Part 5

"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, pates, 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."

*CHAPTER V*

MR. Vereker's little supper proved all that Miss Bleecker had claimed for it in the matter of exotic luxury. American beauty roses, as fresh as if they had bloomed that morning, decked the centre of the board, and a corsage bouquet of royal purple violets lay beside each lady's plate. The unpleasantly pallid host, with skin drawn like parchment over his lean jaws, his hair and mustache unnaturally black, sat at one end, and (to the dismay of Miss Bleecker, who had been made to fit in at the side) Miss Posey Winstanley upon his left, opposite my Lady Channel Fleet in a rumpled cotton blouse, still wearing the turquoise earrings, with the addition of a turquoise chain to hold her eyeglasses.

Posey, in severely plain white voile, with a picture hat and white feathers framing the waves of her splendid hair, thanked her stars that she had had Helen Carstairs' example in dress long enough to profit by it for this occasion. She saw in half a glance that her frock, the result of the best skill of the dressmaker at Alison's Cross Roads, who called her by name in fitting her, could not vie with the dove-colored confection with its all-over embroideries that sat so easily upon Helen's erect form. But she knew that it was unobtrusive, and the little slip of mirror above her washing-stand had told she was at her best.

It had been an ordeal that of dressing while her cross room-mate, who made a virtue of what she called "retiring" early, continued at intervals to extend her head like a turtle's from its shell, and inquire whether Miss Winstanley would be very much longer! Posey was fain to go outside and have the finishing touches put to her toilette by the stewardess, Mrs. Gasher, the bib of whose white apron covered sympathetic interest, since she knew about the supper, and that the ladies to be present were dead set against the beauty of the ship. When she had stuck the last pin, Mrs. Gasher maternally informed Miss Winstanley that she looked pretty enough to beat the Jews, and would find her 'ot water covered with a towel when she came in again to go to bed; and if she couldn't get undone herself, never to mind ringing up Mrs. Gasher.

Under this cheerful inspiration, Posey had marched into the saloon to find the others all in place, an empty chair kept for her at the host's left.

She had been hoping to be next Clandonald--for no reason but that she wanted it. Instead, she had but a cold glance from him across the table, at which she quailed because she thought she read in it displeasure. And immediately he turned back to his conversation with Prince Zourikoff about Silver or Trusts, or Labor, or some of those tiresome things, and looked at her no more. The only consolation for this awful blow was that Helen, sitting between Mariol and Bobby Vane, had smiled at her kindly when she came in late.

Miss Bleecker, beside the Graf von Bau, who occupied the seat to the left of Mrs. Vereker, decided that the world was out of joint. Lord Channel Fleet, at the right of his hostess, looked tired, and when Miss Bleecker effusively addressed him upon topics of contemporaneous interest in London, gave her but scant answers. Graf von Bau, after he had exhausted civilities with the lady of the feast, had but eyes and ears for the spot where Posey had already begun to outdo herself in characteristic nonsense.

"That girl!" said Miss Bleecker, between her teeth, to Mr. Charley Brownlow, a serious-faced, clean-shaven New York clubman of whom the utmost his friends and enemies could find to say was that he was "always everywhere." "It is not enough to defy poor dear Mrs. Vereker, who flatly said she should not be asked, but to make herself so conspicuous. See, every man at table, except you----"

"I don't know her, don't you know? Never met her anywhere," interposed Mr. Brownlow gravely.

"Of course you didn't--as I was saying, every man at table but you, and, I'm glad to see, Lord Clandonald, can look at nothing else. I suppose she went too far with Clandonald, and he wants to put her back in her place. Everybody understands old Vereker's rage for a pretty face, though I, for one, can never see good looks in a common person. It's scandalous the way she's going on to-night. Mr. Vereker's trying to make her take champagne, and she pretending she never drinks it! Poor Lady Channel Fleet, what a trial to sit opposite her! Now, we shall have a fresh batch of stories circulated in London about the way American girls act; and the worst of it is you can never get the English to see the difference between people of our stamp, and hers. Why, I don't believe Lord Channel Fleet and Clandonald take in, at this minute, the enormous distance between my Helen and that impossible young person. What's that they're laughing at? Something saucy she is saying to Lady Channel Fleet, I'll wager."

"What do we do for chaperons, at home, Lady Channel Fleet?" Miss Winstanley was remarking, her head well in the air, and the spirit of mischief securely seated in her eyes. "Well, we don't need 'em greatly at Alison's Cross Roads, where I live; but if there's a party at the other end of town, your best young man generally calls for you in a hack. And when he brings you home again, about three or four in the morning, you give him your latch-key to open the front door, and if you're not tall enough, you get him to turn out the gas in the vestibule before he goes."

"Good Heavens!" ejaculated Lady Channel Fleet, growing purple.

"Why not, I'd like to know?" exclaimed Posey, sturdily. "We consider it awfully swell to be taken that way, and the fellows that can't afford a hack generally bunch together with the girls and all go in the tram; and it's lots of fun, I tell you. Just bully!"

Mrs. Vereker exchanged glances of mute despair with Miss Bleecker and Mr. Brownlow. The others laughed frankly, Clandonald, only, remaining smileless, and Helen Carstairs coloring with a futile desire to arrest Miss Winstanley's progress in confidences.

As well attempt to stay Niagara! A demon of recklessness had possessed himself of John Glynn's promised bride, and poor Posey went from bad to worse, talking continuously, her cheeks flushed to the color of the American beauties lavished upon the table, her eyes glittering defiance; while old Vereker, who had desired nothing better, applauded her every utterance, and urged her to further daring.

"She should stop now," whispered Mariol to Miss Carstairs, who was looking very grave.

"Oh, indeed I think so," answered Helen earnestly.

"For her own sake, if there is no one else whose interests are to be guarded."

Helen started perceptibly. No one else whose interests were to be guarded? What of John Glynn, and where was the friendship Helen had promised to keep for him in lieu of the love she had withdrawn? Impulsively, she leaned forward, caught Posey Winstanley's eye, and into her own beseeching, all-womanly gaze threw an appeal not to be resisted.

Clandonald, who had begun to be sickeningly annoyed by the scene, and as far as possible avoided looking directly at the heroine of the hour, happened to note this little episode. Remembering what Posey had told him of Helen's influence over her imagination, he was touched but not surprised at the younger girl's response. Posey, blushing hotly, drooped her eyes, and in an instant, as if with a garment cast aside, had parted with her aggressive gaiety. During the remainder of the meal she sat dull and spiritless, and at its close, when she had promised to sing one song for them, tried to get out of it and leave the party.

There was a general outcry of remonstrance. Bobby Vane, coming around to lead her to the piano, whispered to her to do her best and silence the tabby chorus. When she finally yielded, and sat down, expectation ran high among Mr. Vereker's faction that the girl would give them something audacious to be remembered.

It was but a "Mammy" chant, she breathed, rather than sang, in a _voix d'or_ that softened all hearts within hearing; and before they could applaud it she struck firmer chords, and began Lockhart's Spanish ballad:

"Rise up, rise up, Xarifa, And lay your golden cushion down."

The song and its setting were unfamiliar to most of those present. While it lasted, they forgot the grinding of mighty screws that bore the ship ever forward, they heard not the wash of ocean coming through the open ports. They were in ancient days of warlike Spain, and all their sympathy was for the lovely Moorish lady forsaken by false Abdallah. Everybody within hearing was drawn irresistibly to listen in ravished silence. And when for the last time the hapless Xarifa refused to come to the window and "gaze with all the town" at her recreant lover riding by in state, the honors of the evening were clearly for Posey Winstanley. At that moment, all but a few of the audience were prepared to be led or used by her, as one feels when Calve softens to sing a folk-song of her native land.