The Motor Maids by Rose, Shamrock and Thistle Part 3

"I'm never quite well," answered Arthur. "The doctor says I'm very delicate, and steamers always make me ill."

"What a shame," said Mr. Kalisch. "There's lots of fun on a steamer, too, for a jolly boy. There's shuffle board, and hide and seek, and animals."

"What is animals?"

"I'll tell you all about it after lunch. In the meantime, you're going to take a fine nap and when you wake up you will be feeling like a fighting c.o.c.k, and then we'll play the game of animals. Perhaps the young ladies will join in, and Feargus and the others. Do you ever take medicine?"

"Lots of it," replied Arthur proudly.

"Here is a pill. It's not a bit nasty. These ladies have all taken the same kind of pill. It cured them of seasickness."

"I don't mind medicine," said Arthur. "I'm quite used to it, I have to take so much. What will this do?"

"It will make you well. You will sleep for an hour and then you will wake up hungry and happy, and the first thing you'll say when you come on deck will be 'Telemac,'-that's my name, you know,-'what about animals?'"

Telemac Kalisch then drew forth one of the small brown pellets and put it between the boy's lips.

"It's not an opiate, Doctor?" asked one of the men uneasily.

Mr. Kalisch shook his head without taking his eyes off the boy's.

"You feel better already, eh? The blood is coming back to your face."

"I do feel better," replied Arthur. "I think I'll go in now, Bobbie."

"Shall I carry you?" asked the young man called Bobbie.

"No, I'll walk," said the child starting down the deck and then turning back. "Thank you, Telemac," he called. "I like you very much. Don't forget-after lunch."

There was an air of authority about the child that was as pathetic as it was amusing, as he moved away.

"Poor little man!" exclaimed Telemac Kalisch. "Poor little fellow!"

"The suggestion pellet, again," thought Billie, smiling slightly. "Was he really ill?" she asked aloud.

"He's delicate," answered Telemac. "Continuous nursing and doctoring would make an invalid of Atlas, himself."

"The Le Roy-Jones, of Castlewood Manor, Virginia," began the languid personage of that name with an elegant drawl,-but the elements themselves prevented her finis.h.i.+ng her aristocratic recital, and Mrs. Le Roy-Jones became the sport of the breezes. A mischievous little puff of wind lifted the brim of her youthful hat, with invisible fingers plucked one of her false curls from her hair, and blew it along the deck.

"Oh, mother, why will you wear those things?" exclaimed Marie-Jeanne blus.h.i.+ng, as she chased the wisp of hair followed by Feargus and the Motor Maids, all of them glad to find something to laugh at.

Her mother clinched her bony hands angrily.

"Insolent girl!" she said, under her breath.

Miss Campbell turned coldly away. There was something very pathetic to her about this poor battered creature, who looked, as Nancy had said, as if she had been hanging on a hook with her clothes in an old forgotten closet for a long time, so faded she was and full of wrinkles. But when she scolded her unhappy daughter, Miss Campbell could not endure her.

"She is a splendid young woman, ma'am," said Telemac Kalisch. "She has a fine, serious face, and if she were allowed to pursue her bent, she would probably grow beautiful."

"Pray, what do you mean by my daughter's 'tastes'?" demanded the shabby mother. "She has no bent, so far as I know."

"That is because you have never made your daughter's acquaintance. She is very much attached to something you have never taken the trouble to notice. But in your heart, you know what it is."

Mrs. Jones gave him an embarra.s.sed glance and hurried away.

"What a strange man you are, Mr. Kalisch," exclaimed Miss Campbell. "You seem to read people's minds like open books."

"No, no," he answered. "Don't attach any such brilliant qualities to me.

With a little practice in observing and talking to people, any one may guess their tastes and inclinations. It was only by the merest accident that I found out what poor Marie-Jeanne has been wis.h.i.+ng for all her life."

"But what is it?" interrupted Miss Helen.

"It's a secret, but I'll tell you. She wants to cook."

"To cook?"

"Certainly. She has lived a wandering life in cheap hotels and boarding houses always with her mother, and she wants a home with a kitchen in it. She told me so herself. She wants to make the dishes her father loved,-vegetable soup and bread pudding and gingerbread."

"Good heavens," cried Miss Campbell wiping the moisture from her eyes, "I should never have thought so from glancing at that unhappy, gaudily dressed girl. What a world! What a world!"

"When Marie-Jeanne, whose name I suspect was once Mary-Jane, becomes a cook," said the man, "her world will be set to rights."

"And what do you make of the little boy?" asked Miss Campbell.

Telemac shook his head.

"I've not been able to place him," he said.

"He might be--" but the lunch call sounded, and our young girls and their friends came bounding down the deck laughing and talking gayly.

CHAPTER III.-AMONG THE Pa.s.sENGERS.

"We are simply wanderers, Marie-Jeanne and I," Mrs. LeRoy-Jones was saying to an interested audience of four girls. Marie-Jeanne was not present. "Simply tramps. We prefer Europe because of our aristocratic connections there, you know. We visit among the aristocracy."

"Where?" asked Billie rather bluntly.

"My friend, the Baroness Varitzy, has a cawstle in Austria and moves in the most exclusive society. I always attend receptions at her home and am often the only unt.i.tled person present."

Nancy rolled her blue eyes back until only the whites were visible, a trick she had when she wanted to laugh and didn't dare. Billie looked stern, Elinor disgusted, and little Mary rather sorrowful.

"We are not rich, you know," continued the strange woman. "Oh, dear no.

We have so little, Marie-Jeanne and I. But we enjoy life. We shall visit on the estate of the Countess di Lanza this summer. She is a friend, you know, of the Archd.u.c.h.ess Leopold Salvata, who married a nephew of the Emperor Franz Josef. The arch-d.u.c.h.ess has just erected a new palace in Vienna which has sixty salons in it,-think of it. Entertaining in Austrian society is done on a grand scale. And I am always received everywhere because of my aristocratic connections."

"Then you have traveled a great deal, Mrs. Le Roy-Jones?" asked Billie, trying to draw the poor woman away from her obsessions.