“Because I can’t afford it,” said the dismal bridegroom, “and because the meals and all that will be served here separately and privately.” He sank limply upon a sumptuous lounge, and hurled an extinct cigarette-end into an open fireplace surrounded by beaten brass and crowned by a mantel in rose-colored marble. “The execrable ordeal of the first cabin dining-room, with its crowds of gross, commonplace, high-spirited, hungry feeders will thus be spared us. You need never set foot in the Ladies’ Drawing-room; the Lounge and the Smoking-room shall equally be shunned by me. Exercise on the Promenade Deck is a necessity. We shall take it daily, and take it together, my incognito preserved by a motor-cap and goggles, your privacy ensured by a silk—two silk—veils.” He smiled wanly. “I have roughly laid down these lines, formulated this plan, for the maintenance of our privacy without making any allowance for the exigencies of the weather and the condition of the sea. But if I should be prostrated—and I am an exceedingly bad sailor at the best of times—remember, dearest, that a tumbler of hot water administered every ten minutes, alternately with a slice of iced lemon, should feverish symptoms intervene, is not a panacea, but an alleviation, as my cousin, Hambridge Ost, would say. I rather wonder what Hambridge is saying now. He possesses an extraordinary faculty of being scathingly sarcastic at the expense of persons who deserve censure. An unpleasant sensation in my spine gives me the impression—do you ever have those impressions?—that he is exercising that faculty now—and at my expense. Timms, I will ask you to unpack my dressing-gown and papooshes, and then, if you, my darling, do not object, I will lie down comfortably in my own room and have a cup of tea. If I might make a suggestion, dearest, it is that you would tell your maid to get out your dressing-gown and your slippers, and lie down comfortably in your own room and have a cup of tea.”
The twenty-six thousand ton Atlantic flyer moved gracefully down the Mersey, the last flutter of handkerchiefs died away on the stage, the last head was pulled back over the vessel’s rail, the seething tumult of settling down reduced itself to a hive-like buzzing. The Regent Street’s passenger-list comprised quite a number of notabilities connected with Art and the Drama, a promising crop of American millionaires, an ex-Viceroy of India, and a singularly gifted orang-utan, the biggest sensation of the London season, who had dined with the Lord Mayor and Corporation at the Mansion House, and was now crossing the ocean to fulfill a roof-garden engagement in New York, and be entertained at a freak supper by six of the supreme leaders of American Society. Petsie pondered the passenger-list with a pouting lip. She heard from her enraptured maid of the glories of the floating palace in which the first week of her honeymoon was to be spent as she sipped the cup of tea recommended by Rustleton.
“Lifts to take you up and down stairs, silver-gilt and enamel souvenirs given to everybody free, Turkish baths, needle baths, electric baths, hairdressing and manicuring saloons, millinery establishments, a theater with a stock company who don’t know what sea-sickness means, jewelers’ shops, florists, and Fuller’s, a palmist, and a thought-reader. Goodness! the gay old ship must be a floating London, with fish and things squattering about underneath one’s shoe-heels instead of ‘phone-wires and electric-light cables. And I’m shut up like a blooming pearl in an oyster, instead of running about and looking at everything. Oh, Simpkie’—Simpkins, the new maid, had been a dresser at the West End Theatre—“I’m dying for the chance of a little flutter on my own, and how am I to get it?”
The Regent Street gave a long, stately, sliding dive forwards as a mammoth roller of St. George’s Channel swept under her sky-scraping stern. A long, plaintive moan—forerunner of how many to come!—sounded from the other side of the partition dividing the apartments of the bride from that of her newly-wedded lord.
“I think you’re goin’ to get it, my lady,” said the demure Simpkins, as Rustleton’s man knocked at his mistress’s door to convey the intimation that his lordship preferred not to dine.
A head-wind and a heavy sea combined, during the next three days of the voyage, to render Rustleton a prey to agonies which are better imagined than described. While he imbibed hot water and nibbled captain’s biscuits, or lay prone and semi-conscious in the clutches of the hideous malady of the wave, Lady Rustleton, bright-eyed, petite, and beautifully dressed, paraded the promenade deck with a tail of male and female cronies, played at quoits and croquet, to the delight of select audiences, and sat in sheltered corners after dinner, well out of the radius of the electric light, sometimes with two or three, generally with one, of the best-looking victims of her bow and spear. She sat on the Captain’s right hand at the center table, outrageously bedecked with diamonds. She played in a musical sketch and sang at a charity concert. “Buzzy, Buzzy, Busy Bee” was thenceforth to be heard in every corner of the vast maritime hotel that was hurrying its guests Westward at the utmost speed of steel and steam. Fresh bouquets of Malmaison carnations, roses and violets from the Piccadilly florists, were continually heaped upon her shrine, dainty jeweled miniature representations of the Regent Street’s house-flag, boxes of choice bonbons showered upon her like rain. The celebrated orang-utan occupied the chair next hers at a special banquet, the newest modes in millinery found their way mysteriously to her apartment, if she had but tried them on, smiled, and, with the inimitable Petsie wink at the reflection of her own provokingly pretty features in the shop mirror, approved.
“I keep forgetting I’m a married woman,” she would say, with the Petsie smile, when elderly ladies of the cat-like type, and middle-aged men who were malicious, inquired after the health of the invisible Lord Rustleton. “But he’s there, poor dear; or as much as is left of him. Quite contented if he gets his milk and beef-juice, and the hot water comes regularly, and there’s a slice of lemon to suck. No; I’m afraid I can’t give him your kind message of sympathy, you know, because sympathy is too disturbing, he says.... He doesn’t even like me to ask him if he’s feeling bad, because, as he tells me, I have only to look at him to know that he is, poor darling.”
Thus prattled the bride, even ready to faire l’ingénue for the benefit of even an audience of one. The voyage agreed with Petsie. Her complexion, dulled by make-up, assumed a healthier tint; her eyes and smile grew brighter, even as the ruddy gold faded from her abundant hair. The end of this story would have been completely different had not the tricksy sea-air brought about this deplorable change.
“I’m getting dreadfully rusty, as you say, Simpkie; and if the man in the hairdresser’s shop on the Promenade Deck Arcade can give me a shampoodle and touch me up a bit—quite an artist is he, and quite the gentleman? Oh, very well, I’ll look in on my gentleman-artist between breakfast and bouillon.”
Petsie did look in. The artist’s studio, elegantly hung with heavy pink plush curtains, only contained, besides a shampooing-basin, a large mirror, a nickel-silver instrument of a type between a chimney-cowl and a ship’s ventilator, and a client’s chair, a young person of ingratiating manners, who offered Lady Rustleton the chair, and enveloping her dainty person in a starchy pink wrapper, touched a bell, and saying, “The operator will attend immediately, moddam,” glided noiselessly away. Petsie, approvingly surveying her image in the mirror, did not hear a male footstep behind her. But as the head and shoulders of the operator rose above the level of her topmost waves, and his reflected gaze encountered her own, she became ghastly pale beneath her rose-bloom, and with a little choking cry of recognition gasped out: