A Bookful of Girls. Fuller Anna

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СКАЧАТЬ stood her ground resolutely, and presently, “Put me up!” she commanded, still in her own sweet tongue.

      Obediently he lifted her, and placed her beside him on the seat, where she sat clinging with one little hand to the sleeve of his coat to keep from slipping down, with the gentle dip of the vessel.

      The two sat, for a few minutes, quite silent, gazing off toward the African coast, and Blythe and her companion drew nearer, filled with curiosity as to the outcome of the interview.

      Presently the child looked up into the Count’s face and inquired, with the pretty Tuscan accent which sounded like an echo of his own question on the evening of the dance:

      “What is thy name?”

      “Giovanni Battista Allamiraviglia.”

      Cecilia repeated after him the long, musical name, without missing a syllable, and with a certain approving inflection which evidently had an ingratiating effect upon the many-syllabled aristocrat; for he lifted his carefully gloved hand and passed it gently over the little head.

      The child took the caress very naturally, and when, presently, the hand returned to the knee, she got possession of it, and began crossing the kid fingers one over the other, quite undisturbed by the fact that they invariably fell apart again as soon as she loosed her hold.

      At this juncture the two eavesdroppers moved discreetly away, and Blythe, leaving her fellow-conspirator far behind, flew to her mother’s side, crying:

      “O Mumsey! She’s simply winding him round her finger, and there’s nothing he won’t be ready to do for us now!”

      “Yes, dear; I’m delighted to hear it,” Mrs. Halliday replied, with what Blythe was wont to call her “benignant and amused” expression. “And after a while you will tell me what you are talking about!”

      But Blythe, nothing daunted, only appealed to Mr. Grey, who had just caught up with her.

      “You agree with me, Mr. Grey; don’t you?” she insisted.

      “Perfectly, and in every particular. Mrs. Halliday, your daughter and I have been eavesdropping, and we have come to confess.”

      Whereupon Blythe dropped upon the foot of her mother’s chair, Mr. Grey established himself in the chair adjoining, and they gave their somewhat bewildered auditor the benefit of a few facts.

      “I really believe,” the Englishman remarked, in conclusion, – “I really believe that haughty old dago can help us if anybody can. And when your engaging young protégée has completed her conquest, – to-morrow, it may be, or the day after, for she’s making quick work of it, – we’ll see what can be done with him.”

      And, after all, what could have been more natural than the attraction which, from that time forth, manifested itself between the Count and his small countrywoman? If the little girl, in making her very marked advances, had been governed by the unwavering instinct which always guided her choice of companions, the old man, for his part, could not but find refreshment, after his long, solitary voyage, in the pretty Tuscan prattle of the child. Most Italians love children, and the Count Giovanni Battista Allamiraviglia appeared to be no exception to his race.

      The two would sit together by the hour, absorbed, neither in the lovely sights of this wonderful Mediterranean voyage, nor in the movements of those about them, but simply and solely in one another.

      “She’s telling her own story better than we could do,” Mr. Grey used to say.

      It was now no unusual thing to see the child established on the old gentleman’s knee, and once Blythe found her fast asleep in his arms. But it was not until the very last day of the voyage that the most wonderful thing of all occurred.

      The sea was smooth as a lake, and all day they had been sailing the length of the Riviera. All day people had been giving names to the gleaming white points on the distant, dreamy shore, – Nice, Mentone, San Remo, – names fragrant with association even to the mind of the young traveller, who knew them only from books and letters.

      Blythe and the little girl were sitting, somewhat apart from the others, on the long bench by the hatchway where Cecilia had first laid siege to the Count’s affections, and Blythe was allowing the child to look through the large end of her field-glass, – a source of endless entertainment to them both. Suddenly Cecilia gave a little shriek of delight at the way her good friend, Mr. Grey, dwindled into a pigmy; upon which the Count, attracted apparently by her voice, left his chair and came and sat down beside them.

      As he lifted his hat, with a polite “Permetta, Signorina,” Blythe noticed, for the first time on the whole voyage, that he was without his gloves. Perhaps the general humanising of his attitude, through intercourse with the child, had caused him to relax this little point of punctilio.

      Cecilia, meanwhile, had promptly climbed upon his knee, and now, laying hold of one of the ungloved hands, she began twisting a large seal ring which presented itself to her mind as a pleasing novelty. Presently her attention seemed arrested by the device of the seal, and she murmured softly, “Fideliter.”

      Blythe might not have distinguished the word as being Latin rather than Italian, had she not been struck by the change of countenance in the wearer of the ring. He turned to her abruptly, and asked, in French:

      “Does she read?”

      “No,” Blythe answered, thankful that she was not obliged to muster her “conjugations” for the emergency!

      There was a swift interchange of question and answer between the old man and the child, of which Blythe understood but little. She heard Cecilia say “Mamma,” in answer to an imperative question; the words “orologio” and “perduto” were intelligible to her. She was sure that the crest and motto formed the subject of discussion, and it was distinctly borne in upon her that the same device – a mailed hand and arm with the word Fideliter beneath it – had been engraved on a lost watch which had belonged to the child’s mother. But it was all surmise on her part, and she could hardly refrain from shouting aloud to Mr. Grey, standing over there, in dense unconsciousness, to come quickly and interpret this exasperating tongue, which sounded so pretty, and eluded her understanding so hopelessly.

      The mind of the Count seemed to be turning in the same direction, for, after a little, he arose abruptly, and, setting the child down beside Blythe, walked straight across the deck to the Englishman, whom he accosted so unceremoniously that Blythe’s sense of wonders unfolding was but confirmed.

      The two men turned and walked away to a more secluded part of the deck, where they remained, deep in conversation, for what seemed to Blythe a long, long time. She felt as if she must not leave her seat, lest she miss the thread of the plot, – for a plot it surely was, with its unravelling close at hand.

      At last she saw the two men striding forward in the direction of the steerage, and with a conspicuous absence of that aimlessness which marks the usual promenade at sea.

      The little girl was again amusing herself with the glasses, and, as the two arbiters of her destiny passed her line of vision, she laughed aloud at their swiftly diminishing forms. Impelled by a curious feeling that the child must take some serious part in this crucial moment of her destiny, Blythe quietly took the glasses from her and said, as she had done each night when she put her little charge to bed:

      “Will you say a little prayer, Cecilia?”

      And the child, wondering, yet perfectly docile, pulled out the little mother-of-pearl rosary СКАЧАТЬ