University of Virginia Library

25. CHAPTER XXV.

Miss Roxy Toothacre was seated by the window of the
little keeping-room where Miss Emily Sewell sat on every-day
occasions. Around her were the insignia of her power
and sway. Her big tailor's goose was heating between Miss
Emily's bright brass fire-irons; her great pin-cushion was by
her side, bristling with pins of all sizes, and with broken
needles thriftily made into pins by heads of red sealing-wax,
and with needles threaded with all varieties of cotton, silk,
and linen; her scissors hung martially by her side; her
black bombazette work-apron was on; and the expression
of her iron features was that of deep responsibility, for she
was making the minister a new Sunday vest!

The good soul looks not a day older than when we left
her, ten years ago. Like the gray, weather-beaten rocks of
her native shore, her strong features had an unchangeable
identity beyond that of anything fair and blooming. There
was of course no chance for a gray streak in her stiff, uncompromising
mohair frisette, which still pushed up her cap-border
bristlingly as of old, and the clear, high winds and
bracing atmosphere of that rough coast kept her in an admirable
state of preservation.

Miss Emily had now and then a white hair among her
soft, pretty brown ones, and looked a little thinner; but the
round, bright spot of bloom on each cheek was there just as
of yore, — and just as of yore she was thinking of her

brother, and filling her little head with endless calculations
to keep him looking fresh and respectable, and his house-keeping
comfortable and easy, on very limited means. She
was now officiously and anxiously attending on Miss Roxy,
who was in the midst of the responsible operation which
should conduce greatly to this end.

“Does that twist work well?” she said, nervously; “because
I believe I 've got some other up-stairs in my India
box.”

Miss Roxy surveyed the article; bit a fragment off, as if
she meant to taste it; threaded a needle and made a few
cabalistical stitches; and then pronounced, ex cathedrâ, that
it would do. Miss Emily gave a sigh of relief. After buttons
and tapes and linings, and various other items had
been also discussed, the conversation began to flow into
general channels.

“Did you know Moses Pennel had got home from Umbagog?”
said Miss Roxy.

“Yes. Captain Kittridge told brother so this morning. I
wonder he does n't call over to see us.”

“Your brother took a sight of interest in that boy,” said
Miss Roxy. “I was saying to Ruey, this morning, that if
Moses Pennel ever did turn out well, he ought to have a
large share of the credit.”

“Brother always did feel a peculiar interest in him; it
was such a strange providence that seemed to cast in his lot
among us,” said Miss Emily.

“As sure as you live, there he is a-coming to the front-door,”
said Miss Roxy.

“Dear me,” said Miss Emily, “and here I have on this
old faded chintz. Just so sure as one puts on any old rag,
and thinks nobody will come, company is sure to call.”

“Law, I 'm sure I should n't think of calling him company,”
said Miss Roxy.

A rap at the door put an end to this conversation, and
very soon Miss Emily introduced our hero into the little
sitting-room, in the midst of a perfect stream of apologies
relating to her old dress and the littered condition of the
sitting-room, for Miss Emily held to the doctrine of those
who consider any sign of human occupation and existence
in a room as being disorder — however reputable and respectable
be the cause of it.

“Well, really,” she said, after she had seated Moses by
the fire, “how time does pass, to be sure; it don't seem
more than yesterday since you used to come with your
Latin books, and now here you are a grown man! I
must run and tell Mr. Sewell. He will be so glad to see
you.”

Mr. Sewell soon appeared from his study in morning-gown
and slippers, and seemed heartily responsive to the
proposition which Moses soon made to him to have some
private conversation with him in his study.

“I declare,” said Miss Emily, as soon as the study-door
had closed upon her brother and Moses, “what a handsome
young man he is! and what a beautiful way he has with
him! — so deferential! A great many young men nowadays
seem to think nothing of their minister; but he comes
to seek advice. Very proper. It is n't every young man
that appreciates the privilege of having elderly friends. I
declare, what a beautiful couple he and Mara Lincoln would
make! Don't Providence seem in a peculiar way to have
designed them for each other?”

“I hope not,” said Miss Roxy, with her grimmest expression.

“You don't! Why not?”

“I never liked him,” said Miss Roxy, who had possessed
herself of her great heavy goose, and was now thumping and
squeaking it emphatically on the press-board. “She 's a
thousand times too good for Moses Pennel,” — thump. “I
never had no faith in him,” — thump. “He 's dreffle unstiddy,”
— thump. “He 's handsome, but he knows it,” —
thump. “He won't never love nobody so much as he does
himself,” — thump, fortissimo con spirito.

“Well, really now, Miss Roxy, you must n't always remember
the sins of his youth. Boys must sow their wild
oats. He was unsteady for a while, but now everybody
says he 's doing well; and as to his knowing he 's handsome,
and all that, I don't see as he does. See how polite
and deferential he was to us all, this morning; and he spoke
so handsomely to you.”

“I don't want none of his politeness,” said Miss Roxy,
inexorably; “and as to Mara Lincoln, she might have better
than him any day. Miss Badger was a-tellin' Captain
Brown Sunday noon that she was very much admired in
Boston.”

“So she was,” said Miss Emily, bridling. “I never reveal
secrets, or I might tell something, — but there has
been a young man, — but I promised not to speak of it, and
I sha' n't.”

“If you mean Mr. Adams,” said Miss Roxy, “you need n't
worry about keepin' that secret, 'cause that ar was all talked
over atween meetin's a Sunday noon; for Mis' Kittridge she
used to know his aunt Jerushy, her that married Solomon
Peters, and Mis' Captain Badger she says that he has a very
good property, and is a professor in the Old South church in
Boston.”

“Dear me,” said Miss Emily, “how things do get about!”

“People will talk, there a'n't no use trying to help it,”
said Miss Roxy; “but it 's strongly borne in on my mind
that it a'n't Adams, nor 't a'n't Moses Pennel that 's to marry
her. I 've had peculiar exercises of mind about that ar child,
— well I have;” and Miss Roxy pulled a large spotted bandanna
handkerchief out of her pocket, and blew her nose like
a trumpet, and then wiped the withered corners of her eyes,
which were humid as some old Orr's Island rock wet with
sea-spray.

Miss Emily had a secret love of romancing. It was one
of the recreations of her quiet, monotonous life to build air-castles,
which she furnished regardless of expense, and in
which she set up at house-keeping her various friends and
acquaintances, and she had always been bent on weaving
a romance on the history of Mara and Moses Pennel.

The good little body had done her best to second Mr.
Sewell's attempts toward the education of the children. It
was little busy Miss Emily who persuaded honest Zephaniah
and Mary Pennel that talents such as Mara's ought to be
cultivated, and that ended in sending her to Miss Plucher's
school in Portland. There her artistic faculties were trained
into creating funereal monuments out of chenille embroidery,
fully equal to Miss Emily's own; also to painting landscapes,
in which the ground and all the trees were one unvarying
tint of blue-green; and also to creating flowers of a new
and particular construction, which, as Sally Kittridge remarked,
were pretty, but did not look like anything in
heaven or earth. Mara had obediently and patiently done
all these things; and solaced herself with copying flowers
and birds and landscapes as near as possible like nature, as
a recreation from these more dignified toils.

Miss Emily also had been the means of getting Mara invited
to Boston, where she saw some really polished society,
and gained as much knowledge of the forms of artificial life
as a nature so wholly and strongly individual could obtain.
So little Miss Emily regarded Mara as her godchild, and
was intent on finishing her up into a romance in real life,
of which a handsome young man, who had been washed
ashore in a shipwreck, should be the hero.

What would she have said could she have heard the
conversation that was passing in her brother's study?
Little could she dream that the mystery, about which she
had timidly nibbled for years, was now about to be unrolled;
— but it was even so.

But, upon what she does not see, good reader, you and
I, following invisibly on tiptoe, will make our observations.

When Moses was first ushered into Mr. Sewell's study,
and found himself quite alone, with the door shut, his heart
beat so that he fancied the good man must hear it. He
knew well what he wanted and meant to say, but he found
in himself all that shrinking and nervous repugnance
which always attends the proposing of any decisive question.

“I thought it proper,” he began, “that I should call and
express my sense of obligation to you, sir, for all the kindness
you showed me when a boy. I 'm afraid in those
thoughtless days I did not seem to appreciate it so much as
I do now.”

As Moses said this, the color rose in his cheeks, and his
fine eyes grew moist with a sort of subdued feeling that
made his face for the moment more than usually beautiful.

Mr. Sewell looked at him with an expression of peculiar

interest, which seemed to have something almost of pain in
it, and answered with a degree of feeling more than he commonly
showed, —

“It has been a pleasure to me to do anything I could for
you, my young friend. I only wish it could have been more.
I congratulate you on your present prospects in life. You
have perfect health; you have energy and enterprise; you
are courageous and self-reliant, and, I trust, your habits are
pure and virtuous. It only remains that you add to all
this that fear of the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom.”

Moses bowed his head respectfully, and then sat silent a
moment, as if he were looking through some cloud where he
vainly tried to discover objects.

Mr. Sewell continued, gravely, —

“You have the greatest reason to bless the kind Providence
which has cast your lot in such a family, in such a
community. I have had some means in my youth of comparing
other parts of the country with our New England,
and it is my opinion that a young man could not ask a better
introduction into life than the wholesome nurture of a
Christian family in our favored land.”

“Mr. Sewell,” said Moses, raising his head, and suddenly
looking him straight in the eyes, “do you know anything of
my family?”

The question was so point-blank and sudden, that for a
moment Mr. Sewell made a sort of motion as if he dodged a
pistol-shot, and then his face assumed an expression of grave
thoughtfulness, while Moses drew a long breath. It was
out, — the question had been asked.

“My son,” replied Mr. Sewell, “it has always been my
intention, when you had arrived at years of discretion, to

make you acquainted with all that I know or suspect in
regard to your life. I trust that when I tell you all I do
know, you will see that I have acted for the best in the
matter. It has been my study and my prayer to do so.”

Mr. Sewell then rose, and unlocking the cabinet, of which
we have before made mention, in his apartment, drew forth
a very yellow and time-worn package of papers, which he
untied. From these he selected one which enveloped an
old-fashioned miniature case.

“I am going to show you,” he said, “what only you and
my God know that I possess. I have not looked at it now
for ten years, but I have no doubt that it is the likeness of
your mother.”

Moses took it in his hand, and for a few moments there
came a mist over his eyes, — he could not see clearly. He
walked to the window as if needing a clearer light.

What he saw was a painting of a beautiful young girl,
with large melancholy eyes, and a clustering abundance of
black, curly hair. The face was of a beautiful, clear oval,
with that warm brunette tint in which the Italian painters
delight. The black eyebrows were strongly and clearly
defined, and there was in the face an indescribable expression
of childish innocence and shyness, mingled with a kind
of confiding frankness, that gave the picture the charm
which sometimes fixes itself in faces for which we involuntarily
make a history.

She was represented as simply attired in a white muslin,
made low in the neck, and the hands and arms were singularly
beautiful. The picture, as Moses looked at it, seemed
to stand smiling at him with a childish grace, — a tender,
ignorant innocence which affected him deeply.

“My young friend,” said Mr. Sewell, “I have written all

that I know of the original of this picture, and the reasons
I have for thinking her your mother.

“You will find it all in this paper, which, if I had been
providentially removed, was to have been given you in your
twenty-first year. You will see in the delicate nature of the
narrative that it could not properly have been imparted to
you till you had arrived at years of understanding. I trust
when you know all that you will be satisfied with the course
I have pursued. You will read it at your leisure, and after
reading I shall be happy to see you again.”

Moses took the package, and after exchanging salutations
with Mr. Sewell, hastily left the house and sought his boat.

When one has suddenly come into possession of a letter
or paper in which is known to be hidden the solution of
some long-pondered secret, or the decision of fate with
regard to some long-cherished desire, who has not been
conscious of a sort of pain, — an unwillingness, at once to
know what is therein?

We turn the letter again and again, we lay it by and
return to it, and defer from moment to moment the opening
of it. So Moses did not sit down in the first retired spot to
ponder the paper. He put it in the breast pocket of his
coat, and then, taking up his oars, rowed across the bay.
He did not land at the house, but passed around the south
point of the Island, and rowed up the other side to seek a
solitary retreat in the rocks, which had always been a
favorite with him in his early days.

The shores of the Island, as we have said, are a precipitous
wall of rock, whose long, ribbed ledges extend far out
into the sea. At high tide these ledges are covered with the
smooth blue sea quite up to the precipitous shore. There
was a place, however, where the rocky shore shelved over,

forming between two ledges a sort of grotto, whose smooth
floor of shells and many-colored pebbles was never wet by
the rising tide. It had been the delight of Moses when a
boy, to come here and watch the gradual rise of the tide till
the grotto was entirely cut off from all approach, and then to
look out in a sort of hermit-like security over the open ocean
that stretched before him. Many an hour he had sat there
and dreamed of all the possible fortunes that might be found
for him when he should launch away into that blue smiling
futurity.

It was now about half-tide, and Moses left his boat and
made his way over the ledge of rocks toward his retreat.
They were all shaggy and slippery with yellow sea-weeds,
with here and there among them wide crystal pools, where
purple and lilac and green mosses unfolded their delicate
threads, and thousands of curious little shell-fish were tranquilly
pursuing their quiet life. The rocks where the pellucid
water lay were in some places crusted with barnacles,
which were opening and shutting the little white scaly doors
of their tiny houses, and drawing in and out those delicate
pink plumes which seem to be their nerves of enjoyment.
Moses and Mara had rambled and played here many hours
of their childhood, amusing themselves with catching crabs
and young lobsters and various little fish for these rocky
aquariums, and then studying at their leisure their various
ways. Now he had come hither a man, to learn the secret
of his life.

Moses stretched himself down on the clean pebbly shore
of the grotto, and drew forth Mr. Sewell's letter.