“Don’t call me rucky,” said the gentleman addressed, who was now rapidly lapsing into the lachrymose stage of his complaint. “Call me a mirerrable worm or a ‘fernal villain. I reserve both names. Doesn’ a man who has alienarid the affeshuns of his father, blirid his mother’s fonnest hopes, and broken his pli’rid word to a fonnanloving woman—girl, by Jingo——”
“Oh, do dry up about that now, darling!” said Lady Rustleton tartly. “I dare say she deserved what she got. What you have to remember now is that you’re married to me, and we shall be spinning away in the Liverpool Express in another hour, en route for the ocean wave. I always said, when I did have a honeymoon—a real one—I’d have it on the opening week of the production on a big Atlantic liner. And this is the trial voyage of the Regent Street, and she’s the biggest thing in ships afloat to-day. Do let’s drink her health!”
The toast was drunk with enthusiasm. Two waiters advanced bearing a wedding-cake upon a charger. The bride coyly cut a segment from the mass. It was divided and passed round. The ladies took pieces to dream on, the men shied at the indigestible morsels. Somebody had the bright idea of sending a lump to the chauffeur of the bridal motor-car, which had been waiting in the bright October sunshine, outside in the palm-adorned courtyard, since one o’clock. A chassé of cognac went round. Rustleton was shaken into consciousness of his marital responsibilities and a fur-lined overcoat; everybody kissed Petsie; all the women cried, Petsie included—but not unbecomingly. Her bridal gown, a walking-costume of white cloth trimmed with silver braid, contained a thoroughly contented young woman; her hat, a fascinating creation, trimmed with a rose-colored bird, a marquisette, and a real lace veil, crowned a completely happy wife. Tonnie possessed nothing extraordinary in the way of good looks or good brains, it was true; but Tonnie’s wife was wealthy in these physical attributes. He possessed a high-nosed, aristocratic old fossil of a father, whose prejudices against a daughter-in-law taken from the lyric boards must be got over. He owned a perfectly awful mother, whose ancestral pride and whose three chins must—nay, should—be leveled with the dust. His sisters, the Ladies Pope-Baggotte, Petsie said to herself with a smile, were foewomen unworthy of such steel as is forged in the coulisses of the musical comedy theaters. Yet should they, too, bite the dust. In a golden halo—partly hope, partly champagne—she saw Lady Rustleton sweeping, attired in electrifying gowns, onwards to the conquest of Society. The greengrocer’s shop in Camberwell, among whose cabbages and potatoes her infancy had been passed; the Board-School, on whose benches the first-fruits of knowledge had been garnered, were quite forgotten. Some other little circumstances connected with the Past were blotted from the slate of memory by the perfumed sponge of gratified ambition. She bore the deluge of rice and confetti with dazzling equanimity. She hummed “Buzzy, Buzzy, Busy Bee” as the motor-car, its chauffeur sorely embarrassed by a giant wedding favor, a pair of elderly slippers tied on the rear-axle, sped to Euston.
“I’ve got there at last,” said Petsie, as the Express ran into the Liverpool docks and toiling human ants began to climb up the ship’s gangways thrust downwards from the beetling gray sides of the biggest of all modern liners. “I’ve got there at last, I have, and in spite of Billy Boman. A precious little silly I must have been to take a hairdresser for a swell; but at seventeen what girl brought up in a Camberwell backstreet knows a paste solitaire from a real diamond, or a ready-made suit, bought for thirty bob at a Universal Supply Stores, from a Bond Street one? And if nice curly hair and a straight nose, a clear skin, and a good figure were all that’s wanted to make a gentleman, Billy could have sported himself along with the best. But now he’s dead, and I’ve married again into the Peerage, and I shall sit on the Captain’s right at the center saloon table, not only as the prettiest woman on board his big new ship, but as a bride and a Viscountess into the bargain. Wake up, Tonnie dear. You’ve slept all the way from Euston, and there’s a plank to climb.”
“Eh?” Tonnie stared with glassy eyes at the scurrying crowds of human figures, the piled-up trucks of giant trunks and dress-baskets soaring aloft at the end of donkey-engine cables, to vanish into the bowels of the marine leviathan. “Eh! What! Hang it! How confoundedly my head aches! Funkstein must have given us a brutally unwholesome luncheon. Why did I allow him to entertain us? I felt from the first it was a hideous mistake.”
“Why did you let the fellows persuade you to drink more of the Boy than is good for you, you soft-headed old darling?” Petsie gurgled. She smoothed the lank hair of her new-made spouse, and, reaching down his hat from the netting, crowned him with it, and bounded out of the reserved first-class compartment like a lively little rubber ball. “Here’s Timms, your man, with my new maid. No, thank you, Simpkins. You can take the traveling-bags. I may be a woman of title, but I mean to carry my jewel-case myself. Come along into the Ark, Tonnie, with the other couples. What number did you say belonged to our cabin, darling?”
“The Gobelin Tapestry Bridal Suite Number Four,” said Rustleton, with a pallid smile, as a white-capped, gold-banded official hurried forward to relieve the Viscountess of her coroneted jewel-case.
“How tweedlums!” sighed Petsie, retaining firm hold of the leather repository of her brand-new diamond tiara and necklace, not to mention all the rings and brooches and bangles reaped from the admiring occupants of the orchestra-stalls at the West End Theatre during the tumultuously successful run of The Charity Girl.
“It costs for the trip—five days, four hours, and sixteen minutes—between Queenstown and the Daunts Rock Lightship,” said Rustleton, with a heavy groan, “exactly two hundred and seventy-five guineas. Ha, ha!” He laughed hollowly.
“But why did you choose such a screamingly swell suite, you wicked, wasteful duckums?” cried the bride coquettishly, as their guide switched on the electric light and revealed a chaste and sumptuous nest of apartments in carved and inlaid mahogany, finished in white enamel with artistic touches of gold, and hung with tapestry of a greeny-blue and livid flesh-color.