beautiful evening in memory hundreds and hundreds of times! It has
helped me through such a lot of hard things--for things are hard
sometimes. Sometimes, when you aren’t here, and there isn’t no one to
speak to on the stairs, and the gentlemen are over-particular about
their boots and changeable about the hours for their meals, things get
the better of me to that extent that I scream and run!”
“Scream and run, do you?” said the puzzled Mr. Popham. “And how do you
do it? Or do you do it without knowing how, eh?”
“I shriek out loud and hear myself as though my voice came from a long
way off,” said Mellicent, opening her large eyes, “and then my feet
begin to run. I scream, and I run screaming up to the little top attic
I slept in when I came here as a child, where my old rag doll is still,
and mother’s patchwork counterpane covers the truckle-bed. And I hide
my head in that, and cry myself quiet and patient again!”
“And Lord have mercy on your lonely little soul!” cried Mr. Popham.
“Patient you are, and that’s the truth!” He took the knotty red hand
and held it in both of his for an instant, looking at the downcast
face. “But don’t scream and run any more. It isn’t good for you!”
“I haven’t screamed and runned for quite a long time now,” she
answered. “But”--her poor lips trembled--“I think I shall when you are
gone for good.”
“Nonsense, nonsense!” Mr. Popham squeezed the red hand and dropped it
gently. “I’ll come and see you from time to time.”
“And leave your little country inn?” said Mellicent, trying to smile.
“You won’t be able!”
“I could leave the landlady in charge,” suggested Mr. Popham. “Stop,
though, a landlady is the kind of article that doesn’t go with the
furniture and fixtures. I shall have to look out for her myself.” His
face changed. “Upon my word I shall!”
“I know the kind you’ll choose,” sighed Miss Mellicent. “And the best
won’t be good enough for you, Mr. Popham. She must be young and fair
and plump and rosy and blue-eyed, with golden curls like the Fairy
Queen in that pantomime, or the lovely dolls I see in the shop windows
when I’m out buying meat and groceries for the gentlemen. And her hands
must be as white and soft as mine are red and hard. And----”
“Don’t cry, my dear!” begged Mr. Popham. He stooped over her as she hid
her flaming cheeks in the hard-worked hands. “You have pretty hair,
Miss Mellicent,” he said, with a sensation of surprise at the discovery.
“I’ve been turning out rooms,” she sobbed, “and it’s full of dust!”
“And you’d have a pretty figure,” said Mr. Popham, now embarked upon
a career of discovery, “if you took the trouble to pull ’em in. And
you’re young--barely thirty--and I’m ten years older. And you’re a
first-class double extra A.1. housekeeper, cook, and manager. See here!
Give the lady proprietor a month’s notice, and come and be landlady of
the Bastling Arms at Helsham!”
“You--you’re not in earnest?”
She faced him, quivering, transfigured, panting.
“Ain’t I?” remarked Mr. Popham simply. “Say ‘Yes,’ Miss Mellicent, give
me a kiss, and we shall both begin to believe it. Run and change your
dress, and we’ll call a cab and make another evening of it, and if the
Alhambra ballet won’t do as well as the pantomime, under the present
circumstances, I shall be surprised! There’s John Henry’s knock at the
hall-door. He brings good news, or it wouldn’t be such a loud one. It
takes the girl ten minutes to get up the kitchen stairs; she’s a born
crawler, if ever there was one, and I’ve a fancy I should like you to
let the boy in--if you’ve no objection?”
“Oh, no, no!” she cried gladly, and flashed out of the room.
“She’s wonderfully nimble on her feet,” mused Mr. Popham; “and though
I’ve never seen ’em to my knowledge, I shouldn’t mind putting a bit on
the chance of their being pretty ones. Lord! I seem in for discoveries
to-day. Come in, John Henry!”
But it was not John Henry, but the butler from Portland Place.
“Odlett! Well, this is kind; and you with such an objection to getting
your feet damp!” Mr. Popham shook the large dough-colored hand of Mr.
Odlett until the butler secured the member from further assault by
putting it into his pocket.
“The boy was wanted to go upon an errand,” explained Mr. Odlett, in the
voice of the description known as rich. “And as a friend!”--his smile
creased his large pale cheeks, and caused the temporary disappearance
of his small twinkling eyes--“as a friend, no more port being wanted
for the party in the library, I thought I’d come and put you out of
your misery!”
“That was uncommon kind of you, Odlett!” breathed the acutely-anxious
Mr. Popham. He wiped his brow, and fixed an intense gaze on the
particular feature from which intelligence might be expected.
“The boy did his duty faithful from first to last,” said Mr. Odlett,
selecting a chair and carefully separating his coat-tails as a
preliminary to sitting down; “and when he laughed, ’ad the presence
of mind to drop his ’ead to the level of the library door mat,
consequently it was supposed to be the pug a-sneezing!”
“Well,” gasped Mr. Popham. “Well?”
“The Will come up to our fondest expectations,” continued Mr. Odlett.
“Sir George, who never shoots, ’ave the General’s old saloon-pistols
and sporting Mantons, and _Bell’s Life_ and the _Army Gazette_ for
twenty year back. Mr. Roderick is left the Chinese and Indian
curiosities on condition of his dusting ’em hisself regularly. My Lady
’ave ten pounds to purchase a mourning-ring, provided she’ll undertake
to wear it; the young ladies ditto; and the money----”
“The money----” choked Mr. Popham.
“The money, with the exception of several smaller legacies, goes, with
the consent of the Mayor and Corporation of Helsham, to purchase and
lay out a Public Park for the people in memory of the Testator. There’s
to be a mausoleum in the middle of it, in which his crematory urn is to
be kep’, and a bandstand at each end, because he always loved to see
people cheerful about him. Also, he bequeaths to Miss Mellicent Davis,
at his lodgings in Margaret Place, five guineas and a set of ivory
chessmen; and to his old and valued friend, William Odlett, which is
me, the sum of two hundred pounds. He adds, he hopes I’ll drink myself
to death on it, inside of a month; but he always was a playful old
gentleman. No--you’re not forgotten!”
Mr. Popham wiped his brow with an air of relief.
“You’re not forgotten--which ought to be a consolation to you!”
repeated Mr. Odlett, creasing all over with a vast, comprehensive
smile. “You’re to ’ave his walking-sticks, clothes, wigs, the rugs and
plaids, and the spare set of teeth, hoping you’ll always have something
to employ ’em on. I came over a-purpose to tell you; you’re so fond of
a joke, Popham.”
“I don’t deny it,” said the crushed and disappointed Mr. Popham; “but
where the humor of this one is, hang me if I know!”
“You’ll see by-and-by,” said Mr. Odlett consolingly. “When you’ve ’ad
time to think it over. Meanwhile I’ll stand a couple of whiskies hot.
A man don’t come into two hundred, cool, every day, and this windfall
is particularly welcome. You know Madgell, the landlord of the Bastling
Arms at Helsham, is gone over to the majority?”
Mr. Popham nodded a pale face.
“The lease, stock, goodwill, and fixtures of that pleasant little ’ouse
is to be ’ad for what I call a song. And I’m going--in a week or so,
when I’ve laid my hand secure on this here little legacy--to pop in and
settle down. Plummer, the cook, a plump and capable young woman, ’ave
expressed her willingness to be the landlady. I did suppose she had had
a bit of an understanding with you. But she’s quite come round my way
since the reading of the will, and I thought you’d like to know it!”
“You’re uncommon considerate,” said the rasped and tingling Mr. Popham,
“but I’ve made arrangements elsewhere.”
“Perhaps the Other One will change her mind when she finds out you’re
diddled in your expectations!” said the comforting Mr. Odlett, shaking
hands heartily. “Good-night. I shan’t hear of you coming to the door!”
But Mr. Popham did come, and slammed it behind the departing form of
Mr. Odlett with great heartiness.
“Damn his wigs and walking-sticks!” he said in the murky passage, “and
his spare teeth as well! A nice Job’s comforter, Odlett! ‘Perhaps
she’ll change her mind when she knows you’ve been diddled in your
expectations.’ Beg pardon, Miss Mellicent, I didn’t see you were there!
You’re not hurt, are you?”
“Only by your thinking I could change!” said Miss Mellicent, with a sob.
The ground-floor sitting-room door stood ajar; the room was unoccupied.
Mr. Popham led Miss Mellicent in, turned up one of the blackened
incandescent gas-jets, and stood petrified at the sight its hissing
white glare revealed.
“A gray silk gown, trimmed with real lace, and a gold chain!” cried the
bewildered Mr. Popham. “A diamond brooch, as I’m a living sinner! and
an opera-mantle and kid gloves and a fan! And your pretty brown hair
done up quite tastefully, and your eyes a-shining over the roses in
your cheeks! What’s done it? Who’s responsible for it? How did it come
about?”
If she had been less shy of him, she would have answered in two words,
“Through love!” But she only faltered:
“I’m so glad you think I look a bit nice in them. They--they belonged
to poor Aunt Davis, and I’ve had ’em altered to fit. She--she left them
to me when she died!”
“And handed over the lodging-house and furniture to the present lady
proprietor,” observed Mr. Popham, searching in his trouser pocket for a
cab whistle, “whom I don’t happen to know by sight.”
“Oh, yes, you do!” Miss Mellicent’s blush and smile made quite a pretty
little face of hers, and Mr. Popham boldly kissed it on the spot. “Oh
yes, you do, for she’s me! I should say, I am her! Law bless you,
dear Mr. Popham, I didn’t mean to startle you like that! Who cares
about your being left a lot of old clothes and wigs instead of a sum
of money--though you deserved it, true and faithful as you was to him
that’s gone! Haven’t I plenty for both? And landlord of the Bastling
Arms you shall be to-morrow, if you’ve set your heart on it! and we
shall be late for the beautiful sights at the theater if you don’t
whistle for a taxicab.”
“Life is certainly a switchback!” said Mr. Popham, as he breathed and
trilled alternately on the damp doorstep. “Now you’re down a-lookin’ up
at your fellow-mortals, and now you’re up, a-lookin’ down upon ’em!...
We’ll have a bit of supper at that very fish-bar, if it’s still in
existence, on our way home, carefully drawing the line at oysters as
risky and uncertain articles of diet for two middle-aged people about
to enter upon the duties and privileges of married life!”
THE COLLAPSE OF THE IDEAL
Canwarden did not write sonnets, or he would have composed many, not
only in celebration of Petronella’s eyebrows, but of her crystalline
blue eyes and burnished hair, her willowy figure of the latest and
most wonderful shape, and her slim, white hands and arched insteps.
But in all his plays--for he was a budding dramatist of exceeding
promise--he described her in red-lined type:--“_Enter So-and-So, a
fair and graceful girl of not more than twenty-five summers, with
sapphire eyes and golden locks, attired in the costume of the period_”
(whatever the period might be). “_She exhales the joyous freshness of
a May morning, and her gurgling laugh rivals the spring song of the
thrush._” This pleased the leading ladies hugely, even when their eyes
were not of sapphire; but stage-managers found Urban Canwarden’s stage
directions a trial. If he had been firmly seated in the motor-car of
public approval, both hands on the driving-wheel as he ripped along
the track of success, they would have smiled even while they writhed.
But Canwarden was not yet famous, and the stage-managers were free not
to disguise their feelings. However, he went on; getting thin--thin
for a plump man--in the effort to make enough to marry on. For the
beloved of his soul was not of the bread-and-cheese-and-kisses type of
betrothed of whom we read in novels that have many years ago silted
to the bottom-shelves in public libraries, and are occasionally
issued as new in paper covers at fourpence-halfpenny. Her full name
was Petronella Lesser, and she dwelt with her parents in an Early
Victorian villa on Haverstock Hill, a residence which had been slowly
settling down on one side ever since the Tube borings had started. The
lease would be out, old Mr. Lesser calculated, a day or two before the
Corinthian-pillared stucco and brick porch sat down. He was something
in the Italian warehouse supply-line in the City, and a singular judge
of olives, Gruyère, and barreled Norwegian sprats. Petronella never
looked a fairer, more poetic thing than when concealing vast quantities
of these zests behind the latest thing in blouses, day or evening wear,
and Urban Canwarden, as he gazed upon his betrothed, or very nearly so,
swore to himself that she should never know what it is to go lacking
the _hors d’œuvres_ that lend piquancy to the Banquet of Life.
Petronella was a girl whose white and well-developed bosom was the
home of emotions but little livelier than those that animate the
beautiful person of a Regent-street wax-doll. Sawdust will burn, it
is true, but the costlier puppets are stuffed with choicer stuffing.
She had not fallen in love with Urban Canwarden; she had simply frozen
on to him. She had liked sitting in the author’s box on First Nights,
while the author tore his hair at his Club or in his chambers. She
liked his person, his friends, his prospects. She looked forward to an
elegantly-furnished villa on Campden Hill, with a cottage at Sonning
or Hampton Wick, and mid-winter runs to the South of France, when a
distinguished dramatist, the husband of a charming and attractive wife,
whose _salon_ would be the constant resort of the fine flower, the top
of the basket of London Society, should require rest and change of air
after his exhausting labors undergone in the composition and rehearsal
of the brilliant play, in four acts and eleven scenes, destined to be
the opening attraction of Mr. James Toplofty’s Spring Season at the
West End Theater. She would dream thus paragraphically, whenever she
did dream, which was seldom, for her imaginative region was small. She
was stupid and narrow, cold-hearted and mercenary.
“Since I have loved you,” Canwarden would say, “I have been able to
write of noble women. You have inspired me; everything that is best in
me comes from you; everything I have done that is good I owe to you....”
“You dear, exaggerating, Romantic Thing!” was invariably the reply of
Petronella. “And when we are married we shall have a 28 h.p. Gohard
with nickel fittings and a changeable body, and a chauffeur in livery.
I used to dream of a dear little private brougham when we were first
engaged, but nobody who wants to be thought Anybody would have such
an old-fashioned thing now. How the world is changing, isn’t it, with
motors and airships and Tubes to travel in?”
* * * * *
The Haverstock Hill villa vibrated as she prattled, and the porch
settled lower by the fraction of an inch. It was a July evening, and
the lovers, arm-in-arm, paced up and down the damp and puddly graveled
avenue under the liquid-soot-distilling lilacs and acacias. The
reflection of a large fire danced upon the windows of Mrs. Lesser’s
drawing-room, and Petronella, despite the warmth of Canwarden’s love,
felt chilly. She wondered why Urban had pressed her to put on goloshes
and a warm wrap after dinner and take this clammy evening stroll
arm-in-arm with him. And then she was conscious that the heart against
which her right hand rested thumped heavily, and she felt his arm
tremble, and remembered that at dinner her betrothed had shown a poor
appetite in conjunction with a well-developed thirst. As pigs are said
to feel wind coming, as cats--even the most sedate--set up their backs
and sprint about the garden at the approach of a storm, Petronella
instinctively felt that bad news was in the air. A more sentimental
and much prettier girl might have anticipated a shipwreck of the
affections--expected to be told that Canwarden had found his Fate in
another’s eyes. Petronella’s previsions of disaster concerned only his
banking account. It was that to which she was really referring when she
said she felt that something had happened.
“It is true, dearest,” Canwarden said, with the kind of hoarse groan
that he had not been able to extract from the leading young man in his
last romantic drama even with the grappling-hooks of continued effort.
“Something has happened. My great play--for that it is great I feel,
and always shall, despite the slings and arrows of that eater of red
meat, the Transatlantic critic ... my great play, ‘_The_ ...’”
“I know, ‘_The Popshop Hearse_’ ...” Petronella put in hurriedly.
“No, no ... ‘_The Poisoned Curse_,’” corrected the author, with a
wince. “My play, produced a fortnight ago at Barney and Keedler’s
Classical Theater, New York, is a failure ... a blank and utter
failure! Yes, yes! the management did cable to me to say it had
been enthusiastically received. I showed the message to you, and
you shared my gladness. But here--here is another cable from
my agent, Loris K. Boodler, of Skyscraper Mansions, 49,000,000
Broadway, that says....” He drew a crackling, flimsy paper from his
waistcoat pocket, and tried to unfold it with hands that shook. “I
can’t read it because it’s too dark, but I remember every word.
‘_Your--play--taken--off--Saturday--following--production. Variety
vaudeville substituted. Writing. Boodler._’ And I was looking forward
to the author’s fees to”--he coughed in a choky way--“to furnish our
house and ... and buy that motor-car you were talking about. It ... it
seemed so sure a thing! I had got such capital percentages; Barney and
Keedler had cabled to say the play was a success....” He choked. “And
now!...”
“You told me all that before, dear,” said Petronella. “But you have two
other plays coming out, haven’t you, in London theaters?... West End
houses.... And one failure doesn’t spell ruin....”
“One failure can break a dramatist, when it is a failure of this kind,”
said her disconsolate lover. “Those two other plays are ... were
coming out at theaters held by the same lessees--Barney and Keedler,
of the Mammoth American Dramatic Trust. And so, don’t you see, all my
balloons are deflated at once. I’ve come down with a crash, and ... it
hurts! But you will trust me, won’t you? You will go on believing in
me, though I’ve had what technical people will call a set-back. And
if our ... our marriage must be delayed....” He stopped under one of
the liquid soot-distilling lilacs, and caught Petronella in his arms,
crushing the draperies arranged by her Hampstead dressmaker roughly
against his damp evening overcoat. “You will not mind!... We will wait
and hope, and love each other ... love each other.... After all, while
we are together, nothing is too hard to bear....”
Thus spoke Canwarden, counting his chickens ere their emergence from
the shell, after the fashion of a young man too deeply in love to
see clearly what manner of young woman his heart is set upon. But
Petronella shivered, conscious that the Hampstead garden was clammy,
and that the dazzling halo of coming fame and approaching prosperity
had been banished from Canwarden’s brow. He stood before her, tall and
straight, and sufficiently good to look at, with his bright brown eyes,
straight, short nose, and sensitive, clean-shaven lips, though his
curly hair, it must be added, was receding too fast from a brow more
bumpy than, according to the accepted canons of classical proportion,
a brow should be. Upon his shirt-front a lilac had shed an inky tear,
and his voice was husky with love and sorrow, not of an utterly selfish
kind, as he promised Petronella to work hard, never to cease working
until he had regained the lost ground.
“But you never may!...” she said, and the doubt in those shallow blue
eyes--he never had realized before that they were shallow--pierced him
to the soul. “And Nora will be married before me, and she is two years
younger, and everybody in Hampstead will say....”
Canwarden, with heat, devoted Hampstead to the devil. I am not
defending him. Petronella thought him brutal, coarse, and profane.
Women of Petronella’s kind always enthusiastically uphold the dignity
of the devil. She told him what she thought, and she wound up in the
red-papered hall of the one-sided Hampstead villa by saying that he
and she had better part. She added, as women of Petronella’s type
invariably do add, that the dead past might bury its dead. And she drew
off her engagement ring--an olivine, imposed by a Bond Street jeweler
upon the too-confiding Canwarden as an emerald, harnessed between two
indifferent diamonds of yellowish hue--and thrust it back upon him, and
went upstairs to her room and locked the door; and as the hall-door
banged violently and the iron avenue gates clashed behind the haggard
Canwarden, his late betrothed sat down to pen a little note to Percy
Flicker--a young man without a chin, junior partner of a small but
pushing firm of shipbrokers at No. 35,000 Cornhill. The porch made up
its mind and sat down that night, and Percy the chinless called upon
the following evening, and was compelled to enter his Love’s bower by
the back-door.
And Canwarden, seeing volcanic ruins smoking where his Castle of
Hope had stood, wandered the West End and the Strand like a thing
accursed. He went into his club, and men slapped him on the shoulder
and congratulated him upon the New York success. They would learn the
truth later, he said to himself, and then they would chuckle and sneer.
The rustling of the cablegram in his waistcoat pocket whispered “_Yes
s’s’!_” Meanwhile he had no appetite for solid food, and, quenching
the thirst that consumed him with iced brandy and soda, he, Canwarden,
usually the most temperate of men, realized how easily spanned is the
gulf that severs the sober man from the inebriate. He might, perhaps,
have crossed it for good and all had he not chanced to pass the
invitingly open door of Grow’s Transatlantic Bureau of Exchange. The
shipping advertisements loomed large and gaily-colored in the window;
passenger lists and railway guides hung from hooks upon the walls, and
lay in piles upon the counter, and a civil clerk and an attractive
girl with squirrel-colored hair were busy over ledgers and things.
Prompted by his guardian angel Canwarden went in and asked for the
New York papers. The mail was just in, and he got them, and, leaning
on the polished shelf-desk where people write out code telegrams, he
turned to the theatrical column. His drama, _The Poisoned Curse_, had
been withdrawn a fortnight ago from the stage of Barney and Keedler’s
Theater--slain as a thing unfit to live--and a variety vaudeville
substituted in its stead. Did not the cablegram--Loris K. Boodler’s
cablegram--say so? He would see the hideous announcement for himself,
and then go under, as men went who had broken the golden bowl of Youth
and Hope, and were too weary to go on fighting.
Could it ... could it be a mistake...? Was the play a success after
all? It looked like it. For in flamboyant type _The Poisoned Curse_: a
Romantic Drama in four acts and eleven scenes, by Urban Canwarden, was
announced by the _New York Trumpeter_ as being presented to-night, and
every night, and to-day at 1.30, and Saturday _matinées_ as announced.
The play had been running when Loris K. Boodler sent the cablegram
announcing its withdrawal; the play was running now--would run.
Canwarden’s hands shook so that the flimsy news-sheet tore. He glanced
at the girl with the squirrel-colored hair and apologized, saying that
he would pay for the paper. She smiled, and he found that he was able
to smile back again. He despatched a short but expressive cablegram to
the office of Mr. Loris K. Boodler, relieving that smart and go-ahead
agent from further responsibility in connection with the collection
of his percentages, and walked out of Grow’s Transatlantic Bureau of
Exchange with his head up--a free man.