CHAPTER XXIV
"Many waters cannot quench love; neither can floods drown it."—The Bible.
The girl kicked aside the jumble of clothes littering the cabin floor, and bending her head squatted upon the bunk, and incidentally, and quite indifferently, upon a crêpe-de-Chine blouse which badly needed washing, and casually watched her mother who was scrabbling through a cabin trunk in a manner reminiscent of a terrier ratting in a hedge.
"Why on earth couldn't you stay on deck?" demanded the mother angrily, as she lifted the transformation from her brow and heaved it on to the upper berth, thereby unashamedly exposing a head not unlike a gorse common devastated by fire.
"I can't find that—oh! here it is. What a state it's in. D'you think the Chinese man could iron it?"
That was one of those hybrid négligés which can serve its turn as a bath gown, a bedroom wrap, or, covered with a genuine native-made tinsel shawl (bought at Teneriffe but made in Birmingham), can pass as an evening gown in the tropics. The cabin was on one of the liners which, calling at odd places like Genoa, Naples, Algiers, etc., allows you to pick up letters brought by the mail boat to Port Said. The inhabitants of the inner, double berthed black hole, called by courtesy a cabin, were the mother and her last unmarried daughter who lived in Surbiton.
The mother had successfully acquired a reputation as a world-wide traveller, and husbands for her numerous daughters amounting to a net total of six, by dint of travelling the latter backwards and forwards over those heartbreaking routes which suffer from two weeks or more of going without a break.
Try from Aden to Sydney with one break at Colombo, and the above long and somewhat involved paragraph will be easily understood.
"I say, mater, guess who gave me these—have one?"
Mater sat back on her heels, bumping her head against the washstand, plucked a Simon Artz from its cardboard nest, lit it, and emitted volumes of smoke from mouth, and nostrils, until the cabin resembled the smoking-room of any West End ladies' club.
"Oh! don't ask silly questions, it's too hot! Who?"
"The Grizzly Bear!"
"No!"
"He did! He'd been ashore!"
"No!"
"Yes! I'd been talking to him, and had just turned to say something to the Babe when he slipped down the gangway. I do wish we weren't so hard up. It's an awful rag going ashore. He came back an hour ago, found a letter, and has been sitting up and taking notice ever since. It was a man's handwriting, I saw the envelope!"
Mater flung everything pell-mell into the trunk, pushed it back with the aid of her daughter's heels under the berth, bent her head and sat down beside her.
"He looked so different that I actually asked him for a cigarette, and he gave me the box, and if it hadn't been for Mrs. Tomlinson-Tomlinson's hateful little brat—you know—Muriel—we should have had a good long talk. The little wretch actually sat on the arm of his chair; it's extraordinary how he lets children worry him."
"Yes! dear Lady de Smythe has christened him the wet nurse!"
Which leaves no doubt whatever that some time, somewhere the dear lady had been clawed by the grizzly.
"Why don't you get into your black sequin to-night! It'll be frightfully hot going down the Canal, and you can slip on the scarf if you go up on the boat deck, as everyone does the first time they go through the Suez."
"Yes! I might—the blue does want ironing!" replied the daughter, taking a hand in that weird game of "make-believe" which the majority of women play between themselves. For what ultimate benefit it is impossible to say, since from the moment the cards are shuffled they know, to a nicety, the tricks and manoeuvres of each player.
Anyway the sequin was fished out from somewhere, and shaken and pulled this way and that.
It consisted of a skirt of a kind, a waistbelt, two shoulder straps, and a big jet butterfly poised just where, for the sake of decency, it was necessary, and as a toilette allied with the boat deck would doubtless prove most attractive to the man who was not in search of a wife.
The man it was intended to subjugate, meanwhile, was lying full length on his deck chair intent upon a letter, oblivious of the noise of the harbour and the racket necessary to the boat's imminent departure.
Jan Cuxson had read the letter five times and was just starting on it for the sixth, subconsciously congratulating himself on his foresight, or horse sense, which you will.
His cabin was like nothing on earth, and in it, upon the outer edge of a dead maelstrom of his entire wardrobe, stood John Smith, cabin steward.
John Smith is not his name, but who does not know and bless him if they have ever travelled on this particular boat.
He has a big, very black mole on the extreme tip of his nose, and is the cheeriest, most optimistic soul on the ocean wave, yea! even those out-size waves in the Bay at its worst.
After the first lightning perusal of the God-sped letter, Jan Cuxson had given divers urgent orders for as much as possible of his gear in the hold to be thrown ashore.
Imagine it, and the boat almost due to sail!
He had then rushed to his cabin and initiated the maelstrom, until common sense had smitten him between the love-fogged eyes of his desire; whereupon he had heaved a huge sigh of utter contentment, propped himself against the door for the second perusal, rung the bell, countermanded all he had ordered, and left John Smith to it.
He had pulled the letter out of its envelope, growled at a vendor of Egyptian wares, and turned with a whole-hearted smile at the sound of a small voice.
"Is 'oo velly unhappy, Mr. Bear?"
The man did not know that he had become the object of that loathsome habit of nicknaming all and sundry which a certain clique on every boat consider so smart.
"I'm the happiest man on earth—water, I mean, little one. Yes! come along up—and why Mr. Bear?"
Followed a scramble, a gurgle, and arranging of infinitesimal frills.
"Mummie calls 'oo Mr. Grizzly Bear because you're cwoss! Mrs. Tom—Tom—li'son says Mummie's cwoss 'cos 'oo wouldn't take the buns she wanted 'oo too. Why didn't 'oo take the buns—buns nice, I fink!"
An agitated nurse swooped down at this crucial moment and recovered that which she had lost, leaving the man laughing aloud to the astonishment of all near him.
Laugh! Why he had not laughed since he had left Mortehoe Church, neither had he smiled at any time upon the boat, or upon anybody except the children; and now he laughed, all on account of an atrocious scrawl on many sheets of thin paper which he started once more to read.
"I hope," ran the scrawl of the man for whom Cuxson had fagged at Harrow, "that this catches you at Port Said, because"—followed a badly expressed bit of business. "London's had the shock of many seasons, by the way. You know that old brute, Pickled Walnuts, well I won't say anything about the old scallawag because he's dead. Well! he married the other day, you'd sailed I think, I didn't go to the wedding. Did you know Susan, old Hetth, V.C.'s sister by marriage—up to her eyes in debt—sold her niece to pay them, I suppose, to the old millionaire—wonder what hold she had on the girl.
"Anyway they went off somewhere in Devon for the honeymoon, God help her.
It seems that she had had an accident the night before, or something, and
fainted, or something, directly after dinner—the wedding dinner, I mean.
Did you ever learn composition on the Hill? I didn't!
"The woman who looks after the cottage put Lady Hickle to bed and tucked her up; placed a bottle of port in—all came out at the inquest—old Hickle's room, and left the house. Next thing, about two o'clock in the morning, a shepherd or something saw a blaze and went to look. Cottage on fire, old Hickle burnt to a cinder, and the girl hauled out of bed just in time, gibbering in French or something in panic I suppose.
"The charwoman thinks the curtains caught fire in the candle, and that the port had made the old man sleep heavily and that he was suffocated by the smoke.
"Full moon, too. What a sight it must have been! Place burned to the ground.
"I believe Lady Hickle is quite a girl and very beautiful—and is starting on a tour round the world or something—she'll get most of his millions, I believe. By the way, who do you think have fixed it up. Dear old Bumble and Diana Lytham. Heaven be good to him. Your turn next, old boy! Well she'll be darned lucky who gets you, see how well I trained you, d'you remember, etc., etc."
The man sat still for some long time, then suddenly sprang to his feet and went aft.
The dressing bugle had sounded but he had not heard; the dinner bugle had sounded and still he had not heard, as he stood at the stern watching the swirling wash of the slow-moving boat.
"Full moon, too! She was hauled from her bed gibbering in French or something."
He quoted the words, and crushed the letter savagely in his hands, for even in the fullness of his joy he remembered Leonie's words, "Terrible things happen wherever I am—they follow me." But in the greatness of his love he figuratively shrugged his shoulders, gathered his beloved into the safe haven of his arms, and closed the moonlit eyes with kisses.
Whilst a jet butterfly fluttered in vain over a very décolleté expanse which covered a heart agitated by rage and disappointment on the boat deck.