answered, with a bow, which he executed as though it were a feat, “we were talking of your charming connection, the Lady Angelica, and I was asking this young man if he knew that she had consented to marry me. Yes, Me. We settled it just before the butler—”
But the sentence was never completed. Harry exploded:
“Great Caesar!” he cried. “I don’t wonder the poor devil dropped dead. But isn’t that too jolly?” he added, turning to Maud. “We shall be connections, too.”
“What? What’s all this about matrimony?” Lord Chudleigh called out. “I say, Beamish, you mustn’t ballyrag that boy into marrying anyone of your choosing. Give him his head.”
“Thank you, Lord Chudleigh,” Harry called back. “But I wish you would give me your daughter instead.”
“His stepdaughter,” the duchess severely corrected. “Before her mother married my brother she had lost her first husband, and that, I think, showed so much savoir faire.”
Apparently, Lord Chudleigh did too. “What?” he exclaimed. “Give you Maud?”
“He saved my life,” the young woman serenely suggested.
“Hello! So he did! So he did! Pulled you out from under a runaway baby carriage, I believe. Beamish, what do you say?”
“What do I say?” answered the stock rigger, who, with Wall Street agility, had calculated to an eighth the value which this new vista of smartness unrolled, and who, in one swift, rapt vision beheld in his house a duke’s daughter handing out grand pianos and polo ponies by way of cotillon favors, and an earl’s stepdaughter distributing diamond collars and four-in-hands. “What do I say? Why, it rather strikes me that we’ll corner the market; that we’ll be top of the heap.”
“And that,” said the duchess, “shows, I think—”
Yet what it showed to the duchess no one seemed to heed. A maître d’hôtel, preceding a footman who was weighed down with tea things, had entered the salon, and was supervising their arrangement in a corner of the room.
During the progress of these solemnities Harry, who had been standing in the embrasure of a window with the prettiest little girl in the world, edged over to his father again.
“Did I understand you to say that that little fascination of the Lady Angelica only manifests itself when she is excited?”
“Well, what of it?”
“Miss Morningside and I have been talking it over, and we have decided on a wedding present for her, which, we think, may be of use.”
Mr. Beamish sniffed with sudden suspicion. “You are getting devilish thoughtful of others. What is it?”
“A nice little cage!”
“And it is thoughtful of us, isn’t it?” Harry remarked, as a trifle overhurriedly, perhaps, he returned to where Miss Morningside stood.
“Yes, indeed; but let us think of ourselves,” that young woman answered, whereupon her hand was openly squeezed.
“Hello!” cried Lord Chudleigh. “What’s all this? Maud, come out of that window and pour the tea.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Beamish, “we don’t want any more waiters falling dead. One is enough on a day like this. Isn’t it?” he added, turning to Angelica.
And the duke’s daughter, looking down at the carpet, blushed, as she answered:
“Meow.”
The Elixir of Love
“I am married to a woman who is not my wife.”
It was on a liner, after dinner. The big ship had lurched. Into the smoking-room where I sat Lord Silverbridge had lurched with it. He had dropped into a seat beside me. I had asked how he did. It was in answer to that question that he made this curious remark.
As he spoke he looked down and away and ran his long, thin fingers through his bright, thick hair.
“What!” I exclaimed.
“And she is one of your compatriots, too.”
Lady Silverbridge—formerly Miss Fanny Bunker—was a Bostonian. Of that I was perfectly aware. At her wedding I had sent with my felicitations a fish-knife. I had not been previously honored with her acquaintance. But Silverbridge I had known through a series of tolerably orgiac semesters at Heidelberg, where his name was merely Jones.
Through what miracles of Death such processions of relatives were mown that from nobody he had become peer, it is idle to burden this narrative. Yet the fact that we had worn identical student caps and fought identical student duels had eluded time; it had eluded, too, transitions and still survived. It was to this survival that I attributed the rather intimate confidence of his curious remark.
Of the purport of it I had not so much as an idea. The day previous I had embarked at Cherbourg for New York and found Silverbridge on board. It was then early in August. His marriage had taken place in London late in May. At the time I was on the Continent. It was the fish-knife that represented me. Subsequently the press supplied me with accounts of the wedding, of the bride’s beauty as well. I never believe a word I read in the papers. But of the girl’s beauty I knew by repute. In her picture I had seen that she embodied the ideal, filled the heart, and stirred it, too—just as Austin Dobson said of Autonoë—with pulse of Spring.
These things take long in the telling. But when Silverbridge made his curious remark, memory promptly ladled them out. I throw them in here to get rid of them.
“What!” I repeated.
Silverbridge looked up. “Yes,” he presently resumed, “it is beastly to boast, but I am up a bigger tree than any one you ever heard of. My wife is not my wife, and, though I am married to her, I am not her husband.”
At this, of course, possibilities of anterior entanglements suggested themselves. It occurred to me that when Silverbridge was Jones, he might, in some unhallowed moment, have gone and done it.
“You are not beating about the bush to tell me that there is another of them, are you?” I asked.
He turned to me quickly. “How did you hit on it? Is it common—in the States, I mean?”
“Common! Common!” I murmured. “I don’t know that I should quite call it that. It seems to me devilish awkward.
