Chapter II (1)

The garden _châlet_ was damp; it had been raining, and the glittering appearance of the walls betrayed the fact. “As though a bally lot of snails had been dancin’ a cotillon on ’em!” said the Duke of Halcyon. He yawned dismally as he opened the casement and leaned out, looking, in his gaudily-hued silken night-suit, like a tulip drooping from the window-sill. Then the keeper’s wife came splashing up the muddy path carrying a tray covered with a mackintosh, and the knowledge that his breakfast would presently be set before him, and set before him in a lukewarm, flabby, and tepid condition, caused Halcyon to groan. But presently, when bathed, shaved, and attired in a neat knickerbocker suit of tawny-orange velveteen, with green silk stockings and tan shoes, salmon-colored silk shirt, rainbow necktie, and Panama, he issued, cigarette in mouth, from the _châlet_, and strolled in the direction of the newly-restored west wing, his Grace’s equanimity seemed restored. He even hummed a tune, which might have been “The Honeysuckle and the Bee” or “God Save the King,” as he mounted the short, wide, double flight of marble steps that led from the terrace, and, pushing open the glazed swing-doors, entered the ballroom, the entire space of which was filled by a bewildering maze of ropes and scaffolding, as though a giant spider had spun a cobweb in hemp and pine. A smell of turpentine and size was in the air, and a paint-table occupied a platform immediately under the skylight dome, the sides of which were already filled in with outlines, transferred from cartoons designed by the artist engaged to ornament the apartment. That gentleman, arrayed in a blue canvas blouse and wearing a deerstalker cap on the back of a well-shaped head, was actively engaged in washing in the values of a colossal nude figure-group with a bucket of sepia and a six-foot brush. He whistled rather queerly as his bright eye fell upon the intruder.

“You’re there, are you?” said the Duke unnecessarily. “Shall I come up?”

“If you can!” said Halcyon Wopse, with a decided smile, that revealed a very complete set of very white teeth. “But, to save time, perhaps I had better come down to you.” And the painter swung himself lightly down from stage to stage until he reached the ground-level of his august relative.

“Put what you’ve got to tell me as clearly as you can,” said the Duke. “I never was a sap at Eton, and the classical names of these Johnnies you’re thingambobbing on the what’s-a-name rather queer me.”

“The design outlined on the plaster in the central space on the left-hand side of the skylight dome,” said Wopse, A.R.A., “is the ‘Judgment of Paris.’ The three figures of the rival goddesses are completely outlined, but, as you see, Paris is only roughly blocked in.”

“I don’t see a city,” said the Duke with some annoyance. “I only see a bit of a man. And, as for being block-tin——”

“Paris was a man—or, rather, a youth,” said Halcyon Wopse, quoting—

“‘Fair and disdainfully lidded, the Shepherd of Ida,
Holding the golden apple, desired of——’”

“Hold on! When people get spouting it knocks me galley-west,” said the Duke. “Just tell me plainly what the beggar was to judge? Goddesses? I savvy! And which of ’em took the biscuit—I mean the apple? Venus? Right you are! That’s as much as I can hold at one time, thanky!”

“Sorry if I’ve over-estimated the extent of the accommodation,” said Halcyon Wopse, smiling and lighting a cigar.

“One of the Partagas. Now, hang it,” said the Duke, “that is infernally stupid of my man.”

“Of my man, you mean,” corrected the painter.

“I begin to think,” said the Duke, “that I have, in falling in with the absurd plot, cooked up by that old footler, Beaumaris, and swopping characters with a beg—with an artist fellow like you, in order to take the fancy of a long-haired, long-legged colt of a girl——”

“I presume you allude to Lady Lymston?” put in the painter coldly.

“Of course. I say, in tumblin’ to the idea and embarkin’ in the game, I’ve made an ass of myself,” said the Duke. “As for you, you’re in clover.”

“Say nettles,” sighed the painter.

“Passin’ under my name——”

“Pardon,” said the painter. “The name is my own. And let us say, simply, that in changing identities with your Grace in order to enable your Grace to cast a glamour of artistic romance over a very ordinary——”

“Eh?” interjected the Duke.

“Situation,” continued the painter. “In doing this I have laid up for myself a considerable store of regret.”

“Regret! Why, hang you! You’re chalkin’ up scores the whole bally time!” shrieked the Duke, stamping his tan shoes on the canvas-protected parquet. “Beaumaris’s guests—only a few purposely selected fogies and duffers, who don’t count, it’s true—believe you to be me. They flatter you and defer to you. You take the Dowager in to dinner, and I’m left to toddle after with Susanna’s French governess. I’m out of everything—and obliged to talk Art, bally Art—from mornin’ till night! While you—you’ve ridden to cub-hunts on my mounts—driven my motor-cars and bust my tires——”

“And very bad ones they are,” said the painter.

“You ride infernally well, and show off before the field at Henworthy Three Gates, where the hardest riders in the county hang back. You ain’t afraid of a trappy take-off—you weren’t built for a broken neck,” screeched the incensed Peer. “You play golf too, and win the Coronation Challenge Cup for the Lymston Club, takin’ seven holes out of the eighteen, and holin’ the round in the score of sixty-eight.”

“It was my duty to maintain the honor of your Grace’s rank once I had consented to assume it,” said the painter with a bow.

“And you’re a dead shot, confound you, knockin’ the birds over right and left, and getting a par. in every sportin’ newspaper for a record bag of four hundred. You’re a polo player too—hit a ball up and down the field and through the goals at each end, and look as if you didn’t care whether the ladies applauded you or not, da—hang you! And you must own to bein’ a bit of a cricketer, and consent to play in the County Match on Thursday, and I wouldn’t like to bet against your chances of makin’ a big score—an all-round admirable what’s-a-name of a fellow like you!”

“Perhaps you’d better not,” the painter remarked calmly, knocking off the ash of his cigar. “But I should be glad to know the reason for this display of temper on your Grace’s part, all the same,” he added. “If I rode like a tailor and shot like a duffer, hit your ponies’ legs instead of the ball, and played cricket like a German governess at a girls’ boarding-school, I could understand——”

“Don’t you understand when I get back into my own skin again, I’ll have to live up to the reputation you’ve made me?” yelled Halcyon. “I could pass muster before because nobody looked for anything. But now....”

“And what of my reputation? I think I heard you telling Susanna——”

“Susanna!” echoed the Duke.

“She is Susanna to your Grace. Did I not hear you telling her that Chiaroscuro was an Italian painter of the Cinquecento—who, you said, was a Pope who patronized Art! You went on to say that Chiaroscuro lived on hard eggs, and designed carnival cars, and that Benvenuto Cellini won the Gold Cup at Ascot Race Meeting in ’91.”

“Look here, we won’t indulge in mutual recriminations. It’s beastly bad form!” said the Duke. “And though you can ride and all that, I never said I thought you could paint for nuts! In fact, between ourselves, I don’t half like havin’ these spooks on the ceilin’ set down to me.” He twisted his sandy little moustache, and fixed his eyeglass in his eye, and started. “Here’s Lady Lymston comin’ over the lawn with a whole pack of dogs, to ask me how I’ve got on since yesterday.”

“Take my blouse!” The painter denuded himself of the turpentiny garment, appearing in a well-cut tweed shooting-suit.

“Get into that rag! Not me, thanks! Hand over your brush, and give me a leg up on that scaffoldin’, like a good chap. I’d better be discovered at work, I suppose,” said his Grace of Halcyon, as he slowly mounted to the platform under the dome.

He had just reached it when Susanna’s fresh young voice was heard outside calling to her dogs, and a moment later she appeared. Her fair cheeks were flushed, her blue eyes were bright with exercise. She wore a rough gray skirt, which, if less abbreviated than of yore, still showed a slim, arched foot and suggested a charming ankle. Her white silk blouse was confined by a Norwegian belt, and a loose _beret_ cap of black velvet crowned her yellow head, its silken riches being now disposed in a great coil, through which a silver arrow was carelessly thrust. She started and reddened from her temples to the edge of lace at her round throat when the tweed-clad figure of the painter caught her eye, and gave him her hand with an indifference which was too ostentatious.

“I didn’t know you were interested in Art,” she said.

“Oh yes!” responded the painter. “At least, if this can be called Art,” he added modestly.

“’Ssh!” warned Susanna. “He is up there, and will hear you.”

“He?” echoed the painter, reveling in the blush.

“Did I hear my name?” called the Duke sweetly, from above. “Hulloa, Lady Lymston, that you? Come to record progress? As you see, we’re going strong.” His six-foot brush menaced a Juno’s draperies, a gallipot of size upset, trickled its contents through the planking; his velveteen coat-tails placed Paris in peril, as he turned his back to the cartoon and resting his hands upon his knees, assumed a stooping attitude, and peered waggishly down over the edge of the scaffolding at Susanna.

“Take care—you!” shouted the painter, forgetting his aristocratic _rôle_.

“My foot is on my native thingumbob, ain’t it, Lady Lymston?” said the owner of the small, cockneyfied, grinning countenance above. “How do you like the wax-works? This is the”—he flourished the six-foot brush perilously—“this is the Judgment of Berlin.”

“Paris!” prompted the false Duke hoarsely.

“He is trying to joke,” said Susanna, in an undertone. “Don’t discourage him.”

“I should think that would be difficult,” remarked Wopse grimly.

“Papa tries to be crushing, and Cousin Alaric’s rudeness is simply appalling,” said Susanna, in a confidential undertone. “And grandmother walks over him as though he were a beetle—no! she would run away from a thing like that—I should say an earwig or a snail, so one feels bound to be a _little_ nice.”

“If only out of opposition!” said the painter, with a keen look of intelligence, at which Susanna blushed again.

“He is idiotic when he tries to be funny about Art—and mixes up names and dates—and tells you that Titian sang in opera and Rubens is a popular composer. But he can paint, and Alaric Orme thinks he will be President of the Academy one day. These cartoons are splendidly bold and effective.”

“You think so! Wait till I’ve colored these girls up a bit,” said the Duke, catching the end of the sentence. “Then you’ll——” He dipped his brush and advanced it, dripping with cobalt, towards the group of goddesses.

“Don’t touch them!” shouted Wopse, in agony.

“Why not?” asked Susanna.

“I don’t know. Excuse me, Lady Lymston, I believe the smell of this size isn’t wholesome,” Wopse stammered. “I’ll get out into the air.” He bolted.

“Good Heavens!” he moaned, as he strode unseeing down a broad path of the dazzling west front pasture, “I can’t stand this! I’ll tell that idiot Osmond-Orme that the deception must come to an end....”

“Why do you walk so fast?” said the voice of Susanna, behind him. “I have had to _race_ to catch you.”

“I am sorry,” said Wopse, stopping and turning his troubled eyes upon the fair face of his young relation.

“Let us walk on”—Susanna cast an apprehensive glance behind her—“or somebody——”

“Somebody will see us walking together!” said Wopse acutely.

“It is so much nicer,” Susanna said demurely, “when one can keep pleasant things to oneself. And we have had a good many walks and talks since you came down here, haven’t we? And cliff scrambles—and bicycle rides—and rows on the river. And the fun of it is that, although we are such pals, really, father and grandmother and Uncle Alaric believe that I positively detest you.” Her young laugh rang out gayly; she thrust a sprig of lavender, perfumed and spicy, under the painter’s nose. He captured the tantalizing hand.

“Do you not?”

“Detest you! You know I don’t.”

“May I have it?” It was the sprig of lavender. But the painter looked at, and squeezed, the hand.

“If you promise to make a big score on Thursday!”

Susanna, it must be admitted, was learning coquetry.

“I will—if you are looking at me!”

“Done!”

“Done! Come into the beech avenue,” the painter pleaded, “just for a few moments, before that little beast follows us. You know he will!”

“He can’t!” Susanna’s golden eyelashes drooped upon crimson cheeks. “He can’t get down! I—I took away the ladder before I came away!” she owned. Both hands were imprisoned, her blue eyes lifted, lost themselves in the brown ones that looked down at her.

“Was that because you wanted—to be alone with me? Was it?” demanded Wopse.

“Oh, Hal, don’t!”

“I’ll let you go when you have owned up, not before,” Wopse said sternly.

Susanna’s reply came in a whisper: “You—know—it—was!”

The whisper was so faint that Wopse had to bend quite low to catch it. Of course he need not have kissed Susanna. But he did, as Alaric Osmond-Orme and Lord Beaumaris appeared, walking confidentially together arm-in-arm.

“I think my little stratagem succeeds!” Lord Beaumaris had just said, in reference to the preference exhibited by his daughter for the society of the pretended painter. And Alaric had responded:

“Yes, as you say, my plan has proved quite a brilliant success!” when Lord Beaumaris clutched his cousin’s arm.

“Merciful powers! Susanna and that—that young impostor!”

Alaric’s eyeglass fell with a click, and the diabolical left eye twirled and twisted fiendishly in its socket as its retina embraced the picture indicated.

“Feign not to have observed.... Well, Susanna! How are you, Halcyon. We are strolling towards the ballroom for a glimpse of Wopse’s work.”

“We are stro——” Lord Beaumaris choked and purpled. Alaric dragged him on.

“Do you think?...” Susanna’s cheeks were white roses now. “Do you think—they——”

“Saw me kiss you? Not a doubt of it!”

“Oh!” Susanna confronted him with blazing eyes. “You!—you did it on _purpose_! It was a plot——”

She clenched her strong young hands, battling with the desire to buffet the handsome bronzed face before her. “I’ll never—never speak to you again!” she cried.

“You will not be allowed to,” groaned the poor painter. “Our walks and rides and all the rest are over.... Yes, there has been a plot, but not of the kind you suspect. I am a traitor—but not the kind of traitor you think me. Lady Lymston, I am not the Duke of Halcyon. I am a poor devil—I beg your pardon!—I am a painter; my name is Wopse, and I have disgraced my profession by the part I have played!” He sat down miserably on a rustic bench.

“Oh! It has been a put-up thing between you all!” Susanna gasped. “Oh!” She towered over Wopse like an incensed young goddess.

“If I could only paint you like that! Yes—I deserve that you should hate me. Never mind who planned the thing, I should have known better than to soil my hands with a deception,” said Wopse. “As for the Duke——”

“The Duke! Do I understand that that earwig in velveteen is my cousin Halcyon!” Susanna’s voice was very cold.

“Yes. I am a kind of cousin, too,” said Wopse.

“But not that kind. Those—those designs—the work on the ceiling. They are really yours?” Susanna asked.

“Mine, of course. Do you think that fellow could have done them?” cried Wopse, firing up. “I’ve risen at four every morning to work at them, and——”

“And you ride splendidly, and you’re a crack shot and polo player, and you’re going to win for the county Eleven on Thursday,” came breathlessly from Susanna.

“Ah, you won’t care to look at me now!” said the depressed Wopse.

“Won’t I?” Susanna’s eyes were dancing, her cheeks were glowing, she pirouetted on the moss-grown ground of the avenue and dropped a little curtsey to the painter. “When doing it will drive father and grandmother and Alaric and the Earwig wild with rage.... When—when I like doing it, too! When——” she stooped, and her lips were very near Wopse’s cheek—“when I love doing it!”

“Oh, Susanna!” cried the painter.

“My dear Halcyon!” said Lord Beaumaris, peering short-sightedly upwards through a maze of scaffolding. “I think you may as well come down.”

“In other words—the game is up!” said Alaric Osmond-Orme mildly. “Come down, my dear fellow, and resume your own _rôle_ of hereditary legislator. Allow me to replace the ladder.” He did so.

“So that fellow’s done me! I guessed as much when that little—when Susanna took away the ladder,” said the Duke, preparing to descend. “And then when I saw him kiss her—there’s a remarkably good view of the gardens through the end window. I——” He pointed to some remarkable effects of color splashed upon the ground so carefully prepared by the painter. “I took it out of the beggar in the only way I could, don’t you know.”

“Take it out of him still more,” suggested Alaric, his tinted eyeglass concealing a fiendish twinkle, “by playing in the County Cricket Match. He’s entered in your name, you know!”

“You’re very obligin’,” said the Duke, “but I don’t think I’m taking any.” He gracefully slithered to the floor as Susanna and Halcyon Wopse entered the ballroom, radiant and hand in hand.

“Papa,” said Susanna, taking the bull by the horns, “Mr. Wopse and I are engaged. We mean to be married as soon as possible after the County Cricket Match.” She kissed the perturbed countenance of Lord Beaumaris, nodded to the Duke, and walked over to Alaric. “Your plan has succeeded beautifully,” she said. “Ain’t you pleased—and won’t you congratulate us?”

“I am delighted,” said the imperturbable Alaric. He dropped his eyeglass and before the preternatural intelligence of his left eye even Susanna quailed. “And I congratulate you both most heartily.” He smiled, and pressed the hands of Susanna and her lover, and, moving away, stepped into the garden. There, unseen, he rubbed his hands, twinkling with mourning rings.

“I loved that boy’s mother very dearly, boy as I was then ...” said Alaric. “As for Susanna, if she knew that I knew she was listening at the library door....” He replaced his eyeglass, and his expression became, as usual, a blank.

LADY CLANBEVAN’S BABY

There was a gray, woolly October fog over Hyde Park. The railings wept grimy tears, and the damp yellow leaves dropped soddenly from the soaked trees. Pedestrians looked chilled and sulky; camphor chests and cedar-presses had yielded up their treasures of sables and sealskin, chinchilla and silver fox. A double stream of fashionable traffic rolled west and east, and the rich clarets and vivid crimsons of the automobiles burned through the fog like genial, warming fires.

A Baby-Bunting six horse-power petrol-car, in color a chrysanthemum yellow, came jiggeting by. The driver stopped. He was a technical chemist and biologist of note and standing, and I had last heard him speak from the platform of the Royal Institution.

“I haven’t seen you,” said the Professor, “for years.”

“That must be because you haven’t looked,” said I, “for I have both seen and heard you quite recently. Only you were upon the platform and I was on the ground-floor.”

“You are too much upon the ground-floor now,” said the Professor, with a shudder of a Southern European at the dampness around and under foot, “and I advise you to accept a seat in my car.”

And the Baby-Bunting, trembling with excitement at being in the company of so many highly-varnished electric victorias and forty horse-power auto-cars, joined the steadily-flowing stream going west.

“I wonder that you stoop to petrol, Professor,” I said, as the thin, skillful hand in the baggy chamois glove manipulated the driving-wheel, and the little car snaked in and out like a torpedo-boat picking her way between the giant warships of a Channel Squadron.

The Professor’s black brows unbent under the cap-peak, and his thin, tightly-gripped lips relaxed into a mirthless smile.

“Ah, yes; you think that I should drive my car by radio-activity, is it not? And so I could—and would, if the pure radium chloride were not three thousand times the price of gold. From eight tons of uranium ore residues about one gramme—that is fifteen grains—can be extracted by fusing the residue with carbonates of soda, dissolving in hydrochloric acid, precipitating the lead and other metals in solution by the aid of hydrogen-sulphide, and separating from the chlorides that remain—polonium, actinium, barium, and so forth—the chloride of radium. With a single pound of this I could not only drive an auto-car, my friend”—his olive cheek warmed, and his melancholy dark eyes grew oddly lustrous—“I could stop the world!”

“And supposing it was necessary to make it go on again?” I suggested.

“When I speak of the world,” exclaimed the Professor, “I do not refer to the planet upon which we revolve; I speak of the human race which inhabits it.”

“Would the human race be obliged to you, Professor?” I queried.

The Professor turned upon me with so sudden a verbal _riposte_ that the Baby-Bunting swerved violently.

“You are not as young as you were when I met you first. To be plain, you are getting middle-aged. Do you like it?”

“I hate it!” I answered, with beautiful sincerity.

“Would you thank the man who should arrest, not the beneficent passage of Time, which means progress, but the wear and tear of nerve and muscle, tissue, and bone, the slow deterioration of the blood by the microbes of old age, for Metchnikoff has shown that there is no difference between the atrophy of senility and the atrophy caused by microbe poison? Would you thank him—the man who should do that for you? Tell me, my friend.”

I replied, briefly and succinctly: “Wouldn’t I?”

“Ha!” exclaimed the Professor, “I thought so!”

“But I should have liked him to have begun earlier,” I said. “Twenty-nine is a nice age, now.... It is the age we all try to stop at, and can’t, however much we try. Look there!”

A landau limousine, dark blue, beautifully varnished, nickel-plated, and upholstered in cream-white leather, came gliding gracefully through the press of vehicles. From the crest upon the panel to the sober workmanlike livery of the chauffeur, the turn-out was perfection. The pearl it contained was worthy of the setting.

“Look there?” I repeated, as the rose-cheeked, sapphire-eyed, smiling vision passed, wrapped in a voluminous coat of chinchilla and silver fox, with a toque of Parma violets under the shimmer of the silken veil that could only temper the burning glory of her wonderful Renaissance hair.

“There’s the exception to the rule.... There’s a woman who doesn’t need the aid of science or of Art to keep her at nine and twenty. There’s a woman in whom ‘the wear and tear of nerve and muscle, tissue and bone’ goes on—if it does go on—imperceptibly. Her blood doesn’t seem to be much deteriorated by the microbe of old age, Professor, does it? And she’s forty-three! The alchemistical forty-three, that turns the gold of life back into lead! The gold remains gold in her case, for that hair, that complexion, that figure, are,” I solemnly declared, “her own.”

At that moment Lady Clanbevan gave a smiling gracious nod to the Professor, and he responded with a cold, grave bow. The glow of her gorgeous hair, the liquid sapphire of her eyes, were wasted on this stony man of science. She passed, going home to Stanhope Gate, I suppose, in which neighborhood she has a house; I had barely a moment to notice the white-bonneted, blue-cloaked nurse on the front of the landau, holding a bundle of laces and cashmeres, and to reflect that I have never yet seen Lady Clanbevan taking the air out of the society of a baby, when the Professor spoke:

“So Lady Clanbevan is the one woman who has no need of the aid of Art or science to preserve her beauty and maintain her appearance of youth? Supposing I could prove to you otherwise, my friend, what then?”

“I should say,” I returned, “that you had proved what everybody else denies. Even the enemies of that modern Ninon de l’Enclos, who has just passed——”

“With the nurse and the baby?” interpolated the Professor.

“With the nurse and the baby,” said I. “Even her enemies—and they are legion—admit the genuineness of the charms they detest. Mentioning the baby, do you know that for twenty years I have never seen Lady Clanbevan out without a baby? She must have quite a regiment of children—children of all ages, sizes, and sexes.”

“Upon the contrary,” said the Professor, “she has only one!”

“The others have all died young, then?” I asked sympathetically, and was rendered breathless by the rejoinder:

“Lady Clanbevan is a widow.”

“One never asks questions about the husband of a professional beauty,” I said. “His individuality is merged in hers from the day upon which her latest photograph assumes a marketable value. Are you sure there isn’t a Lord Clanbevan alive somewhere?”

“There is a Lord Clanbevan alive,” said the Professor coldly. “You have just seen him, in his nurse’s arms. He is the only child of his mother, and she has been a widow for nearly twenty years! You do not credit what I assert, my friend?”

“How can I, Professor?” I asked, turning to meet his full face, and noticed that his dark, somewhat opaque brown irises had lights and gleams of carbuncle-crimson in them. “I have had Lady Clanbevan and her progeny under my occasional observation for years. The world grows older, if she doesn’t, and she has invariably a baby—_toujours_ a new baby—to add to the charming illusion of young motherhood which she sustains so well. And now you tell me that she is a twenty-years’ widow with one child, who must be nearly of age—or it isn’t proper. You puzzle me painfully!”

“Would you care,” asked the Professor after a moment’s pause, “to drive back to Harley Street with me? I am, as you know, a vegetarian, so I will not tax your politeness by inviting you to lunch. But I have something in my laboratory I should wish to show you.”

“Of all things, I should like to come,” I said. “How many times haven’t I fished fruitlessly for an invitation to visit the famous laboratory where nearly twenty years ago——”

“I traced,” said the Professor, “the source of phenomena which heralded the evolution of the Röntgen Ray and the ultimate discovery of the radio-active salt they have christened radium. I called it protium twenty years ago, because of its various and protean qualities. Why did I not push on—perfect the discovery and anticipate Sir William C—— and the X——’s? There was a reason. You will understand it before you leave my laboratory.”

The Baby-Bunting stopped at the unfashionable end of Harley Street, in front of the dingy yellow house with the black front door, flanked by dusty boxes of mildewed dwarf evergreens, and the Professor, relieved of his fur-lined coat and cap, led the way upstairs as lightly as a boy. Two garret-rooms had been knocked together for a laboratory. There was a tiled furnace at the darker end of the long skylighted room thus made, and solid wooden tables much stained with spilt chemicals, were covered with scales, glasses, jars, and retorts—all the tools of chemistry. From one of the many shelves running round the walls, the Professor took down a circular glass flask and placed it in my hands. The flask contained a handful of decayed and moldy-looking wheat, and a number of peculiarly offensive-looking little beetles with tapir-like proboscides.

“The perfectly developed beetle of the _Calandria granaria_,” said the Professor, as I cheerfully resigned the flask, “a common British weevil, whose larvæ feed upon stored grain. Now look at this.” He reached down and handed me a precisely similar flask, containing another handful of grain, cleaner and sounder in appearance, and a number of grubs, sharp-ended chrysalis-like things buried in the grain, inert and inactive.

“The larvæ of _Calandria granaria_,” said the Professor, in his drawling monotone. “How long does it take to hatch the beetle from the grub? you ask. Less than a month. The perfect weevils that I have just shown you I placed in their flask a little more than three weeks back. The grubs you see in the flask you are holding, and which, as you will observe by their anxiety to bury themselves in the grain so as to avoid contact with the light, are still immature, I placed in the glass receptacle twenty years ago. Don’t drop the flask—I value it.”

“Professor!” I gasped.

“Twenty years ago,” repeated the Professor, delicately handling the venerable grubs, “I enclosed these grubs in this flask, with sufficient grain to fully nourish them and bring them to the perfect state. In another flask I placed a similar number of grubs in exactly the same quantity of wheat. Then for twenty-four hours I exposed flask number one to the rays emanating from what is now called radium. And as the electrons discharged from radium are obstructed by collision with air-atoms, I exhausted the air contained in the flask.” He paused.

“Then, when the grubs in flask number two hatched out,” I anticipated, “and the larvæ in flask number one remained stationary, you realized——”

“I realized that the rays from the salt arrested growth, and at the same time prolonged to an almost incalculable extent,” said the Professor—“for you will understand that the grubs in flask number one had lived as grubs half a dozen times as long as grubs usually do.... And I said to myself that the discovery presented an immense, a tremendous field for future development. Suppose a young woman of, say, twenty-nine were enclosed in a glass receptacle of sufficient bulk to contain her, and exposed for a few hours to my protium rays, she would retain for many years to come—until she was a great-grandmother of ninety!—the same charming, youthful appearance——”

“As Lady Clanbevan!” I cried, as the truth rushed upon me and I grasped the meaning this astonishing man had intended to convey.

“As Lady Clanbevan presents to-day,” said the Professor, “thanks to the discovery of a——”

“Of a great man,” said I, looking admiringly at the lean worn figure in the closely-buttoned black frock-coat.

“I loved her.... It was a delight to her to drag a disciple of Science at her chariot-wheels. People talked of me as a coming man. Perhaps I was.... But I did not thirst for distinction, honors, fame.... I thirsted for that woman’s love.... I told her of my discovery—as I told her everything. Bah!” His lean nostrils worked. “You know the game that is played when one is in earnest and the other at play. She promised nothing, she walked delicately among the passions she sowed and fostered in the souls of men, as a beautiful tigress walks among the poison-plants of the jungle. She saw that rightly used, or wrongly used, my great discovery might save her beauty, her angelic, dazzling beauty that had as yet but felt the first touch of Time. She planned the whole thing, and when she said, ‘You do not love me if you will not do this,’ I did it. I was mad when I acceded to her wish, perhaps; but she is a woman to drive men frenzied. You have seen how coldly, how slightingly she looked at me when we encountered her in the Row? I tell you—you have guessed already—I went there to see her. I always go where she is to be encountered, when she is in town. And she bows, always; but her eyes are those of a stranger. Yet I have had her on her knees to me. She cried and begged and kissed my hands.”

He knotted his thin hands, their fingers brown-tipped with the stains of acids, and wrung and twisted them ferociously.

“And so I granted what she asked, carried out the experiment, and paid what you English call the piper. The giant glass bulb with the rubber-valve door was blown and finished in France. It involved an expense of three hundred pounds. The salt I used—of protium (christened radium now)—cost me all my savings—over two thousand pounds—for I had been a struggling man——”

“But the experiment?” I broke in. “Good Heavens, Professor! How could a living being remain for any time in an exhausted receiver? Agony unspeakable, convulsions, syncope, death! One knows what the result would be. The merest common sense——”

“The merest common sense is not what one employs to make discoveries or carry out great experiments,” said the Professor. “I will not disclose my method; I will only admit to you that the subject—the subjects were insensible; that I induced _anæsthesia_ by the ordinary ether-pump apparatus, and that the strength of the ray obtained was concentrated to such a degree that the exposure was complete in three hours.” He looked about him haggardly. “The experiment took place here nineteen years ago—nineteen years ago, and it seems to me as though it were yesterday.”

“And it must seem like yesterday to Lady Clanbevan—whenever she looks in the glass,” I said. “But you have pricked my curiosity, Professor, by the use of the plural. Who was the other subject?”

“Is it possible you don’t guess?” The sad, hollow eyes questioned my face in surprise. Then they turned haggardly away. “My friend, the other subject associated with Lady Clanbevan in my great experiment was—Her Baby!”

I could not speak. The dowdy little grubs in the flask became for me creatures imbued with dreadful potentialities.... The tragedy and the sublime absurdity of the thing I realized caught at my throat, and my brain grew dizzy with its horror.

“Oh! Professor!” I gurgled, “how—how grimly, awfully, tragically ridiculous! To carry about with one wherever one goes a baby that never grows older—a baby——”

“A baby nearly twenty years old? Yes, it is as you say, ridiculous and horrible,” the Professor agreed.

“What could have induced the woman!” burst from me.

The Professor smiled bitterly.

“She is greedy of money. It is the only thing she loves—except her beauty and her power over men; and during the boy’s infancy—that word is used in the Will—she has full enjoyment of the estate. After he ‘attains to manhood’—I quote the Will again—hers is but a life-interest. Now you understand?”

I did understand, and the daring of the woman dazzled me. She had made the Professor doubly her tool.

“And so,” I gurgled between tears and laughter, “Lord Clanbevan, who ought to be leaving Eton this year to commence his first Oxford term, is being carried about in the arms of a nurse, arrayed in the flowing garments of a six-months’ baby! What an astonishing conspiracy!”

“His mother,” continued the Professor calmly, “allows no one to approach him but the nurse. The family are only too glad to ignore what they consider a deplorable case of atavistic growth-arrest, and the boy himself——” He broke off. “I have detained you,” he said, after a pause. “I will not do so longer. Nor will I offer you my hand. I am as conscious as you are—that it has committed a crime.” And he bowed me out with his hands sternly held behind him. There were few more words between us, only I remember turning on the threshold of the laboratory, where I left him, to ask whether protium—radium, as it is now christened—checks the growth of every organic substance? The answer I received was curious:

“Certainly, with the exception of the nails and the hair!”

A week later the Professor was found dead in his laboratory.... There were reports of suicide—hushed up. People said he had been more eccentric than ever of late, and theorized about brain-mischief; only I located the trouble in the heart. A year went by, and I had almost forgotten Lady Clanbevan—for she went abroad after the Professor’s death—when at a little watering-place on the Dorset coast, I saw that lovely thing, as lovely as ever—she who was fifty if a day! With her were the blue-cloaked elderly nurse and Lord Clanbevan, borne, as usual, in the arms of his attendant, or wheeled in a luxurious perambulator. Day after day I encountered them—the lovely mother, the middle-aged nurse, and the mysterious child—until the sight began to get on my nerves. Had the Professor selected me as the recipient of a secret unrivaled in the records of biological discovery, or had he been the victim of some maniacal delusion that cold October day when we met in Rotten Row? One peep under the thick white lace veil with which the baby’s face was invariably covered would clear everything up! Oh! for a chance to allay the pangs of curiosity!

The chance came. It was a hot, waspy August forenoon. Everybody was indoors with all the doors and windows open, lunching upon the innutritive viands alone procurable at health resorts—everybody but myself, Lord Clanbevan, and his nurse. She had fallen asleep upon a green-painted esplanade seat, gratuitously shielded by a striped awning. Lord Clanbevan’s C-springed, white-hooded, cane-built perambulator stood close beside her. He was, as usual, a mass of embroidered cambric and cashmere, and, as always, thickly veiled, his regular breathing heaved his infant breast; the thick white lace drapery attached to his beribboned bonnet obscured the features upon which I so ardently longed to gaze! It was the chance, as I have said; and as the head of the blue-cloaked nurse dropped reassuringly upon her breast, as she emitted the snore that gave assurance of the soundness of her slumbers, I stepped silently on the gravel towards the baby’s perambulator. Three seconds, and I stood over its apparently sleeping inmate; another, and I had lifted the veil from the face of the mystery—and dropped it with a stifled cry of horror!

The child had a moustache!

THE DUCHESS’S DILEMMA

“A person called to see me!” repeated the Duchess of Rantorlie. “He pleaded urgent business, you say?”

She glanced at the card presented by her groom-of-the-chambers without taking the trouble to lift it from the salver. “‘Mr. Moss Rubelius.’ I do not know the name—I have no knowledge of any urgent business. You must tell him to go away at once, and not call again.”

“Begging your Grace’s pardon,” remarked the official, “the person seemed to anticipate a message of the kind——”

“Did he? Then,” thought her Grace, “he is not disappointed.”

“And, still begging your Grace’s pardon,” pursued the discreet domestic, “he asked me to hand this second card to your Grace.”

It was rather a shabby card, and dog’s-eared as though it had been carried long in somebody’s pocket; but it was large and feminine, and adorned with a ducal coronet and the Duchess’s own cipher, and scribbled upon it in pencil, in the Duchess’s own handwriting, were two or three words, simple enough, apparently, and yet sufficiently fraught with meaning to make their fair reader turn very pale. She did not replace this card upon the salver, but kept it as she said:

“Bring the person to me at once.”

And when the softly stepping servant had left the room—one of her Grace’s private suite, charmingly furnished as a study—she made haste to tear the card up, dropping the fragments into the hottest part of the wood-fire, and thrusting at them with the poker until the last tremulous fragment of gray ash had disappeared. Rising from this exercise with a radiant glow upon her usually colorless cheeks the Duchess became aware that she was not alone. A person of vulgar appearance, outrageously attired in a travesty of the ordinary afternoon costume of an English gentleman, stood three or four feet off, regarding her with an observant and rather wily smile. Not at all discomposed, he was the first to speak.

“Before burnin’ _that_,” he remarked, in the thick, snuffling accents of the low-bred, “your Grace ought to have asked yourself whether it was any use. Because—I put it to your Grace, as a poker-player, being told the game’s fashionable in your Grace’s set—a man who holds four aces can afford to throw away the fifth card, even if it’s a king. And people of my profession don’t go in for bluff. It ain’t their fancy.”

“What is your profession?” asked the Duchess, regarding with contempt the dark, full-fed, red-lipped, hook-beaked countenance before her.

“Money!” returned Mr. Moss Rubelius. He rattled coin in his trousers-pockets as he spoke, and the superfluity of gold manifested in large, coarse rings upon his thick fingers, the massy chain festooned across his broad chest, the enormous links fastening his cuffs, and the huge diamond pin in his cravat, seemed to echo “Money.”

The Duchess lost no time in coming to the point. She was not guided by previous experience, having hitherto, by grace as well as luck, steered clear of scandal. But, girl of twenty as she was, she asked, as coolly as an _intrigante_ of forty, though her young heart was fluttering wildly against the walls of its beautiful prison, “How did you get that card?”

“I will be quite plain with your Grace,” returned the money-lender. “When the second lot of cavalry drafts sailed for South Africa early in the year of 1900, our firm, ’aving a writ of _’abeas_ out against Captain Sir Hugh Delaving of the Royal Red Dragoon Guards—I have reason to believe your Grace knew something of the Captain?”

“Yes,” said the Duchess, turning her cold blue eyes upon the twinkling orbs of Mr. Moss Rubelius, “I knew something of the Captain. You do not need to ask the question. Please go on!”

“The Captain was,” resumed Mr. Rubelius, “for a born aristocrat, the downiest I ever see—saw, I mean. He gave our clerks and the men with the warrant the slip by being ’eaded up in a wooden packin’ case, labeled ‘Officers’ Stores,’ and got away to the Cape, where he was killed in his first engagement.”

“This,” said the Duchess, “is no news to me.”

“No,” said the money-lender; “but it may be news to your Grace that, though we couldn’t lay our ‘ands on the Captain himself, we got hold of all his luggage. Not much there that was of any marketable value, except a silver-gilt toilet-set. But there was a packet of letters in a Russia writin’-case with a patent lock, all of ’em written in the large-sized, square ’and peculiar to the leadin’ female aristocracy, and signed ‘Ethelwyne,’ or merely ‘E.’”

“And this discovery procures me the pleasure of this interview?” remarked the Duchess. “The letters are mine—you come on the errand of a blackmailer. I have only one thing to wonder at, and that is—why you have not come before?”

“Myself and partner thought, as honorable men of business, it would be better to approach the Captain first,” explained the usurer. “His mother died the week he sailed for Africa, and left him ten thousand pounds. We ’astened to communicate with him, but——”

“But he had been killed meanwhile,” said the Duchess. “You would have had the money he owed—or did not owe—you, and your price for the letters, had you reached him in time; but you did not, and your goods are left upon your hands. Why, as honorable men of business”—her lovely lip curled—“did you not take them at once to the Duke?”

Mr. Moss Rubelius seemed for the first time a little nonplussed. He looked down at his large, shiny boots, and the sight did not appear to relieve him.

“I will be quite plain with your Grace.”

“Pray endeavor!” said the Duchess.

“The letters are—to put it delicately—not compromising enough. They’re more,” said Mr. Rubelius, “the letters a school-girl at Brighton would write to her music-master, supposing him to be young and possessed of a pair of cavalry legs and a moustache. There’s fuel in ’em for a First-Class Connubial Row,” continued Mr. Rubelius, “but not material for a Domestic Upheaval—followed by an Action for Divorce. As a man, no longer, but once in business—for within this last month our firm has dissolved, and myself and my partner have retired upon our means—this is my opinion with regard to these letters in your Grace’s handwriting, addressed to the late Captain Sir H. Delaving: The Duke, I believe, would only laugh at ’em.”

The Duchess started violently, and seemed about to speak.

“But, still, the letters are worth paying for,” ended Mr. Moss Rubelius. “And your Grace can have em—at my price.”

“What is your price?” asked the Duchess, trying in vain to read in the stolid physiognomy before her the secret purpose of the soul within.

“Perhaps your Grace wouldn’t mind my taking a chair?” insinuated Mr. Rubelius.

“Do as you please, sir,” said the Duchess, “only be brief.”

“I’ll try,” said the money-lender, comfortably crossing his legs. “To begin—we’re in the London Season and the month of March, and your Grace has a party at Rantorlie for the April salmon-fishing. Angling’s my one vice—my only weakness, ever since I caught minnows in the Regent’s Canal with a pickle-bottle tied to a string. Coarse fishing in the Thames was my recreation in grub times, whenever I ’ad a day away from our office in the Minories. Trout I’ve caught now and then, with a worm on a Stuart tackle—since I became a butterfly. But I’ve never had a slap at a salmon, and the finest salmon-anglin’ in the kingdom is to be ’ad in the Haste, below Rantorlie. Ask me there for April, see that I ’ave the pick of the sport, even if you ’ave a Royal duke to cater for, as you ’ad last year, and, the day I land my first twenty-pounder, the letters are yours.”

The Duchess burst out laughing wildly.

“Ha, ha! Oh!” she cried; “it is impossible to help it.... I can’t!... It is so.... Ha, ha, ha!”

“I shan’t disgrace you,” said Mr. Rubelius. “My kit and turn-out will be by the best makers, and I’ll tip the ’ead gillie fifty pound. I’m a soft-hearted hass to let the letters go so cheap, but——Golly! the chance of catchin’ a twenty-pound specimen of _Salmo salar_ that a Royal ’Ighness ’as angled for in vain!... Look ’ere, your Grace”—his tones were oily with entreaty—“write me the invitation now, on the spot, and you shall ’ave back the first three of those nine letters down on the nail.”

“You have them——?”

“With me!” said Mr. Rubelius, producing a letter-case attached to his stout person by a chain. “The others are—say, in retirement for the present.” He extracted from the case three large, square, gray envelopes, their addresses penned in a large, angular, girlish hand. “Write me the invite now,” he said, “and these are yours to burn or show to his Grace—whichever you please. The others shall be yours the day I land my twenty-pounder.”

The Duchess moved to her writing-table and sat down. She chose paper and a pen, and dashed off these few lines:

“900, BERKELEY SQUARE, W.

“DEAR MR. MOSS RUBELIUS,

“The Duke and myself have asked a few friends to join us at Rantorlie on April 1, for the salmon-fishing, and we should be so pleased if you would come.

“Sincerely yours,
“ETHELWYNE RANTORLIE.”

“The first letter I ever had, dated from Berkeley Square,” commented Mr. Rubelius, as, holding the letter very firmly down upon the blotter with her slim and white, but very strong hands, the Duchess signed to him with her chin to read, “that was anything in the nature of a genial invitation.”

He allowed the Duchess to take the three letters previously referred to from his right hand, as he dexterously twitched the invitation from the blotter with his left finger and thumb. “This, your Grace, will be as good as half a dozen more to me,” he observed, “when I show it about and get a par. into the papers.”

“Horrible!” cried the Duchess, shuddering. “You would not do that!”

Mr. Rubelius favored her with a knowing smile as he produced his shiny hat, his gloves, and a malacca cane, gold-handled, from some remote corner in which he had concealed them.

“Let us, being now on the footing of ’ostess and guest, part friendly,” he said. “Your Grace, may I take your ’and?”

“I think the formality absolutely unnecessary,” said the Duchess, ringing the bell.

Then the money-lender went away, and she caught up a little portrait of the Duke that stood upon her writing-table and began to cry over it and kiss it, and say incoherent, affectionate things, like quite an ordinary, commonplace young wife. For, after eighteen months of marriage, she had fallen seriously in love with her quiet, well-bred, intellectual husband, and the remembrance of the silly, romantic flirtation with dead Hugh Delaving was gall and wormwood to the palate that had learned a finer taste. How had she fallen so low as to write those idiotic, gushing letters?

Their perfume sickened her. She shuddered at the touch of them, as she would have shuddered at the touch of the man to whom they had been written had he still lived. But he was dead, and she had never let him kiss her. She was thankful to remember that, as she put the letters in the fire and watched them blacken and burst into flame.

* * * * *

“My dear Ethelwyne,” asked the Duke, “where did you pick up Mr. Rubelius? Or, I should ask, perhaps, how did that gentleman attain to your acquaintance?”

“It is rather a long, dull story,” said his wife, “but he is really an excellent person, if a little vulgar, and—— You won’t bother me any more about him, Rantorlie, will you?”

She clasped her gloved hands about her husband’s arm as they stood together on the river beach below Rantorlie. The turbid flood of the Haste, tinged brown by spate, raced past between its rocky banks; the pine-forests climbed to meet the mountains, and the mountains lifted to the sky their crowns of snow. There was a smell of spring in the air, and word of new-run fish in the string of deep pools below the famous Falls.

“I will not, if you particularly wish it,” said her husband. “But to banish your guest from my mind—that is impossible. For one thing, he is hung with air-belts, bottles, and canteens, as though he were starting for a tour in the wildest part of Norway. I believe his equipment includes a hatchet, and I think that wad he wears upon his shoulders is a rubber tent, but I am not sure. He has never heard of prawn-baiting, his rods are of the most alarming weight and size, and his salmon-flies are as large and gaudy as paroquets, and calculated, McDona says, to frighten any self-respecting fish out of his senses. We can’t allow such a gorgeous tyro to spoil the best water. He must be sent to some of the smaller pools, with a man to look after him.”

“But he—he won’t be likely to catch anything there, will he?” asked the Duchess anxiously.

“A seven-pounder, if he has luck!”

“Oh, Rantorlie, that won’t do _at all_!” cried Rantorlie’s wife in dismay. “I want him to have the chance of something _really big_. It’s our duty to see that our guests are properly treated, and, though you don’t like Mr. Rubelius——”

“Dear child, I don’t dislike Mr. Rubelius. I simply don’t think about him any more than I think about the sea-lice on the new-run fish. They are there, and they look nasty. Rubelius is here, and so does he.”

“_Doesn’t_ he—especially in evening-dress with a red camelia and a turn-down collar?” gasped the Duchess.

The Duke could not restrain a smile at the vision evoked, as Mr. Rubelius, panoplied in india-rubber, cork, and unshrinkables, strode into view. One of the gillies bore his rod, the other his basket. A third followed with that wobbliest of aquatic vehicles, a coracle, strapped upon his back. With a grin, the man waded into the water, unhitched his light burden, placed it on the rapid stream, and stood, knee-deep, holding the short painter, as the frisky coracle tugged at it.

“You’re going to try one of those things?” said the Duke, as Rubelius gracefully lifted his waterproof helmet to the Duchess. “You know they’re awfully crank, don’t you, and not at all safe for a bung—I mean, a beginner?”

“The men, your Grace,” explained Mr. Rubelius, “are going to peg me down in the bed of the stream, a little way out from the shore.”

“But if your peg draws,” said his host, “do you know how to use your paddle?”

“That will be all right, your Grace,” said the affable Rubelius. “I know how to punt. Often on the Thames at Twicken’am——”