REBELLION
We have introduced Mara to our readers as she appears in her seventeenth
year, at the time when she is expecting the return of Moses as a young
man of twenty; but we cannot do justice to the feelings which are roused
in her heart by this expectation, without giving a chapter or two to
tracing the history of Moses since we left him as a boy commencing the
study of the Latin grammar with Mr. Sewell. The reader must see the
forces that acted upon his early development, and what they have made of
him.
It is common for people who write treatises on education to give forth
their rules and theories with a self-satisfied air, as if a human being
were a thing to be made up, like a batch of bread, out of a given number
of materials combined by an infallible recipe. Take your child, and do
thus and so for a given number of years, and he comes out a thoroughly
educated individual.
But in fact, education is in many cases nothing more than a blind
struggle of parents and guardians with the evolutions of some strong,
predetermined character, individual, obstinate, unreceptive, and seeking
by an inevitable law of its being to develop itself and gain free
expression in its own way. Captain Kittridge's confidence that he would
as soon undertake a boy as a Newfoundland pup, is good for those whose
idea of what is to be done for a human being are only what would be done
for a dog, namely, give food, shelter, and world-room, and leave each to
act out his own nature without let or hindrance.
But everybody takes an embryo human being with some plan of one's own
what it shall do or be. The child's future shall shape out some darling
purpose or plan, and fulfill some long unfulfilled expectation of the
parent. And thus, though the wind of every generation sweeps its hopes
and plans like forest-leaves, none are whirled and tossed with more
piteous moans than those which come out green and fresh to shade the
happy spring-time of the cradle. For the temperaments of children are
often as oddly unsuited to parents as if capricious fairies had been
filling cradles with changelings.
A meek member of the Peace Society, a tender, devout, poetical
clergyman, receives an heir from heaven, and straightway devotes him to
the Christian ministry. But lo! the boy proves a young war-horse,
neighing for battle, burning for gunpowder and guns, for bowie-knives
and revolvers, and for every form and expression of physical force;--he
might make a splendid trapper, an energetic sea-captain, a bold, daring
military man, but his whole boyhood is full of rebukes and disciplines
for sins which are only the blind effort of the creature to express a
nature which his parent does not and cannot understand. So again, the
son that was to have upheld the old, proud merchant's time-honored firm,
that should have been mighty in ledgers and great upon 'Change, breaks
his father's heart by an unintelligible fancy for weaving poems and
romances. A father of literary aspirations, balked of privileges of
early education, bends over the cradle of his son with but one idea.
This child shall have the full advantages of regular college-training;
and so for years he battles with a boy abhorring study, and fitted only
for a life of out-door energy and bold adventure,--on whom Latin forms
and Greek quantities fall and melt aimless and useless, as snow-flakes
on the hide of a buffalo. Then the secret agonies,--the long years of
sorrowful watchings of those gentler nurses of humanity who receive the
infant into their bosom out of the void unknown, and strive to read its
horoscope through the mists of their prayers and tears!--what
perplexities,--what confusion! Especially is this so in a community
where the moral and religious sense is so cultivated as in New England,
and frail, trembling, self-distrustful mothers are told that the shaping
and ordering not only of this present life, but of an immortal destiny,
is in their hands.
On the whole, those who succeed best in the rearing of children are the
tolerant and easy persons who instinctively follow nature and accept
without much inquiry whatever she sends; or that far smaller class, wise
to discern spirits and apt to adopt means to their culture and
development, who can prudently and carefully train every nature
according to its true and characteristic ideal.
Zephaniah Pennel was a shrewd old Yankee, whose instincts taught him
from the first, that the waif that had been so mysteriously washed out
of the gloom of the sea into his family, was of some different class and
lineage from that which might have filled a cradle of his own, and of a
nature which he could not perfectly understand. So he prudently watched
and waited, only using restraint enough to keep the boy anchored in
society, and letting him otherwise grow up in the solitary freedom of
his lonely seafaring life.
The boy was from childhood, although singularly attractive, of a moody,
fitful, unrestful nature,--eager, earnest, but unsteady,--with varying
phases of imprudent frankness and of the most stubborn and unfathomable
secretiveness. He was a creature of unreasoning antipathies and
attractions. As Zephaniah Pennel said of him, he was as full of hitches
as an old bureau drawer. His peculiar beauty, and a certain electrical
power of attraction, seemed to form a constant circle of protection and
forgiveness around him in the home of his foster-parents; and great as
was the anxiety and pain which he often gave them, they somehow never
felt the charge of him as a weariness.
We left him a boy beginning Latin with Mr. Sewell in company with the
little Mara. This arrangement progressed prosperously for a time, and
the good clergyman, all whose ideas of education ran through the halls
of a college, began to have hopes of turning out a choice scholar. But
when the boy's ship of life came into the breakers of that narrow and
intricate channel which divides boyhood from manhood, the difficulties
that had always attended his guidance and management wore an intensified
form. How much family happiness is wrecked just then and there! How many
mothers' and sisters' hearts are broken in the wild and confused
tossings and tearings of that stormy transition! A whole new nature is
blindly upheaving itself, with cravings and clamorings, which neither
the boy himself nor often surrounding friends understand.
A shrewd observer has significantly characterized the period as the time
when the boy wishes he were dead, and everybody else wishes so too. The
wretched, half-fledged, half-conscious, anomalous creature has all the
desires of the man, and none of the rights; has a double and triple
share of nervous edge and intensity in every part of his nature, and no
definitely perceived objects on which to bestow it,--and, of course, all
sorts of unreasonable moods and phases are the result.
One of the most common signs of this period, in some natures, is the
love of contradiction and opposition,--a blind desire to go contrary to
everything that is commonly received among the older people. The boy
disparages the minister, quizzes the deacon, thinks the school-master an
ass, and doesn't believe in the Bible, and seems to be rather pleased
than otherwise with the shock and flutter that all these announcements
create among peaceably disposed grown people. No respectable hen that
ever hatched out a brood of ducks was more puzzled what to do with them
than was poor Mrs. Pennel when her adopted nursling came into this
state. Was he a boy? an immortal soul? a reasonable human being? or only
a handsome goblin sent to torment her?
"What shall we do with him, father?" said she, one Sunday, to Zephaniah,
as he stood shaving before the little looking-glass in their bedroom.
"He can't be governed like a child, and he won't govern himself like a
man."
Zephaniah stopped and strapped his razor reflectively.
"We must cast out anchor and wait for day," he answered. "Prayer is a
long rope with a strong hold."
It was just at this critical period of life that Moses Pennel was drawn
into associations which awoke the alarm of all his friends, and from
which the characteristic willfulness of his nature made it difficult to
attempt to extricate him.
In order that our readers may fully understand this part of our history,
we must give some few particulars as to the peculiar scenery of Orr's
Island and the state of the country at this time.
The coast of Maine, as we have elsewhere said, is remarkable for a
singular interpenetration of the sea with the land, forming amid its
dense primeval forests secluded bays, narrow and deep, into which
vessels might float with the tide, and where they might nestle unseen
and unsuspected amid the dense shadows of the overhanging forest.
At this time there was a very brisk business done all along the coast of
Maine in the way of smuggling. Small vessels, lightly built and swift of
sail, would run up into these sylvan fastnesses, and there make their
deposits and transact their business so as entirely to elude the
vigilance of government officers.
It may seem strange that practices of this kind should ever have
obtained a strong foothold in a community peculiar for its rigid
morality and its orderly submission to law; but in this case, as in many
others, contempt of law grew out of weak and unworthy legislation. The
celebrated embargo of Jefferson stopped at once the whole trade of New
England, and condemned her thousand ships to rot at the wharves, and
caused the ruin of thousands of families.
The merchants of the country regarded this as a flagrant, high-handed
piece of injustice, expressly designed to cripple New England commerce,
and evasions of this unjust law found everywhere a degree of sympathy,
even in the breasts of well-disposed and conscientious people. In
resistance to the law, vessels were constantly fitted out which ran upon
trading voyages to the West Indies and other places; and although the
practice was punishable as smuggling, yet it found extensive connivance.
From this beginning smuggling of all kinds gradually grew up in the
community, and gained such a foothold that even after the repeal of the
embargo it still continued to be extensively practiced. Secret
depositories of contraband goods still existed in many of the lonely
haunts of islands off the coast of Maine. Hid in deep forest shadows,
visited only in the darkness of the night, were these illegal stores of
merchandise. And from these secluded resorts they found their way, no
one knew or cared to say how, into houses for miles around.
There was no doubt that the practice, like all other illegal ones, was
demoralizing to the community, and particularly fatal to the character
of that class of bold, enterprising young men who would be most likely
to be drawn into it.
Zephaniah Pennel, who was made of a kind of straight-grained,
uncompromising oaken timber such as built the Mayflower of old, had
always borne his testimony at home and abroad against any violations of
the laws of the land, however veiled under the pretext of righting a
wrong or resisting an injustice, and had done what he could in his
neighborhood to enable government officers to detect and break up these
unlawful depositories. This exposed him particularly to the hatred and
ill-will of the operators concerned in such affairs, and a plot was laid
by a few of the most daring and determined of them to establish one of
their depositories on Orr's Island, and to implicate the family of
Pennel himself in the trade. This would accomplish two purposes, as they
hoped,--it would be a mortification and defeat to him,--a revenge which
they coveted; and it would, they thought, insure his silence and
complicity for the strongest reasons.
The situation and characteristics of Orr's Island peculiarly fitted it
for the carrying out of a scheme of this kind, and for this purpose we
must try to give our readers a more definite idea of it.
The traveler who wants a ride through scenery of more varied and
singular beauty than can ordinarily be found on the shores of any land
whatever, should start some fine clear day along the clean sandy road,
ribboned with strips of green grass, that leads through the flat
pitch-pine forests of Brunswick toward the sea. As he approaches the
salt water, a succession of the most beautiful and picturesque lakes
seems to be lying softly cradled in the arms of wild, rocky forest
shores, whose outlines are ever changing with the windings of the road.
At a distance of about six or eight miles from Brunswick he crosses an
arm of the sea, and comes upon the first of the interlacing group of
islands which beautifies the shore. A ride across this island is a
constant succession of pictures, whose wild and solitary beauty entirely
distances all power of description. The magnificence of the evergreen
forests,--their peculiar air of sombre stillness,--the rich
intermingling ever and anon of groves of birch, beech, and oak, in
picturesque knots and tufts, as if set for effect by some skillful
landscape-gardener,--produce a sort of strange dreamy wonder; while the
sea, breaking forth both on the right hand and the left of the road into
the most romantic glimpses, seems to flash and glitter like some strange
gem which every moment shows itself through the framework of a new
setting. Here and there little secluded coves push in from the sea,
around which lie soft tracts of green meadow-land, hemmed in and guarded
by rocky pine-crowned ridges. In such sheltered spots may be seen neat
white houses, nestling like sheltered doves in the beautiful solitude.
When one has ridden nearly to the end of Great Island, which is about
four miles across, he sees rising before him, from the sea, a bold
romantic point of land, uplifting a crown of rich evergreen and forest
trees over shores of perpendicular rock. This is Orr's Island.
It was not an easy matter in the days of our past experience to guide a
horse and carriage down the steep, wild shores of Great Island to the
long bridge that connects it with Orr's. The sense of wild seclusion
reaches here the highest degree; and one crosses the bridge with a
feeling as if genii might have built it, and one might be going over it
to fairy-land. From the bridge the path rises on to a high granite
ridge, which runs from one end of the island to the other, and has been
called the Devil's Back, with that superstitious generosity which seems
to have abandoned all romantic places to so undeserving an owner.
By the side of this ridge of granite is a deep, narrow chasm, running a
mile and a half or two miles parallel with the road, and veiled by the
darkest and most solemn shadows of the primeval forest. Here scream the
jays and the eagles, and fish-hawks make their nests undisturbed; and
the tide rises and falls under black branches of evergreen, from which
depend long, light festoons of delicate gray moss. The darkness of the
forest is relieved by the delicate foliage and the silvery trunks of
the great white birches, which the solitude of centuries has allowed to
grow in this spot to a height and size seldom attained elsewhere.
It was this narrow, rocky cove that had been chosen by the smuggler
Atkinson and his accomplices as a safe and secluded resort for their
operations. He was a seafaring man of Bath, one of that class who always
prefer uncertain and doubtful courses to those which are safe and
reputable. He was possessed of many of those traits calculated to make
him a hero in the eyes of young men; was dashing, free, and frank in his
manners, with a fund of humor and an abundance of ready anecdote which
made his society fascinating; but he concealed beneath all these
attractions a character of hard, grasping, unscrupulous selfishness, and
an utter destitution of moral principle.
Moses, now in his sixteenth year, and supposed to be in a general way
doing well, under the care of the minister, was left free to come and go
at his own pleasure, unwatched by Zephaniah, whose fishing operations
often took him for weeks from home. Atkinson hung about the boy's path,
engaging him first in fishing or hunting enterprises; plied him with
choice preparations of liquor, with which he would enhance the hilarity
of their expeditions; and finally worked on his love of adventure and
that impatient restlessness incident to his period of life to draw him
fully into his schemes. Moses lost all interest in his lessons, often
neglecting them for days at a time--accounting for his negligence by
excuses which were far from satisfactory. When Mara would expostulate
with him about this, he would break out upon her with a fierce
irritation. Was he always going to be tied to a girl's apron-string? He
was tired of study, and tired of old Sewell, whom he declared an old
granny in a white wig, who knew nothing of the world. He wasn't going to
college--it was altogether too slow for him--he was going to see life
and push ahead for himself.
Mara's life during this time was intensely wearing. A frail, slender,
delicate girl of thirteen, she carried a heart prematurely old with the
most distressing responsibility of mature life. Her love for Moses had
always had in it a large admixture of that maternal and care-taking
element which, in some shape or other, qualities the affection of woman
to man. Ever since that dream of babyhood, when the vision of a pale
mother had led the beautiful boy to her arms, Mara had accepted him as
something exclusively her own, with an intensity of ownership that
seemed almost to merge her personal identity with his. She felt, and
saw, and enjoyed, and suffered in him, and yet was conscious of a higher
nature in herself, by which unwillingly he was often judged and
condemned. His faults affected her with a kind of guilty pain, as if
they were her own; his sins were borne bleeding in her heart in silence,
and with a jealous watchfulness to hide them from every eye but hers.
She busied herself day and night interceding and making excuses for him,
first to her own sensitive moral nature, and then with everybody around,
for with one or another he was coming into constant collision. She felt
at this time a fearful load of suspicion, which she dared not express to
a human being.
Up to this period she had always been the only confidant of Moses, who
poured into her ear without reserve all the good and the evil of his
nature, and who loved her with all the intensity with which he was
capable of loving anything. Nothing so much shows what a human being is
in moral advancement as the quality of his love. Moses Pennel's love was
egotistic, exacting, tyrannical, and capricious--sometimes venting
itself in expressions of a passionate fondness, which had a savor of
protecting generosity in them, and then receding to the icy pole of
surly petulance. For all that, there was no resisting the magnetic
attraction with which in his amiable moods he drew those whom he liked
to himself.
Such people are not very wholesome companions for those who are
sensitively organized and predisposed to self-sacrificing love. They
keep the heart in a perpetual freeze and thaw, which, like the American
northern climate, is so particularly fatal to plants of a delicate
habit. They could live through the hot summer and the cold winter, but
they cannot endure the three or four months when it freezes one day and
melts the next,--when all the buds are started out by a week of genial
sunshine, and then frozen for a fortnight. These fitful persons are of
all others most engrossing, because you are always sure in their good
moods that they are just going to be angels,--an expectation which no
number of disappointments seems finally to do away. Mara believed in
Moses's future as she did in her own existence. He was going to do
something great and good,--that she was certain of. He would be a
splendid man! Nobody, she thought, knew him as she did; nobody could
know how good and generous he was _sometimes_, and how frankly he would
confess his faults, and what noble aspirations he had!
But there was no concealing from her watchful sense that Moses was
beginning to have secrets from her. He was cloudy and murky; and at some
of the most harmless inquiries in the world, would flash out with a
sudden temper, as if she had touched some sore spot. Her bedroom was
opposite to his; and she became quite sure that night after night, while
she lay thinking of him, she heard him steal down out of the house
between two and three o'clock, and not return till a little before
day-dawn. Where he went, and with whom, and what he was doing, was to
her an awful mystery,--and it was one she dared not share with a human
being. If she told her kind old grandfather, she feared that any
inquiry from him would only light as a spark on that inflammable spirit
of pride and insubordination that was rising within him, and bring on an
instantaneous explosion. Mr. Sewell's influence she could hope little
more from; and as to poor Mrs. Pennel, such communications would only
weary and distress her, without doing any manner of good. There was,
therefore, only that one unfailing Confidant--the Invisible Friend to
whom the solitary child could pour out her heart, and whose inspirations
of comfort and guidance never fail to come again in return to true
souls.
One moonlight night, as she lay thus praying, her senses, sharpened by
watching, discerned a sound of steps treading under her window, and then
a low whistle. Her heart beat violently, and she soon heard the door of
Moses's room open, and then the old chamber-stairs gave forth those
inconsiderate creaks and snaps that garrulous old stairs always will
when anybody is desirous of making them accomplices in a night-secret.
Mara rose, and undrawing her curtain, saw three men standing before the
house, and saw Moses come out and join them. Quick as thought she threw
on her clothes and wrapping her little form in a dark cloak, with a
hood, followed them out. She kept at a safe distance behind them,--so
far back as just to keep them in sight. They never looked back, and
seemed to say but little till they approached the edge of that deep belt
of forest which shrouds so large a portion of the island. She hurried
along, now nearer to them lest they should be lost to view in the deep
shadows, while they went on crackling and plunging through the dense
underbrush.