Part 21

“I shan’t disgrace you,” said Mr. Rubelius. “My kit and turn-out will be by the best makers, and I’ll tip the ’ead gillie fifty pound. I’m a soft-hearted hass to let the letters go so cheap, but——Golly! the chance of catchin’ a twenty-pound specimen of _Salmo salar_ that a Royal ’Ighness ’as angled for in vain!... Look ’ere, your Grace”—his tones were oily with entreaty—“write me the invitation now, on the spot, and you shall ’ave back the first three of those nine letters down on the nail.”

“You have them——?”

“With me!” said Mr. Rubelius, producing a letter-case attached to his stout person by a chain. “The others are—say, in retirement for the present.” He extracted from the case three large, square, gray envelopes, their addresses penned in a large, angular, girlish hand. “Write me the invite now,” he said, “and these are yours to burn or show to his Grace—whichever you please. The others shall be yours the day I land my twenty-pounder.”

The Duchess moved to her writing-table and sat down. She chose paper and a pen, and dashed off these few lines:

“900, BERKELEY SQUARE, W.

“DEAR MR. MOSS RUBELIUS,

“The Duke and myself have asked a few friends to join us at Rantorlie on April 1, for the salmon-fishing, and we should be so pleased if you would come.

“Sincerely yours, “ETHELWYNE RANTORLIE.”

“The first letter I ever had, dated from Berkeley Square,” commented Mr. Rubelius, as, holding the letter very firmly down upon the blotter with her slim and white, but very strong hands, the Duchess signed to him with her chin to read, “that was anything in the nature of a genial invitation.”

He allowed the Duchess to take the three letters previously referred to from his right hand, as he dexterously twitched the invitation from the blotter with his left finger and thumb. “This, your Grace, will be as good as half a dozen more to me,” he observed, “when I show it about and get a par. into the papers.”

“Horrible!” cried the Duchess, shuddering. “You would not do that!”

Mr. Rubelius favored her with a knowing smile as he produced his shiny hat, his gloves, and a malacca cane, gold-handled, from some remote corner in which he had concealed them.

“Let us, being now on the footing of ’ostess and guest, part friendly,” he said. “Your Grace, may I take your ’and?”

“I think the formality absolutely unnecessary,” said the Duchess, ringing the bell.

Then the money-lender went away, and she caught up a little portrait of the Duke that stood upon her writing-table and began to cry over it and kiss it, and say incoherent, affectionate things, like quite an ordinary, commonplace young wife. For, after eighteen months of marriage, she had fallen seriously in love with her quiet, well-bred, intellectual husband, and the remembrance of the silly, romantic flirtation with dead Hugh Delaving was gall and wormwood to the palate that had learned a finer taste. How had she fallen so low as to write those idiotic, gushing letters?

Their perfume sickened her. She shuddered at the touch of them, as she would have shuddered at the touch of the man to whom they had been written had he still lived. But he was dead, and she had never let him kiss her. She was thankful to remember that, as she put the letters in the fire and watched them blacken and burst into flame.

* * * * *

“My dear Ethelwyne,” asked the Duke, “where did you pick up Mr. Rubelius? Or, I should ask, perhaps, how did that gentleman attain to your acquaintance?”

“It is rather a long, dull story,” said his wife, “but he is really an excellent person, if a little vulgar, and—— You won’t bother me any more about him, Rantorlie, will you?”

She clasped her gloved hands about her husband’s arm as they stood together on the river beach below Rantorlie. The turbid flood of the Haste, tinged brown by spate, raced past between its rocky banks; the pine-forests climbed to meet the mountains, and the mountains lifted to the sky their crowns of snow. There was a smell of spring in the air, and word of new-run fish in the string of deep pools below the famous Falls.

“I will not, if you particularly wish it,” said her husband. “But to banish your guest from my mind—that is impossible. For one thing, he is hung with air-belts, bottles, and canteens, as though he were starting for a tour in the wildest part of Norway. I believe his equipment includes a hatchet, and I think that wad he wears upon his shoulders is a rubber tent, but I am not sure. He has never heard of prawn-baiting, his rods are of the most alarming weight and size, and his salmon-flies are as large and gaudy as paroquets, and calculated, McDona says, to frighten any self-respecting fish out of his senses. We can’t allow such a gorgeous tyro to spoil the best water. He must be sent to some of the smaller pools, with a man to look after him.”

“But he—he won’t be likely to catch anything there, will he?” asked the Duchess anxiously.

“A seven-pounder, if he has luck!”

“Oh, Rantorlie, that won’t do _at all_!” cried Rantorlie’s wife in dismay. “I want him to have the chance of something _really big_. It’s our duty to see that our guests are properly treated, and, though you don’t like Mr. Rubelius——”

“Dear child, I don’t dislike Mr. Rubelius. I simply don’t think about him any more than I think about the sea-lice on the new-run fish. They are there, and they look nasty. Rubelius is here, and so does he.”

“_Doesn’t_ he—especially in evening-dress with a red camelia and a turn-down collar?” gasped the Duchess.

The Duke could not restrain a smile at the vision evoked, as Mr. Rubelius, panoplied in india-rubber, cork, and unshrinkables, strode into view. One of the gillies bore his rod, the other his basket. A third followed with that wobbliest of aquatic vehicles, a coracle, strapped upon his back. With a grin, the man waded into the water, unhitched his light burden, placed it on the rapid stream, and stood, knee-deep, holding the short painter, as the frisky coracle tugged at it.

“You’re going to try one of those things?” said the Duke, as Rubelius gracefully lifted his waterproof helmet to the Duchess. “You know they’re awfully crank, don’t you, and not at all safe for a bung—I mean, a beginner?”

“The men, your Grace,” explained Mr. Rubelius, “are going to peg me down in the bed of the stream, a little way out from the shore.”

“But if your peg draws,” said his host, “do you know how to use your paddle?”

“That will be all right, your Grace,” said the affable Rubelius. “I know how to punt. Often on the Thames at Twicken’am——”

“My dear sir, the Haste in Moss-shire and the Thames at Twickenham are two very different rivers,” said the Duke, beckoning his gillies to follow, and turning away. “I hope the man may not come to any harm,” he said. “Ethelwyne, will you walk down to the Falls with me? I”—he reddened a little—“I sent the others on in carts by road. We see so little of each other these days.”

And the young couple started, leaving Mr. Rubelius to be put into his coracle, with much splashing, and swearing on his part, by two of the gillies and a volunteer. It was a mild day for April in the North. A single cuckoo called by the riverside, and the Duke and Duchess did not hurry, though Ethelwyne turned back before she reached the Falls, below which the deepest salmon-pools were situated, and where the men, the boats, and the rest of the party waited. She had her rod and gillie, and meant to spin a little desultorily from the bank, the Haste being almost in every part too deep for waders, except in the upper reaches.

“I wonder how that horror is getting on?” she thought, as the gillie baited her prawn-tackle. Then, stepping out upon a natural pier of rough stones leading well out into the turbulent whitey-brown stream, the Duchess skilfully swung out her line, and, after a little manipulation, found herself fast in a good-sized fish.

“What weight should you judge it?” she asked the attendant, when the silvery prey had been gaffed and landed.

“All saxteen,” said the gillie briefly. “Hech! What cry was that?”

As the man held up his hand the noise was repeated.

“It sounds like somebody shouting ‘Help!’” said the Duchess.

And, rod in hand, she ran out upon the pier of bowlders, and, shading her eyes with her hand, gazed upstream, as round a rocky point above came something like a tarred washing-basket with a human figure huddled knees-to-chin inside. The coracle had betrayed the confidence of Mr. Rubelius, and drifted with its hapless tenant down the mile and a half of racing water which lay between Rantorlie and the Falls. The Falls! At that remembrance the laughter died upon the Duchess’s lips, and the ridiculous figure drifting towards her in the bobbing coracle became upon an instant a tragic spectacle. For Death waited for Mr. Rubelius a little below the next bend in the rocky bed of the Haste. And—if the money-lender were drowned—those letters ... yes, those letters, the proofs of the Duchess’s folly, might be regained and destroyed, secretly, and nobody would ever——

It seemed an age of reflection, but really only a second or two went by before the Duchess cried out to Rubelius in her sweet, shrill voice, and ran out to the very end of the pier of rocks, and with a clever underhand jerk sent the heavy prawn-tackle spinning out up and down the river. Once she tried—and failed. The second time, two of the three hooks stuck firmly into the wickerwork of the coracle. It spun round, suddenly arrested in its course, but the strong salmon-gut held, and, after an anxious minute or two, the livid Rubelius safely reached shore.

“I’ve ’ad my lesson,” said he, as the gillie administered whisky. “Never any more salmon-fishing for me! It’s too tryin’,” he gulped—“too ’ard upon the nerves of a man not born to it!” Then he got up, and came bare-headed to the Duchess. His face was very pale and flabby, and his thick lips had lost their color, as he held out a black leather notecase to her Grace. “You—you saved my life,” he said, “and I’m not going to be ungrateful. Here they are—the six letters. Look ’em over, if you like, and see for yourself. And, my obliged thanks to his Grace for his hospitality—but I leave for town to-morrow. Good-by, your Grace. You won’t hear of me again!” And Mr. Rubelius kept his word.

THE CHILD

He arrived late—long after the ship of his father’s fortune had been safely tugged into dock—announcing his entrance upon this terrestrial stage at a moment when people had ceased to expect him. I may say that Tom and Leila, having spent twelve years of married life in the propagation of theories alone, had the most definite notions upon the subject of infant rearing, training, culture, and so forth. Leila intended, she informed me in confidence, to be “an advanced mother,” and Tom, as father to the child of an advanced mother, could hardly help turning out an advanced father, even had he not cherished ambitions in that line.

The boy—for, as Tom reassured all sympathetic callers during the high-pressure first week of its existence, it undoubtedly was a boy—seemed on first sight rather smaller and spottier than the child of so many brilliant prospects had any right to be. They gave him the name of Harold, a clanking procession of other names coupled on to it, ending in Alexander Eric. And they engaged and imported a professional Child Culturist, Miss Sallie Cooter, of Washington—pronounced Wawshington—certified teacher, trained nurse, member of the Ethnophysiological Society of America, and one doesn’t know how many others, to rear Harold on the very latest scientific plan. Miss Cooter, as the intimate friend and chosen disciple of the Inventress of the System at which Tom and Leila had taken fire (a lady of literary talents and original views, who had brought up, on purely hygienic principles, a family of one, and expanded it into a multiplicity of chapters)—Miss Cooter might be trusted to achieve the desired result, and turn out Harold, physically and mentally, a prodigy of infantile perfection. Her work was purely philanthropic, and if she consented to accept the inadequate salary of two hundred a year in return for her services, Leila and Tom explained, she must in no sense be treated as a hireling.

The united efforts of the brougham and the spring-cart fetched Miss Cooter and a mountain of Saratogas from the station one spring day, and she came down to afternoon tea in the very newest of Parisian tea-gowns, which, properly speaking, is not a tea-gown at all. She was decidedly pretty, being dark, slim, bright-eyed, keen-featured, and almost painfully intelligent-looking, even without her gold-framed pince-nez. We devoted the evening to sociality, as Harold’s regimen of mental and physical culture was to commence upon the following day.

“But you shall have a little peep at Baby,” Leila said, “when we go up to dress for dinner.”

Miss Cooter agreed. “But I guess I’ve got to ask you, since the boy’s name is Har’ld, to call him by it, and no other,” she said. “Our society is dead against abbreviations and pet names. We hold that they act as a clog upon the expanding faculties of the child, and arrest mental progress. Besides, when maturity is reached, how pyfectly absurd it is to hear middle-aged men and women addressed as ‘Toto’ and ‘Tiny’!”

Tom, who has a way of calling Leila “Mouse” when in good humor, turned rich imperial purple at this home-thrust, and Leila, whose pet name for Tom is “Tumps,” called attention to the green-fly on the pot-roses, both silently registering a vow never again, save _in camera_, to use the offending appellations.

Miss Cooter was formally invested with Harold on the following morning. His ex-nurse, a plump, rosy-cheeked country-woman, painfully devoid of culture, and absolutely unskilled in the repression of emotion, was relegated, in floods of tears, to command of the laundry. Leila, compassionating the grief of the exile, would have pleaded for Mary’s reduction to the post of under-nurse; but Miss Cooter pronounced that Mary was an obstacle in the way of Progress, and an enemy to Culture, and must go.

Mary went, and Harold, at first too stunned by her desertion to yield to sorrow, presently proclaimed his bereavement in a succession of ear-piercing shrieks.

“What is to be done?” queried Leila, by signs.

Applying both hands to his mouth, after the fashion of a speaking-trumpet, Tom vocalized the suggestion, “Send—for Mary—back!”

But Miss Cooter sternly shook her head, and, bending over the cradle which contained Harold, looked sternly in his flushed and disfigured countenance. He immediately held his breath, growing from crimson to purple and from purple to black as she delivered her inaugural address.

“My dear Har’ld,” said she, with crisp distinctness, “you are a vurry little boy——”

“Hear, hear!” I interpolated, and got a frown from Leila.

“And at three months old your reasoning fahculties are not developed enough for you to comprehend that what you don’t like may be the best thing for you. Mary has gone, and Mary will not come back. Henceforth you are in my cayah, and you will find me fyum, but gentle. However badly you may act, I shall not punish you.”

Harold hiccoughed and stared up at the bright, intellectual face above him with round, astonished eyes and open, dribbling mouth.

“Your own sense of what is right and what is wrawng, dormant though it be at this vurry moment, I intend to awaken and——”

Harold, never before in his brief life harangued after this fashion, appeared to grasp already the idea that something was wrong. The expression of astonishment faded, his down-drooped mouth assumed the bell or trumpet-shape, and, rapidly doubling and undoubling himself with mechanical regularity, he emitted the most astonishing series of sounds we had yet heard from him. No caresses were administered for the assuagement of his woe, no broken English babbled in his infant ears. The Rules of the System of Child Culture absolutely prohibited petting, and baby-language was denounced by Miss Cooter as “pynicious.”

As she predicted, Harold left off howling after a certain interval.

“Now I guess you have lyned one lesson already!” said Miss Cooter. “When you are older, Har’ld, you will cawmprehend that the truest kindness on your payrents’ part praumpted the separation that has given you pain. You will have your bottle now; you will say ‘Thank you’ for it, and ahfter consuming the contents, you will go quietly to sleep.”

But it took a long time to convince the dubious Harold that the trumpet-shaped, nickel-silver-stoppered vessel tendered by his new guardian was the equivalent of his beloved and familiar “Maw.” When finally convinced, he grabbed it without the slightest attempt at saying “Thank you,” and, with the gloomiest scowl that I have ever beheld upon a countenance of such pulpy immaturity, applied himself to deglutition. Miss Cooter shook her head discouragingly.

“This child has a strawngly developed animal nature,” pronounced she—“a throwback to the primeval savage, I should opine.”

“Delightful! Do buy him a little stone ax and a baby bearskin, Leila,” I pleaded. “Think what light he will throw upon the Tertiary Period—if Miss Cooter happens to be right!”

But Miss Cooter shook her head. “He must be environed by softening and civilizing influences,” said she, “from this vurry moment. Vegetarian diet is what I should strawngly recommend.” Her eye doubtfully questioned the rapidly sinking level of the sterilized milk in Harold’s glass trumpet.

“There is such a thing as a cow-tree, isn’t there?” said Leila anxiously. “Perhaps Cope might acclimatize one in the tropical house?”

“But while the cow-tree is being acclimatized,” I asked disturbingly, “upon what is Harold to live?”

“Kindly take this,” said Miss Cooter. “May I trouble you? Please!” she repeated sternly. But Harold only screwed up his eyes and dug his pinky fists into them as his monitress took the empty trumpet away, telling us stories of an atypical and highly-cultured boy baby of her acquaintance who not only exhibited Chesterfieldian politeness at four months of age, saying “Please” and “Thank you,” and “Kindly pass the salt,” but regularly performed its own ablutions, went through breathing exercises and simple gymnastics, was familiar with the use of the abacus, and could work out sums in simple addition upon a patent hygienic slate. All these facts Miss Cooter put before us with convincing eloquence. Her language was well chosen, her scientific knowledge and technical skill quite appalling. There was nothing about a baby that she did not understand, except, perhaps—the baby.

From that day Harold lived under the microscope. Charts of his temper, as of his temperature, were regularly kept up to date; and his progress, physical and psychological, was recorded by Miss Cooter in a kind of ship’s log-book, in which data of meteorological disturbances appeared with distressing frequency. He was not precocious enough to be classified as abnormal, or sufficiently original to come under the heading “Atypical,” or old enough to tell lies, and so be dubbed imaginative. But that tertiary ancestor from whom, according to Miss Cooter, he derived his temperament, must have possessed some strength of character, for from the beginning to the end, Harold’s strongest prejudice was manifested towards Miss Cooter, his most violent attachment in the direction of the banished Mary, for whom he howled at regular intervals until he forgot her, when he became reserved, distrustful, and apathetic. His intellectual qualities were not of the kind that responded to scientific forcing. He never learned that an orange was a sphere, or a rusk an irregular cube. The india-rubber letters and object-blocks possessed for him no meaning; the colored balls of the abacus only awakened in him a tepid interest. He was in texture flabby, and habitually wore an expression of languid indifference—intensified when Miss Cooter was delivering one of her oral lectures, to utter boredom. Despite his sanitary surroundings, his day-nursery, intermediate nursery, and night-nursery, papered, carpeted, furnished, lighted, ventilated, and warmed upon the most approved scientific methods, he did not thrive, contracting complaints incidental to infancy with passionate enthusiasm, and keeping them long after another child would have done with them. And then he complicated an unusually violent attack of croup with convulsions, and Miss Cooter guessed she had better resign the case, which she did “right away,” in favor of some atypical, imaginative, non-atavistic young American citizen. When last I looked into the hygienic day-nursery, most of the educational objects it had contained had vanished—presumably into cupboards—and Harold was lying in the cotton lap of his recovered Mary, nursing a stuffed kitten, and sucking an attenuated thumb. The expression of gloomy boredom had vanished from his countenance as Mary chanted a rhyme, deplorably lacking in sense and construction, about a certain Baby Bunting whose father went a-hunting to get a little rabbit-skin to wrap the Baby Bunting in. It afforded Harold such undisguised delight that I felt sure the rabbit must have burrowed in tertiary strata, and that the predatory parents of Baby Bunting must have been the primal type from which Harold hailed. But Miss Cooter, who could alone have sympathized with my scientific delight in this discovery, was tossing in mid-Atlantic on her way to the land of the Stars and Stripes.

We were, however, to meet yet once again under the spangled folds of Old Glory. It was a year or so later, on board a Hudson River steamboat. She was prettier than ever, quite beautifully dressed, and her _entourage_ comprised two nurses (a colored “mammy” and a pretty Swiss), a perambulator with a baby, and a husband. She introduced me to the husband and the baby, a round, rosy baby, neither atypical nor atavistic, but just of the common, old-fashioned kind.

“Isn’t he cute!” she exclaimed, with rapture. “Smile at Momma, Baby, and show um’s pretty toofs!” Then she addressed the child as a “doodleum ducksey,” while I stood speechless and staring.

My circular gaze awakened memories of the past. She asked after Harold.

“He is very well—now!” I said with point. “May I be pardoned for remarking that you do not appear to be rearing your own baby upon the System of Child Culture you formerly followed with such extraordinary success?”

“No,” said the late Miss Cooter thoughtfully. “No-o!”

“Why not?” I asked, hot with the remembrance of Harold’s sufferings.

Miss Cooter considered, a beautifully manicured forefinger in a dimple that I had never observed before.

“Why not? You earnestly advocated the system—for other people’s babies.”

“Well,” said the late Miss Cooter, with a burst of candor, “I reckon because those _were_ other people’s babies. This is mine!”

A HINDERED HONEYMOON

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.