green eyes looked up at you from under a lock of fair silky hair that
was never to be kept within regulation School bounds, but continually
strayed upon the fair, if freckled, expanse of a brow which might have
been the home of a pure and innocent mind, and probably was not. He had
a pleasant treble boy’s voice and a beautiful smile, particularly when
his mother told him he might smoke just one cigarette, of her own
special brand, as a great treat.
“Mother’s are hay,” he said afterwards in confidence, and added that he
preferred cut Cavendish, and that the best way to induce a meerschaum to
color was to smoke it foul, and never to remove the dottle. But Lady
Garlingham was never the wiser. She had the utmost faith in her boy.
“Gar will be a dab at Classics,” she said with pride. “Fancy his knowing
that Dido was a heathen goddess, and Procrustes was a Grecian King who
murdered his mother and afterwards put out his own eyes! I must really
give his tutor a hint not to bring him on _too_ fast. He will have to
make his own way in the world, poor dear, that is certain; but I don’t
want him to turn out a literary genius with eccentric clothes, or
anything in the scientific line that isn’t careful about its nails and
doesn’t comb its hair.”
Garlingham’s clothes are always of the latest fashion and in the most
admirable taste. His hair is as well groomed, his hands are as
immaculate as any mother’s heart could desire, and he has not turned out
a genius. During his career at Oxford he did not allow his love of study
to interfere with the more serious pursuit of athletic distinction. He
left the University unburdened with honors, carrying in his wake a
string of bills as long as a kite’s tail. Relieved of this by the
sacrifice of some of Lady Garlingham’s diamonds, the kite shot up into
the empyrean in the wake of a dazzling star of the comic-opera stage.
“But, thank Heaven, the boy has principles,” breathed Lady Garlingham.
“He never dreamed of marrying her!”
Garlingham descended from the skies ere long, tangled in a telegraphic
wire, and went into the Diplomatic Service. He became fourth
under-secretary at an Imperial foreign Embassy, in virtue of the
marriage of his maternal aunt with Prince John Schulenstorff-Wangelbrode
(who was Military Attaché in the days of the pannier and the polonaise,
the bustle and the fringed whip-parasol). I have not the least idea in
what Garlingham’s duties consisted, and the dear fellow was
diplomatically reticent when sounded on the subject; but of one thing I
am sure, that few young men have worn an official button and lapels with
greater ease and distinction. He quite adored his mother, and made her
his _confidante_ in all his love affairs. Indeed I believe Lady
Garlingham kept a little register of these at one time on the sticks of
an ivory fan—those that were going off, those that were in full bloom,
and those that were just coming on; and posted up dates and set down
names with the utmost regularity.
For, like the typical butterfly, Garlingham sipped every flower and
changed every hour. A very mature Polly has now his passion requited,
and if human happiness depended on avoirdupois, and it were an
established mathematical fact that the felicity of the object attracted
may be calculated by the dimensions of the object attracting, then is
the handsome boy I used to tip a happy man indeed.
For Gar, “that pocket edition of Apollo,” as a Royal personage with a
happy knack at nicknames termed him—Gar has married a middle-aged, not
too good-looking, extremely fat widow, unknown to fame as Mrs. Rollo
Polkingham. The couple were Hanover Squared in June. Leila and Sheila
Polkingham made the loveliest pair of Dresden china bridesmaids
imaginable, and a Bishop tied the knot, assisted by the brother of the
bride, the Reverend Michael O’Halloran, of Mount Slattery, County Quare,
a surpliced brogue with a Trinity College B.A. hood. The hymns that were
sung by the choir during the ceremony were, “The Voice that Breathed,”
and “Fight the Good Fight,” and the bride looked quite as bridal as
might have been expected of a thirty-eight inch girth arrayed in the
latest heliotrope shade. She became peony, Garlingham pale blue, when
the moment arrived for him to pronounce his vows, and a voice—a high,
nasal voice of the penetrating, saw-edged American kind—said, several
pews behind, quite audibly: “Well, I call it child-stealing!”
The owner of that voice was at the reception in Chesterfield Crescent.
So was I, and when Garlingham thanked me for a silver cigar-box I had
sent him in memory of our old friendship, his hand was damp and clammy,
though he smiled. The Dowager Lady Garlingham, looking much younger than
her daughter-in-law, floated across to ask me why I never came to see
her now, and Gar drifted away. Later, I had a fleeting glimpse of the
bridegroom standing in the large, cool shadow of his newly-made bride,
looking helplessly from one to the other of his recently-acquired
stepdaughters. Then my circular gaze met and merged in the still
attractive eyes of Lady Garlingham.
“You heard,” she breathed in her old confidential way, “what that very
outspoken person—I think a Miss Van Something, from Philadelphia—said in
church?”
“I did hear,” I returned, “and, while I deplored her candor, I could not
but admit——”
“That she had hit off the situation with dreadful accuracy—I felt that,
too,” sighed Gar’s mother.
“We are old friends, or were,” said I, for people always became
sentimental in the vicinity of Lady Garlingham. “Tell me how it
happened!”
“Oh, how——” Lady Garlingham adroitly turned a slight groan into a little
cough. “Indeed, I hardly know. All that seems burned into me is that I
have become a dowager without adequate cause.”
Her pretty brown eyebrows crumpled; she dabbed her still charming eyes
with an absurd little lace handkerchief. She wore a wonderful dress of
something filmy in Watteau blue, and a Lamballe hat with a _paradis_.
Through innumerable veils of tulle her complexion was really wonderful,
considering, and her superb hair still tawny gold.
“Don’t look at me and ask yourself why I’ve never married again,” she
commanded, in the old petulant way. “For Gar’s sake, is the stereotyped
answer to that. And when I look at _her_——” She dabbed away a tear with
the absurd little handkerchief. “She hasn’t had the indecency to call me
‘Mother’ _yet_.... But she will, I know she will! If she doesn’t, she is
more than human. I have said such things to _her_.”
“I can quite believe it,” I agreed.
Champagne cups were going about; infinitesimal sandwiches, tabloids of
condensed indigestion, were being washed down. The best man, an Attaché
friend of Garlingham’s, brandishing a silver-handled carving-knife, was
encouraging the bridling bride to attack the cake. Sheila and Leila
hovered near with silver baskets, and Garlingham, with the merest shadow
of his old easy _insouciance_, was replying to the statute and legendary
chaff of the other men.
“You know he was engaged to the second girl, Sheila, first?” went on
Lady Garlingham plaintively.
I had not known it, and it gave me a thrill.
“Indeed!” I said in a tone of polite inquiry.
“When he was a very little boy, and I took him into a shop to buy a
toy,” said poor Lady Garlingham, “he always was in raptures with it,
whatever it was, until we were half-way home, and _then_ nothing would
satisfy him but the carriage being turned round and driven back, so that
he might exchange the thing for something he had particularly disliked
at first.”
I recalled the trait in my own experience of my young friend.
“Ah, yes. He always took _pralines_ when he really wanted chocolate
fondants,” sighed his mother. “And then—but perhaps you have
forgotten—the dolls?”
I had forgotten the dolls. I suppose I gaped rather stupidly.
“He had three,” gulped Lady Garlingham. “He chose the blue one first,
and then, when we had just reached Hyde Park Gate, he cried, and said it
was the pink one he had wanted all along. So we went back and got her,
and drove home to lunch, which, of course, was Gar’s dinner. And then,
if you had seen him, poor darling,”—her maternal bosom heaved with a
repressed sob—“with his underlip turned down in a quite South Sea Island
way, and the tears tumbling into his rice pudding because the blue
creature was absolutely his ideal from the first, you would have been
foolish enough to order the carriage and drive him back to the Regent
Street toyshop.”
“As you did?”
“As I did,” admitted Lady Garlingham.
“With the result that might have been expected?”
“With the result that seems to me _now_ to be a hateful foreshadowing of
what was to be my poor darling’s fate in life,” said the poor darling’s
mother.... “No, thank you, Sheila dear, I positively could not touch
it,” she added, as the cake-basket came our way. “Not even to dream on—I
have quite done with dreaming now.”
“But how,” I asked hypercritically, “could Garlingham’s subsequent
choice of the blue doll, originally discarded in favor of the pink,
foreshadow his ultimate fate in life?”
“Oh, don’t you understand?” quavered poor Lady Garlingham. “He went into
the toyshop by himself, and came marching out with what the Americans
call a rag-baby, the most odious, distorted, shapeless horror you can
imagine. It fascinated him by its sheer ugliness. He was obsessed,
magnetized, compelled.... As in this case!” A burst of confidence broke
down the floodgates of the poor woman’s reserve. She grasped me by the
arm as she gurgled out hysterically—rocking her slight form to and fro:
“My dear, _she_ is the rag-doll, this awful widow creature Garlingham
has married. And to his fatal curse of indecision he owes the Incubus
that is crushing him to-day.”
The bride had tripped upstairs to put on her going-away gown, attended
by Leila and Sheila and some freshly-married women, who meant to
struggle for the slippers for second choice.
Loud, explosive bursts of jeering merriment came from the dining-room,
where most of the men of the party had congregated. An exhausted maid
and a very obvious private detective hovered in the neighborhood of the
display of wedding presents, and through the open door of the
drawing-room one caught a glimpse of suspiciously new luggage piled up
in the hall, and a little group of youths and maidens of the callower
kind, who were industriously packing the sunshades and umbrellas in the
holdalls with rice and confetti.
“My poor, poor boy has been in and out of love _hundreds_ of times,”
moaned the despairing Dowager, “without once having been actually
engaged. So that when I saw Gar with these three women sitting on four
green chairs in the Park in May, I was not seriously alarmed. Georgiana
Bayham told me that the stout woman with too many bangles was a Mrs.
Rollo Polkingham, a widow, of whom nobody who might with truth be styled
anybody had ever heard, and that she had a wild, jungly house in
Chesterfield Crescent—(don’t those climbing peacocks in the wall-paper
set your teeth on edge?)—and always asked young men to call—and wanted
to know their intentions at the third visit.... ‘I would give this
turquoise charm off my _porte-bonheur_,’ said Georgiana, in her loud,
bubbling voice, ‘to know which of the two daughters Gar is smitten with.
The girl with the eyes like black ballot-balls, or the other with the
Gaiety smile.’ ... My dear, it was the dark one, Leila, as it happened.
Not that Gar flirted desperately. But they went to Hurlingham and
lunched at Prince’s, and then the mother thought my boy hooked, and
struck——”
“Asked his intentions?” I hinted.
“I knew something had happened,” said Gar’s mother, “when he came in to
tea with me that very afternoon. ‘Mother, am I a villain?’ were his very
words. ‘No, dear,’ I said, ‘do you feel like one?’ Then it came out that
the Polkingham woman had asked his intentions with regard to Leila; and
never having had such a thing done to him before, poor, dear boy! Gar
was quite prostrated. He did not deny that he found the eldest
Polkingham girl attractive, but secretly he had been more closely drawn
to the second, Sheila.”
“The pink doll,” I murmured.
“He behaved with the nicest honor in the matter,” declared Lady
Garlingham. “When he told me he was really in love with Sheila, and
could never be happy until he had married her—and how a young woman with
such a muddy complexion could inspire such a passion I don’t pretend to
know—I said: ‘Very well, you have my permission to tell her so. I shall
never stand in the way of your happiness, my son—although these people
are not in Our Set.’ If you had seen his shining eyes. If you had heard
the thrill in his voice as he said, ‘What a rattling good sort you are,
mother!’ you would have felt with me that the sacrifice was worth it.
And then he rushed off in a hansom to declare himself.” Lady Garlingham
clutched my arm painfully.
“To declare himself to Sheila?”
“And came back within the space of half an hour engaged to Leila,”
panted Lady Garlingham. “No, don’t laugh!”
“The b-blue d-doll!” I gasped.
“He was as pale as death!” said his mother. “He had found Leila in the
drawing-room in a becoming half-light, and been taken off his guard.”
“And metaphorically he told the shopwoman he would prefer that one,” I
said shakily. “I understand! Was he very unhappy over his bargain?”
“Frightfully out of sorts and off color,” said the wooer’s mother,
“until at a crisis, a month later, I nerved him to go and see the mother
and explain the mistake.”
“And did he?”
“I will say Mrs. Polkingham took the revelation in good part,” said Lady
Garlingham. “Leila cried a good deal, I believe, when she turned Gar
over to Sheila, and Sheila was not disagreeably inclined to crow. I must
give the girls credit for their behavior. As for Gar, he was the very
picture of young, ardent happiness. ‘Mother,’ I can hear him saying,
‘thanks to you, I have won the dearest and loveliest girl in the world.’
(Poor boy!) ‘And I’m as happy as a gardener.’”
“Did that phase last long?” I queried, with twitching facial muscles.
“He began to flag, as it were, in about six weeks,” said Garlingham’s
mother mournfully. “My poor, affectionate, _wobbly_ boy. The sky of his
simple happiness was overcast. There came a day when the floodgates of
his resolve to go through with everything at any cost—sacrifice himself
for the sake of his duty and for the credit of his family name——”
“_Noblesse oblige_,” I stammered chokily. “_Noblesse oblige._”
“The floodgates were broken down,” said his mother, with a tremble in
her voice. “His heart reverted with a bound to the—the other—to Leila.”
“To the blue doll!” I spluttered.
“When he entreated me,” went on Lady Garlingham, “begged me even with
tears to be his ambassadress to Leila, I grieve to say that for the
first time in his life I failed to rise to the occasion of his need. I
said: ‘I shall do nothing of the kind. Get out of the muddle as you
can—I wash my hands of it.’ And he thought me very hard and very
unfeeling, I know; but even when the _bouleversement_ was managed for
the third time, I could not bring myself to regard the position from my
usually philosophical point of view. It was too cruel. The retransfer of
the engagement-ring, for instance——”
“Ah, true,” I murmured, “and the presents!”
“Too painful!” sighed Lady Garlingham. “It was ultimately arranged by
Gar’s buying a new ring, and Sheila’s dropping the old one into the
almsbag at St. Baverstock’s. Poor girl! I will say her demeanor in the
trying circumstances was admirable.”
“As for the other?” I hinted.
“Leila is not a refined type of girl,” said Lady Garlingham decidedly.
“Her whole expression was that of a Bank Holiday tripper young person
who has just dismounted from one of those giddy-go-rounds. Boat-swings
might impart the dazed look. The mother seemed harassed. As for Gar——”
I guessed what was coming, but I would not have missed hearing Lady
Garlingham tell it for worlds.
“There came a day—a dreadful, dreadful day,” she said, with pale lips,
“when Gar told me that his life was ruined _unless he changed back_! We
had a _dreadful scene_, and for the first time in my life I had
hysterics. Then the unhappy boy tore from the house—_ventre à
terre_—leaving me a perfect wreck, held up by my maid Pinner—you know
Pinner?”
I nodded speechlessly.
“My wretched boy tore from the house, jumped into his ‘Gohard,’ which
was standing at the door—hurtled to Chesterfield Crescent—told the
painful truth——”
“Swopped dolls yet once again, and came back with the rag-baby,” I
gasped.
“_And_ now,” groaned Lady Garlingham, “he has to carry it through life!”
There was a gabbling on the upper landing. The bride was coming down in
a white cut-cloth, tailor-made gown and a picture hat, Leila and Sheila
and a bonneted maid following. The bridegroom, in immaculate tweeds,
appeared at a lower door, the smug face of his valet behind him. There
was a rush of women, an insane kissing and shaking of hands, a glare of
red carpet, a flapping of striped awning. Rice and confetti impregnated
the air, the doorsteps were swamped with smartly-dressed people. The
chauffeur of Gar’s “Gohard” with a giant favor in the buttonhole of his
livery coat grinned when Garlingham leaped tigerishly upon him and tore
it from his chest. The automobile moved on, pursued by farewells. Some
one had thoughtfully attached two slippers to its rearward steps, a
stout, elderly, white satin slipper and a slim masculine, evening shoe
of the pump kind, almost new.
“Say!” said the saw-edged American voice I had heard in the church—“say,
won’t the car-conductor allow she’s traveling with her little boy? What
will folks call him, anyhow?”
My mouth was on a level with the speaker’s back hair.
“The Widow’s Mite,” I said aloud—and fled.
SUSANNA AND HER ELDERS
I
The Earl of Beaumaris, a worthy and imposing personage, flushed from the
nape of his neck to the high summit of his cranium—premature baldness
figured amongst the family heredities—paced, in creaking patent-leather
boots, up and down the castle library—a noble apartment of Tudor design,
lined with rare and antique volumes into which none ever looked. There
were other persons present beside the Dowager Countess, and, to judge by
the strainedly polite expression of their faces, the squeaking leather
must have been playing havoc with their nerves.
“Gustavus,” said the Dowager at length, “you’re an English Peer in your
own castle, and not a pointsman on a Broadway block, unless I’m
considerably mistaken. Sit down!”
“Mother, I will not be defied!” said Lord Beaumaris. “I will not be
bearded by my own child—a mere chit of a girl! Had Susanna been a boy I
should have known how to deal with this spirit of insubordination. Being
a girl—and moreover, motherless—I abandon her to you. She has many
things to learn, but let the first lesson you inculcate be this—that I
positively refuse to be defied!”
“The child has, I gather, gone out to take the air when she ought to
have stayed in and taken a scolding,” said Lady Beaumaris. “Does anybody
know of her whereabouts?”
Alaric Osmond-Omer, a languid, drab-complexioned, light-haired man of
aristocratic appearance, never seen without the smoked eyeglass that
concealed a diabolic squint, spoke:
“I saw her in a crimson golfing-jacket and a white Tam-o’-shanter
crossing the upper terrace. She carried an alpenstock, and was followed
by quite a pack of dogs—incorporated in the body of one extraordinary
mongrel which I have occasionally observed about the stable-yards. I
gathered that she was going for a climb upon the cliffs. That was about
half an hour ago!”
“Alaric, you have attended every Family Council that I recollect since I
became a member of this family, and have never before opened your lips,”
said Lady Beaumaris, fixing the unfortunate Alaric with her eye, which
was still black and snappingly bright. “Make this occasion memorable by
offering a suggestion. You really owe us one!”
Everybody present looked at Alaric, who smiled helplessly and dropped
his eyeglass, revealing the physical peculiarity it concealed. The
effect of the diabolic squint, in combination with his mild features and
somewhat foolish expression, conveyed a general impression of reserve
force. He spoke, fumbling for the missing article, which had plunged
rapturously into his bosom, with long, trim fingers, encrusted with
mourning rings.
“The question at issue is—unless I have failed in my mental digest of
the situation—how to bring Susanna Viscountess Lymston—pardon me if I
indulge a little my weakness for prolixity——”
The door creaked, and Alaric broke off.
“My dear man,” said the Dowager, “I never before heard you utter a
sentence of more than two words’ length!”
“—To bring Susanna, who is just seventeen and fiercely virginal in her
expressed aversion to, and avoidance of, ordinary, everyday Man—into
compliance with your paternal wishes”—Alaric bowed to Lord
Beaumaris—“where the encouragement of a suitor is concerned!”
“I have appealed to her filial feelings—which do not appear to exist,”
said Lord Beaumaris; “I have appealed to her reason—I doubt gravely
whether the girl possesses any: ‘There is too much landed property,
there are too many houses and too many heirlooms, and there is not
enough ready money to keep things going,’ I said. Her reply was: ‘Sell
some of the land and some of the houses and all of the pictures, and
then there will be enough to keep up the rest.’ ‘My dear child, is it
possible,’ I said, ‘that at your age, and occupying the position you
occupy, you have no idea of what is meant by an Entail?’ Then I made her
sit down here, in this library, opposite me, and laid plainly before her
why it is necessary for her, as my daughter, to marry, and to marry
Wealth, Position, and Title. Before I had ended she rose with a flaming
face and burst into an hysterical tirade, which lasted ten minutes. I
gather that she was willing to marry Sir Prosper Le Gai or the Knight of
the Swan if either of these gentlemen proposed for her hand. Neither
being available, she intends, I gather, to write great poems, or paint
great pictures, or go upon the stage.... Go upon the stage! My blood
curdled at the bare idea. It is still in that unpleasant condition.”
Lord Beaumaris shuddered violently, and pressed his handkerchief to his
nose. “If you have any advice to give, Alaric,” he said bluntly, “oblige
us by giving it. We are at a positive crux!”
The drab-complexioned, light-haired Alaric responded:
“In my poor opinion—which may be crassly wrong—too much stress has been
laid upon the necessity of Susanna’s marrying.” At this point the
contrast between the amiable vacuity of Alaric’s face and the
Mephistophelian intelligence of his monocled eye was so extraordinary as
to hold his listeners spellbound in their chairs. “I think we may take
it that the principal feature of the child’s character is—call it
determination amounting to obstinacy——”
“Crass obstinacy!” burst from the Earl.
“Pig-headedness!” interjected the Dowager.
“I think I remember hearing that in her nursery days the sure way to
make her take a dose of harmless necessary medicine,” pursued Alaric,
his left eye fixed upon the door, “was to prepare the potion, pill, or
what-not, sweeten, and then carefully conceal it from her. Were she my
daughter—which Heaven for—which Heaven has not granted!—I should make
her take a husband in the same way.”
“An utterance possibly inspired, but as obscure as the generality. I
fear, my dear Alaric——” Lord Beaumaris began. The Dowager cut him short.
“Say, Gus, can’t you let him finish? That’s what I call real mean—to
switch a man off just when he’s beginning to grip the track.”
“Mother, I bow to you,” Lord Beaumaris said, purpling with indignation.
“Pray continue, Alaric!”
“Hum along, Alaric,” encouraged the Dowager.
Alaric, his countenance as the countenance of a little child, his right
eye beaming with mildness, and his left eye as the eye of an intelligent
fiend, went on:
“Susanna has never yet seen the Duke of Halcyon—her cousin, and the
husband for whom you destine her. When she does see him—I think I may be
pardoned for saying——”