Running Sands Part 26

She went on deck again. She knew that the blond young man would be there, though how she knew it she could not guess, and yet she argued that there was no reason why his presence should banish her from the free air.

She sat down. She saw him coming past, on a walk about the deck, and looked away. The second time he pa.s.sed she glanced at him, and he smiled and raised his steamer cap. A gust of wind fluttered her rug, and he stooped to rearrange it.

"Thank you," stammered Muriel. "It's not necessary, really. The steward----"

The young man bowed. It was a bow that, in New York, would have struck her as absurdly elaborate; here she liked it.

"But it is, I a.s.sure you, a pleasure," he protested.

He spoke English without an accent, but with a precision that, for all its ease, betrayed a Teutonic parentage and education.

"Thank you," repeated Muriel, and she blushed again.

The young man stood before her, his arms folded, swaying in serene certainty with the rolling rhythm of the boat.

"May I sit down?" he asked, indicating, with a gesture of his hand, the row of empty chairs beside her.

Muriel made, by way of reply, what she conceived to be a social masterstroke.

"Certainly," she answered; "but I am here only for a few moments. I'll soon have to be running downstairs--I mean 'below'--to look after my husband."

The stranger's handsome face expressed concern, yet the concern, it immediately appeared, was not because of Muriel's marital state, but because of her husband's physical plight.

"I am so sorry," he said, taking Jim's chair. "He is ill then, your husband?"

Muriel did not seem to like this.

"Not very," said she. "He is"--she searched for a phrase characteristic of Stainton--"he is just a bit under the weather."

"So," sighed the stranger, unduly comprehending. "Ah, perhaps Madame has made more voyages than has he?"

"No, this is the first trip across for both of us."

"Indeed? But you seem to be so excellent a sailor! Is it only youth that makes you so?"

"I don't know." She was clearly, her will to the contrary, a little flattered. "I seem to take naturally to the water."

"But not so your husband!"

"He will be all right to-morrow."

"Only to-day he is, your husband, not all right? I am so sorry. Perhaps he is not so young as you are?"

Muriel felt herself again flus.h.i.+ng. She at once became more angry at her anger than she was at what, upon reflection, she decided to be nothing more than frank curiosity on the part of her interlocutor.

"Of course he is young!" she heard herself saying.

The stranger either did not observe her emotions or did not care to show that he observed them. He launched at once upon an unrestrained flow of s.h.i.+p talk. It seemed that he was an Austrian, though of Hungarian blood on his mother's side. He had gone into the army, was an officer--already a captain, she gathered--and he had been serving for some months as an attache of his country's legation in Was.h.i.+ngton. Now he had been transferred to the legation at Paris. Muriel noted that he spoke with many gestures. She tried to dislike these as being un-American, and when she found it hard to dislike what were, after all, graceful adjuncts to his conversation and frequent aids to his adequate expression, she was annoyed and tried to indicate her annoyance.

"I thought you were a soldier?" she said.

With another European bow he produced a silver case engraved with his arms, drew from it a card, which he handed to Muriel. The card announced him as Captain Franz Esterhazy von B. von Klausen.

"But yes," he said. "Please."

Muriel slipped the card into her belt.

"You seem to like the diplomatic service better," she said.

Von Klausen shrugged.

"I go where I am sent," said he.

"Would you ever go to war?" she persisted.

"If I had to. Why not?"

"And fight?"

"Dear lady, but yes. I do not like, though, to fight, for war is what one of your great generals said: it is h.e.l.l."

"Yet you went into the army?"

"Because all my family have for generations done thus. I was born for that, I was brought up for that, and when I came to know"--he extended his palms--"I had to live," he concluded.

This was scarcely Muriel's ideal of a soldier. She changed the conversation.

"Of course you know Europe perfectly?" she enquired.

"Not Russia," answered von Klausen; "but Germany, France, Spain, Italy and England--yes. You will travel much?"

Muriel did not know; very likely they would. They would do whatever Mr.

Stainton--Mr. Stainton was her husband--elected: she always did, always wanted to do, whatever her husband elected.

The young man bowed at mention of Jim's name, as if he were being introduced.

"Certainly," he gravely agreed. "Certainly, since he is your husband.--But you must not miss my country, dear lady, as so many foolish tourists miss it. It is the Tyrol, my fathers' country: the Austrian Tyrol. There is scenery--the most beautiful scenery in all the world: superb, majestic. You love scenery? Please."

Muriel gave a surprised a.s.sent.

"Then do not neglect the Tyrol. They call it the Austrian Tyrol, but it is really the only real Tyrol. Come to Innsbruck by the way of Zurich.

That will bring you along the Waldersee, and so, too, you pa.s.s Castle Lichtenstein and come across the border at just beyond the ruins of Graphang. You will see genuine mountains then, gigantic, snow-capped, with forests as dense as--as what you call a hairbrush--black, impenetrable. To the very tops of some the train climbs; it trembles over abysses. You look from the window of it down--down--down, a thousand feet, fifteen hundred, into valleys exquisite, with pink farmhouses or grey in them, the roofs weighted with large stones, the sides painted with crucifixes, or ornamented statues of the Blessed Virgin."

He loved his country and he made it vivid to her. He rambled on and on.

Muriel became a more and more fascinated listener. It was not until two hours later that she thought, with a guilty start, of Jim.

She excused herself hastily and, leaving the Austrian bowing by the rail, ran to the close stateroom and her husband.

He was awake, but still sick.