University of Virginia Library

20. CHAPTER XX.

We have introduced Mara to our readers as she appears
in her seventeenth year, at the time when she is expecting
the return of Moses as a young man of twenty; but we cannot
do justice to the feelings which are roused in her heart
by this expectation, without giving a chapter or two to tracing
the history of Moses since we left him as a boy commencing
the study of the Latin grammar with Mr. Sewell.
The reader must see the forces that acted upon his early
development, and what they have made of him.

It is common for people who write treatises on education
to give forth their rules and theories with a self-satisfied air,
as if a human being were a thing to be made up, like a
batch of bread, out of a given number of materials combined
by an infallible recipe.

Take your child, and do thus and so for a given number
of years, and he comes out a thoroughly educated individual.

But in fact, education is in many cases nothing more than
a blind struggle of parents and guardians with the evolutions
of some strong, predetermined character, individual, obstinate,
unreceptive, and seeking by an inevitable law of its
being to develop itself and gain free expression in its own
way. Captain Kittridge's confidence that he would as soon
undertake a boy as a Newfoundland pup, is good for those
whose idea of what is to be done for a human being are
only what would be done for a dog, namely, give food,

shelter, and world-room, and leave each to act out his own
nature without let or hindrance.

But everybody takes an embryo human being with some
plan of one's own what it shall do or be. The child's future
shall shape out some darling purpose or plan, and fulfil some
long unfulfilled expectation of the parent. And thus, though
the wind of every generation sweeps its hopes and plans like
forest-leaves, none are whirled and tossed with more piteous
moans than those which come out green and fresh to shade
the happy spring-time of the cradle.

For the temperaments of children are often as oddly unsuited
to parents as if capricious fairies had been filling
cradles with changelings.

A meek member of the Peace Society, a tender, devout,
poetical clergyman, receives an heir from heaven, and
straightway devotes him to the Christian ministry. But lo!
the boy proves a young war-horse, neighing for battle, burning
for gunpowder and guns, for bowie-knives and revolvers,
and for every form and expression of physical force; — he
might make a splendid trapper, an energetic sea-captain, a
bold, daring military man, but his whole boyhood is full of
rebukes and disciplines for sins which are only the blind
effort of the creature to express a nature which his parent
does not and cannot understand. So again, the son that was
to have upheld the old, proud merchant's time-honored firm,
that should have been mighty in ledgers and great upon
'Change, breaks his father's heart by an unintelligible fancy
for weaving poems and romances. A father of literary aspirations,
balked of privileges of early education, bends over
the cradle of his son with but one idea. This child shall
have the full advantages of regular college-training; and so
for years he battles with a boy abhorring study, and fitted

only for a life of out-door energy and bold adventure, — on
whom Latin forms and Greek quantities fall and melt aimless
and useless, as snow-flakes on the hide of a buffalo. Then
the secret agonies, — the long years of sorrowful watchings
of those gentler nurses of humanity who receive the infant
into their bosom out of the void unknown, and strive to read
its horoscope through the mists of their prayers and tears!
— what perplexities, — what confusion! Especially is this
so in a community where the moral and religious sense is so
cultivated as in New England, and frail, trembling, self-distrustful
mothers are told that the shaping and ordering not
only of this present life, but of an immortal destiny, is in
their hands.

On the whole, those who succeed best in the rearing of
children, are the tolerant and easy persons who instinctively
follow nature and accept without much inquiry whatever
she sends; or that far smaller class, wise to discern spirits
and apt to adopt means to their culture and development,
who can prudently and carefully train every nature according
to its true and characteristic ideal.

Zephaniah Pennel was a shrewd old Yankee, whose instincts
taught him from the first, that the waif that had
been so mysteriously washed out of the gloom of the sea into
his family, was of some different class and lineage from that
which might have filled a cradle of his own, and of a nature
which he could not perfectly understand. So he prudently
watched and waited, only using restraint enough to keep
the boy anchored in society, and letting him otherwise grow
up in the solitary freedom of his lonely seafaring life.

The boy was from childhood, although singularly attractive,
of a moody, fitful, unrestful nature, — eager, earnest,
but unsteady, — with varying phases of imprudent frankness

and of the most stubborn and unfathomable secretiveness.
He was a creature of unreasoning antipathies and attractions.
As Zephaniah Pennel said of him, he was as full of
hitches as an old bureau drawer.

His peculiar beauty, and a certain electrical power of attraction,
seemed to form a constant circle of protection and
forgiveness around him in the home of his foster-parents;
and great as was the anxiety and pain which he often gave
them, they somehow never felt the charge of him as a
weariness.

We left him a boy beginning Latin with Mr. Sewell in
company with the little Mara. This arrangement progressed
prosperously for a time, and the good clergyman, all whose
ideas of education ran through the halls of a college, began to
have hopes of turning out a choice scholar. But when the
boy's ship of life came into the breakers of that narrow and
intricate channel which divides boyhood from manhood, the
difficulties that had always attended his guidance and management
wore an intensified form. How much family happiness
is wrecked just then and there! How many mothers'
and sisters' hearts are broken in the wild and confused tossings
and tearings of that stormy transition!

A whole new nature is blindly upheaving itself, with cravings
and clamorings, which neither the boy himself nor often
surrounding friends understand.

A shrewd observer has significantly characterized the
period as the time when the boy wishes he were dead, and
everybody else wishes so too. The wretched, half-fledged,
half-conscious, anomalous creature has all the desires of the
man, and none of the rights; has a double and triple share
of nervous edge and intensity in every part of his nature,
and no definitely perceived objects on which to bestow it, —

and, of course, all sorts of unreasonable moods and phases
are the result.

One of the most common signs of this period, in some
natures, is the love of contradiction and opposition, — a blind
desire to go contrary to everything that is commonly received
among the older people. The boy disparages the minister,
quizzes the deacon, thinks the school-master an ass, and
does n't believe in the Bible, and seems to be rather pleased
than otherwise with the shock and flutter that all these announcements
create among peaceably disposed grown people.
No respectable hen that ever hatched out a brood of ducks,
was more puzzled what to do with them than was poor Mrs.
Pennel when her adopted nursling came into this state.
Was he a boy? an immortal soul? a reasonable human
being? or only a handsome goblin sent to torment her?

“What shall we do with him, father?” said she, one
Sunday, to Zephaniah, as he stood shaving before the little
looking-glass in their bedroom. “He can't be governed
like a child, and he won't govern himself like a man.”

Zephaniah stopped and strapped his razor reflectively.

“We must cast out anchor and wait for day,” he answered.
“Prayer is a long rope with a strong hold.”

It was just at this critical period of life that Moses Pennel
was drawn into associations which awoke the alarm of
all his friends, and from which the characteristic wilfulness
of his nature made it difficult to attempt to extricate him.

In order that our readers may fully understand this part
of our history, we must give some few particulars as to the
peculiar scenery of Orr's Island and the state of the country
at this time.

The coast of Maine, as we have elsewhere said, is remarkable
for a singular interpenetration of the sea with the land,

forming amid its dense primeval forests secluded bays, narrow
and deep, into which vessels might float with the tide,
and where they might nestle unseen and unsuspected amid
the dense shadows of the overhanging forest.

At this time there was a very brisk business done all
along the coast of Maine in the way of smuggling. Small
vessels, lightly built and swift of sail, would run up into
these sylvan fastnesses, and there make their deposits and
transact their business so as entirely to elude the vigilance
of government officers.

It may seem strange that practices of this kind should
ever have obtained a strong foothold in a community peculiar
for its rigid morality and its orderly submission to law;
but in this case, as in many others, contempt of law grew
out of weak and unworthy legislation. The celebrated
embargo of Jefferson stopped at once the whole trade of
New England, and condemned her thousand ships to rot
at the wharves, and caused the ruin of thousands of families.

The merchants of the country regarded this as a flagrant,
high-handed piece of injustice, expressly designed to cripple
New England commerce, and evasions of this unjust law
found everywhere a degree of sympathy, even in the breasts
of well-disposed and conscientious people. In resistance to
the law, vessels were constantly fitted out which ran upon
trading voyages to the West Indies and other places; and
although the practice was punishable as smuggling, yet it
found extensive connivance. From this beginning smuggling
of all kinds gradually grew up in the community, and
gained such a foothold that even after the repeal of the
embargo it still continued to be extensively practised. Secret
depositories of contraband goods still existed in many

of the lonely haunts of islands off the coast of Mame. Hid
in deep forest shadows, visited only in the darkness of the
night, were these illegal stores of merchandise. And from
these secluded resorts they found their way, no one knew
or cared to say how, into houses for miles around.

There was no doubt that the practice, like all other illegal
ones, was demoralizing to the community, and particularly
fatal to the character of that class of bold, enterprising
young men who would be most likely to be drawn into
it.

Zephaniah Pennel, who was made of a kind of straight-grained,
uncompromising oaken timber such as built the
Mayflower of old, had always borne his testimony at home
and abroad against any violations of the laws of the land,
however veiled under the pretext of righting a wrong or
resisting an injustice, and had done what he could in his
neighborhood to enable government officers to detect and
break up these unlawful depositories. This exposed him
particularly to the hatred and ill-will of the operators concerned
in such affairs, and a plot was laid by a few of the
most daring and determined of them to establish one of their
depositories on Orr's Island, and to implicate the family of
Pennel himself in the trade. This would accomplish two
purposes, as they hoped, — it would be a mortification and
defeat to him, — a revenge which they coveted; and it
would, they thought, insure his silence and complicity for
the strongest reasons.

The situation and characteristics of Orr's Island peculiarly
fitted it for the carrying out of a scheme of this kind,
— and for this purpose we must try to give our readers a
more definite idea of it.

The traveller who wants a ride through scenery of more

varied and singular beauty than can ordinarily be found on
the shores of any land whatever, should start some fine clear
day along the clean sandy road, ribboned with strips of
green grass, that leads through the flat pitch-pine forests
of Brunswick toward the sea. As he approaches the salt
water, a succession of the most beautiful and picturesque
lakes seems to be lying softly cradled in the arms of wild,
rocky forest shores, whose outlines are ever changing with
the windings of the road.

At a distance of about six or eight miles from Brunswick
he crosses an arm of the sea, and comes upon the first of
the interlacing group of islands which beautifies the shore.
A ride across this island is a constant succession of pictures,
whose wild and solitary beauty entirely distances all power
of description. The magnificence of the evergreen forests,
— their peculiar air of sombre stillness, — the rich intermingling
ever and anon of groves of birch, beech, and oak,
in picturesque knots and tufts, as if set for effect by some
skilful landscape-gardener, — produce a sort of strange
dreamy wonder; while the sea, breaking forth both on the
right hand and the left of the road into the most romantic
glimpses, seems to flash and glitter like some strange gem
which every moment shows itself through the framework
of a new setting. Here and there little secluded coves push
in from the sea, around which lie soft tracts of green meadow-land,
hemmed in and guarded by rocky pine-crowned
ridges. In such sheltered spots may be seen neat white
houses, nestling like sheltered doves in the beautiful solitude.

When one has ridden nearly to the end of Great Island,
which is about four miles across, he sees rising before him,
from the sea, a bold romantic point of land, uplifting a

crown of rich evergreen and forest trees over shores of perpendicular
rock. This is Orr's Island.

It was not an easy matter in the days of our past experience
to guide a horse and carriage down the steep, wild
shores of Great Island to the long bridge that connects it with
Orr's. The sense of wild seclusion reaches here the highest
degree; and one crosses the bridge with a feeling as if genii
might have built it, and one might be going over it to
fairy-land. From the bridge the path rises on to a high
granite ridge, which runs from one end of the island to the
other, and has been called the Devil's Back, with that superstitious
generosity which seems to have abandoned all romantic
places to so undeserving an owner.

By the side of this ridge of granite is a deep, narrow
chasm, running a mile and a half or two miles parallel with
the road, and veiled by the darkest and most solemn shadows
of the primeval forest. Here scream the jays and the eagles,
and fish-hawks make their nests undisturbed; and the tide
rises and falls under black branches of evergreen, from which
depend long, light festoons of delicate gray moss. The darkness
of the forest is relieved by the delicate foliage and the
silvery trunks of the great white birches, which the solitude
of centuries has allowed to grow in this spot to a height and
size seldom attained elsewhere.

It was this narrow, rocky cove that had been chosen by
the smuggler Atkinson and his accomplices as a safe and
secluded resort for their operations. He was a sea-faring
man of Bath, one of that class who always prefer uncertain
and doubtful courses to those which are safe and reputable.
He was possessed of many of those traits calculated to make
him a hero in the eyes of young men; was dashing, free,
and frank in his manners, with a fund of humor and an

abundance of ready anecdote which made his society fascinating;
but he concealed beneath all these attractions a
character of hard, grasping, unscrupulous selfishness, and
an utter destitution of moral principle.

Moses, now in his sixteenth year, and supposed to be in a
general way doing well, under the care of the minister, was
left free to come and go at his own pleasure, unwatched by
Zephaniah, whose fishing operations often took him for weeks
from home.

Atkinson hung about the boy's path, engaging him first in
fishing or hunting enterprises; plied him with choice preparations
of liquor, with which he would enhance the hilarity
of their expeditions; and finally worked on his love of
adventure and that impatient restlessness incident to his
period of life to draw him fully into his schemes. Moses
lost all interest in his lessons, often neglecting them for days
at a time — accounting for his negligence by excuses which
were far from satisfactory. When Mara would expostulate
with him about this, he would break out upon her with a
fierce irritation. Was he always going to be tied to a girl's
apron-string? He was tired of study, and tired of old
Sewell, whom he declared an old granny in a white wig,
who knew nothing of the world. He was n't going to college
— it was altogether too slow for him — he was going to
see life and push ahead for himself.

Mara's life during this time was intensely wearing. A
frail, slender, delicate girl of thirteen, she carried a heart
prematurely old with the most distressing responsibility of
mature life. Her love for Moses had always had in it a
large admixture of that maternal and care-taking element
which, in some shape or other, qualifies the affection of
woman to man. Ever since that dream of babyhood, when

the vision of a pale mother had led the beautiful boy to her
arms, Mara had accepted him as something exclusively her
own, with an intensity of ownership that seemed almost to
merge her personal identity with his. She felt, and saw,
and enjoyed, and suffered in him, and yet was conscious of a
higher nature in herself, by which unwillingly he was often
judged and condemned. His faults affected her with a kind
of guilty pain, as if they were her own; his sins were borne
bleeding in her heart in silence, and with a jealous watchfulness
to hide them from every eye but hers. She busied
herself day and night interceding and making excuses for
him, first to her own sensitive moral nature, and then with
everybody around, for with one or another he was coming
into constant collision. She felt at this time a fearful load
of suspicion, which she dared not express to a human being.

Up to this period she had always been the only confidant
of Moses, who poured into her ear without reserve all the
good and the evil of his nature, and who loved her with all
the intensity with which he was capable of loving anything.
Nothing so much shows what a human being is in moral
advancement as the quality of his love. Moses Pennel's
love was egotistic, exacting, tyrannical, and capricious —
sometimes venting itself in expressions of a passionate fondness,
which had a savor of protecting generosity in them,
and then receding to the icy pole of surly petulance. For
all that, there was no resisting the magnetic attraction with
which in his amiable moods he drew those whom he liked to
himself.

Such people are not very wholesome companions for those
who are sensitively organized and predisposed to self sacrificing
love. They keep the heart in a perpetual freeze and
thaw, which, like the American northern climate, is so particularly

fatal to plants of a delicate habit. They could live
through the hot summer and the cold winter, but they cannot
endure the three or four months when it freezes one day
and melts the next, — when all the buds are started out by a
week of genial sunshine, and then frozen for a fortnight.
These fitful persons are of all others most engrossing, because
you are always sure in their good moods that they are
just going to be angels, — an expectation which no number
of disappointments seems finally to do away. Mara believed
in Moses' future as she did in her own existence. He was
going to do something great and good, — that she was certain
of. He would be a splendid man! Nobody, she thought,
knew him as she did; nobody could know how good and
generous he was sometimes, and how frankly he would confess
his faults, and what noble aspirations he had!

But there was no concealing from her watchful sense that
Moses was beginning to have secrets from her. He was
cloudy and murky; and at some of the most harmless inquiries
in the world, would flash out with a sudden temper,
as if she had touched some sore spot.

Her bedroom was opposite to his; and she became quite
sure that night after night, while she lay thinking of him,
she heard him steal down out of the house between two and
three o'clock, and not return till a little before day-dawn.
Where he went, and with whom, and what he was doing,
was to her an awful mystery, — and it was one she dared
not share with a human being. If she told her kind old
grandfather, she feared that any inquiry from him would
only light as a spark on that inflammable spirit of pride and
insubordination that was rising within him, and bring on an
instantaneous explosion. Mr. Sewell's influence she could
hope little more from; and as to poor Mrs. Pennel, such

communications would only weary and distress her, without
doing any manner of good. There was, therefore, only that
one unfailing Confidant — the Invisible Friend to whom the
solitary child could pour out her heart, and whose inspirations
of comfort and guidance never fail to come again in
return to true souls.

One moonlight night, as she lay thus praying, her senses,
sharpened by watching, discerned a sound of steps treading
under her window, and then a low whistle. Her heart beat
violently, and she soon heard the door of Moses' room
open, and then the old chamber-stairs gave forth those inconsiderate
creaks and snaps that garrulous old stairs always
will when anybody is desirous of making them accomplices
in a night-secret. Mara rose, and undrawing her curtain,
saw three men standing before the house, and saw Moses
come out and join them. Quick as thought she threw on
her clothes, and wrapping her little form in a dark cloak,
with a hood, followed them out. She kept at a safe distance
behind them, — so far back as just to keep them in sight.
They never looked back, and seemed to say but little till
they approached the edge of that deep belt of forest which
shrouds so large a portion of the island. She hurried along,
now nearer to them lest they should be lost to view in the
deep shadows, while they went on crackling and plunging
through the dense underbrush.