Transcriber’s Note:

The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

OFF SANDY HOOK

AND OTHER STORIES

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

THE MAN OF IRON

ONE BRAVER THING (The Dop Doctor)

BETWEEN TWO THIEVES

THE HEADQUARTER RECRUIT

THE COST OF WINGS

OFF SANDY HOOK
AND OTHER STORIES

BY

RICHARD DEHAN

Author of “One Braver Thing” (“The Dop Doctor”), “The Man of Iron,” “Between Two Thieves,” etc.

NEW YORK

FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY

PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1915, by

Frederick A. Stokes Company

All rights reserved, including that of translation

into foreign languages

CONTENTS

OFF SANDY HOOK

AND OTHER STORIES

OFF SANDY HOOK

On board the Rampatina liner, eleven days and a half out from Liverpool, the usual terrific sensation created by the appearance of the pilot-yacht prevailed. Necks were craned and toes were trodden on as the steamer slackened speed, and a line dexterously thrown by a blue-jerseyed deck-hand was caught by somebody aboard the yacht. The pilot, not insensible to the fact of his being a personage of note, carefully divested his bearded countenance of all expression as he saluted the Captain, and taking from the deck-steward’s obsequiously proffered salver a glass containing four-fingers of neat Bourbon whisky, concealed its contents about his person without perceptible emotion, and went up with the First Officer upon the upper bridge as the relieved skipper plunged below. The telegraphs clicked their message—the leviathan hulk of the liner quivered and began to forge slowly ahead, and an intelligent-looking, thin-lipped, badly-shaved young man in a bowler, tweeds, and striped necktie, introduced himself to the Second Officer as an emissary of the Press.

“Mr. Cyrus K. Pillson, New York Yeller.... Pleased to know you, sir,” said the Second Officer; “step into the smoke-room, this way. Bar-steward, a brandy cocktail for me, and you, sir, order whatever you are most in the habit of hoisting. Whisky straight! Now, sir, happy to afford you what information I can!”

“I presume,” observed the young gentleman of the Press, settling himself on the springy morocco cushions and accepting the Second Officer’s polite offer of a green Havana of the strongest kind, “that you have had a smooth passage, considerin’ the time of year?”

“Smooth....” The Second Officer carefully reversed in his reply the Pressman’s remark: “Well, yes, the time of year considered, a smooth passage, I take it, we have had.”

“No fogs?” interrogated the young gentleman, clicking the elastic band of a notebook which projected from his breast-pocket.

“Fogs?... No!” said the Second Officer.

“You didn’t chance,” pursued the young gentleman of the Press, taking his short drink from the steward’s salver and throwing it contemptuously down his throat, “to fall in with a berg off the Bank, did you?”

“Not a smell of one!” replied the Second Officer with decision.

“Ran into a derelict hencoop, perhaps?” persisted the young gentleman, concealing the worn sole of a wearied boot from the searching glare of the electric light by tucking it underneath him, “or an old lady’s bonnet-box? ... or a rubber doll some woman’s baby had lost overboard? No?” he echoed, as the Second Officer shook his head. “Then, how in thunder did you manage to lose twenty feet of your port-rail?”

“Carried away,” said the Second Officer, offering the young Press gentleman a light.

“No, thanks. Always eat mine,” said the young Press gentleman gracefully.

“Matter of taste,” observed the Second Officer, blowing blue rings.

“I guess so; and I’ve a taste for knowing how you came,” said the young Pressman, “to part with that twenty foot of rail.”

“Carried away,” said the Second Officer.

“I kin see that,” retorted the visitor.

“It was carried away,” said the Second Officer, “by an elephant.”

“A pet you had running about aboard?” queried the Pressman, with imperturbable coolness.

“A passenger,” returned the Second Officer, with equal calm.

There was a snap, and the Pressman’s notebook was open on his knee. The pencil vibrated over the virgin page, when a curious utterance, between a wail, a cough, and a roar, made the hand that held it start.

“Yarr-rr! Ohowgh! Yarr!” The melancholy sound came from without, borne on the cool breeze of a late afternoon in March, through the open ventilators.

“Might that,” queried the young gentleman of the Press, “be an expression of opinion on the part of the elephant?”

“Lord love you, no!” said the Second Officer. “It’s the leopard.” He added after a second’s pause: “Or the puma.”

“Do you happen to have a menagerie aboard?” inquired the Pressman, making a note in shorthand.

“No, sir. The beasts—elephants, leopards, and a box of cobras—are invoiced from the London Docks to a wealthy amateur in New York State. Not an iron king, or a corn king, or a cotton king, or a pickle king, or a kerosene king,” said the Second Officer, with a steady upper lip, “but a chewing-gum king.”

“If you mean Shadland C. McOster,” said the Pressman, “my mother is his cousin. They used to chew gum together in school recess, sir, little guessing that Shad would one day soar, on wings made of that article, to the realms of gilded plutocracy.”

“I rather imagine the name you mention to be the right one,” said the Second Officer cautiously, “but I won’t commit myself. The beasts shipped from Liverpool are intended as a present for the purchaser’s infant daughter on her fifth birthday.”

“Yarr-rr! Ohowgh! Ohowgh!” Again the coughing roar vibrated through the smoke-room. Then the chorus of “Hail Columbia!” rose from the promenade deck, where the lady passengers were assembled ready to wave starred and striped silk pocket-handkerchiefs and exchange patriotic sentiments at the first glimpse of land.

“It’s not what I should call a humly voice, that of the leopard,” observed the Pressman, controlling a slight shiver.

“Children have queer tastes,” said the Second Officer. “And it’s as well Old Spots is lively, as Bingo’s dead.”

“Bingo?” queried the Pressman.

“Bingo was the elephant,” said the Second Officer, passing the palm of his brown right hand over his upper lip as the Pressman made a few rapid notes. “And if the particulars of the deathbed scene are likely to be of any interest to you—why, you’re welcome to ’em!”

“You’re white!” said the Pressman warmly, licking his pencil. “What did your elephant die of?”

“Seasickness!” said the Second Officer calmly.

“I’ve seen a few things worth seeing—myself,” said the Pressman enviously, “but not a seasick elephant.”

“With a professional lady-nurse in attendance,” said the Second Officer; “all complete from stem to stern, in her print gown, white apron, fly-away cap-rigging, and ward shoes.”

The Pressman grunted, but not from lack of interest. Doubled up in the corner of the smoke-room divan, his notebook balanced on his bulging shirt-front, he made furious notes. The Second Officer waited until the pencil seemed hungry, and then fed it with a little more information.

“When that girl came aboard at Liverpool with her mackintosh and holdall and little black shiny bag,” he went on, “I just noticed her in a passing sort of way as a fresh-colored, tidy-looking young woman, rather plump in the bows, and with an air as though she meant to get her full money’s worth out of her eleven-pound fare. But our cheap tariff had filled the passenger-lists fairly full, and I’d a long score of things to attend to. A special derrick had had to be rigged to sling the elephant’s cage aboard, and a capital one it was, of sound Indian teak strengthened with steel—must have cost a mint of money. We stowed it, after a lot of sweat and swearing, on the promenade deck, abaft the funnels, bolting it to rings specially screwed in the deck, passing a wire hawser across the top, which was made fast to the port and starboard davits, and rigging weather-screens of double tarpaulin to keep Bingo warm and dry. The other beasts we shipped under the lee of the forward cabin skylight; and I’d just got through the job when a quiet ladylike voice at my elbow says:

“‘If you please, officer, with regard to my patient, I wish to know——’

“‘Ask the purser, ma’am,’ I said, rather snappishly, for I was hot and worried ... ‘or the head-stewardess.’

“‘I have asked them both,’ says the voice in a calm, determined way, ‘and have been referred to you.’

“‘Well, what is it?’ says I.

“‘By mistake,’ says the young lady—for a young lady she was, and a hospital nurse besides, neatly rigged out in the usual uniform—‘by mistake I have had allotted to me a bedroom on the ground-floor, so far from my patient that I cannot possibly hear him should he call me in the night. And,’ she went on, as the breeze played with her white silk bonnet-strings and the wavy little kinks of soft brown hair that framed her forehead, ‘and I want you to move me to the upper floor at once.’

“‘You mean the promenade deck, madam,’ says I, smoothing out a grin, though I’m well enough used to the odd bungles land-folks make over names of things at sea.”

The flying pencil stopped. The Pressman looked up, turning his shortened cigar between his teeth.

“When do we come to the elephant?” he asked.

“We’re at him now,” said the Second Officer. “‘You mean the promenade deck,’ says I. ‘Does your patient occupy one of the cabins on the port or the starboard side, and may I ask his number and name?’ Then she smiled at me brightly, her eyes and teeth making a sort of flash together. ‘He doesn’t have a cabin,’ says she; ‘he sleeps in a cage. My patient is Bingo, the elephant!’”

“Great Pierpont Morgan!” ejaculated the Pressman. His previously flying pencil became almost invisible from the extreme rapidity with which he plied it. Drops of perspiration broke out upon his sallow forehead. “Glory!” he cried. “And not another man thought it worth while to run out and tackle this wallowing old tub but me!”

“I touched my cap,” went on the Second Officer, “keeping down as professionally as I could the surprise I felt.... ‘Do I understand, madam,’ I asked, ‘that you are the elephant’s nurse?’ And at that she nodded with another bright smile, and told me that she was Nurse Amy, of St. Baalam’s Nursing Association, London, specially engaged by the American gentleman who had bought the elephant——”

“Shadland C. McOster,” prompted the Pressman, without looking up.

“To attend to the animal on the voyage. It was understood that if the principal patient’s condition permitted, Nurse Amy was to pay the leopards such attentions as they were capable of appreciating, but there was no pressure on this point.”

“Ohowgh!” coughed the voice outside. “Yarr! Ohowgh!”

“He smells the land, I guess,” said the Pressman.

“Or the niggers,” suggested the Second Officer. “You ought to have heard Bingo when we were three days out from the Mersey.... We’d had a fair wind and a smooth sea at first, and nothing delighted the ladies and children on board like feeding him with apples, and nuts, and biscuits, and things prigged from the saloon tables. The sea-air must have sharpened the beast’s appetite, I suppose, for that old trunk of his was snorking round all day, and the Purser, who was naturally wild about it, said he must have put away hogsheads of good things in addition to his allowance of hay, and bread, and beetroot, and grain, and cabbages, and sugar——”

“Was he ca’am in temper?” asked the Pressman.

“Mild as milk.... As kind a beast as ever breathed; and elephants do a lot of breathing,” said the Second Officer. “The ladies and gentlemen in the upper-deck cabins used to complain about his snoring in the night; but as Nurse Amy said, there are people who’d complain about anything. And some of ’em didn’t like the smell of elephant—which, I’ll allow, when you happened to get to wind’ard of Bingo, was—phew!”

“Pooty vociferous?” hinted the Pressman.

“Until,” went on the Second Officer, “Nurse Amy took to washing him with scented soap.”

The pencil stopped. The Pressman looked up with circular eyes. “Scented——”

“Soap,” said the Second Officer. “No expense was to be spared—and we’d several cases of a special toilet and complexion article on board. By the living Harry! if you’d seen that elephant standing up over his morning tub of hot water, swabbing away at himself with a deck-sponge Nurse Amy had soaped for him, and then squirting the water over himself to rinse off the soap, you’d have believed in the intelligence of animals. The sight drew like a pantomime.... But by the sixth day out Bingo had given up all interest in his own appearance. The weather was squally, a bit of a sea got up, hardly a passenger put in an appearance at the saloon tables, and Bingo only shook his ears when the bugle blew, and turned away from his morning haystack and mound of cabbages with disgust. Nurse Amy got him to eat some biscuits and drink a bucket of Bovril, but you could see he was only doing it to oblige her. ‘Oh, come, cheer up!’ she said in a brisk, professional way. ‘You’ll get your sea-legs on directly and the officer says we’re having a wonderfully smooth passage, considering the time of the year.’ But Bingo only sighed, and two tears trickled out of his little red eyes, as he swayed from side to side. ‘He’ll be worse before he’s better,’ says I; for somehow I was generally about when Nurse Amy was looking after her big charge. ‘He’ll be worse before he’s better,’ and he was.”

The Pressman’s face was streaked and shiny, his hair lay glued to his brow. The pencil went on, devouring page after page.

“Nurse Amy, luckily for her patient, was not upset by the pitching of the vessel, for it blew half a gale steady from the sou’-west, and the old Centipede dipped her nose pretty frequently. Nurse was as busy as a bee endeavoring by every means she could devise or adopt from the suggestions of the stewardesses, who showed a good deal of interest in her and her charge, to alleviate the sufferings of Bingo. I have seen that little woman stand for an hour on the wet planking, holding a six-foot deck-swab soaked with eau-de-Cologne to Bingo’s forehead....”

The Pressman jotted down, breathing heavily. “Deck-swab soaked in eau-de-Cologne....” he muttered. “Must have cost slathers of money, I reckon——”

“No expense was to be spared,” the Second Officer reminded him gently. “As for the brandy, Martell’s Three Star, he must have put away a dozen bottles a day.”

“No blamed wonder his head ached!” said the Pressman, moistening his own dry lips.

“Except an occasional bucket of arrowroot with port wine and a tin or so of cuddy biscuits, the animal would take no other nourishment whatever,” continued the Second Officer. “As he grew weaker and weaker, it was touching to see the way in which he clung to Nurse Amy.”

“Clung to her?” the Pressman wrote, marking the words for a headline.

“Fact,” said the Second Officer. “He would put his trunk round her waist, and lay his head on her shoulder as she stood on a ladder lashed against the side of his cage. And he would hang out his forefoot to have his pulse felt, quite in a Christian style. Then when Nurse Amy wanted to take his temperature, the docile brute would curl up his fire-hose—I mean his trunk—and open his mouth, so that the instrument might be comfortably placed under his tongue.”

“By gings, sir, this story is going to knock corners off creation!” gasped the Pressman, pausing to wipe his face with a slightly smeary cuff. “An elephant that understood the use of the therm—blame it! that beast robbed some man of a fortune when he passed in his checks!”

“We lost so many of the ordinary kind of instrument in this way,” went on the Second Officer, almost pensively, “that at last Nurse Amy was obliged to fall back upon the large thermometer and barometer combined that usually hung in the first saloon. But it recorded, to our sorrow, no improvement. The mercury steadily sank, and it became plain to Nurse Amy’s professional eye that her patient was not long for this world.”

“Say, do you believe elephants have souls?” queried the Pressman. The Second Officer deigned no reply.

“She could not leave him a moment; he trumpeted so awfully when he saw her quit his side. I forgot to tell you that from the moment he first felt himself attacked by sea-sickness his bellows of rage and agony were frightful to hear. The other animals became excited by them; they roared and snarled without cessation.”

“Raised general hell,” said the Pressman, “with trimmings.” But he wrote down with a sign that meant leaded spaces and giant capitals:

“PANDEMONIUM IN MID-OCEAN!”

“Nobody on board got a wink of sleep,” said the Second Officer—“that is, unless the devoted Nurse Amy was by the sufferer’s side. Towards the end, when, exhausted by days and nights of arduous nursing, the devoted girl had retired to her deck-cabin to snatch a few moments of much-needed rest, the entire crew vied with each other in efforts to pacify Bingo, without the slightest effect. When they tried to put his feet in hot water he mashed the ship’s buckets like so many gooseberries, and shot the Purser down with half a trunkful of hot cocoa, which had been offered as a last resource. But on Nurse Amy’s appearing he grew pacified, and from that moment until the end the heroic woman never left his side. I begged her to consider herself and those dear to her,” said the Second Officer, with a little tremble in his voice, “but she only smiled—a worn kind of smile—and said that duty must be considered first. I won’t deny it,” said the Second Officer, openly producing a very white pocket-handkerchief and unfolding it. “I kissed that woman’s hand as though she had been the Queen.” He concealed his face with the handkerchief and coughed rather loudly.

“The Rude Shellback Touched to the Quick,” wrote the Pressman. “He Sheds Tears.” “Get on with the death-scene, sir, if you don’t object!” he said, breathing through his nose excitedly. “If that elephant asked for a minister, I’d not be surprised!”

“He did make his will, after a fashion,” said the narrator. “You see, during the convulsive struggles I have described, when he broke off his right tusk—didn’t I mention that?”

“No!” denied the Pressman.

“He broke it, anyhow, right off short, as a boy might snap a carrot,” said the Second Officer. “There it lay, among the litter, in the bottom of his cage. He had suddenly ceased trumpeting, and a deathly silence had fallen on all creation, one would have said. The vessel still rolled a bit, but the wind had fallen, and the sun was going down like a blot of fire, on the——”

“Western horizon,” wrote the Pressman.

“Nurse Amy, from her ladder, still rendered the last offices of human kindness to the sinking animal, sponging his forehead with ice-water and fanning him with a bellows. As she whispered to me that the end was near, Bingo opened his eyes. With an expiring effort he lifted the broken tusk from the bottom of the cage, dropped it on the deck at his faithful Nurse’s feet, uttered a heavy groan, threw up his trunk, sank gently forward upon his massive knees, and died!”

“The editor of the opposition paper will do another die when he runs his eye over the Yeller to-morrow morning,” said the Pressman, joyfully smacking the rubber band round the filled notebook. “And the port-rail got carried away when you yanked the body overboard?”

“We couldn’t stuff him,” said the Second Officer with a sigh. “As for preserving him in spirits, we hadn’t enough spirits left to think of it. We rigged a special derrick, and heaved Bingo overboard, carrying away, as you have guessed, the port-rail in the operation. As Bingo’s tremendous carcass rose and floated buoyantly away to leeward, back and head well above the water, and the two great ears resting flat upon the surface like gigantic lily-pads, Nurse Amy uttered a faint cry and swooned in my arms.”

“Some folks get all the luck!” commented the Pressman, who, having filled his book, was now jotting down notes upon his left cuff.

“You’ve not much to complain of, it strikes me!” observed the Second Officer, with a glance at the crammed notebook.

“I guess that’s true!” said the Pressman, with a sigh of satisfaction. “Now, all I want is a photograph or a sketch of that splendid heroine of a girl, and the honor of shaking her hand, and telling her she deserves to be an American—and I’d not trade places with the President.”

The Second Officer appeared to be struggling with some emotion. The muscles of his mouth worked violently. He reddened through the red, and suspicious moisture shone in his eyes. One by one the members of the silent but not unappreciative audience of male passengers that had gradually gathered within earshot of the Second Officer and his victim, manifested the same symptoms. And glancing for the first time at those listening faces, and observing the identical expression stamped upon each, the Pressman, encircled by wet, crinkled eyes, and cheerfully-curled-back lips, fringed with teeth in all stages of preservation, grasped the conviction that he had been had. And at this crucial moment the hatch-door of the smoke-room rolled back in its brass coamings, and a pointed gray beard and kindly keen eyes, sheltered by the peak of a gold-laced cap, appeared in the aperture.

“New York Harbor, gentlemen,” said the Captain genially. “We’re running into the docks now, and the Custom House officers will board us directly.... I shouldn’t wonder,” he continued, as the majority of the occupants of the smoke-room one by one glided away, “if the newspapers made a story out of our missing port-rail!”

“Permit me to introduce myself as a reporter of the N’York Yeller,” said the young gentleman in tweeds, as he rose and touched his hat. “Perhaps, sir, you would favor me with the facts in connection with the occurrence?”

“Haven’t you had it from Murchison? Why, Murchison——” the Captain was beginning, when with a choking snort the Second Officer rushed from the smoke-room. “Though there’s nothing to tell, Mr. Reporter, worth hearing. A derrick-chain broke at Southampton Docks, and a case of agricultural machine-parts did the damage. We temporarily repaired with some iron piping, and a length of wire hawser; but, of course, it shows badly, and suggests——”

“A collision!” said a smiling stranger.

“Or an elephant,” said another.

“Yarr!” proclaimed the horrible voice outside. “Ohowgh! Yarr!”

“I understand,” said the Pressman with an effort, “that the elephant emanated from the teeming brain of Mr. Murchison. But the leopard—there is a leopard, I surmise, if hearing goes for evidence?”

The Captain’s excellent teeth showed under his gray mustache. “That noise, you mean?” he exclaimed.... “Oh, that’s one of our electric air-pumps, for forcing air into the lower-deck storage chambers, you know. She’s out of gear, and lets us know it in that way. Must have her seen to at New York. Take a drink, won’t you? Come, gentlemen, order what you please.”

“Whisky, square,” murmured the Pressman, as the long, smooth glide of the liner was checked, the engines throbbed and stopped, and the dull roar of the docks pressed upon listening ears. He drank, and as the fluid traversed the usual channel, his eye grew brighter.... “Say, Captain,” he asked, “do you know where your Second Officer was raised?”

“Murchison comes, I believe, from Yorkshire,” said the Captain. “Hey, Murchison, isn’t that the place?”

“I am not acquainted with the geology of Yorkshire,” observed the Pressman, as he passed the Second Officer on his way to the smoke-room; “but the soil grows good liars! So long!”

GEMINI
AN EMBARRASSMENT OF CHOICE

To Captain Galahad Ranking, grilling over his Musketry-Instructorship at Hounslow one arid July, came a square lilac envelope, addressed in a sprawling hand, with plenty of violet ink. The missive smelt of Rhine violets. It bore a monogram, the initials “L. K.” fantastically intertwined, and was, in fact, an invitation from his affectionate cousin Laura, dated from a pleasant country mansion situate amid green lawns and blushing rose-gardens on the Werkshire reaches of the Thames.

Laura was not Galahad’s cousin by blood, but by marriage. Laura was the still young and attractive widow of Thomson Kingdom, once a stout man on the Stock Exchange, remarkable for a head of very upright gray hair and a startling taste in printed linen. Pigs and peaches were his pet hobbies, and the apoplectic seizure from which he never rallied was induced by a weakness in “the City” caused by unprecedentedly heavy selling-orders from a nervous north-eastern European capital, about the time of the entente cordiale. So the bloom was barely off Laura’s crêpe, and the new black gloves purchased by Galahad to grace his kinsman’s obsequies had not done duty at another funeral. The scrawly postscript to her letter said: “I want to consult you very particularly, in the most absolute confidence, upon a matter affecting my whole future.”

Galahad Ranking, Junior Captain, Fourth Battalion Royal Deershire Regiment, wrinkled up his freckled little countenance into queer puckers, and rubbed his bristly cinnamon-colored hair, already getting thin on the summit of his skull, as he puzzled the brain within that receptacle as to the possible meaning of Laura’s impassioned appeal. He was a small man, whose demure and spinster-like demeanor led new acquaintances to ask him plumply how on earth he had managed to get his D.S.O.

“There were chances,” he would reply to these querists, “to be had out there,” waving his hand vaguely in the direction of South Africa, “and I saw one of them and took it—that’s all.”

Others might pump him more successfully to the effect that he—Galahad Ranking—was a poor devil of a militiaman attached to the Royal Deershires; that a small detachment of that well-known territorial regiment, garrisoned in a beastly small tin-pot fort on the Springbok River, Eastern Transvaal, were by Boers besieged; that relief was urgently necessary; and that “one of the fellows went and brought up Kitchener.” Said fellow admitted upon further cross-examination to have been himself. But for such details as that the bringing up involved a six-mile run in scorching sun over tangled bush veldt, crossing the enemy’s lines, being sniped at by Boer sharpshooters and chased by Boer pickets, the curious must refer to despatches. Stampeding Army mules would not trample the truth out of the man.

He wrung half-hearted leave of absence from the powers that were, and his orderly packed the battered tin suit-case and the Gladstone bag that had spent three days at the bottom of a water-hole, and, having had its numerous labels soaked off, bore a painfully leprous appearance.

He found Laura’s omnibus automobile, with its luggage tender, waiting at Cholsford Junction, and smiled his dry little smile, mentally comparing the dimensions of the vehicle with the size of the guest. The suit-case and the Gladstone bag made a poor show; but there were other things to come: huge packages from the Stores, and a sea-weedy hamper from Great Fishby, and some cases of champagne with the label of a first-class Regent Street firm. “Poor Kingdom’s wine-merchants!” Ranking said to himself, and he blinked in a bewildered way at a bandbox of mammoth proportions and three dressmakers’ boxes of stout cardboard with tin corners, their covers bearing the flourishing signature of Babin et Cie. Because, you know, Laura’s bereavement was so very recent, and bachelors of Galahad’s type have a somewhat exaggerated notion of the extent to which conjugal mourners are expected to bewail themselves. However, even a widow requires clothes. This handsome concession to feminine idiosyncrasy made, Galahad ousted Laura’s chauffeur from the driving-seat, and, assuming the steering-wheel, was reaching for the starting-lever when the chauffeur stopped him with—

“Beg pardon, sir, but there’s a gentleman to fetch.”

“A visitor to The Rodelands?” Galahad asked, with furrows of surprise forming below his hat-brim.

The mechanic, a gloomy young man in a gold-banded cap, with a weakness for wearing waterproofs in the driest weather, replied, without a groom’s alertness or a groom’s civility:

“It’s a gentleman staying at Eyot Cottage....” Adding, as Galahad faintly recalled the creeper-covered cot in question, modestly perched on the edge of a marshy lawn running down to the river, and usually let by the landlord of the local hotel to honeymooning couples: “And we usually give him a lift.”

As the chauffeur spoke, the gentleman emerged from the dim, echoing archway through which the down platform disgorged. The stranger was young—Galahad, who was middle-aged, saw that at a glance—and fair, while Galahad was sandy. He wore a suit of gray tweeds too short in the sleeves and trouser-legs, and his cherubically pink countenance, adorned with large, round, china-blue eyes and a little flaxen mustache, was carried at an altitude which would have been disconcerting to a Lifeguardsman of six feet high, and was simply maddening to Galahad, who could only be categorized as small. We are all human, and Galahad was secretly gratified to observe that the young giant’s shoulders boasted a graceful droop, and that his chest was somewhat narrow.

“Hullo, Watson!” observed the tall young gentleman, condescendingly; and Watson smiled faintly and actually touched his cap as the new-comer favored Galahad with a long and round-eyed stare.

“I believe you are coming with us?” said Galahad, raising his hat with punctilious politeness.

“Not inside, thanks,” was the long-legged young stranger’s reply. He stared harder than ever, and Watson murmured in Galahad’s ear that the gentleman usually drove.

“Does he?” ejaculated the astonished Galahad.

A man may hold the rank of captain in one of his Majesty’s territorial Regiments, and yet be shy; may have earned the right to adorn his thorax with the D.S.O., and yet be bashful; may be a more than efficient instructor in Musketry, and yet shrink from the gratuitous schooling of underbred youth in the amenities of good breeding. In less time than it takes to relate it, Galahad was stowed in the omnibus body of the “Runhard” where, a very little kernel in a very roomy shell, he rattled about as the familiar landscape reeled giddily by at the will and pleasure of the long-legged young gentleman, who might be described as the kind of driver that takes risks. A peculiarly steep and curving hill announced by signboards lettered, in appropriate crimson, “Dangerous!” afforded facilities for the exercise of his peculiar talent which temporarily deprived the inside passenger of breath.

The river lay at the bottom of the hill, and the dwelling of Mrs. Kingdom, described in the local guide as “an elegant riparian villa,” sat in its green meadows and sunny croquet lawns and rose-trellised gardens, on the other side.

The automobile swirled in at the lodge-gates, stopped, and Galahad got out, welcomed by the joyful barking of Dinmonts, fox-terriers, pugs, and poodles.

Knee-deep in dogs, the little man responded to the respectful greeting of Laura’s butler, a meek, gray-faced, little, elderly personage with a frill of white whiskers akin to the hirsute adornments of the rare variety of the howling ape. Then the drawing-room door swung open, letting out an avalanche of Pomeranians and some Persian cats; Laura rose from a sofa and advanced with a gushful greeting. Her outstretched hands were grasped by Galahad; he was tinglingly conscious that her widow’s weeds were eminently becoming.

“Dear Captain Ranking, how sweet of you to run down!” Laura cooed. The flash of admiration in Galahad’s weary gray eyes gave her sugared assurance that she was looking her best; his ardent squeeze confirmed the look.

“You used to call me by my Christian name,” he was saying, with a little undulating wobble of sentiment in his voice. Then his glance went past Mrs. Kingdom, and his lean under-jaw dropped. The long-legged gentleman in gray tweed, who had driven, or rather hustled, him from the station, was sitting on the sofa in a suit of blue serge. No, Galahad was not mistaken. There were the long legs, the champagne-bottle shoulders, the china-blue eyes, and the little flaxen mustache. He did not look so pink, that was all. And when Laura, with a nervous giggle, introduced him as Mr. Lasher, he began getting up from the sofa as though he never would have done.

“How do?” he said, when his yellow head had soared to the ceiling.

“Met you before,” said Galahad with some terseness. “And you frightened me abominably by the way you scorched down Penniford Hill.”

The long-legged young man stared with circular blue eyes. Laura burst into a peal of rippling laughter, which struck Galahad as being forced and beside the point.

“My dear Galahad,” Mrs. Kingdom cried, “you must have met Brosy! This is Dosy,” she added, as though all were now clear, and welcomed with a perfect feu de joie of giggles the entrance of the veritable and original young man in gray tweeds who had driven the automobile, and now came strolling into the drawing-room. Then she introduced the pair formally to Captain Ranking as Mr. Theodosius and Mr. Ambrose Lasher, and rustled away to pour out tea, leaving Galahad in a jaundiced frame of mind. For one thing, he hated to be mystified; for another, being an ordinary, though heroic, human being, he had taken at the first moment of encounter a singularly ardent and sincere dislike to the “long-legged, blue-eyed young bounder,” as he mentally termed Mr. Brosy Lasher; and the discovery that the object of his loathing existed in duplicate was not a welcome one. He was dry, stiff, and jerky in his responses to the loud and patronizing advances of the two Lashers. Fortunately the twin young gentlemen accepted as admiration, what was, in fact, the opposite sentiment. They had been used to a good deal of this since the first moment of their simultaneous entrance upon this mundane stage, and they were twenty-six.

“It is so sad,” Laura said in confidential aside to Galahad. “They have lost both parents, and have hardly a penny in the world.” She raised and crumpled her still pretty eyebrows with the old infantile air of appeal. “Two such delightful boys, and so handsome! ... though to my eye Brosy’s nose is less purely Greek in outline than Dosy’s. And they were educated at a public school, with every advantage that a rich man’s sons might naturally expect. But, of course, you recognized the cachet of Eton at once?”

“I notice,” said Ranking drily, “that they both leave the lower button of their waistcoats undone, and call men whom they don’t like ‘scugs.’” His quiet eye dwelt with dubious tenderness upon the Messrs. Lasher, who were romping with the dogs upon the sofas, and devouring cake and strawberries with infantile greed. “I have heard of the Eton manner, of course,” he added, “and I meet a good many Eton-bred men; but I can’t say that these young fellows have any—any special characteristics in common with—ah—those.”

“They belong to a grand old family,” Laura continued, with an air of proprietorship that puzzled Galahad. “The Lashers of Dropshire, you know—quite historical. And their father ran through everything before they came of age. So thoughtless, wasn’t it? And now they are looking round for an opening in life, and really, they tell me, it is dreadfully difficult to find.”

“I rather imagined as much,” said Galahad, making a little point of sarcasm all to himself, and secretly smiling over it.

“I wonder if you could suggest anything; you are always so helpful,” Laura went on. “That they must be together, of course, goes without saying. And that, of course, increases the difficulty. But nobody could be so inhuman as to part twins.” Her lips quivered, and her eyes grew misty with unshed tears.

“My dear Laura,” expostulated the puzzled Galahad, “you talk as though these two young men were six years old instead of six-and-twenty.”

“How changed you are!” Laura blinked away a tear. “You used to understand me so much better in the old days. Of course, they are grown up, that is plain to the meanest capacity. But they have such boyish, charming, confiding natures.... Toto will bite, Brosy, if you hold him in the air by the tail!... that a woman like myself.... If you would like some more cherry cake, Dosy, do ring the bell!... a woman like myself, married at eighteen to a man true and noble if you will, but incapable of awakening the deeper chords of passion and.... Of course, you are both going to dine here and help me to entertain Captain Ranking!... denied the happiness of being a mother”—Laura drooped her eyes and bit her lip, and blushed slightly—“must naturally find their company a great resource. And the distant cousin with whom they are staying, a Mrs. Le Bacon Chalmers, who has taken Eyot Cottage for the summer months, knows this and lends them to me as often as I like.”

“Upon my word, she is uncommonly kind!” said Galahad, with emphasis stronger than Laura’s italics.

“Yes, isn’t she?” responded Laura, whose sense of humor was obscured by predilection. “They ride and drive the horses, and give Holt and the gardeners advice, and they exercise the automobiles, and run the electric launch about, and play tennis and croquet——”

“And the devil generally!” were the words that Galahad bit off and gulped down.

He was very quiet at dinner, sitting in the deceased Kingdom’s place at the foot of the table. And Dosy and Brosy were very loud and very large, though looking, it must be confessed, exceedingly well in evening garb. They made themselves very much at home upon Laura’s right and left hand, recommending certain dishes to each other, criticizing more, ravaging the bonbons, reveling in the dessert, calling, with artless airs of connoisseurship, for special wines laid down by the noble man who yet had not known how to awaken the deeper chords of passion.

“Gad! what a pair of hawbucks!” Galahad mentally ejaculated as the servants ran about like distracted ants, and Laura and Laura’s inseparable though elderly companion-friend, Miss Glidding, vied with each other in encouraging Theodosius and Ambrose to renewed attacks upon the strawberries and peaches.

Left alone with Dosy and Brosy, he submitted to be patronized, offered cigars he had chosen, recommended to try liqueurs with whose liverish and headachy qualities he had been acquainted of old.

They walked with the ladies in the dewy rose-gardens after dinner, and as Galahad paused to light a cigar, behold, he was left alone. Laura with Brosy, Miss Glidding (who looked her best by bat-light) with Dosy, had vanished in the shadowy windings of the trellis-walks and arcades. And Captain Ranking, shrugging his shoulders, picked a half-seen Niphetos, glimmering among the wet, shining leaves, and walked back to the smoking-room, wondering why on earth Laura had dragged him down where he seemed least to be wanted. What was the matter “affecting her whole future” upon which she required advice? His heart gave a sickening little jog as he realized that the future of Dosy, or possibly of Brosy, might also be involved. True, Laura was thirty-nine; but what are years when the heart is young? Galahad asked himself, as peal after peal of the widow’s laughter broke the silence of the scented night. Other mental interrogations fretted his aching brain. What must the servants not have thought and said? What would the neighbors say? What would the County think of such sportive, not to say frivolous, conduct on the part of a widow but recently emancipated from weepers, whose handkerchiefs were still bordered with the inch-deep inky deposit of conjugal woe?

Kingdom was an easy-going, level-headed man, Galahad admitted, biting at one of the deceased’s Havanas and frowning; “but he would have raised the Devil over this. Possibly he’s doing it.”

The portrait of Mr. Kingdom over the mantelshelf of the smoking-room seemed to scowl confirmatively. The servants were all in bed, the promenaders in the garden showed no signs of returning. Galahad shrugged his little shoulders, and went away to bed in a charming, drum-windowed, chintz-hung bower over the front porch. And just as his little cropped head plumped down on the pillow it was electrically jolted up again. Laura was saying good-night in the porch to one—or was it both?—of the infernal twins. And before the hall-door clashed they had promised to come over to lunch to-morrow. Confound them! it was to-morrow now.

One has only to add that when, after exhausting watches, slumber visited Galahad’s eyelids, the twins in maddening iteration played dominoes throughout his dreams, to convince the reader that they had thoroughly got upon his nerves.

Laura, looking wonderfully fresh and young in a lace morning négligé of the peek-a-boo description, poured out his coffee at breakfast and sympathized with him about the headache he denied. Then, shaded by a fluffy black-and-white sunshade, the widow led Galahad out into the sunny garden to a tree-shaded and sequestered nook where West Indian hammocks hung, and, installing herself in one of these receptacles, invited her husband’s cousin to repose himself in another.

Lying on your back, counting ripening plums dangling from green branches above, oscillating at the bidding of the lightest breeze, liable to upset at the slightest movement, it is difficult to be indignant and sarcastic; but Galahad was both.

“Adopt these young men as sons, my dear Laura! Are there no parentless babies in the local workhouse that would better supply the need you express of having something to cherish and love?” exclaimed Galahad.

He sat up with an effort and stared at Laura. Laura rocked, prone amid cushions, knitting a silk necktie of a tender hue suited to a blonde complexion.

“Workhouse babies are invariably ugly, and unhealthy into the bargain,” she pouted.

“Some orphan child from a Home, that is pretty to look at and has had the distemper properly,” suggested Galahad.

“I don’t want an orphan from a Home,” objected Laura. “Besides, it wouldn’t be a twin.”

“There are such things as twin orphans, my dear Laura,” protested Galahad.

But Laura was firm.

“Dosy and Brosy are very, very dear to me,” she protested, a little pinkness about the eyelids and nostrils threatening an impending tear-shower. “They came into my life,” she continued poetically, “at a time of sorrow and bereavement, and the sunshine of their presence drove the dark clouds away. Of course, they are too old, or, rather, not young enough, to be really my sons,” she continued, “but they might have been poor Tom’s.”

“If poor Tom had fathered a brace of bounders like those,” burst out Galahad, “poor Tom would have kicked himself—that’s all I know—kicked himself!” he repeated, fuming and climbing out of his hammock.

“Pray don’t be coarse,” entreated Laura—“and abusive,” she added, as an afterthought. “Of course, as poor Tom’s trustee and executor, I am bound to make a show of consulting you, though my mind is really made up, and nobody can prevent my doing what I like with my own income. I shall allow the boys five hundred a year each for pocket money,” she added with a pretty maternal air. “And Dosy shall go into the Diplomatic Service, and Brosy——”

“You have broached the adoption plan to them then?” gasped Galahad. Laura bowed her head. “And this relative with whom I gather they are now staying,” he continued, “is she agreeable to the proposed arrangement?”

“Mrs. Le Bacon Chalmers? She couldn’t prevent it if she wasn’t!” retorted Laura, “as the boys are of age. But, as it happens, she thinks the plan an ideal one.”

“That proves the value of her judgment, certainly. And the County? Will your friends and neighbors also think the plan an ideal one?” demanded Galahad.

“My friends and neighbors,” said Laura, loftily, “will think as I do, or they will cease to be my friends.”

Galahad, usually punctiliously well-mannered, whistled long and dismally. “Phew! And when you have alienated every soul upon your visiting list, what will you do for society?”

“I shall have the boys,” said Laura, with defiant tenderness.

“And when the ‘boys,’ as you call them, marry?” insinuated Galahad.

Laura sat up so suddenly that all her cushions rolled out of the hammock. “If this is how you treat me when I turn to you for advice——” she began.

“Laura,” said Galahad firmly, “you don’t want advice.” He held up his lean brown hand and checked her, as she would have spoken. “Nor do you require twin sons of six feet three. What you want is——” He was going in his innocence to say “a sincere and candid friend,” and prove himself the ideal by some plain speaking, but Laura fairly brimmed over with conscious blushes.

“How—how can you?” she said, in vibrating tones of reproach, devoid of even a shade of anger. “So soon, too! As if I did not know what was due to poor Tom——”

The toot of a motor-horn, the scuffle of the engine, the dry whirr of the brake as the locomotive stopped at the avenue gate, broke in upon her heroics.

“Here are the boys,” she cried rapturously, and, indeed, hopped out of the hammock with the agility of girlhood as the long-legged, yellow-haired twins came stalking over the grass. She held out her hands to them with a pretty maternal gesture.

“Dosy pet, Brosy darling,” she babbled, “come and kiss Mummy! We have been telling all our little plans to Uncle Galahad, and Uncle quite agrees.”

“No! Does he, though?” was the simultaneous utterance of the long-legged twins. They twirled their yellow mustaches, stooped awkwardly and “kissed Mummy,” as Galahad uttered a yell of frenzied laughter, and, throwing himself recklessly into his recently-vacated hammock, shot out upon the other side.

He went back to Hounslow that day. Dosy and Brosy dutifully accompanied him to the station, and exchanged a fraternal wink when his train steamed out.

“What an infatuation!” he groaned. In his mind’s eye he saw the County grinning over the childless widow and her adopted twins. As for Dosy and Brosy, they would have what in America is termed “a soft snap.” Powerful jaws had both the young gentlemen, wide and greedy gullets. Still, with his mind’s eye Galahad saw their foolish, affectionate, sentimental benefactress gnawed to the bare bone. Day by day he anticipated a letter of shrill astonishment from his cotrustee, and when it came, hinting at mental weakness and the necessity of restraint, he flamed up into defense of Laura so hotly as to surprise himself.

And then, before anything decisive had been done with regard to the settlement—before Brosy and Dosy had taken up their quarters for good beneath the roof of their adopted parent—a change befell, and Galahad received an imploring note from Mrs. Kingdom soliciting his instant presence upon “an urgent matter.”

“She has thought better of it,” said Galahad to himself, as he obeyed the summons. “Her native good sense”—you will realize that the man must have been genuinely in love to believe in Laura’s native good sense—“has come to her aid!” And in his mind’s eye he beheld the long, narrow backs of the twins walking away into a dim perspective.

It was September. Dosy and Brosy were shooting the widow’s partridges, and Galahad found her alone. She was pleased and excited, with an air of one who with difficulty keeps the cork in a bottle of mystery; and when she clasped her hands round Galahad’s arm and told him what a true, true friend he was! he felt absurdly tender, as he begged her to confide her trouble to him.

“I have made such a dreadful discovery,” Laura gasped, dabbing her eyes with a filmy little square of cambric edged with the narrowest possible line of black, “about the—about the boys.”

Galahad strove to compose his features into an expression of decent regret.

“Mr. Ambrose and Mr. Theodosius Lasher.... I rather anticipated that you—that possibly there were discoveries to be made.” He turned his weary gray eyes upon Laura, and pulled at one wiry end of his little gingery mustache. “Have they done anything very bad?” he asked, and his tone was not uncheerful.

“Bad!” echoed Laura, with indignant scorn. “As though two young men gifted with natures like theirs”—she had left off calling them “boys,” Galahad noticed—“so lofty, so noble, so unselfish—and yes, I will say it, so pure!—could possibly be guilty of any bad or even doubtful action. But you do not know them, and you are prejudiced; you must admit you are prejudiced when you hear the—the truth.” The cork escaped, and the secret came with it in a gush. “It is this: I cannot be a mother to Dosy and Brosy; they, poor dears, cannot be my sons. I had not the least idea of their true feeling with regard to me, nor had they, until quite recently.” She swallowed a little sob and dabbed her eyes again. “Oh, Galahad, they are madly in love with me, both of them. What, what am I to do?”

“Send them to the devil, the impudent young beggars!” snorted Galahad. And, striding up and down between the trembling china-tables with clenched fists and angry eyes, he said all the things he had longed to say about folly, and madness and infatuation.

A woman will always submit with a good grace to masculine upbraiding when she has reason to believe the upbraider jealous. Laura bore his reproaches with saintly sweetness.

“They have behaved in the most honorable way, poor darlings!” she protested, “though the realization of the true nature of their feelings towards me, of course, came as a terrible shock. The deeds of settlement had been drawn up. We planned, as soon as everything had been sealed and signed, that the dear boys were to come and live here. I had furnished their bedrooms exactly alike, and fitted up the smoking-room with twin armchairs, twin tobacco-tables, and so on, when the blow fell.” She deepened her voice to a thrilling whisper. “Dosy, looking quite pale and tragic, asked for an interview in the conservatory; Brosy begged for a private word in the pavilion at the end of the upper croquet-lawn. And then,” said Laura, shedding abundant tears, “I knew what I had done. It did occur to me that I might—might marry Brosy and adopt Dosy as my son, or marry Dosy and regard Brosy as an heir. But no, it could not be. Dosy proposed to take poison, or shoot himself, in the most unselfish way; and Brosy suggested going in for a swim too soon after breakfast, and never rising from a dive again. But neither could endure to live to see me the bride of the other,” sobbed Laura.

“And as this is England, and not Malabar,” uttered Galahad, dryly, “the law is against your marrying both.”

“Why, of course, my dear Galahad,” cried Laura innocently, scandalized and round-eyed.

The man who really loved her looked at her and forgave her foolishness. She had set the County buzzing with the tale of her absurd infatuation; she had compromised her dignity by the tragic follies of the past few months; there was but one way of gagging the scandalmongers and regaining lost ground, one way of getting out of the impasse. Galahad pointed out that way, as Laura entreated him to suggest something.

“Why not marry me?” he said bluntly.

“Oh, Galahad!” cried Laura, bright-eyed and quite pleasantly thrilled. “And then we can both adopt the boys.”

“Whether they embrace that idea or not,” said Galahad, with his arm round the long-coveted waist, “remains to be seen. But I promise you, if occasion should arise, that I will act as a father to them.”

He went out, in his new parental character, to look for Dosy and Brosy and break the joyful news. His freckled little face was beaming with smiles, his usually weary gray eyes were alight; he smiled under his bristly little mustache as he selected a stout but stinging Malacca cane from the late Thompson Kingdom’s collection in the hall....

A DISH OF MACARONI

On the occasion of the tenth biennial visit of the Carlo Da Capo Grand Opera Combination to the musical, if murky, city of Smutchester, the principal members of the company pitched their tents, as was their wont, at the Crown Diamonds Hotel, occupying an entire floor of that capacious caravanserie, whose chef, to the grief of many honest British stomachs and the unrestrained joy of these artless children of song, was of cosmopolitan gifts, being an Italian-Spanish-Swiss-German. Here prime donne, tenors, and bassos could revel in national dishes from which their palates had long been divorced, and steaming masses of yellow polenta, knüdels, and borsch, heaped dishes of sausages and red cabbage, ragouts of cockscombs and chicken-livers, veal stewed with tomatoes, frittura of artichokes, with other culinary delicacies strange of aspect and garlicky as to smell, loaded the common board at each meal, only to vanish like the summer snow, so seldom seen but so constantly referred to by the poetical fictionist, amidst a Babel of conversation which might only find its parallel in the parrot-house at the Zoo. Ringed hands plunged into salad-bowls; the smoke of cigarettes went up in the intervals between the courses; the meerschaum-colored lager of Munich, the yellow beer of Bass, the purple Chianti, or the vintage of Epernay brimmed the glasses; and the coffee that crowned the banquet was black and thick and bitter as the soul of a singer who has witnessed the triumph of a rival.

For singers can be jealous: and the advice of Dr. Watts is more at discount behind the operatic scenes, perhaps, than elsewhere. For women may be, and are, jealous of other women; and men may be, and are, jealous of men, off the stage; but it is reserved for the hero and heroine of the stage to be jealous of one another. The glare of the footlights, held by so many virtuous persons to be inimical to the rosebud of innocence, has a curiously wilting and shriveling effect upon the fine flower of chivalry. Signor Alberto Fumaroli, primo uomo, and possessor of a glorious tenor, was possessed by the idea that the chief soprano, De Melzi, the enchanting Teresa—still in the splendor of her youth, with ebony tresses, eyes of jet, skin of ivory, an almost imperceptible mustache, and a figure of the most seductive, doomed ere long to expand into a pronounced embonpoint—had adorned her classic temples with laurels which should by rights have decked his own. The press-cuttings of the previous weeks certainly balanced in her favor. Feeble-minded musical critics, of what the indignant tenor termed “provincial rags,” lauded the Signora to the skies. She was termed a “springing fountain of crystal song,” a “human bulbul in the rose-garden of melody.” Eulogy had exhausted itself upon her; while he, Alberto Fumaroli, the admired of empresses, master of the emotions of myriads of American millionairesses, he was fobbed off with half a dozen patronizing lines. Glancing over the paper in the saloon carriage, he had seen the impertinent upper lip of the De Melzi, tipped with the faintest line of shadow, curl with delight as she scanned each accursed column in turn, and handed the paper to her aunt (a vast person invariably clad in the tightest and shiniest of black satins, and crowned with a towering hat of violet velvet adorned with once snowy plumes and crushed crimson roses), who went everywhere with her niece, and mounted guard over the exchequer. Outwardly calm as Vesuvius, and cool as a Neapolitan ice on a hot day, the outraged Alberto endured the triumph of the women, marked the subterranean chuckles of the stout Signora, the mischievous enjoyment of Teresa; pulled his Austrian-Tyrolese hat over his Corsican brows, and vowed a wily vendetta. His opportunity for wreaking retribution would come at Smutchester, he knew. Wagner was to be given at the Opera House, and as great as the previous triumph of Teresa de Melzi in the rôle of Elsa—newly added by the soprano to her repertoire—should be her fall. Evviva! Down with that fatally fascinating face, smiling so provokingly under its laurels! She should taste the consequences of having insulted a Neapolitan. And the tenor smiled so diabolically that Zamboni, the basso, sarcastically inquired whether Fumaroli was rehearsing Mephistofole?

“Not so, dear friend,” Fumaroli responded, with a dazzling show of ivories. “In that part I should make a bel fiasco; I have no desire to emulate a basso or a bull.... But in this—the rôle in which I am studying to perfect myself—I predict that I shall achieve a dazzling success.” He drew out a green Russia-leather cigarette case, adorned with a monogram in diamonds. “It is permitted that one smokes?” he added, and immediately lighted up.

“It is permitted, if I am to have one also.”

The De Melzi stretched a white, bejeweled hand out, and the seething Alberto, under pain of appearing openly impolite, was forced to comply. “No, I will not take the cigarette you point out,” said the saucy prima donna, as the tenor extended the open case. “It might disagree with me, who knows? and I have predicted that in the part of Elsa to-morrow night at Smutchester I shall achieve a ‘dazzling success.’” And she smiled with brilliant malice upon Alberto Fumaroli, who played Lohengrin. “They are discriminating—the audiences of that big, black, melancholy place—they never mistake geese for swans.”

“Ach, no!” said the Impresario, looking up from his tatting—he was engaged upon a green silk purse for Madame Da Capo, a wrinkled little doll of an old lady with whom he was romantically in love. “They will not take a dournure, some declamation, and half a dozen notes in the upper register bour dout botage. Sing to them well, they will be ready to give you their heads. But sing to them badly, and they will be ready to pelt yours. Twenty years ago they did. I remember a graceless impostor, a ragazzo (foisted upon me for a season by a villain of an agent), who annoyed them in Almaviva.... Ebbene! the elections were in progress—there was a dimonstranza. I can smell those antique eggs, those decomposed oranges, now.”

“Heart’s dearest, thou must not excite thyself,” interrupted Madame; “it is so bad for thee. Play at the poker-game, mes enfants,” she continued, “and leave my good child, my beloved little one, alone!” Saying this, Madame drew from her vast under-pocket a neat case containing an ivory comb, and, removing the fearfully and wonderfully braided traveling cap of the Impresario, fell to combing his few remaining hairs until, soothed by the process, Carlo, who had been christened Karl, fell asleep with his head on Madame’s shoulder; snoring peacefully, despite the screams, shrieks, howls, and maledictions which were the invariable accompaniment of the poker-game.

The train bundled into Smutchester some hours later; a string of cabs conveyed the Impresario, his wife, and the principal members of his company to the Crown Diamonds Hotel. Before he sought his couch that night the revengeful Alberto Fumaroli had interviewed the chef and bribed him with the gift of a box of regalias from the cedar smoking-cabinet of a King, to aid in the carrying-out of the vendetta. Josebattista Funkmuller was not a regal judge of cigars; but these were black, rank, and oily enough to have made an Emperor most imperially sick. Besides, the De Melzi had, or so he declared, once ascribed an indigestion which had ruined, or so she swore, one of her grandest scenas, to an omelette of his making, and the cook was not unwilling that the haughty spirit of the cantatrice should be crushed. His complex nature, his cosmopolitan origin, showed in the plan Josebattista Funkmuller now evolved and placed before the revengeful tenor, who clasped him to his bosom in an ecstasy of delight, planting at the same time a huge, resounding kiss upon both his cheeks.

“It is perfection!” Fumaroli cried. “My friend, it can scarcely fail! If it should, per Bacco! the Fiend himself is upon that insolent creature’s side! But I never heard yet of his helping a woman to resist temptation—oh, mai! it is he who spreads the board and invites Eve.”

And the tenor retired exultant. His sleeping-chamber was next door to that of the hated cantatrice. He dressed upon the succeeding morning to the accompaniment of roulades trilled by the owner of the lovely throat to which Fumaroli would so willingly have given the fatal squeeze. And as Fumaroli, completing his frugal morning ablutions by wiping his beautiful eyes and classic temples very gingerly with a damp towel, paused to listen, a smile of peculiar malignancy was only partly obscured by the folds of the towel. But when the tenor and the soprano encountered at the twelve o’clock déjeuner, Fumaroli’s politeness was excessive, and his large, dark, brilliant eyes responded to every glance of the gleaming black orbs of De Melzi with a languorous, melting significance which almost caused her heart to palpitate beneath her Parisian corsets. Concealed passion lay, it might be, behind an affectation of enmity and ill-will.

“Mai santo cielo!” exclaimed the stout aunt, to whom the cantatrice subsequently revealed her suspicions, “thou guessest always as I myself have thought. The unhappy man is devoured by a grand passion for my Teresa. He grinds his teeth, he calls upon the saints, he grows more bilious every day, and thou more beautiful. One day he will declare himself——”

“And I shall lose an entertaining enemy, to find a stupid lover,” gurgled Teresa. She was looking divine, her dark beauty glowing like a gem in the setting of an Eastern silk of shot turquoise and purple, fifty yards of which an enamored noble of the Ukraine had thrown upon the stage of the Opera House, St. Petersburg, wound round the stem of a costly bouquet. She glanced in the mirror as she kissed the black nose of her Japanese pug. “Every man becomes stupid after a while,” she went on. “Even Josebattista is in love with me. He sends me a little note written on papier jambon to entreat an interview.”

“My soul!” cried the stout aunt, “thou wilt not deny him?”

The saucy singer shook her head as Funkmuller tapped at the door. One need not give in detail the interview that eventuated. It is enough that the intended treachery of Fumaroli was laid bare. His intended victim laughed madly.

“But it is a cerotto—what the English call a nincompoop,” she gasped, pressing a laced handkerchief to her streaming eyes. “If the heavens were to fall, then one could catch larks; but the proverb says nothing about nightingales.”

She tossed her brilliant head and took a turn or two upon the hotel sitting-room carpet, considering.

“I will keep this appointment,” said she.

“Dio! And risk thy precious reputation?” shrieked the aunt.

“Chi sa? Chi sa?

Evviva l’opportunita!”

hummed the provoking beauty. And she dealt the cook a sparkling glance of such intelligence that he felt Signor Alberto would never triumph. Relieved in mind, Josebattista Funkmuller took his leave.

“I will return the King’s cigars,” he said, as he pressed his garlic-scented mustache to the pearly knuckles of the lady.

“Bah!” said she, “they were won in a raffle at Vienna.”

The door closed upon the disgusted chef, and reopened ten minutes later to admit a waiter carrying upon a salver a pretty three-cornered pink note with a gold monogram in the corner. The writer entreated the inestimable privilege of three minutes’ conversation with Madame de Melzi in a private apartment in the basement of the hotel. He did not propose to visit the prima donna in her own rooms, even under the wing of her aunt, for it was of supreme importance that tongues should not be set wagging. Delicacy and respect prevented him from suggesting an interview in the apartments occupied by himself. On the neutral ground of an office in the basement the interview might take place without comment or interruption. He was, in fact, waiting there for an answer.

The answer came in the person of the singer herself, charmingly dressed and radiant with loveliness.

“Fie! What an underground hole! The window barred, the blank wall of an area beyond it!” Her beautiful nostrils quivered. “Caro mio, you have in that covered dish upon the table there something that smells good. What is under the cover?”

“Look and see!” said the cunning tenor, with a provoking smile.

“I am not curious,” responded Teresa, putting both hands behind her and leaning her back against the door. “Come, hurry up! One of your three minutes has gone by, the other two will follow, and I shall be obliged to take myself off without having heard this mysterious revelation. What is it?” She showed a double row of pearl-hued teeth in a mischievous smile. “Shall I guess? You have, by chance, fallen in love with me, and wish to tell me so? How dull and unoriginal! A vivacious, interesting enemy is to be preferred a million times before a stupid friend or a commonplace adorer.”

“Grazie a Dio!” said the tenor, “I am not in love with you.” But at that moment he was actually upon the verge; and the dull, dampish little basement room, floored with kamptulicon warmed by a grudging little gas-stove, its walls adorned with a few obsolete and hideous prints, its oilcloth-covered table, on which stood the mysterious dish, closely covered, bubbling over a spirit lamp and flanked by a spoon, fork, and plate—that little room might have been the scene of a declaration instead of a punishment had it not been for the De Melzi’s amazing nonchalance. It would have been pleasant to have seen the spiteful little arrow pierce that lovely bosom. But instead of frowning or biting her lips, Teresa laughed with the frankest grace in the world.

“Dear Signor Alberto, Heaven has spared you much. Besides, you are of those who esteem quantity above quality—and, for a certain thing, I should be torn to pieces by the ladies of the Chorus.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Well, what is this mysterious communication? The three minutes are up, the fumes of a gas fire are bad for the throat—and I presume you of all people would not wish me to sing ‘Elsa’ with a veiled voice, and disappoint the dear people of Smutchester, and Messieurs the critics, who say such kind things.”

Alberto Fumaroli’s brain spun round. Quick as thought his supple hand went out; the wrist of the coquettish prima donna was imprisoned as in a vise of steel.

“Ragazza!” he gnashed out, “you shall pay for your cursed insolence.” He swung the cantatrice from the door, and Teresa, noting the convulsed workings of his Corsican features, and devoured by the almost scorching glare of his fierce eyes, felt a thrill of alarm.

“Oimè! Signor,” she faltered, “what do you mean by this violence? Recollect that we are not now upon the stage.”

A harsh laugh came from the bull throat of the tenor.

“By mystic Love

Brought from the distance

In thy hour of need.

Behold me, O Elsa!

Loveliest, purest—

Thine own

Unknown!”

he hummed. But his Elsa did not entreat to flow about his feet like the river, or kiss them like the flowers blooming amidst the grasses he trod. Struggling in vain for release from the rude, unchivalrous grasp, an idea came to her; she stooped her beautiful head and bit Lohengrin smartly on the wrist, evoking, instead of further music, a torrent of curses; and as Alberto danced and yelled in agony, she darted from the room. With the key she had previously extracted she locked the door; and as her light footsteps and crisping draperies retreated along the passage, the tenor realized that he was caught in his own trap. Winding his handkerchief about his smarting wrist, he bestowed a few more hearty curses upon Teresa, and sat down upon a horsehair-covered chair to wait for deliverance. They could not possibly give “Lohengrin” without him—there was no understudy for the part. For her own sake, therefore, the De Melzi would see him released in time to assume the armor of the Knight of the Swan. Ebbene! There was nothing to do but wait. He looked at his watch, a superb timepiece encrusted with brilliants. Two o’clock! And the opera did not commence until eight. Six hours to spend in this underground hole, if no one came to let him out. Patience! He would smoke. He got over half an hour with the aid of the green cigarette-case. Then he did a little pounding at the door. This bruised his tender hands, and he soon left off and took to shouting. To the utmost efforts of his magnificent voice no response was made; the part of the hotel basement in which his prison happened to be situated was, in the daytime, when all the servants were engaged in their various departments, almost deserted. Therefore, after an hour of shouting, Fumaroli abandoned his efforts.

What was to be done? He could take a siesta, and did, extended upon two of the grim horsehair chairs with which the apartment was furnished. He slept excellently for an hour, and woke hungry.

Hungry! Diavolo! with what a raging hunger—an appetite of Gargantuan proportions, sharpened to the pitch of famine by the bubbling gushes of savory steam that jetted from underneath the cover of the mysterious dish still simmering over its spirit-lamp upon the table! He knew what that dish contained—his revenge, in fact. Well, it had missed fire, the vendetta. He who had devised the ordeal of temptation for Teresa found himself helpless, exposed to its fiendish seductions. Not that he would be likely to yield, oh mai! was it probable? He banished the idea with a gesture full of superb scorn and a haughty smile. Never, a thousand times never! The cunning Teresa should be disappointed. That evening’s performance should be attacked by him as ever, fasting, the voice of melody, the sonorous lungs, supported by an empty frame. Cospetto! how savory the smell that came from that covered dish! The unhappy tenor moved to the table, snuffed it up in nosefuls, thought of flinging the dish and its contents out of window—would have done so had not the window been barred.

“After all, perhaps she means to keep me here all night,” he thought, and rashly lifted the dish-cover, revealing a vast and heaving plain of macaroni, over which little rills of liquid butter wandered. Parmesan cheese was not lacking to the dish, nor the bland juices of the sliced tomato, and, like the violet by the wayside, the modest garlic added its perfume to the distracting bouquet. Fumaroli was only human, though, as a tenor, divine. He had been shut up for four hours, fasting, in company with a dish of macaroni.... Ah, Heaven! he could endure no longer.... He drew up a chair, grasped fork and spoon—fell to. In the act of finishing the dish, he started, fancying that the silvery tinkle of a feminine laugh sounded at the keyhole. But his faculties were dulled by vast feeding; his anger, like his appetite, had lost its edge. With an effort he disposed of the last shreds of macaroni, the last trickle of butter; and at seven o’clock a waiter, who accidentally unlocked the door of the basement room, awakened a plethoric sleeper from heavy dreams.

“To the Opera House,” was the listless direction he gave the driver of his hired brougham; as one in a dream he entered by the stage-door, and strode to his room.

The curtain had already risen upon grassy lowlands in the neighborhood of Antwerp. Henry, King of Germany, seated under a spreading canvas oak, held court with military pomp. Frederic of Telramond, wizard husband of Ortrud, the witch, had stepped forward to accuse Elsa of the murder of her brother, Gottlieb; the King had cried, “Summon the maid!” and in answer to the command, amidst the blare of brass and the clashing of swords, the De Melzi, draped in pure white, followed by her ladies, and looking the picture of virginal innocence, moved dreamily into view:

“How like an angel!

He who accuses her

Must surely prove

This maiden’s guilt.”

Ah! had those who listened to the thrilling strains that poured from those exquisite lips but guessed, as Elsa described the appearance of her dream-defender, her shining Knight, and sank upon her knees in an ecstasy of passionate prayer, that the celestial deliverer was at that moment gasping in the agonies of indigestion!

“Let me behold

That form of light!”

entreated the maiden; and amidst the exclamations of the eight-part chorus the swan-drawn bark approached the bank; the noble, if somewhat fleshy, form of Alberto Fumaroli, clad from head to foot in silvery mail, stepped from it.... With lofty grace he waved his adieu to the swan, he launched upon his opening strain of unaccompanied melody.... Alas! how muffled, how farinaceous those once clarion tones!... In labored accents, amid the growing disappointment of the Smutchester audience, Lohengrin announced his mission to the King. As he folded the entranced Elsa to his oppressed bosom, crying:

“Elsa, I love thee!”

“She-devil, you have ruined me!” he hissed in the De Melzi’s ear.

“My hope, my solace,

My hero, I am thine!”

Teresa trilled in answer. And raising her love-illumined, mischievously dancing eyes to her deliverer, breathed in his ear: “Try pepsin!”

“FREDDY & C^IE”

It is always a perplexing question how to provide for younger sons, and the immediate relatives of the Honorable Freddy Foulkes had forfeited a considerable amount of beauty sleep in connection with the problem.

“My poor darling!” the Marchioness of Glanmire sighed one day, more in sorrow than in anger, when the Honorable Freddy brought his charming smile and his graceful but unemployed person into her morning-room. “If you could only find some congenial and at the same time lucrative post that would take up your time and absorb your spare energy, how grateful I should be!”

“I have found it,” said the Honorable Freddy, with his cherubic smile. He possessed the blonde curling hair and artless expression that may be symbolical of guilelessness or the admirable mask of guile.

“Thank Heaven!” breathed his mother. Then, with a sense that the thanksgiving might, after all, be premature, she inquired: “But of what nature is this post? Before it can be seriously considered, one must be certain that it entails no loss of caste, demands nothing derogatory in the nature of service from one who—I need not remind you of your position, or of the fact that your family must be considered.”

She smoothed her darling’s silky hair, which exhaled the choicest perfume of Bond Street, and kissed his brow, as pure and shadowless as a slice of cream cheese, as the young man replied:

“Dearest mother, you certainly need not.”

“Then tell me of this post. Is it anything,” the Marchioness asked, “in the Diplomatic line?”

“Without a good deal of diplomacy a man would be no good for the shop,” admitted Freddy; “but otherwise, your guess is out.”

Doubt darkened his mother’s eyes.

“Don’t say,” she exclaimed, “that you have accepted a Club Secretaryship? To me it seems the last resource of the unsuccessful man.”

“It will never be mine,” said Freddy, “because I can’t keep accounts, and they wouldn’t have me. Try again.”

“I trust it has nothing to do with Art,” breathed the Marchioness, who loathed the children of canvas and palette with an unreasonable loathing.

“In a way it has,” replied her son, “and in another way it hasn’t. Come! I’ll give you a lead. There is a good deal of straw in the business for one thing.”

“You cannot contemplate casting in your lot with the agricultural classes? No! I knew the example of your unhappy cousin Reginald would prevent you from adopting so wild a course ... but you spoke of straw.”

“Of straw. And flowers. And tulles.”

“Flowers and tools! Gardening is a craze which has become fashionable of late. But I cannot calmly see you in an apron, potting plants.”

“It is not a question of potting plants, but of potting customers,” said Freddy, showing his white teeth in a charming smile.

A shudder convulsed Freddy’s mother. Freddy went on, filially patting her handsome hand:

“You see, I have decided, and gone into trade. If I were a wealthy cad, I should keep a bucket-shop. Being a poor gentleman, I am going to make a bonnet-shop keep me. And, what is more—I intend to trim all the bonnets myself!”

There was no heart disease upon the maternal side of the house. The Marchioness did not become pale blue, and sink backwards, clutching at her corsage. She rose to her feet and boxed her son’s right ear. He calmly offered the left one for similar treatment.

“Don’t send me out looking uneven,” he said simply. “If I pride myself upon anything, it is a well-balanced appearance. And I have to put in an hour or so at the shop by-and-by.” He glanced in the mantel-mirror as he spoke, and observing with gratification that his immaculate necktie had escaped disarrangement, he twisted his little mustache, smiled, and knew himself irresistible.

“The shop! Degenerate boy!” cried his mother. “Who is your partner in this—this enterprise?”

“You know her by sight, I think,” returned the cherub coolly. “Mrs. Vivianson, widow of the man who led the Doncaster Fusiliers to the top of Mealie Kop and got shot there. Awfully fetching, and as clever as they make them!”