THE TEMPTER
It was well for Mara that so much of her life had been passed in wild
forest rambles. She looked frail as the rays of moonbeam which slid down
the old white-bearded hemlocks, but her limbs were agile and supple as
steel; and while the party went crashing on before, she followed with
such lightness that the slight sound of her movements was entirely lost
in the heavy crackling plunges of the party. Her little heart was
beating fast and hard; but could any one have seen her face, as it now
and then came into a spot of moonshine, they might have seen it fixed in
a deadly expression of resolve and determination. She was going after
_him_--no matter where; she was resolved to know who and what it was
that was leading him away, as her heart told her, to no good. Deeper and
deeper into the shadows of the forest they went, and the child easily
kept up with them.
Mara had often rambled for whole solitary days in this lonely wood, and
knew all its rocks and dells the whole three miles to the long bridge at
the other end of the island. But she had never before seen it under the
solemn stillness of midnight moonlight, which gives to the most familiar
objects such a strange, ghostly charm. After they had gone a mile into
the forest, she could see through the black spruces silver gleams of the
sea, and hear, amid the whirr and sway of the pine-tops, the dash of the
ever restless tide which pushed up the long cove. It was at the full, as
she could discern with a rapid glance of her practiced eye, expertly
versed in the knowledge of every change of the solitary nature around.
And now the party began to plunge straight down the rocky ledge of the
Devil's Back, on which they had been walking hitherto, into the deep
ravine where lay the cove. It was a scrambling, precipitous way, over
perpendicular walls of rock, whose crevices furnished anchoring-places
for grand old hemlocks or silver-birches, and whose rough sides,
leathery with black flaps of lichen, were all tangled and interlaced
with thick netted bushes. The men plunged down laughing, shouting, and
swearing at their occasional missteps, and silently as moonbeam or
thistledown the light-footed shadow went down after them.
She suddenly paused behind a pile of rock, as, through an opening
between two great spruces, the sea gleamed out like a sheet of
looking-glass set in a black frame. And here the child saw a small
vessel swinging at anchor, with the moonlight full on its slack sails,
and she could hear the gentle gurgle and lick of the green-tongued waves
as they dashed under it toward the rocky shore.
Mara stopped with a beating heart as she saw the company making for the
schooner. The tide is high; will they go on board and sail away with him
where she cannot follow? What could she do? In an ecstasy of fear she
kneeled down and asked God not to let him go,--to give her at least one
more chance to save him.
For the pure and pious child had heard enough of the words of these men,
as she walked behind them, to fill her with horror. She had never before
heard an oath, but there came back from these men coarse, brutal tones
and words of blasphemy that froze her blood with horror. And Moses was
going with them! She felt somehow as if they must be a company of fiends
bearing him to his ruin.
For some time she kneeled there watching behind the rock, while Moses
and his companions went on board the little schooner. She had no
feeling of horror at the loneliness of her own situation, for her
solitary life had made every woodland thing dear and familiar to her.
She was cowering down, on a loose, spongy bed of moss, which was all
threaded through and through with the green vines and pale pink blossoms
of the mayflower, and she felt its fragrant breath streaming up in the
moist moonlight. As she leaned forward to look through a rocky crevice,
her arms rested on a bed of that brittle white moss she had often
gathered with so much admiration, and a scarlet rock-columbine, such as
she loved to paint, brushed her cheek,--and all these mute fair things
seemed to strive to keep her company in her chill suspense of
watchfulness. Two whippoorwills, from a clump of silvery birches, kept
calling to each other in melancholy iteration, while she stayed there
still listening, and knowing by an occasional sound of laughing, or the
explosion of some oath, that the men were not yet gone. At last they all
appeared again, and came to a cleared place among the dry leaves, quite
near to the rock where she was concealed, and kindled a fire which they
kept snapping and crackling by a constant supply of green resinous
hemlock branches.
The red flame danced and leaped through the green fuel, and leaping
upward in tongues of flame, cast ruddy bronze reflections on the old
pine-trees with their long branches waving with boards of white
moss,--and by the firelight Mara could see two men in sailor's dress
with pistols in their belts, and the man Atkinson, whom she had
recollected as having seen once or twice at her grandfather's. She
remembered how she had always shrunk from him with a strange instinctive
dislike, half fear, half disgust, when he had addressed her with that
kind of free admiration which men of his class often feel themselves at
liberty to express to a pretty girl of her early age. He was a man that
might have been handsome, had it not been for a certain strange
expression of covert wickedness. It was as if some vile evil spirit,
walking, as the Scriptures say, through dry places, had lighted on a
comely man's body, in which he had set up housekeeping, making it look
like a fair house abused by an unclean owner.
As Mara watched his demeanor with Moses, she could think only of a
loathsome black snake that she had once seen in those solitary
rocks;--she felt as if his handsome but evil eye were charming him with
an evil charm to his destruction.
"Well, Mo, my boy," she heard him say,--slapping Moses on the
shoulder,--"this is something like. We'll have a 'tempus,' as the
college fellows say,--put down the clams to roast, and I'll mix the
punch," he said, setting over the fire a tea-kettle which they brought
from the ship.
After their preparations were finished, all sat down to eat and drink.
Mara listened with anxiety and horror to a conversation such as she
never heard or conceived before. It is not often that women hear men
talk in the undisguised manner which they use among themselves; but the
conversation of men of unprincipled lives, and low, brutal habits,
unchecked by the presence of respectable female society, might well
convey to the horror-struck child a feeling as if she were listening at
the mouth of hell. Almost every word was preceded or emphasized by an
oath; and what struck with a death chill to her heart was, that Moses
swore too, and seemed to show that desperate anxiety to seem _au fait_
in the language of wickedness, which boys often do at that age, when
they fancy that to be ignorant of vice is a mark of disgraceful
greenness. Moses evidently was bent on showing that he was not
green,--ignorant of the pure ear to which every such word came like the
blast of death.
He drank a great deal, too, and the mirth among them grew furious and
terrific. Mara, horrified and shocked as she was, did not, however, lose
that intense and alert presence of mind, natural to persons in whom
there is moral strength, however delicate be their physical frame. She
felt at once that these men were playing upon Moses; that they had an
object in view; that they were flattering and cajoling him, and leading
him to drink, that they might work out some fiendish purpose of their
own. The man called Atkinson related story after story of wild
adventure, in which sudden fortunes had been made by men who, he said,
were not afraid to take "the short cut across lots." He told of
piratical adventures in the West Indies,--of the fun of chasing and
overhauling ships,--and gave dazzling accounts of the treasures found on
board. It was observable that all these stories were told on the line
between joke and earnest,--as frolics, as specimens of good fun, and
seeing life, etc.
At last came a suggestion,--What if they should start off together some
fine day, "just for a spree," and try a cruise in the West Indies, to
see what they could pick up? They had arms, and a gang of fine,
whole-souled fellows. Moses had been tied to Ma'am Pennel's apron-string
long enough. And "hark ye," said one of them, "Moses, they say old
Pennel has lots of dollars in that old sea-chest of his'n. It would be a
kindness to him to invest them for him in an adventure."
Moses answered with a streak of the boy innocence which often remains
under the tramping of evil men, like ribbons of green turf in the middle
of roads:--
"You don't know Father Pennel,--why, he'd no more come into it than"--
A perfect roar of laughter cut short this declaration, and Atkinson,
slapping Moses on the back, said,--
"By ----, Mo! you are the jolliest green dog! I shall die a-laughing of
your innocence some day. Why, my boy, can't you see? Pennel's money can
be invested without asking him."
"Why, he keeps it locked," said Moses.
"And supposing you pick the lock?"
"Not I, indeed," said Moses, making a sudden movement to rise.
Mara almost screamed in her ecstasy, but she had sense enough to hold
her breath.
"Ho! see him now," said Atkinson, lying back, and holding his sides
while he laughed, and rolled over; "you can get off anything on that
muff,--any hoax in the world,--he's so soft! Come, come, my dear boy,
sit down. I was only seeing how wide I could make you open those great
black eyes of your'n,--that's all."
"You'd better take care how you joke with me," said Moses, with that
look of gloomy determination which Mara was quite familiar with of old.
It was the rallying effort of a boy who had abandoned the first outworks
of virtue to make a stand for the citadel. And Atkinson, like a prudent
besieger after a repulse, returned to lie on his arms.
He began talking volubly on other subjects, telling stories, and singing
songs, and pressing Moses to drink.
Mara was comforted to see that he declined drinking,--that he looked
gloomy and thoughtful, in spite of the jokes of his companions; but she
trembled to see, by the following conversation, how Atkinson was
skillfully and prudently making apparent to Moses the extent to which he
had him in his power. He seemed to Mara like an ugly spider skillfully
weaving his web around a fly. She felt cold and faint; but within her
there was a heroic strength.
She was not going to faint; she would make herself bear up. She was
going to do something to get Moses out of this snare,--but what? At last
they rose.
"It is past three o'clock," she heard one of them say.
"I say, Mo," said Atkinson, "you must make tracks for home, or you won't
be in bed when Mother Pennel calls you."
The men all laughed at this joke, as they turned to go on board the
schooner.
When they were gone, Moses threw himself down and hid his face in his
hands. He knew not what pitying little face was looking down upon him
from the hemlock shadows, what brave little heart was determined to save
him. He was in one of those great crises of agony that boys pass through
when they first awake from the fun and frolic of unlawful enterprises to
find themselves sold under sin, and feel the terrible logic of evil
which constrains them to pass from the less to greater crime. He felt
that he was in the power of bad, unprincipled, heartless men, who, if he
refused to do their bidding, had the power to expose him. All he had
been doing would come out. His kind old foster-parents would know it.
Mara would know it. Mr. Sewell and Miss Emily would know the secrets of
his life that past month. He felt as if they were all looking at him
now. He had disgraced himself,--had sunk below his education,--had been
false to all his better knowledge and the past expectations of his
friends, living a mean, miserable, dishonorable life,--and now the
ground was fast sliding from under him, and the next plunge might be
down a precipice from which there would be no return. What he had done
up to this hour had been done in the roystering, inconsiderate
gamesomeness of boyhood. It had been represented to himself only as
"sowing wild oats," "having steep times," "seeing a little of life," and
so on; but this night he had had propositions of piracy and robbery made
to him, and he had not dared to knock down the man that made them,--had
not dared at once to break away from his company. He must meet him
again,--must go on with him, or--he groaned in agony at the thought.
It was a strong indication of that repressed, considerate habit of mind
which love had wrought in the child, that when Mara heard the boy's sobs
rising in the stillness, she did not, as she wished to, rush out and
throw her arms around his neck and try to comfort him.
But she felt instinctively that she must not do this. She must not let
him know that she had discovered his secret by stealing after him thus
in the night shadows. She knew how nervously he had resented even the
compassionate glances she had cast upon him in his restless, turbid
intervals during the past few weeks, and the fierceness with which he
had replied to a few timid inquiries. No,--though her heart was breaking
for him, it was a shrewd, wise little heart, and resolved not to spoil
all by yielding to its first untaught impulses. She repressed herself as
the mother does who refrains from crying out when she sees her
unconscious little one on the verge of a precipice.
When Moses rose and moodily began walking homeward, she followed at a
distance. She could now keep farther off, for she knew the way through
every part of the forest, and she only wanted to keep within sound of
his footsteps to make sure that he was going home. When he emerged from
the forest into the open moonlight, she sat down in its shadows and
watched him as he walked over the open distance between her and the
house. He went in; and then she waited a little longer for him to be
quite retired. She thought he would throw himself on the bed, and then
she could steal in after him. So she sat there quite in the shadows.
The grand full moon was riding high and calm in the purple sky, and
Harpswell Bay on the one hand, and the wide, open ocean on the other,
lay all in a silver shimmer of light. There was not a sound save the
plash of the tide, now beginning to go out, and rolling and rattling
the pebbles up and down as it came and went, and once in a while the
distant, mournful intoning of the whippoorwill. There were silent lonely
ships, sailing slowly to and fro far out to sea, turning their fair
wings now into bright light and now into shadow, as they moved over the
glassy stillness. Mara could see all the houses on Harpswell Neck and
the white church as clear as in the daylight. It seemed to her some
strange, unearthly dream.
As she sat there, she thought over her whole little life, all full of
one thought, one purpose, one love, one prayer, for this being so
strangely given to her out of that silent sea, which lay so like a still
eternity around her,--and she revolved again what meant the vision of
her childhood. Did it not mean that she was to watch over him and save
him from some dreadful danger? That poor mother was lying now silent and
peaceful under the turf in the little graveyard not far off, and _she_
must care for her boy.
A strong motherly feeling swelled out the girl's heart,--she felt that
she _must_, she would, somehow save that treasure which had so
mysteriously been committed to her. So, when she thought she had given
time enough for Moses to be quietly asleep in his room, she arose and
ran with quick footsteps across the moonlit plain to the house.
The front-door was standing wide open, as was always the innocent
fashion in these regions, with a half-angle of moonlight and shadow
lying within its dusky depths. Mara listened a moment,--no sound: he had
gone to bed then. "Poor boy," she said, "I hope he is asleep; how he
must feel, poor fellow! It's all the fault of those dreadful men!" said
the little dark shadow to herself, as she stole up the stairs past his
room as guiltily as if she were the sinner. Once the stairs creaked, and
her heart was in her mouth, but she gained her room and shut and bolted
the door. She kneeled down by her little white bed, and thanked God
that she had come in safe, and then prayed him to teach her what to do
next. She felt chilly and shivering, and crept into bed, and lay with
her great soft brown eyes wide open, intently thinking what she should
do.
Should she tell her grandfather? Something instinctively said No; that
the first word from him which showed Moses he was detected would at once
send him off with those wicked men. "He would never, never bear to have
this known," she said. Mr. Sewell?--ah, that was worse. She herself
shrank from letting him know what Moses had been doing; she could not
bear to lower him so much in his eyes. He could not make allowances, she
thought. He is good, to be sure, but he is so old and grave, and doesn't
know how much Moses has been tempted by these dreadful men; and then
perhaps he would tell Miss Emily, and they never would want Moses to
come there any more.
"What shall I do?" she said to herself. "I must get somebody to help me
or tell me what to do. I can't tell grandmamma; it would only make her
ill, and she wouldn't know what to do any more than I. Ah, I know what I
will do,--I'll tell Captain Kittridge; he was always so kind to me; and
he has been to sea and seen all sorts of men, and Moses won't care so
much perhaps to have him know, because the Captain is such a funny man,
and don't take everything so seriously. Yes, that's it. I'll go right
down to the cove in the morning. God will bring me through, I know He
will;" and the little weary head fell back on the pillow asleep. And as
she slept, a smile settled over her face, perhaps a reflection from the
face of her good angel, who always beholdeth the face of our Father in
Heaven.