Title: The Lady of the Aroostook
Author: Howells, William Dean
Language: English
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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 drunk. If our men had
any spirits amongst ‘em that could be begged, bought, or borrowed, he’d
be drunk now, right along. Well, I’m off watch,” said the mate, at the
tap of bells. “Guess we’ll get our little gale pretty soon.”

“Good-night,” said Staniford, who remained pondering. He presently rose,
and walked up and down the deck. He could hear Lydia and Hicks trying
that song: now the voice, and now the flute; then both together; and
presently a burst of laughter. He began to be angry with her ignorance
and inexperience. It became intolerable to him that a woman should
be going about with no more knowledge of the world than a child,
and entangling herself in relations with all sorts of people. It was
shocking to think of that little sot, who had now made his infirmity
known for all the ship’s company, admitted to association with her which
looked to common eyes like courtship. From the mate’s insinuation that
she ought to be warned, it was evident that they thought her
interested in Hicks; and the mate had come, like Dunham, to leave the
responsibility with Staniford. It only wanted now that Captain Jenness
should appear with his appeal, direct or indirect.

While Staniford walked up and down, and scorned and raged at the idea
that he had anything to do with the matter, the singing and fluting came
to a pause in the cabin; and at the end of the next tune, which brought
him to the head of the gangway stairs, he met Lydia emerging. He stopped
and spoke to her, having instantly resolved, at sight of her, not to do
so.

“Have you come up for breath, like a mermaid?” he asked. “Not that I’m
sure mermaids do.”

“Oh, no,” said Lydia. “I think I dropped my handkerchief where we were
sitting.”

Staniford suspected, with a sudden return to a theory of her which he
had already entertained, that she had not done so. But she went lightly
by him, where he stood stolid, and picked it up; and now he suspected
that she had dropped it there on purpose.

“You have come back to walk with me?”

“No!” said the girl indignantly. “I have not come back to walk with
you!” She waited a moment; then she burst out with, “How dare you say
such a thing to me? What right have you to speak to me so? What have I
done to make you think that I would come back to--”

The fierce vibration in her voice made him know that her eyes were
burning upon him and her lips trembling. He shrank before her passion
as a man must before the justly provoked wrath of a woman, or even of a
small girl.

“I stated a hope, not a fact,” he said in meek uncandor. “Don’t you
think you ought to have done so?”

“I don’t--I don’t understand you,” panted Lydia, confusedly arresting
her bolts in mid-course.

Staniford pursued his guilty advantage; it was his only chance. “I gave
way to Mr. Hicks when you had an engagement with me. I thought--you
would come back to keep your engagement.” He was still very meek.

“Excuse me,” she said with self-reproach that would have melted the
heart of any one but a man who was in the wrong, and was trying to get
out of it at all hazards. “I didn’t know what you meant--I--”

“If I had meant what you thought,” interrupted Staniford nobly, for he
could now afford to be generous, “I should have deserved much more than
you said. But I hope you won’t punish my awkwardness by refusing to walk
with me.”

He knew that she regarded him earnestly before she said, “I must get my
shawl and hat.”

“Let me go!” he entreated.

“You couldn’t find them,” she answered, as she vanished past him. She
returned, and promptly laid her hand in his proffered arm; it was as if
she were eager to make him amends for her harshness.

Staniford took her hand out, and held it while he bowed low toward her.
“I declare myself satisfied.”

“I don’t understand,” said Lydia, in alarm and mortification.

“When a subject has been personally aggrieved by his sovereign, his
honor is restored if they merely cross swords.”

The girl laughed her delight in the extravagance. She must have been
more or less than woman not to have found his flattery delicious. “But
we are republicans!” she said in evasion.

“To be sure, we are republicans. Well, then, Miss Blood, answer your
free and equal one thing: is it a case of conscience?”

“How?” she asked, and Staniford did not recoil at the rusticity. This
how for what, and the interrogative yes, still remained. Since their
first walk, she had not wanted to know, in however great surprise she
found herself.

“Are you going to walk with me because you had promised?”

“Why, of course,” faltered Lydia.

“That isn’t enough.”

“Not enough?”

“Not enough. You must walk with me because you like to do so.”

Lydia was silent.

“Do you like to do so?”

“I can’t answer you,” she said, releasing her hand from him.

“It was not fair to ask you. What I wish to do is to restore the
original status. You have kept your engagement to walk with me, and
your conscience is clear. Now, Miss Blood, may I have your company for a
little stroll over the deck of the Aroostook?” He made her another very
low bow.

“What must I say?” asked Lydia, joyously.

“That depends upon whether you consent. If you consent, you must say, ‘I
shall be very glad.’”

“And if I don’t?”

“Oh, I can’t put any such decision into words.”

Lydia mused a moment. “I shall be very glad,” she said, and put her hand
again into the arm he offered.

As happens after such a passage they were at first silent, while they
walked up and down.

“If this fine weather holds,” said Staniford, “and you continue as
obliging as you are to-night, you can say, when people ask you how you
went to Europe, that you walked the greater part of the way. Shall you
continue so obliging? Will you walk with me every fine night?” pursued
Staniford.

“Do you think I’d better say so?” she asked, with the joy still in her
voice.

“Oh, I can’t decide for you. I merely formulate your decisions after you
reach them,--if they’re favorable.”

“Well, then, what is this one?”

“Is it favorable?”

“You said you would formulate it.” She laughed again, and Staniford
started as one does when a nebulous association crystallizes into a
distinctly remembered fact.

“What a curious laugh you have!” he said. “It’s like a nun’s laugh. Once
in France I lodged near the garden of a convent where the nuns kept a
girls’ school, and I used to hear them laugh. You never happened to be a
nun, Miss Blood?”

“No, indeed!” cried Lydia, as if scandalized.

“Oh, I merely meant in some previous existence. Of course, I didn’t
suppose there was a convent in South Bradfield.” He felt that the
girl did not quite like the little slight his irony cast upon South
Bradfield, or rather upon her for never having been anywhere else. He
hastened to say, “I’m sure that in the life before this you were of the
South somewhere.”

“Yes?” said Lydia, interested and pleased again as one must be in
romantic talk about one’s self. “Why do you think so?”

He bent a little over toward her, so as to look into the face she
instinctively averted, while she could not help glancing at him from the
corner of her eye. “You have the color and the light of the South,”
 he said. “When you get to Italy, you will live in a perpetual
mystification. You will go about in a dream of some self of yours that
was native there in other days. You will find yourself retrospectively
related to the olive faces and the dark eyes you meet; you will
recognize sisters and cousins in the patrician ladies when you see their
portraits in the palaces where you used to live in such state.”

Staniford spiced his flatteries with open burlesque; the girl entered
into his fantastic humor. “But if I was a nun?” she asked, gayly.

“Oh, I forgot. You were a nun. There was a nun in Venice once, about two
hundred years ago, when you lived there, and a young English lord who
was passing through the town was taken to the convent to hear her sing;
for she was not only of ‘an admirable beauty,’ as he says, but sang
‘extremely well.’ She sang to him through the grating of the convent,
and when she stopped he said, ‘Die whensoever you will, you need to
change neither voice nor face to be an angel!’ Do you think--do you
dimly recollect anything that makes you think--it might--Consider
carefully: the singing extremely well, and--” He leant over again, and
looked up into her face, which again she could not wholly withdraw.

“No, no!” she said, still in his mood.

“Well, you must allow it was a pretty speech.”

“Perhaps,” said Lydia, with sudden gravity, in which there seemed to
Staniford a tender insinuation of reproach, “he was laughing at her.”

“If he was, he was properly punished. He went on to Rome, and when he
came back to Venice the beautiful nun was dead. He thought that his
words ‘seemed fatal.’ Do you suppose it would kill you _now_ to be
jested with?”

“I don’t think people like it generally.”

“Why, Miss Blood, you are intense!”

“I don’t know what you mean by that,” said Lydia.

“You like to take things seriously. You can’t bear to think that people
are not the least in earnest, even when they least seem so.”

“Yes,” said the girl, thoughtfully, “perhaps that’s true. Should you
like to be made fun of, yourself?”

“I shouldn’t mind it, I fancy, though it would depend a great deal upon
who made fun of me. I suppose that women always laugh at men,--at their
clumsiness, their want of tact, the fit of their clothes.”

“I don’t know. I should not do that with any one I--”

“You liked? Oh, none of them do!” cried Staniford.

“I was not going to say that,” faltered the girl.

“What were you going to say?”

She waited a moment. “Yes, I was going to say that,” she assented with
a sigh of helpless veracity. “What makes you laugh?” she asked, in
distress.

“Something I like. I’m different from you: I laugh at what I like; I
like your truthfulness,--it’s charming.”

“I didn’t know that truth need be charming.”

“It had better be, in women, if it’s to keep even with the other thing.”
 Lydia seemed shocked; she made a faint, involuntary motion to withdraw
her hand, but he closed his arm upon it. “Don’t condemn me for thinking
that fibbing is charming. I shouldn’t like it at all in you. Should you
in me?”

“I shouldn’t in any one,” said Lydia.

“Then what is it you dislike in me?” he suddenly demanded.

“I didn’t say that I disliked anything in you.”

“But you have made fun of something in me?”

“No, no!”

“Then it wasn’t the stirring of a guilty conscience when you asked me
whether I should like to be made fun of? I took it for granted you’d
been doing it.”

“You are very suspicious.”

“Yes; and what else?”

“Oh, you like to know just what every one thinks and feels.”

“Go on!” cried Staniford. “Analyze me, formulate me!”

“That’s all.”

“All I come to?”

“All I have to say.”

“That’s very little. Now, I’ll begin on you. You don’t care what people
think or feel.”

“Oh, yes, I do. I care too much.”

“Do you care what I think?”

“Yes.”

“Then I think you’re too unsuspicious.”

“Ought I to suspect somebody?” she asked, lightly.

“Oh, that’s the way with all your sex. One asks you to be suspicious,
and you ask whom you shall suspect. You can do nothing in the abstract.
I should like to be suspicious for you. Will you let me?”

“Oh, yes, if you like to be.”

“Thanks. I shall be terribly vigilant,--a perfect dragon. And you really
invest me with authority?”

“Yes.”

“That’s charming.” Staniford drew a long breath. After a space of
musing, he said, “I thought I should be able to begin by attacking some
one else, but I must commence at home, and denounce myself as quite
unworthy of walking to and fro, and talking nonsense to you. You must
beware of me, Miss Blood.”

“Why?” asked the girl.

“I am very narrow-minded and prejudiced, and I have violent antipathies.
I shouldn’t be able to do justice to any one I disliked.”

“I think that’s the trouble with all of us,” said Lydia.

“Oh, but only in degree. I should not allow, if I could help it, a man
whom I thought shabby, and coarse at heart, the privilege of speaking to
any one I valued,--to my sister, for instance. It would shock me to find
her have any taste in common with such a man, or amused by him. Don’t
you understand?”

“Yes,” said Lydia. It seemed to him as if by some infinitely subtle and
unconscious affinition she relaxed toward him as they walked. This was
incomparably sweet and charming to Staniford,--too sweet as recognition
of his protecting friendship to be questioned as anything else. He felt
sure that she had taken his meaning, and he rested content from further
trouble in regard to what it would have been impossible to express. Her
tacit confidence touched a kindred spring in him, and he began to talk
to her of himself: not of his character or opinions,--they had already
gone over them,--but of his past life, and his future. Their strangeness
to her gave certain well-worn topics novelty, and the familiar project
of a pastoral career in the far West invested itself with a color of
romance which it had not worn before. She tried to remember, at his
urgence, something about her childhood in California; and she told him a
great deal more about South Bradfield. She described its characters
and customs, and, from no vantage-ground or stand-point but her native
feeling of their oddity, and what seemed her sympathy with him, made him
see them as one might whose life had not been passed among them. Then
they began to compare their own traits, and amused themselves to find
how many they had in common. Staniford related a singular experience of
his on a former voyage to Europe, when he dreamed of a collision, and
woke to hear a great trampling and uproar on deck, which afterwards
turned out to have been caused by their bare escape from running into an
iceberg. She said that she had had strange dreams, too, but mostly when
she was a little girl; once she had had a presentiment that troubled
her, but it did not come true. They both said they did not believe in
such things, and agreed that it was only people’s love of mystery that
kept them noticed. He permitted himself to help her, with his disengaged
hand, to draw her shawl closer about the shoulder that was away from
him. He gave the action a philosophical and impersonal character by
saying immediately afterwards: “The sea is really the only mystery
left us, and that will never be explored. They circumnavigate the whole
globe,--” here he put the gathered shawl into the fingers which
she stretched through his arm to take it, and she said, “Oh, thank
you!”--“but they don’t describe the sea. War and plague and famine
submit to the ameliorations of science,”--the closely drawn shawl
pressed her against his shoulder; his mind wandered; he hardly knew what
he was saying,--“but the one utterly inexorable calamity--the same now
as when the first sail was spread--is a shipwreck.”

“Yes,” she said, with a deep inspiration. And now they walked back and
forth in silence broken only by a casual word or desultory phrase. Once
Staniford had thought the conditions of these promenades perilously
suggestive of love-making; another time he had blamed himself for not
thinking of this; now he neither thought nor blamed himself for not
thinking. The fact justified itself, as if it had been the one perfectly
right and wise thing in a world where all else might be questioned.

“Isn’t it pretty late?” she asked, at last.

“If you’re tired, we’ll sit down,” he said.

“What time is it?” she persisted.

“Must I look?” he pleaded. They went to a lantern, and he took out his
watch and sprang the case open. “Look!” he said. “I sacrifice myself on
the altar of truth.” They bent their heads low together over the
watch; it was not easy to make out the time. “It’s nine o’clock,” said
Staniford.

“It can’t be; it was half past when I came up,” answered Lydia.

“One hand’s at twelve and the other at nine,” he said, conclusively.

“Oh, then it’s a quarter to twelve.” She caught away her hand from his
arm, and fled to the gangway. “I didn’t dream it was so late.”

The pleasure which her confession brought to his face faded at sight of
Hicks, who was turning the last pages of a novel by the cabin lamp, as
he followed Lydia in. It was the book that Staniford had given her.

“Hullo!” said Hicks, with companionable ease, looking up at her. “Been
having quite a tramp.”

She did not seem troubled by the familiarity of an address that incensed
Staniford almost to the point of taking Hicks from his seat, and tossing
him to the other end of the cabin. “Oh, you’ve finished my book,” she
said. “You must tell me how you like it, to-morrow.”

“I doubt it,” said Hicks. “I’m going to be seasick to-morrow. The
captain’s been shaking his head over the barometer and powwowing with
the first officer. Something’s up, and I guess it’s a gale. Good-by; I
shan’t see you again for a week or so.”

He nodded jocosely to Lydia, and dropped his eyes again to his book,
ignoring Staniford’s presence. The latter stood a moment breathing
quick; then he controlled himself and went into his room. His coming
roused Dunham, who looked up from his pillow. “What time is it?” he
asked, stupidly.

“Twelve,” said Staniford.

“Had a pleasant walk?”

“If you still think,” said Staniford, savagely, “that she’s painfully
interested in you, you can make your mind easy. She doesn’t care for
either of us.”

“_Either_ of us?” echoed Dunham. He roused himself.

“Oh, go to sleep; _go_ to sleep!” cried Staniford.



XV.


The foreboded storm did not come so soon as had been feared, but the
beautiful weather which had lasted so long was lost in a thickened
sky and a sullen sea. The weather had changed with Staniford, too. The
morning after the events last celebrated, he did not respond to the
glance which Lydia gave him when they met, and he hardened his heart to
her surprise, and shunned being alone with her. He would not admit to
himself any reason for his attitude, and he could not have explained
to her the mystery that at first visibly grieved her, and then seemed
merely to benumb her. But the moment came when he ceased to take a
certain cruel pleasure in it, and he approached her one morning on deck,
where she stood holding fast to the railing where she usually sat, and
said, as if there had been no interval of estrangement between them, but
still coldly, “We have had our last walk for the present, Miss Blood. I
hope you will grieve a little for my loss.”

She turned on him a look that cut him to the heart, with what he fancied
its reproach and its wonder. She did not reply at once, and then she did
not reply to his hinted question.

“Mr. Staniford,” she began. It was the second time he had heard her
pronounce his name; he distinctly remembered the first.

“Well?” he said.

“I want to speak to you about lending that book to Mr. Hicks. I ought to
have asked you first.”

“Oh, no,” said Staniford. “It was yours.”

“You gave it to me,” she returned.

“Well, then, it was yours,--to keep, to lend, to throw away.”

“And you didn’t mind my lending it to him?” she pursued. “I--”

She stopped, and Staniford hesitated, too. Then he said, “I didn’t
dislike your lending it; I disliked his having it. I will acknowledge
that.”

She looked up at him as if she were going to speak, but checked herself,
and glanced away. The ship was plunging heavily, and the livid
waves were racing before the wind. The horizon was lit with a yellow
brightness in the quarter to which she turned, and a pallid gleam
defined her profile. Captain Jenness was walking fretfully to and fro;
he glanced now at the yellow glare, and now cast his eye aloft at the
shortened sail. While Staniford stood questioning whether she meant to
say anything more, or whether, having discharged her conscience of an
imagined offense, she had now reached one of her final, precipitous
silences, Captain Jenness suddenly approached them, and said to him, “I
guess you’d better go below with Miss Blood.”

The storm that followed had its hazards, but Staniford’s consciousness
was confined to its discomforts. The day came, and then the dark came,
and both in due course went, and came again. Where he lay in his berth,
and whirled and swung, and rose and sank, as lonely as a planetary
fragment tossing in space, he heard the noises of the life without.
Amidst the straining of the ship, which was like the sharp sweep of
a thunder-shower on the deck overhead, there plunged at irregular
intervals the wild trample of heavily-booted feet, and now and then the
voices of the crew answering the shouted orders made themselves hollowly
audible. In the cabin there was talking, and sometimes even laughing.
Sometimes he heard the click of knives and forks, the sardonic rattle of
crockery. After the first insane feeling that somehow he must get
ashore and escape from his torment, he hardened himself to it through
an immense contempt, equally insane, for the stupidity of the sea, its
insensate uproar, its blind and ridiculous and cruel mischievousness.
Except for this delirious scorn he was a surface of perfect passivity.

Dunham, after a day of prostration, had risen, and had perhaps shortened
his anguish by his resolution. He had since taken up his quarters on a
locker in the cabin; he looked in now and then upon Staniford, with
a cup of tea, or a suggestion of something light to eat; once he even
dared to boast of the sublimity of the ocean. Staniford stared at him
with eyes of lack-lustre indifference, and waited for him to be gone.
But he lingered to say, “You would laugh to see what a sea-bird our lady
is! She hasn’t been sick a minute. And Hicks, you’ll be glad to know, is
behaving himself very well. Really, I don’t think we’ve done the fellow
justice. I think you’ve overshadowed him, and that he’s needed your
absence to show himself to advantage.”

Staniford disdained any comment on this except a fierce “Humph!” and
dismissed Dunham by turning his face to the wall. He refused to think of
what he had said. He lay still and suffered indefinitely, and no longer
waited for the end of the storm. There had been times when he thought
with acquiescence of going to the bottom, as a probable conclusion; now
he did not expect anything. At last, one night, he felt by inexpressibly
minute degrees something that seemed surcease of his misery. It might
have been the end of all things, for all he cared; but as the lull
deepened, he slept without knowing what it was, and when he woke in the
morning he found the Aroostook at anchor in smooth water.

She was lying in the roads at Gibraltar, and before her towered the
embattled rock. He crawled on deck after a while. The captain was going
ashore, and had asked such of his passengers as liked, to go with him
and see the place. When Staniford appeared, Dunham was loyally refusing
to leave his friend till he was fairly on foot. At sight of him they
suspended their question long enough to welcome him back to animation,
with the patronage with which well people hail a convalescent. Lydia
looked across the estrangement of the past days with a sort of inquiry,
and Hicks chose to come forward and accept a cold touch of the hand from
him. Staniford saw, with languid observance, that Lydia was very fresh
and bright; she was already equipped for the expedition, and could never
have had any doubt in her mind as to going. She had on a pretty walking
dress which he had not seen before, and a hat with the rim struck
sharply upward behind, and her masses of dense, dull black hair pulled
up and fastened somewhere on the top of her head. Her eyes shyly
sparkled under the abrupt descent of the hat-brim over her forehead.

His contemptuous rejection of the character of invalid prevailed with
Dunham; and Staniford walked to another part of the ship, to cut short
the talk about himself, and saw them row away.

“Well, you’ve had a pretty tough time, they say,” said the second mate,
lounging near him. “I don’t see any fun in seasickness _myself_.”

“It’s a ridiculous sort of misery,” said Staniford.

“I hope we shan’t have anything worse on board when that chap gets back.
The old man thinks he can keep an eye on him.” The mate was looking
after the boat.

“The captain says he hasn’t any money,” Staniford remarked carelessly.
The mate went away without saying anything more, and Staniford returned
to the cabin, where he beheld without abhorrence the preparations for
his breakfast. But he had not a great appetite, in spite of his long
fast. He found himself rather light-headed, and came on deck again after
a while, and stretched himself in Hicks’s steamer chair, where Lydia
usually sat in it. He fell into a dull, despairing reverie, in which he
blamed himself for not having been more explicit with her. He had merely
expressed his dislike of Hicks; but expressed without reasons it was a
groundless dislike, which she had evidently not understood, or had not
cared to heed; and since that night, now so far away, when he had spoken
to her, he had done everything he could to harden her against himself.
He had treated her with a stupid cruelty, which a girl like her would
resent to the last; he had forced her to take refuge in the politeness
of a man from whom he was trying to keep her.

His heart paused when he saw the boat returning in the afternoon without
Hicks. The others reported that they had separated before dinner, and
that they had not seen him since, though Captain Jenness had spent an
hour trying to look him up before starting back to the ship. The captain
wore a look of guilty responsibility, mingled with intense exasperation,
the two combining in as much haggardness as his cheerful visage could
express. “If he’s here by six o’clock,” he said, grimly, “all well and
good. If not, the Aroostook sails, any way.”

Lydia crept timidly below. Staniford complexly raged to see that the
anxiety about Hicks had blighted the joy of the day for her.

“How the deuce could he get about without any money?” he demanded of
Dunham, as soon as they were alone.

Dunham vainly struggled to look him in the eye. “Staniford,” he
faltered, with much more culpability than some criminals would confess a
murder, “I lent him five dollars!”

“You lent him five dollars!” gasped Staniford.

“Yes,” replied Dunham, miserably; “he got me aside, and asked me for it.
What could I do? What would you have done yourself?”

Staniford made no answer. He walked some paces away, and then returned
to where Dunham stood helpless. “He’s lying about there dead-drunk,
somewhere, I suppose. By Heaven, I could almost wish he was. He couldn’t
come back, then, at any rate.”

The time lagged along toward the moment appointed by the captain, and
the preparations for the ship’s departure were well advanced, when
a boat was seen putting out from shore with two rowers, and rapidly
approaching the Aroostook. In the stern, as it drew nearer, the familiar
figure of Hicks discovered itself in the act of waving a handkerchief He
scrambled up the side of the ship in excellent spirits, and gave Dunham
a detailed account of his adventures since they had parted. As always
happens with such scapegraces, he seemed to have had a good time,
however he had spoiled the pleasure of the others. At tea, when Lydia
had gone away, he clapped down a sovereign near Dunham’s plate.

“Your five dollars,” he said.

“Why, how--” Dunham began.

“How did I get on without it? My dear boy, I sold my watch! A ship’s
time is worth no more than a setting hen’s,--eh, captain?--and why take
note of it? Besides, I always like to pay my debts promptly:
there’s nothing mean about me. I’m not going ashore again without my
pocket-book, I can tell you.” He winked shamelessly at Captain Jenness.
“If you hadn’t been along, Dunham, I couldn’t have made a raise, I
suppose. _You_ wouldn’t have lent me five dollars, Captain Jenness.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” said the captain, bluntly.

“And I believe you’d have sailed without me, if I hadn’t got back on
time.”

“I would,” said the captain, as before.

Hicks threw back his head, and laughed. Probably no human being had
ever before made so free with Captain Jenness at his own table; but the
captain must have felt that this contumacy was part of the general
risk which he had taken in taking Hicks, and he contented himself with
maintaining a silence that would have appalled a less audacious spirit.
Hicks’s gayety, however, was not to be quelled in that way.

“Gibraltar wouldn’t be a bad place to put up at for a while,” he said.
“Lots of good fellows among the officers, they say, and fun going all
the while. First-class gunning in the Cork Woods at St. Roque. If
it hadn’t been for the _res angusta domi_,--you know what I mean,
captain,--I should have let you get along with your old dug-out, as
the gentleman in the water said to Noah.” His hilarity had something
alarmingly knowing in it; there was a wildness in the pleasure with
which he bearded the captain, like that of a man in his first cups; yet
he had not been drinking. He played round the captain’s knowledge of
the sanative destitution in which he was making the voyage with mocking
recurrence; but he took himself off to bed early, and the captain came
through his trials with unimpaired temper. Dunham disappeared not long
afterwards; and Staniford’s vague hope that Lydia might be going on deck
to watch the lights of the town die out behind the ship as they sailed
away was disappointed. The second mate made a point of lounging near him
where he sat alone in their wonted place.

“Well,” he said, “he did come back sober.”

“Yes,” said Staniford.

“Next to not comin’ back at all,” the mate continued, “I suppose it was
the best thing he could do.” He lounged away. Neither his voice nor his
manner had that quality of disappointment which characterizes those who
have mistakenly prophesied evil. Staniford had a mind to call him back,
and ask him what he meant; but he refrained, and he went to bed at last
resolved to unburden himself of the whole Hicks business once for all.
He felt that he had had quite enough of it, both in the abstract and in
its relation to Lydia.



XVI.


Hicks did not join the others at breakfast. They talked of what Lydia
had seen at Gibraltar, where Staniford had been on a former voyage.
Dunham had made it a matter of conscience to know all about it
beforehand from his guide-books, and had risen early that morning to
correct his science by his experience in a long entry in the diary which
he was keeping for Miss Hibbard. The captain had the true sea-farer’s
ignorance, and was amused at the things reported by his passengers of
a place where he had been ashore so often; Hicks’s absence doubtless
relieved him, but he did not comment on the cabin-boy’s announcement
that he was still asleep, except to order him let alone.

They were seated at their one o’clock dinner before the recluse made
any sign. Then he gave note of his continued existence by bumping and
thumping sounds within his state-room, as if some one were dressing
there in a heavy sea.

“Mr. Hicks seems to be taking his rough weather retrospectively,” said
Staniford, with rather tremulous humor.

The door was flung open, and Hicks reeled out, staying himself by the
door-knob. Even before he appeared, a reek of strong waters had preceded
him. He must have been drinking all night. His face was flushed, and
his eyes were bloodshot. He had no collar on; but he wove a cravat and
otherwise he was accurately and even fastidiously dressed. He balanced
himself by the door-knob, and measured the distance he had to make
before reaching his place at the table, smiling, and waving a delicate
handkerchief, which he held in his hand: “Spilt c’logne, tryin’ to
scent my hic--handkerchief. Makes deuced bad smell--too much c’logne;
smells--alcoholic. Thom’s, bear a hand, ‘s good f’low. No? All right,
go on with your waitin’. B-ic--business b’fore pleasure, ‘s feller says.
Play it alone, I guess.”

The boy had shrunk back in dismay, and Hicks contrived to reach his
place by one of those precipitate dashes with which drunken men attain a
point, when the luck is with them. He looked smilingly round the circle
of faces. Staniford and the captain exchanged threatening looks of
intelligence, while Mr. Watterson and Dunham subordinately waited their
motion. But the advantage, as in such cases, was on the side of Hicks.
He knew it, with a drunkard’s subtlety, and was at his ease.

“No app’tite, friends; but thought I’d come out, keep you from feeling
lonesome.” He laughed and hiccuped, and smiled upon them all. “Well,
cap’n,” he continued, “‘covered from ‘tigues day, sterday? You look
blooming’s usual. Thom’s, pass the--pass the--victuals lively, my son,
and fetch along coffee soon. Some the friends up late, and want their
coffee. Nothing like coffee, carry off’fee’s.” He winked to the men, all
round; and then added, to Lydia: “Sorry see you in this state--I mean,
sorry see me--Can’t make it that way either; up stump on both routes.
What I mean is, sorry hadn’t coffee first. But _you’re_ all right--all
right! Like see anybody offer you disrespec’, ‘n I’m around. Tha’s all.”

Till he addressed her, Lydia had remained motionless, first with
bewilderment, and then with open abhorrence. She could hardly have seen
in South Bradfield a man who had been drinking. Even in haying, or other
sharpest stress of farmwork, our farmer and his men stay themselves with
nothing stronger than molasses-water, or, in extreme cases, cider with
a little corn soaked in it; and the Mill Village, where she had taught
school, was under the iron rule of a local vote for prohibition. She
stared in stupefaction at Hicks’s heated, foolish face; she started
at his wild movements, and listened with dawning intelligence to his
hiccup-broken speech, with its thickened sibilants and its wandering
emphasis. When he turned to her, and accompanied his words with a
reassuring gesture, she recoiled, and as if breaking an ugly fascination
she gave a low, shuddering cry, and looked at Staniford.

“Thomas,” he said, “Miss Blood was going to take her dessert on deck
to-day. Dunham?”

Dunham sprang to his feet, and led her out of the cabin.

The movement met Hicks’s approval. “Tha’s right; ‘sert on deck, ‘joy
landscape and pudding together,--Rhine steamer style. All right. Be
up there m’self soon’s I get my coffee.” He winked again with drunken
sharpness. “I know wha’s what. Be up there m’self, ‘n a minute.”

“If you offer to go up,” said Staniford, in a low voice, as soon as
Lydia was out of the way, “I’ll knock you down!”

“Captain,” said Mr. Watterson, venturing, perhaps for the first time in
his whole maritime history, upon a suggestion to his superior officer,
“shall I clap him in irons?”

“Clap him in irons!” roared Captain Jenness. “Clap him in bed! Look
here, you!” He turned to Hicks, but the latter, who had been bristling
at Staniford’s threat, now relaxed in a crowing laugh:--

“Tha’s right, captain. Irons no go, ‘cept in case mutiny; bed perfectly
legal ‘t all times. Bed is good. But trouble is t’ enforce it.”

“Where’s your bottle?” demanded the captain, rising from the seat in
which a paralysis of fury had kept him hitherto. “I want your bottle.”

“Oh, bottle’s all right! Bottle’s under pillow. Empty,--empty’s Jonah’s
gourd; ‘nother sea-faring party,--Jonah. S’cure the shadow ere the
substance fade. Drunk all the brandy, old boy. Bottle’s a canteen;
‘vantage of military port to houseless stranger. Brought the brandy
on board under my coat; nobody noticed,--so glad get me back. Prodigal
son’s return,--fatted calf under his coat.”

The reprobate ended his boastful confession with another burst of
hiccuping, and Staniford helplessly laughed.

“Do me proud,” said Hicks. “Proud, I ‘sure you. Gentleman, every time,
Stanny. Know good thing when you see it--hear it, I mean.”

“Look here, Hicks,” said Staniford, choosing to make friends with the
mammon of unrighteousness, if any good end might be gained by it. “You
know you’re drunk, and you’re not fit to be about. Go back to bed,
that’s a good fellow; and come out again, when you’re all right. You
don’t want to do anything you’ll be sorry for.”

“No, no! No, you don’t, Stanny. Coffee’ll make me all right. Coffee
always does. Coffee--Heaven’s lash besh gift to man. ‘Scovered
subse-subs’quently to grape. See? Comes after claret in course of
nature. Captain doesn’t understand the ‘lusion. All right, captain.
Little learning dangerous thing.” He turned sharply on Mr. Watterson,
who had remained inertly in his place. “Put me in irons, heh! _You_ put
me in irons, you old Triton. Put _me_ in irons, will you?” His
amiable mood was passing; before one could say so, it was past. He was
meditating means of active offense. He gathered up the carving-knife and
fork, and held them close under Mr. Watterson’s nose. “Smell that!” he
said, and frowned as darkly as a man of so little eyebrow could.

At this senseless defiance Staniford, in spite of himself, broke into
another laugh, and even Captain Jenness grinned. Mr. Watterson sat with
his head drawn as far back as possible, and with his nose wrinkled at
the affront offered it. “Captain,” he screamed, appealing even in this
extremity to his superior, “shall I fetch him _one?_”

“No, no!” cried Staniford, springing from his chair; “don’t hit him! He
isn’t responsible. Let’s get him into his room.”

“Fetch me _one_, heh?” said Hicks, rising, with dignity, and beginning
to turn up his cuffs. “_One_! It’ll take more than one, fetch _me_.
Stan’ up, ‘f you’re man enough.” He was squaring at Mr. Watterson,
when he detected signs of strategic approach in Staniford and Captain
Jenness. He gave a wild laugh, and shrank into a corner. “No! No, you
don’t, boys,” he said.

They continued their advance, one on either side, and reinforced by Mr.
Watterson hemmed him in. The drunken man has the advantage of his sober
brother in never seeming to be on the alert. Hicks apparently entered
into the humor of the affair. “Sur-hic-surrender!” he said, with a smile
in his heavy eyes. He darted under the extended arms of Captain Jenness,
who was leading the centre of the advance, and before either wing could
touch him he was up the gangway and on the deck.

Captain Jenness indulged one of those expressions, very rare with him,
which are supposed to be forgiven to good men in moments of extreme
perplexity, and Mr. Watterson profited by the precedent to unburden his
heart in a paraphrase of the captain’s language. Staniford’s laugh had
as much cursing in it as their profanity.

He mechanically followed Hicks to the deck, prepared to renew the
attempt for his capture there. But Hicks had not stopped near Dunham
and Lydia. He had gone forward on the other side of the ship, and was
leaning quietly on the rail, and looking into the sea. Staniford paused
irresolute for a moment, and then sat down beside Lydia, and they
all tried to feign that nothing unpleasant had happened, or was still
impending. But their talk had the wandering inconclusiveness which was
inevitable, and the eyes of each from time to time furtively turned
toward Hicks.

For half an hour he hardly changed his position. At the end of that
time, they found him looking intently at them; and presently he began to
work slowly back to the waist of the ship, but kept to his own side. He
was met on the way by the second mate, when nearly opposite where they
sat.

“Ain’t you pretty comfortable where you are?” they heard the mate
asking. “Guess I wouldn’t go aft any further just yet.”

“_You’re_ all right, Mason,” Hicks answered. “Going below--down cellar,
‘s feller says; go to bed.”

“Well, that’s a pious idea,” said the mate. “You couldn’t do better than
that. I’ll lend you a hand.”

“Don’t care ‘f I do,” responded Hicks, taking the mate’s proffered arm.
But he really seemed to need it very little; he walked perfectly well,
and he did not look across at the others again.

At the head of the gangway he encountered Captain Jenness and Mr.
Watterson, who had completed the perquisition they had remained to make
in his state-room. Mr. Watterson came up empty-handed; but the captain
bore the canteen in which the common enemy had been so artfully conveyed
on board. He walked, darkly scowling, to the rail, and flung the canteen
into the sea. Hicks, who had saluted his appearance with a glare as
savage as his own, yielded to his whimsical sense of the futility of
this vengeance. He gave his fleeting, drunken laugh: “Good old boy,
Captain Jenness. Means well--means well. But lacks--lacks--forecast.
Pounds of cure, but no prevention. Not much on bite, but death on bark.
Heh?” He waggled his hand offensively at the captain, and disappeared,
loosely floundering down the cabin stairs, holding hard by the
hand-rail, and fumbling round with his foot for the steps before he put
it down.

“As soon as he’s in his room, Mr. Watterson, you lock him in.” The
captain handed his officer a key, and walked away forward, with a
hang-dog look on his kindly face, which he kept averted from his
passengers.

The sound of Hicks’s descent had hardly ceased when clapping and
knocking noises were heard again, and the face of the troublesome little
wretch reappeared. He waved Mr. Watterson aside with his left hand, and
in default of specific orders the latter allowed him to mount to
the deck again. Hicks stayed himself a moment, and lurched to where
Staniford and Dunham sat with Lydia.

“What I wish say Miss Blood is,” he began,--“what I wish say is,
peculiar circumstances make no difference with man if man’s gentleman.
What I say is, everybody ‘spec’s--What I say is, circumstances
don’t alter cases; lady’s a lady--What I want do is beg you fellows’
pardon--beg _her_ pardon--if anything I said that firs’ morning--”

“Go away!” cried Staniford, beginning to whiten round the nostrils.
“Hold your tongue!”

Hicks fell back a pace, and looked at him with the odd effect of now
seeing him for the first time. “What _you_ want?” he asked. “What you
mean? Slingin’ criticism ever since you came on this ship! What you mean
by it? Heh? What you mean?”

Staniford rose, and Lydia gave a start. He cast an angry look at her.
“Do you think I’d hurt him?” he demanded.

Hicks went on: “Sorry, very sorry, ‘larm a lady,--specially lady we all
respec’. But this particular affair. Touch--touches my honor. You said,”
 he continued, “‘f I came on deck, you’d knock me down. Why don’t you do
it? Wha’s the matter with you? Sling criticism ever since you been
on ship, and ‘fraid do it! ‘Fraid, you hear? ‘F-ic--‘fraid, I
say.” Staniford slowly walked away forward, and Hicks followed him,
threatening him with word and gesture. Now and then Staniford thrust
him aside, and addressed him some expostulation, and Hicks laughed and
submitted. Then, after a silent excursion to the other side of the ship,
he would return and renew his one-sided quarrel. Staniford seemed to
forbid the interference of the crew, and alternately soothed and baffled
his tedious adversary, who could still be heard accusing him of slinging
criticism, and challenging him to combat. He leaned with his back to the
rail, and now looked quietly into Hicks’s crazy face, when the latter
paused in front of him, and now looked down with a worried, wearied air.
At last he crossed to the other side, and began to come aft again.

“Mr. Dunham!” cried Lydia, starting up. “I know what Mr. Staniford wants
to do. He wants to keep him away from me. Let me go down to the cabin. I
can’t walk; _please_ help me!” Her eyes were full of tears, and the hand
trembled that she laid on Dunham’s arm, but she controlled her voice.

He softly repressed her, while he intently watched Staniford. “No, no!”

“But he can’t bear it much longer,” she pleaded. “And if he should--”

“Staniford would never strike him,” said Dunham, calmly. “Don’t be
afraid. Look! He’s coming back with him; he’s trying to get him below;
they’ll shut him up there. That’s the only chance. Sit down, please.”
 She dropped into her seat, hid her eyes for an instant, and then fixed
them again on the two young men.

Hicks had got between Staniford and the rail. He seized him by the arm,
and, pulling him round, suddenly struck at him. It was too much for his
wavering balance: his feet shot from under him, and he went backwards in
a crooked whirl and tumble, over the vessel’s side.

Staniford uttered a cry of disgust and rage. “Oh, you little brute!” he
shouted, and with what seemed a single gesture he flung off his coat and
the low shoes he wore, and leaped the railing after him.

The cry of “Man overboard!” rang round the ship, and Captain Jenness’s
order, “Down with your helm! Lower a boat, Mr. Mason!” came, quick as it
was, after the second mate had prepared to let go; and he and two of
the men were in the boat, and she was sliding from her davits, while the
Aroostook was coming up to the light wind and losing headway.

When the boat touched the water, two heads had appeared above the
surface terribly far away. “Hold on, for God’s sake! We’ll be there in a
second.”

“All right!” Staniford’s voice called back. “Be quick.” The heads rose
and sank with the undulation of the water. The swift boat appeared to
crawl.

By the time it reached the place where they had been seen, the heads
disappeared, and the men in the boat seemed to be rowing blindly about.
The mate stood upright. Suddenly he dropped and clutched at something
over the boat’s side. The people on the ship could see three hands on
her gunwale; a figure was pulled up into the boat, and proved to be
Hicks; then Staniford, seizing the gunwale with both hands, swung
himself in.

A shout went up from the ship, and Staniford waved his hand. Lydia
waited where she hung upon the rail, clutching it hard with her hands,
till the boat was along-side. Then from white she turned fire-red, and
ran below and locked herself in her room.



XVII.


Dunham followed Staniford to their room, and helped him off with his
wet clothes. He tried to say something ideally fit in recognition of
his heroic act, and he articulated some bald commonplaces of praise, and
shook Staniford’s clammy hand. “Yes,” said the latter, submitting; “but
the difficulty about a thing of this sort is that you don’t know whether
you haven’t been an ass. It has been pawed over so much by the romancers
that you don’t feel like a hero in real life, but a hero of fiction.
I’ve a notion that Hicks and I looked rather ridiculous going over the
ship’s side; I know we did, coming back. No man can reveal his greatness
of soul in wet clothes. Did Miss Blood laugh?”

“Staniford!” said Dunham, in an accent of reproach. “You do her great
injustice. She felt what you had done in the way you would wish,--if you
cared.”

“What did she say?” asked Staniford, quickly.

“Nothing. But--”

“That’s an easy way of expressing one’s admiration of heroic behavior.
I hope she’ll stick to that line. I hope she won’t feel it at all
necessary to say anything in recognition of my prowess; it would be
extremely embarrassing. I’ve got Hicks back again, but I couldn’t stand
any gratitude for it. Not that I’m ashamed of the performance. Perhaps
if it had been anybody but Hicks, I should have waited for them to
lower a boat. But Hicks had peculiar claims. You couldn’t let a man
you disliked so much welter round a great while. Where is the poor old
fellow? Is he clothed and in his right mind again?”

“He seemed to be sober enough,” said Dunham, “when he came on board; but
I don’t think he’s out yet.”

“We must let Thomas in to gather up this bathing-suit,” observed
Staniford. “What a Newportish flavor it gives the place!” He was
excited, and in great gayety of spirits.

He and Dunham went out into the cabin, where they found Captain Jenness
pacing to and fro. “Well, sir,” he said, taking Staniford’s hand,
and crossing his right with his left, so as to include Dunham in his
congratulations, “you ought to have been a sailor!” Then he added, as if
the unqualified praise might seem fulsome, “But if you’d been a sailor,
you wouldn’t have tried a thing like that. You’d have had more sense.
The chances were ten to one against you.”

Staniford laughed. “Was it so bad as that? I shall begin to respect
myself.”

The captain did not answer, but his iron grip closed hard upon
Staniford’s hand, and he frowned in keen inspection of Hicks, who at
that moment came out of his state-room, looking pale and quite sobered.
Captain Jenness surveyed him from head to foot, and then from foot
to head, and pausing at the level of his eyes he said, still holding
Staniford by the hand: “The trouble with a man aboard ship is that he
can’t turn a blackguard out-of-doors just when he likes. The Aroostook
puts in at Messina. You’ll be treated well till we get there, and then
if I find you on my vessel five minutes after she comes to anchor, I’ll
heave you overboard, and I’ll take care that nobody jumps after you. Do
you hear? And you won’t find me doing any such fool kindness as I did
when I took you on board, soon again.”

“Oh, I say, Captain Jenness,” began Staniford.

“He’s all right,” interrupted Hicks. “I’m a blackguard; I know it; and I
don’t think I was worth fishing up. But you’ve done it, and I mustn’t go
back on you, I suppose.” He lifted his poor, weak, bad little face, and
looked Staniford in the eyes with a pathos that belied the slang of his
speech. The latter released his hand from Captain Jenness and gave it to
Hicks, who wrung it, as he kept looking him in the eyes, while his
lips twitched pitifully, like a child’s. The captain gave a quick snort
either of disgust or of sympathy, and turned abruptly about and bundled
himself up out of the cabin.

“I say!” exclaimed Staniford, “a cup of coffee wouldn’t be bad, would
it? Let’s have some coffee, Thomas, about as quick as the cook can make
it,” he added, as the boy came out from his stateroom with a lump of wet
clothes in his hands. “You wanted some coffee a little while ago,” he
said to Hicks, who hung his head at the joke.

For the rest of the day Staniford was the hero of the ship. The men
looked at him from a distance, and talked of him together. Mr. Watterson
hung about whenever Captain Jenness drew near him, as if in the hope
of overhearing some acceptable expression in which he could second his
superior officer. Failing this, and being driven to despair, “Find the
water pretty cold, sir?” he asked at last; and after that seemed to
feel that he had discharged his duty as well as might be under the
extraordinary circumstances.

The second mate, during the course of the afternoon, contrived to pass
near Staniford. “Why, there wa’n’t no _need_ of your doing it,” he said,
in a bated tone. “I could ha’ had him out with the boat, _soon enough_.”

Staniford treasured up these meagre expressions of the general
approbation, and would not have had them different. From this time,
within the narrow bounds that brought them all necessarily together in
some sort, Hicks abolished himself as nearly as possible. He chose often
to join the second mate at meals, which Mr. Mason, in accordance with
the discipline of the ship, took apart both from the crew and his
superior officers. Mason treated the voluntary outcast with a sort of
sarcastic compassion, as a man whose fallen state was not without its
points as a joke to the indifferent observer, and yet might appeal to
the pity of one who knew such cases through the misery they inflicted.
Staniford heard him telling Hicks about his brother-in-law, and dwelling
upon the peculiar relief which the appearance of his name in the
mortality list gave all concerned in him. Hicks listened in apathetic
patience and acquiescence; but Staniford thought that he enjoyed, as
much as he could enjoy anything, the second officer’s frankness. For his
own part, he found that having made bold to keep this man in the world
he had assumed a curious responsibility towards him. It became his
business to show him that he was not shunned by his fellow-creatures,
to hearten and cheer him up. It was heavy work. Hicks with his joke was
sometimes odious company, but he was also sometimes amusing; without
it, he was of a terribly dull conversation. He accepted Staniford’s
friendliness too meekly for good comradery; he let it add, apparently,
to his burden of gratitude, rather than lessen it. Staniford smoked with
him, and told him stories; he walked up and down with him, and made a
point of parading their good understanding, but his spirits seemed to
sink the lower. “Deuce take him!” mused his benefactor; “he’s in love
with her!” But he now had the satisfaction, such as it was, of seeing
that if he was in love he was quite without hope. Lydia had never
relented in her abhorrence of Hicks since the day of his disgrace. There
seemed no scorn in her condemnation, but neither was there any mercy.
In her simple life she had kept unsophisticated the severe morality of a
child, and it was this that judged him, that found him unpardonable and
outlawed him. He had never ventured to speak to her since that day, and
Staniford never saw her look at him except when Hicks was not looking,
and then with a repulsion which was very curious. Staniford could have
pitied him, and might have interceded so far as to set him nearer right
in her eyes; but he felt that she avoided him, too; there were no more
walks on the deck, no more readings in the cabin; the checker-board,
which professed to be the History of England, In 2 Vols., remained a
closed book. The good companionship of a former time, in which they had
so often seemed like brothers and sister, was gone. “Hicks has smashed
our Happy Family,” Staniford said to Dunham, with little pleasure in his
joke. “Upon my word, I think I had better have left him in the water.”
 Lydia kept a great deal in her own room; sometimes when Staniford came
down into the cabin he found her there, talking with Thomas of little
things that amuse children; sometimes when he went on deck in the
evening she would be there in her accustomed seat, and the second mate,
with face and figure half averted, and staying himself by one hand on
the shrouds, would be telling her something to which she listened with
lifted chin and attentive eyes. The mate would go away when Staniford
appeared, but that did not help matters, for then Lydia went too. At
table she said very little; she had the effect of placing herself more
and more under the protection of the captain. The golden age, when they
had all laughed and jested so freely and fearlessly together, under her
pretty sovereignty, was past, and they seemed far dispersed in a common
exile. Staniford imagined she grew pale and thin; he asked Dunham if he
did not see it, but Dunham had not observed. “I think matters have taken
a very desirable shape, socially,” he said. “Miss Blood will reach her
friends as fancy-free as she left home.”

“Yes,” Staniford assented vaguely; “that’s the great object.”

After a while Dunham asked, “She’s never said anything to you about your
rescuing Hicks?”

“Rescuing? What rescuing? They’d have had him out in another minute,
any way,” said Staniford, fretfully. Then he brooded angrily upon the
subject: “But I can tell you what: considering all the circumstances,
she might very well have said something. It looks obtuse, or it looks
hard. She must have known that it all came about through my trying to
keep him away from her.”

“Oh, yes; she knew that,” said Dunham; “she spoke of it at the time. But
I thought--”

“Oh, she did! Then I think that it would be very little if she
recognized the mere fact that something had happened.”

“Why, you said you hoped she wouldn’t. You said it would be
embarrassing. You’re hard to please, Staniford.”

“I shouldn’t choose to have her speak for _my_ pleasure,” Staniford
returned. “But it argues a dullness and coldness in her--”

“I don’t believe she’s dull; I don’t believe she’s cold,” said Dunham,
warmly.

“What _do_ you believe she is?”

“Afraid.”

“Pshaw!” said Staniford.

The eve of their arrival at Messina, he discharged one more duty by
telling Hicks that he had better come on to Trieste with them. “Captain
Jenness asked me to speak to you about it,” he said. “He feels a little
awkward, and thought I could open the matter better.”

“The captain’s all right,” answered Hicks, with unruffled humility,
“but I’d rather stop at Messina. I’m going to get home as soon as I
can,--strike a bee-line.”

“Look here!” said Staniford, laying his hand on his shoulder. “How are
you going to manage for money?”

“Monte di Pietà,” replied Hicks. “I’ve been there before. Used to have
most of my things in the care of the state when I was studying medicine
in Paris. I’ve got a lot of rings and trinkets that’ll carry me through,
with what’s left of my watch.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure.”

“Because you can draw on me, if you’re going to be short.”

“Thanks,” said Hicks. “There’s something I should like to ask you,” he
added, after a moment. “I see as well as you do that Miss Blood isn’t
the same as she was before. I want to know--I can’t always be sure
afterwards--whether I did or said anything out of the way in her
presence.”

“You were drunk,” said Staniford, frankly, “but beyond that you were
irreproachable, as regarded Miss Blood. You were even exemplary.”

“Yes, I know,” said Hicks, with a joyless laugh. “Sometimes it takes
that turn. I don’t think I could stand it if I had shown her any
disrespect. She’s a lady,--a perfect lady; she’s the best girl I ever
saw.”

“Hicks,” said Staniford, presently, “I haven’t bored you in regard to
that little foible of yours. Aren’t you going to try to do something
about it?”

“I’m going home to get them to shut me up somewhere,” answered Hicks.
“But I doubt if anything can be done. I’ve studied the thing; I am a
doctor,--or I would be if I were not a drunkard,--and I’ve diagnosed the
case pretty thoroughly. For three months or four months, now, I shall
be all right. After that I shall go to the bad for a few weeks; and I’ll
have to scramble back the best way I can. Nobody can help me. That
was the mistake this last time. I shouldn’t have wanted anything at
Gibraltar if I could have had my spree out at Boston. But I let them
take me before it was over, and ship me off. I thought I’d try it. Well,
it was like a burning fire every minute, all the way. I thought I
should die. I tried to get something from the sailors; I tried to steal
Gabriel’s cooking-wine. When I got that brandy in Gibraltar I was wild.
Talk about heroism! I tell you it was superhuman, keeping that canteen
corked till night! I was in hopes I could get through it,--sleep it
off,--and nobody be any the wiser. But it wouldn’t work. O Lord, Lord,
Lord!”

Hicks was as common a soul as could well be. His conception of life was
vulgar, and his experience of it was probably vulgar. He had a good mind
enough, with abundance of that humorous brightness which may hereafter
be found the most national quality of the Americans; but his ideals were
pitiful, and the language of his heart was a drolling slang. Yet his
doom lifted him above his low conditions, and made him tragic; his
despair gave him the dignity of a mysterious expiation, and set him
apart with all those who suffer beyond human help. Without deceiving
himself as to the quality of the man, Staniford felt awed by the
darkness of his fate.

“Can’t you try somehow to stand up against it, and fight it off? You’re
so young yet, it can’t--”

The wretched creature burst into tears. “Oh, try,--try! You don’t
know what you’re talking about. Don’t you suppose I’ve had reasons for
trying? If you could see how my mother looks when I come out of one of
my drunks,--and my father, poor old man! It’s no use; I tell you it’s no
use. I shall go just so long, and then I shall want it, and _will_ have
it, unless they shut me up for life. My God, I wish I was dead! Well!”
 He rose from the place where they had been sitting together, and held
out his hand to Staniford. “I’m going to be off in the morning before
you’re out, and I’ll say good-by now. I want you to keep this chair, and
give it to Miss Blood, for me, when you get to Trieste.”

“I will, Hicks,” said Staniford, gently.

“I want her to know that I was ashamed of myself. I think she’ll like to
know it.”

“I will say anything to her that you wish,” replied Staniford.

“There’s nothing else. If ever you see a man with my complaint fall
overboard again, think twice before you jump after him.”

He wrung Staniford’s hand, and went below, leaving him with a dull
remorse that he should ever have hated Hicks, and that he could not
quite like him even now.

But he did his duty by him to the last. He rose at dawn, and was on deck
when Hicks went over the side into the boat which was to row him to the
steamer for Naples, lying at anchor not far off. He presently returned,
to Staniford’s surprise, and scrambled up to the deck of the Aroostook.
“The steamer sails to-night,” he said, “and perhaps I couldn’t raise the
money by that time. I wish you’d lend me ten napoleons. I’ll send ‘em to
you from London. There’s my father’s address: I’m going to telegraph
to him.” He handed Staniford a card, and the latter went below for the
coins. “Thanks,” said Hicks, when he reappeared with them. “Send ‘em to
you where?”

“Care Blumenthals’, Venice. I’m going to be there some weeks.”

In the gray morning light the lurid color of tragedy had faded out of
Hicks. He was merely a baddish-looking young fellow whom Staniford had
lent ten napoleons that he might not see again. Staniford watched the
steamer uneasily, both from the Aroostook and from the shore, where he
strolled languidly about with Dunham part of the day. When she sailed in
the evening, he felt that Hicks’s absence was worth twice the money.



XVIII.


The young men did not come back to the ship at night, but went to a
hotel, for the greater convenience of seeing the city. They had talked
of offering to show Lydia about, but their talk had not ended in
anything. Vexed with himself to be vexed at such a thing, Staniford at
the bottom of his heart still had a soreness which the constant sight
of her irritated. It was in vain that he said there was no occasion,
perhaps no opportunity, for her to speak, yet he was hurt that she
seemed to have seen nothing uncommon in his risking his own life for
that of a man like Hicks. He had set the action low enough in his own
speech; but he knew that it was not ignoble, and it puzzled him that it
should be so passed over. She had not even said a word of congratulation
upon his own escape. It might be that she did not know how, or did not
think it was her place to speak. She was curiously estranged. He felt as
if he had been away, and she had grown from a young girl into womanhood
during his absence. This fantastic conceit was strongest when he met her
with Captain Jenness one day. He had found friends at the hotel, as one
always does in Italy, if one’s world is at all wide,--some young ladies,
and a lady, now married, with whom he had once violently flirted. She
was willing that he should envy her husband; that amused him in his
embittered mood; he let her drive him about; and they met Lydia and the
captain, walking together. Staniford started up from his lounging ease,
as if her limpid gaze had searched his conscience, and bowed with an air
which did not escape his companion.

“Ah! Who’s that?” she asked, with the boldness which she made pass for
eccentricity.

“A lady of my acquaintance,” said Staniford, at his laziest again.

“A lady?” said the other, with an inflection that she saw hurt. “Why
the marine animal, then? She bowed very prettily; she blushed prettily,
too.”

“She’s a very pretty girl,” replied Staniford.

“Charming! But why blush?”

“I’ve heard that there are ladies who blush for nothing.”

“Is she Italian?”

“Yes,--in voice.”

“Oh, an American _prima donna_!” Staniford did not answer. “Who is she?
Where is she from?”

“South Bradfield, Mass.” Staniford’s eyes twinkled at her pursuit,
which he did not trouble himself to turn aside, but baffled by mere
impenetrability.

The party at the hotel suggested that the young men should leave their
ship and go on with them to Naples; Dunham was tempted, for he could
have reached Dresden sooner by land; but Staniford overruled him, and at
the end of four days they went back to the Aroostook. They said it
was like getting home, but in fact they felt the change from the airy
heights and breadths of the hotel to the small cabin and the closets
in which they slept; it was not so great alleviation as Captain Jenness
seemed to think that one of them could now have Hicks’s stateroom. But
Dunham took everything sweetly, as his habit was; and, after all, they
were meeting their hardships voluntarily. Some of the ladies came with
them in the boat which rowed them to the Aroostook; the name made them
laugh; that lady who wished Staniford to regret her waved him her hand
kerchief as the boat rowed away again. She had with difficulty been kept
from coming on board by the refusal of the others to come with her. She
had contrived to associate herself with him again in the minds of the
others, and this, perhaps, was all that she desired. But the
sense of her frivolity--her not so much vacant-mindedness as
vacant-heartedness--was like a stain, and he painted in Lydia’s face
when they first met the reproach which was in his own breast.

Her greeting, however, was frank and cordial; it was a real welcome.
Staniford wondered if it were not more frank and cordial than he quite
liked, and whether she was merely relieved by Hicks’s absence, or had
freed herself from that certain subjection in which she had hitherto
been to himself.

Yet it was charming to see her again as she had been in the happiest
moments of the past, and to feel that, Hicks being out of her world,
her trust of everybody in it was perfect once more. She treated that
interval of coldness and diffidence as all women know how to treat a
thing which they wish not to have been; and Staniford, a man on whom no
pleasing art of her sex was ever lost, admired and gratefully accepted
the effect of this. He fell luxuriously into the old habits again. They
had still almost the time of a steamer’s voyage to Europe before them;
it was as if they were newly setting sail from America. The first night
after they left Messina Staniford found her in her place in the waist of
the ship, and sat down beside her there, and talked; the next night she
did not come; the third she came, and he asked her to walk with him. The
elastic touch of her hand on his arm, the rhythmic movement of her steps
beside him, were things that seemed always to have been. She told him of
what she had seen and done in Messina. This glimpse of Italy had vividly
animated her; she had apparently found a world within herself as well as
without.

With a suddenly depressing sense of loss, Staniford had a prevision
of splendor in her, when she should have wholly blossomed out in that
fervid air of art and beauty; he would fain have kept her still a
wilding rosebud of the New England wayside. He hated the officers who
should wonder at her when she first came into the Square of St. Mark
with her aunt and uncle.

Her talk about Messina went on; he was thinking of her, and not of her
talk; but he saw that she was not going to refer to their encounter.
“You make me jealous of the objects of interest in Messina,” he said.
“You seem to remember seeing everything but me, there.”

She stopped abruptly. “Yes,” she said, after a deep breath, “I saw you
there;” and she did not offer to go on again.

“Where were you going, that morning?”

“Oh, to the cathedral. Captain Jenness left me there, and I looked all
through it till he came back from the consulate.”

“Left you there alone!” cried Staniford.

“Yes; I told him I should not feel lonely, and I should not stir out
of it till he came back. I took one of those little pine chairs and sat
down, when I got tired, and looked at the people coming to worship, and
the strangers with their guide-books.”

“Did any of them look at you?”

“They stared a good deal. It seems to be the custom in Europe; but I
told Captain Jenness I should probably have to go about by myself in
Venice, as my aunt’s an invalid, and I had better get used to it.”

She paused, and seemed to be referring the point to Staniford.

“Yes,--oh, yes,” he said.

“Captain Jenness said it was their way, over here,” she resumed; “but he
guessed I had as much right in a church as anybody.”

“The captain’s common sense is infallible,” answered Staniford. He was
ashamed to know that the beautiful young girl was as improperly alone
in church as she would have been in a café, and he began to hate the
European world for the fact. It seemed better to him that the Aroostook
should put about and sail back to Boston with her, as she was,--better
that she should be going to her aunt in South Bradfield than to her aunt
in Venice. “We shall soon be at our journey’s end, now,” he said, after
a while.

“Yes; the captain thinks in about eight days, if we have good weather.”

“Shall you be sorry?”

“Oh, I like the sea very well.”

“But the new life you are coming to,--doesn’t that alarm you sometimes?”

“Yes, it does,” she admitted, with a kind of reluctance.

“So much that you would like to turn back from it?”

“Oh, no!” she answered quickly. Of course not, Staniford thought;
nothing could be worse than going back to South Bradfield. “I keep
thinking about it,” she added. “You say Venice is such a very strange
place. Is it any use my having seen Messina?”

“Oh, all Italian cities have something in common.”

“I presume,” she went on, “that after I get there everything will become
natural. But I don’t like to look forward. It--scares me. I can’t form
any idea of it.”

“You needn’t be afraid,” said Staniford. “It’s only more beautiful than
anything you can imagine.”

“Yes--yes; I know,” Lydia answered.

“And do you really dread getting there?”

“Yes, I dread it,” she said.

“Why,” returned Staniford lightly, “so do I; but it’s for a different
reason, I’m afraid. I should like such a voyage as this to go on
forever. Now and then I think it will; it seems always to have gone on.
Can you remember when it began?”

“A great while ago,” she answered, humoring his fantasy, “but I can
remember.” She paused a long while. “I don’t know,” she said at last,
“whether I can make you understand just how I feel. But it seems to me
as if I had died, and this long voyage was a kind of dream that I was
going to wake up from in another world. I often used to think, when I
was a little girl, that when I got to heaven it would be lonesome--I
don’t know whether I can express it. You say that Italy--that Venice--is
so beautiful; but if I don’t know any one there--” She stopped, as if
she had gone too far.

“But you do know somebody there,” said Staniford. “Your aunt--”

“Yes,” said the girl, and looked away.

“But the people in this long dream,--you’re going to let some of them
appear to you there,” he suggested.

“Oh, yes,” she said, reflecting his lighter humor, “I shall want to see
them, or I shall not know I am the same person, and I must be sure of
myself, at least.”

“And you wouldn’t like to go back to earth--to South Bradfield again?”
 he asked presently.

“No,” she answered. “All that seems over forever. I couldn’t go back
there and be what I was. I could have stayed there, but I couldn’t go
back.”

Staniford laughed. “I see that it isn’t the other world that’s got hold
of you! It’s _this_ world! I don’t believe you’ll be unhappy in Italy.
But it’s pleasant to think you’ve been so contented on the Aroostook
that you hate to leave it. I don’t believe there’s a man on the ship
that wouldn’t feel personally flattered to know that you liked being
here. Even that poor fellow who parted from us at Messina was anxious
that you should think as kindly of him as you could. He knew that he had
behaved in a way to shock you, and he was very sorry. He left a message
with me for you. He thought you would like to know that he was ashamed
of himself.”

“I pitied him,” said Lydia succinctly. It was the first time that she
had referred to Hicks, and Staniford found it in character for her to
limit herself to this sparse comment. Evidently, her compassion was a
religious duty. Staniford’s generosity came easy to him.

“I feel bound to say that Hicks was not a bad fellow. I disliked him
immensely, and I ought to do him justice, now he’s gone. He deserved all
your pity. He’s a doomed man; his vice is irreparable; he can’t resist
it.” Lydia did not say anything: women do not generalize in these
matters; perhaps they cannot pity the faults of those they do not love.
Staniford only forgave Hicks the more. “I can’t say that up to the last
moment I thought him anything but a poor, common little creature; and
yet I certainly did feel a greater kindness for him after--what I--after
what had happened. He left something more than a message for you, Miss
Blood; he left his steamer chair yonder, for you.”

“For me?” demanded Lydia. Staniford felt her thrill and grow rigid upon
his arm, with refusal. “I will not have it. He had no right to do so.
He--he--was dreadful! I will give it to you!” she said, suddenly. “He
ought to have given it to you. You did everything for him; you saved his
life.”

It was clear that she did not sentimentalize Hicks’s case; and Staniford
had some doubt as to the value she set upon what he had done, even now
she had recognized it.

He said, “I think you overestimate my service to him, possibly. I dare
say the boat could have picked him up in good time.”

“Yes, that’s what the captain and Mr. Watterson and Mr. Mason all said,”
 assented Lydia.

Staniford was nettled. He would have preferred a devoted belief that but
for him Hicks must have perished. Besides, what she said still gave no
clew to her feeling in regard to himself. He was obliged to go on,
but he went on as indifferently as he could. “However, it was hardly a
question for me at the time whether he could have been got out without
my help. If I had thought about it at all--which I didn’t--I suppose I
should have thought that it wouldn’t do to take any chances.”

“Oh, no,” said Lydia, simply, “you couldn’t have done anything less than
you did.”

In his heart Staniford had often thought that he could have done very
much less than jump overboard after Hicks, and could very properly have
left him to the ordinary life-saving apparatus of the ship. But if he
had been putting the matter to some lady in society who was aggressively
praising him for his action, he would have said just what Lydia had said
for him,--that he could not have done anything less. He might have said
it, however, in such a way that the lady would have pursued his retreat
from her praises with still fonder applause; whereas this girl seemed to
think there was nothing else to be said. He began to stand in awe of her
heroic simplicity. If she drew every-day breath in that lofty air, what
could she really think of him, who preferred on principle the atmosphere
of the valley? “Do you know, Miss Blood,” he said gravely, “that you pay
me a very high compliment?”

“How?” she asked.

“You rate my maximum as my mean temperature.” He felt that she listened
inquiringly. “I don’t think I’m habitually up to a thing of that kind,”
 he explained.

“Oh, no,” she assented, quietly; “but when he struck at you so, you had
to do everything.”

“Ah, you have the pitiless Puritan conscience that takes the life out of
us all!” cried Staniford, with sudden bitterness. Lydia seemed startled,
shocked, and her hand trembled on his arm, as if she had a mind to take
it away. “I was a long time laboring up to that point. I suppose you are
always there!”

“I don’t understand,” she said, turning her head round with the slow
motion of her beauty, and looking him full in the face.

“I can’t explain now. I will, by and by,--when we get to Venice,” he
added, with quick lightness.

“You put off everything till we get to Venice,” she said, doubtfully.

“I beg your pardon. It was you who did it the last time.”

“Was it?” She laughed. “So it was! I was thinking it was you.”

It consoled him a little that she should have confused them in her
thought, in this way. “What was it you were to tell me in Venice?” he
asked.

“I can’t think, now.”

“Very likely something of yourself--or myself. A third person might say
our conversational range was limited.”

“Do you think it is very egotistical?” she asked, in the gay tone which
gave him relief from the sense of oppressive elevation of mind in her.

“It is in me,--not in you.”

“But I don’t see the difference.”

“I will explain sometime.”

“When we get to Venice?”

They both laughed. It was very nonsensical; but nonsense is sometimes
enough.

When they were serious again, “Tell me,” he said, “what you thought of
that lady in Messina, the other day.”

She did not affect not to know whom he meant. She merely said, “I only
saw her a moment.”

“But you thought something. If we only see people a second we form some
opinion of them.”

“She is very fine-appearing,” said Lydia.

Staniford smiled at the countrified phrase; he had observed that when
she spoke her mind she used an instinctive good language; when she would
not speak it, she fell into the phraseology of the people with whom
she had lived. “I see you don’t wish to say, because you think she is
a friend of mine. But you can speak out freely. We were not friends; we
were enemies, if anything.”

Staniford’s meaning was clear enough to himself; but Lydia paused, as if
in doubt whether he was jesting or not, before she asked, “Why were you
riding with her then?”

“I was driving with her,” he replied, “I suppose, because she asked me.”

“_Asked_ you!” cried the girl; and he perceived her moral recoil both
from himself and from a woman who could be so unseemly. That lady would
have found it delicious if she could have known that a girl placed like
Lydia was shocked at her behavior. But he was not amused. He was touched
by the simple self-respect that would not let her suffer from what was
not wrong in itself, but that made her shrink from a voluntary semblance
of unwomanliness. It endeared her not only to his pity, but to that
sense which in every man consecrates womanhood, and waits for some woman
to be better than all her sex. Again he felt the pang he had remotely
known before. What would she do with these ideals of hers in that
depraved Old World,--so long past trouble for its sins as to have got
a sort of sweetness and innocence in them,--where her facts would be
utterly irreconcilable with her ideals, and equally incomprehensible?

They walked up and down a few turns without speaking again of that lady.
He knew that she grew momently more constrained toward him; that the
pleasure of the time was spoiled for her; that she had lost her trust in
him, and this half amused, half afflicted him. It did not surprise him
when, at their third approach to the cabin gangway, she withdrew her
hand from his arm and said, stiffly, “I think I will go down.” But she
did not go at once. She lingered, and after a certain hesitation she
said, without looking at him, “I didn’t express what I wanted to, about
Mr. Hicks, and--what you did. It is what I thought you would do.”

“Thanks,” said Staniford, with sincere humility. He understood how she
had had this in her mind, and how she would not withhold justice from
him because he had fallen in her esteem; how rather she would be the
more resolute to do him justice for that reason.



XIX.


He could see that she avoided being alone with him the next day, but he
took it for a sign of relenting, perhaps helpless relenting, that she
was in her usual place on deck in the evening. He went to her, and, “I
see that you haven’t forgiven me,” he said.

“Forgiven you?” she echoed.

“Yes,” he said, “for letting that lady ask me to drive with her.”

“I never said--” she began.

“Oh, no! But I knew it, all the same. It was not such a very wicked
thing, as those things go. But I liked your not liking it. Will you let
me say something to you?”

“Yes,” she answered, rather breathlessly.

“You must think it’s rather an odd thing to say, as I ask leave. It is;
and I hardly know how to say it. I want to tell you that I’ve made bold
to depend a great deal upon your good opinion for my peace of mind, of
late, and that I can’t well do without it now.”

She stole the quickest of her bird-like glances at him, but did not
speak; and though she seemed, to his anxious fancy, poising for flight,
she remained, and merely looked away, like the bird that will not or
cannot fly.

“You don’t resent my making you my outer conscience, do you, and my
knowing that you’re not quite pleased with me?”

She looked down and away with one of those turns of the head, so
precious when one who beholds them is young, and caught at the fringe of
her shawl. “I have no right,” she began.

“Oh, I give you the right!” he cried, with passionate urgence. “You have
the right. Judge me!” She only looked more grave, and he hurried on.
“It was no great harm of her to ask me; that’s common enough; but it was
harm of me to go if I didn’t quite respect her,--if I thought her silly,
and was willing to be amused with her. One hasn’t any right to do that.
I saw this when I saw you.” She still hung her head, and looked away. “I
want you to tell me something,” he pursued. “Do you remember once--the
second time we talked together--that you said Dunham was in earnest, and
you wouldn’t answer when I asked you about myself? Do you remember?”

“Yes,” said the girl.

“I didn’t care, then. I care very much now. You don’t think me--you
think I can be in earnest when I will, don’t you? And that I can
regret--that I really wish--” He took the hand that played with the
shawl-fringe, but she softly drew it away.

“Ah, I see!” he said. “You can’t believe in me. You don’t believe that I
can be a good man--like Dunham!”

She answered in the same breathless murmur, “I think you are good.” Her
averted face drooped lower.

“I will tell you all about it, some day!” he cried, with joyful
vehemence. “Will you let me?”

“Yes,” she answered, with the swift expulsion of breath that sometimes
comes with tears. She rose quickly and turned away. He did not try to
keep her from leaving him. His heart beat tumultuously; his brain seemed
in a whirl. It all meant nothing, or it meant everything.

“What is the matter with Miss Blood?” asked Dunham, who joined him at
this moment. “I just spoke to her at the foot of the gangway stairs, and
she wouldn’t answer me.”

“Oh, I don’t know about Miss Blood--I don’t know what’s the matter,”
 said Staniford. “Look here, Dunham; I want to talk with you--I want to
tell you something--I want you to advise me--I--There’s only one thing
that can explain it, that can excuse it. There’s only one thing that can
justify all that I’ve done and said, and that can not only justify it,
but can make it sacredly and eternally right,--right for her and right
for me. Yes, it’s reason for all, and for a thousand times more. It
makes it fair for me to have let her see that I thought her beautiful
and charming, that I delighted to be with her, that I--Dunham,” cried
Staniford, “I’m in love!”

Dunham started at the burst in which these ravings ended. “Staniford,”
 he faltered, with grave regret, “I _hope_ not!”

“You hope not? You--you--What do you mean? How else can I free myself
from the self-reproach of having trifled with her, of--”

Dunham shook his head compassionately. “You can’t do it that way. Your
only safety is to fight it to the death,--to run from it.”

“But if I don’t _choose_ to fight it?” shouted Staniford,--“if I don’t
_choose_ to run from it? If I--”

“For Heaven’s sake, hush! The whole ship will hear you, and you oughtn’t
to breathe it in the desert. I saw how it was going! I dreaded it; I
knew it; and I longed to speak. I’m to blame for not speaking!”

“I should like to know what would have authorized you to speak?”
 demanded Staniford, haughtily.

“Only my regard for you; only what urges me to speak now! You
_must_ fight it, Staniford, whether you choose or not. Think of
yourself,--think of her! Think--you have always been my ideal of honor
and truth and loyalty--think of her husband--”

“Her husband!” gasped Staniford. “Whose husband? What the deuce--_who_
the deuce--are you talking about, Dunham?”

“Mrs. Rivers.”

“Mrs. Rivers? That flimsy, feather-headed, empty-hearted--eyes-maker!
That frivolous, ridiculous--Pah! And did you think that I was talking of
_her_? Did you think I was in love with _her_?”

“Why,” stammered Dunham, “I supposed--I thought--At Messina, you know--”

“Oh!” Staniford walked the deck’s length away. “Well, Dunham,” he said,
as he came back, “you’ve spoilt a pretty scene with your rot about
Mrs. Rivers. I was going to be romantic! But perhaps I’d better say in
ordinary newspaper English that I’ve just found out that I’m in love
with Miss Blood.”

“With _her_!” cried Dunham, springing at his hand.

“Oh, come now! Don’t _you_ be romantic, after knocking _my_ chance.”

“Why, but Staniford!” said Dunham, wringing his hand with a lover’s joy
in another’s love and his relief that it was not Mrs. Rivers. “I never
should have dreamt of such a thing!”

“Why?” asked Staniford, shortly.

“Oh, the way you talked at first, you know, and--”

“I suppose even people who get married have something to take back about
each other,” said Staniford, rather sheepishly. “However,” he added,
with an impulse of frankness, “I don’t know that I should have dreamt of
it myself, and I don’t blame you. But it’s a fact, nevertheless.”

“Why, of course. It’s splendid! Certainly. It’s magnificent!” There was
undoubtedly a qualification, a reservation, in Dunham’s tone. He
might have thought it right to bring the inequalities of the affair to
Staniford’s mind. With all his effusive kindliness of heart and manner,
he had a keen sense of social fitness, a nice feeling for convention.
But a man does not easily suggest to another that the girl with whom he
has just declared himself in love is his inferior. What Dunham finally
did say was: “It jumps with all your ideas--all your old talk about not
caring to marry a society girl--”

“Society might be very glad of such a girl!” said Staniford, stiffly.

“Yes, yes, certainly; but I mean--”

“Oh, I know what you mean. It’s all right,” said Staniford. “But
it isn’t a question of marrying yet. I can’t be sure she understood
me,--I’ve been so long understanding myself. And yet, she must, she
must! She must believe it by this time, or else that I’m the most
infamous scoundrel alive. When I think how I have sought her out, and
followed her up, and asked her judgment, and hung upon her words, I feel
that I oughtn’t to lose a moment in being explicit. I don’t care for
myself; she can take me or leave me, as she likes; but if she doesn’t
understand, she mustn’t be left in suspense as to my meaning.” He seemed
to be speaking to Dunham, but he was really thinking aloud, and Dunham
waited for some sort of question before he spoke. “But it’s a great
satisfaction to have had it out with myself. I haven’t got to pretend
any more that I hang about her, and look at her, and go mooning round
after her, for this no-reason and that; I’ve got the best reason in the
world for playing the fool,--I’m in love!” He drew a long, deep
breath. “It simplifies matters immensely to have reached the point
of acknowledging that. Why, Dunham, those four days at Messina almost
killed me! They settled it. When that woman was in full fascination
it made me gasp. I choked for a breath of fresh air; for a taste of
spring-water; for--Lurella!” It was a long time since Staniford had used
this name, and the sound of it made him laugh. “It’s droll--but I always
think of her as Lurella; I wish it _was_ her name! Why, it was like
heaven to see her face when I got back to the ship. After we met her
that day at Messina, Mrs. Rivers tried her best to get out of me who
it was, and where I met her. But I flatter myself that I was equal to
_that_ emergency.”

Dunham said nothing, at once. Then, “Staniford,” he faltered, “she got
it out of me.”

“Did you tell her who Lu--who Miss Blood was?”

“Yes.”

“And how I happened to be acquainted with her?”

“Yes.”

“And that we were going on to Trieste with her?”

“She had it out of me before I knew,” said Dunham. “I didn’t realize
what she was after; and I didn’t realize how peculiar the situation
might seem--”

“I see nothing peculiar in the situation,” interrupted Staniford,
haughtily. Then he laughed consciously. “Or, yes, I do; of course I do!
You must know _her_ to appreciate it, though.” He mused a while before
he added: “No wonder Mrs. Rivers was determined to come aboard! I wish
we had let her,--confound her! She’ll think I was ashamed of it. There’s
nothing to be ashamed of! By Heaven, I should like to hear any one--”
 Staniford broke off, and laughed, and then bit his lip, smiling.
Suddenly he burst out again, frowning: “I won’t view it in that light. I
refuse to consider it from that point of view. As far as I’m concerned,
it’s as regular as anything else in life. It’s the same to me as if she
were in her own house, and I had come there to tell her that she has my
future in her hand. She’s such a lady by instinct that she’s made it all
a triumph, and I thank God that I haven’t done or said anything to mar
it. Even that beast of a Hicks didn’t; it’s no merit. I’ve made love to
her,--I own it; of course I have, because I was in love with her; and my
fault has been that I haven’t made love to her openly, but have gone
on fancying that I was studying her character, or some rubbish of that
sort. But the fault is easily repaired.” He turned about, as if he were
going to look for Lydia at once, and ask her to be his wife. But he
halted abruptly, and sat down. “No; that won’t do,” he said. “That won’t
do at all.” He remained thinking, and Dunham, unwilling to interrupt his
reverie, moved a few paces off. “Dunham, don’t go. I want your advice.
Perhaps I don’t see it in the right light.”

“How is it you see it, my dear fellow?” asked Dunham.

“I don’t know whether I’ve a right to be explicit with her, here. It
seems like taking an advantage. In a few days she will be with her
friends--”

“You must wait,” said Dunham, decisively. “You can’t speak to her before
she is in their care; it wouldn’t be the thing. You’re quite right about
that.”

“No, it wouldn’t be the thing,” groaned Staniford. “But how is it all to
go on till then?” he demanded desperately.

“Why, just as it has before,” answered Dunham, with easy confidence.

“But is that fair to her?”

“Why not? You mean to say to her at the right time all that a man can.
Till that time comes I haven’t the least doubt she understands you.”

“Do you think so?” asked Staniford, simply. He had suddenly grown very
subject and meek to Dunham.

“Yes,” said the other, with the superiority of a betrothed lover; “women
are very quick about those things.”

“I suppose you’re right,” sighed Staniford, with nothing of his wonted
arrogant pretension in regard to women’s moods and minds, “I suppose
you’re right. And you would go on just as before?”

“I would, indeed. How could you change without making her unhappy--if
she’s interested in you?”

“That’s true. I could imagine worse things than going on just as before.
I suppose,” he added, “that something more explicit has its charms;
but a mutual understanding is very pleasant,--if it _is_ a mutual
understanding.” He looked inquiringly at Dunham.

“Why, as to that, of course I don’t know. You ought to be the best judge
of that. But I don’t believe your impressions would deceive you.”

“Yours did, once,” suggested Staniford, in suspense.

“Yes; but I was not in love with her,” explained Dunham.

“Of course,” said Staniford, with a breath of relief. “And you
think--Well, I must wait!” he concluded, grimly. “But don’t--don’t
mention this matter, Dunham, unless I do. Don’t keep an eye on me,
old fellow. Or, yes, you must! You can’t help it. I want to tell
you, Dunham, what makes me think she may be a not wholly uninterested
spectator of my--sentiments.” He made full statement of words and looks
and tones. Dunham listened with the patience which one lover has with
another.



XX.


The few days that yet remained of their voyage were falling in the
latter half of September, and Staniford tried to make the young girl
see the surpassing loveliness of that season under Italian skies; the
fierceness of the summer is then past, and at night, when chiefly they
inspected the firmament, the heaven has begun to assume something of the
intense blue it wears in winter. She said yes, it was very beautiful,
but she could not see that the days were finer, or the skies bluer,
than those of September at home; and he laughed at her loyalty to the
American weather. “Don’t _you_ think so, too?” she asked, as if it
pained her that he should like Italian weather better.

“Oh, yes,--yes,” he said. Then he turned the talk on her, as he did
whenever he could. “I like your meteorological patriotism. If I were a
woman, I should stand by America in everything.”

“Don’t you as a man?” she pursued, still anxiously.

“Oh, certainly,” he answered. “But women owe our continent a double debt
of fidelity. It’s the Paradise of women, it’s their Promised Land, where
they’ve been led up out of the Egyptian bondage of Europe. It’s the
home of their freedom. It is recognized in America that women have
consciences and souls.”

Lydia looked very grave. “Is it--is it so different with women in
Europe?” she faltered.

“Very,” he replied, and glanced at her half-laughingly, half-tenderly.

After a while, “I wish you would tell me,” she said, “just what you
mean. I wish you would tell me what is the difference.”

“Oh, it’s a long story. I will tell you--when we get to Venice.” The
well-worn jest served its purpose again; she laughed, and he continued:
“By the way, just when will that be? The captain says that if this wind
holds we shall be in Trieste by Friday afternoon. I suppose your friends
will meet you there on Saturday, and that you’ll go back with them to
Venice at once.”

“Yes,” assented Lydia.

“Well, if I should come on Monday, would that be too soon?”

“Oh, no!” she answered. He wondered if she had been vaguely hoping that
he might go directly on with her to Venice. They were together all day,
now, and the long talks went on from early morning, when they met before
breakfast on deck, until late at night, when they parted there, with
blushed and laughed good-nights. Sometimes the trust she put upon his
unspoken promises was terrible; it seemed to condemn his reticence as
fantastic and hazardous. With her, at least, it was clear that this love
was the first; her living and loving were one. He longed to testify the
devotion which he felt, to leave it unmistakable and safe past accident;
he thought of making his will, in which he should give her everything,
and declare her supremely dear; he could only rid himself of this by
drawing up the paper in writing, and then he easily tore it in pieces.

They drew nearer together, not only in their talk about each other, but
in what they said of different people in their relation to themselves.
But Staniford’s pleasure in the metaphysics of reciprocal appreciation,
his wonder at the quickness with which she divined characters he
painfully analyzed, was not greater than his joy in the pretty hitch of
the shoulder with which she tucked her handkerchief into the back pocket
of her sack, or the picturesqueness with, which she sat facing him, and
leant upon the rail, with her elbow wrapped in her shawl, and the
fringe gathered in the hand which propped her cheek. He scribbled his
sketch-book full of her contours and poses, which sometimes he caught
unawares, and which sometimes she sat for him to draw. One day, as they
sat occupied in this, “I wonder,” he said, “if you have anything of my
feeling, nowadays. It seems to me as if the world had gone on a pleasure
excursion, without taking me along, and I was enjoying myself very much
at home.”

“Why, yes,” she said, joyously; “do you have that feeling, too?”

“I wonder what it is makes us feel so,” he ventured.

“Perhaps,” she returned, “the long voyage.”

“I shall hate to have the world come back, I believe,” he said,
reverting to the original figure. “Shall you?”

“You know I don’t know much about it,” she answered, in lithe evasion,
for which she more than atoned with a conscious look and one of her dark
blushes. Yet he chose, with a curious cruelty, to try how far she was
his.

“How odd it would be,” he said, “if we never should have a chance to
talk up this voyage of ours when it is over!”

She started, in a way that made his heart smite him. “Why, you said
you--” And then she caught herself, and struggled pitifully for the
self-possession she had lost. She turned her head away; his pulse
bounded.

“Did you think I wouldn’t? I am living for that.” He took the hand
that lay in her lap; she seemed to try to free it, but she had not the
strength or will; she could only keep her face turned from him.



XXI.


They arrived Friday afternoon in Trieste, and Captain Jenness
telegraphed his arrival to Lydia’s uncle as he went up to the consulate
with his ship’s papers. The next morning the young men sent their
baggage to a hotel, but they came back for a last dinner on the
Aroostook. They all pretended to be very gay, but everybody was
perturbed and distraught. Staniford and Dunham had paid their way
handsomely with the sailors, and they had returned with remembrances in
florid scarfs and jewelry for Thomas and the captain and the officers.
Dunham had thought they ought to get something to give Lydia as a
souvenir of their voyage; it was part of his devotion to young ladies to
offer them little presents; but Staniford overruled him, and said there
should be nothing of the kind. They agreed to be out of the way when
her uncle came, and they said good-by after dinner. She came on deck
to watch them ashore. Staniford would be the last to take leave. As he
looked into her eyes, he saw brave trust of him, but he thought a sort
of troubled wonder, too, as if she could not understand his reticence,
and suffered from it. There was the same latent appeal and reproach in
the pose in which she watched their boat row away. She stood with one
hand resting on the rail, and her slim grace outlined against the sky.
He waved his hand; she answered with a little languid wave of hers; then
she turned away. He felt as if he had forsaken her.

The afternoon was very long. Toward night-fall he eluded Dunham, and
wandered back to the ship in the hope that she might still be there.
But she was gone. Already everything was changed. There was bustle and
discomfort; it seemed years since he had been there. Captain Jenness
was ashore somewhere; it was the second mate who told Staniford of her
uncle’s coming.

“What sort of person was he?” he asked vaguely.

“Oh, well! _Dum_ an Englishman, any way,” said Mason, in a tone of easy,
sociable explanation.

The scruple to which Staniford had been holding himself for the past
four or five days seemed the most incredible of follies,--the most
fantastic, the most cruel. He hurried back to the hotel; when he found
Dunham coming out from the _table d’hôte_ he was wild.

“I have been the greatest fool in the world, Dunham,” he said. “I
have let a quixotic quibble keep me from speaking when I ought to have
spoken.”

Dunham looked at him in stupefaction. “Where have you been?” he
inquired.

“Down to the ship. I was in hopes that she might be still there. But
she’s gone.”

“The Aroostook _gone_?”

“Look here, Dunham,” cried Staniford, angrily, “this is the second time
you’ve done that! If you are merely thick-witted, much can be forgiven
to your infirmity; but if you’ve a mind to joke, let me tell you you
choose your time badly.”

“I’m not joking. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I may be
thick-witted, as you say; or you may be scatter-witted,” said Dunham,
indignantly. “What are you after, any way?”

“What was my reason for not being explicit with her; for going away from
her without one honest, manly, downright word; for sneaking off without
telling her that she was more than life to me, and that if she cared
for me as I cared for her I would go on with her to Venice, and meet her
people with her?”

“Why, I don’t know,” replied Dunham, vaguely. “We agreed that there
would be a sort of--that she ought to be in their care before--”

“Then I can tell you,” interrupted Staniford, “that we agreed upon the
greatest piece of nonsense that ever was. A man can do no more than
offer himself, and if he does less, after he’s tried everything to show
that he’s in love with a woman, and to make her in love with him, he’s
a scamp to refrain from a bad motive, and an ass to refrain from a good
one. Why in the name of Heaven _shouldn’t_ I have spoken, instead of
leaving her to eat her heart out in wonder at my delay, and to doubt and
suspect and dread--Oh!” he shouted, in supreme self-contempt.

Dunham had nothing to urge in reply. He had fallen in with what he
thought Staniford’s own mind in regard to the course he ought to take;
since he had now changed his mind, there seemed never to have been any
reason for that course.

“My dear fellow,” he said, “it isn’t too late yet to see her, I dare
say. Let us go and find what time the trains leave for Venice.”

“Do you suppose I can offer myself in the _salle d’attente_?” sneered
Staniford. But he went with Dunham to the coffee-room, where they found
the Osservatore Triestino and the time-table of the railroad. The last
train left for Venice at ten, and it was now seven; the Austrian Lloyd
steamer for Venice sailed at nine.

“Pshaw!” said Staniford, and pushed the paper away. He sat brooding over
the matter before the table on which the journals were scattered, while
Dunham waited for him to speak. At last he said, “I can’t stand it; I
must see her. I don’t know whether I told her I should come on to-morrow
night or not. If she should be expecting me on Monday morning, and I
should be delayed--Dunham, will you drive round with me to the Austrian
Lloyd’s wharf? They may be going by the boat, and if they are they’ll
have left their hotel. We’ll try the train later. I should like to find
out if they are on board. I don’t know that I’ll try to speak with them;
very likely not.”

“I’ll go, certainly,” answered Dunham, cordially.

“I’ll have some dinner first,” said Staniford. “I’m hungry.”

It was quite dark when they drove on to the wharf at which the boat for
Venice lay. When they arrived, a plan had occurred to Staniford,
through the timidity which had already succeeded the boldness of his
desperation. “Dunham,” he said, “I want you to go on board, and see if
she’s there. I don’t think I could stand not finding her. Besides, if
she’s cheerful and happy, perhaps I’d better not see her. You can come
back and report. Confound it, you know, I should be so conscious before
that infernal uncle of hers. You understand!”

“Yes, yes,” returned Dunham, eager to serve Staniford in a case like
this. “I’ll manage it.”

“Well,” said Staniford, beginning to doubt the wisdom of either going
aboard, “do it if you think best. I don’t know--”

“Don’t know what?” asked Dunham, pausing in the door of the _fiacre_.

“Oh, nothing, nothing! I hope we’re not making fools of ourselves.”

“You’re morbid, old fellow!” said Dunham, gayly. He disappeared in the
darkness, and Staniford waited, with set teeth, till he came back. He
seemed a long time gone. When he returned, he stood holding fast to the
open fiacre-door, without speaking.

“Well!” cried Staniford, with bitter impatience.

“Well what?” Dunham asked, in a stupid voice.

“Were they there?”

“I don’t know. I can’t tell.”

“Can’t tell, man? Did you go to see?”

“I think so. I’m not sure.”

A heavy sense of calamity descended upon Staniford’s heart, but patience
came with it. “What’s the matter, Dunham?” he asked, getting out
tremulously.

“I don’t know. I think I’ve had a fall, somewhere. Help me in.”

Staniford got out and helped him gently to the seat, and then mounted
beside him, giving the order for their return. “Where is your hat?” he
asked, finding that Dunham was bareheaded.

“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Am I bleeding?”

“It’s so dark, I can’t see.”

“Put your hand here.” He carried Staniford’s hand to the back of his
head.

“There’s no blood; but you’ve had an ugly knock there.”

“Yes, that’s it,” said Dunham. “I remember now; I slipped and struck my
head.” He lapsed away in a torpor; Staniford could learn nothing more
from him.

The hurt was not what Staniford in his first anxiety had feared, but
the doctor whom they called at the hotel was vague and guarded as to
everything but the time and care which must be given in any event.
Staniford despaired; but there was only one thing to do. He sat down
beside his friend to take care of him.

His mind was a turmoil of regrets, of anxieties, of apprehensions; but
he had a superficial calmness that enabled him to meet the emergencies
of the case. He wrote a letter to Lydia which he somehow knew to be
rightly worded, telling her of the accident. In terms which conveyed to
her all that he felt, he said that he should not see her at the time he
had hoped, but promised to come to Venice as soon as he could quit his
friend. Then, with a deep breath, he put that affair away for the time,
and seemed to turn a key upon it.

He called a waiter, and charged him to have his letter posted at once.
The man said he would give it to the _portier_, who was sending out some
other letters. He returned, ten minutes later, with a number of
letters which he said the portier had found for him at the post-office.
Staniford glanced at them. It was no time to read them then, and he put
them into the breast pocket of his coat.



XXII.


At the hotel in Trieste, to which Lydia went with her uncle before
taking the train for Venice, she found an elderly woman, who made her a
courtesy, and, saying something in Italian, startled her by kissing her
hand.

“It’s our Veronica,” her uncle explained; “she wants to know how she can
serve you.” He gave Veronica the wraps and parcels he had been carrying.
“Your aunt thought you might need a maid.”

“Oh, no!” said Lydia. “I always help myself.”

“Ah, I dare say,” returned her uncle. “You American ladies are so--up to
snuff, as you say. But your aunt thought we’d better have her with us,
in any case.”

“And she sent her all the way from Venice?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I never did!” said Lydia, not lightly, but with something of
contemptuous severity.

Her uncle smiled, as if she had said something peculiarly acceptable
to him, and asked, hesitatingly, “When you say you never did, you know,
what is the full phrase?”

Lydia looked at him. “Oh! I suppose I meant I never heard of such a
thing.”

“Ah, thanks, thanks!” said her uncle. He was a tall, slender man of
fifty-five or sixty, with a straight gray mustache, and not at all the
typical Englishman, but much more English-looking than if he had been.
His bearing toward Lydia blended a fatherly kindness and a colonial
British gallantry, such as one sees in elderly Canadian gentlemen
attentive to quite young Canadian ladies at the provincial
watering-places. He had an air of adventure, and of uncommon pleasure
and no small astonishment in Lydia’s beauty. They were already good
friends; she was at her ease with him; she treated him as if he were an
old gentleman. At the station, where Veronica got into the same carriage
with them, Lydia found the whole train very queer-looking, and he
made her describe its difference from an American train. He said, “Oh,
yes--yes, engine,” when she mentioned the locomotive, and he apparently
prized beyond its worth the word cow-catcher, a fixture which Lydia
said was wanting to the European locomotive, and left it very stubby. He
asked her if she would allow him to set it down; and he entered the word
in his note-book, with several other idioms she had used. He said that
he amused himself in picking up these things from his American friends.
He wished to know what she called this and that and the other thing, and
was equally pleased whether her nomenclature agreed or disagreed with
his own. Where it differed, he recorded the fact, with her leave, in
his book. He plied her with a thousand questions about America, with all
parts of which he seemed to think her familiar; and she explained with
difficulty how very little of it she had seen. He begged her not to let
him bore her, and to excuse the curiosity of a Britisher, “As I suppose
you’d call me,” he added.

Lydia lifted her long-lashed lids half-way, and answered, “No, I
shouldn’t call you so.”

“Ah, yes,” he returned, “the Americans always disown it. But I don’t
mind it at all, you know. I like those native expressions.” Where they
stopped for refreshments he observed that one of the dishes, which was
flavored to the national taste, had a pretty tall smell, and seemed
disappointed by Lydia’s unresponsive blankness at a word which a
countryman of hers--from Kentucky--had applied to the odor of the
Venetian canals. He suffered in like measure from a like effect in her
when he lamented the complications that had kept him the year before
from going to America with Mrs. Erwin, when she revisited her old
stomping-ground.

As they rolled along, the warm night which had fallen after the
beautiful day breathed through the half-dropped window in a rich, soft
air, as strange almost as the flying landscape itself. Mr. Erwin began
to drowse, and at last he fell asleep; but Veronica kept her eyes
vigilantly fixed upon Lydia, always smiling when she caught her glance,
and offering service. At the stations, so orderly and yet so noisy,
where the passengers were held in the same meek subjection as at
Trieste, people got in and out of the carriage; and there were officers,
at first in white coats, and after they passed the Italian frontier in
blue, who stared at Lydia. One of the Italians, a handsome young hussar,
spoke to her. She could not know what he said; but when he crossed
over to her side of the carriage, she rose and took her place beside
Veronica, where she remained even after he left the carriage. She was
sensible of growing drowsy. Then she was aware of nothing till she woke
up with her head on Veronica’s shoulder, against which she had fallen,
and on which she had been patiently supported for hours. “Ecco Venezia!”
 cried the old woman, pointing to a swarm of lights that seemed to float
upon an expanse of sea. Lydia did not understand; she thought she was
again on board the Aroostook, and that the lights she saw were the
lights of the shipping in Boston harbor. The illusion passed, and left
her heart sore. She issued from the glare of the station upon the quay
before it, bewildered by the ghostly beauty of the scene, but shivering
in the chill of the dawn, and stunned by the clamor of the gondoliers. A
tortuous course in the shadow of lofty walls, more deeply darkened from
time to time by the arch of a bridge, and again suddenly pierced by the
brilliance of a lamp that shot its red across the gloom, or plunged
it into the black water, brought them to a palace gate at which they
stopped, and where, after a dramatic ceremony of sliding bolts and the
reluctant yielding of broad doors on a level with the water, she passed
through a marble-paved court and up a stately marble staircase to her
uncle’s apartment. “You’re at home, now, you know,” he said, in a kindly
way, and took her hand, very cold and lax, in his for welcome. She could
not answer, but made haste to follow Veronica to her room, whither the
old woman led the way with a candle. It was a gloomily spacious chamber,
with sombre walls and a lofty ceiling with a faded splendor of gilded
paneling. Some tall, old-fashioned mirrors and bureaus stood about, with
rugs before them on the stone floor; in the middle of the room was a
bed curtained with mosquito-netting. Carved chairs were pushed here and
there against the wall. Lydia dropped into one of these, too strange and
heavy-hearted to go to bed in that vastness and darkness, in which her
candle seemed only to burn a small round hole. She longed forlornly
to be back again in her pretty state-room on the Aroostook; vanishing
glimpses and echoes of the faces and voices grown so familiar in the
past weeks haunted her; the helpless tears ran down her cheeks.

There came a tap at her door, and her aunt’s voice called, “Shall I
come in?” and before she could faintly consent, her aunt pushed in,
and caught her in her arms, and kissed her, and broke into a twitter of
welcome and compassion. “You poor child! Did you think I was going to
let you go to sleep without seeing you, after you’d come half round the
world to see me?” Her aunt was dark and slight like Lydia, but not so
tall; she was still a very pretty woman, and she was a very effective
presence now in the long white morning-gown of camel’s hair, somewhat
fantastically embroidered in crimson silk, in which she drifted about
before Lydia’s bewildered eyes. “Let me see how you look! Are you as
handsome as ever?” She held the candle she carried so as to throw its
light full upon Lydia’s face. “Yes!” she sighed. “How pretty you are!
And at your age you’ll look even better by daylight! I had begun to
despair of you; I thought you couldn’t be all I remembered; but you
are,--you’re more! I wish I had you in Rome, instead of Venice;
there would be some use in it. There’s a great deal of society
there,--_English_ society; but never mind: I’m going to take you to
church with me to-morrow,--the English service; there are lots of
English in Venice now, on their way south for the winter. I’m crazy to
see what dresses you’ve brought; your aunt Maria has told me how she
fitted you out. I’ve got two letters from her since you started, and
they’re all perfectly well, dear. Your black silk will do nicely,
with bright ribbons, especially; I hope you haven’t got it spotted or
anything on the way over.” She did not allow Lydia to answer, nor seem
to expect it. “You’ve got your mother’s eyes, Lydia, but your father had
those straight eyebrows: you’re very much like him. Poor Henry! And now
I’m having you get something to eat. I’m not going to risk coffee on
you, for fear it will keep you awake; though you can drink it in this
climate with _comparative_ impunity. Veronica is warming you a bowl of
_bouillon_, and that’s all you’re to have till breakfast!”

“Why, aunt Josephine,” said the girl, not knowing what bouillon was, and
abashed by the sound of it, “I’m not the least hungry. You oughtn’t to
take the trouble--”

“You’ll be hungry when you begin to eat. I’m so impatient to hear about
your voyage! I am going to introduce you to some very nice people,
here,--English people. There are no Americans living in Venice; and the
Americans in Europe are so queer! You’ve no idea how droll our customs
seem here; and I much prefer the English. Your poor uncle can never get
me to ask Americans. I tell him I’m American enough, and he’ll have to
get on without others. Of course, he’s perfectly delighted to get at
you. You’ve quite taken him by storm, Lydia; he’s in raptures about your
looks. It’s what I told him before you came; but I couldn’t believe it
till I took a look at you. I couldn’t have gone to sleep without it. Did
Mr. Erwin talk much with you?”

“He was very pleasant. He talked--as long as he was awake,” said Lydia.

“I suppose he was trying to pick up Americanisms from you; he’s always
doing it. I keep him away from Americans as much as I can: but he will
get at them on the cars and at the hotels. He’s always asking them such
ridiculous questions, and I know some of them just talk nonsense to
him.”

Veronica came in with a tray, and a bowl of bouillon on it; and Mrs.
Erwin pulled up a light table, and slid about, serving her, in
her cabalistic dress, like an Oriental sorceress performing her
incantations. She volubly watched Lydia while she ate her supper, and at
the end she kissed her again. “Now you feel better,” she said. “I knew
it would cheer you up more than any one thing. There’s nothing like
something to eat when you’re homesick. I found that out when I was off
at school.”

Lydia was hardly kissed so much at home during a year as she had been
since meeting Mrs. Erwin. Her aunt Maria sparely embraced her when she
went and came each week from the Mill Village; anything more than this
would have come of insincerity between them; but it had been agreed that
Mrs. Erwin’s demonstrations of affection, of which she had been lavish
during her visit to South Bradfield, might not be so false. Lydia
accepted them submissively, and she said, when Veronica returned for the
tray, “I hate to give you so much trouble. And sending her all the way
to Trieste on my account,--I felt ashamed. There wasn’ a thing for her
to do.”

“Why, of course not!” exclaimed her aunt. “But what did you think I was
made of? Did you suppose I was going to have you come on a night-journey
alone with your uncle? It would have been all over Venice; it would have
been ridiculous. I sent Veronica along for a dragon.”

“A dragon? I don’t understand,” faltered Lydia.

“Well, you will,” said her aunt, putting the palms of her hands against
Lydia’s, and so pressing forward to kiss her. “We shall have breakfast
at ten. Go to bed!”



XXIII.


When Lydia came to breakfast she found her uncle alone in the room,
reading Galignani’s Messenger. He put down his paper, and came forward
to take her hand. “You are all right this morning, I see, Miss Lydia,”
 he said. “You were quite up a stump, last night, as your countrymen
say.”

At the same time hands were laid upon her shoulders from behind, and she
was pulled half round, and pushed back, and held at arm’s-length. It was
Mrs. Erwin, who, entering after her, first scanned her face, and then,
with one devouring glance, seized every detail of her dress--the black
silk which had already made its effect--before she kissed her. “You
_are_ lovely, my dear! I shall spoil you, I know; but you’re worth it!
What lashes you have, child! And your aunt Maria made and fitted that
dress? She’s a genius!”

“Miss Lydia,” said Mr. Erwin, as they sat down, “is of the fortunate age
when one rises young every morning.” He looked very fresh himself in
his clean-shaven chin, and his striking evidence of snowy wristbands and
shirt-bosom. “Later in life, you can’t do that. She looks as blooming,”
 he added, gallantly, “as a basket of chips,--as you say in America.”

“Smiling,” said Lydia, mechanically correcting him.

“Ah! It is? Smiling,--yes; thanks. It’s very good either way; very
characteristic. It would be curious to know the origin of a saying
like that. I imagine it goes back to the days of the first settlers.
It suggests a wood-chopping period. Is it--ah--in general use?” he
inquired.

“Of course it isn’t, Henshaw!” said his wife.

“You’ve been a great while out of the country, my dear,” suggested Mr.
Erwin.

“Not so long as not to know that your Americanisms are enough to make
one wish we had held our tongues ever since we were discovered, or had
never been discovered at all. I want to ask Lydia about her voyage. I
haven’t heard a word yet. Did your aunt Maria come down to Boston with
you?”

“No, grandfather brought me.”

“And you had good weather coming over? Mr. Erwin told me you were not
seasick.”

“We had one bad storm, before we reached Gibraltar; but I wasn’t
seasick.”

“Were the other passengers?”

“One was.” Lydia reddened a little, and then turned somewhat paler than
at first.

“What is it, Lydia?” her aunt subtly demanded. “Who was the one that was
sick?”

“Oh, a gentleman,” answered Lydia.

Her aunt looked at her keenly, and for whatever reason abruptly left the
subject. “Your silk,” she said, “will do very well for church, Lydia.”

“Oh, I say, now!” cried her husband, “you’re not going to make her go to
church to-day!”

“Yes, I am! There will be more people there to-day than any other time
this fall. She must go.”

“But she’s tired to death,--quite tuckered, you know.”

“Oh, I’m rested, now,” said Lydia. “I shouldn’t like to miss going to
church.”

“Your silk,” continued her aunt, “will be quite the thing for church.”
 She looked hard at the dress, as if it were not quite the thing for
breakfast. Mrs. Erwin herself wore a morning-dress of becoming delicacy,
and an airy French cap; she had a light fall of powder on her face.
“What kind of overthing have you got?” she asked.

“There’s a sack goes with this,” said the girl, suggestively.

“That’s nice! What is your bonnet?”

“I haven’t any bonnet. But my best hat is nice. I could--”

“_No_ one goes to church in a hat! You can’t do it. It’s simply
impossible.”

“Why, my dear,” said her husband, “I saw some very pretty American girls
in hats at church, last Sunday.”

“Yes, and everybody _knew_ they were Americans by their hats!” retorted
Mrs. Erwin.

“_I_ knew they were Americans by their good looks,” said Mr. Erwin, “and
what you call their stylishness.”

“Oh, it’s all well enough for you to talk. _You’re_ an Englishman, and
you could wear a hat, if you liked. It would be set down to character.
But in an American it would be set down to greenness. If you were an
American, you would have to wear a bonnet.”

“I’m glad, then, I’m not an American,” said her husband; “I don’t think
I should look well in a bonnet.”

“Oh, stuff, Henshaw! You know what I mean. And I’m not going to have
English people thinking we’re ignorant of the common decencies of life.
Lydia shall not go to church in a hat; she had better _never_ go. I will
lend her one of my bonnets. Let me see, _which_ one.” She gazed at Lydia
in critical abstraction. “I wear rather young bonnets,” she mused aloud,
“and we’re both rather dark. The only difficulty is I’m so much more
delicate--” She brooded upon the question in a silence, from which she
burst exulting. “The very thing! I can fuss it up in no time. It won’t
take two minutes to get it ready. And you’ll look just killing in it.”
 She turned grave again. “Henshaw,” she said, “I _wish_ you would go to
church this morning!”

“I would do almost anything for you, Josephine; but really, you know,
you oughtn’t to ask that. I was there last Sunday; I can’t go every
Sunday. It’s bad enough in England; a man ought to have some relief on
the Continent.”

“Well, well. I suppose I oughtn’t to ask you,” sighed his wife,
“especially as you’re going with us to-night.”

“I’ll go to-night, with pleasure,” said Mr. Erwin. He rose when his wife
and Lydia left the table, and opened the door for them with a certain
courtesy he had; it struck even Lydia’s uneducated sense as something
peculiarly sweet and fine, and it did not overawe her own simplicity,
but seemed of kind with it.

The bonnet, when put to proof, did not turn out to be all that it was
vaunted. It looked a little odd, from the first; and Mrs. Erwin, when
she was herself dressed, ended by taking it off, and putting on Lydia
the hat previously condemned. “You’re divine in that,” she said. “And
after all, you are a traveler, and I can say that some of your things
were spoiled coming over,--people always get things ruined in a sea
voyage,--and they’ll think it was your bonnet.”

“I kept my things very nicely, aunt Josephine,” said Lydia
conscientiously. “I don’t believe anything was hurt.”

“Oh, well, you can’t tell till you’ve unpacked; and we’re not
responsible for what people happen to think, you know. Wait!” her aunt
suddenly cried. She pulled open a drawer, and snatched two ribbons from
it, which she pinned to the sides of Lydia’s hat, and tied in a bow
under her chin; she caught out a lace veil, and drew that over the front
of the hat, and let it hang in a loose knot behind. “Now,” she said,
pushing her up to a mirror, that she might see, “it’s a bonnet; and I
needn’t say _any_thing!”

They went in Mrs. Erwin’s gondola to the palace in which the English
service was held, and Lydia was silent, as she looked shyly, almost
fearfully, round on the visionary splendors of Venice.

Mrs. Erwin did not like to be still. “What are you thinking of, Lydia?”
 she asked.

“Oh! I suppose I was thinking that the leaves were beginning to turn in
the sugar orchard,” answered Lydia faithfully. “I was thinking how still
the sun would be in the pastures, there, this morning. I suppose the
stillness here put me in mind of it. One of these bells has the same
tone as our bell at home.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Erwin. “Everybody finds a familiar bell in Venice.
There are enough of them, goodness knows. I don’t see why you call it
still, with all this clashing and banging. I suppose this seems very odd
to you, Lydia,” she continued, indicating the general Venetian effect.
“It’s an old story to me, though. The great beauty of Venice is that you
get more for your money here than you can anywhere else in the world.
There isn’t much society, however, and you mustn’t expect to be very
gay.”

“I have never been gay,” said Lydia.

“Well, that’s no reason you shouldn’t be,” returned her aunt. “If you
were in Florence, or Rome, or even Naples, you could have a good time.
There! I’m glad your uncle didn’t hear me say that!”

“What?” asked Lydia.

“Good time; that’s an Americanism.”

“Is it?”

“Yes. He’s perfectly delighted when he catches me in one. I try to break
myself of them, but I don’t always know them myself. Sometimes I feel
almost like never talking at all. But you can’t do that, you know.”

“No,” assented Lydia.

“And you have to talk Americanisms if you’re an American. You mustn’t
think your uncle isn’t obliging, Lydia. He is. I oughtn’t to have asked
him to go to church,--it bores him so much. I used to feel terribly
about it once, when we were first married. But things have changed very
much of late years, especially with all this scientific talk. In England
it’s quite different from what it used to be. Some of the best people in
society are skeptics now, and that makes it quite another thing.” Lydia
looked grave, but she said nothing, and her aunt added, “I wouldn’t have
asked him, but I had a little headache, myself.”

“Aunt Josephine,” said Lydia, “I’m afraid you’re doing too much for me.
Why didn’t you let me come alone?”

“Come alone? To church!” Mrs. Erwin addressed her in a sort of whispered
shriek. “It would have been perfectly scandalous.”

“To go to church alone?” demanded Lydia, astounded.

“Yes. A young girl mustn’t go _any_where alone.”

“Why?”

“I’ll explain to you, sometime, Lydia; or rather, you’ll learn for
yourself. In Italy it’s very different from what it is in America.”
 Mrs. Erwin suddenly started up and bowed with great impressiveness, as a
gondola swept towards them. The gondoliers wore shirts of blue silk,
and long crimson sashes. On the cushions of the boat, beside a hideous
little man who was sucking the top of an ivory-handled stick, reclined
a beautiful woman, pale, with purplish rings round the large black eyes
with which, faintly smiling, she acknowledged Mrs. Erwin’s salutation,
and then stared at Lydia.

“Oh, you may look, and you may look, and you may look!” cried Mrs.
Erwin, under her breath. “You’ve met more than your match at last!
The Countess Tatocka,” she explained to Lydia. “That was her palace we
passed just now,--the one with the iron balconies. Did you notice
the gentleman with her? She always takes to those monsters. He’s a
Neapolitan painter, and ever so talented,--clever, that is. He’s dead in
love with her, they say.”

“Are they engaged?” asked Lydia.

“Engaged!” exclaimed Mrs. Erwin, with her shriek in dumb show. “Why,
child, she’s married!”

“To _him_?” demanded the girl, with a recoil.

“No! To her husband.”

“To her husband?” gasped Lydia. “And she--”

“Why, she isn’t quite well seen, even in Venice,” Mrs. Erwin explained.
“But she’s rich, and her _conversazioni_ are perfectly brilliant. She’s
very artistic, and she writes poetry,--Polish poetry. I _wish_ she could
hear you sing, Lydia! I know she’ll be frantic to see you again. But
I don’t see how it’s to be managed; her house isn’t one you can take a
young girl to. And _I_ can’t ask her: your uncle detests her.”

“Do you go to her house?” Lydia inquired stiffly.

“Why, as a foreigner, _I_ can go. Of course, Lydia, you can’t be as
particular about everything on the Continent as you are at home.”

The former oratory of the Palazzo Grinzelli, which served as the
English chapel, was filled with travelers of both the English-speaking
nationalities, as distinguishable by their dress as by their faces.
Lydia’s aunt affected the English style, but some instinctive elegance
betrayed her, and every Englishwoman there knew and hated her for an
American, though she was a precisian in her liturgy, instant in all the
responses and genuflexions. She found opportunity in the course of
the lesson to make Lydia notice every one, and she gave a telegrammic
biography of each person she knew, with a criticism of the costume of
all the strangers, managing so skillfully that by the time the sermon
began she was able to yield the text a statuesquely close attention, and
might have been carved in marble where she sat as a realistic conception
of Worship.

The sermon came to an end; the ritual proceeded; the hymn, with the
hemming and hawing of respectable inability, began, and Lydia lifted her
voice with the rest. Few of the people were in their own church; some
turned and stared at her; the bonnets and the back hair of those who
did not look were intent upon her; the long red neck of one elderly
Englishman, restrained by decorum from turning his head toward her,
perspired with curiosity. Mrs. Erwin fidgeted, and dropped her eyes from
the glances which fell to her for explanation of Lydia, and hurried away
with her as soon as the services ended. In the hall on the water-floor
of the palace, where they were kept waiting for their gondola a while,
she seemed to shrink even from the small, surly greetings with which
people whose thoughts are on higher things permit themselves to
recognize fellow-beings of their acquaintance in coming out of church.
But an old lady, who supported herself with a cane, pushed through the
crowd to where they stood aloof, and, without speaking to Mrs. Erwin,
put out her hand to Lydia; she had a strong, undaunted, plain face, in
which was expressed the habit of doing what she liked. “My dear,” she
said, “how wonderfully you sing! Where did you get that heavenly voice?
You are an American; I see that by your beauty. You are Mrs. Erwin’s
niece, I suppose, whom she expected. Will you come and sing to me? You
must bring her, Mrs. Erwin.”

She hobbled away without waiting for an answer, and Lydia and her aunt
got into their gondola. “_Oh_! How glad I am!” cried Mrs. Erwin, in a
joyful flutter. “She’s the very tip-top of the English here; she has
a whole palace, and you meet the very best people at her house. I was
afraid when you were singing, Lydia, that they would think your voice
was too good to be good form,--that’s an expression you must get; it
means everything,--it sounded almost professional. I wanted to nudge
you to sing a little lower, or different, or something; but I couldn’t,
everybody was looking so. No matter. It’s all right now. If _she_ liked
it, nobody else will dare to breathe. You can see that she has taken a
fancy to you; she’ll make a great pet of you.”

“Who is she?” asked Lydia, bluntly.

“Lady Fenleigh. Such a character,--so eccentric! But really, I suppose,
very hard to live with. It must have been quite a release for poor Sir
Fenleigh.”

“She didn’t seem in mourning,” said Lydia. “Has he been dead long?”

“Why, he isn’t dead at all! He is what you call a grass-widower. The
best soul in the world, everybody says, and very, very fond of her; but
she couldn’t stand it; he was _too_ good, don’t you understand? They’ve
lived apart a great many years. She’s lived a great deal in Asia
Minor,--somewhere. She likes Venice; but of course there’s no telling
how long she may stay. She has another house in Florence, all ready to
go and be lived in at a day’s notice. I wish I had presented you! It
did go through my head; but it didn’t seem as if I _could_ get the Blood
out. It _is_ a fearful name, Lydia; I always felt it so when I was a
girl, and I was _so_ glad to marry out of it; and it sounds so terribly
American. I think you must take your mother’s name, my dear. Latham is
rather flattish, but it’s worlds better than Blood.”

“I am not ashamed of my father’s name,” said Lydia.

“But you’ll have to change it some day, at any rate,--when you get
married.”

Lydia turned away. “I will be called Blood till then. If Lady
Fenleigh--”

“Yes, my dear,” promptly interrupted her aunt, “I know that sort of
independence. I used to have whole Declarations of it. But you’ll get
over that, in Europe. There was a time--just after the war--when the
English quite liked our sticking up for ourselves; but that’s past now.
They like us to be outlandish, but they don’t like us to be independent.
How did you like the sermon? Didn’t you think we had a nicely-dressed
congregation?”

“I thought the sermon was very short,” answered Lydia.

“Well, that’s the English way, and I like it. If you get in all the
service, you _must_ make the sermon short.”

Lydia did not say anything for a little while. Then she asked, “Is the
service the same at the evening meeting?”

“Evening meeting?” repeated Mrs. Erwin.

“Yes,--the church to-night.”

“Why, child, there isn’t any church to-night! What _are_ you talking
about?”

“Didn’t uncle--didn’t Mr. Erwin say he would go with us to-night?”

Mrs. Erwin seemed about to laugh, and then she looked embarrassed. “Why,
Lydia,” she cried at last, “he didn’t mean church; he meant--opera!”

“Opera! Sunday night! Aunt Josephine, do you go to the theatre on
Sabbath evening?”

There was something appalling in the girl’s stern voice. Mrs. Erwin
gathered herself tremulously together for defense. “Why, of course,
Lydia, I don’t approve of it, though I never _was_ Orthodox. Your uncle
likes to go; and if everybody’s there that you want to see, and they
will give the best operas Sunday night, what are you to do?”

Lydia said nothing, but a hard look came into her face, and she shut her
lips tight.

“Now you see, Lydia,” resumed her aunt, with an air of deductive
reasoning from the premises, “the advantage of having a bonnet on, even
if it’s only a make-believe. I don’t believe a soul knew it. All those
Americans had hats. You were the only American girl there with a bonnet.
I’m sure that it had more than half to do with Lady Fenleigh’s speaking
to you. It showed that you had been well brought up.”

“But I never wore a bonnet to church at home,” said Lydia.

“That has nothing to do with it, if they thought you did. And Lydia,”
 she continued, “I was thinking while you were singing there that I
wouldn’t say anything at once about your coming over to cultivate your
voice. That’s got to be such an American thing, now. I’ll let it out
little by little,--and after Lady Fenleigh’s quite taken you under her
wing. Perhaps we may go to Milan with you, or to Naples,--there’s a
conservatory there, too; and we can pull up stakes as easily as not.
Well!” said Mrs. Erwin, interrupting herself, “I’m glad Henshaw wasn’t
by to hear _that_ speech. He’d have had it down among his Americanisms
instantly. I don’t know whether it _is_ an Americanism; but he puts down
all the outlandish sayings he gets hold of to Americans; he has no
end of English slang in his book. Everything has opened _beautifully_,
Lydia, and I intend you shall have the _best_ time!” She looked fondly
at her brother’s child. “You’ve no idea how much you remind me of your
poor father. You have his looks exactly. I always thought he would come
out to Europe before he died. We used to be so proud of his looks at
home! I can remember that, though I was the youngest, and he was ten
years older than I. But I always did worship beauty. A perfect Greek,
Mr. Rose-Black calls me: you’ll see him; he’s an English painter staying
here; he comes a _great_ deal.”

“Mrs. Erwin, Mrs. Erwin!” called a lady’s voice from a gondola behind
them. The accent was perfectly English, but the voice entirely Italian.
“Where are you running to?”

“Why, Miss Landini!” retorted Mrs. Erwin, looking back over her
shoulder. “Is that you? Where in the world are _you_ going?”

“Oh, I’ve been to pay a visit to my old English teacher. He’s awfully
ill with rheumatism; but awfully! He can’t turn in bed.”

“Why, poor man! This is my niece whom I told you I was expecting!
Arrived last night! We’ve been to church!” Mrs. Erwin exclaimed each of
the facts.

The Italian girl stretched her hand across the gunwales of the boats,
which their respective gondoliers had brought skillfully side by side,
and took Lydia’s hand. “I’m glad to see you, my dear. But my God, how
beautiful you Americans are! But you don’t look American, you know;
you look Spanish! I shall come a great deal to see you, and practice my
English.”

“Come home with, us now, Miss Landini, and have lunch,” said Mrs. Erwin.

“No, my dear, I can’t. My aunt will be raising the devil if I’m not
there to drink coffee with her; and I’ve been a great while away now.
Till tomorrow!” Miss Landini’s gondolier pushed his boat away, and rowed
it up a narrow canal on the right.

“I suppose,” Mrs. Erwin explained, “that she’s really her
mother,--everybody says so; but she always calls her aunt. Dear knows
who her father was. But she’s a very bright girl, Lydia, and you’ll like
her. Don’t you think she speaks English wonderfully for a person who’s
never been out of Venice?”

“Why does she swear?” asked Lydia, stonily.

“_Swear_? Oh, I know what you mean. That’s the funniest thing about Miss
Landini. Your uncle says it’s a shame to correct her; but I do, whenever
I think of it. Why, you know, such words as God and devil don’t sound
at all wicked in Italian, and ladies use them quite commonly. She
understands that it isn’t good form to do so in English, but when
she gets excited she forgets. Well, you can’t say but what _she_ was
impressed, Lydia!”

After lunch, various people came to call upon Mrs. Erwin. Several of
them were Italians who were learning English, and they seemed to think
it inoffensive to say that they were glad of the opportunity to practice
the language with Lydia. They talked local gossip with her aunt, and
they spoke of an approaching visit to Venice from the king; it seemed to
Lydia that the king’s character was not good.

Mr. Rose-Black, the English artist, came. He gave himself the effect of
being in Mrs. Erwin’s confidence, apparently without her authority, and
he bestowed a share of this intimacy upon Lydia. He had the manner of
a man who had been taken up by people above him, and the impudence of a
talent which had not justified the expectations formed of it. He softly
reproached Mrs. Erwin for running away after service before he could
speak to her, and told her how much everybody had been enchanted by her
niece’s singing. “At least, they said it was your niece.”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Rose-Black, let me introduce you to Miss--” Lydia looked
hard, even to threatening, at her aunt, and Mrs. Erwin added, “Blood.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Mr. Rose-Black, with his picked-up politeness,
“I didn’t get the name.”

“Blood,” said Mrs. Erwin, more distinctly.

“Aöh!” said Mr. Rose-Black, in a cast-off accent of jaded
indifferentism, just touched with displeasure. “Yes,” he added,
dreamily, to Lydia, “it was divine, you know. You might say it needed
training; but it had the _naïve_ sweetness we associate with your
countrywomen. They’re greatly admired in England now, you know, for
their beauty. Oh, I assure you, it’s quite the thing to admire American
ladies. I want to arrange a little lunch at my studio for Mrs. Erwin and
yourself; and I want you to abet me in it, Miss Blood.” Lydia stared at
him, but he was not troubled. “I’m going to ask to sketch you. Really,
you know, there’s a poise--something bird-like--a sort of repose in
movement--” He sat in a corner of the sofa, with his head fallen back,
and abandoned to an absent enjoyment of Lydia’s pictorial capabilities.
He was very red; his full beard, which started as straw color, changed
to red when it got a little way from his face. He wore a suit of rough
blue, the coat buttoned tightly about him, and he pulled a glove through
his hand as he talked. He was scarcely roused from his reverie by the
entrance of an Italian officer, with his hussar jacket hanging upon one
shoulder, and his sword caught up in his left hand. He ran swiftly to
Mrs. Erwin, and took her hand.

“Ah, my compliments! I come practice my English with you a little. Is it
well said, a little, or do you say a small?”

“A little, cavaliere,” answered Mrs. Erwin, amiably. “But you must say a
good deal, in this case.”

“Yes, yes,--good deal. For what?”

“Let me introduce you to my niece. Colonel Pazzelli,” said Mrs. Erwin.

“Ah! Too much honor, too much honor!” murmured the cavaliere. He brought
his heels together with a click, and drooped towards Lydia till his
head was on a level with his hips. Recovering himself, he caught up his
eye-glasses, and bent them on Lydia. “Very please, very honored, much--”
 He stopped, and looked confused, and Lydia turned pale and red.

“Now, won’t you play that pretty _barcarole_ you played the other night
at Lady Fenleigh’s?” entreated Mrs. Erwin.

Colonel Pazzelli wrenched himself from the fascination of Lydia’s
presence, and lavished upon Mrs. Erwin the hoarded English of a week.
“Yes, yes; very nice, very good. With much pleasure. I thank you. Yes,
I play.” He was one of those natives who in all the great Italian
cities haunt English-speaking societies; they try to drink tea without
grimacing, and sing for the ladies of our race, who innocently pet them,
finding them so very like other women in their lady-like sweetness and
softness; it is said they boast among their own countrymen of their
triumphs. The cavaliere unbuckled his sword, and laying it across a
chair sat down at the piano. He played not one but many barcaroles, and
seemed loath to leave the instrument.

“Now, Lydia,” said Mrs. Erwin, fondly, “won’t you sing us something?”

“Do!” called Mr. Rose-Black from the sofa, with the intonation of a
spoiled first-cousin, or half-brother.

“I don’t feel like singing to-day,” answered Lydia, immovably. Mrs.
Erwin was about to urge her further, but other people came in,--some
Jewish ladies, and then a Russian, whom Lydia took at first for an
American. They all came and went, but Mr. Rose-Black remained in his
corner of the sofa, and never took his eyes from Lydia’s face. At last
he went, and then Mr. Erwin looked in.

“Is that beast gone?” he asked. “I shall be obliged to show him the
door, yet, Josephine. You ought to snub him. He’s worse than his
pictures. Well, you’ve had a whole raft of folks today,--as your
countrymen say.”

“Yes, thank Heaven,” cried Mrs. Erwin, “and they’re all gone. I don’t
want Lydia to think that I let everybody come to see me on Sunday.
Thursday is my day, Lydia, but a few privileged friends understand that
they can drop in Sunday afternoon.” She gave Lydia a sketch of the life
and character of each of these friends. “And now I must tell you that
your manner is very good, Lydia. That reserved way of yours is quite the
thing for a young girl in Europe: I suppose it’s a gift; I never could
get it, even when I _was_ a girl. But you mustn’t show any _hauteur_,
even when you dislike people, and you refused to sing with _rather_
too much _aplomb_. I don’t suppose it was noticed though,--those ladies
coming in at the same time. Really, I thought Mr. Rose-Black and Colonel
Pazzelli were trying to outstare each other! It was certainly amusing.
I never saw such an evident case, Lydia! The poor cavaliere looked as if
he had seen you somewhere before in a dream, and was struggling to make
it all out.”

Lydia remained impassive. Presently she said she would go to her room,
and write home before dinner. When she went out Mrs. Erwin fetched a
deep sigh, and threw herself upon her husband’s sympathy.

“She’s terribly unresponsive,” she began. “I supposed she’d be in
raptures with the place, at least, but you wouldn’t know there was
anything at all remarkable in Venice from anything she’s said. We have
met ever so many interesting people to-day,--the Countess Tatocka, and
Lady Fenleigh, and Miss Landini, and everybody, but I don’t really think
she’s said a word about a soul. She’s too queer for anything.”

“I dare say she hasn’t the experience to be astonished from,” suggested
Mr. Erwin easily. “She’s here as if she’d been dropped down from her
village.”

“Yes, that’s true,” considered his wife. “But it’s hard, with Lydia’s
air and style and self-possession, to realize that she _is_ merely a
village girl.”

“She may be much more impressed than she chooses to show,” Mr. Erwin
continued. “I remember a very curious essay by a French writer about
your countrymen: he contended that they were characterized by a savage
stoicism through their contact with the Indians.”

“Nonsense, Henshaw! There hasn’t been an Indian _near_ South Bradfield
for two hundred years. And besides that, am _I_ stoical?”

“I’m bound to say,” replied her husband, “that so far as you go, you’re
a complete refutation of the theory.”

“I hate to see a young girl so close,” fretted Mrs. Erwin. “But
perhaps,” she added, more cheerfully, “she’ll be the easier managed,
being so passive. She doesn’t seem at all willful,--that’s one comfort.”

She went to Lydia’s room just before dinner, and found the girl with her
head fallen on her arms upon the table, where she had been writing. She
looked up, and faced her aunt with swollen eyes.

“Why, poor thing!” cried Mrs. Erwin. “What is it, dear? What is it,
Lydia?” she asked, tenderly, and she pulled Lydia’s face down upon her
neck.

“Oh, nothing,” said Lydia. “I suppose I was a little homesick; writing
home made me.”

She somewhat coldly suffered Mrs. Erwin to kiss her and smooth her hair,
while she began to talk with her of her grandfather and her aunt at
home. “But this is going to be home to you now,” said Mrs. Erwin, “and
I’m not going to let you be sick for any other. I want you to treat me
just like a mother, or an older sister. Perhaps I shan’t be the wisest
mother to you in the world, but I mean to be one of the best. Come, now,
bathe your eyes, my dear, and let’s go to dinner. I don’t like to
keep your uncle waiting.” She did not go at once, but showed Lydia the
appointments of the room, and lightly indicated what she had caused to
be done, and what she had done with her own hands, to make the place
pretty for her. “And now shall I take your letter, and have your uncle
post it this evening?” She picked up the letter from the table. “Hadn’t
you any wax to seal it? You know they don’t generally mucilage their
envelopes in Europe.”

Lydia blushed. “I left it open for you to read. I thought you ought to
know what I wrote.”

Mrs. Erwin dropped her hands in front of her, with the open letter
stretched between them, and looked at her niece in rapture. “Lydia,” she
cried, “one would suppose you had lived all your days in Europe! Showing
me your letter, this way,--why, it’s quite like a Continental girl.”

“I thought it was no more than right you should see what I was writing
home,” said Lydia, unresponsively.

“Well, no matter, even if it _was_ right,” replied Mrs. Erwin. “It comes
to the same thing. And now, as you’ve been quite a European daughter,
I’m going to be a real American mother.” She took up the wax, and sealed
Lydia’s letter without looking into it. “There!” she said, triumphantly.

She was very good to Lydia all through dinner, and made her talk of the
simple life at home, and the village characters whom she remembered from
her last summer’s visit. That amused Mr. Erwin, who several times, when,
his wife was turning the talk upon Lydia’s voyage over, intervened with
some new question about the life of the queer little Yankee hill-town.
He said she must tell Lady Fenleigh about it,--she was fond of picking
up those curios; it would make any one’s social fortune who could
explain such a place intelligibly in London; when they got to having
typical villages of the different civilizations at the international
expositions,--as no doubt they would,--somebody must really send South
Bradfield over. He pleased himself vastly with this fancy, till Mrs.
Erwin, who had been eying Lydia critically from time to time, as if
making note of her features and complexion, said she had a white cloak,
and that in Venice, where one need not dress a great deal for the opera,
Lydia could wear it that night.

Lydia looked up in astonishment, but she sat passive during her aunt’s
discussion of her plans. When they rose from table, she said, at her
stiffest and coldest, “Aunt Josephine, I want you to excuse me from
going with you to-night. I don’t feel like going.”

“Not feel like going!” exclaimed her aunt in dismay. “Why, your uncle
has taken a box!”

Lydia opposed nothing to this argument. She only said, “I would rather
not go.”

“Oh, but you _will_, dear,” coaxed her aunt. “You would enjoy it so
much.”

“I thought you understood from what I said to-day,” replied Lydia, “that
I could not go.”

“Why, no, I didn’t! I knew you objected; but if I thought it was proper
for you to go--”

“I should not go at home,” said Lydia, in the same immovable fashion.

“Of course not. Every place has its customs, and in Venice it has
_always_ been the custom to go to the opera on Sunday night.” This fact
had no visible weight with Lydia, and after a pause her aunt added,
“Didn’t Paul himself say to do in Rome as the Romans do?”

“No, aunt Josephine,” cried Lydia, indignantly, “he did _not_!”

Mrs. Erwin turned to her husband with a face of appeal, and he answered,
“Really, my dear, I think you’re mistaken. I always had the impression
that the saying was--an Americanism of some sort.”

“But it doesn’t matter,” interposed Lydia decisively. “I couldn’t go, if
I didn’t think it was right, whoever said it.”

“Oh, well,” began Mrs. Erwin, “if you wouldn’t mind what _Paul_ said--”
 She suddenly checked herself, and after a little silence she resumed,
kindly, “I won’t try to force you, Lydia. I didn’t realize what a very
short time it is since you left home, and how you still have all those
ideas. I wouldn’t distress you about them for the world, my dear. I want
you to feel at home with me, and I’ll make it as like home for you as I
can in everything. Henshaw, I think you must go alone, this evening. I
will stay with Lydia.”

“Oh, no, no! I couldn’t let you; I can’t let you! I shall not know what
to do if I keep you at home. Oh, don’t leave it that way, please! I
shall feel so badly about it--”

“Why, we can both stay,” suggested Mr. Erwin, kindly.

Lydia’s lips trembled and her eyes glistened, and Mrs. Erwin said,
“I’ll go with you, Henshaw. I’ll be ready in half an hour. I won’t dress
_much_.” She added this as if not to dress a great deal at the opera
Sunday night might somehow be accepted as an observance of the Sabbath.



XXIV.


The next morning Veronica brought Lydia a little scrawl from her aunt,
bidding the girl come and breakfast with her in her room at nine.

“Well, my dear,” her aunt called to her from her pillow, when she
appeared, “you find me flat enough, this morning. If there was anything
wrong about going to the opera last night, I was properly punished
for it. Such wretched stuff as _I_ never heard! And instead of the new
ballet that they promised, they gave an old thing that I had seen till
I was sick of it. You didn’t miss much, I can tell you. How fresh and
bright you _do_ look, Lydia!” she sighed. “Did you sleep well? Were you
lonesome while we were gone? Veronica says you were reading the whole
evening. Are you fond of reading?”

“I don’t think I am, very,” said Lydia. “It was a book that I began on
the ship. It’s a novel.” She hesitated. “I wasn’t reading it; I was just
looking at it.”

“What a queer child you are! I suppose you were dying to read it, and
wouldn’t because it was Sunday. Well!” Mrs. Erwin put her hand under
her pillow, and pulled out a gossamer handkerchief, with which she
delicately touched her complexion here and there, and repaired with an
instinctive rearrangement of powder the envious ravages of a slight rash
about her nose. “I respect your high principles beyond anything, Lydia,
and if they can only be turned in the right direction they will never be
any disadvantage to you.” Veronica came in with the breakfast on a tray,
and Mrs. Erwin added, “Now, pull up that little table, and bring your
chair, my dear, and let us take it easy. I like to talk while I’m
breakfasting. Will you pour out my chocolate? That’s it, in the ugly
little pot with the wooden handle; the copper one’s for you, with coffee
in it. I never could get that repose which seems to come perfectly
natural to you. I was always inclined to be a little rowdy, my dear, and
I’ve had to fight hard against it, without any help from _either_ of my
husbands; men like it; they think it’s funny. When I was first married,
I was very young, and so was he; it was a real love match; and my
husband was very well off, and when I began to be delicate, nothing
would do but he must come to Europe with me. How little I ever expected
to outlive him!”

“You don’t look very sick now,” began Lydia.

“Ill,” said her aunt. “You must say ill. Sick is an Americanism.”

“It’s in the Bible,” said Lydia, gravely.

“Oh, there are a great many words in the _Bible_ you can’t use,”
 returned her aunt. “No, I don’t look ill now, and I’m worlds better. But
I couldn’t live a year in any other climate, I suppose. You seem to
take after your mother’s side. Well, as I was saying, the European ways
didn’t come natural to me, at all. I used to have a great deal of gayety
when I was a girl, and I liked beaux and attentions; and I had very free
ways. I couldn’t get their stiffness here for years and years, and all
through my widowhood it was one wretched failure with me. Do what I
would, I was always violating the most essential rules, and the worst of
it was that it only seemed to make me the more popular. I do believe it
was nothing but my rowdiness that attracted Mr. Erwin; but I determined
when I had got an Englishman I would make one bold strike for the
proprieties, and have them, or die in the attempt. I determined that no
Englishwoman I ever saw should outdo me in strict conformity to all the
usages of European society. So I cut myself off from all the Americans,
and went with nobody but the English.”

“Do you like them better?” asked Lydia, with the blunt, child-like
directness that had already more than once startled her aunt.

“_Like_ them! I detest them! If Mr. Erwin were a real Englishman, I
think I should go crazy; but he’s been so little in his own country--all
his life in India, nearly, and the rest on the Continent,--that
he’s quite human; and no American husband was ever more patient and
indulgent; and _that_’s saying a good deal. He would be glad to have
nothing but Americans around; he has an enthusiasm for them,--or for
what he supposes they are. Like the English! You ought to have heard
them during our war; it would have made your blood boil! And then how
they came crawling round after it was all over, and trying to pet us up!
Ugh!”

“If you feel so about them,” said Lydia, as before, “why do you want to
go with them so much?”

“My dear,” cried her aunt, “_to beat them with their own weapons on
their own ground_,--to show them that an American can be more European
than any of them, if she chooses! And now you’ve come here with looks
and temperament and everything just to my hand. You’re more
beautiful than any English girl ever dreamt of being; you’re very
distinguished-looking; your voice is perfectly divine; and you’re colder
than an iceberg. _Oh_, if I only had one winter with you in Rome,
I think I should die in peace!” Mrs. Erwin paused, and drank her
chocolate, which she had been letting cool in the eagerness of her
discourse. “But, never mind,” she continued, “we will do the best we can
here. I’ve seen English girls going out two or three together, without
protection, in Rome and Florence; but I mean that you shall be quite
Italian in that respect. The Italians never go out without a chaperone
of some sort, and you must never be seen without me, or your uncle, or
Veronica. Now I’ll tell you how you must do at parties, and so on. You
must be very retiring; you’re that, any way; but you must always keep
close to me. It doesn’t do for young people to talk much together in
society; it makes scandal about a girl. If you dance, you must always
hurry back to me. Dear me!” exclaimed Mrs. Erwin, “I remember how, when
I was a girl, I used to hang on to the young men’s arms, and promenade
with them after a dance, and go out to supper with them, and flirt on
the stairs,--_such_ times! But that wouldn’t do here, Lydia. It would
ruin a girl’s reputation; she could hardly walk arm in arm with a young
man if she was engaged to him.” Lydia blushed darkly red, and then
turned paler than usual, while her aunt went on. “You might do
it, perhaps, and have it set down to American eccentricity or
under-breeding, but I’m not going to have that. I intend you to be just
as dull and diffident in society as if you were an Italian, and _more_
than if you were English. Your voice, of course, is a difficulty. If
you sing, that will make you conspicuous, in spite of everything. But I
don’t see why that can’t be turned to advantage; it’s no worse than your
beauty. Yes, if you’re so splendid-looking and so gifted, and at the
same time as stupid as the rest, it’s so much clear gain. It will come
easy for you to be shy with men, for I suppose you’ve hardly ever talked
with any, living up there in that out-of-the-way village; and your
manner is very good. It’s reserved, and yet it isn’t green. The way,”
 continued Mrs. Erwin, “to treat men in Europe is to behave as if they
were guilty till they prove themselves innocent. All you have to do is
to reverse all your American ideas. But here I am, lecturing you as if
you had been just such a girl as I was, with half a dozen love affairs
on her hands at once, and no end of gentlemen friends. Europe won’t
be hard for you, my dear, for you haven’t got anything to unlearn. But
_some_ girls that come over!--it’s perfectly ridiculous, the trouble
they get into, and the time they have getting things straight. They take
it for granted that men in good society are gentlemen,--what we mean by
gentlemen.”

Lydia had been letting her coffee stand, and had scarcely tasted the
delicious French bread and the sweet Lombard butter of which her aunt
ate so heartily. “Why, child,” said Mrs. Erwin, at last, “where is your
appetite? One would think you were the elderly invalid who had been up
late. Did you find it too exciting to sit at home _looking_ at a novel?
What was it? If it’s a new story I should like to see it. But you didn’t
bring a novel from South Bradfield with you?”

“No,” said Lydia, with a husky reluctance. “One of the--passengers gave
it to me.”

“Had you many passengers? But of course not. That was what made it so
delightful when I came over that way. I was newly married then, and with
spirits--oh dear me!--for anything. It was one adventure, the whole way;
and we got so well acquainted, it was like one family. I suppose your
grandfather put you in charge of some family. I know artists sometimes
come out that way, and people for their health.”

“There was no family on our ship,” said Lydia. “My state-room had been
fixed up for the captain’s wife--”

“Our captain’s wife was along, too,” interposed Mrs. Erwin. “She was
such a joke with us. She had been out to Venice on a voyage before, and
used to be always talking about the Du-_cal_ Palace. And did they really
turn out of their state-room for you?”

“She was not along,” said Lydia.

“Not along?” repeated Mrs. Erwin, feebly. “Who--who were the other
passengers?”

“There were three gentlemen,” answered Lydia.

“Three gentlemen? Three men? Three--And you--and--” Mrs. Erwin fell back
upon her pillow, and remained gazing at Lydia, with a sort of remote
bewildered pity, as at perdition, not indeed beyond compassion, but far
beyond help. Lydia’s color had been coming and going, but now it settled
to a clear white. Mrs. Erwin commanded herself sufficiently to resume:
“And there were--there were--no other ladies?”

“No.”

“And you were--”

“I was the only woman on board,” replied Lydia. She rose abruptly,
striking the edge of the table in her movement, and setting its china
and silver jarring. “Oh, I know what you mean, aunt Josephine, but two
days ago I couldn’t have dreamt it! From the time the ship sailed till I
reached this wicked place, there wasn’t a word said nor a look looked to
make me think I wasn’t just as right and safe there as if I had been in
my own room at home. They were never anything but kind and good to me.
They never let me think that they could be my enemies, or that I must
suspect them and be on the watch against them. They were Americans!
I had to wait for one of your Europeans to teach me that,--for that
officer who was here yesterday--”

“The cavaliere? Why, where--”

“He spoke to me in the cars, when Mr. Erwin was asleep! Had he any right
to do so?”

“He would think he had, if he thought you were alone,” said Mrs. Erwin,
plaintively. “I don’t see how we could resent it. It was simply a
mistake on his part. And now you see, Lydia--”

“Oh, I see how my coming the way I have will seem to all these people!”
 cried Lydia, with passionate despair. “I know how it will seem to that
married woman who lets a man be in love with her, and that old woman
who can’t live with her husband because he’s too good and kind, and that
girl who swears and doesn’t know who her father is, and that impudent
painter, and that officer who thinks he has the right to insult women if
he finds them alone! I wonder the sea doesn’t swallow up a place where
even Americans go to the theatre on the Sabbath!”

“Lydia, Lydia! It isn’t so bad as it seems to you,” pleaded her aunt,
thrown upon the defensive by the girl’s outburst. “There are ever so
many good and nice people in Venice, and I know them, too,--Italians as
well as foreigners. And even amongst those you saw, Miss Landini is one
of the kindest girls in the world, and she had just been to see her
old teacher when we met her,--she half takes care of him; and Lady
Fenleigh’s a perfect mother to the poor; and I never was at the Countess
Tatocka’s except in the most distant way, at a ball where everybody
went; and is it better to let your uncle go to the opera alone, or to go
with him? You told me to go with him yourself; and they consider Sunday
over, on the Continent, after morning service, any way!”

“Oh, it makes no difference!” retorted Lydia, wildly. “I am going away.
I am going home. I have money enough to get to Trieste, and the ship is
there, and Captain Jenness will take me back with him. Oh!” she moaned.
“_He_ has been in Europe, too, and I suppose he’s like the rest of you;
and he thought because I was alone and helpless he had the right to--Oh,
I see it, I see now that he never meant anything, and--Oh, oh, oh!” She
fell on her knees beside the bed, as if crushed to them by the cruel
doubt that suddenly overwhelmed her, and flung out her arms on Mrs.
Erwin’s coverlet--it was of Venetian lace sewed upon silk, a choice bit
from the palace of one of the ducal families--and buried her face in it.

Her aunt rose from her pillow, and looked in wonder and trouble at
the beautiful fallen head, and the fair young figure shaken with sobs.
“He--who--what are you talking about, Lydia? Whom do you mean? Did
Captain Jenness--”

“No, no!” wailed the girl, “the one that gave me the book.”

“The one that gave you the book? The book you were looking at last
night?”

“Yes,” sobbed Lydia, with her voice muffled in the coverlet.

Mrs. Erwin lay down again with significant deliberation. Her face was
still full of trouble, but of bewilderment no longer. In moments of
great distress the female mind is apt to lay hold of some minor anxiety
for its distraction, and to find a certain relief in it. “Lydia,” said
her aunt in a broken voice, “I wish you wouldn’t cry in the coverlet:
it doesn’t hurt the lace, but it stains the silk.” Lydia swept her
handkerchief under her face but did not lift it. Her aunt accepted the
compromise. “How came he to give you the book?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I can’t tell. I thought it was because--because--It
was almost at the very beginning. And after that he walked up and down
with me every night, nearly; and he tried to be with me all he could;
and he was always saying things to make me think--Oh dear, oh _dear_, oh
dear! And he _tried_ to make me care for him! Oh, it was cruel, cruel!”

“You mean that he made love to you?” asked her aunt.

“Yes--no--I don’t know. He tried to make me care for him, and to make me
think he cared for me.”

“Did he say he cared for you? Did he--”

“No!”

Mrs. Erwin mused a while before she said, “Yes, it was cruel indeed,
poor child, and it was cowardly, too.”

“Cowardly?” Lydia lifted her face, and flashed a glance of tearful fire
at her aunt. “He is the bravest man in the world! And the most generous
and high-minded! He jumped into the sea after that wicked Mr. Hicks, and
saved his life, when he disliked him worse than anything!”

“_Who_ was Mr. Hicks?”

“He was the one that stopped at Messina. He was the one that got some
brandy at Gibraltar, and behaved so dreadfully, and wanted to fight
him.”

“Whom?”

“This one. The one who gave me the book. And don’t you see that his
being so good makes it all the worse? Yes; and he pretended to be glad
when I told him I thought he was good,--he got me to say it!” She had
her face down again in her handkerchief. “And I suppose _you_ think it
was horrible, too, for me to take his arm, and talk and walk with him
whenever he asked me!”

“No, not for you, Lydia,” said her aunt, gently. “And don’t you think
now,” she asked after a pause, “that he cared for you?”

“Oh, I _did_ think so,--I _did_ believe it; but now, _now_--”

“Now, what?”

“Now, I’m afraid that may be he was only playing with me, and putting
me off; and pretending that he had something to tell me when he got to
Venice, and he never meant anything by anything.”

“Is he coming to--” her aunt began, but Lydia broke vehemently out
again.

“If he had cared for me, why couldn’t he have told me so at once, and
not had me wait till he got to Venice? He _knew_ I--”

“There are two ways of explaining it,” said Mrs. Erwin. “He _may_
have been in earnest, Lydia, and felt that he had no right to be more
explicit till you were in the care of your friends. That would be the
European way which you consider so bad,” said Mrs. Erwin. “Under the
circumstances, it was impossible for him to keep any distance, and
all he could do was to postpone his declaration till there could be
something like good form about it. Yes, it might have been that.” She
was silent, but the troubled look did not leave her face. “I am sorry
for you, Lydia,” she resumed, “but I don’t know that I wish he was
in earnest.” Lydia looked up at her in dismay. “It might be far less
embarrassing the other way, however painful. He may not be at all a
suitable person.” The tears stood in Lydia’s eyes, and all her face
expressed a puzzled suspense. “Where was he from?” asked Mrs. Erwin,
finally; till then she had been more interested in the lover than the
man.

“Boston,” mechanically answered Lydia.

“What was his name?”

“Mr. Staniford,” owned Lydia, with a blush.

Her aunt seemed dispirited at the sound. “Yes, I know who they are,” she
sighed.

“And aren’t they nice? Isn’t he--suitable?” asked Lydia, tremulously.

“Oh, poor child! He’s only _too_ suitable. I can’t explain to you,
Lydia; but at home he wouldn’t have looked at a girl like you. What sort
of looking person is he?”

“He’s rather--red; and he has--light hair.”

“It must be the family I’m thinking of,” said Mrs. Erwin. She had lived
nearly twenty years in Europe, and had seldom revisited her native
city; but at the sound of a Boston name she was all Bostonian again.
She rapidly sketched the history of the family to which she imagined
Staniford to belong. “I remember his sister; I used to see her at
school. She must have been five or six years younger than I; and this
boy--”

“Why, he’s twenty-eight years old!” interrupted Lydia.

“How came he to tell you?”

“I don’t know. He said that he looked thirty-four.”

“Yes; _she_ was always a forward thing too,--with her freckles,” said
Mrs. Erwin, musingly, as if lost in reminiscences, not wholly pleasing,
of Miss Staniford.

“_He_ has freckles,” admitted Lydia.

“Yes, it’s the one,” said Mrs. Erwin. “He couldn’t have known what your
family was from anything you said?”

“We never talked about our families.”

“Oh, I dare say! You talked about yourselves?”

“Yes.”

“All the time?”

“Pretty nearly.”

“And he didn’t try to find out who or what you were?”

“He asked a great deal about South Bradfield.”

“Of course, that was where he thought you had always belonged.” Mrs.
Erwin lay quiescent for a while, in apparent uncertainty as to how she
should next attack the subject. “How did you first meet?”

Lydia began with the scene on Lucas Wharf, and little by little told
the whole story up to the moment of their parting at Trieste. There were
lapses and pauses in the story, which her aunt was never at a loss to
fill aright. At the end she said, “If it were not for his promising to
come here and see you, I should say Mr. Staniford had been flirting,
and as it is he may not regard it as anything more than flirtation. Of
course, there was his being jealous of Mr. Dunham and Mr. Hicks, as
he certainly was; and his wanting to explain about that lady at
Messina--yes, that looked peculiar; but he may not have meant anything
by it. His parting so at Trieste with you, that might be either because
he was embarrassed at its having got to be such a serious thing, or
because he really felt badly. Lydia,” she asked at last, “what made
_you_ think he cared for you?”

“I don’t know,” said the girl; her voice had sunk to a husky whisper. “I
didn’t believe it till he said he wanted me to be his--conscience, and
tried to make me say he was good, and--”

“That’s a certain kind of man’s way of flirting. It may mean nothing at
all. I could tell in an instant, if I saw him.”

“He said he would be here this afternoon,” murmured Lydia, tremulously.

“This afternoon!” cried Mrs. Erwin. “I must get up!”

At her toilette she had the exaltation and fury of a champion arming for
battle.



XXV.


Mr. Erwin entered about the completion of her preparations, and without
turning round from her glass she said, “I want you to think of the worst
thing you can, Henshaw. I don’t see how I’m ever to lift up my head
again.” As if this word had reminded her of her head, she turned it from
side to side, and got the effect in the glass, first of one ear-ring,
and then of the other. Her husband patiently waited, and she now
confronted him. “You may as well know first as last, Henshaw, and I want
you to prepare yourself for it. Nothing can be done, and you will
just have to live through it. Lydia--has come over--on that
ship--alone,--with three young men,--and not the shadow--not the
ghost--of another woman--on board!” Mrs. Erwin gesticulated with her
hand-glass in delivering the words, in a manner at once intensely
vivid and intensely solemn, yet somehow falling short of the due tragic
effect. Her husband stood pulling his mustache straight down, while
his wife turned again to the mirror, and put the final touches to
her personal appearance with hands which she had the effect of having
desperately washed of all responsibility. He stood so long in this
meditative mood that she was obliged to be peremptory with his image in
the glass. “Well?” she cried.

“Why, my dear,” said Mr. Erwin, at last, “they were all Americans
together, you know.”

“And what difference does that make?” demanded Mrs. Erwin, whirling from
his image to the man again.

“Why, of course, you know, it isn’t as if they were--English.” Mrs.
Erwin flung down three hair-pins upon her dressing-case, and visibly
despaired. “Of course you don’t expect your countrymen--” His wife’s
appearance was here so terrible that he desisted, and resumed by saying,
“Don’t be vexed, my dear. I--I rather like it, you know. It strikes me
as a genuine bit of American civilization.”

“American civilization! Oh, Henshaw!” wailed Mrs. Erwin, “is it possible
that after all I’ve said, and done, and lived, you still think that any
one but a girl from the greenest little country place could do such a
thing as that? Well, it is no use trying to enlighten English people.
You like it, do you? Well, I’m not sure that the Englishman who
misunderstands American things and likes them isn’t a little worse than
the Englishman who misunderstands them and dislikes them. You _all_
misunderstand them. And would you like it, if one of the young men had
been making love to Lydia?”

The amateur of our civilization hesitated and was serious, but he said
at last, “Why, you know, I’m not surprised. She’s so uncommonly pretty.
I--I suppose they’re engaged?” he suggested.

His wife held her peace for scorn. Then she said, “The gentleman is of a
very good Boston family, and would no more think of engaging himself
to a young girl without the knowledge of her friends than you would.
Besides, he’s been in Europe a great deal.”

“I wish I could meet some Americans who hadn’t been in Europe,” said Mr.
Erwin. “I should like to see what you call the simon-pure American. As
for the young man’s not engaging himself, it seems to me that he didn’t
avail himself of his national privileges. I should certainly have done
it in his place, if I’d been an American.”

“Well, if you’d been an American, you wouldn’t,” answered his wife.

“Why?”

“Because an American would have had too much delicacy.”

“I don’t understand that.”

“I know you don’t, Henshaw. And there’s where you show yourself an
Englishman.”

“Really,” said her husband, “you’re beginning to crow, my dear. Come,
I like that a great deal better than your cringing to the effete
despotisms of the Old World, as your Fourth of July orators have it.
It’s almost impossible to get a bit of good honest bounce out of an
American, nowadays,--to get him to spread himself, as you say.”

“All that is neither here nor there, Henshaw,” said his wife. “The
question is how to receive Mr. Staniford--that’s his name--when he
comes. How are we to regard him? He’s coming here to see Lydia, and she
thinks he’s coming to propose.”

“Excuse me, but how does she regard him?”

“Oh, there’s no question about that, poor child. She’s _dead_ in love
with him, and can’t understand why he didn’t propose on shipboard.”

“And she isn’t an Englishman, either!” exulted Mr. Erwin. “It appears
that there are Americans and Americans, and that the men of your nation
have more delicacy than the women like.”

“Don’t be silly,” said his wife. “Of course, women always think what
they would do in such cases, if they were men; but if men did what women
think they would do if they were men, the women would be disgusted.”

“Oh!”

“Yes. Her feeling in the matter is no guide.”

“Do you know his family?” asked Mr. Erwin.

“I think I do. Yes, I’m sure I do.”

“Are they nice people?”

“Haven’t I told you they were a good Boston family?”

“Then upon my word, I don’t see that we’ve to take any attitude at all.
I don’t see that we’ve to regard him in one way or the other. It quite
remains for him to make the first move.”

As if they had been talking of nothing but dress before, Mrs. Erwin
asked: “Do you think I look better in this black mexicaine, or would you
wear your écru?”

“I think you look very well in this. But why--He isn’t going to propose
to you, I hope?”

“I must have on something decent to receive him in. What time does the
train from Trieste get in?”

“At three o’clock.”

“It’s one, now. There’s plenty of time, but there isn’t any too much.
I’ll go and get Lydia ready. Or perhaps you’ll tap on her door, Henshaw,
and send her here. Of course, this is the end of her voice,--if it is
the end.”

“It’s the end of having an extraordinarily pretty girl in the house.
I don’t at all like it, you know,--having her whisked away in this
manner.”

Mrs. Erwin refused to let her mind wander from the main point. “He’ll be
round as soon as he can, after he arrives. I shall expect him by four,
at the latest.”

“I fancy he’ll stop for his dinner before he comes,” said Mr. Erwin.

“Not at all,” retorted his wife, haughtily. And with his going out of
the room, she set her face in a resolute cheerfulness, for the task of
heartening Lydia when she should appear; but it only expressed misgiving
when the girl came in with her yachting-dress on. “Why, Lydia, shall you
wear that?”

Lydia swept her dress with a downward glance.

“I thought I would wear it. I thought he--I should seem--more natural
in it. I wore it all the time on the ship, except Sundays. He said--he
liked it the best.”

Mrs. Erwin shook her head. “It wouldn’t do. Everything must be on a new
basis now. He might like it; but it would be too romantic, wouldn’t it,
don’t you think?” She shook her head still, but less decisively. “Better
wear your silk. Don’t you think you’d better wear your silk? This is
very pretty, and the dark blue does become you, awfully. Still, I don’t
know--_I_ don’t know, either! A great many English wear those careless
things in the house. Well, _wear_ it, Lydia! You _do_ look perfectly
killing in it. I’ll tell you: your uncle was going to ask you to go
out in his boat; he’s got one he rows himself, and this is a boating
costume; and you know you could time yourselves so as to get back just
right, and you could come in with this on--”

Lydia turned pale. “Oughtn’t I--oughtn’t I--to be here?” she faltered.

Her aunt laughed gayly. “Why, he’ll ask for _me_, Lydia.”

“For you?” asked Lydia, doubtfully.

“Yes. And I can easily keep him till you get back. If you’re here by
four--”

“The train,” said Lydia, “arrives at three.”

“How did you know?” asked her aunt, keenly.

Lydia’s eyelids fell even lower than their wont.

“I looked it out in that railroad guide in the parlor.”

Her aunt kissed her. “And you’ve thought the whole thing out, dear,
haven’t you? I’m glad to see you so happy about it.”

“Yes,” said the girl, with a fluttering breath, “I have thought it out,
and _I believe him_. I--” She tried to say something more, but could
not.

Mrs. Erwin rang the bell, and sent for her husband. “He knows about it,
Lydia,” she said.

“He’s just as much interested as we are, dear, but you needn’t be
worried. He’s a perfect post for not showing a thing if you don’t want
him to. He’s really quite superhuman, in that,--equal to a woman. You
can talk Americanisms with him. If we sat here staring at each other
till four o’clock,--he _must_ go to his hotel before he comes here; and
I say four at the earliest; and it’s much more likely to be five or six,
or perhaps evening,--I should die!”

Mr. Erwin’s rowing was the wonder of all Venice. There was every reason
why he should fall overboard at each stroke, as he stood to propel the
boat in the gondolier fashion, except that he never yet had done so. It
was sometimes his fortune to be caught on the shallows by the falling
tide; but on that day he safely explored the lagoons, and returned
promptly at four o’clock to the palace.

His wife was standing on the balcony, looking out for them, and she
smiled radiantly down into Lydia’s anxiously lifted face. But when
she met the girl at the head of the staircase in the great hall, she
embraced her, and said, with the same gay smile, “He hasn’t come yet,
dear, and of course he won’t come till after dinner. If I hadn’t been as
silly as you are, Lydia, I never should have let you expect him sooner.
He’ll want to go to his hotel: and no matter how impatient he is, he’ll
want to dress, and be a little ceremonious about his call. You know
we’re strangers to him, whatever _you_ are.”

“Yes,” said Lydia, mechanically. She was going to sit down, as she was;
of her own motion she would not have stirred from the place till he
came, or it was certain he would not come; but her aunt would not permit
the despair into which she saw her sinking.

She laughed resolutely, and said, “I think we must give up the little
sentimentality of meeting him in that dress, now. Go and change it,
Lydia. Put on your silk,--or wait: let me go with you. I want to try
some little effects with your complexion. We’ve experimented with the
simple and familiar, and now we’ll see what can be done in the way of
the magnificent and unexpected. I’m going to astonish the young man with
a Venetian beauty; you know you look Italian, Lydia.”

“Yes, he said so,” answered Lydia.

“Did he? That shows he has an eye, and he’ll appreciate what we are
going to do.”

She took Lydia to her own room, for the greater convenience of her
experiments, and from that moment she did not allow her to be alone; she
scarcely allowed her to be silent; she made her talk, she kept her in
movement. At dinner she permitted no lapse. “Henshaw,” she said, “Lydia
has been telling me about a storm they had just before they reached
Gibraltar. I wish you would tell her of the typhoon you were in when you
first went out to India.” Her husband obeyed; and then recurring to the
days of his civil employment in India, he told stories of tiger-hunts,
and of the Sepoy mutiny. Mrs. Erwin would not let them sit very long
at table. After dinner she asked Lydia to sing, and she suffered her to
sing all the American songs her uncle asked for. At eight o’clock she
said with a knowing little look at Lydia, which included a sub-wink
for her husband, “You may go to your café alone, this evening, Henshaw.
Lydia and I are going to stay at home and talk South Bradfield gossip.
I’ve hardly had a moment with her yet.” But when he was gone, she took
Lydia to her own room again, and showed her all her jewelry, and passed
the time in making changes in the girl’s toilette.

It was like the heroic endeavor of the arctic voyager who feels the
deadly chill in his own veins, and keeps himself alive by rousing his
comrade from the torpor stealing over him. They saw in each other’s eyes
that if they yielded a moment to the doubt in their hearts they were
lost.

At ten o’clock Mrs. Erwin said abruptly, “Go to bed, Lydia!” Then the
girl broke down, and abandoned herself in a storm of tears. “Don’t cry,
dear, don’t cry,” pleaded her aunt. “He will be here in the morning, I
know he will. He has been delayed.”

“No, he’s not coming,” said Lydia, through her sobs.

“Something has happened,” urged Mrs. Erwin.

“No,” said Lydia, as before. Her tears ceased as suddenly as they had
come. She lifted her head, and drying her eyes looked into her aunt’s
face. “Are you ashamed of me?” she asked hoarsely.

“Ashamed of you? Oh, poor child--”

“I can’t pretend anything. If I had never told you about it at all, I
could have kept it back till I died. But now--But you will never hear
me speak of it again. It’s over.” She took up her candle, and stiffly
suffering the compassionate embrace with which her aunt clung to her,
she walked across the great hall in the vain splendor in which she had
been adorned, and shut the door behind her.



XXVI.


Dunham lay in a stupor for twenty-four hours, and after that he was
delirious, with dim intervals of reason in which they kept him from
talking, till one morning he woke and looked up at Staniford with a
perfectly clear eye, and said, as if resuming the conservation, “I
struck my head on a pile of chains.”

“Yes,” replied Staniford, with a wan smile, “and you’ve been out of it
pretty near ever since. You mustn’t talk.”

“Oh, I’m all right,” said Dunham. “I know about my being hurt. I shall
be cautious. Have you written to Miss Hibbard? I hope you haven’t!”

“Yes, I have,” replied Staniford. “But I haven’t sent the letter,” he
added, in answer to Dunham’s look of distress. “I thought you were going
to pull through, in spite of the doctor,--he’s wanted to bleed you, and
I could hardly keep his lancet out of you,--and so I wrote, mentioning
the accident and announcing your complete restoration. The letter merely
needs dating and sealing. I’ll look it up and have it posted.” He began
a search in the pockets of his coat, and then went to his portfolio.

“What day is this?” asked Dunham.

“Friday,” said Staniford, rummaging his portfolio.

“Have you been in Venice?”

“Look here, Dunham! If you begin in that way, I can’t talk to you.
It shows that you’re still out of your head. How could I have been in
Venice?”

“But Miss Blood; the Aroostook--”

“Miss Blood went to Venice with her uncle last Saturday. The Aroostook
is here in Trieste. The captain has just gone away. He’s stood watch and
watch with me, while you were off on business.”

“But didn’t you go to Venice on Monday?”

“Well, hardly,” answered Staniford.

“No, you stayed with me,--I see,” said Dunham.

“Of course, I wrote to her at once,” said Staniford, huskily, “and
explained the matter as well as I could without making an ado about it.
But now you stop, Dunham. If you excite yourself, there’ll be the deuce
to pay again.”

“I’m not excited,” said Dunham, “but I can’t help thinking how
disappointed--But of course you’ve heard from her?”

“Well, there’s hardly time, yet,” said Staniford, evasively.

“Why, yes, there is. Perhaps your letter miscarried.”

“Don’t!” cried Staniford, in a hollow under-voice, which he broke
through to add, “Go to sleep, now, Dunham, or keep quiet, somehow.”

Dunham was silent for a while, and Staniford continued his search, which
he ended by taking the portfolio by one corner, and shaking its contents
out on the table. “I don’t seem to find it; but I’ve put it away
somewhere. I’ll get it.” He went to another coat, that hung on the back
of a chair, and fumbled in its pockets. “Hello! Here are those letters
they brought me from the post-office Saturday night,--Murray’s, and
Stanton’s, and that bore Farrington’s. I forgot all about them.” He ran
the unopened letters over in his hand. “Ah, here’s my familiar scrawl--”
 He stopped suddenly, and walked away to the window, where he stood with
his back to Dunham.

“Staniford! What is it?”

“It’s--it’s my letter to _her_” said Staniford, without looking round.

“Your letter to Miss Blood--not gone?” Staniford, with his face still
from him, silently nodded. “Oh!” moaned Dunham, in self-forgetful
compassion. “How could it have happened?”

“I see perfectly well,” said the other, quietly, but he looked round at
Dunham with a face that was haggard. “I sent it out to be posted by the
_portier_, and he got it mixed up with these letters for me, and brought
it back.”

The young men were both silent, but the tears stood in Dunham’s eyes.
“If it hadn’t been for me, it wouldn’t have happened,” he said.

“No,” gently retorted Staniford, “if it hadn’t been for _me_, it
wouldn’t have happened. I made you come from Messina with me, when you
wanted to go on to Naples with those people; if I’d had any sense, I
should have spoken fully to her before we parted; and it was I who sent
you to see if she were on the steamer, when you fell and hurt yourself.
I know who’s to blame, Dunham. What day did I tell you this was?”

“Friday.”

“A week! And I told her to expect me Monday afternoon. A week without
a word or a sign of any kind! Well, I might as well take passage in the
Aroostook, and go back to Boston again.”

“Why, no!” cried Dunham, “you must take the first train to Venice. Don’t
lose an instant. You can explain everything as soon as you see her.”

Staniford shook his head. “If all her life had been different, if she
were a woman of the world, it would be different; she would know how to
account for some little misgivings on my part; but as it is she wouldn’t
know how to account for even the appearance of them. What she must have
suffered all this week--I can’t think of it!” He sat down and turned his
face away. Presently he sprang up again. “But I’m going, Dunham. I guess
you won’t die now; but you may die if you like. I would go over your
dead body!”

“Now you are talking sense,” said Dunham.

Staniford did not listen; he had got out his railroad guide and was
studying it. “No; there are only those two trains a day. The seven
o’clock has gone; and the next starts at ten to-night. Great heavens!
I could walk it sooner! Dunham,” he asked, “do you think I’d better
telegraph?”

“What would you say?”

“Say that there’s been a mistake; that a letter miscarried; that I’ll be
there in the morning; that--”

“Wouldn’t that be taking her anxiety a little too much for granted?”

“Yes, that’s true. Well, you’ve got your wits about you now, Dunham,”
 cried Staniford, with illogical bitterness. “Very probably,” he added,
gloomily, “she doesn’t care anything for me, after all.”

“That’s a good frame of mind to go in,” said Dunham.

“Why is it?” demanded Staniford. “Did I ever presume upon any supposed
interest in her?”

“You did at first,” replied Dunham.

Staniford flushed angrily. But you cannot quarrel with a man lying
helpless on his back; besides, what Dunham said was true.

The arrangements for Staniford’s journey were quickly made,--so quickly
that when he had seen the doctor, and had been down to the Aroostook and
engaged Captain Jenness to come and take his place with Dunham for the
next two nights, he had twelve hours on his hands before the train
for Venice would leave, and he started at last with but one clear
perception,--that at the soonest it must be twelve hours more before he
could see her.

He had seemed intolerably slow in arriving on the train, but once
arrived in Venice he wished that he had come by the steamboat, which
would not be in for three hours yet. In despair he went to bed,
considering that after he had tossed there till he could endure it no
longer, he would still have the resource of getting up, which he would
not have unless he went to bed. When he lay down, he found himself
drowsy; and while he wondered at this, he fell asleep, and dreamed a
strange dream, so terrible that he woke himself by groaning in spirit,
a thing which, as he reflected, he had never done before. The sun was
piercing the crevice between his shutters, and a glance at his watch
showed him that it was eleven o’clock.

The shadow of his dream projected itself into his waking mood, and
steeped it in a gloom which he could not escape. He rose and dressed,
and meagrely breakfasted. Without knowing how he came there, he stood
announced in Mrs. Erwin’s parlor, and waited for her to receive him.

His card was brought in to her where she lay in bed. After supporting
Lydia through the first sharp shock of disappointment, she had yielded
to the prolonged strain, and the girl was now taking care of her.
She gave a hysterical laugh as she read the name on the card Veronica
brought, and crushing it in her hand, “He’s come!” she cried.

“I will not see him!” said Lydia instantly.

“No,” assented her aunt. “It wouldn’t be at all the thing. Besides,
he’s asked for me. Your uncle might see him, but he’s out of the way;
of course he _would_ be out of the way. Now, let me see!” The excitement
inspired her; she rose in bed, and called for the pretty sack in which
she ordinarily breakfasted, and took a look at herself in a hand-glass
that lay on the bed. Lydia did not move; she scarcely seemed to breathe;
but a swift pulse in her neck beat visibly. “If it would be decent to
keep him waiting so long, I could dress, and see him myself. I’m _well_
enough.” Mrs. Erwin again reflected. “Well,” she said at last, “you must
see him, Lydia.”

“I--” began the girl.

“Yes, you. Some one must. It will be all right. On second thought, I
believe I should send you, even if I were quite ready to go myself. This
affair has been carried on so far on the American plan, and I think I
shall let you finish it without my interference. Yes, as your uncle
said when I told him, you’re all Americans together; and you _are_. Mr.
Staniford has come to see you, though he asks for me. That’s perfectly
proper; but I can’t see him, and I want you to excuse me to him.”

“What would you--what must I--” Lydia began again.

“No, Lydia,” interrupted her aunt. “I won’t tell you a thing. I might
have advised you when you first came; but now, I--Well, I think I’ve
lived too long in Europe to be of use in such a case, and I won’t have
anything to do with it. I won’t tell you how to meet him, or what to
say; but oh, child,”--here the woman’s love of loving triumphed in her
breast,--“I wish I was in your place! Go!”

Lydia slowly rose, breathless.

“Lydia!” cried her aunt. “Look at me!” Lydia turned her head. “Are you
going to be hard with him?”

“I don’t know what he’s coming for,” said Lydia dishonestly.

“But if he’s coming for what you hope?”

“I don’t hope for anything.”

“But you did. Don’t be severe. You’re terrible when you’re severe.”

“I will be just.”

“Oh, no, you mustn’t, my dear. It won’t do at all to be _just_ with men,
poor fellows. Kiss me, Lydia!” She pulled her down, and kissed her. When
the girl had got as far as the door, “Lydia, Lydia!” she called after
her. Lydia turned. “Do you realize what dress you’ve got on?” Lydia
looked down at her robe; it was the blue flannel yachting-suit of the
Aroostook, which she had put on for convenience in taking care of
her aunt. “Isn’t it too ridiculous?” Mrs. Erwin meant to praise the
coincidence, not to blame the dress. Lydia smiled faintly for answer,
and the next moment she stood at the parlor door.

Staniford, at her entrance, turned from looking out of the window and
saw her as in his dream, with her hand behind her, pushing the door to;
but the face with which she looked at him was not like the dead, sad
face of his dream. It was thrillingly alive, and all passions were blent
in it,--love, doubt, reproach, indignation; the tears stood in her eyes,
but a fire burnt through the tears. With his first headlong impulse
to console, explain, deplore, came a thought that struck him silent at
sight of her. He remembered, as he had not till then remembered, in
all his wild longing and fearing, that there had not yet been anything
explicit between them; that there was no engagement; and that he had
upon the face of things, at least, no right to offer her more than some
formal expression of regret for not having been able to keep his promise
to come sooner. While this stupefying thought gradually filled his whole
sense to the exclusion of all else, he stood looking at her with a dumb
and helpless appeal, utterly stunned and wretched. He felt the life die
out of his face and leave it blank, and when at last she spoke, he
knew that it was in pity of him, or contempt of him. “Mrs. Erwin is not
well,” she said, “and she wished me--”

But he broke in upon her: “Oh, don’t talk to me of Mrs. Erwin! It was
you I wanted to see. Are _you_ well? Are you alive? Do you--” He stopped
as precipitately as he began; and after another hopeless pause, he went
on piteously: “I don’t know where to begin. I ought to have been here
five days ago. I don’t know what you think of me, or whether you have
thought of me at all; and before I can ask I must tell you why I wanted
to come then, and why I come now, and why I think I must have come back
from the dead to see you. You are all the world to me, and have been
ever since I saw you. It seems a ridiculously unnecessary thing to say,
I have been looking and acting and living it so long; but I say it,
because I choose to have you know it, whether you ever cared for me or
not. I thought I was coming here to explain why I had not come sooner,
but I needn’t do that unless--unless--” He looked at her where she still
stood aloof, and he added: “Oh, answer me something, for pity’s sake!
Don’t send me away without a word. There have been times when you
wouldn’t have done that!”

“Oh, I _did_ care for you!” she broke out. “You know I did--”

He was instantly across the room, beside her. “Yes, yes, I know it!” But
she shrank away.

“You tried to make me believe you cared for me, by everything you could
do. And I did believe you then; and yes, I believed you afterwards, when
I didn’t know what to believe. You were the one true thing in the world
to me. But it seems that you didn’t believe it yourself.”

“That I didn’t believe it myself? That I--I don’t know what you mean.”

“You took a week to think it over! I have had a week, too, and I have
thought it over, too. You have come too late.”

“Too late? You don’t, you can’t, mean--Listen to me, Lydia; I want to
tell you--”

“No, there is nothing you can tell me that would change me. I know it, I
understand it all.”

“But you don’t understand what kept me.”

“I don’t wish to know what made you break your word. I don’t care to
know. I couldn’t go back and feel as I did to you. Oh, that’s gone! It
isn’t that you did not come--that you made me wait and suffer; but you
knew how it would be with me after I got here, and all the things I
should find out, and how I should feel! And you stayed away! I don’t
know whether I can forgive you, even; oh, I’m afraid I don’t; but I can
never care for you again. Nothing but a case of life and death--”

“It was a case of life and death!”

Lydia stopped in her reproaches, and looked at him with wistful doubt,
changing to a tender fear.

“Oh, have you been hurt? Have you been sick?” she pleaded, in a breaking
voice, and made some unconscious movement toward him. He put out his
hand, and would have caught one of hers, but she clasped them in each
other.

“No, not I,--Dunham--”

“Oh!” said Lydia, as if this were not at all enough.

“He fell and struck his head, the night you left. I thought he would
die.” Staniford reported his own diagnosis, not the doctor’s; but he was
perhaps in the right to do this. “I had made him go down to the wharf
with me; I wanted to see you again, before you started, and I thought we
might find you on the boat.” He could see her face relenting; her hands
released each other. “He was delirious till yesterday. I couldn’t leave
him.”

“Oh, why didn’t you write to me?” She ignored Dunham as completely as
if he had never lived. “You knew that I--” Her voice died away, and her
breast rose.

“I did write--”

“But how,--I never got it.”

“No,--it was not posted, through a cruel blunder. And then I thought--I
got to thinking that you didn’t care--”

“Oh,” said the girl. “Could you doubt me?”

“You doubted me,” said Staniford, seizing his advantage. “I brought the
letter with me to prove _my_ truth.” She did not look at him, but she
took the letter, and ran it greedily into her pocket. “It’s well I did
so, since you don’t believe my word.”

“Oh, yes,--yes, I know it,” she said; “I never doubted it!” Staniford
stood bemazed, though he knew enough to take the hands she yielded
him; but she suddenly caught them away again, and set them against his
breast. “I was very wrong to suspect you ever; I’m sorry I did; but
there’s something else. I don’t know how to say what I want to say. But
it must be said.”

“Is it something disagreeable?” asked Staniford, lightly.

“It’s right,” answered Lydia, unsmilingly.

“Oh, well, don’t say it!” he pleaded; “or don’t say it now,--not till
you’ve forgiven me for the anxiety I’ve caused you; not till you’ve
praised me for trying to do what I thought the right thing. You can’t
imagine how hard it was for one who hasn’t the habit!”

“I do praise you for it. There’s nothing to forgive _you_; but I can’t
let you care for me unless I know--unless”--She stopped, and then, “Mr.
Staniford,” she began firmly, “since I came here, I’ve been learning
things that I didn’t know before. They have changed the whole world to
me, and it can never be the same again.”

“I’m sorry for that; but if they haven’t changed you, the world may go.”

“No, not if we’re to live in it,” answered the girl, with the soberer
wisdom women keep at such times. “It will have to be known how we met.
What will people say? They will laugh.”

“I don’t think they will in my presence,” said Staniford, with swelling
nostrils. “They may use their pleasure elsewhere.”

“And I shouldn’t care for their laughing, either,” said Lydia. “But oh,
why did you come?”

“Why did I come?”

“Was it because you felt bound by anything that’s happened, and you
wouldn’t let me bear the laugh alone? I’m not afraid for myself. I shall
never blame you. You can go perfectly free.”

“But I don’t want to go free!”

Lydia looked at him with piercing earnestness. “Do you think I’m proud?”
 she asked.

“Yes, I think you are,” said Staniford, vaguely.

“It isn’t for myself that I should be proud with other people. But I
would rather die than bring ridicule upon one I--upon you.”

“I can believe that,” said Staniford, devoutly, and patiently
reverencing the delay of her scruples.

“And if--and--” Her lips trembled, but she steadied her trembling voice.
“If they laughed at you, and thought of me in a slighting way because--”
 Staniford gave a sort of roar of grief and pain to know how her heart
must have been wrung before she could come to this. “You were all so
good that you didn’t let me think there was anything strange about it--”

“Oh, good heavens! We only did what it was our precious and sacred
privilege to do! We were all of one mind about it from the first.
But don’t torture yourself about it, my darling. It’s over now; it’s
past--no, it’s present, and it will always be, forever, the dearest and
best thing in life Lydia, do you believe that I love you?”

“Oh, I must!”

“And don’t you believe that I’m telling you the truth when I say that
I wouldn’t, for all the world can give or take, change anything that’s
been?”

“Yes, I do believe you. Oh, I haven’t said at all what I wanted to say!
There was a great deal that I ought to say. I can’t seem to recollect
it.”

He smiled to see her grieving at this recreance of her memory to her
conscience. “Well, you shall have a whole lifetime to recall it in.”

“No, I must try to speak now. And you must tell me the truth now,--no
matter what it costs either of us.” She laid her hands upon his extended
arms, and grasped them intensely. “There’s something else. I want to ask
you what _you_ thought when you found me alone on that ship with all
of you.” If she had stopped at this point, Staniford’s cause might
have been lost, but she went on: “I want to know whether you were ever
ashamed of me, or despised me for it; whether you ever felt that because
I was helpless and friendless there, you had the right to think less of
me than if you had first met me here in this house.”

It was still a terrible question, but it offered a loop-hole of escape,
which Staniford was swift to seize. Let those who will justify the
answer with which he smiled into her solemn eyes: “I will leave you to
say.” A generous uncandor like this goes as far with a magnanimous and
serious-hearted woman as perhaps anything else.

“Oh, I knew it, I knew it!” cried Lydia. And then, as he caught her to
him at last, “Oh--oh--are you _sure_ it’s right?”

“I have no doubt of it,” answered Staniford. Nor had he any question of
the strategy through which he had triumphed in this crucial test. He
may have thought that there were always explanations that had to be made
afterwards, or he may have believed that he had expiated in what he had
done and suffered for her any slight which he had felt; possibly, he
considered that she had asked more than she had a right to do. It is
certain that he said with every appearance of sincerity, “It began the
moment I saw you on the wharf, there, and when I came to know my mind
I kept it from you only till I could tell you here. But now I wish I
hadn’t! Life is too short for such a week as this.”

“No,” said Lydia, “you acted for the best, and you are--good.”

“I’ll keep that praise till I’ve earned it,” answered Staniford.



XXVII.


In the Campo Santi Apostoli at Venice there stands, a little apart from
the church of that name, a chapel which has been for many years the
place of worship for the Lutheran congregation. It was in this church
that Staniford and Lydia were married six weeks later, before the altar
under Titian’s beautiful picture of Christ breaking bread.

The wedding was private, but it was not quite a family affair. Miss
Hibbard had come down with her mother from Dresden, to complete Dunham’s
cure, and she was there with him perfectly recovered; he was not quite
content, of course, that the marriage should not take place in the
English chapel, but he was largely consoled by the candles burning on
the altar. The Aroostook had been delayed by repairs which were found
necessary at Trieste, and Captain Jenness was able to come over and
represent the ship at the wedding ceremony, and at the lunch which
followed. He reserved till the moment of parting a supreme expression of
good-will. When he had got a hand of Lydia’s and one of Staniford’s in
each of his, with his wrists crossed, he said, “Now, I ain’t one to tack
round, and stand off and on a great deal, but what I want to say is just
this: the Aroostook sails next week, and if you two are a mind to go
back in her, the ship’s yours, as I said to Miss Blood, here,--I mean
Mis’ Staniford; well, I _hain’t_ had much time to get used to it!--when
she first come aboard there at Boston. I don’t mean any pay; I want you
to go back as my guests. You can use the cabin for your parlor; and I
promise you I won’t take any other passengers _this_ time. I declare,”
 said Captain Jenness, lowering his voice, and now referring to Hicks for
the first time since the day of his escapade, “I did feel dreadful about
that fellow!”

“Oh, never mind,” replied Staniford. “If it hadn’t been for Hicks
perhaps I mightn’t have been here.” He exchanged glances with his wife,
that showed they had talked all that matter over.

The captain grew confidential. “Mr. Mason told me he saw you lending
that chap money. I hope he didn’t give you the slip?”

“No; it came to me here at Blumenthals’ the other day.”

“Well, that’s right! It all worked together for good, as you say. Now
you come!”

“What do you say, my dear?” asked Staniford, on whom the poetic fitness
of the captain’s proposal had wrought.

Women are never blinded by romance, however much they like it in the
abstract. “It’s coming winter. Do you think you wouldn’t be seasick?”
 returned the bride of an hour, with the practical wisdom of a matron.

Staniford laughed. “She’s right, captain. I’m no sailor. I’ll get home
by the all-rail route as far as I can.”

Captain Jenness threw back his head, and laughed too. “Good! That’s
about it.” And he released their hands, so as to place one hairy paw on
a shoulder of each. “You’ll get along together, I guess.”

“But we’re just as much obliged to you as if we went, Captain Jenness.
And tell all the crew that I’m homesick for the Aroostook, and thank
all for being so kind to me; and I thank _you_, Captain Jenness!” Lydia
looked at her husband, and then startled the captain with a kiss.

He blushed all over, but carried it off as boldly as he could. “Well,
well,” he said, “that’s right! If you change your minds before the
Aroostook sails, you let me know.”

This affair made a great deal of talk in Venice, where the common stock
of leisure is so great that each person may without self-reproach
devote a much larger share of attention to the interests of the others
than could be given elsewhere. The decorous fictions in which Mrs. Erwin
draped the singular facts of the acquaintance and courtship of Lydia
and Staniford were what unfailingly astonished and amused him, and he
abetted them without scruple. He found her worldliness as innocent as
the unworldliness of Lydia, and he gave Mrs. Erwin his hearty sympathy
when she ingenuously owned that the effort to throw dust in the eyes
of her European acquaintance was simply killing her. He found endless
refreshment in the contemplation of her attitude towards her burdensome
little world, and in her reasons for enslaving herself to it. He was
very good friends with both of the Erwins. When he could spare the time
from Lydia, he went about with her uncle in his boat, and respected his
skill in rowing it without falling overboard. He could not see why any
one should be so much interested in the American character and dialect
as Mr. Erwin was; but he did not object, and he reflected that after all
they were not what their admirer supposed them.

The Erwins came with the Stanifords as far as Paris on their way home,
and afterwards joined them in California, where Staniford bought a
ranch, and found occupation if not profit in its management. Once cut
loose from her European ties, Mrs. Erwin experienced an incomparable
repose and comfort in the life of San Francisco; it was, she declared,
the life for which she had really been adapted, after all; and in the
climate of Santa Barbara she found all that she had left in Italy. In
that land of strange and surprising forms of every sort, her husband
has been very happy in the realization of an America surpassing even his
wildest dreams, and he has richly stored his note-book with philological
curiosities. He hears around him the vigorous and imaginative locutions
of the Pike language, in which, like the late Canon Kingsley, he finds
a Scandinavian hugeness; and pending the publication of his Hand-Book
of Americanisms, he is in confident search of the miner who uses his
pronouns cockney-wise. Like other English observers, friendly and
unfriendly, he does not permit the facts to interfere with his
preconceptions.

Staniford’s choice long remained a mystery to his acquaintances, and
was but partially explained by Mrs. Dunham, when she came home. “Why, I
suppose he fell in love with her,” she said. “Of course, thrown together
that way, as they were, for six weeks, it might have happened to
anybody; but James Staniford was always the most consummate flirt that
breathed; and he never could see a woman, without coming up, in that
metaphysical way of his, and trying to interest her in him. He was
always laughing at women, but there never was a man who cared more for
them. From all that I could learn from Charles, he began by making fun
of her, and all at once he became perfectly infatuated with her. I don’t
see why. I never could get Charles to tell me anything remarkable that
she said or did. She was simply a country girl, with country ideas, and
no sort of cultivation. Why, there was _nothing_ to her. He’s done the
wisest thing he could by taking her out to California. She never would
have gone down, here. I suppose James Staniford knew that as well as any
of us; and if he finds it worth while to bury himself with her there,
we’ve no reason to complain. She did _sing_, wonderfully; that is, her
voice was perfectly divine. But of course that’s all over, now. She
didn’t seem to care much for it; and she really knew so little of life
that I don’t believe she could form the idea of an artistic career, or
feel that it was any sacrifice to give it up. James Staniford was not
worth any such sacrifice; but she couldn’t know that either. She was
good, I suppose. She was very stiff, and she hadn’t a word to say for
herself. I think she was cold. To be sure, she was a beauty; I really
never saw anything like it,--that pale complexion some brunettes have,
with her hair growing low, and such eyes and lashes!”

“Perhaps the beauty had something to do with his falling in love with
her,” suggested a listener. The ladies present tried to look as if this
ought not to be sufficient.

“Oh, very likely,” said Mrs. Dunham. She added, with an air of being
the wreck of her former self, “But we all know what becomes of _beauty_
after marriage.”

The mind of Lydia’s friends had been expressed in regard to her
marriage, when the Stanifords, upon their arrival home from Europe, paid
a visit to South Bradfield. It was in the depths of the winter following
their union, and the hill country, stern and wild even in midsummer,
wore an aspect of savage desolation. It was sheeted in heavy snow,
through which here and there in the pastures, a craggy bowlder lifted
its face and frowned, and along the woods the stunted pines and hemlocks
blackened against a background of leafless oaks and birches. A northwest
wind cut shrill across the white wastes, and from the crests of the
billowed drifts drove a scud of stinging particles in their faces, while
the sun, as high as that of Italy, coldly blazed from a cloudless blue
sky. Ezra Perkins, perched on the seat before them, stiff and silent
as if he were frozen there, drove them from Bradfield Junction to
South Bradfield in the long wagon-body set on bob-sleds, with which he
replaced his Concord coach in winter. At the station he had sparingly
greeted Lydia, as if she were just back from Greenfield, and in the
interest of personal independence had ignored a faint motion of hers
to shake hands; at her grandfather’s gate, he set his passengers down
without a word, and drove away, leaving Staniford to get in his trunk as
he might.

“Well, I declare,” said Miss Maria, who had taken one end of the trunk
in spite of him, and was leading the way up through the path cleanly
blocked out of the snow, “that Ezra Perkins is enough to make you wish
he’d _stayed_ in Dakoty!”

Staniford laughed, as he had laughed at everything on the way from the
station, and had probably thus wounded Ezra Perkins’s susceptibilities.
The village houses, separated so widely by the one long street,
each with its path neatly tunneled from the roadway to the gate; the
meeting-house, so much vaster than the present needs of worship, and
looking blue-cold with its never-renewed single coat of white paint;
the graveyard set in the midst of the village, and showing, after Ezra
Perkins’s disappearance, as many signs of life as any other locality,
realized in the most satisfactory degree his theories of what winter
must be in such a place as South Bradfield. The burning smell of the
sheet-iron stove in the parlor, with its battlemented top of filigree
iron work; the grimness of the horsehair-covered best furniture; the
care with which the old-fashioned fire-places had been walled up, and
all accessible character of the period to which the house belonged had
been effaced, gave him an equal pleasure. He went about with his arm
round Lydia’s waist, examining these things, and yielding to the joy
they caused him, when they were alone. “Oh, my darling,” he said, in one
of these accesses of delight, “when I think that it’s my privilege to
take you away from all this, I begin to feel not so very unworthy, after
all.”

But he was very polite, as Miss Maria owned, when Mr. and Mrs. Goodlow
came in during the evening, with two or three unmarried ladies of the
village, and he kept them from falling into the frozen silence which
habitually expresses social enjoyment in South Bradfield when strangers
are present. He talked about the prospects of Italian advancement to an
equal state of intellectual and moral perfection with rural New England,
while Mr. Goodlow listened, rocking himself back and forth in the
hair-cloth arm-chair. Deacon Latham, passing his hand continually
along the stove battlements, now and then let his fingers rest on the
sheet-iron till he burnt them, and then jerked them suddenly away, to
put them, back the next moment, in his absorbing interest. Miss Maria,
amidst a murmur of admiration from the ladies, passed sponge-cake and
coffee: she confessed afterwards that the evening had been so brilliant
to her as to seem almost wicked; and the other ladies, who owned to
having lain awake all night on her coffee, said that if they _had_
enjoyed themselves they were properly punished for it.

When they were gone, and Lydia and Staniford had said good-night, and
Miss Maria, coming in from the kitchen with a hand-lamp for her father,
approached the marble-topped centre-table to blow out the large lamp of
pea-green glass with red woollen wick, which had shed the full
radiance of a sun-burner upon the festival, she faltered at a manifest
unreadiness in the old man to go to bed, though the fire was low, and
they had both resumed the drooping carriage of people in going about
cold houses. He looked excited, and, so far as his unpracticed visage
could intimate the emotion, joyous.

“Well, there, Maria!” he said. “You can’t say but what he’s a
master-hand to converse, any way. I’d know as I ever see Mr. Goodlow more
struck up with any one. He looked as if every word done him good; I
presume it put him in mind of meetin’s with brother ministers: I don’t
suppose but what he misses it some, here. You can’t say but what he’s a
fine appearin’ young man. I d’know as I see anything wrong in his kind
of dressin’ up to the nines, as you may say. As long’s he’s got the
money, I don’t see what harm it is. It’s all worked for good, Lyddy’s
going out that way; though it did seem a mysterious providence at the
time.”

“Well!” began Miss Maria. She paused, as if she had been hurried too
far by her feelings, and ought to give them a check before proceeding.
“Well, I don’t presume you’d notice it, but she’s got a spot on her
silk, so’t a whole breadth’s got to come out, and be let in again bottom
side up. I guess there’s a pair of ‘em, for carelessness.” She waited a
moment before continuing: “I d’know as I like to see a husband puttin’
his arm round his wife, even when he don’t suppose any one’s lookin’;
but I d’know but what it’s natural, too. But it’s one comfort to see’t
she ain’t the least mite silly about _him_. He’s dreadful freckled.”
 Miss Maria again paused thoughtfully, while her father burnt his fingers
on the stove for the last time, and took them definitively away. “I
don’t say but what he talked well enough, as far forth as talkin’
_goes_; Mr. Goodlow said at the door’t he didn’t know’s he ever passed
_many_ such evenin’s since he’d been in South Bradfield, and I d’know as
_I_ have. I presume he has his faults; we ain’t any of us perfect; but
he _does_ seem terribly wrapped up in Lyddy. I don’t say but what he’ll
make her a good husband, if she must _have_ one. I don’t suppose but
what people might think, as you may say, ‘t she’d made out pretty well;
and if Lyddy’s suited, I d’know as anybody else has got any call to be
over particular.”

THE END.





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