In the midst of this uproar of bra.s.s, strings, sheep-skin, wash-bowls, broken coal, pokers and tongs, a lean figure in curl-papers and slippers, bright red calico wrapper reaching to the floor, and a lighted candle in one hand, forced its way through the crowd at the door and stood out in the glare of the gaslights facing McFudd.

It was Miss Ann Teetum!

Instantly a silence fell upon the room.

"Gentlemen, this is outrageous!" she cried in a voice that ripped through the air like a saw. "I have put up with these disgraceful performances as long as I am going to. Not one of you shall stay in my house another night. Out you go in the morning, every one of you, bag and baggage!"

McFudd attempted to make an apology. Oliver stepped forward, the color mounting to his cheeks, and Waller began a protest at the unwarrantable intrusion, but the infuriated little woman waved them all aside and turning abruptly marched back through the door and down the staircase, preceded by the other female boarders. The little hunchback alone remained. He was doubled up in a knot, wiping the tears from his eyes, his breath gone from excessive laughter.

The Skylarkers looked at each other in blank astonishment. One of the long-cherished traditions of the house was the inviolability of this attic. Its rooms were let with an especial privilege guaranteeing its privacy, with free license to make all the noise possible, provided the racket was confined to that one floor. So careful had been its occupants to observe this rule, that noisy as they all were when once on the top floor, every man unlocked the front door at night with the touch of a burglar and crept upstairs as noiselessly as a footpad.

"I'm sorry, men," said McFudd, looking into the astounded faces about him. "I'm the last man, as ye know, to hurt anybody's feelings. But what the divil's got into the old lady? Who'd 'a' thought she would have heard a word of it down where she sleeps in the bas.e.m.e.nt?"

"'Tis the Van Ta.s.sell," grunted the Walrus. "She's so mesmerized the old woman lately that she don't know her own mind."

"What makes you think she put her up to it, Waller?" asked Cranch.

"I don't think--but it's just like her," answered Waller, with illogical prejudice.

"My eye! wasn't she a beauty!" laughed Fred, and he picked up a bit of charcoal and began an outline of the wrapper and slippers on the side-wall.

Tomlins, Cranch, and the others had no suggestions to offer. Their minds were too much occupied in wondering what was going to become of them in the morning.

The German band by this time had regained their usual solidity. The leader seemed immensely relieved. He had evidently expected the next apparition to be a bluecoat with a pair of handcuffs.

"Put their green jackets on 'em," McFudd said to the leader quietly, pointing to the instruments. "We're much obliged to you and your men for coming up," and he slipped some notes into the leader's hand. "Now get downstairs, every man o' ye, as aisy as if ye were walking on eggs.

Cranch, old man, will ye see 'em out, to kape that infernal drum from b.u.t.ting into the Van Ta.s.sell's door, or we'll have another hornet's nest. Begorra, there's wan thing very sure--it's little baggage I'LL have to move out."

The next morning a row of six vacant seats stared Miss Ann out of countenance. The outcasts had risen early and had gone to Riley's for their breakfast. Miss Ann sat at the coffee-urn as stiff and erect as an avenging judge. Lofty purpose and grim determination were written in every line of her face. Mrs. Van Ta.s.sell was not in evidence. Her nerves had been so shattered by the "night's orgy," she had said to Miss Ann, that she should breakfast in her room. She further notified Miss Teetum that she should at once withdraw her protecting presence from the establishment, and leave it without a distinguished social head, if the dwellers on the top floor remained another day under the same roof with herself.

An ominous silence and depressing gloom seemed to hang over everybody.

Several of the older men pushed back their plates and began drumming oh the table-cloth with their fingers, a far-away look in their eyes. One or two talked in whispers, their coffee untasted. Old Mr. Lang looked down the line of empty seats and took his place with a dejected air. He was the oldest man in the house and the oldest boarder; this gave him certain privileges, one being to speak his mind.

"I understand," he said, unfolding his napkin and facing. Miss Ann, "that you have ordered the boys out of the house?"

"Yes, I have," snapped out Miss Teetum.

Everybody looked up. No one recognized the tone of her voice, it was so sharp and bitter.

"Why, may I ask?"

"I will not have my house turned into a bear-garden, that's why!"

"That's better than a graveyard," retorted Mr. Lang. "That's what the house would be without them. I can't understand why you object. You sleep in the bas.e.m.e.nt and shouldn't hear a sound; my wife and I sleep under them every night. If we can stand it, you can. You send the boys away, Miss Teetum, and we'll move out."

Miss Ann winced under the shot, but she did not answer.

"Do you mean that you're going to turn the young gentlemen into the street, Miss Ann?" whined Mrs. Southwark Boggs in an injured tone, from her end of the table. "Are we going to have no young life in the house at all? I won't stay a day after they're gone."

Miss Teetum changed color, but she looked straight ahead of her. She evidently did not want her private affairs discussed at the table.

"I shall want my bill at the end of the week, now that the boys are to leave," remarked the little hunchback to Miss Ann as he bent over her chair. "Life is dreary enough as it is."

And so the boys stayed on.

Only one room became vacant at the end of the month. That was Mrs.

Schuyler Van Ta.s.sell's.

CHAPTER XI

A CHANGE OF WIND

The affair of the bra.s.s band, with its dramatic and most unlooked-for ending, left an unpleasant memory in the minds of the members of the club, especially in Oliver's. His training had been somewhat different from that of the others present, and his oversensitive nature had been more shocked than pleased by it all. While most of the other partic.i.p.ants regretted the ill-feeling which had been aroused in Miss Teetum's mind, they felt sure--in fact, they knew--that this heretofore kind and gentle hostess could never have fanned her wrath to so white a heat had not some other hand besides her own worked the bellows.

Suspicion first fell upon a new boarder unaccustomed to the ways of the house, who, it was reported, had double-locked herself in at the first crash of the drum, and who had admitted, on being cross-examined by McFudd, that she had nearly broken her back in trying to barricade her bedroom door with a Saratoga trunk and a wash-stand. This theory was abandoned when subsequent inquiries brought to light the fact that Mrs.

Van Ta.s.sell, when the echoes of one of McFudd's songs had reached her ears, had stated a week before that no respectable boarding-house would tolerate uproars like those which took place almost nightly on the top floor, and that she would withdraw her protection from Miss Euphemia and leave the house at once and forever if the noise did not cease.

This dire threat being duly reported to the two Misses Teetum had--it was afterward learned--so affected them both that Miss Ann had gone to bed with a chill and Miss Sarah had warded off another with a bowl of hot camomile tea.

This story, true as it undoubtedly was, did not entirely clear up the situation. One part of it sorely puzzled McFudd. Why did Miss Euphemia need Mrs. Van Ta.s.sell's protection, and why should the loss of it stir Miss Ann to so violent an outburst? This question no member of the Skylarks could answer.

The solution came that very night, and in the most unexpected way, Waller bearing the glad tidings.

Miss Euphemia, ignoring them all, was to be married at St. Mark's at 6 P.M. on the following Monday, and Mrs. Van Ta.s.sell was to take charge of the wedding reception in the front parlor! The groom was the strange young man who had sat for some days beside Miss Euphemia, pa.s.sing as Miss Ann's nephew, and who really was a well-to-do druggist with a shop on Astor Place. All of the regular boarders of the house were to be invited.

The explosion of this matrimonial bomb so cleared the air of all doubt as to the guilt of Mrs. Van Ta.s.sell, that a secret meeting, attended by every member of the Skylarks, was at once held in Waller's room with the result that Miss Ann's invitations to the wedding were unanimously accepted. Not only would the resident members go--so the original resolution ran--but the non-resident and outside members would also be on hand to do honor to Miss Euphemia and her distinguished chaperone.

This amendment being accepted, McFudd announced in a sepulchral tone that, owing to the severity of the calamity and to the peculiarly painful circ.u.mstances which surrounded their esteemed fellow-skylarker, the Honorable Sylvester Ruffle-shirt Tomlins, his fellow-members would wear c.r.a.pe on their left arms for thirty days. This also was carried unanimously, every man except Ruffle-shirt Tomlins breaking out into the "Dead Man's Chorus"--a song, McFudd explained, admirably fitted to the occasion.

When the auspicious night arrived, the several dress-suits of the members were duly laid out on the piano and hung over the chairs, and each gentleman proceeded to array himself in costume befitting the occasion. Waller, who weighed 200 pounds, squeezed himself into McFudd's coat and trousers (McFudd weighed 150), the trousers reaching a little below the painter's knees. McFudd wrapped Waller's coat about his thin girth and turned up the bagging legs, of the unmentionables six inches above his shoes. The a.s.sorted costumes of the other members were equally grotesque. The habiliments themselves were of proper cut and make, according to the standards of the time--spike-tailed coats, white ties, patent-leather pumps, and the customary tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs, but the effects produced were as ludicrous as they were incongruous, though the studied bearing of the gentlemen was meant to prove their unconsciousness of the fact.

The astonishment that rested on Mrs. Van Ta.s.sell's face when this motley group filed into the parlor and with marked and punctilious deference paid their respects to the bride, and the wrath that flashed in Miss Euphemia's eyes, became ever after part of the traditions of the club. Despite Mrs. Van Ta.s.sell's protest against the uproar on the top floor, she had invariably spoken in high terms to her friends and intimates of these very boarders--their acquaintance was really part of her social capital--commenting at the same time upon their exalted social and artistic positions. In fact, many of her own special guests had attended the wedding solely in the hope of being brought into more intimate relations with this distinguished group of painters, editors, and musicians, some of whom were already being talked about.

When, however, McFudd stood in the corner of Miss Teetum's parlor like a half-scared boy, pulling out the fingers of Waller's kid gloves, an inch too long for him, and Waller, Fred, and my Lord c.o.c.kburn stumbled over the hearth-rug one after the other, and Oliver, feeling like a guilty man and a boor, bowed and sc.r.a.ped like a dancing-master; and Bowdoin the painter, and Simmons and Fog-horn Cranch, talked plat.i.tudes with faces as grave as undertakers, the expectant special guests invited by Mrs. Van Ta.s.sell began to look upon her encomiums as part of an advertising scheme to fill Miss Teetum's rooms.

The impression made upon the Teetum contingent by the appearance and manners of the several members--even Oliver's reputation was ruined--was equally disastrous. It was, perhaps, best voiced by the druggist groom, when he informed Mrs. Van T. from behind his lemon-colored glove--that "if that was the gang he had heard so much of, he didn't want no more of 'em."

But these and other jollifications were not long to continue. Causes infinitely more serious were at work undermining the foundations of the Skylarks. The Lodge of Poverty, to which they all belonged, gay as it had often been, was slowly closing its door; the unexpected, which always hangs over life, was about to happen; the tie which bound these men together was slowly loosening. Its members might give the grip of fellowship to other members in other lodges over the globe, but no longer in this one on the top floor of the house on Union Square.

One morning McFudd broke the seal of an important-looking letter bearing a Dublin post-mark on the upper right-hand corner of the envelope, and the family crest on its flap. For some moments he sat still, looking straight before him. Then two tears stole out and glistened on his lashes.

"Boys," he said, slowly, "the governor says I must come home," and he held up a steamer ticket and a draft that barely equalled his dues for a month's board and washing.

That night he p.a.w.ned his new white overcoat with the bone b.u.t.tons and velvet collar--the one his father had sent him, and which had been the envy of every man in the club, and invested every penny of the proceeds in a supper to be given to the Skylarks. The invitation ran as follows:

Mr. Cornelius McFudd respectively requests the pleasure of your presence at an informal wake to be held in honor of a double-breasted overcoat, London cut. The body and tail will be the ducks, and the two sleeves and velvet collar the Burgundy.