CHAPTER I

ON THE BLUE SEA

A blue sea—a blue sky. The yacht was sailing under deep azure, reflected back by calm waters. It was unlike the jolts and staccato teuf-teuf of the automobile; it was gentle as the swinging of a balloon in the open heavens. The furrow of foam behind the yacht was like a trail of clouds.

On the promenade-deck, in the shade of the big deck-house, grandma, Ethel, and Will were taking the air, stretched out in bamboo chairs. Through the open door books and newspapers could be seen on the table, and in the corners of the salon baskets of beautiful flowers were disposed. The sea breeze mingled with the smell of roses. Near the yacht’s prow a band was playing softly. Among the crew there were musicians by trade,—old sailors of the navy bands. They were training themselves for gala-days later on—in Sicily, in Greece, in Morgania. Their low notes reached the group at the stern like a murmur of distant voices. Ethel looked abstractedly across the sea to the horizon. She was thinking of the country she had left behind—of the mists and gardens where the leaves fall in autumn; of the countries she was yet to see, with their blue archipelagos, whose white minarets seem milky pearls set in sapphire.

She was almost overwhelmed with remembrances. She thought of those shores where poets sang of gods and heroes; of that sea which had reflected, in turn, fable and faith, where the galley of St. Paul crossed the meandering track of Ulysses’s bark. She found exquisite delight in this legendary past. She fancied to herself Cleopatra and Dido and Morgana, queens who were all but goddesses, and the Roman matrons, borne across the waves to the sound of lutes, with their jesters and their scribes. At her side, Will and grandma were chatting quietly.

“You are a good boy,” grandma said. “I am glad you got my telegram in time to put an elevator in the yacht;—perhaps the reason I like new things is because I am growing old.”

“Not at all, grandma,” interrupted Ethel. “What is stupider than to go climbing up-stairs? It is the least esthetic of all movements.”

“That was my idea!” said grandma.

“And the wireless telegraph was mine,” said Will.

Will had himself supervised the building of his yacht, to make it a model of its type. He deserved a Nobel prize for the practical way in which he had foreseen everything. But its nautical qualities, and the rigidity of its double steel shell were as nothing in comparison with its interior comfort.

The yacht could have held two hundred passengers, and it accommodated only ten. Its furnishings and arrangements were sumptuous. The deck-house was a hundred feet long. In front were a card-room and the apartments of the captain; all the rest was taken for great cabins, each with its boudoir and bath-room.

Through the music-room, where the breath of the open sea brought to grandma, Ethel, and Will the smell of the roses, they would go down to the great hall wainscoted in unvarnished cedar, which framed decorative panels. Farther on in the suite of rooms was the library, with its wide, red-leather sofas. Above the shelves twelve caryatids, in yellow marble, upheld the plinth. There were radiators for heat and ventilators for coolness, with telephones and electric buttons everywhere. Their bells gave a thrill of life from end to end of the yacht.

Ethel was on the point of ringing for her maid, when Suzanne appeared. She brought the plaids, fearing the evening freshness might incommode Mme. Rowrer or Miss Rowrer.

“Suzanne,” Ethel said, while she was putting a plaid over her shoulders, “I don’t see Monsieur Phil. Perhaps he is showing the yacht to Mademoiselle Helia.”

“No; Monsieur Phil is not showing the yacht. Monsieur Phil is giving a lemon to M. Caracal to suck. M. Caracal suffers martyrdom. The sighs of M. Caracal rend one’s heart. Mademoiselle Helia is in her cabin, reading.”

Suzanne, since she had become a soubrette, said “Mademoiselle” when she spoke of Helia. She had perfect tact; she was the ideal soubrette. She had accepted eagerly Ethel’s offer to accompany her to Morgania. The life she was leading with Perbaccho wearied her; and then, to hear Poufaille always repeating the same thing over,—to be always knocking on the same skull at the same hours,—she was tired of it all.

Will at first intended to take Poufaille along to help the cook, but he prudently gave up the project when he heard Poufaille explaining his ideas on pig’s-rump and garlic, and goat’s-milk cheese. So Suzanne not only escaped from Poufaille for the present, but she served Miss Rowrer, whom she adored; and, moreover, she followed Helia and Phil. She guessed that something had lately passed between them. She was devoured by curiosity to know how the romance would end. Was it possible that Phil, who formerly had been so good and upright, could have changed to such a degree? A hundred times over she had been called to be a witness to his love and a confidante of his oaths. Ah, men, men! for them the broomstick—_et aïe donc_!

“Tell me,” Ethel said, “is Mademoiselle Helia glad, now that she has come? I had Monsieur Phil invite her, and she refused at first. I had to insist myself, and almost get angry, to make her accept.”

“Oh, yes, Mademoiselle Helia is very glad!” and Suzanne, having arranged the plaids, lifted to Miss Rowrer eyes in which she might have read infinite gratitude for so much goodness.

“I need you, Helia,” Ethel had urged; “you know it well! I count on you for my lessons in physical culture, and you know I’ve got it in my head to take you to my father’s university. There are charming young girls there, and you will teach them how to be strong and beautiful. Besides, the voyage will do so much good to Sœurette. Come—you’ll be at home!”

Helia had accepted. To travel with Phil would be to lengthen her torture; but, at least, she would see him.

At first, amid all these marble statues and bronze reliefs, Helia felt herself intimidated, habituated as she was to the coarsely painted scene-canvases and papier-mâché bronzes. But Ethel treated her as an equal—Ethel, who had the art to be respected without being unapproachable.

“Ask them to come up,” Ethel said to Suzanne. “It’s the finest hour of the day.”

The sea was mild. Great clouds were climbing above the horizon, while an enormous sun was slowly setting in splendor of molten gold.

“The duke was right,” Ethel said to Will. “From the point of view of Paris the legend of Morgana might seem ridiculous, but here, in the grandeur of such scene-setting, even the supernatural seems normal. How far away are the ant-hills of Paris and London! Only think how somewhere people are agitating themselves in fog and smoke, while we are sailing straight for dreamland and—isn’t it curious?—a duchy with sorceresses and fairies in its history, where legends a thousand years old still move the people. I wish to believe in it—I wish to see the return of Morgana!”

“Keep thy flight to the West, bold sailor; The land thou seekest shall arise, Even though it existed not, From the depths of the waves to welcome thee.”

It was Phil, who arrived ahead of Caracal. He had heard Ethel, and capped her thought with verses from Schiller.

“How is your patient, Monsieur Phil?” asked Ethel; “how is M. Caracal? Seasickness is a sad affair; even animals suffer from it—the ox, the ass, the hog, the monkey—”

“And especially man,” said Caracal, following Phil.

Caracal thanked Miss Rowrer. He was better. The responsibility of the old French politeness weighed on Caracal. He went through his most graceful manners, lifting his little finger in the air, and smiling and scraping his foot. And then—_crac_! a diving bow, with his lip turned up, to kiss one’s hand—or to bite it.

He wore a faultless suit, and an artistic cravat, which the wind swelled out like a banner. He redoubled his politeness to grandma, a sure means, in his mind, to win her granddaughter. He hummed to himself a music-hall refrain:

“Pour avoir la fille Aimable et gentille, C’est à la maman Qu’il faut d’abord faire des compliments!”

(“To gain the daughter, Sweet and pretty, To the old mother Sing your ditty!”)

He rhymed sonnets to Miss Rowrer, and trotted out his erudition, working up his Baedeker in his cabin, and astonishing every one by his qualifications as a cicerone.

“M. Caracal would make an ideal courier,” thought grandma.

Caracal, out of the tail of his eye, glanced at the books on the salon table. “The House of Glass,” which had just appeared before their departure, lay, uncut, under a pile of magazines. Caracal was a little annoyed; but, with an author’s pride, he hesitated to call Miss Rowrer’s attention again to his own novel.

“A wireless for Miss Rowrer.” The captain’s boy approached, with his cap off and a paper in his hand.

“Where does it come from?” Ethel asked.

“From a ship off there.”

Ethel instinctively lifted her eyes to the mast, which seemed to be throwing out its feelers into space. Then she opened the paper and read:

Captain _Far East_ en route New York wishes good journey to Captain _Columbia_. R. K. Rowrer’s orders to put himself at disposition of yacht. Bad news from Morgania—land excursions dangerous. Any message for New York.

Ethel arose. One point appeared on the horizon and then another.

“It’s the _Far East_ and the _Far West_,” said Will. “They’ve been carrying bridge iron to Africa for the Cape-to-Cairo railway, and machinery for the Nyanza ferry-boat company. They belong to pa.”

“Really!” said Ethel, looking at the two ships coming into sight along the horizon.

“Boy!” she called, giving him the answer:

Sailing straight for Morgania—danger adds to attraction. Our love to dear old pa!

Ethel, with her sea-glass, could observe the ships saluting the yacht; the flags tumbled at the mizzen.

She felt a thrill of pride. Roman matrons and Cleopatras and Didos, slowly dragged over the sea by their chained galley-slaves, what were they beside her? How much better it was to live nowadays! She felt herself more powerful than they had ever been. Space seemed bringing her the salutes of the East and of the distant West. She remained standing until the ships were lost to sight in the evening mists.

They were cruising along the Italian coast, visiting now one spot and now another. Sometimes there were cool streets bordered with palaces whose windows were without glass. The presence of the yachting-party drew swarms of _ragazzi_, boys and girls, more importunate than Jersey mosquitos, and harassing them for _baiocchi_ and _madonne_.

Again, there were islands which from afar were like bouquets of flowers, and from near smelled of cheese and fried fish and garlic. Capri, with the sea like a liquid sky at its feet, lifted its houses along terraces like shelves. It was nothing but a going up and coming down.

“This is a perpendicular country,” was Ethel’s observation. “We are like flies walking along a wall.”

On the days when there was no climbing of the islands that sink abruptly to the sea, the party could look at them from the deck or the library, as they passed. Ethel took the opportunity for her physical training, or put herself out of breath on a stationary bicycle, like those on which the travelers on the trans-Siberian line get the rust from their legs.

“You’ll tire yourself, Miss Rowrer,” Helia said to her, when she saw what ardor she displayed.

“No, no!” said Ethel, “just show me how to do it.”

Helia went through a few movements with consummate ease. There was no getting out of breath, no swelling of veins—neck and shoulders and arms were smooth as marble; for exercise only developed in her the exquisite purity of her form.

“Oh, Helia!” Ethel added, “show me how I can have a neck and shoulders and arms like yours.”

During these short training lessons her friendship for Helia grew; and it is possible Ethel’s only ambition was to have arms like Helia. But it was not such an ambition which the press had been attributing to her for some time back. For the newspapers were always talking about her. When the yacht entered the smallest port, it drew more attention than a war squadron. The cabbage-leaf papers of Calabria and Sicily all had something to say of Miss Rowrer. They spoke of her as a wild woman, because she had bought and saved from death the dog whom the natives were asphyxiating, in honor of foreign tourists, amid the noxious gases of a sulphur grotto. Then they had a story of some hermit on a cliff, whom she wished, so it seemed, to take to Chicago to have him bless her father’s stock-yard from the top of a sky-scraper!

“What fools!” said Will. “They’d do better to put glass in their windows and cultivate their _nespoli_ and _pomidoro_ than lose their time in such silliness. It’s true that time is not worth much in a country where Stromboli and Vesuvius take the place of our Pittsburgs and Homesteads—where there’s nothing smoking on the horizon except some old volcano!”

Yet the yachting-party found pleasure in the halts when, for a change, they went to dine at the hotels. The rushing down-stairs of the clerks and porters and maîtres-d’hôtel, who got suddenly into rank and waited for their orders, amused them. For the landlords their landing was a signal to make all the hay they could while the sun was shining.

Not the cabbage-leaf papers alone, but the great journals also, printed Ethel’s name. At least, she concluded this must be the case one day when she remained on board while Will and the others visited the museum at Palermo. Ethel had letters to write and sat herself down near the music-room under an awning. The yacht was moored beside a great steamer for tourists. Without being seen she could hear, above her head, the talk of these cosmopolitan people, familiar with the Pyramids and the Acropolis, the Smyrna bazaars and Monte Carlo. The whole international swarm knew the Columbia by name. On the steamer they were talking travel and trade and the weather. Ethel heard her name pronounced along with the rest. They were discussing her probable marriage with the Duke of Morgania—“a glorious name in Europe.” “Do you know what Chartered is quoted at on the Stock Exchange?” “They’ll be a magnificent couple!” “The big Pyramid is seven hundred feet less than the Eiffel Tower.” “She’d be a charming duchess!” “The best chance Morgania ever had!”

Then all the voices were lost in the siren’s wailing, long drawn out. The steamer shook itself gently, and issued from the port, leaving Ethel in a reverie.

“Reigning duchess! Queen of Antioch! Lady Knight of Malta!” All this—she acknowledged it to herself—had already passed through her brain. It had even amused her to see how timid the duke was in her presence. She had to say but a word,—not even that,—merely to encourage him with a smile, to see him at her feet. But the newspapers were in too great a hurry. They spoke of something that was not yet decided. She would see; she had never so well appreciated her power as since her departure from Marseilles. Everybody in the world seemed to know her. True enough, across the Red Sea and India and Japan,—everywhere, to the other side of the earth, as far as ’Frisco, it would have been just the same.

The voyage continued tranquilly. Villages at the foot of the rugged Calabrian cliffs saw the yacht passing by, white upon the blue sea, or at night shining with lights like a meteor.

At that hour, most of all after dinner, it was pleasant on the bridge. Will walked backward and forward, and smoked his cigar. Grandma, half asleep, looked at the sea, which reminded her of her Western prairies. At her side, to give her pleasure, Phil picked his banjo. Caracal was bored; he had verified the fact that no one had yet opened his book.

Ethel had other things to do. Stretched out in her bamboo chair, she dreamed under a sky studded with stars.