The Port of Adventure. C. N. Williamson
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If Angela was unjust to Hilliard she was not an isolated instance; for all women are unjust to all men, especially to those in whom they are beginning to take an interest. Angela did not know that she was interested in Nickson Hilliard, and would have laughed if any one had suggested the idea, from a personal point of view; but in her social reign as the Princess di Sereno, she had been a good deal spoiled—by every one except the Prince. Vaguely, and like a petted child, she had taken it for granted that all men were glad to be "nice" to her, and she thought the "forest creature" was showing himself a backwoods creature—rude and unenlightened.
Angela loved the sea, and chose to travel on it whenever she could. The trip from New York to New Orleans was even more interesting than she had expected from tales of her father's, for the ship steamed along the coast, in blue and golden weather, turning into the Gulf of Mexico after rounding the long point of Florida. Cutting the silk woof of azure, day by day, a great longing to be happy knocked at Angela's heart, like something unjustly imprisoned, demanding to be let out. She had never felt it so strongly before. It must be, she thought, the tonic of the air, which made her conscious of youth and life, eager to have things happen, and be in the midst of them. But Kate was a comfort, almost a friend. And Timmy the cat was a priceless treasure.
No town in America, perhaps, could have contrasted more sharply with New York than New Orleans. Angela felt this, even as the ship moved slowly along the great canal and slipped into the dark, turbid gold of the Mississippi River. The drowsy landscape on either side was Southern landscape, and among live-oaks draped with mourning flags of moss, and magnolia-trees gemmed with buds, there were planters' houses which seemed all roof and balcony. Buzzards flew up suddenly, out of rice-fields, as the ship rounded a curve—creatures big and long-legged as the storks of Holland and Algeria. The wharf, when the ship docked at last, was filled with bales of cotton, and it was as if all the negroes in America must have come down to meet the boat. She might have been walking into an old story of Cable's, in the days "befoh the wah."
Her idea had been to travel on to the West next day, but New Orleans held her. She had left the Old World eagerly for the New; but this bit of the Old, in the midst of the New, made her feel as if she had stumbled into an ancient Spanish court, in the middle of a modern skyscraper. The contrast was sharp as the impress of an old seal in new wax, and Angela loved it. She liked her hotel, too, and said but half-heartedly each morning, "To-morrow I'll go on." With Kate for duenna, she wandered through streets which, though they had historic French names, reminded her more of Spain than of France, with their rows of balconies and glimpses of flowery patios paved with mossy stones, or cracked but still beautiful tiles. She made friends with an elderly French shopkeeper of the Vieux Carré, who looked as if carved out of ivory and yellowed with age. His business was the selling of curiosities; antique furniture brought in sailing ships from France when New Orleans was in the making; quaintly set jewels worn by famous beauties of the great old days; brocades and velvets which had been their ball dresses; books which had Andrew Jackson's name on yellow fly-leaves; weird souvenirs from the haunted house where terrible Madame Lalaurie tortured slaves to death; fetishes which had belonged to Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen; sticks and stones of the varnished house where Louis Philippe lived, and letters written by Nicholas Girod, who plotted to rescue Napoleon from St. Helena and spirit him across the sea to New Orleans. The selling of these things, or rather the collecting of them, was the pleasure as well as the business of Monsieur Bienvenu, and he had stored in his mind as many legends of the old town as he had stored treasures in his low-browed, musky-smelling shop. Angela spent her mornings listening to his tales of slave-days, and always she bought something before she bade him au revoir, in the Parisian French which enchanted the old man.
"You light up my place, madame," he said; and insisted, with graceful gestures, that she should not pay for her collection of old miniatures, necklaces, gilded crystal bottles, illuminated books and ivory crucifixes, until the day fixed for her departure.
"Once you pay, madame, you may not come again," he smiled. "I am superstitious. I will not take your money till the last moment."
On the third day, however, Angela decided that she must go. Her father's country called, with a voice she could hear above the music of the Southern town, the laughter of the pretty French girls and the chatter of black and brown babies who babbled a language which was neither French, Spanish, nor English, but a mixture of all. She bought more things of Monsieur Bienvenu, and also in other curiosity shops which she dared not mention to him, since his one failing was a bitter jealousy of rivals.
"Where is my gold bag, Kate? Have you got it?" she asked, when the moment came to pay a hundred dollars for two or three snuff-boxes, picked up in a place she had not visited until that day.
"No, ma'am, you had it on yer arm when I noticed last," said Kate, looking startled. "Fur all the saints, I hope ye haven't lost it!"
Angela, too, began to look anxious. Not only was her bag valuable—worth seven or eight hundred dollars—but all her money was in it, and a check-book she had brought out that morning, to pay Monsieur Bienvenu the rather large sum she owed him. Still, she was not greatly distressed. She had lost that gold bag so many times, had dropped it from her lap when she got up, left it in motor-cars, or lying on the floor in friends' houses, and always it had come back to her! She cheered herself, therefore by saying that to-day would be no exception.
"Let me think, where were we last, Kate?" she wondered. "The shop where I bought the lilac and silver stole, wasn't it?"
"Yes, ma'am it was. And indade, if ye'll not mind my sayin' so, I begged ye not to go in there, the place looked so disrespectable, as if there might be measles or 'most anything, and the man himself come poppin' out to entice ye in, like the spider with the fly."
"We must go back at once and see if I left the bag after paying for the stole," said Angela. And, explaining to the late owner of the snuff-boxes, she hurried out with Kate, leaving her parcel to be called for.
Little Mr. Isaac Cohensohn, of the brocade shop, made a search, but could not find the missing trinket. Unfortunately, a number of people had been in since the lady left, strangers to him. If madam was sure she had gone out of the shop without the bag, why, somebody must have taken it since then. The question was, who? But she must apply to the police.
"If only I hadn't stuffed in that check-book!" Angela said to Kate. "Perhaps they would have cashed a check in the hotel. Anyhow, Monsieur Bienvenu would have taken one for what I owe him. Now I'm in the most horrid scrape! I don't know how I'm going to get out of it."
They walked back toward the shop of the snuff-boxes gloomily discussing the situation, which was complicated by the fact that, grown cautious since the attempted burglary at the Valmont, Angela had left her most valuable jewellery in a bank at New York. It was to be sent on, insured, only when she finished her travelling, and settled down.
"I'll have to call the police, I suppose," she said. "Though it's sure to do no good. I shall never see my bag again! I can telegraph to have the checks stopped at the San Francisco bank; but I had nearly five hundred dollars in the purse. What shall I do about my hotel bill and everything? And my railway tickets? We'll have to stay till I can get money."
Suddenly, because it seemed impossible, she wanted passionately to start at once.
Always she had hated postponing things.
"Somehow, I will go!" she said to herself. "I don't know how—but I will." And she walked on with Kate, back to the hotel, remembering how she had told the head clerk that this was her last day—she was giving up the rooms to-morrow. And the hotel was crammed, because there was a Convention of some sort. It might be that her suite was already let for the next day.
She went to the desk, asking abruptly, "If I find that I need to stop longer, are my rooms free for to-morrow?"
"Unfortunately, we've just let them—not as a suite, but separately," said the young man. "This is a big week for the Crescent City, you know, and we've got people sleeping in bathrooms."
"What shall I do?" Angela exclaimed, trouble breaking down reserve. "All my money and a check-book I had in my gold bag have been stolen. I'll have to telegraph my bank." And she had visions of being