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 dohatea 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, andIdon'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 knowhowlong it would take to lower a boat, if I was to listen to myconscience. 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 younowto 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.”
“Eitherof us?” echoed Dunham. He roused himself.
“Oh, go to sleep;goto sleep!” cried Staniford.
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 seasicknessmyself.”
“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.Youwouldn'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 theres 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.
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 wore 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. Butyou'reall 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!Youput me in irons, you old Triton. Putmein 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 himone?”
“No, no!” cried Staniford, springing from his chair; “don't hit him! He isn't responsible. Let's get him into his room.”
“Fetch meone, heh?” said Hicks, rising, with dignity, and beginning to turn up his cuffs. “One! It'll take more than one, fetchme. 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'reall 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—begherpardon—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. “Whatyouwant?” 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;pleasehelp 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.