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 lord and master.”
“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 Recamier, “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. AEneas
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 I turned
my X-ray gaze upon it I saw that it contained about
six brigades of infantry, three artillery regiments,
and sharp-shooters by the score. It was a sort
of military Noah’s Ark; but I knew that the
prejudice against me was so strong that nobody would
believe what I told them. So I said nothing.
My prophecies never came true, they said, failing
to observe that my warning as to what would be was
in itself the cause of their non-fulfilment. But
desiring to save Troy, I sent for Laocoon and told
him all about it, and he went out and announced it
as his own private prophecy; and then, having tried
to drown his conscience in strong waters, he fell a
victim to the usual serpentine hallucination, and
everybody said he wasn’t sober, and therefore
unworthy of belief. The horse was accepted, hauled
into the city, and that night orders came from hindquarters
to the regiments concealed inside to march. They
marched, and next morning Troy had been removed from
the map; ninety per cent. of the Trojans died suddenly,
and AEneas, grabbing up his family in one hand and
his gods in the other, went yachting for several seasons,
ultimately settling down in Italy. All of this
could have been avoided if the Trojans would have taken
the hint from my prophecies. They preferred,
however, not to do it, with the result that to-day
no one but Helen and myself knows even where Troy was,
and we’ll never tell.”
“It is all true,” said
Helen, proudly. “I was the woman who was
at the bottom of it all, and I can testify that Cassandra
always told the truth, which is why she was always
so unpopular. When anything that was unpleasant
happened, after it was all over she would turn and
say, sweetly, ‘I told you so.’ She
was the original ‘I told you so’ nuisance,
and of course she had the newspapyruses down on her,
because she never left them any sensation to spring
upon the public. If she had only told a fib once
in a while, the public would have had more confidence
in her.”
“Thank you for your endorsement,”
said Cassandra, with a nod at Helen. “With
such testimony I cannot see how you can refrain from
taking my advice in this matter; and I tell you, ladies,
that this man Kidd has made his story up out of whole
cloth; the men of Hades had no more to do with our
being here than we had; they were as much surprised
as we are to find us gone. Kidd himself was not
aware of our presence, and his object in taking us
to Paris is to leave us stranded there, disembodied
spirits, vagrant souls with no familiar haunts to
haunt, no place to rest, and nothing before us save
perpetual exile in a world that would have no sympathy
for us in our misfortune, and no belief in our continued
existence.”
“But what, then, shall we do?”
cried Ophelia, wringing her hands in despair.
“It is a terrible problem,”
said Cleopatra, anxiously; “and yet it does
seem as if our woman’s instinct ought to show
us some way out of our trouble.”
“The Committee on Treachery,”
said Delilah, “has already suggested a chafing-dish
party, with Lucretia Borgia in charge of the lobster
Newberg.”
“That is true,” said Lucretia;
“but I find, in going through my reticule, that
my maid, for some reason unknown to me, has failed
to renew my supply of poisons. I shall discharge
her on my return home, for she knows that I never
go anywhere without them; but that does not help matters
at this juncture. The sad fact remains that I
could prepare a thousand delicacies for these pirates
without fatal results.”
“You mean immediately fatal,
do you not?” suggested Xanthippe. “I
could myself prepare a cake which would in time reduce
our captors to a state of absolute dependence, but
of course the effect is not immediate.”
“We might give a musicale, and
let Trilby sing ‘Ben Bolt’ to them,”
suggested Marguerite de Valois, with a giggle.
“Don’t be flippant, please,”
said Portia. “We haven’t time to waste
on flippant suggestions. Perhaps a court-martial
of these pirates, supplemented by a yard-arm, wouldn’t
be a bad thing. I’ll prosecute the case.”
“You forget that you are dealing
with immortal spirits,” observed Cleopatra.
“If these creatures were mortals, hanging them
would be all right, and comparatively easy, considering
that we outnumber them ten to one, and have many resources
for getting them, more or less, in our power, but
they are not. They have gone through the refining
process of dissolution once, and there’s an
end to that. Our only resource is in the line
of deception, and if we cannot deceive them, then we
have ceased to be women.”
“That is truly said,”
observed Elizabeth. “And inasmuch as we
have already provided ourselves with a suitable committee
for the preparation of our plans of a deceptive nature,
I move, as the easiest possible solution of the difficulty
for the rest of us, that the Committee on Treachery
be requested to go at once into executive session,
with orders not to come out of it until they have
suggested a plausible plan of campaign against our
abductors. We must be rid of them. Let the
Committee on Treachery say how.”
“Second the motion,” said
Mrs. Noah. “You are a very clear-headed
young woman, Lizzie, and your grandmother is proud
of you.”
The Committee on Treachery were about
to protest, but the chair refused to entertain any
debate upon the question, which was put and carried
with a storm of approval.
Five minutes later a note was handed
through the port, addressed to Cleopatra, which read
as follows:
“DEAR MADAME, Six bells
has just struck, and the officers and crew are
hungry. Will you and your fair companions co-operate
with us in our enterprise by having a hearty dinner
ready within two hours? A speck has appeared
on the horizon which betokens a coming storm,
else we would prepare our supper ourselves. As
it is, we feel that your safety depends on our
remaining on deck. If there is any beer on
the ice, we prefer it to tea. Two cases will
suffice.
“Yours respectfully,
“HENRY MORGAN, Bart.,
First Mate.”
“Hurrah!” cried Cleopatra,
as she read this communication. “I have
an idea. Tell the Committee on Treachery to appear
before the full meeting at once.”
The committee was summoned, and Cleopatra
announced her plan of operation, and it was unanimously
adopted; but what it was we shall have to wait for
another chapter to learn.