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 æstheticism 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.
“I have been talking with Miss Winstanley,” he said. “The truth is, Mariol, the poor girl is being pecked by all these women, until it hurts. You have some friendship, perhaps some influence, with Miss Carstairs. Persuade her to be generous, and take the outsider in. It will cost her nothing, and I’m hanged if I understand why she’s been such an icicle, as it is.”
“Did Miss Winstanley invite your intercession?” asked Mariol, dodging back from contact with an inclined plane of mutton broth, in a tilting china plate marked with the White Star’s emblem, borne aloft by a deeply apologetic steward.
“No. Absolutely no. She’d fight to the last ditch before she’d give in to them. But I have an ulterior motive. I want to ask the two young women with my dear old aunt, Lady Campstown, to play propriety, to come down with you to Beaumanoir some day next week, and if they hardly speak——”
“Under these circumstances, I will engage to attempt the impossible, though whether I achieve it is quite another story. I, too, have been at a loss to fathom Miss Carstairs’ apparent intention to ignore our pretty table-mate. I had fancied her too sure of her own position to care about a mere difference in social status. I have found her perfectly amiable. But if, by any chance, the discussion of Miss Winstanley comes up, there is an immediate stiffening of the muscles of the neck and chin, the clear eyes become veiled, and she turns the subject. I could almost fancy, but that they never met before, there was some personal animus between them.”
“Tell her the girl is her devoted lover from afar, makes her a model in all things, and that we owe the agreeable modifications of the fair Posey’s dress and manner exclusively to Miss Carstairs’ example.”
“That is a happy suggestion, and may accomplish good results. But did you ever know a man’s eulogy of a woman effect anything with her own sex? It is generally successful only in confirming the worst predispositions, and in precipitating animosity where latent antipathy had sufficed. Still, who could resist the exquisite flattery of such imitation as our Posey’s of Miss Carstairs? Fix your day for Beaumanoir, my dear chap. I consider our cause gained in advance.”
“Do you know, Mariol,” said Clandonald as the two men sat down at table, where the ladies had not yet arrived, “I have sometimes fancied that you yourself are getting rather under the spell of the young lady you have engaged to placate in Miss Winstanley’s behalf.”
“Do you know, Clan, that I never before suspected you of the imaginative gift? Nothing but Jonah’s gourd—was it Jonah, and was it a gourd?—that grew up and withered in a night, could have had so little time allotted to its natural development, as a fancy by me for Miss Carstairs.”
“That is no argument. I have read of love affairs beginning at the Statue of Liberty and culminating before the Gulf Stream was crossed. There is really no better medium than mid-Atlantic air for the growth of the tender passion. The leisure of a good voyage is like the forty years of Europe compared with the cycle of Cathay.”
“It seems to me that you are exculpatory.”
“I wish to heaven I might be!” exclaimed Clandonald, smothering his very genuine regret with a forkful of the roast beef of old England pastured upon Western plains.
The talk that morning with Posey Winstanley had awakened in him certain emotions of a simple elementary sort that, in spite of him, still twanged upon his heart-strings, pleasingly. He had, however, been by no means prepared for that upward glance of her childlike orbs when he had offered her his sympathy. While the normal vanity of the male creature thrilled in quickened interest in response to it, his judgment, his sense of responsibility, nay, of honor, called upon him loudly to let the thing go no further. A patent and audacious coquette on the surface, she was at heart a child who had as yet tasted no reality of sentiment for one of the dominant sex, and to whom such reality would inevitably come with extraordinary force.
The whimsicality of her having selected him—a battered plaything of the Fates, who did not want her, who could not indulge in her—for the object of a dawning first passion, struck him hard. He resolved to keep out of her way, and considered how he could have his meals elsewhere, or take to his bed for the remainder of the voyage. The projected luncheon at Beaumanoir should be carried out, and that done, he would have acquitted himself, en galant homme, of all that could be reasonably expected of a travelling Briton toward visiting Americans who had contributed to cheer his voyage across the Atlantic.
To begin the new order of things, he let himself be absorbed in conversation by Miss Bleecker, his pet aversion, who leaning over the table, her ample bosom begarlanded with chains and cords, each one sustaining some necessary implement for the aid of vision, far or near, and all of them entangled, was in her best spirits. She, Lady Channel Fleet, and Mrs. Vereker, had been in their deck chairs since broth and biscuits to the present moment, discussing the American women who had married into the British nobility. The three ancient heads cowled in veils and furry hoods—for the air off the Banks had had in it a tang of ice—had bobbed together during this time with a vivacity of movement suggesting the cinematograph.
Mrs. Vereker’s sciatic leg, which it was the mission of her good-looking footman to keep enwrapped with rugs, when he could forego flirting with the ladies’ maids, had been frequently exposed to the biting wind, and yet she did not notice it. Lady Channel Fleet, who, with her husband and a maid, had been doing America economically in somebody’s private car, at somebody’s expense, wisely kept quiet; since, if she shivered, there was no James to wrap her up. Miss Bleecker, more serene, indeed, than Buddha, in her position between a British matron of title and one of New York’s leaders, did not feel the cold. Except in a parterre box at the opera (with the best people), she had no greater idea of happiness than such surroundings; with a long, uninterrupted morning in which to rehash old stories and acquire new ones concerning the ladies under discussion, whom she secretly considered the elect of earth.
Lady Channel Fleet, conscious of having had more honors paid to her in America than in the whole course of her undistinguished life at home, was proportionately inclined to be critical of Americans, now she had come away. Her strictures upon their extravagance in living, which she had enjoyed to the top of her bent, the largeness of their houses and the smallness of their grounds, their ridiculous way of running after strangers, and the extraordinary interchange of matrimonial partners among people one knew and visited, were interspersed with various bits of gossip she had been able to pick up in England concerning American peeresses who had not received her at their houses and were, indeed, unconscious of her existence.
It had been rather a bitter pill for Mrs. Vereker, who was hand-in-glove with all these fine people both in England and New York, to have to listen politely to Lady Channel Fleet. But, then, Mrs. Vereker had already stood so much in the line of incivility from the British dames of high place upon whom she had lavished courtesy during their sojourn in the land of the free, that she was a little hardened. She knew that on arrival out, she would go from Claridge’s to stop at country houses where Lady Channel Fleet’s star would never even faintly rise. She was secure in being able to buy herself a good time and the best of everything wherever she might go, and felt, on the whole, content. Miss Bleecker, on the contrary, who had no such solid foundations as her friend, felt in listening to Lady Channel Fleet as acutely pained as if she were reading one of Mr. Benson’s or Mr. Hichens’ novels, wherein modern Americans of good society are made to say “Popper” and “real nice.” She could hardly imagine how her nation could arise to ignoring these dreadful accusations.
But when Lady Channel Fleet had incidentally let fall that she always presumed Miss Bleecker, from her speech and manner, to be an Englishwoman born, Miss Bleecker had forgiven all. She redoubled her powers of entertainingness, brought out a few newer, racier anecdotes of persons known to all of them, and the luncheon bugle had caught the gossips unawares, making them feel the morning quite too short.
“I suppose we shall see you at Mr. Vereker’s little supper this evening, Lord Clandonald?” said the chaperon, suavely. “One knows what to expect in the way of private dainties, when Mr. Vereker entertains—game, wines, patés, caviare put up for him on the Volga, flowers, grapes and melons from his own glass houses, and such turtle soup as only the Vereker chef can send aboard. And to think the poor man has to sit at the head of the table, drinking milk and swallowing little tablets out of his waistcoat pocket, looking gray as a ghost, and thin as a rail, not able to touch a thing of all his delicious spread!”
“Mr. Vereker has been so good as to include me,” answered Clandonald.
“I believe most of those at our table are expected,” the lady went on, in a hardly lowered voice, “with, of course, one or two exceptions. When Mr. Vereker crosses alone they say his parties are apt to be a little mixed. But with his wife aboard—she is so thoroughly exclusive, one need never fear.”
What might have been omitted from the words, was accentuated by a manner of contempt whose objects there was no mistaking. Mr. Winstanley as usual appeared not to be listening to the passing chat; but his daughter lost not a syllable or look; Helen Carstairs, also, fully appreciated the situation. While Posey, with rare self-control, kept her own counsel and remained silent, Miss Carstairs, flushing faintly, spoke so that all present could hear her.
“I’m afraid I’m one of those who fail to appreciate the honor of Mr. Vereker’s invitations, ashore or afloat. Who was it who said to be left out by him was a greater compliment than to be placed at his right hand?”
“Helen, I’m surprised to hear you talk such nonsense,” began her chaperon briskly, but was interrupted by Posey Winstanley, who with a grateful glance at Helen, spoke in tones as quiet and measured as her own.
“Then I am certainly past getting the benefit of Miss Carstairs’ hint, Miss Bleecker, since Mr. Vereker asked me first, before seeing if he could get the others; and I was rash enough to accept.”