understand,” observed Lady Millebrook. “Of course, you didn’t go?”
Clarice’s lovely gray-blue eyes opened. Her sensitive lips quivered.
“Oh! but I am afraid....” She heaved a little regretful sigh over her
past folly. “That is where I was weak, Bettine. I went. Oh, don’t
laugh!”
“My child, this is hysteria,” explained Lady Millebrook, removing the
filmy handkerchief from her lovely eyes. “Well—you went. You popped your
head into the lion’s mouth—and somehow or other Cadminster played the
_deus ex machina_, and got it out for you again.”
“The golf-house was a queer shanty, with a tarred roof,” said Mrs.
Tollebranch retrospectively. “It held a bunker of coals, and stands for
clubs, and a fireplace, and a folding luncheon-table, and camp-stools,
and hampers. We used to lunch outside when it didn’t rain or snow, and
inside when it did. Well, when Willibrand and Sir Roger Balcombe, Major
Wharfling, the Guardsmen, and Cadminster were quite out of sight,
Pontoise and I somehow found ourselves back at the golf-house. I was
cold, and there was a fire there, and he looked so handsome and so
miserable as he stood bare-headed by the door, waiting for me to enter,
that——”
“The fly walked in. And then the spider——”
“He disappointed me, I will own,” said Clarice, with a little gulp.
“After all his penitent protestations! I have never trusted men with
agate-colored eyes since, and I never will. They have only one idea of
women, and that is—the worst. But when I ordered him to let go my hands
and get up from his knees, something in my face or voice seemed to tell
him that I was really, really, in earnest, and he obeyed me, and moved
suddenly away as I went to the door. The latch rattled as I lifted my
hand, the door opened; Cadminster stood there, white from head to foot,
for a sudden blizzard had swept down from the hills, and the links were
four inches deep in snow. Oh! I shall never forget how tactful he was!
‘You have got here before the rest of us!’ he said, quite in a cheery,
ordinary way. ‘Lucky for you! Tollebranch and the others are coming
after me as hard as they can pelt, and we shall have to put out the
“House Full” boards in a minute.’ And he began to rattle out the flaps
of the luncheon-table, and get out things from the hamper, and then he
looked at me, and said, as he lifted the lid from a great kettle of
Irish stew that had been simmering over the fire, ‘Suppose you were to
take the ladle and give this mess a bit of a stir, Mrs. Tollebranch! The
fire will burn your face, I’m afraid, but what woman wouldn’t sacrifice
her complexion in the cause of duty?’ Oh, Bettine, I could have blessed
Cadminster as I seized that iron ladle, for seeming so natural and at
ease. And then—almost before I had begun to stir the stew—while I was
bending over the pot, Willibrand and the other men came in. What
followed I can never forget!”
“Now we come to Cadminster’s great act of heroism?” interrogated Lady
Millebrook.
“Willibrand came in stamping the snow off,” went on Mrs. Tollebranch.
“So did all the other men. Willibrand sniffed the odor of the oniony
stew with rapture. All the other men sniffed too.”
“The tastes of the male animal are extraordinarily simple,” observed
Lady Millebrook, “in spite of the elaborate pretense carried on and kept
up by him, of being a gourmand and a _connoisseur_. The coarsest dishes
are those which appeal most irresistibly to his palate, and when I find
it necessary for any length of time to chain Millebrook to his home, I
order a succession of barbaric _plats_. By the time we have reached
tripe and onions, served as an _entrée_, there is not a more
domesticated husband breathing. But pray continue.”
“They all assembled round the stewpot,” went on Clarice, “and watched
with absorbed interest the operation of turning its steaming contents
into the dish that awaited them. Cadminster and Willibrand undertook
this duty. Well——”
“Well?”
“Just as they heaved up the steaming cauldron, Willibrand called out,
‘Hulloa, what the deuce is that?’ His hands were occupied—he could not
get at his eyeglass,” said Mrs. Tollebranch, “and so he peered and
exclaimed, while I leaned over his shoulder and glanced into the
stewpot. There, floating upon the surface of the muttony, oniony,
carroty, potatoey mass, was”—she shuddered—“the letter Pontoise had
given me with my candlestick on the preceding night!”
“My _dear_, how awful!” gasped Lady Millebrook.
“I had had it in my pocket,” explained Mrs. Tollebranch, “when I arrived
at the golf-house. When I began to stir the stew I found the handle of
the ladle too hot to be pleasant, and I pulled out my handkerchief to
wrap round it.”
“Whisking Pontoise’s effusion out with it! How reckless not to have
burned it!” cried Lady Millebrook.
“Imagine my feelings!” said Clarice. “There was the letter in the
stewpot. As the contents were turned by Cadminster into the dish, I lost
sight of the envelope beneath a greasy avalanche of fat mutton and
vegetables. I remembered that Pontoise had referred to that unlucky
kiss; I recalled Willibrand’s unfortunate tendency to outbursts of
jealous rage without reason; I shuddered at the thought of the amount of
reason that envelope contained. Self-control abandoned me—my brain spun
round, I thought all lost ... and then—I caught Cadminster’s eye. There
was encouragement in it—and hope. ‘Trust to me,’ it said, ‘I will save
you!’”
“And——?”
“We sat down to table, and that stew was distributed, in large portions,
to all those men. Cadminster assumed control of the ladle. He gravely
asked me whether I cared about stew, and I gasped out something—what I
don’t know, but I believe I said I didn’t. When the words were out, I
knew that I had lost my only chance—that Cadminster had intended to help
me to that fatal envelope. My fate hung in the balance as he filled
plate after plate.... Who would get my letter in his gravy, amongst his
vegetables? What would happen then? Would it be rendered illegible by
grease, or would it not? I scarcely breathed, the suspense was so
awful!” said Mrs. Tollebranch, clutching Lady Millebrook’s sleeve. “And
then—Relief came. I grasped that man’s heroic motive—I understood the
full nobility of his nature when——”
“When Cadminster helped himself to the letter! But, good heavens! you
don’t mean to tell me,” cried Lady Millebrook, “that he _ate_ it?”
“He did, he did!” cried Mrs. Tollebranch, throwing herself into her
friend’s sympathetic embrace. “Now you know why I call him a Bayard, and
look upon him as my truest, noblest friend. Now you know....”
“Why he is a cadaverous dyspeptic! Of course. That document must have
completely wrecked his constitution.”
“It has,” interrupted Clarice, with a little shower of tears.
“I shall never say again,” remarked Lady Millebrook, as she took an
affectionate leave of her dearest friend but four, “that Romance and
Chivalry have no existence in these modern times. To jump into a den
full of lions and things to get a lady’s bracelet or save a lady’s glove
may sound finer, though I am not sure. But to eat another man’s
love-letter, envelope and all, to save a woman’s reputation ... there is
the true ring of heroism about it, the glow that ennobles an ordinary,
commonplace action into something superb. And, unless I mistake,
Pontoise invariably penned his amatory effusions upon the very stiffest
of parchment wove.... Darling, Lord Cadminster must dine with us....
Next Thursday; I will not take No!” ended Lady Millebrook; “and he may
rely upon it that if either Jedbrook or Mills presume to offer him
anything rich or oleaginous, either or both of them will be dismissed
next day!”
RENOVATION
The hands of the Dresden clock upon the white travertine mantelshelf of
Lady Sidonia’s boudoir pointed to the small hours. There was a discreet
knock at the door. The maid, a pale, pretty young woman, who was
wielding the hair-brush, laid the weapon down, and answered the knock.
“Who is it, Pauline?” asked Pauline’s mistress, with her eyes upon the
mirror, which certainly framed a picture well worth looking at.
“Her Grace’s maid, my lady, asking whether you are too tired for a
chat?”
“Say that I shall be delighted, and give me the blue Japanese kimono
instead of this pink thing. Will my hair do? Because, if it needs no
more brushing, you can go to bed.”
“Thank you, my lady.”
The door opened; trailing silks swept over the carpet....
“I can’t kiss you through all this brown-gold silk,” said the Duchess’s
voice. “Stop, though! You shall have it on the top of your head.” And
the kiss descended, light as a puff of thistle-down. “I kiss Cull there
sometimes, when I want him to be in a good temper. He says it thrills
right down to the tips of his toes.... You’re smiling! I guess you think
the stock of thrills ought to be exhausted by this time—three years
since we stood up together on the deck of Cluny F. Farradaile’s anchored
airship, a posse of detectives from Blueberry Street guarding the ends
of the fore and aft cables, where they were anchored three hundred feet
below in the grounds of the N’York Æther Club, just to prevent any one
of the dozens of Society girls who’d tried their level best to catch
Cull and failed, from coming along with a bowie and cutting ’em.... You
remember the pars. in all the papers, headed, ‘A Marriage Made in
Heaven,’ I guess?”
“Of course, of course,” said the Duchess’s hostess and dearest friend.
“My invention,” said her Grace, “and mighty smart, I reckon. I’d always
said I’d be married in a real original way—and I was. The only drawback
to the affair was that she pitched—I mean the airship—and the Minister,
and Cull, and Poppa, and the inventor—that’s Cluny F. Farradaile—were
taken poorly before the close of the cer’mony. As for my sex, I’m proud
to say that Amurrican women can rise superior even to air-sickness when
Paris frocks are in question. But when they wound us down we were glad
enough to get back to dry land. We found a representative of the Customs
waiting for us, by the way; and if Poppa hadn’t gone to law about it,
and proved that we were really fixed on to the States by our cables,
we’d have had to plank down the duty on every jewel we’d got on. Say,
pet, I’m perishing for a smoke!”
The Duchess was supplied with cigarettes. Pauline placed upon a little
table the materials that “factorize,” as the Duchess would have said,
towards the composition of cognac and soda, and glided out.
“Now I call that a real pretty, meek-looking creature,” said her Grace,
blowing a little flight of smoke rings in the direction of the door. “If
she’s as clever as she’s nice, Siddie, you’ve got a treasure!”
“She _is_ a good maid,” responded Lady Sidonia. “For one thing, she
knows a great deal about the toilette, and on the subject of the
complexion she’s really quite an authority. She knows something of
massage, too—on the American system—for, though an English girl, she has
lived in your country——”
“Oh!” said the Duchess, with an accent of interest. “Has she, indeed?”
“She’s reasonable, too,” went on the maid’s mistress; “and not a limpet
in the way of sticking to one mode of doing the hair and refusing to
learn any other. Then she can _wave_——”
“It is an accomplishment,” said the Duchess thoughtfully. “Now, my woman
either frizzes you like a Fiji, or leaves you dank and straight like a
mermaid. Why does hair never wave naturally—out of a novel? It’s a
question for a Convention. And men—dear idiots!—are such believers in
the reality of ripples. There! I’ve been implored over and over again
for ‘just that little bit with the wave in it’ to keep in a
locket—hundreds and hundreds of times. I guess Cull’s wiser now; but
once you’ve seen your husband’s teeth in a tumbler, you’ve entered into
a Conjugal Reciprocity Convention: ‘Believe in me—not as much of me as
really belongs to me, but as much as you see—and I’ll return the
compliment!’ Yes, I guess I’ll take some S. and B. It’s an English
accomplishment, and I’ve mastered it thoroughly. We Amurricans rinse out
with Apollinaris or ice-water, which isn’t half so comforting,
especially in trouble.”
And the Duchess heaved a butterfly’s sigh, which scarcely stirred her
filmy laces, and smoothed her prettiest eyebrow with one exquisite
finger-tip.
“Trouble!” exclaimed her friend. “My dear, you’re the happiest of women.
Don’t try to persuade me that you’ve got a silent sorrow!”
“Not exactly a silent one, because I’m going to confide in you; but
still it is a sorrow.” The Duchess confided one hand to her dearest
friend’s consoling clasp, and wiped away a tear with a minute
handkerchief that would not have dried half a dozen. “Perhaps Amurrican
blood is warmer than English; but, anyhow, our family affections are
vurry much more strongly developed over in the States than yours are
here. And I had a letter from Momma by yesterday’s mail that would have
melted a heart of rock.” She dried a second tear. “If Momma lives till
the end of Creation,” she said, “she will never, never get over it. And
I don’t wonder!”
“Darling, if it would really do you any good to tell me——” breathed Lady
Sidonia.
“I tell all my friends,” said the Duchess with a sigh; “and they’re
invariably of one opinion—that Momma was cruelly victimized.”
“She is——”
“Call her forty, dear. It would be just cruel to say anything more.
People call me lovely and all those things,” said the Duchess candidly,
“and I allow they’re correct. Well, compared with what Momma was at my
age, I’m real ordinary.”
“Oh!”
“Frozen fact! And you can grasp the idea that when—in spite of every
effort—Momma began to lose her figure and her looks, she felt it!”
“Every woman must!”
“But the more she felt it, the more she seemed to expand.... Grief runs
to fat, I do believe,” said the Duchess. “Of course, Poppa’s allowance
to Momma being liber’l—even for a Corn King—she had unlimited funds at
her disposal. To begin with, she rented a medical specialist.”
“Who dieted her?”
“My dear, for a woman accustomed to French cookery, and with the
national predilection for cookies and candy, it must have been——”
“Torture!”
“One gluten biscuit and the eye of a mutton cutlet for dinner. Think of
it! Beef-juice and dry toast for breakfast, ditto for supper. And she
used to skip—a woman of that size, too—for hours! And her trainers came
every morning at five o’clock, and they’d make her just put on a sweater
and take her between them for a sharp trot round Central Park, just as
if she’d been a gentleman jockey sworn to ride at so many stone for a
Plate. And the number of stone Momma got off——”
“She _got_ them off?”
“I guess she got them off,” said the Duchess. “Poppa talked of having an
elegant tombstone set up in Central Park to commemorate the greater
portion of a wife buried there! then he gave up the notion. And then
Momma made handsome presents to her specialist and her trainers, and
contracted with the cleverest operator in N’York to make a face.”
“To make a face?” repeated Lady Sidonia.
“To make a face for Momma that matched her youthful figure,” said the
Duchess composedly. “My! the time that man took in creating a surface to
work on! She slept for a fortnight with her countenance covered with
slices of raw veal.”
“Horrible!” shuddered the listener.
“And the massaging and steaming that went on!”
“I can imagine!”
“The foundations being properly laid——” continued the Duchess, lighting
another cigarette.
Lady Sidonia went into a little uncontrollable shriek of laughter. “As
though ... she had been a house!... Ha, ha, ha!”
“My dear,” returned the Duchess, shaking her beautiful head, “the terms
employed in the contract were precisely those I have quoted.... The
specialist laid the foundations, and carried the contract out. Momma’s
appearance delighted everyone, except Poppa, who has old-fashioned
notions, and complained of feeling shy in the presence of a stranger.
Fortunately their Silver Wedding eventuated just then, and his
conscience—Poppa’s conscience is, for a corn speculator’s, wonderfully
sensitive—ceased to annoy him.”
“And your mother?”
“Momma wore her new face for six months with the greatest satisfaction,”
said the Duchess. “Of course, she had to lay up for repairs pretty
often, but the specialist was there to carry them out. Unluckily, he
contracted a severe chill in the N’York winter season and died. His wife
put his tools and enamels and things in his coffin. She said she knew
business would be brisk when he got up again, and she didn’t wish any
other speculator to chip in before him.” The Duchess sighed. “Then came
Momma’s great trouble.”
“There was no other operator to—take up the—the contract?” hinted Lady
Sidonia.
“There were dozens,” said the Duchess, “and Momma tried them all. My
dear, you may surmise what she looked like.”
“A heterogeneous mingling of styles.”
“It was impossible to conjecture,” said the Duchess confidentially, “to
what period the original structure belonged. By day Momma resorted to a
hat and voile.”
“Even in the house?”
“Even in the house. By night—well, I guess you’ve noticed that a human
work of art, illuminated by electric light, isn’t seen under the most
favorable conditions.”
“There is a pitiless accuracy!”
“An unmerciful candor about its revelations. After one unusually
brilliant reception, Momma retired from society and took to
spiritualism. She persevered until she had materialized that demised
face-specialist, and extracted some definite raps in the way of advice.”
“And what did he advise?”
“He suggested, through the medium, that Momma should apply to the
Milwaukee Mentalists.”
“A Society of Faith Healers?”
“‘Occult Operatists,’ they call themselves on the prospectuses. As for
the cult of the Society,” said the Duchess pensively, “one might call it
a mayonnaise of Freemasonry, Theosophy, Hypnotism, Humbug, and Hoodoo.
But the humbug, like salad oil in the mayonnaise, was the chief
ingredient.” The Duchess stopped to draw breath.
“And into this vortex Mrs. Van Wacken was drawn?” sighed Lady Sidonia.
“Sucked down and swallowed,” said the Duchess, who had been Miss Van
Wacken. “They undertook to make Momma right over again, brand new, by
prayer and faith and—a mentally electrified bath. For which treatment
Momma was to pay ten thousand down.”
“Pounds!” shrieked the horrified Lady Sidonia.
“Dollars,” corrected the Duchess.
“In advance?” cried the listener.
“In advance, after a demonstration had been given which was practically
to satisfy Momma that the Milwaukee Mentalists were square,” said the
Duchess. “My word! when I remember how they bluffed that poor darling—I
should want to laugh, if I didn’t cry.” She dried another tear.
“Do go on!” entreated her friend.
“The High Priestess of the Community was a woman,” went on the Duchess,
“just as cool and ca’am and cunning as they make ’em.”
“I guessed as much,” said Lady Sidonia.
“It takes a woman to know and work on another woman’s weak points,”
rejoined the Duchess. “The High Priestess pretended to be in
communication with a spirit. ‘The Mystikos,’ they called him, and he
resided, when he was at home, in a crystal ball; but bullion was the
real totem of the tribe. Well—but it’s getting late——”
“I shall not sleep a _wink_ until I have heard the _whole story_,” said
Lady Sidonia.
“And Cull and your husband are comparing notes about their wives in the
smoking-room,” said the Duchess.
“Well, the Theologa——”
“The—the—what?”
“The Theologa—that was the professional title of the High
Priestess—whose or’nary name was Mrs. Gideon J. Swale,” her Grace went
on, “talked a great deal to Momma, and made some passes over her, and
got the poor dear completely under her thumb. Momma wasn’t the only
victim, you must know. There were four other ladies, all wealthy, and
each one, like Momma, the leader of a fashionable society set——”
“And—no longer young?”
“And past their first bloom,” amended the Duchess. “And each of ’em had
agreed to plank down the same sum in cold dollars.”
“Fifty thousand in all,” said Lady Sidonia with a sigh. She could have
done so much with fifty thousand dollars, even though American money was
such beastly stuff. “Worth——”
“Worth riskin’ a term in a N’York State prison for—I guess so!” said the
Duchess. “Well, Momma and the other ladies signed on to the terms, and
went through a cer’mony of purification—which included learnin’ a kind
of catechism used in admittin’ a new member into the Occult Operatists’
Community—an’ several hymns. That was to make them worthy to receive the
Revelation from the Mystikos, I guess. At least, the Theologa——”
“Mrs. Gideon J. Swale?”
“The same. The Theologa said so. In a week or so—durin’ which period
they lived at the house of the Community—chiefly on nuts an’
spring-water——”
“For which entertainment they paid——” Lady Sidonia hinted.
“Delmonico rates!” said the Duchess. “Well, it was settled that the
Demonstration was to come off, with the Mystikos’ consent.”
“What sort of——”
“Demonstration? Cur’us,” said the Duchess, “and inter_est_ing. There was
a woman—a Mrs. Gower, English by birth, Amurrican naturalized—who was to
be the Subject. She was a widow—her husband having met his death in an
explosion at an oil-gas producin’ factory. Stoker to the gas-generator
he was, and his wife had brought him his dinner—fried steak in a tin
pail—when the hull kitboodle blew up. Husband was killed—wife was saved,
though so scarred and disfigured about the face as to be changed from a
pretty woman into a plain one.”
“And she—this scarred, disfigured woman—was to be made pretty again by
the Occult Operatists?” hazarded Lady Sidonia.
“Guessed it first time,” nodded the Duchess. “The cer’mony took place in
a temple belonging to the Community, all painted over red and yellow
triangles and things like T-squares. At the upper end was an altar,
raised on three steps, and on this was the ground glass ball in which
the Mystikos lived when he wasn’t somewhere else, and an electric light
was fixed over it, so that it just dazzled your eyes to look at. Below
the altar was a seat for the Theologa, and, you bet, Mrs. Gideon J.
Swale came out strong in the costume line. Momma was reminded of Titiens
in _Norma_, she said.”
“I want to hear about the Demonstration,” pleaded Lady Sidonia
plaintively.
“My! you’re in a hurry,” said the Duchess. “But it was to be brought off
in a bath—if you must know!”
“A _bath_?”
“A bath that was full of water and boiled herbs, and had been properly
incanted over by the Theologa,” explained the Duchess. “There were
incense-burners all round, and not far off a kind of tent of white
linen, all over red triangles and T’s. And the five candidates for
renovation—I mean Momma and the other ladies—sat on a form, in bloomers,
each with a little purse-bag containing bills for ten thousand dollars,
and her heart full of hope and joy.”
“_Oh!_ go on,” cried Lady Sidonia.
“The temple was circular, something like the Mormon Tabernacle at Salt
Lake City,” said the Duchess, “and the Occult Operatives—a round hundred
of ’em—occupied the forms, to assist with the prayers and hymn-singin’.
Of course, the proceedings began with a hymn sung in several different
keys. I surmise the effect was impressive.”
Lady Sidonia elevated her eyebrows.
“Momma said it was wailful, and made her feel as though live clams were
crawling up and down her back. But then the bloomers may account for
that,” said the Duchess, “and I guess the temple registers were out of
order. Then—the lights were suddenly turned out!”
“O-oh!” shivered Lady Sidonia.
“Except the electric stars over the Mystikos’ crystal ball,” went on the
Duchess, “so that all the light in the temple seemed to come from the
altar. Momma said that made her feel those crawling clams worse than
ever.”
“Could one see plainly what was going on?” asked Lady Sidonia.
“It was a religious kind of dimness,” said the Duchess, “but most
everything showed plainly. For instance, when the hideous woman who was
to be the Subject of the Demonstration came out of the linen tent in a
suit of bloomers like Momma’s and the others, she appeared to be plain
enough. Do you keep a cat, dear?” whispered the Duchess.
“Why? No!” said Lady Sidonia.