Stories by English Authors: The Sea Part 11

Melissa came forward tentatively, a dainty blush half rising on her rather pale and delicate little cheek. "Mrs. Hanc.o.c.k?" she said, in an inquiring tone, with just the faintest suspicion of an American accent in her musical, small voice. Lucy took her hand cordially.

"I was sure it was you, ma'am," Melissa went on, with pretty confidence, looking up into her face, "because Mrs. Wade told me you'd be as kind to me as a mother; and the moment I saw you I just said to myself, 'That MUST be Mrs. Hanc.o.c.k; she's so sweetly motherly.'

How good of you to burden yourself with a stranger like me! I hope, indeed, I won't be too much trouble."

That was the beginning. I may as well say, first as last, we were all of us taken by storm "right away" by Melissa. Lucy herself struck her flag unconditionally before a single shot was fired; and Bernard and I, hard hit at all points, surrendered at discretion.

She was the most charming little girl the human mind can conceive.

Our cold English language fails, in its roughness, to describe her.

She was pet.i.te, mignonne, graceful, fairy-like, yet with a touch of Yankee quaintness and a delicious espieglerie that made her absolutely unique in my experience of women. We had utterly lost our hearts to her before ever we reached Liverpool; and, strange to say, I believe the one of us whose heart was most completely gone was, if only you'll believe it, that calmly terrible Lucy.

Melissa's most winning characteristic, however, as it seemed to me, was her perfect frankness. As we whirled along on our way across England, she told us everything about herself, her family, her friends, her neighbours, and the population of Kansas City in general. Not obtrusively or egotistically,--of egotism Melissa would be wholly incapable,--but in a certain timid, confiding, half-childlike way, as of the lost little girl, that was absolutely captivating. "Oh no, ma'am," she said, in answer to one of Lucy's earliest questions; "I didn't come over alone. I think I'd be afraid to. I came with a whole squad of us who were doing Europe. A prominent lady in Kansas City took charge of the square lot. And I got as far as Rome with them, through Germany and Switzerland, and then my money wouldn't run to it any further; so I had to go back. Travelling comes high in Europe, what with hotels and fees and having to pay to get your baggage checked. And that's how I came to want an escort."

Bernard smiled good-naturedly. "Then you had only a fixed sum," he asked, "to make your European tour with?"

"That's so, sir," Melissa answered, looking up at him quizzically through those pretty gray spectacles. "I'd put away quite a little sum of my own to make this trip upon. It was my only chance of seeing Europe and improving myself a piece. I knew when I started I couldn't go all the round trip with the rest of my party; but I thought I'd set out with them, anyway, and go ahead as long as my funds held out; and then, when I was through, I'd turn about and come home again."

"But you put away the money yourself?" Lucy asked, with a little start of admiring surprise.

"Yes, ma'am," Melissa answered, sagely. "I know it. I saved it."

"From your allowance?" Lucy suggested, from the restricted horizon of her English point of view.

Melissa laughed a merry little laugh of amus.e.m.e.nt. "Oh no," she said; "from my salary."

"From your salary!" Bernard put in, looking down at her with an inquiring glance.

"Yes, sir; that's it," Melissa answered, all unabashed. "You see, for four years I was a clerk in the post-office." She p.r.o.nounced it "churk," but that's a detail.

"Oh, indeed!" Bernard echoed. He was burning to know how, I could see, but politeness forbade him to press Melissa on so delicate a point any further.

Melissa, however, herself supplied at once the missing information.

"My father was postmaster in our city," she said, simply, "under the last administration,--President Blanco's, you know,--and he made me one of his clerks, of course, when he'd gotten the place; and as long as the fun went on, I saved all my salary for a tour in Europe."

"And at the end of four years?" Lucy said.

"Our party went out," Melissa put in, confidentially. "So, when the trouble began, my father was dismissed, and I had just enough left to take me as far as Rome, as I told you."

I was obliged to explain parenthetically, to allay Lucy's wonderment, that in America the whole personnel of every local government office changes almost completely with each incoming President.

"That's so, sir," Melissa a.s.sented, with a wise little nod. "And as I didn't think it likely our folks would get in again in a hurry,--the country's had enough of us,--I just thought I'd make the best of my money when I'd got it."

"And you used it all up in giving yourself a holiday in Europe?"

Lucy exclaimed, half reproachfully. To her economic British mind such an expenditure of capital seemed horribly wasteful.

"Yes, ma'am," Melissa answered, all unconscious of the faint disapproval implied in Lucy's tone. "You see, I'd never been anywhere much away from Kansas City before; and I thought this was a special opportunity to go abroad and visit the picture-galleries and cathedrals of Europe, and enlarge my mind and get a little culture. To us a glimpse of Europe's an intellectual necessary."

"Oh, then you regarded your visit as largely educational?" Bernard put in, with increasing interest. Though he's a fellow and tutor of King's, I will readily admit that Bernard's personal tastes lie rather in the direction of rowing and foot-ball than of general culture; but still, the American girl's point of view decidedly attracted him by its novelty in a woman.

"That's so, sir," Melissa answered once more, in her accustomed affirmative. "I took it as a sort of university trip. I graduated in Europe. In America, of course, wherever you go, all you can see's everywhere just the same--purely new and American; the language, the manners, the type, don't vary. In Europe, you cross a frontier or a ribbon of sea, and everything's different. Now, on this trip of ours, we went first to Chester to glimpse a typical old English town--those rows, oh, how lovely! And then to Leamington for Warwick Castle and Kenilworth. Kenilworth's just glorious--isn't it?--with its mouldering red walls and its dark-green ivy, and the ghost of Amy Robsart walking up and down upon the close-shaven English gra.s.s-plots."

"I've heard it's very beautiful," Bernard admitted, gravely.

"What! you live so close, and you've never BEEN there!" Melissa exclaimed, in frank surprise.

Bernard allowed with a smile he had been so culpably negligent.

"And Stratford-on-Avon, too!" Melissa went on, enthusiastically, her black eyes beaming. "Isn't Stratford just charming! I don't care for the interminable Shakespeare nuisance, you know; that's all too new and made up; we could raise a Shakespeare house like that in Kansas City any day. But the church and the elms and the swans and the river! I made such a sweet little sketch of them all, so soft and peaceful. At least, the place itself was as sweet as a corner of heaven, and I tried as well as I could in my way to sketch it."

"I suppose it IS very pretty," Bernard replied, in a meditative tone.

Melissa started visibly. "What! have you never been there, either?"

she exclaimed, taken aback. "Well, that IS odd, now! You live in England, and have never run over to Stratford-on-Avon! Why, you do surprise me! But there! I suppose you English live in the midst of culture, as it were, and can get to it all right away at any time; so perhaps you don't think quite as much of it as we, who have to save up our money, perhaps for years, to get, for once in our lives, just a single pa.s.sing glimpse of it. You live at Cambridge, you see; you must be steeped in culture right down to the finger-ends."

Bernard modestly responded, twirling his manly moustache, that the river and the running-ground, he feared, were more in his way than art or architecture.

"And where else did you go besides England?" Lucy asked, really interested.

"Well, ma'am, from London we went across by Ostend to Bruges, where I studied the Memlings, and made a few little copies from them,"

Melissa answered, with her sunny smile. "It's such a quaint old place--Bruges; life seems to flow as stagnant as its own ca.n.a.ls.

Have you ever been there?"

"Oh, charming!" Lucy answered; "most delightful and quiet.

But--er--who are the Memlings? I don't quite recollect them."

Melissa gazed at her open-eyed. "The Memlings?" she said, slowly; "why, you've just missed the best thing at Bruges if you haven't seen them. They've such a naive charm of their own, so innocent and sympathetic. They're in the Hopital de St. Jean, you know, where Memling put them. And it's so delightful to see great pictures like those (though they're tiny little things to look at) in their native surroundings, exactly as they were first painted--the 'Cha.s.se de Ste. Ursule,' and all those other lovely things, so infantile in their simplicity, and yet so exquisitely graceful and pure and beautiful. I don't know as I saw anything in Europe to equal them for pathos in their own way--except, of course, the Fra Angelicos at San Marco in Florence."

"I don't think I've seen them," Lucy murmured, with an uncomfortable air. I could see it was just dawning upon her, in spite of her patronising, that this Yankee girl, with her imperfect command of the English tongue, knew a vast deal more about some things worth notice than she herself did. "And where did you go then, dear?"

"Oh, from Bruges we went on to Ghent," Melissa answered, leaning back, and looking as pretty as a picture herself in her sweet little travelling dress, "to see the great Van Eyck, the 'Adoration of the Lamb,' you know--that magnificent panel picture. And then we went to Brussels, where we had Dierick Bouts and all the later Flemings; and to Antwerp for Rubens and Vandyck and Quentin Matsys; and the Hague, after that, for Rembrandt and Paul Potter; and Amsterdam, in the end, for Van der Heist and Gerard Dow and the late Dutch painters. So, you see, we had quite an artistic tour; we followed up the development of Netherlandish art from beginning to end in historical order. It was just delightful."

"I went to Antwerp once," Bernard put in, somewhat sheepishly, still twirling his moustache; "but it was on my way to Switzerland, and I didn't see much, as far as I can recollect, except the cathedral and the quay and the hotel I was stopping at."

"Ah, that's all very well for YOU," Melissa answered, with a rather envious air. "You can see these things any day. But for us the chance comes only once in a lifetime, and we must make the most of it."

Well, in such converse as this we reached Liverpool in due time, and went next morning on board our steamer. We had a lovely pa.s.sage out, and, all the way, the more we saw of Melissa the more we liked her. To be sure, Lucy received a terrible shock the third day out, when she asked Melissa what she meant to do when she returned to Kansas City. "You won't go into the post-office again, I suppose, dear?" she said, kindly, for we had got by that time on most friendly terms with our little Melissa.

"I guess not," Melissa answered. "No such luck any more. I'll have to go back again to the store as usual."

"The store!" Lucy repeated, bewildered. "I--I don't quite understand you."

"Well, the shop, I presume you'd call it," Melissa answered, smiling.

"My father's gotten a book-store in Kansas City, and before I went into the post-office I helped him at the counter; in fact, I was his saleswoman."

"I a.s.sure you, Vernon," Lucy remarked, in our berth that night, "if an Englishwoman had said it to me, I'd have been obliged to apologise to her for having forced her to confess it, and I don't know what way I should ever have looked to hide my face while she was talking about it. But with Melissa it's all so different somehow.

She spoke as if it was the most natural thing on earth for her father to keep a shop, and she didn't seem the least little bit in the world ashamed of it, either."

"Why should she?" I answered, with my masculine bluntness. But that was perhaps a trifle too advanced for Lucy. Melissa was exercising a widening influence on my wife's point of view with astonishing rapidity; but still, a perfect lady must always draw a line somewhere.

All the way across, indeed, Melissa's lively talk was a constant delight and pleasure to every one of us. She was so taking,--that girl,--so confidential, so friendly. We really loved her. Then her quaint little Americanisms were as pretty as herself--not only her "Yes, sirs," and her "No, ma'ams," her "I guess" and "That's so," but her fresh Western ideas, and her infinite play of fancy in the queen's English. She turned it as a potter turns his clay.

In Britain our mother tongue has crystallised long since into set forms and phrases. In America it has the plasticity of youth; it is fertile in novelty--nay, even in surprises. And Melissa knew how to twist it deftly into unexpected quips and incongruous conjunctions.

Her talk ran on like a limpid brook, with a musical ripple playing ever on the surface. As for Bernard, he helped her about the ship like a brother, as she moved lightly around, with her sylph-like little form, among the ropes and capstans. Melissa liked to be helped, she said; she didn't believe one bit in woman's rights; no, indeed; she was a great deal too fond of being taken care of for that. And who wouldn't take care of her,--that delicate little thing,--like some choice small masterpiece of cunning workmanship?