Spring was well begun when the Minnehaha sailed for Europe to take
her place in the mimic fleets that were already assembling. As
like seeks like, so the long, swift white steamer headed like a
bird for her faraway companions, and arrived amongst them with
colours flying, and her guns roaring out salutes. By herself she
was greedy for every pound of steam and raced her engines as
though speed were a matter of life and death; but, once in
company, she was content to lag with the slowest, and suit her own
pace to the stately progress of the schooners and cutters that
moved by the wind alone. She found friends amongst all nations,
and, in that cosmopolitan society of ships, dipped her flag to
those of England, France, Holland, Belgium, and Germany.
It was a wonderful life of freedom and gaiety. A great yacht
carries her own letter of introduction, and is accorded everywhere
the courtesies of a man-of-war, to whom, in a sense, she is a
sister. Official visits are paid and returned; naval punctilio
reigns; invitations are lavished from every side. There is,
besides, a freemasonry amongst those splendid wanderers of the
sea, a transcendent Bohemianism, that puts them nearly all upon a
common footing. A holiday spirit is in the air, and kings and
princes who at home are hidden within walls of triple brass, here
unbend like children out of school, and make friends and gossip
about their neighbours and show off their engine-rooms and their
ice plant and some new idea in patent boat davits after the manner
of very ordinary mortals. Not of course that kings and princes
predominate, but the same spirit prevailed with those who on shore
held their heads very high and practised a jealous exclusiveness.
Amongst them all Florence Fenacre was a favourite of favourites.
Young, beautiful, and the mistress of a noble fortune, there was
everything to cast a glamour about this charming American who had
come out of the unknown to take all hearts by storm.
Her haziness about distinctions of rank filled these Europeans
with an amused amazement. There was to them something quite royal
in her naivety and lack of awe; in her high spirit, her vivacity,
and her absolute disregard of those who failed to please her. She
convulsed one personage by describing another as "that tiresome
old man who's really too disreputable to have tagging around me
any longer"; and had a quarrel and a making up with a reigning
duke about a lighter of coal that their respective crews had come
to blows over. Everybody adored her, and she seldom put to sea
without a love-sick yacht in her wake.
Of course, here as elsewhere, every phase of human character was
displayed, and most conspicuous of all amongst the evil was the
determination of many to win Florence's millions for themselves.
Amid that noble concourse of vessels, every one of which stood for
a princely income, there were adventurers as needy and as hungry
as any sharper in the streets of New York. There is an
aristocratic poverty, none the less real because three noughts
must be added to all the figures, that first surprised and then
disgusted the pretty American. Her first awakening to the fact was
when, as a special favour, she sold her best steam launch to a
French marquise at the price it had cost her. Though that lady was
very profuse with little pink notes and could purr over Florence
by the hour, her signature on a cheque was never forthcoming, and
our heroine had a fit of fury to think of having been so deceived.
"It was a downright confidence trick," she burst out to the comte
de Souvary, firing up afresh with the memory of her wrongs. "I
loved my launch. It was a beauty. It never went dotty at the time
you needed it most and it was a vertical inverted triple-expansion
direct-acting propeller!' (Florence could always rattle off
technical details and showed her Americanism in her catalogue-like
fluency in this respect.) "And I miss it and I want it back, and
the horrid old woman never means to pay me a penny!"
"Oh, my child!" said the count, "she never pays anybody ze penny.
She is a stone from which one looks in vain for blood. Your launch
is--what do you call it in ze Far Vest--a goner!"
"But she's descended from Charlemagne," cried Florence. "She has
the entree to all the courts. She ought to be exposed for stealing
my boat!"
"What does anybody do when he is robbed?" said the count
philosophically. He could afford to be philosophical: it wasn't
HIS vertical inverted triple-expansion direct-acting propeller.
"Smile and be more careful ze next time," he went on. "The
marquise's reputation is international for what is charitably
called her eccentricity."
"In America they put people in jail for that kind of
eccentricity!" exclaimed Florence.
"Oh, the best way in Europe is money-with-order," said the count,
"what I remember once a friend seeing in that great country of
which you are ze ornament--in God we trust: all others cash!"
"Well, it's a shame," said Florence, "and if I ever get the chance
of a dark night I'll ram her with the Minnehaha!"
Florence's mother, a dear little old lady who did tatting and read
the Christian Herald, was always the particular target of the
fortune-hunters who pursued her daughter. It seemed such a
brilliant idea to capture the mother first as the preparatory step
of getting into the good graces of the heiress; and the old lady,
who was one of the most guileless of her sex, never failed to fall
into the trap and take the attentions all in earnest. Comte de
Souvary used to say that if you wished to find the wickedest men
in Europe you had only to cast your eyes in the direction of
Florence's mother; and she would be trotted off to church and
driven in automobiles and lunched in casinos by the most notorious
and unprincipled scapegraces of the Old World.
Florence, who, like all heiresses, had developed a positive
instinct for the men who meant her mischief, was always delighted
at the repeated captures of the old lady; and it was an endless
entertainment to her when her mother was induced to champion the
cause of some aristocratic ne'er-do-well.
"But, Mamma," she would say, "I hate to call your friends names,
but really he's a perfect scamp, and underneath all his fine
manners he is no better than a wolf ravening for rich young
lambs!"
"Oh, Florence, how can you be so uncharitable!" her mother would
retort. "If you could only hear the way he speaks of his mother
and his ruined life, and how he is trying to be a better man for
your sake--"
"Always the same old story," said Florence. "It's wonderful the
good I do just sailing around and radiating moral influence. The
count says I ought to get a medal from the government with my
profile on one side and a composite picture of my admirers on the
other! And if I do, Mamsey, I'll give it to you to keep!"
Frank Rignold was sometimes tempted to curse the day that had ever
brought him aboard the Minnehaha. To be a silent spectator of
gaieties and festivities he could not share; to be condemned to
stand aloof while he saw the woman he loved petted and sought
after by men of exalted position--what could be imagined more
detestable to a lover without hope, without the shadow of a claim,
with nothing to look forward to except the inevitable day when a
luckier fellow would carry her off before his eyes. He moped in
secret and often spent hours locked in his cabin, sitting with his
face in his hands, a prey to the bitterest melancholy and
dejection. In public, however, he always bore himself
unflinchingly, and was too proud a man and too innately a
gentleman to allow his face to be read even by her. It was
incumbent on him, so long as he drew her pay and wore her uniform,
to act in all respects the part he was cast to play; and no one
could have guessed, except perhaps the girl herself, that he had
any other thought save to do his duty cheerfully and well.
Captain Landry sat in the saloon at the bottom of the table,
Florence herself taking the head; but the other officers of the
ship had a cosey messroom of their own, presided over by Frank
Rignold as the officer second in rank on board. Thus whole days
might pass with no further exchange between himself and Florence
than the customary good-morning when they happened to meet on
deck. Except on the business of the ship it was tacitly understood
that no officer should speak to her without being first addressed.
The discipline of a man-of-war prevailed; everything went forward
with stereotyped precision and formality; the officers were
supposed to comport themselves with impassivity and self-
effacement. Florence had no more need of being conscious of their
presence than if they had been so many automatons.
Her life and theirs offered a strange contrast. She in her little
court of idlers and merry-makers; they, the grave men who were
answerable for her safety, the exponents of a rigid routine, to
whom the clang of the bells brought recurring duties and the
exercise of their professional knowledge. To her, yachting was a
play: to them, a business.
"I often remark your chief engineer," said the comte de Souvary to
Florence. "A handsome man, with an air at once sad and noble--one
of zoze extraordinary Americans who keep for their machines the
ardour we Europeans lavish on the women we love--and whose spirits
when zey die turn without doubt into petrole or electricity."
"I have known Mr. Rignold ever since I was a child," said
Florence, pleased to hear Frank praised. "I regard him as one of
my best and dearest friends."
"The more to his credit," said the count, astonished. "Many in
such a galere would prove themselves presumptuous and
troublesome."
"He is almost too much the other way," said Florence, with a sigh.
"Ah, that appeals to me!" said the count. "I should be such
anozzer in his place. Proud, silent, unobtrusive, who gives
dignity to what otherwise would be a false position."
"I came very near being his wife once," said Florence, impelled,
she hardly knew why, to make the confession.
The count was thunderstruck.
"His wife!" he exclaimed.
"Before I was rich, you know," explained Florence. "A million
years ago it seems now, when I lived in a little town and was a
nobody."
"Anozzer romance of the Far Vest!" cried the count, to whom this
term embraced the entire continent from Maine to San Francisco.
Florence was curiously capricious in her treatment of Frank
Rignold. Often she would neglect him for weeks together, and then,
in a sort of revulsion, would go almost to the other extreme.
Sometimes at night, when he would be pacing the deck, she would
come and take his arm and call him Frank under her breath and ask
him if he still loved her; and in a manner half tender, half
mocking, would play on his feelings with a deliberate enjoyment of
the pain she inflicted. Her greatest power of torment was her
frankness. She would talk over her proposals; weigh one against
the other; revel in her self-analysis and solemnly ask Frank his
opinion on this or that part of her character. She talked with
equal freedom of her regard for himself, and was almost brutal in
confessing how hard it was to hold herself back.
"I think I must be awfully wicked, Frank," she said to him once.
"I love you so dearly, and yet I wouldn't marry you for anything!"
And then she ran on as to whether she ought to take Souvary and
live in Paris or Lord Comyngs and choose London. "It's so hard to
decide," she said, "and it's so important, because one couldn't
change one's mind afterwards."
"Not very well," said Frank.
"You mustn't grind your teeth so loud," she said. "It's
compromising."
"I wish you would talk about something else or go away," he said,
goaded out of his usual politeness.
"Oh, I love my little stolen tete-a-tetes with you!" she
exclaimed. "All those other men are used up, emotionally speaking.
The count would turn a neat phrase even if he were to blow his
brains out the next minute. They think they are splendidly cool,
but it only means that they have exhausted all their powers of
sensation. You are delightfully primitive and unspoiled, and then
I suppose it is natural to like a fellow-countryman best, isn't
it? Now, honest--have you found any girls over here you like as
well as me?"
"I haven't tried to find any," said Frank.
"You aren't a bit disillusioned, are you?" she said. "You simply
shut your eyes and go it blind. A woman likes that in a man. It's
what love ought to be. It's silly of me to throw it away."
"Perhaps it is, Florence," he said. "Who knows but what some day
you may regret it?"
"I often think of that," she returned. "I am afraid all the good
part of me loves you, and all the bad loves the counts and dukes
and earls, you know. And the good is almost drowned in all the
rest, like vegetables in vegetable soup."
She excelled in giving such little dampers to sentiment, and
laughed heartily at Frank's discomfiture.
"You can be awfully cruel," he said. "I wonder you can be so
beautiful when you can think such things and say them. You treat
hearts like toys and laugh when you break them."
"Well, there's one thing, Frank," she said seriously. "I have
never pretended to you or tried to appear better than I am; and
you are the only man I can say that to and not lie!"