How it came about will probably never be known with absolute accuracy, but just as a staid and dignified footman was about to hand a plate of turtle soup to Mrs. Broadbent, the gentleman on her right—our friend Mr. Felix Johnstone—was observed to be searching wildly for his handkerchief. Alas! unfamiliarity with the geography of pockets in dress clothes, and a hazy recollection that a table napkin should never be placed to the nose, and the result was that Mr. Johnstone’s sneeze—a thing known and dreaded along a hundred miles of Australian coast—burst upon the dinner-table like the crack of doom. So weird, so awful, so unspeakable, and ear-splitting a sneeze had surely never been heard since the world began!
The footman, on Mr. Johnstone’s left, utterly demoralized, dropped his plate of soup where he stood, by the chair of the Bishop’s wife, and the contents, rich, dark, tenacious, fell on the ripe, warm shoulders of the shrieking, half-scalded victim, and rolled in an oily river down the palpitating, outraged bosom, and all athwart the delicate, primrose tinted garment.
The scene now beggared description. Mr. Felix Johnstone, also bespattered by the waiter’s munificence, for which he was devoutly grateful, as it gave him an excuse for leaving the table, walked to the door as if he expected to be hanged outside. As he bowed himself out with a calm born of the supremest desperation, three glances were daguerreotyped on his brain—the flaming visage of the Bishop burning with a look of very unapostolic rage; the amused and cynical smile of Mr. Elphinstone Howard (“I’ve seen you before, where?” flashed the thought and inquiry through the unhappy one’s brain), and last, a look of distress and commiseration directed toward him by Lady Evelyn. That last glance was one of resuscitation in its effects, and was painful, as such always are.
“O the pity of it!” the unhappy man murmured. “But for this awful occurrence she might have grown to care for me, but no woman ever forgave a man for making himself so ridiculous.”
“Jarvis,” he shouted as he entered his rooms, “bring me Bradshaw’s Railway Guide.”
“Yes, sir, I see you have had an accident, won’t you change your clothes, sir, before you return to the dining-room?”
“Jarvis, you are an idiot, do I look like a man who is about to return to a dining-room? I want you to find me the earliest train that starts for the North Pole, and if you don’t catch it, you’ll catch something else; that, I can promise you.”
Jarvis was a discreet servant of vast experience, and the train which he did look up, found its terminus in Euston Square, London.
“There is no train to-night, sir,” was all he said, as he closed his Bradshaw.
An hour later Dick, the son and heir of the family, entered his friend’s room, and after carefully closing the door and seeing Jarvis out of the way, he sat down opposite his friend and gave himself up to great and unrestrained laughter—laughing until the tears ran down his cheeks and until he rolled off his chair through weakness.