Chapter 2
“I believe that some of these things are done here,” replied Mr. Port, in a tone that implied that such frivolities were quite beyond the lines of his own personal interests. “Yes,” he continued, “I am sure that all of them are done here now--for the Pier is not what it used to be, Dorothy. The quiet air of intense respectability that characterized Narragansett when it was the resort only of a few of the best families of Philadelphia has departed from it--I fear forever! But, thank Heaven, its climatic characteristics remain intact. When you are older, Dorothy, and your liver asserts itself, you will appreciate this incomparable climate at its proper value.”
“Well, it hasn’t asserted itself yet, you know; and I must say I’m devoutly thankful that something has happened to wake up the quiet and intensely respectable Philadelphians before I had to come here. But I’m very glad, dear Uncle Hutchinson,” Miss Lee continued, winningly, “that this climate is so good for you, and I’m sure I hope that you won’t have a single bilious attack all the time that you are here. And you’ll take your angel to the dances, and to see the tennis, and you’ll give her lunch-parties, and you’ll take her yachting, won’t you, you dear? But I know you will; and if this were not such a very conspicuous place, and might make a scandal, I’d give you a very sweet kiss to pay you in advance for all the trouble that you are going to take to make your angel enjoy herself. You needn’t bother about the teas, Uncle Hutchinson--for the most part they’re only women, and stupid.”
Being still somewhat cast down by painful memories of that trying final fortnight in Saratoga, during which he and his niece had pulled so strongly in opposite directions, Mr. Port heard with a lively alarm this declaration of a plan of campaign which, if carried out, would wreck hopelessly his own comfort of body and peace of mind. Obviously, this was no time for faltering. If the catastrophe was to be averted, he must speak out at once and with a decisive energy.
“I need not tell you, Dorothy,” he began, speaking in a most grave and earnest tone, “that it is my desire to discharge in the amplest and kindest manner my duties towards you as a guardian--”
“I’m sure of it, and of course you needn’t tell me, you dearest dear--and we might begin with just a little lunch to-day. The breakfast was horrid, and I didn’t get half enough even of what there was.”
“But I must say now,” Mr. Port went on--keenly regretting the unfortunate beginning that he had given to his declaration of independence, but judiciously ignoring Dorothy’s shrewd perversion of it--“that your several suggestions literally are impossibilities. I admit that dancing for a short period, at about an hour after each meal, is an admirable exercise that produces a most salutary effect upon the digestive apparatus; but persistent dancing until an unduly late period of the night is a practice as unhygienic as, in the mixed company of a watering-place, it is socially objectionable.
“Tennis is an absurdity worthy of the vacuous minds of those who engage in it.. To suggest that I shall sit in a cramped position in a draughty gallery for several hours at a stretch in order to watch empty-headed young men playing a perverted form of battledoor and shuttlecock across a net, is to imply that they and I are upon the same intellectual level; and this, I trust, is not the case.
“As you certainly should remember, Dorothy, all persons of a bilious habit suffer severely from seasickness; a fact that, of course, disposes effectually of your yachting plans. For you are not desirous, I am sure, of purchasing your own selfish enjoyment--if you possibly can have enjoyment on board a yacht--at the cost of my intense personal misery.
“But in regard to the lunches, my dear”--Mr. Port’s tone softened perceptibly--“there certainly is something to be said. The food here at the hotel, I admit, is atrocious, and at the Casino it is possible occasionally to procure something eatable. Yes, I shall have much pleasure in giving a lunch this very morning to my angel” (Mr. Port, warming in advance under the genial influence of the croquette and salad that he intended to order, became playful), “for what you said in regard to the breakfast, Dorothy, was quite true--it was abominable. If you will excuse me, I will just step down to the Casino now and give my order; then things will be all ready for us when we get back from the bath.”
And such was Miss Lee’s generalship that she rested content with her success in one direction, and deferred until a more convenient season her further demands. She was a reasonable young woman, and was quite satisfied with accomplishing one thing at a time.
V.
Two or three days later Dorothy advanced her second parallel. In the interval they had bathed every morning and had driven to the Point every afternoon, and they had held converse upon the veranda of the hotel every evening until ten o’clock with certain eminently respectable people from Philadelphia, by whom Dorothy was bored, as she did not hesitate to confess, almost to desperation. Further, Mr. Port had given a lunch-party to which these same Philadelphians were invited; and his niece had informed him, when the festivity was at an end, that if he did anything like that again she certainly would either run away or drown herself. Any trials in this world or any dangers in the next, she declared, were preferable to sitting opposite to such a person as Mrs. Logan Rittenhouse, who talked nothing but uninteresting scandal and crochet, and next to Mr. Pennington Brown, who talked only about peoples’ great-grandfathers and great-aunts.
It was with a lively alarm that Mr. Port noted these signs of discontent, together with returning symptoms of the grumpiness which had disturbed his comfort and digestion at Saratoga; and it was most selfishly in his own self-interest that he tried to think of something that would afford his niece amusement. Miss Lee, when she perceived that her intelligently laid plans were working successfully, was graciously pleased to assist him.
“It is a great pity, Uncle Hutchinson,” she vouchsafed to remark on the fourth day of suppressed domestic sunshine, “that you don’t like tennis. Don’t you think, for your angel’s sake, that you could go for just a little while this afternoon? There’s going to be a capital match this afternoon, and your angel does so want to see it. You haven’t been very--very agreeable the past two or three days, you dear, and I fear that your liver must be a little out of order. Really, you haven’t given your angel a single chance to be affectionate--and unless she can be affectionate and sweet and clinging, and things like that, you know, your poor angel is not happy at all. Suppose we try the tennis for just half an hour or so? It won’t be much of a sacrifice for you, and it will make your angel so happy that she will make herself dearer to you than ever, you precious thing.”
This form of address was disconcerting to Mr. Port, for during the period to which Miss Lee referred he certainly had been trying--not very cleverly, perhaps, for such efforts were not at all in his line, but still to the best of his ability--to make himself as agreeable as possible; and the effort on the part of his niece to be angelic, of which she spoke so confidently, he could not but think had fallen rather more than a little short of absolute success. The one ray of comfort that he extracted from Dorothy’s utterance was her reference to herself as his angel; he had come to understand that the use of this term was a sign of fair weather, and he valued it accordingly. But even for the sake of fair weather Mr. Port was not yet prepared to expose his elderly joints to the draughty discomforts of the galleries overhanging the tennis-court; and he said so, pretty decidedly. Almost anything else he was willing to do, he added, but that particular thing he would not do at all.
“As you please, Uncle Hutchinson,” Dorothy answered, in a tone of gloomy resignation. “I am used to hearing that. It is just what poor dear mamma used to say. She always was willing, you know, to do everything but the thing that I wanted her to do. I remember, just to mention a single instance, how mamma broke up a delightful water party on Windermere that Sir Gordon Graham had arranged expressly for us. The weather was rather misty, as it is apt to be up there, you know, but nothing worth minding when you are well wrapped up. But mamma said that if she went out in such a drizzle she knew her cough would be ever so much worse--and of course she couldn’t really know that it would be worse, for nobody truly knows what the weather is going to do to them--and so she wouldn’t go. And Sir Gordon was very much hurt about it, and never came near us again. And unless I’m very much mistaken, Uncle Hutchinson, mamma’s selfishness that day lost me the chance of being Lady Graham. So I’m used to being treated in this way, and you needn’t at all mind refusing me everything that I ask.” And, being delivered of this discourse, Miss Lee lapsed into a condition of funereal gloom.
At the end of another twenty-four hours Mr. Port knuckled under. “I have been thinking, Dorothy,” he said, “about what you were saying about tennis. It’s a beastly game, but since you insist upon seeing it I’ll take you for a little while this afternoon.” This was not the most gracious form of words in which an invitation could be couched; but Dorothy, who was not a stickler for forms provided she was successful in results, accepted it with alacrity. Later in the day, as they returned from the Casino, she declared:
“Your angel has had a lovely afternoon, Uncle Hutchinson, and she is sure that you have had a lovely afternoon too. And now that you’ve found what fun there is in looking at tennis, we’ll go every day, won’t we, dear? Sometimes, you know, you are just a little, just a very little prejudiced about things; but you are so good and sweet-tempered that your prejudices never last long, and so your angel cannot help loving you a great deal.”
Mr. Port, who was not at all sweet-tempered at that moment, was prepared to reply to the first half of this speech in terms of some emphasis; for he was limping a little, and a shocking twinge took him in his left shoulder when he attempted to raise his arm. But Dorothy’s sudden shifting to polite personalities was of a nature to choke off his projected indignant utterance. Yet not feeling by any means prepared to meet in kind her pleasing manifestation of affection, Mr. Port was a little put to it to find any suitable form of response. After a moment’s reflection he abandoned the attempt to reply coherently, and contented himself with grunting.
VI.
Encouraged by the success that was attending her unselfish efforts to harmonize her own and her uncle’s conceptions of the temporal fitness of things, Miss Lee began to find life at the Pier quite supportable. “There’s not much to do here,” she declared, with her customary candor, “and the hotels--all ugly and all in a row--make it look like an overgrown charitable institution; and most of the people, I must say, are such a dismal lot that they might very well be the patients out for an airing. But, on the whole, I’ve been in several worse places, Uncle Hutchinson; and if only you’d take me to a hop now and then, instead of sitting every evening on the pokey hotel veranda talking Philadelphia twaddle with that stuffy old Mr. Pennington Brown, I might have rather a good time here.”
“You will oblige me, Dorothy,” replied Mr. Port, “by refraining from using such a word as ‘stuffy’ in connection with a gentleman who belongs to one of the oldest and best families in Philadelphia, and who, moreover, is one of my most esteemed friends.”
“But he _is_ stuffy, Uncle Hutchinson. He never talks about anything but who peoples’ grandfathers and grandmothers were; and _Watson’s Annals_ seems to be the only book that he ever has heard of. Indeed, I do truly think that he is the very stuffiest and stupidest old gentleman that I ever have known.”
Mr. Port made no reply to this sally, for his feelings were such that he deemed it best not to give expression to them in words; but he was not unnaturally surprised, after such a declaration of sentiments on the part of his niece, when she begged to be excused on the ensuing afternoon from her regular drive to the Point, on the ground that she had promised to make an expedition to the Rocks in Mr. Brown’s company. Had an opportunity been given him Mr. Port would have asked for an explanation of this phenomenon; but the carriage was in waiting that was to convey his ward and her extraordinary companion to the end of the road at Indian Rock--a slight rheumatic tendency, that he declared was hereditary, rendering it advisable for Mr. Brown to reduce the use of his legs to a minimum--and before Mr. Port could rally his forces they had entered it and had driven away.
In the evening Mr. Port found another surprise awaiting him. Miss Lee presently retired from the veranda for the avowed purpose of searching for a missing fan, thus leaving the two gentlemen together.
“What a charming girl your niece is, Port!” said Mr. Brown, as the fluttering train of Dorothy’s dress disappeared through the door-way.
Mr. Port evidently considered that this possibly debatable statement was sufficiently answered by a grunt, for that was all the answer he gave it.
Not permitting his enthusiasm to be checked by this chillingly dubious response, Mr. Brown continued:
“She certainly is one of the most charming girls I have met in a long time, Port. She is not a bit like the average of young girls nowadays. I rarely have known a young person of either sex to be so genuinely interested in genealogy, especially in Philadelphia genealogy; and I must say that her liking for antiquarian matters generally is very remarkable. I envy you, I really envy you, old boy, the blessing of that sweet young creature’s constant companionship.”
“Umph--do you?” was Mr. Port’s concise and rather discouraging reply.
“Indeed I do”--Mr. Brown was too warm to notice the cynical tone of his friend’s rejoinder--“and I have been thinking, Port, that we are a pair of selfish old wretches to monopolize every evening in the way that we have been doing this bright young flower. It is a shame for us to keep her in our stupid company--though she tells me that she finds our talk about old people and old times exceedingly interesting--instead of letting her have a little of the young society and a little of the excitement and pleasure of watering-place life. Now, how would it do for us to take her down to the Casino to-night? There is to be a hop to-night, she says; at least, that is to say”--Mr. Brown became somewhat confused--“I heard somewhere that there is to be a hop tonight, and while that sort of thing is pretty stupid for you and me, it isn’t a bit stupid for a young and pretty girl like her. So suppose we take her, old man?”
As this amazing proposition was advanced by his elderly friend, Mr. Port’s anger and astonishment were aroused together; and his rude rejoinder to it was: “Have you gone crazy, Brown, or has Dorothy been making a fool of you? Has she asked you to ask me to take her to the Casino hop? She knows there is no use in talking to me about it any longer.”
“No, certainly not--at least--that is to say--well, no, not exactly,” replied Mr. Brown, beginning his sentence with an asperity and positiveness that somehow did not hold out to its end. “She did say to me, I confess, how fond she was of dancing, and how she had refrained from saying much about it to you”--Mr. Port here interpolated a sceptical snort--“because she knew that taking her to the Casino would only bore you. And I do think, Port, that keeping her here with us all the time is grossly selfish; and if you don’t want to take her to the hop I hope you’ll let her go with me. But what we’d better do, old man, is to take her together--then we can talk to each other just as well, at least nearly as well, as we can here, and we can have the comfort of knowing that she is enjoying herself too. Come, Hutch; we’re getting old and rusty, you and I, but let us try at least to keep from degenerating into a pair of selfish old brutes with no care for anybody’s comfort but our own.”
Mr. Hutchinson Port might have replied with a fair amount of truth that so far as he himself was concerned the degeneration that his friend referred to as desirable to avoid already had taken place. But all of us like most to be credited with the virtues of which we have least, and he therefore accepted as his due Mr. Brown’s tribute of implied praise. And the upshot of the matter was that Dorothy, when she returned to the veranda again, was unaffectedly surprised (and considering how carefully she had planned her small campaign she did it very creditably) by discovering that her uncle’s edict against the Casino hops had been withdrawn.
VII.
Even Dorothy was disposed to believe that unless some peculiarly favorable combination of circumstances presented itself as a basis for her intelligent manipulation her strong desire for a yacht voyage must remain ungratified; for, now that his liver was decidedly the larger part of him, Mr. Port had a fairly catlike dread of the sea. To be sure, Dorothy’s character was a resolute one, and her staying powers were quite remarkable; but in the matter of venturing his bilious body upon the ocean she discovered that her uncle--although now reduced to a fairly satisfactory state of submission in other respects--had a large and powerful will of his own.
Fortune, however, favors the resolute even more decidedly than she favors the brave. This fact Dorothy comprehended thoroughly, and uniformly acted upon. Each time that even a remote possibility of a yacht cruise presented itself she instantly brought her batteries to bear; and, with a nice understanding of her uncle’s intellectual peculiarities, she each time treated the matter as though it never before had been discussed.
Therefore it was that when Miss Lee’s eyes were gladdened one day--just as she and her uncle were about to begin their lunch on the shady veranda of the Casino--by the sight of a trim schooner yacht sliding down the wind from the direction of Newport, the subject of the cruise was revived with a suddenness and point that Mr. Port found highly disconcerting. The yacht rounded to off the Casino, and the sound of a plunge and a clanking chain floated across the water as her anchor went overboard.
“Oh, isn’t she a beauty!” exclaimed Dorothy, with enthusiasm. “Now, Uncle Hutchinson, her owner is coming ashore--they have just brought the gig round to the gangway--and if you don’t know him you must get somebody to introduce you to him; and then you must introduce him to me; and then he will ask us to go on a cruise; and of course we will go, and have just the loveliest time in the world. I haven’t been on board a yacht for nearly five years (just look at the gig: don’t the men pull splendidly?)--not since that nice little Lord Alderhone took poor dear mamma and me up to Norway. We did have such a good time! Poor dear mamma, of course, was desperately sick--she always was horribly sea-sick, you know; but I’m never sea-sick the least bit, and it was perfectly delightful. Look, Uncle Hutchinson, they’ve made the dock, and now he’s coming right up here. What a handsome man he is, and how well he looks in his club uniform! It seems to me I’ve seen him somewhere. Do you know him, Uncle Hutchinson?”
A serious difficulty under which Mr. Port labored in his dealings with his niece was his inability--due to his Philadelphia habit of mind--to keep up with the exceptionally rapid flow of her ideas. On the present occasion, while he still was engaged in consideration of the irrational proposition that he should court the desperate misery that attends a bilious man at sea by as good as asking to be taken on a yacht voyage, he suddenly found his ideas twisted off into another direction by the reference to his sister’s sufferings on a similar occasion in the past; and before he could frame in words the reproof that he was disposed to administer to Dorothy for what he probably would have styled her heartlessness, he found his thoughts shunted to yet another track by a direct question. It is within the bounds of possibility that Miss Lee had arrived at a just estimate of her relative’s intellectual peculiarities, and that she even sometimes framed her discourses with a view to taking advantage of them.
The direct question being the simplest section of Dorothy’s complex utterance, Mr. Port abandoned his intended remonstrance and reproof and proceeded to answer it. “Yes,” he said, “I know him. It’s Van Rensselaer Livingstone. His cousin, Van Ruy-ter Livingstone, married your cousin Grace--Grace Winthrop, you know. He’s a great scamp--this one, I mean; gambles, and that sort of thing, I’m told, and drinks, and--and various things. I shall have to speak to him if he sees me, I suppose; but of course I shall not introduce him to you.”
“Mr. Van Rensselaer Livingstone! Why so it is! How perfectly delightful! I know him very well, Uncle Hutchinson. He was in Nice the last winter we were there; and he broke the bank at Monaco; and he played that perfectly absurd trick on little Prince Sporetti: cut off his little black mustache when Prince Sporetti was--was not exactly sober, you know, and gummed on a great red mustache instead of it; and then, before the prince was quite himself again, took him to Lady Orrasby’s ball. All Nice was in a perfect roar over it. And they had a duel afterwards, and Mr. Livingstone--he is a wonderful shot--instead of hurting the little prince, just shot away the tip of his left ear as nicely as possible. Oh, he is a delightful man--and here he comes.” And Dorothy, half rising from her chair, and paying no more attention to Mr. Port’s kicks under the table than she did to his smothered verbal remonstrances, extended her well-shaped white hand in the most cordial manner, and in the most cordial tone exclaimed:
“Won’t you speak to me in English, Mr. Livingstone? We talked French, I think it was, the last time we met. And how is your friend Prince Sporetti? Has his ear grown out again? You know my uncle, I think? Mr. Hutchinson Port.”
Livingstone took the proffered hand with even more cordiality than it was given, and then extended his own to Mr. Port--who seemed much less inclined to shake it than to bite it.
“I think that we are justified in regarding ourselves as relations now, Miss Lee, since our cousins have married each other, you know. Quite a romance, wasn’t it? And how very jolly it is to meet you here--when I thought that you certainly were in Switzerland or Norway, or even over in that new place that people are going to in Roumania! I flatter myself that I always have rather a knack of falling on my feet, but, by Jove, I’m doing it more than usual this morning!”