Hildegarde smiled into Cheviot’s eyes. “Wasn’t that nice?” How easily he made people say amusing, revealing things. “Do you notice how happy everybody looks to-day?”
“Yes,” he admitted. “The Los Angeles is a pretty dismal place, but most of these people have been happier on this horrible ship than they’ve been for years. Happier, some of them, than they’ve ever been before.”
She didn’t quite like him to speak so of the Los Angeles. Yesterday she would have agreed. But to-day—“How do you know they’re happier here?” (Shame on him if he wasn’t. But it was just as well. Oh, much simpler!)
“Talk to them and you’ll see. Everybody on the ship has had the worst luck you ever heard of; and all through ‘circumstances over which’!” His voice made a period, with that old trick of assuming a phrase complete, when you could finish it for yourself. “Even those that look prosperous like you and me, they’ve all failed at the main business of life.”
So far as she was concerned in this review she felt only impatience at his going back upon old loss and pain. What if you have been sorry and sad. It wasn’t the part of a friend to remind you of it. But if Louis must talk of failure here was a ship-load of it! She told herself this thought was the hag that was riding her happiness down. She looked round her. The world was a pretty terrible place, after all, “for the mass,” that Mrs. Locke had taunted her with not caring about. The wind blew out a wisp of straight, fair hair till it played like a golden flame above the brim of her hat of Lincoln-green.
“A whole ship-load of failure!” she said aloud. A sense of the grim business life was for “the mass” pressed leaden, and the scarlet mouth closed pitiful upon the words, “Poor, poor people!” But Cheviot, with his eyes on that beguiling little flame of gold, was ready to reassure her. It didn’t matter if every soul on board had seen unmerciful disaster follow fast and follow faster, up to the hour he set foot upon the ship. Hildegarde needn’t waste her pity. Look at their faces, listen to them making incantations with McKeown and Dingley. Anything would do to work the spell. Why? Because the place they were bound for had the immense advantage of being unknown. No one could say of any of these contrivances, “It’s been tried.” “Not a soul on the ship but has his thawing machine or his banjo, or—”
“Or her black cook.”
He nodded. How well they understood each other, “Some talisman.”
“What’s ours?” said the girl quickly.
“Our what?”