The Lady of the Aroostook Part 18

"No, no!" she said, still in his mood.

"Well, you must allow it was a pretty speech."

"Perhaps," said Lydia, with sudden gravity, in which there seemed to Staniford a tender insinuation of reproach, "he was laughing at her."

"If he was, he was properly punished. He went on to Rome, and when he came back to Venice the beautiful nun was dead. He thought that his words 'seemed fatal.' Do you suppose it would kill you _now_ to be jested with?"

"I don't think people like it generally."

"Why, Miss Blood, you are intense!"

"I don't know what you mean by that," said Lydia.

"You like to take things seriously. You can't bear to think that people are not the least in earnest, even when they least seem so."

"Yes," said the girl, thoughtfully, "perhaps that's true. Should you like to be made fun of, yourself?"

"I shouldn't mind it, I fancy, though it would depend a great deal upon who made fun of me. I suppose that women always laugh at men,--at their clumsiness, their want of tact, the fit of their clothes."

"I don't know. I should not do that with any one I--"

"You liked? Oh, none of them do!" cried Staniford.

"I was not going to say that," faltered the girl.

"What were you going to say?"

She waited a moment. "Yes, I was going to say that," she a.s.sented with a sigh of helpless veracity. "What makes you laugh?" she asked, in distress.

"Something I like. I'm different from you: I laugh at what I like; I like your truthfulness,--it's charming."

"I didn't know that truth need be charming."

"It had better be, in women, if it's to keep even with the other thing."

Lydia seemed shocked; she made a faint, involuntary motion to withdraw her hand, but he closed his arm upon it. "Don't condemn me for thinking that fibbing is charming. I shouldn't like it at all in you. Should you in me?"

"I shouldn't in any one," said Lydia.

"Then what is it you dislike in me?" he suddenly demanded.

"I didn't say that I disliked anything in you."

"But you have made fun of something in me?"

"No, no!"

"Then it wasn't the stirring of a guilty conscience when you asked me whether I should like to be made fun of? I took it for granted you'd been doing it."

"You are very suspicious."

"Yes; and what else?"

"Oh, you like to know just what every one thinks and feels."

"Go on!" cried Staniford. "a.n.a.lyze me, formulate me!"

"That's all."

"All I come to?"

"All I have to say."

"That's very little. Now, I'll begin on you. You don't care what people think or feel."

"Oh, yes, I do. I care too much."

"Do you care what I think?"

"Yes."

"Then I think you're too unsuspicious."

"Ought I to suspect somebody?" she asked, lightly.

"Oh, that's the way with all your s.e.x. One asks you to be suspicious, and you ask whom you shall suspect. You can do nothing in the abstract.

I should like to be suspicious for you. Will you let me?"

"Oh, yes, if you like to be."

"Thanks. I shall be terribly vigilant,--a perfect dragon. And you really invest me with authority?"

"Yes."

"That's charming." Staniford drew a long breath. After a s.p.a.ce of musing, he said, "I thought I should be able to begin by attacking some one else, but I must commence at home, and denounce myself as quite unworthy of walking to and fro, and talking nonsense to you. You must beware of me, Miss Blood."

"Why?" asked the girl.

"I am very narrow-minded and prejudiced, and I have violent antipathies.

I shouldn't be able to do justice to any one I disliked."

"I think that's the trouble with all of us," said Lydia.

"Oh, but only in degree. I should not allow, if I could help it, a man whom I thought shabby, and coa.r.s.e at heart, the privilege of speaking to any one I valued,--to my sister, for instance. It would shock me to find her have any taste in common with such a man, or amused by him. Don't you understand?"

"Yes," said Lydia. It seemed to him as if by some infinitely subtle and unconscious affinition she relaxed toward him as they walked. This was incomparably sweet and charming to Staniford,--too sweet as recognition of his protecting friendship to be questioned as anything else. He felt sure that she had taken his meaning, and he rested content from further trouble in regard to what it would have been impossible to express. Her tacit confidence touched a kindred spring in him, and he began to talk to her of himself: not of his character or opinions,--they had already gone over them,--but of his past life, and his future. Their strangeness to her gave certain well-worn topics novelty, and the familiar project of a pastoral career in the far West invested itself with a color of romance which it had not worn before. She tried to remember, at his urgence, something about her childhood in California; and she told him a great deal more about South Bradfield. She described its characters and customs, and, from no vantage-ground or stand-point but her native feeling of their oddity, and what seemed her sympathy with him, made him see them as one might whose life had not been pa.s.sed among them. Then they began to compare their own traits, and amused themselves to find how many they had in common. Staniford related a singular experience of his on a former voyage to Europe, when he dreamed of a collision, and woke to hear a great trampling and uproar on deck, which afterwards turned out to have been caused by their bare escape from running into an iceberg. She said that she had had strange dreams, too, but mostly when she was a little girl; once she had had a presentiment that troubled her, but it did not come true. They both said they did not believe in such things, and agreed that it was only people's love of mystery that kept them noticed. He permitted himself to help her, with his disengaged hand, to draw her shawl closer about the shoulder that was away from him. He gave the action a philosophical and impersonal character by saying immediately afterwards: "The sea is really the only mystery left us, and that will never be explored. They circ.u.mnavigate the whole globe,--" here he put the gathered shawl into the fingers which she stretched through his arm to take it, and she said, "Oh, thank you!"--"but they don't describe the sea. War and plague and famine submit to the ameliorations of science,"--the closely drawn shawl pressed her against his shoulder; his mind wandered; he hardly knew what he was saying,--"but the one utterly inexorable calamity--the same now as when the first sail was spread--is a shipwreck."

"Yes," she said, with a deep inspiration. And now they walked back and forth in silence broken only by a casual word or desultory phrase. Once Staniford had thought the conditions of these promenades perilously suggestive of love-making; another time he had blamed himself for not thinking of this; now he neither thought nor blamed himself for not thinking. The fact justified itself, as if it had been the one perfectly right and wise thing in a world where all else might be questioned.

"Isn't it pretty late?" she asked, at last.