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The Uncle Of An Angel
by
VII.
Even Dorothy was disposed to believe that unless some peculiarly favorable combination of circumstances presented itself as a basis for her intelligent manipulation her strong desire for a yacht voyage must remain ungratified; for, now that his liver was decidedly the larger part of him, Mr. Port had a fairly catlike dread of the sea. To be sure, Dorothy’s character was a resolute one, and her staying powers were quite remarkable; but in the matter of venturing his bilious body upon the ocean she discovered that her uncle–although now reduced to a fairly satisfactory state of submission in other respects–had a large and powerful will of his own.
Fortune, however, favors the resolute even more decidedly than she favors the brave. This fact Dorothy comprehended thoroughly, and uniformly acted upon. Each time that even a remote possibility of a yacht cruise presented itself she instantly brought her batteries to bear; and, with a nice understanding of her uncle’s intellectual peculiarities, she each time treated the matter as though it never before had been discussed.
Therefore it was that when Miss Lee’s eyes were gladdened one day–just as she and her uncle were about to begin their lunch on the shady veranda of the Casino–by the sight of a trim schooner yacht sliding down the wind from the direction of Newport, the subject of the cruise was revived with a suddenness and point that Mr. Port found highly disconcerting. The yacht rounded to off the Casino, and the sound of a plunge and a clanking chain floated across the water as her anchor went overboard.
“Oh, isn’t she a beauty!” exclaimed Dorothy, with enthusiasm. “Now, Uncle Hutchinson, her owner is coming ashore–they have just brought the gig round to the gangway–and if you don’t know him you must get somebody to introduce you to him; and then you must introduce him to me; and then he will ask us to go on a cruise; and of course we will go, and have just the loveliest time in the world. I haven’t been on board a yacht for nearly five years (just look at the gig: don’t the men pull splendidly?)–not since that nice little Lord Alderhone took poor dear mamma and me up to Norway. We did have such a good time! Poor dear mamma, of course, was desperately sick–she always was horribly sea-sick, you know; but I’m never sea-sick the least bit, and it was perfectly delightful. Look, Uncle Hutchinson, they’ve made the dock, and now he’s coming right up here. What a handsome man he is, and how well he looks in his club uniform! It seems to me I’ve seen him somewhere. Do you know him, Uncle Hutchinson?”
A serious difficulty under which Mr. Port labored in his dealings with his niece was his inability–due to his Philadelphia habit of mind–to keep up with the exceptionally rapid flow of her ideas. On the present occasion, while he still was engaged in consideration of the irrational proposition that he should court the desperate misery that attends a bilious man at sea by as good as asking to be taken on a yacht voyage, he suddenly found his ideas twisted off into another direction by the reference to his sister’s sufferings on a similar occasion in the past; and before he could frame in words the reproof that he was disposed to administer to Dorothy for what he probably would have styled her heartlessness, he found his thoughts shunted to yet another track by a direct question. It is within the bounds of possibility that Miss Lee had arrived at a just estimate of her relative’s intellectual peculiarities, and that she even sometimes framed her discourses with a view to taking advantage of them.
The direct question being the simplest section of Dorothy’s complex utterance, Mr. Port abandoned his intended remonstrance and reproof and proceeded to answer it. “Yes,” he said, “I know him. It’s Van Rensselaer Livingstone. His cousin, Van Ruy-ter Livingstone, married your cousin Grace–Grace Winthrop, you know. He’s a great scamp–this one, I mean; gambles, and that sort of thing, I’m told, and drinks, and–and various things. I shall have to speak to him if he sees me, I suppose; but of course I shall not introduce him to you.”