Concertinas, mouth-organs, a badly-mastered violin gave forth their notes from time to time, their harshness softened by the mingling of the waves’ lap on the vessel’s sides.  Now and then the first-class passengers looked down with amused curiosity upon rude dances, the dancers’ merriment enhanced by stumbling lurches born of the vessel’s slow, long rollings on the sea’s vast, smooth-surfaced swells.

The old man and his daughter never joined in these crude pleasurings and John found in this a certain comfort which he did not try to analyze.  His mother, also watching now and then, observed it, too, and felt her interest in them increasing.  Two days before the slow old ship was due to reach New York she had almost made her mind up to investigate the pair.  Should she find that they were worthy, she told John (that is, should she find they could, in any way, be useful in her campaign of next summer, which, already, she was planning) she might try to help them in New York.  Her resentment of John’s interest in them had faded.  If they were ordinary emigrants he would not see them after the ship docked, if they were of enough importance to be useful to her, if they had influential friends abroad, the more he saw of them the better.  Mrs. Vanderlyn was not a mercenary woman.  The only gold she worshiped had been beaten into coronets; of that which had been minted she had plenty.  She did not envy fortunes, though her envy of position was unbounded.

“You might make a little inquiry,” she told her son.  “If they should really have friends among the aristocracy—­”

It both amused and angered him.  He had imbibed, at a small western college and in the little taste of business life which he had had in New York City, a wondrous spirit of democracy which his stay in Europe had by no means lessened.  It was not the man’s potential social usefulness which made appeal to him, it was the soul which he saw shining, clear and lovely, in his daughter’s eyes; it was not the father’s slow, grey dignity which made him wish to help him, it was the long, pathetic gaze, which, from time to time, he saw him cast back along the vessel’s wake, the lines of patiently-borne sorrow which had formed about his fine, strong mouth, the stoop of weariness and woe endured with uncomplaining fortitude which bent his shoulders.  He might be of an artistic worth which made him peer of and received by kings—­of that John Vanderlyn knew nothing and cared less; but that he was a gentleman of lofty mind and many sorrows patiently endured he felt quite certain, and, as such, his heart yearned to him.  He would have been delighted if some way had come to help him, but he could not bring himself to such a curious investigation of his poor affairs as his mother would have had him make with prying inquiries.  It seemed to him that such a course would be impertinent, and so, whenever she suggested it, he temporized and hesitated.