“If you word that sentence properly, I will,” she returned, quietly.
“Miss Danvers, will you be kind enough to bestow the light of your countenance on me while I make a tour of the principal Boston stores?”
“Yes,” she replied, tranquilly, “I will.”
For several hours they went from store to store. He was hard to suit; and Nina was obliged to allow herself to be pinched, pulled, and fitted by obsequious dressmakers and their attendants, until at last her husband and guardian was satisfied. He put her in a hack; and the bewildered, interested, and slightly homesick girl found herself being rapidly driven through a noisy, dirty, and mysterious part of the city that at last, however, opened on a stretch of narrow blue water.
She uttered an exclamation of delight, and hung out the carriage window. They had rolled into an enormously long and vaulted shed in which bales of merchandise were piled as high as the roof. Some of these bales were flying wildly through the air, all, however, swinging in the direction of several black, open mouths in the hull of a huge steamer lying against the wharf outside. A number of light yellow boxes were also tumbling to and fro, these propelled by shouting men. The mad haste prevailing among animate and inanimate objects made Nina fall a prey to complete bewilderment, and she frantically clung to the strong arm that was to guide her through this sea of apparent confusion.
When they reached the gangway, a kind of paralysis seized her, and she was conscious of being lifted bodily and set down on a floor as clean as that of the scrubbed kitchens in Rubicon Meadows.
She was on the deck of ’Steban’s beloved Merrimac; and, gazing hurriedly about her, she took in the noble lines of a staunch and beautiful oceangoing steamer. But ’Steban had disappeared after a brief, “Show this lady to ninety-three;” and some one was waiting to conduct her down into the heart of this wonderful and mysterious thing. She meekly followed her guide, who was a smart boy in buttons, and presently she found herself alone and standing in front of a narrow red couch. She dropped on it, passed her hand over her eyes, and sat for a few minutes in blank contentment.
Then she began to reflect. She was quite alone in a tiny room not a quarter as large as her bedroom in Rubicon Meadows. She was very, very young. She had left her darling home and two people who adored her. She was going to sea with a monster whom she hated and could never, never live with. The passengers on the steamer would probably be fine city people who would despise her as a green country girl; but she did not care. She would wear her red jacket to breakfast every morning if she wished. They would probably all be shipwrecked and go down to the fishes. What did anything matter, anyway?
From blank despair she proceeded to a more active display of her emotions, and was soon violently weeping. She would cry now until she died. She was a poor, unfortunate lily, uprooted from her native soil. She was withering cruelly in this atmosphere of neglect. ’Steban might have spent at least five minutes with her on her arrival in this new and strange place, and she redoubled her “tear falling pity.”
However, at eighteen one cannot weep for ever, and after an hour had elapsed she sat up and began to review her situation. After all, it was not so very heartrending. How many girls in Rubicon Meadows would give their worldly all to be in her position,—Captain Fordyce and all her other woes included? And if she were too desperately unhappy on this dreaded voyage, and if she were to escape shipwreck, her home was always open to her,—her beloved home; and flinging herself excitedly from the couch she began to pace up and down the tiny room.