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morning; the sun had not yet reddened the east, but the stars were extinct, or glimmered faint points immeasurably withdrawn in the vast gray of the sky.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 shallnot!” 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.
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 “willshe 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 onlyoneamong 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 onlyone?”
“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?”
“Shetalkeda 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 shewasthe 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 shetookmuch 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'sbeenhasty 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?”
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 atthistime of year,” said Captain Jenness.
“Not at this time ofyear,” 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,Idon'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 ifshecould stand it,wemight. 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. “IthoughtI knew you.”
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 theschönsten Augenof 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'smore 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.
“Youwant 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 atsomerural 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 thecari 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.