Even Dorothy was disposed to believe that unless some peculiarly
favorable combination of circumstances presented itself as a basis for
her intelligent manipulation her strong desire for a yacht voyage must
remain ungratified; for, now that his liver was decidedly the larger
part of him, Mr. Port had a fairly catlike dread of the sea. To be sure,
Dorothy’s character was a resolute one, and her staying powers were
quite remarkable; but in the matter of venturing his bilious body upon
the ocean she discovered that her uncle--although now reduced to a
fairly satisfactory state of submission in other respects--had a large
and powerful will of his own.
Fortune, however, favors the resolute even more decidedly than she
favors the brave. This fact Dorothy comprehended thoroughly, and
uniformly acted upon. Each time that even a remote possibility of a
yacht cruise presented itself she instantly brought her batteries
to bear; and, with a nice understanding of her uncle’s intellectual
peculiarities, she each time treated the matter as though it never
before had been discussed.
Therefore it was that when Miss Lee’s eyes were gladdened one day--just
as she and her uncle were about to begin their lunch on the shady
veranda of the Casino--by the sight of a trim schooner yacht sliding
down the wind from the direction of Newport, the subject of the cruise
was revived with a suddenness and point that Mr. Port found highly
disconcerting. The yacht rounded to off the Casino, and the sound of a
plunge and a clanking chain floated across the water as her anchor went
overboard.
[Illustration: The yacht rounded to off the Casino 060]
“Oh, isn’t she a beauty!” exclaimed Dorothy, with enthusiasm. “Now,
Uncle Hutchinson, her owner is coming ashore--they have just brought
the gig round to the gangway--and if you don’t know him you must get
somebody to introduce you to him; and then you must introduce him to me;
and then he will ask us to go on a cruise; and of course we will go,
and have just the loveliest time in the world. I haven’t been on board
a yacht for nearly five years (just look at the gig: don’t the men pull
splendidly?)--not since that nice little Lord Alderhone took poor dear
mamma and me up to Norway. We did have such a good time! Poor dear
mamma, of course, was desperately sick--she always was horribly
sea-sick, you know; but I’m never sea-sick the least bit, and it was
perfectly delightful. Look, Uncle Hutchinson, they’ve made the dock, and
now he’s coming right up here. What a handsome man he is, and how well
he looks in his club uniform! It seems to me I’ve seen him somewhere. Do
you know him, Uncle Hutchinson?”
A serious difficulty under which Mr. Port labored in his dealings with
his niece was his inability--due to his Philadelphia habit of mind--to
keep up with the exceptionally rapid flow of her ideas. On the present
occasion, while he still was engaged in consideration of the irrational
proposition that he should court the desperate misery that attends a
bilious man at sea by as good as asking to be taken on a yacht voyage,
he suddenly found his ideas twisted off into another direction by the
reference to his sister’s sufferings on a similar occasion in the past;
and before he could frame in words the reproof that he was disposed
to administer to Dorothy for what he probably would have styled her
heartlessness, he found his thoughts shunted to yet another track by a
direct question. It is within the bounds of possibility that Miss
Lee had arrived at a just estimate of her relative’s intellectual
peculiarities, and that she even sometimes framed her discourses with a
view to taking advantage of them.
The direct question being the simplest section of Dorothy’s complex
utterance, Mr. Port abandoned his intended remonstrance and reproof and
proceeded to answer it. “Yes,” he said, “I know him. It’s Van Rensselaer
Livingstone. His cousin, Van Ruy-ter Livingstone, married your cousin
Grace--Grace Winthrop, you know. He’s a great scamp--this one, I mean;
gambles, and that sort of thing, I’m told, and drinks, and--and various
things. I shall have to speak to him if he sees me, I suppose; but of
course I shall not introduce him to you.”
“Mr. Van Rensselaer Livingstone! Why so it is! How perfectly delightful!
I know him very well, Uncle Hutchinson. He was in Nice the last winter
we were there; and he broke the bank at Monaco; and he played that
perfectly absurd trick on little Prince Sporetti: cut off his little
black mustache when Prince Sporetti was--was not exactly sober, you
know, and gummed on a great red mustache instead of it; and then, before
the prince was quite himself again, took him to Lady Orrasby’s ball. All
Nice was in a perfect roar over it. And they had a duel afterwards, and
Mr. Livingstone--he is a wonderful shot--instead of hurting the little
prince, just shot away the tip of his left ear as nicely as possible.
Oh, he is a delightful man--and here he comes.” And Dorothy, half rising
from her chair, and paying no more attention to Mr. Port’s kicks under
the table than she did to his smothered verbal remonstrances, extended
her well-shaped white hand in the most cordial manner, and in the most
cordial tone exclaimed:
“Won’t you speak to me in English, Mr. Livingstone? We talked French,
I think it was, the last time we met. And how is your friend Prince
Sporetti? Has his ear grown out again? You know my uncle, I think?
Mr. Hutchinson Port.”
Livingstone took the proffered hand with even more cordiality than it
was given, and then extended his own to Mr. Port--who seemed much less
inclined to shake it than to bite it.
“I think that we are justified in regarding ourselves as relations now,
Miss Lee, since our cousins have married each other, you know. Quite a
romance, wasn’t it? And how very jolly it is to meet you here--when I
thought that you certainly were in Switzerland or Norway, or even over
in that new place that people are going to in Roumania! I flatter myself
that I always have rather a knack of falling on my feet, but, by Jove,
I’m doing it more than usual this morning!”
Miss Lee seemed to be entirely unaware of the fact that her uncle was
looking like an animated thunder-cloud. “It is just like a bit out of
a delightful novel,” was her encouraging response. “A long, low, black
schooner suddenly coming in from the seaward and anchoring close off
shore, and the hero landing in a little boat just in time to slay the
villain and rescue the beautiful bride. Of course I’m the beautiful
bride, but my uncle is not a villain, but the very best of
guardians--by-the-way, I don’t think that you know that poor dear mamma
is dead, Mr. Livingstone? Yes, she died only a week or two after you
left us. So you see you must be very nice to the villain--and you can
begin your kind treatment of him by having lunch with him and with me
too. Uncle Hutchinson was _so_ pleased when he saw you come ashore. He
said that we certainly must capture you, and he sent a man to bring some
hot soup for you at once--here it is now.” And so it was, for Dorothy
herself very thoughtfully had given the order that she now modestly
attributed to her uncle.
And so in less than ten minutes from the moment when Mr. Port had
informed Dorothy that Van Rensselaer Livingstone was a very
objectionable person whom he desired to avoid, and whose introduction to
her was not even to be thought of, they all three were lunching together
in what to the casual observer seemed to be the most amicable manner
possible.