VI.

The journey was a hard one, though so short. How many times an hour did

Hetty bless the good fortune which had given them Dr. Williams for an

escort! Sally had been so much excited and pleased at the prospect

of the trip to the sea-shore, that she had seemed in the outset far

stronger than she really was. Before mid-day a reaction had set in, and

she had grown so weak that the doctor was evidently alarmed. The baby

disturbed, and frightened by the noise and jar, had wailed almost

incessantly; and Hetty was more nearly at her wits' end than she had

ever been in her life. It was piteous to see her,--usually so brisk, so

authoritative, so unhesitating,--looking helplessly into the face of the

doctor, and saying:

“Oh, what shall we do! what shall we do!” At last, the weary day came

to an end; and when Hetty saw her two sufferers quietly asleep in snowy

beds, in a great airy room, with a blazing log-fire on the hearth, she

drew a long breath, and said to the doctor:

“This is the most awful day I ever lived through.”

Dr. Eben smiled. “You have had a life singularly free from troubles,

Miss Gunn.”

“No!” said Hetty, “I've had a great deal. But there has always been

something to do. The only things one can't bear, it seems to me, are

where one can't do any thing, like to-day: that poor little baby crying,

crying, and nothing to be done, but to wait for him to stop; and Sally

looking as if she would die any minute; and that screaming steam-engine

whirling us all along as if we were only dead freight. I suppose if

Sally had died, we should have had to keep right on, shouldn't we?”

“Yes,” said the doctor. Something in his tone arrested Hetty's ear. She

looked at him inquiringly; then she said slowly:

“I understand you. I am ashamed. We were only three people out of

hundreds: it is just like life, isn't it: how selfish we are without

realizing it! It isn't of any consequence how or where or when any one

of us dies: the train must keep right on. I see.”

“Yes,” said the doctor again: and this monosyllable meant even more than

the other. Dr. Eben was a philosopher. Epictetus, and that most royal of

royal emperors, Marcus Aurelius, had been his masters: their words

were ever present with him. “It is not possible that the nature of the

universe, either through want of power or want of skill, has made a

mistake;” “nothing happens to any man which he is not formed by nature

to bear,”--were hourly watchwords of thought with him. In this regard he

and Hetty were alike, though they had reached their common standpoint

by different roads: he by education and reasoning, and a profound

admiration for the ancient classics; she by instinct and healthfulness

of soul, and a profound love for that old Massachusetts militia-man, her

grandfather.

“The Runs” was, as Hetty had said, one of the loveliest of sea-side

places. Dr. Eben, who was familiar with all the well-known sea-side

resorts in America, was forced to admit that this little nook had a

charm of its own, unlike all the others. The epithet “hugged in,” which

Hetty had used, was the very phrase to best convey it. It was at the

mouth of a small river, which, as it drew near the sea, widened so

suddenly that it looked like a lake. The country, for miles about, was

threaded by little streams of water: which of them were sea making up,

and which were river coming down, it was hard to tell. In early morning

they were blue as the sky overhead; at sunset they glowed like a fiery

net, suddenly flung over the grasses and rushes. Great flocks of marsh

birds dwelt year after year in these cool, green labyrinths, and made

no small part of the changeful beauty of the picture, rising sometimes,

suddenly, in a dusky cloud, and floating away, soaring, and sinking, and

at last dropping out of sight again, as suddenly as they had risen.

The meadows were vivid green in June, vivid claret in October: no other

grass spreads such splendor of tint on so superb a palette, as the

salt-marsh grasses on the low, wide stretches of some of New England's

southern shores. Sailing down this river, and keeping close to the

left-hand bank, one came almost unawares on a sharp bend to the left:

here the river suddenly ended, and the sea began; the rushes and reeds

and high grasses ceased; a low, rocky barrier stayed them. Rounding this

point, lo, your boat swayed instantly to the left: a gentle surf-wave

took possession of you, and irresistibly bore you towards a yellow

sand beach, which curved inward like a reaper's sickle, not more than a

quarter of a mile long, from the handle to the shining point; smooth and

glistening, strewn with polished pebbles and tiny shells, it seemed some

half-hidden magic beach on which shallops of fairies might any moment

come to moor. On the farther point, so close to the sea that it

seemed to rise out of the water, stood a high stone lighthouse, with

a revolving light, whose rays swept the open sea for many miles. The

opposite river bank was a much higher one, and ran farther out to sea.

On this promontory was Safe Haven, a small, thickly settled town, whose

spires and house-tops, as seen from the beach at “The Runs,” looked

always like a picture, painted on the sky; white on gray in the morning,

gray on crimson at sunset. The farmhouse of which we have spoken stood

only a few rods back from the beach, and yet it had green fields on

either hand; and a row of Balm of Gilead trees in front; an old and

sandy road, seldom disturbed by wheels, ran between these trees and the

house, and rambled down towards the light-house. Wild pea and pimpernel

made this road gay; white clover and wild rose made it fragrant; and

there branched off from it a lane, on which if you turned and strayed

back into the fields, a mile or so, you came to thickets of wild azalia,

and tracts of pink laurel; and, a little way farther in, you came to

fresh-water ponds which in July were white with lilies. No storm ever

lashed the water high on the beach at “The Runs”; no sultriest summer

calm ever stilled it; the even rhythm and delightsome cooling of its

waves seemed to obey a law of their own, quite independent of the great

booming sea outside the light-house bar.

In the quiet, and the beauty, and the keen salt air of this charmed

spot, poor Sally Little lifted up her head, and began to live again,

like a flower taken from desert sands and set by a spring. The baby also

bloomed like a rose. In an incredibly short time, both mother and child

had so altered that one would hardly have known them. The days went by,

to them all, as days go by for children: unnamed, uncounted; only marked

by joy of sleep, and the delight of waking. In after years, when Hetty

looked back upon these weeks, they seemed to her, not like a dream,

which is usually the heart's first choice of a phrase to describe the

swift flight of a happy time, but like a few days spent on some other

planet, where, for the interval, she had been changed into a sort of

supernatural child. Except at night, they were never in the house. The

harsh New England May laid aside for them all its treacheries, and was

indeed the month of spring. Their mornings they spent on the water,

rowing or sailing; their afternoons in driving through the budding

and blossoming country. Always the baby lay in Hetty's lap: from the

beginning, his nurse had found herself perpetually set aside by Hetty's

imperious affection. As Eben Williams looked, day after day, on the

picture which Hetty and the baby made, he found himself day after day

more and more bewildered by Hetty. She had adopted towards him a uniform

manner of cordial familiarity, which had in it, however, no shade of

intimacy. If Hetty had been the veriest coquette living, she could

not have devised a more effectual charm to a man of Eben Williams's

temperament. He had come out unscathed from many sieges which had

been laid to him by women. He knew very well the ordinary methods, the

atmosphere of the average wooing or wooable woman, and he was proof

against them all. He was thirty years old and he had never yet been in

love. But this woman, who treated him with the same easy, unconscious

frankness with which men treat men, who never seemed to observe his

going or his coming, otherwise than as it might affect her friend's need

of him as a physician; this woman who seemed all mother while she was

holding the baby, and all boy while she was trying, under old Captain

Mayhew's guidance to learn to sail a boat; this woman who was a spinster

in years, and a child in simplicity and directness; who was beautiful,

and never once thought of her beauty; who was alone, and never seemed

lonely: she was a perpetual problem and fascination to him. Dr. Eben

was not usually given to concerning himself much as to other people's

opinion of him: but he found himself for ever wondering what Hetty

Gunn thought of him; whether she were beginning to lose any of her old

prejudice against him; and whether, after this seaside idyl were over,

he should ever see her again. The more he pondered, the less he could

solve the question. No wonder. The simple truth was that Hetty was not

thinking about him at all. She had accepted the whole situation with

frankness and good sense: she found him kind, helpful, cheery, and

entertaining; the embarrassments she had feared, did not arise, and

she was very glad of it. She often said to herself: “The doctor is very

sensible. He does not show any foolish feeling of resentment;” and she

felt a sincere and increasing gratitude to him, because Sally and her

child were fast regaining health under his care. But, beyond this, Hetty

did not occupy her thoughts with Dr. Eben. It had never been her way to

think about men, as most women think about them: good comradeship seemed

to be all that she was capable of towards a man. Dr. Eben said this to

himself hundreds of times each day; and then hundreds of other times

each day, as he watched the looks which she bent on the baby in her

arms, he knew that he had said what was not true; that there must be

unstirred depths in her nature, which only the great forces of love

could move. All this time Dr. Eben fancied that he was simply analyzing

Hetty as a psychological study. He would have admitted frankly to any

one, that she interested him more than any woman he had ever seen,

puzzled him more, occupied his thoughts more; but that he could be in

love with this rather eccentric middle-aged woman, beautiful though she

was, Dr. Eben would have warmly denied. His ideal maiden, the woman whom

he had been for ten years confidently expecting some day to find, woo,

and win, was quite unlike Hetty; unlike even what Hetty must have been

in her youth: she was to be slender and graceful; gentle as a dove;

vivacious, but in no wise opinionated, gracious and suave and versed in

all elegancies; cultured too, and of a rare, fine wit: so easy is it for

the heart to garnish its unfilled chambers, and picture forth the sort

of guest it will choose to entertain. Meanwhile, by doors which the

heart knows not of, quietly enters a guest of quite different presence,

takes up abode, is lodged and fed by angels, till grown a very monarch

in possession and control, it suddenly surprises the heart into an

absolute and unconditional allegiance; and this is like what the apostle

meant, when he said,--

“The kingdom of God cometh not by observation.”

When Hetty said to Dr. Eben, one night, “I really think we must go home.

Sally seems perfectly well, and baby too: do you not think it will be

quite safe to take them back?” he gave an actual start, and colored.

Professionally, Dr. Eben was more ashamed of himself in that instant

than he had ever been in his life. He had absolutely forgotten, for many

days, that it was in the capacity of a physician that he was living on

this shore of the sea. They had been at “The Runs” now two months; and,

except in his weekly visits to Lonway Corners, he had hardly recollected

that he was a physician at all. The sea and the wind had been Sally's

real physicians, and the baby's; and as for the other two, in the happy

quartette, had they needed a physician? Perhaps; but no physician was

there for them.

“Certainly! certainly!” he stammered, “it will be safe;” and his face

grew redder and redder, as he spoke. Hetty looked at him in honest

amazement. She could put but one interpretation on his manner.

“Why, there is no need of our going yet, if it isn't best. Don't look

so! Sally can stay here all summer if it will do her good.”

“You misunderstood me, Miss Gunn,” said the doctor, now himself again.

“It will really be perfectly safe for Mrs. Little to go home. She is

entirely well.”

“What did you mean then?” said Hetty, looking him straight in the eye

with honest perplexity in her face. “You looked as if you didn't think

it best to go.”

“No, Miss Gunn,” replied Dr. Eben. “I looked as if I did not want to go.

It has been so pleasant here: that was all.”

“Oh,” said Hetty, in a relieved tone, “was that it? I feel just so, too:

it has been delightful; it is the only real play-spell I ever had in my

life. But for all that I'm really impatient to get home: they need me on

the farm; the men have not been doing just as they ought to. Jim Little

is all right when I'm there; but they take advantage of him when I'm

away. I really must get home before haying. I think we must certainly go

some day next week.”

Dr. Eben was just going over to town for the letters. As he walked

slowly down to the beach, he said to himself:

“Haying! By Jove!” and this was pretty much all he thought during the

whole of the hour that he spent in rowing to and from the Safe Haven

wharf. “Haying!” he ejaculated again, and again. “What a woman that is!

I believe if we were all dead, she'd have just as keen an eye to that

haying!”

By “we all” in that sentence of his soliloquy, Dr. Eben really meant

“I.” He was beginning to be half aware of a personal unhappiness,

because Hetty showed no more consciousness of his existence. Her few

words this morning about returning home had produced startling results

in his mind; like those a chemist sometimes sees in his crucible, when,

on throwing in a single drop of some powerful agent, he discovers by

its instantaneous and infallible test, the presence of things he had not

suspected were there. Dr. Eben Williams clenched his hands as he paced

up and down the beach. He did not wish to love Hetty Gunn. He did

not approve of loving Hetty Gunn; but love her he did with the whole

strength of his soul. In this one brief hour, he had become aware of it.

What would be its result, in vain he tried to conjecture. One moment, he

said to himself that it was not in Hetty's nature to love any man; the

next moment, with a lover's inconsistency, he reproached himself for a

thought so unjust to her: one moment, he rated himself soundly for his

weakness, and told himself sternly that it was plain Hetty cared no more

for him than she did for one of her farm laborers; the next moment, he

fell into reverie full of a vague and hopeful recalling of all the kind

and familiar things she had ever done or said. The sum and substance of

his meditations was, however, that nothing should lead him to commit the

folly of asking Hetty to marry him, unless her present manner toward him

changed.

“I dare say she would laugh in my face,” thought he; “I don't know but

that she would in any man's face who should ask her,” and, armed and

panoplied in this resolution, Dr. Eben walked up to the spot where Hetty

sat under one of the old Balm of Gilead trees sewing, with the baby

in its cradle at her feet. It was still early morning: the Safe Haven

spires shone in the sun, and the little fishing schooners were racing

out to sea before the wind. This was one of the prettiest sights from

the beach at “The Runs.” Every morning scores of little fishing vessels

came down the river, shot past like arrows, and disappeared beyond the

bar. At night they came home again slowly; sometimes with their sails

cross-set, which made them look like great white butterflies skimming

the water. Hetty never wearied of watching them: still pictures never

wholly pleased her. The things in nature which had motion, evident aim,

purpose, arrested her eye, and gave her delight.

“I haven't learned to sail a boat yet, after all,” she said regretfully,

as the doctor came up. “Only see how lovely they are. I wish I could buy

this whole place, and carry it home. I think we will all come here again

next summer.”

“Not all,” said Dr. Eben; “I shall not be here with you.”

“No, I hope not,” replied Hetty, unconsciously. Dr. Eben laughed

outright: her tone was so unaffectedly honest.

“Oh, you know what I mean,” exclaimed Hetty, “I mean, I hope Sally will

not have to bring you as a physician. Of course, there is nothing to

hinder your coming here at any time, if you like,” she added, in a

kindly but indifferent tone.

“But I should not want to come alone,” said the doctor.

“No,” said Hetty, reflectively. “It would be dull, I shouldn't like it

myself, to be here all alone. The sea is the loneliest of things in the

universe, I think. The fields and the woods and the hills all look as

if they had good fellowship with each other perpetually; but the great,

blank, bare sea, looks for ever alone; and sometimes the waves seem

to me to run up on the shore as fiercely as starved wolves leaping on

prey!”

“Not on this little comfortable beach, though,” said Dr. Eben.

“Oh, no!” replied Hetty, “I did not mean such sea-shore as this. But

even here, I should find it sad if I were alone.”

“All places are sad if one is alone, Miss Gunn,” replied the doctor, in

a pensive tone, rare with him. Hetty turned a surprised glance at him,

and did not speak for a moment. Then she said:

“Yes; but nobody need be alone: there are always plenty of people to

take into one's house. If you are lonely, why don't you get somebody

to live with you, or you might be married,” she added, in as purely

matter-of-fact a tone, as she would have said, “you might take a

journey,” or “you might build on a wing to your house.”

This suggestion sounded oddly enough, coming so soon from the lips of

the woman whom the doctor had just been ardently wishing he could marry;

but its cool and unembarrassed tone was sufficient to corroborate his

utmost disheartenment.

“Ah!” he thought, “I knew she didn't care any thing for me!” and he fell

into a silent brown study which Hetty did not attempt to break. This was

one among her many charms to Dr. Eben, that she was capable of sitting

quietly by a person's side for long intervals of silence. The average

woman, when she is in the company of even a single person, seems to

consider herself derelict in duty, if conversation is not what she calls

“kept up;” an instinctive phrase, which, by its universal use, is the

bitterest comment on its own significance. Men have no such feeling. Two

men will sit by each other's side, it may be for hours, in silence,

and feel no derogation from good comradeship. Why should not women? The

answer is too evident. Women have a perpetual craving to be recognized,

to be admired; and a large part of their ceaseless chatter is no more

nor less than a surface device to call your attention to them; as little

children continually pull your gown to make you look at them. Hetty was

incapable of this. She was a vivacious talker when she had any thing to

say; but a most dogged holder of her tongue when she had not. In this

instance she had nothing to say, and she did not speak: the doctor had

so much to say that he did not speak, and they sat in silence till the

shrill bell from the farm-house door called them to dinner. As they

walked slowly up to the house, the doctor said:

“You don't wonder that I hate to go away from this lovely place, do you,

Miss Gunn?”

Any other woman but Hetty would have felt something which was in his

tone, though not in his words. But Hetty answered bluntly:

“Yes, I do wonder; it is very lovely here: but I should think you'd want

to be at work; I do. I think we've had play-spell enough; for, after

all, it hasn't been any thing but play-spell for you and me.”

“Now she despises me,” thought poor Dr. Eben. “She hasn't any tolerance

in her, anyhow,” and he was grave and preoccupied all through dinner.