CHRISTINE and I found her there. She was a small, dark-skinned, yellow-eyed child, the offspring of the ocean and the heats, tawny, lithe and wild, shy yet fearless—not unlike one of the little brown deer that bounded through the open reaches of the pine-barren behind the house. She did not come to us—we came to her; we loomed into her life like genii from another world, and she was partly afraid and partly proud of us. For were we not her guests? proud thought! and, better still, were we not women? “I have only seen three women in all my life,” said Felipa, inspecting us gravely, “and I like women. I am a woman too, although these clothes of the son of Pedro make me appear as a boy; I wear them on account of the boat and the hauling in of the fish. The son of Pedro being dead at a convenient age, and his clothes fitting me, what would you have? It was a chance not to be despised. But when I am grown I shall wear robes long and beautiful like the señora’s.” The little creature was dressed in a boy’s suit of dark-blue linen, much the worse for wear, and torn.
“If you are a girl, why do you not mend your clothes?” I said.
“Do you mend, señora?”
“Certainly: all women sew and mend.”
“The other lady?”
Christine laughed as she lay at ease upon the brown carpet of pine-needles, warm and aromatic after the tropic day’s sunshine. “The child has divined me already, Catherine,” she said.
Christine was a tall, lissome maid, with an unusually long stretch of arm, long sloping shoulders, and a long fair throat; her straight hair fell to her knees when unbound, and its clear flaxen hue had not one shade of gold, as her clear gray eyes had not one shade of blue. Her small, straight, rose-leaf lips parted over small, dazzlingly white teeth, and the outline of her face in profile reminded you of an etching in its distinctness, although it was by no means perfect according to the rules of art. Still, what a comfort it was, after the blurred outlines and smudged profiles many of us possess—seen to best advantage, I think, in church on Sundays, crowned with flower-decked bonnets, listening calmly serene to favorite ministers, unconscious of noses! When Christine had finished her laugh—and she never hurried anything—she stretched out her arm carelessly and patted Felipa’s curly head. The child caught the descending hand and kissed the long white fingers.
It was a wild place where we were, yet not new or crude—the coast of Florida, that old-new land, with its deserted plantations, its skies of Paradise, and its broad wastes open to the changeless sunshine. The old house stood on the edge of the dry land, where the pine-barren ended and the salt-marsh began; in front curved the tide-water river that seemed ever trying to come up close to the barren and make its acquaintance, but could not quite succeed, since it must always turn and flee at a fixed hour, like Cinderella at the ball, leaving not a silver slipper behind, but purple driftwood and bright seaweeds, brought in from the Gulf Stream outside. A planked platform ran out into the marsh from the edge of the barren, and at its end the boats were moored; for, although at high tide the river was at our feet, at low tide it was far away out in the green waste somewhere, and if we wanted it we must go and seek it. We did not want it, however; we let it glide up to us twice a day with its fresh salt odors and flotsam of the ocean, and the rest of the time we wandered over the barrens or lay under the trees looking up into the wonderful blue above, listening to the winds as they rushed across from sea to sea. I was an artist, poor and painstaking. Christine was my kind friend. She had brought me South because my cough was troublesome, and here because Edward Bowne recommended the place. He and three fellow sportsmen were down at the Madre Lagoon, farther south; I thought it probable we should see him, without his three fellow sportsmen, before very long.
“Who were the three women you have seen, Felipa?” said Christine.
“The grandmother, an Indian woman of the Seminoles who comes sometimes with baskets, and the wife of Miguel of the island. But they are all old, and their skins are curled: I like better the silver skin of the señora.”
Poor little Felipa lived on the edge of the great salt-marsh alone with her grandparents, for her mother was dead. The yellow old couple were slow-witted Minorcans, part pagan, part Catholic, and wholly ignorant; their minds rarely rose above the level of their orange-trees and their fish-nets. Felipa’s father was a Spanish sailor, and, as he had died only the year before, the child’s Spanish was fairly correct, and we could converse with her readily, although we were slow to comprehend the patois of the old people, which seemed to borrow as much from the Italian tongue and the Greek as from its mother Spanish. “I know a great deal,” Felipa remarked confidently, “for my father taught me. He had sailed on the ocean out of sight of land, and he knew many things. These he taught to me. Do the gracious ladies think there is anything else to know?”
One of the gracious ladies thought not, decidedly. In answer to my remonstrance, expressed in English, she said, “Teach a child like that, and you ruin her.”
“Ruin her?”
“Ruin her happiness—the same thing.”
Felipa had a dog, a second self—a great gaunt yellow creature of unknown breed, with crooked legs, big feet, and the name Drollo. What Drollo meant, or whether it was an abbreviation, we never knew; but there was a certain satisfaction in it, for the dog was droll: the fact that the Minorcan title, whatever it was, meant nothing of that sort, made it all the better. We never saw Felipa without Drollo. “They look a good deal alike,” observed Christine—“the same coloring.”
“For shame!” I said.
But it was true. The child’s bronzed yellow skin and soft eyes were not unlike the dog’s, but her head was crowned with a mass of short black curls, while Drollo had only his two great flapping ears and his low smooth head. Give him an inch or two more of skull, and what a creature a dog would be! For love and faithfulness even now what man can match him? But, although ugly, Felipa was a picturesque little object always, whether attired in boy’s clothes or in her own forlorn bodice and skirt. Olive-hued and meager-faced, lithe and thin, she flew over the pine-barrens like a creature of air, laughing to feel her short curls toss and her thin childish arms buoyed up on the breeze as she ran, with Drollo barking behind. For she loved the winds, and always knew when they were coming—whether down from the north, in from the ocean, or across from the Gulf of Mexico: she watched for them, sitting in the doorway, where she could feel their first breath, and she taught us the signs of the clouds. She was a queer little thing: we used to find her sometimes dancing alone out on the barren in a circle she had marked out with pine-cones, and once she confided to us that she talked to the trees. “They hear,” she said in a whisper; “you should see how knowing they look, and how their leaves listen.”
Once we came upon her most secret lair in a dense thicket of thorn-myrtle and wild smilax—a little bower she had made, where was hidden a horrible-looking image formed of the rough pieces of saw-palmetto grubbed up by old Bartolo from his garden. She must have dragged these fragments thither one by one, and with infinite pains bound them together with her rude withes of strong marsh-grass, until at last she had formed a rough trunk with crooked arms and a sort of a head, the red hairy surface of the palmetto looking not unlike the skin of some beast, and making the creature all the more grotesque. This fetich was kept crowned with flowers, and after this we often saw the child stealing away with Drollo to carry to it portions of her meals or a new-found treasure—a sea-shell, a broken saucer, or a fragment of ribbon. The food always mysteriously disappeared, and my suspicion is that Drollo used to go back secretly in the night and devour it, asking no questions and telling no lies: it fitted in nicely, however, Drollo merely performing the ancient part of the priests of Jupiter, men who have been much admired. “What a little pagan she is!” I said.
“Oh, no, it is only her doll,” replied Christine.
I tried several times to paint Felipa during these first weeks, but those eyes of hers always evaded me. They were, as I have said b
efore, yellow—that is, they were brown with yellow lights—and they stared at you with the most inflexible openness. The child had the full-curved, half-open mouth of the tropics, and a low Greek forehead. “Why isn’t she pretty?” I said.
“She is hideous,” replied Christine; “look at her elbows.”
Now Felipa’s arms were unpleasant: they were brown and lean, scratched and stained, and they terminated in a pair of determined little paws that could hold on like grim Death. I shall never forget coming upon a tableau one day out on the barren—a little Florida cow and Felipa, she holding on by the horns, and the beast with its small fore feet stubbornly set in the sand; girl pulling one way, cow the other; both silent and determined. It was a hard contest, but the girl won.
“And if you pass over her elbows, there are her feet,” continued Christine languidly. For she was a sybaritic lover of the fine linens of life, that friend of mine—a pre-Raphaelite lady with clinging draperies and a mediæval clasp on her belt. Her whole being rebelled against ugliness, and the mere sight of a sharp-nosed, light-eyed woman on a cold day made her uncomfortable.
“Have we not feet too?” I replied sharply.
But I knew what she meant. Bare feet are not pleasant to the eye nowadays, whatever they may have been in the days of the ancient Greeks; and Felipa’s little brown insteps were half the time torn or bruised by the thorns of the chaparral. Besides, there was always the disagreeable idea that she might step upon something cold and squirming when she prowled through the thickets knee-deep in the matted grasses. Snakes abounded, although we never saw them; but Felipa went up to their very doors, as it were, and rang the bell defiantly.
One day old Grandfather Bartolo took the child with him down to the coast: she was always wild to go to the beach, where she could gather shells and sea-beans, and chase the little ocean-birds that ran along close to the waves with that swift gliding motion of theirs, and where she could listen to the roar of the breakers. We were several miles up the salt-marsh, and to go down to the ocean was quite a voyage to Felipa. She bade us good-by joyously; then ran back to hug Christine a second time, then to the boat again; then back.
“I thought you wanted to go, child?” I said, a little impatiently; for I was reading aloud, and these small irruptions were disturbing.
“Yes,” said Felipa, “I want to go; and still— Perhaps if the gracious señora would kiss me again—”
Christine only patted her cheek and told her to run away: she obeyed, but there was a wistful look in her eyes, and, even after the boat had started, her face, watching us from the stern, haunted me.
“Now that the little monkey has gone, I may be able at last to catch and fix a likeness of her,” I said; “in this case a recollection is better than the changing quicksilver reality.”
“You take it as a study of ugliness?”
“Do not be hard upon the child, Christine.”
“Hard? Why, she adores me,” said my friend, going off to her hammock under the tree.
Several days passed, and the boat returned not. I accomplished a fine amount of work, and Christine a fine amount of swinging in the hammock and dreaming. At length one afternoon I gave my final touch, and carried my sketch over to the pre-Raphaelite lady for criticism. “What do you see?” I said.
“I see a wild-looking child with yellow eyes, a mat of curly black hair, a lank little bodice, her two thin brown arms embracing a gaunt old dog with crooked legs, big feet, and turned-in toes.”
“Is that all?”
“All.”
“You do not see latent beauty, courage, and a possible great gulf of love in that poor wild little face?”
“Nothing of the kind,” replied Christine decidedly. “I see an ugly little girl; that is all.”
The next day the boat returned, and brought back five persons, the old grandfather, Felipa, Drollo, Miguel of the island, and—Edward Bowne.
“Already?” I said.
“Tired of the Madre, Kitty; thought I would come up here and see you for a while. I knew you must be pining for me.”
“Certainly,” I replied; “do you not see how I have wasted away?”
He drew my arm through his and raced me down the plank-walk toward the shore, where I arrived laughing and out of breath.
“Where is Christine?” he asked.
I came back into the traces at once. “Over there in the hammock. You wish to go to the house first, I suppose?”
“Of course not.”
“But she did not come to meet you, Edward, although she knew you had landed.”
“Of course not, also.”
“I do not understand you two.”
“And of course not, a third time,” said Edward, looking down at me with a smile. “What do peaceful little artists know about war?”
“Is it war?”
“Something very like it, Kitty. What is that you are carrying?”
“Oh! my new sketch. What do you think of it?”
“Good, very good. Some little girl about here, I suppose?”
“Why, it is Felipa!”
“And who is Felipa? Seems to me I have seen that old dog, though.”
“Of course you have; he was in the boat with you, and so was Felipa; but she was dressed in boy’s clothes, and that gives her a different look.”
“Oh! that boy? I remember him. His name is Philip. He is a funny little fellow,” said Edward calmly.
“Her name is Felipa, and she is not a boy or a funny little fellow at all,” I replied.
“Isn’t she? I thought she was both,” replied Ned carelessly; and then he went off toward the hammock. I turned away, after noting Christine’s cool greeting, and went back to the boat.
Felipa came bounding to meet me. “What is his name?” she demanded.
“Bowne.”
“Buon—Buona; I can not say it.”
“Bowne, child—Edward Bowne.”
“Oh! Eduardo; I know that. Eduardo—Eduardo—a name of honey.”
She flew off singing the name, followed by Drollo carrying his mistress’s palmetto basket in his big patient mouth; but when I passed the house a few moments afterward she was singing, or rather talking volubly of, another name—“Miguel,” and “the wife of Miguel,” who were apparently important personages on the canvas of her life. As it happened, I never really saw that wife of Miguel, who seemingly had no name of her own; but I imagined her. She lived on a sand-bar in the ocean not far from the mouth of our salt-marsh; she drove pelicans like ducks with a long switch, and she had a tame eagle; she had an old horse also, who dragged the driftwood across the sand on a sledge, and this old horse seemed like a giant horse always, outlined as he was against the flat bar and the sky. She went out at dawn, and she went out at sunset, but during the middle of the burning day she sat at home and polished sea-beans, for which she obtained untold sums; she was very tall, she was very yellow, and she had but one eye. These items, one by one, had been dropped by Felipa at various times, and it was with curiosity that I gazed upon the original Miguel, the possessor of this remarkable spouse. He was a grave-eyed, yellow man, who said little and thought less, applying cui bono? to mental much as the city man applies it to bodily exertion, and therefore achieving, I think, a finer degree of inanition. The tame eagle, the pelicans, were nothing to him; and, when I saw his lethargic, gentle countenance, my own curiosity about them seemed to die away in haze, as though I had breathed in an invisible opiate. He came, he went, and that was all; exit Miguel.
Felipa was constantly with us now. She and Drollo followed the three of us wherever we went—followed the two also whenever I staid behind to sketch, as I often staid, for in those days I was trying to catch the secret of the salt-marsh; a hopeless effort—I know it now. “Stay with me, Felipa,” I said; for it was natural to suppose that the lovers might like to be alone. (I call them lovers
for want of a better name, but they were more like haters; however, in such cases it is nearly the same thing.) And then Christine, hearing this, would immediately call “Felipa!” and the child would dart after them, happy as a bird. She wore her boy’s suit now all the time, because the señora had said she “looked well in it.” What the señora really said was, that in boy’s clothes she looked less like a grasshopper. But this had been translated as above by Edward Bowne when Felipa suddenly descended upon him one day and demanded to be instantly told what the gracious lady was saying about her; for she seemed to know by intuition when we spoke of her, although we talked in English and mentioned no names. When told, her small face beamed, and she kissed Christine’s hand joyfully and bounded away. Christine took out her handkerchief and wiped the spot.
“Christine,” I said, “do you remember the fate of the proud girl who walked upon bread?”
“You think that I may starve for kisses some time?” said my friend, going on with the wiping.
“Not while I am alive,” called out Edward from behind. His style of courtship was of the sledge-hammer sort sometimes. But he did not get much for it on that day; only lofty tolerance, which seemed to amuse him greatly.
Edward played with Felipa very much as if she was a rubber toy or a little trapeze performer. He held her out at arm’s length in mid-air, he poised her on his shoulder, he tossed her up into the low myrtle-trees, and dangled her by her little belt over the claret-colored pools on the barren; but he could not frighten her; she only laughed and grew wilder and wilder, like a squirrel. “She has muscles and nerves of steel,” he said admiringly.
“Do put her down; she is too excitable for such games,” I said in French, for Felipa seemed to divine our English now. “See the color she has.”
For there was a trail of dark red over the child’s thin oval cheeks which made her look unlike herself. As she caught our eyes fixed upon her, she suddenly stopped her climbing and came and sat at Christine’s feet. “Some day I shall wear robes like the señora’s,” she said, passing her hand over the soft fabric; “and I think,” she added after some slow consideration, “that my face will be like the señora’s too.”
Constance Fenimore Woolson Page 37
