V.
CAPTAIN LITTLEPAGE.
It was a long time after this; an hour was very long in that coast town
where nothing stole away the shortest minute. I had lost myself
completely in work, when I heard footsteps outside. There was a steep
footpath between the upper and the lower road, which I climbed to
shorten the way, as the children had taught me, but I believed that Mrs.
Todd would find it inaccessible, unless she had occasion to seek me in
great haste. I wrote on, feeling like a besieged miser of time, while
the footsteps came nearer, and the sheep-bell tinkled away in haste as
if some one had shaken a stick in its wearer’s face. Then I looked, and
saw Captain Littlepage passing the nearest window; the next moment he
tapped politely at the door.
“Come in, sir,” I said, rising to meet him; and he entered, bowing with
much courtesy. I stepped down from the desk and offered him a chair by
the window, where he seated himself at once, being sadly spent by his
climb. I returned to my fixed seat behind the teacher’s desk, which gave
him the lower place of a scholar.
“You ought to have the place of honor, Captain Littlepage,” I said.
“A happy, rural seat of various views,”
he quoted, as he gazed out into the sunshine and up the long wooded
shore. Then he glanced at me, and looked all about him as pleased as a
child.
“My quotation was from Paradise Lost: the greatest of poems, I suppose
you know?” and I nodded. “There’s nothing that ranks, to my mind, with
Paradise Lost; it’s all lofty, all lofty,” he continued. “Shakespeare
was a great poet; he copied life, but you have to put up with a great
deal of low talk.”
I now remembered that Mrs. Todd had told me one day that Captain
Littlepage had overset his mind with too much reading; she had also made
dark reference to his having “spells” of some unexplainable nature. I
could not help wondering what errand had brought him out in search of
me. There was something quite charming in his appearance: it was a face
thin and delicate with refinement, but worn into appealing lines, as if
he had suffered from loneliness and misapprehension. He looked, with his
careful precision of dress, as if he were the object of cherishing care
on the part of elderly unmarried sisters, but I knew Mari’ Harris to be
a very commonplace, inelegant person, who would have no such standards;
it was plain that the captain was his own attentive valet. He sat
looking at me expectantly. I could not help thinking that, with his
queer head and length of thinness, he was made to hop along the road of
life rather than to walk. The captain was very grave indeed, and I bade
my inward spirit keep close to discretion.
“Poor Mrs. Begg has gone,” I ventured to say. I still wore my Sunday
gown by way of showing respect.
“She has gone,” said the captain,—“very easy at the last, I was
informed; she slipped away as if she were glad of the opportunity.”
I thought of the Countess of Carberry and felt that history repeated
itself.
“She was one of the old stock,” continued Captain Littlepage, with
touching sincerity. “She was very much looked up to in this town, and
will be missed.”
I wondered, as I looked at him, if he had sprung from a line of
ministers; he had the refinement of look and air of command which are
the heritage of the old ecclesiastical families of New England. But as
Darwin says in his autobiography, “there is no such king as a
sea-captain; he is greater even than a king or a schoolmaster!”
Captain Littlepage moved his chair out of the wake of the sunshine, and
still sat looking at me. I began to be very eager to know upon what
errand he had come.
“It may be found out some o’ these days,” he said earnestly. “We may
know it all, the next step; where Mrs. Begg is now, for instance.
Certainty, not conjecture, is what we all desire.”
“I suppose we shall know it all some day,” said I.
“We shall know it while yet below,” insisted the captain, with a flush
of impatience on his thin cheeks. “We have not looked for truth in the
right direction. I know what I speak of; those who have laughed at me
little know how much reason my ideas are based upon.” He waved his hand
toward the village below. “In that handful of houses they fancy that
they comprehend the universe.”