I stood aghast. Full of sympathy as I had always been with the projects of Mrs. Van Raffles, and never in the least objecting on moral grounds to any of her schemes of acquisition, I could not but think that this time she proposed to go too far. To rob a millionaire of his bonds, a national bank of its surplus, a philanthropist of a library, or a Metropolitan Boxholder of a diamond stomacher, all that seemed reasonable to me and proper according to my way of looking at it, but to rob a neighbor of her cook--if there is any worse social crime than that I don"t know what it is.
"You"d better think twice on that proposition, Henriette," I advised with a gloomy shake of the head. "It is not only a mean crime, but a dangerous one to boot. Success would in itself bring ruin. Mrs. Innitt would never forgive you, and society at large--"
"Society at large would dine with me instead of with Mrs. Innitt, that"s all," said Henriette. "I mean to have her before the season"s over."
"Well, I draw the line at stealing a cook," said I, coldly. "I"ve robbed churches and I"ve made way with fresh-air funds, and I"ve helped you in many another legitimate scheme, but in this, Mrs. Van Raffles, you"ll have to go it alone."
"Oh, don"t you be afraid, Bunny," she answered. "I"m not going to use your charms as a bait to lure this culinary Phyllis into the Arcadia in which you with your Strephonlike form disport yourself."
"You oughtn"t to do it at all," said I, gruffly. "It"s worse than murder, for it is prohibited twice in the decalogue, while murder is only mentioned once."
"What!" cried Henrietta "What, pray, does the decalogue say about cooks, I"d like to know?"
"First, thou shalt not steal. You propose to steal this woman. Second, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor"s maid-servant. How many times does that make?" I asked.
"Dear me, Bunny," said Henriette, "but you _are_ a little tuppenny Puritan, aren"t you? Anybody"d know you were the son of a clergyman!
Well, let me tell you, I sha"n"t steal the woman, and I sha"n"t covet her. I"m just going to get her, that"s all."
It was two weeks later that Norah Sullivan left the employ of Mrs.
Innitt and was installed in our kitchen; and, strange to relate, she came as a matter of charity on Henriette"s part--having been discharged by Mrs. Innitt.
The Friday before Norah"s arrival Henriette requested me to get her a rusty nail, a piece of gravel from the drive, two hair-pins, and a steel nut from the automobile.
"What on earth--" I began, but she shut me off with an imperious gesture.
"Do as I tell you," she commanded. "You are not in on this venture." And then apparently she relented. "But I"m willing to tell you just one thing, Bunny"--here her eyes began to twinkle joyously--"I"m going to Mrs. Innitt"s to dinner to-morrow night--so look out for Norah by Monday."
I turned sulkily away.
"You know how I feel on that subject," said I. "This business of going into another person"s house as a guest and inducing their servants to leave is an infraction of the laws of hospitality. How would you like it if Mrs. Gaster stole me away from you?"
Henriette"s answer was a puzzling smile. "You are free to better your condition, Bunny," she said. "But I am not going to rob Mrs. Innitt, as I told you once before. She will discharge Norah and I will take her, that"s all; so do be a good boy and bring me the nail and gravel and the hair-pins and the automobile nut."
I secured the desired articles for my mistress, and the next evening she went to Mrs. Innitt"s little dinner to Miss Gullet and her fiance, Lord Dullpate, eldest son of the Duke of Lackshingles, who had come over to America to avoid the scrutiny of the Bankruptcy Court, taking the absurd objects with her. Upon her return at 2 A.M. she was radiant and triumphant.
"I won out, Bunny--I won out!" she cried.
"How?" I inquired.
"Mrs. Innitt has discharged Norah, though I begged her not to," she fairly sang.
"On what grounds?"
"Several," said Henriette, unfastening her glove. "To begin with, there was a rusty nail in my clam c.o.c.ktail, and it nearly choked me to death.
I tried hard to keep Mrs. Innitt from seeing what had happened, but she is watchful if not brainy, and all my efforts went for naught. She was much mortified of course and apologized profusely. All went well until the fish, when one of the two hair-pins turned up in the pompano to the supreme disgust of my hostess, who was now beginning to look worried.
Hair-pin number two made its debut in my timbale. This was too much for the watchful Mrs. Innitt, self-poised though she always is, and despite my remonstrances she excused herself from the table for a moment, and I judge from the flushed appearance of her cheeks when she returned five minutes later that somebody had had the riot act read to her somewhere.
""I don"t understand it at all, Mrs. Van Raffles," she said with a sheepish smile. "Cook"s perfectly sober. If anything of the kind ever happens again she shall go.""
"Even as Mrs. Innitt spoke I conveyed a luscious morsel of filet mignon with mushrooms to my mouth and nearly broke my tooth on a piece of gravel that went with it, and Norah was doomed, for although we all laughed heartily, the thing had come to be such a joke, it was plain from the expression of Mrs. Innitt"s countenance that she was very, very angry.
""Forgive her this time for my sake, Mrs. Innitt," I pleaded. "After all it is the little surprises that give zest to life.""
"And you didn"t have to use the automobile nut?" I asked, deeply impressed with the woman"s ingenuity.
"Oh yes," said Henriette. "As dinner progressed I thought it wise to use it to keep Mrs. Innitt from weakening; so when the salad was pa.s.sed I managed, without anybody"s observing it, to drop the automobile nut into the bowl. The Duke of Snarleyow got it and the climax was capped.
Mrs. Innitt burst into a flood of tears and--well, to-morrow, Bunny, Norah leaves. You will take her this ten-dollar bill from me, and tell her that I am sorry she got into so much trouble on my account. Say that if I can be of any a.s.sistance to her all she has to do is to call here and I will do what I can to get her another place."
[Ill.u.s.tration: "ON HER WAY TO BARLY CHURCH I WAYLAID NORAH"]
With this Henriette retired and the next morning on her way to early church I waylaid Norah. Her eyes were red with weeping, but a more indignant woman never lived. Her discharge was unrighteous; Mrs. Innitt was no lady; the butler was in a conspiracy to ruin her--and all that; indeed, her mood was most receptive to the furtherance of Henriette"s plans. The ten-dollar bill was soothing, and indicated that my mistress was a "foine woman" and "surely Norah would come "round in the evening to ask her aid."
"It"s ruined I am unless somebody"ll be good to me and give me a riference, which Mrs. Innitt, bad cess to her, won"t do, at all, at all," she wailed, and then I left her.
She called that night, and two days later was installed in the Van Raffles"s kitchen.
A new treasure was added to the stores of our loot, but somehow or other I have never been happy over the successful issue of the enterprise. I can"t quite make up my mind that it was a lady-like thing for Henriette to do even in Newport.
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 sc.r.a.p 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-Sc.r.a.ppe!_
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-Sc.r.a.ppes 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 Sc.r.a.ppe had long been the most ardent admirer of Mrs.
Gushington-Andrews, and Mrs. Constant-Sc.r.a.ppe"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-Sc.r.a.ppes 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-Sc.r.a.ppes 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-Sc.r.a.ppe for her own. Colonel Sc.r.a.ppe 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 att.i.tude 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.
[Ill.u.s.tration: "HENRIETTE WAS TESTING THE FIFTY-THOUSAND-DOLLAR PIANO"]