"That is much better," remarked Staniford, "than being younger than you look. I am twenty-eight, and people take me for thirty-four. I"m a prematurely middle-aged man. I wish you would tell me, Miss Blood, a little about South Bradfield. I"ve been trying to make out whether I was ever there. I tramped nearly everywhere when I was a student. What sort of people are they there?"
"Oh, they are very nice people," said Lydia.
"Do you like them?"
"I never thought whether I did. They are nearly all old. Their children have gone away; they don"t seem to live; they are just staying. When I first came there I was a little girl. One day I went into the grave-yard and counted the stones; there were three times as many as there were living persons in the village."
"I think I know the kind of place," said Staniford. "I suppose you"re not very homesick?"
"Not for the place," answered Lydia, evasively.
"Of course," Staniford hastened to add, "you miss your own family circle." To this she made no reply. It is the habit of people bred like her to remain silent for want of some sort of formulated comment upon remarks to which they a.s.sent.
Staniford fell into a musing mood, which was without visible embarra.s.sment to the young girl, who must have been inured to much severer silences in the society of South Bradfield. He remained staring at her throughout his reverie, which in fact related to her. He was thinking what sort of an old maid she would have become if she had remained in that village. He fancied elements of hardness and sharpness in her which would have a.s.serted themselves as the joyless years went on, like the bony structure of her face as the softness of youth left it. She was saved from that, whatever was to be her destiny in Italy.
From South Bradfield to Venice,--what a prodigious transition! It seemed as if it must transfigure her. "Miss Blood," he exclaimed, "I wish I could be with you when you first see Venice!"
"Yes?" said Lydia.
Even the interrogative comment, with the rising inflection, could not chill his enthusiasm. "It is really the greatest sight in the world."
Lydia had apparently no comment to make on this fact. She waited tranquilly a while before she said, "My father used to talk about Italy to me when I was little. He wanted to go. My mother said afterwards--after she had come home with me to South Bradfield--that she always believed he would have lived if he had gone there. He had consumption."
"Oh!" said Staniford softly. Then he added, with the tact of his s.e.x, "Miss Blood, you mustn"t take cold, sitting here with me. This wind is chilly. Shall I go below and get you some more wraps?"
"No, thank you," said Lydia; "I believe I will go down, now."
She went below to her room, and then came out into the cabin with some sewing at which she sat and st.i.tched by the lamp. The captain was writing in his log-book; Dunham and Hicks were playing checkers together. Staniford, from a corner of a locker, looked musingly upon this curious family circle. It was not the first time that its occupations had struck him oddly. Sometimes when they were all there together, Dunham read aloud. Hicks knew tricks of legerdemain which he played cleverly. The captain told some very good stories, and led off in the laugh. Lydia always sewed and listened. She did not seem to find herself strangely placed, and her presence characterized all that was said and done with a charming innocence. As a bit of life, it was as pretty as it was quaint.
"Really," Staniford said to Dunham, as they turned in, that night, "she has domesticated us."
"Yes," a.s.sented Dunham with enthusiasm; "isn"t she a nice girl?"
"She"s intolerably pa.s.sive. Or not pa.s.sive, either. She says what she thinks, but she doesn"t seem to have thought of many things. Did she ever tell you about her father?"
"No," said Dunham.
"I mean about his dying of consumption?"
"No, she never spoke of him to me. Was he--"
"Um. It appears that we have been upon terms of confidence, then."
Staniford paused, with one boot in his hand. "I should never have thought it."
"What was her father?" asked Dunham.
"Upon my word, I don"t know. I didn"t seem to get beyond elemental statements of intimate fact with her. He died in California, where she was born; and he always had a longing to go to Italy. That was rather pretty."
"It"s very touching, I think."
"Yes, of course. We might fancy this about Lurella: that she has a sort of piety in visiting the scenes that her father wished to visit, and that--Well, anything is predicable of a girl who says so little and looks so much. She"s certainly very handsome; and I"m bound to say that her room could not have been better than her company, so far."
X.
The dress that Lydia habitually wore was one which her aunt Maria studied from the costume of a summer boarder, who had spent a preceding summer at the sea-sh.o.r.e, and who found her yachting-dress perfectly adapted to tramping over the South Bradfield hills. Thus reverting to its original use on shipboard, the costume looked far prettier on Lydia than it had on the summer boarder from whose unconscious person it had been plagiarized. It was of the darkest blue flannel, and was fitly set off with those bright ribbons at the throat which women know how to dispose there according to their complexions. One day the bow was scarlet, and another crimson; Staniford did not know which was better, and disputed the point in vain with Dunham. They all grew to have a taste in such matters. Captain Jenness praised her dress outright, and said that he should tell his girls about it. Lydia, who had always supposed it was a walking costume, remained discreetly silent when the young men recognized its nautical character. She enjoyed its success; she made some little changes in the hat she wore with it, which met the approval of the cabin family; and she tranquilly kept her black silk in reserve for Sunday. She came out to breakfast in it, and it swept the narrow s.p.a.ces, as she emerged from her state-room, with so rich and deep a murmur that every one looked up. She sustained their united glance with something tenderly deprecatory and appealingly conscious in her manner, much as a very sensitive girl in some new finery meets the eyes of her brothers when she does not know whether to cry or laugh at what they will say. Thomas almost dropped a plate. "Goodness!" he said, helplessly expressing the public sentiment in regard to a garment of which he alone had been in the secret. No doubt it pa.s.sed his fondest dreams of its splendor; it fitted her as the sheath of the flower fits the flower.
Captain Jenness looked hard at her, but waited a decent season after saying grace before offering his compliment, which he did in drawing the carving-knife slowly across the steel. "Well, Miss Blood, that"s right!"
Lydia blushed richly, and the young men made their obeisances across the table.
The flushes and pallors chased each other over her face, and the sight of her pleasure in being beautiful charmed Staniford. "If she were used to worship she would have taken our adoration more arrogantly," he said to his friend when they went on deck after breakfast. "I can place her; but one"s circ.u.mstance doesn"t always account for one in America, and I can"t make out yet whether she"s ever been praised for being pretty.
Some of our hill-country people would have felt like hushing up her beauty, as almost sinful, and some would have gone down before it like Greeks. I can"t tell whether she knows it all or not; but if you suppose her unconscious till now, it"s pathetic. And black silks must be too rare in her life not to be celebrated by a high tumult of inner satisfaction. I"m glad we bowed down to the new dress."
"Yes," a.s.sented Dunham, with an uneasy absence; "but--Staniford, I should like to propose to Captain Jenness our having service this morning. It is the eleventh Sunday after--"
"Ah, yes!" said Staniford. "It is Sunday, isn"t it? I _thought_ we had breakfast rather later than usual. All over the Christian world, on land and sea, there is this abstruse relation between a late breakfast and religious observances."
Dunham looked troubled. "I wish you wouldn"t talk that way, Staniford, and I hope you won"t say anything--"
"To interfere with your proposition? My dear fellow, I am at least a gentleman."
"I beg your pardon," said Dunham, gratefully.
Staniford even went himself to the captain with Dunham"s wish; it is true the latter a.s.sumed the more disagreeable part of proposing the matter to Hicks, who gave a humorous a.s.sent, as one might to a joke of doubtful feasibility.
Dunham gratified both his love for social management and his zeal for his church in this organization of worship; and when all hands were called aft, and stood round in decorous silence, he read the lesson for the day, and conducted the service with a gravity astonishing to the sailors, who had taken him for a mere dandy. Staniford bore his part in the responses from the same prayer-book with Captain Jenness, who kept up a devout, inarticulate under-growl, and came out strong on particular words when he got his bearings through his spectacles. Hicks and the first officer silently shared another prayer-book, and Lydia offered half hers to Mr. Mason.
When the hymn was given out, she waited while an experimental search for the tune took place among the rest. They were about to abandon the attempt, when she lifted her voice and began to sing. She sang as she did in the meeting-house at South Bradfield, and her voice seemed to fill all the hollow height and distance; it rang far off like a mermaid"s singing, on high like an angel"s; it called with the same deep appeal to sense and soul alike. The sailors stood rapt; Dunham kept up a show of singing for the church"s sake. The others made no pretense of looking at the words; they looked at her, and she began to falter, hearing herself alone. Then Staniford struck in again wildly, and the sea-voices lent their powerful discord, while the girl"s contralto thrilled through all.
"Well, Miss Blood," said the captain, when the service had ended in that subordination of the spiritual to the artistic interest which marks the process and the close of so much public worship in our day, "you"ve given us a surprise. I guess we shall keep you pretty busy with our calls for music, after this."
"She is a genius!" observed Staniford at his first opportunity with Dunham. "I knew there must be something the matter. Of course she"s going out to school her voice; and she hasn"t strained it in idle babble about her own affairs! I must say that Lu--Miss Blood"s power of holding her tongue commands my homage. Was it her little _coup_ to wait till we got into that hopeless hobble before she struck in?"
"Coup? For shame, Staniford! Coup at such a time!"
"Well, well! I don"t say so. But for the theatre one can"t begin practicing these effects too soon. Really, that voice puts a new complexion on Miss Blood. I have a theory to reconstruct. I have been philosophizing her as a simple country girl. I must begin on an operatic novice. I liked the other better. It gave value to the black silk; as a singer she"ll wear silk as habitually as a coc.o.o.n. She will have to take some stage name; translate Blood into Italian. We shall know her hereafter as La Sanguinelli; and when she comes to Boston we shall make our modest brags about going out to Europe with her. I don"t know; I think I preferred the idyllic flavor I was beginning to find in the presence of the ordinary, futureless young girl, voyaging under the chaperonage of her own innocence,--the Little Sister of the Whole Ship. But this crepusculant prima donna--no, I don"t like it. Though it explains some things. These splendid creatures are never sent half equipped into the world. I fancy that where there"s an operatic voice, there"s an operatic soul to go with it. Well, La Sanguinelli will wear me out, yet! Suggest some new topic, Dunham; talk of something else, for heaven"s sake!"
"Do you suppose," asked Dunham, "that she would like to help get up some _musicales_, to pa.s.s away the time?"
"Oh, do you call that talking of something else? What an insatiate organizer you are! You organize shuffleboard; you organize public worship; you want to organize musicales. She would have to do all your music for you."
"I think she would like to go in for it," said Dunham. "It must be a pleasure to exercise such a gift as that, and now that it"s come out in the way it has, it would be rather awkward for us not to recognize it."
Staniford refused point-blank to be a party to the new enterprise, and left Dunham to his own devices at dinner, where he proposed the matter.
"If you had my Persis here, now," observed Captain Jenness, "with her parlor organ, you could get along."
"I wish Miss Jenness was here," said Dunham, politely. "But we must try to get on as it is. With Miss Blood"s voice to start with, nothing ought to discourage us." Dunham had a thin and gentle pipe of his own, and a fairish style in singing, but with his natural modesty he would not offer himself as a performer except in default of all others. "Don"t you sing, Mr. Hicks?"