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The day wore itself out. After dinner the two friends put in a long and
harassing evening trying to decide what to do with the five thousand
dollars reward which they were going to get when they should find
One-Armed Pete, and catch him, and prove him to be the right person,
and extradite him, and ship him to Tahlequah in the Indian Territory.
But there were so many dazzling openings for ready cash that they found
it impossible to make up their minds and keep them made up. Finally,
Mrs. Sellers grew very weary of it all, and said:
“What is the sense in cooking a rabbit before it’s caught?”
Then the matter was dropped, for the time being, and all went to bed.
Next morning, being persuaded by Hawkins, the colonel made drawings and
specifications and went down and applied for a patent for his toy
puzzle, and Hawkins took the toy itself and started out to see what
chance there might be to do something with it commercially. He did not
have to go far. In a small old wooden shanty which had once been
occupied as a dwelling by some humble negro family he found a keen-eyed
Yankee engaged in repairing cheap chairs and other second-hand
furniture. This man examined the toy indifferently; attempted to do the
puzzle; found it not so easy as he had expected; grew more interested,
and finally emphatically so; achieved a success at last, and asked:
“Is it patented?”
“Patent applied for.”
“That will answer. What do you want for it?”
“What will it retail for?”
“Well, twenty-five cents, I should think.”
“What will you give for the exclusive right?”
“I couldn’t give twenty dollars, if I had to pay cash down; but I’ll
tell you what I’ll do. I’ll make it and market it, and pay you five
cents royalty on each one.”
Washington sighed. Another dream disappeared; no money in the thing. So
he said:
“All right, take it at that. Draw me a paper.” He went his way with the
paper, and dropped the matter out of his mind dropped it out to make
room for further attempts to think out the most promising way to invest
his half of the reward, in case a partnership investment satisfactory
to both beneficiaries could not be hit upon.
He had not been very long at home when Sellers arrived sodden with
grief and booming with glad excitement—working both these emotions
successfully, sometimes separately, sometimes together. He fell on
Hawkins’s neck sobbing, and said:
“Oh, mourn with me my friend, mourn for my desolate house: death has
smitten my last kinsman and I am Earl of Rossmore—congratulate me!”
He turned to his wife, who had entered while this was going on, put his
arms about her and said—“You will bear up, for my sake, my lady—it had
to happen, it was decreed.”
She bore up very well, and said:
“It’s no great loss. Simon Lathers was a poor well-meaning useless
thing and no account, and his brother never was worth shucks.”
The rightful earl continued:
“I am too much prostrated by these conflicting griefs and joys to be
able to concentrate my mind upon affairs; I will ask our good friend
here to break the news by wire or post to the Lady Gwendolen and
instruct her to—”
“_What_ Lady Gwendolen?”
“Our poor daughter, who, alas!—”
“Sally Sellers? Mulberry Sellers, are you losing your mind?”
“There—please do not forget who you are, and who I am; remember your
own dignity, be considerate also of mine. It were best to cease from
using my family name, now, Lady Rossmore.”
“Goodness gracious, well, I never! What _am_ I to call you then?”
“In private, the ordinary terms of endearment will still be admissible,
to some degree; but in public it will be more becoming if your ladyship
will speak _to_ me as my lord, or your lordship, and _of_ me as
Rossmore, or the Earl, or his Lordship, and—”
“Oh, scat! I can’t ever do it, Berry.”
“But indeed you must, my love—we must live up to our altered position
and submit with what grace we may to its requirements.”
“Well, all right, have it your own way; I’ve never set my wishes
against your commands yet, Mul—my lord, and it’s late to begin now,
though to my mind it’s the rottenest foolishness that ever was.”
“Spoken like my own true wife! There, kiss and be friends again.”
“But—Gwendolen! I don’t know how I am ever going to stand that name.
Why, a body wouldn’t _know_ Sally Sellers in it. It’s too large for
her; kind of like a cherub in an ulster, and it’s a most outlandish
sort of a name, anyway, to my mind.”
“You’ll not hear her find fault with it, my lady.”
“That’s a true word. She takes to any kind of romantic rubbish like she
was born to it. She never got it from me, that’s sure. And sending her
to that silly college hasn’t helped the matter any—just the other way.”
“Now hear her, Hawkins! Rowena-Ivanhoe College is the selectest and
most aristocratic seat of learning for young ladies in our country.
Under no circumstances can a girl get in there unless she is either
very rich and fashionable or can prove four generations of what may be
called American nobility. Castellated college-buildings—towers and
turrets and an imitation moat—and everything about the place named out
of Sir Walter Scott’s books and redolent of royalty and state and
style; and all the richest girls keep phaetons, and coachmen in livery,
and riding-horses, with English grooms in plug hats and tight-buttoned
coats, and top-boots, and a whip-handle without any whip to it, to ride
sixty-three feet behind them—”
“And they don’t learn a blessed thing, Washington Hawkins, not a single
blessed thing but showy rubbish and un-american pretentiousness. But
send for the Lady Gwendolen—do; for I reckon the peerage regulations
require that she must come home and let on to go into seclusion and
mourn for those Arkansas blatherskites she’s lost.”
“My darling! Blatherskites? Remember—_noblesse oblige_.”
“There, there—talk to me in your own tongue, Ross—you don’t know any
other, and you only botch it when you try. Oh, don’t stare—it was a
slip, and no crime; customs of a life-time can’t be dropped in a
second. Ross_more_—there, now, be appeased, and go along with you and
attend to Gwendolen. Are you going to write, Washington?—or telegraph?”
“He will telegraph, dear.”
“I thought as much,” my lady muttered, as she left the room. “Wants it
so the address will have to appear on the envelop. It will just make a
fool of that child. She’ll get it, of course, for if there are any
other Sellerses there they’ll not be able to claim it. And just leave
her alone to show it around and make the most of it. Well, maybe she’s
forgivable for that. She’s so poor and they’re so rich, of course she’s
had her share of snubs from the livery-flunkey sort, and I reckon it’s
only human to want to get even.”
Uncle Dan’l was sent with the telegram; for although a conspicuous
object in a corner of the drawing-room was a telephone hanging on a
transmitter, Washington found all attempts to raise the central office
vain. The Colonel grumbled something about its being “_always_ out of
order when you’ve got particular and especial use for it,” but he
didn’t explain that one of the reasons for this was that the thing was
only a dummy and hadn’t any wire attached to it. And yet the Colonel
often used it—when visitors were present—and seemed to get messages
through it. Mourning paper and a seal were ordered, then the friends
took a rest.
Next afternoon, while Hawkins, by request, draped Andrew Jackson’s
portrait with crape, the rightful earl, wrote off the family
bereavement to the usurper in England—a letter which we have already
read. He also, by letter to the village authorities at Duffy’s Corners,
Arkansas, gave order that the remains of the late twins be embalmed by
some St. Louis expert and shipped at once to the usurper—with bill.
Then he drafted out the Rossmore arms and motto on a great sheet of
brown paper, and he and Hawkins took it to Hawkins’s Yankee
furniture-mender and at the end of an hour came back with a couple of
stunning hatchments, which they nailed up on the front of the
house—attractions calculated to draw, and they did; for it was mainly
an idle and shiftless negro neighborhood, with plenty of ragged
children and indolent dogs to spare for a point of interest like that,
and keep on sparing them for it, days and days together.
The new earl found—without surprise—this society item in the evening
paper, and cut it out and scrapbooked it:
By a recent bereavement our esteemed fellow citizen, Colonel Mulberry
Sellers, Perpetual Member-at-large of the Diplomatic Body, succeeds, as
rightful lord, to the great earldom of Rossmore, third by order of
precedence in the earldoms of Great Britain, and will take early
measures, by suit in the House of Lords, to wrest the title and estates
from the present usurping holder of them. Until the season of mourning
is past, the usual Thursday evening receptions at Rossmore Towers will
be discontinued.
Lady Rossmore’s comment—to herself:
“Receptions! People who don’t rightly know him may think he is
commonplace, but to my mind he is one of the most unusual men I ever
saw. As for suddenness and capacity in imagining things, his beat don’t
exist, I reckon. As like as not it wouldn’t have occurred to anybody
else to name this poor old rat-trap Rossmore Towers, but it just comes
natural to him. Well, no doubt it’s a blessed thing to have an
imagination that can always make you satisfied, no matter how you are
fixed. Uncle Dave Hopkins used to always say, ‘Turn me into John
Calvin, and I want to know which place I’m going to; turn me into
Mulberry Sellers and I don’t care.’”
The rightful earl’s comment—to himself:
“It’s a beautiful name, beautiful. Pity I didn’t think of it before I
wrote the usurper. But I’ll be ready for him when he answers.”