Chapter II

The boar, a _ragot_, had met his end at the point of the Marquis’s hunting knife, an ancestral _couteau de chasse_ with a blade about three feet long. The field had dispersed, one or two of the _valets de chien_ gone after the missing hounds, leading the decoy dogs on leashes. Afternoon tea at the _château_ was a very lively affair, the clatter of tongues, cups, and teaspoons almost deafening. A _cuirassier_, whose polished boot had suffered abrasion from the tusk of the wounded animal, recounted his adventure to a circle of sympathetic ladies. A fire of beech logs blazed on the wide hearth, the leaping flames playing a color symphony, from peacock green to sapphire, from ruby to orange, dying into palest lemon-yellow, leaping up in lilac, deepening to violet, and so _da capo_.... The silver andirons had sphinx heads adorned with full-bottomed periwigs of the period of Louis le Grand.... The exquisite Watteaus and Bouchers, set in the paneling--painted white because the little Marquise had found oak so _triste_--shone with a subdued splendor. The perfume of fine tobacco, green tea, and many roses, loaded the atmosphere, producing a mild intoxication in the brain of the tall, fair, well-dressed young fellow, unmistakably British, whom a servant had announced as Monsieur Brown....

“Monsieur Brown?” Monsieur de Courvaux read the card passed over to him by his wife. “Who under the sun is Monsieur Brown?”

“Fie, Frédéric!” rebuked the little Marquise. “It is the English tutor!”

Then they rose together and welcomed the newcomer with hospitable warmth. Charny les Bois was hideously difficult of access; the railway from the junction at which one had to change was a single line, and a perfect disgrace. Monsieur de Courvaux had long intended to bring the question--a burning one--before the proper authorities. Both Monsieur and Madame were horrified to realize that Monsieur Brown had walked from the station, where cabs were conspicuous by their absence. A conveyance had been ordered to be sent, but at the last moment it was wanted for the hunt. Monsieur Brown had hunted in England, of course?

Mr. Brown admitted that he had followed the hounds in several counties. Looking at the new tutor’s square shoulders, sinewy frame, long, well-made limbs, and firmly knit, supple hands, tanned like his face and throat by outdoor exercise, Monsieur de Courvaux did not doubt it. Brown came of good race, that was clear at the first glance. Harrow and Oxford had added the _cachet_ of the high public school and the university. He had recommendations from the Duke of Atholblair, who mentioned him as the son of a dear old friend. And Atholblair was of the old _régime_, a great nobleman who chose his friends with discretion. Clearly Brown would do. His French was singularly pure; his English was the English of the upper classes. Absolutely, Brown was the thing. He was, he said, a Scotchman. The late Queen of England, to whom the little Marquise had the honor of being god-daughter’s daughter, had had a valuable attendant--also a Scotchman--of the name of Brown! Did Monsieur Brown happen to be any relation?

“Unhappily no, Madame!” said Mr. Brown, who seemed rather tickled by the notion. He took the next opportunity to laugh, and did it heartily. He was standing on the bear-skin before the fireplace, measuring an equal six feet of height with Monsieur de Courvaux, when he laughed, and several people, grouped about a central figure--that of the elder Madame de Courvaux, who sat upon a gilt _fauteuil_ with her back to the great windows, beyond which the fires of the sunset were burning rapidly away--the people glanced round.

“What a handsome Englishman!” a lady whispered, a tiny brunette, with eyes of jet and ebony hair, who consequently adored the hazel-eyed, the tawny-haired, the tall of the opposite sex. Madame de Courvaux, superb in her laces and dove-colored silks, sat like a figure of marble. Under her broad white brow, crowned by its waves of gray-gold hair, her eyes, blue and brilliant still, fixed with an intensity of regard almost devouring upon the face of the new tutor, whom the Marquis, stepping forward, presented to his mother with due ceremony, and to whom, offering her white, jeweled hand, she said:

“Welcome once more to France, Monsieur Dunbar!”

“But, Mamma,” put in Monsieur de Courvaux, as young Mr. Brown started and crimsoned to the roots of his tawny hair, “the name of Monsieur is Brown, and he has never before visited our country.”

“Monsieur Brown will pardon me!” Madame de Courvaux rose to her full height and swept the astonished young fellow a wonderful curtsy. “The old are apt to make mistakes. And--there sounds the dressing gong!”

Indeed, the metallic _tintamarre_ of the instrument named began at that instant, and the great room emptied as the chatterers and tea drinkers scurried away. A rosy, civil footman in plain black livery showed Mr. Brown to his room, which was not unreasonably high up, and boasted a dressing cabinet and a bath. As Brown hurriedly removed the smuts of the railway with oceans of soap and water, and got into his evening clothes--much too new and well cut for a tutor--he pondered. As he shook some attar of violets--much too expensive a perfume for a tutor, who, at the most, should content himself with Eau de Cologne of the ninepenny brand--upon his handkerchief, he shook his head.

“I’ll be shot if she didn’t, and plainly too! It wasn’t the confusion of the beastly all-night train journey from Paris. It wasn’t the clatter of French talk, or the delusion of a guilty conscience--decidedly not! The thing is as certain as it is inexplicable! I arrive under the name of Brown at a country house in a country I don’t know, belonging to people I have never met, and the second lady I am introduced to addresses me as Mr. Dunbar. There’s the second gong! I wonder whether there is a governess for me to take in, or whether I trot behind my superiors, who aren’t paid a hundred and fifty pounds a year to teach English?”

And Mr. Brown went down to dinner. Somewhat to his surprise, he was placed impartially, served without prejudice, and conversed with as an equal. The De Courvaux were charming people, their tutor thought--equal to the best-bred Britons he had ever met. His pupils--the freckled boy with hair cropped _à la brosse_, and the pretty, frank-mannered girl of sixteen--interested him. He was uncommonly obliged to the kind old Duke for his recommendation; the bread of servitude eaten under this hospitable roof would have no bitter herbs mingled with it, that was plain. He helped himself to an _entrée_ of calves’ tongues stewed with mushrooms, as he thought this, and noted the violet bouquet of the old Bordeaux with which one of the ripe-faced, black-liveried footmen filled his glass. And perhaps he thought of another table, at the bottom of which his place had been always laid, and of the grim, gaunt dining-room in which it stood, with the targets and breast-pieces, the chain and plate mail of his--Brown’s--forebears winking against the deep lusterless black of the antique paneling; and, opposite, lost in deep reflection, the master of the house, moody, haggard, gray-moustached and gray-haired, but eminently handsome still, leaning his head upon his hand, and staring at the gold and ruby reflections of the wine decanters in the polished surface of the ancient oak, or staring straight before him at the portrait, so oddly out of keeping with the Lord Neils and Lord Ronalds in tartans and powdered wigs, the Lady Agnes and the Lady Jean in hoops and stomachers, with their hair dressed over cushions, and shepherds’ crooks in their narrow, yellowish hands.... That portrait, of an exquisite girl--a lily-faced, gold-haired, blue-eyed child in the ball costume of 1870--had been the object of Mr. Brown’s boyish adoration. Varolan painted it, Mr. Brown’s uncle--whose name was no more Brown than his nephew’s--had often said. And on one occasion, years previously, he had expanded sufficiently to tell his nephew and expectant heir that the original of the portrait was the daughter of a ducal family of France, a star moving in the social orbit of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, married to a Minister of the Imperial Government a few weeks previous to that Government’s collapse and fall.

“I believe the dear old boy must have been in love with her before Uncle Ronald died, and he came in for the family honors,” mused Mr. Brown, and then began to wonder whether he had treated the dear old boy badly or _vice versa_. For between this uncle and nephew, who, despite a certain chilly stiffness and rigor of mental bearing, often mutually exhibited by relations, were sincerely attached to each other, a breach had opened, an estrangement had occurred. Hot words and bitter reproaches had suddenly, unexpectedly been exchanged, old wrongs flaming up at a kindling word, forgotten grudges coming to light in the blaze of the conflagration....

And so it had come to pass that the son of Lord Hailhope’s younger brother, named Angus after his uncle, had not been thrown, had hurled himself upon his own resources. And the Duke of Atholblair had found him the place of English tutor in the family of Madame de Courvaux.

“It is the only thing that presents itself,” the aged peer had explained, “and therefore, my dear boy, you had better take it until something better turns up.”

For the present. But the future? Mr. Brown wondered whether he and the English grammar and lexicon--the phrase book, dictionary, and the other volumes which constituted his tutorial equipment--were doomed to grow gray and dog’s-eared, drooping and shabby together?

Then he looked up, for some one touched him upon the arm.

“The ladies permit us to smoke in the library, which is the best room for music in the house,” said the pleasant voice of Monsieur de Courvaux; “so we will take our _café_ and _chasse_ in their company, if you please.”

Mr. Brown reached the door in time to open it, and to comprehend that the act of gallantry was not expected of him. And the feminine paroquets and the sable-coated male rooks went by, and Mademoiselle Lucie gave the handsome, well-groomed Englishman a shy glance of approval from under her black eyelashes, and Monsieur Frédéric, puffy with incipient indigestion, grinned feebly. Brown put his hand upon the boy’s shoulder, and followed the rest.

“You don’t want me to do any English to-night, do you, Monsieur Brown?” young hopeful insinuated, as they went into the long walnut-paneled room with another bay at the southern end with blinds undrawn, revealing a wonderful panorama of moonlit forest and river and champaign. “I can say ‘all-a-raight!’ ‘wat-a-rot!’ and ‘daddle-doo!’ already,” the youth continued. “The English groom of papa, I learned the words of him, _voyez_! You shall know Smeet, to-morrow!”

“Thanks, old fellow!” said Mr. Brown, with a good-humored smile.

“Grandmamma is making a sign that you are to go and speak to her, Monsieur,” said Mademoiselle Lucie, Brown’s elder pupil-elect. “Everybody in this house obeys Grandmamma, and so must you. Mamma says it is because she was so beautiful when she was young--young, you comprehend, as in that portrait over the fireplace--that everybody fell down and worshiped her. And she is beautiful now, is she not, sir? Not as the portrait; but----”

“The portrait, Mademoiselle?... Over the fireplace.... Good Lord, what an extraordinary likeness!” broke from Mr. Brown. For the counterpart of the exquisite picture of Varolan that had hung in the dining hall of the gray old northern castle where Mr. Brown’s boyhood, youth, and earliest manhood had been spent, hung above the hooded fifteenth-century fireplace of the noble library of this French château.

There she stood, the golden, slender, lily-faced, sapphire-eyed young aristocrat of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, with her indefinable air of pride and hauteur and exclusiveness mingled with girlish merriment and mischief. And there she sat--the original in the flesh--Madame la Marquise de Courvaux, the Grandmamma of these young people--regal in sweeping folds of amethyst velvet and wonderful creamy Spanish point lace.

Obedient to the bidding of her fan, Mr. Brown crossed the library and took the chair she indicated near her. And the diamond cross upon her still beautiful bosom moved quickly, with the beating of Grandmamma’s heart, as he did this.

“How like he is!--how like!” she whispered to herself; and the electric lights became crystal girandoles, and the library became a ballroom at the Tuileries. The Empress, beautiful and cold, passed down the ranks of curtsying, bare-backed, bejeweled women and bowing, gold-laced men. Monsieur de Courvaux, with his orders, his bald forehead, and his white whiskers, released mademoiselle at the claim of a tall, tawny-haired, hazel-eyed, fair-faced partner, a Highland gentleman, in plaid and philabeg, with sporran and claymore, the antique gold brooch upon his shoulder set with ancient amethysts, river pearls and cairngorms. And he told her how he loved her, there in the alcove of palms, and heard her little confession that, had she not been bound by a promise of marriage to Monsieur de Courvaux she would--oh, how gladly!--become the wife of Monsieur Angus Dunbar.

“As you say.... Fate has been cruel to both of us.... And--and I am engaged. She lives in Leicestershire. I met her one hunting season. She is in Paris, staying at Meurice’s with her mother now. They’re buying the trousseau.... God help me!” groaned Angus Dunbar.

But the little lady of the Faubourg Saint-Germain drew back the hand he snatched at, and swept him a haughty little curtsy, looking straight in his face: “The State Quadrille is beginning. Be so good as to take me to Mamma.... And I wish you all happiness, sir, and your _fiancée_ also.” Another little curtsy he got, poor lad, with her “Adieu, and a thousand thanks, Monsieur!” and then--he walked the dusty streets of Paris until morning; while Mademoiselle lay sleepless on her tear-drenched lace pillows. And----

Grandmamma awakened as though from a dream, to meet the frank hazel eyes of Mr. Brown, the English tutor.

“Monsieur will forgive the curiosity of an old woman,” she said, with her inimitable air of grace and sweetness. “I wished to ask whether you were not of Northern race--a Scot, for example? Yes? Ah, I thought I had guessed correctly. The type is not to be mistaken, and I once had--a dear friend!--whom Monsieur resembles to identity. But his name was not Brown.”

“I was within an ace of telling her mine was not, either,” reflected the English tutor as, an hour or so later, he got into bed. “How perfectly beautiful Madame--not the _agaçante, espiègle_ little Madame, but the old one--must have been in the rich prime of her womanhood! Did she and my uncle ever meet again, I wonder? No, I should think not. The dear old boy is just the sort of character to hug a romance all his life, and she--she is just the woman to be the heroine of one. Are all French country-house beds in this style, and is one supposed to draw these rosebudded chintz curtains modestly round one, or let them alone?” Mr. Brown concluded to let them alone, and fell very soundly asleep.

At the late breakfast, an elaborate meal, beginning with soup and fish, and ending with tea and cakes, it was explained to the tutor that no English lesson was to be given that day, as a costume ball of the calico type was to take place that evening, and the children’s study, a homely, comfortable little wainscoted parlor on the ground floor, looking out upon a grass-grown courtyard with a bronze fountain in the middle, was to be given up to hats, coats, and opera cloaks. Monsieur Frédéric was to personate one of his own ancestors, page to the Duke of Burgundy, killed in a jousting match in 1369, Monsieur le Marquis and Madame respectively appearing as the Chevalier de Courvaux and his lady, parents of the youth referred to, represented in a miniature by Othea. Mademoiselle Lucie chose to be “Undine” in gauze and water-lilies. For Monsieur Brown a character could surely be found, a costume devised, even at the eleventh hour. There were jack-boots, _salades_, and coats of mail innumerable in the great hall, Mr. Brown, who shared the objection of his British countrymen to being made to appear ridiculous, shook his head. He preferred not to dress up; but he had, or thought he had, packed away in one of his portmanteaux (which were too numerous for a tutor) something that would do. A Highland costume, in fact, of the modified kind worn by gentlemen of Caledonia as dinner dress or upon occasions of festivity.

Thus Mr. Brown unconsciously pledged himself to bring about a crisis in the lives of two people, one of whom was actively engaged at that moment in trying to find him. For Lord Hailhope was genuinely attached to his nephew, and the basis of the quarrel between them, never very secure, had been shaken and shattered, firstly, by the indifference manifested by the young lady concerned, a rather plain young heiress, at the news of the said nephew’s disappearance, and, secondly, by her marriage with her father’s chaplain, a Presbyterian divine of thunderous eloquence and sweeping predestinary convictions.

“Tell him that I was in the wrong--that I apologize--that everything shall be as it was before, if he will come back! The money shall be secured to him; I will guarantee that,” Lord Hailhope wrote to the London solicitor employed in the search for Young Lochinvar, who had sprung to the saddle and ridden away--without the lady. “If he will not come to me, I will go to him. The insult _was_ gross; I admit it, and will atone to the best of my ability!”

“The hot-headed old Highlander!” commented the man of law, as he filed the letter. “He adopts the boy--his dead brother’s son--brings him up in the expectation of inheriting his private fortune as well as the title, and then turns him out of doors because he won’t marry a girl with teeth like tombstones and a fancy for another man. If Master Angus Dunbar is wise, he will hold out against going back until that question of the money has been disposed of irrevocably. Though people never have sense--lucky for my profession!”

Meanwhile, at Charny les Bois preparations for the ball--the materials of which owed much more to the lordly silkworm than the plebeian cotton pod--went on apace. Evening came, the band of the _cuirassiers_, generously lent by Monsieur the Colonel, drove over from the barracks in a couple of _chars-à-bancs_, the Colonel and the officers of that gallant regiment, arrayed to kill in the green and gold costumes of the hunt of the Grand Monarque, followed upon their English _drague_. _Voitures_ of every description disgorged their happy loads. Monsieur, Madame, the young ladies and the young gentlemen, hot, happy, smiling, and fearfully and wonderfully disguised.

“Their unconsciousness, the entire absence of the conviction that they are ridiculous, makes them quite lovable,” thought Mr. Brown. “That fat, fair papa, with spectacles and large sandy whiskers, as Pluton, from _Orphée aux Enfers_, in red satin tunic and black silk tights spotted with yellow, a satin cloak with a train, a gilt pasteboard crown and trident pleases me tremendously. He is, I believe, a magistrate from Charny. His wife is the even fatter and fairer lady attired as Norma, and those three little dumpy girls, flower girls of a period decidedly uncertain.”

“Does not Monsieur dance?” said Mademoiselle Lucie, looking, with her filmy green draperies, her fair locks crowned, and her slim waist girdled with water-lilies and forget-me-nots, a really exquisite river sprite.

“If Mademoiselle would accord me the honor of her hand in a valse,” Mr. Brown began; then he broke off, remembering that in England the tutor did not usually dance with the daughters of the house--if, indeed, that functionary danced at all. But----

“Mamma has been telling me that Englishmen dance badly,” observed Mademoiselle, with a twinkle in her blue eyes. “Grandmamma will have it, by the way, that you are Scotch! Do not look round for her; she was a little fatigued by so much conversation and fuss, and will not come down to-night.... Heavens! look at Frédéric,” she added, in a tone of sisterly solicitude, as the page of the Court of Burgundy moved unsteadily into sight, clinging to the arm of a bosom friend in a “celadon” costume and a condition of similar obfuscation. “Alas! I comprehend!” she continued. “Those plums conserved in cognac have a fatal fascination for my unhappy brother. Quick, Monsieur! make to remove him from the view of Papa, or the consequences will be of the most terrible.... Frédéric has been already warned....”

And outwardly grave and sympathetic, albeit splitting with repressed laughter, Mr. Brown went in chase of the unseasoned vessels, and conveyed them to the safe harbor of the small study on the second floor, which had been allotted to him as a den. Locking them in, he was about to descend in search of seltzer water, when, in the act of crossing the gallery, unlighted save for the dazzling moonlight that poured through the long mullioned windows, giving a strange semblance of fantastic life to the dark family portraits on the opposite wall, and lying in silver pools upon the shining parquet islanded with threadbare carpets of ancient Oriental woof, he encountered the elder Madame de Courvaux, who came swiftly toward him from the opposite end of a long gallery, carrying a light and a book that looked like a Catholic breviary. With the glamour of moonlight upon her, in a loose silken dressing robe trimmed with the priceless lace she affected, her wealth of golden-gray tresses in two massive plaits, drawn forward and hanging over her bosom, almost to her knees, her beauty was marvelous. Mr. Brown caught his breath and stopped short; Madame, on her part, uttered a faint cry--was it of delight or of terror?--and would have dropped her candle had not the tutor caught it and placed it on a _console_ that stood near.

“Pardon, Madame!” he was beginning, when....

“Oh, Angus Dunbar! Angus, my beloved, my adored!” broke from Madame de Courvaux. “There is no need that either of us should ask for pardon.” Her blue eyes gleamed like sapphires, her still beautiful bosom heaved and panted, her lips smiled, though the great tears brimmed one by one over her underlids and chased down her pale cheeks. “We did what was right. The path of honor was never easy. You married, and I also, and all these years no news of you has reached me. But I understand now that you are dead, and bound no longer by the vows of earth, and that you have come, brave as of old, beautiful as of old, to tell me that you are free!”

With an impulse never quite to be accounted for, Angus Dunbar, the younger, stepped forward and enclosed in his own warm, living grasp Madame’s trembling hands....

“My name is Angus Dunbar, Madame,” he said, “but--but I believe you must be speaking of my uncle. He succeeded to the peerage twenty years ago; he is now Lord Hailhope, but he--he never married, though I believe he loved, very sincerely and devotedly, a lady whose portrait by Varolan hangs in the dining-room at Hailhope, just as it hangs in the library here at Charny les Bois.”

“I--I do not understand.... How comes it that----” Madame hesitated piteously, her hands wringing each other, her great wistful eyes fixed upon the splendid, stalwart figure of the young man. “You are so like.... And the costume----”

“It is customary for Highland gentlemen to wear the kilt at social functions; and when I left Hailhope--or, rather, was turned out of doors, for my uncle disowned me when I refused to marry a girl who did not care for me, and who has since married to please herself--Gregor packed it in one of my kit cases. The cat is out of the bag as well as the kilt.... I came here as English tutor to your grandchildren, Madame, at the suggestion of an old friend, the Duke of Atholblair, to whom I told the story of the quarrel with my uncle.”

Madame began to recover her courtly grace and self-possession. Her hands ceased to tremble in Dunbar’s clasp; she drew them away with a smile that was only a little fluttered.

“And I took you for a ghost ... a _revenant_.... I was a little agitated.... I had been suffering from an attack of the nerves.... Monsieur will make allowances for a superstitious old woman. To-morrow, after breakfast, in the garden Monsieur will explain the whole story to me--how it came that Monsieur Dunbar, his uncle, now Lord Hailhope--ah, yes! there was a crippled elder brother of that title--disowned his nephew for refusing to give his hand to one he did not love.... I should have imagined---- Good-night, Monsieur!”

In the garden, after breakfast, Angus Dunbar, no longer handicapped by the plebeian name of Brown, told his story to a sympathetic listener. Madame’s head was bent--perhaps her hearing was not so good as it had been when, more than forty years previously, Angus Dunbar, the elder, had whispered his secret in that delicate ear. But as footsteps sounded upon the terrace, and one of the fresh-faced, black-liveried footmen appeared, piloting a stranger, a tall, somewhat stern-featured, gray-moustached gentleman, she started and looked round. In the same moment the late Mr. Brown jumped up, over-setting his chair, the pugs barked, and----

“I owed it to you to make the first move,” said Lord Hailhope, rather huskily, as the uncle and nephew grasped hands. “Forgive me, Angus, my dear boy!”

“Lady Grisel has married the Presbyterian minister, sir, and we’re all going to be happy for ever after, like people in a fairy tale,” said Angus Dunbar. Then he turned to Madame de Courvaux, and bowed with his best grace. “Madame, permit me to present my uncle, Lord Hailhope, who I believe has had the honor of meeting you before!”

And, being possessed of a degree of discretion quite proper and desirable in a tutor, Mr. Angus Dunbar moved away in the direction of a rose walk, down which Mademoiselle Lucie’s white gown had flitted a moment before, leaving the two old lovers looking in each other’s eyes.

AN INDIAN BABY

When old Lovelace-Legge sank into a stertorous final coma which his lovely marble tombstone called by a much prettier name, and the blinds were drawn up after a decent interval, and a tremendous heraldic joke, furnished by Heralds’ College, was dismounted from over the front door, Mrs. Lovelace-Legge, after the requisite period of seclusion, took an exquisite little gem of a house in Sloane Street, furnished it to a marvel, and began, with discreetness, to enjoy herself. All her affairs flourished, her pet plans prospered, her gratifications were many, her disappointments nil; people began to call her “Lucky Lotta Legge.” She took her good fortune as her due.

“Perhaps she feels she deserves something of Providence for putting up patiently with old Lovelace-Legge during those ten awful years,” said Lady Cranberry, her dearest friend, to another just a shade less dear, as they walked up Sloane Street one fine morning.

“I suppose he _was_ awful?” hazarded the second-best beloved.

Lady Cranberry crumpled her eyebrows. “He had a complexion like New Zealand meat,” she said. “Next time you walk up the King’s Road with Lotta, watch her as you pass a cheap butcher’s shop. She will wince and look the other way, and you may guess what she is thinking of, poor darling!”

“She said to me once,” remarked the second-best one, “‘_I always fretted for children, but perhaps they were wisely withheld._’”

“I should think so,” consented Lady Cranberry. “When there is a chance of an infant’s coming into the world with three chins and a nose like Punch, to say nothing of bandy legs and patent shoes like bicycle gear cases----”

The second-best reminded Lady Cranberry that children were not usually born with shoes.

“Of course, I meant feet,” said Lady Cranberry. “Feet of that size and flatness, too. And if there is the merest chance of a child’s coming into the world thus handicapped, it is infinitely better that the child should keep out of it. Here we are at Lotta’s door. Isn’t that cream enamel with the old Florentine copper-embossed knocker and bells too divine for anything? Great Heavens!”

She had evidently received a shock, for she was paler than her powder, and as she clutched her companion’s arm her eyes were fixed in quite a ghastly stare.

“Mercy!” the next best-beloved friend of the owner of the cream-white door with the Florentine copper work adjuncts exclaimed, “you saw something--what?”

But Lady Cranberry, with more energy than her weak state seemed to warrant, had ascended Mrs. Lovelace-Legge’s brown doorsteps, and was plying the Florentine knocker. The servant who responded to the summons thought that Mrs. Lovelace-Legge was at home, but knew her to be profoundly engaged.

“Take up the names. We will wait,” said Lady Cranberry. Then, as the respectful servant went upstairs, she drew her companion into the shelter of a little reposeful niche, in Liberty draperies and Indian carved wood, where palms and things flourished in pots, and an object of familiar shape, in bamboo work, and newly freed from swathings of brown paper, stood upon a table. To this she pointed with a neatly gloved forefinger that trembled with emotion.

“Oh! Why,” cried the other, “it is A BABY’S CRADLE!”

“It was delivered,” said Lady Cranberry, “at this door as we came up. It cannot be for a doll: it is full-sized. What on earth can Lotta want with such a thing?”

As she uttered these words the servant returned. His mistress begged the ladies to come upstairs. He delivered his message, and then, with well-trained gravity, lifted the compromising cradle and led the way upstairs. Mrs. Lovelace-Legge did not purpose to receive her friends in the drawing-room, it appeared, or even on the floor above, where her bedroom and boudoir were situated. The ladies were conducted by their guide to regions more airy still; indeed, their progress knew no pause until they reached the highest landing. Here Lady Cranberry received another shock, for a gaily-painted wooden gate, newly hung, gave access to a space where a rocking-horse stood rampant in all the glory of bright paint and red leather trappings; and beyond, through an open door, shone a glimpse of an infantile Paradise, all rosebud dimity, blue ribbons, and brightness, in the midst of which moved Mrs. Lovelace-Legge radiant in a lawn apron with Valenciennes insertion, issuing directions to a head nurse of matronly proportions, an under-nurse of less discretionary years, and a young person dressed in blue baize, trimmed with red braid and buttons, whose functions were less determinable.

“My dears!” Mrs. Lovelace-Legge fluttered to her friends and kissed them, and nothing save Lady Cranberry’s imperative need of an explanation kept that lady from swooning on the spot. “You find me all anyhow,” said Lotta, with beaming eyes. “But come--come and look.” She pioneered the way into the room beyond, with its Lilliputian fittings, its suggestive cosiness, its scent of violet powder and new flannel. “Do you think he will be happy here?” she asked, with a tender quasi-maternal quaver of delightful anticipation.

“Who is--He?”

Lady Cranberry hardly recognized her own voice, so transformed was it by the emotions she suppressed; but Mrs. Lovelace-Legge noticed nothing. “Who?” she echoed, and then laughed with moist, beaming eyes. “Who but the baby? Is it possible I haven’t told you? Or Lucy?” The second-best-beloved shook her head. “No. You see--the news of his coming was broken so suddenly that I was carried off my feet, and since then I’ve done nothing but engage nurses and buy baby things. This is Mrs. Porter”--she turned to the matronly person--“who will have entire charge of my pet--when he arrives; and this is Susan, her assistant. This”--she indicated the anomaly in blue baize and red braid--“is Miss Pilsener, from the Brompton Kindergarten. She is going to teach me how to open his little--_little_ mind, and be everything to him from the very beginning!”

“Won’t you open _our_ little minds?” implored the second-best friend. “You know we are in a state of the darkest ignorance.”

Mrs. Lovelace-Legge dismissed her attendants, and made her friends sit down on the nursery sofa, and sank into a low nursing-chair. She absently tried on an india-rubber apron as she spoke, and it was plain her heart was with the invisible infant. “Ask me questions,” she said. “I don’t seem able to keep my thoughts concentrated on anything but--baby!”

“You must understand, Lotta,” said Lady Cranberry, “that to find you in possession of”--she gulped--“a baby is a shock in itself to your most intimate friends. And in the name of your regard for Lucy, supposing myself to have no claim upon your confidence, I must ask you to explain how you come to be in possession of such a--such a thing? And to--to whom it belongs--and where it is coming from?”

“I came into possession of baby through a dear friend,” explained Mrs. Lovelace-Legge. She added: “Perhaps you have heard of General Carabyne--Lieutenant-General Ranford Carabyne of the Ordnance Department, Calcutta?”

Her friends replied simultaneously: “Never!”

“He is the father of my child,” continued Mrs. Lovelace-Legge, “and, I am given to understand, a charming person!”

Lady Cranberry’s lips moved soundlessly. She might have been breathing a prayer for patience.

“The General,” went on Lotta, “married my old school-fellow, Julia Daubeny, in the spring of last year. He had already been married--in fact, had been twice a widower--when Julia met him at a Garrison Gymkhana. It was a case of love at first sight, and I gave Julia her trousseau as my wedding present. And now she is sending me home the General’s baby--the child of his last wife--as it cannot stand the climate, and she knows how I dote on little children.”

“How old is this child?” queried Lady Cranberry.

Mrs. Lovelace-Legge produced a thin crackling envelope from her pocket, and unfolded Mrs. Carabyne’s letter. “Julia always writes without punctuation, and all her capitals are in the wrong places,” she said, apologizing for the hesitation with which she attacked the scrawled pages. “‘_I forgot to mention_,’” wrote Julia, “‘_that the General has one son quite a darling and a favorite with everybody. He was christened Dampierre. There is French blood on the mother’s side, but everybody calls him ‘Dumps.’ He has the sweetest nature and splendid teeth until about six months old----_’”

“Incoherent, isn’t she, rather?” hinted Lady Cranberry.

“‘_Six months old when he was thrown out of his bamboo-cart_’--Anglo-Indian for perambulator, I suppose--‘_thrown out of his bamboo-cart with a woman who had got hold of him at the time a most dreadful creature and sustained a severe concussion of the brain. You will gather by this that the poor dear is inclined to be more than a little child._’”

“Is not the sense of that rather--involved?”

Mrs. Lovelace-Legge held out the letter.

“It is ‘child’ or else ‘wild,’” Lady Cranberry said, dropping her eyeglasses.

“As if an infant of six months old could be called ‘wild’!” giggled Mrs. Lovelace-Legge. She read on:

“‘_Now the doctors have positively ordered him home, and we have not the least idea where to send him. In this dilemma I thought of you. The General shakes his head, but I have carried my point, and Dumps and his nurse sail by the “Ramjowrah” next Thursday, and when arrived in London will come straight to you. I have every faith in your goodness of heart, and know that poor dear Dumps could be placed in charge of no kinder friend. He is extremely affectionate--from pursuits which ruin many of the most promising young._’”

“Humph!” ejaculated the puzzled Lady Cranberry.

“Perhaps Julia means tearing his clothes and sucking the paint off his toys?” suggested the second-best dearest friend.

Mrs. Lovelace-Legge read on: “‘_Men in India if you have read Rudyard Kipling I need not be more definite we shall look to your gentle influence to wean him._’”

“One thing at least is clear,” remarked Lady Cranberry. “The child is not yet weaned. As to your correspondent’s style, Lotta----” She said no more, but in her mind she harbored a most definite conviction that Julia Carabyne drank. “Eau de Cologne or red lavender,” she thought, “or pure, unadulterated cognac. I pity the General from my heart!”

A few more confused and comma-less paragraphs, and the letter wound up.

“You think I did right?” Mrs. Lovelace-Legge glanced round at her preparations. “But, indeed, I had no choice. How could any woman with a heart--and a nursery----”

“Both unoccupied?” said Lady Cranberry.

“Close her doors against a little sick baby, coming all the way from India in a nurse’s arms? The bare idea strikes one as horrible! Besides, the poor darling may arrive at any moment!” Mrs. Lovelace-Legge dried her pretty eyes with a fragment of gossamer cambric, and then--rat-tatter, tatter, TAT! went the hall-door knocker.

The three ladies started to their feet. Mrs. Lovelace-Legge rushed to the window.

“Can it be?”

“The baby--arrived?”...

“It has! I see the top of a cab piled with luggage!” cried Mrs. Lovelace-Legge, leaning eagerly from the nursery window. “I can make out the Harries Line label on the portmanteaux----”

The second-best friend joined her at the casement.

“One thing puzzles me,” she said, peering downward. “Would a child of that age travel with gun-cases and a bicycle?”

“They may belong to a passenger friend who promised to see the dear child delivered safely into my hands. Ah, here is Simmons!”

Simmons it was, with a salver and a card. He wore a peculiar, rather wild expression, and his countenance was flushed and somewhat swollen; perhaps with the effort of climbing so many stairs. All three ladies hurried to meet him.

“He--it--the----”

“_They_ have arrived?” gasped little Mrs. Lovelace-Legge.

Simmons bowed his head. His mistress could not speak. She took the card without looking at it, and turned away.

“Show them up here!” commanded Lady Cranberry, sympathetically comprehending Lotta’s emotion.

“And pay the cabman,” added the second-best friend.

Left together, the three women broke out into anticipatory ejaculations:

“The pet!”

“The wumpsy!”

“Will it be pretty?”

“Oh, I hope so! But even if it is not,” cried little Mrs. Lovelace-Legge, clasping her hands, “I feel that I shall love it. Ought we”--her eyebrows crumpled inquiringly--“ought we to give it a warm bath at once? Where is Nurse?”

Nurse and her understrapper appeared on the scene with the young lady from the Kindergarten. Six eager feminine heads were projected over the balusters of the top landing as masculine footsteps creaked upon the staircase, and a tall young man, dressed in a rough yachting suit of blue serge, raised his eyes--a handsome and ingenuous pair--and blushed under the salvo of optical artillery which greeted his appearance. Behind him followed a grizzled, middle-aged person, evidently a soldier-servant in mufti.

“I--I presume ...,” the young gentleman began, “I--I have the honor....”

“I am Mrs. Lovelace-Legge,” cried the charming widow, craning forward, “and where--oh, where is the baby?”

The young man turned pale. “The--the baby?”

“Haven’t you brought it?” cried all the ladies.

Tears welled up in Mrs. Lovelace-Legge’s lovely eyes.

“Don’t tell me it is dead!” she gasped. “Oh, if that were true, how could I break the news to Julia and General Carabyne?”

“Madam,” stammered the young gentleman, “I am the only son of General Carabyne--Dampierre Carabyne.” He blushed again. “People usually call me ‘Dumps,’” he said, and broke off as all six women screamed at once:

“YOU! YOU THE BABY!”

And the nurses flung their clean cambric aprons over their heads, and rushed in titters from the scene, as poor little Mrs. Lovelace-Legge went into screaming hysterics in the arms of her second-dearest friend.

“It is all a ridi--a ridiculous misunderstanding!” gasped Lady Cranberry, an hour later, as the recovered hostess, her friends, and her newly-arrived guest sat together in the drawing-room. “Let him see Mrs. Carabyne’s letter, Lotta. Perhaps he will be able to---- No! Better give it to me.” She mounted her gold eyeglasses upon her aquiline nose, and conned the Runic scroll a while. “We were misled,” she explained to the young man, “principally by a reference to your nurse.”

“Molloy _is_ my nurse,” explained Mr. Dampierre Carabyne. “He was one of the hospital orderlies at Calcutta, and looked after me when I was ill. And the Pater thought it best that he should valet me on the voyage, being a useful, experienced kind of man.”

“As to this illness you speak of?” said Lady Cranberry.

“It happened six months ago....”

“Ago! I see a glimmer,” said Lady Cranberry.

“When I was thrown out of a bamboo-cart in which I was driving a friend of mine--a very great friend.”

Again the young man colored.

“_The woman who had got hold of him_,” murmured Lady Cranberry to herself. “And ‘_more than a little child_’ means ‘_more than a little wild_.’ I should have seen _that_ in his eye without a hint from Mrs. Carabyne.”

Thus, bit by bit, the determined lady translated Julia’s letter, which ran as follows:

“He was christened Dampierre (there is French blood on the mother’s side); but everybody calls him ‘Dumps.’ He has the sweetest nature, and splendid health until six months ago, when he was thrown out of his bamboo-cart with a woman who had got hold of him at the time--a most dreadful creature--and sustained a severe concussion of the brain. (You will gather by this that the poor dear is inclined to be more than a little wild.) Now the doctors have positively ordered him home, and we have not the least idea where to send him. In this dilemma I thought of you. The General shakes his head, but I have carried my point, and Dumps and his nurse sail by the _Ramjowrah_ next Thursday, and when arrived in London will come straight to you. I have every faith in your goodness of heart, and know that poor dear Dumps could be placed in charge of no kinder friend.... He is extremely affectionate.... From pursuits which ruin many of the most promising young men in India (if you have read Rudyard Kipling I need not be more definite) we look to your gentle influence to wean him.”

Lady Cranberry took off her _pince-nez_ and refolded the letter. As she did so she glanced toward the snug nook by the fireplace, where the pretty widow, entrenched behind the barricade of her afternoon tea-table, was making but a feeble show of resistance to the raking fire of Dumps’s handsome eyes. In such a mood such a woman as Lady Cranberry shares a corner of the mantle of the Prophets. It occurred to her that the infantile Paradise upstairs might not, if all went merrily as marriage bells, remain so very long untenanted.

And, indeed, at the expiration of a twelvemonth from that date Mrs. Dampierre Carabyne----

Please see the left-hand top corner reserved in the morning papers for these delicate and personal intimations.

YVONNE

IN TWO PARTS