I did all I could to help make dinner a lively meal, and with iced Pommery of a particularly good year as my aid-de-camp, superficially, at least, I succeeded. But whenever there was an instant's lull in the conversation I felt that every one was asking himself or herself, “Where is the coffin?”
The plan had been to have a little moonlight fox-trotting and jazzing on deck, but with that black thing hidden somewhere on board, we confined ourselves to more bridge and star gazing, according to taste. I, as professional brightener, nobly kept Mr. Pollen out of everybody's way by annexing him for a stroll. This deserved the name of a double brightening act, for I brightened the lives of his fellow guests by saving them from him, and I brightened his by encouraging him to talk of well-connected people.
“Who was she before she married Lord Thingumbob?” or, “Yes, she was a Miss So-and-so, a cousin of the Duke of Dinkum,” might have been heard issuing sapiently from our lips had any one been mentally destitute enough to eavesdrop. But I had my reward. Dear little Shelagh and Roger Fane seemed to have cheered each other. I left them standing together, elbows on the rail, as they had been before the affair of the afternoon. The moonlight was shining full upon Shelagh's bright hair and frail white face as she looked up, eager-eyed, at Roger, and he looked—at least, his back looked—as if there was nobody on land or sea except one girl.
Having lured Mr. Pollen to make a fourth at a bridge table where the players were too polite to kill him, I ventured to vanish. There being no one on board with whom I wished to flirt, my one desire after two hard hours of brightening was to curl up in my cabin with a nice book. I quite looked forward to the moment for shutting myself cozily in, for the cabin was a delicious pink-and-white nest, the biggest on board, as a tribute to my princesshood.
Hardly had I opened the door, however, when the bubble of my dream broke. A very odd and repellent odor greeted me and seemed almost to push me back across the threshold. I held my ground, however, and sniffed with curiosity and disgust.
Somebody had been at my perfume, my expensive pet perfume made specially for me in Rome—one drop exquisite; two, oppressive—and must have spilled it. But, worse than that, the heavy fragrance was mingled with a horrid reek of stale brandy.
Anger flashed up in me like a match set to guncotton. Some impertinent person had sneaked into my stateroom and played a stupid practical joke. Or, if not that, one of the pleasantly trim, immaculate women—a cross between the stewardess and ladies'-maid type—engaged to hook up our frocks and make up our cabins, was secretly a confirmed rotter!
I switched on the light, shut the door smartly without locking it, and flung a furious glance around. The creature had actually dared to place a brandy bottle conspicuously upon my dressing table, among gold-handled brushes and silver-gilt boxes; and as a crowning impertinence had left a common-looking tumbler beside the bottle, a quarter full of strong-smelling brown stuff. Close by lay my lovely crystal flask of “Campagna Violets,” quite empty. I could get no more, and it had cost three pounds! I could hardly breathe in the room. Oh, evidently a stewardess must have gone stark mad, or else some practical joker had waited until the stewardesses were in bed to play the coup.
As I thought this, my eyes as well as my nostrils warned me of something strange about my pleasant quarters. The rose-colored silk curtains which, when I went to dinner, had been gracefully looped back at the head and foot of my pretty white-and-pink bed—a real bed, not a mere berth—were now closely drawn with a secretive air. This made me imagine that it was a practical joke I had to deal with, and my fancy flew to all sorts of weird surprises, any one of which I might find hidden behind the draperies.
I hope and trust that I have a sense of humor, and I can laugh at a jest against myself as well as any woman, perhaps better than most. But to-night I was in no mood to laugh at any kind of jest, and I wondered how anybody on board had possessed the heart, not to mention the cheek, to perpetrate one after the shock we had all experienced. Besides, I couldn't think of a person likely to play a trick on me. Certainly my host wouldn't. Shelagh, my best and most intimate friend, was far too gentle and sensitive-minded for anything of the kind. And none of the other guests were of the noisy, bounding sort who will take liberties even with quite distant acquaintances for fun.