The Lady of the Aroostook

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

"Let me go!" he entreated.

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

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

"I don't understand," said Lydia, in alarm and mortification.

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

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

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

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

"Are you going to walk with me because you had promised?"

"Why, of course," faltered Lydia.

"That isn't enough."

"Not enough?"

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

Lydia was silent.

"Do you like to do so?"

"I can't answer you," she said, releasing her hand from him.

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

"What must I say?" asked Lydia, joyously.

"That depends upon whether you consent. If you consent, you must say,
'I shall be very glad.'"

"And if I don't?"

"Oh, I can't put any such decision into words."

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

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

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

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

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

"Well, then, what is this one?"

"Is it favorable?"

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

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

"No, indeed!" cried Lydia, as if scandalized.

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

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

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

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

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

"No, no!" she said, still in his mood.

"Well, you must allow it was a pretty speech."

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

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

"I don't think people like it generally."

"Why, Miss Blood, you are intense!"

"I don't know what you mean by that," said Lydia.

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

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

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

"I don't know. I should not do that with any one I--"

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

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

"What were you going to say?"

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

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

"I didn't know that truth need be charming."

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

"I shouldn't in any one," said Lydia.

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

"I didn't say that I disliked anything in you."

"But you have made fun of something in me?"

"No, no!"

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

"You are very suspicious."

"Yes; and what else?"

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

"Go on!" cried Staniford. "Analyze me, formulate me!"

"That's all."

"All I come to?"

"All I have to say."

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

"Oh, yes, I do. I care too much."

"Do you care what I think?"

"Yes."

"Then I think you're too unsuspicious."

"Ought I to suspect somebody?" she asked, lightly.

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

"Oh, yes, if you like to be."

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

"Yes."

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

"Why?" asked the girl.

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

"I think that's the trouble with all of us," said Lydia.

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

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

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

"Isn't it pretty late?" she asked, at last.

"If you're tired, we'll sit down," he said.

"What time is it?" she persisted.

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

"It can't be; it was half past when I came up," answered Lydia.

"One hand's at twelve and the other at nine," he said, conclusively.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Twelve," said Staniford.

"Had a pleasant walk?"

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

"_Either_ of us?" echoed Dunham. He roused himself.

"Oh, go to sleep; _go_ to sleep!" cried Staniford.

XV.

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

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

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

"Well?" he said.

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

"Oh, no," said Staniford. "It was yours."

"You gave it to me," she returned.

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

"And you didn't mind my lending it to him?" she pursued. "I--"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It's a ridiculous sort of misery," said Staniford.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You lent him five dollars!" gasped Staniford.

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

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

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

"Your five dollars," he said.

"Why, how--" Dunham began.

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

"No, I wouldn't," said the captain, bluntly.

"And I believe you'd have sailed without me, if I hadn't got back
on time."

"I would," said the captain, as before.

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

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