eyebrows in embarrassment, and the butler permitted himself the shadow
of a smile.
“Ladies like sweet wine,” remarked Valcourt. He refused liqueur with
coffee, but considered Mrs. Mussard’s cigarettes “rather mild.”
“I—I don’t usually smoke that brand,” his hostess explained. “I—I
ordered them on purpose for——” She broke off, in sheer admiration of
Valcourt’s beautiful grin.
The _matinée_ for which she had secured a stage-box did not commence
until three. “Time for a little chat in the drawing-room,” she thought,
and ran over in her mind a list of the things dear Geraldine would have
wished her to say. She bade the boy sit in the opposite angle of her pet
sofa, upholstered in shimmering lily-leaf green, billowed with huge
puffy pillows of apricot-yellow, covered with cambric and Valenciennes.
She thought the harmony well completed by Valcourt’s sleek fair head and
inscrutable tourmaline eyes, and wished for the first time that poor
dear Mussard had left an heir. Vague as the yearning was, it imparted a
misty softness to her brown eyes, and caused the corners of her delicate
lips to quiver. She drew a little nearer to Valcourt, and laid her white
jeweled hand softly upon the muscular young arm, firm and hard beneath
an uncommonly well-cut sleeve.
“My dear Valcourt,” she began.
“Your eyes are brown, aren’t they?” asked Valcourt.
“I believe they are,” murmured Mrs. Mussard. “My dear boy, I trust
that——”
Valcourt shut his own sleepy tourmaline eyes and sniffed, a long
rapturous sniff. “Mother uses attar of violets. It’s her pet scent.
Jolly, but not so nice as yours. What is it?” He sniffed again. “I can’t
guess. ’Mph! I give it up. I know!” The sleepy tourmaline eyes opened,
large and round and bright, the cherubic-angelic smile suffused his
features. “Why, it comes from your hair!”
“People have said that before. Oh! never mind my hair!” Mrs. Mussard was
not displeased, nevertheless. “Tell me how you progress at School. You
know your mother is my dearest friend. I should so much like you to
remember that and confide in me, _almost_ as you confide in her!”
A solemn, innocent expression came over Valcourt’s face.
“All right,” he said, after a pause, during which he seemed to be
listening to choirs of angels chanting to the accompaniment of celestial
harps. “I’ll tell you things just exactly as I tell ’em to mother!”
“You dear!” exclaimed the impulsive young widow, and kissed him. The
smooth elastic skin, brownish-pink as a new-laid egg, and dotted with
sunny little freckles, grew pinker under the velvet violence of the
lady’s lips. Valcourt turned the other cheek, with his cherub’s smile,
and less warmly, because more consciously, his mother’s dearest friend
saluted that also.
“Now,” he said, in his boyish voice, “what did you want me to tell you
about School? I’m not a sap at books, and I don’t spend all my time in
getting up my muscles. I’m just an ordinary kind of fellow.... I say,
how pretty your nails are!”
He took up one of Mrs. Mussard’s exquisitely manicured hands, and,
holding it to the tempered sunlight that stole through the lace blinds,
noted with appreciative, if infantile, interest the pearly hues and rosy
inward radiances, the nicks and dimples of the wrist and the delicate
articulations of the fingers. Then, with a droll, half-mischievous
twinkle of the tourmaline eye that was next the fair widow, he bent his
sleek, fair head and rubbed his cheek against the pretty hand
caressingly.
“Silly boy!” breathed Mrs. Mussard.
“I believe I am an awful ass sometimes,” agreed Valcourt composedly.
“Who says so?”
“My tutor and heaps of other fellows, and the Head—not that he says so,
but he looks as if he thought it!” said Valcourt.
“Does the Head see a great deal of you?” asked Mrs. Mussard, drawing
away her hand and grasping at a chance of improving the languishing
conversation. Then as Valcourt, with a grave air of reserve, nodded in
reply, “I am _so glad_!” breathed Mrs. Mussard gushingly; “because, at
your age, impressions received must sink in deeply. And to be brought in
contact with a personality so marked must be impressive, mustn’t it?”
she concluded, rather lamely.
“I suppose so,” agreed Valcourt, examining the pattern of the carpet. He
looked a little sulky and a little bored, and for sheer womanly desire
of seeing the illuminations rekindled Mrs. Mussard gave him her hand
again.
“You are going into the Guards, aren’t you, by-and-by?” she queried.
“If I can get through,” said Valcourt, playing with her rings and
smiling. “I’m in the Army Class, mathematics and swot generally. But I
think our family’s too old or something to produce brainy fellows. Cads
are cleverer, really, than we are.”
His tone took a reflection of the purple, his finely-cut profile looked
for an instant hard as diamond and exquisite as a cameo.
Mrs. Mussard, sympathizing, said to herself: “After all, why _should_ he
be clever?”
“Still, when one hasn’t much money,” she began, reminiscent of the
Duchess’s entreaty.
“We’re beastly poor, of course,” admitted Valcourt. “But as to clothes
and horses and shootin’, tradespeople will tick a fellow till the cows
come home, and the millionaire manufacturers who buy or rent fellows’
forests and moors and rivers and things are always glad to get the
fellow himself to show with ’em; and the keepers and gillies and chaps
take care that he gets the best that’s going generally. And so he does
himself pretty well all round.”
“That sort of thing is too—undignified!” said Mrs. Mussard, “and too
uncertain. A man of rank and title must have a solid backing, a definite
_entourage_. You must marry, and marry well.”
“Mother always talks like that!” said Valcourt. “I think,” he added,
“she has somebody in her eye for me!”
“Who is she?” asked Mrs. Mussard sharply.
“I’m not quite sure,” said Valcourt, his tourmaline eyes narrowing as he
smiled his angelic smile. “Dutch Jewess, perhaps,” he added simply,
“with barrels of bullion and a family all nose.”
“Horrible!” cried Mrs. Mussard, shuddering.
“Her brother’s in the Fifth,” let out Valcourt. “We call him ‘Hooky
Holland.’ Their father was secretary to the Klaproths and made heaps of
cash—‘cath’ Hooky calls it. He never talks about anything but ‘cath,’
and fellows punch him for it.” Valcourt doubled his right hand
scientifically, thumb well down, and glanced at it with modest
appreciation ere he resumed: “He has lots of it, too, Hooky, and lends
at interest—pretty thick interest—to fellows who get broke at Bridge or
baccarat!”
“Oh-h! You don’t play baccarat at school, surely! Such an awfully
gambling game!” expostulated Valcourt’s hostess.
“We go to school to be educated, you see,” said Valcourt, in a slightly
argumentative tone, “for what Buntham calls ‘the business of life,’ and
cards are part of a fellow’s life, aren’t they? So they ought, instead
of being forbidden, to form part of what Old Cads calls the curriculum.
We call Buntham ‘Cads’ because he calls us cads when we do anything that
upsets him. He’s a nervous beggar, and gets a good deal of upsetting. My
dame says he weighs himself at the end of every term, and makes a note
of the pounds he’s lost since the beginning. When I go to Sandhurst she
thinks he’ll pick up a bit,” explained Valcourt with his angelic grin.
“I hope your dame is a nice, motherly old person!” breathed Mrs.
Mussard.
“She’s nice—quite,” said Valcourt, “and awfully obliging. I don’t know
about being old—unless you’d call thirty-three old.” Mrs. Mussard
started slightly. “When I have a cold she makes me jellies and things.
Awfully good things! And I give her concert tickets, and sometimes we go
on the river and have strawberries and cream. Lots of our fellows tell
her their love affairs.”
“Do you?”
“And some of ’em are in love with her,” went on Valcourt.
Mrs. Mussard breathed quickly. Never before had she realized what perils
environ the young of the opposite sex, even with the chaste environment
of school bounds. In her agitation she laid her hand on Valcourt’s
shoulder. “I hope—you do not fancy yourself in love with her,” she
uttered anxiously.
“Not much catch!” said Valcourt, with the composure of forty. “I got
over that in my second year.”
“Silly boy!” Mrs. Mussard very gently smoothed down a lock at the back
of his head, which erected itself in silky defiance above its fellows.
“When love comes to you, Valcourt,” she went on, with a vivid
recollection of the utterances of the inspired authoress of _The Bride’s
Babble Book_, “you will find out what it _really_ means. It is a great
mystery, my dear boy, a sacred and solemn unveiling of the heart——”
She stopped, for Valcourt had turned his face up toward hers, gently
smiling, and revealing two neat rows of milky white teeth. His
tourmaline eyes had an odd expression.
“Did you speak, dear?” his fair Gamaliel asked. For the impression upon
her was that he had uttered two words, and that they were, “Hooky’s
sister!”
But Valcourt shook his head. “I was only thinking. A fellow like me ...
has got to take what comes ... the best he can get ... and the better it
is, so much the better for him, don’t you see? If he don’t like what he
gets, he doesn’t go about grousing. He generally pretends he’s suited;
and _she_ pretends; and they get into a groove—or they get into the
newspapers,” said Geraldine’s unworldly babe. “Beastly bad form to get
into the newspapers. I never mean to.”
Mrs. Mussard listened breathlessly.
“I shall have a rattling time,” said Valcourt, in his soft, cooing
voice, “till Hooky’s sister grows up, and mother presents her, and then
I shall marry her, I suppose.”
“Dearest boy, I hope not!” exclaimed Mrs. Mussard. “Someone more
suitable _must_ be found,” she continued, rapidly putting all the
moneyed girls of her acquaintance through a mental review. “Why should
you not marry beauty and birth as well as a banking account? The three
things are sometimes associated.”
“German princes pick up girls of that kind,” said Valcourt, his elbows
upon his knees, and his round young chin cupped in his hands, “and
Austrian archdukes. But why need it be a girl?” he went on, pressing up
the smooth young skin at his temples with his finger-tips, so as to
produce the effect of premature crows’-feet. “I don’t like girls—all red
wrists and flat waists. Why shouldn’t it be a woman, say a dozen years
older—an awfully pretty woman, rich, and in the best set, who’d show me
the ropes? I’m a jolly ass in some things. I shall come no end of
croppers when I go into society, unless there’s somebody to give me the
needful tip.”
Mrs. Mussard sat very upright. She looked at Valcourt; the hand with
which she had smoothed his hair remained suspended in mid-air until she
recollected it and laid it over its companion in her lap.
“Most young fellows beginning life go to other men’s wives for advice,”
said Valcourt. “Why shouldn’t I go to my own?”
Mrs. Mussard’s chiseled scarlet lips moved as though she had echoed,
“Why not?”
“They—the chaps I’m talking of—are wild about ’em—the other men’s wives.
Yet nearly all of the women are old enough to be their mothers.”
“Their grandmothers, sometimes,” said Mrs. Mussard unkindly.
“Then why shouldn’t I marry a woman who’s only old enough to be my
aunt—a young aunt! I’d make a Marchioness of her, don’t you know! and
she’d make—she could make anything she liked of me!” said Valcourt,
turning his cherub smile and tourmaline eyes suddenly on Mrs. Mussard.
“_You_ could!” The lovely widow started violently, and flushed from the
string of pearls encircling her pretty throat to the little gold
hair-waves that crisped at her blue-veined temples. “You _know_ you
could!” murmured Valcourt. The strong young arm in the well-cut sleeve
intercepted the retreating movement that would have placed the lovely
widow in the uttermost corner of the sofa. The remonstrance upon
Vivienne’s lips was stifled by a kiss, given with eloquence and
decision, though the lips that administered it were soft, and unshaded
by even the rudiments of a mustache. “I’m seventeen the end of this
term, and five feet nine in my socks,” said Valcourt, a little
breathlessly, for the kiss had not been one-sided; “and—and you’re
simply awfully pretty. Marry me—I shall be of age before you know
it—and——”
“You dreadfully presuming boy!” There were tears in the lovely eyes of
the late Mr. Mussard’s lovely widow; an unwonted throbbing in the region
of her bodice imparted a tremor to her voice that added to its charm. “I
shall write to your mother!”
“Do!” said Valcourt, with his angelic smile. “She’ll be awfully pleased!
I wonder the idea didn’t occur to her instead of to me, for she’s
awfully clever, and I’m rather an ass.... Five o’clock!” he exclaimed,
as the delicate chime of a Pompadour clock upon the mantelshelf
announced the hour.
“And you have missed the _matinée_!” said Mrs. Mussard.
“I preferred this!” said Valcourt, getting up. She had no idea of his
being taller than herself until she found the tourmaline eyes looking
down into hers. “Good-bye, and thank you, Mrs. Mussard,” said the
boyish, ringing voice. “I’ve had an awfully pleasant day.”
Their hands met and lingered.
“Don’t call me Mrs. Mussard any more; my—my name is Vivienne,” she said
in a half-whisper.
“Jolly! Hooky’s sister’s is Bethsaba,” said Valcourt. He made a quaint
grimace, as though the word tasted nasty, and Vivienne gave a little,
musical, contented laugh. “And I may come again, mayn’t I?”
“This week,” nodded Mrs. Mussard.
“I’ll say it’s my tooth,” explained Geraldine’s guileless offspring.
He reached the door, the handle turned, when Mrs. Mussard beckoned, and
Valcourt came back.
“I should like to ask you,” she began hesitatingly—“not that it matters
to me; but _still_, in your _own interests_—— And you know your mother
is my dearest friend!” ... Valcourt stood with the beautiful grin upon
his face, and Mrs. Mussard found the thing more difficult to say than
she had imagined. “Where did you—who taught you to make love like—like
that?—at your—at your age.... I—it is——” Valcourt made no reply in
words, but the expression upon his face became more celestial than
before. “I hope kissing is not a feature of the curriculum. But,
understand clearly,” said Mrs. Mussard, with that unusual tremor in her
charming voice, “that you are not for the future to kiss anybody but
me!” And as the door closed on Valcourt’s heavenly grin and tourmaline
eyes, she sat down to write a letter to Geraldine.
THE EVOLUTION OF THE FAIREST
If not absolutely a nincompoop, Gerald Delaurier Gandelish, Esq., of
Swellingham Mansions, Piccadilly, Undertherose Cottage, Sunningwater,
Berks, and Horshundam Abbey, Miltshire, was undoubtedly a type of the
_genus homo_ recently classified by a distinguished K.C. as soft-minded
gentlemen. Strictly educated by a private clerical tutor under the eye
of pious parents of limited worldly experience and unlimited prejudices,
it was not to be expected that Gerry, upon their dying and leaving him
in undisputed command of a handsome slice of the golden cheese of
worldly wealth, should not immediately proceed to make ducks and drakes
of it. He essayed to win a name upon the Turf; and when I remind you
that, at a huge price, the youth became possessor of that remarkable
Derby race-horse, Duffer, by Staggers out of Hansom Cab, from whom
eighteen opponents cantered away in the Prince’s year of ’90, leaving
the animal to finish the race at three lengths from the starting-post, I
have said all. Gerry dabbled “considerable,” as our American relatives
would say, in stocks, and started a _café chantant_ on the open-air
Parisian plan, which was frequented only by stray cats and London
blacks, and has since been roofed in and turned into tea-rooms. Sundry
other investments of Gerry’s resulted in the enrichment of several very
shady persons, and a consequent, and very considerable, diminution in
the large stock of ready money with which Gerry had started his career.
But though the edges of the slice of golden cheese had been a good deal
nibbled, the bulk of it remained, and Gerry’s Miltshire acres, strictly
entailed and worth eighty thousand pounds, with another twenty thousand
in Consols, and about half as much again snugly invested in Home Rails,
made him a catch worth angling for in the eyes of many mothers.
We have termed Gerry “soft-minded.” He was also soft-hearted, soft-eyed,
soft-voiced, soft-haired, soft-skinned, and soft-mannered—the kind of
youth women who own to years of discretion like to pet and bully, the
kind of man schoolgirls call a “duck.” True, his neckties aroused
indignation in the breasts of intolerant elderly gentlemen, the patterns
of his tweeds afforded exquisite amusement to members of the Household
Brigade, and his jewelry could not be gazed at without winking by the
unseasoned eye; but, despite these drawbacks, Gerry was a gentleman.
Without the stamp of a public school or a select club, without the tone
of the best society—for, with the exception of a turfy baronet or so and
a couple of sporting peers, Gerry knew nobody who was anybody—Gerry was
decidedly a gentleman, whose progress to the dogs was arrested, luckily
for the young prodigal, when he fell in love with the famous burlesque
actress, Miss Lottie Speranza, of the Levity Theater.
Of theaters and theatrical people Gerry may be said to have known little
or nothing until the enchanting Lottie blazed upon his field of vision.
Gerry’s worthy parents, strict moralists both, had considered the
theater as the temple of Satan, and had exacted from their only child a
solemn promise that he would never enter one. This promise Gerry had
actually kept, contenting himself with the entertainments offered by the
music halls, which his father had omitted to stigmatize and his mother
knew not of. But at the close of a festive dinner, given by Gerry to a
select party of “pals,” in a private room at the Levity Restaurant, when
a brief, lethargic slumber obscured the senses of the youthful host, the
brilliant idea of conveying him to a box in the theater upstairs
occurred to one of his guests, and was forthwith carried out. Emerging
from a condition of coma, Gerry found himself staring into a web of
crossing and intersecting limelights of varying hues, in which a
dazzling human butterfly, entangled, was beating quivering wings. The
butterfly had lustrous eyes, encircled with blue rims, a complexion of
theatrical red and white, and masses of golden hair. Her twinkling feet
beat out a measure to which Gerry’s pulses began to dance madly. He sent
the goddess an invitation to supper, which was promptly declined. He
forwarded a stack of roses, which were not acknowledged, and a
muff-chain, turquoise and peridot, which were returned to the address
upon his card. He felt hurt but happy at these rebuffs, which proved to
him that Miss Speranza was above reproach; and when a bosom friend of
his own age hinted that the prudish fair one was playing the big game,
and advised him to try her with a motor-car, Gerry promptly converted
the bosom friend into a stranger by the simple process of asking him to
redeem a few of his I O U’s. This got about, and caused Gerry’s other
friends to turn sharp round corners, or jump into hansoms when they saw
Gerry coming. Gerry hardly missed them, though the man who could have
afforded an introduction to his charmer would have been welcomed with
open arms. He occupied the same box at the Levity nightly now, and made
up, in its murkiest corner, a good deal of the nightly rest of which his
clamant passion deprived him. But he awakened, as by instinct, whenever
Miss Speranza tripped upon the stage; and the large-eyed, vacuous,
gorgeously-attired beauties who “went on” with the Chorus—the Lotties,
Maries, Daisies, Topsies of the noble houses of Montague, Talbot, De
Crespigny, and Delamere,—would languidly nudge each other at the
passionately prolonged plaudits of a particular pair of immaculate white
gloves, and wonder semi-audibly what the man saw in Speranza, dear, to
make such a bloomin’ silly fuss about?
Gerry had occupied his watch-tower at the Levity for six weeks or so,
and was beginning to deteriorate in appetite and complexion (so powerful
are the effects of passion unreturned), when Undertherose Cottage at
Sunningwater, a charming Thames-side residence of the bijou kind, with
small grounds and a capacious cellar, a boat-house, and a house-boat, a
pigeon-cote and a private post-box, became suddenly vacant. The tenant,
a lady of many charms and much experience, who had passed over to Gerry
with the property, returned to her native Paris to open a bonnet-shop;
and Gerry, as he wandered over the dwelling with the sanitary engineer
and decorator, who had _carte blanche_ to do-up the place, found himself
strolling on the tiny lawn (in imagination) by the visioned side of the
enchantress who had enthralled him, supping (also in imagination) with
the same divine creature in the duodecimo oak dining-room, and smoking a
cigarette in her delightful company upon the balcony of the boudoir.
Waking from these dreams was a piquant anguish. Gerry indeed possessed
the cage, one of the most ideal nests for a honeymooning pair
imaginable; but in vain for the airy feminine songster might the
infatuated fowler spread nets and set springs.
“If we didn’t live in this confoundedly proper twentieth century,”
thought disconsolate Gerry, “a chappie might hire a coach and eight,
bribe a few bruisers to repress attempts at rescue, snap her up
respectfully as she came out at the stage door, and absquatulate—no!
abduct’s the word. Not that I’d behave like a brute; I’d marry her
to-morrow if she’d only give me a chance to ask her. Marquises do that
sort of thing, and their families come round a bit and bless the young
people. She must have shown the door to dozens of ’em.” He sighed, for
where the possessor of a ripe old peerage had failed, how could Gerald
Gandelish, Esq., hope to triumph? “And she’s so awfully proper and
standoffish, too,” he reflected. He wondered how many years it had taken
those privileged persons whom the lady permitted to rank as her friends
to attain that enviable distinction. “I’ve never met a man who could, or
would, introduce me,” he added, pulling his mustache, which from happily
turning up at the corners had recently acquired a decided tendency to
droop. “Seemed to shy at it, somehow; and so I shall take the
initi—what-you-call—myself. She shall know from the start that my
intentions are honorable, and, hang it! the name’s a good one....
There’s been a Gandelish of Horshundam ever since Henry the Eighth
hanged the abbot and turned out the monks, and put my ancestor Gorbred
in to keep the place warm. Gorbred was His Majesty’s principal purveyor
of sack and sugar, ‘and divers dainty cates beside,’ as the Chronicle
has it, and must have given the Tudor unlimited tick, I gather. Anyhow,
if four centuries of landlording don’t make a tradesman a gentleman,
they ought to; and I can’t see——”
Gerry climbed into his “Runhard” thirty horse-power roadster, pulled
down the talc mask of his driving cap to preserve his eyes and
complexion, and ran back to town. That night, as he quitted his box at
the conclusion of the Levity performance (you will remember the
phenomenal run of _The Idiot Girl_ in 19—!), he turned up his coat
collar with the air of a man resolved to do or die, and boldly plunged
into the little entry leading to the stage door. The bemedaled military
guardian of those rigid portals, who had absorbed several of Gerry’s
sovereigns without winking, regarded him with a glazed eye and a stiff
upper lip.
“Would you kindly——” began Gerry.