The Lady of the Aroostook

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

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

XXII.

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

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

"Oh, no!" said Lydia. "I always help myself."

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

"And she sent her all the way from Venice?"

"Yes."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"A dragon? I don't understand," faltered Lydia.

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

XXIII.

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

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

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

"Smiling," said Lydia, mechanically correcting him.

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

"Of course it isn't, Henshaw!" said his wife.

"You've been a great while out of the country, my dear," suggested
Mr. Erwin.

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

"No, grandfather brought me."

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

"We had one bad storm, before we reached Gibraltar; but I wasn't
seasick."

"Were the other passengers?"

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

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

"Oh, a gentleman," answered Lydia.

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

"Oh, I say, now!" cried her husband, "you're not going to make her
go to church to-day!"

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

"But she's tired to death,--quite tuckered, you know."

"Oh, I'm rested, now," said Lydia. "I shouldn't like to miss going
to church."

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

"There's a sack goes with this," said the girl, suggestively.

"That's nice! What is your bonnet?"

"I haven't any bonnet. But my best hat is nice. I could--"

"_No_ one goes to church in a hat! You can't do it. It's simply
impossible."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I kept my things very nicely, aunt Josephine," said Lydia
conscientiously. "I don't believe anything was hurt."

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

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

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

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

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

"I have never been gay," said Lydia.

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

"What?" asked Lydia.

"Good time; that's an Americanism."

"Is it?"

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

"No," assented Lydia.

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

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

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

"To go to church alone?" demanded Lydia, astounded.

"Yes. A young girl mustn't go _any_where alone."

"Why?"

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

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

"Are they engaged?" asked Lydia.

"Engaged!" exclaimed Mrs. Erwin, with her shriek in dumb show.
"Why, child, she's married!"

"To _him_?" demanded the girl, with a recoil.

"No! To her husband."

"To her husband?" gasped Lydia. "And she--"

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

"Do you go to her house?" Lydia inquired stiffly.

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

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

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

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