"C Q", or, In the Wireless House/Chapter 10
X
Mrs. Trevelyan makes an error of judgment and the Captain scores.
A GENTLE southen breeze, warmed by the bright rays of the September sun, fanned Mrs. Trevelyan’s straying yellow curls as she sat outside the door of her state-room and idly turned the pages of the European edition—without the advertisements—of an American monthly. Somehow the loss of bulk in her usual slice of current literature gave her a sense of being defrauded. It was not that she enjoyed the contents less, but she missed all those ingenious devices to capture her jaded attention, the humor of the phraseology of the Yankee “ad,” and the ofttimes startling representations of ladies and gentlemen in divers stages of undress and dishabille that peeped at her from between the leaves. Sometimes she recognized her own photograph, thinly disguised, advertising a cigar, a cold cream or a hair tonic. She had no objection to this, and in fact rather enjoyed it. It was one of the misfortunes or prerogatives (whichever way you choose to regard it) of being a public character.
She had glanced through an article on how to dress alluringly on seven hundred dollars a year and had stigmatized the author as a pernicious fool. Dress on seven hundred a year? Why, no woman could be decent on less than seven thousand! Then she had skipped over a Yiddish dialect story laid in the lower East Side of New York City and written by a young woman who had never been east of Denver, to sip here and there the sweet insipidity of a love affair in which flossy girls with trim, athletic figures and strong-jawed, manly young men, clean shaven and clad in lower Broadway ready-made suits, dallied together towards legitimate matrimony—although the reader was always in a delicious uncertainty—on yachts and at “Cabarets” in the Tenderloin, along the elm-shaded walks of marvelous Long Island estates, or in the “gun rooms” of English castles. It was very amusing, this mixture of fluff and folly, of lingerie and love, in which the most reckless, risque situations only led to the most innocent of consequences, and wherein the excitement of the reader was relieved by a series of necessary anti-climaxes without which his nerves would certainly have parted company with his self-control. She had read at least twenty such, and she even knew a gentleman—a quiet enough little man—who made sixty thousand a year writing them. Sometimes she thought she would write herself. If she had written herself she would have been the best seller in either England or America.
She was just about to inform herself as to the habits of the bee—and particularly the queen bee—when a shadow fell across the pages, and Captain Ponsonby, attired in immaculate uniform and much gold braid, made his appearance at her side. Mrs. Trevelyan thought him a hideous bore but he himself was firmly convinced that he had made a deep impression upon her.
“Good morning, my dear lady!” said the gallant officer. “How fresh you look this morning.”
“And how fresh you are this morning!” Lily murmured to herself,—transforming the words vocally to “Oh, good morning, Captain Ponsonby! How you startled me! I was deep in a story.”
“A love story, I ’ll be bound,” simpered Ponsonby with a grimace intended to be tender but which would in fact have been thoroughly terrifying to an inexperienced person. “I want to propose—”
“Remember I ’m a married woman,” shot back Lily. “It ’s not customary—is it—to be so formal in such cases.”
Ponsonby, who was a much-married man with five ill-assorted offspring, blushed furiously.
“I—I—I,” he stammered.
“You—you—you are a very wicked person!” interrupted Lily, shaking her head at him. “What was it you wanted to propose?”
The Captain, thus relieved, for he was a ponderous flirt and would have floundered for an hour if left to himself, grinned a fatuous purple grin.
“I want your bright eyes to help me do some detective work!” he whispered in a hoarse voice. “There may be a criminal on board!”
Under the veil of her golden smile Lily Trevelyan’s radiant color fled. Something had gone wrong—the news had leaked out! Could Micky have tricked her? Could he have endeavored to save her feelings by promising not to do something which he had already done? For an instant she was disinclined to accept such a possibility, then, as it seemed clear to her that there was no other way for the facts to have become known, she decided that Micky had simply taken her in with his childlike, guileless face and made a fool of her. And there leaped into her breast a fierce hatred of him—a hatred as full-blooded and intense as her passion for him had been before—less because of what he had done than because she, whose business in life was deceiving, had been deceived.
“A criminal?” she repeated innocently. “How interesting!”
“Yes,—is n’t it! Of course he may not be on my ship. But they traced him to the Continent. Perhaps he came aboard at ‘Gib.’” The Captain’s face betrayed ill-suppressed excitement.
“What has the poor man done?” asked Lily, putting her finger between the pages which detailed the matrimonial eccentricities of the queen bee.
“Ah!” the Captain remarked teasingly with a peculiar and meaning smile. “That would be telling! However, I ’ll say this much, that you would be particularly interested in the case if you knew who the man was and whom he had wronged.”
“You don’t mean to suggest that I am personally acquainted with this—criminal!” Lily flashed with simulated indignation.
Ponsonby smiled again.
“Perhaps,” he said significantly.
Lily took up her magazine.
“I don’t think you are at all nice,” she pouted. “First you ask me to help find a criminal for you,—and then it turns out that you imagine he or she is one of my personal friends. Anyhow, you don’t think I’d turn traitor, do you? Captain Ponsonby, even if there were a murderer on board, and I knew him—I ’d never tell. I won’t be a bloodhound, a hawk or a trained panther for you or anybody else.”
All the time she was furiously raging inside at Micky who had thus played her false. And then it burst upon her! What an idiot she had been! To think that a common little red-haired beast like Fitzpatrick could or would do the decent thing, when he was, or foolishly fancied that he was, in love with the same girl as Cosmo Graeme. Why, it was his one great chance! Turn Cosmo over to the law and Micky could go on making love to Evelyn Farquhar and perhaps either persuade her into a vulgar intrigue or stir up such a scandal that the Earl would be compelled to buy him off. She had seen many a young coachman, many a red-cheeked chauffeur, annex thirty or forty thousand dollars by judiciously tampering with the tender affections of his master’s daughter. And as Lily Trevelyan was ready to believe the worst of anybody and did believe the worst of most people, she then and there stigmatized Micky as a rotten little sneak and consigned him to the lowest depths of the inferno. And a deep red slowly surged up her neck and into the roots of her yellow hair as she thought of the pilot-house and Micky asleep at his desk in the blaze of yesterday morning’s sun.
A tiger-like resolve to stand by Cosmo to the last possessed her. If they took him it should be not because of her but in spite of her. She almost forgot the Captain for the moment, but he answered her question and stood his ground.
“My dear Mrs. Trevelyan,” said he reprovingly, “I did n’t mean to suggest that this criminal might be your friend,—I only said you might know him. That ’s an entirely different matter, is n’t it? You might know Jack Johnson, the prize-fighter, or Nan Patterson, or Oscar Wilde—”
"What a delightful circle of acquaintances!” laughed Lily, amused in spite of herself. “If you ’d only throw in Harry Thaw, Tod Sloan, Abe Hunmiel, and Grand Duke Boris it would be really chic,— a real salon!”
The Captain seemed a bit annoyed.
"You ’re a very witty woman,” said he stiffly. “I can’t argue with you.” Then he added more genially. “But don’t you want to stroll around the ship and see what we can do in the Sherlock Holmes line?”
It suddenly occurred to Lily that it was conceivably possible that if she went with Ponsonby she might somehow be able to divert his attention or throw him off the track, so far as Cosmo was concerned.
“Certainly I ’ll go with you,” she answered quite cordially, getting up and throwing the magazine into the seat of her deck-chair. “Where shall we go? The forecastle or the rear castle?—By the way, you have n’t told me what your criminal has done.”
“This way—!” bowed the Captain. “No, Mrs. Trevelyan, I want to give you a little surprise—if we identify the man. And you will be surprised! If we don’t find him on board I ’ll tell you all about it, afterwards.”
Feeling that it would be unwise for Cosmo’s sake to show too great an interest in either the identity of the criminal or the details of his crime, Lily walked along the deck with the Captain towards the reading-saloon.
“Extraordinary, isn’t it!” continued Ponsonby confidentially, “how we are able to keep in constant touch with England? I receive all the news, as you know, every morning. Now this man had no sooner committed his offense than I knew all about it and the directors at once wired me personally to look over the ship and see if I could n’t pick out the fellow among the passengers. I won’t tell you who he is—but I ’ll give you his description and ask you to help me” (he pulled out a slip of paper and studied it) “‘tall, clean-shaven when last seen, blue eyes, brown hair, hollow cheeks, acquiline nose.’ Ought not to be difficult, ought it? There can’t be many fellows on board all exactly like that, can there?”
Again Lily felt the blood leave her face. Yes, It was Cosmo fast enough. Micky had played fast and loose with her. He might even have confided to the Captain that she was a friend of Graeme’s. No,—if he had done that the Captain would never have talked to her so unconcernedly. Micky, probably, had simply delivered the press news, as she assumed was his duty, and had not held it back as he had promised. Yet he had not been a traitor to the extent of repeating to the Captain the interview between Cosmo and herself at which he had been—as she now believed—a deliberate eavesdropper.
“If there is any one on board who fits the description you will surely have no difficulty in finding him,” said Lily. “Where are you going first?”
“Let ’s take a look into the reading-saloon,” said Ponsonby, who wanted as many of the pas-sengers as possible to see personally that he had been honored above all men. He stalked along with her, whispering intimately, and touching his cap in all directions. But there was nobody on deck who fitted the description and in the reading saloon were only the Boston bride and her husband, playing an exclusive game of piquet, three old women who were writing exhaustive narratives in their diaries of the astonishing things one saw on the Champs Elysées and in the Vatican, and an aged man in a gray shawl eating an orange, the odor of which permeated the air and suggested a dining-car on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad going through a tunnel.
“I don’t think he ’s the one!” giggled Lily; “that is, unless he ’s accused of the crime of eating oranges in the closed season."
“No,” answered Ponsonby. “There are no burglars or murderers concealed in here. Let ’s take a turn on the second-cabin deck.”
Now it was perhaps a rather peculiar thing that on the promenade deck in all the long line of extended masculine forms there was not one which fitted the very general description repeated by the Captain. There were flat-nosed tall men, and pug-nosed short men; there were thin men with aquiline noses and fat men with almost no noses at all; and there was one very aristocratic person whose appearance tallied with the description exactly—only he was the royal chamberlain of King Gustaf of Sweden.
As they wended their way among the passengers, Lily, as usual, drew the glances of everybody after her. To-day she looked younger than ever and as owing to the warmth, she had discarded her polo coat, the extraordinary beauty of the lines of her waist and hips were plainly visible to the admiring eyes of all the passengers—only to be truthful and to give her full credit she had no hips—to speak of. And yet she ate everything she wanted, never took any exercise, and did not “roll” each morning before breakfast!
Lily Trevelyan was an assiduous frequenter or “Jenny’s” department at her club on Madison Avenue, where that most expert of all masseuses gave her daily attention, and she occasionally walked around the Reservoir in the Park—with some friend of the opposite sex. That was the extent of her regimen. Otherwise she took no thought for her health or figure. Yet she had a perfect cure for any tendency to put on weight, a guaranteed recipe for remaining trim and slender,—a recipe which any one of her stout friends at the same club would have given nine-tenths of their fortunes to possess, well knowing that with a figure such as hers they could recover not only the nine-tenths of their own fortune thus surrendered but at least one additional fortune besides, and perhaps more. What this recipe was I shall not disclose. Some day when Lily Leslie is no longer Lily Trevelyan and the stress of poverty is upon her (which God forbid!) she may perforce have need to open a beauty parlor or a perfumery shop on Fifth Avenue or elsewhere and this secret will prove as much her fortune as her face was in her younger days. But do not pray for her downfall, ladies! Perhaps—I do not say it—that secret may be simply that you must be one of those fortunate persons that Heaven intended to be always slender and trim and hipless. If a quarter inch on the end of Cleopatra’s nose would have changed the destinies of Europe, how much of an inch on—well, I shall not go further into this interesting speculation. But I suggest the subject for the serious consideration of Professor Hugo Munsterberg of Harvard University.
And so this Hebe, this Diana—who was any age you choose and not a day over—walked along with Captain Ponsonby, looking like a woman of thirty,—not because she was good or bad, had lived well or ill, but because it was preordained that a woman just like her should exist, to mix things up on this poor little humdrum globe of ours, and set the sluggish blood of boot-blacks and butlers of princes and prize-fighters, of clerks, cab drivers, kings and crossing-sweepers dancing through their veins, and to stimulate them to actions of all sorts—good, bad or indifferent—just like a cocktail, a sermon or a pint of champagne. Had she wished consistently to do so, Lily Trevelyan could have accomplished more good in the world, have been a greater influence for the elevation of mankind, than a Parkhurst or a Pankhurst, a T. DeWitt Anybody. But unfortunately she was not consistent, and the wind of her emotions never blew long in the same direction although It often blew at eighty miles an hour.
Thus they proceeded toward the second-cabin deck and as luck would have it they had no sooner reached the bottom of the companionway than they met Cosmo Graeme face to face. He was crossing from the deck-house to the windbreak and coming straight towards them, and so unexpected was the encounter that instinctively he raised his hand to his hat and bowed to Lily, who gasped, flushed and drew back.
Captain Ponsonby grasped her arm tight, if tenderly, as Cosmo hurried by them without speaking.
“That ’s our man!” he whispered tensely. “The very man! You saw how he recognized you. Fits the description to a T.”
But in the single moment required for the Captain to formulate this very obvious judgment Lily Trevelyan had recovered herself.
“I ’m sorry to upset your theory. Captain Ponsonby,” she replied in her usual bantering tone, “but I never saw that mournful-looking person before in my life. I ’m sure if I had, I should remember him—such a ‘lean and hungry’ Cassius as that! (No, my friend,—he may be a criminal but you can’t prove it by me!)” This last sentence was added as a sort of mental foot-note to the paragraph of her verbal retort.
But the Captain besides being an Englishman, was the czar of his ship, and more than usually obstinate. Besides, he regarded all women as having considerably less intelligence than dogs,—and in his experience the better looking they happened to be the greater fools they were apt to prove. And now having the chance to go down into history as a man of marvelous perspicacity, he swept Lily Trevelyan aside and classed her brutally with all the rest of her sex so far as the matter of brains was concerned.
“I can’t help that,” he answered, calm in the confidence of his own superiority of intellect; “that ’s our man. When you know more about the case you ’ll probably remember him!—even if you don’t now.”
Lily bit her lip. Old Purple Nose was not such an ass as she had always taken him for. The game was up. There was nothing she could do now but play for time, and so far as possible prevent Cosmo’s immediate arrest and public disgrace. A wild scheme of hiding him in some nook or closet on the ship and cutting loose one of the life-boats flashed across her mind. It would be easy enough to bribe some sailor to so create the counterfeit presentment of an escape. But the danger and genuine futility of such a course instantly became obvious to her. No, she must use all her arts to induce the Captain to keep the matter to himself and to delay action until the ship should near the shore.
They had crossed the second-cabin deck with the apparent object on the Captain’s part of asking Cloud’s name of the second-cabin steward, when a short way aft of the deck house they encountered Bennett and his sister walking in the opposite direction. This was the first time that Lily had noticed the couple, since there was, to be sure, nothing about them which would have especially attracted her attention, but as the man had removed his hat in order to get the full benefit of the breeze, his face was brought out into sharp relief by the sunlight, and, one glance at him told her that so far as features and coloring were concerned he fitted the description received by the Captain as well as Cosmo, if not better. Certainly he had blue eyes, was thin and hollow-cheeked, and he too was slightly bald and had curly hair; and yet he was no more like Cosmo than the Duke of Wellington was like Napoleon Bonaparte. The intensity and directness of her gaze embarrassed both the girl and her brother, and the latter nervously raised his hand to his face, possibly as if to conceal it, then changed his mind in the act and touched his cap to the Captain.
“Good morning,” returned Ponsonby stiffly.
“Good morning, sir,” answered Bennett confusedly. Something about the man recalled in a vague fashion a long-forgotten impression to Lily,—she had a statesman's gift for faces—a distant and not altogether pleasant recollection of her wedding to Trevelyan, with its crowds of relatives and acquaintances, its awkward congratulations and useless, ponderous gifts of glass and silver. Had she ever known this person? Had she perhaps seen him doing duty in some ungainly and clownish fashion on the occasion when the employees of the bank had presented her husband with a loving cup? Ah, that was it! This must be the man who had made the speech of congratulation,—had expressed in halting, insipid, and unconvincing phrase the regard in which these poor automatic machines held the autocrat who had lived by the sweat of their brows and the scratching of their quills, the man who came at ten forty-five and smoked a cigar in the inside office with a silk hat on the back of his head, the man who did about one full day’s work each week while they slaved from eight until six, except on bank holidays. Yes, now she recalled him! He was the assistant cashier, who had come disjointedly forward at the wedding reception and in high-water trousers and weird white tie had made the "few remarks." Bennett saw that she recognized him and his face changed color. Coincidentally Lily thought she saw a chance to divert the Captain’s attention in a new direction, and as she squeezed his arm she bowed quickly to the man before her.
“How do you do?” she said in cordial tones. “It ’s a long time since we ’ve met, Mr.—”
Bennett looked at her helplessly with an expression of agonized entreaty.
“It ’s Mrs. Trevelyan,—is n’t it?” he stammered.
“Yes,” she answered. “I ’m glad to see you again. I forget your name.”
The man opened his mouth as if to reply but no sound came from his lips.
“Bennett,” interjected the girl at his side hurriedly. “You must excuse us,—my brother is n’t feeling well.”
Lily and the Captain passed on, the officer deep in his plans for the immediate arrest of Cloud. He was naturally exhilarated over his good fortune at so quickly identifying a celebrated criminal among his passengers, while Lily was furious at herself, the Captain, and especially at Micky for having everything go wrong. And as she believed that the main thing was to conceal the identity of the real Cosmo, however temporary the expedient might prove to be, and thus give the latter a few days or at least hours more of freedom, she resolved to take a desperate chance—for more desperate chances had occasionally served her ends—and to make a last and Herculean effort to put Ponsonby upon the wrong scent. So she turned to him with a face full of childlike simplicity and candor and said quietly:
“Captain Ponsonby, you noticed that person who just passed us, I presume? You saw the color of his eyes and hair? You observed that he recognized me? And I him. Well, that man—the man who called me by name—is the one you want—Cosmo Graeme!”
Captain Ponsonby turned upon her with an expression of utter bewilderment.
“Cosmo Graeme?" he repeated after her. “Who on earth is Cosmo Graeme? I’m looking for a man named Chilvers who ’s robbed the London Branch of your husband’s bank of £5,000!“