"No indeed. I mean her mother's and Mrs. Allen's; the girl's too of course. They put themselves on us by main force."

"Oh yes, I can testify to that. Therefore I'm glad too. We should have missed it, I think."

"How seriously you take it!" Mrs. Nettlepoint amusedly cried.

"Ah wait a few days!"--and I got up to leave her.

CHAPTER III

The _Patagonia_ was slow, but s.p.a.cious and comfortable, and there was a motherly decency in her long nursing rock and her rustling old-fashioned gait, the mult.i.tudinous swish, in her wake, as of a thousand proper petticoats. It was as if she wished not to present herself in port with the splashed eagerness of a young creature. We weren't numerous enough quite to elbow each other and yet weren't too few to support--with that familiarity and relief which figures and objects acquire on the great bare field of the ocean and under the great bright gla.s.s of the sky. I had never liked the sea so much before, indeed I had never liked it at all; but now I had a revelation of how in a midsummer mood it could please. It was darkly and magnificently blue and imperturbably quiet--save for the great regular swell of its heartbeats, the pulse of its life; and there grew to be something so agreeable in the sense of floating there in infinite isolation and leisure that it was a positive G.o.dsend the _Patagonia_ was no racer. One had never thought of the sea as the great place of safety, but now it came over one that there's no place so safe from the land. When it doesn't confer trouble it takes trouble away--takes away letters and telegrams and newspapers and visits and duties and efforts, all the complications, all the superfluities and superst.i.tions that we have stuffed into our terrene life. The simple absence of the post, when the particular conditions enable you to enjoy the great fact by which it's produced, becomes in itself a positive bliss, and the clean boards of the deck turn to the stage of a play that amuses, the personal drama of the voyage, the movement and interaction, in the strong sea-light, of figures that end by representing something--something moreover of which the interest is never, even in its keenness, too great to suffer you to slumber. I at any rate dozed to excess, stretched on my rug with a French novel, and when I opened my eyes I generally saw Jasper Nettlepoint pa.s.s with the young woman confided to his mother's care on his arm. Somehow at these moments, between sleeping and waking, I inconsequently felt that my French novel had set them in motion. Perhaps this was because I had fallen into the trick, at the start, of regarding Grace Mavis almost as a married woman, which, as every one knows, is the necessary status of the heroine of such a work. Every revolution of our engine at any rate would contribute to the effect of making her one.

In the saloon, at meals, my neighbour on the right was a certain little Mrs. Peck, a very short and very round person whose head was enveloped in a "cloud" (a cloud of dirty white wool) and who promptly let me know that she was going to Europe for the education of her children. I had already perceived--an hour after we left the dock--that some energetic measure was required in their interest, but as we were not in Europe yet the redemption of the four little Pecks was stayed. Enjoying untrammelled leisure they swarmed about the ship as if they had been pirates boarding her, and their mother was as powerless to check their licence as if she had been gagged and stowed away in the hold. They were especially to be trusted to dive between the legs of the stewards when these attendants arrived with bowls of soup for the languid ladies. Their mother was too busy counting over to her fellow-pa.s.sengers all the years Miss Mavis had been engaged. In the blank of our common detachment things that were n.o.body's business very soon became everybody's, and this was just one of those facts that are propagated with mysterious and ridiculous speed. The whisper that carries them is very small, in the great scale of things, of air and s.p.a.ce and progress, but it's also very safe, for there's no compression, no sounding-board, to make speakers responsible. And then repet.i.tion at sea is somehow not repet.i.tion; monotony is in the air, the mind is flat and everything recurs--the bells, the meals, the stewards'

faces, the romp of children, the walk, the clothes, the very shoes and b.u.t.tons of pa.s.sengers taking their exercise. These things finally grow at once so circ.u.mstantial and so arid that, in comparison, lights on the personal history of one's companions become a subst.i.tute for the friendly flicker of the lost fireside.

Jasper Nettlepoint sat on my left hand when he was not upstairs seeing that Miss Mavis had her repast comfortably on deck. His mother's place would have been next mine had she shown herself, and then that of the young lady under her care. These companions, in other words, would have been between us, Jasper marking the limit of the party in that quarter.

Miss Mavis was present at luncheon the first day, but dinner pa.s.sed without her coming in, and when it was half over Jasper remarked that he would go up and look after her.

"Isn't that young lady coming--the one who was here to lunch?" Mrs. Peck asked of me as he left the saloon.

"Apparently not. My friend tells me she doesn't like the saloon."

"You don't mean to say she's sick, do you?"

"Oh no, not in this weather. But she likes to be above."

"And is that gentleman gone up to her?"

"Yes, she's under his mother's care."

"And is his mother up there, too?" asked Mrs. Peck, whose processes were homely and direct.

"No, she remains in her cabin. People have different tastes. Perhaps that's one reason why Miss Mavis doesn't come to table," I added--"her chaperon not being able to accompany her."

"Her chaperon?" my fellow pa.s.senger echoed.

"Mrs. Nettlepoint--the lady under whose protection she happens to be."

"Protection?" Mrs. Peck stared at me a moment, moving some valued morsel in her mouth; then she exclaimed familiarly "Pshaw!" I was struck with this and was on the point of asking her what she meant by it when she continued: "Ain't we going to see Mrs. Nettlepoint?"

"I'm afraid not. She vows she won't stir from her sofa."

"Pshaw!" said Mrs. Peck again. "That's quite a disappointment."

"Do you know her then?"

"No, but I know all about her." Then my companion added: "You don't mean to say she's any real relation?"

"Do you mean to me?"

"No, to Grace Mavis."

"None at all. They're very new friends, as I happen to know. Then you're acquainted with our young lady?" I hadn't noticed the pa.s.sage of any recognition between them at luncheon.

"Is she your young lady too?" asked Mrs. Peck with high significance.

"Ah when people are in the same boat--literally--they belong a little to each other."

"That's so," said Mrs. Peck. "I don't know Miss Mavis, but I know all about her--I live opposite to her on Merrimac Avenue. I don't know whether you know that part."

"Oh yes--it's very beautiful."

The consequence of this remark was another "Pshaw!" But Mrs. Peck went on: "When you've lived opposite to people like that for a long time you feel as if you had some rights in them--t.i.t for tat! But she didn't take it up today; she didn't speak to me. She knows who I am as well as she knows her own mother."

"You had better speak to her first--she's const.i.tutionally shy," I remarked.

"Shy? She's const.i.tutionally tough! Why she's thirty years old," cried my neighbour. "I suppose you know where she's going."

"Oh yes--we all take an interest in that."

"That young man, I suppose, particularly." And then as I feigned a vagueness: "The handsome one who sits _there_. Didn't you tell me he's Mrs. Nettlepoint's son?"

"Oh yes--he acts as her deputy. No doubt he does all he can to carry out her function."

Mrs. Peck briefly brooded. I had spoken jocosely, but she took it with a serious face. "Well, she might let him eat his dinner in peace!" she presently put forth.

"Oh he'll come back!" I said, glancing at his place. The repast continued and when it was finished I screwed my chair round to leave the table. Mrs. Peck performed the same movement and we quitted the saloon together. Outside of it was the usual vestibule, with several seats, from which you could descend to the lower cabins or mount to the promenade-deck. Mrs. Peck appeared to hesitate as to her course and then solved the problem by going neither way. She dropped on one of the benches and looked up at me.

"I thought you said he'd come back."

"Young Nettlepoint? Yes, I see he didn't. Miss Mavis then has given him half her dinner."

"It's very kind of her! She has been engaged half her life."

"Yes, but that will soon be over."

"So I suppose--as quick as ever we land. Every one knows it on Merrimac Avenue," Mrs. Peck pursued. "Every one there takes a great interest in it."

"Ah of course--a girl like that has many friends."

But my informant discriminated. "I mean even people who don't know her."

"I see," I went on: "she's so handsome that she attracts attention--people enter into her affairs."

Mrs. Peck spoke as from the commanding centre of these. "She _used_ to be pretty, but I can't say I think she's anything remarkable today.

Anyhow, if she attracts attention she ought to be all the more careful what she does. You had better tell her that."