A COQUETTE
The timbers of the ship which was to carry the fortunes of our hero were
laid by the side of Middle Bay, and all these romantic shores could
hardly present a lovelier scene. This beautiful sheet of water separates
Harpswell from a portion of Brunswick. Its shores are rocky and
pine-crowned, and display the most picturesque variety of outline. Eagle
Island, Shelter Island, and one or two smaller ones, lie on the glassy
surface like soft clouds of green foliage pierced through by the
steel-blue tops of arrowy pine-trees.
There were a goodly number of shareholders in the projected vessel; some
among the most substantial men in the vicinity. Zephaniah Pennel had
invested there quite a solid sum, as had also our friend Captain
Kittridge. Moses had placed therein the proceeds of his recent voyage,
which enabled him to buy a certain number of shares, and he secretly
revolved in his mind whether the sum of money left by his father might
not enable him to buy the whole ship. Then a few prosperous voyages, and
his fortune was made!
He went into the business of building the new vessel with all the
enthusiasm with which he used, when a boy, to plan ships and mould
anchors. Every day he was off at early dawn in his working-clothes, and
labored steadily among the men till evening. No matter how early he
rose, however, he always found that a good fairy had been before him and
prepared his dinner, daintily sometimes adding thereto a fragrant
little bunch of flowers. But when his boat returned home at evening, he
no longer saw her as in the days of girlhood waiting far out on the
farthest point of rock for his return. Not that she did not watch for it
and run out many times toward sunset; but the moment she had made out
that it was surely he, she would run back into the house, and very
likely find an errand in her own room, where she would be so deeply
engaged that it would be necessary for him to call her down before she
could make her appearance. Then she came smiling, chatty, always
gracious, and ready to go or to come as he requested,--the very
cheerfulest of household fairies,--but yet for all that there was a
cobweb invisible barrier around her that for some reason or other he
could not break over. It vexed and perplexed him, and day after day he
determined to whistle it down,--ride over it rough-shod,--and be as free
as he chose with this apparently soft, unresistant, airy being, who
seemed so accessible. Why shouldn't he kiss her when he chose, and sit
with his arm around her waist, and draw her familiarly upon his
knee,--this little child-woman, who was as a sister to him? Why, to be
sure? Had she ever frowned or scolded as Sally Kittridge did when he
attempted to pass the air-line that divides man from womanhood? Not at
all. She had neither blushed nor laughed, nor ran away. If he kissed
her, she took it with the most matter-of-fact composure; if he passed
his arm around her, she let it remain with unmoved calmness; and so
somehow he did these things less and less, and wondered why.
The fact is, our hero had begun an experiment with his little friend
that we would never advise a young man to try on one of these intense,
quiet, soft-seeming women, whose whole life is inward. He had determined
to find out whether she loved him before he committed himself to her;
and the strength of a whole book of martyrs is in women to endure and
to bear without flinching before they will surrender the gate of this
citadel of silence. Moreover, our hero had begun his siege with
precisely the worst weapons.
For on the night that he returned and found Mara conversing with a
stranger, the suspicion arose in his mind that somehow Mara might be
particularly interested in him, and instead of asking her, which anybody
might consider the most feasible step in the case, he asked Sally
Kittridge.
Sally's inborn, inherent love of teasing was up in a moment. Did she
know anything of that Mr. Adams? Of course she did,--a young lawyer of
one of the best Boston families,--a splendid fellow; she wished any such
luck might happen to her! Was Mara engaged to him? What would he give to
know? Why didn't he ask Mara? Did he expect her to reveal her friend's
secrets? Well, she shouldn't,--report said Mr. Adams was well-to-do in
the world, and had expectations from an uncle,--and didn't Moses think
he was interesting in conversation? Everybody said what a conquest it
was for an Orr's Island girl, etc., etc. And Sally said the rest with
many a malicious toss and wink and sly twinkle of the dimples of her
cheek, which might mean more or less, as a young man of imaginative
temperament was disposed to view it. Now this was all done in pure
simple love of teasing. We incline to think phrenologists have as yet
been very incomplete in their classification of faculties, or they would
have appointed a separate organ for this propensity of human nature.
Certain persons, often the most kind-hearted in the world, and who would
not give pain in any serious matter, seem to have an insatiable appetite
for those small annoyances we commonly denominate teasing,--and Sally
was one of this number.
She diverted herself infinitely in playing upon the excitability of
Moses,--in awaking his curiosity, and baffling it, and tormenting him
with a whole phantasmagoria of suggestions and assertions, which played
along so near the line of probability, that one could never tell which
might be fancy and which might be fact.
Moses therefore pursued the line of tactics for such cases made and
provided, and strove to awaken jealousy in Mara by paying marked and
violent attentions to Sally. He went there evening after evening,
leaving Mara to sit alone at home. He made secrets with her, and alluded
to them before Mara. He proposed calling his new vessel the Sally
Kittridge; but whether all these things made Mara jealous or not, he
could never determine. Mara had no peculiar gift for acting, except in
this one point; but here all the vitality of nature rallied to her
support, and enabled her to preserve an air of the most unperceiving
serenity. If she shed any tears when she spent a long, lonesome evening,
she was quite particular to be looking in a very placid frame when Moses
returned, and to give such an account of the books, or the work, or
paintings which had interested her, that Moses was sure to be vexed.
Never were her inquiries for Sally more cordial,--never did she seem
inspired by a more ardent affection for her.
Whatever may have been the result of this state of things in regard to
Mara, it is certain that Moses succeeded in convincing the common fame
of that district that he and Sally were destined for each other, and the
thing was regularly discussed at quilting frolics and tea-drinkings
around, much to Miss Emily's disgust and Aunt Roxy's grave satisfaction,
who declared that "Mara was altogether too good for Moses Pennel, but
Sally Kittridge would make him stand round,"--by which expression she
was understood to intimate that Sally had in her the rudiments of the
same kind of domestic discipline which had operated so favorably in the
case of Captain Kittridge.
These things, of course, had come to Mara's ears. She had overheard the
discussions on Sunday noons as the people between meetings sat over
their doughnuts and cheese, and analyzed their neighbors' affairs, and
she seemed to smile at them all. Sally only laughed, and declared that
it was no such thing; that she would no more marry Moses Pennel, or any
other fellow, than she would put her head into the fire. What did she
want of any of them? She knew too much to get married,--that she did.
She was going to have her liberty for one while yet to come, etc., etc.;
but all these assertions were of course supposed to mean nothing but the
usual declarations in such cases. Mara among the rest thought it quite
likely that this thing was yet to be.
So she struggled and tried to reason down a pain which constantly ached
in her heart when she thought of this. She ought to have foreseen that
it must some time end in this way. Of course she must have known that
Moses would some time choose a wife; and how fortunate that, instead of
a stranger, he had chosen her most intimate friend. Sally was careless
and thoughtless, to be sure, but she had a good generous heart at the
bottom, and she hoped she would love Moses at least as well as _she_
did, and then she would always live with them, and think of any little
things that Sally might forget.
After all, Sally was so much more capable and efficient a person than
herself,--so much more bustling and energetic, she would make altogether
a better housekeeper, and doubtless a better wife for Moses. But then it
was so hard that he did not tell her about it. Was she not his
sister?--his confidant for all his childhood?--and why should he shut up
his heart from her now? But then she must guard herself from being
jealous,--that would be mean and wicked. So Mara, in her zeal of
self-discipline, pushed on matters; invited Sally to tea to meet Moses;
and when she came, left them alone together while she busied herself in
hospitable cares. She sent Moses with errands and commissions to Sally,
which he was sure to improve into protracted visits; and in short, no
young match-maker ever showed more good-will to forward the union of two
chosen friends than Mara showed to unite Moses and Sally.
So the flirtation went on all summer, like a ship under full sail, with
prosperous breezes; and Mara, in the many hours that her two best
friends were together, tried heroically to persuade herself that she was
not unhappy. She said to herself constantly that she never had loved
Moses other than as a brother, and repeated and dwelt upon the fact to
her own mind with a pertinacity which might have led her to suspect the
reality of the fact, had she had experience enough to look closer. True,
it was rather lonely, she said, but that she was used to,--she always
had been and always should be. Nobody would ever love her in return as
she loved; which sentence she did not analyze very closely, or she might
have remembered Mr. Adams and one or two others, who had professed more
for her than she had found herself able to return. That general
proposition about nobody is commonly found, if sifted to the bottom, to
have specific relation to somebody whose name never appears in the
record.
Nobody could have conjectured from Mara's calm, gentle cheerfulness of
demeanor, that any sorrow lay at the bottom of her heart; she would not
have owned it to herself.
There are griefs which grow with years, which have no marked
beginnings,--no especial dates; they are not events, but slow
perceptions of disappointment, which bear down on the heart with a
constant and equable pressure like the weight of the atmosphere, and
these things are never named or counted in words among life's sorrows;
yet through them, as through an unsuspected inward wound, life, energy,
and vigor slowly bleed away, and the persons, never owning even to
themselves the weight of the pressure,--standing, to all appearance,
fair and cheerful, are still undermined with a secret wear of this inner
current, and ready to fall with the first external pressure.
There are persons often brought into near contact by the relations of
life, and bound to each other by a love so close, that they are
perfectly indispensable to each other, who yet act upon each other as a
file upon a diamond, by a slow and gradual friction, the pain of which
is so equable, so constantly diffused through life, as scarcely ever at
any time to force itself upon the mind as a reality.
Such had been the history of the affection of Mara for Moses. It had
been a deep, inward, concentrated passion that had almost absorbed
self-consciousness, and made her keenly alive to all the moody,
restless, passionate changes of his nature; it had brought with it that
craving for sympathy and return which such love ever will, and yet it
was fixed upon a nature so different and so uncomprehending that the
action had for years been one of pain more than pleasure. Even now, when
she had him at home with her and busied herself with constant cares for
him, there was a sort of disturbing, unquiet element in the history of
every day. The longing for him to come home at night,--the wish that he
would stay with her,--the uncertainty whether he would or would not go
and spend the evening with Sally,--the musing during the day over all
that he had done and said the day before, were a constant interior
excitement. For Moses, besides being in his moods quite variable and
changeable, had also a good deal of the dramatic element in him, and put
on sundry appearances in the way of experiment.
He would feign to have quarreled with Sally, that he might detect
whether Mara would betray some gladness; but she only evinced concern
and a desire to make up the difficulty. He would discuss her character
and her fitness to make a man happy in matrimony in the style that
young gentlemen use who think their happiness a point of great
consequence in the creation; and Mara, always cool, and firm, and
sensible, would talk with him in the most maternal style possible, and
caution him against trifling with her affections. Then again he would be
lavish in his praise of Sally's beauty, vivacity, and energy, and Mara
would join with the most apparently unaffected delight. Sometimes he
ventured, on the other side, to rally her on some future husband, and
predict the days when all the attentions which she was daily bestowing
on him would be for another; and here, as everywhere else, he found his
little Sphinx perfectly inscrutable. Instinct teaches the grass-bird,
who hides her eggs under long meadow grass, to creep timidly yards from
the nest, and then fly up boldly in the wrong place; and a like instinct
teaches shy girls all kinds of unconscious stratagems when the one
secret of their life is approached. They may be as truthful in all other
things as the strictest Puritan, but here they deceive by an infallible
necessity. And meanwhile, where was Sally Kittridge in all this matter?
Was her heart in the least touched by the black eyes and long lashes?
Who can say? Had she a heart? Well, Sally was a good girl. When one got
sufficiently far down through the foam and froth of the surface to find
what was in the depths of her nature, there was abundance there of good
womanly feeling, generous and strong, if one could but get at it.
She was the best and brightest of daughters to the old Captain, whose
accounts she kept, whose clothes she mended, whose dinner she often
dressed and carried to him, from loving choice; and Mrs. Kittridge
regarded her housewifely accomplishments with pride, though she never
spoke to her otherwise than in words of criticism and rebuke, as in her
view an honest mother should who means to keep a flourishing sprig of a
daughter within limits of a proper humility.
But as for any sentiment or love toward any person of the other sex,
Sally, as yet, had it not. Her numerous admirers were only so many
subjects for the exercise of her dear delight of teasing, and Moses
Pennel, the last and most considerable, differed from the rest only in
the fact that he was a match for her in this redoubtable art and
science, and this made the game she was playing with him altogether more
stimulating than that she had carried on with any other of her admirers.
For Moses could sulk and storm for effect, and clear off as bright as
Harpswell Bay after a thunder-storm--for effect also. Moses could play
jealous, and make believe all those thousand-and-one shadowy nothings
that coquettes, male and female, get up to carry their points with; and
so their quarrels and their makings-up were as manifold as the
sea-breezes that ruffled the ocean before the Captain's door.
There is but one danger in play of this kind, and that is, that deep
down in the breast of every slippery, frothy, elfish Undine sleeps the
germ of an unawakened soul, which suddenly, in the course of some such
trafficking with the outward shows and seemings of affection, may wake
up and make of the teasing, tricksy elf a sad and earnest woman--a
creature of loves and self-denials and faithfulness unto death--in
short, something altogether too good, too sacred to be trifled with; and
when a man enters the game protected by a previous attachment which
absorbs all his nature, and the woman awakes in all her depth and
strength to feel the real meaning of love and life, she finds that she
has played with one stronger than she, at a terrible disadvantage.
Is this mine lying dark and evil under the saucy little feet of our
Sally? Well, we should not of course be surprised some day to find it
so.