The Lady of the Aroostook Part 24

In his heart Staniford had often thought that he could have done very much less than jump overboard after Hicks, and could very properly have left him to the ordinary life-saving apparatus of the ship. But if he had been putting the matter to some lady in society who was aggressively praising him for his action, he would have said just what Lydia had said for him,--that he could not have done anything less. He might have said it, however, in such a way that the lady would have pursued his retreat from her praises with still fonder applause; whereas this girl seemed to think there was nothing else to be said. He began to stand in awe of her heroic simplicity. If she drew every-day breath in that lofty air, what could she really think of him, who preferred on principle the atmosphere of the valley? "Do you know, Miss Blood," he said gravely, "that you pay me a very high compliment?"

"How?" she asked.

"You rate my maximum as my mean temperature." He felt that she listened inquiringly. "I don't think I'm habitually up to a thing of that kind,"

he explained.

"Oh, no," she a.s.sented, quietly; "but when he struck at you so, you had to do everything."

"Ah, you have the pitiless Puritan conscience that takes the life out of us all!" cried Staniford, with sudden bitterness. Lydia seemed startled, shocked, and her hand trembled on his arm, as if she had a mind to take it away. "I was a long time laboring up to that point. I suppose you are always there!"

"I don't understand," she said, turning her head round with the slow motion of her beauty, and looking him full in the face.

"I can't explain now. I will, by and by,--when we get to Venice," he added, with quick lightness.

"You put off everything till we get to Venice," she said, doubtfully.

"I beg your pardon. It was you who did it the last time."

"Was it?" She laughed. "So it was! I was thinking it was you."

It consoled him a little that she should have confused them in her thought, in this way. "What was it you were to tell me in Venice?" he asked.

"I can't think, now."

"Very likely something of yourself--or myself. A third person might say our conversational range was limited."

"Do you think it is very egotistical?" she asked, in the gay tone which gave him relief from the sense of oppressive elevation of mind in her.

"It is in me,--not in you."

"But I don't see the difference."

"I will explain sometime."

"When we get to Venice?"

They both laughed. It was very nonsensical; but nonsense is sometimes enough.

When they were serious again, "Tell me," he said, "what you thought of that lady in Messina, the other day."

She did not affect not to know whom he meant. She merely said, "I only saw her a moment."

"But you thought something. If we only see people a second we form some opinion of them."

"She is very fine-appearing," said Lydia.

Staniford smiled at the countrified phrase; he had observed that when she spoke her mind she used an instinctive good language; when she would not speak it, she fell into the phraseology of the people with whom she had lived. "I see you don't wish to say, because you think she is a friend of mine. But you can speak out freely. We were not friends; we were enemies, if anything."

Staniford's meaning was clear enough to himself; but Lydia paused, as if in doubt whether he was jesting or not, before she asked, "Why were you riding with her then?"

"I was driving with her," he replied, "I suppose, because she asked me."

"_Asked_ you!" cried the girl; and he perceived her moral recoil both from himself and from a woman who could be so unseemly. That lady would have found it delicious if she could have known that a girl placed like Lydia was shocked at her behavior. But he was not amused. He was touched by the simple self-respect that would not let her suffer from what was not wrong in itself, but that made her shrink from a voluntary semblance of unwomanliness. It endeared her not only to his pity, but to that sense which in every man consecrates womanhood, and waits for some woman to be better than all her s.e.x. Again he felt the pang he had remotely known before. What would she do with these ideals of hers in that depraved Old World,--so long past trouble for its sins as to have got a sort of sweetness and innocence in them,--where her facts would be utterly irreconcilable with her ideals, and equally incomprehensible?

They walked up and down a few turns without speaking again of that lady.

He knew that she grew momently more constrained toward him; that the pleasure of the time was spoiled for her; that she had lost her trust in him, and this half amused, half afflicted him. It did not surprise him when, at their third approach to the cabin gangway, she withdrew her hand from his arm and said, stiffly, "I think I will go down." But she did not go at once. She lingered, and after a certain hesitation she said, without looking at him, "I didn't express what I wanted to, about Mr. Hicks, and--what you did. It is what I thought you would do."

"Thanks," said Staniford, with sincere humility. He understood how she had had this in her mind, and how she would not withhold justice from him because he had fallen in her esteem; how rather she would be the more resolute to do him justice for that reason.

XIX.

He could see that she avoided being alone with him the next day, but he took it for a sign of relenting, perhaps helpless relenting, that she was in her usual place on deck in the evening. He went to her, and, "I see that you haven't forgiven me," he said.

"Forgiven you?" she echoed.

"Yes," he said, "for letting that lady ask me to drive with her."

"I never said--" she began.

"Oh, no! But I knew it, all the same. It was not such a very wicked thing, as those things go. But I liked your not liking it. Will you let me say something to you?"

"Yes," she answered, rather breathlessly.

"You must think it's rather an odd thing to say, as I ask leave. It is; and I hardly know how to say it. I want to tell you that I've made bold to depend a great deal upon your good opinion for my peace of mind, of late, and that I can't well do without it now."

She stole the quickest of her bird-like glances at him, but did not speak; and though she seemed, to his anxious fancy, poising for flight, she remained, and merely looked away, like the bird that will not or cannot fly.

"You don't resent my making you my outer conscience, do you, and my knowing that you're not quite pleased with me?"

She looked down and away with one of those turns of the head, so precious when one who beholds them is young, and caught at the fringe of her shawl. "I have no right," she began.

"Oh, I give you the right!" he cried, with pa.s.sionate urgence. "You have the right. Judge me!" She only looked more grave, and he hurried on.

"It was no great harm of her to ask me; that's common enough; but it was harm of me to go if I didn't quite respect her,--if I thought her silly, and was willing to be amused with her. One hasn't any right to do that.

I saw this when I saw you." She still hung her head, and looked away. "I want you to tell me something," he pursued. "Do you remember once--the second time we talked together--that you said Dunham was in earnest, and you wouldn't answer when I asked you about myself? Do you remember?"

"Yes," said the girl.

"I didn't care, then. I care very much now. You don't think me--you think I can be in earnest when I will, don't you? And that I can regret--that I really wish--" He took the hand that played with the shawl-fringe, but she softly drew it away.

"Ah, I see!" he said. "You can't believe in me. You don't believe that I can be a good man--like Dunham!"

She answered in the same breathless murmur, "I think you are good." Her averted face drooped lower.

"I will tell you all about it, some day!" he cried, with joyful vehemence. "Will you let me?"