What if the dead were not dead? What if, unforgetting and cruel, they
could stretch out shadowy hands from that mysterious distance which they
peopled, and summon the living to join them? What if Death itself served
them to-night, and crept upon Charlotte and him unawares in some horror
of this coming storm? Jacobus, like all skeptics, was superstitious; but
he had courage and zest enough to fight down the terror that seized him,
to pamper and play with it. He threw his lank length upon the wet beach,
and clasped his hands under his head; where he disturbed the sand,
gleamed sudden flashes of phosphoric light; he brought them out of the
darkness with his finger: "Fit writing for the dead gone over to leave
upon the shore for those who should follow!" he thought.
Lying on his back, and staring straight up into the fog-covered sky, the
thunder of the sea, that before had filled the whole night, seemed to
his startled senses to drive its direct tide beneath him,--to
articulate, at last, with a new and unexpected meaning. He shut his
eyes; the terror had taken shape; he lay drenched and shivering, his
brain on fire with fancies. What was vision to Dante was real to him. He
lay upon the edge of the fathomless gulf, warm and living, with the cry
from Hades made audible to him; as it ebbed and flowed, it wailed like
the wind through leafless forests; it shook the earth to its centre,
then died into the solitary cry of one in nameless pain. Some broad,
dark figure stood afterwards beside him in the fog, and a voice repeated
the old word of the prophet,--
"Hell from beneath is moved to meet thee at thy coming; it stirreth up
the dead for thee"--
"There is no hell," he cried, getting up and staggering forward,--then
smiled at his own folly.
It might have been Lufflin who had spoken, after all; he was well read
in the Bible. But he could see no sign of their torches, in the stretch
of damp, darkening fog; he was left alone to keep guard.
Jacobus tried to shake off his sickly fancies, and measure coolly
whatever danger waited in this strange night; but it rose before him in
a form so ghastly and new that his strength was but as a woman's. He was
but a landsman,--dull and ignorant besides, outside his library. What
was he to do, when the very ground trembled beneath his feet,--when the
sky was blotted out,--when, there was lack of a single known stationary
object to guide eye or ear? This side of that gray horizon of darkness
which absorbed all his fears, the northern lights streamed up, a pale
orange glare, and showed him a heavy, impenetrable bulwark of shadow,
that rose closer and closer with each throb of the breakers, walling out
the sea. His feet sank curiously in the yielding sand, as if he stood at
the verge of a maelstrom. Some rough hand griping his shoulder roused
him from his daze.
"Cathcart!" he said; then pointing out, "what lies yonder, George? It
might be Death's world, I think!"
The fisherman's arm shook, he fancied; but he answered steadily, in his
usual piping, weak tones,--
"It don't matter whether it's God's world or the Devil's world, as I
see, so long as it kin send ashore a grip on us like that,"--glancing
down at his feet, where Jacobus saw the yellow, flaky foam curling up
from under the sand. He stooped leisurely to examine it.
"What does this portend?" he asked.
"God! it be the tide, man," shrieked out Cathcart, with an oath. "Can't
you see that it's broken over the topmost boundaries? You be standing
now above the level of your own house."
One swift, sharp glance was enough to waken him into real life out of
his vague dreams. The man, nervous and fierce, that had been smothered
in the unable bookworm so long, sprang up to cope with the sudden death
that faced him.
"You be too late!" he heard Cathcart's shrill cry, as he fought his way
through the surging surf; and at the same moment there was a heavy
crash,--where, he could not see.
The fog blinded him; the sand, driven by the resistless wind, cut his
skin, penetrated his eyes and nostrils; while higher and higher, as he
waded on, the muddy water crept up his body, slimy and cold, and
tangling his feet in its undertow of kelp. There was a weight on his
chest which strangled him when he tried to cry aloud.--No matter; the
next headland passed and the house would be gained.
* * * * *
She was there, standing on a heap of fallen stone, her white night-dress
torn and muddied by the rocks and branches which the water swept by her.
Jacobus wondered if that were the house whose ruins curdled the dull
sweep of water beneath her; then the thought of his wife blotted out all
besides. Around her was a creeping, seething stream, widening each
moment; he did not see how deep it was, nor that the unsteady pile of
stones on which she had climbed was crumbling into it. He threw off
Lufflin's coat and his shoes, calling out almost joyously to her, so
fierce was the new strength in his muscles, and the passion in his
heart.
_"Sois tranquille!_" he shouted. "Lotty! It is I who comes! I go to
swim!"
She never heard the words, it is probable, for only a faint cry reached
him, of which he distinguished nothing; but he saw her hand waving him
back, and laughed.
"Poor child! she thinks to die, and stupid old Jerome so near! Foolish
Sharley!"
But the water weighed him down already, as he struggled ignorantly in
it, his gaunt limbs floundering, the tender smile yet on his bony face;
it cramped his arms, closed over his head: with a groping wrench he
recovered his footing, and breast-high in the rising tide looked at her.
"It is I who comes, Sharley!" he shouted, fiercely. "Wife! wife!" The
old English word meant so much to him at that moment!
Whether hours or minutes passed in that struggle he never knew; but at
its close he lay washed, like a poor wisp of weed, upon the shore. The
stream between them, which he never should pass, deepened, deepened: it
licked her feet now, her knees. She stretched out her hands to
him,--whether for help, or to say good-bye, he never knew.
He made no sign in reply. Her face was turned to him, not heeding the
death at her feet,--the thin face set in its iron-gray hair, with the
beauty of all those years of love upon it, the same wistful smile on it
with which it looked at him across the fire on winter evenings;--and he
was to sit there, unmanned, impotent, helpless, to watch the slow death
creep up to her lips, her eyes?
He lifted one hand feebly to his chest, with a dull hope of crushing out
the faint life beating uselessly there; then, with a desperate clutch on
the sand, struggled towards the water.
"I go to swim! Sharley! Sharley!" he cried, and that was all.
The morning dawned, bleak and blue; the thin light came into the cracks
of a wrecker's hut, colder than even on the sea. Jacobus had made a heap
of ropes and driftwood on which to lay his dead. He sat holding her head
on his breast, having twisted up her wet hair in a vain effort to adjust
it as she liked it best. There was no wild vagueness in his eyes, such
as dimmed them sometimes over his books; it was a grave, simple,
reasonable face that bent over this cold and unanswering one. It seemed
as if this one great blow, which God had given, had struck out from his
life all its vain vagaries and dreams.
Lufflin and one or two fishermen stood by, looking on; and outside he
heard women's voices, in shrill whispers, and a sob now and then.
"I want to carry her in the shore farther," he said, looking up
impatiently. "I will not have her vexed by these sounds of trouble."
"Yes, yes," said Lufflin, soothingly. "But you forget, dear Sir, she's
beyond all reach of pain now. Sorrow and tears cannot come near her
again."
"I don't know," said Jacobus,--"she has a quick ear for any cry of
trouble,"--holding the thin, blue-veined hand in his, and looking at it
with a face which made old Lufflin turn away.
"She be at rest now, yer woman," piped George Cathcart, in true
class-meeting twang. "Not all yer cries, nor the cries of the sea,
neyther, 'u'd wake her. Glory be to God!"
Jacobus looked from one to the other, his sickly frame in a heat of
inarticulate rage. That these boors, that death itself, should come
between him and his wife and say she could not hear his lightest word!
"Why, it's Lotty!"--in a whisper, hugging the stiff body closer, looking
up to Lufflin. "Dead or alive, it's my wife. It's Lotty. Do not you
understand?"
"Yes, Mounchere, yes, I understand,"--sopping his face and bald head
with his handkerchief. "My good men, had you not better go out a moment?
We need air here. He only meant," gently, when they were gone, "that she
is at rest; our pain cannot pain her now."
"When I do suffer, she will suffer with me," muttered Jacobus. "You
don't know," after a pause, "how together we have been, or that you
could not say. Is it that I should go back to that den in New York
_alone_? That I live there for days,--for years? That I hunger and work
as before, and _she_ not heed nor care,--my wife? Ah! you do not know
Lotty!" touching the closed white lids with an inexpressibly tender
smile. "I call her 'Sharley,' when we are alone together,"--going on in
his simple, monotonous fashion; "and when she sleeps the heaviest, she
have never forgot to hear that name. _She never will_,"--looking up
quietly.
"But your wife is dead now," said Lufflin, almost impatiently; "and you
yourself thank God that she will never waken to her old loves and hates
and fancies."
"I?" gasped Jacobus.
There was a long silence; as his old creed came back to him, the blood
rushed thick and cold about his heart.
"God's world, and all His creatures," persisted Lufflin, "are foul with
sin. You blessed Him that for them and it death was an eternal sleep."
"I did not remember her love for me," pleaded Jacobus, humbly. "_It_
could not sleep. Why! you man, Lufflin," starting to his feet, and
drawing up his full height, "if that could be, would I stand to look at
her here? Could I live, if she were truly gone?--she, that has been
strength and hope and hands for me these many years? I'm not a strong
man, like--like you, Captain," with a sudden weak giving way. "God gave
me Sharley. Death cannot take her away."
Lufflin took up her hand.
"So soft it used to be!" he said. "It's been hard-worked since then. It
would be well for Lotty, if death were a long sleep: she needs it."
Jacobus made no reply. He sat down and held his dead in his arms; she
was his own; so were those years of hard work which had worn her hands
rough, and left these sharp lines in her face. He only knew what they
had been: in the long silence that followed, while the daylight
broadened bluer and colder about him, he lived them over again; and he
knew then, by every day of griping poverty, which it wrung the clammy
drops out of his face to remember,--by all her patient tenderness,--by
the happiness they had hoped for, but which never came,--by the true
love they had borne to each other, and to little Tom, which knew so
little comfort, he knew that the recompense would come, that the end was
not yet She had shaken off the hunger and the pain, and had gone into
the world where only the love endured and found its comfort and its late
reward. There was such a world--somewhere. He put back the grayed hair
from the forehead; little Tom had such a brow,--broad, quiet,
melancholy.
"'I will go to them,'" he said, "'but they will not return to me!'"
* * * * *
Was it he that had been dead, and waked again? A strong hand lifting his
head; a warm face and breath at his cheek; a voice calling him as sweet
and cheerful as when first he heard it on the banks of the--little creek
in Canada? Then out of the reeling and groping of shadows and real
objects came a square bay-window opening on a sea-horizon of drifting
olive-gray clouds, the crackle and glow of a great wood-fire, a cheerful
breakfast-room, and some busy chatter about a night spent sleeping in
drenched clothes and night-fogs.
Lufflin's round, red face was the first real grip his senses took of it
all. The Captain was in his holiday suit of blue and brass, and pulled
down his jacket with a complacent twinkle in his eyes.
"Faith, ye'll suffer a sea-change in short order, Mounchere, if you
spend a few more nights dreaming by that window! Your very eyes look
rheumy and glazed already."
Jacobus got up, stunned and dull beyond his wont,--his eyes fixed, not
on the joking Captain, but on the anxious, wondering face upturned to
his. He touched the cheek, a little worn and haggard, may-be, but with
good, healthy blood reddening it,--felt the nervous hands,--then stooped
and solemnly kissed her lips.
They trembled a little; then she laughed.
"Did the sea send you dreams of me?"--trying to jest, but with some of
last night's trouble in her eyes.
"Not the sea,"--putting his hand to his head; "I think God sent them,
Lotty."
Lufflin, whose instincts were quick as a woman's, glanced at the two,
and then said something about its not being long enough after dawn to
begin the day, and that he would turn into his bunk for an hour or two,
and made his way down stairs. He turned into the kitchen instead, to
give Ann and the breakfast a warning look, and, for aught we know, put
his own shoulder to the wheel, so far as broiling the chops was
concerned. He had been up half the night, helping "the child get ready
her holiday," steadying shelves, hanging pictures, dusting books in the
library, and now meant to stand aside until the great joy of the day was
over: "only they two could share it together."
Yet he stepped to the kitchen-door and listened keenly, when, after a
long silence, he heard the door above open, and Charlotte lead her
husband into the library.
"Mounchere knows what his wife's done for him at last," he
muttered;--"and there goes in the baby," as a faint cry and a rush of
skirts followed,--with an amused laugh, and his eyes dim.
But when he heard Lotty coming presently for him, he hurried in, to
stretch himself on his bunk, and began to snore.
"It's kind in them to think of an old fellow like me; but they're best
alone. They have had a rough pull of it together, and I think this is
their first glimpse of land."
He could not wait long, however, but soon went bustling up, with the
eager glow of all his childish Christmases in his simple old face and
mind. They made ready for the day inland, he supposed; but they could
do nothing like this,--glancing in, as he trotted up stairs, at the big
fires he had built, and the bits of holly stuck around, and then out at
the sweep of barren lee-coast and the desolate sea.
"And Lotty's surprise of the house, and that blessed baby! She's a
devilish clever woman to contrive such a day for Mounchere, that's a
fact!"
The library, when he reached it, seemed the very heart and core of all
Christmas brightness. The very cold, and the hungry solitude of the
restless sea on which the window opened widely, deepened the warmth
within. The room slept in a still comfort: no fire was ever so clear, no
air so calm, no baby so content to be alive as this which lay on its
mother's breast while she walked to and fro. Her face was paler and
humbler than he had ever seen it; her husband followed her unceasingly
with his eyes,--a strange sense of almost loss in them Lufflin fancied,
idly.
Jacobus was very silent and still; he did not seem so nervous with
happiness as the Captain had fancied this opening of a new life would
make him; but there was about him a rested and hushed look,--a depth of
content which he did not believe any gain of the house or child could
give. Lufflin was awed, he knew not why.
"It is as if they had found something which Death itself could not take
away," he thought, after a space of wonder, as if they had talked to God
Himself to-day.
The Professor wished him a happy Christmas, in his simple, hearty
fashion, and then the two men sat talking of how they kept the day long
ago: Lufflin telling of frolics on ship-board, but M. Jacobus going back
constantly to the time when he was a boy with his mother.
"I have neglected it for long," he said. "I shall never again. I think
she will like us to keep it. She and--our boy."
He laid his hand on the baby's head, but his eyes wandered dreamily away
out beyond the sea.
The day was fuller of cheerfulness and pleasure than even the lonely old
sailor had hoped; the two people in whom he was beginning to confine his
whole interest were happy in a way he could not fathom; he could not
understand why Jacobus should look and listen to his wife so hungrily.
"It was the child that the day gave to him, not 'Sharley,' as he calls
her," thought Lufflin.
So he took the baby in his arms, feeling as if it were in some sort
neglected.
"I like to think," he said, after looking in its face awhile, and
speaking with an effort, as he always did, about "religion,"--"I like to
think of Christ as a helpless baby; that's the reason I like Christmas
for."
"To think," said Charlotte, softly, "that to-day Eternal Love came into
the world!--and Life!" glancing at her husband.
But Jacobus did not speak; he had his face covered with his hand, and
when he looked up was paler than before. Lufflin fancied there was a
change in the simple-hearted old bookworm's manner all day, a quiet
composure, the dignity of a man who knew his place both with God and his
brother man.
He went down again presently, leaving them alone for a little while. M.
Jacobus was standing by the window, watching the awful stillness with
which a new day lifts itself over the sea; he had the child in his arms,
and beckoned Lotty to his side. She came and leaned her head on his
shoulder.
"You will never leave me now, Sharley,--_never_," he said, his face
kindling with a new, strange triumph.
The waves lapped the shore in gentle rifts of spray; the beach itself
shone in the rising light like fretted silver. Beyond the foamy
earth-colored breakers lay the illimitable sea, a dark violet glow,
fading into the dim horizon whence came the dawn. The man's eye was
fixed on the far line which his sight could never pass; his wife's quick
glance followed his. It was from that dread Beyond, she knew, that he
had fancied last night the dead beckoned to him.
She touched him again.
"It is a quiet morning yonder," she said, calmly.
"Yes, Lotty."
"God sent your dream. I hardly hoped, Jerome," her eyes filling with
tears, "that we should keep Christmas together,--you, the baby, and I."
He smiled and pressed her hand, touched the little cheek, and then
looked wistfully out again.
He held the baby God had given to comfort his old age proudly and
tenderly; but his heart would turn to the other child's face that was
watching for him yonder behind the dawn, and listen for the weak little
voice which he knew on that Christmas morning was somewhere
calling,--"Father! father!"
LUCY'S LETTERS.
On a cold January night I returned home after a holiday visit to town.
Snow was just beginning to fall, and a desolate sort of feeling came
over me as the omnibus drove up to my residence. A bright, cheerful
light shone out of the library-windows, and Ernestina, a maid who had
lived with me half a score of years before her marriage, was at the gate
to receive me.
"It is owing to her kind, capable hands that the house looks so
comfortable," I said to myself, with a little sigh; "but what am I to do
when, she returns to her own home?"
Then, with a true spinster selfishness, I wished her good husband and
beautiful boy "better off" in Abraham's bosom, and wondered what could
make women so foolish as to get married. The cause of all this
discomfort was the consciousness of having a new serving-maid. My last
experience in that necessary domestic article had not been an agreeable
one. The woman, though not "as old as Sibyl," was
"as curst and shrewd
As Socrates' Xantippe, or a worse."
She was a dusky Melpomene, who openly insulted the furniture, assaulted
violently the china, and waged universal war against all inanimate
objects. Being a trifle deaf, she used this defect as an excuse for not
hearing any request or command; when spoken to, she glared grimly,
turned her back, and strode off with a tragic _loup_, reminding one of a
Forest in petticoats. I never knew I was an amiable woman, until her
advent into my peaceable establishment.
"Now I return to a new experience, may-be no better than the former," I
thought.
Upon entering the house, I saw through the open kitchen-door--out of
which streamed a savory smell of broiled chicken, buns, and tea--an
encouraging picture for a housekeeper: there was a bright fire, and a
tidy room, with a nice-looking colored girl who wore a headkerchief and
a check apron over her chintz gown. She rose up from her seat, and gave
me a slight curtsy, which civility I acknowledged half shyly, half
coldly.
"This is Lucy," said Ernestina, "the new maid I have engaged for you,
Ma'am." Then, addressing the girl, she added,--"Lucy, you may dish up
supper now."
"I wonder how I shall like her," was my remark to Ernestina, as we went
into the library. "Do you think she will bully me much?"
Ernestina laughed.
"No, indeed, Ma'am! She is gentle and civil. I think she will suit you.
I have found her both capable and agreeable while we have been putting
the house in order."
"Oh I can dispense with capability,--a little of it, at least,--if she
will only not frighten me out of my wits with a vixen temper!"
"No fear of that, I assure you," said Ernestina, encouragingly.
Nor was there any cause for fear. During the five months the girl lived
with me, I found her uniformly civil and amiable. I do not intend
inflicting on my readers any more of my personal experience with Lucy;
it is her own little history I wish to relate.
A few days after my return home, I noticed, that, when Lucy was left to
herself, she seemed sad. I often observed her suppressing tears; and
every little while she gave a heavy, long sigh, as if apprehensive of
some trouble.
I am as unwilling to meddle with the affairs of inferiors as with those
of equals; so I contented myself with speaking very gently, granting
little unexpected indulgences, and smiling cheerfully at her. I knew she
was married to a man who was many years her senior, and it was said they
were much attached to each other. This husband had gone into the army,
and Ernestina told me that Lucy and he were looking anxiously forward to
the period of his return,--more than two years off,--when they hoped to
take his bounty-money and savings, and buy therewith a little house and
small "garden-patch" for a settled home.
One day I asked her if she could read or write.
"Neither," was the reply.
"How then, do you write to your husband?"
This question brought out the whole story of her anxiety. Hitherto her
friends had written in her name, but her husband had received only three
of the many letters she had sent him during the six months he had been
gone. In his last letter he had complained bitterly of her silence.
"Oh, if he could only hear straight from me!" she exclaimed. "For he
thinks, Ma'am, I don't write because I gets no money. 'T isn't the money
I care for. I'd sooner never have a cent from him than have him keep
a-thinkin' I don't send no letters."
When she said this, big round tears fell down like pebbles on her cheeks
and hands and apron. Of course I offered to write for her, saying that I
would do so once a week, if she wished. She then gave me his last letter
to read, which I will copy without correction; for he wrote it himself,
being "a scholar," as she said, with some little pride.
And she endowed him with another possession, or gift, which seemed to
give her almost as much satisfaction as his scholarly attainments.
"He kin see _sperits_, Ma'am, as plain as me and you sees folks; and so
kin his little boy, his fust wife's child. Once when I was a-walkin' in
the road with 'em, one moonlighty night, when we was a-goin' home to
Spring-Town, them two stepped quick-like away from the path.
"'Lucy,' says my husband, says he, a'most in a whisper, 'quick! step
furder over on t' other side.'
"After we got along a piece, them both told me there wor a band of
_sperits_ a-comin' along; and if we gets out of the way of 'em, them
don't do us no hurt, you know."
I did not like to suggest to the credulous wife that probably her sharp
husband had been seeing at the tavern, before starting on the homeward
walk with her,
"Black spirits and white,
Blue spirits and gray."
I fancy the cunning fellow, with a true masculine, marital love of
power, had wished to inspire this young wife of his with a becoming awe
and reverence for her him. But we will return to his letter.
"Januwerry the/18teen, 1864, Mooreses Island
"MY DEARE WIEF
"i take this opertunity to informe you that i am not well at
preasante. and i hope you are injoyin' goode helthe providin
that they ever doe finde you and of you are enny whares that
you can be found
"Enny whares in the State of N Jarsey.