People bestowed that nickname upon little Lord Garlingham years ago, when he was the daintiest of human playthings ever adored by a young mother. Shutting my eyes, I can recall him, all golden curls and frills, sitting on the front seat of the victoria with Toto, the Maltese. Japanese pugs had not then come into fashion, nor the ubiquitous automobile. Gar is the Widow’s Mite still, but for other reasons. He was a charming, irresolute, impulsive child, who invariably meant “macaroons” when he said “sponge cake.” It recurs to me that he was passionately fond of dolls, not nigger Sambo dolls, or sailor dolls, or Punchinelli with curved caps and bells, or policemen with large feet so cunningly weighted that it is next door to impossible to knock them over, but frilled and furbelowed dollies of the gentler sex. There was a blue princess in tulle with a glass chandelier-drop tiara, and a dancing girl in pink, and a stout, shapeless, rag lady, whose features were painted on the calico ball that represented her head, and whose hair resembled the fringe of a black woollen shawl. Holding her by one leg, Gar would sink to sleep upon his lace-trimmed pillows in a halo of shining curls, and Lady Garlingham’s last new friend or latest new adorer would be brought up to the night nursery for an after-dinner peep at “my precious in his cot.” “My precious” was equally charming in his Eton days, when his sleepy green eyes looked up at you from under a lock of fair silky hair that was never to be kept 231within regulation School bounds, but continually strayed upon the fair, if freckled, expanse of a brow which might have been the home of a pure and innocent mind, and probably was not. He had a pleasant treble boy’s voice and a beautiful smile, particularly when his mother told him he might smoke just one cigarette, of her own special brand, as a great treat.
“Mother’s are hay,” he said afterwards in confidence, and added that he preferred cut Cavendish, and that the best way to induce a meerschaum to color was to smoke it foul, and never to remove the dottle. But Lady Garlingham was never the wiser. She had the utmost faith in her boy.
“Gar will be a dab at Classics,” she said with pride. “Fancy his knowing that Dido was a heathen goddess, and Procrustes was a Grecian King who murdered his mother and afterwards put out his own eyes! I must really give his tutor a hint not to bring him on too fast. He will have to make his own way in the world, poor dear, that is certain; but I don’t want him to turn out a literary genius with eccentric clothes, or anything in the scientific line that isn’t careful about its nails and doesn’t comb its hair.”
Garlingham’s clothes are always of the latest fashion and in the most admirable taste. His hair is as well groomed, his hands are as immaculate as any mother’s heart could desire, and he has not turned out a genius. During his career at Oxford he did not allow his love of study to interfere with the more serious pursuit of athletic distinction. He left the University unburdened with honors, carrying in his wake a string of bills as long as a kite’s tail. Relieved of this by the sacrifice of some of Lady Garlingham’s diamonds, the kite shot up into the empyrean in the wake of a dazzling star of the comic-opera stage.
“But, thank Heaven, the boy has principles,” 232breathed Lady Garlingham. “He never dreamed of marrying her!”
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 233pair 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 234became 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 235a 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 toys............