The Pursuit of the House-Boat by John Kendrick Bangs (great novels txt) 📗

her over to his side.  On the other hand, Elizabeth’s brow became as corrugated as her ruff, and the spirit of the pirate shivered to the core as he turned and gazed upon that glowering face.

“Sir Walter agreed to that, did he?” snapped Elizabeth.  “And yet he was willing to part with—ah—his sister.”

“Well, your Majesty,” began Kidd, hesitatingly, “you see it was this way: Sir Walter—er—did say that, but—ah—he—ah—but he added that he of course merely judged—er—this man Bassanio’s feelings by his own in parting from his sister—”

“Did he say sister?” cried Elizabeth.

“Well—no—not in those words,” shuffled Kidd, perceiving quickly wherein his error lay, “but—ah—I jumped at the conclusion, seeing his intense enthusiasm for the lady’s beauty and—er—intellectual qualities, that he referred to you, and it is from yourself that I have gained my knowledge as to the fraternal, not to say sororal, relationship that exists between you.”

“That man’s a diplomat from Diplomaville!” muttered Sir Henry Morgan, who, with Abeuchapeta and Conrad, was listening at the port without.

“He is that,” said Abeuchapeta, “but he can’t last much longer.  He’s perspiring like a pitcher of ice-water on a hot day, and a spirit of his size and volatile nature can’t stand much of that without evaporating.  If you will observe him closely you will see that his left arm already has vanished into thin air.”

“By Jove!” whispered Conrad, “that’s a fact!  If they don’t let up on him he’ll vanish.  He’s getting excessively tenuous about the top of his head.”

All of which was only too true.  Subjected to a scrutiny which he had little expected, the deceitful ambassador of the thieving band was rapidly dissipating, and, as those without had so fearsomely noted, was in imminent danger of complete sublimation, which, in the case of one possessed of so little elementary purity, meant nothing short of annihilation.  Fortunately for Kidd, however, his wonderful tact had stemmed the tide of suspicion.  Elizabeth was satisfied with his explanation, and in the minds of at least three of the most influential ladies on board, Portia, Xanthippe, and Elizabeth, he had become a creature worthy of credence, which meant that he had nothing more to fear.

“I am prepared, your Majesty,” said Elizabeth, addressing Cleopatra, “to accept from this time on the gentleman’s word.  The little that he has already told us is hall-marked with truth.  I should like to ask, however, one more question, and that is how our gentleman friends expected to embark us upon this voyage without letting us into the secret?”

“Oh, as for that,” replied Kidd, with a deep-drawn sigh of relief, for he too had noticed the gradual evaporation of his arm and the incipient etherization of his cranium—“as for that, it was simple enough.  There was to have been a day set apart for ladies’ day at the club, and when you were all on board we were quietly to weigh anchor and start.  The fact that you had anticipated the day, of your own volition, was telephoned by my scouts to me at my headquarters, and that news was by me transmitted by messenger to Sir Walter at Charon’s Glen Island, where the long-talked-of fight between Samson and Goliath was taking place.  Raleigh immediately replied, ‘Good!  Start at once.  Paris first.  Unlimited credit.  Love to Elizabeth.’  Wherefore, ladies,” he added, rising from his chair and walking to the door—“wherefore you are here and in my care.  Make yourselves comfortable, and with the aid of the fashion papers which you have already received prepare yourselves for the joys that await you.  With the aid of Madame Récamier and Baedeker’s Paris, which you will find in the library, it will be your own fault if when you arrive there you resemble a great many less fortunate women who don’t know what they want.”

With these words Kidd disappeared through the door, and fainted in the arms of Sir Henry Morgan.  The strain upon him had been too great.

“A charming fellow,” said Portia, as the pirate disappeared.

“Most attractive,” said Elizabeth.

“Handsome, too, don’t you think?” asked Helen of Troy.

“And truthful beyond peradventure,” observed Xanthippe, as she reflected upon the words the captain had attributed to Socrates.  “I didn’t believe him at first, but when he told me what my sweet-tempered philosopher had said, I was convinced.”

“He’s a sweet child,” interposed Mrs. Noah, fondly.  “One of my favorite grandchildren.”

“Which makes it embarrassing for me to say,” cried Cassandra, starting up angrily, “that he is a base caitiff!”

Had a bomb been dropped in the middle of the room, it could not have created a greater sensation than the words of Cassandra.

“What?” cried several voices at once.  “A caitiff?”

“A caitiff with a capital K,” retorted Cassandra.  “I know that, because while he was telling his story I was listening to it with one ear and looking forward into the middle of next week with the other—I mean the other eye—and I saw—”

“Yes, you saw?” cried Cleopatra.

“I saw that he was deceiving us.  Mark my words, ladies, he is a base caitiff,” replied Cassandra—“a base caitiff.”

“What did you see?” cried Elizabeth, excitedly.

“This,” said Cassandra, and she began a narration of future events which I must defer to the next chapter.  Meanwhile his associates were endeavoring to restore the evaporated portions of the prostrated Kidd’s spirit anatomy by the use of a steam-atomizer, but with indifferent success.  Kidd’s training had not fitted him for an intellectual combat with superior women, and he suffered accordingly.

p. 157X
A WARNING ACCEPTED

“It is with no desire to interrupt my friend Cassandra unnecessarily,” said Mrs. Noah, as the prophetess was about to narrate her story, “that I rise to beg her to remember that, as an ancestress of Captain Kidd, I hope she will spare a grandmother’s feelings, if anything in the story she is about to tell is improper to be placed before the young.  I have been so shocked by the stories of perfidy and baseness generally that have been published of late years, that I would interpose a protest while there is yet time if there is a line in Cassandra’s story which ought to be withheld from the public; a protest based upon my affection for posterity, and in the interests of morality everywhere.”

“You may rest easy upon that score, my dear Mrs. Noah,” said the prophetess.  “What I have to say would commend itself, I am sure, even to the ears of a British matron; and while it is as complete a demonstration of man’s perfidy as ever was, it is none the less as harmless a little tale as the Dottie Dimple books or any other more recent study of New England character.”

“Thank you for the load your words have lifted from my mind,” said Mrs. Noah, settling back in her chair, a satisfied expression upon her gentle countenance.  “I hope you will understand why I spoke, and withal why modern literature generally has been so distressful to me.  When you reflect that the world is satisfied that most of man’s criminal instincts are the result of heredity, and that Mr. Noah and I are unable to shift the responsibility for posterity to other shoulders than our own, you will understand my position.  We were about the most domestic old couple that ever lived, and when we see the long and varied assortment of crimes that are cropping out everywhere in our descendants it is painful to us to realize what a pair of unconsciously wicked old fogies we must have been.”

“We all understand that,” said Cleopatra, kindly; “and we are all prepared to acquit you of any responsibility for the advanced condition of wickedness to-day.  Man has progressed since your time, my dear grandma, and the modern improvements in the science of crime are no more attributable to you than the invention of the telephone or the oyster cocktail is attributable to your husband.”

“Thank you kindly,” murmured the old lady, and she resumed her knitting upon a phantom tam-o’-shanter, which she was making as a Christmas surprise for her husband.

“When Captain Kidd began his story,” said Cassandra, “he made one very bad mistake, and yet one which was prompted by that courtesy which all men instinctively adopt when addressing women.  When he entered the room he removed his hat, and therein lay his fatal error, if he wished to convince me of the truth of his story, for with his hat removed I could see the workings of his mind.  While you ladies were watching his lips or his eyes, some of you taking in the gorgeous details of his dress, all of you hanging upon his every word, I kept my eye fixed firmly upon his imagination, and I saw, what you did not, that he was drawing wholly upon that!”

“How extraordinary!” cried Elizabeth.

“Yes—and fortunate,” said Cassandra.  “Had I not done so, a week hence we should, every one of us, have been lost in the surging wickedness of the city of Paris.”

“But, Cassandra,” said Trilby, who was anxious to return once more to the beautiful city by the Seine, “he told us we were going to Paris.”

“Of course he did,” said Madame Récamier, “and in so many words.  Certainly he was not drawing upon his imagination there.”

“And one might be lost in a very much worse place,” put in Marguerite de Valois, “if, indeed, it were possible to lose us in Paris at all.  I fancy that I know enough about Paris to find my way about.”

“Humph!” ejaculated Cassandra.  “What a foolish little thing you are!  You don’t imagine that the Paris of to-day is the Paris of your time, or even the Paris of that sweet child Trilby’s time, do you?  If you do you are very much mistaken.  I almost wish I had not warned you of your danger and had let you go, just to see those eyes of yours open with amazement at the change.  You’d find your Louvre a very different sort of a place from what it used to be, my dear lady.  Those pleasing little windows through which your relations were wont in olden times to indulge in target practice at people who didn’t go to their church are now kept closed; the galleries which used to swarm with people, many of whom ought to have been hanged, now swarm with pictures, many of which ought not to have been hung; the romance which clung about its walls is as much a part of the dead past as yourselves, and were you to materialize suddenly therein you would find yourselves jostled and hustled and trodden upon by the curious from other lands, with Argus eyes taking in five hundred pictures a minute, and traversing those halls at a rate of speed at which Mercury himself would stand aghast.”

“But my beloved Tuileries?” cried Marie Antoinette.

“Has been swallowed up by a play-ground for the people, my dear,” said Cassandra, gently.  “Paris is no place for us, and it is the intention of these men, in whose hands we are, to take us there and then desert us.  Can you imagine anything worse than ourselves, the phantoms of a glorious romantic past, basely deserted in the streets of a wholly strange, superficial, material city of to-day?  What do you think, Elizabeth, would be your fate if, faint and famished, you begged for sustenance at an English door to-day, and when asked your name and profession were to reply, ‘Elizabeth, Queen of England’?”

“Insane asylum,” said Elizabeth, shortly.

“Precisely.  So in Paris with the rest of us,” said Cassandra.

“How do you know all this?” asked Trilby, still unconvinced.

“I know it just as you knew how to become a prima donna,” said Cassandra.  “I am, however, my own Svengali, which is rather preferable to the patent detachable hypnotizer you had.  I hypnotize myself, and direct my mind into the future.  I was a professional forecaster in the days of ancient Troy, and if my revelations had been heeded the Priam family would, I doubt not, still be doing business at the old stand, and Mr. Æneas would not have grown round-shouldered giving his poor father a picky-back ride on the opening night of the horse-show, so graphically depicted by Virgil.”

“I never heard about that,” said Trilby.  “It sounds like a very funny story, though.”

“Well, it wasn’t so humorous for some as it was for others,” said Cassandra, with a sly glance at Helen.  “The fact is, until you mentioned it yourself, it never occurred to me that there was much fun in any portion of the Trojan incident, excepting perhaps the delirium tremens of old Laocoon, who got no more than he deserved for stealing my thunder.  I had warned Troy against the Greeks, and they all laughed at me, and said my eye to the future was strabismatic; that the Greeks couldn’t get into Troy at all, even if they wanted to.  And then the Greeks made a great wooden horse as a gift for the Trojans, and when