One of the advantages of the negative part assigned to women in life
is that they are seldom forced to commit themselves. They can, if they
choose, remain perfectly passive while a great many things take place in
regard to them; they need not account for what they do not do. From time
to time a man must show his hand, but save for one supreme exigency a
woman need never show hers. She moves in mystery as long as she likes;
and mere reticence in her, if she is young and fair, interprets itself
as good sense and good taste.
Lydia was, by convention as well as by instinct, mistress of the
situation when she came out to breakfast, and confronted the young men
again with collected nerves, and a reserve which was perhaps a little
too proud. The captain was there to introduce them, and presented first
Mr. Dunham, the gentleman who had spoken to her grandfather on the
wharf, and then Mr. Staniford, his friend and senior by some four or
five years. They were both of the fair New England complexion; but
Dunham's eyes were blue, and Staniford's dark gray. Their mustaches were
blonde, but Dunham's curled jauntily outward at the corners, and his
light hair waved over either temple from the parting in the middle.
Staniford's mustache was cut short; his hair was clipped tight to his
shapely head, and not parted at all; he had a slightly aquiline nose,
with sensitive nostrils, showing the cartilage; his face was darkly
freckled. They were both handsome fellows, and fittingly dressed in
rough blue, which they wore like men with the habit of good clothes;
they made Lydia such bows as she had never seen before. Then the Captain
introduced Mr. Watterson, the first officer, to all, and sat down,
saying to Thomas, with a sort of guilty and embarrassed growl, “Ain't he
out yet? Well, we won't wait,” and with but little change of tone asked
a blessing; for Captain Jenness in his way was a religious man.
There was a sixth plate laid, but the captain made no further mention of
the person who was not out yet till shortly after the coffee was poured,
when the absentee appeared, hastily closing his state-room door behind
him, and then waiting on foot, with a half-impudent, half-intimidated
air, while Captain Jenness, with a sort of elaborate repressiveness,
presented him as Mr. Hicks. He was a short and slight young man, with
a small sandy mustache curling tightly in over his lip, floating
reddish-blue eyes, and a deep dimple in his weak, slightly retreating
chin. He had an air at once amiable and baddish, with an
expression, curiously blended, of monkey-like humor and spaniel-like
apprehensiveness. He did not look well, and till he had swallowed two
cups of coffee his hand shook. The captain watched him furtively from
under his bushy eyebrows, and was evidently troubled and preoccupied,
addressing a word now and then to Mr. Watterson, who, by virtue of what
was apparently the ship's discipline, spoke only when he was spoken
to, and then answered with prompt acquiescence. Dunham and Staniford
exchanged not so much a glance as a consciousness in regard to him,
which seemed to recognize and class him. They talked to each other,
and sometimes to the captain. Once they spoke to Lydia. Mr. Dunham,
for example, said, “Miss--ah--Blood, don't you think we are uncommonly
fortunate in having such lovely weather for a start-off?”
“I don't know,” said Lydia.
Mr. Dunham arrested himself in the use of his fork. “I beg your pardon?”
he smiled.
It seemed to be a question, and after a moment's doubt Lydia answered,
“I didn't know it was strange to have fine weather at the start.”
“Oh, but I can assure you it is,” said Dunham, with a certain lady-like
sweetness of manner which he had. “According to precedent, we ought to
be all deathly seasick.”
“Not at _this_ time of year,” said Captain Jenness.
“Not at this time of _year_,” repeated Mr. Watterson, as if the remark
were an order to the crew.
Dunham referred the matter with a look to his friend, who refused
to take part in it, and then he let it drop. But presently Staniford
himself attempted the civility of some conversation with Lydia. He asked
her gravely, and somewhat severely, if she had suffered much from the
heat of the day before.
“Yes,” said Lydia, “it was very hot.”
“I'm told it was the hottest day of the summer, so far,” continued
Staniford, with the same severity.
“I want to know!” cried Lydia.
The young man did not say anything more.
As Dunham lit his cigar at Staniford's on deck, the former said
significantly, “What a very American thing!”
“What a bore!” answered the other.
Dunham had never been abroad, as one might imagine from his calling
Lydia's presence a very American thing, but he had always consorted
with people who had lived in Europe; he read the Revue des Deux Mondes
habitually, and the London weekly newspapers, and this gave him the
foreign stand-point from which he was fond of viewing his native world.
“It's incredible,” he added. “Who in the world can she be?”
“Oh, _I_ don't know,” returned Staniford, with a cold disgust. “I should
object to the society of such a young person for a month or six weeks
under the most favorable circumstances, and with frequent respites; but
to be imprisoned on the same ship with her, and to have her on one's
mind and in one's way the whole time, is more than I bargained for.
Captain Jenness should have told us; though I suppose he thought that
if _she_ could stand it, _we_ might. There's that point of view. But
it takes all ease and comfort out of the prospect. Here comes that
blackguard.” Staniford turned his back towards Mr. Hicks, who was
approaching, but Dunham could not quite do this, though he waited for
the other to speak first.
“Will you--would you oblige me with a light?” Mr. Hicks asked, taking a
cigar from his case.
“Certainly,” said Dunham, with the comradery of the smoker.
Mr. Hicks seemed to gather courage from his cigar. “You didn't expect to
find a lady passenger on board, did you?” His poor disagreeable little
face was lit up with unpleasant enjoyment of the anomaly. Dunham
hesitated for an answer.
“One never can know what one's fellow passengers are going to be,” said
Staniford, turning about, and looking not at Mr. Hicks's face, but his
feet, with an effect of being, upon the whole, disappointed not to find
them cloven. He added, to put the man down rather than from an exact
belief in his own suggestion, “She's probably some relation of the
captain's.”
“Why, that's the joke of it,” said Hicks, fluttered with his superior
knowledge. “I've been pumping the cabin-boy, and he says the captain
never saw her till yesterday. She's an up-country school-marm, and she
came down here with her grandfather yesterday. She's going out to meet
friends of hers in Venice.” The little man pulled at his cigar, and
coughed and chuckled, and waited confidently for the impression.
“Dunham,” said Staniford, “did I hand you that sketch-block of mine to
put in your bag, when we were packing last night?”
“Yes, I've got it.”
“I'm glad of that. Did you see Murray yesterday?”
“No; he was at Cambridge.”
“I thought he was to have met you at Parker's.” The conversation no
longer included Mr. Hicks or the subject he had introduced; after a
moment's hesitation, he walked away to another part of the ship. As soon
as he was beyond ear-shot, Staniford again spoke: “Dunham, this girl
is plainly one of those cases of supernatural innocence, on the part of
herself and her friends, which, as you suggested, wouldn't occur among
any other people in the world but ours.”
“You're a good fellow, Staniford!” cried Dunham.
“Not at all. I call myself simply a human being, with the elemental
instincts of a gentleman, as far as concerns this matter. The girl has
been placed in a position which could be made very painful to her. It
seems to me it's our part to prevent it from being so. I doubt if she
finds it at all anomalous, and if we choose she need never do so till
after we've parted with her. I fancy we can preserve her unconsciousness
intact.”
“Staniford, this is like you,” said his friend, with glistening eyes. “I
had some wild notion of the kind myself, but I'm so glad you spoke of it
first.”
“Well, never mind,” responded Staniford. “We must make her feel that
there is nothing irregular or uncommon in her being here as she is.
I don't know how the matter's to be managed, exactly; it must be a
negative benevolence for the most part; but it can be done. The first
thing is to cow that nuisance yonder. Pumping the cabin-boy! The little
sot! Look here, Dunham; it's such a satisfaction to me to think of
putting that fellow under foot that I'll leave you all the credit of
saving the young lady's feelings. I should like to begin stamping on him
at once.”
“I think you have made a beginning already. I confess I wish you hadn't
such heavy nails in your boots!”
“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.”