Part 2 (1/2)

VII.

Even Dorothy was disposed to believe that unless some peculiarly favorable combination of circ.u.mstances 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The yacht rounded to off the Casino 060]

”Oh, isn't she a beauty!” exclaimed Dorothy, with enthusiasm. ”Now, Uncle Hutchinson, her owner is coming ash.o.r.e--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!”

Miss Lee seemed to be entirely unaware of the fact that her uncle was looking like an animated thunder-cloud. ”It is just like a bit out of a delightful novel,” was her encouraging response. ”A long, low, black schooner suddenly coming in from the seaward and anchoring close off sh.o.r.e, and the hero landing in a little boat just in time to slay the villain and rescue the beautiful bride. Of course I'm the beautiful bride, but my uncle is not a villain, but the very best of guardians--by-the-way, I don't think that you know that poor dear mamma is dead, Mr. Livingstone? Yes, she died only a week or two after you left us. So you see you must be very nice to the villain--and you can begin your kind treatment of him by having lunch with him and with me too. Uncle Hutchinson was _so_ pleased when he saw you come ash.o.r.e. He said that we certainly must capture you, and he sent a man to bring some hot soup for you at once--here it is now.” And so it was, for Dorothy herself very thoughtfully had given the order that she now modestly attributed to her uncle.

And so in less than ten minutes from the moment when Mr. Port had informed Dorothy that Van Rensselaer Livingstone was a very objectionable person whom he desired to avoid, and whose introduction to her was not even to be thought of, they all three were lunching together in what to the casual observer seemed to be the most amicable manner possible.

VIII.

”I've run over to look up Mrs. Rattleton,” said Livingstone, as he discussed with evident relish the _filet_ that Mr. Port charitably hoped would choke him. ”Very likely you haven't met her, for she's only just got here. But you'll like her, I know, for she's ever so jolly. She's promised to play propriety for me in a party that we want to make up aboard the yacht. The squadron won't get down from New York for a week yet, and I've come up ahead of it so that we can have a cruise to the Shoals and back before the races. Of course, Miss Lee, you won't fly in the face of Fate, after this providential meeting, by refusing to join our party; at least if you do you will make me wretched to the end of my days. And we will try to make you comfortable on board, sir,” he added, politely, turning to Mr. Port. ”I have a tolerably fair cook, and ice isn't the only thing in the ice-chest, I a.s.sure you.”

”How very kind you are, Mr. Livingstone,” Dorothy hastened to say, in order to head off her uncle's inevitable refusal. ”Of course we will go, with the greatest possible pleasure. It is very odd how things fall out sometimes. Now only this morning I was begging Uncle Hutchinson to take me off yachting, and he was saying how much he enjoyed being at sea, and how he really thought that if it wasn't for his age--wasn't it absurd of him to talk about his age? He is not old at all, the dear!--he would have a yacht of his own. And almost before the words are fairly out of our mouths here you drop from the clouds, or are cast up by the sea, it's all the same thing, and give us both just what we have been longing for. At least, Uncle Hutchinson pretended to be longing for it only in case he could be young enough to enjoy it; but if he doesn't think he's young now, I'd like to know what he'll call himself when he's fifty!”

And then, facing around sharply upon her uncle, Dorothy concluded: ”The idea of pretending that _you_ are too old to go yachting! Really, Uncle Hutchinson, I am ashamed of you!”

As has been intimated, if there was any one subject upon which Mr. Port was especially sensitive, it was the subject of his age. As the parish register of St. Peter's all too plainly proved, he never would see sixty again; but this awkward record was in an out-of-the-way place, and the agreeable fiction that he advanced in various indirect ways to the effect that he was a trifle turned of forty-seven was not likely to be officially contradicted. And it is not impossible, so tenacious was he upon this point, that had the official proof been produced, he would have denied its authenticity. For it was Mr. Port's firm determination still to figure before the world as a youngish, middle-aged man.

To say that Miss Lee deliberately set herself to playing upon this weakness of her guardian's, possibly, remotely possibly, would be doing her injustice. But the fact is obvious that she succeeded by her cleverly turned discourse in landing her esteemed relative fairly between the horns of an exceedingly awkward dilemma: either Mr. Port must accept the invitation and be horribly ill, or he must reject it, and so throw over his pretensions to elderly youth.

For a moment the unhappy gentleman hung in the wind, and Dorothy regretted that she had not made her statement of the case still stronger. Indeed, she was about to supplement it by a remark to the effect that people never thought of giving up yachting until they were turned of sixty, when, to her relief, her uncle slowly filled away on the right tack. His acceptance was expressed in highly ungracious terms; but, as has been said, Dorothy never troubled herself about forms, provided she compa.s.sed results. The moment that he had uttered the fatal words, Mr. Port fell to cursing himself in his own mind for being such a fool; but the same reason that had impelled him to give his consent withheld him from retracting it. He knew that he was going to be desperately miserable; but, at least, n.o.body could say that he was old.

”I'm ever so much obliged to you, Miss Lee, and to you too, Mr. Port,”

said Livingstone. ”And now, if you'll excuse me, I'll go and hunt up Mrs. Rattle-ton, and tell her what a splendid raise I've made, and help her organize the rest of the party. We shall have only two more. It's a bore to have more than six people on board a yacht. I don't know why it is, I'm sure, but if you have more than six they always get to fighting.

Queer, isn't it?”

”I beg your pardon,” said Mr. Port. ”Mrs. Rattleton? May I ask if this is the Mrs. Rattleton from New York who was here last season, the one whose bathing costume was so--so very eccentric, and about whom there was so much very disagreeable talk?”