strap-thing that goes round my head must be too tight. I've been mad
with it the last half hour. How do I look?" he asked genially as he took
it off, and proceeded to tamper with the buckles and elastic. "Howling
Jupiter!" he cried a moment later, "I've busted it."
As the two friends stood and stared at one another aghast, they heard
the click of Patty's returning heels, and Mead, abandoning dignity,
courage--everything except the broken mask--dived into Miss Perry's
maiden bower.
Mrs. Hawley watched this procedure with wide and fascinated eyes. No
ripple shook the walls of the bower. No sound proceeded from it as the
moments flew. Then Patty fell away into helpless laughter and wept tears
of shocked and sudden mirth into the now useless motor veil.
"Patty!" remonstrated her husband, but she laughed helplessly on. "At
least come out into the hall and laugh there," he urged, "the poor chap
will hear you." And when he had followed her and listened to her shaken
whisper, he broke into such a shout as forced the indignant and
outraged Kate into a shudder of protest and disgust.
Instantly Mead threw an arm past the table's single central support and
grasped a handful of silk chiffon and two fingers.
He, being of an acquisitive turn, retained the fingers. She being of a
dictatorial turn, rebuked him.
"Finding is keeping," he shamelessly remarked. "Even in infancy I was
taught that."
Now, a certain pomp of scene and circumstance is necessary to the sort
of dignified snubbing with which Miss Perry was accustomed to treat
possible admirers. Also, a serene consciousness of superlative good
looks. But Kate Perry disfigured, cramped into a ridiculous hiding
place, and suffering untold miseries of headache and throbbing eyes, was
a very different creature.
And Mead, flippant, hard, and misanthropic in the state of nature,
softened wonderfully as he sat in the gloom of the tablecover, in
silent possession of those two slim fingers.
His words grew gentle, his manner kind, and her answers were calculated
to petrify her long-suffering family if they could have overheard them.
"Mr. Mead," she said at last, "will you be so very kind as to stay here
quietly under the table while I scramble out and go up to my room?"
No tongue of angel could have made a more welcome suggestion. Mead
uttered feeble and polite proffers of escort, and silently called down
blessings upon the head he had never seen. He had just allowed himself
to be dissuaded from knight errantry, when the door opened and Jimmie
flashed his dark lantern about the brightly lighted room. He then beckoned
mysteriously to the still vigilant Horace, who lurked in the hall.
"Have you found them?" whispered that youth.
"Not a trace of them," answered Jimmie triumphantly. "They ain't gone
out. They ain't in their rooms, and I'm studyin' how I can round 'em up.
They're the most suspicious characters I ever see, Horace, and this
night's work may cost us our lives."
This disposition of his existence did not seem to cheer Horace.
"Counterfeiters," Jimmie went on, "is the desperatest kind of criminals
there is. Still we got to git 'em. I'll look round this room just so as
nothing won't escape us, and then we'll go up to the next floor. It's
good we got two of them located in the bridal suite."
Jimmie, with his prying dark lantern and his prodding nightstick, soon
reached the space under the table, and the counterfeiters secreted there.
"I got 'em," he cried delightedly. "Hi, you. Come out of there and show
yourselves."
They came. There was nothing else to do.
"Moses's holy aunt," cried Jimmie, falling back upon Horace, who
promptly fell back upon the sofa.
"Here, you," said Mead. "You get out of this, both of you. Don't you
know this is a private sitting-room?"
"No settin'-room," said Jimmie, recovering somewhat, "is private to them
as sets under tables blackening one another's eyes."
"You ridiculous idiot," snorted Mead. "Do you dare to think that I hurt
this lady?"
"Lady? Ain't she your wife?"
"She is _not_," snapped Kate.
"Then why did you hit her?" demanded Jimmie. "If she ain't your wife
what did you want to hit her for? An' anyway, she'd ought to be. That's
all I got to say."
* * * * *
The same idea occurred to Mr. and Mrs. Hawley, crouched guiltily against
their door to hear their victims pass, for their amazed ears caught
these words--the first were Kate's:
"You must let me give you some of my lotion."
And then came Mead's:
"I shall be _most_ grateful. It must be hot stuff. You know you're
hardly disfigured at all."
"The saints forgive him," Patty gurgled.
Later on in the darkness, Jimmie's idea visited Mead and was received
with some cordiality. And at some time later still, it must have been
presented to Miss Perry, for the misanthropic Mead--no longer
misanthropic--now boasts a massive and handsome wife whom he calls his
Little Kitty. But the idea was originally Jimmie's.
THE CHRISTMAS GUEST
On the day before Christmas eve John Sedyard closed his desk, dismissed
his two clerks and his stenographer two hours earlier than usual, and
set out in quest of adventure and a present for his sister Edith. John
Sedyard had a habit of succeeding in all he set forth to do but the
complete and surprising success which attended him in this quest was a
notch above even his high average.
Earlier in the month, his stenographer had secured the annual pledges of
his affection for all the relatives, friends and dependants to whom he
was in the habit of giving presents: all except his mother, his
unmarried sister, Edith, who still lived at home, and his fiancée, Mary
Van Plank. The gifts for these three, he had decided, must be of his
own choice and purchase. He had provided for his mother and for Mary
earlier in the week. Neither excitement nor adventure had attended upon
the purchase of their gifts. Something for the house or the table was
always the trick for elderly ladies who presided over large
establishments and gave their whole souls to the managing of them. He
bought for his mother a set of colonial silver candlesticks. For Mary,
he bought a comb of gold--all gold, like her own lovely hair. The dark
tortoise shell of the one she wore always seemed an incongruous note in
her fair crown. But Edith was as yet unpresented, and it was on her
account that Mr. Sedyard deserted his office and delighted his
subordinates at three o'clock in the afternoon.
Edith was much more difficult than the other two had been. She was
strong-minded, much given to churchwork and committees. Neither the
home, as represented by the candlesticks, nor self-adornment as
typified by the golden comb could be expected to appeal to her
communistic, altruistic nature. And Sedyard, having experienced two
inspirations, could think of nothing but combs and candlesticks. So he
threw himself into the current, which swept along Broadway, trusting
that some accident would suggest a suitable offering. Meanwhile, he
revelled in the crowd, good-humored, holiday-making, holly-decked, which
carried him uptown, past Wanamaker's and Grace Church, swirled him
across old "dead man's curve," and down the Fourteenth Street side of
Union Square. Here the shops were smaller, not so overwhelming, and here
he was stopped by seeing a red auction flag. Looking in over the heads
of the assembled crowd, he saw that the auctioneer was holding up a
feather-crowned hat and addressing his audience after the manner of his
kind:
"Buy a hat for your wife. A waste-paper basket by night and a hat by
day. Genuine ostrich feathers growing on it. Becoming to all styles of
feminine beauty. What am I bid on this sure tickler of the feminine
palate? Three dollars? Why, ladies and gents, the dooty on it alone was
twelve. It's a Paris hat, ladies. Your sister, your mother, your maiden
aunt--"
Sedyard hearkened, but absently, to the fellow's words, but his problem
was solved. He would buy Edith something to look pretty in. She was a
pretty girl and in danger of forgetting it. And she had been decent,
John reflected, awfully decent about Mary. He knew that the _entente
cordiale_ which existed between Mary and his mother was largely due to
Edith, and he knew, too, that Edith, an authority on modern-housing and
model-living, surely but silently disapproved of Mary's living alone in
a three-roomed studio and devoting her days to painting, when there was
so much rescue work to be done in the world.
"I get my uplift," Mary would explain when Edith urged these things upon
her, "from the elevator. Living on the eighth floor, dear, I cannot but
help seeing the world from a very different angle."
Yes, John reflected as he chuckled in retrospect over such
conversations, Edith had certainly been awfully decent.
During these meditations several articles of feminine apparel had come
and gone under the hammer. The crowd had decreased somewhat and his
position now commanded a clear view of the auctioneer's platform, and he
realized that the fierce light of the arc lamps beat down upon as
charming a costume as he had seen for many a day. All of corn-flower
blue it was, a chiffon gown, a big chiffon muff and a plumed hat. Oh! if
he had been allowed to do such shopping for Mary! how quickly he would
have entered into the lists of bidders! Mary's eyes were just that
heavenly shade of blue, but Mary's pride was as great as her poverty,
and the time when he could shower his now useless wealth upon her was
not yet. And then his loyal memory told him that Edith was blue-eyed
like all the Sedyards and he knew that his sister's Christmas gifts
stood before him. He failed, however, to discern in the bland presence
of the lay figure, upon which they were disposed to such advantage, the
companion of one of the most varied adventures in his long career.
The chiffon finery was rather too much for the Fourteenth Street
audience. The bidding languished. The auctioneer's pleadings fell upon
deaf ears. In vain his assistant, a deft-fingered man with a beard,
twirled the waxen-faced figure to show the "semi-princesse back" and the
"near-Empire front." Corn-blue chiffon and panne velvet are not much
worn in Fourteenth Street. The auctioneer grew desperate. "Twenty-five
dollars," he repeated with such scorn that the timid woman who had made
the bid wished herself at home and in bed. "_Twenty-five_ dollars!"
"Throw in the girl, why don't you?" suggested a facetious youth, chiefly
remarkable for a nose, a necktie and a diamond ring. "She's a peach all
right, all right. She's got a smile that won't come off."
"All right, I'll throw her in," cried the desperate auctioneer. "What am
I bid for this here afternoon costume complete with lady."
"Twenty-seven fifty," said a woman whom three years of banting would
still have left too fat to get into it.
"Twenty-eight," whispered the first bidder.
"Thirty," said John Sedyard.
There was some other desultory bidding but in a few moments Sedyard
found himself minus fifty-four dollars and plus a chiffon gown and
muff, a hat all drooping plumes and a graceful female form,
golden-haired, bewitching, with a smile sweetly blended of surprise,
incipient idiocy and allure.
"She's a queen all right, all right," the sophisticated youth cheered
him. "Git onto them lovely wax-like hands. Say, you know honest, on the
level, she's worth the whole price of admission."
John, still chaperoned by this sagacious and helpful youth, made his way
to the clerk's desk and proceeded to give his name and address and
request that his purchases should be delivered in the morning.
"Deliver nothin'," said the clerk pleasantly. "Do you suppose we'd 'a
let you have the goods at that price if we could 'a stored 'em
overnight? Our lease is up," he continued consulting his Ingersoll
watch, "in just fifteen minutes. In a quarter of an hour we hand over
the keys and what's left of the fixtures to the landlord. He's let the
store for to-morrow to a Christmas-tree ornaments merchant."
"Then I suppose I'll have to get an expressman. Where is the nearest, do
you know?"
"Expressman!" exclaimed the sharp youth. "Well, I guess the nearest
would be about Three Hundred and Fifty-second Street and _then_ he'd
have a load and a jag. No, sir, it's the faithful cab for yours. There's
a row of cabs just on the edge of the square. I could go over and get
you a hansom."
"Thank you," said John, "I wish you would." But a glance at his
languishing companion made him add, "I guess you had better make it a
four-wheeler. Hansom-riding would be pretty cold for a lady without a
coat."
"All right," said the sharp youth. "You bring her out on the sidewalk
and I'll get the hurry-up wagon. Say!" he halted to suggest, "you know
what you'll look like, don't you?--riding around with that smile. When
the lights flush you, you'll look just like a bridal party from
Hoboken."
Leaving this word of comfort behind him, he proceeded to imperil his
life among trolley cars and traffic, while John engaged the lady and
urged her to motion.
He discovered that, supported at the waistline, she could be wheeled
very nicely. He forced the muff over her upraised right hand, so that it
somewhat concealed her face, and through an aisle respectfully cleared
by the onlookers he led her to the open air. There he propped her
against the show-window and turned in search of the cab and his new
friend. In doing so he came face to face with an old one.
"Why, hello John!" said Frederick Trevor, a man who had an office in his
building and an interest in his sister. "Who would have thought of
meeting you here?"
"Or you," retorted John. "But since you are here, you can help me in a
little difficulty."
"Not now, old chap," said Frederick, "I'm in a bit of a hurry. See you
about it to-morrow. Well, so long. Don't let me keep you from your
friend."
"Friend!" stormed John and then following the directions of Trevor's
eyes, he descried a blue-clad, golden-haired young lady lolling against
the window, trying with a giant chiffon muff to smother a fit of
hilarious laughter. One arched and smiling eye showed above the muff and
the whole figure was instinct with Bacchanalian mirth. "Why that's," he
began to explain, but young Trevor had vanished into the crowd.
Presently the cab with the smart youth inside drew up to the curb and
Sedyard, with a new self-consciousness, put his arm around the blue
figure and trundled her across the sidewalk. The cabman threw his rug
across his horse's quarters and lumbered down to assist at the
embarkation of so fair a passenger. The smart youth held the door
encouragingly open and John proceeded, with much more strength than he
had expected to use, to heave the passenger aboard.
Even these preliminaries had attracted the nucleus of a crowd and the
smart youth grew restive.
"Aw, say Maudie," he urged when the lady stuck rigid catty-cornerwise
across the cab with her blue feathers pressed against the roof in one
corner, and her bird-cage skirt arrangement protruding beyond the
door-sill. "Aw, say Maudie, set down, why don't you, and take your
Trilbys in. This gent is going to take you carriage riding."
"What's the matter with her anyway," demanded the cabman. "Don't she
know how to set in a carriage?"
"No, she doesn't, she's only a wax figure," said John, "but I bought
her and now I'm determined to take her home. She'd better go up on the
box with you."
"What! her?" demanded the outraged Jehu. "Say, what do you take me for
anyway? Do you suppose I ain't got no friends just 'cause I drive a cab?
Why! I wouldn't drive up Broadway with them goo-goo eyes settin' beside
me, not for nothing you could offer, I wouldn't."
By this time the crowd had reached very respectable proportions although
there was nothing to see except the end of a blue gown hanging out of
the cab's open door. The sharp youth, the cabman and John took turns in
trying to adjust the lady to her environment. The rigidity and fragility
of her arms and head made this very difficult, and presently there
rolled upon the scene a policeman, large, Irish and chivalrous. It took
Patrolman McDonogh but a second, but one glance at the tableaux and one
whisper from the crowd to understand that a kidnapping atrocity was in
progress.
With wrath in his eye, he shouldered aside Sedyard and the cabman,
grabbed the smart youth, whose turn at persuasion was then on, and threw
him into the face of the crowd.
"Oh! but you're the villyans," he admonished them, and then addressed
the captive maid in reassuring tones.
"You're all right, Miss, now. You're no longer defenceless in this
wicked city. The arrum of the law is around you," he cried, encircling
her waist with that substantial member. "You're safe at last, come here
to me out of that."
"Oh! noble, noble man," cried an emotional woman in the crowd. "If all
officers were like you!"
Heartened by these words the noble, noble man exerted the arm of the
law and plucked the maiden out of the cab amid great excitement and
applause. But above the general murmur the shrill voice of the sharp
youth rent the air:
"Fathead," he cried, "you've broke her neck. Can't you see how her
head's goin' round and round?"
[Illustration: THE CHANGELESS SMILE AND THE DROOPING PLUMES MADE THREE
COMPLETE REVOLUTIONS AND NESTLED CONFIDINGLY UPON THE SHOULDER OF THE
LAW. Page 129.]
At this the emotional woman dropped to the sidewalk. "Lady fainted here,
officer," cried a gentleman. But the noble, noble officer had no time
for faints, and the lady was obliged to revive with only the assistance
of the cold stones and curiosity.
For the shrill voice had spoken truth. Something had given away in
Maudie's mysterious anatomy; the fair head, the changeless smile and the
drooping plumes made three complete revolutions and nestled confidingly
upon the shoulder of the Law.
"Here, none o' that," yelled Patrolman McDonogh quite reversing his
earlier diagnosis of the situation. "None of your flim-flams, if you
please. You go quiet and paceable with this gentleman. A little ride in
the air is what you need."
"That's right, officer," Sedyard interrupted. "That's how to talk to
her. I can't do a thing with her."
"Brute!" cried the emotional woman now happily restored. "It's officers
like him that disgraces the force."
Patrolman McDonogh turned to identify this blasphemer and Maudie's head,
deprived of its support, made another revolution and then dropped coyly
to her left shoulder. She looked so unspeakable in that attitude that
the cabman felt called upon to offer a little professional advice:
"She needs a checkrein," he declared, "an' she needs it bad," a remark
which so incensed Patrolman McDonogh that Sedyard decided to explain:
"Just disperse those people, will you," said he, "I want to talk to you."
The sharp youth relieved the officer of law of his fair burden and
posed her in a natural attitude of waiting beside the cab. McDonogh
cleared the sidewalk and hearkened to Sedyard's tale.
"So you see," said John in conclusion, "what I'm up against. I really
didn't want the dummy when I bought it and you can bet I'm tired of it
now. What I wanted was the clothes, and I guess the thing for me to do
is just to take them in the cab and leave the figure here."
"What!" thundered McDonogh. "You're going to leave a dummy without her
clothes here on my beat? Not if I see ye first, ye ain't, and if ye try
it on I'll run ye in."
"Say! I'll tell you what you want," piped up the still buoyant, smart
youth. "You need one of them open taxicabs.
"He needs a hearse," corrected the disgruntled cabman. "Somethin' she
can lay down in comfortable an' take in the sights through the windows."
"Now, he needs a taxi. He can leave her stand in the back all right,
but I guess," he warned John, "you'll have to sit in with her and hold
her head on."
And thus it was that Maudie left the scene. She left, too, the smart
youth, the cabman and the noble, noble officer. And as the taxi bumped
over the trolley tracks she, despite all Sedyard's efforts, turned her
head and smiled out at them straight over her near-princesse back.
"Gee!" said the smart youth, "ain't she the friendliest bunch of
calico."
"This case," said the noble Patrolman McDonogh with unpunctual
inspiration, "had ought to be looked into by rights."
"Chauffeur," said John Sedyard to the shadowy form before him, "just
pick out the darkest streets, will you?"
"Yes, sir," answered the chauffeur looking up into the bland smile and
the outstretched hand above him. "I'll make it if I can but if we get
stopped, don't blame me."
A year later, or so it seemed to John Sedyard, the taxicab, panting with
indignation at the insults and interferences to which it had been
subjected, turned into Sedyard's eminently respectable block and drew up
before his eminently handsome house.
He paid and propitiated the chauffeur, took his lovely burden in his
arms and staggered up the steps with the half regretful feeling of one
who steps out of the country of adventure back to prosaic things. He
found his latchkey, opened his door and drew Maudie into the hall. And
on the landing half-way up the stairs stood his sister Edith, evidently
the bearer of some pleasant tidings.
Maudie's smile flashed up at her from John's shoulder. Edith stared,
stiffened, and retraced her steps. John wheeled the figure into the
reception-room and thus addressed it:
"Listen to me, you dumbhead. You may think this adventure is over.
Well, so did I, but I tell you now it's only just beginning. If you are
not mighty careful you will be wrecking a home. So keep your mouth
shut," he charged her, "and do nothing till you hear from me!"
Maudie smiled archly, coyly, confidentially, and he went upstairs.
In the sitting-room, he found gathered together his mother, his sister
and Dick Van Plank, Mary's young brother and a student at Columbia. John
was supported through Edith's first remark and the look with which she
accompanied it by the memory of her goodness to Mary and by the
anticipation of the fun which Maudie might be made to provide.
"I wish to say, John," she began, before any one else had time to speak,
"that I've said _nothing_ to mother or Dick, and I think it would be
better if you didn't. I can attend to the case if you leave it to me."
"Like you," said John shortly. "Who told you she is a 'case.' Mother,"
he went on addressing that gentle knitter by the fire, "I want you to
come downstairs."
"She shall do nothing of the kind!" cried Edith, and as Mrs. Sedyard
looked interrogatively from one to another of her children, her daughter
swept on. "John must be crazy, I saw him come in with a--a person--who
never ought to be in a house like this."
"I'd like to know why not?" stormed John. "You don't know a thing about
her. _I_ don't know much for that matter, but when I came across her
down on Union Square, just turned out of a shop where she had been
working, mother, I made up my mind that I would bring her right straight
home, and that Edith would be decent to her. You can see that Edith does
not intend to be."
"But my dear boy," faltered Mrs. Sedyard, "was not that a very reckless
thing to do? I know of an institution where you could send her."
"Oh! yes, yes," said John. "And I suppose I might have handed her over
to a policeman," he added, thinking of his attempt in this direction,
"but I didn't. The sight of her so gentle and uncomplaining in that
awful situation at this time of general rejoicing was too much for me."
He felt this to be so fine a flight and its effect upon Dick was so
remarkable, that he went on in a voice, as his mother always remembered,
"that positively trembled at times."
"How was I, a man strong and well-dowered, to pass heartlessly by like
the Good Samaritan--"
"There's something wrong with that," Dick interposed.
But John was not to be deflected. "What, mother, would you have thought
of your son if he left that beautiful figure--for she is beautiful--"
"You don't say," said Dick.
"To be buffeted by the waves of 'dead man's curve?'"
"Oh, how awful!" murmured the old lady. "How _perfectly_ dreadful."
It was at this point that Dick Van Plank unostentatiously left the room.