Читать книгу American Captain - Эдисон Маршалл - Страница 15

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In one of my rambles along the northwest shore, I marked a school of large fishes feeding in the shallow water of a small inlet. I soon made them out to be bass, running from twenty to sixty pounds, silvery colored with bluish backs; they were feeding on small crabs. On the following morning I went crabbing, then with a bucketful for bait and a hand line twenty fathoms long with hooks and sinkers, I went a-fishing. The big school of bass had vanished, but hopeful that they would return, I fixed a crab on the hook, whirled the lead, and cast it some fifteen fathoms. Then I sat down on the warm sand, under the balmy sky, to wait a bite, to daydream, and to enjoy my outing.

It happened that this reach of beach ran longer and straighter than any hereabouts. No houses were in sight, and I shared it only with little sandpipers, flying and settling and piping along the water’s edge—the hindmost ever the first to take off again. Since the breeze blew offshore, the cobalt blue of the sea stood almost unruffled; and all I could see of it was forsaken, too, except for gulls so far out that they were only visible when the sunlight glinted their snowy wings, and once in a while a small flock of pelicans, flying parallel to the coast on business that brooked no delay. The whole effect was of solitude deeper and more touching than any I had felt since I came to Malta.

That solitude was not broken, only oddly changed, when I made out a dot of life moving slowly along the beach a good mile off. It was a human being, walking—or rather wandering—in my direction, his gait unusually slow for the brisk, businesslike Maltese. He stopped now and again, and at one point he turned and began to retrace his steps. I felt pleased when again he stopped, hesitated, and came on.

Sitting as still as the old sand-sunk snag beside me, I did not think he had discovered my presence. When ten minutes had passed, his raiment began to puzzle me a great deal. The low-crowned, narrow-brimmed hat and the full skirt suggested a priest, but the latter was too short and the waist too narrow to fill the bill. On the other hand, the Maltese women invariably wore the faldetta, which is a black headdress extended into a cloak.

Suddenly I knew the person was female with a youthful step. Sometimes women working in the fields pinned up their dresses just below the knee, but she had more likely done so to cross the runnels of the making tide. Her tan skirt and tight-fitting jacket looked foreign to the island; still she might be a fisherman’s daughter, going to meet her father’s smack at some cove up the beach and carrying something fairly large, brown, and glossy in her hand. If she had time to loaf along the way, I thought I might persuade her to stay awhile with me.

I rose slowly to my feet so she could see me. Drawing in my line, I rebaited and cast again, to show her I was here on honest business. To my joy she kept her course, and with quickening step. This last puzzled me more than any other incident so far. It was one of those little things that go against one’s positive expectations. A child might hurry to look at me and at what I might be doing, but girls of courting age should be more circumspect.

Only when she drew within fifty paces and I had bowed my head and touched my cap in salutation, did I surmise the strangeness of the adventure. The girl was not a Maltese. I did not think she belonged to any Mediterranean nation. Although she went barefoot and bare-legged to her knees, she was a far cry from a fisherman’s daughter. She wore a beautifully fitted buff riding habit, pinned up for her comfort, and carried glossy riding boots in her hand.

She stopped about forty feet away and regarded me with frank curiosity. I expected to speak first, but she beat me.

“Are you catching any fish?” she asked, in a cheerful, rather friendly, completely assured voice.

“Not yet. The tide’s still a little low for them to start biting.”

She cocked her head a little in puzzlement or surprise. I did what I had learned to do in situations I did not wholly grasp—waited in silence.

“What is your shire? Your accent is—I was going to say York or Lancashire, but it isn’t quite like either. I’m not sure I ever heard it before.”

“I’m a native of Bath,” I told her with a straight face.

“Wiltshire? I don’t believe you. I mean, you must have left there before you learned to talk. I know Wiltshire from one end to the other.”

“I lived there all my life, just up the bay from Portland.”

“Portland is in Dorsetshire. You’re a liar—and no English sailor would dare lie to me—and that means you’re not English. I know what you are. I was a fool not to tell it right away. You’re a Yankee.”

“I am, but I didn’t lie to you about Bath, or Portland either. I came from the District of Maine, in Massachusetts.”

“Massachusetts! The hotbed of rebellion! Well, what are you doing here?”

“Fishing.”

“Stop being impudent. You’re a sailor, aren’t you?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Haven’t sailors in America any manners?”

I did not answer at once. It came to me that this girl was not naturally as high-handed as she showed. Her eyes had brightened, and I believed she was pleased to come on a young Yankee so unexpectedly, and her baiting me was a kind of game, to see what I would do. With that to go on, I could perceive her more clearly than before.

There was no getting out of it—she was an aristocrat. I had seen only a few in my life, since America was settled almost altogether by yeomanry with a sprinkling of gentry, and we were too young a nation to have developed many. The delicate molding of her hands and face gave me the clue, and her easy manner, complete composure, even her high skirt and bare feet which she had forgotten, clinched the matter in my mind. Indeed, she might be one of a high order, since she felt no need of putting on airs or minding Mrs. Grundy. Most likely she was rich. Her riding habit and boots looked expensive, her little hat was beaver, and a dark red stone, probably a ruby, burned in the clasp at her throat.

Still, I did not feel dismissed from her by this. Almost all except great folk know the feeling of dismissal—maybe these know it, too, although it cannot happen to them so often as to the poor—when we are brought to the attention of people who have everything. It is not that they are out of our reach. They simply do not want anything we can give them, and that brings a bleakness upon our souls. I felt a strong fellow humanity with the girl, and something more that did not seem to make sense. It was a desire to please her and make her laugh and be happy, not to gain her esteem, but for her own sake.

As I stood there, drinking her in, I knew there was something touching about her, which no amount of wealth or position or beauty could gainsay. But beauty is never something to drive people off. It always draws them in. There could be cold perfection in a face that would wither a bunch of posies, but that is not beauty. Real beauty makes every non-evil person feel warm-hearted and generous and happy along with being a little sorrowful. Unless they can have it for themselves, evil people hate it to the bottom of their hearts.