Before a little waxen image of the Mother and Child,--an odd little
Virgin with an Indian face, brought home by Feliu as a gift after one
of his Mexican voyages,--Carmen Viosca had burned candles and prayed;
sometimes telling her beads; sometimes murmuring the litanies she knew
by heart; sometimes also reading from a prayer-book worn and greasy as
a long-used pack of cards. It was particularly stained at one page, a
page on which her tears had fallen many a lonely night--a page with a
clumsy wood cut representing a celestial lamp, a symbolic radiance,
shining through darkness, and on either side a kneeling angel with
folded wings. And beneath this rudely wrought symbol of the Perpetual
Calm appeared in big, coarse type the title of a prayer that has been
offered up through many a century, doubtless, by wives of Spanish
mariners,--Contra las Tempestades.
Once she became very much frightened. After a partial lull the storm
had suddenly redoubled its force: the ground shook; the house quivered
and creaked; the wind brayed and screamed and pushed and scuffled at
the door; and the water, which had been whipping in through every
crevice, all at once rose over the threshold and flooded the dwelling.
Carmen dipped her finger in the water and tasted it. It was salt!
And none of Feliu's boats had yet come in;--doubtless they had been
driven into some far-away bayous by the storm. The only boat at the
settlement, the Carmencita, had been almost wrecked by running upon a
snag three days before;--there was at least a fortnight's work for the
ship-carpenter of Dead Cypress Point. And Feliu was sleeping as if
nothing unusual had happened--the heavy sleep of a sailor, heedless of
commotions and voices. And his men, Miguel and Mateo, were at the
other end of the cheniere.
With a scream Carmen aroused Feliu. He raised himself upon his elbow,
rubbed his eyes, and asked her, with exasperating calmness, "Que
tienes? que tienes?" (What ails thee?)
--"Oh, Feliu! the sea is coming upon us!" she answered, in the same
tongue. But she screamed out a word inspired by her fear: she did not
cry, "Se nos viene el mar encima!" but "Se nos viene LA ALTURA!"--the
name that conveys the terrible thought of depth swallowed up in
height,--the height of the high sea.
"No lo creo!" muttered Feliu, looking at the floor; then in a quiet,
deep voice he said, pointing to an oar in the corner of the room,
"Echame ese remo."
She gave it to him. Still reclining upon one elbow, Feliu measured the
depth of the water with his thumb nail upon the blade of the oar, and
then bade Carmen light his pipe for him. His calmness reassured her.
For half an hour more, undismayed by the clamoring of the wind or the
calling of the sea, Feliu silently smoked his pipe and watched his oar.
The water rose a little higher, and he made another mark;--then it
climbed a little more, but not so rapidly; and he smiled at Carmen as
he made a third mark. "Como creia!" he exclaimed, "no hay porque
asustarse: el agua baja!" And as Carmen would have continued to pray,
he rebuked her fears, and bade her try to obtain some rest:
"Basta ya de plegarios, querida!--vete y duerme." His tone, though
kindly, was imperative; and Carmen, accustomed to obey him, laid
herself down by his side, and soon, for very weariness, slept.
It was a feverish sleep, nevertheless, shattered at brief intervals by
terrible sounds, sounds magnified by her nervous condition--a sleep
visited by dreams that mingled in a strange way with the impressions of
the storm, and more than once made her heart stop, and start again at
its own stopping. One of these fancies she never could forget--a dream
about little Concha,--Conchita, her firstborn, who now slept far away
in the old churchyard at Barcelona. She had tried to become
resigned,--not to think. But the child would come back night after
night, though the earth lay heavy upon her--night after night, through
long distances of Time and Space. Oh! the fancied clinging of
infant-lips!--the thrilling touch of little ghostly hands!--those
phantom-caresses that torture mothers' hearts! ... Night after night,
through many a month of pain. Then for a time the gentle presence
ceased to haunt her,--seemed to have lain down to sleep forever under
the high bright grass and yellow flowers. Why did it return, that
night of all nights, to kiss her, to cling to her, to nestle in her
arms?
For in her dream she thought herself still kneeling before the waxen
Image, while the terrors of the tempest were ever deepening about
her,--raving of winds and booming of waters and a shaking of the land.
And before her, even as she prayed her dream-prayer, the waxen Virgin
became tall as a woman, and taller,--rising to the roof and smiling as
she grew. Then Carmen would have cried out for fear, but that
something smothered her voice,--paralyzed her tongue. And the Virgin
silently stooped above her, and placed in her arms the Child,--the
brown Child with the Indian face. And the Child whitened in her hands
and changed,--seeming as it changed to send a sharp pain through her
heart: an old pain linked somehow with memories of bright windy
Spanish hills, and summer scent of olive groves, and all the luminous
Past;--it looked into her face with the soft dark gaze, with the
unforgotten smile of ... dead Conchita!
And Carmen wished to thank; the smiling Virgin for that priceless
bliss, and lifted up her eyes, but the sickness of ghostly fear
returned upon her when she looked; for now the Mother seemed as a woman
long dead, and the smile was the smile of fleshlessness, and the places
of the eyes were voids and darknesses ... And the sea sent up so vast a
roar that the dwelling rocked.
Carmen started from sleep to find her heart throbbing so that the couch
shook with it. Night was growing gray; the door had just been opened
and slammed again. Through the rain-whipped panes she discerned the
passing shape of Feliu, making for the beach--a broad and bearded
silhouette, bending against the wind. Still the waxen Virgin smiled
her Mexican smile,--but now she was only seven inches high; and her
bead-glass eyes seemed to twinkle with kindliness while the flame of
the last expiring taper struggled for life in the earthen socket at her
feet.