were reports of suicide—hushed up. People said he had been more
eccentric than ever of late, and theorized about brain-mischief; only I
located the trouble in the heart. A year went by, and I had almost
forgotten Lady Clanbevan—for she went abroad after the Professor’s
death—when at a little watering-place on the Dorset coast, I saw that
lovely thing, as lovely as ever—she who was fifty if a day! With her
were the blue-cloaked elderly nurse and Lord Clanbevan, borne, as usual,
in the arms of his attendant, or wheeled in a luxurious perambulator.
Day after day I encountered them—the lovely mother, the middle-aged
nurse, and the mysterious child—until the sight began to get on my
nerves. Had the Professor selected me as the recipient of a secret
unrivaled in the records of biological discovery, or had he been the
victim of some maniacal delusion that cold October day when we met in
Rotten Row? One peep under the thick white lace veil with which the
baby’s face was invariably covered would clear everything up! Oh! for a
chance to allay the pangs of curiosity!
The chance came. It was a hot, waspy August forenoon. Everybody was
indoors with all the doors and windows open, lunching upon the
innutritive viands alone procurable at health resorts—everybody but
myself, Lord Clanbevan, and his nurse. She had fallen asleep upon a
green-painted esplanade seat, gratuitously shielded by a striped awning.
Lord Clanbevan’s C-springed, white-hooded, cane-built perambulator stood
close beside her. He was, as usual, a mass of embroidered cambric and
cashmere, and, as always, thickly veiled, his regular breathing heaved
his infant breast; the thick white lace drapery attached to his
beribboned bonnet obscured the features upon which I so ardently longed
to gaze! It was the chance, as I have said; and as the head of the
blue-cloaked nurse dropped reassuringly upon her breast, as she emitted
the snore that gave assurance of the soundness of her slumbers, I
stepped silently on the gravel towards the baby’s perambulator. Three
seconds, and I stood over its apparently sleeping inmate; another, and I
had lifted the veil from the face of the mystery—and dropped it with a
stifled cry of horror!
The child had a moustache!
THE DUCHESS’S DILEMMA
“A person called to see me!” repeated the Duchess of Rantorlie. “He
pleaded urgent business, you say?”
She glanced at the card presented by her groom-of-the-chambers without
taking the trouble to lift it from the salver. “‘Mr. Moss Rubelius.’ I
do not know the name—I have no knowledge of any urgent business. You
must tell him to go away at once, and not call again.”
“Begging your Grace’s pardon,” remarked the official, “the person seemed
to anticipate a message of the kind——”
“Did he? Then,” thought her Grace, “he is not disappointed.”
“And, still begging your Grace’s pardon,” pursued the discreet domestic,
“he asked me to hand this second card to your Grace.”
It was rather a shabby card, and dog’s-eared as though it had been
carried long in somebody’s pocket; but it was large and feminine, and
adorned with a ducal coronet and the Duchess’s own cipher, and scribbled
upon it in pencil, in the Duchess’s own handwriting, were two or three
words, simple enough, apparently, and yet sufficiently fraught with
meaning to make their fair reader turn very pale. She did not replace
this card upon the salver, but kept it as she said:
“Bring the person to me at once.”
And when the softly stepping servant had left the room—one of her
Grace’s private suite, charmingly furnished as a study—she made haste to
tear the card up, dropping the fragments into the hottest part of the
wood-fire, and thrusting at them with the poker until the last tremulous
fragment of gray ash had disappeared. Rising from this exercise with a
radiant glow upon her usually colorless cheeks the Duchess became aware
that she was not alone. A person of vulgar appearance, outrageously
attired in a travesty of the ordinary afternoon costume of an English
gentleman, stood three or four feet off, regarding her with an observant
and rather wily smile. Not at all discomposed, he was the first to
speak.
“Before burnin’ _that_,” he remarked, in the thick, snuffling accents of
the low-bred, “your Grace ought to have asked yourself whether it was
any use. Because—I put it to your Grace, as a poker-player, being told
the game’s fashionable in your Grace’s set—a man who holds four aces can
afford to throw away the fifth card, even if it’s a king. And people of
my profession don’t go in for bluff. It ain’t their fancy.”
“What is your profession?” asked the Duchess, regarding with contempt
the dark, full-fed, red-lipped, hook-beaked countenance before her.
“Money!” returned Mr. Moss Rubelius. He rattled coin in his
trousers-pockets as he spoke, and the superfluity of gold manifested in
large, coarse rings upon his thick fingers, the massy chain festooned
across his broad chest, the enormous links fastening his cuffs, and the
huge diamond pin in his cravat, seemed to echo “Money.”
The Duchess lost no time in coming to the point. She was not guided by
previous experience, having hitherto, by grace as well as luck, steered
clear of scandal. But, girl of twenty as she was, she asked, as coolly
as an _intrigante_ of forty, though her young heart was fluttering
wildly against the walls of its beautiful prison, “How did you get that
card?”
“I will be quite plain with your Grace,” returned the money-lender.
“When the second lot of cavalry drafts sailed for South Africa early in
the year of 1900, our firm, ’aving a writ of _’abeas_ out against
Captain Sir Hugh Delaving of the Royal Red Dragoon Guards—I have reason
to believe your Grace knew something of the Captain?”
“Yes,” said the Duchess, turning her cold blue eyes upon the twinkling
orbs of Mr. Moss Rubelius, “I knew something of the Captain. You do not
need to ask the question. Please go on!”
“The Captain was,” resumed Mr. Rubelius, “for a born aristocrat, the
downiest I ever see—saw, I mean. He gave our clerks and the men with the
warrant the slip by being ’eaded up in a wooden packin’ case, labeled
‘Officers’ Stores,’ and got away to the Cape, where he was killed in his
first engagement.”
“This,” said the Duchess, “is no news to me.”
“No,” said the money-lender; “but it may be news to your Grace that,
though we couldn’t lay our ‘ands on the Captain himself, we got hold of
all his luggage. Not much there that was of any marketable value, except
a silver-gilt toilet-set. But there was a packet of letters in a Russia
writin’-case with a patent lock, all of ’em written in the large-sized,
square ’and peculiar to the leadin’ female aristocracy, and signed
‘Ethelwyne,’ or merely ‘E.’”
“And this discovery procures me the pleasure of this interview?”
remarked the Duchess. “The letters are mine—you come on the errand of a
blackmailer. I have only one thing to wonder at, and that is—why you
have not come before?”
“Myself and partner thought, as honorable men of business, it would be
better to approach the Captain first,” explained the usurer. “His mother
died the week he sailed for Africa, and left him ten thousand pounds. We
’astened to communicate with him, but——”
“But he had been killed meanwhile,” said the Duchess. “You would have
had the money he owed—or did not owe—you, and your price for the
letters, had you reached him in time; but you did not, and your goods
are left upon your hands. Why, as honorable men of business”—her lovely
lip curled—“did you not take them at once to the Duke?”
Mr. Moss Rubelius seemed for the first time a little nonplussed. He
looked down at his large, shiny boots, and the sight did not appear to
relieve him.
“I will be quite plain with your Grace.”
“Pray endeavor!” said the Duchess.
“The letters are—to put it delicately—not compromising enough. They’re
more,” said Mr. Rubelius, “the letters a school-girl at Brighton would
write to her music-master, supposing him to be young and possessed of a
pair of cavalry legs and a moustache. There’s fuel in ’em for a
First-Class Connubial Row,” continued Mr. Rubelius, “but not material
for a Domestic Upheaval—followed by an Action for Divorce. As a man, no
longer, but once in business—for within this last month our firm has
dissolved, and myself and my partner have retired upon our means—this is
my opinion with regard to these letters in your Grace’s handwriting,
addressed to the late Captain Sir H. Delaving: The Duke, I believe,
would only laugh at ’em.”
The Duchess started violently, and seemed about to speak.
“But, still, the letters are worth paying for,” ended Mr. Moss Rubelius.
“And your Grace can have em—at my price.”
“What is your price?” asked the Duchess, trying in vain to read in the
stolid physiognomy before her the secret purpose of the soul within.
“Perhaps your Grace wouldn’t mind my taking a chair?” insinuated Mr.
Rubelius.
“Do as you please, sir,” said the Duchess, “only be brief.”
“I’ll try,” said the money-lender, comfortably crossing his legs. “To
begin—we’re in the London Season and the month of March, and your Grace
has a party at Rantorlie for the April salmon-fishing. Angling’s my one
vice—my only weakness, ever since I caught minnows in the Regent’s Canal
with a pickle-bottle tied to a string. Coarse fishing in the Thames was
my recreation in grub times, whenever I ’ad a day away from our office
in the Minories. Trout I’ve caught now and then, with a worm on a Stuart
tackle—since I became a butterfly. But I’ve never had a slap at a
salmon, and the finest salmon-anglin’ in the kingdom is to be ’ad in the
Haste, below Rantorlie. Ask me there for April, see that I ’ave the pick
of the sport, even if you ’ave a Royal duke to cater for, as you ’ad
last year, and, the day I land my first twenty-pounder, the letters are
yours.”
The Duchess burst out laughing wildly.
“Ha, ha! Oh!” she cried; “it is impossible to help it.... I can’t!... It
is so.... Ha, ha, ha!”
“I shan’t disgrace you,” said Mr. Rubelius. “My kit and turn-out will be
by the best makers, and I’ll tip the ’ead gillie fifty pound. I’m a
soft-hearted hass to let the letters go so cheap, but——Golly! the chance
of catchin’ a twenty-pound specimen of _Salmo salar_ that a Royal
’Ighness ’as angled for in vain!... Look ’ere, your Grace”—his tones
were oily with entreaty—“write me the invitation now, on the spot, and
you shall ’ave back the first three of those nine letters down on the
nail.”
“You have them——?”
“With me!” said Mr. Rubelius, producing a letter-case attached to his
stout person by a chain. “The others are—say, in retirement for the
present.” He extracted from the case three large, square, gray
envelopes, their addresses penned in a large, angular, girlish hand.
“Write me the invite now,” he said, “and these are yours to burn or show
to his Grace—whichever you please. The others shall be yours the day I
land my twenty-pounder.”
The Duchess moved to her writing-table and sat down. She chose paper and
a pen, and dashed off these few lines:
“900, BERKELEY SQUARE, W.
“DEAR MR. MOSS RUBELIUS,
“The Duke and myself have asked a few friends to join us at Rantorlie on
April 1, for the salmon-fishing, and we should be so pleased if you
would come.
“Sincerely yours,
“ETHELWYNE RANTORLIE.”
“The first letter I ever had, dated from Berkeley Square,” commented Mr.
Rubelius, as, holding the letter very firmly down upon the blotter with
her slim and white, but very strong hands, the Duchess signed to him
with her chin to read, “that was anything in the nature of a genial
invitation.”
He allowed the Duchess to take the three letters previously referred to
from his right hand, as he dexterously twitched the invitation from the
blotter with his left finger and thumb. “This, your Grace, will be as
good as half a dozen more to me,” he observed, “when I show it about and
get a par. into the papers.”
“Horrible!” cried the Duchess, shuddering. “You would not do that!”
Mr. Rubelius favored her with a knowing smile as he produced his shiny
hat, his gloves, and a malacca cane, gold-handled, from some remote
corner in which he had concealed them.
“Let us, being now on the footing of ’ostess and guest, part friendly,”
he said. “Your Grace, may I take your ’and?”
“I think the formality absolutely unnecessary,” said the Duchess,
ringing the bell.
Then the money-lender went away, and she caught up a little portrait of
the Duke that stood upon her writing-table and began to cry over it and
kiss it, and say incoherent, affectionate things, like quite an
ordinary, commonplace young wife. For, after eighteen months of
marriage, she had fallen seriously in love with her quiet, well-bred,
intellectual husband, and the remembrance of the silly, romantic
flirtation with dead Hugh Delaving was gall and wormwood to the palate
that had learned a finer taste. How had she fallen so low as to write
those idiotic, gushing letters?
Their perfume sickened her. She shuddered at the touch of them, as she
would have shuddered at the touch of the man to whom they had been
written had he still lived. But he was dead, and she had never let him
kiss her. She was thankful to remember that, as she put the letters in
the fire and watched them blacken and burst into flame.
* * * * *
“My dear Ethelwyne,” asked the Duke, “where did you pick up Mr.
Rubelius? Or, I should ask, perhaps, how did that gentleman attain to
your acquaintance?”
“It is rather a long, dull story,” said his wife, “but he is really an
excellent person, if a little vulgar, and—— You won’t bother me any more
about him, Rantorlie, will you?”
She clasped her gloved hands about her husband’s arm as they stood
together on the river beach below Rantorlie. The turbid flood of the
Haste, tinged brown by spate, raced past between its rocky banks; the
pine-forests climbed to meet the mountains, and the mountains lifted to
the sky their crowns of snow. There was a smell of spring in the air,
and word of new-run fish in the string of deep pools below the famous
Falls.
“I will not, if you particularly wish it,” said her husband. “But to
banish your guest from my mind—that is impossible. For one thing, he is
hung with air-belts, bottles, and canteens, as though he were starting
for a tour in the wildest part of Norway. I believe his equipment
includes a hatchet, and I think that wad he wears upon his shoulders is
a rubber tent, but I am not sure. He has never heard of prawn-baiting,
his rods are of the most alarming weight and size, and his salmon-flies
are as large and gaudy as paroquets, and calculated, McDona says, to
frighten any self-respecting fish out of his senses. We can’t allow such
a gorgeous tyro to spoil the best water. He must be sent to some of the
smaller pools, with a man to look after him.”
“But he—he won’t be likely to catch anything there, will he?” asked the
Duchess anxiously.
“A seven-pounder, if he has luck!”
“Oh, Rantorlie, that won’t do _at all_!” cried Rantorlie’s wife in
dismay. “I want him to have the chance of something _really big_. It’s
our duty to see that our guests are properly treated, and, though you
don’t like Mr. Rubelius——”
“Dear child, I don’t dislike Mr. Rubelius. I simply don’t think about
him any more than I think about the sea-lice on the new-run fish. They
are there, and they look nasty. Rubelius is here, and so does he.”
“_Doesn’t_ he—especially in evening-dress with a red camelia and a
turn-down collar?” gasped the Duchess.
The Duke could not restrain a smile at the vision evoked, as Mr.
Rubelius, panoplied in india-rubber, cork, and unshrinkables, strode
into view. One of the gillies bore his rod, the other his basket. A
third followed with that wobbliest of aquatic vehicles, a coracle,
strapped upon his back. With a grin, the man waded into the water,
unhitched his light burden, placed it on the rapid stream, and stood,
knee-deep, holding the short painter, as the frisky coracle tugged at
it.
“You’re going to try one of those things?” said the Duke, as Rubelius
gracefully lifted his waterproof helmet to the Duchess. “You know
they’re awfully crank, don’t you, and not at all safe for a bung—I mean,
a beginner?”
“The men, your Grace,” explained Mr. Rubelius, “are going to peg me down
in the bed of the stream, a little way out from the shore.”
“But if your peg draws,” said his host, “do you know how to use your
paddle?”
“That will be all right, your Grace,” said the affable Rubelius. “I know
how to punt. Often on the Thames at Twicken’am——”
“My dear sir, the Haste in Moss-shire and the Thames at Twickenham are
two very different rivers,” said the Duke, beckoning his gillies to
follow, and turning away. “I hope the man may not come to any harm,” he
said. “Ethelwyne, will you walk down to the Falls with me? I”—he
reddened a little—“I sent the others on in carts by road. We see so
little of each other these days.”
And the young couple started, leaving Mr. Rubelius to be put into his
coracle, with much splashing, and swearing on his part, by two of the
gillies and a volunteer. It was a mild day for April in the North. A
single cuckoo called by the riverside, and the Duke and Duchess did not
hurry, though Ethelwyne turned back before she reached the Falls, below
which the deepest salmon-pools were situated, and where the men, the
boats, and the rest of the party waited. She had her rod and gillie, and
meant to spin a little desultorily from the bank, the Haste being almost
in every part too deep for waders, except in the upper reaches.
“I wonder how that horror is getting on?” she thought, as the gillie
baited her prawn-tackle. Then, stepping out upon a natural pier of rough
stones leading well out into the turbulent whitey-brown stream, the
Duchess skilfully swung out her line, and, after a little manipulation,
found herself fast in a good-sized fish.
“What weight should you judge it?” she asked the attendant, when the
silvery prey had been gaffed and landed.
“All saxteen,” said the gillie briefly. “Hech! What cry was that?”
As the man held up his hand the noise was repeated.
“It sounds like somebody shouting ‘Help!’” said the Duchess.
And, rod in hand, she ran out upon the pier of bowlders, and, shading
her eyes with her hand, gazed upstream, as round a rocky point above
came something like a tarred washing-basket with a human figure huddled
knees-to-chin inside. The coracle had betrayed the confidence of Mr.
Rubelius, and drifted with its hapless tenant down the mile and a half
of racing water which lay between Rantorlie and the Falls. The Falls! At
that remembrance the laughter died upon the Duchess’s lips, and the
ridiculous figure drifting towards her in the bobbing coracle became
upon an instant a tragic spectacle. For Death waited for Mr. Rubelius a
little below the next bend in the rocky bed of the Haste. And—if the
money-lender were drowned—those letters ... yes, those letters, the
proofs of the Duchess’s folly, might be regained and destroyed,
secretly, and nobody would ever——
It seemed an age of reflection, but really only a second or two went by
before the Duchess cried out to Rubelius in her sweet, shrill voice, and
ran out to the very end of the pier of rocks, and with a clever
underhand jerk sent the heavy prawn-tackle spinning out up and down the
river. Once she tried—and failed. The second time, two of the three
hooks stuck firmly into the wickerwork of the coracle. It spun round,
suddenly arrested in its course, but the strong salmon-gut held, and,
after an anxious minute or two, the livid Rubelius safely reached shore.
“I’ve ’ad my lesson,” said he, as the gillie administered whisky. “Never
any more salmon-fishing for me! It’s too tryin’,” he gulped—“too ’ard
upon the nerves of a man not born to it!” Then he got up, and came
bare-headed to the Duchess. His face was very pale and flabby, and his
thick lips had lost their color, as he held out a black leather notecase
to her Grace. “You—you saved my life,” he said, “and I’m not going to be
ungrateful. Here they are—the six letters. Look ’em over, if you like,
and see for yourself. And, my obliged thanks to his Grace for his
hospitality—but I leave for town to-morrow. Good-by, your Grace. You
won’t hear of me again!” And Mr. Rubelius kept his word.
THE CHILD
He arrived late—long after the ship of his father’s fortune had been
safely tugged into dock—announcing his entrance upon this terrestrial
stage at a moment when people had ceased to expect him. I may say that
Tom and Leila, having spent twelve years of married life in the
propagation of theories alone, had the most definite notions upon the
subject of infant rearing, training, culture, and so forth. Leila
intended, she informed me in confidence, to be “an advanced mother,” and
Tom, as father to the child of an advanced mother, could hardly help
turning out an advanced father, even had he not cherished ambitions in
that line.
The boy—for, as Tom reassured all sympathetic callers during the
high-pressure first week of its existence, it undoubtedly was a
boy—seemed on first sight rather smaller and spottier than the child of
so many brilliant prospects had any right to be. They gave him the name
of Harold, a clanking procession of other names coupled on to it, ending
in Alexander Eric. And they engaged and imported a professional Child
Culturist, Miss Sallie Cooter, of Washington—pronounced
Wawshington—certified teacher, trained nurse, member of the
Ethnophysiological Society of America, and one doesn’t know how many
others, to rear Harold on the very latest scientific plan. Miss Cooter,
as the intimate friend and chosen disciple of the Inventress of the
System at which Tom and Leila had taken fire (a lady of literary talents
and original views, who had brought up, on purely hygienic principles, a
family of one, and expanded it into a multiplicity of chapters)—Miss
Cooter might be trusted to achieve the desired result, and turn out
Harold, physically and mentally, a prodigy of infantile perfection. Her
work was purely philanthropic, and if she consented to accept the
inadequate salary of two hundred a year in return for her services,
Leila and Tom explained, she must in no sense be treated as a hireling.
The united efforts of the brougham and the spring-cart fetched Miss
Cooter and a mountain of Saratogas from the station one spring day, and
she came down to afternoon tea in the very newest of Parisian tea-gowns,
which, properly speaking, is not a tea-gown at all. She was decidedly
pretty, being dark, slim, bright-eyed, keen-featured, and almost
painfully intelligent-looking, even without her gold-framed pince-nez.
We devoted the evening to sociality, as Harold’s regimen of mental and
physical culture was to commence upon the following day.
“But you shall have a little peep at Baby,” Leila said, “when we go up
to dress for dinner.”
Miss Cooter agreed. “But I guess I’ve got to ask you, since the boy’s
name is Har’ld, to call him by it, and no other,” she said. “Our society
is dead against abbreviations and pet names. We hold that they act as a
clog upon the expanding faculties of the child, and arrest mental
progress. Besides, when maturity is reached, how pyfectly absurd it is
to hear middle-aged men and women addressed as ‘Toto’ and ‘Tiny’!”
Tom, who has a way of calling Leila “Mouse” when in good humor, turned
rich imperial purple at this home-thrust, and Leila, whose pet name for
Tom is “Tumps,” called attention to the green-fly on the pot-roses, both
silently registering a vow never again, save _in camera_, to use the
offending appellations.
Miss Cooter was formally invested with Harold on the following morning.
His ex-nurse, a plump, rosy-cheeked country-woman, painfully devoid of
culture, and absolutely unskilled in the repression of emotion, was
relegated, in floods of tears, to command of the laundry. Leila,
compassionating the grief of the exile, would have pleaded for Mary’s
reduction to the post of under-nurse; but Miss Cooter pronounced that
Mary was an obstacle in the way of Progress, and an enemy to Culture,
and must go.
Mary went, and Harold, at first too stunned by her desertion to yield to
sorrow, presently proclaimed his bereavement in a succession of
ear-piercing shrieks.
“What is to be done?” queried Leila, by signs.
Applying both hands to his mouth, after the fashion of a
speaking-trumpet, Tom vocalized the suggestion, “Send—for Mary—back!”