University of Virginia Library

28. CHAPTER XXVIII.

The timbers of the ship which was to carry the fortunes
of our hero were laid by the side of Middle Bay, and
all these romantic shores could hardly present a lovelier
scene.

This beautiful sheet of water separates Harpswell from
a portion of Brunswick. Its shores are rocky and pine-crowned,
and display the most picturesque variety of outline.
Eagle Island, Shelter Island, and one or two smaller
ones, lie on the glassy surface like soft clouds of green
foliage pierced through by the steel-blue tops of arrowy
pine-trees.

There were a goodly number of shareholders in the projected
vessel; some among the most substantial men in the
vicinity. Zephaniah Pennel had invested there quite a solid
sum, as had also our friend Captain Kittridge. Moses had
placed therein the proceeds of his recent voyage, which
enabled him to buy a certain number of shares, and he
secretly revolved in his mind whether the sum of money
left by his father might not enable him to buy the whole
ship. Then a few prosperous voyages, and his fortune was
made!

He went into the business of building the new vessel with
all the enthusiasm with which he used when a boy to plan
ships and mould anchors. Every day he was off at early
dawn in his working-clothes, and labored steadily among the

men till evening. No matter how early he rose, however,
he always found that a good fairy had been before him and
prepared his dinner, daintily sometimes adding thereto a fragrant
little bunch of flowers. But when his boat returned
home at evening, he no longer saw her as in the days of
girlhood waiting far out on the farthest point of rock for
his return. Not that she did not watch for it and run out
many times toward sunset; but the moment she had made
out that it was surely he, she would run back into the house,
and very likely find an errand in her own room, where she
would be so deeply engaged that it would be necessary for
him to call her down before she could make her appearance.
Then she came smiling, chatty, always gracious, and ready
to go or to come as he requested, — the very cheerfulest
of household fairies, — but yet for all that there was a cobweb
invisible barrier around her that for some reason or
other he could not break over. It vexed and perplexed
him, and day after day he determined to whistle it down, —
ride over it rough-shod, — and be as free as he chose with
this apparently soft, unresistant, airy being, who seemed so
accessible. Why should n't he kiss her when he chose, and
sit with his arm around her waist, and draw her familiarly
upon his keee, — this little child-woman, who was as a sister
to him? Why, to be sure? Had she ever frowned or
scolded as Sally Kittridge did when he attempted to pass
the air-line that divides man from womanhood? Not at all.
She had neither blushed nor laughed, nor ran away. If he
kissed her, she took it with the most matter-of-fact composure;
if he passed his arm around her, she let it remain
with unmoved calmness; and so somehow he did these
things less and less, and wondered why.

The fact is, our hero had begun an experiment with his

little friend that we would never advise a young man to
try on one of these intense, quiet, soft-seeming women,
whose whole life is inward. He had determined to find out
whether she loved him before he committed himself to her;
and the strength of a whole book of martyrs is in women
to endure and to bear without flinching before they will
surrender the gate of this citadel of silence. Moreover,
our hero had begun his siege with precisely the worst
weapons.

For on the night that he returned and found Mara conversing
with a stranger, the suspicion arose in his mind
that somehow Mara might be particularly interested in
him, — and instead of asking her, which anybody might
consider the most feasible step in the case, he asked Sally
Kittridge.

Sally's inborn, inherent love of teasing was up in a
moment.

Did she know anything of that Mr. Adams? Of course
she did, — a young lawyer of one of the best Boston families,
— a splendid fellow, — she wished any such luck might
happen to her! Was Mara engaged to him? — What would
he give to know? — Why did n't he ask Mara? — Did he
expect her to reveal her friend's secrets? Well, she
should n't, — report said Mr. Adams was well to do in the
world, and had expectations from an uncle, — and did n't
Moses think he was interesting in conversation? Everybody
said what a conquest it was for an Orr's Island girl,
etc., etc. And Sally said the rest with many a malicious
toss and wink and sly twinkle of the dimples of her cheek,
which might mean more or less as a young man of imaginative
temperament was disposed to view it. Now this
was all done in pure, simple love of teasing. We incline

to think phrenologists have as yet been very incomplete in
their classification of faculties, or they would have appointed
a separate organ for this propensity of human nature.
Certain persons, often the most kind-hearted in the
world, and who would not give pain in any serious matter,
seem to have an insatiable appetite for those small annoyances
we commonly denominate teasing, — and Sally was
one of this number.

She diverted herself infinitely in playing upon the excitability
of Moses, — in awaking his curiosity, and baffling
it, and tormenting him with a whole phantasmagoria of
suggestions and assertions, which played along so near the
line of probability, that one could never tell which might be
fancy and which might be fact.

Moses therefore pursued the line of tactics for such cases
made and provided, and strove to awaken jealousy in Mara
by paying marked and violent attentions to Sally. He went
there evening after evening, leaving Mara to sit alone at
home. He made secrets with her, and alluded to them before
Mara. He proposed calling his new vessel the Sally
Kittridge; but whether all these things made Mara jealous
or not, he could never determine. Mara had no peculiar
gift for acting, except in this one point; but here all the
vitality of nature rallied to her support, and enabled her
to preserve an air of the most unperceiving serenity. If
she shed any tears when she spent a long, lonesome evening,
she was quite particular to be looking in a very placid
frame when Moses returned, and to give such an account
of the books, or the work, or paintings which had interested
her, that Moses was sure to be vexed. Never were her
inquiries for Sally more cordial, — never did she seem inspired
by a more ardent affection for her.

Whatever may have been the result of this state of
things in regard to Mara, it is certain that Moses succeeded
in convincing the common fame of that district that he and
Sally were destined for each other, and the thing was regularly
discussed at quilting frolics and tea-drinkings around,
much to Miss Emily's disgust and Aunt Roxy's grave satisfaction,
who declared that “Mara was altogether too good
for Moses Pennel, but Sally Kittridge would make him
stand round,” — by which expression she was understood
to intimate that Sally had in her the rudiments of the same
kind of domestic discipline which had operated so favorably
in the case of Captain Kittridge.

These things, of course, had come to Mara's ears. She
had overheard the discussions on Sunday noons as the people
between meetings sat over their doughnuts and cheese,
and analyzed their neighbors' affairs, and she seemed to
smile at them all. Sally only laughed, and declared that
it was no such thing; that she would no more marry Moses
Pennel or any other fellow than she would put her head
into the fire. What did she want of any of them? She
knew too much to get married, — that she did. She was
going to have her liberty for one while yet to come, etc.,
etc.; but all these assertions were of course supposed to
mean nothing but the usual declarations in such cases.
Mara among the rest thought it quite likely that this thing
was yet to be.

So she struggled and tried to reason down a pain which
constantly ached in her heart when she thought of this.
She ought to have foreseen that it must some time end in
this way. Of course she must have known that Moses
would some time choose a wife; and how fortunate that,
instead of a stranger, he had chosen her most intimate

friend. Sally was careless and thoughtless, to be sure, but
she had a good generous heart at the bottom, and she hoped
she would love Moses at least as well as she did, and then
she would always live with them, and think of any little
things that Sally might forget.

After all, Sally was so much more capable and efficient a
person than herself, — so much more bustling and energetic,
she would make altogether a better house-keeper, and doubtless
a better wife for Moses.

But then it was so hard that he did not tell her about
it. Was she not his sister? — his confidant for all his
childhood? — and why should he shut up his heart from
her now? But then she must guard herself from being
jealous, — that would be mean and wicked. So Mara, in
her zeal of self-discipline, pushed on matters; invited Sally
to tea to meet Moses; and when she came, left them alone
together while she busied herself in hospitable cares. She
sent Moses with errands and commissions to Sally, which
he was sure to improve into protracted visits; and in short,
no young match-maker ever showed more good-will to forward
the union of two chosen friends than Mara showed to
unite Moses and Sally.

So the flirtation went on all summer, like a ship under
full sail, with prosperous breezes; and Mara, in the many
hours that her two best friends were together, tried heroically
to persuade herself that she was not unhappy. She
said to herself constantly that she never had loved Moses
other than as a brother, and repeated and dwelt upon the
fact to her own mind with a pertinacity which might have
led her to suspect the reality of the fact, had she had experience
enough to look closer. True, it was rather lonely,
she said, but that she was used to, — she always had been

and always should be. Nobody would ever love her in
return as she loved; which sentence she did not analyze
very closely, or she might have remembered Mr. Adams
and one or two others, who had professed more for her
than she had found herself able to return. That general
proposition about nobody is commonly found, if sifted to
the bottom, to have specific relation to somebody whose name
never appears in the record.

Nobody could have conjectured from Mara's calm, gentle
cheerfulness of demeanor, that any sorrow lay at the
bottom of her heart; she would not have owned it to
herself.

There are griefs which grow with years, which have no
marked beginnings, — no especial dates; they are not events,
but slow perceptions of disappointment, which bear down on
the heart with a constant and equable pressure like the
weight of the atmosphere, and these things are never named
or counted in words among life's sorrows; yet through them,
as through an unsuspected inward wound, life, energy, and
vigor, slowly bleed away, and the persons, never owning
even to themselves the weight of the pressure, — standing,
to all appearance, fair and cheerful, are still undermined with
a secret wear of this inner current, and ready to fall with the
first external pressure.

There are persons often brought into near contact by the
relations of life, and bound to each other by a love so
close, that they are perfectly indispensable to each other,
who yet act upon each other as a file upon a diamond, by a
slow and gradual friction, the pain of which is so equable,
so constantly diffused through life, as scarcely ever at any
time to force itself upon the mind as a reality.

Such had been the history of the affection of Mara for

Moses. It had been a deep, inward, concentrated passion
that had almost absorbed self-consciousness, and made her
keenly alive to all the moody, restless, passionate changes
of his nature; it had brought with it that craving for sympathy
and return which such love ever will, and yet it was
fixed upon a nature so different and so uncomprehending
that the action had for years been one of pain more than
pleasure. Even now, when she had him at home with her
and busied herself with constant cares for him, there was
a sort of disturbing, unquiet element in the history of every
day. The longing for him to come home at night, — the wish
that he would stay with her, — the uncertainty whether he
would or would not go and spend the evening with Sally, —
the musing during the day over all that he had done and
said the day before, were a constant interior excitement.
For Moses, besides being in his moods quite variable and
changeable, had also a good deal of the dramatic element
in him, and put on sundry appearances in the way of experiment.

He would feign to have quarrelled with Sally, that he
might detect whether Mara would betray some gladness;
but she only evinced concern and a desire to make up the
difficulty. He would discuss her character and her fitness
to make a man happy in matrimony in the style that young
gentlemen use who think their happiness a point of great
consequence in the creation; and Mara, always cool, and
firm, and sensible, would talk with him in the most maternal
style possible, and caution him against trifling with her affections.
Then again he would be lavish in his praise of
Sally's beauty, vivacity, and energy, and Mara would join
with the most apparently unaffected delight. Sometimes he
ventured, on the other side, to rally her on some future

husband, and predict the days when all the attentions which
she was daily bestowing on him would be for another; and
here, as everywhere else, he found his little Sphinx perfectly
inscrutable. Instinct teaches the grass-bird, who hides
her eggs under long meadow grass, to creep timidly yards
from the nest, and then fly up boldly in the wrong place;
and a like instinct teaches shy girls all kinds of unconscious
stratagems when the one secret of their life is approached.
They may be as truthful in all other things as the strictest
Puritan, but here they deceive by an infallible necessity.
And meanwhile where was Sally Kittridge in all this matter?
Was her heart in the least touched by the black eyes
and long lashes? Who can say? Had she a heart? Well,
Sally was a good girl. When one got sufficiently far down
through the foam and froth of the surface, to find what was
in the depths of her nature, there was abundance there of
good womanly feeling, generous and strong, if one could but
get at it.

She was the best and brightest of daughters to the old
Captain, whose accounts she kept, whose clothes she mended,
whose dinner she often dressed and carried to him, from loving
choice; and Mrs. Kittridge regarded her housewifely
accomplishments with pride, though she never spoke to her
otherwise than in words of criticism and rebuke, as in her
view an honest mother should who means to keep a flourishing
sprig of a daughter within limits of a proper humility.

But as for any sentiment or love toward any person of the
other sex, Sally, as yet, had it not. Her numerous admirers
were only so many subjects for the exercise of her dear delight
of teasing, and Moses Pennel, the last and most considerable,
differed from the rest only in the fact that he was
a match for her in this redoubtable art and science, and this

made the game she was playing with him altogether more
stimulating than that she had carried on with any other of
her admirers. For Moses could sulk and storm for effect,
and clear off as bright as Harpswell Bay after a thunder-storm
— for effect also. Moses could play jealous, and
make believe all those thousand-and-one shadowy nothings
that coquettes, male and female, get up to carry their points
with; and so their quarrels and their makings-up were as
manifold as the sea-breezes that ruffled the ocean before the
Captain's door.

There is but one danger in play of this kind, and that is,
that deep down in the breast of every slippery, frothy, elfish
Undine sleeps the germ of an unawakened soul, which suddenly,
in the course of some such trafficking with the outward
shows and seemings of affection, may wake up and
make of the teasing, tricksy elf a sad and earnest woman —
a creature of loves and self-denials and faithfulness unto
death — in short, something altogether too good, too sacred
to be trifled with; and when a man enters the game protected
by a previous attachment which absorbs all his nature,
and the woman awakes in all her depth and strength to feel
the real meaning of love and life, she finds that she has
played with one stronger than she, at a terrible disadvantage.

Is this mine lying dark and evil under the saucy little
feet of our Sally? Well, we should not of course be surprised
some day to find it so.