J. B. bounced up with great, even unnecessary vigour, crying out: "Oh, this has got to be stopped—one of you fellows take it away from him!"
"No use now, Breck," said Archie dolefully. "That jag will last till morning."
"Jag yourself!" said Teddy epigrammatically, if somewhat indistinctly.
"Take away his glass, I say!"
"Shan't either," said Teddy, grasping it unsteadily. "J. B., for shame! You're drunk——" He got to his feet wavering; everybody was up by this time. "Doc' Vardaman, 'pol'gise—J. B.'s condition—sorry——" He tried to carry the glass to his lips, failed, and it crashed on the floor. Teddy stood swaying, he smiled benevolently upon the doctor, "Sorry," he murmured.
"Look out! Hold him up!"
"Huddesley——"
"Here—hold on——!" A chair went over. Huddesley sprang to the rescue.
"Sorry," repeated Teddy sleepily, "lead horsh to water—can't make him stop drinkin'—sorry." He drooped on Huddesley's shoulder.
"'Old hup, Mr. Theodore," said the latter amiably. "Lord!'E 'as 'ad a leetle too much, ain't 'e? Never mind, gents, Hi'll get 'im hupstairs, Hi've 'andled 'em before."
"Here's a nice how-de-do, now what's to be done?" said J. B. despairingly as Teddy was dragged off. He looked around on the suddenly sobered and very shame-faced group. Mr. T. S. Arthur could not have pointed a moral half so well as did the spectacle of that drunken lad; for somehow every man there felt himself at fault.
Dr. Vardaman was not a little downcast; he saw himself in the unenviable posture of an old Silenus, leading boys astray. "I am to blame for this, boys," he said, glancing about in genuine distress. "I—I——"
"No, you aren't, Doctor, we were all taking too much," somebody said. "And we're old enough to know better. We ought to have looked out for Ted."
"What I want to know is, what are we going to do now?" repeated J. B. And in the silence of blank looks that followed, Huddesley came back.
"'E'll do nicely now, gents," he announced cheerfully. "Hi'll go hup and get the rest of 'is clothes hoff hafter a while. 'E was aleetlefractious habout being' hundressed, but Hi persuaded 'im 'e was goin' to put on 'is costoom for 'William Tell,' and 'e let me take 'is coat like a lamb."
"'William Tell,' hey?" said Archie grimly. "It's all up with 'William Tell' now."
"Sir?" said Huddesley aghast.
"Worse than that—it's all up with 'Mrs. Tankerville,' too."
"Five minutes to nine! We ought to be there now."
"Well, we'll just have to tell them that he's been taken sick——"
"Everybody knows what that means," said J. B. impatiently. "Might as well tell the truth."
"Good Lord! What will the girls think? And Miss Baxter, too—what willshethink? What will everybody say? We'll never hear the last of it! Can't anybody—can't one of you fellows take his part? Here, Ollie Hunt—or you, Joe?"
Vain hope! "I'm doing Gwynne Peters' part as it is," said Joe, helplessly. A hurried canvass revealed the dire fact that the one or two men who were of a size to wear the dress either were already provided with parts of too much importance to be left out, or could not sing the music allotted toMrs. Gessler. Nobody remembered the dialogue in either play; but that was a small matter, if only someone could be found, a dummy, a straw man, anybody to appear on the stage and read the lines. Things looked black—and already the carriages of prompt arrivals were beginning to roll into the Pallinder gate.
"Couldn't you give him some stuff—something strong that would bring him around, Doctor?" it was asked as the old gentleman returned from a look at his guest. "They won't be surprised at an amateur performance being late—and an hour might straighten him out."
The doctor shook his head. "Nothing I know of in the whole range of medicine," said he briefly. "He's sound asleep, stupefied, dead drunk, or whatever you choose to call it—as if he'd been drugged. Mynheer Van der Cuyp's wine was the last straw—terribly strong stuff."
"I guess there's no way out of it—we'll have to give the thing up or postpone it," said Archie gloomily. "Nice job for the Pallinders, isn't it? Think of the staging and lights——"
"And the house all floor-clothed and decorated——"
"And the orchestra——"
"I'mwaiting to hear what old Botlisch will say, that's all!"
"We'll have to stand from under whenshebegins, I guess."
"Can't be helped now, fellows, we'll have to take our medicine. But who's going to tell 'em?"
"Beg parding, Mr. Breckinridge, sir, but you ain't goin' to give hup the plays on haccount of Mr. Theodore, are you?" Huddesley inquired with a face of consternation.
"Have to, Huddesley," said the doctor. "There's no one to take his place, you know."
"But, beg parding, sir, 'ow'll you hexplain?"
"Why, somehow—anyhow—get up some kind of story."
"Doctor Vardaman, sir," said Huddesley, wagging his head solemnly. "Murder will hout. Wotever story you get hup, you'll 'ave—if you'll hexcuse my saying it—you'll 'ave the devil's own time."
"Well, we've thought of that, but——"
"You 'aven't thought hof heverything, sir," said Huddesley in a melodramatic undertone. "THE PAPERS, sir!" (and nothing but the largest capitals will express the curdling whisper with which he brought out the words). "'HAWFUL HORGIES HAMONG THE FOUR 'UNDRED! PRIVATE LIFE OF HEMINENT PHYSICIAN REVEALED! DAYS HOF HANCIENT ROME RECALLED! HEXTRY! HALL HABOUT THE SCANDAL IN 'IGH LIFE!' That's what it will be sir, as sure as fate!" His face and gestures were vividly pictorial; headlines such as he suggested in letters half-a-foot high on the first page of the morning journals loomed uponeveryone's mental vision. J. B. looked at the man and again suspicion awoke within him.
"Any editor that publishes lies like that will get a horse-whipping," said he deliberately (J. B. was not born a Kentuckian for nothing). "And if any story of the kind gets out, the man that starts it will get another. If you want to be bought off, Huddesley, you've come to the wrong people."
"I wasn't thinking of that, Mr. Breckinridge," said Huddesley, cringing. "I only wanted to save trouble."
"Save trouble how?"
"Why, if it isn't presuming too much, sir, I—I could do Mr. Johns' parts, I've heard him often. I don't want to be putting myself forward, sir, but I gave him some suggestions about thebusiness, and you yourself were so kind as to say that they were good ones."
J. B. and the doctor stared at first incredulously, then with a glimmer of relief. The servant was plainly in desperate earnest. His forehead was wet, there was colour in his sallow cheeks, he twisted the napkin in his hands. But J. B., as he afterwards confessed, paid little enough attention to the changes in Huddesley's manner, singular as they were; he was too much occupied with this possible way out of their difficulty. If Huddesleycoulddo it, the day might yet be saved. No one but the performers need know it; in theMrs. Gesslermake-up Teddy was unrecognisable from the front, as also when he appeared asJenks the butlerin mutton-chop sidewhiskers. They were all men in "William Tell"; in the second play, his rôle would not bring Huddesley into offensive contact with the girls; they would have to be told, but trust Mazie Pallinder to carry off a situation like that! If Huddesley could manage to get through, some excusecould be found for his non-appearance afterwards; nobody would suspect anything, and when the truth did come out, gossip would have been staved off for a little while at least, and people rarely halloo long on a cold scent. J. B. questioned the doctor with a glance; then called to the others:
"I say, you fellows, come here a minute, I want to talk about something!"
When I meet some fellow-performer in the Pallinder theatricals nowadays we seldom fail to hark back to that noteworthy occasion before we have had out our talk. There were many of us and we have since scattered wide to widely differing lives, yet, I think for most this episode of the eighties probably bulks largest in the dun landscape of our respectable careers. This is no tragedy; we all married—or by far the greater number of us—and lived happily at times, at times unhappily, as people do, ever after. But we never came nearer to adventure. Reviewing that night with a friend, I am always amazed at the stirring events that took place within the notice of only one or two persons; we each cherish a different recollection. So much seems to have happened to us individually, it is after all not surprising that something tremendous should have happened to us collectively. Not long since, as we were discussing it in a company, someone said: "Wasn't it awful when I fell over the jardinière right out by the footlights?" Nobody else remembered the shocking occurrence! This heroine is now a comfortable matron of forty-odd with two daughters at Bryn Mawr; she has a handsome establishment, and an excellent dressmaker; her only anxiety, I believe, is her youngest son, who is a delicate child. It is strange to think of this sensible middle-aged woman, who, like all the rest of us, has lived out her romance, seen the world, suffered who knows how many griefs anddisappointments, and yet had her share of happiness, it is strange to think of her harbouring all these years the stinging memory of how she fell over the jardinière. The mind has a vexatious pet-animal trick of picking up and storing away trivialities; what would we not all give to remember what is worth remembering—and to forget!
I said we were many; for, besides the cast of "Tell," "Mrs. Tankerville's Tiara" demanded a practically unlimited number of young people in full dress for the ballroom scene. I have since suspected that Mazie, the diplomatic, selected the play for that very reason. She asked all the débutantes, and every one else who was "anybody"; and, no matter what we said, we were all sufficiently tickled to figure so publicly in a new dress, even if only for a few minutes, and in what I have seen aptly ticketed a "thinking part." Such was my own, and I was divided between a feeling of relief that I had no speeches to remember and deliver in the hollow expectant silence of the audience-room, and an inward conviction that had I been cast for a leading rôle, I should have done much better than anyone else. The performance was, of course, late in beginning; but everybody expected that, and although people had been invited for nine, many did not arrive until long after. To this day I can remember the look of the ballroom,[5]very high, wide, and chilly, rows of empty chairs drawn up across the floor, spirals of smilax twisted around the pillars—it was a hard place to decorate, so big and bare—and Mrs. Pallinder erect by the door, with a grove of potted plants behind her. She had to receive by herself, as Mazie took part in the second play, anddid not care to dull the effect of her first costume by letting it be seen prematurely. Mazie had a fine idea of dramatic proprieties, and a certain sense of climax. The colonel did not show for some reason; I believe he was downstairs, welcoming the men as they came in, to the punchbowl on the sideboard. Mrs. Botlisch had providentially gone to bed with a bilious attack; she had entertained us with a particular account of her symptoms, remedies, and their results at luncheon. So Mrs. Pallinder received, looking rather haggard, I thought, in spite of her rouge; perhaps it was because she was not wearing those famous diamonds, and one missed their generous brilliance. Jewels were eminently suited to Mrs. Pallinder; her fair hair and clear stone-grey eyes seemed to gain a needed lustre from her necklaces and pendants, and she was the only woman I ever saw who could wear an earring gracefully. That barbaric ornament set her ear like a drop of dew on the petal of a flower—there was no hint of mutilation about it; and I believe she could have sported a stud in her nostril without offence. She was placed to the utmost advantage; her delicately classic head and white shoulders were detached upon the background of dark foliage with a charming cameo-like effect. But she was all one faint exquisitely-faded colour in an ashes-of-roses silk, and that or something else more subtle made her look strangely older. She had surrendered her diamonds with many playful-serious cautions toMrs. Tankerville, that is, Mazie; and that young woman was decorating her languid Oriental person with them in the depths of her den of rocking-chairs and mirrors.
The Chorus of "William Tell" arrived a long while ahead of the stars, who, as we have seen, were dining with DoctorVardaman. Even by the time the Chorus had finished dressing—there was only one of him, as I believe I have intimated elsewhere, a tall fair young man, who wore eye-glasses in private life and was a great admirer of Mazie's,—the rest of the cast had not yet put in an appearance. I suppose if we could have known what was going forward in the Swiss cottage we would have been much exercised; but we had no apprehensions, and no quick means of communication, if any doubts had assailed us. Few private houses had a telephone in those days, not even the Pallinders—which was, no doubt, owing in large part to the inconvenient habit prevailing among telephone-companies from the earliest times of demanding quarterly payments in advance, and removing the instrument if they were not forthcoming. So far from worrying, however, we found some pleasurable excitement in the long wait behind the scenes, and stealthy peeps through the eye-hole. The setting for "Tell" was the same throughout its two acts as I recall, a Swiss picture with Alps in the background, canvas trees and foliage to the front, and a "practicable" well with a gigantic sweep, whence they brought up pails of water and diluted the contents ofTell'smilk-cans—he was a dairyman in the burlesque; this was theSchactenthal Waterfall, and was the subject of many noble apostrophes from all the actors; evenGesslerandJemmyhad something to say about it. There was a trap-door in the floor of the stage and a servant stood to hand up buckets as they were needed.
"Most people," the Chorus remarked to me, "would have had to put up a lot of money for all this. The colonel got a carpenter from the Grand Opera House, not the head man, I suppose, but some second-best fellow they could spare, toplan and oversee it all, so that everything would be safe. That's the man over there now; he told me the bill for the lumber alone would be thirty-five or forty dollars—and it's good for nothing but kindling-wood after to-night, you know."
We were sitting together on a green baise-covered mound, very much in the way, doubtless, as we watched the men getting things in position. I had no business to be there at all, but I was dressed and ready for my part, and so alive with curiosity and excitement, I could no more stay in one place sedately than a young kitten or puppy. The stolid professionals at work on the scenery endured our presence on the principle, perhaps, that bids us to suffer fools kindly.
"The Pallinders must be awfully well off," I said. My companion eyed me soberly. The Chorus was a serious and practical young fellow; at the present time he is conducting a great milling business somewhere up in Michigan. They make two or three kinds of breakfast-foods, I think, and have been extraordinarily successful. But we were not dreaming of that the night we perched together on the make-believe mound behind the swaying drop-curtain; rather must his thoughts have been occupied with Mazie Pallinder, her long serpentine figure, and sprightly drawl. For I noticed how his eyes wandered constantly in the direction whence she might appear.
"I wish the boys would get here," he said, wrinkling his brows. "It's half-after already. They're beginning to crowd in pretty thick—last time I looked all the first fifteen rows were taken. Is—ah—is Miss Pallinder going to come and help her mother receive? I didn't see her. But if she is, I—ah—I really ought to go and speak to them."
He coloured furiously at the mere mention of her name; and it struck me as exquisitely humorous that his goddess was probably at that instant producing just such a blush on her own well-tried cheeks by what mysterious agency! Pink nail-paste and talcum-powder had a good deal to do with it, I believe.
"She isn't there, and you shouldn't go in costume anyhow. Nobody ought to be seen beforehand—Mazie says so. She's all dressed and sitting in her room until 'Mrs. Tankerville,' begins. How did it happen you didn't go to dinner at Doctor Vardaman's with the others?"
"Why, I had to go down to the train to meet Susie; she's coming on from New Haven with the two children to make us a visit. Her train was due at eight, but it's five hours late—stalled at a washout just this side of Pittsburgh, the fellow at the ticket-office told me. He said all the Pan-Handle and B. & O. trains were coming in anywhere from one to nine hours behind the schedule-time. Freshets, you know; the Ohio's on a boom. They're having an awful time in Cincinnati, they say, biggest flood in years. There, isn't that J. B.'s voice?"
I beat a hasty retreat for Mazie's room, where the entire feminine cast of "Mrs. Tankerville" was by this time collected. We had to be bestowed in some place where we could talk in safety; and no talking could be allowed "behind" while the plays were in progress, even such a scatter-brained crew as we were, knew that. But from time to time one of us would steal out to the wings, watch the familiar antics, listen to the familiar jokes a while, and bring back a report. I believe we enjoyed this excited hour or two more than anything that went before or after. In Mazie's room the gasflared high; the chairs, the lounge, the bed were heaped with finery. We pulled a big pink silk screen in front of the door so that the arriving audience, taking off its wraps in the other bedrooms, might not see us. There was a green-room atmosphere (we thought) of flowers, candy, perfume, acid gossip; and now and again we could hear one of the men rushing through the hall outside to their quarters in the wing, for a change of clothes; or a thunderous burst of laughter, "like a dam giving away," Kitty said, when the dining-room door in the hall below swung open.
"It's going all right," she reported, returning from one of these expeditions with very bright eyes and flushed cheeks. She looked distractingly neat and coquettish in her black frock, cap, and short ruffled apron as the maid; and I was afterwards told that one of the men had caught and kissed her in a dark corner behind the prompter's chair. They all seemed to be in wonderfully high spirits. "Only it's so funny the audience sometimes laugh in places where we didn't expect 'em to at all! You ought to see J. B. Taylor. He looks perfectlyimmensein that kilt; I didn'tknowhe was such a big man; great big round pink arms like this! And the kilt kind of peaks down right in the middle of the back; Harry Smith called him Doctor Mary Walker; andGesslersaid he ought to have a bustle—right out loud so that the people could hear! They call thatgaggingthe part." She sent a glance of sparkling malice, suggestive, somehow, of a file of small new pins, toward Muriel. "J. B.'s thesilliest—you can't help laughing to save your life."
"Did they laugh at Teddy?"
"Like everything! He's a little husky, or else it's too much dinner, his voice sounds kind of queer, but I guess thatwill wear off in a minute." She added in a rapid whisper, as Mazie's back was turned, "Girls, it'srich! He's got himself up to look about as fat as Mrs. Botlisch in an old gingham wrapper without corsets, you know, and he's sort of taking her off, he's simplysplendid, people just roll over and laugh every time he opens his mouth."
"Is Doctor Vardaman there?"
"What, behind? No. He's not here at all, one of the men told me. He had to go and sit up with some sick person, or something. Don't you want to see J. B., Muriel?"
"No," said Muriel flatly. She was looking acutely distressed, like a large sorrowing Madonna. "I think Mr. Johns must look a great deal sillier," she said with a kind of defiance. "Or that other—what is his name?—the one that pretends to be the Chorus, just one of him—he'sverysilly!"
"How is Bob doing?" Mazie asked.
Bob was the Chorus. He was no actor; but the part only required someone with a voice, and he had a really beautiful high sweet tenor. All he must do was to appear in season and out of season and jodel, which he did to admiration, with a perfectly grave face, for as I have said, he was of a sober disposition, and to tell the truth saw nothing comic in it. But about the seventh or eighth jodel the audience fell into paroxysms of laughter and so continued whenever the Chorus came on. Bob made one of the hits of the evening, to his own great confusion and the frank surprise of everyone else in the cast.
"Bob? Oh, all right. But that's one of the things they're laughing at; isn't that funny?"
"Why not, if he's funny?" said Muriel, puzzled.
"Oh, I don't mean funnythatway, you know, I meanfunny. Why don't you come and look on a while, Maze? Bob'll do better if you're there."
"Oh, I guess I don't care to," said Mazie with indolent emphasis. "I'd tear my dress or something. It's all full of ropes and nails and pegs behind there." She leaned back in her rocker, contemplating the sweeping breadths of her dull red silk train, spangled with jets; the front of her low corsage darted light from innumerable facets of jet and diamonds. In the absence of an actual tiara, her mother's diamond necklace had been fastened on a symmetrical frame of silver wire, and gleamed abroad from Mazie's dead-black hair, arranged in a forest of bangs. Without a single pretty feature, she wrought a curious illusion of dark and brilliant beauty; and Kitty gave her the tribute of an unwilling admiration. A girl, and not a handsome girl at that, who was too lazy or too stiff-necked to walk half-a-dozen steps to show herself when she was looking her best to a man, who as we all knew was in love with her, and who would be no poor match either—such a girl, I say, commanded all the respect of which Kitty's small soul was capable.
Then I adventured again, alone; and harvested a sensation. For, while I was standing in the left wings, between two blocks of scenery, with my skirts furled as close as the fashion of the day would allow, to avoid casual tacks, Teddy Johns came off, followed by a gratifying, yet somehow a little awesome, burst of applause. He stood close beside me breathing hard, for his humour was largely acrobatic, and dabbing the perspiration from his forehead and cheeks with a corner of handkerchief, daintily so as not to mar his paint. And the audience clamoured a recall. I suppose there were not more than a couple of hundred people in the ballroom, yet the noisethey made was deafening in so contracted a space; there was something formidable and pitiless in that great insistent voice. Sudden comprehension of what stage-fright might be came to me, and I looked at Teddy with admiring wonder. What must it be to face that hydra of a creature, that thing of many souls fused into one unthinkable whole out there beyond the footlights!
"Weren't you frightened?" I whispered.
He turned towards me—and it was not Teddy Johns at all! It was a man I had never seen before.
I was so startled I could only gasp and stutter; the light was good enough, yet I thought it must have misled me, and peered into his face anxiously, expecting his familiar chuckle. His features were a mask of paint, apparently laid on at random, but as I know now, with real skill and knowledge of effect; he wore false eyebrows and a wig with a grotesque "slat" sunbonnet pushed halfway off, and held by the strings knotted under his chin. His body was padded shapelessly. And while I strove to find Teddy under this disguise, he suddenly bestowed on me a grin so vicious and repellent, that I almost screamed aloud. Whether that expression of amusement was involuntary on Huddesley's part, or whether he feigned it out of deliberate deviltry, I have often wondered. I must have uttered some sort of queer noise, for he said in a biting whisper: "Hold your tongue, you—fool!" and in the same breath was back on the stage, bowing to the tumult. He made the leader of the orchestra a sign, the instruments crashed out the opening bars of his song, and he began over again.
I did not faint or go into hysterics, for I was a healthy and after all a tolerably sensible young woman; but it isimpossible to convey any idea of my bewilderment. Fortunately it lasted only a moment or so. Huddesley made his second exit to the right, for the sake of variety, maybe; and the Chorus, crossing the stage, stationed himself in the wings almost at my side, that he might be heard jodeling "off," in stage-phrase.
"No, that isn't Teddy," he whispered, in answer to my excited murmur. "Yo-de-la-hee-ho!—Teddy's sick, that's the doctor's man—La-he, la-he, la-he, ho!—Huddesley, you know; they got him to take Ted's place, mighty lucky he can, too—Yo-de-la—hee-ho, yo-de-la-a-a!"
FOOTNOTE:[5]It was the last time I saw it; in fact, I doubt, on thinking it over, if any of us were ever inside the old Gwynne house again.—M. S. W.
[5]It was the last time I saw it; in fact, I doubt, on thinking it over, if any of us were ever inside the old Gwynne house again.—M. S. W.
[5]It was the last time I saw it; in fact, I doubt, on thinking it over, if any of us were ever inside the old Gwynne house again.—M. S. W.
Doctor Vardaman viewed the departure of his guests with mingled relief and chagrin; the evening had not ended quite according to his expectations, and he could not decide whether the disaster was his fault or theirs; perhaps on the whole, they were lucky the outcome was no worse. The young men of this generation lacked the self-control or the physical fibre of their sires, he told himself irritably; and then a queer smile twitched his lips as he remembered his own father saying the same thing. To every age its own faults, and also its own standards of judging them. In his day people used to speak tolerantly enough of a man who drank; it was held a contemptible, but hardly a disgraceful weakness. Are we grown better, or only more prudent? We go to church less, but we certainly bathe a deal oftener. The creed of keeping one's health is no such poor creed, when all is said; a man will diet to save his mortal body with twice the vigour and conviction than he will pray to save his immortal soul—and who shall say that it is not right, or at least expedient for him to do so? For after all the health of his soul is his own affair, but the health of his body vitally concerns the welfare of others. Thus the doctor, moralising a little far afield from the events of the evening; and he shrewdly suspected that to the rest of the young fellows, Ted's drunkenness was not so unforgivable an offence in itself, except for the monstrous inconvenience of it. "And I am afraid Iamresponsible forthat," he said with half a sigh. "If I had married and brought up a family, I should have known better how to manage the lads. Eh, Louise?" He uttered the last words aloud with a pensive glance at his Labrador-stones, and started at the eerie sound of his own voice raised in sentimental monologue beside his empty hearth. "I'm getting maudlin myself, now!" he thought, and went to close the hall door swaying and creaking dismally in a rush of damp, chilly air. It was raining pitilessly; it had rained for nearly two weeks. The doctor, standing in his doorway, beheld the arrowy slant of water shining against the dark where the hall light irradiated it; amongst the irregularities of his brick-paved walk small puddles showed an unsteady glistening surface. The bushes in half-leaf on either side drooped and shone. Farther away there was an incessant rumour of wheels, and he was aware of the measured approach and passage of carriage-lamps in pairs, directed toward the Pallinder gate. Doctor Vardaman watched them absently for some time, while the swift wind refreshed his house; then he remembered Teddy, whom he had refused to leave alone, slammed the door and went upstairs.
The young man was sleeping heavily, spread out upon the doctor's staid old four-post bed; not in years, if ever, had that respectable piece of furniture witnessed such a spectacle, and the doctor had a quaint fancy that it withdrew itself shudderingly from the contamination. It had been his mother's, and a kind of feminine severity appeared in its starched and ruffled valance, as of indignant petticoats. He leaned over and scanned Teddy's face, holding his own chin in his hand, with knotted brows; then he felt the sleeper's pulse, listened to his thick breathing, shook his head with aperplexed look, and began mechanically to gather up the clothes thrown here and there about the room. He went back and surveyed the bed again. "Very strange," said Doctor Vardaman. And again: "Very strange!"
He went downstairs, and, not without a sardonic grin, brought up a pitcher of ice-water, and placed it in readiness on the little old mahogany candle-stand at the sufferer's right hand. The dining-room was a woeful picture as he re-entered it. In the middle of the table, the pyramid of jellies and cream had partly dissolved and trickled down to mix with a waste of crumbled cake, cigar-stumps and ashes, nut-shells, soiled napkins, shattered china—the doctor sat down amid the desolation, likening himself to Marius among the ruins of Carthage. There was a dreary odour—an odour? Astench, Doctor Vardaman vigorously characterised it—of stale wine, stale coffee, stale tobacco. Fragments of cheese swam in pudding-sauce; spent bottles cumbered the sideboard; the door was open into the kitchen, affording a vista of plates piled in tottering heaps, pots and pans crowded on the cold range, a bowl of dishwater crowned with scum in the sink, half-eaten meats and vegetables stiffening grimly in lakes of discoloured gravy. "Faugh!" said the doctor in strong distaste, and closed the door on the depressing scene. He sat down in his place at the head of the table. Huddesley would have a job of cleaning up this squalid hole on the morrow, he thought, and wondered how the man was getting on in his new sphere; smiled, too, as he reflected that the dream of Huddesley's life was being fulfilled. He had wanted to be a "hactor," and indeed he had some turn that way, poor creature! It was strange to think how unequally the gifts of Fate are distributed: now there was Huddesley, an honestman, not at all a dull man, who, if he had been born in any class but the servant class, even in a less respectable one, might have made more of himself! That inherited attitude of servility was a greater bar to his advancement than dulness or vice; in America it might have been different; we have no definite classes, and no traditions of behaviour. But in England a man who habitually says "sir," and drops hish's—here the old gentleman came bolt upright in his chair, upon a sudden moving recollection. Huddesley had not dropped a singlehnor added one on, since assuming Teddy's character! During all the talk that had followed his proposal, and when he had hurriedly recited for them a number of Teddy's speeches, his accent had nowise differed from their own. The fact, noted in some obscure corner of the doctor's brain, now in the silence of the vacant room, obtruded itself with an unwelcome insistence. It was a slight thing, yet of a curious significance; a person could not thus at will abandon the habit of a lifetime. Say it were not such a habit, what then? Why, then the dialect was put on, like a garment; and for what reason? If that was the case, Huddesley was by far too much of a "hactor" to be officiating in the doctor's kitchen. We do not look for, nor somehow relish so much versatility in one of Huddesley's degree. Doctor Vardaman's thoughts hardly proceeded in so orderly a sequence as they have been here set down, but by vague speculative turns and windings they reached the last conclusion. He began uncomfortably to review the manner of his engaging Huddesley, and was startled to realise how little he actually knew of the man, how haphazard had been his methods of hiring servants. "I'll write to that Lord Whatever-his-name-was to-morrow," he told himself—and then had to smilea little at this access of belated caution. The whole thing, of course, was capable of some very simple explanation, he thought impatiently, unwilling to own himself baffled; there was not necessarily a dark, bloody mystery about a person's speaking in dialect one moment and in the queen's English the next. It might be that Huddesley was the exiled black sheep of some decent, even gentle family—well, perhaps, not a black sheep, but at least a brindled one, not good enough for the station to which he had been born, too good for that to which he had sunk; stranger things than that have happened. He had told a perfectly straight story; even if it were an invention, that, so long as the man behaved himself, was no concern of Doctor Vardaman's. "And when he misbehaves," said the doctor inwardly, "why, then, like Dogberry, I'll let him go, and thank God I am rid of a knave! I don't believe heisa knave, but certainly I've always had an idea he was no ordinary man. Maybe I'd better have a talk with him to-morrow."
Now that suspicion, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, a kind of doubting curiosity, had been aroused in the doctor's mind, it would not down; a dozen instances of slips or inconsistencies in Huddesley's conduct thronged upon him. He sat a long while, frowning in uncomfortable recollection; then got up at last, and halfway to the mantelpiece to get a cigar, paused again in puzzled meditation with his gaze on the floor. At his feet there lay the broken bits of Teddy's final glass in a sticky morass of Mynheer Van der Cuyp's wine, that calamitous beverage, seeped into the nap of the carpet. Doctor Vardaman gathered up the largest pieces gingerly, and tried to fit them together; that set of glasses had been his mother's when she went to housekeeping. It wasbeyond mending, however, and he was on the point of tossing the shards into a waste-basket, when a fresh discovery restrained him. He sniffed at them, sniffed his fingers, got down on all-fours and laboriously sniffed the stained carpet. He rose; "Teddy didn't drink that glass," he said aloud. "He only drank the first one Huddesley gave him. But he had been drinking all evening." He smelled at some other glasses standing near the young man's place, but apparently could make nothing of them. He went hesitatingly toward the door of a little room opening upon the hall, and at the very threshold wavered in indecision. "Oh, this is all foolishness," he said. "How could Huddesley—what possible motive——?" He opened the door. It was a dark, windowless place, little more than a closet, which the doctor had put to all sorts of uses, experimenting with chemicals, photographic plates, raising mushrooms, the hundred-and-one devices of industrious idleness. Everything there was in a kind of handy masculine disorder, and he often boasted that he could go there in the dark and pick up whatever he wanted without a moment's hesitation. But now he struck a match, and ran an anxious eye along the shelves; he breathed a little freer when he discerned the bottle he sought in its accustomed place with contents undisturbed; it was colourless stuff. "All fancy! I'm getting as notional as an old woman," he said to himself, and was turning away, when some second thought prompted him to reach the bottle down from the shelf. His match had gone out; the doctor went into the parlour, where all the gas-jets were burning wastefully high, and some red tulips he had bought that afternoon to decorate his banquet flagged miserably in the old French china vases. He deliberately removed the cork, smelled it, hesitated,touched the bottle to his tongue. "Well, I'll be——," he ejaculated, facing his own pale and perturbed image in the old-fashioned gilt mantel-glass.
Doctor Vardaman did not finish saying what he would be, but with a mechanical precision, poured the rest of the liquid into a vase of tulips. "There wasn't enough there to hurt him," he said thoughtfully. "Ithoughthe didn't seem like a plain drunk somehow. He'll be pretty sick when he comes to, but he'd be that anyway." He sought a cigar, and sat down by the fireless grate with his hands on his knees. "The question is, what next?" said he. "What is the bottom of all this? And what on earth ought I to do?"
The old gentleman smoked his cigar out with his queries unanswered, and sat staring intently at the mantel-board, his mind travelling up and down in a fog of doubt and futile conjecture. The mantel-board exactly fitted the opening of the fireplace, and was covered with pale green wall-paper, having an arabesque border in white and gold all around the edges, and in the middle a design of a Watteau gentleman and lady kissing beside a fountain at the foot of a flight of marble steps with a temple in the background. Clouds, roses, swans, butterflies and turtle-doves contributed to the scene, and on a ribbon scroll beneath one read: "Dolce far niente." It was an interesting mantel-board and at least fifty years old. The doctor stared so long and so hard that presently he experienced no surprise at finding himself on his way to morning-service at the temple with a bunch of tulips in one hand and a bottle of Mynheer Van der Cuyp's wine labelled somewhat erratically "CAUTION. POISON.Antidote, very strong black coffee," in the other. He was obliged to take passage in a boat with old Mrs. Botlisch, and whenHuddesley came around to collect the fare, discovered to his mild annoyance that he had omitted to put on his trousers—a lapse from conventionality which nobody else noticed, however. There arose a terrific storm of thunder mainly, and someone began to be very seasick—and—and——
And then the doctor waked up, with a jerk and the well-known but perfectly indefinable feeling of lateness in the air. He looked around blinking. Certain dismal sounds from the bedroom overhead accounted for one feature of his dream, and a fusillade of knocks on the front door supplied the thunder. "Why, I believe I've been asleep!" said Doctor Vardaman, slowly collecting his faculties. A pause, and then more knocking; voices muttered together, feet went to and fro on his porch, somebody fumbled for the bell-handle, struck a match and found it, and directly the bell sent forth a shattering broadside of sound in the waste and deserted kitchen. "I'm coming!" shouted the doctor, adding a brief anathema under his breath, and went to the door. Outside the rain had ceased, but a wet wind shook and tip-toed among the trees. There was a ghostly twilight abroad; it was possible dimly to descry the outlines of the landscape. Stationary before his gate the lamps of a carriage burned dimly. It was dawn! The doctor repressed an exclamation of surprise and turned to his visitors. There were three of them; one was a policeman in a shining waterproof cape-coat; he was a head and shoulders above the others, and stood back from them deferentially as one in the presence of his superiors. Before a word was spoken Doctor Vardaman observed confusedly that all three drew together, and closed up in front of the opening door, and the policeman shortened his grasp on the baton he carried.
"Somebody hurt?" inquired the doctor, following up the first idea suggested by this apparition. He was met by a counter question.
"Doctor Vardaman?" said the foremost. The doctor looked at him. He was a commonplace man in commonplace clothes, stoutly-built and active, with rather hard features and quick black eyes. The other might have been his twin, save for a certain youthfulness in his alert gaze; he leaned against the door-post chewing the fag end of a dead cigar. There was a vague hostility in the appearance of these people; in the unbecoming light of early morning, everyone wore a haggard and unkempt air, except the burly fresh-faced policeman in his trim wet-weather gear.
"I am Doctor Vardaman," said the old gentleman. "Is anyone hurt or sick?"
"No, it's all right, Doc., take it easy, nobody's needin' you," said the first speaker. "Sorry to knock you up this time o' night, but it couldn't be helped. If my train had 'a' got in on time, I'd 'a' been here not much after supper; but we're just in, I come right up from the deepo. I gotta hump myself, or I wouldn't 'a' thought o' disturbin' you. Here's my card. Say, you got a man named Huddesley, ain't you?"
"Huddesley?" echoed the doctor, in helpless bewilderment. During the above speech, which had been delivered in a brisk, authoritative, but carefully lowered voice, the speaker had walked in without the ceremony of waiting to be asked, and now stood in the middle of the hall, apparently inventorying everything in it with a swift and practised eye. His subordinates followed, the policeman halting at the door-mat and respectfully wiping his shoes.
"Yes, Huddesley, had him about eight or ten weeks, ain'tyou? Little dark, stocky fellow; talks like he was English; says he was butler to the nobility over there—ain't that him? Is he in the house now?"
"I don't think so," said the doctor, at once disturbed and resentful. "He had to go out this evening. If you will oblige me with your name, sir, and the object of this visit——?"
"You got it there on the card," said the other. "Take your time, Doc., don't go off at half-cock. I know it's kinder sudden, and I'm sorry, but I guess I'll have to pinch your man. Where is he? Where'd he go? Don't you know whether he's in or not? Who's that upstairs?"
"That is a guest of mine who is ill," said the doctor with rising irritation. "If you will please to explain, sir——"
"I gotta hump myself, or I wouldn't 'a' bothered you, Doc.," said the man, civilly enough. "Soon's you've got the sleep outa your eyes, you can just look at that card I give you. We ain't goin' to makeyouany trouble, you know, any more'n we can help, that is. Where's his room? Upstairs? To the back? Go up there and look, Judd. Here, you, one-o'-the-finest, what's your name?"
"Clancy, sor," said the policeman, and put a finger to his helmet.
"Go 'round to the back, and keep your eye out. I'll stay here. Is there any other outside-doors, Doc.?"
"No," said the doctor shortly. "Is—ah—is this your card, sir?"
"Keep your shirt on," said the other soothingly. "You're comin' along by the slow freight, but you'll get there directly. Go easy, and when you're through readin' let me know."
The doctor, diverting his astounded mind from the spectacle of a strange man of uncouth appearance and no mannersgiving orders in his house, and another strange man going upstairs seemingly to search it, adjusted his glasses and bringing them to bear on the card which the leader had thrust into his passive hand, read: