University of Virginia Library

8. CHAPTER VIII.
THE JOYS AND SNARES OF MOONLIGHT.

“Did you ever see such a dull place!” demanded the sociable Alice, quite
ready, we fear, to let Satan into Sea Lodge rather than bear with its dulness.

“Alice, I am perfectly happy,” answered Nestoria. “That is, almost,”
she added, recollecting certain absent ones whose presence would have made
the happiness perfect. “I find every day too short. I hate to go to sleep.”

“Well, if you are not joyful on the very smallest provocation! What in
the world are you happy for? Because we never do anything? Because we
never see anybody? Because we are shut up in an enchanted castle, with Uncle
Wetherel for a magician?”

“But we do do something. I have read half of Robinson's `Syria' to
your uncle. I have written twenty pages to my father. We have driven and
sailed and walked. I could look all day at the sea, it is so beautiful and mysterious.
How can you find it dull! You ought to live in a Nestorian village
for a few years. It would teach you what sameness is.”

“Why, my dear little canary bird, I do believe you are scolding,” laughed
Alice.

“Scolding?” asked Nestoria

“At any rate you lectured. It was borne in upon me that I repine without
cause. You certainly lectured.”

“Did I? I mustn't. I am not fit.”

“Oh, don't be so humble! And do, please, don't be so reprovingly con-tented.
You wouldn't be, perhaps, if you had seen as much of the world as I
have, and knew by experience how much livelier places there are in it than
Sea Lodge. What I am crazy for is Newport.”

“What is Newport?” inquired Nestoria.

“What is Newport?” repeated Alice. “Oh, of course you don't know.
Well, Newport is the principal seaport of—of Mount Pisgah.”

Nestoria perceived that Alice was laughing at her, and a blush of dismay
and distress danced into her cheeks, so sensitive can a young person be who
grows up in Nestorian hamlets, surrounded by grave, considerate, kindly people.

“Really, you ought to be shown Newport,” continued Alice. “If uncle
wasn't shamefully mean—”

“Don't!” pleaded Nestoria, forgetting her sense of humiliation in her desire
to defend the excellent Judge.

“I mean if he wasn't dreadfully good and conscientious, and so forth, he
would take us there. We should see some living life, and we should pick up
beaux. They are a deal finer than cockle shells. They are the most interesting
of objects by the seaside. And there is one particular beau of mine whom
I should dearly like to meet again for the fun of laughing at his oddities.
Men are always more entertaining than women; they are so much more untrammelled,
and do so much queerer things, and have so much more character;
but this special man is as diverting as a cage full of monkeys. He is a
Pole, so he says, and a count also, so he says, and I never heard anybody say
to the contrary, and it may be so. But at any rate he is a gentleman, and
handsome, and pretends to be very learned, and as polite as a pickpocket, as I
heard somebody put it; and oh, so devoted, such compliments, such nonsense'

I could listen to him forever, only it might kill me with laughing. Count Poloski.
It's quite a distinguished name, isn't it? And he is a great favorite, I
can tell you; and the attentions he paid me set more than one other girl on a
pincushion; and of course that made the fun all the greater. Oh yes, what
with the Count and lots more not so very much wiser, and a few who are really
fascinating and irresistible, Newport is a delightful sort of Vanity Fair,
and well worth showing to you.”

Nestoria made no response. Either Alice's description of the charms of
Newport did not present a temptation to her mind, or she thought it wrong to
discourse of such temptations.

“This evening we will get up our own Newport,” continued Miss Dinneford.
“We will walk alone and in silence on the beach, and view the moonlight.”

“I wish you would,” answered Nestoria, who honestly thought this simple
treat delightful.

“You don't mean it!” echoed the worldling of twenty, in mockery. “Well,
reckless as the dissipation may be, we will plunge into it. But what would
your father say?”

“I don't see why he should object,” wondered the innocent from the dovecote
in Kurdistan.

“Nor I either, on second thoughts,” laughed Alice, “We may meet a
few oysters, but they are deaf and dumb, you know; they won't even make
signs to us. And even if they do, I hope we shall be above flirting with mollusks”

“Are they mollusks?” queried Nestoria. “Oh dear, how little I know
about this wonderful world that I live in! I must recommence my studies.”

“Let them go at mollusks,” advised Alice. “I am sure I don't know
whether they are or not, and don't care. I am sorry I used the horrid word,
since it has waked up your worrisome conscience. What do you have such a
conscience for? It must be very inconvenient.”

“Alice, I should be afraid of you if I thought you meant half you say,”
gravely observed Nestoria.

“Oh, I don't; I don't mean a quarter of it.” affirmed Alice. “I mainly
mean to talk. When I can't find any human being to listen to me, I talk to
the cat; and didn't I get a lecture on the subject one day from Uncle Wetherel!
`Alice,' said he, `conversation addressed to a dumb beast must be considered
as idle conversation, and as such we shall be called to account for it.' Now
do you believe that the recording angel takes down what I say to a pussy cat?
If so, he must take down what Uncle Wetherel says to Old Sorrel. But I
don't believe it. I don't believe that angels attend to any such small business.”

“Alice, I wish you wouldn't speak of such subjects so—gayly,” murmured
Nestoria. “You fill me with astonishment and perplexity.”

“Poor little dove!” said Alice. “How could they send you out of the
ark?”

As the girls prepared to take their walk in the evening Mrs. Dinneford
asked where they were going.

“Nantucket, Cape Cod, and all along shore,” answered her daughter. “If
we don't come back, inquire at Marblehead.”

“Don't expose yourselves too long to the night air,” counselled the elder
woman, who, like many elder women, was much given to medical precepts.
“The moonlight is not healthful.”

“The moonlight is healthful, begging your pardon, Mrs. Dinneford,” interposed
the Judge. “The moonlight is but the reflection of the life-giving
sunlight. It is the dampness of the night air which is not healthful.”

“I was always brought up to believe that it was the moonlight which did
the harm,” persisted good Mrs. Dinneford, a kind soul not without obstinacy.

“When our bringing up is contrary to the truth, we must abjure it, as we
would abjure and renounce our original sinfulness,” lectured the old gentleman.

“I have the greatest mind to walk out with you, children,” said Mrs. Dinneford.
“If you'll wait just a minute till I find my hat and shawl—”

“Oh, mamma, don't!” protested Alice. “You know you never will find
your hat and shawl. And besides we want to take a romantic walk and fill
our tranquil souls with meditation, and if you go with us you will spoil all
that by talking a steady stream and quoting Tupper.”

“Well, go along,” laughed the mother. “But do be careful, and if you
meet any strangers turn back, for there are too many wild people about here
of nights.”

“Without are dogs,” quoted the Judge.

So the two girls went unattended down to the beach and strolled along its
enchauted meanderings. The ripples of a brimming tide joyously patted the
sands at their feet, and a varying moonlight descended upon them through
the shifting mountains of cloudland. The harbor, a sheet of sombre azure
chased with sparkling silver, swept out into the broad expanse, here obscure
and there effulgent, of the Sound. Miles away a light-house beamed luridly
“like a star on eternity's ocean.” A single sail, undoubtedly that of a pleasure
boat, now gleaming like polished marble and now darkening into a misty
ghost, was the only moving object in the exquisite picture. For nearly half
an hour the pair wandered; the lively Alice chattering gayly, or throwing
pebbles into the water, or whirling on her heel to make marks in the sand;
while the quieter Nestoria listened, smiled, and loitered, half lost in waking
dreams.

“I would like to stay here till morning,” murmured the waif from the
arid Orient. “This world of waters is something so new to me, and so inexhaustibly
wonderful, that it bewitches me.”

“So would I like to make a night of it, if there were only dancing,” answered
the representative of New York society. “Oh, don't I hate quiet, and
don't I love company! I was made to buzz and hum through life like a fly,
always looking for a swarm of other flies. Uncle Wetherel compares me to a
hornbug; you know what headlong, noisy things they are, and how they blunder
about; buzz, bang, and down they come on their backs and kick dreadfully;
and then up again, to knock their heads against some other corner and
get another great fall, like Humpty Dumpty. It's an odious comparison, and
I don't assent to it altogether; and yet I must admit that there is something a
little like, for I do have a great many adventures, and bounce out of them
safely.”

“That sail boat is coming to land,” observed Nestoria. “Ought we not to
go back?”

“Go back? No. There are sail boats spinning up and down the harbor
every evening, just for the sake of spinning up and down and enjoying the
motion. You might as well be afraid of gulls. The one lands as often as the
other.”

“But it is close under that rocky point,” declared Nestoria. “They could
disembark there without our seeing them.”

“Oh, boats frequently sail under the bluff and then sweep on into the cove
beyond. And they come very near the shore, too; we might perhaps hail
them. Would you mind hailing them and then running away? There is just
a possible small chance that some of our New Haven friends might be in the
boat. You won't? Oh, Nestoria, you are a regular drag and drawback to
fun, and more prudent and shy than my mother. You stay here while I climb
up the rocks and look over to see who they are. It is only a few rods. Will
you?”

“Yes,” conceded Nestoria. “But don't be gone long, and do be prudent.”

“If they are strangers, I will come directly back,” promised Alice. She
hurried away on her frolicking reconnoissance, and clambered the little rocky
bluff with a beating heart but with a soul prepared for audacious ventures.
Reaching the seaside brow of the knoll, she looked down upon the boat, discovered
that it had drawn close up to the shore as if the men in it proposed to
land, and was about to slip back and return to Nestoria, when she heard herself
called by name.

“Who is it?” she asked in a voice of gleeful excitement.

“Edward Wetherel; and Count Poloski is with me.”

“Oh, Cousin Edward!” exclaimed Alice. She hesitated an instant and
then added, “Come up here, Edward. And the Count may come, too.”