Bella had heard of Captain Standish, both from his brother officers and from the outside world, until she knew his excellences and accomplishments by heart. She was inspired with the same desire to cultivate his acquaintance which agitated feminine society in the brand-new Granges, Moats, and Manors round Great Yafford. The Porkmans had met him at a fancy ball, where he had stood out from the tinselled King Charleses, and the spangled Black Princes, and the theatrical brigands and troubadours, in the actual dress of a Spanish bullfighter. He had once accepted an invitation to dine at the Porkmans’, had disappointed them at the last moment, and had called a week after. The Miss Porkmans had forgiven the ungracious disappointment on account of the gracious call.
‘He looks lovely in morning dress,’ said Blanche Porkman, who was youthful and enthusiastic. ‘If you knew him you would rave about him.’
‘I never rave about people,’ returned Bella, with dignity. ‘And I don’t in the least care about knowing this Captain Standish.’
‘This Captain Standish!’ echoed Blanche Porkman, indignantly. ‘You needn’t put a demonstrative pronoun before him, Mrs. Piper. There’s nobody else like him.’
In spite of her affected indifference, Bella was bent upon bringing Captain Standish to the Park. He had called upon the Porkmans. Was she—with her advanced ideas of elegance and her unlimited capacity for reading French novels—to be of less account than the Porkmans? Was that overgrown Blanche, with her drab hair and complexion, and goggle eyes, to boast of an acquaintance beyond Bella’s reach?
‘The next time you come, colonel, you must bring Captain Standish,’ said Mrs. Piper to the cordial O’Shaughnessy, after that gentleman had dined copiously at Mr. Piper’s expense, and told all his tiger stories, in which he was apt to lose the tiger in a jumble of irrelevant parentheses.
‘Madam, if I live and he lives till next Thursday, Standish shall do homage at the shrine of beauty and domestic excellence,’ protested the colonel, which was merely his way of saying that Captain Standish should come to see Mrs. Piper.
The following Thursday came, but no Standish. Another and another Thursday, and the colonel still appeared, apologetic and disgusted. That fellow Standish was perfectly incorrigible, he declared. But this was the fourth Thursday, and Captain Standish was here.
‘Madam,’ said the colonel, introducing his junior, ‘I have kept my promise. If this fellow had tried to put me off to-day I should have lugged him here by the hair of his head.’
‘And if I had known how charming—a place I was to see, I should have come ages ago without your interference, colonel,’ said the captain.