The steadfast gaze brings out the star,That, like an eyeSet in the sky,Its sweet light shedding from afar,At morning dawn, and still at even,The night alway,And livelong day,There twinkles ever, deep in heaven:Thy constant prayer so reacheth Love,That, like the star,Seeming so far,Its glad strength sending from above,To youth’s fair dream, and memory’s smart,To grief’s sad moan,And joy’s sweet tone,Aye burns for us, deep in God’s heart.
The steadfast gaze brings out the star,That, like an eyeSet in the sky,Its sweet light shedding from afar,At morning dawn, and still at even,The night alway,And livelong day,There twinkles ever, deep in heaven:
Thy constant prayer so reacheth Love,That, like the star,Seeming so far,Its glad strength sending from above,To youth’s fair dream, and memory’s smart,To grief’s sad moan,And joy’s sweet tone,Aye burns for us, deep in God’s heart.
Having given their consent to Edith’s engagement, the Yorkes immediately adopted Dick Rowan as their own. They were not people to be friendly by halves. Even Melicent was propitious, and, when she saw with what pleased surprise he met her advances, became still more amiable. Clara, who lived in a rarer atmosphere, effervesced more readily, and could not enough praise her cousin’sfutur. Hester insisted that he should leave the hotel, and stay at her house. She was completely won by the almost boyish affection and respect with which he treated her husband, his first and only former friend in Seaton, and by his fondness to her children.
Mrs. Yorke, beginning by talking with, in order to study him, and know thoroughly what sort of man she had promised her niece to, found herself growing affectionate toward him, and not only probing his mind, but unfolding her own. In after-years she remembered these confidential interviews as an honor, which, at the time, she had scarcely appreciated. The young man told her all his hopes and plans, asked her advice in everything concerning Edith, and listened eagerly when she explained to him the needs and habits of a delicately bred lady.
“My poor mother is the only woman I have ever lived in the house with,” he remarked; “and, of course, she was not able to be dainty.”
He said this rather sadly, but withouta taint of humility. Mrs. Yorke was impressed by the dignity of that character which would not be ashamed of anything but its own wrong-doing.
One confidence led to another, and Dick was afterward surprised on recollecting that he had related the story of his whole life to Edith’s aunt, and spoken more freely to her of his early struggles and sufferings than even to Edith herself. Not only this; but, seeing tears in her eyes when he told of his father’s despairing efforts to reform himself, and hearing the pitying word she spoke for him whom others had mocked, he told her the end of it all, and where that father’s desolate grave had been made.
“You poor, dear boy!” she exclaimed, holding out her kind hand to him, “I don’t wonder that Edith loves you!”
“I do not pretend to understand the designs of God,” Dick said unsteadily. “When I think of my father, all is a mystery. But for myself, I think I can see that suffering was good. My nature is to go straight to any end which I propose to myself, without much regard for the wishes of others, and no regard for ordinary obstacles. I might have been cruel, I should have been selfish; but suffering has taught me to be more tender of other people.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Yorke said; and, recollecting her own early trials, thought that they had helped her to be more pitiful of his.
Then, led on by her sympathy for him, she told her own past, there on the spot where it had occurred.
These confidences drew the two together, and formed a bond which was never broken.
A man’s manliness can scarcely bear a severer test than when he becomes the pet of woman. One is sometimes astonished to see how characters, apparently fine, deteriorate under that insidious influence. But Dick Rowan was too grateful and modest, and too little selfish or vain, to be injured.
“He is not quite like us,” Mrs. Yorke said, “but he is more natural and original, and is, altogether, a remarkable young man. Edith has reason to be proud of his homage. He certainly behaves exquisitely toward her.”
Mr. Yorke, refusing to be influenced by feminine raptures, was fain to take the young man out of the house, in order to talk with him uninterruptedly. He displayed the improvements he had made in the place, his avenues, now as hard as cement, his terraces, smooth and green with turf of velvet fineness. There were vines here and there, disposed for effect, like drapery in an artist’s studio, and many a flower which bloomed now for the first time under Seaton skies. They stopped at last beside a clover-plot, thick with crowded trefoils and blossoms. Its surface was unsteady with bees, musical with a low hum, and all the air was sweet with the breath of it.
“If I were not disgusted with Seaton,” Mr. Yorke said, “I should like to spend my summers here, and carry out my plans for the place; but when we go away, probably in October, I shall never wish to see the town again. There is no security here.”
Dick leaned thoughtfully on the fence, and watched the bees come and go over the clover, and took offhis hat to shake his hair loose in that fragrant air. “I think, sir, that Seaton may be in future all the better for this trouble,” he said slowly. “The tone of the place is low, I know that well, but it is in a fair way of becoming ashamed of itself, and so, of mending. When people have wrong ideas, and stand by them stubbornly, I like to have them go on, and find out for themselves what their principles lead to. Conviction reaches them then through their own experience, and so you hear no more about the matter. It is, of course, a slow way, but it is sure.”
Mr. Yorke made a grimace, and quoted President Mann: “God Almighty is not in a hurry, and I am.”
Carl had gone to Bragon. He went quite unexpectedly, the day Dick Rowan came, and did not see Edith’s lover till he had been a week in Seaton. He came home one evening after tea, when the young people were in the cupola, looking down the bay, for theHalcyon. They waved their handkerchiefs to him, and his mother ran out to meet him.
“My dear son!” she exclaimed, embracing him as joyfully as if he had been gone a year. “I would not watch for you, lest I should be disappointed. I pretended I did not expect you. But you may know what a hypocritical pretence it was when I say that your supper is all ready, though, to be sure, breakfast, dinner, and supper have been kept for you every day.”
While speaking, she led him into a little northern parlor, which was their summer dining-room.
Carl looked at his mother with a smile, but tears rose to his eyes. He was not one to take even a mother’s devotion as a matter of course, and just now he found it peculiarly touching.
Mrs. Yorke looked very frail and lovely as she sat opposite her son. Her snowdrop of a face, the pale blue scarf knotted loosely about her neck, with fringed ends hanging over her white dress, the fall of lace fastened to her hair by a rosebud—all made a pretty picture. To the inherent loveliness of the mother, she added the charm of the exquisite lady.
“If you do not need that apostle behind your chair—” her son suggested.
She immediately dismissed Paul Patten; and Carl was free to say, “Now tell me the state of affairs. The engagement I take for granted; but have I got to endure the spectacle of a pair of cooing lovers? I would rather leave the country.”
For a moment Mrs. Yorke was too much occupied to give any reply but a smiling shake of the head. Eating was one of the fine arts with her, and she made a point of having the circumstances of that odious operation as artistic as possible. Having placed an accurate square of currant jelly on a glass plate, where it lay like a ruby block stolen from Solomon’s hidden treasures, and filled a gorgeous Japanese cup with coffee, into which she put a tiny cube of loaf-sugar and a spoonful of cream, she was ready to speak.
“There is no necessity for any such banishment, my dear. Edith is very friendly to him, but she surrounds herself with a fine reserve which he could not break through if he would. I could as soon fancy a gentleman approaching familiarly the Queen of Sheba. They are very little alone together.”
“What delicious coffee!” Carl exclaimed, and immediately began to tell some incidents of his journey.
When they heard the others coming down-stairs, they went to meet them. Melicent came first, with Mr.Rowan, and all saw with pleasure that the two young men met not only with courtesy, but friendliness. Carl’s invariable, haughty silence whenever Dick Rowan’s name was mentioned had given them some uneasiness regarding the meeting. Indeed, could they have found fault with him for anything, it would have been for what they considered this excess of pride.
The two passed on, Clara following, and, quite in the rear, came Edith, alone. She was half-smiling, and came slowly down, step by step, with a touch of feminine coquetry as innocent and natural as the tricks of a playful kitten, lingering as he waited. Yet her bright cheeks and shining eyes told that the approach was a delight.
But for some reason, Carl chose to be displeased all at once, and, by a slight change of attitude and expression, to be waiting, not to greet her, but to go up-stairs.
“Pardon me for being so slow,” she said, becoming instantly a courteous lady. “I think I am getting old and dignified. The wings have gone from my feet.”
TheHalcyonhad come, and the Yorkes immediately made the acquaintance of its master. Dick and Edith went down to the ship to see him, and persuaded him to go home to tea with them. The big, bashful sailor was not accustomed to the society of ladies, and had the impression that there was something cabalistic in good-breeding. But he found himself quite at ease with the family, after a while, and was convinced that they were not aware of the few blunders he committed in the first embarrassment of meeting them. Some diversion had always taken place at precisely the right moment to screen him, and soon his self-possession was quite restored. He leftthe house that night highly pleased with his visit.
“They seem to me perfectly kind and natural people,” he said to Dick, as they walked through the woods together. “Your Edith, it is true, is rather grand, but in a sweet, child-like way, and Miss Melicent seems disposed to be a little on the high horse once in a while, but not much. I always thought that accomplished ladies were more airy, but I don’t see that these do any great things.”
“True,” Dick answered; “but mark the things which they do not do.”
They were much together after that, and Mrs. Yorke and her daughters went on board theHalcyon, and were entertained there. Carl had been afraid to have his mother venture on board the ship, and had charged himself especially with the care of her, but his solicitude was not needed. He was both pleased and amused by the simplicity and tenderness with which their gigantic host smoothed every smallest obstruction from her path and spared her every exertion. There had been a momentary flash of angry surprise when he saw his mother lifted over an obstructing timber in Captain Cary’s arms; but the sailor’s face was so absolutely anxious and kind, and Mrs. Yorke laughed so merrily over thenaïfgallantry, that he instantly perceived the folly of resenting it.
“My dear,” Mrs. Yorke whispered to Clara, “he is like one’s grandfather, grandmother, and all one’s aunts and uncles, in one. It’s a pity he hasn’t a wife, he would be so good to her.”
Clara blushed slightly. She had been thinking some such thought herself.
The intercourse gave the Yorkes a fresh and novel sensation. It was so different from anything they hadever had before, and, at the same time, so pleasant. It came like a breath of pure sea-air into a warm and scented drawing-room. They were not so mummified by convention that they could not appreciate this simple, unconventional nature, in which they found a noble delicacy.
Captain Cary listened with indignation to the story of their Seaton experiences. An autocrat on board ship, and completely his own master everywhere, he could not comprehend how one part of a community could exercise such tyranny and coercion over the other. “It seems to me that the Catholics must have done something out of the way,” he said. “There’s usually fault on both sides, you know, though no fault would justify such a persecution.”
“There is just the trouble,” Mr. Yorke replied, rather impatiently. “It is so easy for people, who wish to be fair, and, at the same time, not put themselves to the inconvenience of investigating, to say that there is probably fault on both sides, and then fancy that they have done justice. On the contrary, they may have done great injustice, and have, certainly, rendered a careless and slipshod judgment. For there are cases where the fault is all on one side, and other cases where, though in the end there may be fault on both sides, the responsibility really rests on the one who was the aggressor, and provoked the other beyond endurance. I am not blaming you, sir; but I am always anoyed by that off-hand way of saying, ‘There’s probably fault on both sides.’ If people don’t know, let them say they don’t know, and not give any judgment at all. I do know, and I say that no provocation was given, and the Catholics have been only too supine.”
“There have been times, Captain Cary,” Edith said, “when I havewished that you were here. I know you would have been on our side.”
“That I would!” he answered heartily, looking at her with a kind smile. The two were great friends. “And I would have left my mark anywhere you told me to strike.”
“It was a shame to waste you on a merchant-ship,” Clara said to him. “You should have been an admiral.”
The sailor gave one of his great laughs, which always made Mrs. Yorke jump and flush. “We big fellows are not always fond of fighting,” he said. “When I was a boy, I had two younger brothers about half my size, and either of them was a match for me. I was so peaceable that I was called Mother Cary’s chicken, and I believe it was that nickname that first put it into my head to go to sea. No, I’d rather fight wind and wave than men. I could attack a man if he were doing anything absolutely wrong; but to kill him because he belonged to a foreign nation, and carried a different flag, that would be too cold-blooded for me.”
The two sailors, with Edith and Clara, visited the Catholic school, carrying gifts for the children and encouragement to the teacher.
“You look so worn, dear friend,” Edith said. “I wish you would give up, and come to Boston with us.”
The teacher shook her head. “I cannot give up,” she said.
Captain Cary complimented Miss Churchill in his own fashion: “We call that a pretty sharp ship that will sail within four points of the wind,” he said. “But I hear that you have been making way with the wind in your teeth.”
“I have not made much headway,” she answered, smiling, “but only held my own. I am anchored.”
Carl accompanied them up IrishLane, on Sunday afternoon. They called at several houses, and talked with and encouraged the inmates. It was a help to these poor souls to have some one to tell their troubles to. “But what shall we do when you are all gone?” they asked mournfully. To them, the expected departure of the Yorke family from Seaton was a misfortune second only to the banishment of their priest.
Their situation was, indeed, a cruel one. It was not alone the contumely to which they were subjected, and the being unable to hear Mass, but their sick and dying were deprived of the sacraments, and their infants were unbaptized. Yet no harsh word escaped them. Scarcely one seemed to recollect their persecutors. They were suffering for the faith, and it was God’s will—that was their view of the position. The instruments which God used to try them, they thought but little of. Carl Yorke went home thinking that he had heard better sermons that afternoon than he had ever before heard in his life.
Father Rasle’s continued absence was not voluntary. He would fain have returned to his flock, in spite of Mr. Yorke’s and Miss Churchill’s letters, but his superior added a command to their advice, and he was forced to restrain his zeal.
“Tell my people that I never forgot them,” he wrote to the teacher. “Every day at Mass I pray for their deliverance. It cannot be long before I shall visit them. Meantime, let them give their enemies no pretext for further injury.”
To Edith he wrote:
“Your desire toactin behalf of these persecuted people is natural, but I must forbid you. You may safely follow the advice of such good people as Mr. and Mrs. Yorke. But do not fear that, because you are inactive,you therefore are useless. I visited once, in Europe, a spot where a temple had stood. Nothing was left of it but a few broken fragments lying about, and a single beautiful pillar that stood alone. Was that pillar useless? No; in its way, it was very eloquent. No one could look upon it without trying to fancy what the whole edifice might have been; and you may be sure that the traveller’s imagination did its best in rebuilding that temple. So, now, you shall be the little caryatid of the church in Seaton. You have the gift of silence: use it. Be as obedient and quiet as that solitary column, and let the world guess from you how fair must be that structure of which you are a part.”
Edith turned from the window, where she had stood to read her letter, folded her arms up over her head, and said to Dick Rowan, sitting there, “Can you fancy me supporting an entablature?”
“No,” he answered; “for then there would have to be others like you.”
Edith blushed, and dropped her arms; for they were all looking at her, and their faces, as well as Dick Rowan’s answer, reminded her that she was beautiful. She gave him her letter to read, and went to sit on the window-sill beside Clara, and listen to the talk of the three gentlemen on the piazza. The two families were dining together that day, and Mr. Yorke, with his son-in-law, and Captain Cary, were smoking their cigars outside. Inside the window nearest her husband, Mrs. Cleaveland sat in a low, broad arm-chair. A nurse in a white cap had just placed on her knees Hester’s second son, an infant of six months old. As it lay slowly and deliciously waking up, both nurse and mother gazed down upon it with adoring eyes. Master Philip,this baby’s predecessor, was hiding his face in one arm of his mother’s arm-chair, being in temporary disgrace. Original sin was very strong and active in this child. He was full of vitality and determination, and just at that age when will is pretty well developed, and memory and understanding still dormant—the age for childish atrocities. There were moments when the child’s life was a burden to him, by reason of the great number of things which he wished to do, and meant to do, and could not remember that he must not do. He had a chronic desire to pull out the baby’s eyelashes, “eye-winkeys,” he called them, and to make it smile in season and out by violently drawing the corners of its mouth round toward its ears. Whenever an infantine shriek was heard, it was always understood that Master Philip was in some way accountable. Another fancy of his was to poke holes in paper, or any delicate and easily perforated fabric, with his plump forefinger. He could have no greater pleasure than to seat himself, with some precious volume before him, and go gravely and industriously through it in this way, leaf by leaf, from cover to cover. There was, indeed, a long list of indictments against this unhappy child. The two little forefingers tied together behind his back, and a dilapidated book lying on the carpet, showed plainly enough what his offence was at this time.
In the background, Carl was telling marvellous stories to the culprit’s half-brother, Eugene; and Mrs. Yorke and Milicent, in the centre of the room, were coaxing some account of his adventures from Dick Rowan. He had to be persuaded before he would speak much of himself.
“Isn’t he magnificent?” Clara whispered to Edith, meaning Captain Cary.
The sailor had been describing an arrowy little craft, theHumming-bird, in which he had once darted in and out of the Chinese coast, smuggling opium in the very teeth of an English man-of-war. Seeing the addition to his audience, he threw the end of his cigar away, and moved his chair nearer the window.
“How I should like to be a sailor!” exclaimed Clara with enthusiasm.
Captain Cary leaned forward, with his arms on his knees, in order to bring himself more on a level with the young ladies. “And how would you like to be a sailor’s wife?” he asked.
Although he had the greatest possible admiration for Miss Clara Yorke, and considered her by far the cleverest young woman he had ever known, it would be safe to say that the thought of going any further than that had never entered his mind, till he saw the flash of eyes and color with which she received his question. The effect was electrical. He straightened himself up again, and, in the first break of that possibility, did not hear her saucy but rather tardy reply: “That depends on who the sailor is.”
The man was confounded between terror, rapture, and astonishment. Clara’s look had seemed to show that such a consummation was not impossible to, at least, think of—that it had, perhaps, occurred to her own mind. True, she was most likely to scorn the thought; but, for all that, a momentary vision danced before his eyes of what his life would be if he had a woman of his own to love and serve. That the wife of his choice should serve him, never occurred to this generous soul. He could at any time have married a common person, whom most people would have thought good enough for him; but there was in his nature a capacity for tender worship which made him shrink from such an alliance.
Presently, Edith’s cool voice stole through the chaos of his mind. “You can go to sea with Dick and me, Clara.”
The sailor started, and fell from the clouds. His face became overcast, and, with a deep sigh, he seemed to renounce a long-cherished hope.
With a laugh and a toss of the head, Clara rose from her lowly seat, and, stepping out through the window, began to promenade up and down the garden-walk. She saw through this great, transparent creature perfectly, and was amused, and she knew not what else. One could not be angry with the fellow, she said laughingly to herself. She had been looking up to him with enthusiasm, as to some antique bronze or marble Argonaut, or other hero of simpler times. Now that was changed, and she was on the pedestal, to be worshipped by him. It was preposterous, but not altogether disagreeable.
Meantime, Captain Cary was confiding his distress to Edith. “I hope that your cousin didn’t think I was fool enough to dream of her being my wife,” he said, looking down. “What I said was a slip of the tongue, and I didn’t know the drift of it myself till I saw how she took it.”
“Oh! never mind,” Edith answered. “Clara is always jesting, and twisting people’s meaning. She knew you meant no such thing.”
He sighed, and said no more.
If Clara had expected the sailor to watch her, she was disappointed. He went into the parlor, and when, later, she entered, brilliant with exercise and mischief, he was sitting by Carl, and listening with as sober a face to the stories that young man was telling Eugene Cleaveland as if he were listening to a sermon. Clara passed near them, to hear what it might be which produced such solemnityin the man and such a trance of interest in the child.
“Then,” Carl was saying, “Taurus sent to the Great Bear to say that he should like to have something out of the golden dipper about the middle of the next month, for all the little stars would grow dim about that time, and need something to polish up with. And the Bear said, ‘All right! but the dipper hangs so high on the celestial pole that you will have to pay me a good deal to climb up to it.’ And Taurus answered, ‘All right!’ And then the Bears set slyly to work to grease the pole, so that the dipper should slip down, and they get their pay without work; and Taurus he set to work to push the dipper higher up, so as to get more work than he had agreed to pay for; and, meantime, all the poor little stars languished, and grew dim. And then Orion got mad, and brought a lot of little dippers, and gave each of the little stars a full one. And the stars grew bright and glad. But the Bulls and Bears, finding that they were both beaten, didn’t feel glad. The Bear began to bite his own paws, and the Bull went for Orion, and tried to toss him. But Orion laughed, and put up his shield, and called his dogs, and—”
“Upon my word, Carl,” says Clara, “I think you put the stars to base uses when you set them to gambling in stocks. Have you told Captain Cary of our projected sail down the bay?”
“Poor Clara!” Melicent said, joining them. “We are planning some little pleasure-trip to distract her mind. You do not know, perhaps, that the Philistines are upon her?”
The sailor did not understand, but looked so inquiring and solicitous that Clara explained to him.
“I published a story ages ago,” she said, “and the editor of theCosmichas just become aware of it. He found it lately among thedébrisof his writing-table. The authoress, he says, has shaken up a few fancies in a kaleidoscope, and calls them life. They are about as much like life, he adds, as Watteau’s shepherdesses are like real shepherdesses, or as Marie Antoinette’s housekeeping at the Petit Trianon, with ribbons tied round the handles of silver saucepans, was like real kitchen-work. Still, he concludes, the story is amusing, in spite of its pinchbeck ideal, and, when the writer is older, she will, doubtless, do better. The musty old metaphysician!” exclaimed Miss Clara, warming with the subject. “I once read a paragraph in one of his articles, and found it comical. I had never seen any of the words before, except the articles and prepositions. My first impression was that he had made them up, for fun. I found them all out in the unabridged dictionary, though. They were real words, but I have forgotten what they mean.”
“So much the better!” said Melicent. And then followed a controversy on the subject of learned women. Melicent denounced them as unwomanly; but Melicent was neither a student nor well read, and there might be a difference of opinion as to cause and effect in her case. Mr. Yorke mockedles savantes; but Mr. Yorke adored a wife whose literary acquirements were of the most modest kind, and he had once, in a never-forgotten argument, been worsted by a clever woman. Captain Cary was of opinion that clever and learned women were not fit wives for common men. At that, Clara took up the gauntlet with great spirit.
Clever women did not wish to marry common men, she said. And there were plenty of uncommon menwho were not jealous of them. She disliked all this hypocritical talk about the beauty of simplicity and humility and submission in women. The real meaning of it was not Christian, but Mohammedan.
“For me,” Mrs. Yorke interposed, “I think that some women should be learned, in order to appreciate learned men. If the wife of a scholar could not understand and sympathize in her husband’s love of books and what they teach, she would soon grow jealous of them, and he would miss what should be his sweetest homage.”
“Now, is not there an orthodox woman?” Mr. Yorke exclaimed with delight. “The sole use she can conceive of a woman’s having for learning is that she may be better able to appreciate her husband.”
Edith glanced past Carl, and looked with arch inquiry at Dick Rowan.
He was perfectly self-possessed, and spoke even with a slight air of authority. “I believe the true superiority of woman to be in religion,” he said; “and, if she has that, it is no matter whether she is learned or not.”
“But is not your view somewhat ascetical?” asked Carl Yorke. “We are supposing that this life is something. Looking at the question in that light, I would say that no one has the right to dogmatize one way or the other. Let each woman follow the bent of her own mind, and be as learned as she will. I only stipulate that she shall not be loud-voiced nor disputatious, but wear her learning with a grace, as an ornament, not a weapon, though she may use it as a weapon when there is need. I would have woman wear erudition, as Mrs. Browning says men wear grief who have worn it long:
‘As a hat aside,With a flower stuck in it.’”
“And while your erudite wife is gracefully adjusting her ologies, who is to see to the bread and the buttons?” Melicent asked, rather sneeringly.
“Oh! those everlasting buttons!” Clara cried out, and put her hands over her ears.
“The servant, probably,” Carl replied to Melicent. “If a woman could give some thought to those things also, well and good, but I should not choose a wife for such a service. I would rather have her help me to polish a sentence or pose a figure than cook my dinner or mend my stockings, unless we were so poor that labor was absolutely necessary. I should be ashamed to see my wife performing menial services for me. I would as willingly see her at work in the field as bringing me my slippers.”
Carl had scarcely time to see the look of beaming approval in Edith’s eyes, before his sight and hearing were both temporarily lost in Clara’s rapturous embrace. “You are perfect!” she cried, kissing him. “You are of the progeny of Apollo! I am so glad to have that slipper theory upset; for I never saw a woman bringing her husband’s slippers for him without feeling a contempt for her. I don’t believe that any one ever admired such a piece of mean servility, except the lazy Turk who allowed it to be done for him.”
While they laughed at Clara’s enthusiasm, Dick Rowan said to Edith, “I quite agree with your cousin. I mean all that he means, and more.”
“By the way,” Carl said carelessly, as he went toward the door, “I am not Edith’s cousin, nor in any way related to her.”
Captain Cary had been three weeks in Seaton, and was to sail in two days for New York, where theHalcyonwas sold, taking Dick Rowan with him. From New York, Dick was to sail immediately, on a three years’ voyage, in theEdith Yorke. The captain did not say definitely what his own plans were, perhaps did not know them himself. “I did think of settling down on shore,” he said to Mrs. Yorke. “But one person doesn’t make a home, and all my people are dead. I’d half a mind to ask Rowan to take me as a passenger. He has a splendid ship.”
They were all in the garden that last evening but one. Edith sat on a bench beside Melicent, and looked intently at Dick Rowan, who was talking with Clara and Mrs. Yorke. She was thinking over all his goodness, all his affection for her, studying his personal beauty, his frank, bright face and athletic form, and trying to excite in herself some enthusiasm regarding him. Carl stood near, listening to, but not joining in, the conversation. She compared the two young men. Their height, their form, were very nearly the same; but Carl had the proud and measured tread of one bred to the parlor and the promenade, Dick the free and springing step of the mountaineer. This was distinctive, yet each had moods like the other. On the deck of his own ship, the sailor trod like a king; and the man of the world could bound as lightly up a steep, or vault as lightly over an obstacle, as though his life had been spent in athletic sports. Dick Rowan’s eyes sparkled like the ripples ofhis own blue sea, and lookedatpeople, not through them; Carl’s careless glance could become piercing and keen as a two-edged blade. It was useless to compare them, the one as direct and transparent as a child, the other noble, indeed, yet subtle, as one aware of the world’s ways, and guarded at every point.
“I must be very hard and cold,” Edith thought, finding herself unmoved, in spite of her efforts. “Or, perhaps, it may be because I have always known and been sure of him.”
Looking her way, Dick met that steady gaze, and flushed with pleasure. If the expression was grave and regretful, what then? Were they not about to part? He led Mrs. Yorke to her, and the others followed, to make arrangements “for a sail they were to have the next day.”
“You had better wear dresses that wetting will not hurt,” Dick said; “for you will be likely to get a little scud-water in your laps.”
“And, pray, what is scud-water?” Mrs. Yorke asked.
Dick explained that it was spray blown off.
“How pretty!” exclaimed Clara. “You may fill my lap with it.”
They separated again, and Dick was left with Edith.
“What shall I bring you from Calcutta?” he asked.
“Bring me Dick Rowan safe back again,” was the answer.
Both were silent a little while, then he spoke in a quiet voice: “Ask God to do that, Edith. He has been so good to us, I think he will refuse nothing.”
She looked at him wistfully. “Are you very happy, Dick?”
“Happy!” he exclaimed. “Dear, my very finger-nails shine! Edith, I am so happy that I should be afraid, if I would allow myself to be. But, no; I will trust God when he gives me joy, as well as when he gives me pain.”
While they talked, Mrs. Yorke was walking aside with Clara, and questioning her. “What is the matter with Captain Cary?” she asked. “He has grown very sober lately.”
Clara laughed, rather consciously. “How should I know, mamma?”
Mrs. Yorke looked displeased. “I wish for a frank answer,” she said. “What is the meaning of this? It isn’t possible that there has been any trifling on your part!”
The girl blushed deeply, but told what little there was to tell, including that unlucky question: “How would you like to be a sailor’s wife?”
“He hadn’t the slightest personal meaning, mamma,” Clara added hastily, seeing her eyes open with something like a flash. “He told Edith afterward that it was a slip of the tongue.”
“Then why should not that have been the end of the matter?” Mrs. Yorke asked, rather peremptorily. “You had but to assume that such a thing was impossible, not to be thought of, and be just as courteous to him as before.”
“But you see, mamma,” Clara replied, looking a little frightened, “it isn’t as impossible as it is unlikely. Stranger things have happened in the world, and will again, and the world is and will be no worse for them. You know I have never been able to acquire the fine art of assuming that ninety-nine facts make a truth.”
“My dear,” said the mother withprecision, “please not to be grandiloquent. Let us confine ourselves to the case in hand. Your sublime generalizing has done you very little credit if it has led you to disturb the peace of a good honest man, and put our own delicacy in question. Coquetry is not only cruel, it is mean and vulgar. Of course you are ready with the childish excuse that you meant no harm. That is not enough for one who has arrived at years of discretion and has a conscience. You must mean something one way or the other.”
Clara’s eyes were suffused with tears. “I think that you misunderstand me, mamma,” she said in a low voice. “I was never in my life so much pleased to have any one like me.”
Mrs. Yorke stopped, and looked at her daughter in astonishment.
“Oh! I know all that you would say, mamma,” the girl went on, half laughing, half weeping. “He is a sailor, which is as if a bird should say, ‘He is a fish.’ He has only a common-school education, as far as books go, and he has none of our ways. But all that doesn’t make his esteem any less worth having. Men of the world often give only a tame, half affection, and are, perhaps, almost sorry when they are accepted. They think of themselves, they think of a thousand other things: he would think of me. When Edith sang, the other evening,
‘Oh! wert thou in the cauld blast,
I saw his eyes fill with tears. He would take all the roughness, and danger, and hardship, I know. But men of the world are as dainty as women. If they give us the inside of the pavement, and let us enter a room first, they have gone the length of their chivalry. Then, there is theeffect on myself. In the society of such a man”—glancing to where Captain Cary stood—“I should be gentle and feminine. But with the wilted specimens of humanity I see ordinarily, I am in imminent danger of becoming a strong-minded woman. One must keep up a balance, mamma, and it is weak men make bold women.”
Mrs. Yorke sank on to a bench. “What do you mean to do? What am I to think?” she exclaimed.
Clara laughed. “Don’t be afraid, mamma. If this Neptune should offer himself to me—he will not!—I should refuse him, and then cry my eyes out afterward. But if he should take me by force, pirate-fashion, and run away with me, so that I could not help myself nor be responsible, I should be delighted. Now, don’t say any more about it, please.”
Mrs. Yorke threw off her fears with a shrug of the shoulders. It was a mere theory. It was one of Clara’s enthusiasms. “Well, my dear,” she concluded, rising, “all I have to add is that I hope your admiration of the rough diamond will not lead you to consume it in the blowpipe.”
And so the subject dropped.
“There is a party of Indians camping out on the Point,” Mr. Yorke said to them that evening. “You might find it interesting to visit them to-morrow. I met one in the woodland, this morning, cutting down a tree for basket-wood. I asked him who gave him permission to cut trees on my land. ‘It was all ours once,’ he growled out, and gave me a look that I shouldn’t like to meet, unless I had friends near. I told him to take all he wanted.”
The little sailing-party, only six with a sailor from theHalcyonas assistant, started early in the afternoon. The crew of theHalcyongavethem a hearty cheer as they slid down past the wharf where she lay; the fresh breeze, blowing off shore, smoothed the waves, and, overhead, light clouds ran races with them. Out of one cloud, that seemed scarcely a hand’s breadth, a shower of large, sun-lighted drops came clattering down. In the midst of it they reached the Point, and stepped out on to the rocky shore. A clumsy old Indian woman had just kindled a fire, and piled brush over it. Not a spark was visible, but thick white smoke gushed out through the green, curled over into a shifting Corinthian capital, and rose into air, and in another instant it topped a shaft of flame. The woman took no notice of the visitors standing near her, but stood tossing twigs into the fire. Her face was ugly, her dress careless, but her small brown hands and moccasined feet were models of beauty. Two or three men were lying about lazily, waiting for their dinner, and a mischievous little girl was weaving a basket. She alone noticed the strangers, the others wore a look of disdainful unconsciousness. The ladies talked with the child, and bought baskets of her; the gentlemen made themselves acquainted with the elders, and found them not insensible to the charms of tobacco and coffee. Under these persuasive influences, their taciturn hosts melted, and became almost friendly. Presently, another Indian appeared from the woods, came straight toward them, and dropped a long string of quivering, rainbow-colored trout at the old woman’s feet. A whispered exclamation broke from the lips of the visitors as they saw this dusky young Adonis. The Greek outlines, with more than Grecian richness of color, the plumy, clustering hair, from which a few raindrops slid as from a bird’s wing, the eagle eyes, the fanciful dress,beaded and fringed, that air of superb repose and unconsciousness which civilization only imitates, but does not attain—all were fascinating andunique. He stood one moment as some exquisite bronze, then stepped lightly over the springy moss, lifted the fold of a tent, and disappeared. This was her brother, Philip Nicola, the little girl told the ladies, and her name was Malie. Edith gave the child an Indian prayer-book, prepared by their patlias; then the party embarked again, spread their sail to the breeze, and sped down the bay.
Dick Rowan, standing to unfurl the sail, sang out joyously, in a clear, ringing voice, an old French song:
“‘Si le roi m’avoit donnéParis sa grand’ ville,Et qu’il me fallût quitterL’amour de ma mie,Je dirois au roi Henri:Reprenez votre Paris,J’aime mieux ma mie, oh, gay!J’aime mieux ma mie.’”
Edith turned her head aside, and watched their sparkling wake subside to a milky path. If she was pleased, no one could see. But as they approached that low, sandy island that three of them had visited before, she rose, and leaned on Dick’s arm, and gazed on it with him.
“God have mercy on him!” they whispered; and both Dick and the captain removed their hats, and remained uncovered till they had passed by. The others did not know what it meant, but they asked no question, and soon all was gay again.
They landed a few miles down the bay, wandered awhile on the shore, took their luncheon there, and sat to see the sun go down, reddening all the water. Then a bright pallor succeeded, tingling with unseen stars, and the bay became a silver mirror. The breeze went down with the sun, and only a soft breath out of thesouth pressed their sail as they started to return. Between two fleckless, transparent abysses, they floated, as through ether, and might, it seemed, be drawn up or sink down at any moment. The night deepened, and became a crystalline darkness, with stars above and stars below, and then the east grew radiant with a soft aurora.
As the light increased, they saw a speck on the water, and, leaning low, Captain Cary espied Philip Nicola in a bark canoe, dancing across the bay, skimming the water like a bird. The imp of mischief, or of vanity, seemed to possess the fellow. He shot across their prow, so near as almost to catch the foam it threw up, he zigzagged ahead of them, he slid into their wake on one side, and flew past them on the other. Lastly, he dropped far behind, and they heard him singing over the water. The song was some wild chant in his own language, piercingly sweet, and full of a barbarous pathos and power. As they listened, convention dropped from them like a garment. They were simple children of nature, and creation was full of mysteries for them.
A golden splendor filled the east, a disk of burning gold showed above the woods, and kindled their feathery tops, a crinkling flame ran round every ripple of the bay, and their prow tossed off sparks instead of foam. Then the moon sailed majestically upward, and made an enchanted day about them. As she rose, the blue of the sky drew back, like the fold of a curtain, and left a pathway of mellow light for her feet.
Not a word was said by any one. The scene was too beautiful for praise. Edith and Carl sat opposite each other, and Dick Rowan stood between them, leaning against the mast, and looking down on that fair headwith its crown of braids. She leaned over the boat-side, and trailed her hand in the water, nor spoke a word, nor once lifted her eyes. As the water-lily, growing to maturity through unconscious sun and dew, when its appointed sunrise comes, shines through all its snowy petals, and opens to disclose another sun hidden within its folded whiteness, so her soul, now its time was come to know itself and be known, stirred through all its calm reserves and unconsciousness at the sound of that savage chant. She forgot, for the time, all that was cramping in her life, and had a new sense of freedom and joy.
The song ceased. They neared the Point, and a path of crimson trembled out from the camp-fire there and crossed the moonlight. Clara leaned, and whispered to Carl. He hesitated a moment, then, with a gesture that showed a sort of defiant resolution, acquiesced in her demand. Carl seldom sang, and, when he did, it was for the words rather than the music, and his style was that of an improvisator. He sang: