The Honorable Percival Hascombe came
aboard the Pacific liner about to sail from San Francisco,
preceded by a fur coat, a gun-case, two pigskin bags,
a hat-box, and a valet. He was tall and slender,
and moved with an air of fastidious distinction.
He wore a small mustache, a monocle, and an expression
of unutterable ennui. His costume consisted of
a smart tweed traveling-suit, with cap to match, white
spats, and a pair of binoculars swung across his shoulders.
In his eyes was the look, carefully maintained, of
one who has sounded the depths of human tragedy.
Since his advent into the world twenty-eight
years before, he had been made to feel but one responsibility.
His elder brother, having persistently refused to
provide himself with a wife and heir, the duty of
perpetuating the family name fell upon him, Percival
Hascombe, second son of the late Earl of Westenhanger,
of Hascombe Hall, fifth in descent from the great
Westenhanger whose marble effigy adorns the dullest
and most respectable cathedral in southern England.
From the time Percival had been able
to cast a discriminating eye, his adoring family had
presented the feminine flowers of the country-side
for his inspection. One after another they had
met with his grave consideration and subsequent disapprobation.
Fears had begun to be entertained that he would follow
in the solitary footsteps of his bachelor brother,
when Lady Hortense Vevay appeared on the scene.
Lady Hortense, with her mother, the
Duchess of Dare, had come down to Devon for the shooting
one autumn, seeking rest after a strenuous social
season following her presentation at court. She
had been there less than a week when she bagged the
biggest game in the neighborhood. The explanation
was obvious: the Lady Hortense had no faults to
be discovered. The closest inspection through
two pairs of glasses, Percival’s and her own,
failed to reveal a flaw. Her birth and position
were equal to his own; her beauty, if attenuated, was
sufficient; while her discriminating taste amounted
to a virtue. The Honorable Percival proffered
his hand, and was accepted. Hascombe Hall rang
with applause.
All might have been well had not mother
and daughter been pressed to seal the compact by a
closer intimacy in a ten-days’ visit at the hall.
The young people were allowed to bask uninterrupted
in the light of each other’s perfections, and
the result was disastrous. Two persons who have
achieved distinction as soloists do not take kindly
to duets. A few days after the Vevays’
return to London, Lady Hortense wrote a perfectly
worded note, and asked to be released from the engagement.
The utterly preposterous fact that
a Hascombe of Hascombe Hall had been jilted was too
amazing a circumstance to be concealed, and the county
buzzed with rumors. The Honorable Percival, whose
pride had sustained a compound fracture, set sail
immediately for America. After a hurried trip
across the continent, he was embarking again, this
time for Hong-Kong, where a sympathetic married sister
held out embracing arms, and a promise of refuge from
wagging tongues.
As he moved languidly down the deck
and sank into the steamer-chair that bore his name,
he assured himself for the fortieth time since leaving
England that life bored him to tears. He had sounded
its joys and its sorrows, he had exhausted its thrills;
it was like a scenic railway over which he was compelled
to ride after every detail had become monotonously
familiar. There was nothing more for him to learn
about life, nothing more for him to feel. At
least that is what the Honorable Percival thought.
But when one reckons too confidently on having exhausted
the varieties of human experience, one is apt to get
a jolt.
Carefully selecting a cigarette from
a gold case, he struck a light, and, after a whiff
or two, lay back and, closing his eyes on the stir
and confusion, gave himself up to painful reflections.
His shrunken self-esteem, like a feathered thing exposed
to wet weather, was clamoring for a sunny spot in
which to expand to natural proportions. Had he
been able to remain at home, the unending chorus of
feminine praise would soon have dried his draggled
feathers and left him preening himself contentedly
in the comforting assurance that Lady Hortense was
in no way worthy of him. But being confronted
thus suddenly with the necessity of supplying his
egotism with all its nourishment, he found himself
unequal to the task. Behind every consoling thought
stalked that totally incredible “No.”
He tortured his brain for possible reasons for Hortense’s
deflection, but could find none. Detail by detail
he reviewed their acquaintance from the first time
he had bowed over her fingers, in Lord Carlton’s
hunting-lodge, to the moment he had touched his lips
to the same fingers in formal farewell on the terrace
at Hascombe Hall. It had been such a well-bred
courtship from the start, so thoroughly approved by
both sides, so perfectly conducted throughout!
Then, following suddenly on this smooth
course of events, came a series of bumps that made
Percival wince as he recalled them: protests,
evasions, humiliating questions on the part of the
public, and then ignominious flight. He shuddered
as he thought of the dull, wet days on the Atlantic
and his hideous week in America. He had been in
a perpetual state of protest against everything from
the hotel service to what he termed the “crass
vulgarity of the States.”
There had been but one oasis in the
desert of gloom through which he had traveled, and
that had been on his interminable trip across the
continent, when for ten brief minutes his blight had
been lifted, and he had caught a breath of the incense
for which his soul hungered.
It was at a little station in Wyoming
that he, a convalescent from love, had for the first
time in weeks managed to look up and take a bit of
amatory nourishment. He was standing alone on
the rear platform of the observation-car, arms on
railing, watching with no interest whatever the taking
off of mail-bags. Suddenly within his line of
vision came a stalwart young chap and a girl, each
astride a bronco. They drew rein at the platform,
cursorily scanned the waiting train, glanced at him,
then at each other, and, apparently without the slightest
reason, burst into unrestrained merriment. Percival
continued to survey them calmly and haughtily through
his monocle. His first glance had revealed the
fact that the girl was strikingly pretty. Her
lithe young body showed round and comely in its khaki
suit and brown leggings. Her black mane was braided
in two short, thick plaits with a dash of scarlet ribbons
at the ends. Blue eyes, full of daring, danced
under the blackest of brows, and the smile she flashed
at her companion revealed a dimple of distracting
proportions.
As Percival gazed he was quite oblivious
of the fact that the laugh was at his expense.
In fact, he accorded her darting glances a far more
flattering interpretation, and when her escort dismounted,
and disappeared within the station, he deliberately
caught her eye and held it. There was a touch
of daring in her face and figure, an evident sense
of security in the fact that the train was already
beginning to move. He shifted his position from
the end of the platform to the side next the station,
and she met the challenge by gathering up her reins
and keeping pace with the slow-moving train.
For a short distance road and track
lay parallel, and as the train slowly got under way,
the bronco was put to a run. Side by side, not
ten feet apart, Percival and the girl moved abreast,
their eyes keeping company. He had never seen
anything so vitally young and untrammeled as she was.
She rode superbly, like an Indian, leaning well forward,
gripping the bronco with her knees, with one hand grasping
his mane. Every muscle was tense with life, every
nerve a-quiver with glee. Before the young Englishman
knew it, his own sluggish blood was stirring in his
veins through sympathy. Then the train began to
gain upon her, and throwing herself back in the saddle,
she shook a vanquished head. As Percival raised
his cap she wheeled her horse, and, standing in the
stirrups, blew an audacious kiss from her finger-tips.
The next instant she was dashing away across the wide,
bleak prairies, the only living thing in sight, her
scarlet ribbons a streak of color in the dull-gray
landscape.
Percival had taken heart of grace
from that airy kiss. It stood to him as a symbol
that, though one of the sex had proved a deserter to
his standard, there were still volunteers. He
treasured the incident as a king treasures the homage
of his humblest subject when rebellion is rife in
the kingdom. On such trifles often hang one’s
self-esteem.
When the stir and bustle on deck became
so lively that he was no longer able to indulge in
introspection, he got up and indifferently joined the
moving throng. The warning had sounded for those
going ashore, and the numerous gangways were crowded.
Passengers lined the promenade-deck, shouting and
waving to the crowd on the wharf below. From the
bridge-deck the captain could be heard cheerfully swearing
through a megaphone at the second officer below.
Chinese deck-stewards glided about in their felt slippers,
trying to attach the right person to the right steamer-chair.
Cabin-boys scurried about with baskets of fruit and
flowers and other sea-going impedimenta that, after
one appreciative glance from the recipient, are usually
consigned to the ice-box. All was noise and confusion.
Percival’s critical eye swept
the line of human backs that presented themselves
at the railing. The same old types! He could
describe them with his eyes shut: the conventional
globe-trotters, avid to obtain and to impart information;
business men comparing statistics and endlessly discussing
the tariff; rich wanderers in quest of health; poor
missionaries in quest of “foreign fields”;
fussy Frenchmen; stolid Germans; a few suspicious-looking
Englishmen; and always the ubiquitous Americans, who
had the same effect upon him that a highly colored
cloth has on the delicate sensibilities of a certain
large animal.
The most conspicuous example of the
last class was a somewhat noisy young person in a
still more resonant steamer-coat who hung at an angle
of forty-five degrees over the railing, and exchanged
confidences of a personal nature with an old man on
the wharf twenty feet below. Every time Percival’s
walk brought him toward the bow of the boat, his eyes
were offended by that blue-and-lavender steamer-coat
and by a pair of beaded-leather slippers with three
straps across the instep and absurdly high French
heels. Could any one but an American, he soliloquized,
be guilty of starting on a journey in such a costume?
The prospect of being imprisoned between
decks for four weeks, with this heterogeneous collection
appalled him. His only safety lay in maintaining
a rigid and uncompromising aloofness. He would
discourage all advances from the start, he would promptly
nip in the bud the first sign of intrusion. He
had left the only country an Englishman regards as
the proper place for existence, to cross two abominable
seas and an even more abominable continent, for the
sole purpose of privacy, and privacy he meant to have
at all costs.
As the Saluria weighed anchor
and steamed out of the Golden Gate, he went below
to see that his valet had made satisfactory disposition
of his varied belongings. His state-room was
at the end of a short passage leading from the main,
one, and he was displeased at finding the deep ledge
under the passage window completely filled with flowers
and fruit that evidently belonged to some one occupying
a room in the same passage.
He rang for the cabin-boy.
“Remove that greengrocer’s
shop!” he commanded peremptorily. “It
is abominably stuffy down here. We can’t
have the port-holes filled up like that, you know.”
The bland face of the young Chinaman
assumed an expression of mild inquiry.
“Take away!” ordered Percival, resorting
to gesture.
“No can,” said the boy,
calmly. “All same b’long one missy.
Missy b’long cap’n.”
Percival turned impatiently to his
valet, who was coming through the passage.
“Judson, get those things out
of the window, and keep them out. Do you hear?”
“Yes, sir. But where shall I put them,
sir?”
“On the floor in
the sea wherever you like,” said Percival,
as he slipped his arms into the top-coat that was
being respectfully held for him.
Once again on deck, he found that
the wind had acquired a sudden edge. The short
chop of the waves and scudding of gray clouds indicated
that the customary bit of rough weather after leaving
the Golden Gate was to be expected. Percival
was not happy in rough weather. He attributed
it to extreme sensitiveness to atmospheric conditions.
Whatever the cause, the result remained that he was
not happy.
The motion of the vessel made him
pause a moment. The casual observer would have
said he stopped to cast an experienced eye on a sky
that could not deceive him; but the casual observer
does not always know. It is a long distance between
the prow and the stern of an ocean liner, when the
deck is composed of alternating mountains and valleys
that one has to climb and descend. Percival found
it decidedly hard going before he reached his steamer-chair.
When he did so, he encountered a sight
that filled him with chagrin. Wrapped in the
folds of his rug was that obnoxious blue-and-lavender
steamer-coat, with its owner snugly ensconced within,
her eyes closed, and her cheek brazenly reposing on
the Hascombe crest that adorned the pillow under her
head!
Percival paused, irresolute, and his
nostrils quivered. He wanted very much to sit
down, and he was unwilling to occupy any other steamer-chair,
for fear its owner might claim it. There was nothing
left for him but to pace up and down that undulating
deck until the young person opened her eyes and discovered,
by glances which he would render unmistakable, that
she was trespassing.
When his third round brought him in
front of her, and he saw that she was awake, he carefully
adjusted his monocle, and turned upon her a look that
was not unfamiliar to certain menials in the employ
of Hascombe Hall.
But no withering blight followed his
look. Instead, the wearer of the gaudy coat sat
up suddenly and said, with a radiant smile:
“Well, did you ever! Where did you
come from?”
By a curious twist, his mind suddenly
beheld a rolling prairie in place of the tumbling
sea, and a comely figure in khaki and brown leggings
in place of the muffled form in the hideous coat.
His suspicion was confirmed when he met the frank
gaze of the bluest eyes that ever held a challenge.
Instead of being amused, Percival
was profoundly annoyed. The incident on the train
had been pretty enough in its way, but it was closed.
As it stood, it had been rather artistic and satisfying.
A wild, unknown bit of femininity dashing into his
life for ten throbbing minutes, then vanishing into
the sunset, was one thing, and this very tangible young
person in clothes of the wrong cut and color, addressing
him in terms of easy familiarity, was quite another.
“I beg your pardon,” he
said stiffly. “Did you address me?”
Her eyes clouded.
“Why, I thought I thought you were
some one I knew. Is this your chair?”
“It is. Pray do not discommode yourself?”
“That is all right,” she
answered, trying to disentangle her high heels from
his rug. “I’ve had my nap, thank you.
Think I’ll go down and get a sandwich.”
Percival waited in frigid silence
until she had departed; then he sank limply into the
warm nest she had just left, and closed his eyes on
a world that failed in all respects to give satisfaction.