As soon as Mrs. Lander could make her way to her state-room, she got into
her berth, and began to take the different remedies for sea-sickness
which she had brought with her. Mrs. Milray said that was nice, and that
now she and Clementina could have a good time. But before it came to that
she had taken pity on a number of lonely young men whom she found on
board. She cheered them up by walking round the ship with them; but if
any of them continued dull in spite of this, she dropped him, and took
another; and before she had been two days out she had gone through with
nearly all the lonely young men on the list of cabin passengers. She
introduced some of them to Clementina, but at such times as she had them
in charge; and for the most part she left her to Milray. Once, as the
girl sat beside him in her steamer-chair, Mrs. Milray shed a wrap on his
knees in whirring by on the arm of one of her young men, with some
laughed and shouted charge about it.
"What did she say?" he asked Clementina, slanting the down-pulled brim of
his soft hat purblindly toward her.
She said she had not understood, and then Milray asked, "What sort of
person is that Boston youth of Mrs. Milray's? Is he a donkey or a lamb?"
Clementina said ingenuously, "Oh, she's walking with that English
gentleman now--that lo'd."
"Ah, yes," said Milray. "He's not very much to look at, I hear."
"Well, not very much," Clementina admitted; she did not like to talk
against people.
"Lords are sometimes disappointing, Clementina," Milray said, "but then,
so are other great men. I've seen politicians on our side who were
disappointing, and there are clergymen and gamblers who don't look it."
He laughed sadly. "That's the way people talk who are a little
disappointing themselves. I hope you don't expect too much of yourself,
Clementina?"
"I don't know what you mean," she said, stiffening with a suspicion that
he might be going to make fun of her.
He laughed more gayly. "Well, I mean we must hold the other fellows up to
their duty, or we can't do our own. We need their example. Charity may
begin at home, but duty certainly begins abroad." He went on, as if it
were a branch of the same inquiry, "Did you ever meet my sisters? They
came to the hotel in New York to see Mrs. Milray."
"Yes, I was in the room once when they came in."
"Did you like them?"
"Yes--I sca'cely spoke to them--I only stayed a moment."
"Would you like to see any more of the family?"
"Why, of cou'se!" Clementina was amused at his asking, but he seemed in
earnest.
"One of my sisters lives in Florence, and Mrs. Milray says you think of
going there, too."
"Mrs. Landa thought it would be a good place to spend the winter. Is it a
pleasant place?"
"Oh, delightful! Do you know much about Italy?"
"Not very much, I don't believe."
"Well, my sister has lived a good while in Florence. I should like to
give you a letter to her."
"Oh, thank you!" said Clementina.
Milray smiled at her spare acknowledgment, but inquired gravely: "What do
you expect to do in Florence?"
"Why, I presume, whateva Mrs. Landa wants to do."
"Do you think Mrs. Lander will want to go into society?"
This question had not occurred to Clementina. "I don't believe she will,"
she said, thoughtfully.
"Shall you?"
Clementina laughed, "Why, do you think," she ventured, "that society
would want me to?"
"Yes, I think it would, if you're as charming as you've tried to make me
believe. Oh, I don't mean, to your own knowledge; but some people have
ways of being charming without knowing it. If Mrs. Lander isn't going
into society, and there should be a way found for you to go, don't
refuse, will you?"
"I shall wait and see if I'm asked, fust."
"Yes, that will be best," said Milray. "But I shall give you a letter to
my sister. She and I used to be famous cronies, and we went to a great
many parties together when we were young people. We thought the world was
a fine thing, then. But it changes."
He fell into a muse, and they were both sitting quite silent when Mrs.
Milray came round the corner of the music room in the course of her
twentieth or thirtieth compass of the deck, and introduced her lord to
her husband and to Clementina. He promptly ignored Milray, and devoted
himself to the girl, leaning over her with his hand against the bulkhead
behind her and talking down upon her.
Lord Lioncourt must have been about thirty, but he had the heated and
broken complexion of a man who has taken more than is good for him in
twice that number of years. This was one of the wrongs nature had done
him in apparent resentment of the social advantages he was born to, for
he was rather abstemious, as Englishmen go. He looked a very shy person
till he spoke, and then you found that he was not in the least shy. He
looked so English that you would have expected a strong English accent of
him, but his speech was more that of an American, without the nasality.
This was not apparently because he had been much in America; he was
returning from his first visit to the States, which had been spent
chiefly in the Territories; after a brief interval of Newport he had
preferred the West; he liked rather to hunt than to be hunted, though
even in the West his main business had been to kill time, which he found
more plentiful there than other game. The natives, everywhere, were much
the same thing to him; if he distinguished it was in favor of those who
did not suppose themselves cultivated. If again he had a choice it was
for the females; they seemed to him more amusing than the males, who
struck him as having an exaggerated reputation for humor. He did not care
much for Clementina's past, as he knew it from Mrs. Milray, and if it did
not touch his fancy, it certainly did not offend his taste. A real
artistocracy is above social prejudice, when it will; he had known some
of his order choose the mothers of their heirs from the music halls, and
when it came to a question of distinctions among Americans, he could not
feel them. They might be richer or poorer; but they could not be more
patrician or more plebeian.
The passengers, he told Clementina, were getting up, at this point of the
ship's run, an entertainment for the benefit of the seaman's hospital in
Liverpool, that well-known convention of ocean-travel, which is sure at
some time or other, to enlist all the talent on board every English
steamer in some sort of public appeal. He was not very clear how he came
to be on the committee for drumming up talent for the occasion; his
distinction seemed to have been conferred by a popular vote in the
smoking room, as nearly as he could make out; but here he was, and he was
counting upon Miss Claxon to help him out. He said Mrs. Milray had told
him about that charming affair they had got up in the mountains, and he
was sure they could have something of the kind again. "Perhaps not a
coaching party; that mightn't be so easy to manage at sea. But isn't
there something else--some tableaux or something? If we couldn't have the
months of the year we might have the points of the compass, and you could
take your choice."
He tried to get something out of the notion, but nothing came of it that
Mrs. Milray thought possible. She said, across her husband, on whose
further side she had sunk into a chair, that they must have something
very informal; everybody must do what they could, separately. "I know you
can do anything you like, Clementina. Can't you play something, or sing?"
At Clementina's look of utter denial, she added, desperately, "Or dance
something?" A light came into the girl's face at which she caught. "I
know you can dance something! Why, of course! Now, what is it?"
Clementina smiled at her vehemence. "Why, it's nothing. And I don't know
whether I should like to."
"Oh, yes," urged Lord Lioncourt. "Such a good cause, you know."
"What is it?" Mrs. Milray insisted. "Is it something you could do alone?"
"It's just a dance that I learned at Woodlake. The teacha said that all
the young ladies we'e leaning it. It's a skut-dance--"
"The very thing!" Mrs. Milray shouted. "It'll be the hit of the evening."
"But I've never done it before any one," Clementina faltered.
"They'll all be doing their turns," the Englishman said. "Speaking, and
singing, and playing."
Clementina felt herself giving way, and she pleaded in final reluctance,
"But I haven't got a pleated skut in my steama trunk."
"No matter! We can manage that." Mrs. Milray jumped to her feet and took
Lord Lioncourt's arm. "Now we must go and drum up somebody else." He did
not seem eager to go, but he started. "Then that's all settled," she
shouted over her shoulder to Clementina.
"No, no, Mrs. Milray!" Clementina called after her. "The ship tilts so--"
"Nonsense! It's the smoothest run she ever made in December. And I'll
engage to have the sea as steady as a rock for you. Remember, now, you've
promised."
Mrs. Milray whirled her Englishman away, and left Clementina sitting
beside her husband.
"Did you want to dance for them, Clementina?" he asked.
"I don't know," she said, with the vague smile of one to whom a pleasant
hope has occurred.
"I thought perhaps you were letting Mrs. Milray bully you into it. She's
a frightful tyrant."
"Oh, I guess I should like to do it, if you think it would be--nice."
"I dare say it will be the nicest thing at their ridiculous show." Milray
laughed as if her willingness to do the dance had defeated a sentimental
sympathy in him.
"I don't believe it will be that," said Clementina, beaming joyously.
"But I guess I shall try it, if I can find the right kind of a dress."
"Is a pleated skirt absolutely necessary," asked Milray, gravely.
"I don't see how I could get on without it," said Clementina.
She was so serious still when she went down to her state-room that Mrs.
Lander was distracted from her potential ailments to ask: "What is it,
Clementina?"
"Oh, nothing. Mrs. Milray has got me to say that I would do something at
a concert they ah' going to have on the ship." She explained, "It's that
skut dance I learnt at Woodlake of Miss Wilson."
"Well, I guess if you're worryin' about that you needn't to."
"Oh, I'm not worrying about the dance. I was just thinking what I should
wear. If I could only get at the trunks!"
"It won't make any matte what you wear," said Mrs. Lander. "It'll be the
greatest thing; and if 't wa'n't for this sea-sickness that I have to
keep fightin' off he'a, night and day, I should come up and see you
myself. You ah' just lovely in that dance, Clementina."
"Do you think so, Mrs. Landa?" asked the girl, gratefully. "Well, Mr.
Milray didn't seem to think that I need to have a pleated skut. Any rate,
I'm going to look over my things, and see if I can't make something else
do."