Of theaters and theatrical people Gerry may be said to have known little or nothing until the enchanting Lottie blazed upon his field of vision. Gerry’s worthy parents, strict moralists both, had considered the theater as the temple of Satan, and had exacted from their only child a solemn promise that he would never enter one. This promise Gerry had actually kept, contenting himself with the entertainments offered by the music halls, which his father had omitted to stigmatize and his mother knew not of. But at the close of a festive dinner, given by Gerry to a select party of “pals,” in a private room at the Levity Restaurant, when a brief, lethargic slumber obscured the senses of the youthful host, the brilliant idea of conveying him to a box in the theater upstairs occurred to one of his guests, and was forthwith carried out. Emerging from a condition of coma, Gerry found himself staring into a web of crossing and intersecting limelights of varying hues, in which a dazzling human butterfly, entangled, was beating quivering wings. The butterfly had lustrous eyes, encircled with blue rims, a complexion of theatrical red and white, and masses of golden hair. Her twinkling feet beat out a measure to which Gerry’s pulses began to dance madly. He sent the goddess an invitation to supper, which was promptly declined. He forwarded a stack of roses, which were not acknowledged, and a muff-chain, turquoise and peridot, which were returned to the address upon his card. He felt hurt but happy at these rebuffs, which proved to him that Miss Speranza was above reproach; and when a bosom friend of his own age hinted that the prudish fair one was playing the big game, and advised him to try her with a motor-car, Gerry promptly converted the bosom friend into a stranger by the simple process of asking him to redeem a few of his I O U’s. This got about, and caused Gerry’s other friends to turn sharp round corners, or jump into hansoms when they saw Gerry coming. Gerry hardly missed them, though the man who could have afforded an introduction to his charmer would have been welcomed with open arms. He occupied the same box at the Levity nightly now, and made up, in its murkiest corner, a good deal of the nightly rest of which his clamant passion deprived him. But he awakened, as by instinct, whenever Miss Speranza tripped upon the stage; and the large-eyed, vacuous, gorgeously-attired beauties who “went on” with the Chorus—the Lotties, Maries, Daisies, Topsies of the noble houses of Montague, Talbot, De Crespigny, and Delamere,—would languidly nudge each other at the passionately prolonged plaudits of a particular pair of immaculate white gloves, and wonder semi-audibly what the man saw in Speranza, dear, to make such a bloomin’ silly fuss about?
Gerry had occupied his watch-tower at the Levity for six weeks or so, and was beginning to deteriorate in appetite and complexion (so powerful are the effects of passion unreturned), when Undertherose Cottage at Sunningwater, a charming Thames-side residence of the bijou kind, with small grounds and a capacious cellar, a boat-house, and a house-boat, a pigeon-cote and a private post-box, became suddenly vacant. The tenant, a lady of many charms and much experience, who had passed over to Gerry with the property, returned to her native Paris to open a bonnet-shop; and Gerry, as he wandered over the dwelling with the sanitary engineer and decorator, who had carte blanche to do-up the place, found himself strolling on the tiny lawn (in imagination) by the visioned side of the enchantress who had enthralled him, supping (also in imagination) with the same divine creature in the duodecimo oak dining-room, and smoking a cigarette in her delightful company upon the balcony of the boudoir. Waking from these dreams was a piquant anguish. Gerry indeed possessed the cage, one of the most ideal nests for a honeymooning pair imaginable; but in vain for the airy feminine songster might the infatuated fowler spread nets and set springs.
“If we didn’t live in this confoundedly proper twentieth century,” thought disconsolate Gerry, “a chappie might hire a coach and eight, bribe a few bruisers to repress attempts at rescue, snap her up respectfully as she came out at the stage door, and absquatulate—no! abduct’s the word. Not that I’d behave like a brute; I’d marry her to-morrow if she’d only give me a chance to ask her. Marquises do that sort of thing, and their families come round a bit and bless the young people. She must have shown the door to dozens of ’em.” He sighed, for where the possessor of a ripe old peerage had failed, how could Gerald Gandelish, Esq., hope to triumph? “And she’s so awfully proper and standoffish, too,” he reflected. He wondered how many years it had taken those privileged persons whom the lady permitted to rank as her friends to attain that enviable distinction. “I’ve never met a man who could, or would, introduce me,” he added, pulling his mustache, which from happily turning up at the corners had recently acquired a decided tendency to droop. “Seemed to shy at it, somehow; and so I shall take the initi—what-you-call—myself. She shall know from the start that my intentions are honorable, and, hang it! the name’s a good one.... There’s been a Gandelish of Horshundam ever since Henry the Eighth hanged the abbot and turned out the monks, and put my ancestor Gorbred in to keep the place warm. Gorbred was His Majesty’s principal purveyor of sack and sugar, ‘and divers dainty cates beside,’ as the Chronicle has it, and must have given the Tudor unlimited tick, I gather. Anyhow, if four centuries of landlording don’t make a tradesman a gentleman, they ought to; and I can’t see——”
Gerry climbed into his “Runhard” thirty horse-power roadster, pulled down the talc mask of his driving cap to preserve his eyes and complexion, and ran back to town. That night, as he quitted his box at the conclusion of the Levity performance (you will remember the phenomenal run of The Idiot Girl in 19—!), he turned up his coat collar with the air of a man resolved to do or die, and boldly plunged into the little entry leading to the stage door. The bemedaled military guardian of those rigid portals, who had absorbed several of Gerry’s sovereigns without winking, regarded him with a glazed eye and a stiff upper lip.
“Would you kindly——” began Gerry.
But the stage-doorkeeper paid no heed, busily engaged as he was in delivering letters from a rack on the wall, lettered S, into the hands of a slight little woman in a rather shabby tweed ulster and plain felt hat. Gerry’s heart jumped as he recognized his own handwriting upon one of the envelopes.... Surely the tiny tin gods had favored him! The little woman in the ulster and the plain felt hat must be lady’s maid to the brilliant Speranza. As she thrust the letters into her pockets, nodded familiarly to the commissionaire, and came out of the stage-door office, Gerry, his heart in his mouth and his hat in his hand, stood in her way.
“Miss—Madam——” he began. “If I might ask you——”
“What’s that?” shouted the commissionaire. As the little woman stepped quickly backwards, Cerberus emerged, purple and growling, from his den and reared his huge body as a barrier before her. “Annoying the lady, are ye?” he roared, with a fine forgetfulness of Gerry’s sovereigns. “Wait till I knock your mouth round to the back of your head, you kid-gloved young blaggyard, you! Wait till——”
“Be quiet, O’Murphy!” said the little woman in a tone and with an accent which raised her to the level of lady’s companion in Gerry’s estimation. And as the crestfallen O’Murphy retreated into his den, she said, turning a plain little clever face, irradiated by a pair of brilliant eyes, upon the crimson Gerry, “Did you wish to speak to me?”
“I certainly do, if you are any relative—or a member of the household—of Miss Speranza,” Gerry stuttered.