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.”
“But don't you--don't you play something, anything?” persisted Dunham,
in desperate appeal to Hicks.
“Well, yes,” the latter admitted, “I play the flute a little.”
“Flutes on water!” said Staniford. Hicks looked at him in sulky dislike,
but as if resolved not to be put down by him.
“And have you got your flute with you?” demanded Dunham, joyously.
“Yes, I have,” replied Hicks.
“Then we are all right. I think I can carry a part, and if you will play
to Miss Blood's singing--”
“Try it this evening, if you like,” said the other.
“Well, ah--I don't know. Perhaps--we hadn't better begin this evening.”
Staniford laughed at Dunham's embarrassment. “You might have a sacred
concert, and Mr. Hicks could represent the shawms and cymbals with his
flute.”
Dunham looked sorry for Staniford's saying this. Captain Jenness stared
at him, as if his taking the names of these scriptural instruments in
vain were a kind of blasphemy, and Lydia seemed puzzled and a little
troubled.
“I didn't think of its being Sunday,” said Hicks, with what Staniford
felt to be a cunning assumption of manly frankness, “or any more Sunday
than usual; seems as if we had had a month of Sundays already since
we sailed. I'm not much on religion myself, but I shouldn't like to
interfere with other people's principles.”
Staniford was vexed with himself for his scornful pleasantry, and vexed
with the others for taking it so seriously and heavily, and putting him
so unnecessarily in the wrong. He was angry with Dunham, and he said to
Hicks, “Very just sentiments.”
“I am glad you like them,” replied Hicks, with sullen apprehension of
the offensive tone.
Staniford turned to Lydia. “I suppose that in South Bradfield your
Sabbath is over at sundown on Sunday evening.”
“That used to be the custom,” answered the girl. “I've heard my
grandfather tell of it.”
“Oh, yes,” interposed Captain Jenness. “They used to keep Saturday night
down our way, too. I can remember when I was a boy. It came pretty hard
to begin so soon, but it seemed to kind of break it, after all, having a
night in.”
The captain did not know what Staniford began to laugh at. “Our Puritan
ancestors knew just how much human nature could stand, after all. We
did not have an uninterrupted Sabbath till the Sabbath had become much
milder. Is that it?”
The captain had probably no very clear notion of what this meant, but
simply felt it to be a critical edge of some sort. “I don't know as you
can have too much religion,” he remarked. “I've seen some pretty rough
customers in the church, but I always thought, What would they be out of
it!”
“Very true!” said Staniford, smiling. He wanted to laugh again, but he
liked the captain too well to do that; and then he began to rage in his
heart at the general stupidity which had placed him in the attitude of
mocking at religion, a thing he would have loathed to do. It seemed to
him that Dunham was answerable for his false position. “But we shall not
see the right sort of Sabbath till Mr. Dunham gets his Catholic church
fully going,” he added.
They all started, and looked at Dunham as good Protestants must when
some one whom they would never have suspected of Catholicism turns out
to be a Catholic. Dunham cast a reproachful glance at his friend, but
said simply, “I am a Catholic,--that is true; but I do not admit the
pretensions of the Bishop of Rome.”
The rest of the company apparently could not follow him in making this
distinction; perhaps some of them did not quite know who the Bishop of
Rome was. Lydia continued to look at him in fascination; Hicks seemed
disposed to whistle, if such a thing were allowable; Mr. Watterson
devoutly waited for the captain. “Well,” observed the captain at last,
with the air of giving the devil his due, “I've seen some very good
people among the Catholics.”
“That's so, Captain Jenness,” said the first officer.
“I don't see,” said Lydia, without relaxing her gaze, “why, if you are a
Catholic, you read the service of a Protestant church.”
“It is not a Protestant church,” answered Dunham, gently, “as I have
tried to explain to you.”
“The Episcopalian?” demanded Captain Jenness.
“The Episcopalian,” sweetly reiterated Dunham.
“I should like to know what kind of a church it is, then,” said Captain
Jenness, triumphantly.
“An Apostolic church.”
Captain Jenness rubbed his nose, as if this were a new kind of church to
him.
“Founded by Saint Henry VIII. himself,” interjected Staniford.
“No, Staniford,” said Dunham, with a soft repressiveness. And now a
threatening light of zeal began to burn in his kindly eyes. These souls
had plainly been given into his hands for ecclesiastical enlightenment.
“If our friends will allow me, I will explain--”
Staniford's shaft had recoiled upon his own head. “O Lord!” he cried,
getting up from the table, “I can't stand _that_!” The others regarded
him, as he felt, even to that weasel of a Hicks, as a sheep of uncommon
blackness. He went on deck, and smoked a cigar without relief. He still
heard the girl's voice in singing; and he still felt in his nerves the
quality of latent passion in it which had thrilled him when she sang.
His thought ran formlessly upon her future, and upon what sort of
being was already fated to waken her to those possibilities of intense
suffering and joy which he imagined in her. A wound at his heart,
received long before, hurt vaguely; and he felt old.