THE BETROTHAL
Moses walked slowly home from his interview with Sally, in a sort of
maze of confused thought. In general, men understand women only from the
outside, and judge them with about as much real comprehension as an
eagle might judge a canary-bird. The difficulty of real understanding
intensifies in proportion as the man is distinctively manly, and the
woman womanly. There are men with a large infusion of the feminine
element in their composition who read the female nature with more
understanding than commonly falls to the lot of men; but in general,
when a man passes beyond the mere outside artifices and unrealities
which lie between the two sexes, and really touches his finger to any
vital chord in the heart of a fair neighbor, he is astonished at the
quality of the vibration.
"I could not have dreamed there was so much in her," thought Moses, as
he turned away from Sally Kittridge. He felt humbled as well as
astonished by the moral lecture which this frisky elf with whom he had
all summer been amusing himself, preached to him from the depths of a
real woman's heart. What she said of Mara's loving him filled his eyes
with remorseful tears,--and for the moment he asked himself whether this
restless, jealous, exacting desire which he felt to appropriate her
whole life and heart to himself were as really worthy of the name of
love as the generous self-devotion with which she had, all her life,
made all his interests her own.
Was he to go to her now and tell her that he loved her, and therefore
he had teased and vexed her,--therefore he had seemed to prefer another
before her,--therefore he had practiced and experimented upon her
nature? A suspicion rather stole upon him that love which expresses
itself principally in making exactions and giving pain is not exactly
worthy of the name. And yet he had been secretly angry with her all
summer for being the very reverse of this; for her apparent cheerful
willingness to see him happy with another; for the absence of all signs
of jealousy,--all desire of exclusive appropriation. It showed, he said
to himself, that there was no love; and now when it dawned on him that
this might be the very heroism of self-devotion, he asked himself which
was best worthy to be called love.
"She did love him, then!" The thought blazed up through the smouldering
embers of thought in his heart like a tongue of flame. She loved him! He
felt a sort of triumph in it, for he was sure Sally must know, they were
so intimate. Well, he would go to her, and tell her all, confess all his
sins, and be forgiven.
When he came back to the house, all was still evening. The moon, which
was playing brightly on the distant sea, left one side of the brown
house in shadow. Moses saw a light gleaming behind the curtain in the
little room on the lower floor, which had been his peculiar sanctum
during the summer past. He had made a sort of library of it, keeping
there his books and papers. Upon the white curtain flitted, from time to
time, a delicate, busy shadow; now it rose and now it stooped, and then
it rose again--grew dim and vanished, and then came out again. His heart
beat quick.
Mara was in his room, busy, as she always had been before his
departures, in cares for him. How many things had she made for him, and
done and arranged for him, all his life long! things which he had taken
as much as a matter of course as the shining of that moon. His thought
went back to the times of his first going to sea,--he a rough, chaotic
boy, sensitive and surly, and she the ever thoughtful good angel of a
little girl, whose loving-kindness he had felt free to use and to abuse.
He remembered that he made her cry there when he should have spoken
lovingly and gratefully to her, and that the words of acknowledgment
that ought to have been spoken, never had been said,--remained unsaid to
that hour. He stooped low, and came quite close to the muslin curtain.
All was bright in the room, and shadowy without; he could see her
movements as through a thin white haze. She was packing his sea-chest;
his things were lying about her, folded or rolled nicely. Now he saw her
on her knees writing something with a pencil in a book, and then she
enveloped it very carefully in silk paper, and tied it trimly, and hid
it away at the bottom of the chest. Then she remained a moment kneeling
at the chest, her head resting in her hands. A sort of strange, sacred
feeling came over him as he heard a low murmur, and knew that she felt a
Presence that he never felt or acknowledged. He felt somehow that he was
doing her a wrong thus to be prying upon moments when she thought
herself alone with God; a sort of vague remorse filled him; he felt as
if she were too good for him. He turned away, and entering the front
door of the house, stepped noiselessly along and lifted the latch of the
door. He heard a rustle as of one rising hastily as he opened it and
stood before Mara. He had made up his mind what to say; but when she
stood there before him, with her surprised, inquiring eyes, he felt
confused.
"What, home so soon?" she said.
"You did not expect me, then?"
"Of course not,--not for these two hours; so," she said, looking about,
"I found some mischief to do among your things. If you had waited as
long as I expected, they would all have been quite right again, and you
would never have known."
Moses sat down and drew her toward him, as if he were going to say
something, and then stopped and began confusedly playing with her
work-box.
"Now, please don't," said she, archly. "You know what a little old maid
I am about my things!"
"Mara," said Moses, "people have asked you to marry them, have they
not?"
"People asked me to marry them!" said Mara. "I hope not. What an odd
question!"
"You know what I mean," said Moses; "you have had offers of
marriage--from Mr. Adams, for example."
"And what if I have?"
"You did not accept him, Mara?" said Moses.
"No, I did not."
"And yet he was a fine man, I am told, and well fitted to make you
happy."
"I believe he was," said Mara, quietly.
"And why were you so foolish?"
Mara was fretted at this question. She supposed Moses had come to tell
her of his engagement to Sally, and that this was a kind of preface, and
she answered,--
"I don't know why you call it foolish. I was a true friend to Mr. Adams.
I saw intellectually that he might have the power of making any
reasonable woman happy. I think now that the woman will be fortunate who
becomes his wife; but I did not wish to marry him."
"Is there anybody you prefer to him, Mara?" said Moses.
She started up with glowing cheeks and sparkling eyes.
"You have no right to ask me that, though you are my brother."
"I am not your brother, Mara," said Moses, rising and going toward her,
"and that is why I ask you. I feel I have a right to ask you."
"I do not understand you," she said, faintly.
"I can speak plainer, then. I wish to put in my poor venture. I love
you, Mara--not as a brother. I wish you to be my wife, if you will."
While Moses was saying these words, Mara felt a sort of whirling in her
head, and it grew dark before her eyes; but she had a strong, firm will,
and she mastered herself and answered, after a moment, in a quiet,
sorrowful tone, "How can I believe this, Moses? If it is true, why have
you done as you have this summer?"
"Because I was a fool, Mara,--because I was jealous of Mr.
Adams,--because I somehow hoped, after all, that you either loved me or
that I might make you think more of me through jealousy of another. They
say that love always is shown by jealousy."
"Not true love, I should think," said Mara. "How _could_ you do so?--it
was cruel to her,--cruel to me."
"I admit it,--anything, everything you can say. I have acted like a fool
and a knave, if you will; but after all, Mara, I do love you. I know I
am not worthy of you--never was--never can be; you are in all things a
true, noble woman, and I have been unmanly."
It is not to be supposed that all this was spoken without accompaniments
of looks, movements, and expressions of face such as we cannot give, but
such as doubled their power to the parties concerned; and the "I love
you" had its usual conclusive force as argument, apology,
promise,--covering, like charity, a multitude of sins.
Half an hour after, you might have seen a youth and a maiden coming
together out of the door of the brown house, and walking arm in arm
toward the sea-beach.
It was one of those wonderfully clear moonlight evenings, when the
ocean, like a great reflecting mirror, seems to double the brightness of
the sky,--and its vast expanse lay all around them in its stillness,
like an eternity of waveless peace. Mara remembered that time in her
girlhood when she had followed Moses into the woods on just such a
night,--how she had sat there under the shadows of the trees, and looked
over to Harpswell and noticed the white houses and the meeting-house,
all so bright and clear in the moonlight, and then off again on the
other side of the island where silent ships were coming and going in the
mysterious stillness. They were talking together now with that
outflowing fullness which comes when the seal of some great reserve has
just been broken,--going back over their lives from day to day, bringing
up incidents of childhood, and turning them gleefully like two children.
And then Moses had all the story of his life to relate, and to tell Mara
all he had learned of his mother,--going over with all the narrative
contained in Mr. Sewell's letter.
"You see, Mara, that it was intended that you should be my fate," he
ended; "so the winds and waves took me up and carried me to the lonely
island where the magic princess dwelt."
"You are Prince Ferdinand," said Mara.
"And you are Miranda," said he.
"Ah!" she said with fervor, "how plainly we can see that our heavenly
Father has been guiding our way! How good He is,--and how we must try to
live for Him,--both of us."
A sort of cloud passed over Moses's brow. He looked embarrassed, and
there was a pause between them, and then he turned the conversation.
Mara felt pained; it was like a sudden discord; such thoughts and
feelings were the very breath of her life; she could not speak in
perfect confidence and unreserve, as she then spoke, without uttering
them; and her finely organized nature felt a sort of electric
consciousness of repulsion and dissent. She grew abstracted, and they
walked on in silence.
"I see now, Mara, I have pained you," said Moses, "but there are a class
of feelings that you have that I have not and cannot have. No, I cannot
feign anything. I can understand what religion is in you, I can admire
its results. I can be happy, if it gives you any comfort; but people are
differently constituted. I never can feel as you do."
"Oh, don't say never," said Mara, with an intensity that nearly startled
him; "it has been the one prayer, the one hope, of my life, that you
might have these comforts,--this peace."
"I need no comfort or peace except what I shall find in you," said
Moses, drawing her to himself, and looking admiringly at her; "but pray
for me still. I always thought that my wife must be one of the sort of
women who pray."
"And why?" said Mara, in surprise.
"Because I need to be loved a great deal, and it is only that kind who
pray who know how to love really. If you had not prayed for me all this
time, you never would have loved me in spite of all my faults, as you
did, and do, and will, as I know you will," he said, folding her in his
arms, and in his secret heart he said, "Some of this intensity, this
devotion, which went upward to heaven, will be mine one day. She will
worship me."
"The fact is, Mara," he said, "I am a child of this world. I have no
sympathy with things not seen. You are a half-spiritual creature,--a
child of air; and but for the great woman's heart in you, I should feel
that you were something uncanny and unnatural. I am selfish, I know; I
frankly admit, I never disguised it; but I love your religion because it
makes you love me. It is an incident to that loving, trusting nature
which makes you all and wholly mine, as I want you to be. I want you all
and wholly; every thought, every feeling,--the whole strength of your
being. I don't care if I say it: I would not wish to be second in your
heart even to God himself!"
"Oh, Moses!" said Mara, almost starting away from him, "such words are
dreadful; they will surely bring evil upon us."
"I only breathed out my nature, as you did yours. Why should you love an
unseen and distant Being more than you do one whom you can feel and see,
who holds you in his arms, whose heart beats like your own?"
"Moses," said Mara, stopping and looking at him in the clear moonlight,
"God has always been to me not so much like a father as like a dear and
tender mother. Perhaps it was because I was a poor orphan, and my father
and mother died at my birth, that He has been so loving to me. I never
remember the time when I did not feel His presence in my joys and my
sorrows. I never had a thought of joy and sorrow that I could not say to
Him. I never woke in the night that I did not feel that He was loving
and watching me, and that I loved Him in return. Oh, how many, many
things I have said to Him about you! My heart would have broken years
ago, had it not been for Him; because, though you did not know it, you
often seemed unkind; you hurt me very often when you did not mean to.
His love is so much a part of my life that I cannot conceive of life
without it. It is the very air I breathe."
Moses stood still a moment, for Mara spoke with a fervor that affected
him; then he drew her to his heart, and said,--
"Oh, what could ever make you love me?"
"He sent you and gave you to me," she answered, "to be mine in time and
eternity."
The words were spoken in a kind of enthusiasm so different from the
usual reserve of Mara, that they seemed like a prophecy. That night, for
the first time in her life, had she broken the reserve which was her
very nature, and spoken of that which was the intimate and hidden
history of her soul.