Section 2 of 7 - Table of Contents
CHAPTER IV.
The day wore itself out. After dinner the two friends put in a long and
harassing evening trying to decide what to do with the five thousand
dollars reward which they were going to get when they should find One-
Armed Pete, and catch him, and prove him to be the right person, and
extradite him, and ship him to Tahlequah in the Indian Territory. But
there were so many dazzling openings for ready cash that they found it
impossible to make up their minds and keep them made up. Finally, Mrs.
Sellers grew very weary of it all, and said:
"What is the sense in cooking a rabbit before it's caught?"
Then the matter was dropped, for the time being, and all went to bed.
Next morning, being persuaded by Hawkins, the colonel made drawings and
specifications and went down and applied for a patent for his toy puzzle,
and Hawkins took the toy itself and started out to see what chance there
might be to do something with it commercially. He did not have to go
far. In a small old wooden shanty which had once been occupied as a
dwelling by some humble negro family he found a keen-eyed Yankee engaged
in repairing cheap chairs and other second-hand furniture. This man
examined the toy indifferently; attempted to do the puzzle; found it not
so easy as he had expected; grew more interested, and finally
emphatically so; achieved a success at last, and asked:
"Is it patented?"
"Patent applied for."
"That will answer. What do you want for it?"
"What will it retail for?"
"Well, twenty-five cents, I should think."
"What will you give for the exclusive right?"
"I couldn't give twenty dollars, if I had to pay cash down; but I'll tell
you what I'll do. I'll make it and market it, and pay you five cents
royalty on each one."
Washington sighed. Another dream disappeared; no money in the thing.
So he said:
"All right, take it at that. Draw me a paper." He went his way with the
paper, and dropped the matter out of his mind dropped it out to make room
for further attempts to think out the most promising way to invest his
half of the reward, in case a partnership investment satisfactory to both
beneficiaries could not be hit upon.
He had not been very long at home when Sellers arrived sodden with grief
and booming with glad excitement--working both these emotions
successfully, sometimes separately, sometimes together. He fell on
Hawkins's neck sobbing, and said:
"Oh, mourn with me my friend, mourn for my desolate house: death has
smitten my last kinsman and I am Earl of Rossmore--congratulate me!"
He turned to his wife, who had entered while this was going on, put his
arms about her and said--"You will bear up, for my sake, my lady--it had
to happen, it was decreed."
She bore up very well, and said:
"It's no great loss. Simon Lathers was a poor well-meaning useless thing
and no account, and his brother never was worth shucks."
The rightful earl continued:
"I am too much prostrated by these conflicting griefs and joys to be able
to concentrate my mind upon affairs; I will ask our good friend here to
break the news by wire or post to the Lady Gwendolen and instruct her
to--"
"What Lady Gwendolen?"
"Our poor daughter, who, alas!--"
"Sally Sellers? Mulberry Sellers, are you losing your mind?"
"There--please do not forget who you are, and who I am; remember your own
dignity, be considerate also of mine. It were best to cease from using
my family name, now, Lady Rossmore."
"Goodness gracious, well, I never! What am I to call you then?"
"In private, the ordinary terms of endearment will still be admissible,
to some degree; but in public it will be more becoming if your ladyship
will speak to me as my lord, or your lordship, and of me as Rossmore, or
the Earl, or his Lordship, and--"
"Oh, scat! I can't ever do it, Berry."
"But indeed you must, my love--we must live up to our altered position
and submit with what grace we may to its requirements."
"Well, all right, have it your own way; I've never set my wishes against
your commands yet, Mul--my lord, and it's late to begin now, though to my
mind it's the rottenest foolishness that ever was."
"Spoken like my own true wife! There, kiss and be friends again."
"But--Gwendolen! I don't know how I am ever going to stand that name.
Why, a body wouldn't know Sally Sellers in it. It's too large for her;
kind of like a cherub in an ulster, and it's a most outlandish sort of a
name, anyway, to my mind."
"You'll not hear her find fault with it, my lady."
"That's a true word. She takes to any kind of romantic rubbish like she
was born to it. She never got it from me, that's sure. And sending her
to that silly college hasn't helped the matter any--just the other way."
"Now hear her, Hawkins! Rowena-Ivanhoe College is the selectest and most
aristocratic seat of learning for young ladies in our country. Under no
circumstances can a girl get in there unless she is either very rich and
fashionable or can prove four generations of what may be called American
nobility. Castellated college-buildings--towers and turrets and an
imitation moat--and everything about the place named out of Sir Walter
Scott's books and redolent of royalty and state and style; and all the
richest girls keep phaetons, and coachmen in livery, and riding-horses,
with English grooms in plug hats and tight-buttoned coats, and top-boots,
and a whip-handle without any whip to it, to ride sixty-three feet behind
them--"
"And they don't learn a blessed thing, Washington Hawkins, not a single
blessed thing but showy rubbish and un-american pretentiousness. But
send for the Lady Gwendolen--do; for I reckon the peerage regulations
require that she must come home and let on to go into seclusion and mourn
for those Arkansas blatherskites she's lost."
"My darling! Blatherskites? Remember--noblesse oblige."
"There, there--talk to me in your own tongue, Ross--you don't know any
other, and you only botch it when you try. Oh, don't stare--it was a
slip, and no crime; customs of a life-time can't be dropped in a second.
Rossmore--there, now, be appeased, and go along with you and attend to
Gwendolen. Are you going to write, Washington?--or telegraph?"
"He will telegraph, dear."
"I thought as much," my lady muttered, as she left the room. "Wants it
so the address will have to appear on the envelop. It will just make a
fool of that child. She'll get it, of course, for if there are any other
Sellerses there they'll not be able to claim it. And just leave her
alone to show it around and make the most of it. Well, maybe she's
forgivable for that. She's so poor and they're so rich, of course she's
had her share of snubs from the livery-flunkey sort, and I reckon it's
only human to want to get even."
Uncle Dan'l was sent with the telegram; for although a conspicuous object
in a corner of the drawing-room was a telephone hanging on a transmitter,
Washington found all attempts to raise the central office vain. The
Colonel grumbled something about its being "always out of order when
you've got particular and especial use for it," but he didn't explain
that one of the reasons for this was that the thing was only a dummy and
hadn't any wire attached to it. And yet the Colonel often used it--when
visitors were present--and seemed to get messages through it. Mourning
paper and a seal were ordered, then the friends took a rest.
Next afternoon, while Hawkins, by request, draped Andrew Jackson's
portrait with crape, the rightful earl, wrote off the family bereavement
to the usurper in England--a letter which we have already read. He also,
by letter to the village authorities at Duffy's Corners, Arkansas, gave
order that the remains of the late twins be embalmed by some St. Louis
expert and shipped at once to the usurper--with bill. Then he drafted
out the Rossmore arms and motto on a great sheet of brown paper, and he
and Hawkins took it to Hawkins's Yankee furniture-mender and at the end
of an hour came back with a couple of stunning hatchments, which they
nailed up on the front of the house--attractions calculated to draw, and
they did; for it was mainly an idle and shiftless negro neighborhood,
with plenty of ragged children and indolent dogs to spare for a point of
interest like that, and keep on sparing them for it, days and days
together.
The new earl found--without surprise--this society item in the evening
paper, and cut it out and scrapbooked it:
By a recent bereavement our esteemed fellow citizen, Colonel
Mulberry Sellers, Perpetual Member-at-large of the Diplomatic Body,
succeeds, as rightful lord, to the great earldom of Rossmore, third
by order of precedence in the earldoms of Great Britain, and will
take early measures, by suit in the House of Lords, to wrest the
title and estates from the present usurping holder of them. Until
the season of mourning is past, the usual Thursday evening
receptions at Rossmore Towers will be discontinued.
Lady Rossmore's comment-to herself:
"Receptions! People who don't rightly know him may think he is
commonplace, but to my mind he is one of the most unusual men I ever saw.
As for suddenness and capacity in imagining things, his beat don't exist,
I reckon. As like as not it wouldn't have occurred to anybody else to
name this poor old rat-trap Rossmore Towers, but it just comes natural to
him. Well, no doubt it's a blessed thing to have an imagination that can
always make you satisfied, no matter how you are fixed. Uncle Dave
Hopkins used to always say, 'Turn me into John Calvin, and I want to know
which place I'm going to; turn me into Mulberry Sellers and I don't
care.'"
The rightful earl's comment-to himself:
"It's a beautiful name, beautiful. Pity I didn't think of it before I
wrote the usurper. But I'll be ready for him when he answers."
CHAPTER V.
No answer to that telegram; no arriving daughter. Yet nobody showed any
uneasiness or seemed surprised; that is, nobody but Washington. After
three days of waiting, he asked Lady Rossmore what she supposed the
trouble was. She answered, tranquilly:
"Oh, it's some notion of hers, you never can tell. She's a Sellers, all
through--at least in some of her ways; and a Sellers can't tell you
beforehand what he's going to do, because he don't know himself till he's
done it. She's all right; no occasion to worry about her. When she's
ready she'll come or she'll write, and you can't tell which, till it's
happened."
It turned out to be a letter. It was handed in at that moment, and was
received by the mother without trembling hands or feverish eagerness,
or any other of the manifestations common in the case of long delayed
answers to imperative telegrams. She polished her glasses with
tranquility and thoroughness, pleasantly gossiping along, the while,
then opened the letter and began to read aloud:
KENILWORTH KEEP, REDGAUNTLET HALL,
ROWENA-IVANHOE COLLEGE, THURSDAY.
DEAR PRECIOUS MAMMA ROSSMORE:
Oh, the joy of it!--you can't think. They had always turned up
their noses at our pretentions, you know; and I had fought back as
well as I could by turning up mine at theirs. They always said it
might be something great and fine to be rightful Shadow of an
earldom, but to merely be shadow of a shadow, and two or three times
removed at that--pooh-pooh! And I always retorted that not to be
able to show four generations of American-Colonial-Dutch Peddler-
and-Salt-Cod-McAllister-Nobility might be endurable, but to have to
confess such an origin--pfew-few! Well, the telegram, it was just a
cyclone! The messenger came right into the great Rob Roy Hall of
Audience, as excited as he could be, singing out, "Dispatch for Lady
Gwendolen Sellers!" and you ought to have seen that simpering
chattering assemblage of pinchbeck aristocrats, turn to stone!
I was off in the corner, of course, by myself--it's where Cinderella
belongs. I took the telegram and read it, and tried to faint--and I
could have done it if I had had any preparation, but it was all so
sudden, you know--but no matter, I did the next best thing: I put my
handkerchief to my eyes and fled sobbing to my room, dropping the
telegram as I started. I released one corner of my eye a moment--
just enough to see the herd swarm for the telegram--and then
continued my broken-hearted flight just as happy as a bird.
Then the visits of condolence began, and I had to accept the loan of
Miss Augusta-Templeton-Ashmore Hamilton's quarters because the press
was so great and there isn't room for three and a cat in mine. And
I've been holding a Lodge of Sorrow ever since and defending myself
against people's attempts to claim kin. And do you know, the very
first girl to fetch her tears and sympathy to my market was that
foolish Skimperton girl who has always snubbed me so shamefully and
claimed lordship and precedence of the whole college because some
ancestor of hers, some time or other, was a McAllister. Why it was
like the bottom bird in the menagerie putting on airs because its
head ancestor was a pterodactyl.
But the ger-reatest triumph of all was--guess. But you'll never.
This is it. That little fool and two others have always been
fussing and fretting over which was entitled to precedence--by rank,
you know. They've nearly starved themselves at it; for each claimed
the right to take precedence of all the college in leaving the
table, and so neither of them ever finished her dinner, but broke
off in the middle and tried to get out ahead of the others. Well,
after my first day's grief and seclusion--I was fixing up a mourning
dress you see--I appeared at the public table again, and then--what
do you think? Those three fluffy goslings sat there contentedly,
and squared up the long famine--lapped and lapped, munched and
munched, ate and ate, till the gravy appeared in their eyes--humbly
waiting for the Lady Gwendolen to take precedence and move out
first, you see!
Oh, yes, I've been having a darling good time. And do you know, not
one of these collegians has had the cruelty to ask me how I came by
my new name. With some, this is due to charity, but with the others
it isn't. They refrain, not from native kindness but from educated
discretion. I educated them.
Well, as soon as I shall have settled up what's left of the old
scores and snuffed up a few more of those pleasantly intoxicating
clouds of incense, I shall pack and depart homeward. Tell papa I
am as fond of him as I am of my new name. I couldn't put it
stronger than that. What an inspiration it was! But inspirations
come easy to him.
These, from your loving daughter,
GWENDOLEN.
Hawkins reached for the letter and glanced over it.
"Good hand," he said, "and full of confidence and animation, and goes
racing right along. She's bright--that's plain."
"Oh, they're all bright--the Sellerses. Anyway, they would be, if there
were any. Even those poor Latherses would have been bright if they had
been Sellerses; I mean full blood. Of course they had a Sellers strain
in them--a big strain of it, too--but being a Bland dollar don't make it
a dollar just the same."
The seventh day after the date of the telegram Washington came dreaming
down to breakfast and was set wide awake by an electrical spasm of
pleasure.
Here was the most beautiful young creature he had ever seen in his life.
It was Sally Sellers Lady Gwendolen; she had come in the night. And it
seemed to him that her clothes were the prettiest and the daintiest he
had ever looked upon, and the most exquisitely contrived and fashioned
and combined, as to decorative trimmings, and fixings, and melting
harmonies of color. It was only a morning dress, and inexpensive, but he
confessed to himself, in the English common to Cherokee Strip, that it
was a "corker." And now, as he perceived, the reason why the Sellers
household poverties and sterilities had been made to blossom like the
rose, and charm the eye and satisfy the spirit, stood explained; here was
the magician; here in the midst of her works, and furnishing in her own
person the proper accent and climaxing finish of the whole.
"My daughter, Major Hawkins--come home to mourn; flown home at the call
of affliction to help the authors of her being bear the burden of
bereavement. She was very fond of the late earl--idolized him, sir,
idolized him--"
"Why, father, I've never seen him."
"True--she's right, I was thinking of another--er--of her mother--"
"I idolized that smoked haddock?--that sentimental, spiritless--"
"I was thinking of myself! Poor noble fellow, we were inseparable com--"
"Hear the man! Mulberry Sel--Mul--Rossmore--hang the troublesome name I
can never--if I've heard you say once, I've heard you say a thousand
times that if that poor sheep--"
"I was thinking of--of--I don't know who I was thinking of, and it
doesn't make any difference anyway; somebody idolized him, I recollect it
as if it were yesterday; and--"
"Father, I am going to shake hands with Major Hawkins, and let the
introduction work along and catch up at its leisure. I remember you very
well in deed, Major Hawkins, although I was a little child when I saw you
last; and I am very, very glad indeed to see you again and have you in
our house as one of us;" and beaming in his face she finished her cordial
shake with the hope that he had not forgotten her.
He was prodigiously pleased by her outspoken heartiness, and wanted to
repay her by assuring her that he remembered her, and not only that but
better even than he remembered his own children, but the facts would not
quite warrant this; still, he stumbled through a tangled sentence which
answered just as well, since the purport of it was an awkward and
unintentional confession that her extraordinary beauty had so stupefied
him that he hadn't got back to his bearings, yet, and therefore couldn't
be certain as to whether he remembered her at all or not. The speech
made him her friend; it couldn't well help it.
In truth the beauty of this fair creature was of a rare type, and may
well excuse a moment of our time spent in its consideration. It did not
consist in the fact that she had eyes, nose, mouth, chin, hair, ears, it
consisted in their arrangement. In true beauty, more depends upon right
location and judicious distribution of feature than upon multiplicity of
them. So also as regards color. The very combination of colors which in
a volcanic irruption would add beauty to a landscape might detach it from
a girl. Such was Gwendolen Sellers.
The family circle being completed by Gwendolen's arrival, it was decreed
that the official mourning should now begin; that it should begin at six
o'clock every evening, (the dinner hour,) and end with the dinner.
"It's a grand old line, major, a sublime old line, and deserves to be
mourned for, almost royally; almost imperially, I may say. Er--Lady
Gwendolen--but she's gone; never mind; I wanted my Peerage; I'll fetch it
myself, presently, and show you a thing or two that will give you a
realizing idea of what our house is. I've been glancing through Burke,
and I find that of William the Conqueror's sixty-four natural ah--
my dear, would you mind getting me that book? It's on the escritoire in
our boudoir. Yes, as I was saying, there's only St. Albans, Buccleugh
and Grafton ahead of us on the list--all the rest of the British nobility
are in procession behind us. Ah, thanks, my lady. Now then, we turn to
William, and we find--letter for XYZ? Oh, splendid--when'd you get it?"
"Last night; but I was asleep before you came, you were out so late; and
when I came to breakfast Miss Gwendolen--well, she knocked everything out
of me, you know--"
"Wonderful girl, wonderful; her great origin is detectable in her step,
her carriage, her features--but what does he say? Come, this is
exciting."
"I haven't read it--er--Rossm--Mr. Rossm--er--"
"M'lord! Just cut it short like that. It's the English way. I'll open
it. Ah, now let's see."
A. TO YOU KNOW WHO. Think I know you. Wait ten days. Coming to
Washington.
The excitement died out of both men's faces. There was a brooding
silence for a while, then the younger one said with a sigh:
"Why, we can't wait ten days for the money."
"No--the man's unreasonable; we are down to the bed rock, financially
speaking."
"If we could explain to him in some way, that we are so situated that
time is of the utmost importance to us--"
"Yes--yes, that's it--and so if it would be as convenient for him to come
at once it would be a great accommodation to us, and one which we--which
we--which we--wh--well, which we should sincerely appreciate--"
"That's it--and most gladly reciprocate--"
"Certainly--that'll fetch him. Worded right, if he's a man--got any of
the feelings of a man, sympathies and all that, he'll be here inside of
twenty-four hours. Pen and paper--come, we'll get right at it."
Between them they framed twenty-two different advertisements, but none
was satisfactory. A main fault in all of them was urgency. That feature
was very troublesome: if made prominent, it was calculated to excite
Pete's suspicion; if modified below the suspicion-point it was flat and
meaningless. Finally the Colonel resigned, and said:
"I have noticed, in such literary experiences as I have had, that one of
the most taking things to do is to conceal your meaning when you are
trying to conceal it. Whereas, if you go at literature with a free
conscience and nothing to conceal, you can turn out a book, every time,
that the very elect can't understand. They all do."
Then Hawkins resigned also, and the two agreed that they must manage to
wait the ten days some how or other. Next, they caught a ray of cheer:
since they had something definite to go upon, now, they could probably
borrow money on the reward--enough, at any rate, to tide them over till
they got it; and meantime the materializing recipe would be perfected,
and then good bye to trouble for good and all.
The next day, May the tenth, a couple of things happened--among others.
The remains of the noble Arkansas twins left our shores for England,
consigned to Lord Rossmore, and Lord Rossmore's son, Kirkcudbright
Llanover Marjoribanks Sellers Viscount Berkeley, sailed from Liverpool
for America to place the reversion of the earldom in the hands of the
rightful peer, Mulberry Sellers, of Rossmore Towers in the District of
Columbia, U. S. A.
These two impressive shipments would meet and part in mid-Atlantic, five
days later, and give no sign.
CHAPTER VI.
In the course of time the twins arrived and were delivered to their great
kinsman. To try to describe the rage of that old man would profit
nothing, the attempt would fall so far short of the purpose. However
when he had worn himself out and got quiet again, he looked the matter
over and decided that the twins had some moral rights, although they had
no legal ones; they were of his blood, and it could not be decorous to
treat them as common clay. So he laid them with their majestic kin in
the Cholmondeley church, with imposing state and ceremony, and added the
supreme touch by officiating as chief mourner himself. But he drew the
line at hatchments.
Our friends in Washington watched the weary days go by, while they waited
for Pete and covered his name with reproaches because of his calamitous
procrastinations. Meantime, Sally Sellers, who was as practical and
democratic as the Lady Gwendolen Sellers was romantic and aristocratic,
was leading a life of intense interest and activity and getting the most
she could out of her double personality. All day long in the privacy of
her work-room, Sally Sellers earned bread for the Sellers family; and all
the evening Lady Gwendolen Sellers supported the Rossmore dignity. All
day she was American, practically, and proud of the work of her head and
hands and its commercial result; all the evening she took holiday and
dwelt in a rich shadow-land peopled with titled and coroneted fictions.
By day, to her, the place was a plain, unaffected, ramshackle old trap
just that, and nothing more; by night it was Rossmore Towers. At college
she had learned a trade without knowing it. The girls had found out that
she was the designer of her own gowns. She had no idle moments after
that, and wanted none; for the exercise of an extraordinary gift is the
supremest pleasure in life, and it was manifest that Sally Sellers
possessed a gift of that sort in the matter of costume-designing. Within
three days after reaching home she had hunted up some work; before Pete
was yet due in Washington, and before the twins were fairly asleep in
English soil, she was already nearly swamped with work, and the
sacrificing of the family chromos for debt had got an effective check.
"She's a brick," said Rossmore to the Major; "just her father all over:
prompt to labor with head or hands, and not ashamed of it; capable,
always capable, let the enterprise be what it may; successful by nature--
don't know what defeat is; thus, intensely and practically American by
inhaled nationalism, and at the same time intensely and aristocratically
European by inherited nobility of blood. Just me, exactly: Mulberry
Sellers in matter of finance and invention; after office hours, what do
you find? The same clothes, yes, but what's in them? Rossmore of the
peerage."
The two friends had haunted the general post-office daily. At last they
had their reward. Toward evening the 20th of May, they got a letter for
XYZ. It bore the Washington postmark; the note itself was not dated. It
said:
"Ash barrel back of lamp post Black horse Alley. If you are playing
square go and set on it to-morrow morning 21st 10.22 not sooner not
later wait till I come."
The friends cogitated over the note profoundly. Presently the earl said:
"Don't you reckon he's afraid we are a sheriff with a requisition?"
"Why, m'lord?"
"Because that's no place for a seance. Nothing friendly, nothing
sociable about it. And at the same time, a body that wanted to know who
was roosting on that ash-barrel without exposing himself by going near
it, or seeming to be interested in it, could just stand on the street
corner and take a glance down the alley and satisfy himself, don't you
see?"
"Yes, his idea is plain, now. He seems to be a man that can't be candid
and straightforward. He acts as if he thought we--shucks, I wish he had
come out like a man and told us what hotel he--"
"Now you've struck it! you've struck it sure, Washington; he has told
us."
"Has he?"
"Yes, he has; but he didn't mean to. That alley is a lonesome little
pocket that runs along one side of the New Gadsby. That's his hotel."
"What makes' you think that?"
"Why, I just know it. He's got a room that's just across from that lamp
post. He's going to sit there perfectly comfortable behind his shutters
at 10.22 to-morrow, and when he sees us sitting on the ash-barrel, he'll
say to himself, 'I saw one of those fellows on the train'--and then he'll
pack his satchel in half a minute and ship for the ends of the earth."
Hawkins turned sick with disappointment:
"Oh, dear, it's all up, Colonel--it's exactly what he'll do."
"Indeed he won't!"
"Won't he? Why?"
"Because you won't be holding the ash barrel down, it'll be me. You'll
be coming in with an officer and a requisition in plain clothes--the
officer, I mean--the minute you see him arrive and open up a talk with
me."
"Well, what a head you have got, Colonel Sellers! I never should have
thought of that in the world."
"Neither would any earl of Rossmore, betwixt William's contribution and
Mulberry--as earl; but it's office hours, now, you see, and the earl in
me sleeps. Come--I'll show you his very room."
They reached the neighborhood of the New Gadsby about nine in the
evening, and passed down the alley to the lamp post.
"There you are," said the colonel, triumphantly, with a wave of his hand
which took in the whole side of the hotel. "There it is--what did I tell
you?"
"Well, but--why, Colonel, it's six stories high. I don't quite make out
which window you--"
"All the windows, all of them. Let him have his choice--I'm indifferent,
now that I have located him. You go and stand on the corner and wait;
I'll prospect the hotel."
The earl drifted here and there through the swarming lobby, and finally
took a waiting position in the neighborhood of the elevator. During an
hour crowds went up and crowds came down; and all complete as to limbs;
but at last the watcher got a glimpse of a figure that was satisfactory--
got a glimpse of the back of it, though he had missed his chance at the
face through waning alertness. The glimpse revealed a cowboy hat, and
below it a plaided sack of rather loud pattern, and an empty sleeve
pinned up to the shoulder. Then the elevator snatched the vision aloft
and the watcher fled away in joyful excitement, and rejoined the
fellow-conspirator.
"We've got him, Major--got him sure! I've seen him--seen him good; and I
don't care where or when that man approaches me backwards, I'll recognize
him every time. We're all right. Now for the requisition."
They got it, after the delays usual in such cases. By half past eleven
they were at home and happy, and went to bed full of dreams of the
morrow's great promise.
Among the elevator load which had the suspect for fellow-passenger was a
young kinsman of Mulberry Sellers, but Mulberry was not aware of it and
didn't see him. It was Viscount Berkeley.
CHAPTER VII.
Arrived in his room Lord Berkeley made preparations for that first and
last and all-the-time duty of the visiting Englishman--the jotting down
in his diary of his "impressions" to date. His preparations consisted in
ransacking his "box" for a pen. There was a plenty of steel pens on his
table with the ink bottle, but he was English. The English people
manufacture steel pens for nineteen-twentieths of the globe, but they
never use any themselves. They use exclusively the pre-historic quill.
My lord not only found a quill pen, but the best one he had seen in
several years--and after writing diligently for some time, closed with
the following entry:
BUT IN ONE THING I HAVE MADE AN IMMENSE MISTAKE, I OUGHT TO
HAVE SHUCKED MY TITLE AND CHANGED MY NAME BEFORE I STARTED.
He sat admiring that pen a while, and then went on:
"All attempts to mingle with the common people and became permanently one
of them are going to fail, unless I can get rid of it, disappear from it,
and re-appear with the solid protection of a new name. I am astonished
and pained to see how eager the most of these Americans are to get
acquainted with a lord, and how diligent they are in pushing attentions
upon him. They lack English servility, it is true--but they could
acquire it, with practice. My quality travels ahead of me in the most
mysterious way. I write my family name without additions, on the
register of this hotel, and imagine that I am going to pass for an
obscure and unknown wanderer, but the clerk promptly calls out, 'Front!
show his lordship to four-eighty-two!' and before I can get to the lift
there is a reporter trying to interview me as they call it. This sort of
thing shall cease at once. I will hunt up the American Claimant the
first thing in the morning, accomplish my mission, then change my lodging
and vanish from scrutiny under a fictitious name."
He left his diary on the table, where it would be handy in case any new
"impressions" should wake him up in the night, then he went to bed and
presently fell asleep. An hour or two passed, and then he came slowly to
consciousness with a confusion of mysterious and augmenting sounds
hammering at the gates of his brain for admission; the next moment he was
sharply awake, and those sounds burst with the rush and roar and boom of
an undammed freshet into his ears. Banging and slamming of shutters;
smashing of windows and the ringing clash of falling glass; clatter of
flying feet along the halls; shrieks, supplications, dumb moanings of
despair, within, hoarse shouts of command outside; cracklings and
mappings, and the windy roar of victorious flames!
Bang, bang, bang! on the door, and a cry:
"Turn out--the house is on fire!"
The cry passed on, and the banging. Lord Berkeley sprang out of bed and
moved with all possible speed toward the clothes-press in the darkness
and the gathering smoke, but fell over a chair and lost his bearings.
He groped desperately about on his hands, and presently struck his head
against the table and was deeply grateful, for it gave him his bearings
again, since it stood close by the door. He seized his most precious
possession; his journaled Impressions of America, and darted from the
room.
He ran down the deserted hall toward the red lamp which he knew indicated
the place of a fire-escape. The door of the room beside it was open.
In the room the gas was burning full head; on a chair was a pile of
clothing. He ran to the window, could not get it up, but smashed it with
a chair, and stepped out on the landing of the fire-escape; below him was
a crowd of men, with a sprinkling of women and youth, massed in a ruddy
light. Must he go down in his spectral night dress? No--this side of
the house was not yet on fire except at the further end; he would snatch
on those clothes. Which he did. They fitted well enough, though a
trifle loosely, and they were just a shade loud as to pattern. Also as
to hat--which was of a new breed to him, Buffalo Bill not having been to
England yet. One side of the coat went on, but the other side refused;
one of its sleeves was turned up and stitched to the shoulder. He
started down without waiting to get it loose, made the trip successfully,
and was promptly hustled outside the limit-rope by the police.
The cowboy hat and the coat but half on made him too much of a centre of
attraction for comfort, although nothing could be more profoundly
respectful, not to say deferential, than was the manner of the crowd
toward him. In his mind he framed a discouraged remark for early entry
in his diary: "It is of no use; they know a lord through any disguise,
and show awe of him--even something very like fear, indeed."
Presently one of the gaping and adoring half-circle of boys ventured a
timid question. My lord answered it. The boys glanced wonderingly at
each other and from somewhere fell the comment:
"English cowboy! Well, if that ain't curious."
Another mental note to be preserved for the diary: "Cowboy. Now what
might a cowboy be? Perhaps--" But the viscount perceived that some more
questions were about to be asked; so he worked his way out of the crowd,
released the sleeve, put on the coat and wandered away to seek a humble
and obscure lodging. He found it and went to bed and was soon asleep.
In the morning, he examined his clothes. They were rather assertive, it
seemed to him, but they were new and clean, at any rate. There was
considerable property in the pockets. Item, five one-hundred dollar
bills. Item, near fifty dollars in small bills and silver. Plug of
tobacco. Hymn-book, which refuses to open; found to contain whiskey.
Memorandum book bearing no name. Scattering entries in it, recording in
a sprawling, ignorant hand, appointments, bets, horse-trades, and so on,
with people of strange, hyphenated name--Six-Fingered Jake, Young-Man-
afraid-of his-Shadow, and the like. No letters, no documents.
The young man muses--maps out his course. His letter of credit is burned;
he will borrow the small bills and the silver in these pockets, apply
part of it to advertising for the owner, and use the rest for sustenance
while he seeks work. He sends out for the morning paper, next, and
proceeds to read about the fire. The biggest line in the display-head
announces his own death! The body of the account furnishes all the
particulars; and tells how, with the inherited heroism of his caste, he
went on saving women and children until escape for himself was
impossible; then with the eyes of weeping multitudes upon him, he stood
with folded arms and sternly awaited the approach of the devouring fiend;
"and so standing, amid a tossing sea of flame and on-rushing billows of
smoke, the noble young heir of the great house of Rossmore was caught up
in a whirlwind of fiery glory, and disappeared forever from the vision of
men."
The thing was so fine and generous and knightly that it brought the
moisture to his eyes. Presently he said to himself: "What to do is as
plain as day, now. My Lord Berkeley is dead--let him stay so. Died
creditably, too; that will make the calamity the easier for my father.
And I don't have to report to the American Claimant, now. Yes, nothing
could be better than the way matters have turned out. I have only to
furnish myself with a new name, and take my new start in life totally
untrammeled. Now I breathe my first breath of real freedom; and how
fresh and breezy and inspiring it is! At last I am a man! a man on equal
terms with my neighbor; and by my manhood; and by it alone, I shall rise
and be seen of the world, or I shall sink from sight and deserve it.
This is the gladdest day, and the proudest, that ever poured it's sun
upon my head!"
CHAPTER VIII.
"GOD bless my soul, Hawkins!"
The morning paper dropped from the Colonel's nerveless-grasp.
"What is it?"
"He's gone!--the bright, the young, the gifted, the noblest of his
illustrious race--gone! gone up in flames and unimaginable glory!"
"Who?"
"My precious, precious young kinsman--Kirkcudbright Llanover Marjoribanks
Sellers Viscount Berkeley, son and heir of usurping Rossmore."
"No!"
"It's true--too true."
"When?"
"Last night."
"Where?"
"Right here in Washington; where he arrived from England last night, the
papers say."
"You don't say!"
"Hotel burned down."
"What hotel?"
"The New Gadsby!"
"Oh, my goodness! And have we lost both of them?"
"Both who?"
"One-Arm Pete."
"Oh, great guns, I forgot all about him. Oh, I hope not."
"Hope! Well, I should say! Oh, we can't spare him! We can better
afford to lose a million viscounts than our only support and stay."
They searched the paper diligently, and were appalled to find that a
one-armed man had been seen flying along one of the halls of the hotel
in his underclothing and apparently out of his head with fright, and as
he would listen to no one and persisted in making for a stairway which
would carry him to certain death, his case was given over as a hopeless
one.
"Poor fellow," sighed Hawkins; "and he had friends so near. I wish we
hadn't come away from there--maybe we could have saved him."
The earl looked up and said calmly:
"His being dead doesn't matter. He was uncertain before. We've got him
sure, this time."
"Got him? How?"
"I will materialize him."
"Rossmore, don't--don't trifle with me. Do you mean that? Can you do
it?"
"I can do it, just as sure as you are sitting there. And I will."
"Give me your hand, and let me have the comfort of shaking it. I was
perishing, and you have put new life into me. Get at it, oh, get at it
right away."
"It will take a little time, Hawkins, but there's no hurry, none in the
world--in the circumstances. And of course certain duties have devolved
upon me now, which necessarily claim my first attention. This poor young
nobleman--"
"Why, yes, I am sorry for my heartlessness, and you smitten with this new
family affliction. Of course you must materialize him first--I quite
understand that."
"I--I--well, I wasn't meaning just that, but,--why, what am I thinking
of! Of course I must materialize him. Oh, Hawkins, selfishness is the
bottom trait in human nature; I was only thinking that now, with the
usurper's heir out of the way. But you'll forgive that momentary weakness,
and forget it. Don't ever remember it against me that Mulberry Sellers
was once mean enough to think the thought that I was thinking. I'll
materialise him--I will, on my honor--and I'd do it were he a thousand
heirs jammed into one and stretching in a solid rank from here to the
stolen estates of Rossmore, and barring the road forever to the rightful
earl!
"There spoke the real Sellers--the other had a false ring, old friend."
"Hawkins, my boy, it just occurs to me--a thing I keep forgetting to
mention--a matter that we've got to be mighty careful about."
"What is that?"
"We must keep absolutely still about these materializations. Mind, not a
hint of them must escape--not a hint. To say nothing of how my wife and
daughter--high-strung, sensitive organizations--might feel about them,
the negroes wouldn't stay on the place a minute."
"That's true, they wouldn't. It's well you spoke, for I'm not naturally
discreet with my tongue when I'm not warned."
Sellers reached out and touched a bell-button in the wall; set his eye
upon the rear door and waited; touched it again and waited; and just as
Hawkins was remarking admiringly that the Colonel was the most
progressive and most alert man he had ever seen, in the matter of
impressing into his service every modern convenience the moment it was
invented, and always keeping breast to breast with the drum major in the
great work of material civilization, he forsook the button (which hadn't
any wire attached to it,) rang a vast dinner bell which stood on the
table, and remarked that he had tried that new-fangled dry battery, now,
to his entire satisfaction, and had got enough of it; and added:
"Nothing would do Graham Bell but I must try it; said the mere fact of my
trying it would secure public confidence, and get it a chance to show
what it could do. I told him that in theory a dry battery was just a
curled darling and no mistake, but when it come to practice, sho!--and
here's the result. Was I right? What should you say, Washington
Hawkins? You've seen me try that button twice. Was I right?--that's the
idea. Did I know what I was talking about, or didn't I?"
"Well, you know how I feel about you, Colonel Sellers, and always have
felt. It seems to me that you always know everything about everything.
If that man had known you as I know you he would have taken your judgment
at the start, and dropped his dry battery where it was."
"Did you ring, Marse Sellers?"
"No, Marse Sellers didn't."
"Den it was you, Marse Washington. I's heah, suh."
"No, it wasn't Marse Washington, either."
"De good lan'! who did ring her, den?"
"Lord Rossmore rang it!"
The old negro flung up his hands and exclaimed:
"Blame my skin if I hain't gone en forgit dat name agin! Come heah,
Jinny--run heah, honey."
Jinny arrived.
"You take dish-yer order de lord gwine to give you I's gwine down suller
and study dat name tell I git it."
"I take de order! Who's yo' nigger las' year? De bell rung for you."
"Dat don't make no diffunce. When a bell ring for anybody, en old
marster tell me to--"
"Clear out, and settle it in the kitchen!"
The noise of the quarreling presently sank to a murmur in the distance,
and the earl added: "That's a trouble with old house servants that were
your slaves once and have been your personal friends always."
"Yes, and members of the family."
"Members of the family is just what they become--THE members of the
family, in fact. And sometimes master and mistress of the household.
These two are mighty good and loving and faithful and honest, but hang
it, they do just about as they please, they chip into a conversation
whenever they want to, and the plain fact is, they ought to be killed."
It was a random remark, but it gave him an idea--however, nothing could
happen without that result.
"What I wanted, Hawkins, was to send for the family and break the news to
them."
"O, never mind bothering with the servants, then. I will go and bring
them down."
While he was gone, the earl worked his idea.
"Yes," he said to himself, "when I've got the materializing down to a
certainty, I will get Hawkins to kill them, and after that they will be
under better control. Without doubt a materialized negro could easily be
hypnotized into a state resembling silence. And this could be made
permanent--yes, and also modifiable, at will--sometimes very silent,
sometimes turn on more talk, more action, more emotion, according to what
you want. It's a prime good idea. Make it adjustable--with a screw or
something."
The two ladies entered, now, with Hawkins, and the two negroes followed,
uninvited, and fell to brushing and dusting around, for they perceived
that there was matter of interest to the fore, and were willing to find
out what it was.
Sellers broke the news with stateliness and ceremony, first warning the
ladies, with gentle art, that a pang of peculiar sharpness was about to
be inflicted upon their hearts--hearts still sore from a like hurt, still
lamenting a like loss--then he took the paper, and with trembling lips
and with tears in his voice he gave them that heroic death-picture.
The result was a very genuine outbreak of sorrow and sympathy from all
the hearers. The elder lady cried, thinking how proud that great-hearted
young hero's mother would be, if she were living, and how unappeasable
her grief; and the two old servants cried with her, and spoke out their
applauses and their pitying lamentations with the eloquent sincerity and
simplicity native to their race. Gwendolen was touched, and the romantic
side of her nature was strongly wrought upon. She said that such a
nature as that young man's was rarely and truly noble, and nearly
perfect; and that with nobility of birth added it was entirely perfect.
For such a man she could endure all things, suffer all things, even to
the sacrificing of her life. She wished she could have seen him; the
slightest, the most momentary, contact with such a spirit would have
ennobled her own character and made ignoble thoughts and ignoble acts
thereafter impossible to her forever.
"Have they found the body, Rossmore?" asked the wife.
"Yes, that is, they've found several. It must be one of them, but none
of them are recognizable."
"What are you going to do?"
"I am going down there and identify one of them and send it home to the
stricken father."
"But papa, did you ever see the young man?"
"No, Gwendolen-why?"
"How will you identify it?"
"I--well, you know it says none of them are recognizable. I'll send his
father one of them--there's probably no choice."
Gwendolen knew it was not worth while to argue the matter further, since
her father's mind was made up and there was a chance for him to appear
upon that sad scene down yonder in an authentic and official way. So she
said no more--till he asked for a basket.
"A basket, papa? What for?"
"It might be ashes."
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