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 pa.s.sion 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 n.o.bly, 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 pa.s.sage 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 a.s.sociation 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 pa.s.sing 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.