never had cried for Tom as his mother did,--never named him to her; she
thought he had forgotten. The fancy seized him, that, now that he was
here, if Tom cared for him, and for coming there, as he did once, he was
not far off at that moment. His sallow jaws colored at the boyish
notion, and then he laughed at it,--in a strange saturnine fashion. It
was as if another man than the simple Professor suddenly looked out
through his eyes,--a man older, more untrustworthy, weak through a
life-long doubt,--not his natural self, in a word, but the man which
years of life in dirty ways, and the creed which his father gave him,
had made of him. He looked out of the window, his fingers knitted behind
him.
"There is the sea, and I am here, but Tom is not here; he's dust and
ashes, yonder in Salem graveyard,--a heap of yellow dust, nothing
more,"--a laugh, which the foulest of French skeptics would have envied,
crossing his grim face at this fancy of the child's being yet alive and
near to him.
But the creed having asserted itself thus, the simple face grew suddenly
blank, and the gray eyes looked out of their dark hollows as if the
world were empty and he alone lived to tell the tale.
M. Jacobus had a watchful keeper; she was never far off; she put her
hand on his shoulder now with,--
"What do you look for at sea, Jerome?"--speaking cheerfully, and in his
own tongue.
He did not turn his head until he thought he had put all his trouble out
of sight.
"I pursue your Captain's fancy," he said. "_I_ find in the sea but muddy
water, with power to bring rage and destruction for no cause. I find
great treasures lying useless below, starving men sailing above,--great
pain, death every day,--the baby washed from its mother's arms, the
husband from the wife. The good Captain sees a loving God behind all
these: my eyes are not so clear."
She pushed the lattice farther open.
"It is a strong sea for December," was all she said. "The tides run
higher later, usually."
"Everyman makes his own God and heaven," maundered on the Professor, in
a set, monotonous voice, "out of his individual animal or mental needs.
The Southern European surrounds Him with virgins, paradise, and music;
and the cold Scotchman gives us a magnified shadow of his own grim face,
gracious and merciful only to his own petty clan."
Mrs. Jacobus did not reply. It was an old tale to her ears, perhaps; she
remembered it croaked by his father with a venomous zest; but Jerome
repeated it with a stolid apathy, like one who asked for bread in life,
and they gave him but this stone.
"Come down on the beach," she said. "There are curious bits of wreck
washed ashore to-day, they tell me: broken sea-weeds from far-off
coasts, unknown here; and small shell-fish coming into shoal water for
safety, that never ventured so far inland in the memory of any of the
wreckers. Come look at this sky, Jerome: how rapidly it has changed!"
M. Jacobus thrust out his head with an assumption of sagacity.
"It was there that Captain Lufflin warned me the danger lay," said his
wife, pointing to a mere fleck of quiet and black in the northeast,
which remained immovably solid while the whole heaven around was broken
into drifting frightened masses. Beneath, (yet not far beneath, for
ocean and sky to-day seemed like gray, fast-approaching planes,) the
angry roar of the waves and the tossing of yellow frothy caps had been
suddenly quelled into the vast silence which rose and fell in slowly
darkening, awful pulsations. Jacobus and his wife looked on anxiously.
"These are peculiar features of a storm," he said, "if they forebode a
storm. The tide should be at its lowest ebb now. I will go and consult
our friend George. Come down! come down!"
As he hurried out of the door, however, he stopped, and put his hand on
her shoulder with a deprecating smile.
"I ought not to let those old thoughts strike the life out of the day
for me, ought I?"
"No, Jerome, no!" She caught his hand and kissed it as a mother might a
child's.
"I had almost ceased to make holiday," he added, gravely, putting his
foot up, retying the leather strings of his heavy shoes, and looking
down on his fisherman's rig with secret complacency.
"Shall we go down? There are foreboding signs in the sea, that I would
wish to study."
* * * * *
Late in the afternoon of that day, Captain Lufflin, coming up the rocks
from the beach, (for he had spent the day measuring the advancing
tide,) saw a queer-shaped cart or van drive up to the side door, and a
woman with divers bundles alight and go in. About an hour after, Madame
Jacobus came out to him, a woollen shawl over her head, and stood beside
the garden-fence with him, pulling the heads off the dead
hollyhock-stalks as she talked.
"I've a story to tell you," she said, her voice thick at first, and her
face hot.
"Eh? About yourself, Charlotte?" The Captain's small eyes kindled with
curiosity, and he pushed a log for her to sit down. "Go on, my dear."
"About ourselves,--M. Jacobus and me,"--with another pause.
"I perceived," said her father's friend, preparing for the confession of
some imprudence, "that your married life has been peculiar: modelled
after the ideas of young people, I suppose."
"I do not know," she said, absently. She balanced herself more
comfortably against the fence, and went on with her story with a quiet
unconsciousness that balked Lufflin's intention of censure.
"We have been poor in the two or three years just past," she
said,--"wanted enough to satisfy even his favorite Saint-Simon's theory.
My husband is no"----
"Financier?" gently suggested the Captain.
"No. He could beard the world in defence of an idea; but for bread and
butter, ah-h! I'm rougher! I ought to have been the man for that! About
a year ago he was offered a chance to go with a geological party to
Brazil. I was glad of that. The air and sights of our close court were
killing him. I wanted to finish some work I had to do, and then"----
She stopped; a scarlet flush broke over her neck and face.
"Yes, child?"
"God was very good to us,"--in an almost whisper. "Six months after my
husband left home, He gave us another child."
"You never told me this," cried Lufflin, aghast.
"I never told Jerome," quietly. "I put my baby out to nurse, where it
could breathe air, and not poison,--not far from here. I have left it
there since. May-be it was wrong," said poor Charlotte, hiding her face
in her hands, with a happy laugh. "It was a whim, I know. I may have
wronged him, but I had a fancy to give him his home and his child both
upon this Christmas day."
The Captain gasped, took a fresh bit of tobacco, but said nothing.
"There is no more to say,--but you want to see the baby?" suddenly.
"Certainly, Charlotte, certainly,--see the baby!" And the old Captain
followed her, glancing about him in a mild imbecility of astonishment.
"God bless my soul!" he broke out at last. "The idea of springing a
house and a baby on a man in one day! It assuredly is, child, the most
unprecedented whim"----
"Yes, yes,"--dodging suddenly into a room, and bringing out a bundle of
white linen and wool. She stood in the passage by a window, the red
evening light falling about her.
"It's a boy," she whispered, lifting off the covering. "He is very like
little Tom,"--an inexpressible awe on her face.
"Yes," said the Captain. He had meant to say a few sensible words to
bring her to reason about this matter; but, instead, he took up the
little white foot thrust out of the blanket and kissed it sheepishly,
looking askance at the woman's figure and face bent over the child,
beaming with a rare and tender beauty.
They said little after that. The mother stood playing with her baby,
touching its cheeks and chin until it laughed. She forgot Lufflin was
there, I suppose. Her soul seemed to be in her fingers, her pure passion
to envelop the mite of flesh as the weak sunshine did herself, and to
hold it in life. There was something in this wife-and-mother-love which
poor Lufflin did not understand.
"Well, well," he said, "I'll go now. God bless you, Lotty! You'll let me
have a share in this young fellow here, eh?"--and trotted down the back
stairs, leaving her in the narrow hall. "Old Mounchere Jacobus must have
been a good fellow," he thought, "to have deserved all this. God deals
so differently with different men!"
She had nothing more to say about it, Madame Jacobus had told him; yet,
standing there in the quiet cold light, within a few steps of the closed
door behind which was her husband, her feet on the floor of the house
she had worked hard to buy him, the child in her arms she would give him
to-morrow, she thought she had touched in this hour the very depth and
height of life.
"It is worth all the pain that's gone,--it's worth it all," she said
again and again, pressing the boy so closely that he cried. When she
turned to the window, the cold and gathering night somehow made her home
more real, the future alive with great and good possibilities.
Yet it was a foreboding, revengeful night. Outside the little panes of
the passage-window she could see the gray walls of the house and the
bare trunks of the trees darken and draw apart in the dull light. There
was no mellowness in the outlines of rocks or beach: they loomed up
harsh and threatening. From the low, dingy horizon came at intervals
subdued soughs of wind that broke on the projecting headlands with a
muffled cry. The floor grew chilly to her feet; the strip of carpet
shook in the gusts; and the passage was dark, but for a cheerful glimmer
of light under the Professor's door. Charlotte went shivering with her
baby into the nurse's room; and when she had watched it safe into its
cradle, came out, going again through the hall to the library. As she
touched the door-handle, she checked herself in humming some song,
growing colorless as she thought what it was,--an old ditty with which
she used to lull little Tom to sleep, but never had sung since then. But
in a moment a curious smile came on her lips. "That is all right," she
said, opening the door. From that moment her little boy and poor Tom,
dead in the city graveyard yonder, were as one to the mother: she nursed
them in her heart together.
One word as to the plan of the house, for the better understanding of
what followed. It was niched, as we said, into a cove of rocks, open
only to the sea. In spite of all the croaking of the wreckers, the
highest tide had never yet approached nearer than to ten feet sheer
descent from the foundation-stones. On the ground-floor was a room
appropriated by the Captain, filled with his bunk, fishing-nets, guns,
and other trumpery, and the kitchen and offices; above were the library
and dining-room; and on the third floor three bed-chambers.
M. Jacobus sat now by the fire in the dining-room, his feet on the
fender, some books scattered around him, rapidly getting out with them
into a world where northeasters, nor high tides, nor his wife either,
ever came. She saw that in the half-frown with which he looked at her
over his spectacles.
"M. Jacobus!" she said.
"_Plait-il, Madame?_" and afterwards laid down his book, thinking the
figure before him could hardly be that of his matter-of-fact wife: which
was true enough,--for her heart was brimful of her little project and
the child, and the face, with its low forehead and resolute jaws, beamed
curiously young and eager. Her husband seated her, and stood leaning on
the mantel-shelf while she talked: he had all the courtesy of an
old-fashioned Frenchman towards women; and besides, M. Jacobus had a
keen eye for beauty in this the only woman he had ever loved.
"Go down, Jerome; the tide turns," she said. "Captain Lufflin is
watching it. Besides, I want this room to make ready for to-morrow."
M. Jacobus began, obedient as usual, to button his coat, muttering,
"To-morrow?" however, with a puzzled face.
"It is Christmas,"--with the repressed excitement now in her voice as in
her eyes. "I want that we shall keep the day this year; I have some
little plans"--
The skeptic's face altered; he lingered over the last button of the
coat.
"It is worth more to you than other days?"--dryly.
"We never observed it before. God has been so good to us, Jerome,--and
it is His day of the whole year,--the day," her voice sinking with an
inexpressible tenderness, "when Love came into the world as a little
child,--_as a little child._"
He looked at her wistfully for a moment, then took up his stick and an
hygrometer, saying, as he opened the door,--
"But hear to the cry of the sea! it grows more muffled and dull each
hour. If Death itself could speak, that is his voice, I think." He spoke
vaguely, with an anxious, absent look, then went groping down the dark
stairway. Presently she heard him come back hurriedly.
"Will it cost you much to give up this day, child?" he demanded, coming
close and putting his hand on her head. "I ask it of you. I must be with
you in your little plans, and"--
"Your mother kept it," interrupted she, sharply.
"I know,"--with dull, pained looks at the fire, at the night without,
everything but her face. "Her faith is not mine."
"No, Jerome," gently,--for she was tender with him always, when he
seemed weaker than herself. "But if it could be, my husband?"--her voice
growing unsteady. "Humor me this one time: I have looked forward to it
so long! Perhaps it was to remember my own childhood; perhaps I had some
little gifts to offer you. But let me keep it. If it be childish, let me
be a child."
Something in the broken voice reminded him of little Tom's. She put her
hands on his arms, too, and in the thin face turned up to his there was
a look left by all the years of patient love and work she had borne for
him; it struck him back somehow, as by a touch, to those first days when
they were lovers together in Canada. It was curious, that, in after
years, when M. Jacobus remembered his wife, it was always as she looked
at that last moment.
"Don't think me harsh, Sharley," he faltered.
She caught at her advantage. "We will keep it together,"--eagerly.
He thrust her hands from his arms, and went about the room with long,
unsteady strides.
"I cannot lie to God! I cannot lie!" he said.
His wife, seeing his face, when he turned, cried hurriedly,--
"It is a trifle; let it go, Jerome. I can give you my little gifts all
the same; it is a trifle."
Down below his credulous simplicity and the weight of borrowed ideas
with which books had loaded his brain, (borrowed infidelity with the
rest,) M. Jacobus was a sturdy, honest man, with a keen sense of honor:
it was no trifle to him. She saw that some rough touch of hers had
reached a secret depth of his soul never bared to her before.
"What is it, Jerome?"--coming up to catch him again with her trembling
hand. "It is to me a matter of so little import!"
He stopped.
"It is this to me. She did keep it,--my mother. It is my first
remembrance of our home,--when she was dead. We children made yet a
feast upon that day, that she might look back and see. Now that I am no
longer a child, and know that she can never look back, that what was my
mother is but a heap of bones and dust, I--I cannot keep the day."
She stood in his way.
"Dead is dead!" he cried, fiercely, "When I know that she and the child
I loved cannot speak or look at me more than this stone at my feet, I
cannot believe in the day on which you say He came to bring eternal
life."
"There is nothing more alive to me than my little Tom. I'm sorry you do
not feel it so, Jerome," said matter-of-fact Charlotte. "I was not what
you call a religious woman before he died; and when better thoughts come
to me now, I am sure he brings them from the good Lord."
"Do you remember," he said, suddenly, "a habit the boy had of sitting
on the sunny door-step, quite silent, by the hour?"
"I remember,"--turning her head away.
"It used to remind me of the days when I was a boy, on the shore of Lake
Erie. My father was a squatter there. There was nothing I did not dare
nor hope in those long dreams of what my life was to be. I would hunt,
wrestle, fight, as no man had done before. I would be the first leader
in the world,--a soldier, a priest,--God! what was there I would not be!
What came of it all?"--his voice rising into a weak, wiry cry. "There
was a tiny cancer, a little taint in my blood,--a trifle,--bah! a
nothing! My grandfather died a drunkard; my father ate opium.
I--Sharley, it's an old story to you."
She did not shame him by a look at him: her own face had the old pallor
and defiant clench of the jaws which Lufflin had seen. She drew his hand
under her arm, and kissed it passionately.
"It was no crime," she cried,--the old burden for many years.
A fine, sad smile crossed his face.
"Poor Sharley!" he said. "No,--no crime; for with the temptation was
given me a weak will. So they're gone now, hopes and chances in
life,--mind and body eaten away by that one animal thirst,--gone! Who
was to blame?"
"You told me," she said, eagerly, "that the stimulant in this air would
be all that you would require,--that it would effect a cure."
"Yes; but was it right that the fate of a man's soul should thus depend
on outward chances? Was I to blame for this hereditary plague in my
blood? Half of the lost millions who crowd the cities can plead against
the crime that dragged them down some inherited vice; theft,
drunkenness, butchery, were born with them, sucked in with their
mothers' milk. This world, that God called good, is but a gigantic mass
of corruption, foul with disease and pain, which man did not first
create, and never will conquer."
"Why do you talk of this to-night?" said Charlotte, shunning the storm,
as usual.
"Because I thank God, that, if He has made this failure, He will blot it
out. I liked to fancy once that my mother would waken out of her long
sleep into all her old loves and hates and fancies. I thank God now that
she knows nothing,--that for her, and for all of us, after death, lies
but an eternal blank."
In the pause, the dulled throb of the sea rose for an instant into a
fierce warning cry, and then was gloomily still.
"It is as if the dead yonder would drive us back from their rest and
silence,"--his speculative eye wandering dreamily out into the night.
But death and all that lay beyond were real to the practical woman
beside him; there was no speculation in her eyes; it was an actual life
he was dragging from before her; her child was in it; some day her own
feet in Mesh and blood would tread there. She put her hand on his
shoulder and leaned out beyond him, peering down over the shore, just as
if in the night and cold beyond lay in truth the land of the dead.
"I am not afraid of their rest and silence," she cried,--"I'm not
afraid, Jerome!"
The fair, clear-cut face came warm and living between him and the
darkness; her voice called into the vague distance cheerful and strong.
She turned back to him glowing with color.
"Our boy is there," she said; "and there are others dead that I loved. I
always knew they'd keep a watch for us, Jerome!"
He listened with a sad smile.
"And I've _no_ fear," she went on, energetically, "I never had any fear,
that He would give them back to us just misty, holy angels, who could
neither cry nor laugh with us, when our very hearts were sick to catch
their hands and kiss their lips again.--I know," after a pause, "my boy
will come first to me, with his old trick of hiding and calling for
'Mother, mother!'--he'll not forget I liked that name the best; and
he'll have the same laugh in his eyes, just the same,--he'd find no
better look in heaven than that was. I knew, when I closed his eyes that
night, it was but for a little while." Yet she stopped suddenly, putting
her hand to her throat to choke back a cry of pain, "A little while,"
she repeated, firmly.
Her husband listened, the smile growing more bitter: she had never
seemed more silly or more dear to him than then.
"I am not a child," she said, quickly. "It is not fancy. The dead are in
Christ's kingdom; and He is alive, not dead, yonder. It was a real man,
Jerome, that ascended from the mountain, loving his friend, censuring
Peter, taking care of his mother. Mary found no spirit there, when she
died, but the son whose baby-head rested on her breast; and I shall find
my boy."
He soothed her, for she had grown nervous and trembling; let her cling
to his neck and cry away her trouble, after the fashion of women who
have brought their hearts out to argue for them.
"Let us forget that far-away country," he said, after a while, "and go
to rest, Lotty. The moans of this storm will wear your strength
out,"--leading her to the foot of the chamber-stairway.
She went up, pausing at the top to look back, a smile on her flushed
cheeks and swollen eyes.
"It will be a quiet morning," she said, waving a good-night.
There was some meaning in her words which he could not penetrate, but it
touched and startled him.
"A quiet morning?"
The words haunted the simple old man, sitting alone to watch the night
wear away. He had never been more utterly alone. The new home was
strange; the very wood-fire had burned out on the hearth; unfamiliar,
cold lines met his eye, wherever he turned; the heavy mist crept in from
the sea through every cranny, like vapors from a charnel-house. He had a
dull, superstitious dread of what lay beyond that sullen beach of
mist,--the undefined. There, whence these low rumblings, and sharp,
inarticulate cries reached him: he stood up, looking into it, shivering.
A bat swooped past the open window, and struck its clammy wing against
his face; the moon had gone down, and the mist that saturated his
clothes, so present and close at hand was it, stretched up and possessed
the very sky as well as the shore,--yellowed thickened the air he
breathed, hid the line where the breakers struck the coast, driven in
with a subdued, persistent fury he had never known before. The
shore-mist had its bounds: it did not touch that clear darkness beyond,
into which Jacobus looked, drawing down his grizzled brows, trying to
jeer his cowardice away.
"By daylight," he said, "it is but a bulk of water, full enough of
danger and death; but now it might be hell itself yonder, that has 'made
the clouds its band.'"
He was not sure how long a portion of the night crept by. Sometime in
it, however, he saw flashes of light moving through the fog among the
rocks: Lufflin and the fishermen keeping watch,--"uneasy ghosts that
could not pass over into Hades," he laughed, with the same miserable
attempt at a joke; but the laugh died away feebly in the empty room, and
it was with a grave face the Professor made his way down the dark
staircase, and, finding the Captain's dread-nought coat, put it on
before he ventured out into the storm. "To please Lotty," he muttered.
His heart was strangely tender to-night to the only friend he had known
for years.
There was a dead quiet in the fog as he came out and waited on the
flagging before the house. Lufflin and George Cathcart came by,
presently, carrying lanterns and ropes, their faces looking ghastly in
the greenish light; their voices, too, were thin and far off as in a
dream, though the Captain tried to be hearty and gruff as usual.
"Best within, Mounchere Jacobus; it's an uncertain night; best within."
"You apprehend the rain?"
"No; it's a dry storm; unpleasant on this coast. Go in; there's no
telling what frenzy may seize the wind, and Charlotte is alone."
But M. Jacobus did not go in. He had observed a curious motion on the
part of both men, as they talked: bending their ears at intervals to
listen intently, and keeping a keen scrutiny fixed on the small patch of
ground at their feet, made visible by their lanterns. He saw, too, that
Cathcart stooped, as he turned from them, and, picking up a crisp,
yellow flake, showed it to his companion; and he fancied, too, that the
grim face of the old Captain lost its color when he saw it. He would not
go in: he had a right to see what danger threatened her,--to watch for
it,--to know what were these messengers of coming death sent in from the
silence yonder. And at that fancy, the old wonder and dread of the far
darkness seized him, and he went slowly on through the mist, forgetting
alike danger and warning.