University of Virginia Library

3. CHAPTER III.

A long voyage. There was time in it for
quite a little romance. And the time was not
misimproved, for, if we should narrate minutely
all that happened on board the
Mersey, we should have a volume. That,
however, would by no means do; we must
simply indicate how things went.

In the first place, there was Mrs. Chester's
flirtation. She was nearly forty-four years
old, and yet she was not too old for coquetry,
or at least she did not think so. More
elderly people are thus minded than the
young imagine; many a man well stricken
in years has thoughts of captivating some
chit of a girl; he not only wants to win her
hand, but he trusts that he may win her
heart; actually hopes, the deluded senior,
to inspire her with love. Same with
some women; can't believe they have
passed the age of fascinating; make eyes at
young dandies who don't understand it at
all; would beggar themselves for a husband
of twenty-two.

Mrs. Chester was well preserved; complexion
brunette, but tolerably clear, — from
a distance; dark hazel eyes, still remarkably
bright, — also from a distance; hair very
black, to be sure, but honestly her own,
even to the color; a long face, but not lean,
and with high and rather fine features; on
the whole, a distinguished countenance. Her
form had not kept quite so well, being obviously
a little too exuberant, notwithstanding
the cunning of dress-makers. What was
repellant about her, at least to an attentive
and sensitive observer, was her smile. It
was over-sweet; its cajolery was too visible;
it did not fascinate; it put you on your
guard. Even her eyes, with all their fine
color and sparkle, were not entirely pleasing,
being too watchful and cunning and at times
too combative. On the whole, it was the
face of a woman who had long been a flirt,
who had long been a leader of fashion, who
had seen trouble without getting any good
out of it, who had ended by becoming something
of a tartar, and all without ceasing to
be a flirt.

Mrs. Chester was a widow. A country
belle in her youth, a city lady during middle
life, she had lost her husband within the last
six years, found herself without a fortune,
and retired upon a wealthy brother. Disappointed
woman; thought she had not had
her fair share of life's sweetness; still uneasily
seeking after worldly joys. Old enough to be
Mr. McMaster's mother, old enough to matronize
him wisely in society, she was unable
to give herself the good advice to keep from
flirting with him. She had courted his acquaintance
at the table of the Mersey for
his own sake. It was not because he had
been civil to her niece; it was because she
wanted him to be sweet upon herself.
Could n't help it; old habits too strong for
her sense; old habits and a born tendency.

Of course, he did not understand her. No
man of twenty-four can have the least suspicion
that an elderly or middle-aged woman
wants him to flirt with her. Mr. McMaster

(not his real name, please to remember)
helped Mrs. Chester around the vessel in
the innocence of ignorance. He did not
want her company, but could not help getting
it. “Mr. McMaster, will you oblige me
with your arm up these stairs?” And then
he was in for a long, prattling promenade
on deck. “Mr. McMaster, will you please
take me into the cabin?” And then he
found himself caught in a maelstrom of
whist. He had meant to keep away from
the Beaumonts; but he could not manage it
because of Mrs. Chester. The result was
— the terribly pregnant result — that he saw
a great deal of Miss Kate.

Pretty soon, say in about a week, there
was a muddle. While he was talking to
Mrs. Chester, and while Mrs. Chester supposed
that she was his point of interest, he
was really talking for the sake of Miss
Beaumont. The aunt, as innocent of any
such gentle purpose as a bald eagle, gathered
these two chickens under her chaperonic
wings and brooded in them thoughts of each
other. Had she known what she was doing,
she would have snapped at Kate, insulted
Mr. McMaster, shut herself up in her state-room,
and had a fit of the sulks.

Results were hastened by rough weather.
Mrs. Chester, losing her sea-legs once more,
became to a certain extent bedridden, or
lay about the decks inert. By this time our
tall young friend was under a spell which
promised pleasures and would not let him
see dangers.

“Miss Beaumont, you need some one to
assist you”; “Miss Beaumont, shall I annoy
you if I walk with you?”

He can't help saying these things; sees
the folly of them, no doubt, but still says
them; resolves that he will do nothing of the
sort, and breaks his resolution; very clear-headed
youth, but getting ungovernable
about the heart. Of course one likes him
the better for this weakness, and would
hardly have a man of twenty-four behave
differently. But the result? Long walks
and long talks; getting more interested every
day; cannot learn too much about Miss
Beaumont; finds her school-girl reminiscences
more delightful than chemistry. The
young lady, handsome by daylight, seems to
him a goddess by moonlight. He experiences
a pure, exquisite, almost unearthly pleasure
in looking down at her bright, innocent
face, and seeing it look up at him. He does
a great deal of reading (not in chemistry)
in the cabin, Miss Beaumont being always
one listener, if not the only one. What a
change has come over him, and how rapidly
it has come! If this thing is to go on as it
has begun, he will soon be indisputably in
love. And then?

“Wonder if he ain't getting himself into
a scrape?” thinks the diplomatic Wilkins,
careful, however, not to utter the query
aloud, lest babbling Duffy should repeat it
and make mischief. “Well,” he continues,
still speaking in strict confidence to himself,
“that 's the way with all youngsters,
pretty much. Women will get the better
of them. They 've tripped me pretty often.”
(Mr. Wilkins, now nigh on to forty, has not
been badly tripped as yet, being still unmarried.)
“That girl might upset me now,
well as I know her breed. Pretty girl, devilish
pretty girl, and looks like a good one,
too, in spite of her breed.”

There are moments when our tall fellow
wonders at himself as much as Wilkins
wonders at him. He is one of the wisest of
youngsters; at least he has that reputation
among his acquaintance; he has even had
it with himself. Though of an impulsive
race, and partly because he is aware that he
is of such a race, he has proposed to himself
to be practical, has set up practicalmindedness
as his nirvana, and has stubbornly,
self-repressively striven after it. For
years he has not meant to do anything which
was not worth while, nor even to do anything
which was not the best thing to do.
Many of his younger associates have considered
him disagreeably well-balanced;
have felt reproved, cramped, and chilled by
his rational conversation and sound example;
would have liked him better if he had
had more emotions, enthusiasms, and whims.

And this sagacious youth has allowed his
heart to draw him into a scrape; as the
philosophical Wilkins puts the case, a woman
has got the better of him. At the
breakfast-table, no matter what may have
been his resolves during the night, he can't
keep his eyes from bidding Kate Beaumont
something kinder than good morning. If
he sees her in need of a chair, he can't
help bringing her one. If he finds her pacing
the unsteady deck alone (her aunt
rolled in shawls, and her brother talking
horse below to boozing companions), he must
offer her his arm, or jump overboard. When
Mrs. Chester, anxious in her least sickish
hours to have him near her, proposes an
evening family party of whist, he takes the
cards. And, subsequent on the game, when
the riper lady leans back in a corner, does
her dizzy best to be agreeable, and, despite
herself, falls into a series of dozings, how
can he quit Miss Beaumont, or how be dull
with her? One little weakness after another
makes a whole day of unwisdom and
wrong-doing.

Excuse him? Of course we can, and do
it joyfully. We do not forget that pregnant
saying, “A woman in the same house has
so many devilish chances at a fellow”; and
we remember that in a ship she has even
more chances than in a house. Miss Kate
had no rival young lady on board the Mersey.

She had not even a rival, at least not
for a long time past, in the emotional memory
of Mr. McMaster. He was like Adam
alone when he first beheld Eve the unknown.
The over-soul of his sex, the great
necessity of loving some one of the other
sex, the universal instinct which is too strong
for any individuality, had begun to take
complete possession of him, and to upset his
boasted common sense, self-command, and
so forth. A man may be upright and sensible;
but a man 's a man for a' that.

It was simple folly. He knew perfectly
well who were the Beaumonts; he was informed,
at least in a general way, of the
long feud between them and his own family;
he could not show for his conduct a ray
of the excuse called ignorance. Before his
mind's eye rose the two houses: the roof
of the one visible from the roof of the
other; separated by only four miles of
God's blooming, joyous earth; yet never
an act or message of friendship between
them; rather a ceaseless interchange of
wrongs and hate. It is one of the rare
cases of a spite which has outlasted two
generations, and which is so violent in its
deeds and so loud in its words that all men
know of it. It is a stand-point, a fixed
fact; no one expects it to pass away. And
yet, knowing all this bitter history, he has
become surreptitiously intimate with Beaumonts,
and has dared even to pay surreptitious
courtship to a Beaumont girl.

Of course he reproved and bullied himself
for it with distressing plainness. “What
do I mean?” he said; and meanwhile he
meant nothing. He no more proposed to
fall in love than a man proposes to get
drunk who takes glass after glass of a liquor
which is too pleasant to be refused. And
still less did he intend to make this charming
and innocent young lady fall in love
with himself. That, he thought, would be
dishonorable; for there could be no good
end to it. It was, humanly speaking, impossible
that a Miss Beaumont should marry
one of his family; and if it should happen,
it would almost certainly divide her from
her own blood, and so make her more or
less wretched for life. So, marriage being
out of the question, all love-making was
futility, and was even wickedness. He did
not purpose it; resolved over and over that
he would have none of it; and all the
while, led by the great race instinct of
loving, went on with it. Terrible downfall
for a man of solid sense and strong principles,
born into high ideas of gentlemanliness,
bred for years among philosophers,
accustomed to do analyses and other accurate
things, able to analyze even himself,
and so thoroughly a responsible being.

On the twelfth day of the voyage, some
time in the still, cloudy, sombre evening,
this young man received a shock. The
irrepressible Duffy, blind as a bat from
coming out of the bright cabin on to the
murky deck, halted a few feet from Mr. McMaster
without seeing him, planted his back
against the weather bulwark, rested his
lazy elbows upon it, puffed gently at his
cigar, and mumbled to the invisibly deprecating
Wilkins, “Seems to me that tall chap
is getting himself either into a marriage or
a fight.”

The subject of the observation immediately
stole away to meditate. This outside
comment, this voice of the world at large,
more potent than any of his own reflections,
startled him into a terrible sense of his
situation. What brought the comment more
forcibly home to him was a suspicion, amounting
almost to a certainty, that the speaker
knew him. Duffy he had long since recognized,
and Wilkins also; but he had believed
until now that they did not remember
him. Absent eight years; a boy when he
left home; grown twelve inches or more
since then, broad shoulders, side whiskers,
mustache, and all that; — he must surely
be changed beyond recognition. Now he
believed that these two had found him out;
and consequently he felt as if he were
standing on a mine. Any day the Beaumonts
might be informed who he was; and
then what judgment would they pass upon
him to his face?

“You a gentleman!” they would sneer,
or perhaps storm. “Sneak among us and
listen to our talk under a false name! Even
if you were an indifferent person, such conduct
would be shabby. As things are between
our families, it is scoundrelly.”

And then would arise the old, stupid,
hateful quarrel, more violent perhaps than
ever, and to some extent rational in its violence,
because justified by his folly.

A young man has a vast power of repentance.
When he sees that he has committed
an error, he sees it in awful proportions.
Our giant lay awake over his sin
nearly all that night, and writhed in spirit
over it all the following day. A gentleman,
sensitively a gentleman, what one might call
chivalrous, what one might even call quixotic,
yes, chivalrous in spite of his assumed
name, quixotic in spite of his long struggle
to be practical, he was tormented by remorse.
How could a man of honor, who
had caught himself falling by surprise into
a dishonorable action, how could he do sufficient
penance? Moreover, his blunder
might lead to disastrous consequences;
what chivalrous feat could he perform to
prevent them? After a severe storm of
emotions, after suffering spiritually more in
one day than a nation of savages could suffer
in a month, he hit upon one of the most
irrational and yet perhaps one of the most

natural plans that could be imagined. Only
a young man could have devised it, or at
least have decided upon it. The young are
so wise and so foolish! They are such inspired
idiots! Sometimes uninspired ones!

It was a moonlit autumn evening, strangely
summer-like for the season, when he led
Miss Beaumont on deck alone, ostensibly to
take a walk with her, but really to carry
out his plan.

We can imagine the hesitation and futility
of his first steps toward a confession. There
were two persons in him: the one intent
upon being straightforward and prompt;
the other shying and balking. All the
young fellow's introductions seemed to lead
in a circle and bring him back to where he
had started. So hard is it to ayow an error
which is both intellectual and moral, when
one is anxious to preserve the respect of
the listener, not to mention a tip-end of
self-respect. It seems at the moment as if
confession were a new crime, instead of a
justifying virtue.

At last, out of patience with himself, Mr.
McMaster (we will soon give his true name)
made a direct plunge at his subject.

“Miss Beaumont, I beg your attention
for a moment to a very serious matter.”

There was no start from this most innocent
of young ladies. A girl more experienced
in society, or in novels, or in reveries,
would have sniffed an offer of marriage.
This one was ingenuous enough to
be merely puzzled, to turn up her handsome
face in the moonlight with calm wonder,
to say with perfect simplicity as he hesitated,
“What is it?”

“My name is not McMaster,” he proceeded;
then, after scowling a moment, “It
is McAlister.

“I beg you will hear me out,” he hurried
on, anticipating that she would leave him,
perhaps before he could begin his apology.

But Kate was as yet simply puzzled.
Four years of absence from home, of faraway
ideas and of hard study, had rendered
some of the notions and feelings of her
childhood vague to her, so that the word
“McAlister” did not at first rouse an association.

“I don't know how the captain got the
idea that my name was McMaster,” pursued
the penitent. “Perhaps my illegible handwriting;
I engaged my passage by letter.
Never mind. He introduced me by that
name. I thought — it was a great mistake,
it looks like unhandsome conduct — but I
honestly thought it best to let it pass.”

“It was odd,” hesitated Kate, feeling that
she ought to say something, and not knowing
what to say.

“You cannot blame me more severely
than I blame myself,” he added.

“I did not mean to blame you” Kate
puzzled on. “If it was a joke? — Well, I
don't know what I ought to tell you, Mr.
Me —”

The moment she began to pronounce the
name McAlister, she remembered the quarrel
which it represented. She stopped; her
hand fell out of his arm; she stood away
from him and stared at him.

“I beg of you!” he implored. “Will you
not do me the favor to hear my reasons? I
appeal to you as a woman, who cannot sympathize
with these old bitternesses, and who
must wish for — at least not enmity. You
had a brother on board. I did not want to
resume the ancient quarrel with him. I
hate the whole affair. It is a point of family
honor, I know; it seems to be held a
duty to keep up the feud. But I have
learned other ideas. The quarrel appears
to me — I beg you will excuse my frankness
— simply barbarous. I have no more
sympathy with it than I have with a scalphunt.
Well, you can guess what I had in
view. I wanted a peaceful voyage. I
wanted not to be known to you or your relatives
in any manner whatever. I assure
you, on the word of a gentleman, that those
were my motives for letting my name go
unrevealed. Can you blame me for them?”

Kate, in spite of her astonishmont and a
certain measure of alarm, felt that she was
called upon to be a woman, and she was
capable of being one. After drawing a
long breath to make sure of her voice, she
said quietly, and with a really dignified
firmness, “No, Mr. McAlister, I cannot
blame you.”

“I thank you sincerely,” he replied, so
greatly relieved that he was almost joyous.
“I did not expect so much kindness. I
only hoped it.”

“I have lived away from home, like yourself,”
she went on. “I suppose I have lost
some of the home ideas. But,” she added,
after a moment of reflection, “I am going
home.”

“Yes, I know what you mean,” he said.
“You cannot control your circumstances.
I must give you up as an acquaintance.”

Kate, looking frankly up at him, her
handsome face spiritualized by the moonlight,
nodded her head with a rather sad
gravity.

“There is one thing more,” he proceeded.
“I am going to Hartland. I shall perhaps
be seen there and recognized by some of
your family. Then this deceit, this unhappy
deceit of mine, will be discovered.
And then the old quarrel may blaze up hotter
than before.”

“I hope not,” murmured Kate, fearing
however that so it would be.

“It is for that that I have told you what I
have,” he explained. “I have made my confession
to you. I have begged your pardon.

If you should say thus much to your father
and brothers, they might perhaps be persuaded
that I meant no insult. It would
pain me horribly,” he declared, stamping
his foot slightly, and scowling at himself,
“if I should find that I had rekindled the
old spite.”

Kate's head had drooped; it seemed to
her that a heavy load was being laid upon
her; she could not tell what to decide and
to promise.

McAlister (we give him his true name at
last) was also perplexed, and for a time
silent. The weightiest part of his plan was
still unfinished, and he was in great doubt
whether he ought to carry it out.

“No; even that is insufficient,” he broke
out, shaking his head. “There is still room
to claim an impertinence, an insult. I am
justified in telling you all that is upon my
mind. Let me offer you one more reparation,
Miss Beaumont. It is myself. I lay
all that I am at your feet. I suppose you
will refuse me. Never mind, I am sincere.
I shall not change. You need make no reply
now. But whenever you choose to
speak, your answer shall be binding. Do
not go. One single word. You can tell
your family this; I wish you to tell them.
All the consequences that may attach to
this step I am prepared to take. I shall
live and die by it.”

Kate was stupefied. Wonderful as the
interview had been thus far, she had not expected
any such ending as this. While he
(no flirt, be it understood) had supposed for
days back that he was paying her unmistakable
attentions, she was so little of a flirt
that she had not guessed his meaning. The
time had passed pleasantly; she had begun
to respect and admire and even like this tall
young gentleman; but that was all that had
come into her heart or head. And now,
bang! bang! one shot after another; here
was a mask thrown off and a lover falling at
her feet. She was not angry; she had no
recollection just then of the family feud;
she was simply amazed, and in a certain
sense shocked. It was as if he had taken a
liberty; as if, for instance, he had tried to
kiss her; and he almost a stranger, a nine
days' acquaintance!

The first words that she found to say
were, “Mr. McAlister, I cannot talk to you.
I think I ought to go.”

And in her confusion and alarm she was
about to leave him and traverse the staggering
deck alone.

“Let me help you,” he begged, offering his
arm so gently and with such dignity that
she took it. “Please allow me one word
more. How may I address you during
the rest of the voyage? As an acquaintance,
I hope.”

It was terrible to Kate, young as she was
and inexperienced in the gravities of life,
to be called on to decide such questions.
She would consult her aunt; no, that would
not answer at all; that might lead to great
mischief. Her native sense — a wisdom
which one might almost say was not of this
world — enabled her to regain her self-possession
and make a judicious answer.

“We will speak to each other,” she murmured.
“But I must not walk with you
alone any more. I will still call you Mr.
McMaster.”

At the top of the cabin stairway she left
him, obviously in great trembling of body
and agitation of spirit; so that, as he turned
away, he was full of remorse at having
given her such a shock.

Some minutes later he remembered that
she had not answered his offer of marriage,
and, walking hastily up and down the darkling
deck, he fell to querying whether
she ever would answer it.