There is considerable monotony in seaside life, but it is monotony of a different kind from the everyday existence of the rest of the year; and in this complete change its princ.i.p.al charm and benefit consist.

The home-life of a number of households is laid aside for the time, and the heterogeneous elements are thrown for the moment into a larger whole, forming an unstable compound--a salad of humanity where the sweets, the sours, and the bitters find themselves in new combinations with one another, and united for the time in a _sauce piquante_ of fresh air and idleness. There can be no great variety in the occupations; picnics, excursions, drives, rides, walks, form an ever-recurring ditto, to which the unaccustomedness alone gives flavour.

There is rest for the workers, and society for the home-keeping, but genuine delight only for the very young, whose gregarious instincts are still unblunted, and who find in the presence of one another the exhilaration of spreading their callow wings in early flights.

For the mother-birds, however, there is anxiety. In this larger poultry-yard their chicks grow wilder than they have ever known them before. The broods get mixed, and wander into undreamt-of mischief, pullets consorting with c.o.c.kerels of another breed, chickens with ducklings venturing into the water, while Dame Partlet clucks and flutters about, pecking and distracted.

Mrs Naylor sat fidgeting and restless among the matrons who presided over and superintended the enjoyments of their youthful charges. Lucy was causing her anxiety. "Who was that tall man she was dancing with?--dancing not for the first time or the second, but the third time without a break. And how unnecessarily intimate they appeared!

Could she not fan herself if she felt warm, when they stopped for breath?--instead of letting an awkward stranger raise tempests which were blowing her hair into unsightly confusion, and making her so needlessly conspicuous." If a gentleman was warranted "nice," she did not object to his paying attention to her girls, but she wanted a.s.surance of the niceness. She leant over to the nearest neighbour who seemed at leisure to answer her inquiries, and with whom, being a stranger, she would not compromise herself, whatever might be said.

The neighbour was Miss Maida Springer, a damsel scarcely any longer young, seeing her thirtieth birthday would be her next, who hovered on the confines of the dance, and looked hungrily after young men leading other maidens out, and wondering why no one came for her. She sat under the wing of an elder as lonely as herself--the widow Denwiddie, who varied the sober tenor of her life by spending a fortnight each summer among the gaieties and dissipations by the sea. She was bidding the widow observe things curious in the whirling crowd of dancers as they pa.s.sed.

"See that great thing in pink," she had said last. "Positively stout.

And what a colour for a large woman to wear! If it had been black, now, or blue, or even white----" and she glanced down approvingly at her own blue and white washed muslin. "Just watch the slow revolving heap. Ain't she like an iceberg out at sea, growing pink in the setting sun? And her poor little bit of a partner, racing to get round her on time! My! mustn't he feel warm! He reminds me of an ant trying to carry home a seed of wheat. Why don't he choose a slim one like himself?" and she ran her eye down her own spare form, which was certainly as slim as the absence of superfluous tissue could make it, with spider-like arms and wrists which would not be kept out of sight,--thinking how much freer the gentleman would have felt in the clasp of these slender tendrils.

"Look at that one's feet. Well, I never! What a size! I wonder how she can venture to stand up and dance. Ain't it good for the beetles they ain't none of them here?" and then, by a strange coincidence, a pair of number-one shoes stole out in front to show themselves--things small and narrow, on which it seemed wonderful that a human being could stand. But then a few bones can be packed away in very little room.

"Will you kindly tell me," asked Mrs Naylor, "who is that gentleman by the wall, with a lady's fan in his hand?--the one with the limp hair, brushed up so strangely above his forehead."

"The tall fine man with drab hair? That's Mr Aurelius Sefton of Pugwash--one of the most rising pork-packers in the whole West, they do say."

"Pugwash? What a name! And pork! That accounts for the sleekness of his hair. Lard--depend upon it."

"You think the lard has got in his hair? Well, now, ain't you droll!

Perhaps it has. But if lard has got in the hair, they do tell there has money got in the pocket. Do you lumber folks in Canady, now, have chips in your hair--chips and sawdust?"

Mrs Naylor looked dignified, and turned away. The magnates of her country deal in lumber. It is quite a high-cla.s.s pursuit, and not to be spoken of in the same breath with pork--a horrid butcherly business, in which no person of refinement would condescend to make his fortune.

Maida raised her eyebrows, and turned to her friend.

"Ain't we high-strung, just! we aristocrats from Canady? What difference can it make whether it's hogs or logs a man makes his pile by, so long as he makes it? And I guess, if there's been less money made in pork, there's been a sight more lost in lumber. I had a friend once----" and she coloured faintly, looking down, and heaving a sigh so demonstrative that her friend turned and looked at her.

"Yes, my dear?" said the widow, with a droop in her voice in token of sympathy. "You _had_ a friend? That sounds sad. Whaar did he go to?"

"He went away; and that's why it always seems as if something was catching my breath and making me feel low, whenever lumber is spoken of. _He_ went to Canady in the lumbering interest, because prospects were better there than in old Vermont. He promised to come back when he had made his pile, and I promised to wait. It's nothing so mighty unusual for young folks to do; and it's real feelin' of you to shake your head and look at me like that, Mrs Denwiddie. But don't let folks see you a-doing it; they might wonder."

"Ah yes!" heaved the widow, in deep sympathy; "I can understand. It's the tender way us trustin' women always has. We never tell our love, but just let folks think it's a big caterpillar has got in the heart of the cabbage, so to speak; or rather, I should say, liver and dispepsy that's eatin' our young looks away. It's disappinted love, now--is it, my dear--that's wearin' you to a shaddy? I know the feelin' well," and another sigh undulated her portly figure. "It's twenty years, come Fall, since I was left a lone woman, and hope has been tellin' me flatterin' tales ever since; but the men are that backward--they just look foolish when I shake their hands friendly-like and invite them to sit a bit, after seein' me home from evenin' meetin'; and away they go, sayin' never a word, and leavin' me with no more appet.i.te for supper than if I'd eaten it a'ready."

"Do you mean that you would marry again?"

"I would then--and don't you forget it--if ever I get the chance."

Maida glanced sidewise, and shrank the least bit possible away.

"You think me light-minded now, maybe, my dear? I don't wonder at it.

Them as hain't been married don't know how lonesome it feels to see just the one cup and saucer laid out beside the teapot at mealtimes."

"There must be memories. It would be sweet, I should have thought, to dwell on the idea that one had gone before, and was waiting across the river to be joined by the old companion."

"Oh yes; that's sweet--in a way. At least it was, when it was a dear young minister that was sayin' beautiful things about the Golden Sh.o.r.e, and comfortin' the bereaved. But twenty years is a long time.

The Rev. Mr Beulah is a married man now, with a fine young family of his own. Folks have forgotten about my affliction this many a year.

And as for Hezekiah----I don't hold with them spiritualists. He's more to do, you bet, than to be coming around frightenin' a lone woman with messages rapped out on a tea-table, or to mind whether I'm married or single. I'll be laid beside him when the time comes; that's as it should be. But it would be real pleasant to have some one for company in the meantime. It's a vale of tears--we've Gospel for that; but if ever you come to my time of life, you'll be wishin', like me, you had some one to dry your eyes in it."

Maida sighed disappointedly. Her friend's sentiments were too robust for the plaintive tone in which that word "lumber" had been tempting her to indulge. Mrs Denwiddie, on the other hand, felt talkative, and there being no one else whom she could address, she accommodated herself to her friend's mood.

"Is it long, now, since you saw him last?--your friend, I mean."

"He went ten years ago."

"Ten years! That's half a lifetime. Have you been gettin' letters from him for ten years?"

"He used to write--at first, that is. Then he would send a newspaper.

Now, I don't know where he is, or what he is doing. I wish I did. All would be forgiven and forgotten, if he only would return."

"It's real good of you to speak like that, my dear. It takes a woman to be true and forgivin' like that. I wonder what the young man will be doin', now, all this time?"

"He is trying hard to make that weary fortune, to be sure. He is ambitious."

"And he don't allow himself even the encouragement of writin' to tell you how he's gettin' on. Do you think there could be some one up there encouragin' him?"

"Mrs Denwiddie!"

"There's no tellin', my dear, what the men are up to. They ain't faithful and endurin' like us."

"I have waited. I can wait."

"It does you credit, my dear. But a girl's youth won't wait. How about settlin' yourself in life?"

Maida tightened her lips. She knew all that as well as Mrs Denwiddie; but what right had the woman to inspect her life in this fashion? to pull open the fold in which she chose to hide her inner self, and pry and probe in wanton curiosity?--the merciless and contemptuous curiosity with which married women will card out and examine the tangled threads of a spinster's being. She knew well enough the hopelessness of what, for want of another name, she thought of as her "attachment." Yet why could it not be taken at such small worth as she put upon it? She had not boasted of it. She knew its little value too well. But it was all she had, and why might she not wear it, having nothing else? That evening she was sitting a wallflower while the rest were merry--with no one to lead her out or make her a sharer in the gaiety. What wonder if she should wish to refer to a deferred engagement, and furbish up the poor little relic of a might-have-been, the one bit of romance she ever had, if only to seem less forlorn in her own eyes? And this old thing by her side, as lonely and shut out from the revelry as herself, and who, but for her, would have sat absolutely solitary--that _she_ should take upon her to be inquisitive and unpleasant! It was intolerable. She gathered her spare skirts more tightly round her, and edged some inches away upon the haircloth sofa she divided with her "friend." She would have risen altogether, but where was she to go? To what other companion could she join herself?

She was not intimate with any of the other guests, married or single, old or young. She belonged, poor soul, to the order of bats--both bird and quadruped, yet accepted by neither. In the marrying aspect, she was regarded as altogether out of the running, while old and young agreed each in cla.s.sing her with the other variety--too old to be a girl, not old enough to be a tabby--and n.o.body minded her when other company could be got. She felt it all, though she bravely ignored and struggled with her fate, living through many a tragic pang which no one ever suspected. She dared not put her position to the test by quarrelling with the widow. Already she saw herself flitting in and out among the revellers, unheeded, like a disembodied spirit. Where she sat she had at least a companion, and was safe from pity. She choked back her anger as a luxury she could not afford, and was ready to respond when Mrs Denwiddie, warned by symptoms that she might be left solitary in the crowd, realised that she must have been disagreeable, and set herself to open a new conversation in a less personal strain.

How many of us would dispense with our dear friends, if we were only sure we could get on without them!

CHAPTER X.

A MOTHER'S CARES.

Mrs Naylor went back to her chair to digest the information she had received. Pork and Pugwash were not ideas attractive to her refined imagination; but if there was money! The sons of "first families" in the East were sent West at times, she knew. Why not to Pugwash as well as other places? If Mr Aurelius Sefton were indeed well off, even Pugwash might be an endurable place to live in. Millinery is sent from New York by express all over the country, and railways have brought Everywhere within reach of civilisation. "Yes; if the man had his hair cut, and his manners chastened down by a judicious mother-in-law, he really was not ill-looking. She would find out brother Joseph, and bid him have an eye on the man, and try what he could find out about him from the other people in the house. It did seem, to see the pair still circling cheerfully together, as if something might be brought to pa.s.s, if that were desirable. Yet, if it were not, she must see that the girl did not compromise herself, and get cla.s.sed with the easily accessible." "Ah!" she said to herself, "the anxieties of a fond mother! How are my poor nerves to stand the strain of settling those two girls?" She realised how good she was, feeling strengthened thereby, and almost heroic, as she rose and moved slowly round the outskirts of the dance in search of her brother-in-law.

The company was more numerous than usual that evening. A bra.s.s band from Lippenstock stood on the verandah, and brayed waltzes in through the open windows; and three or four omnibus-loads of strangers from Blue Fish Creek, some miles along the sh.o.r.e, had arrived to a.s.sist.

The rooms were full, and it was not easy to pick out any one in the crowd. She made her way from doorway to doorway and past the windows, outside which the men not actively engaged were wont to lounge; but no Joseph could she see--though it was in such situations that he generally stood watching the gambols he no longer cared to join. She walked along the neighbouring galleries; but these seemed taken possession of by dancers cooling off, and sauntering in the moonlight till they were ready for another start.

At last, in the shadow of a pillar and leaning on the bal.u.s.trade, she came upon a pair looking out seaward, in intimate talk. She thought she recognised something in the gentleman's back, and figure, and close-cropped hair. She almost fancied she knew him; yet who could he be? The lady wore a dress less simple than the attire of the other girls that evening. There was a shimmer of satin here and there among the dimness of thinner fabric--