"Me want somefin"," said the little one.
"That"s what she"s always sayin"," said Miss Roxy.
"Me want somebody to pay wis"," continued the little one.
"Want somebody to play with," said old Dame Pennel, as she came in from the back-room with her hands yet floury with kneading bread; "sure enough, she does. Our house stands in such a lonesome place, and there ain"t any children. But I never saw such a quiet little thing--always still and always busy."
"I"ll take her down with me to Cap"n Kittridge"s," said Miss Roxy, "and let her play with their little girl; she"ll chirk her up, I"ll warrant.
She"s a regular little witch, Sally is, but she"ll chirk her up. It ain"t good for children to be so still and old-fashioned; children ought to be children. Sally takes to Mara just "cause she"s so different."
"Well, now, you may," said Dame Pennel; "to be sure _he_ can"t bear her out of his sight a minute after he comes in; but after all, old folks can"t be company for children."
Accordingly, that afternoon, the little Mara was arrayed in a little blue flounced dress, which stood out like a balloon, made by Miss Roxy in first-rate style, from a French fashion-plate; her golden hair was twined in manifold curls by Dame Pennel, who, restricted in her ideas of ornamentation, spared, nevertheless, neither time nor money to enhance the charms of this single ornament to her dwelling. Mara was her picture-gallery, who gave her in the twenty-four hours as many Murillos or Greuzes as a lover of art could desire; and as she tied over the child"s golden curls a little flat hat, and saw her go dancing off along the sea-sands, holding to Miss Roxy"s bony finger, she felt she had in her what galleries of pictures could not buy.
It was a good mile to the one story, gambrel-roofed cottage where lived Captain Kittridge,--the long, lean, brown man, with his good wife of the great Leghorn bonnet, round, black bead eyes, and psalm-book, whom we told you of at the funeral. The Captain, too, had followed the sea in his early life, but being not, as he expressed it, "very rugged," in time changed his ship for a tight little cottage on the seash.o.r.e, and devoted himself to boat-building, which he found sufficiently lucrative to furnish his brown cottage with all that his wife"s heart desired, besides extra money for knick-knacks when she chose to go up to Brunswick or over to Portland to shop.
The Captain himself was a welcome guest at all the firesides round, being a chatty body, and disposed to make the most of his foreign experiences, in which he took the usual advantages of a traveler. In fact, it was said, whether slanderously or not, that the Captain"s yarns were spun to order; and as, when pressed to relate his foreign adventures, he always responded with, "What would you like to hear?" it was thought that he fabricated his article to suit his market. In short, there was no species of experience, finny, fishy, or aquatic,--no legend of strange and unaccountable incident of fire or flood,--no romance of foreign scenery and productions, to which his tongue was not competent, when he had once seated himself in a double bow-knot at a neighbor"s evening fireside.
His good wife, a sharp-eyed, literal body, and a vigorous church-member, felt some concern of conscience on the score of these narrations; for, being their constant auditor, she, better than any one else, could perceive the variations and discrepancies of text which showed their mythical character, and oftentimes her black eyes would snap and her knitting-needles rattle with an admonitory vigor as he went on, and sometimes she would unmercifully come in at the end of a narrative with,--
"Well, now, the Cap"n"s told them ar stories till he begins to b"lieve "em himself, I think."
But works of fiction, as we all know, if only well gotten up, have always their advantages in the hearts of listeners over plain, homely truth; and so Captain Kittridge"s yarns were marketable fireside commodities still, despite the skepticisms which attended them.
The afternoon sunbeams at this moment are painting the gambrel-roof with a golden brown. It is September again, as it was three years ago when our story commenced, and the sea and sky are purple and amethystine with its Italian haziness of atmosphere.
The brown house stands on a little knoll, about a hundred yards from the open ocean. Behind it rises a ledge of rocks, where cedars and hemlocks make deep shadows into which the sun shoots golden shafts of light, illuminating the scarlet feathers of the sumach, which throw themselves jauntily forth from the crevices; while down below, in deep, damp, mossy recesses, rise ferns which autumn has just begun to tinge with yellow and brown. The little knoll where the cottage stood had on its right hand a tiny bay, where the ocean water made up amid picturesque rocks--s.h.a.ggy and solemn. Here trees of the primeval forest, grand and lordly, looked down silently into the waters which ebbed and flowed daily into this little pool. Every variety of those beautiful evergreens which feather the coast of Maine, and dip their wings in the very spray of its ocean foam, found here a representative. There were aspiring black spruces, crowned on the very top with heavy coronets of cones; there were balsamic firs, whose young buds breathe the scent of strawberries; there were cedars, black as midnight clouds, and white pines with their swaying plumage of needle-like leaves, strewing the ground beneath with a golden, fragrant matting; and there were the gigantic, wide-winged hemlocks, hundreds of years old, and with long, swaying, gray beards of moss, looking white and ghostly under the deep shadows of their boughs. And beneath, creeping round trunk and matting over stones, were many and many of those wild, beautiful things which embellish the shadows of these northern forests. Long, feathery wreaths of what are called ground-pines ran here and there in little ruffles of green, and the prince"s pine raised its oriental feather, with a mimic cone on the top, as if it conceived itself to be a grown-up tree. Whole patches of partridge-berry wove their evergreen matting, dotted plentifully with brilliant scarlet berries. Here and there, the rocks were covered with a curiously inwoven tapestry of moss, overshot with the exquisite vine of the Linnea borealis, which in early spring rings its two fairy bells on the end of every spray; while elsewhere the wrinkled leaves of the mayflower wove themselves through and through deep beds of moss, meditating silently thoughts of the thousand little cups of pink sh.e.l.l which they had it in hand to make when the time of miracles should come round next spring.
Nothing, in short, could be more quaintly fresh, wild, and beautiful than the surroundings of this little cove which Captain Kittridge had thought fit to dedicate to his boat-building operations,--where he had set up his tar-kettle between two great rocks above the highest tide-mark, and where, at the present moment, he had a boat upon the stocks.
Mrs. Kittridge, at this hour, was sitting in her clean kitchen, very busily engaged in ripping up a silk dress, which Miss Roxy had engaged to come and make into a new one; and, as she ripped, she cast now and then an eye at the face of a tall, black clock, whose solemn tick-tock was the only sound that could be heard in the kitchen.
By her side, on a low stool, sat a vigorous, healthy girl of six years, whose employment evidently did not please her, for her well-marked black eyebrows were bent in a frown, and her large black eyes looked surly and wrathful, and one versed in children"s grievances could easily see what the matter was,--she was turning a sheet! Perhaps, happy young female reader, you don"t know what that is,--most likely not; for in these degenerate days the strait and narrow ways of self-denial, formerly thought so wholesome for little feet, are quite gra.s.s-grown with neglect. Childhood nowadays is unceasingly feted and caressed, the princ.i.p.al difficulty of the grown people seeming to be to discover what the little dears want,--a thing not always clear to the little dears themselves. But in old times, turning sheets was thought a most especial and wholesome discipline for young girls; in the first place, because it took off the hands of their betters a very uninteresting and monotonous labor; and in the second place, because it was such a long, straight, unending turnpike, that the youthful travelers, once started thereupon, could go on indefinitely, without requiring guidance and direction of their elders. For these reasons, also, the task was held in special detestation by children in direct proportion to their amount of life, and their ingenuity and love of variety. A dull child took it tolerably well; but to a lively, energetic one, it was a perfect torture.
"I don"t see the use of sewing up sheets one side, and ripping up the other," at last said Sally, breaking the monotonous tick-tock of the clock by an observation which has probably occurred to every child in similar circ.u.mstances.
"Sally Kittridge, if you say another word about that ar sheet, I"ll whip you," was the very explicit rejoinder; and there was a snap of Mrs.
Kittridge"s black eyes, that seemed to make it likely that she would keep her word. It was answered by another snap from the six-year-old eyes, as Sally comforted herself with thinking that when she was a woman she"d speak her mind out in pay for all this.
At this moment a burst of silvery child-laughter rang out, and there appeared in the doorway, illuminated by the afternoon sunbeams, the vision of Miss Roxy"s tall, lank figure, with the little golden-haired, blue-robed fairy, hanging like a gay b.u.t.terfly upon the tip of a thorn-bush. Sally dropped the sheet and clapped her hands, unnoticed by her mother, who rose to pay her respects to the "cunning woman" of the neighborhood.
"Well, now, Miss Roxy, I was "mazin" afraid you wer"n"t a-comin". I"d just been an" got my silk ripped up, and didn"t know how to get a step farther without you."
"Well, I was finishin" up Cap"n Pennel"s best pantaloons," said Miss Roxy; "and I"ve got "em along so, Ruey can go on with "em; and I told Mis" Pennel I must come to you, if "twas only for a day; and I fetched the little girl down, "cause the little thing"s so kind o" lonesome like. I thought Sally could play with her, and chirk her up a little."
"Well, Sally," said Mrs. Kittridge, "stick in your needle, fold up your sheet, put your thimble in your work-pocket, and then you may take the little Mara down to the cove to play; but be sure you don"t let her go near the tar, nor wet her shoes. D"ye hear?"
"Yes, ma"am," said Sally, who had sprung up in light and radiance, like a translated creature, at this unexpected turn of fortune, and performed the welcome orders with a celerity which showed how agreeable they were; and then, stooping and catching the little one in her arms, disappeared through the door, with the golden curls fluttering over her own crow-black hair.
The fact was, that Sally, at that moment, was as happy as human creature could be, with a keenness of happiness that children who have never been made to turn sheets of a bright afternoon can never realize. The sun was yet an hour high, as she saw, by the flash of her shrewd, time-keeping eye, and she could bear her little prize down to the cove, and collect unknown quant.i.ties of gold and silver sh.e.l.ls, and starfish, and salad-dish sh.e.l.ls, and white pebbles for her, besides quant.i.ties of well turned shavings, brown and white, from the pile which constantly was falling under her father"s joiner"s bench, and with which she would make long extemporaneous tresses, so that they might play at being mermaids, like those that she had heard her father tell about in some of his sea-stories.
"Now, railly, Sally, what you got there?" said Captain Kittridge, as he stood in his shirt-sleeves peering over his joiner"s bench, to watch the little one whom Sally had dumped down into a nest of clean white shavings. "Wal", wal", I should think you"d a-stolen the big doll I see in a shop-window the last time I was to Portland. So this is Pennel"s little girl?--poor child!"
"Yes, father, and we want some nice shavings."
"Stay a bit, I"ll make ye a few a-purpose," said the old man, reaching his long, bony arm, with the greatest ease, to the farther part of his bench, and bringing up a board, from which he proceeded to roll off shavings in fine satin rings, which perfectly delighted the hearts of the children, and made them dance with glee; and, truth to say, reader, there are coa.r.s.er and homelier things in the world than a well turned shaving.
"There, go now," he said, when both of them stood with both hands full; "go now and play; and mind you don"t let the baby wet her feet, Sally; them shoes o" hern must have cost five-and-sixpence at the very least."
That sunny hour before sundown seemed as long to Sally as the whole seam of the sheet; for childhood"s joys are all pure gold; and as she ran up and down the white sands, shouting at every sh.e.l.l she found, or darted up into the overhanging forest for checkerberries and ground-pine, all the sorrows of the morning came no more into her remembrance.
The little Mara had one of those sensitive, excitable natures, on which every external influence acts with immediate power. Stimulated by the society of her energetic, buoyant little neighbor, she no longer seemed wishful or pensive, but kindled into a perfect flame of wild delight, and gamboled about the sh.o.r.e like a blue and gold-winged fly; while her bursts of laughter made the squirrels and blue jays look out inquisitively from their fastnesses in the old evergreens. Gradually the sunbeams faded from the pines, and the waves of the tide in the little cove came in, solemnly tinted with purple, flaked with orange and crimson, borne in from a great rippling sea of fire, into which the sun had just sunk.
"Mercy on us--them children!" said Miss Roxy.
"_He"s_ bringin" "em along," said Mrs. Kittridge, as she looked out of the window and saw the tall, lank form of the Captain, with one child seated on either shoulder, and holding on by his head.
The two children were both in the highest state of excitement, but never was there a more marked contrast of nature. The one seemed a perfect type of well-developed childish health and vigor, good solid flesh and bones, with glowing skin, brilliant eyes, shining teeth, well-knit, supple limbs,--vigorously and healthily beautiful; while the other appeared one of those aerial mixtures of cloud and fire, whose radiance seems scarcely earthly. A physiologist, looking at the child, would shake his head, seeing one of those perilous organizations, all nerve and brain, which come to life under the clear, stimulating skies of America, and, burning with the intensity of lighted phosphorus, waste themselves too early.
The little Mara seemed like a fairy sprite, possessed with a wild spirit of glee. She laughed and clapped her hands incessantly, and when set down on the kitchen-floor spun round like a little elf; and that night it was late and long before her wide, wakeful eyes could be veiled in sleep.
"Company jist sets this "ere child crazy," said Miss Roxy; "it"s jist her lonely way of livin"; a pity Mis" Pennel hadn"t another child to keep company along with her."
"Mis" Pennel oughter be trainin" of her up to work," said Mrs.
Kittridge. "Sally could oversew and hem when she wa"n"t more"n three years old; nothin" straightens out children like work. Mis" Pennel she just keeps that ar child to look at."
"All children ain"t alike, Mis" Kittridge," said Miss Roxy, sententiously. "This "un ain"t like your Sally. "A hen and a b.u.mble-bee can"t be fetched up alike, fix it how you will!""
CHAPTER VI
GRANDPARENTS
Zephaniah Pennel came back to his house in the evening, after Miss Roxy had taken the little Mara away. He looked for the flowery face and golden hair as he came towards the door, and put his hand in his vest-pocket, where he had deposited a small store of very choice sh.e.l.ls and sea curiosities, thinking of the widening of those dark, soft eyes when he should present them.
"Where"s Mara?" was the first inquiry after he had crossed the threshold.
"Why, Roxy"s been an" taken her down to Cap"n Kittridge"s to spend the night," said Miss Ruey. "Roxy"s gone to help Mis" Kittridge to turn her spotted gray and black silk. We was talking this mornin" whether "no "t would turn, "cause _I_ thought the spot was overshot, and wouldn"t make up on the wrong side; but Roxy she says it"s one of them ar Calcutty silks that has two sides to "em, like the one you bought Miss Pennel, that we made up for her, you know;" and Miss Ruey arose and gave a finishing snap to the Sunday pantaloons, which she had been left to "finish off,"--which snap said, as plainly as words could say that there was a good job disposed of.
Zephaniah stood looking as helpless as animals of the male kind generally do when appealed to with such prolixity on feminine details; in reply to it all, only he asked meekly,--
"Where"s Mary?"
"Mis" Pennel? Why, she"s up chamber. She"ll be down in a minute, she said; she thought she"d have time afore supper to get to the bottom of the big chist, and see if that "ere vest pattern ain"t there, and them sticks o" twist for the b.u.t.ton-holes, "cause Roxy she says she never see nothin" so rotten as that "ere twist we"ve been a-workin" with, that Mis" Pennel got over to Portland; it"s a clear cheat, and Mis" Pennel she give more"n half a cent a stick more for "t than what Roxy got for her up to Brunswick; so you see these "ere Portland stores charge up, and their things want lookin" after."
Here Mrs. Pennel entered the room, "the Captain" addressing her eagerly,--