Chapter II (2)

“My dear sir, the Haste in Moss-shire and the Thames at Twickenham are two very different rivers,” said the Duke, beckoning his gillies to follow, and turning away. “I hope the man may not come to any harm,” he said. “Ethelwyne, will you walk down to the Falls with me? I”—he reddened a little—“I sent the others on in carts by road. We see so little of each other these days.”

And the young couple started, leaving Mr. Rubelius to be put into his coracle, with much splashing, and swearing on his part, by two of the gillies and a volunteer. It was a mild day for April in the North. A single cuckoo called by the riverside, and the Duke and Duchess did not hurry, though Ethelwyne turned back before she reached the Falls, below which the deepest salmon-pools were situated, and where the men, the boats, and the rest of the party waited. She had her rod and gillie, and meant to spin a little desultorily from the bank, the Haste being almost in every part too deep for waders, except in the upper reaches.

“I wonder how that horror is getting on?” she thought, as the gillie baited her prawn-tackle. Then, stepping out upon a natural pier of rough stones leading well out into the turbulent whitey-brown stream, the Duchess skilfully swung out her line, and, after a little manipulation, found herself fast in a good-sized fish.

“What weight should you judge it?” she asked the attendant, when the silvery prey had been gaffed and landed.

“All saxteen,” said the gillie briefly. “Hech! What cry was that?”

As the man held up his hand the noise was repeated.

“It sounds like somebody shouting ‘Help!’” said the Duchess.

And, rod in hand, she ran out upon the pier of bowlders, and, shading her eyes with her hand, gazed upstream, as round a rocky point above came something like a tarred washing-basket with a human figure huddled knees-to-chin inside. The coracle had betrayed the confidence of Mr. Rubelius, and drifted with its hapless tenant down the mile and a half of racing water which lay between Rantorlie and the Falls. The Falls! At that remembrance the laughter died upon the Duchess’s lips, and the ridiculous figure drifting towards her in the bobbing coracle became upon an instant a tragic spectacle. For Death waited for Mr. Rubelius a little below the next bend in the rocky bed of the Haste. And—if the money-lender were drowned—those letters ... yes, those letters, the proofs of the Duchess’s folly, might be regained and destroyed, secretly, and nobody would ever——

It seemed an age of reflection, but really only a second or two went by before the Duchess cried out to Rubelius in her sweet, shrill voice, and ran out to the very end of the pier of rocks, and with a clever underhand jerk sent the heavy prawn-tackle spinning out up and down the river. Once she tried—and failed. The second time, two of the three hooks stuck firmly into the wickerwork of the coracle. It spun round, suddenly arrested in its course, but the strong salmon-gut held, and, after an anxious minute or two, the livid Rubelius safely reached shore.

“I’ve ’ad my lesson,” said he, as the gillie administered whisky. “Never any more salmon-fishing for me! It’s too tryin’,” he gulped—“too ’ard upon the nerves of a man not born to it!” Then he got up, and came bare-headed to the Duchess. His face was very pale and flabby, and his thick lips had lost their color, as he held out a black leather notecase to her Grace. “You—you saved my life,” he said, “and I’m not going to be ungrateful. Here they are—the six letters. Look ’em over, if you like, and see for yourself. And, my obliged thanks to his Grace for his hospitality—but I leave for town to-morrow. Good-by, your Grace. You won’t hear of me again!” And Mr. Rubelius kept his word.

THE CHILD

He arrived late—long after the ship of his father’s fortune had been safely tugged into dock—announcing his entrance upon this terrestrial stage at a moment when people had ceased to expect him. I may say that Tom and Leila, having spent twelve years of married life in the propagation of theories alone, had the most definite notions upon the subject of infant rearing, training, culture, and so forth. Leila intended, she informed me in confidence, to be “an advanced mother,” and Tom, as father to the child of an advanced mother, could hardly help turning out an advanced father, even had he not cherished ambitions in that line.

The boy—for, as Tom reassured all sympathetic callers during the high-pressure first week of its existence, it undoubtedly was a boy—seemed on first sight rather smaller and spottier than the child of so many brilliant prospects had any right to be. They gave him the name of Harold, a clanking procession of other names coupled on to it, ending in Alexander Eric. And they engaged and imported a professional Child Culturist, Miss Sallie Cooter, of Washington—pronounced Wawshington—certified teacher, trained nurse, member of the Ethnophysiological Society of America, and one doesn’t know how many others, to rear Harold on the very latest scientific plan. Miss Cooter, as the intimate friend and chosen disciple of the Inventress of the System at which Tom and Leila had taken fire (a lady of literary talents and original views, who had brought up, on purely hygienic principles, a family of one, and expanded it into a multiplicity of chapters)—Miss Cooter might be trusted to achieve the desired result, and turn out Harold, physically and mentally, a prodigy of infantile perfection. Her work was purely philanthropic, and if she consented to accept the inadequate salary of two hundred a year in return for her services, Leila and Tom explained, she must in no sense be treated as a hireling.

The united efforts of the brougham and the spring-cart fetched Miss Cooter and a mountain of Saratogas from the station one spring day, and she came down to afternoon tea in the very newest of Parisian tea-gowns, which, properly speaking, is not a tea-gown at all. She was decidedly pretty, being dark, slim, bright-eyed, keen-featured, and almost painfully intelligent-looking, even without her gold-framed pince-nez. We devoted the evening to sociality, as Harold’s regimen of mental and physical culture was to commence upon the following day.

“But you shall have a little peep at Baby,” Leila said, “when we go up to dress for dinner.”

Miss Cooter agreed. “But I guess I’ve got to ask you, since the boy’s name is Har’ld, to call him by it, and no other,” she said. “Our society is dead against abbreviations and pet names. We hold that they act as a clog upon the expanding faculties of the child, and arrest mental progress. Besides, when maturity is reached, how pyfectly absurd it is to hear middle-aged men and women addressed as ‘Toto’ and ‘Tiny’!”

Tom, who has a way of calling Leila “Mouse” when in good humor, turned rich imperial purple at this home-thrust, and Leila, whose pet name for Tom is “Tumps,” called attention to the green-fly on the pot-roses, both silently registering a vow never again, save _in camera_, to use the offending appellations.

Miss Cooter was formally invested with Harold on the following morning. His ex-nurse, a plump, rosy-cheeked country-woman, painfully devoid of culture, and absolutely unskilled in the repression of emotion, was relegated, in floods of tears, to command of the laundry. Leila, compassionating the grief of the exile, would have pleaded for Mary’s reduction to the post of under-nurse; but Miss Cooter pronounced that Mary was an obstacle in the way of Progress, and an enemy to Culture, and must go.

Mary went, and Harold, at first too stunned by her desertion to yield to sorrow, presently proclaimed his bereavement in a succession of ear-piercing shrieks.

“What is to be done?” queried Leila, by signs.

Applying both hands to his mouth, after the fashion of a speaking-trumpet, Tom vocalized the suggestion, “Send—for Mary—back!”

But Miss Cooter sternly shook her head, and, bending over the cradle which contained Harold, looked sternly in his flushed and disfigured countenance. He immediately held his breath, growing from crimson to purple and from purple to black as she delivered her inaugural address.

“My dear Har’ld,” said she, with crisp distinctness, “you are a vurry little boy——”

“Hear, hear!” I interpolated, and got a frown from Leila.

“And at three months old your reasoning fahculties are not developed enough for you to comprehend that what you don’t like may be the best thing for you. Mary has gone, and Mary will not come back. Henceforth you are in my cayah, and you will find me fyum, but gentle. However badly you may act, I shall not punish you.”

Harold hiccoughed and stared up at the bright, intellectual face above him with round, astonished eyes and open, dribbling mouth.

“Your own sense of what is right and what is wrawng, dormant though it be at this vurry moment, I intend to awaken and——”

Harold, never before in his brief life harangued after this fashion, appeared to grasp already the idea that something was wrong. The expression of astonishment faded, his down-drooped mouth assumed the bell or trumpet-shape, and, rapidly doubling and undoubling himself with mechanical regularity, he emitted the most astonishing series of sounds we had yet heard from him. No caresses were administered for the assuagement of his woe, no broken English babbled in his infant ears. The Rules of the System of Child Culture absolutely prohibited petting, and baby-language was denounced by Miss Cooter as “pynicious.”

As she predicted, Harold left off howling after a certain interval.

“Now I guess you have lyned one lesson already!” said Miss Cooter. “When you are older, Har’ld, you will cawmprehend that the truest kindness on your payrents’ part praumpted the separation that has given you pain. You will have your bottle now; you will say ‘Thank you’ for it, and ahfter consuming the contents, you will go quietly to sleep.”

But it took a long time to convince the dubious Harold that the trumpet-shaped, nickel-silver-stoppered vessel tendered by his new guardian was the equivalent of his beloved and familiar “Maw.” When finally convinced, he grabbed it without the slightest attempt at saying “Thank you,” and, with the gloomiest scowl that I have ever beheld upon a countenance of such pulpy immaturity, applied himself to deglutition. Miss Cooter shook her head discouragingly.

“This child has a strawngly developed animal nature,” pronounced she—“a throwback to the primeval savage, I should opine.”

“Delightful! Do buy him a little stone ax and a baby bearskin, Leila,” I pleaded. “Think what light he will throw upon the Tertiary Period—if Miss Cooter happens to be right!”

But Miss Cooter shook her head. “He must be environed by softening and civilizing influences,” said she, “from this vurry moment. Vegetarian diet is what I should strawngly recommend.” Her eye doubtfully questioned the rapidly sinking level of the sterilized milk in Harold’s glass trumpet.

“There is such a thing as a cow-tree, isn’t there?” said Leila anxiously. “Perhaps Cope might acclimatize one in the tropical house?”

“But while the cow-tree is being acclimatized,” I asked disturbingly, “upon what is Harold to live?”

“Kindly take this,” said Miss Cooter. “May I trouble you? Please!” she repeated sternly. But Harold only screwed up his eyes and dug his pinky fists into them as his monitress took the empty trumpet away, telling us stories of an atypical and highly-cultured boy baby of her acquaintance who not only exhibited Chesterfieldian politeness at four months of age, saying “Please” and “Thank you,” and “Kindly pass the salt,” but regularly performed its own ablutions, went through breathing exercises and simple gymnastics, was familiar with the use of the abacus, and could work out sums in simple addition upon a patent hygienic slate. All these facts Miss Cooter put before us with convincing eloquence. Her language was well chosen, her scientific knowledge and technical skill quite appalling. There was nothing about a baby that she did not understand, except, perhaps—the baby.

From that day Harold lived under the microscope. Charts of his temper, as of his temperature, were regularly kept up to date; and his progress, physical and psychological, was recorded by Miss Cooter in a kind of ship’s log-book, in which data of meteorological disturbances appeared with distressing frequency. He was not precocious enough to be classified as abnormal, or sufficiently original to come under the heading “Atypical,” or old enough to tell lies, and so be dubbed imaginative. But that tertiary ancestor from whom, according to Miss Cooter, he derived his temperament, must have possessed some strength of character, for from the beginning to the end, Harold’s strongest prejudice was manifested towards Miss Cooter, his most violent attachment in the direction of the banished Mary, for whom he howled at regular intervals until he forgot her, when he became reserved, distrustful, and apathetic. His intellectual qualities were not of the kind that responded to scientific forcing. He never learned that an orange was a sphere, or a rusk an irregular cube. The india-rubber letters and object-blocks possessed for him no meaning; the colored balls of the abacus only awakened in him a tepid interest. He was in texture flabby, and habitually wore an expression of languid indifference—intensified when Miss Cooter was delivering one of her oral lectures, to utter boredom. Despite his sanitary surroundings, his day-nursery, intermediate nursery, and night-nursery, papered, carpeted, furnished, lighted, ventilated, and warmed upon the most approved scientific methods, he did not thrive, contracting complaints incidental to infancy with passionate enthusiasm, and keeping them long after another child would have done with them. And then he complicated an unusually violent attack of croup with convulsions, and Miss Cooter guessed she had better resign the case, which she did “right away,” in favor of some atypical, imaginative, non-atavistic young American citizen. When last I looked into the hygienic day-nursery, most of the educational objects it had contained had vanished—presumably into cupboards—and Harold was lying in the cotton lap of his recovered Mary, nursing a stuffed kitten, and sucking an attenuated thumb. The expression of gloomy boredom had vanished from his countenance as Mary chanted a rhyme, deplorably lacking in sense and construction, about a certain Baby Bunting whose father went a-hunting to get a little rabbit-skin to wrap the Baby Bunting in. It afforded Harold such undisguised delight that I felt sure the rabbit must have burrowed in tertiary strata, and that the predatory parents of Baby Bunting must have been the primal type from which Harold hailed. But Miss Cooter, who could alone have sympathized with my scientific delight in this discovery, was tossing in mid-Atlantic on her way to the land of the Stars and Stripes.

We were, however, to meet yet once again under the spangled folds of Old Glory. It was a year or so later, on board a Hudson River steamboat. She was prettier than ever, quite beautifully dressed, and her _entourage_ comprised two nurses (a colored “mammy” and a pretty Swiss), a perambulator with a baby, and a husband. She introduced me to the husband and the baby, a round, rosy baby, neither atypical nor atavistic, but just of the common, old-fashioned kind.

“Isn’t he cute!” she exclaimed, with rapture. “Smile at Momma, Baby, and show um’s pretty toofs!” Then she addressed the child as a “doodleum ducksey,” while I stood speechless and staring.

My circular gaze awakened memories of the past. She asked after Harold.

“He is very well—now!” I said with point. “May I be pardoned for remarking that you do not appear to be rearing your own baby upon the System of Child Culture you formerly followed with such extraordinary success?”

“No,” said the late Miss Cooter thoughtfully. “No-o!”

“Why not?” I asked, hot with the remembrance of Harold’s sufferings.

Miss Cooter considered, a beautifully manicured forefinger in a dimple that I had never observed before.

“Why not? You earnestly advocated the system—for other people’s babies.”

“Well,” said the late Miss Cooter, with a burst of candor, “I reckon because those _were_ other people’s babies. This is mine!”

A HINDERED HONEYMOON

The coffee and liquor stage of a long and elaborate luncheon having been reached, the rubicund and puffy personage occupying the chair at the head of the table—number three against the glass partition, east end, Savoy Grill-room—waved a stout hand, and instantly eight of the nimblest waiters—two to a double-leaved folding-screen—closed in upon the table with these aids to privacy. The rubicund personage, attired, like each of his male guests present, in the elaborate frock-coat, with white buttonhole bouquet, tender-hued necktie, pale-complexioned waistcoat, gray trousers, and shiny patent leathers inseparable from a wedding—the rubicund personage (who was no less a personage than Mr. Otto Funkstein, managing head of the West End Theatre Syndicate) got upon his legs, champagne-glass in hand, and proposed the united healths of Lord and Lady Rustleton.

“For de highly-brivileged nopleman who hos dis day gonferred ubon de brightest oond lofliest ornamend of de London sdage a disdinguished name oond an ancient didle I hof noding put gongradulations,” said Mr. Funkstein, balancing himself upon the tips of his patent-leather toes, and thrusting his left hand (hairy and adorned with rings of price) in between the jeweled buttons of his large, double-breasted buff waistcoat. “For de sdage oond de pooblic dot will lose de most prilliant star dot has efer dwinkled on de sdage of de West Enf Deatre I hof nodings poot gommiseration. As de manacher of dot blayhouse I feel vit de pooblic. As de friend—am I bermitted to say de lofing oond baternal friend of de late Miss Betsie le Boyntz?”—(tumultuous applause checked the current of the speaker’s eloquence)—“changed poot dis day in de dwingling of an eye—in de hooding of a modor-horn—by de machick of a simble ceremony at de Registrar’s—gonverted from a yoong kirl in de first dender ploom”—(deafening bravos hailed this flight of poetic imagination)—“de first dender ploom of peauty oond de early brime of chenius”—(the lady-guests produced their handkerchiefs)—“into a yoong vife, desdined ere long to wear upon her lofely prow de goronet of an English Gountess”—(Otto began to weep freely)—“a Gountess of Pomphrey.... Potztauzend! de dears dey choke me. Mine dear vriends, I gannot go on.”

Everybody patted Funkstein upon the back at once. Everybody uttered something consoling at an identical moment. Mopping his streaming features with the largest white cambric handkerchief ever seen, the manager was about to resume, when Lord Rustleton—whose tragic demeanor at the Registrar’s Office had created a subdued sensation among the officials there, whose deep depression during the wedding banquet had been intensified rather than alleviated by frequent bumpers of champagne, and who had gradually collapsed in his chair during Funkstein’s address until little save his hair and features remained above the level of the tablecloth, galvanically rose and, with a soft attempt to thump the table, cried: “Order!”

“Choke him off,” murmured a smart comedian to his neighbor, “for pity’s sake. He’s going to tell us how he threw over the swell girl he was engaged to a month before their wedding—for Petsie’s sake; and how he has brought his parents’ gray hairs with sorrow to the grave, and for ever forfeited the right to call himself an English gentleman. I know, bless you! I had it all from him last night at the Mummers’ Club, and this morning at his rooms in Wigmore Street.”

“Rustleton!”

“Order!” yelled Rustleton again.

“Order!” echoed Funkstein, turning a circular pair of rather bibulous and bloodshot blue eyes upon the protestant bridegroom. “Oond vy order?”

“Permimme to reminyou,” said Rustleton, with laborious distinctness, “that the present Head of my fammary, the Rironaurable the Earl of Pomphrey—in poinnofac’, my Fara—is at the present momen’ of speaking in the enjoymen’ of exhallent health, an’ nowistanning present painfully strained rela’ions essisting bi’ween us, I have no desire—nor, I feel convinned, has my wife, Lady Rustleton, any desire—to, in poinnofac’, usurp his shoes, or play leapfrog over his—in poinnofac’, his coffin. Therefore, the referen’ of the distinnwished gelleman who, in poinnofac’, holds the floor, to the coronet of a Countess in premature conneshion with the brow of my newly-marriwife I am compelled to regard as absorrutely ram bad form!”

“Tam bad _vat_?” shrieked Funkstein.

Rustleton leaned over the table. His eyes were set in a leaden-hued countenance. His hair hung lankly over his damp forehead. He nerved himself for a supreme effort. “Ununerrarrably ram baform!” he said, and with this polysyllabic utterance fell into a crystal dish of melted ice, and a comatose condition.

“Bad, bad boy!” said the recently-made Lady Rustleton, biting her notorious cherry underlip, and darting a brilliant glance at Funkstein out of her celebrated eyes as Rustleton was snatched from his perilous position by a strong-armed chorus beauty; and the low comedian, who had become famous since the production of _The Charity Girl_, dried the Viscount’s head with a table-napkin and propped him firmly in his chair.

“It is not de Boy, but de man dat drinks it,” giggled Funkstein, with recovered good temper. “Ach ja, oond also de voman. How many bints hof I not seen you....”

“That’ll do, thanks,” said the newly-made Viscountess, with her well-known expression of prim propriety. “Not so much reminiscing, you know; it’s what poor Tonnie called ‘ahem’d bad form’ just now, didn’t you, ducky?”

“Don’t call me rucky,” said the gentleman addressed, who was now rapidly lapsing into the lachrymose stage of his complaint. “Call me a mirerrable worm or a ‘fernal villain. I reserve both names. Doesn’ a man who has alienarid the affeshuns of his father, blirid his mother’s fonnest hopes, and broken his pli’rid word to a fonnanloving woman—girl, by Jingo——”

“Oh, do dry up about that now, darling!” said Lady Rustleton tartly. “I dare say she deserved what she got. What you have to remember now is that you’re married to me, and we shall be spinning away in the Liverpool Express in another hour, _en route_ for the ocean wave. I always _said_, when I _did_ have a honeymoon—a real one—I’d have it on the opening week of the production on a big Atlantic liner. And this is the trial voyage of the _Regent Street_, and she’s the biggest thing in ships afloat to-day. Do let’s drink her health!”

The toast was drunk with enthusiasm. Two waiters advanced bearing a wedding-cake upon a charger. The bride coyly cut a segment from the mass. It was divided and passed round. The ladies took pieces to dream on, the men shied at the indigestible morsels. Somebody had the bright idea of sending a lump to the chauffeur of the bridal motor-car, which had been waiting in the bright October sunshine, outside in the palm-adorned courtyard, since one o’clock. A _chassé_ of cognac went round. Rustleton was shaken into consciousness of his marital responsibilities and a fur-lined overcoat; everybody kissed Petsie; all the women cried, Petsie included—but not unbecomingly. Her bridal gown, a walking-costume of white cloth trimmed with silver braid, contained a thoroughly contented young woman; her hat, a fascinating creation, trimmed with a rose-colored bird, a _marquisette_, and a real lace veil, crowned a completely happy wife. Tonnie possessed nothing extraordinary in the way of good looks or good brains, it was true; but Tonnie’s wife was wealthy in these physical attributes. He possessed a high-nosed, aristocratic old fossil of a father, whose prejudices against a daughter-in-law taken from the lyric boards must be got over. He owned a perfectly awful mother, whose ancestral pride and whose three chins must—nay, should—be leveled with the dust. His sisters, the Ladies Pope-Baggotte, Petsie said to herself with a smile, were foewomen unworthy of such steel as is forged in the _coulisses_ of the musical comedy theaters. Yet should they, too, bite the dust. In a golden halo—partly hope, partly champagne—she saw Lady Rustleton sweeping, attired in electrifying gowns, onwards to the conquest of Society. The greengrocer’s shop in Camberwell, among whose cabbages and potatoes her infancy had been passed; the Board-School, on whose benches the first-fruits of knowledge had been garnered, were quite forgotten. Some other little circumstances connected with the Past were blotted from the slate of memory by the perfumed sponge of gratified ambition. She bore the deluge of rice and confetti with dazzling equanimity. She hummed “Buzzy, Buzzy, Busy Bee” as the motor-car, its chauffeur sorely embarrassed by a giant wedding favor, a pair of elderly slippers tied on the rear-axle, sped to Euston.

“I’ve got there at last,” said Petsie, as the Express ran into the Liverpool docks and toiling human ants began to climb up the ship’s gangways thrust downwards from the beetling gray sides of the biggest of all modern liners. “I’ve got there at last, I have, and in spite of Billy Boman. A precious little silly I must have been to take a hairdresser for a swell; but at seventeen what girl brought up in a Camberwell backstreet knows a paste solitaire from a real diamond, or a ready-made suit, bought for thirty bob at a Universal Supply Stores, from a Bond Street one? And if nice curly hair and a straight nose, a clear skin, and a good figure were all that’s wanted to make a gentleman, Billy could have sported himself along with the best. But now he’s dead, and I’ve married again into the Peerage, and I shall sit on the Captain’s right at the center saloon table, not only as the prettiest woman on board his big new ship, but as a bride and a Viscountess into the bargain. Wake up, Tonnie dear. You’ve slept all the way from Euston, and there’s a plank to climb.”

“Eh?” Tonnie stared with glassy eyes at the scurrying crowds of human figures, the piled-up trucks of giant trunks and dress-baskets soaring aloft at the end of donkey-engine cables, to vanish into the bowels of the marine leviathan. “Eh! What! Hang it! How confoundedly my head aches! Funkstein must have given us a brutally unwholesome luncheon. Why did I allow him to entertain us? I felt from the first it was a hideous mistake.”

“Why did you let the fellows persuade you to drink more of the Boy than is good for you, you soft-headed old darling?” Petsie gurgled. She smoothed the lank hair of her new-made spouse, and, reaching down his hat from the netting, crowned him with it, and bounded out of the reserved first-class compartment like a lively little rubber ball. “Here’s Timms, your man, with my new maid. No, thank you, Simpkins. You can take the traveling-bags. I may be a woman of title, but I mean to carry my jewel-case myself. Come along into the Ark, Tonnie, with the other couples. What number did you say belonged to our cabin, darling?”

“The Gobelin Tapestry Bridal Suite Number Four,” said Rustleton, with a pallid smile, as a white-capped, gold-banded official hurried forward to relieve the Viscountess of her coroneted jewel-case.

“How tweedlums!” sighed Petsie, retaining firm hold of the leather repository of her brand-new diamond tiara and necklace, not to mention all the rings and brooches and bangles reaped from the admiring occupants of the orchestra-stalls at the West End Theatre during the tumultuously successful run of _The Charity Girl_.

“It costs for the trip—five days, four hours, and sixteen minutes—between Queenstown and the Daunts Rock Lightship,” said Rustleton, with a heavy groan, “exactly two hundred and seventy-five guineas. Ha, ha!” He laughed hollowly.

“But why did you choose such a screamingly swell suite, you wicked, wasteful duckums?” cried the bride coquettishly, as their guide switched on the electric light and revealed a chaste and sumptuous nest of apartments in carved and inlaid mahogany, finished in white enamel with artistic touches of gold, and hung with tapestry of a greeny-blue and livid flesh-color.

“Because I can’t afford it,” said the dismal bridegroom, “and because the meals and all that will be served here separately and privately.” He sank limply upon a sumptuous lounge, and hurled an extinct cigarette-end into an open fireplace surrounded by beaten brass and crowned by a mantel in rose-colored marble. “The execrable ordeal of the first cabin dining-room, with its crowds of gross, commonplace, high-spirited, hungry feeders will thus be spared us. You need never set foot in the Ladies’ Drawing-room; the Lounge and the Smoking-room shall equally be shunned by me. Exercise on the Promenade Deck is a necessity. We shall take it daily, and take it together, my _incognito_ preserved by a motor-cap and goggles, your privacy ensured by a silk—two silk—veils.” He smiled wanly. “I have roughly laid down these lines, formulated this plan, for the maintenance of our privacy without making any allowance for the exigencies of the weather and the condition of the sea. But if I should be prostrated—and I am an exceedingly bad sailor at the best of times—remember, dearest, that a tumbler of hot water administered every ten minutes, alternately with a slice of iced lemon, should feverish symptoms intervene, is not a panacea, but an alleviation, as my cousin, Hambridge Ost, would say. I rather wonder what Hambridge is saying now. He possesses an extraordinary faculty of being scathingly sarcastic at the expense of persons who deserve censure. An unpleasant sensation in my spine gives me the impression—do you ever have those impressions?—that he is exercising that faculty now—and at my expense. Timms, I will ask you to unpack my dressing-gown and papooshes, and then, if you, my darling, do not object, I will lie down comfortably in my own room and have a cup of tea. If I might make a suggestion, dearest, it is that you would tell your maid to get out _your_ dressing-gown and _your_ slippers, and lie down comfortably in _your_ own room and have a cup of tea.”

The twenty-six thousand ton Atlantic flyer moved gracefully down the Mersey, the last flutter of handkerchiefs died away on the stage, the last head was pulled back over the vessel’s rail, the seething tumult of settling down reduced itself to a hive-like buzzing. The _Regent Street’s_ passenger-list comprised quite a number of notabilities connected with Art and the Drama, a promising crop of American millionaires, an ex-Viceroy of India, and a singularly gifted orang-utan, the biggest sensation of the London season, who had dined with the Lord Mayor and Corporation at the Mansion House, and was now crossing the ocean to fulfill a roof-garden engagement in New York, and be entertained at a freak supper by six of the supreme leaders of American Society. Petsie pondered the passenger-list with a pouting lip. She heard from her enraptured maid of the glories of the floating palace in which the first week of her honeymoon was to be spent as she sipped the cup of tea recommended by Rustleton.

“Lifts to take you up and down stairs, silver-gilt and enamel souvenirs given to everybody free, Turkish baths, needle baths, electric baths, hairdressing and manicuring saloons, millinery establishments, a theater with a stock company who don’t know what sea-sickness means, jewelers’ shops, florists, and Fuller’s, a palmist, and a thought-reader. Goodness! the gay old ship must be a floating London, with fish and things squattering about underneath one’s shoe-heels instead of ‘phone-wires and electric-light cables. And I’m shut up like a blooming pearl in an oyster, instead of running about and looking at everything. Oh, Simpkie’—Simpkins, the new maid, had been a dresser at the West End Theatre—“I’m dying for the chance of a little flutter on my own, and how am I to get it?”

The _Regent Street_ gave a long, stately, sliding dive forwards as a mammoth roller of St. George’s Channel swept under her sky-scraping stern. A long, plaintive moan—forerunner of how many to come!—sounded from the other side of the partition dividing the apartments of the bride from that of her newly-wedded lord.

“I think you’re goin’ to get it, my lady,” said the demure Simpkins, as Rustleton’s man knocked at his mistress’s door to convey the intimation that his lordship preferred not to dine.

A head-wind and a heavy sea combined, during the next three days of the voyage, to render Rustleton a prey to agonies which are better imagined than described. While he imbibed hot water and nibbled captain’s biscuits, or lay prone and semi-conscious in the clutches of the hideous malady of the wave, Lady Rustleton, bright-eyed, _petite_, and beautifully dressed, paraded the promenade deck with a tail of male and female cronies, played at quoits and croquet, to the delight of select audiences, and sat in sheltered corners after dinner, well out of the radius of the electric light, sometimes with two or three, generally with one, of the best-looking victims of her bow and spear. She sat on the Captain’s right hand at the center table, outrageously bedecked with diamonds. She played in a musical sketch and sang at a charity concert. “Buzzy, Buzzy, Busy Bee” was thenceforth to be heard in every corner of the vast maritime hotel that was hurrying its guests Westward at the utmost speed of steel and steam. Fresh bouquets of Malmaison carnations, roses and violets from the Piccadilly florists, were continually heaped upon her shrine, dainty jeweled miniature representations of the _Regent Street’s_ house-flag, boxes of choice bonbons showered upon her like rain. The celebrated orang-utan occupied the chair next hers at a special banquet, the newest modes in millinery found their way mysteriously to her apartment, if she had but tried them on, smiled, and, with the inimitable Petsie wink at the reflection of her own provokingly pretty features in the shop mirror, approved.

“I keep forgetting I’m a married woman,” she would say, with the Petsie smile, when elderly ladies of the cat-like type, and middle-aged men who were malicious, inquired after the health of the invisible Lord Rustleton. “But he’s there, poor dear; or as much as is left of him. Quite contented if he gets his milk and beef-juice, and the hot water comes regularly, and there’s a slice of lemon to suck. No; I’m afraid I can’t give him your kind message of sympathy, you know, because sympathy is too disturbing, he says.... He doesn’t even like _me_ to ask him if he’s feeling bad, because, as he tells me, I have only to look at him to know that he is, poor darling.”

Thus prattled the bride, even ready to _faire l’ingénue_ for the benefit of even an audience of one. The voyage agreed with Petsie. Her complexion, dulled by make-up, assumed a healthier tint; her eyes and smile grew brighter, even as the ruddy gold faded from her abundant hair. The end of this story would have been completely different had not the tricksy sea-air brought about this deplorable change.

“I’m getting dreadfully rusty, as you say, Simpkie; and if the man in the hairdresser’s shop on the Promenade Deck Arcade can give me a shampoodle and touch me up a bit—quite an artist is he, and quite the gentleman? Oh, very well, I’ll look in on my gentleman-artist between breakfast and _bouillon_.”

Petsie did look in. The artist’s studio, elegantly hung with heavy pink plush curtains, only contained, besides a shampooing-basin, a large mirror, a nickel-silver instrument of a type between a chimney-cowl and a ship’s ventilator, and a client’s chair, a young person of ingratiating manners, who offered Lady Rustleton the chair, and enveloping her dainty person in a starchy pink wrapper, touched a bell, and saying, “The operator will attend immediately, moddam,” glided noiselessly away. Petsie, approvingly surveying her image in the mirror, did not hear a male footstep behind her. But as the head and shoulders of the operator rose above the level of her topmost waves, and his reflected gaze encountered her own, she became ghastly pale beneath her rose-bloom, and with a little choking cry of recognition gasped out:

“Bill ... Boman! ... it can’t be you?”

“The old identical same,” Mr. William Boman said, with a cheerful smile. “And if the shock has made you giddy, I can turn on the basin-hose in half a tick, and give you a splash of cold as a reviver. Will you have it? No? Then don’t faint, that’s all.”

“You wrote to say you were dying at Dieppe five years ago,” sobbed Petsie, into the folds of the pink calico wrapper. “You wicked, cruel man, you know you did!”

“And now you’re crying because I didn’t die,” said Mr. Boman, arranging his sable forehead-curls in the glass, and complacently twirling a highly-waxed mustache. “No pleasing you women. You never know what you want, strikes me.”

“But somebody sent me a French undertaker’s bill for a first-class funeral, nearly thirty pounds it came to when we’d got the francs down to sovereigns,” moaned Petsie, “and I paid it.”

“That was my little dodge,” said Mr. Boman calmly, “to get a few yellow-birds to go on with. Trouble I’d got into—don’t say any more about it, because I am a reformed character now. And now we’re talking about characters, what price yours, my Lady Rustleton?”

“Oh, Billy!”

“Bigamy ain’t a pretty word, but that’s what it comes to, as I’ve said to myself many an evening as I smoked my cigar on the second-class deck promenade, and heard you singing away in there to the swells in the music-room like a—like a cage full of canaries. I shan’t make no scene nor nothing like that, says I. Her hair’s getting a bit off color—see it by daylight, she’ll have to come my way before long, and then I shall tip her the ghost with a vengeance.”

“Oh, Bill dear, how could you be so cruel!” pleaded Petsie.

“Not so much of the ‘Bill dear,’ I’ll trouble you,” said Mr. Boman sternly. “Why don’t you produce that aristocratic corpse you’ve married, and let me have it out with him? Seasick, is he? I’ll make him land-sick before I’ve done with him, and so I tell you. He’ll have to sell some of his blooming acres to satisfy me, or some of them diamonds of yours, my lady.”

But at this juncture the delayed attack of hysteria swooped upon its victim. Summoning his young lady-assistant, Mr. Boman, with a few injunctions, placed the patient in her care. Then brushing a few bronze-hued hairs from his frock-coat, removing his dapper apron, and tidying his hair with a rapid application of the brush, he winked as one well pleased, and betook himself to Gobelin Tapestry Bridal Suite Number Four, in the character of a Messenger of Fate.

Three hours later the news had leaked out all over the _Regent Street_. The great vessel buzzed like a wasps’-nest, and the utmost resources of wireless telegraphy were taxed to communicate to sister ships upon the ocean and fellow-men upon the nearest land the astounding fact of the sudden collapse of the Rustleton marriage, owing to the arrival on the scene of a previous husband of the lady.

“_Ach Himmel!_ it is klorious!” gasped Funkstein, waving a pale blue paper, “I haf here Petsie’s reply to de offer of de Syindigate—she comes to de Vest End Theatre; at an advanced salary returns—and de house will be cram-jammed to de doors for anoder tree hoondred berformances. It is an ill vind dot to nopody plows goot, mark my vords!”

Lord Pomphrey had just given utterance to a similar sentiment; Rustleton, on the other side of the Atlantic, had previously arrived at a like conclusion. Mr. Boman had entertained the same view from the outset of affairs. Petsie—again Le Poyntz—realizing the gigantic advertisement that the resurrection of her first proprietor involved, was gradually becoming reconciled to the situation. When all the characters of a tale are made content, is it not time the narrative came to a close?

“CLOTHES—AND THE MAN—!”

The smoking-room of the Younger Sons’ Club, the bow-windows of which command a view of Piccadilly, contained at the hour of two-thirty its full complement of habitual nicotians, who, seated in the comfortable armchairs, recumbent on the leather divans, or grouped upon the hearthrug, lent their energies with one accord to the thickening of the atmosphere.

Hambridge Ost, a small, drab-hued man with a triangular face, streakily-brushed hair, champagne-bottle shoulders, and feet as narrow as boot-trees without the detachable side-pieces, invariably encased in the shiniest of patent leathers,—Hambridge, from behind a large green cigar, was giving a select audience of very young and callow listeners the benefit of his opinions upon dress.

“If I proposed to jot down the small events of my insignificant private life, dear fellers, or had the gift—supposing I did commit ’em to paper—of makin’ ’em interesting ...” said Hambridge, raising his eyebrows to the edge of his carefully parted hair and letting them down again, “I don’t mind telling you, dear fellers, that the resultant volume or two would mark an epoch in autobiographical literature. But, like the violet—so to put it—I have, up to the present, preferred to blush unseen. Not that the violet _can_ blush anything but purple—or blue in frosty weather, but the simile has up to now always held good in literature. Lord Pomphrey—a man appreciative to a degree of the talents of his relatives—has said to me a thousand times if one, ‘Confound you, Hambridge, why is not that, or this, or the other, so to put it, in print?’ But Pomphrey may be partial——”

“No, no!” exclaimed, in a very deep bass, a very young man in a knitted silk waistcoat and a singularly brilliant set of pimples. “No, no!”

“Much obliged, dear fellow,” said Hambridge, hoisting his eyebrows and letting them drop in his characteristic manner. “Some of my views may possess originality—even freshness when expressed, as I invariably express ’em, in a perfectly commonplace manner.”

“No, no!” again exclaimed the pimply-faced owner of the deep bass voice.

“As to the Ethics of the Crinoline, now,” went on Hambridge, “I observe that an energetic effort is being made—in a certain quarter and amongst a certain _coterie_—to revive the discarded hoops of 1855–66. They did their best to impart a second vitality to the Early Victorian poke-bonnet some years ago. Why did the effort fail, dear fellers? Because, with their accompanying garniture of modesty, blushes were considered necessary to the feminine equipment at the date I have mentioned. And because blushes—I speak on the most reliable authority—are more difficult to simulate than tears. Also because, looking down the pink silk-lined tunnel of the poke-bonnet of 1855–66, it was impossible for you, as an ordinary male creature, to decide whether the rosy glow invading the features of the woman you adored—we adored women, dear fellows, at that period—was genuine or the reverse. There you have in a nutshell the reason why the poke-bonnet was not welcomed at the dawn of the twentieth century. Modesty and blushes, dear fellers, are out of date.”

Hambridge leaned back in his chair with an air of mild triumph, running his movable eye—the left was rigidly fixed behind his monocle—over the faces of the listeners.

“Will the woman of the Twentieth Century willingly enclose her legs—they were limbs in 1855–66—once more in the steel-barred calico cage, fifteen feet in circumference, if not more, that contained the woman of the Early Victorian Era? Dear fellers, the question furnishes material for an interestin’ debate. In my young days there was no sittin’ in ladies’ pockets, no cosy-cornering, so to put it. You invariably kept at a respectful distance from the young creature whom you, more or less ardently—we could be ardent in those days—desired to woo and win, simply because you couldn’t get nearer. You didn’t approach her mother for permission to pay your addresses-her mother was encased in a similar panoply. You went to her father, because you could get at him—there you have the plain, simple reason of the custom of ‘askin’ Papa.’ And if you were reprehensibly desirous of eloping with another fellow’s wife, you didn’t express your wish in words. You wrote a letter invitin’ her to fly with you—we called it flying in those days—and dropped it in the post. If the lady disapproved, she dropped you. If not, she bolted with you in a chaise with four or a pair—and even then her crinoline kept you at a distance. You were no more at liberty to put your arm round her waist than if the eye of Early Victorian Society had been glued upon you.

“To put forward another reason _contra_ the reacceptance of the crinoline by the Woman of To-day, dear fellers, the Woman of To-day can swim. Therefore, the advantage of being dressed practically in a lifebuoy, does not appeal to her as it did early in the previous reign. I could quote you an instance of an accident which occurred to the Dover and Calais paddle-wheel steam-packet, on board which I happened to be a passenger, which, owing to the negligence of the captain, ran ashore upon a sandbank half a mile from the pier. The first boat which was lowered was filled with lady passengers, all in crinolines. It was swamped by a wave which washed over the stern. The steersman and the sailors who were rowing were unluckily snatched to a watery grave, poor fellows. Not so the women passengers of the swamped boat, dear creatures, who simply floated, keeping hold of one another’s scarves and bonnet-strings, and so forth, until they could be picked up and conveyed ashore. Not one of ’em could swim a stroke—and all were saved, thanks to the crinoline in which each was attired. But, useful as under certain circumstances the birdcage may be, the Twentieth Century Woman will never be tempted back into it. She has learned what it is to have muscles and to use ’em, dear fellers! and the era of languid inertia is over for her.

“I will add, dear fellers, that in these drab and uncommonly dismal days of early December, the dash of color now perceptible in the clothes of the best dressed men present at social functions of the superior sort, adds largely to the cheeriness of the scene. _Cela me fait cet effet_, dear fellers, but of course I may be wrong. And the first man to adopt and appear in the newest style in evenin’ dress—a bright blue coat of fine faced cloth, with black velvet collar, velvet cuffs, and silk facin’s, worn with trousers of the same material, braided with black down the side seams, and a V-cut vest of white Irish silk poplin-has realized a fortune through it.

“A well-known man, dear fellers, connected with two old Tory families of the highest distinction, educated at Eton, popular at the University-where he did not allow his love of study to interfere with the more serious pursuit of sport—d’ye take me? Suppose we call him Eric de Peauchamp-Walmerdale. His marriage took place yesterday at St. Neot’s, Knightsbridge, the sacred edifice bein’ decorated with large lilies and white chrysanthemums, and the gatherin’ of guests surprisingly large—the biggest crush of the Season as yet. There were six little girl-bridesmaids in pale blue, with diamond lockets, and the bride’s train was carried by four pages, also in pale blue, with gold-headed canes. As for the bride, considerin’ her age—a cool seventy—surprisin’, dear fellers! Only daughter and heiress of an ex-butler, who invented a paste for cleanin’ plate, patented it, and became a millionaire, Isaac Shyne, Esq., M.P., of The Beeches, Wopsley, and 710, Park Lane, deceased ten years ago at the ripe age of ninety.

“De Peauchamp-Walmerdale’s married sister lived next door to the rich Miss Shyne, who practically went nowhere, and only received her Nonconformist minister, and a few whist-playin’ friends of the same denomination on certain specified evenin’s. House absolutely Early Victorian—walnut-wood drawing-room suite, upholstered in green silk rep, mahogany and brown leather for the dinin’-room. Berlin woolwork curtains, worked by the mistress of the house, at all the front windows. Three parrots, two poodles, and a pair of King Charles spaniels of the obsolete miniature breed. Maid-servants—all elderly, butler like a bishop, uncommon good cellar of gouty old Madeiras and sherries, laid down by the defunct Shyne, awful collection of pictures by Smith, Jones, Brown, and Robinson, splendid plate, too heavy to lift. And a fortune of one hundred and fifty thousand in the most reliable Home Rails and breweries, besides an estate of sixty thousand acres in Crannshire, and the title deeds of the Park Lane house.

“It came—the idea of bringing Miss Shyne and De Peauchamp-Walmerdale together—like a flash of inspiration—as the dear feller’s sister, Lady Tewsminster, told me yesterday when people had struggled up after the Psalm, and yawned through the address, _not_ delivered by a Nonconformist, but by the Bishop of Baxterham; and while the choir were singin’, ‘O Perfect Love!’ She was frightfully cast down when she discovered through her maid, who had scraped, under orders, an acquaintance with Miss Shyne’s elderly confidential attendant, that her lady objected to young gentlemen—couldn’t endure the sight, so to put it, of anything masculine under fifty, or without a bulge under the waistcoat, and a bald top to its head. Further inquiries elicited that Miss Shyne had had a disappointment in early life, and wore at the back of an old-fashioned cameo brooch, representin’ the ‘Choice of Paris,’ the portrait on ivory of a handsome young man with fair hair, the livin’ image of Eric de Peauchamp-Walmerdale, in a light blue tail-coat, with a black velvet collar and gold buttons, holding a King Charles spaniel of the miniature breed under his arm.

“Dear fellers, Lady Tewsminster, the evening upon which she received this item of information, knew no more than a newly-born infant what she was going to do with it. As happens to most of us, she mentally filed it for further reference, and getting into her gown, her diamonds, and her evening _coiffure_—those Etruscan rolled curls are extremely becoming to a woman of pronounced outlines, and there’s only one place in London, she tells me, where they can be bought or redressed—went down to the drawing-room.

“A small but select party had been invited for the evenin’, including, on the feminine side, an American heiress on the lookout for a husband with a title—or, at least, the next heir to one-a handsome widow with a fairly decent jointure, and a couple of marriageable girls with almost quite respectable _dots_. From these, carefully collected on approval by a devoted sister, De Peauchamp-Walmerdale might, who knows? have selected a life partner, and sunk into the obscurity of moderate means for ever, had it not occurred to him upon that particular evening—do you take me, dear fellers?—to array himself in the latest cry of modern masculine evening dress.

“He was standing on the hearthrug when Lady Tewsminster entered, a tall, slim, youthful figure, fair-haired and complexioned, and quite uncommonly handsome, in his light blue coat with the black velvet collar, braided accompaniments, and pearl-buttoned, watch-chainless, white silk vest.

“‘How do you like me, Ju, old girl?’ he said, coming to kiss her. ‘I’ve come to dine in character as our great-grandfather. Awful fool I feel, but my tailor insisted on my wearin’ ’em, and as I owe the brute a frightful bill I thought I’d best appease him by givin’ in.’

“The gilded Early Victorian frame of the high mantel-mirror behind De Peauchamp-Walmerdale had the effect of being a frame, if you foller me, out of which, the figure of the dear feller had stepped. A cameo brooch shot into the mind of Lady Tewsminster, above it the long narrow face and dowdy black lace bonnet of the heiress, Miss Jane Ann Shyne. A plan of campaign was instantly formulated in the mind of that surprising woman. She stepped to one of the windows commandin’ Park Lane, drew aside the blind, and saw, paddlin’ up and down on the rainy pavement outside, the waterproofed figure of Miss Shyne’s confidential maid, taking the King Charles spaniels and the poodles for their customary evenin’ ta-ta. Instantly she touched the bell, sent for her maid and said to her in a rapid undertone, ‘Johnson, ten pounds are yours if you can steal one of Miss Shyne’s pet King Charles spaniels while their attendant is not looking. There is no risk—I shall send the creature back in ten minutes. Will you undertake this? Yes? Very well, go and get the beast.’

“The maid, Johnson, departed swiftly, the area-gate clicked, and Lady Tewsminster, feverish with the great project boiling under her transformation, paced the drawing-room until she heard the second click of the gate. She swept down the stairs to meet Johnson, in whose black silk apron struggled the smallest of the King Charles spaniels. ‘Did the woman see?’ whispered the mistress. ‘Not a bit of her, my lady,’ returned the maid. ‘She was gossiping with the District Police-Inspector about a burglary they’ve had three doors away. So I got Tottles—that’s his name, my lady-quite easy, not being on a lead.’