THE SHOP GIRL
CHAPTER I
THE DRYAD DOOR
It was a horrible day at sea, horrible even on board the new and splendid Monarchic. All the prettiest people had disappeared from the huge dining-saloon. They had turned green, and then faded away, one by one or in hurried groups; and now the very thought of music at meals made them sick, in ragtime.
Peter Rolls was never sick in any time or in any weather, which was his one disagreeable, superior-to-others trick. Most of his qualities were likable, and he was likable, though a queer fellow in some ways, said his best friends—the ones who called him "Petro." When the ship played that she was a hobby-horse or a crab (if that is the creature which shares with elderly Germans a specialty for walking from side to side), also a kangaroo, and occasionally a boomerang, Peter Rolls did not mind.
He was sorry for the men and girls he knew, including his sister, who lay in deck chairs pretending to be rugs, or who went to bed and wished themselves in their peaceful graves. But for himself, the wild turmoil of the waves filled him with sympathetic restlessness. It had never occurred to Peter that he was imaginative, yet he seemed to know what the white-faced storm was saying, and to want to shout an answer.
The second morning out (the morning after the Monarchic had to pass Queenstown without taking on the mails or putting off enraged passengers) Peter thought he would go to the gymnasium and work up an appetite for luncheon. He had looked in the first day, and had seen a thing which could give you all the sensations and benefits of a camel ride across the desert. He had ridden camels in real deserts and liked them. Now he did not see why waves should not answer just as well as dunes, and was looking forward to the experiment; but he must have been absent-minded, for when he opened what ought to have been the gymnasium door, it was not the gymnasium door. It was—good heavens!—what was it?
Peter Rolls, the unimaginative young man, thought that he must be in his berth and dreaming he was here. For this room that he was looking into could not possibly be a room on a ship, not even on the Monarchic, that had all the latest, day-after-to-morrow improvements and luxuries. The very bread was to-morrow's bread; but these marvellous creatures could not be supplied by the management as improvements or luxuries of any kind. Peter seemed to have opened a door into a crystal-walled world peopled entirely by dryads.
He thought of dryads, because in pictures, beings called by that name were taller, slimmer, more graceful, more beautiful, and had longer legs than young females of mortal breed. There were five of them (at least he believed there were five), and though it was eleven o'clock in the morning, they were dressed as if for the prince's ball in the story of "Cinderella." Unless on the stage, Peter had never seen such dresses or such girls.
He heard himself gasp; and afterward, when he and a wave together had banged the door shut, he hoped that he had said: "I beg your pardon." He was so confused, however, that he was not at all sure he had not blurted out "Good Lord!"
For a moment he stood as still as the sea would let him in front of the door, burning to open it again and see if the girls were really there. But, of course, he could not do that. He would have been almost inclined to believe they were wax figures if they had not moved, but they had moved.
They had been—sprawling is not a word to use in connection with dryads—yet certainly reclining, in easy chairs and on sofas, and had started up as the door opened to stare at him. One had laughed. Peter had shut the door on her laugh. He had brought away a vague impression that chairs, sofas, and carpet were pale gray, and that the dryads' dresses of wonderful tints, sparkling with gold and silver and jewels, had been brilliant as tropical flowers against the neutral background. Also, when he came to think of it, he wasn't sure that the walls were not mostly made of mirrors. That was why he could not be certain whether he had seen five dryads or five times five.
"The dryad door," he apostrophized it romantically, keeping his balance by standing with his feet apart, as old men stand before a fire. It was a very ordinary-looking door, and that made the romance for Peter in giving it such a name—just a white-painted door, so new that it smelled slightly of varnish—yet behind it lay dreamland.
Of course Peter Rolls knew that the tall, incredibly lovely beings were not dryads and not dreams, although they wore low necks, and pearls and diamonds in their wonderful, waved hair, at eleven o'clock of a stormy morning on board an Atlantic liner. Still, he was blessed if he could think what they were, and what they were doing in that room of mirrors without any furniture which he could recall, except a very large screen, a few chairs, and a sofa or two.
The next best thing to the forbidden one—opening the door again to ask the beings point-blank whether they were pipe dreams or just mermaids—was to go on to the gymnasium and inquire there. Toward this end young Mr. Rolls (as he was respectfully called in a business house never mentioned by his sister) immediately took steps. But taking steps was as far as he got. Suddenly it seemed a deed you could not do, to demand of an imitation-camel's attendant why five young ladies wore evening dress in the morning in a room three doors away.
After all, why should a camel attendant dare to know anything about them? Perhaps they were merely amusing themselves and each other by trying on all their gladdest clothes. There might be girls who would think this a good way to kill time in a storm. Yes, conceivably there might be such girls, just as there might be sea serpents; but, though Peter Rolls was too shy to have learned much about the female of his species, the explanation did not appeal to his reason.
His mind would persist in making a mystery of the mirror-walled room with its five dazzling occupants, and even the bumpings of the imitation camel could not jerk out of his head speculations which played around the dryad door. He was as curious as Fatima herself, and with somewhat the same curiosity; for, except that in one case the beautiful ladies had their heads, and in the other had lost them, there was a hint of resemblance between the two mysteries.
Peter Rolls wondered whether he would like to ask his sister Ena if she knew the visions, or even if, being a woman, she could form any theory to account for them. It would be interesting to see what she would say; but then, unless she were too seasick, she would probably laugh, and perhaps tell Lord Raygan.
As for the visions themselves, only one had spirit enough left in her to be able to laugh at being thought a dryad or a mystery. She alone of the five would have known what "dryad" means. And she could always laugh, no matter how miserable or how sick she was.
That day she was very sick indeed. They were all very sick, but she could not help seeing, at her worst, that it was funny.
"For heaven's sake, what are you giggling at?" snapped the longest, slimmest, most abnormal dryad, diaphanously draped in yellow, when she could gasp out an intelligible sentence after an exhausting bout of agony.
"Us," said the girl who could always laugh, a vision in silver.
"Us? I don't see anything funny about us!" groaned a tall dream in crimson and purple.
"Funny! I should think not!" snorted a fantasy in emerald.
"It makes me worse to hear you laugh," squealed a radiance in rose.
"I wish we were all dead, especially Miss Child," snarled the last of the five, a symphony in black and all conceivable shades of blue. Because of this combination, the Miss Child in question had named her the "Bruise."
"Sorry! I'll try not to laugh again till the sea goes down," Miss Child apologized. "I wasn't laughing at any of you exactly, it was more the whole situation: us, dressed like stars of the Russian ballet and sick as dogs, pearls in our hair and basins in our hands, looking like queens and feeling like dolls with our stuffing gone."
"Don't speak of stuffing. It makes me think of sage and onions," quavered the tallest queen.
"Ugh!" they all groaned, except Winifred Child, who was to blame for starting the subject. "Ugh! Oh! Ugh!"
When they were better they lay back on their sofas, or leaned back in their chairs, their beautiful—or meant to be beautiful—faces pale, their eyes shut. And it was at this moment that Peter Rolls burst open the door.
As he had observed, the waxlike figures moved, sat upright, and stared. This sudden disturbance of brain balance made them all giddy, but the surprise of seeing a man, not a steward, at the door, was so great that for a moment or two it acted as a tonic. Nothing dreadful happened to any one of the five until after the smooth black head had been withdrawn and the door closed.
"A man!" breathed Miss Devereux, the abnormally tall girl in yellow chiffon over gold gauze.
"Yes, dear. I wonder what he wanted?" sighed Miss Carroll, the girl in rose.
The one in green was Miss Tyndale, the one in black and blue Miss Vedrine, all very becoming labels; and if they had Christian names of equal distinction to match, the alien known at home simply as "Win" had never heard them. They called each other Miss Devereux, Miss Carroll, Miss Tyndale, and Miss Vedrine, or else "dear."
"I wish we could think he wanted to see us!" remarked Miss Tyndale.
"I hope he didn't notice the basins," added Miss Vedrine
"I think we hid them with our trains," said Miss Carroll.
"Was he nice looking?" Miss Vedrine had courage to ask. She had wonderful red hair, only a little darker at the roots, and long, straight black eyelashes. A few of these had come off on her cheeks, but they were not noticeable at a distance.
"I don't know, I'm sure, dear," replied Miss Devereux, a fawn-eyed brunette, who was nearest the door. "There wasn't time to see. I just thought: 'Good heavens! have we got to parade?' Then, 'No, thank goodness, it's a man!' And he was gone."
"What should we do if a woman did come, and we had to get up?" wondered Miss Vedrine, whose great specialty was her profile and length of white throat.
"She wouldn't be a woman; she'd be a monster, to care about clothes in weather like this," pronounced the golden-haired Miss Carroll. "Parade indeed! I wouldn't. I'd simply lie down and expire."
"I feel I've never till now sympathized enough with the animals in the ark," said Miss Child, who had not chosen her own name, or else had shown little taste in selection, compared with the others. But she was somehow different, rather subtly different, from them in all ways; not so elaborately refined, not so abnormally tall, not so startlingly picturesque. "One always thinks of the ark animals in a procession, poor dears—showing off their fur or their stripes or their spots or something—just like us."
"Speak for yourself, if you talk about spots, please," said Miss Devereux, who never addressed Miss Child as "dear," nor did the others.
"I was thinking of leopards," explained the fifth dryad. "They're among the few things you can think of without being sick."
"I can't," said Miss Devereux, and was. They all were, and somehow Miss Child seemed to be the one to blame.
"We were just getting better!" wailed Miss Vedrine.
"It was only a momentary excitement that cheered us," suggested Winifred Child.
"What excitement?" they all wanted indignantly to know.
"That man looking in."
"Do you call that an excitement? Where have you lived?"
"Well, a surprise, then. But would we have been better if it had been madame who looked in?"
The picture called up by this question was so appalling that they shuddered and forgot their little grudge against Miss Child, who was not so bad when you were feeling well, except that she had odd ways of looking at things, and laughed when nobody else could see anything to laugh at.
"Thank heaven, she's a bad sailor!" Miss Devereux cried.
"Thank heaven, all the other women on board are bad sailors," added Win.
"If madame was well she'd think we ought to be," said Miss Carroll. "She'd dock our pay every time we–– Oh, this is bad enough, but if she was well it would be a million times worse!"
"Could anything be worse?" Miss Tyndale pitifully questioned, for just then the ship was sliding down the side of a wave as big as a millionaire's house.
"Yes, it would be worse if we were wearing our waists slender this year," said Win.
"Down, down, wallow, wallow, jump!" was the program the Monarchic carried out for the twentieth time in half as many minutes. Slender waists! Oh, horrible to think of, unless you broke in two and death ended your troubles!
"Let's try breathing in as she goes up and out as she goes down. I've heard that works wonderfully," said Win.
They tried, but it worked disappointingly that time. Perhaps it was the ship's fault. It was impossible to time her antics with the most careful breathing.
"Oh, why did we leave our peaceful homes?" moaned Miss Vedrine.
"I didn't," whispered Win.
"Didn't what?"
"Leave my peaceful home. If I'd had one I shouldn't be here."
This was the first time she had volunteered or had had dragged out of her a word concerning her past. But at the moment no one could be keyed to interest in anything except preparation for the next wave.
In the veranda cafe Peter Rolls was asking his sister Ena if she knew anything about five incredibly beautiful girls in evening dress shut up together in a room with walls made of mirrors.
Ena Rolls was not in a mood to answer irrelevant questions, especially from a brother; but Lord Raygan and his sister were there, and pricked up their ears at the hint of a mystery. She could not be cross and ask Peter kindly to go to the devil and not talk rot, as she would have done if the others had been somewhere else. But then, were it not for Lord Raygan and his sister and mother, Miss Rolls would be flat in her berth.
"Five incredibly beautiful girls in evening dress!" repeated Lord Raygan, who, like Peter, was a good sailor.
Ena Rolls wanted him to be interested in her, and not in five preposterous persons in evening dress, so she replied promptly to Peter's question: "I suppose they must be Nadine's living models. We all had cards about their being on board and the hours of their parade to show the latest fashions. You saw the card, I suppose, Lady Eileen?"
"Yes," returned Lord Raygan's flapper sister. "It's on the writing-desk in that darling sitting-room you've given Mubs and me."
Ena felt rewarded for her sacrifice. She and Peter had engaged the best suite on board the Monarchic, but when Lord Raygan and his mother and sister were borne past Queenstown in most unworthy cabins (two very small ones between the three), Ena had given up her own and Peter's room to the two ladies. It was a Providential chance to make their acquaintance and win their gratitude. (She had met Raygan in Egypt and London, and sailed on the Monarchic in consequence.)
"The stewardess told me before I moved down," she went on, "that Mme. Nadine had taken the ship's nursery this trip for her show, and fitted it with wardrobes and mirror doors at immense expense. I'm afraid she won't get her money back if this storm lasts. Who could gaze at living models?"
"I could, if they're as beautiful as your brother says," replied Lord Raygan, a tall, lanky, red-headed Irishman with humorous eyes and a heavy jaw. He was the first earl Ena had ever met, but she prayed fervently that he might not be the last.
Peter somehow did not want those pale dryads sacrificed to make a Raygan holiday. He regretted having remarked on their beauty. "They looked more like dying than living models when I saw them," he said.
"Let's go and see what they look like now," suggested Raygan. "Eh, what, Miss Rolls?"
"I don't know if men can go," she hesitated.
"Who's to stop them? Why shouldn't I be wanting to buy one of the dresses off their backs for my sister?"
"What a melting idea! You do, don't you, dear boy?" the flapper encouraged him.
"I might. Come along, Miss Rolls. Come along, Eily. What about you, Rolls? Will you guide us?"
"Let's wait till after lunch," said Ena. She hoped that it might disagree with everybody, and then they would not want to go.
"Oh, no!" pleaded Lady Eileen O'Neill. "We may be dead after luncheon, and probably will be. Or Rags'll change his mind about the dress. Nadine's dresses are too heavenly. I've never seen any except on the stage, worn by wonderful, thin giantesses. All her gowns are named, you know, Rags: 'Dawn,' or 'Sunset,' or 'Love in Spring,' or 'Passion in Twilight,' and poetic things like that."
"Can't be very poetic bein' sick in 'em, by Jove! for those girls in the nursery," remarked Rags, "especially if they've got a sense of humour."
(One of them had. The shimmering sheath of silver and chiffon she wore to-day, as it happened, rejoiced in the name of "First Love." It was all white. She was being very careful of its virginal purity; but it occurred to her that unless the sea's passion died, the frock would soon have to be renamed "Second Love," or even "Slighted Affection," if not "Rejected Addresses.")
Urged by Eileen, who would think her a "pig" if she refused, Ena reluctantly uncurled herself from a safe and graceful position on a cushioned sofa. The result was alarming. Her swimming head warned her that if she did not instantly sit down again something too awful to think of in the presence of an earl would happen.
"You'd better go without me. I'm not very keen," she faintly explained, appealing to Peter with her eyes.
He contrived to understand without asking stupid questions, as some brothers would, and hurried the others off to the room of the mirrors. No longer was it a room of mystery; yet romance, once awakened, cannot be put to sleep in a minute, and Peter Rolls's heart beat with excitement or shyness, he was not sure which, as Lady Eileen O'Neill knocked at the dryad door.
CHAPTER II
BALM OF GILEAD
It was the worst possible moment for the dryads. But when their tear-wet eyes beheld a girl and two men, some deep-down primordial pride of womanhood rushed to their rescue and, flowing through their veins, performed a miracle beyond the power of any patent remedy. The five forlorn girls became at need the five stately goddesses Mme. Nadine paid them to be. (Winifred Child, by the way, was not paid, for she was not a goddess by profession. But she got her passage free. It was for that she was goddessing.)
Miss Devereux was the leader, by virtue, not of extra age, no indeed! but of height, manner, and experience. She apologized, with the most refined accent, for Mme. Nadine, who was "quite prostrated"; for Mme. Nadine's manageress, who was even worse; and for themselves. "I'm afraid we must do the best we can alone," she finished with unconscious pathos.
"It's a shame to disturb you," said Peter Rolls.
Miss Devereux and her attendant dryads turned their eyes to him. They had fancied that he was the man who had burst in before and burst out again; now they were sure. If he had been a woman, they would have borne him a grudge for coming back and bringing companions worse than himself; but as he was a man, young, and not bad looking, they forgave him meekly.
They forgave the other man for the same reason, and forgave the girl because she was with the men. If only they could behave themselves as young ladies should through this ordeal! That was the effort on which they must concentrate their minds and other organs.
"Not at all," returned Miss Devereux, every inch a princess. "We are here to be disturbed." (Alas, how true!)
She smiled at Lady Eileen, but not patronizingly, because a mysterious instinct told her that the plain, pleasant young girl in Irish tweed was a "swell." The men, too, were swells, or important in some way or other. One exerted one's self to be charming to such people and to keep the male members of the party from looking at the other girls. "Would you like to see something else, different from what we are showing? Evening cloaks? Day dresses? We have a number of smart little afternoon frocks––"
"I think that white dress is the meltingest thing I ever saw," said Lady Eileen, who had walked into the room without waiting for Miss Devereux's answer to Peter Rolls's objection.
She was a kind-hearted girl, but, after all, living models were living models until they were dead, and she wasn't going to lose the chance of getting a dreamy frock out of Rags! All the goddesses were on their mettle and their feet now, though swaying like tall lilies in a high wind and occasionally bracing themselves against mirrors, while Lady Eileen was in the biggest chair, with Raygan and Peter Rolls standing behind her. The men also were offered chairs by Miss Vedrine with a lovely play of eyelashes, but refused them: the chairs, not the eyelashes, which no man could have spurned, despite their scattered effect.
"The white dress, moddam?" (It thrills a flapper to be called "moddam.") "It is one of the latest designs and considered perfect for a débutante. No doubt you know it is Mme. Nadine's custom to name her inspirations. Come here, if you please, Miss Child! This is 'First Love.'"
"Looks like it," remarked Lord Raygan, as Miss Child obeyed. He might have meant the wearer or the dress. Peter Rolls flashed a gimlet glance his way to see which. He felt uncomfortably responsible for the manners of the visitors and the feelings of the visited. But the face of Rags was grave, and no offence could be taken. Peter Rolls withdrew the glance, though not before Winifred Child had it intercepted and interpreted.
"I believe he's a nice fellow," was the thought that slid through her mind as, like a chicken on a spit, she turned and turned to let Lady Eileen behold "First Love" from every point of view.
"Rippin', but a foot too tall for you," said Rags, more because it amused him to prolong the scene than through a real desire to criticise. "You don't go in for bein' a sylph."
Another backhanded compliment for the wearer, if she cared to accept it; but she was beautifully unconscious and, for once, not laughing. Her eyes looked miles away. Peter Rolls wondered to what land she had gone.
The girl appeared to be gazing over his head; but, as a matter of fact, she could see him perfectly. He had black hair and blue eyes, shrewd perhaps, yet they might be kind and merry; just now they looked worried. She thought him not handsome, but tanned and thin (she detested fat men) and somehow nice. Win wondered if she were taller than he. She hated being taller than men, though she owed her present engagement to her height and length of limb.
Miss Devereux respectfully argued that appearances were deceitful. Moddam was quite as sylphlike as the model. Might the dress be sent to moddam's cabin to try? Then it came out that moddam was Lady Eileen O'Neill, and the four tallest dryads visibly brightened, not so much for the owner of the name as for her brother.
Their dull days had been dimly lightened by gossip on the ship, brought to them by a stewardess from Lord Raygan's native isle, who knew all about him: that he was an earl, that with his mother and sister he had booked from Liverpool to Queenstown, but, owing to the ferocity of the sea, had been unable to land and was being carried to America. Also that a rich young American and his sister had given up their suite to the ladies. This American was said to be of no birth, the son of some big shopkeeper, and far, far outside even the fringe of the Four Hundred; therefore the tallest dryads did their best eyelash work for Lord Raygan. They were born British, hailing from Brixton or other suburban health resorts, and now they knew he was a "lord" the nickname of "Rags," which had sickened them at first, seemed interesting and intimate as a domestic anecdote about royalty.
Rags consented to buy the dress for his sister if it fitted and didn't cost a million pounds. The dryads thought this adorably generous, for the stewardess, who knew all about Lord Raygan, said that the "family had become impoverished; they were not what they had once been except in name, which was of the best and oldest in Ireland." Stewardesses can tell all the things that Marconi does not mention.
When the sale was settled Miss Devereux turned to Peter Rolls. "And you, sir?" she asked, slightly coquettish because he was a man, though not of the Four Hundred. "I suppose there's nothing we can do for you?"
"I suppose not," Peter was echoing, when something occurred to him. "Unless," he amended, "my sister would like to buy a dress. She's on board."
"Would she care to look at Mme. Nadine's designs?" suggested Miss Devereux. "We have wardrobes full of marvellous inspirations."
"The trouble is, she feels queer if she walks around much," said Peter.
"Perhaps she would trust you to pick out something she might see in her own room? Is she tall or short?"
"Not so tall as any of you."
"Things which would fit this young lady would be the best, then. Miss Child, Miss Vedrine will help you out of 'First Love' behind the screen and put you into the 'Young Moon.' What"—sotto voce—"are you laughing at this time?"
"Nothing," said the smallest dryad meekly, though she gurgled under her breath.
"We'd better go now, and I'll come back," hastily suggested Peter. "Don't bother to change behind the screen for us, please. I must ask my sister about the dress."
He got the others out, which was not difficult as far as Eileen was concerned. She could hardly wait to try "First Love."
Rags was determined to ask Miss Rolls if he shouldn't choose a frock for her. But she said no, she didn't want one. This would have seemed to settle the matter, and did for Lord Raygan, who sat down beside her, abandoning further thought of the dryads. Peter, however, returned in due course to the room of the mirrors, because Miss Child could not be allowed to get into the "Young Moon" in such weather for nothing.
She was in it when he arrived. And pluck, mingled with excitement, having had a truly bracing effect on the girls, in the absence of the peer they were nice to the plebeian. The girl in the "Young Moon," to be sure, had scarcely anything to say, but she had a peculiarly fascinating way of not saying it.
By the time Mr. Rolls had bought the "Moon" for his sister, he had become quite friendly with the other dryads, on the strength of a few simple jokes about green cheese and blue moons and never having dreamed he could obtain one by crying for it.
"I was wondering," he said at last, when he was about to go, "whether you'd care for me to bring you some Balm of Gilead?"
"Balm of Gilead?" all five, even the girl in the "Moon," exclaimed.
"Yes. Stuff for seasickness. Not that you are seasick of course. But the balm's a good preventive. Did you never hear of it?"
They shook their heads.
"It's the great thing our side of the water. I don't need it myself, but I know it's all right, because it's making my father a fortune."
"Did he invent it?" inquired Miss Carroll.
"No. But he named it and he sells it. It's the men who name things and sell things, not the ones who invent them, that get the money. My father is Peter Rolls, and I––"
"I hope you spell Rolls with an 'e,'" broke in Miss Vedrine. "Else it would remind me of something I want to forget."
"Something you—But maybe I can guess! What the ship does now?"
"Don't speak of it!" they groaned.
"I won't! Or my name, either, if you'd rather not, especially as only my sister spells it with an 'e.' I mentioned the name on account of the balm. The barber has no end of bottles. I'll go and buy you one now. It tastes good. Back in ten minutes." And he was gone.
"His father must be a chemist," sniffed Miss Devereux, as she unhooked the "Young Moon."
When Peter returned Miss Child was wearing a robe like an illuminated cobweb on a background of violets. This was the "Yielding Heart." Peter had brought a bottle and a clean napkin and five teaspoons. "I got these things off a dining-room steward," he explained.
"Sounds like a conjurer," murmured the girl who laughed.
"How rude of you!" Miss Devereux scolded in a whisper. "Don't mind her, Mr. Rolls. She isn't a bit like the rest of us."
Peter had noticed that.
"She's always laughing at everything, and everybody, too," went on Miss Devereux.
"She's welcome to laugh at me," said Peter. "I enjoy it."
"Ladies don't. She'd never do for a permanence with Mme. Nadine. Clients wouldn't stand being grinned at by models."
"I don't laugh at people. I laugh at the world," the model defended herself.
"Why?" inquired Peter, with a straight look at the queer, arresting face.
"To keep it from laughing at me first. And to make it laugh with me—if I can."
"Do you think you can?"
"I shall try hard—against the biggest odds. And whatever it does to me, I shan't cry."
"I shouldn't wonder if that wasn't the whole secret of life!" said Peter Rolls, continuing to look at the face.
Suddenly it flashed a smile at him. "Shouldn't you? Give me the Balm of Gilead, and the rest would be easy!"
Peter was not stupid as a rule, yet he could not be quite sure what she meant. If he guessed right, the rest wasn't as easy as she thought. Yet the words made him wish that he could give the girl who laughed—the girl who was not to be a "permanence" with Nadine—more than a teaspoonful of balm.
CHAPTER III
AN ILL WIND
While the storm held, Peter Rolls went several times each dreadful day to the room of the mirrors and dosed his dryads with Balm of Gilead. The medicine—or something else—sustained them marvellously. And it occurred to Peter that they would make a magnificent advertisement, if there were any way of using them—the kind of advertisement his father loved.
It was well that Peter senior was not on board, or he would certainly propose a new feature for the balm department: scene, richly furnished salon on a yacht; five fair effects in ball dresses sipping Balm of Gilead; the whole arrangement on a rocking platform, with mechanism hidden by realistically painted waves. But the dryads were previously engaged by the prostrate Nadine—all except one.
When they were sufficiently restored to take an interest, Peter smuggled grapefruit, chocolates, and novels into the nursery. The novels his sister had brought with her to kill time during the voyage; but as it happened, she was killing it with Lord Raygan instead and never missed the books.
Nadine had been obliged to take first-class tickets for her models; otherwise the rules of the ship would not have allowed them past the barrier, even in the pursuit of business. But they sardined in one cabin, near the bow, on the deepest down deck allotted to first-classhood, and their private lives were scarcely more enjoyable than the professional. They were, to be sure, theoretically able to take exercise at certain hours, weather permitting; but weather did not permit, and four of the dryads, when free, sought distraction in lying down rather than walking. It was only the fifth who would not take the weather's "no" for an answer.
She had a mackintosh, and with her head looking very small and neat, wound in a brown veil the colour of her hair, she joined the brigade of the strong men and women who defied the winds by night. From eight to ten she staggered and slid up and down the wet length of the least-frequented deck, or flopped and gasped joyously for a few minutes in an unclaimed chair.
Being "not a bit like the rest" of her sister dryads, she refrained from mentioning this habit to Mr. Rolls, whose prowling place was on higher decks. Not that she was still what he would have called "standoffish" with him. That would have been silly and Victorian after the grapefruit and chocolates and novels, to say nothing of balm by the bottleful. The last dress she had worn on the first day of their acquaintance, the "Yielding Heart," had to a certain extent prophesied her attitude with the one man who knocked at the dryad door. Miss Child not only thought Mr. Rolls "might be rather nice," but was almost sure he was. She was nice to him, too, in dryad land, when he paid his visits to the sisterhood, but she did not "belong on his deck."
By and by, however, he discovered her in the mackintosh and veil. It was one night when a young playwright who had seized on him as prey wished to find a quiet place to be eloquent about the plot.
"There's a deck two below," said the aspirant for fame, "where nobody prowls except a young female panther tied up in a veil."
Five minutes later Peter Rolls took off his cap to the female panther. The playwright noticed this, but was too much interested in himself and the hope of securing a capitalist to care. In sketching out his comedy he was blind to any other possibilities of drama, and so did not see Peter's eagerness to get rid of him. He was even pleased when, after a few compliments, Rolls junior said: "Look here, you'd better leave me to think over what you've told me. I fix things in my memory that way. And maybe when I've got it straight in my head I'll—er—mention it to a man I know."
As the playwright was shivering, he obeyed with alacrity; and in the warmth of the smoking-room revelled in the picture of his tame capitalist pacing a cold deck, lost to the sea's welter in thoughts of that marvellous last act.
But it was a first act which was engaging Peter Rolls's attention, and he, though the only male character in it (by choice), had to learn his part as he went on.
The play began by his joining the leading lady. (This has been done before, but seldom with such a lurch and on such sloping boards.)
It would have been a mockery to say "good evening" on a night so vile, and Mr. Rolls began by asking Miss Child if he might walk with her.
"Or tango," said she. "This deck is teaching me some wonderful new steps."
"I wish you'd teach them to me," said Peter.
"I can't, but the ship can."
"Did you ever dance the tango?" he wanted to know.
"Yes. In another state of existence."
This silenced him for an instant. Then he skipped at least two speeches ahead, whither his thoughts had flown. "Say, Miss Child, I wish you'd tell me something about yourself."
"There isn't anything interesting to tell, thank you, Mr. Rolls."
"If that's your only reason, I think you might let me judge. Honestly, I don't want to intrude or be curious. But you're so different from the others."
"I know I'm not pretty. That's why I have to be so painfully sweet. I got the engagement only by a few extra inches. Luckily it isn't the face matters so much," she chattered on. "I thought it was. But it's legs; their being long; Mme. Nadine engages on that and your figure being right for the dresses of the year. So many pretty girls come in short or odd lengths, you find, when they have to be measured by the yard, at bargain price."
Peter laughed.
"You're not meant to laugh there," she said. "It's a solemn fact."
"But you always laugh."
"That's because I'm what you'd call 'up against' life. It gives me such a funny point of view."
"That's part of what I want to talk about. Please don't keep trying to turn the subject. Unless you think I have no business seizing the first chance when I find you alone, to––"
"It isn't that," said Win. "I think you're very kind to take the slightest interest. But really there is nothing to tell. Just the usual sort of thing."
"It doesn't seem exactly usual to me for a girl about nineteen years old––"
"Twenty!"
"—to be leaving home alone and starting for a new country."
"Not alone. Mme. Nadine might be furious if she were spoken of as my chaperon; but she is, all the same. Not that an emigrant needs a chaperon."
"You an emigrant!"
"Well, what else am I?"
"I've been thinking of you as a dryad."
"A poor, drenched dryad, thousands of miles from her native woods. Do you know, my veil is soaked?"
"I'll get you a sou'wester hat to-morrow."
"Does the barber keep them as well as Balm of Gilead?"
"No, but my sister does. She keeps one. And she doesn't want it. I shall annex it."
"Oh! I couldn't take it!"
"If you don't, I'll throw it overboard."
"Were the chocolates hers?"
"Yes."
"And the books?"
"Some were mine. But not the ones Miss Devereux says are pretty. Look here, Miss Child, another thing she says is that you are not with Nadine as a permanence. What does that mean, if you don't much mind my asking?"
"Not what you think. I'm not going to be discharged. I was engaged only for the voyage, to take the place of a prettier girl with still longer legs who fell through at the last moment—literally. She stepped into one of those gas-hole places in the street. And I stepped into her shoes—lucky shoes!—sort of seven-league ones, bringing me across the sea, all the way to New York free, for nothing. No! I hope not for nothing. I hope it is to make my fortune."
"I hope so, too," said Peter gravely. "Got any friends there besides me?"
"Thanks for putting it so, Mr. Balm of Gilead. Why, I've heard that everybody in America is ready to be a friend to lonely strangers!"
"I guess your informant was almost too much of an optimist. Couldn't you be serious for just a minute? You know, I feel quite well acquainted with you—and the others, of course. But they are different. And they are 'permanences' with Nadine. That's the kind of thing they're fit for. I don't worry about them, and I shan't worry about you, either, if you tell me you have friends or know what you are going to do when you land."
"I can't tell you that," Win answered in a changed tone, as if suddenly she were weary of trying to "frivol." "But I have hopes; and I have two letters of introduction and a respectable, recommended boarding-house and a little money left, so I really believe I shall be all right, thank you. My people thought my wanting to come showed 'my wild spirit,' so I'm anxious to prove as soon as I can—not to them any more, but to myself—that I can live my own life in a new world without coming to grief."
"Why not prove to them any more?"
"Oh—because no one is going to care much. As I said, my native woods are far behind, and most of the trees are cut down. Not a dryad of the true dryad family left, and this one is practically forgotten already. Her niche was all grown over with new bark long ago, so it was more than time she ceased to haunt the place."
"I'm afraid you've had a great sorrow," said Peter.
"It was hardly big enough for that word—this thing that's sent me seeking my fortune—though it began with a sorrow long ago."
"Some one you loved died?" Peter had a simple, direct way of asking questions that led you on.
"My mother. When I was fourteen—not old enough to be of much use to my father and the baby brother. So my father had to get some one to be a kind of housekeeper and superior nurse. He's a clergyman. I don't look like a clergyman's daughter, perhaps—and he thought I didn't behave like one, especially after the housekeeper came. She's the kind who calls herself 'a lady housekeeper.' I don't know if you have them in America. She and I had rows—and that upset father. He didn't want to get rid of her because she managed things splendidly—him and the baby and the vicarage—and influential old ladies said she 'filled a difficult position satisfactorily.' So it was simpler to get rid of me. I went to boarding-school."
"Did you like that?"
"I loved it. After the first year I didn't go home even for the holidays. Often I visited—girls were nice to me. But I didn't make the most of my time—I'm furious with myself for that now. I learned nothing—nothing, really, except the things I wanted to learn. And those are always the ones that are least useful."
"I found that, too," said Peter, "at Yale."
"It didn't matter for you. You have the Balm of Gilead."
"That's my father's."
"What's his is yours, I suppose."
"He says so. But—we all have our own trouble. Mine's not living up to my principles, or even knowing exactly what they are—being all in a turmoil. But it's yours I want to talk about."
"I've forbidden myself the word 'trouble.' It builds a wall. And I've just broken through my wall. I could have done it sooner and better if I'd learned more difficult things, that's all. When I wanted to do something for myself—why, I couldn't do a thing that was any good in a busy world. I'd had no training except for my voice."
"There! I thought you sounded as if you had a voice!"
"I thought so, too. But that was another of my mistakes."
"I bet it wasn't."
"You'd lose your money, Mr. Rolls. I spent most of mine before I found out. You see, my mother left a little. It wasn't to come to me till I was twenty-one, but all sorts of things happened. My father kept me at school till a year and a half ago because he didn't know what to do with me. Then my little brother died. I ought to have cared more, but I hardly knew him. His coming killed my mother; and he loved that woman. I don't see how he could!
"When he was gone, people might have gossiped about her and father perhaps. I believe she suggested it to him and said she must go away, to make him think of marrying her; but all he did was to send for me. I stood it for six months. It was horrid for all three. I dare say I was to blame. I had a scene with father, and told him I'd made up my mind to go to London for singing lessons so I could support myself: I couldn't live at home. That forced the situation! Before any one—except the 'lady housekeeper'—knew quite what was happening, father had asked her to be his wife—or she'd asked him. I went before the wedding. I'd worshipped my mother! And—but that's all the story."
"I call it only the preface. What about London?"
"Oh, father gave me my money ahead of time, for the lessons. He didn't approve, on principle, but he would have had no peace with me at home, and he likes peace better than anything. I had to promise I wouldn't go into musical comedy. That makes me laugh now! But I thought then I'd only to ask and to have. I took lessons of a man who'd been a celebrated tenor. He must have known that my voice was nothing, really, but he buoyed me up. I suppose they're all like that. It's business.
"When the money was two thirds spent I dared not go on, and I asked him to find me something to do. He'd often said he would when the right time came. Apparently it hadn't come. He made the excuse that I ought to have stayed with him longer. It would hurt his reputation to launch a pupil too soon. So I had to try to launch myself. And it didn't work. One manager of opera companies on whom I forced myself tested my voice and said it wasn't strong enough—only a twilight voice for a drawing-room, he called it. I was broken up—just at first."
"Poor child!" Peter muttered, but the girl's quick ears caught the words over the roar of that "ill wind" which had brought them together.
"Child is my surname, and it's not polite to call me by it." She brought him to his bearings by suddenly "frivolling" again. "They call militant suffragettes and housemaids sent to prison for stealing their kind mistresses' jewels by their surnames. I'm not a militant; and I've not been a housemaid yet, though I may be, if New York isn't kinder to me than London."
"I hope it will be—kind in just the right way!"
"My friend who gave me the two letters of introduction says it will: that Americans love English girls, if they have the courage to come over. She says there are heaps more chances as well as heaps more room for us in that country than there are at home."
"That's true, but––"
"Please don't discourage me!"
"Not on your life! Only––"
"'Only' is as bad a word as 'but.' I've got a letter of introduction to the editor of a New York paper, To-day and To-morrow, and one to the organist of a Higher Thought church. Maud Ellis says they're both splendid men and interested in women's progress. Something good ought to come from one or the other. Getting this chance of my passage free seems a happy omen, as if I were meant to take this great adventure. I'm not one bit afraid. I feel boiling with courage—except when the ship pitches and rolls at the same time."
"That's right. You're bound to make good, of course. I wouldn't discourage you for the world. All I meant to say was that I'd like you to think of me as a friend. I don't want to lose sight of you when we land. I might be able to help in some way or other or—my family might. Before we get off the ship I'll introduce you and my sister to each other."
"Oh, thank you! You're very kind," the banished dryad said for the third or fourth time. "But I should be sorry to trouble Miss Rolls. She wouldn't––"
"Yes, she would," insisted Peter. "She'll be awfully interested when I tell her about you, Miss Child, and very pleased to know you."
Win was silenced, though not convinced. It is not safe for a brother to judge his sister by himself.
CHAPTER IV
THE KINDNESS OF MISS ROLLS
Peter found it not so easy as he had expected to snatch an opportunity of interesting Ena in Miss Child. His sister was even more than ordinarily interested in her own affairs, which had reached a critical stage, and if Peter, having run her to earth in her cabin, attempted to talk of any one save Ena Rolls or Lord Raygan her eyes became like shut windows. He could almost see her soul turning its back and walking away behind the panes of opaque gray glass.
There had been another evening prowl with the young female panther before the evasive chance was grasped, and the storm-tossed, overdue Monarchic hoped to dock within eighteen hours.
Things were growing desperate for Peter. He was not, of course, in love with the "queer, arresting face," but he could not bear to think of its arriving alone and unprotected in New York. Something must be done, and he resorted to bribery.
"Look here, Sis," he began, "I've just thought there may be reasons why Raygan can't make up his mind to visit a bit on our side, now he and his family are here."
"He hasn't said he won't do it," Ena cut in.
"No, but he hasn't said he will, has he?"
"Not yet. I daren't seem too eager."
"To save my life, I don't see why you should be eager. But as you are, I've been giving my mind to the subject." (This was subtle of Peter.) "I've come to the conclusion that the man would like to stay. I'm sure his sister would. Perhaps you can answer for the mother. The trouble may be money."
"Perhaps. I've thought of that. But what can we do? We can't go to him out of a clear sky and offer to lend."
"I might propose to put him on to a good thing."
"Oh, Peter, would you help me like that, in a man's way?"
"I would, if you'd do me a favour, in a woman's way."
"What is it? But whatever it is, I'm sure to!"
They were in Miss Rolls's cabin, the one she had generously taken over from Lady Raygan and Eileen. Ena was sitting on the seat under the window; Peter was looking uncomfortable on a camp-chair. It was a small cabin, boiling over with dresses, though the "Young Moon" had not yet been added to their number. Peter had never found his sister in a propitious mood for the gift, and had been keeping the "Moon," figuratively, up his sleeve till the right moment came. Now, perhaps it had come.
Ena had been lying down after luncheon. She had given herself this little rest because she knew that Raygan was going to play poker in the smoking-room. She had learned bridge—though cards bored her—just as she had learned tennis and golf and all sorts of eccentric dances, in order to be popular, to be in the swim, to do just what the fashionable people were doing—the people at the top, where she wanted to arrive.
But she could not play poker! And if she could, it would have been impossible to go with Lord Raygan into the smoking-room. Luckily no other girl would be there, so Ena resigned herself to the loss of valuable time on her last day.
"Why, yes," Peter answered. "I believe you are sure to! It won't be a hard favour to do, Sis. It's only to let me introduce a girl, a very nice girl, and then to be kind and help her if she needs it."
Ena laughed. "Is that all? I guess—I mean, I fancy—I can promise that. Girls don't need much help nowadays Who is she? Have I seen her?"
"No. You haven't seen her."
"Is she pretty?" Peter had expected that question. Ena, and all the other girls he knew, invariably asked it. But he did not quite know what to answer.
"She's awfully attractive," he said. "The sort you'd turn and look after in a crowd. She hasn't got what you call features, but—you can't take your eyes off her somehow. She looks—she looks—well, a tiny bit like a—a—perfectly gloriously fascinating—golliwog."
"A golliwog!"
"Great big, wide-apart eyes, I mean; dark, floating ones, with immense eyelashes that curl up and stick out when you see her profile. She's got a short, round face—no, kind of heart-shaped, I guess, and a little, delicate, turned-up nose, like the Duchess of Marlborough's; and a lovely mouth—yes, her mouth is lovely, no mistake! She's nearly always laughing, even when she isn't happy. She's got a long neck, like a flower stem, and long legs––"
"Good gracious, what a description! For heaven's sake, who is the girl?"
"Oh, I know it must sound queer; but she's the most fascinating thing you ever saw, and any man would say so. She's a Miss Child––"
"There's no Miss Child on the passenger list."