Blue Aloes Part 31

"She is very young," she faltered at length, and was unwise enough to add, "and pretty."

These being two heinous offences in the eyes of Mrs. Stanislaw, she proceeded at once to hang, draw, and quarter the criminal. But her voice was tenderer than before.

"Yes, isn't it a pity? . . . and so foolishly indiscreet. Do you know, they tell me that she is spoken of by all the men on the ship as the April Fool, a parody on her name, which is April Poole."

Pleasant hearing for her listener, who flushed scarlet.

"Can you imagine any one who has a living to earn being so unwise? I find it difficult to believe she is going to the Cape to teach someone's children. I only hope that the story of her indiscretions will not precede her, poor girl."

April was dumb. Mrs. Stanislaw came to the conclusion that she was dull and rather lacking in feminine sweetness, and after a while went away to bargain with a native for some embroideries. She would have been delighted to know what a poisoned barb she had implanted and left quivering in the side of the so-called Lady Diana.

Beneath the folded V of filmy lace on April's bosom her heart was beating pa.s.sionately, and the rose-wreathed hat fortunately drooped enough to hide the tears of mortification that filled her eyes. _Her_ name to be parodied and bandied about the ship on men's lips! A poor thing, but her own! One that for all her ups and downs she had striven and contrived to keep untarnished. How dared Diana Vernilands do this thing to her? What foolishness had she herself been guilty of to put it in another's power to thus injure her?

Her eyes were so blurred with tears that she did not notice at what particular moment another occupant had usurped the chair of Major Sarle.

It was a man this time. April hastily seized a book and began to read.

He must have stolen up with the silence of a tiger, and he reminded her of tigers somehow, though she could not quite tell why, except that he was curiously powerful and graceful looking. His hair, which grew in a thick short mat, was strongly sprinkled with silver, but his skin, though brick-red, was unlined. She judged him to be a sailor-man, for he had the clear and innocent eye of one who has looked long on great s.p.a.ces.

These were her conclusions, made while diligently reading her book. He, too, was busy reading in the same fashion, but, manlike, was slower in his deductions. By the time she had finished with his hair he had not got much further than her charming ankles. Certainly, he had ascertained that she was a pretty woman before he took possession of his chair, but that was merely instinct, the fulfilling of a human law. Detail, like destruction, was to come after. He lingered over the first detail. They were such very pretty ankles. It did not seem right that they should be resting on the hard deck instead of on a canvas foot-rest. He remembered that his own chair had a foot-rest, but it was in his cabin.

Should he go and fetch it? Dared he offer it to her? He was on hail-fellow-well-met terms with lions and tigers, as April had curiously divined, but having enjoyed fewer encounters with women, was slightly shy of them. However, being naturally courageous, he might presently have been observed emerging from a deck cabin with a canvas foot-rest in his hand, and it was only the natural sequence of events that while attempting to hitch it on his chair his guileless gaze should discover that April's feet were without support. He looked so shy and kind for such a sun-bitten, weather-hardened creature, that she had no heart to refuse the friendly offer, even had she felt the inclination. Besides, the advances made to her in the role of Lady Diana were very different to those she had so often been obliged to repulse as April Poole.

She felt, too, that here was a man not trying to make friends with any ulterior motive, but just because on this pleasant, delightful morning it was pleasant and delightful to talk to someone and share the pleasure.

Vereker Sarle had made the voyage to South Africa so many times that he had lost count of them, and knew Madeira so well that it bored him to go ash.o.r.e there any more.

"We have the best of it from here, in spite of a little coal dust," he told her, for with a great deal of rattling, banging, and singing on the lower decks the ship was taking on her voyage ration of coal. "Still, you should go ash.o.r.e and see it some time. It is worth a visit for the sake of the gardens, the breakfast of fresh fish at the hotel on the hilltop, and the b.u.mping rush down again in the man-drawn sleighs."

He took it for granted that she was a woman travelling for pleasure and likely to be back this way soon. While she gave a little inward sigh, wondering whether she would ever have the money to return to England, or if it would be her fate to live in exile for ever.

Sarle presented her with one of his simple maxims of life.

"All good citizens of the world should do everything once and once only,"

he averred, with his frank and disarming smile. "If we stuck to that rule life would never go stale on us."

"I'm afraid it would hardly apply to everyday life and all the weary things we have to do over and over again."

"I was thinking of the big things," he said slowly. "Like potting your first elephant or falling in love. I don't know what equivalents women have for these things."

April could not forbear a little ripple of laughter.

"I believe they fall in love, too, sometimes," she said. But Sarle, with his sea-blue gaze on her, answered gravely:

"I know very little about them."

It was hard to decide whether he was an expert flirt with new methods, or really and truly a man with a heart as guileless as his eyes. But, at any rate, he was amusing, and April forgot her tears and anger completely in the pleasant hour they spent together until the pa.s.sengers, recalled by the ship's siren, began to return from ash.o.r.e.

Diana and her bodyguard were the last to arrive, the men laden with fruit, flowers, and numerous parcels, and the girl more openly careless of the rest of the world than before. They took possession of a group of chairs that did not belong to them, and scattered their possessions upon the deck. Pomegranates, nectarines, and bananas began to roll in every direction, to the inconvenience of the pa.s.sers-by, but what did that matter? Diana lit a cigarette, declaring that it was too hot for words, and that she _must_ have a John Collins. They all ordered John Collinses. The handsome man fanned Diana with a large palm leaf, and she looked at him with languorous eyes.

April grew hot inside her skin. Conversation interrupted by the noise around them, both she and Sarle had immersed themselves once more in their books. But April, at least, was profoundly conscious of everything said and done by the neighbouring group, and she longed to take Diana Vernilands by the shoulders and give her a sound shaking. As for the three men who were encouraging and abetting the little minx, it would have been a pleasure to push them separately and singly overboard. She did not know how she could have managed to sit so still, except that Sarle was there reading by her side, silent and calm, apparently noticing nothing extraordinary in the behaviour of their neighbours.

A steward brought the John Collinses--four tall gla.s.ses of pale liquid and ice, some stuff red as blood floating on the top. No sooner had Diana tasted hers than she set up a loud wail that there was not enough Angostura in it. One of the men hurried away to have this grave defect remedied, and the moment he was out of sight Diana took up his as yet untouched gla.s.s, and with two long straws between her lips, skilfully sucked all the red stuff from the top of the drink and replaced the gla.s.s. Above the delighted laughter of her companions, April heard a woman's scornful remark further down the deck:

"It is only the April Fool!"

That was the little more that proved too much. The real April closed her book sharply and left her chair. Walking to the deck-rail, she stood leaning over, thinking hard, trying to decide how best to get hold of Diana Vernilands and tell her firmly that this folly must stop at once.

She felt very miserable. Madeira, fading in the wake of the ship, with already the blue haze of distance blurring its outlines, seemed to her like the dream she had lived in these last few days . . . the golden dream in which everyone liked and trusted her, and her beauty was a pleasure instead of a burden. Tomorrow she must return to her destiny of shabby clothes and second places, with the added bitterness of knowing her name made the byword of the ship! That was something she could never live down, if the voyage lasted a year. There would merely be two April fools instead of one, and she the wretched masquerader in borrowed plumes not the least of them! Slowly she turned away from the rail and went to her cabin. A line sent by a steward brought Diana there at the double-quick. She burst into the cabin, the open note in her hand.

"What do you mean? Is this the way you keep faith? . . . Trying to slither out of our bargain before it is a week old!"

"It is you who have broken faith," retorted April indignantly. "Surely it was in the bargain that you should behave with common decency and not make my name notorious!"

"Rot!" was the airy answer. "A few old p.u.s.s.y cats with their fur brushed the wrong way, that's all. Who's going to mind what they say?"

"Do you realize that you are known from one end of the ship to the other as the April Fool?"

Diana burst out laughing.

"I know who started that . . . the poisonous asp I share my cabin with.

Just because I have seen her putting on her transformation, and know how many kinds of paints she uses to build up her face! If it had been _you_ it would have been just the same. You'd have been the April Fool instead, that's all. You ought to be jolly grateful, instead of bullying me."

She sat down on the lounge, smiling and sparkling, and took out a cigarette. April, in whom laughter was always near the surface, could have smiled herself had she not been nearer weeping. After all, Diana's pranks and antics were in no way vicious, but seemed merely the result of the lifelong drastic restraint hitherto exercised over her. Her vitality was breaking out like a fire that has been too long covered up. But there was no knowing where she would stop, and what would not be consumed in the merry blaze.

"Well, I'm _not_ grateful," she said firmly, "and if you want to be talked about in future, it will have to be under your own name."

"Oh, April!" Diana's jauntiness left her instantly. "I beg of you, _don't_ be unkind. I am having such a topping time. I've never been so happy in my life. If you only knew how dull I've been with old Aunt Grizel always hounding me to death. Don't go and spoil my first good time."

"It is you who are spoiling it. You forget that I have to earn my living and am dependent on the world's good opinion. Where shall I be at the end of the voyage with the frivolous reputation you are building up for me?"

"I won't do it any more. I'll be so good. You'll see how I'll change from now on."

"The mischief is already done, unfortunately."

"All the same, we can't possibly change now," pleaded Diana. "What good will it do us? . . . and you will get the worst of it, my dear. The world is a bundle of sn.o.bs, and the people on the ship thoroughly represent it. They will soon forgive me, but your crime will be unpardonable. They will be simply furious with you for taking them in."

This was the tongue of truth, as April knew well. She looked at the other girl ruefully.

"How can I trust you any longer? I saw you with those men on deck . . .

playing the fool . . . making yourself cheap. Oh, Diana, how can you? . . . under my name or any other, you are still a lady with certain rules to observe."

Diana flushed.

"You don't understand . . . I can't explain to you what it means to me to break loose from convention for a little while . . . it's something in my blood that has to come out. But, indeed, April, I swear to you if you will only go on I will behave. I really will. I can't help what is past, but there shall be nothing fresh for them to carp at in the future, anyhow. Do be a sport and consent, won't you?"

In the end, by pleading, beguiling, and piling promise on promise, she got her way, and thereafter the game went on--with a difference. They still called her the April Fool, because names like that stick; but as far as could be seen, she committed no fresh escapades to deserve the t.i.tle. Yet the real April Poole sometimes wondered if the last phase of this folly was not worse than the first. She could not in justice deny that Diana was much quieter and more orderly, but it seemed a pity that her quietness should take the form of sitting for long hours at a time in rapt silence with a certain extremely handsome man. This was Captain the Hon. Geoffrey Bellew, on his way to South Africa as attache to a Governor somewhere in the interior. He it was with whom Diana had been on such happy terms the day of landing at Madeira. The two other men had been cast forth like Gadarene swine. Bellew and Diana were sufficient unto themselves. Eternally together, sometimes they walked the deck, or threw quoits, or played two-handed card games; but ever they avoided large companionable games, and always they sought the dusky corner in which to sit undisturbed, gazing into each other's eyes. Strictly speaking, there was nothing to cavil at in this. Numbers of other couples were doing the same. These little games of two and two go forward all the time on voyages to the Cape (especially nearing the Equator), and are the joy of the genial-hearted. Even those who have no little games of their own are wont to look on sympathetically, or, better still, to turn away the understanding eye. The long, lazy, somnolent days and the magic nights, star-spangled above and lit with phosph.o.r.escent seas below, lend themselves to the dangerous kind of flirtation that says little and looks much, and if there is any place in the world where Cupid is rampant and "Psyche may meet unblamed her Eros," it is on the deck of a liner in the tropics.

But either Diana was one of those unfortunate girls who cannot glance over the garden wall without being accused of stealing peaches, or else she had too thoroughly got people's backs up during the first week at sea, for everyone looked cold-eyed at her romance and called it unromantic names. There were continual little undercurrents of gossip going on about her beneath the otherwise pleasant surface of everyday life. April did not talk gossip nor listen to it, but she was vaguely aware of it. Except for this, she would have been the happiest girl in the world, and, indeed, she did not allow it to bother her too much, having made up her mind to cast care to the winds and enjoy herself while the sun shone. Destruction might come after--at Cape Town, perhaps, but if it did, _tant pis_!

Something of Diana's recklessness entered into her, only that it did not take the form of outraging the convenances, but just of enjoying life to the full with the permission and approval of the world. She loved the summer seas, and each blue and golden hour seemed all too short for the pleasure to be stuffed into it.

Everyone was delightful to her. Gone were the days when all women's hands were against her and her hand against all men. When she had time to think about it, she fully recognized that most of the admiration and kindness tendered to her by the other pa.s.sengers was entirely worthless, and merely the result of sn.o.bbery.