When a ship is small and the passengers are few, it becomes a floating
home for one family. Everybody comes to know everybody else very well
indeed after the second day out. The captain is the father of the
family, and there is a great deal of talk about small, unimportant
things.
So it was with the ship which bore our Motor Maids and Miss Helen
Campbell to Europe. Every morning at eleven o'clock when the steward
appeared with a tray of bouillon and biscuit, certain of the ship's
forty passengers gathered about the Motor Maids in friendly intercourse.
At least, already it seemed every morning, because this made the second
time.
Reclining lazily in steamer chairs or leaning on the deck rail, the four
girls chatted with their new friends.
"As I was saying," observed Nancy to Feargus O'Connor, the young man
whose dish of finnan haddie had made Elinor so ill the first day out,
and who proved to be the secretary of the older man, Mr. Kalisch, "there
is some mystery about him, I am sure."
"Mystery about whom?" demanded Billie from the depths of her chair.
"Mystery about little Arthur, of course."
"And who is little Arthur?" asked Mr. Kalisch.
"Little Arthur is little Arthur," replied Nancy. "We really don't know."
"You mean that horrid little boy who is always with the three men?"
asked Mrs. Alonzo Le Roy-Jones of Castlewood, Virginia.
Nancy nodded politely. She did not care for this over-dressed,
high-voiced woman who talked of the Le Roy-Jones family and their past
glories to anybody who would listen to her.
"But he is not horrid, mamma," put in her daughter, Marie-Jeanne Le
Roy-Jones. "When you saw him crying he was suffering. He is very
delicate."
"Marie-Jeanne, a Le Roy-Jones never cried from pain, no, not even when
wounded on the battlefield----"
"But, mother, the Le Roy-Joneses were never on a battlefield at the age
of ten----"
"Don't answer back, I beg of you, Marie. It is so _bourgeois_, so
common."
Mrs. Le Roy-Jones turned coldly away from her daughter, who was a plain
girl and wore her fussy clothes with a discontented air.
"Here he comes," called Feargus. "He is a funny little chap with such
old ways. I talked with him a moment this morning, but his guardians are
so careful they won't let any one come near him."
"Who is the child?" asked Miss Campbell, at last revived from a morning
nap.
"I tell you, we don't know, Cousin. Nobody has ever taken the trouble to
look him up on the passenger list. He is called Arthur by the tall man
in blue, and that's all we know."
Mr. Kalisch shook back his shaggy hair and looked carefully at the
little boy, who now approached walking between two tall young
Englishmen.
Just as the child came opposite the company, he stopped and put his hand
to his heart. His face turned very pale and tears came into his eyes.
The two young men were so engrossed in their conversation that they did
not notice him swaying dizzily. It was Mr. Kalisch who caught him in his
arms.
"Oh, my heart! My heart!" cried the little fellow.
In a moment the other passengers had surrounded him, as people will do
at such times, partly from curiosity, partly from sympathy.
"Give him air, my friends," called Mr. Kalisch, as he laid Arthur on a
steamer rug that Billie had spread on the deck for the purpose.
"Where's Dr. Benton?" demanded one Englishman of the other.
"I'll run and fetch him," replied the man hurrying away.
In the meantime, Mr. Kalisch and the Englishman were kneeling beside
little Arthur, who had turned as white as a corpse and very blue about
the lips. The moments dragged slowly and everybody stood anxiously by in
deep silence. Presently the man who had gone in search of the doctor
returned.
"I can't find him," he said, "or the ship's surgeon, either. By Jove,
what are we going to do, Bobbie?"
"Mr. Kalisch is a doctor," put in Billie.
Mr. Kalisch was already feeling the boy's heart and pulse.
"His pulse is very faint," he said.
The two men exchanged frightened glances.
Mr. Kalisch drew from his inner pocket a small medicine case and took
out a phial filled with white liquid, with which he moistened the
child's lips.
"Arthur," he said in a voice that seemed somehow to come from another
sphere, "Arthur, are you asleep?"
The child opened his eyes and smiled.
"You feel quite well, now, don't you, my boy?"
"I'm never quite well," answered Arthur. "The doctor says I'm very
delicate, and steamers always make me ill."
"What a shame," said Mr. Kalisch. "There's lots of fun on a steamer,
too, for a jolly boy. There's shuffle board, and hide and seek, and
animals."
"What is animals?"
"I'll tell you all about it after lunch. In the meantime, you're going
to take a fine nap and when you wake up you will be feeling like a
fighting cock, and then we'll play the game of animals. Perhaps the
young ladies will join in, and Feargus and the others. Do you ever take
medicine?"
"Lots of it," replied Arthur proudly.
"Here is a pill. It's not a bit nasty. These ladies have all taken the
same kind of pill. It cured them of seasickness."
"I don't mind medicine," said Arthur. "I'm quite used to it, I have to
take so much. What will this do?"
"It will make you well. You will sleep for an hour and then you will
wake up hungry and happy, and the first thing you'll say when you come
on deck will be 'Telemac,'--that's my name, you know,--'what about
animals?'"
Telemac Kalisch then drew forth one of the small brown pellets and put
it between the boy's lips.
"It's not an opiate, Doctor?" asked one of the men uneasily.
Mr. Kalisch shook his head without taking his eyes off the boy's.
"You feel better already, eh? The blood is coming back to your face."
"I do feel better," replied Arthur. "I think I'll go in now, Bobbie."
"Shall I carry you?" asked the young man called Bobbie.
"No, I'll walk," said the child starting down the deck and then turning
back. "Thank you, Telemac," he called. "I like you very much. Don't
forget--after lunch."
There was an air of authority about the child that was as pathetic as it
was amusing, as he moved away.
"Poor little man!" exclaimed Telemac Kalisch. "Poor little fellow!"
"The suggestion pellet, again," thought Billie, smiling slightly. "Was
he really ill?" she asked aloud.
"He's delicate," answered Telemac. "Continuous nursing and doctoring
would make an invalid of Atlas, himself."
"The Le Roy-Jones, of Castlewood Manor, Virginia," began the languid
personage of that name with an elegant drawl,--but the elements
themselves prevented her finishing her aristocratic recital, and Mrs. Le
Roy-Jones became the sport of the breezes. A mischievous little puff of
wind lifted the brim of her youthful hat, with invisible fingers plucked
one of her false curls from her hair, and blew it along the deck.
"Oh, mother, why will you wear those things?" exclaimed Marie-Jeanne
blushing, as she chased the wisp of hair followed by Feargus and the
Motor Maids, all of them glad to find something to laugh at.
Her mother clinched her bony hands angrily.
"Insolent girl!" she said, under her breath.
Miss Campbell turned coldly away. There was something very pathetic to
her about this poor battered creature, who looked, as Nancy had said, as
if she had been hanging on a hook with her clothes in an old forgotten
closet for a long time, so faded she was and full of wrinkles. But when
she scolded her unhappy daughter, Miss Campbell could not endure her.
"She is a splendid young woman, ma'am," said Telemac Kalisch. "She has a
fine, serious face, and if she were allowed to pursue her bent, she
would probably grow beautiful."
"Pray, what do you mean by my daughter's 'tastes'?" demanded the shabby
mother. "She has no bent, so far as I know."
"That is because you have never made your daughter's acquaintance. She
is very much attached to something you have never taken the trouble to
notice. But in your heart, you know what it is."
Mrs. Jones gave him an embarrassed glance and hurried away.
"What a strange man you are, Mr. Kalisch," exclaimed Miss Campbell. "You
seem to read people's minds like open books."
"No, no," he answered. "Don't attach any such brilliant qualities to me.
With a little practice in observing and talking to people, any one may
guess their tastes and inclinations. It was only by the merest accident
that I found out what poor Marie-Jeanne has been wishing for all her
life."
"But what is it?" interrupted Miss Helen.
"It's a secret, but I'll tell you. She wants to cook."
"To cook?"
"Certainly. She has lived a wandering life in cheap hotels and boarding
houses always with her mother, and she wants a home with a kitchen in
it. She told me so herself. She wants to make the dishes her father
loved,--vegetable soup and bread pudding and gingerbread."
"Good heavens," cried Miss Campbell wiping the moisture from her eyes,
"I should never have thought so from glancing at that unhappy, gaudily
dressed girl. What a world! What a world!"
"When Marie-Jeanne, whose name I suspect was once Mary-Jane, becomes a
cook," said the man, "her world will be set to rights."
"And what do you make of the little boy?" asked Miss Campbell.
Telemac shook his head.
"I've not been able to place him," he said.
"He might be----" but the lunch call sounded, and our young girls and
their friends came bounding down the deck laughing and talking gayly.