Love, the Fiddler Part 4

The count would turn a neat phrase even if he were to blow his brains out the next minute. They think they are splendidly cool, but it only means that they have exhausted all their powers of sensation. You are delightfully primitive and unspoiled, and then I suppose it is natural to like a fellow-countryman best, isn't it? Now, honest--have you found any girls over here you like as well as me?"

"I haven't tried to find any," said Frank.

"You aren't a bit disillusioned, are you?" she said. "You simply shut your eyes and go it blind. A woman likes that in a man. It's what love ought to be. It's silly of me to throw it away."

"Perhaps it is, Florence," he said. "Who knows but what some day you may regret it?"

"I often think of that," she returned. "I am afraid all the good part of me loves you, and all the bad loves the counts and dukes and earls, you know. And the good is almost drowned in all the rest, like vegetables in vegetable soup."

She excelled in giving such little dampers to sentiment, and laughed heartily at Frank's discomfiture.

"You can be awfully cruel," he said. "I wonder you can be so beautiful when you can think such things and say them. You treat hearts like toys and laugh when you break them."

"Well, there's one thing, Frank," she said seriously. "I have never pretended to you or tried to appear better than I am; and you are the only man I can say that to and not lie!"

IV

The comte de Souvary, towards whom Florence betrayed an inclination that seemed at times to deserve a warmer word, was a French gentleman nearing forty. He was a man of distinguished appearance, with all the gaiety, grace, and charm that, in spite our popular impression to the contrary, are not seldom found amongst the n.o.bles of his country. His undoubted wealth and position redeemed his suit from any appearance of being inspired by a mercenary motive. Indeed, he was accustomed himself to be pursued, and Florence and he recognised in each other a fellowship of persecution.

"We are ze Pale Faces," he would say, "and ze ozzers zey are Indians closing in from every corner of ze Far Vest for our scalps!"

He was, in many ways, the most accomplished man that Florence had ever known. He was a violinist, a singer, a poet, and yet these were but a part of his various gifts; for in everything out of doors he was no less a master and took the first place as though by right. He was the embodiment of everything daring and manly; it seemed natural for him to excel; he simply did not know what fear was. He was always ready to smile and turn a little joke, whether speeding in his automobile at a breakneck pace or ballooning above the clouds in search of what was to him the breath of life: "ze sensation." He could never see a new form of "ze sensation"

without running for it like a child for a new toy. His whole att.i.tude towards the world was that of a furious curiosity. He could not bear to leave it, he said, until all he had learned how all the wheels went round. He had stood on the Matterhorn. He had driven the Sud express. He had exhausted lions and tigers. In moods of depression he would threaten to follow Andree to the pole and figure out his plans on the back of an envelope.

"Magnificent!" he would cry, growing instantly cheerful at the prospect. "Think of ze sensation!"

He spoke English fluently, though shaky on the TH and the W, and it was first hand and not mentally translated. His p.r.o.nunciation of Far West, two words that were constantly on his lips, was an endless entertainment to Florence, and out of a sense of humour she forebore to correct him. It was typical, indeed, of his ignorance of everything American. Europe was at his fingers' ends; there was not a country in it he was not familiar with; intimately familiar, knowing much of what went on behind the scenes, and the lives and characters of the men, and not less the women, who shaped national policies and held the steering-wheels of state.

"Muravief would never do that," he would say. "He is const.i.tutionally inert, and his imagination has carried him through too many unfought wars for him to throw down the gage now.

He smokes cigarettes and dreams of endless peace. I had many talks with him last year and found him impatient of any subject but the redemption of the paper rouble!"

But his mind had never crossed the Atlantic Ocean. He still thought that the Civil War had been between North and South America. To him the United States was a vague region peopled with miners, pork-packers, and Indians; a jumble of factories, forests, and red-shirted men digging for gold, all of it fantastically seen through the medium of Buffalo Bill's show. It was a constant wonder to him that such conditions had been able to produce a woman like Florence Fenacre.

"You are the flower of ze prairie," he would say, "an atavism of type, harking back a dozen generations to aristocratic progenitors, having nothing in common with the Pathfinder your Papa!"

"He wasn't a pathfinder," said Florence, "he was a whaler captain."

But this to the count seemed only the more remarkable. He raised the fabric of a fresh romance on the instant, especially (on Florence telling him more about her forebears) when he began to mix up the Pilgrim Fathers, the Revolutionary War, and the Alabama in one brisk panorama of his ever dear "Far Vest"!

Florence's acquaintance with the comte de Souvary went back to Majorca, where, in the course of one of those sudden blows, so common on the Mediterranean, their respective yachts had fled for shelter. His own was a large auxiliary schooner called the Paquita, a lofty, showy vessel which he sailed himself with his usual courage and audacity. He had the reputation of scaring his unhappy guests--when any were bold enough to accept his invitations--to within the proverbial inch of their lives; and they usually changed "ze sensation" for the nearest mail-boat home. Florence and he had struck up a warm friendship from the start, and for the whole summer their vessels were inseparable, sailing everywhere in company and anchoring side by side.

The count had a way of courtship peculiarly his own. He made it apparent from the first how deeply he had been stirred by Florence's beauty and how ready he was to offer her his hand; but as a matter of fact he never did so in set terms, and treated her more as a comrade than a divinity. He talked of his own devotion to her as something detached and impersonal, willing as much as she to laugh over it and treat it lightly. He was never jealous, never exacting, and seemed to be as happy to share her with others as when he had her all alone in one of their tete-a-tetes. What he coveted most of all was her intimacy, her confidence, the frank expression of her own true self; and in this exchange he was willing to give as much as he received and often more. Sometimes she was piqued at his apparent indifference--at his lack of any stronger feeling for her--seeming to detect in him something of her own insouciance and coldness.

"You really don't care for me a bit," she said once. "I am only another form of 'ze sensation'--like going up in a balloon or riding on the cow-catcher."

"I keep myself well in hand," he returned. "I am not approaching the terrible age of forty without knowing a little at least about women and their ways."

"A little!" she exclaimed ironically. "You know enough to write a book!"

"Zat book has taught me to go very slow," he said. "Were I in my young manhood I'd come zoop, like that, and carry you off in ze Far Vest style. But I can never hope to be that again with any woman; my decreasing hair forbids, if nozing else--but my way is to make myself indispensable--ze old dog, ze old standby, as you Americans say--the good old harbour to which you will come at last when tired of ze storms outside!"

"Your humility is a new trait," said Florence.

"It's none ze less real because it is often hid," said the count.

"I watch you very closely, more closely than perhaps you even think. You have all the heartlessness of youth and health and beauty. I would be wrong to put my one little piece of money on the table and lose all; and so I save and save, and play ze only game that offers me the least chance--ze waiting game!"

"I believe that's true," said Florence.

"Were I to act ze distracted lover, you would laugh in my face,"

he went on earnestly. "Were I to propose and be refused, my pride would not let me--my instinct as gentleman would not let me--go trailing after you with my long face. The idyll would be over. I would go!"

"There are times when I think a heap of you," said Florence encouragingly.

"Oh, I know so well how it would be," he continued. "A week of doubt--of fever; a rain of little notes; and then with your good clear honest Far Vest sense you would say: No, mon cher, it is eempossible!"

"Yes, I suppose I would," said Florence.

"I would rather be your friend all my life," said the count, "than to be merely one of the rejected. I have no ambition to place my name on that already great list. I have never yet asked a woman to marry me, and when I do I care not for the expectation of being refused!"

"You are like all Europeans," said Florence, "you believe in a sure thing."

"My heart is not on my sleeve," he returned, "and I value it too highly to lose it without compensation."

"It is interesting to hear all your views," said Florence. "I am sure I appreciate the compliment highly. It's a new idea, this of the wolf making a confidant of the lamb."

"Oh, my dear!" he broke out, "I am only a poor devil holding back from committing a great stupidity."

"Is that how you describe marrying me?" she said lightly.

"Ze day will come," he said, disregarding her question, "I think it will--I hope it will--when you will say to me: My dear fellow, I am tired of all this fict.i.tious gaiety; of all this rush and bustle and flirtation; of this life of fever and emptiness. I long for peace and do not know where to find it. I am like a piece of music to whom one waits in vain for the return to the keynote.

Tell me where to find it or else I die!"

"Rather forward of me to say all that, Count," observed the girl.

"But suppose I did--what then?"

The count opened wide his arms.

"I would answer: here!" he said.

V

Thus the bright days pa.s.sed, amid animating scenes, with memories of sky and cloud and n.o.ble headlands and stately, beautiful ships.

Like two ocean sweethearts the Minnehaha and the Paquita took their restless way together, side by side in port, inseparable at sea. At night the one lit the other's road with a string of ruby lanterns and kept the pair in company across the dark and silent water. Their respective crews, not behindhand in this splendid camaraderie of ships, fraternised in wine-shops and strolled through the crooked foreign streets arm in arm. Breton and American, red cap and blue, sixty of the one and eighty of the other--they were brothers all and cemented their friendship in blood and gunpowder, in tattooed names, flags and mottoes, after the time-honoured and artless manner of the sea.

In the drama of life it is often the least important actors who are happiest, and the stars themselves are not always to be the most envied. Florence, torn between her ambition and her love, knew what it was to toss all night on her sleepless bed and wet the pillow with her tears. De Souvary, who found himself every day deeper in the toils of his ravishing American, chafed and struggled with unavailing pangs; and as for Frank Rignold, he endured long periods of black depression as he watched from afar the steady progress of his rival's suit; and his moody face grew moodier and exasperation rose within him to the rebellion point.

By September the two yachts were lying in Cowes, and already there was some talk of winter plans and a possible voyage to India. The count was enthusiastic about the project, as he was about anything that could keep him and Florence together, and he had ordered a stack of books and spent hours at a time with the mistress of the Minnehaha reading over Indian Ocean directories and plotting imaginary courses on the chart.

With the prospect of so extended a trip before him, Frank found much to be done in the engine-room, for their suggested cruise would be likely to carry them far out of the beaten track, and he had to be prepared for all contingencies. A marine engine requires to be perpetually tinkered, and an engineer's duty is not only to run it, but to make good the little defects and breakdowns that are constantly occurring. Frank was a daily visitor at the local machine-shop, and his business engagements with Mr. Derwent, the proprietor, led insensibly to others of the social kind.