The little story I am about to tell will meet, I have no doubt, with
a good deal of incredulity, not to say derision. Very well; there is
the subject of it himself to testify. If you can put an end to him by
any lethal process known to man, I will acknowledge myself
misinformed, and attend your last moments on the scaffold.
Miss Belmont disapproved of Mrs. John Belmont; and Mrs. John Belmont
hated Miss Belmont. And the visible token of this antagonism was a
button.
It was of jade stone, and it was a talisman. For three generations it
had been the mascot of the Belmont family, an heirloom, and
symbolizing in its shining disk a little local sun, as it were, of
prosperity. The last three head Belmonts had all been men of an ample
presence. The first of them, the original owner of the stone, having
assigned it a place in perpetuity at the bottom hole of his waistcoat
(as representing the centre of his system), his heirs were careful to
substantiate a tradition which meant so much to them in a double
sense.
Indeed, the button was as good as a blister. It seemed to draw its
wearer to a head in the prosperous part of him. It was set in gold,
artfully furnished at its back with a loop and hank, and made
transferable from waistcoat to waistcoat, that its possessor for the
time being might enjoy at all seasons its beneficent influence. In
broad or long cloth, in twill or flannel, by day and by night, the
button attended him, regulating indiscriminately his business and his
digestion. In such circumstances, it is plain that Death must have
been hard put to it to find a vulnerable place; and such was the fact.
It has often been said that a man’s soul is in his stomach; how, then,
could it get behind the button? Only by one of those unworthy
subterfuges, which, nevertheless, it does not disdain. The first
Belmont lived to ninety, and with such increasing portliness that, at
the last, a half-moon had to be cut, and perpetually enlarged, out of
the dining-room table to accommodate his presence. Practically, he was
eating his way through the board, with the prospect of emerging at the
other end, when, in rising from a particularly substantial repast one
night, he caught the button in the crack between the first slab
(almost devoured) and the second, wrenched it away, and was
immediately seized with apoplexy. He died; and the Destroyer, after
pursuing his heir to threescore years and ten, looking for the heel of
Achilles, as unworthily “got home” into him. He was lumbering down
Fleet Street one dog-day when, oppressed beyond endurance by the heat,
he wrenched open—in defiance of all canons of taste and prudence—his
waistcoat. The button—_the_ button—was burst from its bonds in the
act, though, fortunately—for the next-of-kin—to be caught by its
hank in the owner’s watch-chain. But to the owner himself the impulse
was fatal. A prowling cutpurse, quick to the chance, “let out” full on
the old gentleman’s bow-window, quenching its lights, so to speak, for
ever; and then, having snatched the chain, incontinently doubled into
the arms of a constable. The property was recovered—but for the heir;
the second Belmont’s bellows having been broken beyond mending.
The third met with as inglorious an end, and at a comparatively early
age; for the button—as a saving clause to whatever god had thrown it
down, for the fun of the thing, among men—was possessed with a very
devil of touchiness, and always instant to resent the least fancied
slight to its self-importance. Else had Tithonus been its wearer to
this day, as——but I won’t anticipate. The third Belmont, then, in a
fit of colossal forgetfulness, sent the button, _in_ a white
waistcoat, to the wash. The calamity was detected forthwith, _but not
in time to avert itself_. After death, the doctor. Before the outraged
article could be restored to its owner and victim, he had died of a
rapid dropsy, and the button became the property of Mrs. John Belmont,
his relict and residuary legatee, who——
But, for the history of the button itself? Why, in brief, as it
affected the Belmont family, it was this. Mr. Adolphus Belmont had
been Consul at one of the five treaty ports of China about the
troublous years of 1840-42. During the short time that he held office,
a certain local mandarin, Elephoo Ting by name, was reported to Peking
for high treason, and honoured with an imperial ukase, or invitation
to forestall the headsman. There was no doubt, indeed, that Elephoo
Ting had been very strenuous, in public, in combating the intrusion of
the foreign devil, while inviting him, in private, to come on and hold
tight. There is no doubt, too, that in the result Elephoo and Adolphus
had made a profitable partnership of it in the matter of opium, and
that the mandarin had formed a very high, and even sentimental,
opinion of the business capacities of his young friend. Young, that is
to say, relatively, for Adolphus was already sixty-three when
appointed to his post. But, then, of the immemorial Ting’s age no
record actually existed. The oldest inhabitant of Ningpo knew him as
one knows the historic beech of one’s district. He had always been
there—bland, prosperous, enormous, a smooth bole of a man radiating
benevolence. And now at last he was to die. It seemed impossible.
It _was_ impossible, save on a condition. That he confided to his odd
partner and confidant, the English Consul, during a last interview. He
held a carving-knife in his hand.
“Shall I accept this signal favour of the imperial sun?” he said.
“Have you any choice?” asked the Consul gloomily. “The decree is out;
the soldiers surround your dwelling.”
Elephoo Ting laughed softly.
“Vain, vain all, unless I discard my talisman.” He produced the jade
button from his cap. “This,” he said, “I had from my father, when the
old man sickened at last of life, desiring to be an ancestor. It
renders who wears it, while he wears it, immortal; only it is jealous,
jealous, and stands upon its dignity. Shall I, too, part with it, and
at a stroke let in the light of ages?”
He saw the incredulity in his visitor’s face, and handed him the
carving-knife.
“Strike,” he said. “I bid thee.”
“You take the consequences?”
“All.”
With infinite cynicism, Mr. Belmont essayed to tickle, just to tickle,
the creature’s infatuation with the steel point. It bent, where it
touched, like paper. He thrust hard and ever harder, until at last he
was thrashing and slicing with the implement in a sort of frenzy of
horror. The mandarin stood apathetic, while the innocuous blade swept
and rustled about his huge bulk like a harmless feather. Then said he,
as the other desisted at length, unnerved and trembling: “Art thou
convinced?”
“I am convinced,” said the Consul.
Elephoo Ting handed him the button in exchange for the knife.
“Take and wear it,” he said, “for my sake, whom you have pleased by
outwitting, on the score of benefiting, two Governments. You have the
makings of a great mandarin in you; the button will do the rest. Would
you ever escape the too-soon satiety of this stodgy life, pass it on,
with these instructions which I shall give you, to your next-of-kin.
Be ever deferential to the button and considerate of its vanity, for
it is the fetish of a sensitive but undiscriminating spirit. So long
as you cherish it, you will prosper. But the least apparent slight to
itself, it will revenge, and promptly. As for me, I have an
indigestion of the world that I would cure.”
And with the words he too became an ancestor.
Then riches and bodily amplitude came to Adolphus Belmont, until the
earth groaned under his importance. He was a spanker, and after him
Richard Belmont was a spanker, and after him John Belmont was a very
spanker of spanks, even at thirty-two, when he committed the last
enormous indiscretion which brought him death and his fortunes almost
ruin. For the outrage to the button had been so immeasurable that, not
content with his obliteration, it must manœuvre likewise to scatter
the accumulations of fortune, which it had brought him, by involving
in a common ruin most of the concerns in which that fortune was
invested, so that his widow found herself left, all in a moment, a
comparatively poor woman.
And here Mrs. John Belmont comes in.
She was a little woman, of piquancy and resource, and a very
accomplished angler of men. She could count on her pink finger-tips
the ten most killing baits for vanity. And, having once recovered the
button, she set herself to conciliating it with a thousand pretty
kisses and attentions. It lived between the bosom of her frock and the
ruff of her dainty nightgown. Yet for a long time it sulked, refusing
to be coaxed into better than a tacit staying of its devastating hand.
And so matters stood when the Assembly ball was held.
Miss Emma Belmont and Mrs. John Belmont lived in the same town,
connexions, but apart. Their visits were visits of ceremony—and
dislike. Miss Emma was Mr. John’s sister, and had always highly
disapproved of his marriage with the “adventuress.” Her very name, she
thought, bordered on an impropriety! How could any “Inez” dissociate
herself from the tradition of cigarette-stained lips and white
eyeballs travelling behind a fan like little moons of coquetry? This
one, in fact, took no trouble to. Her reputation involved them in a
common scandal; and it was solely on this account, I think, that she
so resented her sister-in-law’s appropriation of the button. She
herself was devoted to good works, and utterly content in her mission.
She did not want the button; but, inasmuch as it was a Belmont
heirloom, and Mrs. John childless, she chose to symbolize in it the
bone of contention, and to use it as a convenient bar to amenities
which would, otherwise, have seemed to argue in her a sympathy with a
mode of life with which she could not too emphatically wish to
disconnect herself.
They met at the Assembly ball. Miss Belmont, though herself involved
in the financial ebb, had considered it her duty to respect so
respectable an occasion, and even to adorn it with a silk of such
inflexibility that (I tremble as I write it) one could imagine her
slipping out of it through a trap, like the vanishing lady, and
leaving all standing. Presently Mrs. John Belmont, with a wicked look,
floated up to her.
“_You_ here, Inez!” exclaimed Miss Emma, affecting an amazement which,
unhappily, she could not feel.
The other flirted and simpered. When she smiled, one could detect
little threads drawn in the fine powder near the corners of her mouth.
There was no ensign of widowhood about her. She ruffled with little
gaudy downs and feathers, like a new-fledged bird of paradise.
“Yes, indeed,” she said. “And I’ve brought Captain Naylor, who’s been
dining with me. Shall I introduce him to you?”
Miss Belmont’s sense of decorum left her speechless.
Inez, on the contrary, rippled out the most china-tinkling laugh.
“You dear old thing,” she tittered. “Don’t look so shocked. I knew
you’d be here to chaperon me, and——” She came a step closer. “Yes,
the button’s there, Emma. You may stare; but make up your mind, I’m
not going to part with it.”