given to everybody free, Turkish baths, needle baths, electric baths,
hairdressing and manicuring saloons, millinery establishments, a theater
with a stock company who don’t know what sea-sickness means, jewelers’
shops, florists, and Fuller’s, a palmist, and a thought-reader.
Goodness! the gay old ship must be a floating London, with fish and
things squattering about underneath one’s shoe-heels instead of
‘phone-wires and electric-light cables. And I’m shut up like a blooming
pearl in an oyster, instead of running about and looking at everything.
Oh, Simpkie’—Simpkins, the new maid, had been a dresser at the West End
Theatre—“I’m dying for the chance of a little flutter on my own, and how
am I to get it?”
The _Regent Street_ gave a long, stately, sliding dive forwards as a
mammoth roller of St. George’s Channel swept under her sky-scraping
stern. A long, plaintive moan—forerunner of how many to come!—sounded
from the other side of the partition dividing the apartments of the
bride from that of her newly-wedded lord.
“I think you’re goin’ to get it, my lady,” said the demure Simpkins, as
Rustleton’s man knocked at his mistress’s door to convey the intimation
that his lordship preferred not to dine.
A head-wind and a heavy sea combined, during the next three days of the
voyage, to render Rustleton a prey to agonies which are better imagined
than described. While he imbibed hot water and nibbled captain’s
biscuits, or lay prone and semi-conscious in the clutches of the hideous
malady of the wave, Lady Rustleton, bright-eyed, _petite_, and
beautifully dressed, paraded the promenade deck with a tail of male and
female cronies, played at quoits and croquet, to the delight of select
audiences, and sat in sheltered corners after dinner, well out of the
radius of the electric light, sometimes with two or three, generally
with one, of the best-looking victims of her bow and spear. She sat on
the Captain’s right hand at the center table, outrageously bedecked with
diamonds. She played in a musical sketch and sang at a charity concert.
“Buzzy, Buzzy, Busy Bee” was thenceforth to be heard in every corner of
the vast maritime hotel that was hurrying its guests Westward at the
utmost speed of steel and steam. Fresh bouquets of Malmaison carnations,
roses and violets from the Piccadilly florists, were continually heaped
upon her shrine, dainty jeweled miniature representations of the _Regent
Street’s_ house-flag, boxes of choice bonbons showered upon her like
rain. The celebrated orang-utan occupied the chair next hers at a
special banquet, the newest modes in millinery found their way
mysteriously to her apartment, if she had but tried them on, smiled,
and, with the inimitable Petsie wink at the reflection of her own
provokingly pretty features in the shop mirror, approved.
“I keep forgetting I’m a married woman,” she would say, with the Petsie
smile, when elderly ladies of the cat-like type, and middle-aged men who
were malicious, inquired after the health of the invisible Lord
Rustleton. “But he’s there, poor dear; or as much as is left of him.
Quite contented if he gets his milk and beef-juice, and the hot water
comes regularly, and there’s a slice of lemon to suck. No; I’m afraid I
can’t give him your kind message of sympathy, you know, because sympathy
is too disturbing, he says.... He doesn’t even like _me_ to ask him if
he’s feeling bad, because, as he tells me, I have only to look at him to
know that he is, poor darling.”
Thus prattled the bride, even ready to _faire l’ingénue_ for the benefit
of even an audience of one. The voyage agreed with Petsie. Her
complexion, dulled by make-up, assumed a healthier tint; her eyes and
smile grew brighter, even as the ruddy gold faded from her abundant
hair. The end of this story would have been completely different had not
the tricksy sea-air brought about this deplorable change.
“I’m getting dreadfully rusty, as you say, Simpkie; and if the man in
the hairdresser’s shop on the Promenade Deck Arcade can give me a
shampoodle and touch me up a bit—quite an artist is he, and quite the
gentleman? Oh, very well, I’ll look in on my gentleman-artist between
breakfast and _bouillon_.”
Petsie did look in. The artist’s studio, elegantly hung with heavy pink
plush curtains, only contained, besides a shampooing-basin, a large
mirror, a nickel-silver instrument of a type between a chimney-cowl and
a ship’s ventilator, and a client’s chair, a young person of
ingratiating manners, who offered Lady Rustleton the chair, and
enveloping her dainty person in a starchy pink wrapper, touched a bell,
and saying, “The operator will attend immediately, moddam,” glided
noiselessly away. Petsie, approvingly surveying her image in the mirror,
did not hear a male footstep behind her. But as the head and shoulders
of the operator rose above the level of her topmost waves, and his
reflected gaze encountered her own, she became ghastly pale beneath her
rose-bloom, and with a little choking cry of recognition gasped out:
“Bill ... Boman! ... it can’t be you?”
“The old identical same,” Mr. William Boman said, with a cheerful smile.
“And if the shock has made you giddy, I can turn on the basin-hose in
half a tick, and give you a splash of cold as a reviver. Will you have
it? No? Then don’t faint, that’s all.”
“You wrote to say you were dying at Dieppe five years ago,” sobbed
Petsie, into the folds of the pink calico wrapper. “You wicked, cruel
man, you know you did!”
“And now you’re crying because I didn’t die,” said Mr. Boman, arranging
his sable forehead-curls in the glass, and complacently twirling a
highly-waxed mustache. “No pleasing you women. You never know what you
want, strikes me.”
“But somebody sent me a French undertaker’s bill for a first-class
funeral, nearly thirty pounds it came to when we’d got the francs down
to sovereigns,” moaned Petsie, “and I paid it.”
“That was my little dodge,” said Mr. Boman calmly, “to get a few
yellow-birds to go on with. Trouble I’d got into—don’t say any more
about it, because I am a reformed character now. And now we’re talking
about characters, what price yours, my Lady Rustleton?”
“Oh, Billy!”
“Bigamy ain’t a pretty word, but that’s what it comes to, as I’ve said
to myself many an evening as I smoked my cigar on the second-class deck
promenade, and heard you singing away in there to the swells in the
music-room like a—like a cage full of canaries. I shan’t make no scene
nor nothing like that, says I. Her hair’s getting a bit off color—see it
by daylight, she’ll have to come my way before long, and then I shall
tip her the ghost with a vengeance.”
“Oh, Bill dear, how could you be so cruel!” pleaded Petsie.
“Not so much of the ‘Bill dear,’ I’ll trouble you,” said Mr. Boman
sternly. “Why don’t you produce that aristocratic corpse you’ve married,
and let me have it out with him? Seasick, is he? I’ll make him land-sick
before I’ve done with him, and so I tell you. He’ll have to sell some of
his blooming acres to satisfy me, or some of them diamonds of yours, my
lady.”
But at this juncture the delayed attack of hysteria swooped upon its
victim. Summoning his young lady-assistant, Mr. Boman, with a few
injunctions, placed the patient in her care. Then brushing a few
bronze-hued hairs from his frock-coat, removing his dapper apron, and
tidying his hair with a rapid application of the brush, he winked as one
well pleased, and betook himself to Gobelin Tapestry Bridal Suite Number
Four, in the character of a Messenger of Fate.
Three hours later the news had leaked out all over the _Regent Street_.
The great vessel buzzed like a wasps’-nest, and the utmost resources of
wireless telegraphy were taxed to communicate to sister ships upon the
ocean and fellow-men upon the nearest land the astounding fact of the
sudden collapse of the Rustleton marriage, owing to the arrival on the
scene of a previous husband of the lady.
“_Ach Himmel!_ it is klorious!” gasped Funkstein, waving a pale blue
paper, “I haf here Petsie’s reply to de offer of de Syindigate—she comes
to de Vest End Theatre; at an advanced salary returns—and de house will
be cram-jammed to de doors for anoder tree hoondred berformances. It is
an ill vind dot to nopody plows goot, mark my vords!”
Lord Pomphrey had just given utterance to a similar sentiment;
Rustleton, on the other side of the Atlantic, had previously arrived at
a like conclusion. Mr. Boman had entertained the same view from the
outset of affairs. Petsie—again Le Poyntz—realizing the gigantic
advertisement that the resurrection of her first proprietor involved,
was gradually becoming reconciled to the situation. When all the
characters of a tale are made content, is it not time the narrative came
to a close?
“CLOTHES—AND THE MAN—!”
The smoking-room of the Younger Sons’ Club, the bow-windows of which
command a view of Piccadilly, contained at the hour of two-thirty its
full complement of habitual nicotians, who, seated in the comfortable
armchairs, recumbent on the leather divans, or grouped upon the
hearthrug, lent their energies with one accord to the thickening of the
atmosphere.
Hambridge Ost, a small, drab-hued man with a triangular face,
streakily-brushed hair, champagne-bottle shoulders, and feet as narrow
as boot-trees without the detachable side-pieces, invariably encased in
the shiniest of patent leathers,—Hambridge, from behind a large green
cigar, was giving a select audience of very young and callow listeners
the benefit of his opinions upon dress.
“If I proposed to jot down the small events of my insignificant private
life, dear fellers, or had the gift—supposing I did commit ’em to
paper—of makin’ ’em interesting ...” said Hambridge, raising his
eyebrows to the edge of his carefully parted hair and letting them down
again, “I don’t mind telling you, dear fellers, that the resultant
volume or two would mark an epoch in autobiographical literature. But,
like the violet—so to put it—I have, up to the present, preferred to
blush unseen. Not that the violet _can_ blush anything but purple—or
blue in frosty weather, but the simile has up to now always held good in
literature. Lord Pomphrey—a man appreciative to a degree of the talents
of his relatives—has said to me a thousand times if one, ‘Confound you,
Hambridge, why is not that, or this, or the other, so to put it, in
print?’ But Pomphrey may be partial——”
“No, no!” exclaimed, in a very deep bass, a very young man in a knitted
silk waistcoat and a singularly brilliant set of pimples. “No, no!”
“Much obliged, dear fellow,” said Hambridge, hoisting his eyebrows and
letting them drop in his characteristic manner. “Some of my views may
possess originality—even freshness when expressed, as I invariably
express ’em, in a perfectly commonplace manner.”
“No, no!” again exclaimed the pimply-faced owner of the deep bass voice.
“As to the Ethics of the Crinoline, now,” went on Hambridge, “I observe
that an energetic effort is being made—in a certain quarter and amongst
a certain _coterie_—to revive the discarded hoops of 1855–66. They did
their best to impart a second vitality to the Early Victorian
poke-bonnet some years ago. Why did the effort fail, dear fellers?
Because, with their accompanying garniture of modesty, blushes were
considered necessary to the feminine equipment at the date I have
mentioned. And because blushes—I speak on the most reliable
authority—are more difficult to simulate than tears. Also because,
looking down the pink silk-lined tunnel of the poke-bonnet of 1855–66,
it was impossible for you, as an ordinary male creature, to decide
whether the rosy glow invading the features of the woman you adored—we
adored women, dear fellows, at that period—was genuine or the reverse.
There you have in a nutshell the reason why the poke-bonnet was not
welcomed at the dawn of the twentieth century. Modesty and blushes, dear
fellers, are out of date.”
Hambridge leaned back in his chair with an air of mild triumph, running
his movable eye—the left was rigidly fixed behind his monocle—over the
faces of the listeners.
“Will the woman of the Twentieth Century willingly enclose her legs—they
were limbs in 1855–66—once more in the steel-barred calico cage, fifteen
feet in circumference, if not more, that contained the woman of the
Early Victorian Era? Dear fellers, the question furnishes material for
an interestin’ debate. In my young days there was no sittin’ in ladies’
pockets, no cosy-cornering, so to put it. You invariably kept at a
respectful distance from the young creature whom you, more or less
ardently—we could be ardent in those days—desired to woo and win, simply
because you couldn’t get nearer. You didn’t approach her mother for
permission to pay your addresses-her mother was encased in a similar
panoply. You went to her father, because you could get at him—there you
have the plain, simple reason of the custom of ‘askin’ Papa.’ And if you
were reprehensibly desirous of eloping with another fellow’s wife, you
didn’t express your wish in words. You wrote a letter invitin’ her to
fly with you—we called it flying in those days—and dropped it in the
post. If the lady disapproved, she dropped you. If not, she bolted with
you in a chaise with four or a pair—and even then her crinoline kept you
at a distance. You were no more at liberty to put your arm round her
waist than if the eye of Early Victorian Society had been glued upon
you.
“To put forward another reason _contra_ the reacceptance of the
crinoline by the Woman of To-day, dear fellers, the Woman of To-day can
swim. Therefore, the advantage of being dressed practically in a
lifebuoy, does not appeal to her as it did early in the previous reign.
I could quote you an instance of an accident which occurred to the Dover
and Calais paddle-wheel steam-packet, on board which I happened to be a
passenger, which, owing to the negligence of the captain, ran ashore
upon a sandbank half a mile from the pier. The first boat which was
lowered was filled with lady passengers, all in crinolines. It was
swamped by a wave which washed over the stern. The steersman and the
sailors who were rowing were unluckily snatched to a watery grave, poor
fellows. Not so the women passengers of the swamped boat, dear
creatures, who simply floated, keeping hold of one another’s scarves and
bonnet-strings, and so forth, until they could be picked up and conveyed
ashore. Not one of ’em could swim a stroke—and all were saved, thanks to
the crinoline in which each was attired. But, useful as under certain
circumstances the birdcage may be, the Twentieth Century Woman will
never be tempted back into it. She has learned what it is to have
muscles and to use ’em, dear fellers! and the era of languid inertia is
over for her.
“I will add, dear fellers, that in these drab and uncommonly dismal days
of early December, the dash of color now perceptible in the clothes of
the best dressed men present at social functions of the superior sort,
adds largely to the cheeriness of the scene. _Cela me fait cet effet_,
dear fellers, but of course I may be wrong. And the first man to adopt
and appear in the newest style in evenin’ dress—a bright blue coat of
fine faced cloth, with black velvet collar, velvet cuffs, and silk
facin’s, worn with trousers of the same material, braided with black
down the side seams, and a V-cut vest of white Irish silk poplin-has
realized a fortune through it.
“A well-known man, dear fellers, connected with two old Tory families of
the highest distinction, educated at Eton, popular at the
University-where he did not allow his love of study to interfere with
the more serious pursuit of sport—d’ye take me? Suppose we call him Eric
de Peauchamp-Walmerdale. His marriage took place yesterday at St.
Neot’s, Knightsbridge, the sacred edifice bein’ decorated with large
lilies and white chrysanthemums, and the gatherin’ of guests
surprisingly large—the biggest crush of the Season as yet. There were
six little girl-bridesmaids in pale blue, with diamond lockets, and the
bride’s train was carried by four pages, also in pale blue, with
gold-headed canes. As for the bride, considerin’ her age—a cool
seventy—surprisin’, dear fellers! Only daughter and heiress of an
ex-butler, who invented a paste for cleanin’ plate, patented it, and
became a millionaire, Isaac Shyne, Esq., M.P., of The Beeches, Wopsley,
and 710, Park Lane, deceased ten years ago at the ripe age of ninety.
“De Peauchamp-Walmerdale’s married sister lived next door to the rich
Miss Shyne, who practically went nowhere, and only received her
Nonconformist minister, and a few whist-playin’ friends of the same
denomination on certain specified evenin’s. House absolutely Early
Victorian—walnut-wood drawing-room suite, upholstered in green silk rep,
mahogany and brown leather for the dinin’-room. Berlin woolwork
curtains, worked by the mistress of the house, at all the front windows.
Three parrots, two poodles, and a pair of King Charles spaniels of the
obsolete miniature breed. Maid-servants—all elderly, butler like a
bishop, uncommon good cellar of gouty old Madeiras and sherries, laid
down by the defunct Shyne, awful collection of pictures by Smith, Jones,
Brown, and Robinson, splendid plate, too heavy to lift. And a fortune of
one hundred and fifty thousand in the most reliable Home Rails and
breweries, besides an estate of sixty thousand acres in Crannshire, and
the title deeds of the Park Lane house.
“It came—the idea of bringing Miss Shyne and De Peauchamp-Walmerdale
together—like a flash of inspiration—as the dear feller’s sister, Lady
Tewsminster, told me yesterday when people had struggled up after the
Psalm, and yawned through the address, _not_ delivered by a
Nonconformist, but by the Bishop of Baxterham; and while the choir were
singin’, ‘O Perfect Love!’ She was frightfully cast down when she
discovered through her maid, who had scraped, under orders, an
acquaintance with Miss Shyne’s elderly confidential attendant, that her
lady objected to young gentlemen—couldn’t endure the sight, so to put
it, of anything masculine under fifty, or without a bulge under the
waistcoat, and a bald top to its head. Further inquiries elicited that
Miss Shyne had had a disappointment in early life, and wore at the back
of an old-fashioned cameo brooch, representin’ the ‘Choice of Paris,’
the portrait on ivory of a handsome young man with fair hair, the livin’
image of Eric de Peauchamp-Walmerdale, in a light blue tail-coat, with a
black velvet collar and gold buttons, holding a King Charles spaniel of
the miniature breed under his arm.
“Dear fellers, Lady Tewsminster, the evening upon which she received
this item of information, knew no more than a newly-born infant what she
was going to do with it. As happens to most of us, she mentally filed it
for further reference, and getting into her gown, her diamonds, and her
evening _coiffure_—those Etruscan rolled curls are extremely becoming to
a woman of pronounced outlines, and there’s only one place in London,
she tells me, where they can be bought or redressed—went down to the
drawing-room.
“A small but select party had been invited for the evenin’, including,
on the feminine side, an American heiress on the lookout for a husband
with a title—or, at least, the next heir to one-a handsome widow with a
fairly decent jointure, and a couple of marriageable girls with almost
quite respectable _dots_. From these, carefully collected on approval by
a devoted sister, De Peauchamp-Walmerdale might, who knows? have
selected a life partner, and sunk into the obscurity of moderate means
for ever, had it not occurred to him upon that particular evening—do you
take me, dear fellers?—to array himself in the latest cry of modern
masculine evening dress.
“He was standing on the hearthrug when Lady Tewsminster entered, a tall,
slim, youthful figure, fair-haired and complexioned, and quite
uncommonly handsome, in his light blue coat with the black velvet
collar, braided accompaniments, and pearl-buttoned, watch-chainless,
white silk vest.
“‘How do you like me, Ju, old girl?’ he said, coming to kiss her. ‘I’ve
come to dine in character as our great-grandfather. Awful fool I feel,
but my tailor insisted on my wearin’ ’em, and as I owe the brute a
frightful bill I thought I’d best appease him by givin’ in.’
“The gilded Early Victorian frame of the high mantel-mirror behind De
Peauchamp-Walmerdale had the effect of being a frame, if you foller me,
out of which, the figure of the dear feller had stepped. A cameo brooch
shot into the mind of Lady Tewsminster, above it the long narrow face
and dowdy black lace bonnet of the heiress, Miss Jane Ann Shyne. A plan
of campaign was instantly formulated in the mind of that surprising
woman. She stepped to one of the windows commandin’ Park Lane, drew
aside the blind, and saw, paddlin’ up and down on the rainy pavement
outside, the waterproofed figure of Miss Shyne’s confidential maid,
taking the King Charles spaniels and the poodles for their customary
evenin’ ta-ta. Instantly she touched the bell, sent for her maid and
said to her in a rapid undertone, ‘Johnson, ten pounds are yours if you
can steal one of Miss Shyne’s pet King Charles spaniels while their
attendant is not looking. There is no risk—I shall send the creature
back in ten minutes. Will you undertake this? Yes? Very well, go and get
the beast.’
“The maid, Johnson, departed swiftly, the area-gate clicked, and Lady
Tewsminster, feverish with the great project boiling under her
transformation, paced the drawing-room until she heard the second click
of the gate. She swept down the stairs to meet Johnson, in whose black
silk apron struggled the smallest of the King Charles spaniels. ‘Did the
woman see?’ whispered the mistress. ‘Not a bit of her, my lady,’
returned the maid. ‘She was gossiping with the District Police-Inspector
about a burglary they’ve had three doors away. So I got Tottles—that’s
his name, my lady-quite easy, not being on a lead.’
“Telling the maid the promised ten pounds should be hers that night,
Lady Tewsminster snatched the struggling ‘Tottles’ from the enveloping
apron and swept back to her drawing-room to carry out her plan. ‘Peachie
dear,’ she said as she entered, ‘it would be frightfully sweet of you if
you would run in next door and carry this little beast to its owner,
Miss Shyne. Insist on seeing her; do not give the animal into any other
hands; do not wear your hat or an overcoat. I am firm upon this; and
remember,’ she fixed her large, expressive eyes full upon her brother’s
face, ‘remember, she has _nearly two hundred thousand pounds, and your
fate is in your own hands!... Go!_’
“Rather bewildered by Lady Tewsminster’s almost tragic address, De
Peauchamp-Walmerdale took the wriggling Tottles, left the house, and
carried out his instructions to the letter. The loss of Tottles had been
discovered. Miss Shyne’s establishment was topsy-turvy when he arrived,
servants tearing up and down stairs, the confidential attendant in tears
on a hall chair, Miss Shyne in hysterics in her Early Victorian boudoir,
the remaining dogs harking their heads off, and the very devil to pay.
But the arrival of De Peauchamp-Walmerdale, dear fellers, caused a lull
in the storm. Faithful to his instructions, he refused to give up the
dog, except to its mistress, and after a feint or two of departure, Miss
Shyne gave in and ordered her fate, as it turned out to be—d’ye foller
me?—to be shown upstairs.
“The Early Victorian drawing-room, with the green rep furniture and the
Berlin woolwork curtains—a pattern of macaws and dahlias, I
understood—was in partial darkness. Only the wax candles in the crystal
candelabra on the marble mantelshelf were alight, no electric
illuminations bein’ permitted on the premises.