card attached to the hat of rejection he inscribed: “Wear this, if I am
to be unhappy.” Then he closed the large double bandbox in which he had
packed the hats, breathed a kiss into the folds of the silver paper,
and, ringing the bell, bade a messenger carry the box to the hotel at
which Cornelia Vanderdecken was staying, and where, millionairess though
she was, she was still content to dress with the help of a deft maid and
the adoration of a devoted companion. Then the exhausted artist fell
back on the divan. Cornelia was to come at twelve upon the morrow.
“Then I shall learn my fate,” said Freddy. He drove home in his
brougham, and passed a sleepless night. The fateful hour found him again
upon his divan, surrounded by the materials of his craft, waiting
feverishly for Cornelia.
The curtains parted. He started up at the rustling of her gown and the
jingling of her bangles. Horror! she wore the somber hat of sorrow,
though under its shadow her face was curiously bright.
She advanced toward Freddy. He reeled and staggered backward, raised his
white hand to his delicate throat, and fell fainting amongst his
cushions. Cornelia screamed. Mrs. Vivianson and her young ladies came
hurrying in. As the stylish widow noted Cornelia’s headgear, her eyes
flashed and joy was in her face. Then it clouded over, for she knew that
Papa Vanderdecken had been coaxed over, and Freddy was an accepted man.
My reader, being exceptionally acute, will realize that the jealous
woman had changed the tickets on the hats.
“Not that it was much use,” she avowed to herself, as she entered with
smelling-salts and burnt feathers to restore Freddy’s consciousness.
“When he revives, she will tell him the truth.” But Freddy only regained
consciousness to lose it in the ravings of delirium. He had an attack of
brain fever, in which he wandered through groves of bonnet shops,
looking unavailingly for Cornelia. And then came the crisis, and he woke
up with an ice-bandage on, to find himself in his bedroom at Glanmire
House, with the Marchioness leaning over him.
“Mother, my heart is broken,” said the boy—he was really little more.
“The world exists no more for me. Let me make my last hat—and leave it.”
“Oh, Freddy, don’t you know me?” gasped Cornelia in the background; but
the repentant woman who had brought about all this trouble drew the girl
away.
“Even good news broken suddenly to him in his weak state,” said Mrs.
Vivianson in a rapid whisper, “may prove fatal. I have a plan which may
gradually enlighten him.”
“I trust you,” said Cornelia. “You have saved his life with your
nursing. Now give him back to me!”
“Hush!” said Mrs. Vivianson.
She had rapidly dispatched a messenger to Condover Street, and now, as
Freddy again opened his eyes and repeated his piteous request, the
messenger returned. Then all present gathered about the bed, whose
inmate had been raised upon supporting pillows. It was a queer scene as
the shaded electric light above the bed played upon Freddy’s pallid
features, showing the ravages of sickness there. “Now!” said Mrs.
Vivianson. She placed the milliner’s box upon the bed, and Freddy’s
feeble fingers, diving into it, drew forth a spray of orange blossoms
and a diaphanous cloud of filmy lace.
“Black—not white!” Freddy gasped brokenly. “It is a mourning toque that
I must make. Let Cornelia wear it at my funeral.”
“Cornelia will not wear it at your funeral, Freddy,” said Mrs.
Vivianson, bending over him; “for she is going to marry you, not to bury
you.” And, drawing the tearful girl to Freddy’s side, she flung over her
beautiful head the bridal veil, and crowned her with a wreath of orange
blossoms. And as, with a feeble cry, Freddy opened his wasted arms and
Cornelia fell into them, Mrs. Vivianson, her work of atonement
completed, pressed the offered hand of Freddy’s mother, and hurried out
of the room and out of the story. Which ends, as stories ought, happily
for the lovers, who are now honeymooning in the Riviera.
UNDER THE ELECTRICS
A SHOW-LADY IS ELOQUENT
“Really, my dear, I think the man has gone a bit too far. Writes a
play with a fast young lady in the Profession for the heroine—and
where he got his model from I can’t imagine—and then writes to the
papers to explain, accounting for her past being a bit off
color—_twiggez-vous?_—by saying she isn’t a Chorus-lady, only a
Show-lady.
“Gracious! I’m short of a bit of wig-paste, my pet complexion-color No.
2. Any lady present got half a stick to lend? I want to look my special
best to-night: _somebody in the stalls_, don’tcherknow! Chuck it
over!—mind that bottle of Bass! I’m aware beer is bad for the liver, but
such a nourishing tonic, isn’t it? When I get back to the theater, tired
after a sixty-mile ride in somebody’s 20 h.p. Gohard—_twiggez?_—a
tumbler with a good head to it makes my dear old self again in a twink.
“Half-hour? That new call-boy must be spoke to on the quiet, dears. Such
manners, putting his nasty little head right into the show-ladies’
dressing-room when he calls. I suggest, girlies, that when we’re all
running down for the general entrance in the First Act—and that
staircase on the prompt side is the narrowest I ever struck—I suggest
that when we meet that little brute—he’s always coming up to give the
principals the last call—I suggest that each girl bumps his head against
the wall as she goes by! That’ll make twenty bumps, and do him lots of
good, too!
“Miss de la Regy, dear, I lent you my blue pencil last night. Hand it
over, there’s a good old sort, when you’ve given the customary languish
to your eyes, love. What are you saying? Stage-Manager’s order that
we’re not to grease-black our eyelashes so much, as some people say it
looks fair hideous from the front? Tell him to consume his own smoke
next time he’s in a beast of a cooker. Why don’t he tell _her_ to mind
her own business?—I’m sure she’s old enough! What I say is, I’ve always
been accustomed to put lots on mine, and I don’t see myself altering my
usual make-up at this time o’ day. Do you? Not much?—I rather thought
so. What else does he say?—he’ll be obliged if we’ll wear the chin-strap
of our Hussar busbies down instead of tucked up inside ’em? What I say
is—and I’m sure you’ll agree with me, girls—that it’s bad enough to have
to wear a fur hat with a red bag hangin’ over the top, without marking a
young lady’s face in an unbecoming way with a chin-strap. Also he
insists—what price him?—he _insists_ on our leavin’ our Bridgehands down
in the dressing-room, and not coming on the stage with ’em stuck in the
fronts of our tunics, in defiance of the Army Regulations? Rot the
Regulations, and bother the Stage-Manager! How _she_ must have been
nagging at him, mustn’t she?—because he _can_ be quite too frightfully
nice and gentlemanly when he likes. I will speak up for him that much.
Not that I ever was a special favorite—I keep myself to myself too much.
Different to some people not so far off. _Twiggez?_ I’ve my pride,
that’s what I say, if I am a Show-girl!
“Thirty-five shillings a week, with _matinées_—you can’t say it’s much
to look like a lady on, can you now? No, but what a girl with taste and
clever fingers, and a knack of getting what she wants at a remnant
sale—and the things those forward creatures in black cashmere _Princess_
robes try to shove down a lady-customer’s throat are generally the
things she could buy elsewhere new for less money—not but that a girl
with her head screwed on the right way can turn out in first-class style
for less than some people would think, and get credit in _some quarters
we know of_—this is a beastly, spiteful world, my dear—for taking
presents right and left.
“Now, who has been and hung my wig on the electric light? If the person
considers that a practical joke, it shows—that’s what I say!—it shows
that she’s descended from the lowest circles. I won’t pretend I don’t
suspect who has been up to her little games again, and, though I should,
_as a lady_, be sorry to behave otherwise, I must caution her, unless
she wishes to find her military boots full of prepared chalk one o’
these nights, to quit and chuck ’em.
“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.