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."