Chapter VIII: Front Matter (8)

For at the moment when Monte Polverino’s scorn of the lovely plebeian he has wedded is expressed in words—when Aquella, pierced to the heart by being called “a low-born vulgarian” and a “peasant huckster,” is about to utter her famous yell of frenzied laughter, the Old Stage-Doorers and the New Stage-Doorers hung out their boots. A _chevaux de frise_ of walking-sticks, from each of which depended a pair of these indispensable articles of attire, graced the gallery, distinguished the upper circle, and appeared upon the level of the pit. Stricken to the soul, faltering and ghastly under his paint, and shaking in the most sumptuous pair of patent leathers, white kid topped, in which he had yet appeared, De Boo blankly contemplated the horrid spectacle; while Mrs. Gudrun, to whose somewhat latent sense of humor the spectacle appealed, burst into peal upon peal of the wildest laughter ever heard beyond the walls of an establishment for the care of the mentally afflicted. “The grandeur, poignancy, and reality of the acting,” wrote Cluffer, of the _Morning Whooper_, “was acknowledged by a crowded house with a deafening and unanimous outburst of applause.”

“Both Mrs. Gudrun and Mr. De Boo attained the highest level of dramatic expression,” pronounced Mullekens, of the _Daily Tomahawk_. “It was the touch of Nature which attunes the universe to one throb of universal relationship.”

The play was a success. Even the “Boo’s!” of both the clubs, united for the nonce in disapprobation, could not rob Leo of his laurels. He wears them to-day, for _Pride of Race_ has enjoyed a tremendous run.

“We’ve made the beggar’s reputation instead of sending him back to the boot-shop and that poor girl,” said Ulick Snowle to Tom Glauber next day.

“Possibly,” said Tom Glauber, sniffing at his inseparable carnation. “But it’s all the better for the girl, I imagine, in the long run.”

A SPIRIT ELOPEMENT

When I exchanged my maiden name for better or worse, and dearest Vavasour and I, at the conclusion of the speeches—I was married in a traveling-dress of Bluefern’s—descended the steps of mamma’s house in Ebury Street—the Belgravian, _not_ the Pimlican end—and, amid a hurricane of farewells and a hailstorm of pink and yellow and white _confetti_, stepped into the brougham that was to convey us to a Waterloo Station, _en route_ for Southampton—our honeymoon was to be spent in Guernsey—we were perfectly well satisfied with ourselves and each other. This state of mind is not uncommon at the outset of wedded life. You may have heard the horrid story of the newly-wedded cannibal chief, who remarked that he had never yet known a young bride to disagree with her husband in the early stages of the honeymoon. I believe if dearest Vavasour had seriously proposed to chop me into _cotêlettes_ and eat me, with or without sauce, I should have taken it for granted that the powers that be had destined me to the high end of supplying one of the noblest of created beings with an _entrée_ dish.

We were idiotically blissful for two or three days. It was flowery April, and Guernsey was looking her loveliest. No horrid hotel or boarding-house sheltered our lawful endearments. Some old friends of papa’s had lent us an ancient mansion standing in a wild garden, now one pink riot of almond-blossom, screened behind lofty walls of lichened red brick and weather-worn, wrought-iron gates, painted yellow-white like all the other iron and wood work about the house.

“Mon Désir” the place was called, and the fragrance of potpourri yet hung about the old paneled salons. Vavasour wrote a sonnet—I have omitted to speak before of my husband’s poetic gifts—all about the breath of new Passion stirring the fragrant dust of dead old Love, and the kisses of lips long moldered that mingled with ours. It was a lovely sonnet, but crawly, as the poetical compositions of the Modern School are apt to be. And Vavasour was an enthusiastic convert to, and follower of, the Modern School. He had often told me that, had not his father heartlessly thrown him into his brewery business at the outset of his career—Sim’s Mild and Bitter Ales being the foundation upon which the family fortunes were originally reared—he, Vavasour, would have been, ere the time of speaking, known to Fame, not only as a Minor Poet, but a Minor Decadent Poet—which trisyllabic addition, I believe, makes as advantageous a difference as the word “native” when attached to an oyster, or the guarantee “new laid” when employed with reference to an egg.

Dear Vavasour’s temperament and tastes having a decided bias towards the gloomy and mystic, he had, before his great discovery of his latent poetical gifts, and in the intervals of freedom from the brain-carking and soul-stultifying cares of business, made several excursions into the regions of the Unknown. He had had some sort of intercourse with the Swedenborgians, and had mingled with the Muggletonians; he had coquetted with the Christian Scientists, and had been, until Theosophic Buddhism opened a wider field to his researches, an enthusiastic Spiritualist. But our engagement somewhat cooled his passion for psychic research, and when questioned by me with regard to table-rappings, manifestations, and materializations, I could not but be conscious of a reticence in his manner of responding to my innocent desire for information. The reflection that he probably, like Canning’s knife-grinder, had no story to tell, soon induced me to abandon the subject. I myself am somewhat reserved at this day in my method of dealing with the subject of spooks. But my silence does not proceed from ignorance.

Knowledge came to me after this fashion. Though the April sun shone bright and warm upon Guernsey, the island nights were chill. Waking by dear Vavasour’s side—the novelty of this experience has since been blunted by the usage of years—somewhere between one and two o’clock towards break of the fourth day following our marriage, it occurred to me that a faint cold draft, with a suggestion of dampness about it, was blowing against my right cheek. One of the windows upon that side—our room possessed a rather unbecoming cross-light—had probably been left open. Dear Vavasour, who occupied the right side of our couch, would wake with toothache in the morning, or, perhaps, with mumps! Shuddering, as much at the latter idea as with cold, I opened my eyes, and sat up in bed with a definite intention of getting out of it and shutting the offending casement. Then I saw Katie for the first time.

She was sitting on the right side of the bed, close to dear Vavasour’s pillow; in fact, almost hanging over it. From the first moment I knew that which I looked upon to be no creature of flesh and blood, but the mere apparition of a woman. It was not only that her face, which struck me as both pert and plain; her hands; her hair, which she wore dressed in an old-fashioned ringletty mode—in fact, her whole personality was faintly luminous, and surrounded by a halo of bluish phosphorescent light. It was not only that she was transparent, so that I saw the pattern of the old-fashioned, striped, dimity bed-curtain, in the shelter of which she sat, quite plainly through her. The consciousness was further conveyed to me by a voice—or the toneless, flat, faded impression of a voice—speaking faintly and clearly, not at my outer, but at my inner ear.

“Lie down again, and don’t fuss. It’s only Katie!” she said.

“Only Katie!” I liked that!

“I dare say you don’t,” she said tartly, replying as she had spoken, and I wondered that a ghost should exhibit such want of breeding. “But you have got to put up with me!”

“How dare you intrude here—and at such an hour!” I exclaimed mentally, for there was no need to wake dear Vavasour by talking aloud when my thoughts were read at sight by the ghostly creature who sat so familiarly beside him.

“I knew your husband before you did,” responded Katie, with a faint phosphorescent sneer. “We became acquainted at a _séance_ in North-West London soon after his conversion to Spiritualism, and have seen a great deal of each other from time to time.” She tossed her shadowy curls with a possessive air that annoyed me horribly. “He was constantly materializing me in order to ask questions about Shakespeare. It is a standing joke in our Spirit world that, from the best educated spook in our society down to the most illiterate astral that ever knocked out ‘rapport’ with one ‘p,’ we are all expected to know whether Shakespeare wrote his own plays, or whether they were done by another person of the same name.”

“And which way was it?” I asked, yielding to a momentary twinge of curiosity.

Katie laughed mockingly. “There you go!” she said, with silent contempt.

“I wish _you_ would!” I snapped back mentally. “It seems to me that you manifest a great lack of refinement in coming here!”

“I cannot go until Vavasour has finished,” said Katie pertly. “Don’t you see that he has materialized me by dreaming about me? And as there exists _at present_”—she placed an annoying stress upon the last two words—“a strong sympathy between you, so it comes about that I, as your husband’s spiritual affinity, am visible to your waking perceptions. All the rest of the time I am hovering about you, though unseen.”

“I call it detestable!” I retorted indignantly. Then I gripped my sleeping husband by the shoulder. “Wake up! wake up!” I cried aloud, wrath lending power to my grasp and a penetrative quality to my voice. “Wake up and leave off dreaming! I cannot and will not endure the presence of this creature another moment!”

“_Whaa_——” muttered my husband, with the almost inebriate incoherency of slumber, “_whasamaramydarling?_”

“Stop dreaming about that creature,” I cried, “or I shall go home to Mamma!”

“Creature?” my husband echoed, and as he sat up I had the satisfaction of seeing Katie’s misty, luminous form fade slowly into nothingness.

“You know who I mean!” I sobbed. “Katie—your spiritual affinity, as she calls herself!”

“You don’t mean,” shouted Vavasour, now thoroughly roused, “that you have seen _her_?”

“I do mean it,” I mourned. “Oh, if I had only known of your having an entanglement with any creature of the kind, I would never have married you—never!”

“Hang her!” burst out Vavasour. Then he controlled himself, and said soothingly: “After all, dearest, there is nothing to be jealous of——”

“I jealous! And of that——” I was beginning, but Vavasour went on:

“After all, she is only a disembodied astral entity with whom I became acquainted—through my fifth principle, which is usually well developed—in the days when I moved in Spiritualistic society. She was, when living—for she died long before I was born—a young lady of very good family. I believe her father was a clergyman ... and I will not deny that I encouraged her visits.”

“Discourage them from this day!” I said firmly. “Neither think of her nor dream of her again, or I will have a separation.”

“I will keep her, as much as possible, out of my waking thoughts,” said poor Vavasour, trying to soothe me; “but a man cannot control his dreams, and she pervades mine in a manner which, even before our engagement, my pet, I began to find annoying. However, if she really is, as she has told me, a lady by birth and breeding, she will understand”—he raised his voice as though she were there and he intended her to hear—“that I am now a married man, and from this moment desire to have no further communication with her. Any suitable provision it is in my power to make——”

He ceased, probably feeling the difficulty he would have in explaining the matter to his lawyers; and it seemed to me that a faint mocking sniggle, or rather the auricular impression of it, echoed his words. Then, after some more desultory conversation, we fell soundly asleep. An hour may have passed when the same chilly sensation as of a damp draft blowing across the bed roused me. I rubbed my cheek and opened my eyes. They met the pale, impertinent smile of the hateful Katie, who was installed in her old post beside Vavasour’s end of the bolster.

“You see,” she said, in the same soundless way, and with a knowing little nod of triumph, “it is no use. He is dreaming of me again!”

“Wake up!” I screamed, snatching the pillow from under my husband’s head and madly hurling it at the shameless intruder. This time Vavasour was almost snappish at being disturbed. Daylight surprised us in the middle of our first connubial quarrel. The following night brought a repetition of the whole thing, and so on, _da capo_, until it became plain to us, to our mutual disgust, that the more Vavasour strove to banish Katie from his dreams, the more persistently she cropped up in them. She was the most ill-bred and obstinate of astrals—Vavasour and I the most miserable of newly-married people. A dozen times in a night I would be roused by that cold draft upon my cheek, would open my eyes and see that pale, phosphorescent, outline perched by Vavasour’s pillow—nine times out of the dozen would be driven to frenzy by the possessive air and cynical smile of the spook. And although Vavasour’s former regard for her was now converted into hatred, he found the thought of her continually invading his waking mind at the most unwelcome seasons. She had begun to appear to both of us _by day as well as by night_ when our poisoned honeymoon came to an end, and we returned to town to occupy the house which Vavasour had taken and furnished in Sloane Street. I need only mention that Katie accompanied us.

Insufficient sleep and mental worry had by this time thoroughly soured my temper no less than Vavasour’s. When I charged him with secretly encouraging the presence I had learned to hate, he rudely told me to think as I liked! He implored my pardon for this brutality afterwards upon his knees, and with the passage of time I learned to endure the presence of his attendant shade with patience. When she nocturnally hovered by the side of my sleeping spouse, or in constituence no less filmy than a whiff of cigarette-smoke, appeared at his elbow in the face of day, I saw her plainly, and at these moments she would favor me with a significant contraction of the eyelid, which was, to say the least of it, unbecoming in a spirit who had been a clergyman’s daughter. After one of these experiences it was that the idea which I afterwards carried into execution occurred to me.

I began by taking in a few numbers of a psychological publication entitled _The Spirit-Lamp_. Then I formed the acquaintance of Madame Blavant, the renowned Professoress of Spiritualism and Theosophy. Everybody has heard of Madame, many people have read her works, some have heard her lecture. I had heard her lecture. She was a lady with a strong determined voice and strong determined features. She wore her plentiful gray hair piled in sibylline coils on the top of her head, and—when she lectured—appeared in a white Oriental silk robe that fell around her tall gaunt figure in imposing folds. This robe was replaced by one of black satin when she held her _séances_. At other times, in the seclusion of her study, she was draped in an ample gown of Indian chintz innocent of cut, but yet imposing. She smiled upon my new-born desire for psychic instruction, and when I had subscribed for a course of ten private _séances_ at so many guineas a piece she smiled more.

Madame lived in a furtive, retiring house, situated behind high walls in Endor’s Grove, N.W. A long glass tunnel led from the garden gate to the street door, for the convenience of Mahatmas and other persons who preferred privacy. I was one of those persons, for not for spirit worlds would I have had Vavasour know of my repeated visits to Endor’s Grove. Before these were over I had grown quite indifferent to supernatural manifestations, banjos and accordions that were thrummed by invisible performers, blood-red writing on mediums’ wrists, mysterious characters in slate-pencil, Planchette, and the Table Alphabet. And I had made and improved upon acquaintance with Simon.

Simon was a spirit who found me attractive. He tried in his way to make himself agreeable, and, with my secret motive in view—let me admit without a blush—I encouraged him. When I knew I had him thoroughly in hand, I attended no more _séances_ at Endor’s Grove. My purpose was accomplished upon a certain night, when, feeling my shoulder violently shaken, I opened the eyes which had been closed in simulated slumber to meet the indignant glare of my husband. I glanced over his shoulder. Katie did not occupy her usual place. I turned my glance towards the armchair which stood at my side of the bed. It was not vacant. As I guessed, it was occupied by Simon. There he sat, the luminously transparent appearance of a weak-chinned, mild-looking young clergyman, dressed in the obsolete costume of eighty years previously. He gave me a bow in which respect mingled with some degree of complacency, and glanced at Vavasour.

“I have been explaining matters to your husband,” he said, in that soundless spirit-voice with which Katie had first made me acquainted. “He understands that I am a clergyman and a reputable spirit, drawn into your life-orbit by the irresistible attraction which your mediumistic organization exercises over my——”

“There, you hear what he says!” I interrupted, nodding confirmatively at Vavasour. “Do let me go to sleep!”

“What, with that intrusive beast sitting beside you?” shouted Vavasour indignantly. “Never!”

“Think how many months I have put up with the presence of Katie!” said I. “After all, it’s only tit for tat!” And the ghost of a twinkle in Simon’s pale eye seemed to convey that he enjoyed the retort.

Vavasour grunted sulkily, and resumed his recumbent position. But several times that night he awakened me with renewed objurgations of Simon, who with unflinching resolution maintained his post. Later on I started from sleep to find Katie’s usual seat occupied. She looked less pert and confident than usual, I thought, and rather humbled and fagged, as though she had had some trouble in squeezing her way into Vavasour’s sleeping thoughts. By day, after that night, she seldom appeared. My husband’s brain was too much occupied with Simon, who assiduously haunted me. And it was now my turn to twit Vavasour with unreasonable jealousy. Yet though I gloried in the success of my stratagem, the continual presence of that couple of spooks was an unremitting strain upon my nerves.

But at length an extraordinary conviction dawned on my mind, and became stronger with each successive night. Between Simon and Katie an acquaintance had sprung up. I would awaken, or Vavasour would arouse, to find them gazing across the barrier of the bolster which divided them with their pale negatives of eyes, and chatting in still, spirit voices. Once I started from sleep to find myself enveloped in a kind of mosquito-tent of chilly, filmy vapor, and the conviction rushed upon me that He and She had leaned across our couch and exchanged an intangible embrace. Katie was the leading spirit in this, I feel convinced—there was no effrontery about Simon. Upon the next night I, waking, overheard a fragment of conversation between them which plainly revealed how matters stood.

“We should never have met upon the same plane,” remarked Simon silently, “but for the mediumistic intervention of these people. Of the man”—he glanced slightingly towards Vavasour—“I cannot truthfully say I think much. The lady”—he bowed in my direction—“is everything that a lady should be!”

“You are infatuated with her, it is plain!” snapped Katie, “and the sooner you are removed from her sphere of influence the better.”

“Her power with me is weakening,” said Simon, “as Vavasour’s is with you. Our outlines are no longer so clear as they used to be, which proves that our astral individualities are less strongly impressed upon the brains of our earthly sponsors than they were. We are still materialized; but how long this will continue——” He sighed and shrugged his shoulders.

“Don’t let us wait for a formal dismissal, then,” said Katie boldly. “Let us throw up our respective situations.”

“I remember enough of the Marriage Service to make our union, if not regular, at least respectable,” said Simon.

“And I know quite a fashionable place on the Outside Edge of Things, where we could settle down,” said Katie, “and live practically on nothing.”

I blinked at that moment. When I saw the room again clearly, the chairs beside our respective pillows were empty.

Years have passed, and neither Vavasour nor myself has ever had a glimpse of the spirits whom we were the means of introducing to one another. We are quite content to know ourselves deprived for ever of their company. Yet sometimes, when I look at our three babies, I wonder whether that establishment of Simon’s and Katie’s on the Outside Edge of Things includes a nursery.

THE WIDOW’S MITE

People bestowed that nickname upon little Lord Garlingham years ago, when he was the daintiest of human playthings ever adored by a young mother. Shutting my eyes, I can recall him, all golden curls and frills, sitting on the front seat of the victoria with Toto, the Maltese. Japanese pugs had not then come into fashion, nor the ubiquitous automobile. Gar is the Widow’s Mite still, but for other reasons. He was a charming, irresolute, impulsive child, who invariably meant “macaroons” when he said “sponge cake.” It recurs to me that he was passionately fond of dolls, not nigger Sambo dolls, or sailor dolls, or Punchinelli with curved caps and bells, or policemen with large feet so cunningly weighted that it is next door to impossible to knock them over, but frilled and furbelowed dollies of the gentler sex. There was a blue princess in tulle with a glass chandelier-drop tiara, and a dancing girl in pink, and a stout, shapeless, rag lady, whose features were painted on the calico ball that represented her head, and whose hair resembled the fringe of a black woollen shawl. Holding her by one leg, Gar would sink to sleep upon his lace-trimmed pillows in a halo of shining curls, and Lady Garlingham’s last new friend or latest new adorer would be brought up to the night nursery for an after-dinner peep at “my precious in his cot.”

“My precious” was equally charming in his Eton days, when his sleepy green eyes looked up at you from under a lock of fair silky hair that was never to be kept within regulation School bounds, but continually strayed upon the fair, if freckled, expanse of a brow which might have been the home of a pure and innocent mind, and probably was not. He had a pleasant treble boy’s voice and a beautiful smile, particularly when his mother told him he might smoke just one cigarette, of her own special brand, as a great treat.

“Mother’s are hay,” he said afterwards in confidence, and added that he preferred cut Cavendish, and that the best way to induce a meerschaum to color was to smoke it foul, and never to remove the dottle. But Lady Garlingham was never the wiser. She had the utmost faith in her boy.

“Gar will be a dab at Classics,” she said with pride. “Fancy his knowing that Dido was a heathen goddess, and Procrustes was a Grecian King who murdered his mother and afterwards put out his own eyes! I must really give his tutor a hint not to bring him on _too_ fast. He will have to make his own way in the world, poor dear, that is certain; but I don’t want him to turn out a literary genius with eccentric clothes, or anything in the scientific line that isn’t careful about its nails and doesn’t comb its hair.”

Garlingham’s clothes are always of the latest fashion and in the most admirable taste. His hair is as well groomed, his hands are as immaculate as any mother’s heart could desire, and he has not turned out a genius. During his career at Oxford he did not allow his love of study to interfere with the more serious pursuit of athletic distinction. He left the University unburdened with honors, carrying in his wake a string of bills as long as a kite’s tail. Relieved of this by the sacrifice of some of Lady Garlingham’s diamonds, the kite shot up into the empyrean in the wake of a dazzling star of the comic-opera stage.

“But, thank Heaven, the boy has principles,” breathed Lady Garlingham. “He never dreamed of marrying her!”

Garlingham descended from the skies ere long, tangled in a telegraphic wire, and went into the Diplomatic Service. He became fourth under-secretary at an Imperial foreign Embassy, in virtue of the marriage of his maternal aunt with Prince John Schulenstorff-Wangelbrode (who was Military Attaché in the days of the pannier and the polonaise, the bustle and the fringed whip-parasol). I have not the least idea in what Garlingham’s duties consisted, and the dear fellow was diplomatically reticent when sounded on the subject; but of one thing I am sure, that few young men have worn an official button and lapels with greater ease and distinction. He quite adored his mother, and made her his _confidante_ in all his love affairs. Indeed I believe Lady Garlingham kept a little register of these at one time on the sticks of an ivory fan—those that were going off, those that were in full bloom, and those that were just coming on; and posted up dates and set down names with the utmost regularity.

For, like the typical butterfly, Garlingham sipped every flower and changed every hour. A very mature Polly has now his passion requited, and if human happiness depended on avoirdupois, and it were an established mathematical fact that the felicity of the object attracted may be calculated by the dimensions of the object attracting, then is the handsome boy I used to tip a happy man indeed.

For Gar, “that pocket edition of Apollo,” as a Royal personage with a happy knack at nicknames termed him—Gar has married a middle-aged, not too good-looking, extremely fat widow, unknown to fame as Mrs. Rollo Polkingham. The couple were Hanover Squared in June. Leila and Sheila Polkingham made the loveliest pair of Dresden china bridesmaids imaginable, and a Bishop tied the knot, assisted by the brother of the bride, the Reverend Michael O’Halloran, of Mount Slattery, County Quare, a surpliced brogue with a Trinity College B.A. hood. The hymns that were sung by the choir during the ceremony were, “The Voice that Breathed,” and “Fight the Good Fight,” and the bride looked quite as bridal as might have been expected of a thirty-eight inch girth arrayed in the latest heliotrope shade. She became peony, Garlingham pale blue, when the moment arrived for him to pronounce his vows, and a voice—a high, nasal voice of the penetrating, saw-edged American kind—said, several pews behind, quite audibly: “Well, I call it child-stealing!”

The owner of that voice was at the reception in Chesterfield Crescent. So was I, and when Garlingham thanked me for a silver cigar-box I had sent him in memory of our old friendship, his hand was damp and clammy, though he smiled. The Dowager Lady Garlingham, looking much younger than her daughter-in-law, floated across to ask me why I never came to see her now, and Gar drifted away. Later, I had a fleeting glimpse of the bridegroom standing in the large, cool shadow of his newly-made bride, looking helplessly from one to the other of his recently-acquired stepdaughters. Then my circular gaze met and merged in the still attractive eyes of Lady Garlingham.

“You heard,” she breathed in her old confidential way, “what that very outspoken person—I think a Miss Van Something, from Philadelphia—said in church?”

“I did hear,” I returned, “and, while I deplored her candor, I could not but admit——”

“That she had hit off the situation with dreadful accuracy—I felt that, too,” sighed Gar’s mother.

“We are old friends, or were,” said I, for people always became sentimental in the vicinity of Lady Garlingham. “Tell me how it happened!”

“Oh, how——” Lady Garlingham adroitly turned a slight groan into a little cough. “Indeed, I hardly know. All that seems burned into me is that I have become a dowager without adequate cause.”

Her pretty brown eyebrows crumpled; she dabbed her still charming eyes with an absurd little lace handkerchief. She wore a wonderful dress of something filmy in Watteau blue, and a Lamballe hat with a _paradis_. Through innumerable veils of tulle her complexion was really wonderful, considering, and her superb hair still tawny gold.

“Don’t look at me and ask yourself why I’ve never married again,” she commanded, in the old petulant way. “For Gar’s sake, is the stereotyped answer to that. And when I look at _her_——” She dabbed away a tear with the absurd little handkerchief. “She hasn’t had the indecency to call me ‘Mother’ _yet_.... But she will, I know she will! If she doesn’t, she is more than human. I have said such things to _her_.”

“I can quite believe it,” I agreed.

Champagne cups were going about; infinitesimal sandwiches, tabloids of condensed indigestion, were being washed down. The best man, an Attaché friend of Garlingham’s, brandishing a silver-handled carving-knife, was encouraging the bridling bride to attack the cake. Sheila and Leila hovered near with silver baskets, and Garlingham, with the merest shadow of his old easy _insouciance_, was replying to the statute and legendary chaff of the other men.

“You know he was engaged to the second girl, Sheila, first?” went on Lady Garlingham plaintively.

I had not known it, and it gave me a thrill.

“Indeed!” I said in a tone of polite inquiry.

“When he was a very little boy, and I took him into a shop to buy a toy,” said poor Lady Garlingham, “he always was in raptures with it, whatever it was, until we were half-way home, and _then_ nothing would satisfy him but the carriage being turned round and driven back, so that he might exchange the thing for something he had particularly disliked at first.”

I recalled the trait in my own experience of my young friend.

“Ah, yes. He always took _pralines_ when he really wanted chocolate fondants,” sighed his mother. “And then—but perhaps you have forgotten—the dolls?”

I had forgotten the dolls. I suppose I gaped rather stupidly.

“He had three,” gulped Lady Garlingham. “He chose the blue one first, and then, when we had just reached Hyde Park Gate, he cried, and said it was the pink one he had wanted all along. So we went back and got her, and drove home to lunch, which, of course, was Gar’s dinner. And then, if you had seen him, poor darling,”—her maternal bosom heaved with a repressed sob—“with his underlip turned down in a quite South Sea Island way, and the tears tumbling into his rice pudding because the blue creature was absolutely his ideal from the first, you would have been foolish enough to order the carriage and drive him back to the Regent Street toyshop.”

“As you did?”

“As I did,” admitted Lady Garlingham.

“With the result that might have been expected?”

“With the result that seems to me _now_ to be a hateful foreshadowing of what was to be my poor darling’s fate in life,” said the poor darling’s mother.... “No, thank you, Sheila dear, I positively could not touch it,” she added, as the cake-basket came our way. “Not even to dream on—I have quite done with dreaming now.”

“But how,” I asked hypercritically, “could Garlingham’s subsequent choice of the blue doll, originally discarded in favor of the pink, foreshadow his ultimate fate in life?”

“Oh, don’t you understand?” quavered poor Lady Garlingham. “He went into the toyshop by himself, and came marching out with what the Americans call a rag-baby, the most odious, distorted, shapeless horror you can imagine. It fascinated him by its sheer ugliness. He was obsessed, magnetized, compelled.... As in this case!” A burst of confidence broke down the floodgates of the poor woman’s reserve. She grasped me by the arm as she gurgled out hysterically—rocking her slight form to and fro: “My dear, _she_ is the rag-doll, this awful widow creature Garlingham has married. And to his fatal curse of indecision he owes the Incubus that is crushing him to-day.”

The bride had tripped upstairs to put on her going-away gown, attended by Leila and Sheila and some freshly-married women, who meant to struggle for the slippers for second choice.

Loud, explosive bursts of jeering merriment came from the dining-room, where most of the men of the party had congregated. An exhausted maid and a very obvious private detective hovered in the neighborhood of the display of wedding presents, and through the open door of the drawing-room one caught a glimpse of suspiciously new luggage piled up in the hall, and a little group of youths and maidens of the callower kind, who were industriously packing the sunshades and umbrellas in the holdalls with rice and confetti.

“My poor, poor boy has been in and out of love _hundreds_ of times,” moaned the despairing Dowager, “without once having been actually engaged. So that when I saw Gar with these three women sitting on four green chairs in the Park in May, I was not seriously alarmed. Georgiana Bayham told me that the stout woman with too many bangles was a Mrs. Rollo Polkingham, a widow, of whom nobody who might with truth be styled anybody had ever heard, and that she had a wild, jungly house in Chesterfield Crescent—(don’t those climbing peacocks in the wall-paper set your teeth on edge?)—and always asked young men to call—and wanted to know their intentions at the third visit.... ‘I would give this turquoise charm off my _porte-bonheur_,’ said Georgiana, in her loud, bubbling voice, ‘to know which of the two daughters Gar is smitten with. The girl with the eyes like black ballot-balls, or the other with the Gaiety smile.’ ... My dear, it was the dark one, Leila, as it happened. Not that Gar flirted desperately. But they went to Hurlingham and lunched at Prince’s, and then the mother thought my boy hooked, and struck——”

“Asked his intentions?” I hinted.

“I knew something had happened,” said Gar’s mother, “when he came in to tea with me that very afternoon. ‘Mother, am I a villain?’ were his very words. ‘No, dear,’ I said, ‘do you feel like one?’ Then it came out that the Polkingham woman had asked his intentions with regard to Leila; and never having had such a thing done to him before, poor, dear boy! Gar was quite prostrated. He did not deny that he found the eldest Polkingham girl attractive, but secretly he had been more closely drawn to the second, Sheila.”

“The pink doll,” I murmured.

“He behaved with the nicest honor in the matter,” declared Lady Garlingham. “When he told me he was really in love with Sheila, and could never be happy until he had married her—and how a young woman with such a muddy complexion could inspire such a passion I don’t pretend to know—I said: ‘Very well, you have my permission to tell her so. I shall never stand in the way of your happiness, my son—although these people are not in Our Set.’ If you had seen his shining eyes. If you had heard the thrill in his voice as he said, ‘What a rattling good sort you are, mother!’ you would have felt with me that the sacrifice was worth it. And then he rushed off in a hansom to declare himself.” Lady Garlingham clutched my arm painfully.

“To declare himself to Sheila?”

“And came back within the space of half an hour engaged to Leila,” panted Lady Garlingham. “No, don’t laugh!”

“The b-blue d-doll!” I gasped.

“He was as pale as death!” said his mother. “He had found Leila in the drawing-room in a becoming half-light, and been taken off his guard.”

“And metaphorically he told the shopwoman he would prefer that one,” I said shakily. “I understand! Was he very unhappy over his bargain?”

“Frightfully out of sorts and off color,” said the wooer’s mother, “until at a crisis, a month later, I nerved him to go and see the mother and explain the mistake.”

“And did he?”

“I will say Mrs. Polkingham took the revelation in good part,” said Lady Garlingham. “Leila cried a good deal, I believe, when she turned Gar over to Sheila, and Sheila was not disagreeably inclined to crow. I must give the girls credit for their behavior. As for Gar, he was the very picture of young, ardent happiness. ‘Mother,’ I can hear him saying, ‘thanks to you, I have won the dearest and loveliest girl in the world.’ (Poor boy!) ‘And I’m as happy as a gardener.’”

“Did that phase last long?” I queried, with twitching facial muscles.

“He began to flag, as it were, in about six weeks,” said Garlingham’s mother mournfully. “My poor, affectionate, _wobbly_ boy. The sky of his simple happiness was overcast. There came a day when the floodgates of his resolve to go through with everything at any cost—sacrifice himself for the sake of his duty and for the credit of his family name——”

“_Noblesse oblige_,” I stammered chokily. “_Noblesse oblige._”

“The floodgates were broken down,” said his mother, with a tremble in her voice. “His heart reverted with a bound to the—the other—to Leila.”

“To the blue doll!” I spluttered.

“When he entreated me,” went on Lady Garlingham, “begged me even with tears to be his ambassadress to Leila, I grieve to say that for the first time in his life I failed to rise to the occasion of his need. I said: ‘I shall do nothing of the kind. Get out of the muddle as you can—I wash my hands of it.’ And he thought me very hard and very unfeeling, I know; but even when the _bouleversement_ was managed for the third time, I could not bring myself to regard the position from my usually philosophical point of view. It was too cruel. The retransfer of the engagement-ring, for instance——”

“Ah, true,” I murmured, “and the presents!”

“Too painful!” sighed Lady Garlingham. “It was ultimately arranged by Gar’s buying a new ring, and Sheila’s dropping the old one into the almsbag at St. Baverstock’s. Poor girl! I will say her demeanor in the trying circumstances was admirable.”

“As for the other?” I hinted.

“Leila is not a refined type of girl,” said Lady Garlingham decidedly. “Her whole expression was that of a Bank Holiday tripper young person who has just dismounted from one of those giddy-go-rounds. Boat-swings might impart the dazed look. The mother seemed harassed. As for Gar——”

I guessed what was coming, but I would not have missed hearing Lady Garlingham tell it for worlds.

“There came a day—a dreadful, dreadful day,” she said, with pale lips, “when Gar told me that his life was ruined _unless he changed back_! We had a _dreadful scene_, and for the first time in my life I had hysterics. Then the unhappy boy tore from the house—_ventre à terre_—leaving me a perfect wreck, held up by my maid Pinner—you know Pinner?”

I nodded speechlessly.

“My wretched boy tore from the house, jumped into his ‘Gohard,’ which was standing at the door—hurtled to Chesterfield Crescent—told the painful truth——”

“Swopped dolls yet once again, and came back with the rag-baby,” I gasped.

“_And_ now,” groaned Lady Garlingham, “he has to carry it through life!”

There was a gabbling on the upper landing. The bride was coming down in a white cut-cloth, tailor-made gown and a picture hat, Leila and Sheila and a bonneted maid following. The bridegroom, in immaculate tweeds, appeared at a lower door, the smug face of his valet behind him. There was a rush of women, an insane kissing and shaking of hands, a glare of red carpet, a flapping of striped awning. Rice and confetti impregnated the air, the doorsteps were swamped with smartly-dressed people. The chauffeur of Gar’s “Gohard” with a giant favor in the buttonhole of his livery coat grinned when Garlingham leaped tigerishly upon him and tore it from his chest. The automobile moved on, pursued by farewells. Some one had thoughtfully attached two slippers to its rearward steps, a stout, elderly, white satin slipper and a slim masculine, evening shoe of the pump kind, almost new.

“Say!” said the saw-edged American voice I had heard in the church—“say, won’t the car-conductor allow she’s traveling with her little boy? What will folks call him, anyhow?”

My mouth was on a level with the speaker’s back hair.

“The Widow’s Mite,” I said aloud—and fled.

SUSANNA AND HER ELDERS