In the course of time the twins arrived and were delivered to their
great kinsman. To try to describe the rage of that old man would profit
nothing, the attempt would fall so far short of the purpose. However
when he had worn himself out and got quiet again, he looked the matter
over and decided that the twins had some moral rights, although they
had no legal ones; they were of his blood, and it could not be decorous
to treat them as common clay. So he laid them with their majestic kin
in the Cholmondeley church, with imposing state and ceremony, and added
the supreme touch by officiating as chief mourner himself. But he drew
the line at hatchments.
Our friends in Washington watched the weary days go by, while they
waited for Pete and covered his name with reproaches because of his
calamitous procrastinations. Meantime, Sally Sellers, who was as
practical and democratic as the Lady Gwendolen Sellers was romantic and
aristocratic, was leading a life of intense interest and activity and
getting the most she could out of her double personality. All day long
in the privacy of her work-room, Sally Sellers earned bread for the
Sellers family; and all the evening Lady Gwendolen Sellers supported
the Rossmore dignity. All day she was American, practically, and proud
of the work of her head and hands and its commercial result; all the
evening she took holiday and dwelt in a rich shadow-land peopled with
titled and coroneted fictions. By day, to her, the place was a plain,
unaffected, ramshackle old trap— just that, and nothing more; by night
it was Rossmore Towers. At college she had learned a trade without
knowing it. The girls had found out that she was the designer of her
own gowns. She had no idle moments after that, and wanted none; for the
exercise of an extraordinary gift is the supremest pleasure in life,
and it was manifest that Sally Sellers possessed a gift of that sort in
the matter of costume-designing. Within three days after reaching home
she had hunted up some work; before Pete was yet due in Washington, and
before the twins were fairly asleep in English soil, she was already
nearly swamped with work, and the sacrificing of the family chromos for
debt had got an effective check.
“She’s a brick,” said Rossmore to the Major; “just her father all over:
prompt to labor with head or hands, and not ashamed of it; capable,
always capable, let the enterprise be what it may; successful by
nature—don’t know what defeat is; thus, intensely and practically
American by inhaled nationalism, and at the same time intensely and
aristocratically European by inherited nobility of blood. Just me,
exactly: Mulberry Sellers in matter of finance and invention; after
office hours, what do you find? The same clothes, yes, but what’s in
them? Rossmore of the peerage.”
The two friends had haunted the general post-office daily. At last they
had their reward. Toward evening on the 20th of May, they got a letter
for XYZ. It bore the Washington postmark; the note itself was not
dated. It said:
“Ash barrel back of lamp post Black horse Alley. If you are playing
square go and set on it to-morrow morning 21st 10.22 not sooner not
later wait till I come.”
The friends cogitated over the note profoundly. Presently the earl
said:
“Don’t you reckon he’s afraid we are a sheriff with a requisition?”
“Why, m’lord?”
“Because that’s no place for a seance. Nothing friendly, nothing
sociable about it. And at the same time, a body that wanted to know who
was roosting on that ash-barrel without exposing himself by going near
it, or seeming to be interested in it, could just stand on the street
corner and take a glance down the alley and satisfy himself, don’t you
see?”
“Yes, his idea is plain, now. He seems to be a man that can’t _be_
candid and straightforward. He acts as if he thought we—shucks, I wish
he had come out like a man and told us what hotel he—”
“Now you’ve struck it! you’ve struck it sure, Washington; he has told
us.”
“Has he?”
“Yes, he has; but he didn’t mean to. That alley is a lonesome little
pocket that runs along one side of the New Gadsby. That’s his hotel.”
“What makes’ you think that?”
“Why, I just know it. He’s got a room that’s just across from that lamp
post. He’s going to sit there perfectly comfortable behind his shutters
at 10.22 to-morrow, and when he sees us sitting on the ash-barrel,
he’ll say to himself, ‘I saw _one_ of those fellows on the train’—and
then he’ll pack his satchel in half a minute and ship for the ends of
the earth.”
Hawkins turned sick with disappointment:
“Oh, dear, it’s all up, Colonel—it’s exactly what he’ll do.”
“Indeed he won’t!”
“Won’t he? Why?”
“Because _you_ won’t be holding the ash barrel down, it’ll be me.
You’ll be coming in with an officer and a requisition in plain
clothes—the officer, I mean—the minute you see him arrive and open up a
talk with me.”
“Well, what a head you have got, Colonel Sellers! I never should have
thought of that in the world.”
“Neither would any earl of Rossmore, betwixt William’s contribution and
Mulberry—_as_ earl; but it’s office hours, now, you see, and the earl
in me sleeps. Come—I’ll show you his very room.”
They reached the neighborhood of the New Gadsby about nine in the
evening, and passed down the alley to the lamp post.
“There you are,” said the colonel, triumphantly, with a wave of his
hand which took in the whole side of the hotel. “There it is—what did I
tell you?”
“Well, but—why, Colonel, it’s six stories high. I don’t quite make out
which window you—”
“All the windows, all of them. Let him have his choice—I’m indifferent,
now that I have located him. You go and stand on the corner and wait;
I’ll prospect the hotel.”
The earl drifted here and there through the swarming lobby, and finally
took a waiting position in the neighborhood of the elevator. During an
hour crowds went up and crowds came down; and all complete as to limbs;
but at last the watcher got a glimpse of a figure that was
satisfactory—got a glimpse of the back of it, though he had missed his
chance at the face through waning alertness. The glimpse revealed a
cowboy hat, and below it a plaided sack of rather loud pattern, and an
empty sleeve pinned up to the shoulder. Then the elevator snatched the
vision aloft and the watcher fled away in joyful excitement, and
rejoined the fellow-conspirator.
“We’ve got him, Major—got him sure! I’ve seen him—seen him good; and I
don’t care where or when that man approaches me backwards, I’ll
recognize him every time. We’re all right. Now for the requisition.”
They got it, after the delays usual in such cases. By half past eleven
they were at home and happy, and went to bed full of dreams of the
morrow’s great promise.
Among the elevator load which had the suspect for fellow-passenger was
a young kinsman of Mulberry Sellers, but Mulberry was not aware of it
and didn’t see him. It was Viscount Berkeley.