"Good heavens," said he, going as red as if I had accused him of s.n.a.t.c.hing it from my lips. "Then you must have both together, before you begin to tell me anything."
"We might go out and have a sandwich somewhere," I suggested.
"There"s nothing the matter with the Waldorf sandwiches."
"Except that they"re expensive," said I. "You must remember you and I aren"t millionaires."
"I"ve been doing pretty well lately," said he. "I can almost call myself rich. Please have some lunch, I can afford it, and if you refuse I"ll know it"s because----"
I guessed what he might be going to say, so I stopped him.
"Nonsense!" I exclaimed. "But I"ve run away from Mrs. Stuyvesant-Knox, and I don"t want to be found. If she or her brother should have come to New York, or if anybody else----"
"I"ve thought of that," said he, quickly, "but we"ve no time to waste.
You"re starving. If you wouldn"t mind my getting you a private dining room, and sending you in some lunch----"
"But I want you to be with me," I insisted.
He evidently hesitated, but only for a minute. I don"t think he"s the sort of man to hesitate long about anything.
"Very well, that"s what I"d like best, of course, if you don"t mind,"
said he. "I"ll go and see to everything, and be back before you can count sixty, if you do it slowly."
I didn"t do it at all, but thought how thankful I was that he had come to me, for I was sure everything would go right now.
In two or three minutes he came back to take me into a charming little dining room, where there was no danger that Mrs. Ess Kay or Potter could pounce upon us, as it was for Mr. Brett and me alone. I shuddered to think what it must be costing, but his clothes were so exceedingly good I hoped he hadn"t exaggerated about the luck that had come to him.
Naturally I couldn"t tell the part of my story which concerned Potter Parker; but I said that Mrs. Ess Kay wanted me to do things which I didn"t think it right to do, and I couldn"t stay in her house even a day longer.
"I should like to go home," I went on, "but I can"t yet, and the only other thing is to join Miss Woodburn in Chicago. You remember Miss Woodburn, don"t you?"
He said he remembered her very well, had read in the newspapers that she had left Newport for Chicago, and thought it was a wise idea of mine to join her.
"I"m glad you think that," said I, "for I want to start to-day; and I hope you"ll tell me how to go, how much money it will be, how long it takes to get there, and all about it."
He didn"t answer for a minute, but sat looking very grave, staring at his brown hand on the white tablecloth, as if he"d never seen it before. Then he said:
"Curiously enough, I am going West this afternoon too. Would you object to my being in the same train? I wouldn"t suggest such a thing, only you see as you"re a stranger in the country, I might be able to help you a little."
"How splendid!" I exclaimed. "It seems almost too good to be true. You can"t fancy what a relief it is to my mind."
He looked pleased at that, and said I was very kind, though I should have thought it was the other way round.
"I"ll get your ticket then," he went on. "If you"ll give me twenty-five dollars--five pounds, you know--I"ll hand you back the change; but I"m afraid it won"t be much."
"Change?" I echoed. "Why, I supposed it would be ever so much more than five pounds to get to Chicago, which is almost in Central America, isn"t it?"
"The people who live there think it"s central," said Mr. Brett. "But they make the railroad men keep prices down, so that dissatisfied New Yorkers can afford to go and live there. It isn"t a bad journey, you"ll find. I think it will interest you. You sleep and eat in the train, you know."
"What fun!" I exclaimed. "I"ve never slept in a train, even on the Continent."
"If you had, it would be different from this one," said he. "Can you be ready in twenty-five minutes? The train which we call the Twentieth Century, starts at 2.45."
"I"m ready now," said I. "The sooner we"re on the way the better. But oh, about Vivace. Will they allow him to sleep and eat too?"
"I expect I can arrange that," Mr. Brett answered, in such a confident way that I felt sure he could do it, or anything else he set out to do.
It really was lucky for me that he happened to be travelling West that same day, and such an extraordinary coincidence, too.
"Are you going on journalistic business?" I asked.
"No, it"s business I"m undertaking for a friend," he explained. "But I hope to get something good for myself out of it in the end."
"Oh, I do hope you will," I replied. "I"m sure you deserve to."
"I"m sure I don"t," said he, laughing. "But I shall try hard for it, all the same. You know, you told me to be ambitious."
"I know I did," I answered.
A moment later he said that he must hurry off and attend to the tickets, and I had only time to glance through some papers the waiter brought me, with columns full of Mohunsleigh"s marriage, when he was back again with a cab.
While I read an account of the wedding, and gushing paragraphs about me, I wondered if there mightn"t be things not so flattering in the same papers to-morrow.
"If it got out that I had run away, would there be a scandal?" I asked Mr. Brett in the cab. But he said that I needn"t be afraid; Mrs.
Stuyvesant-Knox was much too clever a woman to let anything she wouldn"t like get into the papers. She would send a paragraph to the effect that Lady Betty Bulkeley had been suddenly called home or had gone to visit other friends, or something of that sort. "But she will almost certainly cable to your people," he went on.
"Yes, but she won"t know where I"ve gone till afterwards, and anyhow, they can"t object to my being with Miss Woodburn," I answered him.
"You don"t think they"ll send for you to come home at once?"
I shook my head. "They won"t do that. They don"t want--that is, they think it wiser for me to stop on this side longer, now I"m here."
"I"m very glad of that," said Mr. Brett and he looked at me as if he really were glad, in spite of all the trouble I"d made him.
XIV
ABOUT THE TWENTIETH CENTURY LIMITED AND CHICAGO
The train for Chicago is perfectly wonderful, not like an ordinary, human kind of train at all. I"m in it now, and have been writing everything about the wedding and what happened afterwards, because I have a whole room of my own, and I"m much too excited to sleep.
There"s a bed in the room--not a hard shelf, but quite a wide, springy bed, with electric light close by the pillow; there are walls made of mirrors; there"s a sofa, a washhand-stand, and a palm-leaf fan; there"s netting in the window so that you can have it open without getting black; and there would be plenty of places to put my things if I"d brought three times as many. But better than anything else, there"s a soft, sweet, brown maid who goes with the room and isn"t an extra.
She"s the same brown as the porters, only paler than most, and the train wasn"t ten minutes outside New York when she appeared, to ask what she could do for me. There was nothing at the time, but she didn"t go away. She looked about for a minute, then pouncing on the palm leaf she began to fan me, slowly and gracefully, not holding on by anything, though the train was hurling itself through the State of New York apparently with the speed in which light travels round the world. (I never could remember how many times it can do the whole distance in a minute, but whatever it is, it has the air of being a boast.)
I thanked her a good deal, and said I wouldn"t trouble her any more, though it was very nice; but she kept straight on, like a mechanical doll, until I felt that in common humanity I ought to fan her. If anyone in England, especially anyone in her position (only there aren"t such positions) had asked half as many questions as she did, people would be extremely surprised and offended; but I would defy even the crossest person to be offended with this soft brown thing. It would have been too ungrateful not to answer her nicely when she was keeping my flies at bay with extreme inconvenience to herself, so I admitted that I was English, told what county I came from, how long I"d been in the States, where I"d been staying, how I liked America, where I was going now, and ended up by satisfying her as to my age and whether I had a mother. I also stated that I was neither married nor engaged. The dear creature rewarded me for all this by telling me a great deal about herself and her relatives, and a church picnic she attended last Sunday, where there were more young gentlemen than ladies--"which always makes parties so nice for us girls."