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Mrs. Raffles: Being the Adventures of an Amateur Crackswoman, a fiction by John Kendrick Bangs |
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Chapter 12. The Last Adventure |
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_ CHAPTER XII. THE LAST ADVENTURE I am bathed in tears. I have tried to write of my sensations, to tell the story of the Last Adventure of Mrs. Van Raffles, in lucid terms, but though my pen runs fast over the paper the ink makes no record of the facts. My woe is so great and so deep that my tears, falling into the ink-pot, turn it into a fluid so thin it will not mark the paper, and when I try the pencil the words are scarce put down before they're blotted out. And yet with all this woe I find myself a multi-millionaire--possessed of sums so far beyond my wildest dreams of fortune that my eye can scarce take in the breadth of all the figures. My dollars coined into silver, placed on top of one another, would form a bullion tower that would reach higher into the air than fifteen superimposed domes of St. Peter's placed on top of seventeen spires of Trinity on the summit of Mont Blanc. In five-pound notes laid side by side they'd suffice to paper every scrap of bedroom wall in all the Astor houses in the world, and invested in Amalgamated Copper they would turn the system green with envy--and yet I am not happy. My well-beloved Henriette's last adventure has turned my fortune into bitterest gall, and plain unvarnished wormwood forms the finish of my interior, for she is gone! I, amid the splendor of my new-found possessions, able to keep not one but a hundred motor-cars, and to pay the chauffeur's fines, to endow chairs in universities, to build libraries in every hamlet in the land from Podunk to Richard Mansfield, to eat three meals a day and lodge at the St. Regicide, and to evade my taxes without exciting suspicion, am desolate and forlorn, for, I repeat, Henriette has gone! The very nature of her last adventure by a successful issue has blown out the light of my life. She has stolen Constant-Scrappe! If I could be light of heart in this tragic hour I would call this story the Adventure of the Lifted Fiance, but that would be so out of key with my emotions that I cannot bring myself to do it. I must content myself with a narration of the simple facts of the lengths to which my beloved's ambition led her, without frivolity and with a heavy heart. Of course you know what all Newport has known for months, that the Constant-Scrappes were seeking divorce, not that they loved one another less, but that both parties to the South Dakota suit loved some one else more. Colonel Scrappe had long been the most ardent admirer of Mrs. Gushington-Andrews, and Mrs. Constant-Scrappe's devotion to young Harry de Lakwitz had been at least for two seasons evident to any observer with half an eye. Gushington-Andrews had considerately taken himself out of the way by eloping to South Africa with Tottie Dimpleton of the Frivolity Burlesquers, and Harry de Lakwitz's only recorded marriage had been annulled by the courts because at the time of his wedding to the forty-year-old housemaid of the Belleville Boarding-School for Boys at Skidgeway, Rhode Island, he was only fifteen years of age. Consequently, they both were eligible, and provided the Constant-Scrappes could be so operated on by the laws of South Dakota as to free them from one another, there were no valid reasons why the yearnings of these ardent souls should not all be gratified. Indeed, both engagements had been announced tentatively, and only the signing of the decree releasing the Constant-Scrappes from their obligations to one another now stood in the way of two nuptial ceremonies which would make four hearts beat as one. Mrs. Gushington-Andrews's trousseau was ready, and that of the future Mrs. de Lakwitz had been ordered; both ladies had received their engagement rings when that inscrutable Henriette marked Constant-Scrappe for her own. Colonel Scrappe had returned from Monte Carlo, having broken the bank twice, and Henriette had met him at a little dinner given in his honor by Mrs. Gushington-Andrews. He turned out to be a most charming man, and it didn't require a much more keen perception than my own to take in the fact that he had made a great impression upon Henriette, though she never mentioned it to me until the final blow came. I merely noticed a growing preoccupation in her manner and in her attitude towards me, which changed perceptibly. "I think, Bunny," she said to me one morning as I brought her marmalade and toast, "that considering our relations to each other you should not call me Henrietta. After all, you know, you are here primarily as my butler, and there are some proprieties that should be observed even in this Newport atmosphere." "But," I protested, "am I no more than that? I am your partner, am I not?" "You are my business partner--not my social, Bunny," she said. "We must not mix society and business. In this house I am mistress of the situation; you are the butler--that is the precise condition, and I think it well that hereafter you should recognize the real truth and avoid over-familiarity by addressing me as Mrs. Van Raffles. If we should ever open an office for our Burglary Company in New York or elsewhere you may call me anything you please there. Here, however, you must be governed by the etiquette of your environment. Let it be _Mrs._ Van Raffles hereafter." "And is it to be Mr. Bunny?" I inquired, sarcastically. Her response was a cold glance of the eye and a majestic sweep from the room. That evening Colonel Scrappe called, ostensibly to look over the house and as landlord to see if there was anything he could do to make it more comfortable, and I, blind fool that I was for the moment, believed that that was his real errand, and ventured to remind Henriette of the leak in the roof, at which they both, I thought, exchanged amused glances, and _he_ gravely mounted the stairs to the top of the house to look at it. On our return, Henriette dismissed me and told me that she would not require my services again during the evening. Even then my suspicions were not aroused, although there was a dull, disturbed feeling about my heart whose precise causes I could not define. I went to the club and put in a miserable evening, returning home about midnight to discover that Colonel Scrappe was still there. He was apparently giving the house and its contents a thorough inspection, for when I arrived, Henriette was testing the fifty-thousand-dollar piano in the drawing-room for him with a brilliant rendering of "O Promise Me." What decision they reached as to its tone and quality I never knew, for in spite of my hints on the subject, Henriette never spoke of the matter to me. I suppose I should have begun to guess what was happening under my very nose then, but thank Heaven I am not of a suspicious nature, and although I didn't like the looks of things, the inevitable meaning of their strange behavior never even dawned upon my mind. Even when two nights later Colonel Scrappe escorted Henriette home at midnight from a lecture on the Inscrutability of Sartor Resartus at Mrs. Gushington-Andrews's it did not strike me as unusual, although, instead of going home immediately, as most escorts do under the circumstances, he remained about two hours testing that infernal piano again, and with the same old tune. Then the automobile rides began, and pretty nearly every morning, long before polite society was awake, Colonel Scrappe and Henriette took long runs together through the country in her Mercedes machine, for what purpose I snever knew, for whatever interest the colonel might have had in our welfare as a landlord I could not for the life of me guess how it could be extended to our automobiles. One thing I did notice, however, was a growing coldness between Henriette and Mrs. Gushington-Andrews. The latter came to a card-party at Bolivar Lodge one afternoon about two weeks after Colonel Scrappe's return, and her greeting to her hostess instead of having the old-time effusiveness was frigid to a degree. In fact, when they clasped hands I doubt if more than the tips of their fingers touched. Moreover, Mrs. Gushington-Andrews, hitherto considered one of the best fists at bridge or hearts in the 400, actually won the booby prize, which I saw her throw into the street when she departed. It was evident something had happened to disturb her equanimity. My eyes were finally opened by a remark made at the club by Digby, Reggie de Pelt's valet, who asked me how I liked my new boss, and whose explanation of the question led to a complete revelation of the true facts in the case. Everybody knew, he said, that from the moment she had met him Mrs. Van Raffles had set her cap for Colonel Scrappe, and that meeting her for the first time he had fallen head over heels in love with her even in the presence of his fiancee. Of course I hotly denied Digby's insinuations, and we got so warm over the discussion that when I returned home that night I had two badly discolored eyes, and Digby--well, Digby didn't go home at all. Both of us were suspended from the Gentleman's Gentleman's Club for four weeks for ungentleman's ungentlemanly behavior in consequence. Black as my eyes were, however, I was on hand at the breakfast-table the following morning, and of course Henriette observed my injuries. "Why, Bunny!" she cried. "What is the meaning of this? Have you been fighting?" "Oh no, Mrs. Van Raffles," I returned, sarcastically, "I've just strained my eyes reading the divorce news from South Dakota." She gave a sudden start. "What do you mean?" she demanded, her face flushing hotly. "You know well enough what I mean," I retorted, angrily. "Your goings on with Colonel Scrappe are the talk of the town, and I got these eyes in a little discussion of your matrimonial intentions. That's all." "Leave the room instantly!" she cried, rising and haughtily pointing to the door. "You are insufferable." But the color in her cheeks showed that I had hit home far harder than she was willing to admit. There was nothing for me to do but to obey meekly, but my blood was up, and instead of moping in my room I started out to see if I could find Constant-Scrappe. My love for Henriette was too deep to permit of my sitting quietly by and seeing another walk away with the one truly coveted prize of my life, and I was ready on sight to take the colonel by the collar--he was only a governor's-staff colonel anyhow, and, consequently no great shakes as a fighter--and throw him into the harbor, but my quest was a vain one. He was to be found in none of his familiar haunts, and I returned to Bolivar Lodge. And then came the shock. As I approached the house I saw the colonel assisting Henriette into the motor-car, and in response to the chauffeur's "Where to, sir," I heard Scrappe reply in an excited undertone: "To New York--and damn the speed laws." In a moment they had rushed by me like the flash of a lightning express, and Henriette was gone! You must know the rest. The papers the next day were full of the elopement in high life. They told how the Scrappe divorce had been granted at five o'clock in the afternoon the day before, how Colonel Scrappe and Mrs. Van Raffles had sped to New York in the automobile and been quietly married at the Little Church Around the Corner, and were now sailing down the bay on the _Hydrostatic_, bound for foreign climes. They likewise intimated that a very attractive lady of more than usual effusiveness of manner, whose nuptials were expected soon to be published for the second time, had gone to a sanitarium in Philadelphia to be treated for a sudden and overwhelming attack of nervous hysteria. It was all too true, that tale. Henriette's final coup had been successful, and she had at one stroke stolen her landlord, her landlady's husband, and her neighbor's fiance. To console me she left this note, written on board of the steamer and mailed by the pilot.
My misery is deep but I am buoyed up by one great hope in every thought. These Newport marriages are so seldom for life that I yet have hope that some day Henriette will be restored to me without its necessarily involving any serious accident to her husband the colonel. [THE END] _ |
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