University of Virginia Library

1. CHAPTER I.
A RAY FROM THE EAST.

YOUNG Mr. Edward Wetherel and his more mature friend Mr. Frank
Wolverton were on the after promenade deck of the steamer Elm City,
bound from New York to New Haven.

“Yes, I see her,” said Wolverton, looking at the young lady whom Wetherel
was pointing out to him. “Pretty girl. Shines like a star. Wonderful
air of innocence. Who is she?”

“I think I shall astonish you, Wolverton,” replied Wetherel, obviously taking
much pleasure in talking about this young lady. “She is the daughter of
a missionary.”

“Missionary! You do astonish me. One has an idea that such people
don't have children, or have little monsters of plainness and grimness. A fellow
naturally thinks, you know, that a missionary's daughter would only make
a show in society on the principle that handsome is as handsome does. Where
does she come from?”

“From the Nestorian country, somewhere in Persia, I fancy. Her father
is quite a famous man among his set, I understand. He has done some notorious
wrestling with heathenism, or whatever the religion of the country may
be. `The celebrated Doctor Bernard.' I heard a white-cravated gentleman call
him.”

“He had better leave his missionarying to his daughter,” pronounced Wolverton,
gazing steadily at the girl, and with a gentler expression in his eyes
than was habitual with them. “I don't believe the celebrated Doctor Bernard
could hold a candle to such a young lady in the work of bringing over misbelievers.
If I were the chief high priest of the Nestorians, or whatever they
call themselves, and that little beauty should ask me to break down my altars
and forsake the faith of my ancestors. I should say, Certainly! any little thing
of the sort to please you.”

This talk was both jesting and serious. The two men spoke lightly of the
missionary “work,” obviously to them a dim and unimportant quixotism; but
with regard to the girl they were entirely sincere and respectful. Of the solemnity
of religious matters they had apparently no more perception than if
they had been denizens of some planet to which no divine revelation, whether
natural or verbal, had ever been granted. The worshipfulness of beauty, however,

they could see plainly, and they were creditably sensitive, as it appeared,
to maidenly purity.

Personally these two civilized heathens were themselves worthy of admiring
consideration. Wolverton, although not much short of forty, was as agreeable
to the artistic eye as many much younger men are, his curling black hair
being still fresh and glossy, his large brown eyes healthfully clear and resolute,
his darkly-pale cheek as firm in look as marble, and his broad, muscular figure
fit for a boat race. Wetherel, who might have been about twenty-five, was
tall, flexible, and graceful, with a blonde complexion, waving light hair, intelligent
gray eyes, and features in the main regular. The defect in his face was
a chin too prominent, too domineering, and we might say too virile. Even
in a man one would like to see more meekness of temper and persuasibility of
mind than this chin permitted.

Both were dressed with a scrupulous neatness and fastidious taste which indicated
a brahminic position in society. Only the rich and leisurely, only those
who have been able to give their lives to dandyism, can attain to such faultlessness
of costume. They were in summer suits, and yet they mirrored the
fashions. It seemed as if dust would stop short in its flight toward such neatness,
and as if grime would fall reverentially at its feet without soiling it.
Spectators of the workaday class, if of a humble-minded and impressible nature,
might easily imagine such clothing as exhaling an aroma of daintiness
and giving forth a halo of high-breeding. Of a hot summer's day it would
have seemed little less than abnormal and monstrous to be so vestured in neatness
and freshness and triumphal grace as were these lilies of the club and the
drawing-room. But the day, although sultry enough on shore to remind one
of the air of forges, was breezy and restorative on the deck of the Elm City.
The stainless flannel coats and delicate silken scarfs of the two dandies were
appropriate to the cleansed and sweetened air which blew over the azure wavelets
of Long Island Sound.

“Look at her now,” said Wolverton, attracted by some change in the countenance
of the girl whom he was watching, one of those beautiful changes
which come over young and innocent faces, the reflections of a fawn-like enjoyment
of life. “I never saw such another entangling, attaching face.” Then
he added, after a long pause as if for a deep sigh, “Never but once! There is
something tremendous in the power of a resemblance. I don't mind telling
you, youngster—in fact it is a sober sort of pleasure for me to tell you—that I
have seen such a face as that once before, and that it was the angelic sight of
my life. Death is a scoundrelly robber. If that face had not been carried beyond
my sight, I should have passed my life beneath it, looking up to it. I
have been a worse man for being plundered in that way. Well,” he concluded
with another sigh, “that was seven years ago. I wish we could smoke
here.”

The younger man looked at the elder with respectful astonishment. He
had discovered a heart where he had little looked to find one. He was like
one who, wandering through halls of gayety and watching the feet of dancers,
beholds the bloodstain of a bygone tragedy. In the unexpected presence of
revelations of this sorrowful aspect, the eyes of the lightest and hardest are apt
to fill with solemn wonder, or at least with pitying curiosity.

“You, Wolverton!” said Wetherel, in a tone of pensive amazement. Then
he changed the subject, for he had some capacity of delicate sympathy in him
or at least he had its counterpart, good-breeding.

“Of course we can smoke on the forward deck,” he added. “Do you particularly
care for it?”

“No. I would rather look at this girl.”

“Do you want to talk with her? I know her well enough to take you up.”

“No. The charm might pass away. It wouldn't be the same voice. I
prefer to look at her. By the way, where did you meet her?”

“On the steamer from England.”

“Oh, the steamer! Jolly place for courting, an ocean steamer,” said Wolverton,
throwing off his rarely-worn seriousness, and appearing once more in
the spiritual garb of a veteran of society. “Your romance kills mine. Of
course you two became intimate and walked arm in arm by the moonlight, and
all that sort of thing. So she is just in the country, just fresh from the missionary
harvest, just from the Orient! How odd and interesting our stupid
American life must seem to her! She is having emotions every minute. I
wish to heaven I was young again. The greatest pleasure I know now is to
take a child to the theatre and watch its wonder. I shall have to smoke,” he
added, turning serious once more. “Go and talk to the new soul from Mount
Ararat. Show her the tower of Babel.”

With the serious face of a wearied worldling who remembers that he once
came near living a better life than that of egoism, he drew from his pocket
the consolation of a cigar-case, and sought the forecastle deck of the steamer.

Wetherel, left to himself, wavered hither and thither an instant, and then
advanced to the young lady. She did not see him; her eyes were fixed on the
distant blue shore of Connecticut; they were settled, pensive, and almost sad,
as if longing for the far-away home.

“Nestoria?” he asked.

“What?” she replied, looking up at him with inquiry and surprise, while
a fairy mob of blushes rushed into her cheeks.

“Have I spoken the magic name?” he smiled.

“It is my name,” she confessed. “How did you know it?”

“What! Is your name Nestoria?” he almost exclaimed, so interesting was
the discovery. “I did not know it at all, and couldn't have guessed it. I supposed
you were thinking of your native mountains. So I asked you, Nestoria?”

“Oh!” And here the blushes rioted again, fighting in a field of lilies.
“So I exposed myself.”

“Don't you like the name?” he wondered, for he had already decided that
it was a charming one.

“I ought. My father likes it; and it is his field. He named me after the
people among whom he labors. And yet I can't quite like it. People ask me
so many questions about it, and exclaim so much about it; such a strange
name! and oh, what a beautiful name! and isn't it singular? I am so tired of
hearing about it that I call myself Nettie. Nestoria sounds too grand for a little
bit of a woman. Don't you think so? It seems like blowing a trumpet before
me. I like Nettie best.”

“I like both,” responded the New York dandy and man-about-town. The
tender seriousness with which he treated the subject was certainly curious in a
practised beau who had the fame of being a lady-killer. It was also very
agreeable; it ridded him of the confident smile and fatuous levity with which
he was wont to spoil the effect of his compliments; it enabled him to say his
pleasant thing with a sincere tone, which made it gracious and effective.

It must be understood that he already knew the missionary's daughter well,
and liked her much. Eleven days of close companionship on shipboard had
made them intimates, and had landed him on that island of sorceries where
men see women as seraphs. He knew the girl's whole history; he had drawn
from her long reminiscences of her secluded, strange life in Erzeroum and the
Kurdish mountains; he had heard her tell of turbaned chiefs and veiled beauties
until it seemed a wonder to him that she wore familiar vestments and
spoke English; he had looked at her through the enchantment of distance, and
clothed her in the mystery of the Orient, and made a poem of her. She was,
in many ways, like an inhabitant of some other world to him. Her ideas were
as novel and curious as her recollections. She knew almost nothing of the
fashionable, worldly existence which was nearly all that he did know. She
was as ignorant and innocent as if she had just come out of the Garden of
Eden. Even her language was odd to him; it sounded in his ears as did the
speech of Christian and Faithful in the ears of the men of “Vanity Fair”; he
was at first displeased, then amused, and then charmed when she talked of
“the missionary work,” of “Christian labors,” of “the conversion of the East.”
These phrases sounded like cant, but in a little while they sounded like poetry.
He likened himself to an angel of darkness who should take a fancy to the society
of a cherub fresh from Paradise.

What a fascination there was in her innocence and simplicity! When he
told her that he liked both her names she did not guess why; she looked up at
him with a childlike expression that was part surprise and part pleasure. He
had never before seen such virginity of soul, and he had the exultation of a
navigator who discovers a new island hitherto unvisited by mortals.

“Did you ever know any one called Nettie?” she asked; meaning, did you
like her, and so like the name?

“I never did,” he answered smiling, because he understood the drift of the
question, and was charmed with the lack of egotism which it proved.

“Then why —” she hesitated.

“Oh, they are pretty names,” he said, feeling that he was on the brink of
an abyss, and drawing back from it. He did not dare to say, “I like the names
because I like the person who bears them;” for an interior thrill warned him
that the confession might have a mighty momentum in it; and he was not yet
prepared for a declaration of love.