Part 2

"Well, now, ma'am, that's beautifully said. But I won't let you go without knowing that, though I've come to it by a long, hard way, my luck has turned at last, and the only trouble is that she's not here to share it. The long years after we moved south to Alabama (where I'd an opening, and after a while set up for myself), when wife toiled and moiled for me--when we lost all the children that were born to us, but the last one--how she used to sit in the evenings and read about English cathedrals and Stonehenge, and the like! She didn't seem to care so much about visiting Italy and Paris and the Riviera, but Switzerland tickled her awfully. She had a picture of Mont Blanc on top of a work-box. When I think how cheap the post cards are in these days, I do wish wife could have had a lot to paste in an album that she kept. She always said I was to take daughter, if we ever got money enough for two to cross on, and that she would stay at home. And now, the money's come, enough for all of us, and I'm taking daughter, just as she said, and we're to see England and she isn't! I tell you, ma'am, things are sorted out unevenly by our good Lord!"

Miss Carstairs carried into her cabin the wistfulness of the gentle old face, the irresistible conviction of his honesty. What, in the beginning, had tempted her to mock, now laid forcible hold of her better nature, and impelled her to gentler thoughts.

A sharp awakening was the rencounter with Miss Bleecker's apprehensions as to where she should sit at table, and the effervescence of that lady's regrets that the parties with whom she had counted upon being included, were all "made up." Helen recalled previous voyages under the aegis of her distinguished father, where their table was the one most desired by social pretenders, with its _plats_ and wines served from his private stores, its aura of plutocratic exclusiveness in which revolved obsequious stewards! She winced at thought of glory fled, but while Miss Bleecker enlarged upon the neglect of the secretary, Foster, in not having arranged this matter for them, reflected bitterly that Foster, trimming his sails to the wind of Fortune, was now the devotee of the new Mrs. Carstairs' whims, and unless especially ordered so to do, would be likely to make no effort for the rebellious stepdaughter's advancement.

Affecting indifference to the detail in question, she found herself at dinner assigned to a small table in one corner of the saloon, of which five of the nine seats were already filled, when Miss Bleecker, sparkling intermittently in jet, sailed ahead of her charge, and motioned Helen into place beside her. A steward, who had identified the ladies, came hurrying to overtake them, and express his hope that Miss Carstairs would be satisfied with his selection for her, assuring her, in a whisper, that he had taken every care that she should have only the "best" people as her comrades.

Helen, who had not yet sat down, smiled at the reassuring promise. The whisper, overheard by two of the gentlemen unfolding their napkins opposite, produced an answering smile. Impossible to resist a voucher so bestowed! Simultaneously the two men arose and stood till Miss Carstairs had taken her revolving chair and was safely installed beside her chaperon. The table was now complete, save for the seat at the end and that at its right adjoining Helen's.

Soup had hardly been placed before them when the intended occupants of the vacant places resolved themselves into a couple, at sight of whom a cold tremor passed into Miss Carstairs' limbs--for they were none other than the mild little man with whom she had been talking on the deck, and the girl who had thrown John Glynn a flower!

The old fellow had made scant preparation for the ceremonial meal of the day on shipboard. His kind face shone with soap and water, while a thin lock of gray hair was laboriously trained by the same medium over his bald crown. His mustard-colored "tourist suit" of tweed, the red tie and rumpled cheviot shirt, might, indeed, have served a noble earl upon his travels through an American drawing-room; but whatever the appearance of her sire, it was at once lost to sight in the radiant prettiness and extraordinary self-possession of the girl who accompanied him.

A goddess of liberty in height, with the complexion of a pink-and-white balsam flower, and rippled hair of gold worn parted in the middle and extending outward in exaggerated wings; her admirable young form was attired in cheap China silk of an azure tint incorporating transparencies of white lace that revealed a dazzling neck and arms. Decked with profuse jewelry of the inexpensive sort, she stood for a moment where the rest of the company could fully profit by the apparition before it went into eclipse in her allotted seat!

The attention of their table, hitherto indirectly converging upon the fine lines and _pate tendre_ coloring of Miss Carstairs, now shifted its focus to a point not to be forsaken for the remainder of the voyage (an example promptly to be followed by the rest of the passengers, the officers and personnel of the big ship in general). The newcomer possessed, in spite of her extreme youth, the manner of some histrionic star who has the conscience of her calling in producing effects not to be forfeited by a moment's neglect of opportunity. Her present entrance had the full effect of a sweep down to the footlights, to pause with one hand upon the desk from which the heroine is wont to dash off her little notes to the leading man, whilst reading them aloud to the audience.

But withal, so childlike were her contours, so joyous her appeal for notice, one felt that her vanity might still be the innocent belief of a little girl secure of her own interestingness to the public, when she comes into a roomful of her mother's guests.

All eyes following her movements, the stranger surveyed the saloon briefly, and spoke to her companion with good-humored authority.

"Just what I told you, Dad. The older gentlemen all sit in the end seats, and that's the place for you."

"Now, Posey, child," came in audible rejoinder, "none of your nonsense, but just do as I said, and take the end yourself. Nobody wants to see an old fossil like me put forward when they can get a nice young lady to look at. Sit down, right away, and I'll just slip in beside this lady. Why, ma'am," he added, interrupting himself with a face of glad recognition in identifying Miss Carstairs, "if it ain't you, and I'm real pleased to meet up with you again! A needle in a haystack, I was thinking myself among all these strange folk. And you'll be such prime company for Posey, here. Let me make you acquainted with my daughter, Miss Pamela Winstanley, of Alison's Cross Roads, Alabama."

Miss Carstairs inclined her head toward the beaming newcomer, and almost immediately turned to close converse in an undertone with Miss Bleecker, who was herself occupied in digesting unpleasant first impressions.

For, after fortifying herself with soup, and ordering a whiskey and soda for digestion's sake, the chaperon had sent her eagle glance around the board with this result:

Of the five gentlemen installed before their arrival, two were mentally labelled, "Hopeless, old, grumpy, no doubt, of no possible use to us." Another, "A mere larky boy, not knowing him, must keep him down," and the pair who had arisen and stood at their approach, "An Englishman, badly bored, good figure, eyes and teeth, has been, or is, in the army; the Frenchman with him, rather like Mephistopheles, might be amusing, but will, of course, be sea-sick all the way over. A poor lot, and just wait till I get at that head steward and find out what he means by it!"

*CHAPTER II*

"My dear Helen, I really may as well tell you at once, that I don't like your walking alone, in the dark, down on that lower deck that looks steeragy, where there are no chairs, and the men go to smoke after dinner."

"Do they? I hadn't noticed," said Helen, indifferently.

She had come into their rooms with a brighter look upon her face, born of the delicious swoop of salt air upon it, and the sound of that churning music of the waves with which the sea rewards the good ship when she takes her ocean crests easily and settles down to her grand Atlantic stride.

"I lost you, after dinner, when I was sitting on the boat deck with Mrs. Vereker, hearing all about her daughter's divorce and her son's appendicitis. No wonder the poor woman goes abroad for a change. And, really, I'm glad, after all, we are not with them at table, since she can talk of nothing else, and much as one may feel for a friend's troubles, it is nicer to hear a little about other people's, too! I was telling Mrs. Vereker--though, dear me, she hardly lets one speak--how dreadfully they had served us about the people they put us with, and, my dear, what do you think? It never does to judge by first appearances at sea, for as it turns out, Mr. Vereker--who is that kind of a fussing, Miss Nancyish man, and loves to study the passenger list--has discovered that every soul at our table, except those dreadful Southerners, has a title! The one with glasses, who speaks such funny English, is a German Graf, of a family of fabulous antiquity, who has been to Washington to see his ambassador about sending one of his sons to learn agriculture in America. The one who gobbles so, and complains of the draught on his back, and had the port shut, is Prince Zourikoff, a Russian savant, who has written a book called 'Etudes sur la cause de la decadence des peuples.' The saucy boy who went in for a flirtation with that Winstanley girl, is Mr. Vane, a son of Lord Kennington, whom they sent to Canada for a year to get him out of mischief at home. The really interesting person is--who do you suppose?--the man opposite you, Lord Clandonald, whose story was in all the newspapers a year ago. His wife, a beautiful Miss Darien, behaved scandalously, yet was so clever in tricking everybody, it was hard to get the divorce. But he got rid of her at last, and then went around the world. Doesn't look like a man of that sort, does he? Rather shy, I should say, and hold-off, but a splendid figure. The Frenchman is actually the famous Mariol, whose books are my delight, though he's a wretch the way he writes about women. He's Clandonald's great chum, and they have been travelling together."

Helen's face had lighted.

"I know only one or two books of Mariol's--essays principally, but they are perfect of their kind----"

"I advise you to keep to the essays," said Miss Bleecker, dryly. "He has an enormous reputation in the literary world, and one likes to meet them, now and again, if they are not frumps."

"And provided he is not sea-sick," said Helen, smiling.

"In this boat, in an ordinary sea, there'll be no excuse for it. Why, one hardly knows we are moving. To return to Clandonald, don't you think people one reads about and hears about are always disappointing? I don't say there was anything wrong attributed to _him_; they said he was rather Quixotic in his treatment of the worthless creature, who had to give up his name and go under. But he is so much like other people. Nothing to show he was in such a notorious divorce suit--Helen, what are you smiling at?"

"The thrilling thought that I had M. de Mariol to mix my salad dressing," replied Miss Carstairs.

"Was it good? I am always careful the first day out. Oh! I must tell you about those queer Dicks, the Southerners. It seems that Lord and Lady Channel Fleet came on board at the last minute, and took quite an ordinary room--that heavy-looking red-faced man and the dowdy woman in big turquoise earrings, who sat at the captain's table--they had to have those two seats, so the Winstanleys were transferred to us. If we had only secured the Channel Fleets, we should have been so complete! Perhaps they and Clandonald don't speak, though, and the captain found it out, or the purser, who always hears all the gossip. At any rate, we've got to put up with the Winstanleys, and I'll give you my frank opinion, Helen, that before this voyage is over we'll have cause to rue the day when we laid eyes on them. The old man is simply too absurd. Treats her as if she were a princess and he her courier. How you could stand his babbling in your ear, I can't imagine. But she! she! The worst specimen of the travelling American who makes one blush for one's country when abroad."

"One must own to her good looks," Helen interpolated bravely.

Miss Bleecker snorted.

"My dear, that is unworthy of you. A Twenty-third Street shop-girl would be ashamed to do her hair like that; and her frock--bought in stock, and fitted in half a day, probably. But even that doesn't count beside her phenomenal assurance and self-conceit. Fancy now, her addressing a remark to me, before I had spoken to her. I never heard such a string of words from a young person in my life, and to take it upon her to entertain the whole table! It really silenced me. One comfort is that everybody will put her down as I did, and sooner or later she'll be left severely to herself."

"I noticed that Lord Clandonald and M. de Mariol seemed much amused, and the others couldn't keep their eyes from her," said truthful Helen, who had her own cause for blank wonderment at the further development of John Glynn's acquaintances.

"Oh! that is the provoking part of men," answered Miss Bleecker, tossing her head; "give them a pretty face and a forward manner, and they'll pretend to be entertained. I'm very sorry, Helen, but if that girl doesn't take my hint and tone down a great deal, I shall be under the necessity of making a complaint about our seats. It isn't possible the line wouldn't wish to place your father's daughter at least _respectably_ at table. These Winstanleys are, in my opinion, most suspicious people, and I have asked Mr. Vereker to make very particular inquiries and find out if I am not right. He says that when she came into the saloon, every neck on our side was stretched looking after her, and he quite agrees with me--no, Mrs. Vereker agreed with me, her husband was weak enough to say what were the odds when a girl is so deuced pretty--that there must be something wrong."

The latter part of Miss Bleecker's monologue was spoken to space, since Miss Carstairs, melting away into her own room, had closed the door between them.

Helen found Mlle. Eulalie sitting on the foot of the cane settee, comfortably warming her toes at a small apparatus of shining brass, which, with its red lamp inside, presented a fair semblance of the forsaken fires of home. Upon the bed lay her own satin quilt, her own pillows of embroidered linen were prepared invitingly, her peignoir billowed across the couch. Upon every side gleamed and glittered the little objects of cut-glass, tortoise-shell and gold which she had heaped in the balance against John Glynn's love, along with a hundred other manifestations of the outward and visible signs of a solvent existence. To-night she was strangely repelled by them. She made a motion to go out again into the half darkness of that same deserted lower deck, where she could walk to the rush of the wind and the inspiriting swish of the water. She wanted to be alone with her thoughts, to bid a last good-by to the love she had known for a little happy while. Then the image of Miss Posey Winstanley, with her assured smile and undaunted self-satisfaction, came to her with a new shock, and, turning back, she let Eulalie take off her dress and brush her hair, surrendering herself inertly to the warmth and perfume of materialism, and trying to think she was better so.

Far into the night Helen lay, physically at rest, inhaling the pure air from her open window, feeling the gentle uplift of the sea as the huge bulk of the ship faintly answered to its impulse, listening to the bells challenging one another from afar, but she could not sleep. Tirelessly her memory went over every incident of her acquaintanceship with Glynn, and of the virtual break with her father since the terrible substitution of the woman she suspected into her old place at home. To the last she had kept a brave front, and no one should ever know what this past year had cost her. She was leaving America, without temptation to return. The secret glimmering hope that had kept alight within her, that some day John Glynn and she might come together again, was now finally extinguished. It was as if a new era of life were opening, and the question was, how best should she shape it?

For the twentieth time Miss Carstairs had come around to the knottiest problem of all those that kept her wakeful in her giant cradle of the sea. She was wondering how duty and dignity might combine to inspire her action toward her successor in Glynn's affections. Her chief apprehension regarding Pamela Winstanley, was that John Glynn should have made her ever so little aware of that prior bond. A cold terror had possessed her at thought of the exuberant creature sharing or even suspecting her sacred secret. But in the girl's helter-skelter attempts at speech with every one at table, she had given no hint that she had previously heard of Miss Carstairs. Helen could only hope that Glynn's name would never come up between them. And, at this point, a soft, swabbing sound and the tread of muffled feet upon the deck beneath her window, gave notice that the sailors were at their early morning tasks. The weird, self-pitying note of the parrot in a cabin hard by seemed to grow fainter and more dreamlike. Turning wearily upon her pillows, she let sleep take her into its merciful embrace.

"Certainly, Mariol, you have found your American types ready to hand upon this voyage," Lord Clandonald was saying, as the two men walked up and down with their cigars upon the deck decried by Miss Carstairs' chaperon. "The most obvious one is, of course, the astonishing young person who aroused us from the spiritual lethargy of a first meal at sea, when one is always on guard not to be too accessible."

"She is like one of those Eastern shops, where everything is in the window," Mariol answered. "But adorably fresh and naive and pretty. No other continent could produce her than the wide and liberal one we are just quitting."

"Might we but keep her to ourselves!" said Clandonald, mockingly. "But I foresee that she will be the wonder and the joy of the entire ship's company on our run over. And the mild old boy who retires into the background to give his Wonder every chance! I rather like the old boy, I think."

"My own taste would be for the young lady who is protected by Buddha reincarnate, in the person of the disapproving chaperon. Her beauty is rarer, more subtle, than the other's; she is clearly of the _fine fleur_ of the American aristocracy of dollars. I suspect a Colonial ancestor somewhere, and you observed that the chaperon did not disdain us too much, to let fall a hint or two concerning the custom of splendor in her charge's life. When they find you out, Clandonald, I'll wager the sun will promptly shine between the clouds for you."

"The old woman is in the apologetic stage for America, and that's enough to give me a strong disgust for her. Let them be anything that's real, and I'm ready to meet Americans 'hands across the sea.' But the ones that affect to decry their nationality, to convince us that they are of a small, segregated class that stand on higher ground than the rest, are abhorrent to me. Clearly, Buddha's protegee belongs to that class? and will not tarry to let us become aware of it."

"Grant that my Mdlle. Helene--for I don't know her other name--is both beautiful and finely bred, and I will abandon you the rest of her sisterhood. She is full of an exquisite intellectuality, but it would not prevent her loving if her heart were awakened--and if I am not mistaken, it has already been awakened. Imagine a young girl, _chez nous_, with that expression in her eyes, and yet that delicate restraint of manner. I should like to know the fair Helene's history."

"That you might dissect her with admirable grace in a feuilleton that _tout Paris_ would read and applaud--and--forget her the next hour, in a new enthusiasm."

"Better to possess all the enthusiasms than none, old chap. I am really in despair over your failure to be aroused by the infinite variety of the diversions offered to you in this journey of ours that, alas! must end too soon."

"There is one pleasure that has never palled on me, and that is the society of my travelling companion. You are the ideal one in many respects, Mariol; but if I could point out one virtue more than another that distinguishes you in that character, it is the letting a man enjoy all his bad humors, his fads, his follies, if you will, unchecked and unbridled. I have sometimes basely suspected you of sacrificing me in order to make copy of my infirmities. But, at any rate, I have enjoyed blessed liberty, and, whatever the result, I have profited by the semblance of a perfect tact and consideration."

"A roundabout way of warning me not to intrude my advice upon you now. But seriously, Clandonald, and at any risk, I must tell you that you need rousing. That past of yours, unsavory as it was through no fault of yours, has been long enough decently interred for you to forget it, and to recreate your life's happiness. One can't be sore always, any more than we can love always, or mourn always. And you, of all men the one best fitted to wear the yoke of your staid British virtues, to serve your country and your king at home, to be a model landlord, a husband and a paterfamilias, _comme il y en a peu_! For heaven's sake, accept the blessed opportunity of your present freedom, and make up for that wretched first mistake. You aren't happy, you have no ambition, no purpose, no zest in living. Get yourself a wife."

"This from Mariol, the scoffer, the celibate! My dear fellow, I forgive you your trespass upon forbidden ground, because I know you are sincere. But you forget one small, important fact. The person who bore my name, and her various works of evil, have so depleted my finances that, had I the courage, I haven't the wherewithal to hawk my wares in the marriage mart. I wonder if you know what it costs to keep a Lady Clandonald in the enjoyment of the domestic atmosphere of which you speak. I know to my cost. Unless she were a beautiful savage, content to retire with me to one of those isles of the South Sea poor Louis Stevenson idealized, I couldn't even give her a season in town, or a trip to Paris or Homburg, much less races, and all the bridge a woman needs; and so there'd be the devil to pay, you see. If she would set up a bonnet-shop, or a place for horribly dear frocks, and keep me on the proceeds--! but otherwise, I'm as poor as a rat, Mariol, and haven't your resources, or royalties, remember."

"A small matter, my dear lad, with the ever-continuing flood of American dollars pouring from West to East through the facile clasp of the fair beings by whom we are presently surrounded. And you would not run great risks. There is this to be said for them, that American ladies rarely degenerate into either bores, dupes or pieces of household machinery: 'Le familier vulgaire, utile et sans bouquet, comme le vin qu'on boit avec l'eau.' They progress with the epoch and the civilization that claim them. Take--as a matter of illustration merely--either of the two young women who grace our board."

"As a matter of illustration, merely," answered Clandonald, laughing, "I'd prefer to take the sweet child of nature, combining, with the vulgarity of a powdered nose, the eyes of an intelligent cherub recently short-coated."