Part 18

Garlingham descended from the skies ere long, tangled in a telegraphic wire, and went into the Diplomatic Service. He became fourth under-secretary at an Imperial foreign Embassy, in virtue of the marriage of his maternal aunt with Prince John Schulenstorff-Wangelbrode (who was Military Attaché in the days of the pannier and the polonaise, the bustle and the fringed whip-parasol). I have not the least idea in what Garlingham’s duties consisted, and the dear fellow was diplomatically reticent when sounded on the subject; but of one thing I am sure, that few young men have worn an official button and lapels with greater ease and distinction. He quite adored his mother, and made her his _confidante_ in all his love affairs. Indeed I believe Lady Garlingham kept a little register of these at one time on the sticks of an ivory fan—those that were going off, those that were in full bloom, and those that were just coming on; and posted up dates and set down names with the utmost regularity.

For, like the typical butterfly, Garlingham sipped every flower and changed every hour. A very mature Polly has now his passion requited, and if human happiness depended on avoirdupois, and it were an established mathematical fact that the felicity of the object attracted may be calculated by the dimensions of the object attracting, then is the handsome boy I used to tip a happy man indeed.

For Gar, “that pocket edition of Apollo,” as a Royal personage with a happy knack at nicknames termed him—Gar has married a middle-aged, not too good-looking, extremely fat widow, unknown to fame as Mrs. Rollo Polkingham. The couple were Hanover Squared in June. Leila and Sheila Polkingham made the loveliest pair of Dresden china bridesmaids imaginable, and a Bishop tied the knot, assisted by the brother of the bride, the Reverend Michael O’Halloran, of Mount Slattery, County Quare, a surpliced brogue with a Trinity College B.A. hood. The hymns that were sung by the choir during the ceremony were, “The Voice that Breathed,” and “Fight the Good Fight,” and the bride looked quite as bridal as might have been expected of a thirty-eight inch girth arrayed in the latest heliotrope shade. She became peony, Garlingham pale blue, when the moment arrived for him to pronounce his vows, and a voice—a high, nasal voice of the penetrating, saw-edged American kind—said, several pews behind, quite audibly: “Well, I call it child-stealing!”

The owner of that voice was at the reception in Chesterfield Crescent. So was I, and when Garlingham thanked me for a silver cigar-box I had sent him in memory of our old friendship, his hand was damp and clammy, though he smiled. The Dowager Lady Garlingham, looking much younger than her daughter-in-law, floated across to ask me why I never came to see her now, and Gar drifted away. Later, I had a fleeting glimpse of the bridegroom standing in the large, cool shadow of his newly-made bride, looking helplessly from one to the other of his recently-acquired stepdaughters. Then my circular gaze met and merged in the still attractive eyes of Lady Garlingham.

“You heard,” she breathed in her old confidential way, “what that very outspoken person—I think a Miss Van Something, from Philadelphia—said in church?”

“I did hear,” I returned, “and, while I deplored her candor, I could not but admit——”

“That she had hit off the situation with dreadful accuracy—I felt that, too,” sighed Gar’s mother.

“We are old friends, or were,” said I, for people always became sentimental in the vicinity of Lady Garlingham. “Tell me how it happened!”

“Oh, how——” Lady Garlingham adroitly turned a slight groan into a little cough. “Indeed, I hardly know. All that seems burned into me is that I have become a dowager without adequate cause.”

Her pretty brown eyebrows crumpled; she dabbed her still charming eyes with an absurd little lace handkerchief. She wore a wonderful dress of something filmy in Watteau blue, and a Lamballe hat with a _paradis_. Through innumerable veils of tulle her complexion was really wonderful, considering, and her superb hair still tawny gold.

“Don’t look at me and ask yourself why I’ve never married again,” she commanded, in the old petulant way. “For Gar’s sake, is the stereotyped answer to that. And when I look at _her_——” She dabbed away a tear with the absurd little handkerchief. “She hasn’t had the indecency to call me ‘Mother’ _yet_.... But she will, I know she will! If she doesn’t, she is more than human. I have said such things to _her_.”

“I can quite believe it,” I agreed.

Champagne cups were going about; infinitesimal sandwiches, tabloids of condensed indigestion, were being washed down. The best man, an Attaché friend of Garlingham’s, brandishing a silver-handled carving-knife, was encouraging the bridling bride to attack the cake. Sheila and Leila hovered near with silver baskets, and Garlingham, with the merest shadow of his old easy _insouciance_, was replying to the statute and legendary chaff of the other men.

“You know he was engaged to the second girl, Sheila, first?” went on Lady Garlingham plaintively.

I had not known it, and it gave me a thrill.

“Indeed!” I said in a tone of polite inquiry.

“When he was a very little boy, and I took him into a shop to buy a toy,” said poor Lady Garlingham, “he always was in raptures with it, whatever it was, until we were half-way home, and _then_ nothing would satisfy him but the carriage being turned round and driven back, so that he might exchange the thing for something he had particularly disliked at first.”

I recalled the trait in my own experience of my young friend.

“Ah, yes. He always took _pralines_ when he really wanted chocolate fondants,” sighed his mother. “And then—but perhaps you have forgotten—the dolls?”

I had forgotten the dolls. I suppose I gaped rather stupidly.

“He had three,” gulped Lady Garlingham. “He chose the blue one first, and then, when we had just reached Hyde Park Gate, he cried, and said it was the pink one he had wanted all along. So we went back and got her, and drove home to lunch, which, of course, was Gar’s dinner. And then, if you had seen him, poor darling,”—her maternal bosom heaved with a repressed sob—“with his underlip turned down in a quite South Sea Island way, and the tears tumbling into his rice pudding because the blue creature was absolutely his ideal from the first, you would have been foolish enough to order the carriage and drive him back to the Regent Street toyshop.”

“As you did?”

“As I did,” admitted Lady Garlingham.

“With the result that might have been expected?”

“With the result that seems to me _now_ to be a hateful foreshadowing of what was to be my poor darling’s fate in life,” said the poor darling’s mother.... “No, thank you, Sheila dear, I positively could not touch it,” she added, as the cake-basket came our way. “Not even to dream on—I have quite done with dreaming now.”

“But how,” I asked hypercritically, “could Garlingham’s subsequent choice of the blue doll, originally discarded in favor of the pink, foreshadow his ultimate fate in life?”

“Oh, don’t you understand?” quavered poor Lady Garlingham. “He went into the toyshop by himself, and came marching out with what the Americans call a rag-baby, the most odious, distorted, shapeless horror you can imagine. It fascinated him by its sheer ugliness. He was obsessed, magnetized, compelled.... As in this case!” A burst of confidence broke down the floodgates of the poor woman’s reserve. She grasped me by the arm as she gurgled out hysterically—rocking her slight form to and fro: “My dear, _she_ is the rag-doll, this awful widow creature Garlingham has married. And to his fatal curse of indecision he owes the Incubus that is crushing him to-day.”

The bride had tripped upstairs to put on her going-away gown, attended by Leila and Sheila and some freshly-married women, who meant to struggle for the slippers for second choice.

Loud, explosive bursts of jeering merriment came from the dining-room, where most of the men of the party had congregated. An exhausted maid and a very obvious private detective hovered in the neighborhood of the display of wedding presents, and through the open door of the drawing-room one caught a glimpse of suspiciously new luggage piled up in the hall, and a little group of youths and maidens of the callower kind, who were industriously packing the sunshades and umbrellas in the holdalls with rice and confetti.

“My poor, poor boy has been in and out of love _hundreds_ of times,” moaned the despairing Dowager, “without once having been actually engaged. So that when I saw Gar with these three women sitting on four green chairs in the Park in May, I was not seriously alarmed. Georgiana Bayham told me that the stout woman with too many bangles was a Mrs. Rollo Polkingham, a widow, of whom nobody who might with truth be styled anybody had ever heard, and that she had a wild, jungly house in Chesterfield Crescent—(don’t those climbing peacocks in the wall-paper set your teeth on edge?)—and always asked young men to call—and wanted to know their intentions at the third visit.... ‘I would give this turquoise charm off my _porte-bonheur_,’ said Georgiana, in her loud, bubbling voice, ‘to know which of the two daughters Gar is smitten with. The girl with the eyes like black ballot-balls, or the other with the Gaiety smile.’ ... My dear, it was the dark one, Leila, as it happened. Not that Gar flirted desperately. But they went to Hurlingham and lunched at Prince’s, and then the mother thought my boy hooked, and struck——”

“Asked his intentions?” I hinted.

“I knew something had happened,” said Gar’s mother, “when he came in to tea with me that very afternoon. ‘Mother, am I a villain?’ were his very words. ‘No, dear,’ I said, ‘do you feel like one?’ Then it came out that the Polkingham woman had asked his intentions with regard to Leila; and never having had such a thing done to him before, poor, dear boy! Gar was quite prostrated. He did not deny that he found the eldest Polkingham girl attractive, but secretly he had been more closely drawn to the second, Sheila.”

“The pink doll,” I murmured.

“He behaved with the nicest honor in the matter,” declared Lady Garlingham. “When he told me he was really in love with Sheila, and could never be happy until he had married her—and how a young woman with such a muddy complexion could inspire such a passion I don’t pretend to know—I said: ‘Very well, you have my permission to tell her so. I shall never stand in the way of your happiness, my son—although these people are not in Our Set.’ If you had seen his shining eyes. If you had heard the thrill in his voice as he said, ‘What a rattling good sort you are, mother!’ you would have felt with me that the sacrifice was worth it. And then he rushed off in a hansom to declare himself.” Lady Garlingham clutched my arm painfully.

“To declare himself to Sheila?”

“And came back within the space of half an hour engaged to Leila,” panted Lady Garlingham. “No, don’t laugh!”

“The b-blue d-doll!” I gasped.

“He was as pale as death!” said his mother. “He had found Leila in the drawing-room in a becoming half-light, and been taken off his guard.”

“And metaphorically he told the shopwoman he would prefer that one,” I said shakily. “I understand! Was he very unhappy over his bargain?”

“Frightfully out of sorts and off color,” said the wooer’s mother, “until at a crisis, a month later, I nerved him to go and see the mother and explain the mistake.”

“And did he?”

“I will say Mrs. Polkingham took the revelation in good part,” said Lady Garlingham. “Leila cried a good deal, I believe, when she turned Gar over to Sheila, and Sheila was not disagreeably inclined to crow. I must give the girls credit for their behavior. As for Gar, he was the very picture of young, ardent happiness. ‘Mother,’ I can hear him saying, ‘thanks to you, I have won the dearest and loveliest girl in the world.’ (Poor boy!) ‘And I’m as happy as a gardener.’”

“Did that phase last long?” I queried, with twitching facial muscles.

“He began to flag, as it were, in about six weeks,” said Garlingham’s mother mournfully. “My poor, affectionate, _wobbly_ boy. The sky of his simple happiness was overcast. There came a day when the floodgates of his resolve to go through with everything at any cost—sacrifice himself for the sake of his duty and for the credit of his family name——”

“_Noblesse oblige_,” I stammered chokily. “_Noblesse oblige._”

“The floodgates were broken down,” said his mother, with a tremble in her voice. “His heart reverted with a bound to the—the other—to Leila.”

“To the blue doll!” I spluttered.

“When he entreated me,” went on Lady Garlingham, “begged me even with tears to be his ambassadress to Leila, I grieve to say that for the first time in his life I failed to rise to the occasion of his need. I said: ‘I shall do nothing of the kind. Get out of the muddle as you can—I wash my hands of it.’ And he thought me very hard and very unfeeling, I know; but even when the _bouleversement_ was managed for the third time, I could not bring myself to regard the position from my usually philosophical point of view. It was too cruel. The retransfer of the engagement-ring, for instance——”

“Ah, true,” I murmured, “and the presents!”

“Too painful!” sighed Lady Garlingham. “It was ultimately arranged by Gar’s buying a new ring, and Sheila’s dropping the old one into the almsbag at St. Baverstock’s. Poor girl! I will say her demeanor in the trying circumstances was admirable.”

“As for the other?” I hinted.

“Leila is not a refined type of girl,” said Lady Garlingham decidedly. “Her whole expression was that of a Bank Holiday tripper young person who has just dismounted from one of those giddy-go-rounds. Boat-swings might impart the dazed look. The mother seemed harassed. As for Gar——”

I guessed what was coming, but I would not have missed hearing Lady Garlingham tell it for worlds.

“There came a day—a dreadful, dreadful day,” she said, with pale lips, “when Gar told me that his life was ruined _unless he changed back_! We had a _dreadful scene_, and for the first time in my life I had hysterics. Then the unhappy boy tore from the house—_ventre à terre_—leaving me a perfect wreck, held up by my maid Pinner—you know Pinner?”

I nodded speechlessly.

“My wretched boy tore from the house, jumped into his ‘Gohard,’ which was standing at the door—hurtled to Chesterfield Crescent—told the painful truth——”

“Swopped dolls yet once again, and came back with the rag-baby,” I gasped.

“_And_ now,” groaned Lady Garlingham, “he has to carry it through life!”

There was a gabbling on the upper landing. The bride was coming down in a white cut-cloth, tailor-made gown and a picture hat, Leila and Sheila and a bonneted maid following. The bridegroom, in immaculate tweeds, appeared at a lower door, the smug face of his valet behind him. There was a rush of women, an insane kissing and shaking of hands, a glare of red carpet, a flapping of striped awning. Rice and confetti impregnated the air, the doorsteps were swamped with smartly-dressed people. The chauffeur of Gar’s “Gohard” with a giant favor in the buttonhole of his livery coat grinned when Garlingham leaped tigerishly upon him and tore it from his chest. The automobile moved on, pursued by farewells. Some one had thoughtfully attached two slippers to its rearward steps, a stout, elderly, white satin slipper and a slim masculine, evening shoe of the pump kind, almost new.

“Say!” said the saw-edged American voice I had heard in the church—“say, won’t the car-conductor allow she’s traveling with her little boy? What will folks call him, anyhow?”

My mouth was on a level with the speaker’s back hair.

“The Widow’s Mite,” I said aloud—and fled.

SUSANNA AND HER ELDERS

I

The Earl of Beaumaris, a worthy and imposing personage, flushed from the nape of his neck to the high summit of his cranium—premature baldness figured amongst the family heredities—paced, in creaking patent-leather boots, up and down the castle library—a noble apartment of Tudor design, lined with rare and antique volumes into which none ever looked. There were other persons present beside the Dowager Countess, and, to judge by the strainedly polite expression of their faces, the squeaking leather must have been playing havoc with their nerves.

“Gustavus,” said the Dowager at length, “you’re an English Peer in your own castle, and not a pointsman on a Broadway block, unless I’m considerably mistaken. Sit down!”

“Mother, I will not be defied!” said Lord Beaumaris. “I will not be bearded by my own child—a mere chit of a girl! Had Susanna been a boy I should have known how to deal with this spirit of insubordination. Being a girl—and moreover, motherless—I abandon her to you. She has many things to learn, but let the first lesson you inculcate be this—that I positively refuse to be defied!”

“The child has, I gather, gone out to take the air when she ought to have stayed in and taken a scolding,” said Lady Beaumaris. “Does anybody know of her whereabouts?”

Alaric Osmond-Omer, a languid, drab-complexioned, light-haired man of aristocratic appearance, never seen without the smoked eyeglass that concealed a diabolic squint, spoke:

“I saw her in a crimson golfing-jacket and a white Tam-o’-shanter crossing the upper terrace. She carried an alpenstock, and was followed by quite a pack of dogs—incorporated in the body of one extraordinary mongrel which I have occasionally observed about the stable-yards. I gathered that she was going for a climb upon the cliffs. That was about half an hour ago!”

“Alaric, you have attended every Family Council that I recollect since I became a member of this family, and have never before opened your lips,” said Lady Beaumaris, fixing the unfortunate Alaric with her eye, which was still black and snappingly bright. “Make this occasion memorable by offering a suggestion. You really owe us one!”

Everybody present looked at Alaric, who smiled helplessly and dropped his eyeglass, revealing the physical peculiarity it concealed. The effect of the diabolic squint, in combination with his mild features and somewhat foolish expression, conveyed a general impression of reserve force. He spoke, fumbling for the missing article, which had plunged rapturously into his bosom, with long, trim fingers, encrusted with mourning rings.

“The question at issue is—unless I have failed in my mental digest of the situation—how to bring Susanna Viscountess Lymston—pardon me if I indulge a little my weakness for prolixity——”

The door creaked, and Alaric broke off.

“My dear man,” said the Dowager, “I never before heard you utter a sentence of more than two words’ length!”

“—To bring Susanna, who is just seventeen and fiercely virginal in her expressed aversion to, and avoidance of, ordinary, everyday Man—into compliance with your paternal wishes”—Alaric bowed to Lord Beaumaris—“where the encouragement of a suitor is concerned!”

“I have appealed to her filial feelings—which do not appear to exist,” said Lord Beaumaris; “I have appealed to her reason—I doubt gravely whether the girl possesses any: ‘There is too much landed property, there are too many houses and too many heirlooms, and there is not enough ready money to keep things going,’ I said. Her reply was: ‘Sell some of the land and some of the houses and all of the pictures, and then there will be enough to keep up the rest.’ ‘My dear child, is it possible,’ I said, ‘that at your age, and occupying the position you occupy, you have no idea of what is meant by an Entail?’ Then I made her sit down here, in this library, opposite me, and laid plainly before her why it is necessary for her, as my daughter, to marry, and to marry Wealth, Position, and Title. Before I had ended she rose with a flaming face and burst into an hysterical tirade, which lasted ten minutes. I gather that she was willing to marry Sir Prosper Le Gai or the Knight of the Swan if either of these gentlemen proposed for her hand. Neither being available, she intends, I gather, to write great poems, or paint great pictures, or go upon the stage.... Go upon the stage! My blood curdled at the bare idea. It is still in that unpleasant condition.” Lord Beaumaris shuddered violently, and pressed his handkerchief to his nose. “If you have any advice to give, Alaric,” he said bluntly, “oblige us by giving it. We are at a positive crux!”

The drab-complexioned, light-haired Alaric responded:

“In my poor opinion—which may be crassly wrong—too much stress has been laid upon the necessity of Susanna’s marrying.” At this point the contrast between the amiable vacuity of Alaric’s face and the Mephistophelian intelligence of his monocled eye was so extraordinary as to hold his listeners spellbound in their chairs. “I think we may take it that the principal feature of the child’s character is—call it determination amounting to obstinacy——”

“Crass obstinacy!” burst from the Earl.

“Pig-headedness!” interjected the Dowager.

“I think I remember hearing that in her nursery days the sure way to make her take a dose of harmless necessary medicine,” pursued Alaric, his left eye fixed upon the door, “was to prepare the potion, pill, or what-not, sweeten, and then carefully conceal it from her. Were she my daughter—which Heaven for—which Heaven has not granted!—I should make her take a husband in the same way.”

“An utterance possibly inspired, but as obscure as the generality. I fear, my dear Alaric——” Lord Beaumaris began. The Dowager cut him short.

“Say, Gus, can’t you let him finish? That’s what I call real mean—to switch a man off just when he’s beginning to grip the track.”

“Mother, I bow to you,” Lord Beaumaris said, purpling with indignation. “Pray continue, Alaric!”

“Hum along, Alaric,” encouraged the Dowager.

Alaric, his countenance as the countenance of a little child, his right eye beaming with mildness, and his left eye as the eye of an intelligent fiend, went on:

“Susanna has never yet seen the Duke of Halcyon—her cousin, and the husband for whom you destine her. When she does see him—I think I may be pardoned for saying——”

“She’ll raise Cain,” agreed Lady Beaumaris. “Girls think such heaps of good looks; I was like that myself, before I married your father, Gus.”

“My dear mother, granted that Halcyon’s gifts, both physical and mental, are not”—the Earl coughed—“not of the kind best calculated to impress and win upon a romantic, willful girl!... He is, to speak plainly——”

“A hideous little Troglodyte,” nodded the Dowager, over her interminable Shetland-wool knitting.

“Odd, considering that his mother, when Lady Flora MacCodrum, was, with the sole exception of myself, the handsomest young woman presented in the Spring of 1845.”

“Mother,” said Lord Beaumaris, “delightful as your reminiscences invariably are, Alaric is waiting to resume.”