The Lady of the Aroostook | Page 3

curtains to the bed. He says he had it fixed up for his wife, and he lets Lyddy have it all for her own. She can set there and do her mendin' when she don't feel like comin' into the cabin. The cabin--well, I wish you could see that cabin, Maria! The first mate is a fine-appearing man, too. Some of the sailors looked pretty rough; but I guess it was as much their clothes as anything; and I d'know as Lyddy'd have a great deal to do with them, any way." The old man's treble ceased, and at the same moment the shrilling of a locust in one of the door-yard maples died away; both voices, arid, nasal, and high, lapsed as one into a common silence.
The woman stirred impatiently in her chair, as if both voices had been repeating something heard many times before. They seemed to renew her discontent. "Yes, I know; I know all that, father. But it ain't the mahogany I think of. It's the child's gettin' there safe and well."
"Well," said the old man, "I asked the captain about the seasickness, and he says she ain't nigh so likely to be sick as she would on the steamer; the motion's more regular, and she won't have the smell of the machinery. That's what he said. And he said the seasickness would do her good, any way. I'm sure I don't want her to be sick any more than you do, Maria." He added this like one who has been unjustly put upon his defense.
They now both remained silent, the woman rocking herself and fanning, and the old man holding his fingers suspended from their drubbing upon the table, and looking miserably from the woman in the rocking-chair to the girl at the window, as if a strict inquiry into the present situation might convict him of it in spite of his innocence. The girl still sat with her face turned from them, and still from time to time she put her handkerchief to her eyes and wiped away the tears. The locust in the maple began again, and shrilled inexorably. Suddenly the girl leaped to her feet.
"There's the stage!" she cried, with a tumult in her voice and manner, and a kind of choking sob. She showed, now that she stood upright, the slim and elegant shape which is the divine right of American girlhood, clothed with the stylishness that instinctive taste may evoke, even in a hill town, from study of paper patterns, Harper's Bazar, and the costume of summer boarders. Her dress was carried with spirit and effect.
"Lydia Blood!" cried the other woman, springing responsively to her feet, also, and starting toward the girl, "don't you go a step without you feel just like it! Take off your things this minute and stay, if you wouldn't jus' as lives go. It's hard enough to have you go, child, without seemin' to force you!"
"Oh, aunt Maria," answered the girl, piteously, "it almost kills me to go; but _I'm_ doing it, not you. I know how you'd like to have me stay. But don't say it again, or I couldn't bear up; and I'm going now, if I have to be carried."
The old man had risen with the others; he was shorter than either, and as he looked at them he seemed half awed, half bewildered, by so much drama. Yet it was comparatively very little. The girl did not offer to cast herself upon her aunt's neck, and her aunt did not offer her an embrace, it was only their hearts that clung together as they simply shook hands and kissed each other. Lydia whirled away for her last look at herself in the glass over the table, and her aunt tremulously began to put to rights some slight disorder in the girl's hat.
"Father," she said sharply, "are Lyddy's things all ready there by the door, so's not to keep Ezra Perkins waitin'? You know he always grumbles so. And then he gets you to the cars so't you have to wait half an hour before they start." She continued to pin and pull at details of Lydia's dress, to which she descended from her hat. "It sets real nice on you, Lyddy. I guess you'll think of the time we had gettin' it made up, when you wear it out there." Miss Maria Latham laughed nervously.
With a harsh banging and rattling, a yellow Concord coach drew up at the gate where Miss Maria had stopped the hearse. The driver got down, and without a word put Lydia's boxes and bags into the boot, and left two or three light parcels for her to take into the coach with her.
Miss Maria went down to the gate with her father and niece. "Take the