CHAPTER XII
JASPER J. MORTON AGAIN
“MAXIM for travelers: Always begin your first trip to France at Saint Malo,” announced Betty Wales, after they had explored the quaint old town a little. Babbie and Madeline, the traveled contingent, agreed that it was “just as dear and almost as dirty” as anything in Italy, which was Madeline’s standard of real charm. Babe, being in a state of subdued and pensive melancholy, said nothing and thought a great deal—but not about Saint Malo. Madeline and Babbie supposed she was missing John until Babe, unable to endure their constant chaffing any longer, informed them curtly that she never wished to see him again as long as she lived. Having freed her mind, she felt a little better; but she sternly rejected sympathy, even from Betty, refused to confide in Babbie, though the B’s had always told one another everything, and spent most of her time on the hotel piazza facing the sea, sitting in one of the hooded beach chairs that abound at all the continental watering-places. The hood of this particular one was lined with pink flowered cretonne, and it was so becoming that Babbie declared it was a perfect shame the effect should be lost.
“John would do anything she wanted if he could see her in that chair,” she declared. “As for her not wanting to see him, she’s simply dying to this very minute. Won’t it be interesting watching them make up in Paris?”
“Almost as interesting as it is watching Betty buy post-cards in French,” laughed Madeline.
“I don’t care if I am funny,” declared Betty stoutly. “I’m learning. I can say almost anything I want to now, only I have to look up some words in my dictionary. I’ve written my family that you can learn more French here in a week than you do in a year at Harding.”
“That’s a base slander on Harding,” returned Madeline promptly. “Here you are engaging the entire time of two excellent tutors,—meaning me and Miss Hildreth,—besides getting incidental instruction from nearly every inhabitant of the town. You ought to be learning a little something, my child.”
“You never bought a dictionary either, at Harding,” put in Babbie. “You used to borrow Nita’s.”
Betty’s diminutive French dictionary had been her first purchase in Saint Malo. In the crowd of porters and custom-house officials on the landing-wharf she had discovered that she knew even less French than she had supposed, and Madeline’s and Babbie’s easy intercourse with the hotel servants and shop-keepers filled her with envy and despair.
“I will learn,” she declared. “I never wanted to particularly before, but now I want to more than anything. I won’t be carried along on this trip like a piece of baggage, having to call one of you whenever I want to ask for hot water or buy a postage stamp.”
So she bought her dictionary and carried it with her everywhere, bringing it out on all occasions, to the intense amusement of Babbie and Madeline, who criticised her accent mercilessly, taught her the most complicated idioms they could remember, and assisted her progress by making her inquire the way about the town, do their shopping as well as her own, and even flounder through protracted interviews with the fat and obtuse old woman who rented bath-houses and suits on the rocks just below the wall that encircled the town. With such strenuous practice it was certainly no wonder, as Madeline had pointed out, that Betty’s progress was rapid.
Saint Malo is a tiny, sleepy town, shut in by a great wall. Its narrow, crooked streets are lined with tall stone houses, there is a lovely old church towering over everything, and on all sides, when the tide is high, is the sea. At low tide there are great stretches of ugly yellow sand flats, where it is not safe to walk because of treacherous quicksands, and over which the incoming sea rushes “faster than a horse can gallop,” so the natives tell you proudly. But there are small bathing beaches close to the wall; there is the wall to promenade on; there are the dark, stuffy little shops in the town where one buys Brittany ware and Cluny lace, all “très bon marché,” of bright-eyed peasant women in caps and sabots; and everywhere there is the fascinating foreign atmosphere that is, after all, the crowning feature in the charm of traveling.
“I’m so glad we aren’t automobiling this time!” sighed Babbie. “James wouldn’t have let us come here. He’d have fussed about the roads or the garages or something of that sort. I hope we shall have time for some more little out-of-the-way villages.”
“There are dozens in this neighborhood,” the “man from Cook’s” assured her. “We ought to be energetic and take some side-trips. We can go to Dinard——”
“That’s where I want to go,” broke in Mrs. Hildreth. “I’ve heard so much about what a gay, pretty little place it is. Is it hard to get there, Madeline?”
“Not a bit,” responded Madeline, “only if we’re going to-day we ought to start in a few minutes and have lunch there, because the tide is low about noon, and at low tide the ferry-boat doesn’t run, or if it does it starts from some inconvenient place.”
“Then if Dinard is dressy, I can’t go,” said Betty sadly. “Every one of my thin waists is torn, and it takes ages to mend them nicely.”
“Then why don’t you come over in the afternoon and meet us there?” suggested Madeline. “The pretty French girl who sits opposite us at table d’hôte says that there is a Casino where they have music in the afternoons. People motor in from the châteaux, and it’s great fun sitting on the piazzas and watching the gaiety. I’ll wait and come with you, if you like.”
But Betty insisted that she could go perfectly well alone. “I can say, ‘Ou est le casino?’ beautifully,” she declared, “and if I don’t understand a word of the answer why I can just watch which way they point. The lovely thing about French people is that they always point. I’ll mend all my waists and take the ferry about four, or whenever the tide is right, and meet you at the Casino.”
And so at half-past three,—because, to tell the truth, it was easier to be a little early than to ask the hotel clerk about the tide,—Betty, dressed in her prettiest white suit and her hat with the pink roses, came out of the hotel and started down the road to the ferry landing. It was a hot day and the road was dusty, and she hurried as fast as possible to get into the shelter of the little park just back of the landing. But before she reached it she heard a shout from the bottom of the landing-steps, and the next minute she realized that somebody was calling her,—a stout gentleman, who, having detached himself from the little crowd that had gathered there, was laboriously climbing the steps to meet her, still calling and beckoning frantically as he came. But instead of using her name he was shouting, “Miss B. A.! Miss B. A.!” And this, before he was near enough to be recognized, gave Betty the clue to his identity. It was Jasper J. Morton, of course.
His coat was off, he carried his hat in his hand, and his face was red with heat and indignation.
“Do you speak English?” he demanded, when he was near enough to be heard. “I mean do you speak French? I’ve been tearing around asking people if they speak English until I’m hoarse.”
“I’m very glad to see you again,” said Betty, holding out her hand and trying not to smile at the absurd figure he cut. “I speak only a little bit of French, but fortunately I have my dictionary along,”—she pulled the little book out of a pocket in her linen coat—“and with that I can generally manage pretty well.”
“The point is,” Mr. Morton broke in impatiently, “do you speak French enough to ascertain what has happened to this confounded ferry? I came over here this morning from a place called Dinard. I came by ferry. I climbed those identical steps.” He waved his hand dramatically toward the landing. “I lunched and strolled around the town until it was nearly time for me to meet my chauffeur in Dinard. Then I came back here. The ferry is gone. The ocean is gone. Am I out of my senses, or what’s happened?” He mopped his brow and glowered darkly at Betty.
“The ferry hasn’t gone for good,” she assured him soothingly, “nor the ocean. In a few minutes they’ll both be back and we can go to Dinard together. I’m waiting for the ferry too.” And she explained about the tides, which necessitated the intermittent service.
“I HAVE MY DICTIONARY”
Jasper J. Morton stared out across the great stretch of bare sand. “Do you mean to tell me that in a few minutes all that will be under water enough to float a good-sized ferry-boat? Well, these tides must be French, like all the rest of it. In that case it’s lucky I didn’t try to walk out to the edge of the water to see if I couldn’t find a boat there.” He looked at his watch. “I’m two hours late now. I’m never late for my appointments. My chauffeur won’t know what to make of it. He can’t speak French either, so he won’t be able to ask any questions.”
Betty laughed. “You ought to get a dictionary like mine. It’s very useful. Can I do anything else for you, Mr. Morton?”
Mr. Morton looked at her sharply. “You can. You can come down the steps with me and tell the man who insists on holding my coat that I don’t want a guide, philosopher and friend, or whatever else he’s trying to be to me, but that I do want my coat. Pay him off with these.” He handed her some silver.
With some difficulty Betty made the man understand that “le monsieur Anglais” did not want a guide for the afternoon, nor a boatman, nor a porter.
“And now,” said Jasper J. Morton briskly, “comes the real business of the moment. I’ve got to send some telegrams to Dol, where I’m stopping and where I was to meet two friends on business at five o’clock. I shan’t be there at five. Is your French equal to finding a telegraph office?”
Betty looked up several words in her dictionary, asked a question or two, and they started off. At the telegraph office Mr. Morton wrote two messages just alike: “Unavoidably detained. Back in evening. Clef d’Or best hotel.”
“That will fix them,” he said, smiling cheerfully at Betty. “They’ll spend the afternoon in the sulks, thinking I’ve changed my mind and won’t come in to their game. Now see that he reads them right and tell him to hurry them off, and then we can talk English for a while.
“I’ve done everything to-day that my doctor ordered me not to,” he told her when they were on their way back to the ferry. “I’ve worried about business, I’ve got overexcited and overheated, I’ve lost my temper, and to-night I’m going to do business—the biggest deal I ever put through. You’ve been a Benevolent Adventurer this time all right, Miss—Miss——”
“Wales,” Betty supplied.
“Think I’ll have to call you Miss B. A.,” he laughed. “By the way, how did you find out my name?”
Betty had to think a minute. “Why, we met a man in London who knows you, and then we know your son.”
“You know John?” repeated Mr. Morton irritably.
Betty nodded. “Don’t you remember I told you when we met before what a good time we had in Oban? Well, he was the one we had it with—he and Mr. Dwight. Only I didn’t know it then—I didn’t know he was your son, I mean. And then in London we met him again.”
“You did, eh?” Mr. Morton eyed her sharply. “Met him again in London? Are you at the bottom of this new leaf of his that Dwight wrote me about, Miss B. A.?”
“Oh, no,” said Betty quickly, “but I think Babe is,—at least they got to be awfully good friends, and she hates a shirk.”
“Babe—that’s the little tomboy who stood up for you against me.” Mr. Morton laughed at the recollection. “She’d be a match for John. She’d make something of him if any one could. But what she can see in him beats me. Oh, he’s a pleasant fellow enough, but he’ll never amount to that, Miss B. A.” Jasper J. Morton snapped his fingers derisively.
They had come out on the water-front and Betty, happening to look ahead, saw that the tide had come in, and with it the ferry-boat, which at that very moment gave a warning whistle.
“Oh, dear, we’ve missed the boat!” she said, “and they only go once an hour.”
“No, we haven’t,” cried Mr. Morton. “What’s the French for ‘Wait’? You tell me and I’ll shout it.” Which he did with such effect that the captain reversed his engines and put back for them.
“Attendez,” repeated Mr. Morton, when he had settled himself on board and caught his breath. “Hope I can remember that. It will be sure to come in handy somewhere. I haven’t any head for languages—never had. Can’t talk to one of my foreign agents without an interpreter.”
“It’s queer that your son should be so fine at languages,” said Betty, glad to get in a word in John’s favor. “We’ve always thought that Madeline Ayres was perfectly remarkable, but she says he is any amount more so.”
“Really?” Mr. Morton’s tone was unpleasantly sceptical. “Well, I don’t know that I ever paid a bill for a tutor in languages, as far as that goes.”
“Oh, these aren’t the kinds you study at college,” Betty explained, “or at least he knows them too, I suppose; but I was thinking of Dutch and Danish and Russian and those queer kinds. He speaks ten different ones, I think he said, and he can understand a few words of some others.”
“This is all news to me,” said Jasper J. Morton drily. “How’d he learn them?”
“Down on some wharves that you own, he said. You do own some wharves, don’t you?”
Mr. Morton puckered his lips into a queer smile. “Well, I’m surprised for once in my life—agreeably surprised. I didn’t suppose John had any useful accomplishments.”
Betty smiled engagingly. “Well, as long as you didn’t know about this one, don’t you suppose he has lots of others that you don’t know about, either?”
Mr. Morton laughed good-naturedly. “So you think I’m inclined to look on the dark side of things, do you, Miss B. A.? Well, I’ll write the boy to-night, after I’ve scalped those two railroad presidents, and tell him that I hear good accounts of him. I say, here we are at Dinard, and actually there’s my chauffeur waiting for me. Waited because it was the easiest thing to do, I suppose. Now you must let me take you to your friends, only you’ll have to ask the way, because I can’t.”
As Betty waved him a good-bye from the steps of the Casino she thought sadly of a great many things she might have said about John and hadn’t. “It’s so difficult when you’ve been confided in and have to remember what you mustn’t tell,” she thought. “Oh, dear, I meant to explain about Mr. Blake and what I told him. I forgot that too. I hope Mr. Morton won’t forget to write the letter to his son.”
Her eyes followed Mr. Morton’s big red car as it turned a corner, and there, walking briskly toward her, his eyes absently fixed on the ground, his cynical expression even more pronounced than usual, was Mr. Richard Blake himself.
