The Lady of the Aroostook

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

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

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

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

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

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

"She wanted to know," said Staniford, with a laugh.

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

"Jerusha, probably."

"Oh, impossible!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Not quite," assented Staniford.

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

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

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

VII.

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

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

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

"You'll decide against both," said Dunham.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I have you," answered his friend, demurely.

"Oh, I'm nothing," said Dunham, with sincerity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"'Pretty as a bird,' the captain said."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh, I doubt that," said Dunham.

"You doubt it? Pessimist!"

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

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

VIII.

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

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

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

"No," she answered, "not at all. I like it."

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

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

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

"No," said Lydia.

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

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

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

"Yes?" said Lydia.

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

"I could look at it forever," replied Lydia.

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

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

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

"Yes, thank you," answered Lydia, "I would."

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

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

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

"It does, somehow," admitted Lydia."

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

"Oh, not at all!" cried the girl.

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

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

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

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

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