by harriet prescott spofford.

just a capful of wind, and dan shook loose the linen, and a straight shining streak with specks of foam shot after us. the mast bent like eel-grass, and our keel was half out of the water. faith belied her name, and clung to the sides with her ten finger-nails; but as for me, i liked it.

“take the stick, georgie,” said dan, suddenly, his cheeks white. “head her up the wind. steady. sight the figure-head on pearson’s loft. here’s too much sail for a frigate.”

but before the words were well uttered, the mast doubled up and coiled like a whip-lash, there was a report like the crack of doom, and half of the thing crashed short over the bows, dragging the heavy sail in the waves.

then there came a great laugh of thunder close above, and the black cloud dropped like a curtain round us: the squall had broken.

“cut it off, dan! quick!” i cried.

“let it alone,” said he, snapping together his jack-knife;[116] “it’s as good as a best bower-anchor. now i’ll take the tiller, georgie. strong little hand,” said he, bending so that i didn’t see his face. “and lucky it’s good as strong. it’s saved us all. my god, georgie! where’s faith?”

i turned. there was no faith in the boat. we both sprang to our feet, and so the tiller swung round and threw us broadside to the wind, and between the dragging mast and the centre-board drowning seemed too good for us.

“you’ll have to cut it off,” i cried again; but he had already ripped half through the canvas, and was casting it loose.

at length he gave his arm a toss. with the next moment, i never shall forget the look of horror that froze dan’s face.

“i’ve thrown her off!” he exclaimed,——“i’ve thrown her off!”

he reached his whole length over the boat, i ran to his side, and perhaps our motion impelled it, or perhaps some unseen hand; for he caught at an end of rope, drew it in a second, let go and clutched at a handful of the sail, and then i saw how it had twisted round and swept poor little faith over, and she had swung there in it, like a dead butterfly in a chrysalis. the lightnings were slipping down into the water like blades of fire everywhere around us, with short, sharp volleys of thunder, and the waves were more than i ever rode this side of the bar before or since, and we took in water every time our hearts beat; but we never once thought of our own danger while we bent to pull dear[117] little faith out of hers; and that done, dan broke into a great hearty fit of crying that i’m sure he’d no need to be ashamed of. but it didn’t last long; he just up and dashed off the tears and set himself at work again, while i was down on the floor rubbing faith. there she lay like a broken lily, with no life in her little white face, and no breath, and maybe a pulse and maybe not. i couldn’t hear a word dan said, for the wind; and the rain was pouring through us. i saw him take out the oars, but i knew they’d do no good in such a chop, even if they didn’t break; and pretty soon he found it so, for he drew them in and began to untie the anchor-rope and wind it round his waist. i sprang to him.

“what are you doing, dan?” i exclaimed.

“i can swim, at least,” he answered.

“and tow us?——a mile? you know you can’t! it’s madness!”

“i must try. little faith will die, if we don’t get ashore.”

“she’s dead now, dan.”

“what! no, no, she isn’t. faith isn’t dead. but we must get ashore.”

“dan,” i cried, clinging to his arm, “faith’s only one. but if you die so,——and you will!——i shall die too.”

“you?”

“yes; because, if it hadn’t been for me, you wouldn’t have been here at all.”

“and is that all the reason?” he asked, still at work.

“reason enough,” said i.

“not quite,” said he.

[118]

“dan,——for my sake——”

“i can’t, georgie. don’t ask me. i mustn’t——” and here he stopped short, with the coil of rope in his hand, and fixed me with his eye, and his look was terrible,——“we mustn’t let faith die.”

“well,” i said, “try it, if you dare; and as true as there’s a lord in heaven, i’ll cut the rope!”

he hesitated, for he saw i was resolute; and i would, i declare i would have done it; for, do you know, at the moment, i hated the little dead thing in the bottom of the boat there.

just then there came a streak of sunshine through the gloom where we’d been plunging between wind and water, and then a patch of blue sky, and the great cloud went blowing down river. dan threw away the rope and took out the oars again.

“give me one, dan,” said i; but he shook his head. “o dan, because i’m so sorry!”

“see to her, then,——fetch faith to,” he replied, not looking at me, and making up with great sturdy pulls.

so i busied myself, though i couldn’t do a bit of good. the instant we touched bottom, dan snatched her, sprang through the water and up the landing. i stayed behind; as the boat recoiled, pushed in a little, fastened the anchor and threw it over, and then followed.

our house was next the landing, and there dan had carried faith; and when i reached it, a great fire was roaring up the chimney, and the teakettle hung over it, and he was rubbing faith’s feet hard enough to strike sparks. i couldn’t understand exactly what made dan[119] so fiercely earnest, for i thought i knew just how he felt about faith; but suddenly, when nothing seemed to answer, and he stood up and our eyes met, i saw such a haggard, conscience-stricken face that it all rushed over me. but now we had done what we could, and then i felt all at once as if every moment that i effected nothing was drawing out murder. something flashed by the window, i tore out of the house and threw up my arms, i don’t know whether i screamed or not, but i caught the doctor’s eye, and he jumped from his gig and followed me in. we had a siege of it. but at length, with hot blankets, and hot water, and hot brandy dribbled down her throat, a little pulse began to play upon faith’s temple, and a little pink to beat up and down her cheek, and she opened her pretty dark eyes and lifted herself and wrung the water out of her braids; then she sank back.

“faith! faith! speak to me!” said dan, close in her ear. “don’t you know me?”

“go away,” she said hoarsely, pushing his face with her flat wet palm. “you let the sail take me over and drown me, while you kissed georgie’s hand.”

i flung my hand before her eyes.

“is there a kiss on those fingers?” i cried, in a blaze. “he never kissed my hands or my lips. dan is your husband, faith!”

for all answer faith hid her head and gave a little moan. somehow i couldn’t stand that; so i ran and put my arms round her neck and lifted her face and kissed it, and then we cried together. and dan, walking the floor, took up his hat and went out, while she never cast a look after him. to think of such a great strong nature[120] and such a powerful depth of feeling being wasted on such a little limp rag! i cried as much for that as anything. then i helped faith into my bedroom, and, running home, i got her some dry clothes,——after rummaging enough, dear knows! for you’d be more like to find her nightcap in the tea-caddy than elsewhere,——and i made her a corner on the settle, for she was afraid to stay in the bedroom, and when she was comfortably covered there she fell asleep. dan came in soon and sat down beside her, his eyes on the floor, never glancing aside nor smiling, but gloomier than the grave. as for me, i felt at ease now, so i went and laid my hand on the back of his chair and made him look up. i wanted he should know the same rest that i had, and perhaps he did; for, still looking up, the quiet smile came floating round his lips, and his eyes grew steady and sweet as they used to be before he married faith. then i went bustling lightly about the kitchen again.

“dan,” i said, “if you’d just bring me in a couple of those chickens stalking out there like two gentlemen from spain.”

while he was gone i flew round and got a cake into the bake-kettle, and a pan of biscuit down before the fire; and i set the tea to steep on the coals, because father always likes his tea strong enough to bear up an egg, after a hard day’s work, and he’d had that to-day; and i put on the coffee to boil, for i knew dan never had it at home, because faith liked it and it didn’t agree with her. and then he brought me in the chickens all ready for the pot, and so at last i sat down, but at the opposite side of the chimney. then he rose, and, without[121] exactly touching me, swept me back to the other side, where lay the great net i was making for father; and i took the little stool by the settle, and not far from him, and went to work.

“georgie,” said dan, at length, after he’d watched me a considerable time, “if any word i may have said to-day disturbed you a moment, i want you to know that it hurt me first, and just as much.”

“yes, dan,” said i.

i’ve always thought there was something real noble between dan and me then. there was i,——well, i don’t mind telling you. and he,——yes, i’m sure he loved me perfectly,——you mustn’t be startled, i’ll tell you how it was,——and always had, only maybe he hadn’t known it; but it was deep down in his heart just the same, and by and by it stirred. there we were, both of us thoroughly conscious, yet neither of us expressing it by a word, and trying not to by a look,——both of us content to wait for the next life, when we could belong to one another. in those days i contrived to have it always pleasure enough for me just to know that dan was in the room; and though that wasn’t often, i never grudged faith her right in him, perhaps because i knew she didn’t care anything about it. you see, this is how it was.

when dan was a lad of sixteen, and took care of his mother, a ship went to pieces down there on the island. it was one of the worst storms that ever whistled, and though crowds were on the shore, it was impossible to reach her. they could see the poor wretches hanging in the rigging, and dropping one by one, and they could[122] only stay and sicken, for the surf stove the boats, and they didn’t know then how to send out ropes on rockets or on cannon-balls, and so the night fell, and the people wrung their hands and left the sea to its prey, and felt as if blue sky could never come again. and with the bright, keen morning not a vestige of the ship, but here a spar and there a door, and on the side of a sand-hill a great dog watching over a little child that he’d kept warm all night. dan, he’d got up at turn of tide, and walked down,——the sea running over the road knee-deep,——for there was too much swell for boats; and when day broke, he found the little girl, and carried her up to town. he didn’t take her home, for he saw that what clothes she had were the very finest,——made as delicately,——with seams like the hair-strokes on that heart’s-ease there; and he concluded that he couldn’t bring her up as she ought to be. so he took her round to the rich men, and represented that she was the child of a lady, and that a poor fellow like himself——for dan was older than his years, you see——couldn’t do her justice: she was a slight little thing, and needed dainty training and fancy food, maybe a matter of seven years old, and she spoke some foreign language, and perhaps she didn’t speak it plain, for nobody knew what it was. however, everybody was very much interested, and everybody was willing to give and to help, but nobody wanted to take her, and the upshot of it was that dan refused all their offers and took her himself.

his mother’d been in to our house all the afternoon before, and she’d kept taking her pipe out of her mouth,——she had the asthma, and smoked,——and kept sighing.

[123]

“this storm’s going to bring me something,” says she, in a mighty miserable tone. “i’m sure of it!”

“no harm, i hope, miss devereux,” said mother.

“well, rhody,”——mother’s father, he was a queer kind, called his girls all after the thirteen states, and there being none left for uncle mat, he called him after the state of matrimony,——“well, rhody,” she replied, rather dismally, and knocking the ashes out of the bowl, “i don’t know; but i’ll have faith to believe that the lord won’t send me no ill without distincter warning. and that it’s good i have faith to believe.”

and so when the child appeared, and had no name, and couldn’t answer for herself, mrs. devereux called her faith.

we’re a people of presentiments down here on the flats, and well we may be. you’d own up yourself, maybe, if in the dark of the night, you locked in sleep, there’s a knock on the door enough to wake the dead, and you start up and listen and nothing follows; and falling back, you’re just dozing off, and there it is once more, so that the lad in the next room cries out, “who’s that, mother?” no one answering, you’re half lost again, when rap comes the hand again, the loudest of the three, and you spring to the door and open it, and there’s naught there but a wind from the graves blowing in your face; and after a while you learn that in that hour of that same night your husband was lost at sea. well, that happened to mrs. devereux. and i haven’t time to tell you the warnings i’ve known of. as for faith, i mind that she said herself, as we were in the boat for that clear midnight sail, that the[124] sea had a spite against her, but third time was trying time.

so faith grew up, and dan sent her to school what he could, for he set store by her. she was always ailing,——a little wilful, pettish thing, but pretty as a flower; and folks put things into her head, and she began to think she was some great shakes; and she may have been a matter of seventeen years old when mrs. devereux died. dan, as simple at twenty-six as he had been ten years before, thought to go on just in the old way, but the neighbors were one too many for him; and they all represented that it would never do, and so on, till the poor fellow got perplexed and vexed and half beside himself. there wasn’t the first thing she could do for herself, and he couldn’t afford to board her out, for dan was only a laboring-man, mackerelling all summer and shoemaking all winter, less the dreadful times when he stayed out on the georges; and then he couldn’t afford, either, to keep her there and ruin the poor girl’s reputation;——and what did dan do but come to me with it all?

now for a number of years i’d been up in the other part of the town with aunt netty, who kept a shop that i tended between schools and before and after, and i’d almost forgotten there was such a soul on earth as dan devereux,——though he’d not forgotten me. i’d got through the grammar and had a year in the high, and suppose i should have finished with an education and gone off teaching somewhere, instead of being here now, cheerful as heart could wish, with a little black-haired hussy tiltering on the back of my chair. rolly, get[125] down! her name’s laura,——for his mother. i mean i might have done all this, if at that time mother hadn’t been thrown on her back, and been bedridden ever since. i haven’t said much about mother yet, but there all the time she was, just as she is to-day, in her little tidy bed in one corner of the great kitchen, sweet as a saint, and as patient;——and i had to come and keep house for father. he never meant that i should lose by it, father didn’t; begged, borrowed, or stolen, bought or hired, i should have my books, he said: he’s mighty proud of my learning, though between you and me it’s little enough to be proud of; but the neighbors think i know ’most as much as the minister,——and i let ’em think. well, while mrs. devereux was sick i was over there a good deal,——for if faith had one talent, it was total incapacity,——and there had a chance of knowing the stuff that dan was made of; and i declare to man ’t would have touched a heart of stone to see the love between the two. she thought dan held up the sky, and dan thought she was the sky. it’s no wonder,——the risks our men lead can’t make common-sized women out of their wives and mothers. but i hadn’t been coming in and out, busying about where dan was, all that time, without making any mark; though he was so lost in grief about his mother that he didn’t take notice of his other feelings, or think of himself at all. and who could care the less about him for that? it always brings down a woman to see a man wrapt in some sorrow that’s lawful and tender as it is large. and when he came and told me what the neighbors said he must do with faith, the blood stood still in my heart.

[126]

“ask mother, dan,” says i; for i couldn’t have advised him. “she knows best about everything.”

so he asked her.

“i think——i’m sorry to think, for i fear she’ll not make you a good wife,” said mother, “but that perhaps her love for you will teach her to be——you’d best marry faith.”

“but i can’t marry her!” said dan, half choking; “i don’t want to marry her,——it——it makes me uncomfortable-like to think of such a thing. i care for the child plenty——besides,” said dan, catching at a bright hope, “i’m not sure that she’d have me.”

“have you, poor boy! what else can she do?”

dan groaned.

“poor little faith!” said mother. “she’s so pretty, dan, and she’s so young, and she’s pliant. and then how can we tell what may turn up about her some day? she may be a duke’s daughter yet,——who knows? think of the stroke of good-fortune she may give you!”

“but i don’t love her,” said dan, as a finality.

“perhaps——it isn’t——you don’t love any one else?”

“no,” said dan, as a matter of course, and not at all with reflection. and then, as his eyes went wandering, there came over them a misty look, just as the haze creeps between you and some object away out at sea, and he seemed to be sifting his very soul. suddenly the look swept off them, and his eyes struck mine, and he turned, not having meant to, and faced me entirely, and there came such a light into his countenance, such a smile round his lips, such a red stamped his cheek, and[127] he bent a little,——and it was just as if the angel of the lord had shaken his wings over us in passing, and we both of us knew that here was a man and here was a woman, each for the other, in life and death; and i just hid my head in my apron, and mother turned on her pillow with a little moan. how long that lasted i can’t say, but by and by i heard mother’s voice, clear and sweet as a tolling bell far away on some fair sunday morning,——

“the lord is in his holy temple, the lord’s throne is in heaven: his eyes behold, his eyelids try the children of men.”

and nobody spoke.

“thou art my father, my god, and the rock of my salvation. thou wilt light my candle: the lord my god will enlighten my darkness. for with thee is the fountain of life: in thy light shall we see light.”

then came the hush again, and dan started to his feet, and began to walk up and down the room as if something drove him; but, wearying, he stood and leaned his head on the chimney there. and mother’s voice broke the stillness anew, and she said,——

“hath god forgotten to be gracious? his mercy endureth forever. and none of them that trust in him shall be desolate.”

there was something in mother’s tone that made me forget myself and my sorrow, and look; and there she was, as she hadn’t been before for six months, half risen from the bed, one hand up, and her whole face white and shining with confident faith. well, when i see all that such trust has buoyed mother over, i wish to goodness[128] i had it: i take more after martha. but never mind, do well here and you’ll do well there, say i. perhaps you think it wasn’t much, the quiet and the few texts breathed through it; but sometimes when one’s soul’s at a white heat, it may be moulded like wax with a finger. as for me, maybe god hardened pharaoh’s heart,——though how that was pharaoh’s fault i never could see;——but dan,——he felt what it was to have a refuge in trouble, to have a great love always extending over him like a wing; he longed for it; he couldn’t believe it was his now, he was so suddenly convicted of all sin and wickedness; and something sprang up in his heart, a kind of holy passion that he felt to be possible for this great and tender divine being; and he came and fell on his knees by the side of the bed, crying out for mother to show him the way; and mother, she put her hand on his head and prayed,——prayed, oh! so beautifully, that it makes the water stand in my eyes now to remember what she said. but i didn’t feel so then, my heart and my soul were rebellious, and love for dan alone kept me under, not love for god. and in fact, if ever i’d got to heaven then, love for dan ’d have been my only saving grace; for i was mighty high-spirited, as a girl. well, dan he never made open profession; but when he left the house, he went and asked faith to marry him.

now faith didn’t care anything about dan,——except the quiet attachment that she couldn’t help, from living in the house with him, and he’d always petted and made much of her, and dressed her like a doll,——he wasn’t the kind of man to take her fancy; she’d have maybe liked some slender, smooth-faced chap; but dan was a black,[129] shaggy fellow, with shoulders like the cross-tree, and a length of limb like saul’s, and eyes set deep, like lamps in caverns. and he had a great, powerful heart,——and, oh! how it was lost! for she might have won it, she might have made him love her, since i would have stood wide away and aside for the sake of seeing him happy. but faith was one of those that, if they can’t get what they want, haven’t any idea of putting up with what they have,——god forgive me, if i am hard on the child! and she couldn’t give dan an answer right off, but was loath to think of it, and went flirting about among the other boys; and dan, when he saw she wasn’t so easily gotten, perhaps set more value on her. for faith, she grew prettier every day; her great brown eyes were so soft and clear, and had a wide, sorrowful way of looking at you; and her cheeks, that were usually pale, blossomed to roses when you spoke to her, her hair drooping over them dark and silky; and though she was slack and untidy and at loose ends about her dress, she somehow always seemed like a princess in disguise; and when she had on anything new,——a sprigged calico and her little straw bonnet with the pink ribbons and mrs. devereux’s black scarf, for instance,——you’d have allowed that she might have been daughter to the queen of sheba. i don’t know, but i rather think dan wouldn’t have said any more to faith, from various motives, you see, notwithstanding the neighbors were still remonstrating with him, if it hadn’t been that miss brown——she that lived round the corner there; the town’s well quit of her now, poor thing!——went to saying the same stuff to faith, and telling her all that other folks said. and faith went[130] home in a passion,——some of your timid kind nothing ever abashes, and nobody gets to the windward of them,——and, being perfectly furious, fell to accusing dan of having brought her to this, so that dan actually believed he had, and was cut to the quick with contrition, and told her that all the reparation he could make he was waiting and wishing to make, and then there came floods of tears. some women seem to have set out with the idea that life’s a desert for them to cross, and they’ve laid in a supply of water-bags accordingly, but it’s the meanest weapon! and then, again, there’s men that are iron, and not to be bent under calamities, that these tears can twist round your little finger. well, i suppose faith concluded ’t was no use to go hungry because her bread wasn’t buttered on both sides, but she always acted as if she’d condescended ninety degrees in marrying dan, and dan always seemed to feel that he’d done her a great injury; and there it was.

i kept in the house for a time; mother was worse,——and i thought the less dan saw of me the better; i kind of hoped he’d forget, and find his happiness where it ought to be. but the first time i saw him, when faith had been his wife all the spring, there was the look in his eyes that told of the ache in his heart. faith wasn’t very happy herself, of course, though she was careless; and she gave him trouble,——keeping company with the young men just as before; and she got into a way of flying straight to me, if dan ventured to reprove her ever so lightly; and stormy nights, when he was gone, and in his long trips, she always locked up her doors and came over and got into my bed; and she was[131] one of those that never listened to reason, and it was none so easy for me, you may suppose.

things had gone on now for some three years, and i’d about lived in my books,——i’d tried to teach faith some, but she wouldn’t go any further than newspaper stories,——when one day dan took her and me to sail, and we were to have had a clam-chowder on the point, if the squall hadn’t come. as it was, we’d got to put up with chicken-broth, and it couldn’t have been better, considering who made it. it was getting on toward the cool of the may evening, the sunset was round on the other side of the house, but all the east looked as if the sky had been stirred up with currant-juice, till it grew purple and dark, and then the two lighthouses flared out and showed us the lip of froth lapping the shadowy shore beyond, and i heard father’s voice, and he came in.

there was nothing but the firelight in the room, and it threw about great shadows, so that at first entering all was indistinct; but i heard a foot behind father’s, and then a form appeared, and something, i never could tell what, made a great shiver rush down my back, just as when a creature is frightened in the dark at what you don’t see; and so, though my soul was unconscious, my body felt that there was danger in the air. dan had risen and lighted the lamp that swings in the chimney, and father first of all had gone up and kissed mother, and left the stranger standing; then he turned round, saying,——

“a tough day,——it’s been a tough day; and here’s some un to prove it. georgie, hope that pot’s steam[132] don’t belie it, for mr. gabriel verelay and i want a good supper and a good bed.”

at this, the stranger, still standing, bowed.

“here’s the one, father,” said i. “but about the bed,——faith’ll have to stay here,——and i don’t see,——unless dan takes him over——”

“that i’ll do,” said dan.

“all right,” said the stranger, in a voice that you didn’t seem to notice while he was speaking, but that you remembered afterwards like the ring of any silver thing that has been thrown down; and he dropped his hat on the floor and drew near the fireplace, warming hands that were slender and brown, but shapely as a woman’s. i was taking up the supper; so i only gave him a glance or two, and saw him standing there, his left hand extended to the blaze, and his eye resting lightly and then earnestly on faith in her pretty sleep, and turning away much as one turns from a picture. at length i came to ask him to sit by, and at that moment faith’s eyes opened.

faith always woke up just as a baby does, wide and bewildered, and the fire had flushed her cheeks, and her hair was disordered, and she fixed her gaze on him as if he had stepped out of her dream, her lips half parted and then curling in a smile; but in a second he moved off with me, and faith slipped down and into the little bedroom.

well, we didn’t waste many words until father’d lost the edge of his appetite, and then i told about faith.

“’f that don’t beat the dutch!” said father. “here’s mr.——mr.——”

[133]

“gabriel,” said the stranger.

“yes,——mr. gabriel verelay been served the same trick by the same squall, only worse and more of it,——knocked off the yacht——what’s that you call her?”

“la belle louise.”

“and left for drowned,——if they see him go at all. but he couldn’t ’a’ sinked in that sea, if he’d tried. he kep’ afloat; we blundered into him; and here he is.”

dan and i looked round in considerable surprise, for he was dry as an august leaf.

“o,” said the stranger, coloring, and with the least little turn of his words, as if he didn’t always speak english, “the good capitain reached shore, and, finding sticks, he kindled a fire, and we did dry our clothes until it made fine weather once more.”

“yes,” said father; “but ’t wouldn’t been quite such fine weather, i reckon, if this’d gone to the fishes!” and he pushed something across the table.

it was a pouch with steel snaps, and well stuffed. the stranger colored again, and held his hand for it, and the snap burst, and great gold pieces, english coin and very old french ones, rolled about the table, and father shut his eyes tight; and just then faith came back and slipped into her chair. i saw her eyes sparkle as we all reached, laughing and joking, to gather them; and mr. gabriel——we got into the way of calling him so,——he liked it best——hurried to get them out of sight as if he’d committed some act of ostentation. and then, to make amends, he threw off what constraint he had worn in this new atmosphere of ours, and was so gay, so full of questions and quips and conceits, all spoken in his[134] strange way, his voice was so sweet, and he laughed so much and so like a boy, and his words had so much point and brightness, that i could think of nothing but the showers of colored stars in fireworks. dan felt it like a play, sat quiet, but enjoying, and i saw he liked it;——the fellow had a way of attaching every one. father was uproarious, and kept calling out, “mother, do you hear?——d’you hear that, mother?” and faith, she was near, taking it all in as a flower does sunshine, only smiling a little, and looking utterly happy. then i hurried to clear up, and faith sat in the great arm-chair, and father got out the pipes, and you could hardly see across the room for the wide tobacco-wreaths; and then it was father’s turn, and he told story after story of the hardships and the dangers and the charms of our way of living. and i could see mr. gabriel’s cheek blanch, and he would bend forward, forgetting to smoke, and his breath coming short, and then right himself like a boat after lurching,——he had such natural ways, and except that he’d maybe been a spoiled child, he would have had a good heart, as hearts go. and nothing would do at last but he must stay and live the same scenes for a little; and father told him ’t wouldn’t pay,——they weren’t so much to go through with as to tell of,——there was too much prose in the daily life, and too much dirt, and ’t wa’n’t fit for gentlemen. o, he said, he’d been used to roughing it,——woodsing, camping and gunning and yachting, ever since he’d been a free man. he was a canadian, and had been cruising from the st. lawrence to florida; and now, as his companions would go on without him, he had a mind to[135] try a bit of coast-life. and could he board here? or was there any handy place? and father said, there was dan,——dan devereux, a man that hadn’t his match at oar or helm. and mr. gabriel turned his keen eye and bowed again,——and couldn’t dan take mr. gabriel? and before dan could answer, for he’d referred it to faith, mr. gabriel had forgotten all about it, and was humming a little french song and stirring the coals with the tongs. and that put father off in a fresh remembrance; and as the hours lengthened, the stories grew fearful, and he told them deep into the midnight, till at last mr. gabriel stood up.

“no more, good friend,” said he. “but i will have a taste of this life perilous. and now where is it that i go?”

dan also stood up.

“my little woman,” said he, glancing at faith, “thinks there’s a corner for you, sir.”

“i beg your pardon——” and mr. gabriel paused, with a shadow skimming over his clear dark face.

dan wondered what he was begging pardon for, but thought perhaps he hadn’t heard him, so he repeated,——

“my wife,”——nodding over his shoulder at faith, “she’s my wife,——thinks there’s a——”

“she’s your wife?” said mr. gabriel, his eyes opening and brightening the way an aurora runs up the sky, and looking first at one and then at the other, as if he couldn’t understand how so delicate a flower grew on so thorny a stem.

the red flushed up dan’s face,——and up mine, too,[136] for the matter of that,——but in a minute the stranger had dropped his glance.

“and why did you not tell me,” he said, “that i might have found her less beautiful?”

then he raised his shoulders, gave her a saucy bow, with his hand on dan’s arm,——dan, who was now too well pleased at having faith made happy by a compliment to sift it,——and they went out.

but i was angry enough; and you may imagine i wasn’t much soothed by seeing faith, who’d been so die-away all the evening, sitting up before my scrap of looking-glass, trying in my old coral ear-rings, bowing up my ribbons, and plaiting and prinking till the clock frightened her into bed.

the next morning, mother, who wasn’t used to such disturbance, was ill, and i was kept pretty busy tending on her for two or three days. faith had insisted on going home the first thing after breakfast, and in that time i heard no more of anybody,——for father was out with the night-tides, and, except to ask how mother did, and if i’d seen the stray from the lobblelyese again, was too tired for talking when he came back. that had been——let me see——on a monday, i think,——yes, on a monday; and thursday evening, as in-doors had begun to tell on me, and mother was so much improved, i thought i’d run out for a walk along the sea-wall. the sunset was creeping round everything, and lying in great sheets on the broad, still river, the children were frolicking in the water, and all was so gay, and the air was so sweet, that i went lingering along farther than i’d meant, and by and by who should i see but a couple[137] sauntering toward me at my own gait, and one of them was faith. she had on a muslin with little roses blushing all over it, and she floated along in it as if she were in a pink cloud, and she’d snatched a vine of the tender young woodbine as she went, and, throwing it round her shoulders, held the two ends in one hand like a ribbon, while with the other she swung her white sunbonnet. she laughed, and shook her head at me, and there, large as life, under the dark braids dangled my coral ear-rings, that she’d adopted without leave or license. she’d been down to the lower landing to meet dan,——a thing she’d done before——i don’t know when,——and was walking up with mr. gabriel while dan stayed behind to see to things. i kept them talking, and mr. gabriel was sparkling with fun, for he’d got to feeling acquainted, and it had put him in high spirits to get ashore at this hour, though he liked the sea, and we were all laughing, when dan came up. now i must confess i hadn’t fancied mr. gabriel over and above; i suppose my first impression had hardened into a prejudice; and after i’d fathomed the meaning of faith’s fine feathers i liked him less than ever. but when dan came up, he joined right in, gay and hearty, and liking his new acquaintance so much, that, thinks i, he must know best, and i’ll let him look out for his interests himself. it would ’a’ been no use, though, for dan to pretend to beat the frenchman at his own weapons,——and i don’t know that i should have cared to have him. the older i grow, the less i think of your mere intellect; throw learning out of the scales, and give me a great, warm heart,——like dan’s.

[138]

well, it was getting on in the evening, when the latch lifted, and in ran faith. she twisted my ear-rings out of her hair, exclaiming,——

“o georgie, are you busy? can’t you perse my ears now?”

“pierce them yourself, faith.”

“well, pierce, then. but i can’t,——you know i can’t. won’t you now, georgie?” and she tossed the ear-rings into my lap.

“why, faith,” said i, “how’d you contrive to wear these, if your ears aren’t——”

“o, i tied them on. come now, georgie!”

so i got the ball of yarn and the darning-needle.

“o, not such a big one!” cried she.

“perhaps you’d like a cambric needle,” said i.

“i don’t want a winch,” she pouted.

“well, here’s a smaller one. now kneel down.”

“yes, but you wait a moment, till i screw up my courage.”

“no need. you can talk, and i’ll take you at unawares.”

so faith knelt down, and i got all ready.

“and what shall i talk about?” said she. “about aunt rhody, or mr. gabriel, or——i’ll tell you the queerest thing, georgie! going to now?”

“do be quiet, faith, and not keep your head flirting about so!”——for she’d started up to speak. then she composed herself once more.

“what was i saying? o, about that! yes, georgie, the queerest thing! you see this evening, when dan was out, i was sitting talkin’ with mr. gabriel, and he[139] was wondering how i came to be dropped down here, so i told him all about it. and he was so interested that i went and showed him the things i had on when dan found me,——you know they’ve been kept real nice. and he took them, and looked them over close, admiring them, and——and——admiring me,——and finally he started, and then held the frock to the light, and then lifted a little plait, and in the under side of the belt lining there was a name very finely wrought,——virginie des violets; and he looked at all the others, and in some hidden corner of every one was the initials of the same name,——v. des v.

“‘that should be your name, mrs. devereux,’ says he.

“‘o, no!’ says i. ‘my name’s faith.’

“well, and on that he asked, was there no more; and so i took off the little chain that i’ve always worn and showed him that, and he asked if there was a face in it, in what we thought was a coin, you know; and i said, o, it didn’t open; and he turned it over and over, and finally something snapped, and there was a face,——here, you shall see it, georgie.”

and faith drew it from her bosom, and opened and held it before me; for i’d sat with my needle poised, and forgetting to strike. and there was the face indeed, a sad, serious face, dark and sweet, yet the image of faith, and with the same mouth,——that so lovely in a woman becomes weak in a man,——and on the other side there were a few threads of hair, with the same darkness and fineness as faith’s hair, and under them a little picture chased in the gold and enamelled, which from what[140] i’ve read since i suppose must have been the crest of the des violets.

“and what did mr. gabriel say then?” i asked, giving it back to faith, who put her head into the old position again.

“o, he acted real queer! talked french, too,——o, so fast! ‘the very man!’ then he cried out. ‘the man himself! his portrait,——i have seen it a hundred times!’ and then he told me that about a dozen years ago or more, a ship sailed from——from——i forget the place exactly, somewhere up there where he came from,——mr. gabriel, i mean,——and among the passengers was this man and his wife, and his little daughter, whose name was virginie des violets, and the ship was never heard from again. but he says that without a doubt i’m the little daughter and my name is virginie, though i suppose every one’ll call me faith. o, and that isn’t the queerest! the queerest is, this gentleman,” and faith lifted her head, “was very rich. i can’t tell you how much he owned. lands that you can walk on a whole day and not come to the end, and ships, and gold. and the whole of it’s lying idle and waiting for an heir,——and i, georgie, am the heir.”

and faith told it with cheeks burning and eyes shining, but yet quite as if she’d been born and brought up in the knowledge.

“it don’t seem to move you much, faith,” said i, perfectly amazed, although i’d frequently expected something of the kind.

“well, i may never get it, and so on. if i do, i’ll give you a silk dress and set you up in a bookstore. but[141] here’s a queerer thing yet. des violets is the way mr. gabriel’s own name is spelt, and his father and mine——his mother and——well, some way or other we’re sort of cousins. only think, georgie! isn’t that——i thought, to be sure, when he quartered at our house, dan’d begin to take me to do, if i looked at him sideways,——make the same fuss that he does if i nod to any of the other young men.”

“i don’t think dan speaks before he should, faith.”

“why don’t you say virginie?” says she, laughing.

“because faith you’ve always been, and faith you’ll have to remain, with us, to the end of the chapter.”

“well, that’s as it may be. but dan can’t object now to my going where i’m a mind to with my own cousin!” and here faith laid her ear on the ball of yarn again.

“hasten, headsman!” said she, out of a novel, “or they’ll wonder where i am.”

“well,” i answered, “just let me run the needle through the emery.”

“yes, georgie,” said faith, going back with her memories while i sharpened my steel, “mr. gabriel and i are kin. and he said that the moment he laid eyes on me he knew i was of different blood from the rest of the people——”

“what people?” asked i.

“why, you, and dan, and all these. and he said he was struck to stone when he heard i was married to dan,——i must have been entrapped,——the courts would annul it,——any one could see the difference between us——”

[142]

here was my moment, and i didn’t spare it, but jabbed the needle into the ball of yarn, if her ear did lie between them.

“yes!” says i, “anybody with half an eye can see the difference between you, and that’s a fact! nobody’d ever imagine for a breath that you were deserving of dan,——dan, who’s so noble he’d die for what he thought was right; you, who are so selfish and idle and fickle and——”

and at that faith burst out crying.

“o, i never expected you’d talk about me so, georgie!” said she between her sobs. “how could i tell you were such a mighty friend of dan’s? and besides, if ever i was virginie des violets, i’m faith devereux now, and dan’ll resent any one’s speaking so about his wife!”

and she stood up, the tears sparkling like diamonds in her flashing dark eyes, her cheeks red, and her little fist clinched.

“that’s the right spirit, faith,” says i, “and i’m glad to see you show it. and as for this young canadian, the best thing to do with him is to send him packing. i don’t believe a word he says; it’s more than likely nothing but to get into your good graces.”

“but there’s the names,” said she, so astonished that she didn’t remember she was angry.

“happened so.”

“o, yes! ‘happened so’! a likely story! it’s nothing but your envy, and that’s all!”

“faith!” says i, for i forgot she didn’t know how close she struck.

[143]

“well,——i mean——there, don’t let’s talk about it any more! how under the sun am i going to get these ends tied?”

“come here. there! now for the other one.”

“no, i sha’n’t let you do that; you hurt me dreadfully, and you got angry, and took the big needle.”

“i thought you expected to be hurt.”

“i didn’t expect to be stabbed.”

“well, just as you please. i suppose you’ll go round with one ear-ring.”

“like a little pig with his ear cropped? no, i shall do it myself. see there, georgie!” and she threw a bit of a box into my hands.

i opened it, and there lay inside, on their velvet cushion, a pair of the prettiest things you ever saw,——a tiny bunch of white grapes, and every grape a round pearl, and all hung so that they would tinkle together on their golden stems every time faith shook her head,——and she had a cunning little way of shaking it often enough.

“these must have cost a penny, faith,” said i. “where’d you get them?”

“mr. gabriel gave them to me just now. he went up town and bought them. and i don’t want him to know that my ears weren’t bored.”

“mr. gabriel? and you took them?”

“of course i took them, and mighty glad to get them.”

“faith dear,” said i, “don’t you know that you shouldn’t accept presents from gentlemen, and especially now you’re a married woman, and especially from those of higher station?”

[144]

“but he isn’t higher.”

“you know what i mean. and then, too, he is; for one always takes rank from one’s husband.”

faith looked rather downcast at this.

“yes,” said i; “and pearls and calico——”

“just because you haven’t got a pair yourself! there, be still! i don’t want any of your instructions in duty!”

“you ought to put up with a word from a friend, faith,” said i. “you always come to me with your grievances. and i’ll tell you what i’ll do. you used to like these coral branches of mine; and if you’ll give those back to mr. gabriel, you shall have the coral.”

well, faith, she hesitated, standing there trying to muster her mind to the needle, and it ended by her taking the coral, though i don’t believe she returned the pearls; but we none of us ever saw them afterwards.

we’d been talking in a pretty low tone, because mother was asleep; and just as she’d finished the other ear, and a little drop of blood stood up on it like a live ruby, the door opened and dan and mr. gabriel came in. there never was a prettier picture than faith at that moment, and so the young stranger thought, for he stared at her, smiling and at ease, just as if she’d been hung in a gallery and he’d bought a ticket. so then he sat down and repeated to dan and mother what she’d told me, and he promised to send for the papers to prove it all. but he never did send for them,——delaying and delaying, till the summer wore away; and perhaps there were such papers and perhaps there weren’t. i’ve always thought he didn’t want his own friends to know where he was.[145] dan might be a rich man to-day, if he chose to look them up; but he’d scorch at a slow fire before he’d touch a copper of it. father never believed a word about it, when we recited it again to him.

“so faith’s come into her fortune, has she?” said he. “pretty child! she ’a’n’t had so much before sence she fell heir to old miss devereux’s best chany, her six silver spoons, and her surname.”

so the days passed, and the greater part of every one mr. gabriel was dabbling in the water somewhere. there wasn’t a brook within ten miles that he didn’t empty of trout, for dan knew the woods as well as the shores, and he knew the clear nights when the insects can keep free from the water so that next day the fish rise hungry to the surface; and so sometimes in the brightest of may noons they’d bring home a string of those beauties, speckled with little tongues of flame; and mr. gabriel would have them cooked, and make us all taste them,——for we don’t care much for that sort, down here on the flats; we should think we were famished if we had to eat fish. and then they’d lie in wait all day for the darting pickerel in the little stream of shadows above; and when it came june, up the river he went trolling for bass, and he used a different sort of bait from the rest,——bass won’t bite much at clams,——and he hauled in great forty-pounders. and sometimes, in the afternoons, he took out faith and me,——for, as faith would go, whether or no, i always made it a point to put by everything and go too; and i used to try and get some of the other girls in, but mr. gabriel never would take them, though he was hail-fellow-well-met[146] with everybody, and was everybody’s favorite, and it was known all round how he found out faith, and that alone made him so popular, that i do believe, if he’d only taken out naturalization papers, we’d have sent him to general court. and then it grew time for the river mackerel, and they used to bring in at sunset two or three hundred in a shining heap, together with great lobsters, that looked as if they’d been carved out of heliotrope-stone, and so old that they were barnacled. and it was so novel to mr. gabriel, that he used to act as if he’d fallen in fairy-land.

after all, i don’t know what we should have done without him that summer; he always paid dan or father a dollar a day and the hire of the boat; and the times were so hard, and there was so little doing, that, but for this, and packing the barrels of clam-bait, they’d have been idle and fared sorely. but we’d rather have starved: though, as for that, i’ve heard father say there never was a time when he couldn’t go out and catch some sort of fish and sell it for enough to get us something to eat. and then this mr. gabriel, he had such a winning way with him, he was as quick at wit as a bird on the wing, he had a story or a song for every point, he seemed to take to our simple life as if he’d been born to it, and he was as much interested in all our trifles as we were ourselves. then, he was so sympathetic, he felt everybody’s troubles, he went to the city and brought down a wonderful doctor to see mother, and he got her queer things that helped her more than you’d have thought anything could, and he went himself and set honeysuckles out all round dan’s house, so that[147] before summer was over it was a bower of great sweet blows, and he had an alms for every beggar, and a kind word for every urchin, and he followed dan about as a child would follow some big shaggy dog. he introduced, too, a lot of new-fangled games; he was what they called a gymnast, and in feats of rassling there wasn’t a man among them all but he could stretch as flat as a flounder. and then he always treated. everybody had a place for him soon,——even i did; and as for dan, he’d have cut his own heart out of his body, if mr. gabriel’d had occasion to use it. he was a different man from any dan’d ever met before, something finer, and he might have been better, and dan’s loyal soul was glad to acknowledge him master, and i declare i believe he felt just as the jacobites in the old songs used to feel for royal charlie. there are some men born to rule with a haughty, careless sweetness, and others born to die for them with stern and dogged devotion.

well, and all this while faith wasn’t standing still; she was changing steadily, as much as ever the moon changed in the sky. i noticed it first one day when mr. gabriel’d caught every child in the region and given them a picnic in the woods of the stack-yard-gate, and faith was nowhere to be seen tiptoeing round every one as she used to do, but i found her at last standing at the head of the table,——mr. gabriel dancing here and there, seeing to it that all should be as gay as he seemed to be,——quiet and dignified as you please, and feeling every one of her inches. but it wasn’t dignity really that was the matter with faith,——it was just gloom. she’d brighten[148] up for a moment or two, and then down would fall the cloud again; she took to long fits of dreaming, and sometimes she’d burst out crying at any careless word, so that my heart fairly bled for the poor child,——for one couldn’t help seeing that she’d some secret unhappiness or other,——and i was as gentle and soothing to her as it’s in my nature to be. she was in to our house a good deal; she kept it pretty well out of dan’s way, and i hoped she’d get over it sooner or later, and make up her mind to circumstances. and i talked to her a sight about dan, praising him constantly before her, though i couldn’t bear to do it; and finally, one very confidential evening, i told her that i’d been in love with dan myself once a little, but i’d seen that he would marry her, and so had left off thinking about it; for, do you know, i thought it might make her set more price on him now, if she knew somebody else had ever cared for him. well, that did answer awhile: whether she thought she ought to make it up to dan, or whether he really did grow more in her eyes, faith got to being very neat and domestic and praiseworthy. but still there was the change, and it didn’t make her any the less lovely. indeed, if i’d been a man, i should have cared for her more than ever: it was like turning a child into a woman: and i really think, as dan saw her going about with such a pleasant gravity, her pretty figure moving so quietly, her pretty face so still and fair, as if she had thoughts and feelings now, he began to wonder what had come over faith, and, if she were really as charming as this, why he hadn’t felt it before; and then, you know, whether you love a woman or not, the mere fact that[149] she’s your wife, that her life is sunk in yours, that she’s something for you to protect, and that your honor lies in doing so, gives you a certain kindly feeling that might ripen into love any day under sunshine and a south wall.

blue-fish were about done with, when one day dan brought in some mackerel from boon island: they hadn’t been in the harbor for some time, though now there was a probability of their return. so they were going out when the tide served——the two boys——at midnight for mackerel, and dan had heard me wish for the experience so often, a long while ago, that he said, why shouldn’t they take the girls? and faith snatched at the idea, and with that mr. gabriel agreed to fetch me at the hour, and so we parted. i was kind of sorry, but there was no help for it.

when we started, it was in that clear crystal dark that looks as if you could see through it forever till you reached infinite things, and we seemed to be in a great hollow sphere, and the stars were like living beings who had the night to themselves. always, when i’m up late, i feel as if it were something unlawful, as if affairs were in progress which i had no right to witness, a kind of grand freemasonry. i’ve felt it nights when i’ve been watching with mother, and there has come up across the heavens the great caravan of constellations, and a star that i’d pulled away the curtain on the east side to see came by and by and looked in at the south window; but i never felt it as i did this night. the tide was near the full, and so we went slipping down the dark water by the starlight; and as we saw them shining above us, and[150] then looked down and saw them sparkling up from beneath,——the stars,——it really seemed as if dan’s oars must be two long wings, as if we swam on them through a motionless air. by and by we were in the island creek, and far ahead, in a streak of wind that didn’t reach us, we could see a pointed sail skimming along between the banks, as if some ghost went before to show us the way; and when the first hush and mystery wore off, mr. gabriel was singing little french songs in tunes like the rise and fall of the tide. while he sang he rowed, and dan was gangeing the hooks. at length dan took the oars again, and every now and then he paused to let us float along with the tide as it slacked, and take the sense of the night. and all the tall grass that edged the side began to wave in a strange light, and there blew on a little breeze, and over the rim of the world tipped up a waning moon. if there’d been anything needed to make us feel as if we were going to find the witch of endor, it was this. it was such a strange moon, pointing such a strange way, with such a strange color, so remote, and so glassy,——it was like a dead moon, or the spirit of one, and was perfectly awful.

“she has come to look at faith,” said mr. gabriel; for faith, who once would have been nodding here and there all about the boat, was sitting up pale and sad, like another spirit, to confront it. but dan and i both felt a difference.

mr. gabriel, he stepped across and went and sat down behind faith, and laid his hand lightly on her arm. perhaps he didn’t mind that he touched her,——he had a kind of absent air; but if any one had looked at the[151] nervous pressure of the slender fingers, they would have seen as much meaning in that touch as in many an embrace; and faith lifted her face to his, and they forgot that i was looking at them, and into the eyes of both there stole a strange, deep smile,——and my soul groaned within me. it made no odds to me then that the air blew warm off the land from scented hay-ricks, that the moon hung like some exhumed jewel in the sky, that all the perfect night was widening into dawn. i saw and felt nothing but the wretchedness that must break one day on dan’s head. should i warn him? i couldn’t do that. and what then?

the sail was up, we had left the headland and the hills, and when they furled it and cast anchor we were swinging far out on the back of the great monster that was frolicking to itself and thinking no more of us than we do of a mote in the air. elder snow, he says that it’s singular we regard day as illumination and night as darkness,——day that really hems us in with narrow light and shuts us upon ourselves, night that sets us free and reveals to us all the secrets of the sky. i thought of that when one by one the stars melted and the moon became a breath, and up over the wide grayness crept color and radiance and the sun himself,——the sky soaring higher and higher, like a great thin bubble of flaky hues,——and, all about, nothing but the everlasting wash of waters broke the sacred hush. and it seemed as if god had been with us, and withdrawing we saw the trail of his splendid garments; and i remembered the words mother had spoken to dan once before, and why couldn’t i leave him in heavenly hands? and then it came into my heart[152] to pray. i knew i hadn’t any right to pray expecting to be heard; but yet mine would be the prayer of the humble, and wasn’t faith of as much consequence as a sparrow? by and by, as we all sat leaning over the gunwale, the words of a hymn that i’d heard at camp-meetings came into my mind, and i sang them out, loud and clear. i always had a good voice, though dan’d never heard me do anything with it except hum little low things, putting mother to sleep; but here i had a whole sky to sing in, and the hymns were trumpet-calls. and one after another they kept thronging up, and there was a rush of feeling in them that made you shiver, and as i sang them they thrilled me through and through. wide as the way before us was, it seemed to widen; i felt myself journeying with some vast host towards the city of god, and its light poured over us, and there was nothing but joy and love and praise and exulting expectancy in my heart. and when the hymn died on my lips because the words were too faint and the tune was too weak for the ecstasy, and when the silence had soothed me back again, i turned and saw dan’s lips bitten, and his cheek white, and his eyes like stars, and mr. gabriel’s face fallen forward in his hands, and he shaking with quick sobs; and as for faith,——faith, she had dropped asleep, and one arm was thrown above her head, and the other lay where it had slipped from mr. gabriel’s loosened grasp. there’s a contagion, you know, in such things, but faith was never of the catching kind.

well, this wasn’t what we’d come for,——turning all out-doors into a church,——though what’s a church but a place of god’s presence? and for my part, i never see[153] high blue sky and sunshine without feeling that. and all of a sudden there came a school of mackerel splashing and darkening and curling round the boat, after the bait we’d thrown out on anchoring. ’twould have done you good to see dan just at that moment; you’d have realized what it was to have a calling. he started up, forgetting everything else, his face all flushed, his eyes like coals, his mouth tight and his tongue silent; and how many hooks he had out i’m sure i don’t know, but he kept jerking them in by twos and threes, and finally they bit at the bare barb and were taken without any bait at all, just as if they’d come and asked to be caught. mr. gabriel, he didn’t pay any attention at first, but dan called to him to stir himself, and so gradually he worked back into his old mood; but he was more still and something sad all the rest of the morning. well, when we’d gotten about enough, and they were dying in the boat there, as they cast their scales, like the iris, we put in-shore; and building a fire, we cooked our own dinner and boiled our own coffee. many’s the icy winter night i’ve wrapped up dan’s bottle of hot coffee in rolls on rolls of flannel, that he might drink it hot and strong far out at sea in a wherry at daybreak!

but as i was saying,——all this time, mr. gabriel, he scarcely looked at faith. at first she didn’t comprehend, and then something swam all over her face as if the very blood in her veins had grown darker, and there was such danger in her eye that before we stepped into the boat again i wished to goodness i had a life-preserver. but in the beginning the religious impression lasted and gave him great resolutions; and then strolling[154] off and along the beach, he fell in with some men there and did as he always did, scraped acquaintance. i verily believe that these men were total strangers, that he’d never laid eyes on them before, and after a few words he wheeled about. as he did so, his glance fell on faith standing there alone against the pale sky, for the weather’d thickened, and watching the surf break at her feet. he was motionless, gazing at her long, and then, when he had turned once or twice irresolutely, he ground his heel into the sand and went back. the men rose and wandered on with him, and they talked together for a while, and i saw money pass; and pretty soon mr. gabriel returned, his face vividly pallid, but smiling, and he had in his hand some little bright shells that you don’t often find on these northern beaches, and he said he had bought them of those men. and all this time he’d not spoken with faith, and there was the danger yet in her eye. but nothing came of it, and i had accused myself of nearly every crime in the decalogue, and on the way back we had put up the lines, and mr. gabriel had hauled in the lobster-net for the last time. he liked that branch of the business; he said it had all the excitement of gambling,——the slow settling downwards, the fading of the last ripple, the impenetrable depth and shade and the mystery of the work below, five minutes of expectation, and it might bring up a scale of the sea-serpent, or the king of the crabs might have crept in for a nap in the folds, or it might come up as if you’d dredged for pearls, or it might hold the great backward-crawling lobsters, or a tangle of sea-weed, or the long yellow locks of some drowned girl,——or nothing at all. so he always drew[155] in that net, and it needed muscle, and his was like steel,——not good for much in the long pull, but just for a breathing could handle the biggest boatman in the harbor. well,——and we’d hoisted the sail and were in the creek once more, for the creek was only to be used at high-water, and i’d told dan i couldn’t be away from mother over another tide and so we mustn’t get aground, and he’d told me not to fret, there was nothing too shallow for us on the coast. “this boat,” said dan, “she’ll float in a heavy dew.” and he began singing a song he liked:——

“i cast my line in largo bay,

and fishes i caught nine:

there’s three to boil, and three to fry,

and three to bait the line.”

and mr. gabriel’d never heard it before, and he made him sing it again and again.

“the boatie rows, the boatie rows,

the boatie rows indeed,”

repeated mr. gabriel, and he said it was the only song he knew that held the click of the oar in the rowlock.

the little birds went skimming by us, as we sailed, their breasts upon the water, and we could see the gunners creeping through the marshes beside them.

“the wind changes,” said mr. gabriel. “the equinox treads close behind us. sst! is it that you do not feel its breath? and you hear nothing?”

“it’s the soul of the bar,” said dan; and he fell to telling us one of the wild stories that fishermen can tell each other by the lantern, rocking outside at night in the dory.

[156]

the wind was dead east, and now we flew before it, and now we tacked in it, up and up the winding stream, and always a little pointed sail came skimming on in suit.

“what sail is that, dan?” asked i. “it looks like the one that flitted ahead this morning.”

“it is the one,” said dan,——for he’d brought up a whole horde of superstitious memories, and a gloom that had been hovering off and on his face settled there for good. “as much of a one as that was. it’s no sail at all. it’s a death-sign. and i’ve never been down here and seen it but trouble was on its heels. georgie! there’s two of them!”

we all looked, but it was hidden in a curve, and when it stole in sight again there were two of them, filmy and faint as spirits’ wings; and while we gazed they vanished, whether supernaturally or in the mist that was rising mast-high i never thought, for my blood was frozen as it ran.

“you have fear?” asked mr. gabriel,——his face perfectly pale, and his eye almost lost in darkness. “if it is a phantom, it can do you no harm.”

faith’s teeth chattered,——i saw them. he turned to her, and as their look met, a spot of carnation burned into his cheek almost as a brand would have burned. he seemed to be balancing some point, to be searching her and sifting her; and faith half rose, proudly, and pale, as if his look pierced her with pain. the look was long,——but before it fell, a glow and sparkle filled the eyes, and over his face there curled the deep, strange smile of the morning, till the long lids and heavy lashes dropped and made it sad. and faith,——she started in[157] a new surprise, the darkness gathered and crept off her face as cream wrinkles from milk, and spleen or venom or what-not became absorbed again and lost, and there was nothing in her glance but passionate forgetfulness. some souls are like the white river-lilies,——fixed, yet floating; but mr. gabriel had no firm root anywhere, and was blown about with every breeze, like a leaf on the flood. his purposes melted and made with his moods.

the wind got round more to the north, the mist fell upon the waters or blew away over the meadows, and it was cold. mr. gabriel wrapped the cloak about faith and fastened it, and tied her bonnet. just now dan was so busy handling the boat,——and it’s rather risky, you have to wriggle up the creek so,——that he took little notice of us. then mr. gabriel stood up, as if to change his position; and taking off his hat, he held it aloft, while he passed the other hand across his forehead. and leaning against the mast, he stood so, many minutes.

“dan,” i said, “did your spiritual craft ever hang out a purple pennant?”

“no,” said dan.

“well,” says i. and we all saw a little purple ribbon running up the rope and streaming on the air behind us.

“and why do we not hoist our own?” said mr. gabriel, putting on his hat. and suiting the action to the word, a little green signal curled up and flaunted above us like a bunch of the weed floating there in the water beneath and dyeing all the shallows so that they looked like caves of cool emerald, and wide off and over[158] them the west burned smoulderingly red like a furnace. many a time since, i’ve felt the magical color between those banks and along those meadows, but then i felt none of it; every wit i had was too awake and alert and fast-fixed in watching.

“is it that the phantoms can be flesh and blood?” said mr. gabriel, laughingly; and, lifting his arm again, he hailed the foremost.

“boat ahoy! what names?” said he.

the answer came back on the wind full and round.

“speed, and follow.”

“where from?” asked dan, with just a glint in his eye: for usually he knew every boat on the river, but he didn’t know these.

“from the schooner flyaway, taking in sand over at black rocks.”

then mr. gabriel spoke again, as they drew near; but whether he spoke so fast that i couldn’t understand, or whether he spoke french, i never knew; and dan, with some kind of feeling that it was mr. gabriel’s acquaintance, suffered the one we spoke to pass us.

once or twice mr. gabriel had begun some question to dan about the approaching weather, but had turned it off again before anybody could answer. you see he had some little nobility left, and didn’t want the very man he was going to injure to show him how to do it. now, however, he asked him that was steering the speed by, if it was going to storm.

the man thought it was.

“how is it, then, that your schooner prepares to sail?”

[159]

“o, wind’s backed in; we’ll be on blue water before the gale breaks, i reckon, and then beat off where there’s plenty of sea-room.”

“but she shall make shipwreck!”

“‘not if the court know herself, and he think she do,’” was the reply from another, as they passed.

somehow i began to hate myself, i was so full of poisonous suspicions. how did mr. gabriel know the schooner prepared to sail? and this man, could he tell boom from bowsprit? i didn’t believe it; he had the hang of the up-river folks. but there stood mr. gabriel, so quiet and easy, his eyelids down, and he humming an underbreath of song; and there sat faith, so pale and so pretty, a trifle sad, a trifle that her conscience would brew for her, whether or no. yet, after all, there was an odd expression in mr. gabriel’s face, an eager, restless expectation; and if his lids were lowered, it was only to hide the spark that flushed and quenched in his eye like a beating pulse.

we had reached the draw, it was lifted for the speed, she had passed, and the wind was in her sail once more. yet, somehow, she hung back. and then i saw that the men in her were of those with whom mr. gabriel had spoken at noon. dan’s sail fell slack, and we drifted slowly through, while he poled us along with an oar.

“look out, georgie!” said dan, for he thought i was going to graze my shoulder upon the side there. i looked; and when i turned again, mr. gabriel was rising up from some earnest and hurried sentence to faith. and faith, too, was standing, standing and swaying with indecision, and gazing away out before her,——so[160] flushed and so beautiful,——so loath and so willing. poor thing! poor thing! as if her rising in itself were not the whole!

mr. gabriel stepped across the boat, stooped a minute, and then also took an oar. how perfect he was, as he stood there that moment!——perfect like a statue, i mean,——so slender, so clean-limbed, his dark face pale to transparency in the green light that filtered through the draw! and then a ray from the sunset came creeping over the edge of the high fields and smote his eyes sidelong so that they glowed like jewels, and he with his oar planted firmly hung there bending far back with it, completely full of strength and grace.

“it is not the bateaux in the rapids,” said he.

“what are you about?” asked dan, with sudden hoarseness. “you are pulling the wrong way!”

mr. gabriel laughed, and threw down his oar, and stepped back again; gave his hand to faith, and half led, half lifted her, over the side, and into the speed, followed, and never looked behind him. they let go something they had held, the speed put her nose in the water and sprinkled us with spray, plunged, and dashed off like an arrow.

it was like him,——daring and insolent coolness! just like him! always the soul of defiance! none but one so reckless and impetuous as he would have dreamed of flying into the teeth of the tempest in that shell of a schooner. but he was mad with love, and they——there wasn’t a man among them but was the worse for liquor.

for a moment dan took it, as mr. gabriel had expected him to do, as a joke, and went to trim the boat[161] for racing, not meaning they should reach town first. but i——i saw it all.

“dan!” i sung out, “save her! she’s not coming back! they’ll make for the schooner at black rocks! o dan, he’s taken her off!”

now one whose intelligence has never been trained, who shells his five wits and gets rid of the pods as best he can, mayn’t be so quick as another, but like an animal, he feels long before he sees; and a vague sense of this had been upon dan all day. yet now he stood thunderstruck; and the thing went on before his very eyes. it was more than he could believe at once,——and perhaps his first feeling was, why should he hinder? and then the flood fell. no thought of his loss,——though loss it wa’n’t,——only of his friend,——of such stunning treachery, that, if the sun fell hissing into the sea at noon, it would have mattered less,——only of that loss that tore his heart out with it.

“gabriel!” he shouted,——“gabriel!” and his voice was heart-rending. i know that mr. gabriel felt it, for he never turned nor stirred.

then i don’t know what came over dan: a blind rage swelling in his heart seemed to make him larger in every limb; he towered like a flame. he sprang to the tiller, but, as he did so, saw with one flash of his eye that mr. gabriel had unshipped the rudder and thrown it away. he seized an oar to steer with in its place; he saw that they, in their ignorance fast edging on the flats, would shortly be aground; more fisherman than sailor, he knew a thousand tricks of boat-craft that they had never heard of. we flew, we flew through cloven ridges, we[162] became a wind ourselves, and while i tell it he was beside them, had gathered himself as if to leap the chasm between time and eternity, and had landed among them in the speed. the wherry careened with the shock and the water poured into her, and she flung headlong and away as his foot spurned her. heaven knows why she didn’t upset, for i thought of nothing but the scene before me as i drifted off from it. i shut the eyes in my soul now, that i mayn’t see that horrid scuffle twice. mr. gabriel, he rose, he turned. if dan was the giant beside him, he himself was so well-knit, so supple, so adroit, that his power was like the blade in the hand. dan’s strength was lying round loose, but mr. gabriel’s was trained, it hid like springs of steel between brain and wrist, and from him the clap fell with the bolt. and then, besides, dan did not love faith, and he did love gabriel. any one could see how it would go. i screamed. i cried, “faith! faith!” and some natural instinct stirred in faith’s heart, for she clung to mr. gabriel’s arm to pull him off from dan. but he shook her away like rain. then such a mortal weakness took possession of me that i saw everything black, and when it was clean gone, i looked, and they were locked in each other’s arms, fierce, fierce and fell, a death-grip. they were staggering to the boat’s edge: only this i saw, that mr. gabriel was inside: suddenly the helmsman interposed with an oar, and broke their grasps. mr. gabriel reeled away, free, for a second; then, the passion, the fury, the hate in his heart feeding his strength as youth fed the locks of samson, he darted, and lifted dan in his two arms and threw him like a[163] stone into the water. stiffened to ice, i waited for dan to rise; the other craft, the follow, skimmed between us, and one man managing her that she shouldn’t heel, the rest drew dan in,——it’s not the depth of two foot there,——tacked about, and after a minute came alongside, seized our painter, and dropped him gently into his own boat. then——for the speed had got afloat again——the thing stretched her two sails wing and wing, and went ploughing up a great furrow of foam before her.

i sprang to dan. he was not senseless, but in a kind of stupor: his head had struck the fluke of a half-sunk anchor and it had stunned him, but as the wound bled he recovered slowly and opened his eyes. ah, what misery was in them! i turned to the fugitives. they were yet in sight, mr. gabriel sitting and seeming to adjure faith, whose skirts he held; but she stood, and her arms were outstretched, and, pale as a foam-wreath her face, and piercing as a night-wind her voice, i heard her cry, “o georgie! georgie!” it was too late for her to cry or to wring her hands now. she should have thought of that before. but mr. gabriel rose and drew her down, and hid her face in his arms and bent over it; and so they fled up the basin and round the long line of sand, and out into the gloom and the curdling mists.

i bound up dan’s head. i couldn’t steer with an oar,——that was out of the question,——but, as luck would have it, could row tolerably; so i got down the little mast, and at length reached the wharves. the town-lights flickered up in the darkness and flickered back from the black rushing river, and then out blazed the great mills; and as i felt along, i remembered times[164] when we’d put in by the tender sunset, as the rose faded out of the water and the orange ebbed down the west, and one by one the sweet evening-bells chimed forth, so clear and high, and each with a different tone, that it seemed as if the stars must flock, tinkling, into the sky. and here were the bells ringing out again, ringing out of the gray and the gloom, dull and brazen, as if they rang from some cavern of shadows, or from the mouth of hell,——but no, that was down river! well, i made my way, and the men on the landing took up dan, and helped him in and got him on my little bed, and no sooner there than the heavy sleep with which he had struggled fell on him like lead.

the story flew from mouth to mouth, the region rang with it; nobody had any need to add to it, or to make it out a griffin or a dragon that had gripped faith and carried her off in his talons. but everybody declared that those boats could be no ship’s yawls at all, but must belong to parties from up river camping out on the beach, and that a parcel of such must have gone sailing with some of the hands of a sand-droger: there was one in the stream now, that had got off with the tide, said the jerdan boys who’d been down there that afternoon, though there was no such name as “flyaway” on her stern, and they were waiting for the master of her, who’d gone off on a spree,——a dare-devil fellow, that used to run a smuggler between bordeaux and bristol, as they’d heard say: and all agreed that mr. gabriel could never have had to do with them before that day, or he’d have known what a place a sand-droger would be for a woman; and everybody made excuses for[165] gabriel, and everybody was down on faith. so there things lay. it was raw and chill when the last neighbor left us, the sky was black as a cloak, not a star to be seen, the wind had edged back to the east again and came in wet and wild from the sea and fringed with its thunder. o, poor little faith, what a night! what a night for her!

i went back and sat down by dan, and tried to keep his head cool. father was up walking the kitchen floor till late, but at length he lay down across the foot of mother’s bed, as if expecting to be called. the lights were put out, there was no noise in the town, every one slept,——every one, except they watched like me, on that terrible night. no noise in the town, did i say? ah, but there was! it came creeping round the corners, it poured rushing up the street, it rose from everywhere,——a voice, a voice of woe, the heavy booming rote of the sea. i looked out, but it was pitch-dark, light had forsaken the world, we were beleaguered by blackness. it grew colder, as if one felt a fog fall, and the wind, mounting slowly, now blew a gale. it eddied in clouds of dead and whirling leaves, and sent big torn branches flying aloft; it took the house by the four corners and shook it to loosening the rafters, and i felt the chair rock under me; it rumbled down the chimney as if it would tear the life out of us. and with every fresh gust of the gale the rain slapped against the wall, the rain that fell in rivers, and went before the wind in sheets; and sheltered as i was, the torrents seemed to pour over me like cataracts, and every drop pierced me like a needle, and i put my fingers in my ears to shut out the howl of the wind and[166] the waves. i couldn’t keep my thoughts away from faith. o, poor girl, this wasn’t what she’d expected! as plainly as if i were aboard-ship i felt the scene, the hurrying feet, the slippery deck, the hoarse cries, the creaking cordage, the heaving and plunging and straining, and the wide wild night. and i was beating off those dreadful lines with them, two dreadful lines of white froth through the blackness, two lines where the horns of breakers guard the harbor,——all night long beating off the lee with them, my life in my teeth, and chill, blank, shivering horror before me. my whole soul, my whole being, was fixed in that one spot, that little vessel driving on the rocks: it seemed as if a madness took possession of me, i reeled as i walked, i forefelt the shivering shock, i waited till she should strike. and then i thought i heard cries, and i ran out in the storm, and down upon the causey, but nothing met me but the hollow night and the roaring sea and the wind. i came back, and hurried up and down and wrung my hands in an agony. pictures of summer nights flashed upon me and faded,——where out of deep blue vaults the stars hung like lamps, great and golden,——or where soft films just hazing heaven caught the rays till all above gleamed like gauze faintly powdered and spangled with silver,——or heavy with heat, slipping over silent waters, through scented airs, under purple skies. and then storms rolled in and rose before my eyes, distinct for a moment, and breaking,——such as i’d seen them from the shoals in broad daylight, when tempestuous columns scooped themselves up from the green gulfs and shattered in foam on the shuddering rock,——ah! but that was day, and this was midnight and[167] murk!——storms as i’d heard tell of them off cape race, when great steamers went down with but one cry, and the waters crowded them out of sight,——storms where, out of the wilderness of waves that far and wide wasted white around, a single one came ploughing on straight to the mark, gathering its grinding masses mast-high, poising, plunging, and swamping and crashing them into bottomless pits of destruction,——storms where waves toss and breakers gore, where, hanging on crests that slip from under, reefs impale the hull, and drowning wretches cling to the crags with stiffening hands, and the sleet ices them, and the spray, and the sea lashes and beats them with great strokes and sucks them down to death; and right in the midst of it all there burst a gun,——one, another, and no more. “o faith! faith!” i cried again, and i ran and hid my head in the bed.

how long did i stay so? an hour, or maybe two. dan was still dead with sleep, but mother had no more closed an eye than i. there was no rain now, the wind had fallen, the dark had lifted; i looked out once more, and could just see dimly the great waters swinging in the river from bank to bank. i drew the bucket fresh, and bound the cloths cold on dan’s head again. i hadn’t a thought in my brain, and i fell to counting the meshes in the net that hung from the wall, but in my ears there was the everlasting rustle of the sea and shore. it grew clearer,——it got to being a universal gray; there’d been no sunrise, but it was day. dan stirred,——he turned over heavily; then he opened his eyes wide and looked about him.

[168]

“i’ve had such a fright!” he said. “georgie! is that you?”

with that it swept over him afresh, and he fell back. in a moment or two he tried to rise, but he was weak as a child. he contrived to keep on his elbow a moment, though, and to give a look out of the window.

“it came on to blow, didn’t it?” he asked; but there he sank down again.

“i can’t stay so!” he murmured soon. “i can’t stay so! here,——i must tell you. georgie, get out the spy-glass, and go up on the roof and look over. i’ve had a dream, i tell you! i’ve had a dream. not that either,——but it’s just stamped on me! it was like a storm,——and i dreamed that that schooner——the flyaway——had parted. and the half of her’s crashed down just as she broke, and faith and that man are high up on the bows in the middle of the south breaker! make haste, georgie! christ! make haste!”

i flew to the drawers and opened them, and began to put the spy-glass together. suddenly he cried out again,——

“o, here’s where the fault was! what right had i ever to marry the child, not loving her? i bound her! i crushed her! i stifled her! if she lives, it is my sin; if she dies, i murder her!”

he hid his face, as he spoke, so that his voice came thick, and great choking groans rent their way up from his heart.

all at once, as i looked up, there stood mother, in her long white gown, beside the bed, and bending over and taking dan’s hot head in her two hands.

[169]

“behold, he cometh with clouds!” she whispered.

it always did seem to me as if mother had the imposition of hands,——perhaps every one feels just so about their mother,——but only her touch always lightens an ache for me, whether it’s in the heart or the head.

“o aunt rhody,” said dan, looking up in her face with his distracted eyes, “can’t you help me?”

“i will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help,” said mother.

“there’s no help there!” called dan. “there’s no god there! he wouldn’t have let a little child run into her damnation!”

“hush, hush, dan!” murmured mother. “faith never can have been at sea in such a night as this, and not have felt god’s hand snatching her out of sin. if she lives, she’s a changed woman; and if she dies, her soul is whitened and fit to walk with saints. through much tribulation.”

“yes, yes,” muttered father, in the room beyond, spitting on his hands, as if he were going to take hold of the truth by the handle,——“it’s best to clean up a thing with the first spot, and not wait for it to get all rusty with crime.”

“and he!” said dan,——“and he,——that man,——gabriel!”

“between the saddle and the ground

if mercy’s asked, mercy’s found,”

said i.

“are you there yet, georgie?” he cried, turning to me. “here! i’ll go myself!” but he only stumbled and fell on the bed again.

[170]

“in all the terror and the tempest of these long hours,——for there’s been a fearful storm, though you haven’t felt it,” said mother,——“in all that, mr. gabriel can’t have slept. but at first it must have been that great dread appalled him, and he may have been beset with sorrow. he’d brought her to this. but at last, for he’s no coward, he has looked death in the face and not flinched; and the danger, and the grandeur there is in despair, have lifted his spirit to great heights,——heights found now in an hour, but which in a whole life long he never would have gained,——heights from which he has seen the light of god’s face and been transfigured in it,——heights where the soul dilates to a stature it can never lose. o dan, there’s a moment, a moment when the dross strikes off, and the impurities, and the grain sets, and there comes out the great white diamond! for by grace are ye saved, through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of god,——of him that maketh the seven stars and orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning. o, i will believe that mr. gabriel hadn’t any need to grope as we do, but that suddenly he saw the heavenly arm and clung to it, and the grasp closed round him, and death and hell can have no power over him now! dan, poor boy, is it better to lie in the earth with the ore than to be forged in the furnace and beaten to a blade fit for the hands of archangels?”

and mother stopped, trembling like a leaf.

i’d been wiping and screwing the glass, and i’d waited a breath, for mother always talked so like a preacher; but when she’d finished, after a second or two dan looked up, and said, as if he’d just come in,[171]——

“aunt rhody, how come you out of bed?”

and then mother, she got upon the bed, and she took dan’s head on her breast and fell to stroking his brows, laying her cool palms on his temples and on his eyelids, as once i’d have given my ears to do,——and i slipped out of the room.

o, i hated to go up those stairs, to mount that ladder, to open the scuttle! and once there, i waited and waited before i dared to look. the night had unnerved me. at length i fixed the glass. i swept the broad swollen stream, to the yellowing woods, and over the meadows, where a pale transient beam crept under and pried up the haycocks,——the smoke that began to curl from the chimneys and fall as soon,——the mists blowing off from indian hill, but brooding blue and dense down, the turnpike, and burying the red spark of the moon, that smothered like a half-dead coal in her ashes,——anywhere, anywhere but that spot! i don’t know why it was, but i couldn’t level the glass there,——my arm would fall, my eye haze. finally i brought it round nearer and tried again. everywhere, as far as your eye could reach, the sea was yeasty and white with froth, and great streaks of it were setting up the inky river, and against it there were the twin lighthouses quivering their little yellow rays as if to mock the dawn, and far out on the edge of day the great light at the isles of shoals blinked and blinked, crimson and gold, fainter and fainter, and lost at last. it was no use, i didn’t dare point it, my hand trembled so i could see nothing plain, when suddenly an engine went thundering over the bridge and startled me into stillness. the tube[172] slung in my hold and steadied against the chimney, and there——what was it in the field? what ghastly picture?

the glass crashed from my hand, and i staggered shrieking down the ladder.

the sound wasn’t well through my lips, when the door slammed, and dan had darted out of the house and to the shore. i after him. there was a knot sitting and standing round there in the gray, shivering, with their hands in their pockets and their pipes set in their teeth; but the gloom was on them as well, and the pipes went out between the puffs.

“where’s dennis’s boat?” dan demanded, as he strode.

“the six-oar’s all the one not——”

“the six-oar i want. who goes with me?”

there wasn’t a soul in the ward but would have followed dan’s lead to the end of the world and jumped off; and before i could tell their names there were three men on the thwart, six oars in the air, dan stood in the bows, a word from him, and they shot away.

i watched while i could see, and then in and up to the attic, forgetting to put mother in her bed, forgetting all things but the one. and there lay the glass broken. i sat awhile with the pieces in my hand, as if i’d lost a kingdom; then down, and mechanically put things to rights, and made mother comfortable,——and she’s never stood on her feet from that day to this. at last i seated myself before the fire, and stared into it to blinding.

“won’t some one lend you a glass, georgie?” said mother.

[173]

“of course they will!” i cried,——for, you see, i hadn’t a wit of my own,——and i ran out.

there’s a glass behind every door in the street, you should know, and there’s no day in the year that you’ll go by and not see one stretching from some roof where the heart of the house is out on the sea. o, sometimes i think all the romance of the town is clustered down here on the flats and written in pale cheeks and starting eyes! but what’s the use? after one winter, one, i gave mine away, and never got another. it’s just an emblem of despair. look, and look again, and look till your soul sinks, and the thing you want never crosses it; but you’re down in the kitchen stirring a porridge, or you’re off at a neighbor’s asking the news, and somebody shouts at you round the corner, and there, black and dirty and dearer than gold, she lies between the piers.

all the world was up on their house-tops spying, that morning, but there was nobody would keep their glass while i had none; so i went back armed, and part of it all i saw, and part of it father told me.

i waited till i thought they were ’most across, and then i rubbed the lens. at first i saw nothing, and i began to quake with a greater fear than any that had yet taken root in me. but with the next moment there they were, pulling close up. i shut my eyes for a flash with some kind of a prayer that was most like an imprecation, and when i looked again they had dashed over and dashed over, taking the rise of the long roll, and were in the midst of the south breaker. o god! that terrible south breaker! the oars bent lithe as willow-switches,[174] a moment they skimmed on the caps, a moment were hid in the snow of the spray. dan, red-shirted, still stood there, his whole soul on the aim before him, like that of some leaper flying through the air; he swayed to the stroke, he bowed, he rose, perfectly balanced, and flexile as the wave. the boat behaved beneath their hands like a live creature: she bounded so that you almost saw the light under her; her whole stem lifted itself slowly out of the water, caught the back of a roller and rode over upon the next; the very things that came rushing in with their white rage to devour her bent their necks and bore her up like a bubble. constantly she drew nearer that dark and shattered heap up to which the fierce surf raced, and over which it leaped. and there all the time, all the time, they had been clinging, far out on the bowsprit, those two figures, her arms close-knit about him, he clasping her with one, the other twisted in the hawser whose harsh thrilling must have filled their ears like an organ-note as it swung them to and fro,——clinging to life,——clinging to each other more than to life. the wreck scarcely heaved with the stoutest blow of the tremendous surge; here and there, only, a plank shivered off and was bowled on and thrown high upon the beach beside fragments of beams broken and bruised to a powder; it seemed to be as firmly planted there as the breaker itself. great feathers of foam flew across it, great waves shook themselves thin around it and veiled it in shrouds, and with their every breath the smothering sheets dashed over them,——the two. and constantly the boat drew nearer, as i said; they were almost within hail; dan saw her hair streaming on the wind; he waited only for[175] the long wave. on it came, that long wave,——oh! i can see it now!——plunging and rearing and swelling, a monstrous billow, sweeping and swooping and rocking in. its hollows gaped with slippery darkness, it towered and sent the scuds before its trembling crest, breaking with a mighty rainbow as the sun burst forth, it fell in a white blindness everywhere, rushed seething up the sand,——and the bowsprit was bare!——

when father came home, the rack had driven down the harbor and left clear sky; it was near nightfall; they’d been searching the shore all day,——to no purpose. but that rainbow,——i always took it for a sign. father was worn out, yet he sat in the chimney-side, cutting off great quids and chewing and thinking and sighing. at last he went and wound up the clock,——it was the stroke of twelve,——and then he turned to me and said,——

“dan sent you this, georgie. he hailed a pilot-boat, and’s gone to the cape to join the fall fleet to the fish’ries. and he sent you this.”

it was just a great hand-grip to make your nails purple, but there was heart’s-blood in it. see, there’s the mark to-day.

so there was dan off in the bay of chaleur. ’twas the best place for him. and i went about my work once more. there was a great gap in my life, but i tried not to look at it. i durstn’t think of dan, and i wouldn’t think of them,——the two. always in such times it’s as if a breath had come and blown across the pool and you could see down its dark depths and into the very bottom, but time scums it all over again. and i tell you it’s best to look trouble in the face; if you don’t you’ll have[176] more of it. so i got a lot of shoes to bind, and what part of my spare time i wa’n’t at my books the needle flew. but i turned no more to the past than i could help, and the future trembled too much to be seen.

well, the two months dragged away, it got to be thanksgiving week, and at length the fleet was due. i mind me i made a great baking that week; and i put brandy into the mince for once, instead of vinegar and dried-apple juice,——and there were the fowls stuffed and trussed on the shelf,——and the pumpkin-pies like slices of split gold,——and the cranberry-tarts, plats of crimson and puffs of snow,——and i was brewing in my mind a right-royal red indian pudding to come out of the oven smoking hot and be soused with thick clots of yellow cream,——when one of the boys ran in and told us the fleet’d got back, but no dan with it,——he’d changed over to a fore-and-after, and wouldn’t be home at all, but was to stay down in the georges all winter, and he’d sent us word. well, the baking went to the dogs, or the thanksgiving beggars, which is the same thing.

then days went by, as days will, and it was well into the new year. i used to sit there at the window, reading,——but the lines would run together, and i’d forget what ’twas all about, and gather no sense, and the image of the little fore-and-after, the feather, raked in between the leaves, and at last i had to put all that aside; and then i sat stitching, stitching, but got into a sad habit of looking up and looking out each time i drew the thread. i felt it was a shame of me to be so glum, and mother missed my voice; but i could no more talk than i could have given conundrums to king solomon, and[177] as for singing——o, i used to long so for just a word from dan!

we’d had dry fine weeks all along, and father said he’d known we should have just such a season, because the goose’s breast-bone was so white; but st. valentine’s day the weather broke, broke in a chain of storms that the september gale was a whisper to. ah, it was a dreadful winter, that! you’ve surely heard of it. it made forty widows in one town. of the dead that were found on prince edward’s island’s shores there were four corpses in the next house yonder, and two in the one behind. and what waiting and watching and cruel pangs of suspense for them that couldn’t have even the peace of certainty! and i was one of those.

the days crept on, i say, and got bright again; no june days ever stretched themselves to half such length; there was perfect stillness in the house,——it seemed to me that i counted every tick of the clock. in the evenings the neighbors used to drop in and sit mumbling over their fearful memories till the flesh crawled on my bones. father, then, he wanted cheer, and he’d get me to singing “caller herrin’.” once, i’d sung the first part, but as i reached the lines,——

“when ye were sleepin’ on your pillows,

dreamt ye aught o’ our puir fellows

darklin’ as they face the billows,

a’ to fill our woven willows,”——

as i reached those lines, my voice trembled so’s to shake the tears out of my eyes, and jim jerdan took it up himself and sung it through for me to words of his own[178] invention. he was always a kindly fellow, and he knew a little how the land lay between me and dan.

“when i was down in the georges,” said jim jerdan——

“you? when was you down there?” asked father.

“well,——once i was. there’s worse places.”

“can’t tell me nothing about the georges,” said father. “’ta’n’t the rivers of damascus exactly, but ’ta’n’t the marlstrom neither.”

“ever ben there, cap’n?”

“a few. spent more nights under cover roundabouts than georgie’ll have white hairs in her head,——for all she’s washing the color out of her eyes now.”

you see, father knew i set by my hair,——for in those days i rolled it thick as a cable, almost as long, black as that cat’s back,——and he thought he’d touch me up a little.

“wash the red from her cheek and the light from her look, and she’ll still have the queen’s own tread,” said jim.

“if loisy currier’d heern that, you’d wish your cake was dough,” says father.

“i’ll resk it,” says jim. “loisy knows who’s second choice, as well as if you told her.”

“but what about the georges, jim?” i asked; for though i hated to hear, i could listen to nothing else.

“georges? o, not much! just like any other place.”

“but what do you do down there?”

“do? why, we fish,——in the pleasant weather.”

“and when it’s not pleasant?”

“o, then we make things taut, hoist fores’l, clap the[179] hellum into the lee becket, and go below and amuse ourselves.”

“how?” i asked, as if i hadn’t heard it all a hundred times.

“one way ’n’ another. pipes, and mugs, and poker, if it a’n’t too rough; and if it is, we just bunk and snooze till it gets smooth.”

“why, jim,——how do you know when that is?”

“well, you can jedge,——’f the pipe falls out of your pocket and don’t light on the ceiling.”

“and who’s on deck?”

“there’s no one on deck. there’s no danger, no trouble, no nothing. can’t drive ashore, if you was to try: hundred miles off, in the first place. hatches are closed, she’s light as a cork, rolls over and over just like any other log in the water, and there can’t a drop get into her, if she turns bottom-side up.”

“but she never can right herself!”

“can’t she? you just try her. why, i’ve known ’em to keel over and rake bottom and bring up the weed on the topmast. i tell you now! there was one time we knowed she’d turned a somerset, pretty well. why? because, when it cleared and we come up, there was her two masts broke short off!”

and jim went home thinking he’d given me a night’s sleep. but it was cold comfort; the georges seemed to me a worse place than the hellgate. and mother she kept murmuring, “he layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters, his pavilion round about him is dark waters and thick clouds of the skies.” and i knew by that she thought it pretty bad.

[180]

so the days went in cloud and wind. the owners of the feather’d been looking for her a month and more, and there were strange kind of rumors afloat; and nobody mentioned dan’s name, unless they tripped. i went glowering like a wild thing. i knew i’d never see dan now nor hear his voice again, but i hated the lord that had done it, and i made my heart like the nether millstone. i used to try and get out of folks’s sight; and roaming about the back streets one day, as the snow went off, i stumbled on miss catharine. “old miss catharine” everybody called her, though she was but a pauper, and had black blood in her veins. eighty years had withered her,——a little woman at best, and now bent so that her head and shoulders hung forward and she couldn’t lift them, and she never saw the sky. her face to the ground as no beast’s face is turned even, she walked with a cane, and fixing it every few steps she would throw herself back, and so get a glimpse of her way and go on. i looked after her, and for the first time in weeks my heart ached for somebody beside myself. the next day mother sent me with a dish to miss catharine’s room, and i went in and sat down. i didn’t like her at first; she’d got a way of looking sidelong that gave her an evil air; but soon she tilted herself backward, and i saw her face,——such a happy one!

“what’s the matter of ye, honey?” said she. “d’ye read your bible?”

read my bible!

“is that what makes you happy, miss catharine?” i asked.

“well, i can’t read much myself,——i don’t know the[181] letters,” says she; “but i’ve got the blessed promises in my heart.”

“do you want me to read to you?”

“no, not to-day. next time you come, maybe.”

so i sat awhile and listened to her little humming voice, and we fell to talking about mother’s ailments, and she said how fine it would be, if we could only afford to take mother to bethesda.

“there’s no angel there now,” said i.

“i know it, dear,——but then——there might be, you know. at any rate, there’s always the living waters running to make us whole: i often think of that.”

“and what else do you think of, miss catharine?”

“me?” said she. “o, i ha’n’t got no husband nor no child to think about and hope for, and so i think of myself, and what i should like, honey. and sometimes i remember them varses,——here! you read ’em now,——luke xiii. 11.”

so i read:——

“and, behold, there was a woman which had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years, and was bowed together, and could in no wise lift up herself. and when jesus saw her, he called her to him, and said unto her, ‘woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity.’ and he laid his hands on her: and immediately she was made straight, and glorified god.”

“ay, honey, i see that all as if it was me. and i think, as i’m setting here, what if the latch should lift, and the gracious stranger should come in, his gown a-sweepin’ behind him and a-sweet’nin’ the air, and he should look down on me with his heavenly eyes, and he[182] should smile, and lay his hands on my head, warm,——and i say to myself, ‘lord, i am not worthy,’——and he says, ‘miss catharine, thou art loosed from thine infirmity!’ and the latch lifts as i think, and i wait,——but it’s not him.”

well, when i went out of that place i wasn’t the same girl that had gone in. my will gave way; i came home and took up my burden and was in peace. still i couldn’t help my thoughts,——and they ran perpetually to the sea. i hadn’t need to go up on the house-tops, for i didn’t shut my eyes but there it stretched before me. i stirred about the rooms and tried to make them glad once more; but i was thin and blanched as if i’d been rising from a fever. father said it was the salt air i wanted; and one day he was going out for frost-fish, and he took me with him, and left me and my basket on the sands while he was away. it was this side of the south breaker that he put me out, but i walked there; and where the surf was breaking in the light, i went and sat down and looked over it. i could do that now.

there was the cape sparkling miles and miles across the way, unconcerned that he whose firm foot had rung last on its flints should ring there no more; there was the beautiful town lying large and warm along the river; here gay craft went darting about like gulls, and there up the channel sped a larger one, with all her canvas flashing in the sun, and shivering a little spritsail in the shadow, as she went; and fawning in upon my feet came the foam from the south breaker, that still perhaps cradled faith and gabriel. but as i looked, my eye fell, and there came the sea-scenes again,——other scenes than[183] this, coves and corners of other coasts, sky-girt regions of other waters. the air was soft, that april day, and i thought of the summer calms; and with that rose long sheets of stillness, far out from any strand, purple beneath the noon; fields slipping close in-shore, emerald-backed and scaled with sunshine; long sleepy swells that hid the light in their hollows, and came creaming along the cliffs. and if upon these broke suddenly a wild glimpse of some storm careering over a merciless mid-ocean, of a dear dead face tossing up on the surge and snatched back again into the depths, of mad wastes rushing to tear themselves to fleece above clear shallows and turbid sand-bars,——they melted and were lost in peaceful glimmers of the moon on distant flying foam-wreaths, in solemn midnight tides chanting in under hushed heavens, in twilight stretches kissing twilight slopes, in rosy morning waves flocking up the singing shores. and sitting so, with my lids still fallen, i heard a quick step on the beach, and a voice that said, “georgie!” and i looked, and a figure, red-shirted, towered beside me, and a face, brown and bearded and tender, bent above me.