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 feted 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!'"