Part 7 (1/2)

”Oh, come, now!” protested Dunham. ”I wouldn't say that!” The cook and Lydia stared at him in equal surprise.

”Well,” answered the cook, ”I'll kill the hens first, den. It don't make any difference to me which I kill. I dunno but de hens is tenderer.” He smoked in a bland indifference.

”Oh, hold on!” exclaimed Dunham, in repet.i.tion of his helpless protest.

Lydia stooped down to make closer acquaintance with the devoted birds.

They huddled themselves away from her in one corner of their prison, and talked together in low tones of grave mistrust. ”Poor things!” she said.

As a country girl, used to the practical ends of poultry, she knew as well as the cook that it was the fit and simple destiny of chickens to be eaten, sooner or later; and it must have been less in commiseration of their fate than in self-pity and regret for the scenes they recalled that she sighed. The hens that burrowed yesterday under the lilacs in the door-yard; the c.o.c.k that her aunt so often drove, insulted and exclamatory, at the head of his harem, out of forbidden garden bounds; the social groups that scratched and descanted lazily about the wide, sunny barn doors; the anxious companies seeking their favorite perches, with alarming outcries, in the dusk of summer evenings; the sentinels answering each other from farm to farm before winter dawns, when all the hills were drowned in snow, were of kindred with these hapless prisoners.

Dunham was touched at Lydia's compa.s.sion. ”Would you like--would you like to feed them?” he asked by a happy inspiration. He turned to the cook, with his gentle politeness: ”There's no objection to our feeding them, I suppose?”

”Laws, no!” said the cook. ”Fats 'em up.” He went inside, and reappeared with a pan full of sc.r.a.ps of meat and crusts of bread.

”Oh, I say!” cried Dunham. ”Haven't you got some grain, you know, of some sort; some seeds, don't you know?”

”They will like this,” said Lydia, while the cook stared in perplexity.

She took the pan, and opening the little door of the coop flung the provision inside. But the fowls were either too depressed in spirit to eat anything, or they were not hungry; they remained in their corner, and merely fell silent, as if a new suspicion had been roused in their unhappy b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

”Dey'll come, to it,” observed the cook.

Dunham felt far from content, and regarded the poultry with silent disappointment. ”Are you fond of pets?” he asked, after a while.

”Yes, I used to have pet chickens when I was a little thing.”

”You ought to adopt one of these,” suggested Dunham. ”That white one is a pretty creature.”

”Yes,” said Lydia. ”He looks as if he were Leghorn. Leghorn breed,” she added, in reply to Dunham's look of inquiry. ”He's a beauty.”

”Let me get him out for you a moment!” cried the young man, in his amiable zeal. Before Lydia could protest, or the cook interfere, he had opened the coop-door and plunged his arm into the tumult which his manoeuvre created within. He secured the c.o.c.kerel, and drawing it forth was about to offer it to Lydia, when in its struggles to escape it drove one of its spurs into his hand. Dunham suddenly released it; and then ensued a wild chase for its recapture, up and down the s.h.i.+p, in which it had every advantage of the young man. At last it sprang upon the rail; he put out his hand to seize it, when it rose with a desperate screech, and flew far out over the sea. They watched the suicide till it sank exhausted into a distant white-cap.

”Dat's gone,” said the cook, philosophically. Dunham looked round. Half the s.h.i.+p's company, alarmed by his steeple-chase over the deck, were there, silently agrin.

Lydia did not laugh. When he asked, still with his habitual sweetness, but entirely at random, ”Shall we--ah--go below?” she did not answer definitely, and did not go. At the same time she ceased to be so timidly intangible and aloof in manner. She began to talk to Dunham, instead of letting him talk to her; she asked him questions, and listened with deference to what he said on such matters as the probable length of the voyage and the sort of weather they were likely to have. She did not take note of his keeping his handkerchief wound round his hand, nor of his attempts to recur to the subject of his mortifying adventure. When they were again quite alone, the cook's respect having been won back through his ethnic susceptibility to silver, she remembered that she must go to her room.

”In other words,” said Staniford, after Dunham had reported the whole case to him, ”she treated your hurt vanity as if you had been her pet schoolboy. She lured you away from yourself, and got you to talking and thinking of other things. Lurella is deep, I tell you. What consummate tacticians the least of women are! It's a pity that they have to work so often in such dull material as men; they ought always to have women to operate on. The youngest of them has more wisdom in human nature than the sages of our s.e.x. I must say, Lurella is magnanimous, too. She might have taken her revenge on you for pitying her yesterday when she sat in that warehouse door on the wharf. It was rather fine in Lurella not to do it. What did she say, Dunham? What did she talk about? Did she want to know?”

”No!” shouted Dunham. ”She talked very well, like any young lady.”

”Oh, all young ladies talk well, of course. But what did this one say?

What did she do, except suffer a visible pang of homesickness at the sight of unattainable poultry? Come, you have represented the interview with Miss Blood as one of great brilliancy.”

”I haven't,” said Dunham. ”I have done nothing of the kind. Her talk was like any pleasant talk; it was refined and simple, and--un.o.btrusive.”

”That is, it was in no way remarkable,” observed Staniford, with a laugh. ”I expected something better of Lurella; I expected something salient. Well, never mind. She's behaved well by you, seeing what a goose you had made of yourself. She behaved like a lady, and I've noticed that she eats with her fork. It often happens in the country that you find the women practicing some of the arts of civilization, while their men folk are still sunk in barbaric uses. Lurella, I see, is a social creature; she was born for society, as you were, and I suppose you will be thrown a good deal together. We're all likely to be a.s.sociated rather familiarly, under the circ.u.mstances. But I wish you would note down in your mind some points of her conversation. I'm really curious to know what a girl of her traditions thinks about the world when she first sees it. Her mind must be in most respects an unbroken wilderness. She's had schooling, of course, and she knows her grammar and algebra; but she can't have had any cultivation. If she were of an earlier generation, one would expect to find something biblical in her; but you can't count upon a Puritanic culture now among our country folks.”

”If you are so curious,” said Dunham, ”why don't you study her mind, yourself?”

”No, no, that wouldn't do,” Staniford answered. ”The light of your innocence upon hers is invaluable. I can understand her better through you. You must go on. I will undertake to make your peace with Miss Hibbard.”