The coffee and liquor stage of a long and elaborate luncheon having been reached, the rubicund and puffy personage occupying the chair at the head of the table—number three against the glass partition, east end, Savoy Grill-room—waved a stout hand, and instantly eight of the nimblest waiters—two to a double-leaved folding-screen—closed in upon the table with these aids to privacy. The rubicund personage, attired, like each of his male guests present, in the elaborate frock-coat, with white buttonhole bouquet, tender-hued necktie, pale-complexioned waistcoat, gray trousers, and shiny patent leathers inseparable from a wedding—the rubicund personage (who was no less a personage than Mr. Otto Funkstein, managing head of the West End Theatre Syndicate) got upon his legs, champagne-glass in hand, and proposed the united healths of Lord and Lady Rustleton. “For de highly-brivileged nopleman who hos dis day gonferred ubon de brightest oond lofliest ornamend of de London sdage a disdinguished name oond an ancient didle I hof noding put gongradulations,” said Mr. Funkstein, balancing himself upon the tips of his patent-leather toes, and thrusting his left hand (hairy and adorned with rings of price) in between the jeweled buttons of his large, double-breasted buff waistcoat. “For de sdage oond de pooblic dot will lose de most prilliant star dot has efer dwinkled on de sdage of de West Enf Deatre I hof nodings poot gommiseration. As de manacher of dot blayhouse I feel vit de pooblic. 296As de friend—am I bermitted to say de lofing oond baternal friend of de late Miss Betsie le Boyntz?”—(tumultuous applause checked the current of the speaker’s eloquence)—“changed poot dis day in de dwingling of an eye—in de hooding of a modor-horn—by de machick of a simble ceremony at de Registrar’s—gonverted from a yoong kirl in de first dender ploom”—(deafening bravos hailed this flight of poetic imagination)—“de first dender ploom of peauty oond de early brime of chenius”—(the lady-guests produced their handkerchiefs)—“into a yoong vife, desdined ere long to wear upon her lofely prow de goronet of an English Gountess”—(Otto began to weep freely)—“a Gountess of Pomphrey.... Potztauzend! de dears dey choke me. Mine dear vriends, I gannot go on.”
Everybody patted Funkstein upon the back at once. Everybody uttered something consoling at an identical moment. Mopping his streaming features with the largest white cambric handkerchief ever seen, the manager was about to resume, when Lord Rustleton—whose tragic demeanor at the Registrar’s Office had created a subdued sensation among the officials there, whose deep depression during the wedding banquet had been intensified rather than alleviated by frequent bumpers of champagne, and who had gradually collapsed in his chair during Funkstein’s address until little save his hair and features remained above the level of the tablecloth, galvanically rose and, with a soft attempt to thump the table, cried: “Order!”
“Choke him off,” murmured a smart comedian to his neighbor, “for pity’s sake. He’s going to tell us how he threw over the swell girl he was engaged to a month before their wedding—for Petsie’s sake; and how he has brought his parents’ gray hairs with sorrow to the grave, and for ever forfeited the right to call himself an English gentleman. I know, bless you! I had it all from 297him last night at the Mummers’ Club, and this morning at his rooms in Wigmore Street.”
“Rustleton!”
“Order!” yelled Rustleton again.
“Order!” echoed Funkstein, turning a circular pair of rather bibulous and bloodshot blue eyes upon the protestant bridegroom. “Oond vy order?”
“Permimme to reminyou,” said Rustleton, with laborious distinctness, “that the present Head of my fammary, the Rironaurable the Earl of Pomphrey—in poinnofac’, my Fara—is at the present momen’ of speaking in the enjoymen’ of exhallent health, an’ nowistanning present painfully strained rela’ions essisting bi’ween us, I have no desire—nor, I feel convinned, has my wife, Lady Rustleton, any desire—to, in poinnofac’, usurp his shoes, or play leapfrog over his—in poinnofac’, his coffin. Therefore, the referen’ of the distinnwished gelleman who, in poinnofac’, holds the floor, to the coronet of a Countess in premature conneshion with the brow of my newly-marriwife I am compelled to regard as absorrutely ram bad form!”
“Tam bad vat?” shrieked Funkstein.
Rustleton leaned over the table. His eyes were set in a leaden-hued countenance. His hair hung lankly over his damp forehead. He nerved himself for a supreme effort. “Ununerrarrably ram baform!” he said, and with this polysyllabic utterance fell into a crystal dish of melted ice, and a comatose condition.
“Bad, bad boy!” said the recently-made Lady Rustleton, biting her notorious cherry underlip, and darting a brilliant glance at Funkstein out of her celebrated eyes as Rustleton was snatched from his perilous position by a strong-armed chorus beauty; and the low comedian, who had become famous since the production of The Charity Girl, dried the Viscount’s head with a table-napkin and propped him firmly in his chair.
298“It is not de Boy, but de man dat drinks it,” giggled Funkstein, with recovered good temper. “Ach ja, oond also de voman. How many bints hof I not seen you....”
“That’ll do, thanks,” said the newly-made Viscountess, with her well-known expression of prim propriety. “Not so much reminiscing, you know; it’s what poor Tonnie called ‘ahem’d bad form’ just now, didn’t you, ducky?”
“Don’t call me rucky,” said the gentleman addressed, who was now rapidly lapsing into the lachrymose stage of his complaint. “Call me a mirerrable worm or a ‘fernal villain. I reserve both names. Doesn’ a man who has alienarid the affeshuns of his father, blirid his mother’s fonnest hopes, and broken his pli’rid word to a fonnanloving woman—girl, by Jingo——”
“Oh, do dry up about that now, darling!” said Lady Rustleton tartly. “I dare say she deserved what she got. What you have to remember now is that you’re married to me, and we shall be spinning away in the Liverpool Express in another hour, en route for the ocean wave. I always said, when I did have a honeymoon—a real one—I’d have it on the opening week of the production on a big Atlantic liner. And this is the trial voyage of the Regent Street, and she’s the biggest thing in ships afloat to-day. Do let’s drink her health!”
The toast was drunk with enthusiasm. Two waiters advanced bearing a wedding-cake upon a charger. The bride coyly cut a segment from the mass. It was divided and passed round. The ladies took pieces to dream on, the men shied at the indigestible morsels. Somebody had the bright idea of sending a lump to the chauffeur of the bridal motor-car, which had been waiting in the bright October sunshine, outside in the palm-adorned courtyard, since one o’clock. A chassé of cognac went round. Rustleton was shaken into consciousness of his marital 299responsibilities and a fur-lined overcoat; everybody kissed Petsie; all the women cried, Petsie included—but not unbecomingly. Her bridal gown, a walking-costume of white cloth trimmed with silver braid, contained a thoroughly contented young woman; her hat, a fascinating creation, trimmed with a rose-colored bird, a marquisette, and a real lace veil, crowned a completely happy wife. Tonnie possessed nothing extraordinary in the way of good looks or good brains, it was true; but Tonnie’s wife was wealthy in these physical attributes. He possessed a high-nosed, aristocratic old fossil of a father, whose prejudices against a daughter-in-law taken from the lyric boards must be got over. He owned a perfectly awful mother, whose ancestral pride and whose three chins must—nay, should—be leveled with the dust. His sisters, the Ladies Pope-Baggotte, Petsie said to herself with a smile, were foewomen unworthy of such steel as is forged in the coulisses of the musical comedy theaters. Yet should they, too, bite the dust. In a golden halo—partly hope, partly champagne—she saw Lady Rustleton sweeping, attired in electrifying gowns, onwards to the conquest of Society. The greengrocer’s shop in Camberwell, among whose cabbages and potatoes her infancy had been passed; the Board-School, on whose benches the first-fruits of knowledge had been garnered, were quite forgotten. Some other little circumstances connected with the Past were blotted from the slate of memory by the perfumed sponge of gratified ambition. She bore the deluge of rice and confetti with dazzling equanimity. She hummed “Buzzy, Buzzy, Busy Bee” as the motor-car, its chauffeur sorely embarrassed by a giant wedding favor, a pair of elderly slippers tied on the rear-axle, sped to Euston.
“I’ve got there at last,” said Petsie, as the Express ran into the Liverpool docks and toiling human ants began to climb up the ship’s gangways thrust downwards 300from the beetling gray sides of the biggest of all modern liners. “I’ve got there at last, I have, and in spite of Billy Boman. A precious little silly I must have been to take a hairdresser for a swell; but at seventeen what girl brought up in a Camberwell backstreet knows a paste solitaire from a real diamond, or a ready-made suit, bought for thirty bob at a Universal Supply Stores, from a Bond Street one? And if nice curly hair and a straight nose, a clear skin, and a good figure were all that’s wanted to make a gentleman, Billy could have sported himself along with the best. But now he’s dead, and I’ve married again into the Peerage, and I shall sit on the Captain’s right at the center saloon table, not only as the prettiest woman on board his big new ship, but as a bride and a Viscountess into the bargain. Wake up, Tonnie dear. You’ve slept all the way from Euston, and there’s a plank to climb.”
“Eh?” Tonnie stared with glassy eyes at the scurrying crowds of human figures, the piled-up trucks of giant trunks and dress-baskets soaring aloft at the end of donkey-engine cables, to vanish into the bowels of the marine leviathan. “Eh! What! Hang it! How confoundedly my head aches! Funkstein must have given us a brutally unwholesome luncheon. Why did I allow him to entertain us? I felt from the first it was a hideous mistake.”
“Why did you let the fellows persuade you to drink more of the Boy than is good for you, you soft-headed old darling?” Petsie gurgled. She smoothed the lank hair of her new-made spouse, and, reaching down his hat from the netting, crowned him with it, and bounded out of the reserved first-class compartment like a lively little rubber ball. “Here’s Timms, your man, with my new maid. No, thank you, Simpkins. You can take the traveling-bags. I may be a woman of title, but I mean to carry my jewel-case myself. Come along into the 301Ark, Tonnie, with the other couples. What number did you say belonged to our cabin, darling?”
“The Gobelin Tapestry Bridal Suite Number Four,” said Rustleton, with a pallid smile, as a white-capped, gold-banded official hurried forward to relieve the Viscountess of her coroneted jewel-case.
“How tweedlums!” sighed Petsie, retaining firm hold of the leather repository of her brand-new diamond tiara and necklace, not to mention all the rings and brooches and bangles reaped from the admiring occupants of the orchestra-stalls at the West End Theatre during the tumultuously successful run of The Charity Girl.
“It costs for the trip—five days, four hours, and sixteen minutes—between Queenstown and the Daunts Rock Lightship,” said Rustleton, with a heavy groan, “exactly two hundred and seventy-five guineas. Ha, ha!” He laughed hollowly.
“But why did you choose such a screamingly swell suite, you wicked, wasteful duckums?” cried the bride coquettishly, as their guide switched on the electric light and revealed a chaste and sumptuous nest of apartments in carved and inlaid mahogany, finished in white enamel with artistic touches of gold, and hung with tapestry of a greeny-blue and livid flesh-color.
“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 302take 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, 303and 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. 304While 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 305like 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 ma............