Ragged Lady, Part 2

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RAGGED LADY

By William Dean Howells




Part 2



XV.

Mrs. Lander went to a hotel in New York where she had been in the habit
of staying with her husband, on their way South or North. The clerk knew
her, and shook hands with her across the register, and said she could
have her old rooms if she wanted them; the bell-boy who took up their
hand-baggage recalled himself to her; the elevator-boy welcomed her with
a smile of remembrance.

Since she was already up, from coming off the sleeping-car, she had no
excuse for not going to breakfast like other people; and she went with
Clementina to the dining-room, where the head-waiter, who found them
places, spoke with an outlandish accent, and the waiter who served them
had a parlance that seemed superficially English, but was inwardly
something else; there was even a touch in the cooking of the familiar
dishes, that needed translation for the girl's inexperienced palate. She
was finding a refuge in the strangeness of everything, when she was
startled by the sound of a familiar voice calling, "Clementina Claxon!
Well, I was sure all along it was you, and I determined I wouldn't stand
it another minute. Why, child, how you have changed! Why, I declare you
are quite a woman! When did you come? How pretty you are!" Mrs. Milray took
Clementina in her arms and kissed her in proof of her admiration before
the whole breakfast room. She was very nice to Mrs. Lander, too, who,
when Clementina introduced them, made haste to say that Clementina was
there on a visit with her. Mrs. Milray answered that she envied her such
a visitor as Miss Claxon, and protested that she should steal her away
for a visit to herself, if Mr. Milray was not so much in love with her
that it made her jealous. "Mr. Milray has to have his breakfast in his
room," she explained to Clementina. "He's not been so well, since he lost
his mother. Yes," she said, with decorous solemnity, "I'm still in
mourning for her," and Clementina saw that she was in a tempered black.
"She died last year, and now I'm taking Mr. Milray abroad to see if it
won't cheer him up a little. Are you going South for the winter?" she
inquired, politely, of Mrs. Lander. "I wish I was going," she said, when
Mrs. Lander guessed they should go, later on. "Well, you must come in and
see me all you can, Clementina; and I shall have the pleasure of calling
upon you," she added to Mrs. Lander with state that was lost in the
soubrette-like volatility of her flight from them the next moment.
"Goodness, I forgot all about Mr. Milray's breakfast!" She ran back to
the table she had left on the other side of the room.

"Who is that, Clementina?" asked Mrs. Lander, on their way to their
rooms. Clementina explained as well as she could, and Mrs. Lander summed
up her feeling in the verdict, "Well, she's a lady, if ever I saw a lady;
and you don't see many of 'em, nowadays."

The girl remembered how Mrs. Milray had once before seemed very fond of
her, and had afterwards forgotten the pretty promises and professions she
had made her. But she went with Mrs. Lander to see her, and she saw Mr.
Milray, too, for a little while. He seemed glad of their meeting, but
still depressed by the bereavement which Mrs. Milray supported almost
with gayety. When he left them she explained that he was a good deal away
from her, with his family, as she approved of his being, though she had
apparently no wish to join him in all the steps of the reconciliation
which the mother's death had brought about among them. Sometimes his
sisters came to the hotel to see her, but she amused herself perfectly
without them, and she gave much more of her leisure to Clementina and
Mrs. Lander.

She soon knew the whole history of the relation between them, and the
first time that Clementina found her alone with Mrs. Lander she could
have divined that Mrs. Lander had been telling her of the Fane affair,
even if Mrs. Milray had not at once called out to her, "I know all about
it; and I'll tell you what, Clementina, I'm going to take you over with
me and marry you to an English Duke. Mrs. Lander and I have been planning
it all out, and I'm going to send down to the steamer office, and engage
your passage. It's all settled!"

When she was gone, Mrs. Lander asked, "What do you s'pose your folks
would say to your goin' to Europe, anyway, Clementina?" as if the matter
had been already debated between them.

Clementina hesitated. "I should want to be su'a, Mrs. Milray really wanted
me to go ova with her."

"Why, didn't you hear her say so?" demanded Mrs. Lander.

"Yes," sighed Clementina. "Mrs. Lander, I think Mrs. Milray means what
she says, at the time, but she is one that seems to forget."

"She thinks the wo'ld of you," Mrs. Lander urged.

"She was very nice to me that summer at Middlemount. I guess maybe she
would like to have us go with her," the girl relented.

"I guess we'll wait and see," said Mrs. Lander. "I shouldn't want she
should change her mind when it was too late, as you say." They were both
silent for a time, and then Mrs. Lander resumed, "But I presume she
ha'n't got the only steams that's crossin'. What should you say about
goin' over on some otha steams? I been South a good many wintas, and I
should feel kind of lonesome goin' round to the places where I been with
Mr. Landa. I felt it since I been here in this hotel, some, and I can't
seem to want to go ova the same ground again, well, not right away."

Clementina said, "Why, of cou'se, Mrs. Landa."

"Should you be willin'," asked Mrs. Lander, after another little pause,
"if your folks was willin', to go ova the'a, to some of them European
countries, to spend the winta?"

"Oh yes, indeed!" said Clementina.

They discussed the matter in one of the full talks they both liked. At
the end Mrs. Lander said, "Well, I guess you betta write home, and ask
your motha whetha you can go, so't if we take the notion we can go any
time. Tell her to telegraph, if she'll let you, and do write all the ifs
and ands, so't she'll know just how to answa, without havin' to have you
write again."

That evening Mrs. Milray came to their table from where she had been
dining alone, and asked in banter: "Well, have you made up your minds to
go over with me?"

Mrs. Lander said bluntly, "We can't ha'dly believe you really want us to,
Mrs. Milray."

"I don't want you? Who put such an idea into your head! Oh, I know!" She
threatened Clementina with the door-key, which she was carrying in her
hand. "It was you, was it? What an artful, suspicious thing! What's got
into you, child? Do you hate me?" She did not give Clementina time to
protest. "Well, now, I can just tell you I do want you, and I'll be quite
heart-broken if you don't come."

"Well, she wrote to her friends this mohning," Mrs. Lander said, "but I
guess she won't git an answa in time for youa steamer, even if they do
let her go."

"Oh, yes she will," Mrs. Milray protested. "It's all right, now; you've
got to go, and there's no use trying to get out of it."

She came to them whenever she could find them in the dining-room, and she
knocked daily at their door till she knew that Clementina had heard from
home. The girl's mother wrote, without a punctuation mark in her letter,
but with a great deal of sense, that such a thing as her going to Europe
could not be settled by telegraph. She did not think it worth while to
report all the facts of a consultation with the rector which they had
held upon getting Clementina's request, and which had renewed all the
original question of her relations with Mrs. Lander in an intensified
form. He had disposed of this upon much the same terms as before; and
they had yielded more readily because the experiment had so far
succeeded. Clementina had apparently no complaint to make of Mrs. Lander;
she was eager to go, and the rector and his wife, who had been invited to
be of the council, were both of the opinion that a course of European
travel would be of the greatest advantage to the girl, if she wished to
fit herself for teaching. It was an opportunity that they must not think
of throwing away. If Mrs. Lander went to Florence, as it seemed from
Clementina's letter she thought of doing, the girl would pass a
delightful winter in study of one of the most interesting cities in the
world, and she would learn things which would enable her to do better for
herself when she came home than she could ever hope to do otherwise. She
might never marry, Mr. Richling suggested, and it was only right and fair
that she should be equipped with as much culture as possible for the
struggle of life; Mrs. Richling agreed with this rather vague theory, but
she was sure that Clementina would get married to greater advantage in
Florence than anywhere else. They neither of them really knew anything at
first hand about Florence; the rector's opinion was grounded on the
thought of the joy that a sojourn in Italy would have been to him; his
wife derived her hope of a Florentine marriage for Clementina from
several romances in which love and travel had gone hand in hand, to the
lasting credit of triumphant American girlhood.

The Claxons were not able to enter into their view of the case, but if
Mrs. Lander wanted to go to Florence instead of Florida they did not see
why Clementina should not go with her to one place as well as the other.
They were not without a sense of flattery from the fact that their
daughter was going to Europe; but they put that as far from them as they
could, the mother severely and the father ironically, as something too
silly, and they tried not to let it weigh with them in making up their
mind, but to consider only Clementina's best good, and not even to regard
her pleasure. Her mother put before her the most crucial questions she
could think of, in her letter, and then gave her full leave from her
father as well as herself to go if she wished.

Clementina had rather it had been too late to go with the Milrays, but
she felt bound to own her decision when she reached it; and Mrs. Milray,
whatever her real wish was, made it a point of honor to help get Mrs.
Lander berths on her steamer. It did not require much effort; there are
plenty of berths for the latest-comers on a winter passage, and
Clementina found herself the fellow passenger of Mrs. Milray.




XVI.

As soon as Mrs. Lander could make her way to her state-room, she got into
her berth, and began to take the different remedies for sea-sickness
which she had brought with her. Mrs. Milray said that was nice, and that
now she and Clementina could have a good time. But before it came to that
she had taken pity on a number of lonely young men whom she found on
board. She cheered them up by walking round the ship with them; but if
any of them continued dull in spite of this, she dropped him, and took
another; and before she had been two days out she had gone through with
nearly all the lonely young men on the list of cabin passengers. She
introduced some of them to Clementina, but at such times as she had them
in charge; and for the most part she left her to Milray. Once, as the
girl sat beside him in her steamer-chair, Mrs. Milray shed a wrap on his
knees in whirring by on the arm of one of her young men, with some
laughed and shouted charge about it.

"What did she say?" he asked Clementina, slanting the down-pulled brim of
his soft hat purblindly toward her.

She said she had not understood, and then Milray asked, "What sort of
person is that Boston youth of Mrs. Milray's? Is he a donkey or a lamb?"

Clementina said ingenuously, "Oh, she's walking with that English
gentleman now--that lo'd."

"Ah, yes," said Milray. "He's not very much to look at, I hear."

"Well, not very much," Clementina admitted; she did not like to talk
against people.

"Lords are sometimes disappointing, Clementina," Milray said, "but then,
so are other great men. I've seen politicians on our side who were
disappointing, and there are clergymen and gamblers who don't look it."
He laughed sadly. "That's the way people talk who are a little
disappointing themselves. I hope you don't expect too much of yourself,
Clementina?"

"I don't know what you mean," she said, stiffening with a suspicion that
he might be going to make fun of her.

He laughed more gayly. "Well, I mean we must hold the other fellows up to
their duty, or we can't do our own. We need their example. Charity may
begin at home, but duty certainly begins abroad." He went on, as if it
were a branch of the same inquiry, "Did you ever meet my sisters? They
came to the hotel in New York to see Mrs. Milray."

"Yes, I was in the room once when they came in."

"Did you like them?"

"Yes--I sca'cely spoke to them--I only stayed a moment."

"Would you like to see any more of the family?"

"Why, of cou'se!" Clementina was amused at his asking, but he seemed in
earnest.

"One of my sisters lives in Florence, and Mrs. Milray says you think of
going there, too."

"Mrs. Landa thought it would be a good place to spend the winter. Is it a
pleasant place?"

"Oh, delightful! Do you know much about Italy?"

"Not very much, I don't believe."

"Well, my sister has lived a good while in Florence. I should like to
give you a letter to her."

"Oh, thank you!" said Clementina.

Milray smiled at her spare acknowledgment, but inquired gravely: "What do
you expect to do in Florence?"

"Why, I presume, whateva Mrs. Landa wants to do."

"Do you think Mrs. Lander will want to go into society?"

This question had not occurred to Clementina. "I don't believe she will,"
she said, thoughtfully.

"Shall you?"

Clementina laughed, "Why, do you think," she ventured, "that society
would want me to?"

"Yes, I think it would, if you're as charming as you've tried to make me
believe. Oh, I don't mean, to your own knowledge; but some people have
ways of being charming without knowing it. If Mrs. Lander isn't going
into society, and there should be a way found for you to go, don't
refuse, will you?"

"I shall wait and see if I'm asked, fust."

"Yes, that will be best," said Milray. "But I shall give you a letter to
my sister. She and I used to be famous cronies, and we went to a great
many parties together when we were young people. We thought the world was
a fine thing, then. But it changes."

He fell into a muse, and they were both sitting quite silent when Mrs.
Milray came round the corner of the music room in the course of her
twentieth or thirtieth compass of the deck, and introduced her lord to
her husband and to Clementina. He promptly ignored Milray, and devoted
himself to the girl, leaning over her with his hand against the bulkhead
behind her and talking down upon her.

Lord Lioncourt must have been about thirty, but he had the heated and
broken complexion of a man who has taken more than is good for him in
twice that number of years. This was one of the wrongs nature had done
him in apparent resentment of the social advantages he was born to, for
he was rather abstemious, as Englishmen go. He looked a very shy person
till he spoke, and then you found that he was not in the least shy. He
looked so English that you would have expected a strong English accent of
him, but his speech was more that of an American, without the nasality.
This was not apparently because he had been much in America; he was
returning from his first visit to the States, which had been spent
chiefly in the Territories; after a brief interval of Newport he had
preferred the West; he liked rather to hunt than to be hunted, though
even in the West his main business had been to kill time, which he found
more plentiful there than other game. The natives, everywhere, were much
the same thing to him; if he distinguished it was in favor of those who
did not suppose themselves cultivated. If again he had a choice it was
for the females; they seemed to him more amusing than the males, who
struck him as having an exaggerated reputation for humor. He did not care
much for Clementina's past, as he knew it from Mrs. Milray, and if it did
not touch his fancy, it certainly did not offend his taste. A real
artistocracy is above social prejudice, when it will; he had known some
of his order choose the mothers of their heirs from the music halls, and
when it came to a question of distinctions among Americans, he could not
feel them. They might be richer or poorer; but they could not be more
patrician or more plebeian.

The passengers, he told Clementina, were getting up, at this point of the
ship's run, an entertainment for the benefit of the seaman's hospital in
Liverpool, that well-known convention of ocean-travel, which is sure at
some time or other, to enlist all the talent on board every English
steamer in some sort of public appeal. He was not very clear how he came
to be on the committee for drumming up talent for the occasion; his
distinction seemed to have been conferred by a popular vote in the
smoking room, as nearly as he could make out; but here he was, and he was
counting upon Miss Claxon to help him out. He said Mrs. Milray had told
him about that charming affair they had got up in the mountains, and he
was sure they could have something of the kind again. "Perhaps not a
coaching party; that mightn't be so easy to manage at sea. But isn't
there something else--some tableaux or something? If we couldn't have the
months of the year we might have the points of the compass, and you could
take your choice."

He tried to get something out of the notion, but nothing came of it that
Mrs. Milray thought possible. She said, across her husband, on whose
further side she had sunk into a chair, that they must have something
very informal; everybody must do what they could, separately. "I know you
can do anything you like, Clementina. Can't you play something, or sing?"
At Clementina's look of utter denial, she added, desperately, "Or dance
something?" A light came into the girl's face at which she caught. "I
know you can dance something! Why, of course! Now, what is it?"

Clementina smiled at her vehemence. "Why, it's nothing. And I don't know
whether I should like to."

"Oh, yes," urged Lord Lioncourt. "Such a good cause, you know."

"What is it?" Mrs. Milray insisted. "Is it something you could do alone?"

"It's just a dance that I learned at Woodlake. The teacha said that all
the young ladies we'e leaning it. It's a skut-dance--"

"The very thing!" Mrs. Milray shouted. "It'll be the hit of the evening."

"But I've never done it before any one," Clementina faltered.

"They'll all be doing their turns," the Englishman said. "Speaking, and
singing, and playing."

Clementina felt herself giving way, and she pleaded in final reluctance,
"But I haven't got a pleated skut in my steama trunk."

"No matter! We can manage that." Mrs. Milray jumped to her feet and took
Lord Lioncourt's arm. "Now we must go and drum up somebody else." He did
not seem eager to go, but he started. "Then that's all settled," she
shouted over her shoulder to Clementina.

"No, no, Mrs. Milray!" Clementina called after her. "The ship tilts so--"

"Nonsense! It's the smoothest run she ever made in December. And I'll
engage to have the sea as steady as a rock for you. Remember, now, you've
promised."

Mrs. Milray whirled her Englishman away, and left Clementina sitting
beside her husband.

"Did you want to dance for them, Clementina?" he asked.

"I don't know," she said, with the vague smile of one to whom a pleasant
hope has occurred.

"I thought perhaps you were letting Mrs. Milray bully you into it. She's
a frightful tyrant."

"Oh, I guess I should like to do it, if you think it would be--nice."

"I dare say it will be the nicest thing at their ridiculous show." Milray
laughed as if her willingness to do the dance had defeated a sentimental
sympathy in him.

"I don't believe it will be that," said Clementina, beaming joyously.
"But I guess I shall try it, if I can find the right kind of a dress."

"Is a pleated skirt absolutely necessary," asked Milray, gravely.

"I don't see how I could get on without it," said Clementina.

She was so serious still when she went down to her state-room that Mrs.
Lander was distracted from her potential ailments to ask: "What is it,
Clementina?"

"Oh, nothing. Mrs. Milray has got me to say that I would do something at
a concert they ah' going to have on the ship." She explained, "It's that
skut dance I learnt at Woodlake of Miss Wilson."

"Well, I guess if you're worryin' about that you needn't to."

"Oh, I'm not worrying about the dance. I was just thinking what I should
wear. If I could only get at the trunks!"

"It won't make any matte what you wear," said Mrs. Lander. "It'll be the
greatest thing; and if 't wa'n't for this sea-sickness that I have to
keep fightin' off he'a, night and day, I should come up and see you
myself. You ah' just lovely in that dance, Clementina."

"Do you think so, Mrs. Landa?" asked the girl, gratefully. "Well, Mr.
Milray didn't seem to think that I need to have a pleated skut. Any rate,
I'm going to look over my things, and see if I can't make something else
do."




XVII.

The entertainment was to be the second night after that, and Mrs. Milray
at first took the whole affair into her own hands. She was willing to let
the others consult with her, but she made all the decisions, and she
became so prepotent that she drove Lord Lioncourt to rebellion in the
case of some theatrical people whom he wanted in the programme. He wished
her to let them feel that they were favoring rather than favored, and she
insisted that it should be quite the other way. She professed a scruple
against having theatrical people in the programme at all, which she might
not have felt if her own past had been different, and she spoke with an
abhorrence of the stage which he could by no means tolerate in the case.
She submitted with dignity when she could not help it. Perhaps she
submitted with too much dignity. Her concession verged upon hauteur; and
in her arrogant meekness she went back to another of her young men, whom
she began to post again as the companion of her promenades.

He had rather an anxious air in the enjoyment of the honor, but the
Englishman seemed unconscious of its loss, or else he chose to ignore it.
He frankly gave his leisure to Clementina, and she thought he was very
pleasant. There was something different in his way from that of any of
the other men she had met; something very natural and simple, a way of
being easy in what he was, and not caring whether he was like others or
not; he was not ashamed of being ignorant of anything he did not know,
and she was able to instruct him on some points. He took her quite
seriously when she told him about Middlemount, and how her family came to
settle there, and then how she came to be going to Europe with Mrs.
Lander. He said Mrs. Milray had spoken about it; but he had not
understood quite how it was before; and he hoped Mrs. Lander was coming
to the entertainment.

He did not seem aware that Mrs. Milray was leaving the affair more and
more to him. He went forward with it and was as amiable with her as she
would allow. He was so amiable with everybody that he reconciled many
true Americans to his leadership, who felt that as nearly all the
passengers were Americans, the chief patron of the entertainment ought to
have been some distinguished American. The want of an American who was
very distinguished did something to pacify them; but the behavior of an
English lord who put on no airs was the main agency. When the night came
they filled the large music room of the 'Asia Minor', and stood about in
front of the sofas and chairs so many deep that it was hard to see or
hear through them.

They each paid a shilling admittance; they were prepared to give
munificently besides when the hat came round; and after the first burst
of blundering from Lord Lioncourt, they led the magnanimous applause. He
said he never minded making a bad speech in a good cause, and he made as
bad a one as very well could be. He closed it by telling Mark Twain's
whistling story so that those who knew it by heart missed the paint; but
that might have been because he hurried it, to get himself out of the way
of the others following. When he had done, one of the most ardent of the
Americans proposed three cheers for him.

The actress whom he had secured in spite of Mrs. Milray appeared in
woman's dress contrary to her inveterate professional habit, and followed
him with great acceptance in her favorite variety-stage song; and then
her husband gave imitations of Sir Henry Irving, and of Miss Maggie Kline
in "T'row him down, McCloskey," with a cockney accent. A frightened
little girl, whose mother had volunteered her talent, gasped a ballad to
her mother's accompaniment, and two young girls played a duet on the
mandolin and guitar. A gentleman of cosmopolitan military tradition, who
sold the pools in the smoking-room, and was the friend of all the men
present, and the acquaintance of several, gave selections of his
autobiography prefatory to bellowing in a deep bass voice, "They're
hanging Danny Deaver," and then a lady interpolated herself into the
programme with a kindness which Lord Lioncourt acknowledged, in saying
"The more the merrier," and sang Bonnie Dundee, thumping the piano out of
all proportion to her size and apparent strength.