Complete Works of Harriet Beecher Stowe

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  When he came back to the house, all was still evening. The moon, which was playing brightly on the distant sea, left one side of the brown house in shadow. Moses saw a light gleaming behind the curtain in the little room on the lower floor, which had been his peculiar sanctum during the summer past. He had made a sort of library of it, keeping there his books and papers. Upon the white curtain flitted, from time to time, a delicate, busy shadow; now it rose and now it stooped, and then it rose again — grew dim and vanished, and then came out again. His heart beat quick.

  Mara was in his room, busy, as she always had been before his departures, in cares for him. How many things had she made for him, and done and arranged for him, all his life long! things which he had taken as much as a matter of course as the shining of that moon. His thought went back to the times of his first going to sea, — he a rough, chaotic boy, sensitive and surly, and she the ever thoughtful good angel of a little girl, whose loving-kindness he had felt free to use and to abuse. He remembered that he made her cry there when he should have spoken lovingly and gratefully to her, and that the words of acknowledgment that ought to have been spoken, never had been said, — remained unsaid to that hour. He stooped low, and came quite close to the muslin curtain. All was bright in the room, and shadowy without; he could see her movements as through a thin white haze. She was packing his sea-chest; his things were lying about her, folded or rolled nicely. Now he saw her on her knees writing something with a pencil in a book, and then she enveloped it very carefully in silk paper, and tied it trimly, and hid it away at the bottom of the chest. Then she remained a moment kneeling at the chest, her head resting in her hands. A sort of strange, sacred feeling came over him as he heard a low murmur, and knew that she felt a Presence that he never felt or acknowledged. He felt somehow that he was doing her a wrong thus to be prying upon moments when she thought herself alone with God; a sort of vague remorse filled him; he felt as if she were too good for him. He turned away, and entering the front door of the house, stepped noiselessly along and lifted the latch of the door. He heard a rustle as of one rising hastily as he opened it and stood before Mara. He had made up his mind what to say; but when she stood there before him, with her surprised, inquiring eyes, he felt confused.

  “What, home so soon?” she said.

  “You did not expect me, then?”

  “Of course not, — not for these two hours; so,” she said, looking about, “I found some mischief to do among your things. If you had waited as long as I expected, they would all have been quite right again, and you would never have known.”

  Moses sat down and drew her toward him, as if he were going to say something, and then stopped and began confusedly playing with her work-box.

  “Now, please don’t,” said she, archly. “You know what a little old maid I am about my things!”

  “Mara,” said Moses, “people have asked you to marry them, have they not?”

  “People asked me to marry them!” said Mara. “I hope not. What an odd question!”

  “You know what I mean,” said Moses; “you have had offers of marriage — from Mr. Adams, for example.”

  “And what if I have?”

  “You did not accept him, Mara?” said Moses.

  “No, I did not.”

  “And yet he was a fine man, I am told, and well fitted to make you happy.”

  “I believe he was,” said Mara, quietly.

  “And why were you so foolish?”

  Mara was fretted at this question. She supposed Moses had come to tell her of his engagement to Sally, and that this was a kind of preface, and she answered, —

  “I don’t know why you call it foolish. I was a true friend to Mr. Adams. I saw intellectually that he might have the power of making any reasonable woman happy. I think now that the woman will be fortunate who becomes his wife; but I did not wish to marry him.”

  “Is there anybody you prefer to him, Mara?” said Moses.

  She started up with glowing cheeks and sparkling eyes.

  “You have no right to ask me that, though you are my brother.”

  “I am not your brother, Mara,” said Moses, rising and going toward her, “and that is why I ask you. I feel I have a right to ask you.”

  “I do not understand you,” she said, faintly.

  “I can speak plainer, then. I wish to put in my poor venture. I love you, Mara — not as a brother. I wish you to be my wife, if you will.”

  While Moses was saying these words, Mara felt a sort of whirling in her head, and it grew dark before her eyes; but she had a strong, firm will, and she mastered herself and answered, after a moment, in a quiet, sorrowful tone, “How can I believe this, Moses? If it is true, why have you done as you have this summer?”

  “Because I was a fool, Mara, — because I was jealous of Mr. Adams, — because I somehow hoped, after all, that you either loved me or that I might make you think more of me through jealousy of another. They say that love always is shown by jealousy.”

  “Not true love, I should think,” said Mara. “How could you do so? — it was cruel to her, — cruel to me.”

  “I admit it, — anything, everything you can say. I have acted like a fool and a knave, if you will; but after all, Mara, I do love you. I know I am not worthy of you — never was — never can be; you are in all things a true, noble woman, and I have been unmanly.”

  It is not to be supposed that all this was spoken without accompaniments of looks, movements, and expressions of face such as we cannot give, but such as doubled their power to the parties concerned; and the “I love you” had its usual conclusive force as argument, apology, promise, — covering, like charity, a multitude of sins.

  Half an hour after, you might have seen a youth and a maiden coming together out of the door of the brown house, and walking arm in arm toward the sea-beach.

  It was one of those wonderfully clear moonlight evenings, when the ocean, like a great reflecting mirror, seems to double the brightness of the sky, — and its vast expanse lay all around them in its stillness, like an eternity of waveless peace. Mara remembered that time in her girlhood when she had followed Moses into the woods on just such a night, — how she had sat there under the shadows of the trees, and looked over to Harpswell and noticed the white houses and the meeting-house, all so bright and clear in the moonlight, and then off again on the other side of the island where silent ships were coming and going in the mysterious stillness. They were talking together now with that outflowing fullness which comes when the seal of some great reserve has just been broken, — going back over their lives from day to day, bringing up incidents of childhood, and turning them gleefully like two children.

  And then Moses had all the story of his life to relate, and to tell Mara all he had learned of his mother, — going over with all the narrative contained in Mr. Sewell’s letter.

  “You see, Mara, that it was intended that you should be my fate,” he ended; “so the winds and waves took me up and carried me to the lonely island where the magic princess dwelt.”

  “You are Prince Ferdinand,” said Mara.

  “And you are Miranda,” said he.

  “Ah!” she said with fervor, “how plainly we can see that our heavenly Father has been guiding our way! How good He is, — and how we must try to live for Him, — both of us.”

  A sort of cloud passed over Moses’s brow. He looked embarrassed, and there was a pause between them, and then he turned the conversation.

  Mara felt pained; it was like a sudden discord; such thoughts and feelings were the very breath of her life; she could not speak in perfect confidence and unreserve, as she then spoke, without uttering them; and her finely organized nature felt a sort of electric consciousness of repulsion and dissent. She grew abstracted, and they walked on in silence.

  “I see now, Mara, I have pained you,” said Moses, “but there are a class of feelings that you have that I have not and cannot have. No, I cannot feign anything. I can understand what religion is i
n you, I can admire its results. I can be happy, if it gives you any comfort; but people are differently constituted. I never can feel as you do.”

  “Oh, don’t say never,” said Mara, with an intensity that nearly startled him; “it has been the one prayer, the one hope, of my life, that you might have these comforts, — this peace.”

  “I need no comfort or peace except what I shall find in you,” said Moses, drawing her to himself, and looking admiringly at her; “but pray for me still. I always thought that my wife must be one of the sort of women who pray.”

  “And why?” said Mara, in surprise.

  “Because I need to be loved a great deal, and it is only that kind who pray who know how to love really. If you had not prayed for me all this time, you never would have loved me in spite of all my faults, as you did, and do, and will, as I know you will,” he said, folding her in his arms, and in his secret heart he said, “Some of this intensity, this devotion, which went upward to heaven, will be mine one day. She will worship me.”

  “The fact is, Mara,” he said, “I am a child of this world. I have no sympathy with things not seen. You are a half-spiritual creature, — a child of air; and but for the great woman’s heart in you, I should feel that you were something uncanny and unnatural. I am selfish, I know; I frankly admit, I never disguised it; but I love your religion because it makes you love me. It is an incident to that loving, trusting nature which makes you all and wholly mine, as I want you to be. I want you all and wholly; every thought, every feeling, — the whole strength of your being. I don’t care if I say it: I would not wish to be second in your heart even to God himself!”

  “Oh, Moses!” said Mara, almost starting away from him, “such words are dreadful; they will surely bring evil upon us.”

  “I only breathed out my nature, as you did yours. Why should you love an unseen and distant Being more than you do one whom you can feel and see, who holds you in his arms, whose heart beats like your own?”

  “Moses,” said Mara, stopping and looking at him in the clear moonlight, “God has always been to me not so much like a father as like a dear and tender mother. Perhaps it was because I was a poor orphan, and my father and mother died at my birth, that He has been so loving to me. I never remember the time when I did not feel His presence in my joys and my sorrows. I never had a thought of joy and sorrow that I could not say to Him. I never woke in the night that I did not feel that He was loving and watching me, and that I loved Him in return. Oh, how many, many things I have said to Him about you! My heart would have broken years ago, had it not been for Him; because, though you did not know it, you often seemed unkind; you hurt me very often when you did not mean to. His love is so much a part of my life that I cannot conceive of life without it. It is the very air I breathe.”

  Moses stood still a moment, for Mara spoke with a fervor that affected him; then he drew her to his heart, and said, —

  “Oh, what could ever make you love me?”

  “He sent you and gave you to me,” she answered, “to be mine in time and eternity.”

  The words were spoken in a kind of enthusiasm so different from the usual reserve of Mara, that they seemed like a prophecy. That night, for the first time in her life, had she broken the reserve which was her very nature, and spoken of that which was the intimate and hidden history of her soul.

  CHAPTER XXXIII

  AT A QUILTING

  “And so,” said Mrs. Captain Badger to Miss Roxy Toothacre, “it seems that Moses Pennel ain’t going to have Sally Kittridge after all, — he’s engaged to Mara Lincoln.”

  “More shame for him,” said Miss Roxy, with a frown that made her mohair curls look really tremendous.

  Miss Roxy and Mrs. Badger were the advance party at a quilting, to be holden at the house of Mr. Sewell, and had come at one o’clock to do the marking upon the quilt, which was to be filled up by the busy fingers of all the women in the parish. Said quilt was to have a bordering of a pattern commonly denominated in those parts clam-shell, and this Miss Roxy was diligently marking with indigo.

  “What makes you say so, now?” said Mrs. Badger, a fat, comfortable, motherly matron, who always patronized the last matrimonial venture that put forth among the young people.

  “What business had he to flirt and gallivant all summer with Sally Kittridge, and make everybody think he was going to have her, and then turn round to Mara Lincoln at the last minute? I wish I’d been in Mara’s place.”

  In Miss Roxy’s martial enthusiasm, she gave a sudden poke to her frisette, giving to it a diagonal bristle which extremely increased its usually severe expression; and any one contemplating her at the moment would have thought that for Moses Pennel, or any other young man, to come with tender propositions in that direction would have been indeed a venturesome enterprise.

  “I tell you what ’tis, Mis’ Badger,” she said, “I’ve known Mara since she was born, — I may say I fetched her up myself, for if I hadn’t trotted and tended her them first four weeks of her life, Mis’ Pennel’d never have got her through; and I’ve watched her every year since; and havin’ Moses Pennel is the only silly thing I ever knew her to do; but you never can tell what a girl will do when it comes to marryin’, — never!”

  “But he’s a real stirrin’, likely young man, and captain of a fine ship,” said Mrs. Badger.

  “Don’t care if he’s captain of twenty ships,” said Miss Roxy, obdurately; “he ain’t a professor of religion, and I believe he’s an infidel, and she’s one of the Lord’s people.”

  “Well,” said Mrs. Badger, “you know the unbelievin’ husband shall be sanctified by the believin’ wife.”

  “Much sanctifyin’ he’ll get,” said Miss Roxy, contemptuously. “I don’t believe he loves her any more than fancy; she’s the last plaything, and when he’s got her, he’ll be tired of her, as he always was with anything he got ever since. I tell you, Moses Pennel is all for pride and ambition and the world; and his wife, when he gets used to her, ‘ll be only a circumstance, — that’s all.”

  “Come, now, Miss Roxy,” said Miss Emily, who in her best silk and smoothly-brushed hair had just come in, “we must not let you talk so. Moses Pennel has had long talks with brother, and he thinks him in a very hopeful way, and we are all delighted; and as to Mara, she is as fresh and happy as a little rose.”

  “So I tell Roxy,” said Miss Ruey, who had been absent from the room to hold private consultations with Miss Emily concerning the biscuits and sponge-cake for tea, and who now sat down to the quilt and began to unroll a capacious and very limp calico thread-case; and placing her spectacles awry on her little pug nose, she began a series of ingenious dodges with her thread, designed to hit the eye of her needle.

  “The old folks,” she continued, “are e’en a’most tickled to pieces,—’cause they think it’ll jist be the salvation of him to get Mara.”

  “I ain’t one of the sort that wants to be a-usin’ up girls for the salvation of fellers,” said Miss Roxy, severely. “Ever since he nearly like to have got her eat up by sharks, by giggiting her off in the boat out to sea when she wa’n’t more’n three years old, I always have thought he was a misfortin’ in that family, and I think so now.”

  Here broke in Mrs. Eaton, a thrifty energetic widow of a deceased sea-captain, who had been left with a tidy little fortune which commanded the respect of the neighborhood. Mrs. Eaton had entered silently during the discussion, but of course had come, as every other woman had that afternoon, with views to be expressed upon the subject.

  “For my part,” she said, as she stuck a decisive needle into the first clam-shell pattern, “I ain’t so sure that all the advantage in this match is on Moses Pennel’s part. Mara Lincoln is a good little thing, but she ain’t fitted to help a man along, — she’ll always be wantin’ somebody to help her. Why, I ‘member goin’ a voyage with Cap’n Eaton, when I saved the ship, if anybody did, — it was allowed on all hands. Cap’n Eaton wasn’t hearty at that time, he was jist gettin�
�� up from a fever, — it was when Marthy Ann was a baby, and I jist took her and went to sea and took care of him. I used to work the longitude for him and help him lay the ship’s course when his head was bad, — and when we came on the coast, we were kept out of harbor beatin’ about nearly three weeks, and all the ship’s tacklin’ was stiff with ice, and I tell you the men never would have stood it through and got the ship in, if it hadn’t been for me. I kept their mittens and stockings all the while a-dryin’ at my stove in the cabin, and hot coffee all the while a-boilin’ for ‘em, or I believe they’d a-frozen their hands and feet, and never been able to work the ship in. That’s the way I did. Now Sally Kittridge is a great deal more like that than Mara.”

  “There’s no doubt that Sally is smart,” said Mrs. Badger, “but then it ain’t every one can do like you, Mrs. Eaton.”

  “Oh no, oh no,” was murmured from mouth to mouth; “Mrs. Eaton mustn’t think she’s any rule for others, — everybody knows she can do more than most people;” whereat the pacified Mrs. Eaton said “she didn’t know as it was anything remarkable, — it showed what anybody might do, if they’d only try and have resolution; but that Mara never had been brought up to have resolution, and her mother never had resolution before her, it wasn’t in any of Mary Pennel’s family; she knew their grandmother and all their aunts, and they were all a weakly set, and not fitted to get along in life, — they were a kind of people that somehow didn’t seem to know how to take hold of things.”

  At this moment the consultation was hushed up by the entrance of Sally Kittridge and Mara, evidently on the closest terms of intimacy, and more than usually demonstrative and affectionate; they would sit together and use each other’s needles, scissors, thread, and thimbles interchangeably, as if anxious to express every minute the most overflowing confidence. Sly winks and didactic nods were covertly exchanged among the elderly people, and when Mrs. Kittridge entered with more than usual airs of impressive solemnity, several of these were covertly directed toward her, as a matron whose views in life must have been considerably darkened by the recent event.