OFF SANDY HOOK
AND OTHER STORIES
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR_
THE MAN OF IRON
ONE BRAVER THING (THE DOP DOCTOR)
BETWEEN TWO THIEVES
THE HEADQUARTER RECRUIT
THE COST OF WINGS
OFF SANDY HOOK
AND OTHER STORIES
BY
RICHARD DEHAN
_Author of “One Braver Thing” (“The Dop Doctor”), “The Man of Iron,”
“Between Two Thieves,” etc._
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
_Copyright, 1915, by_
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
_All rights reserved, including that of translation
into foreign languages_
[Illustration: _September, 1915_]
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
PAGE
OFF SANDY HOOK 1
GEMINI 15
A DISH OF MACARONI 31
“FREDDY & C^{IE}” 44
UNDER THE ELECTRICS 60
“VALCOURT’S GRIN” 68
THE EVOLUTION OF THE FAIREST 81
THE REVOLT OF RUSTLETON 95
A DYSPEPTIC’S TRAGEDY 107
RENOVATION 119
THE BREAKING PLACE 133
A LANCASHIRE DAISY 143
A PITCHED BATTLE 154
THE TUG OF WAR 164
GAS! 180
AIR 193
SIDE! 205
A SPIRIT ELOPEMENT 219
THE WIDOW’S MITE 230
SUSANNA AND HER ELDERS 241
LADY CLANBEVAN’S BABY 264
THE DUCHESS’S DILEMMA 276
THE CHILD 287
A HINDERED HONEYMOON 295
“CLOTHES—AND THE MAN—!” 308
THE DEVIL AND THE DEEP SEA 317
OFF SANDY HOOK
AND OTHER STORIES
OFF SANDY HOOK
On board the Rampatina liner, eleven days and a half out from Liverpool,
the usual terrific sensation created by the appearance of the
pilot-yacht prevailed. Necks were craned and toes were trodden on as the
steamer slackened speed, and a line dexterously thrown by a
blue-jerseyed deck-hand was caught by somebody aboard the yacht. The
pilot, not insensible to the fact of his being a personage of note,
carefully divested his bearded countenance of all expression as he
saluted the Captain, and taking from the deck-steward’s obsequiously
proffered salver a glass containing four-fingers of neat Bourbon whisky,
concealed its contents about his person without perceptible emotion, and
went up with the First Officer upon the upper bridge as the relieved
skipper plunged below. The telegraphs clicked their message—the
leviathan hulk of the liner quivered and began to forge slowly ahead,
and an intelligent-looking, thin-lipped, badly-shaved young man in a
bowler, tweeds, and striped necktie, introduced himself to the Second
Officer as an emissary of the Press.
“Mr. Cyrus K. Pillson, _New York Yeller_.... Pleased to know you, sir,”
said the Second Officer; “step into the smoke-room, this way.
Bar-steward, a brandy cocktail for me, and you, sir, order whatever you
are most in the habit of hoisting. Whisky straight! Now, sir, happy to
afford you what information I can!”
“I presume,” observed the young gentleman of the Press, settling himself
on the springy morocco cushions and accepting the Second Officer’s
polite offer of a green Havana of the strongest kind, “that you have had
a smooth passage, considerin’ the time of year?”
“Smooth....” The Second Officer carefully reversed in his reply the
Pressman’s remark: “Well, yes, the time of year considered, a smooth
passage, I take it, we _have_ had.”
“No fogs?” interrogated the young gentleman, clicking the elastic band
of a notebook which projected from his breast-pocket.
“Fogs?... No!” said the Second Officer.
“You didn’t chance,” pursued the young gentleman of the Press, taking
his short drink from the steward’s salver and throwing it contemptuously
down his throat, “to fall in with a berg off the Bank, did you?”
“Not a smell of one!” replied the Second Officer with decision.
“Ran into a derelict hencoop, perhaps?” persisted the young gentleman,
concealing the worn sole of a wearied boot from the searching glare of
the electric light by tucking it underneath him, “or an old lady’s
bonnet-box? ... or a rubber doll some woman’s baby had lost overboard?
No?” he echoed, as the Second Officer shook his head. “Then, how in
thunder did you manage to lose twenty feet of your port-rail?”
“Carried away,” said the Second Officer, offering the young Press
gentleman a light.
“No, thanks. Always eat mine,” said the young Press gentleman
gracefully.
“Matter of taste,” observed the Second Officer, blowing blue rings.
“I guess so; and I’ve a taste for knowing how you came,” said the young
Pressman, “to part with that twenty foot of rail.”
“Carried away,” said the Second Officer.
“I kin see that,” retorted the visitor.
“It was carried away,” said the Second Officer, “by an elephant.”
“A pet you had running about aboard?” queried the Pressman, with
imperturbable coolness.
“A passenger,” returned the Second Officer, with equal calm.
There was a snap, and the Pressman’s notebook was open on his knee. The
pencil vibrated over the virgin page, when a curious utterance, between
a wail, a cough, and a roar, made the hand that held it start.
“Yarr-rr! Ohowgh! Yarr!” The melancholy sound came from without, borne
on the cool breeze of a late afternoon in March, through the open
ventilators.
“Might that,” queried the young gentleman of the Press, “be an
expression of opinion on the part of the elephant?”
“Lord love you, no!” said the Second Officer. “It’s the leopard.” He
added after a second’s pause: “Or the puma.”
“Do you happen to have a menagerie aboard?” inquired the Pressman,
making a note in shorthand.
“No, sir. The beasts—elephants, leopards, and a box of cobras—are
invoiced from the London Docks to a wealthy amateur in New York State.
Not an iron king, or a corn king, or a cotton king, or a pickle king, or
a kerosene king,” said the Second Officer, with a steady upper lip, “but
a chewing-gum king.”
“If you mean Shadland C. McOster,” said the Pressman, “my mother is his
cousin. They used to chew gum together in school recess, sir, little
guessing that Shad would one day soar, on wings made of that article, to
the realms of gilded plutocracy.”
“I rather imagine the name you mention to be the right one,” said the
Second Officer cautiously, “but I won’t commit myself. The beasts
shipped from Liverpool are intended as a present for the purchaser’s
infant daughter on her fifth birthday.”
“Yarr-rr! Ohowgh! Ohowgh!” Again the coughing roar vibrated through the
smoke-room. Then the chorus of “Hail Columbia!” rose from the promenade
deck, where the lady passengers were assembled ready to wave starred and
striped silk pocket-handkerchiefs and exchange patriotic sentiments at
the first glimpse of land.
“It’s not what I should call a humly voice, that of the leopard,”
observed the Pressman, controlling a slight shiver.
“Children have queer tastes,” said the Second Officer. “And it’s as well
Old Spots is lively, as Bingo’s dead.”
“Bingo?” queried the Pressman.
“Bingo was the elephant,” said the Second Officer, passing the palm of
his brown right hand over his upper lip as the Pressman made a few rapid
notes. “And if the particulars of the deathbed scene are likely to be of
any interest to you—why, you’re welcome to ’em!”
“You’re white!” said the Pressman warmly, licking his pencil. “What did
your elephant die of?”
“Seasickness!” said the Second Officer calmly.
“I’ve seen a few things worth seeing—myself,” said the Pressman
enviously, “but not a seasick elephant.”
“With a professional lady-nurse in attendance,” said the Second Officer;
“all complete from stem to stern, in her print gown, white apron,
fly-away cap-rigging, and ward shoes.”
The Pressman grunted, but not from lack of interest. Doubled up in the
corner of the smoke-room divan, his notebook balanced on his bulging
shirt-front, he made furious notes. The Second Officer waited until the
pencil seemed hungry, and then fed it with a little more information.
“When that girl came aboard at Liverpool with her mackintosh and holdall
and little black shiny bag,” he went on, “I just noticed her in a
passing sort of way as a fresh-colored, tidy-looking young woman, rather
plump in the bows, and with an air as though she meant to get her full
money’s worth out of her eleven-pound fare. But our cheap tariff had
filled the passenger-lists fairly full, and I’d a long score of things
to attend to. A special derrick had had to be rigged to sling the
elephant’s cage aboard, and a capital one it was, of sound Indian teak
strengthened with steel—must have cost a mint of money. We stowed it,
after a lot of sweat and swearing, on the promenade deck, abaft the
funnels, bolting it to rings specially screwed in the deck, passing a
wire hawser across the top, which was made fast to the port and
starboard davits, and rigging weather-screens of double tarpaulin to
keep Bingo warm and dry. The other beasts we shipped under the lee of
the forward cabin skylight; and I’d just got through the job when a
quiet ladylike voice at my elbow says:
“‘If you please, officer, with regard to my patient, I wish to know——’
“‘Ask the purser, ma’am,’ I said, rather snappishly, for I was hot and
worried ... ‘or the head-stewardess.’
“‘I have asked them both,’ says the voice in a calm, determined way,
‘and have been referred to you.’
“‘Well, what is it?’ says I.
“‘By mistake,’ says the young lady—for a young lady she was, and a
hospital nurse besides, neatly rigged out in the usual uniform—‘by
mistake I have had allotted to me a bedroom on the ground-floor, so far
from my patient that I cannot possibly hear him should he call me in the
night. And,’ she went on, as the breeze played with her white silk
bonnet-strings and the wavy little kinks of soft brown hair that framed
her forehead, ‘and I want you to move me to the upper floor at once.’
“‘You mean the promenade deck, madam,’ says I, smoothing out a grin,
though I’m well enough used to the odd bungles land-folks make over
names of things at sea.”
The flying pencil stopped. The Pressman looked up, turning his shortened
cigar between his teeth.
“When do we come to the elephant?” he asked.
“We’re at him now,” said the Second Officer. “‘You mean the promenade
deck,’ says I. ‘Does your patient occupy one of the cabins on the port
or the starboard side, and may I ask his number and name?’ Then she
smiled at me brightly, her eyes and teeth making a sort of flash
together. ‘He doesn’t have a cabin,’ says she; ‘he sleeps in a cage. My
patient is Bingo, the elephant!’”
“Great Pierpont Morgan!” ejaculated the Pressman. His previously flying
pencil became almost invisible from the extreme rapidity with which he
plied it. Drops of perspiration broke out upon his sallow forehead.
“Glory!” he cried. “And not another man thought it worth while to run
out and tackle this wallowing old tub but me!”
“I touched my cap,” went on the Second Officer, “keeping down as
professionally as I could the surprise I felt.... ‘Do I understand,
madam,’ I asked, ‘that you are the elephant’s nurse?’ And at that she
nodded with another bright smile, and told me that she was Nurse Amy, of
St. Baalam’s Nursing Association, London, specially engaged by the
American gentleman who had bought the elephant——”
“Shadland C. McOster,” prompted the Pressman, without looking up.
“To attend to the animal on the voyage. It was understood that if the
principal patient’s condition permitted, Nurse Amy was to pay the
leopards such attentions as they were capable of appreciating, but there
was no pressure on this point.”
“Ohowgh!” coughed the voice outside. “Yarr! Ohowgh!”
“He smells the land, I guess,” said the Pressman.
“Or the niggers,” suggested the Second Officer. “You ought to have heard
Bingo when we were three days out from the Mersey.... We’d had a fair
wind and a smooth sea at first, and nothing delighted the ladies and
children on board like feeding him with apples, and nuts, and biscuits,
and things prigged from the saloon tables. The sea-air must have
sharpened the beast’s appetite, I suppose, for that old trunk of his was
snorking round all day, and the Purser, who was naturally wild about it,
said he must have put away hogsheads of good things in addition to his
allowance of hay, and bread, and beetroot, and grain, and cabbages, and
sugar——”
“Was he ca’am in temper?” asked the Pressman.
“Mild as milk.... As kind a beast as ever breathed; and elephants do a
lot of breathing,” said the Second Officer. “The ladies and gentlemen in
the upper-deck cabins used to complain about his snoring in the night;
but as Nurse Amy said, there are people who’d complain about anything.
And some of ’em didn’t like the smell of elephant—which, I’ll allow,
when you happened to get to wind’ard of Bingo, was—phew!”
“Pooty vociferous?” hinted the Pressman.
“Until,” went on the Second Officer, “Nurse Amy took to washing him with
scented soap.”
The pencil stopped. The Pressman looked up with circular eyes.
“Scented——”
“Soap,” said the Second Officer. “No expense was to be spared—and we’d
several cases of a special toilet and complexion article on board. By
the living Harry! if you’d seen that elephant standing up over his
morning tub of hot water, swabbing away at himself with a deck-sponge
Nurse Amy had soaped for him, and then squirting the water over himself
to rinse off the soap, you’d have believed in the intelligence of
animals. The sight drew like a pantomime.... But by the sixth day out
Bingo had given up all interest in his own appearance. The weather was
squally, a bit of a sea got up, hardly a passenger put in an appearance
at the saloon tables, and Bingo only shook his ears when the bugle blew,
and turned away from his morning haystack and mound of cabbages with
disgust. Nurse Amy got him to eat some biscuits and drink a bucket of
Bovril, but you could see he was only doing it to oblige her. ‘Oh, come,
cheer up!’ she said in a brisk, professional way. ‘You’ll get your
sea-legs on directly and the officer says we’re having a wonderfully
smooth passage, considering the time of the year.’ But Bingo only
sighed, and two tears trickled out of his little red eyes, as he swayed
from side to side. ‘He’ll be worse before he’s better,’ says I; for
somehow I was generally about when Nurse Amy was looking after her big
charge. ‘He’ll be worse before he’s better,’ _and he was_.”
The Pressman’s face was streaked and shiny, his hair lay glued to his
brow. The pencil went on, devouring page after page.
“Nurse Amy, luckily for her patient, was not upset by the pitching of
the vessel, for it blew half a gale steady from the sou’-west, and the
old _Centipede_ dipped her nose pretty frequently. Nurse was as busy as
a bee endeavoring by every means she could devise or adopt from the
suggestions of the stewardesses, who showed a good deal of interest in
her and her charge, to alleviate the sufferings of Bingo. I have seen
that little woman stand for an hour on the wet planking, holding a
six-foot deck-swab soaked with eau-de-Cologne to Bingo’s forehead....”
The Pressman jotted down, breathing heavily. “Deck-swab soaked in
eau-de-Cologne....” he muttered. “Must have cost slathers of money, I
reckon——”
“No expense was to be spared,” the Second Officer reminded him gently.
“As for the brandy, Martell’s Three Star, he must have put away a dozen
bottles a day.”
“No blamed wonder his head ached!” said the Pressman, moistening his own
dry lips.
“Except an occasional bucket of arrowroot with port wine and a tin or so
of cuddy biscuits, the animal would take no other nourishment whatever,”
continued the Second Officer. “As he grew weaker and weaker, it was
touching to see the way in which he clung to Nurse Amy.”
“Clung to her?” the Pressman wrote, marking the words for a headline.
“Fact,” said the Second Officer. “He would put his trunk round her
waist, and lay his head on her shoulder as she stood on a ladder lashed
against the side of his cage. And he would hang out his forefoot to have
his pulse felt, quite in a Christian style. Then when Nurse Amy wanted
to take his temperature, the docile brute would curl up his fire-hose—I
mean his trunk—and open his mouth, so that the instrument might be
comfortably placed under his tongue.”
“By gings, sir, this story is going to knock corners off creation!”
gasped the Pressman, pausing to wipe his face with a slightly smeary
cuff. “An elephant that understood the use of the therm—blame it! that
beast robbed some man of a fortune when he passed in his checks!”
“We lost so many of the ordinary kind of instrument in this way,” went
on the Second Officer, almost pensively, “that at last Nurse Amy was
obliged to fall back upon the large thermometer and barometer combined
that usually hung in the first saloon. But it recorded, to our sorrow,
no improvement. The mercury steadily sank, and it became plain to Nurse
Amy’s professional eye that her patient was not long for this world.”
“Say, do you believe elephants have souls?” queried the Pressman. The
Second Officer deigned no reply.
“She could not leave him a moment; he trumpeted so awfully when he saw
her quit his side. I forgot to tell you that from the moment he first
felt himself attacked by sea-sickness his bellows of rage and agony were
frightful to hear. The other animals became excited by them; they roared
and snarled without cessation.”
“Raised general hell,” said the Pressman, “with trimmings.” But he wrote
down with a sign that meant leaded spaces and giant capitals:
“PANDEMONIUM IN MID-OCEAN!”
“Nobody on board got a wink of sleep,” said the Second Officer—“that is,
unless the devoted Nurse Amy was by the sufferer’s side. Towards the
end, when, exhausted by days and nights of arduous nursing, the devoted
girl had retired to her deck-cabin to snatch a few moments of
much-needed rest, the entire crew vied with each other in efforts to
pacify Bingo, without the slightest effect. When they tried to put his
feet in hot water he mashed the ship’s buckets like so many
gooseberries, and shot the Purser down with half a trunkful of hot
cocoa, which had been offered as a last resource. But on Nurse Amy’s
appearing he grew pacified, and from that moment until the end the
heroic woman never left his side. I begged her to consider herself and
those dear to her,” said the Second Officer, with a little tremble in
his voice, “but she only smiled—a worn kind of smile—and said that duty
must be considered first. I won’t deny it,” said the Second Officer,
openly producing a very white pocket-handkerchief and unfolding it. “I
kissed that woman’s hand as though she had been the Queen.” He concealed
his face with the handkerchief and coughed rather loudly.
“The Rude Shellback Touched to the Quick,” wrote the Pressman. “He Sheds
Tears.” “Get on with the death-scene, sir, if you don’t object!” he
said, breathing through his nose excitedly. “If that elephant asked for
a minister, I’d not be surprised!”
“He did make his will, after a fashion,” said the narrator. “You see,
during the convulsive struggles I have described, when he broke off his
right tusk—didn’t I mention that?”
“No!” denied the Pressman.
“He broke it, anyhow, right off short, as a boy might snap a carrot,”
said the Second Officer. “There it lay, among the litter, in the bottom
of his cage. He had suddenly ceased trumpeting, and a deathly silence
had fallen on all creation, one would have said. The vessel still rolled
a bit, but the wind had fallen, and the sun was going down like a blot
of fire, on the——”
“Western horizon,” wrote the Pressman.
“Nurse Amy, from her ladder, still rendered the last offices of human
kindness to the sinking animal, sponging his forehead with ice-water and
fanning him with a bellows. As she whispered to me that the end was
near, Bingo opened his eyes. With an expiring effort he lifted the
broken tusk from the bottom of the cage, dropped it on the deck at his
faithful Nurse’s feet, uttered a heavy groan, threw up his trunk, sank
gently forward upon his massive knees, and died!”
“The editor of the opposition paper will do another die when he runs his
eye over the _Yeller_ to-morrow morning,” said the Pressman, joyfully
smacking the rubber band round the filled notebook. “And the port-rail
got carried away when you yanked the body overboard?”
“We couldn’t stuff him,” said the Second Officer with a sigh. “As for
preserving him in spirits, we hadn’t enough spirits left to think of it.
We rigged a special derrick, and heaved Bingo overboard, carrying away,
as you have guessed, the port-rail in the operation. As Bingo’s
tremendous carcass rose and floated buoyantly away to leeward, back and
head well above the water, and the two great ears resting flat upon the
surface like gigantic lily-pads, Nurse Amy uttered a faint cry and
swooned in my arms.”
“Some folks get all the luck!” commented the Pressman, who, having
filled his book, was now jotting down notes upon his left cuff.
“You’ve not much to complain of, it strikes me!” observed the Second
Officer, with a glance at the crammed notebook.
“I guess that’s true!” said the Pressman, with a sigh of satisfaction.
“Now, all I want is a photograph or a sketch of that splendid heroine of
a girl, and the honor of shaking her hand, and telling her she deserves
to be an American—and I’d not trade places with the President.”
The Second Officer appeared to be struggling with some emotion. The
muscles of his mouth worked violently. He reddened through the red, and
suspicious moisture shone in his eyes. One by one the members of the
silent but not unappreciative audience of male passengers that had
gradually gathered within earshot of the Second Officer and his victim,
manifested the same symptoms. And glancing for the first time at those
listening faces, and observing the identical expression stamped upon
each, the Pressman, encircled by wet, crinkled eyes, and
cheerfully-curled-back lips, fringed with teeth in all stages of
preservation, grasped the conviction that he had been had. And at this
crucial moment the hatch-door of the smoke-room rolled back in its brass
coamings, and a pointed gray beard and kindly keen eyes, sheltered by
the peak of a gold-laced cap, appeared in the aperture.
“New York Harbor, gentlemen,” said the Captain genially. “We’re running
into the docks now, and the Custom House officers will board us
directly.... I shouldn’t wonder,” he continued, as the majority of the
occupants of the smoke-room one by one glided away, “if the newspapers
made a story out of our missing port-rail!”
“Permit me to introduce myself as a reporter of the _N’York Yeller_,”
said the young gentleman in tweeds, as he rose and touched his hat.
“Perhaps, sir, you would favor me with the facts in connection with the
occurrence?”
“Haven’t you had it from Murchison? Why, Murchison——” the Captain was
beginning, when with a choking snort the Second Officer rushed from the
smoke-room. “Though there’s nothing to tell, Mr. Reporter, worth
hearing. A derrick-chain broke at Southampton Docks, and a case of
agricultural machine-parts did the damage. We temporarily repaired with
some iron piping, and a length of wire hawser; but, of course, it shows
badly, and suggests——”
“A collision!” said a smiling stranger.
“Or an elephant,” said another.
“Yarr!” proclaimed the horrible voice outside. “Ohowgh! Yarr!”
“I understand,” said the Pressman with an effort, “that the elephant
emanated from the teeming brain of Mr. Murchison. But the leopard—there
is a leopard, I surmise, if hearing goes for evidence?”
The Captain’s excellent teeth showed under his gray mustache. “That
noise, you mean?” he exclaimed.... “Oh, that’s one of our electric
air-pumps, for forcing air into the lower-deck storage chambers, you
know. She’s out of gear, and lets us know it in that way. Must have her
seen to at New York. Take a drink, won’t you? Come, gentlemen, order
what you please.”
“Whisky, square,” murmured the Pressman, as the long, smooth glide of
the liner was checked, the engines throbbed and stopped, and the dull
roar of the docks pressed upon listening ears. He drank, and as the
fluid traversed the usual channel, his eye grew brighter.... “Say,
Captain,” he asked, “do you know where your Second Officer was raised?”
“Murchison comes, I believe, from Yorkshire,” said the Captain. “Hey,
Murchison, isn’t that the place?”
“I am not acquainted with the geology of Yorkshire,” observed the
Pressman, as he passed the Second Officer on his way to the smoke-room;
“but the soil grows good liars! So long!”
GEMINI
AN EMBARRASSMENT OF CHOICE
To Captain Galahad Ranking, grilling over his Musketry-Instructorship at
Hounslow one arid July, came a square lilac envelope, addressed in a
sprawling hand, with plenty of violet ink. The missive smelt of Rhine
violets. It bore a monogram, the initials “L. K.” fantastically
intertwined, and was, in fact, an invitation from his affectionate
cousin Laura, dated from a pleasant country mansion situate amid green
lawns and blushing rose-gardens on the Werkshire reaches of the Thames.
Laura was not Galahad’s cousin by blood, but by marriage. Laura was the
still young and attractive widow of Thomson Kingdom, once a stout man on
the Stock Exchange, remarkable for a head of very upright gray hair and
a startling taste in printed linen. Pigs and peaches were his pet
hobbies, and the apoplectic seizure from which he never rallied was
induced by a weakness in “the City” caused by unprecedentedly heavy
selling-orders from a nervous north-eastern European capital, about the
time of the _entente cordiale_. So the bloom was barely off Laura’s
crêpe, and the new black gloves purchased by Galahad to grace his
kinsman’s obsequies had not done duty at another funeral. The scrawly
postscript to her letter said: “I want to consult you _very
particularly_, in the _most absolute confidence_, upon a matter
affecting my _whole future_.”
Galahad Ranking, Junior Captain, Fourth Battalion Royal Deershire
Regiment, wrinkled up his freckled little countenance into queer
puckers, and rubbed his bristly cinnamon-colored hair, already getting
thin on the summit of his skull, as he puzzled the brain within that
receptacle as to the possible meaning of Laura’s impassioned appeal. He
was a small man, whose demure and spinster-like demeanor led new
acquaintances to ask him plumply how on earth he had managed to get his
D.S.O.
“There were chances,” he would reply to these querists, “to be had out
there,” waving his hand vaguely in the direction of South Africa, “and I
saw one of them and took it—that’s all.”
Others might pump him more successfully to the effect that he—Galahad
Ranking—was a poor devil of a militiaman attached to the Royal
Deershires; that a small detachment of that well-known territorial
regiment, garrisoned in a beastly small tin-pot fort on the Springbok
River, Eastern Transvaal, were by Boers besieged; that relief was
urgently necessary; and that “one of the fellows went and brought up
Kitchener.” Said fellow admitted upon further cross-examination to have
been himself. But for such details as that the bringing up involved a
six-mile run in scorching sun over tangled bush veldt, crossing the
enemy’s lines, being sniped at by Boer sharpshooters and chased by Boer
pickets, the curious must refer to despatches. Stampeding Army mules
would not trample the truth out of the man.
He wrung half-hearted leave of absence from the powers that were, and
his orderly packed the battered tin suit-case and the Gladstone bag that
had spent three days at the bottom of a water-hole, and, having had its
numerous labels soaked off, bore a painfully leprous appearance.
He found Laura’s omnibus automobile, with its luggage tender, waiting at
Cholsford Junction, and smiled his dry little smile, mentally comparing
the dimensions of the vehicle with the size of the guest. The suit-case
and the Gladstone bag made a poor show; but there were other things to
come: huge packages from the Stores, and a sea-weedy hamper from Great
Fishby, and some cases of champagne with the label of a first-class
Regent Street firm. “Poor Kingdom’s wine-merchants!” Ranking said to
himself, and he blinked in a bewildered way at a bandbox of mammoth
proportions and three dressmakers’ boxes of stout cardboard with tin
corners, their covers bearing the flourishing signature of Babin _et
Cie_. Because, you know, Laura’s bereavement was so very recent, and
bachelors of Galahad’s type have a somewhat exaggerated notion of the
extent to which conjugal mourners are expected to bewail themselves.
However, even a widow requires clothes. This handsome concession to
feminine idiosyncrasy made, Galahad ousted Laura’s chauffeur from the
driving-seat, and, assuming the steering-wheel, was reaching for the
starting-lever when the chauffeur stopped him with—
“Beg pardon, sir, but there’s a gentleman to fetch.”
“A visitor to The Rodelands?” Galahad asked, with furrows of surprise
forming below his hat-brim.
The mechanic, a gloomy young man in a gold-banded cap, with a weakness
for wearing waterproofs in the driest weather, replied, without a
groom’s alertness or a groom’s civility:
“It’s a gentleman staying at Eyot Cottage....” Adding, as Galahad
faintly recalled the creeper-covered cot in question, modestly perched
on the edge of a marshy lawn running down to the river, and usually let
by the landlord of the local hotel to honeymooning couples: “And we
usually give him a lift.”
As the chauffeur spoke, the gentleman emerged from the dim, echoing
archway through which the down platform disgorged. The stranger was
young—Galahad, who was middle-aged, saw that at a glance—and fair, while
Galahad was sandy. He wore a suit of gray tweeds too short in the
sleeves and trouser-legs, and his cherubically pink countenance, adorned
with large, round, china-blue eyes and a little flaxen mustache, was
carried at an altitude which would have been disconcerting to a
Lifeguardsman of six feet high, and was simply maddening to Galahad, who
could only be categorized as small. We are all human, and Galahad was
secretly gratified to observe that the young giant’s shoulders boasted a
graceful droop, and that his chest was somewhat narrow.
“Hullo, Watson!” observed the tall young gentleman, condescendingly; and
Watson smiled faintly and actually touched his cap as the new-comer
favored Galahad with a long and round-eyed stare.
“I believe you are coming with us?” said Galahad, raising his hat with
punctilious politeness.
“Not inside, thanks,” was the long-legged young stranger’s reply. He
stared harder than ever, and Watson murmured in Galahad’s ear that the
gentleman usually drove.
“Does he?” ejaculated the astonished Galahad.
A man may hold the rank of captain in one of his Majesty’s territorial
Regiments, and yet be shy; may have earned the right to adorn his thorax
with the D.S.O., and yet be bashful; may be a more than efficient
instructor in Musketry, and yet shrink from the gratuitous schooling of
underbred youth in the amenities of good breeding. In less time than it
takes to relate it, Galahad was stowed in the omnibus body of the
“Runhard” where, a very little kernel in a very roomy shell, he rattled
about as the familiar landscape reeled giddily by at the will and
pleasure of the long-legged young gentleman, who might be described as
the kind of driver that takes risks. A peculiarly steep and curving hill
announced by signboards lettered, in appropriate crimson, “Dangerous!”
afforded facilities for the exercise of his peculiar talent which
temporarily deprived the inside passenger of breath.
The river lay at the bottom of the hill, and the dwelling of Mrs.
Kingdom, described in the local guide as “an elegant riparian villa,”
sat in its green meadows and sunny croquet lawns and rose-trellised
gardens, on the other side.
The automobile swirled in at the lodge-gates, stopped, and Galahad got
out, welcomed by the joyful barking of Dinmonts, fox-terriers, pugs, and
poodles.
Knee-deep in dogs, the little man responded to the respectful greeting
of Laura’s butler, a meek, gray-faced, little, elderly personage with a
frill of white whiskers akin to the hirsute adornments of the rare
variety of the howling ape. Then the drawing-room door swung open,
letting out an avalanche of Pomeranians and some Persian cats; Laura
rose from a sofa and advanced with a gushful greeting. Her outstretched
hands were grasped by Galahad; he was tinglingly conscious that her
widow’s weeds were eminently becoming.
“Dear Captain Ranking, how sweet of you to run down!” Laura cooed. The
flash of admiration in Galahad’s weary gray eyes gave her sugared
assurance that she was looking her best; his ardent squeeze confirmed
the look.
“You used to call me by my Christian name,” he was saying, with a little
undulating wobble of sentiment in his voice. Then his glance went past
Mrs. Kingdom, and his lean under-jaw dropped. The long-legged gentleman
in gray tweed, who had driven, or rather hustled, him from the station,
was sitting on the sofa in a suit of blue serge. No, Galahad was not
mistaken. There were the long legs, the champagne-bottle shoulders, the
china-blue eyes, and the little flaxen mustache. He did not look so
pink, that was all. And when Laura, with a nervous giggle, introduced
him as Mr. Lasher, he began getting up from the sofa as though he never
would have done.
“How do?” he said, when his yellow head had soared to the ceiling.
“Met you before,” said Galahad with some terseness. “And you frightened
me abominably by the way you scorched down Penniford Hill.”
The long-legged young man stared with circular blue eyes. Laura burst
into a peal of rippling laughter, which struck Galahad as being forced
and beside the point.
“My dear Galahad,” Mrs. Kingdom cried, “you must have met Brosy! This is
Dosy,” she added, as though all were now clear, and welcomed with a
perfect _feu de joie_ of giggles the entrance of the veritable and
original young man in gray tweeds who had driven the automobile, and now
came strolling into the drawing-room. Then she introduced the pair
formally to Captain Ranking as Mr. Theodosius and Mr. Ambrose Lasher,
and rustled away to pour out tea, leaving Galahad in a jaundiced frame
of mind. For one thing, he hated to be mystified; for another, being an
ordinary, though heroic, human being, he had taken at the first moment
of encounter a singularly ardent and sincere dislike to the
“long-legged, blue-eyed young bounder,” as he mentally termed Mr. Brosy
Lasher; and the discovery that the object of his loathing existed in
duplicate was not a welcome one. He was dry, stiff, and jerky in his
responses to the loud and patronizing advances of the two Lashers.
Fortunately the twin young gentlemen accepted as admiration, what was,
in fact, the opposite sentiment. They had been used to a good deal of
this since the first moment of their simultaneous entrance upon this
mundane stage, and they were twenty-six.
“It is so sad,” Laura said in confidential aside to Galahad. “They have
lost both parents, and have hardly a penny in the world.” She raised and
crumpled her still pretty eyebrows with the old infantile air of appeal.
“Two such delightful boys, and so handsome! ... though to my eye Brosy’s
nose is less purely Greek in outline than Dosy’s. And they were educated
at a public school, with every advantage that a rich man’s sons might
naturally expect. But, of course, you recognized the _cachet_ of Eton at
once?”
“I notice,” said Ranking drily, “that they both leave the lower button
of their waistcoats undone, and call men whom they don’t like ‘scugs.’”
His quiet eye dwelt with dubious tenderness upon the Messrs. Lasher, who
were romping with the dogs upon the sofas, and devouring cake and
strawberries with infantile greed. “I have heard of the Eton manner, of
course,” he added, “and I meet a good many Eton-bred men; but I can’t
say that these young fellows have any—any special characteristics in
common with—ah—those.”
“They belong to a grand old family,” Laura continued, with an air of
proprietorship that puzzled Galahad. “The Lashers of Dropshire, you
know—quite historical. And their father ran through everything before
they came of age. So thoughtless, wasn’t it? And now they are looking
round for an opening in life, and really, they tell me, it is dreadfully
difficult to find.”
“I rather imagined as much,” said Galahad, making a little point of
sarcasm all to himself, and secretly smiling over it.
“I wonder if you could suggest anything; you are always so helpful,”
Laura went on. “That they must be together, of course, goes without
saying. And that, of course, increases the difficulty. But nobody could
be so inhuman as to part twins.” Her lips quivered, and her eyes grew
misty with unshed tears.
“My dear Laura,” expostulated the puzzled Galahad, “you talk as though
these two young men were six years old instead of six-and-twenty.”
“How changed you are!” Laura blinked away a tear. “You used to
understand me so much better in the old days. _Of course_, they are
grown up, that is plain to the meanest capacity. But they have such
boyish, charming, confiding natures.... Toto will bite, Brosy, if you
hold him in the air by the tail!... that a woman like myself.... If you
would like some more cherry cake, Dosy, do ring the bell!... a woman
like myself, married at eighteen to a man true and noble if you will,
but incapable of awakening the deeper chords of passion and.... Of
course, you are both going to dine here and help me to entertain Captain
Ranking!... denied the happiness of being a mother”—Laura drooped her
eyes and bit her lip, and blushed slightly—“must naturally find their
company a _great resource_. And the distant cousin with whom they are
staying, a Mrs. Le Bacon Chalmers, who has taken Eyot Cottage for the
summer months, _knows this_ and _lends_ them to me as _often_ as I
like.”
“Upon my word, she is uncommonly kind!” said Galahad, with emphasis
stronger than Laura’s italics.
“Yes, isn’t she?” responded Laura, whose sense of humor was obscured by
predilection. “They ride and drive the horses, and give Holt and the
gardeners advice, and they exercise the automobiles, and run the
electric launch about, and play tennis and croquet——”
“And the devil generally!” were the words that Galahad bit off and
gulped down.
He was very quiet at dinner, sitting in the deceased Kingdom’s place at
the foot of the table. And Dosy and Brosy were very loud and very large,
though looking, it must be confessed, exceedingly well in evening garb.
They made themselves very much at home upon Laura’s right and left hand,
recommending certain dishes to each other, criticizing more, ravaging
the bonbons, reveling in the dessert, calling, with artless airs of
connoisseurship, for special wines laid down by the noble man who yet
had not known how to awaken the deeper chords of passion.
“Gad! what a pair of hawbucks!” Galahad mentally ejaculated as the
servants ran about like distracted ants, and Laura and Laura’s
inseparable though elderly companion-friend, Miss Glidding, vied with
each other in encouraging Theodosius and Ambrose to renewed attacks upon
the strawberries and peaches.
Left alone with Dosy and Brosy, he submitted to be patronized, offered
cigars he had chosen, recommended to try liqueurs with whose liverish
and headachy qualities he had been acquainted of old.
They walked with the ladies in the dewy rose-gardens after dinner, and
as Galahad paused to light a cigar, behold, he was left alone. Laura
with Brosy, Miss Glidding (who looked her best by bat-light) with Dosy,
had vanished in the shadowy windings of the trellis-walks and arcades.
And Captain Ranking, shrugging his shoulders, picked a half-seen
Niphetos, glimmering among the wet, shining leaves, and walked back to
the smoking-room, wondering why on earth Laura had dragged him down
where he seemed least to be wanted. What was the matter “affecting her
whole future” upon which she required advice? His heart gave a sickening
little jog as he realized that the future of Dosy, or possibly of Brosy,
might also be involved. True, Laura was thirty-nine; but what are years
when the heart is young? Galahad asked himself, as peal after peal of
the widow’s laughter broke the silence of the scented night. Other
mental interrogations fretted his aching brain. What must the servants
not have thought and said? What would the neighbors say? What would the
County think of such sportive, not to say frivolous, conduct on the part
of a widow but recently emancipated from weepers, whose handkerchiefs
were still bordered with the inch-deep inky deposit of conjugal woe?
Kingdom was an easy-going, level-headed man, Galahad admitted, biting at
one of the deceased’s Havanas and frowning; “but he would have raised
the Devil over this. Possibly he’s doing it.”
The portrait of Mr. Kingdom over the mantelshelf of the smoking-room
seemed to scowl confirmatively. The servants were all in bed, the
promenaders in the garden showed no signs of returning. Galahad shrugged
his little shoulders, and went away to bed in a charming, drum-windowed,
chintz-hung bower over the front porch. And just as his little cropped
head plumped down on the pillow it was electrically jolted up again.
Laura was saying good-night in the porch to one—or was it both?—of the
infernal twins. And before the hall-door clashed they had promised to
come over to lunch to-morrow. Confound them! it was to-morrow now.
One has only to add that when, after exhausting watches, slumber visited
Galahad’s eyelids, the twins in maddening iteration played dominoes
throughout his dreams, to convince the reader that they had thoroughly
got upon his nerves.
Laura, looking wonderfully fresh and young in a lace morning _négligé_
of the peek-a-boo description, poured out his coffee at breakfast and
sympathized with him about the headache he denied. Then, shaded by a
fluffy black-and-white sunshade, the widow led Galahad out into the
sunny garden to a tree-shaded and sequestered nook where West Indian
hammocks hung, and, installing herself in one of these receptacles,
invited her husband’s cousin to repose himself in another.
Lying on your back, counting ripening plums dangling from green branches
above, oscillating at the bidding of the lightest breeze, liable to
upset at the slightest movement, it is difficult to be indignant and
sarcastic; but Galahad was both.
“Adopt these young men as sons, my dear Laura! Are there no parentless
babies in the local workhouse that would better supply the need you
express of having something to cherish and love?” exclaimed Galahad.
He sat up with an effort and stared at Laura. Laura rocked, prone amid
cushions, knitting a silk necktie of a tender hue suited to a blonde
complexion.
“Workhouse babies are invariably ugly, and unhealthy into the bargain,”
she pouted.
“Some orphan child from a Home, that is pretty to look at and has had
the distemper properly,” suggested Galahad.
“I don’t want an orphan from a Home,” objected Laura. “Besides, it
wouldn’t be a twin.”
“There are such things as twin orphans, my dear Laura,” protested
Galahad.
But Laura was firm.
“Dosy and Brosy are very, very dear to me,” she protested, a little
pinkness about the eyelids and nostrils threatening an impending
tear-shower. “They came into my life,” she continued poetically, “at a
time of sorrow and bereavement, and the sunshine of their presence drove
the dark clouds away. Of course, they are too old, or, rather, not young
enough, to be really my sons,” she continued, “but they might have been
poor Tom’s.”
“If poor Tom had fathered a brace of bounders like those,” burst out
Galahad, “poor Tom would have kicked himself—that’s all I know—kicked
himself!” he repeated, fuming and climbing out of his hammock.
“Pray don’t be coarse,” entreated Laura—“and abusive,” she added, as an
afterthought. “Of course, as poor Tom’s trustee and executor, I am bound
to make a show of consulting you, though my mind is really made up, and
nobody can prevent my doing what I like with my own income. I shall
allow the boys five hundred a year each for pocket money,” she added
with a pretty maternal air. “And Dosy shall go into the Diplomatic
Service, and Brosy——”
“You have broached the adoption plan to them then?” gasped Galahad.
Laura bowed her head. “And this relative with whom I gather they are now
staying,” he continued, “is she agreeable to the proposed arrangement?”
“Mrs. Le Bacon Chalmers? She couldn’t prevent it if she wasn’t!”
retorted Laura, “as the boys are of age. But, as it happens, she thinks
the plan an ideal one.”
“That proves the value of her judgment, certainly. And the County? Will
your friends and neighbors also think the plan an ideal one?” demanded
Galahad.
“My friends and neighbors,” said Laura, loftily, “will think as I do, or
they will cease to be my friends.”
Galahad, usually punctiliously well-mannered, whistled long and
dismally. “Phew! And when you have alienated every soul upon your
visiting list, what will you do for society?”
“I shall have the boys,” said Laura, with defiant tenderness.
“And when the ‘boys,’ as you call them, marry?” insinuated Galahad.
Laura sat up so suddenly that all her cushions rolled out of the
hammock. “If this is how you treat me when I turn to you for advice——”
she began.
“Laura,” said Galahad firmly, “you don’t want advice.” He held up his
lean brown hand and checked her, as she would have spoken. “Nor do you
require twin sons of six feet three. What you want is——” He was going in
his innocence to say “a sincere and candid friend,” and prove himself
the ideal by some plain speaking, but Laura fairly brimmed over with
conscious blushes.
“How—how can you?” she said, in vibrating tones of reproach, devoid of
even a shade of anger. “So soon, too! As if I did not know what was due
to poor Tom——”
The toot of a motor-horn, the scuffle of the engine, the dry whirr of
the brake as the locomotive stopped at the avenue gate, broke in upon
her heroics.
“Here are the boys,” she cried rapturously, and, indeed, hopped out of
the hammock with the agility of girlhood as the long-legged,
yellow-haired twins came stalking over the grass. She held out her hands
to them with a pretty maternal gesture.
“Dosy pet, Brosy darling,” she babbled, “come and kiss Mummy! We have
been telling all our little plans to Uncle Galahad, and Uncle quite
agrees.”
“No! Does he, though?” was the simultaneous utterance of the long-legged
twins. They twirled their yellow mustaches, stooped awkwardly and
“kissed Mummy,” as Galahad uttered a yell of frenzied laughter, and,
throwing himself recklessly into his recently-vacated hammock, shot out
upon the other side.
He went back to Hounslow that day. Dosy and Brosy dutifully accompanied
him to the station, and exchanged a fraternal wink when his train
steamed out.
“What an infatuation!” he groaned. In his mind’s eye he saw the County
grinning over the childless widow and her adopted twins. As for Dosy and
Brosy, they would have what in America is termed “a soft snap.” Powerful
jaws had both the young gentlemen, wide and greedy gullets. Still, with
his mind’s eye Galahad saw their foolish, affectionate, sentimental
benefactress gnawed to the bare bone. Day by day he anticipated a letter
of shrill astonishment from his cotrustee, and when it came, hinting at
mental weakness and the necessity of restraint, he flamed up into
defense of Laura so hotly as to surprise himself.
And then, before anything decisive had been done with regard to the
settlement—before Brosy and Dosy had taken up their quarters for good
beneath the roof of their adopted parent—a change befell, and Galahad
received an imploring note from Mrs. Kingdom soliciting his instant
presence upon “an urgent matter.”
“She has thought better of it,” said Galahad to himself, as he obeyed
the summons. “Her native good sense”—you will realize that the man must
have been genuinely in love to believe in Laura’s native good sense—“has
come to her aid!” And in his mind’s eye he beheld the long, narrow backs
of the twins walking away into a dim perspective.
It was September. Dosy and Brosy were shooting the widow’s partridges,
and Galahad found her alone. She was pleased and excited, with an air of
one who with difficulty keeps the cork in a bottle of mystery; and when
she clasped her hands round Galahad’s arm and told him what a true, true
friend he was! he felt absurdly tender, as he begged her to confide her
trouble to him.