A Voyage of Consolation by Sara Jeannette Duncan (top 10 most read books in the world .txt) 📖

suspicion, and said it was much better that young people should discover their unsuitability to one another before marriage than after. "I can conceive nothing more shocking than divorce," said Mrs. Portheris, and her tone indicated that I had probably narrowly escaped it.

We were rather a large party as we made our way to the elevator, and I found myself behind the others in conversation with Dicky Dod. It was a happiness to come thus unexpectedly upon Dicky Dod--he gave forth all that is most exhilarating in our democratic civilisation, and he was in excellent spirits. As the young lady of Mrs. Portheris's party joined us I thought I found a barometric reading in Mr. Dod's countenance that explained the situation. "I remember you," she said shyly, and there was something in this innocent audacity and the blush which accompanied it that helped me to remember her too. "You came to see mamma in Half Moon-street once. I am Isabel."

"Dear me!" I replied, "so you are. I remember--you had to go upstairs, hadn't you. Please don't mind," I went on hastily as Isabel looked distressed, "you couldn't help it. I was very unexpected, and I might have been dangerous. How--how you've _grown_!" I really couldn't think of anything else to say.

Isabel blushed again, Dicky observing with absorbed adoration. It _was_ lovely colour. "You know I haven't really," she said, "it's all one's long frocks and doing up one's hair, you know."

"Miss Portheris only came out two months ago," remarked Mr. Dod, with the effect of announcing that Venus had just arisen from the foam.

"Come, young people," Mrs. Portheris exclaimed from the lift; "we are waiting for you." Poppa and momma and Mr. Mafferton were already inside. Mrs. Portheris stood in the door. As Isabel entered, I saw that Mr. Dod was making the wildest efforts to communicate something to me with his left eye.

"Come, young people," repeated Mrs. Portheris.

"Do you think it's safe for so many?" asked Dicky doubtfully. "Suppose anything should _give_, you know!"

Mrs. Portheris looked undecided. Momma, from the interior, immediately proposed to get out.

"Safe as a church," remarked the Senator.

"What _do_ you mean, Dod?" demanded Mr. Mafferton.

"Well, it's like this," said Dicky; "Miss Wick is rather nervous about overcrowding, and I think it's better to run no risks myself. You all go down, and we'll follow you next trip. See?"

"I suppose you will hardly allow _that_, Mrs. Wick," said our relation, with ominous portent.

"_Est ce que vous voulez a descendre, monsieur?_" inquired the official attached to the elevator, with some impatience.

"I don't see what there is to object to--I suppose it _would_ be safer," momma replied anxiously, and the official again demanded if we were going down.

"Not this trip, thank you," said Dicky, and turned away. Mrs. Portheris, who had taken her seat, rose with dignity. "In that case," said she, "I also will remain at the top;" but her determination arrived too late. With a ferocious gesture the little official shut the door and gave the signal, and Mrs. Portheris sank earthwards, a vision of outraged propriety. I felt sorry for momma.

"And now," I inquired of Mr. Dod, "why was the elevator not safe?"

"I'll tell you," said Dicky. "Do you know Mrs. Portheris well?"

"Very slightly indeed," I replied.

"Not well enough to--sort of chum up with our party, I suppose."

"Not for worlds," said I.

Dicky looked so disconsolate that I was touched.

"Still," I said, "you'd better trot out the circumstances, Dicky. We haven't forgotten what you did in your humble way, you know, at election time. I can promise for the family that we'll do anything we can. You mustn't ask us to poison her, but we might lead her into the influenza."

"It's this way," said Mr. Dod. "How remarkably contracted the Place de la Concorde looks down there, doesn't it! It's like looking through the wrong end of an opera glass."

"I've observed that," I said. "It won't be fair to keep them waiting _very_ long down there on the earth, you know, Dicky."

"Certainly not! Well, as I was saying, your poppa's Aunt Caroline is a perfect fiend of a chaperone. By Jove, Mamie, let's be silhouetted!"

"Poppa was silhouetted," I said, "and the artist turned him out the image of Senator Frye. Now he doesn't resemble Senator Frye in the least degree. The elevator is ascending, Richard."

Richard blushed and looked intently at the horizon beyond Montmartre.

"You see, between Miss Portheris and me, it's this way," he began recklessly, but with the vision before my eyes of momma on the steps below wanting her tea, I cut him short.

"So far as you are concerned, Dicky, I see the way it is," I interposed sympathetically. "The question is----"

"Exactly. So it is. About Isabel. But I can't find out. It seems to be so difficult with an English girl. Doesn't seem to think such a thing as a--a proposal exists. Now an American girl is just as ready----"

"Richard," I interrupted severely, "the circumstances do not require international comparisons. By the way, how do you happen to be travelling with--with Mr. Mafferton?"

"That's exactly where it comes in," Mr. Dod exclaimed luminously. "You'd think, the way Mafferton purrs round the old lady, he'd been a friend of the family from the beginning of time! Fact is, he met them two days before they left London. _I_ had known them a good month, and the venerable one seemed to take to me considerably. There wasn't a cab she wouldn't let me call, nor a box at the theatre she wouldn't occupy, nor a supper she wouldn't try to enjoy. Used to ask me to tea. Inquired whether I was High or Low. That was awful, because I had to chance it, being Congregational, but I hit it right--she's Low, too, strong. Isabel always made the tea out of a canister the old lady kept locked. Singular habit that, locking tea up in a canister."

"You are wandering, Dicky," I said. "And Isabel used to ask you whether you would have muffins or brown bread and butter--I know. Go on."

"Girls _have_ intuition," remarked Mr. Dod with a glance of admiration which I discounted with contempt. "Well, then old Mafferton turned up here a week ago. Since then I haven't been waltzing in as I did before. Old lady seems to think there's a chance of keeping the family pure English--seems to think she'd like it better--see? At least, I take it that way; he's cousin to a lord," Dick added dejectedly, "and you know financially I've been coming through a cold season."

"It's awkward," I admitted, "but old ladies of no family are like that over here. I know Mrs. Portheris is an old lady of no family, because she's a connection of ours, you see. What about Isabel? Can't you tell the least bit?"

"How can a fellow? She blushes just as much when he speaks to her as when I do."

"But are you quite sure," I asked delicately, "whether Mr. Mafferton is--interested?"

"There's the worst kind of danger of it," Dicky replied impressively. "I don't know whether I ought to tell you, but the fact is Mafferton's just got the sack--I beg your pardon--just been _congeed_ himself. They say she was an American and it was a bad case; she behaved most unfeelingly."

"You shouldn't believe all you hear," I said, "but I don't see what that has to do with it."

"Why, he's just in the mood to console himself. What fellow would think twice of being thrown over, if Miss Portheris were the alternative!"

"It depends, Dicky," I observed. "You are jumping at conclusions."

"What I hoped," he went on regretfully as we took our places in the elevator, "was that we might travel together a bit and that you wouldn't mind just now and then taking old Mafferton off our hands, you know."

"Dicky," I said, as we swiftly descended, "here is our itinerary. Genoa, you see, then Pisa, Rome, Naples, Rome again, Florence, Venice, Verona, up through the lakes to Switzerland, and so on. We leave to-morrow. If we _should_ meet again, I don't promise to undertake it personally, but I'll see what momma can do."


CHAPTER VIII.

Poppa said as we steamed out of Paris that night that the Presidency itself would not induce him to reside there, and I think he meant it. I don't know whether the omnibus _numeros_ and the _correspondances_ where you change, or the men sitting staring on the side walks drinking things for hours at a time, or getting no vegetables to speak of with his joint, annoyed him most, but he was very decided in his views. Momma and I were not quite so certain; we had a guilty sense of ingratitude when we thought of the creations in the van; but the cobblestones biassed momma a good deal, who hoped she should get some sleep in Italy. I had breakfasted that morning in the most amusing way with Dicky Dod at a _cafe_ in the Champs Elysees--poppa and momma had an engagement with Mr. and Mrs. Malt and couldn't come--and in the leniency of the recollection I said something favourable about the Arc de Triomphe at sunset; but I gathered from the Senator's remarks that, while the sunset was fine enough, he didn't see the propriety in using it that way as a background for Napoleon Bonaparte, so to speak.

"Result is," said the Senator, "the intelligent foreigner's got pretty nearly to go out of the town to see a sunset without having to think about Aboukir and Alexandria. But that's Paris all over. There isn't a street, or a public building, or a statue, or a fountain, or a thing that doesn't shout at you, 'Look at me! Think about me! Your admiration or your life!' Those Frenchmen don't mind it because it only repeats what they're always saying themselves, but if you're a foreigner it gets on your nerves. That city is too uniformly fine to be of much use to me--it keeps me all the time wondering why I'm not in one eternal good humour to match. There's good old London now--always looks, I should think, just as you feel. Looks like history, too, and change, and contrast, and the different varieties of the human lot."

"I see what you mean, poppa," I said. "There's too much equality in Paris, isn't there--to be interesting," but the Senator was too deeply engaged in getting out momma's smelling salts to corroborate this interpretation.

It is a very long way to Genoa if you don't stop at Aix-les-Bains or anywhere--twenty-four hours--but Mont Cenis occurs in the night, which is suitable in a tunnel. There came a chill through the darkness that struck to one's very marrow, and we all rose with one accord and groped about for more rugs. When broad daylight came it was Savoy, and we realised what we had been through. The Senator was inclined to deplore missing the realisation of the Mont Cenis, and it was only when momma said it was a pity he hadn't taken a train that would have brought us through in the daytime and enabled him to examine it, that he ceased to express regret. My parents are often vehicles of philosophy for each other.

Besides, in the course of the morning the Senator acknowledged that he got more tunnels than he had any idea he had paid for. They came with a precipitancy that interfered immensely with any connected idea of the scenery, though momma, in