throw herself again upon his breast; but he thrust her from him with
resolute hands that trembled no more.

“I wish,” he said very distinctly, “to be Sir Robert Daymond, Baronet,
and President of the ---- before the year is out!”

She fell away from him, and waned, and became unsubstantial and shadowy
like the ghost she was, and unlike the thing of flesh and blood she had
seemed before. Nothing remained to her of lifelikeness but the scorn
and anger, the anguish and reproach of her great eyes.

“Only the dead are faithful to Love--because they are dead,” she said.
“The living live on--and forget! They may remember sometimes to regret
us--beat their breasts and call upon our names--but they shudder if we
answer back across the distance; and if we should offer to come back,
‘Return!’ they say! ‘go and lie down in the comfortable graves we have
made you; there is no room for you in your old places any more!’ They
told me I should be sorry for coming; but I would not listen, I had
such confidence. I am wiser now! Good-bye!”

A long sigh fluttered by him in the semi-obscurity, like a bird with
a broken wing. There was a rattling of curtain rings, the dull sough
of falling tapestry, and the opening and closing of a door. She was
gone! And Daymond, waking from strangely dreamful slumbers to the
cheerlessness of dying embers and burned-out candle, rang the bell for
his servant, and ordered lights. A few minutes later saw him, perfectly
dressed, stepping into his cab.

“Chesterfield Gardens, Mayfair,” he said, giving the direction to his
valet for transference to the groom.

“Beg pardon, sir, but Lady Mary Fraber’s servant is still waiting!” The
man pointed back to the house.

“Ah!” said Daymond, who had had a passing glimpse of alien cord gaiters
reposing before his hall-fire. “Tell him I have taken the answer to his
mistress myself.”

And as he spoke he scattered a handful of torn-up squares of paper--the
fragments of a letter--in largesse to the night and the gusty weather.




AN ORDEAL BY FIRE


Mr. Lanter was bookkeeping clerk in a New York dry-goods store. For
his services he was remunerated at the rate of fifteen dollars per
week. His bedroom at the boarding house with daily breakfast and three
meals on the Sunday, cost him ten dollars; the remaining five supplied
all other necessities--fed him at cheap restaurants, dressed him from
cheap clothing stores, and allowed him to send a cash bill now and
then to his mother, who lived in a New Hampshire village on tea, bread
and sauce, wore her hair in looped bell-ropes on either side of her
forehead and a rosette behind, and thought her son the most splendid
man in the world. But despite heroic efforts, Mr. Lanter had not
succeeded in putting by anything against a rainy day. As to marriage,
it was not to be dreamt of, which is probably the reason why Mr.
Lanter dreamed of it so frequently. But the feminine form that figured
in those dreams was not that of a typist, or a sales-lady, or even a
chorus-girl or variety artist. Mr. Lanter was a young man with a turn
for reading, who regularly spent his Sundays at the Cooper Institute,
and he did not feel that he could undertake to do his duty as a husband
by anything short of a heroine of romantic classical fiction. He had
had imaginary love passages with several of these, both ancient and
modern. _The Faëry Queen_ had given him Britomart, and the _Volsunga
Saga_ had supplied him with Brunhild. Hypatia’s erudition made her
a little alarming, but the affair was pleasant while it lasted; and
Iseult was too dark for Mr. Lanter’s taste, but he changed the color
of her locks as expeditiously as a French hairdresser, and roamed the
forest ways with her more appreciatively than Prosper. Theaters Mr.
Lanter did not frequent, because Mrs. Lanter regarded such places as
pitfalls dug by the devil for the capture of unwary young America, and
he had promised his mother he would not visit them. Indeed, had he
been inclined to go back on his word, he could not have afforded to do
so. But neither concert-halls, museums, nor circuses figured on Mrs.
Lanter’s black list, because she had forgotten to specify them; and one
half-holiday Mr. Lanter found himself entering Kneeman’s Star Musée
with an order.

The Kneeman Musée is a big, opulent building, with a central dome of
colored glass, a gorgeous façade ornamented with groups of sculptured
figures and a gilded vestibule where are displayed an array of
life-sized photographs and gigantic colored posters illustrating
the wonders to be seen within; promising upon this occasion, among
other exquisite novelties, the unique whistling entertainment of
Madame Smithers, the Kentucky Mocking Bird; the Celebrated Centaur
Family, in their feats of Equitation; the Balancing Bonellis, in their
electrifying plank-and-ladder interlude; Madame la Comtesse Püspök
Ladany, the Beautiful Hungarian (heroine of one of the most sensational
European elopements) in her Elegant Effects of Equestrianism upon the
highly-trained Arab Maimoun, assisted by Rurik the Gitano, who had
the honor, upon the sensational occasion above alluded to, of eloping
with Madame la Comtesse. Then came the Mermaids in a Tank Act, and
three-inch notes of exclamation clamorously invited attention to the
American Girl Giantess, Mademoiselle Minota, nineteen years of age,
nine feet in height, weighing four hundred and twenty-six pounds, able
to lift a weight of one hundred and forty pounds with one hand....
The remainder of the bill was filled with dwarfs, performing lions,
snake-charmers, and ventriloquists.

Mr. Lanter presented nothing remarkable to the ordinary observation.
He was fair, undersized, and short-sighted, and the necktie he
had chosen was of a vivid salmon-pink, trying to his complexion,
which had been injured by overwork and close confinement in a glass
counting-hutch lighted by electricity, and heated by steam. He
followed his companion, who was a smart, bustling young salesman
with a lady-killing reputation, and sporting proclivities; and as he
went he smiled a little vaguely, and his mouth was not quite shut,
a negligence which deprives the expression of intellectuality. They
had fauteuil seats so close to the Ring that their knees rubbed
against the low velvet-cushioned barrier that enclosed the sand-strewn
space, which seemed to Mr. Lanter to be a brown central-patch, in a
gorgeous, multi-colored dream. The dome above, all glass and gilding,
the pretty women in the boxes, the perambulating vendors of candy and
ices, the orchestra tuning up in a gilded balcony on the left of the
stage, the whiffs of menagerie, gas, and stabling which escaped from
the coulisses, the people who pushed past into their places, Madame
Smithers trilling and piping in emulation of the feathered songsters
of American groves, the Centaur Family upon their gaily-trapped
steeds, the bursts of applause, the shouts of laughter, were all made
of dream-stuff.... But when heavy tableau-curtains rose upon a scene
representing a mediæval banqueting-hall, and revealed the American
Girl Giantess, throned upon a high seat, arrayed in gilded chain-mail
and flowing purple draperies, a sword in her large white right hand,
a crimson cloak upon her shoulders and a dragon-crested helm upon her
large fair head, the start Mr. Lanter gave would have awakened any
ordinary sleeper. But the dream closed in again, as Miss Minota rose,
and, bowing to the right, to the left, to the middle, descended the
baize-covered staircase which led from the stage to the Ring.... Other
spectators saw a young woman monstrously overgrown, with tow-colored
hairplaits as thick as coir-cable, and blue eyes as round as silver
dollars, who was well-proportioned in her huge way, and who, if looked
at through the wrong end of an opera-glass, when divested of her tawdry
theatrical trappings, might have appeared an honest, ordinary young
person of average good looks. But Mr. Lanter saw a golden roof-ridge
and a ring of magic fire roaring up, and the Brunhild of his visions;
and breathed hard, and felt a clammy sensation about the palms of
the hands, while his heart drummed heavily against the lining of his
ready-made waistcoat. He must have been very pale or very purple in the
face, for his companion nudged him.

“Guess you’re feeling off color!... Like to get out into the air?... If
so, I’ll keep your seat,” he whispered; but Mr. Lanter shook his head.

The band struck up a march, Miss Minota descended into the arena,
a voluble gentleman in evening dress, who acted as showman, and,
when necessary, as interpreter, walking in the shadow of her
elbow. She seemed, indeed, an overwhelming example of feminine
physical development as she gravely performed her round, replying
in monosyllables to the remarks that were made to her by members of
the audience, complying with their expressed desire to shake her
enormous hand. Mr. Lanter was hot and cold by turns as her monumental
proportions drew nearer; he meant to rise in his place and boldly
engage her in conversation; he got as far as getting on his legs.
It seemed that the large blue eyes of the giantess dropped upon him
inquiringly; he almost fancied her about to pause. But his tongue
refused to utter the word which would have arrested her progress....
She swept past, and it was as though the mainsail of a yacht had gone
over on the starboard tack, emptying a whole breeze out of an acre of
canvas. Another moment and she had ascended to the stage, her draperies
of crimson and purple trailing as she went; she had lifted her weights,
respectively guaranteed at one hundred and one hundred and forty pounds
avoirdupois; she had made her three bows, and the tableau-curtains had
descended and closed. Thenceforward Mr. Lanter took no interest in the
entertainment. With fishy eyes he sat, retrospective, unobservant; and
his companion, the lively Mr. Goter, found him mighty dull.

“Oh, look here!... Say now! what’s up with you?” he protested, as they
walked home together through the crowded streets.

The clang of street-car gongs, the intermittent roar and rattle of
the elevated railway, mingled with the blare of tin horns, and the
clamor of voices. It was hot May weather, and there was a smell upon
the languid air that seemed to combine in itself the flavor of rotten
fruit, the musky odor of African skins, the pungent acridity of frying
oil, and the rankness of coarse tobacco.

“Up with me? Why, I’m all right,” said Mr. Lanter, “and I’ve had a real
good time, thanks to you, old man!”

“Come, have a drink?” said the pacified Goter, and they turned in at
the swing doors of a beer saloon. “Bully, wasn’t she?” he broke out,
after ordering two iced bocks. “My style all over! Guess I’ve a good
mind to take her on!” and he winked knowingly.

Mr. Lanter set down his tall glass of untasted Münchener. “Look here,
who are you talking about?” He was salmon-pink to the edge of his black
Derby hat, and his pale blue eyes had angry sparks in them.

“That girl that did the jugglin’ business on the plank-and-ladder,”
responded Goter. “Black eyes, black hair, high color, and spankin’
action. Did you s’pose I meant that walkin’ grain-elevator in the tin
armor? No, sir!”

He had yet another fulminating witticism on hand, and he discharged it.
Before it had done crackling he saw stars, for the placable Lanter had
suddenly smitten him upon the nose.

“Good thunder! what are you up to, anyway?” spluttered the astonished
Mr. Goter.

“Hol’ off there! Go easy!” shouted the barkeeper. Half a dozen men,
their drinks in their hands, their hats tilted back from interested
faces, had gathered round, and a colored boy was mopping the
red-stained marble table with a wet cloth.

“He--he insulted a lady!” gasped Mr. Lanter, “and I struck him! If he
does it again--I’ll do it again!... Mind that!” The tone and the look
with which he delivered the final warning convinced Mr. Goter that he
had better mind.

Thenceforward he ceased to regard Mr. Lanter as a “Willie” and Mr.
Lanter ceased to regard himself as a Christian young man. His own
violence had shocked him. There must be a good deal of cold reason, he
reflected, at the bottom of Mrs. Lanter’s inveterate prejudice against
public places of entertainment, and his conscience pricked him. But she
had made him promise that he would not go to “theaters,” and he salved
his conscience by reminding himself that he had kept his word. But he
went again and yet again to Kneeman’s Star Musée. And upon the third
occasion he mustered up courage to speak to Miss Minota.

“How do you do?” he blurted out. Then as an afterthought he blurted
out, “Mademoiselle.” He had to tilt his head quite back to look up into
Miss Minota’s large fair moon-face. He wondered what she would say if
anybody told her that she was his ideal of womanhood?

“I guess I am very well, thank you,” responded the giantess. She had a
plaintive, mooing voice, and despite the usage of a public career, she
seemed little less bashful than Mr. Lanter.

“Do you like N’York?” Mr. Lanter inquired.

“Well,” Miss Minota returned, “I guess I do!” She sighed as she
continued: “But one place is much the same as another to you--when you
don’t see anythin’ more of it than the inside of the hotel where you
happen to be located, and the inside of the hall where you chance to be
exhibitin’.”

“Why, now, that’s a shame!” said Mr. Lanter, growing red with sympathy.
“Don’t your friends take you around some, when you feel you’d like to
go?”

“I suppose they’d be real pleased,” said Miss Minota, after an
instant’s consideration, “if I didn’t attract so much attention.
But when you’re too big to go on the cars, like other folk, or pass
along the sidewalk without blockin’ it----” She shrugged her enormous
shoulders with a little air of fatigue, and the gentleman in evening
dress, who officiated as showman, gave her the signal to move.
“Good-afternoon!” she said graciously, and passed on.

But Mr. Lanter’s brain was surging with sympathy. “My gracious!” he
cried to himself, “is it possible that that splendid creature isn’t
happy?” A vague look of gentle melancholy was certainly floating on the
surface of those limpid china-blue eyes. He breathed through his nose
and clenched his fists, one of which already bore a proof impression
of Mr. Goter’s projecting front tooth. And the very next half-holiday
found him waiting at the side-door through which professionals found
entrance to the back scenes of Kneeman’s. One or two sallow, cropped
men in furred overcoats passed in, one of them in company with a
black-eyed, vivacious, middle-aged woman, who conversed with her
fingers, her shoulders, and every muscle of her face--and in whom Mr.
Lanter recognized Goter’s houri. Then a vehicle like a hotel-omnibus,
only taller and shinier, drawn by a pair of stout horses, pulled up by
the curb; two men, moustached, and dressed in a kind of buff uniform
faced with red (Mr. Lanter recognized it as the livery common to the
attendants of the Musée), got down from the box seat and opened the
omnibus door.... Mr. Lanter’s heart thumped wildly as a colossal foot
and ankle, appareled in a pink silk stocking and rosetted black satin
shoe, cautiously descended to the ground, and the rest of Miss Minota
followed by gradual instalments until the giantess stood upright on
the pavement, her nine feet of height handsomely accentuated by an
umbrageous hat, with a plume of nodding feathers which might have
served for the central ornament of a canopy of state. She inclined this
tremendous headgear in gracious recognition of Mr. Lanter. Mr. Lanter
took off his hat with his best manner, and boldly stepped forward.

A large pink flush invaded the giantess’s immense cheeks, previously
of a pale or dough-colored complexion. “Won’t you walk in a minute?”
she said, in a timid, fluttering way. Then, not without difficulty, she
went in at the side-door, Mr. Lanter followed, the attendants mounted
to their seats, and the large shiny omnibus drove away.

The sensation of moving and speaking in a dream bore heavily upon Mr.
Lanter as he followed the tall, stooping figure of the giantess up
a short flight of stairs and through what seemed to be a labyrinth
of winding passages, each of which seemed more dark and dusky than
the preceding one, and conveyed a stronger olfactory impression
of gas, mice, and turpentine. But the labyrinth ended in a vast
echoing chaos of shaky canvas scenes and machinery, which Miss
Minota introduced as the stage. The iron curtain that separated the
stage from the auditorium was down, and they stood together in the
midst of a heterogeneous jumble of properties among which Mr. Lanter
recognized the plank-and-ladder of the equilibrists, the gilded props
and rubber-covered block-tackle used by the tight-rope dancer, the
belled and ribboned saddles employed by the Centaur Family, and Miss
Minota’s mediæval throne, flanked by the gilded weights employed in her
exhibition of manual strength.

“Won’t you----” Involuntarily he pointed to the gaudy throne-seat.

“Well,” said the giantess, “I don’t know but what I will sit down--just
a minute.” Seated, her large round face and china-blue, rather foolish
eyes were above the level of Mr. Lanter’s as he stood before her.
Certainly, but for the suet dumpling pallor of her fair complexion and
a prevailing flabbiness, the result of insufficient exercise, Miss
Minota would have been good-looking. “I guess I ought to thank you for
being so polite!” she said, and her tone and accent were homely as
those of the New England village-folk among whom Mr. Lanter had been
raised. “I guess you thought I acted like I was silly just now; but
boys do scare me so.... If there’s one thing more than another I dasn’t
face, it’s a boy; and you bet boys know it, and lay along for me--the
nasty little things! So there’s another reason why I can’t go round
like other folks--even if the management wouldn’t object to my givin’
the show away!” She folded her immense hands upon her knees and looked
placidly at Mr. Lanter.

“But why should the management object, Miss--Mademoiselle?” asked Mr.
Lanter, standing, very red and stiff and embarrassed, at Miss Minota’s
knee, like a somewhat dull little boy about to say a lesson.

“Because once folks have seen me for nothin’, they’ll leave the
pay-place alone,” said Miss Minota. “It’s human natur’, take it how you
will. An’ I’m only Mademoiselle on the posters. My first professional
exhibitin’ tour was in the State of Minnesota, an’ that’s how I got
my professional name. My own name seemed kind of one-horse for a
poster--Quilt--Miss Hattie Quilt of Smartsville, New Hampshire, I was
when I lived to-home.”

“I’ve been to Smartsville,” said Mr. Lanter eagerly, as though it were
a bond. “It’s only forty miles from Saunderstown where I was raised.
My mother, Mrs. Lanter, she lives there now. And Quilt’s a name I’ve
heard.... There was old Deacon Quilt that had the lawsuit----”

“I guess he was my grandfather!” said Miss Minota soberly.

Mr. Lanter tilted his head, trying to remember what the lawsuit had
been about.

“It was a suit about an iron bedstead,” said Miss Minota. “It’s ’most
ten years ago. Grandfather bought it for me, because I’d crowded
mother out of hers. We slep’ together till I was ’bout eleven years
old. Well, grandfather measured me himself for that bed, but it didn’t
get delivered for a month on end, and I’d growed beyond my measure,
and didn’t fit it, or it didn’t fit me. Mother tried to convince the
old man by showin’ him my frocks--she’d let ’em down eight inches
only four weeks back, an’ they was hardly on speakin’ terms with my
boot-tops by then--but he said on’y Jonah’s gourd growed at that rate,
an’ the dry-goods man must change the bedstead or he’d go to law. An’
the dry-goods man said rather than have legal trouble he’d change the
bed for a bigger, ’n he did; but the new one was six weeks in gettin’
delivered, and it was the same story over again--it didn’t fit me,
nohow! So grandfather went to law, an’ the case was tried in the
Smartsville court-house, an’ grandfather would ’a got damages if the
dry-goods man’s lawyer hadn’t asked to have me produced in court. It
was my first public appearance, an’ I was dretful shy. People used to
laugh at me bein’ so shy, but you’ve no idee what a tryin’ thing it is
bein’ bigger ’n anybody else--when you first find it out!” The large
form of Miss Minota was convulsed by a shudder. “You’d hide yourself in
a mousehole, if it was big enough to hold you. Well, they called Miss
Hattie Quilt, an’ I got up an’ straightened out, for I’d been settin’
cramped in a kind of pew, an’ it seemed even to myself as if I’d never
end. An’ the judge looked at me through his glasses. My! didn’t he
stare! An’ he asked how old I was, an’ I said ‘Risin’ twelve’; an’ the
judge allowed if I kep’ on risin’ I might get somewheres in time; an’
that a man with a granddaughter like that growin’ up about him ought to
provide india-rubber bedsteads an’ a sliding roof. An’ all the folks
laughed an’ grandfather had to pay sixty dollars damages an’ costs.”
Miss Minota’s gentle, monotonous, mooing voice left off talking; she
paused to draw breath.

“And then----?” said Mr. Lanter, in whose brain dim and faded hearsays
connected with the Quilt law-case were stirring.

“Then grandfather took a kind of down on me,” Miss Minota explained,
“though he’d set a deal of store on me before. An’ mother used to
beg me with tears in her eyes not to grow at that rate; an’ I tried
not--hard; but I kep’ on. I stinted meals an’ wore an iron pound-weight
on my head under my hat--but still I kep’ on. An’ at last grandfather
opinioned to father and mother it was time to let out the house--or to
let out me. So they hired me to Dan Slater--perhaps you’ve heard of
Slater’s Traveling Museum of Marvels--an’----”

“I should have thought they’d been ashamed!” burst out Mr. Lanter,
flushing to the temples. “Their own flesh and blood!”

“That’s what other people kep’ saying to grandfather, ‘your own flesh
and blood’!” returned Miss Minota. “But all grandfather ever said was
that there was more flesh and blood than he’d bargained for, and he’d
thank ’em to ’tend to their own affairs.”

“I don’t think he was a nice kind of man,” said little Mr. Lanter,
thrilling with indignation to his toes and finger-tips, “to send a
young girl away from her home and her mother--out into the world--among
strangers who might have treated her badly!” He looked up at his ideal
of womanhood with passionate chivalry.

“Oh, but they didn’t treat me badly!” said Miss Minota. “Dan Slater
was real kind. An’ when I outgrew the caravan I traveled in at first,
he telescoped two together--an’ as one of ’em had been made for the
giraffe, I got on pretty well. But I’ve never got used to bein’ made a
show of, an’ stared at, and asked questions by people, whether they’re
ordinary folks or Kings an’ Queens an’ Serene Highnesses--an’ I guess I
never will. Perhaps you wouldn’t believe it’s lonsome to be bigger ’n
anybody else--but it makes me feel so, times!”

“I wish I could prevent your feeling lonesome!” burst out Mr. Lanter,
before he was aware. “I wish I could carry you right away from
this”--he waved his hand comprehensively--“and take care of you. I
wouldn’t let a rough breath blow on you as I could help. I’d stand
between you and the world, and shelter you--I’d spend my life in doing
it--and spend it gladly!” He forgot himself in what he was saying, and
therefore did not blush, but his awkward, plain, and homely little
figure in its badly-fitting store clothes was a spectacle to smile
at. “Oh! if you knew all I’d thought and dreamed of since I saw you
first!” he said, with a quiver of passion in his voice. “It seems like
a dream to be talking to you here.... If it didn’t how could I tell
you straight out as I am telling you now, what I haven’t even had the
courage to write--that I--I----”

Miss Minota modestly reared her Alpine height from the mediæval throne
as a trampling of feet sounded from the dusty passage beyond. “I guess
I have got to go and dress,” she said modestly.

“Oh, please wait one minute!” pleaded Mr. Lanter. “You must know it, if
you never speak to me or look at me again. I think you the grandest,
most glorious woman I ever saw! I’m ready to die for you right now, if
the dying of a common store clerk would be any use! But it wouldn’t,”
said Mr. Lanter, “and so I must go on thinking of you, and worshipping
you, and loving you to the end of my days----” He broke down, blushing
and stammering.

“Oh, my!” cried Miss Minota. In her surprise she sat down again so
unguardedly that the mediæval throne creaked and tottered. “You don’t
mean it? Honest, you don’t?”

“I mean it with all my soul!” asseverated Mr. Lanter.

Miss Minota blushed a dull red all over her immense face, as she met
the young man’s rather ugly, candid gaze. Then her large china-blue
eyes brimmed over; she pulled from her pocket a cambric handkerchief
as large as the mainsail of a toy yacht, and began to cry like a
thunder-cloud.

“Don’t!” begged Mr. Lanter. “Please don’t! If you’re angry with me I
don’t know what I should do. I don’t, indeed!” He was dreadfully in
earnest, and quite pale, and large drops stood upon his forehead, for
the air in the Musée was insufferably hot and close. There was a smell
of charred wood and blistering paint, and the unsettled dust of the
place made the straggling rays of daylight that bored their way into it
seem blue and smoky. A sudden clamor of voices broke out below, almost
under the stage it seemed, and then came the trampling of feet, the
crash of broken glass, and the smell of some spilled chemical mingled
with the grosser odors of the place. The scent, the stir, the sounds,
seemed vaguely associated in Mr. Lanter’s mind with something dangerous
and sinister. But he was listening to Miss Minota.

“I ain’t a mite angry,” said the giantess, giving her overflowing eyes
a final dab with the handkerchief, now crumpled into a damp ball. “I
should hate to have you believe it! I--I think you’re real generous,
an’ kind, an’ noble. And I shall be grateful to you all my life”--she
mopped her eyes again--“for makin’ me feel--for once--like I’d been an
ordinary-sized girl; for I--I’ll own I have fretted considerable. But
there, when things can’t be altered, anyhow, it’s no good frettin’, is
it? An’, of course, there could never be nothin’ between us--I couldn’t
ever play it so low down on a man that’s as generous and kind as you
are, as to say there could be. But I’m just as obliged. And now I’ll
say good-bye, and if we don’t never meet again you’re to remember I was
grateful. My land! I do believe the show’s afire!”

For the crackling, blistering heat that parched the flooring underfoot,
with the sudden volume of smoke that rolled upward, betrayed the
condition of things no less than the thin tongues of flame that
licked upward between the boards. In the regions under the stage the
conflagration had broken out; they heard the shouts of the stage-hands,
the crash of glass fire-bombs breaking one after another, and next
moment a solitary man, smoke-blackened and red-faced, burst upward from
the regions below, and, rushing to the fire-hose, coiled like a brown
snake against the bare masonry of the wall, began to haul it down. As
the man tugged and swore at the hose, other voices shouted and other
feet clattered, and half a dozen other men, singed and blackened like
so many demons, emerged as the first had done, from those conjectural
lower depths.

“It’s no use--no use!” they shouted as they ran, and the fireman
dropped the hose and ran with them. They did not have to cross the
charring, blistering stage, for they were on the right side for the
passage-way. They fought and struggled, shrieking, in the narrow exit,
blocked by their terrified bodies.

“Come! Didn’t you hear?” shouted Mr. Lanter. He caught Miss Minota by
the skirt and tugged at it like a faithful terrier. “Run!” he shouted
again. But a choking volume of smoke, a blast of fiercer heat fanned
up from below. The boards of the stage were now in flames. And the
flames were of beautiful, ravishingly-delicate shades of blue and
hyacinth and orange-red. And they devoured where they licked with a
deadly greed and a purring, crackling kind of satisfaction.... “Come!”
Mr. Lanter shouted again. The giantess had sunk upon her knees,
he shook her violently by the shoulder, and she lifted her large,
terrified face and staring blue eyes, now for the first time upon a
level with his own.

“I dasn’t!” she cried. “The floor wouldn’t bear me--I should never
git across! Save yourself while you have time!” As she sobbed and
shuddered, Mr. Lanter put his arm round her, as though she had been
quite an ordinary-sized girl.

“Pluck up!” he shouted, for the fire roared as triumphantly as though
Kneeman’s Star Musée were the choicest morsel in the world. “I’ll get
you out of this or burn with you, by--thunder!” and he kissed her. The
kiss seemed to revive Miss Minota, for she gasped, and struggled to her
feet, and looked with him upon a wall of rejoicing flame that soared
upward between them and the passage-way. “These doors behind us--where
do they lead?” Mr. Lanter shouted, and Miss Minota shouted back, “To
the dressing-rooms!”

There was no way of escape before them; the iron curtain walled them
in. As the slim greedy tongues of fire began to lick the boards on
which they stood, they retreated to the back of the stage. But the
stifling smoke and the greedy fire followed them, and the end of things
seemed not far off.... It seemed quite natural now that they should be
holding hands. They were blackened both, and smoke-begrimed, parched
and giddy with the terrific heat, and the incandescent air fanned on
their smirched faces as though the wings of Azrael had stirred it; but
they were a comfort to each other. To be heard by each other in that
fiendish tumult of insentient things was impossible; but they pressed
close to one another like children in the smoky dark, and held one
another’s hands.

“I don’t know as I’d choose to have things different,” said a grip of
Mr. Lanter’s; and the answering squeeze of Miss Minota’s large hand
said, “Thank you for helping me to die so like an ordinary-sized girl!”
But the hand she pressed seemed to melt in hers and slip away, and,
groping downward in the dun-colored smother, the giantess touched the
senseless body of Mr. Lanter lying at her feet. And then she gave a cry
of love and grief and anger mingled, as an ordinary-sized woman might
have done--and lifted her lover from the blistering floor as though he
had been a baby. The smoke seemed less dense a few feet beyond where
she stood, and, moving forward with Mr. Lanter held upon one arm, the
other outstretched gropingly, Miss Minota bruised her knuckles against
a wooden door. It was the high, narrow door of solid, iron-clamped
timber (usually situated at the back of the scene-dock), by which
scenery and the more bulky properties were hoisted up to or removed
from the stage of Kneeman’s Musée. In the joy of the discovery Miss
Minota cried out. Then she laid down Mr. Lanter very gently on the
floor, and fumbled for the door-bolts. But the door opened by a winch
and lever, and Miss Minota fumbled in vain. A chill despair seized her.
He lay so helpless and inert at her feet that he might have been dead!
“O Lord!” Miss Minota prayed, “where’s the use in You havin’ made me so
much bigger than other folk if I can’t save him? Help me to do it, and
I’ll never go back on You by grumblin’ at my size any more!”

A dizziness overcame her, she reeled and staggered against the side
wall of the scene-dock, bruising her knee against something that fell
with a dull, reverberating crash. It was a solid bar of iron used by a
professional athlete in a weight-lifting exhibition, and it might have
weighed a hundred and sixty pounds. The crash of its fall brought Miss
Minota to herself. She stooped, and found and lifted it, and exultant,
for the first time, in the stature and the strength that marked her
out and set her apart from her ordinary-sized sisters, the giantess
attacked the door. One battering blow from the weapon wielded by those
tremendous arms, and the hinges started and the stout planks split; a
second, and a plank crashed splintering outward; a third, and a shout
went up from the crowd assembled in the street below, as, amid volumes
of escaping smoke, the begrimed and fire-scorched figure of Miss Minota
appeared, carrying the insensible body of Mr. Lanter in her arms.

       *       *       *       *       *

“Well,” said Madame Lanter, the Colossal American Marvel, some months
later, to an interviewer specially despatched from the office of the
_Boston Magpie_, “I guess you know what happened after that!” She
blushed a little, being yet a bride, and coyly turned her wedding
ring, a golden circlet of the dimensions of a baby’s bracelet, upon
her colossal finger. “We brought him to, and then _he_ brought it
off. Flesh an’ blood is flesh an’ blood, an’ we all have our weak
p’ints!--and if I did lay out never to marry a man as I couldn’t look
up to--I guess it would take half a dozen of my size, standing on each
other’s heads, to equal the loftiness of Mr. Lanter’s mind!”

The young man thus eulogized presented to the reporter’s view a spare
and rather undersized personality, plain of feature, and awkward
of manner, drawbacks afterward transmuted by the magic touch of
the stylographic pen into “_slightness, unpretending elegance, and
unaffected simplicity. The beaming affection discernible in the glance
he turned upon his stately bride justified the eulogistic terms in
which that lady spoke of her husband. Their brief but thrillingly
romantic courtship, with its strikingly sensational ‘dénouement,’
created a ‘furore’ when detailed by the New York press. The
disinterested nature of the attachment of Mr. Lanter (who is a member
of one of our oldest New England families) to the superb specimen of
American womanhood who bears his aristocratic name may be gathered
from the fact that the marriage ceremony was some weeks old before
Mr. Lanter discovered that Mrs. Lanter had amassed, during the period
of time spent by her in exhibiting her personal developments in the
principal cities of Europe and the States, a fortune of ninety-five
thousand dollars._”

And in this final statement the stylographic pen distilled pure truth.




HOW THE MISTRESS CAME HOME


The avenue of lofty elms was veiled in a white fog; upon the low-lying
parklands, cropped meadows, and sere stubble-fields, the same woolly
vapor lay dankly. But the square windows of the fine old Tudor
manor-house flashed with ruddy light, and the hospitable hearth-fires
of the hall diffused glow and radiance through open doors. Sir Vivian
and Lady Wroth were coming home after a honeymoon of eight months’
duration spent in scampering over the face of the habitable globe; and
the village was in a state of loyal ferment over the advent of the lord
and lady of the manor. Already the local band, heavily primed with
home-brewed, was posted at the station in readiness to burst into the
strains of “See the Conquering Hero” upon the arrival of the London
express. Eight sturdy laborers, in clean smock-frocks, waited, rope
in hand, for the opportunity of harnessing themselves to the bridal
brougham, while Venetian masts, upbearing strings of flags and fairy
lanterns, testified to the strength and temperature of popular goodwill.

“A sweet pretty creature, ’m, I hear!” said Mrs. Ansdey, the
white-haired, handsome, black-silk-clad housekeeper to the Rector’s
wife, who had driven up to the house to ask for a cup of tea, and leave
a parcel addressed to the new mistress of the manor, containing three
dozen very raspy cambric handkerchiefs, hemmed and initialed by the
Girls’ Sewing Class at the National Schools.

“Quite a picture, Sir Vivian’s valet said!” added the butler, who was
comparatively young, not being over sixty, and therefore looked down
upon by Mrs. Ansdey from her vantage of fifteen summers.

“Beauty is grass!” said the Rector’s wife, who was not overburdened
with the commodity. She was a long, thin, high-nosed woman, with color
distributed over her countenance in little islands. She drank her
tea, and toasted her large, useful feet at the glowing wood-fire, and
praised the Sally Lunns.

Her reverend partner was down at the village reading-rooms, rehearsing
the shrill-voiced school children in the “Greet Ye To-night, Thrice
Happy Pair,” chorus from _Lohengrin_. She knew the quality of the cocoa
to be obtained there, and longed to share with him the hospitable
burden of Mrs. Ansdey’s silver tray. But as this amicable division of
spoil was manifestly impossible, the Rector’s wife consoled herself
by making a clean sweep. And so she ate and drank and chatted to the
not displeased Mrs. Ansdey with unflagging vigor, while the famous
Reynolds portraits of departed ladies of the manor smiled and simpered
from the shining paneled walls, and the gray-muzzled bloodhounds, last
of a famous race and favorite of the last Baronet, snored upon the
leopard-skin hearthrug.

“You have had many visitors this season?” queried the Rector’s wife,
with a calculating glance at the donation box, the contents of which
went to the Cottage Hospital twice in the year.

“Troops of them,” returned the housekeeper, nodding her lace lappets.
“And, as usual, half of ’em with American twangs. Even if they didn’t
talk through their noses, I should guess ’em from the States, shouldn’t
you, Mr. Cradell?”

“Without doubt, ma’am,” rejoined the butler. “There’s a feverish
anxiety to get the greatest amount of information in the shortest
possible time, and an equally ardent determination to finger what isn’t
meant to be fingered, price what can’t be priced, and buy what isn’t
for sale, which, to my mind, is a trademark distinguishing the bearer,
male or female, as hailing from the other side of the Atlantic.”

“Even if he didn’t call me ‘marm’--if he’s a man and middle-aged, and
put American dollars in the box instead of English half-crowns if he
happens to be a lady,” continued Mrs. Ansdey. “But what I will say is,
if it was with my latest breath, that the young ladies are most elegant
and have a real appreciation for old and what you might call romantic
things,” she added somewhat hastily; and the Rector’s wife said, as she
added sugar to her fourth cup:

“The new Lady Wroth is an American, I have always understood.”

“Born in Washington, but edicated in Paris,” said Mr. Cradell, putting
a fresh log of apple-wood upon the glowing fire at the lower end of the
hall.

“She comes of a fine old family, we have always understood,” said
the housekeeper, smoothing her lace apron with her plump white
hands. “Rutherfoord her maiden name was, and with her beauty and her
jewels--for her late papa was a Senator, besides being what I’ve heard
called a Railway King--she created a sensation when she was presented
by the Duchess of Balgowrie last May but one.”

“As to her style of good looks,” said Mr. Cradell, dusting lichen from
his coat, “Sir Vivian was always partial to dark beauty. ‘What is she
like?’ says he to me when I took the liberty of asking, as an old
servant may. ‘A black pearl, Cradell, and I hope to wear my jewel in
my bonnet as my ancestor Sir Guy wore Queen Elizabeth’s ruby--until the
day I die!’ He’d a light in his eyes when he said it, and what with
love and happiness and all, he looked more like a boy of twenty-three
than a man of forty. And I said to Mrs. Ansdey, ‘If ever there was
a love-match,’ I says, ‘Sir Vivian’s is one.’ And now the carriage
is waiting at the station to bring home both the master and the
mistress--bless them both!”

“She wrote to me from Mentone,” went on Mrs. Ansdey, “and I truly
call it a pretty thought, and a gracious one, of me that have been my
master’s nurse, and held him on my knees when he picked out bounding
‘B’ and curly ‘Q’ with an ivory crotchet-hook.” She produced from a
morocco pocketbook, of solid and responsible appearance, a letter
written with violet ink on thin, foreign paper, in delicate upright
characters. “‘_My husband has told me of all your faithful service and
true devotion to him and his_,’ she read; ‘_and I hope before long to
take your kind hand in mine and thank you for him and for myself!_’
There now!”

“Gracious and graceful too,” said old Cradell, who had beaten noiseless
time to the reading of the young mistress’s letter with one wrinkled
finger on a withered palm. “Good breeding there--and old blood--in
every line!”

“And she looks forward to seeing her husband’s dear old English home,”
went on the housekeeper, “and prays God to give them many days in it
together--and I trust He will!”

“Let us hope so, for all concerned!” said the Rector’s wife, who
resented theological references as trenching upon her own particular
province.

“Though in this family it’s been like a fate, or a doom, or whatever
you might please to term it,” said Mrs. Ansdey, “that the course of
true love, the deeper it was and the truer it was, was always to be
broken--not by change or faithlessness of one that loved, but by the
hand of death. There was Sir Geoffrey and Lady Euphrasia--hundreds
of years back--that were drowned crossing the ford on the ride home
from their baby’s christening and the baby lived to be Sir Launcelot,
whose bride was carried off by the Black Death before the roses on
her wedding garland were withered.... And then there were Sir Alan
and Sir Guy, who were both killed in battle within a year of their
weddings, and Sir Vivian’s great-grandfather, old Sir Vivian, found
his young wife dead at her tapestry-frame when he’d crept up quiet to
surprise her with his unexpected return from the Embassy to Rome. And
Sir Vivian’s own dear mother lived but a very few years after the dear
child came to comfort her for his father’s early loss. But time goes
by, and the curse--if it be a curse, as they say it is, brought upon
the founder of the family for some secret deed of evil--the curse may
have passed over, or worn itself out. What’s that?”

“What’s what, ma’am?” asked the butler, as Mrs. Ansdey rose in her
rustling silks and made a sign for silence.

“I fancied I heard a timid kind of tap on the hall door,” said the
housekeeper.

“A robin blew against it, perhaps,” said the butler. “They’re stupid
with the frost.”

“There was a footstep too,” said Mrs. Ansdey, holding up her hand and
making her old-fashioned rings gleam and twinkle in the firelight. “At
least, if there wasn’t, Mr. Cradell, I admit I’ve been deceived!”

“We’ll see, we’ll see!” said Cradell, moving to the great oaken door.
“It may be a tramp.” The handle turned, the massive oak door moved
inward. The fog had thinned, it had grown clearer beyond doors. Within
the frame of the massive lintels appeared the glimmering stone steps,
a segment of the formal garden, with its black Irish yews, pale marble
urns, and cartwheel beds of late flowers, enclosed within borders
of box. Beyond the trees reared a somber barrier, shutting out the
sky, and the chill wind of winter drove the dead leaves in swirls and
drifts across the melancholy picture. The Rector’s wife, thinking of
her walk across the park to the Rectory, sniffed and shivered, and the
housekeeper motioned to the butler to shut the door.

“For I was mistaken, as you see, and there’s not a living soul about,
unless it’s skulking in the shadow of the trees,” she said. “Another
cup of tea, or a drop of cherry-brandy, ma’am, to keep the bitter
air out as you walk home? Though there’s no reason you should walk
when there’s the pony-chair.... Or perhaps you would rather----” She
started. “Call me nervous, or finical, or what you like,” she said,
peering anxiously through her gold-rimmed spectacles in the direction
of the door. “But, if I spoke with my dying breath, there was a tap,
and then a pause, and then another tap, as plain as plain could be!”

“Dear me!” The Rector’s wife, alarm in her eyes and crumbs on her
chin, rose from her chair, dropping her imitation sable boa. “I really
believe I heard it too!... Had you not better----?”

Cradell shook his old head and clucked softly with his tongue. “The
ladies must always have their way!” he said, shuffling on his neatly
polished shoes toward the hall-door. He opened it, and both the
housekeeper and the Rector’s wife uttered a simultaneous exclamation
of surprise.

For a woman was standing in the moonlight outside. She was of slight
form, and wore a wide-brimmed feathered hat, and the heavy shadow of
the portico fell blackly over her, so that she seemed no more than a
silhouette with a pale glimmering background. But a delicate perfume
stole upon the senses of those who, from within, looked out at her, and
when she moved there was the unmistakable frou-frou of silken linings.

“Ma’am!” the butler began.

“I came on before,” a sweet plaintive voice said--a voice that was
viola-like in its rather thin, but sweet and vibrating quality. “And
you must be Cradell.”

“_Ma’am?_” the old servant said again, while the Rector’s wife and the
housekeeper listened with strained anxiety.

“I am Lady Wroth,” came in the clear, vibrating tones. “I came on
before.... It does not matter why. There was a slight accident between
Greystoke Station and the Elvand Tunnel. Do not be alarmed. Sir Vivian
is safe, quite safe,” she went on, as agitated exclamations broke from
the three listeners. “Indeed only one person was killed, though two or
three are injured, and he--my husband--is helping the sufferers. He is
always like that, so ready to help, so full of sympathy....”

She was now standing in the firelight, whose ruddy glow illumined the
slight figure, and drew gleams of crimson and emerald from the jewels
at her throat and shone in the depths of her great dark eyes. Her face
was of delicate, pearly paleness, her hair had the tints of autumn
leaves, and her draperies, too, were of the tints of autumn. She drew
off a glove, and her wedding ring, with its diamond keeper, showed upon
the slight and pretty hand, as her traveling mantle of velvet trimmed
with costly sables fell to the floor.

“Oh, your ladyship!” cried the housekeeper. “What must you think of
us--standing here and staring? But as goodness sees us--what with your
sudden coming, and the news about the accident, and all--we’ve lost our
heads, me and Mr. Cradell!”

“So very alarming!” said the Rector’s wife. “I trust Lady Wroth will
excuse what may seem like an intrusion----”

“The intrusion is mine,” said the sweet viola-voice. “I should have
given warning of my coming, but it was not to be. Oh! the dear house!”
She looked with wondering, shining eyes upon the paneled walls, the
trophied arms, the noble pictures, and the quaint antique furniture,
and between her lips, of the faintest rose, her delicate teeth gleamed
like pearls, as her breath came quick and eager. “Vivian’s old home ...
Vivian’s home, and mine!” she whispered to herself, and laid a hand
upon her heart, as though to check its beating.

“I will not intrude,” said the Rector’s wife. “I will hope for
the pleasure of calling, with the Rector, at a more fitting time.
Good-night, Lady Wroth.”

The Rector’s wife had held out her large hand in its cheap glove, but
the new mistress of the manor only smiled upon her with vague wistful
sweetness, and did not touch the massive extremity. Whereupon its owner
set down Lady Wroth as “proud,” and made a mental note to tell the
Rector so, as her large feet carried her out of the house and out of
the story.

The two old servants exchanged a glance as the slight figure of their
mistress moved across the polished floor, strewn with Oriental rugs and
skins of wild beasts.

“Would my lady wish to go to her room, or to have some refreshment in
the dining-room?” the housekeeper asked.

My lady declined.

“I have no need of anything. I only wish to rest a little and see my
husband’s home before starting upon a journey,” she explained.

“A journey? Dear, gracious me! And your ladyship just fresh from
travel, and shaken by an accident and all!” cried Mrs. Ansdey, shaking
her lace lappets.

“I am so used to travel,” said her ladyship, “though this is the
longest journey I have ever taken--or ever shall take!” She smiled upon
the two old people, and settled herself in the seat she had chosen,
and resting her elbow upon the arm of it, and her pretty chin in her
delicate palm, let her sweet shining eyes travel about the place. “All
as he described it, yes!” she whispered to herself. “The mullioned
windows with the coats of arms, the carved and painted ceiling, the
hooded Tudor fireplaces, the arms and the pictures.... That is the
great Gainsborough portrait of Sir Alan’s young wife, the girl who died
of grief when they brought her husband’s _bâton_ of Field Marshal to
her--won an hour before he was killed in battle. There is the painting
by Velasquez of the Wroth who was made Bishop of Toledo. That must be
the Vandyck of Lady Marjorie with the deerhound by her side, and there
is the Watts picture of Vivian’s young mother playing ball with her
boy. Ah! what a sweet, sweet child!”

The plaintive voice thrilled and trembled. Tears might not have been
far from the shadowy dark eyes, as Lady Wroth rose and moved to the
foot of the great staircase, attended by the housekeeper.

“Shall I show you your rooms, my lady?” Mrs. Ansdey began. “The fires
are burning beautifully, and everything is quite ready, and I feel
sure your ladyship must need rest after----”

“I will rest presently. But what I wish now, is to be shown the house,
if you are not too tired. Lady Audrey’s turret, and the paneled chamber
where Sir Roger fought the duel with the Spanish cavalier, and the
bedroom where Queen Elizabeth slept, and the banqueting-hall and the
chapel where the Templar’s heart is buried under the altar, and the
gallery where Lady Euphrasia danced with King Henry VIII., in masquing
dress, and the whispering corridor, and the painted room----”

“And the ghost-chamber, my lady? Oddly enough, that’s the first room
that American ladies ask to see!... But maybe your ladyship doesn’t
believe in ghosts, or the fact of its being late and getting dark----”

Lady Wroth laughed quietly and sweetly. “Do you believe that the
spirits of those who have passed on can only appear in the dark, dear
Mrs. Ansdey?”

The housekeeper rustled her stiff silken skirts as she followed her new
mistress up the broad staircase with its carven balusters and mossy
carpets.

“I don’t believe in ghosts at all, my lady!”

“Not in ghosts as they are commonly imagined; those shadowy white
things that point and scare and hover,” came floating back in the thin,
sweet tones; “but in the spirits of the departed--it may be long-dead,
or newly called from earth--who borrow for a little while the semblance
in which they lived and loved, and return for one last look at a
beloved home, or come for one dear glimpse of what might, but for the
Infinite Eternal Will, have been a home. You believe in them, do you
not? Or, if you do not now, you will! Ah, yes! you will, dear Mrs.
Ansdey!”

Looking upward from the hall, the butler saw the slight figure
of Sir Vivian’s bride traverse the first landing and pass out of
view, followed by the portly figure of the housekeeper; and in that
moment came the grind of wheels upon the avenue, a loud knock at
the hall-door, and a sharp peal at the bell. Two liveried servants,
appearing in haste, admitted the master of the house, and at the first
glimpse of Sir Vivian’s ghastly face and torn and disordered garments,
Cradell cried out in alarm.

“Sir Vivian--sir! It’s worse than what my lady said!... You’ve been
hurt! Shall I send for the doctor?”

“He is with us!” came the hoarse reply, and Cradell, peering out into
the chill, gathering darkness, saw a strange carriage drawn up before
the door, whose lamps threw a yellow reflection on the clouds of steam
rising from the flanks of a pair of jaded horses. They were busy
about the door; something was being lifted out? _What?_ asked the old
servant’s shaking lips dumbly.

“Drove in from Greystoke ... hospital carriage.... Send the men
to help.... Get me some brandy,” came from Sir Vivian in hoarse
shaking tones. “I can’t ... my arm ... dislocated, that’s all. I
wish to Heaven----” His face expressed the nature of the wish, and
the old butler cried with spirit, as he brought the brandy from the
dining-room. “You should be thankful, sir, that you’ve been spared to
her!”

“Spared to--her?”

The decanter clinked against the glass. Sir Vivian set it down upon the
tray, and turned a white, seamed face and haggard eyes upon Cradell.

“Spared to my lady, sir, God bless her!” the old servant said. “Your
hand shakes sadly; let me pour the brandy out.”

Sir Vivian laughed, or made a grimace of laughter, showing his teeth
and stretching his pale lips.

“Lord, sir! don’t look like that!” Cradell begged. “Think if her
ladyship were to see you! She----”

“If her ladyship were to see me!” repeated Sir Vivian. He drank off a
glass of brandy and laughed again. “Cradell--are you mad, or am I?”

“Neither of us, sir, I hope!” said Cradell. Then a light broke upon
him, and he cried, “Good gracious, Sir Vivian, is it possible that you
don’t know ... my lady is here?”

“I know it.” An awful agony was expressed in Sir Vivian’s face. “I know
it too well!” Great drops stood upon his forehead; he turned aside,
clenching his hand, and fighting for self-command.

“She came half an hour ago,” began the butler. “Me and Mrs. Ansdey were
quite took aback. Mrs. Ansdey is upstairs with her ladyship now....”

“Man--man!” cried Sir Vivian, “do you know what you are saying?”

He turned his streaming face upon the frightened butler and gripped him
by the arm, fiercely.

“Lady Wroth--my wife, she is dead! There was an accident--she was
killed instantaneously, with little pain, thank God! They said so at
the Greystoke Hospital.... She is outside--there!” He pointed a shaking
hand toward the partly open hall-door, through which a pale line of
moonlight came stealing as the careful, measured tread of men carrying
a precious burden sounded on the stone. “Yet you say to me--she arrived
half an hour ago! You are raving--or I am delirious!”

For answer the butler pointed to the velvet mantle trimmed with costly
sables that lay upon the floor.

“It’s heaven’s truth, Sir Vivian! And there lies the proof! ... and
here is Mrs. Ansdey to confirm it.”

Both men looked up as the portly figure in its rustling black silken
robes hurried down the great staircase.

“Sir Vivian! Oh, welcome home, Sir Vivian, a thousand times!” The
housekeeper’s face was very pale, her hands worked nervously, crumpling
her fine lace apron. “But something dreadful has happened! it’s written
in your face!” she cried, “and God forgive a sinful woman, but I am
beginning to believe that I have spoken with a spirit!”

“Cradell tells me that----” Sir Vivian made an upward gesture.

“It’s true,” cried Mrs. Ansdey. “Her ladyship--if ’twas her
ladyship--explained that you were delayed. Someone was killed in the
railway accident----”

“Someone _was_ killed!”

“And you were coming on after you had seen to the wounded.... She--she
would not eat, or drink, or rest; she wished--all she wished was to
see the house, and I obeyed, and we went through room after room
until--there was a ring at the hall-door bell, and a knocking, and
I turned to speak to my lady as we stood together in the painted
chamber--and she was gone! Oh, Sir Vivian, what does it all mean?”
cried Mrs. Ansdey.

“It means--that!”

As the hall-door opened to admit the bearers with their precious
burden, and as the men laid that cold, lovely, smiling image of Death
reverently on the settle, the bloodhound wakened from his slumber and
rising, uttered a long plaintive howl.

“Welcome home, my wife!” said Sir Vivian. “Now please to leave us here
together!”

So the servants and the bearers withdrew.

“It was the same face!” Mrs. Ansdey whispered, as her faithful old
comrade led her away. “Why did she come?”

Cradell said: “Because she’d made up her mind to--and she was a woman!
There’s two answers in one!”

He stooped mechanically to pick up the sable-trimmed mantle that had
lain upon the floor. No hand had touched it, but it was no longer
there.




THE MOTOR-BURGLAR

A DEVELOPMENT OF THE AGE OF PETROL


“A quite remarkable case of coincidence, dear fellars--a parallel
without precedent,” said Hambridge Ost to a select circle of
listeners in the smoking-room of the Younger Sons’ Club, “is that the
giant plate-burglary successfully accomplished at Lord Whysdale’s
shooting-box in Deershire on Tuesday last by a party of three polite
persons traveling in a large, roomy and handsomely-appointed pale
blue ‘Flygoer’ automobile, was echoed, so to put it--on Friday by
a colossal robbery at the seat of my cousin, Lord Pomphrey; the
defrauding persons being also, in that case, a trio of civil-spoken
and well-dressed strangers, occupying a light green ‘Runhard’ of
twenty-eight horse-power with a limousine body and singularly brilliant
nickel fittings. The _most_ remarkable point on one side, and one which
has given cause for the noisy derision of the _profanum vulgus_--do you
foller me?--being that Lord Pomphrey--I regret to add--assisted and
abetted by the humble individual now speaking, actually assisted the
thieves to get clear off with his property, includin’ an Elizabethan
beaker with a cover, out of which the Virgin Monarch graciously quaffed
a nightcap of the cordial called ‘lambswool’ when staying at The Towers
during a Royal progress in the year 1566, and a silver tea-kettle and
punch-bowl presented by the tenants on the late Earl’s coming-of-age,
with a cargo of other valuables, out of which I had the melancholy
privilege of rescuing one Queen Anne Apostle spoon.

“My cousin Wosbric, between attacks of his hereditary gout, is an
ardent golfer. Residing at his Club during the absence of Lady Pomphrey
and the family in the Tyrol, he takes every feasible opportunity of
cultivating his skill and renewing his enthusiasm for the game, the
intricacies of which, dear fellars, I may own I have never been able
to master. To me, when a large, cheerful, whiskered man, dressed in
shaggy greenish clothes, with gaiters, announces, rubbing his hands,
which are invariably encased in woolen mitts, that he has _taken his
driver twice going to the twelfth hole; did not altogether mishit
either shot, and yet was not up to the green, because the wind bore
down like a Vanguard omnibus_;--to me nothing wildly incredible or
curious has been said. The large man in the shaggy clothes is talking a
shibboleth I do not and never could understand, dear fellars, if I bent
my whole intelligence--considered by some decent judges not altogether
contemptible--to the task, until the final collapse of the present
Social System. But, nevertheless, Lord Pomphrey is partial to the
company of this humble individual upon his golfing days, and to me the
Head of my House--d’ye foller me?--in mentioning a preference issues a
mandate. Enveloped in a complete golfing costume of Jaeger material,
surmounted by two fur-lined overcoats, the pockets of the under one
containing two patent ‘keep-hot’ bottles of warm and comforting
liquids--coffee and soup--which aid to maintain the temperature
of the outer man at normal, before being transferred to the inner
individual--I manage to defy the rigors of the English climate and
support the exhaustion consequent upon indulgence in the national game
of North Britain. My walking-stick is convertible into a camp-stool;
the soles of my thick boots are protected by goloshes, a peaked cap
with flaps for the ears crowns my panoply; and, place in the mouth of
the individual thus attired one of Dunhill’s ‘Asorbal’ cigarettes,
each of which is furnished with a patent hygienic mouthpiece-filter
which absorbs the deleterious oil of nicotine, and catches the stray
particles of tobacco--d’ye foller me, dear fellars?--which otherwise
find their way into the system of the smoker--and the picture is
complete.

“The run by road from the Club doorsteps to Cluckham Pomphrey, where
the Fargey Common Golf-links equal any that our country can boast,
faithful copies of the eighteen best holes in the world having been
carefully made under the supervision of Lord Pomphrey--the run can be
made within four hours. We started. I had received the Fiery Cross from
my kinsman, so to put it, in a laconic note, running: ‘Golf to-morrow
if the weather keeps up and the gout keeps down.--Yours, Pomphrey.’
We started in a mild drizzle, at six-thirty. Our car, a ‘Rusher,’ of
twenty-six horse-power, with a detachable top and glass driving-screen,
behaved excellently. Driving through Cluckham, our county town--it
happened to be market-day!--we accidentally converted a lamb into
cutlets; but the immolated creature, as it chanced, being the property
of one of my cousin’s farmer-tenants, the casualty passed over with
fewer comments than generally ensue. Bowing to several well-known
yeomen and county land-holders, my cousin and myself alighted at the
Pink Boar, kept by an old retainer of the family, took a light but
nourishing ante-luncheon or snack of a couple of raw eggs beaten up
with whisky, and proceeded on our way to the Fargey Common Links.

“A mile from The Towers, whose picturesque battlements could be
descried, dear fellars, embosomed, as it were, in surroundin’ trees,
we encountered some motorists upon the road in quite a regrettable
plight. Their car, a large, light green ‘Runhard’ of twenty-eight
horse-power, was drawn up by the roadside;--quite an arsenal of
tools glittered in the wintry rays of the sun, spread out upon an
india-rubber sheet, and what had occurred was plain to the meanest
automobiling capacity. A tire had exploded after a long, stiff climb of
the steep hill, a notable feature in our county landscape--the descent
of which we were about to negotiate. And the spare tire, after being
attached, had proved to be leaky beyond repair.

“Fellar-feeling, dear fellars!--would have moved any fellar of you to
foller our example. We raised our hats, the three strangers in the
‘Runhard’ car politely returning the salutation; we offered aid, and
met with grateful acceptance. Larger than our own locomotive--the
‘Runhard’ wheels were of exactly the same diameter--the ‘Runhard’ tires
were ‘Fridolines,’ like our own. We offered our spare tire, it fitted
to a miracle. We were overwhelmed with the grateful acknowledgments of
its three polite proprietors.

“‘You will at least permit me to pay for the tire!’ pleaded the
gentleman who appeared to take the lead. As Lord Pomphrey refused, with
the courtly wave of the hand that distinguishes this thirteenth wearer
of the coronet, he continued: ‘For you do not know--you never can
know!--how inestimable a service your lordship has rendered us!’

“Wosbric was known, then. He elevated his eyebrows in polite surprise.
Not being able to discern the features of the strangers behind their
cap-masks and goggles, he could not recall ever having met them
before. Then the second polite stranger, who was even more polite than
the first, explained in a slight American accent the reason of his
companion’s recognition of Lord Pomphrey. ‘We have, like many other
tourists,’ he said, ‘recently enjoyed the privilege of going over your
lordship’s antique and noble family pile. In the hall, the feudal
stateliness of which especially appealed to me as an American citizen,
hangs a portrait of your lordship taken, in company with a gold-hilted
sword and a red velvet curtain, as Lord-Lieutenant of the County.’

“Lord Pomphrey bowed. ‘As Lord-Lieutenant of the County,’ I put in.
‘Quite so. The likeness is agreed to be a striking one. And as you have
viewed the other treasures of The Towers, I presume you did not miss
the large oak cabinet of Jacobean silver plate--magnificent and unique
as having belonged to Queen Anne of Denmark--which stands at the end of
the smaller library behind the large Chinese screen?’

“The polite strangers looked at me and then at Lord Pomphrey and then
at each other. A cloud passed over the bright intelligent eyes that
shone through their motor-goggles as they sorrowfully shook their heads.

“‘We missed that cabinet!’ said the first polite stranger, with a sigh.

“‘I guess we did!’ said the second.

“‘Just like wot I calls our beastly, blooming luck!’ sighed the third
stranger who was sitting in the car, and who, though polite, was not
in the least a refined sort of person. As all three of them seemed
unfeignedly depressed, Lord Pomphrey, who is the soul of hospitality,
begged them to return to The Towers, accept refreshment, and examine
under his personal superintendence, the magnificent contents of the oak
cabinet in the second library.

“‘We thank your lordship profoundly!’ said the first polite stranger,
bowing, ‘but we are unable to accept your invitation!’ He bowed again,
and got into the car.

“‘And we shall never cease to regret, I guess,’ said the second,
‘that we have missed the most valuable item of your lordship’s
collection of silver heirlooms. But we have garnered many precious
momentos’--it struck me at that moment that there were a great many
waterproof-covered bundles in the ‘Runhard’ car, and as he spoke he
patted one of these affectionately--‘of our visit to this country which
must serve to sweeten life for us when we are far away. And with these
we must endeavor to be content!’

“He too bowed, dear fellars, and got into the car. The machinery began
to splutter at a touch upon the lever.

“‘Let ’er rip, Cocky,’ advised the third stranger; ‘we ain’t got none
too much of a start with this yere tire a-busting. So long!’ he said,
and like an arrow from a bow, so to put it, dear fellars, the large,
light green ‘Runhard’ leapt forward and was out of sight in an instant.
We proceeded in the ‘Rusher’ toward our destination.

“Presently, dear fellars, we met two large, hot, county constables on
bicycles. They did not recognize us, so great was their haste. Their
large boots vigorously trod the pedals, their bulky, blue-uniformed
figures were crouched over the handle-bars as they pounded up the hill
from Cluckham Pomphrey. We wondered whither they might be going? We
questioned what agricultural breach of the peace, what local felony,
had spurred them to such an unusual display of energy. We found out.

“For at the next bend of the road, dear fellars, we encountered quite
a little cavalcade of hot and red-faced, or pale and panting persons.
The steward from Pomphrey Towers in his T-cart, the head-bailiff from
Pomphrey Towers on his cob, the coachman driving a light gig with two
armed grooms on the back seat, an excited mob of stable-helpers and
gardeners straggling along behind.... Even before they recognized us,
those in the van of the pursuers shouted to us, asking if we had passed
an automobile upon the road--a large, light green ‘Runhard’ containing
three men?

“In a few gasped sentences, dear fellars, the ghastly truth stood
revealed; the facts were laid bare to us. Pomphrey Towers had been,
to employ the expression of the bailiff, ‘cracked and burgled,’ only
an hour previously, of a quantity of silver articles and a mass of
valuable plate. Lord Pomphrey and myself had met the burglars upon the
road, had supplied them with the means of continuing their flight,
had entered into conversation with them, and returned their polite
farewells.

“We joined the pursuit, all thoughts of golf submerged in the bosom of
Lord Pomphrey, beneath the boiling lava-flood of rage and indignation.
To be robbed is bad; to be placed in the position of confederate to
the robbers, unknowing aider and abettor of their nefarious flight,
is maddening. The three polite individuals in the large, light green
motor-car have not, up to the present, been traced. One small spoon
of the Apostle-headed kind, found by the roadside where they replaced
their own deflated tire, with that so generously bestowed upon them by
Lord Pomphrey, is the only clue so far.

“A distressin’ experience, dear fellars!--confoundedly so in the
estimation of this humble individual. Thanks, I _will_ take another of
those long Dutch cigars and a Scotch, with Hebinaris’--the new mineral
water, do you foller me?--with iridescent bubbles that snap at your
nose. My love to you, dear fellars, and a Happy New Year!”




THE LOST ROOM


They were going to part at last--to separate quietly, but
formally--after a married life of nearly three years.

There was no Other Woman, even she was quite sure of that; there wasn’t
even the shadow of another man. He rather wished there were, with a
good solid six-foot personality to project it. He was so confoundedly
tired of conjugal life.

He had an old historic title, a large estate unencumbered by the
prodigalities of ancestors, unhampered by his own. She had inherited
from an American mother a large fortune and some of the biggest jewels
Tiffany had ever set. Their tastes were similar, their constitutions
robust, their tempers strong and healthy, their temperaments ardent
and enthusiastic, their moral and mental temperatures since the last
decisive meeting between the trustees of her property and his family
lawyers had been slowly descending to normal. Never, oh, never would
either of them put their heads again, they were determined, into
the noose of marriage! even if a _decree nisi_ should ever make it
possible. Because naturally, as time went on, she would meet somebody
she liked, he thought.... Because men were so constituted, reflected
she, that if a woman only told one of them often enough that he was in
love with her, he would begin to believe it.

They had used up all their capability for passion, devotion, and so
on, during their romantic wooing, their short but divine engagement,
and the incandescent eight weeks’ honeymoon that had followed the
wedding. They wanted to forget the world then, and be alone together;
and they got what they wanted, one April, one May, in that great old
granite-built pepper-box turreted Scotch mansion on the banks of the
silver Tweed.

It was heavenly, or at the very least Paradisaical. They wanted it to
be quite an old-fashioned honeymoon, so they did not go down by motor,
but by the Euston express. Ten hours of traveling, and then they got
out at a little gray station of a little Scots town with a dreadful
tweed-factory in it whose dye and grease terribly defiled the silvery
river reaches, and does so to this day--and drove through lovely woods
of larch and birch and hawthorn, just breaking into green leaf, to
Maryhouse, the cradle of the race from which she sprang, the unhappy
lovely Queen--whose great wrought gates of rusted iron, with the Stuart
shield of arms in faded gold and crimson and blue, would never be
unlocked again until a Stuart should reign once more upon the throne of
England.

The great avenue had been turned into park, and you reached the house
by the lesser way. It had a square courtyard, closed by another pair of
great wrought gates, and bears with ragged staves were on the pillars,
and even held up the antique scraper at the low-browed door, and the
knocker was the tiniest bear of all. There were no rooms to some of
the four hundred casements that winked out of the lichened walls. You
pulled the bear-handle of the house-bell, and it clanged up high out
of sight somewhere among the twisted chimneys and the great slants of
stone-tiled roof studded with pinky house-leek and gay with yellow moss.

Then the low, square, iron-studded door had opened, and two people had
gone in, to commence, among the tragic relics of vanished, forgotten
existences, their own new life together. Perhaps some sorrowful shadow
of failure and disillusion had fallen upon them from those old gray
walls. A week before they went there a piece of paneling had fallen
from the wall in the great hall, revealing in a niche behind it a
skull, and what else Time had left of the man who had suffered such a
tragic ending.

As I have said, the Deed of Separation had been formally signed by both
parties, their trustees and lawyers. She was beautifully free. She sang
a little song as her motor-victoria ran her homeward to the house which
he had no right to enter now, and she ordered the touring limousine to
be at the door very early in the morning before she ran upstairs.

She was as gay as possible. She told her maid, as she hummed the “Dream
Waltz,” to have a cabin trunk and a bag packed. Only these, because she
would be back in a week. She was only going to visit some old great,
quiet people in an old great, quiet house up North, who had been very
fond of society in their time, but now never even dressed for dinner.
She meant the fair murdered Scots’ Queen and the Kings who had dwelt at
Maryhouse, of course.

“Fancy that, my lady!” said the maid, thanking her own stars that she
was not to accompany her mistress. Many silken calves and much company
above and below stairs constituted the waiting-woman’s ideal of Life.

Well, the itinerary of the Great North road--that would take too long.
Behind the glass screen she sat, swathed in her sables, while the
taciturn, clean-shaven chauffeur made England spin by. She chose her
own road, the collieries were left behind in their smoke, the ruins
of St. Oswald’s Chapel of Ease were passed, standing gray and battered
on their battle-site. Serving-shields, where under the enchanted hall
sleep Arthur and his Knights, she saw before she lost the vision. She
slept at Carlisle, and went on next morning to Peebles, where Needpath
elevates its single fang above the salmon pool.

And so to Maryhouse, not even a telegram having been sent ahead of her.
She knew her dear friends, the owners of the place, were still abroad.
But there was always Mistress Dumphie, the old, old lady-housekeeper,
who had been born and reared and wooed and married, too, at Maryhouse.
Mistress Dumphie would take her in for a night, and if not--there was
an inn in the ugly little weaving village. The great limousine rolled
through the gates of the smaller avenue and over the bridge of the
Arbalestiers Tower, and stopped before the great, rusty crowned gates
of the sunny courtyard.

The larks were singing. The Quhair brook ran under the hazel-banks. Oh!
what sweet quiet after the roar of Paris and London and the dust of the
roads.

The rusty chain was pulled, the great bell clanged on the side of a
pepper-box turret ever so high overhead. Mistress Dumphie, in her
morn’s merino and black net cap, appeared behind the rusty grille.

“Guid preserve ’s a’! It’s the young lord’s leddy!” she said.

The “young lord’s leddy” came in. She was to stay. The chauffeur went
back to the hotel.

“I feel as though I should find something here,” said the “young lord’s
leddy,” “something that I have lost somehow. It is very odd!”

She wandered about the beautiful old house all the rest of the day.

“Here is the great oak window-seat where we used to sit together.
Here is the little stone parlor where we quarreled and made it up.
Here is the vast tapestried chamber, with the faded Stuart portraits
on the walls, that was my bedroom; and this smaller room, with the
acorn-shaped stone mullions and the ebony and tulip wood furniture, was
_his_!”

What fine days they had spent in those daisied avenues, under those
huge oaks. What wet ones under the old painted, diapered ceilings. The
wettest of all they had spent in looking for the Lost Room.

The Lost Room was a chamber that everybody knew of, but nobody ever
discovered. Counting from outside, you could be sure there was an extra
window, but go where you would about the hushed mysterious house, you
never opened a door that led into the Lost Room.

She supped in a little dining-parlor that those dead Queens had used
before her. She went to bed in the tapestried room. She slept well and
woke in the middle of the night with a great bell clanging in her ears.
She could not sleep after that. Lights flickered before her shut eyes
in the darkness.

“I _did_ hear a step on the staircase! I _did_ hear the shutting of a
door!” she said to herself, and got out of the great bed on the daïs
and put warm slippers on her white little naked feet, and threw on a
dressing gown lined with unborn Persian lambskin--such a cruel idea,
you know, but very fashionable. And she took her electric torch, and
unlocked the door noiselessly, and stepped out boldly into the wide,
dusky corridor.

She trod upon something soft, and repressed a scream. She held the
light downward and picked up a man’s dogskin glove.

“Ah, now I know that I am dreaming!” she said quite cheerfully. She
need not be afraid of mice or rats, because she knew that she was all
the time lying in bed in the big tapestried room. As for ghosts, she
wanted to see one frightfully--always had.

The door of the room that had been his was just opposite. Something
made her go in, on her noiseless dream-feet, carrying the dream-glove
in her hand. The dream went on quite as dreams usually do. She had gone
back to the sweet old half-forgotten honeymoon time.

“This is the night on which we had tiffed, and I was the first to make
it up!” She smiled and went in. It was just as she had expected. There
he lay, fast asleep in the big tapestry-hung bed.

She went up to the side of it, and pulled back the curtain without
waking him, and sat down, shading the light from the dear, handsome,
manly face, and devouring it with famished eyes. This was what she had
come seeking; some glamour of the old time; some sweet remembrance
unspoiled by anything that had happened since.

The jars, the disagreements, the quarrels had never happened.... She
was back in the old times, and he was not yet regretting his lost
freedom, but tightening the bond a little closer every day by words and
deeds of love.

This was the Lost Room, this dream-chamber where he lay. She was glad
to have come down to Maryhouse for this. Who would not take a journey
to find your old self and your old self’s self at the end of it, and
Love lying sleeping in the shadow of dear memories, ready to be wakened
with a kiss?

She stooped and gave the kiss. He started and awakened. He stared at
her, and the light of the old joy leaped into his eyes.

“Alice! You’re only a dream, I know, but it is better than the real
Alice, who grew to hate me. Oh! put your arms round me again! let me
have your heart on mine again; let both of us forget what a ruin we
have made of the life that we set out to make so sweet and fair!”

He caught her hands. The torch fell with a crash, and went out. The
dark was full of light, and warm, throbbing memories, and they were one
again. Just for a little while, only in a dream....

But day came through the diamond casements, laughing, and hand in hand
with Hope. There were tears and laughter in her train. Two real people.
No dream after all.

He had wanted to look at Maryhouse again, and had traveled down in the
express from Euston, hours after she had started. It was he who had
rung the bell in the night.

Mistress Dumphie had let him in and given him supper, and lighted the
old room for him. He had thought there was a curious twinkle in her eye.

The Deed of Separation, now waste-paper, may be had on application,
by any young, wealthy couple who are desirous, upon a sensible
arrangement, to part.




FATHER TO THE MAN

  _Being a Confidential Letter from the Right Hon. Viscount
    Tynstone, at the Rev. O. Gotobed’s, Eton College, to the Lady Mary
   Cliffe-Bradlay, ooo Wessex Street, Park Lane, W._


GOOD OLD POLL,--

It is awfully nice of you to be so fritefully sick about it--_i.
e._, my Getting Swished this Half, but fellows get Hardened to these
things at School. Hemming major says there is something in a rotten
poetry-book about a Divinity that shapes our Ends. I expect the beggar
who wrote it was trying to get round the Head for his own Reesons. Your
simpathy about the Ladies’ Plate is cumforting, but the Eton Eight
must give other Crews a chance sumtimse. So everyboddy says, and as
far as stile went our Fellowse boddies were better under controle, and
the whole Appearanse of the Rowing was up to the best traddishunse of
Eton. No. 7, Biggly-Wade, presenting a beautiful example of rithm and
elastissity; and Henson No. 4, simply being a Tower of strength. N. B.,
he is Captain of my Tutor’s and Has licked me awfully several timse, so
I am in a pusition to Judge.

While the Thames Cup was being slogged for I made up my mind to
Sacrifise myself for the good of my Fammaly, and drop into Lunch with
Mr. and Mrs. Le Moser, those Millionaire Friends of Mother’s, who she
said were such Howling Cads, and so anxhus to know me. They Had an A.1.
Motor-Launch, sedar-built, with plated fittingse and with salloons 4
and aft, and Green Awnings second on the Bucks side 2 Private Lawns
billow the Kingston Rowing Club. There were Moundse of Flowers, and
though lots of other awfully smart launches filled up the First Section
of the Bank before the Houseboats Began, where you, and Mother, and
the Girls were on Uncle Todmore’s _Roulette_, the Le Moser craft
collared the bikker for sumshuous splender. Regger minor of my house,
who is quite an awfully Brilliant umorist, made an eppigram about the
general Swellness of boats and launches billonging to people like the
Le Moser’s. He said: “On the Berks side there are piles only, and no
Booms. On the Bucks side there are _both_ Boomse and Piles.”

Regger was so awfully Pleased with himself for saying such a clever
Remark that I Had to Kick him to Tone Him down. He is Fritefully
litterary and Artistic, because his Father Has just Bought a Weakly
Illustrated Journal, and He is to Eddit it when He leaves Oxford; and
the Things he said about the akwatic Fairy Palaces bineath the Pine
treese and the Green-clad Hilly Vista, kombining to make up a Picture
uneek in its English beauty, and without Paralel in the sivilised World
were like hearing bitts read out of some Rotten Newspaper the day after
the Rigatta.

I had Not Had much Brekker, bicause our Boys’ Maid is quite awfully
spoons on Henson No. 4 of the Eight, and forgetse where she has Hidden
the Knives and Forkse to kepe Other Fellows from getting at Them. I
Found them in my Cricket Pads after I had Eaten eggs and Sausages with
my Fingers like one of those Prehistorick Beggers with Stone Hatchets.
So the Hospitallity of the Le Mosers was ixtremely Welcome. Mrs. Le
Moser was Frightfully Civil. She Had Diamond buttons on a White Reefer
Jacket, and Rows and Rows of pearls as big as Sparrows’ eggse. A White
Gangway, railed with gilt chains on posts with gilt Knobs, led to a
Markay on Shore, which was Decorated as a Medievil Banqueting Hall, and
there was a Footman in the Le Moser livery behind everybody’s chair.
The Dalmatian Band and the Castillian Minstrels Played, and it was an
awfully ripping lunchon, with everything you could think of to Eat and
Drink and lots more bissides. There were 4,000 Pot plants on Board, and
when it Got Dark the Fairy Litse looked awfully fine.

Mr. Le Moser was a ripping good Host, though his waistcoat and necktie
were frightfully loud, and he wares his Nails as long as the front ends
of a Pair of Swedish Skates. N. B., Perhaps it is to Rake in the Money
with? He told me that my Distinguished Father’s Name was Down as One
of the Directors of His New Company, and that He Hoped to have Mine
in a Few Years. He said the Risponsibilities of Rank were fritefully
tremendous, and never seemed to Notice how I kept Slogging into the
Champagne. He told me to keep the Cigarretts biside me, and offered me
a Partagga in a glass case, price 8s. 6d., which I expect comes to a
frightfully big price for a box of 100. I acsepted the luxurious Weed,
but Did Not Smoak it. (N. B., I have got it now, and Regger, who has
been swotting Pericles this half for English Classics, calls it “a
glorious casket stored with ill.” I can’t think what makes him.)

After everybody was stodged we went on Board the launch, and Miss Le
Moser--Mother is quite rite about her being a pretty girl, though her
Pater and Mater are such awful form, and her Pater doesn’t know how
to stop talking about the money he has Bagged on the Stock Ixchange,
and in other Places, the Diamond Mines in South Africa particularly. A
chap in the Guards who was on the launch said it was a well-developed
case of I. D. B., but Forgot to tell me what the Letters ment. He
said, “Josie would carry the pile” (Josie is Miss Le Moser), and that
if I was a sensible young beggar, and not a rotten Ass, I would see
where my own advantidge lay even before I left School for Sandhurst.
He went on about an infusion of Radical blood being a good thing to
mingel with the ancient Tory blue, and rather Valuable than otherwise
to one’s descendents, and said that to win a young and distinctly
decently-looking wife with a hundred and eighty thousand jimmies in
her wedding nightcap would be getting the Grand Slam in mattrimony. I
checked him a bit and asked him if he had Praktised what he jolly well
preached, and he twisted his mustash and said: “Unfortunately, no,
young ’un; as like a Good many other fellows, I Came under the Married
Women’s propperty Act before I was eighteen.”

Then he pointed out a weedy, long-legged Beggar with the ghost of a
red mustash and fritefully swagger clothes, who was making himself
tremendously nice to Josie Le Moser, and said he was the Son of Mr.
Joyd Lorge’s privite Secretary and an _enfant gâtày_ of the Liberal
Government, with a seat in the Lower House being kept warm for him
until he should come of age, and a lot more, ending up by asking me if
I was driving an Automobile and saw a Dog trying to Bite through one
of my Tyres, what I should do to the dog? I said I should Drive over
it, of course, which seemed to pleese him frightfully, for he tipped
me a sov, and then winked towards the Fellow who was showing his teeth
at Miss Le Moser and said, “Then, there’s the Dog, don’t you know!”
and went off to talk to a frightfully swell woman who called him to
come over to her. I should rather like to be like that Guardsman when
I go into the Army. His name is Gerald, for I heard the lady call
him by it; he is Lord Dennismore, and he was so jolly Respectful and
attentive to the lady, who wore quite a lot of vales and had heaps
of golden hair, though she was quite old, and a tremendously red and
white Complection, and a front figure that rinkled and bulged when she
stooped or sat down, that I thought she must be his Mother, until Mrs.
Le Moser told me she was the Duchess of Rinkhorn and his great friend.
What I said about the Duchess being his mother seemed to amuse Mrs. Le
Moser like mad, for I Heard her tell quite a lot of people, and they
All yelled, as if I had been trying to be funny, which I was Not.

She told me lots more About Lord Dennismore, which made me feel beastly
proud of his having talked to me, and given me Advice. He was out with
his battalion in the South African War, and did splendid thingse at the
Front, and got speshally mentioned in Despatches, after Jaegersfontein
and for Rescewing twenty wounded Tommies who had fallen in the Grass
which the liddite from the shells had set on fire--I think it was
liddite. And he got potted in the Shoulder, and was getting quite fit
again, and would have done a lot more fiting if the Duchess hadn’t
come out in a Speshul Hospital ship and carried him back “to England,
Home and Duty,” as a lady who was listening to Mrs. Le Moser put in. I
think it was jolly mean of the Duchess, don’t you? As if a chap could
be properly grateful for being muffed like that! I forgot to say that
Lord Denismore, when a little chap, was Father’s fag at school, and
used to field for him when stump cricket in the passage in wet weather
first came in. And he, Lord Denismore, was picked to Play in the School
Eleven when he was still only a Lower Boy, and was Captain for a half
before he left. And I feel awfuly Glad I met him, but I wonder why he
said that about coming under the Married Women’s Property Act before
he was eighteen? There is a Duke of Rinkhorn, who goes about in a Bath
Chair with a Nurse in a white cap and apron to feed him and blow his
nose when it wants it, so Perhaps the Duchess is the married woman he
meant after all.

I must say Josie Le Moser seemed to like me talking to her and
explaining things more than she seemed to when the weedy chap with the
ghost of a red mustash was trying to. After the phinal of the Diamonds,
when the Crowds began to thin, and later when the Twilite came down
and the Nats came out, and the Le Moser’s launch and their markay were
elluminated up with about twice as many Fairy Lites as anybody else
had, and the Castillian Minstrils played splendidly on their mandalins,
I began to think her an awfully pretty girl. I don’t believe it was
the crême de Menth her Pater had made me have with my coffy after
Lunch and the Champagne, or the Russian rum they sent round in little
dekanters, with the five o’clock tea, because the fellows say my Head
is frightfully strong. But I got her hand and squeezed it a lot of
times, and whenever the sucking M. P. edged a word in, and he tried to
keep in Josie’s pocket the Most of the time, I wanted to fit him, and
I think He guessed it from my Manner. He let Out He had been Edducated
by Private Tutors at Home because his constitushion was dellicate as a
Boy, and I said “Oh!” and I think Josie began to feel him rather in the
way after that. His name is Wenham-Biggs, and I xpect his Constitushion
is giving him a lot more trouble by now.

The thing happened like this. I had only leeve till 7.30, but Mr. Le
Moser asked me to stop and Dine, and I thought I could work the squash
at the Station, and being three tranes late for an extra 2 hours so
consentid with thanx, as it is a Poor Heart that Never rejoices, as
Regger says. Josie and Me were up in the Bows where there is just Room
for 2, and Wenham-Biggs was sitting on the Steersman’s Box rubbing
his chin against the Wheel, to make his Beard grow I suppose, and
Getting more Sickeningly Sweet and Centimental in the things He was
saying to Josie every Minute. I call it Nerve to go on like that with
another fellow nearly as old as yourself listening to every Word. At
last he Said he was ready to Die for the Woman he Loved--I like that,
don’t you?--Whenever she asked the sacrafice, and I said it would be
the Leest he could Do, if she had an objection to a red mustash. It
must be being so much with Regger makes me bat off these Things I
xpect. Wenham-Biggs was perfeckly wild, and Josie giggled so mutch
that she Forgot she was Close to the Edge and the Rubber mat slipped
or something, the Launch being polished like a Looking Glass, and she
went plump into the River, and it is pretty Deep on the Bucks side, and
there is a good deal of Streem.

I was Glad of all the Swimmers I had gone in for at Cuckoo Weir. I
was Beestly sorry about my Swagger Flannelse and my new colors I had
sported for the 1st time; but of corse I had to go in after Josie and
thogh I don’t suppose I showed much skill, People made an awful Row,
crowding to the Bullarks, and throwing life-boys and cork fenders at us
like ennything. Mr. Le Moser kept offering rewards in lbs. and making
it ginnies, and Mrs. Le Moser had histerrics in Lord Dennismore’s arms,
which shows she was not quite unconshus because He was the best-bread
and best-looking man of the Launch-party.

What price your Little Brother when Me and Josie were Hauled up into
the Launch all over pslime and Duckweed. Everybody Shook Hands with Me
and said things that Made me Tingal all Over, and all the Women kept
kissing Josie who they took away and put to Bed. Mr. Le Moser lent me a
Change of his Thingse. O crumbs! if you Had seen me in them ispeshally
the Wastecoat and the etsetras with stripes down the Legs. And he rote
me a letter to Take back to my Tutor, and left it ungummed. And the
things He said about my Pluck and Daring and his Eternal obbligation
made me feel quite Shy when I read them going back in the last trane.
There were two other Lower Boys in the carriage, and besidse them, a
Fellow of my house who is One of the Swells of the Sixth Form, who was
awfully annoyed at being obbliged to travel with us.

The Butler was sitting up for us at my tutor’s, and everyone Else in
Bed, as it was past 12, when we Got Back, but beyond a Slite Cold in
my Head the Risults of the Outing were Not Paneful, my Letter putting
Things in an awfully good light, which made the Other Fellows rather
envious thogh they were let off with midling paenas.

I Forgot to say Mr. Le Moser tipped me £100, which will come in very
usefull. Also I am to try and get leave to go and Spend the Day at
their Place at Staines next week, and they will send me Home in one of
their motor-carse. Xcuse Spelling and mistakes as my Cold is making me
Sneaze pretty Frequently, and with love to Mother, and all at home.

                                          Bilieve me,
                                                 Your loving Brother,
                                                                   TOBY.

P.S.--You Never saw a Fellow with plenty of conceat and Nerve about Him
look as small as Wenham-Biggs when Lord Dennismore asked Him why He did
not Dive in after Josie too, and he Had to own up He Could not swim a
Stroak. What price private Tutors and being Edducated at Home?

       *       *       *       *       *

P.P.S.--I saw Josie before I came away, and Mrs. Le Moser kissed me,
which was horrid, and so did the Duchess and Several Other Ladies, and
then they told Josie to and she did and gave me a little Diamond Duck
to wear on my watch chane. N.B.--I think I see myself doing it and
getting fitted by my fagmaster for side.                              T.

       *       *       *       *       *

P.P.S.S.--Lord Dennismore neerly rung my hand off when I said Good-bye,
and said, “You’ve tumbled in for a good thing, you lucky little beggar,
and I’m ½ inclined to billeve....” And then he left off without saying
What. But he tipped me 3 soverins more, and asked me to come and
lunch with Him when Next he is on Duty, and you bet I said delighted
thanks....                                                            T.

       *       *       *       *       *

P.P.P.S.S.S.--As my Fagmaster seemed inclined to be Nasty about my not
getting Up in Time to Fill his Bath and make his tost and cofy in the
morning I gave Him Mr. Le Moser’s 8s. 6d. Partagga in the glass case.
First he bitt the end of the case off and it neerly choaked Him, and
then He had a lot of trouble in getting it to Lite, and before it was
½ through he had a lot more trubble of a different kind. (N.B.--Ask
mother if it would Not be a good Thing for me _i. e._ marrying Josie
Le Moser when I am of Age? I shall be fritefully poor and she will be
awfully Rich, so her Father and Mother would not matter much. Also it
would be Better than coming under the Married Women’s Propperty Act at
18, like poor Dennismore!)                                     TYNSTONE.




THE FLY AND THE SPIDER

  _Being a Confidential Letter from the Right Hon. Viscount Tynstone,
    on board the Yacht “Spindrift,” Cowes Roads, to the Lady Mary
    Cliffe-Bradlay, Silversands Park, Sussex._


                                                   TUESDAY, _August --_.

GOOD OLD POLL,--

I thought you were Rotting about Lord Dennismore and the Duchess at the
baginning of your Letter, but your Locking him up in the Peech House
was a Stunning Lark. The Duchess must Have been in a Regular Wax, and
He must have been Fritefully Wild, only you can’t Hit a Girl, they are
so Soft and Go down so Easily.

Uncle Todmore Has the Usual Yacht Party for the Rigatta, and the old
_Spindrift_ looks A.1. painted white with a new Copper Rail and a New
Sett of Lifeboyse, etc. I asked Uncle Todmore How Much it had Cost, and
He Heeved a Sigh, and said sufficient to the Day was the evil Thereof,
so I xpect it comes to a Lump, and He and Aunt Honoria will Have to
spend the Winter down at that Beestly Place of His in Devonshire
instead of Going to the Riviara or Egipt this time.

I said He Had the Usual Party on Board; but there are Two New People--a
Captain Clanarthur, late of the Malta Artillery, a Man who Parts His
Hair Down the Back, and Wares a Gold Braselet on his Left Wrist, and
his Wife. Mrs. Clanarthur is a simply Fritefully pretty woman, with
Long Black ilashes that Curl at the endse, and Eyes you Cant tell the
right Colour of, never Being the Same Twise Running. Aunt Honoria is a
Great Friend of Hers. And she Wares a Silver Belt with her Ruff weather
Serge Gown that was a saint Bernard Dog’s Collar--so you may immagine
How Small her waste is. She says I am a Mear Boy, and Ought Not to
Notice Such Things; but I shall be Sixteen in September, and lots of
Our Fellows at My Tutors are in love. Greening Minor, Who is a Regular
Shrimp, regularly rites verses To the Barmade in the Slough Station
refreshment room. First class--I mean the Refreshment Room, not the
Verses. One Poem bigins--

  “How Nobly Does Thy Fair Form Tower,
    Whenare I Gaze On Thee.
  I Wish thou Wert a Lilly Flower,
    & I a Hunney Bee.”

Which is Not Half Bad for a Lower Boy. And Regger is Secretly ingaged
to his Sisters Jerman Guverness, who is 30 if a Day. She Has Promised
to Wate for Regger, who is a Year Older than Me, and simply awfully
Divoted to Her. She Makes Splendid Gingerbred with Nuts in it, which
will come in Usefull if Regger’s Pater Cuts Him Off with a Shilling.

Mrs. Clanarthur’s Christian Name is Ermengarde, but Her Friends call
Her Nini for short. The Divise on Her Note Paper is a Gold Spider in
a silver Web, and she Wares a little Broach with a Diamond Spider in
a Gold Web. She keeps on Telling me she is Not Young, but That must
be All Rot, because She is so mutch moar Girlish than the 2 Girls on
Board. They are the Pope-Baggotes, and Lady Jane is Fatter than ever.


                                                              WEDNESDAY.

I can’t Immajin Why Mrs. Clanarthur ever married such a regular Scug as
Captain Clanarthur, though she Says she was a mear Child, and did It
to Pleese Her Family. They have been 10 Yearse married, so if she was
so young at the time she cannot be as old as she says she is. She says
she Had Her Hair Done up and wore Long Skirts For the first Time on her
Wedding Day, and thought more of the Cake and the Presents than what
was to Come. She cried when she Told me that, after dinner on Deck,
when an Italian Opera Fellow, whose Name I can’t spell, was singing
Love songs to the Acompaniment of the Mandolin, and the Starse were
shining more Brightly than I ever remember to Have Seen Them. Her Hair
has a Scent like Violets, and when Her Head Comes Near you it makes
you Feel Hot and cold and Swimmy--at leest it does Me. Clanarthur was
Away Racing a Yawl of His at the Royal Portsmouth Corinthian Yacht Club
Rigatta, and I thoght if He should Get Drowned what a Jolly Good thing
it would Be. He Ought to be Kicked for Making that woman so frightfully
wretchid when She is 10,000 times Too Good For Him. N.B.--Of course
She did Not Tell me what he has Done, but I bet you ½ a crown it is
sumthing Beastly caddish.

I think the Men on Board a Not very Well Bred Sett, as they chaff Me
like mad about Mrs. Clanarthur; and even when she is Within Earshott,
which makes Me want Frightfully to Kick them all Round. I Cannot Sleep
at Night as I used to Do, and my Head Aches in a Beastly way in the
Morning. I have got a handkerchief of Mrs. Clanarthur’s I Stole when
She was Not Looking, and I Keep it Under My Pillow at Night and Switch
the illectric light On and Look at it every Now and Then. There is
“Nini” imbroidered in the Corner, and it Smells of Violets, like her
Hair. If I was married to a Lovely Woman like that I should not be a
Beast like Clanarthur. She Told Me that she Never has suffered Him
to Kiss her on the Lips Since She Knew Him to be Unworthy of a Pure
Woman’s Love. Sumhow I am glad of that, thogh it is Rough on Clanarthur.


                                                               SATURDAY.

Last Night Sumthing Happened I am Now Going to tell you about. They
were Throwing Coloured Lites on the Sea from the Victoria Pier, and
all the Big Steam Yachts Had Fairy lamps Hung Out, and the Music of
the Bands and things Comming Over the Water quite made it simply
ripping. It was after dinner, and I was Sitting on Deck with Mrs.
Clanarthur, and She thought She would like a Moonlight Pull in the
Yacht’s dinghy, as the Sea was so Beautifully Smooth. So I tipped two
of the _Spindrift_ men to get the boat reddy, and not say ennything to
ennybody and We Started. There was a Fritefully Stiff Tide on. I Rowed
Her Round and Down a Lane made of Torpedo Gun-boats on One Side and
1st Class Cruisers on the other, All Reddy for the King to inspect on
Saturday. It was Ripping Fun, and Nini was Delighted. Then we Drifted
dreemily along Towards Ryde, and I Forgot there was such a Fritefully
Stiff Tide Running out to Spithead because I was Holding Nini’s
Hand--she let me--and thinking there were Worse Things than Coming
under the Married Women’s Property Act after All.

When We Had got a Good Distance Out I found I could Not Get Back For
Nuts, However Hard I Pulled.

The Perspirashun was Running off me like Water and my Arms Ached like
Mad. Nini--she had said I might call her Nini the Evening Before--Nini
Could not See ennything was Wrong, but I knew we were being Carried
Out to Sea at About 100 miles an Hour and it Kept Getting Darker.
N.B.--Of course, I did Not Care For myself, but I Kept Thinking of
Nini. She said the Poetry of the illimittible Oshan made Her Trill like
a Smitten Lute, and I said, “Does it?” and Kept Slogging Away against
the Tide without making 1 Not in 1,000 Hours, as the Signals in Coes
Roads kept getting Smaller. Then a Southampton Liner came Rushing out
of the Dark. I Saw Both her Port and Starboard Litse as I Turned my
Head, so she must have been Coming Straight down on Us. You may Suppose
I had Fits, thinking of Mrs. Clanarthur, and I would have tried to
Shout, but I Had Lost my Wind completely.

“How pretty,” said Nini--Mrs. Clanarthur I mean--“that must be the
_Campania_ for New York from Southampton.” And she went on Gassing
about the Beauty of the Seen without an Idea that we might be cut in 2
Next Minute. But we got off. The liner swerved to port and went by us
lighted up like a sea Alhambra, all her deckse crowded with People and
her Band Playing ‘The Merry Widow,’ and Clanarthur lost his chance of
being a Merry Widower. But she passed so jolly close to us that a lot
of Wash slopped in, and Nini screamed and called out, “You silly boy,
it’s all your Fault!” which I like, considering the sittuation. And
She Pulled her White Evening Wrap round her and said, “Let’s get back
to the yacht; it’s shockingly cold and the sea is getting abominably
Rough!” And then I had to own up what a jolly Hat we were in, and that
we had been steddily Drifting Out to Sea for Some time Past.

What price me? I felt small enough to get into a cricket-ball case
already, but I felt something worse when Mrs. Clanarthur Boxed my
Ears. She said I was a Little Idiot, and that she had been culpably
Reckless to alow Me to Take Her on the Water, and what would Freddy
say? Freddy is Captain Clanarthur. So I said I would stand up to Him
with or without Gloves, Fight Him with Rivolverse across a necktie if
he liked, and that He could Divorse Her afterwardse and then she could
marry me, and everything would be jolly well settled all Round, as
she Had Told me He was aborrent to Her only the night before when she
kissed me under the Aft Awning three Times--which she Had Done, though
she called me an untruthful little Retch for saying so, and then she
had Histericks, and then what Uncle Podmore calls the Mallady of the
Wave came on, and I had to ship the oars and Hold Her Up, and she was
Awfully Bad. Mother on the Turbean xing to Boulogne was Nothing To it.
I am not Joking When I Tell You that We Drifted About in That beestly
Dinghy all night at the immanent Risk of Being Run Down by anything
from a Tramp Steamer to a Government Crooser, and if the Tide Had Not
Turned, which it did at 4 o’clock in the Morning, we should be as dead
now as Two People can be.

O crumbs, when I looked at Nini, who After jawing at me till she was
Tired Had Gone to sleep with Her Head on my Shoulder! By the Glimmaring
Light of Dawn she Looked as Old as Aunt Honoria, and not Half as Nice.
Her Swagger Evening Gown and Mantal were Ruined with Seawater, and
one Long Tale of her Lovely Hair was Washing about in the Bilje at
the Bottom of the Dinghy, we had shipped such a lot in the Night. Her
Forhead and one Eye were nearly Hidden by a Top Piece with curls that
had come off, though there was lots of Hair underneath it, and she was
Perfectly Blue with Cold and Fright.

I thought she must have been Pretty Old when she Married Captain
Clanarthur after all, and when I Remembered how mad I had been about
Her, and how I wanted to Snipe Clanarthur and Marry Her, I felt awfully
sick at having been such an unlimited ass.

She woke up and called me some more Names and then a Pilot cutter came
along bound for Portsmouth Pier, and I Haled the Pilot and He agreed to
take us back to Cowes Road for £1. And they Hawled us on Board because
we were too jolly stiff to clime up the cutter’s side and we Got back
to the Yacht in Time for Breakfast.

You may guess if the men of the Party chaffed me Before how frightfully
they chaff Now, I am Roasted about the Beastly Business from morning
till Night. Uncle Podmore told me they had sent out 2 Boats to Find
us and burned blue Lights. All Captain Clanarthur Said when He saw
Mrs. Clanarthur come up the yacht’s side like a Ragbag, was, “So there
You are, are you?” But suppose he is Lying Low to bring an Axion for
Divorse, do you suppose I shall have to marry Mrs. Clanarthur?

I do jolly well Hope Not. She is old enough to be my mother, and Has a
Perfectly awful temper.

Fancy me being as Pleased as a Fox-terrier with 2 tails when she let me
Kiss Her under the Deck Awning after dinner. Fellows with lots of good
sense can be asses at times.

Of course I tell you All this in Confidence on the Strict Q.T., because
you are Not like other Girls about Keeping a Secret. There is a Big
Review of the Home Fleet and the Swedish Squadron by the King to-day,
and the Fleet will be elluminated in the Evening after dinner, and
there will be Fireworks from the Victoria Pier. But whether it is my
having been Out all Night with Nini--I mean Mrs. Clanarthur--in that
rotten Dinghy or something else I don’t ixactly know, but I feel jolly
miserable.

I wish Greening minor was here, it would do me Good to give the little
Brute a regular licking. Fancy him Being in love with a Barmade and
writing her verses. And Regger, who has the nerve to make up to his
sister’s Jerman Governess. I can’t think why Fellows do such idiotic
Things.

I Think rather than Have to marry Mrs. Clanarthur I would Run away and
be a stoker like that Fellow in the newspapers. She looks quite young
again this afternoon and her Hair is beautifully done, but I keep on
seeing Her as she was at 4 this morning, when that pilot-cutter Found
us.

I am getting rather sorry for Clanarthur tied up to a Woman who Boxes a
Fellow’s ears and calls him Names for Nothing--that is, I should feel
sorry for him if I was quite Eesy in my mind about his bringing an
Axion for Divorse.

                                  Ever your affeckshionate Brother,
                                                               TYNSTONE.




FOR VALOR!


The city of Smutborough was holding a solemn public function in honor
of one of her sons. Formerly a soldier in the Smutborough Regiment,
he had won his V. C. a long time back in the early days of the last
South African War. At the conclusion of hostilities, having, like many
other men, attained perfect competency and ripe experience with the
expiration of the age-limit, Color-Sergeant Stoneham was naturally
shelved as being of no further use to the nation, except in an
emergency like the last.

The rear of the Town Hall, Smutborough, formed one side of an unsavory
blind alley: a dingy _cul-de-sac_ blocked at the end by the high,
sooty, spike-bordered wall of what was termed, with mordant but
unconscious humor, the Workhouse Recreation Yard. The Workhouse loomed
large upon the opposite side. Though the great main entrance for misery
was in another street, a solid oaken door, hospitably garnished with
large nails and a double row of bristling prongs, exhibited upon a
mud-splashed fanlight above it the black-lettered legend, “Casual Ward.”

It was only one o’clock, and the door would not open before seven, but
a queue of deplorable applicants had already mustered before it. A
tall, upright, gaunt man of about forty, dressed in a weather-stained
jacket-suit of tweed, and wearing a shabby deerstalker low over his
haggard eyes, had been one of the last to attach himself to Poverty’s
kite-tail.

Against the wall of the Workhouse Recreation Yard was the excuse for
a considerable expenditure of public funds at a moment felt by the
humbler citizens of Smutborough to be extremely inopportune. The excuse
was let into the sooty brick masonry. It made a queerly-shaped bulge
in the middle of an oppressively new Union Jack which covered it, and
upon each side of this tantalizing mystery stood a large, pink, shining
police-constable, in the largest size obtainable of brand-new white
woolen gloves.

At the bottom of the blind alley were more constables, ready in case of
the mob of unemployed making a rush round from the front of the Town
Hall. But at present it surged, a human sea lashed to fury by the whip
of hunger and the voice of Socialism, in the square outside the long
row of first-floor windows where the sumptuous luncheon was laid for a
hundred guests.

“A’a’ah! T’ss’s! Ya’-’aah!”

“Close up here, close up!” A police-sergeant, hurrying from the bottom
of the alley, herded the struggling queue before the door of the casual
ward into a compact bunch. Then the rearward portals of the Town Hall,
before which a red-and-white striped awning had suddenly sprouted, were
thrown wide. A crush of rosetted stewards, carrying very shiny hats,
preceded the Mace-Bearer; the Mayor, a plump and rosy personage, in his
furred robes and chain of office, appeared, walking between a lovely
lady in sumptuous sables and an accurately-attired gentleman, whose
intense vacuity of eye, mechanical bow and smile, and inability to
utter anything without being first prompted by an attendant secretary
from behind, denoted him a Personage of the first importance....
The Sheriff followed with the Mayoress, the Aldermen and the guests
trooped after. And the mob at the other side of the Town Hall, making
a charge round the corner, and being repulsed by the police, vented
its indignation in such an outburst of boo’s that the Mayor’s speech
was delivered in dumb show. Everybody clapped when he had done,
though. Upon which the Personage, prompted by his attendant spirit,
delivered himself in short, House of Commons gasps of the contents of
a Be-ribboned roll of typoscript. The last sentence was audible: “And
let this! Be a perpetual! Reminder to this! And succeeding generations!
How our! Mother country! Rewards her! Heroic sons!” Everybody clapped
and applauded the Personage. The Personage, then, advancing upon
exquisitely-polished boots to the Union Jack with the mysterious bulge
under it pulled a white cord with a lavender kid glove, and brought
the flag down, revealing a square block of Caen stone bearing some
sculptural figures in low relief set in the masonry above a neat little
drinking fountain. Then the Personage, the lovely lady in furs, the
Mayor and Mayoress, Sheriff, Aldermen, guests, and stewards trooped
back into the Town Hall to luncheon, and the crowd surged back again
to boo the banqueters. But after the last of these had, under a
cross-fire of gibes and taunts, taken himself away, the turbulent ocean
of humanity rolled back into its foodless garrets and cellars, and the
Socialist leaders who had urged on the ring-leaders retired to dine at
a hotel. Subsequently the alley behind the Town Hall became gorged with
homeless persons seeking shelter for the night, and when seven o’clock
struck and the Casual Ward door opened, one rush of misery packed it
instantly from wall to wall, and Stoneham, V. C., late Color-Sergeant
in the Smutborough Regiment, found himself shut out.

He wondered, as he ruefully felt in his empty pockets, whether it would
end in his having to sell the Cross? He had never failed to raise money
on his reserve-pension when the General Brushmaker’s Union had forced
him to come out with the other men, because a non-union _employé_
had been taken on at the factory. Since then he had navvied, stoked,
scavenged, done everything and anything that a capable man might do to
get bare bread and common shelter for himself and his. Now the wife was
in Clogham Infirmary with two of the children, and another was dead of
clemming, and ... and the old wound from the cross-nicked Mauser bullet
pained him horribly. He was giddy and sick with starvation, and the
world was spinning round....

Just in time he caught at the edge of the new drinking fountain, and
saved himself from falling. The grudging glimmer from the fanlight over
the door of the Casual Ward showed him something that roused him as a
swooning man may be roused by a splash of icy water in his face. It was
his own name in shining gold letters, boldly incised upon a handsome
tablet under the sculptured block that jutted from the sooty brick wall.

“Lord above, what’s this?” gasped the man whom Smutborough had that
day toasted. He struck a match, the last he had, and read, beneath the
bas-relief which represented the city’s hero in the act of shielding
a wounded officer with his body from a supposititious volley of Boer
bullets:

         TO COMMEMORATE THE GALLANT ACTION
       BY WHICH COLOUR-SERGEANT H. STONEHAM,
           OF THE SMUTBOROUGH REGIMENT,
             AND A NATIVE OF THIS CITY,
               WON THE VICTORIA CROSS.

  IN ACTION, PAARDFONTEIN, TRANSVAAL, SOUTH AFRICA, 1901.


“Move on, you!” said the voice of a police-constable behind him.
And Stoneham, V. C., drove his freezing hands deep into his ragged
pockets, wheeled and obeyed.

“It’s a rum world!” He reeled a little in his gait, and whispered
thickly to himself, as if some of the champagne and grub that had been
consumed that day in his honor had got into his head by proxy. “Damned
queer from start to finish! But, in the long run, I’m a bit better off
than the bloke in the Bible. He asked for bread, and they gave him a
stone. And I’ve got a drinking fountain into the bargain!”

And the wet night swallowed him up.




MELLICENT


“Happy is the corpse, they say, that the rain rains on,” observed Mr.
Popham, “but knowing his rheumatic nature, I could have wished him a
drier day. However, we must take what comes, and it’s curious that what
comes is generally what one would have preferred to be without. Life is
very like a switchback railway,” continued Mr. Popham. “Now you’re up,
a-looking down upon other human beings; and now you’re down a-looking
up at ’em. And similarly your fellow-creatures as regards you. It’s a
curious reflection that I shan’t ever measure out his colchicum again;
or soothe the morning twinges in his knees and elbers with a lithia
lollipop in a glass of warm water; or hear him swear when I tighten
his straps and buckles; or fetch and carry his wigs between this and
the hairdresser’s in Regent Place. Who do those wigs belong to now?
Yesterday his coffin, an extra-sized, double oak casket, metal-lined,
with plated handles and silver name-plate, stood in there!” He jerked
his head at the double doors leading into the bedroom. “This morning we
accompanied him to Woking Cemetery. This afternoon they are a-reading
of the Will in Portland Place, and Odlett gave me his solemn word that
John Henry shouldn’t remove his ear from the library keyhole without
finding out whether a little bit on account of faithful services
rendered hadn’t been left to Frederick T. Popham, valet to the above.
For he promised to leave me something all along, and almost with his
last breath, ‘I haven’t forgotten you, Popham,’ says he. ‘You’ve been
remembered, you’ll find, in the Will.’ And ... Lord! Was that you? What
a turn you gave me, Miss Mellicent!”

“Why, you’re quite nervous, Mr. Popham, sir,” said Miss Mellicent.

Miss Mellicent had bumped at the door with the end of a coal-scuttle,
and now apologized, bringing it in. Miss Mellicent was a thin person
of some thirty London summers, dressed in a worn black gown with
stray threads sticking out where crape had been ripped off. Her hair
would have been a nice brown if it had been less dusty, her gray eyes
were timid and kind, and her dingy pale face had a look of belated
girlhood--was sometimes quite transfigured into prettiness when she
smiled.

“I’ll own I am a little unlike myself,” agreed Mr. Popham. “Perhaps
it’s his luggage all ready in a pile near the door, as if we were
off to a foreign Spa within the next five minutes, or going down to
Helsham to stop in his usual rooms in the south wing. Perhaps it’s his
going off so sudden in quite a mild attack. Perhaps it’s the strain
of the funeral this morning, perhaps it’s sympathy for Sir George
and the family, perhaps it’s a little anxiety on my own account! I
know what he had, and I’ve my notions as to how he’s disposed of it!
The likeliest way to bring about a lawsuit and get it into Chancery
would be his way, bless you! The embroilingest way; the way to bring
about the greatest amount of jealousy and bitterness; the way to cost
the most to all concerned and bring about the smallest return in the
way of satisfaction and profit to ’em, would be the way he’d give
the preference to over all. And if he was a-listening to me at this
minute,” said Mr. Popham, with a slight uncomfortable glance toward the
folding doors that led into the bedroom--“and I’m sure I hope he’s
better employed!--he’d own I’ve done him no more than justice!”

“The many years I’ve known General Bastling,” said Miss Mellicent,
“and it’s going on for twenty that he’s lodged with us four months in
each twelvemonth--I’ve never asked or cared to know. Was he a rich
gentleman?”

“Why, I should call him pretty snug at that,” said Mr. Popham. “Ten
thousand in Home Rails; a pretty little nest-egg of five thousand in
Government Three per Cents; a matter of sixteen hundred invested in
the Chillianmugger Anthracite Mining Company; and a nice little bit of
loose cash in the current account at Cox’s. That’s what I’ve my eye on,
to tell you the truth; and I don’t think it’s unnatural or greedy.”

“I would never believe you selfish or money-seeking,” said Miss
Mellicent, folding her hard-worked red hands upon her worn stuff apron,
“not if an Angel was to come down out of the stained-glass window in
church--I sit under it on a Sunday evening sometimes, when I’m not
wanted at home--and tell me so!”

“I hope I’m not naturally more of a groveler than other men in my
situation--my late situation--would be,” returned Mr. Popham. “But
forty odd is getting on in years, and I’m reluctant at my time of
life to go looking for another middle-aged gentleman to valet. The
young ones are too harum-scarum and given to late hours for a man
like me; and if they weren’t, they’d be unnatural phenomenons. A
nice little inn in a country town, with a decentish bar custom and a
solid bottle-and-jug department, and a cold lunch in the coffee-room
on market-days, would suit me; with Hunt, Harriers, Freemasons, and
Friendly Societies’ dinners to cater for; and a private understanding
with a few gamekeepers anxious to promote their own interests in a
quiet, unassuming way--the guards of the late and early Expresses--and
one or two West End poulterers and greengrocers as I have met in what
I might call the butterfly stage of my existence, when I wore silk
stockings and livery, floured my hair regular, wore a bookay on Levée
and Drawing-Room days, and would as soon have eaten cold joint or
cleaned the carriage as taken up coals. And why I haven’t relieved you
of the scuttle before this, is a question between me and my conscience.
Let me take it and put it down. It won’t be the first time, if it is
the last, will it?”

“Don’t, Mr. Popham, sir!” pleaded Miss Mellicent; “don’t speak in that
downhearted way.” Her red hands plucked at a corner of her dingy stuff
apron, her gray eyes were already pink about the rims. Tears rose in
them. She coughed and swallowed nervously.

“The Bastling Arms is the name of that there little inn,” said Mr.
Popham. “The sign is the same as the crest on _his_ notepaper and
his seal-ring and the lock of that despatch-box.” He pointed to the
despatch-box crowning the pile of solid, well-used, much be-labeled
portmanteaux and imperials that occupied the corner near the door of
the room--a comfortably furnished, rather dingy second-floor apartment
in a quiet street above, and running parallel with, Oxford Circus. “The
landlord died the day before yesterday--as if to oblige or aggravate
me, I don’t know which!--and the widow, knowing my ambitions, dropped
me a postcard to inform. Three hundred is wanted for the lease, stock,
and goodwill, and fifty for the furniture, stable and yard-effects.
A bargain, Miss Mellicent, if I only had the money! But as it goes,
I’m a hundred and fifty short--unless John Henry’s ear is tingling at
this moment with tidings of comfort and joy. Now, what do you mean by
lighting a fire as if I wanted coddling, when you’ve a dozen people to
look after, if you’ve one?”

Miss Mellicent was down on her knees at the old-fashioned grate, laying
a fire. She struck a match and lighted the kindling, and, though it was
mid-June, the bright blaze was welcome in the dingy sitting-room, whose
window-panes streamed with torrents of rain.

“The gentlemen are all out but the third-floor front,” she said,
“and when the rain began, and I thought of you sitting up here in
the dim light alone, it seemed as if I might do this much to make
things cheerfuller. For you’ve done so much for me ever since I came
here”--her red and blackened knuckles went up to her pink-rimmed
eyes--“you always done so much for me!”

“For you, my dear soul!” ejaculated Mr. Popham, with circular eyes.
“You make too much of things, Miss Mellicent!”

“That’s one of ’em,” cried grateful Mellicent, turning upon him a thin,
blushing face down which two tears openly trickled. “You’ve called me
‘Miss Mellicent’ from the first. From the time I came here to Mr. and
Mrs. Davis, an orphan, ten years old, in my cheap black frock, made out
of the skirt of poor mother’s mourning for poor father, you’ve always
called me ‘Miss.’ It helped me, somehow; just as your carrying up the
heavy cans of hot water and the coals did.”

“You was a bright-eyed, grateful little mouse, too,” said Mr. Popham
retrospectively, “and many’s the time I’ve had it in my mind to speak
to Mr. and Mrs. Davis about their driving a little thing like you so
hard. They’re past driving now, that’s one comfort! It’s years since
I’ve set eyes on either of ’em, now I come to think of it!”

“It’s years!” Mellicent echoed in a slightly bewildered way. “Why of
course it would be years!”

“She was a mountain, was the venerable lady, and the old gentleman
was a mere lath,” said Mr. Popham meditatively. “He used to answer
the letters we wrote year by year, season in and season out, from the
family seat at Helsham, from the Engadine, Aix, or Ems, Paris, or the
Riviera, to say we were coming on such a day. Ten years ago the writing
of the letters changed to a feminine hand--and since then I haven’t
seen him.”

“Why--don’t you know--he died?” said Mellicent.

“Did he really?” cried Mr. Popham. “Well, it was like him to keep it so
quiet, and like the old lady, too. Reminds me--I haven’t set eyes on
_her_ for a matter of five year and over!”

“Oh dear, Mr. Popham! she’s dead too!” gasped Mellicent in distress.

“She’d be pleased to know how little we’ve missed her, I know,”
responded Mr. Popham cheerfully. “Now, quite between ourselves,
Miss Mellicent, since for the first time since I’ve known you we’re
indulging in a confidential conversation--who’s carrying on the house?”

“Don’t you know? No--you’ve never asked or thought to ask in all these
years,” returned Mellicent. “The person who carries on the house
is--not quite--but I suppose she would be called so--a lady!”

“And very sensibly she manages,” approved Mr. Popham, “in keeping
out of the way and letting you do it for her. And a nice income she
makes, I’ll be bound! Why, the house has never been empty since first
I come here. Old gentlemen with ample means on every floor, toddling
out to their clubs when their various complaints permit, and dining
at home--and dining comfortably, too--when they don’t. Such a polish
on the boots, such a crispness of the breakfast bacon, such a flavor
about the coffee and the curries, such a tenderness about the joints,
such a dryness about the daily newspaper, and such an absence of
over-statement about the total of the weekly bill as, with all my
experience, I’ve never found elsewhere. And all owing to You! If your
modesty allowed you to think over yourself for one moment--which I
truly believe you’ve never done since you were born--you’d admit, Miss
Mellicent--that you’re a wonder!”

“Oh! do you truly mean it?” she cried, with her heart upon her lips.

“I do,” answered Mr. Popham, with warmth. “And if the present
proprietor of the lodgings wasn’t a lady--and knew what was good for
him--he’d----”

“Oh no! No, Mr. Popham, sir, no! He wouldn’t. No one could ever think
of me in such a way!” Her red and blackened hands went up to the
piteous, quivering face, and her lean bosom heaved behind the meager
bib of her scorched stuff apron. “Never!”

“Tell me now, upon your honor,” Mr. Popham pressed. “Haven’t you never
looked at nobody in that way yourself?”

Miss Mellicent fairly writhed and shuddered with nervousness. But
she laughed, looking away from Mr. Popham and into the old-fashioned
but handsome glass over the mantelshelf, in which, within an Early
Victorian frame of fly-spotted gilding, the reflection of Mr. Popham’s
alert, well-featured, respectable profile and her own poor, wistful
face appeared together.

“If you won’t ask me no more--yes, then! but he never dreamed o’ me!”

“More shame for him!” asseverated Mr. Popham stoutly. “Why, what a
put-upon young woman you are, Miss Mellicent! Since you were ten years
old, I do verily believe you’ve never had a pleasure, never had a
present, never had a friend, never had an outing--no more than you’ve
had a sweetheart.”

“Ah, but,” she cried, with a happy laugh, “I have had a friend! You’ve
been my friend, haven’t you? And I have had pleasure in knowing that.
And I’ve had an outing--twice. Once Uncle Davis took me to the World’s
Fair--it was my twelfth birthday--and once, two years later, you
treated me to the pantomime.”

“Did I? And uncommon generous and considerate it was of me, I must
say, to have done that much for you, you poor little neglected, lonely
creature!” uttered the remorseful Mr. Popham.

“I never forgot it,” Mellicent cried, with beaming eyes. “The glory and
the splendor, the living roses and the talking animals and the shining
fairies, and you to explain it all and be so kind. I never forgot it!
Who could?”

“Why, I’m beginning to remember something about it myself!” said Mr.
Popham, clearing. “We partook of a dozen oysters and some shandy-gaff
at a fish-bar on the way home. According to present views, we ought to
have shaken carbolic powder over that shellfish instead of pepper, and
washed it down with Condy’s Fluid; but, being behind the present times,
we enjoyed ourselves.”

“Didn’t we!” Mellicent clapped her hands. “I have gone back to that
beautiful evening in memory hundreds and hundreds of times! It has
helped me through such a lot of hard things--for things are hard
sometimes. Sometimes, when you aren’t here, and there isn’t no one to
speak to on the stairs, and the gentlemen are over-particular about
their boots and changeable about the hours for their meals, things get
the better of me to that extent that I scream and run!”

“Scream and run, do you?” said the puzzled Mr. Popham. “And how do you
do it? Or do you do it without knowing how, eh?”

“I shriek out loud and hear myself as though my voice came from a long
way off,” said Mellicent, opening her large eyes, “and then my feet
begin to run. I scream, and I run screaming up to the little top attic
I slept in when I came here as a child, where my old rag doll is still,
and mother’s patchwork counterpane covers the truckle-bed. And I hide
my head in that, and cry myself quiet and patient again!”

“And Lord have mercy on your lonely little soul!” cried Mr. Popham.
“Patient you are, and that’s the truth!” He took the knotty red hand
and held it in both of his for an instant, looking at the downcast
face. “But don’t scream and run any more. It isn’t good for you!”

“I haven’t screamed and runned for quite a long time now,” she
answered. “But”--her poor lips trembled--“I think I shall when you are
gone for good.”

“Nonsense, nonsense!” Mr. Popham squeezed the red hand and dropped it
gently. “I’ll come and see you from time to time.”

“And leave your little country inn?” said Mellicent, trying to smile.
“You won’t be able!”

“I could leave the landlady in charge,” suggested Mr. Popham. “Stop,
though, a landlady is the kind of article that doesn’t go with the
furniture and fixtures. I shall have to look out for her myself.” His
face changed. “Upon my word I shall!”

“I know the kind you’ll choose,” sighed Miss Mellicent. “And the best
won’t be good enough for you, Mr. Popham. She must be young and fair
and plump and rosy and blue-eyed, with golden curls like the Fairy
Queen in that pantomime, or the lovely dolls I see in the shop windows
when I’m out buying meat and groceries for the gentlemen. And her hands
must be as white and soft as mine are red and hard. And----”

“Don’t cry, my dear!” begged Mr. Popham. He stooped over her as she hid
her flaming cheeks in the hard-worked hands. “You have pretty hair,
Miss Mellicent,” he said, with a sensation of surprise at the discovery.

“I’ve been turning out rooms,” she sobbed, “and it’s full of dust!”

“And you’d have a pretty figure,” said Mr. Popham, now embarked upon
a career of discovery, “if you took the trouble to pull ’em in. And
you’re young--barely thirty--and I’m ten years older. And you’re a
first-class double extra A.1. housekeeper, cook, and manager. See here!
Give the lady proprietor a month’s notice, and come and be landlady of
the Bastling Arms at Helsham!”

“You--you’re not in earnest?”

She faced him, quivering, transfigured, panting.

“Ain’t I?” remarked Mr. Popham simply. “Say ‘Yes,’ Miss Mellicent, give
me a kiss, and we shall both begin to believe it. Run and change your
dress, and we’ll call a cab and make another evening of it, and if the
Alhambra ballet won’t do as well as the pantomime, under the present
circumstances, I shall be surprised! There’s John Henry’s knock at the
hall-door. He brings good news, or it wouldn’t be such a loud one. It
takes the girl ten minutes to get up the kitchen stairs; she’s a born
crawler, if ever there was one, and I’ve a fancy I should like you to
let the boy in--if you’ve no objection?”

“Oh, no, no!” she cried gladly, and flashed out of the room.

“She’s wonderfully nimble on her feet,” mused Mr. Popham; “and though
I’ve never seen ’em to my knowledge, I shouldn’t mind putting a bit on
the chance of their being pretty ones. Lord! I seem in for discoveries
to-day. Come in, John Henry!”

But it was not John Henry, but the butler from Portland Place.

“Odlett! Well, this is kind; and you with such an objection to getting
your feet damp!” Mr. Popham shook the large dough-colored hand of Mr.
Odlett until the butler secured the member from further assault by
putting it into his pocket.

“The boy was wanted to go upon an errand,” explained Mr. Odlett, in the
voice of the description known as rich. “And as a friend!”--his smile
creased his large pale cheeks, and caused the temporary disappearance
of his small twinkling eyes--“as a friend, no more port being wanted
for the party in the library, I thought I’d come and put you out of
your misery!”

“That was uncommon kind of you, Odlett!” breathed the acutely-anxious
Mr. Popham. He wiped his brow, and fixed an intense gaze on the
particular feature from which intelligence might be expected.

“The boy did his duty faithful from first to last,” said Mr. Odlett,
selecting a chair and carefully separating his coat-tails as a
preliminary to sitting down; “and when he laughed, ’ad the presence
of mind to drop his ’ead to the level of the library door mat,
consequently it was supposed to be the pug a-sneezing!”

“Well,” gasped Mr. Popham. “Well?”

“The Will come up to our fondest expectations,” continued Mr. Odlett.
“Sir George, who never shoots, ’ave the General’s old saloon-pistols
and sporting Mantons, and _Bell’s Life_ and the _Army Gazette_ for
twenty year back. Mr. Roderick is left the Chinese and Indian
curiosities on condition of his dusting ’em hisself regularly. My Lady
’ave ten pounds to purchase a mourning-ring, provided she’ll undertake
to wear it; the young ladies ditto; and the money----”

“The money----” choked Mr. Popham.

“The money, with the exception of several smaller legacies, goes, with
the consent of the Mayor and Corporation of Helsham, to purchase and
lay out a Public Park for the people in memory of the Testator. There’s
to be a mausoleum in the middle of it, in which his crematory urn is to
be kep’, and a bandstand at each end, because he always loved to see
people cheerful about him. Also, he bequeaths to Miss Mellicent Davis,
at his lodgings in Margaret Place, five guineas and a set of ivory
chessmen; and to his old and valued friend, William Odlett, which is
me, the sum of two hundred pounds. He adds, he hopes I’ll drink myself
to death on it, inside of a month; but he always was a playful old
gentleman. No--you’re not forgotten!”

Mr. Popham wiped his brow with an air of relief.

“You’re not forgotten--which ought to be a consolation to you!”
repeated Mr. Odlett, creasing all over with a vast, comprehensive
smile. “You’re to ’ave his walking-sticks, clothes, wigs, the rugs and
plaids, and the spare set of teeth, hoping you’ll always have something
to employ ’em on. I came over a-purpose to tell you; you’re so fond of
a joke, Popham.”

“I don’t deny it,” said the crushed and disappointed Mr. Popham; “but
where the humor of this one is, hang me if I know!”

“You’ll see by-and-by,” said Mr. Odlett consolingly. “When you’ve ’ad
time to think it over. Meanwhile I’ll stand a couple of whiskies hot.
A man don’t come into two hundred, cool, every day, and this windfall
is particularly welcome. You know Madgell, the landlord of the Bastling
Arms at Helsham, is gone over to the majority?”

Mr. Popham nodded a pale face.

“The lease, stock, goodwill, and fixtures of that pleasant little ’ouse
is to be ’ad for what I call a song. And I’m going--in a week or so,
when I’ve laid my hand secure on this here little legacy--to pop in and
settle down. Plummer, the cook, a plump and capable young woman, ’ave
expressed her willingness to be the landlady. I did suppose she had had
a bit of an understanding with you. But she’s quite come round my way
since the reading of the will, and I thought you’d like to know it!”

“You’re uncommon considerate,” said the rasped and tingling Mr. Popham,
“but I’ve made arrangements elsewhere.”

“Perhaps the Other One will change her mind when she finds out you’re
diddled in your expectations!” said the comforting Mr. Odlett, shaking
hands heartily. “Good-night. I shan’t hear of you coming to the door!”

But Mr. Popham did come, and slammed it behind the departing form of
Mr. Odlett with great heartiness.

“Damn his wigs and walking-sticks!” he said in the murky passage, “and
his spare teeth as well! A nice Job’s comforter, Odlett! ‘Perhaps
she’ll change her mind when she knows you’ve been diddled in your
expectations.’ Beg pardon, Miss Mellicent, I didn’t see you were there!
You’re not hurt, are you?”

“Only by your thinking I could change!” said Miss Mellicent, with a sob.

The ground-floor sitting-room door stood ajar; the room was unoccupied.
Mr. Popham led Miss Mellicent in, turned up one of the blackened
incandescent gas-jets, and stood petrified at the sight its hissing
white glare revealed.

“A gray silk gown, trimmed with real lace, and a gold chain!” cried the
bewildered Mr. Popham. “A diamond brooch, as I’m a living sinner! and
an opera-mantle and kid gloves and a fan! And your pretty brown hair
done up quite tastefully, and your eyes a-shining over the roses in
your cheeks! What’s done it? Who’s responsible for it? How did it come
about?”

If she had been less shy of him, she would have answered in two words,
“Through love!” But she only faltered:

“I’m so glad you think I look a bit nice in them. They--they belonged
to poor Aunt Davis, and I’ve had ’em altered to fit. She--she left them
to me when she died!”

“And handed over the lodging-house and furniture to the present lady
proprietor,” observed Mr. Popham, searching in his trouser pocket for a
cab whistle, “whom I don’t happen to know by sight.”

“Oh, yes, you do!” Miss Mellicent’s blush and smile made quite a pretty
little face of hers, and Mr. Popham boldly kissed it on the spot. “Oh
yes, you do, for she’s me! I should say, I am her! Law bless you,
dear Mr. Popham, I didn’t mean to startle you like that! Who cares
about your being left a lot of old clothes and wigs instead of a sum
of money--though you deserved it, true and faithful as you was to him
that’s gone! Haven’t I plenty for both? And landlord of the Bastling
Arms you shall be to-morrow, if you’ve set your heart on it! and we
shall be late for the beautiful sights at the theater if you don’t
whistle for a taxicab.”

“Life is certainly a switchback!” said Mr. Popham, as he breathed and
trilled alternately on the damp doorstep. “Now you’re down a-lookin’ up
at your fellow-mortals, and now you’re up, a-lookin’ down upon ’em!...
We’ll have a bit of supper at that very fish-bar, if it’s still in
existence, on our way home, carefully drawing the line at oysters as
risky and uncertain articles of diet for two middle-aged people about
to enter upon the duties and privileges of married life!”




THE COLLAPSE OF THE IDEAL


Canwarden did not write sonnets, or he would have composed many, not
only in celebration of Petronella’s eyebrows, but of her crystalline
blue eyes and burnished hair, her willowy figure of the latest and
most wonderful shape, and her slim, white hands and arched insteps.
But in all his plays--for he was a budding dramatist of exceeding
promise--he described her in red-lined type:--“_Enter So-and-So, a
fair and graceful girl of not more than twenty-five summers, with
sapphire eyes and golden locks, attired in the costume of the period_”
(whatever the period might be). “_She exhales the joyous freshness of
a May morning, and her gurgling laugh rivals the spring song of the
thrush._” This pleased the leading ladies hugely, even when their eyes
were not of sapphire; but stage-managers found Urban Canwarden’s stage
directions a trial. If he had been firmly seated in the motor-car of
public approval, both hands on the driving-wheel as he ripped along
the track of success, they would have smiled even while they writhed.
But Canwarden was not yet famous, and the stage-managers were free not
to disguise their feelings. However, he went on; getting thin--thin
for a plump man--in the effort to make enough to marry on. For the
beloved of his soul was not of the bread-and-cheese-and-kisses type of
betrothed of whom we read in novels that have many years ago silted
to the bottom-shelves in public libraries, and are occasionally
issued as new in paper covers at fourpence-halfpenny. Her full name
was Petronella Lesser, and she dwelt with her parents in an Early
Victorian villa on Haverstock Hill, a residence which had been slowly
settling down on one side ever since the Tube borings had started. The
lease would be out, old Mr. Lesser calculated, a day or two before the
Corinthian-pillared stucco and brick porch sat down. He was something
in the Italian warehouse supply-line in the City, and a singular judge
of olives, Gruyère, and barreled Norwegian sprats. Petronella never
looked a fairer, more poetic thing than when concealing vast quantities
of these zests behind the latest thing in blouses, day or evening wear,
and Urban Canwarden, as he gazed upon his betrothed, or very nearly so,
swore to himself that she should never know what it is to go lacking
the _hors d’œuvres_ that lend piquancy to the Banquet of Life.

Petronella was a girl whose white and well-developed bosom was the
home of emotions but little livelier than those that animate the
beautiful person of a Regent-street wax-doll. Sawdust will burn, it
is true, but the costlier puppets are stuffed with choicer stuffing.
She had not fallen in love with Urban Canwarden; she had simply frozen
on to him. She had liked sitting in the author’s box on First Nights,
while the author tore his hair at his Club or in his chambers. She
liked his person, his friends, his prospects. She looked forward to an
elegantly-furnished villa on Campden Hill, with a cottage at Sonning
or Hampton Wick, and mid-winter runs to the South of France, when a
distinguished dramatist, the husband of a charming and attractive wife,
whose _salon_ would be the constant resort of the fine flower, the top
of the basket of London Society, should require rest and change of air
after his exhausting labors undergone in the composition and rehearsal
of the brilliant play, in four acts and eleven scenes, destined to be
the opening attraction of Mr. James Toplofty’s Spring Season at the
West End Theater. She would dream thus paragraphically, whenever she
did dream, which was seldom, for her imaginative region was small. She
was stupid and narrow, cold-hearted and mercenary.

“Since I have loved you,” Canwarden would say, “I have been able to
write of noble women. You have inspired me; everything that is best in
me comes from you; everything I have done that is good I owe to you....”

“You dear, exaggerating, Romantic Thing!” was invariably the reply of
Petronella. “And when we are married we shall have a 28 h.p. Gohard
with nickel fittings and a changeable body, and a chauffeur in livery.
I used to dream of a dear little private brougham when we were first
engaged, but nobody who wants to be thought Anybody would have such
an old-fashioned thing now. How the world is changing, isn’t it, with
motors and airships and Tubes to travel in?”

       *       *       *       *       *

The Haverstock Hill villa vibrated as she prattled, and the porch
settled lower by the fraction of an inch. It was a July evening, and
the lovers, arm-in-arm, paced up and down the damp and puddly graveled
avenue under the liquid-soot-distilling lilacs and acacias. The
reflection of a large fire danced upon the windows of Mrs. Lesser’s
drawing-room, and Petronella, despite the warmth of Canwarden’s love,
felt chilly. She wondered why Urban had pressed her to put on goloshes
and a warm wrap after dinner and take this clammy evening stroll
arm-in-arm with him. And then she was conscious that the heart against
which her right hand rested thumped heavily, and she felt his arm
tremble, and remembered that at dinner her betrothed had shown a poor
appetite in conjunction with a well-developed thirst. As pigs are said
to feel wind coming, as cats--even the most sedate--set up their backs
and sprint about the garden at the approach of a storm, Petronella
instinctively felt that bad news was in the air. A more sentimental
and much prettier girl might have anticipated a shipwreck of the
affections--expected to be told that Canwarden had found his Fate in
another’s eyes. Petronella’s previsions of disaster concerned only his
banking account. It was that to which she was really referring when she
said she felt that something had happened.

“It is true, dearest,” Canwarden said, with the kind of hoarse groan
that he had not been able to extract from the leading young man in his
last romantic drama even with the grappling-hooks of continued effort.
“Something has happened. My great play--for that it is great I feel,
and always shall, despite the slings and arrows of that eater of red
meat, the Transatlantic critic ... my great play, ‘_The_ ...’”

“I know, ‘_The Popshop Hearse_’ ...” Petronella put in hurriedly.

“No, no ... ‘_The Poisoned Curse_,’” corrected the author, with a
wince. “My play, produced a fortnight ago at Barney and Keedler’s
Classical Theater, New York, is a failure ... a blank and utter
failure! Yes, yes! the management did cable to me to say it had
been enthusiastically received. I showed the message to you, and
you shared my gladness. But here--here is another cable from
my agent, Loris K. Boodler, of Skyscraper Mansions, 49,000,000
Broadway, that says....” He drew a crackling, flimsy paper from his
waistcoat pocket, and tried to unfold it with hands that shook. “I
can’t read it because it’s too dark, but I remember every word.
‘_Your--play--taken--off--Saturday--following--production. Variety
vaudeville substituted. Writing. Boodler._’ And I was looking forward
to the author’s fees to”--he coughed in a choky way--“to furnish our
house and ... and buy that motor-car you were talking about. It ... it
seemed so sure a thing! I had got such capital percentages; Barney and
Keedler had cabled to say the play was a success....” He choked. “And
now!...”

“You told me all that before, dear,” said Petronella. “But you have two
other plays coming out, haven’t you, in London theaters?... West End
houses.... And one failure doesn’t spell ruin....”

“One failure can break a dramatist, when it is a failure of this kind,”
said her disconsolate lover. “Those two other plays are ... were
coming out at theaters held by the same lessees--Barney and Keedler,
of the Mammoth American Dramatic Trust. And so, don’t you see, all my
balloons are deflated at once. I’ve come down with a crash, and ... it
hurts! But you will trust me, won’t you? You will go on believing in
me, though I’ve had what technical people will call a set-back. And
if our ... our marriage must be delayed....” He stopped under one of
the liquid soot-distilling lilacs, and caught Petronella in his arms,
crushing the draperies arranged by her Hampstead dressmaker roughly
against his damp evening overcoat. “You will not mind!... We will wait
and hope, and love each other ... love each other.... After all, while
we are together, nothing is too hard to bear....”

Thus spoke Canwarden, counting his chickens ere their emergence from
the shell, after the fashion of a young man too deeply in love to
see clearly what manner of young woman his heart is set upon. But
Petronella shivered, conscious that the Hampstead garden was clammy,
and that the dazzling halo of coming fame and approaching prosperity
had been banished from Canwarden’s brow. He stood before her, tall and
straight, and sufficiently good to look at, with his bright brown eyes,
straight, short nose, and sensitive, clean-shaven lips, though his
curly hair, it must be added, was receding too fast from a brow more
bumpy than, according to the accepted canons of classical proportion,
a brow should be. Upon his shirt-front a lilac had shed an inky tear,
and his voice was husky with love and sorrow, not of an utterly selfish
kind, as he promised Petronella to work hard, never to cease working
until he had regained the lost ground.

“But you never may!...” she said, and the doubt in those shallow blue
eyes--he never had realized before that they were shallow--pierced him
to the soul. “And Nora will be married before me, and she is two years
younger, and everybody in Hampstead will say....”

Canwarden, with heat, devoted Hampstead to the devil. I am not
defending him. Petronella thought him brutal, coarse, and profane.
Women of Petronella’s kind always enthusiastically uphold the dignity
of the devil. She told him what she thought, and she wound up in the
red-papered hall of the one-sided Hampstead villa by saying that he
and she had better part. She added, as women of Petronella’s type
invariably do add, that the dead past might bury its dead. And she drew
off her engagement ring--an olivine, imposed by a Bond Street jeweler
upon the too-confiding Canwarden as an emerald, harnessed between two
indifferent diamonds of yellowish hue--and thrust it back upon him, and
went upstairs to her room and locked the door; and as the hall-door
banged violently and the iron avenue gates clashed behind the haggard
Canwarden, his late betrothed sat down to pen a little note to Percy
Flicker--a young man without a chin, junior partner of a small but
pushing firm of shipbrokers at No. 35,000 Cornhill. The porch made up
its mind and sat down that night, and Percy the chinless called upon
the following evening, and was compelled to enter his Love’s bower by
the back-door.

And Canwarden, seeing volcanic ruins smoking where his Castle of
Hope had stood, wandered the West End and the Strand like a thing
accursed. He went into his club, and men slapped him on the shoulder
and congratulated him upon the New York success. They would learn the
truth later, he said to himself, and then they would chuckle and sneer.
The rustling of the cablegram in his waistcoat pocket whispered “_Yes
s’s’!_” Meanwhile he had no appetite for solid food, and, quenching
the thirst that consumed him with iced brandy and soda, he, Canwarden,
usually the most temperate of men, realized how easily spanned is the
gulf that severs the sober man from the inebriate. He might, perhaps,
have crossed it for good and all had he not chanced to pass the
invitingly open door of Grow’s Transatlantic Bureau of Exchange. The
shipping advertisements loomed large and gaily-colored in the window;
passenger lists and railway guides hung from hooks upon the walls, and
lay in piles upon the counter, and a civil clerk and an attractive
girl with squirrel-colored hair were busy over ledgers and things.
Prompted by his guardian angel Canwarden went in and asked for the
New York papers. The mail was just in, and he got them, and, leaning
on the polished shelf-desk where people write out code telegrams, he
turned to the theatrical column. His drama, _The Poisoned Curse_, had
been withdrawn a fortnight ago from the stage of Barney and Keedler’s
Theater--slain as a thing unfit to live--and a variety vaudeville
substituted in its stead. Did not the cablegram--Loris K. Boodler’s
cablegram--say so? He would see the hideous announcement for himself,
and then go under, as men went who had broken the golden bowl of Youth
and Hope, and were too weary to go on fighting.

Could it ... could it be a mistake...? Was the play a success after
all? It looked like it. For in flamboyant type _The Poisoned Curse_: a
Romantic Drama in four acts and eleven scenes, by Urban Canwarden, was
announced by the _New York Trumpeter_ as being presented to-night, and
every night, and to-day at 1.30, and Saturday _matinées_ as announced.
The play had been running when Loris K. Boodler sent the cablegram
announcing its withdrawal; the play was running now--would run.
Canwarden’s hands shook so that the flimsy news-sheet tore. He glanced
at the girl with the squirrel-colored hair and apologized, saying that
he would pay for the paper. She smiled, and he found that he was able
to smile back again. He despatched a short but expressive cablegram to
the office of Mr. Loris K. Boodler, relieving that smart and go-ahead
agent from further responsibility in connection with the collection
of his percentages, and walked out of Grow’s Transatlantic Bureau of
Exchange with his head up--a free man.

Petronella married Percy Flicker. Canwarden is a flourishing and
popular dramatist, with a thumping bank balance and a permanent
predilection for bachelor existence. All the female villains in his
plays are blondes. The stage directions, underlined in red, run thus:
“_Enter So-and-So, a fair and slightly formed woman of barely thirty,
with icy and repellent blue eyes and hair of a pale and sunless straw
color. She conveys the impression of cold insincerity and self-centered
absorption, and her hard and mocking laugh falls gratingly upon the
ear._” Which goes to prove that Human Nature is and never will be
anything but Human Nature until the Curtain drops.




THE HAND THAT FAILED


Four men were seated about a round table, with dessert and wine
upon it, in the dining-room of a luxuriously furnished house in a
fashionable street in the West End of London--a street which is the
Eldorado of the struggling professional man, the Tom Tiddler’s ground
of successful members of the faculties of surgery and medicine. The
aroma of Turkish coffee and choice Havanas was warm and fragrant
upon the air, and the Bishop consented to a second Benedictine. His
left-hand neighbor was a dry-faced, courteous gentleman, a King’s
Counsel, famous by reason of several _causes célèbres_. The third man
at table was merely a hard-working, small-earning practitioner of
medicine and surgery, settled in a populous suburb of the high-lying
North. Coming to the host, with whom the Highgate Doctor had walked the
hospitals in his student days, one may describe him as a world-famous
Consulting Specialist and operator; one of the kings of the scalpel,
the bistoury, and the curette; a man of medals, orders, and scientific
titles innumerable. Forty-three years of age, shortly about to be
married (to a widowed niece of the Bishop), and in excellent spirits--a
thought too excellent, perhaps....

“Wants rest, decidedly. Pupils of the eyes unnaturally dilated,
circulation not what it ought to be. Overdone.... Changed color when
the servant dropped a fork just now.... He had better take care!” said
the Highgate Doctor to himself. He had to deal with many cases of
nervous breakdown up Highgate way, where there are so many compositors
and clerks and journalists. But the Bishop and the King’s Counsel had
never seen the Distinguished Surgeon look more fit, and so they told
him.

“What makes it more remarkable, in my poor opinion”--the Bishop,
employing his favorite phrase, emptied his liqueur-glass and folded
his plump, white hands--“being that our distinguished friend here”--he
waved the fattest and whitest of his thumbs toward his host--“seldom,
if ever, takes a holiday.”

“When,” said the Distinguished Surgeon, playing with a gold fruit-knife
belonging to a set which had formed part of the First Napoleon
camp-equipment at Leipsic, “when a professional man’s brain is
absolutely clear, his nerves infallibly steady; when his digestion,
sleep, appetite are unimpaired by any amount of physical and mental
labor; when his hand is the ready, unerring, unflinching servant of his
will at all times and all seasons, what need has that man of rest and
relaxation?” The strong, supple, finely-modeled hand went on playing
with the historical fruit-knife, as its owner added: “Work is my play!
For change of air, give me change of experience; for change of scene,
new cases, or fresh developments of familiar ones. The excitement of
the gaming table, or any other form of excitement, would be a poor
exchange for the sensations of the operator, the skilled, experienced,
unerring operator, who calculates to the fraction of an inch the depth
of the incision his scalpel makes in the body of the anæsthetized
patient extended on the glass-table before him. Life or Death are his
to give, and the trembling of the balance one way or the other is to
be guided and controlled by his unerring eye, his unerring brain, and
his skilled, infallible hand. He holds the balances of Fate--he guides
and controls Destiny, and knows his power and glories in it. He is a
supreme artist--not in clay or marble, gold or silver, pigments or
enamels--but in living flesh and blood!”

The Bishop shifted in his chair uneasily, and turned a little pale
about the gills. The removal of the episcopal appendix some months
previously had preserved to the Church of England one of its principal
corner-stones; and the neat, red seam underneath the Bishop’s apron
on the right side, on the spot that would have been covered by the
vest-pocket of an ordinary layman, twitched and tingled. And the King’s
Counsel, who had once undergone a minor operation for throat-trouble,
hurriedly gulped down a mouthful of port. The Highgate Doctor alone
answered, fixing his steel-rimmed pince-nez securely on his nose, and
tilting his chin so as to get the host’s face well into focus: “He is a
supreme artist, as you say, and he delights in his work. But supposing
him to delight too much? Supposing him to have arrived at such a pass
that he cannot live without the excitement of it!--that he indulges
in the exercise of his beneficent profession as a cocaine-drinker or
hashish-eater, or morphinomaniac, indulges in the drug that destroys
him, morally and physically--how long will he retain in their
perfection the faculties which have made him what he is?”

“As long as he chooses!” said the Distinguished Surgeon, putting
down the gold fruit-knife, and rising with the easy air of the
well-bred host. “He is no longer a mere man, but a highly-geared and
ingeniously-planned machine, in all that concerns the peculiar physical
functions brought to bear upon the exercise of his profession. To lie
idle, for such a machine, means rust and ruin; to work unceasingly is
to increase facility and gain in power, and, provided it be carefully
looked after--and I assure you my nuts and bearings receive the
necessary amount of attention!--the machine of which I speak may go on
practically for ever!” And he ushered his guests through the folding
doors into his luxurious consulting-room.

“Unless there happened,” put in the King’s Counsel, “to be a screw
loose?”

“My dear fellow,” said the Distinguished Surgeon, with a smile, “my
screws are never neglected, I have assured you. The machine won’t come
to grief that way!”

“It might come to grief in another way,” said the Highgate Doctor in a
queer voice. “The Inventor might stop it Himself, just to prove to His
handiwork that it _was_ a machine--and something more!”

At this remark, plopped into the middle of the calm duck-pond of
sociality, the Bishop looked pained, as might an elderly spinster
of severe morals at an allusion savoring of impropriety. The King’s
Counsel, feeling for the Bishop, turned the conversation; but the
Distinguished Surgeon and the Highgate Doctor were at it again, hammer
and tongs, in a minute.

“I do not simply believe I shall not fail, my dear fellow! I _know_ I
shall not! As for----” (the Distinguished Surgeon, sitting smoking in
his Louis Quinze consulting-chair, mentioned a certain operation in
abdominal surgery, delicate, difficult, and dangerous in the extreme)
“I have performed it hundreds of times, successfully, within the last
twelvemonth, leaving minor operations--scores of them”--he waved the
scores aside with a movement of the supple hand--“entirely out of
the question! At the Hospital to-day” (mentioning the name of a great
public institution) “I operated in seven cases, bringing up the number
to one thousand and one. The last was the most interesting case I have
met with for some time, presenting complications rendering the use of
the knife both difficult and risky, but----”

The sharp whirring tingle of the telephone bell punctuated the
Distinguished Surgeon’s sentence: “But she’ll pull through; I guarantee
it! We’ll have the bandages off in three weeks. She’ll be walking about
before the month’s out like the others!”

“Under Providence let us hope so!” said the Bishop, encircled by
a halo of fragrant cigar smoke. “Thank you, yes, I will take a
whisky-and-soda. Without presumption, let us hope so, remembering,
trusting in--arah--the--arah--the Divine assurance.”

“You may take the assurance from me, my lord!” said the Distinguished
Surgeon. He got up and went to the fireplace (carved by Adam), and
leaned one elbow lightly on the mantelshelf--an easy attitude, but
instinct with pride and power. “As I have said, Case One Thousand and
One is a difficult case. I could name surgeons of repute who would have
hesitated to operate; but, given the requisite skill and the necessary
care, failure, I hold, is out of the question. I have never failed
yet--I do not intend to fail. It’s impossible!”

The second shrill, imperative summons of the telephone bell ended the
Distinguished Surgeon’s sentence.

“Tch! They’re ringing ye up on the telephone from somewhere,” said the
Highgate Doctor.

“Find out what they want, Donald, there’s a good fellow,” said the
Distinguished Surgeon, buttonholed by the Bishop, whose urbane
benevolence had creased into smiles tinctured with roguishness, as he
related a clerical after-dinner story.

And the Highgate Doctor rang back, and unhooked the receiver and cried:
“Halloa?” and listened to the thin ghost of a voice that droned and
tickled at his ear, and turned toward the Distinguished Surgeon a face
that had suddenly been bleached of all color.

“Well, who is it?” the Distinguished Surgeon asked.

“It’s the House Surgeon at the Hospital. Perhaps ye would speak to him
yourself?” the Highgate Doctor said thickly; and the Distinguished
Surgeon, released by the chuckling Bishop, strolled over and took the
Highgate Doctor’s place at the receiver.

“Halloa! Yes, it’s Sir Arthur Blank!” he called, and the ghostly voice
came back.... “One of the abdominal sections in the Mrs. Solomon Davis
Ward ... Number Seven ... Mrs. Reed ... Hæmorrhage.... Imminent danger
... collapse.... Come at once!”

The Distinguished Surgeon glanced round, with eyes that were sunk
in pits quite newly dug. The Bishop, still in his anecdotage, was
buttonholing the King’s Counsel. Plainly they had not overheard. And
as the Distinguished Surgeon took out his handkerchief and wiped the
cold damps from a face that had gone gray and shiny, he knew relief.
He avoided looking point-blank at the Highgate Doctor as he made his
courteous excuses to his guests. “An urgent case--suddenly called
away for an hour. My dear Lord, my dear Entwhistle, my dear Donald,
entertain yourselves for that space of time, and don’t deprive me of a
pleasant end to this delightful evening!”

But the Bishop, recently wedded for the third time, took leave,
accepting his host’s offer of dropping him at his hotel, and the pair
got into fur coats and a snug ante-brougham and drove away together.
Soon after, somebody from the Chancery Buildings came with an urgent
summons for the King’s Counsel, and he melted away with regrets, and
the Highgate Doctor sat in the luxurious consulting-room, and started
at every stoppage of swift wheels in the streets.

The silent servants came and looked to the fire, the Pompadour clock
upon the mantel chimed eleven! And then, looking up out of a brown
study, the Highgate Doctor saw his host returned, and started at his
worn and haggard aspect. As the demure servant relieved him of his
coat and hat, and vanished, the Distinguished Surgeon dropped into
an easy-chair and sat shading his face with the right hand, whose
steadiness he had so vaunted. And that infallible, unerring hand shook
as if with palsy.

The Highgate Doctor could bear no more....

“O man,” he said--in moments of excitement his accent savored of from
north of the Tweed--“dinna sit glowering and shaking there! I ken weel
what has happened! Your pride has got the killing thrust; she is in her
death-pangs at this minute I’m talking, and you stand face to face wi’
One you have denied! Am I richt or no?”

The Distinguished Surgeon moved the shaking hand and said, not in the
calm level tone the Highgate Doctor knew, but one jerky and uneven:

“You are right! You shall know the truth, though it places my
reputation at your mercy....”

“Forget your reputation a meenute,” said the Highgate Doctor. “As to
Case One Thousand and One ... is the woman dead?”

“No ...” said the other--“no, I reached the Hospital in time ... we
called up the chart-nurse and the Matron, had her taken up to the
theater and----”

“Found that ye had bungled--for once in your life!” said the Highgate
Doctor. “And weel for you, if not for your patient, that it is so. The
ligature had slipped, I take it, being insecurely tied?”

The Distinguished Surgeon looked him steadily between the eyes and
answered:

“The ligature was not tied at all! A grosser instance of neglect I
never met with.” He got up and leaned against the mantelshelf, folding
his arms. “I said so pretty plainly, and I have made a minute on the
Hospital register to that effect. I shall also draw the attention of
the Committee to the matter without delay!”

The Highgate Doctor blew his nose violently. His eyeglasses were misty.

“Ye have censured yourself? Ye will report yourself? O man! I kenned ye
were a great one, but ye have never been so great--in my eyes--as ye
are this night!”

“Thank you!” said the Distinguished Surgeon, as the two men gripped
hands. “And--Donald, old fellow--I am going to take a holiday!”

“Where is the whisky-and-soda?” said the Highgate Doctor gleefully.




HIS SILHOUETTE


“He walked down Upper Bond Street, after leaving his chambers, half-way
up on the left-hand side. The ground floor is occupied by the only
London purveyor of American chewing-gum, who does a tremendous business
in the imported article, and the shop is crowded all day by ladies,
young and old, whose jaws, even in moments of repose from conversation,
are in perpetual motion. Englishwomen do not yet chew gum. Let us hope
that our wives, sweethearts, sisters, and cousins will be slow to
acquire what, in my opinion, is an unpleasant habit, but too suggestive
of arboreal tendencies inherited from anthropoid ancestors.”

The man who was telling the story stretched out his hand across the
coffee-cups to select a toothpick. The man who opposed him at the table
promptly annexed the glass-and-silver receptacle containing the article
required.

“The original ape,” he said, “probably employed a twig. I cannot
encourage you in a practice you so strongly denounce. Waiter, take
these things away! Bonson, my good fellow, let us hear your story--if
it is worth hearing. If not, keep it to yourself. The man began by
walking down Bond Street. There is nothing original in that. I myself
do it every day without being the hero of a story.”

“This man was the hero of a tragedy,” said the man who was telling the
story. “Other people might smile at it for a farce--it was a tragedy to
him.”

“Where did the horror of it come in?” asked the other man.

“Under Shelmadine’s waistcoat,” said the man who had been addressed
as Bonson. “Shelmadine was losing his figure, which had been his
joy and pride and the delight of the female eye ever since he left
Oxford, without his degree, and, thanks to the influence of his uncle,
Colonel Sir Barberry Bigglesmith, K.C.B., Assistant Under-Secretary to
the Ordnance Office Council, took up a Second Division Higher-grade
Clerkship at £280 per annum, which sufficiently supplemented his
younger son’s allowance of £500 to make it feasible to get along with
some show of decency--don’t you follow me?”

“If I had followed this beggar down Upper Bond Street,” hinted the
other man, knocking an ash off a long, slim High Dutch cigar, “where
would he have led me?”

“Into his tailor’s,” said the man who had been addressed as Bonson
promptly. “He walked in there regularly every day on his way to the
War Office. Clothes were his passion--in fact, he simply couldn’t live
without clothes!”

“Could we?” answered the other man simply.

“I have heard that Europeans shipwrecked on the palm-fringed shores of
a Pacific Island,” said Bonson, “have managed to do very well without
them. Under those circumstances, let me tell you, Shelmadine would
still have managed to be well dressed. He would have evolved style out
of cocoa-fiber and elegance out of banana-leaves, or he would have died
in the attempt. I am trying to convey to you that he had a genius for
clothes. He evolved ideas which sartorial artists were only too happy
to carry out. He gave bootmakers hints which made their reputations.
He would run over to Paris every month or so to look at Le Bargy’s hat
and cravats. He never told anyone where he got his walking sticks, but
they were wonderful. I tell you----”

“Every man likes to be well dressed,” said the man who was listening to
the story, “but this beggar seems to have had coats and trousers on the
brain.”

“Rather,” said the narrator. “He thought of clothes, dreamed of
clothes--lived for clothes alone. Garments were his fad, his folly, his
passion, his mania, his dearest object in life. Men consulted him--men
who wanted to be particularly well got-up couldn’t do better than put
themselves in Shelmadine’s hands. He permitted no servile copying of
the modes and styles he exhibited on his person. ‘Forge my name,’
he said to a fellow once, ‘but never copy the knot of my necktie!’
Chap took the advice, and did forge his name--to the tune of £60.
Shelmadine would not prosecute. He was planning an overcoat--a kind of
Chesterfield, cut skirty--with which he made a sensation at Doncaster
this year, and when a certain Distinguished Personage condescended to
order one like it, Shelmadine made the three he had got, quite new,
and wickedly expensive, into a parcel, poured on petrol, and applied a
match. Shut himself up for three days, and appeared on the fourth with
a perfectly new silhouette.”

“A perfectly new what?” said the listener, with circular eyes.

“Shelmadine’s creed was that for a man to look thoroughly well dressed
he must have a perfect silhouette. Every line about him must be
perfect. The sweep of the shoulders, the spring of the hips, the arch
over the instep, and so forth, must display the cut of scissors wielded
by an artist--not a mere workman. Now, on this particular morning,
not so very long ago, it had been brought home to him, as he looked in
his full-length, quadruple-leaved, swing-balance, double lever-action
cheval glass, that the reflection it gave back to him was not quite
satisfactory. His silhouette did not satisfy him. Then all at once came
with a rush the overwhelming discovery that he was----”

“Getting potty,” said the listener. “Those Government clerkships play
the devil with a man’s waist. Nothing to do but eat, drink, sleep,
walk, or drive to the Office and sit in a chair gumming up envelopes or
drawing heads on the blotting paper when you’re there, until you fall
asleep. Once you’re asleep, you don’t wake till it’s time to go home.
Consequently you develop adipose tissue.” He yawned.

“Do you suppose,” asked the teller of the tale, with large
contempt, “that Shelmadine lived the life of one of those human
marmots--Shelmadine, a man so sensitively, keenly alive to the beauty
of Shape, Form, Line, and Proportion? Do you dream that he lightly
risked the inevitable result of indulgence in the pleasures of the
table or the delights of drowsiness? If so, you are wrong. He rose at
5 a.m., winter and summer, in town or country, and after a hot bath,
followed by a cold douche, pursued a course of physical exercises
until seven, when he breakfasted on milkless tea, dry toast, or gluten
biscuits”--the other man shuddered--“with, perhaps, a little plain
boiled fish, its lack of flavor undisguised by Worcester sauce or any
other condiment.”

“Horrible!” said the other man. “I once tried....”

“After breakfast, in all weathers, he walked five miles, within the
Radius, returning to dress for the day. Anon he would saunter down Bond
Street, look in at the shops, where he was adored, and criticize the
new models submitted to him, as only Shelmadine could, show himself
at his Club, stroll in the Park, and get to the Ordnance Office about
eleven. The floors at Whitehall are solidly built, consequently his
habit of jumping backward and forward over the office-table when
he felt his muscles dangerously relaxed, met with little, if any,
opposition in the Department. Dumb-bells, of course, were always ready
to hand. At his Club the invariable luncheon supplied to him was the
eye of a grilled cutlet, a glass of claret and water, eight stewed
prunes, and, of course, more gluten biscuits. He shunned fat-forming
foods more than he would the devil!”

“And made his life a hell!” said the other man, with conviction.

“My dear fellow,” said the relater, “you can’t understand what a man’s
life is or is not until you have seen both sides of it. A Second
Division Higher-Grade War Office clerkship allows of a good deal of
liberty. Picture Shelmadine as the _enfant gâté_ of Society, followed,
stared at, caressed and courted, by the smartest feminine leaders of
fashion, as well as by the swellest men, as the acknowledged Oracle
in Clothes. There’s a position for a young man single-handed to
have achieved. To be the vogue--the rage--the _coq de village_--the
_village_ being London--and at twenty-seven.”

“Exhausting,” said the other man, “to keep up, but sufficiently
agreeable. Quite sufficiently agreeable! And I realize that at the
psychological moment, when the fellow discovered that his figure had
begun to run to seed, he sustained a shock--kind of cold moral and
mental _douche_ a professional beauty gets when her toilet glass shows
her the first crow’s-foot. Did your friend have hysterics and ask his
valet for sal-volatile? I should expect it of him!”

“Shelmadine did not employ a man,” said the teller of the tale, fixing
his eyeglass firmly in its place, “to do anything but brush his
clothes. For all other purposes connected with the toilet he preferred
a Swiss lady’s-maid. Do not misunderstand, my friend,” he added
sternly, as the listener exploded in a guffaw of laughter. “_Honi soit_
... the rest of the quotation is familiar to you. And Mariette Duchâtel
had been strongly recommended to him by his aunt, Lady Bigglesmith, as
a most desirable person for the post of housekeeper. She was at least
fifty--retained the archæological remains of good looks, and owned a
moustache a buddin’ Guardsman might be jealous of, by Jingo! But her
heart had remained youthful, or we may so conjecture.”

“I begin to tumble to the situation of the swelling subject of your
story,” said the other man, pouring out a Benedictine. “When your
elderly housekeeper happens to be in love with you, it is bad enough.
Things become complicated when the victim of your charms happens to be
your maid. Continue!”

“A visit to his tailor’s on the day on which my story begins,” said
Bonson, “convinced Shelmadine that--in fact, his outlines were becoming
indefinite. ‘This will not do, sir,’ said his tailor, a grave and
himself a portly personage, ‘with your reputation for silhouette to
keep up--and at your years. We will let out the garment one inch--a
thing I decline to do even for Royal Personages, as destructive of
the design--and as this is now the Autumn Season I recommend you to
obtain leave. Klümpenstein in the Tyrol has a reputation for reducing
weight; its waters have done wonders for several of my customers, and
the Rittenberg affords several thousand feet of climbing opportunity to
tourists who wish to be quickly rid of superfluous girth. But, first of
all, I should consult Dr. Quox, of Harley Street. Good-morning.’

“Quox of Harley Street went into Shelmadine’s case, elicited the
fact that his maternal grandfather had turned the scale at twenty
stone, that his mother, Lady Fanny, hadn’t seen her own shoe-buckles
for eighteen years, except when the shoes weren’t on--don’t you
twig?--and that he possessed what Quox pleased to call ‘a record of
family obesity.’ So Shelmadine, who, in spite of rigorous diet and
redoubled physical exercises, kept getting more and more uncertain in
his outlines, rushed frantically off to Klümpenstein in the Tyrol,
with what was, for him, quite a limited wardrobe. He drank the
water--infernally nasty, too--and climbed the Rittenberg religiously,
without finding his lost silhouette. Only on the Dolomittenweg, a
pine-shaded promenade of great promise in the flirtatious line, he did
find--a girl. And, despite his anxiety with regard to his silhouette,
they had an uncommonly pleasant time together.”

“He had left his lady’s-maid behind, I presume?” hinted the listener.

“He had,” said Bonson. “When he got back to London, though, Mariette
met him with a shriek. ‘Heavens!’ cried she, throwing up her hands,
‘the figure of Monsieur--the silhouette on which he justly prided
himself, where--where has it gone? Hélas! those beautiful clothes that
have arrived from the tailor’s during the absence of Monsieur--_jamais
de la vie_ will he be able to get into them, _j’en suis baba_ in
contemplating the extraordinary _embonpoint_ of Monsieur.’

“‘Hang it, Mariette!’ said Shelmadine, quite shocked; ‘am I so beastly
bulged as all that comes to?’ Mariette broke down at that, and went
into floods of tears. It took the best part of a bottle of Cognac
to bring her round, and then Shelmadine set about overhauling his
wardrobe.”

“Nothing would meet, I presume?” hinted the man who had been listening.

“Not by three finger-breadths,” said the man who was telling the story.
“Plowondllellm Wells in North Wales has got a kind of reputation for
making stout kine lean. Shelmadine got extension of leave on account of
bereavement....”

“When a man loses his figure he may be said to be bereaved!” nodded the
listener.

“Shelmadine tried the Wells, without success. All he ate was weighed
out in ounces, all he drank measured out with the most grudging care;
nothing was allowed to enter his system that contained anything
conducive to the accumulation of the hated tissue, but nothing could
keep him from putting it on!”

“Poor brute!” said the hearer.

“He had gone to the Wells a distinctly roundabout figure. He came back
a potty young man! Despair preyed upon his vitals without reducing his
bulk, however. He saw ‘Slimaline’ advertised.”

“I know,” said the listener. “A harmless vegetable compound which
reduces the bulkiest middle-aged human figure of either sex in the
course of a few weeks to the slender proportions of graceful youth.
Three-and-sixpence a bottle, sent secretly packed, to any address in
the United Kingdom. _Bis!_”

“He then,” continued the narrator, “went in for ‘Frosher’s Fat-Reducing
Soap.’ Perhaps you are not acquainted with that compound, which is
rubbed briskly into the--ah--the----”

“Personality,” put in the other man.

“... Until a strong lather is obtained. The lather proved ineffectual;
Shelmadine took to stays.”

“Phew!” puffed the other man.

The first man continued:

“As the weary weeks went on he was compelled to return to his desk at
Whitehall--crouching in a taxicab to avoid observation. But concealment
was useless. From the Department allotted to the Second Division
Higher-Grade clerks the secret crept out, and Society pounced upon it
and tore it to shreds, shrieking.”

“Like ’em,” said the listener--“like ’em!”

“That night, as Shelmadine sat in his dainty dressing-room surrounded
by mountains of costly and elegant clothes, which, though only of the
previous season’s make, would no longer accommodate his proportions,”
went on Bonson--“lounging clothes, shooting clothes, walking clothes
of all descriptions--London did not contain a wretcheder man. The
exquisitely chosen waist-coats, the taffetas shirts of the once slim
dandy of the War Office--a world too narrow for the fat man who now
represented him were in piles about him. Dozens of lovely gloves in
all the newest shades--squirrel-gray, dead-leaf yellow, Havana-brown,
chrysanthemum-buff--were scattered around by the hands that were now
too stout to wear them. Piles of boots--afternoon boots, with uppers
of corduroy leather, gray, fawn, or the white antelope, emblematical
of the blameless pattern of virtue; walking boots, shooting boots, and
shoes of all descriptions; slippers in heliotrope, rose-petal pink,
and lizard-skin green, obscured the furniture. The pedal extremities
that had bulged beyond all reasonable limits must now be accommodated
in large Number Nines. Even Shelmadine’s dressing gowns--foulard silk,
lined with cashmere--had declined to contain him.”

“’Pon my word, you make me sorry for the idiot,” said the listener;
“mere clothes-peg, as he seems to have been!”

“Suicide--the thought of suicide had occurred to him.”

“He ought to have swallowed a set of enamel evening buttons or a set of
five jeweled tie-pins,” suggested the listener, “and taken leave of the
world in an appropriate manner.”

“I won’t go so far as to say that he would not have done something
desperate,” continued the man who was telling the story, “had not
Mariette--who may or may not have suspected that things were getting
to a desperate pitch--appeared upon the scene. ‘Poor lamb! thou art in
despair’--thus she addressed Shelmadine in the affectionate idiom with
which her native language abounds--‘confide in Mariette, who alone can
restore the silhouette that seems for ever lost to thee. Seems only,
Monsieur; for at the bidding of me, myself, it will return. A little
condition is attached to the recovery of thy figure, my child--not
to be carried out if I cannot be as good as my word. _Passe moi la
casse, je te passerai le séné._ All I want, Monsieur, is senna for my
rhubarb--your written promise to marry Mariette Duchâtel, daughter of
Marius Duchâtel, druggist of Geneva, if within three months you recover
your beautiful figure. What do you say? Is it a bargain? Will you be
fat and free, or slim and no longer single? Speak, then! You agree?
_Pour sûr!_ I thought you would!’”

“And did he marry his lady’s-maid?” asked the listening man quite
eagerly.

“He did not,” said the teller of the tale, “though he was very near it.
Fortunately for Shelmadine, the girl he had met on the Dolomittenweg
Promenade stepped in. She was an American, original, independent, and
determined. When Shelmadine wrote--on Ordnance Office paper--to her in
Paris, saying that Fate had stepped in between them, and that she never
could be his, she asked the reason why. Not getting a satisfactory
answer, she ran over to London to see for herself ... bringing her
mother--a vast person, who wore a diamond tiara, mittens, and diamond
shoulder-straps in the evening, and carried them in a hip-bag by
day--with her.”

“The American mother is an appendage,” said the listener, “rather than
a necessity.”

“The sight of Shelmadine, who had expanded like a balloon in the
filling-shed since the happy days at Klümpenstein, was to Miss Van
Kyper--Miss Mamie Van Kyper was her complete name,” went on the man who
had been called Bonson--“an undoubted shock.”

“Of course,” agreed the man who was being told the story.

“They met at the Carlton Hotel, where she had engaged a suite of
reception-rooms for the interview.”

“Not being quite certain whether one would hold Shelmadine?” suggested
the other.

“And the matter was thrashed out satisfactorily in five minutes, where
an English girl would have taken five weeks. ‘I guess there’s a good
deal more of you than ever either of us expected there would be,’ said
Mamie; ‘but I’ve got to choose between having too much of the man I
love, or nothing at all. And it seems mighty unreasonable--when I felt
plum-sure at Klümpenstein that I could never have enough of you--that I
should be miserable here in London because there happens to be a good
deal more than there was then.’ With a gush of warm and affectionate
devotion she twined her arms as far round Shelmadine as they would go,
and he, in accepting the fate that made him the husband of Miss Mamie
Van Kyper, renounced his silhouette for ever!”

“But you said he got it back again!” said the second man.

“He has,” said the first man.

“Without the assistance of Mariette Duchâtel, daughter of Marius
Duchâtel, herbalist, of Geneva?” queried the second man.

“Mariette,” said the first man, “on finding Shelmadine indisposed to
accept her offer, first attempted to commit suicide in a cistern; then
threw up the sponge and made a clean breast of everything. A peculiar
vegetable preparation, the secret of which she had had from her father,
the herbalist of Geneva, administered in Shelmadine’s food, had caused
the extraordinary accumulation of adipose tissue. The antidote, which
she had promised to administer in the intervals of her own designs on
my poor friend’s freedom, she confided to him, with bitter tears and
many entreaties for forgiveness, before she went out of the Bond Street
flat and Shelmadine’s life for ever.”

“He married Miss Van Kyper immediately. He has an Assistant-Principal
clerkship at the Ordnance Office; he has recovered his silhouette, but
he no longer cares for clothes. You could scare rooks with him as he
dresses now. Fact!”

“Facts are confoundedly rummy things!” said the man who had been told
the story.




A NOCTURNE


“You look,” He said nastily, as She raised her disheveled _coiffure_
and tear-blurred features from the center of a large muslin-flounced
and covered cushion that sat at the end of the lounge that opened like
a box, and held frilled petticoats--“you look like a wilted prize
chrysanthemum.”

She mechanically put up one hand to drive home deserting hairpins
into the mass of hair He had, in the lyrical days of early passion,
celebrated as Corinthian gold-bronze, in a halting sonnet of which
he was now profoundly ashamed. Stifling the recurrent hiccough that
accompanies a liberal effusion of tears, she stared at him blankly.

A silver timepiece, a wedding present from His mother, who had objected
to the match, struck the midnight hour. The thin sound of the last
stroke, spun into tenuity by silence, died, and the clanking, hooting,
nerve-shattering scurry of racing motor-buses went by like a wild
hunt of iron-shackled fiends. A private car passed with its exhaust
wailing like an exiled banshee, a belated hansom or two bowled along
the sloppy asphalt, the raucous screech of a constable-defying nymph
of the pavement rent the muggy air. He hardly heard it; he had been
agreeing with his mother ever since the clock had struck. To-morrow
he would go and look in at 000, Sloane Street, and tell her that she
had always known best. In imagination he was telling her so, when the
sable-bordered tail of a dove-colored Indian cashmere dressing gown he
had worshiped during the honeymoon swept across the feuille-rose carpet
in the direction of the boudoir; Sada Yacco and Abé San, snub-nosed,
blue-and-pink-bowed canine causes of the conjugal quarrel, joyously
yelping in its wake.

“Aren’t you going to bed?” He demanded.

“You did not seem inclined to go to your dressing-room,” She returned
with point, “and as I have to write an important letter, I may as well
do it now!”

He knew that the letter would be addressed to Her mother, who had also
objected to the match, and would contain a daughter’s testimony to the
correctness of the maternal judgment. Sada Yacco and Abé San, sitting
on their haunches, with their pink tongues lolling, looked as though
they knew it too. How he loathed those Japanese pugs! As he glared at
them she gathered them up, one under each arm, protectingly.

“Don’t be afraid!” He said, with the kind of laugh described by the
popular novelist as grating; “I am not going to murder the little
brutes, after paying thirty pounds for the pair.” This was a touch of
practical economy that made Her lip curl. “What I say is, I decline to
have those animals galloping over me in the middle of the night.”

“It is the middle of the night now,” She said, concealing a yawn behind
three fingers--his wedding ring and keeper upon one--“and they are not
galloping over you. Men are supposed to be more logical than women. I
have often wondered why since last May.”

“We were married in May,” He said, folding his arms after a method much
in favor with the popular novelist when heroes are grim.

“It seems,” She said, rather drearily, “a long time ago.”

“If I had told you last May,” He retorted, “that I object to wake in
the middle of the night with one Japanese pug snorting upon my--ah--my
chest, and the other usurping the greater part of my pillow, you
would have sympathized with my feeling, understood the objection, and
relegated Sada Yacco and Abé San to their comfortable basket in the
corner of the kitchen--or anywhere else,” he added hurriedly, seeing
thievish early errand-boys on the tip of her tongue, “except your
bedroom!”

The popular novelist would have described her pose as “sculpturesque,”
her expression as “fateful,” and her tone as “icy,” as She said:

“The bedroom being mine, perhaps you will permit me to remind you that
you possess one of your own, and that it is nearly one o’clock!”

It was, in fact, a quarter-past twelve. But the door closed behind Him
with such a terrific bang that the thready little utterance of the
silver timepiece was completely unnoticed.

She put her hand to her throat, as a leading actress invariably does
in moments of great mental stress, and uttered a choking little laugh
of sorrow and bitterness. Men were really like this, then! Fool, oh,
fool, to doubt! Had she not read, had she not seen, had not other
women whispered?... And had her mother not plainly told her that
this man--now her husband!--was more like other men than any of the
other men resembled others? She sobbed a few sobs, dried her eyes,
and prepared for bed. But when arrayed in white samite, mystic and
wonderful, with the traces of tears effaced by perfumed hot water, the
pinkness of nose and eyelids ameliorated by a dab or two of powder,
the gold-brown tresses He had once sonneted, and now sneered at,
brushed out and beautiful, she took up the double basket owned by Sada
Yacco and Abé San, placed it in the boudoir, returned for the canine
couple, deposited them inside it, and then, resolutely shutting the
door of communication upon their astonished countenances, got into bed,
cast one indifferent glance at the twin couch adjoining, shrugged her
shoulders, and switched off the light.

“S’n’ff!”

That was Abé San snuffing inquiringly at the bottom of the door. Sada
Yacco joined him, and they snuffed together. It was impossible to
sleep, especially when they began to discuss the situation in whimpers
and short yelps. Then they began to race round the boudoir, barking
in whimpers. Then, just as She had made up her mind to buy peace by
letting them in, there was a sharp bark from Sada Yacco, a joyous
scrape at a distant door, and a rattling of claws as the couple,
emancipated from vile durance in the boudoir, joyously galloped down
the passage. Then sleep soporifically stole over the senses of a
wronged and brutally injured woman. It was not chilly, sloppy December:
it was radiant July. She was not in a London flat. She was in a
well-known back-water above Goring-on-Thames, cosy in a red-curtained
punt, with a Japanese umbrella and two Japanese pugs and a husband,
very handsome, almost quite new, madly devoted, not the quite plain,
absolutely sulky, unspeakably disagreeable He now conjecturally snoring
on the opposite side of the passage. And so She slept and dreamed.

He was not asleep. Propped up in his own beautiful little bed in his
own cosy dressing-room, he was smoking a long cigar, and, as a further
demonstration of bachelor independence, a brandy and Apollinaris stood
untouched beside him. By the electric light dangling over his head,
where sardonically hung suspended a wooden Cupid--ha, ha!--he was
perusing a book. She objected to reading in bed, that was why--ha, ha!
again. The thin-paper volume, supposed to be an enlightening work on
Oval Billiards, proved, by a tricky freak of Fate, to be an English
translation of _Thus Spake Zarathustra_. This is what he read:

  “Calm is the bottom of my sea:
  Who would divine that it hideth droll monsters?
  Unmoved is my depth, yet it sparkleth with swimming enigmas and laughters.
  An imposing One saw I to-day--a solemn One, a penitent of the Spirit....
  Should he become weary of his imposingness, this imposing one....”

There came a scratch at the bottom of the door, a snuffling sound,
and a sneeze he knew well. What did Abé San straying about draughty
passages by night? But it was no business of his. Let the beast’s owner
see to it. He read on:

  “Gracefulness belongeth to the generosity of the magnanimous.”

Sada Yacco had joined her lord. Together they burrowed, mutually they
snuffed. It was not to be borne. He got up and opened the door. Sada
Yacco and Abé San rushed in, their tongues lolling, their eyes bulging
with curiosity, and, after a brief excursion round the apartment, which
they found small, fawned upon him with a sickening devotion. He scowled
on the small black-and-white silky handfuls. Then he yielded to the
impulse that plucked at his maxillary muscles and grinned. The little
brutes were so painfully sorry for him. They were so clearly under the
impression that he was in disgrace.

He got back into bed, and lay there, grinning still, if unwillingly.
Sada Yacco, with the forwardness of her sex, scrambled up and sat upon
him. Abé San scratched at the coverlet imploringly, until, hoisted
upward by the scruff, he, too, gained the desired haven. They had
plainly come to stay, so He resigned himself with a sigh, switched off
the electric light, and fell asleep before Abé San had turned round the
regulation number of times.

Meanwhile She, wakened by the toot of a belated motor-taxi, began to
wonder whither the Japanese couple had strayed. Urged and wearied by
the unbroken silence, she rose, arrayed herself in her dressing gown,
armed herself with a lighted wax taper in a silver candlestick--another
wedding present--and began a tour of discovery. The pugs had vanished.
Had the maids yielded to their entreaties and taken them in? She
listened at two doors; the steady snoring of the sleepers within was
unmingled with snort or slumbering whimper of Sada and her mate. Then,
returning, she noticed that His dressing-room door was open.

Taper in hand, She went in. He was sound asleep, Sada Yacco sweetly
slumbering on the surface covered by daylight with a waistcoat, Abé
San curled up, a floss-silk ball, on the pillow by his ear. If he had
seen her eyes as she bent over him, shading the light, he would have
regained his old opinion of them in the twinkling of the tear She
dropped upon His cheek.

Don’t say there are no such things as guardian angels. His woke him up
just as She kissed him--the kiss was so light it would not have wakened
him by itself.




THE LAST EXPEDITION


I

Suppose that you see Captain Arthur Magellison, late of His Majesty’s
Royal Navy, with the eyes of the writer’s remembrance, as a thick-set,
fair man of middle height, neat in appearance and alert in bearing. His
skin was a curious bleached bronze, and his wide-pupilled pale gray
eyes, netted about with close, fine wrinkles, had looked on the awful
desolation of the Arctic until something of its loneliness and terror
had sunk into them and stamped itself upon the man’s brain, never to
be effaced, or so it seemed to me. For his wife, once the marble Miss
Dycehurst, who had not married a semi-Celebrity for nothing, took her
husband much with her into London Society, and at gossipy dinner-tables
and in crowded drawing-rooms; on the Lawn at Ascot and in a box on
the Grand Stand at Doncaster, as on a Henley houseboat, and during a
polo tournament at Ranelagh, I have seen Magellison, to all appearance
perfectly oblivious of the gay and giddy world about him, sitting,
or standing with folded arms and bent head, and staring out with
fixed and watchful eyes, over Heaven knows what illimitable wastes of
snow-covered land or frozen ocean....

I have described Captain Arthur Magellison as a semi-Celebrity.
Erstwhile Commander of the Third-class Armored Destroyer _Sidonia_,
he became, after his severance from the Royal Navy, and by reason
of the adventures and hardships by him undergone as leader of the
Scottish Alaskan Coastal Survey Expedition of 1906-1908, something
of a hero. A series of lectures, delivered at the Edinburgh Hall of
Science, in the course of which the explorer, by verbal descriptions
as well as cinematographic effects, completely disposed of the theory
regarding the existence of a range of active volcanoes to the north of
Alaska, previously accepted by the illuminati, made a sensation among
scientists, and induced, in the case of Sir Jedbury Fargoe, F.R.G.S.,
M.R.I., a rush of blood to the cerebrum, followed by the breaking out
of a Funeral Hatchment over his front door, a procession in slow time,
with wreaths, palls, and feathers, and a final exit _per_ trolley into
the Furnace at Croking Crematorium.

The Public, never having bothered about the volcanoes, remained unmoved
by the intelligence of their non-existence, but the Professors and the
Press shed much ink upon the subject. Upon a wave of which sable fluid
Captain Arthur Magellison was borne, if not into the inner court, at
least into the vestibule of the Temple of Fame. Then the wave, as is
the way of waves, receded; leaving Magellison, by virtue of certain
researches and discoveries in Natural History, Botany and Physiology, a
Member of the Royal Institution, Associate of the Zoological Society,
Fellow of the Institute of Ethnology, and the husband of the marble
Miss Dycehurst.

Never was a more appropriate sobriquet bestowed. Down in Clayshire, her
native county, the statuesque Geraldine, orphan heiress of a wealthy
landholder not remotely connected with the Brewing interests of his
native isle, dispensed, under the protective auspices of a maternal
aunt of good family--Miss Dycehurst’s mother’s deceased papa had wedded
a portionless spinster of noble blood--dispensed, I say, a lavish but
stony hospitality. In London she went out a great deal, looking like
a sculptured Minerva of the Græco-Latin school, _minus_ the helmet but
_plus_ a tower of astonishing golden hair, received proposals from
Eligibles and Ineligibles, petrified their makers with a single stare,
and proceeded upon her marmorean way in maiden meditation, fancy free.
Until she attended that series of lectures, delivered at the Edinburgh
Hall of Science by the eminent Arctic Explorer, Captain Arthur
Magellison.

Society in Clayshire and Society in London expressed ardent curiosity
to know how the engagement had been brought about? All that is known
for certain is, that after the lecture, when the Explorer held a
little reception in a draughty enclosure of green baize screens, Miss
Dycehurst, looking rather like a mythical goddess of the Polar Regions,
her frosty beauty crowned with its diadem of pale golden hair, and her
fine shape revealed in greenish-blue, icily-gleaming draperies, asked a
local magnate to present the lecturer, and met him at a public dinner
given in his honor upon the following night. Later on in London, where
the lecture was, by invitation of the learned heads of the nation,
repeated, Miss Dycehurst with a large party occupied the second row
of stalls. Later still, Magellison dined with the heiress at 000,
Chesterfield Crescent, her town address, and later still the couple
were Hanover-Squared into one flesh. It was in May, and the sacred
edifice was garlanded with white Rambler roses and adorned with lilies
and smilax and palms. A Bishop tied the knot, and the choir rendered
the anthem with exquisite effect, as well as “Fight the Good Fight” and
“The Voice that Breathed----.” And the Bride, in dead white, with a
swansdown train and a Malines veil, and ropes of pearls and brilliants,
and a crown of diamond spikes that might have been sparkling icicles,
gleaming and scintillating on the summit of her wonderful tower of
hair, looked more like the Lady of the Eternal Snows than ever.

No one knew whether the Magellisons’ married life was happy or the
other thing. Suffice it, as the popular three-volume novelist used
to say when not compelled to pad, that, to all outward seeming, the
couple agreed. But I think that when the high tide of Fame receded (as
during 1909, when the thrilling adventures of the dauntless explorer,
Blank, were electrifying the newspaper-reading world, it certainly
did, leaving nothing but a vague halo of heroism and adventure hanging
about the name of Magellison, and a sedimentary deposit of honorary
letters at the tail of it) the woman who had married Magellison knew
disillusion. As for Magellison, he had always been a silent, absorbed
and solitary man. And that strange look in those wide-pupilled
pale gray eyes of his, the eyes of one who has lived through the
half-year-long twilight of Arctic nights, and seen the ringed moon with
her mock moons glimmer through the ghostly frost-fog, and the pale pink
curving feathers of the Aurora Borealis stream across the ice-blue
sky, and the awful crimson of the Polar Day rush up beyond the floe
and strike the icy loneliness into new beauty and new terror--never
changed. Perhaps, in discovering the true nature of his Geraldine,
the Explorer found himself traversing a colder and more rugged
desert than he had encountered when he led the Scottish-Northumbrian
Polar Expedition in quest of those volcanic ranges proved to be
non-existent--in Alaska to the North.

I believe he really loved the woman he had married. I know that, while
he acted as the unpaid steward of her estates, he spent nothing beyond
his half-pay, eked out by articles which he wrote now and then for
the kind of Scientific Review that rewards the contributor with ten
shillings per page of one thousand words, _plus_ the honor of having
contributed. In his own houses--his wife’s, I should say--he was a
pathetic nonentity. At 000 Chesterfield Crescent, and at Edengates in
Clayshire, the recent Miss Dycehurst’s country seat, he hugged his own
rooms, about which, arranged in cases and hung upon the walls, were
disposed native weapons, stuffed birds, geological specimens, dried
algæ, water-color sketches, and such trophies of the Survey Expedition
as had not been presented by Magellison to needy museums. When his name
appeared in newspaper-paragraphs as the writer of one of the articles
referred to, or as the donor of such a gift, his wife would pluck him
from his beloved solitude, and compel him to tread the social round
with her. But as the slow years crept on, the man himself, long before
the ebbing tide of Fame left a desolate stretch of seaweedy mud where
its waters had heaved and whispered, was so rarely seen, in his wife’s
company or out of it, that her all-but-newest friends believed Mrs.
Arthur Magellison to be the wife of an incurable invalid, and the most
recent were convinced that she was a widow. Proposals of marriage were
sometimes made to the lady, who by the way was handsomer and stonier
than ever, by Eligibles or Ineligibles laboring under this conviction.

“I am extremely sensible of the honor you have done me,” said Mrs.
Magellison upon one of these occasions, “but as a fact, my husband is
alive. Which relieves me of the necessity--don’t you think?--of coming
to a decision!”

The man who had proposed, a barely middle-aged, extremely good-looking,
well-made, well-bred Hawting-Holliday of Hirlmere, sufficiently
endowed with ancient, if embarrassed, acres, and a sixteenth-century
Baronetcy, to have tempted the marble Geraldine, had her frosty hand
been disengaged, to its bestowal on him, was, though impecunious enough
to be strongly attracted by the lady’s wealth, yet honestly enamored
of her sculpturesque person. Consequently as the final syllable of
the foregoing utterance fell from the lady’s lips, he assumed, for a
fleeting instant or so, the rosy complexion of early adolescence, and
stared upon the conquering Geraldine with blank and circular eyes. Then
he said:

“By--Jove! that does let me out, doesn’t it? My dear lady, I entreat
you to consider me as prostrate in humiliation at your feet. With”--he
felt over the surface of an admirably thought-out waistcoat for his
eyeglass, which was still in his eye--“with sackcloth and ashes, and
all the appropriate trimmings. Let me retrieve my character in your
eyes by saying, that if it--ahem!--gives you any gratification to
have a live husband at this juncture--I will endeavor to share the
sentiment. But you really have run him as a Dark Horse, now haven’t
you?”

He lifted his eyebrows in interrogation, and the eyeglass leaped into
the folds of his well-chosen cravat, the kind of subdued yet hopeful
thing in shades a man of taste and brains would put on to propose in.

“My dear Sir Robert,” Mrs. Magellison said, in well-chosen language and
with an icy little smile, “I am not an adept in the use of sporting
phraseology. Captain Magellison is of studious habits, retiring
nature, and--shall I say?--an indolent disposition. It would not very
well become me if I insisted on his society when he is not disposed
to bestow it upon me, and therefore I generally go out alone. When,
unless I give a formal dinner, upon which an occasion my husband must
necessarily take his place at the other end of the board--when I
entertain intimates----”

“You put your people at a round table,” said Hawting-Holliday
of Hirlmere. “And a round table is the very deuce--and--all for
obliterating a husband!” He found his eyeglass and screwed it firmly in.

“I do not altogether blame the table,” said Mrs. Magellison coldly.
“Because, upon nine occasions out of ten my husband prefers a cutlet in
his rooms. Pray do not suppose that I find fault with the preference.
He is not by nature sociable, as I have said, and prefers to follow, at
Edengates and in Scotland and in Paris, as well as here in town, his
own peculiar bent. And what that is you are probably aware?” She turned
her head with a superb movement, and her helmet of pale hair gleamed
in the wintry sunshine that streamed through the lace blinds of the
Chesterfield Crescent drawing-room.

“I had a general idea,” said the man she addressed, who, hampered in
early life by the fact of being born a Hawting-Holliday of Hirlmere,
had not succeeded in being anything else, “that the late--I beg your
pardon!--the present Captain Magellison was--I should say is--a
Scientific Buffer--of sorts!”

Mrs. Magellison smiled coldly and rose.

“The term you employ is slang, of course,” she said, “but it is quite
appropriate and really descriptive. My husband was once a famous man,
he is now a Scientific Buffer--and as you say--of sorts. Would you like
to see him?”

She moved to the drawing-room door and turned her head with another
fine movement, and Hawting-Holliday’s eclectic taste was charmed with
the sculpturesque pose. He followed her and they crossed a landing,
and Mrs. Magellison knocked at the door of one of a suite of rooms
that had been thrown out over what had been a back-yard. And as nobody
said “Come in,” she entered, followed by the visitor.


II

The room was long, carpeted but uncurtained, and lighted by that most
depressing of all forms of illumination, a skylight. Dwarf bookcases
ran round it, and the walls were covered with frames and glass cases,
primitive weapons, and a multitude of quaint and curious things.
There was a low couch, covered with seal skins and feather rugs, and
a leather writing-chair was set at the table, which had on it a fine
microscope and many scientific instruments, of which the uses were
unknown to the head of the Hawting-Hollidays of Hirlmere. Piles of
dusty papers there were, and a couple of battered ship’s logs, stained
and discolored by sea-water and grease. And in the writing-chair,
with his feet on a magnificent Polar bear-skin and the receiver of
a telephone at his ear, sat the Scientific Buffer of sorts, staring
fixedly before him, apparently over an illimitable waste of frozen
drift-ice covering uncharted Polar seas.

“Arthur!” said Mrs. Magellison, with a cold kind of impatience,
rattling the handle of the door as if to attract his attention. He came
back with a start and hung up the receiver, and rose. He had a simple,
courteous manner that won upon the suitor who had just proposed to his
wife; and oddly enough, the appearance of a servant with a message that
summoned the lady to an interview with her _modiste_ was not greatly
regretted by Hawting-Holliday.

“I have seen you before, of course,” said his host, making him free of
a rack of Esquimaux pipes and pushing over a jar of Navy-cut.

“Have you though?” rose to the visitor’s lips, but the words were
not allowed to escape. Looking round he saw that there were piles
of receipted accounts, and orderly piles of tradesmen’s books upon
the table with the reams of dusty MSS., and as servants came in for
orders and went away instructed, and messages were telephoned to
various purveyors, Hawting-Holliday arrived at the conclusion that
Mrs. Magellison’s husband was regarded less in that capacity by Mrs.
Magellison and her household than as major-domo, head-bailiff and
house-steward.

       *       *       *       *       *

The two men chatted a little, and presently one spoke while the other
listened. The capacity for hero-worship is quick in every generous
nature, and the extravagant, impoverished, high-bred county gentleman
and man-about-town was conscious that this modest, absent-minded
little ex-naval Commander was of the stuff that went to build great
heroes. Franklin and Nansen were brothers to this man, and that the
justly-honored names of Shackleton and Peary, and the cognomen of
Cook (King of terminological inexactitudinarians), were hot upon the
public’s mouths just then, mattered nothing to Hawting-Holliday, as he
heard how in the year of Our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Six, ten men
sailed from San Francisco for Bering Sea on board a sixty-ton schooner,
to settle the question of the existence of Undiscovered Ranges of
Volcanic Origin in Alaska to the North. And how great storms and awful
blizzards hindered the Coastal Survey Expedition, and sickness crippled
its members, yet they struggled gamely on.

“Good God!” said Hawting-Holliday, whose pipe had long since gone out.
He heard next how the Expedition suffered the loss of their ship and
all their stores, and how their leader sent his crew home by a passing
whaler and, for the enlargement of his own experience, chose to journey
back to civilization along the Alaskan coast, three thousand miles of
solitary sledge-traveling, aided only by the Esquimaux he chanced on
in his terrible journey. And as he went on narrating in his calm and
even voice, enforcing a point by a modest gesture of the hand that had
lost the top-joints of the first and second fingers, and sometimes
looking through and beyond the face of the listener with those strange,
sorrowful, far-away eyes, what he related the other man saw, and----

“Good Lord!” said Hawting-Holliday again, “what an Odyssey the whole
thing is! And so you got back to Ithaca after eighteen months of
tramping it on your lonesome along a frozen coast and sleeping in
holes dug in the snow, and living on blubber and seal-meat or boiled
skin-boots when you couldn’t get anything else; and gathering knowledge
and experience when there wasn’t even reindeer moss to scrape off
the rocks!” He got up and held out his hand. “As a perfectly useless
and idle kind of beggar, I don’t know that my sincere admiration and
respect are worth having, Captain, but if they were!----”

       *       *       *       *       *

He gulped, and went, quite clumsily, away, but came back again, and
so a friendship grew between the “perfectly useless and idle kind of
beggar,” Hawting-Holliday, and the hero of the three-thousand-mile
tramp back to Civilization. Perhaps Hawting-Holliday had really never
been seriously attached to the handsome piece of statuary that bore
Magellison’s name. It is certain that her cold neglect and open
contempt of her husband eventually kindled the wrath of Magellison’s
newly-won champion to boiling-point. Not that the Captain gave any
perceptible sign of suffering under the icy blizzard of his wife’s
scorn. Endurance was the lesson he had learned best of all, and he
agreed with her in regarding himself as a Failure.

“A beautiful and gifted woman has a right to be ambitious for the man
she marries,” he said once to Hawting-Holliday. “And if he has no power
to keep at high-level, if he makes no more way than a schooner frozen
in the floe, it is natural that she should feel keenly disappointed
and--and manifest the feeling by a--a certain change of attitude as
regards him.”

“The schooner may be frozen in the floe, Captain,” said
Hawting-Holliday, lounging in the window-seat of the Captain’s big,
bare room at Edengates, that was--only barring the skylight--exactly
like the Captain’s other big bare room at 000, Chesterfield Crescent.
“But the floe is traveling all the time. That’s a bit of scientific
information that I got from you. And I rather pride myself on applying
it neatly.”

The Captain looked hard at him, and Hawting-Holliday noticed for
the first time that the curly fair hair that topped the deep-lined
pale-bronze face was growing white. Then Magellison said, with a queer
smile:

“You have found me out, I see! And yet I thought I had kept the
secret--or rather, the arrangement, quite closely. But on the whole I’m
rather glad you guessed. For I like you, young man”--Hawting-Holliday
was at least thirty-five--“and I shall give you the parting hand-shake
with sincere regret--with very sincere regret, when the ice breaks
up and the little engine helps the hoisted sails, and the floe-bound
vessel that never really stopped, although her journey was only of
inches in the month--moves on not North but South, along the thawed and
open sea-lanes----”

He stopped, for Hawting-Holliday dropped his pipe and got off the
window-seat, and caught the maimed right hand and wrung it until its
owner winced.

“You gave me credit for too much perspicuity, Captain. I hadn’t seen as
much as the cat’s tail until you let her out of the bag. Where are you
going, man, and when do you go?”

Briefly, Magellison told him.

“All right, Captain,” said Hawting-Holliday. “You’re going to take
charge of the Steam and Sail Antarctic Geological Research Expedition,
financed by the Swedish Government, sailing from Plymouth for King
Edward Land in April, so as to get the summer months of December,
January, and February for exploration, botanizing, deep-sea-dredging,
and scientific observations. You calculate on being away not quite
three years. Very well, but remember this! If you don’t turn up in
three years’ time and no definite news has reached us as to your
whereabouts, the most useless and idle dog of my acquaintance--and
that’s myself--will take the liberty to come and look for you. I swear
it--by the Great Barrier and the Blue Antarctic Ooze!”

They shook hands upon it, laughing at the humorous idea of the
Captain’s not coming back, and a little later the news of her husband’s
impending departure was imparted, _per_ the medium of the Press, to the
marmorean lady to whom the explorer had frozen himself some few years
previously. She was radiant with smiles at the revival of newspaper
interest in Magellison, and postponed her spring visit to the Riviera
for the purpose of giving a series of Departure Dinners in honor of
the Captain. All the leading scientific lights of the day twinkled
in turn about the board. And Geraldine wore all her diamonds, and
was exceedingly gracious to her Distinguished Man. She saw him off
from Plymouth, one balmy April day, and shed a few discreet tears
in a minute and filmy pocket handkerchief as the Swedish oak-built,
schooner-rigged steamship-sailer _Selma_ ran up the Swedish colors
and curtsied adieu to English waters at the outset of the long South
Atlantic voyage, and the petrol steam-launch containing the friends and
relatives of the Expedition rocked in her wake, and the red-eyed people
crowding on the oily-smelling little vessel’s decks raised a quavering
farewell cheer. Two men stood together at the _Selma’s_ after-rail:
a short, square man of muscular build, with a slight stoop that told
of scholarly habits, and thick, fair hair, streaked with white, and a
deeply-lined, clean-shaven face, with pale, far-seeing eyes that were
set in a network of fine wrinkles. The other man was Hawting-Holliday,
who had announced his intention, at the last minute, of accompanying
the Expedition as far as Madeira for the sake of the sea-blow.

“Tell Geraldine I shall mail home from the Cape and Melbourne,” the
leader of the Expedition said, three days later, as the boat that
was to convey Hawting-Holliday ashore bobbed under the _Selma’s_
side-ladder in a clamoring rout of tradesmen’s luggers and Funchal
market-flats. “Tell her I shall certainly communicate from Lyttelton,
and after that she must trust to luck and homeward-bound whalers for
news of me.” He wrung Hawting-Holliday’s hand, and added, “And in
case--anything should happen to me--not that such a chance is worth
speaking of!--I know that I can rely upon you to act towards my--my
dear girl as a friend!” The Captain’s voice shook a little, and a mist
was over those clear, wide-pupilled, far-away-gazing gray eyes.

“I promise you that, faithfully,” said Hawting-Holliday, and gripped
the maimed right hand of the man he loved as a brother, and went down
over the side of the _Selma_ with a sore heart.

That was in April, 1910, and news of the loss of the _Selma_, in the
ice of the Antarctic Circle was cabled from Honolulu at the beginning
of last month. An American Antarctic Expedition, having concluded a
mission of exploration in the summer season of 1910, finding upon
the coast of King Edward Land the few survivors of the Swedish
Steam and Sail Antarctic Research Expedition making preparations to
winter in a wooden hut built out of the wreckage of their teak-built
sailing-steamer--rescued and carried them on their homeward route. The
saved men, later interviewed at San Francisco, were unable to give
news of their leader, save that the Captain, taking a dog-sledge and a
little stock of provisions and instruments, and a hearty leave of all
of them, turned that lined bronze face of his and those eyes with the
far-away look in their wide pupils, to the dim, mysterious, uncharted
regions lying South, in the lap of the mysterious Unknown, and with a
wave of a fur-gloved hand, was lost in them.

       *       *       *       *       *

“He is dead, Arthur is dead!” moaned Geraldine Magellison, in the
depths of conjugal anguish and a lace-covered sofa-cushion, when the
Press and Hawting-Holliday broke the news between them. “Dead!--and I
loved him so--I loved him so!”

“It is a pity, under the circumstances,” said Hawting-Holliday,
carrying out his promise of being a friend to Magellison’s wife by
telling that wife the truth, “that you were so economical in your
expressions of affection. For I do not think that when the Captain left
you he had any remaining illusions as to the nature of your regard for
him.”

“How cruel you are--how cruel!” gasped Geraldine, as her maid bore in a
salver piled with the regrets of Learned Societies and the sympathy of
distinguished Personages and private friends.

“Let me for once use the trite and hackneyed saying that I am cruel
only to be kind!” said Hawting-Holliday, emphatically, “and that I
speak solely in the interests of--a friend whom I love.”

Mrs. Magellison flushed to the roots of her superb golden hair, and
consciously drooped her scarcely-reddened eyelids as she held up a
protesting hand.

“No, no, Sir Robert!” she pleaded. “If I--as you infer--have gravely
erred in lack of warmth toward poor, poor, dearest Arthur! let me at
least be ungrudging in respect of his great memory. Forget what you
have said, carried away by a feeling which in honor you subdued after
the rude awakening of many months ago, and do not revert to--the
subject for--for _at least_ a year to come!”

At that Hawting-Holliday got upon his legs, and thrusting his hands
deep into his trouser-pockets, made the one and only harangue of his
existence.

“Mrs. Magellison, when you suggest that in the very hour when the
intelligence of grave disaster to your husband’s vessel has reached us,
I am capable of addressing you in what the poetic faculty term--Heaven
knows how idiotically and falsely!--the language of love, _you_ gravely
err. The friend in whose interests I spoke just now, was--your husband.
_Is_ your husband--for I do not accept by any means the theory that
because he has been lost sight of, he is dead. I believe him to be
living. I shall go on believing this until I see his body, or meet with
some relics of him that supply me--his friend!--with the evidence that
you, his wife, are so uncommonly ready to dispense with.”

His eyes burned her with their contempt. She gasped:

“You--you mean that you are going South to try and find him?”

“You comprehend my meaning perfectly,” said Hawting-Holliday, and bowed
to Mrs. Magellison with ironical deference and left her.

He was, though not a wealthy man, far from being a poor one. He
chartered a stout vessel that was lying in Liverpool Docks, the
Iceland Coast Survey Company’s steam-and-sail schooner _Snowbird_, and
equipped and provisioned and manned her with a speed and thoroughness
that are seldom found in combination. The _Snowbird’s_ own skipper
goes in charge of his ship, but Hawting-Holliday is the Leader of the
Expedition.

And yesterday the _Snowbird_ sailed, in search of that man who has
been swallowed up by the great Conjecture. And of this I am sure, that
whether Hawting-Holliday succeeds or fails, lives or dies, he will
grasp the hand of his friend again Somewhere. Either upon this side of
the Great Gray Veil that hangs in the doorway of the Smoky House, or
upon the other....


THE END




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.

Archaic or variant spelling has been retained.