The Lady of the Aroostook by W. D. Howells

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"That's merely the strangeness of everything. There's nothing like
local familiarity to make the time pass,--except monotony; and one
gets both at sea. Next week will go faster than this, and we shall
all be at Trieste before we know it. Of course we shall have a storm
or two, and that will retard us in fact as well as fancy. But you
wouldn't feel that you'd been at sea if you hadn't had a storm."

He knew that his tone was patronizing, but he had theorized the girl
so much with a certain slight in his mind that he was not able at once
to get the tone which he usually took towards women. This might not,
indeed, have pleased some women any better than patronage: it mocked
while it caressed all their little pretenses and artificialities; he
addressed them as if they must be in the joke of themselves, and did
not expect to be taken seriously. At the same time he liked them
greatly, and would not on any account have had the silliest of them
different from what she was. He did not seek them as Dunham did;
their society was not a matter of life or death with him; but he
had an elder-brotherly kindness for the whole sex.

Lydia waited awhile for him to say something more, but he added
nothing, and she observed, with a furtive look: "I presume you've
seen some very severe storms at sea."

"No," Staniford answered, "I haven't. I've been over several times,
but I've never seen anything alarming. I've experienced the ordinary
seasickening tempestuousness."

"Have you--have you ever been in Italy?" asked Lydia, after another
pause.

"Yes," he said, "twice; I'm very fond of Italy." He spoke of it in
a familiar tone that might well have been discouraging to one of her
total unacquaintance with it. Presently he added of his own motion,
looking at her with his interest in her as a curious study, "You're
going to Venice, I think Mr. Dunham told me."

"Yes," said Lydia.

"Well, I think it's rather a pity that you shouldn't arrive there
directly, without the interposition of Trieste." He scanned her yet
more closely, but with a sort of absence in his look, as if he
addressed some ideal of her.

"Why?" asked Lydia, apparently pushed to some self-assertion by
this way of being looked and talked at.

"It's the strangest place in the world," said Staniford; and then he
mused again. "But I suppose--" He did not go on, and the word fell
again to Lydia.

"I'm going to visit my aunt, who is staying there. She was where I
live, last summer, and she told us about it. But I couldn't seem to
understand it."

"No one can understand it, without seeing it."

"I've read some descriptions of it," Lydia ventured.

"They're of no use,--the books."

"Is Trieste a strange place, too?"

"It's strange, as a hundred other places are,--and it's picturesque;
but there's only one Venice."

"I'm afraid sometimes," she faltered, as if his manner in regard to
this peculiar place had been hopelessly exclusive, "that it will be
almost too strange."

"Oh, that's another matter," said Staniford. "I confess I should be
rather curious to know whether you liked Venice. I like it, but I can
imagine myself sympathizing with people who detested it,--if they said
so. Let me see what will give you some idea of it. Do you know Boston
well?"

"No; I've only been there twice," Lydia acknowledged.

"Then you've never seen the Back Bay by night, from the Long Bridge.
Well, let me see--"

"I'm afraid," interposed Lydia, "that I've not been about enough for
you to give me an idea from other places. We always go to Greenfield
to do our trading; and I've been to Keene and Springfield a good many
times."

"I'm sorry to say I haven't," said Staniford. "But I'll tell you:
Venice looks like an inundated town. If you could imagine those
sunset clouds yonder turned marble, you would have Venice as she is
at sunset. You must first think of the sea when you try to realize
the place. If you don't find the sea too strange, you won't find
Venice so."

"I wish it would ever seem half as home-like!" cried the girl.

"Then you find the ship--I'm glad you find the ship--home-like,"
said Staniford, tentatively.

"Oh, yes; everything is so convenient and pleasant. It seems
sometimes as if I had always lived here."

"Well, that's very nice," assented Staniford, rather blankly. "Some
people feel a little queer at sea--in the beginning. And you haven't
--at all?" He could not help this leading question, yet he knew its
meanness, and felt remorse for it.

"Oh, _I_ did, at first," responded the girl, but went no farther;
and Staniford was glad of it. After all, why should he care to know
what was in her mind?

"Captain Jenness," he merely said, "understands making people
at home."

"Oh, yes, indeed," assented Lydia. "And Mr. Watterson is very
agreeable, and Mr. Mason. I didn't suppose sailors were so. What
soft, mild voices they have!"

"That's the speech of most of the Down East coast people."

"Is it? I like it better than our voices. Our voices are so sharp
and high, at home."

"It's hard to believe that," said Staniford, with a smile.

Lydia looked at him. "Oh, I wasn't born in South Bradfield. I was
ten years old when I went there to live."

"Where _were_ you born, Miss Blood?" he asked.

"In California. My father had gone out for his health, but he died
there."

"Oh!" said Staniford. He had a book in his hand, and he began to
scribble a little sketch of Lydia's pose, on a fly-leaf. She looked
round and saw it. "You've detected me," he said; "I haven't any right
to keep your likeness, now. I must make you a present of this work
of art, Miss Blood." He finished the sketch with some ironical
flourishes, and made as if to tear out the leaf.

"Oh!" cried Lydia, simply, "you will spoil the book!"

"Then the book shall go with the picture, if you'll let it," said
Staniford.

"Do you mean to give it to me?" she asked, with surprise.

"That was my munificent intention. I want to write your name in it.
What's the initial of your first name, Miss Blood?"

"L, thank you," said Lydia.

Staniford gave a start. "No!" he exclaimed. It seemed a fatality.

"My name is Lydia," persisted the girl. "What letter should it begin
with?"

"Oh--oh, I knew Lydia began with an L," stammered Staniford, "but
I--I--I thought your first name was--"

"What?" asked Lydia sharply.

"I don't know. Lily," he answered guiltily.

"Lily _Blood_!" cried the girl. "Lydia is bad enough; but
_Lily_ Blood! They couldn't have been such fools!"

"I beg your pardon. Of course not. I don't know how I could have got
the idea. It was one of those impressions--hallucinations--" Staniford
found himself in an attitude of lying excuse towards the simple girl,
over whom he had been lording it in satirical fancy ever since he had
seen her, and meekly anxious that she should not be vexed with him.
He began to laugh at his predicament, and she smiled at his mistake.
"What is the date?" he asked.

"The 15th," she said; and he wrote under the sketch, _Lydia Blood.
Ship Aroostook, August_ 15, 1874, and handed it to her, with a bow
surcharged with gravity.

She took it, and regarded the picture without comment.

"Ah!" said Staniford, "I see that you know how bad my sketch is.
You sketch."

"No, I don't know how to draw," replied Lydia.

"You criticise."

"No."

"So glad," said Staniford. He began to like this. A young man must
find pleasure in sitting alone near a pretty young girl, and talking
with her about herself and himself, no matter how plain and dull
her speech is; and Staniford, though he found Lydia as blankly
unresponsive as might be to the flattering irony of his habit, amused
himself in realizing that here suddenly he was almost upon the terms
of window-seat flirtation with a girl whom lately he had treated
with perfect indifference, and just now with fatherly patronage.
The situation had something more even than the usual window-seat
advantages; it had qualities as of a common shipwreck, of their being
cast away on a desolate island together. He felt more than ever that
he must protect this helpless loveliness, since it had begun to please
his imagination. "You don't criticise," he said. "Is that because you
are so amiable? I'm sure you could, if you would."

"No," returned Lydia; "I don't really know. But I've often wished
I did know."

"Then you didn't teach drawing, in your school?"

"How did you know I had a school?" asked Lydia quickly.

He disliked to confess his authority, because he disliked the
authority, but he said, "Mr. Hicks told us."

"Mr. Hicks!" Lydia gave a little frown as of instinctive displeasure,
which gratified Staniford.

"Yes; the cabin-boy told him. You see, we are dreadful gossips on
the Aroostook,--though there are so few ladies--" It had slipped
from him, but it seemed to have no personal slant for Lydia.

"Oh, yes; I told Thomas," she said. "No; it's only a country school.
Once I thought I should go down to the State Normal School, and
study drawing there; but I never did. Are you--are you a painter,
Mr. Staniford?"

He could not recollect that she had pronounced his name before; he
thought it came very winningly from her lips. "No, I'm not a painter.
I'm not anything." He hesitated; then he added recklessly, "I'm a
farmer."

"A farmer?" Lydia looked incredulous, but grave.

"Yes; I'm a horny-handed son of the soil. I'm a cattle-farmer; I'm
a sheep-farmer; I don't know which. One day I'm the one, and the next
day I'm the other." Lydia looked mystified, and Staniford continued:
"I mean that I have no profession, and that sometimes I think of going
into farming, out West."

"Yes?" said Lydia.

"How should I like it? Give me an opinion, Miss Blood."

"Oh, I don't know," answered the girl.

"You would never have dreamt that I was a farmer, would you?"

"No, I shouldn't," said Lydia, honestly. "It's very hard work."

"And I don't look fond of hard work?"

"I didn't say that."

"And I've no right to press you for your meaning."

"What I meant was--I mean--Perhaps if you had never tried it you
didn't know what very hard work it was. Some of the summer boarders
used to think our farmers had easy times."

"I never was a summer boarder of that description. I know that farming
is hard work, and I'm going into it because I dislike it. What do you
think of that as a form of self-sacrifice?"

"I don't see why any one should sacrifice himself uselessly."

"You don't? You have very little conception of martyrdom. Do you
like teaching school?"

"No," said Lydia promptly.

"Why do you teach, then?" Staniford had blundered. He knew why
she taught, and he felt instantly that he had hurt her pride, more
sensitive than that of a more sophisticated person, who would have had
no scruple in saying that she did it because she was poor. He tried
to retrieve himself. "Of course, I understand that school-teaching
is useful self-sacrifice." He trembled lest she should invent some
pretext for leaving him; he could not afford to be left at a
disadvantage. "But do you know, I would no more have taken you
for a teacher than you me for a farmer."

"Yes?" said Lydia.

He could not tell whether she was appeased or not, and he rather
feared not. "You don't ask why. And I asked you why at once."

Lydia laughed. "Well, why?"

"Oh, that's a secret. I'll tell you one of these days." He had really
no reason; he said this to gain time. He was always honest in his talk
with men, but not always with women.

"I suppose I look very young," said Lydia. "I used to be afraid of
the big boys."

"If the boys were big enough," interposed Staniford, "they must have
been afraid of you."

Lydia said, as if she had not understood, "I had hard work to get
my certificate. But I was older than I looked."

"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 assent.

Staniford fell into a musing mood, which was without visible
embarrassment 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 asserted 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 sex,
"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 stitched 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," assented Dunham with enthusiasm; "isn't she a nice girl?"

"She's intolerably passive. Or not passive, 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-shore, 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 spaces, 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 passed 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 circumstance 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," assented 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 assumed the more disagreeable part of proposing the
matter to Hicks, who gave a humorous assent, 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 cocoon. 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 pass 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?"

"Anything to oblige a friend," returned Hicks. "But I don't sing
--before Miss Blood."

"Miss Blood," said Staniford, listening in ironic safety, "you overawe
us all. I never did sing, but I think I should want to make an effort
if you were not by."

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