Little Miss Grouch Part 29

"Oh!" in a feminine and tremulous pitch.

"Forgive me," said the Tyro hoa.r.s.ely. "That was for good-bye."

Was it a detaining hand that went forth in the darkness? If so, it failed of its purpose, for the Tyro had gone.

Then and there Little Miss Grouch proceeded to pervert a proverb.

"Man proposes," she observed to herself, philosophically. "Maybe not always, though. But, anyway, woman disposes. _I_ don't think that was _really_ good-bye."

Behold now a complete reversal of conditions from the initial night of the voyage. For now it was the Tyro who went to bed, miserable and at odds with a hostile world; whereas Little Miss Grouch dreamed of a morrow, new, glorious, and irradiated with a more splendid adventurousness than her slave had ever previsioned.

LAND HO!

Land Ho!

A fool for luck went a-fis.h.i.+ng in the Atlantic with his heart for bait--and caught the G.o.ddess of the Realm of Dreams.

I have sailed out of the Port of Chance, across the Ocean of Golden hopes, straight into the Haven of All-Joy--

And so, Journey's End in the good old way--

SMITH'S LOG.

Blue-gray out of pearl-gray mist rose the sh.o.r.es of old England. Long before the sun, the Tyro was up and on deck, looking with all his eyes, a little awed, a little thrilled, as every man of the true American blood who honors his country must be at first sight of the Motherland.

Slowly, through an increasing glow that lighted land and water alike, the leviathan of the deep made her ponderous progress to the hill-encircled harbor. A step that halted at the Tyro's elbow detached his attention.

"What do you think of it?" asked Lord Guenn.

The eyes of Alexander Forsyth Smith rested for a moment on a toy lighthouse and pa.s.sed to the trim sh.o.r.e, where a plaything locomotive was pulling a train of midget box-cars with the minimum of noise and effort.

"It's like Fairyland," he said, in a voice unconsciously modulated to the peace of the scene. "So tiny and neatly beautiful."

"Yes; it hasn't the overwhelming magnificence of New York Harbor. But it's England."

"And you're gladder to get back to it than you'd confess, for shame of sentimentalizing," said the other shrewdly, having marked the note of deep content in that "it's England."

"One doesn't climb the rail and sing 'Rule, Britannia.'"

"It's a matter of temperament and training. Inside, I suppose, every decent man feels the same about his own country, allowing for racial differences. I don't suppose, though, you'd have quite the same sensation if you were an American returning home after a long absence."

"Good Lord, no!" was the unguarded reply.

The Tyro laughed outright. "For once I've pierced the disguise of your extremely courteous cosmopolitanism, and behold! there's John Bull underneath, rampantly sure that n.o.body can be a really justified patriot except an Englishman."

"Confound you and your traps!" retorted the young peer, ruefully. "Ah, I say, Cecily!" he cried as Little Miss Grouch appeared, looking, in her long soft traveling-coat, rather lovelier (so the Tyro considered within himself) than any human being has any right to look.

She came over to the rail, giving the Tyro the briefest flutter of a glance to accompany her "Good-morning, Mr. Smith."

"I appeal to you," continued Lord Guenn. "You're a cosmopolitan--"

"Indeed, I'm not! I'm an American," said the young lady with vigor.

"Heaven preserve us! You Yankees are all alike. You may be as mild and deprecatory as you please at home; one sniff of foreign air, and up goes the Stars and Stripes. Very well, I withdraw the appeal. To change the subject, when are you coming to us? Laura will be on the tender and she'll want to know."

"Dad will also be on the tender," observed Little Miss Grouch, "and he'll want to know, oh, heaps of things!"

"True enough! We'll keep out of the way of your affecting reunion. Lady Guenn's got a stateroom, Smith, in case it might rain. Come around and meet her. Unless I'm mistaken, the tender's putting out now."

"Oh!" cried Little Miss Grouch. "That adorable kiddie! I nearly forgot him. Don't forget, please," she added to the Tyro, "you promised to look after them and see that they got on the right train."

"Steerage pa.s.sengers come in later," said Lord Guenn. "Hullo! There's your pater, on the upper deck of the tender. Doesn't look particularly stern and unforgiving, does he? Perhaps you'll get off with your life, after all."

Little Miss Grouch turned rather white, and shot an appealing look at the Tyro, correctly interpreting which, he wandered away.

When he next saw her, she was in the arms of a square-faced grizzled man, and manifestly quite content to be there. The tender was swaying alongside in a strong tide-rip and the Tyro himself was making the pa.s.sage between the two craft carefully but jerkily, in the wake of Alderson and Enderby. Once on the small boat he separated himself from his companions, found a secluded spot at the rail, well aft, and tactfully turned his back upon the Grouch group.

Evolutionists a.s.sert that we all possess some characteristic, however vague, of all the forms into which the life-stock has differentiated.

Upon this theory the Tyro must have had in his make-up a disproportionate share of the common house-fly, which, we are taught, rejoices in eyes all around its head. For, though he sedulously averted his face from the pair in whom his interest centered, he was perfectly aware of what they were doing.

First Little Miss Grouch glanced at him and said something. Then her father glared at him and said something. Then she turned toward him again and made another remark. Then the disgruntled parent glowered more fiercely and said a worse thing than he had said before. Then both of them regarded him until his ears flushed and swelled to their farthest tips.

All of which was a triumph of the visual imagination. As a matter of fact they weren't talking about him at all. Little Miss Grouch was afraid to. And her stern parent didn't even know who he was. The subject of their conversation was, largely, the Battery Place house.

Still continuing to imagine a vain thing, the Tyro felt the gentlest little pressure on his arm.

"Such a deep-brown, brown study!" said Little Miss Grouch's gay little voice, at his elbow.

The Tyro turned with a sigh, quickly succeeded by a smile. It was very hard not to smile, just for pure joy of the eye, when Little Miss Grouch was in the foreground.

"Why the musing melancholy?" she pursued.

"I'm coming out of Fairyland into the Realm of Realities," he explained. "And I don't believe in realities any more."

"I'm a reality," she averred.

"No." He shook his head. "You're a figment. I made you up, myself, in a burst of creative genius."

"Just like that? Right out of your head?"

"Out of my heart," he corrected.

"Then why not have moulded me nearer to the heart's desire?" she queried cunningly. "Do you still think I'm homely?"

He shut his eyes firmly. "I do."