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Title: The Pearl of Orr's Island: A Story of the Coast of Maine

Author: Harriet Beecher Stowe

Release date: March 6, 2010 [eBook #31522]
                Most recently updated: January 6, 2021

Language: English

Credits: Produced by David Edwards, Jane Hyland and the Online
        Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
        book was produced from scanned images of public domain
        material from the Google Print project.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PEARL OF ORR'S ISLAND: A STORY OF THE COAST OF MAINE ***




Produced by David Edwards, Jane Hyland and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
book was produced from scanned images of public domain
material from the Google Print project.)







THE

PEARL OF ORR'S ISLAND


A Story of the Coast of Maine


BY

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE


BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

The Riverside Press, Cambridge

1896


Copyright, 1862 and 1890,

BY HARRIET BEECHER STOWE.


Copyright, 1896,

BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO.


_All rights reserved._


_The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A._

Electrotyped and Printed by H.O. Houghton & Co.




CONTENTS


  INTRODUCTORY NOTE                                  vii

     CHAP.                                          PAGE

        I. NAOMI                                      1

       II. MARA                                       5

      III. THE BAPTISM AND THE BURIAL                 9

       IV. AUNT ROXY AND AUNT RUEY                   15

        V. THE KITTRIDGES                            25

       VI. GRANDPARENTS                              36

      VII. FROM THE SEA                              47

     VIII. THE SEEN AND THE UNSEEN                   58

       IX. MOSES                                     74

        X. THE MINISTER                              85

       XI. LITTLE ADVENTURERS                        99

      XII. SEA TALES                                110

     XIII. BOY AND GIRL                             120

      XIV. THE ENCHANTED ISLAND                     132

       XV. THE HOME COMING                          143

      XVI. THE NATURAL AND THE SPIRITUAL            154

     XVII. LESSONS                                  165

    XVIII. SALLY                                    175

      XIX. EIGHTEEN                                 179

       XX. REBELLION                                186

      XXI. THE TEMPTER                              198

     XXII. A FRIEND IN NEED                         208

    XXIII. THE BEGINNING OF THE STORY               218

     XXIV. DESIRES AND DREAMS                       229

      XXV. MISS EMILY                               235

     XXVI. DOLORES                                  245

    XXVII. HIDDEN THINGS                            258

   XXVIII. A COQUETTE                               270

     XXIX. NIGHT TALKS                              279

      XXX. THE LAUNCH OF THE ARIEL                  290

     XXXI. GREEK MEETS GREEK                        303

    XXXII. THE BETROTHAL                            315

   XXXIII. AT A QUILTING                            323

    XXXIV. FRIENDS                                  329

     XXXV. THE TOOTHACRE COTTAGE                    335

    XXXVI. THE SHADOW OF DEATH                      339

   XXXVII. THE VICTORY                              351

  XXXVIII. OPEN VISION                              358

    XXXIX. THE LAND OF BEULAH                       368

       XL. THE MEETING                              376

      XLI. CONSOLATION                              380

     XLII. LAST WORDS                               387

    XLIII. THE PEARL                                393

     XLIV. FOUR YEARS AFTER                         398

The frontispiece (Mara, page 376) was drawn by W.L. Taylor. The vignette
was etched by Charles H. Woodbury.




INTRODUCTORY NOTE.


The publication of _Uncle Tom's Cabin_, though much more than an
incident in an author's career, seems to have determined Mrs. Stowe more
surely in her purpose to devote herself to literature. During the summer
following its appearance, she was in Andover, making over the house
which she and her husband were to occupy upon leaving Brunswick; and
yet, busy as she was, she was writing articles for _The Independent_ and
_The National Era_. The following extract from a letter written at that
time, July 29, 1852, intimates that she already was sketching the
outline of the story which later grew into _The Pearl of Orr's
Island_:--

"I seem to have so much to fill my time, and yet there is my Maine story
waiting. However, I am composing it every day, only I greatly need
living studies for the filling in of my sketches. There is old Jonas, my
"fish father," a sturdy, independent fisherman farmer, who in his youth
sailed all over the world and made up his mind about everything. In his
old age he attends prayer-meetings and reads the _Missionary Herald_. He
also has plenty of money in an old brown sea-chest. He is a great heart
with an inflexible will and iron muscles. I must go to Orr's Island and
see him again." The story seems to have remained in her mind, for we are
told by her son that she worked upon it by turns with _The Minister's
Wooing_.

It was not, however, until eight years later, after _The Minister's
Wooing_ had been published and _Agnes of Sorrento_ was well begun, that
she took up her old story in earnest and set about making it into a
short serial. It would seem that her first intention was to confine
herself to a sketch of the childhood of her chief characters, with a
view to delineating the influences at work upon them; but, as she
herself expressed it, "Out of the simple history of the little Pearl of
Orr's Island as it had shaped itself in her mind, rose up a Captain
Kittridge with his garrulous yarns, and Misses Roxy and Ruey, given to
talk, and a whole pigeon roost of yet undreamed of fancies and dreams
which would insist on being written." So it came about that the story as
originally planned came to a stopping place at the end of Chapter XVII.,
as the reader may see when he reaches that place. The childish life of
her characters ended there, and a lapse of ten years was assumed before
their story was taken up again in the next chapter. The book when
published had no chapter headings. These have been supplied in the
present edition.




THE PEARL OF ORR'S ISLAND




CHAPTER I

NAOMI


On the road to the Kennebec, below the town of Bath, in the State of
Maine, might have been seen, on a certain autumnal afternoon, a
one-horse wagon, in which two persons were sitting. One was an old man,
with the peculiarly hard but expressive physiognomy which characterizes
the seafaring population of the New England shores. A clear blue eye,
evidently practiced in habits of keen observation, white hair, bronzed,
weather-beaten cheeks, and a face deeply lined with the furrows of
shrewd thought and anxious care, were points of the portrait that made
themselves felt at a glance.

By his side sat a young woman of two-and-twenty, of a marked and
peculiar personal appearance. Her hair was black, and smoothly parted on
a broad forehead, to which a pair of penciled dark eyebrows gave a
striking and definite outline. Beneath, lay a pair of large black eyes,
remarkable for tremulous expression of melancholy and timidity. The
cheek was white and bloodless as a snowberry, though with the clear and
perfect oval of good health; the mouth was delicately formed, with a
certain sad quiet in its lines, which indicated a habitually repressed
and sensitive nature.

The dress of this young person, as often happens in New England, was, in
refinement and even elegance, a marked contrast to that of her male
companion and to the humble vehicle in which she rode. There was not
only the most fastidious neatness, but a delicacy in the choice of
colors, an indication of elegant tastes in the whole arrangement, and
the quietest suggestion in the world of an acquaintance with the usages
of fashion, which struck one oddly in those wild and dreary
surroundings. On the whole, she impressed one like those fragile
wild-flowers which in April cast their fluttering shadows from the mossy
crevices of the old New England granite,--an existence in which
colorless delicacy is united to a sort of elastic hardihood of life, fit
for the rocky soil and harsh winds it is born to encounter.

The scenery of the road along which the two were riding was wild and
bare. Only savins and mulleins, with their dark pyramids or white spires
of velvet leaves, diversified the sandy wayside; but out at sea was a
wide sweep of blue, reaching far to the open ocean, which lay rolling,
tossing, and breaking into white caps of foam in the bright sunshine.
For two or three days a northeast storm had been raging, and the sea was
in all the commotion which such a general upturning creates.

The two travelers reached a point of elevated land, where they paused a
moment, and the man drew up the jogging, stiff-jointed old farm-horse,
and raised himself upon his feet to look out at the prospect.

There might be seen in the distance the blue Kennebec sweeping out
toward the ocean through its picturesque rocky shores, docked with
cedars and other dusky evergreens, which were illuminated by the orange
and flame-colored trees of Indian summer. Here and there scarlet
creepers swung long trailing garlands over the faces of the dark rock,
and fringes of goldenrod above swayed with the brisk blowing wind that
was driving the blue waters seaward, in face of the up-coming ocean
tide,--a conflict which caused them to rise in great foam-crested
waves. There are two channels into this river from the open sea,
navigable for ships which are coming in to the city of Bath; one is
broad and shallow, the other narrow and deep, and these are divided by a
steep ledge of rocks.

Where the spectators of this scene were sitting, they could see in the
distance a ship borne with tremendous force by the rising tide into the
mouth of the river, and encountering a northwest wind which had
succeeded the gale, as northwest winds often do on this coast. The ship,
from what might be observed in the distance, seemed struggling to make
the wider channel, but was constantly driven off by the baffling force
of the wind.

"There she is, Naomi," said the old fisherman, eagerly, to his
companion, "coming right in." The young woman was one of the sort that
never start, and never exclaim, but with all deeper emotions grow still.
The color slowly mounted into her cheek, her lips parted, and her eyes
dilated with a wide, bright expression; her breathing came in thick
gasps, but she said nothing.

The old fisherman stood up in the wagon, his coarse, butternut-colored
coat-flaps fluttering and snapping in the breeze, while his interest
seemed to be so intense in the efforts of the ship that he made
involuntary and eager movements as if to direct her course. A moment
passed, and his keen, practiced eye discovered a change in her
movements, for he cried out involuntarily,--

"_Don't_ take the narrow channel to-day!" and a moment after, "O Lord! O
Lord! have mercy,--there they go! Look! look! look!"

And, in fact, the ship rose on a great wave clear out of the water, and
the next second seemed to leap with a desperate plunge into the narrow
passage; for a moment there was a shivering of the masts and the
rigging, and she went down and was gone.

"They're split to pieces!" cried the fisherman. "Oh, my poor girl--my
poor girl--they're gone! O Lord, have mercy!"

The woman lifted up no voice, but, as one who has been shot through the
heart falls with no cry, she fell back,--a mist rose up over her great
mournful eyes,--she had fainted.

The story of this wreck of a home-bound ship just entering the harbor is
yet told in many a family on this coast. A few hours after, the
unfortunate crew were washed ashore in all the joyous holiday rig in
which they had attired themselves that morning to go to their sisters,
wives, and mothers.

This is the first scene in our story.




CHAPTER II

MARA


Down near the end of Orr's Island, facing the open ocean, stands a brown
house of the kind that the natives call "lean-to," or "linter,"--one of
those large, comfortable structures, barren in the ideal, but rich in
the practical, which the workingman of New England can always command.
The waters of the ocean came up within a rod of this house, and the
sound of its moaning waves was even now filling the clear autumn
starlight. Evidently something was going on within, for candles
fluttered and winked from window to window, like fireflies in a dark
meadow, and sounds as of quick footsteps, and the flutter of brushing
garments, might be heard.

Something unusual is certainly going on within the dwelling of Zephaniah
Pennel to-night.

Let us enter the dark front-door. We feel our way to the right, where a
solitary ray of light comes from the chink of a half-opened door. Here
is the front room of the house, set apart as its place of especial
social hilarity and sanctity,--the "best room," with its low studded
walls, white dimity window-curtains, rag carpet, and polished wood
chairs. It is now lit by the dim gleam of a solitary tallow candle,
which seems in the gloom to make only a feeble circle of light around
itself, leaving all the rest of the apartment in shadow.

In the centre of the room, stretched upon a table, and covered partially
by a sea-cloak, lies the body of a man of twenty-five,--lies, too,
evidently as one of whom it is written, "He shall return to his house
no more, neither shall his place know him any more." A splendid manhood
has suddenly been called to forsake that lifeless form, leaving it, like
a deserted palace, beautiful in its desolation. The hair, dripping with
the salt wave, curled in glossy abundance on the finely-formed head; the
flat, broad brow; the closed eye, with its long black lashes; the firm,
manly mouth; the strongly-moulded chin,--all, all were sealed with that
seal which is never to be broken till the great resurrection day.

He was lying in a full suit of broadcloth, with a white vest and smart
blue neck-tie, fastened with a pin, in which was some braided hair under
a crystal. All his clothing, as well as his hair, was saturated with
sea-water, which trickled from time to time, and struck with a leaden
and dropping sound into a sullen pool which lay under the table.

This was the body of James Lincoln, ship-master of the brig Flying Scud,
who that morning had dressed himself gayly in his state-room to go on
shore and meet his wife,--singing and jesting as he did so.

This is all that you have to learn in the room below; but as we stand
there, we hear a trampling of feet in the apartment above,--the quick
yet careful opening and shutting of doors,--and voices come and go about
the house, and whisper consultations on the stairs. Now comes the roll
of wheels, and the Doctor's gig drives up to the door; and, as he goes
creaking up with his heavy boots, we will follow and gain admission to
the dimly-lighted chamber.

Two gossips are sitting in earnest, whispering conversation over a small
bundle done up in an old flannel petticoat. To them the doctor is about
to address himself cheerily, but is repelled by sundry signs and sounds
which warn him not to speak. Moderating his heavy boots as well as he
is able to a pace of quiet, he advances for a moment, and the petticoat
is unfolded for him to glance at its contents; while a low, eager,
whispered conversation, attended with much head-shaking, warns him that
his first duty is with somebody behind the checked curtains of a bed in
the farther corner of the room. He steps on tiptoe, and draws the
curtain; and there, with closed eye, and cheek as white as wintry snow,
lies the same face over which passed the shadow of death when that
ill-fated ship went down.

This woman was wife to him who lies below, and within the hour has been
made mother to a frail little human existence, which the storm of a
great anguish has driven untimely on the shores of life,--a precious
pearl cast up from the past eternity upon the wet, wave-ribbed sand of
the present. Now, weary with her moanings, and beaten out with the
wrench of a double anguish, she lies with closed eyes in that passive
apathy which precedes deeper shadows and longer rest.

Over against her, on the other side of the bed, sits an aged woman in an
attitude of deep dejection, and the old man we saw with her in the
morning is standing with an anxious, awestruck face at the foot of the
bed.

The doctor feels the pulse of the woman, or rather lays an inquiring
finger where the slightest thread of vital current is scarcely
throbbing, and shakes his head mournfully. The touch of his hand rouses
her,--her large wild, melancholy eyes fix themselves on him with an
inquiring glance, then she shivers and moans,--

"Oh, Doctor, Doctor!--Jamie, Jamie!"

"Come, come!" said the doctor, "cheer up, my girl, you've got a fine
little daughter,--the Lord mingles mercies with his afflictions."

Her eyes closed, her head moved with a mournful but decided dissent.

A moment after she spoke in the sad old words of the Hebrew Scripture,--

"Call her not Naomi; call her Mara, for the Almighty hath dealt very
bitterly with me."

And as she spoke, there passed over her face the sharp frost of the last
winter; but even as it passed there broke out a smile, as if a flower
had been thrown down from Paradise, and she said,--

"Not my will, but thy will," and so was gone.

Aunt Roxy and Aunt Ruey were soon left alone in the chamber of death.

"She'll make a beautiful corpse," said Aunt Roxy, surveying the still,
white form contemplatively, with her head in an artistic attitude.

"She was a pretty girl," said Aunt Ruey; "dear me, what a Providence! I
'member the wedd'n down in that lower room, and what a handsome couple
they were."

"They were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their deaths they
were not divided," said Aunt Roxy, sententiously.

"What was it she said, did ye hear?" said Aunt Ruey.

"She called the baby 'Mary.'"

"Ah! sure enough, her mother's name afore her. What a still,
softly-spoken thing she always was!"

"A pity the poor baby didn't go with her," said Aunt Roxy;
"seven-months' children are so hard to raise."

"'Tis a pity," said the other.

But babies will live, and all the more when everybody says that it is a
pity they should. Life goes on as inexorably in this world as death. It
was ordered by THE WILL above that out of these two graves should spring
one frail, trembling autumn flower,--the "Mara" whose poor little roots
first struck deep in the salt, bitter waters of our mortal life.




CHAPTER III

THE BAPTISM AND THE BURIAL


Now, I cannot think of anything more unlikely and uninteresting to make
a story of than that old brown "linter" house of Captain Zephaniah
Pennel, down on the south end of Orr's Island.

Zephaniah and Mary Pennel, like Zacharias and Elizabeth, are a pair of
worthy, God-fearing people, walking in all the commandments and
ordinances of the Lord blameless; but that is no great recommendation to
a world gaping for sensation and calling for something stimulating. This
worthy couple never read anything but the Bible, the "Missionary
Herald," and the "Christian Mirror,"--never went anywhere except in the
round of daily business. He owned a fishing-smack, in which he labored
after the apostolic fashion; and she washed, and ironed, and scrubbed,
and brewed, and baked, in her contented round, week in and out. The only
recreation they ever enjoyed was the going once a week, in good weather,
to a prayer-meeting in a little old brown school-house, about a mile
from their dwelling; and making a weekly excursion every Sunday, in
their fishing craft, to the church opposite, on Harpswell Neck.

To be sure, Zephaniah had read many wide leaves of God's great book of
Nature, for, like most Maine sea-captains, he had been wherever ship can
go,--to all usual and unusual ports. His hard, shrewd, weather-beaten
visage had been seen looking over the railings of his brig in the port
of Genoa, swept round by its splendid crescent of palaces and its
snow-crested Apennines. It had looked out in the Lagoons of Venice at
that wavy floor which in evening seems a sea of glass mingled with fire,
and out of which rise temples, and palaces, and churches, and distant
silvery Alps, like so many fabrics of dreamland. He had been through the
Skagerrack and Cattegat,--into the Baltic, and away round to Archangel,
and there chewed a bit of chip, and considered and calculated what
bargains it was best to make. He had walked the streets of Calcutta in
his shirt-sleeves, with his best Sunday vest, backed with black glazed
cambric, which six months before came from the hands of Miss Roxy, and
was pronounced by her to be as good as any tailor could make; and in all
these places he was just Zephaniah Pennel,--a chip of old
Maine,--thrifty, careful, shrewd, honest, God-fearing, and carrying an
instinctive knowledge of men and things under a face of rustic
simplicity.

It was once, returning from one of his voyages, that he found his wife
with a black-eyed, curly-headed little creature, who called him papa,
and climbed on his knee, nestled under his coat, rifled his pockets, and
woke him every morning by pulling open his eyes with little fingers, and
jabbering unintelligible dialects in his ears.

"We will call this child Naomi, wife," he said, after consulting his old
Bible; "for that means pleasant, and I'm sure I never see anything beat
her for pleasantness. I never knew as children was so engagin'!"

It was to be remarked that Zephaniah after this made shorter and shorter
voyages, being somehow conscious of a string around his heart which
pulled him harder and harder, till one Sunday, when the little Naomi was
five years old, he said to his wife,--

"I hope I ain't a-pervertin' Scriptur' nor nuthin', but I can't help
thinkin' of one passage, 'The kingdom of heaven is like a merchantman
seeking goodly pearls, and when he hath found one pearl of great price,
for joy thereof he goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that
pearl.' Well, Mary, I've been and sold my brig last week," he said,
folding his daughter's little quiet head under his coat, "'cause it
seems to me the Lord's given us this pearl of great price, and it's
enough for us. I don't want to be rambling round the world after riches.
We'll have a little farm down on Orr's Island, and I'll have a little
fishing-smack, and we'll live and be happy together."

And so Mary, who in those days was a pretty young married woman, felt
herself rich and happy,--no duchess richer or happier. The two
contentedly delved and toiled, and the little Naomi was their princess.
The wise men of the East at the feet of an infant, offering gifts, gold,
frankincense, and myrrh, is just a parable of what goes on in every
house where there is a young child. All the hard and the harsh, and the
common and the disagreeable, is for the parents,--all the bright and
beautiful for their child.

When the fishing-smack went to Portland to sell mackerel, there came
home in Zephaniah's fishy coat pocket strings of coral beads, tiny
gaiter boots, brilliant silks and ribbons for the little fairy
princess,--his Pearl of the Island; and sometimes, when a stray party
from the neighboring town of Brunswick came down to explore the romantic
scenery of the solitary island, they would be startled by the apparition
of this still, graceful, dark-eyed child exquisitely dressed in the best
and brightest that the shops of a neighboring city could
afford,--sitting like some tropical bird on a lonely rock, where the sea
came dashing up into the edges of arbor vitæ, or tripping along the wet
sands for shells and seaweed.

Many children would have been spoiled by such unlimited indulgence; but
there are natures sent down into this harsh world so timorous, and
sensitive, and helpless in themselves, that the utmost stretch of
indulgence and kindness is needed for their development,--like plants
which the warmest shelf of the green-house and the most careful watch of
the gardener alone can bring into flower. The pale child, with her
large, lustrous, dark eyes, and sensitive organization, was nursed and
brooded into a beautiful womanhood, and then found a protector in a
high-spirited, manly young ship-master, and she became his wife.

And now we see in the best room--the walls lined with serious
faces--men, women, and children, that have come to pay the last tribute
of sympathy to the living and the dead. The house looked so utterly
alone and solitary in that wild, sea-girt island, that one would have as
soon expected the sea-waves to rise and walk in, as so many neighbors;
but they had come from neighboring points, crossing the glassy sea in
their little crafts, whose white sails looked like millers' wings, or
walking miles from distant parts of the island.

Some writer calls a funeral one of the amusements of a New England
population. Must we call it an amusement to go and see the acted despair
of Medea? or the dying agonies of poor Adrienne Lecouvreur? It is
something of the same awful interest in life's tragedy, which makes an
untaught and primitive people gather to a funeral,--a tragedy where
there is no acting,--and one which each one feels must come at some time
to his own dwelling.

Be that as it may, here was a roomful. Not only Aunt Roxy and Aunt Ruey,
who by a prescriptive right presided over all the births, deaths, and
marriages of the neighborhood, but there was Captain Kittridge, a long,
dry, weather-beaten old sea-captain, who sat as if tied in a double
bow-knot, with his little fussy old wife, with a great Leghorn bonnet,
and eyes like black glass beads shining through in the bows of her horn
spectacles, and her hymn-book in her hand ready to lead the psalm. There
were aunts, uncles, cousins, and brethren of the deceased; and in the
midst stood two coffins, where the two united in death lay sleeping
tenderly, as those to whom rest is good. All was still as death, except
a chance whisper from some busy neighbor, or a creak of an old lady's
great black fan, or the fizz of a fly down the window-pane, and then a
stifled sound of deep-drawn breath and weeping from under a cloud of
heavy black crape veils, that were together in the group which
country-people call the mourners.

A gleam of autumn sunlight streamed through the white curtains, and fell
on a silver baptismal vase that stood on the mother's coffin, as the
minister rose and said, "The ordinance of baptism will now be
administered." A few moments more, and on a baby brow had fallen a few
drops of water, and the little pilgrim of a new life had been called
Mara in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,--the minister
slowly repeating thereafter those beautiful words of Holy Writ, "A
father of the fatherless is God in his holy habitation,"--as if the
baptism of that bereaved one had been a solemn adoption into the
infinite heart of the Lord.

With something of the quaint pathos which distinguishes the primitive
and Biblical people of that lonely shore, the minister read the passage
in Ruth from which the name of the little stranger was drawn, and which
describes the return of the bereaved Naomi to her native land. His voice
trembled, and there were tears in many eyes as he read, "And it came to
pass as she came to Bethlehem, all the city was moved about them; and
they said, Is this Naomi? And she said unto them, Call me not Naomi;
call me Mara; for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me. I went
out full, and the Lord hath brought me home again empty: why then call
ye me Naomi, seeing the Lord hath testified against me, and the Almighty
hath afflicted me?"

Deep, heavy sobs from the mourners were for a few moments the only
answer to these sad words, till the minister raised the old funeral
psalm of New England,--

    "Why do we mourn departing friends,
      Or shake at Death's alarms?
    'Tis but the voice that Jesus sends
      To call them to his arms.

    "Are we not tending upward too,
      As fast as time can move?
    And should we wish the hours more slow
      That bear us to our love?"

The words rose in old "China,"--that strange, wild warble, whose
quaintly blended harmonies might have been learned of moaning seas or
wailing winds, so strange and grand they rose, full of that intense
pathos which rises over every defect of execution; and as they sung,
Zephaniah Pennel straightened his tall form, before bowed on his hands,
and looked heavenward, his cheeks wet with tears, but something sublime
and immortal shining upward through his blue eyes; and at the last verse
he came forward involuntarily, and stood by his dead, and his voice rose
over all the others as he sung,--

    "Then let the last loud trumpet sound,
      And bid the dead arise!
    Awake, ye nations under ground!
      Ye saints, ascend the skies!"

The sunbeam through the window-curtain fell on his silver hair, and they
that looked beheld his face as it were the face of an angel; he had
gotten a sight of the city whose foundation is jasper, and whose every
gate is a separate pearl.




CHAPTER IV

AUNT ROXY AND AUNT RUEY


The sea lay like an unbroken mirror all around the pine-girt, lonely
shores of Orr's Island. Tall, kingly spruces wore their regal crowns of
cones high in air, sparkling with diamonds of clear exuded gum; vast old
hemlocks of primeval growth stood darkling in their forest shadows,
their branches hung with long hoary moss; while feathery larches, turned
to brilliant gold by autumn frosts, lighted up the darker shadows of the
evergreens. It was one of those hazy, calm, dissolving days of Indian
summer, when everything is so quiet that the faintest kiss of the wave
on the beach can be heard, and white clouds seem to faint into the blue
of the sky, and soft swathing bands of violet vapor make all earth look
dreamy, and give to the sharp, clear-cut outlines of the northern
landscape all those mysteries of light and shade which impart such
tenderness to Italian scenery.

The funeral was over; the tread of many feet, bearing the heavy burden
of two broken lives, had been to the lonely graveyard, and had come back
again,--each footstep lighter and more unconstrained as each one went
his way from the great old tragedy of Death to the common cheerful walks
of Life.

The solemn black clock stood swaying with its eternal "tick-tock,
tick-tock," in the kitchen of the brown house on Orr's Island. There was
there that sense of a stillness that can be felt,--such as settles down
on a dwelling when any of its inmates have passed through its doors for
the last time, to go whence they shall not return. The best room was
shut up and darkened, with only so much light as could fall through a
little heart-shaped hole in the window-shutter,--for except on solemn
visits, or prayer meetings, or weddings, or funerals, that room formed
no part of the daily family scenery.

The kitchen was clean and ample, with a great open fireplace and wide
stone hearth, and oven on one side, and rows of old-fashioned
splint-bottomed chairs against the wall. A table scoured to snowy
whiteness, and a little work-stand whereon lay the Bible, the
"Missionary Herald" and the "Weekly Christian Mirror," before named,
formed the principal furniture. One feature, however, must not be
forgotten,--a great sea-chest, which had been the companion of Zephaniah
through all the countries of the earth. Old, and battered, and unsightly
it looked, yet report said that there was good store within of that
which men for the most part respect more than anything else; and,
indeed, it proved often when a deed of grace was to be done,--when a
woman was suddenly made a widow in a coast gale, or a fishing-smack was
run down in the fogs off the banks, leaving in some neighboring cottage
a family of orphans,--in all such cases, the opening of this sea-chest
was an event of good omen to the bereaved; for Zephaniah had a large
heart and a large hand, and was apt to take it out full of silver
dollars when once it went in. So the ark of the covenant could not have
been looked on with more reverence than the neighbors usually showed to
Captain Pennel's sea-chest.

The afternoon sun is shining in a square of light through the open
kitchen-door, whence one dreamily disposed might look far out to sea,
and behold ships coming and going in every variety of shape and size.

But Aunt Roxy and Aunt Ruey, who for the present were sole occupants of
the premises, were not people of the dreamy kind, and consequently were
not gazing off to sea, but attending to very terrestrial matters that in
all cases somebody must attend to. The afternoon was warm and balmy, but
a few smouldering sticks were kept in the great chimney, and thrust deep
into the embers was a mongrel species of snub-nosed tea-pot, which fumed
strongly of catnip-tea, a little of which gracious beverage Miss Roxy
was preparing in an old-fashioned cracked India china tea-cup, tasting
it as she did so with the air of a connoisseur.

Apparently this was for the benefit of a small something in long white
clothes, that lay face downward under a little blanket of very blue new
flannel, and which something Aunt Roxy, when not otherwise engaged,
constantly patted with a gentle tattoo, in tune to the steady trot of
her knee. All babies knew Miss Roxy's tattoo on their backs, and never
thought of taking it in ill part. On the contrary, it had a vital and
mesmeric effect of sovereign force against colic, and all other
disturbers of the nursery; and never was infant known so pressed with
those internal troubles which infants cry about, as not speedily to give
over and sink to slumber at this soothing appliance.

At a little distance sat Aunt Ruey, with a quantity of black crape
strewed on two chairs about her, very busily employed in getting up a
mourning-bonnet, at which she snipped, and clipped, and worked,
zealously singing, in a high cracked voice, from time to time, certain
verses of a funeral psalm.

Miss Roxy and Miss Ruey Toothacre were two brisk old bodies of the
feminine gender and singular number, well known in all the region of
Harpswell Neck and Middle Bay, and such was their fame that it had even
reached the town of Brunswick, eighteen miles away.

They were of that class of females who might be denominated, in the Old
Testament language, "cunning women,"--that is, gifted with an infinite
diversity of practical "faculty," which made them an essential
requisite in every family for miles and miles around. It was impossible
to say what they could not do: they could make dresses, and make shirts
and vests and pantaloons, and cut out boys' jackets, and braid straw,
and bleach and trim bonnets, and cook and wash, and iron and mend, could
upholster and quilt, could nurse all kinds of sicknesses, and in default
of a doctor, who was often miles away, were supposed to be infallible
medical oracles. Many a human being had been ushered into life under
their auspices,--trotted, chirruped in babyhood on their knees, clothed
by their handiwork in garments gradually enlarging from year to year,
watched by them in the last sickness, and finally arrayed for the long
repose by their hands.

These universally useful persons receive among us the title of "aunt" by
a sort of general consent, showing the strong ties of relationship which
bind them to the whole human family. They are nobody's aunts in
particular, but aunts to human nature generally. The idea of restricting
their usefulness to any one family, would strike dismay through a whole
community. Nobody would be so unprincipled as to think of such a thing
as having their services more than a week or two at most. Your country
factotum knows better than anybody else how absurd it would be

    "To give to a part what was meant for mankind."

Nobody knew very well the ages of these useful sisters. In that cold,
clear, severe climate of the North, the roots of human existence are
hard to strike; but, if once people do take to living, they come in time
to a place where they seem never to grow any older, but can always be
found, like last year's mullein stalks, upright, dry, and seedy,
warranted to last for any length of time.

Miss Roxy Toothacre, who sits trotting the baby, is a tall, thin,
angular woman, with sharp black eyes, and hair once black, but now well
streaked with gray. These ravages of time, however, were concealed by an
ample mohair frisette of glossy blackness woven on each side into a heap
of stiff little curls, which pushed up her cap border in rather a
bristling and decisive way. In all her movements and personal habits,
even to her tone of voice and manner of speaking, Miss Roxy was
vigorous, spicy, and decided. Her mind on all subjects was made up, and
she spoke generally as one having authority; and who should, if she
should not? Was she not a sort of priestess and sibyl in all the most
awful straits and mysteries of life? How many births, and weddings, and
deaths had come and gone under her jurisdiction! And amid weeping or
rejoicing, was not Miss Roxy still the master-spirit,--consulted,
referred to by all?--was not her word law and precedent? Her younger
sister, Miss Ruey, a pliant, cozy, easy-to-be-entreated personage, plump
and cushiony, revolved around her as a humble satellite. Miss Roxy
looked on Miss Ruey as quite a frisky young thing, though under her
ample frisette of carroty hair her head might be seen white with the
same snow that had powdered that of her sister. Aunt Ruey had a face
much resembling the kind of one you may see, reader, by looking at
yourself in the convex side of a silver milk-pitcher. If you try the
experiment, this description will need no further amplification.

The two almost always went together, for the variety of talent comprised
in their stock could always find employment in the varying wants of a
family. While one nursed the sick, the other made clothes for the well;
and thus they were always chippering and chatting to each other, like a
pair of antiquated house-sparrows, retailing over harmless gossips, and
moralizing in that gentle jogtrot which befits serious old women. In
fact, they had talked over everything in Nature, and said everything
they could think of to each other so often, that the opinions of one
were as like those of the other as two sides of a pea-pod. But as often
happens in cases of the sort, this was not because the two were in all
respects exactly alike, but because the stronger one had mesmerized the
weaker into consent.

Miss Roxy was the master-spirit of the two, and, like the great coining
machine of a mint, came down with her own sharp, heavy stamp on every
opinion her sister put out. She was matter-of-fact, positive, and
declarative to the highest degree, while her sister was naturally
inclined to the elegiac and the pathetic, indulging herself in
sentimental poetry, and keeping a store thereof in her thread-case,
which she had cut from the "Christian Mirror." Miss Roxy sometimes, in
her brusque way, popped out observations on life and things, with a
droll, hard quaintness that took one's breath a little, yet never failed
to have a sharp crystallization of truth,--frosty though it were. She
was one of those sensible, practical creatures who tear every veil, and
lay their fingers on every spot in pure business-like good-will; and if
we shiver at them at times, as at the first plunge of a cold bath, we
confess to an invigorating power in them after all.

"Well, now," said Miss Roxy, giving a decisive push to the tea-pot,
which buried it yet deeper in the embers, "ain't it all a strange kind
o' providence that this 'ere little thing is left behind so; and then
their callin' on her by such a strange, mournful kind of name,--Mara. I
thought sure as could be 'twas Mary, till the minister read the passage
from Scriptur'. Seems to me it's kind o' odd. I'd call it Maria, or I'd
put an Ann on to it. Mara-ann, now, wouldn't sound so strange."

"It's a Scriptur' name, sister," said Aunt Ruey, "and that ought to be
enough for us."

"Well, I don't know," said Aunt Roxy. "Now there was Miss Jones down on
Mure P'int called her twins Tiglath-Pileser and Shalmaneser,--Scriptur'
names both, but I never liked 'em. The boys used to call 'em, Tiggy and
Shally, so no mortal could guess they was Scriptur'."

"Well," said Aunt Ruey, drawing a sigh which caused her plump
proportions to be agitated in gentle waves, "'tain't much matter, after
all, _what_ they call the little thing, for 'tain't 'tall likely it's
goin' to live,--cried and worried all night, and kep' a-suckin' my cheek
and my night-gown, poor little thing! This 'ere's a baby that won't get
along without its mother. What Mis' Pennel's a-goin' to do with it when
we is gone, I'm sure I don't know. It comes kind o' hard on old people
to be broke o' their rest. If it's goin' to be called home, it's a pity,
as I said, it didn't go with its mother"--

"And save the expense of another funeral," said Aunt Roxy. "Now when
Mis' Pennel's sister asked her what she was going to do with Naomi's
clothes, I couldn't help wonderin' when she said she should keep 'em for
the child."

"She had a sight of things, Naomi did," said Aunt Ruey. "Nothin' was
never too much for her. I don't believe that Cap'n Pennel ever went to
Bath or Portland without havin' it in his mind to bring Naomi
somethin'."

"Yes, and she had a faculty of puttin' of 'em on," said Miss Roxy, with
a decisive shake of the head. "Naomi was a still girl, but her faculty
was uncommon; and I tell you, Ruey, 'tain't everybody hes faculty as hes
things."

"The poor Cap'n," said Miss Ruey, "he seemed greatly supported at the
funeral, but he's dreadful broke down since. I went into Naomi's room
this morning, and there the old man was a-sittin' by her bed, and he had
a pair of her shoes in his hand,--you know what a leetle bit of a foot
she had. I never saw nothin' look so kind o' solitary as that poor old
man did!"

"Well," said Miss Roxy, "she was a master-hand for keepin' things,
Naomi was; her drawers is just a sight; she's got all the little
presents and things they ever give her since she was a baby, in one
drawer. There's a little pair of red shoes there that she had when she
wa'n't more'n five year old. You 'member, Ruey, the Cap'n brought 'em
over from Portland when we was to the house a-makin' Mis' Pennel's
figured black silk that he brought from Calcutty. You 'member they cost
just five and sixpence; but, law! the Cap'n he never grudged the money
when 'twas for Naomi. And so she's got all her husband's keepsakes and
things just as nice as when he give 'em to her."

"It's real affectin'," said Miss Ruey, "I can't all the while help
a-thinkin' of the Psalm,--

    "'So fades the lovely blooming flower,--
    Frail, smiling solace of an hour;
    So quick our transient comforts fly,
    And pleasure only blooms to die.'"

"Yes," said Miss Roxy; "and, Ruey, I was a-thinkin' whether or no it
wa'n't best to pack away them things, 'cause Naomi hadn't fixed no baby
drawers, and we seem to want some."

"I was kind o' hintin' that to Mis' Pennel this morning," said Ruey,
"but she can't seem to want to have 'em touched."

"Well, we may just as well come to such things first as last," said Aunt
Roxy; "'cause if the Lord takes our friends, he does take 'em; and we
can't lose 'em and have 'em too, and we may as well give right up at
first, and done with it, that they are gone, and we've got to do without
'em, and not to be hangin' on to keep things just as they was."

"So I was a-tellin' Mis' Pennel," said Miss Ruey, "but she'll come to it
by and by. I wish the baby might live, and kind o' grow up into her
mother's place."

"Well," said Miss Roxy, "I wish it might, but there'd be a sight o'
trouble fetchin' on it up. Folks can do pretty well with children when
they're young and spry, if they do get 'em up nights; but come to
grandchildren, it's pretty tough."

"I'm a-thinkin', sister," said Miss Ruey, taking off her spectacles and
rubbing her nose thoughtfully, "whether or no cow's milk ain't goin' to
be too hearty for it, it's such a pindlin' little thing. Now, Mis'
Badger she brought up a seven-months' child, and she told me she gave it
nothin' but these 'ere little seed cookies, wet in water, and it throve
nicely,--and the seed is good for wind."

"Oh, don't tell me none of Mis' Badger's stories," said Miss Roxy, "I
don't believe in 'em. Cows is the Lord's ordinances for bringing up
babies that's lost their mothers; it stands to reason they should
be,--and babies that can't eat milk, why they can't be fetched up; but
babies can eat milk, and this un will if it lives, and if it can't it
won't live." So saying, Miss Roxy drummed away on the little back of the
party in question, authoritatively, as if to pound in a wholesome
conviction at the outset.

"I hope," said Miss Ruey, holding up a strip of black crape, and looking
through it from end to end so as to test its capabilities, "I hope the
Cap'n and Mis' Pennel'll get some support at the prayer-meetin' this
afternoon."

"It's the right place to go to," said Miss Roxy, with decision.

"Mis' Pennel said this mornin' that she was just beat out tryin' to
submit; and the more she said, 'Thy will be done,' the more she didn't
seem to feel it."

"Them's common feelin's among mourners, Ruey. These 'ere forty years
that I've been round nussin', and layin'-out, and tendin' funerals, I've
watched people's exercises. People's sometimes supported wonderfully
just at the time, and maybe at the funeral; but the three or four weeks
after, most everybody, if they's to say what they feel, is
unreconciled."

"The Cap'n, he don't say nothin'," said Miss Ruey.

"No, he don't, but he looks it in his eyes," said Miss Roxy; "he's one
of the kind o' mourners as takes it deep; that kind don't cry; it's a
kind o' dry, deep pain; them's the worst to get over it,--sometimes they
just says nothin', and in about six months they send for you to nuss 'em
in consumption or somethin'. Now, Mis' Pennel, she can cry and she can
talk,--well, she'll get over it; but _he_ won't get no support unless
the Lord reaches right down and lifts him up over the world. I've seen
that happen sometimes, and I tell you, Ruey, that sort makes powerful
Christians."

At that moment the old pair entered the door. Zephaniah Pennel came and
stood quietly by the pillow where the little form was laid, and lifted a
corner of the blanket. The tiny head was turned to one side, showing the
soft, warm cheek, and the little hand was holding tightly a morsel of
the flannel blanket. He stood swallowing hard for a few moments. At last
he said, with deep humility, to the wise and mighty woman who held her,
"I'll tell you what it is, Miss Roxy, I'll give all there is in my old
chest yonder if you'll only make her--live."




CHAPTER V

THE KITTRIDGES


It did live. The little life, so frail, so unprofitable in every mere
material view, so precious in the eyes of love, expanded and flowered at
last into fair childhood. Not without much watching and weariness. Many
a night the old fisherman walked the floor with the little thing in his
arms, talking to it that jargon of tender nonsense which fairies bring
as love-gifts to all who tend a cradle. Many a day the good little old
grandmother called the aid of gossips about her, trying various
experiments of catnip, and sweet fern, and bayberry, and other teas of
rustic reputation for baby frailties.

At the end of three years, the two graves in the lonely graveyard were
sodded and cemented down by smooth velvet turf, and playing round the
door of the brown houses was a slender child, with ways and manners so
still and singular as often to remind the neighbors that she was not
like other children,--a bud of hope and joy,--but the outcome of a great
sorrow,--a pearl washed ashore by a mighty, uprooting tempest. They that
looked at her remembered that her father's eye had never beheld her, and
her baptismal cup had rested on her mother's coffin.

She was small of stature, beyond the wont of children of her age, and
moulded with a fine waxen delicacy that won admiration from all eyes.
Her hair was curly and golden, but her eyes were dark like her mother's,
and the lids drooped over them in that manner which gives a peculiar
expression of dreamy wistfulness. Every one of us must remember eyes
that have a strange, peculiar expression of pathos and desire, as if the
spirit that looked out of them were pressed with vague remembrances of a
past, or but dimly comprehended the mystery of its present life. Even
when the baby lay in its cradle, and its dark, inquiring eyes would
follow now one object and now another, the gossips would say the child
was longing for something, and Miss Roxy would still further venture to
predict that that child always would long and never would know exactly
what she was after.

That dignitary sits at this minute enthroned in the kitchen corner,
looking majestically over the press-board on her knee, where she is
pressing the next year's Sunday vest of Zephaniah Pennel. As she makes
her heavy tailor's goose squeak on the work, her eyes follow the little
delicate fairy form which trips about the kitchen, busily and silently
arranging a little grotto of gold and silver shells and seaweed. The
child sings to herself as she works in a low chant, like the prattle of
a brook, but ever and anon she rests her little arms on a chair and
looks through the open kitchen-door far, far off where the horizon line
of the blue sea dissolves in the blue sky.

"See that child now, Roxy," said Miss Ruey, who sat stitching beside
her; "do look at her eyes. She's as handsome as a pictur', but 't ain't
an ordinary look she has neither; she seems a contented little thing;
but what makes her eyes always look so kind o' wishful?"

"Wa'n't her mother always a-longin' and a-lookin' to sea, and watchin'
the ships, afore she was born?" said Miss Roxy; "and didn't her heart
break afore she was born? Babies like that is marked always. They don't
know what ails 'em, nor nobody."

"It's her mother she's after," said Miss Ruey.

"The Lord only knows," said Miss Roxy; "but them kind o' children always
seem homesick to go back where they come from. They're mostly grave and
old-fashioned like this 'un. If they gets past seven years, why they
live; but it's always in 'em to long; they don't seem to be really
unhappy neither, but if anything's ever the matter with 'em, it seems a
great deal easier for 'em to die than to live. Some say it's the mothers
longin' after 'em makes 'em feel so, and some say it's them longin'
after their mothers; but dear knows, Ruey, what anything is or what
makes anything. Children's mysterious, that's my mind."

"Mara, dear," said Miss Ruey, interrupting the child's steady lookout,
"what you thinking of?"

"Me want somefin'," said the little one.

"That's what she's always sayin'," said Miss Roxy.

"Me want somebody to pay wis'," continued the little one.

"Want somebody to play with," said old Dame Pennel, as she came in from
the back-room with her hands yet floury with kneading bread; "sure
enough, she does. Our house stands in such a lonesome place, and there
ain't any children. But I never saw such a quiet little thing--always
still and always busy."

"I'll take her down with me to Cap'n Kittridge's," said Miss Roxy, "and
let her play with their little girl; she'll chirk her up, I'll warrant.
She's a regular little witch, Sally is, but she'll chirk her up. It
ain't good for children to be so still and old-fashioned; children ought
to be children. Sally takes to Mara just 'cause she's so different."

"Well, now, you may," said Dame Pennel; "to be sure _he_ can't bear her
out of his sight a minute after he comes in; but after all, old folks
can't be company for children."

Accordingly, that afternoon, the little Mara was arrayed in a little
blue flounced dress, which stood out like a balloon, made by Miss Roxy
in first-rate style, from a French fashion-plate; her golden hair was
twined in manifold curls by Dame Pennel, who, restricted in her ideas
of ornamentation, spared, nevertheless, neither time nor money to
enhance the charms of this single ornament to her dwelling. Mara was her
picture-gallery, who gave her in the twenty-four hours as many Murillos
or Greuzes as a lover of art could desire; and as she tied over the
child's golden curls a little flat hat, and saw her go dancing off along
the sea-sands, holding to Miss Roxy's bony finger, she felt she had in
her what galleries of pictures could not buy.

It was a good mile to the one story, gambrel-roofed cottage where lived
Captain Kittridge,--the long, lean, brown man, with his good wife of the
great Leghorn bonnet, round, black bead eyes, and psalm-book, whom we
told you of at the funeral. The Captain, too, had followed the sea in
his early life, but being not, as he expressed it, "very rugged," in
time changed his ship for a tight little cottage on the seashore, and
devoted himself to boat-building, which he found sufficiently lucrative
to furnish his brown cottage with all that his wife's heart desired,
besides extra money for knick-knacks when she chose to go up to
Brunswick or over to Portland to shop.

The Captain himself was a welcome guest at all the firesides round,
being a chatty body, and disposed to make the most of his foreign
experiences, in which he took the usual advantages of a traveler. In
fact, it was said, whether slanderously or not, that the Captain's yarns
were spun to order; and as, when pressed to relate his foreign
adventures, he always responded with, "What would you like to hear?" it
was thought that he fabricated his article to suit his market. In short,
there was no species of experience, finny, fishy, or aquatic,--no legend
of strange and unaccountable incident of fire or flood,--no romance of
foreign scenery and productions, to which his tongue was not competent,
when he had once seated himself in a double bow-knot at a neighbor's
evening fireside.

His good wife, a sharp-eyed, literal body, and a vigorous church-member,
felt some concern of conscience on the score of these narrations; for,
being their constant auditor, she, better than any one else, could
perceive the variations and discrepancies of text which showed their
mythical character, and oftentimes her black eyes would snap and her
knitting-needles rattle with an admonitory vigor as he went on, and
sometimes she would unmercifully come in at the end of a narrative
with,--

"Well, now, the Cap'n's told them ar stories till he begins to b'lieve
'em himself, I think."

But works of fiction, as we all know, if only well gotten up, have
always their advantages in the hearts of listeners over plain, homely
truth; and so Captain Kittridge's yarns were marketable fireside
commodities still, despite the skepticisms which attended them.

The afternoon sunbeams at this moment are painting the gambrel-roof with
a golden brown. It is September again, as it was three years ago when
our story commenced, and the sea and sky are purple and amethystine with
its Italian haziness of atmosphere.

The brown house stands on a little knoll, about a hundred yards from the
open ocean. Behind it rises a ledge of rocks, where cedars and hemlocks
make deep shadows into which the sun shoots golden shafts of light,
illuminating the scarlet feathers of the sumach, which throw themselves
jauntily forth from the crevices; while down below, in deep, damp, mossy
recesses, rise ferns which autumn has just begun to tinge with yellow
and brown. The little knoll where the cottage stood had on its right
hand a tiny bay, where the ocean water made up amid picturesque
rocks--shaggy and solemn. Here trees of the primeval forest, grand and
lordly, looked down silently into the waters which ebbed and flowed
daily into this little pool. Every variety of those beautiful evergreens
which feather the coast of Maine, and dip their wings in the very spray
of its ocean foam, found here a representative. There were aspiring
black spruces, crowned on the very top with heavy coronets of cones;
there were balsamic firs, whose young buds breathe the scent of
strawberries; there were cedars, black as midnight clouds, and white
pines with their swaying plumage of needle-like leaves, strewing the
ground beneath with a golden, fragrant matting; and there were the
gigantic, wide-winged hemlocks, hundreds of years old, and with long,
swaying, gray beards of moss, looking white and ghostly under the deep
shadows of their boughs. And beneath, creeping round trunk and matting
over stones, were many and many of those wild, beautiful things which
embellish the shadows of these northern forests. Long, feathery wreaths
of what are called ground-pines ran here and there in little ruffles of
green, and the prince's pine raised its oriental feather, with a mimic
cone on the top, as if it conceived itself to be a grown-up tree. Whole
patches of partridge-berry wove their evergreen matting, dotted
plentifully with brilliant scarlet berries. Here and there, the rocks
were covered with a curiously inwoven tapestry of moss, overshot with
the exquisite vine of the Linnea borealis, which in early spring rings
its two fairy bells on the end of every spray; while elsewhere the
wrinkled leaves of the mayflower wove themselves through and through
deep beds of moss, meditating silently thoughts of the thousand little
cups of pink shell which they had it in hand to make when the time of
miracles should come round next spring.

Nothing, in short, could be more quaintly fresh, wild, and beautiful
than the surroundings of this little cove which Captain Kittridge had
thought fit to dedicate to his boat-building operations,--where he had
set up his tar-kettle between two great rocks above the highest
tide-mark, and where, at the present moment, he had a boat upon the
stocks.

Mrs. Kittridge, at this hour, was sitting in her clean kitchen, very
busily engaged in ripping up a silk dress, which Miss Roxy had engaged
to come and make into a new one; and, as she ripped, she cast now and
then an eye at the face of a tall, black clock, whose solemn tick-tock
was the only sound that could be heard in the kitchen.

By her side, on a low stool, sat a vigorous, healthy girl of six years,
whose employment evidently did not please her, for her well-marked black
eyebrows were bent in a frown, and her large black eyes looked surly and
wrathful, and one versed in children's grievances could easily see what
the matter was,--she was turning a sheet! Perhaps, happy young female
reader, you don't know what that is,--most likely not; for in these
degenerate days the strait and narrow ways of self-denial, formerly
thought so wholesome for little feet, are quite grass-grown with
neglect. Childhood nowadays is unceasingly fêted and caressed, the
principal difficulty of the grown people seeming to be to discover what
the little dears want,--a thing not always clear to the little dears
themselves. But in old times, turning sheets was thought a most especial
and wholesome discipline for young girls; in the first place, because it
took off the hands of their betters a very uninteresting and monotonous
labor; and in the second place, because it was such a long, straight,
unending turnpike, that the youthful travelers, once started thereupon,
could go on indefinitely, without requiring guidance and direction of
their elders. For these reasons, also, the task was held in special
detestation by children in direct proportion to their amount of life,
and their ingenuity and love of variety. A dull child took it tolerably
well; but to a lively, energetic one, it was a perfect torture.

"I don't see the use of sewing up sheets one side, and ripping up the
other," at last said Sally, breaking the monotonous tick-tock of the
clock by an observation which has probably occurred to every child in
similar circumstances.

"Sally Kittridge, if you say another word about that ar sheet, I'll whip
you," was the very explicit rejoinder; and there was a snap of Mrs.
Kittridge's black eyes, that seemed to make it likely that she would
keep her word. It was answered by another snap from the six-year-old
eyes, as Sally comforted herself with thinking that when she was a woman
she'd speak her mind out in pay for all this.

At this moment a burst of silvery child-laughter rang out, and there
appeared in the doorway, illuminated by the afternoon sunbeams, the
vision of Miss Roxy's tall, lank figure, with the little golden-haired,
blue-robed fairy, hanging like a gay butterfly upon the tip of a
thorn-bush. Sally dropped the sheet and clapped her hands, unnoticed by
her mother, who rose to pay her respects to the "cunning woman" of the
neighborhood.

"Well, now, Miss Roxy, I was 'mazin' afraid you wer'n't a-comin'. I'd
just been an' got my silk ripped up, and didn't know how to get a step
farther without you."

"Well, I was finishin' up Cap'n Pennel's best pantaloons," said Miss
Roxy; "and I've got 'em along so, Ruey can go on with 'em; and I told
Mis' Pennel I must come to you, if 'twas only for a day; and I fetched
the little girl down, 'cause the little thing's so kind o' lonesome
like. I thought Sally could play with her, and chirk her up a little."

"Well, Sally," said Mrs. Kittridge, "stick in your needle, fold up your
sheet, put your thimble in your work-pocket, and then you may take the
little Mara down to the cove to play; but be sure you don't let her go
near the tar, nor wet her shoes. D'ye hear?"

"Yes, ma'am," said Sally, who had sprung up in light and radiance, like
a translated creature, at this unexpected turn of fortune, and
performed the welcome orders with a celerity which showed how agreeable
they were; and then, stooping and catching the little one in her arms,
disappeared through the door, with the golden curls fluttering over her
own crow-black hair.

The fact was, that Sally, at that moment, was as happy as human creature
could be, with a keenness of happiness that children who have never been
made to turn sheets of a bright afternoon can never realize. The sun was
yet an hour high, as she saw, by the flash of her shrewd, time-keeping
eye, and she could bear her little prize down to the cove, and collect
unknown quantities of gold and silver shells, and starfish, and
salad-dish shells, and white pebbles for her, besides quantities of well
turned shavings, brown and white, from the pile which constantly was
falling under her father's joiner's bench, and with which she would make
long extemporaneous tresses, so that they might play at being mermaids,
like those that she had heard her father tell about in some of his
sea-stories.

"Now, railly, Sally, what you got there?" said Captain Kittridge, as he
stood in his shirt-sleeves peering over his joiner's bench, to watch the
little one whom Sally had dumped down into a nest of clean white
shavings. "Wal', wal', I should think you'd a-stolen the big doll I see
in a shop-window the last time I was to Portland. So this is Pennel's
little girl?--poor child!"

"Yes, father, and we want some nice shavings."

"Stay a bit, I'll make ye a few a-purpose," said the old man, reaching
his long, bony arm, with the greatest ease, to the farther part of his
bench, and bringing up a board, from which he proceeded to roll off
shavings in fine satin rings, which perfectly delighted the hearts of
the children, and made them dance with glee; and, truth to say, reader,
there are coarser and homelier things in the world than a well turned
shaving.

"There, go now," he said, when both of them stood with both hands full;
"go now and play; and mind you don't let the baby wet her feet, Sally;
them shoes o' hern must have cost five-and-sixpence at the very least."

That sunny hour before sundown seemed as long to Sally as the whole seam
of the sheet; for childhood's joys are all pure gold; and as she ran up
and down the white sands, shouting at every shell she found, or darted
up into the overhanging forest for checkerberries and ground-pine, all
the sorrows of the morning came no more into her remembrance.

The little Mara had one of those sensitive, excitable natures, on which
every external influence acts with immediate power. Stimulated by the
society of her energetic, buoyant little neighbor, she no longer seemed
wishful or pensive, but kindled into a perfect flame of wild delight,
and gamboled about the shore like a blue and gold-winged fly; while her
bursts of laughter made the squirrels and blue jays look out
inquisitively from their fastnesses in the old evergreens. Gradually the
sunbeams faded from the pines, and the waves of the tide in the little
cove came in, solemnly tinted with purple, flaked with orange and
crimson, borne in from a great rippling sea of fire, into which the sun
had just sunk.

"Mercy on us--them children!" said Miss Roxy.

"_He's_ bringin' 'em along," said Mrs. Kittridge, as she looked out of
the window and saw the tall, lank form of the Captain, with one child
seated on either shoulder, and holding on by his head.

The two children were both in the highest state of excitement, but never
was there a more marked contrast of nature. The one seemed a perfect
type of well-developed childish health and vigor, good solid flesh and
bones, with glowing skin, brilliant eyes, shining teeth, well-knit,
supple limbs,--vigorously and healthily beautiful; while the other
appeared one of those aerial mixtures of cloud and fire, whose radiance
seems scarcely earthly. A physiologist, looking at the child, would
shake his head, seeing one of those perilous organizations, all nerve
and brain, which come to life under the clear, stimulating skies of
America, and, burning with the intensity of lighted phosphorus, waste
themselves too early.

The little Mara seemed like a fairy sprite, possessed with a wild spirit
of glee. She laughed and clapped her hands incessantly, and when set
down on the kitchen-floor spun round like a little elf; and that night
it was late and long before her wide, wakeful eyes could be veiled in
sleep.

"Company jist sets this 'ere child crazy," said Miss Roxy; "it's jist
her lonely way of livin'; a pity Mis' Pennel hadn't another child to
keep company along with her."

"Mis' Pennel oughter be trainin' of her up to work," said Mrs.
Kittridge. "Sally could oversew and hem when she wa'n't more'n three
years old; nothin' straightens out children like work. Mis' Pennel she
just keeps that ar child to look at."

"All children ain't alike, Mis' Kittridge," said Miss Roxy,
sententiously. "This 'un ain't like your Sally. 'A hen and a bumble-bee
can't be fetched up alike, fix it how you will!'"




CHAPTER VI

GRANDPARENTS


Zephaniah Pennel came back to his house in the evening, after Miss Roxy
had taken the little Mara away. He looked for the flowery face and
golden hair as he came towards the door, and put his hand in his
vest-pocket, where he had deposited a small store of very choice shells
and sea curiosities, thinking of the widening of those dark, soft eyes
when he should present them.

"Where's Mara?" was the first inquiry after he had crossed the
threshold.

"Why, Roxy's been an' taken her down to Cap'n Kittridge's to spend the
night," said Miss Ruey. "Roxy's gone to help Mis' Kittridge to turn her
spotted gray and black silk. We was talking this mornin' whether 'no 't
would turn, 'cause _I_ thought the spot was overshot, and wouldn't make
up on the wrong side; but Roxy she says it's one of them ar Calcutty
silks that has two sides to 'em, like the one you bought Miss Pennel,
that we made up for her, you know;" and Miss Ruey arose and gave a
finishing snap to the Sunday pantaloons, which she had been left to
"finish off,"--which snap said, as plainly as words could say that there
was a good job disposed of.

Zephaniah stood looking as helpless as animals of the male kind
generally do when appealed to with such prolixity on feminine details;
in reply to it all, only he asked meekly,--

"Where's Mary?"

"Mis' Pennel? Why, she's up chamber. She'll be down in a minute, she
said; she thought she'd have time afore supper to get to the bottom of
the big chist, and see if that 'ere vest pattern ain't there, and them
sticks o' twist for the button-holes, 'cause Roxy she says she never see
nothin' so rotten as that 'ere twist we've been a-workin' with, that
Mis' Pennel got over to Portland; it's a clear cheat, and Mis' Pennel
she give more'n half a cent a stick more for 't than what Roxy got for
her up to Brunswick; so you see these 'ere Portland stores charge up,
and their things want lookin' after."

Here Mrs. Pennel entered the room, "the Captain" addressing her
eagerly,--

"How came you to let Aunt Roxy take Mara off so far, and be gone so
long?"

"Why, law me, Captain Pennel! the little thing seems kind o' lonesome.
Chil'en want chil'en; Miss Roxy says she's altogether too sort o' still
and old-fashioned, and must have child's company to chirk her up, and so
she took her down to play with Sally Kittridge; there's no manner of
danger or harm in it, and she'll be back to-morrow afternoon, and Mara
will have a real good time."

"Wal', now, really," said the good man, "but it's 'mazin' lonesome."

"Cap'n Pennel, you're gettin' to make an idol of that 'ere child," said
Miss Ruey. "We have to watch our hearts. It minds me of the hymn,--

    "'The fondness of a creature's love,
      How strong it strikes the sense,--
    Thither the warm affections move,
      Nor can we call them hence.'"

Miss Ruey's mode of getting off poetry, in a sort of high-pitched
canter, with a strong thump on every accented syllable, might have
provoked a smile in more sophisticated society, but Zephaniah listened
to her with deep gravity, and answered,--

"I'm 'fraid there's truth in what you say, Aunt Ruey. When her mother
was called away, I thought that was a warning I never should forget; but
now I seem to be like Jonah,--I'm restin' in the shadow of my gourd, and
my heart is glad because of it. I kind o' trembled at the prayer meetin'
when we was a-singin',--

    "'The dearest idol I have known,
      Whate'er that idol be,
    Help me to tear it from Thy throne,
      And worship only Thee.'"

"Yes," said Miss Ruey, "Roxy says if the Lord should take us up short on
our prayers, it would make sad work with us sometimes."

"Somehow," said Mrs. Pennel, "it seems to me just her mother over again.
She don't look like her. I think her hair and complexion comes from the
Badger blood; my mother had that sort o' hair and skin,--but then she
has ways like Naomi,--and it seems as if the Lord had kind o' given
Naomi back to us; so I hope she's goin' to be spared to us."

Mrs. Pennel had one of those natures--gentle, trustful, and hopeful,
because not very deep; she was one of the little children of the world
whose faith rests on child-like ignorance, and who know not the deeper
needs of deeper natures; such see only the sunshine and forget the
storm.

This conversation had been going on to the accompaniment of a clatter of
plates and spoons and dishes, and the fizzling of sausages, prefacing
the evening meal, to which all now sat down after a lengthened grace
from Zephaniah.

"There's a tremendous gale a-brewin'," he said, as they sat at table. "I
noticed the clouds to-night as I was comin' home, and somehow I felt
kind o' as if I wanted all our folks snug in-doors."

"Why, law, husband, Cap'n Kittridge's house is as good as ours, if it
does blow. You never can seem to remember that houses don't run aground
or strike on rocks in storms."

"The Cap'n puts me in mind of old Cap'n Jeduth Scranton," said Miss
Ruey, "that built that queer house down by Middle Bay. The Cap'n he
would insist on havin' on't jist like a ship, and the closet-shelves had
holes for the tumblers and dishes, and he had all his tables and chairs
battened down, and so when it came a gale, they say the old Cap'n used
to sit in his chair and hold on to hear the wind blow."

"Well, I tell you," said Captain, "those that has followed the seas
hears the wind with different ears from lands-people. When you lie with
only a plank between you and eternity, and hear the voice of the Lord on
the waters, it don't sound as it does on shore."

And in truth, as they were speaking, a fitful gust swept by the house,
wailing and screaming and rattling the windows, and after it came the
heavy, hollow moan of the surf on the beach, like the wild, angry howl
of some savage animal just beginning to be lashed into fury.

"Sure enough, the wind is rising," said Miss Ruey, getting up from the
table, and flattening her snub nose against the window-pane. "Dear me,
how dark it is! Mercy on us, how the waves come in!--all of a sheet of
foam. I pity the ships that's comin' on coast such a night."

The storm seemed to have burst out with a sudden fury, as if myriads of
howling demons had all at once been loosened in the air. Now they piped
and whistled with eldritch screech round the corners of the house--now
they thundered down the chimney--and now they shook the door and rattled
the casement--and anon mustering their forces with wild ado, seemed to
career over the house, and sail high up into the murky air. The dash of
the rising tide came with successive crash upon crash like the discharge
of heavy artillery, seeming to shake the very house, and the spray
borne by the wind dashed whizzing against the window-panes.

Zephaniah, rising from supper, drew up the little stand that had the
family Bible on it, and the three old time-worn people sat themselves as
seriously down to evening worship as if they had been an extensive
congregation. They raised the old psalm-tune which our fathers called
"Complaint," and the cracked, wavering voices of the women, with the
deep, rough bass of the old sea-captain, rose in the uproar of the storm
with a ghostly, strange wildness, like the scream of the curlew or the
wailing of the wind:--

    "Spare us, O Lord, aloud we pray,
      Nor let our sun go down at noon:
    Thy years are an eternal day,
      And must thy children die so soon!"

Miss Ruey valued herself on singing a certain weird and exalted part
which in ancient days used to be called counter, and which wailed and
gyrated in unimaginable heights of the scale, much as you may hear a
shrill, fine-voiced wind over a chimney-top; but altogether, the deep
and earnest gravity with which the three filled up the pauses in the
storm with their quaint minor key, had something singularly impressive.
When the singing was over, Zephaniah read to the accompaniment of wind
and sea, the words of poetry made on old Hebrew shores, in the dim, gray
dawn of the world:--

"The voice of the Lord is upon the waters; the God of glory thundereth;
the Lord is upon many waters. The voice of the Lord shaketh the
wilderness; the Lord shaketh the wilderness of Kadesh. The Lord sitteth
upon the floods, yea, the Lord sitteth King forever. The Lord will give
strength to his people; yea, the Lord will bless his people with peace."

How natural and home-born sounded this old piece of Oriental poetry in
the ears of the three! The wilderness of Kadesh, with its great cedars,
was doubtless Orr's Island, where even now the goodly fellowship of
black-winged trees were groaning and swaying, and creaking as the breath
of the Lord passed over them.

And the three old people kneeling by their smouldering fireside, amid
the general uproar, Zephaniah began in the words of a prayer which Moses
the man of God made long ago under the shadows of Egyptian pyramids:
"Lord, thou hast been our dwelling-place in all generations. Before the
mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and
the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God."

We hear sometimes in these days that the Bible is no more inspired of
God than many other books of historic and poetic merit. It is a fact,
however, that the Bible answers a strange and wholly exceptional purpose
by thousands of firesides on all shores of the earth; and, till some
other book can be found to do the same thing, it will not be surprising
if a belief of its Divine origin be one of the ineffaceable ideas of the
popular mind. It will be a long while before a translation from Homer or
a chapter in the Koran, or any of the beauties of Shakespeare, will be
read in a stormy night on Orr's Island with the same sense of a Divine
presence as the Psalms of David, or the prayer of Moses, the man of God.

Boom! boom! "What's that?" said Zephaniah, starting, as they rose up
from prayer. "Hark! again, that's a gun,--there's a ship in distress."

"Poor souls," said Miss Ruey; "it's an awful night!"

The captain began to put on his sea-coat.

"You ain't a-goin' out?" said his wife.

"I must go out along the beach a spell, and see if I can hear any more
of that ship."

"Mercy on us; the wind'll blow you over!" said Aunt Ruey.

"I rayther think I've stood wind before in my day," said Zephaniah, a
grim smile stealing over his weather-beaten cheeks. In fact, the man
felt a sort of secret relationship to the storm, as if it were in some
manner a family connection--a wild, roystering cousin, who drew him out
by a rough attraction of comradeship.

"Well, at any rate," said Mrs. Pennel, producing a large tin lantern
perforated with many holes, in which she placed a tallow candle, "take
this with you, and don't stay out long."

The kitchen door opened, and the first gust of wind took off the old
man's hat and nearly blew him prostrate. He came back and shut the
door. "I ought to have known better," he said, knotting his
pocket-handkerchief over his head, after which he waited for a momentary
lull, and went out into the storm.

Miss Ruey looked through the window-pane, and saw the light go twinkling
far down into the gloom, and ever and anon came the mournful boom of
distant guns.

"Certainly there is a ship in trouble somewhere," she said.

"He never can be easy when he hears these guns," said Mrs. Pennel; "but
what can he do, or anybody, in such a storm, the wind blowing right on
to shore?"

"I shouldn't wonder if Cap'n Kittridge should be out on the beach, too,"
said Miss Ruey; "but laws, he ain't much more than one of these 'ere old
grasshoppers you see after frost comes. Well, any way, there _ain't_
much help in man if a ship comes ashore in such a gale as this, such a
dark night too."

"It's kind o' lonesome to have poor little Mara away such a night as
this is," said Mrs. Pennel; "but who would a-thought it this afternoon,
when Aunt Roxy took her?"

"I 'member my grandmother had a silver cream-pitcher that come ashore
in a storm on Mare P'int," said Miss Ruey, as she sat trotting her
knitting-needles. "Grand'ther found it, half full of sand, under a knot
of seaweed way up on the beach. It had a coat of arms on it,--might have
belonged to some grand family, that pitcher; in the Toothacre family
yet."

"I remember when I was a girl," said Mrs. Pennel, "seeing the hull of a
ship that went on Eagle Island; it run way up in a sort of gully between
two rocks, and lay there years. They split pieces off it sometimes to
make fires, when they wanted to make a chowder down on the beach."

"My aunt, Lois Toothacre, that lives down by Middle Bay," said Miss
Ruey, "used to tell about a dreadful blow they had once in time of the
equinoctial storm; and what was remarkable, she insisted that she heard
a baby cryin' out in the storm,--she heard it just as plain as could
be."

"Laws a-mercy," said Mrs. Pennel, nervously, "it was nothing but the
wind,--it always screeches like a child crying; or maybe it was the
seals; seals will cry just like babes."

"So they told her; but no,--she insisted she knew the difference,--it
_was_ a baby. Well, what do you think, when the storm cleared off, they
found a baby's cradle washed ashore sure enough!"

"But they didn't find any baby," said Mrs. Pennel, nervously.

"No; they searched the beach far and near, and that cradle was all they
found. Aunt Lois took it in--it was a very good cradle, and she took it
to use, but every time there came up a gale, that ar cradle would rock,
rock, jist as if somebody was a-sittin' by it; and you could stand
across the room and see there wa'n't nobody there."

"You make me all of a shiver," said Mrs. Pennel.

This, of course, was just what Miss Ruey intended, and she went on:--

"Wal', you see they kind o' got used to it; they found there wa'n't no
harm come of its rockin', and so they didn't mind; but Aunt Lois had a
sister Cerinthy that was a weakly girl, and had the janders. Cerinthy
was one of the sort that's born with veils over their faces, and can see
sperits; and one time Cerinthy was a-visitin' Lois after her second baby
was born, and there came up a blow, and Cerinthy comes out of the
keepin'-room, where the cradle was a-standin', and says, 'Sister,' says
she, 'who's that woman sittin' rockin' the cradle?' and Aunt Lois says
she, 'Why, there ain't nobody. That ar cradle always will rock in a
gale, but I've got used to it, and don't mind it.' 'Well,' says
Cerinthy, 'jist as true as you live, I just saw a woman with a silk gown
on, and long black hair a-hangin' down, and her face was pale as a
sheet, sittin' rockin' that ar cradle, and she looked round at me with
her great black eyes kind o' mournful and wishful, and then she stooped
down over the cradle.' 'Well,' says Lois, 'I ain't goin' to have no such
doin's in my house,' and she went right in and took up the baby, and the
very next day she jist had the cradle split up for kindlin'; and that
night, if you'll believe, when they was a-burnin' of it, they heard,
jist as plain as could be, a baby scream, scream, screamin' round the
house; but after that they never heard it no more."

"I don't like such stories," said Dame Pennel, "'specially to-night,
when Mara's away. I shall get to hearing all sorts of noises in the
wind. I wonder when Cap'n Pennel will be back."

And the good woman put more wood on the fire, and as the tongues of
flame streamed up high and clear, she approached her face to the
window-pane and started back with half a scream, as a pale, anxious
visage with sad dark eyes seemed to approach her. It took a moment or
two for her to discover that she had seen only the reflection of her own
anxious, excited face, the pitchy blackness without having converted the
window into a sort of dark mirror.

Miss Ruey meanwhile began solacing herself by singing, in her
chimney-corner, a very favorite sacred melody, which contrasted oddly
enough with the driving storm and howling sea:--

    "Haste, my beloved, haste away,
    Cut short the hours of thy delay;
    Fly like the bounding hart or roe,
    Over the hills where spices grow."

The tune was called "Invitation,"--one of those profusely florid in
runs, and trills, and quavers, which delighted the ears of a former
generation; and Miss Ruey, innocently unconscious of the effect of old
age on her voice, ran them up and down, and out and in, in a way that
would have made a laugh, had there been anybody there to notice or to
laugh.

"I remember singin' that ar to Mary Jane Wilson the very night she
died," said Aunt Ruey, stopping. "She wanted me to sing to her, and it
was jist between two and three in the mornin'; there was jist the least
red streak of daylight, and I opened the window and sat there and sung,
and when I come to 'over the hills where spices grow,' I looked round
and there was a change in Mary Jane, and I went to the bed, and says she
very bright, 'Aunt Ruey, the Beloved has come,' and she was gone afore I
could raise her up on her pillow. I always think of Mary Jane at them
words; if ever there was a broken-hearted crittur took home, it was
her."

At this moment Mrs. Pennel caught sight through the window of the gleam
of the returning lantern, and in a moment Captain Pennel entered,
dripping with rain and spray.

"Why, Cap'n! you're e'en a'most drowned," said Aunt Ruey.

"How long have you been gone? You must have been a great ways," said
Mrs. Pennel.

"Yes, I have been down to Cap'n Kittridge's. I met Kittridge out on the
beach. We heard the guns plain enough, but couldn't see anything. I went
on down to Kittridge's to get a look at little Mara."

"Well, she's all well enough?" said Mrs. Pennel, anxiously.

"Oh, yes, well enough. Miss Roxy showed her to me in the trundle-bed,
'long with Sally. The little thing was lying smiling in her sleep, with
her cheek right up against Sally's. I took comfort looking at her. I
couldn't help thinking: 'So he giveth his beloved sleep!'"




CHAPTER VII

FROM THE SEA


During the night and storm, the little Mara had lain sleeping as quietly
as if the cruel sea, that had made her an orphan from her birth, were
her kind-tempered old grandfather singing her to sleep, as he often
did,--with a somewhat hoarse voice truly, but with ever an undertone of
protecting love. But toward daybreak, there came very clear and bright
into her childish mind a dream, having that vivid distinctness which
often characterizes the dreams of early childhood.

She thought she saw before her the little cove where she and Sally had
been playing the day before, with its broad sparkling white beach of
sand curving round its blue sea-mirror, and studded thickly with gold
and silver shells. She saw the boat of Captain Kittridge upon the
stocks, and his tar-kettle with the smouldering fires flickering under
it; but, as often happens in dreams, a certain rainbow vividness and
clearness invested everything, and she and Sally were jumping for joy at
the beautiful things they found on the beach.

Suddenly, there stood before them a woman, dressed in a long white
garment. She was very pale, with sweet, serious dark eyes, and she led
by the hand a black-eyed boy, who seemed to be crying and looking about
as for something lost. She dreamed that she stood still, and the woman
came toward her, looking at her with sweet, sad eyes, till the child
seemed to feel them in every fibre of her frame. The woman laid her hand
on her head as if in blessing, and then put the boy's hand in hers, and
said, "Take him, Mara, he is a playmate for you;" and with that the
little boy's face flashed out into a merry laugh. The woman faded away,
and the three children remained playing together, gathering shells and
pebbles of a wonderful brightness. So vivid was this vision, that the
little one awoke laughing with pleasure, and searched under her pillows
for the strange and beautiful things that she had been gathering in
dreamland.

"What's Mara looking after?" said Sally, sitting up in her trundle-bed,
and speaking in the patronizing motherly tone she commonly used to her
little playmate.

"All gone, pitty boy--all gone!" said the child, looking round
regretfully, and shaking her golden head; "pitty lady all gone!"

"How queer she talks!" said Sally, who had awakened with the project of
building a sheet-house with her fairy neighbor, and was beginning to
loosen the upper sheet and dispose the pillows with a view to this
species of architecture. "Come, Mara, let's make a pretty house!" she
said.

"Pitty boy out dere--out dere!" said the little one, pointing to the
window, with a deeper expression than ever of wishfulness in her eyes.

"Come, Sally Kittridge, get up this minute!" said the voice of her
mother, entering the door at this moment; "and here, put these clothes
on to Mara, the child mustn't run round in her best; it's strange, now,
Mary Pennel never thinks of such things."

Sally, who was of an efficient temperament, was preparing energetically
to second these commands of her mother, and endue her little neighbor
with a coarse brown stuff dress, somewhat faded and patched, which she
herself had outgrown when of Mara's age; with shoes, which had been
coarsely made to begin with, and very much battered by time; but, quite
to her surprise, the child, generally so passive and tractable, opposed
a most unexpected and desperate resistance to this operation. She began
to cry and to sob and shake her curly head, throwing her tiny hands out
in a wild species of freakish opposition, which had, notwithstanding, a
quaint and singular grace about it, while she stated her objections in
all the little English at her command.

"Mara don't want--Mara want pitty boo des--and _pitty_ shoes."

"Why, was ever anything like it?" said Mrs. Kittridge to Miss Roxy, as
they both were drawn to the door by the outcry; "here's this child won't
have decent every-day clothes put on her,--she must be kept dressed up
like a princess. Now, that ar's French calico!" said Mrs. Kittridge,
holding up the controverted blue dress, "and that ar never cost a cent
under five-and-sixpence a yard; it takes a yard and a half to make it,
and it must have been a good day's work to make it up; call that
three-and-sixpence more, and with them pearl buttons and thread and all,
that ar dress never cost less than a dollar and seventy-five, and here
she's goin' to run out every day in it!"

"Well, well!" said Miss Roxy, who had taken the sobbing fair one in her
lap, "you know, Mis' Kittridge, this 'ere's a kind o' pet lamb, an
old-folks' darling, and things be with her as they be, and we can't make
her over, and she's such a nervous little thing we mustn't cross her."
Saying which, she proceeded to dress the child in her own clothes.

"If you had a good large checked apron, I wouldn't mind putting that on
her!" added Miss Roxy, after she had arrayed the child.

"Here's one," said Mrs. Kittridge; "that may save her clothes some."

Miss Roxy began to put on the wholesome garment; but, rather to her
mortification, the little fairy began to weep again in a most
heart-broken manner.

"Don't want che't apon."

"Why don't Mara want nice checked apron?" said Miss Roxy, in that extra
cheerful tone by which children are to be made to believe they have
mistaken their own mind.

"Don't want it!" with a decided wave of the little hand; "I's too pitty
to wear che't apon."

"Well! well!" said Mrs. Kittridge, rolling up her eyes, "did I ever! no,
I never did. If there ain't depraved natur' a-comin' out early. Well, if
she says she's pretty now, what'll it be when she's fifteen?"

"She'll learn to tell a lie about it by that time," said Miss Roxy, "and
say she thinks she's horrid. The child _is_ pretty, and the truth comes
uppermost with her now."

"Haw! haw! haw!" burst with a great crash from Captain Kittridge, who
had come in behind, and stood silently listening during this
conversation; "that's musical now; come here, my little maid, you _are_
too pretty for checked aprons, and no mistake;" and seizing the child in
his long arms, he tossed her up like a butterfly, while her sunny curls
shone in the morning light.

"There's one comfort about the child, Miss Kittridge," said Aunt Roxy:
"she's one of them that dirt won't stick to. I never knew her to stain
or tear her clothes,--she always come in jist so nice."

"She ain't much like Sally, then!" said Mrs. Kittridge. "That girl'll
run through more clothes! Only last week she walked the crown out of my
old black straw bonnet, and left it hanging on the top of a
blackberry-bush."

"Wal', wal'," said Captain Kittridge, "as to dressin' this 'ere
child,--why, ef Pennel's a mind to dress her in cloth of gold, it's none
of our business! He's rich enough for all he wants to do, and so let's
eat our breakfast and mind our own business."

After breakfast Captain Kittridge took the two children down to the
cove, to investigate the state of his boat and tar-kettle, set high
above the highest tide-mark. The sun had risen gloriously, the sky was
of an intense, vivid blue, and only great snowy islands of clouds, lying
in silver banks on the horizon, showed vestiges of last night's storm.
The whole wide sea was one glorious scene of forming and dissolving
mountains of blue and purple, breaking at the crest into brilliant
silver. All round the island the waves were constantly leaping and
springing into jets and columns of brilliant foam, throwing themselves
high up, in silvery cataracts, into the very arms of the solemn
evergreen forests which overhung the shore.

The sands of the little cove seemed harder and whiter than ever, and
were thickly bestrewn with the shells and seaweed which the upturnings
of the night had brought in. There lay what might have been fringes and
fragments of sea-gods' vestures,--blue, crimson, purple, and orange
seaweeds, wreathed in tangled ropes of kelp and sea-grass, or lying
separately scattered on the sands. The children ran wildly, shouting as
they began gathering sea-treasures; and Sally, with the air of an
experienced hand in the business, untwisted the coils of rosy seaweed,
from which every moment she disengaged some new treasure, in some rarer
shell or smoother pebble.

Suddenly, the child shook out something from a knotted mass of
sea-grass, which she held up with a perfect shriek of delight. It was a
bracelet of hair, fastened by a brilliant clasp of green, sparkling
stones, such as she had never seen before. She redoubled her cries of
delight, as she saw it sparkle between her and the sun, calling upon her
father.

"Father! father! do come here, and see what I've found!"

He came quickly, and took the bracelet from the child's hand; but, at
the same moment, looking over her head, he caught sight of an object
partially concealed behind a projecting rock. He took a step forward,
and uttered an exclamation,--

"Well, well! sure enough! poor things!"

There lay, bedded in sand and seaweed, a woman with a little boy clasped
in her arms! Both had been carefully lashed to a spar, but the child was
held to the bosom of the woman, with a pressure closer than any knot
that mortal hands could tie. Both were deep sunk in the sand, into which
had streamed the woman's long, dark hair, which sparkled with glittering
morsels of sand and pebbles, and with those tiny, brilliant, yellow
shells which are so numerous on that shore.

The woman was both young and beautiful. The forehead, damp with
ocean-spray, was like sculptured marble,--the eyebrows dark and decided
in their outline; but the long, heavy, black fringes had shut down, as a
solemn curtain, over all the history of mortal joy or sorrow that those
eyes had looked upon. A wedding-ring gleamed on the marble hand; but the
sea had divorced all human ties, and taken her as a bride to itself.
And, in truth, it seemed to have made to her a worthy bed, for she was
all folded and inwreathed in sand and shells and seaweeds, and a great,
weird-looking leaf of kelp, some yards in length, lay twined around her
like a shroud. The child that lay in her bosom had hair, and face, and
eyelashes like her own, and his little hands were holding tightly a
portion of the black dress which she wore.

"Cold,--cold,--stone dead!" was the muttered exclamation of the old
seaman, as he bent over the woman.

"She must have struck her head there," he mused, as he laid his finger
on a dark, bruised spot on her temple. He laid his hand on the child's
heart, and put one finger under the arm to see if there was any
lingering vital heat, and then hastily cut the lashings that bound the
pair to the spar, and with difficulty disengaged the child from the cold
clasp in which dying love had bound him to a heart which should beat no
more with mortal joy or sorrow.

Sally, after the first moment, had run screaming toward the house, with
all a child's forward eagerness, to be the bearer of news; but the
little Mara stood, looking anxiously, with a wishful earnestness of
face.

"Pitty boy,--pitty boy,--come!" she said often; but the old man was so
busy, he scarcely regarded her.

"Now, Cap'n Kittridge, do tell!" said Miss Roxy, meeting him in all
haste, with a cap-border stiff in air, while Dame Kittridge exclaimed,--

"Now, you don't! Well, well! didn't I say that was a ship last night?
And what a solemnizing thought it was that souls might be goin' into
eternity!"

"We must have blankets and hot bottles, right away," said Miss Roxy, who
always took the earthly view of matters, and who was, in her own person,
a personified humane society. "Miss Kittridge, you jist dip out your
dishwater into the smallest tub, and we'll put him in. Stand away, Mara!
Sally, you take her out of the way! We'll fetch this child to, perhaps.
I've fetched 'em to, when they's seemed to be dead as door-nails!"

"Cap'n Kittridge, you're sure the woman's dead?"

"Laws, yes; she had a blow right on her temple here. There's no bringing
her to till the resurrection."

"Well, then, you jist go and get Cap'n Pennel to come down and help you,
and get the body into the house, and we'll attend to layin' it out by
and by. Tell Ruey to come down."

Aunt Roxy issued her orders with all the military vigor and precision of
a general in case of a sudden attack. It was her habit. Sickness and
death were her opportunities; where they were, she felt herself at home,
and she addressed herself to the task before her with undoubting faith.

Before many hours a pair of large, dark eyes slowly emerged from under
the black-fringed lids of the little drowned boy,--they rolled dreamily
round for a moment, and dropped again in heavy languor.

The little Mara had, with the quiet persistence which formed a trait in
her baby character, dragged stools and chairs to the back of the bed,
which she at last succeeded in scaling, and sat opposite to where the
child lay, grave and still, watching with intense earnestness the
process that was going on. At the moment when the eyes had opened, she
stretched forth her little arms, and said, eagerly, "Pitty boy,
come,"--and then, as they closed again, she dropped her hands with a
sigh of disappointment. Yet, before night, the little stranger sat up in
bed, and laughed with pleasure at the treasures of shells and pebbles
which the children spread out on the bed before him.

He was a vigorous, well-made, handsome child, with brilliant eyes and
teeth, but the few words that he spoke were in a language unknown to
most present. Captain Kittridge declared it to be Spanish, and that a
call which he most passionately and often repeated was for his mother.
But he was of that happy age when sorrow can be easily effaced, and the
efforts of the children called forth joyous smiles. When his playthings
did not go to his liking, he showed sparkles of a fiery, irascible
spirit.

The little Mara seemed to appropriate him in feminine fashion, as a
chosen idol and graven image. She gave him at once all her slender stock
of infantine treasures, and seemed to watch with an ecstatic devotion
his every movement,--often repeating, as she looked delightedly around,
"Pitty boy, come."

She had no words to explain the strange dream of the morning; it lay in
her, struggling for expression, and giving her an interest in the
new-comer as in something belonging to herself. Whence it came,--whence
come multitudes like it, which spring up as strange, enchanted flowers,
every now and then in the dull, material pathway of life,--who knows? It
may be that our present faculties have among them a rudimentary one,
like the germs of wings in the chrysalis, by which the spiritual world
becomes sometimes an object of perception; there may be natures in which
the walls of the material are so fine and translucent that the spiritual
is seen through them as through a glass darkly. It may be, too, that the
love which is stronger than death has a power sometimes to make itself
heard and felt through the walls of our mortality, when it would plead
for the defenseless ones it has left behind. All these things _may_
be,--who knows?

       *       *       *       *       *

"There," said Miss Roxy, coming out of the keeping-room at sunset; "I
wouldn't ask to see a better-lookin' corpse. That ar woman was a sight
to behold this morning. I guess I shook a double handful of stones and
them little shells out of her hair,--now she reely looks beautiful.
Captain Kittridge has made a coffin out o' some cedar-boards he happened
to have, and I lined it with bleached cotton, and stuffed the pillow
nice and full, and when we come to get her in, she reely will look
lovely."

"I s'pose, Mis' Kittridge, you'll have the funeral to-morrow,--it's
Sunday."

"Why, yes, Aunt Roxy,--I think everybody must want to improve such a
dispensation. Have you took little Mara in to look at the corpse?"

"Well, no," said Miss Roxy; "Mis' Pennel's gettin' ready to take her
home."

"I think it's an opportunity we ought to improve," said Mrs. Kittridge,
"to learn children what death is. I think we can't begin to solemnize
their minds too young."

At this moment Sally and the little Mara entered the room.

"Come here, children," said Mrs. Kittridge, taking a hand of either one,
and leading them to the closed door of the keeping-room; "I've got
somethin' to show you."

The room looked ghostly and dim,--the rays of light fell through the
closed shutter on an object mysteriously muffled in a white sheet.

Sally's bright face expressed only the vague curiosity of a child to see
something new; but the little Mara resisted and hung back with all her
force, so that Mrs. Kittridge was obliged to take her up and hold her.

She folded back the sheet from the chill and wintry form which lay so
icily, lonely, and cold. Sally walked around it, and gratified her
curiosity by seeing it from every point of view, and laying her warm,
busy hand on the lifeless and cold one; but Mara clung to Mrs.
Kittridge, with eyes that expressed a distressed astonishment. The good
woman stooped over and placed the child's little hand for a moment on
the icy forehead. The little one gave a piercing scream, and struggled
to get away; and as soon as she was put down, she ran and hid her face
in Aunt Roxy's dress, sobbing bitterly.

"That child'll grow up to follow vanity," said Mrs. Kittridge; "her
little head is full of dress now, and she hates anything serious,--it's
easy to see that."

The little Mara had no words to tell what a strange, distressful chill
had passed up her arm and through her brain, as she felt that icy cold
of death,--that cold so different from all others. It was an impression
of fear and pain that lasted weeks and months, so that she would start
out of sleep and cry with a terror which she had not yet a sufficiency
of language to describe.

"You seem to forget, Mis' Kittridge, that this 'ere child ain't rugged
like our Sally," said Aunt Roxy, as she raised the little Mara in her
arms. "She was a seven-months' baby, and hard to raise at all, and a
shivery, scary little creature."

"Well, then, she ought to be hardened," said Dame Kittridge. "But Mary
Pennel never had no sort of idea of bringin' up children; 'twas jist so
with Naomi,--the girl never had no sort o' resolution, and she just died
for want o' resolution,--that's what came of it. I tell ye, children's
got to learn to take the world as it is; and 'tain't no use bringin' on
'em up too tender. Teach 'em to begin as they've got to go out,--that's
my maxim."

"Mis' Kittridge," said Aunt Roxy, "there's reason in all things, and
there's difference in children. 'What's one's meat's another's pison.'
You couldn't fetch up Mis' Pennel's children, and she couldn't fetch up
your'n,--so let's say no more 'bout it."

"I'm always a-tellin' my wife that ar," said Captain Kittridge; "she's
always wantin' to make everybody over after her pattern."

"Cap'n Kittridge, I don't think _you_ need to speak," resumed his wife.
"When such a loud providence is a-knockin' at _your_ door, I think you'd
better be a-searchin' your own heart,--here it is the eleventh hour, and
you hain't come into the Lord's vineyard yet."

"Oh! come, come, Mis' Kittridge, don't twit a feller afore folks," said
the Captain. "I'm goin' over to Harpswell Neck this blessed minute after
the minister to 'tend the funeral,--so we'll let _him_ preach."




CHAPTER VIII

THE SEEN AND THE UNSEEN


Life on any shore is a dull affair,--ever degenerating into commonplace;
and this may account for the eagerness with which even a great calamity
is sometimes accepted in a neighborhood, as affording wherewithal to
stir the deeper feelings of our nature. Thus, though Mrs. Kittridge was
by no means a hard-hearted woman, and would not for the world have had a
ship wrecked on her particular account, yet since a ship had been
wrecked and a body floated ashore at her very door, as it were, it
afforded her no inconsiderable satisfaction to dwell on the details and
to arrange for the funeral.

It was something to talk about and to think of, and likely to furnish
subject-matter for talk for years to come when she should go out to tea
with any of her acquaintances who lived at Middle Bay, or Maquoit, or
Harpswell Neck. For although in those days,--the number of light-houses
being much smaller than it is now,--it was no uncommon thing for ships
to be driven on shore in storms, yet this incident had undeniably more
that was stirring and romantic in it than any within the memory of any
tea-table gossip in the vicinity. Mrs. Kittridge, therefore, looked
forward to the funeral services on Sunday afternoon as to a species of
solemn fête, which imparted a sort of consequence to her dwelling and
herself. Notice of it was to be given out in "meeting" after service,
and she might expect both keeping-room and kitchen to be full. Mrs.
Pennel had offered to do her share of Christian and neighborly
kindness, in taking home to her own dwelling the little boy. In fact, it
became necessary to do so in order to appease the feelings of the little
Mara, who clung to the new acquisition with most devoted fondness, and
wept bitterly when he was separated from her even for a few moments.
Therefore, in the afternoon of the day when the body was found, Mrs.
Pennel, who had come down to assist, went back in company with Aunt Ruey
and the two children.

The September evening set in brisk and chill, and the cheerful fire that
snapped and roared up the ample chimney of Captain Kittridge's kitchen
was a pleasing feature. The days of our story were before the advent of
those sullen gnomes, the "air-tights," or even those more sociable and
cheery domestic genii, the cooking-stoves. They were the days of the
genial open kitchen-fire, with the crane, the pot-hooks, and
trammels,--where hissed and boiled the social tea-kettle, where steamed
the huge dinner-pot, in whose ample depths beets, carrots, potatoes, and
turnips boiled in jolly sociability with the pork or corned beef which
they were destined to flank at the coming meal.

On the present evening, Miss Roxy sat bolt upright, as was her wont, in
one corner of the fireplace, with her spectacles on her nose, and an
unwonted show of candles on the little stand beside her, having resumed
the task of the silk dress which had been for a season interrupted. Mrs.
Kittridge, with her spectacles also mounted, was carefully and warily
"running-up breadths," stopping every few minutes to examine her work,
and to inquire submissively of Miss Roxy if "it will do?"

Captain Kittridge sat in the other corner busily whittling on a little
boat which he was shaping to please Sally, who sat on a low stool by his
side with her knitting, evidently more intent on what her father was
producing than on the evening task of "ten bouts," which her mother
exacted before she could freely give her mind to anything on her own
account. As Sally was rigorously sent to bed exactly at eight o'clock,
it became her to be diligent if she wished to do anything for her own
amusement before that hour.

And in the next room, cold and still, was lying that faded image of
youth and beauty which the sea had so strangely given up. Without a
name, without a history, without a single accompaniment from which her
past could even be surmised,--there she lay, sealed in eternal silence.

"It's strange," said Captain Kittridge, as he whittled away,--"it's very
strange we don't find anything more of that ar ship. I've been all up
and down the beach a-lookin'. There was a spar and some broken bits of
boards and timbers come ashore down on the beach, but nothin' to speak
of."

"It won't be known till the sea gives up its dead," said Miss Roxy,
shaking her head solemnly, "and there'll be a great givin' up then, I'm
a-thinkin'."

"Yes, indeed," said Mrs. Kittridge, with an emphatic nod.

"Father," said Sally, "how many, many things there must be at the bottom
of the sea,--so many ships are sunk with all their fine things on board.
Why don't people contrive some way to go down and get them?"

"They do, child," said Captain Kittridge; "they have diving-bells, and
men go down in 'em with caps over their faces, and long tubes to get the
air through, and they walk about on the bottom of the ocean."

"Did you ever go down in one, father?"

"Why, yes, child, to be sure; and strange enough it was, to be sure.
There you could see great big sea critters, with ever so many eyes and
long arms, swimming right up to catch you, and all you could do would be
to muddy the water on the bottom, so they couldn't see you."

"I never heard of that, Cap'n Kittridge," said his wife, drawing herself
up with a reproving coolness.

"Wal', Mis' Kittridge, you hain't heard of everything that ever
happened," said the Captain, imperturbably, "though you _do_ know a
sight."

"And how does the bottom of the ocean look, father?" said Sally.

"Laws, child, why trees and bushes grow there, just as they do on land;
and great plants,--blue and purple and green and yellow, and lots of
great pearls lie round. I've seen 'em big as chippin'-birds' eggs."

"Cap'n Kittridge!" said his wife.

"I have, and big as robins' eggs, too, but them was off the coast of
Ceylon and Malabar, and way round the Equator," said the Captain,
prudently resolved to throw his romance to a sufficient distance.

"It's a pity you didn't get a few of them pearls," said his wife, with
an indignant appearance of scorn.

"I did get lots on 'em, and traded 'em off to the Nabobs in the interior
for Cashmere shawls and India silks and sich," said the Captain,
composedly; "and brought 'em home and sold 'em at a good figure, too."

"Oh, father!" said Sally, earnestly, "I wish you had saved just one or
two for us."

"Laws, child, I wish now I had," said the Captain, good-naturedly. "Why,
when I was in India, I went up to Lucknow, and Benares, and round, and
saw all the Nabobs and Biggums,--why, they don't make no more of gold
and silver and precious stones than we do of the shells we find on the
beach. Why, I've seen one of them fellers with a diamond in his turban
as big as my fist."

"Cap'n Kittridge, what are you telling?" said his wife once more.

"Fact,--as big as my fist," said the Captain, obdurately; "and all the
clothes he wore was jist a stiff crust of pearls and precious stones. I
tell you, he looked like something in the Revelations,--a real New
Jerusalem look he had."

"I call that ar talk wicked, Cap'n Kittridge, usin' Scriptur' that ar
way," said his wife.

"Why, don't it tell about all sorts of gold and precious stones in the
Revelations?" said the Captain; "that's all I meant. Them ar countries
off in Asia ain't like our'n,--stands to reason they shouldn't be;
them's Scripture countries, and everything is different there."

"Father, didn't you ever get any of those splendid things?" said Sally.

"Laws, yes, child. Why, I had a great green ring, an emerald, that one
of the princes giv' me, and ever so many pearls and diamonds. I used to
go with 'em rattlin' loose in my vest pocket. I was young and gay in
them days, and thought of bringin' of 'em home for the gals, but somehow
I always got opportunities for swappin' of 'em off for goods and sich.
That ar shawl your mother keeps in her camfire chist was what I got for
one on 'em."

"Well, well," said Mrs. Kittridge, "there's never any catchin' you,
'cause you've been where we haven't."

"You've caught me once, and that ought'r do," said the Captain, with
unruffled good-nature. "I tell you, Sally, your mother was the
handsomest gal in Harpswell in them days."

"I should think you was too old for such nonsense, Cap'n," said Mrs.
Kittridge, with a toss of her head, and a voice that sounded far less
inexorable than her former admonition. In fact, though the old Captain
was as unmanageable under his wife's fireside _régime_ as any brisk old
cricket that skipped and sang around the hearth, and though he hopped
over all moral boundaries with a cheerful alertness of conscience that
was quite discouraging, still there was no resisting the spell of his
inexhaustible good-nature.

By this time he had finished the little boat, and to Sally's great
delight, began sailing it for her in a pail of water.

"I wonder," said Mrs. Kittridge, "what's to be done with that ar child.
I suppose the selectmen will take care on't; it'll be brought up by the
town."

"I shouldn't wonder," said Miss Roxy, "if Cap'n Pennel should adopt it."

"You don't think so," said Mrs. Kittridge. "'Twould be taking a great
care and expense on their hands at their time of life."

"I wouldn't want no better fun than to bring up that little shaver,"
said Captain Kittridge; "he's a bright un, I promise you."

"You, Cap'n Kittridge! I wonder you can talk so," said his wife. "It's
an awful responsibility, and I wonder you don't think whether or no
you're fit for it."

"Why, down here on the shore, I'd as lives undertake a boy as a
Newfoundland pup," said the Captain. "Plenty in the sea to eat, drink,
and wear. That ar young un may be the staff of their old age yet."

"You see," said Miss Roxy, "I think they'll adopt it to be company for
little Mara; they're bound up in her, and the little thing pines bein'
alone."

"Well, they make a real graven image of that ar child," said Mrs.
Kittridge, "and fairly bow down to her and worship her."

"Well, it's natural," said Miss Roxy. "Besides, the little thing is
cunnin'; she's about the cunnin'est little crittur that I ever saw, and
has such enticin' ways."

The fact was, as the reader may perceive, that Miss Roxy had been thawed
into an unusual attachment for the little Mara, and this affection was
beginning to spread a warming element though her whole being. It was as
if a rough granite rock had suddenly awakened to a passionate
consciousness of the beauty of some fluttering white anemone that
nestled in its cleft, and felt warm thrills running through all its
veins at every tender motion and shadow. A word spoken against the
little one seemed to rouse her combativeness. Nor did Dame Kittridge
bear the child the slightest ill-will, but she was one of those
naturally care-taking people whom Providence seems to design to perform
the picket duties for the rest of society, and who, therefore, challenge
everybody and everything to stand and give an account of themselves.
Miss Roxy herself belonged to this class, but sometimes found herself so
stoutly overhauled by the guns of Mrs. Kittridge's battery, that she
could only stand modestly on the defensive.

One of Mrs. Kittridge's favorite hobbies was education, or, as she
phrased it, the "fetchin' up" of children, which she held should be
performed to the letter of the old stiff rule. In this manner she had
already trained up six sons, who were all following their fortunes upon
the seas, and, on this account, she had no small conceit of her
abilities; and when she thought she discerned a lamb being left to frisk
heedlessly out of bounds, her zeal was stirred to bring it under proper
sheepfold regulations.

"Come, Sally, it's eight o'clock," said the good woman.

Sally's dark brows lowered over her large, black eyes, and she gave an
appealing look to her father.

"Law, mother, let the child sit up a quarter of an hour later, jist for
once."

"Cap'n Kittridge, if I was to hear to you, there'd never be no rule in
this house. Sally, you go 'long this minute, and be sure you put your
knittin' away in its place."

The Captain gave a humorous nod of submissive good-nature to his
daughter as she went out. In fact, putting Sally to bed was taking away
his plaything, and leaving him nothing to do but study faces in the
coals, or watch the fleeting sparks which chased each other in flocks
up the sooty back of the chimney.

It was Saturday night, and the morrow was Sunday,--never a very pleasant
prospect to the poor Captain, who, having, unfortunately, no spiritual
tastes, found it very difficult to get through the day in compliance
with his wife's views of propriety, for he, alas! soared no higher in
his aims.

"I b'lieve, on the hull, Polly, I'll go to bed, too," said he, suddenly
starting up.

"Well, father, your clean shirt is in the right-hand corner of the upper
drawer, and your Sunday clothes on the back of the chair by the bed."

The fact was that the Captain promised himself the pleasure of a long
conversation with Sally, who nestled in the trundle-bed under the
paternal couch, to whom he could relate long, many-colored yarns,
without the danger of interruption from her mother's sharp,
truth-seeking voice.

A moralist might, perhaps, be puzzled exactly what account to make of
the Captain's disposition to romancing and embroidery. In all real,
matter-of-fact transactions, as between man and man, his word was as
good as another's, and he was held to be honest and just in his
dealings. It was only when he mounted the stilts of foreign travel that
his paces became so enormous. Perhaps, after all, a rude poetic and
artistic faculty possessed the man. He might have been a humbler phase
of the "mute, inglorious Milton." Perhaps his narrations required the
privileges and allowances due to the inventive arts generally. Certain
it was that, in common with other artists, he required an atmosphere of
sympathy and confidence in which to develop himself fully; and, when
left alone with children, his mind ran such riot, that the bounds
between the real and unreal became foggier than the banks of
Newfoundland.

The two women sat up, and the night wore on apace, while they kept
together that customary vigil which it was thought necessary to hold
over the lifeless casket from which an immortal jewel had recently been
withdrawn.

"I re'lly did hope," said Mrs. Kittridge, mournfully, "that this 'ere
solemn Providence would have been sent home to the Cap'n's mind; but he
seems jist as light and triflin' as ever."

"There don't nobody see these 'ere things unless they's effectually
called," said Miss Roxy, "and the Cap'n's time ain't come."

"It's gettin' to be t'ward the eleventh hour," said Mrs. Kittridge, "as
I was a-tellin' him this afternoon."

"Well," said Miss Roxy, "you know

    "'While the lamp holds out to burn,
    The vilest sinner may return.'"

"Yes, I know that," said Mrs. Kittridge, rising and taking up the
candle. "Don't you think, Aunt Roxy, we may as well give a look in there
at the corpse?"

It was past midnight as they went together into the keeping-room. All
was so still that the clash of the rising tide and the ticking of the
clock assumed that solemn and mournful distinctness which even tones
less impressive take on in the night-watches. Miss Roxy went
mechanically through with certain arrangements of the white drapery
around the cold sleeper, and uncovering the face and bust for a moment,
looked critically at the still, unconscious countenance.

"Not one thing to let us know who or what she is," she said; "that boy,
if he lives, would give a good deal to know, some day."

"What is it one's duty to do about this bracelet?" said Mrs. Kittridge,
taking from a drawer the article in question, which had been found on
the beach in the morning.

"Well, I s'pose it belongs to the child, whatever it's worth," said Miss
Roxy.

"Then if the Pennels conclude to take him, I may as well give it to
them," said Mrs. Kittridge, laying it back in the drawer.

Miss Roxy folded the cloth back over the face, and the two went out into
the kitchen. The fire had sunk low--the crickets were chirruping
gleefully. Mrs. Kittridge added more wood, and put on the tea-kettle
that their watching might be refreshed by the aid of its talkative and
inspiring beverage. The two solemn, hard-visaged women drew up to each
other by the fire, and insensibly their very voices assumed a tone of
drowsy and confidential mystery.

"If this 'ere poor woman was hopefully pious, and could see what was
goin' on here," said Mrs. Kittridge, "it would seem to be a comfort to
her that her child has fallen into such good hands. It seems a'most a
pity she couldn't know it."

"How do you know she don't?" said Miss Roxy, brusquely.

"Why, you know the hymn," said Mrs. Kittridge, quoting those somewhat
saddusaical lines from the popular psalm-book:--

    "'The living know that they must die,
    But all the dead forgotten lie--
    _Their memory and their senses gone,
    Alike unknowing and unknown_.'"

"Well, I don't know 'bout that," said Miss Roxy, flavoring her cup of
tea; "hymn-book ain't Scriptur', and I'm pretty sure that ar ain't true
always;" and she nodded her head as if she could say more if she chose.

Now Miss Roxy's reputation of vast experience in all the facts relating
to those last fateful hours, which are the only certain event in every
human existence, caused her to be regarded as a sort of Delphic oracle
in such matters, and therefore Mrs. Kittridge, not without a share of
the latent superstition to which each human heart must confess at some
hours, drew confidentially near to Miss Roxy, and asked if she had
anything particular on her mind.

"Well, Mis' Kittridge," said Miss Roxy, "I ain't one of the sort as
likes to make a talk of what I've seen, but mebbe if I was, I've seen
some things _as_ remarkable as anybody. I tell you, Mis' Kittridge,
folks don't tend the sick and dyin' bed year in and out, at all hours,
day and night, and not see some remarkable things; that's my opinion."

"Well, Miss Roxy, did you ever see a sperit?"

"I won't say as I have, and I won't say as I haven't," said Miss Roxy;
"only as I have seen some remarkable things."

There was a pause, in which Mrs. Kittridge stirred her tea, looking
intensely curious, while the old kitchen-clock seemed to tick with one
of those fits of loud insistence which seem to take clocks at times when
all is still, as if they had something that they were getting ready to
say pretty soon, if nobody else spoke.

But Miss Roxy evidently had something to say, and so she began:--

"Mis' Kittridge, this 'ere's a very particular subject to be talkin'
of. I've had opportunities to observe that most haven't, and I don't
care if I jist say to you, that I'm pretty sure spirits that has left
the body do come to their friends sometimes."

The clock ticked with still more _empressement_, and Mrs. Kittridge
glared through the horn bows of her glasses with eyes of eager
curiosity.

"Now, you remember Cap'n Titcomb's wife, that died fifteen years ago
when her husband had gone to Archangel; and you remember that he took
her son John out with him--and of all her boys, John was the one she
was particular sot on."

"Yes, and John died at Archangel; I remember that."

"Jes' so," said Miss Roxy, laying her hand on Mrs. Kittridge's; "he died
at Archangel the very day his mother died, and jist the hour, for the
Cap'n had it down in his log-book."

"You don't say so!"

"Yes, I do. Well, now," said Miss Roxy, sinking her voice, "this 'ere
was remarkable. Mis' Titcomb was one of the fearful sort, tho' one of
the best women that ever lived. Our minister used to call her 'Mis'
Muchafraid'--you know, in the 'Pilgrim's Progress'--but he was satisfied
with her evidences, and told her so; she used to say she was 'afraid of
the dark valley,' and she told our minister so when he went out, that ar
last day he called; and his last words, as he stood with his hand on the
knob of the door, was 'Mis' Titcomb, the Lord will find ways to bring
you thro' the dark valley.' Well, she sunk away about three o'clock in
the morning. I remember the time, 'cause the Cap'n's chronometer watch
that he left with her lay on the stand for her to take her drops by. I
heard her kind o' restless, and I went up, and I saw she was struck with
death, and she looked sort o' anxious and distressed.

"'Oh, Aunt Roxy,' says she, 'it's so dark, who will go with me?' and in
a minute her whole face brightened up, and says she, 'John is going with
me,' and she jist gave the least little sigh and never breathed no
more--she jist died as easy as a bird. I told our minister of it next
morning, and he asked if I'd made a note of the hour, and I told him I
had, and says he, 'You did right, Aunt Roxy.'"

"What did he seem to think of it?"

"Well, he didn't seem inclined to speak freely. 'Miss Roxy,' says he,
'all natur's in the Lord's hands, and there's no saying why he uses this
or that; them that's strong enough to go by faith, he lets 'em, but
there's no saying what he won't do for the weak ones.'"

"Wa'n't the Cap'n overcome when you told him?" said Mrs. Kittridge.

"Indeed he was; he was jist as white as a sheet."

Miss Roxy now proceeded to pour out another cup of tea, and having mixed
and flavored it, she looked in a weird and sibylline manner across it,
and inquired,--

"Mis' Kittridge, do you remember that ar Mr. Wadkins that come to
Brunswick twenty years ago, in President Averill's days?"

"Yes, I remember the pale, thin, long-nosed gentleman that used to sit
in President Averill's pew at church. Nobody knew who he was, or where
he came from. The college students used to call him Thaddeus of Warsaw.
Nobody knew who he was but the President, 'cause he could speak all the
foreign tongues--one about as well as another; but the President he knew
his story, and said he was a good man, and he used to stay to the
sacrament regular, I remember."

"Yes," said Miss Roxy, "he used to live in a room all alone, and keep
himself. Folks said he was quite a gentleman, too, and fond of reading."

"I heard Cap'n Atkins tell," said Mrs. Kittridge, "how they came to take
him up on the shores of Holland. You see, when he was somewhere in a
port in Denmark, some men come to him and offered him a pretty good sum
of money if he'd be at such a place on the coast of Holland on such a
day, and take whoever should come. So the Cap'n he went, and sure enough
on that day there come a troop of men on horseback down to the beach
with this man, and they all bid him good-by, and seemed to make much of
him, but he never told 'em nothin' on board ship, only he seemed kind o'
sad and pinin'."

"Well," said Miss Roxy; "Ruey and I we took care o' that man in his
last sickness, and we watched with him the night he died, and there was
something quite remarkable."

"Do tell now," said Mrs. Kittridge.

"Well, you see," said Miss Roxy, "he'd been low and poorly all day, kind
o' tossin' and restless, and a little light-headed, and the Doctor said
he thought he wouldn't last till morning, and so Ruey and I we set up
with him, and between twelve and one Ruey said she thought she'd jist
lop down a few minutes on the old sofa at the foot of the bed, and I
made me a cup of tea like as I'm a-doin' now, and set with my back to
him."

"Well?" said Mrs. Kittridge, eagerly.

"Well, you see he kept a-tossin' and throwin' off the clothes, and I
kept a-gettin' up to straighten 'em; and once he threw out his arms, and
something bright fell out on to the pillow, and I went and looked, and
it was a likeness that he wore by a ribbon round his neck. It was a
woman--a real handsome one--and she had on a low-necked black dress, of
the cut they used to call Marie Louise, and she had a string of pearls
round her neck, and her hair curled with pearls in it, and very wide
blue eyes. Well, you see, I didn't look but a minute before he seemed to
wake up, and he caught at it and hid it in his clothes. Well, I went and
sat down, and I grew kind o' sleepy over the fire; but pretty soon I
heard him speak out very clear, and kind o' surprised, in a tongue I
didn't understand, and I looked round."

Miss Roxy here made a pause, and put another lump of sugar into her tea.

"Well?" said Mrs. Kittridge, ready to burst with curiosity.

"Well, now, I don't like to tell about these 'ere things, and you
mustn't never speak about it; but as sure as you live, Polly Kittridge,
I see that ar very woman standin' at the back of the bed, right in the
partin' of the curtains, jist as she looked in the pictur'--blue eyes
and curly hair and pearls on her neck, and black dress."

"What did you do?" said Mrs. Kittridge.

"Do? Why, I jist held my breath and looked, and in a minute it kind o'
faded away, and I got up and went to the bed, but the man was gone. He
lay there with the pleasantest smile on his face that ever you see; and
I woke up Ruey, and told her about it."

Mrs. Kittridge drew a long breath. "What do you think it was?"

"Well," said Miss Roxy, "I know what I think, but I don't think best to
tell. I told Doctor Meritts, and he said there were more things in
heaven and earth than folks knew about--and so I think."

       *       *       *       *       *

Meanwhile, on this same evening, the little Mara frisked like a
household fairy round the hearth of Zephaniah Pennel.

The boy was a strong-limbed, merry-hearted little urchin, and did full
justice to the abundant hospitalities of Mrs. Pennel's tea-table; and
after supper little Mara employed herself in bringing apronful after
apronful of her choicest treasures, and laying them down at his feet.
His great black eyes flashed with pleasure, and he gamboled about the
hearth with his new playmate in perfect forgetfulness, apparently, of
all the past night of fear and anguish.

When the great family Bible was brought out for prayers, and little Mara
composed herself on a low stool by her grandmother's side, he, however,
did not conduct himself as a babe of grace. He resisted all Miss Ruey's
efforts to make him sit down beside her, and stood staring with his
great, black, irreverent eyes during the Bible-reading, and laughed out
in the most inappropriate manner when the psalm-singing began, and
seemed disposed to mingle incoherent remarks of his own even in the
prayers.

"This is a pretty self-willed youngster," said Miss Ruey, as they rose
from the exercises, "and I shouldn't think he'd been used to religious
privileges."

"Perhaps not," said Zephaniah Pennel; "but who can say but what this
providence is a message of the Lord to us--such as Pharaoh's daughter
sent about Moses, 'Take this child, and bring him up for me'?"

"I'd like to take him, if I thought I was capable," said Mrs. Pennel,
timidly. "It seems a real providence to give Mara some company; the poor
child pines so for want of it."

"Well, then, Mary, if you say so, we will bring him up with our little
Mara," said Zephaniah, drawing the child toward him. "May the Lord bless
him!" he added, laying his great brown hands on the shining black curls
of the child.




CHAPTER IX

MOSES


Sunday morning rose clear and bright on Harpswell Bay. The whole sea was
a waveless, blue looking-glass, streaked with bands of white, and
flecked with sailing cloud-shadows from the skies above. Orr's Island,
with its blue-black spruces, its silver firs, its golden larches, its
scarlet sumachs, lay on the bosom of the deep like a great many-colored
gem on an enchanted mirror. A vague, dreamlike sense of rest and Sabbath
stillness seemed to brood in the air. The very spruce-trees seemed to
know that it was Sunday, and to point solemnly upward with their dusky
fingers; and the small tide-waves that chased each other up on the
shelly beach, or broke against projecting rocks, seemed to do it with a
chastened decorum, as if each blue-haired wave whispered to his brother,
"Be still--be still."

Yes, Sunday it was along all the beautiful shores of Maine--netted in
green and azure by its thousand islands, all glorious with their
majestic pines, all musical and silvery with the caresses of the
sea-waves, that loved to wander and lose themselves in their numberless
shelly coves and tiny beaches among their cedar shadows.

Not merely as a burdensome restraint, or a weary endurance, came the
shadow of that Puritan Sabbath. It brought with it all the sweetness
that belongs to rest, all the sacredness that hallows home, all the
memories of patient thrift, of sober order, of chastened yet intense
family feeling, of calmness, purity, and self-respecting dignity which
distinguish the Puritan household. It seemed a solemn pause in all the
sights and sounds of earth. And he whose moral nature was not yet enough
developed to fill the blank with visions of heaven was yet wholesomely
instructed by his weariness into the secret of his own spiritual
poverty.

Zephaniah Pennel, in his best Sunday clothes, with his hard visage
glowing with a sort of interior tenderness, ministered this morning at
his family-altar--one of those thousand priests of God's ordaining that
tend the sacred fire in as many families of New England. He had risen
with the morning star and been forth to meditate, and came in with his
mind softened and glowing. The trance-like calm of earth and sea found a
solemn answer with him, as he read what a poet wrote by the sea-shores
of the Mediterranean, ages ago: "Bless the Lord, O my soul. O Lord my
God, thou art very great; thou art clothed with honor and majesty. Who
coverest thyself with light as with a garment: who stretchest out the
heavens like a curtain: who layeth the beams of his chambers in the
waters: who maketh the clouds his chariot: who walketh upon the wings of
the wind. The trees of the Lord are full of sap; the cedars of Lebanon,
which he hath planted; where the birds make their nests; as for the
stork, the fir-trees are her house. O Lord, how manifold are thy works!
in wisdom hast thou made them all."

Ages ago the cedars that the poet saw have rotted into dust, and from
their cones have risen generations of others, wide-winged and grand. But
the words of that poet have been wafted like seed to our days, and
sprung up in flowers of trust and faith in a thousand households.

"Well, now," said Miss Ruey, when the morning rite was over, "Mis'
Pennel, I s'pose you and the Cap'n will be wantin' to go to the meetin',
so don't you gin yourse'ves a mite of trouble about the children, for
I'll stay at home with 'em. The little feller was starty and fretful in
his sleep last night, and didn't seem to be quite well."

"No wonder, poor dear," said Mrs. Pennel; "it's a wonder children can
forget as they do."

"Yes," said Miss Ruey; "you know them lines in the 'English Reader,'--

    'Gay hope is theirs by fancy led,
      Least pleasing when possessed;
    The tear forgot as soon as shed,
      The sunshine of the breast.'

Them lines all'ys seemed to me affectin'."

Miss Ruey's sentiment was here interrupted by a loud cry from the
bedroom, and something between a sneeze and a howl.

"Massy! what is that ar young un up to!" she exclaimed, rushing into the
adjoining bedroom.

There stood the young Master Hopeful of our story, with streaming eyes
and much-bedaubed face, having just, after much labor, succeeded in
making Miss Ruey's snuff-box fly open, which he did with such force as
to send the contents in a perfect cloud into eyes, nose, and mouth. The
scene of struggling and confusion that ensued cannot be described. The
washings, and wipings, and sobbings, and exhortings, and the sympathetic
sobs of the little Mara, formed a small tempest for the time being that
was rather appalling.

"Well, this 'ere's a youngster that's a-goin' to make work," said Miss
Ruey, when all things were tolerably restored. "Seems to make himself at
home first thing."

"Poor little dear," said Mrs. Pennel, in the excess of loving-kindness,
"I hope he will; he's welcome, I'm sure."

"Not to my snuff-box," said Miss Ruey, who had felt herself attacked in
a very tender point.

"He's got the notion of lookin' into things pretty early," said Captain
Pennel, with an indulgent smile.

"Well, Aunt Ruey," said Mrs. Pennel, when this disturbance was somewhat
abated, "I feel kind o' sorry to deprive you of your privileges to-day."

"Oh! never mind me," said Miss Ruey, briskly. "I've got the big Bible,
and I can sing a hymn or two by myself. My voice ain't quite what it
used to be, but then I get a good deal of pleasure out of it." Aunt
Ruey, it must be known, had in her youth been one of the foremost
leaders in the "singers' seats," and now was in the habit of speaking of
herself much as a retired _prima donna_ might, whose past successes were
yet in the minds of her generation.

After giving a look out of the window, to see that the children were
within sight, she opened the big Bible at the story of the ten plagues
of Egypt, and adjusting her horn spectacles with a sort of sideway twist
on her little pug nose, she seemed intent on her Sunday duties. A moment
after she looked up and said, "I don't know but I must send a message by
you over to Mis' Deacon Badger, about a worldly matter, if 'tis Sunday;
but I've been thinkin', Mis' Pennel, that there'll have to be clothes
made up for this 'ere child next week, and so perhaps Roxy and I had
better stop here a day or two longer, and you tell Mis' Badger that
we'll come to her a Wednesday, and so she'll have time to have that new
press-board done,--the old one used to pester me so."

"Well, I'll remember," said Mrs. Pennel.

"It seems a'most impossible to prevent one's thoughts wanderin'
Sundays," said Aunt Ruey; "but I couldn't help a-thinkin' I could get
such a nice pair o' trousers out of them old Sunday ones of the Cap'n's
in the garret. I was a-lookin' at 'em last Thursday, and thinkin' what a
pity 'twas you hadn't nobody to cut down for; but this 'ere young un's
going to be such a tearer, he'll want somethin' real stout; but I'll try
and put it out of my mind till Monday. Mis' Pennel, you'll be sure to
ask Mis' Titcomb how Harriet's toothache is, and whether them drops
cured her that I gin her last Sunday; and ef you'll jist look in a
minute at Major Broad's, and tell 'em to use bayberry wax for his
blister, it's so healin'; and do jist ask if Sally's baby's eye-tooth
has come through yet."

"Well, Aunt Ruey, I'll try to remember all," said Mrs. Pennel, as she
stood at the glass in her bedroom, carefully adjusting the respectable
black silk shawl over her shoulders, and tying her neat bonnet-strings.

"I s'pose," said Aunt Ruey, "that the notice of the funeral'll be gin
out after sermon."

"Yes, I think so," said Mrs. Pennel.

"It's another loud call," said Miss Ruey, "and I hope it will turn the
young people from their thoughts of dress and vanity,--there's Mary Jane
Sanborn was all took up with gettin' feathers and velvet for her fall
bonnet. I don't think I shall get no bonnet this year till snow comes.
My bonnet's respectable enough,--don't you think so?"

"Certainly, Aunt Ruey, it looks very well."

"Well, I'll have the pork and beans and brown-bread all hot on table
agin you come back," said Miss Ruey, "and then after dinner we'll all go
down to the funeral together. Mis' Pennel, there's one thing on my
mind,--what you goin' to call this 'ere boy?"

"Father and I've been thinkin' that over," said Mrs. Pennel.

"Wouldn't think of giv'n him the Cap'n's name?" said Aunt Ruey.

"He must have a name of his own," said Captain Pennel. "Come here,
sonny," he called to the child, who was playing just beside the door.

The child lowered his head, shook down his long black curls, and looked
through them as elfishly as a Skye terrier, but showed no inclination to
come.

"One thing he hasn't learned, evidently," said Captain Pennel, "and that
is to mind."

"Here!" he said, turning to the boy with a little of the tone he had
used of old on the quarter-deck, and taking his small hand firmly.

The child surrendered, and let the good man lift him on his knee and
stroke aside the clustering curls; the boy then looked fixedly at him
with his great gloomy black eyes, his little firm-set mouth and bridled
chin,--a perfect little miniature of proud manliness.

"What's your name, little boy?"

The great eyes continued looking in the same solemn quiet.

"Law, he don't understand a word," said Zephaniah, putting his hand
kindly on the child's head; "our tongue is all strange to him. Kittridge
says he's a Spanish child; may be from the West Indies; but nobody
knows,--we never shall know his name."

"Well, I dare say it was some Popish nonsense or other," said Aunt Ruey;
"and now he's come to a land of Christian privileges, we ought to give
him a good Scripture name, and start him well in the world."

"Let's call him Moses," said Zephaniah, "because we drew him out of the
water."

"Now, did I ever!" said Miss Ruey; "there's something in the Bible to
fit everything, ain't there?"

"I like Moses, because I had a brother of that name," said Mrs. Pennel.

The child had slid down from his protector's knee, and stood looking
from one to the other gravely while this discussion was going on. What
change of destiny was then going on for him in this simple formula of
adoption, none could tell; but, surely, never orphan stranded on a
foreign shore found home with hearts more true and loving.

"Well, wife, I suppose we must be goin'," said Zephaniah.

About a stone's throw from the open door, the little fishing-craft lay
courtesying daintily on the small tide-waves that came licking up the
white pebbly shore. Mrs. Pennel seated herself in the end of the boat,
and a pretty placid picture she was, with her smooth, parted hair, her
modest, cool, drab bonnet, and her bright hazel eyes, in which was the
Sabbath calm of a loving and tender heart. Zephaniah loosed the sail,
and the two children stood on the beach and saw them go off. A pleasant
little wind carried them away, and back on the breeze came the sound of
Zephaniah's Sunday-morning psalm:--

    "Lord, in the morning thou shalt hear
      My voice ascending high;
    To thee will I direct my prayer,
      To thee lift up mine eye.

    "Unto thy house will I resort.
      To taste thy mercies there;
    I will frequent thy holy court,
      And worship in thy fear."

The surface of the glassy bay was dotted here and there with the white
sails of other little craft bound for the same point and for the same
purpose. It was as pleasant a sight as one might wish to see.

Left in charge of the house, Miss Ruey drew a long breath, took a
consoling pinch of snuff, sang "Bridgewater" in an uncommonly high key,
and then began reading in the prophecies. With her good head full of the
"daughter of Zion" and the house of Israel and Judah, she was recalled
to terrestrial things by loud screams from the barn, accompanied by a
general flutter and cackling among the hens.

Away plodded the good soul, and opening the barn-door saw the little boy
perched on the top of the hay-mow, screaming and shrieking,--his face
the picture of dismay,--while poor little Mara's cries came in a more
muffled manner from some unexplored lower region. In fact, she was found
to have slipped through a hole in the hay-mow into the nest of a very
domestic sitting-hen, whose clamors at the invasion of her family
privacy added no little to the general confusion.

The little princess, whose nicety as to her dress and sensitiveness as
to anything unpleasant about her pretty person we have seen, was lifted
up streaming with tears and broken eggs, but otherwise not seriously
injured, having fallen on the very substantial substratum of hay which
Dame Poulet had selected as the foundation of her domestic hopes.

"Well, now, did I ever!" said Miss Ruey, when she had ascertained that
no bones were broken; "if that ar young un isn't a limb! I declare for't
I pity Mis' Pennel,--she don't know what she's undertook. How upon 'arth
the critter managed to get Mara on to the hay, I'm sure I can't
tell,--that ar little thing never got into no such scrapes before."

Far from seeming impressed with any wholesome remorse of conscience, the
little culprit frowned fierce defiance at Miss Ruey, when, after having
repaired the damages of little Mara's toilet, she essayed the good old
plan of shutting him into the closet. He fought and struggled so
fiercely that Aunt Ruey's carroty frisette came off in the skirmish, and
her head-gear, always rather original, assumed an aspect verging on the
supernatural. Miss Ruey thought of Philistines and Moabites, and all the
other terrible people she had been reading about that morning, and came
as near getting into a passion with the little elf as so good-humored
and Christian an old body could possibly do. Human virtue is frail, and
every one has some vulnerable point. The old Roman senator could not
control himself when his beard was invaded, and the like sensitiveness
resides in an old woman's cap; and when young master irreverently clawed
off her Sunday best, Aunt Ruey, in her confusion of mind, administered a
sound cuff on either ear.

Little Mara, who had screamed loudly through the whole scene, now
conceiving that her precious new-found treasure was endangered, flew at
poor Miss Ruey with both little hands; and throwing her arms round her
"boy," as she constantly called him, she drew him backward, and looked
defiance at the common enemy. Miss Ruey was dumb-struck.

"I declare for't, I b'lieve he's bewitched her," she said, stupefied,
having never seen anything like the martial expression which now gleamed
from those soft brown eyes. "Why, Mara dear,--putty little Mara."

But Mara was busy wiping away the angry tears that stood on the hot,
glowing cheeks of the boy, and offering her little rosebud of a mouth to
kiss him, as she stood on tiptoe.

"Poor boy,--no kie,--Mara's boy," she said; "Mara love boy;" and then
giving an angry glance at Aunt Ruey, who sat much disheartened and
confused, she struck out her little pearly hand, and cried, "Go way,--go
way, naughty!"

The child jabbered unintelligibly and earnestly to Mara, and she seemed
to have the air of being perfectly satisfied with his view of the case,
and both regarded Miss Ruey with frowning looks. Under these peculiar
circumstances, the good soul began to bethink her of some mode of
compromise, and going to the closet took out a couple of slices of cake,
which she offered to the little rebels with pacificatory words.

Mara was appeased at once, and ran to Aunt Ruey; but the boy struck the
cake out of her hand, and looked at her with steady defiance. The little
one picked it up, and with much chippering and many little feminine
manoeuvres, at last succeeded in making him taste it, after which
appetite got the better of his valorous resolutions,--he ate and was
comforted; and after a little time, the three were on the best possible
footing. And Miss Ruey having smoothed her hair, and arranged her
frisette and cap, began to reflect upon herself as the cause of the
whole disturbance. If she had not let them run while she indulged in
reading and singing, this would not have happened. So the toilful good
soul kept them at her knee for the next hour or two, while they looked
through all the pictures in the old family Bible.

       *       *       *       *       *

The evening of that day witnessed a crowded funeral in the small rooms
of Captain Kittridge. Mrs. Kittridge was in her glory. Solemn and
lugubrious to the last degree, she supplied in her own proper person the
want of the whole corps of mourners, who generally attract sympathy on
such occasions. But what drew artless pity from all was the unconscious
orphan, who came in, led by Mrs. Pennel by the one hand, and with the
little Mara by the other.

The simple rite of baptism administered to the wondering little creature
so strongly recalled that other scene three years before, that Mrs.
Pennel hid her face in her handkerchief, and Zephaniah's firm hand shook
a little as he took the boy to offer him to the rite. The child received
the ceremony with a look of grave surprise, put up his hand quickly and
wiped the holy drops from his brow, as if they annoyed him; and
shrinking back, seized hold of the gown of Mrs. Pennel. His great
beauty, and, still more, the air of haughty, defiant firmness with which
he regarded the company, drew all eyes, and many were the whispered
comments.

"Pennel'll have his hands full with that ar chap," said Captain
Kittridge to Miss Roxy.

Mrs. Kittridge darted an admonitory glance at her husband, to remind him
that she was looking at him, and immediately he collapsed into
solemnity.

The evening sunbeams slanted over the blackberry bushes and mullein
stalks of the graveyard, when the lonely voyager was lowered to the rest
from which she should not rise till the heavens be no more. As the
purple sea at that hour retained no trace of the ships that had furrowed
its waves, so of this mortal traveler no trace remained, not even in
that infant soul that was to her so passionately dear.




CHAPTER X

THE MINISTER


Mrs. Kittridge's advantages and immunities resulting from the shipwreck
were not yet at an end. Not only had one of the most "solemn
providences" known within the memory of the neighborhood fallen out at
her door,--not only had the most interesting funeral that had occurred
for three or four years taken place in her parlor, but she was still
further to be distinguished in having the minister to tea after the
performances were all over. To this end she had risen early, and taken
down her best china tea-cups, which had been marked with her and her
husband's joint initials in Canton, and which only came forth on high
and solemn occasions. In view of this probable distinction, on Saturday,
immediately after the discovery of the calamity, Mrs. Kittridge had
found time to rush to her kitchen, and make up a loaf of pound-cake and
some doughnuts, that the great occasion which she foresaw might not find
her below her reputation as a forehanded housewife.

It was a fine golden hour when the minister and funeral train turned
away from the grave. Unlike other funerals, there was no draught on the
sympathies in favor of mourners--no wife, or husband, or parent, left a
heart in that grave; and so when the rites were all over, they turned
with the more cheerfulness back into life, from the contrast of its
freshness with those shadows into which, for the hour, they had been
gazing.

The Rev. Theophilus Sewell was one of the few ministers who preserved
the costume of a former generation, with something of that imposing
dignity with which, in earlier times, the habits of the clergy were
invested. He was tall and majestic in stature, and carried to advantage
the powdered wig and three-cornered hat, the broad-skirted coat,
knee-breeches, high shoes, and plated buckles of the ancient costume.
There was just a sufficient degree of the formality of olden times to
give a certain quaintness to all he said and did. He was a man of a
considerable degree of talent, force, and originality, and in fact had
been held in his day to be one of the most promising graduates of
Harvard University. But, being a good man, he had proposed to himself no
higher ambition than to succeed to the pulpit of his father in
Harpswell.

His parish included not only a somewhat scattered seafaring population
on the mainland, but also the care of several islands. Like many other
of the New England clergy of those times, he united in himself numerous
different offices for the benefit of the people whom he served. As there
was neither lawyer nor physician in the town, he had acquired by his
reading, and still more by his experience, enough knowledge in both
these departments to enable him to administer to the ordinary wants of a
very healthy and peaceable people.

It was said that most of the deeds and legal conveyances in his parish
were in his handwriting, and in the medical line his authority was only
rivaled by that of Miss Roxy, who claimed a very obvious advantage over
him in a certain class of cases, from the fact of her being a woman,
which was still further increased by the circumstance that the good man
had retained steadfastly his bachelor estate. "So, of course," Miss Roxy
used to say, "poor man! what could he know about a woman, you know?"

This state of bachelorhood gave occasion to much surmising; but when
spoken to about it, he was accustomed to remark with gallantry, that he
should have too much regard for any lady whom he could think of as a
wife, to ask her to share his straitened circumstances. His income,
indeed, consisted of only about two hundred dollars a year; but upon
this he and a very brisk, cheerful maiden sister contrived to keep up a
thrifty and comfortable establishment, in which everything appeared to
be pervaded by a spirit of quaint cheerfulness.

In fact, the man might be seen to be an original in his way, and all the
springs of his life were kept oiled by a quiet humor, which sometimes
broke out in playful sparkles, despite the gravity of the pulpit and the
awfulness of the cocked hat. He had a placid way of amusing himself with
the quaint and picturesque side of life, as it appeared in all his
visitings among a very primitive, yet very shrewd-minded people.

There are those people who possess a peculiar faculty of mingling in the
affairs of this life as spectators as well as actors. It does not, of
course, suppose any coldness of nature or want of human interest or
sympathy--nay, it often exists most completely with people of the
tenderest human feeling. It rather seems to be a kind of distinct
faculty working harmoniously with all the others; but he who possesses
it needs never to be at a loss for interest or amusement; he is always a
spectator at a tragedy or comedy, and sees in real life a humor and a
pathos beyond anything he can find shadowed in books.

Mr. Sewell sometimes, in his pastoral visitations, took a quiet pleasure
in playing upon these simple minds, and amusing himself with the odd
harmonies and singular resolutions of chords which started out under his
fingers. Surely he had a right to something in addition to his limited
salary, and this innocent, unsuspected entertainment helped to make up
the balance for his many labors.

His sister was one of the best-hearted and most unsuspicious of the
class of female idolaters, and worshiped her brother with the most
undoubting faith and devotion--wholly ignorant of the constant amusement
she gave him by a thousand little feminine peculiarities, which struck
him with a continual sense of oddity. It was infinitely diverting to him
to see the solemnity of her interest in his shirts and stockings, and
Sunday clothes, and to listen to the subtle distinctions which she would
draw between best and second-best, and every-day; to receive her
somewhat prolix admonition how he was to demean himself in respect of
the wearing of each one; for Miss Emily Sewell was a gentlewoman, and
held rigidly to various traditions of gentility which had been handed
down in the Sewell family, and which afforded her brother too much quiet
amusement to be disturbed. He would not have overthrown one of her
quiddities for the world; it would be taking away a part of his capital
in existence.

Miss Emily was a trim, genteel little person, with dancing black eyes,
and cheeks which had the roses of youth well dried into them. It was
easy to see that she had been quite pretty in her days; and her neat
figure, her brisk little vivacious ways, her unceasing good-nature and
kindness of heart, still made her an object both of admiration and
interest in the parish. She was great in drying herbs and preparing
recipes; in knitting and sewing, and cutting and contriving; in saving
every possible snip and chip either of food or clothing; and no less
liberal was she in bestowing advice and aid in the parish, where she
moved about with all the sense of consequence which her brother's
position warranted.

The fact of his bachelorhood caused his relations to the female part of
his flock to be even more shrouded in sacredness and mystery than is
commonly the case with the great man of the parish; but Miss Emily
delighted to act as interpreter. She was charmed to serve out to the
willing ears of his parish from time to time such scraps of information
as regarded his life, habits, and opinions as might gratify their ever
new curiosity. Instructed by her, all the good wives knew the difference
between his very best long silk stocking and his second best, and how
carefully the first had to be kept under lock and key, where he could
not get at them; for he was understood, good as he was, to have
concealed in him all the thriftless and pernicious inconsiderateness of
the male nature, ready at any moment to break out into unheard-of
improprieties. But the good man submitted himself to Miss Emily's rule,
and suffered himself to be led about by her with an air of half
whimsical consciousness.

Mrs. Kittridge that day had felt the full delicacy of the compliment
when she ascertained by a hasty glance, before the first prayer, that
the good man had been brought out to her funeral in all his very best
things, not excepting the long silk stockings, for she knew the
second-best pair by means of a certain skillful darn which Miss Emily
had once shown her, which commemorated the spot where a hole had been.
The absence of this darn struck to Mrs. Kittridge's heart at once as a
delicate attention.

"Mis' Simpkins," said Mrs. Kittridge to her pastor, as they were seated
at the tea-table, "told me that she wished when you were going home that
you would call in to see Mary Jane; she couldn't come out to the funeral
on account of a dreffle sore throat. I was tellin' on her to gargle it
with blackberry-root tea--don't you think that is a good gargle, Mr.
Sewell?"

"Yes, I think it a very good gargle," replied the minister, gravely.

"Ma'sh rosemary is the gargle that I always use," said Miss Roxy; "it
cleans out your throat so."

"Marsh rosemary is a very excellent gargle," said Mr. Sewell.

"Why, brother, don't you think that rose leaves and vitriol is a good
gargle?" said little Miss Emily; "I always thought that you liked rose
leaves and vitriol for a gargle."

"So I do," said the imperturbable Mr. Sewell, drinking his tea with the
air of a sphinx.

"Well, now, you'll have to tell which on 'em will be most likely to cure
Mary Jane," said Captain Kittridge, "or there'll be a pullin' of caps,
I'm thinkin'; or else the poor girl will have to drink them all, which
is generally the way."

"There won't any of them cure Mary Jane's throat," said the minister,
quietly.

"Why, brother!" "Why, Mr. Sewell!" "Why, you don't!" burst in different
tones from each of the women.

"I thought you said that blackberry-root tea was good," said Mrs.
Kittridge.

"I understood that you 'proved of ma'sh rosemary," said Miss Roxy,
touched in her professional pride.

"And I am sure, brother, that I have heard you say, often and often,
that there wasn't a better gargle than rose leaves and vitriol," said
Miss Emily.

"You are quite right, ladies, all of you. I think these are all good
gargles--excellent ones."

"But I thought you said that they didn't do any good?" said all the
ladies in a breath.

"No, they don't--not the least in the world," said Mr. Sewell; "but they
are all excellent gargles, and as long as people must have gargles, I
think one is about as good as another."

"Now you have got it," said Captain Kittridge.

"Brother, you do say the strangest things," said Miss Emily.

"Well, I must say," said Miss Roxy, "it is a new idea to me, long as
I've been nussin', and I nussed through one season of scarlet fever
when sometimes there was five died in one house; and if ma'sh rosemary
didn't do good then, I should like to know what did."

"So would a good many others," said the minister.

"Law, now, Miss Roxy, you mus'n't mind him. Do you know that I believe
he says these sort of things just to hear us talk? Of course he wouldn't
think of puttin' his experience against yours."

"But, Mis' Kittridge," said Miss Emily, with a view of summoning a less
controverted subject, "what a beautiful little boy that was, and what a
striking providence that brought him into such a good family!"

"Yes," said Mrs. Kittridge; "but I'm sure I don't see what Mary Pennel
is goin' to do with that boy, for she ain't got no more government than
a twisted tow-string."

"Oh, the Cap'n, he'll lend a hand," said Miss Roxy, "it won't be easy
gettin' roun' him; Cap'n bears a pretty steady hand when he sets out to
drive."

"Well," said Miss Emily, "I do think that bringin' up children is the
most awful responsibility, and I always wonder when I hear that any one
dares to undertake it."

"It requires a great deal of resolution, certainly," said Mrs.
Kittridge; "I'm sure I used to get a'most discouraged when my boys was
young: they was a reg'lar set of wild ass's colts," she added, not
perceiving the reflection on their paternity.

But the countenance of Mr. Sewell was all aglow with merriment, which
did not break into a smile.

"Wal', Mis' Kittridge," said the Captain, "strikes me that you're
gettin' pussonal."

"No, I ain't neither," said the literal Mrs. Kittridge, ignorant of the
cause of the amusement which she saw around her; "but you wa'n't no help
to me, you know; you was always off to sea, and the whole wear and tear
on't came on me."

"Well, well, Polly, all's well that ends well; don't you think so, Mr.
Sewell?"

"I haven't much experience in these matters," said Mr. Sewell, politely.

"No, indeed, that's what he hasn't, for he never will have a child round
the house that he don't turn everything topsy-turvy for them," said Miss
Emily.

"But I was going to remark," said Mr. Sewell, "that a friend of mine
said once, that the woman that had brought up six boys deserved a seat
among the martyrs; and that is rather my opinion."

"Wal', Polly, if you git up there, I hope you'll keep a seat for me."

"Cap'n Kittridge, what levity!" said his wife.

"I didn't begin it, anyhow," said the Captain.

Miss Emily interposed, and led the conversation back to the subject.
"What a pity it is," she said, "that this poor child's family can never
know anything about him. There may be those who would give all the world
to know what has become of him; and when he comes to grow up, how sad he
will feel to have no father and mother!"

"Sister," said Mr. Sewell, "you cannot think that a child brought up by
Captain Pennel and his wife would ever feel as without father and
mother."

"Why, no, brother, to be sure not. There's no doubt he will have
everything done for him that a child could. But then it's a loss to lose
one's real home."

"It may be a gracious deliverance," said Mr. Sewell--"who knows? We may
as well take a cheerful view, and think that some kind wave has drifted
the child away from an unfortunate destiny to a family where we are
quite sure he will be brought up industriously and soberly, and in the
fear of God."

"Well, I never thought of that," said Miss Roxy.

Miss Emily, looking at her brother, saw that he was speaking with a
suppressed vehemence, as if some inner fountain of recollection at the
moment were disturbed. But Miss Emily knew no more of the deeper parts
of her brother's nature than a little bird that dips its beak into the
sunny waters of some spring knows of its depths of coldness and shadow.

"Mis' Pennel was a-sayin' to me," said Mrs. Kittridge, "that I should
ask you what was to be done about the bracelet they found. We don't know
whether 'tis real gold and precious stones, or only glass and pinchbeck.
Cap'n Kittridge he thinks it's real; and if 'tis, why then the question
is, whether or no to try to sell it, or keep it for the boy agin he
grows up. It may help find out who and what he is."

"And why should he want to find out?" said Mr. Sewell. "Why should he
not grow up and think himself the son of Captain and Mrs. Pennel? What
better lot could a boy be born to?"

"That may be, brother, but it can't be kept from him. Everybody knows
how he was found, and you may be sure every bird of the air will tell
him, and he'll grow up restless and wanting to know. Mis' Kittridge,
have you got the bracelet handy?"

The fact was, little Miss Emily was just dying with curiosity to set her
dancing black eyes upon it.

"Here it is," said Mrs. Kittridge, taking it from a drawer.

It was a bracelet of hair, of some curious foreign workmanship. A green
enameled serpent, studded thickly with emeralds and with eyes of ruby,
was curled around the clasp. A crystal plate covered a wide flat braid
of hair, on which the letters "D.M." were curiously embroidered in a
cipher of seed pearls. The whole was in style and workmanship quite
different from any jewelry which ordinarily meets one's eye.

But what was remarkable was the expression in Mr. Sewell's face when
this bracelet was put into his hand. Miss Emily had risen from table and
brought it to him, leaning over him as she did so, and he turned his
head a little to hold it in the light from the window, so that only she
remarked the sudden expression of blank surprise and startled
recognition which fell upon it. He seemed like a man who chokes down an
exclamation; and rising hastily, he took the bracelet to the window, and
standing with his back to the company, seemed to examine it with the
minutest interest. After a few moments he turned and said, in a very
composed tone, as if the subject were of no particular interest,--

"It is a singular article, so far as workmanship is concerned. The value
of the gems in themselves is not great enough to make it worth while to
sell it. It will be worth more as a curiosity than anything else. It
will doubtless be an interesting relic to keep for the boy when he grows
up."

"Well, Mr. Sewell, you keep it," said Mrs. Kittridge; "the Pennels told
me to give it into your care."

"I shall commit it to Emily here; women have a native sympathy with
anything in the jewelry line. She'll be sure to lay it up so securely
that she won't even know where it is herself."

"Brother!"

"Come, Emily," said Mr. Sewell, "your hens will all go to roost on the
wrong perch if you are not at home to see to them; so, if the Captain
will set us across to Harpswell, I think we may as well be going."

"Why, what's your hurry?" said Mrs. Kittridge.

"Well," said Mr. Sewell, "firstly, there's the hens; secondly, the pigs;
and lastly, the cow. Besides I shouldn't wonder if some of Emily's
admirers should call on her this evening,--never any saying when Captain
Broad may come in."

"Now, brother, you are too bad," said Miss Emily, as she bustled about
her bonnet and shawl. "Now, that's all made up out of whole cloth.
Captain Broad called last week a Monday, to talk to you about the pews,
and hardly spoke a word to me. You oughtn't to say such things, 'cause
it raises reports."

"Ah, well, then, I won't again," said her brother. "I believe, after
all, it was Captain Badger that called twice."

"Brother!"

"And left you a basket of apples the second time."

"Brother, you know he only called to get some of my hoarhound for
Mehitable's cough."

"Oh, yes, I remember."

"If you don't take care," said Miss Emily, "I'll tell where you call."

"Come, Miss Emily, you must not mind him," said Miss Roxy; "we all know
his ways."

And now took place the grand leave-taking, which consisted first of the
three women's standing in a knot and all talking at once, as if their
very lives depended upon saying everything they could possibly think of
before they separated, while Mr. Sewell and Captain Kittridge stood
patiently waiting with the resigned air which the male sex commonly
assume on such occasions; and when, after two or three "Come, Emily's,"
the group broke up only to form again on the door-step, where they were
at it harder than ever, and a third occasion of the same sort took place
at the bottom of the steps, Mr. Sewell was at last obliged by main force
to drag his sister away in the middle of a sentence.

Miss Emily watched her brother shrewdly all the way home, but all traces
of any uncommon feeling had passed away; and yet, with the restlessness
of female curiosity, she felt quite sure that she had laid hold of the
end of some skein of mystery, could she only find skill enough to unwind
it.

She took up the bracelet, and held it in the fading evening light, and
broke into various observations with regard to the singularity of the
workmanship. Her brother seemed entirely absorbed in talking with
Captain Kittridge about the brig Anna Maria, which was going to be
launched from Pennel's wharf next Wednesday. But she, therefore,
internally resolved to lie in wait for the secret in that confidential
hour which usually preceded going to bed. Therefore, as soon as she had
arrived at their quiet dwelling, she put in operation the most seducing
little fire that ever crackled and snapped in a chimney, well knowing
that nothing was more calculated to throw light into any hidden or
concealed chamber of the soul than that enlivening blaze, which danced
so merrily on her well-polished andirons, and made the old chintz sofa
and the time-worn furniture so rich in remembrances of family comfort.

She then proceeded to divest her brother of his wig and his dress-coat,
and to induct him into the flowing ease of a study-gown, crowning his
well-shaven head with a black cap, and placing his slippers before the
corner of a sofa nearest the fire. She observed him with satisfaction
sliding into his seat, and then she trotted to a closet with a glass
door in the corner of the room, and took down an old, quaintly-shaped
silver cup, which had been an heirloom in their family, and was the only
piece of plate which their modern domestic establishment could boast;
and with this, down cellar she tripped, her little heels tapping lightly
on each stair, and the hum of a song coming back after her as she sought
the cider-barrel. Up again she came, and set the silver cup, with its
clear amber contents, down by the fire, and then busied herself in
making just the crispest, nicest square of toast to be eaten with it;
for Miss Emily had conceived the idea that some little ceremony of this
sort was absolutely necessary to do away all possible ill effects from a
day's labor, and secure an uninterrupted night's repose. Having done
all this, she took her knitting-work, and stationed herself just
opposite to her brother.

It was fortunate for Miss Emily that the era of daily journals had not
yet arisen upon the earth, because if it had, after all her care and
pains, her brother would probably have taken up the evening paper, and
holding it between his face and her, have read an hour or so in silence;
but Mr. Sewell had not this resort. He knew perfectly well that he had
excited his sister's curiosity on a subject where he could not gratify
it, and therefore he took refuge in a kind of mild, abstracted air of
quietude which bid defiance to all her little suggestions.

After in vain trying every indirect form, Miss Emily approached the
subject more pointedly. "I thought that you looked very much interested
in that poor woman to-day."

"She had an interesting face," said her brother, dryly.

"Was it like anybody that you ever saw?" said Miss Emily.

Her brother did not seem to hear her, but, taking the tongs, picked up
the two ends of a stick that had just fallen apart, and arranged them so
as to make a new blaze.

Miss Emily was obliged to repeat her question, whereat he started as one
awakened out of a dream, and said,--

"Why, yes, he didn't know but she did; there were a good many women with
black eyes and black hair,--Mrs. Kittridge, for instance."

"Why, I don't think that she looked like Mrs. Kittridge in the least,"
said Miss Emily, warmly.

"Oh, well! I didn't say she did," said her brother, looking drowsily at
his watch; "why, Emily, it's getting rather late."

"What made you look so when I showed you that bracelet?" said Miss
Emily, determined now to push the war to the heart of the enemy's
country.

"Look how?" said her brother, leisurely moistening a bit of toast in his
cider.

"Why, I never saw anybody look more wild and astonished than you did for
a minute or two."

"I did, did I?" said her brother, in the same indifferent tone. "My dear
child, what an active imagination you have. Did you ever look through a
prism, Emily?"

"Why, no, Theophilus; what do you mean?"

"Well, if you should, you would see everybody and everything with a nice
little bordering of rainbow around them; now the rainbow isn't on the
things, but in the prism."

"Well, what's that to the purpose?" said Miss Emily, rather bewildered.

"Why, just this: you women are so nervous and excitable, that you are
very apt to see your friends and the world in general with some coloring
just as unreal. I am sorry for you, childie, but really I can't help you
to get up a romance out of this bracelet. Well, good-night, Emily; take
good care of yourself and go to bed;" and Mr. Sewell went to his room,
leaving poor Miss Emily almost persuaded out of the sight of her own
eyes.




CHAPTER XI

LITTLE ADVENTURERS


The little boy who had been added to the family of Zephaniah Pennel and
his wife soon became a source of grave solicitude to that mild and
long-suffering woman. For, as the reader may have seen, he was a
resolute, self-willed little elf, and whatever his former life may have
been, it was quite evident that these traits had been developed without
any restraint.

Mrs. Pennel, whose whole domestic experience had consisted in rearing
one very sensitive and timid daughter, who needed for her development
only an extreme of tenderness, and whose conscientiousness was a law
unto herself, stood utterly confounded before the turbulent little
spirit to which her loving-kindness had opened so ready an asylum, and
she soon discovered that it is one thing to take a human being to bring
up, and another to know what to do with it after it is taken.

The child had the instinctive awe of Zephaniah which his manly nature
and habits of command were fitted to inspire, so that morning and
evening, when he was at home, he was demure enough; but while the good
man was away all day, and sometimes on fishing excursions which often
lasted a week, there was a chronic state of domestic warfare--a
succession of skirmishes, pitched battles, long treaties, with divers
articles of capitulation, ending, as treaties are apt to do, in open
rupture on the first convenient opportunity.

Mrs. Pennel sometimes reflected with herself mournfully, and with many
self-disparaging sighs, what was the reason that young master somehow
contrived to keep her far more in awe of him than he was of her. Was she
not evidently, as yet at least, bigger and stronger than he, able to
hold his rebellious little hands, to lift and carry him, and to shut him
up, if so she willed, in a dark closet, and even to administer to him
that discipline of the birch which Mrs. Kittridge often and forcibly
recommended as the great secret of her family prosperity? Was it not her
duty, as everybody told her, to break his will while he was young?--a
duty which hung like a millstone round the peaceable creature's neck,
and weighed her down with a distressing sense of responsibility.

Now, Mrs. Pennel was one of the people to whom self-sacrifice is
constitutionally so much a nature, that self-denial for her must have
consisted in standing up for her own rights, or having her own way when
it crossed the will and pleasure of any one around her. All she wanted
of a child, or in fact of any human creature, was something to love and
serve. We leave it entirely to theologians to reconcile such facts with
the theory of total depravity; but it is a fact that there are a
considerable number of women of this class. Their life would flow on
very naturally if it might consist only in giving, never in
withholding--only in praise, never in blame--only in acquiescence, never
in conflict; and the chief comfort of such women in religion is that it
gives them at last an object for love without criticism, and for whom
the utmost degree of self-abandonment is not idolatry, but worship.

Mrs. Pennel would gladly have placed herself and all she possessed at
the disposition of the children; they might have broken her china, dug
in the garden with her silver spoons, made turf alleys in her best room,
drummed on her mahogany tea-table, filled her muslin drawer with their
choicest shells and seaweed; only Mrs. Pennel knew that such kindness
was no kindness, and that in the dreadful word responsibility, familiar
to every New England mother's ear, there lay an awful summons to deny
and to conflict where she could so much easier have conceded.

She saw that the tyrant little will would reign without mercy, if it
reigned at all; and ever present with her was the uneasy sense that it
was her duty to bring this erratic little comet within the laws of a
well-ordered solar system,--a task to which she felt about as competent
as to make a new ring for Saturn. Then, too, there was a secret feeling,
if the truth must be told, of what Mrs. Kittridge would think about it;
for duty is never more formidable than when she gets on the cap and gown
of a neighbor; and Mrs. Kittridge, with her resolute voice and
declamatory family government, had always been a secret source of
uneasiness to poor Mrs. Pennel, who was one of those sensitive souls who
can feel for a mile or more the sphere of a stronger neighbor. During
all the years that they had lived side by side, there had been this
shadowy, unconfessed feeling on the part of poor Mrs. Pennel, that Mrs.
Kittridge thought her deficient in her favorite virtue of "resolution,"
as, in fact, in her inmost soul she knew she was;--but who wants to have
one's weak places looked into by the sharp eyes of a neighbor who is
strong precisely where we are weak? The trouble that one neighbor may
give to another, simply by living within a mile of one, is incredible;
but until this new accession to her family, Mrs. Pennel had always been
able to comfort herself with the idea that the child under her
particular training was as well-behaved as any of those of her more
demonstrative friend. But now, all this consolation had been put to
flight; she could not meet Mrs. Kittridge without most humiliating
recollections.

On Sundays, when those sharp black eyes gleamed upon her through the
rails of the neighboring pew, her very soul shrank within her, as she
recollected all the compromises and defeats of the week before. It
seemed to her that Mrs. Kittridge saw it all,--how she had ingloriously
bought peace with gingerbread, instead of maintaining it by rightful
authority,--how young master had sat up till nine o'clock on divers
occasions, and even kept little Mara up for his lordly pleasure.

How she trembled at every movement of the child in the pew, dreading
some patent and open impropriety which should bring scandal on her
government! This was the more to be feared, as the first effort to
initiate the youthful neophyte in the decorums of the sanctuary had
proved anything but a success,--insomuch that Zephaniah Pennel had been
obliged to carry him out from the church; therefore, poor Mrs. Pennel
was thankful every Sunday when she got her little charge home without
any distinct scandal and breach of the peace.

But, after all, he was such a handsome and engaging little wretch,
attracting all eyes wherever he went, and so full of saucy drolleries,
that it seemed to Mrs. Pennel that everything and everybody conspired to
help her spoil him. There are two classes of human beings in this world:
one class seem made to give love, and the other to take it. Now Mrs.
Pennel and Mara belonged to the first class, and little Master Moses to
the latter.

It was, perhaps, of service to the little girl to give to her delicate,
shrinking, highly nervous organization the constant support of a
companion so courageous, so richly blooded, and highly vitalized as the
boy seemed to be. There was a fervid, tropical richness in his air that
gave one a sense of warmth in looking at him, and made his Oriental name
seem in good-keeping. He seemed an exotic that might have waked up under
fervid Egyptian suns, and been found cradled among the lotus blossoms of
old Nile; and the fair golden-haired girl seemed to be gladdened by his
companionship, as if he supplied an element of vital warmth to her
being. She seemed to incline toward him as naturally as a needle to a
magnet.

The child's quickness of ear and the facility with which he picked up
English were marvelous to observe. Evidently, he had been somewhat
accustomed to the sound of it before, for there dropped out of his
vocabulary, after he began to speak, phrases which would seem to betoken
a longer familiarity with its idioms than could be equally accounted for
by his present experience. Though the English evidently was not his
native language, there had yet apparently been some effort to teach it
to him, although the terror and confusion of the shipwreck seemed at
first to have washed every former impression from his mind.

But whenever any attempt was made to draw him to speak of the past, of
his mother, or of where he came from, his brow lowered gloomily, and he
assumed that kind of moody, impenetrable gravity, which children at
times will so strangely put on, and which baffle all attempts to look
within them. Zephaniah Pennel used to call it putting up his
dead-lights. Perhaps it was the dreadful association of agony and terror
connected with the shipwreck, that thus confused and darkened the mirror
of his mind the moment it was turned backward; but it was thought wisest
by his new friends to avoid that class of subjects altogether--indeed,
it was their wish that he might forget the past entirely, and remember
them as his only parents.

Miss Roxy and Miss Ruey came duly, as appointed, to initiate the young
pilgrim into the habiliments of a Yankee boy, endeavoring, at the same
time, to drop into his mind such seeds of moral wisdom as might make the
internal economy in time correspond to the exterior. But Miss Roxy
declared that "of all the children that ever she see, he beat all for
finding out new mischief,--the moment you'd make him understand he
mustn't do one thing, he was right at another."

One of his exploits, however, had very nearly been the means of cutting
short the materials of our story in the outset.

It was a warm, sunny afternoon, and the three women, being busy together
with their stitching, had tied a sun-bonnet on little Mara, and turned
the two loose upon the beach to pick up shells. All was serene, and
quiet, and retired, and no possible danger could be apprehended. So up
and down they trotted, till the spirit of adventure which ever burned in
the breast of little Moses caught sight of a small canoe which had been
moored just under the shadow of a cedar-covered rock. Forthwith he
persuaded his little neighbor to go into it, and for a while they made
themselves very gay, rocking it from side to side.

The tide was going out, and each retreating wave washed the boat up and
down, till it came into the boy's curly head how beautiful it would be
to sail out as he had seen men do,--and so, with much puffing and
earnest tugging of his little brown hands, the boat at last was loosed
from her moorings and pushed out on the tide, when both children laughed
gayly to find themselves swinging and balancing on the amber surface,
and watching the rings and sparkles of sunshine and the white pebbles
below. Little Moses was glorious,--his adventures had begun,--and with a
fairy-princess in his boat, he was going to stretch away to some of the
islands of dreamland. He persuaded Mara to give him her pink sun-bonnet,
which he placed for a pennon on a stick at the end of the boat, while he
made a vehement dashing with another, first on one side of the boat and
then on the other,--spattering the water in diamond showers, to the
infinite amusement of the little maiden.

Meanwhile the tide waves danced them out and still outward, and as they
went farther and farther from shore, the more glorious felt the boy. He
had got Mara all to himself, and was going away with her from all grown
people, who wouldn't let children do as they pleased,--who made them sit
still in prayer-time, and took them to meeting, and kept so many things
which they must not touch, or open, or play with. Two white sea-gulls
came flying toward the children, and they stretched their little arms in
welcome, nothing doubting but these fair creatures were coming at once
to take passage with them for fairy-land. But the birds only dived and
shifted and veered, turning their silvery sides toward the sun, and
careering in circles round the children. A brisk little breeze, that
came hurrying down from the land, seemed disposed to favor their
unsubstantial enterprise,--for your winds, being a fanciful, uncertain
tribe of people, are always for falling in with anything that is
contrary to common sense. So the wind trolled them merrily along,
nothing doubting that there might be time, if they hurried, to land
their boat on the shore of some of the low-banked red clouds that lay in
the sunset, where they could pick up shells,--blue and pink and
purple,--enough to make them rich for life. The children were all
excitement at the rapidity with which their little bark danced and
rocked, as it floated outward to the broad, open ocean; at the blue,
freshening waves, at the silver-glancing gulls, at the floating,
white-winged ships, and at vague expectations of going rapidly
somewhere, to something more beautiful still. And what is the happiness
of the brightest hours of grown people more than this?

"Roxy," said Aunt Ruey innocently, "seems to me I haven't heard nothin'
o' them children lately. They're so still, I'm 'fraid there's some
mischief."

"Well, Ruey, you jist go and give a look at 'em," said Miss Roxy. "I
declare, that boy! I never know what he will do next; but there didn't
seem to be nothin' to get into out there but the sea, and the beach is
so shelving, a body can't well fall into that."

Alas! good Miss Roxy, the children are at this moment tilting up and
down on the waves, half a mile out to sea, as airily happy as the
sea-gulls; and little Moses now thinks, with glorious scorn, of you and
your press-board, as of grim shadows of restraint and bondage that shall
never darken his free life more.

Both Miss Roxy and Mrs. Pennel were, however, startled into a paroxysm
of alarm when poor Miss Ruey came screaming, as she entered the door,--

"As sure as you're alive, them chil'en are off in the boat,--they're out
to sea, sure as I'm alive! What shall we do? The boat'll upset, and the
sharks'll get 'em."

Miss Roxy ran to the window, and saw dancing and courtesying on the blue
waves the little pinnace, with its fanciful pink pennon fluttered gayly
by the indiscreet and flattering wind.

Poor Mrs. Pennel ran to the shore, and stretched her arms wildly, as if
she would have followed them across the treacherous blue floor that
heaved and sparkled between them.

"Oh, Mara, Mara! Oh, my poor little girl! Oh, poor children!"

"Well, if ever I see such a young un as that," soliloquized Miss Roxy
from the chamber-window; "there they be, dancin' and giggitin' about;
they'll have the boat upset in a minit, and the sharks are waitin' for
'em, no doubt. _I_ b'lieve that ar young un's helped by the Evil
One,--not a boat round, else I'd push off after 'em. Well, I don't see
but we must trust in the Lord,--there don't seem to be much else to
trust to," said the spinster, as she drew her head in grimly.

To say the truth, there was some reason for the terror of these most
fearful suggestions; for not far from the place where the children
embarked was Zephaniah's fish-drying ground, and multitudes of sharks
came up with every rising tide, allured by the offal that was here
constantly thrown into the sea. Two of these prowlers, outward-bound
from their quest, were even now assiduously attending the little boat,
and the children derived no small amusement from watching their motions
in the pellucid water,--the boy occasionally almost upsetting the boat
by valorous plunges at them with his stick. It was the most exhilarating
and piquant entertainment he had found for many a day; and little Mara
laughed in chorus at every lunge that he made.

What would have been the end of it all, it is difficult to say, had not
some mortal power interfered before they had sailed finally away into
the sunset. But it so happened, on this very afternoon, Rev. Mr. Sewell
was out in a boat, busy in the very apostolic employment of catching
fish, and looking up from one of the contemplative pauses which his
occupation induced, he rubbed his eyes at the apparition which presented
itself. A tiny little shell of a boat came drifting toward him, in which
was a black-eyed boy, with cheeks like a pomegranate and lustrous
tendrils of silky dark hair, and a little golden-haired girl, white as a
water-lily, and looking ethereal enough to have risen out of the
sea-foam. Both were in the very sparkle and effervescence of that
fanciful glee which bubbles up from the golden, untried fountains of
early childhood. Mr. Sewell, at a glance, comprehended the whole, and at
once overhauling the tiny craft, he broke the spell of fairy-land, and
constrained the little people to return to the confines, dull and
dreary, of real and actual life.

Neither of them had known a doubt or a fear in that joyous trance of
forbidden pleasure which shadowed with so many fears the wiser and more
far-seeing heads and hearts of the grown people; nor was there enough
language yet in common between the two classes to make the little ones
comprehend the risk they had run. Perhaps so do our elder brothers, in
our Father's house, look anxiously out when we are sailing gayly over
life's sea,--over unknown depths,--amid threatening monsters,--but want
words to tell us why what seems so bright is so dangerous.

Duty herself could not have worn a more rigid aspect than Miss Roxy, as
she stood on the beach, press-board in hand; for she had forgotten to
lay it down in the eagerness of her anxiety. She essayed to lay hold of
the little hand of Moses to pull him from the boat, but he drew back,
and, looking at her with a world of defiance in his great eyes, jumped
magnanimously upon the beach. The spirit of Sir Francis Drake and of
Christopher Columbus was swelling in his little body, and was he to be
brought under by a dry-visaged woman with a press-board? In fact,
nothing is more ludicrous about the escapades of children than the utter
insensibility they feel to the dangers they have run, and the light
esteem in which they hold the deep tragedy they create.

That night, when Zephaniah, in his evening exercise, poured forth most
fervent thanksgivings for the deliverance, while Mrs. Pennel was sobbing
in her handkerchief, Miss Roxy was much scandalized by seeing the young
cause of all the disturbance sitting upon his heels, regarding the
emotion of the kneeling party with his wide bright eyes, without a wink
of compunction.

"Well, for her part," she said, "she hoped Cap'n Pennel would be blessed
in takin' that ar boy; but she was sure she didn't see much that looked
like it now."

       *       *       *       *       *

The Rev. Mr. Sewell fished no more that day, for the draught from
fairy-land with which he had filled his boat brought up many thoughts
into his mind, which he pondered anxiously.

"Strange ways of God," he thought, "that should send to my door this
child, and should wash upon the beach the only sign by which he could be
identified. To what end or purpose? Hath the Lord a will in this
matter, and what is it?"

So he thought as he slowly rowed homeward, and so did his thoughts work
upon him that half way across the bay to Harpswell he slackened his oar
without knowing it, and the boat lay drifting on the purple and
gold-tinted mirror, like a speck between two eternities. Under such
circumstances, even heads that have worn the clerical wig for years at
times get a little dizzy and dreamy. Perhaps it was because of the
impression made upon him by the sudden apparition of those great dark
eyes and sable curls, that he now thought of the boy that he had found
floating that afternoon, looking as if some tropical flower had been
washed landward by a monsoon; and as the boat rocked and tilted, and the
minister gazed dreamily downward into the wavering rings of purple,
orange, and gold which spread out and out from it, gradually it seemed
to him that a face much like the child's formed itself in the waters;
but it was the face of a girl, young and radiantly beautiful, yet with
those same eyes and curls,--he saw her distinctly, with her thousand
rings of silky hair, bound with strings of pearls and clasped with
strange gems, and she raised one arm imploringly to him, and on the
wrist he saw the bracelet embroidered with seed pearls, and the letters
D.M. "Ah, Dolores," he said, "well wert thou called so. Poor Dolores! I
cannot help thee."

"What am I dreaming of?" said the Rev. Mr. Sewell. "It is my Thursday
evening lecture on Justification, and Emily has got tea ready, and here
I am catching cold out on the bay."




CHAPTER XII

SEA TALES


Mr. Sewell, as the reader may perhaps have inferred, was of a nature
profoundly secretive. It was in most things quite as pleasant for him to
keep matters to himself, as it was to Miss Emily to tell them to
somebody else. She resembled more than anything one of those trotting,
chattering little brooks that enliven the "back lot" of many a New
England home, while he was like one of those wells you shall sometimes
see by a deserted homestead, so long unused that ferns and lichens
feather every stone down to the dark, cool water.

Dear to him was the stillness and coolness of inner thoughts with which
no stranger intermeddles; dear to him every pendent fern-leaf of memory,
every dripping moss of old recollection; and though the waters of his
soul came up healthy and refreshing enough when one really must have
them, yet one had to go armed with bucket and line and draw them
up,--they never flowed. One of his favorite maxims was, that the only
way to keep a secret was never to let any one suspect that you have one.
And as he had one now, he had, as you have seen, done his best to baffle
and put to sleep the feminine curiosity of his sister.

He rather wanted to tell her, too, for he was a good-natured brother,
and would have liked to have given her the amount of pleasure the
confidence would have produced; but then he reflected with dismay on the
number of women in his parish with whom Miss Emily was on tea-drinking
terms,--he thought of the wondrous solvent powers of that beverage in
whose amber depths so many resolutions yea, and solemn vows, of utter
silence have been dissolved like Cleopatra's pearls. He knew that an
infusion of his secret would steam up from every cup of tea Emily should
drink for six months to come, till gradually every particle would be
dissolved and float in the air of common fame. No; it would not do.

You would have thought, however, that something was the matter with Mr.
Sewell, had you seen him after he retired for the night, after he had so
very indifferently dismissed the subject of Miss Emily's inquiries. For
instead of retiring quietly to bed, as had been his habit for years at
that hour, he locked his door, and then unlocked a desk of private
papers, and emptied certain pigeon-holes of their contents, and for an
hour or two sat unfolding and looking over old letters and papers; and
when all this was done, he pushed them from him, and sat for a long time
buried in thoughts which went down very, very deep into that dark and
mossy well of which we have spoken.

Then he took a pen and wrote a letter, and addressed it to a direction
for which he had searched through many piles of paper, and having done
so, seemed to ponder, uncertainly, whether to send it or not. The
Harpswell post-office was kept in Mr. Silas Perrit's store, and the
letters were every one of them carefully and curiously investigated by
all the gossips of the village, and as this was addressed to St.
Augustine in Florida, he foresaw that before Sunday the news would be in
every mouth in the parish that the minister had written to so and so in
Florida, "and what do you s'pose it's about?"

"No, no," he said to himself, "that will never do; but at all events
there is no hurry," and he put back the papers in order, put the letter
with them, and locking his desk, looked at his watch and found it to be
two o'clock, and so he went to bed to think the matter over.

Now, there may be some reader so simple as to feel a portion of Miss
Emily's curiosity. But, my friend, restrain it, for Mr. Sewell will
certainly, as we foresee, become less rather than more communicative on
this subject, as he thinks upon it. Nevertheless, whatever it be that he
knows or suspects, it is something which leads him to contemplate with
more than usual interest this little mortal waif that has so strangely
come ashore in his parish. He mentally resolves to study the child as
minutely as possible, without betraying that he has any particular
reason for being interested in him.

Therefore, in the latter part of this mild November afternoon, which he
has devoted to pastoral visiting, about two months after the funeral, he
steps into his little sail-boat, and stretches away for the shores of
Orr's Island. He knows the sun will be down before he reaches there; but
he sees, in the opposite horizon, the spectral, shadowy moon, only
waiting for daylight to be gone to come out, calm and radiant, like a
saintly friend neglected in the flush of prosperity, who waits patiently
to enliven our hours of darkness.

As his boat-keel grazed the sands on the other side, a shout of laughter
came upon his oar from behind a cedar-covered rock, and soon emerged
Captain Kittridge, as long and lean and brown as the Ancient Mariner,
carrying little Mara on one shoulder, while Sally and little Moses
Pennel trotted on before.

It was difficult to say who in this whole group was in the highest
spirits. The fact was that Mrs. Kittridge had gone to a tea-drinking
over at Maquoit, and left the Captain as housekeeper and general
overseer; and little Mara and Moses and Sally had been gloriously
keeping holiday with him down by the boat-cove, where, to say the truth,
few shavings were made, except those necessary to adorn the children's
heads with flowing suits of curls of a most extraordinary effect. The
aprons of all of them were full of these most unsubstantial specimens of
woody treasure, which hung out in long festoons, looking of a yellow
transparency in the evening light. But the delight of the children in
their acquisitions was only equaled by that of grown-up people in
possessions equally fanciful in value.

The mirth of the little party, however, came to a sudden pause as they
met the minister. Mara clung tight to the Captain's neck, and looked out
slyly under her curls. But the little Moses made a step forward, and
fixed his bold, dark, inquisitive eyes upon him. The fact was, that the
minister had been impressed upon the boy, in his few visits to the
"meeting," as such a grand and mysterious reason for good behavior, that
he seemed resolved to embrace the first opportunity to study him close
at hand.

"Well, my little man," said Mr. Sewell, with an affability which he
could readily assume with children, "you seem to like to look at me."

"I do like to look at you," said the boy gravely, continuing to fix his
great black eyes upon him.

"I see you do, my little fellow."

"Are you the Lord?" said the child, solemnly.

"Am I what?"

"The Lord," said the boy.

"No, indeed, my lad," said Mr. Sewell, smiling. "Why, what put that into
your little head?"

"I thought you were," said the boy, still continuing to study the pastor
with attention. "Miss Roxy said so."

"It's curious what notions chil'en will get in their heads," said
Captain Kittridge. "They put this and that together and think it over,
and come out with such queer things."

"But," said the minister, "I have brought something for you all;" saying
which he drew from his pocket three little bright-cheeked apples, and
gave one to each child; and then taking the hand of the little Moses in
his own, he walked with him toward the house-door.

Mrs. Pennel was sitting in her clean kitchen, busily spinning at the
little wheel, and rose flushed with pleasure at the honor that was done
her.

"Pray, walk in, Mr. Sewell," she said, rising, and leading the way
toward the penetralia of the best room.

"Now, Mrs. Pennel, I am come here for a good sit-down by your
kitchen-fire, this evening," said Mr. Sewell. "Emily has gone out to sit
with old Mrs. Broad, who is laid up with the rheumatism, and so I am
turned loose to pick up my living on the parish, and you must give me a
seat for a while in your kitchen corner. Best rooms are always cold."

"The minister's right," said Captain Kittridge. "When rooms ain't much
set in, folks never feel so kind o' natural in 'em. So you jist let me
put on a good back-log and forestick, and build up a fire to tell
stories by this evening. My wife's gone out to tea, too," he said, with
an elastic skip.

And in a few moments the Captain had produced in the great cavernous
chimney a foundation for a fire that promised breadth, solidity, and
continuance. A great back-log, embroidered here and there with tufts of
green or grayish moss, was first flung into the capacious arms of the
fireplace, and a smaller log placed above it. "Now, all you young uns go
out and bring in chips," said the Captain. "There's capital ones out to
the wood-pile."

Mr. Sewell was pleased to see the flash that came from the eyes of
little Moses at this order, how energetically he ran before the others,
and came with glowing cheeks and distended arms, throwing down great
white chips with their green mossy bark, scattering tufts on the floor.
"Good," said he softly to himself, as he leaned on the top of his
gold-headed cane; "there's energy, ambition, muscle;" and he nodded his
head once or twice to some internal decision.

"There!" said the Captain, rising out of a perfect whirlwind of chips
and pine kindlings with which in his zeal he had bestrown the wide,
black stone hearth, and pointing to the tongues of flame that were
leaping and blazing up through the crevices of the dry pine wood which
he had intermingled plentifully with the more substantial fuel,--"there,
Mis' Pennel, ain't I a master-hand at a fire? But I'm really sorry I've
dirtied your floor," he said, as he brushed down his pantaloons, which
were covered with bits of grizzly moss, and looked on the surrounding
desolations; "give me a broom, I can sweep up now as well as any woman."

"Oh, never mind," said Mrs. Pennel, laughing, "I'll sweep up."

"Well, now, Mis' Pennel, you're one of the women that don't get put out
easy; ain't ye?" said the Captain, still contemplating his fire with a
proud and watchful eye.

"Law me!" he exclaimed, glancing through the window, "there's the Cap'n
a-comin'. I'm jist goin' to give a look at what he's brought in. Come,
chil'en," and the Captain disappeared with all three of the children at
his heels, to go down to examine the treasures of the fishing-smack.

Mr. Sewell seated himself cozily in the chimney corner and sank into a
state of half-dreamy reverie; his eyes fixed on the fairest sight one
can see of a frosty autumn twilight--a crackling wood-fire.

Mrs. Pennel moved soft-footed to and fro, arraying her tea-table in her
own finest and pure damask, and bringing from hidden stores her best
china and newest silver, her choicest sweetmeats and cake--whatever was
fairest and nicest in her house--to honor her unexpected guest.

Mr. Sewell's eyes followed her occasionally about the room, with an
expression of pleased and curious satisfaction. He was taking it all in
as an artistic picture--that simple, kindly hearth, with its mossy logs,
yet steaming with the moisture of the wild woods; the table so neat, so
cheery with its many little delicacies, and refinements of appointment,
and its ample varieties to tempt the appetite; and then the Captain
coming in, yet fresh and hungry from his afternoon's toil, with the
children trotting before him.

"And this is the inheritance he comes into," he murmured;
"healthy--wholesome--cheerful--secure: how much better than hot,
stifling luxury!"

Here the minister's meditations were interrupted by the entrance of all
the children, joyful and loquacious. Little Moses held up a string of
mackerel, with their graceful bodies and elegantly cut fins.

"Just a specimen of the best, Mary," said Captain Pennel. "I thought I'd
bring 'em for Miss Emily."

"Miss Emily will be a thousand times obliged to you," said Mr. Sewell,
rising up.

As to Mara and Sally, they were reveling in apronfuls of shells and
seaweed, which they bustled into the other room to bestow in their
spacious baby-house.

And now, after due time for Zephaniah to assume a land toilet, all sat
down to the evening meal.

After supper was over, the Captain was besieged by the children. Little
Mara mounted first into his lap, and nestled herself quietly under his
coat--Moses and Sally stood at each knee.

"Come, now," said Moses, "you said you would tell us about the mermen
to-night."

"Yes, and the mermaids," said Sally. "Tell them all you told me the
other night in the trundle-bed."

Sally valued herself no little on the score of the Captain's talent as a
romancer.

"You see, Moses," she said, volubly, "father saw mermen and mermaids a
plenty of them in the West Indies."

"Oh, never mind about 'em now," said Captain Kittridge, looking at Mr.
Sewell's corner.

"Why not, father? mother isn't here," said Sally, innocently.

A smile passed round the faces of the company, and Mr. Sewell said,
"Come, Captain, no modesty; we all know you have as good a faculty for
telling a story as for making a fire."

"Do tell me what mermen are," said Moses.

"Wal'," said the Captain, sinking his voice confidentially, and hitching
his chair a little around, "mermen and maids is a kind o' people that
have their world jist like our'n, only it's down in the bottom of the
sea, 'cause the bottom of the sea has its mountains and its valleys, and
its trees and its bushes, and it stands to reason there should be people
there too."

Moses opened his broad black eyes wider than usual, and looked absorbed
attention.

"Tell 'em about how you saw 'em," said Sally.

"Wal', yes," said Captain Kittridge; "once when I was to the
Bahamas,--it was one Sunday morning in June, the first Sunday in the
month,--we cast anchor pretty nigh a reef of coral, and I was jist
a-sittin' down to read my Bible, when up comes a merman over the side of
the ship, all dressed as fine as any old beau that ever ye see, with
cocked hat and silk stockings, and shoe-buckles, and his clothes were
sea-green, and his shoe-buckles shone like diamonds."

"Do you suppose they were diamonds, really?" said Sally.

"Wal', child, I didn't ask him, but I shouldn't be surprised, from all I
know of their ways, if they was," said the Captain, who had now got so
wholly into the spirit of his fiction that he no longer felt
embarrassed by the minister's presence, nor saw the look of amusement
with which he was listening to him in his chimney-corner. "But, as I was
sayin', he came up to me, and made the politest bow that ever ye see,
and says he, 'Cap'n Kittridge, I presume,' and says I, 'Yes, sir.' 'I'm
sorry to interrupt your reading,' says he; and says I, 'Oh, no matter,
sir.' 'But,' says he, 'if you would only be so good as to move your
anchor. You've cast anchor right before my front-door, and my wife and
family can't get out to go to meetin'.'"

"Why, do they go to meeting in the bottom of the sea?" said Moses.

"Law, bless you sonny, yes. Why, Sunday morning, when the sea was all
still, I used to hear the bass-viol a-soundin' down under the waters,
jist as plain as could be,--and psalms and preachin'. I've reason to
think there's as many hopefully pious mermaids as there be folks," said
the Captain.

"But," said Moses, "you said the anchor was before the front-door, so
the family couldn't get out,--how did the merman get out?"

"Oh! he got out of the scuttle on the roof," said the Captain, promptly.

"And did you move your anchor?" said Moses.

"Why, child, yes, to be sure I did; he was such a gentleman I wanted to
oblige him,--it shows you how important it is always to be polite," said
the Captain, by way of giving a moral turn to his narrative.

Mr. Sewell, during the progress of this story, examined the Captain with
eyes of amused curiosity. His countenance was as fixed and steady, and
his whole manner of reciting as matter-of-fact and collected, as if he
were relating some of the every-day affairs of his boat-building.

"Wal', Sally," said the Captain, rising, after his yarn had proceeded
for an indefinite length in this manner, "you and I must be goin'. I
promised your ma you shouldn't be up late, and we have a long walk
home,--besides it's time these little folks was in bed."

The children all clung round the Captain, and could hardly be persuaded
to let him go.

When he was gone, Mrs. Pennel took the little ones to their nest in an
adjoining room.

Mr. Sewell approached his chair to that of Captain Pennel, and began
talking to him in a tone of voice so low, that we have never been able
to make out exactly what he was saying. Whatever it might be, however,
it seemed to give rise to an anxious consultation. "I did not think it
advisable to tell _any_ one this but yourself, Captain Pennel. It is for
you to decide, in view of the probabilities I have told you, what you
will do."

"Well," said Zephaniah, "since you leave it to me, I say, let us keep
him. It certainly seems a marked providence that he has been thrown upon
us as he has, and the Lord seemed to prepare a way for him in our
hearts. I am well able to afford it, and Mis' Pennel, she agrees to it,
and on the whole I don't think we'd best go back on our steps; besides,
our little Mara has thrived since he came under our roof. He is, to be
sure, kind o' masterful, and I shall have to take him off Mis' Pennel's
hands before long, and put him into the sloop. But, after all, there
seems to be the makin' of a man in him, and when we are called away, why
he'll be as a brother to poor little Mara. Yes, I think it's best as 't
is."

The minister, as he flitted across the bay by moonlight, felt relieved
of a burden. His secret was locked up as safe in the breast of Zephaniah
Pennel as it could be in his own.




CHAPTER XIII

BOY AND GIRL


Zephaniah Pennel was what might be called a Hebrew of the Hebrews.

New England, in her earlier days, founding her institutions on the
Hebrew Scriptures, bred better Jews than Moses could, because she read
Moses with the amendments of Christ.

The state of society in some of the districts of Maine, in these days,
much resembled in its spirit that which Moses labored to produce in
ruder ages. It was entirely democratic, simple, grave, hearty, and
sincere,--solemn and religious in its daily tone, and yet, as to all
material good, full of wholesome thrift and prosperity. Perhaps, taking
the average mass of the people, a more healthful and desirable state of
society never existed. Its better specimens had a simple Doric grandeur
unsurpassed in any age. The bringing up a child in this state of society
was a far more simple enterprise than in our modern times, when the
factious wants and aspirations are so much more developed.

Zephaniah Pennel was as high as anybody in the land. He owned not only
the neat little schooner, "Brilliant," with divers small fishing-boats,
but also a snug farm, adjoining the brown house, together with some
fresh, juicy pasture-lots on neighboring islands, where he raised
mutton, unsurpassed even by the English South-down, and wool, which
furnished homespun to clothe his family on all every-day occasions.

Mrs. Pennel, to be sure, had silks and satins, and flowered India
chintz, and even a Cashmere shawl, the fruits of some of her husband's
earlier voyages, which were, however, carefully stowed away for
occasions so high and mighty, that they seldom saw the light. _Not to
wear best things every day_ was a maxim of New England thrift as little
disputed as any verse of the catechism; and so Mrs. Pennel found the
stuff gown of her own dyeing and spinning so respectable for most
purposes, that it figured even in the meeting-house itself, except on
the very finest of Sundays, when heaven and earth seemed alike
propitious. A person can well afford to wear homespun stuff to meeting,
who is buoyed up by a secret consciousness of an abundance of fine
things that could be worn, if one were so disposed, and everybody
respected Mrs. Pennel's homespun the more, because they thought of the
things she didn't wear.

As to advantages of education, the island, like all other New England
districts, had its common school, where one got the key of
knowledge,--for having learned to read, write, and cipher, the young
fellow of those regions commonly regarded himself as in possession of
all that a man needs, to help himself to any further acquisitions he
might desire. The boys then made fishing voyages to the Banks, and those
who were so disposed took their books with them. If a boy did not wish
to be bored with study, there was nobody to force him; but if a bright
one saw visions of future success in life lying through the avenues of
knowledge, he found many a leisure hour to pore over his books, and work
out the problems of navigation directly over the element they were meant
to control.

Four years having glided by since the commencement of our story, we find
in the brown house of Zephaniah Pennel a tall, well-knit, handsome boy
of ten years, who knows no fear of wind or sea; who can set you over
from Orr's Island to Harpswell, either in sail or row-boat, he thinks,
as well as any man living; who knows every rope of the schooner
Brilliant, and fancies he could command it as well as "father" himself;
and is supporting himself this spring, during the tamer drudgeries of
driving plough, and dropping potatoes, with the glorious vision of being
taken this year on the annual trip to "the Banks," which comes on after
planting. He reads fluently,--witness the "Robinson Crusoe," which never
departs from under his pillow, and Goldsmith's "History of Greece and
Rome," which good Mr. Sewell has lent him,--and he often brings shrewd
criticisms on the character and course of Romulus or Alexander into the
common current of every-day life, in a way that brings a smile over the
grave face of Zephaniah, and makes Mrs. Pennel think the boy certainly
ought to be sent to college.

As for Mara, she is now a child of seven, still adorned with long golden
curls, still looking dreamily out of soft hazel eyes into some unknown
future not her own. She has no dreams for herself--they are all for
Moses. For his sake she has learned all the womanly little
accomplishments which Mrs. Kittridge has dragooned into Sally. She knits
his mittens and his stockings, and hems his pocket-handkerchiefs, and
aspires to make his shirts all herself. Whatever book Moses reads,
forthwith she aspires to read too, and though three years younger, reads
with a far more precocious insight.

Her little form is slight and frail, and her cheek has a clear
transparent brilliancy quite different from the rounded one of the boy;
she looks not exactly in ill health, but has that sort of transparent
appearance which one fancies might be an attribute of fairies and
sylphs. All her outward senses are finer and more acute than his, and
finer and more delicate all the attributes of her mind. Those who
contend against giving woman the same education as man do it on the
ground that it would make the woman unfeminine, as if Nature had done
her work so slightly that it could be so easily raveled and knit over.
In fact, there is a masculine and a feminine element in all knowledge,
and a man and a woman put to the same study extract only what their
nature fits them to see, so that knowledge can be fully orbed only when
the two unite in the search and share the spoils.

When Moses was full of Romulus and Numa, Mara pondered the story of the
nymph Egeria--sweet parable, in which lies all we have been saying. Her
trust in him was boundless. He was a constant hero in her eyes, and in
her he found a steadfast believer as to all possible feats and exploits
to which he felt himself competent, for the boy often had privately
assured her that he could command the Brilliant as well as father
himself.

Spring had already come, loosing the chains of ice in all the bays and
coves round Harpswell, Orr's Island, Maquoit, and Middle Bay. The
magnificent spruces stood forth in their gala-dresses, tipped on every
point with vivid emerald; the silver firs exuded from their tender
shoots the fragrance of ripe pineapple; the white pines shot forth long
weird fingers at the end of their fringy boughs; and even every little
mimic evergreen in the shadows at their feet was made beautiful by the
addition of a vivid border of green on the sombre coloring of its last
year's leaves. Arbutus, fragrant with its clean, wholesome odors, gave
forth its thousand dewy pink blossoms, and the trailing Linnea borealis
hung its pendent twin bells round every mossy stump and old rock damp
with green forest mould. The green and vermilion matting of the
partridge-berry was impearled with white velvet blossoms, the
checkerberry hung forth a translucent bell under its varnished green
leaf, and a thousand more fairy bells, white or red, hung on blueberry
and huckleberry bushes. The little Pearl of Orr's Island had wandered
many an hour gathering bouquets of all these, to fill the brown house
with sweetness when her grandfather and Moses should come in from work.

The love of flowers seemed to be one of her earliest characteristics,
and the young spring flowers of New England, in their airy delicacy and
fragility, were much like herself; and so strong seemed the affinity
between them, that not only Mrs. Pennel's best India china vases on the
keeping-room mantel were filled, but here stood a tumbler of scarlet
rock columbine, and there a bowl of blue and white violets, and in
another place a saucer of shell-tinted crowfoot, blue liverwort, and
white anemone, so that Zephaniah Pennel was wont to say there wasn't a
drink of water to be got, for Mara's flowers; but he always said it with
a smile that made his weather-beaten, hard features look like a rock lit
up by a sunbeam. Little Mara was the pearl of the old seaman's life,
every finer particle of his nature came out in her concentrated and
polished, and he often wondered at a creature so ethereal belonging to
him--as if down on some shaggy sea-green rock an old pearl oyster should
muse and marvel on the strange silvery mystery of beauty that was
growing in the silence of his heart.

But May has passed; the arbutus and the Linnea are gone from the woods,
and the pine tips have grown into young shoots, which wilt at noon under
a direct reflection from sun and sea, and the blue sky has that metallic
clearness and brilliancy which distinguishes those regions, and the
planting is at last over, and this very morning Moses is to set off in
the Brilliant for his first voyage to the Banks. Glorious knight he! the
world all before him, and the blood of ten years racing and throbbing in
his veins as he talks knowingly of hooks, and sinkers, and bait, and
lines, and wears proudly the red flannel shirt which Mara had just
finished for him.

"How I do wish I were going with you!" she says. "I could do something,
couldn't I--take care of your hooks, or something?"

"Pooh!" said Moses, sublimely regarding her while he settled the collar
of his shirt, "you're a girl; and what can girls do at sea? you never
like to catch fish--it always makes you cry to see 'em flop."

"Oh, yes, poor fish!" said Mara, perplexed between her sympathy for the
fish and her desire for the glory of her hero, which must be founded on
their pain; "I can't help feeling sorry when they gasp so."

"Well, and what do you suppose you would do when the men are pulling up
twenty and forty pounder?" said Moses, striding sublimely. "Why, they
flop so, they'd knock you over in a minute."

"Do they? Oh, Moses, do be careful. What if they should hurt you?"

"Hurt me!" said Moses, laughing; "that's a good one. I'd like to see a
fish that could hurt me."

"Do hear that boy talk!" said Mrs. Pennel to her husband, as they stood
within their chamber-door.

"Yes, yes," said Captain Pennel, smiling; "he's full of the matter. I
believe he'd take the command of the schooner this morning, if I'd let
him."

The Brilliant lay all this while courtesying on the waves, which kissed
and whispered to the little coquettish craft. A fairer June morning had
not risen on the shores that week; the blue mirror of the ocean was all
dotted over with the tiny white sails of fishing-craft bound on the same
errand, and the breeze that was just crisping the waters had the very
spirit of energy and adventure in it.

Everything and everybody was now on board, and she began to spread her
fair wings, and slowly and gracefully to retreat from the shore. Little
Moses stood on the deck, his black curls blowing in the wind, and his
large eyes dancing with excitement,--his clear olive complexion and
glowing cheeks well set off by his red shirt.

Mrs. Pennel stood with Mara on the shore to see them go. The fair little
golden-haired Ariadne shaded her eyes with one arm, and stretched the
other after her Theseus, till the vessel grew smaller, and finally
seemed to melt away into the eternal blue. Many be the wives and lovers
that have watched those little fishing-craft as they went gayly out like
this, but have waited long--too long--and seen them again no more. In
night and fog they have gone down under the keel of some ocean packet or
Indiaman, and sunk with brave hearts and hands, like a bubble in the
mighty waters. Yet Mrs. Pennel did not turn back to her house in
apprehension of this. Her husband had made so many voyages, and always
returned safely, that she confidently expected before long to see them
home again.

The next Sunday the seat of Zephaniah Pennel was vacant in church.
According to custom, a note was put up asking prayers for his safe
return, and then everybody knew that he was gone to the Banks; and as
the roguish, handsome face of Moses was also missing, Miss Roxy
whispered to Miss Ruey, "There! Captain Pennel's took Moses on his first
voyage. We must contrive to call round on Mis' Pennel afore long. She'll
be lonesome."

Sunday evening Mrs. Pennel was sitting pensively with little Mara by the
kitchen hearth, where they had been boiling the tea-kettle for their
solitary meal. They heard a brisk step without, and soon Captain and
Mrs. Kittridge made their appearance.

"Good evening, Mis' Pennel," said the Captain; "I's a-tellin' my good
woman we must come down and see how you's a-getting along. It's raly a
work of necessity and mercy proper for the Lord's day. Rather lonesome,
now the Captain's gone, ain't ye? Took little Moses, too, I see. Wasn't
at meetin' to-day, so I says, Mis' Kittridge, we'll just step down and
chirk 'em up a little."

"I didn't really know how to come," said Mrs. Kittridge, as she allowed
Mrs. Pennel to take her bonnet; "but Aunt Roxy's to our house now, and
she said she'd see to Sally. So you've let the boy go to the Banks? He's
young, ain't he, for that?"

"Not a bit of it," said Captain Kittridge. "Why, I was off to the Banks
long afore I was his age, and a capital time we had of it, too. Golly!
how them fish did bite! We stood up to our knees in fish before we'd
fished half an hour."

Mara, who had always a shy affinity for the Captain, now drew towards
him and climbed on his knee. "Did the wind blow very hard?" she said.

"What, my little maid?"

"Does the wind blow at the Banks?"

"Why, yes, my little girl, that it does, sometimes; but then there ain't
the least danger. Our craft ride out storms like live creatures. I've
stood it out in gales that was tight enough, I'm sure. 'Member once I
turned in 'tween twelve and one, and hadn't more'n got asleep, afore I
came _clump_ out of my berth, and found everything upside down. And
'stead of goin' upstairs to get on deck, I had to go right down. Fact
was, that 'ere vessel jist turned clean over in the water, and come
right side up like a duck."

"Well, now, Cap'n, I wouldn't be tellin' such a story as that," said his
helpmeet.

"Why, Polly, what do you know about it? you never was to sea. We did
turn clear over, for I 'member I saw a bunch of seaweed big as a peck
measure stickin' top of the mast next day. Jist shows how safe them ar
little fishing craft is,--for all they look like an egg-shell on the
mighty deep, as Parson Sewell calls it."

"I was very much pleased with Mr. Sewell's exercise in prayer this
morning," said Mrs. Kittridge; "it must have been a comfort to you, Mis'
Pennel."

"It was, to be sure," said Mrs. Pennel.

"Puts me in mind of poor Mary Jane Simpson. Her husband went out, you
know, last June, and hain't been heard of since. Mary Jane don't really
know whether to put on mourning or not."

"Law! I don't think Mary Jane need give up yet," said the Captain.
"'Member one year I was out, we got blowed clear up to Baffin's Bay, and
got shut up in the ice, and had to go ashore and live jist as we could
among them Esquimaux. Didn't get home for a year. Old folks had clean
giv' us up. Don't need never despair of folks gone to sea, for they's
sure to turn up, first or last."

"But I hope," said Mara, apprehensively, "that grandpapa won't get blown
up to Baffin's Bay. I've seen that on his chart,--it's a good ways."

"And then there's them 'ere icebergs," said Mrs. Kittridge; "I'm always
'fraid of running into them in the fog."

"Law!" said Captain Kittridge, "I've met 'em bigger than all the
colleges up to Brunswick,--great white bears on 'em,--hungry as Time in
the Primer. Once we came kersmash on to one of 'em, and if the Flying
Betsey hadn't been made of whalebone and injer-rubber, she'd a-been
stove all to pieces. Them white bears, they was so hungry, that they
stood there with the water jist runnin' out of their chops in a perfect
stream."

"Oh, dear, dear," said Mara, with wide round eyes, "what will Moses do
if they get on the icebergs?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Kittridge, looking solemnly at the child through the
black bows of her spectacles, "we can truly say:--

    "'Dangers stand thick through all the ground,
        To push us to the tomb,'

as the hymn-book says."

The kind-hearted Captain, feeling the fluttering heart of little Mara,
and seeing the tears start in her eyes, addressed himself forthwith to
consolation. "Oh, never you mind, Mara," he said, "there won't nothing
hurt 'em. Look at me. Why, I've been everywhere on the face of the
earth. I've been on icebergs, and among white bears and Indians, and
seen storms that would blow the very hair off your head, and here I am,
dry and tight as ever. You'll see 'em back before long."

The cheerful laugh with which the Captain was wont to chorus his
sentences sounded like the crackling of dry pine wood on the social
hearth. One would hardly hear it without being lightened in heart; and
little Mara gazed at his long, dry, ropy figure, and wrinkled thin face,
as a sort of monument of hope; and his uproarious laugh, which Mrs.
Kittridge sometimes ungraciously compared to "the crackling of thorns
under a pot," seemed to her the most delightful thing in the world.

"Mary Jane was a-tellin' me," resumed Mrs. Kittridge, "that when her
husband had been out a month, she dreamed she see him, and three other
men, a-floatin' on an iceberg."

"Laws," said Captain Kittridge, "that's jist what my old mother dreamed
about me, and 'twas true enough, too, till we got off the ice on to the
shore up in the Esquimaux territory, as I was a-tellin'. So you tell
Mary Jane she needn't look out for a second husband _yet_, for that ar
dream's a sartin sign he'll be back."

"Cap'n Kittridge!" said his helpmeet, drawing herself up, and giving him
an austere glance over her spectacles; "how often must I tell you that
there _is_ subjects which shouldn't be treated with levity?"

"Who's been a-treatin' of 'em with levity?" said the Captain. "I'm sure
I ain't. Mary Jane's good-lookin', and there's plenty of young fellows
as sees it as well as me. I declare, she looked as pretty as any young
gal when she ris up in the singers' seats to-day. Put me in mind of you,
Polly, when I first come home from the Injies."

"Oh, come now, Cap'n Kittridge! we're gettin' too old for that sort o'
talk."

"We ain't too old, be we, Mara?" said the Captain, trotting the little
girl gayly on his knee; "and we ain't afraid of icebergs and no sich, be
we? I tell you they's a fine sight of a bright day; they has millions of
steeples, all white and glistering, like the New Jerusalem, and the
white bears have capital times trampin' round on 'em. Wouldn't little
Mara like a great, nice white bear to ride on, with his white fur, so
soft and warm, and a saddle made of pearls, and a gold bridle?"

"You haven't seen any little girls ride so," said Mara, doubtfully.

"I shouldn't wonder if I had; but you see, Mis' Kittridge there, she
won't let me tell all I know," said the Captain, sinking his voice to a
confidential tone; "you jist wait till we get alone."

"But, you are sure," said Mara, confidingly, in return, "that white
bears will be kind to Moses?"

"Lord bless you, yes, child, the kindest critturs in the world they be,
if you only get the right side of 'em," said the Captain.

"Oh, yes! because," said Mara, "I know how good a wolf was to Romulus
and Remus once, and nursed them when they were cast out to die. I read
that in the Roman history."

"Jist so," said the Captain, enchanted at this historic confirmation of
his apocrypha.

"And so," said Mara, "if Moses should happen to get on an iceberg, a
bear might take care of him, you know."

"Jist so, jist so," said the Captain; "so don't you worry your little
curly head one bit. Some time when you come down to see Sally, we'll go
down to the cove, and I'll tell you lots of stories about chil'en that
have been fetched up by white bears, jist like Romulus and what's his
name there."

"Come, Mis' Kittridge," added the cheery Captain; "you and I mustn't be
keepin' the folks up till nine o'clock."

"Well now," said Mrs. Kittridge, in a doleful tone, as she began to put
on her bonnet, "Mis' Pennel, you must keep up your spirits--it's one's
duty to take cheerful views of things. I'm sure many's the night, when
the Captain's been gone to sea, I've laid and shook in my bed, hearin'
the wind blow, and thinking what if I should be left a lone widow."

"There'd a-been a dozen fellows a-wanting to get you in six months,
Polly," interposed the Captain. "Well, good-night, Mis' Pennel; there'll
be a splendid haul of fish at the Banks this year, or there's no truth
in signs. Come, my little Mara, got a kiss for the dry old daddy? That's
my good girl. Well, good night, and the Lord bless you."

And so the cheery Captain took up his line of march homeward, leaving
little Mara's head full of dazzling visions of the land of romance to
which Moses had gone. She was yet on that shadowy boundary between the
dreamland of childhood and the real land of life; so all things looked
to her quite possible; and gentle white bears, with warm, soft fur and
pearl and gold saddles, walked through her dreams, and the victorious
curls of Moses appeared, with his bright eyes and cheeks, over
glittering pinnacles of frost in the ice-land.




CHAPTER XIV

THE ENCHANTED ISLAND


June and July passed, and the lonely two lived a quiet life in the brown
house. Everything was so still and fair--no sound but the coming and
going tide, and the swaying wind among the pine-trees, and the tick of
the clock, and the whirr of the little wheel as Mrs. Pennel sat spinning
in her door in the mild weather. Mara read the Roman history through
again, and began it a third time, and read over and over again the
stories and prophecies that pleased her in the Bible, and pondered the
wood-cuts and texts in a very old edition of Æsop's Fables; and as she
wandered in the woods, picking fragrant bayberries and gathering
hemlock, checkerberry, and sassafras to put in the beer which her
grandmother brewed, she mused on the things that she read till her
little mind became a tabernacle of solemn, quaint, dreamy forms, where
old Judean kings and prophets, and Roman senators and warriors, marched
in and out in shadowy rounds. She invented long dramas and conversations
in which they performed imaginary parts, and it would not have appeared
to the child in the least degree surprising either to have met an angel
in the woods, or to have formed an intimacy with some talking wolf or
bear, such as she read of in Æsop's Fables.

One day, as she was exploring the garret, she found in an old barrel of
cast-off rubbish a bit of reading which she begged of her grandmother
for her own. It was the play of the "Tempest," torn from an old edition
of Shakespeare, and was in that delightfully fragmentary condition
which most particularly pleases children, because they conceive a
mutilated treasure thus found to be more especially their own
property--something like a rare wild-flower or sea-shell. The pleasure
which thoughtful and imaginative children sometimes take in reading that
which they do not and cannot fully comprehend is one of the most common
and curious phenomena of childhood.

And so little Mara would lie for hours stretched out on the pebbly
beach, with the broad open ocean before her and the whispering pines and
hemlocks behind her, and pore over this poem, from which she collected
dim, delightful images of a lonely island, an old enchanter, a beautiful
girl, and a spirit not quite like those in the Bible, but a very
probable one to her mode of thinking. As for old Caliban, she fancied
him with a face much like that of a huge skate-fish she had once seen
drawn ashore in one of her grandfather's nets; and then there was the
beautiful young Prince Ferdinand, much like what Moses would be when he
was grown up--and how glad she would be to pile up his wood for him, if
any old enchanter should set him to work!

One attribute of the child was a peculiar shamefacedness and shyness
about her inner thoughts, and therefore the wonder that this new
treasure excited, the host of surmises and dreams to which it gave rise,
were never mentioned to anybody. That it was all of it as much authentic
fact as the Roman history, she did not doubt, but whether it had
happened on Orr's Island or some of the neighboring ones, she had not
exactly made up her mind. She resolved at her earliest leisure to
consult Captain Kittridge on the subject, wisely considering that it
much resembled some of his fishy and aquatic experiences.

Some of the little songs fixed themselves in her memory, and she would
hum them as she wandered up and down the beach.

    "Come unto these yellow sands,
      And then take hands;
    Courtsied when you have and kissed
      The wild waves whist,
    Foot it featly here and there;
    And, sweet sprites, the burthen bear."

And another which pleased her still more:--

    "Full fathom five thy father lies;
      Of his bones are coral made,
    Those are pearls that were his eyes:
      Nothing of him that can fade
    But doth suffer a sea-change
    Into something rich and strange;
    Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
    Hark, now I hear them--ding-dong, bell."

These words she pondered very long, gravely revolving in her little head
whether they described the usual course of things in the mysterious
under-world that lay beneath that blue spangled floor of the sea;
whether everybody's eyes changed to pearl, and their bones to coral, if
they sunk down there; and whether the sea-nymphs spoken of were the same
as the mermaids that Captain Kittridge had told of. Had he not said that
the bell rung for church of a Sunday morning down under the waters?

Mara vividly remembered the scene on the sea-beach, the finding of
little Moses and his mother, the dream of the pale lady that seemed to
bring him to her; and not one of the conversations that had transpired
before her among different gossips had been lost on her quiet, listening
little ears. These pale, still children that play without making any
noise are deep wells into which drop many things which lie long and
quietly on the bottom, and come up in after years whole and new, when
everybody else has forgotten them.

So she had heard surmises as to the remaining crew of that unfortunate
ship, where, perhaps, Moses had a father. And sometimes she wondered if
_he_ were lying fathoms deep with sea-nymphs ringing his knell, and
whether Moses ever thought about him; and yet she could no more have
asked him a question about it than if she had been born dumb. She
decided that she should never show him this poetry--it might make him
feel unhappy.

One bright afternoon, when the sea lay all dead asleep, and the long,
steady respiration of its tides scarcely disturbed the glassy
tranquillity of its bosom, Mrs. Pennel sat at her kitchen-door spinning,
when Captain Kittridge appeared.

"Good afternoon, Mis' Pennel; how ye gettin' along?"

"Oh, pretty well, Captain; won't you walk in and have a glass of beer?"

"Well, thank you," said the Captain, raising his hat and wiping his
forehead, "I be pretty dry, it's a fact."

Mrs. Pennel hastened to a cask which was kept standing in a corner of
the kitchen, and drew from thence a mug of her own home-brewed, fragrant
with the smell of juniper, hemlock, and wintergreen, which she presented
to the Captain, who sat down in the doorway and discussed it in
leisurely sips.

"Wal', s'pose it's most time to be lookin' for 'em home, ain't it?" he
said.

"I _am_ lookin' every day," said Mrs. Pennel, involuntarily glancing
upward at the sea.

At the word appeared the vision of little Mara, who rose up like a
spirit from a dusky corner, where she had been stooping over her
reading.

"Why, little Mara," said the Captain, "you ris up like a ghost all of a
sudden. I thought you's out to play. I come down a-purpose arter you.
Mis' Kittridge has gone shoppin' up to Brunswick, and left Sally a
'stent' to do; and I promised her if she'd clap to and do it quick, I'd
go up and fetch you down, and we'd have a play in the cove."

Mara's eyes brightened, as they always did at this prospect, and Mrs.
Pennel said, "Well, I'm glad to have the child go; she seems so kind o'
still and lonesome since Moses went away; really one feels as if that
boy took all the noise there was with him. I get tired myself sometimes
hearing the clock tick. Mara, when she's alone, takes to her book more
than's good for a child."

"She does, does she? Well, we'll see about that. Come, little Mara, get
on your sun-bonnet. Sally's sewin' fast as ever she can, and we're goin'
to dig some clams, and make a fire, and have a chowder; that'll be nice,
won't it? Don't you want to come, too, Mis' Pennel?"

"Oh, thank you, Captain, but I've got so many things on hand to do afore
they come home, I don't really think I can. I'll trust Mara to you any
day."

Mara had run into her own little room and secured her precious fragment
of treasure, which she wrapped up carefully in her handkerchief,
resolving to enlighten Sally with the story, and to consult the Captain
on any nice points of criticism. Arrived at the cove, they found Sally
already there in advance of them, clapping her hands and dancing in a
manner which made her black elf-locks fly like those of a distracted
creature.

"Now, Sally," said the Captain, imitating, in a humble way, his wife's
manner, "are you sure you've finished your work well?"

"Yes, father, every stitch on't."

"And stuck in your needle, and folded it up, and put it in the drawer,
and put away your thimble, and shet the drawer, and all the rest on't?"
said the Captain.

"Yes, father," said Sally, gleefully, "I've done everything I could
think of."

"'Cause you know your ma'll be arter ye, if you don't leave everything
straight."

"Oh, never you fear, father, I've done it all half an hour ago, and I've
found the most capital bed of clams just round the point here; and you
take care of Mara there, and make up a fire while I dig 'em. If she
comes, she'll be sure to wet her shoes, or spoil her frock, or
something."

"Wal', she likes no better fun now," said the Captain, watching Sally,
as she disappeared round the rock with a bright tin pan.

He then proceeded to construct an extemporary fireplace of loose stones,
and to put together chips and shavings for the fire,--in which work
little Mara eagerly assisted; but the fire was crackling and burning
cheerily long before Sally appeared with her clams, and so the Captain,
with a pile of hemlock boughs by his side, sat on a stone feeding the
fire leisurely from time to time with crackling boughs. Now was the time
for Mara to make her inquiries; her heart beat, she knew not why, for
she was full of those little timidities and shames that so often
embarrass children in their attempts to get at the meanings of things in
this great world, where they are such ignorant spectators.

"Captain Kittridge," she said at last, "do the mermaids toll any bells
for people when they are drowned?"

Now the Captain had never been known to indicate the least ignorance on
any subject in heaven or earth, which any one wished his opinion on; he
therefore leisurely poked another great crackling bough of green hemlock
into the fire, and, Yankee-like, answered one question by asking
another.

"What put that into your curly pate?" he said.

"A book I've been reading says they do,--that is, sea-nymphs do. Ain't
sea-nymphs and mermaids the same thing?"

"Wal', I guess they be, pretty much," said the Captain, rubbing down his
pantaloons; "yes, they be," he added, after reflection.

"And when people are drowned, how long does it take for their bones to
turn into coral, and their eyes into pearl?" said little Mara.

"Well, that depends upon circumstances," said the Captain, who wasn't
going to be posed; "but let me jist see your book you've been reading
these things out of."

"I found it in a barrel up garret, and grandma gave it to me," said
Mara, unrolling her handkerchief; "it's a beautiful book,--it tells
about an island, and there was an old enchanter lived on it, and he had
one daughter, and there was a spirit they called Ariel, whom a wicked
old witch fastened in a split of a pine-tree, till the enchanter got him
out. He was a beautiful spirit, and rode in the curled clouds and hung
in flowers,--because he could make himself big or little, you see."

"Ah, yes, I see, to be sure," said the Captain, nodding his head.

"Well, that about sea-nymphs ringing his knell is here," Mara added,
beginning to read the passage with wide, dilated eyes and great
emphasis. "You see," she went on speaking very fast, "this enchanter had
been a prince, and a wicked brother had contrived to send him to sea
with his poor little daughter, in a ship so leaky that the very rats had
left it."

"Bad business that!" said the Captain, attentively.

"Well," said Mara, "they got cast ashore on this desolate island, where
they lived together. But once, when a ship was going by on the sea that
had his wicked brother and his son--a real good, handsome young
prince--in it, why then he made a storm by magic arts."

"Jist so," said the Captain; "that's been often done, to my sartin
knowledge."

"And he made the ship be wrecked, and all the people thrown ashore, but
there wasn't any of 'em drowned, and this handsome prince heard Ariel
singing this song about his father, and it made him think he was dead."

"Well, what became of 'em?" interposed Sally, who had come up with her
pan of clams in time to hear this story, to which she had listened with
breathless interest.

"Oh, the beautiful young prince married the beautiful young lady," said
Mara.

"Wal'," said the Captain, who by this time had found his soundings;
"that you've been a-tellin' is what they call a play, and I've seen 'em
act it at a theatre, when I was to Liverpool once. I know all about it.
Shakespeare wrote it, and he's a great English poet."

"But did it ever happen?" said Mara, trembling between hope and fear.
"Is it like the Bible and Roman history?"

"Why, no," said Captain Kittridge, "not exactly; but things jist like
it, you know. Mermaids and sich is common in foreign parts, and they has
funerals for drowned sailors. 'Member once when we was sailing near the
Bermudas by a reef where the Lively Fanny went down, and I heard a kind
o' ding-dongin',--and the waters there is clear as the sky,--and I
looked down and see the coral all a-growin', and the sea-plants a-wavin'
as handsome as a pictur', and the mermaids they was a-singin'. It was
beautiful; they sung kind o' mournful; and Jack Hubbard, he would have
it they was a-singin' for the poor fellows that was a-lyin' there round
under the seaweed."

"But," said Mara, "did you ever see an enchanter that could make
storms?"

"Wal', there be witches and conjurers that make storms. 'Member once
when we was crossin' the line, about twelve o'clock at night, there was
an old man with a long white beard that shone like silver, came and
stood at the masthead, and he had a pitchfork in one hand, and a lantern
in the other, and there was great balls of fire as big as my fist came
out all round in the rigging. And I'll tell you if we didn't get a blow
that ar night! I thought to my soul we should all go to the bottom."

"Why," said Mara, her eyes staring with excitement, "that was just like
this shipwreck; and 'twas Ariel made those balls of fire; he says so; he
said he 'flamed amazement' all over the ship."

"I've heard Miss Roxy tell about witches that made storms," said Sally.

The Captain leisurely proceeded to open the clams, separating from the
shells the contents, which he threw into a pan, meanwhile placing a
black pot over the fire in which he had previously arranged certain
slices of salt pork, which soon began frizzling in the heat.

"Now, Sally, you peel them potatoes, and mind you slice 'em thin," he
said, and Sally soon was busy with her work.

"Yes," said the Captain, going on with his part of the arrangement,
"there was old Polly Twitchell, that lived in that ar old tumble-down
house on Mure P'int; people used to say she brewed storms, and went to
sea in a sieve."

"Went in a sieve!" said both children; "why a sieve wouldn't swim!"

"No more it wouldn't, in any Christian way," said the Captain; "but that
was to show what a great witch she was."

"But this was a good enchanter," said Mara, "and he did it all by a book
and a rod."

"Yes, yes," said the Captain; "that ar's the gen'l way magicians do,
ever since Moses's time in Egypt. 'Member once I was to Alexandria, in
Egypt, and I saw a magician there that could jist see everything you
ever did in your life in a drop of ink that he held in his hand."

"He could, father!"

"To be sure he could! told me all about the old folks at home; and
described our house as natural as if he'd a-been there. He used to
carry snakes round with him,--a kind so p'ison that it was certain death
to have 'em bite you; but he played with 'em as if they was kittens."

"Well," said Mara, "my enchanter was a king; and when he got through all
he wanted, and got his daughter married to the beautiful young prince,
he said he would break his staff, and deeper than plummet sounded he
would bury his book."

"It was pretty much the best thing he could do," said the Captain,
"because the Bible is agin such things."

"Is it?" said Mara; "why, he was a real good man."

"Oh, well, you know, we all on us does what ain't quite right sometimes,
when we gets pushed up," said the Captain, who now began arranging the
clams and sliced potatoes in alternate layers with sea-biscuit, strewing
in salt and pepper as he went on; and, in a few moments, a smell,
fragrant to hungry senses, began to steam upward, and Sally began
washing and preparing some mammoth clam-shells, to serve as ladles and
plates for the future chowder.

Mara, who sat with her morsel of a book in her lap, seemed deeply
pondering the past conversation. At last she said, "What did you mean by
saying you'd seen 'em act that at a theatre?"

"Why, they make it all seem real; and they have a shipwreck, and you see
it all jist right afore your eyes."

"And the Enchanter, and Ariel, and Caliban, and all?" said Mara.

"Yes, all on't,--plain as printing."

"Why, that is by magic, ain't it?" said Mara.

"No; they hes ways to jist make it up; but,"--added the Captain, "Sally,
you needn't say nothin' to your ma 'bout the theatre, 'cause she
wouldn't think I's fit to go to meetin' for six months arter, if she
heard on't."

"Why, ain't theatres good?" said Sally.

"Wal', there's a middlin' sight o' bad things in 'em," said the
Captain, "that I must say; but as long as folks _is_ folks, why, they
will be _folksy_;--but there's never any makin' women folk understand
about them ar things."

"I am sorry they are bad," said Mara; "I want to see them."

"Wal', wal'," said the Captain, "on the hull I've seen real things a
good deal more wonderful than all their shows, and they hain't no
make-b'lieve to 'em; but theatres is takin' arter all. But, Sally, mind
you don't say nothin' to Mis' Kittridge."

A few moments more and all discussion was lost in preparations for the
meal, and each one, receiving a portion of the savory stew in a large
shell, made a spoon of a small cockle, and with some slices of bread and
butter, the evening meal went off merrily. The sun was sloping toward
the ocean; the wide blue floor was bedropped here and there with rosy
shadows of sailing clouds. Suddenly the Captain sprang up, calling
out,--

"Sure as I'm alive, there they be!"

"Who?" exclaimed the children.

"Why, Captain Pennel and Moses; don't you see?"

And, in fact, on the outer circle of the horizon came drifting a line of
small white-breasted vessels, looking like so many doves.

"Them's 'em," said the Captain, while Mara danced for joy.

"How soon will they be here?"

"Afore long," said the Captain; "so, Mara, I guess you'll want to be
getting hum."




CHAPTER XV

THE HOME COMING


Mrs. Pennel, too, had seen the white, dove-like cloud on the horizon,
and had hurried to make biscuits, and conduct other culinary
preparations which should welcome the wanderers home.

The sun was just dipping into the great blue sea--a round ball of
fire--and sending long, slanting tracks of light across the top of each
wave, when a boat was moored at the beach, and the minister sprang
out,--not in his suit of ceremony, but attired in fisherman's garb.

"Good afternoon, Mrs. Pennel," he said. "I was out fishing, and I
thought I saw your husband's schooner in the distance. I thought I'd
come and tell you."

"Thank you, Mr. Sewell. I thought I saw it, but I was not certain. Do
come in; the Captain would be delighted to see you here."

"We miss your husband in our meetings," said Mr. Sewell; "it will be
good news for us all when he comes home; he is one of those I depend on
to help me preach."

"I'm sure you don't preach to anybody who enjoys it more," said Mrs.
Pennel. "He often tells me that the greatest trouble about his voyages
to the Banks is that he loses so many sanctuary privileges; though he
always keeps Sunday on his ship, and reads and sings his psalms; but, he
says, after all, there's nothing like going to Mount Zion."

"And little Moses has gone on his first voyage?" said the minister.

"Yes, indeed; the child has been teasing to go for more than a year.
Finally the Cap'n told him if he'd be faithful in the ploughing and
planting, he should go. You see, he's rather unsteady, and apt to be off
after other things,--very different from Mara. Whatever you give her to
do, she always keeps at it till it's done."

"And pray, where is the little lady?" said the minister; "is she gone?"

"Well, Cap'n Kittridge came in this afternoon to take her down to see
Sally. The Cap'n's always so fond of Mara, and she has always taken to
him ever since she was a baby."

"The Captain is a curious creature," said the minister, smiling.

Mrs. Pennel smiled also; and it is to be remarked that nobody ever
mentioned the poor Captain's name without the same curious smile.

"The Cap'n is a good-hearted, obliging creature," said Mrs. Pennel, "and
a master-hand for telling stories to the children."

"Yes, a perfect 'Arabian Nights' Entertainment,'" said Mr. Sewell.

"Well, I really believe the Cap'n believes his own stories," said Mrs.
Pennel; "he always seems to, and certainly a more obliging man and a
kinder neighbor couldn't be. He has been in and out almost every day
since I've been alone, to see if I wanted anything. He would insist on
chopping wood and splitting kindlings for me, though I told him the
Cap'n and Moses had left a plenty to last till they came home."

At this moment the subject of their conversation appeared striding along
the beach, with a large, red lobster in one hand, while with the other
he held little Mara upon his shoulder, she the while clapping her hands
and singing merrily, as she saw the Brilliant out on the open blue sea,
its white sails looking of a rosy purple in the evening light, careering
gayly homeward.

"There is Captain Kittridge this very minute," said Mrs. Pennel, setting
down a tea-cup she had been wiping, and going to the door.

"Good evening, Mis' Pennel," said the Captain. "I s'pose you see your
folks are comin'. I brought down one of these 'ere ready b'iled, 'cause
I thought it might make out your supper."

"Thank you, Captain; you must stay and take some with us."

"Wal', me and the children have pooty much done our supper," said the
Captain. "We made a real fust-rate chowder down there to the cove; but
I'll jist stay and see what the Cap'n's luck is. Massy!" he added, as he
looked in at the door, "if you hain't got the minister there! Wal', now,
I come jist as I be," he added, with a glance down at his clothes.

"Never mind, Captain," said Mr. Sewell; "I'm in my fishing-clothes, so
we're even."

As to little Mara, she had run down to the beach, and stood so near the
sea, that every dash of the tide-wave forced her little feet to tread an
inch backward, stretching out her hands eagerly toward the schooner,
which was standing straight toward the small wharf, not far from their
door. Already she could see on deck figures moving about, and her sharp
little eyes made out a small personage in a red shirt that was among the
most active. Soon all the figures grew distinct, and she could see her
grandfather's gray head, and alert, active form, and could see, by the
signs he made, that he had perceived the little blowy figure that stood,
with hair streaming in the wind, like some flower bent seaward.

And now they are come nearer, and Moses shouts and dances on the deck,
and the Captain and Mrs. Pennel come running from the house down to the
shore, and a few minutes more, and all are landed safe and sound, and
little Mara is carried up to the house in her grandfather's arms, while
Captain Kittridge stops to have a few moments' gossip with Ben Halliday
and Tom Scranton before they go to their own resting-places.

Meanwhile Moses loses not a moment in boasting of his heroic exploits to
Mara.

"Oh, Mara! you've no idea what times we've had! I can fish equal to any
of 'em, and I can take in sail and tend the helm like anything, and I
know all the names of everything; and you ought to have seen us catch
fish! Why, they bit just as fast as we could throw; and it was just
throw and bite,--throw and bite,--throw and bite; and my hands got
blistered pulling in, but I didn't mind it,--I was determined no one
should beat me."

"Oh! did you blister your hands?" said Mara, pitifully.

"Oh, to be sure! Now, you girls think that's a dreadful thing, but we
men don't mind it. My hands are getting so hard, you've no idea. And,
Mara, we caught a great shark."

"A shark!--oh, how dreadful! Isn't he dangerous?"

"Dangerous! I guess not. We served him out, I tell you. He'll never eat
any more people, I tell you, the old wretch!"

"But, poor shark, it isn't his fault that he eats people. He was made
so," said Mara, unconsciously touching a deep theological mystery.

"Well, I don't know but he was," said Moses; "but sharks that we catch
never eat any more, I'll bet you."

"Oh, Moses, did you see any icebergs?"

"Icebergs! yes; we passed right by one,--a real grand one."

"Were there any bears on it?"

"Bears! No; we didn't see any."

"Captain Kittridge says there are white bears live on 'em."

"Oh, Captain Kittridge," said Moses, with a toss of superb contempt; "if
you're going to believe all _he_ says, you've got your hands full."

"Why, Moses, you don't think he tells lies?" said Mara, the tears
actually starting in her eyes. "I think he is _real_ good, and tells
nothing but the truth."

"Well, well, you are young yet," said Moses, turning away with an air of
easy grandeur, "and only a girl besides," he added.

Mara was nettled at this speech. First, it pained her to have her
child's faith shaken in anything, and particularly in her good old
friend, the Captain; and next, she felt, with more force than ever she
did before, the continual disparaging tone in which Moses spoke of her
girlhood.

"I'm sure," she said to herself, "he oughtn't to feel so about girls and
women. There was Deborah was a prophetess, and judged Israel; and there
was Egeria,--she taught Numa Pompilius all his wisdom."

But it was not the little maiden's way to speak when anything thwarted
or hurt her, but rather to fold all her feelings and thoughts inward, as
some insects, with fine gauzy wings, draw them under a coat of horny
concealment. Somehow, there was a shivering sense of disappointment in
all this meeting with Moses. She had dwelt upon it, and fancied so much,
and had so many things to say to him; and he had come home so
self-absorbed and glorious, and seemed to have had so little need of or
thought for her, that she felt a cold, sad sinking at her heart; and
walking away very still and white, sat down demurely by her
grandfather's knee.

"Well, so my little girl is glad grandfather's come," he said, lifting
her fondly in his arms, and putting her golden head under his coat, as
he had been wont to do from infancy; "grandpa thought a great deal about
his little Mara."

The small heart swelled against his. Kind, faithful old grandpa! how
much more he thought about her than Moses; and yet she had thought so
much of Moses. And there he sat, this same ungrateful Moses, bright-eyed
and rosy-cheeked, full of talk and gayety, full of energy and vigor, as
ignorant as possible of the wound he had given to the little loving
heart that was silently brooding under her grandfather's
butternut-colored sea-coat. Not only was he ignorant, but he had not
even those conditions within himself which made knowledge possible. All
that there was developed of him, at present, was a fund of energy,
self-esteem, hope, courage, and daring, the love of action, life, and
adventure; his life was in the outward and present, not in the inward
and reflective; he was a true ten-year old boy, in its healthiest and
most animal perfection. What she was, the small pearl with the golden
hair, with her frail and high-strung organization, her sensitive nerves,
her half-spiritual fibres, her ponderings, and marvels, and dreams, her
power of love, and yearning for self-devotion, our readers may, perhaps,
have seen. But if ever two children, or two grown people, thus
organized, are thrown into intimate relations, it follows, from the very
laws of their being, that one must hurt the other, simply by being
itself; one must always hunger for what the other has not to give.

It was a merry meal, however, when they all sat down to the tea-table
once more, and Mara by her grandfather's side, who often stopped what he
was saying to stroke her head fondly. Moses bore a more prominent part
in the conversation than he had been wont to do before this voyage, and
all seemed to listen to him with a kind of indulgence elders often
accord to a handsome, manly boy, in the first flush of some successful
enterprise. That ignorant confidence in one's self and one's future,
which comes in life's first dawn, has a sort of mournful charm in
experienced eyes, who know how much it all amounts to.

Gradually, little Mara quieted herself with listening to and admiring
him. It is not comfortable to have any heart-quarrel with one's
cherished idol, and everything of the feminine nature, therefore, can
speedily find fifty good reasons for seeing one's self in the wrong and
one's graven image in the right; and little Mara soon had said to
herself, without words, that, of course, Moses couldn't be expected to
think as much of her as she of him. He was handsomer, cleverer, and had
a thousand other things to do and to think of--he was a boy, in short,
and going to be a glorious man and sail all over the world, while she
could only hem handkerchiefs and knit stockings, and sit at home and
wait for him to come back. This was about the _résumé_ of life as it
appeared to the little one, who went on from the moment worshiping her
image with more undivided idolatry than ever, hoping that by and by he
would think more of her.

Mr. Sewell appeared to study Moses carefully and thoughtfully, and
encouraged the wild, gleeful frankness which he had brought home from
his first voyage, as a knowing jockey tries the paces of a high-mettled
colt.

"Did you get any time to read?" he interposed once, when the boy stopped
in his account of their adventures.

"No, sir," said Moses; "at least," he added, blushing very deeply, "I
didn't feel like reading. I had so much to do, and there was so much to
see."

"It's all new to him now," said Captain Pennel; "but when he comes to
being, as I've been, day after day, with nothing but sea and sky, he'll
be glad of a book, just to break the sameness."

"Laws, yes," said Captain Kittridge; "sailor's life ain't all
apple-pie, as it seems when a boy first goes on a summer trip with his
daddy--not by no manner o' means."

"But," said Mara, blushing and looking very eagerly at Mr. Sewell,
"Moses has read a great deal. He read the Roman and the Grecian history
through before he went away, and knows all about them."

"Indeed!" said Mr. Sewell, turning with an amused look towards the tiny
little champion; "do you read them, too, my little maid?"

"Yes, indeed," said Mara, her eyes kindling; "I have read them a great
deal since Moses went away--them and the Bible."

Mara did not dare to name her new-found treasure--there was something so
mysterious about that, that she could not venture to produce it, except
on the score of extreme intimacy.

"Come, sit by me, little Mara," said the minister, putting out his hand;
"you and I must be friends, I see."

Mr. Sewell had a certain something of mesmeric power in his eyes which
children seldom resisted; and with a shrinking movement, as if both
attracted and repelled, the little girl got upon his knee.

"So you like the Bible and Roman history?" he said to her, making a
little aside for her, while a brisk conversation was going on between
Captain Kittridge and Captain Pennel on the fishing bounty for the year.

"Yes, sir," said Mara, blushing in a very guilty way.

"And which do you like the best?"

"I don't know, sir; I sometimes think it is the one, and sometimes the
other."

"Well, what pleases you in the Roman history?"

"Oh, I like that about Quintus Curtius."

"Quintus Curtius?" said Mr. Sewell, pretending not to remember.

"Oh, don't you remember him? why, there was a great gulf opened in the
Forum, and the Augurs said that the country would not be saved unless
some one would offer himself up for it, and so he jumped right in, all
on horseback. I think that was grand. I should like to have done that,"
said little Mara, her eyes blazing out with a kind of starry light which
they had when she was excited.

"And how would you have liked it, if you had been a Roman girl, and
Moses were Quintus Curtius? would you like to have him give himself up
for the good of the country?"

"Oh, no, no!" said Mara, instinctively shuddering.

"Don't you think it would be very grand of him?"

"Oh, yes, sir."

"And shouldn't we wish our friends to do what is brave and grand?"

"Yes, sir; but then," she added, "it would be so dreadful _never_ to see
him any more," and a large tear rolled from the great soft eyes and fell
on the minister's hand.

"Come, come," thought Mr. Sewell, "this sort of experimenting is too
bad--too much nerve here, too much solitude, too much pine-whispering
and sea-dashing are going to the making up of this little piece of
workmanship."

"Tell me," he said, motioning Moses to sit by him, "how _you_ like the
Roman history."

"I like it first-rate," said Moses. "The Romans were such smashers, and
beat everybody; nobody could stand against them; and I like Alexander,
too--I think he was splendid."

"True boy," said Mr. Sewell to himself, "unreflecting brother of the
wind and the sea, and all that is vigorous and active--no precocious
development of the moral here."

"Now you have come," said Mr. Sewell, "I will lend you another book."

"Thank you, sir; I love to read them when I'm at home--it's so still
here. I should be dull if I didn't."

Mara's eyes looked eagerly attentive. Mr. Sewell noticed their hungry
look when a book was spoken of.

"And you must read it, too, my little girl," he said.

"Thank you, sir," said Mara; "I always want to read everything Moses
does."

"What book is it?" said Moses.

"It is called Plutarch's 'Lives,'" said the minister; "it has more
particular accounts of the men you read about in history."

"Are there any lives of women?" said Mara.

"No, my dear," said Mr. Sewell; "in the old times, women did not get
their lives written, though I don't doubt many of them were much better
worth writing than the men's."

"I should like to be a great general," said Moses, with a toss of his
head.

"The way to be great lies through books, now, and not through battles,"
said the minister; "there is more done with pens than swords; so, if you
want to do anything, you must read and study."

"Do you think of giving this boy a liberal education?" said Mr. Sewell
some time later in the evening, after Moses and Mara were gone to bed.

"Depends on the boy," said Zephaniah. "I've been up to Brunswick, and
seen the fellows there in the college. With a good many of 'em, going to
college seems to be just nothing but a sort of ceremony; they go because
they're sent, and don't learn anything more'n they can help. That's what
I call waste of time and money."

"But don't you think Moses shows some taste for reading and study?"

"Pretty well, pretty well!" said Zephaniah; "jist keep him a little
hungry; not let him get all he wants, you see, and he'll bite the
sharper. If I want to catch cod, I don't begin with flingin' over a
barrel o' bait. So with the boys, jist bait 'em with a book here and a
book there, and kind o' let 'em feel their own way, and then, if nothin'
will do but a fellow must go to college, give in to him--that'd be _my_
way."

"And a very good one, too!" said Mr. Sewell. "I'll see if I can't bait
my hook, so as to make Moses take after Latin this winter. I shall have
plenty of time to teach him."

"Now, there's Mara!" said the Captain, his face becoming phosphorescent
with a sort of mild radiance of pleasure as it usually was when he spoke
of her; "she's real sharp set after books; she's ready to fly out of her
little skin at the sight of one."

"That child thinks too much, and feels too much, and knows too much for
her years!" said Mr. Sewell. "If she were a boy, and you would take her
away cod-fishing, as you have Moses, the sea-winds would blow away some
of the thinking, and her little body would grow stout, and her mind less
delicate and sensitive. But she's a woman," he said, with a sigh, "and
they are all alike. We can't do much for them, but let them come up as
they will and make the best of it."




CHAPTER XVI

THE NATURAL AND THE SPIRITUAL


"Emily," said Mr. Sewell, "did you ever take much notice of that little
Mara Lincoln?"

"No, brother; why?"

"Because I think her a very uncommon child."

"She is a pretty little creature," said Miss Emily, "but that is all I
know; modest--blushing to her eyes when a stranger speaks to her."

"She has wonderful eyes," said Mr. Sewell; "when she gets excited, they
grow so large and so bright, it seems almost unnatural."

"Dear me! has she?" said Miss Emily, in a tone of one who had been
called upon to do something about it. "Well?" she added, inquiringly.

"That little thing is only seven years old," said Mr. Sewell; "and she
is thinking and feeling herself all into mere spirit--brain and nerves
all active, and her little body so frail. She reads incessantly, and
thinks over and over what she reads."

"Well?" said Miss Emily, winding very swiftly on a skein of black silk,
and giving a little twitch, every now and then, to a knot to make it
subservient.

It was commonly the way when Mr. Sewell began to talk with Miss Emily,
that she constantly answered him with the manner of one who expects some
immediate, practical proposition to flow from every train of thought.
Now Mr. Sewell was one of the reflecting kind of men, whose thoughts
have a thousand meandering paths, that lead nowhere in particular. His
sister's brisk little "Well's?" and "Ah's!" and "Indeed's!" were
sometimes the least bit in the world annoying.

"What is to be done?" said Miss Emily; "shall we speak to Mrs. Pennel?"

"Mrs. Pennel would know nothing about her."

"How strangely you talk!--who should, if she doesn't?"

"I mean, she wouldn't understand the dangers of her case."

"Dangers! Do you think she has any disease? She seems to be a healthy
child enough, I'm sure. She has a lovely color in her cheeks."

Mr. Sewell seemed suddenly to become immersed in a book he was reading.

"There now," said Miss Emily, with a little tone of pique, "that's the
way you always do. You begin to talk with me, and just as I get
interested in the conversation, you take up a book. It's too bad."

"Emily," said Mr. Sewell, laying down his book, "I think I shall begin
to give Moses Pennel Latin lessons this winter."

"Why, what do you undertake that for?" said Miss Emily. "You have enough
to do without that, I'm sure."

"He is an uncommonly bright boy, and he interests me."

"Now, brother, you needn't tell me; there is some mystery about the
interest you take in that child, _you know_ there is."

"I am fond of children," said Mr. Sewell, dryly.

"Well, but you don't take as much interest in other boys. I never heard
of your teaching any of them Latin before."

"Well, Emily, he is an uncommonly interesting child, and the
providential circumstances under which he came into our neighborhood"--

"Providential fiddlesticks!" said Miss Emily, with heightened color,
"_I_ believe you knew that boy's mother."

This sudden thrust brought a vivid color into Mr. Sewell's cheeks. To be
interrupted so unceremoniously, in the midst of so very proper and
ministerial a remark, was rather provoking, and he answered, with some
asperity,--

"And suppose I had, Emily, and supposing there were any painful subject
connected with this past event, you might have sufficient forbearance
not to try to make me speak on what I do not wish to talk of."

Mr. Sewell was one of your gentle, dignified men, from whom Heaven
deliver an inquisitive female friend! If such people would only get
angry, and blow some unbecoming blast, one might make something of them;
but speaking, as they always do, from the serene heights of immaculate
propriety, one gets in the wrong before one knows it, and has nothing
for it but to beg pardon. Miss Emily had, however, a feminine resource:
she began to cry--wisely confining herself to the simple eloquence of
tears and sobs. Mr. Sewell sat as awkwardly as if he had trodden on a
kitten's toe, or brushed down a china cup, feeling as if he were a
great, horrid, clumsy boor, and his poor little sister a martyr.

"Come, Emily," he said, in a softer tone, when the sobs subsided a
little.

But Emily didn't "come," but went at it with a fresh burst. Mr. Sewell
had a vision like that which drowning men are said to have, in which all
Miss Emily's sisterly devotions, stocking-darnings, account-keepings,
nursings and tendings, and infinite self-sacrifices, rose up before him:
and there she was--crying!

"I'm sorry I spoke harshly, Emily. Come, come; that's a good girl."

"I'm a silly fool," said Miss Emily, lifting her head, and wiping the
tears from her merry little eyes, as she went on winding her silk.

"Perhaps he will tell me now," she thought, as she wound.

But he didn't.

"What I was going to say, Emily," said her brother, "was, that I thought
it would be a good plan for little Mara to come sometimes with Moses;
and then, by observing her more particularly, you might be of use to
her; her little, active mind needs good practical guidance like yours."

Mr. Sewell spoke in a gentle, flattering tone, and Miss Emily was
flattered; but she soon saw that she had gained nothing by the whole
breeze, except a little kind of dread, which made her inwardly resolve
never to touch the knocker of his fortress again. But she entered into
her brother's scheme with the facile alacrity with which she usually
seconded any schemes of his proposing.

"I might teach her painting and embroidery," said Miss Emily, glancing,
with a satisfied air, at a framed piece of her own work which hung over
the mantelpiece, revealing the state of the fine arts in this country,
as exhibited in the performances of well-instructed young ladies of that
period. Miss Emily had performed it under the tuition of a celebrated
teacher of female accomplishments. It represented a white marble
obelisk, which an inscription, in legible India ink letters, stated to
be "Sacred to the memory of Theophilus Sewell," etc. This obelisk stood
in the midst of a ground made very green by an embroidery of different
shades of chenille and silk, and was overshadowed by an embroidered
weeping-willow. Leaning on it, with her face concealed in a plentiful
flow of white handkerchief, was a female figure in deep mourning,
designed to represent the desolate widow. A young girl, in a very black
dress, knelt in front of it, and a very lugubrious-looking young man,
standing bolt upright on the other side, seemed to hold in his hand one
end of a wreath of roses, which the girl was presenting, as an
appropriate decoration for the tomb. The girl and gentleman were, of
course, the young Theophilus and Miss Emily, and the appalling grief
conveyed by the expression of their faces was a triumph of the pictorial
art.

Miss Emily had in her bedroom a similar funeral trophy, sacred to the
memory of her deceased mother,--besides which there were, framed and
glazed, in the little sitting-room, two embroidered shepherdesses
standing with rueful faces, in charge of certain animals of an uncertain
breed between sheep and pigs. The poor little soul had mentally resolved
to make Mara the heiress of all the skill and knowledge of the arts by
which she had been enabled to consummate these marvels.

"She is naturally a lady-like little thing," she said to herself, "and
if I know anything of accomplishments, she shall have them."

Just about the time that Miss Emily came to this resolution, had she
been clairvoyant, she might have seen Mara sitting very quietly, busy in
the solitude of her own room with a little sprig of partridge-berry
before her, whose round green leaves and brilliant scarlet berries she
had been for hours trying to imitate, as appeared from the scattered
sketches and fragments around her. In fact, before Zephaniah started on
his spring fishing, he had caught her one day very busy at work of the
same kind, with bits of charcoal, and some colors compounded out of wild
berries; and so out of his capacious pocket, after his return, he drew a
little box of water-colors and a lead-pencil and square of India-rubber,
which he had bought for her in Portland on his way home.

Hour after hour the child works, so still, so fervent, so
earnest,--going over and over, time after time, her simple, ignorant
methods to make it "look like," and stopping, at times, to give the true
artist's sigh, as the little green and scarlet fragment lies there
hopelessly, unapproachably perfect. Ignorantly to herself, the hands of
the little pilgrim are knocking at the very door where Giotto and
Cimabue knocked in the innocent child-life of Italian art.

"Why won't it look round?" she said to Moses, who had come in behind
her.

"Why, Mara, did you do these?" said Moses, astonished; "why, how well
they are done! I should know in a minute what they were meant for."

Mara flushed up at being praised by Moses, but heaved a deep sigh as she
looked back.

"It's so pretty, that sprig," she said; "if I only could make it just
like"--

"Why, nobody expects _that_," said Moses, "it's like enough, if people
only know what you mean it for. But come, now, get your bonnet, and come
with me in the boat. Captain Kittridge has just brought down our new
one, and I'm going to take you over to Eagle Island, and we'll take our
dinner and stay all day; mother says so."

"Oh, how nice!" said the little girl, running cheerfully for her
sun-bonnet.

At the house-door they met Mrs. Pennel, with a little closely covered
tin pail.

"Here's your dinner, children; and, Moses, mind and take good care of
her."

"Never fear _me_ mother, I've been to the Banks; there wasn't a man
there could manage a boat better than I could."

"Yes, grandmother," said Mara, "you ought to see how strong his arms
are; I believe he will be like Samson one of these days if he keeps
on."

So away they went. It was a glorious August forenoon, and the sombre
spruces and shaggy hemlocks that dipped and rippled in the waters were
penetrated to their deepest recesses with the clear brilliancy of the
sky,--a true northern sky, without a cloud, without even a softening
haze, defining every outline, revealing every minute point, cutting with
sharp decision the form of every promontory and rock, and distant
island.

The blue of the sea and the blue of the sky were so much the same, that
when the children had rowed far out, the little boat seemed to float
midway, poised in the centre of an azure sphere, with a firmament above
and a firmament below. Mara leaned dreamily over the side of the boat,
and drew her little hands through the waters as they rippled along to
the swift oars' strokes, and she saw as the waves broke, and divided and
shivered around the boat, a hundred little faces, with brown eyes and
golden hair, gleaming up through the water, and dancing away over
rippling waves, and thought that so the sea-nymphs might look who came
up from the coral caves when they ring the knell of drowned people.
Moses sat opposite to her, with his coat off, and his heavy black curls
more wavy and glossy than ever, as the exercise made them damp with
perspiration.

Eagle Island lay on the blue sea, a tangled thicket of
evergreens,--white pine, spruce, arbor vitæ, and fragrant silver firs. A
little strip of white beach bound it, like a silver setting to a gem.
And there Moses at length moored his boat, and the children landed. The
island was wholly solitary, and there is something to children quite
delightful in feeling that they have a little lonely world all to
themselves. Childhood is itself such an enchanted island, separated by
mysterious depths from the mainland of nature, life, and reality.

Moses had subsided a little from the glorious heights on which he
seemed to be in the first flush of his return, and he and Mara, in
consequence, were the friends of old time. It is true he thought himself
quite a man, but the manhood of a boy is only a tiny masquerade,--a
fantastic, dreamy prevision of real manhood. It was curious that Mara,
who was by all odds the most precociously developed of the two, never
thought of asserting herself a woman; in fact, she seldom thought of
herself at all, but dreamed and pondered of almost everything else.

"I declare," said Moses, looking up into a thick-branched, rugged old
hemlock, which stood all shaggy, with heavy beards of gray moss drooping
from its branches, "there's an eagle's nest up there; I mean to go and
see." And up he went into the gloomy embrace of the old tree, crackling
the dead branches, wrenching off handfuls of gray moss, rising higher
and higher, every once in a while turning and showing to Mara his
glowing face and curly hair through a dusky green frame of boughs, and
then mounting again. "I'm coming to it," he kept exclaiming.

Meanwhile his proceedings seemed to create a sensation among the
feathered house-keepers, one of whom rose and sailed screaming away into
the air. In a moment after there was a swoop of wings, and two eagles
returned and began flapping and screaming about the head of the boy.

Mara, who stood at the foot of the tree, could not see clearly what was
going on, for the thickness of the boughs; she only heard a great
commotion and rattling of the branches, the scream of the birds, and the
swooping of their wings, and Moses's valorous exclamations, as he seemed
to be laying about him with a branch which he had broken off.

At last he descended victorious, with the eggs in his pocket. Mara stood
at the foot of the tree, with her sun-bonnet blown back, her hair
streaming, and her little arms upstretched, as if to catch him if he
fell.

"Oh, I was so afraid!" she said, as he set foot on the ground.

"Afraid? Pooh! Who's afraid? Why, you might know the old eagles couldn't
beat me."

"Ah, well, I know how strong you are; but, you know, I couldn't help it.
But the poor birds,--do hear 'em scream. Moses, don't you suppose they
feel bad?"

"No, they're only mad, to think they couldn't beat me. I beat them just
as the Romans used to beat folks,--I played their nest was a city, and I
spoiled it."

"I shouldn't want to spoil cities!" said Mara.

"That's 'cause you are a girl,--I'm a man, and men always like war; I've
taken one city this afternoon, and mean to take a great many more."

"But, Moses, do you think war is right?"

"Right? why, yes, to be sure; if it ain't, it's a pity; for it's all
that has ever been done in this world. In the Bible, or out, certainly
it's right. I wish I had a gun now, I'd stop those old eagles'
screeching."

"But, Moses, we shouldn't want any one to come and steal all our things,
and then shoot us."

"How long you do think about things!" said Moses, impatient at her
pertinacity. "I am older than you, and when I tell you a thing's right,
you ought to believe it. Besides, don't you take hens' eggs every day,
in the barn? How do you suppose the hens like that?"

This was a home-thrust, and for the moment threw the little casuist off
the track. She carefully folded up the idea, and laid it away on the
inner shelves of her mind till she could think more about it. Pliable as
she was to all outward appearances, the child had her own still,
interior world, where all her little notions and opinions stood up crisp
and fresh, like flowers that grow in cool, shady places. If anybody too
rudely assailed a thought or suggestion she put forth, she drew it back
again into this quiet inner chamber, and went on. Reader, there are
some women of this habit; and there is no independence and pertinacity
of opinion like that of these seemingly soft, quiet creatures, whom it
is so easy to silence, and so difficult to convince. Mara, little and
unformed as she yet was, belonged to the race of those spirits to whom
is deputed the office of the angel in the Apocalypse, to whom was given
the golden rod which measured the New Jerusalem. Infant though she was,
she had ever in her hands that invisible measuring-rod, which she was
laying to the foundations of all actions and thoughts. There may,
perhaps, come a time when the saucy boy, who now steps so superbly, and
predominates so proudly in virtue of his physical strength and daring,
will learn to tremble at the golden measuring-rod, held in the hand of a
woman.

"Howbeit, that is not first which is spiritual, but that which is
natural." Moses is the type of the first unreflecting stage of
development, in which are only the out-reachings of active faculties,
the aspirations that tend toward manly accomplishments. Seldom do we
meet sensitiveness of conscience or discriminating reflection as the
indigenous growth of a very vigorous physical development. Your true
healthy boy has the breezy, hearty virtues of a Newfoundland dog, the
wild fullness of life of the young race-colt. Sentiment, sensibility,
delicate perceptions, spiritual aspirations, are plants of later growth.

But there are, both of men and women, beings born into this world in
whom from childhood the spiritual and the reflective predominate over
the physical. In relation to other human beings, they seem to be
organized much as birds are in relation to other animals. They are the
artists, the poets, the unconscious seers, to whom the purer truths of
spiritual instruction are open. Surveying man merely as an animal, these
sensitively organized beings, with their feebler physical powers, are
imperfect specimens of life. Looking from the spiritual side, they seem
to have a noble strength, a divine force. The types of this latter class
are more commonly among women than among men. Multitudes of them pass
away in earlier years, and leave behind in many hearts the anxious
wonder, why they came so fair only to mock the love they kindled. They
who live to maturity are the priests and priestesses of the spiritual
life, ordained of God to keep the balance between the rude but absolute
necessities of physical life and the higher sphere to which that must at
length give place.




CHAPTER XVII

LESSONS


Moses felt elevated some inches in the world by the gift of a new Latin
grammar, which had been bought for him in Brunswick. It was a step
upward in life; no graduate from a college ever felt more ennobled.

"Wal', now, I tell ye, Moses Pennel," said Miss Roxy, who, with her
press-board and big flat-iron, was making her autumn sojourn in the
brown house, "I tell ye Latin ain't just what you think 'tis, steppin'
round so crank; you must remember what the king of Israel said to
Benhadad, king of Syria."

"I don't remember; what did he say?"

"I remember," said the soft voice of Mara; "he said, 'Let not him that
putteth on the harness boast as him that putteth it off.'"

"Good for you, Mara," said Miss Roxy; "if some other folks read their
Bibles as much as you do, they'd know more."

Between Moses and Miss Roxy there had always been a state of sub-acute
warfare since the days of his first arrival, she regarding him as an
unhopeful interloper, and he regarding her as a grim-visaged,
interfering gnome, whom he disliked with all the intense, unreasoning
antipathy of childhood.

"I hate that old woman," he said to Mara, as he flung out of the door.

"Why, Moses, what for?" said Mara, who never could comprehend hating
anybody.

"I do hate her, and Aunt Ruey, too. They are two old scratching cats;
they hate me, and I hate them; they're always trying to bring me down,
and I won't be brought down."

Mara had sufficient instinctive insight into the feminine rôle in the
domestic concert not to adventure a direct argument just now in favor of
her friends, and therefore she proposed that they should sit down
together under a cedar hard by, and look over the first lesson.

"Miss Emily invited me to go over with you," she said, "and I should
like so much to hear you recite."

Moses thought this very proper, as would any other male person, young or
old, who has been habitually admired by any other female one. He did not
doubt that, as in fishing and rowing, and all other things he had
undertaken as yet, he should win himself distinguished honors.

"See here," he said; "Mr. Sewell told me I might go as far as I liked,
and I mean to take all the declensions to begin with; there's five of
'em, and I shall learn them for the first lesson; then I shall take the
adjectives next, and next the verbs, and so in a fortnight get into
reading."

Mara heaved a sort of sigh. She wished she had been invited to share
this glorious race; but she looked on admiring when Moses read, in a
loud voice, "Penna, pennæ, pennæ, pennam," etc.

"There now, I believe I've got it," he said, handing Mara the book; and
he was perfectly astonished to find that, with the book withdrawn, he
boggled, and blundered, and stumbled ingloriously. In vain Mara softly
prompted, and looked at him with pitiful eyes as he grew red in the face
with his efforts to remember.

"Confound it all!" he said, with an angry flush, snatching back the
book; "it's more trouble than it's worth."

Again he began the repetition, saying it very loud and plain; he said it
over and over till his mind wandered far out to sea, and while his
tongue repeated "penna, pennæ," he was counting the white sails of the
fishing-smacks, and thinking of pulling up codfish at the Banks.

"There now, Mara, try me," he said, and handed her the book again; "I'm
sure I _must_ know it now."

But, alas! with the book the sounds glided away; and "penna" and
"pennam" and "pennis" and "pennæ" were confusedly and indiscriminately
mingled. He thought it must be Mara's fault; she didn't read right, or
she told him just as he was going to say it, or she didn't tell him
right; or was he a fool? or had he lost his senses?

That first declension has been a valley of humiliation to many a sturdy
boy--to many a bright one, too; and often it is, that the more full of
thought and vigor the mind is, the more difficult it is to narrow it
down to the single dry issue of learning those sounds. Heinrich Heine
said the Romans would never have found time to conquer the world, if
they had had to learn their own language; but that, luckily for them,
they were born into the knowledge of what nouns form their accusatives
in "um."

Long before Moses had learned the first declension, Mara knew it by
heart; for her intense anxiety for him, and the eagerness and zeal with
which she listened for each termination, fixed them in her mind.
Besides, she was naturally of a more quiet and scholar-like turn than
he,--more intellectually developed. Moses began to think, before that
memorable day was through, that there was some sense in Aunt Roxy's
quotation of the saying of the King of Israel, and materially to
retrench his expectations as to the time it might take to master the
grammar; but still, his pride and will were both committed, and he
worked away in this new sort of labor with energy.

It was a fine, frosty November morning, when he rowed Mara across the
bay in a little boat to recite his first lesson to Mr. Sewell.

Miss Emily had provided a plate of seed-cake, otherwise called cookies,
for the children, as was a kindly custom of old times, when the little
people were expected. Miss Emily had a dim idea that she was to do
something for Mara in her own department, while Moses was reciting his
lesson; and therefore producing a large sampler, displaying every form
and variety of marking-stitch, she began questioning the little girl, in
a low tone, as to her proficiency in that useful accomplishment.

Presently, however, she discovered that the child was restless and
uneasy, and that she answered without knowing what she was saying. The
fact was that she was listening, with her whole soul in her eyes, and
feeling through all her nerves, every word Moses was saying. She knew
all the critical places, where he was likely to go wrong; and when at
last, in one place, he gave the wrong termination, she involuntarily
called out the right one, starting up and turning towards them. In a
moment she blushed deeply, seeing Mr. Sewell and Miss Emily both looking
at her with surprise.

"Come here, pussy," said Mr. Sewell, stretching out his hand to her.
"Can you say this?"

"I believe I could, sir."

"Well, try it."

She went through without missing a word. Mr. Sewell then, for curiosity,
heard her repeat all the other forms of the lesson. She had them
perfectly.

"Very well, my little girl," he said, "have you been studying, too?"

"I heard Moses say them so often," said Mara, in an apologetic manner,
"I couldn't help learning them."

"Would you like to recite with Moses every day?"

"Oh, yes, sir, so much."

"Well, you shall. It is better for him to have company."

Mara's face brightened, and Miss Emily looked with a puzzled air at her
brother.

"So," she said, when the children had gone home, "I thought you wanted
me to take Mara under my care. I was going to begin and teach her some
marking stitches, and you put her up to studying Latin. I don't
understand you."

"Well, Emily, the fact is, the child has a natural turn for study, that
no child of her age ought to have; and I have done just as people always
will with such children; there's no sense in it, but I wanted to do it.
You can teach her marking and embroidery all the same; it would break
her little heart, now, if I were to turn her back."

"I do not see of what use Latin can be to a woman."

"Of what use is embroidery?"

"Why, that is an accomplishment."

"Ah, indeed!" said Mr. Sewell, contemplating the weeping willow and
tombstone trophy with a singular expression, which it was lucky for Miss
Emily's peace she did not understand. The fact was, that Mr. Sewell had,
at one period of his life, had an opportunity of studying and observing
minutely some really fine works of art, and the remembrance of them
sometimes rose up to his mind, in the presence of the _chefs-d'oeuvre_
on which his sister rested with so much complacency. It was a part of
his quiet interior store of amusement to look at these bits of Byzantine
embroidery round the room, which affected him always with a subtle sense
of drollery.

"You see, brother," said Miss Emily, "it is far better for women to be
accomplished than learned."

"You are quite right in the main," said Mr. Sewell, "only you must let
me have my own way just for once. One can't be consistent always."

So another Latin grammar was bought, and Moses began to feel a secret
respect for his little companion, that he had never done before, when
he saw how easily she walked through the labyrinths which at first so
confused him. Before this, the comparison had been wholly in points
where superiority arose from physical daring and vigor; now he became
aware of the existence of another kind of strength with which he had not
measured himself. Mara's opinion in their mutual studies began to assume
a value in his eyes that her opinions on other subjects had never done,
and she saw and felt, with a secret gratification, that she was becoming
more to him through their mutual pursuit. To say the truth, it required
this fellowship to inspire Moses with the patience and perseverance
necessary for this species of acquisition. His active, daring
temperament little inclined him to patient, quiet study. For anything
that could be done by two hands, he was always ready; but to hold hands
still and work silently in the inner forces was to him a species of
undertaking that seemed against his very nature; but then he would do
it--he would not disgrace himself before Mr. Sewell, and let a girl
younger than himself outdo him.

But the thing, after all, that absorbed more of Moses's thoughts than
all his lessons was the building and rigging of a small schooner, at
which he worked assiduously in all his leisure moments. He had dozens of
blocks of wood, into which he had cut anchor moulds; and the melting of
lead, the running and shaping of anchors, the whittling of masts and
spars took up many an hour. Mara entered into all those things readily,
and was too happy to make herself useful in hemming the sails.

When the schooner was finished, they built some ways down by the sea,
and invited Sally Kittridge over to see it launched.

"There!" he said, when the little thing skimmed down prosperously into
the sea and floated gayly on the waters, "when I'm a man, I'll have a
big ship; I'll build her, and launch her, and command her, all myself;
and I'll give you and Sally both a passage in it, and we'll go off to
the East Indies--we'll sail round the world!"

None of the three doubted the feasibility of this scheme; the little
vessel they had just launched seemed the visible prophecy of such a
future; and how pleasant it would be to sail off, with the world all
before them, and winds ready to blow them to any port they might wish!

The three children arranged some bread and cheese and doughnuts on a
rock on the shore, to represent the collation that was usually spread in
those parts at a ship launch, and felt quite like grown people--acting
life beforehand in that sort of shadowy pantomime which so delights
little people. Happy, happy days--when ships can be made with a
jack-knife and anchors run in pine blocks, and three children together
can launch a schooner, and the voyage of the world can all be made in
one sunny Saturday afternoon!

"Mother says you are going to college," said Sally to Moses.

"Not I, indeed," said Moses; "as soon as I get old enough, I'm going up
to Umbagog among the lumberers, and I'm going to cut real, splendid
timber for my ship, and I'm going to get it on the stocks, and have it
built to suit myself."

"What will you call her?" said Sally.

"I haven't thought of that," said Moses.

"Call her the Ariel," said Mara.

"What! after the spirit you were telling us about?" said Sally.

"Ariel is a pretty name," said Moses. "But what is that about a spirit?"

"Why," said Sally, "Mara read us a story about a ship that was wrecked,
and a spirit called Ariel, that sang a song about the drowned
mariners."

Mara gave a shy, apprehensive glance at Moses, to see if this allusion
called up any painful recollections.

No; instead of this, he was following the motions of his little schooner
on the waters with the briskest and most unconcerned air in the world.

"Why didn't you ever show me that story, Mara?" said Moses.

Mara colored and hesitated; the real reason she dared not say.

"Why, she read it to father and me down by the cove," said Sally, "the
afternoon that you came home from the Banks; I remember how we saw you
coming in; don't you, Mara?"

"What have you done with it?" said Moses.

"I've got it at home," said Mara, in a faint voice; "I'll show it to
you, if you want to see it; there are such beautiful things in it."

That evening, as Moses sat busy, making some alterations in his darling
schooner, Mara produced her treasure, and read and explained to him the
story. He listened with interest, though without any of the extreme
feeling which Mara had thought possible, and even interrupted her once
in the middle of the celebrated--

    "Full fathom five thy father lies,"

by asking her to hold up the mast a minute, while he drove in a peg to
make it rake a little more. He was, evidently, thinking of no drowned
father, and dreaming of no possible sea-caves, but acutely busy in
fashioning a present reality; and yet he liked to hear Mara read, and,
when she had done, told her that he thought it was a pretty--quite a
pretty story, with such a total absence of recognition that the story
had any affinities with his own history, that Mara was quite astonished.

She lay and thought about him hours, that night, after she had gone to
bed; and he lay and thought about a new way of disposing a pulley for
raising a sail, which he determined to try the effect of early in the
morning.

What was the absolute truth in regard to the boy? Had he forgotten the
scenes of his early life, the strange catastrophe that cast him into his
present circumstances? To this we answer that all the efforts of Nature,
during the early years of a healthy childhood, are bent on effacing and
obliterating painful impressions, wiping out from each day the sorrows
of the last, as the daily tide effaces the furrows on the seashore. The
child that broods, day after day, over some fixed idea, is so far forth
not a healthy one. It is Nature's way to make first a healthy animal,
and then develop in it gradually higher faculties. We have seen our two
children unequally matched hitherto, because unequally developed. There
will come a time, by and by in the history of the boy, when the haze of
dreamy curiosity will steam up likewise from his mind, and vague
yearnings, and questionings, and longings possess and trouble him, but
it must be some years hence.

       *       *       *       *       *

Here for a season we leave both our child friends, and when ten years
have passed over their heads,--when Moses shall be twenty, and Mara
seventeen,--we will return again to tell their story, for then there
will be one to tell. Let us suppose in the interval, how Moses and Mara
read Virgil with the minister, and how Mara works a shepherdess with
Miss Emily, which astonishes the neighborhood,--but how by herself she
learns, after divers trials, to paint partridge, and checkerberry, and
trailing arbutus,--how Moses makes better and better ships, and Sally
grows up a handsome girl, and goes up to Brunswick to the high
school,--how Captain Kittridge tells stories, and Miss Roxy and Miss
Ruey nurse and cut and make and mend for the still rising
generation,--how there are quiltings and tea-drinkings and prayer
meetings and Sunday sermons,--how Zephaniah and Mary Pennel grow old
gradually and graciously, as the sun rises and sets, and the eternal
silver tide rises and falls around our little gem, Orr's Island.




CHAPTER XVIII

SALLY


"Now, where's Sally Kittridge! There's the clock striking five, and
nobody to set the table. Sally, I say! Sally!"

"Why, Mis' Kittridge," said the Captain, "Sally's gone out more'n an
hour ago, and I expect she's gone down to Pennel's to see Mara; 'cause,
you know, she come home from Portland to-day."

"Well, if she's come home, I s'pose I may as well give up havin' any
good of Sally, for that girl fairly bows down to Mara Lincoln and
worships her."

"Well, good reason," said the Captain. "There ain't a puttier creature
breathin'. I'm a'most a mind to worship her myself."

"Captain Kittridge, you ought to be ashamed of yourself, at your age,
talking as you do."

"Why, laws, mother, I don't feel my age," said the frisky Captain,
giving a sort of skip. "It don't seem more'n yesterday since you and I
was a-courtin', Polly. What a life you did lead me in them days! I think
you kep' me on the anxious seat a pretty middlin' spell."

"I do wish you wouldn't talk so. You ought to be ashamed to be triflin'
round as you do. Come, now, can't you jest tramp over to Pennel's and
tell Sally I want her?"

"Not I, mother. There ain't but two gals in two miles square here, and I
ain't a-goin' to be the feller to shoo 'em apart. What's the use of
bein' gals, and young, and putty, if they can't get together and talk
about their new gownds and the fellers? That ar's what gals is for."

"I do wish you wouldn't talk in that way before Sally, father, for her
head is full of all sorts of vanity now; and as to Mara, I never did see
a more slack-twisted, flimsy thing than she's grown up to be. Now
Sally's learnt to do something, thanks to me. She can brew, and she can
make bread and cake and pickles, and spin, and cut, and make. But as to
Mara, what does she do? Why, she paints pictur's. Mis' Pennel was
a-showin' on me a blue-jay she painted, and I was a-thinkin' whether she
could brile a bird fit to be eat if she tried; and she don't know the
price of nothin'," continued Mrs. Kittridge, with wasteful profusion of
negatives.

"Well," said the Captain, "the Lord makes some things jist to be looked
at. Their work is to be putty, and that ar's Mara's sphere. It never
seemed to me she was cut out for hard work; but she's got sweet ways and
kind words for everybody, and it's as good as a psalm to look at her."

"And what sort of a wife'll she make, Captain Kittridge?"

"A real sweet, putty one," said the Captain, persistently.

"Well, as to beauty, I'd rather have our Sally any day," said Mrs.
Kittridge; "and she looks strong and hearty, and seems to be good for
use."

"So she is, so she is," said the Captain, with fatherly pride. "Sally's
the very image of her ma at her age--black eyes, black hair, tall and
trim as a spruce-tree, and steps off as if she had springs in her heels.
I tell you, the feller'll have to be spry that catches her. There's two
or three of 'em at it, I see; but Sally won't have nothin' to say to
'em. I hope she won't, yet awhile."

"Sally is a girl that has as good an eddication as money can give,"
said Mrs. Kittridge. "If I'd a-had her advantages at her age, I should
a-been a great deal more'n I am. But we ha'n't spared nothin' for Sally;
and when nothin' would do but Mara must be sent to Miss Plucher's school
over in Portland, why, I sent Sally too--for all she's our seventh
child, and Pennel hasn't but the one."

"You forget Moses," said the Captain.

"Well, he's settin' up on his own account, I guess. They did talk o'
giving him college eddication; but he was so unstiddy, there weren't no
use in trying. A real wild ass's colt he was."

"Wal', wal', Moses was in the right on't. He took the cross-lot track
into life," said the Captain. "Colleges is well enough for your smooth,
straight-grained lumber, for gen'ral buildin'; but come to fellers
that's got knots, and streaks, and cross-grains, like Moses Pennel, and
the best way is to let 'em eddicate 'emselves, as he's a-doin'. He's cut
out for the sea, plain enough, and he'd better be up to Umbagog, cuttin'
timber for his ship, than havin' rows with tutors, and blowin' the roof
off the colleges, as one o' them 'ere kind o' fellers is apt to when he
don't have work to use up his steam. Why, mother, there's more gas got
up in them Brunswick buildin's, from young men that are spilin' for hard
work, than you could shake a stick at! But Mis' Pennel told me yesterday
she was 'spectin' Moses home to-day."

"Oho! that's at the bottom of Sally's bein' up there," said Mrs.
Kittridge.

"Mis' Kittridge," said the Captain, "I take it you ain't the woman as
would expect a daughter of your bringin' up to be a-runnin' after any
young chap, be he who he may," said the Captain.

Mrs. Kittridge for once was fairly silenced by this home-thrust;
nevertheless, she did not the less think it quite possible, from all
that she knew of Sally; for although that young lady professed great
hardness of heart and contempt for all the young male generation of her
acquaintance, yet she had evidently a turn for observing their
ways--probably purely in the way of philosophical inquiry.




CHAPTER XIX

EIGHTEEN


In fact, at this very moment our scene-shifter changes the picture. Away
rolls the image of Mrs. Kittridge's kitchen, with its sanded floor, its
scoured rows of bright pewter platters, its great, deep fireplace, with
wide stone hearth, its little looking-glass with a bit of asparagus
bush, like a green mist, over it. _Exeunt_ the image of Mrs. Kittridge,
with her hands floury from the bread she has been moulding, and the dry,
ropy, lean Captain, who has been sitting tilting back in a
splint-bottomed chair,--and the next scene comes rolling in. It is a
chamber in the house of Zephaniah Pennel, whose windows present a blue
panorama of sea and sky. Through two windows you look forth into the
blue belt of Harpswell Bay, bordered on the farther edge by Harpswell
Neck, dotted here and there with houses, among which rises the little
white meeting-house, like a mother-bird among a flock of chickens. The
third window, on the other side of the room, looks far out to sea, where
only a group of low, rocky islands interrupts the clear sweep of the
horizon line, with its blue infinitude of distance.

The furniture of this room, though of the barest and most frigid
simplicity, is yet relieved by many of those touches of taste and fancy
which the indwelling of a person of sensibility and imagination will
shed off upon the physical surroundings. The bed was draped with a white
spread, embroidered with a kind of knotted tracery, the working of which
was considered among the female accomplishments of those days, and over
the head of it was a painting of a bunch of crimson and white trillium,
executed with a fidelity to Nature that showed the most delicate gifts
of observation. Over the mantelpiece hung a painting of the Bay of
Genoa, which had accidentally found a voyage home in Zephaniah Pennel's
sea-chest, and which skillful fingers had surrounded with a frame
curiously wrought of moss and sea-shells. Two vases of India china stood
on the mantel, filled with spring flowers, crowfoot, anemones, and
liverwort, with drooping bells of the twin-flower. The looking-glass
that hung over the table in one corner of the room was fancifully webbed
with long, drooping festoons of that gray moss which hangs in such
graceful wreaths from the boughs of the pines in the deep forest shadows
of Orr's Island. On the table below was a collection of books: a whole
set of Shakespeare which Zephaniah Pennel had bought of a Portland
bookseller; a selection, in prose and verse, from the best classic
writers, presented to Mara Lincoln, the fly-leaf said, by her sincere
friend, Theophilus Sewell; a Virgil, much thumbed, with an old, worn
cover, which, however, some adroit fingers had concealed under a coating
of delicately marbled paper;--there was a Latin dictionary, a set of
Plutarch's Lives, the Mysteries of Udolpho, and Sir Charles Grandison,
together with Edwards on the Affections, and Boston's Fourfold
State;--there was an inkstand, curiously contrived from a sea-shell,
with pens and paper in that phase of arrangement which betokened
frequency of use; and, lastly, a little work-basket, containing a long
strip of curious and delicate embroidery, in which the needle yet
hanging showed that the work was in progress.

By a table at the sea-looking window sits our little Mara, now grown to
the maturity of eighteen summers, but retaining still unmistakable signs
of identity with the little golden-haired, dreamy, excitable, fanciful
"Pearl" of Orr's _Island_.

She is not quite of a middle height, with something beautiful and
child-like about the moulding of her delicate form. We still see those
sad, wistful, hazel eyes, over which the lids droop with a dreamy
languor, and whose dark lustre contrasts singularly with the golden hue
of the abundant hair which waves in a thousand rippling undulations
around her face. The impression she produces is not that of paleness,
though there is no color in her cheek; but her complexion has everywhere
that delicate pink tinting which one sees in healthy infants, and with
the least emotion brightens into a fluttering bloom. Such a bloom is on
her cheek at this moment, as she is working away, copying a bunch of
scarlet rock-columbine which is in a wine-glass of water before her;
every few moments stopping and holding her work at a distance, to
contemplate its effect. At this moment there steps behind her chair a
tall, lithe figure, a face with a rich Spanish complexion, large black
eyes, glowing cheeks, marked eyebrows, and lustrous black hair arranged
in shining braids around her head. It is our old friend, Sally
Kittridge, whom common fame calls the handsomest girl of all the region
round Harpswell, Maquoit, and Orr's Island. In truth, a wholesome,
ruddy, blooming creature she was, the sight of whom cheered and warmed
one like a good fire in December; and she seemed to have enough and to
spare of the warmest gifts of vitality and joyous animal life. She had a
well-formed mouth, but rather large, and a frank laugh which showed all
her teeth sound--and a fortunate sight it was, considering that they
were white and even as pearls; and the hand that she laid upon Mara's at
this moment, though twice as large as that of the little artist, was yet
in harmony with her vigorous, finely developed figure.

"Mara Lincoln," she said, "you are a witch, a perfect little witch, at
painting. How you can make things look so like, I don't see. Now, I
could paint the things we painted at Miss Plucher's; but then, dear me!
they didn't look at all like flowers. One needed to write under them
what they were made for."

"Does this look like to you, Sally?" said Mara. "I wish it would to me.
Just see what a beautiful clear color that flower is. All I can do, I
can't make one like it. My scarlet and yellows sink dead into the
paper."

"Why, I think your flowers are wonderful! You are a real genius, that's
what you are! I am only a common girl; I can't do things as you can."

"You can do things a thousand times more useful, Sally. I don't pretend
to compare with you in the useful arts, and I am only a bungler in
ornamental ones. Sally, I feel like a useless little creature. If I
could go round as you can, and do business, and make bargains, and push
ahead in the world, I should feel that I was good for something; but
somehow I can't."

"To be sure you can't," said Sally, laughing. "I should like to see you
try it."

"Now," pursued Mara, in a tone of lamentation, "I could no more get into
a carriage and drive to Brunswick as you can, than I could fly. I can't
drive, Sally--something is the matter with me; and the horses always
know it the minute I take the reins; they always twitch their ears and
stare round into the chaise at me, as much as to say, 'What! you there?'
and I feel sure they never will mind me. And then how you can make those
wonderful bargains you do, I can't see!--you talk up to the clerks and
the men, and somehow you talk everybody round; but as for me, if I only
open my mouth in the humblest way to dispute the price, everybody puts
me down. I always tremble when I go into a store, and people talk to me
just as if I was a little girl, and once or twice they have made me buy
things that I knew I didn't want, just because they will talk me down."

"Oh, Mara, Mara," said Sally, laughing till the tears rolled down her
cheeks, "what do _you_ ever go a-shopping for?--of course you ought
always to send me. Why, look at this dress--real India chintz; do you
know I made old Pennywhistle's clerk up in Brunswick give it to me just
for the price of common cotton? You see there was a yard of it had got
faded by lying in the shop-window, and there were one or two holes and
imperfections in it, and you ought to have heard the talk I made! I
abused it to right and left, and actually at last I brought the poor
wretch to believe that he ought to be grateful to me for taking it off
his hands. Well, you see the dress I've made of it. The imperfections
didn't hurt it the least in the world as I managed it,--and the faded
breadth makes a good apron, so you see. And just so I got that red
spotted flannel dress I wore last winter. It was moth-eaten in one or
two places, and I made them let me have it at half-price;--made exactly
as good a dress. But after all, Mara, I can't trim a bonnet as you can,
and I can't come up to your embroidery, nor your lace-work, nor I can't
draw and paint as you can, and I can't sing like you; and then as to all
those things you talk with Mr. Sewell about, why they're beyond my
depth,--that's all I've got to say. Now, you are made to have poetry
written to you, and all that kind of thing one reads of in novels.
Nobody would ever think of writing poetry to me, now, or sending me
flowers and rings, and such things. If a fellow likes me, he gives me a
quince, or a big apple; but, then, Mara, there ain't any fellows round
here that are fit to speak to."

"I'm sure, Sally, there always is a train following you everywhere, at
singing-school and Thursday lecture."

"Yes--but what do I care for 'em?" said Sally, with a toss of her head.
"Why they follow me, I don't see. I don't do anything to make 'em, and I
tell 'em all that they tire me to death; and still they will hang
round. What is the reason, do you suppose?"

"What can it be?" said Mara, with a quiet kind of arch drollery which
suffused her face, as she bent over her painting.

"Well, you know I can't bear fellows--I think they are hateful."

"What! even Tom Hiers?" said Mara, continuing her painting.

"Tom Hiers! Do you suppose I care for him? He would insist on waiting on
me round all last winter, taking me over in his boat to Portland, and up
in his sleigh to Brunswick; but I didn't care for him."

"Well, there's Jimmy Wilson, up at Brunswick."

"What! that little snip of a clerk! You don't suppose I care for him, do
you?--only he almost runs his head off following me round when I go up
there shopping; he's nothing but a little dressed-up yard-stick! I never
saw a fellow yet that I'd cross the street to have another look at. By
the by, Mara, Miss Roxy told me Sunday that Moses was coming down from
Umbagog this week."

"Yes, he is," said Mara; "we are looking for him every day."

"You must want to see him. How long is it since you saw him?"

"It is three years," said Mara. "I scarcely know what he is like now. I
was visiting in Boston when he came home from his three-years' voyage,
and he was gone into the lumbering country when I came back. He seems
almost a stranger to me."

"He's pretty good-looking," said Sally. "I saw him on Sunday when he was
here, but he was off on Monday, and never called on old friends. Does he
write to you often?"

"Not very," said Mara; "in fact, almost never; and when he does, there
is so little in his letters."

"Well, I tell you, Mara, you must not expect fellows to write as girls
can. They don't do it. Now, our boys, when they write home, they tell
the latitude and longitude, and soil and productions, and such things.
But if you or I were only there, don't you think we should find
something more to say? Of course we should,--fifty thousand little
things that they never think of."

Mara made no reply to this, but went on very intently with her painting.
A close observer might have noticed a suppressed sigh that seemed to
retreat far down into her heart. Sally did not notice it.

What was in that sigh? It was the sigh of a long, deep, inner history,
unwritten and untold--such as are transpiring daily by thousands, and of
which we take no heed.




CHAPTER XX

REBELLION


We have introduced Mara to our readers as she appears in her seventeenth
year, at the time when she is expecting the return of Moses as a young
man of twenty; but we cannot do justice to the feelings which are roused
in her heart by this expectation, without giving a chapter or two to
tracing the history of Moses since we left him as a boy commencing the
study of the Latin grammar with Mr. Sewell. The reader must see the
forces that acted upon his early development, and what they have made of
him.

It is common for people who write treatises on education to give forth
their rules and theories with a self-satisfied air, as if a human being
were a thing to be made up, like a batch of bread, out of a given number
of materials combined by an infallible recipe. Take your child, and do
thus and so for a given number of years, and he comes out a thoroughly
educated individual.

But in fact, education is in many cases nothing more than a blind
struggle of parents and guardians with the evolutions of some strong,
predetermined character, individual, obstinate, unreceptive, and seeking
by an inevitable law of its being to develop itself and gain free
expression in its own way. Captain Kittridge's confidence that he would
as soon undertake a boy as a Newfoundland pup, is good for those whose
idea of what is to be done for a human being are only what would be done
for a dog, namely, give food, shelter, and world-room, and leave each to
act out his own nature without let or hindrance.

But everybody takes an embryo human being with some plan of one's own
what it shall do or be. The child's future shall shape out some darling
purpose or plan, and fulfill some long unfulfilled expectation of the
parent. And thus, though the wind of every generation sweeps its hopes
and plans like forest-leaves, none are whirled and tossed with more
piteous moans than those which come out green and fresh to shade the
happy spring-time of the cradle. For the temperaments of children are
often as oddly unsuited to parents as if capricious fairies had been
filling cradles with changelings.

A meek member of the Peace Society, a tender, devout, poetical
clergyman, receives an heir from heaven, and straightway devotes him to
the Christian ministry. But lo! the boy proves a young war-horse,
neighing for battle, burning for gunpowder and guns, for bowie-knives
and revolvers, and for every form and expression of physical force;--he
might make a splendid trapper, an energetic sea-captain, a bold, daring
military man, but his whole boyhood is full of rebukes and disciplines
for sins which are only the blind effort of the creature to express a
nature which his parent does not and cannot understand. So again, the
son that was to have upheld the old, proud merchant's time-honored firm,
that should have been mighty in ledgers and great upon 'Change, breaks
his father's heart by an unintelligible fancy for weaving poems and
romances. A father of literary aspirations, balked of privileges of
early education, bends over the cradle of his son with but one idea.
This child shall have the full advantages of regular college-training;
and so for years he battles with a boy abhorring study, and fitted only
for a life of out-door energy and bold adventure,--on whom Latin forms
and Greek quantities fall and melt aimless and useless, as snow-flakes
on the hide of a buffalo. Then the secret agonies,--the long years of
sorrowful watchings of those gentler nurses of humanity who receive the
infant into their bosom out of the void unknown, and strive to read its
horoscope through the mists of their prayers and tears!--what
perplexities,--what confusion! Especially is this so in a community
where the moral and religious sense is so cultivated as in New England,
and frail, trembling, self-distrustful mothers are told that the shaping
and ordering not only of this present life, but of an immortal destiny,
is in their hands.

On the whole, those who succeed best in the rearing of children are the
tolerant and easy persons who instinctively follow nature and accept
without much inquiry whatever she sends; or that far smaller class, wise
to discern spirits and apt to adopt means to their culture and
development, who can prudently and carefully train every nature
according to its true and characteristic ideal.

Zephaniah Pennel was a shrewd old Yankee, whose instincts taught him
from the first, that the waif that had been so mysteriously washed out
of the gloom of the sea into his family, was of some different class and
lineage from that which might have filled a cradle of his own, and of a
nature which he could not perfectly understand. So he prudently watched
and waited, only using restraint enough to keep the boy anchored in
society, and letting him otherwise grow up in the solitary freedom of
his lonely seafaring life.

The boy was from childhood, although singularly attractive, of a moody,
fitful, unrestful nature,--eager, earnest, but unsteady,--with varying
phases of imprudent frankness and of the most stubborn and unfathomable
secretiveness. He was a creature of unreasoning antipathies and
attractions. As Zephaniah Pennel said of him, he was as full of hitches
as an old bureau drawer. His peculiar beauty, and a certain electrical
power of attraction, seemed to form a constant circle of protection and
forgiveness around him in the home of his foster-parents; and great as
was the anxiety and pain which he often gave them, they somehow never
felt the charge of him as a weariness.

We left him a boy beginning Latin with Mr. Sewell in company with the
little Mara. This arrangement progressed prosperously for a time, and
the good clergyman, all whose ideas of education ran through the halls
of a college, began to have hopes of turning out a choice scholar. But
when the boy's ship of life came into the breakers of that narrow and
intricate channel which divides boyhood from manhood, the difficulties
that had always attended his guidance and management wore an intensified
form. How much family happiness is wrecked just then and there! How many
mothers' and sisters' hearts are broken in the wild and confused
tossings and tearings of that stormy transition! A whole new nature is
blindly upheaving itself, with cravings and clamorings, which neither
the boy himself nor often surrounding friends understand.

A shrewd observer has significantly characterized the period as the time
when the boy wishes he were dead, and everybody else wishes so too. The
wretched, half-fledged, half-conscious, anomalous creature has all the
desires of the man, and none of the rights; has a double and triple
share of nervous edge and intensity in every part of his nature, and no
definitely perceived objects on which to bestow it,--and, of course, all
sorts of unreasonable moods and phases are the result.

One of the most common signs of this period, in some natures, is the
love of contradiction and opposition,--a blind desire to go contrary to
everything that is commonly received among the older people. The boy
disparages the minister, quizzes the deacon, thinks the school-master an
ass, and doesn't believe in the Bible, and seems to be rather pleased
than otherwise with the shock and flutter that all these announcements
create among peaceably disposed grown people. No respectable hen that
ever hatched out a brood of ducks was more puzzled what to do with them
than was poor Mrs. Pennel when her adopted nursling came into this
state. Was he a boy? an immortal soul? a reasonable human being? or only
a handsome goblin sent to torment her?

"What shall we do with him, father?" said she, one Sunday, to Zephaniah,
as he stood shaving before the little looking-glass in their bedroom.
"He can't be governed like a child, and he won't govern himself like a
man."

Zephaniah stopped and strapped his razor reflectively.

"We must cast out anchor and wait for day," he answered. "Prayer is a
long rope with a strong hold."

It was just at this critical period of life that Moses Pennel was drawn
into associations which awoke the alarm of all his friends, and from
which the characteristic willfulness of his nature made it difficult to
attempt to extricate him.

In order that our readers may fully understand this part of our history,
we must give some few particulars as to the peculiar scenery of Orr's
Island and the state of the country at this time.

The coast of Maine, as we have elsewhere said, is remarkable for a
singular interpenetration of the sea with the land, forming amid its
dense primeval forests secluded bays, narrow and deep, into which
vessels might float with the tide, and where they might nestle unseen
and unsuspected amid the dense shadows of the overhanging forest.

At this time there was a very brisk business done all along the coast of
Maine in the way of smuggling. Small vessels, lightly built and swift of
sail, would run up into these sylvan fastnesses, and there make their
deposits and transact their business so as entirely to elude the
vigilance of government officers.

It may seem strange that practices of this kind should ever have
obtained a strong foothold in a community peculiar for its rigid
morality and its orderly submission to law; but in this case, as in many
others, contempt of law grew out of weak and unworthy legislation. The
celebrated embargo of Jefferson stopped at once the whole trade of New
England, and condemned her thousand ships to rot at the wharves, and
caused the ruin of thousands of families.

The merchants of the country regarded this as a flagrant, high-handed
piece of injustice, expressly designed to cripple New England commerce,
and evasions of this unjust law found everywhere a degree of sympathy,
even in the breasts of well-disposed and conscientious people. In
resistance to the law, vessels were constantly fitted out which ran upon
trading voyages to the West Indies and other places; and although the
practice was punishable as smuggling, yet it found extensive connivance.
From this beginning smuggling of all kinds gradually grew up in the
community, and gained such a foothold that even after the repeal of the
embargo it still continued to be extensively practiced. Secret
depositories of contraband goods still existed in many of the lonely
haunts of islands off the coast of Maine. Hid in deep forest shadows,
visited only in the darkness of the night, were these illegal stores of
merchandise. And from these secluded resorts they found their way, no
one knew or cared to say how, into houses for miles around.

There was no doubt that the practice, like all other illegal ones, was
demoralizing to the community, and particularly fatal to the character
of that class of bold, enterprising young men who would be most likely
to be drawn into it.

Zephaniah Pennel, who was made of a kind of straight-grained,
uncompromising oaken timber such as built the Mayflower of old, had
always borne his testimony at home and abroad against any violations of
the laws of the land, however veiled under the pretext of righting a
wrong or resisting an injustice, and had done what he could in his
neighborhood to enable government officers to detect and break up these
unlawful depositories. This exposed him particularly to the hatred and
ill-will of the operators concerned in such affairs, and a plot was laid
by a few of the most daring and determined of them to establish one of
their depositories on Orr's Island, and to implicate the family of
Pennel himself in the trade. This would accomplish two purposes, as they
hoped,--it would be a mortification and defeat to him,--a revenge which
they coveted; and it would, they thought, insure his silence and
complicity for the strongest reasons.

The situation and characteristics of Orr's Island peculiarly fitted it
for the carrying out of a scheme of this kind, and for this purpose we
must try to give our readers a more definite idea of it.

The traveler who wants a ride through scenery of more varied and
singular beauty than can ordinarily be found on the shores of any land
whatever, should start some fine clear day along the clean sandy road,
ribboned with strips of green grass, that leads through the flat
pitch-pine forests of Brunswick toward the sea. As he approaches the
salt water, a succession of the most beautiful and picturesque lakes
seems to be lying softly cradled in the arms of wild, rocky forest
shores, whose outlines are ever changing with the windings of the road.

At a distance of about six or eight miles from Brunswick he crosses an
arm of the sea, and comes upon the first of the interlacing group of
islands which beautifies the shore. A ride across this island is a
constant succession of pictures, whose wild and solitary beauty entirely
distances all power of description. The magnificence of the evergreen
forests,--their peculiar air of sombre stillness,--the rich
intermingling ever and anon of groves of birch, beech, and oak, in
picturesque knots and tufts, as if set for effect by some skillful
landscape-gardener,--produce a sort of strange dreamy wonder; while the
sea, breaking forth both on the right hand and the left of the road into
the most romantic glimpses, seems to flash and glitter like some strange
gem which every moment shows itself through the framework of a new
setting. Here and there little secluded coves push in from the sea,
around which lie soft tracts of green meadow-land, hemmed in and guarded
by rocky pine-crowned ridges. In such sheltered spots may be seen neat
white houses, nestling like sheltered doves in the beautiful solitude.

When one has ridden nearly to the end of Great Island, which is about
four miles across, he sees rising before him, from the sea, a bold
romantic point of land, uplifting a crown of rich evergreen and forest
trees over shores of perpendicular rock. This is Orr's Island.

It was not an easy matter in the days of our past experience to guide a
horse and carriage down the steep, wild shores of Great Island to the
long bridge that connects it with Orr's. The sense of wild seclusion
reaches here the highest degree; and one crosses the bridge with a
feeling as if genii might have built it, and one might be going over it
to fairy-land. From the bridge the path rises on to a high granite
ridge, which runs from one end of the island to the other, and has been
called the Devil's Back, with that superstitious generosity which seems
to have abandoned all romantic places to so undeserving an owner.

By the side of this ridge of granite is a deep, narrow chasm, running a
mile and a half or two miles parallel with the road, and veiled by the
darkest and most solemn shadows of the primeval forest. Here scream the
jays and the eagles, and fish-hawks make their nests undisturbed; and
the tide rises and falls under black branches of evergreen, from which
depend long, light festoons of delicate gray moss. The darkness of the
forest is relieved by the delicate foliage and the silvery trunks of
the great white birches, which the solitude of centuries has allowed to
grow in this spot to a height and size seldom attained elsewhere.

It was this narrow, rocky cove that had been chosen by the smuggler
Atkinson and his accomplices as a safe and secluded resort for their
operations. He was a seafaring man of Bath, one of that class who always
prefer uncertain and doubtful courses to those which are safe and
reputable. He was possessed of many of those traits calculated to make
him a hero in the eyes of young men; was dashing, free, and frank in his
manners, with a fund of humor and an abundance of ready anecdote which
made his society fascinating; but he concealed beneath all these
attractions a character of hard, grasping, unscrupulous selfishness, and
an utter destitution of moral principle.

Moses, now in his sixteenth year, and supposed to be in a general way
doing well, under the care of the minister, was left free to come and go
at his own pleasure, unwatched by Zephaniah, whose fishing operations
often took him for weeks from home. Atkinson hung about the boy's path,
engaging him first in fishing or hunting enterprises; plied him with
choice preparations of liquor, with which he would enhance the hilarity
of their expeditions; and finally worked on his love of adventure and
that impatient restlessness incident to his period of life to draw him
fully into his schemes. Moses lost all interest in his lessons, often
neglecting them for days at a time--accounting for his negligence by
excuses which were far from satisfactory. When Mara would expostulate
with him about this, he would break out upon her with a fierce
irritation. Was he always going to be tied to a girl's apron-string? He
was tired of study, and tired of old Sewell, whom he declared an old
granny in a white wig, who knew nothing of the world. He wasn't going to
college--it was altogether too slow for him--he was going to see life
and push ahead for himself.

Mara's life during this time was intensely wearing. A frail, slender,
delicate girl of thirteen, she carried a heart prematurely old with the
most distressing responsibility of mature life. Her love for Moses had
always had in it a large admixture of that maternal and care-taking
element which, in some shape or other, qualities the affection of woman
to man. Ever since that dream of babyhood, when the vision of a pale
mother had led the beautiful boy to her arms, Mara had accepted him as
something exclusively her own, with an intensity of ownership that
seemed almost to merge her personal identity with his. She felt, and
saw, and enjoyed, and suffered in him, and yet was conscious of a higher
nature in herself, by which unwillingly he was often judged and
condemned. His faults affected her with a kind of guilty pain, as if
they were her own; his sins were borne bleeding in her heart in silence,
and with a jealous watchfulness to hide them from every eye but hers.
She busied herself day and night interceding and making excuses for him,
first to her own sensitive moral nature, and then with everybody around,
for with one or another he was coming into constant collision. She felt
at this time a fearful load of suspicion, which she dared not express to
a human being.

Up to this period she had always been the only confidant of Moses, who
poured into her ear without reserve all the good and the evil of his
nature, and who loved her with all the intensity with which he was
capable of loving anything. Nothing so much shows what a human being is
in moral advancement as the quality of his love. Moses Pennel's love was
egotistic, exacting, tyrannical, and capricious--sometimes venting
itself in expressions of a passionate fondness, which had a savor of
protecting generosity in them, and then receding to the icy pole of
surly petulance. For all that, there was no resisting the magnetic
attraction with which in his amiable moods he drew those whom he liked
to himself.

Such people are not very wholesome companions for those who are
sensitively organized and predisposed to self-sacrificing love. They
keep the heart in a perpetual freeze and thaw, which, like the American
northern climate, is so particularly fatal to plants of a delicate
habit. They could live through the hot summer and the cold winter, but
they cannot endure the three or four months when it freezes one day and
melts the next,--when all the buds are started out by a week of genial
sunshine, and then frozen for a fortnight. These fitful persons are of
all others most engrossing, because you are always sure in their good
moods that they are just going to be angels,--an expectation which no
number of disappointments seems finally to do away. Mara believed in
Moses's future as she did in her own existence. He was going to do
something great and good,--that she was certain of. He would be a
splendid man! Nobody, she thought, knew him as she did; nobody could
know how good and generous he was _sometimes_, and how frankly he would
confess his faults, and what noble aspirations he had!

But there was no concealing from her watchful sense that Moses was
beginning to have secrets from her. He was cloudy and murky; and at some
of the most harmless inquiries in the world, would flash out with a
sudden temper, as if she had touched some sore spot. Her bedroom was
opposite to his; and she became quite sure that night after night, while
she lay thinking of him, she heard him steal down out of the house
between two and three o'clock, and not return till a little before
day-dawn. Where he went, and with whom, and what he was doing, was to
her an awful mystery,--and it was one she dared not share with a human
being. If she told her kind old grandfather, she feared that any
inquiry from him would only light as a spark on that inflammable spirit
of pride and insubordination that was rising within him, and bring on an
instantaneous explosion. Mr. Sewell's influence she could hope little
more from; and as to poor Mrs. Pennel, such communications would only
weary and distress her, without doing any manner of good. There was,
therefore, only that one unfailing Confidant--the Invisible Friend to
whom the solitary child could pour out her heart, and whose inspirations
of comfort and guidance never fail to come again in return to true
souls.

One moonlight night, as she lay thus praying, her senses, sharpened by
watching, discerned a sound of steps treading under her window, and then
a low whistle. Her heart beat violently, and she soon heard the door of
Moses's room open, and then the old chamber-stairs gave forth those
inconsiderate creaks and snaps that garrulous old stairs always will
when anybody is desirous of making them accomplices in a night-secret.
Mara rose, and undrawing her curtain, saw three men standing before the
house, and saw Moses come out and join them. Quick as thought she threw
on her clothes and wrapping her little form in a dark cloak, with a
hood, followed them out. She kept at a safe distance behind them,--so
far back as just to keep them in sight. They never looked back, and
seemed to say but little till they approached the edge of that deep belt
of forest which shrouds so large a portion of the island. She hurried
along, now nearer to them lest they should be lost to view in the deep
shadows, while they went on crackling and plunging through the dense
underbrush.




CHAPTER XXI

THE TEMPTER


It was well for Mara that so much of her life had been passed in wild
forest rambles. She looked frail as the rays of moonbeam which slid down
the old white-bearded hemlocks, but her limbs were agile and supple as
steel; and while the party went crashing on before, she followed with
such lightness that the slight sound of her movements was entirely lost
in the heavy crackling plunges of the party. Her little heart was
beating fast and hard; but could any one have seen her face, as it now
and then came into a spot of moonshine, they might have seen it fixed in
a deadly expression of resolve and determination. She was going after
_him_--no matter where; she was resolved to know who and what it was
that was leading him away, as her heart told her, to no good. Deeper and
deeper into the shadows of the forest they went, and the child easily
kept up with them.

Mara had often rambled for whole solitary days in this lonely wood, and
knew all its rocks and dells the whole three miles to the long bridge at
the other end of the island. But she had never before seen it under the
solemn stillness of midnight moonlight, which gives to the most familiar
objects such a strange, ghostly charm. After they had gone a mile into
the forest, she could see through the black spruces silver gleams of the
sea, and hear, amid the whirr and sway of the pine-tops, the dash of the
ever restless tide which pushed up the long cove. It was at the full, as
she could discern with a rapid glance of her practiced eye, expertly
versed in the knowledge of every change of the solitary nature around.

And now the party began to plunge straight down the rocky ledge of the
Devil's Back, on which they had been walking hitherto, into the deep
ravine where lay the cove. It was a scrambling, precipitous way, over
perpendicular walls of rock, whose crevices furnished anchoring-places
for grand old hemlocks or silver-birches, and whose rough sides,
leathery with black flaps of lichen, were all tangled and interlaced
with thick netted bushes. The men plunged down laughing, shouting, and
swearing at their occasional missteps, and silently as moonbeam or
thistledown the light-footed shadow went down after them.

She suddenly paused behind a pile of rock, as, through an opening
between two great spruces, the sea gleamed out like a sheet of
looking-glass set in a black frame. And here the child saw a small
vessel swinging at anchor, with the moonlight full on its slack sails,
and she could hear the gentle gurgle and lick of the green-tongued waves
as they dashed under it toward the rocky shore.

Mara stopped with a beating heart as she saw the company making for the
schooner. The tide is high; will they go on board and sail away with him
where she cannot follow? What could she do? In an ecstasy of fear she
kneeled down and asked God not to let him go,--to give her at least one
more chance to save him.

For the pure and pious child had heard enough of the words of these men,
as she walked behind them, to fill her with horror. She had never before
heard an oath, but there came back from these men coarse, brutal tones
and words of blasphemy that froze her blood with horror. And Moses was
going with them! She felt somehow as if they must be a company of fiends
bearing him to his ruin.

For some time she kneeled there watching behind the rock, while Moses
and his companions went on board the little schooner. She had no
feeling of horror at the loneliness of her own situation, for her
solitary life had made every woodland thing dear and familiar to her.
She was cowering down, on a loose, spongy bed of moss, which was all
threaded through and through with the green vines and pale pink blossoms
of the mayflower, and she felt its fragrant breath streaming up in the
moist moonlight. As she leaned forward to look through a rocky crevice,
her arms rested on a bed of that brittle white moss she had often
gathered with so much admiration, and a scarlet rock-columbine, such as
she loved to paint, brushed her cheek,--and all these mute fair things
seemed to strive to keep her company in her chill suspense of
watchfulness. Two whippoorwills, from a clump of silvery birches, kept
calling to each other in melancholy iteration, while she stayed there
still listening, and knowing by an occasional sound of laughing, or the
explosion of some oath, that the men were not yet gone. At last they all
appeared again, and came to a cleared place among the dry leaves, quite
near to the rock where she was concealed, and kindled a fire which they
kept snapping and crackling by a constant supply of green resinous
hemlock branches.

The red flame danced and leaped through the green fuel, and leaping
upward in tongues of flame, cast ruddy bronze reflections on the old
pine-trees with their long branches waving with boards of white
moss,--and by the firelight Mara could see two men in sailor's dress
with pistols in their belts, and the man Atkinson, whom she had
recollected as having seen once or twice at her grandfather's. She
remembered how she had always shrunk from him with a strange instinctive
dislike, half fear, half disgust, when he had addressed her with that
kind of free admiration which men of his class often feel themselves at
liberty to express to a pretty girl of her early age. He was a man that
might have been handsome, had it not been for a certain strange
expression of covert wickedness. It was as if some vile evil spirit,
walking, as the Scriptures say, through dry places, had lighted on a
comely man's body, in which he had set up housekeeping, making it look
like a fair house abused by an unclean owner.

As Mara watched his demeanor with Moses, she could think only of a
loathsome black snake that she had once seen in those solitary
rocks;--she felt as if his handsome but evil eye were charming him with
an evil charm to his destruction.

"Well, Mo, my boy," she heard him say,--slapping Moses on the
shoulder,--"this is something like. We'll have a 'tempus,' as the
college fellows say,--put down the clams to roast, and I'll mix the
punch," he said, setting over the fire a tea-kettle which they brought
from the ship.

After their preparations were finished, all sat down to eat and drink.
Mara listened with anxiety and horror to a conversation such as she
never heard or conceived before. It is not often that women hear men
talk in the undisguised manner which they use among themselves; but the
conversation of men of unprincipled lives, and low, brutal habits,
unchecked by the presence of respectable female society, might well
convey to the horror-struck child a feeling as if she were listening at
the mouth of hell. Almost every word was preceded or emphasized by an
oath; and what struck with a death chill to her heart was, that Moses
swore too, and seemed to show that desperate anxiety to seem _au fait_
in the language of wickedness, which boys often do at that age, when
they fancy that to be ignorant of vice is a mark of disgraceful
greenness. Moses evidently was bent on showing that he was not
green,--ignorant of the pure ear to which every such word came like the
blast of death.

He drank a great deal, too, and the mirth among them grew furious and
terrific. Mara, horrified and shocked as she was, did not, however, lose
that intense and alert presence of mind, natural to persons in whom
there is moral strength, however delicate be their physical frame. She
felt at once that these men were playing upon Moses; that they had an
object in view; that they were flattering and cajoling him, and leading
him to drink, that they might work out some fiendish purpose of their
own. The man called Atkinson related story after story of wild
adventure, in which sudden fortunes had been made by men who, he said,
were not afraid to take "the short cut across lots." He told of
piratical adventures in the West Indies,--of the fun of chasing and
overhauling ships,--and gave dazzling accounts of the treasures found on
board. It was observable that all these stories were told on the line
between joke and earnest,--as frolics, as specimens of good fun, and
seeing life, etc.

At last came a suggestion,--What if they should start off together some
fine day, "just for a spree," and try a cruise in the West Indies, to
see what they could pick up? They had arms, and a gang of fine,
whole-souled fellows. Moses had been tied to Ma'am Pennel's apron-string
long enough. And "hark ye," said one of them, "Moses, they say old
Pennel has lots of dollars in that old sea-chest of his'n. It would be a
kindness to him to invest them for him in an adventure."

Moses answered with a streak of the boy innocence which often remains
under the tramping of evil men, like ribbons of green turf in the middle
of roads:--

"You don't know Father Pennel,--why, he'd no more come into it than"--

A perfect roar of laughter cut short this declaration, and Atkinson,
slapping Moses on the back, said,--

"By ----, Mo! you are the jolliest green dog! I shall die a-laughing of
your innocence some day. Why, my boy, can't you see? Pennel's money can
be invested without asking him."

"Why, he keeps it locked," said Moses.

"And supposing you pick the lock?"

"Not I, indeed," said Moses, making a sudden movement to rise.

Mara almost screamed in her ecstasy, but she had sense enough to hold
her breath.

"Ho! see him now," said Atkinson, lying back, and holding his sides
while he laughed, and rolled over; "you can get off anything on that
muff,--any hoax in the world,--he's so soft! Come, come, my dear boy,
sit down. I was only seeing how wide I could make you open those great
black eyes of your'n,--that's all."

"You'd better take care how you joke with me," said Moses, with that
look of gloomy determination which Mara was quite familiar with of old.
It was the rallying effort of a boy who had abandoned the first outworks
of virtue to make a stand for the citadel. And Atkinson, like a prudent
besieger after a repulse, returned to lie on his arms.

He began talking volubly on other subjects, telling stories, and singing
songs, and pressing Moses to drink.

Mara was comforted to see that he declined drinking,--that he looked
gloomy and thoughtful, in spite of the jokes of his companions; but she
trembled to see, by the following conversation, how Atkinson was
skillfully and prudently making apparent to Moses the extent to which he
had him in his power. He seemed to Mara like an ugly spider skillfully
weaving his web around a fly. She felt cold and faint; but within her
there was a heroic strength.

She was not going to faint; she would make herself bear up. She was
going to do something to get Moses out of this snare,--but what? At last
they rose.

"It is past three o'clock," she heard one of them say.

"I say, Mo," said Atkinson, "you must make tracks for home, or you won't
be in bed when Mother Pennel calls you."

The men all laughed at this joke, as they turned to go on board the
schooner.

When they were gone, Moses threw himself down and hid his face in his
hands. He knew not what pitying little face was looking down upon him
from the hemlock shadows, what brave little heart was determined to save
him. He was in one of those great crises of agony that boys pass through
when they first awake from the fun and frolic of unlawful enterprises to
find themselves sold under sin, and feel the terrible logic of evil
which constrains them to pass from the less to greater crime. He felt
that he was in the power of bad, unprincipled, heartless men, who, if he
refused to do their bidding, had the power to expose him. All he had
been doing would come out. His kind old foster-parents would know it.
Mara would know it. Mr. Sewell and Miss Emily would know the secrets of
his life that past month. He felt as if they were all looking at him
now. He had disgraced himself,--had sunk below his education,--had been
false to all his better knowledge and the past expectations of his
friends, living a mean, miserable, dishonorable life,--and now the
ground was fast sliding from under him, and the next plunge might be
down a precipice from which there would be no return. What he had done
up to this hour had been done in the roystering, inconsiderate
gamesomeness of boyhood. It had been represented to himself only as
"sowing wild oats," "having steep times," "seeing a little of life," and
so on; but this night he had had propositions of piracy and robbery made
to him, and he had not dared to knock down the man that made them,--had
not dared at once to break away from his company. He must meet him
again,--must go on with him, or--he groaned in agony at the thought.

It was a strong indication of that repressed, considerate habit of mind
which love had wrought in the child, that when Mara heard the boy's sobs
rising in the stillness, she did not, as she wished to, rush out and
throw her arms around his neck and try to comfort him.

But she felt instinctively that she must not do this. She must not let
him know that she had discovered his secret by stealing after him thus
in the night shadows. She knew how nervously he had resented even the
compassionate glances she had cast upon him in his restless, turbid
intervals during the past few weeks, and the fierceness with which he
had replied to a few timid inquiries. No,--though her heart was breaking
for him, it was a shrewd, wise little heart, and resolved not to spoil
all by yielding to its first untaught impulses. She repressed herself as
the mother does who refrains from crying out when she sees her
unconscious little one on the verge of a precipice.

When Moses rose and moodily began walking homeward, she followed at a
distance. She could now keep farther off, for she knew the way through
every part of the forest, and she only wanted to keep within sound of
his footsteps to make sure that he was going home. When he emerged from
the forest into the open moonlight, she sat down in its shadows and
watched him as he walked over the open distance between her and the
house. He went in; and then she waited a little longer for him to be
quite retired. She thought he would throw himself on the bed, and then
she could steal in after him. So she sat there quite in the shadows.

The grand full moon was riding high and calm in the purple sky, and
Harpswell Bay on the one hand, and the wide, open ocean on the other,
lay all in a silver shimmer of light. There was not a sound save the
plash of the tide, now beginning to go out, and rolling and rattling
the pebbles up and down as it came and went, and once in a while the
distant, mournful intoning of the whippoorwill. There were silent lonely
ships, sailing slowly to and fro far out to sea, turning their fair
wings now into bright light and now into shadow, as they moved over the
glassy stillness. Mara could see all the houses on Harpswell Neck and
the white church as clear as in the daylight. It seemed to her some
strange, unearthly dream.

As she sat there, she thought over her whole little life, all full of
one thought, one purpose, one love, one prayer, for this being so
strangely given to her out of that silent sea, which lay so like a still
eternity around her,--and she revolved again what meant the vision of
her childhood. Did it not mean that she was to watch over him and save
him from some dreadful danger? That poor mother was lying now silent and
peaceful under the turf in the little graveyard not far off, and _she_
must care for her boy.

A strong motherly feeling swelled out the girl's heart,--she felt that
she _must_, she would, somehow save that treasure which had so
mysteriously been committed to her. So, when she thought she had given
time enough for Moses to be quietly asleep in his room, she arose and
ran with quick footsteps across the moonlit plain to the house.

The front-door was standing wide open, as was always the innocent
fashion in these regions, with a half-angle of moonlight and shadow
lying within its dusky depths. Mara listened a moment,--no sound: he had
gone to bed then. "Poor boy," she said, "I hope he is asleep; how he
must feel, poor fellow! It's all the fault of those dreadful men!" said
the little dark shadow to herself, as she stole up the stairs past his
room as guiltily as if she were the sinner. Once the stairs creaked, and
her heart was in her mouth, but she gained her room and shut and bolted
the door. She kneeled down by her little white bed, and thanked God
that she had come in safe, and then prayed him to teach her what to do
next. She felt chilly and shivering, and crept into bed, and lay with
her great soft brown eyes wide open, intently thinking what she should
do.

Should she tell her grandfather? Something instinctively said No; that
the first word from him which showed Moses he was detected would at once
send him off with those wicked men. "He would never, never bear to have
this known," she said. Mr. Sewell?--ah, that was worse. She herself
shrank from letting him know what Moses had been doing; she could not
bear to lower him so much in his eyes. He could not make allowances, she
thought. He is good, to be sure, but he is so old and grave, and doesn't
know how much Moses has been tempted by these dreadful men; and then
perhaps he would tell Miss Emily, and they never would want Moses to
come there any more.

"What shall I do?" she said to herself. "I must get somebody to help me
or tell me what to do. I can't tell grandmamma; it would only make her
ill, and she wouldn't know what to do any more than I. Ah, I know what I
will do,--I'll tell Captain Kittridge; he was always so kind to me; and
he has been to sea and seen all sorts of men, and Moses won't care so
much perhaps to have him know, because the Captain is such a funny man,
and don't take everything so seriously. Yes, that's it. I'll go right
down to the cove in the morning. God will bring me through, I know He
will;" and the little weary head fell back on the pillow asleep. And as
she slept, a smile settled over her face, perhaps a reflection from the
face of her good angel, who always beholdeth the face of our Father in
Heaven.





CHAPTER XXII

A FRIEND IN NEED


Mara was so wearied with her night walk and the agitation she had been
through, that once asleep she slept long after the early breakfast hour
of the family. She was surprised on awaking to hear the slow old clock
downstairs striking eight. She hastily jumped up and looked around with
a confused wonder, and then slowly the events of the past night came
back upon her like a remembered dream. She dressed herself quickly, and
went down to find the breakfast things all washed and put away, and Mrs.
Pennel spinning.

"Why, dear heart," said the old lady, "how came you to sleep so?--I
spoke to you twice, but I could not make you hear."

"Has Moses been down, grandma?" said Mara, intent on the sole thought in
her heart.

"Why, yes, dear, long ago,--and cross enough he was; that boy does get
to be a trial,--but come, dear, I've saved some hot cakes for you,--sit
down now and eat your breakfast."

Mara made a feint of eating what her grandmother with fond officiousness
would put before her, and then rising up she put on her sun-bonnet and
started down toward the cove to find her old friend.

The queer, dry, lean old Captain had been to her all her life like a
faithful kobold or brownie, an unquestioning servant of all her gentle
biddings. She dared tell him anything without diffidence or
shamefacedness; and she felt that in this trial of her life he might
have in his sea-receptacle some odd old amulet or spell that should be
of power to help her. Instinctively she avoided the house, lest Sally
should see and fly out and seize her. She took a narrow path through the
cedars down to the little boat cove where the old Captain worked so
merrily ten years ago, in the beginning of our story, and where she
found him now, with his coat off, busily planing a board.

"Wal', now,--if this 'ere don't beat all!" he said, looking up and
seeing her; "why, you're looking after Sally, I s'pose? She's up to the
house."

"No, Captain Kittridge, I'm come to see _you_."

"You _be_?" said the Captain, "I swow! if I ain't a lucky feller. But
what's the matter?" he said, suddenly observing her pale face and the
tears in her eyes. "Hain't nothin' bad happened,--hes there?"

"Oh! Captain Kittridge, something dreadful; and nobody but you can help
me."

"Want to know, now!" said the Captain, with a grave face. "Well, come
here, now, and sit down, and tell me all about it. Don't you cry,
there's a good girl! Don't, now."

Mara began her story, and went through with it in a rapid and agitated
manner; and the good Captain listened in a fidgety state of interest,
occasionally relieving his mind by interjecting "Do tell, now!" "I
swan,--if that ar ain't too bad."

"That ar's rediculous conduct in Atkinson. He ought to be talked to,"
said the Captain, when she had finished, and then he whistled and put a
shaving in his mouth, which he chewed reflectively.

"Don't you be a mite worried, Mara," he said. "You did a great deal
better to come to me than to go to Mr. Sewell or your grand'ther either;
'cause you see these 'ere wild chaps they'll take things from me they
wouldn't from a church-member or a minister. Folks mustn't pull 'em up
with _too_ short a rein,--they must kind o' flatter 'em off. But that ar
Atkinson's too rediculous for anything; and if he don't mind, I'll serve
him out. I know a thing or two about him that I shall shake over his
head if he don't behave. Now I don't think so much of smugglin' as some
folks," said the Captain, lowering his voice to a confidential tone. "I
reely don't, now; but come to goin' off piratin',--and tryin' to put a
young boy up to robbin' his best friends,--why, there ain't no kind o'
sense in that. It's p'ison mean of Atkinson. I shall tell him so, and I
shall talk to Moses."

"Oh! I'm afraid to have you," said Mara, apprehensively.

"Why, chickabiddy," said the old Captain, "you don't understand me. I
ain't goin' at him with no sermons,--I shall jest talk to him this way:
Look here now, Moses, I shall say, there's Badger's ship goin' to sail
in a fortnight for China, and they want likely fellers aboard, and I've
got a hundred dollars that I'd like to send on a venture; if you'll take
it and go, why, we'll share the profits. I shall talk like that, you
know. Mebbe I sha'n't let him know what I know, and mebbe I shall; jest
tip him a wink, you know; it depends on circumstances. But bless you,
child, these 'ere fellers ain't none of 'em 'fraid o' me, you see,
'cause they know I know the ropes."

"And can you make that horrid man let him alone?" said Mara, fearfully.

"Calculate I can. 'Spect if I's to tell Atkinson a few things I know,
he'd be for bein' scase in our parts. Now, you see, I hain't minded
doin' a small bit o' trade now and then with them ar fellers myself; but
this 'ere," said the Captain, stopping and looking extremely disgusted,
"why, it's contemptible, it's rediculous!"

"Do you think I'd better tell grandpapa?" said Mara.

"Don't worry your little head. I'll step up and have a talk with Pennel,
this evening. He knows as well as I that there is times when chaps must
be seen to, and no remarks made. Pennel knows that ar. Why, now, Mis'
Kittridge thinks our boys turned out so well all along of her bringin'
up, and I let her think so; keeps her sort o' in spirits, you see. But
Lord bless ye, child, there's been times with Job, and Sam, and Pass,
and Dass, and Dile, and all on 'em finally, when, if I hadn't jest
pulled a rope here and turned a screw there, and said nothin' to nobody,
they'd a-been all gone to smash. I never told Mis' Kittridge none o'
their didos; bless you, 'twouldn't been o' no use. I never told _them_,
neither; but I jest kind o' worked 'em off, you know; and they's all
putty 'spectable men now, as men go, you know; not like Parson Sewell,
but good, honest mates and ship-masters,--kind o' middlin' people, you
know. It takes a good many o' sich to make up a world, d'ye see."

"But oh, Captain Kittridge, did any of them use to swear?" said Mara, in
a faltering voice.

"Wal', they did, consid'able," said the Captain;--then seeing the
trembling of Mara's lip, he added,--

"Ef you could a-found this 'ere out any other way, it's most a pity
you'd a-heard him; 'cause he wouldn't never have let out afore you. It
don't do for gals to hear the fellers talk when they's alone, 'cause
fellers,--wal', you see, fellers will be fellers, partic'larly when
they're young. Some on 'em, they never gits over it all their lives
finally."

"But oh! Captain Kittridge, that talk last night was so dreadfully
wicked! and Moses!--oh, it was dreadful to hear him!"

"Wal', yes, it was," said the Captain, consolingly; "but don't you cry,
and don't you break your little heart. I expect he'll come all right,
and jine the church one of these days; 'cause there's old Pennel, he
prays,--fact now, I think there's consid'able in some people's prayers,
and he's one of the sort. And you pray, too; and I'm quite sure the good
Lord _must_ hear you. I declare sometimes I wish you'd jest say a good
word to Him for me; I should like to get the hang o' things a little
better than I do, somehow, I reely should. I've gi'n up swearing years
ago. Mis' Kittridge, she broke me o' that, and now I don't never go
further than 'I vum' or 'I swow,' or somethin' o' that sort; but you see
I'm old;--Moses is young; but then he's got eddication and friends, and
he'll come all right. Now you jest see ef he don't!"

This miscellaneous budget of personal experiences and friendly
consolation which the good Captain conveyed to Mara may possibly make
you laugh, my reader, but the good, ropy brown man was doing his best to
console his little friend; and as Mara looked at him he was almost
glorified in her eyes--he had power to save Moses, and he would do it.
She went home to dinner that day with her heart considerably lightened.
She refrained, in a guilty way, from even looking at Moses, who was
gloomy and moody.

Mara had from nature a good endowment of that kind of innocent hypocrisy
which is needed as a staple in the lives of women who bridge a thousand
awful chasms with smiling, unconscious looks, and walk, singing and
scattering flowers, over abysses of fear, while their hearts are dying
within them.

She talked more volubly than was her wont with Mrs. Pennel, and with her
old grandfather; she laughed and seemed in more than usual spirits, and
only once did she look up and catch the gloomy eye of Moses. It had that
murky, troubled look that one may see in the eye of a boy when those
evil waters which cast up mire and dirt have once been stirred in his
soul. They fell under her clear glance, and he made a rapid, impatient
movement, as if it hurt him to be looked at. The evil spirit in boy or
man cannot bear the "touch of celestial temper;" and the sensitiveness
to eyebeams is one of the earliest signs of conscious, inward guilt.

Mara was relieved, as he flung out of the house after dinner, to see the
long, dry figure of Captain Kittridge coming up and seizing Moses by the
button. From the window she saw the Captain assuming a confidential air
with him; and when they had talked together a few moments, she saw Moses
going with great readiness after him down the road to his house.

In less than a fortnight, it was settled Moses was to sail for China,
and Mara was deep in the preparations for his outfit. Once she would
have felt this departure as the most dreadful trial of her life. Now it
seemed to her a deliverance for him, and she worked with a cheerful
alacrity, which seemed to Moses more than was proper, considering _he_
was going away.

For Moses, like many others of his sex, boy or man, had quietly settled
in his own mind that the whole love of Mara's heart was to be his, to
have and to hold, to use and to draw on, when and as he liked. He
reckoned on it as a sort of inexhaustible, uncounted treasure that was
his own peculiar right and property, and therefore he felt abused at
what he supposed was a disclosure of some deficiency on her part.

"You seem to be very glad to be rid of me," he said to her in a bitter
tone one day, as she was earnestly busy in her preparations.

Now the fact was, that Moses had been assiduously making himself
disagreeable to Mara for the fortnight past, by all sorts of unkind
sayings and doings; and he knew it too; yet he felt a right to feel very
much abused at the thought that she could possibly want him to be going.
If she had been utterly desolate about it, and torn her hair and sobbed
and wailed, he would have asked what she could be crying about, and
begged not to be bored with scenes; but as it was, this cheerful
composure was quite unfeeling.

Now pray don't suppose Moses to be a monster of an uncommon species. We
take him to be an average specimen of a boy of a certain kind of
temperament in the transition period of life. Everything is chaos
within; the flesh lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit against the
flesh, and "light and darkness, and mind and dust, and passion and pure
thoughts, mingle and contend," without end or order. He wondered at
himself sometimes that he could say such cruel things as he did to his
faithful little friend--to one whom, after all, he did love and trust
before all other human beings.

There is no saying why it is that a man or a boy, not radically
destitute of generous comprehensions, will often cruelly torture and
tyrannize over a woman whom he both loves and reveres, who stands in his
soul in his best hours as the very impersonation of all that is good and
beautiful. It is as if some evil spirit at times possessed him, and
compelled him to utter words which were felt at the moment to be mean
and hateful. Moses often wondered at himself, as he lay awake nights,
how he could have said and done the things he had, and felt miserably
resolved to make it up somehow before he went away; but he did not.

He could not say, "Mara, I have done wrong," though he every day meant
to do it, and sometimes sat an hour in her presence, feeling murky and
stony, as if possessed by a dumb spirit; then he would get up and fling
stormily out of the house.

Poor Mara wondered if he really would go without one kind word. She
thought of all the years they had been together, and how he had been her
only thought and love. What had become of her brother?--the Moses that
once she used to know--frank, careless, not ill-tempered, and who
sometimes seemed to love her and think she was the best little girl in
the world? Where was he gone to--this friend and brother of her
childhood, and would he never come back?

At last came the evening before his parting; the sea-chest was all made
up and packed; and Mara's fingers had been busy with everything, from
more substantial garments down to all those little comforts and nameless
conveniences that only a woman knows how to improvise. Mara thought
certainly she should get a few kind words, as Moses looked it over. But
he only said, "All right;" and then added that "there was a button off
one of the shirts." Mara's busy fingers quickly replaced it, and Moses
was annoyed at the tear that fell on the button. What was she crying for
now? He knew very well, but he felt stubborn and cruel. Afterwards he
lay awake many a night in his berth, and acted this last scene over
differently. He took Mara in his arms and kissed her; he told her she
was his best friend, his good angel, and that he was not worthy to kiss
the hem of her garment; but the next day, when he thought of writing a
letter to her, he didn't, and the good mood passed away. Boys do not
acquire an ease of expression in letter-writing as early as girls, and a
voyage to China furnished opportunities few and far between of sending
letters.

Now and then, through some sailing ship, came missives which seemed to
Mara altogether colder and more unsatisfactory than they would have done
could she have appreciated the difference between a boy and a girl in
power of epistolary expression; for the power of really representing
one's heart on paper, which is one of the first spring flowers of early
womanhood, is the latest blossom on the slow-growing tree of manhood. To
do Moses justice, these seeming cold letters were often written with a
choking lump in his throat, caused by thinking over his many sins
against his little good angel; but then that past account was so long,
and had so much that it pained him to think of, that he dashed it all
off in the shortest fashion, and said to himself, "One of these days
when I see her I'll make it all up."

No man--especially one that is living a rough, busy, out-of-doors
life--can form the slightest conception of that veiled and secluded life
which exists in the heart of a sensitive woman, whose sphere is narrow,
whose external diversions are few, and whose mind, therefore, acts by a
continual introversion upon itself. They know nothing how their careless
words and actions are pondered and turned again in weary, quiet hours of
fruitless questioning. What did he mean by this? and what did he intend
by that?--while he, the careless buffalo, meant nothing, or has
forgotten what it was, if he did. Man's utter ignorance of woman's
nature is a cause of a great deal of unsuspected cruelty which he
practices toward her.

Mara found one or two opportunities of writing to Moses; but her letters
were timid and constrained by a sort of frosty, discouraged sense of
loneliness; and Moses, though he knew he had no earthly right to expect
this to be otherwise, took upon him to feel as an abused individual,
whom nobody loved--whose way in the world was destined to be lonely and
desolate. So when, at the end of three years, he arrived suddenly at
Brunswick in the beginning of winter, and came, all burning with
impatience, to the home at Orr's Island, and found that Mara had gone to
Boston on a visit, he resented it as a personal slight.

He might have inquired why she should expect him, and whether her whole
life was to be spent in looking out of the window to watch for him. He
might have remembered that he had warned her of his approach by no
letter. But no. "Mara didn't care for him--she had forgotten all about
him--she was having a good time in Boston, just as likely as not with
some train of admirers, and he had been tossing on the stormy ocean, and
she had thought nothing of it." How many things he had meant to say! He
had never felt so good and so affectionate. He would have confessed all
the sins of his life to her, and asked her pardon--and she wasn't there!

Mrs. Pennel suggested that he might go to Boston after her.

No, he was not going to do that. He would not intrude on her pleasures
with the memory of a rough, hard-working sailor. He was alone in the
world, and had his own way to make, and so best go at once up among
lumbermen, and cut the timber for the ship that was to carry Cæsar and
his fortunes.

When Mara was informed by a letter from Mrs. Pennel, expressed in the
few brief words in which that good woman generally embodied her
epistolary communications, that Moses had been at home, and gone to
Umbagog without seeing her, she felt at her heart only a little closer
stricture of cold, quiet pain, which had become a habit of her inner
life.

"He did not love her--he was cold and selfish," said the inner voice.
And faintly she pleaded, in answer, "He is a man--he has seen the
world--and has so much to do and think of, no wonder."

In fact, during the last three years that had parted them, the great
change of life had been consummated in both. They had parted boy and
girl; they would meet man and woman. The time of this meeting had been
announced.

And all this is the history of that sigh, so very quiet that Sally
Kittridge never checked the rattling flow of her conversation to observe
it.




CHAPTER XXIII

THE BEGINNING OF THE STORY


We have in the last three chapters brought up the history of our
characters to the time when our story opens, when Mara and Sally
Kittridge were discussing the expected return of Moses. Sally was
persuaded by Mara to stay and spend the night with her, and did so
without much fear of what her mother would say when she returned; for
though Mrs. Kittridge still made bustling demonstrations of authority,
it was quite evident to every one that the handsome grown-up girl had
got the sceptre into her own hands, and was reigning in the full
confidence of being, in one way or another, able to bring her mother
into all her views.

So Sally stayed--to have one of those long night-talks in which girls
delight, in the course of which all sorts of intimacies and confidences,
that shun the daylight, open like the night-blooming cereus in strange
successions. One often wonders by daylight at the things one says very
naturally in the dark.

So the two girls talked about Moses, and Sally dilated upon his
handsome, manly air the one Sunday that he had appeared in Harpswell
meeting-house.

"He didn't know me at all, if you'll believe it," said Sally. "I was
standing with father when he came out, and he shook hands with him, and
looked at me as if I'd been an entire stranger."

"I'm not in the least surprised," said Mara; "you're grown so and
altered."

"Well, now, you'd hardly know him, Mara," said Sally. "He is a man--a
real man; everything about him is different; he holds up his head in
such a proud way. Well, he always did that when he was a boy; but when
he speaks, he has such a deep voice! How boys do alter in a year or
two!"

"Do you think I have altered much, Sally?" said Mara; "at least, do you
think _he_ would think so?"

"Why, Mara, you and I have been together so much, I can't tell. We don't
notice what goes on before us every day. I really should like to see
what Moses Pennel will think when he sees you. At any rate, he can't
order you about with such a grand air as he used to when you were
younger."

"I think sometimes he has quite forgotten about me," said Mara.

"Well, if I were you, I should put him in mind of myself by one or two
little ways," said Sally. "I'd plague him and tease him. I'd lead him
such a life that he couldn't forget me,--that's what I would."

"I don't doubt you would, Sally; and he might like you all the better
for it. But you know that sort of thing isn't my way. People must act in
character."

"Do you know, Mara," said Sally, "I always thought Moses was hateful in
his treatment of you? Now I'd no more marry that fellow than I'd walk
into the fire; but it would be a just punishment for his sins to have to
marry me! Wouldn't I serve him out, though!"

With which threat of vengeance on her mind Sally Kittridge fell asleep,
while Mara lay awake pondering,--wondering if Moses would come
to-morrow, and what he would be like if he did come.

The next morning as the two girls were wiping breakfast dishes in a room
adjoining the kitchen, a step was heard on the kitchen-floor, and the
first that Mara knew she found herself lifted from the floor in the
arms of a tall dark-eyed young man, who was kissing her just as if he
had a right to. She knew it must be Moses, but it seemed strange as a
dream, for all she had tried to imagine it beforehand.

He kissed her over and over, and then holding her off at arm's length,
said, "Why, Mara, you have grown to be a beauty!"

"And what was she, I'd like to know, when you went away, Mr. Moses?"
said Sally, who could not long keep out of a conversation. "She was
handsome when you were only a great ugly boy."

"Thank you, Miss Sally!" said Moses, making a profound bow.

"Thank me for what?" said Sally, with a toss.

"For your intimation that I am a handsome young man now," said Moses,
sitting with his arm around Mara, and her hand in his.

And in truth he was as handsome now for a man as he was in the promise
of his early childhood. All the oafishness and surly awkwardness of the
half-boy period was gone. His great black eyes were clear and confident:
his dark hair clustering in short curls round his well-shaped head; his
black lashes, and fine form, and a certain confident ease of manner, set
him off to the greatest advantage.

Mara felt a peculiar dreamy sense of strangeness at this brother who was
not a brother,--this Moses so different from the one she had known. The
very tone of his voice, which when he left had the uncertain cracked
notes which indicate the unformed man, were now mellowed and settled.
Mara regarded him shyly as he talked, blushed uneasily, and drew away
from his arm around her, as if this handsome, self-confident young man
were being too familiar. In fact, she made apology to go out into the
other room to call Mrs. Pennel.

Moses looked after her as she went with admiration. "What a little woman
she has grown!" he said, naïvely.

"And what did you expect she would grow?" said Sally. "You didn't expect
to find her a girl in short clothes, did you?"

"Not exactly, Miss Sally," said Moses, turning his attention to her;
"and some other people are changed too."

"Like enough," said Sally, carelessly. "I should think so, since
somebody never spoke a word to one the Sunday he was at meeting."

"Oh, you remember that, do you? On my word, Sally"--

"Miss Kittridge, if you please, sir," said Sally, turning round with the
air of an empress.

"Well, then, Miss Kittridge," said Moses, making a bow; "now let me
finish my sentence. I never dreamed who you were."

"Complimentary," said Sally, pouting.

"Well, hear me through," said Moses; "you had grown so handsome, Miss
Kittridge."

"Oh! that indeed! I suppose you mean to say I was a fright when you
left?"

"Not at all--not at all," said Moses; "but handsome things may grow
handsomer, you know."

"I don't like flattery," said Sally.

"I never flatter, Miss Kittridge," said Moses.

Our young gentleman and young lady of Orr's Island went through with
this customary little lie of civilized society with as much gravity as
if they were practicing in the court of Versailles,--she looking out
from the corner of her eye to watch the effect of her words, and he
laying his hand on his heart in the most edifying gravity. They
perfectly understood one another.

But, says the reader, seems to me Sally Kittridge does all the talking!
So she does,--so she always will,--for it is her nature to be bright,
noisy, and restless; and one of these girls always overcrows a timid and
thoughtful one, and makes her, for the time, seem dim and faded, as does
rose color when put beside scarlet.

Sally was a born coquette. It was as natural for her to want to flirt
with every man she saw, as for a kitten to scamper after a pin-ball.
Does the kitten care a fig for the pin-ball, or the dry leaves, which
she whisks, and frisks, and boxes, and pats, and races round and round
after? No; it's nothing but kittenhood; every hair of her fur is alive
with it. Her sleepy green eyes, when she pretends to be dozing, are full
of it; and though she looks wise a moment, and seems resolved to be a
discreet young cat, let but a leaf sway--off she goes again, with a
frisk and a rap. So, though Sally had scolded and flounced about Moses's
inattention to Mara in advance, she contrived even in this first
interview to keep him talking with nobody but herself;--not because she
wanted to draw him from Mara, or meant to; not because she cared a pin
for him; but because it was her nature, as a frisky young cat. And Moses
let himself be drawn, between bantering and contradicting, and jest and
earnest, at some moments almost to forget that Mara was in the room.

She took her sewing and sat with a pleased smile, sometimes breaking
into the lively flow of conversation, or eagerly appealed to by both
parties to settle some rising quarrel.

Once, as they were talking, Moses looked up and saw Mara's head, as a
stray sunbeam falling upon the golden hair seemed to make a halo around
her face. Her large eyes were fixed upon him with an expression so
intense and penetrative, that he felt a sort of wincing uneasiness.
"What makes you look at me so, Mara?" he said, suddenly.

A bright flush came in her cheek as she answered, "I didn't know I was
looking. It all seems so strange to me. I am trying to make out who and
what you are."

"It's not best to look too deep," Moses said, laughing, but with a
slight shade of uneasiness.

When Sally, late in the afternoon, declared that she must go home, she
couldn't stay another minute, Moses rose to go with her.

"What are you getting up for?" she said to Moses, as he took his hat.

"To go home with you, to be sure."

"Nobody asked you to," said Sally.

"I'm accustomed to asking myself," said Moses.

"Well, I suppose I must have you along," said Sally. "Father will be
glad to see you, of course."

"You'll be back to tea, Moses," said Mara, "will you not? Grandfather
will be home, and want to see you."

"Oh, I shall be right back," said Moses, "I have a little business to
settle with Captain Kittridge."

But Moses, however, did stay at tea with Mrs. Kittridge, who looked
graciously at him through the bows of her black horn spectacles, having
heard her liege lord observe that Moses was a smart chap, and had done
pretty well in a money way.

How came he to stay? Sally told him every other minute to go; and then
when he had got fairly out of the door, called him back to tell him that
there was something she had heard about him. And Moses of course came
back; wanted to know what it was; and couldn't be told, it was a secret;
and then he would be ordered off, and reminded that he promised to go
straight home; and then when he got a little farther off she called
after him a second time, to tell him that he would be very much
surprised if he knew how she found it out, etc., etc.,--till at last tea
being ready, there was no reason why he shouldn't have a cup. And so it
was sober moonrise before Moses found himself going home.

"Hang that girl!" he said to himself; "don't she know what she's about,
though?"

There our hero was mistaken. Sally never did know what she was
about,--had no plan or purpose more than a blackbird; and when Moses was
gone laughed to think how many times she had made him come back.

"Now, confound it all," said Moses, "I care more for our little Mara
than a dozen of her; and what have I been fooling all this time
for?--now Mara will think I don't love her."

And, in fact, our young gentleman rather set his heart on the sensation
he was going to make when he got home. It is flattering, after all, to
feel one's power over a susceptible nature; and Moses, remembering how
entirely and devotedly Mara had loved him all through childhood, never
doubted but he was the sole possessor of uncounted treasure in her
heart, which he could develop at his leisure and use as he pleased. He
did not calculate for one force which had grown up in the meanwhile
between them,--and that was the power of womanhood. He did not know the
intensity of that kind of pride, which is the very life of the female
nature, and which is most vivid and vigorous in the most timid and
retiring.

Our little Mara was tender, self-devoting, humble, and religious, but
she was woman after all to the tips of her fingers,--quick to feel
slights, and determined with the intensest determination, that no man
should wrest from her one of those few humble rights and privileges,
which Nature allows to woman. Something swelled and trembled in her when
she felt the confident pressure of that bold arm around her waist,--like
the instinct of a wild bird to fly. Something in the deep, manly voice,
the determined, self-confident air, aroused a vague feeling of defiance
and resistance in her which she could scarcely explain to herself. Was
he to assume a right to her in this way without even asking? When he
did not come to tea nor long after, and Mrs. Pennel and her grandfather
wondered, she laughed, and said gayly,--

"Oh, he knows he'll have time enough to see me. Sally seems more like a
stranger."

But when Moses came home after moonrise, determined to go and console
Mara for his absence, he was surprised to hear the sound of a rapid and
pleasant conversation, in which a masculine and feminine voice were
intermingled in a lively duet. Coming a little nearer, he saw Mara
sitting knitting in the doorway, and a very good-looking young man
seated on a stone at her feet, with his straw hat flung on the ground,
while he was looking up into her face, as young men often do into pretty
faces seen by moonlight. Mara rose and introduced Mr. Adams of Boston to
Mr. Moses Pennel.

Moses measured the young man with his eye as if he could have shot him
with a good will. And his temper was not at all bettered as he observed
that he had the easy air of a man of fashion and culture, and learned by
a few moments of the succeeding conversation, that the acquaintance had
commenced during Mara's winter visit to Boston.

"I was staying a day or two at Mr. Sewell's," he said, carelessly, "and
the night was so fine I couldn't resist the temptation to row over."

It was now Moses's turn to listen to a conversation in which he could
bear little part, it being about persons and places and things
unfamiliar to him; and though he could give no earthly reason why the
conversation was not the most proper in the world,--yet he found that it
made him angry.

In the pauses, Mara inquired, prettily, how he found the Kittridges, and
reproved him playfully for staying, in despite of his promise to come
home. Moses answered with an effort to appear easy and playful, that
there was no reason, it appeared, to hurry on her account, since she
had been so pleasantly engaged.

"That is true," said Mara, quietly; "but then grandpapa and grandmamma
expected you, and they have gone to bed, as you know they always do
after tea."

"They'll keep till morning, I suppose," said Moses, rather gruffly.

"Oh yes; but then as you had been gone two or three months, naturally
they wanted to see a little of you at first."

The stranger now joined in the conversation, and began talking with
Moses about his experiences in foreign parts, in a manner which showed a
man of sense and breeding. Moses had a jealous fear of people of
breeding,--an apprehension lest they should look down on one whose life
had been laid out of the course of their conventional ideas; and
therefore, though he had sufficient ability and vigor of mind to acquit
himself to advantage in this conversation, it gave him all the while a
secret uneasiness. After a few moments, he rose up moodily, and saying
that he was very much fatigued, he went into the house to retire.

Mr. Adams rose to go also, and Moses might have felt in a more Christian
frame of mind, had he listened to the last words of the conversation
between him and Mara.

"Do you remain long in Harpswell?" she asked.

"That depends on circumstances," he replied. "If I do, may I be
permitted to visit you?"

"As a friend--yes," said Mara; "I shall always be happy to see you."

"No more?"

"No more," replied Mara.

"I had hoped," he said, "that you would reconsider."

"It is impossible," said she; and soft voices can pronounce that word,
_impossible_, in a very fateful and decisive manner.

"Well, God bless you, then, Miss Lincoln," he said, and was gone.

Mara stood in the doorway and saw him loosen his boat from its moorings
and float off in the moonlight, with a long train of silver sparkles
behind.

A moment after Moses was looking gloomily over her shoulder.

"Who is that puppy?" he said.

"He is not a puppy, but a very fine young man," said Mara.

"Well, that very fine young man, then?"

"I thought I told you. He is a Mr. Adams of Boston, and a distant
connection of the Sewells. I met him when I was visiting at Judge
Sewell's in Boston."

"You seemed to be having a very pleasant time together?"

"We were," said Mara, quietly.

"It's a pity I came home as I did. I'm sorry I interrupted you," said
Moses, with a sarcastic laugh.

"You didn't interrupt us; he had been here almost two hours."

Now Mara saw plainly enough that Moses was displeased and hurt, and had
it been in the days of her fourteenth summer, she would have thrown her
arms around his neck, and said, "Moses, I don't care a fig for that man,
and I love you better than all the world." But this the young lady of
eighteen would not do; so she wished him good-night very prettily, and
pretended not to see anything about it.

Mara was as near being a saint as human dust ever is; but--she was a
woman saint; and therefore may be excused for a little gentle
vindictiveness. She was, in a merciful way, rather glad that Moses had
gone to bed dissatisfied, and rather glad that he did not know what she
might have told him--quite resolved that he should not know at present.
Was he to know that she liked nobody so much as him? Not he, unless he
loved her more than all the world, and said so first. Mara was resolved
upon that. He might go where he liked--flirt with whom he liked--come
back as late as he pleased; never would she, by word or look, give him
reason to think she cared.




CHAPTER XXIV

DESIRES AND DREAMS


Moses passed rather a restless and uneasy night on his return to the
home-roof which had sheltered his childhood. All his life past, and all
his life expected, seemed to boil and seethe and ferment in his
thoughts, and to go round and round in never-ceasing circles before him.

Moses was _par excellence_ proud, ambitious, and willful. These words,
generally supposed to describe positive vices of the mind, in fact are
only the overaction of certain very valuable portions of our nature,
since one can conceive all three to raise a man immensely in the scale
of moral being, simply by being applied to right objects. He who is too
proud even to admit a mean thought--who is ambitious only of ideal
excellence--who has an inflexible will only in the pursuit of truth and
righteousness--may be a saint and a hero.

But Moses was neither a saint nor a hero, but an undeveloped chaotic
young man, whose pride made him sensitive and restless; whose ambition
was fixed on wealth and worldly success; whose willfulness was for the
most part a blind determination to compass his own points, with the
leave of Providence or without. There was no God in his estimate of
life--and a sort of secret unsuspected determination at the bottom of
his heart that there should be none. He feared religion, from a
suspicion which he entertained that it might hamper some of his future
schemes. He did not wish to put himself under its rules, lest he might
find them in some future time inconveniently strict.

With such determinations and feelings, the Bible--necessarily an
excessively uninteresting book to him--he never read, and satisfied
himself with determining in a general way that it was not worth reading,
and, as was the custom with many young men in America at that period,
announced himself as a skeptic, and seemed to value himself not a little
on the distinction. Pride in skepticism is a peculiar distinction of
young men. It takes years and maturity to make the discovery that the
power of faith is nobler than the power of doubt; and that there is a
celestial wisdom in the ingenuous propensity to trust, which belongs to
honest and noble natures. Elderly skeptics generally regard their
unbelief as a misfortune.

Not that Moses was, after all, without "the angel in him." He had a good
deal of the susceptibility to poetic feeling, the power of vague and
dreamy aspiration, the longing after the good and beautiful, which is
God's witness in the soul. A noble sentiment in poetry, a fine scene in
nature, had power to bring tears in his great dark eyes, and he had,
under the influence of such things, brief inspired moments in which he
vaguely longed to do, or be, something grand or noble. But this,
however, was something apart from the real purpose of his life,--a sort
of voice crying in the wilderness,--to which he gave little heed.
Practically, he was determined with all his might, to have a good time
in this life, whatever another might be,--if there were one; and that he
would do it by the strength of his right arm. Wealth he saw to be the
lamp of Aladdin, which commanded all other things. And the pursuit of
wealth was therefore the first step in his programme.

As for plans of the heart and domestic life, Moses was one of that very
common class who had more desire to be loved than power of loving. His
cravings and dreams were not for somebody to be devoted to, but for
somebody who should be devoted to him. And, like most people who
possess this characteristic, he mistook it for an affectionate
disposition.

Now the chief treasure of his heart had always been his little sister
Mara, chiefly from his conviction that he was the one absorbing thought
and love of her heart. He had never figured life to himself otherwise
than with Mara at his side, his unquestioning, devoted friend. Of course
he and his plans, his ways and wants, would always be in the future, as
they always had been, her sole thought. These sleeping partnerships in
the interchange of affection, which support one's heart with a basis of
uncounted wealth, and leave one free to come and go, and buy and sell,
without exaction or interference, are a convenience certainly, and the
loss of them in any way is like the sudden breaking of a bank in which
all one's deposits are laid.

It had never occurred to Moses how or in what capacity he should always
stand banker to the whole wealth of love that there was in Mara's heart,
and what provision he should make on his part for returning this
incalculable debt. But the interview of this evening had raised a new
thought in his mind. Mara, as he saw that day, was no longer a little
girl in a pink sun-bonnet. She was a woman,--a little one, it is true,
but every inch a woman,--and a woman invested with a singular poetic
charm of appearance, which, more than beauty, has the power of awakening
feeling in the other sex.

He felt in himself, in the experience of that one day, that there was
something subtle and veiled about her, which set the imagination at
work; that the wistful, plaintive expression of her dark eyes, and a
thousand little shy and tremulous movements of her face, affected him
more than the most brilliant of Sally Kittridge's sprightly sallies.
Yes, there would be people falling in love with her fast enough, he
thought even here, where she is as secluded as a pearl in an
oyster-shell,--it seems means were found to come after her,--and then
all the love of her heart, that priceless love, would go to another.

Mara would be absorbed in some one else, would love some one else, as he
knew she could, with heart and soul and mind and strength. When he
thought of this, it affected him much as it would if one were turned out
of a warm, smiling apartment into a bleak December storm. What should he
do, if that treasure which he had taken most for granted in all his
valuations of life should suddenly be found to belong to another? Who
was this fellow that seemed so free to visit her, and what had passed
between them? Was Mara in love with him, or going to be? There is no
saying how the consideration of this question enhanced in our hero's
opinion both her beauty and all her other good qualities.

Such a brave little heart! such a good, clear little head! and such a
pretty hand and foot! She was always so cheerful, so unselfish, so
devoted! When had he ever seen her angry, except when she had taken up
some childish quarrel of his, and fought for him like a little Spartan?
Then she was pious, too. She was born religious, thought our hero, who,
in common with many men professing skepticism for their own particular
part, set a great value on religion in that unknown future person whom
they are fond of designating in advance as "my wife." Yes, Moses meant
his wife should be pious, and pray for him, while he did as he pleased.

"Now there's that witch of a Sally Kittridge," he said to himself; "I
wouldn't have such a girl for a wife. Nothing to her but foam and
frisk,--no heart more than a bobolink! But isn't she amusing? By George!
isn't she, though?"

"But," thought Moses, "it's time I settled this matter who is to be my
wife. I won't marry till I'm rich,--that's flat. My wife isn't to rub
and grub. So at it I must go to raise the wind. I wonder if old Sewell
really does know anything about my parents. Miss Emily would have it
that there was some mystery that he had the key of; but I never could
get any thing from him. He always put me off in such a smooth way that I
couldn't tell whether he did or he didn't. But, now, supposing I have
relatives, family connections, then who knows but what there may be
property coming to me? That's an idea worth looking after, surely."

There's no saying with what vividness ideas and images go through one's
wakeful brain when the midnight moon is making an exact shadow of your
window-sash, with panes of light, on your chamber-floor. How vividly we
all have loved and hated and planned and hoped and feared and desired
and dreamed, as we tossed and turned to and fro upon such watchful,
still nights. In the stillness, the tide upon one side of the Island
replied to the dash on the other side in unbroken symphony, and Moses
began to remember all the stories gossips had told him of how he had
floated ashore there, like a fragment of tropical seaweed borne landward
by a great gale. He positively wondered at himself that he had never
thought of it more, and the more he meditated, the more mysterious and
inexplicable he felt. Then he had heard Miss Roxy once speaking
something about a bracelet, he was sure he had; but afterwards it was
hushed up, and no one seemed to know anything about it when he inquired.
But in those days he was a boy,--he was nobody,--now he was a young man.
He could go to Mr. Sewell, and demand as his right a fair answer to any
questions he might ask. If he found, as was quite likely, that there was
nothing to be known, his mind would be thus far settled,--he should
trust only to his own resources.

So far as the state of the young man's finances were concerned, it
would be considered in those simple times and regions an auspicious
beginning of life. The sum intrusted to him by Captain Kittridge had
been more than doubled by the liberality of Zephaniah Pennel, and Moses
had traded upon it in foreign parts with a skill and energy that brought
a very fair return, and gave him, in the eyes of the shrewd, thrifty
neighbors, the prestige of a young man who was marked for success in the
world.

He had already formed an advantageous arrangement with his grandfather
and Captain Kittridge, by which a ship was to be built, which he should
command, and thus the old Saturday afternoon dream of their childhood be
fulfilled. As he thought of it, there arose in his mind a picture of
Mara, with her golden hair and plaintive eyes and little white hands,
reigning as a fairy queen in the captain's cabin, with a sort of wish to
carry her off and make sure that no one else ever should get her from
him.

But these midnight dreams were all sobered down by the plain
matter-of-fact beams of the morning sun, and nothing remained of
immediate definite purpose except the resolve, which came strongly upon
Moses as he looked across the blue band of Harpswell Bay, that he would
go that morning and have a talk with Mr. Sewell.




CHAPTER XXV

MISS EMILY


Miss Roxy Toothache was seated by the window of the little keeping-room
where Miss Emily Sewell sat on every-day occasions. Around her were the
insignia of her power and sway. Her big tailor's goose was heating
between Miss Emily's bright brass fire-irons; her great pin-cushion was
by her side, bristling with pins of all sizes, and with broken needles
thriftily made into pins by heads of red sealing-wax, and with needles
threaded with all varieties of cotton, silk, and linen; her scissors
hung martially by her side; her black bombazette work-apron was on; and
the expression of her iron features was that of deep responsibility, for
she was making the minister a new Sunday vest!

The good soul looks not a day older than when we left her, ten years
ago. Like the gray, weather-beaten rocks of her native shore, her strong
features had an unchangeable identity beyond that of anything fair and
blooming. There was of course no chance for a gray streak in her stiff,
uncompromising mohair frisette, which still pushed up her cap-border
bristlingly as of old, and the clear, high winds and bracing atmosphere
of that rough coast kept her in an admirable state of preservation.

Miss Emily had now and then a white hair among her soft, pretty brown
ones, and looked a little thinner; but the round, bright spot of bloom
on each cheek was there just as of yore,--and just as of yore she was
thinking of her brother, and filling her little head with endless
calculations to keep him looking fresh and respectable, and his
housekeeping comfortable and easy, on very limited means. She was now
officiously and anxiously attending on Miss Roxy, who was in the midst
of the responsible operation which should conduce greatly to this end.

"Does that twist work well?" she said, nervously; "because I believe
I've got some other upstairs in my India box."

Miss Roxy surveyed the article; bit a fragment off, as if she meant to
taste it; threaded a needle and made a few cabalistical stitches; and
then pronounced, _ex cathedrâ_, that it would do. Miss Emily gave a sigh
of relief. After buttons and tapes and linings, and various other items
had been also discussed, the conversation began to flow into general
channels.

"Did you know Moses Pennel had got home from Umbagog?" said Miss Roxy.

"Yes. Captain Kittridge told brother so this morning. I wonder he
doesn't call over to see us."

"Your brother took a sight of interest in that boy," said Miss Roxy. "I
was saying to Ruey, this morning, that if Moses Pennel ever did turn out
well, he ought to have a large share of the credit."

"Brother always did feel a peculiar interest in him; it was such a
strange providence that seemed to cast in his lot among us," said Miss
Emily.

"As sure as you live, there he is a-coming to the front door," said Miss
Roxy.

"Dear me," said Miss Emily, "and here I have on this old faded chintz.
Just so sure as one puts on any old rag, and thinks nobody will come,
company is sure to call."

"Law, I'm sure I shouldn't think of calling him company," said Miss
Roxy.

A rap at the door put an end to this conversation, and very soon Miss
Emily introduced our hero into the little sitting-room, in the midst of
a perfect stream of apologies relating to her old dress and the
littered condition of the sitting-room, for Miss Emily held to the
doctrine of those who consider any sign of human occupation and
existence in a room as being disorder--however reputable and respectable
be the cause of it.

"Well, really," she said, after she had seated Moses by the fire, "how
time does pass, to be sure; it don't seem more than yesterday since you
used to come with your Latin books, and now here you are a grown man! I
must run and tell Mr. Sewell. He will be so glad to see you."

Mr. Sewell soon appeared from his study in morning-gown and slippers,
and seemed heartily responsive to the proposition which Moses soon made
to him to have some private conversation with him in his study.

"I declare," said Miss Emily, as soon as the study-door had closed upon
her brother and Moses, "what a handsome young man he is! and what a
beautiful way he has with him!--so deferential! A great many young men
nowadays seem to think nothing of their minister; but he comes to seek
advice. Very proper. It isn't every young man that appreciates the
privilege of having elderly friends. I declare, what a beautiful couple
he and Mara Lincoln would make! Don't Providence seem in a peculiar way
to have designed them for each other?"

"I hope not," said Miss Roxy, with her grimmest expression.

"You don't! Why not?"

"I never liked him," said Miss Roxy, who had possessed herself of her
great heavy goose, and was now thumping and squeaking it emphatically on
the press-board. "She's a thousand times too good for Moses
Pennel,"--thump. "I ne'er had no faith in him,"--thump. "He's dreffle
unstiddy,"--thump. "He's handsome, but he knows it,"--thump. "He won't
never love nobody so much as he does himself,"--thump, _fortissimo con
spirito_.

"Well, really now, Miss Roxy, you mustn't always remember the sins of
his youth. Boys must sow their wild oats. He was unsteady for a while,
but now everybody says he's doing well; and as to his knowing he's
handsome, and all that, I don't see as he does. See how polite and
deferential he was to us all, this morning; and he spoke so handsomely
to you."

"I don't want none of his politeness," said Miss Roxy, inexorably; "and
as to Mara Lincoln, she might have better than him any day. Miss Badger
was a-tellin' Captain Brown, Sunday noon, that she was very much admired
in Boston."

"So she was," said Miss Emily, bridling. "I never reveal secrets, or I
might tell something,--but there has been a young man,--but I promised
not to speak of it, and I sha'n't."

"If you mean Mr. Adams," said Miss Roxy, "you needn't worry about
keepin' that secret, 'cause that ar was all talked over atween meetin's
a-Sunday noon; for Mis' Kittridge she used to know his aunt Jerushy, her
that married Solomon Peters, and Mis' Captain Badger she says that he
has a very good property, and is a professor in the Old South church in
Boston."

"Dear me," said Miss Emily, "how things do get about!"

"People will talk, there ain't no use trying to help it," said Miss
Roxy; "but it's strongly borne in on my mind that it ain't Adams, nor 't
ain't Moses Pennel that's to marry her. I've had peculiar exercises of
mind about that ar child,--well I have;" and Miss Roxy pulled a large
spotted bandanna handkerchief out of her pocket, and blew her nose like
a trumpet, and then wiped the withered corners of her eyes, which were
humid as some old Orr's Island rock wet with sea-spray.

Miss Emily had a secret love of romancing. It was one of the
recreations of her quiet, monotonous life to build air-castles, which
she furnished regardless of expense, and in which she set up at
housekeeping her various friends and acquaintances, and she had always
been bent on weaving a romance on the history of Mara and Moses Pennel.
The good little body had done her best to second Mr. Sewell's attempts
toward the education of the children. It was little busy Miss Emily who
persuaded honest Zephaniah and Mary Pennel that talents such as Mara's
ought to be cultivated, and that ended in sending her to Miss Plucher's
school in Portland. There her artistic faculties were trained into
creating funereal monuments out of chenille embroidery, fully equal to
Miss Emily's own; also to painting landscapes, in which the ground and
all the trees were one unvarying tint of blue-green; and also to
creating flowers of a new and particular construction, which, as Sally
Kittridge remarked, were pretty, but did not look like anything in
heaven or earth. Mara had obediently and patiently done all these
things; and solaced herself with copying flowers and birds and
landscapes as near as possible like nature, as a recreation from these
more dignified toils.

Miss Emily also had been the means of getting Mara invited to Boston,
where she saw some really polished society, and gained as much knowledge
of the forms of artificial life as a nature so wholly and strongly
individual could obtain. So little Miss Emily regarded Mara as her
godchild, and was intent on finishing her up into a romance in real
life, of which a handsome young man, who had been washed ashore in a
shipwreck, should be the hero.

What would she have said could she have heard the conversation that was
passing in her brother's study? Little could she dream that the mystery,
about which she had timidly nibbled for years, was now about to be
unrolled;--but it was even so. But, upon what she does not see, good
reader, you and I, following invisibly on tiptoe, will make our
observations.

When Moses was first ushered into Mr. Sewell's study, and found himself
quite alone, with the door shut, his heart beat so that he fancied the
good man must hear it. He knew well what he wanted and meant to say, but
he found in himself all that shrinking and nervous repugnance which
always attends the proposing of any decisive question.

"I thought it proper," he began, "that I should call and express my
sense of obligation to you, sir, for all the kindness you showed me when
a boy. I'm afraid in those thoughtless days I did not seem to appreciate
it so much as I do now."

As Moses said this, the color rose in his cheeks, and his fine eyes grew
moist with a sort of subdued feeling that made his face for the moment
more than usually beautiful.

Mr. Sewell looked at him with an expression of peculiar interest, which
seemed to have something almost of pain in it, and answered with a
degree of feeling more than he commonly showed,--

"It has been a pleasure to me to do anything I could for you, my young
friend. I only wish it could have been more. I congratulate you on your
present prospects in life. You have perfect health; you have energy and
enterprise; you are courageous and self-reliant, and, I trust, your
habits are pure and virtuous. It only remains that you add to all this
that fear of the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom."

Moses bowed his head respectfully, and then sat silent a moment, as if
he were looking through some cloud where he vainly tried to discover
objects.

Mr. Sewell continued, gravely,--

"You have the greatest reason to bless the kind Providence which has
cast your lot in such a family, in such a community. I have had some
means in my youth of comparing other parts of the country with our New
England, and it is my opinion that a young man could not ask a better
introduction into life than the wholesome nurture of a Christian family
in our favored land."

"Mr. Sewell," said Moses, raising his head, and suddenly looking him
straight in the eyes, "do you know anything of my family?"

The question was so point-blank and sudden, that for a moment Mr. Sewell
made a sort of motion as if he dodged a pistol-shot, and then his face
assumed an expression of grave thoughtfulness, while Moses drew a long
breath. It was out,--the question had been asked.

"My son," replied Mr. Sewell, "it has always been my intention, when you
had arrived at years of discretion, to make you acquainted with all that
I know or suspect in regard to your life. I trust that when I tell you
all I do know, you will see that I have acted for the best in the
matter. It has been my study and my prayer to do so."

Mr. Sewell then rose, and unlocking the cabinet, of which we have before
made mention, in his apartment, drew forth a very yellow and time-worn
package of papers, which he untied. From these he selected one which
enveloped an old-fashioned miniature case.

"I am going to show you," he said, "what only you and my God know that I
possess. I have not looked at it now for ten years, but I have no doubt
that it is the likeness of your mother."

Moses took it in his hand, and for a few moments there came a mist over
his eyes,--he could not see clearly. He walked to the window as if
needing a clearer light.

What he saw was a painting of a beautiful young girl, with large
melancholy eyes, and a clustering abundance of black, curly hair. The
face was of a beautiful, clear oval, with that warm brunette tint in
which the Italian painters delight. The black eyebrows were strongly
and clearly defined, and there was in the face an indescribable
expression of childish innocence and shyness, mingled with a kind of
confiding frankness, that gave the picture the charm which sometimes
fixes itself in faces for which we involuntarily make a history. She was
represented as simply attired in a white muslin, made low in the neck,
and the hands and arms were singularly beautiful. The picture, as Moses
looked at it, seemed to stand smiling at him with a childish grace,--a
tender, ignorant innocence which affected him deeply.

"My young friend," said Mr. Sewell, "I have written all that I know of
the original of this picture, and the reasons I have for thinking her
your mother.

"You will find it all in this paper, which, if I had been providentially
removed, was to have been given you in your twenty-first year. You will
see in the delicate nature of the narrative that it could not properly
have been imparted to you till you had arrived at years of
understanding. I trust when you know all that you will be satisfied with
the course I have pursued. You will read it at your leisure, and after
reading I shall be happy to see you again."

Moses took the package, and after exchanging salutations with Mr.
Sewell, hastily left the house and sought his boat.

When one has suddenly come into possession of a letter or paper in which
is known to be hidden the solution of some long-pondered secret, of the
decision of fate with regard to some long-cherished desire, who has not
been conscious of a sort of pain,--an unwillingness at once to know what
is therein? We turn the letter again and again, we lay it by and return
to it, and defer from moment to moment the opening of it. So Moses did
not sit down in the first retired spot to ponder the paper. He put it
in the breast pocket of his coat, and then, taking up his oars, rowed
across the bay. He did not land at the house, but passed around the
south point of the Island, and rowed up the other side to seek a
solitary retreat in the rocks, which had always been a favorite with him
in his early days.

The shores of the Island, as we have said, are a precipitous wall of
rock, whose long, ribbed ledges extend far out into the sea. At high
tide these ledges are covered with the smooth blue sea quite up to the
precipitous shore. There was a place, however, where the rocky shore
shelved over, forming between two ledges a sort of grotto, whose smooth
floor of shells and many-colored pebbles was never wet by the rising
tide. It had been the delight of Moses when a boy, to come here and
watch the gradual rise of the tide till the grotto was entirely cut off
from all approach, and then to look out in a sort of hermit-like
security over the open ocean that stretched before him. Many an hour he
had sat there and dreamed of all the possible fortunes that might be
found for him when he should launch away into that blue smiling
futurity.

It was now about half-tide, and Moses left his boat and made his way
over the ledge of rocks toward his retreat. They were all shaggy and
slippery with yellow seaweeds, with here and there among them wide
crystal pools, where purple and lilac and green mosses unfolded their
delicate threads, and thousands of curious little shell-fish were
tranquilly pursuing their quiet life. The rocks where the pellucid water
lay were in some places crusted with barnacles, which were opening and
shutting the little white scaly doors of their tiny houses, and drawing
in and out those delicate pink plumes which seem to be their nerves of
enjoyment. Moses and Mara had rambled and played here many hours of
their childhood, amusing themselves with catching crabs and young
lobsters and various little fish for these rocky aquariums, and then
studying at their leisure their various ways. Now he had come hither a
man, to learn the secret of his life.

Moses stretched himself down on the clean pebbly shore of the grotto,
and drew forth Mr. Sewell's letter.




CHAPTER XXVI

DOLORES


Mr. Sewell's letter ran as follows:--

MY DEAR YOUNG FRIEND,--It has always been my intention when you arrived
at years of maturity to acquaint you with some circumstances which have
given me reason to conjecture your true parentage, and to let you know
what steps I have taken to satisfy my own mind in relation to these
conjectures. In order to do this, it will be necessary for me to go back
to the earlier years of my life, and give you the history of some
incidents which are known to none of my most intimate friends. I trust I
may rely on your honor that they will ever remain as secrets with you.

I graduated from Harvard University in ----. At the time I was suffering
somewhat from an affection of the lungs, which occasioned great alarm to
my mother, many of whose family had died of consumption. In order to
allay her uneasiness, and also for the purpose of raising funds for the
pursuit of my professional studies, I accepted a position as tutor in
the family of a wealthy gentleman at St. Augustine, in Florida.

I cannot do justice to myself,--to the motives which actuated me in the
events which took place in this family, without speaking with the most
undisguised freedom of the character of all the parties with whom I was
connected.

Don José Mendoza was a Spanish gentleman of large property, who had
emigrated from the Spanish West Indies to Florida, bringing with him an
only daughter, who had been left an orphan by the death of her mother
at a very early age. He brought to this country a large number of
slaves;--and shortly after his arrival, married an American lady: a
widow with three children. By her he had four other children. And thus
it will appear that the family was made up of such a variety of elements
as only the most judicious care could harmonize. But the character of
the father and mother was such that judicious care was a thing not to be
expected of either.

Don José was extremely ignorant and proud, and had lived a life of the
grossest dissipation. Habits of absolute authority in the midst of a
community of a very low moral standard had produced in him all the worst
vices of despots. He was cruel, overbearing, and dreadfully passionate.
His wife was a woman who had pretensions to beauty, and at times could
make herself agreeable, and even fascinating, but she was possessed of a
temper quite as violent and ungoverned as his own.

Imagine now two classes of slaves, the one belonging to the mistress,
and the other brought into the country by the master, and each animated
by a party spirit and jealousy;--imagine children of different
marriages, inheriting from their parents violent tempers and stubborn
wills, flattered and fawned on by slaves, and alternately petted or
stormed at, now by this parent and now by that, and you will have some
idea of the task which I undertook in being tutor in this family.

I was young and fearless in those days, as you are now, and the
difficulties of the position, instead of exciting apprehension, only
awakened the spirit of enterprise and adventure.

The whole arrangements of the household, to me fresh from the simplicity
and order of New England, had a singular and wild sort of novelty which
was attractive rather than otherwise. I was well recommended in the
family by an influential and wealthy gentleman of Boston, who
represented my family, as indeed it was, as among the oldest and most
respectable of Boston, and spoke in such terms of me, personally, as I
should not have ventured to use in relation to myself. When I arrived, I
found that two or three tutors, who had endeavored to bear rule in this
tempestuous family, had thrown up the command after a short trial, and
that the parents felt some little apprehension of not being able to
secure the services of another,--a circumstance which I did not fail to
improve in making my preliminary arrangements. I assumed an air of grave
hauteur, was very exacting in all my requisitions and stipulations, and
would give no promise of doing more than to give the situation a
temporary trial. I put on an air of supreme indifference as to my
continuance, and acted in fact rather on the assumption that I should
confer a favor by remaining.

In this way I succeeded in obtaining at the outset a position of more
respect and deference than had been enjoyed by any of my predecessors. I
had a fine apartment, a servant exclusively devoted to me, a horse for
riding, and saw myself treated among the servants as a person of
consideration and distinction.

Don José and his wife both had in fact a very strong desire to retain my
services, when after the trial of a week or two, it was found that I
really could make their discordant and turbulent children to some extent
obedient and studious during certain portions of the day; and in fact I
soon acquired in the whole family that ascendancy which a well-bred
person who respects himself, and can keep his temper, must have over
passionate and undisciplined natures.

I became the receptacle of the complaints of all, and a sort of
confidential adviser. Don José imparted to me with more frankness than
good taste his chagrins with regard to his wife's indolence,
ill-temper, and bad management, and his wife in turn omitted no
opportunity to vent complaints against her husband for similar reasons.
I endeavored, to the best of my ability, to act a friendly part by both.
It never was in my nature to see anything that needed to be done without
trying to do it, and it was impossible to work at all without becoming
so interested in my work as to do far more than I had agreed to do. I
assisted Don José about many of his affairs; brought his neglected
accounts into order; and suggested from time to time arrangements which
relieved the difficulties which had been brought on by disorder and
neglect. In fact, I became, as he said, quite a necessary of life to
him.

In regard to the children, I had a more difficult task. The children of
Don José by his present wife had been systematically stimulated by the
negroes into a chronic habit of dislike and jealousy toward her children
by a former husband. On the slightest pretext, they were constantly
running to their father with complaints; and as the mother warmly
espoused the cause of her first children, criminations and
recriminations often convulsed the whole family.

In ill-regulated families in that region, the care of the children is
from the first in the hands of half-barbarized negroes, whose power of
moulding and assimilating childish minds is peculiar, so that the
teacher has to contend constantly with a savage element in the children
which seems to have been drawn in with the mother's milk. It is, in a
modified way, something the same result as if the child had formed its
manners in Dahomey or on the coast of Guinea. In the fierce quarrels
which were carried on between the children of this family, I had
frequent occasion to observe this strange, savage element, which
sometimes led to expressions and actions which would seem incredible in
civilized society.

The three children by Madame Mendoza's former husband were two girls of
sixteen and eighteen and a boy of fourteen. The four children of the
second marriage consisted of three boys and a daughter,--the eldest
being not more than thirteen.

The natural capacity of all the children was good, although, from
self-will and indolence, they had grown up in a degree of ignorance
which could not have been tolerated except in a family living an
isolated plantation life in the midst of barbarized dependents. Savage
and untaught and passionate as they were, the work of teaching them was
not without its interest to me. A power of control was with me a natural
gift; and then that command of temper which is the common attribute of
well-trained persons in the Northern states, was something so singular
in this family as to invest its possessor with a certain awe; and my
calm, energetic voice, and determined manner, often acted as a charm on
their stormy natures.

But there was one member of the family of whom I have not yet
spoken,--and yet all this letter is about her,--the daughter of Don José
by his first marriage. Poor Dolores! poor child! God grant she may have
entered into his rest!

I need not describe her. You have seen her picture. And in the wild,
rude, discordant family, she always reminded me of the words, "a lily
among thorns." She was in her nature unlike all the rest, and, I may
say, unlike any one I ever saw. She seemed to live a lonely kind of life
in this disorderly household, often marked out as the object of the
spites and petty tyrannies of both parties. She was regarded with bitter
hatred and jealousy by Madame Mendoza, who was sure to visit her with
unsparing bitterness and cruelty after the occasional demonstrations of
fondness she received from her father. Her exquisite beauty and the
gentle softness of her manners made her such a contrast to her sisters
as constantly excited their ill-will. Unlike them all, she was
fastidiously neat in her personal habits, and orderly in all the little
arrangements of life.

She seemed to me in this family to be like some shy, beautiful pet
creature in the hands of rude, unappreciated owners, hunted from quarter
to quarter, and finding rest only by stealth. Yet she seemed to have no
perception of the harshness and cruelty with which she was treated. She
had grown up with it; it was the habit of her life to study peaceable
methods of averting or avoiding the various inconveniences and
annoyances of her lot, and secure to herself a little quiet.

It not unfrequently happened, amid the cabals and storms which shook the
family, that one party or the other took up and patronized Dolores for a
while, more, as it would appear, out of hatred for the other than any
real love to her. At such times it was really affecting to see with what
warmth the poor child would receive these equivocal demonstrations of
good-will--the nearest approaches to affection which she had ever
known--and the bitterness with which she would mourn when they were
capriciously withdrawn again. With a heart full of affection, she
reminded me of some delicate, climbing plant trying vainly to ascend the
slippery side of an inhospitable wall, and throwing its neglected
tendrils around every weed for support.

Her only fast, unfailing friend was her old negro nurse, or Mammy, as
the children called her. This old creature, with the cunning and
subtlety which had grown up from years of servitude, watched and waited
upon the interests of her little mistress, and contrived to carry many
points for her in the confused household. Her young mistress was her one
thought and purpose in living. She would have gone through fire and
water to serve her; and this faithful, devoted heart, blind and
ignorant though it were, was the only unfailing refuge and solace of the
poor hunted child.

Dolores, of course, became my pupil among the rest. Like the others, she
had suffered by the neglect and interruptions in the education of the
family, but she was intelligent and docile, and learned with a
surprising rapidity. It was not astonishing that she should soon have
formed an enthusiastic attachment to me, as I was the only intelligent,
cultivated person she had ever seen, and treated her with unvarying
consideration and delicacy. The poor thing had been so accustomed to
barbarous words and manners that simple politeness and the usages of
good society seemed to her cause for the most boundless gratitude.

It is due to myself, in view of what follows, to say that I was from the
first aware of the very obvious danger which lay in my path in finding
myself brought into close and daily relations with a young creature so
confiding, so attractive, and so singularly circumstanced. I knew that
it would be in the highest degree dishonorable to make the slightest
advances toward gaining from her that kind of affection which might
interfere with her happiness in such future relations as her father
might arrange for her. According to the European fashion, I know that
Dolores was in her father's hands, to be disposed of for life according
to his pleasure, as absolutely as if she had been one of his slaves. I
had every reason to think that his plans on this subject were matured,
and only waited for a little more teaching and training on my part, and
her fuller development in womanhood, to be announced to her.

In looking back over the past, therefore, I have not to reproach myself
with any dishonest and dishonorable breach of trust; for I was from the
first upon my guard, and so much so that even the jealousy my other
scholars never accused me of partiality. I was not in the habit of
giving very warm praise, and was in my general management anxious
rather to be just than conciliatory, knowing that with the kind of
spirits I had to deal with, firmness and justice went farther than
anything else. If I approved Dolores oftener than the rest, it was seen
to be because she never failed in a duty; if I spent more time with her
lessons, it was because her enthusiasm for study led her to learn longer
ones and study more things; but I am sure there was never a look or a
word toward her that went beyond the proprieties of my position.

But yet I could not so well guard my heart. I was young and full of
feeling. She was beautiful; and more than that, there was something in
her Spanish nature at once so warm and simple, so artless and yet so
unconsciously poetic, that her presence was a continual charm. How well
I remember her now,--all her little ways,--the movements of her pretty
little hands,--the expression of her changeful face as she recited to
me,--the grave, rapt earnestness with which she listened to all my
instructions!

I had not been with her many weeks before I felt conscious that it was
her presence that charmed the whole house, and made the otherwise
perplexing and distasteful details of my situation agreeable. I had a
dim perception that this growing passion was a dangerous thing for
myself; but was it a reason, I asked, why I should relinquish a position
in which I felt that I was useful, and when I could do for this lovely
child what no one else could do? I call her a child,--she always
impressed me as such,--though she was in her sixteenth year and had the
early womanly development of Southern climates. She seemed to me like
something frail and precious, needing to be guarded and cared for; and
when reason told me that I risked my own happiness in holding my
position, love argued on the other hand that I was her only friend, and
that I should be willing to risk something myself for the sake of
protecting and shielding her. For there was no doubt that my presence in
the family was a restraint upon the passions which formerly vented
themselves so recklessly on her, and established a sort of order in
which she found more peace than she had ever known before.

For a long time in our intercourse I was in the habit of looking on
myself as the only party in danger. It did not occur to me that this
heart, so beautiful and so lonely, might, in the want of all natural and
appropriate objects of attachment, fasten itself on me unsolicited, from
the mere necessity of loving. She seemed to me so much too beautiful,
too perfect, to belong to a lot in life like mine, that I could not
suppose it possible this could occur without the most blameworthy
solicitation on my part; and it is the saddest and most affecting proof
to me how this poor child had been starved for sympathy and love, that
she should have repaid such cold services as mine with such an entire
devotion. At first her feelings were expressed openly toward me, with
the dutiful air of a good child. She placed flowers on my desk in the
morning, and made quaint little nosegays in the Spanish fashion, which
she gave me, and busied her leisure with various ingenious little
knick-knacks of fancy work, which she brought me. I treated them all as
the offerings of a child while with her, but I kept them sacredly in my
own room. To tell the truth, I have some of the poor little things now.

But after a while I could not help seeing how she loved me; and then I
felt as if I ought to go; but how could I? The pain to myself I could
have borne; but how could I leave her to all the misery of her bleak,
ungenial position? She, poor thing, was so unconscious of what I
knew,--for I was made clear-sighted by love. I tried the more strictly
to keep to the path I had marked out for myself, but I fear I did not
always do it; in fact, many things seemed to conspire to throw us
together. The sisters, who were sometimes invited out to visit on
neighboring estates, were glad enough to dispense with the presence and
attractions of Dolores, and so she was frequently left at home to study
with me in their absence. As to Don José, although he always treated me
with civility, yet he had such an ingrained and deep-rooted idea of his
own superiority of position, that I suppose he would as soon have
imagined the possibility of his daughter's falling in love with one of
his horses. I was a great convenience to him. I had a knack of governing
and carrying points in his family that it had always troubled and
fatigued him to endeavor to arrange,--and that was all. So that my
intercourse with Dolores was as free and unwatched, and gave me as many
opportunities of enjoying her undisturbed society, as heart could
desire.

At last came the crisis, however. After breakfast one morning, Don José
called Dolores into his library and announced to her that he had
concluded for her a treaty of marriage, and expected her husband to
arrive in a few days. He expected that this news would be received by
her with the glee with which a young girl hears of a new dress or of a
ball-ticket, and was quite confounded at the grave and mournful silence
in which she received it. She said no word, made no opposition, but went
out from the room and shut herself up in her own apartment, and spent
the day in tears and sobs.

Don José, who had rather a greater regard for Dolores than for any
creature living, and who had confidently expected to give great delight
by the news he had imparted, was quite confounded by this turn of
things. If there had been one word of either expostulation or argument,
he would have blazed and stormed in a fury of passion; but as it was,
this broken-hearted submission, though vexatious, was perplexing. He
sent for me, and opened his mind, and begged me to talk with Dolores
and show her the advantages of the alliance, which the poor foolish
child, he said, did not seem to comprehend. The man was immensely rich,
and had a splendid estate in Cuba. It was a most desirable thing.

I ventured to inquire whether his person and manners were such as would
be pleasing to a young girl, and could gather only that he was a man of
about fifty, who had been most of his life in the military service, and
was now desirous of making an establishment for the repose of his latter
days, at the head of which he would place a handsome and tractable
woman, and do well by her.

I represented that it would perhaps be safer to say no more on the
subject until Dolores had seen him, and to this he agreed. Madame
Mendoza was very zealous in the affair, for the sake of getting clear of
the presence of Dolores in the family, and her sisters laughed at her
for her dejected appearance. They only wished, they said, that so much
luck might happen to them. For myself, I endeavored to take as little
notice as possible of the affair, though what I felt may be conjectured.
I knew,--I was perfectly certain,--that Dolores loved me as I loved her.
I knew that she had one of those simple and unworldly natures which
wealth and splendor could not satisfy, and whose life would lie entirely
in her affections. Sometimes I violently debated with myself whether
honor required me to sacrifice her happiness as well as my own, and I
felt the strongest temptation to ask her to be my wife and fly with me
to the Northern states, where I did not doubt my ability to make for her
a humble and happy home.

But the sense of honor is often stronger than all reasoning, and I felt
that such a course would be the betrayal of a trust; and I determined at
least to command myself till I should see the character of the man who
was destined to be her husband.

Meanwhile the whole manner of Dolores was changed. She maintained a
stony, gloomy silence, performed all her duties in a listless way, and
occasionally, when I commented on anything in her lessons or exercises,
would break into little flashes of petulance, most strange and unnatural
in her. Sometimes I could feel that she was looking at me earnestly, but
if I turned my eyes toward her, hers were instantly averted; but there
was in her eyes a peculiar expression at times, such as I have seen in
the eye of a hunted animal when it turned at bay,--a sort of desperate
resistance,--which, taken in connection with her fragile form and lovely
face, produced a mournful impression.

One morning I found Dolores sitting alone in the schoolroom, leaning her
head on her arms. She had on her wrist a bracelet of peculiar
workmanship, which she always wore,--the bracelet which was afterwards
the means of confirming her identity. She sat thus some moments in
silence, and then she raised her head and began turning this bracelet
round and round upon her arm, while she looked fixedly before her. At
last she spoke abruptly, and said,--

"Did I ever tell you that this was _my mother's_ hair? It is my mother's
hair,--and she was the only one that ever loved me; except poor old
Mammy, nobody else loves me,--nobody ever will."

"My dear Miss Dolores," I began.

"Don't call me dear," she said; "you don't care for me,--nobody
does,--papa doesn't, and I always loved him; everybody in the house
wants to get rid of me, whether I like to go or not. I have always tried
to be good and do all you wanted, and I should think _you_ might care
for me a little, but you don't."

"Dolores," I said, "I do care for you more than I do for any one in the
world; I love you more than my own soul."

These were the very words I never meant to say, but somehow they seemed
to utter themselves against my will. She looked at me for a moment as if
she could not believe her hearing, and then the blood flushed her face,
and she laid her head down on her arms.

At this moment Madame Mendoza and the other girls came into the room in
a clamor of admiration about a diamond bracelet which had just arrived
as a present from her future husband. It was a splendid thing, and had
for its clasp his miniature, surrounded by the largest brilliants.

The enthusiasm of the party even at this moment could not say anything
in favor of the beauty of this miniature, which, though painted on
ivory, gave the impression of a coarse-featured man, with a scar across
one eye.

"No matter for the beauty," said one of the girls, "so long as it is set
with such diamonds."

"Come, Dolores," said another, giving her the present, "pull off that
old hair bracelet, and try this on."

Dolores threw the diamond bracelet from her with a vehemence so unlike
her gentle self as to startle every one.

"I shall not take off my mother's bracelet for a gift from a man I never
knew," she said. "I hate diamonds. I wish those who like such things
might have them."

"Was ever anything so odd?" said Madame Mendoza.

"Dolores always was odd," said another of the girls; "nobody ever could
tell what she would like."




CHAPTER XXVII

HIDDEN THINGS


The next day Señor Don Guzman de Cardona arrived, and the whole house
was in a commotion of excitement. There was to be no school, and
everything was bustle and confusion. I passed my time in my own room in
reflecting severely upon myself for the imprudent words by which I had
thrown one more difficulty in the way of this poor harassed child.

Dolores this day seemed perfectly passive in the hands of her mother and
sisters, who appeared disposed to show her great attention. She allowed
them to array her in her most becoming dress, and made no objection to
anything except removing the bracelet from her arm. "Nobody's gifts
should take the place of her mother's," she said, and they were obliged
to be content with her wearing of the diamond bracelet on the other arm.

Don Guzman was a large, plethoric man, with coarse features and heavy
gait. Besides the scar I have spoken of, his face was adorned here and
there with pimples, which were not set down in the miniature. In the
course of the first hour's study, I saw him to be a man of much the same
stamp as Dolores's father--sensual, tyrannical, passionate. He seemed in
his own way to be much struck with the beauty of his intended wife, and
was not wanting in efforts to please her. All that I could see in her
was the settled, passive paleness of despair. She played, sang,
exhibited her embroidery and painting, at the command of Madame Mendoza,
with the air of an automaton; and Don Guzman remarked to her father on
the passive obedience as a proper and hopeful trait. Once only when he,
in presenting her a flower, took the liberty of kissing her cheek, did I
observe the flashing of her eye and a movement of disgust and
impatience, that she seemed scarcely able to restrain.

The marriage was announced to take place the next week, and a holiday
was declared through the house. Nothing was talked of or discussed but
the _corbeille de mariage_ which the bridegroom had brought--the
dresses, laces, sets of jewels, and cashmere shawls. Dolores never had
been treated with such attention by the family in her life. She rose
immeasurably in the eyes of all as the future possessor of such wealth
and such an establishment as awaited her. Madame Mendoza had visions of
future visits in Cuba rising before her mind, and overwhelmed her
daughter-in-law with flatteries and caresses, which she received in the
same passive silence as she did everything else.

For my own part, I tried to keep entirely by myself. I remained in my
room reading, and took my daily rides, accompanied by my servant--seeing
Dolores only at mealtimes, when I scarcely ventured to look at her. One
night, however, as I was walking through a lonely part of the garden,
Dolores suddenly stepped out from the shrubbery and stood before me. It
was bright moonlight, by which her face and person were distinctly
shown. How well I remember her as she looked then! She was dressed in
white muslin, as she was fond of being, but it had been torn and
disordered by the haste with which she had come through the shrubbery.
Her face was fearfully pale, and her great, dark eyes had an unnatural
brightness. She laid hold on my arm.

"Look here," she said, "I saw you and came down to speak with you."

She panted and trembled, so that for some moments she could not speak
another word. "I want to ask you," she gasped, after a pause, "whether I
heard you right? Did you say"--

"Yes, Dolores, you did. I did say what I had no right to say, like a
dishonorable man."

"But is it true? Are you sure it is true?" she said, scarcely seeming to
hear my words.

"God knows it is," said I despairingly.

"Then why don't you save me? Why do you let them sell me to this
dreadful man? He don't love me--he never will. Can't you take me away?"

"Dolores, I am a poor man. I cannot give you any of these splendors your
father desires for you."

"Do you think I care for them? I love you more than all the world
together. And if you do really love me, why should we not be happy with
each other?"

"Dolores," I said, with a last effort to keep calm, "I am much older
than you, and know the world, and ought not to take advantage of your
simplicity. You have been so accustomed to abundant wealth and all it
can give, that you cannot form an idea of what the hardships and
discomforts of marrying a poor man would be. You are unused to having
the least care, or making the least exertion for yourself. All the world
would say that I acted a very dishonorable part to take you from a
position which offers you wealth, splendor, and ease, to one of
comparative hardship. Perhaps some day you would think so yourself."

While I was speaking, Dolores turned me toward the moonlight, and fixed
her great dark eyes piercingly upon me, as if she wanted to read my
soul. "Is that all?" she said; "is that the only reason?"

"I do not understand you," said I.

She gave me such a desolate look, and answered in a tone of utter
dejection, "Oh, I didn't know, but perhaps _you_ might not want me. All
the rest are so glad to sell me to anybody that will take me. But you
really do love me, don't you?" she added, laying her hand on mine.

What answer I made I cannot say. I only know that every vestige of what
is called reason and common sense left me at that moment, and that there
followed an hour of delirium in which I--we both were _very_ happy--we
forgot everything but each other, and we arranged all our plans for
flight. There was fortunately a ship lying in the harbor of St.
Augustine, the captain of which was known to me. In course of a day or
two passage was taken, and my effects transported on board. Nobody
seemed to suspect us. Everything went on quietly up to the day before
that appointed for sailing. I took my usual rides, and did everything as
much as possible in my ordinary way, to disarm suspicion, and none
seemed to exist. The needed preparations went gayly forward. On the day
I mentioned, when I had ridden some distance from the house, a messenger
came post-haste after me. It was a boy who belonged specially to
Dolores. He gave me a little hurried note. I copy it:--

    "Papa has found all out, and it is dreadful. No one else knows, and
    he means to kill you when you come back. Do, if you love me, hurry
    and get on board the ship. I shall never get over it, if evil comes
    on you for my sake. I shall let them do what they please with me, if
    God will only save _you_. I will try to be good. Perhaps if I bear
    my trials well, he will let me die soon. That is all I ask. I love
    you, and always shall, to death and after.

    DOLORES."

There was the end of it all. I escaped on the ship. I read the marriage
in the paper. Incidentally I afterwards heard of her as living in Cuba,
but I never saw her again till I saw her in her coffin. Sorrow and
death had changed her so much that at first the sight of her awakened
only a vague, painful remembrance. The sight of the hair bracelet which
I had seen on her arm brought all back, and I felt sure that my poor
Dolores had strangely come to sleep her last sleep near me.

Immediately after I became satisfied who you were, I felt a painful
degree of responsibility for the knowledge. I wrote at once to a friend
of mine in the neighborhood of St. Augustine, to find out any
particulars of the Mendoza family. I learned that its history had been
like that of many others in that region. Don José had died in a bilious
fever, brought on by excessive dissipation, and at his death the estate
was found to be so incumbered that the whole was sold at auction. The
slaves were scattered hither and thither to different owners, and Madame
Mendoza, with her children and remains of fortune, had gone to live in
New Orleans.

Of Dolores he had heard but once since her marriage. A friend had
visited Don Guzman's estates in Cuba. He was living in great splendor,
but bore the character of a hard, cruel, tyrannical master, and an
overbearing man. His wife was spoken of as being in very delicate
health,--avoiding society and devoting herself to religion.

I would here take occasion to say that it was understood when I went
into the family of Don José, that I should not in any way interfere with
the religious faith of the children, the family being understood to
belong to the Roman Catholic Church. There was so little like religion
of any kind in the family, that the idea of their belonging to any faith
savored something of the ludicrous. In the case of poor Dolores,
however, it was different. The earnestness of her nature would always
have made any religious form a reality to her. In her case I was glad to
remember that the Romish Church, amid many corruptions, preserves all
the essential beliefs necessary for our salvation, and that many holy
souls have gone to heaven through its doors. I therefore was only
careful to direct her principal attention to the more spiritual parts of
her own faith, and to dwell on the great themes which all Christian
people hold in common.

Many of my persuasion would not have felt free to do this, but my
liberty of conscience in this respect was perfect. I have seen that if
you break the cup out of which a soul has been used to take the wine of
the gospel, you often spill the very wine itself. And after all, these
forms are but shadows of which the substance is Christ.

I am free to say, therefore, that the thought that your poor mother was
devoting herself earnestly to religion, although after the forms of a
church with which I differ, was to me a source of great consolation,
because I knew that in that way alone could a soul like hers find peace.

I have never rested from my efforts to obtain more information. A short
time before the incident which cast you upon our shore, I conversed with
a sea-captain who had returned from Cuba. He stated that there had been
an attempt at insurrection among the slaves of Don Guzman, in which a
large part of the buildings and out-houses of the estate had been
consumed by fire. On subsequent inquiry I learned that Don Guzman had
sold his estates and embarked for Boston with his wife and family, and
that nothing had subsequently been heard of him.

Thus, my young friend, I have told you all that I know of those singular
circumstances which have cast your lot on our shores. I do not expect at
your time of life you will take the same view of this event that I do.
You may possibly--very probably will--consider it a loss not to have
been brought up as you might have been in the splendid establishment of
Don Guzman, and found yourself heir to wealth and pleasure without
labor or exertion. Yet I am quite sure in that case that your value as a
human being would have been immeasurably less. I think I have seen in
you the elements of passions, which luxury and idleness and the too
early possession of irresponsible power, might have developed with fatal
results. You have simply to reflect whether you would rather be an
energetic, intelligent, self-controlled man, capable of guiding the
affairs of life and of acquiring its prizes,--or to be the reverse of
all this, with its prizes bought for you by the wealth of parents. I
hope mature reflection will teach you to regard with gratitude that
disposition of the All-Wise, which cast your lot as it has been cast.

Let me ask one thing in closing. I have written for you here many things
most painful for me to remember, because I wanted you to love and honor
the memory of your mother. I wanted that her memory should have
something such a charm for you as it has for me. With me, her image has
always stood between me and all other women; but I have never even
intimated to a living being that such a passage in my history ever
occurred,--no, not even to my sister, who is nearer to me than any other
earthly creature.

In some respects I am a singular person in my habits, and having once
written this, you will pardon me if I observe that it will never be
agreeable to me to have the subject named between us. Look upon me
always as a friend, who would regard nothing as a hardship by which he
might serve the son of one so dear.

I have hesitated whether I ought to add one circumstance more. I think I
will do so, trusting to your good sense not to give it any undue weight.

I have never ceased making inquiries in Cuba, as I found opportunity, in
regard to your father's property, and late investigations have led me to
the conclusion that he left a considerable sum of money in the hands of
a notary, whose address I have, which, if your identity could be proved,
would come in course of law to you. I have written an account of all the
circumstances which, in my view, identify you as the son of Don Guzman
de Cardona, and had them properly attested in legal form.

This, together with your mother's picture and the bracelet, I recommend
you to take on your next voyage, and to see what may result from the
attempt. How considerable the sum may be which will result from this, I
cannot say, but as Don Guzman's fortune was very large, I am in hopes it
may prove something worth attention.

At any time you may wish to call, I will have all these things ready for
you.

    I am, with warm regard,
            Your sincere friend,
                  THEOPHILUS SEWELL.

When Moses had finished reading this letter, he laid it down on the
pebbles beside him, and, leaning back against a rock, looked moodily out
to sea. The tide had washed quite up to within a short distance of his
feet, completely isolating the little grotto where he sat from all the
surrounding scenery, and before him, passing and repassing on the blue
bright solitude of the sea, were silent ships, going on their wondrous
pathless ways to unknown lands. The letter had stirred all within him
that was dreamy and poetic: he felt somehow like a leaf torn from a
romance, and blown strangely into the hollow of those rocks. Something
too of ambition and pride stirred within him. He had been born an heir
of wealth and power, little as they had done for the happiness of his
poor mother; and when he thought he might have had these two wild horses
which have run away with so many young men, he felt, as young men all
do, an impetuous desire for their possession, and he thought as so many
do, "Give them to me, and I'll risk my character,--I'll risk my
happiness."

The letter opened a future before him which was something to speculate
upon, even though his reason told him it was uncertain, and he lay there
dreamily piling one air-castle on another,--unsubstantial as the great
islands of white cloud that sailed through the sky and dropped their
shadows in the blue sea.

It was late in the afternoon when he bethought him he must return home,
and so climbing from rock to rock he swung himself upward on to the
island, and sought the brown cottage. As he passed by the open window he
caught a glimpse of Mara sewing. He walked softly up to look in without
her seeing him. She was sitting with the various articles of his
wardrobe around her, quietly and deftly mending his linen, singing soft
snatches of an old psalm-tune.

She seemed to have resumed quite naturally that quiet care of him and
his, which she had in all the earlier years of their life. He noticed
again her little hands,--they seemed a sort of wonder to him. Why had he
never seen, when a boy, how pretty they were? And she had such dainty
little ways of taking up and putting down things as she measured and
clipped; it seemed so pleasant to have her handling his things; it was
as if a good fairy were touching them, whose touch brought back peace.
But then, he thought, by and by she will do all this for some one else.
The thought made him angry. He really felt abused in anticipation. She
was doing all this for him just in sisterly kindness, and likely as not
thinking of somebody else whom she loved better all the time. It is
astonishing how cool and dignified this consideration made our hero as
he faced up to the window. He was, after all, in hopes she might blush,
and look agitated at seeing him suddenly; but she did not. The foolish
boy did not know the quick wits of a girl, and that all the while that
he had supposed himself so sly, and been holding his breath to observe,
Mara had been perfectly cognizant of his presence, and had been
schooling herself to look as unconscious and natural as possible. So she
did,--only saying,--

"Oh, Moses, is that you? Where have you been all day?"

"Oh, I went over to see Parson Sewell, and get my pastoral lecture, you
know."

"And did you stay to dinner?"

"No; I came home and went rambling round the rocks, and got into our old
cave, and never knew how the time passed."

"Why, then you've had no dinner, poor boy," said Mara, rising suddenly.
"Come in quick, you must be fed, or you'll get dangerous and eat
somebody."

"No, no, don't get anything," said Moses, "it's almost supper-time, and
I'm not hungry."

And Moses threw himself into a chair, and began abstractedly snipping a
piece of tape with Mara's very best scissors.

"If you please, sir, don't demolish that; I was going to stay one of
your collars with it," said Mara.

"Oh, hang it, I'm always in mischief among girls' things," said Moses,
putting down the scissors and picking up a bit of white wax, which with
equal unconsciousness, he began kneading in his hands, while he was
dreaming over the strange contents of the morning's letter.

"I hope Mr. Sewell didn't say anything to make you look so very gloomy,"
said Mara.

"Mr. Sewell?" said Moses, starting; "no, he didn't; in fact, I had a
pleasant call there; and there was that confounded old sphinx of a Miss
Roxy there. Why don't she die? She must be somewhere near a hundred
years old by this time."

"Never thought to ask her why she didn't die," said Mara; "but I presume
she has the best of reasons for living."

"Yes, that's so," said Moses; "every old toadstool, and burdock, and
mullein lives and thrives and lasts; no danger of their dying."

"You seem to be in a charitable frame of mind," said Mara.

"Confound it all! I hate this world. If I could have my own way now,--if
I could have just what I wanted, and do just as I please exactly, I
might make a pretty good thing of it."

"And pray what would you have?" said Mara.

"Well, in the first place, riches."

"In the first place?"

"Yes, in the first place, I say; for money buys everything else."

"Well, supposing so," said Mara, "for argument's sake, what would you
buy with it?"

"Position in society, respect, consideration,--and I'd have a splendid
place, with everything elegant. I have ideas enough, only give me the
means. And then I'd have a wife, of course."

"And how much would you pay for her?" said Mara, looking quite cool.

"I'd buy her with all the rest,--a girl that wouldn't look at _me_ as I
am,--would take me for all the rest, you know,--that's the way of the
world."

"It is, is it?" said Mara. "I don't understand such matters much."

"Yes; it's the way with all you girls," said Moses; "it's the way you'll
marry when you do."

"Don't be so fierce about it. I haven't done it yet," said Mara; "but
now, really, I must go and set the supper-table when I have put these
things away,"--and Mara gathered an armful of things together, and
tripped singing upstairs, and arranged them in the drawer of Moses's
room. "Will his wife like to do all these little things for him as I
do?" she thought. "It's natural I should. I grew up with him, and love
him, just as if he were my own brother,--he is all the brother I ever
had. I love him more than anything else in the world, and this wife he
talks about could do no more."

"She don't care a pin about me," thought Moses; "it's only a habit she
has got, and her strict notions of duty, that's all. She is housewifely
in her instincts, and seizes all neglected linen and garments as her
lawful prey,--she would do it just the same for her grandfather;" and
Moses drummed moodily on the window-pane.




CHAPTER XXVIII

A COQUETTE


The timbers of the ship which was to carry the fortunes of our hero were
laid by the side of Middle Bay, and all these romantic shores could
hardly present a lovelier scene. This beautiful sheet of water separates
Harpswell from a portion of Brunswick. Its shores are rocky and
pine-crowned, and display the most picturesque variety of outline. Eagle
Island, Shelter Island, and one or two smaller ones, lie on the glassy
surface like soft clouds of green foliage pierced through by the
steel-blue tops of arrowy pine-trees.

There were a goodly number of shareholders in the projected vessel; some
among the most substantial men in the vicinity. Zephaniah Pennel had
invested there quite a solid sum, as had also our friend Captain
Kittridge. Moses had placed therein the proceeds of his recent voyage,
which enabled him to buy a certain number of shares, and he secretly
revolved in his mind whether the sum of money left by his father might
not enable him to buy the whole ship. Then a few prosperous voyages, and
his fortune was made!

He went into the business of building the new vessel with all the
enthusiasm with which he used, when a boy, to plan ships and mould
anchors. Every day he was off at early dawn in his working-clothes, and
labored steadily among the men till evening. No matter how early he
rose, however, he always found that a good fairy had been before him and
prepared his dinner, daintily sometimes adding thereto a fragrant
little bunch of flowers. But when his boat returned home at evening, he
no longer saw her as in the days of girlhood waiting far out on the
farthest point of rock for his return. Not that she did not watch for it
and run out many times toward sunset; but the moment she had made out
that it was surely he, she would run back into the house, and very
likely find an errand in her own room, where she would be so deeply
engaged that it would be necessary for him to call her down before she
could make her appearance. Then she came smiling, chatty, always
gracious, and ready to go or to come as he requested,--the very
cheerfulest of household fairies,--but yet for all that there was a
cobweb invisible barrier around her that for some reason or other he
could not break over. It vexed and perplexed him, and day after day he
determined to whistle it down,--ride over it rough-shod,--and be as free
as he chose with this apparently soft, unresistant, airy being, who
seemed so accessible. Why shouldn't he kiss her when he chose, and sit
with his arm around her waist, and draw her familiarly upon his
knee,--this little child-woman, who was as a sister to him? Why, to be
sure? Had she ever frowned or scolded as Sally Kittridge did when he
attempted to pass the air-line that divides man from womanhood? Not at
all. She had neither blushed nor laughed, nor ran away. If he kissed
her, she took it with the most matter-of-fact composure; if he passed
his arm around her, she let it remain with unmoved calmness; and so
somehow he did these things less and less, and wondered why.

The fact is, our hero had begun an experiment with his little friend
that we would never advise a young man to try on one of these intense,
quiet, soft-seeming women, whose whole life is inward. He had determined
to find out whether she loved him before he committed himself to her;
and the strength of a whole book of martyrs is in women to endure and
to bear without flinching before they will surrender the gate of this
citadel of silence. Moreover, our hero had begun his siege with
precisely the worst weapons.

For on the night that he returned and found Mara conversing with a
stranger, the suspicion arose in his mind that somehow Mara might be
particularly interested in him, and instead of asking her, which anybody
might consider the most feasible step in the case, he asked Sally
Kittridge.

Sally's inborn, inherent love of teasing was up in a moment. Did she
know anything of that Mr. Adams? Of course she did,--a young lawyer of
one of the best Boston families,--a splendid fellow; she wished any such
luck might happen to her! Was Mara engaged to him? What would he give to
know? Why didn't he ask Mara? Did he expect her to reveal her friend's
secrets? Well, she shouldn't,--report said Mr. Adams was well-to-do in
the world, and had expectations from an uncle,--and didn't Moses think
he was interesting in conversation? Everybody said what a conquest it
was for an Orr's Island girl, etc., etc. And Sally said the rest with
many a malicious toss and wink and sly twinkle of the dimples of her
cheek, which might mean more or less, as a young man of imaginative
temperament was disposed to view it. Now this was all done in pure
simple love of teasing. We incline to think phrenologists have as yet
been very incomplete in their classification of faculties, or they would
have appointed a separate organ for this propensity of human nature.
Certain persons, often the most kind-hearted in the world, and who would
not give pain in any serious matter, seem to have an insatiable appetite
for those small annoyances we commonly denominate teasing,--and Sally
was one of this number.

She diverted herself infinitely in playing upon the excitability of
Moses,--in awaking his curiosity, and baffling it, and tormenting him
with a whole phantasmagoria of suggestions and assertions, which played
along so near the line of probability, that one could never tell which
might be fancy and which might be fact.

Moses therefore pursued the line of tactics for such cases made and
provided, and strove to awaken jealousy in Mara by paying marked and
violent attentions to Sally. He went there evening after evening,
leaving Mara to sit alone at home. He made secrets with her, and alluded
to them before Mara. He proposed calling his new vessel the Sally
Kittridge; but whether all these things made Mara jealous or not, he
could never determine. Mara had no peculiar gift for acting, except in
this one point; but here all the vitality of nature rallied to her
support, and enabled her to preserve an air of the most unperceiving
serenity. If she shed any tears when she spent a long, lonesome evening,
she was quite particular to be looking in a very placid frame when Moses
returned, and to give such an account of the books, or the work, or
paintings which had interested her, that Moses was sure to be vexed.
Never were her inquiries for Sally more cordial,--never did she seem
inspired by a more ardent affection for her.

Whatever may have been the result of this state of things in regard to
Mara, it is certain that Moses succeeded in convincing the common fame
of that district that he and Sally were destined for each other, and the
thing was regularly discussed at quilting frolics and tea-drinkings
around, much to Miss Emily's disgust and Aunt Roxy's grave satisfaction,
who declared that "Mara was altogether too good for Moses Pennel, but
Sally Kittridge would make him stand round,"--by which expression she
was understood to intimate that Sally had in her the rudiments of the
same kind of domestic discipline which had operated so favorably in the
case of Captain Kittridge.

These things, of course, had come to Mara's ears. She had overheard the
discussions on Sunday noons as the people between meetings sat over
their doughnuts and cheese, and analyzed their neighbors' affairs, and
she seemed to smile at them all. Sally only laughed, and declared that
it was no such thing; that she would no more marry Moses Pennel, or any
other fellow, than she would put her head into the fire. What did she
want of any of them? She knew too much to get married,--that she did.
She was going to have her liberty for one while yet to come, etc., etc.;
but all these assertions were of course supposed to mean nothing but the
usual declarations in such cases. Mara among the rest thought it quite
likely that this thing was yet to be.

So she struggled and tried to reason down a pain which constantly ached
in her heart when she thought of this. She ought to have foreseen that
it must some time end in this way. Of course she must have known that
Moses would some time choose a wife; and how fortunate that, instead of
a stranger, he had chosen her most intimate friend. Sally was careless
and thoughtless, to be sure, but she had a good generous heart at the
bottom, and she hoped she would love Moses at least as well as _she_
did, and then she would always live with them, and think of any little
things that Sally might forget.

After all, Sally was so much more capable and efficient a person than
herself,--so much more bustling and energetic, she would make altogether
a better housekeeper, and doubtless a better wife for Moses. But then it
was so hard that he did not tell her about it. Was she not his
sister?--his confidant for all his childhood?--and why should he shut up
his heart from her now? But then she must guard herself from being
jealous,--that would be mean and wicked. So Mara, in her zeal of
self-discipline, pushed on matters; invited Sally to tea to meet Moses;
and when she came, left them alone together while she busied herself in
hospitable cares. She sent Moses with errands and commissions to Sally,
which he was sure to improve into protracted visits; and in short, no
young match-maker ever showed more good-will to forward the union of two
chosen friends than Mara showed to unite Moses and Sally.

So the flirtation went on all summer, like a ship under full sail, with
prosperous breezes; and Mara, in the many hours that her two best
friends were together, tried heroically to persuade herself that she was
not unhappy. She said to herself constantly that she never had loved
Moses other than as a brother, and repeated and dwelt upon the fact to
her own mind with a pertinacity which might have led her to suspect the
reality of the fact, had she had experience enough to look closer. True,
it was rather lonely, she said, but that she was used to,--she always
had been and always should be. Nobody would ever love her in return as
she loved; which sentence she did not analyze very closely, or she might
have remembered Mr. Adams and one or two others, who had professed more
for her than she had found herself able to return. That general
proposition about nobody is commonly found, if sifted to the bottom, to
have specific relation to somebody whose name never appears in the
record.

Nobody could have conjectured from Mara's calm, gentle cheerfulness of
demeanor, that any sorrow lay at the bottom of her heart; she would not
have owned it to herself.

There are griefs which grow with years, which have no marked
beginnings,--no especial dates; they are not events, but slow
perceptions of disappointment, which bear down on the heart with a
constant and equable pressure like the weight of the atmosphere, and
these things are never named or counted in words among life's sorrows;
yet through them, as through an unsuspected inward wound, life, energy,
and vigor slowly bleed away, and the persons, never owning even to
themselves the weight of the pressure,--standing, to all appearance,
fair and cheerful, are still undermined with a secret wear of this inner
current, and ready to fall with the first external pressure.

There are persons often brought into near contact by the relations of
life, and bound to each other by a love so close, that they are
perfectly indispensable to each other, who yet act upon each other as a
file upon a diamond, by a slow and gradual friction, the pain of which
is so equable, so constantly diffused through life, as scarcely ever at
any time to force itself upon the mind as a reality.

Such had been the history of the affection of Mara for Moses. It had
been a deep, inward, concentrated passion that had almost absorbed
self-consciousness, and made her keenly alive to all the moody,
restless, passionate changes of his nature; it had brought with it that
craving for sympathy and return which such love ever will, and yet it
was fixed upon a nature so different and so uncomprehending that the
action had for years been one of pain more than pleasure. Even now, when
she had him at home with her and busied herself with constant cares for
him, there was a sort of disturbing, unquiet element in the history of
every day. The longing for him to come home at night,--the wish that he
would stay with her,--the uncertainty whether he would or would not go
and spend the evening with Sally,--the musing during the day over all
that he had done and said the day before, were a constant interior
excitement. For Moses, besides being in his moods quite variable and
changeable, had also a good deal of the dramatic element in him, and put
on sundry appearances in the way of experiment.

He would feign to have quarreled with Sally, that he might detect
whether Mara would betray some gladness; but she only evinced concern
and a desire to make up the difficulty. He would discuss her character
and her fitness to make a man happy in matrimony in the style that
young gentlemen use who think their happiness a point of great
consequence in the creation; and Mara, always cool, and firm, and
sensible, would talk with him in the most maternal style possible, and
caution him against trifling with her affections. Then again he would be
lavish in his praise of Sally's beauty, vivacity, and energy, and Mara
would join with the most apparently unaffected delight. Sometimes he
ventured, on the other side, to rally her on some future husband, and
predict the days when all the attentions which she was daily bestowing
on him would be for another; and here, as everywhere else, he found his
little Sphinx perfectly inscrutable. Instinct teaches the grass-bird,
who hides her eggs under long meadow grass, to creep timidly yards from
the nest, and then fly up boldly in the wrong place; and a like instinct
teaches shy girls all kinds of unconscious stratagems when the one
secret of their life is approached. They may be as truthful in all other
things as the strictest Puritan, but here they deceive by an infallible
necessity. And meanwhile, where was Sally Kittridge in all this matter?
Was her heart in the least touched by the black eyes and long lashes?
Who can say? Had she a heart? Well, Sally was a good girl. When one got
sufficiently far down through the foam and froth of the surface to find
what was in the depths of her nature, there was abundance there of good
womanly feeling, generous and strong, if one could but get at it.

She was the best and brightest of daughters to the old Captain, whose
accounts she kept, whose clothes she mended, whose dinner she often
dressed and carried to him, from loving choice; and Mrs. Kittridge
regarded her housewifely accomplishments with pride, though she never
spoke to her otherwise than in words of criticism and rebuke, as in her
view an honest mother should who means to keep a flourishing sprig of a
daughter within limits of a proper humility.

But as for any sentiment or love toward any person of the other sex,
Sally, as yet, had it not. Her numerous admirers were only so many
subjects for the exercise of her dear delight of teasing, and Moses
Pennel, the last and most considerable, differed from the rest only in
the fact that he was a match for her in this redoubtable art and
science, and this made the game she was playing with him altogether more
stimulating than that she had carried on with any other of her admirers.
For Moses could sulk and storm for effect, and clear off as bright as
Harpswell Bay after a thunder-storm--for effect also. Moses could play
jealous, and make believe all those thousand-and-one shadowy nothings
that coquettes, male and female, get up to carry their points with; and
so their quarrels and their makings-up were as manifold as the
sea-breezes that ruffled the ocean before the Captain's door.

There is but one danger in play of this kind, and that is, that deep
down in the breast of every slippery, frothy, elfish Undine sleeps the
germ of an unawakened soul, which suddenly, in the course of some such
trafficking with the outward shows and seemings of affection, may wake
up and make of the teasing, tricksy elf a sad and earnest woman--a
creature of loves and self-denials and faithfulness unto death--in
short, something altogether too good, too sacred to be trifled with; and
when a man enters the game protected by a previous attachment which
absorbs all his nature, and the woman awakes in all her depth and
strength to feel the real meaning of love and life, she finds that she
has played with one stronger than she, at a terrible disadvantage.

Is this mine lying dark and evil under the saucy little feet of our
Sally? Well, we should not of course be surprised some day to find it
so.




CHAPTER XXIX

NIGHT TALKS


October is come, and among the black glooms of the pine forests flare
out the scarlet branches of the rock-maple, and the beech-groves are all
arrayed in gold, through which the sunlight streams in subdued richness.
October is come with long, bright, hazy days, swathing in purple mists
the rainbow brightness of the forests, and blending the otherwise gaudy
and flaunting colors into wondrous harmonies of splendor. And Moses
Pennel's ship is all built and ready, waiting only a favorable day for
her launching.

And just at this moment Moses is sauntering home from Captain
Kittridge's in company with Sally, for Mara has sent him to bring her to
tea with them. Moses is in high spirits; everything has succeeded to his
wishes; and as the two walk along the high, bold, rocky shore, his eye
glances out to the open ocean, where the sun is setting, and the fresh
wind blowing, and the white sails flying, and already fancies himself a
sea-king, commanding his own place, and going from land to land.

"There hasn't been a more beautiful ship built here these twenty years,"
he says, in triumph.

"Oho, Mr. Conceit," said Sally, "that's only because it's yours
now--your geese are all swans. I wish you could have seen the Typhoon,
that Ben Drummond sailed in--a real handsome fellow he was. What a pity
there aren't more like him!"

"I don't enter on the merits of Ben Drummond's beauty," said Moses; "but
I don't believe the Typhoon was one whit superior to our ship. Besides,
Miss Sally, I thought you were going to take it under your especial
patronage, and let me honor it with your name."

"How absurd you always will be talking about that--why don't you call it
after Mara?"

"After Mara?" said Moses. "I don't want to--it wouldn't be
appropriate--one wants a different kind of girl to name a ship
after--something bold and bright and dashing!"

"Thank you, sir, but I prefer not to have my bold and dashing qualities
immortalized in this way," said Sally; "besides, sir, how do I know that
you wouldn't run me on a rock the very first thing? When I give my name
to a ship, it must have an experienced commander," she added,
maliciously, for she knew that Moses was specially vulnerable on this
point.

"As you please," said Moses, with heightened color. "Allow me to remark
that he who shall ever undertake to command the 'Sally Kittridge' will
have need of all his experience--and then, perhaps, not be able to know
the ways of the craft."

"See him now," said Sally, with a malicious laugh; "we are getting
wrathy, are we?"

"Not I," said Moses; "it would cost altogether too much exertion to get
angry at every teasing thing you choose to say, Miss Sally. By and by I
shall be gone, and then won't your conscience trouble you?"

"My conscience is all easy, so far as you are concerned, sir; your
self-esteem is too deep-rooted to suffer much from my poor little
nips--they produce no more impression than a cat-bird pecking at the
cones of that spruce-tree yonder. Now don't you put your hand where your
heart is supposed to be--there's nobody at home there, you know. There's
Mara coming to meet us;" and Sally bounded forward to meet Mara with all
those demonstrations of extreme delight which young girls are fond of
showering on each other.

"It's such a beautiful evening," said Mara, "and we are all in such good
spirits about Moses's ship, and I told him you must come down and hold
counsel with us as to what was to be done about the launching; and the
name, you know, that is to be decided on--are you going to let it be
called after you?"

"Not I, indeed. I should always be reading in the papers of horrible
accidents that had happened to the 'Sally Kittridge.'"

"Sally has so set her heart on my being unlucky," said Moses, "that I
believe if I make a prosperous voyage, the disappointment would injure
her health."

"She doesn't mean what she says," said Mara; "but I think there are some
objections in a young lady's name being given to a ship."

"Then I suppose, Mara," said Moses, "that you would not have yours
either?"

"I would be glad to accommodate you in anything _but_ that," said Mara,
quietly; but she added, "Why need the ship be named for anybody? A ship
is such a beautiful, graceful thing, it should have a fancy name."

"Well, suggest one," said Moses.

"Don't you remember," said Mara, "one Saturday afternoon, when you and
Sally and I launched your little ship down in the cove after you had
come from your first voyage at the Banks?"

"I do," said Sally. "We called that the Ariel, Mara, after that old torn
play you were so fond of. That's a pretty name for a ship."

"Why not take that?" said Mara.

"I bow to the decree," said Moses. "The Ariel it shall be."

"Yes; and you remember," said Sally, "Mr. Moses here promised at that
time that he would build a ship, and take us two round the world with
him."

Moses's eyes fell upon Mara as Sally said these words with a sort of
sudden earnestness of expression which struck her. He was really feeling
very much about something, under all the bantering disguise of his
demeanor, she said to herself. Could it be that he felt unhappy about
his prospects with Sally? That careless liveliness of hers might wound
him perhaps now, when he felt that he was soon to leave her.

Mara was conscious herself of a deep undercurrent of sadness as the time
approached for the ship to sail that should carry Moses from her, and
she could not but think some such feeling must possess her mind. In vain
she looked into Sally's great Spanish eyes for any signs of a lurking
softness or tenderness concealed under her sparkling vivacity. Sally's
eyes were admirable windows of exactly the right size and color for an
earnest, tender spirit to look out of, but just now there was nobody at
the casement but a slippery elf peering out in tricksy defiance.

When the three arrived at the house, tea was waiting on the table for
them. Mara fancied that Moses looked sad and preoccupied as they sat
down to the tea-table, which Mrs. Pennel had set forth festively, with
the best china and the finest tablecloth and the choicest sweetmeats. In
fact, Moses did feel that sort of tumult and upheaving of the soul which
a young man experiences when the great crisis comes which is to plunge
him into the struggles of manhood. It is a time when he wants sympathy
and is grated upon by uncomprehending merriment, and therefore his
answers to Sally grew brief and even harsh at times, and Mara sometimes
perceived him looking at herself with a singular fixedness of
expression, though he withdrew his eyes whenever she turned hers to look
on him. Like many another little woman, she had fixed a theory about
her friends, into which she was steadily interweaving all the facts she
saw. Sally _must_ love Moses, because she had known her from childhood
as a good and affectionate girl, and it was impossible that she could
have been going on with Moses as she had for the last six months without
loving him. She must evidently have seen that he cared for her; and in
how many ways had she shown that she liked his society and him! But then
evidently she did not understand him, and Mara felt a little womanly
self-pluming on the thought that _she_ knew him so much better. She was
resolved that she would talk with Sally about it, and show her that she
was disappointing Moses and hurting his feelings. Yes, she said to
herself, Sally has a kind heart, and her coquettish desire to conceal
from him the extent of her affection ought now to give way to the
outspoken tenderness of real love.

So Mara pressed Sally with the old-times request to stay and sleep with
her; for these two, the only young girls in so lonely a neighborhood,
had no means of excitement or dissipation beyond this occasional
sleeping together--by which is meant, of course, lying awake all night
talking.

When they were alone together in their chamber, Sally let down her long
black hair, and stood with her back to Mara brushing it. Mara sat
looking out of the window, where the moon was making a wide sheet of
silver-sparkling water. Everything was so quiet that the restless dash
of the tide could be plainly heard. Sally was rattling away with her
usual gayety.

"And so the launching is to come off next Thursday. What shall you
wear?"

"I'm sure I haven't thought," said Mara.

"Well, I shall try and finish my blue merino for the occasion. What fun
it will be! I never was on a ship when it was launched, and I think it
will be something perfectly splendid!"

"But doesn't it sometimes seem sad to think that after all this Moses
will leave us to be gone so long?"

"What do I care?" said Sally, tossing back her long hair as she brushed
it, and then stopping to examine one of her eyelashes.

"Sally dear, you often speak in that way," said Mara, "but really and
seriously, you do yourself great injustice. You could not certainly have
been going on as you have these six months past with a man you did not
care for."

"Well, I do care for him, 'sort o','" said Sally; "but is that any
reason I should break my heart for his going?--that's too much for any
man."

"But, Sally, you _must_ know that Moses loves you."

"I'm not so sure," said Sally, freakishly tossing her head and laughing.

"If he did not," said Mara, "why has he sought you so much, and taken
every opportunity to be with you? I'm sure I've been left here alone
hour after hour, when my only comfort was that it was because my two
best friends loved each other, as I know they must some time love some
one better than they do me."

The most practiced self-control must fail some time, and Mara's voice
faltered on these last words, and she put her hands over her eyes. Sally
turned quickly and looked at her, then giving her hair a sudden fold
round her shoulders, and running to her friend, she kneeled down on the
floor by her, and put her arms round her waist, and looked up into her
face with an air of more gravity than she commonly used.

"Now, Mara, what a wicked, inconsistent fool I have been! Did you feel
lonesome?--did you care? I ought to have seen that; but I'm selfish, I
love admiration, and I love to have some one to flatter me, and run
after me; and so I've been going on and on in this silly way. But I
didn't know you cared--indeed, I didn't--you are such a deep little
thing. Nobody can ever tell what you feel. I never shall forgive myself,
if you have been lonesome, for you are worth five hundred times as much
as I am. You really do love Moses. I don't."

"I do love him as a dear brother," said Mara.

"Dear fiddlestick," said Sally. "Love is love; and when a person loves
all she can, it isn't much use to talk so. I've been a wicked sinner,
that I have. Love? Do you suppose I would bear with Moses Pennel all his
ins and outs and ups and downs, and be always putting him before myself
in everything, as you do? No, I couldn't; I haven't it in me; but you
have. He's a sinner, too, and deserves to get me for a wife. But, Mara,
I have tormented him well--there's some comfort in that."

"It's no comfort to me," said Mara. "I see his heart is set on you--the
happiness of his life depends on you--and that he is pained and hurt
when you give him only cold, trifling words when he needs real true
love. It is a serious thing, dear, to have a strong man set his whole
heart on you. It will do him a great good or a great evil, and you ought
not to make light of it."

"Oh, pshaw, Mara, you don't know these fellows; they are only playing
games with us. If they once catch us, they have no mercy; and for one
here's a child that isn't going to be caught. I can see plain enough
that Moses Pennel has been trying to get me in love with him, but he
doesn't love me. No, he doesn't," said Sally, reflectively. "He only
wants to make a conquest of me, and I'm just the same. I want to make a
conquest of him,--at least I have been wanting to,--but now I see it's a
false, wicked kind of way to do as we've been doing."

"And is it really possible, Sally, that you don't love him?" said Mara,
her large, serious eyes looking into Sally's. "What! be with him so
much,--seem to like him so much,--look at him as I have seen you
do,--and not love him!"

"I can't help my eyes; they will look so," said Sally, hiding her face
in Mara's lap with a sort of coquettish consciousness. "I tell you I've
been silly and wicked; but he's just the same exactly."

"And you have worn his ring all summer?"

"Yes, and he has worn mine; and I have a lock of his hair, and he has a
lock of mine; yet I don't believe he cares for them a bit. Oh, his heart
is safe enough. If he has any, it isn't with me: that I know."

"But if you found it were, Sally? Suppose you found that, after all, you
were the one love and hope of his life; that all he was doing and
thinking was for you; that he was laboring, and toiling, and leaving
home, so that he might some day offer you a heart and home, and be your
best friend for life? Perhaps he dares not tell you how he really does
feel."

"It's no such thing! it's no such thing!" said Sally, lifting up her
head, with her eyes full of tears, which she dashed angrily away. "What
am I crying for? I hate him. I'm glad he's going away. Lately it has
been such a trouble to me to have things go on so. I'm really getting to
dislike him. You are the one he ought to love. Perhaps all this time you
are the one he does love," said Sally, with a sudden energy, as if a new
thought had dawned in her mind.

"Oh, no; he does not even love me as he once did, when we were
children," said Mara. "He is so shut up in himself, so reserved, I know
nothing about what passes in his heart."

"No more does anybody," said Sally. "Moses Pennel isn't one that says
and does things straightforward because he feels so; but he says and
does them to see what _you_ will do. That's his way. Nobody knows why he
has been going on with me as he has. He has had his own reasons,
doubtless, as I have had mine."

"He has admired you very much, Sally," said Mara, "and praised you to me
very warmly. He thinks you are so handsome. I could tell you ever so
many things he has said about you. He knows as I do that you are a more
enterprising, practical sort of body than I am, too. Everybody thinks
you are engaged. I have heard it spoken of everywhere."

"Everybody is mistaken, then, as usual," said Sally. "Perhaps Aunt Roxy
was in the right of it when she said that Moses would never be in love
with anybody but himself."

"Aunt Roxy has always been prejudiced and unjust to Moses," said Mara,
her cheeks flushing. "She never liked him from a child, and she never
can be made to see anything good in him. I know that he has a deep
heart,--a nature that craves affection and sympathy; and it is only
because he is so sensitive that he is so reserved and conceals his
feelings so much. He has a noble, kind heart, and I believe he truly
loves you, Sally; it must be so."

Sally rose from the floor and went on arranging her hair without
speaking. Something seemed to disturb her mind. She bit her lip, and
threw down the brush and comb violently. In the clear depths of the
little square of looking-glass a face looked into hers, whose eyes were
perturbed as if with the shadows of some coming inward storm; the black
brows were knit, and the lips quivered. She drew a long breath and burst
out into a loud laugh.

"What _are_ you laughing at now?" said Mara, who stood in her white
night-dress by the window, with her hair falling in golden waves about
her face.

"Oh, because these fellows are so funny," said Sally; "it's such fun to
see their actions. Come now," she added, turning to Mara, "don't look so
grave and sanctified. It's better to laugh than cry about things, any
time. It's a great deal better to be made hard-hearted like me, and not
care for anybody, than to be like you, for instance. The idea of any
one's being in love is the drollest thing to me. I haven't the least
idea how it feels. I wonder if I ever shall be in love!"

"It will come to you in its time, Sally."

"Oh, yes,--I suppose like the chicken-pox or the whooping cough," said
Sally; "one of the things to be gone through with, and rather
disagreeable while it lasts,--so I hope to put it off as long as
possible."

"Well, come," said Mara, "we must not sit up all night."

After the two girls were nestled into bed and the light out, instead of
the brisk chatter there fell a great silence between them. The full
round moon cast the reflection of the window on the white bed, and the
ever restless moan of the sea became more audible in the fixed
stillness. The two faces, both young and fair, yet so different in their
expression, lay each still on its pillow,--their wide-open eyes gleaming
out in the shadow like mystical gems. Each was breathing softly, as if
afraid of disturbing the other. At last Sally gave an impatient
movement.

"How lonesome the sea sounds in the night," she said. "I wish it would
ever be still."

"I like to hear it," said Mara. "When I was in Boston, for a while I
thought I could not sleep, I used to miss it so much."

There was another silence, which lasted so long that each girl thought
the other asleep, and moved softly, but at a restless movement from
Sally, Mara spoke again.

"Sally,--you asleep?"

"No,--I thought you were."

"I wanted to ask you," said Mara, "did Moses ever say anything to you
about me?--you know I told you how much he said about you."

"Yes; he asked me once if you were engaged to Mr. Adams."

"And what did you tell him?" said Mara, with increasing interest.

"Well, I only plagued him. I sometimes made him think you were, and
sometimes that you were not; and then again, that there was a deep
mystery in hand. But I praised and glorified Mr. Adams, and told him
what a splendid match it would be, and put on any little bits of
embroidery here and there that I could lay hands on. I used to make him
sulky and gloomy for a whole evening sometimes. In that way it was one
of the best weapons I had."

"Sally, what does make you love to tease people so?" said Mara.

"Why, you know the hymn says,--

    'Let dogs delight to bark and bite,
      For God hath made them so;
    Let bears and lions growl and fight,
      For 'tis their nature too.'

That's all the account I can give of it."

"But," said Mara, "I never can rest easy a moment when I see I am making
a person uncomfortable."

"Well, I don't tease anybody but the men. I don't tease father or mother
or you,--but men are fair game; they are such thumby, blundering
creatures, and we can confuse them so."

"Take care, Sally, it's playing with edge tools; you may lose your heart
some day in this kind of game."

"Never you fear," said Sally; "but aren't you sleepy?--let's go to
sleep."

Both girls turned their faces resolutely in opposite directions, and
remained for an hour with their large eyes looking out into the moonlit
chamber, like the fixed stars over Harpswell Bay. At last sleep drew
softly down the fringy curtains.




CHAPTER XXX

THE LAUNCH OF THE ARIEL


In the plain, simple regions we are describing,--where the sea is the
great avenue of active life, and the pine forests are the great source
of wealth,--ship-building is an engrossing interest, and there is no
fête that calls forth the community like the launching of a vessel. And
no wonder; for what is there belonging to this workaday world of ours
that has such a never-failing fund of poetry and grace as a ship? A ship
is a beauty and a mystery wherever we see it: its white wings touch the
regions of the unknown and the imaginative; they seem to us full of the
odors of quaint, strange, foreign shores, where life, we fondly dream,
moves in brighter currents than the muddy, tranquil tides of every day.

Who that sees one bound outward, with her white breasts swelling and
heaving, as if with a reaching expectancy, does not feel his own heart
swell with a longing impulse to go with her to the far-off shores? Even
at dingy, crowded wharves, amid the stir and tumult of great cities, the
coming in of a ship is an event that never can lose its interest. But on
these romantic shores of Maine, where all is so wild and still, and the
blue sea lies embraced in the arms of dark, solitary forests, the sudden
incoming of a ship from a distant voyage is a sort of romance. Who that
has stood by the blue waters of Middle Bay, engirdled as it is by soft
slopes of green farming land, interchanged here and there with heavy
billows of forest-trees, or rocky, pine-crowned promontories, has not
felt that sense of seclusion and solitude which is so delightful? And
then what a wonder! There comes a ship from China, drifting in like a
white cloud,--the gallant creature! how the waters hiss and foam before
her! with what a great free, generous plash she throws out her anchors,
as if she said a cheerful "Well done!" to some glorious work
accomplished! The very life and spirit of strange romantic lands come
with her; suggestions of sandal-wood and spice breathe through the
pine-woods; she is an oriental queen, with hands full of mystical gifts;
"all her garments smell of myrrh and cassia, out of the ivory palaces,
whereby they have made her glad." No wonder men have loved ships like
birds, and that there have been found brave, rough hearts that in fatal
wrecks chose rather to go down with their ocean love than to leave her
in the last throes of her death-agony.

A ship-building, a ship-sailing community has an unconscious poetry ever
underlying its existence. Exotic ideas from foreign lands relieve the
trite monotony of life; the ship-owner lives in communion with the whole
world, and is less likely to fall into the petty commonplaces that
infest the routine of inland life.

Never arose a clearer or lovelier October morning than that which was to
start the Ariel on her watery pilgrimage. Moses had risen while the
stars were yet twinkling over their own images in Middle Bay, to go down
and see that everything was right; and in all the houses that we know in
the vicinity, everybody woke with the one thought of being ready to go
to the launching.

Mrs. Pennel and Mara were also up by starlight, busy over the provisions
for the ample cold collation that was to be spread in a barn adjoining
the scene,--the materials for which they were packing into baskets
covered with nice clean linen cloths, ready for the little sail-boat
which lay within a stone's throw of the door in the brightening dawn,
her white sails looking rosy in the advancing light.

It had been agreed that the Pennels and the Kittridges should cross
together in this boat with their contributions of good cheer.

The Kittridges, too, had been astir with the dawn, intent on their quota
of the festive preparations, in which Dame Kittridge's housewifely
reputation was involved,--for it had been a disputed point in the
neighborhood whether she or Mrs. Pennel made the best doughnuts; and of
course, with this fact before her mind, her efforts in this line had
been all but superhuman.

The Captain skipped in and out in high feather,--occasionally pinching
Sally's cheek, and asking if she were going as captain or mate upon the
vessel after it was launched, for which he got in return a fillip of his
sleeve or a sly twitch of his coat-tails, for Sally and her old father
were on romping terms with each other from early childhood, a thing
which drew frequent lectures from the always exhorting Mrs. Kittridge.

"Such levity!" she said, as she saw Sally in full chase after his
retreating figure, in order to be revenged for some sly allusions he had
whispered in her ear.

"Sally Kittridge! Sally Kittridge!" she called, "come back this minute.
What are you about? I should think your father was old enough to know
better."

"Lawful sakes, Polly, it kind o' renews one's youth to get a new ship
done," said the Captain, skipping in at another door. "Sort o' puts me
in mind o' that _I_ went out cap'en in when I was jist beginning to
court you, as somebody else is courtin' our Sally here."

"Now, father," said Sally, threateningly, "what did I tell you?"

"It's really _lemancholy_," said the Captain, "to think how it does
distress gals to talk to 'em 'bout the fellers, when they ain't thinkin'
o' nothin' else all the time. They can't even laugh without sayin'
he-he-he!"

"Now, father, you know I've told you five hundred times that I don't
care a cent for Moses Pennel,--that he's a hateful creature," said
Sally, looking very red and determined.

"Yes, yes," said the Captain, "I take that ar's the reason you've ben
a-wearin' the ring he gin you and them ribbins you've got on your neck
this blessed minute, and why you've giggled off to singin'-school, and
Lord knows where with him all summer,--that ar's clear now."

"But, father," said Sally, getting redder and more earnest, "I don't
care for him really, and I've told him so. I keep telling him so, and he
will run after me."

"Haw! haw!" laughed the Captain; "he will, will he? Jist so, Sally; that
ar's jist the way your ma there talked to me, and it kind o' 'couraged
me along. I knew that gals always has to be read back'ard jist like the
writin' in the Barbary States."

"Captain Kittridge, will you stop such ridiculous talk?" said his
helpmeet; "and jist carry this 'ere basket of cold chicken down to the
landin' agin the Pennels come round in the boat; and you must step spry,
for there's two more baskets a-comin'."

The Captain shouldered the basket and walked toward the sea with it, and
Sally retired to her own little room to hold a farewell consultation
with her mirror before she went.

You will perhaps think from the conversation that you heard the other
night, that Sally now will cease all thought of coquettish allurement in
her acquaintance with Moses, and cause him to see by an immediate and
marked change her entire indifference. Probably, as she stands
thoughtfully before her mirror, she is meditating on the propriety of
laying aside the ribbons he gave her--perhaps she will alter that
arrangement of her hair which is one that he himself particularly
dictated as most becoming to the character of her face. She opens a
little drawer, which looks like a flower garden, all full of little
knots of pink and blue and red, and various fancies of the toilet, and
looks into it reflectively. She looses the ribbon from her hair and
chooses another,--but Moses gave her that too, and said, she remembers,
that when she wore that "he should know she had been thinking of him."
Sally is Sally yet--as full of sly dashes of coquetry as a tulip is of
streaks.

"There's no reason I should make myself look like a fright because I
don't care for him," she says; "besides, after all that he has said, he
ought to say more,--he ought at least to give me a chance to say no,--he
_shall_, too," said the gypsy, winking at the bright, elfish face in the
glass.

"Sally Kittridge, Sally Kittridge," called her mother, "how long will
you stay prinkin'?--come down this minute."

"Law now, mother," said the Captain, "gals must prink afore such times;
it's as natural as for hens to dress their feathers afore a
thunder-storm."

Sally at last appeared, all in a flutter of ribbons and scarfs, whose
bright, high colors assorted well with the ultramarine blue of her
dress, and the vivid pomegranate hue of her cheeks. The boat with its
white sails flapping was balancing and courtesying up and down on the
waters, and in the stern sat Mara; her shining white straw hat trimmed
with blue ribbons set off her golden hair and pink shell complexion. The
dark, even penciling of her eyebrows, and the beauty of the brow above,
the brown translucent clearness of her thoughtful eyes, made her face
striking even with its extreme delicacy of tone. She was unusually
animated and excited, and her cheeks had a rich bloom of that pure deep
rose-color which flushes up in fair complexions under excitement, and
her eyes had a kind of intense expression, for which they had always
been remarkable. All the deep secluded yearning of repressed nature was
looking out of them, giving that pathos which every one has felt at
times in the silence of eyes.

"Now bless that ar gal," said the Captain, when he saw her. "Our Sally
here's handsome, but she's got the real New-Jerusalem look, she
has--like them in the Revelations that wears the fine linen, clean and
white."

"Bless you, Captain Kittridge! don't be a-makin' a fool of yourself
about no girl at your time o' life," said Mrs. Kittridge, speaking under
her breath in a nipping, energetic tone, for they were coming too near
the boat to speak very loud.

"Good mornin', Mis' Pennel; we've got a good day, and a mercy it is so.
'Member when we launched the North Star, that it rained guns all the
mornin', and the water got into the baskets when we was a-fetchin' the
things over, and made a sight o' pester."

"Yes," said Mrs. Pennel, with an air of placid satisfaction, "everything
seems to be going right about this vessel."

Mrs. Kittridge and Sally were soon accommodated with seats, and
Zephaniah Pennel and the Captain began trimming sail. The day was one of
those perfect gems of days which are to be found only in the
jewel-casket of October, a day neither hot nor cold, with an air so
clear that every distant pine-tree top stood out in vivid separateness,
and every woody point and rocky island seemed cut out in crystalline
clearness against the sky. There was so brisk a breeze that the boat
slanted quite to the water's edge on one side, and Mara leaned over and
pensively drew her little pearly hand through the water, and thought of
the days when she and Moses took this sail together--she in her pink
sun-bonnet, and he in his round straw hat, with a tin dinner-pail
between them; and now, to-day the ship of her childish dreams was to be
launched. That launching was something she regarded almost with
superstitious awe. The ship, built on one element, but designed to have
its life in another, seemed an image of the soul, framed and fashioned
with many a weary hammer-stroke in this life, but finding its true
element only when it sails out into the ocean of eternity. Such was her
thought as she looked down the clear, translucent depths; but would it
have been of any use to try to utter it to anybody?--to Sally Kittridge,
for example, who sat all in a cheerful rustle of bright ribbons beside
her, and who would have shown her white teeth all round at such a
suggestion, and said, "Now, Mara, who but you would have thought of
that?"

But there are souls sent into this world who seem to have always
mysterious affinities for the invisible and the unknown--who see the
face of everything beautiful through a thin veil of mystery and sadness.
The Germans call this yearning of spirit home-sickness--the dim
remembrances of a spirit once affiliated to some higher sphere, of whose
lost brightness all things fair are the vague reminders. As Mara looked
pensively into the water, it seemed to her that every incident of life
came up out of its depths to meet her. Her own face reflected in a
wavering image, sometimes shaped itself to her gaze in the likeness of
the pale lady of her childhood, who seemed to look up at her from the
waters with dark, mysterious eyes of tender longing. Once or twice this
dreamy effect grew so vivid that she shivered, and drawing herself up
from the water, tried to take an interest in a very minute account which
Mrs. Kittridge was giving of the way to make corn-fritters which should
taste exactly like oysters. The closing direction about the quantity of
mace Mrs. Kittridge felt was too sacred for common ears, and therefore
whispered it into Mrs. Pennel's bonnet with a knowing nod and a look
from her black spectacles which would not have been bad for a priestess
of Dodona in giving out an oracle. In this secret direction about the
_mace_ lay the whole mystery of corn-oysters; and who can say what
consequences might ensue from casting it in an unguarded manner before
the world?

And now the boat which has rounded Harpswell Point is skimming across to
the head of Middle Bay, where the new ship can distinctly be discerned
standing upon her ways, while moving clusters of people were walking up
and down her decks or lining the shore in the vicinity. All sorts of
gossiping and neighborly chit-chat is being interchanged in the little
world assembling there.

"I hain't seen the Pennels nor the Kittridges yet," said Aunt Ruey,
whose little roly-poly figure was made illustrious in her best
cinnamon-colored dyed silk. "There's Moses Pennel a-goin' up that ar
ladder. Dear me, what a beautiful feller he is! it's a pity he ain't
a-goin' to marry Mara Lincoln, after all."

"Ruey, do hush up," said Miss Roxy, frowning sternly down from under the
shadow of a preternatural black straw bonnet, trimmed with huge bows of
black ribbon, which head-piece sat above her curls like a helmet. "Don't
be a-gettin' sentimental, Ruey, whatever else you get--and talkin' like
Miss Emily Sewell about match-makin'; I can't stand it; it rises on my
stomach, such talk does. As to that ar Moses Pennel, folks ain't so
certain as they thinks what he'll do. Sally Kittridge may think he's
a-goin' to have her, because he's been a-foolin' round with her all
summer, and Sally Kittridge may jist find she's mistaken, that's all."

"Yes," said Miss Ruey, "I 'member when I was a girl my old aunt, Jerushy
Hopkins, used to be always a-dwellin' on this Scripture, and I've been
havin' it brought up to me this mornin': 'There are three things which
are too wonderful for me, yea, four, which I know not: the way of an
eagle in the air, the way of a serpent upon a rock, the way of a ship in
the sea, and the way of a man with a maid.' She used to say it as a
kind o' caution to me when she used to think Abram Peters was bein'
attentive to me. I've often reflected what a massy it was that ar never
come to nothin', for he's a poor drunken critter now."

"Well, for my part," said Miss Roxy, fixing her eyes critically on the
boat that was just at the landing, "I should say the ways of a maid with
a man was full as particular as any of the rest of 'em. Do look at Sally
Kittridge now. There's Tom Hiers a-helpin' her out of the boat; and did
you see the look she gin Moses Pennel as she went by him? Wal', Moses has
got Mara on his arm anyhow; there's a gal worth six-and-twenty of the
other. Do see them ribbins and scarfs, and the furbelows, and the way
that ar Sally Kittridge handles her eyes. She's one that one feller
ain't never enough for."

Mara's heart beat fast when the boat touched the shore, and Moses and
one or two other young men came to assist in their landing. Never had he
looked more beautiful than at this moment, when flushed with excitement
and satisfaction he stood on the shore, his straw hat off, and his black
curls blowing in the sea-breeze. He looked at Sally with a look of frank
admiration as she stood there dropping her long black lashes over her
bright cheeks, and coquettishly looking out from under them, but she
stepped forward with a little energy of movement, and took the offered
hand of Tom Hiers, who was gazing at her too with undisguised rapture,
and Moses, stepping into the boat, helped Mrs. Pennel on shore, and then
took Mara on his arm, looking her over as he did so with a glance far
less assured and direct than he had given to Sally.

"You won't be afraid to climb the ladders, Mara?" said he.

"Not if you help me," she said.

Sally and Tom Hiers had already walked on toward the vessel, she
ostentatiously chatting and laughing with him. Moses's brow clouded a
little, and Mara noticed it. Moses thought he did not care for Sally; he
knew that the little hand that was now lying on his arm was the one he
wanted, and yet he felt vexed when he saw Sally walk off triumphantly
with another. It was the dog-in-the-manger feeling which possesses
coquettes of both sexes. Sally, on all former occasions, had shown a
marked preference for him, and professed supreme indifference to Tom
Hiers.

"It's all well enough," he said to himself, and he helped Mara up the
ladders with the greatest deference and tenderness. "This little woman
is worth ten such girls as Sally, if one only could get her heart. Here
we are on our ship, Mara," he said, as he lifted her over the last
barrier and set her down on the deck. "Look over there, do you see Eagle
Island? Did you dream when we used to go over there and spend the day
that you ever would be on _my_ ship, as you are to-day? You won't be
afraid, will you, when the ship starts?"

"I am too much of a sea-girl to fear on anything that sails in water,"
said Mara with enthusiasm. "What a splendid ship! how nicely it all
looks!"

"Come, let me take you over it," said Moses, "and show you my cabin."

Meanwhile the graceful little vessel was the subject of various comments
by the crowd of spectators below, and the clatter of workmen's hammers
busy in some of the last preparations could yet be heard like a shower
of hail-stones under her.

"I hope the ways are well greased," said old Captain Eldritch. "'Member
how the John Peters stuck in her ways for want of their being greased?"

"Don't you remember the Grand Turk, that keeled over five minutes after
she was launched?" said the quavering voice of Miss Ruey; "there was
jist such a company of thoughtless young creatures aboard as there is
now."

"Well, there wasn't nobody hurt," said Captain Kittridge. "If Mis'
Kittridge would let me, I'd be glad to go aboard this 'ere, and be
launched with 'em."

"I tell the Cap'n he's too old to be climbin' round and mixin' with
young folks' frolics," said Mrs. Kittridge.

"I suppose, Cap'n Pennel, you've seen that the ways is all right," said
Captain Broad, returning to the old subject.

"Oh yes, it's all done as well as hands can do it," said Zephaniah.
"Moses has been here since starlight this morning, and Moses has pretty
good faculty about such matters."

"Where's Mr. Sewell and Miss Emily?" said Miss Ruey. "Oh, there they are
over on that pile of rocks; they get a pretty fair view there."

Mr. Sewell and Miss Emily were sitting under a cedar-tree, with two or
three others, on a projecting point whence they could have a clear view
of the launching. They were so near that they could distinguish clearly
the figures on deck, and see Moses standing with his hat off, the wind
blowing his curls back, talking earnestly to the golden-haired little
woman on his arm.

"It is a launch into life for him," said Mr. Sewell, with suppressed
feeling.

"Yes, and he has Mara on his arm," said Miss Emily; "that's as it should
be. Who is that that Sally Kittridge is flirting with now? Oh, Tom
Hiers. Well! he's good enough for her. Why don't she take him?" said
Miss Emily, in her zeal jogging her brother's elbow.

"I'm sure, Emily, I don't know," said Mr. Sewell dryly; "perhaps he
won't be taken."

"Don't you think Moses looks handsome?" said Miss Emily. "I declare
there is something quite romantic and Spanish about him; don't you think
so, Theophilus?"

"Yes, I think so," said her brother, quietly looking, externally, the
meekest and most matter-of-fact of persons, but deep within him a voice
sighed, "Poor Dolores, be comforted, your boy is beautiful and
prosperous!"

"There, there!" said Miss Emily, "I believe she is starting."

All eyes of the crowd were now fixed on the ship; the sound of hammers
stopped; the workmen were seen flying in every direction to gain good
positions to see her go,--that sight so often seen on those shores, yet
to which use cannot dull the most insensible.

First came a slight, almost imperceptible, movement, then a swift
exultant rush, a dash into the hissing water, and the air was rent with
hurrahs as the beautiful ship went floating far out on the blue seas,
where her fairer life was henceforth to be.

Mara was leaning on Moses's arm at the instant the ship began to move,
but in the moment of the last dizzy rush she felt his arm go tightly
round her, holding her so close that she could hear the beating of his
heart.

"Hurrah!" he said, letting go his hold the moment the ship floated free,
and swinging his hat in answer to the hats, scarfs, and handkerchiefs,
which fluttered from the crowd on the shore. His eyes sparkled with a
proud light as he stretched himself upward, raising his head and
throwing back his shoulders with a triumphant movement. He looked like a
young sea-king just crowned; and the fact is the less wonderful,
therefore, that Mara felt her heart throb as she looked at him, and that
a treacherous throb of the same nature shook the breezy ribbons
fluttering over the careless heart of Sally. A handsome young
sea-captain, treading the deck of his own vessel, is, in his time and
place, a prince.

Moses looked haughtily across at Sally, and then passed a half-laughing
defiant flash of eyes between them. He looked at Mara, who could
certainly not have known what was in her eyes at the moment,--an
expression that made his heart give a great throb, and wonder if he saw
aright: but it was gone a moment after, as all gathered around in a knot
exchanging congratulations on the fortunate way in which the affair had
gone off. Then came the launching in boats to go back to the collation
on shore, where were high merry-makings for the space of one or two
hours: and thus was fulfilled the first part of Moses Pennel's Saturday
afternoon prediction.




CHAPTER XXXI

GREEK MEETS GREEK


Moses was now within a day or two of the time of his sailing, and yet
the distance between him and Mara seemed greater than ever. It is
astonishing, when two people are once started on a wrong understanding
with each other, how near they may live, how intimate they may be, how
many things they may have in common, how many words they may speak, how
closely they may seem to simulate intimacy, confidence, friendship,
while yet there lies a gulf between them that neither crosses,--a
reserve that neither explores.

Like most shy girls, Mara became more shy the more really she understood
the nature of her own feelings. The conversation with Sally had opened
her eyes to the secret of her own heart, and she had a guilty feeling as
if what she had discovered must be discovered by every one else. Yes, it
was clear she loved Moses in a way that made him, she thought, more
necessary to her happiness than she could ever be to his,--in a way that
made it impossible to think of him as wholly and for life devoted to
another, without a constant inner conflict. In vain had been all her
little stratagems practiced upon herself the whole summer long, to prove
to herself that she was glad that the choice had fallen upon Sally. She
saw clearly enough now that she was not glad,--that there was no woman
or girl living, however dear, who could come for life between him and
her, without casting on her heart the shuddering sorrow of a dim
eclipse.

But now the truth was plain to herself, her whole force was directed
toward the keeping of her secret. "I may suffer," she thought, "but I
will have strength not to be silly and weak. Nobody shall know,--nobody
shall dream it,--and in the long, long time that he is away, I shall
have strength given me to overcome."

So Mara put on her most cheerful and matter-of-fact kind of face, and
plunged into the making of shirts and knitting of stockings, and talked
of the coming voyage with such a total absence of any concern, that
Moses began to think, after all, there could be no depth to her
feelings, or that the deeper ones were all absorbed by some one else.

"You really seem to enjoy the prospect of my going away," said he to
her, one morning, as she was energetically busying herself with her
preparations.

"Well, of course; you know your career must begin. You must make your
fortune; and it is pleasant to think how favorably everything is shaping
for you."

"One likes, however, to be a little regretted," said Moses, in a tone of
pique.

"A little regretted!" Mara's heart beat at these words, but her
hypocrisy was well practiced. She put down the rebellious throb, and
assuming a look of open, sisterly friendliness, said, quite naturally,
"Why, we shall all miss you, of course."

"Of course," said Moses,--"one would be glad to be missed some other way
than _of course_."

"Oh, as to that, make yourself easy," said Mara. "We shall all be dull
enough when you are gone to content the most exacting." Still she spoke,
not stopping her stitching, and raising her soft brown eyes with a
frank, open look into Moses's--no tremor, not even of an eyelid.

"You men must have everything," she continued, gayly, "the enterprise,
the adventure, the novelty, the pleasure of feeling that you are
something, and can do something in the world; and besides all this, you
want the satisfaction of knowing that we women are following in chains
behind your triumphal car!"

There was a dash of bitterness in this, which was a rare ingredient in
Mara's conversation.

Moses took the word. "And you women sit easy at home, sewing and
singing, and forming romantic pictures of our life as like its homely
reality as romances generally are to reality; and while we are off in
the hard struggle for position and the means of life, you hold your
hearts ready for the first rich man that offers a fortune ready made."

"The first!" said Mara. "Oh, you naughty! sometimes we try two or
three."

"Well, then, I suppose this is from one of them," said Moses, flapping
down a letter from Boston, directed in a masculine hand, which he had
got at the post-office that morning.

Now Mara knew that this letter was nothing in particular, but she was
taken by surprise, and her skin was delicate as peach-blossom, and so
she could not help a sudden blush, which rose even to her golden hair,
vexed as she was to feel it coming. She put the letter quietly in her
pocket, and for a moment seemed too discomposed to answer.

"You do well to keep your own counsel," said Moses. "No friend so near
as one's self, is a good maxim. One does not expect young girls to learn
it so early, but it seems they do."

"And why shouldn't they as well as young men?" said Mara. "Confidence
begets confidence, they say."

"I have no ambition to play confidant," said Moses; "although as one who
stands to you in the relation of older brother and guardian, and just on
the verge of a long voyage, I might be supposed anxious to know."

"And I have no ambition to be confidant," said Mara, all her spirit
sparkling in her eyes; "although when one stands to you in the relation
of an only sister, I might be supposed perhaps to feel some interest to
be in your confidence."

The words "older brother" and "only sister" grated on the ears of both
the combatants as a decisive sentence. Mara never looked so pretty in
her life, for the whole force of her being was awake, glowing and
watchful, to guard passage, door, and window of her soul, that no
treacherous hint might escape. Had he not just reminded her that he was
only an older brother? and what would he think if he knew the
truth?--and Moses thought the words _only sister_ unequivocal
declaration of how the matter stood in her view, and so he rose, and
saying, "I won't detain you longer from your letter," took his hat and
went out.

"Are you going down to Sally's?" said Mara, coming to the door and
looking out after him.

"Yes."

"Well, ask her to come home with you and spend the evening. I have ever
so many things to tell her."

"I will," said Moses, as he lounged away.

"The thing is clear enough," said Moses to himself. "Why should I make a
fool of myself any further? What possesses us men always to set our
hearts precisely on what isn't to be had? There's Sally Kittridge likes
me; I can see that plainly enough, for all her mincing; and why couldn't
I have had the sense to fall in love with her? She will make a splendid,
showy woman. She has talent and tact enough to rise to any position I
may rise to, let me rise as high as I will. She will always have skill
and energy in the conduct of life; and when all the froth and foam of
youth has subsided, she will make a noble woman. Why, then, do I cling
to this fancy? I feel that this little flossy cloud, this delicate,
quiet little puff of thistledown, on which I have set my heart, is the
only thing for me, and that without her my life will always be
incomplete. I remember all our early life. It was she who sought me, and
ran after me, and where has all that love gone to? Gone to this fellow;
that's plain enough. When a girl like her is so comfortably cool and
easy, it's because her heart is off somewhere else."

This conversation took place about four o'clock in as fine an October
afternoon as you could wish to see. The sun, sloping westward, turned to
gold the thousand blue scales of the ever-heaving sea, and soft,
pine-scented winds were breathing everywhere through the forests, waving
the long, swaying films of heavy moss, and twinkling the leaves of the
silver birches that fluttered through the leafy gloom. The moon, already
in the sky, gave promise of a fine moonlight night; and the wild and
lonely stillness of the island, and the thoughts of leaving in a few
days, all conspired to foster the restless excitement in our hero's mind
into a kind of romantic unrest.

Now, in some such states, a man disappointed in one woman will turn to
another, because, in a certain way and measure, her presence stills the
craving and fills the void. It is a sort of supposititious courtship,--a
saying to one woman, who is sympathetic and receptive, the words of
longing and love that another will not receive. To be sure it is a game
unworthy of any true man,--a piece of sheer, reckless, inconsiderate
selfishness. But men do it, as they do many other unworthy things, from
the mere promptings of present impulse, and let consequences take care
of themselves. Moses met Sally that afternoon in just the frame to play
the lover in this hypothetical, supposititious way, with words and looks
and tones that came from feelings given to another. And as to Sally?
Well, for once, Greek met Greek; for although Sally, as we showed her,
was a girl of generous impulses, she was yet in no danger of immediate
translation on account of superhuman goodness. In short, Sally had made
up her mind that Moses should give her a chance to say that precious and
golden _No_, which should enable her to count him as one of her
captives,--and then he might go where he liked for all her.

So said the wicked elf, as she looked into her own great eyes in the
little square of mirror shaded by a misty asparagus bush; and to this
end there were various braidings and adornings of the lustrous black
hair, and coquettish earrings were mounted that hung glancing and
twinkling just by the smooth outline of her glowing cheek,--and then
Sally looked at herself in a friendly way of approbation, and nodded at
the bright dimpled shadow with a look of secret understanding. The real
Sally and the Sally of the looking-glass were on admirable terms with
each other, and both of one mind about the plan of campaign against the
common enemy. Sally thought of him as he stood kingly and triumphant on
the deck of his vessel, his great black eyes flashing confident glances
into hers, and she felt a rebellious rustle of all her plumage. "No,
sir," she said to herself, "you don't do it. You shall never find me
among your slaves,"--"that you know of," added a doubtful voice within
her. "Never to your knowledge," she said, as she turned away. "I wonder
if he will come here this evening," she said, as she began to work upon
a pillow-case,--one of a set which Mrs. Kittridge had confided to her
nimble fingers. The seam was long, straight, and monotonous, and Sally
was restless and fidgety; her thread would catch in knots, and when she
tried to loosen it, would break, and the needle had to be threaded over.
Somehow the work was terribly irksome to her, and the house looked so
still and dim and lonesome, and the tick-tock of the kitchen-clock was
insufferable, and Sally let her work fall in her lap and looked out of
the open window, far to the open ocean, where a fresh breeze was
blowing toward her, and her eyes grew deep and dreamy following the
gliding ship sails. Sally was getting romantic. Had she been reading
novels? Novels! What can a pretty woman find in a novel equal to the
romance that is all the while weaving and unweaving about her, and of
which no human foresight can tell her the catastrophe? It is _novels_
that give false views of life. Is there not an eternal novel, with all
these false, cheating views, written in the breast of every beautiful
and attractive girl whose witcheries make every man that comes near her
talk like a fool? Like a sovereign princess, she never hears the truth,
unless it be from the one manly man in a thousand, who understands both
himself and her. From all the rest she hears only flatteries more or
less ingenious, according to the ability of the framer. Compare, for
instance, what Tom Brown says to little Seraphina at the party to-night,
with what Tom Brown sober says to sober sister Maria _about_ her
to-morrow. Tom remembers that he was a fool last night, and knows what
he thinks and always has thought to-day; but pretty Seraphina thinks he
adores her, so that no matter what she does he will never see a flaw,
she is sure of that,--poor little puss! She does not know that
philosophic Tom looks at her as he does at a glass of champagne, or a
dose of exhilarating gas, and calculates how much it will do for him to
take of the stimulus without interfering with his serious and settled
plans of life, which, of course, he doesn't mean to give up for her. The
one-thousand-and-first man in creation is he that can feel the
fascination but will not flatter, and that tries to tell to the little
tyrant the rare word of truth that may save her; he is, as we say, the
one-thousand-and-first. Well, as Sally sat with her great dark eyes
dreamily following the ship, she mentally thought over all the
compliments Moses had paid her, expressed or understood, and those of
all her other admirers, who had built up a sort of cloud-world around
her, so that her little feet never rested on the soil of reality. Sally
was shrewd and keen, and had a native mother-wit in the discernment of
spirits, that made her feel that somehow this was all false coin; but
still she counted it over, and it looked so pretty and bright that she
sighed to think it was not real.

"If it only had been," she thought; "if there were only any truth to the
creature; he is so handsome,--it's a pity. But I do believe in his
secret heart he is in love with Mara; he is in love with some one, I
know. I have seen looks that must come from something real; but they
were not for me. I have a kind of power over him, though," she said,
resuming her old wicked look, "and I'll puzzle him a little, and torment
him. He shall find his match in me," and Sally nodded to a cat-bird that
sat perched on a pine-tree, as if she had a secret understanding with
him, and the cat-bird went off into a perfect roulade of imitations of
all that was going on in the late bird-operas of the season.

Sally was roused from her revery by a spray of goldenrod that was thrown
into her lap by an invisible hand, and Moses soon appeared at the
window.

"There's a plume that would be becoming to your hair," he said; "stay,
let me arrange it."

"No, no; you'll tumble my hair,--what can you know of such things?"

Moses held the spray aloft, and leaned toward her with a sort of quiet,
determined insistence.

"By your leave, fair lady," he said, wreathing it in her hair, and then
drawing back a little, he looked at her with so much admiration that
Sally felt herself blush.

"Come, now, I dare say you've made a fright of me," she said, rising and
instinctively turning to the looking-glass; but she had too much
coquetry not to see how admirably the golden plume suited her black
hair, and the brilliant eyes and cheeks; she turned to Moses again, and
courtesied, saying "Thank you, sir," dropping her eyelashes with a mock
humility.

"Come, now," said Moses; "I am sent after you to come and spend the
evening; let's walk along the seashore, and get there by degrees."

And so they set out; but the path was circuitous, for Moses was always
stopping, now at this point and now at that, and enacting some of those
thousand little by-plays which a man can get up with a pretty woman.
They searched for smooth pebbles where the waves had left
them,--many-colored, pink and crimson and yellow and brown, all smooth
and rounded by the eternal tossings of the old sea that had made
playthings of them for centuries, and with every pebble given and taken
were things said which should have meant more and more, had the play
been earnest. Had Moses any idea of offering himself to Sally? No; but
he was in one of those fluctuating, unresisting moods of mind in which
he was willing to lie like a chip on the tide of present emotion, and
let it rise and fall and dash him when it liked; and Sally never had
seemed more beautiful and attractive to him than that afternoon, because
there was a shade of reality and depth about her that he had never seen
before.

"Come on, and let me show you my hermitage," said Moses, guiding her
along the slippery projecting rocks, all covered with yellow tresses of
seaweed. Sally often slipped on this treacherous footing, and Moses was
obliged to hold her up, and instinctively he threw a meaning into his
manner so much more than ever he had before, that by the time they had
gained the little cove both were really agitated and excited. He felt
that temporary delirium which is often the mesmeric effect of a strong
womanly presence, and she felt that agitation which every woman must
when a determined hand is striking on the great vital chord of her
being. When they had stepped round the last point of rock they found
themselves driven by the advancing tide up into the little lonely
grotto,--and there they were with no lookout but the wide blue sea, all
spread out in rose and gold under the twilight skies, with a silver moon
looking down upon them.

"Sally," said Moses, in a low, earnest whisper, "you love me,--do you
not?" and he tried to pass his arm around her.

She turned and flashed at him a look of mingled terror and defiance, and
struck out her hands at him; then impetuously turning away and
retreating to the other end of the grotto, she sat down on a rock and
began to cry.

Moses came toward her, and kneeling, tried to take her hand. She raised
her head angrily, and again repulsed him.

"Go!" she said. "What right had you to say that? What right had you even
to think it?"

"Sally, you do love me. It cannot but be. You are a woman; you could not
have been with me as we have and not feel more than friendship."

"Oh, you men!--your conceit passes understanding," said Sally. "You
think we are born to be your bond slaves,--but for once you are
mistaken, sir. I _don't_ love you; and what's more, you don't love
me,--you know you don't; you know that you love somebody else. You love
Mara,--you know you do; there's no truth in you," she said, rising
indignantly.

Moses felt himself color. There was an embarrassed pause, and then he
answered,--

"Sally, why should I love Mara? Her heart is all given to another,--you
yourself know it."

"I don't know it either," said Sally; "I know it isn't so."

"But you gave me to understand so."

"Well, sir, you put prying questions about what you ought to have asked
her, and so what was I to do? Besides, I did want to show you how much
better Mara could do than to take you; besides, I didn't know till
lately. I never thought she could care much for any man more than I
could."

"And you think she loves me?" said Moses, eagerly, a flash of joy
illuminating his face; "do you, really?"

"There you are," said Sally; "it's a shame I have let you know! Yes,
Moses Pennel, she loves you like an angel, as none of you men deserve to
be loved,--as you in particular don't."

Moses sat down on a point of rock, and looked on the ground
discountenanced. Sally stood up glowing and triumphant, as if she had
her foot on the neck of her oppressor and meant to make the most of it.

"Now what do you think of yourself for all this summer's work?--for what
you have just said, asking me if I didn't love you? Supposing, now, I
had done as other girls would, played the fool and blushed, and said
yes? Why, to-morrow you would have been thinking how to be rid of me! I
shall save you all that trouble, sir."

"Sally, I own I have been acting like a fool," said Moses, humbly.

"You have done more than that,--you have acted wickedly," said Sally.

"And am I the only one to blame?" said Moses, lifting his head with a
show of resistance.

"Listen, sir!" said Sally, energetically; "I have played the fool and
acted wrong too, but there is just this difference between you and me:
you had nothing to lose, and I a great deal; your heart, such as it was,
was safely disposed of. But supposing you had won mine, what would you
have done with it? That was the last thing you considered."

"Go on, Sally, don't spare; I'm a vile dog, unworthy of either of you,"
said Moses.

Sally looked down on her handsome penitent with some relenting, as he
sat quite dejected, his strong arms drooping, and his long eyelashes
cast down.

"I'll be friends with you," she said, "because, after all, I'm not so
very much better than you. We have both done wrong, and made dear Mara
very unhappy. But after all, I was not so much to blame as you; because,
if there had been any reality in your love, I could have paid it
honestly. I had a heart to give,--I have it now, and hope long to keep
it," said Sally.

"Sally, you are a right noble girl. I never knew what you were till
now," said Moses, looking at her with admiration.

"It's the first time for all these six months that we have either of us
spoken a word of truth or sense to each other. I never did anything but
trifle with you, and you the same. Now we've come to some plain dry
land, we may walk on and be friends. So now help me up these rocks, and
I will go home."

"And you'll not come home with me?"

"Of course not. I think you may now go home and have one talk with Mara
without witnesses."




CHAPTER XXXII

THE BETROTHAL


Moses walked slowly home from his interview with Sally, in a sort of
maze of confused thought. In general, men understand women only from the
outside, and judge them with about as much real comprehension as an
eagle might judge a canary-bird. The difficulty of real understanding
intensifies in proportion as the man is distinctively manly, and the
woman womanly. There are men with a large infusion of the feminine
element in their composition who read the female nature with more
understanding than commonly falls to the lot of men; but in general,
when a man passes beyond the mere outside artifices and unrealities
which lie between the two sexes, and really touches his finger to any
vital chord in the heart of a fair neighbor, he is astonished at the
quality of the vibration.

"I could not have dreamed there was so much in her," thought Moses, as
he turned away from Sally Kittridge. He felt humbled as well as
astonished by the moral lecture which this frisky elf with whom he had
all summer been amusing himself, preached to him from the depths of a
real woman's heart. What she said of Mara's loving him filled his eyes
with remorseful tears,--and for the moment he asked himself whether this
restless, jealous, exacting desire which he felt to appropriate her
whole life and heart to himself were as really worthy of the name of
love as the generous self-devotion with which she had, all her life,
made all his interests her own.

Was he to go to her now and tell her that he loved her, and therefore
he had teased and vexed her,--therefore he had seemed to prefer another
before her,--therefore he had practiced and experimented upon her
nature? A suspicion rather stole upon him that love which expresses
itself principally in making exactions and giving pain is not exactly
worthy of the name. And yet he had been secretly angry with her all
summer for being the very reverse of this; for her apparent cheerful
willingness to see him happy with another; for the absence of all signs
of jealousy,--all desire of exclusive appropriation. It showed, he said
to himself, that there was no love; and now when it dawned on him that
this might be the very heroism of self-devotion, he asked himself which
was best worthy to be called love.

"She did love him, then!" The thought blazed up through the smouldering
embers of thought in his heart like a tongue of flame. She loved him! He
felt a sort of triumph in it, for he was sure Sally must know, they were
so intimate. Well, he would go to her, and tell her all, confess all his
sins, and be forgiven.

When he came back to the house, all was still evening. The moon, which
was playing brightly on the distant sea, left one side of the brown
house in shadow. Moses saw a light gleaming behind the curtain in the
little room on the lower floor, which had been his peculiar sanctum
during the summer past. He had made a sort of library of it, keeping
there his books and papers. Upon the white curtain flitted, from time to
time, a delicate, busy shadow; now it rose and now it stooped, and then
it rose again--grew dim and vanished, and then came out again. His heart
beat quick.

Mara was in his room, busy, as she always had been before his
departures, in cares for him. How many things had she made for him, and
done and arranged for him, all his life long! things which he had taken
as much as a matter of course as the shining of that moon. His thought
went back to the times of his first going to sea,--he a rough, chaotic
boy, sensitive and surly, and she the ever thoughtful good angel of a
little girl, whose loving-kindness he had felt free to use and to abuse.
He remembered that he made her cry there when he should have spoken
lovingly and gratefully to her, and that the words of acknowledgment
that ought to have been spoken, never had been said,--remained unsaid to
that hour. He stooped low, and came quite close to the muslin curtain.
All was bright in the room, and shadowy without; he could see her
movements as through a thin white haze. She was packing his sea-chest;
his things were lying about her, folded or rolled nicely. Now he saw her
on her knees writing something with a pencil in a book, and then she
enveloped it very carefully in silk paper, and tied it trimly, and hid
it away at the bottom of the chest. Then she remained a moment kneeling
at the chest, her head resting in her hands. A sort of strange, sacred
feeling came over him as he heard a low murmur, and knew that she felt a
Presence that he never felt or acknowledged. He felt somehow that he was
doing her a wrong thus to be prying upon moments when she thought
herself alone with God; a sort of vague remorse filled him; he felt as
if she were too good for him. He turned away, and entering the front
door of the house, stepped noiselessly along and lifted the latch of the
door. He heard a rustle as of one rising hastily as he opened it and
stood before Mara. He had made up his mind what to say; but when she
stood there before him, with her surprised, inquiring eyes, he felt
confused.

"What, home so soon?" she said.

"You did not expect me, then?"

"Of course not,--not for these two hours; so," she said, looking about,
"I found some mischief to do among your things. If you had waited as
long as I expected, they would all have been quite right again, and you
would never have known."

Moses sat down and drew her toward him, as if he were going to say
something, and then stopped and began confusedly playing with her
work-box.

"Now, please don't," said she, archly. "You know what a little old maid
I am about my things!"

"Mara," said Moses, "people have asked you to marry them, have they
not?"

"People asked me to marry them!" said Mara. "I hope not. What an odd
question!"

"You know what I mean," said Moses; "you have had offers of
marriage--from Mr. Adams, for example."

"And what if I have?"

"You did not accept him, Mara?" said Moses.

"No, I did not."

"And yet he was a fine man, I am told, and well fitted to make you
happy."

"I believe he was," said Mara, quietly.

"And why were you so foolish?"

Mara was fretted at this question. She supposed Moses had come to tell
her of his engagement to Sally, and that this was a kind of preface, and
she answered,--

"I don't know why you call it foolish. I was a true friend to Mr. Adams.
I saw intellectually that he might have the power of making any
reasonable woman happy. I think now that the woman will be fortunate who
becomes his wife; but I did not wish to marry him."

"Is there anybody you prefer to him, Mara?" said Moses.

She started up with glowing cheeks and sparkling eyes.

"You have no right to ask me that, though you are my brother."

"I am not your brother, Mara," said Moses, rising and going toward her,
"and that is why I ask you. I feel I have a right to ask you."

"I do not understand you," she said, faintly.

"I can speak plainer, then. I wish to put in my poor venture. I love
you, Mara--not as a brother. I wish you to be my wife, if you will."

While Moses was saying these words, Mara felt a sort of whirling in her
head, and it grew dark before her eyes; but she had a strong, firm will,
and she mastered herself and answered, after a moment, in a quiet,
sorrowful tone, "How can I believe this, Moses? If it is true, why have
you done as you have this summer?"

"Because I was a fool, Mara,--because I was jealous of Mr.
Adams,--because I somehow hoped, after all, that you either loved me or
that I might make you think more of me through jealousy of another. They
say that love always is shown by jealousy."

"Not true love, I should think," said Mara. "How _could_ you do so?--it
was cruel to her,--cruel to me."

"I admit it,--anything, everything you can say. I have acted like a fool
and a knave, if you will; but after all, Mara, I do love you. I know I
am not worthy of you--never was--never can be; you are in all things a
true, noble woman, and I have been unmanly."

It is not to be supposed that all this was spoken without accompaniments
of looks, movements, and expressions of face such as we cannot give, but
such as doubled their power to the parties concerned; and the "I love
you" had its usual conclusive force as argument, apology,
promise,--covering, like charity, a multitude of sins.

Half an hour after, you might have seen a youth and a maiden coming
together out of the door of the brown house, and walking arm in arm
toward the sea-beach.

It was one of those wonderfully clear moonlight evenings, when the
ocean, like a great reflecting mirror, seems to double the brightness of
the sky,--and its vast expanse lay all around them in its stillness,
like an eternity of waveless peace. Mara remembered that time in her
girlhood when she had followed Moses into the woods on just such a
night,--how she had sat there under the shadows of the trees, and looked
over to Harpswell and noticed the white houses and the meeting-house,
all so bright and clear in the moonlight, and then off again on the
other side of the island where silent ships were coming and going in the
mysterious stillness. They were talking together now with that
outflowing fullness which comes when the seal of some great reserve has
just been broken,--going back over their lives from day to day, bringing
up incidents of childhood, and turning them gleefully like two children.

And then Moses had all the story of his life to relate, and to tell Mara
all he had learned of his mother,--going over with all the narrative
contained in Mr. Sewell's letter.

"You see, Mara, that it was intended that you should be my fate," he
ended; "so the winds and waves took me up and carried me to the lonely
island where the magic princess dwelt."

"You are Prince Ferdinand," said Mara.

"And you are Miranda," said he.

"Ah!" she said with fervor, "how plainly we can see that our heavenly
Father has been guiding our way! How good He is,--and how we must try to
live for Him,--both of us."

A sort of cloud passed over Moses's brow. He looked embarrassed, and
there was a pause between them, and then he turned the conversation.

Mara felt pained; it was like a sudden discord; such thoughts and
feelings were the very breath of her life; she could not speak in
perfect confidence and unreserve, as she then spoke, without uttering
them; and her finely organized nature felt a sort of electric
consciousness of repulsion and dissent. She grew abstracted, and they
walked on in silence.

"I see now, Mara, I have pained you," said Moses, "but there are a class
of feelings that you have that I have not and cannot have. No, I cannot
feign anything. I can understand what religion is in you, I can admire
its results. I can be happy, if it gives you any comfort; but people are
differently constituted. I never can feel as you do."

"Oh, don't say never," said Mara, with an intensity that nearly startled
him; "it has been the one prayer, the one hope, of my life, that you
might have these comforts,--this peace."

"I need no comfort or peace except what I shall find in you," said
Moses, drawing her to himself, and looking admiringly at her; "but pray
for me still. I always thought that my wife must be one of the sort of
women who pray."

"And why?" said Mara, in surprise.

"Because I need to be loved a great deal, and it is only that kind who
pray who know how to love really. If you had not prayed for me all this
time, you never would have loved me in spite of all my faults, as you
did, and do, and will, as I know you will," he said, folding her in his
arms, and in his secret heart he said, "Some of this intensity, this
devotion, which went upward to heaven, will be mine one day. She will
worship me."

"The fact is, Mara," he said, "I am a child of this world. I have no
sympathy with things not seen. You are a half-spiritual creature,--a
child of air; and but for the great woman's heart in you, I should feel
that you were something uncanny and unnatural. I am selfish, I know; I
frankly admit, I never disguised it; but I love your religion because it
makes you love me. It is an incident to that loving, trusting nature
which makes you all and wholly mine, as I want you to be. I want you all
and wholly; every thought, every feeling,--the whole strength of your
being. I don't care if I say it: I would not wish to be second in your
heart even to God himself!"

"Oh, Moses!" said Mara, almost starting away from him, "such words are
dreadful; they will surely bring evil upon us."

"I only breathed out my nature, as you did yours. Why should you love an
unseen and distant Being more than you do one whom you can feel and see,
who holds you in his arms, whose heart beats like your own?"

"Moses," said Mara, stopping and looking at him in the clear moonlight,
"God has always been to me not so much like a father as like a dear and
tender mother. Perhaps it was because I was a poor orphan, and my father
and mother died at my birth, that He has been so loving to me. I never
remember the time when I did not feel His presence in my joys and my
sorrows. I never had a thought of joy and sorrow that I could not say to
Him. I never woke in the night that I did not feel that He was loving
and watching me, and that I loved Him in return. Oh, how many, many
things I have said to Him about you! My heart would have broken years
ago, had it not been for Him; because, though you did not know it, you
often seemed unkind; you hurt me very often when you did not mean to.
His love is so much a part of my life that I cannot conceive of life
without it. It is the very air I breathe."

Moses stood still a moment, for Mara spoke with a fervor that affected
him; then he drew her to his heart, and said,--

"Oh, what could ever make you love me?"

"He sent you and gave you to me," she answered, "to be mine in time and
eternity."

The words were spoken in a kind of enthusiasm so different from the
usual reserve of Mara, that they seemed like a prophecy. That night, for
the first time in her life, had she broken the reserve which was her
very nature, and spoken of that which was the intimate and hidden
history of her soul.




CHAPTER XXXIII

AT A QUILTING


"And so," said Mrs. Captain Badger to Miss Roxy Toothacre, "it seems
that Moses Pennel ain't going to have Sally Kittridge after all,--he's
engaged to Mara Lincoln."

"More shame for him," said Miss Roxy, with a frown that made her mohair
curls look really tremendous.

Miss Roxy and Mrs. Badger were the advance party at a quilting, to be
holden at the house of Mr. Sewell, and had come at one o'clock to do the
marking upon the quilt, which was to be filled up by the busy fingers of
all the women in the parish. Said quilt was to have a bordering of a
pattern commonly denominated in those parts clam-shell, and this Miss
Roxy was diligently marking with indigo.

"What makes you say so, now?" said Mrs. Badger, a fat, comfortable,
motherly matron, who always patronized the last matrimonial venture that
put forth among the young people.

"What business had he to flirt and gallivant all summer with Sally
Kittridge, and make everybody think he was going to have her, and then
turn round to Mara Lincoln at the last minute? I wish I'd been in Mara's
place."

In Miss Roxy's martial enthusiasm, she gave a sudden poke to her
frisette, giving to it a diagonal bristle which extremely increased its
usually severe expression; and any one contemplating her at the moment
would have thought that for Moses Pennel, or any other young man, to
come with tender propositions in that direction would have been indeed
a venturesome enterprise.

"I tell you what 'tis, Mis' Badger," she said, "I've known Mara since
she was born,--I may say I fetched her up myself, for if I hadn't
trotted and tended her them first four weeks of her life, Mis' Pennel'd
never have got her through; and I've watched her every year since; and
havin' Moses Pennel is the only silly thing I ever knew her to do; but
you never can tell what a girl will do when it comes to
marryin',--never!"

"But he's a real stirrin', likely young man, and captain of a fine
ship," said Mrs. Badger.

"Don't care if he's captain of twenty ships," said Miss Roxy,
obdurately; "he ain't a professor of religion, and I believe he's an
infidel, and she's one of the Lord's people."

"Well," said Mrs. Badger, "you know the unbelievin' husband shall be
sanctified by the believin' wife."

"Much sanctifyin' he'll get," said Miss Roxy, contemptuously. "I don't
believe he loves her any more than fancy; she's the last plaything, and
when he's got her, he'll be tired of her, as he always was with anything
he got ever since. I tell you, Moses Pennel is all for pride and
ambition and the world; and his wife, when he gets used to her, 'll be
only a circumstance,--that's all."

"Come, now, Miss Roxy," said Miss Emily, who in her best silk and
smoothly-brushed hair had just come in, "we must _not_ let you talk so.
Moses Pennel has had long talks with brother, and he thinks him in a
very hopeful way, and we are all delighted; and as to Mara, she is as
fresh and happy as a little rose."

"So I tell Roxy," said Miss Ruey, who had been absent from the room to
hold private consultations with Miss Emily concerning the biscuits and
sponge-cake for tea, and who now sat down to the quilt and began to
unroll a capacious and very limp calico thread-case; and placing her
spectacles awry on her little pug nose, she began a series of ingenious
dodges with her thread, designed to hit the eye of her needle.

"The old folks," she continued, "are e'en a'most tickled to
pieces,--'cause they think it'll jist be the salvation of him to get
Mara."

"I ain't one of the sort that wants to be a-usin' up girls for the
salvation of fellers," said Miss Roxy, severely. "Ever since he nearly
like to have got her eat up by sharks, by giggiting her off in the boat
out to sea when she wa'n't more'n three years old, I always have
thought he was a misfortin' in that family, and I think so now."

Here broke in Mrs. Eaton, a thrifty energetic widow of a deceased
sea-captain, who had been left with a tidy little fortune which
commanded the respect of the neighborhood. Mrs. Eaton had entered
silently during the discussion, but of course had come, as every other
woman had that afternoon, with views to be expressed upon the subject.

"For my part," she said, as she stuck a decisive needle into the first
clam-shell pattern, "I ain't so sure that all the advantage in this
match is on Moses Pennel's part. Mara Lincoln is a good little thing,
but she ain't fitted to help a man along,--she'll always be wantin'
somebody to help her. Why, I 'member goin' a voyage with Cap'n Eaton,
when I saved the ship, if anybody did,--it was allowed on all hands.
Cap'n Eaton wasn't hearty at that time, he was jist gettin' up from a
fever,--it was when Marthy Ann was a baby, and I jist took her and went
to sea and took care of him. I used to work the longitude for him and
help him lay the ship's course when his head was bad,--and when we came
on the coast, we were kept out of harbor beatin' about nearly three
weeks, and all the ship's tacklin' was stiff with ice, and I tell you
the men never would have stood it through and got the ship in, if it
hadn't been for me. I kept their mittens and stockings all the while
a-dryin' at my stove in the cabin, and hot coffee all the while
a-boilin' for 'em, or I believe they'd a-frozen their hands and feet,
and never been able to work the ship in. That's the way _I_ did. Now
Sally Kittridge is a great deal more like that than Mara."

"There's no doubt that Sally is smart," said Mrs. Badger, "but then it
ain't every one can do like you, Mrs. Eaton."

"Oh no, oh no," was murmured from mouth to mouth; "Mrs. Eaton mustn't
think she's any rule for others,--everybody knows she can do more than
most people;" whereat the pacified Mrs. Eaton said "she didn't know as
it was anything remarkable,--it showed what anybody might do, if they'd
only _try_ and have resolution; but that Mara never had been brought up
to have resolution, and her mother never had resolution before her, it
wasn't in any of Mary Pennel's family; she knew their grandmother and
all their aunts, and they were all a weakly set, and not fitted to get
along in life,--they were a kind of people that somehow didn't seem to
know how to take hold of things."

At this moment the consultation was hushed up by the entrance of Sally
Kittridge and Mara, evidently on the closest terms of intimacy, and more
than usually demonstrative and affectionate; they would sit together and
use each other's needles, scissors, thread, and thimbles
interchangeably, as if anxious to express every minute the most
overflowing confidence. Sly winks and didactic nods were covertly
exchanged among the elderly people, and when Mrs. Kittridge entered with
more than usual airs of impressive solemnity, several of these were
covertly directed toward her, as a matron whose views in life must have
been considerably darkened by the recent event.

Mrs. Kittridge, however, found an opportunity to whisper under her
breath to Miss Ruey what a relief to her it was that the affair had
taken such a turn. She had felt uneasy all summer for fear of what might
come. Sally was so thoughtless and worldly, she felt afraid that he
would lead her astray. She didn't see, for her part, how a professor of
religion like Mara could make up her mind to such an unsettled kind of
fellow, even if he did seem to be rich and well-to-do. But then she had
done looking for consistency; and she sighed and vigorously applied
herself to quilting like one who has done with the world.

In return, Miss Ruey sighed and took snuff, and related for the
hundredth time to Mrs. Kittridge the great escape she once had from the
addresses of Abraham Peters, who had turned out a "poor drunken
creetur." But then it was only natural that Mara should be interested in
Moses; and the good soul went off into her favorite verse:--

    "The fondness of a creature's love,
      How strong it strikes the sense!
    Thither the warm affections move,
      Nor can we drive them thence."

In fact, Miss Ruey's sentimental vein was in quite a gushing state, for
she more than once extracted from the dark corners of the limp calico
thread-case we have spoken of certain long-treasured _morceaux_ of
newspaper poetry, of a tender and sentimental cast, which she had laid
up with true Yankee economy, in case any one should ever be in a
situation to need them. They related principally to the union of kindred
hearts, and the joys of reciprocated feeling and the pains of absence.
Good Miss Ruey occasionally passed these to Mara, with glances full of
meaning, which caused the poor old thing to resemble a sentimental
goblin, keeping Sally Kittridge in a perfect hysterical tempest of
suppressed laughter, and making it difficult for Mara to preserve the
decencies of life toward her well-intending old friend. The trouble with
poor Miss Ruey was that, while her body had grown old and crazy, her
soul was just as juvenile as ever,--and a simple, juvenile soul
disporting itself in a crazy, battered old body, is at great
disadvantage. It was lucky for her, however, that she lived in the most
sacred unconsciousness of the ludicrous effect of her little
indulgences, and the pleasure she took in them was certainly of the most
harmless kind. The world would be a far better and more enjoyable place
than it is, if all people who are old and uncomely could find amusement
as innocent and Christian-like as Miss Ruey's inoffensive thread-case
collection of sentimental truisms.

This quilting of which we speak was a solemn, festive occasion of the
parish, held a week after Moses had sailed away; and so _piquant_ a
morsel as a recent engagement could not, of course, fail to be served up
for the company in every variety of garnishing which individual tastes
might suggest.

It became an ascertained fact, however, in the course of the evening
festivities, that the minister was serenely approbative of the event;
that Captain Kittridge was at length brought to a sense of the errors of
his way in supposing that Sally had ever cared a pin for Moses more than
as a mutual friend and confidant; and the great affair was settled
without more ripples of discomposure than usually attend similar
announcements in more refined society.




CHAPTER XXXIV

FRIENDS


The quilting broke up at the primitive hour of nine o'clock, at which,
in early New England days, all social gatherings always dispersed.
Captain Kittridge rowed his helpmeet, with Mara and Sally, across the
Bay to the island.

"Come and stay with me to-night, Sally," said Mara.

"I think Sally had best be at home," said Mrs. Kittridge. "There's no
sense in girls talking all night."

"There ain't sense in nothin' else, mother," said the Captain. "Next to
sparkin', which is the Christianist thing I knows on, comes gals' talks
'bout their sparks; they's as natural as crowsfoot and red columbines
in the spring, and spring don't come but once a year neither,--and so
let 'em take the comfort on't. I warrant now, Polly, you've laid awake
nights and talked about me."

"We've all been foolish once," said Mrs. Kittridge.

"Well, mother, we want to be foolish too," said Sally.

"Well, you and your father are too much for me," said Mrs. Kittridge,
plaintively; "you always get your own way."

"How lucky that my way is always a good one!" said Sally.

"Well, you know, Sally, you are going to make the beer to-morrow," still
objected her mother.

"Oh, yes; that's another reason," said Sally. "Mara and I shall come
home through the woods in the morning, and we can get whole apronfuls of
young wintergreen, and besides, I know where there's a lot of sassafras
root. We'll dig it, won't we, Mara?"

"Yes; and I'll come down and help you brew," said Mara. "Don't you
remember the beer I made when Moses came home?"

"Yes, yes, I remember," said the Captain, "you sent us a couple of
bottles."

"We can make better yet now," said Mara. "The wintergreen is young, and
the green tips on the spruce boughs are so full of strength. Everything
is lively and sunny now."

"Yes, yes," said the Captain, "and I 'spect I know why things do look
pretty lively to some folks, don't they?"

"I don't know what sort of work you'll make of the beer among you," said
Mrs. Kittridge; "but you must have it your own way."

Mrs. Kittridge, who never did anything else among her tea-drinking
acquaintances but laud and magnify Sally's good traits and domestic
acquirements, felt constantly bound to keep up a faint show of
controversy and authority in her dealings with her,--the fading remains
of the strict government of her childhood; but it was, nevertheless,
very perfectly understood, in a general way, that Sally was to do as she
pleased; and so, when the boat came to shore, she took the arm of Mara
and started up toward the brown house.

The air was soft and balmy, and though the moon by which the troth of
Mara and Moses had been plighted had waned into the latest hours of the
night, still a thousand stars were lying in twinkling brightness,
reflected from the undulating waves all around them, and the tide, as it
rose and fell, made a sound as gentle and soft as the respiration of a
peaceful sleeper.

"Well, Mara," said Sally, after an interval of silence, "all has come
out right. You see that it was you whom he loved. What a lucky thing
for me that I am made so heartless, or I might not be as glad as I am."

"You are not heartless, Sally," said Mara; "it's the enchanted princess
asleep; the right one hasn't come to waken her."

"Maybe so," said Sally, with her old light laugh. "If I only were sure
he would make you happy now,--half as happy as you deserve,--I'd forgive
him his share of this summer's mischief. The fault was just half mine,
you see, for I witched with him. I confess it. I have my own little
spider-webs for these great lordly flies, and I like to hear them buzz."

"Take care, Sally; never do it again, or the spider-web may get round
you," said Mara.

"Never fear me," said Sally. "But, Mara, I wish I felt sure that Moses
could make you happy. Do you really, now, when you think seriously, feel
as if he would?"

"I never thought seriously about it," said Mara; "but I know he needs
me; that I can do for him what no one else can. I have always felt all
my life that he was to be mine; that he was sent to me, ordained for me
to care for and to love."

"You are well mated," said Sally. "He wants to be loved very much, and
you want to love. There's the active and passive voice, as they used to
say at Miss Plucher's. But yet in your natures you are opposite as any
two could well be."

Mara felt that there was in these chance words of Sally more than she
perceived. No one could feel as intensely as she could that the mind and
heart so dear to her were yet, as to all that was most vital and real in
her inner life, unsympathizing. To her the spiritual world was a
reality; God an ever-present consciousness; and the line of this present
life seemed so to melt and lose itself in the anticipation of a future
and brighter one, that it was impossible for her to speak intimately and
not unconsciously to betray the fact. To him there was only the life of
this world: there was no present God; and from all thought of a future
life he shrank with a shuddering aversion, as from something ghastly and
unnatural. She had realized this difference more in the few days that
followed her betrothal than all her life before, for now first the
barrier of mutual constraint and misunderstanding having melted away,
each spoke with an _abandon_ and unreserve which made the acquaintance
more vitally intimate than ever it had been before. It was then that
Mara felt that while her sympathies could follow him through all his
plans and interests, there was a whole world of thought and feeling in
her heart where his could not follow her; and she asked herself, Would
it be so always? Must she walk at his side forever repressing the
utterance of that which was most sacred and intimate, living in a
nominal and external communion only? How could it be that what was so
lovely and clear in its reality to her, that which was to her as
life-blood, that which was the vital air in which she lived and moved
and had her being, could be absolutely nothing to him? Was it really
possible, as he said, that God had no existence for him except in a
nominal cold belief; that the spiritual world was to him only a land of
pale shades and doubtful glooms, from which he shrank with dread, and
the least allusion to which was distasteful? and would this always be
so? and if so, could she be happy?

But Mara said the truth in saying that the question of personal
happiness never entered her thoughts. She loved Moses in a way that made
it necessary to her happiness to devote herself to him, to watch over
and care for him; and though she knew not how, she felt a sort of
presentiment that it was through her that he must be brought into
sympathy with a spiritual and immortal life.

All this passed through Mara's mind in the reverie into which Sally's
last words threw her, as she sat on the door-sill and looked off into
the starry distance and heard the weird murmur of the sea.

"How lonesome the sea at night always is," said Sally. "I declare, Mara,
I don't wonder you miss that creature, for, to tell the truth, I do a
little bit. It was something, you know, to have somebody to come in, and
to joke with, and to say how he liked one's hair and one's ribbons, and
all that. I quite got up a friendship for Moses, so that I can feel how
dull you must be;" and Sally gave a half sigh, and then whistled a tune
as adroitly as a blackbird.

"Yes," said Mara, "we two girls down on this lonely island need some one
to connect us with the great world; and he was so full of life, and so
certain and confident, he seemed to open a way before one out into
life."

"Well, of course, while he is gone there will be plenty to do getting
ready to be married," said Sally. "By the by, when I was over to
Portland the other day, Maria Potter showed me a new pattern for a
bed-quilt, the sweetest thing you can imagine,--it is called the morning
star. There is a great star in the centre, and little stars all
around,--white on a blue ground. I mean to begin one for you."

"I am going to begin spinning some very fine flax next week," said Mara;
"and have I shown you the new pattern I drew for a counterpane? it is to
be morning-glories, leaves and flowers, you know,--a pretty idea, isn't
it?"

And so, the conversation falling from the region of the sentimental to
the practical, the two girls went in and spent an hour in discussions so
purely feminine that we will not enlighten the reader further therewith.
Sally seemed to be investing all her energies in the preparation of the
wedding outfit of her friend, about which she talked with a constant and
restless activity, and for which she formed a thousand plans, and
projected shopping tours to Portland, Brunswick, and even to
Boston,--this last being about as far off a venture at that time as
Paris now seems to a Boston belle.

"When you are married," said Sally, "you'll have to take me to live with
you; that creature sha'n't have you _all_ to himself. I hate men, they
are so exorbitant,--they spoil all our playmates; and what shall I do
when _you_ are gone?"

"You will go with Mr.--what's his name?" said Mara.

"Pshaw, I don't know him. I shall be an old maid," said Sally; "and
really there isn't much harm in that, if one could have company,--if
somebody or other wouldn't marry all one's friends,--that's lonesome,"
she said, winking a tear out of her black eyes and laughing. "If I were
only a young fellow now, Mara, I'd have you myself, and that would be
just the thing; and I'd shoot Moses, if he said a word; and I'd have
money, and I'd have honors, and I'd carry you off to Europe, and take
you to Paris and Rome, and nobody knows where; and we'd live in peace,
as the story-books say."

"Come, Sally, how wild you are talking," said Mara, "and the clock has
just struck one; let's try to go to sleep."

Sally put her face to Mara's and kissed her, and Mara felt a moist spot
on her cheek,--could it be a tear?




CHAPTER XXXV

THE TOOTHACRE COTTAGE


Aunt Roxy and Aunt Ruey Toothacre lived in a little one-story
gambrel-roofed cottage, on the side of Harpswell Bay, just at the head
of the long cove which we have already described. The windows on two
sides commanded the beautiful bay and the opposite shores, and on the
other they looked out into the dense forest, through whose deep shadows
of white birch and pine the silver rise and fall of the sea daily
revealed itself.

The house itself was a miracle of neatness within, for the two thrifty
sisters were worshipers of soap and sand, and these two tutelary deities
had kept every board of the house-floor white and smooth, and also every
table and bench and tub of household use. There was a sacred care over
each article, however small and insignificant, which composed their
slender household stock. The loss or breakage of one of them would have
made a visible crack in the hearts of the worthy sisters,--for every
plate, knife, fork, spoon, cup, or glass was as intimate with them, as
instinct with home feeling, as if it had a soul; each defect or spot had
its history, and a cracked dish or article of furniture received as
tender and considerate medical treatment as if it were capable of
understanding and feeling the attention.

It was now a warm, spicy day in June,--one of those which bring out the
pineapple fragrance from the fir-shoots, and cause the spruce and
hemlocks to exude a warm, resinous perfume. The two sisters, for a
wonder, were having a day to themselves, free from the numerous calls
of the vicinity for twelve miles round. The room in which they were
sitting was bestrewn with fragments of dresses and bonnets, which were
being torn to pieces in a most wholesale way, with a view to a general
rejuvenescence. A person of unsympathetic temperament, and disposed to
take sarcastic views of life, might perhaps wonder what possible object
these two battered and weather-beaten old bodies proposed to themselves
in this process,--whether Miss Roxy's gaunt black-straw helmet, which
she had worn defiantly all winter, was likely to receive much lustre
from being pressed over and trimmed with an old green ribbon which that
energetic female had colored black by a domestic recipe; and whether
Miss Roxy's rusty bombazette would really seem to the world any fresher
for being ripped, and washed, and turned, for the second or third time,
and made over with every breadth in a different situation. Probably
after a week of efficient labor, busily expended in bleaching, dyeing,
pressing, sewing, and ripping, an unenlightened spectator, seeing them
come into the meeting-house, would simply think, "There are those two
old frights with the same old things on they have worn these fifty
years." Happily the weird sisters were contentedly ignorant of any such
remarks, for no duchesses could have enjoyed a more quiet belief in
their own social position, and their semi-annual spring and fall
rehabilitation was therefore entered into with the most simple-hearted
satisfaction.

"I'm a-thinkin', Roxy," said Aunt Ruey, considerately turning and
turning on her hand an old straw bonnet, on which were streaked all the
marks of the former trimming in lighter lines, which revealed too
clearly the effects of wind and weather,--"I'm a-thinkin' whether or no
this 'ere mightn't as well be dyed and done with it as try to bleach it
out. I've had it ten years last May, and it's kind o' losin' its
freshness, you know. I don't believe these 'ere streaks will bleach
out."

"Never mind, Ruey," said Miss Roxy, authoritatively, "I'm goin' to do
Mis' Badger's leg'orn, and it won't cost nothin'; so hang your'n in the
barrel along with it,--the same smoke'll do 'em both. Mis' Badger she
finds the brimstone, and next fall you can put it in the dye when we do
the yarn."

"That ar straw is a beautiful straw!" said Miss Ruey, in a plaintive
tone, tenderly examining the battered old head-piece,--"I braided every
stroke on it myself, and I don't know as I could do it ag'in. My fingers
ain't quite so limber as they was! I don't think I shall put green
ribbon on it ag'in; 'cause green is such a color to ruin, if a body gets
caught out in a shower! There's these green streaks come that day I left
my amberil at Captain Broad's, and went to meetin'. Mis' Broad she says
to me, 'Aunt Ruey, it won't rain.' And says I to her, 'Well, Mis' Broad,
I'll try it; though I never did leave my amberil at home but what it
rained.' And so I went, and sure enough it rained cats and dogs, and
streaked my bonnet all up; and them ar streaks won't bleach out, I'm
feared."

"How long is it Mis' Badger has had that ar leg'orn?"

"Why, you know, the Cap'n he brought it home when he came from his
voyage from Marseilles. That ar was when Phebe Ann was born, and she's
fifteen year old. It was a most elegant thing when he brought it; but I
think it kind o' led Mis' Badger on to extravagant ways,--for gettin'
new trimmin' spring and fall so uses up money as fast as new bonnets;
but Mis' Badger's got the money, and she's got a right to use it if she
pleases; but if I'd a-had new trimmin's spring and fall, I shouldn't
a-put away what I have in the bank."

"Have you seen the straw Sally Kittridge is braidin' for Mara Lincoln's
weddin' bonnet?" said Miss Ruey. "It's jist the finest thing ever you
did see,--and the whitest. I was a-tellin' Sally that I could do as well
once myself, but my mantle was a-fallin' on her. Sally don't seem to act
a bit like a disap'inted gal. She is as chipper as she can be about
Mara's weddin', and seems like she couldn't do too much. But laws,
everybody seems to want to be a-doin' for her. Miss Emily was a-showin'
me a fine double damask tablecloth that she was goin' to give her; and
Mis' Pennel, she's been a-spinnin' and layin' up sheets and towels and
tablecloths all her life,--and then she has all Naomi's things. Mis'
Pennel was talkin' to me the other day about bleachin' 'em out 'cause
they'd got yellow a-lyin'. I kind o' felt as if 'twas unlucky to be
a-fittin' out a bride with her dead mother's things, but I didn't like
to say nothin'."

"Ruey," said Miss Roxy impressively, "I hain't never had but jist one
mind about Mara Lincoln's weddin',--it's to be,--but it won't be the way
people think. I hain't nussed and watched and sot up nights sixty years
for nothin'. I can see beyond what most folks can,--her weddin' garments
is bought and paid for, and she'll wear 'em, but she won't be Moses
Pennel's wife,--now you see."

"Why, whose wife will she be then?" said Miss Ruey; "'cause that ar Mr.
Adams is married. I saw it in the paper last week when I was up to Mis'
Badger's."

Miss Roxy shut her lips with oracular sternness and went on with her
sewing.

"Who's that comin' in the back door?" said Miss Ruey, as the sound of a
footstep fell upon her ear. "Bless me," she added, as she started up to
look, "if folks ain't always nearest when you're talkin' about 'em. Why,
Mara; you come down here and catched us in all our dirt! Well now, we're
glad to see you, if we be," said Miss Ruey.




CHAPTER XXXVI

THE SHADOW OF DEATH


It was in truth Mara herself who came and stood in the doorway. She
appeared overwearied with her walk, for her cheeks had a vivid
brightness unlike their usual tender pink. Her eyes had, too, a
brilliancy almost painful to look upon. They seemed like ardent fires,
in which the life was slowly burning away.

"Sit down, sit down, little Mara," said Aunt Ruey. "Why, how like a
picture you look this mornin',--one needn't ask you how you do,--it's
plain enough that you are pretty well."

"Yes, I am, Aunt Ruey," she answered, sinking into a chair; "only it is
warm to-day, and the sun is so hot, that's all, I believe; but I am very
tired."

"So you are now, poor thing," said Miss Ruey. "Roxy, where's my
turkey-feather fan? Oh, here 'tis; there, take it, and fan you, child;
and maybe you'll have a glass of our spruce beer?"

"Thank you, Aunt Roxy. I brought you some young wintergreen," said Mara,
unrolling from her handkerchief a small knot of those fragrant leaves,
which were wilted by the heat.

"Thank you, I'm sure," said Miss Ruey, in delight; "you always fetch
something, Mara,--always would, ever since you could toddle. Roxy and I
was jist talkin' about your weddin'. I s'pose you're gettin' things well
along down to your house. Well, here's the beer. I don't hardly know
whether you'll think it worked enough, though. I set it Saturday
afternoon, for all Mis' Twitchell said it was wicked for beer to work
Sundays," said Miss Ruey, with a feeble cackle at her own joke.

"Thank you, Aunt Ruey; it is excellent, as your things always are. I was
very thirsty."

"I s'pose you hear from Moses pretty often now," said Aunt Ruey. "How
kind o' providential it happened about his getting that property; he'll
be a rich man now; and Mara, you'll come to grandeur, won't you? Well, I
don't know anybody deserves it more,--I r'ally don't. Mis' Badger was
a-sayin' so a-Sunday, and Cap'n Kittridge and all on 'em. I s'pose
though we've got to lose you,--you'll be goin' off to Boston, or New
York, or somewhere."

"We can't tell what may happen, Aunt Ruey," said Mara, and there was a
slight tremor in her voice as she spoke.

Miss Roxy, who beyond the first salutations had taken no part in this
conversation, had from time to time regarded Mara over the tops of her
spectacles with looks of grave apprehension; and Mara, looking up, now
encountered one of these glances.

"Have you taken the dock and dandelion tea I told you about?" said the
wise woman, rather abruptly.

"Yes, Aunt Roxy, I have taken them faithfully for two weeks past."

"And do they seem to set you up any?" said Miss Roxy.

"No, I don't think they do. Grandma thinks I'm better, and grandpa, and
I let them think so; but Miss Roxy, _can't_ you think of something
else?"

Miss Roxy laid aside the straw bonnet which she was ripping, and
motioned Mara into the outer room,--the sink-room, as the sisters called
it. It was the scullery of their little establishment,--the place where
all dish-washing and clothes-washing was generally performed,--but the
boards of the floor were white as snow, and the place had the odor of
neatness. The open door looked out pleasantly into the deep forest,
where the waters of the cove, now at high tide, could be seen glittering
through the trees. Soft moving spots of sunlight fell, checkering the
feathery ferns and small piney tribes of evergreen which ran in ruffling
wreaths of green through the dry, brown matting of fallen pine needles.
Birds were singing and calling to each other merrily from the green
shadows of the forest,--everything had a sylvan fullness and freshness
of life. There are moods of mind when the sight of the bloom and
freshness of nature affects us painfully, like the want of sympathy in a
dear friend. Mara had been all her days a child of the woods; her
delicate life had grown up in them like one of their own cool shaded
flowers; and there was not a moss, not a fern, not an upspringing thing
that waved a leaf or threw forth a flower-bell, that was not a
well-known friend to her; she had watched for years its haunts, known
the time of its coming and its going, studied its shy and veiled habits,
and interwoven with its life each year a portion of her own; and now she
looked out into the old mossy woods, with their wavering spots of sun
and shadow, with a yearning pain, as if she wanted help or sympathy to
come from their silent recesses.

She sat down on the clean, scoured door-sill, and took off her straw
hat. Her golden-brown hair was moist with the damps of fatigue, which
made it curl and wave in darker little rings about her forehead; her
eyes,--those longing, wistful eyes,--had a deeper pathos of sadness than
ever they had worn before; and her delicate lips trembled with some
strong suppressed emotion.

"Aunt Roxy," she said suddenly, "I _must_ speak to somebody. I can't go
on and keep up without telling some one, and it had better be you,
because you have skill and experience, and can help me if anybody can.
I've been going on for six months now, taking this and taking that, and
trying to get better, but it's of no use. Aunt Roxy, I feel my life
going,--going just as steadily and as quietly every day as the sand goes
out of your hour-glass. I want to live,--oh, I never wanted to live so
much, and I can't,--oh, I know I can't. Can I now,--do you think I can?"

Mara looked imploringly at Miss Roxy. The hard-visaged woman sat down on
the wash-bench, and, covering her worn, stony visage with her checked
apron, sobbed aloud.

Mara was confounded. This implacably withered, sensible, dry woman,
beneficently impassive in sickness and sorrow, weeping!--it was awful,
as if one of the Fates had laid down her fatal distaff to weep.

Mara sprung up impulsively and threw her arms round her neck.

"Now don't, Aunt Roxy, don't. I didn't think you would feel bad, or I
wouldn't have told you; but oh, you don't know how hard it is to keep
such a secret all to one's self. I have to make believe all the time
that I am feeling well and getting better. I really say what isn't true
every day, because, poor grandmamma, how could I bear to see her
distress? and grandpapa,--oh, I wish people didn't love me so! Why
cannot they let me go? And oh, Aunt Roxy, I had a letter only yesterday,
and he is so sure we shall be married this fall,--and I know it cannot
be." Mara's voice gave way in sobs, and the two wept together,--the old
grim, gray woman holding the soft golden head against her breast with a
convulsive grasp. "Oh, Aunt Roxy, do you love me, too?" said Mara. "I
didn't know you did."

"Love ye, child?" said Miss Roxy; "yes, I love ye like my life. I ain't
one that makes talk about things, but I do; you come into my arms fust
of anybody's in this world,--and except poor little Hitty, I never loved
nobody as I have you."

"Ah! that was your sister, whose grave I have seen," said Mara, speaking
in a soothing, caressing tone, and putting her little thin hand against
the grim, wasted cheek, which was now moist with tears.

"Jes' so, child, she died when she was a year younger than you be; she
was not lost, for God took her. Poor Hitty! her life jest dried up like
a brook in August,--jest so. Well, she was hopefully pious, and it was
better for her."

"Did she go like me, Aunt Roxy?" said Mara.

"Well, yes, dear; she did begin jest so, and I gave her everything I
could think of; and we had doctors for her far and near; but _'twasn't
to be_,--that's all we could say; she was called, and her time was
come."

"Well, now, Aunt Roxy," said Mara, "at any rate, it's a relief to speak
out to some one. It's more than two months that I have felt every day
more and more that there was no hope,--life has hung on me like a
weight. I have had to _make_ myself keep up, and make myself do
everything, and no one knows how it has tried me. I am so tired all the
time, I could cry; and yet when I go to bed nights I can't sleep, I lie
in such a hot, restless way; and then before morning I am drenched with
cold sweat, and feel so weak and wretched. I force myself to eat, and I
force myself to talk and laugh, and it's all pretense; and it wears me
out,--it would be better if I stopped trying,--it would be better to
give up and act as weak as I feel; but how can I let them know?"

"My dear child," said Aunt Roxy, "the truth is the kindest thing we can
give folks in the end. When folks know jest where they are, why they can
walk; you'll all be supported; you must trust in the Lord. I have been
more'n forty years with sick rooms and dyin' beds, and I never knew it
fail that those that trusted in the Lord was brought through."

"Oh, Aunt Roxy, it is so hard for me to give up,--to give up hoping to
live. There were a good many years when I thought I should love to
depart,--not that I was really unhappy, but I longed to go to heaven,
though I knew it was selfish, when I knew how lonesome I should leave my
friends. But now, oh, life has looked so bright; I have clung to it so;
I do now. I lie awake nights and pray, and try to give it up and be
resigned, and I can't. Is it wicked?"

"Well, it's natur' to want to live," said Miss Roxy. "Life is sweet, and
in a gen'l way we was made to live. Don't worry; the Lord'll bring you
right when His time comes. Folks isn't always supported jest when they
want to be, nor _as_ they want to be; but yet they're supported fust and
last. Ef I was to tell you how as I has hope in your case, I shouldn't
be a-tellin' you the truth. I hasn't much of any; only all things is
possible with God. If you could kind o' give it all up and rest easy in
His hands, and keep a-doin' what you can,--why, while there's life
there's hope, you know; and if you are to be made well, you will be all
the sooner."

"Aunt Roxy, it's all right; I know it's all right. God knows best; He
will do what is best; I know that; but my heart bleeds, and is sore. And
when I get his letters,--I got one yesterday,--it brings it all back
again. Everything is going on so well; he says he has done more than all
he ever hoped; his letters are full of jokes, full of spirit. Ah, he
little knows,--and how can I tell him?"

"Child, you needn't yet. You can jest kind o' prepare his mind a
little."

"Aunt Roxy, have you spoken of my case to any one,--have you told what
you know of me?"

"No, child, I hain't said nothin' more than that you was a little weakly
now and then."

"I have such a color every afternoon," said Mara. "Grandpapa talks about
my roses, and Captain Kittridge jokes me about growing so handsome;
nobody seems to realize how I feel. I have kept up with all the strength
I had. I have tried to shake it off, and to feel that nothing was the
matter,--really there is nothing much, only this weakness. This morning
I thought it would do me good to walk down here. I remember times when I
could ramble whole days in the woods, but I was so tired before I got
half way here that I had to stop a long while and rest. Aunt Roxy, if
you would only tell grandpapa and grandmamma just how things are, and
what the danger is, and let them stop talking to me about wedding
things,--for really and truly I am too unwell to keep up any longer."

"Well, child, I will," said Miss Roxy. "Your grandfather will be
supported, and hold you up, for he's one of the sort as has the secret
of the Lord,--I remember him of old. Why, the day your father and mother
was buried he stood up and sung old China, and his face was wonderful to
see. He seemed to be standin' with the world under his feet and heaven
opening. He's a master Christian, your grandfather is; and now you jest
go and lie down in the little bedroom, and rest you a bit, and by and
by, in the cool of the afternoon, I'll walk along home with you."

Miss Roxy opened the door of a little room, whose white fringy
window-curtains were blown inward by breezes from the blue sea, and laid
the child down to rest on a clean sweet-smelling bed with as deft and
tender care as if she were not a bony, hard-visaged, angular female, in
a black mohair frisette.

She stopped a moment wistfully before a little profile head, of a kind
which resembles a black shadow on a white ground. "That was Hitty!" she
said.

Mara had often seen in the graveyard a mound inscribed to this young
person, and heard traditionally of a young and pretty sister of Miss
Roxy who had died very many years before. But the grave was overgrown
with blackberry-vines, and gray moss had grown into the crevices of the
slab which served for a tombstone, and never before that day had she
heard Miss Roxy speak of her. Miss Roxy took down the little black
object and handed it to Mara. "You can't tell much by that, but she was
a most beautiful creatur'. Well, it's all best as it is." Mara saw
nothing but a little black shadow cast on white paper, yet she was
affected by the perception how bright, how beautiful, was the image in
the memory of that seemingly stern, commonplace woman, and how of all
that in her mind's eye she saw and remembered, she could find no outward
witness but this black block. "So some day my friends will speak of me
as a distant shadow," she said, as with a sigh she turned her head on
the pillow.

Miss Roxy shut the door gently as she went out, and betrayed the
unwonted rush of softer feelings which had come over her only by being
more dictatorial and commanding than usual in her treatment of her
sister, who was sitting in fidgety curiosity to know what could have
been the subject of the private conference.

"I s'pose Mara wanted to get some advice about makin' up her weddin'
things," said Miss Ruey, with a sort of humble quiver, as Miss Roxy
began ripping and tearing fiercely at her old straw bonnet, as if she
really purposed its utter and immediate demolition.

"No she didn't, neither," said Miss Roxy, fiercely. "I declare, Ruey,
you are silly; your head is always full of weddin's, weddin's,
weddin's--nothin' else--from mornin' till night, and night till mornin'.
I tell you there's other things have got to be thought of in this world
besides weddin' clothes, and it would be well, if people would think
more o' gettin' their weddin' garments ready for the kingdom of heaven.
That's what Mara's got to think of; for, mark my words, Ruey, there is
no marryin' and givin' in marriage for her in this world."

"Why, bless me, Roxy, now you don't say so!" said Miss Ruey; "why I knew
she was kind o' weakly and ailin', but"--

"Kind o' weakly and ailin'!" said Miss Roxy, taking up Miss Ruey's words
in a tone of high disgust, "I should rather think she was; and more'n
that, too: she's marked for death, and that before long, too. It may be
that Moses Pennel'll never see her again--he never half knew what she
was worth--maybe he'll know when he's lost her, that's one comfort!"

"But," said Miss Ruey, "everybody has been a-sayin' what a beautiful
color she was a-gettin' in her cheeks."

"Color in her cheeks!" snorted Miss Roxy; "so does a rock-maple get
color in September and turn all scarlet, and what for? why, the frost
has been at it, and its time is out. That's what your bright colors
stand for. Hain't you noticed that little gravestone cough, jest the
faintest in the world, and it don't come from a cold, and it hangs on. I
tell you you can't cheat me, she's goin' jest as Mehitabel went, jest as
Sally Ann Smith went, jest as Louisa Pearson went. I could count now on
my fingers twenty girls that have gone that way. Nobody saw 'em goin'
till they was gone."

"Well, now, I don't think the old folks have the least idea on't," said
Miss Ruey. "Only last Saturday Mis' Pennel was a-talkin' to me about the
sheets and tablecloths she's got out a-bleachin'; and she said that the
weddin' dress was to be made over to Mis' Mosely's in Portland, 'cause
Moses he's so particular about havin' things genteel."

"Well, Master Moses'll jest have to give up his particular notions,"
said Miss Roxy, "and come down in the dust, like all the rest on us,
when the Lord sends an east wind and withers our gourds. Moses Pennel's
one of the sort that expects to drive all before him with the strong
arm, and sech has to learn that things ain't to go as they please in the
Lord's world. Sech always has to come to spots that they can't get over
nor under nor round, to have their own way, but jest has to give right
up square."

"Well, Roxy," said Miss Ruey, "how does the poor little thing take it?
Has she got reconciled?"

"Reconciled! Ruey, how you do ask questions!" said Miss Roxy, fiercely
pulling a bandanna silk handkerchief out of her pocket, with which she
wiped her eyes in a defiant manner. "Reconciled! It's easy enough to
talk, Ruey, but how would you like it, when everything was goin' smooth
and playin' into your hands, and all the world smooth and shiny, to be
took short up? I guess you wouldn't be reconciled. That's what I guess."

"Dear me, Roxy, who said I should?" said Miss Ruey. "I wa'n't blamin'
the poor child, not a grain."

"Well, who said you was, Ruey?" answered Miss Roxy, in the same high
key.

"You needn't take my head off," said Aunt Ruey, roused as much as her
adipose, comfortable nature could be. "You've been a-talkin' at me ever
since you came in from the sink-room, as if I was to blame; and snappin'
at me as if I hadn't a right to ask civil questions; and I won't stan'
it," said Miss Ruey. "And while I'm about it, I'll say that you always
have snubbed me and contradicted and ordered me round. I won't bear it
no longer."

"Come, Ruey, don't make a fool of yourself at your time of life," said
Miss Roxy. "Things is bad enough in this world without two lone sisters
and church-members turnin' agin each other. You must take me as I am,
Ruey; my bark's worse than my bite, as you know."

Miss Ruey sank back pacified into her usual state of pillowy dependence;
it was so much easier to be good-natured than to contend. As for Miss
Roxy, if you have ever carefully examined a chestnut-burr, you will
remember that, hard as it is to handle, no plush of downiest texture can
exceed the satin smoothness of the fibres which line its heart. There
are a class of people in New England who betray the uprising of the
softer feelings of our nature only by an increase of outward asperity--a
sort of bashfulness and shyness leaves them no power of expression for
these unwonted guests of the heart--they hurry them into inner chambers
and slam the doors upon them, as if they were vexed at their appearance.

Now if poor Miss Roxy had been like you, my dear young lady--if her soul
had been encased in a round, rosy, and comely body, and looked out of
tender blue eyes shaded by golden hair, probably the grief and love she
felt would have shown themselves only in bursts of feeling most graceful
to see, and engaging the sympathy of all; but this same soul, imprisoned
in a dry, angular body, stiff and old, and looking out under beetling
eyebrows, over withered high cheek-bones, could only utter itself by a
passionate tempest--unlovely utterance of a lovely impulse--dear only to
Him who sees with a Father's heart the real beauty of spirits. It is our
firm faith that bright solemn angels in celestial watchings were
frequent guests in the homely room of the two sisters, and that passing
by all accidents of age and poverty, withered skins, bony features, and
grotesque movements and shabby clothing, they saw more real beauty there
than in many a scented boudoir where seeming angels smile in lace and
satin.

"Ruey," said Miss Roxy, in a more composed voice, while her hard, bony
hands still trembled with excitement, "this 'ere's been on my mind a
good while. I hain't said nothin' to nobody, but I've seen it a-comin'.
I always thought that child wa'n't for a long life. Lives is run in
different lengths, and nobody can say what's the matter with some folks,
only that their thread's run out; there's more on one spool and less on
another. I thought, when we laid Hitty in the grave, that I shouldn't
never set my heart on nothin' else--but we can't jest say we will or we
won't. Ef we are to be sorely afflicted at any time, the Lord lets us
set our hearts before we know it. This 'ere's a great affliction to me,
Ruey, but I must jest shoulder my cross and go through with it. I'm
goin' down to-night to tell the old folks, and to make arrangements so
that the poor little lamb may have the care she needs. She's been
a-keepin' up so long, 'cause she dreaded to let 'em know, but this 'ere
has got to be looked right in the face, and I hope there'll be grace
given to do it."




CHAPTER XXXVII

THE VICTORY


Meanwhile Mara had been lying in the passive calm of fatigue and
exhaustion, her eyes fixed on the window, where, as the white curtain
drew inward, she could catch glimpses of the bay. Gradually her eyelids
fell, and she dropped into that kind of half-waking doze, when the outer
senses are at rest, and the mind is all the more calm and clear for
their repose. In such hours a spiritual clairvoyance often seems to lift
for a while the whole stifling cloud that lies like a confusing mist
over the problem of life, and the soul has sudden glimpses of things
unutterable which lie beyond. Then the narrow straits, that look so full
of rocks and quicksands, widen into a broad, clear passage, and one
after another, rosy with a celestial dawn, and ringing silver bells of
gladness, the isles of the blessed lift themselves up on the horizon,
and the soul is flooded with an atmosphere of light and joy. As the
burden of Christian fell off at the cross and was lost in the sepulchre,
so in these hours of celestial vision the whole weight of life's anguish
is lifted, and passes away like a dream; and the soul, seeing the
boundless ocean of Divine love, wherein all human hopes and joys and
sorrows lie so tenderly upholden, comes and casts the one little drop of
its personal will and personal existence with gladness into that
Fatherly depth. Henceforth, with it, God and Saviour is no more word of
mine and thine, for in that hour the child of earth feels himself heir
of all things: "All things are yours, and ye are Christ's, and Christ is
God's."

       *       *       *       *       *

"The child is asleep," said Miss Roxy, as she stole on tiptoe into the
room when their noon meal was prepared. A plate and knife had been laid
for her, and they had placed for her a tumbler of quaint old engraved
glass, reputed to have been brought over from foreign parts, and which
had been given to Miss Roxy as her share in the effects of the
mysterious Mr. Swadkins. Tea also was served in some egg-like India
china cups, which saw the light only on the most high and festive
occasions.

"Hadn't you better wake her?" said Miss Ruey; "a cup of hot tea would do
her so much good."

Miss Ruey could conceive of few sorrows or ailments which would not be
materially better for a cup of hot tea. If not the very elixir of life,
it was indeed the next thing to it.

"Well," said Miss Roxy, after laying her hand for a moment with great
gentleness on that of the sleeping girl, "she don't wake easy, and she's
tired; and she seems to be enjoying it so. The Bible says, 'He giveth
his beloved sleep,' and I won't interfere. I've seen more good come of
sleep than most things in my nursin' experience," said Miss Roxy, and
she shut the door gently, and the two sisters sat down to their noontide
meal.

"How long the child does sleep!" said Miss Ruey as the old clock struck
four.

"It was too much for her, this walk down here," said Aunt Roxy. "She's
been doin' too much for a long time. I'm a-goin' to put an end to that.
Well, nobody needn't say Mara hain't got resolution. I never see a
little thing have more. She always did have, when she was the leastest
little thing. She was always quiet and white and still, but she did
whatever she sot out to."

At this moment, to their surprise, the door opened, and Mara came in,
and both sisters were struck with a change that had passed over her. It
was more than the result of mere physical repose. Not only had every
sign of weariness and bodily languor vanished, but there was about her
an air of solemn serenity and high repose that made her seem, as Miss
Ruey afterwards said, "like an angel jest walked out of the big Bible."

"Why, dear child, how you have slept, and how bright and rested you
look," said Miss Ruey.

"I am rested," said Mara; "oh how much! And happy," she added, laying
her little hand on Miss Roxy's shoulder. "I thank you, dear friend, for
all your kindness to me. I am sorry I made you feel so sadly; but now
you mustn't feel so any more, for all is well--yes, all is well. I see
now that it is so. I have passed beyond sorrow--yes, forever."

Soft-hearted Miss Ruey here broke into audible sobbing, hiding her face
in her hands, and looking like a tumbled heap of old faded calico in a
state of convulsion.

"Dear Aunt Ruey, you mustn't," said Mara, with a voice of gentle
authority. "We mustn't any of us feel so any more. There is no harm
done, no real evil is coming, only a good which we do not understand. I
am perfectly satisfied--perfectly at rest now. I was foolish and weak to
feel as I did this morning, but I shall not feel so any more. I shall
comfort you all. Is it anything so dreadful for me to go to heaven? How
little while it will be before you all come to me! Oh, how
little--little while!"

"I told you, Mara, that you'd be supported in the Lord's time," said
Miss Roxy, who watched her with an air of grave and solemn attention.
"First and last, folks allers is supported; but sometimes there is a
long wrestlin'. The Lord's give you the victory early."

"Victory!" said the girl, speaking as in a deep muse, and with a
mysterious brightness in her eyes; "yes, that is the word--it _is_ a
victory--no other word expresses it. Come, Aunt Roxy, we will go home. I
am not afraid now to tell grandpapa and grandmamma. God will care for
them; He will wipe away all tears."

"Well, though, you mus'n't think of goin' till you've had a cup of tea,"
said Aunt Ruey, wiping her eyes. "I've kep' the tea-pot hot by the fire,
and you must eat a little somethin', for it's long past dinner-time."

"Is it?" said Mara. "I had no idea I had slept so long--how thoughtful
and kind you are!"

"I do wish I could only do more for you," said Miss Ruey. "I don't seem
to get reconciled no ways; it seems dreffle hard--dreffle; but I'm glad
you _can_ feel so;" and the good old soul proceeded to press upon the
child not only the tea, which she drank with feverish relish, but every
hoarded dainty which their limited housekeeping commanded.

It was toward sunset before Miss Roxy and Mara started on their walk
homeward. Their way lay over the high stony ridge which forms the
central part of the island. On one side, through the pines, they looked
out into the boundless blue of the ocean, and on the other caught
glimpses of Harpswell Bay as it lay glorified in the evening light. The
fresh cool breeze blowing landward brought with it an invigorating
influence, which Mara felt through all her feverish frame. She walked
with an energy to which she had long been a stranger. She said little,
but there was a sweetness, a repose, in her manner contrasting
singularly with the passionate melancholy which she had that morning
expressed.

Miss Roxy did not interrupt her meditations. The nature of her
profession had rendered her familiar with all the changing mental and
physical phenomena that attend the development of disease and the
gradual loosening of the silver cords of a present life. Certain
well-understood phrases everywhere current among the mass of the people
in New England, strikingly tell of the deep foundations of religious
earnestness on which its daily life is built. "A triumphant death" was a
matter often casually spoken of among the records of the neighborhood;
and Miss Roxy felt that there was a vague and solemn charm about its
approach. Yet the soul of the gray, dry woman was hot within her, for
the conversation of the morning had probed depths in her own nature of
whose existence she had never before been so conscious. The roughest and
most matter-of-fact minds have a craving for the ideal somewhere; and
often this craving, forbidden by uncomeliness and ungenial surroundings
from having any personal history of its own, attaches itself to the
fortune of some other one in a kind of strange disinterestedness. Some
one young and beautiful is to live the life denied to them--to be the
poem and the romance; it is the young mistress of the poor black
slave--the pretty sister of the homely old spinster--or the clever son
of the consciously ill-educated father. Something of this unconscious
personal investment had there been on the part of Miss Roxy in the
nursling whose singular loveliness she had watched for so many years,
and on whose fair virgin orb she had marked the growing shadow of a
fatal eclipse, and as she saw her glowing and serene, with that peculiar
brightness that she felt came from no earthly presence or influence, she
could scarcely keep the tears from her honest gray eyes.

When they arrived at the door of the house, Zephaniah Pennel was sitting
in it, looking toward the sunset.

"Why, reely," he said, "Miss Roxy, we thought you must a-run away with
Mara; she's been gone a'most all day."

"I expect she's had enough to talk with Aunt Roxy about," said Mrs.
Pennel. "Girls goin' to get married have a deal to talk about, what with
patterns and contrivin' and makin' up. But come in, Miss Roxy; we're
glad to see you."

Mara turned to Miss Roxy, and gave her a look of peculiar meaning. "Aunt
Roxy," she said, "you must tell them what we have been talking about
to-day;" and then she went up to her room and shut the door.

Miss Roxy accomplished her task with a matter-of-fact distinctness to
which her business-like habits of dealing with sickness and death had
accustomed her, yet with a sympathetic tremor in her voice which
softened the hard directness of her words. "You can take her over to
Portland, if you say so, and get Dr. Wilson's opinion," she said, in
conclusion. "It's best to have all done that can be, though in my mind
the case is decided."

The silence that fell between the three was broken at last by the sound
of a light footstep descending the stairs, and Mara entered among them.

She came forward and threw her arms round Mrs. Pennel's neck, and kissed
her; and then turning, she nestled down in the arms of her old
grandfather, as she had often done in the old days of childhood, and
laid her hand upon his shoulder. There was no sound for a few moments
but one of suppressed weeping; but _she_ did not weep--she lay with
bright calm eyes, as if looking upon some celestial vision.

"It is not so very sad," she said at last, in a gentle voice, "that I
should go there; you are going, too, and grandmamma; we are all going;
and we shall be forever with the Lord. Think of it! think of it!"

Many were the words spoken in that strange communing; and before Miss
Roxy went away, a calmness of solemn rest had settled down on all. The
old family Bible was brought forth, and Zephaniah Pennel read from it
those strange words of strong consolation, which take the sting from
death and the victory from the grave:--

"And I heard a great voice out of heaven. Behold the tabernacle of God
is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people;
and God himself shall be with them and be their God. And God shall wipe
away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death,
neither sorrow nor crying, for the former things are passed away."




CHAPTER XXXVIII

OPEN VISION


As Miss Roxy was leaving the dwelling of the Pennels, she met Sally
Kittridge coming toward the house, laughing and singing, as was her
wont. She raised her long, lean forefinger with a gesture of warning.

"What's the matter now, Aunt Roxy? You look as solemn as a hearse."

"None o' your jokin' now, Miss Sally; there _is_ such a thing as serious
things in this 'ere world of our'n, for all you girls never seems to
know it."

"What is the matter, Aunt Roxy?--has anything happened?--is anything the
matter with Mara?"

"Matter enough. I've known it a long time," said Miss Roxy. "She's been
goin' down for three months now; and she's got that on her that will
carry her off before the year's out."

"Pshaw, Aunt Roxy! how lugubriously you old nurses always talk! I hope
now you haven't been filling Mara's head with any such notions--people
can be frightened into anything."

"Sally Kittridge, don't be a-talkin' of what you don't know nothin'
about! It stands to reason that a body that was bearin' the heat and
burden of the day long before you was born or thought on in this world
_should_ know a thing or two more'n you. Why, I've laid you on your
stomach and trotted you to trot up the wind many a day, and I was pretty
experienced then, and it ain't likely that I'm a-goin' to take sa'ce
from you. Mara Pennel is a gal as has every bit and grain as much
resolution and ambition as you have, for all you flap your wings and
crow so much louder, and she's one of the close-mouthed sort, that don't
make no talk, and she's been a-bearin' up and bearin' up, and comin' to
me on the sly for strengthenin' things. She's took camomile and
orange-peel, and snake-root and boneset, and dash-root and
dandelion--and there hain't nothin' done her no good. She told me to-day
she couldn't keep up no longer, and I've been a-tellin' Mis' Pennel and
her grand'ther. I tell you it has been a solemn time; and if you're
goin' in, don't go in with none o' your light triflin' ways, 'cause 'as
vinegar upon nitre is he that singeth songs on a heavy heart,' the
Scriptur' says."

"Oh, Miss Roxy, do tell me truly," said Sally, much moved. "What do you
think is the matter with Mara? I've noticed myself that she got tired
easy, and that she was short-breathed--but she seemed so cheerful. Can
anything really be the matter?"

"It's consumption, Sally Kittridge," said Miss Roxy, "neither more nor
less; that ar is the long and the short. They're going to take her over
to Portland to see Dr. Wilson--it won't do no harm, and it won't do no
good."

"You seem to be determined she shall die," said Sally in a tone of
pique.

"Determined, am I? Is it I that determines that the maple leaves shall
fall next October? Yet I know they will--folks can't help knowin' what
they know, and shuttin' one's eyes won't alter one's road. I s'pose you
think 'cause you're young and middlin' good-lookin' that you have
feelin's and I hasn't; well, you're mistaken, that's all. I don't
believe there's one person in the world that would go farther or do more
to save Mara Pennel than I would,--and yet I've been in the world long
enough to see that livin' ain't no great shakes neither. Ef one is
hopefully prepared in the days of their youth, why they escape a good
deal, ef they get took cross-lots into heaven."

Sally turned away thoughtfully into the house; there was no one in the
kitchen, and the tick of the old clock sounded lonely and sepulchral.
She went upstairs to Mara's room; the door was ajar. Mara was sitting at
the open window that looked forth toward the ocean, busily engaged in
writing. The glow of evening shone on the golden waves of her hair, and
tinged the pearly outline of her cheek. Sally noticed the translucent
clearness of her complexion, and the deep burning color and the
transparency of the little hands, which seemed as if they might transmit
the light like Sèvres porcelain. She was writing with an expression of
tender calm, and sometimes stopping to consult an open letter that Sally
knew came from Moses.

So fair and sweet and serene she looked that a painter might have chosen
her for an embodiment of twilight, and one might not be surprised to see
a clear star shining out over her forehead. Yet in the tender serenity
of the face there dwelt a pathos of expression that spoke of struggles
and sufferings past, like the traces of tears on the face of a restful
infant that has grieved itself to sleep.

Sally came softly in on tiptoe, threw her arms around her, and kissed
her, with a half laugh, then bursting into tears, sobbed upon her
shoulder.

"Dear Sally, what is the matter?" said Mara, looking up.

"Oh, Mara, I just met Miss Roxy, and she told me"--

Sally only sobbed passionately.

"It is very sad to make all one's friends so unhappy," said Mara, in a
soothing voice, stroking Sally's hair. "You don't know how much I have
suffered dreading it. Sally, it is a long time since I began to expect
and dread and fear. My time of anguish was then--then when I first felt
that it could be possible that I should not live after all. There was a
long time I dared not even think of it; I could not even tell such a
fear to myself; and I did far more than I felt able to do to convince
myself that I was not weak and failing. I have been often to Miss Roxy,
and once, when nobody knew it, I went to a doctor in Brunswick, but then
I was afraid to tell him half, lest he should say something about me,
and it should get out; and so I went on getting worse and worse, and
feeling every day as if I could not keep up, and yet afraid to lie down
for fear grandmamma would suspect me. But this morning it was pleasant
and bright, and something came over me that said I _must_ tell somebody,
and so, as it was cool and pleasant, I walked up to Aunt Roxy's and told
her. I thought, you know, that she knew the most, and would feel it the
least; but oh, Sally, she has such a feeling heart, and loves me so; it
is strange she should."

"Is it?" said Sally, tightening her clasp around Mara's neck; and then
with a hysterical shadow of gayety she said, "I suppose you think that
you are such a hobgoblin that nobody could be expected to do that. After
all, though, I should have as soon expected roses to bloom in a juniper
clump as love from Aunt Roxy."

"Well, she does love me," said Mara. "No mother could be kinder. Poor
thing, she really sobbed and cried when I told her. I was very tired,
and she told me she would take care of me, and tell grandpapa and
grandmamma,--_that_ had been lying on my heart as such a dreadful thing
to do,--and she laid me down to rest on her bed, and spoke so lovingly
to me! I wish you could have seen her. And while I lay there, I fell
into a strange, sweet sort of rest. I can't describe it; but since then
everything has been changed. I wish I could tell any one how I saw
things then."

"Do try to tell me, Mara," said Sally, "for I need comfort too, if there
is any to be had."

"Well, then, I lay on the bed, and the wind drew in from the sea and
just lifted the window-curtain, and I could see the sea shining and hear
the waves making a pleasant little dash, and then my head seemed to
swim. I thought I was walking out by the pleasant shore, and everything
seemed so strangely beautiful, and grandpapa and grandmamma were there,
and Moses had come home, and you were there, and we were all so happy.
And then I felt a sort of strange sense that something was coming--some
great trial or affliction--and I groaned and clung to Moses, and asked
him to put his arm around me and hold me.

"Then it seemed to be not by our seashore that this was happening, but
by the Sea of Galilee, just as it tells about it in the Bible, and there
were fishermen mending their nets, and men sitting counting their money,
and I saw Jesus come walking along, and heard him say to this one and
that one, 'Leave all and follow me,' and it seemed that the moment he
spoke they did it, and then he came to me, and I felt his eyes in my
very soul, and he said, 'Wilt _thou_ leave _all_ and follow me?' I
cannot tell now what a pain I felt--what an anguish. I wanted to leave
all, but my heart felt as if it were tied and woven with a thousand
threads, and while I waited he seemed to fade away, and I found myself
then alone and unhappy, wishing that I could, and mourning that I had
not; and then something shone out warm like the sun, and I looked up,
and he stood there looking pitifully, and he said again just as he did
before, 'Wilt thou leave all and follow me?' Every word was so gentle
and full of pity, and I looked into his eyes and could not look away;
they drew me, they warmed me, and I felt a strange, wonderful sense of
his greatness and sweetness. It seemed as if I felt within me cord after
cord breaking, I felt so free, so happy; and I said, 'I will, I will,
with all my heart;' and I woke then, so happy, so sure of God's love.

"I saw so clearly how his love is in everything, and these words came
into my mind as if an angel had spoken them, 'God shall wipe away all
tears from their eyes.' Since then I cannot be unhappy. I was so myself
only this morning, and now I wonder that any one can have a grief when
God is so loving and good, and cares so sweetly for us all. Why, Sally,
if I could see Christ and hear him speak, I could not be more certain
that he will make this sorrow such a blessing to us all that we shall
never be able to thank him enough for it."

"Oh Mara," said Sally, sighing deeply, while her cheek was wet with
tears, "it is beautiful to hear you talk; but there is one that I am
sure will not and cannot feel so."

"God will care for him," said Mara; "oh, I am sure of it; He is love
itself, and He values his love in us, and He never, never would have
brought such a trial, if it had not been the true and only way to our
best good. We shall not shed one needless tear. Yes, if God loved us so
that he spared not his own Son, he will surely give us all the good here
that we possibly can have without risking our eternal happiness."

"You are writing to Moses, now?" said Sally.

"Yes, I am answering his letter; it is so full of spirit and life and
hope--but all hope in this world--all, all earthly, as much as if there
was no God and no world to come. Sally, perhaps our Father saw that I
could not have strength to live with him and keep my faith. I should be
drawn by him earthward instead of drawing him heavenward; and so this is
in mercy to us both."

"And are you telling him the whole truth, Mara?"

"Not all, no," said Mara; "he could not bear it at once. I only tell him
that my health is failing, and that my friends are seriously alarmed,
and then I speak as if it were doubtful, in my mind, what the result
might be."

"I don't think you can make him feel as you do. Moses Pennel has a
tremendous will, and he never yielded to any one. You bend, Mara, like
the little blue harebells, and so the storm goes over you; but he will
stand up against it, and it will wrench and shatter him. I am afraid,
instead of making him better, it will only make him bitter and
rebellious."

"He has a Father in heaven who knows how to care for him," said Mara. "I
am persuaded--I feel certain that he will be blessed in the end; not
perhaps in the time and way I should have chosen, but in the end. I have
always felt that he was mine, ever since he came a little shipwrecked
boy to me--a little girl. And now I have given him up to his Saviour and
my Saviour--to his God and my God--and I am perfectly at peace. All will
be well."

Mara spoke with a look of such solemn, bright assurance as made her, in
the dusky, golden twilight, seem like some serene angel sent down to
comfort, rather than a hapless mortal just wrenched from life and hope.

Sally rose up and kissed her silently. "Mara," she said, "I shall come
to-morrow to see what I can do for you. I will not interrupt you now.
Good-by, dear."

       *       *       *       *       *

There are no doubt many, who have followed this history so long as it
danced like a gay little boat over sunny waters, and who would have
followed it gayly to the end, had it closed with ringing of
marriage-bells, who turn from it indignantly, when they see that its
course runs through the dark valley. This, they say, is an imposition, a
trick upon our feelings. We want to read only stories which end in joy
and prosperity.

But have we then settled it in our own mind that there is no such thing
as a fortunate issue in a history which does not terminate in the way of
earthly success and good fortune? Are we Christians or heathen? It is
now eighteen centuries since, as we hold, the "highly favored among
women" was pronounced to be one whose earthly hopes were all cut off in
the blossom,--whose noblest and dearest in the morning of his days went
down into the shadows of death.

Was Mary the highly-favored among women, and was Jesus indeed the
blessed,--or was the angel mistaken? If they were these, if we are
Christians, it ought to be a settled and established habit of our souls
to regard something else as prosperity than worldly success and happy
marriages. That life is a success which, like the life of Jesus, in its
beginning, middle, and close, has borne a perfect witness to the truth
and the highest form of truth. It is true that God has given to us, and
inwoven in our nature a desire for a perfection and completeness made
manifest to our senses in this mortal life. To see the daughter bloom
into youth and womanhood, the son into manhood, to see them marry and
become themselves parents, and gradually ripen and develop in the
maturities of middle life, gradually wear into a sunny autumn, and so be
gathered in fullness of time to their fathers,--such, one says, is the
programme which God has made us to desire; such the ideal of happiness
which he has interwoven with our nerves, and for which our heart and our
flesh crieth out; to which every stroke of a knell is a violence, and
every thought of an early death is an abhorrence.

But the life of Christ and his mother sets the foot on this lower ideal
of happiness, and teaches us that there is something higher. His
ministry began with declaring, "Blessed are they that mourn." It has
been well said that prosperity was the blessing of the Old Testament,
and adversity of the New. Christ came to show us a nobler style of
living and bearing; and so far as he had a personal and earthly life, he
buried it as a corner-stone on which to erect a new immortal style of
architecture.

Of his own, he had nothing, neither houses, nor lands, nor family ties,
nor human hopes, nor earthly sphere of success; and as a human life, it
was all a sacrifice and a defeat. He was rejected by his countrymen,
whom the passionate anguish of his love and the unwearied devotion of
his life could not save from an awful doom. He was betrayed by weak
friends, prevailed against by slanderers, overwhelmed with an
ignominious death in the morning of youth, and his mother stood by his
cross, and she was the only woman whom God ever called highly favored in
this world.

This, then, is the great and perfect ideal of what God honors. Christ
speaks of himself as bread to be eaten,--bread, simple, humble,
unpretending, vitally necessary to human life, made by the bruising and
grinding of the grain, unostentatiously having no life or worth of its
own except as it is absorbed into the life of others and lives in them.
We wished in this history to speak of a class of lives formed on the
model of Christ, and like his, obscure and unpretending, like his,
seeming to end in darkness and defeat, but which yet have this
preciousness and value that the dear saints who live them come nearest
in their mission to the mission of Jesus. They are made, not for a
career and history of their own, but to be bread of life to others. In
every household or house have been some of these, and if we look on
their lives and deaths with the unbaptized eyes of nature, we shall see
only most mournful and unaccountable failure, when, if we could look
with the eye of faith, we should see that their living and dying has
been bread of life to those they left behind. Fairest of these, and
least developed, are the holy innocents who come into our households to
smile with the smile of angels, who sleep in our bosoms, and win us with
the softness of tender little hands, and pass away like the lamb that
was slain before they have ever learned the speech of mortals. Not vain
are even these silent lives of Christ's lambs, whom many an earth-bound
heart has been roused to follow when the Shepherd bore them to the
higher pastures. And so the daughter who died so early, whose
wedding-bells were never rung except in heaven,--the son who had no
career of ambition or a manly duty except among the angels,--the patient
sufferers, whose only lot on earth seemed to be to endure, whose life
bled away drop by drop in the shadows of the sick-room--all these are
among those whose life was like Christ's in that they were made, not for
themselves, but to become bread to us.

It is expedient for us that they go away. Like their Lord, they come to
suffer, and to die; they take part in his sacrifice; their life is
incomplete without their death, and not till they are gone away does the
Comforter fully come to us.

It is a beautiful legend which one sees often represented in the
churches of Europe, that when the grave of the mother of Jesus was
opened, it was found full of blossoming lilies,--fit emblem of the
thousand flowers of holy thought and purpose which spring up in our
hearts from the memory of our sainted dead.

Cannot many, who read these lines, bethink them of such rooms that have
been the most cheerful places in the family,--when the heart of the
smitten one seemed the band that bound all the rest together,--and have
there not been dying hours which shed such a joy and radiance on all
around, that it was long before the mourners remembered to mourn? Is it
not a misuse of words to call such a heavenly translation _death_? and
to call most things that are lived out on this earth _life_?




CHAPTER XXXIX

THE LAND OF BEULAH


It is now about a month after the conversation which we have recorded,
and during that time the process which was to loose from this present
life had been going on in Mara with a soft, insensible, but steady
power. When she ceased to make efforts beyond her strength, and allowed
herself that languor and repose which nature claimed, all around her
soon became aware how her strength was failing; and yet a cheerful
repose seemed to hallow the atmosphere around her. The sight of her
every day in family worship, sitting by in such tender tranquillity,
with such a smile on her face, seemed like a present inspiration. And
though the aged pair knew that she was no more for this world, yet she
was comforting and inspiring to their view as the angel who of old
rolled back the stone from the sepulchre and sat upon it. They saw in
her eyes, not death, but the solemn victory which Christ gives over
death.

Bunyan has no more lovely poem than the image he gives of that land of
pleasant waiting which borders the river of death, where the chosen of
the Lord repose, while shining messengers, constantly passing and
repassing, bear tidings from the celestial shore, opening a way between
earth and heaven. It was so, that through the very thought of Mara an
influence of tenderness and tranquillity passed through the whole
neighborhood, keeping hearts fresh with sympathy, and causing thought
and conversation to rest on those bright mysteries of eternal joy which
were reflected on her face.

Sally Kittridge was almost a constant inmate of the brown house, ever
ready in watching and waiting; and one only needed to mark the
expression of her face to feel that a holy charm was silently working
upon her higher and spiritual nature. Those great, dark, sparkling eyes
that once seemed to express only the brightness of animal vivacity, and
glittered like a brook in unsympathetic gayety, had in them now
mysterious depths, and tender, fleeting shadows, and the very tone of
her voice had a subdued tremor. The capricious elf, the tricksy sprite,
was melting away in the immortal soul, and the deep pathetic power of a
noble heart was being born. Some influence sprung of sorrow is necessary
always to perfect beauty in womanly nature. We feel its absence in many
whose sparkling wit and high spirits give grace and vivacity to life,
but in whom we vainly seek for some spot of quiet tenderness and
sympathetic repose. Sally was, ignorantly to herself, changing in the
expression of her face and the tone of her character, as she ministered
in the daily wants which sickness brings in a simple household.

For the rest of the neighborhood, the shelves and larder of Mrs. Pennel
were constantly crowded with the tributes which one or another sent in
for the invalid. There was jelly of Iceland moss sent across by Miss
Emily, and brought by Mr. Sewell, whose calls were almost daily. There
were custards and preserves, and every form of cake and other
confections in which the housekeeping talent of the neighbors delighted,
and which were sent in under the old superstition that sick people must
be kept eating at all hazards.

At church, Sunday after Sunday, the simple note requested the prayers of
the church and congregation for Mara Lincoln, who was, as the note
phrased it, drawing near her end, that she and all concerned might be
prepared for the great and last change. One familiar with New England
customs must have remembered with what a plaintive power the reading of
such a note, from Sunday to Sunday, has drawn the thoughts and
sympathies of a congregation to some chamber of sickness; and in a
village church, where every individual is known from childhood to every
other, the power of this simple custom is still greater.

Then the prayers of the minister would dwell on the case, and thanks
would be rendered to God for the great light and peace with which he had
deigned to visit his young handmaid; and then would follow a prayer that
when these sad tidings should reach a distant friend who had gone down
to do business on the great waters, they might be sanctified to his
spiritual and everlasting good. Then on Sunday noons, as the people ate
their dinners together in a room adjoining the church, all that she said
and did was talked over and over,--how quickly she had gained the
victory of submission, the peace of a will united with God's, mixed with
harmless gossip of the sick chamber,--as to what she ate and how she
slept, and who had sent her gruel with raisins in it, and who jelly with
wine, and how she had praised this and eaten that twice with a relish,
but how the other had seemed to disagree with her. Thereafter would come
scraps of nursing information, recipes against coughing, specifics
against short breath, speculations about watchers, how soon she would
need them, and long legends of other death-beds where the fear of death
had been slain by the power of an endless life.

Yet through all the gossip, and through much that might have been called
at other times commonplace cant of religion, there was spread a tender
earnestness, and the whole air seemed to be enchanted with the fragrance
of that fading rose. Each one spoke more gently, more lovingly to each,
for the thought of her.

It was now a bright September morning, and the early frosts had changed
the maples in the pine-woods to scarlet, and touched the white birches
with gold, when one morning Miss Roxy presented herself at an early hour
at Captain Kittridge's.

They were at breakfast, and Sally was dispensing the tea at the head of
the table, Mrs. Kittridge having been prevailed on to abdicate in her
favor.

"It is such a fine morning," she said, looking out at the window, which
showed a waveless expanse of ocean. "I do hope Mara has had a good
night."

"I'm a-goin' to make her some jelly this very forenoon," said Mrs.
Kittridge. "Aunt Roxy was a-tellin' me yesterday that she was a-goin'
down to stay at the house regular, for she needed so much done now."

"It's 'most an amazin' thing we don't hear from Moses Pennel," said
Captain Kittridge. "If he don't make haste, he may never see her."

"There's Aunt Roxy at this minute," said Sally.

In truth, the door opened at this moment, and Aunt Roxy entered with a
little blue bandbox and a bundle tied up in a checked handkerchief.

"Oh, Aunt Roxy," said Mrs. Kittridge, "you are on your way, are you? Do
sit down, right here, and get a cup of strong tea."

"Thank you," said Aunt Roxy, "but Ruey gave me a humming cup before I
came away."

"Aunt Roxy, have they heard anything from Moses?" said the Captain.

"No, father, I know they haven't," said Sally. "Mara has written to him,
and so has Mr. Sewell, but it is very uncertain whether he ever got the
letters."

"It's most time to be a-lookin' for him home," said the Captain. "I
shouldn't be surprised to see him any day."

At this moment Sally, who sat where she could see from the window, gave
a sudden start and a half scream, and rising from the table, darted
first to the window and then to the door, whence she rushed out eagerly.

"Well, what now?" said the Captain.

"I am sure I don't know what's come over her," said Mrs. Kittridge,
rising to look out.

"Why, Aunt Roxy, do look; I believe to my soul that ar's Moses Pennel!"

And so it was. He met Sally, as she ran out, with a gloomy brow and
scarcely a look even of recognition; but he seized her hand and wrung it
in the stress of his emotion so that she almost screamed with the pain.

"Tell me, Sally," he said, "tell me the truth. I dared not go home
without I knew. Those gossiping, lying reports are always exaggerated.
They are dreadful exaggerations,--they frighten a sick person into the
grave; but you have good sense and a hopeful, cheerful temper,--you must
see and know how things are. Mara is not so very--very"--He held Sally's
hand and looked at her with a burning eagerness. "Say, what do you think
of her?"

"We all think that we cannot long keep her with us," said Sally. "And
oh, Moses, I am so glad you have come."

"It's false,--it must be false," he said, violently; "nothing is more
deceptive than these ideas that doctors and nurses pile on when a
sensitive person is going down a little. I know Mara; everything depends
on the mind with her. I shall wake her up out of this dream. She is not
to die. She shall not die,--I come to save her."

"Oh, if you could!" said Sally, mournfully.

"It cannot be; it is not to be," he said again, as if to convince
himself. "No such thing is to be thought of. Tell me, Sally, have you
tried to keep up the cheerful side of things to her,--have you?"

"Oh, you cannot tell, Moses, how it is, unless you see her. She is
cheerful, happy; the only really joyous one among us."

"Cheerful! joyous! happy! She does not believe, then, these frightful
things? I thought she would keep up; she is a brave little thing."

"No, Moses, she does believe. She has given up all hope of life,--all
wish to live; and oh, she is so lovely,--so sweet,--so dear."

Sally covered her face with her hands and sobbed. Moses stood still,
looking at her a moment in a confused way, and then he answered,--

"Come, get your bonnet, Sally, and go with me. You must go in and tell
them; tell her that I am come, you know."

"Yes, I will," said Sally, as she ran quickly back to the house.

Moses stood listlessly looking after her. A moment after she came out of
the door again, and Miss Roxy behind. Sally hurried up to Moses.

"Where's that black old raven going?" said Moses, in a low voice,
looking back on Miss Roxy, who stood on the steps.

"What, Aunt Roxy?" said Sally; "why, she's going up to nurse Mara, and
take care of her. Mrs. Pennel is so old and infirm she needs somebody to
depend on."

"I can't bear her," said Moses. "I always think of sick-rooms and
coffins and a stifling smell of camphor when I see her. I never could
endure her. She's an old harpy going to carry off my dove."

"Now, Moses, you must _not_ talk so. She loves Mara dearly, the poor
old soul, and Mara loves her, and there is no earthly thing she would
not do for her. And she knows what to do for sickness better than you or
I. I have found out one thing, that it isn't mere love and good-will
that is needed in a sick-room; it needs knowledge and experience."

Moses assented in gloomy silence, and they walked on together the way
that they had so often taken laughing and chatting. When they came
within sight of the house, Moses said,--

"Here she came running to meet us; do you remember?"

"Yes," said Sally.

"I was never half worthy of her. I never said half what I ought to," he
added. "She _must_ live! I must have one more chance."

When they came up to the house, Zephaniah Pennel was sitting in the
door, with his gray head bent over the leaves of the great family Bible.

He rose up at their coming, and with that suppression of all external
signs of feeling for which the New Englander is remarkable, simply shook
the hand of Moses, saying,--

"Well, my boy, we are glad you have come."

Mrs. Pennel, who was busied in some domestic work in the back part of
the kitchen, turned away and hid her face in her apron when she saw him.
There fell a great silence among them, in the midst of which the old
clock ticked loudly and importunately, like the inevitable approach of
fate.

"I will go up and see her, and get her ready," said Sally, in a whisper
to Moses. "I'll come and call you."

Moses sat down and looked around on the old familiar scene; there was
the great fireplace where, in their childish days, they had sat together
winter nights,--her fair, spiritual face enlivened by the blaze, while
she knit and looked thoughtfully into the coals; there she had played
checkers, or fox and geese, with him; or studied with him the Latin
lessons; or sat by, grave and thoughtful, hemming his toyship sails,
while he cut the moulds for his anchors, or tried experiments on
pulleys; and in all these years he could not remember one selfish
action,--one unlovely word,--and he thought to himself, "I hoped to
possess this angel as a mortal wife! God forgive my presumption."




CHAPTER XL

THE MEETING


Sally found Mara sitting in an easy-chair that had been sent to her by
the provident love of Miss Emily. It was wheeled in front of her room
window, from whence she could look out upon the wide expanse of the
ocean. It was a gloriously bright, calm morning, and the water lay clear
and still, with scarce a ripple, to the far distant pearly horizon. She
seemed to be looking at it in a kind of calm ecstasy, and murmuring the
words of a hymn:--

    "Nor wreck nor ruin there is seen,
      There not a wave of trouble rolls,
    But the bright rainbow round the throne
      Peals endless peace to all their souls."

Sally came softly behind her on tiptoe to kiss her. "Good-morning, dear,
how do you find yourself?"

"Quite well," was the answer.

"Mara, is not there anything you want?"

"There might be many things; but His will is mine."

"You want to see Moses?"

"Very much; but I shall see him as soon as it is best for us both."

"Mara,--he is come."

The quick blood flushed over the pale, transparent face as a virgin
glacier flushes at sunrise, and she looked up eagerly. "Come!"

"Yes, he is below-stairs wanting to see you."

She seemed about to speak eagerly, and then checked herself and mused a
moment. "Poor, poor boy!" she said. "Yes, Sally, let him come at once."

There were a few dazzling, dreamy minutes when Moses first held that
frail form in his arms, which but for its tender, mortal warmth, might
have seemed to him a spirit. It was no spirit, but a woman whose heart
he could feel thrilling against his own; who seemed to him like some
frail, fluttering bird; but somehow, as he looked into her clear,
transparent face, and pressed her thin little hands in his, the
conviction stole over him overpoweringly that she was indeed fading away
and going from him,--drawn from him by that mysterious, irresistible
power against which human strength, even in the strongest, has no
chance.

It is dreadful to a strong man who has felt the influence of his
strength,--who has always been ready with a resource for every
emergency, and a weapon for every battle,--when first he meets that
mighty invisible power by which a beloved life--a life he would give his
own blood to save--melts and dissolves like smoke before his eyes.

"Oh, Mara, Mara," he groaned, "this is too dreadful, too cruel; it is
cruel."

"You will think so at first, but not always," she said, soothingly. "You
will live to see a joy come out of this sorrow."

"Never, Mara, never. I cannot believe that kind of talk. I see no love,
no mercy in it. Of course, if there is any life after death you will be
happy; if there is a heaven you will be there; but can this dim,
unsubstantial, cloudy prospect make you happy in leaving me and giving
up one's lover? Oh, Mara, you cannot love as I do, or you could not"--

"Moses, I have suffered,--oh, very, very much. It was many months ago
when I first thought that I must give everything up,--when I thought
that we must part; but Christ helped me; he showed me his wonderful
love,--the love that surrounds us all our life, that follows us in all
our wanderings, and sustains us in all our weaknesses,--and then I felt
that whatever He wills for us is in love; oh, believe it,--believe it
for my sake, for your own."

"Oh, I cannot, I cannot," said Moses; but as he looked at the bright,
pale face, and felt how the tempest of his feelings shook the frail
form, he checked himself. "I do wrong to agitate you so, Mara. I will
try to be calm."

"And to pray?" she said, beseechingly.

He shut his lips in gloomy silence.

"Promise me," she said.

"I have prayed ever since I got your first letter, and I see it does no
good," he answered. "Our prayers cannot alter fate."

"Fate! there is no fate," she answered; "there is a strong and loving
Father who guides the way, though we know it not. We cannot resist His
will; but it is all love,--pure, pure love."

At this moment Sally came softly into the room. A gentle air of womanly
authority seemed to express itself in that once gay and giddy face, at
which Moses, in the midst of his misery, marveled.

"You must not stay any longer now," she said; "it would be too much for
her strength; this is enough for this morning."

Moses turned away, and silently left the room, and Sally said to Mara,--

"You must lie down now, and rest."

"Sally," said Mara, "promise me one thing."

"Well, Mara; of course I will."

"Promise to love him and care for him when I am gone; he will be so
lonely."

"I will do all I can, Mara," said Sally, soothingly; "so now you must
take a little wine and lie down. You know what you have so often said,
that all will yet be well with him."

"Oh, I know it, I am sure," said Mara, "but oh, his sorrow shook my very
heart."

"You must not talk another word about it," said Sally, peremptorily, "Do
you know Aunt Roxy is coming to see you? I see her out of the window
this very moment."

And Sally assisted to lay her friend on the bed, and then, administering
a stimulant, she drew down the curtains, and, sitting beside her, began
repeating, in a soft monotonous tone, the words of a favorite hymn:--

    "The Lord my shepherd is,
      I shall be well supplied;
    Since He is mine, and I am His,
      What can I want beside?"

Before she had finished, Mara was asleep.




CHAPTER XLI

CONSOLATION


Moses came down from the chamber of Mara in a tempest of contending
emotions. He had all that constitutional horror of death and the
spiritual world which is an attribute of some particularly strong and
well-endowed physical natures, and he had all that instinctive
resistance of the will which such natures offer to anything which
strikes athwart their cherished hopes and plans. To be wrenched suddenly
from the sphere of an earthly life and made to confront the unclosed
doors of a spiritual world on the behalf of the one dearest to him, was
to him a dreary horror uncheered by one filial belief in God. He felt,
furthermore, that blind animal irritation which assails one under a
sudden blow, whether of the body or of the soul,--an anguish of
resistance, a vague blind anger.

Mr. Sewell was sitting in the kitchen,--he had called to see Mara, and
waited for the close of the interview above. He rose and offered his
hand to Moses, who took it in gloomy silence, without a smile or word.

"'My son, despise not thou the chastening of the Lord,'" said Mr.
Sewell.

"I cannot bear that sort of thing," said Moses abruptly, and almost
fiercely. "I beg your pardon, sir, but it irritates me."

"Do you not believe that afflictions are sent for our improvement?" said
Mr. Sewell.

"No! how can I? What improvement will there be to me in taking from me
the angel who guided me to all good, and kept me from all evil; the one
pure motive and holy influence of my life? If you call this the
chastening of a loving father, I must say it looks more to me like the
caprice of an evil spirit."

"Had you ever thanked the God of your life for this gift, or felt your
dependence on him to keep it? Have you not blindly idolized the creature
and forgotten Him who gave it?" said Mr. Sewell.

Moses was silent a moment.

"I cannot believe there is a God," he said. "Since this fear came on me
I have prayed,--yes, and humbled myself; for I know I have not always
been what I ought. I promised if he would grant me this one thing, I
would seek him in future; but it did no good,--it's of no use to pray. I
would have been good in this way, if she might be spared, and I cannot
in any other."

"My son, our Lord and Master will have no such conditions from us," said
Mr. Sewell. "We must submit unconditionally. _She_ has done it, and her
peace is as firm as the everlasting hills. God's will is a great current
that flows in spite of us; if we go with it, it carries us to endless
rest,--if we resist, we only wear our lives out in useless struggles."

Moses stood a moment in silence, and then, turning away without a word,
hurried from the house. He strode along the high rocky bluff, through
tangled junipers and pine thickets, till he came above the rocky cove
which had been his favorite retreat on so many occasions. He swung
himself down over the cliffs into the grotto, where, shut in by the high
tide, he felt himself alone. There he had read Mr. Sewell's letter, and
dreamed vain dreams of wealth and worldly success, now all to him so
void. He felt to-day, as he sat there and watched the ships go by, how
utterly nothing all the wealth in the world was, in the loss of that one
heart. Unconsciously, even to himself, sorrow was doing her ennobling
ministry within him, melting off in her fierce fires trivial ambitions
and low desires, and making him feel the sole worth and value of love.
That which in other days had seemed only as one good thing among many
now seemed the _only_ thing in life. And he who has learned the
paramount value of love has taken one step from an earthly to a
spiritual existence.

But as he lay there on the pebbly shore, hour after hour glided by, his
whole past life lived itself over to his eye; he saw a thousand actions,
he heard a thousand words, whose beauty and significance never came to
him till now. And alas! he saw so many when, on his part, the responsive
word that should have been spoken, and the deed that should have been
done, was forever wanting. He had all his life carried within him a
vague consciousness that he had not been to Mara what he should have
been, but he had hoped to make amends for all in that future which lay
before him,--that future now, alas! dissolving and fading away like the
white cloud-islands which the wind was drifting from the sky. A voice
seemed saying in his ears, "Ye know that when he would have inherited a
blessing he was rejected; for he found no place for repentance, though
he sought it carefully with tears." Something that he had never felt
before struck him as appalling in the awful fixedness of all past deeds
and words,--the unkind words once said, which no tears could unsay,--the
kind ones suppressed, to which no agony of wishfulness could give a past
reality. There were particular times in their past history that he
remembered so vividly, when he saw her so clearly,--doing some little
thing for him, and shyly watching for the word of acknowledgment, which
he did not give. Some willful wayward demon withheld him at the moment,
and the light on the little wishful face slowly faded. True, all had
been a thousand times forgiven and forgotten between them, but it is the
ministry of these great vital hours of sorrow to teach us that nothing
in the soul's history ever dies or is forgotten, and when the beloved
one lies stricken and ready to pass away, comes the judgment-day of
love, and all the dead moments of the past arise and live again.

He lay there musing and dreaming till the sun grew low in the afternoon
sky, and the tide that isolated the little grotto had gone far out into
the ocean, leaving long, low reefs of sunken rocks, all matted and
tangled with the yellow hair of the seaweed, with little crystal pools
of salt water between. He heard the sound of approaching footsteps, and
Captain Kittridge came slowly picking his way round among the shingle
and pebbles.

"Wal', now, I thought I'd find ye here!" he said: "I kind o' thought I
wanted to see ye,--ye see."

Moses looked up half moody, half astonished, while the Captain seated
himself upon a fragment of rock and began brushing the knees of his
trousers industriously, until soon the tears rained down from his eyes
upon his dry withered hands.

"Wal', now ye see, I can't help it, darned if I can; knowed her ever
since she's that high. She's done me good, she has. Mis' Kittridge has
been pretty faithful. I've had folks here and there talk to me
consid'able, but Lord bless you, I never had nothin' go to my heart like
this 'ere--Why to look on her there couldn't nobody doubt but what there
was somethin' in religion. You never knew half what she did for you,
Moses Pennel, you didn't know that the night you was off down to the
long cove with Skipper Atkinson, that 'ere blessed child was a-follerin'
you, but she was, and she come to me next day to get me to do somethin'
for you. That was how your grand'ther and I got ye off to sea so quick,
and she such a little thing then; that ar child was the savin' of ye,
Moses Pennel."

Moses hid his head in his hands with a sort of groan.

"Wal', wal'," said the Captain, "I don't wonder now ye feel so,--I don't
see how ye can stan' it no ways--only by thinkin' o' where she's goin'
to--Them ar bells in the Celestial City must all be a-ringin' for
her,--there'll be joy that side o' the river I reckon, when she gets
acrost. If she'd jest leave me a hem o' her garment to get in by, I'd be
glad; but she was one o' the sort that was jest _made_ to go to heaven.
She only stopped a few days in our world, like the robins when they's
goin' south; but there'll be a good many fust and last that'll get into
the kingdom for love of her. She never said much to me, but she kind o'
drew me. Ef ever I should get in there, it'll be _she_ led me. But come,
now, Moses, ye oughtn't fur to be a-settin' here catchin' cold--jest
come round to our house and let Sally gin you a warm cup o' tea--do
come, now."

"Thank you, Captain," said Moses, "but I will go home; I must see her
again to-night."

"Wal', don't let her see you grieve too much, ye know; we must be a
little sort o' manly, ye know, 'cause her body's weak, if her heart is
strong."

Now Moses was in a mood of dry, proud, fierce, self-consuming sorrow,
least likely to open his heart or seek sympathy from any one; and no
friend or acquaintance would probably have dared to intrude on his
grief. But there are moods of the mind which cannot be touched or
handled by one on an equal level with us that yield at once to the
sympathy of something below. A dog who comes with his great honest,
sorrowful face and lays his mute paw of inquiry on your knee, will
sometimes open floodgates of sober feeling, that have remained closed to
every human touch;--the dumb simplicity and ignorance of his sympathy
makes it irresistible. In like manner the downright grief of the
good-natured old Captain, and the child-like ignorance with which he
ventured upon a ministry of consolation from which a more cultivated
person would have shrunk away, were irresistibly touching. Moses grasped
the dry, withered hand and said, "Thank you, thank you, Captain
Kittridge; you're a true friend."

"Wal', I be, that's a fact, Moses. Lord bless me, I ain't no great--I
ain't nobody--I'm jest an old last-year's mullein-stalk in the Lord's
vineyard; but that 'ere blessed little thing allers had a good word for
me. She gave me a hymn-book and marked some hymns in it, and read 'em to
me herself, and her voice was jest as sweet as the sea of a warm
evening. Them hymns come to me kind o' powerful when I'm at my work
planin' and sawin'. Mis' Kittridge, she allers talks to me as ef I was a
terrible sinner; and I suppose I be, but this 'ere blessed child, she's
so kind o' good and innocent, she thinks I'm good; kind o' takes it for
granted I'm one o' the Lord's people, ye know. It kind o' makes me want
to be, ye know."

The Captain here produced from his coat-pocket a much worn hymn-book,
and showed Moses where leaves were folded down. "Now here's this 'ere,"
he said; "you get her to say it to you," he added, pointing to the
well-known sacred idyl which has refreshed so many hearts:--

    "There is a land of pure delight
      Where saints immortal reign;
    Eternal day excludes the night,
      And pleasures banish pain.

    "There everlasting spring abides,
      And never-fading flowers;
    Death like a narrow sea divides
      This happy land from ours."

"Now that ar beats everything," said the Captain, "and we must kind o'
think of it for her, 'cause she's goin' to see all that, and ef it's our
loss it's her gain, ye know."

"I know," said Moses; "our grief is selfish."

"Jest so. Wal', we're selfish critters, we be," said the Captain; "but
arter all, 't ain't as ef we was heathen and didn't know where they was
a-goin' to. We jest ought to be a-lookin' about and tryin' to foller
'em, ye know."

"Yes, yes, I do know," said Moses; "it's easy to say, but hard to do."

"But law, man, she prays for you; she did years and years ago, when you
was a boy and she a girl. You know it tells in the Revelations how the
angels has golden vials full of odors which are the prayers of saints. I
tell ye Moses, you ought to get into heaven, if no one else does. I
expect you are pretty well known among the angels by this time. I tell
ye what 'tis, Moses, fellers think it a mighty pretty thing to be
a-steppin' high, and a-sayin' they don't believe the Bible, and all that
ar, so long as the world goes well. This 'ere old Bible--why it's jest
like yer mother,--ye rove and ramble, and cut up round the world without
her a spell, and mebbe think the old woman ain't so fashionable as some;
but when sickness and sorrow comes, why, there ain't nothin' else to go
back to. Is there, now?"

Moses did not answer, but he shook the hand of the Captain and turned
away.




CHAPTER XLII

LAST WORDS


The setting sun gleamed in at the window of Mara's chamber, tinted with
rose and violet hues from a great cloud-castle that lay upon the smooth
ocean over against the window. Mara was lying upon the bed, but she
raised herself upon her elbow to look out.

"Dear Aunt Roxy," she said, "raise me up and put the pillows behind me,
so that I can see out--it is splendid."

Aunt Roxy came and arranged the pillows, and lifted the girl with her
long, strong arms, then stooping over her a moment she finished her
arrangements by softly smoothing the hair from her forehead with a
caressing movement most unlike her usual precise business-like
proceedings.

"I love you, Aunt Roxy," said Mara, looking up with a smile.

Aunt Roxy made a strange wry face, which caused her to look harder than
usual. She was choked with tenderness, and had only this uncomely way of
showing it.

"Law now, Mara, I don't see how ye can; I ain't nothin' but an old
burdock-bush; love ain't for me."

"Yes it is too," said Mara, drawing her down and kissing her withered
cheek, "and you sha'n't call yourself an old burdock. God sees that you
are beautiful, and in the resurrection everybody will see it."

"I was always homely as an owl," said Miss Roxy, unconsciously speaking
out what had lain like a stone at the bottom of even her sensible heart.
"I always had sense to know it, and knew my sphere. Homely folks would
like to say pretty things, and to have pretty things said to them, but
they never do. I made up my mind pretty early that my part in the
vineyard was to have hard work and no posies."

"Well, you will have all the more in heaven; I love you dearly, and I
like your looks, too. You look kind and true and good, and that's beauty
in the country where we are going."

Miss Roxy sprang up quickly from the bed, and turning her back began to
arrange the bottles on the table with great zeal.

"Has Moses come in yet?" said Mara.

"No, there ain't nobody seen a thing of him since he went out this
morning."

"Poor boy!" said Mara, "it is too hard upon him. Aunt Roxy, please pick
some roses off the bush from under the window and put in the vases;
let's have the room as sweet and cheerful as we can. I hope God will let
me live long enough to comfort him. It is not so very terrible, if one
would only think so, to cross that river. All looks so bright to me now
that I have forgotten how sorrow seemed. Poor Moses! he will have a hard
struggle, but he will get the victory, too. I am very weak to-night, but
to-morrow I shall feel better, and I shall sit up, and perhaps I can
paint a little on that flower I was doing for him. We will not have
things look sickly or deathly. There, Aunt Roxy, he has come in; I hear
his step."

"I didn't hear it," said Miss Roxy, surprised at the acute senses which
sickness had etherealized to an almost spirit-like intensity. "Shall I
call him?"

"Yes, do," said Mara. "He can sit with me a little while to-night."

The light in the room was a strange dusky mingling of gold and gloom,
when Moses stole softly in. The great cloud-castle that a little while
since had glowed like living gold from turret and battlement, now dim,
changed for the most part to a sombre gray, enlivened with a dull glow
of crimson; but there was still a golden light where the sun had sunk
into the sea. Moses saw the little thin hand stretched out to him.

"Sit down," she said; "it has been such a beautiful sunset. Did you
notice it?"

He sat down by the bed, leaning his forehead on his hand, but saying
nothing.

She drew her fingers through his dark hair. "I am so glad to see you,"
she said. "It is such a comfort to me that you have come; and I hope it
will be to you. You know I shall be better to-morrow than I am to-night,
and I hope we shall have some pleasant days together yet. We mustn't
reject what little we may have, because it cannot be more."

"Oh, Mara," said Moses, "I would give my life, if I could take back the
past. I have never been worthy of you; never knew your worth; never made
you happy. You always lived for me, and I lived for myself. I deserve to
lose you, but it is none the less bitter."

"Don't say lose. Why must you? I cannot think of losing you. I know I
shall not. God has given you to me. You will come to me and be mine at
last. I feel sure of it."

"You don't know me," said Moses.

"Christ does, though," she said; "and He has promised to care for you.
Yes, you will live to see many flowers grow out of my grave. You cannot
think so now; but it will be so--believe me."

"Mara," said Moses, "I never lived through such a day as this. It seems
as if every moment of my life had been passing before me, and every
moment of yours. I have seen how true and loving in thought and word and
deed you have been, and I have been doing nothing but take. You have
given love as the skies give rain, and I have drunk it up like the hot
dusty earth."

Mara knew in her own heart that this was all true, and she was too real
to use any of the terms of affected humiliation which many think a kind
of spiritual court language. She looked at him and answered, "Moses, I
always knew I loved most. It was my nature; God gave it to me, and it
was a gift for which I give him thanks--not a merit. I knew you had a
larger, wider nature than mine,--a wider sphere to live in, and that you
could not live in your heart as I did. Mine was all thought and feeling,
and the narrow little duties of this little home. Yours went all round
the world."

"But, oh Mara--oh, my angel! to think I should lose you when I am just
beginning to know your worth. I always had a sort of superstitious
feeling,--a sacred presentiment about you,--that my spiritual life, if
ever I had any, would come through you. It seemed if there ever was such
a thing as God's providence, which some folks believe in, it was in
leading me to you, and giving you to me. And now, to have all
lashed--all destroyed--It makes me feel as if all was blind chance; no
guiding God; for if he wanted me to be good, he would spare you."

Mara lay with her large eyes fixed on the now faded sky. The dusky
shadows had dropped like a black crape veil around her pale face. In a
few moments she repeated to herself, as if she were musing upon them,
those mysterious words of Him who liveth and was dead, "Except a corn of
wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; if it die, it
bringeth forth much fruit."

"Moses," she said, "for all I know you have loved me dearly, yet I have
felt that in all that was deepest and dearest to me, I was alone. You
did not come near to me, nor touch me where I feel most deeply. If I had
lived to be your wife, I cannot say but this distance in our spiritual
nature might have widened. You know, what we live with we get used to;
it grows an old story. Your love to me might have grown old and worn
out. If we lived together in the commonplace toils of life, you would
see only a poor threadbare wife. I might have lost what little charm I
ever had for you; but I feel that if I die, this will not be. There is
something sacred and beautiful in death; and I may have more power over
you, when I seem to be gone, than I should have had living."

"Oh, Mara, Mara, don't say that."

"Dear Moses, it is so. Think how many lovers marry, and how few lovers
are left in middle life; and how few love and reverence living friends
as they do the dead. There are only a very few to whom it is given to do
that."

Something in the heart of Moses told him that this was true. In this one
day--the sacred revealing light of approaching death--he had seen more
of the real spiritual beauty and significance of Mara's life than in
years before, and felt upspringing in his heart, from the deep pathetic
influence of the approaching spiritual world a new and stronger power of
loving. It may be that it is not merely a perception of love that we
were not aware of before, that wakes up when we approach the solemn
shadows with a friend. It may be that the soul has compressed and
unconscious powers which are stirred and wrought upon as it looks over
the borders into its future home,--its loves and its longings so swell
and beat, that they astonish itself. We are greater than we know, and
dimly feel it with every approach to the great hereafter. "It doth not
yet appear what we shall be."

       *       *       *       *       *

"Now, I'll tell you what 'tis," said Aunt Roxy, opening the door, "all
the strength this 'ere girl spends a-talkin' to-night, will be so much
taken out o' the whole cloth to-morrow."

Moses started up. "I ought to have thought of that, Mara."

"Ye see," said Miss Roxy, "she's been through a good deal to-day, and
she must be got to sleep at some rate or other to-night. 'Lord, if he
sleep he shall do well,' the Bible says, and it's one of my best nussin'
maxims."

"And a good one, too, Aunt Roxy," said Mara. "Good-night, dear boy; you
see we must all mind Aunt Roxy."

Moses bent down and kissed her, and felt her arms around his neck.

"Let not your heart be troubled," she whispered. In spite of himself
Moses felt the storm that had risen in his bosom that morning soothed by
the gentle influences which Mara breathed upon it. There is a
sympathetic power in all states of mind, and they who have reached the
deep secret of eternal rest have a strange power of imparting calm to
others.

It was in the very crisis of the battle that Christ said to his
disciples, "_My peace I give unto you_," and they that are made one with
him acquire like precious power of shedding round them repose, as
evening flowers shed odors. Moses went to his pillow sorrowful and
heart-stricken, but bitter or despairing he could not be with the
consciousness of that present angel in the house.




CHAPTER XLIII

THE PEARL


The next morning rose calm and bright with that wonderful and mystical
stillness and serenity which glorify autumn days. It was impossible that
such skies could smile and such gentle airs blow the sea into one great
waving floor of sparkling sapphires without bringing cheerfulness to
human hearts. You must be very despairing indeed, when Nature is doing
her best, to look her in the face sullen and defiant. So long as there
is a drop of good in your cup, a penny in your exchequer of happiness, a
bright day reminds you to look at it, and feel that all is not gone yet.

So felt Moses when he stood in the door of the brown house, while Mrs.
Pennel was clinking plates and spoons as she set the breakfast-table,
and Zephaniah Pennel in his shirt-sleeves was washing in the back-room,
while Miss Roxy came downstairs in a business-like fashion, bringing
sundry bowls, plates, dishes, and mysterious pitchers from the
sick-room.

"Well, Aunt Roxy, you ain't one that lets the grass grow under your
feet," said Mrs. Pennel. "How is the dear child, this morning?"

"Well, she had a better night than one could have expected," said Miss
Roxy, "and by the time she's had her breakfast, she expects to sit up a
little and see her friends." Miss Roxy said this in a cheerful tone,
looking encouragingly at Moses, whom she began to pity and patronize,
now she saw how real was his affliction.

After breakfast Moses went to see her; she was sitting up in her white
dressing-gown, looking so thin and poorly, and everything in the room
was fragrant with the spicy smell of the monthly roses, whose late buds
and blossoms Miss Roxy had gathered for the vases. She seemed so
natural, so calm and cheerful, so interested in all that went on around
her, that one almost forgot that the time of her stay must be so short.
She called Moses to come and look at her drawings, and paintings of
flowers and birds,--full of reminders they were of old times,--and then
she would have her pencils and colors, and work a little on a bunch of
red rock-columbine, that she had begun to do for him; and she chatted of
all the old familiar places where flowers grew, and of the old talks
they had had there, till Moses quite forgot himself; forgot that he was
in a sick room, till Aunt Roxy, warned by the deepening color on Mara's
cheeks, interposed her "nussing" authority, that she must do no more
that day.

Then Moses laid her down, and arranged her pillows so that she could
look out on the sea, and sat and read to her till it was time for her
afternoon nap; and when the evening shadows drew on, he marveled with
himself how the day had gone.

Many such there were, all that pleasant month of September, and he was
with her all the time, watching her wants and doing her
bidding,--reading over and over with a softened modulation her favorite
hymns and chapters, arranging her flowers, and bringing her home wild
bouquets from all her favorite wood-haunts, which made her sick-room
seem like some sylvan bower. Sally Kittridge was there too, almost every
day, with always some friendly offering or some helpful deed of
kindness, and sometimes they two together would keep guard over the
invalid while Miss Roxy went home to attend to some of her own more
peculiar concerns. Mara seemed to rule all around her with calm
sweetness and wisdom, speaking unconsciously only the speech of heaven,
talking of spiritual things, not in an excited rapture or wild ecstasy,
but with the sober certainty of waking bliss. She seemed like one of the
sweet friendly angels one reads of in the Old Testament, so lovingly
companionable, walking and talking, eating and drinking, with mortals,
yet ready at any unknown moment to ascend with the flame of some
sacrifice and be gone. There are those (a few at least) whose blessing
it has been to have kept for many days, in bonds of earthly fellowship,
a perfected spirit in whom the work of purifying love was wholly done,
who lived in calm victory over sin and sorrow and death, ready at any
moment to be called to the final mystery of joy.

Yet it must come at last, the moment when heaven claims its own, and it
came at last in the cottage on Orr's Island. There came a day when the
room so sacredly cheerful was hushed to a breathless stillness; the bed
was then all snowy white, and that soft still sealed face, the parted
waves of golden hair, the little hands folded over the white robe, all
had a sacred and wonderful calm, a rapture of repose that seemed to say
"it is done."

They who looked on her wondered; it was a look that sunk deep into every
heart; it hushed down the common cant of those who, according to country
custom, went to stare blindly at the great mystery of death,--for all
that came out of that chamber smote upon their breasts and went away in
silence, revolving strangely whence might come that unearthly beauty,
that celestial joy.

Once more, in that very room where James and Naomi Lincoln had lain side
by side in their coffins, sleeping restfully, there was laid another
form, shrouded and coffined, but with such a fairness and tender purity,
such a mysterious fullness of joy in its expression, that it seemed more
natural to speak of that rest as some higher form of life than of
death.

Once more were gathered the neighborhood; all the faces known in this
history shone out in one solemn picture, of which that sweet restful
form was the centre. Zephaniah Pennel and Mary his wife, Moses and
Sally, the dry form of Captain Kittridge and the solemn face of his
wife, Aunt Roxy and Aunt Ruey, Miss Emily and Mr. Sewell; but their
faces all wore a tender brightness, such as we see falling like a thin
celestial veil over all the faces in an old Florentine painting. The
room was full of sweet memories, of words of cheer, words of assurance,
words of triumph, and the mysterious brightness of that young face
forbade them to weep. Solemnly Mr. Sewell read,--

"He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord God will wipe away
tears from off all faces; and the rebuke of his people shall he take
away from off all the earth; for the Lord hath spoken it. And it shall
be said in that day, Lo this is our God; we have waited for him, and he
will save us; this is the Lord; we have waited for him, we will be glad
and rejoice in his salvation."

Then the prayer trembled up to heaven with thanksgiving, for the early
entrance of that fair young saint into glory, and then the same old
funeral hymn, with its mournful triumph:--

    "Why should we mourn departed friends,
      Or shake at death's alarms,
    'Tis but the voice that Jesus sends
      To call them to his arms."

Then in a few words Mr. Sewell reminded them how that hymn had been sung
in this room so many years ago, when that frail, fluttering orphan soul
had been baptized into the love and care of Jesus, and how her whole
life, passing before them in its simplicity and beauty, had come to so
holy and beautiful a close; and when, pointing to the calm sleeping face
he asked, "Would we call her back?" there was not a heart at that moment
that dared answer, Yes. Even he that should have been her bridegroom
could not at that moment have unsealed the holy charm, and so they bore
her away, and laid the calm smiling face beneath the soil, by the side
of poor Dolores.

       *       *       *       *       *

"I had a beautiful dream last night," said Zephaniah Pennel, the next
morning after the funeral, as he opened his Bible to conduct family
worship.

"What was it?" said Miss Roxy.

"Well, ye see, I thought I was out a-walkin' up and down, and lookin'
and lookin' for something that I'd lost. What it was I couldn't quite
make out, but my heart felt heavy as if it would break, and I was
lookin' all up and down the sands by the seashore, and somebody said I
was like the merchantman, seeking goodly pearls. I said I had lost my
pearl--my pearl of great price--and then I looked up, and far off on the
beach, shining softly on the wet sands, lay my pearl. I thought it was
Mara, but it seemed a great pearl with a soft moonlight on it; and I was
running for it when some one said 'hush,' and I looked and I saw _Him_
a-coming--Jesus of Nazareth, jist as he walked by the sea of Galilee. It
was all dark night around Him, but I could see Him by the light that
came from his face, and the long hair was hanging down on his shoulders.
He came and took up my pearl and put it on his forehead, and it shone
out like a star, and shone into my heart, and I felt happy; and he
looked at me steadily, and rose and rose in the air, and melted in the
clouds, and I awoke so happy, and so calm!"




CHAPTER XLIV

FOUR YEARS AFTER


It was a splendid evening in July, and the sky was filled high with
gorgeous tabernacles of purple and gold, the remains of a grand
thunder-shower which had freshened the air and set a separate jewel on
every needle leaf of the old pines.

Four years had passed since the fair Pearl of Orr's Island had been laid
beneath the gentle soil, which every year sent monthly tributes of
flowers to adorn her rest, great blue violets, and starry flocks of
ethereal eye-brights in spring, and fringy asters, and goldenrod in
autumn. In those days, the tender sentiment which now makes the
burial-place a cultivated garden was excluded by the rigid spiritualism
of the Puritan life, which, ever jealous of that which concerned the
body, lest it should claim what belonged to the immortal alone, had
frowned on all watching of graves, as an earthward tendency, and
enjoined the flight of faith with the spirit, rather than the yearning
for its cast-off garments.

But Sally Kittridge, being lonely, found something in her heart which
could only be comforted by visits to that grave. So she had planted
there roses and trailing myrtle, and tended and watered them; a
proceeding which was much commented on Sunday noons, when people were
eating their dinners and discussing their neighbors.

It is possible good Mrs. Kittridge might have been much scandalized by
it, had she been in a condition to think on the matter at all; but a
very short time after the funeral she was seized with a paralytic
shock, which left her for a while as helpless as an infant; and then she
sank away into the grave, leaving Sally the sole care of the old
Captain.

A cheerful home she made, too, for his old age, adorning the house with
many little tasteful fancies unknown in her mother's days; reading the
Bible to him and singing Mara's favorite hymns, with a voice as sweet as
the spring blue-bird. The spirit of the departed friend seemed to hallow
the dwelling where these two worshiped her memory, in simple-hearted
love. Her paintings, framed in quaint woodland frames of moss and
pine-cones by Sally's own ingenuity, adorned the walls. Her books were
on the table, and among them many that she had given to Moses.

"I am going to be a wanderer for many years," he said in parting, "keep
these for me until I come back."

And so from time to time passed long letters between the two
friends,--each telling to the other the same story,--that they were
lonely, and that their hearts yearned for the communion of one who could
no longer be manifest to the senses. And each spoke to the other of a
world of hopes and memories buried with her, "Which," each so constantly
said, "no one could understand but you." Each, too, was firm in the
faith that buried love must have no earthly resurrection. Every letter
strenuously insisted that they should call each other brother and
sister, and under cover of those names the letters grew longer and more
frequent, and with every chance opportunity came presents from the
absent brother, which made the little old cottage quaintly suggestive
with smell of spice and sandal-wood.

But, as we said, this is a glorious July evening,--and you may discern
two figures picking their way over those low sunken rocks, yellowed with
seaweed, of which we have often spoken. They are Moses and Sally going
on an evening walk to that favorite grotto retreat, which has so often
been spoken of in the course of this history.

Moses has come home from long wanderings. It is four years since they
parted, and now they meet and have looked into each other's eyes, not as
of old, when they met in the first giddy flush of youth, but as fully
developed man and woman. Moses and Sally had just risen from the
tea-table, where she had presided with a thoughtful housewifery gravity,
just pleasantly dashed with quaint streaks of her old merry willfulness,
while the old Captain, warmed up like a rheumatic grasshopper in a fine
autumn day, chirruped feebly, and told some of his old stories, which
now he told every day, forgetting that they had ever been heard before.
Somehow all three had been very happy; the more so, from a shadowy sense
of some sympathizing presence which was rejoicing to see them together
again, and which, stealing soft-footed and noiseless everywhere, touched
and lighted up every old familiar object with sweet memories.

And so they had gone out together to walk; to walk towards the grotto
where Sally had caused a seat to be made, and where she declared she had
passed hours and hours, knitting, sewing, or reading.

"Sally," said Moses, "do you know I am tired of wandering? I am coming
home now. I begin to want a home of my own." This he said as they sat
together on the rustic seat and looked off on the blue sea.

"Yes, you must," said Sally. "How lovely that ship looks, just coming in
there."

"Yes, they are beautiful," said Moses abstractedly; and Sally rattled on
about the difference between sloops and brigs; seeming determined that
there should be no silence, such as often comes in ominous gaps between
two friends who have long been separated, and have each many things to
say with which the other is not familiar.

"Sally!" said Moses, breaking in with a deep voice on one of these
monologues. "Do you remember some presumptuous things I once said to
you, in this place?"

Sally did not answer, and there was a dead silence in which they could
hear the tide gently dashing on the weedy rocks.

"You and I are neither of us what we were then, Sally," said Moses. "We
are as different as if we were each another person. We have been trained
in another life,--educated by a great sorrow,--is it not so?"

"I know it," said Sally.

"And why should we two, who have a world of thoughts and memories which
no one can understand but the other,--why should we, each of us, go on
alone? If we must, why then, Sally, I must leave you, and I must write
and receive no more letters, for I have found that you are becoming so
wholly necessary to me, that if any other should claim you, I could not
feel as I ought. Must I go?"

Sally's answer is not on record; but one infers what it was from the
fact that they sat there very late, and before they knew it, the tide
rose up and shut them in, and the moon rose up in full glory out of the
water, and still they sat and talked, leaning on each other, till a
cracked, feeble voice called down through the pine-trees above, like a
hoarse old cricket,--

"Children, be you there?"

"Yes, father," said Sally, blushing and conscious.

"Yes, all right," said the deep bass of Moses. "I'll bring her back when
I've done with her, Captain."

"Wal',--wal'; I was gettin' consarned; but I see I don't need to. I hope
you won't get no colds nor nothin'."

They did not; but in the course of a month there was a wedding at the
brown house of the old Captain, which everybody in the parish was glad
of, and was voted without dissent to be just the thing.

Miss Roxy, grimly approbative, presided over the preparations, and all
the characters of our story appeared, and more, having on their
wedding-garments. Nor was the wedding less joyful, that all felt the
presence of a heavenly guest, silent and loving, seeing and blessing
all, whose voice seemed to say in every heart,--

"He turneth the shadow of death into morning."





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