When the hymn was given out, she waited while an experimental search for the tune took place among the rest. They were about to abandon the attempt, when she lifted her voice and began to sing. She sang as she did in the meeting-house at South Bradfield, and her voice seemed to fill all the hollow height and distance; it rang far off like a mermaid's singing, on high like an angel's; it called with the same deep appeal to sense and soul alike. The sailors stood rapt; Dunham kept up a show of singing for the church's sake. The others made no pretense of looking at the words; they looked at her, and she began to falter, hearing herself alone. Then Staniford struck in again wildly, and the sea-voices lent their powerful discord, while the girl's contralto thrilled through all.
“Well, Miss Blood,” said the captain, when the service had ended in that subordination of the spiritual to the artistic interest which marks the process and the close of so much public worship in our day, “you've given us a surprise. I guess we shall keep you pretty busy with our calls for music, after this.”
“She is a genius!” observed Staniford at his first opportunity with Dunham. “I knew there must be something the matter. Of course she's going out to school her voice; and she hasn't strained it in idle babble about her own affairs! I must say that Lu—Miss Blood's power of holding her tongue commands my homage. Was it her little coup to wait till we got into that hopeless hobble before she struck in?”
“Coup? For shame, Staniford! Coup at such a time!”
“Well, well! I don't say so. But for the theatre one can't begin practicing these effects too soon. Really, that voice puts a new complexion on Miss Blood. I have a theory to reconstruct. I have been philosophizing her as a simple country girl. I must begin on an operatic novice. I liked the other better. It gave value to the black silk; as a singer she'll wear silk as habitually as a cocoon. She will have to take some stage name; translate Blood into Italian. We shall know her hereafter as La Sanguinelli; and when she comes to Boston we shall make our modest brags about going out to Europe with her. I don't know; I think I preferred the idyllic flavor I was beginning to find in the presence of the ordinary, futureless young girl, voyaging under the chaperonage of her own innocence,—the Little Sister of the Whole Ship. But this crepusculant prima donna—no, I don't like it. Though it explains some things. These splendid creatures are never sent half equipped into the world. I fancy that where there's an operatic voice, there's an operatic soul to go with it. Well, La Sanguinelli will wear me out, yet! Suggest some new topic, Dunham; talk of something else, for heaven's sake!”
“Do you suppose,” asked Dunham, “that she would like to help get up some musicales, to pass away the time?”
“Oh, do you call that talking of something else? What an insatiate organizer you are! You organize shuffleboard; you organize public worship; you want to organize musicales. She would have to do all your music for you.”
“I think she would like to go in for it,” said Dunham. “It must be a pleasure to exercise such a gift as that, and now that it's come out in the way it has, it would be rather awkward for us not to recognize it.”
Staniford refused point-blank to be a party to the new enterprise, and left Dunham to his own devices at dinner, where he proposed the matter.
“If you had my Persis here, now,” observed Captain Jenness, “with her parlor organ, you could get along.”