Books: Love, The Fiddler
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Lloyd Osbourne >> Love, The Fiddler
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She looked a shade put out.
"Well, Frank, it's the truth, anyway," she said, "and in the old
days we were always such sticklers for the truth--for sincerity,
you know--weren't we?"
"I have no business to correct you," he said humbly. "I resigned
all my pretensions that morning in the old house."
"Well, so long as you love me still!" she exclaimed, with a little
mocking laugh. "That's the great thing, isn't it? I mean for me,
of course. I am greedy for love. It makes me feel so safe and
comfortable to think there are whole rows of men that love me.
When you have a great fortune you begin to appreciate the things
that money cannot buy."
"Oh, your money!" he said. That word in her mouth always stung
him.
"Well, you ought to hate my money," she remarked cheerfully. "It
queered you, didn't it? And then all rich people are detestable,
anyway--selfish to the core, and horrid. Do you know that
sometimes when I have flirted awfully with a man at a dinner or
somewhere, and the next day he telephones--and the telephone is in
the next room--I've just said: 'Oh, bother! tell him I'm out,'
rather than take the trouble to get up from my chair. And a nice
man, too!"
"I thought I might be treated the same way," he said.
"Then you thought wrong, Frank," she returned, with a sudden
change from her tone of flippancy and lightness. "I haven't sunk
quite as low as that, you know. I meant other people--I didn't
mean you, Frank, dear."
This was said with such a little ring of kindness that Frank was
moved.
"Then the old days still count for something?" he said.
"Oh, yes!" she said.
"But not enough to hurt?" he ventured.
"Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't," she returned. "It
depends on how good a time I'm having. But I hate to think I'm
weak and selfish and vain, and that the only person I really care
for is myself. I value my self-esteem, and it often gets an awful
jar. Sometimes I feel like a girl that has run away from home--
diamonds and dyed hair, you know--and then wakes up at night and
cries to think of what a price she has paid for all her fine
things!" Florence waved her hand towards the alabaster statue of
Pocahontas, with a little ripple of self-disdain. She was in a
strange humour, and beneath the surface of her apparent gaiety
there ran an undercurrent of bitterness and contempt for herself.
Her eyes were unusually brilliant, and her cheeks were pink enough
to have been rouged. The sight of her old lover had stirred many
memories in her bosom.
"And what about my job, Florence?" he said, changing the
conversation. "I've caught the yachting idea, too. Can it be
managed?"
"Oh, I want to talk to you about that," she said.
"Well, go on," he said, as she hesitated.
"I am so afraid of hurting your feelings, Frank," she said with a
singular timidity.
"My feelings are probably tougher than you think," he returned.
"You will think so badly of me," she said. "You will be
affronted."
"It sounds as though you wanted to engage me for your butler," he
said. Then, as she still withheld the words on her lips, he went
on: "Don't be uneasy about saying it, Florence. If it's
impossible--why, that's the end of it, of course, and no harm
done."
"I want you to come," she said simply.
"Then, what's the trouble?" he demanded, getting more and more
mystified. "I don't mind being an artificer the least bit. I like
to work with my hands. I'm a good mechanic, and I like it."
"I want you for my chief engineer," she said.
This was news, indeed. Frank's face betrayed his keen pleasure. He
had never soared to the heights of asking or expecting THAT.
"I had to dismiss the last one," she went on. "That's the reason
why I'm still here, and not two days out, as I had expected. He
locked himself in his cabin and shot at people through the door,
and told awful lies to the newspapers."
"If it's anything about my qualifications," he said, thinking he
had found the reason of her backwardness, "I don't fancy I'll have
any trouble to satisfy you. I don't want to toot my own horn,
Florence, but really, you know, I am rated a first-class man. I'll
prove that by my certificates and all that, or give me two weeks'
trial, and see for yourself."
"Oh, it isn't that," she said.
"Then, what is it?" he broke out. "Only the other day they offered
me a Western Ocean liner, and, if you like, I'll send you the
letter. If I am good enough for a big passenger ship, I guess I
can run the Minnehaha to please you!"
"Frank," she returned, "it is not a question of your competency at
all. You know very well I'd trust my life to you, blindfold. It's
--it's the social side, the old affair between us, the first names
and all that kind of thing."
"Oh, I see!" he said blankly.
"As an officer on my ship," she said, "you could easily put
yourself and me in a difficult position. In a way, we'll really be
further apart than if you were in South America and I in Monte
Carlo, for, though we'd always be good friends, and all that, the
formalities would have to be observed. Now, I have offended you?"
she added, putting out her hand appealingly.
"I think you might have known me better, Florence," he returned.
"I am not offended--what right have I to be offended--only a
little hurt, perhaps, to think that you could doubt me for a
single moment in such a matter. I understand very well, and
appreciate the need for it. Did you expect me to call you Florence
on the quarterdeck of your own vessel, and presume on our old
friendship to embarrass you and set people talking? Good Heavens,
what do you take me for?"
"Don't be angry with me, Frank," she pleaded. "It had to be said,
you know. I wanted you so much to come; I wanted to share my
beautiful vessel with you; and yet I dreaded any kind of a false
position."
"I shall treat you precisely as I would any owner of any ship I
sailed on," he said. "That is, with respect and always preserving
my distance. I will never address you first except to say good-
morning and good-evening, and will show no concern if you do not
speak to me for days on end."
"Oh, Frank, you are an angel!" she cried.
"No," he returned, "only--as far as I can--a gentleman, Miss
Fenacre."
"We needn't begin now, Frank," she exclaimed, almost with
annoyance.
"Am I in your service?" he asked.
"From to-day," she answered, "and I will give you a note to
Captain Landry."
"Then you will be Miss Fenacre to me from now on," he said.
"You must say good-bye to Florence first," she said, smiling. "You
may kiss my hand," she said, as she gave it to him. "You used to
do it so gallantly in the old days--such a Spaniard that you are,
Frank--and I liked it so much!"
He did so, and for the first time in his life with a kind of
shame.
"I hope we are not both of us making a terrible mistake,
Florence," he said.
"Oh, I couldn't want a better chief!" she said, "and, as for you,
it's the wisest thing you ever did. It's me, after all, who is
making the sacrifice, for, in a month or two, all the gilt will
wear off, and you will see me as I really am. You will find it
very disillusioning to go to sea with your divinity," she added.
"You will discover she is a very flesh-and-blood affair, after
all, Frank, and not worth the tip of your little finger."
"I had a good many opportunities of judging before," he replied,
"and the more I knew her the more I loved her."
"Well, I am changed now," she said. "I suppose all the bad has
come to the surface since--like the slag when they melt iron and
skim it off with dippers--only with me there's nobody to dip. If
_I_ am astounded at the difference, what do you suppose you'll
be?"
"There never could be any difference to me," he said.
"That's the only kind of love worth talking about," she said,
going to the window and looking out.
For a while neither of them spoke. Frank rose and stood with his
hat in his hand, waiting to take his departure. Florence turned,
and going to an escritoire sat down and wrote a few lines on a
card.
"Present this to Captain Landry," she said, "and, now, my dear
chief engineer, I will give you your conge."
He thanked her, and put the card carefully in his pocketbook.
"What a farce it all is, Frank!" she broke out. "There's something
wrong in a system that gives a girl millions of dollars to do just
as she likes with. I don't care what they say to the contrary; I
believe women were meant to belong to men, to live in semi-slavery
and do what they are told, to bring up children and travel with
the pots and pans, and find their only reward in pleasing their
husbands."
"I wouldn't care to pass an opinion," said Frank. "Some of them
are happy that way, no doubt."
"What does anybody want except to be happy?" she continued, in the
same strain of resentment. "Isn't that what all are trying for as
hard as they can? I'd like to go out in the street and stop people
as they came along and ask them, the one after the other: 'Would
you tell me if you are happy?' And the one that said 'yes' I'd
give a hundred dollars to!"
"As like as not it would be some shabby fellow with no overcoat,"
said Frank.
"Now you can go away!" she exclaimed suddenly. "I don't know
what's the matter with me, Frank. I think I'm going to cry! Go,
go!" she cried imperiously, as he still stood there.
Frank bowed and obeyed, and his last glimpse, as he closed the
door, was of her at the window, looking down disconsolately into
the street below.
III
Spring was well begun when the Minnehaha sailed for Europe to take
her place in the mimic fleets that were already assembling. As
like seeks like, so the long, swift white steamer headed like a
bird for her faraway companions, and arrived amongst them with
colours flying, and her guns roaring out salutes. By herself she
was greedy for every pound of steam and raced her engines as
though speed were a matter of life and death; but, once in
company, she was content to lag with the slowest, and suit her own
pace to the stately progress of the schooners and cutters that
moved by the wind alone. She found friends amongst all nations,
and, in that cosmopolitan society of ships, dipped her flag to
those of England, France, Holland, Belgium, and Germany.
It was a wonderful life of freedom and gaiety. A great yacht
carries her own letter of introduction, and is accorded everywhere
the courtesies of a man-of-war, to whom, in a sense, she is a
sister. Official visits are paid and returned; naval punctilio
reigns; invitations are lavished from every side. There is,
besides, a freemasonry amongst those splendid wanderers of the
sea, a transcendent Bohemianism, that puts them nearly all upon a
common footing. A holiday spirit is in the air, and kings and
princes who at home are hidden within walls of triple brass, here
unbend like children out of school, and make friends and gossip
about their neighbours and show off their engine-rooms and their
ice plant and some new idea in patent boat davits after the manner
of very ordinary mortals. Not of course that kings and princes
predominate, but the same spirit prevailed with those who on shore
held their heads very high and practised a jealous exclusiveness.
Amongst them all Florence Fenacre was a favourite of favourites.
Young, beautiful, and the mistress of a noble fortune, there was
everything to cast a glamour about this charming American who had
come out of the unknown to take all hearts by storm.
Her haziness about distinctions of rank filled these Europeans
with an amused amazement. There was to them something quite royal
in her naivety and lack of awe; in her high spirit, her vivacity,
and her absolute disregard of those who failed to please her. She
convulsed one personage by describing another as "that tiresome
old man who's really too disreputable to have tagging around me
any longer"; and had a quarrel and a making up with a reigning
duke about a lighter of coal that their respective crews had come
to blows over. Everybody adored her, and she seldom put to sea
without a love-sick yacht in her wake.
Of course, here as elsewhere, every phase of human character was
displayed, and most conspicuous of all amongst the evil was the
determination of many to win Florence's millions for themselves.
Amid that noble concourse of vessels, every one of which stood for
a princely income, there were adventurers as needy and as hungry
as any sharper in the streets of New York. There is an
aristocratic poverty, none the less real because three noughts
must be added to all the figures, that first surprised and then
disgusted the pretty American. Her first awakening to the fact was
when, as a special favour, she sold her best steam launch to a
French marquise at the price it had cost her. Though that lady was
very profuse with little pink notes and could purr over Florence
by the hour, her signature on a cheque was never forthcoming, and
our heroine had a fit of fury to think of having been so deceived.
"It was a downright confidence trick," she burst out to the comte
de Souvary, firing up afresh with the memory of her wrongs. "I
loved my launch. It was a beauty. It never went dotty at the time
you needed it most and it was a vertical inverted triple-expansion
direct-acting propeller!' (Florence could always rattle off
technical details and showed her Americanism in her catalogue-like
fluency in this respect.) "And I miss it and I want it back, and
the horrid old woman never means to pay me a penny!"
"Oh, my child!" said the count, "she never pays anybody ze penny.
She is a stone from which one looks in vain for blood. Your launch
is--what do you call it in ze Far Vest--a goner!"
"But she's descended from Charlemagne," cried Florence. "She has
the entree to all the courts. She ought to be exposed for stealing
my boat!"
"What does anybody do when he is robbed?" said the count
philosophically. He could afford to be philosophical: it wasn't
HIS vertical inverted triple-expansion direct-acting propeller.
"Smile and be more careful ze next time," he went on. "The
marquise's reputation is international for what is charitably
called her eccentricity."
"In America they put people in jail for that kind of
eccentricity!" exclaimed Florence.
"Oh, the best way in Europe is money-with-order," said the count,
"what I remember once a friend seeing in that great country of
which you are ze ornament--in God we trust: all others cash!"
"Well, it's a shame," said Florence, "and if I ever get the chance
of a dark night I'll ram her with the Minnehaha!"
Florence's mother, a dear little old lady who did tatting and read
the Christian Herald, was always the particular target of the
fortune-hunters who pursued her daughter. It seemed such a
brilliant idea to capture the mother first as the preparatory step
of getting into the good graces of the heiress; and the old lady,
who was one of the most guileless of her sex, never failed to fall
into the trap and take the attentions all in earnest. Comte de
Souvary used to say that if you wished to find the wickedest men
in Europe you had only to cast your eyes in the direction of
Florence's mother; and she would be trotted off to church and
driven in automobiles and lunched in casinos by the most notorious
and unprincipled scapegraces of the Old World.
Florence, who, like all heiresses, had developed a positive
instinct for the men who meant her mischief, was always delighted
at the repeated captures of the old lady; and it was an endless
entertainment to her when her mother was induced to champion the
cause of some aristocratic ne'er-do-well.
"But, Mamma," she would say, "I hate to call your friends names,
but really he's a perfect scamp, and underneath all his fine
manners he is no better than a wolf ravening for rich young
lambs!"
"Oh, Florence, how can you be so uncharitable!" her mother would
retort. "If you could only hear the way he speaks of his mother
and his ruined life, and how he is trying to be a better man for
your sake--"
"Always the same old story," said Florence. "It's wonderful the
good I do just sailing around and radiating moral influence. The
count says I ought to get a medal from the government with my
profile on one side and a composite picture of my admirers on the
other! And if I do, Mamsey, I'll give it to you to keep!"
Frank Rignold was sometimes tempted to curse the day that had ever
brought him aboard the Minnehaha. To be a silent spectator of
gaieties and festivities he could not share; to be condemned to
stand aloof while he saw the woman he loved petted and sought
after by men of exalted position--what could be imagined more
detestable to a lover without hope, without the shadow of a claim,
with nothing to look forward to except the inevitable day when a
luckier fellow would carry her off before his eyes. He moped in
secret and often spent hours locked in his cabin, sitting with his
face in his hands, a prey to the bitterest melancholy and
dejection. In public, however, he always bore himself
unflinchingly, and was too proud a man and too innately a
gentleman to allow his face to be read even by her. It was
incumbent on him, so long as he drew her pay and wore her uniform,
to act in all respects the part he was cast to play; and no one
could have guessed, except perhaps the girl herself, that he had
any other thought save to do his duty cheerfully and well.
Captain Landry sat in the saloon at the bottom of the table,
Florence herself taking the head; but the other officers of the
ship had a cosey messroom of their own, presided over by Frank
Rignold as the officer second in rank on board. Thus whole days
might pass with no further exchange between himself and Florence
than the customary good-morning when they happened to meet on
deck. Except on the business of the ship it was tacitly understood
that no officer should speak to her without being first addressed.
The discipline of a man-of-war prevailed; everything went forward
with stereotyped precision and formality; the officers were
supposed to comport themselves with impassivity and self-
effacement. Florence had no more need of being conscious of their
presence than if they had been so many automatons.
Her life and theirs offered a strange contrast. She in her little
court of idlers and merry-makers; they, the grave men who were
answerable for her safety, the exponents of a rigid routine, to
whom the clang of the bells brought recurring duties and the
exercise of their professional knowledge. To her, yachting was a
play: to them, a business.
"I often remark your chief engineer," said the comte de Souvary to
Florence. "A handsome man, with an air at once sad and noble--one
of zoze extraordinary Americans who keep for their machines the
ardour we Europeans lavish on the women we love--and whose spirits
when zey die turn without doubt into petrole or electricity."
"I have known Mr. Rignold ever since I was a child," said
Florence, pleased to hear Frank praised. "I regard him as one of
my best and dearest friends."
"The more to his credit," said the count, astonished. "Many in
such a galere would prove themselves presumptuous and
troublesome."
"He is almost too much the other way," said Florence, with a sigh.
"Ah, that appeals to me!" said the count. "I should be such
anozzer in his place. Proud, silent, unobtrusive, who gives
dignity to what otherwise would be a false position."
"I came very near being his wife once," said Florence, impelled,
she hardly knew why, to make the confession.
The count was thunderstruck.
"His wife!" he exclaimed.
"Before I was rich, you know," explained Florence. "A million
years ago it seems now, when I lived in a little town and was a
nobody."
"Anozzer romance of the Far Vest!" cried the count, to whom this
term embraced the entire continent from Maine to San Francisco.
Florence was curiously capricious in her treatment of Frank
Rignold. Often she would neglect him for weeks together, and then,
in a sort of revulsion, would go almost to the other extreme.
Sometimes at night, when he would be pacing the deck, she would
come and take his arm and call him Frank under her breath and ask
him if he still loved her; and in a manner half tender, half
mocking, would play on his feelings with a deliberate enjoyment of
the pain she inflicted. Her greatest power of torment was her
frankness. She would talk over her proposals; weigh one against
the other; revel in her self-analysis and solemnly ask Frank his
opinion on this or that part of her character. She talked with
equal freedom of her regard for himself, and was almost brutal in
confessing how hard it was to hold herself back.
"I think I must be awfully wicked, Frank," she said to him once.
"I love you so dearly, and yet I wouldn't marry you for anything!"
And then she ran on as to whether she ought to take Souvary and
live in Paris or Lord Comyngs and choose London. "It's so hard to
decide," she said, "and it's so important, because one couldn't
change one's mind afterwards."
"Not very well," said Frank.
"You mustn't grind your teeth so loud," she said. "It's
compromising."
"I wish you would talk about something else or go away," he said,
goaded out of his usual politeness.
"Oh, I love my little stolen tete-a-tetes with you!" she
exclaimed. "All those other men are used up, emotionally speaking.
The count would turn a neat phrase even if he were to blow his
brains out the next minute. They think they are splendidly cool,
but it only means that they have exhausted all their powers of
sensation. You are delightfully primitive and unspoiled, and then
I suppose it is natural to like a fellow-countryman best, isn't
it? Now, honest--have you found any girls over here you like as
well as me?"
"I haven't tried to find any," said Frank.
"You aren't a bit disillusioned, are you?" she said. "You simply
shut your eyes and go it blind. A woman likes that in a man. It's
what love ought to be. It's silly of me to throw it away."
"Perhaps it is, Florence," he said. "Who knows but what some day
you may regret it?"
"I often think of that," she returned. "I am afraid all the good
part of me loves you, and all the bad loves the counts and dukes
and earls, you know. And the good is almost drowned in all the
rest, like vegetables in vegetable soup."
She excelled in giving such little dampers to sentiment, and
laughed heartily at Frank's discomfiture.
"You can be awfully cruel," he said. "I wonder you can be so
beautiful when you can think such things and say them. You treat
hearts like toys and laugh when you break them."
"Well, there's one thing, Frank," she said seriously. "I have
never pretended to you or tried to appear better than I am; and
you are the only man I can say that to and not lie!"
IV
The comte de Souvary, towards whom Florence betrayed an
inclination that seemed at times to deserve a warmer word, was a
French gentleman nearing forty. He was a man of distinguished
appearance, with all the gaiety, grace, and charm that, in spite
our popular impression to the contrary, are not seldom found
amongst the nobles of his country. His undoubted wealth and
position redeemed his suit from any appearance of being inspired
by a mercenary motive. Indeed, he was accustomed himself to be
pursued, and Florence and he recognised in each other a fellowship
of persecution.
"We are ze Pale Faces," he would say, "and ze ozzers zey are
Indians closing in from every corner of ze Far Vest for our
scalps!"
He was, in many ways, the most accomplished man that Florence had
ever known. He was a violinist, a singer, a poet, and yet these
were but a part of his various gifts; for in everything out of
doors he was no less a master and took the first place as though
by right. He was the embodiment of everything daring and manly; it
seemed natural for him to excel; he simply did not know what fear
was. He was always ready to smile and turn a little joke, whether
speeding in his automobile at a breakneck pace or ballooning above
the clouds in search of what was to him the breath of life: "ze
sensation." He could never see a new form of "ze sensation"
without running for it like a child for a new toy. His whole
attitude towards the world was that of a furious curiosity. He
could not bear to leave it, he said, until all he had learned how
all the wheels went round. He had stood on the Matterhorn. He had
driven the Sud express. He had exhausted lions and tigers. In
moods of depression he would threaten to follow Andree to the pole
and figure out his plans on the back of an envelope.
"Magnificent!" he would cry, growing instantly cheerful at the
prospect. "Think of ze sensation!"
He spoke English fluently, though shaky on the TH and the W, and
it was first hand and not mentally translated. His pronunciation
of Far West, two words that were constantly on his lips, was an
endless entertainment to Florence, and out of a sense of humour
she forebore to correct him. It was typical, indeed, of his
ignorance of everything American. Europe was at his fingers' ends;
there was not a country in it he was not familiar with; intimately
familiar, knowing much of what went on behind the scenes, and the
lives and characters of the men, and not less the women, who
shaped national policies and held the steering-wheels of state.
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