The Bandbox - Louis Joseph Vance (read along books .TXT) 📗

the core of her and breathless—though by no means dumb. Women are never dumb with admiration.

“O sir!” she breathed in ecstasy—“it’s a real creashun!”

“Daresay,” Staff conceded sourly. “Did you find a note?”

“And the price-tag, sir—it says twen-ty five pounds!”

“I hope there’s a receipted bill, then.... Do you see anything remotely resembling a note—or something?”

With difficulty subduing her transports—“I’ll see, sir,” said Milly.

Grunting with exasperation, Staff bent over a trunk and stuffed things into it until Milly committed herself to the definite announcement: “I don’t seem to find nothing, sir.”

“Look again, please.”

Again Milly pawed the tissue-paper.

“There ain’t nothing at all, sir,” she declared finally.

Staff stood up, thrust his hands into his pockets and champed the stem of his pipe—scowling.

“It is a bit odd, sir, isn’t it?—having this sent to you like this and you knowing nothing at all about it!”

Staff said something indistinguishable because of the obstructing pipe-stem.

“It’s perfectly beautiful, sir—a won’erful hat, really.”

“The devil fly away with it!”

“Beg pardon, sir?”

“I said, I’m simply crazy about it, myself.”

“Oh, did you, sir?”

“Please put it back and tie it up.”

“Yessir.” Reluctantly Milly restored the creation to its tissue-paper nest. “And what would you wish me to do with it now, sir?” she resumed when at length the ravishing vision was hidden away.

“Do with it?” stormed the vexed gentleman. “I don’t care what the d—ickens you do with it. It isn’t my hat. Take it away. Throw it into the street. Send it back to the place it came from. Give it ... or, wait!”

Pausing for breath and thought, he changed his mind. The hat was too valuable to be treated with disrespect, no matter who was responsible for the mistake. Staff felt morally obligated to secure its return to the Maison Lucille.

“Look here, Milly ...”

“Yessir?”

“I’ll just telephone ... No! Half a minute!”

He checked, on the verge of yielding to an insane impulse. Being a native of New York, it had been his instinctive thought to call up the hat-shop and demand the return of its delivery-boy. Fortunately the instinct of a true dramatist moved him to sketch hastily the ground-plot of the suggested tragedy.

In Act I (Time: the Present) he saw himself bearding the telephone in its lair—that is, in the darkest and least accessible recess of the ground-floor hallway. In firm, manful accents, befitting an intrepid soul, he details a number to the central operator—and meekly submits to an acidulated correction of his Amurrikin accent.

Act II (fifteen minutes have elapsed): He is clinging desperately to the receiver, sustained by hope alone while he attends sympathetically to the sufferings of an English lady trying to get in communication with the Army and Navy Stores.

Act III (ten minutes later): He has exhausted himself grinding away at an obsolete rotary bell-call. Abruptly his ears are enchanted by a far, thin, frigid moan. It says: “Are you theah?” Responding savagely “NO!” he dashes the receiver back into its hook and flings away to discover that he has lost both train and steamer. Tag line: For this is London in the Twentieth Century. Curtain: End of the Play....

Disenchanted by consideration of this tentative synopsis, the playwright consulted his watch. Already the incident of the condemnable bandbox had eaten up much invaluable time. He would see himself doomed to unending perdition if he would submit to further hindrance on its behalf.

“Milly,” said he with decision, “take that ... thing down-stairs, and tell Mrs. Gigg to telephone the hat-shop to call for it.”

“Yessir.”

“And after that, call me a taxi. Tell it to wait. I’ll be ready by ten or know—”

Promptly retiring, Milly took with her, in addition to the bandbox, a confused impression of a room whose atmosphere was thick with flying garments, in the wild swirl of which a lanky lunatic danced weirdly, muttering uncouth incantations....

Forty minutes later (on the stroke of ten) Mr. Staff, beautifully groomed after his habit, his manner (superbly nonchalant) denying that he had ever known reason why he should take a single step in haste, followed his trunks down to the sidewalk and, graciously bidding his landlady adieu, presented Milly with a keepsake in the shape of a golden coin of the realm.

A taxicab, heavy-laden with his things, fretted before the door. Staff nodded to the driver.

“Euston,” said he; “and a shilling extra if you drive like sin.”

“Right you are, sir.”

In the act of entering the cab, Staff started back with bitter imprecations.

Mrs. Gigg, who had not quite closed the front door, opened it wide to his remonstrant voice.

“I say, what’s this bandbox doing in my cab? I thought I told Milly—”

“Sorry, sir; I forgot,” Mrs. Gigg interposed—“bein’ that flustered—”

“Well?”

“The woman what keeps the ’at-shop said as ’ow the ’at wasn’t to come back, sir. She said a young lidy bought it yestiddy ahfternoon and awsked to ’ave it sent you this mornin’ before nine o’clock.”

“The deuce she did!” said Staff blankly.

“An’ the young lidy said as ’ow she’d write you a note explynin’. So I tells Milly not to bother you no more abaht it, but put the ’at-box in the keb, sir—wishin’ not to ’inder you.”

“Thoughtful of you, I’m sure. But didn’t the—ah—woman who keeps the hat-shop mention the name of the—ah—person who purchased the hat?”

By the deepening of its corrugations, the forehead of Mrs. Gigg betrayed the intensity of her mental strain. Her eyes wore a far-away look and her lips moved, at first silently. Then—“I ain’t sure, sir, as she did nime the lidy, but if she did, it was somethin’ like Burnside, I fancy—or else Postlethwayt.”

“Nor Jones nor Brown? Perhaps Robinson? Think, Mrs. Gigg! Not Robinson?”

“I’m sure it may ’ave been eyether of them, sir, now you puts it to me pl’in.”

“That makes everything perfectly clear. Thank you so much.”

With this, Staff turned hastily away, nodded to his driver to cut along, and with groans and lamentations squeezed himself into what space the bandbox did not demand of the interior of the vehicle.

III TWINS

On the boat-train, en route for Liverpool, Mr. Staff found plenty of time to consider the affair of the foundling bandbox in every aspect with which a lively imagination could invest it; but to small profit. In fact, he was able to think of little else, with the damned thing smirking impishly at him from its perch on the opposite seat. He was vexed to exasperation by the consciousness that he couldn’t guess why or by whom it had been so cavalierly thrust into his keeping. Consequently he cudgelled his wits unmercifully in exhaustive and exhausting attempts to clothe it with a plausible raison d’être.

He believed firmly that the Maison Lucille had acted in good faith; the name of Staff was too distinctive to admit of much latitude for error. Nor was it difficult to conceive that this or that young woman of his acquaintance might have sent him the hat to take home for her—thus ridding herself of a cumbersome package and neatly saddling him with all the bother of getting the thing through the customs. But ...! Who was there in London just then that knew him well enough so to presume upon his good nature? None that he could call to mind. Besides, how in the name of all things inexplicable had anybody found out his intention of sailing on the Autocratic, that particular day?—something of which he himself had yet to be twenty-four hours aware!

His conclusions may be summed up under two heads: (a) there wasn’t any answer; (b) it was all an unmitigated nuisance. And so thinking, divided between despair and disgust, Mr. Staff gave the problem up against his arrival on board the steamship. There remained to him a single gleam of hope: a note of explanation had been promised; he thought it just possible that it might have been sent to the steamship rather than to his lodgings in London.

Therefore, the moment he set foot aboard the ship, he consigned his hand-luggage to a steward, instructing the fellow where to take it, and hurried off to the dining-saloon where, upon a table round which passengers buzzed like flies round a sugar-lump, letters and telegrams for the departing were displayed. But he could find nothing for Mr. Benjamin Staff.

Disappointed and indignant to the point of suppressed profanity, he elbowed out of the thronged saloon just in time to espy a steward (quite another steward: not him with whom Staff had left his things) struggling up the main companionway under the handicap of several articles of luggage which Staff didn’t recognise, and one which he assured himself he did: a bandbox as like the cause of all his perturbation as one piano-case resembles another.

Now if quite out of humour with the bandbox and all that appertained thereunto, the temper of the young man was such that he was by no means prepared to see it confiscated without his knowledge or consent. In two long strides he overhauled the steward, plucked him back with a peremptory hand, and abashed him with a stern demand:

“I say! where the devil do you think you’re going, my man?”

His man showed a face of dashed amazement.

“Beg pardon, sir! Do you mean me?”

“Most certainly I mean you. That’s my bandbox. What are you doing with it?”

Looking guiltily from his face to the article in question, the steward flushed and stammered—culpability incarnate, thought Staff.

“Your bandbox, sir?”

“Do you think I’d go charging all over this ship for a silly bandbox that wasn’t mine?”

“But, sir—”

“I tell you, it’s mine. It’s tagged with my name. Where’s the steward I left it with?”

“But, sir,” pleaded the accused, “this belongs to this lidy ’ere. I’m just tikin’ it to ’er stiteroom, sir.”

Staff’s gaze followed the man’s nod, and for the first time he became aware that a young woman stood a step or two above them, half turned round to attend to the passage, her air and expression seeming to indicate a combination of amusement and impatience.

Precipitately the young man removed his hat. Through the confusion clouding his thoughts, he both foreglimpsed humiliation and was dimly aware of a personality of force and charm: of a well-poised figure cloaked in a light pongee travelling-wrap; of a face that seemed to consist chiefly in dark eyes glowing lambent in the shadow of a wide-brimmed, flopsy hat. He was sensitive to a hint of breeding and reserve in the woman’s attitude; as though (he thought) the contretemps diverted and engaged her more than he did who was responsible for it.

He addressed her in a diffident and uncertain voice: “I beg pardon....”

“The box is mine,” she affirmed with a cool and even gravity. “The steward is right.”

He choked back a counterclaim, which would have been unmannerly, and in his embarrassment did something that he instantly realised was even worse, approaching downright insolence in that it demanded confirmation of her word: he bent forward and glanced at the tag on the bandbox.

It was labelled quite legibly with the name of Miss Eleanor Searle.

He coloured, painfully contrite. “I’m sorry,” he stammered. “I—ah—happen to have with me the precise duplicate of this box. I didn’t at first realise that it might have a—ah—twin.”

The young woman inclined her head distantly.

“I understand,” she said, turning away. “Come, steward, if you please.”

“I’m very sorry—very,” Staff said hastily in intense mortification.

Miss Searle did not reply; she had already resumed her upward progress. Her steward followed, openly grinning.

Since it is not considered good form to kick a steward for knowing an ass when he meets one, Staff could no more than turn away, disguise the unholy emotions that fermented in his heart, and seek his stateroom.

“It had to be me!” he groaned.

Stateroom 432-433 proved to be very much occupied when he found it—chiefly, to be sure, by the bandbox, which took up most of