University of Virginia Library

2. CHAPTER II.
A BEGINNING OF SORROW.

“They are both pretty names,” Wetherel repeated, unable to let the fascinating
subject alone. “And of the two I think I like Nestoria the best. If I
were related to you, I should call you Nestoria.”

The girl wanted to say, “You may call me so,” but after reflecting a moment,
it seemed best not. The young man's eyes were bent upon her face
with an expression of admiration which she did not fully comprehend, but
which nevertheless embarrassed her and thwarted her childlike confidence.

Of course the most potent spring of the dandy's admiration for Nestoria was
her beauty. Her guilelessness of character and her puritanisms of speech
would have appeared to him ridiculous, had she been homely. But he found
it impossible to laugh at her, impossible not to grant her a certain worship
when he looked at her.

She was certainly quite handsome, and there were moments when she dazzled.
At first you hardly noticed this little figure, and this infantile blonde
face. But presently you could not help remarking how regular the small features
were, how delicate the rose and lily complexion, and how heaven-like
the blue eyes. Then came a revelation of golden hair, so luxuriant as to remind
one of fields of yellow corn, and bright through all its wavings with an
inner sunshine. This hair had fascinated Wetherel; one stormy day on the
ocean it had burst its bonds and flooded the girl to the waist; and he never
afterwards escaped from the bewildering influence of those radiant tresses. It
was from the date of that aureate inundation that he began to find all Nestoria's
ways, all her retired, prim ideas, and all her puritanic phrases, no longer
displeasing or odd, but charming.

All the sense and self-command that he possessed had been needed to keep
him from making downright court to the girl on the Cunarder; and indeed,
nothing but luck, nothing but accidental interventions of fellow-passengers,
had delivered him from the snares set for him by certain moonlights. One
might think that the obscurities of evening would have shorn the brilliance
from a beauty of which color formed so great a part. But it was not so; this
child could spare the rose, the lily, and the gold; her features were fine enough
for that. And the moonlight so idealized her, it made her so like ethereal marble,
it gave her such a brightness of better worlds, that she seemed more than
human. Like a star she grew in loveliness as evening gathered its magic
veils about her. Wetherel, who was half a pagan in education and almost
wholly pagan in soul, used to think of Venus rising from the sea and of Cyprian
multitudes bowing in adoration.

Well, he had not proposed to her during the ocean voyage; but he had
shown his interest so plainly that a coquette would have been aware of a conquest;
and even this innocent from Kurdistan had perceived that she was liked.
They were well acquainted; when they met on the Elm City it was as two old
friends meet; it seemed to each of them that they had known each other forever.
As the boat wound up the picturesque turns of the East River Wetherel
had pointed out to Nestoria all the objects of note, delighting in her naive
pleasure and wonder. Then, discovering Wolverton, his model and mentor in
the ways of worldliness, he had joined him for a moment to show him Nestoria
and to enjoy his admiration. And now, Wolverton having gone to his lonely
solace of a cigar, he had fluttered back moth-like to his candle.

As that luminary made no response to his declared preference for her name
of Nestoria, and as he felt that the subject might be perilous to his bachelor
freedom if he should pursue it, he looked about the visible cosmos for another.

“How perfectly beautiful the sea is to-day,” was his commonplace remark,
greatly ennobled to him, however, by the feeling which prompted it. Try as
he would to evade the dominion of this girl, he could not utter a word which
was not pervaded by her. The sea was more to him than its wont, simply because
it served as a background to her face and figure, and thus seemed to
partake of her personality. Everything that he looked upon in her company
acquired beauty in his eyes, for the reason that she also beheld it. Within
the last fortnight he had discovered a new heaven and a new earth, hitherto
unknown to him and even unsuspected. It is pretty clear that, notwithstanding
some remaining anchor of prudence, his heart was beginning to drift dangerously.
We can understand now the prompt and serious sympathy which
he had accorded to Wolverton's tale of shipwrecked love.

“It is beautiful,” replied Nestoria, her clear blue eyes looking down like
two little cloudless heavens upon the indigo wavelets. Then, with a pathetic
expression of sadness, resignation, and awe, she added, “And wonderful!”

She wanted to say, “Terrible!” The ocean represented to her a majesty
and power which were more than earthly; there were moments when it seemed
to carry her off, as a little speck, beyond the bounds of time; moments when
it was no longer an ocean, but an eternity. A feeling of intense loneliness and
a longing remembrance of her only parent, so far away, deepened this sentiment
of solemnity and also touched it with tenderness. Had she known Wetherel
well enough she would have taken his hand, and held it for a sense of companionship.
As it was, she turned to a text: “O God of our salvation, who
art the confidence of them that are afar off upon the sea;” these words seemed
to walk before her upon the waters. It was one of the verses which her father
had asked her to learn by heart before he parted with her. Had she been
among her familiar friends, the devout missionaries with whom she had passed
her youth, she would have repeated it aloud. Even now the sentence seemed
to wrestle at her lips; but glancing furtively at Wetherel's face, she said to
herself, “He might think it very strange;” for gentle and sympathetic as he
had been to her, she did not yet feel certain that he could share all her ideas;
and, indeed, well might she doubt it.

Of a sudden she turned her face toward the waters. Wetherel leaned forward
ever so little, and saw a single tear upon her cheek. As much moved by
it as if it had been the only tear ever shed in the world, he said in a burst of
pity, “You are very lonely.”

“Yes, I am,” she murmured, still trying to hide her face.

The confession hurt him; then he was nothing to her; his presence was no
consolation! But of course there was nothing to be done about it, and while
he was still looking blank and feeling uncomfortable and finding nothing to say,
the girl unexpectedly recovered her self-possession as women will, and looked
up at him with a peculiarly arch, childlike smile, which was characteristic of
some of her moods, and which had already delighted him many times.

“If it would relieve your mind to call me a baby, you may do so,” she
said.

“I don't think you are a baby at all,” he protested. “Why, what a great
distance you have travelled, and almost alone!”

“A baby might go as far in a baby-wagon, if its nurse would only push it.
I couldn't very well help myself. I was put on a mule, and a screaming
mountaineer drove it; and then I was put into a steamer, and other men drove
that. Oh, the journey has come easily enough; one day followed another.
You are never called on to do on Monday the work that is allotted to Tuesday
and Wednesday and Thursday, and so on. And so it will be, I suppose,
throughout life and with other things as well as journeys.”

“You are as brave as a lion,” he laughed approvingly, at the same time
thinking what a cheerful little wife she would make, and how well she would
bear his troubles for him. “But what do you mean to do throughout life?”

“And you?” she asked, her arch smile sparkling up once more, like a
sunny bubble rising to the surface of a fountain.

“I?” he repeated somewhat discomfited, for his existence hitherto had
been idle and his future was aimless. “Really, I hardly know.”

“Then how can I know what I shall do?” she answered more pensively.
“A woman has so little strength that she can hardly have plans; isn't that so?

And yet, although you will perhaps laugh at me when I tell you of it, I do
venture to harbor some aims and aspirations. I want to do what work I can
and what good I can.”

“Oh, don't!” he protested. “People who live to do good are generally
awfully irksome.”

“I am sorry you think so,” she replied, looking him full in the face with
an air of grave surprise and disappointment. “It has not been my experience.”
Then, thinking no doubt that her tone had been too monitorial, she
threw out a meek olive-branch of a smile and added, “I wish you could meet
my father. You would see one man who lives to do good, and who is charming.”

“I should feel honored to meet him,” bowed Wetherel, anxious to recover
lost ground in her esteem. “You must excuse what I said just now. I was
thinking perhaps of people who merely talk of living for the benefit of others,
and stop there.”

“Parrots who say Pretty Polly, and never do anything pretty,” she laughed,
evidently pleased to hear him right himself.

Now this was cheerful conversation, and Mr. Edward Wetherel could not
of course help finding it pleasant, and yet his soul was not entirely satisfied
with it. He was more sentimentally content with the girl when she was sad,
because then he could imagine himself as gathering her into his philanthropie
bosom and cherishing her with consolation. So he reverted once more to her
condition of isolation and loneliness.

“You have, I am afraid, very few friends in America.”

“Very few,” she admitted, with the cheerful little nod of a canary, and in
fact with far less of depression than he had longed to see. “But the few are
very good. I shall be with some of them to-night. I wonder if you ever heard
of them—a Mrs. Dinneford and her daughter Alice.”

“A Mrs. Dinneford and her daughter Alice are my relatives,” he answered,
surprised rather than gratified.

“Are they?” said Nestoria, obviously delighted. “I was with them often
in London. You know I stopped almost six months in London with an English
lady—a lady who knew about my father and who is very kind to missionary
people. Her brother brought me on from Erzeroum; he is a great antiquarian
and made wonderful discoveries in Babylon; but I told you all that
on the Arabia. At this lady's house I met Mrs. Dinneford and Alice. Isn't
Alice pleasant, and isn't her mother good? They asked me to visit them in
America, and when I reached New York I found a letter for me. Oh, you
can't imagine how it cheered me. I felt like Paul when he met the brethren
at the Three Taverns. They are at Savin Rock, near New Haven.”

“At the house of a Mr. Wetherel?” asked the young man coldly.

“Yes,” she said, her smile dancing out gayly, like a fairy leaping from a
rose. “Your name!”

He pondered a moment, and then observed gravely, “I cannot call on you
there.”

She did not reply; it was clearly a momentous piece of information; and
her gaze of inquiry showed even more regret than surprise.

“No,” he went on, biting his moustache. “Mr. Jabez Wetherel is my uncie;
and I am sorry, very sorry to say it, but we are not on good terms.”

“I am sorry too,” she murmured; what else could such a child say?

“Still, I will try to see you, if you permit it,” he continued. “I venture to
hope that I shall be able to meet you again somewhere.”

“I shall be pleased,” was her answer. Then she said no more on the sub
ject, being not quite sure that she had not done wrong in saying even so much;
for the fact of a family quarrel was a terribly ugly one to her mind, throwing
doubtful shadows upon the people who were engaged in it, and rendering her
pathway among them intricate.