“It’s out!” she said. “Everybody was talking about it to-night. You’ll be gazetted in the next Birthday List. And not a trumpery knighthood, either. You’re to be a full-blown baronet—no less.”
Theodore Shelf lay back in his chair with a very queer expression on his face. He put his white fingers together under his chin, and stared curiously at his wife. “Your doing, I suppose, Laura?”
“You may thank me for it entirely,” she replied with a smiling bow. “I arranged for it here with the Minister; and at the two places where we looked in at afterwards, I told the news to three of my dearest friends in the very strictest of confidence. Consequently, it is all over London to-night, and will be in all the papers in England to-morrow. Would you like to congratulate me?”
“I’ll wait,” said the shipowner, “till I see you Lady Shelf. The title is not formally given over for a fortnight, and between now and then so much may happen. Man is but a frail creature.”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” said Mrs. Shelf, disgustedly, “don’t cant now. When you are Sir Theodore I can’t have you disgracing me by preaching and holding forth to those low people you used to know. You must cut all that connection. Good heavens, Theodore, you can’t like it! And there’s really no more to be got out of that sort of thing. You’ve used those dreary, goody-goody folks, and made your fortune out of them, and let that suffice. Now, if you want to get on further, you’ve got to pick up with another set. Don’t you understand?”
For reply Theodore Shelf burst into a sudden wild cackle of laughter.
His wife drew back a step, half-scared. She had scarcely ever heard the man laugh once in all her life with him; never like that; and she did not know what to make of it. But at last he stopped and spoke. “You’re a clever woman, Laura, and a handsome one. I’ve never seen you look so fine as you do to-night. But you are a bit too rapid in some of your movements. You’re counting at present that, beyond a doubt, the servants will be calling you ‘miladi’ within a fortnight, and I suppose you’ll go out to-morrow and get a new card-plate engraved. Well, my dear, if I were you, I’d wait. A fortnight is fourteen days, and in every minute of that time something may happen to bring you an appalling disappointment. For instance, I may die. Take it that the Almighty does make me die, and where then comes in the use for your new card-plate? There is precedent for creating a baroness, I grant you; but I don’t think they are likely to manufacture another precedent by making you Lady Shelf in your own right if I am not at hand to share the dignity.”
A servant came in and announced that Fairfax was in the hall below. Amy Rivers said “Good-night” hurriedly, and slipped out of the room. Mrs. Shelf took up her stand in front of the fireplace, flushed with triumph and wrath, and looking her superbest. “You are talking the merest nonsense, Theodore,” she said, “and before that girl, too! Thank goodness, she is practically one of the family, and will not gossip. Die, indeed! You die! what an absurdity! One would think, to hear you, that the world was coming to an end before the Birthday List is out. Of course you will have the baronetcy. There can’t be a doubt about it now, thanks to me.”
“What do you want me to say?” Shelf asked.
“Well, to begin with, in common decency you might thank me. If it had not been for my diplomacy in this house to-night, you would only have had a beggarly knighthood offered, if as much as that. You have the chance of making a sensation now.”