If not absolutely a nincompoop, Gerald Delaurier Gandelish, Esq., of Swellingham Mansions, Piccadilly, Undertherose Cottage, Sunningwater, Berks, and Horshundam Abbey, Miltshire, was undoubtedly a type of the genus homo recently classified by a distinguished K.C. as soft-minded gentlemen. Strictly educated by a private clerical tutor under the eye of pious parents of limited worldly experience and unlimited prejudices, it was not to be expected that Gerry, upon their dying and leaving him in undisputed command of a handsome slice of the golden cheese of worldly wealth, should not immediately proceed to make ducks and drakes of it. He essayed to win a name upon the Turf; and when I remind you that, at a huge price, the youth became possessor of that remarkable Derby race-horse, Duffer, by Staggers out of Hansom Cab, from whom eighteen opponents cantered away in the Prince’s year of ’90, leaving the animal to finish the race at three lengths from the starting-post, I have said all. Gerry dabbled “considerable,” as our American relatives would say, in stocks, and started a café chantant on the open-air Parisian plan, which was frequented only by stray cats and London blacks, and has since been roofed in and turned into tea-rooms. Sundry other investments of Gerry’s resulted in the enrichment of several very shady persons, and a consequent, and very considerable, diminution in the large stock of ready money with which Gerry had started his career. But though the edges of 82the slice of golden cheese had been a good deal nibbled, the bulk of it remained, and Gerry’s Miltshire acres, strictly entailed and worth eighty thousand pounds, with another twenty thousand in Consols, and about half as much again snugly invested in Home Rails, made him a catch worth angling for in the eyes of many mothers. We have termed Gerry “soft-minded.” He was also soft-hearted, soft-eyed, soft-voiced, soft-haired, soft-skinned, and soft-mannered—the kind of youth women who own to years of discretion like to pet and bully, the kind of man schoolgirls call a “duck.” True, his neckties aroused indignation in the breasts of intolerant elderly gentlemen, the patterns of his tweeds afforded exquisite amusement to members of the Household Brigade, and his jewelry could not be gazed at without winking by the unseasoned eye; but, despite these drawbacks, Gerry was a gentleman. Without the stamp of a public school or a select club, without the tone of the best society—for, with the exception of a turfy baronet or so and a couple of sporting peers, Gerry knew nobody who was anybody—Gerry was decidedly a gentleman, whose progress to the dogs was arrested, luckily for the young prodigal, when he fell in love with the famous burlesque actress, Miss Lottie Speranza, of the Levity Theater.
Of theaters and theatrical people Gerry may be said to have known little or nothing until the enchanting Lottie blazed upon his field of vision. Gerry’s worthy parents, strict moralists both, had considered the theater as the temple of Satan, and had exacted from their only child a solemn promise that he would never enter one. This promise Gerry had actually kept, contenting himself with the entertainments offered by the music halls, which his father had omitted to stigmatize and his mother knew not of. But at the close of a festive dinner, given by Gerry to a select party of “pals,” in a private 83room at the Levity Restaurant, when a brief, lethargic slumber obscured the senses of the youthful host, the brilliant idea of conveying him to a box in the theater upstairs occurred to one of his guests, and was forthwith carried out. Emerging from a condition of coma, Gerry found himself staring into a web of crossing and intersecting limelights of varying hues, in which a dazzling human butterfly, entangled, was beating quivering wings. The butterfly had lustrous eyes, encircled with blue rims, a complexion of theatrical red and white, and masses of golden hair. Her twinkling feet beat out a measure to which Gerry’s pulses began to dance madly. He sent the goddess an invitation to supper, which was promptly declined. He forwarded a stack of roses, which were not acknowledged, and a muff-chain, turquoise and peridot, which were returned to the address upon his card. He felt hurt but happy at these rebuffs, which proved to him that Miss Speranza was above reproach; and when a bosom friend of his own age hinted that the prudish fair one was playing the big game, and advised him to try her with a motor-car, Gerry promptly converted the bosom friend into a stranger by the simple process of asking him to redeem a few of his I O U’s. This got about, and caused Gerry’s other friends to turn sharp round corners, or jump into hansoms when they saw Gerry coming. Gerry hardly missed them, though the man who could have afforded an introduction to his charmer would have been welcomed with open arms. He occupied the same box at the Levity nightly now, and made up, in its murkiest corner, a good deal of the nightly rest of which his clamant passion deprived him. But he awakened, as by instinct, whenever Miss Speranza tripped upon the stage; and the large-eyed, vacuous, gorgeously-attired beauties who “went on” with the Chorus—the Lotties, Maries, Daisies, Topsies of the noble houses of Montague, Talbot, De Crespigny, and Delamere,—would 84languidly nudge each other at the passionately prolonged plaudits of a particular pair of immaculate white gloves, and wonder semi-audibly what the man saw in Speranza, dear, to make such a bloomin’ silly fuss about?
Gerry had occupied his watch-tower at the Levity for six weeks or so, and was beginning to deteriorate in appetite and complexion (so powerful are the effects of passion unreturned), when Undertherose Cottage at Sunningwater, a charming Thames-side residence of the bijou kind, with small grounds and a capacious cellar, a boat-house, and a house-boat, a pigeon-cote and a private post-box, became suddenly vacant. The tenant, a lady of many charms and much experience, who had passed over to Gerry with the property, returned to her native Paris to open a bonnet-shop; and Gerry, as he wandered over the dwelling with the sanitary engineer and decorator, who had carte blanche to do-up the place, found himself strolling on the tiny lawn (in imagination) by the visioned side of the enchantress who had enthralled him, supping (also in imagination) with the same divine creature in the duodecimo oak dining-room, and smoking a cigarette in her delightful company upon the balcony of the boudoir. Waking from these dreams was a piquant anguish. Gerry indeed possessed the cage, one of the most ideal nests for a honeymooning pair imaginable; but in vain for the airy feminine songster might the infatuated fowler spread nets and set springs.
“If we didn’t live in this confoundedly proper twentieth century,” thought disconsolate Gerry, “a chappie might hire a coach and eight, bribe a few bruisers to repress attempts at rescue, snap her up respectfully as she came out at the stage door, and absquatulate—no! abduct’s the word. Not that I’d behave like a brute; I’d marry her to-morrow if she’d only give me a chance 85to ask her. Marquises do that sort of thing, and their families come round a bit and bless the young people. She must have shown the door to dozens of ’em.” He sighed, for where the possessor of a ripe old peerage had failed, how could Gerald Gandelish, Esq., hope to triumph? “And she’s so awfully proper and standoffish, too,” he reflected. He wondered how many years it had taken those privileged persons whom the lady permitted to rank as her friends to attain that enviable distinction. “I’ve never met a man who could, or would, introduce me,” he added, pulling his mustache, which from happily turning up at the corners had recently acquired a decided tendency to droop. “Seemed to shy at it, somehow; and so I shall take the initi—what-you-call—myself. She shall know from the start that my intentions are honorable, and, hang it! the name’s a good one.... There’s been a Gandelish of Horshundam ever since Henry the Eighth hanged the abbot and turned out the monks, and put my ancestor Gorbred in to keep the place warm. Gorbred was His Majesty’s principal purveyor of sack and sugar, ‘and divers dainty cates beside,’ as the Chronicle has it, and must have given the Tudor unlimited tick, I gather. Anyhow, if four centuries of landlording don’t make a tradesman a gentleman, they ought to; and I can’t see——”
Gerry climbed into his “Runhard” thirty horse-power roadster, pulled down the talc mask of his driving cap to preserve his eyes and complexion, and ran back to town. That night, as he quitted his box at the conclusion of the Levity performance (you will remember the phenomenal run of The Idiot Girl in 19—!), he turned up his coat collar with the air of a man resolved to do or die, and boldly plunged into the little entry leading to the stage door. The bemedaled military guardian of those rigid portals, who had absorbed several of 86Gerry’s sovereigns without winking, regarded him with a glazed eye and a stiff upper lip.
“Would you kindly——” began Gerry.
But the stage-doorkeeper paid no heed, busily engaged as he was in delivering letters from a rack on the wall, lettered S, into the hands of a slight little woman in a rather shabby tweed ulster and plain felt hat. Gerry’s heart jumped as he recognized his own handwriting upon one of the envelopes.... Surely the tiny tin gods had favored him! The little woman in the ulster and the plain felt hat must be lady’s maid to the brilliant Speranza. As she thrust the letters into her pockets, nodded familiarly to the commissionaire, and came out of the stage-door office, Gerry, his heart in his mouth and his hat in his hand, stood in her way.
“Miss—Madam——” he began. “If I might ask you——”
“What’s that?” shouted the commissionaire. As the little woman stepped quickly backwards, Cerberus emerged, purple and growling, from his den and reared his huge body as a barrier before her. “Annoying the lady, are ye?” he roared, with a fine forgetfulness of Gerry’s sovereigns. “Wait till I knock your mouth round to the back of your head, you kid-gloved young blaggyard, you! Wait till——”
“Be quiet, O’Murphy!” said the little woman in a tone and with an accent which raised her to the level of lady’s companion in Gerry’s estimation. And as the crestfallen O’Murphy retreated into his den, she said, turning a plain little clever face, irradiated by a pair of brilliant eyes, upon the crimson Gerry, “Did you wish to speak to me?”
“I certainly do, if you are any relative—or a member of the household—of Miss Speranza,” Gerry stuttered.
There was a flash of eyes and teeth in the plain, insignificant face.
87“Oh, yes,” said the little woman, “I live with Miss Speranza.”
Gerry’s tongue grew large, impeding utterance, and his palate dried up. Of all creatures upon earth this little tweed-ulstered woman, in the well-worn felt hat with the fatigued feather, seemed to him the most to be envied.
“You—you’re lucky,” he said lamely, and blushed up to the roots of his hair, and down to the tips of his toes.
“I’ve known her ever since she knew herself,” said the little companion. “We were girls together.” Gerry could have laughed in her middle-aged face, but he only handed her his card. “Oh yes,” she said after she had glanced at it. “I seem to know the name. You have written to her, haven’t you?”
“Sev-several times,” acquiesced Gerry hoarsely. “I have ta-taken the privilege.”
“A great many other young gentlemen have taken it too,” observed Miss Speranza’s companion.
Then, as the swing doors behind her opened to let out a blast of hot air and several grimy stage carpenters, and the swing doors before her parted to let in a blast of cold air as the men shouldered out, “Excuse me,” she said, and shivered, and moved as though to pass. “It is very cold here, and the brougham is waiting.”
“Beggin’ pardon!” said O’Murphy, looking out of his hole, “the groom sent his jooty, an’ the pole av a ’bus had gone clane through the back panel av the broom in a block off the Sthrand.... The horse kicked wan av his four shoes off, an’ they’ve gone back wid themselves to the stables to get the landau an’ pair——”
“Call a hansom,” said the plain little woman. “I—we can’t wait here all night!”
As O’Murphy saluted and went outside, she stepped into his vacant hutch, and Gerry daringly followed.
88“If I might venture to offer,” he began. “My cab—place disposal—Miss Speranza—too much honored——” He trailed off into a morass of polite intentions, rudimentarily expressed. The little companion maintained a preoccupied air; she was probably expecting her mistress, Gerry thought, but the conviction was no sooner formed than banished.
“You are very kind,” she said, “but Miss Speranza cannot avail herself of your offer. She sometimes leaves quite early, and by the private door, and, as it happens, I am going home alone.”
“Oh!” cried Gerry earnestly, “if you knew how awfully I want to speak to you, you would let me drive you there—wherever it is!”
Tears stood in the soft eyes of the somewhat soft-headed young man, and the heart of the little lady in the ulster was softened, for she looked upon him with a smile, saying:
“Here comes O’Murphy to say my hansom is waiting.... You may drive with me part of the way, and say what you have to say, if it is so very important,” she said, with a brilliant gleam of mockery in her remarkable eyes.
Need one say that the enamored Gerry jumped at the proposal, and they went out into the plashy night together.
“Give the driver the address, O’Murphy,” ordered the little ulstered woman. “Jump in!” she said to Gerry, and, presto! they were rattling together up a stony thoroughfare leading from the roaring midnight Strand, which in the present year of grace presents a smooth face of macadam.
“Will you have the glass down?” said Gerry.
“Too warm!” cried the little ulstered woman. “Now, what have you to say?”
“How this trap rattles!” shouted Gerry. “One can 89hardly hear oneself speak. But with regard to Miss Speranza——”
“I suppose the pith of the matter is—you are in love with her?” shrieked the little woman.
“Madly!” bellowed Gerry. “Been so for weeks. Hold up, you brute!” This to the cab-horse, a dilapidated equine wreck, which had stumbled.
“Oh, you boys! You’re all alike!” cried his companion.
“Mine is a man’s love,” roared Gerry. “I would lay the world at her feet, if I had it; and I want you to tell her so.” The rattling of the crazy cab nearly drowned his accents. “Oh! what do you think she will say?” he bellowed, his lips close to the little woman’s ear.
“She would say—Oh! do you think this man is sober?” screamed the little woman. “I mean the driver,” she added, meeting Gerry’s indignant glare.
“I don’t think he is too drunk to drive,” yelled Gerry. “Tell me, if you have a heart,” he howled, “have I any chance with her?”
“Ah! we’re off the cobblestones now!” said his companion, leaning back with an air of relief.
“And you can answer my question,” pressed Gerry. “I—I needn’t explain my views are honorable—straight as a fellow’s can be. Love like mine is——”
“So dreadfully greasy!” commented his companion anxiously, as the debilitated steed recovered himself with difficulty at the end of a long slide.
“When I have been sitting, night after night, in that box looking at her, thinking of her, worshiping her, by George!” went on Gerry, “she must have sometimes noticed me, and said to herself——”
“I knew he would go down!” cried the little woman, clutching Gerry’s arm, as the steed disappeared and the shaft-ends bumped on the asphalt. “Let’s get out!”
90“Don’t be alarmed, lydy,” said a hoarse voice, through the trap overhead, as the panting steed heaved and struggled to regain his hoofs. “’E won’t do it agen this journey. One fall is ’is allowance, an’ ’e never goes beyond.”
“And we’re quite close to Pelgrave Square,” said Gerry.
“How do you know Miss Speranza lives in Pelgrave Square?” said his companion with a keen look.
“Because I’ve seen photogravings of her house in an illustrated interview,” replied Gerry.
“Ah, of course,” said the little lady, with a thoughtful smile. The steed, bearing out his driver’s recommendation, was now jogging along reassuringly enough. “And did the portraits remind you of no one?” she added, with another of those flashing smiles that invested her little fatigued features with transient youth.
“They weren’t half beautiful enough for her,” said Gerry fervently. Then a ray of light broke upon him, and he jumped. “You—you’re a little bit like her!” he exclaimed. “What a blind duffer I am! I’ve been taking you for her companion, and all the while you’re a relative.”
“Yes, I am a relative,” nodded the little lady.
“Her aunt!” hazarded Gerry.
“Her mother!” said the little lady, with a dazzling flash of eyes and teeth. “How stupid you were not to guess it before!”
“I’ve said nothing, madam, that I should not, I trust,” remarked Gerry, with quite a seventeenth-century manner. “And, therefore, when I entreat you to allow me an interview with your daughter, I trust you will not refuse to grant my—my prayer.”
“Hear the boy!” cried the little woman, with a trill of laughter, as the cab pulled up before a large lighted house in a large darkish square. “Well,” she added, “I 91think I can promise you that Lottie will see you at least for a minute or two to-morrow. Not here—at the theater, seven o’clock sharp. Lend me a pencil and one of your cards.” She scribbled a word or two on the bit of pasteboard, paid the cab in spite of Gerry’s protestations, and ran lightly up the solemn doorsteps, turned to the enraptured young man standing, hat in hand, below, waved her hand, plunged a Yale key into the keyhole—and instantly vanished from view.
Behind Gerry’s shirt-front throbbed tumultuous delight. To have driven in a cab with her mother—talked of her, told his tale of love—albeit with interruptions—and won the promise of an interview at seven sharp upon the morrow.... Unprecedented fortune! incomparable luck! Did Time itself cease he would not fail to keep the tryst with punctuality. He caught a passing cab, drove home to his Piccadilly chambers, and went to bed so blissfully happy that he spent a wretchedly bad night. The card he kept beneath his pillow; and true to the promise made by the mother of the enchantress of his soul—when, punctually to the stroke of seven, Gerry, dressed with the most excruciating care, and clammy with repressed emotion, presented himself at the stage door of the Levity—the scrawled hieroglyphics on the blessed piece of pasteboard admitted him behind the scenes. Led by a smartly-aproned maid, he climbed stairs, he crossed the stage, was jostled by baize-aproned men in paper caps, and begged their pardon. He followed his guide down a short passage, fell up three steps—and knocked with his burning brow against the door—her door! A voice he knew said, “Come in!” and in he went, to find, not the adored, the worshiped Lottie, but the little plainish lady of the previous night, sitting at a lace-veiled dressing-table, attired in a Japanese gown.
“Oh, I say!” murmured Gerry.
92“Ah! there you are!” The little lady looked at him over her shoulder, and nodded kindly. “Don’t be too disappointed at not finding Lottie here,” she said cheerfully; “she won’t be long.”
“I’m so awfully obliged for all your kindness,” said Gerry, sheepishly smiling over a giant bouquet.
“You shall be really grateful to me one of these days, I promise you,” said the little lady. “Let my maid take that haysta—that bouquet, and sit down, do!”
Gerry took the indicated chair beside the dressing-table, and noted, as he sucked the top of his stick, how pitilessly the relentless radiance of the electric light accentuated the worn lines of the little lady’s face and the gray streaks in her still soft and pretty brown hair.
“Cheer up!” she said, turning one of her flashing smiles upon him as he sadly sucked his stick. “You won’t have long to wait for Lottie!”
“No!” said Gerry rather vacuously.
“No!” said Lottie’s mother, pulling off some very handsome rings and hanging them upon the horns of a coral lobster that adorned the dressing-table. “She takes about twenty minutes to make up.” Her pretty, white, carefully-manicured fingers busied themselves, as she talked, with various little pots and bottles and rolls of a mysterious substance of a pinky hue, not unlike the peppermint suck-stick of Gerry’s youth. “And are you as much in love with her to-day,” she continued, “as you were last night?”
“So much in love,” said Gerry, uncorking himself, “that to call her my wife I would sacrifice everything.”
“To call her your wife?” The little lady pushed her hair back from her face, twisted it tightly up behind, and pinned it flat with a relentless hairpin.
“To make her my wife,” Gerry amended, with a healthy blush.
“Ah!” said the little lady, who had covered her 93entire countenance, ears, and neck with a shiny mask of pinkish paste. “A word makes such a difference.” She dipped a hare’s-foot into a saucer of rouge, and with this compound impartially, as it seemed to Gerry, incarnadined her cheeks and chin. “Of course,” she went on, dipping a disemboweled powder-puff into a pot of French chalk and deftly applying it, “you are aware that she possesses in years the advantage of yourself.”
“I am twenty-three,” said Gerry proudly.
“She owns to more than that!” said the lovely Lottie’s mother. She had reddened her mouth, hitherto obliterated by the paste, into an alluring Cupid’s bow, and darkened in, above her wonderfully brilliant eyes, a pair of arch-provoking eyebrows. Now, as some inkling of the fateful revelation in store clamped Gerry’s jaws upon his stick and twined his legs in a death-grip about the supports of his chair, she rapidly, with a blue pencil, imparted to those brilliant eyes the Oriental languor, the divinely alluring, almond-lidded droop that distinguished Lottie’s, seized a tooth-brush, dipped it into a bottle, apparently of liquid soot, rapidly blackened her eyelashes, indicated with rose-pink a dimple on her chin, groped for a moment in a cardboard box that stood upon the ledge of her toilet table, produced a golden wig of streaming tresses, dexterously assumed it, pulled here, patted there, twisted a brow-tendril into shape—and turning, shed upon the paralyzed Gerry the smile that had enchained his heart.
“I told you Lottie would not be long,” said Lottie, “and I’ve made up under twenty minutes. You dear, silly, honorable, romantic boy, don’t stare in that awful way. Twenty-three indeed! And I told you I owned to more! I ought to, for I have a son at Harrow, and a daughter of seventeen besides.... Do try and shut your mouth. Why, you poor dear goose, I was making 94my bow to the boys in the gallery when you were playing with a Noah’s Ark. Shake hands, and go round in front and see me do my piece, as usual. I’ve got used to that nice fresh face of yours up in Box B, and applause is the breath of my nostrils, if I am old enough to be your mother. Leave your flowers; my girl at home has got quite to look out for them—and be off with you, because this”—she indicated the French chalk—“has got to go farther!” She gave Gerry her pretty hand and one of the brilliant smiles, as he blundered up from his chair, gasping apologies.
“Come and lunch with us to-morrow. You know my address, and I’ve told the Professor all about you. You’ll like the Professor—my husband. One of the best, though his wife says it. And the children——”
“Can I come in, mother?” said a clear voice outside.
“All right, pet!” called back Gerry’s late goddess, and a girl of seventeen came into the room. She was all that Gerry had dreamed.... His frozen blood began to thaw, and his tongue found words. Here was the ideal.
“But her name isn’t Lottie!” said his dethroned goddess, with a twinkle of the wondrous eyes. “However, you’re coming to lunch to-morrow, aren’t you?”
“With the greatest pleasure,” said Gerry. And as he went round to his box he carefully obliterated the name from the portrait cherished in his bosom for so many weeks, with the intention of filling it in with another to-morrow.