DESIRES AND DREAMS
Moses passed rather a restless and uneasy night on his return to the
home-roof which had sheltered his childhood. All his life past, and all
his life expected, seemed to boil and seethe and ferment in his
thoughts, and to go round and round in never-ceasing circles before him.
Moses was _par excellence_ proud, ambitious, and willful. These words,
generally supposed to describe positive vices of the mind, in fact are
only the overaction of certain very valuable portions of our nature,
since one can conceive all three to raise a man immensely in the scale
of moral being, simply by being applied to right objects. He who is too
proud even to admit a mean thought--who is ambitious only of ideal
excellence--who has an inflexible will only in the pursuit of truth and
righteousness--may be a saint and a hero.
But Moses was neither a saint nor a hero, but an undeveloped chaotic
young man, whose pride made him sensitive and restless; whose ambition
was fixed on wealth and worldly success; whose willfulness was for the
most part a blind determination to compass his own points, with the
leave of Providence or without. There was no God in his estimate of
life--and a sort of secret unsuspected determination at the bottom of
his heart that there should be none. He feared religion, from a
suspicion which he entertained that it might hamper some of his future
schemes. He did not wish to put himself under its rules, lest he might
find them in some future time inconveniently strict.
With such determinations and feelings, the Bible--necessarily an
excessively uninteresting book to him--he never read, and satisfied
himself with determining in a general way that it was not worth reading,
and, as was the custom with many young men in America at that period,
announced himself as a skeptic, and seemed to value himself not a little
on the distinction. Pride in skepticism is a peculiar distinction of
young men. It takes years and maturity to make the discovery that the
power of faith is nobler than the power of doubt; and that there is a
celestial wisdom in the ingenuous propensity to trust, which belongs to
honest and noble natures. Elderly skeptics generally regard their
unbelief as a misfortune.
Not that Moses was, after all, without "the angel in him." He had a good
deal of the susceptibility to poetic feeling, the power of vague and
dreamy aspiration, the longing after the good and beautiful, which is
God's witness in the soul. A noble sentiment in poetry, a fine scene in
nature, had power to bring tears in his great dark eyes, and he had,
under the influence of such things, brief inspired moments in which he
vaguely longed to do, or be, something grand or noble. But this,
however, was something apart from the real purpose of his life,--a sort
of voice crying in the wilderness,--to which he gave little heed.
Practically, he was determined with all his might, to have a good time
in this life, whatever another might be,--if there were one; and that he
would do it by the strength of his right arm. Wealth he saw to be the
lamp of Aladdin, which commanded all other things. And the pursuit of
wealth was therefore the first step in his programme.
As for plans of the heart and domestic life, Moses was one of that very
common class who had more desire to be loved than power of loving. His
cravings and dreams were not for somebody to be devoted to, but for
somebody who should be devoted to him. And, like most people who
possess this characteristic, he mistook it for an affectionate
disposition.
Now the chief treasure of his heart had always been his little sister
Mara, chiefly from his conviction that he was the one absorbing thought
and love of her heart. He had never figured life to himself otherwise
than with Mara at his side, his unquestioning, devoted friend. Of course
he and his plans, his ways and wants, would always be in the future, as
they always had been, her sole thought. These sleeping partnerships in
the interchange of affection, which support one's heart with a basis of
uncounted wealth, and leave one free to come and go, and buy and sell,
without exaction or interference, are a convenience certainly, and the
loss of them in any way is like the sudden breaking of a bank in which
all one's deposits are laid.
It had never occurred to Moses how or in what capacity he should always
stand banker to the whole wealth of love that there was in Mara's heart,
and what provision he should make on his part for returning this
incalculable debt. But the interview of this evening had raised a new
thought in his mind. Mara, as he saw that day, was no longer a little
girl in a pink sun-bonnet. She was a woman,--a little one, it is true,
but every inch a woman,--and a woman invested with a singular poetic
charm of appearance, which, more than beauty, has the power of awakening
feeling in the other sex.
He felt in himself, in the experience of that one day, that there was
something subtle and veiled about her, which set the imagination at
work; that the wistful, plaintive expression of her dark eyes, and a
thousand little shy and tremulous movements of her face, affected him
more than the most brilliant of Sally Kittridge's sprightly sallies.
Yes, there would be people falling in love with her fast enough, he
thought even here, where she is as secluded as a pearl in an
oyster-shell,--it seems means were found to come after her,--and then
all the love of her heart, that priceless love, would go to another.
Mara would be absorbed in some one else, would love some one else, as he
knew she could, with heart and soul and mind and strength. When he
thought of this, it affected him much as it would if one were turned out
of a warm, smiling apartment into a bleak December storm. What should he
do, if that treasure which he had taken most for granted in all his
valuations of life should suddenly be found to belong to another? Who
was this fellow that seemed so free to visit her, and what had passed
between them? Was Mara in love with him, or going to be? There is no
saying how the consideration of this question enhanced in our hero's
opinion both her beauty and all her other good qualities.
Such a brave little heart! such a good, clear little head! and such a
pretty hand and foot! She was always so cheerful, so unselfish, so
devoted! When had he ever seen her angry, except when she had taken up
some childish quarrel of his, and fought for him like a little Spartan?
Then she was pious, too. She was born religious, thought our hero, who,
in common with many men professing skepticism for their own particular
part, set a great value on religion in that unknown future person whom
they are fond of designating in advance as "my wife." Yes, Moses meant
his wife should be pious, and pray for him, while he did as he pleased.
"Now there's that witch of a Sally Kittridge," he said to himself; "I
wouldn't have such a girl for a wife. Nothing to her but foam and
frisk,--no heart more than a bobolink! But isn't she amusing? By George!
isn't she, though?"
"But," thought Moses, "it's time I settled this matter who is to be my
wife. I won't marry till I'm rich,--that's flat. My wife isn't to rub
and grub. So at it I must go to raise the wind. I wonder if old Sewell
really does know anything about my parents. Miss Emily would have it
that there was some mystery that he had the key of; but I never could
get any thing from him. He always put me off in such a smooth way that I
couldn't tell whether he did or he didn't. But, now, supposing I have
relatives, family connections, then who knows but what there may be
property coming to me? That's an idea worth looking after, surely."
There's no saying with what vividness ideas and images go through one's
wakeful brain when the midnight moon is making an exact shadow of your
window-sash, with panes of light, on your chamber-floor. How vividly we
all have loved and hated and planned and hoped and feared and desired
and dreamed, as we tossed and turned to and fro upon such watchful,
still nights. In the stillness, the tide upon one side of the Island
replied to the dash on the other side in unbroken symphony, and Moses
began to remember all the stories gossips had told him of how he had
floated ashore there, like a fragment of tropical seaweed borne landward
by a great gale. He positively wondered at himself that he had never
thought of it more, and the more he meditated, the more mysterious and
inexplicable he felt. Then he had heard Miss Roxy once speaking
something about a bracelet, he was sure he had; but afterwards it was
hushed up, and no one seemed to know anything about it when he inquired.
But in those days he was a boy,--he was nobody,--now he was a young man.
He could go to Mr. Sewell, and demand as his right a fair answer to any
questions he might ask. If he found, as was quite likely, that there was
nothing to be known, his mind would be thus far settled,--he should
trust only to his own resources.
So far as the state of the young man's finances were concerned, it
would be considered in those simple times and regions an auspicious
beginning of life. The sum intrusted to him by Captain Kittridge had
been more than doubled by the liberality of Zephaniah Pennel, and Moses
had traded upon it in foreign parts with a skill and energy that brought
a very fair return, and gave him, in the eyes of the shrewd, thrifty
neighbors, the prestige of a young man who was marked for success in the
world.
He had already formed an advantageous arrangement with his grandfather
and Captain Kittridge, by which a ship was to be built, which he should
command, and thus the old Saturday afternoon dream of their childhood be
fulfilled. As he thought of it, there arose in his mind a picture of
Mara, with her golden hair and plaintive eyes and little white hands,
reigning as a fairy queen in the captain's cabin, with a sort of wish to
carry her off and make sure that no one else ever should get her from
him.
But these midnight dreams were all sobered down by the plain
matter-of-fact beams of the morning sun, and nothing remained of
immediate definite purpose except the resolve, which came strongly upon
Moses as he looked across the blue band of Harpswell Bay, that he would
go that morning and have a talk with Mr. Sewell.