delivering letters from a rack on the wall, lettered S, into the hands
of a slight little woman in a rather shabby tweed ulster and plain felt
hat. Gerry’s heart jumped as he recognized his own handwriting upon one
of the envelopes.... Surely the tiny tin gods had favored him! The
little woman in the ulster and the plain felt hat must be lady’s maid to
the brilliant Speranza. As she thrust the letters into her pockets,
nodded familiarly to the commissionaire, and came out of the stage-door
office, Gerry, his heart in his mouth and his hat in his hand, stood in
her way.
“Miss—Madam——” he began. “If I might ask you——”
“What’s that?” shouted the commissionaire. As the little woman stepped
quickly backwards, Cerberus emerged, purple and growling, from his den
and reared his huge body as a barrier before her. “Annoying the lady,
are ye?” he roared, with a fine forgetfulness of Gerry’s sovereigns.
“Wait till I knock your mouth round to the back of your head, you
kid-gloved young blaggyard, you! Wait till——”
“Be quiet, O’Murphy!” said the little woman in a tone and with an accent
which raised her to the level of lady’s companion in Gerry’s estimation.
And as the crestfallen O’Murphy retreated into his den, she said,
turning a plain little clever face, irradiated by a pair of brilliant
eyes, upon the crimson Gerry, “Did you wish to speak to me?”
“I certainly do, if you are any relative—or a member of the household—of
Miss Speranza,” Gerry stuttered.
There was a flash of eyes and teeth in the plain, insignificant face.
“Oh, yes,” said the little woman, “I live with Miss Speranza.”
Gerry’s tongue grew large, impeding utterance, and his palate dried up.
Of all creatures upon earth this little tweed-ulstered woman, in the
well-worn felt hat with the fatigued feather, seemed to him the most to
be envied.
“You—you’re lucky,” he said lamely, and blushed up to the roots of his
hair, and down to the tips of his toes.
“I’ve known her ever since she knew herself,” said the little companion.
“We were girls together.” Gerry could have laughed in her middle-aged
face, but he only handed her his card. “Oh yes,” she said after she had
glanced at it. “I seem to know the name. You have written to her,
haven’t you?”
“Sev-several times,” acquiesced Gerry hoarsely. “I have ta-taken the
privilege.”
“A great many other young gentlemen have taken it too,” observed Miss
Speranza’s companion.
Then, as the swing doors behind her opened to let out a blast of hot air
and several grimy stage carpenters, and the swing doors before her
parted to let in a blast of cold air as the men shouldered out, “Excuse
me,” she said, and shivered, and moved as though to pass. “It is very
cold here, and the brougham is waiting.”
“Beggin’ pardon!” said O’Murphy, looking out of his hole, “the groom
sent his jooty, an’ the pole av a ’bus had gone clane through the back
panel av the broom in a block off the Sthrand.... The horse kicked wan
av his four shoes off, an’ they’ve gone back wid themselves to the
stables to get the landau an’ pair——”
“Call a hansom,” said the plain little woman. “I—we can’t wait here all
night!”
As O’Murphy saluted and went outside, she stepped into his vacant hutch,
and Gerry daringly followed.
“If I might venture to offer,” he began. “My cab—place disposal—Miss
Speranza—too much honored——” He trailed off into a morass of polite
intentions, rudimentarily expressed. The little companion maintained a
preoccupied air; she was probably expecting her mistress, Gerry thought,
but the conviction was no sooner formed than banished.
“You are very kind,” she said, “but Miss Speranza cannot avail herself
of your offer. She sometimes leaves quite early, and by the private
door, and, as it happens, I am going home alone.”
“Oh!” cried Gerry earnestly, “if you knew how awfully I want to speak to
you, you would let me drive you there—wherever it is!”
Tears stood in the soft eyes of the somewhat soft-headed young man, and
the heart of the little lady in the ulster was softened, for she looked
upon him with a smile, saying:
“Here comes O’Murphy to say my hansom is waiting.... You may drive with
me part of the way, and say what you have to say, if it is so very
important,” she said, with a brilliant gleam of mockery in her
remarkable eyes.
Need one say that the enamored Gerry jumped at the proposal, and they
went out into the plashy night together.
“Give the driver the address, O’Murphy,” ordered the little ulstered
woman. “Jump in!” she said to Gerry, and, presto! they were rattling
together up a stony thoroughfare leading from the roaring midnight
Strand, which in the present year of grace presents a smooth face of
macadam.
“Will you have the glass down?” said Gerry.
“Too warm!” cried the little ulstered woman. “Now, what have you to
say?”
“How this trap rattles!” shouted Gerry. “One can hardly hear oneself
speak. But with regard to Miss Speranza——”
“I suppose the pith of the matter is—you are in love with her?” shrieked
the little woman.
“Madly!” bellowed Gerry. “Been so for weeks. Hold up, you brute!” This
to the cab-horse, a dilapidated equine wreck, which had stumbled.
“Oh, you boys! You’re all alike!” cried his companion.
“Mine is a man’s love,” roared Gerry. “I would lay the world at her
feet, if I had it; and I want you to tell her so.” The rattling of the
crazy cab nearly drowned his accents. “Oh! what do you think she will
say?” he bellowed, his lips close to the little woman’s ear.
“She would say—Oh! _do_ you think this man is sober?” screamed the
little woman. “I mean the driver,” she added, meeting Gerry’s indignant
glare.
“I don’t think he is too drunk to drive,” yelled Gerry. “Tell me, if you
have a heart,” he howled, “have I any chance _with her_?”
“Ah! we’re off the cobblestones now!” said his companion, leaning back
with an air of relief.
“And you can answer my question,” pressed Gerry. “I—I needn’t explain my
views are honorable—straight as a fellow’s can be. Love like mine is——”
“So dreadfully greasy!” commented his companion anxiously, as the
debilitated steed recovered himself with difficulty at the end of a long
slide.
“When I have been sitting, night after night, in that box looking at
her, thinking of her, worshiping her, by George!” went on Gerry, “she
must have sometimes noticed me, and said to herself——”
“I _knew_ he would go down!” cried the little woman, clutching Gerry’s
arm, as the steed disappeared and the shaft-ends bumped on the asphalt.
“Let’s get out!”
“Don’t be alarmed, lydy,” said a hoarse voice, through the trap
overhead, as the panting steed heaved and struggled to regain his hoofs.
“’E won’t do it agen this journey. One fall is ’is allowance, an’ ’e
never goes beyond.”
“And we’re quite close to Pelgrave Square,” said Gerry.
“How do you know Miss Speranza lives in Pelgrave Square?” said his
companion with a keen look.
“Because I’ve seen photogravings of her house in an illustrated
interview,” replied Gerry.
“Ah, of course,” said the little lady, with a thoughtful smile. The
steed, bearing out his driver’s recommendation, was now jogging along
reassuringly enough. “And did the portraits remind you of no one?” she
added, with another of those flashing smiles that invested her little
fatigued features with transient youth.
“They weren’t half beautiful enough for her,” said Gerry fervently. Then
a ray of light broke upon him, and he jumped. “You—you’re a little bit
like her!” he exclaimed. “What a blind duffer I am! I’ve been taking you
for her companion, and all the while you’re a relative.”
“Yes, I am a relative,” nodded the little lady.
“Her aunt!” hazarded Gerry.
“Her mother!” said the little lady, with a dazzling flash of eyes and
teeth. “How stupid you were not to guess it before!”
“I’ve said nothing, madam, that I should not, I trust,” remarked Gerry,
with quite a seventeenth-century manner. “And, therefore, when I entreat
you to allow me an interview with your daughter, I trust you will not
refuse to grant my—my prayer.”
“Hear the boy!” cried the little woman, with a trill of laughter, as the
cab pulled up before a large lighted house in a large darkish square.
“Well,” she added, “I think I can promise you that Lottie will see you
at least for a minute or two to-morrow. Not here—at the theater, seven
o’clock sharp. Lend me a pencil and one of your cards.” She scribbled a
word or two on the bit of pasteboard, paid the cab in spite of Gerry’s
protestations, and ran lightly up the solemn doorsteps, turned to the
enraptured young man standing, hat in hand, below, waved her hand,
plunged a Yale key into the keyhole—and instantly vanished from view.
Behind Gerry’s shirt-front throbbed tumultuous delight. To have driven
in a cab with _her_ mother—talked of _her_, told his tale of love—albeit
with interruptions—and won the promise of an interview at seven sharp
upon the morrow.... Unprecedented fortune! incomparable luck! Did Time
itself cease he would not fail to keep the tryst with punctuality. He
caught a passing cab, drove home to his Piccadilly chambers, and went to
bed so blissfully happy that he spent a wretchedly bad night. The card
he kept beneath his pillow; and true to the promise made by the mother
of the enchantress of his soul—when, punctually to the stroke of seven,
Gerry, dressed with the most excruciating care, and clammy with
repressed emotion, presented himself at the stage door of the Levity—the
scrawled hieroglyphics on the blessed piece of pasteboard admitted him
behind the scenes. Led by a smartly-aproned maid, he climbed stairs, he
crossed the stage, was jostled by baize-aproned men in paper caps, and
begged their pardon. He followed his guide down a short passage, fell up
three steps—and knocked with his burning brow against the door—her door!
A voice he knew said, “Come in!” and in he went, to find, not the
adored, the worshiped Lottie, but the little plainish lady of the
previous night, sitting at a lace-veiled dressing-table, attired in a
Japanese gown.
“Oh, I say!” murmured Gerry.
“Ah! there you are!” The little lady looked at him over her shoulder,
and nodded kindly. “Don’t be too disappointed at not finding Lottie
here,” she said cheerfully; “she won’t be long.”
“I’m so awfully obliged for all your kindness,” said Gerry, sheepishly
smiling over a giant bouquet.
“You shall be really grateful to me one of these days, I promise you,”
said the little lady. “Let my maid take that haysta—that bouquet, and
sit down, do!”
Gerry took the indicated chair beside the dressing-table, and noted, as
he sucked the top of his stick, how pitilessly the relentless radiance
of the electric light accentuated the worn lines of the little lady’s
face and the gray streaks in her still soft and pretty brown hair.
“Cheer up!” she said, turning one of her flashing smiles upon him as he
sadly sucked his stick. “You won’t have long to wait for Lottie!”
“No!” said Gerry rather vacuously.
“No!” said Lottie’s mother, pulling off some very handsome rings and
hanging them upon the horns of a coral lobster that adorned the
dressing-table. “She takes about twenty minutes to make up.” Her pretty,
white, carefully-manicured fingers busied themselves, as she talked,
with various little pots and bottles and rolls of a mysterious substance
of a pinky hue, not unlike the peppermint suck-stick of Gerry’s youth.
“And are you as much in love with her to-day,” she continued, “as you
were last night?”
“So much in love,” said Gerry, uncorking himself, “that to call her my
wife I would sacrifice everything.”
“To _call_ her your wife?” The little lady pushed her hair back from her
face, twisted it tightly up behind, and pinned it flat with a relentless
hairpin.
“To make her my wife,” Gerry amended, with a healthy blush.
“Ah!” said the little lady, who had covered her entire countenance,
ears, and neck with a shiny mask of pinkish paste. “A word makes such a
difference.” She dipped a hare’s-foot into a saucer of rouge, and with
this compound impartially, as it seemed to Gerry, incarnadined her
cheeks and chin. “Of course,” she went on, dipping a disemboweled
powder-puff into a pot of French chalk and deftly applying it, “you are
aware that she possesses in years the advantage of yourself.”
“I am twenty-three,” said Gerry proudly.
“She owns to more than that!” said the lovely Lottie’s mother. She had
reddened her mouth, hitherto obliterated by the paste, into an alluring
Cupid’s bow, and darkened in, above her wonderfully brilliant eyes, a
pair of arch-provoking eyebrows. Now, as some inkling of the fateful
revelation in store clamped Gerry’s jaws upon his stick and twined his
legs in a death-grip about the supports of his chair, she rapidly, with
a blue pencil, imparted to those brilliant eyes the Oriental languor,
the divinely alluring, almond-lidded droop that distinguished Lottie’s,
seized a tooth-brush, dipped it into a bottle, apparently of liquid
soot, rapidly blackened her eyelashes, indicated with rose-pink a dimple
on her chin, groped for a moment in a cardboard box that stood upon the
ledge of her toilet table, produced a golden wig of streaming tresses,
dexterously assumed it, pulled here, patted there, twisted a
brow-tendril into shape—and turning, shed upon the paralyzed Gerry the
smile that had enchained his heart.
“I told you Lottie would not be long,” said Lottie, “and I’ve made up
under twenty minutes. You dear, silly, honorable, romantic boy, don’t
stare in that awful way. Twenty-three indeed! And I told you I owned to
more! I ought to, for I have a son at Harrow, and a daughter of
seventeen besides.... Do try and shut your mouth. Why, you poor dear
goose, I was making my bow to the boys in the gallery when you were
playing with a Noah’s Ark. Shake hands, and go round in front and see me
do my piece, as usual. I’ve got used to that nice fresh face of yours up
in Box B, and applause is the breath of my nostrils, if I am old enough
to be your mother. Leave your flowers; my girl at home has got quite to
look out for them—and be off with you, because this”—she indicated the
French chalk—“has got to go farther!” She gave Gerry her pretty hand and
one of the brilliant smiles, as he blundered up from his chair, gasping
apologies.
“Come and lunch with us to-morrow. You know my address, and I’ve told
the Professor all about you. You’ll like the Professor—my husband. One
of the best, though his wife says it. And the children——”
“Can I come in, mother?” said a clear voice outside.
“All right, pet!” called back Gerry’s late goddess, and a girl of
seventeen came into the room. She was all that Gerry had dreamed.... His
frozen blood began to thaw, and his tongue found words. Here was the
ideal.
“But her name isn’t Lottie!” said his dethroned goddess, with a twinkle
of the wondrous eyes. “However, you’re coming to lunch to-morrow, aren’t
you?”
“With the greatest pleasure,” said Gerry. And as he went round to his
box he carefully obliterated the name from the portrait cherished in his
bosom for so many weeks, with the intention of filling it in with
another to-morrow.
THE REVOLT OF RUSTLETON
A new-comer joined the circle of attentive listeners gathered round the
easiest of all the easy-chairs in the smoking-room of the Younger Sons’
Club. The surrounded chair contained Hambridge Ost, a small, drab,
livery man, with long hair and drooping eyelids, who, as cousin to Lord
Pomphrey, enjoyed the immense but fleeting popularity of the moment.
Everyone panted to hear the details of the latest Society elopement
before the newspapers should disseminate them abroad. And Hambridge was
not unwilling to oblige.
“The first inkling of the general trend of affairs, dear fellow,” said
Hambridge, joining his long, pale finger-tips before him, and smiling at
the new-comer across the barrier thus formed, “was conveyed to me by an
agitated ring at the telephone in my rooms. Bucknell, my man, hello’ed.
To Bucknell’s astonishment the ring-up came from 000, Werkeley Square,
the town mansion of my cousin, Lord Pomphrey, which he knew to be in
holland covers and the care of an ex-housekeeper. And Lady Pomphrey was
the ringer. When I hello’ed her, saying, ‘Are you there, Annabella? So
glad, but how unexpected; thought you were all enjoying your _otium cum_
down at Cluckham-Pomphrey’—my cousin’s country-seat in Slowshire, dear
fellow—such a verbal flood of disjointed sentences came hustling over
the wire, so to speak, that I felt convinced, even in the act of rubbing
my ear, which tickled confoundedly, that something was quite absolutely
wrong somewhere. Pomphrey—dear fellow!—was my first thought; then the
Dowager—the ideal of a fine old Tory noblewoman of ninety-eight, who may
drop, so to put it, any moment, dear creature, relieving her family of
the charge of paying her income and leaving the Dower House vacant for
Lord Rustleton, my cousin’s heir and his—ahem!—bride. Knowing that
Rustleton was to lead the Hon. Celine Twissing to the altar of St.
George’s, Hanover Square, early in the Winter season, it occurred to me,
so to put it, that the demise of the Dowager could not have occurred at
a more auspicious moment. Thank you, dear fellow, I _will_ smoke one of
your particular Partagas, since you’re so good.”
Four men struck vestas simultaneously as Hambridge relieved the nicotian
delicacy of its gold-and-scarlet cummerbund. Another man supplied him
with an ash-tray. Yet another pushed a footstool under his pampered
patent-leathers. Exhaling a thin blue cloud, the Oracle continued:
“Amidst my distracted relative’s fragmentary utterances I gleaned the
name of Rustleton. Hereditary weak heart—circulation as limited as that
of a newspaper which on strictly moral grounds declines to report
Divorce Cases—and a disproportionate secretion of bile, so to put it,
distinguishes him, dear fellow, from, shall I say, mortals less favored
by birth and of lower rank. A vision of a hatchment over the door of
000, Werkeley Square—of the entire population of the county assisting at
his obsequies, dear fellow—volted through my brain. I seized my hat, and
rushed from my chambers in Ryder Street. An electric hansom had
fortunately pulled up in front of ’em. I jumped in. ‘Where to?’ asked
the chauffeur. ‘To a broken-hearted mother,’ said I, ‘000, Werkeley
Square, and drive like the dooce!’”
Hambridge cleared his throat with some pomp, and crossed his little legs
comfortably. Then he went on:
“Like the Belgian sportsman, who, in missin’ a sittin’ hare, shot his
father-in-law in the stomach, mine was an effort not altogether wasted.
All the blinds of the house were down, and the hysterical shrieks of
Lady Pomphrey echoin’ through practically a desert of rolled-up carpets
and swathed furniture, had collected a small but representative crowd
about the area-railings. I leaped out of the motor-cab, threw the
chauffeur the legal fare, and bein’ admitted to the house by an
hysterical caretaker, ascended to my cousin’s boudoir, the sobs and
shrieks of the distracted mother growing louder as I went. Dear fellows,
when Lady Pomphrey saw me, heard me saying, ‘Annabella, I must entreat
you as a near relative to calm yourself sufficiently to tell me the
worst without delay, or to direct me to the nearest person who can
supply authentic information,’ the floodgates of her sorrow were opened
to such an extent that—possessing a constitution naturally susceptible
to damp—I have had a deuce of a cold ever since.
“Lord Rustleton—always a nervous faddist, though the dearest of
fellows—Rustleton had suddenly broken off his engagement to the Hon.
Celine Twissing, only child and heiress of Lord Twissing of Hopsacks,
the colossal financier figurehead, as I call him, of the Brewing Trade.
Naturally, the young man’s mother was crushed by the blow. The marriage
was to have been solemnized at the opening of the Winter Season—the
trousseau was nearly ready, and the cake—a mammoth pile of elaborate
indigestion—was bein’ built up in tiers at Guzzards’. The presents
(includin’ a diamond and sapphire bangle from a Royal source) had come
in in shoals. Nothing could be more confoundedly inopportune than
Rustleton’s decision. For all her muscularity—and she is an unpleasantly
muscular young woman—you’d marry her yourself to-morrow did you get the
chance, dear fellow. _Vous n’êtes pas dégoûté._
“But Rustleton’s a difficult man—always was. His personal appearance
ain’t prepossessin’, but he is Somebody, and looks it; d’ye foller me?
You feel at once that a long line of ancestors, more or less
distinguished, must have handed down the bilious tendency from father to
son. Originally—which goes to prove that first impressions are the
stronger—Lady Pomphrey tells me he could not stand Celine Twissing,
wouldn’t have her for nuts, or at any price; but after the disaster to
the steam yacht _Fifi_—run down by a collier at her moorings in
Southampton Water, you recollect, when by pure force of muscle Miss
Twissing snatched Lord Rustleton from a watery grave, so to put it—he
seemed to cave in, as it were, and the engagement was formally
announced. I thought his eye unsteady and his laugh hollow, when, with
the rest of the family, I proffered my insignificant congratulations. On
that occasion, dear fellow, he gave me two fingers instead of one, which
amounts to a grip with him, and whispered to the effect that there was
no use in cryin’ over spilled milk—a familiar saw which has sprung to my
own lips at the most inopportune moments.
“Celine was undoubtedly in love. Her being in love, so to put it, added
immensely to Rustleton’s discomfort. For the New Girl is, as well as a
muscular being, a strenuous creature, omnivorous in her appetite for
mental exercise, and from the latest theories in physics to the morality
of the newest Slavonic novelist Rustleton was expected to range with her
hour by hour. Her mass of knowledge oppressed him, her inexhaustible
fund of argument exhausted him, her fiery enthusiasm reduced him to a
condition of clammy limpness which was—I may say it openly—painful to
witness. A backward Lower boy and an impatient Head Master might have
presented such a spectacle. Thank you, I will take a Vermouth, since you
are so kind. But the boy, in getting away for the holidays, had the
advantage of Rustleton, poor fellow!”
Hambridge waited till the Vermouth came, and, sipping the tonic fluid,
continued:
“These details, I need not say, were not culled from Lady Pomphrey, but
extracted from Rustleton, who had rushed up to town and gone to earth at
his Club, to the consternation of the few waiters who were not taking
holidays at the seaside. Little by little I became master of the facts
of the case, which was one of disparity from the outset. From the
muscular as from the intellectual point Celine Twissing had always
overshadowed her _fiancé_. But Celine’s intimate knowledge of the mode
of conduct necessary—I quote herself—to sane living and clear thinking
positively appalled him. Rustleton began the day with hot Vichy water,
dry toast, weak tea, and a tepid immersion. _She_, Miss Twissing,
commenced with Indian clubs, a three-quarter-mile sprint in sweaters,
coffee, eggs, cold game-pie, ham, jam, muffins, and marmalade. Did she
challenge the man, to whom she was soon to pledge lifelong obedience at
the altar, to a single at lawn-tennis, she quite innocently served him
twisters that he could only follow with his eye, and volleyed balls that
infallibly hit it. At croquet she was a scientist, winning the game by
the time Lord Rustleton had got through three hoops, and coming back to
stand by his side and goad him to silent frenzy by criticism of his
method. She is a red-hot motorist, and insisted upon taking Rustleton,
wrapped in fur coats, and protected by goggles, as passenger in the back
seat of her sixty-horse-power ‘Gohard’ when she competed in the
Crooklands Circular Track One Thousand Mile Platinum Cup Race, for
private owners only, professional drivers barred; and upon my honor, I
believe she would have pulled up the winner and heroine of the hour had
not the racing diet of bananas, meat jujubes, and egg-nog created such a
revolt in Rustleton’s system, poor fellow, that at the sixth hour of the
ordeal he was borne, almost insensible, and bathed in cold perspiration,
from the _tonneau_ to a neighboring hotel.