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The Lady of the Aroostook

by William Dean Howells · English · Gutenberg #7797 · 437,567 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Lady of the Aroostook

Author: William Dean Howells


        
Release date: March 1, 2005 [eBook #7797]
                Most recently updated: February 25, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7797

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LADY OF THE AROOSTOOK ***




Produced by Eric Eldred, Earle Beach and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team







THE LADY OF THE AROOSTOOK

By William Dean Howells



THE LADY OF THE AROOSTOOK




I.


In the best room of a farm-house on the skirts of a village in the hills
of Northern Massachusetts, there sat one morning in August three people
who were not strangers to the house, but who had apparently assembled
in the parlor as the place most in accord with an unaccustomed finery
in their dress. One was an elderly woman with a plain, honest face, as
kindly in expression as she could be perfectly sure she felt, and
no more; she rocked herself softly in the haircloth arm-chair, and
addressed as father the old man who sat at one end of the table between
the windows, and drubbed noiselessly upon it with his stubbed fingers,
while his lips, puckered to a whistle, emitted no sound. His face had
that distinctly fresh-shaven effect which once a week is the advantage
of shaving no oftener: here and there, in the deeper wrinkles, a frosty
stubble had escaped the razor. He wore an old-fashioned, low black
satin stock, over the top of which the linen of his unstarched collar
contrived with difficulty to make itself seen; his high-crowned,
lead-colored straw hat lay on the table before him. At the other end of
the table sat a young girl, who leaned upon it with one arm, propping
her averted face on her hand. The window was open beside her, and she
was staring out upon the door-yard, where the hens were burrowing for
coolness in the soft earth under the lilac bushes; from time to time she
put her handkerchief to her eyes.

“I don't like this part of it, father,” said the elderly
woman,--“Lyddy's seeming to feel about it the way she does right at the
last moment, as you may say.” The old man made a noise in his throat
as if he might speak; but he only unpuckered his mouth, and stayed his
fingers, while the other continued: “I don't want her to go now, no more
than ever I did. I ain't one to think that eatin' up everything on your
plate keeps it from wastin', and I never was; and I say that even if you
couldn't get the money back, it would cost no more to have her stay than
to have her go.”

“I don't suppose,” said the old man, in a high, husky treble, “but what
I could get some of it back from the captain; may be all. He didn't seem
any ways graspin'. I don't want Lyddy should feel, any more than you do,
Maria, that we're glad to have her go. But what I look at is this:
as long as she has this idea--Well, it's like this--I d'know as I can
express it, either.” He relapsed into the comfort people find in giving
up a difficult thing.

“Oh, I know!” returned the woman. “I understand it's an opportunity; you
might call it a leadin', almost, that it would be flyin' in the face
of Providence to refuse. I presume her gifts were given her for
improvement, and it would be the same as buryin' them in the ground for
her to stay up here. But I do say that I want Lyddy should feel just
_so_ about goin', or not go at all. It ain't like goin' among strangers,
though, if it _is_ in a strange land. They're her father's own kin, and
if they're any ways like him they're warm-_hearted_ enough, if that's
all you want. I guess they'll do what's right by Lyddy when she gets
there. And I try to look at it this way: that long before that maple by
the gate is red she'll be with her father's own sister; and I for one
don't mean to let it worry me.” She made search for her handkerchief,
and wiped away the tears that fell down her cheeks.

“Yes,” returned the old man; “and before the leaves are on the ground
we shall more'n have got our first letter from her. I declare for't,”
 he added, after a tremulous pause, “I was goin' to say how Lyddy would
enjoy readin' it to us! I don't seem to get it rightly into my head that
she's goin' away.”

“It ain't as if Lyddy was leavin' any life behind her that's over and
above pleasant,” resumed the woman. “She's a good girl, and I never want
to see a more uncomplainin'; but I know it's duller and duller here all
the while for her, with us two old folks, and no young company; and I
d'know as it's been any better the two winters she's taught in the
Mill Village. That's what reconciles me, on Lyddy's account, as much as
anything. I ain't one to set much store on worldly ambition, and I never
was; and I d'know as I care for Lyddy's advancement, as you may call it.
I believe that as far forth as true happiness goes she'd be as well off
here as there. But I don't say but what she would be more satisfied in
the end, and as long as you can't have happiness, in this world, I say
you'd better have satisfaction. Is that Josiah Whitman's hearse goin'
past?” she asked, rising from her chair, and craning forward to bring
her eyes on a level with the window, while she suspended the agitation
of the palm-leaf fan which she had not ceased to ply during her talk;
she remained a moment with the quiescent fan pressed against her bosom,
and then she stepped out of the door, and down the walk to the gate.
“Josiah!” she called, while the old man looked and listened at the
window. “Who you be'n buryin'?”

The man halted his hearse, and answered briefly, “Mirandy Holcomb.”

“Why, I thought the funeral wa'n't to be till tomorrow! Well, I
declare,” said the woman, as she reëntered the room and sat down again
in her rocking-chair, “I didn't ask him whether it was Mr. Goodlow
or Mr. Baldwin preached the sermon. I was so put out hearin' it was
Mirandy, you might say I forgot to ask him anything. Mirandy was always
a well woman till they moved down to the Mill Village and began takin'
the hands to board,--so many of 'em. When I think of Lyddy's teachin'
there another winter,--well, I could almost rejoice that she was goin'
away. She ain't a mite too strong as it is.”

Here the woman paused, and the old man struck in with his quaint treble
while she fanned herself in silence: “I do suppose the voyage is goin'
to be everything for her health. She'll be from a month to six weeks
gettin' to Try-East, and that'll be a complete change of air, Mr.
Goodlow says. And she won't have a care on her mind the whole way out.
It'll be a season of rest and quiet. I did wish, just for the joke of
the thing, as you may say, that the ship had be'n goin' straight to
Venus, and Lyddy could 'a' walked right in on 'em at breakfast, some
morning. I should liked it to be'n a surprise. But there wa'n't any ship
at Boston loadin' for Venus, and they didn't much believe I'd find
one at New York. So I just took up with the captain of the Aroostook's
offer. He says she can telegraph to her folks at Venus as soon as she
gets to Try-East, and she's welcome to stay on the ship till they come
for her. I didn't think of their havin' our mod'n improvements out
there; but he says they have telegraphs and railroads everywheres, the
same as we do; and they're _real_ kind and polite when you get used to
'em. The captain, he's as nice a man as I ever see. His wife's be'n two
or three voyages with him in the Aroostook, and he'll know just how to
have Lyddy's comfort looked after. He showed me the state-room she's
goin' to have. Well, it ain't over and above large, but it's pretty as
a pink: all clean white paint, with a solid mahogany edge to the berth,
and a mahogany-framed lookin'-glass on one side, and little winders at
the top, and white lace curtains to the bed. He says he had it fixed
up for his wife, and he lets Lyddy have it all for her own. She can set
there and do her mendin' when she don't feel like comin' into the cabin.
The cabin--well, I wish you could see that cabin, Maria! The first mate
is a fine-appearing man, too. Some of the sailors looked pretty rough;
but I guess it was as much their clothes as anything; and I d'know as
Lyddy'd _have_ a great deal to do with them, any way.” The old man's
treble ceased, and at the same moment the shrilling of a locust in one
of the door-yard maples died away; both voices, arid, nasal, and high,
lapsed as one into a common silence.

The woman stirred impatiently in her chair, as if both voices had been
repeating something heard many times before. They seemed to renew her
discontent. “Yes, I know; I know all that, father. But it ain't the
mahogany I think of. It's the child's gettin' there safe and well.”

“Well,” said the old man, “I asked the captain about the seasickness,
and he says she ain't nigh so likely to be sick as she would on the
steamer; the motion's more regular, and she won't have the smell of the
machinery. That's what he said. And he said the seasickness would do her
good, any way. I'm sure I don't want her to be sick any more than you
do, Maria.” He added this like one who has been unjustly put upon his
defense.

They now both remained silent, the woman rocking herself and fanning,
and the old man holding his fingers suspended from their drubbing upon
the table, and looking miserably from the woman in the rocking-chair
to the girl at the window, as if a strict inquiry into the present
situation might convict him of it in spite of his innocence. The girl
still sat with her face turned from them, and still from time to time
she put her handkerchief to her eyes and wiped away the tears. The
locust in the maple began again, and shrilled inexorably. Suddenly the
girl leaped to her feet.

“There's the stage!” she cried, with a tumult in her voice and manner,
and a kind of choking sob. She showed, now that she stood upright, the
slim and elegant shape which is the divine right of American girlhood,
clothed with the stylishness that instinctive taste may evoke, even in a
hill town, from study of paper patterns, Harper's Bazar, and the costume
of summer boarders. Her dress was carried with spirit and effect.

“Lydia Blood!” cried the other woman, springing responsively to her
feet, also, and starting toward the girl, “don't you go a step without
you feel just like it! Take off your things this minute and stay, if
you wouldn't jus' as lives go. It's hard enough to _have_ you go, child,
without seemin' to force you!”

“Oh, aunt Maria,” answered the girl, piteously, “it almost kills me to
go; but _I'm_ doing it, not you. I know how you'd like to have me stay.
But don't say it again, or I couldn't bear up; and I'm going now, if I
have to be carried.”

The old man had risen with the others; he was shorter than either, and
as he looked at them he seemed half awed, half bewildered, by so much
drama. Yet it was comparatively very little. The girl did not offer to
cast herself upon her aunt's neck, and her aunt did not offer her an
embrace, it was only their hearts that clung together as they simply
shook hands and kissed each other. Lydia whirled away for her last look
at herself in the glass over the table, and her aunt tremulously began
to put to rights some slight disorder in the girl's hat.

“Father,” she said sharply, “are Lyddy's things all ready there by the
door, so's not to keep Ezra Perkins waitin'? You know he always grumbles
so. And then he _gets_ you to the cars so't you have to wait half an
hour before they start.” She continued to pin and pull at details of
Lydia's dress, to which she descended from her hat. “It sets real nice
on you, Lyddy. I guess you'll think of the time we had gettin' it made
up, when you wear it out there.” Miss Maria Latham laughed nervously.

With a harsh banging and rattling, a yellow Concord coach drew up at the
gate where Miss Maria had stopped the hearse. The driver got down, and
without a word put Lydia's boxes and bags into the boot, and left two or
three light parcels for her to take into the coach with her.

Miss Maria went down to the gate with her father and niece. “Take the
back seat, father!” she said, as the old man offered to take the middle
place. “Let them that come later have what's left. You'll be home
to-night, father; I'll set up for you. Good-by again, Lyddy.” She did
not kiss the girl again, or touch her hand. Their decent and sparing
adieux had been made in the house. As Miss Maria returned to the door,
the hens, cowering conscience-stricken under the lilacs, sprang up
at sight of her with a screech of guilty alarm, and flew out over the
fence.

“Well, I vow,” soliloquized Miss Maria, “from where she set Lyddy must
have seen them pests under the lilacs the whole time, and never said
a word.” She pushed the loosened soil into place with the side of her
ample slipper, and then went into the house, where she kindled a fire in
the kitchen stove, and made herself a cup of Japan tea: a variety of the
herb which our country people prefer, apparently because it affords the
same stimulus with none of the pleasure given by the Chinese leaf.




II.


Lydia and her grandfather reached Boston at four o'clock, and the old
man made a bargain, as he fancied, with an expressman to carry her
baggage across the city to the wharf at which the Aroostook lay. The
expressman civilly offered to take their small parcels without charge,
and deliver them with the trunk and large bag; but as he could not check
them all her grandfather judged it safest not to part with them, and he
and Lydia crowded into the horse-car with their arms and hands full. The
conductor obliged him to give up the largest of these burdens, and hung
the old-fashioned oil-cloth sack on the handle of the brake behind,
where Mr. Latham with keen anxiety, and Lydia with shame, watched it as
it swayed back and forth with the motion of the car and threatened
to break loose from its hand-straps and dash its bloated bulk to the
ground. The old man called out to the conductor to be sure and stop in
Scollay's Square, and the people, who had already stared uncomfortably
at Lydia's bundles, all smiled. Her grandfather was going to repeat his
direction as the conductor made no sign of having heard it, when his
neighbor said kindly, “The car always stops in Scollay's Square.”

“Then why couldn't he say so?” retorted the old man, in his high
nasal key; and now the people laughed outright. He had the nervous
restlessness of age when out of its wonted place: he could not remain
quiet in the car, for counting and securing his parcels; when they
reached Scollay's Square, and were to change cars, he ran to the
car they were to take, though there was abundant time, and sat down
breathless from his effort. He was eager then that they should not be
carried too far, and was constantly turning to look out of the window to
ascertain their whereabouts. His vigilance ended in their getting aboard
the East Boston ferry-boat in the car, and hardly getting ashore before
the boat started. They now gathered up their burdens once more, and
walked toward the wharf they were seeking, past those squalid streets
which open upon the docks. At the corners they entangled themselves in
knots of truck-teams and hucksters' wagons and horse-cars; once
they brought the traffic of the neighborhood to a stand-still by the
thoroughness of their inability and confusion. They wandered down the
wrong wharf amidst the slime cast up by the fishing craft moored in the
dock below, and made their way over heaps of chains and cordage, and
through the hand-carts pushed hither and thither with their loads of
fish, and so struggled back to the avenue which ran along the top of
all the wharves. The water of the docks was of a livid turbidity, which
teemed with the gelatinous globes of the sun-fish; and people were
rowing about there in pleasure-boats, and sailors on floats were
painting the hulls of the black ships. The faces of the men they met
were red and sunburned mostly,--not with the sunburn of the fields, but
of the sea; these men lurched in their gait with an uncouth heaviness,
yet gave them way kindly enough; but certain dull-eyed, frowzy-headed
women seemed to push purposely against her grandfather, and one of them
swore at Lydia for taking up all the sidewalk with her bundles. There
were such dull eyes and slattern heads at the open windows of the shabby
houses; and there were gaunt, bold-faced young girls who strolled up
and down the pavements, bonnetless and hatless, and chatted into the
windows, and joked with other such girls whom they met. Suddenly a
wild outcry rose from the swarming children up one of the intersecting
streets, where a woman was beating a small boy over the head with a
heavy stick: the boy fell howling and writhing to the ground, and the
cruel blows still rained upon him, till another woman darted from an
open door and caught the child up with one hand, and with the other
wrenched the stick away and flung it into the street. No words passed,
and there was nothing to show whose child the victim was; the first
woman walked off, and while the boy rubbed his head and arms, and
screamed with the pain, the other children, whose sports had been
scarcely interrupted, were shouting and laughing all about him again.

“Grandfather,” said Lydia faintly, “let us go down here, and rest a
moment in the shade. I'm almost worn out.” She pointed to the open and
quiet space at the side of the lofty granite warehouse which they had
reached.

“Well, I guess I'll set down a minute, too,” said her grandfather.
“Lyddy,” he added, as they released their aching arms from their bags
and bundles, and sank upon the broad threshold of a door which seemed to
have been shut ever since the decay of the India trade, “I don't believe
but what it would have be'n about as cheap in the end to come down in a
hack. But I acted for what I thought was the best. I supposed we'd be'n
there before now, and the idea of givin' a dollar for ridin' about
ten minutes did seem sinful. I ain't noways afraid the ship will sail
without you. Don't you fret any. I don't seem to know rightly just where
I am, but after we've rested a spell I'll leave you here, and inquire
round. It's a real quiet place, and I guess your things will be safe.”

He took off his straw hat and fanned his face with it, while Lydia
leaned her head against the door frame and closed her eyes. Presently
she heard the trampling of feet going by, but she did not open her
eyes till the feet paused in a hesitating way, and a voice asked her
grandfather, in the firm, neat tone which she had heard summer boarders
from Boston use, “Is the young lady ill?” She now looked up, and
blushed like fire to see two handsome young men regarding her with frank
compassion.

“No,” said her grandfather; “a little beat out, that's all. We've been
trying to find Lucas Wharf, and we don't seem somehow just to hit on
it.”

“This is Lucas Wharf,” said the young man. He made an instinctive
gesture of salutation toward his hat, with the hand in which he held a
cigar; he put the cigar into his mouth as he turned from them, and
the smoke drifted fragrantly back to Lydia as he tramped steadily and
strongly on down the wharf, shoulder to shoulder with his companion.

“Well, I declare for't, so it is,” said her grandfather, getting stiffly
to his feet and retiring a few paces to gain a view of the building at
the base of which they had been sitting. “Why, I might known it by this
buildin'! But where's the Aroostook, if this is Lucas Wharf?” He looked
wistfully in the direction the young men had taken, but they were
already too far to call after.

“Grandfather,” said the girl, “do I look pale?”

“Well, you don't now,” answered the old man, simply. “You've got a good
color now.”

“What right had he,” she demanded, “to speak to you about me?”

“I d'know but what you did look rather pale, as you set there with your
head leaned back. I d'know as I noticed much.”

“He took us for two beggars,--two tramps!” she exclaimed, “sitting here
with our bundles scattered round us!”

The old man did not respond to this conjecture; it probably involved
matters beyond his emotional reach, though he might have understood
them when he was younger. He stood a moment with his mouth puckered to
a whistle, but made no sound, and retired a step or two farther from
the building and looked up at it again. Then he went toward the dock and
looked down into its turbid waters, and returned again with a face of
hopeless perplexity. “This is Lucas Wharf, and no mistake,” he said. “I
know the place first-rate, now. But what I can't make out is, What's got
the Aroostook?”

A man turned the corner of the warehouse from the street above, and came
briskly down towards them, with his hat off, and rubbing his head and
face with a circular application of a red silk handkerchief. He was
dressed in a suit of blue flannel, very neat and shapely, and across
his ample waistcoat stretched a gold watch chain; in his left hand he
carried a white Panama hat. He was short and stout; his round florid
face was full of a sort of prompt kindness; his small blue eyes twinkled
under shaggy brows whose sandy color had not yet taken the grizzled tone
of his close-clipped hair and beard. From his clean wristbands his hands
came out, plump and large; stiff, wiry hairs stood up on their backs,
and under these various designs in tattooing showed their purple.

Lydia's grandfather stepped out to meet and halt this stranger, as he
drew near, glancing quickly from the girl to the old man, and then at
their bundles. “Can you tell me where a ship named the Aroostook
is, that was layin' at this wharf--Lucas Wharf--a fortnight ago, and
better?”

“Well, I guess I can, Mr. Latham,” answered the stranger, with a
quizzical smile, offering one of his stout hands to Lydia's grandfather.
“You don't seem to remember your friends very well, do you?”

The old man gave a kind of crow expressive of an otherwise unutterable
relief and comfort. “Well, if it ain't Captain Jenness! I be'n so turned
about, I declare for't, I don't believe I'd ever known you if you hadn't
spoke up. Lyddy,” he cried with a child-like joy, “this is Captain
Jenness!”

Captain Jenness having put on his hat changed Mr. Latham's hand into his
left, while he stretched his great right hand across it and took Lydia's
long, slim fingers in its grasp, and looked keenly into her face. “Glad
to see you, glad to see you, Miss Blood. (You see I've got your name
down on my papers.) Hope you're well. Ever been a sea-voyage before?
Little homesick, eh?” he asked, as she put her handkerchief to her eyes.
He kept pressing Lydia's hand in the friendliest way. “Well, that's
natural. And you're excited; that's natural, too. But we're not going to
have any homesickness on the Aroostook, because we're going to make her
home to you.” At this speech all the girl's gathering forlornness broke
in a sob. “That's right!” said Captain Jenness. “Bless you, I've got a
girl just about your age up at Deer Isle, myself!” He dropped her hand,
and put his arm across her shoulders. “Good land, I know what girls are,
I hope! These your things?” He caught up the greater part of them into
his capacious hands, and started off down the wharf, talking back at
Lydia and her grandfather, as they followed him with the light parcels
he had left them. “I hauled away from the wharf as soon as I'd stowed my
cargo, and I'm at anchor out there in the stream now, waiting till I
can finish up a few matters of business with the agents and get my
passengers on board. When you get used to the strangeness,” he said to
Lydia, “you won't be a bit lonesome. Bless your heart! My wife's been
with me many a voyage, and the last time I was out to Messina I had both
my daughters.”

At the end of the wharf, Captain Jenness stopped, and suddenly calling
out, “Here!” began, as she thought, to hurl Lydia's things into the
water. But when she reached the same point, she found they had all been
caught, and deposited in a neat pile in a boat which lay below, where
two sailors stood waiting the captain's further orders. He keenly
measured the distance to the boat with his eye, and then he bade the men
work round outside a schooner which lay near; and jumping on board this
vessel, he helped Lydia and her grandfather down, and easily transferred
them to the small boat. The men bent to their oars, and pulled swiftly
out toward a ship that lay at anchor a little way off. A light breeze
crept along the water, which was here blue and clear, and the grateful
coolness and pleasant motion brought light into the girl's cheeks and
eyes. Without knowing it she smiled. “That's right!” cried Captain
Jenness, who had applauded her sob in the same terms. “_You'll_ like
it, first-rate. Look at that ship! _That's_ the Aroostook. _Is_ she a
beauty, or ain't she?”

The stately vessel stood high from the water, for Captain Jenness's
cargo was light, and he was going out chiefly for a return freight.
Sharp jibs and staysails cut their white outlines keenly against the
afternoon blue of the summer heaven; the topsails and courses dripped,
half-furled, from the yards stretching across the yellow masts that
sprang so far aloft; the hull glistened black with new paint. When Lydia
mounted to the deck she found it as clean scrubbed as her aunt's kitchen
floor. Her glance of admiration was not lost upon Captain Jenness. “Yes,
Miss Blood,” said he, “one difference between an American ship and any
other sort is dirt. I wish I could take you aboard an English vessel, so
you could appreciate the Aroostook. But I guess you don't need it,” he
added, with a proud satisfaction in his laugh. “The Aroostook ain't in
order yet; wait till we've been a few days at sea.” The captain swept
the deck with a loving eye. It was spacious and handsome, with a stretch
of some forty or fifty feet between the house at the stern and the
forecastle, which rose considerably higher; a low bulwark was surmounted
by a heavy rail supported upon turned posts painted white. Everything,
in spite of the captain's boastful detraction, was in perfect trim, at
least to landfolk's eyes. “Now come into the cabin,” said the captain.
He gave Lydia's traps, as he called them, in charge of a boy, while
he led the way below, by a narrow stairway, warning Lydia and her
grandfather to look out for their heads as they followed. “There!” he
said, when they had safely arrived, inviting their inspection of the
place with a general glance of his own.

“What did I tell you, Lyddy?” asked her grandfather, with simple joy in
the splendors about them. “Solid mahogany trimmin's everywhere.” There
was also a great deal of milk-white paint, with some modest touches of
gilding here and there. The cabin was pleasantly lit by the long low
windows which its roof rose just high enough to lift above the deck, and
the fresh air entered with the slanting sun. Made fast to the floor was
a heavy table, over which hung from the ceiling a swinging shelf. Around
the little saloon ran lockers cushioned with red plush. At either
end were four or five narrow doors, which gave into as many tiny
state-rooms. The boy came with Lydia's things, and set them inside one
of these doors; and when he came out again the captain pushed it
open, and called them in. “Here!” said he. “Here's where my girls made
themselves at home the last voyage, and I expect you'll find it pretty
comfortable. They say you don't feel the motion so much,--_I_ don't
know anything about the motion,--and in smooth weather you can have that
window open sometimes, and change the air. It's light and it's large.
Well, I had it fitted up for my wife; but she's got kind of on now, you
know, and she don't feel much like going any more; and so I always give
it to my nicest passenger.” This was an unmistakable compliment,
and Lydia blushed to the captain's entire content. “That's a rug she
hooked,” he continued, touching with his toe the carpet, rich in its
artless domestic dyes as some Persian fabric, that lay before the berth.
“These gimcracks belong to my girls; they left 'em.” He pointed to
various slight structures of card-board worked with crewel, which were
tacked to the walls. “Pretty snug, eh?”

“Yes,” said Lydia, “it's nicer than I thought it could be, even after
what grandfather said.”

“Well, that's right!” exclaimed the captain. “I like your way of
speaking up. I wish you could know my girls. How old are you now?”

“I'm nineteen,” said Lydia.

“Why, you're just between my girls!” cried the captain. “Sally is
twenty-one, and Persis is eighteen. Well, now, Miss Blood,” he said, as
they returned to the cabin, “you can't begin to make yourself at home
too soon for me. I used to sail to Cadiz and Malaga a good deal; and
when I went to see any of them Spaniards he'd say, 'This house is
yours.' Well, that's what I say: This ship is yours as long as you
stay in her. And I _mean_ it, and that's more than _they_ did!” Captain
Jenness laughed mightily, took some of Lydia's fingers in his left hand
and squeezed them, and clapped her grandfather on the shoulder with
his right. Then he slipped his hand down the old man's bony arm to the
elbow, and held it, while he dropped his head towards Lydia, and said,
“We shall be glad to have him stay to supper, and as much longer as he
likes, heh?”

“Oh, no!” said Lydia; “grandfather must go back on the six o'clock
train. My aunt expects him.” Her voice fell, and her face suddenly
clouded.

“Good!” cried the captain. Then he pulled out his watch, and held it
as far away as the chain would stretch, frowning at it with his head
aslant. “Well!” he burst out. “He hasn't got any too much time on his
hands.” The old man gave a nervous start, and the girl trembled. “Hold
on! Yes; there's time. It's only fifteen minutes after five.”

“Oh, but we were more than half an hour getting down here,” said Lydia,
anxiously. “And grandfather doesn't know the way back. He'll be sure to
get lost. I _wish_ we'd come in a carriage.”

“Couldn't 'a' kept the carriage waitin' on expense, Lyddy,” retorted her
grandfather, “But I tell you,” he added, with something like resolution,
“if I could find a carriage anywheres near that wharf, I'd take it, just
as _sure_! I wouldn't miss that train for more'n half a dollar. It would
cost more than that at a hotel to-night, let alone how your aunt Maria'd
feel.”

“Why, look here!” said Captain Jenness, naturally appealing to the girl.
“Let _me_ get your grandfather back. I've got to go up town again, any
way, for some last things, with an express wagon, and we can ride right
to the depot in that. Which depot is it?”

“Fitchburg,” said the old man eagerly.

“That's right!” commented the captain. “Get you there in plenty of time,
if we don't lose any now. And I'll tell you what, my little girl,” he
added, turning to Lydia: “if it'll be a comfort to you to ride up with
us, and see your grandfather off, why come along! _My_ girls went with
me the last time on an express wagon.”

“No,” answered Lydia. “I want to. But it wouldn't be any comfort. I
thought that out before I left home, and I'm going to say good-by to
grandfather here.”

“First-rate!” said Captain Jenness, bustling towards the gangway so as
to leave them alone. A sharp cry from the old man arrested him.

“Lyddy! Where's your trunks?”

“Why!” said the girl, catching her breath in dismay, “where _can_ they
be? I forgot all about them.”

“I got the checks fast enough,” said the old man, “and I shan't give 'em
up without I get the trunks. They'd ought to had 'em down here long
ago; and now if I've got to pester round after 'em I'm sure to miss the
train.”

“What shall we do?” asked Lydia.

“Let's see your checks,” said the captain, with an evident ease of
mind that reassured her. When her grandfather had brought them with
difficulty from the pocket visited last in the order of his search, and
laid them in the captain's waiting palm, the latter endeavored to get
them in focus. “What does it say on 'em?” he asked, handing them to
Lydia. “My eyes never _did_ amount to anything on shore.” She read aloud
the name of the express stamped on them. The captain gathered them back
into his hand, and slipped them into his pocket, with a nod and wink
full of comfort. “I'll see to it,” he said. “At any rate, this ship
ain't a-going to sail without them, if she waits a week. Now, then, Mr.
Latham!”

The old man, who waited, when not directly addressed or concerned, in a
sort of blank patience, suddenly started out of his daze, and following
the captain too alertly up the gangway stairs drove his hat against the
hatch--with a force that sent him back into Lydia's arms.

“Oh, grandfather, are you hurt?” she piteously asked, trying to pull up
the hat that was jammed down over his forehead.

“Not a bit! But I guess my hat's about done for,--without I can get it
pressed over; and I d'know as this kind of straw _doos_ press.”

“First-rate!” called the captain from above. “Never mind the hat.”
 But the girl continued fondly trying to reshape it, while the old man
fidgeted anxiously, and protested that he would be sure to be left. It
was like a half-shut accordion when she took it from his head; when she
put it back it was like an accordion pulled out.

“All ready!” shouted Captain Jenness from the gap in the bulwark, where
he stood waiting to descend into the small boat. The old man ran towards
him in his senile haste, and stooped to get over the side into the boat
below.

“Why, grandfather!” cried the girl in a breaking voice, full of keen,
yet tender reproach.

“I declare for't,” he said, scrambling back to the deck. “I 'most
forgot. I be'n so put about.” He took Lydia's hand loosely into his own,
and bent forward to kiss her. She threw her arms round him, and while he
remained looking over her shoulder, with a face of grotesque perplexity,
and saying, “Don't cry, Lyddy, don't cry!” she pressed her face tighter
into his withered neck, and tried to muffle her homesick sobs. The
sympathies as well as the sensibilities often seem dulled by age. They
have both perhaps been wrought upon too much in the course of the years,
and can no longer respond to the appeal or distress which they can only
dimly realize; even the heart grows old. “Don't you, don't you, Lyddy!”
 repeated the old man. “You mustn't. The captain's waitin'; and the
cars--well, every minute I lose makes it riskier and riskier; and your
aunt Maria, she's always so uneasy, you know!”

The girl was not hurt by his anxiety about himself; she was more anxious
about him than about anything else. She quickly lifted her head, and
drying her eyes, kissed him, forcing her lips into the smile that is
more heart-breaking to see than weeping. She looked over the side, as
her grandfather was handed carefully down to a seat by the two
sailors in the boat, and the captain noted her resolute counterfeit of
cheerfulness. “That's right!” he shouted up to her. “Just like my girls
when their mother left 'em. But bless you, they soon got over it, and
so'll you. Give way, men,” he said, in a lower voice, and the boat
shot from the ship's side toward the wharf. He turned and waved
his handkerchief to Lydia, and, stimulated apparently by this, her
grandfather felt in his pockets for his handkerchief; he ended after a
vain search by taking off his hat and waving that.

When he put it on again, it relapsed into that likeness of a half-shut
accordion from which Lydia had rescued it; but she only saw the face
under it.

As the boat reached the wharf an express wagon drove down, and Lydia saw
the sarcastic parley which she could not hear between the captain and
the driver about the belated baggage which the latter put off. Then she
saw the captain help her grandfather to the seat between himself and the
driver, and the wagon rattled swiftly out of sight. One of the sailors
lifted Lydia's baggage over the side of the wharf to the other in the
boat, and they pulled off to the ship with it.




III.


Lydia went back to the cabin, and presently the boy who had taken charge
of her lighter luggage came dragging her trunk and bag down the gangway
stairs. Neither was very large, and even a boy of fourteen who was small
for his age might easily manage them.

“You can stow away what's in 'em in the drawers,” said the boy. “I
suppose you didn't notice the drawers,” he added, at her look of
inquiry. He went into her room, and pushing aside the valance of
the lower berth showed four deep drawers below the bed; the charming
snugness of the arrangement brought a light of housewifely joy to the
girl's face.

“Why, it's as good as a bureau. They will hold everything.”

“Yes,” exulted the boy; “they're for two persons' things. The captain's
daughters, they both had this room. Pretty good sized too; a good deal
the captain's build. You won't find a better stateroom than this on a
steamer. I've been on 'em.” The boy climbed up on the edge of the upper
drawer, and pulled open the window at the top of the wall. “Give you
a little air, I guess. If you want I should, the captain said I was to
bear a hand helping you to stow away what was in your trunks.”

“No,” said Lydia, quickly. “I'd just as soon do it alone.”

“All right,” said the boy. “If I was you, I'd do it now. I don't know
just when the captain means to sail; but after we get outside, it might
be rough, and it's better to have everything pretty snug by that time.
I'll haul away the trunks when you've got 'em empty. If I shouldn't
happen to be here, you can just call me at the top of the gangway, and
I'll come. My name's Thomas,” he said. He regarded Lydia inquiringly a
moment before he added: “If you'd just as lives, I rather you'd call
me Thomas, and not _steward_. They said you'd call me steward,” he
explained, in a blushing, deprecating confidence; “and as long as I've
not got my growth, it kind of makes them laugh, you know,--especially
the second officer.”

“I will call you Thomas,” said Lydia.

“Thank you.” The boy glanced up at the round clock screwed to the cabin
wall. “I guess you won't have to call me anything unless you hurry. I
shall be down here, laying the table for supper, before you're done. The
captain said I was to lay it for you and him, and if he didn't get back
in time you was to go to eating, any way. Guess you won't think Captain
Jenness is going to starve anybody.”

“Have you been many voyages with Captain Jenness before this?” asked
Lydia, as she set open her trunk, and began to lay her dresses out on
the locker. Homesickness, like all grief, attacks in paroxysms. One gust
of passionate regret had swept over the girl; before another came, she
could occupy herself almost cheerfully with the details of unpacking.

“Only one before,” said the boy. “The last one, when his daughters went
out. I guess it was their coaxing got mother to let me go. _My_ father
was killed in the war.”

“Was he?” asked Lydia, sympathetically.

“Yes. I didn't know much about it at the time; so little. Both your
parents living?”

“No,” said Lydia. “They're both dead. They died a long while ago. I've
always lived with my aunt and grandfather.”

“I thought there must be something the matter,--your coming with your
grandfather,” said the boy. “I don't see why you don't let me carry in
some of those dresses for you. I'm used to helping about.”

“Well, you may,” answered Lydia, “if you want.” A native tranquil
kindness showed itself in her voice and manner, but something of the
habitual authority of a school-mistress mingled with it. “You must be
careful not to rumple them if I let you.”

“I guess not. I've got older sisters at home. They hated to have me
leave. But I looked at it this way: If I was ever going to sea--and I
_was_--I couldn't get such another captain as Captain Jenness, nor such
another crew; all the men from down our way; and I don't mind the second
mate's jokes much. He doesn't mean anything by them; likes to plague,
that's all. He's a first-rate sailor.”

Lydia was kneeling before one of the trunks, and the boy was stooping
over it, with a hand on either knee. She had drawn out her only black
silk dress, and was finding it rather crumpled. “I shouldn't have
thought it would have got so much jammed, coming fifty miles,” she
soliloquized. “But they seemed to take a pleasure in seeing how much
they could bang the trunks.” She rose to her feet and shook out the
dress, and drew the skirt several times over her left arm.

The boy's eyes glistened. “Goodness!” he said. “Just new, ain't it?
Going to wear it any on board?”

“Sundays, perhaps,” answered Lydia thoughtfully, still smoothing and
shaping the dress, which she regarded at arm's-length, from time to
time, with her head aslant.

“I suppose it's the latest style?” pursued the boy.

“Yes, it is,” said Lydia. “We sent to Boston for the pattern. I hate to
pack it into one of those drawers,” she mused.

“You needn't,” replied Thomas. “There's a whole row of hooks.”

“I want to know!” cried Lydia. She followed Thomas into her state-room.
“Well, well! They do seem to have thought of everything!”

“I should say so,” exulted the boy. “Look here!” He showed her a little
niche near the head of the berth strongly framed with glass, in which a
lamp was made fast. “Light up, you know, when you want to read, or feel
kind of lonesome.” Lydia clasped her hands in pleasure and amaze. “Oh,
I tell you Captain Jenness meant to have things about right. The other
state-rooms don't begin to come up to this.” He dashed out in his zeal,
and opened their doors, that she might triumph in the superiority of her
accommodations without delay. These rooms were cramped together on one
side; Lydia's was in a comparatively ample corner by itself.

She went on unpacking her trunk, and the boy again took his place near
her, in the same attitude as before. “I tell you,” he said, “I shall
like to see you with that silk on. Have you got any other nice ones?”

“No; only this I'm wearing,” answered Lydia, half amused and half honest
in her sympathy with his ardor about her finery. “They said not to bring
many clothes; they would be cheaper over there.” She had now reached the
bottom of her trunk. She knew by the clock that her grandfather could
hardly have left the city on his journey home, but the interval of time
since she had parted with him seemed vast. It was as if she had started
to Boston in a former life; the history of the choosing and cutting and
making of these clothes was like a dream of preëxistence. She had never
had so many things new at once, and it had been a great outlay, but her
aunt Maria had made the money go as far as possible, and had spent it
with that native taste, that genius for dress, which sometimes strikes
the summer boarder in the sempstresses of the New England hills. Miss
Latham's gift was quaintly unrelated to herself. In dress, as in person
and manner, she was uncompromisingly plain and stiff. All the more
lavishly, therefore, had it been devoted to the grace and beauty of
her sister's child, who, ever since she came to find a home in her
grandfather's house, had been more stylishly dressed than any other girl
in the village. The summer boarders, whom the keen eye of Miss Latham
studied with unerring sense of the best new effects in costume, wondered
at Lydia's elegance, as she sat beside her aunt in the family pew,
a triumph of that grim artist's skill. Lydia knew that she was well
dressed, but she knew that after all she was only the expression of her
aunt's inspirations. Her own gift was of another sort. Her father was
a music-teacher, whose failing health had obliged him to give up his
profession, and who had taken the traveling agency of a parlor organ
manufactory for the sake of the out-door life. His business had brought
him to South Bradfield, where he sold an organ to Deacon Latham's
church, and fell in love with his younger daughter. He died a few years
after his marriage, of an ancestral consumption, his sole heritage from
the good New England stock of which he came. His skill as a pianist,
which was considerable, had not descended to his daughter, but her
mother had bequeathed her a peculiarly rich and flexible voice, with a
joy in singing which was as yet a passion little affected by culture. It
was this voice which, when Lydia rose to join in the terrible hymning of
the congregation at South Bradfield, took the thoughts of people off her
style and beauty; and it was this which enchanted her father's sister
when, the summer before the date of which we write, that lady had come
to America on a brief visit, and heard Lydia sing at her parlor organ in
the old homestead.

Mrs. Erwin had lived many years abroad, chiefly in Italy, for the sake
of the climate. She was of delicate health, and constantly threatened by
the hereditary disease that had left her the last of her generation,
and she had the fastidiousness of an invalid. She was full of generous
impulses which she mistook for virtues; but the presence of some object
at once charming and worthy was necessary to rouse these impulses. She
had been prosperously married when very young, and as a pretty
American widow she had wedded in second marriage at Naples one of those
Englishmen who have money enough to live at ease in Latin countries; he
was very fond of her, and petted her. Having no children she might
long before have thought definitely of poor Henry's little girl, as she
called Lydia, but she had lived very comfortably indefinite in regard to
her ever since the father's death. Now and then she had sent the child a
handsome present or a sum of money. She had it on her conscience not to
let her be wholly a burden to her grandfather; but often her conscience
drowsed. When she came to South Bradfield, she won the hearts of the
simple family, which had been rather hardened against her, and she
professed an enthusiasm for Lydia. She called her pretty names in
Italian, which she did not pronounce well; she babbled a great deal
about what ought to be done for her, and went away without doing
anything; so that when a letter finally came, directing Lydia to be sent
out to her in Venice, they were all surprised, in the disappointment to
which they had resigned themselves.

Mrs. Erwin wrote an epistolary style exasperatingly vacuous and diffuse,
and, like many women of that sort, she used pencil instead of ink,
always apologizing for it as due now to her weak eyes, and now to her
weak wrist, and again to her not being able to find the ink. Her hand
was full of foolish curves and dashes, and there were no spaces between
the words at times. Under these conditions it was no light labor to get
at her meaning; but the sum of her letter was that she wished Lydia to
come out to her at once, and she suggested that, as they could have few
opportunities or none to send her with people going to Europe, they had
better let her come the whole way by sea. Mrs. Erwin remembered--in the
space of a page and a half--that nothing had ever done _her_ so much
good as a long sea voyage, and it would be excellent for Lydia, who,
though she looked so strong, probably needed all the bracing up she
could get. She had made inquiries,--or, what was the same thing, Mr.
Erwin had, for her,--and she found that vessels from American ports
seldom came to Venice; but they often came to Trieste, which was only a
few hours away; and if Mr. Latham would get Lydia a ship for Trieste at
Boston, she could come very safely and comfortably in a few weeks. She
gave the name of a Boston house engaged in the Mediterranean trade to
which Mr. Latham could apply for passage; if they were not sending any
ship themselves, they could probably recommend one to him.

This was what happened when Deacon Latham called at their office a
few days after Mrs. Erwin's letter came. They directed him to the firm
dispatching the Aroostook, and Captain Jenness was at their place when
the deacon appeared there. The captain took cordial possession of the
old man at once, and carried him down to the wharf to look at the ship
and her accommodations. The matter was quickly settled between them.
At that time Captain Jenness did not know but he might have other
passengers out; at any rate he would look after the little girl (as
Deacon Latham always said in speaking of Lydia) the same as if she were
his own child.

Lydia knelt before her trunk, thinking of the remote events, the extinct
associations of a few minutes and hours and days ago; she held some
cuffs and collars in her hand, and something that her aunt Maria had
said recurred to her. She looked up into the intensely interested face
of the boy, and then laughed, bowing her forehead on the back of the
hand that held these bits of linen.

The boy blushed. “What are you laughing at?” he asked, half piteously,
half indignantly, like a boy used to being badgered.

“Oh, nothing,” said Lydia. “My aunt told me if any of these things
should happen to want doing up, I had better get the stewardess to help
me.” She looked at the boy in a dreadfully teasing way, softly biting
her lip.

“Oh, if you're going to begin _that_ way!” he cried in affliction.

“I'm not,” she answered, promptly. “I like boys. I've taught school two
winters, and I like boys first-rate.”

Thomas was impersonally interested again. “Time! _You_ taught school?”

“Why not?”

“You look pretty young for a school-teacher!”

“Now you're making fun of me,” said Lydia, astutely.

The boy thought he must have been, and was consoled. “Well, you began
it,” he said.

“I oughtn't to have done so,” she replied with humility; “and I won't
any more. There!” she said, “I'm not going to open my bag now. You can
take away the trunk when you want, Thomas.”

“Yes, ma'am,” said the boy. The idea of a school-mistress was perhaps
beginning to awe him a little. “Put your bag in your state-room first.”
 He did this, and when he came back from carrying away her trunk he began
to set the table. It was a pretty table, when set, and made the little
cabin much cosier. When the boy brought the dishes from the cook's
galley, it was a barbarously abundant table. There was cold boiled ham,
ham and eggs, fried fish, baked potatoes, buttered toast, tea, cake,
pickles, and watermelon; nothing was wanting. “I tell you,” said Thomas,
noticing Lydia's admiration, “the captain lives well lay-days.”

“Lay-days?” echoed Lydia.

“The days we're in port,” the boy explained.

“Well, I should think as much!” She ate with the hunger that
tranquillity bestows upon youth after the swift succession of strange
events, and the conflict of many emotions. The captain had not returned
in time, and she ate alone.

After a while she ventured to the top of the gangway stairs, and stood
there, looking at the novel sights of the harbor, in the red sunset
light, which rose slowly from the hulls and lower spars of the shipping,
and kindled the tips of the high-shooting masts with a quickly fading
splendor. A delicate flush responded in the east, and rose to meet
the denser crimson of the west; a few clouds, incomparably light and
diaphanous, bathed themselves in the glow. It was a summer sunset,
portending for the land a morrow of great heat. But cool airs crept
along the water, and the ferry-boats, thrust shuttlewise back and forth
between either shore, made a refreshing sound as they crushed a broad
course to foam with their paddles. People were pulling about in small
boats; from some the gay cries and laughter of young girls struck
sharply along the tide. The noise of the quiescent city came off in a
sort of dull moan. The lamps began to twinkle in the windows and the
streets on shore; the lanterns of the ships at anchor in the stream
showed redder and redder as the twilight fell. The homesickness began to
mount from Lydia's heart in a choking lump to her throat; for one must
be very happy to endure the sights and sounds of the summer evening
anywhere. She had to shield her eyes from the brilliancy of the kerosene
when she went below into the cabin.




IV.


Lydia did not know when the captain came on board. Once, talking in the
cabin made itself felt through her dreams, but the dense sleep of weary
youth closed over her again, and she did not fairly wake till morning.
Then she thought she heard the crowing of a cock and the cackle of hens,
and fancied herself in her room at home; the illusion passed with
a pang. The ship was moving, with a tug at her side, the violent
respirations of which were mingled with the sound of the swift rush of
the vessels through the water, the noise of feet on the deck, and of
orders hoarsely shouted.

The girl came out into the cabin, where Thomas was already busy with
the breakfast table, and climbed to the deck. It was four o'clock of the
summer's morning; the sun had not yet reddened the east, but the stars
were extinct, or glimmered faint points immeasurably withdrawn in the
vast gray of the sky. At that hour there is a hovering dimness over all,
but the light on things near at hand is wonderfully keen and clear, and
the air has an intense yet delicate freshness that seems to breathe from
the remotest spaces of the universe,--a waft from distances beyond the
sun. On the land the leaves and grass are soaked with dew; the densely
interwoven songs of the birds are like a fabric that you might see and
touch. But here, save for the immediate noises on the ship, which
had already left her anchorage far behind, the shouting of the tug's
escape-pipes, and the huge, swirling gushes from her powerful wheel, a
sort of spectacular silence prevailed, and the sounds were like a part
of this silence. Here and there a small fishing schooner came lagging
slowly in, as if belated, with scarce wind enough to fill her sails; now
and then they met a steamboat, towering white and high, a many-latticed
bulk, with no one to be seen on board but the pilot at his wheel, and a
few sleepy passengers on the forward promenade. The city, so beautiful
and stately from the bay, was dropping, and sinking away behind. They
passed green islands, some of which were fortified: the black guns
looked out over the neatly shaven glacis; the sentinel paced the
rampart.

“Well, well!” shouted Captain Jenness, catching sight of Lydia where she
lingered at the cabin door. “You are an early bird. Glad to see you up!
Hope you rested well! Saw your grandfather off all right, and kept him
from taking the wrong train with my own hand. He's terribly excitable.
Well, I suppose I shall be just so, at his age. Here!” The captain
caught up a stool and set it near the bulwark for her. “There! You make
yourself comfortable wherever you like. You're at home, you know.” He
was off again in a moment. Lydia cast her eye over at the tug. On the
deck, near the pilot-house, stood the young man who had stopped the
afternoon before, while she sat at the warehouse door, and asked her
grandfather if she were not ill. At his feet was a substantial valise,
and over his arm hung a shawl. He was smoking, and seated near him, on
another valise, was his companion of the day before, also smoking. In
the instant that Lydia caught sight of them, she perceived that they
both recognized her and exchanged, as it were, a start of surprise. But
they remained as before, except that he who was seated drew out a fresh
cigarette, and without looking up reached to the other for a light. They
were both men of good height, and they looked fresh and strong, with
something very alert in their slight movements,--sudden turns of the
head and brisk nods, which were not nervously quick. Lydia wondered at
their presence there in an ignorance which could not even conjecture.
She knew too little to know that they could not have any destination on
the tug, and that they would not be making a pleasure-excursion at that
hour in the morning. Their having their valises with them deepened the
mystery, which was not solved till the tug's engines fell silent, and at
an unnoticed order a space in the bulwark not far from Lydia was opened
and steps were let down the side of the ship. Then the young men, who
had remained, to all appearance, perfectly unconcerned, caught up their
valises and climbed to the deck of the Aroostook. They did not give her
more than a glance out of the corners of their eyes, but the surprise of
their coming on board was so great a shock that she did not observe that
the tug, casting loose from the ship, was describing a curt and foamy
semicircle for her return to the city, and that the Aroostook, with a
cloud of snowy canvas filling overhead, was moving over the level sea
with the light ease of a bird that half swims, half flies, along
the water. A sudden dismay, which was somehow not fear so much as an
overpowering sense of isolation, fell upon the girl. She caught at
Thomas, going forward with some dishes in his hand, with a pathetic
appeal.

“Where are you going, Thomas?”

“I'm going to the cook's galley to help dish up the breakfast.”

“What's the cook's galley?”

“Don't you know? The kitchen.”

“Let me go with you. I should like to see the kitchen.” She trembled
with eagerness. Arrived at the door of the narrow passage that ran
across the deck aft of the forecastle, she looked in and saw, amid
a haze of frying and broiling, the short, stocky figure of a negro,
bow-legged, and unnaturally erect from the waist up. At sight of Lydia,
he made a respectful duck forward with his uncouth body. “Why, are you
the cook?” she almost screamed in response to this obeisance.

“Yes, miss,” said the man, humbly, with a turn of the pleading black
eyes of the negro.

Lydia grew more peremptory: “Why--why--I thought the cook was a woman!”

“Very sorry, miss,” began the negro, with a deprecatory smile, in a
slow, mild voice.

Thomas burst into a boy's yelling laugh: “Well, if that ain't the best
joke on Gabriel! He'll never hear the last of it when I tell it to the
second officer!”

“Thomas!” cried Lydia, terribly, “you shall _not_!” She stamped her
foot. “Do you hear me?”

The boy checked his laugh abruptly. “Yes, ma'am,” he said submissively.

“Well, then!” returned Lydia. She stalked proudly back to the cabin
gangway, and descending shut herself into her state-room.




V.


A few hours later Deacon Latham came into the house with a milk-pan full
of pease. He set this down on one end of the kitchen table, with his
straw hat beside it, and then took a chair at the other end and fell
into the attitude of the day before, when he sat in the parlor with
Lydia and Miss Maria waiting for the stage; his mouth was puckered to
a whistle, and his fingers were held above the board in act to drub it.
Miss Maria turned the pease out on the table, and took the pan into
her lap. She shelled at the pease in silence, till the sound of their
pelting, as they were dropped on the tin, was lost in their multitude;
then she said, with a sharp, querulous, pathetic impatience, “Well,
father, I suppose you're thinkin' about Lyddy.”

“Yes, Maria, I be,” returned her father, with uncommon plumpness, as
if here now were something he had made up his mind to stand to. “I been
thinkin' that Lyddy's a woman grown, as you may say.”

“Yes,” admitted Miss Maria, “she's a woman, as far forth as that goes.
What put it into your head?”

“Well, I d'know as I know. But it's just like this: I got to thinkin'
whether she mightn't get to feelin' rather lonely on the voyage, without
any other woman to talk to.”

“I guess,” said Miss Maria, tranquilly, “she's goin' to feel lonely
enough at times, any way, poor thing! But I told her if she wanted
advice or help about anything just to go to the stewardess. That Mrs.
Bland that spent the summer at the Parkers' last year was always tellin'
how they went to the stewardess for most everything, and she give her
five dollars in gold when they got into Boston. I shouldn't want
Lyddy should give so much as that, but I should want she should give
something, as long's it's the custom.”

“They don't have 'em on sailin' vessels, Captain Jenness said; they only
have 'em on steamers,” said Deacon Latham.

“Have what?” asked Miss Maria, sharply.

“Stewardesses. They've got a cabin-boy.”

Miss Maria desisted a moment from her work; then she answered, with a
gruff shortness peculiar to her, “Well, then, she can go to the cook, I
suppose. It wouldn't matter which she went to, I presume.”

Deacon Latham looked up with the air of confessing to sin before the
whole congregation. “The cook's a man,--a black man,” he said.

Miss Maria dropped a handful of pods into the pan, and sent a handful of
peas rattling across the table on to the floor. “Well, who in Time”--the
expression was strong, but she used it without hesitation, and was never
known to repent it “_will_ she go to, then?”

“I declare for't,” said her father, “I don't know. I d'know as I ever
thought it out fairly before; but just now when I was pickin' the pease
for you, my mind got to dwellin' on Lyddy, and then it come to me all
at once: there she was, the only _one_ among a whole shipful, and I--I
didn't know but what she might think it rather of a strange position for
her.”

“_Oh_!” exclaimed Miss Maria, petulantly. “I guess Lyddy'd know how to
conduct herself wherever she was; she's a born lady, if ever there was
one. But what I think is--” Miss Maria paused, and did not say what she
thought; but it was evidently not the social aspect of the matter which
was uppermost in her mind. In fact, she had never been at all afraid of
men, whom she regarded as a more inefficient and feebler-minded kind of
women.

“The only thing't makes me feel easier is what the captain said about
the young men,” said Deacon Latham.

“What young men?” asked Miss Maria.

“Why, I told you about 'em!” retorted the old man, with some
exasperation.

“You told me about two young men that stopped on the wharf and pitied
Lyddy's worn-out looks.”

“Didn't I tell you the rest? I declare for't, I don't believe I did; I
be'n so put about. Well, as we was drivin' up to the depot, we met the
same two young men, and the captain asked 'em, 'Are you goin' or not
a-goin'?'--just that way; and they said, 'We're goin'.' And he said,
'When you comin' aboard?' and he told 'em he was goin' to haul out this
mornin' at three o'clock. And they asked what tug, and he told 'em, and
they fixed it up between 'em all then that they was to come aboard from
the tug, when she'd got the ship outside; and that's what I suppose they
did. The captain he said to me he hadn't mentioned it before, because he
wa'n't sure't they'd go till that minute. He give 'em a first-rate of a
character.”

Miss Maria said nothing for a long while. The subject seemed one with
which she did not feel herself able to grapple. She looked all about
the kitchen for inspiration, and even cast a searching glance into
the wood-shed. Suddenly she jumped from her chair, and ran to the open
window: “Mr. Goodlow! Mr. Goodlow! I wish you'd come in here a minute.”

She hurried to meet the minister at the front door, her father lagging
after her with the infantile walk of an old man.

Mr. Goodlow took off his straw hat as he mounted the stone step to the
threshold, and said good-morning; they did not shake hands. He wore a
black alpaca coat, and waistcoat of farmer's satin; his hat was dark
straw, like Deacon Latham's, but it was low-crowned, and a line of
ornamental openwork ran round it near the top.

“Come into the settin'-room,” said Miss Maria. “It's cooler, in there.”
 She lost no time in laying the case before the minister. She ended by
saying, “Father, he don't feel just right about it, and I d'know as I'm
quite clear in my own mind.”

The minister considered a while in silence before he said, “I think
Lydia's influence upon those around her will be beneficial, whatever her
situation in life may be.”

“There, father!” cried Miss Maria, in reproachful relief.

“You're right, Maria, you're right!” assented the old man, and they both
waited for the minister to continue.

“I rejoiced with you,” he said, “when this opportunity for Lydia's
improvement offered, and I am not disposed to feel anxious as to the
ways and means. Lydia is no fool. I have observed in her a dignity, a
sort of authority, very remarkable in one of her years.”

“I guess the boys at the school down to the Mill Village found out she
had authority enough,” said Miss Maria, promptly materializing the idea.

“Precisely,” said Mr. Goodlow.

“That's what I told father, in the first place,” said Miss Maria. “I
guess Lyddy'd know how to conduct herself wherever she was,--just the
words I used.”

“I don't deny it, Maria, I don't deny it,” shrilly piped the old man.
“I ain't afraid of any harm comin' to Lyddy any more'n what you be. But
what I said was, Wouldn't she feel kind of strange, sort of lost, as you
may say, among so many, and she the only _one_?”

“She will know how to adapt herself to circumstances,” said Mr. Goodlow.
“I was conversing last summer with that Mrs. Bland who boarded at Mr.
Parker's, and she told me that girls in Europe are brought up with no
habits of self-reliance whatever, and that young ladies are never seen
on the streets alone in France and Italy.”

“Don't you think,” asked Miss Maria, hesitating to accept this
ridiculous statement, “that Mrs. Bland exaggerated some?”

“She _talked_ a great deal,” admitted Mr. Goodlow. “I should be sorry
if Lydia ever lost anything of that native confidence of hers in her
own judgment, and her ability to take care of herself under any
circumstances, and I do not think she will. She never seemed conceited
to me, but she _was_ the most self-reliant girl I ever saw.”

“You've hit it there, Mr. Goodlow. Such a spirit as she always had!”
 sighed Miss Maria. “It was just so from the first. It used to go to my
heart to see that little thing lookin' after herself, every way, and not
askin' anybody's help, but just as quiet and proud about it! She's her
mother, all over. And yest'day, when she set here waitin' for the stage,
and it did seem as if I should have to give up, hearin' her sob,
sob, sob,--why, Mr. Goodlow, she hadn't any more idea of backin' out
than--than--” Miss Maria relinquished the search for a comparison, and
went into another room for a handkerchief. “I don't believe she cared
over and above about goin', from the start,” said Miss Maria, returning,
“but when once she'd made up her mind to it, there she was. I d'know
as she _took_ much of a fancy to her aunt, but you couldn't told from
anything that Lyddy said. Now, if I have anything on my mind, I have to
blat it right out, as you may say; I can't seem to bear it a minute;
but Lyddy's different. Well,” concluded Miss Maria, “I guess there ain't
goin' to any harm come to her. But it did give me a kind of start, first
off, when father up and got to feelin' sort of bad about it. I d'know
as I should thought much about it, if he hadn't seemed to. I d'know as
I should ever thought about anything except her not havin' any one to
advise with about her clothes. It's the only thing she ain't handy with:
she won't know what to wear. I'm afraid she'll spoil her silk. I d'know
but what father's _been_ hasty in not lookin' into things carefuller
first. He most always does repent afterwards.”

“Couldn't repent beforehand!” retorted Deacon Latham. “And I tell
you, Maria, I never saw a much finer man than Captain Jenness; and the
cabin's everything I said it was, and more. Lyddy reg'larly went off
over it; 'n' I guess, as Mr. Goodlow says, she'll influence 'em for
good. Don't you fret about her clothes any. You fitted her out in
apple-pie order, and she'll soon be there. 'T ain't but a little ways
to Try-East, any way, to what it is some of them India voyages, Captain
Jenness said. He had his own daughters out the last voyage; 'n' I guess
he can tell Lyddy when it's weather to wear her silk. I d'know as I'd
better said anything about what I was thinkin'. I don't want to be
noways rash, and yet I thought I couldn't be too partic'lar.”

For a silent moment Miss Maria looked sourly uncertain as to the
usefulness of scruples that came so long after the fact. Then she said
abruptly to Mr. Goodlow, “Was it you or Mr. Baldwin, preached Mirandy
Holcomb's fune'l sermon?”




VI.


One of the advantages of the negative part assigned to women in life
is that they are seldom forced to commit themselves. They can, if they
choose, remain perfectly passive while a great many things take place in
regard to them; they need not account for what they do not do. From time
to time a man must show his hand, but save for one supreme exigency a
woman need never show hers. She moves in mystery as long as she likes;
and mere reticence in her, if she is young and fair, interprets itself
as good sense and good taste.

Lydia was, by convention as well as by instinct, mistress of the
situation when she came out to breakfast, and confronted the young men
again with collected nerves, and a reserve which was perhaps a little
too proud. The captain was there to introduce them, and presented first
Mr. Dunham, the gentleman who had spoken to her grandfather on the
wharf, and then Mr. Staniford, his friend and senior by some four or
five years. They were both of the fair New England complexion; but
Dunham's eyes were blue, and Staniford's dark gray. Their mustaches were
blonde, but Dunham's curled jauntily outward at the corners, and his
light hair waved over either temple from the parting in the middle.
Staniford's mustache was cut short; his hair was clipped tight to his
shapely head, and not parted at all; he had a slightly aquiline nose,
with sensitive nostrils, showing the cartilage; his face was darkly
freckled. They were both handsome fellows, and fittingly dressed in
rough blue, which they wore like men with the habit of good clothes;
they made Lydia such bows as she had never seen before. Then the Captain
introduced Mr. Watterson, the first officer, to all, and sat down,
saying to Thomas, with a sort of guilty and embarrassed growl, “Ain't he
out yet? Well, we won't wait,” and with but little change of tone asked
a blessing; for Captain Jenness in his way was a religious man.

There was a sixth plate laid, but the captain made no further mention of
the person who was not out yet till shortly after the coffee was poured,
when the absentee appeared, hastily closing his state-room door behind
him, and then waiting on foot, with a half-impudent, half-intimidated
air, while Captain Jenness, with a sort of elaborate repressiveness,
presented him as Mr. Hicks. He was a short and slight young man, with
a small sandy mustache curling tightly in over his lip, floating
reddish-blue eyes, and a deep dimple in his weak, slightly retreating
chin. He had an air at once amiable and baddish, with an
expression, curiously blended, of monkey-like humor and spaniel-like
apprehensiveness. He did not look well, and till he had swallowed two
cups of coffee his hand shook. The captain watched him furtively from
under his bushy eyebrows, and was evidently troubled and preoccupied,
addressing a word now and then to Mr. Watterson, who, by virtue of what
was apparently the ship's discipline, spoke only when he was spoken
to, and then answered with prompt acquiescence. Dunham and Staniford
exchanged not so much a glance as a consciousness in regard to him,
which seemed to recognize and class him. They talked to each other,
and sometimes to the captain. Once they spoke to Lydia. Mr. Dunham,
for example, said, “Miss--ah--Blood, don't you think we are uncommonly
fortunate in having such lovely weather for a start-off?”

“I don't know,” said Lydia.

Mr. Dunham arrested himself in the use of his fork. “I beg your pardon?”
 he smiled.

It seemed to be a question, and after a moment's doubt Lydia answered,
“I didn't know it was strange to have fine weather at the start.”

“Oh, but I can assure you it is,” said Dunham, with a certain lady-like
sweetness of manner which he had. “According to precedent, we ought to
be all deathly seasick.”

“Not at _this_ time of year,” said Captain Jenness.

“Not at this time of _year_,” repeated Mr. Watterson, as if the remark
were an order to the crew.

Dunham referred the matter with a look to his friend, who refused
to take part in it, and then he let it drop. But presently Staniford
himself attempted the civility of some conversation with Lydia. He asked
her gravely, and somewhat severely, if she had suffered much from the
heat of the day before.

“Yes,” said Lydia, “it was very hot.”

“I'm told it was the hottest day of the summer, so far,” continued
Staniford, with the same severity.

“I want to know!” cried Lydia.

The young man did not say anything more.

As Dunham lit his cigar at Staniford's on deck, the former said
significantly, “What a very American thing!”

“What a bore!” answered the other.

Dunham had never been abroad, as one might imagine from his calling
Lydia's presence a very American thing, but he had always consorted
with people who had lived in Europe; he read the Revue des Deux Mondes
habitually, and the London weekly newspapers, and this gave him the
foreign stand-point from which he was fond of viewing his native world.
“It's incredible,” he added. “Who in the world can she be?”

“Oh, _I_ don't know,” returned Staniford, with a cold disgust. “I should
object to the society of such a young person for a month or six weeks
under the most favorable circumstances, and with frequent respites; but
to be imprisoned on the same ship with her, and to have her on one's
mind and in one's way the whole time, is more than I bargained for.
Captain Jenness should have told us; though I suppose he thought that
if _she_ could stand it, _we_ might. There's that point of view. But
it takes all ease and comfort out of the prospect. Here comes that
blackguard.” Staniford turned his back towards Mr. Hicks, who was
approaching, but Dunham could not quite do this, though he waited for
the other to speak first.

“Will you--would you oblige me with a light?” Mr. Hicks asked, taking a
cigar from his case.

“Certainly,” said Dunham, with the comradery of the smoker.

Mr. Hicks seemed to gather courage from his cigar. “You didn't expect to
find a lady passenger on board, did you?” His poor disagreeable little
face was lit up with unpleasant enjoyment of the anomaly. Dunham
hesitated for an answer.

“One never can know what one's fellow passengers are going to be,” said
Staniford, turning about, and looking not at Mr. Hicks's face, but his
feet, with an effect of being, upon the whole, disappointed not to find
them cloven. He added, to put the man down rather than from an exact
belief in his own suggestion, “She's probably some relation of the
captain's.”

“Why, that's the joke of it,” said Hicks, fluttered with his superior
knowledge. “I've been pumping the cabin-boy, and he says the captain
never saw her till yesterday. She's an up-country school-marm, and she
came down here with her grandfather yesterday. She's going out to meet
friends of hers in Venice.” The little man pulled at his cigar, and
coughed and chuckled, and waited confidently for the impression.

“Dunham,” said Staniford, “did I hand you that sketch-block of mine to
put in your bag, when we were packing last night?”

“Yes, I've got it.”

“I'm glad of that. Did you see Murray yesterday?”

“No; he was at Cambridge.”

“I thought he was to have met you at Parker's.” The conversation no
longer included Mr. Hicks or the subject he had introduced; after a
moment's hesitation, he walked away to another part of the ship. As soon
as he was beyond ear-shot, Staniford again spoke: “Dunham, this girl
is plainly one of those cases of supernatural innocence, on the part of
herself and her friends, which, as you suggested, wouldn't occur among
any other people in the world but ours.”

“You're a good fellow, Staniford!” cried Dunham.

“Not at all. I call myself simply a human being, with the elemental
instincts of a gentleman, as far as concerns this matter. The girl has
been placed in a position which could be made very painful to her. It
seems to me it's our part to prevent it from being so. I doubt if she
finds it at all anomalous, and if we choose she need never do so till
after we've parted with her. I fancy we can preserve her unconsciousness
intact.”

“Staniford, this is like you,” said his friend, with glistening eyes. “I
had some wild notion of the kind myself, but I'm so glad you spoke of it
first.”

“Well, never mind,” responded Staniford. “We must make her feel that
there is nothing irregular or uncommon in her being here as she is.
I don't know how the matter's to be managed, exactly; it must be a
negative benevolence for the most part; but it can be done. The first
thing is to cow that nuisance yonder. Pumping the cabin-boy! The little
sot! Look here, Dunham; it's such a satisfaction to me to think of
putting that fellow under foot that I'll leave you all the credit of
saving the young lady's feelings. I should like to begin stamping on him
at once.”

“I think you have made a beginning already. I confess I wish you hadn't
such heavy nails in your boots!”

“Oh, they'll do him good, confound him!” said Staniford.

“I should have liked it better if her name hadn't been Blood,” remarked
Dunham, presently.

“It doesn't matter what a girl's surname is. Besides, Blood is very
frequent in some parts of the State.”

“She's very pretty, isn't she?” Dunham suggested.

“Oh, pretty enough, yes,” replied Staniford. “Nothing is so common
as the pretty girl of our nation. Her beauty is part of the general
tiresomeness of the whole situation.”

“Don't you think,” ventured his friend, further, “that she has rather a
lady-like air?”

“She wanted to know,” said Staniford, with a laugh.

Dunham was silent a while before he asked, “What do you suppose her
first name is?”

“Jerusha, probably.”

“Oh, impossible!”

“Well, then,--Lurella. You have no idea of the grotesqueness of these
people's minds. I used to see a great deal of their intimate life when
I went on my tramps, and chanced it among them, for bed and board,
wherever I happened to be. We cultivated Yankees and the raw material
seem hardly of the same race. Where the Puritanism has gone out of
the people in spots, there's the rankest growth of all sorts of crazy
heresies, and the old scriptural nomenclature has given place to
something compounded of the fancifulness of story-paper romance and the
gibberish of spiritualism. They make up their names, sometimes, and call
a child by what sounds pretty to them. I wonder how the captain picked
up that scoundrel.”

The turn of Staniford's thought to Hicks was suggested by the appearance
of Captain Jenness, who now issued from the cabin gangway, and came
toward them with the shadow of unwonted trouble in his face. The
captain, too, was smoking.

“Well, gentlemen,” he began, with the obvious indirectness of a man not
used to diplomacy, “how do you like your accommodations?”

Staniford silently acquiesced in Dunham's reply that they found them
excellent. “But you don't mean to say,” Dunham added, “that you're going
to give us beefsteak and all the vegetables of the season the whole way
over?”

“No,” said the captain; “we shall put you on sea-fare soon enough. But
you'll like it. You don't want the same things at sea that you do on
shore; your appetite chops round into a different quarter altogether,
and you want salt beef; but you'll get it good. Your room's pretty
snug,” he suggested.

“Oh, it's big enough,” said Staniford, to whom he had turned as perhaps
more in authority than Dunham. “While we're well we only sleep in it,
and if we're seasick it doesn't matter where we are.”

The captain knocked the ash from his cigar with the tip of his fat
little finger, and looked down. “I was in hopes I could have let you
had a room apiece, but I had another passenger jumped on me at the last
minute. I suppose you see what's the matter with Mr. Hicks?” He looked
up from one to another, and they replied with a glance of perfect
intelligence. “I don't generally talk my passengers over with one
another, but I thought I'd better speak to you about him. I found him
yesterday evening at my agents', with his father. He's just been on a
spree, a regular two weeks' tear, and the old gentleman didn't know what
to do with him, on shore, any longer. He thought he'd send him to sea a
voyage, and see what would come of it, and he plead hard with me to take
him. I didn't want to take him, but he worked away at me till I couldn't
say no. I argued in my own mind that he couldn't get anything to drink
on my ship, and that he'd behave himself well enough as long as he was
sober.” The captain added ruefully, “He looks worse this morning than
he did last night. He looks bad. I told the old gentleman that if he got
into any trouble at Try-East, or any of the ports where we touched,
he shouldn't set foot on my ship again. But I guess he'll keep pretty
straight. He hasn't got any money, for one thing.”

Staniford laughed. “He stops drinking for obvious reasons, if for no
others, like Artemus Ward's destitute inebriate. Did you think only of
us in deciding whether you should take him?”

The captain looked up quickly at the young men, as if touched in a sore
place. “Well, there again I didn't seem to get my bearings just right.
I suppose you mean the young lady?” Staniford motionlessly and silently
assented. “Well, she's more of a young lady than I thought she was, when
her grandfather first come down here and talked of sending her over with
me. He was always speaking about his little girl, you know, and I got
the idea that she was about thirteen, or eleven, may be. I thought the
child might be some bother on the voyage, but thinks I, I'm used to
children, and I guess I can manage. Bless your soul! when I first see
her on the wharf yesterday, it most knocked me down! I never believed
she was half so tall, nor half so good-looking.” Staniford smiled at
this expression of the captain's despair, but the captain did not smile.
“Why, she was as pretty as a bird. Well, there I was. It was no time
then to back out. The old man wouldn't understood. Besides, there was
the young lady herself, and she seemed so forlorn and helpless that I
kind of pitied her. I thought, What if it was one of my own girls? And I
made up my mind that she shouldn't know from anything I said or did that
she wasn't just as much at home and just as much in place on my ship as
she would be in my house. I suppose what made me feel easier about it,
and took the queerness off some, was my having my own girls along last
voyage. To be sure, it ain't quite the same thing,” said the captain,
interrogatively.

“Not quite,” assented Staniford.

“If there was two of them,” said the captain, “I don't suppose I should
feel so bad about it. But thinks I, A lady's a lady the world over,
and a gentleman's a gentleman.” The captain looked significantly at
the young men. “As for that other fellow,” added Captain Jenness, “if I
can't take care of him, I think I'd better stop going to sea altogether,
and go into the coasting trade.”

He resumed his cigar with defiance, and was about turning away when
Staniford spoke. “Captain Jenness, my friend and I had been talking this
little matter over just before you came up. Will you let me say that I'm
rather proud of having reasoned in much the same direction as yourself?”

This was spoken with that air which gave Staniford a peculiar
distinction, and made him the despair and adoration of his friend: it
endowed the subject with seriousness, and conveyed a sentiment of grave
and noble sincerity. The captain held out a hand to each of the young
men, crossing his wrists in what seemed a favorite fashion with him.
“Good!” he cried, heartily. “I _thought_ I knew you.”




VII.


Staniford and Dunham drew stools to the rail, and sat down with their
cigars after the captain left them. The second mate passed by, and cast
a friendly glance at them; he had whimsical brown eyes that twinkled
under his cap-peak, while a lurking smile played under his heavy
mustache; but he did not speak. Staniford said, there was a pleasant
fellow, and he should like to sketch him. He was only an amateur artist,
and he had been only an amateur in life otherwise, so far; but he did
not pretend to have been anything else.

“Then you're not sorry you came, Staniford?” asked Dunham, putting
his hand on his friend's knee. “He characteristically assumed the
responsibility, although the voyage by sailing-vessel rather than
steamer was their common whim, and it had been Staniford's preference
that decided them for Trieste rather than any nearer port.

“No, I'm not sorry,--if you call it come, already. I think a bit of
Europe will be a very good thing for the present, or as long as I'm
in this irresolute mood. If I understand it, Europe is the place for
American irresolution. When I've made up my mind, I'll come home
again. I still think Colorado is the thing, though I haven't abandoned
California altogether; it's a question of cattle-range and sheep-ranch.”

“You'll decide against both,” said Dunham.

“How would you like West Virginia? They cattle-range in West Virginia,
too. They may sheep-ranch, too, for all I know,--no, that's in Old
Virginia. The trouble is that the Virginias, otherwise irreproachable,
are not paying fields for such enterprises. They say that one is a sure
thing in California, and the other is a sure thing in Colorado. They
give you the figures.” Staniford lit another cigar.

“But why shouldn't you stay where you are, Staniford? You've money
enough left, after all.”

“Yes, money enough for one. But there's something ignoble in living on a
small stated income, unless you have some object in view besides living,
and I haven't, you know. It's a duty I owe to the general frame of
things to make more money.”

“If you turned your mind to any one thing, I'm sure you'd succeed where
you are,” Dunham urged.

“That's just the trouble,” retorted his friend. “I can't turn my mind to
any one thing,--I'm too universally gifted. I paint a little, I model
a little, I play a very little indeed; I can write a book notice. The
ladies praise my art, and the editors keep my literature a long time
before they print it. This doesn't seem the highest aim of being. I have
the noble earth-hunger; I must get upon the land. That's why I've got
upon the water.” Staniford laughed again, and pulled comfortably at
his cigar. “Now, you,” he added, after a pause, in which Dunham did not
reply, “you have not had losses; you still have everything comfortable
about you. _Du hast Alles was Menschen begehr_, even to the _schönsten
Augen_ of the divine Miss Hibbard.”

“Yes, Staniford, that's it. I hate your going out there all alone. Now,
if you were taking some nice girl with you!” Dunham said, with a lover's
fond desire that his friend should be in love, too.

“To those wilds? To a redwood shanty in California, or a turf hovel in
Colorado? What nice girl would go? 'I will take some savage woman, she
shall rear my dusky race.'”

“I don't like to have you take any risks of degenerating,” began Dunham.

“With what you know to be my natural tendencies? Your prophetic eye
prefigures my pantaloons in the tops of my boots. Well, there is time
yet to turn back from the brutality of a patriarchal life. You must
allow that I've taken the longest way round in going West. In Italy
there are many chances; and besides, you know, I like to talk.”

It seemed to be an old subject between them, and they discussed it
languidly, like some abstract topic rather than a reality.

“If you only had some tie to bind you to the East, I should feel pretty
safe about you,” said Dunham, presently.

“I have you,” answered his friend, demurely.

“Oh, I'm nothing,” said Dunham, with sincerity.

“Well, I may form some tie in Italy. Art may fall in love with me,
there. How would you like to have me settle in Florence, and set up
a studio instead of a ranch,--choose between sculpture and painting,
instead of cattle and sheep? After all, it does grind me to have lost
that money! If I had only been swindled out of it, I shouldn't have
cared; but when you go and make a bad thing of it yourself, with your
eyes open, there's a reluctance to place the responsibility where it
belongs that doesn't occur in the other case. Dunham, do you think it
altogether ridiculous that I should feel there was something sacred in
the money? When I remember how hard my poor old father worked to get it
together, it seems wicked that I should have stupidly wasted it on the
venture I did. I want to get it back; I want to make money. And so I'm
going out to Italy with you, to waste more. I don't respect myself as I
should if I were on a Pullman palace car, speeding westward. I'll own I
like this better.”

“Oh, it's all right, Staniford,” said his friend. “The voyage will
do you good, and you'll have time to think everything over, and start
fairer when you get back.”

“That girl,” observed Staniford, with characteristic abruptness, “is
a type that is commoner than we imagine in New England. We fair people
fancy we are the only genuine Yankees. I guess that's a mistake. There
must have been a good many dark Puritans. In fact, we always think of
Puritans as dark, don't we?”

“I believe we do,” assented Dunham. “Perhaps on account of their black
clothes.”

“Perhaps,” said Staniford. “At any rate, I'm so tired of the blonde type
in fiction that I rather like the other thing in life. Every novelist
runs a blonde heroine; I wonder why. This girl has the clear Southern
pallor; she's of the olive hue; and her eyes are black as sloes,--not
that I know what sloes are. Did she remind you of anything in
particular?”

“Yes; a little of Faed's Evangeline, as she sat in the door-way of the
warehouse yesterday.”

“Exactly. I wish the picture were more of a picture; but I don't know
that it matters. _She's_ more of a picture.”

“'Pretty as a bird,' the captain said.”

“Bird isn't bad. But the bird is in her manner. There's something
tranquilly alert in her manner that's like a bird; like a bird that
lingers on its perch, looking at you over its shoulder, if you come up
behind. That trick of the heavily lifted, half lifted eyelids,--I wonder
if it's a trick. The long lashes can't be; she can't make them curl up
at the edges. Blood,--Lurella Blood. And she wants to know.” Staniford's
voice fell thoughtful.

“She's more slender than Faed's Evangeline. Faed painted rather too fat
a sufferer on that tombstone. Lurella Blood has a very pretty figure.
Lurella. Why Lurella?”

“Oh, come, Staniford!” cried Dunham. “It isn't fair to call the girl by
that jingle without some ground for it.”

“I'm sure her name's Lurella, for she wanted to know. Besides, there's
as much sense in it as there is in any name. It sounds very well.
Lurella. It is mere prejudice that condemns the novel collocation of
syllables.”

“I wonder what she's thinking of now,--what's passing in her mind,”
 mused Dunham aloud.

“_You_ want to know, too, do you?” mocked his friend. “I'll tell you
what: processions of young men so long that they are an hour getting by
a given point. That's what's passing in every girl's mind--when
she's thinking. It's perfectly right. Processsions of young girls are
similarly passing in our stately and spacious intellects. It's the chief
business of the youth of one sex to think of the youth of the other
sex.”

“Oh, yes, I know,” assented Dunham; “and I believe in it, too--”

“Of course you do, you wicked wretch, you abandoned Lovelace, you
bruiser of ladies' hearts! You hope the procession is composed entirely
of yourself. What would the divine Hibbard say to your goings-on?”

“Oh, don't, Staniford! It isn't fair,” pleaded Dunham, with the
flattered laugh which the best of men give when falsely attainted
of gallantry. “I was wondering whether she was feeling homesick, or
strange, or--”

“I will go below and ask her,” said Staniford. “I know she will tell
me the exact truth. They always do. Or if you will take a guess of mine
instead of her word for it, I will hazard the surmise that she is not at
all homesick. What has a pretty young girl to regret in such a life as
she has left? It's the most arid and joyless existence under the sun.
She has never known anything like society. In the country with us, the
social side must always have been somewhat paralyzed, but there are
monumental evidences of pleasures in other days that are quite extinct
now. You see big dusty ball-rooms in the old taverns: ball-rooms that
have had no dancing in them for half a century, and where they give you
a bed sometimes. There used to be academies, too, in the hill towns,
where they furnished a rude but serviceable article of real learning,
and where the local octogenarian remembers seeing something famous in
the way of theatricals on examination-day; but neither his children nor
his grandchildren have seen the like. There's a decay of the religious
sentiment, and the church is no longer a social centre, with merry
meetings among the tombstones between the morning and the afternoon
service. Superficial humanitarianism of one kind or another has killed
the good old orthodoxy, as the railroads have killed the turnpikes and
the country taverns; and the common schools have killed the academies.
Why, I don't suppose this girl ever saw anything livelier than a
township cattle show, or a Sunday-school picnic, in her life. They don't
pay visits in the country except at rare intervals, and their evening
parties, when they have any, are something to strike you dead with pity.
They used to clear away the corn-husks and pumpkins on the barn floor,
and dance by the light of tin lanterns. At least, that's the traditional
thing. The actual thing is sitting around four sides of the room,
giggling, whispering, looking at photograph albums, and coaxing somebody
to play on the piano. The banquet is passed in the form of apples and
water. I have assisted at _some_ rural festivals where the apples were
omitted. Upon the whole, I wonder our country people don't all go mad.
They do go mad, a great many of them, and manage to get a little glimpse
of society in the insane asylums.” Staniford ended his tirade with a
laugh, in which he vented his humorous sense and his fundamental pity of
the conditions he had caricatured.

“But how,” demanded Dunham, breaking rebelliously from the silence in
which he had listened, “do you account for her good manner?”

“She probably was born with a genius for it. Some people are born with
a genius for one thing, and some with a genius for another. I, for
example, am an artistic genius, forced to be an amateur by the delusive
possession of early wealth, and now burning with a creative instinct
in the direction of the sheep or cattle business; you have the gift of
universal optimism; Lurella Blood has the genius of good society. Give
that girl a winter among nice people in Boston, and you would never know
that she was not born on Beacon Hill.”

“Oh, I doubt that,” said Dunham.

“You doubt it? Pessimist!”

“But you implied just now that she had no sensibility,” pursued Dunham.

“So I did!” cried Staniford, cheerfully. “Social genius and sensibility
are two very different things; the cynic might contend they were
incompatible, but I won't insist so far. I dare say she may regret the
natal spot; most of us have a dumb, brutish attachment to the _cari
luoghi_; but if she knows anything, she hates its surroundings, and must
be glad to get out into the world. I should like mightily to know how
the world strikes her, as far as she's gone. But I doubt if she's one
to betray her own counsel in any way. She looks deep, Lurella does.”
 Staniford laughed again at the pain which his insistence upon the name
brought into Dunham's face.




VIII.


After dinner, nature avenged herself in the young men for their vigils
of the night before, when they had stayed up so late, parting with
friends, that they had found themselves early risers without having been
abed. They both slept so long that Dunham, leaving Staniford to a still
unfinished nap, came on deck between five and six o'clock.

Lydia was there, wrapped against the freshening breeze in a red knit
shawl, and seated on a stool in the waist of the ship, in the Evangeline
attitude, and with the wistful, Evangeline look in her face, as she
gazed out over the far-weltering sea-line, from which all trace of the
shore had vanished. She seemed to the young man very interesting, and he
approached her with that kindness for all other women in his heart which
the lover feels in absence from his beloved, and with a formless sense
that some retribution was due her from him for the roughness with which
Staniford had surmised her natural history. Women had always been dear
and sacred to him; he liked, beyond most young men, to be with them; he
was forever calling upon them, getting introduced to them, waiting upon
them, inventing little services for them, corresponding with them, and
wearing himself out in their interest. It is said that women do not
value men of this sort so much as men of some other sorts. It was
long, at any rate, before Dunham--whom people always called Charley
Dunham--found the woman who thought him more lovely than every other
woman pronounced him; and naturally Miss Hibbard was the most exacting
of her sex. She required all those offices which Dunham delighted to
render, and many besides: being an invalid, she needed devotion. She had
refused Dunham before going out to Europe with her mother, and she had
written to take him back after she got there. He was now on his way
to join her in Dresden, where he hoped that he might marry her, and be
perfectly sacrificed to her ailments. She only lacked poverty in order
to be thoroughly displeasing to most men; but Dunham had no misgiving
save in regard to her money; he wished she had no money.

“A good deal more motion, isn't there?” he said to Lydia, smiling
sunnily as he spoke, and holding his hat with one hand. “Do you find it
unpleasant?”

“No,” she answered, “not at all. I like it.”

“Oh, there isn't enough swell to make it uncomfortable, yet,” asserted
Dunham, looking about to see if there were not something he could do for
her. “And you may turn out a good sailor. Were you ever at sea before?”

“No; this is the first time I was ever on a ship.”

“Is it possible!” cried Dunham; he was now fairly at sea for the first
time himself, though by virtue of his European associations he seemed
to have made many voyages. It appeared to him that if there was nothing
else he could do for Lydia, it was his duty to talk to her. He found
another stool, and drew it up within easier conversational distance.
“Then you've never been out of sight of land before?”

“No,” said Lydia.

“That's very curious--I beg your pardon; I mean you must find it a great
novelty.”

“Yes, it's very strange,” said the girl, seriously. “It looks like the
Flood. It seems as if all the rest of the world was drowned.”

Dunham glanced round the vast horizon. “It _is_ like the Flood. And it
has that quality, which I've often noticed in sublime things, of seeming
to be for this occasion only.”

“Yes?” said Lydia.

“Why, don't you know? It seems as if it must be like a fine sunset,
and would pass in a few minutes. Perhaps we feel that we can't endure
sublimity long, and want it to pass.”

“I could look at it forever,” replied Lydia.

Dunham turned to see if this were young-ladyish rapture, but perceived
that she was affecting nothing. He liked seriousness, for he was, with
a great deal of affectation for social purposes, a very sincere person.
His heart warmed more and more to the lonely girl; to be talking to her
seemed, after all, to be doing very little for her, and he longed to be
of service. “Have you explored our little wooden world, yet?” he asked,
after a pause.

Lydia paused too. “The ship?” she asked presently. “No; I've only been
in the cabin, and here; and this morning,” she added, conscientiously,
“Thomas showed me the cook's galley,--the kitchen.”

“You've seen more than I have,” said Dunham. “Wouldn't you like to go
forward, to the bow, and see how it looks there?”

“Yes, thank you,” answered Lydia, “I would.”

She tottered a little in gaining her feet, and the wind drifted her
slightness a step or two aside. “Won't you take my arm, perhaps?”
 suggested Dunham.

“Thank you,” said Lydia, “I think I can get along.” But after a few
paces, a lurch of the ship flung her against Dunham's side; he caught
her hand, and passed it through his arm without protest from her.

“Isn't it grand?” he asked triumphantly, as they stood at the prow, and
rose and sank with the vessel's careering plunges. It was no gale, but
only a fair wind; the water foamed along the ship's sides, and, as her
bows descended, shot forward in hissing jets of spray; away on every
hand flocked the white caps. “You had better keep my arm, here.” Lydia
did so, resting her disengaged hand on the bulwarks, as she bent over a
little on that side to watch the rush of the sea. “It really seems as if
there were more of a view here.”

“It does, somehow,” admitted Lydia.

“Look back at the ship's sails,” said Dunham. The swell and press of the
white canvas seemed like the clouds of heaven swooping down upon them
from all the airy heights. The sweet wind beat in their faces, and they
laughed in sympathy, as they fronted it. “Perhaps the motion is a little
too strong for you here?” he asked.

“Oh, not at all!” cried the girl.

He had done something for her by bringing her here, and he hoped to do
something more by taking her away. He was discomfited, for he was at
a loss what other attention to offer. Just at that moment a sound made
itself heard above the whistling of the cordage and the wash of the sea,
which caused Lydia to start and look round.

“Didn't you think,” she asked, “that you heard hens?”

“Why, yes,” said Dunham. “What could it have been? Let us investigate.”

He led the way back past the forecastle and the cook's galley, and
there, in dangerous proximity to the pots and frying pans, they found a
coop with some dozen querulous and meditative fowl in it.

“I heard them this morning,” said Lydia. “They seemed to wake me with
their crowing, and I thought--I was at home!”

“I'm very sorry,” said Dunham, sympathetically. He wished Staniford were
there to take shame to himself for denying sensibility to this girl.

The cook, smoking a pipe at the door of his galley, said, “Dey won't
trouble you much, miss. Dey don't gen'ly last us long, and I'll kill de
roosters first.”

“Oh, come, now!” protested Dunham. “I wouldn't say that!” The cook and
Lydia stared at him in equal surprise.

“Well,” answered the cook, “I'll kill the hens first, den. It don't make
any difference to me which I kill. I dunno but de hens is tenderer.” He
smoked in a bland indifference.

“Oh, hold on!” exclaimed Dunham, in repetition of his helpless protest.

Lydia stooped down to make closer acquaintance with the devoted birds.
They huddled themselves away from her in one corner of their prison, and
talked together in low tones of grave mistrust. “Poor things!” she said.
As a country girl, used to the practical ends of poultry, she knew as
well as the cook that it was the fit and simple destiny of chickens to
be eaten, sooner or later; and it must have been less in commiseration
of their fate than in self-pity and regret for the scenes they recalled
that she sighed. The hens that burrowed yesterday under the lilacs
in the door-yard; the cock that her aunt so often drove, insulted and
exclamatory, at the head of his harem, out of forbidden garden bounds;
the social groups that scratched and descanted lazily about the wide,
sunny barn doors; the anxious companies seeking their favorite perches,
with alarming outcries, in the dusk of summer evenings; the sentinels
answering each other from farm to farm before winter dawns, when all
the hills were drowned in snow, were of kindred with these hapless
prisoners.

Dunham was touched at Lydia's compassion. “Would you like--would you
like to feed them?” he asked by a happy inspiration. He turned to the
cook, with his gentle politeness: “There's no objection to our feeding
them, I suppose?”

“Laws, no!” said the cook. “Fats 'em up.” He went inside, and reappeared
with a pan full of scraps of meat and crusts of bread.

“Oh, I say!” cried Dunham. “Haven't you got some grain, you know, of
some sort; some seeds, don't you know?”

“They will like this,” said Lydia, while the cook stared in perplexity.
She took the pan, and opening the little door of the coop flung the
provision inside. But the fowls were either too depressed in spirit to
eat anything, or they were not hungry; they remained in their corner,
and merely fell silent, as if a new suspicion had been roused in their
unhappy breasts.

“Dey'll come, to it,” observed the cook.

Dunham felt far from content, and regarded the poultry with silent
disappointment. “Are you fond of pets?” he asked, after a while.

“Yes, I used to have pet chickens when I was a little thing.”

“You ought to adopt one of these,” suggested Dunham. “That white one is
a pretty creature.”

“Yes,” said Lydia. “He looks as if he were Leghorn. Leghorn breed,” she
added, in reply to Dunham's look of inquiry. “He's a beauty.”

“Let me get him out for you a moment!” cried the young man, in his
amiable zeal. Before Lydia could protest, or the cook interfere, he
had opened the coop-door and plunged his arm into the tumult which his
manoeuvre created within. He secured the cockerel, and drawing it forth
was about to offer it to Lydia, when in its struggles to escape it drove
one of its spurs into his hand. Dunham suddenly released it; and then
ensued a wild chase for its recapture, up and down the ship, in which it
had every advantage of the young man. At last it sprang upon the rail;
he put out his hand to seize it, when it rose with a desperate screech,
and flew far out over the sea. They watched the suicide till it sank
exhausted into a distant white-cap.

“Dat's gone,” said the cook, philosophically. Dunham looked round. Half
the ship's company, alarmed by his steeple-chase over the deck, were
there, silently agrin.

Lydia did not laugh. When he asked, still with his habitual sweetness,
but entirely at random, “Shall we--ah--go below?” she did not answer
definitely, and did not go. At the same time she ceased to be so timidly
intangible and aloof in manner. She began to talk to Dunham, instead
of letting him talk to her; she asked him questions, and listened with
deference to what he said on such matters as the probable length of the
voyage and the sort of weather they were likely to have. She did not
take note of his keeping his handkerchief wound round his hand, nor of
his attempts to recur to the subject of his mortifying adventure. When
they were again quite alone, the cook's respect having been won back
through his ethnic susceptibility to silver, she remembered that she
must go to her room.

“In other words,” said Staniford, after Dunham had reported the whole
case to him, “she treated your hurt vanity as if you had been her pet
schoolboy. She lured you away from yourself, and got you to talking and
thinking of other things. Lurella is deep, I tell you. What consummate
tacticians the least of women are! It's a pity that they have to work so
often in such dull material as men; they ought always to have women to
operate on. The youngest of them has more wisdom in human nature than
the sages of our sex. I must say, Lurella is magnanimous, too. She might
have taken her revenge on you for pitying her yesterday when she sat in
that warehouse door on the wharf. It was rather fine in Lurella not to
do it. What did she say, Dunham? What did she talk about? Did she want
to know?”

“No!” shouted Dunham. “She talked very well, like any young lady.”

“Oh, all young ladies talk well, of course. But what did this one say?
What did she do, except suffer a visible pang of homesickness at the
sight of unattainable poultry? Come, you have represented the interview
with Miss Blood as one of great brilliancy.”

“I haven't,” said Dunham. “I have done nothing of the kind. Her talk was
like any pleasant talk; it was refined and simple, and--unobtrusive.”

“That is, it was in no way remarkable,” observed Staniford, with a
laugh. “I expected something better of Lurella; I expected something
salient. Well, never mind. She's behaved well by you, seeing what
a goose you had made of yourself. She behaved like a lady, and I've
noticed that she eats with her fork. It often happens in the country
that you find the women practicing some of the arts of civilization,
while their men folk are still sunk in barbaric uses. Lurella, I see, is
a social creature; she was born for society, as you were, and I
suppose you will be thrown a good deal together. We're all likely to be
associated rather familiarly, under the circumstances. But I wish you
would note down in your mind some points of her conversation. I'm really
curious to know what a girl of her traditions thinks about the world
when she first sees it. Her mind must be in most respects an unbroken
wilderness. She's had schooling, of course, and she knows her grammar
and algebra; but she can't have had any cultivation. If she were of an
earlier generation, one would expect to find something biblical in
her; but you can't count upon a Puritanic culture now among our country
folks.”

“If you are so curious,” said Dunham, “why don't you study her mind,
yourself?”

“No, no, that wouldn't do,” Staniford answered. “The light of your
innocence upon hers is invaluable. I can understand her better through
you. You must go on. I will undertake to make your peace with Miss
Hibbard.”

The young men talked as they walked the deck and smoked in the
starlight. They were wakeful after their long nap in the afternoon,
and they walked and talked late, with the silences that old friends
can permit themselves. Staniford recurred to his loss of money and his
Western projects, which took more definite form now that he had placed
so much distance between himself and their fulfillment. With half a year
in Italy before him, he decided upon a cattle-range in Colorado. Then,
“I should like to know,” he said, after one of the pauses, “how two
young men of our form strike that girl's fancy. I haven't any personal
curiosity about her impressions, but I should like to know, as an
observer of the human race. If my conjectures are right, she's never met
people of our sort before.”

“What sort of men has she been associated with?” asked Dunham.

“Well, I'm not quite prepared to say. I take it that it isn't exactly
the hobbledehoy sort. She has probably looked high,--as far up as
the clerk in the store. He has taken her to drive in a buggy Saturday
afternoons, when he put on his ready-made suit,--and looked very well
in it, too; and they've been at picnics together. Or may be, as she's in
the school-teaching line, she's taken some high-browed, hollow-cheeked
high-school principal for her ideal. Or it is possible that she
has never had attention from any one. That is apt to happen to
self-respectful girls in rural communities, and their beauty doesn't
save them. Fellows, as they call themselves, like girls that have what
they call go, that make up to them. Lurella doesn't seem of that kind;
and I should not be surprised if you were the first gentleman who
had ever offered her his arm. I wonder what she thought of you. She's
acquainted by sight with the ordinary summer boarder of North America;
they penetrate everywhere, now; but I doubt if she's talked with them
much, if at all. She must be ignorant of our world beyond anything we
can imagine.”

“But how do you account for her being so well dressed?”

“Oh, that's instinct. You find it everywhere. In every little village
there is some girl who knows how to out-preen all the others. I wonder,”
 added Staniford, in a more deeply musing tone, “if she kept from
laughing at you out of good feeling, or if she was merely overawed by
your splendor.”

“She didn't laugh,” Dunham answered, “because she saw that it would have
added to my annoyance. My splendor had nothing to do with it.”

“Oh, don't underrate your splendor, my dear fellow!” cried Staniford,
with a caressing ridicule that he often used with Dunham. “Of course,
_I_ know what a simple and humble fellow you are, but you've no idea how
that exterior of yours might impose upon the agricultural imagination;
it has its effect upon me, in my pastoral moods.” Dunham made a gesture
of protest, and Staniford went on: “Country people have queer ideas
of us, sometimes. Possibly Lurella was afraid of you. Think of that,
Dunham,--having a woman afraid of you, for once in your life! Well,
hurry up your acquaintance with her, Dunham, or I shall wear myself out
in mere speculative analysis. I haven't the _aplomb_ for studying the
sensibilities of a young lady, and catching chickens for her, so as to
produce a novel play of emotions. I thought this voyage was going to
be a season of mental quiet, but having a young lady on board seems to
forbid that kind of repose. I shouldn't mind a half dozen, but _one_ is
altogether too many. Poor little thing! I say, Dunham! There's something
rather pretty about having her with us, after all, isn't there? It gives
a certain distinction to our voyage. We shall not degenerate. We shall
shave every day, wind and weather permitting, and wear our best things.”
 They talked of other matters, and again Staniford recurred to Lydia: “If
she has any regrets for her mountain home,--though I don't see why she
should have,--I hope they haven't kept her awake. My far-away cot on the
plains is not going to interfere with my slumbers.”

Staniford stepped to the ship's side, and flung the end of his cigarette
overboard; it struck, a red spark amidst the lurid phosphorescence of
the bubbles that swept backward from the vessel's prow.




IX.


The weather held fine. The sun shone, and the friendly winds blew out
of a cloudless heaven; by night the moon ruled a firmament powdered with
stars of multitudinous splendor. The conditions inspired Dunham with a
restless fertility of invention in Lydia's behalf. He had heard of the
game of shuffle-board, that blind and dumb croquet, with which the jaded
passengers on the steamers appease their terrible leisure, and with the
help of the ship's carpenter he organized this pastime, and played it
with her hour after hour, while Staniford looked on and smoked in grave
observance, and Hicks lurked at a distance, till Dunham felt it on
his kind heart and tender conscience to invite him to a share in the
diversion. As his nerves recovered their tone, Hicks showed himself a
man of some qualities that Staniford would have liked in another man:
he was amiable, and he was droll, though apt to turn sulky if Staniford
addressed him, which did not often happen. He knew more than Dunham of
shuffle-board, as well as of tossing rings of rope over a peg set up a
certain space off in the deck,--a game which they eagerly took up in the
afternoon, after pushing about the flat wooden disks all the morning.
Most of the talk at the table was of the varying fortunes of the
players; and the yarn of the story-teller in the forecastle remained
half-spun, while the sailors off watch gathered to look on, and to bet
upon Lydia's skill. It puzzled Staniford to make out whether she felt
any strangeness in the situation, which she accepted with so much
apparent serenity. Sometimes, in his frequently recurring talks with
Dunham, he questioned whether their delicate precautions for saving her
feelings were not perhaps thrown away upon a young person who played
shuffle-board and ring-toss on the deck of the Aroostook with as much
self-possession as she would have played croquet on her native turf at
South Bradfield.

“Their ideal of propriety up country is very different from ours,” he
said, beginning one of his long comments. “I don't say that it concerns
the conscience more than ours does; but they think evil of different
things. We're getting Europeanized,--I don't mean you, Dunham; in spite
of your endeavors you will always remain one of the most hopelessly
American of our species,--and we have our little borrowed anxieties
about the free association of young people. They have none whatever;
though they are apt to look suspiciously upon married people's
friendships with other people's wives and husbands. It's quite likely
that Lurella, with the traditions of her queer world, has not
imagined anything anomalous in her position. She may realize certain
inconveniences. But she must see great advantages in it. Poor girl!
How she must be rioting on the united devotion of cabin and forecastle,
after the scanty gallantries of a hill town peopled by elderly unmarried
women! I'm glad of it, for her sake. I wonder which she really prizes
most: your ornate attentions, or the uncouth homage of those sailors,
who are always running to fetch her rings and blocks when she makes
a wild shot. I believe I don't care and shouldn't disapprove of her
preference, whichever it was.” Staniford frowned before he added: “But
I object to Hicks and his drolleries. It's impossible for that little
wretch to think reverently of a young girl; it's shocking to see her
treating him as if he were a gentleman.” Hicks's behavior really gave no
grounds for reproach; and it was only his moral mechanism, as Staniford
called the character he constructed for him, which he could blame;
nevertheless, the thought of him gave an oblique cast to Staniford's
reflections, which he cut short by saying, “This sort of worship is
every woman's due in girlhood; but I suppose a fortnight of it will make
her a pert and silly coquette. What does she say to your literature,
Dunham?”

Dunham had already begun to lend Lydia books,--his own and
Staniford's,--in which he read aloud to her, and chose passages for her
admiration; but he was obliged to report that she had rather a passive
taste in literature. She seemed to like what he said was good, but not
to like it very much, or to care greatly for reading; or else she had
never had the habit of talking books. He suggested this to Staniford,
who at once philosophized it.

“Why, I rather like that, you know. We all read in such a literary way,
now; we don't read simply for the joy or profit of it; we expect to talk
about it, and say how it is this and that; and I've no doubt that we're
sub-consciously harassed, all the time, with an automatic process of
criticism. Now Lurella, I fancy, reads with the sense of the days when
people read in private, and not in public, as we do. She believes that
your serious books are all true; and she knows that my novels are all
lies--that's what some excellent Christians would call the fiction even
of George Eliot or of Hawthorne; she would be ashamed to discuss the
lives and loves of heroes and heroines who never existed. I think that's
first-rate. She must wonder at your distempered interest in them. If
one could get at it, I suppose the fresh wholesomeness of Lurella's mind
would be something delicious,--a quality like spring water.”

He was one of those men who cannot rest in regard to people they meet
till they have made some effort to formulate them. He liked to ticket
them off; but when he could not classify them, he remained content with
his mere study of them. His habit was one that does not promote sympathy
with one's fellow creatures. He confessed even that it disposed him to
wish for their less acquaintance when once he had got them generalized;
they became then collected specimens. Yet, for the time being, his
curiosity in them gave him a specious air of sociability. He lamented
the insincerity which this involved, but he could not help it. The next
novelty in character was as irresistible as the last; he sat down before
it till it yielded its meaning, or suggested to him some analogy by
which he could interpret it.

With this passion for the arrangement and distribution of his neighbors,
it was not long before he had placed most of the people on board in what
he called the psychology of the ship. He did not care that they should
fit exactly in their order. He rather preferred that they should have
idiosyncrasies which differentiated them from their species, and he
enjoyed Lydia's being a little indifferent about books for this and for
other reasons. “If she were literary, she would be like those vulgar
little persons of genius in the magazine stories. She would have read
all sorts of impossible things up in her village. She would have
been discovered by some aesthetic summer boarder, who had happened to
identify her with the gifted Daisy Dawn, and she would be going out on
the aesthetic's money for the further expansion of her spirit in Europe.
Somebody would be obliged to fall in love with her, and she would
sacrifice her career for a man who was her inferior, as we should be
subtly given to understand at the close. I think it's going to be as
distinguished by and by not to like books as it is not to write them.
Lurella is a prophetic soul; and if there's anything comforting about
her, it's her being so merely and stupidly pretty.”

“She is not merely and stupidly pretty!” retorted Dunham. “She never
does herself justice when you are by. She can talk very well, and on
some subjects she thinks strongly.”

“Oh, I'm sorry for that!” said Staniford. “But call me some time when
she's doing herself justice.”

“I don't mean that she's like the women we know. She doesn't say witty
things, and she hasn't their responsive quickness; but her ideas are
her own, no matter how old they are; and what she says she seems to
be saying for the first time, and as if it had never been thought out
before.”

“That is what I have been contending for,” said Staniford; “that is what
I meant by spring water. It is that thrilling freshness which charms
me in Lurella.” He laughed. “Have you converted her to your spectacular
faith, yet?” Dunham blushed. “You have tried,” continued Staniford.
“Tell me about it!”

“I will not talk with you on such matters,” said Dunham, “till you know
how to treat serious things seriously.”

“I shall know how when I realize that they are serious with you. Well, I
don't object to a woman's thinking strongly on religious subjects: it's
the only safe ground for her strong thinking, and even there she had
better feel strongly. Did you succeed in convincing her that Archbishop
Laud was a _saint incompris_, and the good King Charles a blessed
martyr.”

Dunham did not answer till he had choked down some natural resentment.
He had, several years earlier, forsaken the pale Unitarian worship of
his family, because, Staniford always said, he had such a feeling for
color, and had adopted an extreme tint of ritualism. It was rumored at
one time, before his engagement to Miss Hibbard, that he was going to
unite with a celibate brotherhood; he went regularly into retreat at
certain seasons, to the vast entertainment of his friend; and, within
the bounds of good taste, he was a zealous propagandist of his faith,
of which he had the practical virtues in high degree. “I hope,” he
said presently, “that I know how to respect convictions, even of those
adhering to the Church in Error.”

Staniford laughed again. “I see you have not converted Lurella. Well,
I like that in her, too. I wish I could have the arguments, _pro_ and
_con_. It would have been amusing. I suppose,” he pondered aloud, “that
she is a Calvinist of the deepest dye, and would regard me as a lost
spirit for being outside of her church. She would look down upon me from
one height, as I look down upon her from another. And really, as far as
personal satisfaction in superiority goes, she might have the advantage
of me. That's very curious, very interesting.”

As the first week wore away, the wonted incidents of a sea voyage lent
their variety to the life on board. One day the ship ran into a school
of whales, which remained heavily thumping and lolling about in her
course, and blowing jets of water into the air, like so many breaks in
garden hose, Staniford suggested. At another time some flying-fish came
on board. The sailors caught a dolphin, and they promised a shark, by
and by. All these things were turned to account for the young girl's
amusement, as if they had happened for her. The dolphin died that she
might wonder and pity his beautiful death; the cook fried her some of
the flying-fish; some one was on the lookout to detect even porpoises
for her. A sail in the offing won the discoverer envy when he pointed
it out to her; a steamer, celebrity. The captain ran a point out of
his course to speak to a vessel, that she might be able to tell what
speaking a ship at sea was like.

At table the stores which the young men had laid in for private use
became common luxuries, and she fared sumptuously every day upon
dainties which she supposed were supplied by the ship,--delicate jellies
and canned meats and syruped fruits; and, if she wondered at anything,
she must have wondered at the scrupulous abstinence with which Captain
Jenness, seconded by Mr. Watterson, refused the luxuries which his
bounty provided them, and at the constancy with which Staniford declined
some of these dishes, and Hicks declined others. Shortly after the
latter began more distinctly to be tolerated, he appeared one day on
deck with a steamer-chair in his hand, and offered it to Lydia's use,
where she sat on a stool by the bulwark. After that, as she reclined in
this chair, wrapped in her red shawl, and provided with a book or some
sort of becoming handiwork, she was even more picturesquely than
before the centre about which the ship's pride and chivalrous sentiment
revolved. They were Americans, and they knew how to worship a woman.

Staniford did not seek occasions to please and amuse her, as the others
did. When they met, as they must, three times a day, at table, he took
his part in the talk, and now and then addressed her a perfunctory
civility. He imagined that she disliked him, and he interested himself
in imagining the ignorant grounds of her dislike. “A woman,” he said,
“must always dislike some one in company; it's usually another woman; as
there's none on board, I accept her enmity with meekness.” Dunham wished
to persuade him that he was mistaken. “Don't try to comfort me, Dunham,”
 he replied. “I find a pleasure in being detested which is inconceivable
to your amiable bosom.”

Dunham turned to go below, from where they stood at the head of the
cabin stairs. Staniford looked round, and saw Lydia, whom they had kept
from coming up; she must have heard him. He took his cigar from his
mouth, and caught up a stool, which he placed near the ship's side,
where Lydia usually sat, and without waiting for her concurrence got a
stool for himself, and sat down with her.

“Well, Miss Blood,” he said, “it's Saturday afternoon at last, and we're
at the end of our first week. Has it seemed very long to you?”

Lydia's color was bright with consciousness, but the glance she gave
Staniford showed him looking tranquilly and honestly at her. “Yes,” she
said, “it _has_ seemed long.”

“That's merely the strangeness of everything. There's nothing like local
familiarity to make the time pass,--except monotony; and one gets both
at sea. Next week will go faster than this, and we shall all be at
Trieste before we know it. Of course we shall have a storm or two, and
that will retard us in fact as well as fancy. But you wouldn't feel that
you'd been at sea if you hadn't had a storm.”

He knew that his tone was patronizing, but he had theorized the girl so
much with a certain slight in his mind that he was not able at once
to get the tone which he usually took towards women. This might not,
indeed, have pleased some women any better than patronage: it mocked
while it caressed all their little pretenses and artificialities; he
addressed them as if they must be in the joke of themselves, and did not
expect to be taken seriously. At the same time he liked them greatly,
and would not on any account have had the silliest of them different
from what she was. He did not seek them as Dunham did; their society was
not a matter of life or death with him; but he had an elder-brotherly
kindness for the whole sex.

Lydia waited awhile for him to say something more, but he added nothing,
and she observed, with a furtive look: “I presume you've seen some very
severe storms at sea.”

“No,” Staniford answered, “I haven't. I've been over several times,
but I've never seen anything alarming. I've experienced the ordinary
seasickening tempestuousness.”

“Have you--have you ever been in Italy?” asked Lydia, after another
pause.

“Yes,” he said, “twice; I'm very fond of Italy.” He spoke of it in a
familiar tone that might well have been discouraging to one of her total
unacquaintance with it. Presently he added of his own motion, looking
at her with his interest in her as a curious study, “You're going to
Venice, I think Mr. Dunham told me.”

“Yes,” said Lydia.

“Well, I think it's rather a pity that you shouldn't arrive there
directly, without the interposition of Trieste.” He scanned her yet more
closely, but with a sort of absence in his look, as if he addressed some
ideal of her.

“Why?” asked Lydia, apparently pushed to some self-assertion by this way
of being looked and talked at.

“It's the strangest place in the world,” said Staniford; and then he
mused again. “But I suppose--” He did not go on, and the word fell again
to Lydia.

“I'm going to visit my aunt, who is staying there. She was where I live,
last summer, and she told us about it. But I couldn't seem to understand
it.”

“No one can understand it, without seeing it.”

“I've read some descriptions of it,” Lydia ventured.

“They're of no use,--the books.”

“Is Trieste a strange place, too?”

“It's strange, as a hundred other places are,--and it's picturesque; but
there's only one Venice.”

“I'm afraid sometimes,” she faltered, as if his manner in regard to this
peculiar place had been hopelessly exclusive, “that it will be almost
too strange.”

“Oh, that's another matter,” said Staniford. “I confess I should be
rather curious to know whether you liked Venice. I like it, but I can
imagine myself sympathizing with people who detested it,--if they said
so. Let me see what will give you some idea of it. Do you know Boston
well?”

“No; I've only been there twice,” Lydia acknowledged.

“Then you've never seen the Back Bay by night, from the Long Bridge.
Well, let me see--”

“I'm afraid,” interposed Lydia, “that I've not been about enough for you
to give me an idea from other places. We always go to Greenfield to do
our trading; and I've been to Keene and Springfield a good many times.”

“I'm sorry to say I haven't,” said Staniford. “But I'll tell you: Venice
looks like an inundated town. If you could imagine those sunset clouds
yonder turned marble, you would have Venice as she is at sunset. You
must first think of the sea when you try to realize the place. If you
don't find the sea too strange, you won't find Venice so.”

“I wish it would ever seem half as home-like!” cried the girl.

“Then you find the ship--I'm glad you find the ship--home-like,” said
Staniford, tentatively.

“Oh, yes; everything is so convenient and pleasant. It seems sometimes
as if I had always lived here.”

“Well, that's very nice,” assented Staniford, rather blankly. “Some
people feel a little queer at sea--in the beginning. And you haven't--at
all?” He could not help this leading question, yet he knew its meanness,
and felt remorse for it.

“Oh, _I_ did, at first,” responded the girl, but went no farther; and
Staniford was glad of it. After all, why should he care to know what was
in her mind?

“Captain Jenness,” he merely said, “understands making people at home.”

“Oh, yes, indeed,” assented Lydia. “And Mr. Watterson is very agreeable,
and Mr. Mason. I didn't suppose sailors were so. What soft, mild voices
they have!”

“That's the speech of most of the Down East coast people.”

“Is it? I like it better than our voices. Our voices are so sharp and
high, at home.”

“It's hard to believe that,” said Staniford, with a smile.

Lydia looked at him. “Oh, I wasn't born in South Bradfield. I was ten
years old when I went there to live.”

“Where _were_ you born, Miss Blood?” he asked.

“In California. My father had gone out for his health, but he died
there.”

“Oh!” said Staniford. He had a book in his hand, and he began to
scribble a little sketch of Lydia's pose, on a fly-leaf. She looked
round and saw it. “You've detected me,” he said; “I haven't any right to
keep your likeness, now. I must make you a present of this work of art,
Miss Blood.” He finished the sketch with some ironical flourishes, and
made as if to tear out the leaf.

“Oh!” cried Lydia, simply, “you will spoil the book!”

“Then the book shall go with the picture, if you'll let it,” said
Staniford.

“Do you mean to give it to me?” she asked, with surprise.

“That was my munificent intention. I want to write your name in it.
What's the initial of your first name, Miss Blood?”

“L, thank you,” said Lydia.

Staniford gave a start. “No!” he exclaimed. It seemed a fatality.

“My name is Lydia,” persisted the girl. “What letter should it begin
with?”

“Oh--oh, I knew Lydia began with an L,” stammered Staniford, “but
I--I--I thought your first name was--”

“What?” asked Lydia sharply.

“I don't know. Lily,” he answered guiltily.

“Lily _Blood_!” cried the girl. “Lydia is bad enough; but _Lily_ Blood!
They couldn't have been such fools!”

“I beg your pardon. Of course not. I don't know how I could have got the
idea. It was one of those impressions--hallucinations--” Staniford found
himself in an attitude of lying excuse towards the simple girl, over
whom he had been lording it in satirical fancy ever since he had seen
her, and meekly anxious that she should not be vexed with him. He began
to laugh at his predicament, and she smiled at his mistake. “What is the
date?” he asked.

“The 15th,” she said; and he wrote under the sketch, _Lydia Blood. Ship
Aroostook, August_ 15, 1874, and handed it to her, with a bow surcharged
with gravity.

She took it, and regarded the picture without comment.

“Ah!” said Staniford, “I see that you know how bad my sketch is. You
sketch.”

“No, I don't know how to draw,” replied Lydia.

“You criticise.”

“No.”

“So glad,” said Staniford. He began to like this. A young man must find
pleasure in sitting alone near a pretty young girl, and talking with her
about herself and himself, no matter how plain and dull her speech is;
and Staniford, though he found Lydia as blankly unresponsive as might be
to the flattering irony of his habit, amused himself in realizing that
here suddenly he was almost upon the terms of window-seat flirtation
with a girl whom lately he had treated with perfect indifference, and
just now with fatherly patronage. The situation had something more even
than the usual window-seat advantages; it had qualities as of a common
shipwreck, of their being cast away on a desolate island together. He
felt more than ever that he must protect this helpless loveliness, since
it had begun to please his imagination. “You don't criticise,” he said.
“Is that because you are so amiable? I'm sure you could, if you would.”

“No,” returned Lydia; “I don't really know. But I've often wished I did
know.”

“Then you didn't teach drawing, in your school?”

“How did you know I had a school?” asked Lydia quickly.

He disliked to confess his authority, because he disliked the authority,
but he said, “Mr. Hicks told us.”

“Mr. Hicks!” Lydia gave a little frown as of instinctive displeasure,
which gratified Staniford.

“Yes; the cabin-boy told him. You see, we are dreadful gossips on the
Aroostook,--though there are so few ladies--” It had slipped from him,
but it seemed to have no personal slant for Lydia.

“Oh, yes; I told Thomas,” she said. “No; it's only a country school.
Once I thought I should go down to the State Normal School, and
study drawing there; but I never did. Are you--are you a painter, Mr.
Staniford?”

He could not recollect that she had pronounced his name before; he
thought it came very winningly from her lips. “No, I'm not a painter.
I'm not anything.” He hesitated; then he added recklessly, “I'm a
farmer.”

“A farmer?” Lydia looked incredulous, but grave.

“Yes; I'm a horny-handed son of the soil. I'm a cattle-farmer; I'm a
sheep-farmer; I don't know which. One day I'm the one, and the next day
I'm the other.” Lydia looked mystified, and Staniford continued: “I
mean that I have no profession, and that sometimes I think of going into
farming, out West.”

“Yes?” said Lydia.

“How should I like it? Give me an opinion, Miss Blood.”

“Oh, I don't know,” answered the girl.

“You would never have dreamt that I was a farmer, would you?”

“No, I shouldn't,” said Lydia, honestly. “It's very hard work.”

“And I don't look fond of hard work?”

“I didn't say that.”

“And I've no right to press you for your meaning.”

“What I meant was--I mean--Perhaps if you had never tried it you didn't
know what very hard work it was. Some of the summer boarders used to
think our farmers had easy times.”

“I never was a summer boarder of that description. I know that farming
is hard work, and I'm going into it because I dislike it. What do you
think of that as a form of self-sacrifice?”

“I don't see why any one should sacrifice himself uselessly.”

“You don't? You have very little conception of martyrdom. Do you like
teaching school?”

“No,” said Lydia promptly.

“Why do you teach, then?” Staniford had blundered. He knew why she
taught, and he felt instantly that he had hurt her pride, more sensitive
than that of a more sophisticated person, who would have had no scruple
in saying that she did it because she was poor. He tried to retrieve
himself. “Of course, I understand that school-teaching is useful
self-sacrifice.” He trembled lest she should invent some pretext for
leaving him; he could not afford to be left at a disadvantage. “But do
you know, I would no more have taken you for a teacher than you me for a
farmer.”

“Yes?” said Lydia.

He could not tell whether she was appeased or not, and he rather feared
not. “You don't ask why. And I asked you why at once.”

Lydia laughed. “Well, why?”

“Oh, that's a secret. I'll tell you one of these days.” He had really no
reason; he said this to gain time. He was always honest in his talk with
men, but not always with women.

“I suppose I look very young,” said Lydia. “I used to be afraid of the
big boys.”

“If the boys were big enough,” interposed Staniford, “they must have
been afraid of you.”

Lydia said, as if she had not understood, “I had hard work to get my
certificate. But I was older than I looked.”

“That is much better,” remarked Staniford, “than being younger than
you look. I am twenty-eight, and people take me for thirty-four. I'm
a prematurely middle-aged man. I wish you would tell me, Miss Blood, a
little about South Bradfield. I've been trying to make out whether I was
ever there. I tramped nearly everywhere when I was a student. What sort
of people are they there?”

“Oh, they are very nice people,” said Lydia.

“Do you like them?”

“I never thought whether I did. They are nearly all old. Their children
have gone away; they don't seem to live; they are just staying. When I
first came there I was a little girl. One day I went into the grave-yard
and counted the stones; there were three times as many as there were
living persons in the village.”

“I think I know the kind of place,” said Staniford. “I suppose you're
not very homesick?”

“Not for the place,” answered Lydia, evasively.

“Of course,” Staniford hastened to add, “you miss your own family
circle.” To this she made no reply. It is the habit of people bred like
her to remain silent for want of some sort of formulated comment upon
remarks to which they assent.

Staniford fell into a musing mood, which was without visible
embarrassment to the young girl, who must have been inured to much
severer silences in the society of South Bradfield. He remained staring
at her throughout his reverie, which in fact related to her. He was
thinking what sort of an old maid she would have become if she had
remained in that village. He fancied elements of hardness and sharpness
in her which would have asserted themselves as the joyless years went
on, like the bony structure of her face as the softness of youth left
it. She was saved from that, whatever was to be her destiny in Italy.
From South Bradfield to Venice,--what a prodigious transition! It seemed
as if it must transfigure her. “Miss Blood,” he exclaimed, “I wish I
could be with you when you first see Venice!”

“Yes?” said Lydia.

Even the interrogative comment, with the rising inflection, could not
chill his enthusiasm. “It is really the greatest sight in the world.”

Lydia had apparently no comment to make on this fact. She waited
tranquilly a while before she said, “My father used to talk about
Italy to me when I was little. He wanted to go. My mother said
afterwards--after she had come home with me to South Bradfield--that
she always believed he would have lived if he had gone there. He had
consumption.”

“Oh!” said Staniford softly. Then he added, with the tact of his sex,
“Miss Blood, you mustn't take cold, sitting here with me. This wind is
chilly. Shall I go below and get you some more wraps?”

“No, thank you,” said Lydia; “I believe I will go down, now.”

She went below to her room, and then came out into the cabin with
some sewing at which she sat and stitched by the lamp. The captain
was writing in his log-book; Dunham and Hicks were playing checkers
together. Staniford, from a corner of a locker, looked musingly
upon this curious family circle. It was not the first time that its
occupations had struck him oddly. Sometimes when they were all there
together, Dunham read aloud. Hicks knew tricks of legerdemain which he
played cleverly. The captain told some very good stories, and led off
in the laugh. Lydia always sewed and listened. She did not seem to find
herself strangely placed, and her presence characterized all that was
said and done with a charming innocence. As a bit of life, it was as
pretty as it was quaint.

“Really,” Staniford said to Dunham, as they turned in, that night, “she
has domesticated us.”

“Yes,” assented Dunham with enthusiasm; “isn't she a nice girl?”

“She's intolerably passive. Or not passive, either. She says what she
thinks, but she doesn't seem to have thought of many things. Did she
ever tell you about her father?”

“No,” said Dunham.

“I mean about his dying of consumption?”

“No, she never spoke of him to me. Was he--”

“Um. It appears that we have been upon terms of confidence, then.”
 Staniford paused, with one boot in his hand. “I should never have
thought it.”

“What was her father?” asked Dunham.

“Upon my word, I don't know. I didn't seem to get beyond elemental
statements of intimate fact with her. He died in California, where she
was born; and he always had a longing to go to Italy. That was rather
pretty.”

“It's very touching, I think.”

“Yes, of course. We might fancy this about Lurella: that she has a sort
of piety in visiting the scenes that her father wished to visit, and
that--Well, anything is predicable of a girl who says so little and
looks so much. She's certainly very handsome; and I'm bound to say that
her room could not have been better than her company, so far.”



X.

The dress that Lydia habitually wore was one which her aunt Maria
studied from the costume of a summer boarder, who had spent a preceding
summer at the sea-shore, and who found her yachting-dress perfectly
adapted to tramping over the South Bradfield hills. Thus reverting to
its original use on shipboard, the costume looked far prettier on Lydia
than it had on the summer boarder from whose unconscious person it had
been plagiarized. It was of the darkest blue flannel, and was fitly
set off with those bright ribbons at the throat which women know how
to dispose there according to their complexions. One day the bow was
scarlet, and another crimson; Staniford did not know which was better,
and disputed the point in vain with Dunham. They all grew to have a
taste in such matters. Captain Jenness praised her dress outright,
and said that he should tell his girls about it. Lydia, who had always
supposed it was a walking costume, remained discreetly silent when the
young men recognized its nautical character. She enjoyed its success;
she made some little changes in the hat she wore with it, which met the
approval of the cabin family; and she tranquilly kept her black silk in
reserve for Sunday. She came out to breakfast in it, and it swept the
narrow spaces, as she emerged from her state-room, with so rich and deep
a murmur that every one looked up. She sustained their united glance
with something tenderly deprecatory and appealingly conscious in her
manner, much as a very sensitive girl in some new finery meets the eyes
of her brothers when she does not know whether to cry or laugh at what
they will say. Thomas almost dropped a plate. “Goodness!” he said,
helplessly expressing the public sentiment in regard to a garment of
which he alone had been in the secret. No doubt it passed his fondest
dreams of its splendor; it fitted her as the sheath of the flower fits
the flower.

Captain Jenness looked hard at her, but waited a decent season after
saying grace before offering his compliment, which he did in drawing the
carving-knife slowly across the steel. “Well, Miss Blood, that's right!”
 Lydia blushed richly, and the young men made their obeisances across the
table.

The flushes and pallors chased each other over her face, and the sight
of her pleasure in being beautiful charmed Staniford. “If she were used
to worship she would have taken our adoration more arrogantly,” he said
to his friend when they went on deck after breakfast. “I can place her;
but one's circumstance doesn't always account for one in America, and
I can't make out yet whether she's ever been praised for being pretty.
Some of our hill-country people would have felt like hushing up her
beauty, as almost sinful, and some would have gone down before it like
Greeks. I can't tell whether she knows it all or not; but if you suppose
her unconscious till now, it's pathetic. And black silks must be
too rare in her life not to be celebrated by a high tumult of inner
satisfaction. I'm glad we bowed down to the new dress.”

“Yes,” assented Dunham, with an uneasy absence; “but--Staniford, I
should like to propose to Captain Jenness our having service this
morning. It is the eleventh Sunday after--”

“Ah, yes!” said Staniford. “It is Sunday, isn't it? I _thought_ we had
breakfast rather later than usual. All over the Christian world, on land
and sea, there is this abstruse relation between a late breakfast and
religious observances.”

Dunham looked troubled. “I wish you wouldn't talk that way, Staniford,
and I hope you won't say anything--”

“To interfere with your proposition? My dear fellow, I am at least a
gentleman.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Dunham, gratefully.

Staniford even went himself to the captain with Dunham's wish; it is
true the latter assumed the more disagreeable part of proposing the
matter to Hicks, who gave a humorous assent, as one might to a joke of
doubtful feasibility.

Dunham gratified both his love for social management and his zeal for
his church in this organization of worship; and when all hands were
called aft, and stood round in decorous silence, he read the lesson for
the day, and conducted the service with a gravity astonishing to the
sailors, who had taken him for a mere dandy. Staniford bore his part in
the responses from the same prayer-book with Captain Jenness, who kept
up a devout, inarticulate under-growl, and came out strong on particular
words when he got his bearings through his spectacles. Hicks and the
first officer silently shared another prayer-book, and Lydia offered
half hers to Mr. Mason.

When the hymn was given out, she waited while an experimental search
for the tune took place among the rest. They were about to abandon the
attempt, when she lifted her voice and began to sing. She sang as she
did in the meeting-house at South Bradfield, and her voice seemed
to fill all the hollow height and distance; it rang far off like a
mermaid's singing, on high like an angel's; it called with the same deep
appeal to sense and soul alike. The sailors stood rapt; Dunham kept up
a show of singing for the church's sake. The others made no pretense
of looking at the words; they looked at her, and she began to falter,
hearing herself alone. Then Staniford struck in again wildly, and the
sea-voices lent their powerful discord, while the girl's contralto
thrilled through all.

“Well, Miss Blood,” said the captain, when the service had ended in that
subordination of the spiritual to the artistic interest which marks
the process and the close of so much public worship in our day, “you've
given us a surprise. I guess we shall keep you pretty busy with our
calls for music, after this.”

“She is a genius!” observed Staniford at his first opportunity with
Dunham. “I knew there must be something the matter. Of course she's
going out to school her voice; and she hasn't strained it in idle babble
about her own affairs! I must say that Lu--Miss Blood's power of holding
her tongue commands my homage. Was it her little _coup_ to wait till we
got into that hopeless hobble before she struck in?”

“Coup? For shame, Staniford! Coup at such a time!”

“Well, well! I don't say so. But for the theatre one can't begin
practicing these effects too soon. Really, that voice puts a new
complexion on Miss Blood. I have a theory to reconstruct. I have been
philosophizing her as a simple country girl. I must begin on an operatic
novice. I liked the other better. It gave value to the black silk; as a
singer she'll wear silk as habitually as a cocoon. She will have to
take some stage name; translate Blood into Italian. We shall know her
hereafter as La Sanguinelli; and when she comes to Boston we shall make
our modest brags about going out to Europe with her. I don't know; I
think I preferred the idyllic flavor I was beginning to find in the
presence of the ordinary, futureless young girl, voyaging under the
chaperonage of her own innocence,--the Little Sister of the Whole
Ship. But this crepusculant prima donna--no, I don't like it. Though
it explains some things. These splendid creatures are never sent half
equipped into the world. I fancy that where there's an operatic voice,
there's an operatic soul to go with it. Well, La Sanguinelli will wear
me out, yet! Suggest some new topic, Dunham; talk of something else, for
heaven's sake!”

“Do you suppose,” asked Dunham, “that she would like to help get up some
_musicales_, to pass away the time?”

“Oh, do you call that talking of something else? What an insatiate
organizer you are! You organize shuffleboard; you organize public
worship; you want to organize musicales. She would have to do all your
music for you.”

“I think she would like to go in for it,” said Dunham. “It must be a
pleasure to exercise such a gift as that, and now that it's come out in
the way it has, it would be rather awkward for us not to recognize it.”

Staniford refused point-blank to be a party to the new enterprise, and
left Dunham to his own devices at dinner, where he proposed the matter.

“If you had my Persis here, now,” observed Captain Jenness, “with her
parlor organ, you could get along.”

“I wish Miss Jenness was here,” said Dunham, politely. “But we must try
to get on as it is. With Miss Blood's voice to start with, nothing ought
to discourage us.” Dunham had a thin and gentle pipe of his own, and
a fairish style in singing, but with his natural modesty he would not
offer himself as a performer except in default of all others. “Don't you
sing, Mr. Hicks?”

“Anything to oblige a friend,” returned Hicks. “But I don't sing--before
Miss Blood.”

“Miss Blood,” said Staniford, listening in ironic safety, “you overawe
us all. I never did sing, but I think I should want to make an effort if
you were not by.”

“But don't you--don't you play something, anything?” persisted Dunham,
in desperate appeal to Hicks.

“Well, yes,” the latter admitted, “I play the flute a little.”

“Flutes on water!” said Staniford. Hicks looked at him in sulky dislike,
but as if resolved not to be put down by him.

“And have you got your flute with you?” demanded Dunham, joyously.

“Yes, I have,” replied Hicks.

“Then we are all right. I think I can carry a part, and if you will play
to Miss Blood's singing--”

“Try it this evening, if you like,” said the other.

“Well, ah--I don't know. Perhaps--we hadn't better begin this evening.”

Staniford laughed at Dunham's embarrassment. “You might have a sacred
concert, and Mr. Hicks could represent the shawms and cymbals with his
flute.”

Dunham looked sorry for Staniford's saying this. Captain Jenness stared
at him, as if his taking the names of these scriptural instruments in
vain were a kind of blasphemy, and Lydia seemed puzzled and a little
troubled.

“I didn't think of its being Sunday,” said Hicks, with what Staniford
felt to be a cunning assumption of manly frankness, “or any more Sunday
than usual; seems as if we had had a month of Sundays already since
we sailed. I'm not much on religion myself, but I shouldn't like to
interfere with other people's principles.”

Staniford was vexed with himself for his scornful pleasantry, and vexed
with the others for taking it so seriously and heavily, and putting him
so unnecessarily in the wrong. He was angry with Dunham, and he said to
Hicks, “Very just sentiments.”

“I am glad you like them,” replied Hicks, with sullen apprehension of
the offensive tone.

Staniford turned to Lydia. “I suppose that in South Bradfield your
Sabbath is over at sundown on Sunday evening.”

“That used to be the custom,” answered the girl. “I've heard my
grandfather tell of it.”

“Oh, yes,” interposed Captain Jenness. “They used to keep Saturday night
down our way, too. I can remember when I was a boy. It came pretty hard
to begin so soon, but it seemed to kind of break it, after all, having a
night in.”

The captain did not know what Staniford began to laugh at. “Our Puritan
ancestors knew just how much human nature could stand, after all. We
did not have an uninterrupted Sabbath till the Sabbath had become much
milder. Is that it?”

The captain had probably no very clear notion of what this meant, but
simply felt it to be a critical edge of some sort. “I don't know as you
can have too much religion,” he remarked. “I've seen some pretty rough
customers in the church, but I always thought, What would they be out of
it!”

“Very true!” said Staniford, smiling. He wanted to laugh again, but he
liked the captain too well to do that; and then he began to rage in his
heart at the general stupidity which had placed him in the attitude of
mocking at religion, a thing he would have loathed to do. It seemed to
him that Dunham was answerable for his false position. “But we shall not
see the right sort of Sabbath till Mr. Dunham gets his Catholic church
fully going,” he added.

They all started, and looked at Dunham as good Protestants must when
some one whom they would never have suspected of Catholicism turns out
to be a Catholic. Dunham cast a reproachful glance at his friend, but
said simply, “I am a Catholic,--that is true; but I do not admit the
pretensions of the Bishop of Rome.”

The rest of the company apparently could not follow him in making this
distinction; perhaps some of them did not quite know who the Bishop of
Rome was. Lydia continued to look at him in fascination; Hicks seemed
disposed to whistle, if such a thing were allowable; Mr. Watterson
devoutly waited for the captain. “Well,” observed the captain at last,
with the air of giving the devil his due, “I've seen some very good
people among the Catholics.”

“That's so, Captain Jenness,” said the first officer.

“I don't see,” said Lydia, without relaxing her gaze, “why, if you are a
Catholic, you read the service of a Protestant church.”

“It is not a Protestant church,” answered Dunham, gently, “as I have
tried to explain to you.”

“The Episcopalian?” demanded Captain Jenness.

“The Episcopalian,” sweetly reiterated Dunham.

“I should like to know what kind of a church it is, then,” said Captain
Jenness, triumphantly.

“An Apostolic church.”

Captain Jenness rubbed his nose, as if this were a new kind of church to
him.

“Founded by Saint Henry VIII. himself,” interjected Staniford.

“No, Staniford,” said Dunham, with a soft repressiveness. And now a
threatening light of zeal began to burn in his kindly eyes. These souls
had plainly been given into his hands for ecclesiastical enlightenment.
“If our friends will allow me, I will explain--”

Staniford's shaft had recoiled upon his own head. “O Lord!” he cried,
getting up from the table, “I can't stand _that_!” The others regarded
him, as he felt, even to that weasel of a Hicks, as a sheep of uncommon
blackness. He went on deck, and smoked a cigar without relief. He still
heard the girl's voice in singing; and he still felt in his nerves the
quality of latent passion in it which had thrilled him when she sang.
His thought ran formlessly upon her future, and upon what sort of
being was already fated to waken her to those possibilities of intense
suffering and joy which he imagined in her. A wound at his heart,
received long before, hurt vaguely; and he felt old.




XI.


No one said anything more of the musicales, and the afternoon and
evening wore away without general talk. Each seemed willing to keep
apart from the rest. Dunham suffered Lydia to come on deck alone after
tea, and Staniford found her there, in her usual place, when he went up
some time later. He approached her at once, and said, smiling down into
her face, to which the moonlight gave a pale mystery, “Miss Blood, did
you think I was very wicked to-day at dinner?”

Lydia looked away, and waited a moment before she spoke. “I don't know,”
 she said. Then, impulsively, “Did you?” she asked.

“No, honestly, I don't think I was,” answered Staniford. “But I seemed
to leave that impression on the company. I felt a little nasty, that
was all; and I tried to hurt Mr. Dunham's feelings. But I shall make
it right with him before I sleep; he knows that. He's used to having me
repent at leisure. Do you ever walk Sunday night?”

“Yes, sometimes,” said Lydia interrogatively.

“I'm glad of that. Then I shall not offend against your scruples if I
ask you to join me in a little ramble, and you will refuse from purely
personal considerations. Will you walk with me?”

“Yes.” Lydia rose.

“And will you take my arm?” asked Staniford, a little surprised at her
readiness.

“Thank you.”

She put her hand upon his arm, confidently enough, and they began to
walk up and down the stretch of open deck together.

“Well,” said Staniford, “did Mr. Dunham convince you all?”

“I think he talks beautifully about it,” replied Lydia, with quaint
stiffness.

“I am glad you see what a very good fellow he is. I have a real
affection for Dunham.”

“Oh, yes, he's good. At first it surprised me. I mean--”

“No, no,” Staniford quickly interrupted, “why did it surprise you to
find Dunham good?”

“I don't know. You don't expect a person to be serious who is so--so--”

“Handsome?”

“No,--so--I don't know just how to say it: fashionable.”

Staniford laughed. “Why, Miss Blood, you're fashionably dressed
yourself, not to go any farther, and you're serious.”

“It's different with a man,” the girl explained.

“Well, then, how about me?” asked Staniford. “Am I too well dressed to
be expected to be serious?”

“Mr. Dunham always seems in earnest,” Lydia answered, evasively.

“And you think one can't be in earnest without being serious?” Lydia
suffered one of those silences to ensue in which Staniford had already
found himself helpless. He knew that he should be forced to break it:
and he said, with a little spiteful mocking, “I suppose the young men of
South Bradfield are both serious and earnest.”

“How?” asked Lydia.

“The young men of South Bradfield.”

“I told you that there were none. They all go away.”

“Well, then, the young men of Springfield, of Keene, of Greenfield.”

“I can't tell. I am not acquainted there.”

Staniford had begun to have a disagreeable suspicion that her ready
consent to walk up and down with a young man in the moonlight might have
come from a habit of the kind. But it appeared that her fearlessness
was like that of wild birds in those desert islands where man has
never come. The discovery gave him pleasure out of proportion to its
importance, and he paced back and forth in a silence that no longer
chafed. Lydia walked very well, and kept his step with rhythmic unison,
as if they were walking to music together. “That's the time in her
pulses,” he thought, and then he said, “Then you don't have a great
deal of social excitement, I suppose,--dancing, and that kind of thing?
Though perhaps you don't approve of dancing?”

“Oh, yes, I like it. Sometimes the summer boarders get up little dances
at the hotel.”

“Oh, the summer boarders!” Staniford had overlooked them. “The young men
get them up, and invite the ladies?” he pursued.

“There are no young men, generally, among the summer boarders. The
ladies dance together. Most of the gentlemen are old, or else invalids.”

“Oh!” said Staniford.

“At the Mill Village, where I've taught two winters, they have dances
sometimes,--the mill hands do.”

“And do you go?”

“No. They are nearly all French Canadians and Irish people.”

“Then you like dancing because there are no gentlemen to dance with?”

“There are gentlemen at the picnics.”

“The picnics?”

“The teachers' picnics. They have them every summer, in a grove by the
pond.”

There was, then, a high-browed, dyspeptic high-school principal, and the
desert-island theory was probably all wrong. It vexed Staniford, when
he had so nearly got the compass of her social life, to find this
unexplored corner in it.

“And I suppose you are leaving very agreeable friends among the
teachers?”

“Some of them are pleasant. But I don't know them very well. I've only
been to one of the picnics.”

Staniford drew a long, silent breath. After all, he knew everything. He
mechanically dropped a little the arm on which her hand rested, that it
might slip farther within. Her timid remoteness had its charm, and he
fell to thinking, with amusement, how she who was so subordinate to him
was, in the dimly known sphere in which he had been groping to find her,
probably a person of authority and consequence. It satisfied a certain
domineering quality in him to have reduced her to this humble attitude,
while it increased the protecting tenderness he was beginning to have
for her. His mind went off further upon this matter of one's different
attitudes toward different persons; he thought of men, and women
too, before whom he should instantly feel like a boy, if he could be
confronted with them, even in his present lordliness of mood. In a
fashion of his when he convicted himself of anything, he laughed aloud.
Lydia shrank a little from him, in question. “I beg your pardon,” he
said. “I was laughing at something I happened to think of. Do you ever
find yourself struggling very hard to be what you think people think you
are?”

“Oh, yes,” replied Lydia. “But I thought no one else did.”

“Everybody does the thing that we think no one else does,” said
Staniford, sententiously.

“I don't know whether I quite like it,” said Lydia. “It seems like
hypocrisy. It used to worry me. Sometimes I wondered if I had any real
self. I seemed to be just what people made me, and a different person to
each.”

“I'm glad to hear it, Miss Blood. We are companions in hypocrisy. As
we are such nonentities we shall not affect each other at all.” Lydia
laughed. “Don't you think so? What are you laughing at? I told you what
I was laughing at!”

“But I didn't ask you.”

“You wished to know.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Then you ought to tell me what I wish to know.”

“It's nothing,” said Lydia. “I thought you were mistaken in what you
said.”

“Oh! Then you believe that there's enough of you to affect me?”

“No.”

“The other way, then?”

She did not answer.

“I'm delighted!” exclaimed Staniford. “I hope I don't exert an
uncomfortable influence. I should be very unhappy to think so.” Lydia
stooped side-wise, away from him, to get a fresh hold of her skirt,
which she was carrying in her right hand, and she hung a little more
heavily upon his arm. “I hope I make you think better of yourself,--very
self-satisfied, very conceited even.”

“No,” said Lydia.

“You pique my curiosity beyond endurance. Tell me how I make you feel.”

She looked quickly round at him, as if to see whether he was in earnest.
“Why, it's nothing,” she said. “You made me feel as if you were laughing
at everybody.”

It flatters a man to be accused of sarcasm by the other sex, and
Staniford was not superior to the soft pleasure of the reproach. “Do you
think I make other people feel so, too?”

“Mr. Dunham said--”

“Oh! Mr. Dunham has been talking me over with you, has he? What did
he tell you of me? There is nobody like a true friend for dealing an
underhand blow at one's reputation. Wait till you hear my account of
Dunham! What did he say?”

“He said that was only your way of laughing at yourself.”

“The traitor! What did you say?”

“I don't know that I said anything.”

“You were reserving your opinion for my own hearing?”

“No.”

“Why don't you tell me what you thought? It might be of great use to me.
I'm in earnest, now; I'm serious. Will you tell me?”

“Yes, some time,” said Lydia, who was both amused and mystified at this
persistence.

“When? To-morrow?”

“Oh, that's too soon. When I get to Venice!”

“Ah! That's a subterfuge. You know we shall part in Trieste.”

“I thought,” said Lydia, “you were coming to Venice, too.”

“Oh, yes, but I shouldn't be able to see you there.”

“Why not?”

“Why not? Why, because--” He was near telling the young girl who hung
upon his arm, and walked up and down with him in the moonlight, that in
the wicked Old World towards which they were sailing young people could
not meet save in the sight and hearing of their elders, and that a
confidential analysis of character would be impossible between them
there. The wonder of her being where she was, as she was, returned upon
him with a freshness that it had been losing in the custom of the week
past. “Because you will be so much taken up with your friends,” he said,
lamely. He added quickly, “There's one thing I should like to know, Miss
Blood: did you hear what Mr. Dunham and I were saying, last night, when
we stood in the gangway and kept you from coming up?”

Lydia waited a moment. Then she said, “Yes. I couldn't help hearing it.”

“That's all right. I don't care for your hearing what I said. But--I
hope it wasn't true?”

“I couldn't understand what you meant by it,” she answered, evasively,
but rather faintly.

“Thanks,” said Staniford. “I didn't mean anything. It was merely the
guilty consciousness of a generally disagreeable person.” They walked up
and down many turns without saying anything. She could not have made
any direct protest, and it pleased him that she could not frame any
flourishing generalities. “Yes,” Staniford resumed, “I will try to see
you as I pass through Venice. And I will come to hear you sing when you
come out at Milan.”

“Come out? At Milan?”

“Why, yes! You are going to study at the conservatory in Milan?”

“How did you know that?” demanded Lydia.

“From hearing you to-day. May I tell you how much I liked your singing?”

“My aunt thought I ought to cultivate my voice. But I would never go
upon the stage. I would rather sing in a church. I should like that
better than teaching.”

“I think you're quite right,” said Staniford, gravely. “It's certainly
much better to sing in a church than to sing in a theatre. Though I
believe the theatre pays best.”

“Oh, I don't care for that. All I should want would be to make a
living.”

The reference to her poverty touched him. It was a confidence, coming
from one so reticent, that was of value. He waited a moment and said,
“It's surprising how well we keep our footing here, isn't it? There's
hardly any swell, but the ship pitches. I think we walk better together
than alone.”

“Yes,” answered Lydia, “I think we do.”

“You mustn't let me tire you. I'm indefatigable.”

“Oh, I'm not tired. I like it,--walking.”

“Do you walk much at home?”

“Not much. It's a pretty good walk to the school-house.”

“Oh! Then you like walking at sea better than you do on shore?”

“It isn't the custom, much. If there were any one else, I should have
liked it there. But it's rather dull, going by yourself.”

“Yes, I understand how that is,” said Staniford, dropping his teasing
tone. “It's stupid. And I suppose it's pretty lonesome at South
Bradfield every way.”

“It is,--winters,” admitted Lydia. “In the summer you see people, at any
rate, but in winter there are days and days when hardly any one passes.
The snow is banked up everywhere.”

He felt her give an involuntary shiver; and he began to talk to her
about the climate to which she was going. It was all stranger to her
than he could have realized, and less intelligible. She remembered
California very dimly, and she had no experience by which she could
compare and adjust his facts. He made her walk up and down more and more
swiftly, as he lost himself in the comfort of his own talking and of her
listening, and he failed to note the little falterings with which she
expressed her weariness.

All at once he halted, and said, “Why, you're out of breath! I beg your
pardon. You should have stopped me. Let us sit down.” He wished to
walk across the deck to where the seats were, but she just perceptibly
withstood his motion, and he forbore.

“I think I won't sit down,” she said. “I will go down-stairs.” She began
withdrawing her hand from his arm. He put his right hand upon hers, and
when it came out of his arm it remained in his hand.

“I'm afraid you won't walk with me again,” said Staniford. “I've tired
you shamefully.”

“Oh, not at all!”

“And you will?”

“Yes.”

“Thanks. You're very amiable.” He still held her hand. He pressed it.
The pressure was not returned, but her hand seemed to quiver and throb
in his like a bird held there. For the time neither of them spoke, and
it seemed a long time. Staniford found himself carrying her hand towards
his lips; and she was helplessly, trustingly, letting him.

He dropped her hand, and said, abruptly, “Good-night.”

“Good-night,” she answered, and ceased from his side like a ghost.




XII.


Staniford sat in the moonlight, and tried to think what the steps were
that had brought him to this point; but there were no steps of which
he was sensible. He remembered thinking the night before that the
conditions were those of flirtation; to-night this had not occurred to
him. The talk had been of the dullest commonplaces; yet he had pressed
her hand and kept it in his, and had been about to kiss it. He bitterly
considered the disparity between his present attitude and the stand he
had taken when he declared to Dunham that it rested with them to guard
her peculiar isolation from anything that she could remember with pain
or humiliation when she grew wiser in the world. He recalled his rage
with Hicks, and the insulting condemnation of his bearing towards him
ever since; and could Hicks have done worse? He had done better: he had
kept away from her; he had let her alone.

That night Staniford slept badly, and woke with a restless longing to
see the girl, and to read in her face whatever her thought of him had
been. But Lydia did not come out to breakfast. Thomas reported that she
had a headache, and that he had already carried her the tea and toast
she wanted. “Well, it seems kind of lonesome without her,” said the
captain. “It don't seem as if we could get along.”

It seemed desolate to Staniford, who let the talk flag and fail round
him without an effort to rescue it. All the morning he lurked about,
keeping out of Dunham's way, and fighting hard through a dozen pages of
a book, to which he struggled to nail his wandering mind. A headache was
a little matter, but it might be even less than a headache. He belated
himself purposely at dinner, and entered the cabin just as Lydia issued
from her stateroom door.

She was pale and looked heavy-eyed. As she lifted her glance to him,
she blushed; and he felt the answering red stain his face. When she sat
down, the captain patted her on the shoulder with his burly right hand,
and said he could not navigate the ship if she got sick. He pressed her
to eat of this and that; and when she would not, he said, well, there
was no use trying to force an appetite, and that she would be better all
the sooner for dieting. Hicks went to his state-room, and came out
with a box of guava jelly, from his private stores, and won a triumph
enviable in all eyes when Lydia consented to like it with the chicken.
Dunham plundered his own and Staniford's common stock of dainties for
her dessert; the first officer agreed and applauded right and left;
Staniford alone sat taciturn and inoperative, watching her face
furtively. Once her eyes wandered to the side of the table where he and
Dunham sat; then she colored and dropped her glance.

He took his book again after dinner, and with his finger between the
leaves, at the last-read, unintelligible page, he went out to the bow,
and crouched down there to renew the conflict of the morning. It was not
long before Dunham followed. He stooped over to lay a hand on either of
Staniford's shoulders.

“What makes you avoid me, old man?” he demanded, looking into
Staniford's face with his frank, kind eyes.

“And I avoid you?” asked Staniford.

“Yes; why?”

“Because I feel rather shabby, I suppose. I knew I felt shabby, but I
didn't know I was avoiding you.”

“Well, no matter. If you feel shabby, it's all right; but I hate to have
you feel shabby.” He got his left hand down into Staniford's right, and
a tacit reconciliation was transacted between them. Dunham looked about
for a seat, and found a stool, which he planted in front of Staniford.
“Wasn't it pleasant to have our little lady back at table, again?”

“Very,” said Staniford.

“I couldn't help thinking how droll it was that a person whom we all
considered a sort of incumbrance and superfluity at first should really
turn out an object of prime importance to us all. Isn't it amusing?”

“Very droll.”

“Why, we were quite lost without her, at breakfast. I couldn't have
imagined her taking such a hold upon us all, in so short a time. But
she's a pretty creature, and as good as she's pretty.”

“I remember agreeing with you on those points before.” Staniford feigned
to suppress fatigue.

Dunham observed him. “I know you don't take so much interest in her
as--as the rest of us do, and I wish you did. You don't know what a
lovely nature she is.”

“No?”

“No; and I'm sure you'd like her.”

“Is it important that I should like her? Don't let your enthusiasm for
the sex carry you beyond bounds, Dunham.”

“No, no. Not important, but very pleasant. And I think acquaintance with
such a girl would give you some new ideas of women.”

“Oh, my old ones are good enough. Look here, Dunham,” said Staniford,
sharply, “what are you after?”

“What makes you think I'm after anything?”

“Because you're not a humbug, and because I am. My depraved spirit
instantly recognized the dawning duplicity of yours. But you'd better be
honest. You can't make the other thing work. What do you want?”

“I want your advice. I want your help, Staniford.”

“I thought so! Coming and forgiving me in that--apostolic manner.”

“Don't!”

“Well. What do you want my help for? What have you been doing?”
 Staniford paused, and suddenly added: “Have you been making love to
Lurella?” He said this in his ironical manner, but his smile was rather
ghastly.

“For shame, Staniford!” cried Dunham. But he reddened violently.

“Then it isn't with Miss Hibbard that you want my help. I'm glad of
that. It would have been awkward. I'm a little afraid of Miss Hibbard.
It isn't every one has your courage, my dear fellow.”

“I haven't been making love to her,” said Dunham, “but--I--”

“But you what?” demanded Staniford sharply again. There had been less
tension of voice in his joking about Miss Hibbard.

“Staniford,” said his friend, “I don't know whether you noticed her, at
dinner, when she looked across to our own side?”

“What did she do?”

“Did you notice that she--well, that she blushed a little?”

Staniford waited a while before he answered, after a gulp, “Yes, I
noticed that.”

“Well, I don't know how to put it exactly, but I'm afraid that I have
unwittingly wronged this young girl.”

“Wronged her? What the devil _do_ you mean, Dunham?” cried Staniford,
with bitter impatience.

“I'm afraid--I'm afraid--Why, it's simply this: that in trying to amuse
her, and make the time pass agreeably, and relieve her mind, and
all that, don't you know, I've given her the impression that
I'm--well--interested in her, and that she may have allowed
herself--insensibly, you know--to look upon me in that light, and that
she may have begun to think--that she may have become--”

“Interested in you?” interrupted Staniford rudely.

“Well--ah--well, that is--ah--well--yes!” cried Dunham, bracing himself
to sustain a shout of ridicule. But Staniford did not laugh, and Dunham
had courage to go on. “Of course, it sounds rather conceited to say so,
but the circumstances are so peculiar that I think we ought to recognize
even any possibilities of that sort.”

“Oh, yes,” said Staniford, gravely. “Most women, I believe, are so
innocent as to think a man in love when he behaves like a lover. And
this one,” he added ruefully, “seems more than commonly ignorant of our
ways,--of our infernal shilly-shallying, purposeless no-mindedness.
She couldn't imagine a man--a gentleman--devoting himself to her by the
hour, and trying by every art to show his interest and pleasure in her
society, without imagining that he wished her to like him,--love him;
there's no half-way about it. She couldn't suppose him the shallow,
dawdling, soulless, senseless ape he really was.” Staniford was quite in
a heat by this time, and Dunham listened in open astonishment.

“You are hard upon me,” he said. “Of course, I have been to blame; I
know that, I acknowledge it. But my motive, as you know well enough, was
never to amuse myself with her, but to contribute in any way I could to
her enjoyment and happiness. I--”

“_You_!” cried Staniford. “What are you talking about?”

“What are _you_ talking about?” demanded Dunham, in his turn.

Staniford recollected himself. “I was speaking of abstract flirtation. I
was firing into the air.”

“In my case, I don't choose to call it flirtation,” returned Dunham. “My
purpose, I am bound to say, was thoroughly unselfish and kindly.”

“My dear fellow,” said Staniford, with a bitter smile, “there can be no
unselfishness and no kindliness between us and young girls, unless we
mean business,--love-making. You may be sure that they feel it so, if
they don't understand it so.”

“I don't agree with you. I don't believe it. My own experience is that
the sweetest and most generous friendships may exist between us, without
a thought of anything else. And as to making love, I must beg you to
remember that my love has been made once for all. I never dreamt of
showing Miss Blood anything but polite attention.”

“Then what are you troubled about?”

“I am troubled--” Dunham stopped helplessly, and Staniford laughed in a
challenging, disagreeable way, so that the former perforce resumed:

“I'm troubled about--about her possible misinterpretation.”

“Oh! Then in this case of sweet and generous friendship the party of the
second part may have construed the sentiment quite differently! Well,
what do you want me to do? Do you want me to take the contract off your
hands?”

“You put it grossly,” said Dunham.

“And _you_ put it offensively!” cried the other. “My regard for the
young lady is as reverent as yours. You have no right to miscolor my
words.”

“Staniford, you are too bad,” said Dunham, hurt even more than angered.
“If I've come to you in the wrong moment--if you are vexed at anything,
I'll go away, and beg your pardon for boring you.”

Staniford was touched; he looked cordially into his friend's face. “I
_was_ vexed at something, but you never can come to me at the wrong
moment, old fellow. I beg _your_ pardon. _I_ see your difficulty plainly
enough, and I think you're quite right in proposing to hold up,--for
that's what you mean, I take it?”

“Yes,” said Dunham, “it is. And I don't know how she will like it. She
will be puzzled and grieved by it. I hadn't thought seriously about the
matter till this morning, when she didn't come to breakfast. You know
I've been in the habit of asking her to walk with me every night after
tea; but Saturday evening you were with her, and last night I felt sore
about the affairs of the day, and rather dull, and I didn't ask her. I
think she noticed it. I think she was hurt.”

“You think so?” said Staniford, peculiarly.

“I might not have thought so,” continued Dunham, “merely because she did
not come to breakfast; but her blushing when she looked across at dinner
really made me uneasy.”

“Very possibly you're right.” Staniford mused a while before he spoke
again. “Well, what do you wish me to do?”

“I must hold up, as you say, and of course she will feel the difference.
I wish--I wish at least you wouldn't avoid her, Staniford. That's all.
Any little attention from you--I know it bores you--would not only
break the loneliness, but it would explain that--that my--attentions
didn't--ah--hadn't meant anything.”

“Oh!”

“Yes; that it's common to offer them. And she's a girl of so much force
of character that when she sees the affair in its true light--I suppose
I'm to blame! Yes, I ought to have told her at the beginning that I
was engaged. But you can't force a fact of that sort upon a new
acquaintance: it looks silly.” Dunham hung his head in self-reproach.

“Well?” asked Staniford.

“Well, that's all! No, it _isn't_ all, either. There's something else
troubles me. Our poor little friend is a blackguard, I suppose?”

“Hicks?”

“Yes.”

“You have invited him to be the leader of your orchestra, haven't you?”

“Oh, don't, Staniford!” cried Dunham in his helplessness. “I should hate
to see her dependent in any degree upon that little cad for society.”
 Cad was the last English word which Dunham had got himself used to.
“That was why I hoped that you wouldn't altogether neglect her. She's
here, and she's no choice but to remain. We can't leave her to herself
without the danger of leaving her to Hicks. You see?”

“Well,” said Staniford gloomily, “I'm not sure that you couldn't leave
her to a worse cad than Hicks.” Dunham looked up in question. “To me,
for example.”

“Oh, hallo!” cried Dunham.

“I don't see how I'm to be of any use,” continued the other. “I'm not a
squire of dames; I should merely make a mess of it.”

“You're mistaken, Staniford,--I'm sure you are,--in supposing that she
dislikes you,” urged his friend.

“Oh, very likely.”

“I know that she's simply afraid of you.”

“Don't flatter, Dunham. Why should I care whether she fears me or
affects me? No, my dear fellow. This is irretrievably your own affair.
I should be glad to help you out if I knew how. But I don't. In the mean
time your duty is plain, whatever happens. You can't overdo the sweet
and the generous in this wicked world without paying the penalty.”

Staniford smiled at the distress in which Dunham went his way. He
understood very well that it was not vanity, but the liveliness of a
sensitive conscience, that had made Dunham search his conduct for the
offense against the young girl's peace of heart which he believed he had
committed, and it was the more amusing because he was so guiltless of
harm. Staniford knew who was to blame for the headache and the blush. He
knew that Dunham had never gone so far; that his chivalrous pleasure in
her society might continue for years free from flirtation. But in
spite of this conviction a little poignant doubt made itself felt, and
suddenly became his whole consciousness. “Confound him!” he mused. “I
wonder if she really could care anything for him!” He shut his book, and
rose to his feet with such a burning in his heart that he could not have
believed himself capable of the greater rage he felt at what he just
then saw. It was Lydia and Hicks seated together in the place where he
had sat with her. She leaned with one arm upon the rail, in an attitude
that brought all her slim young grace into evidence. She seemed on
very good terms with him, and he was talking and making her laugh as
Staniford had never heard her laugh before--so freely, so heartily.




XIII.


The atoms that had been tending in Staniford's being toward a certain
form suddenly arrested and shaped themselves anew at the vibration
imparted by this laughter. He no longer felt himself Hicks's possible
inferior, but vastly better in every way, and out of the turmoil of his
feelings in regard to Lydia was evolved the distinct sense of having
been trifled with. Somehow, an advantage had been taken of his
sympathies and purposes, and his forbearance had been treated with
contempt.

The conviction was neither increased nor diminished by the events of
the evening, when Lydia brought out some music from her state-room, and
Hicks appeared, flute in hand, from his, and they began practicing one
of the pieces together. It was a pretty enough sight. Hicks had
been gradually growing a better-looking fellow; he had an undeniable
picturesqueness, as he bowed his head over the music towards hers;
and she, as she held the sheet with one hand for him to see, while she
noiselessly accompanied herself on the table with the fingers of the
other, and tentatively sang now this passage and now that, was divine.
The picture seemed pleasing to neither Staniford nor Dunham; they went
on deck together, and sat down to their cigarettes in their wonted
place. They did not talk of Lydia, or of any of the things that had
formed the basis of their conversation hitherto, but Staniford returned
to his Colorado scheme, and explained at length the nature of his
purposes and expectations. He had discussed these matters before, but he
had never gone into them so fully, nor with such cheerful earnestness.
He said he should never marry,--he had made up his mind to that; but
he hoped to make money enough to take care of his sister's boy Jim
handsomely, as the little chap had been named for him. He had been
thinking the matter over, and he believed that he should get back by
rail and steamer as soon as he could after they reached Trieste. He was
not sorry he had come; but he could not afford to throw away too much
time on Italy, just then.

Dunham, on his part, talked a great deal of Miss Hibbard, and of
some curious psychological characteristics of her dyspepsia. He asked
Staniford whether he had ever shown him the photograph of Miss Hibbard
taken by Sarony when she was on to New York the last time: it was a
three-quarters view, and Dunham thought it the best she had had done. He
spoke of her generous qualities, and of the interest she had always had
in the Diet Kitchen, to which, as an invalid, her attention had been
particularly directed: and he said that in her last letter she had
mentioned a project for establishing diet kitchens in Europe, on the
Boston plan. When their talk grew more impersonal and took a wider
range, they gathered suggestion from the situation, and remarked upon
the immense solitude of the sea. They agreed that there was something
weird in the long continuance of fine weather, and that the moon had a
strange look. They spoke of the uncertainty of life. Dunham regretted,
as he had often regretted before, that his friend had no fixed religious
belief; and Staniford gently accepted his solicitude, and said that he
had at least a conviction if not a creed. He then begged Dunham's pardon
in set terms for trying to wound his feelings the day before; and in the
silent hand-clasp that followed they renewed all the cordiality of their
friendship. From time to time, as they talked, the music from below came
up fitfully, and once they had to pause as Lydia sang through the song
that she and Hicks were practicing.

As the days passed their common interest in the art brought Hicks
and the young girl almost constantly together, and the sound of their
concerting often filled the ship. The musicales, less formal than
Dunham had intended, and perhaps for that reason a source of rapidly
diminishing interest with him, superseded both ring-toss and
shuffle-board, and seemed even more acceptable to the ship's company as an
entertainment. One evening, when the performers had been giving a piece
of rather more than usual excellence and difficulty, one of the sailors,
deputed by his mates, came aft, with many clumsy shows of deference, and
asked them to give Marching through Georgia. Hicks found this out of his
repertory, but Lydia sang it. Then the group at the forecastle shouted
with one voice for Tramp, Tramp, Tramp, the Boys are Marching, and so
beguiled her through the whole list of war-songs. She ended with one
unknown to her listeners, but better than all the rest in its pathetic
words and music, and when she had sung The Flag's come back to
Tennessee, the spokesman of the sailors came aft again, to thank her for
his mates, and to say they would not spoil that last song by asking
for anything else. It was a charming little triumph for her, as she sat
surrounded by her usual court: the captain was there to countenance the
freedom the sailors had taken, and Dunham and Staniford stood near, but
Hicks, at her right hand, held the place of honor.

The next night Staniford found her alone in the waist of the ship, and
drew up a stool beside the rail where she sat.

“We all enjoyed your singing so much, last night, Miss Blood. I think
Mr. Hicks plays charmingly, but I believe I prefer to hear your voice
alone.”

“Thank you,” said Lydia, looking down, demurely.

“It must be a great satisfaction to feel that you can give so much
pleasure.”

“I don't know,” she said, passing the palm of one hand over the back of
the other.

“When you are a _prima donna_ you mustn't forget your old friends of the
Aroostook. We shall all take vast pride in you.”

It was not a question, and Lydia answered nothing. Staniford, who had
rather obliged himself to this advance, with some dim purpose of showing
that nothing had occurred to alienate them since the evening, of their
promenade, without having proved to himself that it was necessary to do
this, felt that he was growing angry. It irritated him to have her sit
as unmoved after his words as if he had not spoken.

“Miss Blood,” he said, “I envy you your gift of snubbing people.”

Lydia looked at him. “Snubbing people?” she echoed.

“Yes; your power of remaining silent when you wish to put down some one
who has been wittingly or unwittingly impertinent.”

“I don't know what you mean,” she said, in a sort of breathless way.

“And you didn't intend to mark your displeasure at my planning your
future?”

“No! We had talked of that. I--”

“And you were not vexed with me for anything? I have been afraid that
I--that you--” Staniford found that he was himself getting short of
breath. He had begun with the intention of mystifying her, but matters
had suddenly taken another course, and he was really anxious to know
whether any disagreeable associations with that night lingered in her
mind. With this longing came a natural inability to find the right word.
“I was afraid--” he repeated, and then he stopped again. Clearly, he
could not tell her that he was afraid he had gone too far; but this
was what he meant. “You don't walk with me, any more, Miss Blood,” he
concluded, with an air of burlesque reproach.

“You haven't asked me--since,” she said.

He felt a singular value and significance in this word, since. It showed
that her thoughts had been running parallel with his own; it permitted,
if it did not signify, that he should resume the mood of that time,
where their parting had interrupted it. He enjoyed the fact to the
utmost, but he was not sure that he wished to do what he was permitted.
“Then I didn't tire you?” he merely asked. He was not sure, now he came
to think of it, that he liked her willingness to recur to that time. He
liked it, but not quite in the way he would have liked to like it.

“No,” she said.

“The fact is,” he went on aimlessly, “that I thought I had rather abused
your kindness. Besides,” he added, veering off, “I was afraid I should
be an interruption to the musical exercises.”

“Oh, no,” said Lydia. “Mr. Dunham hasn't arranged anything yet.”
 Staniford thought this uncandid. It was fighting shy of Hicks, who was
the person in his own mind; and it reawakened a suspicion which was
lurking there. “Mr. Dunham seems to have lost his interest.”

This struck Staniford as an expression of pique; it reawakened quite
another suspicion. It was evident that she was hurt at the cessation
of Dunham's attentions. He was greatly minded to say that Dunham was a
fool, but he ended by saying, with sarcasm, “I suppose he saw that he
was superseded.”

“Mr. Hicks plays well,” said Lydia, judicially, “but he doesn't really
know so much of music as Mr. Dunham.”

“No?” responded Staniford, with irony. “I will tell Dunham. No doubt
he's been suffering the pangs of professional jealousy. That must be the
reason why he keeps away.”

“Keeps away?” asked Lydia.

“_Now_ I've made an ass of myself!” thought Staniford. “You said that he
seemed to have lost his interest,” he answered her.

“Oh! Yes!” assented Lydia. And then she remained rather distraught,
pulling at the ruffling of her dress.

“Dunham is a very accomplished man,” said Staniford, finding the usual
satisfaction in pressing his breast against the thorn. “He's a great
favorite in society. He's up to no end of things.” Staniford uttered
these praises in a curiously bitter tone. “He's a capital talker. Don't
you think he talks well?”

“I don't know; I suppose I haven't seen enough people to be a good
judge.”

“Well, you've seen enough people to know that he's very good looking?”

“Yes?”

“You don't mean to say you don't think him good looking?”

“No,--oh, no, I mean--that is--I don't know anything about his looks.
But he resembles a lady who used to come from Boston, summers. I thought
he must be her brother.”

“Oh, then you think he looks effeminate!” cried Staniford, with inner
joy. “I assure you,” he added with solemnity, “Dunham is one of the
manliest fellows in the world!”

“Yes?” said Lydia.

Staniford rose. He was smiling gayly as he looked over the broad stretch
of empty deck, and down into Lydia's eyes. “Wouldn't you like to take a
turn, now?”

“Yes,” she said promptly, rising and arranging her wrap across her
shoulders, so as to leave her hands free. She laid one hand in his arm
and gathered her skirt with the other, and they swept round together for
the start and confronted Hicks.

“Oh!” cried Lydia, with what seemed dismay, “I promised Mr. Hicks to
practice a song with him.” She did not try to release her hand from
Staniford's arm, but was letting it linger there irresolutely.

Staniford dropped his arm, and let her hand fall. He bowed with icy
stiffness, and said, with a courtesy so fierce that Mr. Hicks, on
whom he glared as he spoke, quailed before it, “I yield to your prior
engagement.”




XIV.


It was nothing to Staniford that she should have promised Hicks to
practice a song with him, and no process of reasoning could have made
it otherwise. The imaginary opponent with whom he scornfully argued the
matter had not a word for himself. Neither could the young girl answer
anything to the cutting speeches which he mentally made her as he
sat alone chewing the end of his cigar; and he was not moved by the
imploring looks which his fancy painted in her face, when he made
believe that she had meekly returned to offer him some sort of
reparation. Why should she excuse herself? he asked. It was he who ought
to excuse himself for having been in the way. The dialogue went on at
length, with every advantage to the inventor.

He was finally aware of some one standing near and looking down at
him. It was the second mate, who supported himself in a conversational
posture by the hand which he stretched to the shrouds above their heads.
“Are you a good sailor, Mr. Staniford?” he inquired. He and Staniford
were friends in their way, and had talked together before this.

“Do you mean seasickness? Why?” Staniford looked up at the mate's face.

“Well, we're going to get it, I guess, before long. We shall soon be off
the Spanish coast. We've had a great run so far.”

“If it comes we must stand it. But I make it a rule never to be seasick
beforehand.”

“Well, I ain't one to borrow trouble, either. It don't run in the
family. Most of us like to chance things, I chanced it for the whole
war, and I come out all right. Sometimes it don't work so well.”

“Ah?” said Staniford, who knew that this was a leading remark, but
forbore, as he knew Mason wished, to follow it up directly.

“One of us chanced it once too often, and of course it was a woman.”

“The risk?”

“Not the risk. My oldest sister tried tamin' a tiger. Ninety-nine times
out of a hundred, a tiger won't tame worth a cent. But her pet was such
a lamb most the while that she guessed she'd chance it. It didn't work.
She's at home with mother now,--three children, of course,--and he's in
hell, I s'pose. He was killed 'long-side o' me at Gettysburg. Ike was a
good fellow when he was sober. But my souls, the life he led that poor
girl! Yes, when a man's got that tiger in him, there ought to be some
quiet little war round for puttin' him out of his misery.” Staniford
listened silently, waiting for the mate to make the application of his
grim allegory. “I s'pose I'm prejudiced; but I do _hate_ a drunkard; and
when I see one of 'em makin' up to a girl, I want to go to her, and tell
her she'd better take a real tiger out the show, at once.”

The idea which these words suggested sent a thrill to Staniford's heart,
but he continued silent, and the mate went on, with the queer smile,
which could be inferred rather than seen, working under his mustache
and the humorous twinkle of his eyes evanescently evident under his cap
peak.

“I don't go round criticisn' my superior officers, and _I_ don't say
anything about the responsibility the old man took. The old man's all
right, accordin' to his lights; he ain't had a tiger in the family. But
if that chap was to fall overboard,--well, I don't know _how_ long it
would take to lower a boat, if I was to listen to my _conscience_. There
ain't really any help for him. He's begun too young ever to get over it.
He won't be ashore at Try-East an hour before he's dr

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