Part 5

“I don’t know how to say it, dear, but we shall never be married. Poppa is perfectly rocky on one point, and that is that the man I hitch up with shall never have dabbled as much as his little finger in trade. ‘You have dollars enough to buy one of the real high-toned sort,’ he keeps saying, ‘and if blood royal is to be got for money, Silas P. Vanderdecken is the man to get it. So run along and play, little girl, till the right man comes along.’ And I know he’ll say you’re the wrong one!”

Freddy’s complexion, grown transparent from excess of emotion and lack of exercise, paled to an ivory hue. His sedentary life had softened his condition and unstrung his nerves. He adored Cornelia, and had looked forward to a lifetime spent in adorning her beauty with bonnets of the most becoming shapes and designs. Now that a coarse Transatlantic millionaire with soft shirt-fronts and broad-leaved felt hats might step in and shatter for ever his beautiful dream of union, bitter revulsion seized him. He feared his fate. What was he? The second son of a poor Marquis, with a particularly healthy elder brother. He looked upon the chiffons, the flowers and the feathers that surrounded him, and felt that the hopes of a heart reared upon so frail a basis were insecure indeed. Then his old blood rallied to his heart, and he rose from the divan and clasped the now tearful Cornelia to his breast.

“Go, my dearest,” he said, “tell all to your father—plead for me. Do not write or wire—bring me his verdict to-morrow. Meanwhile I will compose two hats. Each shall be a masterpiece—a swan-song of my Art. One is to be worn if”—his voice broke—“if I am to be happy; the other if I am fated to despair. Go now, for I must be alone to carry out my inspiration.”

And Cornelia went. Then Freddy, sternly refusing to receive any more customers that day, set himself to the completion of his task. Before very long both hats were actualities. Hat Number One was an Empire shape of dead-leaf beaver, the crown draped with dove-colored silk, a spray of sere oak-leaves and rue in front, a fine scarf of black lace, partly to veil the face of the wearer, thrown back over one side of the brim and caught with a clasp of black pearls set in oxidized silver. It breathed of chastened woe and temperate sadness, and was to be worn if Papa Vanderdecken persisted in refusing to accept Freddy as a suitor.

But Hat Number Two! It was of the palest blue guipure straw, draped with coral silk and Cluny lace. In front was a spray of moss rosebuds and forget-me-nots, dove’s wings of burnished hues were set at either side. It was the very hat to be worn by a bringer of joyful news, the ideal hat under which might be appropriately exchanged the first kiss of plighted passion. Upon it Freddy pinned a fairy-like card, white and gold-edged.

“If I am to be happy, wear this,” was written upon it; and upon a buff card attached to the hat of rejection he inscribed: “Wear this, if I am to be unhappy.” Then he closed the large double bandbox in which he had packed the hats, breathed a kiss into the folds of the silver paper, and, ringing the bell, bade a messenger carry the box to the hotel at which Cornelia Vanderdecken was staying, and where, millionairess though she was, she was still content to dress with the help of a deft maid and the adoration of a devoted companion. Then the exhausted artist fell back on the divan. Cornelia was to come at twelve upon the morrow.

“Then I shall learn my fate,” said Freddy. He drove home in his brougham, and passed a sleepless night. The fateful hour found him again upon his divan, surrounded by the materials of his craft, waiting feverishly for Cornelia.

The curtains parted. He started up at the rustling of her gown and the jingling of her bangles. Horror! she wore the somber hat of sorrow, though under its shadow her face was curiously bright.

She advanced toward Freddy. He reeled and staggered backward, raised his white hand to his delicate throat, and fell fainting amongst his cushions. Cornelia screamed. Mrs. Vivianson and her young ladies came hurrying in. As the stylish widow noted Cornelia’s headgear, her eyes flashed and joy was in her face. Then it clouded over, for she knew that Papa Vanderdecken had been coaxed over, and Freddy was an accepted man. My reader, being exceptionally acute, will realize that the jealous woman had changed the tickets on the hats.

“Not that it was much use,” she avowed to herself, as she entered with smelling-salts and burnt feathers to restore Freddy’s consciousness. “When he revives, she will tell him the truth.” But Freddy only regained consciousness to lose it in the ravings of delirium. He had an attack of brain fever, in which he wandered through groves of bonnet shops, looking unavailingly for Cornelia. And then came the crisis, and he woke up with an ice-bandage on, to find himself in his bedroom at Glanmire House, with the Marchioness leaning over him.

“Mother, my heart is broken,” said the boy—he was really little more. “The world exists no more for me. Let me make my last hat—and leave it.”

“Oh, Freddy, don’t you know me?” gasped Cornelia in the background; but the repentant woman who had brought about all this trouble drew the girl away.

“Even good news broken suddenly to him in his weak state,” said Mrs. Vivianson in a rapid whisper, “may prove fatal. I have a plan which may gradually enlighten him.”

“I trust you,” said Cornelia. “You have saved his life with your nursing. Now give him back to me!”

“Hush!” said Mrs. Vivianson.

She had rapidly dispatched a messenger to Condover Street, and now, as Freddy again opened his eyes and repeated his piteous request, the messenger returned. Then all present gathered about the bed, whose inmate had been raised upon supporting pillows. It was a queer scene as the shaded electric light above the bed played upon Freddy’s pallid features, showing the ravages of sickness there. “Now!” said Mrs. Vivianson. She placed the milliner’s box upon the bed, and Freddy’s feeble fingers, diving into it, drew forth a spray of orange blossoms and a diaphanous cloud of filmy lace.

“Black—not white!” Freddy gasped brokenly. “It is a mourning toque that I must make. Let Cornelia wear it at my funeral.”

“Cornelia will not wear it at your funeral, Freddy,” said Mrs. Vivianson, bending over him; “for she is going to marry you, not to bury you.” And, drawing the tearful girl to Freddy’s side, she flung over her beautiful head the bridal veil, and crowned her with a wreath of orange blossoms. And as, with a feeble cry, Freddy opened his wasted arms and Cornelia fell into them, Mrs. Vivianson, her work of atonement completed, pressed the offered hand of Freddy’s mother, and hurried out of the room and out of the story. Which ends, as stories ought, happily for the lovers, who are now honeymooning in the Riviera.

UNDER THE ELECTRICS A SHOW-LADY IS ELOQUENT

“Really, my dear, I think the man has gone a bit too far. Writes a play with a fast young lady in the Profession for the heroine—and where he got his model from I can’t imagine—and then writes to the papers to explain, accounting for her past being a bit off color—_twiggez-vous?_—by saying she isn’t a Chorus-lady, only a Show-lady.

“Gracious! I’m short of a bit of wig-paste, my pet complexion-color No. 2. Any lady present got half a stick to lend? I want to look my special best to-night: _somebody in the stalls_, don’tcherknow! Chuck it over!—mind that bottle of Bass! I’m aware beer is bad for the liver, but such a nourishing tonic, isn’t it? When I get back to the theater, tired after a sixty-mile ride in somebody’s 20 h.p. Gohard—_twiggez?_—a tumbler with a good head to it makes my dear old self again in a twink.

“Half-hour? That new call-boy must be spoke to on the quiet, dears. Such manners, putting his nasty little head right into the show-ladies’ dressing-room when he calls. I suggest, girlies, that when we’re all running down for the general entrance in the First Act—and that staircase on the prompt side is the narrowest I ever struck—I suggest that when we meet that little brute—he’s always coming up to give the principals the last call—I suggest that each girl bumps his head against the wall as she goes by! That’ll make twenty bumps, and do him lots of good, too!

“Miss de la Regy, dear, I lent you my blue pencil last night. Hand it over, there’s a good old sort, when you’ve given the customary languish to your eyes, love. What are you saying? Stage-Manager’s order that we’re not to grease-black our eyelashes so much, as some people say it looks fair hideous from the front? Tell him to consume his own smoke next time he’s in a beast of a cooker. Why don’t he tell _her_ to mind her own business?—I’m sure she’s old enough! What I say is, I’ve always been accustomed to put lots on mine, and I don’t see myself altering my usual make-up at this time o’ day. Do you? Not much?—I rather thought so. What else does he say?—he’ll be obliged if we’ll wear the chin-strap of our Hussar busbies down instead of tucked up inside ’em? What I say is—and I’m sure you’ll agree with me, girls—that it’s bad enough to have to wear a fur hat with a red bag hangin’ over the top, without marking a young lady’s face in an unbecoming way with a chin-strap. Also he insists—what price him?—he _insists_ on our leavin’ our Bridgehands down in the dressing-room, and not coming on the stage with ’em stuck in the fronts of our tunics, in defiance of the Army Regulations? Rot the Regulations, and bother the Stage-Manager! How _she_ must have been nagging at him, mustn’t she?—because he _can_ be quite too frightfully nice and gentlemanly when he likes. I will speak up for him that much. Not that I ever was a special favorite—I keep myself to myself too much. Different to some people not so far off. _Twiggez?_ I’ve my pride, that’s what I say, if I am a Show-girl!

“Thirty-five shillings a week, with _matinées_—you can’t say it’s much to look like a lady on, can you now? No, but what a girl with taste and clever fingers, and a knack of getting what she wants at a remnant sale—and the things those forward creatures in black cashmere _Princess_ robes try to shove down a lady-customer’s throat are generally the things she could buy elsewhere new for less money—not but that a girl with her head screwed on the right way can turn out in first-class style for less than some people would think, and get credit in _some quarters we know of_—this is a beastly, spiteful world, my dear—for taking presents right and left.

“Now, who has been and hung my wig on the electric light? If the person considers that a practical joke, it shows—that’s what I say!—it shows that she’s descended from the lowest circles. I won’t pretend I don’t suspect who has been up to her little games again, and, though I should, _as a lady_, be sorry to behave otherwise, I must caution her, unless she wishes to find her military boots full of prepared chalk one o’ these nights, to quit and chuck ’em.

“Quarter of an hour! That _was_ clever of you, Miss Enderville dear, to shut that imp’s head in the door before he could pop it back again. Well, there! if you haven’t got another diamond ring!... Left at the stage-door office, addressed to you, by a perfect stranger, who hasn’t even enclosed a line.... Perhaps you’ll meet him in a better land, dear; he seems a lot too shy for this one. Not that I admire the three-speeds-forward sort of fellow, but there is such a thing as being too backward in coming up to the scratch—twig?

“I ought to know something about that, considering which my life was spoiled—never you mind how long ago, because dates are a rotten nuisance—by one of those hang-backers who want the young woman—the young lady, I should say—to make all the pace for both sides. It was during the three-hundred night run of——There! I’ve forgotten the name of the gay old show, but Miss de la Regy was in it with me—one of the Tall Eleven, weren’t you, Miss de la Regy dear? And we were Anchovian Brigands in the First Act—Sardinian Brigands, did you say? I knew it had something to do with the beginning of a dinner at the Savoy—and Marie Antoinette gentlemen in powdered wigs and long, gold-headed canes in the Second, and in the Final Tableau British tars in pink silk fleshings, pale blue socks, and black pumps, and Union Jacks. I remember how I fancied myself in that costume, and how frightfully it fetched _him_.

“Me keeping my eyes very much to myself in those days, new to the Profession as I was, I didn’t tumble to the fact of having made a regular conquest till a girl older than me twigged and gave me a hint—then I saw him sitting in the stalls, dear, if you’ll believe me!—dash it! I’ve dropped my powder-puff in the water-jug!—with his mouth wide open—not a becoming thing, but a sign of true feeling.

“He was fair and pale and slim, with large blue eyes, and lovely linen, and a diamond stud in the shirt-front, and a gardenia in the buttonhole was good form then, and the white waistcoats were twill. To-day his waistcoat would be heliotrope watered silk, and his shirt-front embroidered cambric, and if he showed more than an inch of platinum watch-chain, he’d be outcast for ever from his kind. Bless you! men think as much of being in the fashion as we do, take my word for it, dear.

“He kept his mouth open, as I’ve said, all through the evening, only putting the knob of his stick into it sometimes—silver knobs were all the go then—and never took his eyes off me. ‘You’ve made a victim, Daisy,’ says one of the girls as we did a step off to the chorus, two by two, ‘and don’t you forget to make hay while the sun shines!’ I thanked her to keep her advice to herself, and moved proudly away, but my heart was doing ragtime under my corsets, and no mistake about it. When we ran downstairs after the General Entrance and the Final Tableau, I took off as much make-up as I thought necessary, and dressed in a hurry, wishing I’d come to business in a more stylish get-up. And as I came out between the swing-leaves of the stage-door, I saw _him_ outside in an overcoat with a sable collar, a crush hat, and a white muffler. Dark as the light was, he knew me, and I recognized him, his mouth being ajar, same as during the show, and his eyes being fixed in the same intense gaze, which I don’t blush to own gave me a sensation like what you have when the shampooing young woman at the Turkish Baths stands you up in the corner of a room lined with hot tiles and fires cold water at you from the other end of it out of a rubber hose.

“‘Well, have you found his name out yet, Daisy, old girl?’ was the question in the dressing-room next night. I felt red-hot with good old-crusted shame, when I found out that it was generally known he’d followed me down Wellington Street to my ’bus—not a Vanguard, but a gee-gee-er in those days—and stood on the splashy curb to see me get in, without offering an utterance—which I dare say if he had I should have shrieked for a policeman, me being young and shy. No, I’d no idea what his name was, nor nothing more than that he looked the complete swell, and was evidently a regular goner—_twiggez?_—on the personal charms of yours truly.

“If you’ll believe me, there wasn’t a line or a rosebud waiting for me at the stage-door next night, though he sat in the same stall and stared in the same marked way all through the evening. Perhaps he might for ever have remained anonymous, but that the girl who dressed on my left hand—quite a rattlingly good sort, but with a passion for eating pickled gherkins out of the bottle with a fork during all the stage waits and intervals such as I’ve never seen equaled—that girl happened to know the man—middle-aged toff, with his head through his hair and a pane in his eye—who was in the stall next my conquest the night before. She applied the pump—_twiggez?_—and learned the name and title of one I shall always remember, even though things never came to nothing definite betwixt us—twig?

“He was a Viscount—sable and not musquash—the genuine article, not dyed or made up of inferior skins; blow on the hairs and hold it to the light, you will not see the fatally regular line that bears testimony to deception. Lord Polkstone, eldest son of the Earl of ——. Well, there, if I haven’t been and forgotten his dadda’s title! Rolling in money, and an only boy. It was less usual then than now for a peer to pick a life-partner among the Show-girls, but just to keep us bright and chirpy, the thing was occasionally done—twig? And there Lord Polkstone sat night after night, _matinée_ after _matinée_, in the same place in the stalls, with his mouth open and his large blue eyes nailed upon the features of yours truly. Whenever I came out after the show, there he was waiting, but it went no farther. Pitying his bashfulness, I might—I don’t say I would, but I _might_—have passed a ladylike remark upon the weather, and broken the ice that way. But every girl in my room—the Tall Eleven dressed in one together—every girl’s unanimous advice was, ‘Let him speak first, Daisy.’ Then they’d simply split with laughing and have to wipe their eyes. Me, being young and unsophis—I forget how to spell the rest of that word, but it means jolly fresh and green—never suspected them of pulling my leg. I took their crocodileish advice, and waited for Lord Polkstone to speak. My dear, I’ve wondered since how it was I never suspected the truth! Weeks went by, and the affair had got no farther. Young and inexperienced as I was, I could see by his eye that his was no Sunday-to-Monday affection, but a real, lasting devotion of the washable kind. Knowing that, helped me to go on waiting, though I was dying to hear his voice. But he never spoke nor wrote, though several other people did, and, my attention being otherwise taken up, I treated those fellows with more than indifference.

“I remember the Commissionaire—an obliging person when not under the influence of whisky—telling me that what he called a rum party had left several bouquets at the stage-door—no name being on them, and without saying who for—which seemed uncommonly queer. Afterward it flashed on me—but there! never mind!

“If I had ever said a word to that dear when his imploring eyes met mine, and lingered on the curb when I heard his faithful footsteps following me to my ’bus, the mask would have fallen, dear, and the blooming mystery been brought to light. But it shows the kind of girl I was in those days, that with ‘Good-evening,’ ready on the tip of my tongue, I shut my mouth and didn’t say it. If I had, I might have been a Countess now, sitting in a turret and sewing tapestry, or walking about a large estate in a tailor-made gown, showing happy cottagers how to do dairy-work.

“That’s my romance, dear—is there a drop of Bass left in that bottle? I’ve a thirst on me I wouldn’t sell for four ‘d.’ Spite and malice on the part of some I shall not condescend to accuse, helplessness on his part—poor, devoted dear!—and ignorance on mine, nipped it in the bud; and when he vanished from the stalls—didn’t turn up at the stage-door—appearing in the Royal Box, one night I shall never forget, with two young girls in white and a dowager in a diamond fender, I knew he’d given up the chase, and with it all thoughts of poor little downy Me.

“We were singing a deadly lively chorus about being ‘jolly, confoundedly jolly!’ and I stood and sang and sniveled with the black running off my eyes. For even to my limited capacity, and without the sneering whispers of a treacherous snake-in-the-grass, whose waist I had to keep my arm round all the time, me playing boy to her girl, first couple proscenium right, next the Royal Box, where he sat with those three women—I could see how I’d lost the prize. One glance at Lord Polkstone—prattling away on his fingers to the best-looking of those two girls, neither of ’em being over and above what I should call passable—one glance revealed the truth.

“He was deaf and dumb!—and I had been waiting a week of Sundays for him to speak out first. Hugging my happy love and my innocent hope to my heart of hearts—there’s an exercise in h’s for any person whose weakness lies in the letter—I’d been waiting for what couldn’t never come. Why hadn’t he have wrote? That question I’ve often asked myself, and the answer is that none of them who could have told Lord Polkstone my name could understand the deaf and dumb alphabet.

“Oh! it was a piercing shock—a freezing blow I’ve never got over, dear, nor never shall. He married that girl in white, that artful thing who could understand his finger language and talk back.

“Think what a blessing I lost in a husband who could never contradict or shout at me. And I feel I could have been an honor to the Peerage, and worn a coronet like one born to it. I’ll stand another Bass, dear, if you’ll tell the dresser to fetch it; or will you have a brandy-and-Polly? You’ve hit it, dear, the girls were shocking spiteful, but I was jolly well a lot too retiring and shy. I’ve got over the weakness since, of course, and now I positively make a point of speaking if one of ’em seems quite unusually hangbacky.

“‘Who knows,’ I say to myself, ‘perhaps he’s deaf and dumb!’”

“VALCOURT’S GRIN”

The lovely and high-born relict of a decrepit and enormously wealthy commoner, she had sustained her husband’s loss with a becoming display of sorrow, and passed with exquisite grace and discretion through the successive phases of the toilet indicative of connubial woe. From a lovely chrysalis swathed in crape she had changed to a dove-colored moth; the moth had become a heliotrope butterfly, on the point of changing its wings for a brighter pair, when the post brought her a letter from one of her dearest friends. It bore the Zurich postmark, and ran as follows:

“HOTEL SCHWERT, “APPENBAD, “_June 18th._”