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 fife, 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 nonevil 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.
The girl's clean lines gave a trimness to her figure and a vividness to her face. They curved boldly or subtly, with no straight line on her, unless it was her nose; and on second look, it had a little upward tilt. Barefoot girls almost never look tall. She did so, for she was a good five and a half feet and slimly made; but that slimness never suggested fragility or dimmed her femininity. Bosom and butt are the badge: in her case neither was large, but both were prominent enough to take a sailor's eye and breath, trim, and, as is proper to young girls with spirit, rode somewhat high.
Her hair and rather heavy eyebrows appeared dusky black, and her skin might be called dusky too, as compared to the fair skins of England and New England. Actually it was only what we call a deep brunette, but it looked darker than her fight gray eyes and set them off. The sea lights upon them in contrast with their thickets of sable lashes gave them a jewel-like brilliance my gaze could not resist.
Over her small, prominent, finely worked and fitted facial bone, the flesh was spare, taut, and given to high lights. Her mouth was unevenly shaped—the upper-hp thin, the lower full, and the curved line at one corner was deeper than at the other. I did not know what had attracted my eyes to this minor oddity until I perceived it as a clue to her identity. Perhaps it was a flaw in her beauty. If so, I did not want it changed. Perhaps it only caused her mouth to appear wistful and childlike, denying that she had everything and no use for me.
I had not yet seen her smile, but wished I could.
"Won't you sit down and go back to your fishing?" she asked. "I'd like to watch you the little while before I must go."
"I reckon I haven't stopped fishing. I just haven't paid it any mind." This last was a Maine expression.
I sat down at my old place by the old snag, and she dropped on the sand beside me.
"My name is Sophia," she told me. "What's yours?"
This was deeper water than it seemed but, aroused and alert, I almost instantly saw through it. My last name did not matter, but hers did. I might have already heard it and its placing of her would prevent any easy communion between us. She wanted our meeting to be pleasant and interesting and uncomplicated; she might meet me a good halfway in that. But when we had parted, it would be over with.
"Homer," I answered.
"Homer?" she echoed in agreeable surprise. "How would you like to be named Ulysses?" She was watching me closely.