Part 23

“Because I can’t afford it,” said the dismal bridegroom, “and because the meals and all that will be served here separately and privately.” He sank limply upon a sumptuous lounge, and hurled an extinct cigarette-end into an open fireplace surrounded by beaten brass and crowned by a mantel in rose-colored marble. “The execrable ordeal of the first cabin dining-room, with its crowds of gross, commonplace, high-spirited, hungry feeders will thus be spared us. You need never set foot in the Ladies’ Drawing-room; the Lounge and the Smoking-room shall equally be shunned by me. Exercise on the Promenade Deck is a necessity. We shall take it daily, and take it together, my _incognito_ preserved by a motor-cap and goggles, your privacy ensured by a silk—two silk—veils.” He smiled wanly. “I have roughly laid down these lines, formulated this plan, for the maintenance of our privacy without making any allowance for the exigencies of the weather and the condition of the sea. But if I should be prostrated—and I am an exceedingly bad sailor at the best of times—remember, dearest, that a tumbler of hot water administered every ten minutes, alternately with a slice of iced lemon, should feverish symptoms intervene, is not a panacea, but an alleviation, as my cousin, Hambridge Ost, would say. I rather wonder what Hambridge is saying now. He possesses an extraordinary faculty of being scathingly sarcastic at the expense of persons who deserve censure. An unpleasant sensation in my spine gives me the impression—do you ever have those impressions?—that he is exercising that faculty now—and at my expense. Timms, I will ask you to unpack my dressing-gown and papooshes, and then, if you, my darling, do not object, I will lie down comfortably in my own room and have a cup of tea. If I might make a suggestion, dearest, it is that you would tell your maid to get out _your_ dressing-gown and _your_ slippers, and lie down comfortably in _your_ own room and have a cup of tea.”

The twenty-six thousand ton Atlantic flyer moved gracefully down the Mersey, the last flutter of handkerchiefs died away on the stage, the last head was pulled back over the vessel’s rail, the seething tumult of settling down reduced itself to a hive-like buzzing. The _Regent Street’s_ passenger-list comprised quite a number of notabilities connected with Art and the Drama, a promising crop of American millionaires, an ex-Viceroy of India, and a singularly gifted orang-utan, the biggest sensation of the London season, who had dined with the Lord Mayor and Corporation at the Mansion House, and was now crossing the ocean to fulfill a roof-garden engagement in New York, and be entertained at a freak supper by six of the supreme leaders of American Society. Petsie pondered the passenger-list with a pouting lip. She heard from her enraptured maid of the glories of the floating palace in which the first week of her honeymoon was to be spent as she sipped the cup of tea recommended by Rustleton.

“Lifts to take you up and down stairs, silver-gilt and enamel souvenirs given to everybody free, Turkish baths, needle baths, electric baths, hairdressing and manicuring saloons, millinery establishments, a theater with a stock company who don’t know what sea-sickness means, jewelers’ shops, florists, and Fuller’s, a palmist, and a thought-reader. Goodness! the gay old ship must be a floating London, with fish and things squattering about underneath one’s shoe-heels instead of ‘phone-wires and electric-light cables. And I’m shut up like a blooming pearl in an oyster, instead of running about and looking at everything. Oh, Simpkie’—Simpkins, the new maid, had been a dresser at the West End Theatre—“I’m dying for the chance of a little flutter on my own, and how am I to get it?”

The _Regent Street_ gave a long, stately, sliding dive forwards as a mammoth roller of St. George’s Channel swept under her sky-scraping stern. A long, plaintive moan—forerunner of how many to come!—sounded from the other side of the partition dividing the apartments of the bride from that of her newly-wedded lord.

“I think you’re goin’ to get it, my lady,” said the demure Simpkins, as Rustleton’s man knocked at his mistress’s door to convey the intimation that his lordship preferred not to dine.

A head-wind and a heavy sea combined, during the next three days of the voyage, to render Rustleton a prey to agonies which are better imagined than described. While he imbibed hot water and nibbled captain’s biscuits, or lay prone and semi-conscious in the clutches of the hideous malady of the wave, Lady Rustleton, bright-eyed, _petite_, and beautifully dressed, paraded the promenade deck with a tail of male and female cronies, played at quoits and croquet, to the delight of select audiences, and sat in sheltered corners after dinner, well out of the radius of the electric light, sometimes with two or three, generally with one, of the best-looking victims of her bow and spear. She sat on the Captain’s right hand at the center table, outrageously bedecked with diamonds. She played in a musical sketch and sang at a charity concert. “Buzzy, Buzzy, Busy Bee” was thenceforth to be heard in every corner of the vast maritime hotel that was hurrying its guests Westward at the utmost speed of steel and steam. Fresh bouquets of Malmaison carnations, roses and violets from the Piccadilly florists, were continually heaped upon her shrine, dainty jeweled miniature representations of the _Regent Street’s_ house-flag, boxes of choice bonbons showered upon her like rain. The celebrated orang-utan occupied the chair next hers at a special banquet, the newest modes in millinery found their way mysteriously to her apartment, if she had but tried them on, smiled, and, with the inimitable Petsie wink at the reflection of her own provokingly pretty features in the shop mirror, approved.

“I keep forgetting I’m a married woman,” she would say, with the Petsie smile, when elderly ladies of the cat-like type, and middle-aged men who were malicious, inquired after the health of the invisible Lord Rustleton. “But he’s there, poor dear; or as much as is left of him. Quite contented if he gets his milk and beef-juice, and the hot water comes regularly, and there’s a slice of lemon to suck. No; I’m afraid I can’t give him your kind message of sympathy, you know, because sympathy is too disturbing, he says.... He doesn’t even like _me_ to ask him if he’s feeling bad, because, as he tells me, I have only to look at him to know that he is, poor darling.”

Thus prattled the bride, even ready to _faire l’ingénue_ for the benefit of even an audience of one. The voyage agreed with Petsie. Her complexion, dulled by make-up, assumed a healthier tint; her eyes and smile grew brighter, even as the ruddy gold faded from her abundant hair. The end of this story would have been completely different had not the tricksy sea-air brought about this deplorable change.

“I’m getting dreadfully rusty, as you say, Simpkie; and if the man in the hairdresser’s shop on the Promenade Deck Arcade can give me a shampoodle and touch me up a bit—quite an artist is he, and quite the gentleman? Oh, very well, I’ll look in on my gentleman-artist between breakfast and _bouillon_.”

Petsie did look in. The artist’s studio, elegantly hung with heavy pink plush curtains, only contained, besides a shampooing-basin, a large mirror, a nickel-silver instrument of a type between a chimney-cowl and a ship’s ventilator, and a client’s chair, a young person of ingratiating manners, who offered Lady Rustleton the chair, and enveloping her dainty person in a starchy pink wrapper, touched a bell, and saying, “The operator will attend immediately, moddam,” glided noiselessly away. Petsie, approvingly surveying her image in the mirror, did not hear a male footstep behind her. But as the head and shoulders of the operator rose above the level of her topmost waves, and his reflected gaze encountered her own, she became ghastly pale beneath her rose-bloom, and with a little choking cry of recognition gasped out:

“Bill ... Boman! ... it can’t be you?”

“The old identical same,” Mr. William Boman said, with a cheerful smile. “And if the shock has made you giddy, I can turn on the basin-hose in half a tick, and give you a splash of cold as a reviver. Will you have it? No? Then don’t faint, that’s all.”

“You wrote to say you were dying at Dieppe five years ago,” sobbed Petsie, into the folds of the pink calico wrapper. “You wicked, cruel man, you know you did!”

“And now you’re crying because I didn’t die,” said Mr. Boman, arranging his sable forehead-curls in the glass, and complacently twirling a highly-waxed mustache. “No pleasing you women. You never know what you want, strikes me.”

“But somebody sent me a French undertaker’s bill for a first-class funeral, nearly thirty pounds it came to when we’d got the francs down to sovereigns,” moaned Petsie, “and I paid it.”

“That was my little dodge,” said Mr. Boman calmly, “to get a few yellow-birds to go on with. Trouble I’d got into—don’t say any more about it, because I am a reformed character now. And now we’re talking about characters, what price yours, my Lady Rustleton?”

“Oh, Billy!”

“Bigamy ain’t a pretty word, but that’s what it comes to, as I’ve said to myself many an evening as I smoked my cigar on the second-class deck promenade, and heard you singing away in there to the swells in the music-room like a—like a cage full of canaries. I shan’t make no scene nor nothing like that, says I. Her hair’s getting a bit off color—see it by daylight, she’ll have to come my way before long, and then I shall tip her the ghost with a vengeance.”

“Oh, Bill dear, how could you be so cruel!” pleaded Petsie.

“Not so much of the ‘Bill dear,’ I’ll trouble you,” said Mr. Boman sternly. “Why don’t you produce that aristocratic corpse you’ve married, and let me have it out with him? Seasick, is he? I’ll make him land-sick before I’ve done with him, and so I tell you. He’ll have to sell some of his blooming acres to satisfy me, or some of them diamonds of yours, my lady.”

But at this juncture the delayed attack of hysteria swooped upon its victim. Summoning his young lady-assistant, Mr. Boman, with a few injunctions, placed the patient in her care. Then brushing a few bronze-hued hairs from his frock-coat, removing his dapper apron, and tidying his hair with a rapid application of the brush, he winked as one well pleased, and betook himself to Gobelin Tapestry Bridal Suite Number Four, in the character of a Messenger of Fate.

Three hours later the news had leaked out all over the _Regent Street_. The great vessel buzzed like a wasps’-nest, and the utmost resources of wireless telegraphy were taxed to communicate to sister ships upon the ocean and fellow-men upon the nearest land the astounding fact of the sudden collapse of the Rustleton marriage, owing to the arrival on the scene of a previous husband of the lady.

“_Ach Himmel!_ it is klorious!” gasped Funkstein, waving a pale blue paper, “I haf here Petsie’s reply to de offer of de Syindigate—she comes to de Vest End Theatre; at an advanced salary returns—and de house will be cram-jammed to de doors for anoder tree hoondred berformances. It is an ill vind dot to nopody plows goot, mark my vords!”

Lord Pomphrey had just given utterance to a similar sentiment; Rustleton, on the other side of the Atlantic, had previously arrived at a like conclusion. Mr. Boman had entertained the same view from the outset of affairs. Petsie—again Le Poyntz—realizing the gigantic advertisement that the resurrection of her first proprietor involved, was gradually becoming reconciled to the situation. When all the characters of a tale are made content, is it not time the narrative came to a close?

“CLOTHES—AND THE MAN—!”

The smoking-room of the Younger Sons’ Club, the bow-windows of which command a view of Piccadilly, contained at the hour of two-thirty its full complement of habitual nicotians, who, seated in the comfortable armchairs, recumbent on the leather divans, or grouped upon the hearthrug, lent their energies with one accord to the thickening of the atmosphere.

Hambridge Ost, a small, drab-hued man with a triangular face, streakily-brushed hair, champagne-bottle shoulders, and feet as narrow as boot-trees without the detachable side-pieces, invariably encased in the shiniest of patent leathers,—Hambridge, from behind a large green cigar, was giving a select audience of very young and callow listeners the benefit of his opinions upon dress.

“If I proposed to jot down the small events of my insignificant private life, dear fellers, or had the gift—supposing I did commit ’em to paper—of makin’ ’em interesting ...” said Hambridge, raising his eyebrows to the edge of his carefully parted hair and letting them down again, “I don’t mind telling you, dear fellers, that the resultant volume or two would mark an epoch in autobiographical literature. But, like the violet—so to put it—I have, up to the present, preferred to blush unseen. Not that the violet _can_ blush anything but purple—or blue in frosty weather, but the simile has up to now always held good in literature. Lord Pomphrey—a man appreciative to a degree of the talents of his relatives—has said to me a thousand times if one, ‘Confound you, Hambridge, why is not that, or this, or the other, so to put it, in print?’ But Pomphrey may be partial——”

“No, no!” exclaimed, in a very deep bass, a very young man in a knitted silk waistcoat and a singularly brilliant set of pimples. “No, no!”

“Much obliged, dear fellow,” said Hambridge, hoisting his eyebrows and letting them drop in his characteristic manner. “Some of my views may possess originality—even freshness when expressed, as I invariably express ’em, in a perfectly commonplace manner.”

“No, no!” again exclaimed the pimply-faced owner of the deep bass voice.

“As to the Ethics of the Crinoline, now,” went on Hambridge, “I observe that an energetic effort is being made—in a certain quarter and amongst a certain _coterie_—to revive the discarded hoops of 1855–66. They did their best to impart a second vitality to the Early Victorian poke-bonnet some years ago. Why did the effort fail, dear fellers? Because, with their accompanying garniture of modesty, blushes were considered necessary to the feminine equipment at the date I have mentioned. And because blushes—I speak on the most reliable authority—are more difficult to simulate than tears. Also because, looking down the pink silk-lined tunnel of the poke-bonnet of 1855–66, it was impossible for you, as an ordinary male creature, to decide whether the rosy glow invading the features of the woman you adored—we adored women, dear fellows, at that period—was genuine or the reverse. There you have in a nutshell the reason why the poke-bonnet was not welcomed at the dawn of the twentieth century. Modesty and blushes, dear fellers, are out of date.”

Hambridge leaned back in his chair with an air of mild triumph, running his movable eye—the left was rigidly fixed behind his monocle—over the faces of the listeners.

“Will the woman of the Twentieth Century willingly enclose her legs—they were limbs in 1855–66—once more in the steel-barred calico cage, fifteen feet in circumference, if not more, that contained the woman of the Early Victorian Era? Dear fellers, the question furnishes material for an interestin’ debate. In my young days there was no sittin’ in ladies’ pockets, no cosy-cornering, so to put it. You invariably kept at a respectful distance from the young creature whom you, more or less ardently—we could be ardent in those days—desired to woo and win, simply because you couldn’t get nearer. You didn’t approach her mother for permission to pay your addresses-her mother was encased in a similar panoply. You went to her father, because you could get at him—there you have the plain, simple reason of the custom of ‘askin’ Papa.’ And if you were reprehensibly desirous of eloping with another fellow’s wife, you didn’t express your wish in words. You wrote a letter invitin’ her to fly with you—we called it flying in those days—and dropped it in the post. If the lady disapproved, she dropped you. If not, she bolted with you in a chaise with four or a pair—and even then her crinoline kept you at a distance. You were no more at liberty to put your arm round her waist than if the eye of Early Victorian Society had been glued upon you.

“To put forward another reason _contra_ the reacceptance of the crinoline by the Woman of To-day, dear fellers, the Woman of To-day can swim. Therefore, the advantage of being dressed practically in a lifebuoy, does not appeal to her as it did early in the previous reign. I could quote you an instance of an accident which occurred to the Dover and Calais paddle-wheel steam-packet, on board which I happened to be a passenger, which, owing to the negligence of the captain, ran ashore upon a sandbank half a mile from the pier. The first boat which was lowered was filled with lady passengers, all in crinolines. It was swamped by a wave which washed over the stern. The steersman and the sailors who were rowing were unluckily snatched to a watery grave, poor fellows. Not so the women passengers of the swamped boat, dear creatures, who simply floated, keeping hold of one another’s scarves and bonnet-strings, and so forth, until they could be picked up and conveyed ashore. Not one of ’em could swim a stroke—and all were saved, thanks to the crinoline in which each was attired. But, useful as under certain circumstances the birdcage may be, the Twentieth Century Woman will never be tempted back into it. She has learned what it is to have muscles and to use ’em, dear fellers! and the era of languid inertia is over for her.

“I will add, dear fellers, that in these drab and uncommonly dismal days of early December, the dash of color now perceptible in the clothes of the best dressed men present at social functions of the superior sort, adds largely to the cheeriness of the scene. _Cela me fait cet effet_, dear fellers, but of course I may be wrong. And the first man to adopt and appear in the newest style in evenin’ dress—a bright blue coat of fine faced cloth, with black velvet collar, velvet cuffs, and silk facin’s, worn with trousers of the same material, braided with black down the side seams, and a V-cut vest of white Irish silk poplin-has realized a fortune through it.

“A well-known man, dear fellers, connected with two old Tory families of the highest distinction, educated at Eton, popular at the University-where he did not allow his love of study to interfere with the more serious pursuit of sport—d’ye take me? Suppose we call him Eric de Peauchamp-Walmerdale. His marriage took place yesterday at St. Neot’s, Knightsbridge, the sacred edifice bein’ decorated with large lilies and white chrysanthemums, and the gatherin’ of guests surprisingly large—the biggest crush of the Season as yet. There were six little girl-bridesmaids in pale blue, with diamond lockets, and the bride’s train was carried by four pages, also in pale blue, with gold-headed canes. As for the bride, considerin’ her age—a cool seventy—surprisin’, dear fellers! Only daughter and heiress of an ex-butler, who invented a paste for cleanin’ plate, patented it, and became a millionaire, Isaac Shyne, Esq., M.P., of The Beeches, Wopsley, and 710, Park Lane, deceased ten years ago at the ripe age of ninety.

“De Peauchamp-Walmerdale’s married sister lived next door to the rich Miss Shyne, who practically went nowhere, and only received her Nonconformist minister, and a few whist-playin’ friends of the same denomination on certain specified evenin’s. House absolutely Early Victorian—walnut-wood drawing-room suite, upholstered in green silk rep, mahogany and brown leather for the dinin’-room. Berlin woolwork curtains, worked by the mistress of the house, at all the front windows. Three parrots, two poodles, and a pair of King Charles spaniels of the obsolete miniature breed. Maid-servants—all elderly, butler like a bishop, uncommon good cellar of gouty old Madeiras and sherries, laid down by the defunct Shyne, awful collection of pictures by Smith, Jones, Brown, and Robinson, splendid plate, too heavy to lift. And a fortune of one hundred and fifty thousand in the most reliable Home Rails and breweries, besides an estate of sixty thousand acres in Crannshire, and the title deeds of the Park Lane house.

“It came—the idea of bringing Miss Shyne and De Peauchamp-Walmerdale together—like a flash of inspiration—as the dear feller’s sister, Lady Tewsminster, told me yesterday when people had struggled up after the Psalm, and yawned through the address, _not_ delivered by a Nonconformist, but by the Bishop of Baxterham; and while the choir were singin’, ‘O Perfect Love!’ She was frightfully cast down when she discovered through her maid, who had scraped, under orders, an acquaintance with Miss Shyne’s elderly confidential attendant, that her lady objected to young gentlemen—couldn’t endure the sight, so to put it, of anything masculine under fifty, or without a bulge under the waistcoat, and a bald top to its head. Further inquiries elicited that Miss Shyne had had a disappointment in early life, and wore at the back of an old-fashioned cameo brooch, representin’ the ‘Choice of Paris,’ the portrait on ivory of a handsome young man with fair hair, the livin’ image of Eric de Peauchamp-Walmerdale, in a light blue tail-coat, with a black velvet collar and gold buttons, holding a King Charles spaniel of the miniature breed under his arm.

“Dear fellers, Lady Tewsminster, the evening upon which she received this item of information, knew no more than a newly-born infant what she was going to do with it. As happens to most of us, she mentally filed it for further reference, and getting into her gown, her diamonds, and her evening _coiffure_—those Etruscan rolled curls are extremely becoming to a woman of pronounced outlines, and there’s only one place in London, she tells me, where they can be bought or redressed—went down to the drawing-room.

“A small but select party had been invited for the evenin’, including, on the feminine side, an American heiress on the lookout for a husband with a title—or, at least, the next heir to one-a handsome widow with a fairly decent jointure, and a couple of marriageable girls with almost quite respectable _dots_. From these, carefully collected on approval by a devoted sister, De Peauchamp-Walmerdale might, who knows? have selected a life partner, and sunk into the obscurity of moderate means for ever, had it not occurred to him upon that particular evening—do you take me, dear fellers?—to array himself in the latest cry of modern masculine evening dress.

“He was standing on the hearthrug when Lady Tewsminster entered, a tall, slim, youthful figure, fair-haired and complexioned, and quite uncommonly handsome, in his light blue coat with the black velvet collar, braided accompaniments, and pearl-buttoned, watch-chainless, white silk vest.

“‘How do you like me, Ju, old girl?’ he said, coming to kiss her. ‘I’ve come to dine in character as our great-grandfather. Awful fool I feel, but my tailor insisted on my wearin’ ’em, and as I owe the brute a frightful bill I thought I’d best appease him by givin’ in.’