Sea-gift

CHAPTER XXXI.

I concluded, after all, to go North. What if father, mother and Carlotta had travelled while I was studying in a quiet little village? I felt equal to them in learning, and resolved that I would be in manners and polish.

I spent a few days in New York, which was very dull, as everybody was off at the summer resorts. With a pretty heavy draught on father’s bankers, I filled a trunk or two with the latest styles and started for Saratoga, where I would spend a few days before joining our family party at Niagara.

Having paid the hackman as much again as his legal fare, and having seen my trunks checked through, I took my seat on a stool at one side of the already crowded deck of the Hudson river boat, which was steaming and hissing at the wharf like a chained griffin, and gazed, with the interest of novelty, at the scene before me. The long forests of masts and yards, with here and there a graceful flag or long fluttering streamer; the busy, fussy tugs, running hither and thither like noisy gossips, coughing and sneezing with bad colds; the patient jades of ferry boats, with their anxious human cargo, hardly waiting for the dropping of the chains; the ocean steamer looming its dark hull in the offing, and curling its black festoons of smoke on the morning sky; the white sailed skiffs leaning gracefully from the wooing wind, and the small row boat which a bare-armed sailor is sculling right under our prow, his blue jacket lying on the seat behind him, and the motion of his body, as he rocks from side to side, slushing the water about in the bottom of the boat, and wetting one sleeve of the jacket on the seat; the anchored ships, here and there, looking like immense laundries, with their rigging and sides covered with the clothes of the crew, all made me forget for a moment my own existence, till I was aroused to a consciousness of it by a shrill voice piping in my ear, “Herald! Times! Tribune!”

Having bought a paper, I turned round on my stool and commenced to read. People continued to crowd in; a hoarse whistle from our boat, or some other, I could not tell which, a few taps on a very hoarse bell, and with a shiver, as if the water was cold, we glided from the wharf.

I had read, perhaps, half a column when the rustle of a dress against my crossed feet attracted my attention, and I peeped under the edge of my paper. It was a very handsome black silk, and, being caught up over my foot, showed a beautiful bootee beneath it – an interesting bootee of purple glove kid, with a dainty high heel, and a firm curving instep – a bootee tapping the deck carelessly, as if about to execute a pirouette on its flexible toe. Standing against the silk dress, close to the bootee, was a pair of boots – large, dignified boots – with broad heels and thick soles, and coming down over their flat insteps were black pant legs. Lifting the edge of my paper a little I came in sight of the skirt of a black cloth coat, and hanging down by the skirt of the coat was a large white hand holding a morocco travelling bag – the hand of a middle aged man, white on the fingers and near the thumbs, and shaded with dark hairs on the side toward the little finger, on which was an onyx seal ring with P. M. in monogram. I knew the bootee belonged to a pretty woman, and the boots and hand to an intelligent elderly man, and to confirm my surmisings I took down the paper with a rattle and looked up at them. The lady turned her head and looked down at me the same instant.

“Why, Mr. Smith! is it possible?” she exclaimed.

“Miss Carrover!” I said, rising and blushing.

“Mrs. Marshman, sir. Mr. Marshman! an old friend of mine, Mr. Smith, of North Carolina.”

Mr. Marshman, a frowning man, with heavy gray brows and a grayer moustache, gave me his hand and a “glad to know you, sir.”

“Let me make you acquainted with our party,” said Mrs. Marshman, turning to two ladies and a gentleman, “Mr. Finnock! Mr. Smith, Miss Sappho Finnock! Miss Stelway!”

I made my obeisance, and, completing the usual commonplace remarks, “took in” the party.

Mrs. Marshman, as beautiful as ever, but a trifle more mature and less dashing; Mr. Marshman, as above described; Mr. Finnock, a pale young man, with very blue eyes and very red lids, and light mossy side whiskers; he was exquisite in style and supercilious in demeanor, and very much devoted to Miss Stelway, a dark skinned young lady, with a short upper lip and very large front teeth, who looked at everything on the river with an opera glass, and whose conversational powers seemed limited to the constant ejaculation of:

“See there, how pretty!”

She was rich, though Finnock’s attentions may have been disinterested.

Miss Sappho Finnock was a little lady, not very young, with thin, sandy hair, which she plastered, classically, around her forehead, and wore in wiry little curls around the back of her neck. Her eyes were as blue as her brother’s, and were “near” in their sight, so that she wore circular gold-rimmed glasses, that magnified her eyes ludicrously when seen through them. She wore fawn gauntlets, and her fingers, when she drew off her gloves, were thin and bluish towards the ends. Her waist was straight from her arms to her skirt, and her neck long and corded. She was constantly taking notes in a gilt-edged book, and peeping at me sideways under her glasses, as I sat by her, which I did most of the way up the river. She opened her eyes a little wider whenever she spoke, as if she was surprised at her own voice, and spoke with a sudden quickness and a little jerk out of her head, as if she wanted to throw the words at you. I soon found that as Mr. Marshman would not give up Lillian, nor Finnock Miss Stelway, Miss Sappho Finnock was to be my companion for the voyage. I was not displeased, for she was entertaining for her very sentimentality, and was not disposed to laugh at any ignorance of the world I might betray, or any social solecism I might commit.

In reply to Mrs. Marshman’s inquiries, I informed her that I was going first to Saratoga to spend a few days, thence to Niagara, where I would meet our family, just returned from Europe. At the mention of Europe, Finnock and Miss Stelway regarded me with more interest, and Miss Finnock increased her smiles and side glances.

We all talked together for some time, when Mr. Marshman left us to go to his state room, Lillian took a novel from the morocco bag, and Finnock and Miss Stelway going to the railing to lean over the water, nothing was left for Miss Finnock and myself, but to walk to the prow of the boat and take a couple of vacant seats that were there.

“I always think of the Culprit Fay when I pass old Crow Nest” she said, arranging her skirt. “Are you not fond of poetry? I am, passionately.”

“I enjoy poetry very much,” I said, not knowing how tame the reply would sound till I had made it.

“I declare I almost cry when I think of that dear little Fay cleaving the waters to catch the crystal drop, while the great monsters swarm after him. What do you think is the most descriptive line in the poem, Mr. Smith.”

“Confound Rodman Drake!” I muttered to myself, for I had not read his poem, having scarcely touched anything save my text-books since I had been at Chapel Hill. Fortunately, I remembered a lecture of our Professor of Rhetoric, on American poetry, in which he had quoted from the poem in question; I therefore replied, pausing as if to consider:

“Really, Miss Finnock, the whole poem is so full of vivid descriptions and striking thoughts that it is hard to make a selection; but I think perhaps the finest passage is that which describes the firefly steed flinging a glittering spark behind.”

“Ah, yes,” she replied, “I remember that. But I think the tiniest, sweetest idea is, ‘their wee faces giggling above the brine.’” To express the tinyness of an idea, she squinted her eyes painfully, and squeezed her forefingers and thumb together, as if she were holding a flea.

“To tell the truth, Miss Finnock,” I said, hoping to take her out of her depth and thereby change the subject, “I greatly prefer the old classic writers, or even the earlier English poets, to the maudlin sentimentalists of the present day.”

“Oh, you prefer the classics, do you?” she exclaimed, brightening her dim looking eyes, “then I am glad we are congenial. Homer is too nervous in his style, but Pindar is so sweet; and Sappho – do you know I am named for her? – isn’t her poetry rapturous? and dear Horace, how pointed and terse he is. Do you know I have studied harder than anything his Art of Poetry, for I sometimes try to write verses myself. Did you ever write poetry? It is really difficult. And you say, too, you like the old English poets? How glad I am! I have a copy of Chaucer in my trunk, and we can read over some of his Canterbury Tales together. Then there’s Spencer; isn’t his Fairy Queen perfectly charming? And Sydney’s Arcadia, do you like that? Sometimes, when I am sad and gloomy, I even like to read the melancholy musings of poor John Ford. You’ve read Ford, have you not? and Marlowe?”

Great Heaven! thought I; take her out of her depth indeed! I have only taken her into it. My only hope to change the subject, and prevent an exposure of my ignorance, is to speak of her own verses, as I know she will not quit that theme as long as I appear interested. I said, therefore, as soon as she ceased speaking,

“You say that you write verses, Miss Finnock? I am sure they are lovely; and I would esteem it a very high honor and privilege to be permitted to read your composition.”

“Oh, I could not think of it,” she said, with an attempt at a blush; “besides, my portfolio is in my trunk, and therefore inaccessible.”

I protested my readiness to go below and have her trunk opened, that I might satisfy my desire to read her beautiful thoughts, and I insisted so earnestly that she would give me her keys and permit me to search, that she said, while she thanked me for my obliging spirit, she would not trouble me any farther than to get her reticule from Mrs. Marshman, for, if she was not mistaken, she had in that some verses on the Hudson that she had composed the summer before.

Of course I was delighted to bring it to her; when she opened it and took out a yard and a quarter of printed poetry, which she commenced to read, first making me promise, a naughty boy, not to laugh at anything in it.

She read the entire yard and a quarter with heaving bosom and unusually dilated optics; but I cannot inflict upon my readers more than an inch or two.

The theme of the poem was the launching of the first steamboat, and in her eyes it seemed an epic fit for Virgil. The lines were these:

“Oh, that is perfectly enchanting,” I exclaimed, when she had completed the ninety-third and last verse, feeling assured that, when she thought so highly of the effort herself, no commendation could be fulsome.

“Pardon the abrupt praise, but Mrs. Browning could not have expressed the idea of the untried wheels more strikingly than you did, by the single word ‘unfledged.’”

“You flatter me, indeed, sir,” she said, looking immensely pleased; “but, to be candid with you, I thought myself that the expression was original and effective. Can you imagine how I got such an idea?”

“Not unless the fairies brought it to you,” I said, gallantly.

“I was at Yonkers last summer, while composing this piece, and saw a young duck, with unfledged wings, learning to swim, and immediately I thought of the steamboat. Remarkable coincidence, was it not?”

“Very remarkable, and all the more striking from that very fact,” I replied.

“But the most striking stanza in the poem,” she continued, running her little thin fingers down the paper, and pinching it at a certain verse, “is the sixty-eighth. Do you remember it?”

“They are all stamped so indelibly on my mind, by their wondrous power and beauty, that I cannot distinguish them by mere numbers; but I can easily recognize it if you will read it again.” This I said leaning forward with an increased air of attention and interest.

“There is no merit about the lines, except that they convey to the mind a vivid impression of the circumstances,” she said, with a preparatory cough, and read:

“Miss Finnock!” I said, rapturously, “you are as daring as Milton in your conceptions. Even Dante does not surpass the appalling picture you draw. I can almost see the long, rugged chasm down which the ships are rolling over and over, snapping off their masts, the fish floundering in the steaming pools, while the red serpent of desolation winds its way down the hissing bed.”

I did not deem it necessary to correct her astronomy by a hint at the nebulosity of comets, or at the absurdity of the idea that a tail, ten millions of miles long and half as many broad, could be squeezed into the channel of the Hudson. I could only admit to myself that if the tail of a comet was red hot, and small enough to fit the river, her picture of the effect of its fall was graphic.

She thanked me with many blushes, and as I paused in my comments she folded up her poetry reluctantly, and returned it to her reticule. As the bag opened I saw a book in it, and my respect for her erudition, before which I positively trembled as she ran through the names I have mentioned, was considerably lessened as I recognized Spalding’s English Literature, and felt that her learning was “crammed.”

As I felt as confident in my smattering as hers; I talked more boldly, and we spent the morning in a conversation on literature that would have made Porson envious at our attainments.

When dinner was announced our party had a private table in the saloon, and I was embarrassed to find that Mr. Finnock and Miss Stelway were regarding my table deportment as if that was the Shibboleth on which they would cut or notice me. Miss Finnock, however, kept me more employed in attentions to the outer woman than to the inner man, so that I got on very well, except pouring her glass too full of wine and making too loud a sip when I tasted mine.

Mr. Marshman had invited an elderly gentleman to dine with him, and was so absorbed in a political discussion that he completely ignored my presence; indeed, he seemed to forget that there was any one present except himself and his patient listener.

Mrs. M. was much annoyed by his neglect of his guests, and wasted many nods and frowns on him. As he paid no attention to them she spoke to him:

“Mr. Marshman, pass the claret to Mr. Smith.”

But she might as well have addressed the post of the saloon, for Marshman was at that moment closing his most forcible argument in favor of his assumption.

“Mr. Marshman!” exclaimed Lillian, a flush on her cheek and a flash in her eye, “do you know where you are? Mr. Smith’s glass is empty.”

“Oh! – yes – pardon me, my dear,” turning with a confused smile to her, and anything but a smile to me as he ran my glass over with the crimson fluid.

For a while there was an awkward pause, during which I felt very much embarrassed, as having been the innocent cause of the disturbance.

Mrs. M. soon resumed her smile, and said:

“Mr. Marshman thinks he is on the floor of the House whenever he gets to talking, and forgets his surroundings.”

“Well, my dear,” he said, pouring out a glass of brandy, “excuse my absent-mindedness. Come, Mr. Debait, since they will not let us finish our discussion, we will have to join the young folks.”