Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

“Quarter of an hour! That _was_ clever of you, Miss Enderville dear, to shut that imp’s head in the door before he could pop it back again. Well, there! if you haven’t got another diamond ring!... Left at the stage-door office, addressed to you, by a perfect stranger, who hasn’t even enclosed a line.... Perhaps you’ll meet him in a better land, dear; he seems a lot too shy for this one. Not that I admire the three-speeds-forward sort of fellow, but there is such a thing as being too backward in coming up to the scratch—twig?

“I ought to know something about that, considering which my life was spoiled—never you mind how long ago, because dates are a rotten nuisance—by one of those hang-backers who want the young woman—the young lady, I should say—to make all the pace for both sides. It was during the three-hundred night run of——There! I’ve forgotten the name of the gay old show, but Miss de la Regy was in it with me—one of the Tall Eleven, weren’t you, Miss de la Regy dear? And we were Anchovian Brigands in the First Act—Sardinian Brigands, did you say? I knew it had something to do with the beginning of a dinner at the Savoy—and Marie Antoinette gentlemen in powdered wigs and long, gold-headed canes in the Second, and in the Final Tableau British tars in pink silk fleshings, pale blue socks, and black pumps, and Union Jacks. I remember how I fancied myself in that costume, and how frightfully it fetched _him_.

“Me keeping my eyes very much to myself in those days, new to the Profession as I was, I didn’t tumble to the fact of having made a regular conquest till a girl older than me twigged and gave me a hint—then I saw him sitting in the stalls, dear, if you’ll believe me!—dash it! I’ve dropped my powder-puff in the water-jug!—with his mouth wide open—not a becoming thing, but a sign of true feeling.

“He was fair and pale and slim, with large blue eyes, and lovely linen, and a diamond stud in the shirt-front, and a gardenia in the buttonhole was good form then, and the white waistcoats were twill. To-day his waistcoat would be heliotrope watered silk, and his shirt-front embroidered cambric, and if he showed more than an inch of platinum watch-chain, he’d be outcast for ever from his kind. Bless you! men think as much of being in the fashion as we do, take my word for it, dear.

“He kept his mouth open, as I’ve said, all through the evening, only putting the knob of his stick into it sometimes—silver knobs were all the go then—and never took his eyes off me. ‘You’ve made a victim, Daisy,’ says one of the girls as we did a step off to the chorus, two by two, ‘and don’t you forget to make hay while the sun shines!’ I thanked her to keep her advice to herself, and moved proudly away, but my heart was doing ragtime under my corsets, and no mistake about it. When we ran downstairs after the General Entrance and the Final Tableau, I took off as much make-up as I thought necessary, and dressed in a hurry, wishing I’d come to business in a more stylish get-up. And as I came out between the swing-leaves of the stage-door, I saw _him_ outside in an overcoat with a sable collar, a crush hat, and a white muffler. Dark as the light was, he knew me, and I recognized him, his mouth being ajar, same as during the show, and his eyes being fixed in the same intense gaze, which I don’t blush to own gave me a sensation like what you have when the shampooing young woman at the Turkish Baths stands you up in the corner of a room lined with hot tiles and fires cold water at you from the other end of it out of a rubber hose.

“‘Well, have you found his name out yet, Daisy, old girl?’ was the question in the dressing-room next night. I felt red-hot with good old-crusted shame, when I found out that it was generally known he’d followed me down Wellington Street to my ’bus—not a Vanguard, but a gee-gee-er in those days—and stood on the splashy curb to see me get in, without offering an utterance—which I dare say if he had I should have shrieked for a policeman, me being young and shy. No, I’d no idea what his name was, nor nothing more than that he looked the complete swell, and was evidently a regular goner—_twiggez?_—on the personal charms of yours truly.

“If you’ll believe me, there wasn’t a line or a rosebud waiting for me at the stage-door next night, though he sat in the same stall and stared in the same marked way all through the evening. Perhaps he might for ever have remained anonymous, but that the girl who dressed on my left hand—quite a rattlingly good sort, but with a passion for eating pickled gherkins out of the bottle with a fork during all the stage waits and intervals such as I’ve never seen equaled—that girl happened to know the man—middle-aged toff, with his head through his hair and a pane in his eye—who was in the stall next my conquest the night before. She applied the pump—_twiggez?_—and learned the name and title of one I shall always remember, even though things never came to nothing definite betwixt us—twig?

“He was a Viscount—sable and not musquash—the genuine article, not dyed or made up of inferior skins; blow on the hairs and hold it to the light, you will not see the fatally regular line that bears testimony to deception. Lord Polkstone, eldest son of the Earl of ——. Well, there, if I haven’t been and forgotten his dadda’s title! Rolling in money, and an only boy. It was less usual then than now for a peer to pick a life-partner among the Show-girls, but just to keep us bright and chirpy, the thing was occasionally done—twig? And there Lord Polkstone sat night after night, _matinée_ after _matinée_, in the same place in the stalls, with his mouth open and his large blue eyes nailed upon the features of yours truly. Whenever I came out after the show, there he was waiting, but it went no farther. Pitying his bashfulness, I might—I don’t say I would, but I _might_—have passed a ladylike remark upon the weather, and broken the ice that way. But every girl in my room—the Tall Eleven dressed in one together—every girl’s unanimous advice was, ‘Let him speak first, Daisy.’ Then they’d simply split with laughing and have to wipe their eyes. Me, being young and unsophis—I forget how to spell the rest of that word, but it means jolly fresh and green—never suspected them of pulling my leg. I took their crocodileish advice, and waited for Lord Polkstone to speak. My dear, I’ve wondered since how it was I never suspected the truth! Weeks went by, and the affair had got no farther. Young and inexperienced as I was, I could see by his eye that his was no Sunday-to-Monday affection, but a real, lasting devotion of the washable kind. Knowing that, helped me to go on waiting, though I was dying to hear his voice. But he never spoke nor wrote, though several other people did, and, my attention being otherwise taken up, I treated those fellows with more than indifference.

“I remember the Commissionaire—an obliging person when not under the influence of whisky—telling me that what he called a rum party had left several bouquets at the stage-door—no name being on them, and without saying who for—which seemed uncommonly queer. Afterward it flashed on me—but there! never mind!

“If I had ever said a word to that dear when his imploring eyes met mine, and lingered on the curb when I heard his faithful footsteps following me to my ’bus, the mask would have fallen, dear, and the blooming mystery been brought to light. But it shows the kind of girl I was in those days, that with ‘Good-evening,’ ready on the tip of my tongue, I shut my mouth and didn’t say it. If I had, I might have been a Countess now, sitting in a turret and sewing tapestry, or walking about a large estate in a tailor-made gown, showing happy cottagers how to do dairy-work.

“That’s my romance, dear—is there a drop of Bass left in that bottle? I’ve a thirst on me I wouldn’t sell for four ‘d.’ Spite and malice on the part of some I shall not condescend to accuse, helplessness on his part—poor, devoted dear!—and ignorance on mine, nipped it in the bud; and when he vanished from the stalls—didn’t turn up at the stage-door—appearing in the Royal Box, one night I shall never forget, with two young girls in white and a dowager in a diamond fender, I knew he’d given up the chase, and with it all thoughts of poor little downy Me.

“We were singing a deadly lively chorus about being ‘jolly, confoundedly jolly!’ and I stood and sang and sniveled with the black running off my eyes. For even to my limited capacity, and without the sneering whispers of a treacherous snake-in-the-grass, whose waist I had to keep my arm round all the time, me playing boy to her girl, first couple proscenium right, next the Royal Box, where he sat with those three women—I could see how I’d lost the prize. One glance at Lord Polkstone—prattling away on his fingers to the best-looking of those two girls, neither of ’em being over and above what I should call passable—one glance revealed the truth.

“He was deaf and dumb!—and I had been waiting a week of Sundays for him to speak out first. Hugging my happy love and my innocent hope to my heart of hearts—there’s an exercise in h’s for any person whose weakness lies in the letter—I’d been waiting for what couldn’t never come. Why hadn’t he have wrote? That question I’ve often asked myself, and the answer is that none of them who could have told Lord Polkstone my name could understand the deaf and dumb alphabet.

“Oh! it was a piercing shock—a freezing blow I’ve never got over, dear, nor never shall. He married that girl in white, that artful thing who could understand his finger language and talk back.

“Think what a blessing I lost in a husband who could never contradict or shout at me. And I feel I could have been an honor to the Peerage, and worn a coronet like one born to it. I’ll stand another Bass, dear, if you’ll tell the dresser to fetch it; or will you have a brandy-and-Polly? You’ve hit it, dear, the girls were shocking spiteful, but I was jolly well a lot too retiring and shy. I’ve got over the weakness since, of course, and now I positively make a point of speaking if one of ’em seems quite unusually hangbacky.

“‘Who knows,’ I say to myself, ‘perhaps he’s deaf and dumb!’”

“VALCOURT’S GRIN”

The lovely and high-born relict of a decrepit and enormously wealthy commoner, she had sustained her husband’s loss with a becoming display of sorrow, and passed with exquisite grace and discretion through the successive phases of the toilet indicative of connubial woe. From a lovely chrysalis swathed in crape she had changed to a dove-colored moth; the moth had become a heliotrope butterfly, on the point of changing its wings for a brighter pair, when the post brought her a letter from one of her dearest friends. It bore the Zurich postmark, and ran as follows:

“HOTEL SCHWERT,
“APPENBAD,
“_June 18th._”

“I wonder, dear, whether you would mind being troubled with Val for a day? He is coming up from Seaton next Thursday on dentist’s leave, and one does not care that a boy of sixteen—one can consider Val a boy without stretching the imagination overmuch—should be drifting anchorless in town. You will find him grown and developed.... You see, I take it for granted, in my own rude way, that you have already said ‘Yes’ to my request.... The views here are divine—such miles of eye-flight over the Lake of Constance and the Rhine Valley! To quote poor Dynham, who suffered much from the whey-cure, ‘every prospect pleases, and only man is bile.’ Kiss Val for me. My dear, the thought of his future is a continual anxiety. The title to keep up, and an income of barely eight thousand pounds.... ‘Marry him,’ you will say; but to whom? American heiresses are beginning to have an exorbitant idea of their own value, and then Val’s is an open, simple nature—_unworldly to a degree!_ Not that I, his mother, could wish him otherwise, but—you will understand and sympathize, I know! And boys are so easily molded by a woman who has charm! If you could drop a word here and there, calculated to bring him to a sense of the responsibility that rests upon his young shoulders, the _duty_ of restoring the diminished fortunes of his house by a _really sensible_ marriage.... I have dinned and dinned, but I fear without much result.

“Ever yours,
“G. D. E. V. T.

“Please address Val, ‘Care of Rev. H. Buntham, Seaton College, near Grindsor.’—G.

“Buntham is the house-master. V. says he ‘_understands the fellows thoroughly_.’ Such a tribute, I think, to a tutor _from_ a boy.—G.”

So a dainty monogrammed and coroneted note, on heliotrope paper, with a thin but decided bordering of black, was sent off to the Marquis of Valcourt, and Valcourt’s hostess in prospective consulted a male relative over the luncheon-table as to the most approved methods of entertaining a schoolboy.

“Heaps of indigestible things to eat—sweet for choice—and a box at the Gaiety if there’s a _matinée_; if not, the Hippodrome. But who’s the boy?” asked the male relative.

“Lord Valcourt, Geraldine’s eldest.”

The male relative pursed up his lips into the shape of a whistle, and helped himself to a cutlet in expressive silence.

“Geraldine is devoted to him. He seems to have a delightful nature, to be quite an ideal son!”

“That young—that young fellow!”

“You have met him, haven’t you?”

“I have had that privilege. I was one of the house-party at Traye last September.”

“Geraldine asked me, but of course it was out of the question....”

“Of course, poor Mussard’s death—quite too recent,” murmured the male relative, taking green peas.

Poor Mussard’s charming relict drooped her long-lashed, brown eyes pensively, and the transparent lace, that covered the hiding-place of the heart that had been wrung with presumable anguish eighteen months before, billowed under the impulse of a little dutiful sigh.

“What a prize for some lucky beggar with a big title and empty pockets!” reflected the male relative, who happened to be a brother, and could therefore contemplate dispassionately. “Thirty—and looks three-and-twenty _en plein jour_, without a pink-lined sunshade.” Aloud he said: “So you are to entertain Valcourt—Tuesday, I think you said?”

“Thursday. It would be dear of you to come and help me,” murmured Mrs. Mussard plaintively.

“It would afford me delight to do so,” returned the male relative unblushingly, “had I not unfortunately an engagement to see a man about a fishing-tour in Norway.”

“Tiresome! I know so little about modern schoolboys!” murmured Mrs. Mussard.

“The less you know about ’em, my dear Vivienne, the better.”

“Having been a boy yourself,” the speaker’s sister responded, with gentle acerbity, “you are naturally prejudiced. But, going by Geraldine’s account, Valcourt is not the ordinary kind of boy at all. Indeed, I have promised her to take him in hand, and impart a few _viva voce_ lessons in _savoir faire_ and worldly wisdom.”

“_Have you?_ By Jove, Vivie, you’ve taken something upon yourself! ‘Angels rush in where demons fear to tread....’ I’m mulling the quotation, but in its perfect state it isn’t complimentary. May Valcourt profit by your instructions on Thursday!”

Thursday came, and with it Valcourt. He was pleasing to view; a clean-limbed, broad-shouldered, straight-featured, pink-and-white specimen of the well-bred English youth of sixteen, with fair hair brushed into a silky sweep above a wide, ingenuous brow; sleepy gray-green eyes, with yellow and blue reflections in them, reminding the beholder of tourmaline; well-kept hands, pleasing manners, and a wide, innocent grin of the cherubic-angelic kind, never more in evidence than when Valcourt was engaged in some pursuit neither angelic nor cherubic. Mrs. Mussard, at first sight, was conscious of a brief maternal inclination to kiss him. Geraldine’s boy was, she said to herself, “a perfect duck!” She subdued the osculatory impulse, shook hands with the boy cordially, and hoped the dentist had not hurt him.

“No, thanks awfully,” said Valcourt, with his cherubic grin. The teeth revealed were exceedingly white and regular.

“But you had gas, of course?” proceeded his hostess.

“When I have teeth out I generally do,” said Valcourt carefully. “They always give you half a guinea extra allowance for gas, so most of the fellows ask to have it.” He touched his waistcoat pocket meditatively as he spoke, and smiled, or rather grinned, again so seraphically that Mrs. Mussard longed to tip him a ten-pound note. She gave her young guest a sumptuous luncheon, and, not without serious misgivings, commanded the butler to produce the exhilarating beverage of champagne.

“A little sweet, isn’t it?” said Valcourt critically.

“I thought that you—that is——” Mrs. Mussard crumpled her delicate eyebrows in embarrassment, and the butler permitted himself the shadow of a smile.

“Ladies like sweet wine,” remarked Valcourt. He refused liqueur with coffee, but considered Mrs. Mussard’s cigarettes “rather mild.”

“I—I don’t usually smoke that brand,” his hostess explained. “I—I ordered them on purpose for——” She broke off, in sheer admiration of Valcourt’s beautiful grin.

The _matinée_ for which she had secured a stage-box did not commence until three. “Time for a little chat in the drawing-room,” she thought, and ran over in her mind a list of the things dear Geraldine would have wished her to say. She bade the boy sit in the opposite angle of her pet sofa, upholstered in shimmering lily-leaf green, billowed with huge puffy pillows of apricot-yellow, covered with cambric and Valenciennes. She thought the harmony well completed by Valcourt’s sleek fair head and inscrutable tourmaline eyes, and wished for the first time that poor dear Mussard had left an heir. Vague as the yearning was, it imparted a misty softness to her brown eyes, and caused the corners of her delicate lips to quiver. She drew a little nearer to Valcourt, and laid her white jeweled hand softly upon the muscular young arm, firm and hard beneath an uncommonly well-cut sleeve.

“My dear Valcourt,” she began.

“Your eyes are brown, aren’t they?” asked Valcourt.

“I believe they are,” murmured Mrs. Mussard. “My dear boy, I trust that——”

Valcourt shut his own sleepy tourmaline eyes and sniffed, a long rapturous sniff. “Mother uses attar of violets. It’s her pet scent. Jolly, but not so nice as yours. What is it?” He sniffed again. “I can’t guess. ’Mph! I give it up. I know!” The sleepy tourmaline eyes opened, large and round and bright, the cherubic-angelic smile suffused his features. “Why, it comes from your hair!”

“People have said that before. Oh! never mind my hair!” Mrs. Mussard was not displeased, nevertheless. “Tell me how you progress at School. You know your mother is my dearest friend. I should so much like you to remember that and confide in me, _almost_ as you confide in her!”

A solemn, innocent expression came over Valcourt’s face.

“All right,” he said, after a pause, during which he seemed to be listening to choirs of angels chanting to the accompaniment of celestial harps. “I’ll tell you things just exactly as I tell ’em to mother!”

“You dear!” exclaimed the impulsive young widow, and kissed him. The smooth elastic skin, brownish-pink as a new-laid egg, and dotted with sunny little freckles, grew pinker under the velvet violence of the lady’s lips. Valcourt turned the other cheek, with his cherub’s smile, and less warmly, because more consciously, his mother’s dearest friend saluted that also.

“Now,” he said, in his boyish voice, “what did you want me to tell you about School? I’m not a sap at books, and I don’t spend all my time in getting up my muscles. I’m just an ordinary kind of fellow.... I say, how pretty your nails are!”

He took up one of Mrs. Mussard’s exquisitely manicured hands, and, holding it to the tempered sunlight that stole through the lace blinds, noted with appreciative, if infantile, interest the pearly hues and rosy inward radiances, the nicks and dimples of the wrist and the delicate articulations of the fingers. Then, with a droll, half-mischievous twinkle of the tourmaline eye that was next the fair widow, he bent his sleek, fair head and rubbed his cheek against the pretty hand caressingly.

“Silly boy!” breathed Mrs. Mussard.

“I believe I am an awful ass sometimes,” agreed Valcourt composedly.

“Who says so?”

“My tutor and heaps of other fellows, and the Head—not that he says so, but he looks as if he thought it!” said Valcourt.

“Does the Head see a great deal of you?” asked Mrs. Mussard, drawing away her hand and grasping at a chance of improving the languishing conversation. Then as Valcourt, with a grave air of reserve, nodded in reply, “I am _so glad_!” breathed Mrs. Mussard gushingly; “because, at your age, impressions received must sink in deeply. And to be brought in contact with a personality so marked must be impressive, mustn’t it?” she concluded, rather lamely.

“I suppose so,” agreed Valcourt, examining the pattern of the carpet. He looked a little sulky and a little bored, and for sheer womanly desire of seeing the illuminations rekindled Mrs. Mussard gave him her hand again.

“You are going into the Guards, aren’t you, by-and-by?” she queried.

“If I can get through,” said Valcourt, playing with her rings and smiling. “I’m in the Army Class, mathematics and swot generally. But I think our family’s too old or something to produce brainy fellows. Cads are cleverer, really, than we are.”

His tone took a reflection of the purple, his finely-cut profile looked for an instant hard as diamond and exquisite as a cameo.

Mrs. Mussard, sympathizing, said to herself: “After all, why _should_ he be clever?”

“Still, when one hasn’t much money,” she began, reminiscent of the Duchess’s entreaty.

“We’re beastly poor, of course,” admitted Valcourt. “But as to clothes and horses and shootin’, tradespeople will tick a fellow till the cows come home, and the millionaire manufacturers who buy or rent fellows’ forests and moors and rivers and things are always glad to get the fellow himself to show with ’em; and the keepers and gillies and chaps take care that he gets the best that’s going generally. And so he does himself pretty well all round.”

“That sort of thing is too—undignified!” said Mrs. Mussard, “and too uncertain. A man of rank and title must have a solid backing, a definite _entourage_. You must marry, and marry well.”

“Mother always talks like that!” said Valcourt. “I think,” he added, “she has somebody in her eye for me!”

“Who is she?” asked Mrs. Mussard sharply.

“I’m not quite sure,” said Valcourt, his tourmaline eyes narrowing as he smiled his angelic smile. “Dutch Jewess, perhaps,” he added simply, “with barrels of bullion and a family all nose.”

“Horrible!” cried Mrs. Mussard, shuddering.

“Her brother’s in the Fifth,” let out Valcourt. “We call him ‘Hooky Holland.’ Their father was secretary to the Klaproths and made heaps of cash—‘cath’ Hooky calls it. He never talks about anything but ‘cath,’ and fellows punch him for it.” Valcourt doubled his right hand scientifically, thumb well down, and glanced at it with modest appreciation ere he resumed: “He has lots of it, too, Hooky, and lends at interest—pretty thick interest—to fellows who get broke at Bridge or baccarat!”

“Oh-h! You don’t play baccarat at school, surely! Such an awfully gambling game!” expostulated Valcourt’s hostess.

“We go to school to be educated, you see,” said Valcourt, in a slightly argumentative tone, “for what Buntham calls ‘the business of life,’ and cards are part of a fellow’s life, aren’t they? So they ought, instead of being forbidden, to form part of what Old Cads calls the curriculum. We call Buntham ‘Cads’ because he calls us cads when we do anything that upsets him. He’s a nervous beggar, and gets a good deal of upsetting. My dame says he weighs himself at the end of every term, and makes a note of the pounds he’s lost since the beginning. When I go to Sandhurst she thinks he’ll pick up a bit,” explained Valcourt with his angelic grin.

“I hope your dame is a nice, motherly old person!” breathed Mrs. Mussard.

“She’s nice—quite,” said Valcourt, “and awfully obliging. I don’t know about being old—unless you’d call thirty-three old.” Mrs. Mussard started slightly. “When I have a cold she makes me jellies and things. Awfully good things! And I give her concert tickets, and sometimes we go on the river and have strawberries and cream. Lots of our fellows tell her their love affairs.”

“Do you?”

“And some of ’em are in love with her,” went on Valcourt.

Mrs. Mussard breathed quickly. Never before had she realized what perils environ the young of the opposite sex, even with the chaste environment of school bounds. In her agitation she laid her hand on Valcourt’s shoulder. “I hope—you do not fancy yourself in love with her,” she uttered anxiously.

“Not much catch!” said Valcourt, with the composure of forty. “I got over that in my second year.”

“Silly boy!” Mrs. Mussard very gently smoothed down a lock at the back of his head, which erected itself in silky defiance above its fellows. “When love comes to you, Valcourt,” she went on, with a vivid recollection of the utterances of the inspired authoress of _The Bride’s Babble Book_, “you will find out what it _really_ means. It is a great mystery, my dear boy, a sacred and solemn unveiling of the heart——”

She stopped, for Valcourt had turned his face up toward hers, gently smiling, and revealing two neat rows of milky white teeth. His tourmaline eyes had an odd expression.

“Did you speak, dear?” his fair Gamaliel asked. For the impression upon her was that he had uttered two words, and that they were, “Hooky’s sister!”

But Valcourt shook his head. “I was only thinking. A fellow like me ... has got to take what comes ... the best he can get ... and the better it is, so much the better for him, don’t you see? If he don’t like what he gets, he doesn’t go about grousing. He generally pretends he’s suited; and _she_ pretends; and they get into a groove—or they get into the newspapers,” said Geraldine’s unworldly babe. “Beastly bad form to get into the newspapers. I never mean to.”

Mrs. Mussard listened breathlessly.

“I shall have a rattling time,” said Valcourt, in his soft, cooing voice, “till Hooky’s sister grows up, and mother presents her, and then I shall marry her, I suppose.”

“Dearest boy, I hope not!” exclaimed Mrs. Mussard. “Someone more suitable _must_ be found,” she continued, rapidly putting all the moneyed girls of her acquaintance through a mental review. “Why should you not marry beauty and birth as well as a banking account? The three things are sometimes associated.”

“German princes pick up girls of that kind,” said Valcourt, his elbows upon his knees, and his round young chin cupped in his hands, “and Austrian archdukes. But why need it be a girl?” he went on, pressing up the smooth young skin at his temples with his finger-tips, so as to produce the effect of premature crows’-feet. “I don’t like girls—all red wrists and flat waists. Why shouldn’t it be a woman, say a dozen years older—an awfully pretty woman, rich, and in the best set, who’d show me the ropes? I’m a jolly ass in some things. I shall come no end of croppers when I go into society, unless there’s somebody to give me the needful tip.”

Mrs. Mussard sat very upright. She looked at Valcourt; the hand with which she had smoothed his hair remained suspended in mid-air until she recollected it and laid it over its companion in her lap.

“Most young fellows beginning life go to other men’s wives for advice,” said Valcourt. “Why shouldn’t I go to my own?”

Mrs. Mussard’s chiseled scarlet lips moved as though she had echoed, “Why not?”

“They—the chaps I’m talking of—are wild about ’em—the other men’s wives. Yet nearly all of the women are old enough to be their mothers.”

“Their grandmothers, sometimes,” said Mrs. Mussard unkindly.

“Then why shouldn’t I marry a woman who’s only old enough to be my aunt—a young aunt! I’d make a Marchioness of her, don’t you know! and she’d make—she could make anything she liked of me!” said Valcourt, turning his cherub smile and tourmaline eyes suddenly on Mrs. Mussard. “_You_ could!” The lovely widow started violently, and flushed from the string of pearls encircling her pretty throat to the little gold hair-waves that crisped at her blue-veined temples. “You _know_ you could!” murmured Valcourt. The strong young arm in the well-cut sleeve intercepted the retreating movement that would have placed the lovely widow in the uttermost corner of the sofa. The remonstrance upon Vivienne’s lips was stifled by a kiss, given with eloquence and decision, though the lips that administered it were soft, and unshaded by even the rudiments of a mustache. “I’m seventeen the end of this term, and five feet nine in my socks,” said Valcourt, a little breathlessly, for the kiss had not been one-sided; “and—and you’re simply awfully pretty. Marry me—I shall be of age before you know it—and——”

“You dreadfully presuming boy!” There were tears in the lovely eyes of the late Mr. Mussard’s lovely widow; an unwonted throbbing in the region of her bodice imparted a tremor to her voice that added to its charm. “I shall write to your mother!”

“Do!” said Valcourt, with his angelic smile. “She’ll be awfully pleased! I wonder the idea didn’t occur to her instead of to me, for she’s awfully clever, and I’m rather an ass.... Five o’clock!” he exclaimed, as the delicate chime of a Pompadour clock upon the mantelshelf announced the hour.

“And you have missed the _matinée_!” said Mrs. Mussard.

“I preferred this!” said Valcourt, getting up. She had no idea of his being taller than herself until she found the tourmaline eyes looking down into hers. “Good-bye, and thank you, Mrs. Mussard,” said the boyish, ringing voice. “I’ve had an awfully pleasant day.”

Their hands met and lingered.

“Don’t call me Mrs. Mussard any more; my—my name is Vivienne,” she said in a half-whisper.

“Jolly! Hooky’s sister’s is Bethsaba,” said Valcourt. He made a quaint grimace, as though the word tasted nasty, and Vivienne gave a little, musical, contented laugh. “And I may come again, mayn’t I?”

“This week,” nodded Mrs. Mussard.

“I’ll say it’s my tooth,” explained Geraldine’s guileless offspring.

He reached the door, the handle turned, when Mrs. Mussard beckoned, and Valcourt came back.

“I should like to ask you,” she began hesitatingly—“not that it matters to me; but _still_, in your _own interests_—— And you know your mother is my dearest friend!” ... Valcourt stood with the beautiful grin upon his face, and Mrs. Mussard found the thing more difficult to say than she had imagined. “Where did you—who taught you to make love like—like that?—at your—at your age.... I—it is——” Valcourt made no reply in words, but the expression upon his face became more celestial than before. “I hope kissing is not a feature of the curriculum. But, understand clearly,” said Mrs. Mussard, with that unusual tremor in her charming voice, “that you are not for the future to kiss anybody but me!” And as the door closed on Valcourt’s heavenly grin and tourmaline eyes, she sat down to write a letter to Geraldine.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE FAIREST

If not absolutely a nincompoop, Gerald Delaurier Gandelish, Esq., of Swellingham Mansions, Piccadilly, Undertherose Cottage, Sunningwater, Berks, and Horshundam Abbey, Miltshire, was undoubtedly a type of the _genus homo_ recently classified by a distinguished K.C. as soft-minded gentlemen. Strictly educated by a private clerical tutor under the eye of pious parents of limited worldly experience and unlimited prejudices, it was not to be expected that Gerry, upon their dying and leaving him in undisputed command of a handsome slice of the golden cheese of worldly wealth, should not immediately proceed to make ducks and drakes of it. He essayed to win a name upon the Turf; and when I remind you that, at a huge price, the youth became possessor of that remarkable Derby race-horse, Duffer, by Staggers out of Hansom Cab, from whom eighteen opponents cantered away in the Prince’s year of ’90, leaving the animal to finish the race at three lengths from the starting-post, I have said all. Gerry dabbled “considerable,” as our American relatives would say, in stocks, and started a _café chantant_ on the open-air Parisian plan, which was frequented only by stray cats and London blacks, and has since been roofed in and turned into tea-rooms. Sundry other investments of Gerry’s resulted in the enrichment of several very shady persons, and a consequent, and very considerable, diminution in the large stock of ready money with which Gerry had started his career. But though the edges of the slice of golden cheese had been a good deal nibbled, the bulk of it remained, and Gerry’s Miltshire acres, strictly entailed and worth eighty thousand pounds, with another twenty thousand in Consols, and about half as much again snugly invested in Home Rails, made him a catch worth angling for in the eyes of many mothers.

We have termed Gerry “soft-minded.” He was also soft-hearted, soft-eyed, soft-voiced, soft-haired, soft-skinned, and soft-mannered—the kind of youth women who own to years of discretion like to pet and bully, the kind of man schoolgirls call a “duck.” True, his neckties aroused indignation in the breasts of intolerant elderly gentlemen, the patterns of his tweeds afforded exquisite amusement to members of the Household Brigade, and his jewelry could not be gazed at without winking by the unseasoned eye; but, despite these drawbacks, Gerry was a gentleman. Without the stamp of a public school or a select club, without the tone of the best society—for, with the exception of a turfy baronet or so and a couple of sporting peers, Gerry knew nobody who was anybody—Gerry was decidedly a gentleman, whose progress to the dogs was arrested, luckily for the young prodigal, when he fell in love with the famous burlesque actress, Miss Lottie Speranza, of the Levity Theater.

Of theaters and theatrical people Gerry may be said to have known little or nothing until the enchanting Lottie blazed upon his field of vision. Gerry’s worthy parents, strict moralists both, had considered the theater as the temple of Satan, and had exacted from their only child a solemn promise that he would never enter one. This promise Gerry had actually kept, contenting himself with the entertainments offered by the music halls, which his father had omitted to stigmatize and his mother knew not of. But at the close of a festive dinner, given by Gerry to a select party of “pals,” in a private room at the Levity Restaurant, when a brief, lethargic slumber obscured the senses of the youthful host, the brilliant idea of conveying him to a box in the theater upstairs occurred to one of his guests, and was forthwith carried out. Emerging from a condition of coma, Gerry found himself staring into a web of crossing and intersecting limelights of varying hues, in which a dazzling human butterfly, entangled, was beating quivering wings. The butterfly had lustrous eyes, encircled with blue rims, a complexion of theatrical red and white, and masses of golden hair. Her twinkling feet beat out a measure to which Gerry’s pulses began to dance madly. He sent the goddess an invitation to supper, which was promptly declined. He forwarded a stack of roses, which were not acknowledged, and a muff-chain, turquoise and peridot, which were returned to the address upon his card. He felt hurt but happy at these rebuffs, which proved to him that Miss Speranza was above reproach; and when a bosom friend of his own age hinted that the prudish fair one was playing the big game, and advised him to try her with a motor-car, Gerry promptly converted the bosom friend into a stranger by the simple process of asking him to redeem a few of his I O U’s. This got about, and caused Gerry’s other friends to turn sharp round corners, or jump into hansoms when they saw Gerry coming. Gerry hardly missed them, though the man who could have afforded an introduction to his charmer would have been welcomed with open arms. He occupied the same box at the Levity nightly now, and made up, in its murkiest corner, a good deal of the nightly rest of which his clamant passion deprived him. But he awakened, as by instinct, whenever Miss Speranza tripped upon the stage; and the large-eyed, vacuous, gorgeously-attired beauties who “went on” with the Chorus—the Lotties, Maries, Daisies, Topsies of the noble houses of Montague, Talbot, De Crespigny, and Delamere,—would languidly nudge each other at the passionately prolonged plaudits of a particular pair of immaculate white gloves, and wonder semi-audibly what the man saw in Speranza, dear, to make such a bloomin’ silly fuss about?

Gerry had occupied his watch-tower at the Levity for six weeks or so, and was beginning to deteriorate in appetite and complexion (so powerful are the effects of passion unreturned), when Undertherose Cottage at Sunningwater, a charming Thames-side residence of the bijou kind, with small grounds and a capacious cellar, a boat-house, and a house-boat, a pigeon-cote and a private post-box, became suddenly vacant. The tenant, a lady of many charms and much experience, who had passed over to Gerry with the property, returned to her native Paris to open a bonnet-shop; and Gerry, as he wandered over the dwelling with the sanitary engineer and decorator, who had _carte blanche_ to do-up the place, found himself strolling on the tiny lawn (in imagination) by the visioned side of the enchantress who had enthralled him, supping (also in imagination) with the same divine creature in the duodecimo oak dining-room, and smoking a cigarette in her delightful company upon the balcony of the boudoir. Waking from these dreams was a piquant anguish. Gerry indeed possessed the cage, one of the most ideal nests for a honeymooning pair imaginable; but in vain for the airy feminine songster might the infatuated fowler spread nets and set springs.

“If we didn’t live in this confoundedly proper twentieth century,” thought disconsolate Gerry, “a chappie might hire a coach and eight, bribe a few bruisers to repress attempts at rescue, snap her up respectfully as she came out at the stage door, and absquatulate—no! abduct’s the word. Not that I’d behave like a brute; I’d marry her to-morrow if she’d only give me a chance to ask her. Marquises do that sort of thing, and their families come round a bit and bless the young people. She must have shown the door to dozens of ’em.” He sighed, for where the possessor of a ripe old peerage had failed, how could Gerald Gandelish, Esq., hope to triumph? “And she’s so awfully proper and standoffish, too,” he reflected. He wondered how many years it had taken those privileged persons whom the lady permitted to rank as her friends to attain that enviable distinction. “I’ve never met a man who could, or would, introduce me,” he added, pulling his mustache, which from happily turning up at the corners had recently acquired a decided tendency to droop. “Seemed to shy at it, somehow; and so I shall take the initi—what-you-call—myself. She shall know from the start that my intentions are honorable, and, hang it! the name’s a good one.... There’s been a Gandelish of Horshundam ever since Henry the Eighth hanged the abbot and turned out the monks, and put my ancestor Gorbred in to keep the place warm. Gorbred was His Majesty’s principal purveyor of sack and sugar, ‘and divers dainty cates beside,’ as the Chronicle has it, and must have given the Tudor unlimited tick, I gather. Anyhow, if four centuries of landlording don’t make a tradesman a gentleman, they ought to; and I can’t see——”

Gerry climbed into his “Runhard” thirty horse-power roadster, pulled down the talc mask of his driving cap to preserve his eyes and complexion, and ran back to town. That night, as he quitted his box at the conclusion of the Levity performance (you will remember the phenomenal run of _The Idiot Girl_ in 19—!), he turned up his coat collar with the air of a man resolved to do or die, and boldly plunged into the little entry leading to the stage door. The bemedaled military guardian of those rigid portals, who had absorbed several of Gerry’s sovereigns without winking, regarded him with a glazed eye and a stiff upper lip.

“Would you kindly——” began Gerry.

But the stage-doorkeeper paid no heed, busily engaged as he was in delivering letters from a rack on the wall, lettered S, into the hands of a slight little woman in a rather shabby tweed ulster and plain felt hat. Gerry’s heart jumped as he recognized his own handwriting upon one of the envelopes.... Surely the tiny tin gods had favored him! The little woman in the ulster and the plain felt hat must be lady’s maid to the brilliant Speranza. As she thrust the letters into her pockets, nodded familiarly to the commissionaire, and came out of the stage-door office, Gerry, his heart in his mouth and his hat in his hand, stood in her way.

“Miss—Madam——” he began. “If I might ask you——”

“What’s that?” shouted the commissionaire. As the little woman stepped quickly backwards, Cerberus emerged, purple and growling, from his den and reared his huge body as a barrier before her. “Annoying the lady, are ye?” he roared, with a fine forgetfulness of Gerry’s sovereigns. “Wait till I knock your mouth round to the back of your head, you kid-gloved young blaggyard, you! Wait till——”

“Be quiet, O’Murphy!” said the little woman in a tone and with an accent which raised her to the level of lady’s companion in Gerry’s estimation. And as the crestfallen O’Murphy retreated into his den, she said, turning a plain little clever face, irradiated by a pair of brilliant eyes, upon the crimson Gerry, “Did you wish to speak to me?”

“I certainly do, if you are any relative—or a member of the household—of Miss Speranza,” Gerry stuttered.

There was a flash of eyes and teeth in the plain, insignificant face.

“Oh, yes,” said the little woman, “I live with Miss Speranza.”

Gerry’s tongue grew large, impeding utterance, and his palate dried up. Of all creatures upon earth this little tweed-ulstered woman, in the well-worn felt hat with the fatigued feather, seemed to him the most to be envied.

“You—you’re lucky,” he said lamely, and blushed up to the roots of his hair, and down to the tips of his toes.

“I’ve known her ever since she knew herself,” said the little companion. “We were girls together.” Gerry could have laughed in her middle-aged face, but he only handed her his card. “Oh yes,” she said after she had glanced at it. “I seem to know the name. You have written to her, haven’t you?”

“Sev-several times,” acquiesced Gerry hoarsely. “I have ta-taken the privilege.”

“A great many other young gentlemen have taken it too,” observed Miss Speranza’s companion.

Then, as the swing doors behind her opened to let out a blast of hot air and several grimy stage carpenters, and the swing doors before her parted to let in a blast of cold air as the men shouldered out, “Excuse me,” she said, and shivered, and moved as though to pass. “It is very cold here, and the brougham is waiting.”

“Beggin’ pardon!” said O’Murphy, looking out of his hole, “the groom sent his jooty, an’ the pole av a ’bus had gone clane through the back panel av the broom in a block off the Sthrand.... The horse kicked wan av his four shoes off, an’ they’ve gone back wid themselves to the stables to get the landau an’ pair——”

“Call a hansom,” said the plain little woman. “I—we can’t wait here all night!”

As O’Murphy saluted and went outside, she stepped into his vacant hutch, and Gerry daringly followed.

“If I might venture to offer,” he began. “My cab—place disposal—Miss Speranza—too much honored——” He trailed off into a morass of polite intentions, rudimentarily expressed. The little companion maintained a preoccupied air; she was probably expecting her mistress, Gerry thought, but the conviction was no sooner formed than banished.

“You are very kind,” she said, “but Miss Speranza cannot avail herself of your offer. She sometimes leaves quite early, and by the private door, and, as it happens, I am going home alone.”

“Oh!” cried Gerry earnestly, “if you knew how awfully I want to speak to you, you would let me drive you there—wherever it is!”

Tears stood in the soft eyes of the somewhat soft-headed young man, and the heart of the little lady in the ulster was softened, for she looked upon him with a smile, saying:

“Here comes O’Murphy to say my hansom is waiting.... You may drive with me part of the way, and say what you have to say, if it is so very important,” she said, with a brilliant gleam of mockery in her remarkable eyes.

Need one say that the enamored Gerry jumped at the proposal, and they went out into the plashy night together.

“Give the driver the address, O’Murphy,” ordered the little ulstered woman. “Jump in!” she said to Gerry, and, presto! they were rattling together up a stony thoroughfare leading from the roaring midnight Strand, which in the present year of grace presents a smooth face of macadam.

“Will you have the glass down?” said Gerry.

“Too warm!” cried the little ulstered woman. “Now, what have you to say?”

“How this trap rattles!” shouted Gerry. “One can hardly hear oneself speak. But with regard to Miss Speranza——”

“I suppose the pith of the matter is—you are in love with her?” shrieked the little woman.

“Madly!” bellowed Gerry. “Been so for weeks. Hold up, you brute!” This to the cab-horse, a dilapidated equine wreck, which had stumbled.

“Oh, you boys! You’re all alike!” cried his companion.

“Mine is a man’s love,” roared Gerry. “I would lay the world at her feet, if I had it; and I want you to tell her so.” The rattling of the crazy cab nearly drowned his accents. “Oh! what do you think she will say?” he bellowed, his lips close to the little woman’s ear.

“She would say—Oh! _do_ you think this man is sober?” screamed the little woman. “I mean the driver,” she added, meeting Gerry’s indignant glare.

“I don’t think he is too drunk to drive,” yelled Gerry. “Tell me, if you have a heart,” he howled, “have I any chance _with her_?”

“Ah! we’re off the cobblestones now!” said his companion, leaning back with an air of relief.

“And you can answer my question,” pressed Gerry. “I—I needn’t explain my views are honorable—straight as a fellow’s can be. Love like mine is——”

“So dreadfully greasy!” commented his companion anxiously, as the debilitated steed recovered himself with difficulty at the end of a long slide.

“When I have been sitting, night after night, in that box looking at her, thinking of her, worshiping her, by George!” went on Gerry, “she must have sometimes noticed me, and said to herself——”

“I _knew_ he would go down!” cried the little woman, clutching Gerry’s arm, as the steed disappeared and the shaft-ends bumped on the asphalt. “Let’s get out!”

“Don’t be alarmed, lydy,” said a hoarse voice, through the trap overhead, as the panting steed heaved and struggled to regain his hoofs. “’E won’t do it agen this journey. One fall is ’is allowance, an’ ’e never goes beyond.”

“And we’re quite close to Pelgrave Square,” said Gerry.

“How do you know Miss Speranza lives in Pelgrave Square?” said his companion with a keen look.

“Because I’ve seen photogravings of her house in an illustrated interview,” replied Gerry.

“Ah, of course,” said the little lady, with a thoughtful smile. The steed, bearing out his driver’s recommendation, was now jogging along reassuringly enough. “And did the portraits remind you of no one?” she added, with another of those flashing smiles that invested her little fatigued features with transient youth.

“They weren’t half beautiful enough for her,” said Gerry fervently. Then a ray of light broke upon him, and he jumped. “You—you’re a little bit like her!” he exclaimed. “What a blind duffer I am! I’ve been taking you for her companion, and all the while you’re a relative.”

“Yes, I am a relative,” nodded the little lady.

“Her aunt!” hazarded Gerry.

“Her mother!” said the little lady, with a dazzling flash of eyes and teeth. “How stupid you were not to guess it before!”

“I’ve said nothing, madam, that I should not, I trust,” remarked Gerry, with quite a seventeenth-century manner. “And, therefore, when I entreat you to allow me an interview with your daughter, I trust you will not refuse to grant my—my prayer.”

“Hear the boy!” cried the little woman, with a trill of laughter, as the cab pulled up before a large lighted house in a large darkish square. “Well,” she added, “I think I can promise you that Lottie will see you at least for a minute or two to-morrow. Not here—at the theater, seven o’clock sharp. Lend me a pencil and one of your cards.” She scribbled a word or two on the bit of pasteboard, paid the cab in spite of Gerry’s protestations, and ran lightly up the solemn doorsteps, turned to the enraptured young man standing, hat in hand, below, waved her hand, plunged a Yale key into the keyhole—and instantly vanished from view.

Behind Gerry’s shirt-front throbbed tumultuous delight. To have driven in a cab with _her_ mother—talked of _her_, told his tale of love—albeit with interruptions—and won the promise of an interview at seven sharp upon the morrow.... Unprecedented fortune! incomparable luck! Did Time itself cease he would not fail to keep the tryst with punctuality. He caught a passing cab, drove home to his Piccadilly chambers, and went to bed so blissfully happy that he spent a wretchedly bad night. The card he kept beneath his pillow; and true to the promise made by the mother of the enchantress of his soul—when, punctually to the stroke of seven, Gerry, dressed with the most excruciating care, and clammy with repressed emotion, presented himself at the stage door of the Levity—the scrawled hieroglyphics on the blessed piece of pasteboard admitted him behind the scenes. Led by a smartly-aproned maid, he climbed stairs, he crossed the stage, was jostled by baize-aproned men in paper caps, and begged their pardon. He followed his guide down a short passage, fell up three steps—and knocked with his burning brow against the door—her door! A voice he knew said, “Come in!” and in he went, to find, not the adored, the worshiped Lottie, but the little plainish lady of the previous night, sitting at a lace-veiled dressing-table, attired in a Japanese gown.

“Oh, I say!” murmured Gerry.

“Ah! there you are!” The little lady looked at him over her shoulder, and nodded kindly. “Don’t be too disappointed at not finding Lottie here,” she said cheerfully; “she won’t be long.”

“I’m so awfully obliged for all your kindness,” said Gerry, sheepishly smiling over a giant bouquet.

“You shall be really grateful to me one of these days, I promise you,” said the little lady. “Let my maid take that haysta—that bouquet, and sit down, do!”

Gerry took the indicated chair beside the dressing-table, and noted, as he sucked the top of his stick, how pitilessly the relentless radiance of the electric light accentuated the worn lines of the little lady’s face and the gray streaks in her still soft and pretty brown hair.

“Cheer up!” she said, turning one of her flashing smiles upon him as he sadly sucked his stick. “You won’t have long to wait for Lottie!”

“No!” said Gerry rather vacuously.

“No!” said Lottie’s mother, pulling off some very handsome rings and hanging them upon the horns of a coral lobster that adorned the dressing-table. “She takes about twenty minutes to make up.” Her pretty, white, carefully-manicured fingers busied themselves, as she talked, with various little pots and bottles and rolls of a mysterious substance of a pinky hue, not unlike the peppermint suck-stick of Gerry’s youth. “And are you as much in love with her to-day,” she continued, “as you were last night?”

“So much in love,” said Gerry, uncorking himself, “that to call her my wife I would sacrifice everything.”

“To _call_ her your wife?” The little lady pushed her hair back from her face, twisted it tightly up behind, and pinned it flat with a relentless hairpin.

“To make her my wife,” Gerry amended, with a healthy blush.