“As Lady Silverbridge?”
“She won’t admit that she is that. She declares that she is Miss Bunker.”
“Permit me. What is her attitude toward you?”
“H’m. Civil, but chilly. I think she hates me.”
“And you want my advice?”
To this question Silverbridge nodded hopelessly.
“Then,” I added, “take her back as you took her from church.”
With the same hopeless look Silverbridge nodded again. “Yes, it is easy to say, but nowadays there is no elixir of love.”
“Indeed there is,” I retorted. “Given tact, opportunity, propinquity, and the desire and any man—who is a man—can change frigidity into affection; hate into love. But the ingredients must be fused. They constitute the elixir.”
To this Silverbridge assented. “That’s of course. But, for the elixir to work, the girl must be normal. Fanny isn’t. She is abnormal.”
“I am not so sure,” I replied. “And yet, if you come to that, are any of us normal? How often it happens that we do or say things that we had no intention of doing or saying, things which afterward we are unable to account for. In the course of every life there are such changes of personality that, could each phase of our existence be incarnated into distinct individuals and those individuals got together, so dissimilar and antipathetic would they be, that it is only a question of time when they would come to blows.
“No,” I presently resumed. “We all change. It is a law of nature. But we change so gradually that the change is unperceived. Lady Silverbridge has changed, too, only the change in her instead of being gradual has been abrupt. But she is not, therefore, abnormal. For that matter nobody is. Every being, however constituted, has his or her raison d’être.”
“Yes,” said Silverbridge, after a moment. “That is probably true. Yet, even so, I don’t see how it helps me.”
“Why, very greatly,” I replied. “The moment you recognize that the condition of your wife is normal you may proceed to administer the elixir. Your wife is a young and sensitive woman. Barring a violin there is nothing more impressionable than a woman who is young and sensitive. Take, by the way, the violin for analogy. In the hands of an artist it is vibrant with harmony. In the hands of an artisan it is discordant. Of course, there are violins so wretched that no artist could draw from them quavers other than cracked and thin. But, given a virtuoso and a Cremona, and what duos, what trios even, the conjunction will produce! A young and sensitive woman is a Cremona in flesh and blood. The harmonies, the duos and trios of which she is capable depend on the maestria of the man by whom she is approached. Now you, I will assume, are a virtuoso and your wife a violin. If you wish her to go with you to Boston as she went with you from church, treat her as an artist should.”
Silverbridge beckoned a steward and ordered beer.
“That is all very fine,” he remarked, when I stopped to draw breath. “Very fine in theory, but in practice—”
“In practice,” I interrupted, “it is finer still. You know the ingredients of the elixir. These ingredients you have. You have but to compound them, feed her with them, and once more she is yours.”
The steward approached with the beer. Silverbridge swallowed it, student fashion, at a gulp.
“Were not Lady Silverbridge already your wife,” I resumed, “the process which I am about to indicate would be perhaps inconvenient, certainly unconventional, but not impractical. As it is, it will appeal to you as being entirely proper, poetic to boot, and psychologic as well.”
Silverbridge looked at his empty glass and then inquiringly at me. But, though there was an inquiry in his eye, the melancholy and hopelessness in them abided.
“Go to her stateroom tonight,” I continued. “Go there when she is asleep. Go there when she is in her first sleep. Then whisper your name in her ear, whisper it again. Then again. Whisper to her that she loves you. But be careful not to awake her. In an hour return and whisper anew. Then leave her. The breathing of your name and the suggestion in her ear will make her dream of you, and in that dream it may be that the two hemispheres of her brain will begin to work in unison, or it may be that the one that knew you will be aroused and the other submerged. But in any event, whichever Fanny Bunker awakes tomorrow that Fanny Bunker will be yours. Then it will depend but on you to renew the harmonies you created.”
I stood up to go. For a moment yet he detained me. His face, previously drear, now was flushed. From his eyes the melancholy and hopelessness were departing.
“Is—is this receipt one of your own manufacture or—or—”
“You will not find it in the pharmacopoeia,” I answered. “But you will find it sovereign.”
“It has been tried?”
“Again and again.”
“Successfully?”
“Always.”
At this Silverbridge got also from his seat. “Thank you,” he said very gravely. “Thank you. I, too, will try it.”
With that for the night we parted. The next day I looked for him. He did not seem to be about. On the morrow, on the promenade deck, I ran into him. At his side was a beauty.
“Let me introduce you,” he said.
As he spoke, he smiled. The beauty smiled also. That smile of his and of hers supplied me with obvious deductions.
An exchange of the usual platitudes ensued. But the deductions I was in haste to examine. I made them into a bundle which presently, after more platitudes, I took with me to the smoking-room. There, later, Silverbridge joined me.
“The prescription worked all right, did it not?” I asked.
“Like an essence of bonbons,” he answered. “I am married now to a woman who is my wife.”
“But to which of them?”
“To both,” he luxuriously replied.
“Lady Silverbridge is certainly a host in herself,” I ventured to remark. “But then, so too
