The hands of the Dresden clock upon the white travertine mantelshelf of Lady Sidonia’s boudoir pointed to the small hours. There was a discreet knock at the door. The maid, a pale, pretty young woman, who was wielding the hair-brush, laid the weapon down, and answered the knock. “Who is it, Pauline?” asked Pauline’s mistress, with her eyes upon the mirror, which certainly framed a picture well worth looking at.
“Her Grace’s maid, my lady, asking whether you are too tired for a chat?”
“Say that I shall be delighted, and give me the blue Japanese kimono instead of this pink thing. Will my hair do? Because, if it needs no more brushing, you can go to bed.”
“Thank you, my lady.”
The door opened; trailing silks swept over the carpet....
“I can’t kiss you through all this brown-gold silk,” said the Duchess’s voice. “Stop, though! You shall have it on the top of your head.” And the kiss descended, light as a puff of thistle-down. “I kiss Cull there sometimes, when I want him to be in a good temper. He says it thrills right down to the tips of his toes.... You’re smiling! I guess you think the stock of thrills ought to be exhausted by this time—three years since we stood up together on the deck of Cluny F. Farradaile’s anchored airship, a posse of detectives from Blueberry Street guarding the ends of the fore and aft 120cables, where they were anchored three hundred feet below in the grounds of the N’York ?ther Club, just to prevent any one of the dozens of Society girls who’d tried their level best to catch Cull and failed, from coming along with a bowie and cutting ’em.... You remember the pars. in all the papers, headed, ‘A Marriage Made in Heaven,’ I guess?”
“Of course, of course,” said the Duchess’s hostess and dearest friend.
“My invention,” said her Grace, “and mighty smart, I reckon. I’d always said I’d be married in a real original way—and I was. The only drawback to the affair was that she pitched—I mean the airship—and the Minister, and Cull, and Poppa, and the inventor—that’s Cluny F. Farradaile—were taken poorly before the close of the cer’mony. As for my sex, I’m proud to say that Amurrican women can rise superior even to air-sickness when Paris frocks are in question. But when they wound us down we were glad enough to get back to dry land. We found a representative of the Customs waiting for us, by the way; and if Poppa hadn’t gone to law about it, and proved that we were really fixed on to the States by our cables, we’d have had to plank down the duty on every jewel we’d got on. Say, pet, I’m perishing for a smoke!”
The Duchess was supplied with cigarettes. Pauline placed upon a little table the materials that “factorize,” as the Duchess would have said, towards the composition of cognac and soda, and glided out.
“Now I call that a real pretty, meek-looking creature,” said her Grace, blowing a little flight of smoke rings in the direction of the door. “If she’s as clever as she’s nice, Siddie, you’ve got a treasure!”
“She is a good maid,” responded Lady Sidonia. “For one thing, she knows a great deal about the toilette, and on the subject of the complexion she’s really quite an 121authority. She knows something of massage, too—on the American system—for, though an English girl, she has lived in your country——”
“Oh!” said the Duchess, with an accent of interest. “Has she, indeed?”
“She’s reasonable, too,” went on the maid’s mistress; “and not a limpet in the way of sticking to one mode of doing the hair and refusing to learn any other. Then she can wave——”
“It is an accomplishment,” said the Duchess thoughtfully. “Now, my woman either frizzes you like a Fiji, or leaves you dank and straight like a mermaid. Why does hair never wave naturally—out of a novel? It’s a question for a Convention. And men—dear idiots!—are such believers in the reality of ripples. There! I’ve been implored over and over again for ‘just that little bit with the wave in it’ to keep in a locket—hundreds and hundreds of times. I guess Cull’s wiser now; but once you’ve seen your husband’s teeth in a tumbler, you’ve entered into a Conjugal Reciprocity Convention: ‘Believe in me—not as much of me as really belongs to me, but as much as you see—and I’ll return the compliment!’ Yes, I guess I’ll take some S. and B. It’s an English accomplishment, and I’ve mastered it thoroughly. We Amurricans rinse out with Apollinaris or ice-water, which isn’t half so comforting, especially in trouble.”
And the Duchess heaved a butterfly’s sigh, which scarcely stirred her filmy laces, and smoothed her prettiest eyebrow with one exquisite finger-tip.
“Trouble!” exclaimed her friend. “My dear, you’re the happiest of women. Don’t try to persuade me that you’ve got a silent sorrow!”
“Not exactly a silent one, because I’m going to confide in you; but still it is a sorrow.” The Duchess confided one hand to her dearest friend’s consoling clasp, 122and wiped away a tear with a minute handkerchief that would not have dried half a dozen. “Perhaps Amurrican blood is warmer than English; but, anyhow, our family affections are vurry much more strongly developed over in the States than yours are here. And I had a letter from Momma by yesterday’s mail that would have melted a heart of rock.” She dried a second tear. “If Momma lives till the end of Creation,” she said, “she will never, never get over it. And I don’t wonder!”
“Darling, if it would really do you any good to tell me——” breathed Lady Sidonia.
“I tell all my friends,” said the Duchess with a sigh; “and they’re invariably of one opinion—that Momma was cruelly victimized.”
“She is——”
“Call her forty, dear. It would be just cruel to say anything more. People call me lovely and all those things,” said the Duchess candidly, “and I allow they’re correct. Well, compared with what Momma was at my age, I’m real ordinary.”
“Oh!”
“Frozen fact! And you can grasp the idea that when—in spite of every effort—Momma began to lose her figure and her looks, she felt it!”
“Every woman must!”
“But the more she felt it, the more she seemed to expand.... Grief runs to fat, I do believe,” said the Duchess. “Of course, Poppa’s allowance to Momma being liber’l—even for a Corn King—she had unlimited funds at her disposal. To begin with, she rented a medical specialist.”
“Who dieted her?”
“My dear, for a woman accustomed to French cookery, and with the national predilection for cookies and candy, it must have been——”
“Torture!”
123“One gluten biscuit and the eye of a mutton cutlet for dinner. Think of it! Beef-juice and dry toast for breakfast, ditto for supper. And she used to skip—a woman of that size, too—for hours! And her trainers came every morning at five o’clock, and they’d make her just put on a sweater and take her between them for a sharp trot round Central Park, just as if she’d been a gentleman jockey sworn to ride at so many stone for a Plate. And the number of stone Momma got off——”
“She got them off?”
“I guess she got them off,” said the Duchess. “Poppa talked of having an elegant tombstone set up in Central Park to commemorate the greater portion of a wife buried there! then he gave up the notion. And then Momma made handsome presents to her specialist and her trainers, and contracted with the cleverest operator in N’York to make a face.”
“To make a face?” repeated Lady Sidonia.
“To make a face for Momma that matched her youthful figure,” said the Duchess composedly. “My! the time that man took in creating a surface to work on! She slept for a fortnight with her countenance covered with slices of raw veal.”
“Horrible!” shuddered the listener.
“And the massaging and steaming that went on!”
“I can imagine!”
“The foundations being properly laid——” continued the Duchess, lighting another cigarette.
Lady Sidonia went into a little uncontrollable shriek of laughter. “As though ... she had been a house!... Ha, ha, ha!”
“My dear,” returned the Duchess, shaking her beautiful head, “the terms employed in the contract were precisely those I have quoted.... The specialist laid the foundations, and carried the contract out. Momma’s appearance delighted everyone, except Poppa, who has 124old-fashioned notions, and complained of feeling shy in the presence of a stranger. Fortunately their Silver Wedding eventuated just then, and his conscience—Poppa’s conscience is, for a corn speculator’s, wonderfully sensitive—ceased to annoy him.”
“And your mother?”
“Momma wore her new face for six months with the greatest satisfaction,” said the Duchess. “Of course, she had to lay up for repairs pretty often, but the specialist was there to carry them out. Unluckily, he contracted a severe chill in the N’York winter season and died. His wife put his tools and enamels and things in his coffin. She said she knew business would be brisk when he got up again, and she didn’t wish any other speculator to chip in before him.” The Duchess sighed. “Then came Momma’s great trouble.”
“There was no other operator to—take up the—the contract?” hinted Lady Sidonia.
“There were dozens,” said the Duchess, “and Momma tried them all. My dear, you may surmise what she looked like.”
“A heterogeneous mingling of styles.”
“It was impossible to conjecture,” said the Duchess confidentially, “to what period the original structure belonged. By day Momma resorted to a hat and voile.”
“Even in the house?”
“Even in the house. By night—well, I guess you’ve noticed that a human work of art, illuminated by electric light, isn’t seen under the most favorable conditions.”
“There is a pitiless accuracy!”
“An unmerciful candor about its revelations. After one unusually brilliant reception, Momma retired from society and took to spiritualism. She persevered until she had materialized that demised face-specialist, and extracted some definite raps in the way of advice.”
“And what did he advise?”
125“He suggested, through the medium, that Momma should apply to the Milwaukee Mentalists.”
“A Society of Faith Healers?”
“‘Occult Operatists,’ they call themselves on the prospectuses. As for the cult of the Society,” said the Duchess pensively, “one might call it a mayonnaise of Freemasonry, Theosophy, Hypnotism, Humbug, and Hoodoo. But the humbug, like salad oil in the mayonnaise, was the chief ingredient.” The Duchess stopped to draw breath.
“And into this vortex Mrs. Van Wacken was drawn?” sighed Lady Sidonia.
“Sucked down and swallowed,” said the Duchess, who had been Miss Van Wacken. “They undertook to make Momma right over again, brand new, by prayer and faith and—a mentally electrified bath. For which treatment Momma was to pay ten thousand down.”
“Pounds!” shrieked the horrified Lady Sidonia.
“Dollars,” corrected the Duchess.
“In advance?” cried the listener.
“In advance, after a demonstration had been given which was practically to satisfy Momma that the Milwaukee Mentalists were square,” said the Duchess. “My word! when I remember how they bluffed that poor darling—I should want to laugh, if I didn’t cry.” She dried another tear.
“Do go on!” entreated her friend.
“The High Priestess of the Community was a woman,” went on the Duchess, “just as cool and ca’am and cunning as they make ’em.”
“I guessed as much,” said Lady Sidonia.
“It takes a woman to know and work on another woman’s weak points,” rejoined the Duchess. “The High Priestess pretended to be in communication with a spirit. &l............