To Love Part 20

The girls, however, on their return found a bottle of champagne and two gla.s.ses waiting for them in f.a.n.n.y's dressing-room. It had been sent with Mr. Brown's compliments to Miss Bellairs. The sight of it sent up f.a.n.n.y's spirits with a bound.

"I did not know how I was going to get through the evening," she confessed, "but this will put new life into us."

She insisted upon Joan having a gla.s.s, and the latter, conscious that in her present state of tiredness she could hardly stand, far less dance, sipped a little of the clear, bubbling liquid--sipped till the small room grew large, till her feet seemed to tread on air, and her eyes shone and sparkled like the brightest of stars on a dark night.

The theatre after that, the crowded rows of faces, the music and the thunder of applause--the audience were good-tempered and inclined to be amused at anything--pa.s.sed before her like some gorgeous light-flecked dream. When the soldiers in the back row took up the words of f.a.n.n.y's song and shouted the refrain she felt swept along on the wings of success.

At the fall of the curtain Daddy Brown patted her on the back. He was by this time radiant with cheerfulness once more.

"You will do, young lady," he said. "We'll have to see if we can't work in a special dance for you;" and f.a.n.n.y flung her arms round Joan in wild joy. "You're made, honey," she whispered, "if Brown has noticed you, you're made. I always said you could dance."

It was very thrilling and exciting, but the champagne was beginning to lose its effect. The world was growing grey again. Joan's head throbbed, and she felt self-consciously inclined to make a fool of herself. She sat very silent through the supper to which Brown treated the company at his hotel. There were about twenty people present, nearly all men; Joan wondered where they had been collected from, and she did not quite like the look of any of them. f.a.n.n.y was making a great deal of noise, and how funny and tawdry their faces looked under the bright light. After supper there was a dance, the table was pushed aside, and someone--Joan saw with surprise that it was Daddy Brown--pounded away at a one-step on the piano. Everyone danced, the men, since there were not enough ladies to go around, with each other.

f.a.n.n.y, wilder, gayer than ever, skirts held very high, showed off a new cake-walk in the centre of the room. Her companion, a young, weak-looking youth, was evidently far from sober, and the more intricate the step, the more hopelessly did he become entangled with his own feet, amidst shouts of amus.e.m.e.nt from the onlookers.

Joan turned presently--she had narrowly escaped being dragged into the dance by a noisily cheerful gentleman--to find Strachan standing beside her. He was watching her with some shade of curiosity.

"Why don't you go home?" he suggested; "it isn't amusing you and I can see you are tired. We get used to these kind of shows after a time."

"I think I will," Joan agreed; "no one will mind if I do, will they?"

"Not they, most of them are incapable of noticing anything." A cynical smile stirred on his face. "It is no wonder," he commented, "that we are known as a danger to provincial towns. You see the state of confusion we reduce the young bloods to." His eyes pa.s.sed round the room and came back to Joan with a shade of apology in them. "A bad night, for your first experience," he said; "we are not always as noisy as this. Come along though, I'll see you home, if I may, my rooms are somewhere down your street."

Joan lay awake long after she had got into bed, and when she did at last drop off to sleep it was to dream strange, noise-haunted dreams, that brought her little rest. It was morning, for a faint golden light was invading the room, when she woke to find f.a.n.n.y standing at the foot of the bed. A different f.a.n.n.y to any Joan had ever seen before, tired and blowsy-looking, her hair pulled about her face, the colour rubbed in patches from her cheeks and lips.

"My word, it has been a night;" she stood swaying and peering at Joan.

"It's life though, isn't it, honey?"

Then a wild fit of coughing seized her and Joan had to scramble out of bed and give what help she could. There was no hope of sleep after that, and when f.a.n.n.y had been helped to bed Joan took up a chair to the window and drew aside the curtain.

Her mind was a tumult of angry thoughts, but her heart ached miserably.

If this was what f.a.n.n.y called life and laughter, she had no wish to live it.

CHAPTER XIX

"I did not choose thee, dearest. It was Love That made the choice, not I."

W. S. BLUNT.

All the way up the river from the Nore after they had picked up the pilot the s.h.i.+p moved through a dense fog. A huge P. & O. liner, heavily laden with pa.s.sengers and mails, she had to proceed cautiously, like some blind giant, emitting every two minutes a dolorous wail from her foghorns.

"Clear the way, I am coming," was the substance of the weird sound, and in answer to it shrill whistles sounded on all sides, from small fleets of fis.h.i.+ng-boats, coal hulks, and cargo boats bound from far-off lands.

"We are here too," they panted in answer; "don't run us down, please."

It was eerie work, even for the pa.s.sengers, who remained in blissful ignorance of the danger of their situation. By rights the s.h.i.+p should have been in dock before breakfast; they had planned the night before that an early dawn should see them awake and preparing to land; yet here was eleven o'clock, and from what the more hardy of them could learn by direct questioning of those in authority, they had not as yet pa.s.sed Canvey Island. d.i.c.k Grant, s.h.i.+p's doctor and therefore free of access to inquirers, underwent a searching examination from all and sundry. The P.

& O. regulations are, that the officers shall not talk or in any way become friendly with any of the pa.s.sengers; the s.h.i.+p's doctor and the purser share the responsibility of looking after their clients' comfort, well-being, and amus.e.m.e.nt. On occasions such as a fog, when the hearts of pa.s.sengers are naturally full of questions as to where they are, how long will the fog last, is there any danger, and ought we to have on our life-belts, these two afore-mentioned officials have a busy time. d.i.c.k felt that Barton, the purser in question, had played him rather a shabby trick, for Barton had a.s.serted that the work of sorting out pa.s.sengers'

luggage and seeing to their valuables would confine him to his office till the s.h.i.+p docked, which excuse left d.i.c.k alone to cope with the fog-produced situation.

d.i.c.k had been at sea now for close on two years. He had s.h.i.+fted from s.h.i.+p to s.h.i.+p, had visited most of the ports in the near and far East.

This was his last voyage; he was going to go back and take up life in London. From Ma.r.s.eilles he had written to Mabel telling her to expect him the week-end after they got in.

His journeyings had given him many and varied experiences. The blue eyes had taken unto themselves some of that unwavering facing of life which seems to come almost always into the eyes of people who spend their lives upon the sea. He had learned to be patient and long-suffering with the oddities of his patients, pa.s.sengers who pa.s.sed through his hands on their brief journeyings; he had seen the pathos of the sick who were s.h.i.+pped with the full knowledge that they would die ere the first port was reached, simply because the wistful ache of home-sickness would not allow them to rest. Home-sickness! d.i.c.k had known it keep a man alive till the grey cliffs of Dover grew out of the sea and he could fall back dead and satisfied.

Board s.h.i.+p throws people together into appalling intimacy; Love springs full-winged into being in the course of an afternoon; pa.s.sion burns at red-heat through drowsy, moon-filled nights. Almost wilfully, to begin with, d.i.c.k had flung himself into romance after romance; perhaps unknown to himself, he sought to satisfy the hunger of heart which could throb in answer to a dream, but which all reality left untouched. He played at love lightly; he had an ingrained reverence for women that even intercourse with Anglo-Indian gra.s.s-widows and the girl who revels in a board-s.h.i.+p flirtation was unable altogether to eradicate. He made love, that is to say, only to those women who first and openly made love to him; but it is to be doubted whether even the most ardent of them could boast that d.i.c.ky Grant had ever been in love with them. They slipped out of his ken when they disembarked at their various ports, and the photographs with which they dowered him hardly served to keep him in mind of their names. And a certain weariness had grown up in his heart; he felt glad that this was to be his last voyage. He had put in two good crowded years, but he was no nearer realizing his dream than he had been on the day when Mabel had said to him: "Did you think I should not know when you fell in love?"

d.i.c.k was thinking of this remark of Mabel's as he stood by himself for the time being, right up by the front of the s.h.i.+p peering into the fog, and with the thought came a memory of the girl with the brown eyes who had stood to face him, her hands clenched at her sides, as she told her piteous tale. Piteous, because of its very bravado. "I am not afraid or ashamed," she had claimed, while fear stared out of her eyes and shame flung the colour to her face. What had the past two years brought her?

Had she stood with her back to the wall of public opinion and fought her fight, or had the forces of contempt and blame been too strong for her?

A very light hand on his arm brought him out of his thoughts with a start, and he turned to find a small, daintily-clad lady standing beside him.

"How much longer shall we be?" she asked; "and when am I going to see you again, d.i.c.ky, once we land?"

She had called him d.i.c.ky from the second day of their acquaintance. Mrs.

Hayter always called men by their Christian names, or by nicknames invented by herself.

d.i.c.k let his eyes linger over her before he answered--immaculately dressed as ever--the wildest storm saw Mrs. Hayter with her hair waved, the other ladies claimed--small, piquante face, blue eyes and a marvellous complexion despite her many seasons spent in the East. She was the wife of an Indian Civilian, a tall, grey-headed man, who had come on board to see her off at Bombay. d.i.c.k had been rather struck with the tragedy of the man's face, that once he had seen it; he connected it always for some unexplainable reason with Mrs. Hayter's small, soft hands and the slumberous fire in her blue eyes. Not that d.i.c.k was not friendly with Mrs. Hayter; he had had on the contrary rather a fierce-tempered flirtation with her. Once, under the spell of a night all purple sea and sky and dim set stars, he had caught her to him and kissed her. Kissed the eager, laughing mouth, the warm, soft neck, just where the little pulse beat in the hollow of her throat. She had practically asked him to kiss her, yet that, he reflected in his cooler mood the next morning, was no excuse for his conduct, and, rather ashamed of himself, he had succeeded in avoiding her fairly well until this moment. He had not the slightest desire to kiss her again; that was always the sad end to all his venturings into the kingdom of romance.

"Where are you going to?" he answered her last question first; "if it is anywhere near London, I shall hope to look you up."

Mrs. Hayter laughed, a little caught-in laugh. "Look me up, d.i.c.ky, between you and me! Never mind, you funny, shy, big boy, you shall put it that way if you like. As a matter of fact, I am going to stay at the Knightsbridge Hotel for a week or so on my way through to my husband's people. Why don't you come there too?"

The invitation in her voice was unmistakable and set his teeth on edge.

"It's too expensive for me," he answered shortly; "but I will come and call one day if I may."

"Of course," she agreed, "let's make it dinner the day after to-morrow.

d.i.c.ky," she moved a little closer to him, "is it me or yourself you are angry with about the other night?"

"Myself," d.i.c.k said dryly, and had no time for more, for on the second a s.h.i.+ver shook the s.h.i.+p, throwing Mrs. Hayter forcibly against him, and the air was suddenly clamorous with shrill whistles, cries, and the quick throb of engines reversed.

Through the fog, which with a seeming malignity was lifting, veil upon thick veil, now that the mischief was accomplished, d.i.c.k could see the faint outlines of land; gaunt trees and a house, quite near at hand, certainly within call. Mrs. Hayter was in a paroxysm of terror, murmuring her fright and strange endearing terms all jumbled together, and the deck had waked to life; they seemed in the centre of a curious, nerve-ridden crowd. It was all very embarra.s.sing; d.i.c.k had to hold on to Mrs. Hayter because he knew she would fall if he let her go, and she clung to him, arms thrown round his neck, golden hair brus.h.i.+ng against his chin.

"There's not a particle of danger," a strong voice shouted from somewhere in the crowd. d.i.c.k could recognize it as the captain's.

"Please don't get alarmed, ladies, it is quite unnecessary, with any luck we will be off almost immediately."

In that he proved incorrect, for, heavily weighted as the _India_ was, she stayed firmly fixed in Thames mud. By slow degrees the fog lifted and showed the long lines of the sh.o.r.e, and the solitary house standing out like a sentinel in the surrounding flatness.

d.i.c.k had succeeded in disentangling Mrs. Hayter's arms and had escorted her to a seat.

"I am afraid I have given myself away hopelessly," she whispered, clutching him with rather a shaky hand. "Did anybody see us?"

"Everybody, I should think," he told her gravely, "But, after all, most things are excusable in a possible wreck."

"Yes," she agreed, "only Mrs. Sandeman is all eyes to my doings, and on one occasion she even wrote Robert. Cat!"