Chapter IV: Front Matter (4)

"They had me put under arrest for that, and kep' me in the guard-house seven months. I liked that well enough. I was saved a deal of hard march'n' and lay'n' out in the cold, that winter.

"'Why don't ye come in, boys,' says I, 'and have a warm?'

"I knowed what I was about! The old man was right ignorant, but the old man was right sharp!"

We passed the line of Sedgwick's retreat a few miles from Fredericksburg.

"Shedrick's men was in line acrost the road hyer, extendin' into the woods on both sides; they had jest butchered their meat, and was ishyin' rations and beginnin' to cook their suppers, when Magruder struck 'em on the left flank." (Elijah was wrong; it was not Magruder, but McLaws. These local guides make many such mistakes, and it is necessary to be on one's guard against them.) "They jest got right up and skedaddled! The whole line jest faced to the right, and put for Banks's Ford. Thar's the road they went. They left it piled so full of wagons, Magruder couldn't follah; but his artillery jest run around by another road I'll show ye, hard as ever they could lay their feet to the ground, wheeled their guns in position on the bluffs by the time Shedrick got cleverly to crossin', and played away. The way they heaped up Shedrick's men was awful!"

Every mile or two we came to a small farm-house, commonly of logs, near which there was usually a small crop of corn growing.

"Every man after he got home, after the fall of Richmond, put in to raise a little somethin' to eat. Some o' the corn looks poo'ly, but it beats no corn at all, all to pieces."

We came to one field which Elijah pronounced a "monstrous fine crap." But he added,--

"I've got thirty acres to home not a bit sorrier'n that. Ye see, that mule of mine," etc.

I noticed--what I never saw in the latitude of New England--that the fodder had been pulled below the ears and tied in little bundles on the stalks to cure. Ingenious shifts for fences had been resorted to by the farmers. In some places the planks of the worn-out plank road had been staked and lashed together to form a temporary inclosure. But the most common fence was what Elijah called "bresh wattlin'." Stakes were first driven into the ground, then pine or cedar brush bent in between them and beaten down with a maul.

"Ye kin build a wattlin' fence that way so tight a rabbit can't git through."

On making inquiries, I found that farms of fine land could be had all through this region for ten dollars an acre.

Elijah hoped that men from the North would come in and settle.

"But," said he, "'twould be dangerous for any one to take possession of a confiscated farm. He wouldn't live a month."

The larger land-owners are now more willing to sell.

"Right smart o' their property was in niggers; they're pore now, and have to raise money.

"The emancipation of slavery," added Elijah, "is wo'kin' right for the country mo'e ways 'an one. The' a'n't two men in twenty, in middlin' sarcumstances, but that's beginnin' to see it. I'm no friend to the niggers, though. They ought all to be druv out of the country. They won't wo'k as long as they can steal. I have my little crap o' corn, and wheat, and po'k; when night comes, I must sleep; then the niggers come and steal all I've got."

I pressed him to give an instance of the negroes' stealing his property. He could not say that they had taken anything from him lately, but they "used to" rob his corn-fields and hen-roosts, and "they would again." Had he ever caught them at it? No, he could not say that he ever had. Then how did he know that the thieves were negroes? He knew it, because "niggers would steal."

"Won't white folks steal, too, sometimes?"

"Yes," said Elijah, "some o' the poo' whites are a durned sight wuss 'n the niggers!"

"Then why not drive them out of the country, too? You see," said I, "your charges against the negroes are vague, and amount to nothing."

"I own," he replied, "thar's now and then one that's ekal to any white man. Thar's one a-comin' thar."

A load of wood was approaching, drawn by two horses abreast and a mule for leader. A white-haired old negro was riding the mule.

"He's the greatest man!" said Elijah, after we had passed. "He's been the support of his master's family for twenty year and over. He kin manage a heap better 'n his master kin. The' a'n't a farmer in the country kin beat him. He keeps right on jest the same now he's free; though I suppose he gits wages."

"You acknowledge, then, that some of the negroes are superior men?"

"Yes, thar's about ten in a hundred honest and smart as anybody."

"That," said I, "is a good many. Do you suppose you could say more of the white race, if it had just come out of slavery?"

"I don't believe," said Elijah, "that ye could say as much!"

We passed the remains of the house "whar Harrow was shot." It had been burned to the ground.

"You've heerd about Harrow; he was Confederate commissary; he stole mo'e hosses f'om the people, and po'ed the money down his own throat, than would have paid fo' fo'ty men like him, if he was black."

A mile or two farther on, we came to another house.

"Hyer's whar the man lives that killed Harrow. He was in the army, and because he objected to some of Harrow's doin's, Harrow had him arrested, and treated him very much amiss. That ground into his conscience and feelin's, and he deserted fo' no other puppose than to shoot him. He's a mighty smart fellah! He'll strike a man side the head, and soon 's his fist leaves it, his foot's thar. He shot Harrow in that house you see burnt to the ground, and then went spang to Washington. Oh, he was sharp!"

On our return we met the slayer of Harrow riding home from Fredericksburg on a mule,--a fine-looking young fellow, of blonde complexion, a pleasant countenance, finely chiselled nose and lips, and an eye full of sunshine. "Jest the best-hearted, nicest young fellah in the wo'ld, till ye git him mad; then look out!" I think it is often the most attractive persons, of fine temperaments, who are capable of the most terrible wrath when roused.

The plank road was in such a ruined condition that nobody thought of driving on it; although the dirt road beside it was in places scarcely better. The back of the seat was cruel, notwithstanding the corn-stalks. But by means of much persuasion, enforced by a good whip, Elijah kept the old horse jogging on. Oak-trees, loaded with acorns, grew beside the road. Black walnuts, already beginning to lose their leaves, hung their delicate balls in the clear light over our heads. Poke-weeds dark with ripening berries, wild grapes festooning bush and tree, sumachs thrusting up through the foliage their sanguinary spears, persimmon-trees, gum-trees, red cedars with their bluish-green clusters, chestnut-oaks, and chincapins, adorned the wild wayside.

So we approached Chancellorsville, twelve miles from Fredericksburg. Elijah was raised in that region, and knew everybody.

"Many a frolic have I had runnin' the deer through these woods! Soon as the dogs started one, he'd put fo' the river, cross, take a turn on t' other side, and it wouldn't be an hour 'fo'e he'd be back ag'in. Man I lived with used to have a mare that was trained to hunt; if she was in the field and heard the dogs, she'd whirl her tail up on her back, lope the fences, and go spang to the United States Ford, git thar 'fo'e the dogs would, and hunt as well without a rider as with one."

But since then a far different kind of hunting, a richer blood than the deer's, and other sounds than the exciting yelp of the dogs, had rendered that region famous.

"Hyer we come to the Chancellorsville farm. Many a poo' soldier's knapsack was emptied of his clothes, after the battle, along this road!" said Elijah, remembering last winter's business with his mule.

The road runs through a large open field bounded by woods. The marks of hard fighting were visible from afar off. A growth of saplings edging the woods on the south had been killed by volleys of musketry: it looked like thickets of bean-poles. The ground everywhere, in the field and in the woods, was strewed with mementoes of the battle,--rotting knapsacks and haversacks, battered canteens and tin cups, and fragments of clothing which Elijah's customers had not deemed it worth the while to pick up. On each side of the road were breastworks and rifle-pits extending into the woods. The clearing, once a well-fenced farm of grain-fields and clover-lots, was now a dreary and deserted common. Of the Chancellorsville House, formerly a large brick tavern, only the half-fallen walls and chimney-stacks remained. Here General Hooker had his head-quarters until the wave of battle on Sunday morning rolled so hot and so near that he was compelled to withdraw. The house was soon after fired by a Rebel shell, when full of wounded men, and burned.

"Every place ye see these big bunches of weeds, that's whar the' was hosses or men buried," said Elijah. "These holes are whar the bones have been dug up for the bone-factory at Fredericksburg."

It was easy for the bone-seekers to determine where to dig. The common was comparatively barren, except where grew those gigantic clumps of weeds. I asked Elijah if he thought many human bones went to the factory.

"Not unless by mistake. But people a'n't always very partic'lar about mistakes thar's money to be made by."

Seeing a small inclosure midway between the road and the woods on the south, we walked to it, and found it a burying-ground ridged with unknown graves. Not a headboard, not an inscription, indicated who were the tenants of that little lonely field. And Elijah knew nothing of its history; it had been set apart, and the scattered dead had been gathered together and buried there, since he passed that way.

We found breastworks thrown up all along by the plank road west of the farm,--the old worn planks having been put to good service in their construction. The tree-trunks pierced by balls, the boughs lopped off by shells, the strips of timber cut to pieces by artillery and musketry fire, showed how desperate the struggle on that side had been. The endeavors of the Confederates to follow up with an overwhelming victory Jackson's swift and telling blows on our right, and the equally determined efforts of our men to retrieve that disaster, rendered this the scene of a furious encounter.

Elijah thought, that, if Jackson had not been killed by his own men after delivering that thunderstroke, Hooker would have been annihilated. "Stonewall" was undoubtedly the enemy's best fighting general. His death was to them equal to the loss of many brigades. With regard to the manner of his death there can be no longer any doubt. I have conversed with Confederate officers who were in the battle, all of whom agree as to the main fact. General Jackson, after shattering our right wing, posted his pickets at night with directions to fire upon any man or body of men that might approach. He afterwards rode forward to reconnoitre, returned inadvertently by the same road, and was shot by his own orders.

The Battle of Bull Run in 1861, Pope's campaign, and Burnside's defeat at Fredericksburg in 1862, and, lastly, Hooker's unsuccessful attempt at Chancellorsville in the spring of 1863, had shown how hard a road to Richmond this was to travel. Repeatedly, as we tried it and failed, the hopes of the Confederacy rose exultant; the heart of the North sank as often, heavy with despair. McClellan's Peninsular route had resulted still more fatally. We all remember the anguish and anxiety of those days. But the heart of the North shook off its despair, listened to no timid counsels; it was growing fierce and obdurate. We no longer received the news of defeat with cries of dismay, with teeth close-set, a smile upon the quivering lips, and a burning fire within. Had the Rebels triumphed again? Then so much the worse for them! Had we been once more repulsed with slaughter from their strong line of defences? Was the precious blood poured out before them all in vain? At last it should not be in vain! Though it should cost a new thirty years' war and a generation of lives, the red work we had begun must be completed; ultimate failure was impossible, ultimate triumph certain.

This inflexible spirit found it embodiment in the leader of the final campaigns against the Rebel capital. It was the deep spirit of humanity itself, ready to make the richest sacrifices, calm, determined, inexorable, moving steadily towards the great object to be achieved. It has been said that General Grant did not consider the lives of his men. Then the people did not consider them. But the truth lies here: precious as were those lives, something lay beyond far more precious, and they were the needful price paid for it. We had learned the dread price, we had duly weighed the worth of the object to be purchased: what, then, was the use of hesitating and higgling?

We were approaching the scene of Grant's first great blow aimed at the gates of the Rebel capital. On the field of Chancellorsville you already tread the borders of the field of the Wilderness,--if that can be called a field which is a mere interminable forest, slashed here and there with roads.

Passing straight along the plank road, we came to a large farm-house, which had been gutted by soldiers, and but recently reoccupied. It was still in a scarcely habitable condition. However, we managed to obtain, what we stood greatly in need of, a cup of cold water. I observed that it tasted strongly of iron.

"The reason of that is, we took twelve camp-kettles out of the well," said the man of the house, "and nobody knows how many more there are down there."

The place is known as Locust Grove. In the edge of the forest, but a little farther on, is the Wilderness Church,--a square framed building, which showed marks of such usage as every uninhabited house receives at the hands of a wild soldiery. Red Mars has little respect for the temples of the Prince of Peace.

"Many a time have I been to meet'n' in that shell, and sot on hard benches, and heard long sermons!" said Elijah. "But I reckon it'll be a long while befo'e them doo's are darkened by a congregation ag'in. Thar a'n't the population through hyer thar used to be. Oncet we'd have met a hundred wagons on this road go'n' to market; but I count we ha'n't met mo'e 'n a dozen to-day."

Not far beyond the church we approached two tall guide-posts erected where the road forks. The one on the right pointed the way to the "Wilderness National Cemetery, No. 1, 4 miles," by the Orange Court-House turnpike. The other indicated the "Wilderness National Cemetery, No. 2," by the plank road.

"All this has been done since I was this way," said Elijah.

We kept the plank road,--or rather the clay road beside it, which stretched before us dim in the hollows, and red as brick on the hillsides. We passed some old fields, and entered the great Wilderness,--a high and dry country, thickly overgrown with dwarfish timber, chiefly scrub oaks, pines, and cedars. Poles lashed to trees for tent-supports indicated where our regiments had encamped; and soon we came upon abundant evidences of a great battle. Heavy breastworks thrown up on Brock's cross-road, planks from the plank road piled up and lashed against trees in the woods, to form a shelter for our pickets, knapsacks, haversacks, pieces of clothing, fragments of harness, tin plates, canteens, some pierced with balls, fragments of shells, with here and there a round-shot, or a shell unexploded, straps, buckles, cartridge-boxes, socks, old shoes, rotting letters, desolate tracts of perforated and broken trees,--all these signs, and others sadder still, remained to tell their silent story of the great fight of the Wilderness.

A cloud passed over the sun: all the scene became sombre, and hushed with a strange brooding stillness, broken only by the noise of twigs crackling under my feet, and distant growls of thunder. A shadow fell upon my heart also, as from the wing of the Death-Angel, as I wandered through the woods, meditating upon what I saw. Where were the feet that wore those empty shoes? Where was he whose proud waist was buckled in that belt? Some soldier's heart was made happy by that poor, soiled, tattered, illegible letter, which rain and mildew have not spared; some mother's, sister's, wife's, or sweetheart's hand, doubtless, penned it; it is the broken end of a thread which unwinds a whole life-history, could we but follow it rightly. Where is that soldier now? Did he fall in the fight, and does his home know him no more? Has the poor wife or stricken mother wailed long for the answer to that letter, which never came, and will never come? And this cap, cut in two by a shot, and stiff with a strange incrustation,--a small cap, a mere boy's, it seems,--where now the fair head and wavy hair that wore it? O mother and sisters at home, do you still mourn for your drummer-boy? Has the story reached you,--how he went into the fight to carry off his wounded comrades, and so lost his life for their sakes?--for so I imagine the tale which will never be told.

And what more appalling spectacle is this? In the cover of thick woods, the unburied remains of two soldiers,--two skeletons side by side, two skulls almost touching each other, like the cheeks of sleepers! I came upon them unawares as I picked my way among the scrub oaks. I knew that scores of such sights could be seen here a few weeks before; but the United States Government had sent to have its unburied dead collected together in the two national cemeteries of the Wilderness; and I had hoped the work was faithfully done.

"They was No'th-Carolinians; that's why they didn't bury 'em," said Elijah, after a careful examination of the buttons fallen from the rotted clothing.

The ground where they lay had been fought over repeatedly, and the dead of both sides had fallen there. The buttons may, therefore, have told a true story: North-Carolinians they may have been: yet I could not believe that the true reason why they had not been decently interred. It must have been that these bodies, and others we found afterwards, were overlooked by the party sent to construct the cemeteries. It was shameful negligence, to say the least.

The cemetery was near by,--a little clearing in the woods by the roadside, thirty yards square, surrounded by a picket-fence, and comprising seventy trenches, each containing the remains of I know not how many dead. Each trench was marked with a headboard, inscribed with the invariable words,--

"Unknown United States soldiers, killed May, 1864."

Elijah, to whom I read the Inscription, said, pertinently, that the words, _United States soldiers_ indicated plainly that it had not been the intention to bury Rebels there. No doubt: but these might at least have been buried in the woods where they fell.

As a grim sarcasm on this neglect, somebody had flung three human skulls, picked up in the woods, over the paling, into the cemetery, where they lay blanching among the graves.

Close by the southeast corner of the fence were three or four Rebel graves, with old headboards. Elijah called my attention to them, and wished me to read what the headboards said. The main fact indicated was, that those buried there were North-Carolinians. Elijah considered this somehow corroborative of his theory derived from the buttons. The graves were shallow, and the settling of the earth over the bodies had left the feet of one of the poor fellows sticking out.

The shadows which darkened the woods, and the ominous thunder-growls, culminated in a shower. Elijah crawled under his wagon; I sought the shelter of a tree: the horse champed his fodder, and we ate our luncheon. How quietly upon the leaves, how softly upon the graves of the cemetery, fell the perpendicular rain! The clouds parted, and a burst of sunlight smote the Wilderness; the rain still poured, but every drop was illumined, and I seemed standing in a shower of silver meteors.

The rain over and luncheon finished, I looked about for some solace to my palate after the dry sandwiches, moistened only by the drippings from the tree,--seeking a dessert in the Wilderness. Summer grapes hung their just ripened clusters from the vine-laden saplings, and the chincapin bushes were starred with opening burrs. I followed a woodland path, embowered with the glistening boughs, and plucked, and ate, and mused. The ground was level, and singularly free from the accumulations of twigs, branches, and old leaves, with which forests usually abound. I noticed, however, many charred sticks and half-burnt roots and logs. Then the terrible recollection overtook me: these were the woods that were on fire during the battle. I called Elijah.

"Yes, all this was a flame of fire while the fight was go'n' on. It was full of dead and wounded men. Cook and Stevens, farmers over hyer, men I know, heard the screams of the poor fellahs burnin' up, and come and dragged many a one out of the fire, and laid 'em in the road."

The woods were full of Rebel graves, with here and there a heap of half-covered bones, where several of the dead had been hurriedly buried together.

I had seen enough. We returned to the cemetery. Elijah hitched up his horse, and we drove back along the plank road, cheered by a rainbow which spanned the Wilderness and moved its bright arch onward over Chancellorsville towards Fredericksburg, brightening and fading, and brightening still again, like the hope which gladdened the nation's eye after Grant's victory.

THE BELLS OF LYNN, HEARD AT NAHANT.

O curfew of the setting sun! O Bells of Lynn!
O requiem of the dying day! O Bells of Lynn!

From the dark belfries of yon cloud-cathedral wafted,
Your sounds aerial seem to float, O Bells of Lynn!

Borne on the evening wind across the crimson twilight,
O'er land and sea they rise and fall, O Bells of Lynn!

The fisherman in his boat, far out beyond the headland,
Listens, and leisurely rows ashore, O Bells of Lynn!

Over the shining sands the wandering cattle homeward
Follow each other at your call, O Bells of Lynn!

The distant lighthouse hears, and with his flaming signal
Answers you, passing the watchword on, O Bells of Lynn!

And down the darkening coast run the tumultuous surges,
And clap their hands, and shout to you, O Bells of Lynn!

Till from the shuddering sea, with your wild incantations,
Ye summon up the spectral moon, O Bells of Lynn!

And startled at the sight, like the weird woman of Endor,
Ye cry aloud, and then are still, O Bells of Lynn!

THE HIGH TIDE OF DECEMBER.

Breakfast was ready. Captain Lufflin, who, like most retired old salts, had a healthy stomach, and humored it, crossed and uncrossed his stumpy little legs, and pulled his gray moustache complacently, when he caught the first sniff of the hot coffee and broiling beefsteak.

He had been down on the foggy beach, (for the high winter tides were worth watching on that lonely coast,) and was now quietly drying his feet before the crackling wood-fire in the dining-room grate; but even Ann, (the clam-digger's daughter, promoted to cook,) as she bustled in and out, had seen the Captain was out of temper, as he waited, frowning portentously, and wagging his bald head now and then as if a wasp stung it.

Lufflin, who aboard ship would have risked a thousand lives on his own cool judgment, had been uneasy and irritable for two months back, ever since Mrs. Jacobus had written to him about buying this house for her.

"It was to be a Christmas gift from her to her husband," she wrote. "She wanted it, therefore, kept a secret from him. Any quiet corner along the coast which they could make into a home." Adding something about M. Jacobus "being fagged out with work, and needing rest," at which Lufflin shook his head. The Captain knew, that, bookworm and picture-maniac though he might be, Jacobus had managed to squander, in some unaccountable way, his own and his wife's fortune. So much of their history had got back to the fishing-town where she had lived when a child. People even hinted that they had been almost starving latterly in New York. However that might be, Old Lufflin knew that the sum she remitted to him was the last they had left; and beyond this, he had a shrewd suspicion that in the shipwreck the Jacobuses had made of life, something of more worth than money had been lost, and that this home she talked of was most probably a last effort to bury some shameful secret.

The Captain, in his disgust at the unknown bookworm, fretted under the whole affair. "It's not in my line," he would growl. "It's a cursed bore. Poor Charlotte! she used to swim like a frog in the inlet there, when she was only eleven. She's little heart for swimming now, it's likely!" And would begin his search with re-doubled vigor.

This house, a gray stone cottage of five or six rooms, in the most solitary part of the lee-coast, had been vacant for some time, and was to be sold cheap. Lufflin bought and furnished it in his own name; and then, as she directed, asked the Professor and his wife down to spend the Christmas holidays with him. He was anxious and awkward as a school-boy when they arrived the night before.

"It was too tough a job for you to set me, Charlotte," he grumbled. "How was I to choose a home for a man that lives, they say, by the sight of his eyes and the hearing of his ears? Water's water to me, and rocks rocks,"--trotting after her as she went through the house in silence, ending the survey with two or three sharp, decisive nods, and a quick, pleased little laugh.

"Satisfied? Yes, I am. Yes, I am. We've had a good many houses, Jerome and I; but this is home."

The Captain understood her.

In the morning, however, he felt all his doubts return. Mrs. Jacobus's quick, firm step sounded above, below him; presently she came in with a jug of yellow cream, and set it on the table, adjusting the dishes, putting a glass of holly in the middle, opening the window-curtains to let the cold, gray, wintry light fall on the white cloth and pretty blue china service.

"Those oysters now?" said the Captain, anxiously. "Ann's a poor cook."

"She's clean as a Shaker, though. But I broiled them myself,"--laughing to herself to see his relieved face.

"They're all right, then, Charlotte?"

"Yes."

She would give her mind to the oysters, he knew. It had been her way to put a little of her brains and blood into all her jobs in life, finishing each with a self-satisfied little nod. No wonder that she was worn, now that she was a middle-aged woman.

"She's lost something, Lotty has since I knew her," he thought, watching the light figure in its dark blue dress moving about; "but she's the right stuff for home use,"--with some vague idea in his old salt-water brain of delicate, incomplete faces suiting best with moonlight and country strolls, and of the sparkle of dinner-lights and brilliant eyes agreeing together, but that a face like Charlotte's was the one for the breakfast-table. The shrewd, kindly eyes, the color on her face, and the laugh came on you as fresh as a child's,--if her hair was a bit gray.

She had gone to the bay-window that overlooked the stretch of coast on which the heavy winter tide was coming in, and grown silent watching it. The Captain called to her; he wanted nothing to put the breakfast back this morning. And he fancied that to a woman who had been a leader in the world of culture and refinement yonder this sky and loud foreboding surf might have some meaning of which he knew nothing.

"Nature's voices, eh?" coming to her side.

Some expression that had held her face suddenly escaped it.

"I am watching for Jerome. Yonder he comes with your fisherman, by the inlet,"--pointing to two dark figures in the mist crossing the sands below.

The house stood on a ledge, facing the sea: ramparts of rock, gray and threatening in this light, running down on either side, and shutting out all outlook but that of the dull, obstinate stretch of sand on which the sea had beaten and fallen back for centuries, with the same baffled, melancholy cry. Behind the house were clumps of pines and cedars. Nature had done all she could in wringing out whatever green and lusty life was left in rocks and sand to make the place home-like and cheerful. Beside the trees, there was a patch of kitchen-garden back of the house, a grape-vine or two on the walls, trailing moss hanging to its eaves,--the delicate web-like moss that grows along this coast out of dead wood; even the beach rocks glowed into colors,--dark browns, purples, and reds.

But for all these it needed summer and sunshine. On this, the day before Christmas, the house and the land about it were smothered in a cold mist: only the shivering sea beyond had voice or motion.

"It's a dull, uncanny place, Mrs. Jacobus," said Lufflin, anxiously. "It looks like a prison to me to-day. What if we've made a mistake?"

"We have made no mistake," calmly.

"Indoors," he persisted, "the house is cheerful enough. But it's a rough coast, and the oyster-dredgers and wrackers hint that the house be n't above highest water-mark. They're a wild pack, them wrackers. I doubt it's a gloomy home I've picked for M. Jacobus, after all his"--

Something in her face silenced him.

"You did right, Uncle George," she answered, cheerfully.

But the pleasant eyes he had liked so much last night he noticed were turned to the sea now with a hard look, new to him, begotten both of great pain and obstinate endurance.

"Of course you know, Charlotte,--of course. God knows I want to do what's for the best."

He hesitated, then went on briskly, taking courage.

"See now, Lotty, I'm an old fellow. I've walked you to sleep many's the night, being your father's chum, and living in his house till the day of his death. I'd like you to know I'm a true friend. If so be as you're in trouble, you must tell me. If this house is a sort of hiding, as I've thought once or twice, speak the word, and there's nobody shall get below Barnegat, to disturb it, or"--

Mrs. Jacobus faced him suddenly,--the nerves in her body seeming to stiffen, her half-shut eyes fixed on his. The Captain's quailed.

"You mean Jerome?" in a low voice.

He did not answer. She waited a moment, and then turned again to the window,--holding forcibly down whatever resistance his touch had roused in her.

"You mean well," she said, quietly, after a pause. "But you do not know my husband. I was a fool to expect that; yet I did expect it,"--remembering bitterly how, when she brought her husband here, she had counted surely on a real justice for him from the single-minded old Captain, which shrewd, sensible men had not given.

"How could I know him? You talk like a woman, Lotty," stammered the Captain. "I never saw M. Jacobus till last night. It was a vague whisper, or rather an old man's whim, that there might be something gone which both you and he wished forgotten."

She had her face pressed against the pane, but Lufflin fancied that it lost color, and that the delicate jaws closed with the firmness of a steel spring.

"There was no crime," she said, in a moment or two.

The old man came close to her after a while, and put his hand gently on her hair; streaked with gray as it was, she seemed nothing but a child to him still.

"You're growing like your mother, Lotty," he said.

After a long while she spoke again, but under her breath, as if half talking to herself.

"We had a child once, Jerome and I," she said.

"I know," the Captain rejoined, quickly turning his eyes from her face, and, after waiting for her to go on, added, "Never but the one,--I know."

"It was a boy,--little Tom."

There was a sudden choking gulp in the mother's throat; she had overrated her strength a little. The old man looked steadily out to sea, and took no notice.

"They never were apart, Jerome and the boy," she went on at last, firmly; "and when I would see them at work with their play-tools, or romping together, I used to wonder which of the two had the most simple, affectionate nature, or knew less of the ways of the world."

Lufflin said nothing to this defence. He was annoyed at himself for having vexed her,--conscious and remorseful for any wrong he had done M. Jacobus, but with a stronger suspicion than before that he had galled some old wound in her memory. Whatever the secret might be, it had made her feeling for her husband, he saw, as tender and keen with pain as that for the little child she had lost, and whose place none had ever come to fill.

"I've often thought, too, that when the time comes"--

She stopped abruptly.

"Yes, Charlotte,"--to hide her effort to control herself.

"He's gone, Tom is, you know,--eleven years ago, now. But when the time comes for Jerome to see his boy again, I've often thought _he_ would have no reason to dread the child's eyes. It's different with me. But they may say of my husband what they will, my baby need not be afraid to lay his head upon his father's breast. He needn't be afraid."

The Captain took up the cold hand that was nervously thrumming on the window-sill, and held it quiet, averting his eyes from her face, distorted with dry, silent weeping.

"It's different with me," she cried, "Sometimes I think, Uncle George, it would be better if I'd never see my boy again. I'm sharper and coarser than other women. I've had to rub with the world."

Lufflin was a queer old fellow. He did not tell her these were but the morbid fancies of an hysterical woman, or blame himself for rousing them. He muttered something about low tide and George Cathcart, and bustled off down the stairs. She had a stronger mind than he, he suspected; silence and her own will would bring her to herself quicker than any comfort of his could do.

He proved to be right. She did not notice his going; stood at first looking into the dark bank of sea-horizon, as if she would have forced out of that vague Beyond where her child had gone the truth of all that had hurt her in her life. The dull thud of the retreating tide kept time to her thoughts,--finally came into them: it was so natural for her mind to swing back into whatever was real and at hand.

Not that she forgot the little fellow whose restless feet and hands were quiet at last in the graveyard at Salem: she never forgot him; since they laid him there, the thought of him had sounded in every day of her busy life like a faint hymn sung by lips far away, holy and calm,--a story of God in it.

But she held it down; watched the tide go out, measuring each sullen sweep with calculating eyes: the old swimming and fishing education in the inlet had not worn out its effect on her.

"The wreckers talk folly," she said; "no tide could touch the house,"--leaning farther out to see the two approaching figures go into the doorway beneath.

One man looked up, waving his hat as he passed, and she drew in her head with a sudden blush and a dewy light in her eyes, catching her breath.

"I have made no mistake," she thought, vehemently. "Look in his face! It is the right home for Jerome."

As she listened to the footsteps coming up the stairway, she moved uneasily about the room, touching almost every article in it with the eager fondness of a child: she knew what it had cost her; for the house had been paid for by money she had earned; it seemed as if she could remember now every seam she had stitched, every page she had copied,--the days of heat and sickness and weariness, when she had almost given up in despair.

That was all over now; she could put her hand on the result in actual stone and mortar; and as she thanked God for it, she went about, woman-like, touching and looking for the hundredth time to enjoy it more utterly. Nothing was too trivial to give her pleasure: she measured the depth of the window-frames with her arm, tested the grain of the doors, felt the texture of the curtains; how warm and clear a crimson they were!--remembering how becoming they would be, and touching her worn cheeks with a quick smile.

She peered through into the open door from the dining-room into the room beyond: she meant that for the library; planning rapidly where on the gray walls their one or two pictures could hang,--how Jerome's old desk would fit into one corner, and her work-table in the other: the book-shelves were below, and the books and what other home treasures she had been able to smuggle with her; she would arrange them all to-night, after he was in bed.

In New York they lived in a crowded tenement-house, out of which Old Jacobus, as the boys called him, went to give his daily lessons. How he had argued and prosed for weeks as to whether they could afford these few days! although it was vacation, and Lufflin had sent free passes for the road. To-morrow he would know that the holiday would last always, and that the book could be finished which was to bring them bread. Madame Jacobus knitted her brows, counting for the twentieth time how many months the money she had would last: long enough for the book to be done, provisions were so cheap here.

So would they start afresh, thank God! There would be nothing here to tempt him to----The old look of defiance flashed over her face.

"It was no crime," she said, half aloud; and just then the door-knob turned.

Captain Lufflin, who had left her with conscience and grief both at work with her a few minutes before, opened the door with a half-scared look, pushing Jacobus before him, whose sleeve she caught eagerly, bidding him good-morning with a laugh.

"God bless us all!" said Lufflin. "The ways of women!"

M. Jacobus had a fisherman's corduroy trousers and red shirt hung on him, as one might say. He made a formal apology to Madame for sitting down to breakfast in them.

"But I like to clothe myself according to my occupation," he said to Lufflin, gravely. "I have begun at dawn to make my holiday, the time is so short; I feel myself quite of the sea already."

The clothes being too small for him, his gaunt legs and bony neck protruded above and below, capped by a brown, honest, homely face, over which thin, iron-gray hairs straggled.

"A younger man than I expected to see," thought the Captain; "but that's one of the faces that never grows old."

M. Jacobus munched his breakfast in silence, and then, clearing a space on the table, dragged out of his pocket one or two crabs, a sea-horse finger-length, and a general mess of slimy legs and tails.

"_Cancer pagurus! Cirripedes!_" triumphantly spreading them on the table-cloth. "The fruits of my morning's labor, except _Hippcampus brevirostris_, vulgarly called Sea-Horse, which stood to me in the sum of forty cents: it shall be saved in other modes of expenditure,--say shoes,"--with a deprecating glance at his wife.

"Yes, Jerome," her eyes fixed, hungrily, on the childish delight in his face.

Lufflin began to perceive now for what she had worked; he chafed his whiskers, and entered into the spirit of the thing with zest.

"You'd call me a happy man, now, Mounchere, to be the owner of this bit of ground, eh?"

"I can conceive," said the Professor, gravely, catching his squirming prey, and tying them up in a handkerchief,--"I can conceive no better abode than this for a man of _esprit_,--of what you call stamina in mind. His wants are little; he rests, he works, he studies books, Nature. She is greatly good to him in this place; she opens her most delicate secrets; she gives to him grandeur, beauty, from full hands."

"She fills his stomach, too," said the Captain, hastily. "No better fishing on the coast, not to mention clams and oysters. Yes, Mounchere," after a pause, as they rose from table, "Nature's grand here, as you say,--or God, which is the same thing. If a man don't come nearer to Him by a day's outlook on yon sea than by years of town-life, it's because his eyes aren't worth the having."

M. Jacobus stretched his long neck to look out at the dull, creeping, moaning waste without, his warm Gallic blood shivering with a vague idea that the relentless, inexorable Thing was no bad symbol of the Puritan's God.

"Ah, _le bon Dieu!_" he muttered. "All that is best in men's nature has been given to make up that image,--and all that is most cruel."

"Eh? yes," said the Captain, not understanding, but wagging his bald head wisely.

"I will go now and preserve my specimens," said the Professor, "and then join our friend George below,--with your permission, Madame? He is but a fisher for the oyster, but I find in him a man of many facts."

When he had mounted to his chamber and secured his prey in a jar, however, he did not return to George Cathcart, but stood irresolute, his hands clasped behind his back, the shiny boatman's hat he wore pulled over his eyes.

Twelve years ago the poor Frenchman and his son had planned this coming to the sea: the boy used to get into his father's bed by dawn to talk it over snugly. It came to be their grand scheme and hope for the future; for neither the father nor little Tom had intellects of a high achieving order. Jacobus had never, I suppose, considered whether his son had genius or not, or what he was to do in the world: to get the boy out of the poisonous city, to see his first look at the ocean, to watch the sturdy little rogue fight the breakers, fish, swim, net for crabs, was about the highest pleasure which the simple old man had ever pictured for them. Now the holiday had come for him; and Tom----

He walked about the room, glancing unsteadily from side to side, as if in search of something lost. The sick, intolerable loneliness of those first days after Tom died came back to him.

"_Mon fils! mon fils!_" he muttered once, holding his hand to his side.

It gave him actual pain to breathe just then; but his eyes were dry. He never had cried for Tom as his mother did,--never named him to her; she thought he had forgotten. The fancy seized him, that, now that he was here, if Tom cared for him, and for coming there, as he did once, he was not far off at that moment. His sallow jaws colored at the boyish notion, and then he laughed at it,--in a strange saturnine fashion. It was as if another man than the simple Professor suddenly looked out through his eyes,--a man older, more untrustworthy, weak through a life-long doubt,--not his natural self, in a word, but the man which years of life in dirty ways, and the creed which his father gave him, had made of him. He looked out of the window, his fingers knitted behind him.

"There is the sea, and I am here, but Tom is not here; he's dust and ashes, yonder in Salem graveyard,--a heap of yellow dust, nothing more,"--a laugh, which the foulest of French skeptics would have envied, crossing his grim face at this fancy of the child's being yet alive and near to him.

But the creed having asserted itself thus, the simple face grew suddenly blank, and the gray eyes looked out of their dark hollows as if the world were empty and he alone lived to tell the tale.

M. Jacobus had a watchful keeper; she was never far off; she put her hand on his shoulder now with,--

"What do you look for at sea, Jerome?"--speaking cheerfully, and in his own tongue.

He did not turn his head until he thought he had put all his trouble out of sight.

"I pursue your Captain's fancy," he said. "_I_ find in the sea but muddy water, with power to bring rage and destruction for no cause. I find great treasures lying useless below, starving men sailing above,--great pain, death every day,--the baby washed from its mother's arms, the husband from the wife. The good Captain sees a loving God behind all these: my eyes are not so clear."

She pushed the lattice farther open.

"It is a strong sea for December," was all she said. "The tides run higher later, usually."

"Everyman makes his own God and heaven," maundered on the Professor, in a set, monotonous voice, "out of his individual animal or mental needs. The Southern European surrounds Him with virgins, paradise, and music; and the cold Scotchman gives us a magnified shadow of his own grim face, gracious and merciful only to his own petty clan."

Mrs. Jacobus did not reply. It was an old tale to her ears, perhaps; she remembered it croaked by his father with a venomous zest; but Jerome repeated it with a stolid apathy, like one who asked for bread in life, and they gave him but this stone.

"Come down on the beach," she said. "There are curious bits of wreck washed ashore to-day, they tell me: broken sea-weeds from far-off coasts, unknown here; and small shell-fish coming into shoal water for safety, that never ventured so far inland in the memory of any of the wreckers. Come look at this sky, Jerome: how rapidly it has changed!"

M. Jacobus thrust out his head with an assumption of sagacity.

"It was there that Captain Lufflin warned me the danger lay," said his wife, pointing to a mere fleck of quiet and black in the northeast, which remained immovably solid while the whole heaven around was broken into drifting frightened masses. Beneath, (yet not far beneath, for ocean and sky to-day seemed like gray, fast-approaching planes,) the angry roar of the waves and the tossing of yellow frothy caps had been suddenly quelled into the vast silence which rose and fell in slowly darkening, awful pulsations. Jacobus and his wife looked on anxiously.

"These are peculiar features of a storm," he said, "if they forebode a storm. The tide should be at its lowest ebb now. I will go and consult our friend George. Come down! come down!"

As he hurried out of the door, however, he stopped, and put his hand on her shoulder with a deprecating smile.

"I ought not to let those old thoughts strike the life out of the day for me, ought I?"

"No, Jerome, no!" She caught his hand and kissed it as a mother might a child's.

"I had almost ceased to make holiday," he added, gravely, putting his foot up, retying the leather strings of his heavy shoes, and looking down on his fisherman's rig with secret complacency.

"Shall we go down? There are foreboding signs in the sea, that I would wish to study."

* * * * *

Late in the afternoon of that day, Captain Lufflin, coming up the rocks from the beach, (for he had spent the day measuring the advancing tide,) saw a queer-shaped cart or van drive up to the side door, and a woman with divers bundles alight and go in. About an hour after, Madame Jacobus came out to him, a woollen shawl over her head, and stood beside the garden-fence with him, pulling the heads off the dead hollyhock-stalks as she talked.

"I've a story to tell you," she said, her voice thick at first, and her face hot.

"Eh? About yourself, Charlotte?" The Captain's small eyes kindled with curiosity, and he pushed a log for her to sit down. "Go on, my dear."

"About ourselves,--M. Jacobus and me,"--with another pause.

"I perceived," said her father's friend, preparing for the confession of some imprudence, "that your married life has been peculiar: modelled after the ideas of young people, I suppose."

"I do not know," she said, absently. She balanced herself more comfortably against the fence, and went on with her story with a quiet unconsciousness that balked Lufflin's intention of censure.

"We have been poor in the two or three years just past," she said,--"wanted enough to satisfy even his favorite Saint-Simon's theory. My husband is no"----

"Financier?" gently suggested the Captain.

"No. He could beard the world in defence of an idea; but for bread and butter, ah-h! I'm rougher! I ought to have been the man for that! About a year ago he was offered a chance to go with a geological party to Brazil. I was glad of that. The air and sights of our close court were killing him. I wanted to finish some work I had to do, and then"----

She stopped; a scarlet flush broke over her neck and face.

"Yes, child?"

"God was very good to us,"--in an almost whisper. "Six months after my husband left home, He gave us another child."

"You never told me this," cried Lufflin, aghast.

"I never told Jerome," quietly. "I put my baby out to nurse, where it could breathe air, and not poison,--not far from here. I have left it there since. May-be it was wrong," said poor Charlotte, hiding her face in her hands, with a happy laugh. "It was a whim, I know. I may have wronged him, but I had a fancy to give him his home and his child both upon this Christmas day."

The Captain gasped, took a fresh bit of tobacco, but said nothing.

"There is no more to say,--but you want to see the baby?" suddenly.

"Certainly, Charlotte, certainly,--see the baby!" And the old Captain followed her, glancing about him in a mild imbecility of astonishment.

"God bless my soul!" he broke out at last. "The idea of springing a house and a baby on a man in one day! It assuredly is, child, the most unprecedented whim"----

"Yes, yes,"--dodging suddenly into a room, and bringing out a bundle of white linen and wool. She stood in the passage by a window, the red evening light falling about her.

"It's a boy," she whispered, lifting off the covering. "He is very like little Tom,"--an inexpressible awe on her face.

"Yes," said the Captain. He had meant to say a few sensible words to bring her to reason about this matter; but, instead, he took up the little white foot thrust out of the blanket and kissed it sheepishly, looking askance at the woman's figure and face bent over the child, beaming with a rare and tender beauty.

They said little after that. The mother stood playing with her baby, touching its cheeks and chin until it laughed. She forgot Lufflin was there, I suppose. Her soul seemed to be in her fingers, her pure passion to envelop the mite of flesh as the weak sunshine did herself, and to hold it in life. There was something in this wife-and-mother-love which poor Lufflin did not understand.

"Well, well," he said, "I'll go now. God bless you, Lotty! You'll let me have a share in this young fellow here, eh?"--and trotted down the back stairs, leaving her in the narrow hall. "Old Mounchere Jacobus must have been a good fellow," he thought, "to have deserved all this. God deals so differently with different men!"