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,--