He plunged down on his knees beside her, as she buried her face in her hands and began to sob.
"My little girl! d.a.m.n that man! My dear little girl! The cad! The devil! My own darling little girl! I"ll thrash him within an inch of his life!"
The clock on the mantelpiece ticked away the minutes. Jill got up.
Her face was wet and quivering, but her mouth had set in a brave line.
"Jill, dear!"
She let his hand close over hers.
"Everything"s happening all at once this afternoon, Uncle Chris, isn"t it!" She smiled a twisted smile. "You look so funny! Your hair"s all rumpled, and your gla.s.ses are over on one side!"
Uncle Chris breathed heavily through his nose.
"When I meet that man ..." he began portentously.
"Oh, what"s the good of bothering! It"s not worth it! Nothing"s worth it!" Jill stopped, and faced him, her hands clenched. "Let"s get away! Let"s get right away! I want to get right away, Uncle Chris!
Take me away! Anywhere! Take me to America with you! I must get away!"
Uncle Chris raised his right hand, and shook it. His reading-gla.s.ses, hanging from his left ear, bobbed drunkenly.
"We"ll sail by the next boat! The very next boat, dammit! I"ll take care of you, dear. I"ve been a blackguard to you, my little girl.
I"ve robbed you, and swindled you. But I"ll make up for it, by George! I"ll make up for it! I"ll give you a new home, as good as this, if I die for it. There"s nothing I won"t do! Nothing! By Jove!"
shouted Uncle Chris, raising his voice in a red-hot frenzy of emotion, "I"ll work! Yes, by Gad, if it comes right down to it, I"ll work!"
He brought his fist down with a crash on the table where Derek"s flowers stood in their bowl. The bowl leaped in the air and tumbled over, scattering the flowers on the floor.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1.
In the lives of each one of us, as we look back and review them in retrospect, there are certain desert wastes from which memory winces like some tired traveller faced with a dreary stretch of road. Even from the security of later happiness we cannot contemplate them without a shudder. Time robs our sorrows of their sharp vividness, but the horror of those blank, gray days never wholly pa.s.ses. It remains for ever at the back of our consciousness to remind us that, though we may have struggled through it to the heights, there is an abyss. We may dwell, like the Pilgrim, on the Delectable Mountains, but we never forget the Slough of Despond. Years afterwards, Jill could not bring herself to think of that brief but age-long period which lay between the evening when she read Derek"s letter and the morning when, with the wet sea-wind in her face and the cry of the wheeling sea-gulls in her ears, she stood on the deck of the liner that was taking her to the land where she could begin a new life. It brooded behind her like a great, dank cloud, shutting out the sunshine.
The conditions of modern life are singularly inimical to swift and dramatic action when we wish to escape from surroundings that have become intolerable. In the old days, your hero would leap on his charger and ride out into the sunset. Now, he is compelled to remain for a week or so to settle his affairs,--especially if he is an Uncle Chris--and has got those affairs into such a tangle that hardened lawyers knit their brows at the sight of them. It took one of the most competent firms in the metropolis four days to produce some sort of order in the confusion resulting from Major Selby"s financial operations; and during those days Jill existed in a state of being which could be defined as living only in that she breathed and ate and comported herself outwardly like a girl and not a ghost.
Boards announcing that the house was for sale appeared against the railings through which Jane the parlormaid conducted her daily conversations with the tradesmen. Strangers roamed the rooms eyeing and appraising the furniture. Uncle Chris, on whom disaster had had a quickening and vivifying effect, was everywhere at once, an impressive figure of energy. One may be wronging Uncle Chris, but to the eye of the casual observer he seemed in these days of trial to be having the time of his life.
Jill varied the monotony of sitting in her room--which was the only place in the house where one might be sure of not encountering a furniture-broker"s man with a note-book and pencil--by taking long walks. She avoided as far as possible the small area which had once made up the whole of London for her, but even so she was not always successful in escaping from old acquaintances. Once, cutting through Lennox Gardens on her way to that vast, desolate King"s Road which stretches its length out into regions unknown to those whose London is the West End, she happened upon Freddie Rooke, who had been paying a call in his best hat and a pair of white spats which would have cut his friend Henry to the quick. It was not an enjoyable meeting.
Freddie, keenly alive to the awkwardness of the situation, was scarlet and incoherent; and Jill, who desired nothing less than to talk with one so intimately connected in her mind with all that she had lost, was scarcely more collected. They parted without regret.
The only satisfaction that came to Jill from the encounter was the knowledge that Derek was still out of town. He had wired for his things, said Freddie and had retreated further north. Freddie, it seemed, had been informed of the broken engagement by Lady Underhill in an interview which appeared to have left a lasting impression on his mind. Of Jill"s monetary difficulties he had heard nothing.
After this meeting, Jill felt a slight diminution of the oppression which weighed upon her. She could not have borne to have come unexpectedly upon Derek, and, now that there was no danger of that, she found life a little easier. The days pa.s.sed somehow, and finally there came the morning when, accompanied by Uncle Chris--voluble and explanatory about the details of what he called "getting everything settled"--she rode in a taxi to take the train for Southampton. Her last impression of London was of rows upon rows of mean houses, of cats wandering in back-yards among groves of home-washed underclothing, and a smoky grayness which gave way, as the train raced on, to the clearer gray of the suburbs and the good green and brown of the open country.
Then the bustle and confusion of the liner; the calm monotony of the journey, when one came on deck each morning to find the vessel so manifestly in the same spot where it had been the morning before that it was impossible to realize how many hundred miles of ocean had really been placed behind one; and finally the Ambrose Channel lightship and the great bulk of New York rising into the sky like a city of fairyland, heartening yet sinister, at once a welcome and a menace.
"There you are, my dear!" said Uncle Chris indulgently, as though it were a toy he had made for her with his own hands. "New York!"
They were standing on the boat-deck, leaning over the rail. Jill caught her breath. For the first time since disaster had come upon her she was conscious of a rising of her spirits. It is impossible to behold the huge buildings which fringe the harbor of New York without a sense of expectancy and excitement. There had remained in Jill"s mind from childhood memories a vague picture of what she now saw, but it had been feeble and inadequate. The sight of this towering city seemed somehow to blot out everything that had gone before. The feeling of starting afresh was strong upon her.
Uncle Chris, the old traveller, was not emotionally affected. He smoked placidly and talked in a wholly earthy strain of grape-fruit and buckwheat cakes.
It was now, also for the first time, that Uncle Chris touched upon future prospects in a practical manner. On the voyage he had been eloquent but sketchy. With the land of promise within biscuit-throw and the tugs bustling about the great liner"s skirts like little dogs about their mistress, he descended to details.
"I shall get a room somewhere," said Uncle Chris, "and start looking about me. I wonder if the old Holland House is still there. I fancy I heard they"d pulled it down. Capital place. I had a steak there in the year ... But I expect they"ve pulled it down. But I shall find somewhere to go. I"ll write and tell you my address directly I"ve got one."
Jill removed her gaze from the sky-line with a start.
"Write to me?"
"Didn"t I tell you about that?" said Uncle Chris cheerily,--avoiding her eye, however, for he had realized all along that it might be a little bit awkward breaking the news. "I"ve arranged that you shall go and stay for the time being down at Brookport--on Long Island, you know--over in that direction--with your Uncle Elmer. Daresay you"ve forgotten you have an Uncle Elmer, eh?" he went on quickly, as Jill was about to speak. "Your father"s brother. Used to be in business, but retired some years ago and goes in for amateur farming. Corn and--and corn," said Uncle Chris. "All that sort of thing. You"ll like him. Capital chap! Never met him myself, but always heard," said Uncle Chris, who had never to his recollection heard any comments upon Mr Elmer Mariner whatever, "that he was a splendid fellow.
Directly we decided to sail, I cabled to him, and got an answer saying that he would be delighted to put you up. You"ll be quite happy there."
Jill listened to this programme with dismay. New York was calling to her, and Brookport held out no attractions at all. She looked down over the side at the tugs puffing their way through the broken blocks of ice that reminded her of a cocoanut candy familiar to her childhood.
"But I want to be with you," she protested.
"Impossible, my dear, for the present. I shall be very busy, very busy indeed for some weeks, until I have found my feet. Really, you would be in the way. He--er--travels the fastest who travels alone! I must be in a position to go anywhere and do anything at a moment"s notice. But always remember, my dear," said Uncle Chris, patting her shoulder affectionately, "that I shall be working for you. I have treated you very badly, but I intend to make up for it. I shall not forget that whatever money I may make will really belong to you." He looked at her benignly, like a monarch of finance who has ear-marked a million or two for the benefit of a deserving charity. "You shall have it all, Jill."
He had so much the air of having conferred a substantial benefit upon her that Jill felt obliged to thank him. Uncle Chris had always been able to make people grateful for the phantom gold which he showered upon them. He was as lavish a man with the money he was going to get next week as ever borrowed a five-pound note to see him through till Sat.u.r.day.
"What are you going to do, Uncle Chris?" asked Jill curiously. Apart from a nebulous idea that he intended to saunter through the city picking dollar-bills off the sidewalk, she had no inkling of his plans.
Uncle Chris toyed with his short mustache. He was not quite equal to a direct answer on the spur of the moment. He had a faith in his star. Something would turn up. Something always had turned up in the old days, and doubtless, with the march of civilization, opportunities had multiplied. Somewhere behind those tall buildings the G.o.ddess of Luck awaited him, her hands full of gifts, but precisely what those gifts would be he was not in a position to say.
"I shall--ah--how shall I put it--?"
"Look round?" suggested Jill.
"Precisely," said Uncle Chris gratefully. "Look round. I daresay you have noticed that I have gone out of my way during the voyage to make myself agreeable to our fellow-travellers? I had an object.
Acquaintances begun on shipboard will often ripen into useful friendships ash.o.r.e. When I was a young man I never neglected the opportunities which an ocean voyage affords. The offer of a book here, a steamer-rug there, a word of encouragement to a chatty bore in the smoke-room--these are small things, but they may lead to much.
One meets influential people on a liner. You wouldn"t think it to look at him, but that man with the eye-gla.s.ses and the thin nose I was talking to just now is one of the richest men in Milwaukee!"
"But it"s not much good having rich friends in Milwaukee when you are in New York!"
"Exactly. There you have put your finger on the very point I have been trying to make. It will probably be necessary for me to travel.
And for that I must be alone. I must be a mobile force. I should dearly like to keep you with me, but you can see for yourself that for the moment you would be an enc.u.mbrance. Later on, no doubt, when my affairs are more settled ..."
"Oh, I understand. I"m resigned. But, oh dear! it"s going to be very dull down at Brookport."
"Nonsense, nonsense! It"s a delightful spot."
"Have you been there?"
"No! But of course everybody knows Brookport! Healthy, invigorating ... Sure to be! The very name ... You"ll be as happy as the days are long!"
"And how long the days will be!"