the dying--’twas only when I thought how lonely it would be,
with no one caring whether I came or went. I’ve forgotten what
loneliness is with you by me. Look up at me.”
He raised his head--and her eyes were dancing.
“Has it yellow hair?”
“Yes.”
“Will you teach it to laugh?”
“Biddy--Biddy----”
“’Twill be dull in Heaven without you,” she said. “But ’twill be
gay when you come.” She leaned toward him, her lips curved to
mischief. “Wait till they tell my Aunt Dasheen--Saint Peter himself
will have to laugh. ‘Woman, there’s someone just come asking after
you--a little one, even on her toes. She says her name is Biddy and
she’s Duchess of Bolingham----’”
The faint voice trailed to airy mirth, and with that music echoing
still about her Her Grace closed her dancing eyes, and closed her
laughing lips, and turned her bright head away and was gone, as
lightly and swiftly as she had come.
THE HONOURABLE TONY
“You actually mean to tell me that you don’t want to get out of
this dripping hole?”
“My dear old ass, why on earth should I want to get out of it?”
Anthony Christopher Stoningham Calvert faced the incredulous glare
of the freckle-faced young gentleman from Ohio with engaging
candour. Four years of soaking in tropical pest holes and rioting
from Monte Carlo to Rio, from Shanghai to Singapore, since they had
met, and yet there he sat, sprawled out full length in his great
cane chair, as cool and shameless and unconquerably youthful as
though he had just been sent down from Oxford for the first time.
Even in the light that filtered in through the cane shutters, green
and strange as the pallid glow that washes through aquariums, it
was clear that time had found no power to touch that long grace,
that bright head with its ruffled crop of short hair, those gay
eyes, wide set and mischievous in the brown young face, those
absurd dimples, carved deep into the lean curve of the cheek. Young
Ledyard gave a bark of outraged protest, his pleasant face flushed
and exasperated under its thatch of sandy hair.
“You mean it? You aren’t coming back with me?”
“Not for all the gold in the Indies, my dear kid--or out of them
either, if it comes to that.” The Honourable Tony, as he had been
dubbed by a scandalized and diverted public, grinned alluringly
through the vaguely sinister light at his onetime comrade at arms.
“The whole thing is absolutely ripping, I tell you, and the only
thing that I ask is to spend the next sixty years doing precisely
what I’m doing now.”
“I don’t believe you,” rejoined his baffled guest flatly. “Why
in God’s name should you want to rot your life away in a little
backwater Hell, when I can give you a first-rate job twenty-four
hours after we land in America?”
“But, my dear fellow, I wouldn’t have your job as a birthday gift.
You may be the heir apparent to the greatest rubber business in
the whole jolly globe, but try to bear in mind that you see before
you the chief, sole, and official British Imperial Adviser to the
fattest little Sultan in Asia--who incidentally eats up every word
of wisdom that falls from his adviser’s lips and sits up and begs
for more, let me tell you.”
“And let me tell _you_ that it’s common gossip in every gutter in
Singapore that your Sultan’s a black-hearted scoundrel who’s only
waiting for a chance to double-cross England and do you one in the
eye.”
“What happens to be the current gutter gossip about his adviser?”
inquired that gentleman blandly.
Ledyard’s jaw looked suddenly aggressive.
“Never mind what it happens to be. What I want to know is why your
friend Bhakdi isn’t back in his dirty little capital trying to
straighten out some of the messes he’s got himself into instead of
squatting up here in the jungle hunting tigers?”
“Because his invaluable adviser advises him to stay precisely where
he is,” explained the Honourable Tony cheerfully. “Just between us,
there are several nasty bits of international complications and
one or two strictly domestic ones that make a protracted absence
from the native heath highly advisable--oh, highly. Besides, you’d
hardly have us trot back without a tiger, would you? I assure you
that so far we haven’t bagged a solitary one. Not a tiger, Bill,
not a tiger!”
“Oh, for the love of the Lord, shut up! I tell you this whole
thing’s a rotten, ugly, dangerous business, and I didn’t come
crawling up through Hades to have you turn it into a joke. I can’t
stay jawing about it, and you know it--it’s going to be a darned
close squeak to make connections with the steamer as it is. Are you
coming or are you not?”
“I are not. Do quiet down and tell me why it is that you’re totally
unable to distinguish between comic opera and melodrama? This
whole performance is the purest farce, I swear! Wait till you see
his Imperial Majesty--as nice a buttery, pompous little blighter
as you’d want to lay eyes on, who’s spent six months at Cambridge
and comes to heel like a spaniel if you tell him that anything
in the world ‘isn’t done.’ He has a solid gold bicycle and four
unhappy marriages and a body-guard with bright green panties and
mother-of-pearl handles to their automatics! You wouldn’t expect
even a Chinaman to take that seriously, would you?”
“I should think you’d go mad in your head trying to get along with
a bounder who doesn’t know the first thing in the world about your
code of standards or----”
“William, you are the most frightful donkey! The only code that
I’ve recognized since I pattered off the ancestral estate is the
jolly dot-dash thing that they use for telegrams. I’ve finally
got our Bhakdi to the point where he drills his troops in pure
British and plays a cracking good game of auction bridge without
cheating--civilization’s greatest triumph in the Near or Far East.
Personally, I ask no more of it!”
Ledyard mopped his brow despairingly. The dim room with its snowy
matting and pale green cushions looked cool enough, but the heat
outside would have penetrated a refrigerator. Just the other side
of those protecting shutters the sun was beating down on the quiet
waters until they glared back like burning silver--the tufts of
palm and bamboo were hanging like so many dejected jade banners
in the breathless air--the ridiculous little houses were huddled
clumsily together on their ungainly piles, shrinking unhappily
under their huge hats of nippa thatch.
“It’s a filthy, poisonous hole!” he protested fiercely. “It beats
me why you can’t see it. If anything went wrong here, you wouldn’t
have a white man in a hundred miles to turn to. You needn’t laugh.
There’s nothing so howlingly funny about it. What about that Scotch
engineer who was so everlastingly intimate with your precious
Bhakdi’s next-door neighbour?”
“Well, what about him? The poor chap fell down a shaft and broke
his neck.”
“Oh, he did, did he? Well, believe me, that’s not what they say
in Singapore! Calvert, for God’s _sake_, get out of this infernal
place. Every inch of it smells of death and damnation. How any
one who calls himself an English gentleman can stick it for a
minute----”
“But I don’t call myself an English gentleman,” the Honourable Tony
assured him earnestly. “God forbid! I call myself an out-and-out
waster exiled for ever from the Mother Country by a cruel and
powerful elder brother. The only trick in it is that I’m simply
cuckoo with ecstasy over the entire situation. Not according
to Kipling, what? No, the glittering prospect of spending the
remaining years of a misspent life in the largest rubber factory in
Ohio leaves me considerably colder than ice.”
“I suggested Ohio because I happen to be in charge of that plant
myself,” returned Ledyard stiffly. “If you’d rather have a go at
one of the others----”
“But, my good child, it seems impossible to make you understand
that the factory has not been built for which I would exchange
one single baked banana soaked in rum and moonlight. Think of the
simply hideous sacrifices that I’d make, can’t you?--taking advice
instead of being paid good round guineas for giving it--working for
one beastly hour after another instead of slipping from one golden
minute to the next--drinking nasty chemical messes in constant
terror of sudden death or prison bars, instead of tossing off
bumpers and flagons and buckets of delectable fluids that smell
like flowers and shine like jewels--dragging around to the most
appalling festivals where pampered little females tip up their
ridiculous powdered noses and distribute two minutes of their
precious dances as though they were conferring the Order of the
Garter, instead of----”
Ledyard looked suddenly three shades hotter beneath his freckles.
“Thanks--glad to know how much you enjoyed your visit.”
“I enjoyed every minute of it to the point of explosion, as you
are thoroughly well aware. If I live to ninety-two, I shall
remember the excellent yarns that your father spun over those
incredibly good cigars and that simply immortal corn pudding, and
the shoulders on the little red-headed creature in the black dress
at the Country Club--good Lord, William, the shoulders on that
creature! After four years of not especially pretty smells and
not especially pretty noises, what do you think that those July
evenings under the awnings on your veranda meant to a God-forsaken
flying chap back from the wars, William?”
William looked frankly unappeased.
“A hell of a lot of difference it makes what I think! I know one
God-forsaken flying chap who thought it wasn’t good enough for
him, by a long shot. Not while he could hop off and rot his soul
out in a water-logged bamboo shack in Asia!”
The owner of the bamboo shack settled deeper into his chair with a
graceless and engaging grin.
“My dear chap, it was Heaven, pure and simple--but a dash too pure
and simple for some of us. Every man his own Heaven, what? Well,
you’re sitting in mine at the present. Of course it mightn’t suit
any one with even an elementary code of principles, but having none
of any kind or description it suits me down to the ground and up to
the sky.”
“Oh, bunk!” commented Ledyard with fervent irritation. “You’ve
got all the principles you need; do you think that I’d have come
chasing up this unspeakable river in everything from a motorboat to
a raft after any howling blackguard?”
“Well, it’s rather one on you, isn’t it, dear boy? Because it’s
so absolutely what you’ve up and gone and done--though through no
earthly fault of mine, you know! Rather not. Didn’t I spend four
jolly busy years trying to get it through your thick skull that
I was ninety-nine different varieties of blighter, and that nice
little American kids with freckles on their noses shouldn’t come
trotting around my propellers?”
“Hey, how do you get that way?” The nice little American kid
raised his voice in poignant irritation. “Kid! If any one ever
took the trouble to give you two looks they’d think you’d bounced
straight out of rompers into long trousers without waiting for
knickerbockers. Kid!”
“Old in iniquity, William, old in iniquity,” explained the
Honourable Tony blithely. “Physically I grant that I’m fairly in
the pink, but morally I’m edging rapidly into senile decay. I
pledge you my word, which is worth considerably less than nothing,
that I haven’t as many morals as I have side whiskers. And even
you, my dear old chap, will be willing to admit that I don’t go in
heavily for side whiskers. Take a long piercing look.”
Ledyard scowled wretchedly at the impish countenance blandly
presented for inspection.
“The trouble with you is that you simply can’t take it in that
any one on the whole bally globe could prefer a Bengal tiger to a
British lion and a bird of paradise to an American eagle. You see
before you a foul monstrosity who would trade all the British Isles
for twenty yards of jungle, and gloat over his bargain. Have a
cigarette?”
“No, I won’t have a cigarette. You make me so sick and tired with
all that jaw about what a devil you are that I could yell. Once and
for all, are you going to drop it and come back with me?”
“Once and for all I am not going to move one quarter of an inch.
Stop jawing yourself for a minute, and try to see it my way. If
you’d been chivvied about for your entire life by a lot of frenzied
vestals for aunts who were trying to guide you to what they
unfortunately considered grace, and three simply appalling bounders
for brothers who set up the most frightful howl over the Bolingham
name and the Bolingham honour and the Bolingham fortune every time
the youngest member of the Bolingham family picked a primrose,
you’d good and well think you were in Heaven if you could get out
of earshot of their ghastly voices.”
“Damn it all!” cried young Ledyard violently. “You haven’t got
the nerve to sit up there and tell me that you call this filthy
water-hole Heaven?”
“Oh, I haven’t, haven’t I?” The Honourable Tony regarded the
flushed countenance with pensive amusement. “I say, you Americans
do have the most amazing cheek! Who ever asked you to come puffing
and blowing into my own particular earthly Paradise and start in
slanging it all over the shop? Filthy water-hole, by Gad! You won’t
recognize Heaven when you have the milk and gold and harps and
honey stuck under your silly nose.”
Ledyard rose sharply to his feet.
“All right, I’ll be off, then, and not waste any more of the
valuable time that you’re employing so profitably. As you suggest,
no one asked me to hurl myself into your affairs, and you’ve
managed to make it good and clear that I was a lunatic to think
that you’d take advice or help from me or any other well-meaning
fool on the face of the earth. If you’ll get hold of one of those
black swine that make up your circle of friends, these days, and
tell them to get my men and the raft----”
“My dear old chap!” The Honourable Tony was at Ledyard’s side in
two great strides, his arm was about Ledyard’s shoulders in the
old, remembered gesture of gay affection. “For God’s sake, do try
to remember that I am simply a feather-headed goat who can’t for
the life of him say three consecutive inoffensive syllables--I give
you my word that I was born with both feet in my mouth--actually!
As for your taking the time and trouble to come tooting up that
frightful river in order to throw me a life-line, I could sit down
and howl with emotion whenever I think of it--no, I swear that’s
the truth! Do sit down again like a good chap--it’s absolute rot
to talk about going before sundown; the sun would simply melt you
down like a tallow candle. Besides, the jetty-eyed companion of
your travels isn’t back from her interview with His Majesty, and
you can hardly abandon her to our tender mercies--oh, well, hardly!
I say, didn’t you gather that she was going to romp straight back
to our sheltering wings as soon as she’d presented the heart-wrung
petition?”
“If you believe two words the lying little devil says, you’re a
worse fool than I am!” said Ledyard gloomily.
The Honourable Tony shouted his delight.
“Where’s all this hundred per cent. American chivalry? What an
absolutely shocking way to talk about a perfect lady who touchingly
relies on your being a perfect gentleman. ‘Meestair Billee Ledyar’,
allaways, allaways he conduck heemself like a mos’ pairfick
genteelman!’”
He shouted again at the sight of Meestair Billee Ledyar’s revolted
countenance.
“Calvert, when I think what I’ve been through with that beastly
limpet, jabbering all day and hysterics all night--it’s nothing
short of a miracle that I didn’t bash her head against the anchor
and feed her to the crocodiles. Who the devil is she, anyway?”
“Daisy de Vallorosa? My dear chap, why ask me?”
“Well, I do ask you. She seems to know who you are all right!”
“Does she, indeed? Upon my word, that’s interesting!”
He cocked his head attentively, guileless and inscrutable.
“Yes, she does indeed. Come on--let me in on this! Did she honestly
come up here to get help for a brother dying in the tin mines, or
is this a rendezvous that the two of you fixed up in Singapore?”
His host looked shocked but magnanimous.
“William, William--no, frankly, you appall me! What a sordid mind
you have under that sunny exterior; out upon you! I never make
rendezvous--absolutely not.”
“Well, she swore that she’d met you and Bhakdi at a special concert
while he was visiting Singapore.”
“Oh, extremely special,” murmured the Honourable Tony, a
reminiscent gleam in his eye. “Rather! She sang some little songs
that were quite as special as anything I’ve ever heard in my life,
and at one time or another I’ve heard a good few. Bhakdi was most
frightfully bowled over; he gave her two hammered gold buckles
and a warm invitation to drop in on him at any time that she was
in the neighbourhood. I rather fancy that that’s what’s at the
bottom of all this; taking one thing with another, I’m inclined to
believe that Necessity became a Mother again when our little Daisy
barged into you, and that the expiring brother is simply one of her
inventive offspring. Hence, death and the tin mines! By the way,
just how _did_ the young female barge into you?”
“She had the next seat on the train from Singapore, curse her!”
replied Ledyard vindictively. “And she sat there as good and quiet
as pie, squeaking out, ‘Yes, I sank you’ and ‘No, I sank you’ every
time I asked her if she wanted the window up, or the shades down
or--or anything. I tell you butter wouldn’t have melted in her
nasty little painted mouth! Then when we found that you and Bhakdi
had lit out after tigers, and I decided that I’d just have time
before the next boat to hire a crew and hunt you down, she went
off into twenty-one different kinds of hysterics until I promised
to bring her along, too. ‘Five meenit--only five small lil’ meenit
to spik weeth the gr-reat, the good Sultan, and the gr-reat, nobl’
Honable Meestaire Tonee Calver’, and her Manuelo would be restore
once more to her arms.’ When I think that I fell for that I could
choke down a quart of carbolic straight.”
“Oh, I can quite see how it came about--quite, quite!” murmured the
Honourable Tony, pensively sympathetic.
“Believe me, you can’t see the half of it!” Ledyard ran a frenzied
hand through the sandy hair. “Listen, how about getting away now,
before she turns up?”
“Well, upon my word, you unprincipled young devil, I’ve yet to hear
a cooler proposition! Damme if you don’t curdle the blood--damme
if you don’t. Are you asking me to sit by and condone a callous
desertion of this young female to the lures of a wily and dissolute
potentate?”
Ledyard faced his delighted inquisitor unabashed.
“Oh, go on--I’ll bet that’s what she’s after--and if you ask me,
he’s plenty good enough for her. She’s probably a cousin of his;
any one with all that fuzzy black hair and those black saucer eyes
and nasty glittery little teeth----”
“Wrong again, dear boy. The lady is undeniably the legitimate
offspring of Lady Scott’s English maid and a Portuguese wine
merchant, born in Madeira. She is also a British subject, being the
legitimate widow of the late Tommy Potts, one-time pianist of the
Imperial Doll Baby Girls.”
“Widow?” demanded Ledyard incredulously.
“Widow and orphan, William. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.
Tommy, alas, passed away while they were touring New Zealand, in a
distressingly complicated attack of appendicitis and D. T.’s. She
didn’t tell you?”
“No, she did not tell me,” replied William somewhat aggressively.
“See here, how do you happen to know so much about this Portuguese
Empire Doll Baby?”
“A trifling matter of a passport, William. Purely as a business
matter it became my painful duty to excavate the lady’s buried
past.”
Ledyard eyed him suspiciously.
“I believe she’s gone on you and you know it,” he said gloomily.
“Anyway, if she doesn’t turn up pretty soon, I’m going to pull out,
and that’s that. You and Bhakdi can fight it out between the two of
you--I’m through chaperoning Daisy de Vallorosa Potts from now on.”
“Sorry, but you’re going to have to chaperon her clear back to
Singapore,” the Honourable Tony assured him inflexibly. “If there’s
one thing that I simply cannot and will not stick it’s cheap
powder, and if there are two things that I simply cannot and will
not stick--it’s cheap perfume. The less they cost, the more they
use. Lord, Lord, the perfume that little hussy uses!”
“If she’s a British subject, it’s your job to look out for her.
She’s under your protection.”
“My dear kid, I wouldn’t disturb this enchanting existence by
lifting a finger to protect Queen Victoria from Don Juan.”
“Well, she’d better step lively,” remarked her late escort
ominously. “I’m not joking, you know--if I don’t make connections
with that boat in Singapore, I’m as good as disinherited! My
Governor’s not so gone on you that he’d consider you any excuse for
missing two boats, you know.”
“Not for missing one, you young ass.” The gay eyes dwelt on him
deeply for a moment, mocking and affectionate. “Your very able
parent was one fellow who never entertained any illusions as to my
intrinsic merit, wasn’t he?”
Ledyard drew a long breath, his face a little pale.
“Yes,” he said slowly, “he was. That was one of the things I wanted
to talk to you about. It’s hard to talk to you about anything like
that, Calvert!”
“Like what?”
The tone was hardly encouraging for all its amiability, but young
Ledyard pushed doggedly ahead.
“Like that--anything serious or intimate or real. You make it
darned difficult, let me tell you.”
“Then why do it?”
“Oh, not because I want to!” His angry, tired young face bore
unmistakable testimony to that. “Believe me, if I were consulting
my own pleasure I’d have told you to go to the devil the first time
you tried any of that condescending impertinence of yours on me.”
“Is it beside the mark to ask you just whose pleasure you _are_
consulting, then?”
Young Ledyard set his teeth hard.
“Pattie’s,” he said, very distinctly.
The Honourable Tony did not stir, but the eyes that he fixed on
Pattie’s brother went suddenly and incredibly black. After a long
pause he repeated, evenly and courteously,
“Pattie’s?”
“Yes, Pattie’s. That’s half of why I came--the other half, if you
want to know, is because I’m fool enough to care more about you
than any other man I ever met--than any other two men.”
The wide eyes were suddenly blue again.
“Thanks,” said the Honourable Tony, and there was something
startlingly sweet in his smile. “Thanks awfully. It’s quite mutual,
you know--any three men, I should say offhand. Suppose we simply
let it go at that? And do try one of these cigarettes; they really
are first-rate.”
“I can’t let it go at that, I tell you--I wish to the Lord I could.
Pattie had it all out with Dad, and she made me swear that I’d run
you down when I got out here and bring you back. She said that if
I couldn’t work it any other way I was to tell you that she said
‘Please.’ I’m at the end of my rope, Calvert--and Pattie says
‘Please.’”
The Honourable Tony raised his hand sharply, staring through
Pattie’s brother as though he saw someone else. Possibly he did see
someone else--someone as clear and cool in that dim, hot room as
a little spring, someone who stood there very small and straight
with young Ledyard’s sandy hair clasping her brows like a wreath of
autumn leaves, and young Ledyard’s gray eyes turned to two dancing
stars, and young Ledyard’s freckles trailing a faint gold powder
across the very tip of her tilted nose--someone as brave and honest
as a little boy and as wistful and gentle as a little girl, who
stood clasping her hands together tightly, and said “Please.”
“No, by God!” cried the Honourable Tony loudly. “No!”
“Don’t yell like that.” Ledyard rapped the words out fiercely.
“I’m not deaf--all you have to say is ‘no’ once. If it’s any
satisfaction to you to know it, I’m through.”
He rose to his feet and his host rose, too, swiftly, catching at
his arm.
“Rather got the wind up, haven’t we, old thing? No, don’t jerk
away; it’s simply rotten bad manners, and throws me off my stride
completely when I’m preparing to do the thing in the grand
manner--apologies, and _amendes honorables_ and every mortal trick
in the bag. You’re absolutely right, you know. It’s far too hot to
start shouting, and I swear that I’ll keep quiet if you will. We
might toss off a stirrup cup of quinine, what?”