Charles has large interests in America, in Santa Fé and Topekas, and other big concerns; and he insisted on taking out several documents and vouchers connected in various ways with his widespread ventures there.  He meant to go, he said, for complete rest and change, on a general tour of private inquiry—­New York, Chicago, Colorado, the mining districts.  It was a millionaire’s holiday.  So he took all these valuables in a black japanned dispatch-box, which he guarded like a child with absurd precautions.  He never allowed that box out of his sight one moment; and he gave me no peace as to its safety and integrity.  It was a perfect fetish.  “We must be cautious,” he said, “Sey, cautious!  Especially in travelling.  Recollect how that little curate spirited the diamonds out of Amelia’s jewel-case!  I shall not let this box out of my sight.  I shall stick to it myself, if we go to the bottom.”

We did not go to the bottom.  It is the proud boast of the Cunard Company that it has “never lost a passenger’s life”; and the captain would not consent to send the Etruria to Davy Jones’s locker, merely in order to give Charles a chance of sticking to his dispatch-box under trying circumstances.  On the contrary, we had a delightful and uneventful passage; and we found our fellow-passengers most agreeable people.  Charles, as Mr. Peter Porter, being freed for the moment from his terror of Colonel Clay, would have felt really happy, I believe—­had it not been for the dispatch-box.  He made friends from the first hour (quite after the fearless old fashion of the days before Colonel Clay had begun to embitter life for him) with a nice American doctor and his charming wife, on their way back to Kentucky.  Dr. Elihu Quackenboss—­that was his characteristically American name—­had been studying medicine for a year in Vienna, and was now returning to his native State with a brain close crammed with all the latest bacteriological and antiseptic discoveries.  His wife, a pretty and piquant little American, with a tip-tilted nose and the quaint sharpness of her countrywomen, amused Charles not a little.  The funny way in which she would make room for him by her side on the bench on deck, and say, with a sweet smile, “You sit right here, Mr. Porter; the sun’s just elegant,” delighted and flattered him.  He was proud to find out that female attention was not always due to his wealth and title; and that plain Mr. Porter could command on his merits the same amount of blandishments as Sir Charles Vandrift, the famous millionaire, on his South African celebrity.

During the whole of that voyage, it was Mrs. Quackenboss here, and Mrs. Quackenboss there, and Mrs. Quackenboss the other place, till, for Amelia’s sake, I was glad she was not on board to witness it.  Long before we sighted Sandy Hook, I will admit, I was fairly sick of Charles’s two-stringed harp—­Mrs. Quackenboss and the dispatch-box.

Mrs. Quackenboss, it turned out, was an amateur artist, and she painted Sir Charles, on calm days on deck, in all possible attitudes.  She seemed to find him a most attractive model.