truth, the way I always have? Then here it is. What I've promised to
do, I'll do. I think just as much of John as you do, in a way, and I
was proud to have him ask me. But I felt he was doing it because he had
made up his mind it was the thing of all others to please you; also,
because it was safe and right to anchor his life to a girl who belonged
to his own class, and had no ideas beyond the plain, homely things she
had been brought up to. But he doesn't know me, in the least. I'm not
the girl he thinks, only a vain, conceited creature who loves admiration
and flattery and pretty things, and all the luxuries I see other people
having on this voyage, and the high-up places of the world. I want to
live, to have my fling, and what's worse, I want to be loved--really, as
I think it ought to be!"
Her voice dropped with her eyelashes; a burning blush ran up and
overspread her face. Old Herbert Winstanley asked himself if this were,
indeed, his little girl, his romp in pinafores of a year or two back?
Whence had come the blooming vision of young womanhood who had
supplanted the Posey of his recent lean and struggling years? What were
these obsessions controlling her? He could not tell, and meekly bent
before the blast.
"I reckon you know best, daughter," he said, clearing his throat in some
embarrassment. "But this much I'm as sure of as that the sun is in the
sky. You've done a wise thing, and a good thing, in engaging yourself
to John. Be true to him and to yourself, and the rest'll all come
right. Only, it's fair to tell you that you and John aren't a-going to
begin as poor as poverty's back door, the way we did. I've had a little
streak o' luck lately, and there's cash enough to give you your fling in
Europe, and start you and John to housekeeping in New York in pretty
decent style. He's a luckier fellow than he knows, is John, only I
don't mean to tell him so yet a while, or anybody else, and neither must
you, my girl."
"Could I have a cabin de luxe, and a French maid and a chaperon to
travel with, daddy," she asked with a glowing countenance, "instead of
half a stateroom with a horrid woman who drenches herself with scents,
and lectures me about keeping the light turned on while I do my hair?
Could I have a little string of real pearls, and one lovely pearl ring,
and a rug for my steamer-chair lined with otter, and tailor-made suits
that fit adorably--like Miss Carstairs, who's just my ideal, though
she'll hardly look at me?"
"We'll see, we'll see," mumbled Mr. Winstanley, looking as much alarmed
as did the fisherman in the "Arabian Nights," when he had let the Genie
escape and soar from the Magic Bottle. "Seems to me you spent a good
lot shopping in New York the week we were there."
"I wish I could throw all that trash I bought overboard," said the girl,
gritting her teeth in vexation. "Nobody but an idiot from Alison's
Cross Roads would have chosen such things and thought them stylish."
"It may be so," said her father, resignedly, "but putting one fact
alongside another, it looks as if you'd had as good a show as any young
lady on board, daughter."
"Daddy, you are the dearest old bat!" cried she, revealing to his
astonished gaze her eyes full of big, bright, childish tears. "How can't
you see that I'm only a peep-show, an amusement for all these people,
and that most of the women on board hardly speak to me? I don't care a
bit about that horrid old war-horse of the Scripture that snorts and
champs--Miss Bleecker! I consider her beneath my notice, and she may
insult me all she pleases. And Mrs. Vereker is another, and all their
set--dull, stiff women, with nothing but their wealth to recommend
them."
"Well, if it comes to that," murmured Mr. Winstanley, involuntarily
clinking the sovereigns he carried in a buckskin pouch in his breeches
pocket, then checking himself and saying no more.
"They may say I'm a chorus girl all they're a mind to. I know I'm not,
and that you are one of the most honored citizens of our town, and we
came of good old stock. I don't deny I've wanted to go on the stage.
Till lately, I've simply yearned for it. But that, and all sorts of
notions I had seem to have vanished away since I came aboard--since I've
known Miss Carstairs."
"That's the young woman sits at our table? Can't say I blame you,
Posey, I kinder took a shine to her, myself, the first evening out; but
she chilled on me afterward, and I'm never for troubling folks with my
attentions."
"She chilled on you because of me, poor dear; for any nice girl in her
senses must see you're a heavenly angel, if you do wear rusty tweeds.
She thought I was crude and aggressive and cheap, and so I am, maybe,
but I don't mean to stay so; and if ever I get to be anything better,
it'll be Helen Carstairs that's started me. But she won't know it, and
won't know me, and that's really what's bothering me so dreadfully,
daddy."
"Her father's the great Carstairs, isn't he? Didn't I hear John say
he'd indirectly given him a lift last year, and said some good things
about the way the boy managed a certain office job that came under
Carstairs' eye?"
"Did he? There now, daddy, is just the girl John would have been wise
to get, if he could. She might have helped him up the ladder by just
putting out a finger-tip. And he is so ambitious, so fastidious. I
could see that little trifles about me jarred on him constantly--the
very things these lords and grandees aboard admire the most it seems. He
called them provincialisms, and Lord Channel Fleet says they're simply
delicious. Who am I to believe?"
"Ah, my little girl, I can't tell you, and that's the truth. But John's
apt to be right, only whether or not Miss Carstairs is his ideal, you
just be yourself, and don't put on any frills. You can't help being
lively, thank God, nor true, nor generous, for you're your own mother's
child. You'll make friends, never fear, the only trouble to my mind is
lest they should be those who care for you only because----"
"Why, daddy, one would almost think I am something in disguise. You
needn't be afraid of any one on this trip, however. They'll all forget
me the day the ship touches Liverpool."
"Well, it don't matter much when we've got John behind us, does it,
daughter? I reckon he'll be proud as I am to hear what a belle you've
been. There's only one thing it's crossed my mind he mightn't fancy
over-much--your going around with that lord fellow that's been so much
talked about--that Clandonald man, I mean."
"Oh! daddy, _don't_!"
Mr. Winstanley had thought himself, through experience, prepared for
most of the idiosyncrasies of femininity as developed by his daughter,
but he could not have reasonably counted upon the look that came into
her face as she made this protest. It caused him to stare, shake
himself like a wet dog, scrutinize her again narrowly, then utter an
exclamation familiar to him only under stress of strong emotion.
"Stonewall Jackson, daughter! I want to know!"
*CHAPTER IV*
The measure of Mr. Winstanley's curiosity was, however, not to be
satisfied on this occasion; since, almost immediately, the colloquy with
his daughter over the "Baltic's" rail was destined to interruption by
Lord Clandonald in person, who came up to ask if Miss Winstanley were
ready for their walk.
Since the first evening of their meeting, he had fallen into the habit
of seeking her out in a half-shy, wholly unemotional manner, and of
spending a half hour or so in her company listening to her merry chatter
and insensibly lightening and brightening out of the heavy lassitude
that had possessed his soul for so many weary months. With returning
animation, the real beauty and high distinction of his face revealed
itself. Posey, who had thought of his title merely as a pleasing toy,
who had as yet acquired none of the prevalent worship of her average
countrymen for the glamour of a place among the hereditary nobility of
the lands they affect to surpass in achievement, liked to be with him
because of three things--viz., the great strength and beauty of his
body, his gift of beautiful diction, and the melodious speech that rang
upon her ear like a chime of perfect bells. She also enjoyed his way of
brushing his hair and putting on his clothes, and not caring in the
least what anybody on board thought of him or said of him. At least,
that is what, had she possessed a confidante of her own sex, Miss
Winstanley would have admitted concerning her indifferent admirer.
He had come to her as a man who at thirty considers himself to have done
with life, and consents to take up incidental diversion by the way. He
had never met a girl so ignorant of the world, so inexhaustibly
interested in things and people, so fresh and healthy, yet innately
refined, so daring, yet so sure of herself that no man might take a
liberty with her in speech or action; and above all, so pretty.
So deliciously pretty! The woman whom he had ruined his life by
marrying, five years before, had been accounted a beauty, and was a
gentlewoman by tradition and association. As he had seen Ruby Darien
last, in the divorce court, she seemed a mere made-up creature who would
go to pieces at night in her maid's hands, a thing of artifice and
stimulant, of base passions and shallow emotionality, already a
has-been, although barely his own age. At what time of her existence
was it that she had made his pulses thrill with her loveliness? Could
he have ever considered Ruby the peer in looks of this stray maiden come
upon by chance to be soon parted with, and never seen again? He hated
to think he had believed himself Ruby's lover during the time before he
had found her out. He loathed the days before he put her away, when,
for his boy's sake, he had kept on terms with her outwardly. After his
child died, and he had taken his opportunity to be a free man, he often
thanked God, that following that voyage of his wife's to South Africa he
had never thought of her as beautiful.
But except for the somewhat languid admiration excited in him, the young
American had not yet stirred the deeper fountains of Clandonald's
feeling. Mariol, observing the progress of affairs, was quietly
content. He really considered the acquaintance with Posey a species of
mild cure, like a visit to a German health-place where one eats brown
bread and baked apples, and goes to bed at ten o'clock. If it had been
Miss Carstairs, now, upon whom these desultory attentions of his
lordship had been bestowed, Mariol, having ascertained this lady to be
the daughter of the world-famous financier, would have been much more
actively concerned in forecasting for her a place among the white
peacocks at Beaumanoir.
It was about Beaumanoir that Clandonald now found himself obliged to
talk with Miss Winstanley. With the lightning-like rapidity of growth
in steamer intimacies, they had all come to discourse of one another's
domiciles and surroundings, and Mariol, whose aestheticism rejoiced in
his friend's noble old forsaken home, had shown the girl a photograph of
it. Posey, like every Southerner, had an instinctive love and reverence
for the historic element in English country homes, and the ancient
moated dwelling in whose grounds monarchs had taken their pleasure
appealed keenly to her otherwise concrete and contemporaneous view of
things. To see it was like stepping out of a modern railway station
into an old-world garden of ripe delights. And to be actually walking
up and down decks with the owner, albeit he looked like other men and
had his hands thrust in the pockets of an indifferently shabby ulster,
was a fillip her imagination had not previously known.
A little teased, a little flattered by her queries on the subject,
Clandonald yet felt assured that her interest was impersonal and
genuine. When he remembered how Ruby had hated to stay at Beaumanoir,
preferring any small stuffy hotel in Paris or Rome, or on the Riviera,
Miss Winstanley's real enthusiasm was refreshing. It almost made him
want to go back himself to that spot, haunted by the ghosts of dead
beliefs, near which the poor little boy slept, under a tiny mound in the
churchyard that he was always trying to forget.
Strange, now it always came to him when alone in a balmy wood, with
birds singing and sun filtering through the branches; or on Sundays when
a church bell rang; or if he awoke suddenly in the middle of the night;
or in looking at a field of haymakers and distant grazing sheep! It was
not a keen pain any longer, but only a sobering, tender thought, and the
man was better for it afterward. Now, again, as he thrust his hands
deeper in his pockets and strode up and down beside the girl, dodging
other walking pairs, and wishing there were not so many people in the
world who wanted to do what he did, the image of the little green mound
arose across the waste of wide Atlantic. Was it Posey who inspired his
one sacred remembrance? He could not tell, but went on letting her draw
him out about his lovely impoverished Beaumanoir, until she was touched
and astonished at the feeling he revealed concerning it.
"Oh! I am sure you will have it all once more, and be able to enjoy
everything as of old," she exclaimed impulsively.
"Perhaps you don't know why this is impossible," he answered, gulping
down the bitter fact, "It is quite hopeless for me to live decently
there, on all I am ever likely to have in the way of income."
"And I, like a goose, keep always ignoring the money question in
connection with those beautiful entrancing old English places. I've read
about them so often in a book we have of 'Dwellings of the Aristocracy
and Gentry,' and also in 'Country Life.' They seem to have been created
to go on for ages by themselves, in a state of suspended animation, like
the Sleeping Beauty's palace. If you won't think me silly, I'll tell you
that when I get hold of a copy of 'Country Life,' I imagine myself
living in one house after another of the illustrations, and I want to
buy all the horses and dogs and sheep and everything in the
advertisements, except, maybe, incubators, which are horrid unnatural
things, and the smelly stuff they put upon the grass and flowers that
can't say 'don't'!"
Clandonald laughed.
"Rather my own idea. But I supposed all you people of the South owned
large estates and many acres to experiment upon."
"Oh! dear, no! We personally never owned anything bigger than a
back-yard, until my father was persuaded by a man to go shares with him
in some land I never saw, where they found both coal and iron. Last
year the man died, and my daddy, who had paid up most all the purchase
money, came into possession of the whole property. I believe it's
turned out better than he thought, and he's lately got something good
out of it, else certainly we'd not have had this trip to Europe. I'm
glad you never saw Alison's Cross Roads, Lord Clandonald. It's just the
homeliest, pokiest little place in Alabama, and the people are good and
kind, but commonplace to a degree. The houses are all of wood with
jig-saw trimmings and the paint half worn off. Nobody thinks it
necessary to improve anything, and the negroes swarm over everywhere,
and rule the land."
"Then I suppose you'll call me jolly impertinent," said he, "if I wonder
how you grew up as you are in the middle of it."
"I don't know! I just did. People have grown tired, down there, of
holding up their hands over me. My teacher at school, who was born
North, was the only one that ever understood why I wanted anything
different from the rest. She took several magazines, and told me about
others, that I persuaded daddy to subscribe to. She lent me books and
talked to me, but two years ago she decided to marry in New York, and I
lost her. She lives there now, dear soul, in an awfully little flat.
Her husband is in the insurance business, and she edits a column of
'Advice to Girls.' She says she fairly hates some of the idiots who
write to her asking the most drivelling questions. But to please the
editor, she has to dissemble, and call them dears and answer like a
guardian angel when she had rather choke them and be done with
it--because the work pays the butcher's bill and half the gas!"
"Has she taught you that such poverty is evened by the good to be
acquired from the married state?"
"I think so. At least, she and Mr. Bartley have a good deal of fun out
of things. Their greatest treat, when their maid's cooking gets too
impossible and Mr. Bartley is growing thin, is to go to dinner at an
Italian restaurant, a dollar each, with wine, and to eat enough
spaghetti to last another little while. Mrs. Bartley got fifteen
dollars for looking up facts and dates in the Astor Library for a
fashionable lady, who was allotted to read a paper on something she
never heard of before, at a meeting of her literary club. Mrs. Bartley
ended by doing the whole thing, and the lady was so fascinated by
herself in typewriting, that she sent a check for fifteen instead of
ten; so the Bartleys took me to their restaurant for dinner, and
afterward to the play, in cheap seats. Yes, I think the Bartleys are
all right. If their kitchen door could be kept shut, and the smell of
cooking be banished from the parlor, I believe they'd be as happy as
most people who are married, anyway."
"Perhaps, if you and your father are to be in London, you would let me
take you out to dinner and cheap seats at the play?"
"Wouldn't I love it? But you can't drag daddy to the theatre, and I'm
not like Miss Carstairs, blessed with a chaperon. Do you notice that,
as we are getting 'half-seas over,' Miss Bleecker's English accent
becomes more pronounced? She is forever talking about when we are 'in
town,' and regretting that it is out of the season, because so few of
their great friends will be there to welcome them. She calls all the
American duchesses by their first names, and the other United States
peeresses that she didn't play with in infancy, she must have brought up
by hand."
"I am afraid I am too lowly a personage to claim the lady's acquaintance
in future," said Clandonald, indifferently. "But I confess I should
like, for my friend Mariol's sake, who has conceived a vast admiration
for her charge--to manage to ask Miss Carstairs and himself to join you
and your father in a run down to Beaumanoir for luncheon, while you are
'in town.' It is pretty, there, in autumn, and there are sure to be
some good peaches on the garden wall."
"How adorable!" exclaimed Posey. "Daddy might go to that, if I beg him,
but Miss Carstairs--! There's the difficulty. She won't more than look
at me. I wonder why you, who are born really higher up in the world
than Miss Bleecker and Miss Carstairs, never let me feel that I am only
a druggist's daughter!"
"In Athens, they tell you Aristotle kept a chemist's shop," answered
Clandonald, laughing. "And I have always understood that some of the
most illustrious of the families in New York's Four Hundred were founded
upon drugs."
"If it wasn't pills, or capsules, or hair tonic, it was some other kind
of merchandise!" said Posey, viciously. "And, anyhow, what does it
matter? There was a sentence I copied out of a book of Maarten
Maartens, that Mrs. Bartley lent me, about there being no other way of
living than either on the money you have earned for yourself, or on the
money that other people have earned for you. As long as that simple
fact remains, the question will also remain whether money-making is so
very contemptible!"
"Try any man living, with an honest chance, and see what he'd answer,"
said Clandonald with a sigh. "I'd give anything I own for a respectable
business that would bring in the cash and the knowledge of how to run
it, _bien entendu_."
"You poor thing!" exclaimed Miss Winstanley, guilelessly. "Why weren't
you born in dear America? Of course if you _could_ go stalking around
in chain-armor like those ancestors of yours at Beaumanoir, it wouldn't
seem so appropriate. But just to look at you as you stand, to-day, I
should judge there were the makings of a fair business man in you. Look
here, Lord Clandonald, I don't know that I was ever better pleased in my
life than by that idea of yours of our going to lunch at Beaumanoir with
Miss Carstairs. I don't mind telling you I just adore that girl--and the
combination of her company with a moat and yew trees, and wall-peaches,
and the chance of seeing English rooks--and Miss Bleecker not 'in it,'
I'll be eternally obliged."
"It seems to me the host counts for unflatteringly little," said
Clandonald, somewhat piqued.
"I didn't mean to have you think so," answered she with astonishing
gentleness, "I was only carried away to forget my manners by realizing
so many dreams at once. Indeed, I am glad, or shall be, to meet you
again after this voyage. Now, I'm going to ask you something that will
make you laugh, perhaps, but please don't. Could you give me the
address of a really good place in London where I could get frocks and
hats, ready-to-wear, that would keep me from looking like a guy?"
Poor Clandonald winced at thought of just how he had become acquainted
with the best _faiseuses_ in London, whose bills he had paid to the
uttermost farthing, after the ex-Lady Clandonald had ceased to be. But
he could not help smiling at the earnest anxiety of his questioner.
"I think I might help you a little, perhaps, but surely----"
"Surely there ought to be some woman aboard to do it? Of course you
think so, but if I could tell you half I've divined, and some things
I've overheard from them, you'd know I'd never ask one of them. Why, I
heard that old Vereker tabby say to the old Bleecker cat, as distinctly
as could be, that I was a freak in clothes and a bounder in manners, and
she wondered the captain let me go at large."
"Oh! I say."
"Perfectly true, and I had it out of her by trailing her half-dead
husband after me all over the ship, until he hadn't a leg to stand on;
and I put a rose in his buttonhole under her very eyes. I've been
ashamed of it ever since, but when a girl's got to fight her own
battles, what would you have?"
"There should be always some one glad to fight for you," he said,
suddenly fired by her proud young beauty in distress.
They had, while speaking, walked down to the dividing rail that cuts off
the promenaders of the second cabin from the first-class decks, and for
some moments tarried there, Clandonald with his back to it, Miss
Winstanley facing him. As the Englishman spoke these unpremeditated
words of warm sympathy, for the second time that day there had come into
the girl's artless face an expression she certainly had no idea of
revealing. It caused Clandonald to pull himself up with a jerk, and
stay the vague, rather affectionate, words he had been on the point of
uttering, without, perhaps, meaning to have too much importance attached
to them. And it was further reflected in the shining green eyes of a
second-class passenger in shabby black, standing near by the barrier,
wearing a veil of black gauze with large coquettish velvet dots that
half concealed her undulated locks of unreasonably ruddy hair!
It was not the first time the green gleam of those watchful eyes had
been fixed upon Clandonald and his companions. He had, in fact, been
under their close observation whenever practicable since leaving New
York harbor, in the course of their owner's predatory walks, as she
alternately drew near and receded with graceful feline tread, seeming to
look at nothing, yet forever alert where the good-looking, lazy young
Englishman was concerned.
The youthful steward who distends himself for the public good by blowing
the bugle for lunch was, on this occasion, the agent of Providence to
relieve a strained situation. Clandonald could not, in the face of such
a blast, go on with his implied offer of championship. The second-cabin
passenger glided swiftly back across her little bridge, and was seen no
more. Miss Winstanley, announcing herself half-starved, went to her
stateroom to wash her hands. And his lordship, to calm his feelings,
partook of a certain small, specially reviving, bitter-sweet draught,
which his servant had acquired the gentle art of mixing, during their
sojourn in San Francisco. On the way into the dining-room, he found
Mariol just ahead of him, amid a congerie of stewards hurrying to and
from their pantries with their arms full of crockery, and in an
atmosphere tinctured with out-rushing odors of cauliflower and curried
rice, gave his friend a word of counsel.