"Not a bit of it," said Captain Kittridge. "Why, I was off to the Banks long afore I was his age, and a capital time we had of it, too. Golly!
how them fish did bite! We stood up to our knees in fish before we"d fished half an hour."
Mara, who had always a shy affinity for the Captain, now drew towards him and climbed on his knee. "Did the wind blow very hard?" she said.
"What, my little maid?"
"Does the wind blow at the Banks?"
"Why, yes, my little girl, that it does, sometimes; but then there ain"t the least danger. Our craft ride out storms like live creatures. I"ve stood it out in gales that was tight enough, I"m sure. "Member once I turned in "tween twelve and one, and hadn"t more"n got asleep, afore I came _clump_ out of my berth, and found everything upside down. And "stead of goin" upstairs to get on deck, I had to go right down. Fact was, that "ere vessel jist turned clean over in the water, and come right side up like a duck."
"Well, now, Cap"n, I wouldn"t be tellin" such a story as that," said his helpmeet.
"Why, Polly, what do you know about it? you never was to sea. We did turn clear over, for I "member I saw a bunch of seaweed big as a peck measure stickin" top of the mast next day. Jist shows how safe them ar little fishing craft is,--for all they look like an egg-sh.e.l.l on the mighty deep, as Parson Sewell calls it."
"I was very much pleased with Mr. Sewell"s exercise in prayer this morning," said Mrs. Kittridge; "it must have been a comfort to you, Mis"
Pennel."
"It was, to be sure," said Mrs. Pennel.
"Puts me in mind of poor Mary Jane Simpson. Her husband went out, you know, last June, and hain"t been heard of since. Mary Jane don"t really know whether to put on mourning or not."
"Law! I don"t think Mary Jane need give up yet," said the Captain.
""Member one year I was out, we got blowed clear up to Baffin"s Bay, and got shut up in the ice, and had to go ash.o.r.e and live jist as we could among them Esquimaux. Didn"t get home for a year. Old folks had clean giv" us up. Don"t need never despair of folks gone to sea, for they"s sure to turn up, first or last."
"But I hope," said Mara, apprehensively, "that grandpapa won"t get blown up to Baffin"s Bay. I"ve seen that on his chart,--it"s a good ways."
"And then there"s them "ere icebergs," said Mrs. Kittridge; "I"m always "fraid of running into them in the fog."
"Law!" said Captain Kittridge, "I"ve met "em bigger than all the colleges up to Brunswick,--great white bears on "em,--hungry as Time in the Primer. Once we came kersmash on to one of "em, and if the Flying Betsey hadn"t been made of whalebone and injer-rubber, she"d a-been stove all to pieces. Them white bears, they was so hungry, that they stood there with the water jist runnin" out of their chops in a perfect stream."
"Oh, dear, dear," said Mara, with wide round eyes, "what will Moses do if they get on the icebergs?"
"Yes," said Mrs. Kittridge, looking solemnly at the child through the black bows of her spectacles, "we can truly say:--
""Dangers stand thick through all the ground, To push us to the tomb,"
as the hymn-book says."
The kind-hearted Captain, feeling the fluttering heart of little Mara, and seeing the tears start in her eyes, addressed himself forthwith to consolation. "Oh, never you mind, Mara," he said, "there won"t nothing hurt "em. Look at me. Why, I"ve been everywhere on the face of the earth. I"ve been on icebergs, and among white bears and Indians, and seen storms that would blow the very hair off your head, and here I am, dry and tight as ever. You"ll see "em back before long."
The cheerful laugh with which the Captain was wont to chorus his sentences sounded like the crackling of dry pine wood on the social hearth. One would hardly hear it without being lightened in heart; and little Mara gazed at his long, dry, ropy figure, and wrinkled thin face, as a sort of monument of hope; and his uproarious laugh, which Mrs.
Kittridge sometimes ungraciously compared to "the crackling of thorns under a pot," seemed to her the most delightful thing in the world.
"Mary Jane was a-tellin" me," resumed Mrs. Kittridge, "that when her husband had been out a month, she dreamed she see him, and three other men, a-floatin" on an iceberg."
"Laws," said Captain Kittridge, "that"s jist what my old mother dreamed about me, and "twas true enough, too, till we got off the ice on to the sh.o.r.e up in the Esquimaux territory, as I was a-tellin". So you tell Mary Jane she needn"t look out for a second husband _yet_, for that ar dream"s a sartin sign he"ll be back."
"Cap"n Kittridge!" said his helpmeet, drawing herself up, and giving him an austere glance over her spectacles; "how often must I tell you that there _is_ subjects which shouldn"t be treated with levity?"
"Who"s been a-treatin" of "em with levity?" said the Captain. "I"m sure I ain"t. Mary Jane"s good-lookin", and there"s plenty of young fellows as sees it as well as me. I declare, she looked as pretty as any young gal when she ris up in the singers" seats to-day. Put me in mind of you, Polly, when I first come home from the Injies."
"Oh, come now, Cap"n Kittridge! we"re gettin" too old for that sort o"
talk."
"We ain"t too old, be we, Mara?" said the Captain, trotting the little girl gayly on his knee; "and we ain"t afraid of icebergs and no sich, be we? I tell you they"s a fine sight of a bright day; they has millions of steeples, all white and glistering, like the New Jerusalem, and the white bears have capital times trampin" round on "em. Wouldn"t little Mara like a great, nice white bear to ride on, with his white fur, so soft and warm, and a saddle made of pearls, and a gold bridle?"
"You haven"t seen any little girls ride so," said Mara, doubtfully.
"I shouldn"t wonder if I had; but you see, Mis" Kittridge there, she won"t let me tell all I know," said the Captain, sinking his voice to a confidential tone; "you jist wait till we get alone."
"But, you are sure," said Mara, confidingly, in return, "that white bears will be kind to Moses?"
"Lord bless you, yes, child, the kindest critturs in the world they be, if you only get the right side of "em," said the Captain.
"Oh, yes! because," said Mara, "I know how good a wolf was to Romulus and Remus once, and nursed them when they were cast out to die. I read that in the Roman history."
"Jist so," said the Captain, enchanted at this historic confirmation of his apocrypha.
"And so," said Mara, "if Moses should happen to get on an iceberg, a bear might take care of him, you know."
"Jist so, jist so," said the Captain; "so don"t you worry your little curly head one bit. Some time when you come down to see Sally, we"ll go down to the cove, and I"ll tell you lots of stories about chil"en that have been fetched up by white bears, jist like Romulus and what"s his name there."
"Come, Mis" Kittridge," added the cheery Captain; "you and I mustn"t be keepin" the folks up till nine o"clock."
"Well now," said Mrs. Kittridge, in a doleful tone, as she began to put on her bonnet, "Mis" Pennel, you must keep up your spirits--it"s one"s duty to take cheerful views of things. I"m sure many"s the night, when the Captain"s been gone to sea, I"ve laid and shook in my bed, hearin"
the wind blow, and thinking what if I should be left a lone widow."
"There"d a-been a dozen fellows a-wanting to get you in six months, Polly," interposed the Captain. "Well, good-night, Mis" Pennel; there"ll be a splendid haul of fish at the Banks this year, or there"s no truth in signs. Come, my little Mara, got a kiss for the dry old daddy? That"s my good girl. Well, good night, and the Lord bless you."
And so the cheery Captain took up his line of march homeward, leaving little Mara"s head full of dazzling visions of the land of romance to which Moses had gone. She was yet on that shadowy boundary between the dreamland of childhood and the real land of life; so all things looked to her quite possible; and gentle white bears, with warm, soft fur and pearl and gold saddles, walked through her dreams, and the victorious curls of Moses appeared, with his bright eyes and cheeks, over glittering pinnacles of frost in the ice-land.
CHAPTER XIV
THE ENCHANTED ISLAND
June and July pa.s.sed, and the lonely two lived a quiet life in the brown house. Everything was so still and fair--no sound but the coming and going tide, and the swaying wind among the pine-trees, and the tick of the clock, and the whirr of the little wheel as Mrs. Pennel sat spinning in her door in the mild weather. Mara read the Roman history through again, and began it a third time, and read over and over again the stories and prophecies that pleased her in the Bible, and pondered the wood-cuts and texts in a very old edition of aesop"s Fables; and as she wandered in the woods, picking fragrant bayberries and gathering hemlock, checkerberry, and sa.s.safras to put in the beer which her grandmother brewed, she mused on the things that she read till her little mind became a tabernacle of solemn, quaint, dreamy forms, where old Judean kings and prophets, and Roman senators and warriors, marched in and out in shadowy rounds. She invented long dramas and conversations in which they performed imaginary parts, and it would not have appeared to the child in the least degree surprising either to have met an angel in the woods, or to have formed an intimacy with some talking wolf or bear, such as she read of in aesop"s Fables.
One day, as she was exploring the garret, she found in an old barrel of cast-off rubbish a bit of reading which she begged of her grandmother for her own. It was the play of the "Tempest," torn from an old edition of Shakespeare, and was in that delightfully fragmentary condition which most particularly pleases children, because they conceive a mutilated treasure thus found to be more especially their own property--something like a rare wild-flower or sea-sh.e.l.l. The pleasure which thoughtful and imaginative children sometimes take in reading that which they do not and cannot fully comprehend is one of the most common and curious phenomena of childhood.
And so little Mara would lie for hours stretched out on the pebbly beach, with the broad open ocean before her and the whispering pines and hemlocks behind her, and pore over this poem, from which she collected dim, delightful images of a lonely island, an old enchanter, a beautiful girl, and a spirit not quite like those in the Bible, but a very probable one to her mode of thinking. As for old Caliban, she fancied him with a face much like that of a huge skate-fish she had once seen drawn ash.o.r.e in one of her grandfather"s nets; and then there was the beautiful young Prince Ferdinand, much like what Moses would be when he was grown up--and how glad she would be to pile up his wood for him, if any old enchanter should set him to work!
One attribute of the child was a peculiar shamefacedness and shyness about her inner thoughts, and therefore the wonder that this new treasure excited, the host of surmises and dreams to which it gave rise, were never mentioned to anybody. That it was all of it as much authentic fact as the Roman history, she did not doubt, but whether it had happened on Orr"s Island or some of the neighboring ones, she had not exactly made up her mind. She resolved at her earliest leisure to consult Captain Kittridge on the subject, wisely considering that it much resembled some of his fishy and aquatic experiences.
Some of the little songs fixed themselves in her memory, and she would hum them as she wandered up and down the beach.