rested well! Saw your grandfather off all right, and kept him from taking the wrong train with my own hand. He's terribly excitable. Well, I suppose I shall be just so, at his age. Here!” The captain caught up a stool and set it near the bulwark for her. “There! You make yourself comfortable wherever you like. You're at home, you know.” He was off again in a moment. Lydia cast her eye over at the tug. On the deck, near the pilot-house, stood the young man who had stopped the afternoon before, while she sat at the warehouse door, and asked her grandfather if she were not ill. At his feet was a substantial valise, and over his arm hung a shawl. He was smoking, and seated near him, on another valise, was his companion of the day before, also smoking. In the instant that Lydia caught sight of them, she perceived that they both recognized her and exchanged, as it were, a start of surprise. But they remained as before, except that he who was seated drew out a fresh cigarette, and without looking up reached to the other for a light. They were both men of good height, and they looked fresh and strong, with something very alert in their slight movements,—sudden turns of the head and brisk nods, which were not nervously quick. Lydia wondered at their presence there in an ignorance which could not even conjecture. She knew too little to know that they could not have any destination on the tug, and that they would not be making a pleasure-excursion at that hour in the morning. Their having their valises with them deepened the mystery, which was not solved till the tug's engines fell silent, and at an unnoticed order a space in the bulwark not far from Lydia was opened and steps were let down the side of the ship. Then the young men, who had remained, to all appearance, perfectly unconcerned, caught up their valises and climbed to the deck of the Aroostook. They did not give her more than a glance out of the corners of their eyes, but the surprise of their coming on board was so great a shock that she did not observe that the tug, casting loose from the ship, was describing a curt and foamy semicircle for her return to the city, and that the Aroostook, with a cloud of snowy canvas filling overhead, was moving over the level sea with the light ease of a bird that half swims, half flies, along the water. A sudden dismay, which was somehow not fear so much as an overpowering sense of isolation, fell upon the girl. She caught at Thomas, going forward with some dishes in his hand, with a pathetic appeal.
“Where are you going, Thomas?”
“I'm going to the cook's galley to help dish up the breakfast.”
“What's the cook's galley?”
“Don't you know? The kitchen.”
“Let me go with you. I should like to see the kitchen.” She trembled with eagerness. Arrived at the door of the narrow passage that ran across the deck aft of the forecastle, she looked in and saw, amid a haze of frying and broiling, the short, stocky figure of a negro, bow-legged, and unnaturally erect from the waist up. At sight of Lydia, he made a respectful duck forward with his uncouth body. “Why, are you the cook?” she almost screamed in response to this obeisance.
“Yes, miss,” said the man, humbly, with a turn of the pleading black eyes of the negro.
Lydia grew more peremptory: “Why—why—I thought the cook was a woman!”
“Very sorry, miss,” began the negro, with a deprecatory smile, in a slow, mild voice.
Thomas burst into a boy's yelling laugh: “Well, if that ain't the best joke on Gabriel! He'll never hear the last of it when I tell it to the second officer!”
“Thomas!” cried Lydia, terribly, “you shall not!” She stamped her foot. “Do you hear me?”
The boy checked his laugh abruptly. “Yes, ma'am,” he said submissively.
“Well, then!” returned Lydia. She stalked proudly back to the cabin gangway, and descending shut herself into her state-room.
V.
A few hours later Deacon Latham came into the house with a milk-pan full of pease. He set this down on one end of the kitchen table, with his straw hat beside it, and then took a chair at the other end and fell into the attitude of the day before, when he sat in the parlor with Lydia and Miss Maria waiting for the stage; his mouth was puckered to a whistle, and his fingers were held above the board in act to drub it. Miss Maria turned the pease out on the table, and took the pan into her lap. She shelled at the pease in silence, till the sound of their pelting, as they were dropped on the tin, was lost in their multitude; then she said, with a sharp, querulous, pathetic impatience, “Well, father, I suppose you're thinkin' about Lyddy.”
“Yes, Maria, I be,” returned her father, with uncommon plumpness, as if here now were something he had made up his mind to stand to. “I been thinkin' that Lyddy's a woman grown, as you may say.”
“Yes,” admitted Miss Maria, “she's a woman, as far forth as that goes. What put it into your head?”
“Well, I d'know as I know. But it's just like this: I got to thinkin' whether she mightn't get to feelin' rather lonely on the voyage, without any other woman to talk to.”
“I guess,” said Miss Maria, tranquilly, “she's goin' to feel lonely enough at times, any way, poor thing! But I told her if she wanted advice or help about anything just to go to the stewardess. That Mrs. Bland that spent the summer at the Parkers' last year was always tellin' how they went to the stewardess for most everything, and she give her five dollars in gold when they got into Boston. I shouldn't want Lyddy should give so much as that, but I should want she should give something, as long's it's the custom.”
“They don't have 'em on sailin' vessels, Captain Jenness said; they only have 'em on steamers,” said Deacon Latham.
“Have what?” asked Miss Maria, sharply.
“Stewardesses. They've got a cabin-boy.”
Miss Maria desisted a moment from her work; then she answered, with a gruff shortness peculiar to her, “Well, then, she can go to the cook, I suppose. It wouldn't matter which she went to, I presume.”
Deacon Latham looked up with the air of confessing to sin before the whole congregation. “The cook's a man,—a black man,” he said.
Miss Maria dropped a handful of pods into the pan, and sent a handful of peas rattling across the table on to the floor. “Well, who in Time”—the expression was strong, but she used it without hesitation, and was never known to repent it “will she go to, then?”
“I declare for't,” said her father, “I don't know. I d'know as I ever thought it out fairly before; but just now when I was pickin' the pease for you, my mind got to dwellin' on Lyddy, and then it come to me all at once: there she was, the only one among a whole shipful, and I—I didn't know but what she might think it rather of a strange position for her.”
“Oh!” exclaimed Miss Maria, petulantly. “I guess Lyddy'd know how to conduct herself wherever she was; she's a born lady, if ever there was one. But what I think is—” Miss Maria paused, and did not say what she thought; but it was evidently not the social aspect of the matter which was uppermost in her mind. In fact, she had never been at all afraid of men, whom she regarded as a more inefficient and feebler-minded kind of women.
“The only thing't makes me feel easier is what the captain said about the young men,” said Deacon Latham.
“What young men?” asked Miss Maria.
“Why, I told you about 'em!” retorted the old man, with some exasperation.
