Chapter V: Front Matter (5)

She had nothing more to say about it, Madame Jacobus had told him; yet, standing there in the quiet cold light, within a few steps of the closed door behind which was her husband, her feet on the floor of the house she had worked hard to buy him, the child in her arms she would give him to-morrow, she thought she had touched in this hour the very depth and height of life.

"It is worth all the pain that's gone,--it's worth it all," she said again and again, pressing the boy so closely that he cried. When she turned to the window, the cold and gathering night somehow made her home more real, the future alive with great and good possibilities.

Yet it was a foreboding, revengeful night. Outside the little panes of the passage-window she could see the gray walls of the house and the bare trunks of the trees darken and draw apart in the dull light. There was no mellowness in the outlines of rocks or beach: they loomed up harsh and threatening. From the low, dingy horizon came at intervals subdued soughs of wind that broke on the projecting headlands with a muffled cry. The floor grew chilly to her feet; the strip of carpet shook in the gusts; and the passage was dark, but for a cheerful glimmer of light under the Professor's door. Charlotte went shivering with her baby into the nurse's room; and when she had watched it safe into its cradle, came out, going again through the hall to the library. As she touched the door-handle, she checked herself in humming some song, growing colorless as she thought what it was,--an old ditty with which she used to lull little Tom to sleep, but never had sung since then. But in a moment a curious smile came on her lips. "That is all right," she said, opening the door. From that moment her little boy and poor Tom, dead in the city graveyard yonder, were as one to the mother: she nursed them in her heart together.

One word as to the plan of the house, for the better understanding of what followed. It was niched, as we said, into a cove of rocks, open only to the sea. In spite of all the croaking of the wreckers, the highest tide had never yet approached nearer than to ten feet sheer descent from the foundation-stones. On the ground-floor was a room appropriated by the Captain, filled with his bunk, fishing-nets, guns, and other trumpery, and the kitchen and offices; above were the library and dining-room; and on the third floor three bed-chambers.

M. Jacobus sat now by the fire in the dining-room, his feet on the fender, some books scattered around him, rapidly getting out with them into a world where northeasters, nor high tides, nor his wife either, ever came. She saw that in the half-frown with which he looked at her over his spectacles.

"M. Jacobus!" she said.

"_Plait-il, Madame?_" and afterwards laid down his book, thinking the figure before him could hardly be that of his matter-of-fact wife: which was true enough,--for her heart was brimful of her little project and the child, and the face, with its low forehead and resolute jaws, beamed curiously young and eager. Her husband seated her, and stood leaning on the mantel-shelf while she talked: he had all the courtesy of an old-fashioned Frenchman towards women; and besides, M. Jacobus had a keen eye for beauty in this the only woman he had ever loved.

"Go down, Jerome; the tide turns," she said. "Captain Lufflin is watching it. Besides, I want this room to make ready for to-morrow."

M. Jacobus began, obedient as usual, to button his coat, muttering, "To-morrow?" however, with a puzzled face.

"It is Christmas,"--with the repressed excitement now in her voice as in her eyes. "I want that we shall keep the day this year; I have some little plans"--

The skeptic's face altered; he lingered over the last button of the coat.

"It is worth more to you than other days?"--dryly.

"We never observed it before. God has been so good to us, Jerome,--and it is His day of the whole year,--the day," her voice sinking with an inexpressible tenderness, "when Love came into the world as a little child,--_as a little child._"

He looked at her wistfully for a moment, then took up his stick and an hygrometer, saying, as he opened the door,--

"But hear to the cry of the sea! it grows more muffled and dull each hour. If Death itself could speak, that is his voice, I think." He spoke vaguely, with an anxious, absent look, then went groping down the dark stairway. Presently she heard him come back hurriedly.

"Will it cost you much to give up this day, child?" he demanded, coming close and putting his hand on her head. "I ask it of you. I must be with you in your little plans, and"--

"Your mother kept it," interrupted she, sharply.

"I know,"--with dull, pained looks at the fire, at the night without, everything but her face. "Her faith is not mine."

"No, Jerome," gently,--for she was tender with him always, when he seemed weaker than herself. "But if it could be, my husband?"--her voice growing unsteady. "Humor me this one time: I have looked forward to it so long! Perhaps it was to remember my own childhood; perhaps I had some little gifts to offer you. But let me keep it. If it be childish, let me be a child."

Something in the broken voice reminded him of little Tom's. She put her hands on his arms, too, and in the thin face turned up to his there was a look left by all the years of patient love and work she had borne for him; it struck him back somehow, as by a touch, to those first days when they were lovers together in Canada. It was curious, that, in after years, when M. Jacobus remembered his wife, it was always as she looked at that last moment.

"Don't think me harsh, Sharley," he faltered.

She caught at her advantage. "We will keep it together,"--eagerly.

He thrust her hands from his arms, and went about the room with long, unsteady strides.

"I cannot lie to God! I cannot lie!" he said.

His wife, seeing his face, when he turned, cried hurriedly,--

"It is a trifle; let it go, Jerome. I can give you my little gifts all the same; it is a trifle."

Down below his credulous simplicity and the weight of borrowed ideas with which books had loaded his brain, (borrowed infidelity with the rest,) M. Jacobus was a sturdy, honest man, with a keen sense of honor: it was no trifle to him. She saw that some rough touch of hers had reached a secret depth of his soul never bared to her before.

"What is it, Jerome?"--coming up to catch him again with her trembling hand. "It is to me a matter of so little import!"

He stopped.

"It is this to me. She did keep it,--my mother. It is my first remembrance of our home,--when she was dead. We children made yet a feast upon that day, that she might look back and see. Now that I am no longer a child, and know that she can never look back, that what was my mother is but a heap of bones and dust, I--I cannot keep the day."

She stood in his way.

"Dead is dead!" he cried, fiercely, "When I know that she and the child I loved cannot speak or look at me more than this stone at my feet, I cannot believe in the day on which you say He came to bring eternal life."

"There is nothing more alive to me than my little Tom. I'm sorry you do not feel it so, Jerome," said matter-of-fact Charlotte. "I was not what you call a religious woman before he died; and when better thoughts come to me now, I am sure he brings them from the good Lord."

"Do you remember," he said, suddenly, "a habit the boy had of sitting on the sunny door-step, quite silent, by the hour?"

"I remember,"--turning her head away.

"It used to remind me of the days when I was a boy, on the shore of Lake Erie. My father was a squatter there. There was nothing I did not dare nor hope in those long dreams of what my life was to be. I would hunt, wrestle, fight, as no man had done before. I would be the first leader in the world,--a soldier, a priest,--God! what was there I would not be! What came of it all?"--his voice rising into a weak, wiry cry. "There was a tiny cancer, a little taint in my blood,--a trifle,--bah! a nothing! My grandfather died a drunkard; my father ate opium. I--Sharley, it's an old story to you."

She did not shame him by a look at him: her own face had the old pallor and defiant clench of the jaws which Lufflin had seen. She drew his hand under her arm, and kissed it passionately.

"It was no crime," she cried,--the old burden for many years.

A fine, sad smile crossed his face.

"Poor Sharley!" he said. "No,--no crime; for with the temptation was given me a weak will. So they're gone now, hopes and chances in life,--mind and body eaten away by that one animal thirst,--gone! Who was to blame?"

"You told me," she said, eagerly, "that the stimulant in this air would be all that you would require,--that it would effect a cure."

"Yes; but was it right that the fate of a man's soul should thus depend on outward chances? Was I to blame for this hereditary plague in my blood? Half of the lost millions who crowd the cities can plead against the crime that dragged them down some inherited vice; theft, drunkenness, butchery, were born with them, sucked in with their mothers' milk. This world, that God called good, is but a gigantic mass of corruption, foul with disease and pain, which man did not first create, and never will conquer."

"Why do you talk of this to-night?" said Charlotte, shunning the storm, as usual.

"Because I thank God, that, if He has made this failure, He will blot it out. I liked to fancy once that my mother would waken out of her long sleep into all her old loves and hates and fancies. I thank God now that she knows nothing,--that for her, and for all of us, after death, lies but an eternal blank."

In the pause, the dulled throb of the sea rose for an instant into a fierce warning cry, and then was gloomily still.

"It is as if the dead yonder would drive us back from their rest and silence,"--his speculative eye wandering dreamily out into the night.

But death and all that lay beyond were real to the practical woman beside him; there was no speculation in her eyes; it was an actual life he was dragging from before her; her child was in it; some day her own feet in Mesh and blood would tread there. She put her hand on his shoulder and leaned out beyond him, peering down over the shore, just as if in the night and cold beyond lay in truth the land of the dead.

"I am not afraid of their rest and silence," she cried,--"I'm not afraid, Jerome!"

The fair, clear-cut face came warm and living between him and the darkness; her voice called into the vague distance cheerful and strong.

She turned back to him glowing with color.

"Our boy is there," she said; "and there are others dead that I loved. I always knew they'd keep a watch for us, Jerome!"

He listened with a sad smile.

"And I've _no_ fear," she went on, energetically, "I never had any fear, that He would give them back to us just misty, holy angels, who could neither cry nor laugh with us, when our very hearts were sick to catch their hands and kiss their lips again.--I know," after a pause, "my boy will come first to me, with his old trick of hiding and calling for 'Mother, mother!'--he'll not forget I liked that name the best; and he'll have the same laugh in his eyes, just the same,--he'd find no better look in heaven than that was. I knew, when I closed his eyes that night, it was but for a little while." Yet she stopped suddenly, putting her hand to her throat to choke back a cry of pain, "A little while," she repeated, firmly.

Her husband listened, the smile growing more bitter: she had never seemed more silly or more dear to him than then.

"I am not a child," she said, quickly. "It is not fancy. The dead are in Christ's kingdom; and He is alive, not dead, yonder. It was a real man, Jerome, that ascended from the mountain, loving his friend, censuring Peter, taking care of his mother. Mary found no spirit there, when she died, but the son whose baby-head rested on her breast; and I shall find my boy."

He soothed her, for she had grown nervous and trembling; let her cling to his neck and cry away her trouble, after the fashion of women who have brought their hearts out to argue for them.

"Let us forget that far-away country," he said, after a while, "and go to rest, Lotty. The moans of this storm will wear your strength out,"--leading her to the foot of the chamber-stairway.

She went up, pausing at the top to look back, a smile on her flushed cheeks and swollen eyes.

"It will be a quiet morning," she said, waving a good-night.

There was some meaning in her words which he could not penetrate, but it touched and startled him.

"A quiet morning?"

The words haunted the simple old man, sitting alone to watch the night wear away. He had never been more utterly alone. The new home was strange; the very wood-fire had burned out on the hearth; unfamiliar, cold lines met his eye, wherever he turned; the heavy mist crept in from the sea through every cranny, like vapors from a charnel-house. He had a dull, superstitious dread of what lay beyond that sullen beach of mist,--the undefined. There, whence these low rumblings, and sharp, inarticulate cries reached him: he stood up, looking into it, shivering. A bat swooped past the open window, and struck its clammy wing against his face; the moon had gone down, and the mist that saturated his clothes, so present and close at hand was it, stretched up and possessed the very sky as well as the shore,--yellowed thickened the air he breathed, hid the line where the breakers struck the coast, driven in with a subdued, persistent fury he had never known before. The shore-mist had its bounds: it did not touch that clear darkness beyond, into which Jacobus looked, drawing down his grizzled brows, trying to jeer his cowardice away.

"By daylight," he said, "it is but a bulk of water, full enough of danger and death; but now it might be hell itself yonder, that has 'made the clouds its band.'"

He was not sure how long a portion of the night crept by. Sometime in it, however, he saw flashes of light moving through the fog among the rocks: Lufflin and the fishermen keeping watch,--"uneasy ghosts that could not pass over into Hades," he laughed, with the same miserable attempt at a joke; but the laugh died away feebly in the empty room, and it was with a grave face the Professor made his way down the dark staircase, and, finding the Captain's dread-nought coat, put it on before he ventured out into the storm. "To please Lotty," he muttered. His heart was strangely tender to-night to the only friend he had known for years.

There was a dead quiet in the fog as he came out and waited on the flagging before the house. Lufflin and George Cathcart came by, presently, carrying lanterns and ropes, their faces looking ghastly in the greenish light; their voices, too, were thin and far off as in a dream, though the Captain tried to be hearty and gruff as usual.

"Best within, Mounchere Jacobus; it's an uncertain night; best within."

"You apprehend the rain?"

"No; it's a dry storm; unpleasant on this coast. Go in; there's no telling what frenzy may seize the wind, and Charlotte is alone."

But M. Jacobus did not go in. He had observed a curious motion on the part of both men, as they talked: bending their ears at intervals to listen intently, and keeping a keen scrutiny fixed on the small patch of ground at their feet, made visible by their lanterns. He saw, too, that Cathcart stooped, as he turned from them, and, picking up a crisp, yellow flake, showed it to his companion; and he fancied, too, that the grim face of the old Captain lost its color when he saw it. He would not go in: he had a right to see what danger threatened her,--to watch for it,--to know what were these messengers of coming death sent in from the silence yonder. And at that fancy, the old wonder and dread of the far darkness seized him, and he went slowly on through the mist, forgetting alike danger and warning.

With a mocking smile on his face, as he pursued his fantastic theory. What if the dead were not dead? What if, unforgetting and cruel, they could stretch out shadowy hands from that mysterious distance which they peopled, and summon the living to join them? What if Death itself served them to-night, and crept upon Charlotte and him unawares in some horror of this coming storm? Jacobus, like all skeptics, was superstitious; but he had courage and zest enough to fight down the terror that seized him, to pamper and play with it. He threw his lank length upon the wet beach, and clasped his hands under his head; where he disturbed the sand, gleamed sudden flashes of phosphoric light; he brought them out of the darkness with his finger: "Fit writing for the dead gone over to leave upon the shore for those who should follow!" he thought.

Lying on his back, and staring straight up into the fog-covered sky, the thunder of the sea, that before had filled the whole night, seemed to his startled senses to drive its direct tide beneath him,--to articulate, at last, with a new and unexpected meaning. He shut his eyes; the terror had taken shape; he lay drenched and shivering, his brain on fire with fancies. What was vision to Dante was real to him. He lay upon the edge of the fathomless gulf, warm and living, with the cry from Hades made audible to him; as it ebbed and flowed, it wailed like the wind through leafless forests; it shook the earth to its centre, then died into the solitary cry of one in nameless pain. Some broad, dark figure stood afterwards beside him in the fog, and a voice repeated the old word of the prophet,--

"Hell from beneath is moved to meet thee at thy coming; it stirreth up the dead for thee"--

"There is no hell," he cried, getting up and staggering forward,--then smiled at his own folly.

It might have been Lufflin who had spoken, after all; he was well read in the Bible. But he could see no sign of their torches, in the stretch of damp, darkening fog; he was left alone to keep guard.

Jacobus tried to shake off his sickly fancies, and measure coolly whatever danger waited in this strange night; but it rose before him in a form so ghastly and new that his strength was but as a woman's. He was but a landsman,--dull and ignorant besides, outside his library. What was he to do, when the very ground trembled beneath his feet,--when the sky was blotted out,--when, there was lack of a single known stationary object to guide eye or ear? This side of that gray horizon of darkness which absorbed all his fears, the northern lights streamed up, a pale orange glare, and showed him a heavy, impenetrable bulwark of shadow, that rose closer and closer with each throb of the breakers, walling out the sea. His feet sank curiously in the yielding sand, as if he stood at the verge of a maelstrom. Some rough hand griping his shoulder roused him from his daze.

"Cathcart!" he said; then pointing out, "what lies yonder, George? It might be Death's world, I think!"

The fisherman's arm shook, he fancied; but he answered steadily, in his usual piping, weak tones,--

"It don't matter whether it's God's world or the Devil's world, as I see, so long as it kin send ashore a grip on us like that,"--glancing down at his feet, where Jacobus saw the yellow, flaky foam curling up from under the sand. He stooped leisurely to examine it.

"What does this portend?" he asked.

"God! it be the tide, man," shrieked out Cathcart, with an oath. "Can't you see that it's broken over the topmost boundaries? You be standing now above the level of your own house."

One swift, sharp glance was enough to waken him into real life out of his vague dreams. The man, nervous and fierce, that had been smothered in the unable bookworm so long, sprang up to cope with the sudden death that faced him.

"You be too late!" he heard Cathcart's shrill cry, as he fought his way through the surging surf; and at the same moment there was a heavy crash,--where, he could not see.

The fog blinded him; the sand, driven by the resistless wind, cut his skin, penetrated his eyes and nostrils; while higher and higher, as he waded on, the muddy water crept up his body, slimy and cold, and tangling his feet in its undertow of kelp. There was a weight on his chest which strangled him when he tried to cry aloud.--No matter; the next headland passed and the house would be gained.

* * * * *

She was there, standing on a heap of fallen stone, her white night-dress torn and muddied by the rocks and branches which the water swept by her. Jacobus wondered if that were the house whose ruins curdled the dull sweep of water beneath her; then the thought of his wife blotted out all besides. Around her was a creeping, seething stream, widening each moment; he did not see how deep it was, nor that the unsteady pile of stones on which she had climbed was crumbling into it. He threw off Lufflin's coat and his shoes, calling out almost joyously to her, so fierce was the new strength in his muscles, and the passion in his heart.

_"Sois tranquille!_" he shouted. "Lotty! It is I who comes! I go to swim!"

She never heard the words, it is probable, for only a faint cry reached him, of which he distinguished nothing; but he saw her hand waving him back, and laughed.

"Poor child! she thinks to die, and stupid old Jerome so near! Foolish Sharley!"

But the water weighed him down already, as he struggled ignorantly in it, his gaunt limbs floundering, the tender smile yet on his bony face; it cramped his arms, closed over his head: with a groping wrench he recovered his footing, and breast-high in the rising tide looked at her.

"It is I who comes, Sharley!" he shouted, fiercely. "Wife! wife!" The old English word meant so much to him at that moment!

Whether hours or minutes passed in that struggle he never knew; but at its close he lay washed, like a poor wisp of weed, upon the shore. The stream between them, which he never should pass, deepened, deepened: it licked her feet now, her knees. She stretched out her hands to him,--whether for help, or to say good-bye, he never knew.

He made no sign in reply. Her face was turned to him, not heeding the death at her feet,--the thin face set in its iron-gray hair, with the beauty of all those years of love upon it, the same wistful smile on it with which it looked at him across the fire on winter evenings;--and he was to sit there, unmanned, impotent, helpless, to watch the slow death creep up to her lips, her eyes?

He lifted one hand feebly to his chest, with a dull hope of crushing out the faint life beating uselessly there; then, with a desperate clutch on the sand, struggled towards the water.

"I go to swim! Sharley! Sharley!" he cried, and that was all.

The morning dawned, bleak and blue; the thin light came into the cracks of a wrecker's hut, colder than even on the sea. Jacobus had made a heap of ropes and driftwood on which to lay his dead. He sat holding her head on his breast, having twisted up her wet hair in a vain effort to adjust it as she liked it best. There was no wild vagueness in his eyes, such as dimmed them sometimes over his books; it was a grave, simple, reasonable face that bent over this cold and unanswering one. It seemed as if this one great blow, which God had given, had struck out from his life all its vain vagaries and dreams.

Lufflin and one or two fishermen stood by, looking on; and outside he heard women's voices, in shrill whispers, and a sob now and then.

"I want to carry her in the shore farther," he said, looking up impatiently. "I will not have her vexed by these sounds of trouble."

"Yes, yes," said Lufflin, soothingly. "But you forget, dear Sir, she's beyond all reach of pain now. Sorrow and tears cannot come near her again."

"I don't know," said Jacobus,--"she has a quick ear for any cry of trouble,"--holding the thin, blue-veined hand in his, and looking at it with a face which made old Lufflin turn away.

"She be at rest now, yer woman," piped George Cathcart, in true class-meeting twang. "Not all yer cries, nor the cries of the sea, neyther, 'u'd wake her. Glory be to God!"

Jacobus looked from one to the other, his sickly frame in a heat of inarticulate rage. That these boors, that death itself, should come between him and his wife and say she could not hear his lightest word!

"Why, it's Lotty!"--in a whisper, hugging the stiff body closer, looking up to Lufflin. "Dead or alive, it's my wife. It's Lotty. Do not you understand?"

"Yes, Mounchere, yes, I understand,"--sopping his face and bald head with his handkerchief. "My good men, had you not better go out a moment? We need air here. He only meant," gently, when they were gone, "that she is at rest; our pain cannot pain her now."

"When I do suffer, she will suffer with me," muttered Jacobus. "You don't know," after a pause, "how together we have been, or that you could not say. Is it that I should go back to that den in New York _alone_? That I live there for days,--for years? That I hunger and work as before, and _she_ not heed nor care,--my wife? Ah! you do not know Lotty!" touching the closed white lids with an inexpressibly tender smile. "I call her 'Sharley,' when we are alone together,"--going on in his simple, monotonous fashion; "and when she sleeps the heaviest, she have never forgot to hear that name. _She never will_,"--looking up quietly.

"But your wife is dead now," said Lufflin, almost impatiently; "and you yourself thank God that she will never waken to her old loves and hates and fancies."

"I?" gasped Jacobus.

There was a long silence; as his old creed came back to him, the blood rushed thick and cold about his heart.

"God's world, and all His creatures," persisted Lufflin, "are foul with sin. You blessed Him that for them and it death was an eternal sleep."

"I did not remember her love for me," pleaded Jacobus, humbly. "_It_ could not sleep. Why! you man, Lufflin," starting to his feet, and drawing up his full height, "if that could be, would I stand to look at her here? Could I live, if she were truly gone?--she, that has been strength and hope and hands for me these many years? I'm not a strong man, like--like you, Captain," with a sudden weak giving way. "God gave me Sharley. Death cannot take her away."

Lufflin took up her hand.

"So soft it used to be!" he said. "It's been hard-worked since then. It would be well for Lotty, if death were a long sleep: she needs it."

Jacobus made no reply. He sat down and held his dead in his arms; she was his own; so were those years of hard work which had worn her hands rough, and left these sharp lines in her face. He only knew what they had been: in the long silence that followed, while the daylight broadened bluer and colder about him, he lived them over again; and he knew then, by every day of griping poverty, which it wrung the clammy drops out of his face to remember,--by all her patient tenderness,--by the happiness they had hoped for, but which never came,--by the true love they had borne to each other, and to little Tom, which knew so little comfort, he knew that the recompense would come, that the end was not yet She had shaken off the hunger and the pain, and had gone into the world where only the love endured and found its comfort and its late reward. There was such a world--somewhere. He put back the grayed hair from the forehead; little Tom had such a brow,--broad, quiet, melancholy.

"'I will go to them,'" he said, "'but they will not return to me!'"

* * * * *

Was it he that had been dead, and waked again? A strong hand lifting his head; a warm face and breath at his cheek; a voice calling him as sweet and cheerful as when first he heard it on the banks of the--little creek in Canada? Then out of the reeling and groping of shadows and real objects came a square bay-window opening on a sea-horizon of drifting olive-gray clouds, the crackle and glow of a great wood-fire, a cheerful breakfast-room, and some busy chatter about a night spent sleeping in drenched clothes and night-fogs.

Lufflin's round, red face was the first real grip his senses took of it all. The Captain was in his holiday suit of blue and brass, and pulled down his jacket with a complacent twinkle in his eyes.

"Faith, ye'll suffer a sea-change in short order, Mounchere, if you spend a few more nights dreaming by that window! Your very eyes look rheumy and glazed already."

Jacobus got up, stunned and dull beyond his wont,--his eyes fixed, not on the joking Captain, but on the anxious, wondering face upturned to his. He touched the cheek, a little worn and haggard, may-be, but with good, healthy blood reddening it,--felt the nervous hands,--then stooped and solemnly kissed her lips.

They trembled a little; then she laughed.

"Did the sea send you dreams of me?"--trying to jest, but with some of last night's trouble in her eyes.

"Not the sea,"--putting his hand to his head; "I think God sent them, Lotty."

Lufflin, whose instincts were quick as a woman's, glanced at the two, and then said something about its not being long enough after dawn to begin the day, and that he would turn into his bunk for an hour or two, and made his way down stairs. He turned into the kitchen instead, to give Ann and the breakfast a warning look, and, for aught we know, put his own shoulder to the wheel, so far as broiling the chops was concerned. He had been up half the night, helping "the child get ready her holiday," steadying shelves, hanging pictures, dusting books in the library, and now meant to stand aside until the great joy of the day was over: "only they two could share it together."

Yet he stepped to the kitchen-door and listened keenly, when, after a long silence, he heard the door above open, and Charlotte lead her husband into the library.

"Mounchere knows what his wife's done for him at last," he muttered;--"and there goes in the baby," as a faint cry and a rush of skirts followed,--with an amused laugh, and his eyes dim.

But when he heard Lotty coming presently for him, he hurried in, to stretch himself on his bunk, and began to snore.

"It's kind in them to think of an old fellow like me; but they're best alone. They have had a rough pull of it together, and I think this is their first glimpse of land."

He could not wait long, however, but soon went bustling up, with the eager glow of all his childish Christmases in his simple old face and mind. They made ready for the day inland, he supposed; but they could do nothing like this,--glancing in, as he trotted up stairs, at the big fires he had built, and the bits of holly stuck around, and then out at the sweep of barren lee-coast and the desolate sea.

"And Lotty's surprise of the house, and that blessed baby! She's a devilish clever woman to contrive such a day for Mounchere, that's a fact!"

The library, when he reached it, seemed the very heart and core of all Christmas brightness. The very cold, and the hungry solitude of the restless sea on which the window opened widely, deepened the warmth within. The room slept in a still comfort: no fire was ever so clear, no air so calm, no baby so content to be alive as this which lay on its mother's breast while she walked to and fro. Her face was paler and humbler than he had ever seen it; her husband followed her unceasingly with his eyes,--a strange sense of almost loss in them Lufflin fancied, idly.

Jacobus was very silent and still; he did not seem so nervous with happiness as the Captain had fancied this opening of a new life would make him; but there was about him a rested and hushed look,--a depth of content which he did not believe any gain of the house or child could give. Lufflin was awed, he knew not why.

"It is as if they had found something which Death itself could not take away," he thought, after a space of wonder, as if they had talked to God Himself to-day.

The Professor wished him a happy Christmas, in his simple, hearty fashion, and then the two men sat talking of how they kept the day long ago: Lufflin telling of frolics on ship-board, but M. Jacobus going back constantly to the time when he was a boy with his mother.

"I have neglected it for long," he said. "I shall never again. I think she will like us to keep it. She and--our boy."

He laid his hand on the baby's head, but his eyes wandered dreamily away out beyond the sea.

The day was fuller of cheerfulness and pleasure than even the lonely old sailor had hoped; the two people in whom he was beginning to confine his whole interest were happy in a way he could not fathom; he could not understand why Jacobus should look and listen to his wife so hungrily.

"It was the child that the day gave to him, not 'Sharley,' as he calls her," thought Lufflin.

So he took the baby in his arms, feeling as if it were in some sort neglected.

"I like to think," he said, after looking in its face awhile, and speaking with an effort, as he always did, about "religion,"--"I like to think of Christ as a helpless baby; that's the reason I like Christmas for."

"To think," said Charlotte, softly, "that to-day Eternal Love came into the world!--and Life!" glancing at her husband.

But Jacobus did not speak; he had his face covered with his hand, and when he looked up was paler than before. Lufflin fancied there was a change in the simple-hearted old bookworm's manner all day, a quiet composure, the dignity of a man who knew his place both with God and his brother man.

He went down again presently, leaving them alone for a little while. M. Jacobus was standing by the window, watching the awful stillness with which a new day lifts itself over the sea; he had the child in his arms, and beckoned Lotty to his side. She came and leaned her head on his shoulder.

"You will never leave me now, Sharley,--_never_," he said, his face kindling with a new, strange triumph.

The waves lapped the shore in gentle rifts of spray; the beach itself shone in the rising light like fretted silver. Beyond the foamy earth-colored breakers lay the illimitable sea, a dark violet glow, fading into the dim horizon whence came the dawn. The man's eye was fixed on the far line which his sight could never pass; his wife's quick glance followed his. It was from that dread Beyond, she knew, that he had fancied last night the dead beckoned to him.

She touched him again.

"It is a quiet morning yonder," she said, calmly.

"Yes, Lotty."

"God sent your dream. I hardly hoped, Jerome," her eyes filling with tears, "that we should keep Christmas together,--you, the baby, and I."

He smiled and pressed her hand, touched the little cheek, and then looked wistfully out again.

He held the baby God had given to comfort his old age proudly and tenderly; but his heart would turn to the other child's face that was watching for him yonder behind the dawn, and listen for the weak little voice which he knew on that Christmas morning was somewhere calling,--"Father! father!"

LUCY'S LETTERS.

On a cold January night I returned home after a holiday visit to town. Snow was just beginning to fall, and a desolate sort of feeling came over me as the omnibus drove up to my residence. A bright, cheerful light shone out of the library-windows, and Ernestina, a maid who had lived with me half a score of years before her marriage, was at the gate to receive me.

"It is owing to her kind, capable hands that the house looks so comfortable," I said to myself, with a little sigh; "but what am I to do when, she returns to her own home?"

Then, with a true spinster selfishness, I wished her good husband and beautiful boy "better off" in Abraham's bosom, and wondered what could make women so foolish as to get married. The cause of all this discomfort was the consciousness of having a new serving-maid. My last experience in that necessary domestic article had not been an agreeable one. The woman, though not "as old as Sibyl," was

"as curst and shrewd
As Socrates' Xantippe, or a worse."

She was a dusky Melpomene, who openly insulted the furniture, assaulted violently the china, and waged universal war against all inanimate objects. Being a trifle deaf, she used this defect as an excuse for not hearing any request or command; when spoken to, she glared grimly, turned her back, and strode off with a tragic _loup_, reminding one of a Forest in petticoats. I never knew I was an amiable woman, until her advent into my peaceable establishment.

"Now I return to a new experience, may-be no better than the former," I thought.

Upon entering the house, I saw through the open kitchen-door--out of which streamed a savory smell of broiled chicken, buns, and tea--an encouraging picture for a housekeeper: there was a bright fire, and a tidy room, with a nice-looking colored girl who wore a headkerchief and a check apron over her chintz gown. She rose up from her seat, and gave me a slight curtsy, which civility I acknowledged half shyly, half coldly.

"This is Lucy," said Ernestina, "the new maid I have engaged for you, Ma'am." Then, addressing the girl, she added,--"Lucy, you may dish up supper now."

"I wonder how I shall like her," was my remark to Ernestina, as we went into the library. "Do you think she will bully me much?"

Ernestina laughed.

"No, indeed, Ma'am! She is gentle and civil. I think she will suit you. I have found her both capable and agreeable while we have been putting the house in order."

"Oh I can dispense with capability,--a little of it, at least,--if she will only not frighten me out of my wits with a vixen temper!"

"No fear of that, I assure you," said Ernestina, encouragingly.

Nor was there any cause for fear. During the five months the girl lived with me, I found her uniformly civil and amiable. I do not intend inflicting on my readers any more of my personal experience with Lucy; it is her own little history I wish to relate.

A few days after my return home, I noticed, that, when Lucy was left to herself, she seemed sad. I often observed her suppressing tears; and every little while she gave a heavy, long sigh, as if apprehensive of some trouble.

I am as unwilling to meddle with the affairs of inferiors as with those of equals; so I contented myself with speaking very gently, granting little unexpected indulgences, and smiling cheerfully at her. I knew she was married to a man who was many years her senior, and it was said they were much attached to each other. This husband had gone into the army, and Ernestina told me that Lucy and he were looking anxiously forward to the period of his return,--more than two years off,--when they hoped to take his bounty-money and savings, and buy therewith a little house and small "garden-patch" for a settled home.

One day I asked her if she could read or write.

"Neither," was the reply.

"How then, do you write to your husband?"

This question brought out the whole story of her anxiety. Hitherto her friends had written in her name, but her husband had received only three of the many letters she had sent him during the six months he had been gone. In his last letter he had complained bitterly of her silence.

"Oh, if he could only hear straight from me!" she exclaimed. "For he thinks, Ma'am, I don't write because I gets no money. 'T isn't the money I care for. I'd sooner never have a cent from him than have him keep a-thinkin' I don't send no letters."

When she said this, big round tears fell down like pebbles on her cheeks and hands and apron. Of course I offered to write for her, saying that I would do so once a week, if she wished. She then gave me his last letter to read, which I will copy without correction; for he wrote it himself, being "a scholar," as she said, with some little pride.

And she endowed him with another possession, or gift, which seemed to give her almost as much satisfaction as his scholarly attainments.

"He kin see _sperits_, Ma'am, as plain as me and you sees folks; and so kin his little boy, his fust wife's child. Once when I was a-walkin' in the road with 'em, one moonlighty night, when we was a-goin' home to Spring-Town, them two stepped quick-like away from the path.

"'Lucy,' says my husband, says he, a'most in a whisper, 'quick! step furder over on t' other side.'

"After we got along a piece, them both told me there wor a band of _sperits_ a-comin' along; and if we gets out of the way of 'em, them don't do us no hurt, you know."

I did not like to suggest to the credulous wife that probably her sharp husband had been seeing at the tavern, before starting on the homeward walk with her,

"Black spirits and white,
Blue spirits and gray."

I fancy the cunning fellow, with a true masculine, marital love of power, had wished to inspire this young wife of his with a becoming awe and reverence for her him. But we will return to his letter.

"Januwerry the/18teen, 1864, Mooreses Island

"MY DEARE WIEF

"i take this opertunity to informe you that i am not well at
preasante. and i hope you are injoyin' goode helthe providin
that they ever doe finde you and of you are enny whares that
you can be found

"Enny whares in the State of N Jarsey.

"And i hev been in the servise 6 monthes. And i hev writen
sume 15teen or 16teen leturs and hev not reseved but 3
leturs from you yet sences i have been in the servise

"And i wante you to write to me in answer to this letur and
let me know what you meane to doe and ef you donte intend
writin why jess say so.

"i suppose because you didente get no munny you wonte write
but ef that has insulted you i will stope to. i hope that
you may understand this.

"And i know what i say. you hev never writen to me. you
havente let me known whether you got that munny I sent you
by Edwurd Towns or no. you heve never sent me enny word
whether you got the munny or no. it is pay day nowe but they
donte wante to pay us but 7 dollurs pur munthe and thats
what i didente inlist fore. and i wonte take it. i shall
wait til congres ses what we are to hev. thats the reason i
havente got no munny to send you.

"i donte intend to stope a writin until i give you a fare
chance and then ef i donte get enny more leturs than i hev i
shall stope writin before long for ef you are mad i am
tired. i shall write so as to heare from my childrun i know
that you think i might send you some munny but ef we donte
get it we cante send it. i hope that you may doe well and
that I may see you againe.

"my deare bruther Samul Stores will you please giv this to
my deare wief and reade it to hur and write to me ef you
please. give my luv to everry boddy. and ef you see my
muther please to giv luv to hur and tell hur that i am not
well at preasante. i am verry weake at preasante. and i
donte kepe well long at a time. and i donte know how i shall
apeare in your preasance. giv my luv to everry boddy. and
tell them to pray fore mee.

"i wante to know how my childrun is. what is anny doin. aske
anny ef she cante sende mee a letur and has the absentes of
hur farthur hurt hur. but i shall remember hur to God. it
donte rendur meeany satisfaction to see othurs get leturs
and i cante gete none myself sum of our boys has gote as hye
as 20ty leturs and sum more and i donte get none, remember
me your

"afect tunate husband

"JAMES WILLIAMS.

"james harris is agoin to send a letur to the church at
spring town in the care of mister saffron to be rede in the
congration. no more at preasante fur i am verry weake

"your luvin husband

"J. WILLIAMS."

After I finished reading this poor fellow's letter, I felt like laughing and crying. The ignorance it displays is droll enough; but the keen yearning for home, the longing after domestic affection and remembrance, the dread of being forgotten, are all very touching.

We replied to it immediately, and after that seldom allowed a week to pass without writing. On Saturday afternoons Lucy would come into the library with a little piece of sewing in her hands, and, sitting on a stool by the dogs' baskets, repeat her proposed letter faster than I could write it.

She related all the news of the two colored villages situated on either side of this town; the meetings they were holding,--the jubilees and quarterlies,--which last seemed to come every Sunday; the payment of the church debts; the births of children; the deaths of old people; the marriages and engagements of young ones; and even the hatching of chickens and killing of pigs. The letters were a droll medley; and when I could not help smiling sometimes at the odd bits of information given, she would say, with innocent earnestness,--

"I know he'll like to hear all this, Ma'am. It'll make him and the other boys from Spring Town and Gould Town feel like bein' among us again."

She dictated very rapidly; and her expressions were right pretty, being so natural and affectionate. Once I remarked to her that she did it so nicely that it sounded sometimes as if read from a book.

"Oh, it's because I keep _a-studyin_' about what to say to him," she replied, "I talks it all over to myself when I'm alone. That's what makes me so forgetful, and gives me this everlastin' _misery_ in my head. I'm forever and ever _a-studyin_' so much about him."

These weekly letters seemed to make Lucy feel as if she were having a stated talk with her absent husband. She gradually grew more cheerful under their influence. While at her work, she would burst out into perfect gusts of wild chanting: scraps of Methodist hymns suited her best. There was one verse she would peal out to a shrill, weird minor melody that was anything but cheerful or gay in its effect; and yet she repeated it over and over, morning, noon, and night, with unparalleled constancy:--

"I know there's room in heaven for me,
So I'm a-goin', I'm a-goin';
And don't you hope there's room for you?
Let's both be goin', let's both be goin';
I should n't wonder if room's for them,
So we'll all be goin' we'll all be goin',
Some day soon."

About two months after she came to live with me, there was a battle somewhere South, in which several colored men from our two villages were killed and wounded. By some mistake, William's name was included in the list; and the publication of it set his poor wife nearly beside herself with grief. The following day, however, some of his old companions received a letter from him, written after the date of the battle, in which he spoke of the others being killed, adding,--

"Tell Lucy, my deare wief im not dede yet. i havente seene a fite sence i hev bene in the servise but i hope i shall soon. My dere bruther Samul Stores can you finde oute why Lucy my wief donte write to me."

We immediately sent off a letter to him by mail; and I advised Lucy to inclose one with that of the friend who had just heard from him, and who intended writing the next day. She never tired of dictating to me; and after this last report from him, we prepared letters and dispatched them with redoubled energy.

One morning she came into the library, and asked me if I could spare time to write a letter.

"I'm so full, Ma'am, of all I want to say, it kind o' bewilders me at my work. I think I shall be more quieter, if I have it written off to him."

This letter was a remarkably pretty and touching one, and had in it the burden of all:--

"If I could only get a letter from you, and you could get one from me, I should not fret so much. I have not had one since January, and have only had four since you left. For three months me and my lady have written to you nigh about every week. All the other women go to the office, and take out two, three, and four letters at a time, some with money in; but if I could only get one from you, I should be happier than they are with all their money. I don't want no money. I can make enough to take care of me and 'Nervy" (their little daughter, glorying in the name of Minerva). "But, my dear husband, do, do write to me."

This letter was sent off about midday; then Lucy went singing about her work, as if she had just seen her husband. Her favorite assurance of there being room in heaven for her and all her friends rang out so shrill and clear that my little Skye terrier grew testy and nervous at the reiteration. At last, when its slumber was broken for the dozenth time, it could bear it no longer, and, leaping out to the basket, crouched on the ground, and, raising its tiny black muzzle in the air, gave one prolonged howl, as if protesting against the information.